This was never supposed to be nothin' but a little somethin' to do

COLT

She's a runner, she's a lover, always stuck in her ways
Pull her closer, think you know her, now she's turning the page
She gave a warning if it's storming, she'll be gone with the rain

For a moment, the sound of his laughter and the fading memory of a much simpler time thoroughly delights her. A sensation she hasn't had the chance to hold near him in some time, and as fleeting as it is, she captures it as long as she is able. "Spoken like someone who has never been around a rooster," she returns haughtily, both eyes opening above a grin. It's worth noting, the ranch never did keep chickens once she took charge of it.

The name though, Nestor, tugs the temporary ease away, and her smile quiets and then flees entirely. "No one ever knew about him," she whispers, shock daring to creep up her spine although it has no right. He demonstrated exactly what he explicitly told her, but hearing and believing don't always arrive together. She hadn't even felt him when he'd been in there with her, and even the thoughts she tried to push away, he caught those too, that small number resurfacing as more than mere coincidence under Nestor's wings.

She's far too aware of her own thoughts now, each one feeling like a stranger she didn't invite in, begging them to shut the fuck up because someone else is listening. Asking for quiet only inspires the opposite, rebellious in the worst ways for herself. Gods, how loud it must be for him. Her own mind is noise enough to drive her mad; she can't imagine making room for others. How ugly it all must be too, seeing the mess that the mouth usually keeps tidy. There's a drawn-out silence as she withdraws into the depths of her mind, eyes going a little glassy with an inner distance, stiff like she's become aware of bindings that've always been there.

Slowly, she swallows and ventures something back into the space between them. "Can you turn it off?" Buried behind that, how often has it happened? How much have you seen? How many more Nestors have there been? A mound she realizes too late that he'll already know the bodies she dumped into it. "I—" but the apology for thinking strangles itself out, and feeling far more exposed than she expected to, she draws her knees up tighter to her chest, hands abandoning the ground to encircle them, head dropping into the shelter of her body like she could at least guard that still.

When she's in it, she's all in it, ain't no holding her back
When I'm with her, she's a river moving steady and fast
She's afraid of all the ways her heart is broke like glass

I need your hand but I don't want to burn it

"Guilty," Vesper concedes, the smirk already pulling warmer at the corners as he looks at Colt. For a moment, he forgets the distance he’d so carefully hammered into place between them. Affection slips through before he can stop it, easy and familiar in the way it softens his eyes, until the full weight of what he’s just admitted begins to settle over her and reminds him precisely why he’d kept this buried. His smile fades alongside hers, though he doesn’t look away.

The fact that she hasn’t punched him yet seems promising, but Vesper knows better than to mistake shock for forgiveness. She hasn’t reached the ugliest corners of it yet, hasn’t had time to understand how little of herself had ever been private when he was near, and he can feel her thoughts multiplying as the realization spreads. Each attempt to force them quiet only gives them another hard surface to ricochet from, questions colliding with embarrassment and fear until the noise crowds against him from every direction. The corners of his eyes tighten with the effort of holding steady beneath it, an exertion he no longer has any reason to disguise.

"It’s like hearin' another language," he explains, his voice kept low while the peppermint stem turns between his fingers. "If I told you right now to block out everythin' I was sayin', you probably could. But it’d take a hell of a lot of effort, and you’d likely have to block out nearly everythin' else along with it." One shoulder lifts in a small, helpless shrug. It isn’t the answer she wants, and it isn’t one he’s ever particularly liked giving himself. "I can’t hear anythin’ when I’m shifted, though." That offers a boundary, however impractical, but it does nothing for the rest of what’s rising behind her question. Vesper sighs softly and glances toward her over one shoulder, something sad briefly darkening the blue of his eyes before he looks down again. He plucks one of the leaves from the peppermint bark and rolls it between his thumb and forefinger, buying himself another second before he answers what she hasn’t managed to ask aloud.

"A good deal more than I know you’d like." His tongue passes across his teeth as he considers how to explain something that has never sat neatly inside language. There’s no version of it that doesn’t sound like an accusation, even when Colt has done nothing except think in the privacy she had every right to believe was hers. "I know it ain’t fair," he begins, stealing another glance toward her before returning his attention to the leaf. "And I know you didn’t do anythin' wrong." The words pull a faint wince across his face anyway, because fairness has never made hearing something hurt less.

"But I could hear it, loud and clear, every time you beat yourself up for likin' me. For likin' me more than you wanted to, or thought you should. For thinkin' maybe you could love me." He lets out a breath through his nose, his shoulders shifting with an attempt at nonchalance too thin to fool either of them. "Then there were all the doubts. What I was really after, whether any of it meant the same thing to me, all the shit I’d never live up to."

None of it had been unreasonable. That had almost made it worse. Her fears hadn’t been petty things he could dismiss, but old wounds recognizing familiar shapes and warning her not to put her hand near the blade again. Vesper had understood every one of them, and still they’d worked their way beneath his skin, carried there day after day by an ability that offered him no distance from the ugliest possibilities her mind could imagine. "The longer it went on, it didn’t matter that you were tryin' to play it cool and slow. Not when I could hear how often you wanted more from me, right alongside every reason you thought wantin' it—me—was a mistake." He flicks the leaf away, watching it vanish into the grass while the bare stem remains trapped between his fingers.

"It hurts, hearin' that over and over again." His voice has gone quieter, stripped of the dry ease he’d tried to keep around the confession. "But like I said, it wasn’t your fault. You weren’t doin' anythin’ wrong." Vesper finally turns his head enough to look at her properly, though the vulnerability in his expression makes the movement seem almost cautious. "So it felt like the only thing I could do was make you hate me." His jaw tightens around the admission. "Figured if I made it ugly enough, you’d move on. Forget about me. And since I couldn’t tell you the truth, that seemed like the only thing to do." The bitterness that follows twists his mouth, not quite a smile and too exhausted to become anger. "Not that the truth really changes anythin'."

