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“How many rooms?” The hunched gnome behind the counter barked.
Julien faltered. They had, of course, not discussed this beforehand.
“I’ll sleep on the fuckin floor, I dont care,” Kattigan offered unhelpfully.
“Do you two, ah… night owls… even require beds?” Julien nodded at Vaelus and Occtis in turn.
Occtis bristled. He hadn't decided how to feel about Vaelus since she broke the Stone, and he knew it was childish, but he hadn’t been intending to properly unpack it anytime soon. He had been vaguely avoiding her when he could, which she had noticed and respected, and he had settled into a quiet resentment, just because it required the least thought. Now, he worried they would be lumped together out of practicality, and he would be forced to get over himself.
“A bed would be nice,” he croaked, cringing at how gravelly his voice was after not using it for a while.
“Take your time,” the old gnome at the counter snapped.
“How many beds does each room hold?” Bolaire asked.
“We have two doubles and a single left, and they’re all each two silver.”
Julien tossed a gold coin across the counter irritably. “I don't carry silver.”
Occtis smirked. The gnome’s entire countenance changed as he fumbled with his keyring, mumbling, “oh, thank you kindly, good sir…”
Bolaire clapped his hands together. “Well then, five beds…”
Occtis ran the possible combinations over in his head, and then he had an idea.
“I can take the single,” he blurted, before wondering if that was rude. “With Thimble.”
The pixie hadn’t had the chance to rest since the night she helped Ulbid with the cave, and she was already half-asleep, tucked into Occtis’s vest. She nuzzled into him approvingly when she heard her name. Occtis felt an odd tingling, and wondered if her fairy dust was soaking through his chest.
The gnome leaned precariously over the edge again, holding a crooked golden key. “There you are, young man. Up those stairs, third door on your right.”
“Thank you,” he said simply, and left the others to divvy up the rest.
The room was tiny: the door bumped against the foot of the bed when it was opened fully, and Occtis could have touched both walls at the same time if he spread his arms completely. But the bed was soft, and long enough for him to lay down, and that was all he needed.
Occtis tossed his pack in the corner and sat on the bed. Thimble repositioned herself against his chest.
He looked down at her, poking out of his vest like she was tucked into bed. Her wings were free, always. When Occtis was a boy, not long after he’d met her, he’d found a perfectly intact dragonfly wing in a courtyard. It was so tiny, and so delicate, he didn’t want to touch it, so he tried to pick it up with a pair of sticks to look at it closer. But the stick snagged the membrane, and the whole wing crumpled like it had been barely held together. Occtis was always terrified, since then, that Thimble trusted him too much, and one day he would break her the same way.
But that line of thinking was almost a disrespect to Thimble. She was a hardened warrior, and a creature of legend, and she knew what she was doing. If she felt safe with him, it had to mean he had something to offer. She didn’t sleep in the others’ vests, at least. He just hoped she wasn’t trusting him to make him feel better. He couldn’t even give her warmth anymore.
“Hey,” he said eventually.
“Mmmhi,” she slurred, smiling without opening her eyes.
“I’d like to take my vest off, if that’s alright.”
She looked up at him and glared. He chuckled and reached to slowly begin unfastening the belt over his vest, and she fluttered out to eye-level with him to blow a raspberry, settling on the nightstand while he took off his boots and more obnoxious accoutrements.
“Do your eyes always glow, now?” She asked quietly while he was undoing his cravat.
“I don’t know.” He closed his eyes completely, “are they still?”
In the quiet of the night, he could feel his hair blow back, ever so slightly, as she flew up to him again.
She giggled. “I think they are… through your eyelids, a little.”
He opened his eyes to see her staring at him with her head cocked, inches from his nose. This close, he could see the golden freckles that he had noticed when she turned big. How is it that he never saw them before? Once he knew to look, they seemed impossible to miss.
“Maybe it stops when I’m unconscious,” Occtis postulated.
“Well, until then, we match!” and she shimmied midair, flickering brighter as she scattered fairy dust over his lap.
She smiled up at him, and the silence seemed to stretch. Occtis, by then, had stripped to just his shirt and trousers, and set all of his components and pouches and straps aside. This was the point where he was supposed to lay down and let Thimble sleep.
But he hesitated. And she noticed.
“What is it?”
He looked at the wall at willed saliva to wet his throat properly. “I had an idea.”
She hovered in front of him expectantly.
“Can you turn big whenever you want?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Does it feel… wrong?”
She tilted her head, like she hadn’t considered that before. “I don’t… I mean, it feels different. I don’t like not being able to fly. But also, I can do so much stuff I always wanted to.”
“Mhm.”
“Was that your idea?”
“No… I, um…”
“Did you want me to turn big?” Before she was even done with the question, her body flashed into an Occtis-sized one. She hit the floor too hard, like she had been expecting to fall farther, and stumbled off-balance. Occtis reached out to catch her before he knew what he was doing, and then they were standing, and he was holding her, and he could feel her– her breath on his shoulder, her chest rising and falling, and her heartbeat thrumming steadily.
He pulled back. “Sorry.”
She blanched. “For what?”
He chuckled. “I don’t know.”
Thimble stepped back, and he got a full look at her again. It was the same hair and skin and eyes he had always known, but he could follow her expressions clearer this way. She was looking up at him– he was only a few inches taller than her, like this– like she was studying him the same way. He let her drag her firefly-green eyes across his face, his hair, his chest. She mouth was closed, but her jaw was moving slightly, like she was nibbling the inner flesh of her lip.
