Work Text:
“You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.” Antoine de Saint-Exupery
The fire leaps and crackles and in the distance, the others have folded themselves into bedrolls and nobody makes the mistake of dwelling on what it means having the two of them who do not (*can*not) sleep.
They moved from filling the night spaces with words. The stories stretch out between them, bridging the gaps, pulling them close enough that they begin to entwine - Occtis swaying in the warm breezes she conjures out of memories of her youth, Vaelus entombed by his remembrances of discovering, wielding the kinds of magic that brought Pincushion back from beyond. (Their familiar, always, snuggled next to them, in a gap between feet, between the hollow of her knees, haloing their heads when two foreheads press desperately together.)
She pillows her head on the emptiness of his chest, the echoing gasps of his breaths, the memory of a heartbeat that never fluttered under her fingers except in imaginings. She stills her hands against the slim bones of his hips; he catches at the back of her neck, a brush of chill fingertips against her skin. A gasp, a sigh, two bodies anchored together as one desperately remembers how a living man should breathe. He whispers against her skin, a mantra passed from him to her and back again. (I am dead and I love, I love, I love.) She holds him like she can pour her warmth into what once was a person.
None of them speak of it.