Knowing the reason doesn’t unmake what he did in the Grounds, nor does it turn the invasion into anything gentler. If anything, the truth only gives every wound between them a deeper root. Her fears had been hers to wrestle with, private and passing things that might have withered if left untouched, but Vesper had heard each one as though it had been spoken directly into his ear until they’d begun to fester in him. By the time the rot had settled, he’d convinced himself the only mercy left was to cut everything away.

No I don't deserve it, I don't deserve it

COLT

She's a runner, she's a lover, always stuck in her ways
Pull her closer, think you know her, now she's turning the page
She gave a warning if it's storming, she'll be gone with the rain

The awareness descends like ink in water. The full spread of it is slow after the immediate bloom of color, but in time, all of it will be stained a shade darker, no place left untouched. Already it’s saturating each memory she has of him, the third time now that they’ve changed color, each new layer making it all the less likely that the original, untarnished silver can be polished back.

Her gaze slowly unfolds back to him over the useless border of her limbs as he talks. She doesn’t crumble the castle that she’s built of her body, the hollow security feeling better than visibly baring herself to him, even if she’s beginning to understand that she already is. No defense will keep him out. She has never been in control around him. All her small triumphs were mere pretence. These truths crawl through her skin with an unease that makes her nauseous, and she shifts her hold around her knees with the discomfort of it. "Fuck," comes the ragged exhale of a breath she didn't know she began to hold onto.

Everything. He knew everything.

All the stillness she begs of her mind is impossible, especially as she slips into the burn of embarrassment. All attempts not to make any ripples, not wanting to alert what lurks beside her, simply doesn’t work and never would. Breath alone forces her to shift, and short of passing out, there’s no end to the current she creates. That’s for the best, really. Once before, for her ex-husband, she tried a similar approach to no avail. She died a little every day. Made herself smaller, as though one day he’d have enough room to stop crowding her. He never stopped, and eventually she decided she’d stop making herself easier to swallow. He could choke on her.

Vesper isn’t asking that of her. Makes a point not to, in fact. He’s kind, as much as he can be while ripping up everything that’d healed wrong and misshapen. Thorough, honest, self-aware. She recognizes that, and in a way she can’t properly name now, she’s grateful for it. Understanding is a certain kind of peace she's long been without, but it does not come without a cost, and it remains to be seen how these new wounds mean to close.

Each detail drags something sharp through her chest, but it's most severe where he lays out what she'd done to him, all by accident. "I never meant..." she starts weakly, but it falters under its own weight. He already knows. He's already said it. That doesn't stop the regret from swelling painfully against her ribs, lips tightening into a line as her throat works against the wretched feeling. Love only ever seems to carve someone up. Fear that it'd be her has bitten her so thoroughly that most of her has gone jagged, and there's no hope he could have held her without being cut. She doesn't blame him for withdrawing from that.

Knowing that this too will set another edge on him scrapes at her anew. A snake that's caught its own tail, she can only circle endlessly with the hooks of her own teeth and the marks they leave.

The heaviness of it all gradually pulls her eyes down to what he's methodically stripping apart in his hands. It's eerily similar to the experience of her own certainty being whittled away to nothing more than sprig and stem, and ridiculously, she empathizes with a fucking stick. "Why did you ever stay?" It's not blame, although it's muttered with a bitterness that curls the tone to a point, the tip meant for her rather than him, but it's one and the same in the end. "I'm sure there's quiet to be found somewhere." Not with her.

When she's in it, she's all in it, ain't no holding her back
When I'm with her, she's a river moving steady and fast
She's afraid of all the ways her heart is broke like glass

I need your hand but I don't want to burn it

As Colt turns the truth over, piece by piece, Vesper feels himself sinking beneath it. The silence between them has become something like cold quicksand, dragging him down no matter how still he holds himself, and every new understanding that blooms inside her takes him a little deeper. His fingertips begin to numb around the ruined peppermint sprig, the chill creeping through his arms and into his chest until even breathing feels distant, as though he’s drifted loose into the vast dark between stars. He can still see the sun of her burning where it always has, bright enough to colour everything around it, but he knows now that its warmth will never reach him in quite the same way again.

He’d imagined the aftermath of telling her nearly as often as he’d rehearsed the confession itself. Anger had been easy to picture, along with disgust, accusation, or the flat finality of her walking away. He’d never imagined this slow drowning, nor the way her memories would rearrange themselves around what he was until every touch and kindness became another place she’d never been alone.

The thoughts of her ex-husband tighten something in his face before he can prevent it and Vesper’s gaze falls to the grass while the shape of those years moves through her; all the room she’d surrendered in the hope that someone might finally stop taking, and the nausea rises hard at the knowledge that his name now sits anywhere near that man’s. It doesn’t matter that he’d never asked her to become smaller for him. He’d entered places she hadn’t offered and listened because he could, and whatever his reasons, he knows well enough what sort of company that puts him in.

When her apology tries to form, Vesper shakes his head immediately. His chin lifts as he glances toward her, blue eyes soft but fixed firmly on her face. "I know." There’s no room for her to carry that as well. He won’t let her make an injury out of thoughts she’d never intended anyone else to hear, even if knowing she hadn’t meant them has never been enough to dull their edges.

Her attention settles on the peppermint sprig, and the strange little flare of sympathy she feels for it has Vesper looking down at what remains between his fingers. Without entirely knowing why, he holds it out to her, the stripped stem resting across his palm like an offering too small to mean anything and too gentle for the conversation they’re having.

