“I know I never say it, but…thanks.” / “I will never say thanks.” (Protective? Between these two? SIGN ME UP)
“I know I never say it, but…thanks.”
Paris, but it feels like Shanghai, think of it as so with held hands and busy streets, but less guards, but with a talk by a dead fireside in the snow between them, but blood and flames from there, and he still holds her hand through crowded roads - and we won’t say if it was her that first reached for the hand or Malachi that made sure it didn’t drop, or the other way around. Maybe it won’t matter.
And so she says this and he can’t tell if it’s for Shanghai, or St. Petersburg, or something in Paris. If it’s for guards in between them, or almost catching tears fallen, or just standing here. (And maybe that’s is what he thinks of, the two of them becoming the people that leave, stayed.)
“Then I won’t tell anyone you said it now either, call it a secret,” he gives back, humor in his voice, and something else too beneath it she may know him well enough to spot by now. She doesn’t need to thank him, he might have said it once, that he doesn’t search for it, would do what he did again without her even knowing he was there at all.