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The blue lights of the Undercity hadn't faded entirely, even after the quake, but they'd gone dim, faint enough that Ashley wished he'd thought to bring a torch. There were darker sections of Leá Monde than this, times where he'd fought blind, eyes straining after the faint streaks of light cast by sharp knives before they struck, the gleam of beast eyes in the dark as they drew close enough to make a final lunge for him. The half-lit, underwater blue of a few ruined corridors wasn't nearly so bad in comparison.
What he didn't like was what the faint glow did to Sydney's skin, how it paled him out, blued his lips and eyes, until he looked like what he was: something long dead.
"Something the matter, Riskbreaker?" the man asked, turning to him with a knowing smirk, which at least broke Ashley's morbid stare from the prophet's scarred back, almost bruise-colored by flickering corpselight.
"No," he managed, dragging his eyes up to Sydney's firmly. "Lead on." If he hadn't needed the use of a particular forge, one that could forge anything, he would never have returned. And as only Sydney knew the altered paths beneath the city now that the quake had changed everything....
"You're certain? I could always draw you a map...."
"Stay." Sydney was gone too often as it was. It wasn't that he didn't want to see the man. He simply didn't want to see him like this.
"If I disturb you, Riot--"
"Always," he growled, closing the gap between them. He'd had enough of Sydney's teasing, and if he was disturbed by what Sydney was, he knew how to remind himself that it wasn't all that Sydney was.
The body he pressed against a crumbling wall was solid and warm, the mouth that opened to his wet and inviting, and if Sydney's kisses tasted a little of the Dark, well, all of him did, after all. And if he wasn't quite alive, he was very far from dead, and always would be: the one thing Ashley could never lose, for all his trying.
"Nn," Sydney hummed against his lips, silver arms wrapping around his neck with an ease that looked casual though it was anything but. "Don't tell me you're afraid of the dead."
"I have too many of those to need another one," Ashley murmured against Sydney's throat, pulling him closer, and Sydney, for a wonder, let himself be held until Ashley had soaked up the feel of him, indestructible and occasionally biddable, only unexpectedly kind.