Chapter 1199: Why?

"Come with me."

Jesse didn’t wait to see if he’d follow. She turned and walked, and the certainty in her spine did the asking for her.

Lucavion fell into step beside her without comment, though she felt him glance sideways once, twice, cataloging the set of her shoulders. They left the practical hall by the side entrance rather than the main one, the noise of the diagnostic pairings dropping away behind the closing door.

The corridor beyond was narrow and mostly forgotten, a service passage between the Martial Arts Block and the covered walkway that led toward the Western Terrace, used more by staff moving equipment than by students moving between classes. No one else’s footsteps echoed here. Stone underfoot, cooler air, a strip of open sky visible where the roof gave way to lattice.

’Good.’

"You know," Lucavion said, hands loose at his sides, tone light, "when a woman goes quiet and drags a man somewhere private, it’s usually a better mood than this one."

Jesse didn’t answer.

He waited, clearly expecting her to break first, as she always had: a huff, a shove, some retort. When she didn’t, his half-smile held a moment longer than it needed to.

"Jesse."

She kept walking.

The passage opened ahead onto the exterior walkway, wind moving through the latticework and laying long, slow bars of shadow across the stone. Beyond it, the ground fell away toward the Terrace itself: low walls, open air, no one close enough to hear a raised voice or a lowered one.

Jesse stopped at the threshold where corridor became open sky.

’Not the practical hall. Not the door. This.’

She turned to face him.

The wind pulled at the edge of her sleeve, and Jesse let it. She’d had this moment a hundred times before: in the frozen dark of a supply post, on a cot in the Shale Expanse, in the half-second before sleep took her under. Every one of those versions had come with words already assembled, sharp and ready, waiting only for his face to arrive in front of her.

His face was in front of her now, and the words, rehearsed for years, had gone out of her.

Lucavion’s smile had gone. He stood with his weight even and his hands still, watching her. He didn’t ask what was wrong, and he didn’t fill the silence with another line to test the air. He just waited, and now nothing stood between them but the thing she couldn’t say.

’Say it.’

Nothing came.

She had a dozen openings and none of them survived contact with him actually standing there. ’You left. Too small. You knew and you still— Knew what.’ She couldn’t even finish accusing him inside her own head, let alone out loud.

Her jaw tightened. She looked past him at the shadows crossing the stone, then back at his face, and found nothing had changed. He was still watching her, letting her have whatever time this took.

That patience was almost worse than a joke would have been.

’I know what I want to ask. I don’t know how it comes out of my mouth.’

Her hand found the pommel at her side out of habit, not intention, and she made herself let go of it.

"I—" She stopped. Started again. "You—"

Nothing. The sentence collapsed before it reached anywhere.

Lucavion’s eyes didn’t leave her. Jesse stopped fighting the collapse.

"Why?"

It came out smaller than she meant it to, but it came out, and once it did the rest of her held still around it, waiting to see if the word alone would be enough.

Lucavion’s black eyes caught what little light crossed the latticework, shining without warmth.

"Why?"

He wasn’t mocking her. The echo was flat, with the wrong weight on it, as if he couldn’t tell which question she had opened. That he didn’t already understand, after everything, pushed the rest of it out of her before she could stop it.

"Why have you never looked for me?"

The words left her low, almost muttered, as if she wished them unheard even while she said them.

Lucavion didn’t answer.

He looked at her as he had looked at Valeria’s blade after the point that changed him, recalculating, recognizing what he should have accounted for already. The wind moved between them and he let it. His hands were empty, and nothing in his face reached for humor this time.

"Looking for you, huh?"

Quiet. It sounded like a man pressing a bruise to learn how deep it went, already suspecting he wouldn’t like the answer.

Jesse watched him, searching for whatever answer was forming behind his face, trying to read him as she’d read a blade before it moved.

"I couldn’t go back."

"You couldn’t go back?"

A breath first, like the words needed room to exist before he’d let them out.

"...Yes."

The rest came the way his explanations always did when they were true and inadequate at once. Desertion during an active war carried a rope or a blade depending on which officer found him first, and Lorian command didn’t forget faces they’d already condemned once. The closer anyone stood to him afterward, the more of that scrutiny they would have drawn. He hadn’t vanished to spare himself alone.

Jesse had known all of it already. She’d lived on the other side of that scrutiny.

"The war was over."

"Yeah, after long years. The border—"

"If it was you, you could have."

The sentence landed and stayed there. Lucavion didn’t finish the border. He didn’t reach for anything else to set beside it.

"....."

He took long enough that Jesse thought he wouldn’t answer at all.

"And after?"

Two words. She hadn’t planned them or sharpened them as she’d sharpened everything else in her head over the years. Spoken, they were plain and certain, because his answer covered the first days, maybe the first months, and nothing past that.

Lucavion’s certainty slipped.

"After was... complicated."

"It was complicated for me too."

She watched his face for the moment he understood what she was telling him.

He was quiet too long before he answered, and when he did, his voice was lower than usual, as if he already knew it wouldn’t be enough.

"I thought leaving you out of it was safer."

Jesse let out a laugh.

It had nothing funny in it. It was short and hard, more breath than sound, and she kept her eyes on him the whole time, needing to see whether he understood what she was laughing at.

’Safer.’

She weighed the word as she would an unfamiliar blade, checking the balance, finding it hollow. Whatever else had happened to them, the desertion, the silence, the years she’d spent learning to survive without him, all of it folded down into one small, tidy word.

’Is that what he thought of me?’

If that was true, she would rather he had forgotten her outright than remembered her as a liability to be managed from a safe distance.

"Then why have you never come to look for me?"

She asked it straight at him this time, no hesitation left in the words, nothing hiding behind them.

Lucavion opened his mouth. Some version of I did, or I tried, was already forming on his face before it reached his voice.

Jesse didn’t let it arrive.

"In the Academy."

She said it flatly, cutting off the space he’d been about to fill.

"At the very least... you could have looked for me, after the Entrance Banquet."