"I'm not sleeping in your room."
"I didn't say you had to. I said you need to sleep. You can do that in the chair if you'd prefer." He stands, collects the cloth, and carries it to the desk. "I'll be on the other side of the room."
"The bond being open doesn't bother you? Sharing a room with it fully running?"
He's quiet for a moment, his back to me. "It bothers me considerably," he says. "But you collapsing in the corridor and the bond snapping under rebound strain while you're alone bothers me more."
I look at the chair. I look at the bed. My spine is still doing something unpleasant along the left side from where I hit the floor.
"I'm staying on my side," I say.
"Obviously."
"And if you do anything that warrants a complaint to the faculty review board, I will file one."
"I would expect nothing less."
I lie back down. He takes the chair at the desk without comment, and the fire settles to a low burn, and the room goes quiet in the way rooms go quiet when two people are in them who are trying not to acknowledge that they are in them together.
Through the open bond, I can feel him not sleeping. The vigilance of someone who has decided to stay awake and will not be talked out of it. It runs underneath everything else like a current that doesn't know how to shut off.
"Ryder," I say to the ceiling.
"Go to sleep, Fairmont."
"The things you said tonight. About why you did what you did. I'm not forgiving you for it. Just so that's clear."
"I know."
"But I'm also not pretending the conversation didn't happen."
A pause. "I wouldn't ask you to."
"Good." I pull the blanket up because the fire is settling and the room is cooling and my body still aches in three separate places. "And for what it's worth," I say, quieter. "I'm sorry about your sister."
The silence that follows is long. The fire ticks. The bond runs between us, open and unguarded for the first time since this started, carrying the weight of everything he keeps locked down, everything he said tonight and the things underneath what he said that neither of us have names for yet.
"Thank you," he says. Just that. His voice is different when he says them, lower and without the careful control he puts on everything, and I don't push it further because some things need space around them to mean what they mean.
I close my eyes.
The chair creaks once as he shifts his weight. The fire breathes. Through the bond, steady and strange and nothing I asked for, I feel him keeping watch.
I fall asleep before I can decide how I feel about that.
Somewhere before morning, I'm aware, in the blurred half-conscious way of deep sleep, that the temperature in the room has dropped and the fire has burned low, and that someone has put a second blanket over me without waking me up.
I don't say anything about it when I wake up. Neither does he.
When I sit up, the academy outside the window is grey with early morning. Ryder is at the desk with a book open and a cup of something steaming at his elbow. He doesn't look up when I move, and I don't announce that I'm awake. The bond between us runs quiet and steady in the cool air.
My chest feels better. Not perfect, but functional. The rebound has settled into something I can carry.
"I should go," I say.
"Probably." He turns a page. "Before the corridors fill up."
I stand, test my legs, and they hold. The bond stays open between us, a current I can feel but not control, carrying information neither of us asked for but both of us have now. His wariness about what comes next. My uncertainty about what to do with everything he told me. The exhaustion we're both carrying from a night that stripped things bare.
