It had been three weeks since the household had settled into calling it the Flora Incident, and Wren still hadn't managed to get through an entire day without someone bringing it up at least once, usually at the worst possible moment.
She wasn't thinking about that now. She was thinking about how strange it still was, after everything, that time with Eremos never actually felt like time at all -- not in the way it felt everywhere else in the Between, where hours stretched thin and gray and interchangeable, one indistinguishable from the last. With him it collapsed. An evening with Eremos passed the way an entire childhood passes when you're the one living it: enormous from the inside, and gone before you've properly noticed it happening.
She was curled against him in the low, warm privacy of one of the smaller rooms tucked off Ilyrisse's central hall -- not the grand crystal galleries where everyone gathered, but one of the quieter alcoves that had grown there, unbidden, sometime after the first few women had needed somewhere private to simply talk. Her cheek rested against his chest, his arms loose and unhurried around her, and beneath the slow, private warmth neither of them had bothered naming out loud, there was still a strangeness to it that hadn't quite worn off, even now -- the particular, unfamiliar awareness of him, present and undeniable, in a way that made her breath catch every so often, not from discomfort exactly, just from the sheer, immediate fact of closeness this total, after a whole mortal life spent keeping careful distance from everyone.
"You've gone quiet," Eremos murmured, one hand tracing slow, absent circles along her spine, patient the way he was patient about everything. "That's unusual, for you."
"I'm thinking." Her voice came out softer than she meant it to, catching a little on the last word as he shifted, unhurried, and she pressed her face harder against his chest to keep the thought from scattering entirely.
"About?"
"About how long we've actually known each other now. I tried to count it the other day and lost track somewhere past the second century." She laughed, low and a little breathless, and felt him smile against the top of her head. "That should feel like a very long time. It doesn't. It feels like we just met."
"It never feels long enough," he agreed. "I think that might be the actual secret to it. Time only ever drags when nothing's happening. We've never once run out of things to say to each other."
"No," she said, tucking herself in closer, feeling the warmth of him settle over her like something she still hadn't quite gotten used to being allowed to have. "We really haven't."
"Tell me something," she said, a while later, once the quiet between them had settled into something easy, unhurried, the kind that made room for talking without needing to fill every silence right away. "Tell me what you remember about the first months. Before I was -- " she gestured vaguely, encompassing the room, the closeness, the whole warm weight of what they'd become to each other " -- this. Back when I was just Elowen's shadow and you were still working out how many years it might take before I let myself want anything for me."
Eremos huffed a laugh, the sound of it moving through her where her cheek rested against him. "You were never just anyone's shadow. I noticed you within the first week. You stood at every doorway like you were expecting an ambush that never came, and you never once let Elowen finish a sentence in a room you hadn't already checked."
"Old habits."
"The oldest kind, apparently. I remember thinking, before I understood what I was looking at, that you must have been miserable -- constantly on guard in a world that had genuinely nothing left in it to guard against. It took me longer than I'd like to admit to realize you weren't miserable at all. You'd simply never been given permission to stop, and nobody had thought to give you that permission until you got here."
"You gave it to me," Wren said, quieter now, tilting her head up to look at him properly. "Do you remember that? The actual moment?"
"I remember." His hand stilled at the small of her back for a beat, holding her there. "You'd positioned yourself at the door of some gathering or another -- I don't even remember whose Fragment it was, before any of this had a shape yet -- and I asked you, very plainly, whether you were actually going to come inside and enjoy yourself, or whether you intended to stand there all evening guarding a room that held nothing worth guarding against. You looked at me like I'd asked you to grow a second head."
"I had no idea what to do with the question. Nobody had ever asked me to just -- exist. For my own sake. Not as someone's protector, not as someone useful. Just Wren, standing in a room, allowed to want to be there."
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"You laughed, eventually," Eremos said, his thumb tracing slow along her jaw. "That was the first time I ever heard you laugh properly. Not the polite, dutiful sound you gave everyone else. An actual laugh, surprised out of you before you could catch it."
"I remember that too," she admitted, and let her eyes fall shut again, listening to the steady, unhurried sound of his heartbeat beneath her ear. "I think that was the exact moment I understood what all of this was going to be. Not right away. Not -- " she paused, feeling her face warm, " -- not this part, not yet. It took a long time to get here. Years of just being your friend before I let myself want more than that. But I think that was the moment the door opened, even if neither of us walked through it for ages afterward."
