I Copy the Authorities of the Four Calamities

Chapter 491: Hers Again

Her arm was warm under his hand. That was the first thing Vane registered, absurdly, after everything, the simple ordinary fact of her skin being warm rather than cold, alive rather than something he’d been fighting.

The black in her eyes didn’t clear all at once. It happened the way ice breaks on a lake in early spring, a single crack first, then a slow, widening network of them, the depthless dark fracturing into something that had color again, grey at the edges, then a thin ring of opal, then more, until she was looking at him with her own eyes, actually her own, wet and wide and utterly lost.

"Vane."

His name came out of her cracked and small, nothing like the voice she used for teasing him, nothing like the composed valedictorian cadence from an hour ago that felt like a different lifetime now.

"I’m here," he said. "I’m right here."

She swayed, and he caught her properly this time, both arms, her full weight suddenly real and present against him where a moment ago there had been nothing to catch at all. The black cracks along her arms had stopped spreading. The blood on her face had stopped tracking fresh. Whatever the Dreamscape had been doing to her body, stripped of its unrestrained fuel, it had finally, mercifully, stopped getting worse.

"I heard him," she said, muffled against his shoulder, and he felt her shaking, not the controlled tremor of composure holding by a thread, something rawer than that. "Alderain. I heard every word of it. The light of civilization. A city opening its gates." Her fingers curled into his shirt. "I was nine, Vane. I was nine years old and I watched it from the hills and my mother told me not to look back and I looked back anyway, and I have spent eleven years since then deciding that if I just held it carefully enough, kept it small enough, none of it would ever have to be real again in front of anyone."

"It’s real. It was always real. You don’t have to keep making it small."

"I know that now." She pulled back enough to look at him properly, tears cutting clean tracks through the blood still drying on her face. "Something happened. In there. I don’t know how to explain it properly. I stopped running from the hill. I just let myself stand on it and watch, the way I actually watched, nine years old and terrified and not brave at all, and it didn’t turn into rage this time. It just hurt. It just hurt exactly as much as it was always going to hurt, and I let it, and somewhere in the middle of finally letting it hurt, I wasn’t burning anymore."

Vane held her steady, saying nothing, giving her the room to keep going.

"I’ve spent four years reading everyone on this island," she said. "Every secret, every fear, every small ugly thing people didn’t want seen. I built an entire life out of knowing things about other people before they knew I knew them. And the whole time, I never let myself actually feel the one thing that mattered most, because feeling it seemed more dangerous than any secret I ever kept for anyone else." She laughed, small and wet and disbelieving. "It took nearly killing an entire hall full of people to finally let myself grieve properly. That’s rather absurd, isn’t it."

"It’s not absurd. It’s just what it cost."

"You cut it away." She looked past him at the wrecked hall, at Sael still slumped near the stage, at the seven, no, three faculty members she actually remembered attacking now that her head was clear enough to count properly. "The Dreamscape. I felt it happen. Something in me kept trying to fold, kept trying to keep you at a distance the way it’s always kept everyone at a distance, and you just... removed it. Piece by piece. Like pulling a knot loose instead of fighting it."

"I didn’t know what else to do. Everything else I tried wasn’t enough."

"It was enough." Her hand found his face, hesitant at first and then not, her palm warm against his jaw. "Vane. I need to say something properly, the actual words, not a joke wrapped around them so I can pretend I didn’t mean it if you flinch."

"Say it."

"I love you." She said it plainly, steady despite the tears still tracking down her face, no performance left in it at all. "I’ve loved you for longer than I’ve let either of us admit. I named a stray cat after you, once, because I was too much of a coward to say it to your actual face, and you never even knew, and I let two years go by telling myself there would always be more time later to say the real version." Her thumb traced along his jaw, light. "There isn’t always more time. I nearly proved that today, to an entire hall full of people who didn’t deserve to pay for what I couldn’t carry properly. I don’t want to spend whatever time is actually left pretending the joke version is easier than the true one."

Vane’s throat tightened, something enormous and simple settling into his chest all at once.

"I love you too," he said. "I have for a long time. I just kept waiting for a moment that felt like the right one to say it, and I don’t think that moment was ever going to arrive on its own. I think you have to just say it, whenever it’s true, whether the room around you is on fire or not."

"The room is rather literally on fire," Nyx said, and something in her voice cracked into a small, real laugh, the first sound she’d made all night that sounded entirely like herself. "Metaphorically. Mostly metaphorically. I hope."

"Mostly."

She looked up at him, opal eyes clear and wet and entirely present, and closed the last of the distance between them herself.

The kiss was nothing like the desperate, fighting energy of the last hour. It was slow, and careful, and tasted faintly of blood and salt, and Vane held her like she might still slip away if he loosened his grip even slightly, and she kissed him back like a woman setting down a weight she’d been carrying since she was nine years old and had finally, finally decided she was allowed to put somewhere else.

Around them, the wrecked hall held its breath. Sael, still on the ground, watched with something unreadable on her face. The distant sounds of the wider chaos rolled on beyond the walls, Isaac’s ice and Ashe’s blade and Valerica’s gravity still holding their own lines somewhere out there.

But here, in the ruin of what had been the proudest day of her life, Nyx pulled back just far enough to rest her forehead against his, breathing unsteady, both of them still standing only because they were holding each other up.

"Thank you," she said, quiet. "For not giving up on the words."

"Always," Vane said, and meant it more than he’d ever meant anything.