( Rhydian)
The question sits in my chest for most of the morning.
I don’t ask it right away. That’s not how I work anymore — four years of surviving on instinct ans you don’t just open your mouth and hand people things they can use against you. You wait. You watch. You make sure the ground is solid before you put your weight on it.
So I watch her instead.
She gets up before , moves around the room doing ordinary things — splashing water on her face, retying her hair, pulling on her boots with the kind of practiced efficiency that tells you she’s been dressing alone for a long ti. No one helping her with buttons. No one handing her things. Just herself, moving through her own space like she’s learned to take up exactly the right amount of it.
I lie on my side and pretend to be half asleep.
She knows I’m watching. She doesn’t say anything about it.
At so point she brings food — bread, dried at, two cups of sothing hot that slls like herbs and bark — and sets it on the small table by the window. She sits down, tears off a piece of bread, and starts eating without ceremony, looking out at the grey morning sky like she has a list in her head she’s already working through.
I sit up. My shoulder pops. I wince.
"Cave damage," I say, to explain it, to no one in particular.
She glances at . "There’s salve on the chest by the bed."
"I know."
I don’t get up to get it. I pull on my shirt instead and sit on the edge of the mattress, elbows on my knees, looking at the floor between my feet.
The question is still there. Getting heavier.
"Co eat," she says.
I go. I sit across from her and pick up the bread and eat half of it before I even taste it because that’s still how I eat — fast, automatic, like soone might take it. She doesn’t comnt. She just refills my cup when it gets low and slides the dried at closer to my side of the table.
Small things. She keeps doing small things.
That’s the problem.
"Why are you kind to ?"
It cos out flatter than I ant it. More like an accusation than a question. She looks up from her cup and her grey eyes do that thing where they go still and careful, taking their ti.
She doesn’t answer right away. She finishes chewing. Sets her bread down. Folds her hands around her cup.
"Specific question," she says finally.
"Is it?"
"You could an a lot of things."
"I an all of them," I say. "The salve. The food. The—" I stop. Wave a hand in the direction of the bed in a way that hopefully covers everything that happened this morning without having to say it out loud. "Why."
She looks at steadily. The silence stretches long enough that I almost take it back — almost tell her to forget it, it doesn’t matter, I was just talking — but she speaks before I get there.
"Why does it bother you?"
"It doesn’t bother ."
"You asked like it bothers you."
"I asked because I don’t understand it." I turn the cup in my hands. The clay is warm. "People don’t just—" I press my mouth together. "Nobody’s ever done these things and not wanted sothing back. There’s always a price. My parents taught that before the elders did."
Sothing crosses her face at the ntion of my parents. Not pity — I’d leave the room if it was pity. Sothing more like recognition.
"Everything has a price," she agrees. "I’m not pretending it doesn’t."
"So what’s yours?"
"A mate who can stand beside without falling apart." She says it simply. "A pack that stays intact. Marcus losing." She tilts her head slightly. "Those are my prices."
"That’s it?"
"That’s a lot, actually."
I look at her. She holds the look without flinching, the way she always does, and I have this feeling I get sotis around her — this uncomfortable, disorienting feeling like I’m standing on a floor that turns out to be glass, and below it is sothing I don’t have words for yet.
"You could’ve gotten all of that by breaking ," I say. "Would’ve been faster."
"Broken things don’t hold weight," she says. "I need you to hold weight."
It’s not romantic. It’s not soft. It’s completely practical and sohow that makes it easier to sit with than if she’d said sothing gentle.
I eat the rest of the bread.
Outside the window the sky has gone from grey to a flat, heavy white. Snow coming. I can sll it — that particular cold-tal sll that gets into everything just before the first fall of the season. I used to love that sll in the cave. ant predators stayed ho. ant I was left alone.
Now it just ans winter.
"I used to count," I say. I don’t know why I say it.
She doesn’t ask count what. She just waits.
"Days alone. In the cave." I turn the cup again. "First year I kept track. Scratched marks in the rock next to where I slept. Then I stopped because—" I shrug. "Because what was the point. It wasn’t going anywhere."
Elena is quiet for a mont. Then, carefully — "How many marks were there. Before you stopped."
"Two hundred and sothing." I look up. "I stopped counting around month eight."
She holds my gaze. "That’s a long ti to be alone."
"I managed."
"I know you did."
And sothing about the way she says it — not *you’re so strong* or *that must have been so hard*, just *I know you did*, simple and certain like she looked at the evidence and reached a conclusion — sothing about that undoes sothing in that I wasn’t aware was tied.