His shoulders hunch when he considers how to answer her. The breath he draws catches faintly on the way in, and for a moment he watches the sprig instead of trusting himself to look at her. "You’d be surprised," he says softly. "Every mind is noisy, but...I liked how yours sounded. Right from the very start." He leaves it there without trying to qualify it with most of the time; everything between them is already split open, and he won’t hide inside technicalities now.

Vesper raises one brow as he glances over his shoulder, meaning only to check her reaction, but his gaze catches instead on the moonlight edging her features. It traces silver along the gold of her hair and gathers against the pout of her cupid’s bow, and for a few seconds he lets himself remember how easily looking at her had once become its own kind of gravity. His inhale turns stiff before he forces his eyes away. "I never really tried to stay with anyone before you." The confession leaves him with less certainty than the one about his magic, and his mouth presses briefly into a line. "I didn’t..." He swallows thickly. An unfamiliar sting gathers behind his eyes, sharp enough to make him blink toward the darkness before he can continue. "I didn’t know how bad it would get."

Slowly, Vesper looks back at her. His gaze climbs with unusual care, as though anything too sudden might frighten her away, and when his eyes finally reach hers, his voice falls quieter still. "Or how good.

I really liked you, Colt." The final consonant in liked barely exists, worn away by everything still true beneath the past tense. He tries to steady himself before the next words, but the tremor reaches his voice anyway, subtle and impossible to call back once it’s there. "And I’m sorry."

No I don't deserve it, I don't deserve it

COLT

She's a runner, she's a lover, always stuck in her ways
Pull her closer, think you know her, now she's turning the page
She gave a warning if it's storming, she'll be gone with the rain

The gesture plucks a new chord through her. So stupidly simple, but the movement of his hand in the dark, offering up a line of silver where the raised stick catches the face of the moon on his palm, pulls the faintest smile into one corner of her mouth. A peppermint stick had been enough to bridge them once before, and even as she wonders if it wouldn't have been better that it never had, one of her hands uncurls from her knees and pinches it into her possession.

"I never can smell this now without thinking of you," she murmurs as she rolls it between forefinger and thumb. Maybe a truth he already knows, not even sure there's a point to her voice now, but it just kind of comes out without much regard, the way holding something back too tightly always seems to cause little cracks where it leaks out anyway. "When you found me loading up lumber that one day, and you had one of these in your mouth, that's when it stuck." She glances up from the sprig to look at him, discovering a shape to him she'd never noticed before now. A crease that's normally in the corner of his eyes is gone, smoothed out with the funny kind of relief that comes from being unburdened, even when letting go is hell. All that careful indifference he always maintained that chafed against her so often. It'd been this. 

"I always did wonder how you knew what his face looked like. Thought I put it there." The wall of shadow he'd given her to set her anger into, giving her respite for what she can't seem to entirely get out from under, hard as she's tried. She'd conquered it for a while, because of that. Thought maybe she'd move past it for good because of him too, but that'd been more than he deserved to carry. "That's when I knew you were good, too." It's not just any man who can sit with the pain of a dislocated shoulder and not rage at the source of it. It's some of the reason his power had never frightened her, not the magical kind anyway.

She sets the stick between her teeth, the same way she had when she'd stolen it from him that day. The mint nips immediately at the inside of her mouth, especially potent with all the work he'd done to it. It's no cigarette, but it gives her something better to chew on than herself.

Her head bows, the weight of everything still pulling her down. Her gaze, her chin, her shoulders, everything pitched forward like she'd stumble if the wind so much as put a hand on her back. A part of her turns a bit, enough to shift her hair but not her eyes, as she catches what he says with an angle of mild curiosity. The sound of her. She's never considered how someone sounds before, not the way he means. She's glad something had been nice for him.

The careful admission he offers up afterwards finally brings her back to the blue of him. It doesn't last, not when she can see the corners of him start to splinter, and she affords him the chance to gather himself without the undue pressure of her stare. Though nothing stops the sound of it, and her teeth press in hard enough on the peppermint that it bends. All the times she'd wished him to lose control, to show her something as wild as the way she felt, she had never intended for it to be this. Tightness finds her throat with enough abrupt force that her breath becomes an audible struggle. Wetness lines her cheeks on her next blink, and she keeps it pressed down as she turns her head further away from him. She runs the heel of her hand above her brows a few times before tipping the weight of her head into her palm completely, holding her forehead to the pressure as though there are wounds at risk of bleeding out otherwise.

The stick clicks melodically against her teeth as her tongue rolls it from one corner of her mouth to the other. "Real bad," she agrees, the sound reedy with the misery of an apology for being his first heartbreak. She never should have held his lack of scars against him, but she shouldn't have ignored them either. His first discovery of affection should have been with someone equally as unblemished as him, and maybe then it wouldn't have bruised him so thoroughly.

The good wafts in like smoke after a fire. With a startled jerk of her head, just enough to set him back at the corner of her view, her bleary gaze reaches back for him. Gone raw with everything that's been pulled away from her, being given this now feels too intense, and her entire body tightens in an attempt to endure it. It's the first undeniable certainty she's had that this didn't just wreck him in all the worst ways, but all the best ones too. That among the mess, she isn't standing alone, not the only one broken apart by affection as surely as injury. "Ves..." Something too close to a sob threatens to run over his name, so she quickly slackens the breath, and it looses with a short, ruined noise that has more shape than an exhale.

The peppermint stick sags off the corner of her lip as her mouth draws open faintly, then tumbles free completely as she heaves herself back like a young colt that's just hit the end of a lead for the first time, every limb suddenly forgetting the shape of restraint with no regard for the boundary of the ground. Both hands rise and rake through her hair, as though by tugging on her roots she could yank out all the turmoil with it. The motion pops her hat off, and her fingers form a fist, holding the grip. "Why tell me now?" Her voice crawls over to him, slinking low like it half means to hide, barely a whisper. She lifts it, though it trembles with the effort. "Why not tell me before?" Her hair rustles over the grass as she turns her head, gaze pitching from the overhead stars to him.

