“Never.”
He meets my eyes.
Something in him breaks completely.
What happens next isn’t dominance. It isn’t claiming. It isn’t any of the things that defined us before the world caught fire. This is different. Raw. Human. Reaper. Everything in between.
He touches me like I’m the only soft thing left in the galaxy.
His mouth traces every bruise he can find, slow kisses laid over each one—like he’s erasing them, rewriting them, giving them meaning beyond pain. His hands explore me gently first, reverent, mapping where I hurt, where I don’t, listening to every hitch of breath I give him.
But there’s hunger there too—buried under the tenderness. A hunger that mirrors mine. The kind that comes after surviving death, after watching everything you built crumble and still somehow managing to hold the one thing that matters.
I touch his chest, feel the violent thud of both hearts under my palm. His breath catches.
“You’re real,” I whisper. “You’re here.”
He presses my hand tighter to his chest.
“Always.”
When our mouths meet again, it’s different. Slower. But deeper. Like we’re trying to memorize each other. Like our lips are speaking truths our throats haven’t figured out yet.
He lays me back against what remains of the pillow, dust rising around us like falling stars. He hovers over me, eyes searching my face as though confirming, again and again, that I’m not a hallucination clawed out of a nightmare.
His fingers skim my ribs, careful. Too careful.
“I won’t break,” I say, breathless.
“You almost did,” he answers.
“So did you.”
He closes his eyes—just for a moment. When they open again, there’s a shine there I’ve never seen from him. Not even in battle. Not even in the darkest moments.
“Let me have this,” he murmurs.
“You already do.”
He lowers his mouth to mine—not hungry, not frantic, but with the quiet, aching devotion of someone who crawled out of a grave to get back here. His lips trail down my throat, across the pulse fluttering wildly under my skin. Each kiss feels like an oath. A promise. A reclaiming of something neither of us realized we could lose.
My hands slide up his back, tracing the deep grooves of his shoulder blades, the warm lines of muscle that tremble under my fingertips. He shudders into me, a full-body exhale that feels like surrender.
Not to me.
To us.
The world outside continues to burn, collapsing in on itself with distant booms and flickering light. But here—here in the ruins of the room where he first said “mine” and I first believed him—there is only this:
His breath.
My heartbeat.
The tremble of his fingers on my skin.
The desperate, reverent way he holds me.
There’s no dominance now. No power struggle. No claiming. Only mutual gravity, pulling us into each other like stars collapsing into the same orbit.
