Page 34 of Crash Landed with My Weredragon

"It has to be voluntary; it can't be forced." He tightened his arm around her. "I'm not asking you to choose right now."

"I'm not waiting. I decided when you tore through a collapsed corridor to save my people. I decided when Peter asked you to take care of me, and you said you would. I decided before any of this." She lifted her head and looked at him. "I choose you, and I choose the bond, and I choose whatever comes with it. Don't ask me again."

His expression contained everything: the boy with the whale movie, the prince with the children's book, the man who'd carried a bleeding human through his Colony because it was the right thing to do. All of it, collapsed into a single look of stunned, grateful, overwhelming love.

"I choose you too," he said.

The hum in her chest flared. Bright, warm, settled. Permanent.

They stayed in the pool until the water cooled enough to make her shiver. Then they climbed out and dried off with Dobromian textiles softer than anything on the Vulcana, and they dressed, and they walked through the Colony's corridors together. Not three paces apart. Side by side. The bond hummed between them like a frequency the universe had been waiting for someone to find.

* * *

The Colony was quiet in its night cycle as they walked. The bioluminescent panels dimmed to their sleeping rhythm; the corridors empty except for the occasional patrol of Weredragon guards who nodded to Toren and carefully did not look at Marina's hand in his.

"They're going to talk," Marina said.

"They're already talking. Twenty thousand people in an underground city; gossip moves faster than seismic waves."

"Faster than seismic waves. Is that a Dobromian expression?"

"It is now." He squeezed her hand. Through the bond, she felt a pulse of contentment so deep it made her chest ache. Not her ache, his. The ache of someone who'd been lonely for a very long time and who was only now realizing how lonely he'd been, because the loneliness had ended and the contrast was staggering.

"You were lonely," she said. Not a question. She could feel it through the connection. She could feel the shape of the loneliness, the years it had occupied and the space it had carved inside him.

"I was the prince of an underground kingdom who collected alien artifacts in a secret cave and watched movies about whales by himself. Yes, I was lonely." He said it without self-pity. Just a fact. "I had Auren. I had my father, in the way that a son has a king. I had duty and purpose and a planet to worry about. But I didn't have someone who," he paused, searching for the right words. "Someone who saw me the way you see me."

"How do I see you?"

"Like I'm interesting. Not because I'm a prince or a dragon or an alien. Interesting because of the way I think, the way I ask questions, the things I care about." His thumb traced a circle on the back of her hand. "Melessra sees my intellect. Auren sees my friendship. My father sees my potential. Khrelan sees my weakness. You see all of it. The whole thing. And you chose it anyway."

Marina stopped walking. They were in a corridor near the residential section, the bioluminescent light a soft violet that turned his scales to amethyst. She turned to face him and put both hands on his chest, feeling the dual heartbeat beneath her palms and the bond humming between them.

"I didn't choose you despite the whole thing," she said. "I chose you because of it. The whale movies and the terrible coffee tolerance and the way you carry bleeding men through collapsing corridors without complaining. The way you fought for the alliance when your own council called you compromised. The way you look at my planet's junk," she thought of the DVD, the earbuds, the children's book, “and see treasure."

"It is treasure."

"I know. That's what I mean. You see value where other people see garbage. You see connection where other people see difference. You've been doing it since you were twelve years old, and the fact that it took a crash landing on a desert planet for someone to notice is a failure of everyone who's ever known you, not a failure of yours."

He was quiet for a long moment. Through the bond, she felt something moving through him that was too big for words; a wave of emotion that was part gratitude, part grief for the lonely years, part joy, and part the devastating relief of being understood.

"You're going to make me cry," he said.

"Can Weredragons cry?"

"Not in the way humans do. We don't produce tears. But the emotion is the same. The feeling of something being too big for the body to hold."

"What do you do with it?"

"Usually, we fly. The sky is big enough to hold anything."

Marina looked at the corridor ceiling, that was solid stone, no sky, no room for flight. "We're underground."

"I know. So, instead of flying, I'm going to kiss you in this corridor and hope the surveillance nodes are pointing the other way."

"They're not. Athena told me the Colony has full coverage on the residential level."

"Then the night shift guards are about to have the most interesting surveillance report of their careers."