When she's in it, she's all in it, ain't no holding her back
When I'm with her, she's a river moving steady and fast
She's afraid of all the ways her heart is broke like glass

I need your hand but I don't want to burn it

Her thoughts keep changing colour as they pass through him, each recollection bleeding into the next until there’s no clean edge between affection and grief. Peppermint comes bright and green against his senses, followed by the warm brown of lumber and the scraped texture of old pain, then the cool silver she’s laid over every memory of him in an effort to decide which version had been real. Vesper feels each new understanding gather weight before settling, layer after layer, until even the quieter pieces of her begin to press against him. When her attention catches on the indifference he’d worn so carefully, he lets out a soft breath and nods. "It never was like that."

Nonchalance had simply been the safest shape available to him. When he had her voice in one ear and everything she never meant to say in the other, appearing unaffected had been the only way to keep from answering questions she hadn’t asked or reacting to wounds she believed were hidden. Every shrug, every lazy curl of his mouth, every careless look away had helped keep the truth from showing through.

Without the peppermint bark to fold himself around, Vesper stretches his long legs through the grass and crosses them at the ankles. He leans back on one hand, though his chest remains angled toward her, some part of him unwilling to turn away even while the rest wishes for enough distance to breathe. At the memory of the shadowed face he’d once given her, a humourless laugh leaves him. "Yeah," he admits, his mouth twisting faintly. "That was careless." He’d known it then, but he'd simply cared more about giving her somewhere to put the anger than he had about protecting himself from the questions it might raise. For one night, easing something inside her had seemed worth the risk, and afterward he’d relied on her believing she’d supplied the face herself.

The regret she begins arranging around his first heartbreak draws a quiet click of disagreement from his tongue. There had been others before her, enough that he hadn’t come to her untouched in the way she now seems to wish he had, but none of them had caught beneath his skin or made him curious enough to remain. A mind polished clean of old damage might never have interested him at all. It had been the sharpness of Colt, the stubborn heat and all the uneven places life had left behind, that had made listening to her feel unlike listening to anyone else.

Then the sound of his name moves through him, broken badly enough that his fingers dig into the earth. The grass bends beneath his hand as he reaches across with the other, hesitation making the movement slower than it might once have been. His fingertip brushes the wetness from her cheek, so light that it barely disturbs the path the tear had taken. "That’s why," he says softly. His gaze lifts toward the stars while he searches for enough space inside himself to explain, but the dark above offers no easier version of the truth. When he looks back, the blue of his eyes has gone unguarded.

"I thought if I was carryin' the weight of the lie for both of us, it’d be fine." His throat works around the words before he continues. "Figured I could live with you hatin' me if it meant you got free of it." It had been arrogant, perhaps, deciding which pain she could bear and making sure she received it without ever being offered a choice. Vesper’s thumb curls faintly against his palm as the realization passes between them. [asy]"But every time I saw you after, I knew you were carryin' just as much." He swallows thickly, shaking his head. "Worse, really, 'cause it was the wrong kind of hurt. You kept thinkin' you’d imagined every good thing between us, or that you’d been stupid for trustin' me, and I knew none of that was true."

His eyes fall briefly toward the grass. The secret had always been larger than him, something braided through his family and the careful way Jack had taught him to move through the world, but the possibility of losing it no longer feels as frightening as watching Colt continue to turn the blade inward. "Guess I figured if you decide to go tell everyone now, maybe that’s just my punishment for doin' you wrong in the first place."

The admission lands heavily, though he offers it without trying to pull sympathy from her. If the truth spread, every relationship outside his family would warp around it. Every silence would become suspicious, every private thought held tighter when he entered a room, and whatever trust he’d built wouldn't survive the knowledge that he’d always been hearing more than anyone intended to give him. It wouldn’t destroy him as completely as Jack being exposed, but it would change the shape of his life all the same.

After a year spent failing to move beyond Colt, Vesper isn’t certain ruin would feel especially different from what he’s already carrying.

He exhales slowly before answering the other half of it. "Because it wasn’t gonna change the outcome of me leavin'." His shoulders rise in a tired shrug. "So I tried to hold onto my secret. My ma always said I’d be a better demigod if no one knew, so.." There had been practical sense behind it. People revealed themselves differently when they believed their minds belonged only to them, and Safrin’s work was easier when enemies didn’t know what sort of weapon stood nearby. At the time, preserving that advantage had felt more important than letting Colt understand why he was cutting them apart. Now the reasoning sounds thin beside the damage it allowed.

Vesper’s breath leaves him heavily, and his head tips in a small, defeated shake before his gaze searches for the amber of hers. When he finds it, his shoulders finally slump away from his ears, all the tension he’s carried through the confession losing its hold at once. "But I couldn’t stand you beatin' yourself up and bein' upset for all the wrong reasons." His voice trembles faintly, though he doesn’t look away. "Still can’t."

No I don't deserve it, I don't deserve it

COLT

She's a runner, she's a lover, always stuck in her ways
Pull her closer, think you know her, now she's turning the page
She gave a warning if it's storming, she'll be gone with the rain

The more he explains, the deeper into it all she wades, the water line rising up like a cool hand pressing over her face, delicate in the way it means to smother her. Memory is starting to feel less like something she can depend upon, despite how often she's leaned against it to prop herself up before. It seems too malleable now, crumpling under the weight of where she presses against it, no better than butter left out on the counter. How often she has strolled through her past in the quiet of every night, revisiting stories of hurt and hope alike, comfortable with the familiarity even if the story ends the same.

