I'm too tired to fall asleep.

You built your walls the way castles were built—slowly, deliberately, with mortar made of clipped sentences and stone quarried from every disappointment you'd ever catalogued in the quiet museum of your chest.

It was not cruelty. You wanted that understood, even if no one was listening closely enough to understand it.

It was preservation.

And Lilia Vanrouge—who had lived long enough to watch forests become kingdoms and kingdoms become footnotes—recognized the architecture immediately.

He'd built similar walls himself, once.

Centuries ago. In a life that tasted like iron and smelled like dying wisteria.

The first time he truly saw you—not the passing glance across the dining hall of Ramshackle Dorm, not the half-acknowledgment when Crowley shoved yet another impossible task toward your already-overflowing plate—but truly saw you, it was raining.

It was always raining in your most unguarded moments, you'd later realize. As though the sky itself conspired to soften what you refused to soften on your own.

You were standing beneath the rotting eaves outside the kitchen door, arms crossed, watching the downpour with an expression that most would read as irritation but that Lilia read as something far more translucent.

Longing.

You wanted to stand in the rain. You just didn't want anyone to see you want it.

"Falling water suits you," he said from the window above, his voice carrying the particular lilting warmth that made half of NRC's student body simultaneously flustered and unnerved. "It makes your scowl look almost poetic."

You didn't startle. You were too well-trained for that. But your shoulders migrated north by a fraction of an inch, and your jaw set with the precision of a closed vault door.

"I'm not scowling. I'm observing."

"Ah." He rested his chin on his folded arms, the window frame casting cruciform shadows across his face. "My mistake. You observe the way a general surveys a battlefield. With great personal offense."

"I don't have personal offense with the rain."

"No. You have personal offense with the fact that you want to stand in it and you've decided that wanting things is a vulnerability you can't afford." He said it simply. Gently. The way one might comment on the color of the sky. As though he hadn't just reached through your ribs and plucked something.

The rain hammered between you.

Your throat did something complicated.

"I don't know what you're talking about," you said, and turned on your heel, and walked inside with the rigid posture of someone who had not just been seen in a way that made them feel like stained glass—beautiful specifically because of the cracks, and devastating specifically because someone was standing close enough to notice the light coming through.

Lilia watched you go.

He smiled.

But it was the kind of smile that had grief folded inside it, like a letter pressed into a book for so long that the words had pressed ghost-versions of themselves onto the facing page.

He recognized you.

Not who you were—what you were.

Someone who had decided, at some point, that love was a door that only opened out, and that if you let anyone in, they would take more than they left behind.

He could have told you that the opposite was also true.

But Lilia Vanrouge had learned, in seven hundred years of living, that some truths had to be earned.

And you were not the type to let anyone earn anything without making them bleed for it first.

ii. the siege

He began the way one begins any siege: not with force, but with persistence so mild it barely registered as an attack at all.

A cup of tea appearing beside your elbow when you studied in the library. Not placed for you—never with the theatrical generosity that would let you reject it on principle. Just… there. As though it had grown there naturally, like a mushroom in damp soil. Chamomile. The specific blend you reached for on the shelf but never bought for yourself because it felt like an indulgence you hadn't earned.

You didn't drink it.

You wanted to drink it. The steam curled upward in gentle, beckoning spirals, and your fingers twitched with the particular ache of someone denying themselves a small mercy.

But drinking it would mean acknowledging it. And acknowledging it would mean acknowledging him. And acknowledging him would mean—

"You know," you said aloud, to no one, staring at the cup with the fury of a general facing an undefeatable enemy, "this is ridiculous."

The tea sat there, steam curling like a question mark.

You drank it.

It was perfect. Of course it was. Because Lilia Vanrouge did nothing by half-measure, and if he was going to wage a quiet war on your defenses, he would do it with the precision of someone who had actually waged war, and who understood that the most effective siege was the one that made the besieged want to open the gates.

He found you in the courtyard three days later, attempting to repair a broken bench with a hammer and a expression that suggested the bench had personally insulted your lineage.

"Trouble?"

"No."

"The bench seems to disagree."

"I don't recall asking the bench." You drove a nail with more force than necessary. The wood groaned in protest. "Or you."

Lilia tilted his head, that ever-present amusement playing at the corners of his mouth like sunlight through leaves—dappled, shifting, capable of casting warmth or shadow depending on the angle. "You didn't ask. And yet here I am. Funny how that works."

"I have a term for people who show up uninvited."

"I'm certain you do." He crouched beside you, and the proximity made your hammer-hand stutter mid-swing, which you covered by pretending you'd meant to pause. "But I've found that most of the things worth having in this life arrive without an invitation. Sunsets. Rain. The realization that you matter to someone."

Your nail bent at an ugly angle.

"You can't just say things like that," you muttered, yanking the ruined nail out with a sound like a small, frustrated murder.

"Like what?"

"Like—" You gestured vaguely with the hammer. A dangerous gesture. "—that. Those. Words. Arranged in that order."

He laughed. Not the performative, mischievous laugh he wore like a costume in the hallways of NRC. Something lower. Softer. A laugh that had weight to it, as though it had been carried a long distance through a long life before arriving here, in this courtyard, for you.

"I've been arranging words for seven centuries," he said. "I've gotten rather good at it."

"I've noticed," you said, and then realized you'd admitted to noticing, and the blush that followed was the kind that started at your collarbones and marched north with military efficiency.

You stood. Abruptly. The bench wobbled dangerously.

"I have to go."

"Do you?"

"Yes."

"Where?"

"Anywhere that isn't here."

You left.

Lilia stayed crouched by the half-repaired bench, and if anyone had been watching closely—and no one was, because Lilia made sure of that—they would have seen him press his palm flat against the wood grain and close his eyes for a moment that lasted exactly one breath longer than comfort allowed.

He was not laughing anymore.

Because he remembered—intimately, viscerally, in the way that old wounds remember the exact temperature of the blade that made them—what it felt like to build a wall so high you forgot there was a world on the other side.

And he was beginning to suspect that your wall was not built to keep him out.

It was built to keep you in.

Safe. Alone. Unhurt.

The cruelest kind of prison was the one you constructed with your own hands and then called protection.

iii. the crack

It happened on a Tuesday.

Unremarkable by calendar standards. Catastrophic by the standards of your carefully maintained architecture.

You'd had a day. Not a bad day—you were too proud and too practiced to allow bad days to accumulate into anything recognizable. But a day of small erosions. A comment from a professor that landed too close to an old insecurity. A letter from home that said everything by saying nothing at all. The particular loneliness of being in a room full of people who spoke a language you understood but could not, for the life of you, speak back.

