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IMMORTAL TENDENCIES (MORTAL FEARS)

kyryll flins x reader summary: time is only a commodity to the fae, which works well enough for keeping a three-hundred-year situationship at arm's length. but those who have it in abundance never learn to spend it, and when the world ends and it runs out at last, you can only mourn all that was squandered, and most of all, him notes: hurt/comfort, happy ending! wc 13.7k oops i got a bit carried away masterlist

There are certain things you can only understand, when you have lived too long.

Mortals, oh, those foolish mortals! They try to fathom eternity as a long, endless, winding road, one with no end, and no beginning, some infinitely white road extending from the bare tips of their feet to the red, gleaming sunset upon the false horizon, and perhaps that is so, for they have no other way to perceive it. To a mortal, one hundred years is a lifetime, and five hundred is history, times long gone and passed down from the dead to the living in broken snippets, as they attempt to piece together what remains of the old world. To the Fae, however, five hundred years is no history. No, to the Fae, five hundred years is merely a season of the mind. It is long enough to become bored with a song and forget that you once loved it, long enough to plant a tree and watch it become the landmark by which generations orient themselves, long enough to quarrel with someone and leave the quarrel unresolved because, naturally, there will be time to return to it. There is always another winter. Another ball. Another afternoon in which to finish the conversation you abandoned at breakfast. Another three hundred years in which to decide whether the blue dress was truly as beautiful as you thought it was when you bought it. Another thousand in which to tell someone you have loved them since you were both young and stupid and still believed that eternity meant you could never possibly run out of tomorrows.

You and Kyryll had been especially bad about this.

You had been Fae long enough to have made an art of postponement. There were books in your house that you had been meaning to read for two centuries. There was a letter from an old friend you had left unanswered for seventy years because you had been offended by the tone and then, after you were no longer offended, had become embarrassed by the length of the delay and therefore left it longer still. There had been a dress you purchased for the Belyi Tsar's winter court and wore twice before deciding that the sleeves were unflattering; you had spent another three hundred years insisting you still liked it because admitting you had changed your mind felt strangely like admitting that the girl who had chosen it was someone you had already become too distant from. You had once told Kyryll, with complete seriousness, that you needed another century to decide whether you actually liked a particular wine. He had stared at you over the rim of his glass and said, "You have been drinking it for eighty years." You had answered, "Exactly. I'm gathering evidence." He had laughed so hard that he had nearly spilled it, and neither of you had thought there was anything strange in the exchange.

That was how Fae life worked. You did not waste time so much as you ceased to recognize it as something that could be wasted. Time was the furniture of the world. It was simply there. It waited. It accumulated in corners. It belonged to you in the same unconscious way that the air belonged to you, and because it seemed inexhaustible, you became careless with it.

Especially with the things that frightened you.

Especially with the things that mattered.

Especially with him.

Kyryll Chudomirovich was perhaps an odd sixty or so years older than you, which in Fae years was the difference between hot and cold tea. He had grown, as had you, within the court of the Belyi Tsar, wherein Fae nobles lived and laughed and drank and indulged, as if it were their birthright to do so.

Certainly, it must have been, for nothing had ever told you otherwise – for life, long, eternal as you knew it – was nothing but balls, but dances, but operas and ballets and piano lessons by the hearth that you’d inevitably skip to smell the budding roses in the summer sun.

You had known him since before you had properly known yourself. This was not an exaggeration so much as a simple note of years — you could not locate, in the whole vast archive of your memory, a version of yourself that did not already contain him somewhere in it, the way a house contains its foundation, unremarkable because it had never once been absent. He had taught you to skip stones on the frozen lake behind the summer palace, badly, both of you, the ice too solid for the stones to do anything but bounce once and clatter uselessly across the surface, and you had laughed about it for a week. He had sat beside you through four different tutors, none of whom had managed to make either of you sit still for a proper history lesson, and had once, memorably, taken the blame for a broken vase that had, in fact, been entirely your doing, simply because he did not like watching you cry in front of the governess.

He was, you had decided very early and never once revised the opinion, the best thing the Belyi Tsar's court had ever produced, and this included the wine, which was considerable praise, given how much of your shared existence had been organized around the wine.

And yet — this is the part that shames you now, across the long cold distance of five hundred years — you never once told him so. Not because you did not wish to. Because there was no occasion grand enough, and because there was, you were certain, an endless supply of lesser occasions in which to practise before you attempted the grand one, and because a thing that is always available is a thing one never quite gets around to reaching for. You told other people. You told your mother, who did not wish to hear it. You told Yelena, who already knew. You told, on one regrettable and wine-soaked evening, a passing Countess who had insulted him and whom you wished to wound. You told everyone in the whole glittering hall except the one person the sentence belonged to, and you told yourself, each time, that you would tell him too — eventually, when the moment arranged itself more favourably, when you had thought of a way to say it that would not sound like weather.

The moment never arranged itself. Or rather — and this is the crueller truth, the one it took a ruined world to teach you — every moment was the moment, each equally and perfectly the moment, and their abundance was precisely what made each single one seem safe to squander. A rich woman does not trouble herself over a coin. She has drawers of them. She has never once seen the bottom of the drawer, and so she has come to believe, without ever framing the belief in words, that the drawer has no bottom, and a thing with no bottom cannot be emptied, and a thing that cannot be emptied does not need to be spent with care. It does not, she believes, need to be spent at all. It merely needs to be had.

So you had him, the way you had the time — completely, unconsciously, without ever once counting — and you did not spend a word of it, and you mistook the having for the keeping, which are not, it transpires, the same thing at all. No one tells you they are not the same thing. You are simply expected to know, and you do not know, and by the time you learn it the lesson is worth nothing, because the thing it concerned is already five hundred years gone.

But, before something is gone, it must be looked at, adored, known. Consider how he looked, before the world took him and gave him back to legend. It is the thing you guard most jealously and the thing that has cost you the most to guard, because every time you take it out to look at it, it wears a little smoother, a little vaguer at the edges, and you are afraid — this is the oldest fear you have now, older than grief, grief's grim grandfather — that one day you will lunge for the exact gold of his eyes and find only the word gold, the label where the thing itself used to be.

So, while it is still here, you will endeavor to be precise.

He was tall, and he held himself such as the statues before the Tsar, still, unmoving, with the knowledge that a court will slide off a man who does not move, the way water slides off stone. His hair was dark, near-black at points yet a lavender in others, and he wore it bound back in a style the younger lords had long abandoned, and you had seen it unbound only a handful of times across three centuries, and each of those times is a separate room in the house of your memory, and you visit them, and you dust them, and you keep them.

His hands were cool. Always. You did not understand it then — you would understand it only at the end of the world, when you learned what he truly was, what burned in him — but then you knew only that Kyryll Chudomirovich Flins ran cold, that his hands against your hand were the temperature of deep water or old silver, and that you found, perversely, that you liked it: that in an overheated hall, in the fever of candlelight and bodies and endless performance, the coolness of him was the most restful thing in any room, and that you contrived, more often than you ever admitted to yourself, to be near enough to feel it.

