Once Betrayed, Twice Shy

Found nothing

CASPIAN

She falls asleep in the chair.

I notice it happening — the way her head drops incrementally, the book she’d picked up from my desk tilting in her loosening grip, her breathing shifting into the slow even rhythm of someone who has stopped fighting their own exhaustion. Her hand is still in mine and I feel the change through it, the gradual weight of sleep relaxing her fingers.

I don’t move.

I sit on the edge of the desk and I watch her sleep and I think about thirty years of alone and how it felt like the correct choice for a very long time and how it feels now like something I was doing wrong without knowing there was a right way.

The sun is properly up. The palace is beginning its morning — I can hear the distant sounds of it, the kitchen, the guards changing, the particular rhythm of a day starting. In an hour Marcus will come looking for me with the debrief from Soren and the overnight intelligence reports and the twelve things that require my attention before noon. In an hour the day will begin in full and whatever this is — this quiet room, this morning light, her hand in mine — will have to exist alongside all of that.

For now there is just this.

I look at her face in sleep. The composed expression she maintains the rest of the time falls away completely — she’s younger looking, the guard gone, the intelligence and the defiance and the careful management of what she shows all suspended. Just her. Whatever she actually is underneath all the rest of it.

I have been trying to find contradictions in her for months. Something that doesn’t fit. Something underneath the surface that tells a different story than the surface tells. I have been doing this with the specific diligence of a man who has been wrong before in the most devastating way possible and is determined not to be wrong again.

I have found nothing.

Not because I haven’t looked. Because there’s nothing to find. She is, with a consistency that I have spent months trying to disprove, exactly what she appears to be. The girl who argues with me at breakfast and gets back up after the training ground knocks her down and sits on the floor of the dress room handling Serapha’s things with a care I didn’t ask for. Who went toward the sound tonight instead of away from it. Who stopped for a child first.

Who made me tea because she wanted to.

I look at our hands.

I have not let go. I’ve been aware of this — the choice in it, the small daily choice of not letting go — and I’ve been making it without examining it, which is how I’ve been making most of the choices that matter lately. Without the usual architecture of consideration. Without the strategic weighing of risk and outcome.

Just — the choice. Direct. Uncomplicated.

This is the thing that should frighten me most. It doesn’t.

I think about what she said. I’m saying that I’ve known for a while that the wanting has nothing to do with any of the things I could blame it on. Said plainly, in the way she says true things. Without performance, without strategy, without asking for anything in return.

I have been loved before in the way people love things they want to own. In the way people love things they want to use. Even, once, in the way people love things they were sent to destroy — and that had its own terrible authenticity, the grief of it still real even knowing what it was.

This is different.

This is someone who has every reason to hate me and has chosen, daily, to try. Someone who didn’t ask for any of this and has been building a life inside it anyway. Someone who came to my study at four in the morning and said I was lying and then said what she actually meant with the clarity of someone who has decided that honesty costs less than the alternative.

I think about the second passage. The willing bond. Both parties. Conscious choice. Not instinct.

I think about whether what I’m feeling is instinct or choice and I think that for the first time I can clearly tell the difference between them and what I feel is both and also neither — it’s something that started as the bond and has become something the bond can’t fully account for and that distinction, I think, might be the whole point.