"I never minded the waiting," Eremos said. "I never mind it with anyone. It isn't a thing to rush past."
They kept talking that way for a long while, the conversation drifting easily between long stretches of comfortable silence and sudden small confessions, the kind of talk that only happens between people who have long since stopped needing to perform anything for each other.
"Do you remember Vesalia's first night?" Wren asked, at one point, her voice gone soft and a little wondering. "The whole household heard about it eventually, obviously, the way everything eventually gets heard about here. I remember thinking, when I first heard the shape of that story -- what she survived, what she carried -- that I understood, for the first time, exactly what kind of thing you actually were. Not a man who happened to be kind. Someone built, all the way down, out of nothing but the will to stay."
"I think about her often," Eremos said, quieter now, some of the easy warmth in his voice giving way to something heavier, older. "About all of it. Vaelira dying twice on purpose before she ever let herself want to stay dead. Flora on that hill, waiting for a sun that never got close enough. Ilyrisse's whole castle built out of centuries of being profoundly, deliberately alone." He tightened his arms around her slightly, drawing her closer. "Every single one of them carries something. I don't think I fully understood, when I started this, how much of my own life would end up being made of other people's grief, carried carefully enough that it eventually turned into something warmer instead."
"Vesalia still doesn't open the way Flora does," Wren said, thoughtfully. "I've noticed that. Flora will tell you anything, almost immediately, the moment she trusts you at all. Vesalia's had just as long with you -- longer, if I've understood the timeline right -- and she still holds most of herself back."
"She does," Eremos agreed, without any frustration in it at all. "And I don't think that's a problem to solve. I think it's simply who she is. Some wounds don't close on a schedule, however much love gets poured over them. I'd rather love her exactly at the pace she can bear than rush her toward some idea of healed that isn't actually true yet."
"That's rare," Wren said. "Most people, given centuries, would start expecting the wound to be finished by now."
"I'm not most people. I was a seed for longer than most souls have been anything at all. I understand patience better than I understand almost anything else." He pressed a slow kiss to the top of her head. "And Elowen," he added, after a moment. "You corrected her once. Or I did, rather -- gently, about the Turn System, about rank, about all of it."
"I remember that too." A faint, rueful smile crossed her face. "I don't think she's ever quite forgiven herself for assuming the world worked that way, even though you never once held it against her."
"She hasn't," Wren agreed. "But she's better for it. And so are the rest of us, honestly, because of what she learned." She tightened her arm around his middle, feeling the slow, steady rhythm of his breathing against her, matched now by something warmer building quietly in her own chest. "Do you remember the fruit? Properly, I mean. Not the chaos of it. The part after, when you went to everyone who needed you that night."
"I remember every face," Eremos said, low and warm, his hand still moving slow along her back. "I remember thinking, the whole time, that I would never once resent a single moment of it, however exhausting it got. That this -- all of it, every person in this house, every story, every grief I've had the privilege of helping carry -- this is the whole of what I ever wanted, back when I was nothing but a voiceless thing on a hill, wanting so badly to be seen."
"You are seen," Wren said, her voice breaking a little around the shape of what was building in her chest. "Everyone in this house sees you completely, in their own way, at their own pace."
He didn't answer right away. He simply held her closer instead, and for a long while after that, neither of them said very much at all -- only breathed, and stayed, and let the quiet settle between them the way it settles between two people who have already said the truest things they had to say and don't feel any need to hurry past the silence that follows. Centuries of history folded, unhurried, into the space of one evening that neither of them would ever be able to properly measure the length of afterward.
She lost track of time entirely somewhere in the middle of it -- the way she always did, here, with him -- and when she finally surfaced enough to notice the hour again, she found herself still tucked against his chest, unhurried and entirely at ease in a way her whole guarded, watchful life had never once prepared her to be, and a little unsteady, in the pleasant, worn-out way that follows a long evening spent exactly where you wanted to be, with exactly who you wanted to be there with.
"I should go clean up," she said eventually, not moving.
"You should," Eremos agreed, equally unhurried, making no effort at all to help her toward that goal.
"You're not helping."
"I never said I would."
She laughed against his chest, low and warm, and stayed exactly where she was a while longer before finally, reluctantly, making herself move.