I reach out.
Just my hand.
Palm up. Open.
He stares at it like it’s a weapon. Like it could gut him.
And slowly, he lifts his own and rests it in mine.
His skin is hot, rough, scaled. My hand looks pale and small against his.
But it fits.
It fits.
“I felt you,” I whisper. “All of you.”
“Yeah,” he murmurs. “Same.”
We stand there like that—touching, breathing, trying to make sense of what just happened.
And it’s not romantic. Not exactly.
It’s more.
It’s foundational.
Like two tectonic plates finally sliding into alignment after centuries of pressure.
I want to say something clever. Or soothing. Or useful.
Instead, I say, “We didn’t die.”
His laugh is low and startled. “Yeah. We didn’t.”
“Should we be proud of that?”
“Hell yeah.”
And just like that, the tension breaks.
He squeezes my hand once before letting go. The moment ends. The air thins.
But I’m not empty.
For the first time in a long time, I feelheld.
The meld dissolves like fog evaporating in sunlight.
But theaftertastelingers—thick, metallic, and electric.
The silence that follows is deafening. Not the absence of sound, but the crash of everything unsaid. The stillness after a scream. The void that comes after you pour your soul into someone else's hands and pray they don't drop it.
Inside Whiplash’s cockpit, everything smells like ozone and adrenaline and burnt insulation. The kind of smell that sinks into your pores and stays there.
I’m still panting, my hands twitching over the now-inert controls. The cockpit’s ambient lighting flickers, then steadies, casting Naull’s scaled skin in a dim amber glow.
He doesn’t move either.
