She kissed him the way she kissed him when she was tired and certain and not performing: stripped of the ceremony of their bond-weight, stripped of what they were to each other in the larger sense. Just Selena, just him, just the press of her mouth and the warmth of her body and the teal thread between them singing low and constant.
He had spent the evening thinking about wounds. About clanmates beyond reach. About the specific, terrible helplessness of a healer whose instruments meant nothing when the patient was a light-year away. The distance had sat in him like something thorned all night, each loop of thought returning to the same point: he could not help them. He could prepare. He could organize. He could sort the same shelf three times. None of it would matter if the bond screamed pain from across the void.
Here was the antidote. Not to the fear—fear was embedded in love and would not be surgically removed—but to the crushing, airless weight of it. She was warm and real and present, and when she pulled back to breathe and looked up at him with her hair mussed and her eyes dark, the knot loosened one slow increment. Not gone. Loosened. Enough to breathe.
“Healer,” she said softly. “MyPrimary.”
Not a just title. Not function. The word in her voice was the sound of someone who saw the whole of him and was speaking to the part that was occasionally, desperately tired of being unbreakable.
His hands moved through her hair. Not clinical—nothing clinical about it, not anymore, not now. She tipped her chin up and he bent to her again, unhurried, and his mind stopped.There was only her breath against his jaw, her warmth anchored against him, the way the bond between them felt when it was simply love and not the anxious web of responsibility he had been pulling tight all evening.
He was her Primary. He was the clan’s foundation. He held without fracturing.
He let her hold him back anyway.
When they finally breathed apart, he pressed his forehead to hers. Teal met dark. The bond hummed between them—full, present, carrying no fear at all, only this, only them, only the specific warmth of two people who loved each other in a room that had, temporarily, suspended the weight of everything waiting outside it.
“Come home,” he said.
Her thumb brushed his jaw.
“That’s the plan.” She sighed. “And when I do, I expect you to be right where you are now. Ready. Not worn to nothing.”
“I’ll try.”
“Xylo.”
“I’ll succeed,” he amended. “Trust, my nestqueen.”
Almost a smile. Close enough.
She took his hand and led him toward the door.
He went two steps then stopped.
She paused without question and waited. Over time she had learned the difference between his hesitations.
He looked back at the medical wing.
The supply crates sat in their rows. The compression wraps, sorted. The coagulant strips beside the plasma-burn compounds. The bone-knit cases nested by size. The emergency compounds, labeled in his own script. The Oetsae-blend analgesics. The neural stabilizers for psychic exposure. The particular compound he had spent weeks refining with Zyxelfor wounds that plasma fire made at close range. Everything prepared. Everything in its place.
Not because the sorting had eased his fear, in the end. It hadn’t. But readiness was a form of faith, and faith was all a healer had when the crisis hadn’t arrived yet. The work done in the dark before the need arose was its own kind of prayer.
It would be here when they needed it.
He turned away.
Selena’s hand was still in his—warm, unhurried—as she led them down the corridor to the royal nestroom.
Tonight they were here. Tonight the constellation was still whole.
His family. Still here. Still his to hold.
He held that thought carefully, the way he held something still warm that he already knew would cool.
Tonight was for holding on.
23
