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There comes a time in everyone’s life where nothing makes sense. Nothing is absolute. All things are in flux. For some, this happens often. In certain cases, often enough to be deemed a lifestyle.

For Detraeus, it was groundbreaking, novel, and terrifying. While he had never purported to know all the answers, he had always had all the information he needed. He had governed his life strictly, efficiently, with a working set of rules. Everything fell into boxes. And he kept his boxes, as he did all his tangible possessions, rigidly organized so that nary a one was ever out of place.

Now, he felt as though he were swimming. Drowning. Lost in a swell with everything he understood washing away from him in different directions as the waves lapped over his head and tossed him side to side. Part of that sensation he blamed on nausea. The dip and roll of the boat beneath his feet did not help. But there was more to it than that. Despite having made the decision, in some sense of the word, to return to Eowyn — seeing as he was on the boat there — when he asked himself why, he still couldn’t pin down a definite answer. He felt wholly and utterly lost in the mess of conflicting concepts, and he desperately, fervently wished for solid ground. In more ways than one.

Afternoon bled into evening, which faded into night, and Detraeus lingered at the deckside, his wings curving around him like a leather tent to stave off the chill of night and the stars winking at him from above, laughing at his plight as his thoughts wrestled each other.

He thought of Araceli and the way her fingers moved when she turned pages in her book. The way her weight rested when she was fully at ease, and the way the air made room for her when she moved, danced for her when she bid it, and lightened with her smile. He thought of all the ways shadows fell into the nooks and curves of her body and the many, many different faces she made, depending on her mood. He thought of the way it tasted to kiss her.

He had never made a commitment to anyone before.

He thought of Casseth, and all the ways Cas had helped him, not only as a child, but as a growing adult. How Casseth had, long before Araceli, been his only friend. How he had managed to find ways to make Detraeus’ mouth want to smile, made his body want to relax and find a reason to let his guard down. How he had not only trusted him with his life during the course of adventure, but stood before him, arms open, guard down, and placed his life in Detraeus’ hands to take if he so chose.

He had never had anyone trust him that fully before.


Had never challenged his own mental certainty that anyone — and everyone — born with even a drop of orderite blood was by birthright incapable being anything more than a monster conceived in the same breath as those who had once owned him.

He had never wanted to forgive anyone who’d hurt him.

For all that it afforded him as many lost meals overboard and as many hours locked in pain as it always did, for once in his life, the trip overseas was too short. The ground beneath his feet when Detraeus staggered off the ship and onto the desert shoreline was at once blissful and ominous. He felt like a stranger on the shore of land he’d called ‘home’ for the past four years of his life, and though his mind knew the path to the house he and Araceli had shared for the span of nearly a full cycle as surely as his fingers knew how to nock an arrow, he felt lost. After gathering his things, his feet moved him in the proper direction, but his pulse began to feel stretched — exaggerated — as though it were spreading to parts of him where it didn’t belong, beating in his palms, his throat, his temples, down his tail.

When he made it to her door, his hands shook. He bunched them, released them, and frowned.

What was he doing here?

She would turn him away, surely. Shout. Scream. But perhaps he owed her that right? He stared at the wood before him. Where would he go when she sent him away? Should he bother to take his remaining things, his books, his scrolls? Or just go? For all the time he’d had to think on these things, for once, he had not planned. He had no plan, other than to stand where he was in the moment and raise his hand to knock. When his knuckles hit, he had not yet so much as chosen what he intended to say.

In the first moment that Detraeus saw her, Araceli looked exactly as he had chosen to remember her: flush cheeked and face lit with the morning sun, her smile bright and beaming and visage dotted with streaks of flour, evidence of her cooking. In the moment after, guilt congealed in his gut, cold and foreboding. He had never realized until that moment how much it could hurt to see pain in someone else’s face. His wings twitched and sank, his shoulders bunched, and his heart hurled itself at his throat. When he opened his mouth, nothing came out, his tongue thick, chalky, and useless.

He shouldn’t have come.

He was hurting her just by appearing. Casseth had been wrong. He shouldn’t have come.

He took a step back.

Detraeus’ heart lurched at the touch, alive with panic, hope, and indecision. Why had he come back? Because, once the thought had planted itself in his head, he couldn’t imagine not coming back. Couldn’t imagine not seeing her. Not trying to formulate some string of words that manifested an apology or some schism of explanation for the damage he apparently caused her.

To say that, though — to manage to force his tongue and lips to move in cooperation with one another — felt akin to swallowing the sun or mediating the cycles of the moon. Impossible. As such, for a long period he found himself mute, staring wordlessly down at her and suffocating on the wild run of his pulse in his throat and lungs. When her posture seemed to sink and stiffen at his silence, he forced his tongue into action. The result: brittle, dry, and foreign, broken by uncertainty.

