Always
Time was odd. It made some things clearer and clouded others. It gave perspective, even as the ache manifested between periods of clarity. Infections cleared, pain dulled, and the universe fell into a new rhythm, strange as it might be.
And for Han and Leia, time uncovered the fledgling seeds of their relationship.
Three days into the long sublight slog to Bespin, Leia had lost some of her fear. She supposed it was to be expected. Who could possibly live in a state of mild panic for weeks on end? The nest of angry slip-wasps rumbled into hibernation and she felt like she could finally breathe. Sleeping was still difficult but the waking hours were pleasant. Careful. Not nearly as awkward. Friendly, but not romantic.
Balance.
She recognized that Han had no desire to make it any worse for them than it already was. And if they shared that same philosophy, then they could coexist as congenial crewmates, as long as no one asked that last, dreaded question.
Are you still leaving, Han?
She had no idea. Neither Han nor Chewie had said anything to her about it. Avoiding the topic entirely seemed to be the best way to handle it at present, even though there wasn't a soul aboard who didn't notice and wince at the tense red line underscoring their destination. Even Threepio seemed to understand that Bespin was a sore topic, and left it alone, some cursed portent of terrible things to come.
But it was there. Despite the balancing act, the little manipulations hung like a weight suspended over a devastating height.
Cross-legged in the main hold, Leia slowed her breathing and rested the backs of her hands on her knees. She vowed to stem her deep desire for understanding in all things: Han, Yoda, Vader. All of it, tugging at the ends of her hair and the edges of her threadbare clothing.
What did it mean? What did any of it mean?
This was the most difficult part of meditation, she decided. She wanted an itinerary. She wanted a goal. Direction. But the itinerary for meditation was to not have one, and instead to lose oneself in a world of passivity, of experience without thought. To wade through the waters of consciousness without judgement, emotion or reaction.
The thought of not reacting was anathema to Leia's very essence. But she would try, if only for her brother.
Luke.
To hear him tell it, meditation was more about the journey itself, not the destination. Unfathomable to Leia, of course—a woman of perpetual movement and energy—but he seemed to find value in it, and if there was a benefit, well, she would attempt it.
It wasn't like there was much more to do on this ship, anyway.
And so she sat and prepared to receive whatever it was the universe wanted to give her. Inhale. Fill your lungs. Hold. Empty your mind. Exhale. Release the tension. Remain still. Let the old worries fall away. Embrace the new...
"Mistress Leia?"
Keeping her eyes closed, she reached for her calm and gripped it as tightly as she could. "Yes, Threepio?"
"Might you be more comfortable somewhere else?"
She opened her eyes to the sight of a frazzled protocol droid, hydrospanner in hand, with his head cocked to the side in a facsimile of human concern. A more stunning break from internal meditation efforts could not have existed, and she wanted to laugh.
"There is nowhere else for me to go."
The corridor was a clear thoroughfare within the ship and Han was busy with some project. Something about the alluvial dampers? She had been paying limited attention. The same dilemma existed in using the cockpit: who knew where Han would show up next? Chewie was sleeping in his quarters and the captain's cabin was still a kind of no-go zone for her, except for use of that blessed water fresher.
There was enough room in the main hold for multiple people to work and exist together, with the added benefit of deck-space for her to assume the Jedi's favored meditation pose. And, too, she could practice levitation here, with so many objects of varying sizes and weights. Goddess knew she still had some questions about that little activity.
If there was any place on the Falcon in which she could truly practice any sort of Jedi skills, it was here.
"Oh dear," Threepio said, clearly upset. "Are you quite sure that is necessary, Your Highness? Commander Solo is heading—"
"I will be fine."
Heavy eyelids fell back into place and Leia refocused on her breathing. Inhale. Fill your lungs. Hold. Empty your mind. Exhale. Release the tension. Repeat. Find beauty in the simplicity, the submissiveness of trying not to think.
For a moment, she managed it: a tethered hold on her mindfulness, a semblance of whatever could be called peace. She felt like she was in zero-G, but also as if she was being held, cared for. She tried not to let the words themselves pull her away, attempting to exist without doing, observing the feeling, though it was so difficult not to have opinions on the subject—
"Fuck! Ow!"
Ripped from the sanctum she had found, she sighed and once again considered the room that held her. Han's outraged voice had come from her left, which meant he was doing something in the engine compartment. Or trying to do something in the engine compartment, and failing.
