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He looked at their joined hands for a long moment. Then he stood, and drew her up with him, and it was not toward the trail.

"There's weather coming in off the north flats," he said. "An hour out, maybe less. Nothing like the last one, but you're not walking down that ridge in it, and I'm not sitting on a rock in it. There's a shelter four minutes from here you've already been inside of."

"Is that the reason? The weather?"

"No." He said it plainly, with nothing underneath it to hide behind. "It's the reason that's true and also not the real one. I wanted to say the true one out loud first, so you'd know I wasn't hiding the other one inside it."

"Then say the other one."

"Come inside. That's the other one."

She went.

*** Varek ***

The chamber looked the way it had looked with seven people in it, except that now there were two, and the difference was enormous.

The rock-moss on the ceiling put out its low blue-green light, the kind that made everything down here look like it sat at the bottom of a warm sea. In it her face was strange and lovely and entirely certain. He had spent two years, three months, and some number of days making this cave into a place a man could survive in. It had never once occurred to him that anyone would stand in it and look at him the way she was looking at him now. The future he'd been able to imagine had no room in it for being looked at.

"I need to tell you something before this goes any further," he said, "so it's said in the light and not found later."

"All right."

"I don't know how to do this well. Not the…" He stopped, and made himself finish it, because she was owed the honest version. "Not the mechanics of it. The other part. I've been alone a long time, and I got used to needing nothing, and I built a whole life out of needing nothing. Then you walked into it, and now I need something, and I've forgotten how to hold a thing I need without gripping it too hard. So if I get it wrong, tell me. I'd rather be told than lose the thing by handling it badly."

Athena crossed the chamber and stood in front of him, close enough that he had to look down to hold her eyes.

"That was the least smooth thing anyone has ever said to me before kissing them," she said. "It's also the only version I'd have believed. So here's the arrangement. Get it wrong. I'll tell you. We'll fix it." She put her hand flat on his chest, over the plates, over the double beat of a heart built for a heavier world. "That's the whole thing."

Then she was the one who closed the distance, and the second kiss was nothing like the first one on the ridge, which had been two guarded people bumping into a thing neither of them expected. This was a decision, made by both of them, out loud, in a cave lit like the bottom of a warm sea.

He kissed her carefully at first, because careful was the only setting he trusted himself on. She let him have careful for about four seconds. Then she made a low, impatient sound against his mouth. Her hand closed in the fabric at his shoulder and pulled, and careful came apart in his hands like something that had never been load-bearing to begin with.

His wings wrapped around her. He did not decide to do it; his body did, pulling the old instinct up out of storage, the membrane curving forward to make a warm dark around them both. She gasped into the kiss, and then she laughed against it, delighted. Her hands found the base of his wings, where the nerves ran close under the skin. The sensation of a human hand in that place; curious and deliberate, went through him like a light turning on in a room dark so long he'd forgotten it had a switch.

They undressed each other slowly, because neither of them was built for hurrying at the important things. Her hands moved over the scored plates of his forearms and the long pale seam on his shoulder, where the planet had opened him up and nobody had closed it properly. She did not flinch from any of it. She traced the damage like it was terrain worth knowing, and for two years he had believed his body was only a thing that survived. Under her hands it stopped being only that.

He learned her the same way she was learning him. The warmth of her was a fixed thing, human and steady, so unlike the burning changeable heat of the surface that his hands kept stopping just to feel it hold. There was earned strength in her, the muscle of a woman who put commanders on the mat and meant it. He found the places that made her breath change and the places that made her go quiet, and he catalogued every one. She had taught him, without trying, that paying close attention to a person was itself a kind of tenderness.

"There," she said, when his mouth found the line of her throat, and then, lower, her voice losing its edges, "there." He took the instruction the way he took all good intelligence; seriously, with gratitude, and with a determination to act on it.

When they came together it was slow, and it was not smooth, and it was the most honest thing he had ever done. There was no performance left in either of them, nothing held back for later, no drawer to keep anything in. She said his name once, low, and it landed in a place that had been waiting two years to hear exactly that; his own name in another person's mouth, chosen, not shouted across a battlefield or pronounced over a sentencing.

Underneath it, faint enough that he nearly lost it in everything else, something in his chest began to hum. He had no word for it. It was not his heartbeat, and it was not hers. It was also not the two of them out of time with each other. It was a third thing, low and warm and entirely new, a note struck behind his sternum that he had never felt in two hundred years of living. It pulsed once in time with the moment and then it faded. He noticed it, and he chose not to chase it, because the moment was too full to spend on a question.

Above them, the weather he had promised came in off the flats and moved over the ridge, small and ordinary, and neither of them heard a second of it.

*** Athena ***

Afterward she lay against his side with his wing over the both of them, listening to the double beat of his heart. It was as strange and as good as everything else about him, two drums in a rhythm no human chest would ever produce.

She had felt the hum. She was fairly sure he had too. She had gone very still when she felt that low warm note under everything, present in her own sternum as much as in his, and her analytical mind had reached for it the way it reached for everything. For once, she had let it go unfiled.

She had a fair idea what it was. Marina had tried to describe it once, months ago, in a letter, in the careful over-explaining voice she used when she'd decided a thing was too important to be embarrassed about. Her sister had given up halfway through the description and simply written, it's like the first full breath after years of shallow ones, and you'll know it if it ever happens, and you won't need me to tell you.

She had known it. She had not needed telling.

"You're thinking," Varek said, his voice moving through his chest and into her ear.