Page 56 of C is for Captive

“You didn’t tell me what I needed to know,” he said.

“What?”

“You told me what you think I should do.” He turned fully towards her, and the last light ran along the swept-back curve of his horns, the deep bronze of his skin, and the metal shine of his eyes. “I need to know what you want.”

She blinked. Of all the things she’d rehearsed for, she hadn’t rehearsed for that.

“That’s—” She laughed, and it came out wrong, cracked. “That’s not how this works.”

“It’s how it works with me.” He said it the way he said everything, flat and certain and impossible to argue with, but there was something careful under it now. He was watching her the way he’d watched her from behind his hair in that cell. Reading her. “I’ve spent a number of days deciding things for you and being wrong about most of them. You fed me. You flew a ship to rescue me. You built a lie from the truth and turned away a Grorn priest. You told me I wasn’t the only one who gets to choose.” His voice dropped. “So choose. What do you want, Amy?”

And the terrible thing was, she didn’t know.

She opened her mouth to answer and found nothing there. She stood on the edge of a mountain on an alien planet, with an alien warrior asking her what she wanted, and when she went looking inside herself for the answer, she found only the person who had spent four years wanting exactly one thing—not to be noticed.

“I don’t know,” she said, and it came out very small. “I haven’t let myself know. Do you understand? Wanting things—” She wrapped her arms around herself. “When they took me off Earth, I wanted to go home so badly I thought it would kill me. And it didn’t kill me, but the only way I got through it was to stop. To stop wanting to go home, to stop wanting my family, to stop wanting anything that wasn’t going to happen. If your wants are small enough, you can’t be disappointed. If your wants are small enough, nobody can take them from you.” Her throat closed. “I got really good at wanting nothing except to be invisible. It’s the only thing that kept me alive.”

He didn’t reach for her. His hands shifted because he wanted to, but he held still and let her have the space. Somehow that undid her more than an embrace would have.

“You’re not there anymore,” he said.

“I know.”

“Then want something.” Not a command, but an open door. “You don’t have to make yourself small anymore.”

She looked out at the valley, at the graves along the far wall going blue in the dusk, and thought about the father who’d crossed a galaxy for the woman he loved and died holding the line so a boy he never got to see grown could stand here safe. And she stopped protecting herself. She let the walls go and let herself actually look at what she’d been refusing to look at for four years. The answer was right there, whole and simple, like it had been waiting the whole time.

“A home,” she said, the word cracking. “I want a home. A real one. Not a locked room over somebody’s restaurant. My own—” She had to stop and breathe. “My own kitchen. Where I cook because I want to, not because it keeps me useful enough that nobody sells me. Where I make good food, food people come back for.” She could see it now, and once she could see it she couldn’t stop. “And people who know my name. People who know I’m Amy and who know what I am and don’t flinch. A place where I belong. A place where somebody notices when I don’t show up.” Her voice broke all the way. “A door I can open in the morning without putting on a disguise first. Where I can just open the door as myself and walk out into a place that’s mine.”

She was crying. She hadn’t cried in front of anyone in four years. She scrubbed at her face with the heel of her hand and made herself say the last of it, the part that scared her more than a Grorn priest, more than anything else.

“And you.” She looked up at him, and made herself hold his eyes. “Most of all, I want you. Not because you saved me. Not because I’d be safer with you than out there alone, although I would. I want you, Brannik. Your silence. Your terrible cooking. The way you put yourself between me and every stupid thing in the universe even when it’s just a squeaky hatch.” She took a breath that shook the whole way in. “I spent four years wanting nothing so nobody could take it. And I don’t want to do that anymore. I want to want things. And the thing I want most is you.”

He went very still.

She’d seen him still before, in the cell when she’d first come within arm’s reach, with the predator’s stillness that meant a body was gathering itself. This wasn’t that. This was the stillness of a male who’d stopped breathing. His silver eyes were fixed on her face and something moved behind them, something huge and slow, like a mountain deciding to shift.

For one horrible second she thought she’d got it wrong. That she’d wanted out loud, in front of him, the way she’d sworn she never would, and he was going to be kind about it, and kind would be the thing that finally broke her⁠—

He crossed the distance between them and pulled her into his arms.

Not gently. Not carefully, the way he handled her when he was frightened of his own strength. He gathered her up against the enormous warmth of him like he was afraid she’d change her mind, one huge hand splayed across her back and the other cradling the back of her head, and he bent down and put his face into her hair and held her so hard she could feel the shudder go through him.

“That,” he said, and his voice was rougher than she’d ever heard it, “is exactly what I want.”

She laughed and sobbed at once, muffled against his chest. “You didn’t even hear the kitchen part⁠—”

“I heard all of it.” He drew back just enough to look at her, and she saw that his own eyes were bright, the metal of them liquid in the last light. “A home. Your kitchen. A door you open as yourself.” His thumb moved along her cheekbone, wiping the tears away. “I haven’t had a home since I was eleven. I’ve been looking for something my whole life. I thought it was her. I thought if I found my mother I’d stop feeling alone.” His jaw worked. “I found her yesterday. But finding her wasn’t what made me stop feeling alone. Do you know when that happened?”

She shook her head, not trusting her voice.

“It happened in a cell, when you tore a strip off your own clothes to pad my chains so they’d stop cutting me.” His forehead came down against hers, huge and gentle. “I stopped being alone the day a frightened little human decided I was worth talking to. I just didn’t have the words for it yet.” His hand tightened at her back. “The home you want. The kitchen. The door. I want to be the one standing behind you when you open it. Every morning. For the rest of my life.”

Her heart cracked wide open, and everything she’d been holding back came pouring through the gap all at once.

“I love you,” she said. “Brannik. I love you.”

He made a sound she’d never heard from him—low and broken and wondering, more of a word than any growl he’d ever given her—and then he was kissing her, and there was nothing careful in it, nothing held back, no restraint remembered at the last second. He kissed her like a male who’d stopped speaking at eleven years old and had finally, finally found something worth saying everything for. He kissed her on the edge of a mountain with the blue graves glowing below and his mother’s people alive in the rock behind them and the whole safe empty sky spread out overhead.