The pages of him are dog-eared and worn, and yet there's still details she discovers anew with every re-read. Even now, the small sounds of his disagreements as she turns one chapter or another over cause her to waver, and it encourages her to glance back at the tale and find a different sort of change. Amid the scraping feeling of being watched, a fragile relief surfaces briefly, similar to scratching at an itch better ignored. She has read these things to herself so often, alone, that the company of him seated beside her is momentarily welcome. How nice, to be read to for once.

When the tide of everything shifting through her can no longer bear containment, the hesitant attempt from him to take some of it threatens to undo her further. It's the same care she'd convinced herself he'd never had, unable to reconcile the shape of him leaving could be the same one that once held her so tenderly.

She gathers herself in silence for a moment, a quivering breath pulled in and held, then smoothed out on an exhale that attempts to empty her. It's a futile attempt, though she keeps at it under the careful rock of his voice through the dark, neat as any knife. It flicks up against every pain point she's had for the past year, lulling her into a version of stillness against the grass as it unhooks each spine that he'd left snared inside her, or that she'd set there on his behalf.

He says it again, hate, and where her gaze rests upon him, tilted on the ground, her brow pinches in. "You took all the things you think you know, and still got this so wrong." Her volume has dropped low enough that it can steady, softness filling it rather than accusation. "Not every thought is complete. Or true." Maybe arrogant of her to try and explain a mind to a telepath, but she's wandered her own enough to be familiar with those truths. Like art, the finished piece often strays from its first sketch, and this feels like he acted before the paint dried. An easy enough claim for someone who only sees the end results and does not have to bear witness to the process.

Yet, in all the ways she has failed to understand him, she's surprised that he's managed to do the same, given the uneven footing they've been on all this time. "You never knew enough if you thought I'd hate you." Her fingers slip from her hair as she extends that certainty with a confidence that has stayed firm when others have gone frail. "Or be free of you." Looking at him sprawled out beside her, she can remember the exact way his constellations briefly darkened beneath the clasp of her hand when it would roll over them, testing the outline of him so she'd never lose the shape of it. She could never forget him. Even in his absence, he's been with her every day. The light in her night sky, the heat behind every glass of rum, the wind that carries over the desert. Even with everything removed or rearranged, the imprint where he'd been remains in her chest, such is the weight when she invites trust.

A sigh knocks in her throat and she loses the trail of her thoughts to properly hold the new weight he sets down. She hadn't fully grabbed hold of the implications of everything he's shared tonight, unable to see past the hounding of her own misery, but it settles fully now. "I've no intention of punishing you." The sound of her voice flakes away from her lips, barely roused around the bite of her cheek. His own Nestor, and far more potent than any of hers, trusted now to sit with it for the sake of letting her breathe easier. It only manages to do the opposite, strangling the air from her chest wholly.

He'd meant to spare her, she believes that now with a certainty she hadn't thought possible an hour ago, but the only thing he'd spared her had been choice. This, from a man who had once worked so hard to never lead her, but walk beside her as if equal. All the wondering how she'd been so blind. All the frustration at reading them so wrong. All the shaken confidence. Unintentional, but this truth doesn't soften what came before it. If anything, it makes it ache in places she'd mistaken for scar. It seems that more than her thoughts are capable of scoring them accidentally.

Despite everything he's taken from her, he returns it all with something else. Not enough to replace it, but enough that the careful, painful generosity manages to arrange all the pieces he's created out of her into something that still attempts to feel whole. "Thank you," she whispers after a long moment spent coaxing her chest back into something useful. Gratitude arrives tangled hopelessly through grief, impossible to separate, but it's genuine. "It means more..." she falters a touch, and a dry, humorless sound slips past. He's already arrived along with her at the significance of being allowed to understand what has tried to swallow her for so long. "No, I guess you do know." Her voice stays small, edging past where he follows her in his mind, as unshakable as her own shadow.

Slowly she turns onto her side, allowing her to more easily see him as her cheek nestles against the curl of one of her arms in the lawn. For all the ways he's stripped her down, he's done the same to himself. For her. That doesn't pass without notice, blurry as sight has become. Cautiously, because there has been so much that's cut lately, her other hand slides through the grass to find his fingers buried in the blades. Not forgiveness, not a promise, just a bid for comfort when so much has been otherwise.

When she's in it, she's all in it, ain't no holding her back
When I'm with her, she's a river moving steady and fast
She's afraid of all the ways her heart is broke like glass

I need your hand but I don't want to burn it

The changes moving through Colt reach him in colours too dense to separate, bruised violet folding over the hot copper of embarrassment while regret moves beneath them with the rough drag of iron filings. Every new conclusion catches against another before settling, roughening the inside of his awareness until he can feel how badly she wants stillness and how impossible her mind finds the request. There’s relief in it too, thin and pale as worn silk, but whenever she reaches for it, grief knots through the fabric and pulls it tight enough to tear.

Her certainty that hatred had never been possible draws a breath of laughter from him. Vesper glances toward her with something faintly wry at one corner of his mouth, though the expression carries more surrender than humour. "No," he murmurs in agreement. "Apparently not." He sighs and lets his gaze fall again, watching the grass bend beneath the weight of his hand. "Thought if I went about it the right way, I could make you hate me." He had approached it with all the care of any other difficult job, choosing each word for the wound it would leave and arranging his indifference so perfectly that even he had almost believed in it. He’d known what she feared finding in him and had simply stepped into the shape, casual and cruel enough that there would be nothing left for her to chase after.

