Lucian
The door closes behind Celeste with a soft, final click, and whatever tension she carried with her slips out of the room as if it belonged to her alone. What replaces it is worse. A quiet so deep it feels deliberate, like the air itself has decided to give me space to bleed in peace.
I make my way to the edge of the bed and sit, shoulders slumping forward before I can stop them. The towel hangs low around my neck, damp and heavy, clinging to my skin as if it’s reluctant to let go. It hides most of the scars across my chest and shoulders—the pale lines, the uneven textures, the places where heat and shrapnel rewrote me—but I can feel them anyway. I always can. I’m seven months into my recovery, and I don’t need to look to know where my skin pulls tighter, goes numb, or where it aches when the room is too cool or the day has been too long.
My prosthetic rests near the chair, exactly where I left it, so I won’t have to reach far for it later. The residual limb throbs with a dull, familiar persistence; this time, the pain is well earned after standing through the concert tonight.
Normally, the pain in my leg would be the loudest thing in the room, aside from Sir Sass’s purr.
Tonight, it barely registers.
Because Celeste was just here.
After all this time, and every day I spent rebuilding myself piece by piece with the singular hope that maybe the next time she saw me, I’d be someone she could look at without pain. Tonight, she stood in front of me and looked through me like I was already a closed chapter.
I drop my elbows to my knees and bury my face in my hands, forcing air into my lungs the way they taught me.
Slow. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Regain control. Ground yourself. Name what you can feel. Stay present. It works when the threat is memory, when it’s a nightmare or a flash of heat and pressure behind my eyes.
It does not work when the threat isher.
Seeing her again feels like taking shrapnel all over—sharp, sudden, lodging itself in places I didn’t know were still exposed. I thought I’d made peace with what I did. With the distance and the way I pushed her away before she could see the full aftermath of the explosion, before she could watch me learn how to exist in a body that no longer obeyed me.
I told myself it was mercy, and I was protecting her from the mess. From the man who woke up in an ICU, missing part of himself and couldn’t reconcile who he’d been with who he was becoming.
That story held, right up until tonight.
Because when she looked at me earlier, when she saw my bare skin, the burns and the shrapnel scars and the truth writtenplainly across my body, she didn’t flinch. If she noticed them at all, she gave no sign that they changed anything.
Which means I didn’t leave because she couldn’t handle it.
I left because I couldn’t.
Celeste was never fragile. She was never something that needed protecting from reality. She was—no is—wildfire in that brilliant, consuming, strong enough to burn and still keep going way. And I abandoned her anyway. I pushed her away and left her standing in the flames alone because I was too afraid to let her see me fall apart and still choose me.
And I took that choice away from her when I told the nurses not to let her back in.
I blocked her number and cut her out because I couldn’t stand the idea of being loved while broken.
Now she’s here, and the worst part isn’t the pain in my leg or the scars I still don’t like to look at.
It’s realizing she survived losing me, and I’m the one still bleeding.
The realization settles in my chest, pressing inward as another truth surfaces, this one I still haven’t wrapped my head around, even after seeing her with my own eyes.
Celeste is Ara.
The name alone feels unreal when I attach it to Celeste, like two incompatible truths forced to coexist. I’ve replayed the image in my head, and it still doesn’t fully land.
Onstage, she isn’t just a woman with a microphone. She moves like something conjured rather than born. The oil-slick wig fractures the light as she turns, greens and blues rippling through black like living flame. Her clothes don’t just catch the movement; theybecomeit, flowing like water pulled by some unseen current. Every step is intentional, every gesture sharpened by discipline and instinct.
She looks untouchable.
Mythic.
And then she sings, her voice—the same one that once murmured my name in the dark, soft and unguarded—rises through smoke and pyrotechnics and transforms a stadium into something reverent. Thousands of people fall silent or scream themselves hoarse at once, pulled under by the weight of it. Seeing it live is something else entirely.
Somehow, in all the time I spent with her, in all the late nights and stolen moments that felt like secrets meant only for us, I never knew I’d kissed the woman behind the veil. I never guessed the scale of what she carried.