And his eyes were the wrong colour. That is how the court described them, when it described them at all — the wrong gold, pale and lamplike, warm and cold at once, unsettling to those who did not know him, a sheen that could almost be called menacing when paired with the soft smile he wore so sparingly. You had never once found them unsettling. You had found them, from the very first, the single most beautiful feature in any face you had ever studied, and you had studied a great many; you had spent three hundred years learning the moods of that gold, the way a sailor learns weather, and you could read in it things no one else at that court would ever be permitted to see. When he was amused, the gold warmed and the corner of his mouth did the small thing, the faint curve, that you spent your whole life learning to summon. When he was moved and did not wish it seen, the gold went very still, and his face held perfectly courtly, and only the eyes gave him away, and only to you. And when the thing neither of you named rose in him — the thing that lived beneath three hundred years of graceful deflection, avoidance, fear — the gold went dark at its centres, and you learned to recognize that darkening the way one learns to recognize the particular quiet before snow.

You think now, you have lost some of it, some of the sheen, some of the brownness in his centres, the exact shade they shone when he smiled as you complained of the ‘oppressive heels’ youd been so burdened with at some ball or the other. Yes, that is the true terror you have been circling all the while. Five hundred years of handling and you can no longer be entirely certain of the exact shade of that gold, whether grief has warmed it or cooled it in its keeping in the vast room you keep to remember him.

But you have not lost all of it. Not yet. And so, while some of it remains — spend it. For once in this long and squandering life, spend a thing before it is gone.

A night to spend, you think, and you think of cool snow pinking his nose. A winter it is, then.

It was winter, deep winter, the true dark of it, and the court had gathered at the Belyi Tsar's great hall for one of the endless balls that were the loom of that whole vanished age — and you had danced, because you always danced, because dancing was the shape of your temperament the way stillness was the shape of his. You had danced with lords and with the Tsar's own cousins and with a visiting dignitary from the eastern holdings who trod on your hem twice and apologized three times too many. And then, as you always did, at some point in the turning of the evening, you had drifted to the cold northern edge of the hall, to the pale pillar of blue ice where Kyryll stood, as he always stood, watching.

"You looked well out there," he said, when you arrived beside him, a little breathless. "For a woman being trodden on. The eastern gentleman dances like a man crossing ice he doesn't trust."

"You watched? I’d have thought you’d doze off by now, as you always do."

"I watch all of it. It's cheaper than the opera and the performances are often better." He handed you the glass of wine he had procured before you'd asked. "Here. Dancing with a man who can't dance is thirsty work."

"He could dance," you defended him, a little unnecessarily.

"He could move. There's a distinction,” he replied, and you could have sworn his eye gleamed. “I'll not press it; you're loyal to your partners, it's one of your worse habits." The faint curve. "Sit. Recover. You've the look of a woman who's been admired past the point of enjoyment."

You scoffed. "There's no such point."

"No," he agreed. "I don't suppose there is, for you. My mistake."

You had leaned against the cold pillar beside him and taken a sip of the wine he'd known you'd want, and felt the warmth that only ever came to you at his side.

"The eastern gentleman should be barred from all future balls," you said. "On grounds of crimes against my hem."

"A serious charge. I'll draft the decree tonight. Exile, or merely a stern letter?" The gold of his eyes had gone warm. "I'm feeling lenient. But say the word and it's exile. I've always wanted to exile someone before breakfast. It would make the whole day feel productive."

And the musicians had struck up the next figure, and a lord you could not refuse had appeared at your elbow to claim it, and the moment had folded shut, gently, the way they all did, and you had gone back into the bright churn with the wine still warm in you and the true thing unsaid, and thought: later. At the doors. In the low hour. There is time.

There was time. That was the thing. There was so much time. And you spent that particular night's allotment of it exactly as you spent every night's — lavishly, thoughtlessly, on everything except the one thing it was for.

He walked you to the doors at the end of that ball, as he did at the end of every ball, in the low blue hour when the hall had emptied and the musicians had packed away their instruments and the light in the high ice-vaults had sunk to its coldest and most honest. He offered you his arm. You took it — your hand at the crook of his elbow, the cool of him coming through the sleeve — and he walked you the long length of the emptying hall, unhurried, the two of you saying nothing much, the way you could only ever say nothing much with him, comfortably, the silence itself a kind of speech.

And at the great doors he stopped, and turned to you, and took your hand — lifted it, the way he always did, his cool fingers around yours — and pressed a kiss to the back of it.

That kiss is worth dwelling on, because it was the entirety of him that you have left, and because you have spent five hundred years trying to keep the exact feel of it and it is among the things time has worn thinnest, and you dread the day you reach for it and find nothing.

His lips were cool. Of course they were; all of him was cool. And the kiss was unhurried — he never hurried it, never made it perfunctory, never let it become the mere courtesy it was disguised as — and it lasted a single heartbeat longer than courtesy allowed, and never, in three hundred years, a heartbeat longer than that. Exactly one heartbeat too long. Calibrated, you understood even then, to the finest possible degree — long enough to say this is not nothing, this is not the courtesy it resembles, I am telling you something, and short enough to be deniable, retrievable, safe, so that if you did not answer it he could pretend it had been only manners after all. Three hundred years of everything unsaid, pressed into the back of your hand by a cool mouth for the space of one beat too long, and then withdrawn, before it could commit either of you to anything.

"Until the next," he said. The Fae farewell. The graceful wager. The lie you did not yet know was a lie.

"Until the next," you answered.

And you had gone out into the winter dark with the ghost of his cool mouth on the back of your hand, and it had lasted you — that small warmth that was not even warmth, that cool small nothing — until the next ball, and the next, across three hundred years of nexts, each one so reliably following the last that you never once, not for a single instant, thought to wonder what you would do if a next simply failed to come.

You have pressed the back of your own hand to your own mouth a great many times, across five hundred years, in the dark of a great many cold and borrowed rooms, trying to summon a kiss that was meant to last only until the following ball. It is a poor substitute, your own mouth. It has always been a poor substitute. But it is the only one that you have been left with, and you have learned to make do, because that is the one skill the long life reliably teaches: how to make do with poor substitutes for irreplaceable things.

You would think, in three hundred years of too long touches, and held out wines, something might give. Somehow, some way, through some means or the other, it would break, and the next would become now, and every almost would immediately fall into an absolutely.

But, of course, that would be giving you both far too much courage, and far too much credit.

It was not that you loved him a little; you loved him past all reckoning, and he loved you the same, and everyone who saw the two of you knew it, and your mother knew it, and Yelena knew it, and the whole court had known it for so long that it had stopped being gossip and become simply a fact of the landscape, like the ice-spires or the northern lights. And yet, across three hundred years of that vast mutual undeniable love, the sum total of what passed between you, in the flesh, was: a hand at your waist to steady you on a step. A leaf drawn from your hair. A single kiss, each night, to the back of a gloved hand, one heartbeat too long. Fingers that grazed the shell of your ear, once, tucking a flower there. A dance, once, in an empty gallery, to a music-box no one else would ever hear.

That was all. Three hundred years, and that was all, and each of those small touches was a monument, each one so rare and so charged that you can still, five hundred years later, place every one of them in the exact room where it happened, the exact quality of the light, the exact catch of your own breath.