"Commander Solo, you should have reversed the coupling first before attempting to reroute the electrical charge."
"No shit, Professor. Hand me the rag—"
A minor electrical burn, then. Leia calmed the flare of worry and worked harder to eliminate the outside world.
Inhale. Fill your lungs. Hold. Empty your mind. Exhale. Release the tension.
This time she found her center easier, but also knew she was not stable there. It felt like she was balancing on one foot while wearing a weighted bag on her back. She had to adjust back and forth, wobbling precariously until she could find the critical weight placement, the right recipe for the peace she desperately needed but which had always eluded her.
And so she tried to cast her mind to her physical body, to use her very existence as a kind of grounding. How did her feet feel? Her knees? Her hips? Up and up and up to the top of her head and then back down again. An endless circuit of aches and pains: the faint trill of hunger, the clouded mess that was her heart. The physical and emotional and spiritual parts of Leia Organa living together in this fragile body, so caught in unholy schism—
Crash.
"What did I tell you, you piece of—"
"You did not tell me anything, Commander Solo! I told you—"
"Go. Get outta here."
A pause, then: "Clearly, you need my assistance, sir. Might I ask—?"
"Leia!"
She was already moving, knowing precisely where the confrontation would lead. There were few absolute truths in the galaxy, rare and priceless as Alderaanian pearls, and one was that these two beings could never, ever, be left alone together without one of them running to her for help.
The scene in the engine compartment was straight out of an old Mayroshi comedy. Crouched over the first engine casing, Han was up to his elbows in mechanical innards, sweat on his brow and a curse on his lips, while Threepio prattled on endlessly in the background.
"—any need for such vulgarities, particularly when I am trying to help—"
"—could melt you for scrap metal, make the casing here look nice and pretty—"
"Threepio, I need you in the cockpit," she interrupted them. "Could you wait for me there, please?"
Han's shoulders very clearly relaxed, though he didn't turn around or acknowledge her intervention. The protocol droid, on the other hand, positively preened in his excitement to be of use to his mistress. Leia's heart squeezed for Threepio, the abuse he suffered at the hands of the entire universe for his utter lack of self-awareness.
"Of course, Mistress Leia. I would happily oblige you in any capacity. Your company is certainly preferable to—"
The sound that interrupted the droid was more akin to growl than speech, and Leia glared at Han in rebuke. Shut up, she mouthed to his profile, then turned to the droid.
"I'll be right there," she said.
Watching as he clunked away, Leia turned to Han, ready to defend the droid. "You couldn't just let him help you?"
Han glared at her through sweat-mopped hair that fell into his eyes. "Was that what he was doing? Helping?"
"Sounded to me like you didn't take his advice and wound up the worse for it," she pointed out.
"Would have been fine without him distracting me."
Would you have? She wondered at her own question, but didn't bother to ask it aloud. Han's stubbornness was not new, nor was it something she could say was altogether a bad thing. Her mind cast back like a net, catching memories of his reliability in times of chaos, the genius she sometimes despised, wrapped up in a package whose primary emotions nowadays seemed to be avoidance of conflict and a deep, abiding hatred for a single protocol droid.
"You can't just yell for me whenever you get annoyed at him."
"Why not?"
"Because I'm not his parent and you're a grown adult who can handle your own problems."
"Sure about that?"
Tempting though it was, she sidestepped the offering. "I have things to do, too, Han."
She said it with emphasis, quietly, and he caught the change in her tone immediately. His expression changed, and with a nod he accepted the subtle criticism.
"Working on Jedi stuff?"
Eyeing the steady work of his hands, she wondered if he realized what he had just asked. By most standards, Han Solo would be classified as a questioner when it came to any belief system, much less the Force. They had held debates over her role as a Force-sensitive person many, many times, hashing out a number of frustrations and skepticisms. This was not new ground for him.
But that had been before. Now she wasn't sure if he truly wanted to hear about her spiritual endeavors or if this was another topic to be suppressed, like that of him leaving.
Her hesitancy must have been palpable, because he urged her on with an eyeroll.
"Look," Han began, "he's gonna wait for you for an hour, maybe two, before he comes looking for you. And if you're here with me, he'll assume we're doing something important, and leave us alone."
True enough, she thought.
He continued without a single glance in her direction. "And I have to work on this and something's bugging you, so go ahead. Talk."
