Until it Breaks
He found him leaning against a gnarled and knotted trunk of one of the many ancient trees that filled the forest. Trickles of stunted moonlight that managed to pierce the thick canopy of the greedy foliage overhead had slipped down and around the leaning figure, illuminating scarlet tresses that hung shadowing his face. Hakkai could see a thin tendril of smoke rising and curling upwards into the air, and it was the sharp scent of nicotine catching the wind that convinced him, more than anything else, that the silent and still figure up ahead was indeed his friend made flesh, and not a ghostly reminder of temptation lost in a forgotten dream.
The group had been beyond exhausted after the day's intense battle with the powerful group of youkai they had come across. So, instead of waiting the hours that it would have taken to reach the next town, they had hastily rigged camp in the womb of the thick forest, and promptly collapsed.
Or at least two of them had managed to collapse. When he had left them a short while ago, both Sanzou and Gokuu were lost in sleep on opposite sides of the dying fire. The priest was always somewhat of a wonder to Hakkai when he slept. The smooth marble-pale countenance of his face freed itself from the harsh look of bored concentration, and relaxed deeper into the haunting beauty of the man that made even Hakkai ache from time to time when confronted with the raw perfection of ivory and gold.
Gokuu was the image of youthful innocence while asleep; his mouth opened to draw in deep breathes, only to release them as noisy snores that the group had somehow managed to get use to. His body was turned towards the priest, as always, and as always, his small hand was stretched out in the direction of the sleeping blonde man in an unconscious plea and desperate question. A question answered, perhaps, only in the realm of his dreams.
Hakkai had initially lain among them when they had first settled in for the night, but was pulled from his rest by the sound of retreating footsteps leading from their camp. He knew without opening his eyes that it was Gojyo up and restless despite his fatigue. Hakkai remained still while his friend left them to seek comfort in the grasp of solitude, but as minutes melted into hours, he finally rose to seek out Gojyo to offer what little comfort he could before the night sky threatened to call for the sun.
He approached the slouched figure with unusual care, mindful that this intrusion may still be unwanted. But he drew closer to Gojyo with a determined mind, knowing, as he did, that * he * had always welcomed the redhead's company whenever the other man had approached him in the past to pull him from darkening thoughts.
The half-youkai remained silent and unmoving until Hakkai was almost in front of him. He saw the end of the dwindling cigarette glow fiercely as the other man took a strong drag before speaking.
"Oi, Hakkai, comin' out here to check on me?"
Hakkai's face reflexively stretched into what he hoped was a friendly and welcoming smile as he replied, "I'm simply returning the favor. Perhaps I decided that it's my turn to see what you looked like depressed."
Gojyo pulled the cigarette from his mouth and ground it out on the heel of his boot as he released a soft chuckle at having his words of not so long ago given back to him. His eyes were fixed somewhere on the damp ground, where they had remained since Hakkai had found him.
"Well, I hate to disappoint you, but this is pretty much it. I try not to let myself get too depressed over nothin'."
Hakkai moved until he was standing next to Gojyo to lean beside him against the giant trunk of the ancient tree. He let his head tilt back until it touched the dry bark in an attempt to catch glimpses of the fading stars that still clung to the night's sky though the barrier of deep green branches that shifted every so often with an insistent breeze. When he spoke again, it was in a softer tone that he unconsciously reserved for nighttime talks with Gojyo.
"This afternoon was a lot of things, but I wouldn't call it 'nothing'. Gojyo, I know more than anyone else what it's like to have a reminder of the worst of your past show up unexpectedly."
The redhead snorted in a deceptively dismissive manner, but he still would not bring the scarlet of his eyes to meet the forest of his concerned friend's.
"That wasn't my past. Those people had nothin' to do with me."
Hakkai felt his eyes slip shut as he reached inside himself to find the patience to get through this conversation. Not that it wasn't easy to find; this was Gojyo, his best friend, the man who picked him up and took him out of the freezing rain on the worst night of his life. All that Hakkai was belonged to this man on so many levels, and patience was among the easiest to give.
The converted youkai replayed the events of earlier in the afternoon. They had reached a small out of the way town and decided to stop there for a short break before continuing their journey westward. But, they quickly drew unfriendly attention as soon as they entered the town. They were met with silence and heated glares, and it didn't take too long to discern that the majority of the instant and unwarranted anger was directed at Gojyo.
