His fingers trace Ithyris's cheekbone, the line of his jaw, the soot still smudged across his skin. His thumb rests at the corner of the prince's mouth. Ithyris's eyes are bright and brimming and he is trying to hold it because he is the prince and the prince does not break in front of the person he was supposed to protect.
"I'm here," Bryn says.
The prince's breath catches.
"I'm still here."
The dam breaks.
Ithyris folds forward. His forehead drops to Bryn's knees and his shoulders shake and the sound he makes is muffled against Bryn's thighs, not a sob exactly, more of a surrender, the sound of a body releasing a tension it has held for hours. Bryn puts his hands in the prince's hair. He holds Ithyris's head against his knees and lets him shake and says it again, quietly, a refrain: "I'm here. I'm still here. You found me. I'm here."
The prince cries against his knees and Bryn holds him and the reversal of it, the dragon prince on the floor and the human boy on the bed with his hands in the dragon's hair, steady and sure, feels true. Ithyris carried him home. Bryn holds him while he falls apart. The arithmetic is not equal. It is not supposed to be. It is reciprocal, and reciprocity is a kind of math Bryn never learned in Everen, where every exchange was a deficit and every kindness was a debt.
Ithyris lifts his head. His face is wet and wrecked and Bryn wipes the tears from his cheeks with his thumbs the way the prince wipes his, a mirror, and Ithyris catches his hand and presses his mouth to Bryn's bandaged wrist with the same reverent tenderness he showed in the cell and Bryn lets him. It doesn't hurt.
***
Mithri is waiting.
Bryn hears her before he sees her. The sound of running feet in the corridor, the specific cadence he would recognize anywherebecause he has listened to those footsteps his entire life, and the door bursts open and she is there.
She throws herself at him.
The impact nearly knocks him off the bed. Her arms lock around his neck and her face buries in his shoulder and she is sobbing, the full-body, shaking sobs of someone who has been holding it together for hours and has run out of material. She is gripping him so hard her fingers dig into the bruises on his back and the pain is sharp and he does not care, not slightly, because his sister is in his arms and she smells of tea and soap and Everen honey cakes and she is alive and safe and they did not get her. He kept her safe. Even bound and bleeding in a cell, even with his face against the floor, he kept her safe because he did not give them her name.
"If you ever do this to me again," she says into his shoulder, her voice wrecked and muffled, "I will kill you myself. I will kill you with my bare hands, Bryn Kaelith. I will find you and I will murder you and then I will bring you back and murder you again."
"That seems excessive."
"I will make it look like an accident." She pulls back. Her face is swollen and red and furious and she is the most beautiful person he has ever seen, his twin, his mirror. She takes his face in her hands, an echo of Ithyris's gesture, and looks at the bruises and the split lip and her eyes fill again and her jaw sets and she says, with a ferocity that could cut glass: "Who did this?"
"It doesn't matter."
"It matters to me."
"Mithri." He takes her hands from his face and holds them. Her fingers are cold. She has been waiting, he realizes. For hours. Since Ithyris left her chambers with scorch marks on the floor and fire in his eyes. She has been waiting and not knowingand holding herself together because that is what Kaeliths do. "I'm here. I'm okay."
"You are not okay. You are bruised and bloody and..."
"I'm alive. I'm home. And I am never leaving your line of sight again."
She laughs. Wet and broken and angry and relieved and the most Mithri sound in the world and she pulls him into another hug, gentler, mindful of the bruises, and they hold each other and they are twins on a bed in a dragon's palace and they are alive and together and for a moment they are children again, holding onto each other in the dark.
Bryn looks over her shoulder.
Ithyris is standing by the door.
He has stepped back. Given them space. The practiced withdrawal that gives the people he loves room to love each other without his presence as an intrusion. He is leaning against the doorframe with his arms at his sides and his face is still wet and his eyes are still red and he is watching Bryn hold his sister with an expression that is not jealousy, not possessiveness.
It is love.
Not the love of the bond or the body or the sacred pool. Not the love that burns and claims. A different love. A quieter one. The love of a man watching the person he chose holding the person she chose and seeing, in the tangle of their arms and the press of their foreheads and the sound of their crying and laughter, the reason that person is worth everything he burned to bring them home.
The prince is looking at Bryn holding his sister and seeing, for the first time, the full shape of who Bryn is. Not the sharp tongue and the tariff arguments. Not the body in his bed or the voice that says husband. The whole of him. The brother. The twin. The boy who crossed a kingdom in a stolen dress because the girl in his arms was too young to be sold and someone had to stand upand it was always going to be him. The boy who cleans wreckage because that is what he knows. The boy who loves fiercely and protects recklessly and carries everyone and asks for nothing and is, right now, being carried by the people who love him.
Bryn looks at the prince across Mithri's shoulder.
Ithyris looks at him.