“I…couldn’t,” he rasped out, “…not—I wanted…you were—” Teeth gritting, his tail flicked, back, and forth. “I…hurt you…? And I want…I came…to apologize. To you. For…hurting you…”

Araceli stared.

He shifted his weight, frowning and entirely off-balance.

“Apologize…” she repeated, her voice quiet, but tone torn between baffled and incredulous. When he moved to take another step back, she jerked forward, stopping her hand inches from gripping the front of his tunic. “No. Just…you left. You left for a month with no word, Detraeus, and then you just show up? Out of nowhere? And you’re sorry? We had been living together for a year, and…being…together, and then you walk in one night spouting off accusations, slamming things—”

“I was angry.”

“I could tell you were angry—”

“I didn’t intend…to hurt you—”

Araceli laughed. A sharp, cutting sound, underpinned with restrained anguish. “Well you did hurt me…” When she smiled, it was a bitter one, her eyes glistening with dampness, and Detraeus felt his insides curdle and gnaw at each other. A sudden, brazen, bizarre desire dictated that he reach out, touch and brush — anything to ease that glint of pain on the precipice of spilling over — but he reined the desire. “You did,” she repeated. “You hurt me.”

“I don’t…understand…why,” he admitted.

He had been angry. He had been hurt, and wanted solace and solitude, but her? She could have had the world — anyone in her life, if she chose it — and he, just an ungrateful speck on her timeline. When Casseth had said she hurt because of him, he’d scarcely believed it. He’d come back less because he felt he owed her an apology and more because he was selfish and couldn’t imagine not seeing her again. He was the one so desperately beaten by her that he wanted, needed, to see her again. But how could she possibly need the same of him…?

In response, though, Araceli only shut her eyes, and Detraeus’ chest burned to see tears on her cheeks, his throat knotting and fingers jerking upwards in an aborted gesture towards her. “Please—”

“Please, what…” she whispered.

“Don’t…”

When she lifted her head, her skin brushed into his lingering fingers, and he twitched them back at first, but then, when she did not pull away, he gradually let them stretch again to rest, lightly as a breeze, on the rise of her cheek. She watched him from beneath damp lashes, her brow furrowed and posture tight, but unmoving.

“Why did you leave…?” she asked at last, and Detraeus felt his gut stirr, a swirling mess of reasons crowding his mind.

‘I was angry.’ ‘I felt betrayed.’ ‘You had lied to me.’ ‘I was confused.’

“I was in love with you,” he answered instead, “…am in love with you…? I love you. And it terrifies me…”

At Araceli’s first response, Detraeus bristled a fraction, the spines on his tail rippling, and he opened his mouth to insist that he did. He had thought a lot about this. He had never and likely would never assert such a thing to anyone else, and if it was true that what he felt wasn’t love, then he had not the faintest clue what qualified because—

Then, Ara’s tone changed. Her statement changed. And her fingers were touching his, lacing with his, and gripping. When her lips brushed his palm, his pulse performed a startled hop, skip, stutter, and his exhale tripped on itself. Then, she was holding him.

Instinctively, his body tensed. An ingrained, all but trained reaction, making him stiff as a board despite the person instigating it, and he knew immediately that he couldn’t let it hold; he had to move. Relax. Return the gesture. Something.

Move.

His heartrate skipped, his breath lodged in his throat.

Move.

His tail coiled around her, looping to hold her in close.

Move.

Cheeks burning and exhale hot on its way out, he forced his arms stiffly out and around. It felt foreign again, after so long without such contact, but gradually — so very gradually — his body relaxed into it. He knew her. This scent. This warmth. The feel of her against him, however rare it had been in the past. And he could handle it. He knew also that in this moment, if he didn’t want to drive her away again permanently, he needed to do this, learn how to hold and let hold until it felt as natural with her as breathing.

So, he let the position linger, waiting as his body relaxed and then waiting longer still as he drew his palm up, tracing along the small of her back and committing the shape — rise, dip, curve — to memory. Only after Araceli’s shivering stilled entirely and her breath evened out, did he move, one arm still around her waist as he ushered her wordlessly towards the doorway. Once through it, he clicked it shut with his tail and eyed her critically.

“You are angry with me…?” he said, half-way between a statement and a question. A need to confirm what he considered inevitable. That surely she was angry, and he would have to make amends. But to do so, he needed to first determine the damage and how to begin repairing it. The only way to do that, was ask.

He watched the curve of her smile, felt the brush of her fingers and shut his eyes, forcing himself not to speak the questions on his tongue: Why? How? How could you possibly love me? Instead, he memorized the texture of her fingertips and the sound of her voice when it was soft and hopeful, and gave breath to the only answer he possibly could:

“Yes.”