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She’s hugging her knees and trying to ignore the Collector’s insistent prodding. They poke and swipe and jibe at her and she just scowls, burying her head in the fabric of her husband’s pants. She didn’t die at twenty-eight, but when she woke up on the cold, hard ground of Phillip’s mind, she was twenty-eight and still had tear tracks down her cheeks.
“Come on,” tries the Collector, “It’s boring to have a revenant who’s not… you know! Rampaging and roaring and evil and always talking about why she’s a revenant!”
Arianna raises her head to growl at him. “It’s going to be a very long life in here,” she says, “I wish I could slash your fucking throat, but you don’t even have one.”
She takes a second look. Yup, no throat. And not like she has anything sharp in here, anyways. She might be twenty-eight, but her magic’s still bunk, and when she draws a fire glyph under where the Collector’s about to sit, she’s disappointed but not surprised when they don’t lurch back screaming.
Well, it was worth a fucking shot, wasn’t it? She’d feel dumb if she didn’t try it and years later it turned out that she could set fire to Phillip’s memories until he was twitching on the floor.
She thinks about what Caleb would do, how he would manage to turn this around—but he’s long gone, even if he feels like he should be next to her, even if she can still feel his heat against the skin of this body, but when she scrunches up her nose, she can’t seem to remember his face.
And it terrifies her.
With a shiver running down her spine, she decides that she’s going to keep his memory alive, even if she’s slashing herself open and bleeding onto the grey slate. “Collector,” she breathes through gasps, and his eyes are the glimmer of the dagger about to sink into her with her next words, “Do you want to hear our love story? Only the good parts. And only the ones that don’t matter. I don’t want you to use him against me, but I want him to live.”
And the Collector lights up like a kid set loose in a market square, and instead of just sitting down, they move to sit next to her, almost on top of her, and as she begins to speak, their head migrates to her lap.
“Let me start with some of the times I knew I was in love, and the time I absolutely did—”
I’m still so devoted to you that it scares me.
Will they ever love me the way that I had loved you once?
One.
It starts with just sex. They knew each other as kids and then life happened and now they’re trying to get to know each other again. Arianna’s wired after hunting down a beast for a bounty, she’s keyed up and she’s on edge and she hates going out with others from the village, but she doesn’t want to be alone. She doesn’t want to be left alone.
So, when Caleb invites her to join them—him and some band of idiots that he’s picked up at the market square—she goes, and she drinks him under the fucking table, and she even allows herself to laugh just a little when he sings karaoke with Green Fang from the potion shop down the road. He smiles at her like she’s real and whole and alive and Arianna feels the tension disappear from her shoulders with each passing hour.
She helps Caleb stumble into the shack he shares with his brother, his arm draped over her shoulders, not unlike how she would have helped him after a sprained ankle in their youth, when he’d bitten off more than he could chew against the fauna of the Boiling Isles.
But there’s something different about the way he looks at her, the way he slurs out compliments and endearments and grabs her waist when he’s about to fall, the way he teases her when she drops him on the bed and starts unlacing his boots.
They’re not sixteen anymore, she thinks very sharply and loudly when she looks back up from where she’s crouched, and she sees him wagging his eyebrow.
She looks at him as he struggles to take off his coat, his limbs not working with his normal and very obviously preferred exactness and thinks fuck it.
She straddles his lap, and he looks up at her in dim confusion, but then she’s kissing him, her hands sliding off his jacket with natural ease. She pushes him onto the bed and forgets. Forgets decency and what she’s supposed to be and who they are and what they cannot do and what they are supposed to be to each other and she’s seventeen again, when they’re at the beach and she’s watching his wet shirt move against his skin and asking the Titan why he couldn’t be literally anyone else.
She takes his hand and shows him how, gives him a map of her body and allows him to explore, just as she did with her homeland all those years ago.
Arianna forgets that Caleb is completely trashed, and that this isn’t fair, really, to either of them. He’s not pissed enough to be unresponsive, and he’s not saying no: but she’s still doing something that she shouldn’t have, something that she cannot continue, even if he’s not an acquired taste.
It happens like that for months.
Sometimes, it’s just like that—and she’s been out hunting something and she’s back and she doesn’t want to think about it, but she’s wired and needs to do something, and sometimes it’s not. Sometimes, Caleb’s drunk. Sometimes, Arianna is. Sometimes, it’s at his place. Sometimes, it’s in another room she’s rented. Once, it’s at her parents’ house. Another time, it’s on the beach where she first wanted him.
