He finishes his work. Packs his satchel. Stands.
At the cage door, he pauses. He doesn't look back. If he looks back, the crack will widen and he can't afford that right now. He can afford it later, in his room, in the dark, where no one is watching.
"I'll see you tomorrow, Zazyrus."
Silence. But a different silence than before. A silence that holds something in it, warm and heavy and new.
Lethe locks the cage and walks up the corridor and his hands don't shake.
***
In his cot that night, the ceiling is the same and the bells are the same and nothing has changed except everything.
He can still feel it. The roughness of Zazyrus's finger against his throat. The careful, deliberate path it traced along the edges of the bruise, not pressing, not probing, just mapping. Learning the shape of the damage the way Lethe learns the shape of wounds: methodically, gently, with attention that borders on reverence.
No one has ever touched his bruises with anything other than the hands that made them.
He presses his own fingers to the place where Zazyrus's claw rested against his neck. The skin is tender. The bruise throbs. But beneath the tenderness there is the ghost of that touch, the warmth of it, and Lethe traces the same path Zazyrus did and feels it echo through his body. Down his throat. Down his chest. Down his spine and into his toes and into the places that have been cold for so long he'd forgotten they could be anything else.
All that power. All that violence, coiled and compressed in a body that could tear Lethe apart without effort. And he used it to touch a bruise on Lethe's throat with a gentleness that Lethe has never, not once, received from a human hand.
He presses his face into his pillow. His chest aches. His eyes burn.
Don't.he thinks.Don't do this to yourself.
But the touch is still there, branded into his skin, and Lethe lies in the dark and feels it and can't make it stop and isn't sure, if he's honest, that he wants to.
He rolls over. Pulls the thin blanket to his chin. Stares at the wall.
Outside, the pits breathe and groan and settle. The bells ring. The guards change. The world keeps turning in its ugly, relentless way.
Lethe touches his throat one more time. Then he closes his eyes.
He sleeps, eventually. And if the last thing he thinks before the dark takes him is the sound of a low hum in a cold cage, the resonance of a beast who heard him and answered in the only language he had, then that is between Lethe and the ceiling and the quiet, stubborn thing in his chest that refuses, despite everything, to die.
Chapter six
Chapter 6
Lethe brings him an orange.
It's tucked inside the satchel, beneath the bandages and the salve tin, wrapped in a scrap of cloth that doesn't quite hide the color of it. Lethe sets it beside Zazyrus's knee the way he sets everything: without ceremony, without eye contact, as though the offering materialized there on its own and had nothing to do with the boy who carried it down two flights of stairs and past three guard posts hidden in a medical bag.
Zazyrus looks at it.
It's fresh. The skin is bright, vivid, a shock of color in a cage that holds nothing but grey stone and dark iron and bloodstained straw. It's the size of his palm. It smells sharp and sweet and alive, and the scent cuts through the damp and the mildew and the old-blood stink of the deep kennels with a clarity that makes something behind Zazyrus's ribs constrict.
He picks it up. The skin gives slightly under the pressure of his thumb, firm but yielding, and a fine mist of citrus oil sprays from the pores and the smell intensifies and Zazyrus holds the thing in his clawed hand and stares at it and thinks.
He thinks a lot of things.
He thinks about what this cost. Not in coin, though coin was likely involved, but in risk. Sneaking food to the fighters is not permitted. The guards confiscate rations and punish the offender if they're caught, and the punishment scales with the value of the contraband, and a fresh orange in the pits is not cheap. The boy risked something to bring him this. He risked something and he set it down beside Zazyrus's knee and didn't mention it, didn't wait for thanks, didn't even look at him while he did it.
He thinks about the fact that no one has given him a gift in his memory. Objects have been assigned to him. Rations have been dispensed. Tools and equipment and the bare necessities of survival have been provided by owners who were investing in their property's upkeep, not offering kindness. This is different. This is a bright, fragile, achingly thoughtful thing placed in the hand of a creature who has done nothing to earn it and everything to discourage it, and the boy who gave it is currently kneeling beside him talking about a cat.
He thinks about that, too. About how the boy gives and gives and gives, rations and water and clean bandages and the steady current of his voice, and never once asks for anything in return. Not compliance. Not gratitude. Not the performance of rehabilitation that owners always want, the tamed beast, the broken will, the satisfying proof that cruelty works. Lethe doesn't want Zazyrus tamed. Lethe doesn't seem to want anything from him at all, except to be allowed to help, and the selflessness of that is so foreign to Zazyrus's experience that he keeps turning it over looking for the lie and can't find one.
He peels the orange. His claws are not ideal for the task but they manage, puncturing the skin and tearing it away in strips. The juice runs over his fingers, sticky and sharp. He separates asegment and puts it in his mouth and the sweetness is so intense, so violently alive, that he closes his eyes.
