If We Only Have Tonight

The way he watched me had changed.

I felt Dorian's gaze while I nursed Ashara in the dying firelight—not the protective vigilance of recent days, but something deeper. A cataloging. As if he was trying to memorize which parts of me remained unchanged, which had been rewritten by gods and mirrors and names that refused to die.

"Do you still feel like yourself?" His voice came soft from the shadows. "Or is someone else looking through your eyes?"

The question I'd been avoiding split me open. Ashara released my breast, milk-drunk and peaceful for once, and I set her in the wooden cradle he'd carved from lightning-struck pine. When I turned to face him, tears were already falling.

"What if she didn't come back whole?" The words tumbled out, raw and ragged. "The Aria you loved—what if I'm just wearing her skin? What if every time I survived, I left pieces behind, and now I'm just... echoes pretending to be a person?"

He crossed the space between us in two strides. His hands found my face, thumbs brushing away tears with devastating gentleness. Then, slowly, deliberately, he knelt. His lips found the silver scar across my belly—the one that marked where divine fire had tried to remake me.

"This body made a miracle," he whispered against the damaged skin. "This body fought gods and won. This body chose me when it could have chosen power." He looked up, amber eyes fierce with certainty. "I'd worship it in every timeline."

Something broke in me—not like shattering, but like ice melting after endless winter. I pulled him up and kissed him with all the desperation of someone drowning in their own skin. Not desire—need. The need to be touched like I was real, singular, his.

"If this is the last night I belong to myself," I whispered against his mouth, "I want you to touch me like it matters. Like we matter. Like tomorrow isn't hunting us."

His hands stilled on my waist. "Aria—"

"Please." I pressed closer, feeling his heartbeat against mine. "I need to remember what it feels like to choose. To want. To be wanted by someone who sees me, not prophecy, not vessel, not mother of possibility. Just me."

He kissed me then, slow and deep and certain. "Just you," he agreed. "Always just you."

We moved together toward the pile of furs that served as our bed, hands relearning territories that cosmic horror had made foreign. He undressed me like unwrapping something sacred—each revealed inch of skin kissed, claimed, remembered. When his mouth found the sensitive spot where neck met shoulder, I gasped, and for the first time in days, it was purely human sound.

"I missed this," I breathed as his hands mapped the changed landscape of my body. "Missed being in my skin without fear."

"Then let me bring you home," he murmured, and proceeded to do exactly that.

The reunion was slow at first—careful touches, reverent exploration. His fingers traced each silver scar like they were love letters written in light. When he finally joined with me, it was with a groan that sounded like prayer, like homecoming, like grief for all the moments we'd thought we'd lost.

But careful couldn't contain what we'd been holding back. Need took over—not just physical but existential. The need to prove we were alive, were real, were more than players in someone else's prophecy. Our bodies remembered rhythms older than divine meddling, and we chased that mortal magic with increasing desperation.

When he bit down on my collarbone—not hard enough to break skin but enough to mark—I cried out. Not from pain but from the shocking relief of being grounded, claimed, made singular in the most primal way.

"Mine," he growled against my throat, and I answered by pulling him deeper, harder, erasing any space between us that gods might slither through.

Through it all, the strangest peace descended. The moonlight through our window, cracked and wrong for so many nights, softened into something almost natural. My silver glyphs, which had blazed with otherness since Ashara's birth, dimmed to faint tracings—not because I was fading but because I was finally, fully present.

And Ashara—our daughter who'd been clenched tight as a fist since drawing her first breath—sighed in her sleep. Her tiny hands uncurled, and she smiled. A real baby's smile, unconscious and sweet.

"Look," I gasped, even as Dorian moved within me. "She knows. She knows we're here."

"We're here," he agreed, pressing his forehead to mine as we moved together toward that ancient completion. "We're here, we're real, we're—"

The rest was lost in sensation, in the salt-sweet collapse of boundaries that left us tangled and gasping and gloriously, mortally spent.

After, I lay on his chest, tracing the faded scar from a war that had happened in another timeline. His heartbeat under my ear was steady, real, mine.

"Do you still believe in us?" I asked into the darkness.

His arms tightened around me. "I believe in the version of the world that lets me fall asleep holding you. That lets me wake up to your voice. That gives us boring mornings and difficult daughters and the chance to grow old complaining about our joints."

I laughed—soft and wet and real. "You think we'll get that? Normal?"

"I think we've earned the right to try."

Sleep was pulling me under, the bone-deep exhaustion that follows perfect connection. Safe in his arms, with our daughter peaceful in her cradle, I could almost believe tomorrow would be kind.

Then, just as consciousness faded, Ashara stirred. Not waking—just turning in dreams. Her lips parted, and she whispered a name.

Not hers. Not the god's. Not even the second name that haunted us.

She whispered mine. My true name. The one my mother had spoken once at my birth and never again. The one the Moonscribe had used. The one no infant should know.

"Aria-who-was-meant-to-be-silent."

The words hung in the air like smoke from a fire not yet lit. Dorian's breathing had already deepened into sleep, unaware of what our daughter had just revealed.

I lay awake, caught between the warmth of love-marked skin and the cold certainty that our reprieve was ending. Whatever had taken root in Ashara—or in me—was patient. It had let us have tonight.

But tomorrow...

Tomorrow, the names would start calling themselves home.