Chapter 340: A Word Between Them

Lucian walked until the voices atop the rise faded with the wind and settling dust.

Evelyn followed, not asked and with her arms wrapped firmly over her chest, the darkening bruise at the edge of her temple a traitor’s mark in itself. Team Zero busied themselves with the wounded and remnants of destruction. The rise was strewn with destruction and Lucian was certain that the distance downwards the slope was as much privacy as the aftermath that waited upon them.

He paused to the right of a broken outcrop and turned.

Evelyn was the first to speak. "If this is about Alistair-"

"It’s about us," Lucian countered.

Her pause was only brief, but it was enough for him to see the narrow-eyed expression that accompanied her reply. "There is no easy ’us’ while you continue to force that man upon the point."

"I know."

"Truly?"

Evens the air with a scoff of amusement, but the fire that had fed it was little less present. "Do you? Because from wherever you stand, every opportunity that the wider world has given you to select yourself over ruin you have chosen him. You have selected that which is old. That which you owe."

Lucian did not recoil from the barb. "I did. And I won’t pretend that it has not left its mark."

Evelyn let out a dry breath. "Hurt is hardly a word for it."

"Then tell me the larger one."

"Betrayal," she said. "Not the dramatic, convenient kind. The kind where I watch you make room for a man who helped finish the world I come from, again and again, because I am supposed to be grateful that he has found utility and/or family."

Lucian nodded. The wind tugged at his coat. Somewhere below the rise, stone shifted and settled.

"Lucy talked to me before the fight," he said.

The mention of her name made Evelyn’s jaw clench. "Of course she did."She told me to stop letting my life and ambitions exist between calamities and to stop hoarding this family like it was the last remaining treasure left to me. She told me to dedicate myself to finding something with you rather than in the spaces between."

Evelyn stared at him. "And now that the battle rages, that you have finished carving up half of infinity, you have the leisure for the platitudes of your personal affairs?"

Lucian shook his head. "Now I’m done pretending that I can keep putting it off."

The bluntness in his tone cut far deeper than any elegant rhetoric ever could have. Evelyn looked away first, jaw working, her eyes scanning the devastated slope downward.

"You held back through most of that fight," Evelyn said. "People bled and Marc nearly tore himself apart keeping your reality intact. You held yourself in check until Cael or fate or whatever nonsense you believe yourself to be bound by finally got you to move and you went off, destroying outer gods and finding yourself in a new dead world with Alistair and a greater measure of whatever power he holds. Pardon me if I am not ready to discuss that ’future’ you envision over some sort of familial dinner."

"I’m not asking for easy terms," Lucian said. "I’m giving up trying to ask that you continue to carry these decisions as the worst possible outcome of the ones I have made."

Evelyn’s arms loosened, but only by a fraction, before folding across her once more. "You can’t smooth it over with words."

Lucian took a steadying breath. "I’m not pretending to smooth it over. I’m trying not to add to what I have done to you." He let out a slow exhale. "Alistair is alive. Stronger. He believes himself to have reclaimed an inheritance and there is no doubt that he intends not to become what he used to be. I do not expect nor ask that you believe him or forgive him. Rather, I only ask that you understand that I am done choosing the crisis of him over the life that is before me."

"That sounds like a battlefield vow," Evelyn remarked. "Necessary for their longevity but rapidly rotting in their promises."

"Then hold me to it when we are elsewhere."

Evelyn regarded him in long silence. Her face was smudged with dust, her cheek still bloodied where it met her temple.

"What does ’getting your personal life in order’ look like to you?" she asked. "Be detailed. Not in terms of obligation because this is not in regard to duty, tenderness disguised as such or otherwise."

Lucian met her gaze. "It looks like not absconding with crisis without consultation when I am faced with it." He paused. "It looks like not letting you contend with the ghosts, the father, the debt of the end of the world and the other catastrophes I stumble over in my life when you have more basic wants. It looks like making something with you that does not only involve the continuation of life through shared survival."

Evelyn’s throat moved. "And if Alistair becomes a threat again?"

"Then I deal with him directly," Lucian said. "No need to ask for a polite digestion of what he stands for first."

"And your infinity does not cease to bring other troubles?"

"Then we deal with them, together, if you care to have that luxury. Apart, if you require a space from the things I carry without the burden of my absence being the condition upon which you must consider your own choices."

The words hung between them simply and without flourish. There was no need for eloquence, for framing one’s feelings in terms of the stars or infinity. Lucian was simply done allowing it to occupy too much space within him when he could offer something else in its place.

Evelyn rubbed a thumb across her wrist binding mark, the residual wound fading. "You hurt me with how easily you accommodated him."

"I know that."I’m still angry."I know that, too."

"And I’m not going to liquefy because you said the right sounding things when nearly dead."

Lucian smiled, or perhaps a wry imitation of one. "I would not expect you to."

That in itself was enough to draw another, smaller breath past Evelyn’s lips. Perhaps not amusement, but something adjacent. The anger remained, thick in her chest, but it had lost its capacity to ignite when she spoke next.

Evelyn turned her gaze away. "The others will be waiting."

"They may wait a little while longer."

Evelyn looked him in the eyes. "Lucy actually told you to begin your family line and let the dysfunctional bits go?"

"She did."

Evelyn was quiet for a minute. "She is not wrong. Not entirely. I do not know how I might handle it cleanly."

"I am not asking for clean," Lucian said. "I am asking for continued."

Evelyn came closer, close enough that the distance between them was no longer an issue of debate or the space of contention. She searched his face, expecting to see the habit of retreat and the way his life so far had always put them at odds despite the fact of his devotion.

"You do understand," Evelyn said quietly, "that if you decide that this is so very necessary, you do so with me as an equal and not another person you shield til you deem me strong enough to hear the weight of truth carried and given from you."

"Agreed."

"And if you begin choosing the ruins and crises of your life above us again, do not expect me to stand on the side of that decision."

"I would not ask you to."

Evelyn held his gaze for another interminable moment before she gave him something of a nod. Pardon, perhaps. Not forgiveness, but permission to attempt continuation.

"All right," she said. "Try."

Lucian felt something settle in his chest with far less gravity than words of this nature normally possessed. He lifted one hand, slowly enough for her to reject the motion and let him take a fraction of the sting from her brow.

"I meant what I said before the world got busy with itself once more," Evelyn murmured. "You came."

"I’ll continue to do it," Lucian said as she turned his hand away.

"You’d better,"

They stood a while in the aftermath of the battle, of ruins and the ghosts still lingering in dust and the wounds of things that should not have been. Life stretched ahead, not without its dangers but something like an existence apart from being on the back end of an apocalypse.

Eventually Evelyn turned towards the rise. "Come on. Before Marc decides that we have begun another war on the field."

Lucian walked at her side, past the remains and towards the future, and the remnants of Team Zero, Lirael imprisoned, Althea and the children recovered, an endless horizon of potential attraction held back only by the gravity of what infinity already possessed.

For the first time, Lucian did not feel like he was returning to his life as the instrument of war.

He was returning to it as something attempting to keep one of his own.