Healer

Chapter 42

     Talia felt that time stopped. Their bodies intertwined, she was whole again, and it didn't really matter if time started moving again or not. She had been crying when she reached him, ripped apart by his pain, and the tears still came, now full of relief. Whatever came next, she had him. He held her so tightly that she thought he may crack a rib and she didn't care. She didn't want him to stop.

Azriel buried his face in her neck, not caring if this was a dream or a hallucination, or a death throw. He had held her when he picked her ruined body up off the forest floor but not since then, and now, now he would not let her go. He could hear her heart beating, that blood beneath her skin pumping and flowing, like he had reached for all that time ago when he had first awoken. The same signs he had used to assure himself of her existence before.

"How?" He breathed against her sweet smelling skin, running his hands up her back and into her tangled hair, pulling her even closer.

Talia pulled back, pressing her lips against his neck, his cheek, and pulling his head down to her chest as she straightened. "It's a long story." He pulled her back down, lifting her legs around his waist and gripping her tighter. "For later."

They stayed like that for a few minutes, their sawing breath the only sound as they fought to be even closer. When he felt his arms might begin to shake from the effort, he lowered her legs to the ground.

"How are you here?" He asked against her neck again, coming out of the moment and beginning to question his sense of reality all too quickly. Couldn't he just let himself have this?

She stood, catching his eyes as he did too. He kept his hands on her shoulders, unwilling to be completely parted.

"The Mother sent me. It has to do with The Hex." She reached up and touched his chest. "I'll explain everything, I promise."

He spoke again and the depth of sadness in his eyes destroyed her. "I'm dead, aren't I?" He asked. It was the only thing that made sense. Something had hit him in the sky, that was why he fell. He had felt like his chest ripped open. Maybe it had hit him in the heart or maybe he had snapped his neck when he hit the ground.

A realization crashed into Talia then, with a force that took her breath. This was him in his grief. This was what he was without her, his mourning so potent that she could taste it. This wasn't their great and beautiful reunion, this was still his struggle to go on, to survive, to understand.

"No, Az. You're not. You're not dead." She took his forearm and squeezed, proving to him that he could feel it.

"Then...." He stepped back, away from her, and it felt like having a limb ripped off. But she didn't follow. He needed to process this and she couldn't force it. "Then you are not really here."

Talia had thought the sadness in him before was total, at its true depth. She was wrong. Somehow it grew, somehow it became even heavier.

She swallowed her own tears. She would give him all the time in the world. She would give him everything he needed, but she would show him this was real, starting now. And she would never leave him again. That, she knew.

"I am here." She kept her voice soft. She forced as much of herself into it as she could. "I am here, Azriel. And I love you so much. I promise we are both here, alive."

Tears welled in his eyes, making them shine and he seemed not to notice. "You look different." He frowned.

Did she? She looked down at herself, small, scarred, she felt the same as she always had. She ran a hand through her hair, suddenly remembering how it had looked when she had first returned. A long strand of white-blonde now framed her face. The rest was as dark as the day she was born. Interesting. She turned it over in her hand.