The group had remained close during their stay, an air of protectiveness thick among them, unspoken yet palatable as it always was whenever one of them was threatened. The animosity could only have been be caused by bigotry since Gojyo had never been to that town. He could not have done anything else to cause offence other than having bloodstained hair and eyes.
There were few places they had come across in their journey where the meaning of the shock of scarlet branded him as a half-youkai. Even before the youkai had begun to succumb to madness, a union between the races was still viewed as fairly taboo, so half-bred children were rare and not often seen.
But there were still places where people knew what that redness meant, and as the violence and madness spread across the land, so did the hatred and prejudice for the children born with the blended blood of the two races.
The group was in desperate need of supplies and the next town on their journey was still a ways off, so they remained in the tense atmosphere amongst the angry stares, united as they always were despite bickering and short tempers, relaying to the townspeople with the determined set of their own glares that to mess with one of them would mean getting through all of them. It was a silent but telling afternoon.
The silence was eventually broken.
"Eiri!"
The woman had come out of nowhere, rushing towards the group. Her face was tear-streaked but her eyes were wild, and she fell to her knees before a startled Gojyo with an anguished sob.
"You've come back! Why? Why did you do that? You know what's going to happen! They're going to make me do it again, Eiri, and it was so hard before! So hard -"
"Aunt Keiko!"
A younger woman ran up to the hysterical woman on the ground and put her hands on her shoulders in an attempt to pull her to her feet. She spared a pained look to Sanzou's group, her gaze lingering on Gojyo, before dropping her eyes back to the kneeling women.
"That's not Eiri, Aunt Keiko. It's not him. Please, get up and come back to the house with me."
But her words, if heard at all, had no effect. The sobbing woman's shaking hand shot out and grabbed Gojyo's before he could pull it away.
"You've come back to me, Eiri! And you're all grown up! How? How is that possible?"
Gojyo struggled to get past his shock and managed to respond with a stuttered breath.
"Y-you must have me confused, lady. My name's not -"
But he was cut off before he finished as the woman, who was clearly insane, rushed on without showing any sign that she had heard him. Her grip tightened on the half-breed's hand, and Hakkai dimly recalled thinking at the time, through his own shock, that her nails were going to leave tiny crescents in his best friend's flesh.
"It's that evil blood, isn't it? That evil blood that I put in your veins. But I fixed it, Eiri, don't you remember? I loved you so much, and they told me that the only way to help you was to free you, to free you from that cursed life that I gave you. But that devil's blood won't let you be free, will it? It sent you back here, back to me, but don't worry, I love you and I'll free you again!"
She moved with surprising speed, leaping from her kneeling position with her hands curled and out stretched towards Gojyo's throat.
It was the Sanzou who stopped her, his black boot connecting with her chest as he kicked her back to the dusty ground. The cocking of the gun seemed unusually loud as he pointed it squarely at her head.
"Get her out of here. Now."
There was no disobeying the murderous tone of the priest's voice. Her niece managed to finally pull the hysterical woman upright and steered her quickly away from the four men standing in startled silence.
Hakkai's eyes immediately went to Gojyo who was standing in dull shock staring after the departing figure of the deranged woman. Then, as if feeling the eyes of his teammate, his face slipped into a blank and neutral mask that hurt Hakkai to look at. Gojyo wasn't like him. Gojyo was the most honest man that he knew, and it had hurt so much to stand there and watch his friend, his savior, put on a mask of indifference that hid the shocking beauty of the constant honesty of his face.
They left right after that. They had already gotten the supplies that they needed, and there was nothing, nothing at all, more that they wanted from that town. The ride out was oddly silent, almost painfully quiet without the familiar sounds of bickering that usually rode with them as a constant companion.
They had not gotten far when they were attacked by a large group of vicious youkai, and they had spent the next few hours in battle. And if Hakkai had noticed the increased vigor in which his best friend killed that day, then he chose not to mention it.
But now, with the nighttime sky beginning its shift from black down to deep navy, it was time to remove that horrible mask of forced indifference that Gojyo wore, because it was so wrong, because it was such a lie. Hakkai knew this because he lied everyday with every smile, because he had watched every drop of honesty that he had ever understood himself to possess pour thickly from Kanan's pale throat down to the unforgiving floor of her cell.
