Chapter 17 #2
I think about that. I think about three months of his classroom, his cold distance across corridors, the specific way he managed to make every interaction feel like a verdict.
And underneath that, apparently, this. The knowledge of what I was walking into.
The calculated cruelty that wasn't casual but was still cruelty.
"You lost someone," I say. "To something like this."
He goes very still.
The bond gives me the rest of what his face doesn't. A grief that's been compressed and stored somewhere he doesn't look at directly, sharp enough that I feel it land in my own sternum like a second echo of the rebound.
"You don't have to tell me," I say. "I'm not asking you to."
"My sister." His voice comes out flat. Controlled in the way things get when the control is the only thing keeping them standing.
"She was a seer. She saw something in the Veil when she was seventeen and she went toward it instead of away from it, because that's what seers do when they understand what they're seeing.
And the Veil took her. It took her and it left nothing and the academy filed a report about an unfortunate magical incident and moved on. "
I don't say anything.
"You remind me of her," he says. "Not in appearance. In the way you decide things. The way you walk into rooms that are designed to make you feel like you don't belong and you find somewhere to stand anyway." He stops. "It's not useful information. I'm aware of that."
"It's honest information."
"Honesty isn't always the same as useful."
"In this case it is." I push myself up slowly, testing my spine, and it holds.
The ache is settling into something manageable.
"Because the version of you I've been dealing with for three months is the one who decided honesty was a liability.
And this version," I gesture vaguely at the space between us, "is one I can actually figure out what to do with. "
His face shifts. He looks at the nightstand and then back at me.
"The bond being open like this," he says. "It's not temporary. What you did with that circle didn't sever anything. It removed the partial barrier that was keeping the connection from fully seating. That barrier was probably the only thing that was going to slow this down."
"I know."
"You should probably be angrier about that."
"I'm working through my feelings in order. I'll get to anger." I swing my legs over the side of the bed and sit up properly. "Right now I'm on confused but functional."
He almost smiles. Through the bond, something warm moves alongside the fear that's been there since he found me on the floor, not replacing it, just existing next to it.
"You need to sleep," he says. "The rebound takes several hours to fully clear. Your nervous system is going to feel like it's been dragged through a wringer until morning."
"I'm not sleeping in your room."
"I didn't say you had to. I said you need to sleep. You can do that in the chair if you'd prefer." He stands, collects the cloth, and carries it to the desk. "I'll be on the other side of the room."
"The bond being open doesn't bother you? Sharing a room with it fully running?"
He's quiet for a moment, his back to me. "It bothers me considerably," he says. "But you collapsing in the corridor and the bond snapping under rebound strain while you're alone bothers me more."
I look at the chair. I look at the bed. My spine is still doing something unpleasant along the left side from where I hit the floor.
"I'm staying on my side," I say.
"Obviously."
"And if you do anything that warrants a complaint to the faculty review board, I will file one."
"I would expect nothing less."
I lie back down. He takes the chair at the desk without comment, and the fire settles to a low burn, and the room goes quiet in the way rooms go quiet when two people are in them who are trying not to acknowledge that they are in them together.
Through the open bond, I can feel him not sleeping. The vigilance of someone who has decided to stay awake and will not be talked out of it. It runs underneath everything else like a current that doesn't know how to shut off.
"Ryder," I say to the ceiling.
"Go to sleep, Fairmont."
"The things you said tonight. About why you did what you did. I'm not forgiving you for it. Just so that's clear."
"I know."
"But I'm also not pretending the conversation didn't happen."
A pause. "I wouldn't ask you to."
"Good." I pull the blanket up because the fire is settling and the room is cooling and my body still aches in three separate places. "And for what it's worth," I say, quieter. "I'm sorry about your sister."
The silence that follows is long. The fire ticks. The bond runs between us, open and unguarded for the first time since this started, carrying the weight of everything he keeps locked down, everything he said tonight and the things underneath what he said that neither of us have names for yet.
"Thank you," he says. Just that. His voice is different when he says them, lower and without the careful control he puts on everything, and I don't push it further because some things need space around them to mean what they mean.
I close my eyes.
The chair creaks once as he shifts his weight. The fire breathes. Through the bond, steady and strange and nothing I asked for, I feel him keeping watch.
I fall asleep before I can decide how I feel about that.
Somewhere before morning, I'm aware, in the blurred half-conscious way of deep sleep, that the temperature in the room has dropped and the fire has burned low, and that someone has put a second blanket over me without waking me up.
I don't say anything about it when I wake up. Neither does he.
When I sit up, the academy outside the window is grey with early morning. Ryder is at the desk with a book open and a cup of something steaming at his elbow. He doesn't look up when I move, and I don't announce that I'm awake. The bond between us runs quiet and steady in the cool air.
My chest feels better. Not perfect, but functional. The rebound has settled into something I can carry.
"I should go," I say.
"Probably." He turns a page. "Before the corridors fill up."
I stand, test my legs, and they hold. The bond stays open between us, a current I can feel but not control, carrying information neither of us asked for but both of us have now.
His wariness about what comes next. My uncertainty about what to do with everything he told me.
The exhaustion we're both carrying from a night that stripped things bare.
I move toward the door. He doesn't get up from the desk.
"Fairmont," he says when I reach for the latch.
I turn back.
"The bond being open like this," he says. "It changes things. Not just between us. The way magic moves through you, the way the other bonds will develop, how visible you are to people who track that kind of signature." He meets my eyes. "Be careful."
I nod. Open the door. Step into the corridor that's still dim with early morning shadows.
Behind me, I hear him close the book. Feel through the bond that he's watching the door I just walked through, and that some part of him wants to follow me and some part of him knows that would make everything more complicated than it already is.
I don't look back.
The corridor is cold and quiet and mine again, and I have classes in three hours and a bond that's fully open and the taste of honesty still sharp in my mouth.
Time to figure out what comes next.