Archive of Our Own ^beta

Nephien’s steps pound down the stairs, tap-tap-tap, in a racing counterpart to her heart. The docks are dark at this hour, illuminated by nothing more than dim lighting strips along the corners that cast more shadows than they alleviate, and before she realises, she’s standing in front of the storage compartment. The lock glares red until she shoves her fist into the panel, and the doors part with a hiss that echoes through the docks.

Vexx’s eyes open at the sound. She can see them, glimmering in the dark. He still sits where she left him, his back to the far wall. She can’t make out anything more than that.

“Bad dreams, Princess?” His voice uncoils from the dark, low and lilting.

Despite everything, something inside her still holds enough hope to shrivel at his mocking tone.

Stupid. You’ll never not be stupid, will you?

Without a word, she steps back, her hand lifting to slap the door closed again.

“Wait. Stop.”

And despite everything, she stops. Standing in the rectangle of light on the threshold, only lighter by degrees to the near-black of the storage compartment, she can’t make out Vexx. She doesn’t recognise this silence.

Quiet has never been uncommon between them, and she thought she knew it all. The library-quiet when he’s on duty in public and the guard captain will sew his mouth shut if he speaks without being directly addressed by a superior. The dark-quiet of the secret passages, thin under the palace’s skin where silence is their saviour. The quiet-quiet when they’re alone and he knows she’s been pushed past her limits for social interaction, and he takes her hand or winds an arm around her waist and she lets him carry the weight for a while.

In this quiet, Vexx’s near-silent intake drags cold and electric over her skin.

“Come here,” he says.

Distantly, she’s aware of her quick, flighty breaths, the cold of the deck plates seeping into her bare feet with every step as she stumbles across the storage room, squeezing between stacks of crates to reach the nook he’s claimed for himself. The door snaps shut behind her, and then she has nothing, not even the colourless gleam of his eyes in the gloom. Maybe this is the truth of the way things are: that she’s been nothing more than fumbling in the dark all this time, her mind conjuring an image of a man from a strange shadow.

When Nephien trips over his booted feet, Vexx reaches up to grab her and pull her down—or at least control her fall—and she lands on her knees beside him. His wrists are still bound, but that doesn’t stop him from dragging his knuckles along her jaw. His touch is cool and dry, and she barely feels it when her heart is still pounding with enough force to make her tremble.

“Bad dreams, Princess?” Vexx asks again, and this time his voice is so soft she aches.

She means to answer, but sometimes there’s a disconnect between her brain and her mouth, and her throat refuses to work no matter how badly she pictures herself saying them. There’s only her own short breaths and the rapid pulse of her heartbeat in her fingertips.

“Okay.” Vexx takes her hands, something which requires considerable fumbling between the lack of light and his tied wrists, but he manages in the end. “I’d tell you to close your eyes, except you can’t see shit in here, anyway.”

It is indeed too dark to see no matter how she strains to make out the curve of his cheek, the line of his shoulders. She doesn’t have a hope of glimpsing the expression of this phantom beside her. But as long as he holds her hands and says her name with that whispered heat, she can pretend she knows him.

Vexx squeezes her fingers. “Tell me what you can feel.”

“You,” she says.

It’s too dark to tell, but she swears she can feel the self-satisfied curl of his mouth. “Besides me.”

The deck plates beneath her knees vibrate with the constant hum of the engines, familiar enough that she’s almost learnt to tune it out. An air vent whispers somewhere unseen near the ceiling, sending a whisper of cool air across her shoulders that leaves her skin prickling.

Bit by bit, her tongue unsticks from the roof of her mouth. “The floor. It’s cold. So is the air. The smell of Cursa. It’s almost been cycled out by the oxygen scrubbers…”

As the seconds pass, her heart slows down, and Vexx can no doubt feel the tremble leave her hands.

“Better?” he asks.

“Better.”

His hand drifts up, fingers brushing along her arm, up her shoulder and over the side of her gills until he can touch her face. He traces the line of her jaw, fumbling as if he’s touching her for the first time, and buries his fingers in her hair. He leans in to rest his forehead against her chin, dragging in breath after harsh breath, and she feels his hand clench into a fist in her hair.

She traces her fingers down his temple to his clenched jaw, feeling his short, jagged exhales against her collarbone. His hand clenches and unclenches in her hair, gripping hard enough it feels like he might rip a chunk out of her scalp.