You suppose you must be thankful, in a way. Scarcity makes a feast of crumbs. You did not touch him, and so every accidental brush of his cool hand against yours was an event you turned over for weeks. He did not touch you, and so the once he steadied you on the library step became a thing you could summon, in the dark, at will, for centuries — the precise pressure of his hands at your waist, the cool of them through the silk, the heartbeat he let them stay past the necessity of the steadying. You built cathedrals out of the smallest materials because the smallest materials were all you would allow yourselves, and the cathedrals were real, they were vast and real and you lived in them — but they were made of crumbs, and in the five hundred years since you mourn that while you subsist on those crumbs, the simpel and utter truth was that you could have had the feast. That it was there, the whole time, on the table between you, and you both sat before it starving, out of a politeness so deep it had become a kind of illness, saying later, there is time, one does not simply reach out and take.

You could have simply reached out and taken. He would have let you, you’re sure. You know now — you knew then, if you had let yourself know it — that Kyryll would have let you take his cool hand and hold it, for no reason, on any of ten thousand nights, and would have died of gratitude for it, and never once asked you to explain. And you did not. And he did not reach for you either, because he was exactly as afraid as you were, and because he loved you too well to force a thing you had not asked for, and so the two of you sat at your feast of crumbs for three hundred years, each one certain that the reaching-out could wait, that the feast was not going anywhere, that there would always, always be another night in which to finally be brave enough to eat.

Your mother saw it, of course. Mothers do; it is their terrible art.

She found you one morning in the small parlour, after one of the late nights, and she did not scold — she had given up scolding, she had exhausted its uses years before — and instead she sat across from you and folded her hands in the deliberate way that meant she considered the conversation a trial, and she looked at you for a long moment before she spoke, and when she spoke her voice was gentle, which was worse, because you had a lifetime's armour against her sharpness and none at all against her tenderness.

"You came home in the low hour again," she said.

“I suppose I have,” you reply, evasive, and uncertain.

“With dear Kyryll, I assume?”

You startle. “Mama— “

“It is always that look you wear, that is the tell. It is a very particular look — half lit up, half bruised, the look of a woman who has spent an evening standing very close to a fire she will not let herself sit down beside." A pause. "How long, my darling? How long do you intend to stand beside the fire and not sit down?"

"I don't know what you mean."

"You know precisely what I mean, and it insults us both when you pretend otherwise, so let me be plain, since one of us in this family ought to be capable of it." Her eyes had been unusually soft. "You love him. You have loved him since before you were properly yourself — I have watched it since you were both children skipping stones on the frozen lake, badly, and laughing about it for a week. And he loves you; do not trouble to deny it on his behalf; I have watched him watch you across three centuries and I have never once, in all my years, seen anyone watch anything the way that cold gentleman watches you. And the two of you have taken the largest love I have ever witnessed and you have, what? Parked it. Set it aside. Called it friendship and courtesy and having time. And it is none of those things. It is fear, my darling, dressed in its very best clothes, and you have both been so well brought up that you have mistaken the clothes for the thing."

"There is time," you said, urgently, flushing. "Mother — we are Fae. We have forever. What is the hurry? Why must a thing be seized this instant, when there are a thousand instants coming just like it? We are not humans, snatching at their little hours—"

"I thought so too," your mother said, "about your father."

And you had gone still, because she never spoke of your father.

"I loved him carelessly," she said, and her voice had changed, gone somewhere old and worn. "Certain there was always more of him arriving on the next tide. I saved the important things — the plain things, the ones that frighten you to say — for a better occasion, because the occasions were infinite, and one does not spend one's best wine on a Tuesday. And then there was a quarrel, an ordinary quarrel, the kind we had had a hundred times and always mended, and we left it unmended because there would be time to mend it, there was always time — and the time did not come. He went east, and the world turned, and it has been eight hundred years, and I have never seen him again, and the last thing I ever said to him was sharp, and the true things I was saving for a better occasion are still here, my darling, still in me, unsaid, eight hundred years unsaid, with no one left to say them to." She reached across and took your hands, and her cool fingers were trembling, very slightly, which you had never once seen. "There is no better occasion. That is the whole of what I know, the only wisdom I have to leave you. The ordinary occasions are the only occasions there are. The infinite supply is the lie the long life tells you, to keep you from the terror of spending — and you mustn’t believe it, you must spend, you must say the plain thing on the ordinary Tuesday, because the grand occasion you are saving it for does not exist, and while you wait for it the ordinary Tuesdays are running out, one at a time, though they feel infinite, though they always feel infinite, right up until the afternoon they do not."

You had listened. You had very nearly heard.

But you are a fool, and a coward, and this — this is that which is hardest to forgive yourself, harder even than the rest — you had put even that away. Even your mother's grief. Even her hands trembling in yours. Even the plain unbearable warning delivered by a woman who had lived the exact catastrophe she was trying to spare you. You filed it under the great heading beneath which you filed everything that frightened you — later, there is time, she is being dramatic, the old are dramatic, there is time — and you had kissed her cheek, and gone up to dress, and gone that very evening to a ball, and stood beside the fire again, and not sat down.

After all, you were only several hundred young then, and you were certain. Because you had, you believed, forever. Because the one thing the long life had never taught you, the one thing it had in fact conspired at every turn to hide from you, was the thing your mother had crossed her own grief to tell you, and you were not able to hear it, and you would not be able to hear it until it was five hundred years too late to be of any use at all.

The moments you keep within the rooms of your memories are large, and the moments themselves sparse — you still loathe to spent, but you spend once again, and remember here, not the pinked nose or snow upon his violet hair, but instead the suns warmth upon his pale skin and how, you thought in the light, his eyes looked like they blazed with the light of a thousand flaming suns. Here, and spend the summer, before the fire. You should have one whole summer of him, kept entire, before the cold part.

The court removed to the summer palace by the lake, as it did each year, when the brief extravagant northern summer softened even Snezhnaya into something gold and green and forgiving. The rhythm of your lives loosened. The balls gave way to long idle afternoons, to picnics on the shore, to boats on the lake and music drifting from open windows and the particular indolence of immortals with nothing to do and all the time in the world to do it in. And in the summers, always, you and Kyryll fell into the older, easier shape of yourselves — the children who had skipped stones on that same lake, before the court had taught you both to armour everything in grace.

There was an afternoon. You have kept it safely, well, barely used. It is one of the only whole ones you have left.

You had gone down to the lake alone, in the gold of a late afternoon, and found him already there — not doing anything, in the way that only he could do nothing, standing at the water's edge with his coat off and his sleeves turned back, watching the light lie long and molten across the water. You had come to stand beside him, and picked up a flat stone from the shingle, and thrown it, and it had skipped — twice, three times, four — across the still gold water, and he had watched it go with an expression of mild affront.

"You've improved," he said. "That's unfair.”

“My apologies.”

“We were meant to be equally bad at this. It was the one thing we could reliably be bad at together. It was practically the foundation of the friendship. And now you go and skip a stone four times, and where does that leave me? Bereft. Outclassed. The lesser stone-skipper of the pair, after three hundred years of comfortable parity."

"I practised."