And the thing that was the most wrong with this situation was not that the woman had killed her own child because she had believed his life to be a curse, and that was really too horrible to think about in itself, but that Gojyo somehow believed the same thing to a degree about the worth of his own life.
That thought made Hakkai so angry that he almost had to bite down on his own tongue to keep from screaming out. This man had saved his life. This man had given him a home when he had lost one, had given him a reason to live when he had lost that, too. This man was * not * worthless.
"You're worth everything."
At first, he was not aware that the words had escaped his lips until he felt the heat of Gojyo's eyes on him, scalding him with their scarlet intensity as they sometimes did. The mask was slipping; it was sliding off his face like a developing sheen of sweat. Sha Gojyo was too honest for it to remain in place, too honest to stop the blossoming hunger that was stealing across the scarred sun-kissed face beneath the awakening sky.
And this look, this want that sometimes surfaced from time to time, hurt Hakkai to look at, as well. But it was a different kind of pain, a pain that left him frightened rather than angry. Unsure, rather than determined.
He let his own mask go, because there was no room for lies in the early hours of this sleepless morning, because the force of Gojyo's honest longing was for once stronger than Hakkai's crippling numbness.
He closed his eyes but he did not pull away when he felt his friend's hand reach out to trace the curve of his cheek. The forest had been silent, but now his ears roared with the sound of his own heartbeat, and he spared a second to be shocked that a heart as small as his could beat with that much intensity.
Gojyo's warm breath close to his face, ghosting over his mouth, flooded another sense with it's moist heat, before the gap was closed and there was nothing left between them, but so much at the same time.
His best friend's kiss tasted sweet, a different sweetness than Kanan's kisses, more like sweet and spicy at the same time. Hakkai parted his lips slightly, and they were joined a little closer, a little more intimately, and he might have sighed as the sweet spiciness increased. And it was too distracting to be calming; it called out too loudly to the each nerve in his body to be merely pleasant. He opened his mouth wider because his body knew, even if his mind had forgotten, that being turned upside-down was much more rewarding than staying in control.
There was so much blood. It was everywhere, leaking from the wounds on his body, staining his clothing, coating his hands in its seen and unseen thick essence, pouring slowly and fiercely from Kanan's throat as she died, as she choked on it as it filled her mouth, and he could feel it in his own mouth, taste it on his tongue, its metallic tang cursing him, cursing his love -
"Sh. It's all right. You're OK, Hakkai, just calm down."
When his eyes opened, his face was nestled against the strong curve of Gojyo's shoulder and he could see soft strands of crimson falling against his face. He was shaking so badly, every inch of his body trembled uncontrollably, held from collapsing to the ground only by the arm circling his waist and the other gently pressing his head against a warm supporting shoulder. He tried to open his mouth to speak, but his muscles would not cooperate. He could do nothing but shake apart in Gojyo's arms, trusting his friend to put him back together as he had done three years ago.
Finally, the trembling lessened, and Hakkai felt as if he could manage to step away from the protection of his friend's embrace. He was released with obvious reluctance, and he could not stop the sigh as a large hand made a final run through his chestnut hair before falling away. Distantly, he could hear the sound of the birds of the forest waking to greet the dawn, and he knew that it would be time soon to wake his remaining companions to continue their journey.
This time, it was Hakkai who could not bring his eyes to meet his friend's. He stood there, as if rooted to the spot while feeling a curl of shame burn throughout his body. This, like so many things in his life, felt like a failure, and he could not face failing Gojyo as he had failed Kanan so terribly in the past.
He could not stop the tensing of his body as his chin was gripped and gently urged upwards. His eyes, however, would not leave the safety of the forest's ground.
"Hey."
That soft syllable finally pulled his gaze upwards, and he was confronted with gentle understanding and affection in the scarlet orbs. The want remained as well, but cooled and banked for the sake of temporary safety.
"It's OK, Hakkai. Just a little too soon, huh?"
His eyes blinked a few times in response to an unfamiliar sting. He wanted to answer, but he could not find the right words to offer to his friend. His voice had been singed away by the flare of shame that had raced through his body. The hand on his chin smoothed down his neck to rest on his shoulder.
"I don't mind waiting, you know. As long as it takes."
The hand tightened as the soft words were spoken, and warmth spread from the point of contact on his shoulder, slowly returning heat to his chilled body.
"You're worth everything, too."
