Chapter Text
Months later.
One morning, a woman arrives at the door. Her dirty face is streaked with tears and her eyes and her bruises and her torn dress tell only parts of a story Emmett has the power to take from her and turn into something she can live with.
He looks at me, pained, torn. I hold his gaze, the cogs of my mind whirring so loudly I can almost hear them.
I feel the crushing weight of the power he’s trusting me with like lead around my neck; stubborn Emmett, who, in the before, would have never, ever have conceded control to me or anyone else.
I nod shortly.
Emmett speaks to her, softly, his voice low and resonating with pain. I stare at the floor, where the sunlight pours through the window panes making a lattice the colour of flame on the dark, polished floor. Has Emmett been polishing the floors? There’s no dust anywhere. Of course he has, without a whisper, just doing what needs to be done, and somehow turning this place into a home for us. It feels more like home than mine ever did and I barely even noticed.
Emmett turns to me, ‘This is Annaliese. She is agreeable to my um- assistant being present. If it would benefit his education.’
Love, it turns out, has its own strange magic.
I shake my head, ‘I trust you, Emmett.’
I don’t know what I mean by that but he does. He nods, slowly, his eyes still flickering towards me as he goes with her into the quiet, comfortable back room that we don’t use and leaves the door open just a sliver. I hear the echoes of her voice and his. After a while, only the scratching of his pen.
I’m not sure what I do with those hours. Only that my insides are thrashing like snakes around the polarity of the kind, strong, beautiful man that I love doing something I have always known to be so vile and treacherous.
But when they come out, her face is pale, blank, lighter. Emmett seems to have taken on the weight of her pain, but he does well to hide it until she leaves. As the door closes behind her, I see his face crumple like tissue paper. My inner turmoil forgotten, I hold him to me and we sink to the floor.
He mumbles and cries and I begin to see more clearly: the Emmett I love and the Binder woven together like different threads in a rich tapestry. You can’t see the image, you’re too close, until you step back and then-
Beautiful.
Hours later, I try to put it into words, ‘That wasn’t like with De Havilland- And the others that my father- They stopped for tea and cake at four- And a three-course meal and wine afterwards and they’d talk so normally, like it didn’t touch them.’
‘I know what you think of binding, Lucian,’ Emmett sighs, ‘and I know why, but it shouldn’t be that way. It should be about helping people. It still can be, I think.’
Bluntly, I ask, ‘Is this what you want? To be a binder?’
Emmett looks almost surprised, ‘Would you mind, if I did?’
‘You didn’t answer the question.’
‘I’ve always been drawn to books, long before I knew what they were. Seredith said I’d be good at it. It’s a calling. I know that now. It feels right, even though it’s painful. I can help people, Lucian, people who need it, who aren’t being forced. I can do that.’ He looks at me, ‘But only if you agree.’
‘I don’t mind, Emmett. It’s okay.’
‘You do mind,’ he says quietly. ‘It took me a long time to find peace with it. Maybe you will too. One day. But thank you.’
He gets up, without an explanation, and moves downstairs. I hear the turn of a key, after a few moments, the heavy swing of the archive door, Emmett’s feet on the stairs.
When he enters, he’s carrying a thick, beautifully bound book. The cover is intricately decorated, roses in a garden, surrounded by ruins. Red and gold stitches woven like tongues of fire around the edges.
‘There’s no title,’ I notice.
He nudges my hand gently towards the rose in the centre, where two initials are so carefully intertwined it seems just part of the pattern until you see it and then you can’t stop seeing it.
‘This is just a novel, there’s no magic binding it. I wrote down everything you told me, from before we met. My past too, on the farm. Everything that happened to us. The courts. Just in case anything went wrong. I never want either of us to forget again. I know it might still happen but-‘
My father will be in jail for a long time, now that the extent of his crimes have come to light. I hope never to see Acre’s face or any of my father’s subordinates again, who fled as soon as they saw the wind was changing. Yet still- My family are in disgrace. I will never be welcome there again, not that I ever was. One day, he will get out and then-
Enemies unseen shadow the corners of my vision until I touch Emmett’s hand and the fear dissolves.
I take the book from him, very gently and begin to leaf through the delicate pages of his careful handwriting. It’s beautifully done. I stop when the writing stops. The rest of the pages are blank.
‘There’s no ending,’ I mumble, stupidly.
‘We get to write that,’ Emmett smiles, ‘together. If-if you want to.’
Out of his pocket, he pulls a small black box. My heart finds it’s way up my throat and into my mouth.
‘It didn’t seem fair that I had a ring and you didn’t. It’s not much, but…’ He opens the box and holds it out to me. I take out a gold band, encrusted with a single midnight-coloured stone, almost black to the eye until I hold it up to the light and I see the scarlet heart of it. I slip it on and he holds my hand and threads our fingers together so that the rings touch, before pressing both to his lips.
By some miracle, we make it up the stairs and to the bedroom, a tangle of limbs and lips and half-shed clothing. His lips are against my neck as I pull his shirt from his shoulders and run my hands across his chest, the light covering of light brown hair and the layer of muscle taut beneath his skin. He shivers. I watch the movement in his throat as he swallows, pulls away a little.
‘Please, Emmett,’ I murmur into his ear, ‘I’m ready. Please, let go. For me.’
He nods and sinks onto the bed and I kiss my way across chest and his stomach until he tilts his hips and blushes.
I peel off our remaining clothes and take him into my mouth until he writhes and whimpers, ‘Lucian,’ as though it’s sacred, and, ‘please,’ staring at me with those brown eyes I could drown in as though I might refuse.
Afterwards, I lie with my head on his chest, feeling somehow both effervescent with joy, yet dizzy and a little nauseous, as the layers of past and present realign.
Emmett says it’s the disconnect between the two planes of memory, a razor-thin line of reality between them which I walk as though on a tightrope. I’d slip, if not for Emmett’s unshakable presence, his hands encircling me until the room stops spinning and there’s just us. For my part, I kiss away the echoes of Emmett’s guilt and regret until they barely shadow the edges.
The grey shadow retreats a little further every day, with every smile, every touch, every time we make love. Every time Emmett writes down a page of our lives, entwining us; binding us, not to paper and ink, but to each other.