When he opens them, the boy is watching. Not obviously. His hands are still working, unwinding a bandage from Zazyrus's ribs, but his eyes have drifted up and there is something in his expression that Zazyrus can't categorize. Something soft. Something that hurts to look at, though Zazyrus couldn't say why.
Their eyes meet. Lethe drops his gaze. Resumes his work.
Zazyrus eats the orange. He says nothing. But he eats every segment, and when it's gone he holds the empty rind in his hand and the scent lingers on his fingers for hours after the boy leaves.
***
The boy is stitching a gash on his ribs.
New fight. New wounds. The rhythm continues, relentless, and the boy keeps pace with it. He arrives after each bout with his satchel restocked and his hands clean and his voice already running, filling the cage before his knees hit the stone. Today's topic is the kitten.
"She's getting fat," Lethe says, threading his needle. "Maren says it's because I sneak her too much fish, which is true, but Soot doesn't complain and I don't think it's fair to let Maren dictate her diet when Maren feeds the entire kitchen staff pastry scraps for breakfast." He sets the first stitch and Zazyrus's breath hisses through his teeth and the boy pauses, waits, continues. "I tried to introduce her to one of the fighters in the upper cages. The one with the broken tooth. He loves her. He held her in one hand and she fell asleep and I thought my heart was going to give out."
Zazyrus watches him. The boy talks with his whole body. His eyebrows move. His mouth curves and flattens and curves again. His free hand gestures when he gets animated, which is always, trailing in the air between them while the hand with the needle remains rock-steady. The dissonance is remarkable. The boy can hold a conversation about kittens and sew a two-inch laceration at the same time without either hand knowing what the other is doing.
"I named the black one Soot, which is terrible," Lethe says. He ties off a stitch and cuts the thread and re-threads the needle with a practiced motion that takes less than a second. "She looks like soot, and I'm not very creative. It's a character flaw. Hopefully I never have to name a human. Can you imagine? Hello, your baby is here, I've named him Floor because that's where I found him."
A sound escapes Zazyrus before he can stop it.
Low. Rough. Barely a breath, caught somewhere between his chest and his throat, expelled in a short, involuntary burst that is not a growl and not a sigh and might, under duress and with sufficient plausible deniability, be classified as a laugh.
The boy goes still.
Needle in hand, thread trailing, his fingers frozen mid-stitch. He looks up at Zazyrus and his eyes are wide and blue and startled and there is something dawning in them, something incredulous and delighted, as though he's just witnessed an impossibility. A sunrise underground. Snow in summer. A beast who laughs.
Zazyrus stares back at him. The sound is gone, vanished as quickly as it came, and he can't retrieve it and he can't deny it and the boy is looking at him with those wide eyes and Zazyrus has not been looked at with that expression in a very long time.
Wonder. That's the word for it. The boy is looking at him with wonder.
Lethe's mouth curves. Slowly. Carefully. A small thing, that smile, tentative at the edges, as though it's testing whether it's allowed to exist. It cracks open his face in a way that changes everything about it: the set of his jaw softens, the tension around his eyes eases, the wariness that lives permanently in his expression retreats, just for a moment, and what's left is young and bright and startlingly, painfully beautiful.
The smile is a door cracking open. Just a sliver. Just enough light to see through.
Lethe drops his gaze back to his work. His needle resumes. But the smile doesn't leave, not entirely. It lingers at the corners of his mouth, pressed down but not extinguished, and the flush on the back of his neck is visible above his collar, a slow tide of pink that starts at his nape and spreads upward to his ears and forward, presumably, to his face, though his head is bowed and Zazyrus can't see it.
He doesn't need to see it. He can see the pink crawling up the sides of the boy's neck, blooming behind his ears, coloring the pale skin in a way that is vivid and involuntary and completely, transparently honest. The boy is flushed because Zazyrus laughed. The boy is smiling because Zazyrus laughed. The equation is simple and the implications are not, and Zazyrus sits with both while the boy finishes his stitches in a silence that, for the first time, feels companionable rather than cautious.
Lethe ties off the last stitch. Applies salve. Bandages. His movements are sure and practiced but softer now, warmer, as though the laugh unlocked something in his hands as well as his face. He smooths the bandage over Zazyrus's ribs and his thumb lingers for a half-second longer than it needs to, a feather-weight press of skin against skin that could be accidental and isn't.
"There," he says. His voice has a quality to it that wasn't there before. Lighter. Almost breathless. "Good as new. Well. Good as good-enough, which is the best I can promise down here."
He packs his satchel. He stands. He's halfway to the cage door before he turns, and the smile is still there, reduced to a faint curve, a residual warmth that hasn't quite faded. His cheeks are pink. His eyes are bright. He opens his mouth, closes it, and shakes his head at himself in a gesture that is so plainly self-conscious it borders on endearing.
"See you tomorrow, Zazyrus," he says, and the way he says the name is different. Careful. As though he's tasting it.
The cage door closes. The lock turns. The footsteps recede.
***
Zazyrus sits in the silence and the silence is different now.
It's not empty the way it used to be. It's not the hard, compressed void he built around himself when he arrived, the space that belonged to him and no one else. The boy has been filling it for days, pouring in words and warmth and the smell of herbs and citrus, and Zazyrus has been telling himself that none of it is staying, that the silence repairs itself each time the boy leaves, that the space is still his.
He laughed.
The realization settles over him with the weight of something irreversible. He laughed and the boy smiled and the boy's cheeks went pink and the boy said his name differently, and Zazyrus is sitting in a cage in the dark and the orange rind is on the floor beside him and his ribs are freshly stitched and the silence is full of things that weren't there a month ago.
He didn't intend for this. He doesn't want this. He wants the rage and the silence and the cold, clear clarity of having nothing to lose, because having nothing to lose is the only advantage a caged beast has. Attachment is a leash. Caring is a collar. Wanting something in this place is an invitation for the humanswho own him to find it and use it against him and break it in front of his eyes, and Zazyrus has learned this lesson enough times to know it by heart.