Mostly, it was at Caleb’s, though or her place on the Knee or a hostel room in Right Arm when he’s hunting for new ways to use magic and Arianna’s there too for no good reason. And Arianna goes camping in Right Arm for no good reason but goes to see him anyways, Arianna teaches Caleb how to make s’mores for no good reasons and they don’t talk about why it’s the first time Phillip hasn’t joined him.
But it’s always at Caleb’s or somewhere she gets to leave in the morning. Because, if she falls into bed with him, then she gets to leave. Then, she gets to be the one who leaves. If it’s his house, he can’t leave her.
And she always leaves because if she stays, if she falls asleep in his arms and wakes up to the smell of him cooking breakfast—and she knows that he would, because beneath his sharp gaze that enraptured her, he’s a fucking gentleman—well, if she enjoys waking up next to him more than she enjoys the sex, then it starts to feel too much like love.
And Arianna Clawthorne does not love.
And then one night, as Arianna sits up, the sheet pooling around her bare hips, Caleb rests a hand on her back and says, “Stay.”
Arianna looks at him and suddenly she knows. He loves her, has loved her for weeks at least, months or years probably—just like she has loved him. He doesn’t fuck her anymore, but instead, he makes love to her and tries his best to hide it from her prying eyes.
She knows this, and yet, she doesn’t know why she lies back down, why she lets him cover her with the blanket, why she rests her cheek over his heart. Why she allows herself this. She’ll leave once he falls asleep, she thinks, but she never does.
Two.
Arianna shows up on Caleb’s doorstep two days after she was kicked out of her family. It takes her exactly twenty-four hours to shrug off that shock and find herself a shitty room at a hostel in the same village as he’s currently in but it’s close enough to his that she feels safe but it’s far enough to be a coincidence.
She shops for groceries, plans escape routes in case she’s forgotten that she owes the wrong people money, buys a couch, considers killing Phillip once, considers killing her father twice, considers kidnapping her sister thrice, she goes to the market square, she dances to some shitty lute in the market square and almost, almost, just barely, feels normal.
It’s a peculiar feeling, one that doesn’t stir well in the pit of her stomach and so, she goes to Caleb, whose straight-forward attitude is oddly grounding in a world full of lies.
She sees the flicker of surprise that ghosts across his features when he opens the door, but it disappears almost as soon as it comes, and it feels a little like trust.
“You hungry?” Caleb asks as he shuts the door behind them. He moves with an ease that Arianna wishes she felt, and it feels a little like trust, too.
“Yes.” She isn’t. She really, really isn’t. Everything tastes like coins and she’s terrified that if she tries to swallow, it’s going to come up tinged with blood.
“You want a sandwich?”
“Sure.” She doesn’t. She’s going to wait until he leaves or turn his back and throw the sandwich out the window so the animals can do her job for her.
Caleb gestures towards the counter that separates the kitchen from the dining space and Arianna sits lightly on one of barstools. His place is neater than she expected for it being occupied by two guys who like to experiment with things that go bang. It barely looks lived in, at least the kitchen and dining room. Maybe they just don’t have a lot of guests and being neat freaks is another weird holdover from the cult they were in, back in the human realm.
Even if she doesn’t remember either Phillip or Caleb being neat when they lived with her family.
People can change. Arianna’s sure changed.
There’s no dining table, but Caleb and Phillip, the everlasting bachelors, don’t need one, she supposes. She can hear Phillip from somewhere covered by walls, and she can hear a hammer meeting metal and wood. If she leans over, she can see a glass with a dribble of beer left in it.
She resists the urge to reach out, take it and drink down that sliver.
“Hot date?” she smirks.
“You know it,” Caleb replies easily. Arianna wonders when the last time he went on a date was and then quickly and with shame, physically shakes the thought from her head.
Caleb works quickly and efficiently, wielding a knife like someone who has killed with less and places a plate with a sandwich, sliced neatly along the diagonal, in front of her. He sets down another sandwich in front of himself, a full plate remaining in his hand and quickly disappears and reappears in front of her.
He doesn’t have the plate anymore and Arianna can’t hear a hammer, either.
“Teleportation,” he grins. “Managed to figure out your little trick,” he taps a finger against the side of his head, “And now I just got to figure out how you manage to be so cool-looking when you do it.”
