Midnight Conversation
(follows from First Feeding)
He should leave well enough alone. He knows it.
Things are, after all, good. The party trusts him, more or less. They see him as one of their own – not enough, perhaps, to have his back in a pinch, not enough to truly feel safe, but he can rely on them in battle. They’ll fight at his side and heal him when he’s hurt, and really, how much more can anyone realistically ask for?
And then there’s Xia, pretty little Xia who never offers her blood but never denies him when he asks for it, and who always seems to know when he needs it. After the first time, he’d waited as long as he could despite her warning, not wanting to face that too-knowing stare again, worried that his self-control would fail a second time. Until she’d taken to watching him across the campfire, a smirk playing over her lips, taunting him until he broke down and asked.
It went well. As it did the third time, and the fourth. His embarrassing loss of control hadn’t repeated, and they’d fallen into a comfortable pattern.
There’s no use disturbing it.
And yet it worries at him, like an itch he knows he shouldn’t scratch. He mulls it over as they sit around the fire and laugh at the latest attempts at cooking, as they each take turns singing in the cool night air.
Xia sings last, the pretty paladin’s voice surprisingly sweet. He waits until the others go to bed; through luck or through some ability to read him that he wishes she lacked, she stays up, strumming the battered old lute idly as they watch the last of the flames die down.
It would be nice if she’d say something. “Out with it,” maybe, or “I can tell you’ve got something on your mind – talk to me.” But Xia can wield silence like a weapon. She’ll wait, and continue to wait, and if he chickens out and says nothing she'll wait even longer, and he’ll know that she knows that he chickened out.
Fine. He moves closer, sits next to her. Waits to gather his thoughts. Then, with no preamble: “How would you know?”
She glances over, still picking through random chords. “Hmm?”
“You said.” He stares into the fire. “That first night. You said you could kill me if it were necessary, but that you didn’t know if it was necessary. Yet.” He swallows, not looking at her. “How would you know it was necessary?”
He can feel her stare now. “You’re asking me what would make me kill you.”
“I think it’s a valid question.”
She takes a deep breath. He waits, still not looking at her, but listening. Oh, he’s listening.
“If you were a threat to the rest of us,” she says slowly, after a long pause. “A threat that couldn’t be resolved any other way. If we couldn’t restrain you, couldn’t reason with you, couldn’t help you. If you were too far gone and there was no bringing you back. Then, yes. I could kill you. And I would. As I would for anyone else here.”
She takes a deep breath. “I would make it fast,” she says softly, and even though he’s not looking directly at her he can tell she’s also staring into the fire now. “Fast and clean. I wouldn’t make you suffer. And I would bury you properly, after. I would mourn you.”
Bizarrely, this makes his throat tighten. It’s… unexpected. He’d always figured when he died, it would be in a dingy dungeon somewhere, or perhaps on the side of the road, his body left for particularly unpicky crows. To hear that anyone, even his would-be murderer, would mourn him when he’s gone… well. It’s unexpected, that’s all.
Equally unexpected is the hand that slips into his. “It’s a pretty big ‘if,’” she says softly, and squeezes his hand. “I don’t expect it to come up.”
If asked (and if he were inclined to be truthful), he would have said that the pretty little paladin barely tolerates him, that she sees him as, at best, a necessary inconvenience. He would have said that he sees her as a meal ticket – quite literally, in fact – and a strong body to stand between him and his enemies, nothing more. Yet as they sit, hand in hand, watching the last of the flames die down, she makes no move to take her hand back and neither does he. And if either of them are manipulating the other, he genuinely can’t tell.
