The things that were his and his alone filled two boxes and one laundry basket, and the boxes and basket looked small and pathetic against the wall in the empty new room. Jordan hadn't asked for the bookshelf, because it was his, a gift, but he didn't think he could stand to look at it right now and be reminded of what he'd done. Maybe eventually. He lay in the dark in a full-sized bed that still felt impossibly narrow, empty, cold. He'd requested the sheets from the quartermaster, and they smelled of generic detergent; the blanket was his, but taken from the wardrobe, and it smelled of his soap but not of them, and he wished it did and was pathetically grateful that it didn't.

The leaden chill still inhabited his ribcage, a heavy hollow emptiness that stole his sense of time and of self and had eaten up his appetite. He'd gone to the cafeteria and tried to eat dinner. It had tasted like sand in his mouth, dry and flavorless and choking and impossible to swallow, and he'd thrown it away and had coffee hot enough to burn if he'd still been only human and then come back and gone to bed. Come back, not home, because home was down the hall and it was no longer his.

He wanted desperately to go back, to take it all back, to rewind the last year somehow and undo all the mistakes he'd made and do it over right. To be there, warm and safe and loved. To have made them feel loved as deeply as he had, as he did. Maybe it would have been doomed anyway. He would never know. He had gone the wrong way and blundered deeper and deeper into his mistakes, forcing the cracks open wider and wider as he tried to repair them.

What he wanted had been already gone. Once they had slept close together, in whatever order they'd crawled into bed or whatever order affection dictated at the moment, never out of arm's reach, but for weeks now it had been Harrison in the middle, Jordan and Rep on opposite sides, carefully never close. And when Rep had left, unable to be even in the same room, Harrison had followed him and left Jordan to himself. They had made him choose. He'd chosen.

The revelation that Harrison had never been sure that Jordan cared still stung. That's a sad list, he'd said when Jordan tried to explain that of course he cared, that he showed it every day, that he thought he'd been showing it all along in the ways that he took care of his lover, smoothed the difficulties over whenever he could, did all the things he knew how to make life easier and happier for the man he loved. It hadn't been enough. It hadn't been right. He hadn't said the right things at the right times, and somehow he had never known that it wasn't enough, that it wasn't right, and the bewildered anger that welled up when he wondered why Harrison had never asked drowned easily in the flood of guilt that he'd never once asked if it was enough.

He hadn't asked why. He hadn't asked either of them why. He could admit to himself, alone now and not asleep in a dark empty room, that he was afraid to face the answers. That he resented that he had to ask at all, that he was too weak to look into the mirror that that knowledge might hold up to his own flaws. That he had not been perfect. That it hurt immeasurably to find out, after all, that he should have been.

Ferros stirred, said softly, Love should not hurt you so much.

I'm sorry, Jordan answered miserably. I'm sorry. He felt, too, because they had no secrets from one another, the sharp and echoing pain the weapon felt, the ache of longing that would not resolve, the memory of a quiet joy in knowing that he could touch Tracey through their humans' hands. That, too, was over.

It had been over already, the dragon reminded him, even as they shared the depth of hurt that the thought provoked. These last few days had been nothing more than the final, sudden flowering of a seed planted farther back than any of them had known. I shouldn't have promised, Jordan whispered. I shouldn't have promised when I had begun to know I couldn't keep it.

Ferros didn't argue with the thought, but he touched, very lightly, an emotion that Jordan turned away from whenever he noticed it beneath the grief and guilt, something he didn't even want to acknowledge that he could feel: a low and steady seep of relief. It's finally over, he'd caught himself thinking, briefly, quietly, not wanting to hear himself, and had shoved the thought violently away. Lying here alone with their thoughts, he could no longer deny the feeling, relieved that he didn't have to pretend any longer, relieved that he could stop trying, that he didn't have to be the one who had to fix it, that he could stop pretending that everything was still, somehow, impossibly, going to be okay. Relieved that he didn't have to live every waking moment braced warily waiting for the next blow, the next problem that was going to be his problem to fix when he didn't even know where to start. When the problem, maybe, had been that they weren't good for each other, and all the love in the world couldn't fix that.

Jordan turned over and buried his face in the pillow. He didn't want the relief. He didn't want any of it. He wanted to go back and do it over right, to go back and stop himself before any of it had even started, because if he'd never known what it felt like to be loved, he wouldn't be able to miss it.

He wasn't going to get to sleep. He sat up and turned the lamp on, got out of bed and left the bed unmade so that it wouldn't look so starkly unlived-in, got dressed. He didn't know where he was going or what he intended to do, but anything was better than lying here and torturing himself.