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Lan felt Moiraine approach before he heard her steps. There was a certain inevitable purpose to her, like a coming storm, something that would not be turned aside or halted until it had completed what it had set out to do.
He turned to meet her as she stopped beside him, and their eyes met. They had not had a moment to stop since Logain. They had both had duties to attend to. Both had known it would come when it could, and did not begrudge the time taken to get to it.
Now, as the darkness of the night began to yield reluctantly to the first rays of the dawn sun, that waiting moment swelled between them.
She blinked, her body shifting, just slightly, and he understood, with that intimate knowing he had only ever found with her. With the person he was bonded to, as intimately as any two people ever could be. She needed him now.
A Warder was not only a physical shield to stand between his Aes Sedai and the dangers of the world. He was there to shield her from the dangers of her own mind, and the madness that would come from trying to shoulder the burdens of an entire world alone.
He nodded to her, but she was already turning away towards their tent, with the certainty that he would follow at her side where she needed him to be.
They did not speak as they walked through the camp. They did not need to.
Once they arrived at their tent, Moiraine jerked her head towards the bed in the corner, without turning to him.
“Sit down.”
The words were commanding, but they were not a command. It had taken him some time, and some chafing at her natural authoritative air, to become aware of that. It did not help that, the more concerned she was, the sharper and brusquer her words became.
Her concern through the bond at the moment was so palpable to him he felt his heart starting to instinctively race in response.
Moiraine was a delicate instrument of the Light. She was bound up by pressure and stress, which was the only way she contained the storm within. But nothing could withstand absolute strain indefinitely.
She needed time to crack. Time to let herself be less than the woman who held the fate of the world on her slight shoulders. Time to simply be human. That was why she needed time with him. For there was no one else she could be that with.
So he sat. Without question or hesitation. And did not take offence at the fact she had not yet looked at him, for he knew there was no offence intended.
There could be no implied slights, or unintentional hurt between a Warder and his Aes Sedai. He could feel what she intended, could sense any implications that might have laced her words or actions.
Across the tent, Moiraine shrugged off her cloak and took her time folding it carefully onto the desk.
She looked somehow so much smaller without it. Though it was not truly the absence of the cloak that did that to her. Such a change in her could not be caused by mere clothing. When she took that off she was no longer Moiraine Sedai of the Blue Ajah. She was simply Moiraine.
The differences in her physicality would have been imperceptible to anyone else. The slightest hunch to hers shoulders. The faintest droop in posture. The soft dip of her chin. But he saw. And he understood.
So he sat, quiet, immovable as a cliff face against which a storm wall would break itself. He radiated peace, through his body, and through their bond. He sensed her settle, just a little, and knew her gratitude for his grounding.
Finally, she turned to him, straightening herself, then stepped to his side and, without further ado, began undressing him. He did not protest, nor interfere, as she efficiently shifted his clothing aside, but he did raise an eyebrow at her.
“There are things that must be done,” she said tersely, answering the unasked question, “I would have preferred to attend to it immediately, but that was not possible.”
He would not have needed their bond to know the tension in her, at that moment. The onslaught of twisted vague words would have told him enough.
He let silence stretch between them, still grounding them with his meditative calm, until she had bared him to the waist, and seemed satisfied with that.
Her eyes studied him, as though trying to find some hidden cipher in the lines of his body. He let her, a suspicion to explain her behaviour entering his mind, though quickly stifled, before it could bleed through to her.
She walked around him, cataloguing each scar and blemish that she knew as well as he. As she circled him, almost like a predator with the lithe grace of her movements, her fingers traced absently against her throat.
For his part, in spite of his careful serenity, he found it difficult not to look at the hole in her shirt, just below her heart. Blood formed a red halo around it, drawing his eye each time she passed.
Apparently satisfied with her visual inspection, Moiraine stopped in front of him and announced briskly, “I would like to Delve you now.”
Lan eyed her for a long moment, then said, voice carefully controlled, “Nynaeve Healed me completely. And everyone else there.”
“I am aware,” Moiraine replied, in a voice that told him, quite clearly, that this was not a matter she intended to let lie, whatever arguments he now made, “However that may have been her first time ever using the Power. I would reassure myself that all is now well with you.”
He held her gaze for a long moment, reading the pulsing of their bond as a seasoned sailor might read the waves or the tides of the ocean.
She could not lie, as Aes Sedai, it was not possible. But it was possible for her to state a series of truths that were not connected, in a way that implied they were.
Yes, it was perhaps Nynaeve’s first time using the Power. And she wanted to reassure herself that he was well, now. However the two were not connected, except that she had placed them side by side. She simply wanted to ensure that he was alright, and Nynaeve’s inexperience was her convenient pretense.
She should not have needed one. He would have happily stripped completely naked and allowed her to Delve every fragment of him, if it would have brought her a moment of comfort. But this was Moiraine, and she would never have been able to ask that of him. Not for her own sake.
So he nodded, as though this was a perfectly expected and reasonable request, and stood before her without a word.
***
Moiraine relaxed as Lan stood, posture relaxed, obviously prepared for her Delving.