Then her thoughts curl around all the places he’d remained with her, and Vesper goes still. The likeness of it catches him unprepared. Colt has been no less present in his life than he has in hers, woven through moments that should have belonged to entirely different people and places. Some days she’d been nothing more than a dull pull behind his ribs; others, she’d filled the whole damn room without being anywhere near it. Warmth darkens his cheeks before he can swallow it away. His eyes remain on the blades of grass cutting across the gold of her hair, then lift slowly toward her face. "Me neither." The admission is quiet, but there’s no caution left inside it. He’d failed just as thoroughly to be free of her, and there’s no point pretending otherwise when she can likely see the truth of it in how carefully he looks away.

When her decision settles around his secret, something in his chest loosens despite knowing he has no right to expect the mercy. "I appreciate that," he says softly.

Relief doesn’t erase the thought that follows, though, nor the sharp little turn of his attention when he feels the shape of what she believes he took from her. Vesper’s brow rises as he looks back at her. "What choice is that?" There’s no accusation in the question, only tired confusion. From where he’d stood, there had been nothing to offer. He could remain and continue hearing every doubt until they hollowed him out, or he could leave before resentment turned everything good between them rotten. Telling her what he was might have explained the injury, but it wouldn’t have made him capable of holding her fears at some graceful distance, untouched by them simply because they weren’t deliberate.

Her gratitude leaves him with a smile that barely manages to form. It’s small and tired, though genuine, and he nods because he does know. He’s followed the path of her understanding from its first painful turn to this narrow place where at least one old wound finally has the right name, even if naming it can’t heal either of them.

As Colt settles more fully into the grass, Vesper’s gaze follows the moonlight where it shapes her against the deep blues and greens of the meadow. When her hand moves toward his, something bright and painful flares beneath his ribs before he can stop it, hope and longing striking together so quickly that for an instant he forgets how dangerous either one can be. His fingers spread beneath hers, making room without hesitation before he swallows the rest carefully, leaving only the quiet warmth of his hand around hers.

No I don't deserve it, I don't deserve it

COLT

She's a runner, she's a lover, always stuck in her ways
Pull her closer, think you know her, now she's turning the page
She gave a warning if it's storming, she'll be gone with the rain

There's little mercy left in hearing how he'd tried to shape her hatred. The right way, indicating a span of consideration for how he could strike her for the most effective shatter. She’s seen monsters before. Married one. Buried one. Vesper has never been a monster, even on the worst days when she tried to turn him into one, but there is something uniquely monstrous about how carefully he'd intentionally damaged her. Despite the reasons and the sense that could be attributed to them, she recoils from that knowledge with a swallow that leaves her mouth overly dry.

Unfortunately, it all seems to drift back to that, his question just the next return to it. She's confused initially by the ask, brow furrowing with an effort of concentration. He picks up conversation where none had been. Not out loud, she realizes, struck still all over again with how easily he'd done it. He just reached into her mind and cupped a passing voice of hers up to his ears. Her stomach somersaults, not fully acclimated to the constant company of him, only seeming to expect it sometimes before turning a corner and finding him there again. "Oh," comes the soft surprise before she reaches to drag that line of thought back into full form, one of so many at the moment it hasn't fully realized itself, not until he asked her to look at it properly.

"Just that...you made a choice for us." There had never been a chance to finish becoming before he'd already decided what they were. "If we'd had this, then, without all this past year..." Her gaze slips off him with a sigh, trying to put to words what she's barely had time to sit with in mind, not yet made neat with the steady roll of turning it over and over again first, tumbling it into something shiny and smooth. "You decided what the cost could be without ever asking what I'd be willing to pay." Her amber settles back on him, voice gone a little brittle at the corners where the strain of it all pulls at her.

She might not know what hearing every slide of his thought is like behind his words, beneath his actions, but she has found ways to manufacture ideas in the silence that do a fine enough job of seeding doubt and hurt. If he'd been nicked by her mind, she knows precisely what that's like.

An ache that feels like finally falling into bed at the end of a long day finds her the moment his hand does. It's the unwinding of something that's been bound, the relief of the pressure its own twisted variety. Her spine trembles as caution gradually gives up the tension of staying so knotted just to avoid having any clean lines left to trip on.

"I've missed you." The small, rough sound of her voice is pushed out like she means to beat the thought. It's nothing but a truth, no deeper disguise built around it, and if it wounds, she can't tell one more cut from the next right now.

When she's in it, she's all in it, ain't no holding her back
When I'm with her, she's a river moving steady and fast
She's afraid of all the ways her heart is broke like glass

I need your hand but I don't want to burn it

At the time, cruelty had seemed like the nearest thing to kindness Vesper had left to offer. If he chose the right words and laid them against the cleanest seams, he thought he could cut himself free without tearing through more of Colt than necessary, leaving one sharp wound that might close instead of allowing a hundred smaller ones to keep opening between them. The year since has made the arrogance of that idea impossible to ignore. He’d badly misjudged how deeply they’d grown into one another, and in trying to carve himself out with a steady hand, he’d only left pieces of them both behind.

Her explanation draws a long breath from him. One corner of his mouth twists, wry despite the complete absence of humour in his voice. "Well, that is normally how breakups go." His thumb shifts once against the side of her hand. "One person makes the decision for both of ’em." As she continues, though, his brow rises before drawing faintly inward. The point he’d meant to make has landed wrong, or perhaps he simply hasn’t been brave enough to state it plainly. He swallows and looks down, his gaze caught among the grass as though the weight of his failure has hooked there and dragged it from her face. "I never thought you wouldn’t try to pay it," he says quietly. "I decided that I couldn’t."

Her thoughts had never been meant for him. Whatever distance she might have learned to build between the first raw flare of fear and the choices she made afterward, Vesper would still have been standing inside the storm before she’d had the chance to understand its direction. Maybe another man could have held all of it without letting the doubts sink hooks beneath his skin, could have remembered that thoughts were only weather and not promises, but he hadn’t been strong enough for that. Or good enough. In the end, the distinction hardly matters.

