39. Althea
ALTHEA
Our quarters have a window now.
That's the detail that undoes me, somehow, more than the ceremony did.
The crew restored a section of the old Ishani hull for us while we were busy not dying, and set a real viewport into it, and now there's a place on this dying-no-longer ship where I can lie in the dark and watch the stars instead of watching the door.
I've spent my whole life watching doors.
It takes me three nights to stop, and Saren never once tells me to hurry.
Tonight no one is hunting us. That's the strangest luxury I've ever owned.
No fleet at our backs, no bounty on my head, no fuse lit under me by someone who decided I was disposable.
Just the Hollow Wake drifting easy through clean space for longer than I can remember, and a clan asleep around us, and a window full of stars, and him.
"You keep looking at me like you're waiting for it to be taken away," Saren says.
He's stretched the length of our bunk, which means most of him is off the end of it, and his hand is tracing idle patterns on the bare skin of my back, the bonding-mark on my collarbone gone silvery in the starlight.
"It won't be. Not tonight. Tonight there is nothing to survive.
There is only us, and we have all the time we never thought we'd get. "
"I don't know how to do that," I admit. "Nothing to survive. I've never had a night with nothing to survive."
"Then we'll learn it." He rolls over me, slow, careful and not careful, and there's no desperation in it this time, no betrayal behind it, no fleet bearing down — just a man choosing to take his time because, for once, time is a thing we have.
"Let me teach you the one thing the Badlands never could. "
And he does. It's nothing like the observatory, where we were two starving people falling into each other; nothing like the night before the dead zone, all claim and possession and the terror of loss.
This is unhurried. This is a man worshipping his wife in a window full of stars with absolutely nowhere either of us has to be.
He undresses me like he has the whole night and intends to use every minute of it, and he does, his mouth tracing the silvered mark along my collarbone and lower, learning me again like there'll always be more time to learn, until I'm coming apart under his hands with my fingers knotted in the bedding and a sound in my throat I don't recognize as mine.
When he finally moves into me it's slow and deep and devastating, and I wrap myself around him and meet him stroke for unhurried stroke, the bond a steady bright current running both ways between us, no door left anywhere in either of us to hold it back.
I watch his face in the starlight, the bone ridges I once read as threats and now read as home, the crimson eyes fixed on mine like I'm the only fixed point in the turning galaxy, and when I break the second time I take his name with me, and he follows me over with the old words on his lips and my name like a vow underneath them, and for one perfect weightless stretch there is genuinely nothing in the universe to survive.
Only this. Only him. Only the absurd, undeserved, hard-won luxury of being wanted by someone who plans to keep wanting me into a future we both stopped believing in and built anyway.
After, tangled and warm and unhurried, he pulls me up onto his chest and I trace the names cut into his horn, and the smooth place below them where Tomas lives now, mine and his dead carried side by side.
"They gave me something today," I tell him.
"Before the ceremony. The crew. Carved tokens — kin-marks, Caelis called them.
One from nearly every person aboard." My voice does the thing it does when I'm not going to be able to stop it.
"Twenty-eight years, Saren. Twenty-eight years of being the thing people used and put down, and then I stow away on a marauder ship to escape off-world for one jump, and instead I get — this.
A clan. A window. You. I didn't know I was allowed to want any of it.
I spent so long surviving I forgot there was supposed to be a point. "
"There's a point," he says, into my hair. "I forgot it too, for three hundred years' worth of my people's grief. You walked into our tomb and reminded us." His arms tighten. "The point was always this. We just had to live long enough to be told."
I fall asleep watching the stars through a window on a ship I once thought was abandoned, in the arms of the monster the galaxy taught me to run from, and I have never in my life felt so completely, dangerously, permanently safe.