Chapter Text
When Onya was five, she sat in the little hut on the outskirts of her village, surrounded by the trees, and poured the tea and laid the herbs over the metal grating. She lit the fire and coughed at the sweet, sticky linger of the smoke in her throat and nose. She’d tried to hide that morning, crouched in the corner of her mother’s garden among the snap peas and the purple sweet potatoes until her father patted her on the head and hauled her out of the tall plants.
Her mother scrubbed her with a cloth while she glowered and held her by the ear to get to the back of her neck while she squirmed for freedom. Dressed her in her brother’s old pants without the holes in knees and the hems and fussed at her hair until Onya tried to bite her hand.
Onya drags her fingers through it, rebellious, while she’s walked to the hut. She knows it as the one the preteen boys throw rocks at during the witching hour when the moon hangs dark and the insects stay quiet, daring each other to touch the wall with a palm before fleeing back into the woods. “Die well,” her brother tells her, smirking, and dodges her hissing snarling swat.
Onya screws up her face and forces her spine straight and raises her chin and refuses to cower before the old woman. When her mother was ten, she’d been told to hang lavender over her door. The year the frost stayed through spring, Onya’s youngest brother died. She remember him only dimly; his crook-toothed smile and tiny chubby fingers. Her father calls the old woman a witch and ignores the gasps of the other adults in their village, the quick circle of their finger over their chest to keep the keryonbaga away. “Superstition,” he’d told Onya at dinner the night before. “But it’s what your mother wants.”
The woman holds Onya’s hand in hers for a long time. She taps each of Onya’s little knuckles and the scrape on her wrist from a tussle in the dirt two days prior. She bites her fingernail into the webbing of skin between Onya’s index finger and thumb until Onya yelps in pain, blood welling up in a thick dark drop. She’s heard whispers from her agemates who’ve come and gone already, sneak peeks in vague hints and odd puzzles of what’s to come in their lives. Onya hopes she’ll be told how she’s going to get out of her village, away from the banal days of learning how to knead dough and nights that are too bright with the moon and suffocating, the humidity and the screaming of the cicadas.
The woman catches Onya’s blood on her thumb and presses it gently to Onya’s forehead. She calls Onya a poor darling of a warriorgirl and while she’s turned away to put out the fire; Onya sucks her tiny wound into her mouth, soothing the pinprick hurt with her tongue. She waits to hear her fate, but the woman just gives her a knife that gleams in the dim light. “You were born in the river,” she says, and Onya stumbles into the sun.
//
“You’re quiet,” Leksa notes at breakfast.
Onya is carving her apple into smaller and smaller slices. She answers in gonasleng. “Am I?”
“Sha, even for you.” Leksa crunches into a slice of bread, still hot, golden crust and fluffy insides and spread thick with fresh butter. Her frown has been an ever present thing for days. “Something I can help with?”
“You cannot even help yourself.” It’s slightly more cutting than Onya intended, but it does make Leksa pause and look at her properly.
“Oh?” Leska’s voice is dangerously soft, too controlled. Onya’s spine straightens despite herself.
“I miss Reivon,” she says, and the cold bare truth of it makes Leksa pause. She sighs.
“I miss Clarke,” she admits. She blinks after, like she’s surprised at herself. Onya wonders if it is easier for her to be honest in trigedasleng, the way it is for Onya to be honest in English. “Kaiidth,” Leksa says.
It’s Onya’s turn to blink. “What?”
“It’s from television.”
Onya frowns. “You are not taking me seriously.”
Leksa stands, her movements jerky. “It is what it is. What can be changed?”
“That’s what they said about you becoming Heda again, after years. About killing Nia.”
Leksa opens one of the many folders and dossiers littering the table. She licks fruit jam off her knuckle and flips it open. “Say what you mean, Anya.”
“You miss--” Onya twists her tongue up, her face scrunched. “Clarke. Why do you deny it?” Leksa opens her mouth and Onya barrels over her. In for a penny, in for a pound. “I know I am the last one would expect to say it, but--but you deserve to be happy. Even if it’s with… Klark.”
