Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken | E, 8/?
“Go to Palmyra,” Jean murmured, softer now, as though gentleness would make it any easier to hear. “Find the Druids. Get as far away from him as possible and do not let him touch you again.”
Nathaniel stared at him. His chest felt too tight, every breath felt thin and wrong in his lungs.
“We will both go. We’re partners.”
Jean looked at him helplessly, like he really thought Nathaniel might let him believe this was their only path.
That frightened him more than anything else.
“We will both go,” Nathaniel repeated, stepping closer before Jean could answer. “Together. That was always the plan.”
“Nathaniel.” Jean’s voice was so gentle it made something in him want to break. “Plans do not always work out.”
“Then we make a better one.”
He could hear how desperate his own voice had become with the panic underneath it, raw and ugly and growing worse with every denial Jean gave him. Nathaniel closed what little space remained between them until Jean’s thighs hit the bed causing him to sit and there was nowhere left for him to retreat.
“Do not do this,” Nathaniel said, and now the words came too quickly, all the fear in them stripped bare despite his best effort. He shuffled into Jean’s lap, taking his face in his hands. “Do not look at me like you’ve already decided this for us. You do not get to decide that I leave and you stay. Please, you cannot ask that of me.”
Jean’s lashes were wet, whether from the bath or something else, Nathaniel could not bear to think too hard about it so he pressed their foreheads together.
“If I run, you suffer for it. If I run, he takes it out on you. If I run, he destroys whatever is left, and you know it.” His voice broke then, that awful ball of pain lodging in his throat. “And if I go without you, then I am alone. How could I go on without you?”
To imagine a life without Jean was not something Nathaniel was willing to bear, not even to entertain the idea of it.
He swallowed hard, trying to speak through it. “I will not do that. I won’t leave you here for him. I won’t leave you here to die, and I won’t go out into the world alone pretending that survival is enough. It isn’t. Not to me.”
Jean’s expression crumpled with something that looked dangerously close to despair and Nathaniel wrapped himself around him before he could stop himself. His arms snaked around Jean’s neck, pulling him tight so their heartbeats were pressed side by side.
“We get out together,” he murmured. “That is the only plan I will accept. I have let too much happen in this place. I am not letting this be one of them.”
Jean pulled back to look at him for a long moment. Nathaniel could see that he wanted to argue, that he was still turning the impossible over in his head, still measuring Nathaniel’s life against his own and finding himself easier to sacrifice. But Jean knew him too well. He knew there was no moving Nathaniel once he had dug his heels in, no prying him loose from the promise they had built their entire lives around.
And because he was Jean and because he loved Nathaniel enough to stop pushing when it would do no good, he gave the smallest nod.
It was not real belief, Nathaniel knew that, but he took it anyway and clung to it.
He lifted a hand and pushed Jean’s damp hair back from his forehead and Jean leaned into the touch, tilting his head up at Nathaniel’s coaxing. When he blinked open his silver eyes, Nathaniel leaned in to press a kiss at the corner of his mouth.
“I’ll burn this world down before it takes you from me, Jean. Know that.”
