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“You said,” rasped a voice in the stillness, “that everything had to die.”
Jeska didn’t look up from her handiwork - a series of knots, intricate ropework over pallid skin, binding flesh to spirit and spirit to flesh. “You will die, sweetness,” she said, her elegant fingers dancing along silk-smooth rope. “You will die when I allow it, and not a breath sooner.” She looked up, at last, and her eyes were the only real thing in the perfumed and shadowed room. Luminous and lovely. “Not a breath sooner,” she repeated. She always spoke softly, but this was a whisper, a prayer, a promise.
The corpse in her bed held her gaze with a quiet desperation. “Of course,” he breathed. He wanted to reach for her; he didn’t know if he could move. He trusted he would move when she willed it. “Will you tell me my name?” he asked.
Jeska smiled, and bent close, and murmured it into his ear.
Sleep was too much like death. His love lived still, for the both of them, but he stayed awake instead, watching the rise and fall of her chest. He felt her every inhale fill his lungs, and the slow absence in every exhale. The ropes he wore bound his life to hers, but her own life burned twice as hot, now.
Death clawed to have him back, and its claws sank into her as well.
Jeska opened her eyes, finding him in the dark and reaching out to touch the curve of his jaw. He cradled her hand in his; she was warm, and he was, always, so cold. “You’ll die,” he said softly. “You could cut me loose - ”
“Never,” Jeska replied placidly. “Don’t suggest it again.”
And he wouldn’t.
Death pulled at him if she was gone from his side too long. A current, a storm - a monsoon, if one wanted to be so on the nose. It ached. He curled around himself and hooked his fingers into the ropework that tethered him, breathing slowly and carefully. It felt, from what he could remember of living, a little like trying to hold back sickness.
And then she came back to him, all murmured apologies, her hands touching the ropes crisscrossing the chest, and the relief was so great it was almost a pleasure.
He held her, buried his face in the tumble of her hair, inhaled the scent of life that clung to her still. When she kissed him, her lips were blood and heat and breath and the thudding of a heart and the electrical firing of a synapse and the rush of lymph to an open wound and a million other systems and sequences and functions of a body, alive, alive, alive. He was nothing, he was nothing, he was hers and he was nothing without her, he was Death’s and would return to Death but only when his love willed it, not a breath sooner, not a breath sooner. Her lips parted; her hands touched the place where his heartbeat would be, if he had a heart; he could almost, almost, remember how it had pounded in his chest that first and only night they had spent together.
“You, sweetness, will die,” he murmured into her mouth, half-remembered words from a half-remembered night, before a death he could recall in crystal perfection.
“But not tonight,” Jeska replied. Her hands touched the ropes that twined them together. “Someday. Not tonight.”
“No,” the corpse replied, as he was lead towards his love’s bed. “Not tonight.”