Work Text:
After, sated, they lie with bodies fast-entwined on a shared bedroll—face to face, skin held tight against skin, all the heat built up between them tempering down into silken, hazy warmth. The vast and heavy world narrows. Just this nameless shelter, all stolen away. Just their settling pulses and the crackle of a low-burning campfire. Just Talanah’s eyes, their golden-amber glow a focal point for Aloy in the dense wilderness dark.
And Aloy is glad to be here. Glad to let her boundaries blur, and to understand how to harbor the seamlessness. She knows the weight and the shape of Talanah’s steady hands splayed along her neck and jaw, knows the tease and scrape of her teeth against her lower lip, knows that legs entwined are an anchor against the fading tilt of night.
But then there is a flicker of something new in Talanah’s eyes—something shadowed and tense and uncertain as a held breath. A bruise. The instinctive bracing before a broken rib.
Silent, Aloy bows in until their foreheads touch. Closer, now, searching to unriddle it. To understand better. Things here should make sense.
And simply for being seen—for being pierced open, slatted to the delicate marrow—Talanah’s apprehension brims over. It spills out on the hushed limits of hearing, doused in naked starlight.
“I’ve lost so many people,” she says. Her steady hands tremble. So does her voice. Her fingers thread into the hair at Aloy’s nape and then grasp, maybe more tightly than she intended, a reflex rooted too deep to tame. “I can’t lose you too.”
Aloy balks. Her heart, staggered again, twists at every odd angle.
Even now they all watch her like she’s going to vanish. Burn right up and become empty space where a body should be.
Aloy has wanted that before. Sometimes she thinks she still might. She wavers and drifts, doubts, keeps her voice low. A sense of inevitability streaks cold through her bones. It looms over her and chases her heels. She has seen her own end from an interrupted distance and now she carries it forward, step after loaded step, trying not to sink beneath its weight.
Point is: she’s marked for it.
One day a door will need to be closed, and she’ll be the one left on the outside, bidding them to take care of each other.
I’m okay with this.
(Will Aloy be, when it catches up to her?)
The question is less important than its answer. Watching the vulnerable, wary lines of Talanah’s expression, transfixed by the feeling of one life marking another instead, Aloy wants to fight it.
If there’s a way to defy inevitability, it’s worth finding.
Aloy will find it before she drowns.
With a careful palm, she eases Talanah into a kiss that is no less urgent for its softness. Talanah cleaves to the reassuring touch, breath catching audibly as their lips graze.
Against them, Aloy whispers, “You won’t,” and for the first time she is learning how to mean it.