"You practised." He said it as though you had confessed to a crime. "In secret. For — how long? Don't tell me. I don't wish to know the scale of the betrayal. All these years I have believed we were united in our incompetence, two lords of the court who could do a great many elegant things and not, either of us, skip a common stone — and the whole time you were down here, practising, planning this moment of humiliation—"

"My goodness, Kyryll.” It was getting harder to hide your grin now. “It wasn't planned. And it was only a few decades of practice, truly. Off and on. When I couldn't sleep."

"A few decades." But the faint curve had come, and the affront was a costume, and you both knew it. He bent, and selected a stone with enormous and theatrical care, weighing several before he chose, and drew back his arm, and threw it — and it sank, instantly, with a single unlovely plunk, not a skip in it. He regarded the spot where it had vanished with great sadness. "Some things do not improve with three hundred years. It's rather comforting, I find. A stone I cannot skip. A fixed point. In a world of alarming change — you, practising in secret, becoming competent behind my back — it is good to know that I remain reliably unable to skip a stone."

You had laughed — the real one, the one only he reliably drew out of you — and picked up another stone and pressed it into his cool hand and closed his cool fingers around it with your warm ones, and stood behind him, and taken his arm to show him, your hand over his hand, guiding the throw. And you had both gone very still.

It was such a small thing. Your hand over his hand. The cool of him beneath your palm, the summer warmth of you above it. His breath, you noticed — you were close enough to notice — had gone shallow, and careful, and quiet. And you had felt, standing there, your hand over his, closer to him than the arm's length ever permitted, the whole enormous unspoken thing rise up between you in the gold summer light, and for a moment neither of you had moved, and the lake had lain still and molten before you, and the plain word had been right there, right at the surface, closer than it had ever been—

"Like this," you had said, softly, and moved his arm through the motion, your hand over his, your breath at his shoulder. "You have to let it go flat. And low. You're throwing it like you're trying to hurt the water. You have to throw it like — like you trust it to catch you. Throw it low and flat and you trust the water to hold it up."

"I've never been good at trusting things to hold me up," he said, very quietly, and it was not about the stone, and you both knew it was not about the stone, and his cool hand had turned, slightly, beneath yours — not pulling away, the opposite of pulling away, a small helpless turning toward — and for one suspended golden instant his fingers had almost, almost laced through yours—

And a shout had come from up the shore — the court, spilling down to the water, someone calling your name, a picnic, a boat, a dozen bright immortals descending on the private gold afternoon — and his hand had gone still beneath yours, and then you had both released, and stepped apart, and restored the arm's length, and by the time the court arrived you were two friends skipping stones on a summer shore, and nothing had happened, and everything had, and the plain word had folded itself away again, unspent, one shout too soon.

"You'll show me again sometime," he said, lightly, as the court swept down. " I'm a slow study, I’m afraid. It may take another few centuries of instruction before I master it. You'll have to be patient with me."

"I have time," you said. "I'm very patient."

"Yes," said Kyryll, and looked at you, one last unguarded look before the court reached you and the costumes went back on. "Yes. We have all the time in the world, you and I."

You have that afternoon. The gold water, the sunk stone, your hand over his cool hand, his breath gone shallow at your shoulder, I've never been good at trusting things to hold me up. You take it out, across the five hundred years, and you turn it over, and you grieve the fingers that almost laced through yours and did not, because a shout came, because there would be another afternoon, because you had all the time in the world and were made of it and could not conceive, in the gold of that summer, that you were even then spending one of a finite and dwindling number of afternoons, and that you would run out of them, and that when you did you would have given anything — the whole of your endless life — to stand once more at that gold water with your hand over his cool hand and, this time, let his fingers lace through yours, and say the word, and not care who was coming down the shore.

There was, near the end of the old world, a night you came the closest. Every long silence has one, the single evening on which the whole thing very nearly, finally, tipped over into speech, and this was yours, and you take it out more than any of the others, and you have worn it thinnest of all with the handling, a thin you fear but cannot let go of.

It was late autumn, the last autumn, though you did not know it for the last; you never know which one is the last. There had been a ball, and it had wound down to its low blue hour, and the hall had emptied, and you had not gone to the doors — you had lingered, the two of you, at the cold pillar, longer than usual, later than usual, in the deep quiet of a hall gone almost entirely dark, only the last blue light in the high vaults and the two of you beneath it.

And you had been talking — about nothing, about everything, in the sidelong way — and you had turned to answer something he'd said, and found him nearer than you had thought, much nearer, and the answer had gone entirely out of your head.

He did not move away.

In three hundred years, at every one of these near-moments, one of you had always moved away — a step, a joke, a subject changed, the arm's length restored — and it had always been done so smoothly, by whichever of you did it, that you could never tell afterward which of you had flinched first. But that night, in the dark and empty hall, neither of you moved. You stood in the last blue light nearer than the arm's length, near enough to feel the cool coming off him, near enough to see the gold of his eyes go dark at their centres — the darkening you had learned to read, the quiet before snow — and the hall was empty, and the music was long done, and there was no lord coming to claim you, no shout down the shore, no interruption anywhere in the whole dark hall, nothing at all between the two of you and the plain word but the two of you.

His hand rose.

You watched it rise — his cool pale hand, lifting between you in the dark — and this time there was no leaf to draw from your hair, no flower to tuck, no stumble to steady, no excuse of any kind, nothing to disguise it as, and his cool fingers came to rest against the side of your face, at your cheek, unbearably light, and his thumb moved, once, along the line of your cheekbone, and you did not breathe, you did not dare breathe, three hundred years and his hand was against your face for no reason at all, for the only reason, and his gold eyes held yours in the dark and the plain thing was rising in him, you could see it rising, all the graceful deflection burning away, and his mouth parted, and he was going to say it, at last, here, now, in the empty hall—

"Kyryll," you breathed.

And you felt him tremble — you were near enough to feel it, the fine tremor that went through his cool hand where it lay against your face — and you saw him at the very brink of it, the plain word, the thing, right there, one breath from spoken—

And then you saw him choose not to.

Saw the word, the speech, the break of silence rise all the way to the surface of him and saw him, at the final instant, close his hand over it and put it away, gently, the way he put everything away, because he was as afraid as you were, because three hundred years of safe grammar had trained the courage out of you both, because to say it plainly was to make it real and to make it real was to make it a thing that could be lost, and he had spent a thousand years at the edge of endings and could not bear, could not bring himself, to hand the world one more precious thing to break.

"You have an eyelash," he said. Very softly. His thumb moved, once more, along your cheekbone, and lifted away — and there it was, on the pad of his cool finger, a single dark lash, this small curved nothing he had manufactured, out of the very brink of the plain word, to give himself a reason to have touched your face that asked nothing of either of you. "Here. It had fallen. I couldn't in good conscience leave it." The faint curve, back in place, but shaking at the edges. "Make a wish. It's the mortal custom, I'm told. Something so small it might carry a wish worth making. Go on."

You had looked at the eyelash on his fingertip. You had looked at him — at the wrong-gold eyes, at the faint curve shaking at its edges, at the fear he had chosen, the same fear you would have chosen, the same fear you had chosen, a thousand times, at a thousand brinks. And you had understood, in that dark and empty hall, that the two of you were never going to say it. That you would go on like this forever — three hundred years and three hundred more and three thousand — coming to the brink and manufacturing eyelashes, drawing leaves from hair, sinking stones, saying until the next,loving each other in every language but the one that would cost you something, because you had forever, and forever was precisely the thing that made you cowards, forever was the great soft endless excuse, there is always another brink, wish on this one and save the plain word for a braver night.