When he pulls back, she can’t breathe. Is he—?

But his arms snake around her, pulling her into his lap. It’s an awkward position, sitting sideways across his legs, her shoulder tucked against his chest, and she buries her head in the crook of his neck. Yet something about the situation makes her skin prickle. One hand drifts down to touch his wrist, and she finds it bare.

She goes still, mind blanking to white.

Was this all a trick to lower her guard? Did she fall for him again, despite everything?

Did she lock the door behind her?

“Hey. Hey.” His arms tighten around her, but not in a confining way. One palm smooths up and down her spine as he murmurs, “You’re safe here, Neph. I’ve got you.”

She should pull away. She should, but the achingly familiar warmth of his body against hers seeps through her. If she pushes all other thoughts away, she can pretend they’re in the palace’s darkest passages that belong to only them.

But she can’t.

“I thought you left me.” Her voice is quiet. Accusing. “You got what you wanted, or you got bored, and you moved on. I was just another travel story for you to collect.”

“No.” His response is low. Immediate. “I couldn’t ever leave you behind.”

“You did worse than that.”

What would her family think of her cosying up to their killer? What does that make her, that all her instincts still point to him?

“I didn’t…” He falters. His face twists in a teeth-bared grimace. “I couldn’t…”

She pulls back to look at him, but her eyes strain in vain. All she can hear is his unsteady breaths. Beneath her hands, his heart thumps too fast in his chest. “What happened to you, Vexx?”

The silence is oppressive. Is that his eyes she can make out in the gloom, the shape of his mouth?

“I don’t remember.”

She swallows, the sound sticking in her throat. “Sometimes you’re the same and sometimes you’re a stranger.”

Even as she says it, she remembers Teranium. Not his face, but his words. He was K’Merii the entire time. Whatever is wrong with him now doesn’t change the fact that if he hadn’t wanted her family dead, they never would have met.

He has always been a stranger.

Vexx lowers his head, his forehead coming to rest in the crook of her shoulder. “I remember you. Or not you, exactly. I remember that I know you. I remember…”

He trails off with a strangled groan, and his forehead presses hard against her collarbone. She can feel the sweat dampening his skin, and suddenly his fingers are digging hard into her back.

Nephien finds herself combing through his hair, as much to fight the rising pressure in her chest as anything else. “Stay with me, Vexx. Don’t leave me again. Don’t leave me—”

Vexx growls low in his throat. “Not… going anywhere. Not this time.”

“Did Zovack do this to you?”

His fingers dig into her back. The silence stretches between them, sightless and sticky, and then she feels more than hears his whisper: “I don’t know.”

Eventually his breathing evens out, as does hers, and their grip on each other loosens enough that she can adjust her position to relieve the pressure digging into her kidney. Vexx shifts, too, lifting his head to tuck her under his chin. They stay like that, the dark settling around them, and when she closes her eyes, the quiet rise of his chest is the only thing left in the world.

A bright light pierces through her eyelids, and she feels more than hears Vexx hiss, his arms coming around her. The air has changed somehow, and her eyes are bleary when she forces them open. The door to the storage compartment stands open, letting in a stream of vicious white light. Morning, or close enough to it without a planetary rotation to give meaning to things like ‘day’ and ‘night’—and with a couple of blinks, she realises the figure filling the threshold is none other than Damon.

“Bringing new meaning to ‘sleeping with the enemy’.” Damon shakes his head, his smile sharp enough to cut. “Tell me you at least got some useful information out of him.”

Vexx bares his teeth. “Fuck off, Reznor.”

Damon’s grin widens. “Well, somebody woke up on the wrong side of the closet.”

Nephien clambers to her feet, feeling every ache and pain from sleeping on the floor suddenly scream for attention. As she does, Vexx’s hand drops away from hers, leaving her cold.

Before she can scurry to safety, Damon holds up a hand to halt her. “Did you undo his restraints?”

“No,” she says.

Damon’s stare turns flinty, but there’s no untruth to find in her, so she endures his scrutiny until at last he jerks a thumb at the door. “Then scram.”

Nephien glances back over her shoulder, just once. The shadows in Vexx’s eyes have gone cold, and a nasty smile curls his mouth. “That’s right, Princess. You better scram.”

Her hands clench into fists, and she turns away. But somehow, despite everything, she still feels the warmth of his touch.