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He took his time. He started at her wrist, where her pulse was going too fast for her to hide. He stayed there for a moment, as though the fact of it pleased him. Then the inside of her elbow. The hollow beneath her ear. The line of her collarbone, where her breath kept giving her away.

He was slow in a way that was unbearable, as if he knew exactly where he was going to go and wanted to take his time getting there. Every time she thought he would move on, he didn’t. Every time she thought she could stay still, she found she could not. And somewhere in all of that she heard herself say his name in a voice she didn’t recognise.

“I know,” he murmured against her skin. “I know.”

He drew the last of her dress away and the rest of her undergarments with it, slowly, never taking his eyes from her. The pale gold of her hair lay loose across her shoulders, messy and real. The curves in her body, the particular way she held herself even now, as though she were still deciding something. He had memorised her in pieces for months. Now he had every part.

Maia blushed, caught between wanting to cover herself and wanting him to never stop looking. “Caelith,” she begged.

She took her hands down to touch him, and he let her.

She had expected to feel clumsy, but she didn’t. She had spent months learning to read him - the tells, the gaps, the half-second before he put his face away - and none of it stopped being useful here. She knew what it meant when he went quiet. She knew what it meant when he didn’t.

She found the place where his ribs had been split open by the wraith and laid her palm flat over it, feeling what that did to him.

“Maia—”

“You said you wanted to remember every part of it.” She moved her hand. “So do I.”

Whatever he had been holding gave way then. She felt it go; a rope coming loose under tension.

What followed between them was not careful.

It was his weight and the cold stone at her back, and the heat of him everywhere they touched. It was her hands in his hair, his mouth on her throat, and her name, over and over, spoken against her skin like something he had been forbidden to say. It was Caelith, inside her, and the realisation that she’d never known how much of herself she’d kept apart from the world, until there was nothing left of her that wished to be apart from him. And when she pulled him back up to her, there was nothing behind his eyes at all but her. She had never been looked at like that in her life and was not likely to be again.

It was him, finally unsteady, and her, finally sure.

The Fracture pulsed distantly beneath them, but for once, neither of them heard it.

When her breathing had steadied and his had not quite, she found herself laughing - quietly, helplessly - at nothing.

“What?” he asked.

“Three hundred years.” She pressed her face into his shoulder. “And I suppose you could have been doing that the whole time.”

He was silent for a moment. Then, into her hair: “Not that. I have never had that.”

Afterwards, they lay still. The alcove was too narrow for comfort, but Maia didn’t move, and Caelith didn’t let go. His arm stayed across her, his breath warm and slow against her hair. The glass veins beneath his skin had dimmed to a faint glow, and in the thin light that crept through the stone, he looked almost peaceful. Almost human.

She traced one of the veins along his forearm with her fingertip, following it from wrist to elbow, the way she had once traced lines of ancient script across parchment, looking for meaning in shapes she’d never seen up close.

“I kept telling myself I’d lost you,” he said quietly.

“You didn’t lose me.”

“No.” He held her tighter.

She tilted her head enough to look at his silver eyes. “You have me now.”

He did not answer at once. He’d let her see wanting already, and this was something else.

“I know. And you have me.” He paused. “For as long as I exist.”

He had carried a vow for three hundred years. It had been demanded of him, and written down by people who had never intended to keep their half of it.

Nobody had asked him for this one. He gave it anyway, and he knew - the way he had always known when she came into a room before he saw her - that it had already been returned.

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