She still wasn't sure that he understood the depth of the question he was asking, the personal nature of it. But one of the things she missed about Han as a partner was his perspective on her journey as a Jedi. He had been the one to assert that she was Force sensitive in the first place. Their conversations about the Jedi were priceless to her: grounded, intellectual discussions about meaning and dogma, even if Han himself wouldn't use those words. As a skeptic, his assurances of truth were few and far between, but when they came, she could rest on them with confidence.
And so what was the harm in seeing if that part of their connection to each other was still open to them? In a galaxy of loss and a rebellion of disappointment and death, there were few in the unique position to offer insight to her struggle.
Perhaps this was the part they could salvage. Their friendship.
"I'm doing better with the Luke-things."
She wanted to laugh at the words that had come out of her mouth, how bizarre they sounded, but couldn't refute their truth. In their stand against Vader, she had used skills she had barely glimpsed in her past efforts. And even before that, her telekinesis had drastically improved since returning from Ord Mantell.
And then she had glimpsed Han's colors a few days ago. That was the most profound of changes.
She desperately wished Luke was here. Was he seeing the same kind of growth? On Home One, or wherever he was? She could feel his presence in her chest like an anchor, but she had no idea where he was or what he was doing.
In her mind, if Luke had somehow become a master swordsman in the intervening weeks since Dagobah, then she could rest more comfortably. If, however, she was alone in this sudden profundity in the Force, then it was too sudden an improvement to be a good thing.
"Been wondering about that," Han mumbled into his work. "The sliding hatch on Hoth."
"Yes."
"Could it be because Vader was there? You always have strong reactions around him."
She frowned. "You mean the marketplace on Nar Shaddaa?"
"Yeah. But on the Death Star, too."
He turned his head and caught her eye. She knew he was referring to her resistance to what people politely called her interrogation at Vader's hands and what Han firmly called her torture every time he had cause to reference it.
A moment of companionable silence passed between them, before she dropped her eyes.
"There's been other things, too," she replied, and he returned to his work with a cant to his head that told her he was still listening. "Things that have happened since Hoth."
Most notably, the great realization that abandonment and a fear of loss might be the source of Han's sudden decision to abandon everything he had built over the past three years.
"So what do you think?" he asked.
"I think something is happening to me, and I'm not sure if I should embrace it or fight it."
Dark Side antics from Vader? Some kind of Force indoctrination? A holdover lesson from Yoda, the master who taught with horrifying discernment and personal attacks?
She didn't trust anybody at this point. The idea that she could somehow fail in her critical thinking skills, that she could be tricked into believing something simply because someone else told her it was true…
She didn't like that idea at all. She refused to be a party to anything other than the absolute truth.
"The Force is supposed to be about life, right?" Han said, still working, still focused on something else entirely. How he could so easily discuss philosophy when it was the tactile field of engineering that he was dealing with, she would never understand. "If something is happening to you, it must need to happen. Right?"
"You're forgetting about the consequences of power."
Chuckling, he tilted his head. "Definitely not doing that."
Leia responded with a soft smile he couldn't see and relished the most normal conversation they had had in weeks.
"So it's because of Dagobah?" he asked. "Or something else?"
She didn't know. Her training with Yoda had been quick and frustrating, more about who they were and less about who they were going to become. Yoda's instruction had been about laying the groundwork for them to practice together during their work with the Alliance. Nowhere on that small swamp planet had she felt like a change was happening to her.
She hadn't gone to Dagobah to learn how to be a Jedi, after all. She had gone to understand her parents' decisions, to vindicate them to herself. But then Han had slipped away and all that was left for her was her brother and the power they shared. The natural leap to thinking of herself as a Jedi hadn't been intentional, but it had happened, and now she floundered on what it meant to her.
And so she declared, "I think it's something else."
Either the circumstances of her injury or some big escalation in the Force. That's what it came down to, for her. Something had unlocked in her the night they had arrived back to Hoth, and she hadn't felt totally herself since.
"What do you mean something else?"
"You know how humans have these universal myths, the ones in which someone learns more than they're supposed to and there are terrible consequences?"
Nodding, he shifted his crouch to support an elbow on his knee. "Sure. Calaphas and the Drag-Ship, on Corellia."
"Yes. Ralytir and the Ice-Sword for us on Alderaan."
"And both of those are better than Luke's," he said. "Have you heard him tell the story of the Hutt-on-a-Stick? Holy shit."