You found yourself on the roof of Ramshackle at midnight, sitting on the edge with your legs dangling, because there was something about verticality that made horizontal problems feel smaller. The night sky over Twisted Wonderland was not your sky. It would never be your sky. The constellations were wrong, the moon hung at the wrong angle, and every time you looked up you were reminded that you were somewhere else, and that somewhere else was not home, and home was—

Home was complicated.

You pressed the heels of your hands against your eyes until you saw colors.

You did not cry. You did not cry. Crying was a luxury reserved for people who hadn't already spent their entire emotional budget on maintaining the structural integrity of their own walls.

"There you are."

You didn't jump. But your heart did something aerobically inadvisable.

Lilia landed on the rooftop with the gravity-defying grace that reminded you, viscerally, that he was not human. That the playful grandmother energy he projected was a choice, a costume worn over something ancient and sharp and not entirely safe.

He didn't sit next to you. He sat a careful three feet away—close enough to be present, far enough to not be a threat—and leaned back on his palms, tilting his face toward the wrong constellations.

"Grim was looking for you. Something about a tuna sandwich and betrayal."

"Tell him I'm dead."

"Shall I arrange a funeral? I know a wonderful florist in the Scalding Sands who does excellent arrangements for the tragically dramatic."

Despite everything—despite the letter, despite the comment, despite the wrong sky and the accumulated weight of being a person who refused to need anyone—your mouth twitched. Just barely. A seismic event disguised as a facial expression.

"You're not funny."

"I'm hilarious. You're simply too committed to misery to laugh."

"I'm not miserable. I'm—"

"Situated on a rooftop at midnight, alone, pressing your hands into your eyes hard enough to leave bruises." His voice was still light, but there was something underneath it now. Something that felt like the bottom of a lake—cold, still, and deeper than it appeared. "If that's not misery, it's at least its close personal friend."

The silence that followed was the loudest thing you'd ever heard.

"I don't need your pity," you said, and your voice came out smaller than you wanted it to. Which made you angry. Which made your voice sharper. "I don't need anyone's pity. I'm fine. I've always been fine. I'll continue to be fine. That's the whole— that's the point."

"The point of what?"

"Of—" You made a frustrated sound, somewhere between a laugh and a wound. "Of handling it. Of not being the kind of person who falls apart because some professor said something careless and a letter from home feels like a bomb with the fuse already lit and I miss—"

You stopped.

The wall shuddered.

Lilia did not move. Did not push. Did not fill the silence with his usual effervescence. He simply sat there, a steady presence in the dark, and let the silence be what it needed to be—which was not empty, but held.

"You miss what?" he asked, quietly. Gently. Like handling something made of glass. Or like handling something made of thorns—carefully, because the thorns were all that was holding it together.

You stared at the wrong stars.

"I don't know," you whispered, and the admission cost you something you couldn't afford to spend. "I don't know what I miss. I just know there's a hole, and I've been pretending it isn't there, and most days I'm fine, but tonight—"

Your voice cracked.

A single, traitorous tear escaped down your cheek with the audacity of a prisoner making a break for it while the guards were distracted.

You swiped at it with a violence that was really desperation.

"Don't—" you started.

"I won't," he said.

And he didn't.

He didn't reach for you. Didn't offer comfort in the way that people offered comfort—loudly, performatively, in ways that required you to receive it publicly and thus acknowledge your own vulnerability. He just sat there, three feet away, wrong constellations reflected in his red eyes, and let you fall apart in the dark without making it a spectacle.

It was, without question, the kindest thing anyone had ever done for you.

And you hated it.

You hated it because kindness that didn't demand anything in return was the most dangerous kind. It was the kind that slipped through the cracks in your wall like water through stone, and water, you knew, could bring down anything if given enough time.

You sat on that roof and you let the tears fall—quietly, furiously, in the way of someone who was angry at their own eyes for betraying them—and Lilia Vanrouge sat three feet away and watched the sky with the patience of someone who had once kept a vigil beside a dying queen and knew that some moments were not about fixing but about witnessing.

When it was over—when the tears had exhausted themselves and you were left hollow and trembling and furious at your own trembling—you spoke without looking at him.

"If you tell anyone about this, I will find a way to end you, ancient fae or not."

"Your secret is safe with me." A pause. Then, softer: "It's always been safe with me."

You stood. Brushed off your uniform. Straightened your spine with the determination of someone rebuilding a demolished wall brick by brick, starting now.

"Goodnight, Lilia."

"Goodnight."

You made it to the rooftop door before his voice caught you again—not because it was loud, but because it was the kind of quiet that travels through bone rather than air.

"For what it's worth," he said, still not looking at you, still gazing at those wrong, beautiful, impossible stars, "the hole doesn't go away. I know. I've been carrying mine for seven hundred years."

Your hand froze on the door handle.

"But it does," he said, "eventually, become a place where light can enter. If you let it."

You didn't turn around.

You couldn't.

Because if you turned around, he would see your face, and your face was doing something it hadn't done in years—it was believing someone.

You went inside.

You did not sleep.

You lay in your bed at Ramshackle.

==================================================(Version 2)

What Blooms In Defiance

The Art of Not Wanting

i. the inconvenient truth of dark hair

You told yourself it was the light.

The way the late afternoon sun caught the edge of his hair as he leaned against the doorway of the classroom, that was all it was. A trick of architecture and atmosphere. Nothing more. The fact that your pulse did something shameful and erratic behind your ribs was purely physiological—a fight-or-flight response to being startled, because he had appeared out of nowhere again, and any reasonable person's heart would seize under such circumstances.

"You're staring," Lilia said, without looking at you.

"I'm glaring," you corrected, because the alternative was unbearable. "There's a difference."

"Is there?" He turned then, and the smile he wore was the kind that had probably undone kingdoms. Not the bright, performative one he wore for the first-years—the one that said look at me, I'm harmless, I'm eccentric, I'm just a funny old man in a young body. No. This one was quieter. Smaller. A secret kept between the two of you, even though you hadn't agreed to keep any secrets with him.

Especially because you hadn't agreed to keep any secrets with him.

"There's a monumental difference," you said, and your voice came out steadier than you deserved. "Glaring implies hostility. Staring implies—" You stopped yourself before you could say fascination or longing or any other traitorous word that had been lodging itself in your throat like a fishbone lately. "—implies a lack of manners."

