We'll still have secrets.
In the engine room, when he held your face in both of his hands, you suddenly knew what the collapsing star surrounding you felt like. He holds you like he does the universe, cupped in his weathered hands like so much unclaimed stardust. An entire world is suspended in death around you but the heat that blisters your skin is right under his hands.
You can smell the end on him (thick and heavy like smoke) as his voice yells the screams and the sounds of atoms cracking like walnuts around you. It smells delicious.
In the heart of his heart, you take his hand.
Better that way.
You tell him you don't want to forget. You're grabbing at the console, his hands again. Always his hands. Those hands that shake and prod at you, touching you and holding you. Those hands make you more important than you've ever been in your life.
You don't know what you are to him but it feels like your birthday and graduation and the day that boy got down on his knee for you all in one.
(Eventually you forgot your birthday because it reminded you of your mum. Your father waved at your graduation, standing all alone. You said no to that boy because he barely knew what you kept locked up. When this man, this alien touches you, you understand why all of that was leading up to this moment.)
You don't understand much but you understand this and your hands wrap around the mismatched buttons on the console and he's bunching up your dress.
And maybe it's because he knows you won't remember it, but it's so much more than you imagined. He's so much more. He's shown you that every day, every moment since he knocked on your door.
Maybe you were the girl he knew.
Both of them, because this feels more than any one person can feel. Your hair is coming undone, sticking to where he's kissing your neck. The weight of it is crushing you and your heart pounds in your ears and he's breathing there and you feel all of his twelve hundred years (all of them) as he holds you. He's done this before.
It feels like all those rooms you saw, the infinity of everything unraveling before you as you ran down the corridor. Your heart pounded in your chest then, too. You know why he needed your approval, that certainty of knowing his vessel endorses you. It's because he is the same, the same as this unbounded box that holds everything like he does with the world in his hands. He carries everything inside him, all at once. And in this moment, when you're truly together and you can feel it with everything he has, you are everything as well.
When he held you earlier, when he pulled you off the edge, you could feel both of his hearts. He was yelling and shaking you (he has a sliver of ice in his heart) and he said all those things about not knowing you and you were frightened but then his arms were around you. And you felt that heartbeat, twice your own. This is real and you realize you are the mystery to him in some backwards way.
You've never held someone's hand and jumped off a cliff before. In one instant you thought you might become birds.
As you both catch your breath, your hands still gripping the console, you know you'll always be everything because in his moment (maybe before this and maybe always) he believes you are.