She laughed, enchanted despite herself. Luke's bizarre upbringing was still an endless source of joy and humiliation for her brother, often paraded around for Han's enjoyment on quiet nights around the holochess table.
"That's kind of what it feels like," she said, coming back to her original point. "Like I've uncovered something big, but I don't know what it is."
"You feel more like Luke, huh?"
Not particularly. She felt like she could glimpse Luke's talents through a new lens, that she could maybe borrow elements of his power from him. Like how on their last day on Dagobah, he had felt the strike of Yoda's walking stick even though she had been the one who had been hit.
The bond didn't trouble her. It was just that—
"I feel like I've tapped into something dark that Luke would handle better."
That was as close as she could come to describing it. Luke spoke eloquently of colors and feelings and motivations, how similar every being was in their desire to do good and their capacity to fall to evil without any intention to do so. She felt like she was pulling power from something darker, some hidden knowledge she shouldn't have, that Luke couldn't yet comprehend because he hadn't yet been robbed of his naivete, despite years of warfare and the lies of the galaxy around them.
"What did he say about that?" Han asked.
"I haven't asked him."
"Why not?"
She just stared at his back a long moment, the camadare of the scene falling around her like a sheet. It always came back to that, didn't it? That the events of the great upheaval coincided with her injury and Han's withdrawal.
"I haven't exactly been in a sociable mood of late."
This kept happening to them, this sudden turn in the conversation. She was beginning to think they really were reading their shared history with two entirely different texts. Did he truly think she had been gossiping with Luke about her heartbreak? That her life had returned to normal the minute Han had begun pulling out of it?
What they weren't saying to each other must be so, so painful, for neither of them to truly understand the other.
"Woulda thought…" he trailed off, wisely refraining from finishing his sentence. He tried a completely different track. "Why would it be dark? This thing you've discovered."
"Everything's been dark."
She said it nonchalantly. Only after the words left her mouth did she think about what she meant by that, but by then it was too late. And she didn't feel particularly incentivized to dispute what it said about her. For her own sake.
With an inclined chin, she allowed him to see, again, what his actions had done.
Han removed his hands from the engine compartment and turned to her with eyes that looked lighter today, more gray than green. His lips made a tight line and his shoulders sank down, as if an actual burden had been placed there.
"I'm sorry."
Again, an apology. And again, an apology for the impact of his choices on her, not for the choices themselves.
She didn't say that she forgave him. She didn't feel that way. And him recognizing the pain he had caused was only one part of what she needed from him.
"I know you are," she said.
Quiet, bold and soft at the same time. And then he resumed his work on the engine, muffled clanks and sizzling in the engine compartment that shielding them from the rest of the ship. Leia didn't feel dismissed, and so she simply sat with him, handing him tools when he asked for them with a level of politeness that was so far outside his natural composure that it almost made her want to laugh. They tiptoed around one another, but it was preferable to avoidance entirely.
Inhale. Hold. Exhale. One moment at a time.
—0—
"Please."
Nursing his whiskey in a loose grip, Han's bleary eyes immediately swept up the corridor that led to the medbunk. His shoulders tensed and heart raced. He wasn't drunk—rule number one on the Millennium Falcon, always—but he was pleasantly relaxed. The day had been slow, one for repairs and quiet complentation while they all kept striving for some kind of equilibrium in the minefield of their relationships with each other.
Things were still tense between him and Leia, but at least they could talk without falling into angry arguments. As long as they kept a kind of friendly, tolerable distance, they could cohabitate. Today she seemed to agree.
But all that changed the moment he heard Leia's very clear, very soft please.
He was out of his chair in mere seconds, blood rushing through his legs in a mad scramble to help, to fix, to solve, to protect.
Please.
He knew what that was. He knew. He had been awakened to that one pleading word many times before, as she trembled beside him in the throes of nightmares about Alderaan. And he remembered with bleeding, buzzing clarity the long minutes in which he had held her as she came to herself, as she realized the vicious twin heartaches at the center of the nightmare: that she had not been able to save her people—her family—and that her most prized possession, her voice, had done nothing to stop the killing.
Arriving at the makeshift medbunk Leia had appropriated as hers, Han found her on her side, asleep, cocooned in her nest of self-heating blankets. A heartbreaking crease split her forehead, and he recognized it with absolute, horrible certainty.
Alderaan.
