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He woke out of a small trembling nightmare, on a gasp that didn’t escape, one hand over his mouth. He knew what he’d dreamed; he felt it. He’d dreamed it before.
He held out a hand. Turned it over, in the dark. Real. Bones and joints and tendons. Put back together. Not fire, not ash.
The bed rustled. Oliver sat up. “Tir?”
“I’m all right.”
“Bad dream?”
“No. Not exactly.” That was true.
Oliver started to speak, stopped. His shoulders slumped. “Tir…I love you.”
“I know. I know. I’m here. I’m not leaving you. Not ever again.”
“No, I know you wouldn’t. I just…” Ollie sighed. In the ink and midnight shadows of night, his normal tawny handsomeness—a lion, a hero, a sunlit sculptor hard at work—became muted, grey and dull. “You know you can tell me anything, right?”
“Yes, of course.” Too short an answer? Not enough?
“Can I hold you?”
“Oh yes. Of course.” He let Oliver wrap him up in big cozy heat. A well-known shape. Beloved. “You feel nice.”
“Good.” Ollie held him close for a while, didn’t say anything more, only kissed him occasionally, rubbed his back, stroked the other hand through his hair. Playing with strands, looping, twining, smoothing, petting. Slow, reassuring, asking nothing.
Tir drifted. Near sleep. Soothed into quiet, body lax and comfortable. Eyes closed, breathing the light spice of Oliver’s soap and skin.
Oliver said, so low that the question might not have been for Tir, “Do you regret it?”
Tir, half-asleep, heard the words without paying enough attention. And then made a wordless protesting sound. “Oliver…”
“You are awake.”
“I am now. What was that?”
“I just…I don’t know. I wonder, sometimes…the way you look…”
“Ask me again.”
Oliver swallowed. Tir watched the motion. “Do you regret it?”
“No. No, never.” He leaned more weight against Oliver as he said so, on purpose. Himself, secure in those artist’s arms. “I’d do it again in a heartbeat. Any of my heartbeats. They’re yours anyway.”
Oliver nodded but didn’t say anything, only held him. Beyond the bedroom window, the starlight lay cool and pale across old castle walls, striped fields, the deep emerald rustle of the forest, the blue silk of the night.
Tir said, reluctantly, because his husband deserved honesty, “I do…I don’t hate this, not exactly…but…maybe I do. Sometimes.”
He both heard and felt the inhale; Oliver nodded, like a man who’d known a trap lay ahead, and who’d taken the spear-blow regardless, no way to dodge.
“No, listen. It feels so empty. And I miss being me. Everything I could do, everything I was…” He waved a hand, set it on his husband’s bare chest. Over golden fuzz and firm broad muscle. “Do I sometimes wish no one had asked this of me? Do I wish I hadn’t had to lose…so much of who I was, who I thought I’d be? Maybe. When I could dance with the tree-folk, or swim with the salmon…”
“I’m sorry,” Oliver whispered. “Tir, I’m so sorry.”
“No, don’t be. I’m not.” He touched his husband’s cheek, felt the wetness there. “It hurts. I’m hurt. Healing—it’ll come back. I know that. The soothsayers said so, Fadi and the other physicians think so. But it’ll take so long. So much time. And I—we—have to know that. To live with it. Every day. But do I regret it? No.”
Oliver’s eyes were very wide, gazing at him in the dark.
Tir said it again: “I don’t regret it. I chose. The hurt is worth it; it is. We brought our lands together. We’re working to end that superstition, that fear. And I have you. I’m alive and I have you and you have me. And that—we have everything, Oliver, everything. Do I wish it hadn’t had a cost? I do—but everything does. A balance.” He knew it, he meant it, as he said the words. With all of his heart. “So I’ve been hurt, and you’ve been hurt, and we’ll be happy. Because we have that, too. This world, you and me, together.”
