She inclines her head, accepting the trust for what it is: a blessing, an apology, a surrender trimmed down until it can pass between ribs without breaking them.
The words settle between them and do not wound as much as they might have. That is something. Ghanima turns her face a fraction, enough that her cheek brushes the weave of his robe, enough that the gesture can be mistaken for idle comfort instead of the small act of care-taking it is.
She doesn't move away yet. Lets the silence be companionable rather than heavy for once in both their long lives. There is a particular exhaustion in being ancient inside a young body, in carrying the full freight of centuries behind eyes that have not yet seen twelve years of sun. She has learned to rest inside moments like this one, the way desert creatures learn to rest inside shade.
Instead, she lets the full weight of herself settle, temple fitting more firmly against him, the line of his shoulder hard and familiar beneath cloth warmed by the suns. His smell is spice and dust and something faint from the stillsuit seals, and beneath that the scent she knows from infancy and before infancy, from memory not wholly her own— the smell of water, of green, of a Caladan she has never seen but mourned.
It steadies her more than she wants it to.
"The room in my head that is yours," almost idly, the way one names a star one has always known, "Is the loudest. I thought you should know."