She looked nervous, he decided. And a little sad. He couldn’t see her dimples, because she wasn’t smiling, but instead, there was a tiny crease between her eyebrows.
Occtis realized that she probably wasn’t used to people seeing her this closely. He wondered if she had realized that. He looked away.
“Did you just want a hug?” She asked finally.
“What?”
She laughed again, but it didn’t sound so tinsel-y now. “Why did you want me to get big?”
“Oh.” Occtis was nervous. He was used to being nervous, he’d been nervous his whole life, but there were none of the same physical sensations now. Instead, it just felt like he was walking on an imaginary tightrope, and if he looked down, he would fall. “I-I was wondering if. You could sleep. Like this. A-and I could… hold you?”
She cocked her head, but her smiled widened. “Yeah?”
“J-just. So I could feel your… heartbeat, and stuff. I just. Um. I miss it. A lot… and I’m worried I’ll forget what it felt like? To be alive.”
She ran towards him and wrapped her own arms around him, and squeezed him tighter than he had ever been held before. His throat was thick, and he realized he would have been crying, if his tear ducts were still functional.
And then she stepped back and looked at the tiny bed. “Okay, so how do you want to do this?”
He looked down at it, too, and gauged that it would barely fit the two of them if they lay sideways. “Sorry, I didn’t plan this very well.”
“It’s okay, we’ll make do. Here, you lay down first, ‘cause you’re bigger, still.” She giggled. “At least in surface area.”
He grinned and moved to sit back down, but then stopped himself.
“What?”
“I… I think I could feel you better if-if… if I took my shirt off?” He wanted to swallow his words as soon as he heard them. He was going to die again.
But Thimble just nodded, “yeah, probably. Should I take my bracers off?”
The question hung in the air. “If you want.”
The unspoken acknowledgement would that she would be making herself weak, and vulnerable. She had only obtained the bracers days ago, but hadn’t had reason to take them off, since. She had lived long enough before them, right?
I’ll keep you safe, Occtis wanted to say, but didn’t. Instead, he just reached over and made sure the door was locked properly. Thimble smiled and began unfastening the bracers’ straps. Occtis turned instinctively so his back faced her while he unbuttoned his shirt, even though she was about to sleep on his bare chest. He pulled it over his head and tossed it in the corner, but didn’t turn around. In the candlelight, his scar seemed cavernous.
“Hey,” Thimble traced a fingertip between his shoulderblades, and he jumped, but she didn’t pull away. “I got scars too.”
He looked over his shoulder. She had taken off her bracers and boots, and was just in her little knit top and shorts.
“I can close my eyes? If it makes you feel better.”
“No, it’s fine.” He turned around and made his way to the bed, not looking at her reaction. If he acted like it wasn’t a big deal, it would be fine.
Occtis lay on his back, trying to leave enough room for her to at least attempt to slot next to him, but as soon as he stopped moving, she clambered on top of him, right where she had been when she was four inches tall, curled around his chest like a cat.
And everything seemed to slow. Or maybe hasten. Or maybe both.
Occtis could feel her breath again, not just from her nose but through her body, rising and falling like the tide. The longer they lay, the more he began to mirror her: when her lungs filled, she pushed harder against his, and he tried to push air out of his own. And as she exhaled, he forced his chest out to fill the space, so they would remain pressed against each other.
He had never felt so much skin before– except maybe when Thaisha hugged him, after he woke up that fateful night, but he had been barely conscious then. Her arms hung loosely over his shoulders, soft as a petal, but dense with flesh and blood. She probably weigh more than him, like this, and he was effectively pinned to the mattress. But the weight of her only served to make her seem more present. He wanted to be completely encapsulated by her, pressed in from all sides at once.
Tentatively, he set a hand on the back of her waist. He knew it was cold, and he expected her to wince, but she just hummed lightly into his neck. She was so soft– it was driving him insane. She had said she had scars, but Occtis couldn’t imagine anything breaking flesh like this.
But as he hugged her waist and ran his fingers through her hair, he started noticing abrasions and imperfections. Since the doors to Faerie closed, she had grown up, and collected all the lines and lumps and creases that came with being alive.
She shivered slightly, and Occtis realized her perfectly smooth skin had horripilated.
He tried to snake an arm off her without shifting too much, grabbing the blanket that he had pushed to the edge of the bed and tossing it over the two of them.
Under the blanket, her warmth seemed to bleed deeper into him. The longer they lay, the more the lines between the two fo them seemed to blur. There was skin, and warmth, and it didn’t really matter whose was whose.
He could feel her blood sliding around in her veins and her heart pumping steadily against the great black night. Her jugular was pressed against his sternum, right at the top of his scar. He imagined her blood seeping into his chest and flowing through his veins like it was his own.
“This is nice,” she said, barely more than a whisper.
“I thought you were asleep.”
“Not yet.” A pause. “I’m getting used to this body, too.”
He stroke the nape of her neck with a featherlight touch.
“Thank you for this,” he said finally.
“Of course. Is it helping?”
He wasn’t sure exactly what she meant by that, but he said, “I think so.”
They lay there for a few more moments. Occtis was trying to inscribe every movement, every touch, into the map he held of her in his mind. He wasn’t sure if she would let him do this again, or if they would even have the chance, and he wanted to remember it in full. If he focused, he could feel the tiny hairs on her arms and midriff when she breathed, and the sheen of sweat on her back.
“You make me feel alive,” he whispered.