He hungrily digs into his own, as if he was just waiting to have her for lunch. As if he expected her to come, as if he waited for her and Arianna can see is a fistful of meat and bread. He pauses mid-chew, when she makes no move towards her own, and says, with his mouth full and sandwich spilling out at the edges, “I thought you said you were hungry.”
“I forgot that I had a big lunch,” Arianna lies, and even on her worst day, she should have been able to come up with something more convincing. She’s been sneaking out of her bedroom window, feet feather-light since she was seven and lying about it since age eight. She should have been able to do better.
But she didn’t. Doesn’t.
Caleb rolls his eyes, as if her answer is incredibly pathetic and she supposes that it is. Without prompting, he grabs the sandwich from her plate and takes a large bite before placing it back in front of her. He holds her gaze steadily as she tries to figure out just what exactly makes him tick.
She’s stumbling through the steps of a dance she used to know by heart, and she wants to cut him open and examine how he works, what’s changed since he was in her father’s house next to her, since they were sixteen on the beach. She doesn’t know him anymore, but she finds that she wants to regain that expertise.
She doesn’t understand him because she doesn’t want the same from him as she does other men—she can’t play him others, but most of all, she doesn’t understand why he isn’t scared of her anymore, more wary of her presence, less willing to turn his back to her.
Arianna looks at him for a long moment, before picking up her sandwich and neatly taking a bite next to his. Caleb grins like he just won something and takes a long drink of his apple blood before handing her the mug.
Three.
Arianna takes a fireball for him on a cold winter’s night on the Knee and when Caleb curses and drags her into a dark alleyway, she thinks stupidly that he’s getting blood on her nice dress.
“Did you manage to get the book?” Arianna croaks, and she’s ashamed at how pathetic her voice sounds.
“Of course, I did,” Caleb says, checking around the corner and then behind the dumpster and then in the windows overlooking the alley. Good for him, Arianna thinks deliriously. Caleb drops to his knees beside her, pressing his hands painfully over the wound, holding her still when she tries to push him away.
“I’m a fucking thief, Ari. ‘Course I managed to snag a book while you were getting roasted alive.”
“Because… Phillip’ll be…” Arianna starts, but she can’t quite pull out the words that she wants to say.
“I got it, Ari,” Caleb cuts her off. “Don’t worry about it.”
“I’m not going to die,” Arianna says firmly, resolutely, her eyes boring into Caleb’s.
“I know.”
“I’m not going to leave you alone.”
“I know.”
“Say it.” Arianna feels Caleb’s hands tighten around her side.
“You’re not going to die.” Caleb’s voice cracks on the words, but this was the last thing she ever hears, she wants it to be Caleb. “You’re not going to fucking die, Arianna. And I’m never going to leave you, either. We’re going to die together, holding hands when we’re old and grey and full of wrinkles and have a bunch of annoying grandchildren with my face and your ears and we’re going to die together, hand-in-hand.”
Four.
Arianna doesn’t realise that she’s on a date until they’re in his house, working on something with yellow eyes like hers and hardwood the colour of his boots—his idea—and they’re drinking the expensive and good hard apple blood—her idea.
She’s curled up in the corner, sitting on top of a worktable lower than the one Caleb’s currently using, tucked up against the wall, a glass of wine dangling from her fingers, her legs propped on Caleb’s lap as he’s working. Caleb’s using his non-dominant hand to massage her calves in an almost mindless way, as he babbles on about his theories for building a portal to the human realm, his glass of wine lying shamefully forgotten on the desk behind him.
She should have realised it earlier, she thinks, when she asked her to stay for dinner—she doesn’t even remember the last time she ate something that came from a pot on the same day as it met her lips—or when they had dinner at a restaurant instead of a tavern and Caleb had to wear a collared shirt to.
She wonders if he knows—and well, he isn’t stupid, he has to, it was his idea—and whether he’d planned this out. She wonders if he wants her to know or if he hopes she won’t notice. She wonders what he wants from her—because people always want something—but Caleb isn’t like that and she has to remind herself of this. He isn’t.
He might just want to love her.
“Are you listening to me?”
Arianna shakes her head lazily, leaning over to place her glass of wine on the table next to whatever he’s working on. She lifts herself into a sitting position instead of a half-lean, placing a hand on the back of his neck as leverage to keep herself upright. And maybe a gesture of something she doesn’t quite have the words for yet.