I look away. Out the window. The first flake of snow drifts past the glass.
"I don’t know how to receive things," I say, to the window. "Anything. Food, help,—" I stop. "Whatever you were doing this morning. I don’t know how to just—let things in. It feels like a trap. Every ti."
"I know," she says. Sa tone. Sa quiet certainty.
"That doesn’t bother you?"
"It’s just where you’re starting from." She stands, collecting the cups, setting them aside with the unhurried economy of soone who is never performing anything. "It’s not where you stay."
I watch her move around the room. The way she checks the fire without thinking about it, adds a log, doesn’t make a production of anything. She lives inside herself so completely. Like every room she’s in becos hers not because she takes it over but because she never needs anything from it.
I’ve never been like that. Even before the exile I was always reaching for sothing — more money, more status, more proof I existed.
I wonder what it would feel like. To just be enough in a room.
"Co here," she says.
I look over. She’s moved to the bed. Sitting on the edge of it, watching with that patient look, and I feel the familiar pull of resistance — that automatic bristling thing my body does whenever soone tells where to go — but under it, sothing else.
Sothing that wants to.
I go.
I stand in front of her and she looks up at and for a mont neither of us says anything. The snow is coming heavier outside now, I can hear it starting against the window, that soft insistent sound.
"Sit," she says.
I sit beside her. Our knees almost touch. My hands find my thighs like they always do — sothing to hold onto.
"Lie back," she says.
I go still. "What?"
"On your back." She nods at the pillow. "Just lie down, Rhydian."
Everything in wants to argue. I can feel the argunt forming — *why, what are you going to do, I’m not so—* but I look at her face and there’s nothing threatening there, nothing predatory. Just that sa patient certainty.
I lie back.
The mattress takes my weight and I stare at the ceiling and try to rember how to breathe normally, which turns out to be difficult when you’re aware of every single point where your body touches the bed.
Elena moves beside . I hear rather than see it — the small sounds of her shifting, settling. Then her hand finds my chest and lies flat there, over my heartbeat, like she did that first night.
I close my eyes.
"You’re going to feel things," she says quietly. "And you’re going to want to pull away from them. Don’t."
"I don’t—"
"You do. You pull away every ti sothing feels good. Like you don’t trust it to last." Her thumb moves. A small slow circle. "So this is the lesson. You lie here and you feel it and you don’t run from it."
I open my mouth. Close it.
Her hand moves up to my shoulder. Squeezes once, then releases. Then she leans down and presses her lips just below my jaw — so light I almost think I imagined it, but my pulse jumps so hard I know she felt it.
"Don’t overthink it," she murmurs against my neck. "Just be here."
*Be here.* Like it’s simple. Like being here isn’t the hardest thing I’ve done in four years.
Her mouth moves down. To my throat. She doesn’t rush — she takes her ti the way she takes her ti with everything, like she’s got nowhere to be, like I’m worth the patience, like—
I exhale. Long and shaky and completely out of my control.
She makes a quiet sound of approval against my skin. And it does sothing terrible to — terrible aning I feel it in my stomach, in my hands, in the backs of my knees, in every place a body stores the things it hasn’t let itself want.
My hand finds her arm without deciding to move it. Just finds it, holds it lightly, my fingers wrapped around her wrist.
She doesn’t stop. She keeps going, slow and deliberate, her mouth finding the base of my throat, the jut of my collarbone, moving with a certainty that makes feel simultaneously like the most and least powerful person in the room.
I’m shaking again. I hate it. I can’t stop it.
"I’ve got you," she says quietly. Sa words as the nightmare. And my chest does that cracking-open thing I can’t explain and can’t prevent.
After a long ti she lifts her head and looks down at . Her hair has co half loose. There’s colour in her face. Her grey eyes are darker than usual and she’s looking at like—
Like sothing she wants to keep.
I don’t know what to do with that. I genuinely don’t know what to do with that.
"Why," I say. My voice cos out wrecked. "You never answered. *Why* are you kind to ."
She looks at for a long mont. Her thumb traces my jaw.
"Because no one ever was to you," she says simply. Like it’s obvious. Like it’s just math.
Then she straightens. Rolls her shoulder. Gives that look — the one that ans the lesson isn’t over.
"Now roll over," she says. "I’ll teach you the other side of pleasure."
I stare at her.
"Trust ," she says. And almost smiles.
God help — I do.
I roll over.
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