Alchemised

by SenLinYu

She looked up at him. “You’re a monster.” He raised an eyebrow. “Noticed that, have you?”

“You irritate my wife,” he said. “Seems I do,” she said blandly. “If you want to do something about it, you could kill me.”

“Oh, Marino.” His thumb trailed along her neck, following the scar below her jaw. “If I’d known what pain you’d cause me, I never would have taken you.”

“He could have asked for anything, cited a crisis of conscience, demanded a mountain of gold, but instead, he wants…you?

“Don’t die, Marino. I might miss you.”

“Stay,” he said softly, and his head dipped so close she felt his breath in her hair. “You know, there’s something about you, Marino, that inspires the most terrible decisions from me. I’ll know better, but then I’ll still…”

“You’re like a rose in a graveyard,” he said, and his lips twisted into a bitter smile. “I wonder what you could have turned into without the war.”

“You made me feel like the parts of me that aren’t useful still deserve to exist. Like I’m not just all the things I can do.”

“You don’t get to lie to me and then get angry when I make the mistake of believing you,”

“In the future, perhaps tell me what you want instead of expecting me to fail where it’s convenient to you. Maybe then we’ll both end up less disappointed in each other.”

She only heard Crowther utter one word before the door sealed shut: “Beg.”

“Perhaps someday, if I have time again, I can make you a list of all the things that apologies don’t fix.”

He wouldn’t let go. He gripped her tighter. “You are not expendable. You don’t get to push everyone away so that they’ll feel comfortable using you and letting you die.”

“I should have known—the moment I looked into your eyes, I should have known I would never win against you.”

“You’re wrong because I’m part of the universe,” she said. “A tiny piece, I admit, maybe never an important or mathematically significant one, but still a piece. You and I are not separate from it. No one is. It matters to me, everyone who’s died and everyone who will, and everyone who suffers. As long as I exist, I will always care. And that means that part of the universe does.” She smiled at him. “Doesn’t that make it all a little brighter?”

“I thought you said if I ever burned you—” He captured her hand and pulled her close. His other hand slid possessively up her throat, fingers tilting her head back, and he kissed her, long and deep, before he drew away to meet her eyes. “Call me, and I will come.”

“Because I have warned you, if something happens to you, I will personally raze the entire Order of the Eternal Flame. That isn’t a threat, it’s a promise. Consider your survival as much a necessity to the Resistance as Holdfast’s. If you die, I will kill every single one of them. Given that the risk to their lives is the only way to make you value your own.”

“Which part of ‘it doesn’t concern you’ do you not understand? Has the meaning of one of those words slipped your mind? Should I bring a dictionary, perhaps?”

“Love isn’t as pretty or pure as people like to think. There’s a darkness in it sometimes. Kaine and I go hand in hand. I made him who he is. I knew what that array meant when I saved him. If he’s a monster, then I’m his creator.”