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More than that, I need my true body back under sky, above root, and in cold air. Need the antlers to settle where they belong. Need the skull. Need the larger lungs and deeper balance and the way the full form lets my thoughts spread more cleanly through the bond.

Staying folded into this human shape too long feels like wearing a shirt that's been soaked through and dried stiff against the skin. Useful once. Uncomfortable now.

Lucas will understand that. He has gotten very good at understanding the difference between what I want and what I need, even when he doesn’t like either.

Before I move, I look around Lucas’s room properly.

At first, I only see human clutter. A shirt thrown over the back of a chair. Boots beside the wall. A trail map folded haphazardly on the dresser. A water glass with his fingerprints on it. Towels darkened by old blood, stacked in a basket because he has not had time or will to wash them yet. Then I see the herbs.

They are everywhere.

Yarrow bound in a strip of cloth on the bedside table. Plantain leaves drying near the window. Cedar tips in a chipped bowl beside a mug stained green-brown from steeping. Nettle hanging upside down from a cabinet knob where he must have forgotten it. A paste of crushed leaves under wax paper, smelling of forest medicine and Lucas’s impatient hands. There are roots too, cleaned and wrapped, some I know grow only near the second creek beyond his usual path. He must have found those while I slept.

No. The forest showed him.

The realization settles through me slowly, deep enough that I close my eyes.

While I lay here weak, while my bond flickered and my wounds tried to decide whether to close, the forest guided him. It opened little paths. It brought him yarrow and cedar and leaves for drawing heat from torn places. It kept him from the wrong lantern and then helped him heal me when I returned broken to his den.

I had thought of the cabin as the annoying den, the little human structure that stole him from the trees and kept him behind walls. Yet the forest reached through those walls for him. It trusted him with green things. It answered his fear with what his hands could use.

Aestrata’s world recognized my mate.

Pride moves through me first, then tenderness. Then shame, quieter but still there. He suffered because I left him without enough truth, but he healed me anyway.

Lucas shifts against me, his hand sliding over my ribs, fingers curling lightly as if some sleeping part of him is checking whether I am still there. The bond hums at the contact, warm now, no longer cold or locked away. I lower my mouth to his hair and breathe him in. Pine, sleep, skin, and smoke, but the sharp, clean edge of worry is not yet gone. Beneath it, my mark and the deeper scent of our sealed bond.

I kiss his temple. He stirs but does not wake. So, I kiss the corner of his eye next, then the bridge of his nose where ember-marks scatter over pale skin. His face scrunches faintly, and his hand tightens on me.

“Mm,” he hums, voice sleep-thick. “If the cabin’s on fire, let it burn.”

Amusement moves through me. Cold box might enjoy flames.

His eyes open a slit. “Don’t threaten my fridge before coffee.”

It still hums smugly.

“It keeps food from poisoning me.”

Barely.

He groans and tries to roll away, but I catch him by the waist and pull him back gently. He lets me, because his body still knows mine before his pride wakes fully. I softly kiss his mouth then, relearning the shape I thought I might never reach after the roots held me down in the deepwood. He exhales into it, tension slowly spilling from his shoulders, and the bond warms with his relief.

He is still afraid; so am I. But here, with his lips parting beneath mine and his fingers sliding up to the back of my neck, fear has room alongside wanting, and neither one needs to devour the other.

When I pull back, his eyes are open, green, and tired and tender enough to make my throat ache. “You’re really here,” he says, like he hates that he still has to check.

Here, I send, pressing my forehead to his. But I need the forest and my true shape. This body has held too long.

He wakes more fully at once. His gaze sharpens, moving over my face, my shoulders, the healing lines beneath my skin. “Are you hurtin’?”

Some. Not danger, just a cage feeling.

His mouth tightens, and his hand strokes down my chest as if soothing the body he can see while thinking of the one he cannot yet. “Okay. We’ll go.”

We.

The word pleases me more than it should.