"Leia," he whispered as he knelt beside her. "Leia, wake up."
"Please. No."
He should have known this would happen. At the very least, the Alliance's loss at Hoth and the confrontation with Vader would have triggered her. Add onto that what she had told him today, about her new, dark knowledge, and it was a perfect storm for this particular nightmare. As he knew intimately now, triggers were triggers, and there was only so much you could push aside before it came back to bite you. The fact that he hadn't heard her have a nightmare before now on this trip was proof of how tightly she was holding onto her control.
"C'mon, sweetheart," he said. Slowly, like he used to, with all the love and terror he felt for her. "You're okay."
It didn't pierce the veil. She trembled and cowered, stuck in the thrall of what he knew was the worst memory she had. Describing it once, she had said that it was the scene of the destruction but somehow amplified, like her fear made her small and helpless. She screamed and cried and begged but there was nothing she could do, lost in the horror of those few minutes between Tarkin's command and the inevitable destruction.
His stomach twisted to see the curl of her lip and the way her fists clamped to the blanket. It was like a biological imperative, as sure as evolution or the changing seasons. Leia in pain was absolutely not allowed, not if he had anything to say about it. He would move mountains to help, would wrap her in his arms and hold her as she rode out the terror.
He couldn't fix it, but at least he could offer his comfort.
Yeah, buddy, except you can't do that anymore.
Frozen in place, he raged to himself. The words were unwelcome reminders that his actions had brutal consequences. He didn't have a right to this scene.
"Don't," she murmured. "Don't."
Torture, to not be able to do anything. To be so helpless, powerless against the enormity of her pain. And torture to know that he had no one to blame but himself.
"It's a nightmare, baby, come on," he said, and his voice cracked on the endearment. "Wake up."
She stilled and he held his breath, wondering if she was awakening or if this was just a lull. He thought of these scenes as her rolling nightmares: slipping in and out of the same horror over and over again, with the exact same result. Destruction and loss. Always.
Sometimes he felt a kind of jealousy for the clear pain she obviously still felt. In her worst moments, he thought about how loved she must have felt in order for the pain to still be this bad, years after the fact. He could barely remember his own mother, much less dream of her. He just plain didn't have the ingredients for such misery.
But then, rationally, he would remember it wasn't just that she was an orphan and had lost her parents in a terrible, state-sponsered murder. This was genocide. There wasn't a damn thing anyone would envy about such unthinkable loss.
"Han."
His name was a whisper from lips that hardly moved, but the effect was shattering. Me? he thought. Why am I there? She hadn't put him in her nightmares before, not to his knowledge. It was Alderaan. It was always Alderaan.
"Don't."
No. This was worse than torture. This was complete and abject helplessness, watching her struggle with whatever was in her mind and being unable to help at all. He wanted to crush her to him, wanted to surround her, remind her she was still so important, still so loved, even though she must feel utterly alone in that big head of hers.
"I'm right here," he told her. "I'm here."
Agitated, she still seemed to be completely under, and he decided that he couldn't take it anymore. He exhaled and then swept his fingers over her cheek and into her hair, holding the back of her head as he brought her to his chest. It was a ridiculous position he was in: kneeling beside the medbunk and leaning over the edge to hold her, twisted uncomfortably.
As was always the case, she was worth anything. Absolutely anything.
"Han?"
"Yeah, sweetheart."
"Please. Don't."
She was going to kill him with that voice. He felt like he had broken a rib and it was puncturing every side of his heart, hit after hit after hit, bright and sharp.
"I'm here," he said, and he kissed the top of her head. "It's okay. It's gonna be okay."
Fuck, this was going to hurt. When she woke up and turned away, when she realized what he had done without her permission, when she told him off for not leaving her alone.
When she has a normal reaction to you half-climbing into bed with her? he chided himself. Of course she's not going to take it well.
"Please wake up," he mumbled in her hair. "C'mon, Leia."
She breathed, pressed her nose into his chest, and made a soft, sad sound before she seemed to come to herself with a tensing of muscle and a tilt of her chin. For a breathless moment, he hung in the space between her nightmare and her wakefulness, a space in which he had some kind of privilege, some faith from her. And he wanted to live in that space before she remembered how much damage he had done. The impulse was so strong that it eclipsed all the reasons he had for leaving her in the first place.
They were going to die anyway, weren't they? Why the hell was it always about losing?