"And you have an abundance of those, I'm sure." He said it like he believed it. Like he'd watched you hold doors for people who didn't thank you. Like he'd noticed the way you straightened the collar of a first-year's uniform when you thought no one was looking. Like he'd been paying attention, which was worse than anything else he could have done, because attention from Lilia Vanrouge was not a casual thing.

It was a precision instrument.

It was a weapon you weren't armored against.

"Go bother someone else," you said, gathering your things with more force than necessary. A pencil rolled off the desk. You did not pick it up. You would not give him the satisfaction of watching you bend.

He picked it up instead.

He turned it over in his fingers—just a boring yellow pencil, nothing special—and you would have thought nothing of it, except that he looked at it the way he looked at everything. Like it mattered. Like the small, unremarkable things people discarded were the very things he found worth holding.

"You dropped this," he said.

"I know. Keep it."

"I intend to."

He slipped it into his pocket, and something in your chest cracked like a window hit by a winter stone—not shattered, but fractured, with a delicate web of damage you could hide but not repair.

You walked out of the classroom without looking back.

You always walked out without looking back.

You were becoming very good at it.

ii. a history of fortified walls (and the general who besieged them)

The thing about Lilia Vanrouge that no one seemed to understand— the thing that made him so insufferably, unreasonably dangerous—was that he was patient.

Not passive. Never passive. There was a difference there too, though most people were too dazzled by the performance to see it. Lilia was patient the way a river was patient with a stone. Not kind. Not cruel. Simply inevitable. He would wear you down not with force but with time, and time was the one thing he had more of than anyone.

You knew this.

You had studied him—carefully, from a distance, the way one studies a predator in the field, with binoculars and a healthy respect for the distance between you. You knew his habits. You knew he took his tea at four, that he haunted the kitchen at midnight to commit atrocities against cuisine, that he watched the first-years with an expression that flickered between amusement and something ancient and unnameable. You knew he had been a general. You knew he had fought in a war that had shaped the very land beneath your feet.

You knew, in the abstract way that one knows historical facts, that he had lost people.

What you did not know—what you refused to examine too closely—was why that knowledge made your throat tighten when you heard him laugh in the next room, bright and sharp as a bell, as if joy were something he had to choose every single day.

"Your observations are becoming less subtle," he told you one evening, appearing beside you on the bench outside the dormitory. The moon was a thin, suspicious sliver. The air smelled like impending rain. You had thought you were alone.

"I don't observe you." The lie was so automatic it barely required your participation. "I have better things to do than track your movements."

"Do you?" He tilted his head, and the moonlight did something terrible to his cheekbones. "I've noticed you don't spend your evenings with anyone else."

"Maybe I like being alone."

"No," he said, with a gentleness that felt like a blade slipping between ribs. "You don't. You've just learned to prefer it over the alternative."

The alternative.

Being seen. Being known. Being left.

You stood up so fast the bench scraped against the stone. "You don't know anything about me."

"I know you stayed up all night last week to finish a potion assignment that wasn't due for a month, because you needed a distraction." He didn't stand. He stayed exactly where he was, looking up at you with those eyes that had seen centuries and still somehow found you worth looking at. "I know you argue with your textbooks when you think no one is listening—not because you disagree with the material, but because you're testing it. Proving it wrong would be easier than trusting it."

"Stop."

"I know you keep a journal and you write in a language you invented yourself so that no one could ever read it, even if they found it." His voice dropped, not softer but closer, like a hand reaching through the dark. "I know that the first word you wrote in that journal, on the very first page, was why."

The rain began then, soft and indifferent, as if the sky had decided to weep on a completely unrelated matter.

You were not crying.

You would never cry in front of Lilia Vanrouge.

"You're a monster," you said, and you meant it in every possible sense of the word—ancient and terrible and impossible to escape.

He smiled, and it was the saddest smile you had ever seen on a human or fae face, and that was the moment you understood the true cruelty of Lilia Vanrouge: he did not pursue you despite knowing these things. He pursued you because of them.

"I've been called worse," he said, "by people I loved far more than you."

It should have been an insult.

It felt like a door opening.

iii. the culinary warfare that was not really about food

You found him in the kitchen at 1:47 AM.

This was not unusual. What was unusual was that you had come to the kitchen intentionally, which meant you had either lost your mind or surrendered to something you didn't have a name for yet. You were hoping it was madness. Madness was treatable. Madness could be blamed on stress or sleep deprivation or the peculiar atmospheric pressures of a school built on a nexus of magical energy.

The other thing—the thing with no name—was not treatable.

The other thing was Lilia stirring a pot of something that smelled like a crime scene and hummed a melody you didn't recognize but that made your chest ache anyway, because it sounded like a lullaby for someone who no longer needed to be lulled.

"Is that supposed to be soup?" you asked from the doorway.

"It is soup."

"It's hostile is what it is."

He laughed, and you hated—genuinely, sincerely hated—the way the sound moved through you like warm water, loosening things that had been clenched tight for years.

"Would you like to try it?"

"I would rather swallow broken glass."

"That can be arranged." He lifted the spoon toward you with an expression of pure, delighted mischief, and you took a step back, and he took a step forward, and suddenly the kitchen felt very small and the distance between you felt very negotiable.

"I'm not eating that," you said.

"I didn't ask you to eat it. I asked if you'd like to try it. There's a difference."

"You and your differences."

"You think about them a lot, don't you? Differences. Boundaries. The space between things." He set the spoon down. He set the mischief down too, and what was underneath it was so raw and so present that you forgot to breathe. "I've been alive for a very long time, and I've learned that most of the walls people build aren't to keep others out. They're maps. They show you exactly where it hurts."

"You're doing it again."

"Doing what?"

"Saying things that make me want to hit you."

"I know." He said it like a confession. Like something shameful. Like the fact that you wanted to hit him was proof of something he treasured and grieved in equal measure. "That's why I keep doing it. You're very beautiful when you're furious."

Your face burned.

Not blushed. Burned. As if someone had pressed a hot iron to your cheekbones, and the heat spread down your neck and across your collarbones and you wanted to die, actually. You wanted to sink into the kitchen floor and become one with the tile grout.

"I'm leaving."

"The soup—"

"Is a war crime and should be tried at an international tribunal. Goodnight, Lilia."

You turned on your heel. You made it three steps.

"You came to the kitchen at nearly two in the morning," he said to your back, quiet as a heartbeat. "Not because you were hungry. Because you knew I'd be here."

You stopped walking.

You did not turn around.

The silence stretched between you like a thread pulled taut, and you could feel it vibrating, and you knew—you knew—that if you turned around, something irrevocable would happen. Some last防线 would crumble. Some door you'd locked and thrown away the key to would ease open, and you would be standing on the threshold of something you'd spent your whole life running from.