“Not even a little,” she says before closing the gap for a kiss. She flicks her eyes towards the desk behind him, “I don’t understand a single thing you’re babbling on about. What the fuck is a flapjack?”
“I know,” he says, kissing her back, “Thanks for listening to me. I miss it there.”
“Shared activity, kissing, drink,” Arianna counts on her fingers, “This is a date, isn’t it?”
“Would you ever let me take you out on a date?”
“No.”
He flicks his tongue at her.
“Then it’s not a date.”
“No,” Arianna murmurs, against his lips, “Not at all.”
That night, as Arianna and Caleb lay in a tangle of sweat and sheets, Arianna whispers into his chest, “I’ve never been on a date before.”
“Mm,” Caleb responds, running a finger down the length of her spine. “Was it good?”
“I’ll tell you in the morning.”
The next morning, Arianna wakes up to the smell of bacon and pancakes. She’s swathed in cheap sheets that are rough against her skin, much different than her own, and when she turns her head into the pillow, she can smell the shampoo that she bought Caleb on the knee when she discovered that all he owned was a bar of soap.
She pads into the kitchen, wearing his collared shirt, and she likes the grin he suppresses when he turns to look at her, a frying pan in one hand and an apron declaring that “Humans Do It Better” in his little brother’s shitty handwriting and it’s covering his bare chest.
He gestures towards the full pitcher of apple blood, before flipping the pancake with a flick of the wrist. “It’s a flapjack,” he says, “Or, it’s an attempt at a flapjack. Philly’s always been better at cooking than me, and I couldn’t find half of the shit I needed for it, so I tried to substitute. And maybe I even remembered the recipe wrong.”
He reddens.
“It’s been a while.”
Arianna hums and pours herself a cup of coffee, sensing that he doesn’t want to be studied so she steals a deliciously crisp piece of bacon and watches him, in a pair of lounge pants and an apron, deftly turn the bacon with one hand and slide the pan—flapjack—onto a plate with his other.
She steps into his space as he pours another dollop of batter into the pan, and he looks down at her in surprise as she stands on her toes and plants a kiss on his lips.
“It was a good one,” she says simply and graciously ignores the stupid smile on his face as she walks away and takes a seat opposite him, because she knows a good sight when she sees one.
Five.
Caleb spends three days in the healer’s kitchen before they agree to release him under the strict orders to stay in bed, and Arianna’s folded arms and unimpressed scowl to enforce it.
But Caleb wasn’t made to stay cooped up, and he’s just watched his brother transform into something horrible and try to attack him only to come back with a cry and run away and well, it doesn’t take him telling Arianna that he feels trapped in his own skin for her to agree that they should do something that isn’t sitting around.
After a few tense sentences, Arianna wraps her cloak around his shoulders, and they take a cart to the fairgrounds she remembers as a girl.
She was going to suggest it anyways, because she knows how it feels to grieve someone who’s still alive, but she appreciates him taking the initiative anyways, because then he might ask her why she could relate.
Caleb grabs her hand, excitement shining in his eyes and he proceeds to win her every stuffed animal they have.
“If you tear your stitches, I’m not taking you back to that healer. She scares the shit out of me,” Arianna warns as Caleb throws a dart at a series of brightly painted Selkidomus scales.
“I’m playing darts, not running a marathon, Ari,” Caleb says, accepting a giant Stonesleeper as his prize and letting it sit on his shoulders like a small child.
Arianna had given away most of the prizes that Caleb had won her—a blue, inflated Galdorstone didn’t really fit in with the décor of her apartment—but she had claimed a small, stuffed owl as her own.
She’s hyper-aware of Caleb—the way he favours his right leg, the way he holds his left arm close to his chest so it won’t be bumped into by an idiotic passer-by trying their luck—Arianna knows that she would gladly humble anyone who tried—the way he leans on her when they wait in lines, but she’s still enjoying her time so much that she almost forgets how very close he was to dying, until he sits down a little too heavily on a bench and her sharp hearing picks up on it before his chest heaves and he suggests they call it a day.
“But I haven’t even dragged you onto the wheel yet! Look at it! I’ve never seen anything like it before! I’m going to be really fucking annoying about it!”
The wheel she was talking about was a boring Hexis Wheel, like a thousand that she’s seen before and a favourite of puppy lovers but that’s not what they were—well, Arianna’s not entirely sure what they are, but they’re not seventeen anymore.
