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In a life that happened long ago, he watched her fall. It was winter then. That he cannot help but remember, just as he can do nothing but recall how even then he could sense he was standing too close to the brink of the void for it to be safe for anyone else to be near him. And yet, and yet—no, he hadn’t pushed her away. He should have shoved her. He should have barked at her until she retreated from him and named him the animal that he is. He should have scared her and saved everyone—himself included—a great deal of pain.
And he hadn’t.
But he should have.
Now, in the memory, she falls because she is standing too close to the frozen stream. She was standing upon snow at the time, bending over and observing the shocking sight of leaves red as blood and gold as new coins flash-frozen in a single cold night, when they had tumbled into the then-flowing stream before they were caught up in invisible eddies for an entire season.
The ice was clear as her healthy eyes. There was also a lot more of it than she had realised.
So, she slipped, and he was too slow to catch her.
He felt the thud of her impact crashing up and down his spine.
She twisted her ankle and her forehead was bleeding by the time he made it to her side. He pulled her up, hoisted her against his shoulder, and he asked her to please be all right as he touched her forehead and checked that she was still conscious.
Which she was. Dazed, and slow, but she was alive and fidgeting, not quite trying to pull away from him, but he was still afraid she would want to anyway. To distract himself from this piteous fear, he removed his cloak, laid it down for her, and helped her settle herself down onto it.
She whimpered and touched her head. She grimaced. She was biting her lip and murmuring to herself, and he could think of nothing to soothe her with his headache a sharding intrusion into each and every one of his thoughts, though the sheer cold of the air should have been enough to relieve some of this insistent, flat suffering.
Only because she looked at him did he realise that she did not blame him. Though they were in a part of Faerghus at the time, and he should have been more vigilant, more careful, more anything. He should have been better. He should have protected her.
She laid her hand on his forearm, her hand slightly trembling, and she had apologised to him.
When he tried to interrupt her, she shook her head and he saw that she was displeased with him. It was enough to make him quiet, back then.
She insisted that it was her fault, not his, nor the ice’s. She should have been more mindful, not been taken in by a vision of something and distracted and vulnerable.
He tried to tell her that he liked that about her. That she could be so—so her own authentic self. Unconstrained. Undiluted and undistilled.
But, like so many things, he couldn’t manage it. And it didn't matter how hard he tried.
He thought about this sometimes in his ageless, unmarked wanderings, when each day was marked as a day passed without his death. Some days he marked with the deaths of others by his hands—Imperial generals he gutted, gloated over, and left as blatant warnings, or bandits he could slaughter by the dozens with a leap and a swipe of his holy artefact tuned to the magical inheritance within his flowing blood. But, always, by the end of each day, huddled up in his fur-lined cloak that smelt of nothing good, some somehow-unbroken part of himself quickened in the darkness, rose up from the dying churn, and thought, I survived another day. Why?
He was thinking about all of the things he could never manage when he was looking at the thick ice between him and the lake’s water. He saw his reflection, the dim, unpleasant thing, and he saw all of these things reflected back up at him. He saw them more clearly than his filthy face. His filthy hair. His dark, sunken eyes.
And, with a roar, he had smashed the ice with a fist and a noise filled the world all around him. The ice cracked, shook, and then shattered with a burst like the earth itself has split open. The ice floes he had created grinded against one another with so much awful, piercing sound he had to leave before catching any fish for food. He travelled three miles, bristling, before he realised he still had to eat something that day.
It was not a proud moment, nor a good moment. It was the sort of moment he had back then, before he discovered that the reason she hadn’t yet haunted him wasn’t because she deserved better than him, even in death. No. That had nothing to do with it. It was because she wasn’t dead. It was because she could still walk under the sun, and offer her hand to him. Help him .
Now, today, when he’s already lived for so long like a beast he’s surely forgotten how to be a man, there isn’t an excuse for his behaviour. Certainly it can’t be because she’s still alive after all. Though she came back to him, he hasn’t made any concessions to her. He hasn’t tried to change. Hasn’t tried to be better. Coming back—finding him, trying to help him—that is her mistake. Her own terrible, terrible mistake.
She is lucky, he thinks, that it is not her hand currently caught up in his grip, not her bones so easily and thoroughly broken that their splinters have shred through skin and leather alike in a dozen different places.