"I've wished," you said, and leaned in — close, close, your face near his cool hand — and blew the eyelash from his fingertip, your breath crossing his skin, close enough that you felt his composure waver, once, at the nearness of you, before it held.

"I hope it comes true," said Kyryll.

And you had heard, underneath the courtesy, in the language only the two of you spoke, exactly what he meant, which was: I know what you wished for. I wished for it too. I have wished for it for three hundred years and never once had the courage to spend the wish aloud, and neither have you, and here we are, two of the oldest and cleverest creatures in all of Snezhnaya, wishing on an eyelash in an empty hall because we cannot, either of us, simply say the thing. And you had heard all of it, and answered none of it, and gone home beneath the late-autumn stars with the wish unsaid and the eyelash gone on your own breath and three hundred years of the arm's length still, deliberately, uncrossed.

There would be another eyelash, you told yourself. There would always be another eyelash.

There were no more eyelashes. That was the last of the brinks. The sky broke before the winter was out, and you never stood in that hall again, and the plain word you had wished and not said in the dark went with the whole old world into the fire, unspoken, one manufactured eyelash too soon.

The Cataclysm came in the spring, on an ordinary afternoon, and the largest things never announce themselves, and so it did not.

But you will not allow yourself to stay, to bask in memory of the whole of it. Some things resist their own telling, and the end of a world is the chief of them, and to find the graceful words for it would be a second betrayal of the first. You will tell only this: that the sky over Snezhnaya, which had held since before your grandmother's grandmother, broke like a dropped glass — and the Belyi Tsar, the fixed point of the world, the foundation beneath every other foundation, was in the span of a single afternoon simply gone — and out of the wound in the sky came the Abyss, the older and colder dark, and the whole glittering eternal indulgent world in which you had spent centuries loving him a crumb at a time began, quietly and then all at once, not to end but to be unmade, which is a worse thing than ending, and longer.

And your first thought — before your house, before your mother, before your own imperilled life — your first and only clear thought in the whole cold reeling ruin of that afternoon, was his name.

You went to find him.

Of course you went to find him. Your feet had known the way to his side since you were a child skipping stones; they did not require your permission now, at the end of things, to carry you there one final time. You found him in a corridor of the palace gone strange and echoing with the sound of a court in flight — doors thrown open, servants carrying boxes they could scarcely lift, voices calling names from one end of the gallery to the other, the enormous windows trembling faintly in their frames — and he was not composed. Kyryll Chudomirovich Flins, who had built his entire self out of composure the way other men build houses out of stone, stood in that corridor with his composure scattered around him on the floor, one glove missing, his coat half-fastened, dark hair fallen loose at his temple, and when he saw you, something in his face broke further open, with what you understood even then, even in the horror, to be relief — pure, undisguised, undefended relief, the mask entirely gone.

"Thank the Tsar." The words escaped him before anything else, and for a moment he simply stared at you, his chest rising too quickly beneath his coat. Then he crossed the corridor toward you, catching your hands in his as though he needed the physical certainty of you beneath his fingers. "You are safe."

"I came to find you."

"I know." His fingers tightened around yours, and the brief, almost disbelieving smile that touched his mouth was so unlike the man who had been standing there moments before that your heart hurt at the sight of it. "I had hoped you would."

You stared at him, this stranger wearing Kyryll's face — hair loose, glove missing, some essential seam of him come undone — and could not, for a moment, make the two versions of him meet in your mind: the man who had never once, in three centuries, let you see him afraid, and the man standing in front of you now, plainly, helplessly glad only to find you breathing.

The corridor answered for you before you could. Somewhere behind him a door slammed against a wall, and a voice — a steward's, you thought, gone ragged past all training — shouted that the eastern passage had been breached, and the word rippled backward through the fleeing court like something physical, a current you felt pass through your own body even as it passed him by.

Kyryll's eyes flicked toward the sound, then immediately returned to you, as though the shout had not happened at all, as though nothing beyond the small space between your two bodies had any claim on him yet. "Listen to me. You cannot stay here."

"Neither can you."

"No." He glanced down at your joined hands, and when he looked back at you there was already something final in his expression, something that had arrived and settled before he'd said a word of it. "I cannot."

You understood before he said it.

"They've called you."

His jaw tightened, and for a moment he looked past you, down the length of the corridor, toward wherever it was that would take him.

"Yes."

"To the front."

"Yes."

The answer came quietly. He seemed to hate that quietness, as though every calm syllable were another betrayal of what was happening around him. He lifted one hand and pushed the loose strand of hair away from his face, then looked toward the windows, where the sky beyond the palace was no longer a sky at all.

"I have to go," he said. "There are still people there. The fighting has reached the northern routes. If the line breaks, it will come through here."

"You could stay."

His eyes returned to yours, and something in them made you wish, instantly, that you could take the words back.

You had not meant for them to sound like pleading.

They did anyway. You heard it happen in your own voice even as it left you, and you watched it hit him like a bruise, watched something behind his careful eyes come loose at the sound of it.

"My lady."

You hated the title when he said it like that. It was a court word, a formal word, a word for keeping distance, and he had never once in three hundred years used it to keep distance from you before now.

"Do not."

His thumb moved unconsciously across the back of your hand, an old gesture, something he had done hundreds of times without either of you thinking about it. Now, you felt every movement of it, as though your skin had only just learned how to notice him.

"I am not asking you to understand," he said.

"I do understand."

"No." There was no sharpness in his voice, only a tired gentleness that somehow made it worse. "You understand why I must go. That is not the same thing."

You looked at him. Around you the corridor kept emptying — a family hurrying past with their arms full, a woman's voice calling a child's name twice, three times — but for a moment the sounds of the palace seemed to recede, folding themselves somewhere far away, as though the centuries behind you had gathered here to watch the two of you and had asked the rest of the world to be quiet while they did.

"Will you come back?"

You could have cringed at the hope, the innocence, the naivete tingeing your voice. You were no fool, not one to be ignorant of the realism of war, of death, of blood, of cruelty. You were Fae after all, and bloodshed followed the Fae like a hound to the grave, yet — yet, still, despite your lessons, your spars, your understanding of such things — you couldn’t help but not regret that plea.

Kyryll's expression changed.

It was so slight that another person might not have seen it. His eyes lowered for an instant. His mouth tightened. When he looked at you again, he had put the courtly composure back into his face, but you had known him too long to be deceived by it, you had watched him build that same face for kings and rivals and men who wished him ill, and you knew exactly what it cost him to wear it now, for you.

"I intend to."

"That is not what I asked."

"I know."

You swallowed. Somewhere down the corridor, glass broke — a window, or something dropped and left — and neither of you turned toward the sound.

"Will you come back?"

He was silent for several seconds, long enough that you felt the question sitting between you like something with weight.

Then he lifted your hand and pressed his lips to your knuckles.

