And then his fire stutters.
I see it. The flame running along his forearms, which he hasn't fully retracted since the fight, flickers. Goes dim. His face changes fast, startled, and he looks down at his hands.
"What are you doing?" he asks.
"Nothing." I take a step toward him because stepping away feels wrong and because I'm incapable of making good decisions in corridors. "Are you hurt? Your fire..."
"It's not... I'm not hurt." He raises his head. "You're pulling it."
"I'm not doing it on purpose."
"I don't care about purpose, Fairmont. Stop."
"I told you, I'm not..."
But his fire is guttering again, and I feel it land in my chest the moment it does, a rush of warmth that isn't mine, and the channel that opened during the fight pulls harder without my permission. I press my palm flat against his forearm without thinking, trying to break the contact, trying to interrupt whatever the null current is doing, and the touch does the opposite of what I intended.
Dragon fire runs up my arm like a lit fuse.
It doesn't burn. That's what stops me cold. It should burn. Thane's fire has scorched stone walls in this building. It brought a wraith-possessed professor to his knees. And it runs up my arm and settles into my chest like heat from the sun on the first warm day after a long winter, everything like heat my body has been waiting for without telling me.
Thane grabs my wrist.
"Stop," he says again, and his voice is different now, lower, strained in a way that has nothing to do with his ribs.
"I'm trying." I am. I push against the current, pushing outward like I learned to push against the tracking seal's anchoring, but this current isn't a ward construct. It doesn't have a seam. It's responding to biology, and it doesn't care about my preference for keeping things compartmentalized.
"Angelic." His grip on my wrist tightens. He almost never uses my first name. It registers somewhere below conscious thought, like a key turning in a lock I didn't know was there. "Look at me."
I'm already looking at him. His eyes have gone full gold, the dark brown swallowed entirely, and his jaw is tight, and there's a tension running through his whole body that I recognize from training, someone holding back.
"There's a bond trying to form," he says. Flat. Controlled. Furious about both. "Between us. I can feel it."
"I know."
"Tell it to stop."
"You think I have an off switch for this?" I try to pull my wrist back and he doesn't release it. "Let go, Thane."
"If I let go right now, this gets worse." His fire has fully retracted, all of it, pulled back to nothing, and I can feel the absence of it like a door closing. The cessation of heat that was just present. "The contact is the only thing keeping it from accelerating. Don't ask me how I know that."
"Dragon instinct?"
"Dragon instinct," he confirms, and the gritted tone tells me he wishes he had a different answer.
So we stand here. His hand around my wrist. The corridor empty in both directions. The current running between us like a live wire that neither of us plugged in.
I push against it harder, methodically, like I've learned to push against foreign magic. It resists. Whatever this is, it isn't ambient. It's targeted, specific, tied to Thane's particular fire signature in a way that my null nature has catalogued without informing me. The pull eases, slows, and I exhale.
"It's slowing," I say.
"I noticed." He hasn't released my wrist. "What did you do?"
"Pushed back."
"You can push back against a bond formation?"
"I can push back against everything else. I'm hoping bond formations follow the same logic."
