Chapter 1205: Then Ask Next Time

"What do you want from me now?"

Jesse blinked.

Of all the things she had expected him to say, the question had never been among them.

She had spent years wanting an answer from him. On sleepless nights, she had imagined tearing one out with her hands. She had pictured his excuses, his remorse, even the possibility that he would look at her with nothing at all.

She had never seriously considered what she would ask for once the answer was hers.

Yet the question suited him.

Years ago, when she had begun lingering after drills, following him from the training ground with one question swallowed behind another, Lucavion had endured it for three evenings. On the fourth, he had stopped beside the supply tent and turned.

"What do you want?"

He had said it without irritation, and without any attempt to spare her embarrassment. She had wanted him to offer so she would not have to ask.

He had made her say it.

"Teach me."

"Then ask next time."

That had been Lucavion. For all the ways he evaded what he felt, he had always known when someone else needed to name what they wanted.

Jesse stared at the wrinkled cloth beneath her palm.

"I..."

That one word was all she managed.

Lucavion waited.

She could ask him to apologize again, or demand that he say he loved her and hear the lie in whatever lesser affection he offered. She could make him swear never to leave and spend every day wondering when circumstance would set a blade against that promise.

"I don’t want—"

Her throat tightened.

She stopped, jaw working as she tried to arrange thoughts that had never needed to become language before.

"I don’t want your forgiveness."

Lucavion’s brow drew together faintly.

Jesse clicked her tongue. "No. That’s wrong."

She drew a breath.

"I’m not asking you to make me forgive you."

His expression cleared, though the strain had not left it.

The sentence scraped her throat on the way out. "I don’t want a promise that you’ll never leave."

"Why?"

"Because I know you won’t make it."

Lucavion said nothing to that.

His eyes lifted instead, past her shoulder, to the pale strip of sky above the low wall, unwilling to hold her gaze while he withheld an answer he wasn’t going to give her.

Jesse let him have it. She realized she had eased back half a step, her palm sliding from his chest to hang at her side.

’He would rather face the sky than lie to me with his face.’

She closed the distance instead.

Slower than before, with no fabric twisted in her fist and no fury behind it. Her hand found his jaw and turned it back down toward her, and he let it happen, still, the way he hadn’t let himself be still with her in years. His skin was cold under her palm, as it always had been, and she felt him go quiet beneath the touch.

"Stop avoiding me," she said.

"I wasn’t—"

"You were. You still are, a little, right now." She didn’t let go of his jaw. "If you don’t know whether I want space, ask me. Don’t just decide it. Don’t call it consideration."

He held her eyes this time.

If something dangerous was coming for him, she wanted to hear it first, and she would decide whether she stood beside him when it arrived. He said he might argue with that one. She told him to argue, then, but not without her in the room. A near-laugh left him, though his face hadn’t caught up to it yet.

"...That sounds exhausting."

"And if you ever mean to disappear again—" Her voice didn’t rise. If anything, it went quieter, and that cost her more than shouting would have. "You tell me first. I’ll try to stop you, and that’ll make it harder, and you tell me anyway."

"And if I tell you first, you’ll just stop me," he said. A little of his dryness was creeping back into his voice, though she could still feel the weight in him.

"Probably. That’s the point." She did not let it turn into banter.

The strain behind his eyes eased.

The last one came harder. She felt it climbing before she let it out.

"And sometimes," she said, "I want you to be the one who comes and finds me."

Her hand slipped from his jaw. She didn’t quite manage to look at him for the rest of it.

"I’m tired of being the one who crosses the distance. Every time." Her jaw worked. "I don’t want an excuse for it, I just... it’s always me."

Heat climbed her face.

When Lucavion spoke, his voice had lost the last of its usual smoothness and sounded closer to the soldier she had spent years teaching herself not to need.

"I can’t promise I’ll always get it right."

"You won’t." Her voice was flat, almost tired.

"...Alright." A breath. "I’ll try."

It was smaller than any vow she had imagined wanting from him, and steadier for it.

Jesse hadn’t forgiven him. She still felt that, unfinished, somewhere low in her chest, and suspected she would for a long while yet, but she wasn’t going to let him drift back out of reach.

* * *

The whetstone rasped once more across the Zweihander’s edge before Valeria set it down, satisfied with the line it had recovered. Diagnostic sessions always left something to correct afterward: a nick from a mistimed parry, a burr where someone’s blade had bitten deeper than the restraint seals should have allowed.

From her bench in the courtyard outside the practice hall, Valeria could hear some of the students who had watched the session arguing over the move Lucavion had made, and she understood their excitement immediately.

Yet she let their argument run its familiar course without joining it. She had already weighed the exchange herself, once, honestly: the moment his blade had left the line and the black-ashen flame had kept its threat there anyway, longer than intention should have allowed. She’d been the one standing across from it. She still didn’t have a clean answer for what she’d felt in that half-second, only that Lucavion had stopped fighting the woman he remembered and started fighting the one actually holding the sword.

That was worth more to her than winning would have been.

Just then, as she was pondering it, she noticed a woman at the far end of the courtyard, where the practice lanterns hadn’t yet been lit, moving at a pace that wasn’t hurrying anywhere so much as putting distance behind it.

Jesse Burns.

Valeria had spent years learning to read rooms as well as she read an opponent: bowing to the correct depth, gauging which smile at a banquet table meant welcome and which meant calculation. She wouldn’t call herself skilled at it. A knight’s instincts ran to weight and distance and the half-second before a blade moved, not to the smaller currency of a face held carefully still. But even a blunt instrument learned something eventually, if you swung it at the same wall for long enough.

And whatever she was looking at now, it wasn’t the woman who had crossed the practice hall half an hour ago and said one word like she’d been rehearsing the weight of it for years.

"Lucavion."

Valeria remembered that clearly enough: the stillness in it, Jesse’s hand lifting from her sword’s pommel to leave both hands free for whatever came next, the flat certainty underneath a voice trying very hard not to sound like it was asking permission.

This Jesse held herself the same way and not at all the same way. Her spine hadn’t bent an inch; if anything she stood straighter, with the deliberate straightness of someone holding herself up on purpose. But her sword hand wasn’t resting near the pommel now. It hung loose and closed at her side, as though she had decided somewhere on the walk back that it needed to be ready for nothing.

That, more than her face, was what caught Valeria’s attention. A hand only went slack like that, she suspected, once whatever it had been braced for was already finished. Valeria had seen that stillness before, on soldiers who had learned it somewhere a great deal less forgiving than a court.

Her eyes were dry, too dry, in the way that meant something had been fought back and not simply left unfelt. Valeria had learned to notice that years ago and had never stopped noticing it in other people.

Jesse’s calm was what remained once the performance had been spent, and she was walking on the last of it.

Valeria didn’t know what had happened since the practice hall, and some old, sharpened part of her wanted to. She let the want pass through her instead of acting on it. Whatever this was, it belonged to a stretch of Jesse’s life Valeria hadn’t been present for, and reading a stance from across a courtyard wasn’t the same as being owed the reasons behind it.

She was still deciding whether to look away and pretend she hadn’t noticed at all when Jesse’s head turned, found her across the courtyard, and did not look away first.

"You can ask, if you want."