The gesture belonged to another world. To candlelit halls and dancing courts, to evenings when the worst thing either of you had to fear was saying the wrong thing to the wrong nobleman. Yet there was nothing ceremonial in it now. His lips lingered against your skin, and when he lowered your hand, his fingers did not immediately release it.

"I shall do everything within my power to return to you," he said.

You stared at him.

"That is still not an answer."

A faint, pained smile touched his mouth.

"No," he admitted. "It is the only honest one I can give you."

Your eyes burned.

"You always have an answer."

"Usually."

"You always know what to say."

"Usually."

"You always know what happens next."

Something in him finally gave.

His gaze fell.

"I don't."

You went very still, the words landing somewhere beneath your ribs before your mind had caught up to them, and you felt your eyes scream as if firewater had been splashed upon their corneas.

He breathed out slowly, and when he spoke again the words were quieter, as though he were confessing something he had not planned to.

"I don't know what happens next."

You shook your head, almost angrily, because the admission frightened you more than anything else he could have said.

"You must."

"I assure you, I would prefer to."

"Kyryll."

"I would prefer to have some elegant assurance prepared for you." His smile was brittle now, his old humor appearing only because he had no other defense left, the last coin in an emptied purse. "Something suitably reassuring. Something you could repeat to yourself while you waited for me and believed me."

His eyes met yours.

"I have nothing."

You felt your fingers tighten around his, as though you could hold the words back in him by force.

"You have to give me something."

"I am trying."

"Try harder."

A breath of laughter escaped him, but it broke almost immediately, cracking somewhere in the middle the way a held note cracks.

"I have never been accused of insufficient effort by you before."

"Then I am accusing you now."

"I see."

He looked at you for a long moment, and the faint smile disappeared, and behind him the corridor kept thinning — fewer voices now, fewer footsteps — as though the palace itself were slowly emptying around the small, unmoving center the two of you had made of yourselves.

"I am afraid."

The words were almost inaudible.

You had never heard him say them. Not in all the years. Not once — not when you were children and the tutors despaired of him, not when he'd ridden out against the border raiders at nineteen, not in any of the small battles and smaller griefs that three centuries had handed him. Whatever else Kyryll Chudomirovich Flins had been to you, he had never once been afraid where you could see it.

Your breath caught.

He looked away, toward the corridor, toward the world that was demanding him from you.

"I am afraid I will not come back," he said. "There. Is that sufficiently honest?"

His voice softened further, and when he looked at you again there was something almost apologetic in it, as though the fear itself were a discourtesy he owed you an debt for.

"And I am afraid that if I tell you that, you will be frightened too."

You looked at him through the tears beginning to gather in your eyes.

"I am already frightened."

"I know."

"I don't want you to go."

His eyes closed.

For one terrible moment he looked very young.

Not the elegant gentleman of the court, not the composed nobleman who could enter a room and make everyone else remember their manners simply by being there, but the boy you had once known, before either of you had understood that the world could actually take things away.

When he opened his eyes again, he reached for your face.

His palm rested against your cheek.

"You must go with your family."

"I know."

"Do not argue with them."

"I make no promises."

A tiny smile appeared, breaking through despite everything, and for just a moment the corridor and the sky and the whole unmaking world fell away and it was only the two of you, the way it had so often been.

"There you are."

You almost laughed.

Instead, you caught his wrist and held it against your cheek.

"Come back."

"I shall try."

"Don't try."

His eyes searched yours.

"Then what would you have me do?"

"Come back."

For a moment he simply looked at you.

Then his thumb brushed beneath your eye, catching the tear before it could fall.

"Very well," he whispered. "I shall."

The corridor was filling. You could feel it, the little time, running out even as you stood in it — the fleeing court, your own name already being called somewhere behind you by someone who would drag you toward the boats, toward the south, toward five hundred years you did not yet know were coming. So little time, after so much of it. After centuries of surplus, of squandered abundance, of eyelashes and stones and until the next and there is always another — now, at the very last, when there was almost none left, you reached, finally, at the end of the world, for the plain thing.

You reached up, through the ruin, and you did the thing three hundred years had taught your hands to do in place of the thing your mouth could not — you moved a strand of his dark hair, come loose in the chaos, back from his face, your fingers at his cheek, and felt him go utterly still beneath the touch, the whole reeling ruin of him stopping for the length of that small gesture, and you looked into the wrong-gold eyes you had loved since before you were properly yourself and you opened your mouth, at last, to say it — plainly, the mortal way, now, in the only time remaining—

And the hand closed on your arm. Your cousin. Your name in her mouth. We have to go, we have to go now, the boats won't wait—

And the plain word, the one plain word, the thing you had spent three hundred years and a bottomless purse of moments failing to say and were, at the very last, finally ready to spend — it was taken from you, again, once more, one final time, by the noise of a world too loud with its own ending to permit you that single quiet word.

"Until," you said. Because it was the only word you had. Because three hundred years had left you no other. Because even then, even there, some idiot immortal part of you still believed in the wager, still could not fully conceive that this next might be the next that failed to come. "Kyryll — until. Do you hear me? Until the next. You are not permitted to make a liar of me. You come back. You find me. You collect it. Do you hear? Until."

And he had looked at you, across the widening space as you were pulled away — and you saw him understand what you were truly saying, saw him hear the whole of it under the single broken word, three hundred years of everything unsaid arriving all at once in the one syllable your cowardice had left you — and something in the ruin of his face steadied, gentled, became, impossibly, almost the old faint curve.

"Until," he agreed. And then he lifted one hand — not a wave; something gentler and more terrible than a wave — and across the noise and the widening dark and the fleeing crowd he shaped, with that cool mouth, silently, unmistakably, the plain word he had never once said aloud in three hundred years of loving you a crumb at a time —

And you could not hear it, because there was nothing to hear; he shaped it in silence, gave it to you with his mouth and no voice, the way you give a thing to someone already too far away for sound — and you have spent five hundred years certain of what it was and unable, entirely, to prove it, and it is the last thing, the very last thing, the shape of his cool mouth making the word he had saved for three hundred years and spent, at last, in silence, across a distance you could not cross, in the last instant you ever saw his face.

Then the corridor turned, and the crowd swept you on, and he was gone.

He did not die. You must not comfort yourself that he died; grief prefers clean things, and he was not granted a clean thing.

He survived. He held whatever line there was to hold, and fought, and became in the fighting the thing legend would remember when it had forgotten everything else about him — the Lantern Fae, a blue flame in the dark of the Cataclysm, standing between the Abyss and the helpless, buying the fleeing their moments with a light that would not go out. A hero of a fallen age. A legend.

You did not want a legend. You wanted the man in the corridor, the man at the pillar, the cool kiss on the back of a hand one heartbeat too long, the breath gone shallow at a gold summer lake. And the world, in its ending, took that man and made him into a story, which is the cruelest exchange there is — a story is a cold thing to hold in the dark, a cold thing to press to your own mouth, a cold and worthless coin against the loss of the true and warm and irreplaceable thing.