He had a ready answer for that question, because it wasn't just him losing. He deserved to lose. But she could lose here, too, and that was unacceptable.
Could lose. Not a certainty. You don't believe in destiny, pal.
He didn't. That was true.
And who said it wasn't allowed? Shouldn't she have a say in that?
See, now, here was the sticking point for him, the fight he had waged with himself over and over again. Leia had no concern for herself, absolutely none. And that was the trouble: she would say he was worth the risk and accept the consequences if it came to that. He had no doubts about that. She was as rooted in faith as a Wroshyr tree.
She's a grown woman. She can make her own choices.
"I thought he took you," she whispered.
Without moving a muscle, he tried to tell her that, no, no one had taken him. He was here, for her, as he always was and always would be until she couldn't save him anymore. But he couldn't say that, could he? It just wasn't fucking true anymore. Not from her perspective, at least.
She thinks you abandoned her. She thinks you don't care.
Conflict ran roughshod through his chest, a busy whirlwind of accusation and guilt, and here he was again, stuck in his head with indecisiveness just when she needed him most.
"Han?"
He pressed his lips together into a grim line and then released her, pulling back far enough to see her face. She was exhausted and the ravages of her nightmare tugged at her eyes in dark shadows. Her hair was a disaster, loose and free on the very small pillow behind her.
And all he wanted was to climb into bed with her and apologize for everything, take it all back, go back in time. The impulse was so strong that he had to swallow down the words before they escaped.
I won't go. I'll stay. Forgive me.
No.
"You okay?" he asked instead.
Her eyes were big on his, and she seemed to consider him closely. He felt naked in a way he hadn't in so long, transparent beneath her inspection.
She shook her head. "No. I'm not okay."
"Do you want me to go?"
He shouldn't have come in the first place. She had set her boundaries very clearly, and he was not who he had been to her. That was the best thing for them both, regardless of the fantasies that played in his mind in moments of duress.
She doesn't want you to leave.
Oh, the question was so big, too. Bigger than this simple moment could hold. Did she want him to go? In which context? Because every fucking thing between them was layered and complicated in a way that only love could manifest.
But… Wasn't it all the same, anyway? She had nightmares in which someone took him from her, and that was his principle fear, too. He had as much control over her demons as she had over his. And wouldn't it be better to die knowing she was with him, even if Jabba found them somewhere? There wasn't a chance in hell all of them would survive this war, anyway. Didn't she get a vote in the choice of what she wanted to die for?
Could you really do that? Could you watch her die for you?
Like a pressure valve releasing trapped steam, a heat bloomed in his chest that was scalding to the lining of his lungs, and the words that drifted up felt so heavy with age that he realized they came from a very, very old part of him, one he didn't know existed. Bedrock. Bone-deep. Suppressed.
You don't deserve that kind of sacrifice.
All in the space of a heartbeat, he felt that truth come to life, spring up from its ancient earth with robust certainty. And as with every single part of his relationship with Leia, it was immediately excised by what she said next.
"Please don't leave. I don't want you to go."
His eyes flew to hers, and he saw it all mirrored there. The connection, the relationship they had built, and the deep desire to move on from where they were. What could be. What they wanted.
She was like a tractor beam, pulling him in.
With shaky legs, he propped himself fully onto the bunk next to her. She made room for him but remained close, pressing her forehead into his chest and slipping her feet between his calves. She was so warm, so soft, and strands of her hair swept over his nose, filling him with the scent of florals. It felt so good to be close to her again. It was like those first nights aboard the Trader's Luck after months of the cold Coronet winter: a reprieve, a shelter. Safety.
"Please," she whispered against his shirt.
He closed his eyes, heart in his throat. He couldn't say that yet. He couldn't promise anything and especially not when she was at her most vulnerable. They had to talk more. There was still a lot to discuss, and he owed her more than he knew how to pay back. His debt to Jabba was nothing compared to what he owed Leia.
But one thing was true. Always had been. And he had withheld it from her the last night they had fallen asleep together in a bed, because it had felt selfish to lay that at her feet when he was about to rip it all away.
"I love you," he murmured into the wilderness of her hair, and wrapped her so tightly in his arms that he wondered how she could possibly breathe.
Author's Note: Thanks, my friends! Your support has been so inspiring. You are all profoundly appreciated each month.
Chapter 26 of Specter will be posted Monday, November 1st. Have a wonderful Spooky Season! - KR
