"You make it sound simple."
"At the time it was."
She pulls her knees up, wraps her arms around them, and rests her chin there, watching me through the firelight. She has never once hidden her burn scar. I've thought about that more than I should. "I spent years waiting for someone to find me," she admits. Flat. Like something carried a long time and set down carefully. "Every checkpoint. Every border guard. Every time someone looked at me too long. Part of me thought I deserved it. Not as something I wanted. As something that was just."
I stand, because seated feels like a decision about to make itself without my permission. I move to the window, check it out of habit. Her reflection shows faint in the warped glass. She hasn't moved.
"I searched for years," I confess. "It wasn't clean or rational. You were there every time the scars pulled, every time someone said Blackwater, every time sleep left before morning."
She's listening intently, waiting for more.
"I told myself it was accountability. That I needed to face the person who made the choice that cost me everything and make her understand it. I believed that for a lengthy time."
"What changed?"
"I found your trail in the Veth lowlands. Four years in. I had a location, a name you were using. I could have moved on it within the week." I turn. "I didn't. Because I realized I didn't know what I would do when I found you. I had made you into a design of everything I'd lost. And I didn't know whether I would want justice or something else entirely."
She rises. Not toward me. Just rises, like the sitting has become something she can't manage anymore. "You're the only person who looks at me and actually sees what I did. And you don't look away from it."
"No."
"Everyone else condemns it or excuses it. You just hold it. Like I'm allowed to be someone who did that terrible thing and still be here." She crosses the distance between us without hurry and without announcement. She stops close and the firelight hits us both from the same glow. Her hand comes up. Stops before it touches. Hesitation or a question.
I should step back. The case for it is coherent and I have been rehearsing it since the cave. The road ahead requires two functional minds, two people who are not making the catastrophic error of confusing shared grief for something survivable. She waits.
I reach up and press her hand against my cheek. Against the scar. The skin there has no sensation at the center. At the edges it has too much. Her breath changes, but her eyes don't leave mine, and something that I have held locked since I dragged myself out of the fire and made myself who I am today, gives way.
"Stop thinking," she suggests.
"I'm not?—"
"You are. You've been thinking since the pass." Her thumb moves against the ruined skin. "Stop."
I take her wrist. Not gently. Her pulse kicks hard against my grip and her chin comes up in answer — defiant, immediate, entirely her — and whatever remained of my restraint goes with it.
I kiss her the way I've refused to since the cave. Without apology. Without the controlled retreat I managed then. She makes a sound against my mouth that isn't surprise, and then her hands are in my collar and she is pulling rather than yielding, which is exactly right, it's the only variation I would believe.
I walk her back until the wall catches her. She doesn't protest. She bites my lower lip in retaliation for the grip I have on her jaw — sharp and deliberate — and I feel it go straight through me.
"There he is," she says, quiet, almost satisfied.
I pull back just enough to look at her. Thick dark curls loose. Eyes hazel. Her pulse pumping at her throat. "You're not afraid of me," I say.
"I didn't say that."
"You're not acting afraid."
Her mouth curves at one corner. "Maybe I've decided it doesn't matter."
I take the hem of her shirt and she raises her arms without being asked — deliberate, chosen, not surrendered. I understand the difference. I honor it by not making her wait. What follows isn't soft, not even gentle; we've both already accounted for that. Her nails find my neck and hold on while my palms learn her — the old blade-marks along her ribs, the geography of damage and survival mapped in scar tissue. I trace them without comment. She watches my face while I do, and that is more intimate to me than anything else.
When she reaches for the buttons of my shirt I let her. She gets two undone and stops and stares at what's beneath — thefull burned ruin of me — and her jaw sets with an expression that is not pity and not horror. She presses against it and holds one palm there, and that single simple warmth is the most dangerous thing that has happened to me in a decade.
"Your turn," she says, and there is a wink in her voice even now, even here.
I pull her back in and she laughs — low and real, bitten off at the end — and then there is no more room for it. I get her out of the rest with more efficiency than patience and she drags her nails slowly down my chest, watching my reaction the entire time, satisfied with what she finds there. When I get my hand between her thighs it shifts to something else. Her composure doesn't slip so much as fracture — a single clean break, quickly plastered over.
"Don't," she starts.