His solid, steady composure throughout this mess was one of the only reasons she was still on her feet, all things told.
She knew, from the softness in the bond, the gentle empathy he felt, that he was at least partially aware why she was doing this. But he would not challenge her, and would let her do what she needed, and she loved him for that.
For his quiet understanding of her flaws, yes, but also for his acceptance.
There would be no protests, no attempts to change her, no quiet reasoning of her illogical action. Just him. And her. And what they needed to do to survive this together.
Moiraine inhaled, then exhaled, steadying herself as she brought her hands up before her and drew upon the Power.
For once she did not appreciate the flooding rush of intensity that came with drawing upon it. She was overstimulated enough without, but she controlled it, contained it.
This thing they did was called channeling for a reason. She did not summon power from herself, she pulled it from an infinite well, and let it use her as a conduit for her will.
Lan remained still and composed, hands clasped behind his back in a soldier’s stance, as she exhaled steadily, and pressed the power towards him.
Fine weaves of light wrapped around him, almost gentle, a quiet embrace of the sort she longed to simply pull him into and hold him there for a while, until her heart stopped fluttering, until she could breathe without it catching in fear as she remembered the awful rattling sound of him drawing what she’d felt was his last.
Calm. Steady.
Her weaves began their work, slipping through pores, whispering between skin and sinew, gently probing muscle and flesh.
The area around his throat was near perfect. She had expected that. Nynaeve had healed a large, life-threatening wound without so much as a scar, which was a feat in itself. That, combined with her existing knowledge of medicine and healing, there had been little doubt in Moiraine’s mind that Lan had been well taken care of.
Yet it had been years since anyone but she had Healed him. She felt a strange emotion, something akin to possessiveness. It was almost disturbing. She had very rarely felt anything like it before for Lan.
They shared a life, a drive, a greater purpose, and more besides. But she did not see him as a leashed thing that she owned and used, as one might a horse.
Still, he was hers. Her Warder. Her partner. The Light’s answer to her soul. She wanted to be the one who Healed him. She wanted to be certain that he remained whole, and with her, body and heart.
She should have been the one who Healed him today.
The memory of it made her falter, for the barest flicker of a heartbeat, so faint she was not sure even Lan felt it. But she knew it. And had to push down the shudder that quivered to life in the pit of her stomach at the thought.
He had been dying . She had felt him dying . As he had tried to come to her aid. He had been feet from her, where she lay, pinned to the ground by the splintered handle of an axe, driven deep into her flesh.
Yet she would have torn it through her body to reach him, to Heal him, to stop that awful feeling of him slipping like smoke through her fingers.
It had been such a quiet thing. So quiet. So awfully, impossibly, horrifyingly quiet.
While the pain of her wound had screamed through her body. And the fear of Logain’s escape had burned in her mind. As the immensity of her failure, and what that meant for the world, ravaged her soul. Lan had been so faint through all that.
The death of the man who had been beside her through it all, had kept her standing when she would otherwise have fallen, had kept her sane when she would otherwise have succumbed to madness, who had let her smile, and find the moments of light in a world so consumed with shadows, had been so quiet.
A mere whisper in a hurricane. Something so soft, and so faint, she might have missed it, had it not been a whisper that promised the doom of everything she yet held dear.
The bond had flickered. Like a candle with no more wick to draw upon. It had flickered, and trembled, and gone still. For but a moment. An awful. Shuddering. Writhing moment. It was still. It had been no more than an extended pause between heartbeats. But she had feared the next would never have come.
No pain, and no fear, and no failure the world had known could have stopped her from her clawing her way, bloody and dying as she had been, to his side.
Yet she had been helpless. Helpless in the face of the worst thing she had known in all her years of life. And that knowledge had enraged her as much as it terrified her.
Jaw set, she reasserted control, and guided her weaves carefully through Lan’s body, mapping carefully, ensuring for herself that he was still here. Still whole. Still hers.
When the Delve reached his heart, she felt it. It beat through the weaves she had wrapped around it like an embrace.
But she felt it through the bond, too. Felt as it matched the rhythm of her own heart. Hers slowing a little to match his calm, while his sped up to meet her anxiety, joining in the middle between them. A single pulse made from two distinct heartbeats, two distinct souls.
Moiraine closed her eyes, and breathed, and let herself have this moment with him. For just a few steady beats of their hearts. To ground her after all they had lost, and all that had nearly been taken.
She let herself rest, held up by the rhythm that she allowed to flood all of her senses with the solid, stable truth: she was not alone.
Moiraine did not break from the suspended calm she had wove until she felt a gentle warmth on her cheek. When she opened her eyes, she found Lan’s hand tenderly cradling her face, tilting it up slightly so that she met his eyes.
He did not speak. He did not need to. She felt the reassurance through the bond, even as their heartbeats separated, the weave dropping away. It had done its work well.
Lan nodded steadily to her. She nodded back.
She had no more time for indulgences.
“I am satisfied,” she announced briskly, striding away from him and pulling her cloak back over her shoulders. Turning back to him she added, “We have work to do.”
She strode from the tent without pause, and Lan fell comfortably in at her side. Where he belonged.