You walked out of the kitchen.

But for the first time, the walking felt like running.

iv. an interlude in which you consider the weight of centuries

You could not sleep.

This was not new. Insomnia and you were old, intimate enemies—familiar as a married couple, hostile as a divorced one. What was new was the reason.

Usually, your sleeplessness was a formless thing. A free-floating anxiety with no anchor, a hum of unease that you couldn't name and couldn't cure. But tonight it had a face. And hair the color of endless night. And a voice that kept saying why in the language you'd invented, as if he'd cracked the code without even trying.

You pressed your face into your pillow and screamed, muffled and undignified.

Why him?

Of all the people in this school—the brilliant ones, the beautiful ones, the ones who didn't carry the weight of centuries in their spines like a second skeleton—why did it have to be the ancient war general who cooked like a supervillain and smiled like he knew every secret you'd ever had?

You thought about the things you knew of his past. Pieced together from overheard conversations and library books and the occasional, devastating slip of Malleus's tongue when the young dragon spoke of his guardian with a tenderness that suggested Lilia had been the only constant in a life full of loss.

He had outlived everyone he'd ever fought beside.

He had held dying friends in his arms and watched the light leave their eyes and then—then—he had gotten up the next morning and made breakfast for a child who had lost his parents, because that is what Lilia Vanrouge did. He carried his grief like a river carries the dead leaves of autumn—quietly, continuously, without ever stopping to demand recognition for the weight.

And you—what were you? A student with a sharp tongue and a tendency to build walls? A  person—who had been hurt, yes, but not in the way he had been hurt. Not in the way that leaves scars measured in centuries. Your wounds were ordinary. Common. The kind that everyone had and no one talked about, and you had built your personality around the conviction that if you never let anyone close enough, you would never have to explain the architecture of your damage.

Lilia had looked at your walls and seen maps.

You rolled onto your back and stared at the ceiling and felt something shift inside you, tectonic and slow, like a continent drifting toward an inevitable collision.

You were not afraid of Lilia.

You were afraid of what he would find when the walls came down.

You were afraid that he would look at the ordinary, common, unremarkable wreckage of your heart and find it not worth the effort of navigating.

You were afraid that he would stay anyway, and that would be worse, because then you would owe him something you didn't know how to give.

Why.

The first word in your journal. The question you'd been asking since before you could remember. Not why me or why this but just—why. Why anything. Why the effort of it. Why the architecture of getting up every morning and performing the rituals of being alive when the being alive part felt so fundamentally unconvincing.

You squeezed your eyes shut.

Sleep did not come.

But something else did—a quiet, terrifying awareness that you were no longer running from Lilia Vanrouge.

You were running toward him, and pretending, even to yourself, that it was the other way around.

v. in which the siege engine reveals itself to be a seed

It happened on a Tuesday.

Unremarkable. Forgettable. The kind of day that history books skip over, the kind that exists only as filler between the moments that matter. Which, you supposed, was exactly the point. Lilia had always understood that the most important things happen in the spaces between.

You were in the library. Alone, or so you thought, because you had chosen the most obscure corner on the most remote floor, surrounded by books on magical theory so dense they could double as blunt weapons. You were not studying. You were hiding. There was a difference, though you had long since stopped pretending it was a meaningful one.

He didn't announce himself. He never did. He simply materialized in the chair across from you, as if the universe had always intended for him to be there and was only now correcting an oversight.

You looked up from your book—a book you had not read a single word of in the past forty minutes—and found him watching you with an expression you couldn't categorize. It wasn't the teasing smile. It wasn't the quiet sadness. It was something else. Something careful. Something that looked almost like—

Fear.

Lilia Vanrouge looked afraid.

The recognition hit you like a physical force, because in all your observations, in all your careful study from a distance, you had never once seen him look afraid. You had seen him amused and tender and weary and fierce and grief-stricken in that hidden way of his, but never afraid, and the fact that he looked afraid now, sitting across from you in a forgotten corner of a library on an unremarkable Tuesday, made your hands go cold.

"Lilia." You said his name without meaning to. It fell out of you, unguarded, and the sound of it in your own voice terrified you almost as much as the look on his face.

He heard it too. The difference. The absence of armor.

"I need to tell you something," he said, "and I need you to not run away while I'm telling you."

"I don't run away."

"You do. You're very fast at it. It's impressive, actually. I've seen you do it in the space between one heartbeat and the next." He folded his hands on the table. His fingers were still. Not fidgeting, not drumming, not performing any of the restless little gestures that usually characterized him. The stillness was wrong. The stillness was what made your chest hurt. "I'm going to say something, and you're going to say something cruel, because that's what you do when someone gets too close. And I need you to know—" His voice faltered. Actually faltered, like a candle flame in a draft, and the fragility of it was so staggering that you felt your own breath catch in sympathy. "I need you to know that I will survive it. Whatever you say. I've survived worse. But I need you to also know that it will hurt, and I'm telling you this anyway, because—"

He stopped.

He looked down at his hands.

"I have lived for a very long time," he said, so quietly you had to lean forward to hear. "And in all that time, I have never once met someone who made me want to explain myself. I have never met someone whose anger I wanted to earn honestly, whose walls I wanted to respect rather than dismantle, whose no I wanted to treat as sacred rather than as an obstacle."

Your throat was closing.

"I don't want to take your walls down," he said. "I want you to open the door. Not for me. For you. Because you deserve to be on the other side of them."

The library was silent. The books were silent. The dust motes hung suspended in the lamplight like frozen stars, and the whole world had drawn a breath and was holding it, waiting to see what you would do with the gift you'd just been given—not a declaration of love, not a demand, not a trap, but a doorway, offered without expectation, held open by hands that trembled slightly under the weight of centuries of loss and the terrible, reckless courage of hoping anyway.

You opened your mouth.

"I don't—" Your voice cracked. You swallowed. Tried again. "I don't know how."

The words came out so small. So unlike you. So stripped of every defense mechanism you'd spent years constructing that you barely recognized them as your own.

Lilia's eyes softened into something that was not pity—never pity—but a recognition so profound it bordered on reverence.

"I know," he said. "That's why I'm not asking you to do it alone."

Something broke open in your chest. Not dramatically, not like a dam bursting, but like a bud unfurling in slow motion—petal by petal, inch by inch, a process that could not be rushed or forced or pretended. You felt your eyes sting, and for the first time in longer than you could remember, you did not fight it.

