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Leon swallowed. But he wasn’t. When Martha had said he couldn’t have Sebastian, he had thought she meant only that his duty prevented him. But now he realized she meant more than that. She meant that when all of this war was said and done, men like Leon and men like Sebastian didn’t end up together.
They turned down another hallway, and Leon felt Sebastian reach for him. “You’re being very quiet.”
Leon reached back and let their consciousness brush together. It was pleasant. He should have let himself touch more before they were forced into a body together. “What do you expect me to say?”
“I don’t know.” Sebastian screwed up his face. “Don’t you have questions?”
“Would you answer them?” Leon felt a strange sort of vulnerability in Sebastian, almost an ache.
“Of course, I would.” Sebastian stopped in front of a door and tapped his fingers along the handle. “You’ve earned honesty from me, at least. I mean if you”—there was that vulnerability again—“if you want to know anything.”
Leon pushed closer, and Sebastian’s consciousness melted against him. “I want to know everything.”
Sebastian tightened his hand around the doorknob and leaned his forehead against the wood. He bit his lip. “You mean that?”
It struck Leon again that Sebastian didn’t seem to know his own value, that he didn’t realize how breathtaking and amazing and fascinating and desirable he was. It mystified Leon because it had always seemed so obvious to him, and because Sebastian had never displayed any doubt about his own abilities in anything else.
“Yes.” Leon expanded from his corner and pushed his feelings of burning curiosity and possessiveness and lust and near obsession into Sebastian’s mind. He felt Sebastian shiver. “Now are you going to open this door or not?”
Sebastian swallowed. “I’m going…”
He opened the doors into a spacious but dusty bedroom. Leon took a cursory inventory of the setup—carpeted floors, a bed in the center, a large floor mirror next to a large wardrobe, shelves with bits and bobs, and a desk—but he mostly reckoned with the idea that he could ask Sebastian anything. He could get answers to all the questions he’d never dared to think he had. And some that he couldn’t have ever imagined he’d have.
But Leon had always been good at asking questions, thinking, and puzzling out a situation and a plan of action. He started with the basics. “Did you grow up in this house?”
Sebastian answered instantly, with the same obedient openness as when he gave reports after missions. “Not just in this house. There’s another one outside of Ralscoln that we went to when the situation in Ralscoln was too precarious.”
“How long has your family been inhabiting the Ralsdis?”
Sebastian scrunched up his nose. “We are Ralsdis. At least, we are the Ralsdis as people think of them. The family story is that we were living in a group of klah’eel raiders that attacked the first human colonists of Tava. When we began to lose, we switched bodies.” Sebastian shrugged his shoulder.
“So by the time the Ralsdis founded Ralscoln, they were torvars.” Leon had spent a lot of time studying the history of Southern Tava, the better to appreciate it and give speeches for its freedom, and he felt the ground shifting under his feet with that realization.
“That’s right.” Sebastian closed the door behind them and shut them away in the bedroom together. “My ancestors.”
Leon tried to recognize the insecurity welling inside him and struggled to rein it in before Sebastian could feel it. Leon had spent so long, so high up in the Resistance, speaking so often and so eloquently about the history and pride of Southern Tava and not exactly hiding but never advertising the fact that he was not from here. His parents had moved him here as a child as part of that calamitous wave of human immigrants that had sparked the war with the Klah’Eel. He was an outsider.
“Are you disturbed?”
Leon came back to himself to find Sebastian still standing near the door, with one arm crossed over his stomach and clasping the other. The submissiveness of the posture was so absurd both in Leon’s body and from Sebastian’s control that Leon snorted.
“You’re very concerned about whether or not I find you disturbing.”
Sebastian hunched his shoulders. “Well, of course I am. You’re the only person who’s ever—never mind.” Then Sebastian shook himself and stepped farther into the bedroom and through to an attached bath.
But Leon latched on. “Who’s ever what?”
“Who’s ever…” Sebastian stopped at the sink and waved his arms around in a complicated motion that seemed to encompass both the whole world and his own body. Then he dropped them down with a frustrated little sound. “You didn’t ask why I joined the Resistance.”
Leon paused at the topic changed and debated between either pushing the original question or seeing where Sebastian was going. He went with the latter. “I was still getting to that.”
“Do you want to know?”
“Of course. Why would you ever leave all this? Your home and your family. You were still helping to liberate Southern Tava, so it can’t have been duty.”
Sebastian sighed and planted his hands on either side of the sink in front of him in a move that clearly came from the muscle memory of Leon’s own body. “Because here I would always be alone.”
That didn’t make any sense. “Your family clearly loves you.” They had not looked or acted at all how Leon imagined a cold and distant family would.
