You know when he's behind you. In a million years you never expected him to show his face, his vessel's face, to you again. You'd spit fire you're so angry with him, but you can feel the regret, the remorse, his miserable understanding of what he'd done, radiating off him like a foul heat. You consider not turning around, just waiting until he cracks or chickens out. Childish of you, you know.
His heart pounds. You can practically feel it vibrating the air of purgatory. So you turn around. He looks awful. Scruffy, rumpled, human. You forgive him. Just like that. He has fallen as far as you now. He knows what he's done, what you did, he understands. No point punishing him just to be brutal.
It's more than that though. He raises his eyes to you. Sheepish in a way he's never been, not even in his most loyal, most deferent moments as a good little soldier of...let's face it, Zachariah's.
"We have to go." Did his voice actually just crack? "Before they know I'm here."
You go with him, take his hand before you both vanish, squeeze it as you fly through time, space, you forget which.
You come to rest, back on the corporeal plane, and he turns to go. You hold his hand fast and he stops, his back to you now.
"I'm sorry, Anna. I was wrong."
And it's more than forgiveness, more than the milk of angelic, fallen kindness. You pull him toward you, make his shoulder turn toward you.
"Look at me and say it." And he does.
"You've come a long way." You brush your hand on his cheek, he drops his eyes, his chin, but you lift it back up with your finger tip. "It suits you." You smile your warmest, best, softest smile, suddenly needing to give him something. Something to fill him up.
"I'm proud of you." When he doesn't drop his hand from yours, you step up and kiss his cheek. Like instinct, like blindness, his face turns toward the contact and your lips brush.
Your breath hitches and he raises his eyes to yours and looks straight at you, straight through you. He's just as surprised as you are. And he kisses you. And the world breaks open again.