A single tear fell onto the open book in front of you. It hit the page with an audible softness, blurring a line of text until the words became unreadable.

Lilia reached across the table.

He did not take your hand. He simply placed his beside yours, close enough that you could feel the warmth of his skin without the obligation of touching it. An offering. A proximity. A choice.

You looked at his hand—pale, long-fingered, a general's hand that had wielded swords and stirred terrible soup and cradled the faces of the dying and now rested, palm-up, on a library table on a Tuesday, waiting for you.

You turned your hand over.

Your fingers touched his.

The contact was so slight it barely qualified as a touch at all—just the merest brush of skin against skin, a whisper of warmth, a question asked in a language older than words.

Lilia's fingers curled gently around yours.

You did not pull away.

The ceiling did not collapse. The world did not end. Your walls did not crumble in a single, cinematic avalanche. They simply—shifted. The way tectonic plates shift: imperceptibly, over time, with a deep and rumbling certainty that changes everything even though you can't see it happening.

You sat in the library on a Tuesday and held hands with Lilia Vanrouge, and it was not a victory and it was not a surrender.

It was a beginning.

vi. the slow and terrible business of being known

After the Tuesday—which you did not call the Tuesday in your head, because that would imply it was special, and you were not yet ready to admit that—things did not change.

That was a lie.

Things changed constantly, in increments so small they were almost invisible, like the movement of an hour hand. You did not suddenly become soft. You did not suddenly become kind. You were still sharp-edged and difficult and prone to saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, and Lilia was still infuriating in that particular way of his where he saw through every one of your defenses as if they were made of glass.

But there were moments.

Small ones. Secret ones. The kind that would mean nothing to an observer and everything to you.

He left a cup of tea outside your door one morning—proper tea, not the nightmare sludge he usually concocted, which meant he had either made it himself with unusual care or coerced someone else into making it, and either way the implication made your face heat. There was no note. There was no signature. Just a cup of tea, still warm, placed with a precision that suggested he had stood there for several minutes deciding on the exact right spot.

You drank it.

You did not thank him.

He knew you drank it because the cup was gone when he came to collect it, and the smile he wore when he retrieved the empty cup from where you'd left it—balanced carefully on the threshold, neither inside nor outside, a liminal placement that said I accept this but don't you dare make a thing of it—that smile was so radiant that Silver, who happened to be passing by, stopped and asked if his father was feeling well.

"I'm feeling wonderful," Lilia said, and meant it.

Another moment: you were in the courtyard, reading, and he sat down beside you without asking, and you didn't move away. This was unprecedented. This was historical. This was the kind of seismic shift that registered on instruments you didn't know existed.

He didn't speak. He simply sat, and read his own book, and the silence between you was not the charged, combative silence of before but something easier. Something that breathed. Something that existed not as a weapon but as a shared space, a room with two chairs and a window and nothing that needed to be filled.

After twenty minutes, you shifted—just slightly, just a few inches—and your shoulder touched his.

You did not move away.

Neither did he.

The contact remained for the rest of the afternoon, a point of warmth that anchored you to something you couldn't name, and when you finally stood up to leave, you said, without looking at him, "Your tea was acceptable."

"I'll strive for good next time," he said, and the laughter in his voice was not at your expense but at the absurdity and the wonder of it—of you, of this, of the fact that after centuries of living, a single word of grudging approval could make him feel like he'd conquered something vast.

vii. a lesson in the grammar of grief

He told you about the war on a Thursday.

Not the whole war—just a piece. A fragment. A single shard of a stained-glass window that had once depicted something magnificent and whole. He told you about a friend—a soldier under his command—who had carried a pocket watch that played a melody when you opened it. A silly, impractical thing to bring to a battlefield. The friend had said it was to remind him that time was passing, that every second was a small music, that even in the worst places, beauty could be wound up and released.

The friend had died on a hillside that no longer had a name.

Lilia had kept the watch.

He still had it.

He didn't show it to you. He simply told you it existed, and the telling was such an act of trust—such a naked, unguarded offering of a wound he had carried for longer than your entire lineage—that you forgot every defense mechanism you'd ever learned.

"That's—" You stopped. Started again. "That's a terrible story. Why would you tell me that?"

"Because you asked."

"I didn't ask anything."

"You asked why." He looked at you, and his eyes were the color of something that didn't have a name—not quite crimson, not quite red, but somewhere in the catastrophic space between. "The first word in your journal. You've been asking it since before I met you. And I wanted you to know that I've been asking it too. For much longer than you."

Why.

The question hung between you like smoke.

"I don't have an answer," he said. "I've looked for one for seven hundred years. I haven't found it. But I've found—" He paused, and you watched him search for the word, watched him rifle through a vocabulary that spanned centuries and multiple languages, and what he settled on was so simple it broke something in you. "—moments. Small ones. That make the question feel less urgent."

You thought about the cup of tea on your threshold. The shoulder against yours in the courtyard. The hand on the library table, palm-up, waiting.

"Like what?" you asked, and your voice was so quiet it barely existed.

"Like this," he said. "Sitting with you. Being someone you don't push away."

The grief in that sentence was immense. Not performed, not displayed for effect, but simply present, the way gravity is present—constant, invisible, inescapable. He had spent centuries being left behind, being the one who survived, being the one who stood at the graves of everyone he'd ever loved, and here he was, telling you that not being pushed away by a difficult, prickly, thoroughly inconvenient person who drank his terrible tea and held his hand in a library was a moment that made the question of why feel less urgent.

You did something you had never done.

You reached for him.

Your hand found his wrist—his wrist, not his hand, because wrists were practical and hands were intimate and you were not ready for intimacy, you were barely ready for proximity—and you held on. Not tightly. Not desperately. Just held on, as if he were something that might drift away if you didn't anchor him.

He looked down at your fingers on his wrist.

His breath caught.

You watched it catch. You watched the rise and fall of his chest stutter like a skipped heartbeat, and the realization that you could affect him—that this ancient, untouchable, devastating creature could be undone by something as small as your hand on his wrist—was so powerful that it terrified you more than any darkness you'd ever faced.

"Don't—" You didn't know how to finish the sentence. Don't leave. Don't die. Don't be a story I have to read about in a history book. Don't become another reason I ask why.

He understood anyway.

He always understood.

"I'm here," he said. "For now. For as long as I can be."

It wasn't a promise. It wasn't forever. It was something better—something honest, something fragile, something that acknowledged the impermanence of all things and chose to exist anyway.

