Croe regretted the question as soon as she asked, watching as a familiar expression glazed her lover’s eyes. It was not familiar on him – it was a look she’d seen in the mirror, for years but years ago: the thousand yard stare of someone traumatized and adrift in time. Of course he couldn’t remember, and she should have known that. Asking him to try was cruel.
Nearly everything about this situation was cruel.
Her dark eyes tracked him as he paced, listless and faraway, surrounded by things he could not pick apart because they had all already been destroyed. Every piece of this place was as broken as his memory, scattered like too many puzzle pieces across the floor. Nothing to dismantle, and nothing to repair. A caged animal, Mallos turned on himself unconsciously, and Croe winced at the drop of blood that fell and stained a shard of glass bright red.
She reached for his hand just as he reached for hers – to anchor him, to heal him. Her magic spun through her and into him, cool as autumn rain. There was so little she could fix, but she could do this; stitch together this tiny wound and sway with him in the silence, to imagined music, in imagined peace. “Don’t push yourself,” she advised softly, breath against his cheek. “The memories will come back on their own schedule.”
They didn’t have time for these delays, really. But on the other hand, could they afford to waste any time together? What was the fate of the council, what was Gwythr, next to what they had?
Croe pulled him tighter, their bodies flush, breaths and heartbeats synchronized. In an unusual spike of inspiration, she conjured a memory of a song they’d danced to, once, and let it filter through her thoughts into his. The deftly plucked strings of a Spanish guitar seemed to echo over a cobbled street. Then, since she had magic for that, too, she overlayed the image of that corner of Barcelona, replacing the fungal blue light with golden sunshine, the blasted walls with quaint storefronts. Her perfect recall made every detail sharp as a photograph. For a long moment she hummed along, to keep the tune. But his question replaced it with a little huff of laughter.
“I doubt it.” Croe supposed Mallos would have no way to compare the experiences – he’d been without magic so few times, and she’d grown in power so much since the last. But there was nothing like divinity, no matter how many tricks she amassed, no matter how far her mastery extended. “You were like…a supernova. Something astronomical, after only knowing the glow of a lightbulb. Uncontainable.” She pressed a kiss against his neck, remembering with a thrill the first time he’d flexed that power against her. They’d been enemies, then. Or at least, they’d been mutual nuisances; both arrogant, and selfish, and afraid of what shimmered between them like a mirage. “I fit neatly into boxes.”
How far they’d come, just to be repeating the same, tired pain.
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