The gradual release of tension from her body knots his stomach rather than easing it, some part of him still expecting that when their hands finally separate, they’ll both come away blistered. Then her admission reaches him without any of the usual armour around it, her voice only narrowly arriving before the same truth blooms in her mind. A small breath of laughter leaves him, hesitant and rough at the edges. Vesper nods, his eyes remaining on their joined hands. "I did too." The words settle heavily between them, frightening in their simplicity. He swallows before forcing himself to keep going, because there’s little purpose in preserving scraps of pride after everything else he’s already placed in her hands.

"For what it’s worth, the reason I came up north durin' LongNight was to make sure you were okay." His fingers tighten faintly around hers before easing again. The next breath carries a thread of guilt through it, and his mouth pulls to one side as he stares out across the dark meadow. "And apologize, I guess." His jaw shifts. "For not bein' able to do more against whatever that thing was." That was twice now he'd missed when she'd called to him, after all.

No I don't deserve it, I don't deserve it

COLT

She's a runner, she's a lover, always stuck in her ways
Pull her closer, think you know her, now she's turning the page
She gave a warning if it's storming, she'll be gone with the rain

A flatter line pulls her lips back, one brow lifting above the slant of a cheek as her face speaks on her behalf. Regarding how breakups normally go, theirs had not been it, and she rather thinks he knows it. "Breakups usually happen because someone wants them to. Because someone has stopped caring." Admittedly, she might have less experience than him in this regard. Her initial marriage was young and fast, and anything since has never survived to the point of care, not for her. Plenty of arguments and slammed doors, but not the sort of thing that drags her soul out. As far as she understands it though, he never wanted this, and that matters.

The way he falls a bit pulls the same shape to her mouth. "No," she disagrees faintly, fingers tightening briefly in his. "That's what I mean. You thought you were the only one who had to pay something." Maybe she truly can't understand. Maybe it's easier to talk about all the maybes when everything's already been dismantled and broken enough to pretend it could have taken other shapes easily, but she can't accept that this was always the shape they'd end up in. It's where they are now, but his resignation to this being the inevitability carries the same cadence that his choosing this had—he thinks he already knows how it ends. For him. For her.

It's understandable; there are patterns to things, and people are complex in as many ways as they are simple. She's thought the same, so certain until he came in out of the blue and thoroughly upended everything she'd made from routine and history. "You didn't give me the choice to try." Not in a way where she knew the truth, just the lie. Not in a way where he trusted her to love as much as he did to hate. Now, she's finally been given all the choices, but the only decision that remains is how much to make either of them bleed.

Rolling breath through her like it could cart some of the weight away, she holds it until her side stretches, and then looses it until the grass bends under the force. In its absence, her eyes shut for a moment, everything around her jumping up in greater notice. The lawn under her arm tickles faintly when she breathes, the herd's distant restlessness calling out to itself, the press of his fingers against hers. Her eyes go back to him with her admission, and his return of it folds into her with all the fragility of something that should not be studied too hard.

A wince tugs at her expression. "Sorry you wasted your time," she murmurs, aware it's not the easiest trip after making it far too many times of late, particularly not for him to come up and see her. "...Even more so, because I came to King's End for LongNight." From what she's been able to gather, he seems to be living here now. She never knew where he went after he left that day in the Grounds, startled to find him gone from The Ark and a very angry Jack receiving her 'gift' in his stead.

His apology catches her off guard, and for a moment, her breath stumbles over it. "You never have to apologize for that." Her voice has gone smaller again, gaze dropping to the lean of his arm and the faint pinpricks of light on it. "I'm sorry," she starts, teeth catching her lower lip. "I was trying to never channel you again, but it came at us so fast." A rush of shadows bending wrong and sand pelting over at her, its gnarled frame landing close enough to her that she could feel the rush of its arrival sweep past her. "I got scared—and you—you always felt safe." She knows the irritant it must be, being hauled into her shit without asking, and a sense of duty doesn't diminish the annoyance of it all.

When she's in it, she's all in it, ain't no holding her back
When I'm with her, she's a river moving steady and fast
She's afraid of all the ways her heart is broke like glass

I need your hand but I don't want to burn it

The look Colt gives him makes it plain she isn’t buying the distinction, and while Vesper could argue the point, he’s seen enough of what happens when a telepath tries to remain inside a relationship to know that wanting to stay isn’t always reason enough to do it. He’d watched Flora accept what Jack was, at least for a while, only for the knowledge to seep into every seam between them until communication became something warped and uneven. His father’s ability had somehow made him responsible for every thought he overheard, obligated him to understand what wasn’t said and answer needs that never reached the air, while Flora had come to rely on being known without always doing the work of making herself clear. Understandable as it might have been, it had still hollowed Jack out for a time, and Vesper has never suffered from the delusion that the apple landed especially far from the tree. He thinks Colt is made of considerably sturdier material than Flora, but that doesn’t mean he’s any better equipped than his father had been to keep another person’s doubts from becoming his own wounds.

Even so, picking apart the finer points of it now won’t change where they’ve ended up, and so he only hums beneath his breath, offering a slight shrug instead of another argument. There are too many possible versions of what might have happened if he’d trusted her with the truth sooner, and every one of them is polished by hindsight into something cleaner than either of them had been at the time.

