i.
The reason Sydney takes so long accept to Adrian's confessions of love is simple: she doesn't believe him. Her entire life has been a succession of silver medals, no matter the achievement, of missions weighed down with a duty so bright, it rendered her a shadow in its wake. It seems impossible that someone could love her enough to put her first.
This is why, she knows, Adrian is braver than her. He fights for what he wants, despite the hidden wounds from his own perceived failures. So many gentle refusals and crushed hopes lie in his past, a dozen actions that whisper 'I want him, not you,' and yet he dares hope she will choose him.
ii.
Adrian falls in love with the idea of love long before he meets Rose, much less Sydney. He loves the idea in the same way he goes on to love those women: wholly and beyond reason, but with keen awareness of its imperfections. It's only after his feelings for Rose have become a raw, festering wound that he wonders if, instead of changing for love, there is something to be said for growing because of it. Maybe it can be just a tendril - a bright, beautiful, shining, golden tendril - of his life instead of a goal in itself.
Which makes it all the more ironic that he's the one to move Sydney to believe. In some ways, they had been going in opposite trajectories from the moment they met, until they collided somewhere in the middle.
iii.
But it had all been so inevitable, at its core. She had seen Adrian, his shell of pain and core of chaos, found herself reflected in his eyes as though he could see through her too. More like me than anyone else I knew. Loneliness was a pain so old and entrenched she only noticed it in its sudden absence. When she's around Adrian, she feels not alone, and that makes every dangerous stolen minute worth the risk.
iv.
Being forced to stay away from Adrian so soon after she'd finally let herself want him back is torment. She had come to understand that ferocious hunger to touch, to be touched in return, just in time to be barred from his skin. Still, Sydney finds that there are some advantages. It's good practice for the future, when far more suspicious Alchemists will be watching. It forces a degree of distance, letting them both keep their heads clear.
And no matter how red she goes when someone, for whatever reason, mentions Adrian's tongue, there will never be any photographic evidence for what they get up to in their shared dreams.
v.
Though that's nothing compared to her reaction the day Adrian mentions, so casual they might have been discussing Hopper's newest tricks, that he wants sex in front of a mirror. Adrian doesn't push it. Yet. It would be counter-productive to make her so tense, it would stop her from watching too, stop her from looking at her unadorned form, clean lines and palpable bones, and see the beauty he does.
vi.
Adrian is horrified when Sydney's need to take care of everything rubs onto him. He has always felt a crowd's pain too keenly to be apathetic, but the instinctive urge to take that pain away, rather than drown his sorrow, is new. The idea that, maybe, he had planted both feet firmly on that path from the moment he snatched Jill from the arms of death, does not occur to him until he sees the pride in Sydney's eyes.
"I might have helped," she disagrees with him, "but you did the work yourself."
"Let me dream a little longer, Sage," he mutters, because he will always be more comfortable when filled with whiskey and wildness, without expectations to disappoint.
At least Castile no longer glares at him, promising vengeance for each momentary shadow he made flicker through Jill. It's a pity he won't be able to poke fun any longer, but no way would he ever consciously put anything but a smile on Jill's face.
vii.
The Alchemists take her and throw his world into chaos, and Adrian doesn't even think of expectations. His love is less flashy now, less chaotic, but Adrian has always known this: love is loyalty, love is action. Love is every small gesture along with every desperate confession. Love is bringing sun block because you know she'll forget, bathing in the sunlight to watch her smile; love is telling her the truth to ease your worry, staying indoors to ease her worry.
Love is knowing she'll come for you if you're ever hurt, and never letting her forget that, with or without combat-ready magic, he'd come for her too.
viii.
Adrian visits her every single night, in the worst three months of her life. It takes almost as long for Sydney to forgive herself for being glad that he put her first, for noticing the darkness creeping into his eyes and trusting him to know his own limits. After three months of that particular guilt, the danger he's in during the actual rescue attempt is almost a relief in comparison. Almost.
viii (b).
"Now you know how I feel," Adrian mutters, when they are stretched side by side and no longer drowning in the urge to cling to one another, "when you overuse your magic."
viii (c).
So when the truth of them sends shockwaves through the public, Alchemist and Moroi and Dhampir all, they bear the brunt of gossip together. Sydney tries to buffer the suspicion falling onto him like waves, nausea rising when she understands some of their whispers. This, she realizes with a sudden cutting clarity, is precisely how Jill had been treated by her peers in Palm Springs. This is how Adrian and Rose had felt, when she called them, sincere to the bone, evil creatures of the night.
It gives her hope. She and Adrian can get past this. Just look at Jill now: calm and composed and head held high, painfully earnest and warm all at once. Jill pays no attention to the rumors that still shadow her every outing with Eddie. She curls her finger's into Eddie's, catches Eddie's eyes until, Sydney knows, Eddie is the only thing she sees. Eddie would fight to his last breath to keep Jill safe - and Jill would do the same to remind Eddie that he is worth every frown of disapproval directed her way.
"In front of everyone," she mutters, running a finger along his collar. "The next time we kiss, I don't want to hide it."
"I never took you for an exhibitionist," Adrian murmurs.
Sydney does not smile. "You and I are going to prove everyone wrong. Want to do it together?"
Adrian's playfulness fades, though his eyes still dance - as mesmerizing as ever. "I thought you'd never ask."
A beat.
"So... about that mirror?"
ix.
Years into the future their relationship makes it into the history books as a pivotal chapter in Alchemist-Moroi relations. Sydney remembers a lonely girl who was not good enough, a lonely boy who thought he'd become nothing, and smiles. She does not read the story in the history books, and does not dwell on the implicit approval between the lines. She and Adrian had never needed anyone else's validation, just a safe space for the possibility of them to grow.
x.
Years and years into the future, they are both still terrified at the prospect of raising a child. Not because the possibility of starting family is unwanted - never - but out of Sydney's fear of becoming another Jared Sage, too wrapped up in the wide strokes of belief to remember her child was a person; Adrian's fear of becoming his father, unable to even make the effort.
x (b).
Which is nonsense of course, each insists to the other, and everyone around them insists too. Adrian, Sydney knows, will love the child with everything he has. Sydney, Adrian tells her, could only inspire their child to greater heights.
They are not their parents. They will never be their parents.