Leksa is burying her face into papers now, obscuring her frown. “I am Heda. That is why it cannot be changed. Blood must have blood. To be Heda is to be alone.”
Onya stands and lets the bread knife fall from her plate with a clatter. “You are a coward.”
Leksa’s eyes flash. “Get out,” she says, cold. Her face is a flat mask, but her eyes flicker and the corner of her mouth tugs slightly down before going neutral.
“You have never been able to lie to me,” Onya reminds her. She leaves before Leksa can respond.
Onya has a computer. It’s a beat up heavy thing that whistles when it’s online, even though the speakers have been broken for as long as she has had it. Leksa gave it to her on the lunar new year five years ago, and has marveled at its continued lifeforce every year thereafter.
Onya hums to it companionably while it flickers and beeps and the fan whirs aggressively. She has an email from Reivon with a single string of letters, and Onya squints at the screen while she taps at the keyboard with one finger. Reivon answers on the first ring. “Luddite,” she says, fond.
“Hm.” Onya perches on her chair, peering into the cracked webcam. “And how is… everything?”
Reivon shrugs, her image grainy. “Boring. Clarke got a job at a gas station.”
Onya cracks a smile. “Oh?”
Reivon rolls her eyes, but she’s smiling back. “Leave her alone, she’s wallowing.” Reivon’s smile fades slightly. “Is this awkward? It feels a little awkward.”
Onya shrugs. As a general rule, she doesn’t notice awkwardness. But she misses Reivon’s physical presence, the real warmth of her smile, the feel of Reivon’s hand in hers. “I miss you,” she admits. A knocking at her door interrupts them.
“Get a phone,” Reivon tells her, before they hang up. “Text me.”
Leksa is in the training yard. There’s a ring of young people, mostly children, but fully grown adults as well, lingering by the fences, murmuring amongst themselves in soft, reverent whispers. Onya dispels them with her presence and the arch of an eyebrow, then slips over the fence. Leksa is breathing hard, sweat sheening on her face. Her eyes flicker to Onya before she exhales, turning and stowing her training swords in their slotted racks. She undoes the wrappings around her palms with neat efficiency, stripping them away and laying them aside.
She arches, fingertips to the sky, until her back cracks, then rolls her head and bends at the waist to place her hands flat to the dirt. Onya rolls her eyes.
“And how long will little Heda be ignoring me?”
Leksa jerks very slightly, surprised. She meets Onya’s eyes. “It’s been a long time since I heard that nickname.”
Onya looks out at the grounds of the capital; the green trees and the scrabbly grass and the bite in the crisp air that tells her winter is coming. She has a meeting in an hour to coordinate the first official group of the new gona. “There were times,” she says, very soft and careful, “where I was so very certain that I would never see Trigeda again.”
Leksa’s breath catches. “Everyone doubts, Onya.”
“I remember that last night. I ate an apple in the stable--do you remember Ana, the horsemaster? I played cards with her and Davi. I was walking to our rooms when the bomb went off.”
“I remember,” Leksa says. Her eyes are far off. “Costia.” She doesn’t say any more than that for a long moment, drawn out between them. “I was sleeping when the sky fell.” Her refocus, her lips quirk. “Good thing it landed on your bed.”
Onya doesn’t return the smile. “You have always been older than you are. You were long before--” she struggles with the translation, “--before the divine. I think I often forgot how young you actually were when we fled. I don’t know if you understand the weight of what you have accomplished.”
“Onya--”
“If I have failed you,” Onya continues over her. “You have been Heda for a long time, but you were Leksa when I took you.”
Leksa grips her shoulder. “You have never failed me.” Her brow creases. “To be Heda is to be alone.”
“To be Heda is to be alone,” Onya echoes, “but not to lie to yourself. Head over heart doesn’t mean you lock your heart away and ignore it. Be brave, Leksa. Speak your heart and rule with your head and grow your shoulders broad enough to carry the consequences.” She tilts her head into the sun. “How lucky are we, for our feet to find their way home again in the dark.”
“Walk with me?” Leksa asks. Onya hesitates. “I do,” Leksa admits, “I do miss her.”
