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Castor can feel Lazette’s soul along the threads. It sings, thrumming and chattering, warm and so utterly alive in his hands. It flits and shifts and changes and never settles, and yet never leaves.
He’s cheating, he knows. By all rights she shouldn’t still be here. By all rights he shouldn’t get to keep her. But the souls of Noel mermaids are slippery things, as changeable as their faces. She’d dodged any other attempt to guide her on, waiting for him, and when she learned he wasn’t leaving—not for a long while, anyway—he’d felt the same stubborn heat in her soul as came from her glare any time he’d suggested he ought to find a way to let her leave the Hausen house without him.
And maybe, perhaps, this is a little kindness, a little favor from the Overseer, to turn his eyes away from this soul that lingers on in Fest’s threads. Castor doesn’t know if he deserves that kindness, but he can surely believe that Lazette does.
So he lets himself have this, lets himself have her, as she has him. He lets her continue to teach him to smile.
In the evenings, while Frau hunts and Labrador sleeps in his garden, Castor comes to the waterways. She waits for him there, flicking moonlit rainbows of spray at him with her tail if he’s late. He settles on the ground and takes her hand, closes his eyes, and lets her soul sing to his.
He feels guilty sometimes—often—about breaking his promises to her: to see the world with her, to find her home, to experience freedom together. When he sits with her, though, she squeezes his hand, and sings back contentment to his anxieties. The world is here, she tells him, here where people from all across the Districts come to lay down their troubles, here where she can make music and friends and see a thousand new faces in a day, and here where he will always come back to her. Her home she found in Xinglu long ago. Wherever she once came from, whatever faded memories she once sought to recapture, she made peace with their loss the first time she made him laugh, she tells him. Her past was a curiosity, a place she sought to find some piece of herself she had once lost to the chains and the bars of a cage, but returning to the ocean was only a sort of proxy dream. The thing she truly desired—to have somewhere to call her home, where she is safe, and loved, and happy—she has in Castor. What could the cold and dark depths of the ocean tell her? What could she possibly learn about her life, that would bring her greater contentment than to be here, holding his hand? She regained everything she’d lost and more in the forging of the bond between them.
And as for freedom, what was freedom but the chance to make her own choices? She’d followed him thrice: to the Hausen house, out of it on the sharp end of a knife, and then once more, through his threads, back to the false life a ghost’s soul could grant her. If Castor wants to give her freedom, he can hardly do so by denying her choice. It’s her wish to stay by his side—and his, to stay by hers.
“Love” is such a small word to encompass it.