It's acknowledgment. Gratitude. Promise of reciprocity when she needs her own secrets kept.
I begin to disappear, feeling the pull of void that serves as my room in this shared house of flesh and bone. But just before I fully fade, time resumes its normal flow.
Nikki's gasp echoes through the realm—sharp, surprised,alive.
The sound follows me into darkness, and I carry it like a talisman.
She lives. She breathes. She continues.
And maybe when the time comes for choices about separation and independence, about who can love whom when bodies and souls don't align conventionally, she'll choose to continue with me.
The possibility shouldn't make my heart race. I'm centuries old, have witnessed love in all its forms through borrowed eyes. I should be beyond such simple reactions.
But I'm not.
Because this isn't observed emotion or secondhand experience.
This is mine.
The feeling terrifies me more than any trial we've faced. Because trials end in victory or death, both absolute states with clear resolution.
But love?
Love is messy. Complicated. Requires independence I don't yet have and faith I'm still learning to build.
Yet as I settle into the void between manifested moments, I find myself planning. Considering.Hoping.
Year Four will come.
The Fae realm will test us all, but it will also offer opportunities. If Nikki and Nikolai truly are split like us—or if they can become so—then possibilities exist that seemed impossible moments ago.
I think of her golden eyes wide with fear and regret. The reaching hand.
The weight of her in my arms as I carried her back to safety she doesn't know she needed.
I think of my sister, keeping secrets for a brother she's only beginning to know as independent entity rather than internal voice.
I wonder of Zeke's knowing smile and cryptic hints about futures that haven't been written yet.
And in the darkness that serves as my home when not walking the world, I allow myself one moment of pure, impossible hope:
Maybe caged birds can learn to fly after all.
The thought carries me into something like sleep—not true unconsciousness but the suspended state I exist in when not manifested. But for the first time in centuries, it doesn't feel like prison.
It feels like waiting.
And for someone who's been the eternal observer, waiting for my own story to begin doesn't seem so bad.
Especially when golden eyes and reaching hands suggest that story might not be one I have to write alone.
Love, I think again, tasting the word like wine aged in barrels of possibility.
It still feels foreign.
But maybe foreign is just another word for new.
After centuries of same, new sounds like exactly what I need.