They walk to the edge of the buildings, the rubble where Nia never bothered to rebuild what she destroyed. Onya wonders if Nia liked to look at it, if it brought her satisfaction. There’s a river along the edge, just starting to get cold and icy. Soon it will be frozen over enough to walk across. They stand on the banks of it and listen to it rumble and roar.
“I was born in a river,” Onya says. When Leksa grips her forearm she closes her fingers around Leksa’s wrist, giving and receiving strength. An equal’s exchange.
“I feel the loss,” Leksa tells her. “I carry it here, in my chest.” She touches two fingers above her heart. “But I carry the light too. I feel it when I look at you.”
//
Onya remembers seeing her mother cry three times:
The first time was when they spread her brother’s ashes under the oak tree. Wove the ti leaves into ropes and laid them across the pyre where he burned, and fasted from sunrise to sundown until they rotted away and the wind took them. She buried her fingers into the dirt and his bone fragments and the dried bits of leaf and Onya watched her shoulders shake until her father told her brother to take her inside.
Onya snuck out in the dead of the night and found her way to the little lake surrounded by crumbling trees and picked the water lily from its pad, cradled the thin, long, soft white, petals in her palms and walked slow and careful back to her house. When she turned the corner, she heard her eldest brother shout and the pounding of her father’s feet as he ran to her, furious. He dragged her inside and her fingers spasmed, crushing the lily in her palm.
Her mother slapped her across the face and then burst into tears, clutching her close. She kissed the red handmark on Onya’s tiny cheek and put the petals in a water cup in the sun and let Onya suck on the sheep bones at dinner.
She cried again when Onya came home with the dried thumbprint between the dip of her eyebrows. Her mother scrubbed at it with a cloth and hot water and tried to hide her tears while Onya attempted to wriggle away. “My youngest,” she said, and it sounded like she was in mourning. my only daughter.
Onya wakes in the middle of the night on her little cot and her mother is knelt by her side, her hand over Onya’s heart. She makes a sleepy noise and her mother shushes her. She kisses Onya on the forehead, lips where the the skin is red and scraped raw.
The last time was the morning Onya left for the capital. She packed her bag and her father had mended the broken strap. The knife the old woman gave her was stowed in the side pocket. Her mother tucked a satchel of herbs from the garden above it and circled her finger above Onya’s heart on her chest to ward away the bad things. She kissed Onya’s forehead and told her to be everything she can be.
Onya’s brother lifted her onto the wagon and the gona that came to fetch her rested his heavy hand on her shoulder. She could barely see over the side and she stood on a box to watch her village disappear into the distance. Her father’s arm was around her mother’s waist and they were both shaking, their faces twisted in grief.
//
“Clarke came home smelling like straight up human feces today,” Reivon tells her, and Onya smiles more broadly than she’d allow herself if anyone was watching. The phone is a warm weight in her hand, a gift from Leksa that came with very minimal teasing considering she admitted she only needed one number in its banks.
“Oh?” she asks, trying for guileless and falling short. “Tell me more.”
Reivon laughs, full and joyous. Onya thinks she will have to reconsider her stance on technology, to hear the colors and the subtleties of Reivon’s voice over so many hundreds of miles. “Octavia hosed her off in the front yard.”
Onya makes a satisfied noise. “I always liked Okteivia.”
“Liar.” Reivon huffs, suddenly playful. “You liked Octavia, huh?”
“Mm. My favourite, even.”
Reivon gasps, dramatically betrayed. “I never figured you for a player. Maybe you don’t need to use your brand new app I know you installed because I texted Lexa to independently confirm.”
Onya hums, perking up. The call cuts out and she frowns at her screen, poking at it with a huff. It lights up again and she drags her fingertip across the green icon. It beeps twice, trilling a jaunty tune, and then Reivon’s face appears. She’s in the bath, blowing bubbles in the waterline that halts just under her nose. She surfaces. “Surprise! FaceTime is a hell of a thing.”
“So it is,” Onya agrees. She stretches out on her bed, head resting on the pillow, and yawns.
Reivon makes a fond noise. “Hold the phone up babe, you’ve got a thousand chins at this angle.”