You held his wrist in a courtyard on a Thursday, and somewhere in the space between your bodies, a question began, very slowly, to transform into something that was not quite an answer but was no longer just a question either.

viii. the disaster of almost saying it

Three weeks after the Tuesday—which you now, privately, in the sanctuary of your own mind, called the Tuesday, because you had run out of lies to tell yourself—you nearly told Lilia Vanrouge that you loved him.

The word had been rising in you like water in a flooding basement—inexorable, relentless, seeping through every crack in your foundation. You had felt it building for days. It was in the way you looked for him in crowded rooms. In the way you caught yourself smiling at the thought of his laugh. In the way you had begun to write his name in the margins of your journal, in your invented language, as if even the alphabet you'd created to keep people out had been infiltrated by him.

You were sitting on the roof of the dormitory at midnight. You did not know how he'd gotten there—you had climbed through a window and crossed a perilous stretch of slate tiles to reach the highest point, specifically because it was inaccessible—but there he was, legs dangling over the edge, looking up at the stars as if they were old friends he was catching up with.

"How," you said.

"The same way I do everything." He patted the tiles beside him. "With flair."

"I hate you."

"You don't." He said it without arrogance. Without smugness. He said it the way one states the weather—clearly, simply, without room for argument, because the sky is blue and water is wet and you did not hate Lilia Vanrouge. "Sit down. You're going to fall."

"I'm not going to—"

Your foot slipped on a loose tile.

You didn't fall—you caught yourself, barely, with a graceless lurch that sent a shower of broken tile fragments skittering over the edge—but for one horrible, suspended moment, the ground was very far away and the air was very empty and your stomach dropped through the floor of the universe.

A hand closed around your arm.

Lilia had moved—actually moved, with a speed that reminded you, violently, that he was not a person but a fae, not a student but a warrior, not a funny old man in a young body but something ancient and powerful and capable of catching you mid-fall without seeming to exert himself at all.

He pulled you to safety. Not roughly, not gently, but with a precision that suggested he had calculated the exact amount of force required to bring you to solid ground without injuring you or dislocating your shoulder.

You ended up on your knees on the rooftop, gasping, his hand still on your arm, and he was crouched in front of you, and his face was very close, and his expression was—

Terrified.

Not of the height. Not of the fall. Of losing you.

The realization hit you with the force of the ground you'd almost hit: Lilia Vanrouge, who had survived wars and famines and the deaths of everyone he'd ever loved, was afraid of losing you. You—a difficult, contrary, thoroughly unremarkable person who couldn't even accept a cup of tea without making it into a power struggle.

"Lilia—"

"Don't." His voice was rough. Stripped of its usual music. "Don't do that again."

"I didn't mean to—"

"I know. That's what makes it—" He stopped. Closed his eyes. His hand was still on your arm, and you could feel his fingers trembling—actually trembling—and the tremor traveled through your skin and into your bones and settled somewhere in the vicinity of your heart, where it lodged like an arrow. "That's what makes it frightening. The things we don't mean to do. The things we can't control."

He opened his eyes.

They were very close. Too close. Close enough that you could see the faint lines at the corners—signs of smiling, of frowning, of seven hundred years of making expressions that meant things. Close enough that you could see your own reflection in them, small and upside-down and seen.

"I lo—"

You stopped.

The word was right there. Right at the edge of your tongue, ripe and terrible and ready to fall. Three syllables. Eight letters. The shortest sentence in any language and the most dangerous one you'd ever almost spoken.

You didn't say it.

Instead, you did something braver.

You kissed him.

It was not a good kiss. It was clumsy and desperate and tasted like the tea he'd made you that morning—good tea, because he'd been practicing, because he'd been trying to get it right, because of course he had—and your nose bumped his and your teeth clicked against his and it was, by any technical standard, a disaster.

But Lilia made a sound against your mouth. A small, broken, grateful sound, as if you had handed him something he'd stopped believing existed, and his hand moved from your arm to the back of your neck, and he kissed you back with a gentleness that made your eyes sting, because he was holding you like you were the pocket watch—like you were a small music, like you were beauty wound up and released, like you were a reason to believe that time passing was not the same as things ending.

When you pulled apart, you were both breathing hard, and the stars were very bright, and the broken tiles were still skittering over the edge into the dark.

"You—" You couldn't finish. You didn't have words. Your invented language had no word for this. No language did. This was the thing that existed before language, the thing that language had been invented to try and fail to capture.

"I know," Lilia said, and his thumb traced a slow arc across the back of your neck, and you shivered, and he smiled—not the performative smile, not the sad smile, not the teasing smile, but a new one, one you'd never seen before, one that was only for you, one that said I see you and I am not afraid of what I see.

"You still haven't said it," he murmured.

"I don't know how."

"I know." He pressed his forehead to yours. His breath was warm against your lips. "I can wait. I've gotten very good at waiting."

"That's not—" You swallowed. "That's not fair. You can't just—be patient at me. I don't know what to do with patience. I know how to fight. I know how to run. I don't know what to do with someone who just waits."

"Then learn." So simple. So impossibly simple. "I'll teach you. I have time."

"You won't." The words came out before you could stop them, and the grief in them—your grief, your grief, the grief of a person who had just realized that she loved someone who might outlive her by centuries—was so raw that it startled you both. "You have too much time, Lilia. And I don't have enough."

The silence that followed was the loudest thing you'd ever heard.

He pulled back just far enough to look at you, and his expression was the most unguarded you'd ever seen it—every mask removed, every performance abandoned, and what was underneath was not the ancient general or the mischievous fae or the loving guardian but simply Lilia, a person who was afraid and hopeful and heartbroken and brave all at once, in the exact proportions that made up every person who had ever loved something they couldn't keep.

"Then we make the time we have count," he said. "That's all we can do. That's all anyone can do." A pause. His voice dropped to something barely above a whisper. "I've lost people who had centuries ahead of them. Time is not the thing that keeps us safe. Love is the thing that makes the time matter."

You stared at him.

You stared at him, and you thought about all the years he had carried, all the loss he had survived, all the moments he had collected like precious stones in the pocket of a coat that was far too old and far too worn, and you thought about the fact that he had chosen to add you to that collection—not as a grief-to-be, not as a future wound, but as a moment, small and current and alive, a small music in the middle of a battlefield.

"Okay," you said.

"Okay?"

"Okay. I'll learn." You said it like a declaration of war. Like a treaty. Like the most terrifying and the most necessary thing you'd ever said. "But I'm going to be bad at it."

"I know."

"I'm going to be terrible at it. I'm going to push you away and say cruel things and build walls and then get mad at you for not climbing them."