When her eyes close, the shape of her awareness changes, and Vesper feels each sensation rise with greater definition until she looks at him again and the world settles back into its usual proportions, though the tenderness of what passes between them remains fragile enough that he hardly dares shift his hand. "It’s fine," he mutters, giving his head a small shake and lifting one shoulder as though the journey north had been no more inconvenient than crossing camp. He nods when she admits where she’d gone instead, already having heard enough to know she’d spent LongNight in King’s End, but he leaves the rest alone. Questions about where he’s been living and what his life has looked like since the Grounds drift near the surface of her mind, yet he doesn’t reach for them, nor does he offer up answers simply because he can feel their shape.

"I do, though," Vesper says quietly, watching the catch of her teeth against her lower lip while the memory of the desert reforms around them in heat, blackened sand, and a creature bent into the shape of something neither of them had understood. "You called because you needed help, and I didn’t end up doin’ a damn thing." His brow furrows as the creature takes form again through her recollection, every crooked limb and violent movement as unpleasant now as it had been while standing in front of it. Whatever else had gone wrong between them, being unable to put himself between Colt and the thing that frightened her still sits badly beneath his ribs, duty and affection wound too tightly together for him to pretend it was merely wounded pride.

Her admission sends a small pressure through his hand before he realizes his fingers have tightened around hers. Vesper looks down at her, and for a moment his blue eyes tour over the familiar lines of her face before finding the amber of her gaze again. "I’ll always come when you call," he says softly, the words leaving without calculation or any attempt to make them safer than they are. His thumb shifts once against her hand, and though the promise already feels dangerously close to everything he’d tried to cut away, he holds her gaze as he adds, "even without channelin' me."

No I don't deserve it, I don't deserve it

COLT

She's a runner, she's a lover, always stuck in her ways
Pull her closer, think you know her, now she's turning the page
She gave a warning if it's storming, she'll be gone with the rain

She doesn't pluck at the silence that meets her refusal, answer enough in the things he doesn't say, even if she can't see beyond the shape of his face for anything more. There's a muted sense of defeat as she lets it go, evident that she hasn't made any progress in convincing him. It's energy she doesn't have the reserves to waste, not over something that's already come to pass and can't be altered.

He shrugs away the things that she thinks matter and picks up the ones she puts down. It causes her gaze to narrow, searching for a better answer in the lines of his face or the seat of his gaze, but those don't offer her anything different. "I'm not sure I could aim well in such a short span of time," she says around the shape of a small smile, trying to smooth away the tension she's sure has found his shoulders, as it has so many times before under the weight of his role. She does not envy his position, not for the least of which is being whisked into danger by an ex.

She might have gone on to explain more about the creature, but the sudden pressure of his fingers that have thus far been careful, grabs her as surely as if his hand were at her chin, fixing her focus firmly to his eyes. Around them, the low sound of his voice, the intent not lost for volume. If she has any lingering doubts about how dutiful he's being about them, the follow-up makes it plain it comes from Vesper, not the demigod.

She should sit with it, fold it up neatly and put it in her chest alongside all the other nice things he's said, and maybe she'd earn enough to cover all the scars. She can't though, not when half of this conversation has felt like the best version of the goodbye he always wanted to give her. Not when he seemed set that leaving could be the only answer for them. "What is this, Ves." It's a question, but it comes out without the ask, flat and fearful. Everything else he'd said had been an explanation. Gut-wrenching at times, but all reviewing things that had already passed between them, even if the undercurrent still hums alive and well. This though, this feels like a promise, something for the future. "You can't tell me one second all you could do was walk away and the next that you'll always show up." Trembling, her fingers slowly slip out of his, sliding back onto the grass. The small movement feels like a monumental ask, and the absence of his touch is an immediate chill.

When she's in it, she's all in it, ain't no holding her back
When I'm with her, she's a river moving steady and fast
She's afraid of all the ways her heart is broke like glass

I need your hand but I don't want to burn it

A wry smile pulls at Vesper’s mouth, the expression lightening him only slightly as he glances down at her. "Well, it is quite literally one of the things I was created to do, so..." The dry tilt of his voice makes room for the obvious flaw in the argument, his smirk conceding that taking the responsibility seriously has never made him infallible, though he certainly intends to improve on that particular weakness.

What moves through Colt afterward reaches him as a darkening blend of textures, apprehension spreading coarse and heavy through the fragile warmth his promise had stirred, while hope flashes beneath it with the slippery brightness of something she’s afraid to catch hold of. Every explanation he’s given her begins to press against what he’s just offered, the contradictions grinding together until uncertainty turns dense enough to obscure everything else, and Vesper feels the moment she decides that whatever comfort his hand provides isn’t worth the danger of mistaking it for something more.

When her fingers slide free, he realizes how wrong he’d been to imagine their touch would leave either of them burned. The cold that takes its place is deeper than that, the starless chill of drifting loose in the dark while her warmth remains visible beside him, close enough to remember and impossibly far from reach. He pushes himself upright, drawing his long legs in enough to sit properly as though posture might lend some structure to what he has to say next.

"People like me don’t get to be in relationships. Not good ones, anyway." Perhaps Jack and The Ark are the exception that proves the rule, though there’s nothing ordinary enough about either of them to offer Vesper much hope for himself. Their bond had been forged through circumstances no one else could reproduce, and even then he doubted if it was easy on a man like Jack.

His gaze settles somewhere beyond the meadow, unfocused enough that the blue darkens around it, though the warmth of her amber stare remains bright at the edge of his awareness. One shoulder lifts in a subdued shrug as he says, "don’t mean I don’t still care about you, or that I wouldn’t want to help if you needed it, even if I can’t..." The words fail beneath the pressure of what they mean, leaving him staring toward the distant trees with the peculiar loneliness of having finally shown her everything and finding himself no less separated from her for it. After a moment, Vesper glances back over one shoulder, his expression stripped of the smirk and every easier defence he might have reached for. "...be with you."

No I don't deserve it, I don't deserve it