Onya rolls her eyes. She lifts up the phone and squints at her own tiny image in the bottom corner. “Better?”
Reivon waggles her eyebrows. “And then what?”
Onya blinks. “And then what what?”
“You’re so bad at this.”
Onya pillows her head on her arm. “I don’t see you doing any better.”
“A challenge? You know me so well.”
Do I, Onya thinks. I’d like to. But Reivon is wet and a little soapy and Onya finds herself enamored by the way her hair curls damp above the water, escaping its bun and natural straightness in little wisps. “Can I aid you in anyway?”
“You’ll think of something,” Reivon says, and her grip goes shaky and there’s a moment where Onya thinks she’ll drop the phone into the water but Onya rumbles at her in trigedasleng, all soft loving and rough possessive, whichever makes Reivon’s breath quicken and her head tilt back on the porcelain edge of the tub and her chest heave while the water quivers and sloshes.
After, Reivon kisses the camera, soft press of lips. She wipes the screen with the edge of her towel and curls up on the corner of her bed in her sweats and a shirt Onya left behind and reads from one of her old textbooks until Onya slips to sleep.
//
When Onya was sixteen, she walked through the marketplace with enough money burning a hole in her pocket for the meat pies she likes. She’s whistling and preening, a little, to be seen in her uniform and to have her sword at her hip. She pauses at a stall selling poultices and herbs and satchels of sage. “Grandmother,” she blurts, shocked.
The woman squints at her, not a hint of recognition, and then she reaches out and presses her thumb between Onya’s eyebrows. She’s so much smaller than Onya remembers, hunched with age and deep lines in her face and Onya has to bend for her to reach, almost a bow. “I remember you,” she says. “The river girl.”
She winds a bracelet of long braided grasses around Onya’s wrist and waves away Onya’s attempt to pay. “Wait,” Onya says, before she loses her nerve. “You---my mother said you told fortunes.”
The woman shrugs. “Boys fulfil prophecies; we women make our own.”
“Please,” Onya presses, unsure why she suddenly, years later, has found her curiosity. She wants to tell the woman about how deeply her mother believes, how her father’s letters have become harder to read, the sickness wobbling his hand. How she remembers him tall and strong and standing straight and how she avoids going home to see how time has changed her faded memories. “Please,” is all she says, quiet.
The woman pats her wrist. “You go first,” she says. “If that’s a comfort. You die first.”
A passerby jostles her and her hand drops from the counter. The woman disappears into the crowd, carried away by the river of movement swarming towards the parade route. “Before who?” Onya asks, calling out helpless into the sea of people. “I die before who?”
//
Onya knows Titus cares about Leksa. She wishes it weren’t a fact she has to make a conscious effort to remember. “He has decided I am an ally,” she tells Reivon on the phone in the early morning, lingering although she knows she ought to get up and wash her face and braid her hair. “It’s… tedious.”
“He sounds like a lot of fun at parties,” Reivon says. Onya sighs, long.
“I have worries,” she admits. “There have been rumblings. No one can stay in power as long as Nia did and not have supporters. And it has taken… longer than I’d like to set up communications.”
“This Time article says you’ve made a shockingly smooth transition.”
“Hm,” Onya says, and Reivon snickers.
“You look good, babe. Except a little like you want to kill the baby you’re holding.”
“Who hands their baby to a stranger,” Onya protests, indignant. “Not even to Heda! To me!”
Reivon giggles again.
“I,” Onya says. She hesitates. “I went to my village yesterday. It’s why I couldn't call.”
Reivon is quiet for a few seconds, waiting her out. Onya makes a little noise, frustrated. “How was it?” Reivon finally asks, and Onya exhales, relieved.
“Odd. It--it doesn’t exist anymore.” She sits on her bed, one leg folded under her. She’s glad, suddenly, it’s not a video call. “Nia, she… it doesn't exist anymore.”
“Oh.”
“It was overgrown,” Onya offers. “It--burning can be good for the soil, sometimes.”
Reivon swallows. “What can I do?” she asks. “I don’t want to say I’m sorry, because that’s bullshit.” Onya frowns at her foot on the floor, her toes in the rug. She curls them up and stretches them out. “Onya.”
