Chapter 358

“But it cost something.” The words came out smaller than the ones before them. The professional composure doing a failing thing, the wall developing more than the first crack now, the structure visible as a structure rather than as solid material. “It cost something that I haven’t – I’ve been carrying it and I haven’t – since the hunt, since the memories came back, I have all of it back and I know what I gave up and I haven’t been able to-”

She stopped.

I was standing outside the door with my hand still raised and something happening in my chest that was the specific ache of witnessing someone who’d been holding something enormous finally reaching the point where holding it was no longer possible.

The silence inside the clinic had a texture. Then I heard something that I identified a moment

Ivory didn’t do after hearing it as Ivory’s composure breaking. Not a dramatic sound dramatic. Just the specific quality of someone’s breathing changing, of the control failing, of a person who’d been managing the unmanageable finally arriving at the moment where management was no longer the available response.

“Hey,” Kael said. And the word was so simple and so completely unlike the Alpha voice and so entirely unlike anything managed that it hit me from outside the room. “Hey. I’ve got you.”

Then what I heard was movement. The particular sound of two people in the same space closing the distance between them.

And Ivory sobbing.

—

Not quietly or not quietly in the way she probably wanted to be quiet about it, the way she’d probably intended to get through this conversation with the composure intact. But the composure was done. The sobs came out with the quality of something that had been held at the specific grief of pressure for too long, that was finally finding the release it had needed someone who’d given up everything they’d been building toward and had been professional about it for eight months and had lost their memories and gotten them back and attended a Hunt and been almost killed and had said the right things to everyone who’d needed her to say the right things and had written a letter and placed it on a desk before dawn and then started her clinic day as though that was a normal thing to do.

All of it, coming out at once.

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“I know,” Kael said, and I could hear from the quality of his voice that he was close to her, that

that he was the movement I’d heard had been him closing the distance and that she was – holding her. That he’d pulled her in and was holding her the way you held someone when holding was what the situation required. “I know. I’ve got you. Let it go.”

–

“I don’t-” she started, and then the sob interrupted it and she tried again, “-I’m not – I don’t do this-”

“I know you don’t,” he said. “You’re doing it anyway.”

Something in his voice when he said it – the specific warmth, the absolute absence of anything managed – made my throat tighten in a way I wasn’t entirely prepared for.

“It was supposed to be us,” she said, and the words were broken apart by the crying but audible, each one landing with the weight of something that had been true and had been set down. “It was I knew what I was giving up, I knew when I wrote the letter that I was – but knowing it and then having it back, having all the memories back and knowing what it was and knowing what it isn’t now-”

“I know,” he said again. The same two words. Carrying different weight each time.

“She’s not wrong,” Ivory said. “Aria. She’s not – she’s better than I wanted her to be. That’s the a sound that was almost a laugh and wasn’t, “-the thing that’s the hardest. She’s actually better than I wanted her to be. She went through the Hunt and she got four fragments and she stood in front of the pack and defended herself and she-” another pause, “-she came to me. In the courtyard. And she said the right things in the right way and I couldn’t-”

“You couldn’t maintain the full position,” Kael said.

2

“I don’t want to hate her,” Ivory said. “That’s the part I didn’t anticipate. I wanted to hate her. It would be so much easier. But she’s – she keeps making it difficult to hate her and I’m exhausted by it.”

Something moved in me that I didn’t have a clean name for. The specific ache of being described by someone who was simultaneously injured by your existence and unable to fully maintain the hatred that would have made the injury simpler.

“She’s trying,” Kael said. “She’s genuinely trying.”

“I know,” Ivory said. “That’s the problem.” A long exhale, shaky at the edges. “I’m so tired, Kael.”

“I know,” he said. “You can be tired. You’ve earned it.”

“I can’t afford to be tired. There’s Sera and the letter and your investigation and the clinic and

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“Today you can be tired,” he said, with the quiet authority of someone who wasn’t arguing about it. “Everything else exists tomorrow. Today you can just-” he stopped, and what filled the pause was the sound of him adjusting how he was holding her, the practical small motion of someone making a long embrace more sustainable. “You can just be here. That’s enough for today.”

–

The crying had gone quieter. Not done – not the sudden stopping of grief, which didn’t work that way — but moved into the phase where the acute part had passed and what remained was the exhausted aftermath. The breathing that was still uneven but less pressured. The specific quality of someone who’d been holding something enormous and had finally set it down and was discovering what their arms felt like without the weight.

a/n: As someone who relates with Ivory more than Aria, have mercy.