And Arianna doesn’t like riding the Hexis Wheel, and he knows it, because the first thing she did when they arrived was call it a piece of shit and insist that she doesn’t intrust her safety to the questionable morals of the teenager piloting the griffins that made it spin, suspended over the ground.
Caleb looks at her in surprise, as if he can’t believe that he pretended to be injury-free so convincingly, but Arianna’s knowing smile as she slides onto the bench tells him otherwise and he rolls his eyes at the realisation.
“You’re making fun of me,” he says, “I almost died and had the worst week of my life and you’re making fun of me. You’re such an asshole, Arianna.”
Arianna kisses him unexpectedly, not even sure herself what brings her to do it. Caleb’s not accustomed to being publicly open about their relationship, let alone kissed by her, but he takes to it like everything else the Boiling Isles have thrown at him, like a fucking champ and he places his hand on the back of her head to hold her in place.
It feels so nice to be normal that Arianna almost thinks that the scary healer’s (and she didn’t lie about being freaked out by them, they were intensely motherly in a way that disturbed Arianna down to her fucking bones) strongly-worded advice on following medical advice will be entirely worth it if she can only stay like this for a few more minutes.
“You want to come over?” Caleb asks when Arianna pulls away. “I can’t promise I’ll be much fun, but I have the homemade, human-eqsue alcohol you like and a new book.”
“I was actually thinking that we could go to my place instead.”
This was the second time today that Caleb gave her a look of complete shock, and Arianna likes the way he wears it so openly on his face.
“It’s closer,” Arianna says by way of explanation.
“No, it’s really not.”
“Well, then, Mr. Difficult,” grins Arianna, “My bed’s more comfortable than yours.” Arianna stands and offers her hands to help Caleb to his feet.
And, she thinks, as a bonus, your little brother didn’t almost kill you at my place.
(And maybe I just like you enough that I want to stay. Maybe I want to try my hand at making bacon and flapjacks.)
“I wouldn’t know,” Caleb says wistfully, using her as leverage to stand up.
“If you bleed on my more-expensive-than-yours sheets, you’re buying me new ones, and remember what I just called them.” Arianna looks pointedly at the bandage that is covering the magically-enhanced-but-still-necessary-because-Titan-Arianna-you-cannot-drag-a-man-THAT-maimed-into-my-kitchen-and-expect-me-to-immediately-be-able-to-fix-all-of-him-healers-get-tired-too-no-matter-how-much-you-threaten-them stitches on his arm.
“And don’t you even think about getting those cheap fucking excuses for linens that you burden me with every time I stay the night.”
Arianna heads towards the exit as Caleb calls after her, “I like those sheets! And they have birds on the edges of them! I’m pretty sure you like birds! I’m sure you like birds!”
Later, when Caleb’s fast asleep on her couch, his head in her lap, his arm tucked around his stuffed Stonesleeper, Arianna runs a hand through his hair and thinks maybe she could get used to this, after all.
Six.
“Caleb’s been seen with… that beast. He might be… infected. I thought you would like to know.”
I love him, Arianna thinks suddenly, so suddenly that it makes her heart clench and her gut drop.
She would kill for him and beside him, she would take a fireball for him. She couldn’t… she couldn’t hurt him. She couldn’t stand around and do nothing. She wouldn’t. So, she turns around and faces Greg, snarling. Later, he’ll ask her if this is love and she’ll say that she doesn’t love because even quivering with fear and worry, she’s still a fucking professional and he’s still her boss, but she feels very small and helpless and alone.
She doesn’t intend him to go soft on the Isle’s fiercest bounty hunter, and if he does, she’ll have to remind him what a mistake that was by stealing his whole enterprise.
But that’ll be later.
She thinks, I need him.
She thinks, I can’t live without him.
She thinks, I’ll save him.
Even if I have to do something he might never forgive me for.
At least he’ll be alive to hate me.
She says, “If you fucking touch him,” and the fires rise to dance alongside her flaming eyes, “I’ll make sure that there’s not a single speck of dirt on the Isles that’s safe for you. You better never stop fucking running.”
But that’s not the way my story ends.
Arianna’s trying to bite back her cries, the Collector’s head on her lap and her hands in what she thinks might be hair but feels like shadows. She can feel the quivers running down her spine like electricity and settling at the base of it, sticking around, staying with her. She can hear footsteps in the distance, and she wishes that the ground would swallow her whole.
She doesn’t know why she’s trapped here, but she’s sure it’s penance.