His body was exhausted, but sleep never came easily. Not for him. Not for fox spirits with too many scars and too many memories of nights gone wrong. But he let himself rest.
He kept his eyes half closed, breaths measured, posture deceptively relaxed: deception he’d mastered long before she was born. Through lowered lashes, he watched her. Always watched.
Poppy turned her head again, checking on him. “Are you in pain?”
“Less than before,” he murmured. “You helped enormously.”
Her expression flickered, something like pride, something like fear she hadn’t realized she carried. She nodded once, sharply, and then returned her gaze to the dark trees.
He allowed his eyes to close fully this time. Not in sleep, but in a rare, fragile moment of peace. His senses stayed sharp—every shift of wind, every groan of branches, every heartbeat within the clearing. He listened the way fox spirits did: deeply, instinctively.
He heard her heartbeat, quick but steady. He heard her breath, soft and determined. He heard the faint shiver she tried to hide.
“You don’t have to stand,” he murmured quietly, eyes still closed. “Sit. Conserve your strength.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re tired.”
“So are you.”
His lips curved faintly, and he opened his eyes a bit more. “I am always tired.”
She didn’t deny that. She lowered herself to sit on a fallen root a few feet from him—still watching the forest, still wrapped in vigilance.
Mingxi saw the line of her profile illuminated in moonlight. She looked… fierce. Not delicate. Not fragile. Fierce. He drank her in silently.
Every few minutes, she looked back to check on him. Every time she did, something in him loosened—some knot pulled so tight inside him he’d forgotten it was there at all.
“Why do you keep looking at me?” he asked finally, voice soft as the winter air.
Poppy startled slightly. “I’m making sure you’re alive.”
“I would tell you if I died.”
A breath of laughter escaped her—surprised, genuine. “I doubt that.”
He tilted his head, studying her. “Why do you care so much?”
She went still.
The question had slipped out before he could stop it. He wasn’t sure he wanted to stop it. Poppy looked away, eyes fixed on the trees.
“Because you helped me. Because you’re hurt. Because it matters.”
He absorbed that slowly, reverently.
“You speak as if it were simple,” he said.
“It is simple.”
“No,” he whispered. “Not for me.”
Her breath caught. He didn’t explain further. He couldn’t.
Not yet.
Instead, he let his head rest back against the bark behind him, breathing carefully, letting the silence settle again, but he did not sleep. He watched her in the clearing, moonlight gathering in her hair, the cold brushing her cheeks, the steady lift of her chest with each breath. A strange warmth unfurled in him—a steady, quiet recognition.