And when it was over — when the fire had guttered and the Abyss had withdrawn and the long grey business of after had begun — Kyryll Chudomirovich Flins was left standing in the ash of everything he had failed to save, hollowed past what even the Fae can bear. He had lost the court, the Tsar, the whole old world. And he had lost you — another face swallowed by the fleeing south, another name for the uncountable list of the gone, because he did not know that you had lived, any more than you knew that he had. And so this gentle, courteous, devastated creature, who had spent a thousand years learning the exact weight of an ending and had just been made to carry the largest ending there had ever been, did the only thing left to a being who cannot die and cannot bear to live: he went to the cold far edge of the north, to a lonely isle, and with his own hands he built a tomb — a memorial, a graveyard, for all the dead he had been unable to save — and he lay down in it, and he folded the whole of himself into a single blue flame, and he slept.

Five hundred years, he slept. And you wandered. And neither of you knew the other lived, which is the grief that has no name in any mortal tongue, because no mortal lives long enough to lose someone to five hundred years of nothing but not-knowing — to build a whole second self around an absence that was never, the entire time, truly absence at all, but only distance, and ignorance, and the failure of a single word to travel.

Here is what the five hundred years did, that you did not know time could do, and that is the true terror underneath all the others.

It was not only that you had failed to say the word. It was that, across the five centuries, you began — slowly, without permission, coin by coin in the dark — to lose him. To lose the having of him that you had mistaken, all along, for keeping. The exact gold of his eyes went uncertain at the edges. The precise cool weight of his mouth on the back of your hand wore thin under five hundred years of your own hand pressed to your own lips, trying to summon it. The faint curve you had spent three centuries learning to draw out of him — you found, taking it out one cold night in some indifferent country, that you could no longer be entirely sure you remembered it true, whether the grief had sweetened it or sharpened it or bent it into some shape the real Kyryll had never worn. The private dictionary of his tells, that you had once read as fluently as your own name — you found, reaching for it, that you had forgotten what a certain type of stillness of his had meant, and could not recover it, and sat in the dark with a whole vocabulary of him crumbling in your hands.

Oh, those mortals! They had been right, with their fear of time, of death, their lifetime of a century and loves of a week. Those mortals feared time, feared eternity so greatly, they would have rather lived in the present, and in the end, you were the foolish fae left in the past. That is the thing too much time does that no one warns you of. It does not only steal the moments you failed to spend. It comes back, patient and merciless, and steals the memory of the moments you did — so that a woman who wasted three hundred years failing to say a single word may find herself, five hundred years on, no longer able to perfectly recall the face of the man she failed to say it to, and terrified past all bearing that she has left it too late even to remember him properly, let alone to have loved him in time.

And so when the rumour reached you — at the frozen edge of the north, in the course of one more anonymous life, a lightkeeper on a lonely isle, a graveyard, a flame that burned the wrong blue in a high window, a flame that had been out there longer than anyone living could account for — the terror that drove you to your feet was not only that he might be dead, or changed, or a stranger. It was that you would cross the last cold water and climb the black rocks and stand before Kyryll Chudomirovich Flins and not be certain, because you no longer perfectly remembered the him you were meant to be certain against — that five hundred years had emptied your archive so thoroughly that you might meet the love of your endless life and fail, at the last, to know him.

You crossed the water anyway. There was never, in all your long and squandering life, anything else to do but go to him, too late, and hope against every scrap of evidence that too late was not, this once, the same as never.

The isle was a hill of graves crowned by a tower, and the blue flame burned in the high window exactly as the rumour said, and you beached the small boat on the black shingle and climbed the wet black rocks in the failing light with your heart going so hard you could not breathe, certain of nothing, terrified of everything, no longer even sure your own worn and crumbling memory could be trusted to tell you whether the figure at the top of the rocks was the man you had come five hundred years to find.

He was standing at the door of the tower.

He had felt you coming — the keepers of the dead feel such things — and he was standing very still, tall and pale, his dark hair loose in a wind that did not seem to touch the rest of him, and the blue light from the high window fell across his face —

— and every terror you had carried across the water died in a single instant, because you knew him.

Not from the worn archive, no, not even from the crumbling memory. Not from anything time had been able to touch. You knew him the way the body knows the ground beneath it, so instantly, wholly, beneath thought, and you understood, standing on his cold rock in the failing light, that the terror had been a lie all along: that some knowings do not live in the part of you that time can steal, but somewhere deeper, somewhere five hundred years could not reach, and that you would have known Kyryll Flins if you had been blind, if you had been dust, if every other thing you had ever known had been scoured out of you entirely. The gold of his eyes was exactly the gold your memory had failed to keep, restored the instant you saw it, truer than any keeping. There was no mistaking him. There had never been any danger of mistaking him. The heart does not keep its most precious things in the archive that time can burn.

He looked at you. And you watched five centuries cross his face — recognition arriving slow and disbelieving, like a tide creeping back into a cove that had been dry so long it had forgotten the very shape of water — and watched, beneath it, the thing that had been held rigid and armoured for five hundred years, the thing that had built its own tomb and lain down inside it rather than feel this, break open at the sight of you on his rock.

"...You," he said.

And his voice was exactly, precisely the same. That was the mercy that undid you first, before anything else — that time had not worn away his voice, that it arrived intact and whole and restored, in a single syllable, everything your archive had let go soft.

For several breaths neither of you moved.

The sea went on below the rocks, lifting and lowering itself against the black shore with the same patient sound it had made when you were young, when the world had still seemed to contain enough years for every promise to be postponed. The blue flame burned somewhere above and behind him, and its light shifted over his face with the wind, making him seem at one moment terribly real and, at the next, almost like something the island had kept for you in secret.

His eyes had not left yours. You could see him looking — not staring, not quite, but looking in the careful way of someone afraid that if he let himself look too quickly, too completely, the thing before him might disappear. His gaze went to your face, your hair, your hands, then returned to your eyes. It was the old habit, though you could not remember ever having noticed it before: he had always looked at you as though memorising were a form of courtesy. Now it looked like desperation.

"You are alive," he said. Not quite a question. More like a fact he was testing the weight of, to see whether it would bear him.

Your mouth opened. Nothing came.

His expression altered at the sight of it — something almost like pain, quickly mastered, folded away with the old reflexive grace.

"Forgive me," he murmured. "I find I had a great deal prepared, against the chance of this, and it has all gone straight out of my head. Five centuries of composure, and it deserts me at the door. Most unlike me. I do apologise."

It was so achingly, exactly him that your eyes filled.

"You prepared?" you managed.

"A very fine speech, rather moving, in its middle section." The faintest ghost of a smile touched his mouth and did not survive. "I was proud of it. I practised it on the graves; they were a forgiving audience." His gaze moved over you again, slow, disbelieving. "I seem to have misplaced every word. You'll have to imagine it. It was excellent. You'd have wept."

"I'm weeping now."

"Then it has succeeded," he said, very softly, "without my having to remember a line of it. Which is, I confess, the laziest triumph of my long career."

The wind lifted his hair. You wanted to reach for him and did not yet dare, and he seemed to know it, and to hold himself still for you the way one holds still for something wild that has come, against all sense, close.

"You kept the light," you said. Because it was easier than the other thing. Because you had to say something, and the light was burning right there above him, the wrong impossible blue, the colour you had failed for five hundred years to find in any honest flame.