"I know."

"And you're going to have to—" Your voice wavered. "You're going to have to keep waiting. Even when I give you no reason to."

"I will." No hesitation. No conditions. Just I will, as simple and as absolute as gravity.

You kissed him again.

This time it was better. Slower. Less desperate and more deliberate, as if you were learning a new language and the kiss was your first sentence—clumsy but clear, imperfect but true. His hand stayed on the back of your neck. Your hand found the front of his shirt and gripped the fabric like an anchor, and the wind moved across the rooftop and the stars watched and the broken tiles fell and fell and fell into the dark, and none of it mattered because you were kissing Lilia Vanrouge on a rooftop at midnight, and the word you couldn't say was everywhere—in the press of your lips, in the grip of your fingers, in the ragged breathing between kisses—and he heard it even though you didn't speak it, because Lilia Vanrouge had spent seven hundred years learning to listen for the things people couldn't say.

ix. an epilogue, of sorts

Months later—months in which you learned to say thank you for the tea and stay when you wanted to run and I'm scared when the walls started rebuilding themselves—you opened your journal to the first page.

Why.

The word sat there, small and solitary, the way you had written it all that time ago, before Lilia, before the Tuesday, before the rooftop and the broken tiles and the kiss that had been a sentence in a language you were still learning.

You picked up your pen.

Beneath the why, in your invented language—in a code that no one else could read—you wrote a second word. Then a third. Then a fourth. A sentence. A paragraph. A page. Another page.

You wrote about pink hair in late afternoon light. About soup that smelled like a crime and tea that tasted like trying. About a hand on a library table, palm-up, waiting. About the sound he made when you kissed him—small, broken, grateful. About the terror of being known and the greater terror of remaining unknown. About grief, his and yours, and the way it didn't cancel each other out but stacked, creating a shared height from which you could both see further than you could alone.

You wrote about the fact that you still didn't have an answer to why.

But you were beginning to think that the question itself was the answer. That the asking was the point. That the very fact that you could sit in a library or on a rooftop or in a kitchen at 1:47 AM and feel something—pain, longing, fear, joy, all of it, all at once, a cacophony that was indistinguishable from being alive—was the closest thing to a reason you were ever going to get.

You closed the journal.

You went to find him.

He was in the kitchen, as he often was, stirring something that smelled marginally less catastrophic than usual. He looked up when you entered, and the smile he gave you was the one that was only for you—the new one, the real one, the one that was still learning how to exist.

"I made tea," he said.

"I can see that."

"It's good this time. I've been practicing."

"I know you have." You crossed the kitchen. You took the cup from his hand. You set it on the counter. And then—because you were learning, slowly, imperfectly, with all the stumbling grace of a newborn thing—you took his face in your hands and kissed him, soft and sure, the way you'd been practicing too.

When you pulled back, his eyes were bright.

"I love you," you said.

The words came out quiet. Matter-of-fact. As if you were telling him the time or the weather or any other simple, obvious, irrefutable truth. No drama. No grand gesture. Just three syllables, spoken in a kitchen that smelled like slightly-burnt tea, to a fae who had waited seven hundred years to hear something that sounded like that—like a door opening, like a wall coming down, like a small music in the middle of a battlefield.

Lilia Vanrouge looked at you as if you had handed him the world.

"I know," he said, and smiled, and meant it, and the word why—that ancient, relentless, unanswerable word—did not disappear, but it softened, the way a question softens when it stops demanding an answer and starts becoming a prayer.

When you woke up, it wasn't the chiming morning light or the weight of the blanket that roused you. It was a presence. Someone was in the room. You opened your eyes, and the blanket almost slipped from your body when you saw the tall figure standing by the window.

He was facing away from you, his silhouette sharp, elegant, and dangerous. Broad shoulders, long black hair, and horns that gleamed like obsidian. Scales, the same colors as "your" lizard's, ran across his neck and shoulders. Your breath hitched in your throat.

"So... this is the realm I have entered," he spoke in a deep, resonant voice without turning around. "Tell me, human... is it common for your kind to buy dragons?"

"What? Of course not. Who are you?" you gasped, stunned. He slowly turned. His eyes were exactly the same. Glowing, green, ancient.

"A very good question." He took a step toward you, the light catching his scales and horns as if they were dusted with stardust. He stopped right by the bed and lowered his head to examine you. "My name is Malleus Draconia."

"So... you were the lizard?" Your throat felt dry.

"Lizard," he repeated with amusement, the corners of his mouth lifting slightly. "How disrespectful. But yes... when I was in a weakened form."

"Why... here with me? Why did you change here?"

He silently observed you for a moment, as if evaluating your soul. Then he reached out a hand and gently touched the edge of your blanket, as if testing the distance between you.

"You drew me in," he answered softly. "Your magic... it's different. I am a dragon, a being made of old powers. And you... you saw me, even when I was hidden."

"I just... you kind of charmed me..." you mumbled, lowering your eyes.

For a brief moment, his eyes softened, as if your words surprised him more than all the magic in the world.

The following days were strange, but surprisingly bright. Malleus stayed close, sometimes in human form, other times as a small lizard curled up on your lap while you read books. He wasn't one to speak much, but his presence was a silent protection. And sometimes... tender.

One evening, he was sitting on your terrace, the sky coloring in shades of purple, and tiny sparks of magic glittered around his horns.

"So... you bring good luck? The salesman said so," you asked, sitting down beside him. Even though you suspected it was nonsense. With a slow movement, he turned his head toward you, his eyes shining with a soft humor.

"Your kind always invents stories. I don't bring luck..." He leaned closer, until you could feel the cool air around his scales. "I choose it." Your heart began to pound.

"And I am your choice?" you whispered. His hand touched yours, cool but strangely comforting, his fingers lightly stroking your skin, as if checking reality.

"Yes," he nodded. "Whether you bought me by accident or by destiny... now I am here for you." He leaned even closer until his forehead gently rested against yours. The magic around you rustled like wind through the trees.

One night, as the world was plunged into silence and the stars hung low, you sat on your window looking at the sky. Malleus approached you without a sound, his silhouette lost in the moonlight.

He sat down behind you, his arms gently wrapping around you, as if shielding you from the entire world. His scales were cool, but his touch was warm.

"For centuries, I walked the worlds alone," he whispered into your hair, his voice almost inaudible. "It was easy to believe that fate had no place for me among mortals."

"And now?" You leaned closer to him, your heart calmer than ever before.

His lips lightly touched your temple, at first hesitantly, almost reverently. As if he was afraid you might dissolve if he were too bold.