“It’s better,” Onya says, abrupt. She softens her voice to explain. “It’s better, for us, to burn. To be trapped in the ground, it’s…”
“I remember.” She can hear shifting on the other end of the line, like Reivon is sitting up in bed or settling into a chair.
Onya thinks about walking down the path to her parent’s house and the path barely visible under the long grasses. How the river looked smaller and shallower and her mother’s flowers were gone under weeds and crabgrass. How it took her half an hour to figure out where she thinks her house was and how she still isn’t sure she found the right place to lay the flowers and say goodbye to her parents and her brothers and her nieces. “You can’t go home again.”
Reivon murmurs something down the line, Onya’s brain shorted out and failing to translate. She keeps talking, soft and easy and calming, until Onya’s breath hitches one last time and she calms. “Hey,” Reivon greets.
“Reivon,” Onya manages.
“Hold on, let me---got it. You settled?”
Onya curls in a ball on her bed and tucks her pillow under her chin because no one can see her do it. “I am.”
“It’s for my gen ed class, so--just don’t judge, okay, I know it’s cliche.”
Onya presses a fist into her eyesocket until it hurts. The phone is hot against her cheek and she fumbles to make sure the charger is plugged in.
Reivon clears her throat. “You want a physicist to speak at your funeral,” she says. “You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died.”
Reivon’s voice fades out. Onya hears her swallow, lick the moisture back into her tongue.
She has uncurled, she realizes. Stretched out and loose limbed and her chest rises and falls without conscious effort for the first time in a long while. “Thank you,” she murmurs, voice thick and drifty. “Ai….”
“Sshh.” Reivon’s voice is gentling. “I am sorry, you know.”
“Ai no.” Onya’s hand slides down her face, the phone dragging on her cheek until it rests on the mattress.
“Go to sleep,” she hears Reivon coax, tinny from the distance and the angle. “You are not alone.”
//
They stayed in that shelter for two months before they got their first tiny shithole of an apartment. Onya figured out how to get them into school and how to keep them fed and and attended the gonasleng classes at night. She hasn’t been placed in a job yet and the hours creeping by in the day without Tris or Kostia or Leksa make her nervous, make her pace.
She wanders the neighborhood. It settles her to map the streets in her head, to know what’s down the alleys and around the corners, and it eats the time where she’d otherwise be sitting on the floor staring at the wall and counting the seconds down.
Once she sat on a bench in a deserted corner of a park with her head in her hands and tried to calm her mind, her heart racing for no reason, fighting to tuck the bad thoughts away. Someone sat next to her and she jerked upright, fully aware, the knife in her hand.
A homeless man peers at her. “You seem like you need this more than me,” he says. He’s holding a coffee out to her.
Onya hesitates. It takes her a moment to find the right sounds on her tongue, words he will understand. “Please--I don’t need it.”
He thrusts it at her. “Life is hard. When you happen to have something someone needs, you have to stretch. And then when you need something, you can reach out your hand.”
“Life is hard,” Onya echoes. She takes the coffee and sips--gone cold and no cream, but she likes the bitter edge of it. She offers it back and he smiles.
“I knew you were alright.”
They pass it back and forth, and Onya doesn’t have any money to give him but she does have an orange in her pocket and she peels it, the white bitter bits under her nails. They split it, the juice dripping sweet on their fingers and down their wrists.
“Good luck,” he says, as she rises to leave, and she hesitates.
“Thank you.”
There’s an army pin on the collar of his worn shirt under the bulky jacket that smells like sweat and unwashed body and he tosses her a salute as she leaves.
Onya thinks about him, sometimes. How someone who had even less than she sat next to her while she struggled not to fall apart and gave her the last of what he had and didn’t expect a thing in return.
//
“You’re a target,” Gustus grunts.
Onya’s eyes flash. Leksa has been hers to protect so long she might as well have tucked Onya’s heart in her own chest. “I will not stand to the side and hide.”