TBC?
He found him leaning against a gnarled and knotted trunk of one of the many ancient trees that filled the forest. Trickles of stunted moonlight that managed to pierce the thick canopy of the greedy foliage overhead had slipped down and around the leaning figure, illuminating scarlet tresses that hung shadowing his face. Hakkai could see a thin tendril of smoke rising and curling upwards into the air, and it was the sharp scent of nicotine catching the wind that convinced him, more than anything else, that the silent and still figure up ahead was indeed his friend made flesh, and not a ghostly reminder of temptation lost in a forgotten dream.
The group had been beyond exhausted after the day's intense battle with the powerful group of youkai they had come across. So, instead of waiting the hours that it would have taken to reach the next town, they had hastily rigged camp in the womb of the thick forest, and promptly collapsed.
Or at least two of them had managed to collapse. When he had left them a short while ago, both Sanzou and Gokuu were lost in sleep on opposite sides of the dying fire. The priest was always somewhat of a wonder to Hakkai when he slept. The smooth marble-pale countenance of his face freed itself from the harsh look of bored concentration, and relaxed deeper into the haunting beauty of the man that made even Hakkai ache from time to time when confronted with the raw perfection of ivory and gold.
Gokuu was the image of youthful innocence while asleep; his mouth opened to draw in deep breathes, only to release them as noisy snores that the group had somehow managed to get use to. His body was turned towards the priest, as always, and as always, his small hand was stretched out in the direction of the sleeping blonde man in an unconscious plea and desperate question. A question answered, perhaps, only in the realm of his dreams.
Hakkai had initially lain among them when they had first settled in for the night, but was pulled from his rest by the sound of retreating footsteps leading from their camp. He knew without opening his eyes that it was Gojyo up and restless despite his fatigue. Hakkai remained still while his friend left them to seek comfort in the grasp of solitude, but as minutes melted into hours, he finally rose to seek out Gojyo to offer what little comfort he could before the night sky threatened to call for the sun.
He approached the slouched figure with unusual care, mindful that this intrusion may still be unwanted. But he drew closer to Gojyo with a determined mind, knowing, as he did, that * he * had always welcomed the redhead's company whenever the other man had approached him in the past to pull him from darkening thoughts.
The half-youkai remained silent and unmoving until Hakkai was almost in front of him. He saw the end of the dwindling cigarette glow fiercely as the other man took a strong drag before speaking.
"Oi, Hakkai, comin' out here to check on me?"
Hakkai's face reflexively stretched into what he hoped was a friendly and welcoming smile as he replied, "I'm simply returning the favor. Perhaps I decided that it's my turn to see what you looked like depressed."
Gojyo pulled the cigarette from his mouth and ground it out on the heel of his boot as he released a soft chuckle at having his words of not so long ago given back to him. His eyes were fixed somewhere on the damp ground, where they had remained since Hakkai had found him.
"Well, I hate to disappoint you, but this is pretty much it. I try not to let myself get too depressed over nothin'."
Hakkai moved until he was standing next to Gojyo to lean beside him against the giant trunk of the ancient tree. He let his head tilt back until it touched the dry bark in an attempt to catch glimpses of the fading stars that still clung to the night's sky though the barrier of deep green branches that shifted every so often with an insistent breeze. When he spoke again, it was in a softer tone that he unconsciously reserved for nighttime talks with Gojyo.
"This afternoon was a lot of things, but I wouldn't call it 'nothing'. Gojyo, I know more than anyone else what it's like to have a reminder of the worst of your past show up unexpectedly."
The redhead snorted in a deceptively dismissive manner, but he still would not bring the scarlet of his eyes to meet the forest of his concerned friend's.
"That wasn't my past. Those people had nothin' to do with me."
Hakkai felt his eyes slip shut as he reached inside himself to find the patience to get through this conversation. Not that it wasn't easy to find; this was Gojyo, his best friend, the man who picked him up and took him out of the freezing rain on the worst night of his life. All that Hakkai was belonged to this man on so many levels, and patience was among the easiest to give.
The converted youkai replayed the events of earlier in the afternoon. They had reached a small out of the way town and decided to stop there for a short break before continuing their journey westward. But, they quickly drew unfriendly attention as soon as they entered the town. They were met with silence and heated glares, and it didn't take too long to discern that the majority of the instant and unwarranted anger was directed at Gojyo.
