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More stubborn silence.
“Tell. Me.”
“Do you remember Farlon’s speech?”
Sebastian paused in the hallway and blinked at the non sequitur. He kept walking and wrinkled his nose. “He gave a lot of speeches.”
“Not this one.”
Sebastian realized what Hess was referring to with a rush of sadness. He remembered talking to Farlon about it and listening to Farlon recite snatches of it to him as he worked on it. “Oh. His victory speech.”
“Yeah.” Grief.
Grief so strong, Sebastian staggered.
He had known Hess and Farlon were close. And he had known on some level that taking over after they lost Farlon would have been hard on Hess. But the man had slipped so seamlessly into the role that Sebastian never really thought about it. He hadn’t realized the depth of Hess’s pain until he stared now into the yawning chasm of it.
Searing pain. Choking inadequacy. Crippling obligation.
Sebastian swallowed against it all. “What about it?”
“He passed it to me.” Hess curled into his spot in the corner of Sebastian’s mind. Sebastian reached out and wished he could hold the man better than in this pathetic facsimile of an embrace. “He said it was my speech now. And that I need to give it for the both of us.”
“And…” Sebastian grasped for the words. How could Farlon have put that on him? He had lain the whole weight of the Resistance’s leadership on Hess’s shoulders when he’d left them. How could he have saddled him with such an emotional anchor as well? “And you will.”
“I have to.” Hess’s familiar intensity flamed up in their small, shared space. “I have to.”
“I know.” And Sebastian did know. With a sinking feeling, he began to understand that this was something Hess had to do.
Hess’s intensity banked down into embers as quickly as it had flared up. “I’ve been working on it. Adding to it. When I came to find you in the cantina, I was going to ask you to read it.”
“Me?”
“I thought it might…” Hess’s consciousness twisted as though he wanted to look away, but of course, he couldn’t because he was trapped here as a prisoner in his own mind. “…help you understand me. It was stupid.”
“It wasn’t stupid,” Sebastian said with a sudden vehemence. It wasn’t stupid. It was telling. Touching. “I’d like to read it sometime.”
Even though Sebastian thought he was already finally starting to understand him.
The flare of hope that flamed briefly out of Hess’s consciousness was almost painful to feel. Sebastian reached for it, felt Hess tense, pushed forward anyway, and then felt Hess finally give and allow Sebastian to settle close to him.
They spent the last leg of their journey in increasingly comfortable silence.
* * *
Leon knew they had reached their destination when he felt Sebastian’s mind tighten on him before pulling away.
It was an odd feeling to have Sebastian so close, both a dream and a nightmare. His entire essence rebelled against the exposure and the helplessness, the very things he’d spent nearly a lifetime trying to avoid. But then, it was those things that kept him from lying, obfuscating, and lashing out and doing all the things he had been doing to sabotage his relationship with Sebastian over the years.
So it was odd. He had settled with identifying it as odd.
And so it was odder still, and a bit disconcerting, to feel Sebastian—who had been mentally hovering and cuddling for almost their entire time together in Leon’s body—pull away and push Leon into a corner.
Leon twisted against the pressure. “Why are you pushing me?”
“I’m not.” The pressure alleviated immediately, and Leon settled back into the strange little alcove he’d carved out for himself in his own mind. “At least, I didn’t mean to.”
Leon didn’t comment. He got the impression that Sebastian wasn’t as experienced with sharing a body as Leon had somehow expected. “Are we there?”