"Now," he answered tenderly, "I have a world I want to return to. Regardless of the realms, time... or the form I wear."

You turned your head toward him, and this time, it was you who bridged the final distance. You kissed him quietly, sweetly, without fear. His hands tightened around you, but still with that immense caution that only a being who could burn to ashes for you could possess.

The magic around you blossomed like green fireflies. And in the midst of that silence, you realised that maybe that "lucky pet" wasn't an accident. Maybe it was destiny.

Night Raven Pet Shop

Sebek's first instinct — his only instinct — is to call out to Lilia. His mentor, his first teacher outside of his family.

The one who trusted him to keep Malleus safe. Who trained him to keep Malleus safe. How badly has he failed them all?

"This is how he was to serve his prince?", He imagines the words threaded through the pain in Malleus’ voice as he says something that doesn't quite penetrate the fog crowding Sebek's thoughts. One minute Malleus is in his arms; the next, he is being picked up by Silver and rushed off to a healer. Silver looks back at him, and Sebek braces himself for disgust, perhaps even hatred.

But its worse.

Its pity.

When Lilia arrives, it is to a Sebek that has not moved from his spot; still on his knees, still with bloodied hands and a vacant expression on his face as tears stream down. When Lilia hoists him up by the arm, Sebek half-expects a scolding.

But what greets him instead is silence.

Silence, that has never sat well with Sebek.

And yet, it is all Diasomnia experiences after the incident. Sebek becomes silent, almost like a ghost wandering the halls.

He leaves the dorm early in the morning, to train. He wields his sword till it is time to wield his pen, and after classes are done for the day he picks his sword up again. He sleeps fitfully, concerning his roommates and avoiding his friends.

His other dormmates look at him with disgust in their eyes, distrust and derision aimed at him for failing the one task he was given: protecting their prince.

“What can you expect from a half blood?” He hears one of them say as he enters the common room one day. But none of them actually bother him, knowing full well that they would have to answer to Lilia if they did.

Sebek hates it.

He wishes they would actually bother him, would punish him for his failure the way he deserves. Because Lilia doesn't. Neither does Silver.

They look at him with quiet concern and something dangerously close to pity, and it only makes his skin crawl with disgust at himself. He isn't the one they should worry about. He is the one who failed them, and let harm befall their son and brother.

He is the one to blame.

The one who will never amount to much, not in the way Lilia expects of him—

"Sebek."

Silver's voice is distant, but it cuts through the sluggish fog that plugs Sebek's ears instantly. He looks... tired, like usual (but when has his fatigue ever endangered his liege?), and Sebek tries not to look at him for too long.

"...yes, Silver."

"Malleus is asking to see you."

Sebek whips his head around, unable to mask the roiling emotions within him.

Has he known that Malleus regained consciousness after being treated by the healers? Yes. Has he visited his liege even once since becoming aware of the fact?

No.

Because he is unworthy.

And somewhere in the deepest recesses of his heart, Sebek is afraid.

Afraid of finding the same pity that lingers in Lilia and Silver's eyes cloud his liege's gaze as well.

But Sebek has never been one to disobey Malleus. And so he quietly asks Silver to allow him time to clean himself up, sheathing his sword.

Silver follows Sebek to his dorm room silently. He never says a word, letting the silence swell between them in that gentle, patient way of his that makes Sebek's skin prickle. He watches the younger slip away to the common bathrooms, auroral eyes tracking him out of the door before looking around the room.

The other beds, belonging to Sebek's dormmates are empty; considering that the sun is still high up in the sky, not too surprising.

Silver's gaze falls next on the desk beside his junior's bed, the one allotted to him to use, and pauses. Normally meticulous about his notes and study material, it is disconcerting to see the way Sebek has left his books haphazardly open and scattered. His line of sight climbs, meeting the familiar calm, assessing gaze of Malleus' portrait, and halts.

Silver has never thought of Malleus as an untouchable being. Hard to do so when you have spent your early days playing with said untouchable being, tugging on his robes to show him the small animals that inevitably scattered once they saw him.

Still, looking at the portrait Silver cannot help but feel like he'll be at the recieving end of a lightning strike. Portrait Malleus has that particular set to his face, one that some may call regal and refined but Silver has come to distinctly know as displeased.

A pointed cough breaks him out of his daydreams, and Silver turns to see Sebek standing at the door, arms crossed across his chest in a defensive position and eyes averted.

Silver does not say a word; not about the state of Sebek's corner of the room, not about the faint traces of a failed cloaking spell he senses from the portrait. All he does, is step forward to lead the youngest of their little family to where the two older faes are waiting for him.

Malleus' room is dim, when they reach it. The door is left slightly ajar for them, and from within, Sebek and Silver can hear hushed whispers. Silver knocks, opening the door fully as he announces their presence, and Sebek automatically turns his gaze to the floor.

Lilia glances over at the two, a subtle nod of his head allowing them passage to where Malleus sits on his bed, blanket loosely tucked around his hips.

It is completely silent, save for the rustle of sheets and Silver's gentle footsteps and Sebek swallows, for silence has never sat well with him.

Thankfully, it is broken fairly quickly by the familiar low drawl of Malleus' voice. He calls Sebek by name, and shame crawls up the younger's spine as he finds himself walking towards his liege as though in a trance of obedience.

His mind screams he is unworthy; his heart whines not to be cast aside regardless.

Sebek dares not look at Malleus. Not when Silver coaxes him with a hand on his shoulder to sit at the edge of Malleus' bed, not when Lilia asks him how he has been, remarking that its been a while since Lilia has been able to hear his voice booming through the halls of Diasomnia.

Not until Malleus himself reaches out to grasp his arm and bring him closer.

When Sebek does look up, he sees only care and concern in Malleus' eyes. The very same eyes that have haunted his dreams ever since the assassination attempt, accusing him of neglecting his duties. Of failing his liege.

And that is the final straw for the young half-fae, who ends up crying.

Sebek doesn't know how it happens, but he soon finds himself in Malleus' arms, the older threading his fingers through his hair. Lilia and Silver close in around them, silent anchors for the both of them as Sebek sobs like the scared little kid he has felt all this while. Later, once he is well-rested and emotionally adjusted, he may feel embarrassed by the way he fists his hands into his liege's shirt, but at the moment, all Sebek can do is cry in his arms.

Silver notices Lilia discreetly rubbing away a tear, allowing the bat fae his privacy as he turns his gaze back to Malleus and Sebek. That does not keep him from leaning the slightest bit more against his father, a wordless reassurance that everything will be fine.