Though his victim trembles like a tree in a storm and is on his knees, Dimitri doesn’t so much as flinch in his resolve. He does not have a fleck of concern within him. Nor a mote of regret.
He is unmoved, unmovable, unmoving. He is still as something long-dead until he hears her pleading with him. Then, despite his immense exhaustion and its inertia, he forces himself to focus, to hear her saying, “Please, Dimitri. Please, watch out—”
He turns on her, flopping the would-be assassin away from her so that she cannot be harmed. And he snarls at her—
Only, she doesn’t stand by to see it. Instead, she is moving, pulling her sword out, pushing him aside. She is not strong enough to break his grasp, but she is fast enough to pierce the would-be assassin’s heart.
He looks down. Dimitri sees a flash of metal sharp as malice, a dagger held in the uncrushed hand of the would-be assassin. And then he sees the Sword of the Creator is plunged into the black-clad chest and protrudes like a half-made point. Dimitri, wide-eyed, finally lets the man go. And he is dead before he clatters to the floor with the strange steel blade he tried to drive into the heart of the One-Eyed Demon.
Dimitri watches the Ashen Demon as she steps on the assassin, clutches her sword, and unsheathes it from the carcass at their feet. He watches as she watches him. There are no words exchanged between them. Whatever there was before, whatever she had come out here to the broken cathedral to say, express, try to reach him with—it is gone. The world is moonlit, and cold, and empty. It's a lot like him.
She says softly, “I’ll have someone come to pick up the body.”
And after a moment of silence, she turns to go.
Only, he doesn’t let her part from him so easily. With the hand that crushed his would-be assassin’s wrist, he grabs her, turns her around, he makes her face him.
Her eyes are wide as the night sky. Her pale skin is wan. She does not look well.
And, he knows why. He knows that the killing on his behalf wasn’t easy for her, and if he had only listened and heeded her warning, he might have managed to spare her sword some blood, and her soul some small amount of its already colossal burden. Maybe he could have managed something.
But he hadn’t. And then he grabbed her, and it’s not exactly like the first thing he is doing is offering her comfort. Her hand shakes in his. Shivering, her fingers are so small, so slender, so slight for all the killing that they’ve done. The lives that they’ve stolen.
He watches her swallow. He watches her step closer to him. Lets her touch him, her palm pressed against his cheek.
And, he sees how this could go, understanding even as he loosens and lets himself lean into her touch. He cannot be gentle. All he has to offer her is this: himself, rough and feral and unclean. Even imagining it he bites his lip and his next exhalation is not a calm thing. He closes his eyes, straining.
He can imagine it, now: finally shoving her. But it would not be how he should have had all those years ago. No. He imagines shoving her against the stone of the wall. He imagines touching her as he is able to: his hands on her body, everywhere, her back to his stomach, the two of them arced and locked together with flames and pain between them. His lips on her skin, on every part of her but her own gentle, quiet, pearl-pink mouth. And he would take from her. Taking, and taking, until she had nothing left to give.
Unable to stop himself, he leans down, towards her. His face is close to her neck where some of the man’s blood splattered. She does not smell of any blood. She smells of nothing but her: her hair, her sweet scent, a vague floral aroma that has followed him through his dreams for years.
He can imagine giving it, but he cannot imagine that she wants it. Really, he cannot imagine that she wants him. That she would, or could. She does not deserve to be handled like something less than she is.
And, like that, the spell is broken. She just doesn’t realise it, looking up at him, an unasked question in her still-lovely eyes, her concern for him too sharp to face, to shield himself from.
So, this time, he does what he should have all those years ago. He shoves her, driving her bodily away from him. She exclaims wordlessly, breathlessly, looking at him before any of her senses have kicked in, like he might explain himself before she judges him and come to her own (correct) conclusions.
But, he wants her to. To do exactly that.
Whatever she is about to say, he shouts at her, “I’ll take care of this dog’s body. Now, begone.” He adds, “Leave me!”
And, until she does, he doesn’t move. It’s only when he’s sure she’s left him that he falls to his knees, and curses himself, and curses this assassin who got so close, but who, just like him, just couldn’t manage to do something important in the end.
. . .