The group had remained close during their stay, an air of protectiveness thick among them, unspoken yet palatable as it always was whenever one of them was threatened. The animosity could only have been be caused by bigotry since Gojyo had never been to that town. He could not have done anything else to cause offence other than having bloodstained hair and eyes.
There were few places they had come across in their journey where the meaning of the shock of scarlet branded him as a half-youkai. Even before the youkai had begun to succumb to madness, a union between the races was still viewed as fairly taboo, so half-bred children were rare and not often seen.
But there were still places where people knew what that redness meant, and as the violence and madness spread across the land, so did the hatred and prejudice for the children born with the blended blood of the two races.
The group was in desperate need of supplies and the next town on their journey was still a ways off, so they remained in the tense atmosphere amongst the angry stares, united as they always were despite bickering and short tempers, relaying to the townspeople with the determined set of their own glares that to mess with one of them would mean getting through all of them. It was a silent but telling afternoon.
The silence was eventually broken.
"Eiri!"
The woman had come out of nowhere, rushing towards the group. Her face was tear-streaked but her eyes were wild, and she fell to her knees before a startled Gojyo with an anguished sob.
"You've come back! Why? Why did you do that? You know what's going to happen! They're going to make me do it again, Eiri, and it was so hard before! So hard -"
"Aunt Keiko!"
A younger woman ran up to the hysterical woman on the ground and put her hands on her shoulders in an attempt to pull her to her feet. She spared a pained look to Sanzou's group, her gaze lingering on Gojyo, before dropping her eyes back to the kneeling women.
"That's not Eiri, Aunt Keiko. It's not him. Please, get up and come back to the house with me."
But her words, if heard at all, had no effect. The sobbing woman's shaking hand shot out and grabbed Gojyo's before he could pull it away.
"You've come back to me, Eiri! And you're all grown up! How? How is that possible?"
Gojyo struggled to get past his shock and managed to respond with a stuttered breath.
"Y-you must have me confused, lady. My name's not -"
But he was cut off before he finished as the woman, who was clearly insane, rushed on without showing any sign that she had heard him. Her grip tightened on the half-breed's hand, and Hakkai dimly recalled thinking at the time, through his own shock, that her nails were going to leave tiny crescents in his best friend's flesh.
"It's that evil blood, isn't it? That evil blood that I put in your veins. But I fixed it, Eiri, don't you remember? I loved you so much, and they told me that the only way to help you was to free you, to free you from that cursed life that I gave you. But that devil's blood won't let you be free, will it? It sent you back here, back to me, but don't worry, I love you and I'll free you again!"
She moved with surprising speed, leaping from her kneeling position with her hands curled and out stretched towards Gojyo's throat.
It was the Sanzou who stopped her, his black boot connecting with her chest as he kicked her back to the dusty ground. The cocking of the gun seemed unusually loud as he pointed it squarely at her head.
"Get her out of here. Now."
There was no disobeying the murderous tone of the priest's voice. Her niece managed to finally pull the hysterical woman upright and steered her quickly away from the four men standing in startled silence.
Hakkai's eyes immediately went to Gojyo who was standing in dull shock staring after the departing figure of the deranged woman. Then, as if feeling the eyes of his teammate, his face slipped into a blank and neutral mask that hurt Hakkai to look at. Gojyo wasn't like him. Gojyo was the most honest man that he knew, and it had hurt so much to stand there and watch his friend, his savior, put on a mask of indifference that hid the shocking beauty of the constant honesty of his face.
They left right after that. They had already gotten the supplies that they needed, and there was nothing, nothing at all, more that they wanted from that town. The ride out was oddly silent, almost painfully quiet without the familiar sounds of bickering that usually rode with them as a constant companion.
They had not gotten far when they were attacked by a large group of vicious youkai, and they had spent the next few hours in battle. And if Hakkai had noticed the increased vigor in which his best friend killed that day, then he chose not to mention it.
But now, with the nighttime sky beginning its shift from black down to deep navy, it was time to remove that horrible mask of forced indifference that Gojyo wore, because it was so wrong, because it was such a lie. Hakkai knew this because he lied everyday with every smile, because he had watched every drop of honesty that he had ever understood himself to possess pour thickly from Kanan's pale throat down to the unforgiving floor of her cell.