His eyes flickered up toward the glow, then back. "I told myself it was for the ships."

"And was it?"

"It was a very convincing explanation. I grew fond of it. After a few decades, one becomes attached to one's excuses; it seemed discourteous to abandon a thing that had served me so long." The smile again, thinner, unbearable. "No. It was not for the ships. I think you knew that before you asked, or you would not have rowed out through the fog to a rock in the middle of the northern sea on the strength of a rumour about a flame."

Your breath caught. "I thought you were gone. All of it — the court, the world, you. I built a whole life around your being gone. Several lives. And then a boatman told me a story about a blue light that had been burning longer than anyone could account for, and I—"

"You came."

"I came."

He was silent a moment, and the silence had a weight to it, something traveling very far inside him and taking its time. When he spoke again the courtliness had thinned to almost nothing, and what was underneath was tired, and tender, and very old.

"I did not know you were looking," he said. His fingers moved once at his side, a small unconscious tightening and release. "I would have come to you. I am ashamed I had stayed asleep the centuries you had looked for me."

"You needn't be ashamed of surviving."

"I did not survive well. There's an art to it and I never learned it." He looked at you then, fully, and something in his face gave way, spilling into a tired and beautiful affection. It was the absolute yielding of a soul that had survived a long, dark storm, arriving at last to lay its burdens at your feet. "I feel you are late." The ghost of the faint curve. "Extravagantly late. Even by your standards, and your standards were always a scandal."

You laughed, wetly, and it broke halfway. "I know. You always did tell me so."

"Insufferably. At every ball. For three hundred years." The curve held, this time, warm and weary. "I had missed it. Being insufferable to you. There is no one else in all the world worth being insufferable to; I tried, once or twice, on the boatmen, and it gave me no satisfaction at all."

And you crossed the last of the distance — the last of the black rock, the last of the arm's length, the last of the five hundred years and the three hundred before them — and you reached up, through the cold and the failing light, and you moved a strand of his loose dark hair back from his face, and tucked it behind his ear, the way you had in a ballroom, and a summer, and the ash of the ending world — your fingers at his cheek, his cool skin beneath them, and the strand going back into place, and his gold eyes very close and holding yours a beat too long, exactly a beat too long, the exact and maddening and perfect degree of it, unchanged across five hundred years, the one thing neither time nor fire had been able to touch.

He went utterly still beneath the touch. As he always had. As, you understood now, he always would.

"You said something to me," you said, your fingers at his cheek, your voice breaking on it. "In the corridor. At the end. You shaped it with your mouth and the fire took the sound, and I have carried the shape of your mouth making a word I couldn't hear for five hundred years." Your thumb moved at his cheekbone. "I don't know what you said, Kyryll. The most important thing anyone ever said to me, and I've never once been sure of it. Say it again. Here, where nothing can take it — no fire, no distance, no eyelash, no until. Plainly."

His cool hand rose, and covered yours, where it lay against his cheek — cool over cool, though your hand was not cool, your hand was warm, it had always been the warm one, and he had always been the cold — and he turned his face, and pressed his lips to your palm. The old gesture. The low-blue-hour gesture. The kiss he had given the back of your gloved hand at the end of a thousand balls, one heartbeat too long and never longer — given now to the bare palm of your hand, on a cold rock at the edge of the world, with no glove between you and no fire to take it and no distance to swallow it, a heartbeat too long and then, for the first time in eight hundred years, a heartbeat longer, and longer, and longer than that, longer than courtesy, longer than caution, longer than the whole careful grammar of the vanished world had ever once permitted.

And the faint curve came to the corner of his mouth against your palm — the true one, the real one, exactly as your failing memory had not been able to keep it and exactly as it had always, always, always been, restored to you whole the instant you felt it.

"You never heard it," he said, softly, against your palm. "Either time. Once in the ash — the fire took the middle of it. Once across the corridor — the world took all of it. A man says the hardest word of his very long life twice, under the most trying circumstances imaginable, and the lady simply doesn't catch it. Both times." The faint curve, wrecked and warm and five hundred years in the waiting. "It's becoming a little wounding, if I'm honest. One begins to take it personally."

"Then say it a third time."

"A third time." His gold eyes came up to yours, and there was no armour left in them at all — no angle, no deflection, nothing between the two of you but eight hundred years finally laid down. "Our people had no word for goodbye, you'll recall. Only until. It ruined us both — you with your postponements, me with my eyelashes." The faint curve. "A great many words for waiting, that old tongue, and not one for the plain thing. A grave oversight. Someone ought to have fixed it centuries ago." A breath. "No matter. There's the mortal word; it will do. Third time, then. Slowly, so you can't possibly miss it. Do pay attention — I shan't manage a fourth."

And on a cold rock at the edge of everything, with the blue flame burning in the high window above you and the sea below and the eight hundred years at last set down, Kyryll Chudomirovich Flins — the best thing the Belyi Tsar's court had ever made, the thing you had told everyone you loved except the one person it belonged to — said, plainly, the whole of it, the word he had shaped in silence across the burning dark and pressed into your palm in the ash and saved, all told, for eight hundred years, said it a third time, slowly, and clearly, and unmistakably, where nothing in the whole ruined world could reach in and take it from you.

And this time, you heard him.

This time, at last, after everything, you heard every word.

And you said it back — plainly, the mortal way, with no until in it anywhere, no wager, no later, no drawer of unsaid things, no better occasion saved for and squandered — you said it back, the plain word, the one you had failed to say for eight hundred years, and it cost you nothing, in the end, nothing at all; it was the easiest thing you had ever said; and you understood, saying it, with his cool mouth against your palm and his gold eyes on yours and the strand of hair you had just tucked behind his ear catching the blue light — you understood the thing your mother had crossed her own grief to tell you, and the thing the eyelash had tried to teach you, and the thing the whole long squandering life had been, all along, trying to make you learn:

that it had never once been too large to say.

That it had always been this small, and this easy, and this near.

That the only thing that had ever made it impossible was the belief that there would be time.

And now there was no more time — there was only this, only now, only the cold rock and the blue flame and his cool hand over your warm one — and it turned out that now, the thing you had spent eight hundred years postponing, was the only occasion there had ever been, and it was enough, it was more than enough, it was everything.

"Until," you said, when you could speak again — and he went still, and then you felt him almost laugh against your palm, because you had said the old word, the wager, the lie —

"—until nothing," you finished. "Never again. I'm done with until, Kyryll. Say it once more. I intend to hear it rather often, to make up for the eight hundred years I didn't."

"Often." The faint curve against your palm, his gold eyes bright and wet and five hundred years unguarded. "I warn you, I'm out of practice. My delivery may want polishing. You'll have to be patient — I'm a slow study, where these things are concerned."

"I know," you said. "You told me once. At a lake. Something about not trusting the water to hold you up." Your fingers were still at his cheek, the strand of hair tucked, the blue light on it. "We've time. I find I finally know what it's for."

guys so i wrote this before snezhnaya came out FORGIVE ME i realize now the timeline is a bit off... i am merely a lore larper.... im sorry..... not edited sincerely apologize for any mispellings of kyryll chudomirovich flins also sincere apologies if ooc and stuff i try my best.... .. please talk to me!! love u all

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