It is wrong, this way she is his, this way he is hers. Both their peoples would decry it. Both would douse the nascent spark of their union in blood. But it is defiance—against forces that span the stars, against what the stars themselves have writ and wrought—that they burn as one. That they keep burning; bowing into one another when they ache down to the marrow; acting out this soft surrender each and every time the quiet allows.