And the thing that was the most wrong with this situation was not that the woman had killed her own child because she had believed his life to be a curse, and that was really too horrible to think about in itself, but that Gojyo somehow believed the same thing to a degree about the worth of his own life.
That thought made Hakkai so angry that he almost had to bite down on his own tongue to keep from screaming out. This man had saved his life. This man had given him a home when he had lost one, had given him a reason to live when he had lost that, too. This man was * not * worthless.
"You're worth everything."
At first, he was not aware that the words had escaped his lips until he felt the heat of Gojyo's eyes on him, scalding him with their scarlet intensity as they sometimes did. The mask was slipping; it was sliding off his face like a developing sheen of sweat. Sha Gojyo was too honest for it to remain in place, too honest to stop the blossoming hunger that was stealing across the scarred sun-kissed face beneath the awakening sky.
And this look, this want that sometimes surfaced from time to time, hurt Hakkai to look at, as well. But it was a different kind of pain, a pain that left him frightened rather than angry. Unsure, rather than determined.
He let his own mask go, because there was no room for lies in the early hours of this sleepless morning, because the force of Gojyo's honest longing was for once stronger than Hakkai's crippling numbness.
He closed his eyes but he did not pull away when he felt his friend's hand reach out to trace the curve of his cheek. The forest had been silent, but now his ears roared with the sound of his own heartbeat, and he spared a second to be shocked that a heart as small as his could beat with that much intensity.
Gojyo's warm breath close to his face, ghosting over his mouth, flooded another sense with it's moist heat, before the gap was closed and there was nothing left between them, but so much at the same time.
His best friend's kiss tasted sweet, a different sweetness than Kanan's kisses, more like sweet and spicy at the same time. Hakkai parted his lips slightly, and they were joined a little closer, a little more intimately, and he might have sighed as the sweet spiciness increased. And it was too distracting to be calming; it called out too loudly to the each nerve in his body to be merely pleasant. He opened his mouth wider because his body knew, even if his mind had forgotten, that being turned upside-down was much more rewarding than staying in control.
There was so much blood. It was everywhere, leaking from the wounds on his body, staining his clothing, coating his hands in its seen and unseen thick essence, pouring slowly and fiercely from Kanan's throat as she died, as she choked on it as it filled her mouth, and he could feel it in his own mouth, taste it on his tongue, its metallic tang cursing him, cursing his love -
"Sh. It's all right. You're OK, Hakkai, just calm down."
When his eyes opened, his face was nestled against the strong curve of Gojyo's shoulder and he could see soft strands of crimson falling against his face. He was shaking so badly, every inch of his body trembled uncontrollably, held from collapsing to the ground only by the arm circling his waist and the other gently pressing his head against a warm supporting shoulder. He tried to open his mouth to speak, but his muscles would not cooperate. He could do nothing but shake apart in Gojyo's arms, trusting his friend to put him back together as he had done three years ago.
Finally, the trembling lessened, and Hakkai felt as if he could manage to step away from the protection of his friend's embrace. He was released with obvious reluctance, and he could not stop the sigh as a large hand made a final run through his chestnut hair before falling away. Distantly, he could hear the sound of the birds of the forest waking to greet the dawn, and he knew that it would be time soon to wake his remaining companions to continue their journey.
This time, it was Hakkai who could not bring his eyes to meet his friend's. He stood there, as if rooted to the spot while feeling a curl of shame burn throughout his body. This, like so many things in his life, felt like a failure, and he could not face failing Gojyo as he had failed Kanan so terribly in the past.
He could not stop the tensing of his body as his chin was gripped and gently urged upwards. His eyes, however, would not leave the safety of the forest's ground.
"Hey."
That soft syllable finally pulled his gaze upwards, and he was confronted with gentle understanding and affection in the scarlet orbs. The want remained as well, but cooled and banked for the sake of temporary safety.
"It's OK, Hakkai. Just a little too soon, huh?"
His eyes blinked a few times in response to an unfamiliar sting. He wanted to answer, but he could not find the right words to offer to his friend. His voice had been singed away by the flare of shame that had raced through his body. The hand on his chin smoothed down his neck to rest on his shoulder.
"I don't mind waiting, you know. As long as it takes."
The hand tightened as the soft words were spoken, and warmth spread from the point of contact on his shoulder, slowly returning heat to his chilled body.
"You're worth everything, too."
TBC?