The second anchoring point shatters.
Two more undead pour through, running directly past August as though he doesn't exist, since they can't perceive him while he's in the rift space. For once, Vale is grateful to be the sole focus of their attention. He sweeps his blade through the nearest skeleton and follows with a glowing fist that reduces the other to a shower of dust.
"One more," August calls from within the rift. His voice is strained, distorted by the barrier between worlds, and Vale turns back to look at him.
His stomach drops.
August is still standing, but he's struggling. Swaying on his feet, hands unsteady, the black veins on his arms that Vale's healing had faded are dark again, deep and vivid, as thoughthe hours of recovery have been erased in minutes. The veins climbing his throat are thick and pronounced, corruption rushing back with a speed that makes it clear the earlier healing was only a reprieve.
They miscalculated. Badly. The spells August is casting aren't the primary cost. It's being inside the rift space. The concentrated death energy of the underworld is compounding the corruption, accelerating it beyond anything they anticipated. Every second August spends on the other side of the veil is feeding the very thing that's killing him.
August is moving toward the last anchor point with his arms wrapped around himself. Even from this side of the threshold, Vale can see the pain written into every line of him.
And there is nothing Vale can do. He can't cross. He can't reach him. He can't heal what he can't touch.
All he can do is watch, and Vale has never hated anything more.
August's hands extend toward the final anchor. There's desperation in the gesture now, the careful precision of earlier replaced by something rawer, a man who knows his window is closing and is throwing everything he has at it before it shuts.
"Come on," Vale mutters, his hand white-knuckled on his sword. "Come on, August."
The third anchoring point shatters.
The rift collapses inward with a long, shuddering sigh as the tear seals shut. The green haze evaporates. The cold recedes. And August materializes in the warehouse, crossing a threshold that no longer exists.
He stumbles forward. Catches himself. Stays on his feet, barely, arms wrapped around his midsection, breathing in shallow, ragged pulls.
The moment August is back, the absence vanishes. Something slots into place inside Vale's chest, the hollow feeling replaced by a rush of presence that has no rational explanation.
Vale's hands are trembling. He notices this with the distant, clinical awareness of a man cataloging his own symptoms without fully processing them.
He can see August struggling. Can see the way his shoulders shake with every breath, the way his skin has gone grey-white beneath the dark web of corruption, the way he's holding himself upright through nothing but will. Vale knows he can fix this. One touch and the pain starts to recede. One touch and August can breathe again.
But August told him not to touch without permission. And Vale gave his word.
The urge to reach for him is physical, a pull that starts in Vale's chest and radiates through his arms to his fingertips. His whole body is straining toward August, and the effort of holding himself still feels like the hardest thing he's ever done. Not the fighting. Not the hunting. Standing six feet from a man in agony and not reaching for him because he promised he wouldn't.
August takes a staggering step forward. Then another. Stubborn and beautiful in his determination, walking through pain with the practiced endurance of someone who has been doing it his entire life and treats this as just one more stretch of bad road. For a long, agonizing moment, Vale thinks August is going to weather this alone. That his pride will outlast his need. That those walls will hold.
He manages three more steps. Each one makes Vale's hands clench harder.
Then August looks up.
His arms are still wrapped around himself, holding his pieces together, and his grey eyes find Vale's across the warehouse floor. The defiance is still there, it's always there, it will probablybe there until the day he dies, but underneath it, something has cracked. Something that looks like surrender. Not to the pain. To the fact that he can't do this part alone, and for once, just this once, he's going to let someone help.
"Vale," he breathes. Just his name. Nothing else.
It's enough.
Vale abandons his sword. It clatters to the concrete, the blade's light dying the moment it leaves his hand, and he crosses the distance between them in three strides. He reaches August just as his legs begin to buckle, catches his bare forearm, skin to skin, and the contact detonates through both of them.
August's knees give out. Vale is there. He gets an arm around August's waist and follows him down, sinking to the warehouse floor, pulling August against him. His hand grips August's forearm and the darkness is already fading, retreating in the precise shape of his touch, the corruption peeling back as though it knows it has no right to this man and never did.
Vale runs his hand along the length of August's arm with firm, deliberate pressure. He can feel the holy magic pouring out of him, eager, alive, almost desperate in its insistence, and beneath his palm the black veins lighten, thin, dissolve. He works his way up from wrist to elbow to shoulder, chasing the poison, and August gasps.
The sound hits Vale with force. It's raw and involuntary and far too close to something else, and it makes every nerve in Vale's body light up in ways that centuries of discipline should have inoculated him against. August has gone rigid in his arms, trembling, his breath coming in stuttered bursts against Vale's neck, and the proximity is testing every ounce of restraint Vale possesses.
Discipline hasn't inoculated him. Not even close.
