The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

When she finally woke, it was slow, the way waking always is for her when nothing has forced it — a soft, unhurried surfacing, eyes opening halfway, then fully, gold and clock-ringed and, for a rare unguarded moment, entirely without their usual armor of wit.

"You were watching me," she said, voice still thick with sleep. "That's a little unfair. I never get to see myself asleep. You have an advantage."

"I like the advantage."

"Of course you do." She stretched, unhurried, the pale gauze sliding further from one shoulder, and then went still, studying my face with the particular sharp attentiveness she brings to anything she suspects is more than it appears. "You were thinking about something. I can always tell. You get a very specific look, like a man doing arithmetic he doesn't want to get wrong."

"I was thinking about a night you told me about once," I admitted. "A long time ago, in your old life. A question you asked out loud, from a balcony, and never got an answer to."

Something moved behind her eyes at that — recognition, and beneath it, something more careful, more exposed. "That's an old memory to be revisiting while I sleep."

"You looked so at peace," I said. "I wanted to understand what it cost you to get here. That's all."

She was quiet for a long moment, searching my face for something I couldn't quite name, and then, slowly, she pushed herself up onto one elbow, close enough that I could feel the warmth of her breath against my jaw, and she smiled — not her usual sharp, teasing smile, but something softer, something I've only ever seen a handful of times across all the years I've known her.

"Do you know," she said, quietly, "I asked that question into the dark for centuries, in one form or another, and never once got an answer. I built theories, and tore them down, and eventually decided the kindest thing was to stop asking at all, because a question with no answer, carried long enough, starts to weigh more than almost anything else a person can hold." She reached up, brushing her knuckles, slow and unhurried, along my jaw, the way she might once have studied an equation she'd finally, after centuries, solved. "I don't wonder anymore, Eremos. I want you to know that. I spent longer than I can properly measure not knowing whether something like this actually existed — whether the thing I watched from that window, all those centuries ago, was real in the way that mattered, or only ever a very convincing story people told themselves to survive their own smallness."

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"And now?"

"Now I know," she said, simply, the words carrying none of her usual armor, none of the wit she wears like a second skin most days. "I know because I'm looking at it. Because I fell asleep in your arms tonight without a single part of myself standing guard, for the first time in longer than any reasonable person should have to wait for that particular relief. Because you were still here when I woke, watching me the way no one in all my very long life ever once watched me, without wanting anything from me except exactly this." Her hand slid from my jaw to rest, flat and warm, over the slow, steady beat of my heart — the same place it always finds, without her seeming to decide to put it there. "The answer is yes. It exists. I found it. It took me most of forever, and I would do every miserable century of the search again, gladly, simply to end up exactly here."

I felt something in my chest loosen at that, some old, quiet ache I hadn't fully realized I was still carrying on her behalf — the accumulated weight of every unanswered night she'd described to me, finally, however belatedly, given somewhere to rest.

"I love you," I told her, plainly, because some things deserve to be said without dressing them up in anything else. "However long it takes you to fully believe that some days, I'm not going anywhere while you get there."

"I know," she said, and then, because she has never once been able to stay entirely soft for longer than a few unguarded minutes at a stretch, a small, sharp smile crept back into place at the corner of her mouth. "Say it again anyway. I intend to make you say it a truly obscene number of times before I allow myself to get tired of hearing it, which, given how long I've already waited for something like this to exist at all, may take considerably longer than either of us can currently imagine."

"I love you," I said again, and meant it exactly as much the second time.

She laughed, then — a real laugh, warm and unguarded, nothing like the dry, lazy amusement she performs for most of the world — and wrapped both arms around me, pulling herself close and holding on tight, tighter than I think she meant to at first, the particular fierce, unpracticed grip of someone who spent centuries never quite letting herself hold onto anything this hard, for fear of what it would cost her to lose it.

"Stay," she murmured, into my shoulder, no longer bothering to disguise how much the word cost her to say plainly. "Just for tonight. Just like this."

"For as long as you want," I told her. "I already promised you that once tonight. I meant it then. I mean it more now."

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