Gustus is a mountain; unmovable. “You are Heda’s right hand, everyone knows it.” Onya remembers him before he had the long scar down his face. He lost two children to Nia and is the only person Onya could have ever considered hiring for being in charge of Leksa’s personal security. “You stand next to her, and you’re making her twice as likely to be killed.”
Onya’s jaw works; she breathes hard through her nose. “Fine,” she snarls. “Fine.”
Onya enters Leksa’s private quarters and leans on the wall with a glower. Leksa looks up from a sheaf of papers. “Did Titus say you couldn’t go to the homecoming dance?”
Onya’s glower intensifies. “I’m glad your safety is so amusing to you.”
Leksa sighs. She sets her papers aside and links her hands on the table top, frowning slightly. “I assure you, it’s not a small worry.” She hesitates, then withdraws a small clear bag from underneath the pile of books by her elbow. It’s plastic, and inside a neat note has been tagged with a literal red flag.
Onya comes closer and takes it, lifting it up to read it. Her face darkens and she feels her heart kick up, the fight response in her blood. “Who is responsible for this?”
Leksa takes the death threat and tucks it away. “It was received early this morning. Gustus has posited that it’s regarding the address on Thursday.”
Onya’s frown grows. “We should cancel.” She sees Leksa’s face and growls. “Leksa.”
“I will not have our government be dictated by fear and threats.”
Onya grips her shoulder, more beseeching than forceful. “That note knew the names of your security team. It named the route you would take to get to the capitol building.”
Leksa stands. “So we change it. What is, is. We adapt.”
“We have a leak.”
Leksa flicks her a look. “Obviously. We’ve tightened confidentiality and clearances.”
Onya scowls at the ground. “And you approved my removal from your team.”
Leksa touches her wrist, oddly hesitant, and then firm, her fingers curling. “You may not be standing next to me, but the only way you’re off my team is if you choose to leave it.”
Onya’s turns her hand to grip Leksa’s forearm in kind. “Never.”
Onya wakes early. They’re moving under the cover of darkness, just before the sun starts to lighten the sky, a concession they practically had to beat Leksa over the head with, Gustus and Onya and Titus even, united in Leksa’s office with their arms crossed over their chests. Onya thinks maybe it was the surprise of seeing them in agreement that did it. There is a text on Onya’s phone she hasn’t swiped away because she likes the buzz and the reminder of it, a wish of luck from Reivon, the first thing she saw when she opened her eyes and reached her hand under her pillow for her phone.
She is on edge the entire time, anxious and irritable for Leksa to be so far out of her line of sight, and is only slightly settled when they enter the address room, the podium set up. She lurks to the side and paces while they do microphone checks and Leksa murmurs to herself and growls to herself as the press starts to trickle in, double checking the credentials hanging around their necks and glowering at the ones who dare to make eye contact. She’s so focused she can feel herself buzzing at the edges.
Leksa comes near, ignoring the faint touches to her elbow by her personal bodyguards. “Onya.”
Onya straightens her shoulders. Leksa stands in front of her and they breathe together. “Leksa.”
“Be still,” Leksa murmurs. “Have faith.”
Onya smiles. She knows it is genuine because Leksa looks surprised. “I have known you before you had faith in yourself. I have always carried it.”
Leksa smiles back. Something eases in her shoulders. “Look what we have done,” she says, quietly awed. She takes a fortifying breath. “Look at what we have left to do.”
Onya lets the moment sit between them, the quiet depth of their devotion. “Heda,” she promises.
Onya listens to Leksa’s speech with half an ear. She’s heard it several times already, and many drafts. Speeches have never been particularly interesting to her anyway. She scans the crowd anxiously and tries to keep her fingers still by curling them around the hilt of the knife hidden in the small of her back and the two smaller blades up her sleeves.
What Onya remember most, afterwards, is that she didn’t see it happen.
//
There was a conversation, before. When Onya was lying in the grass with Reivon, naked and warm and still wet from her touch, the sweet smell of her heavy in the air and her leg hooked over Onya’s hip. Reivon touched her hair gently and traced the shell of her ear and Onya tilted her head into the caress and Reivon asked her, tentative, if she was afraid to return. “There’s something we say here,” she’d said. “You can’t go home again.”
Onya had thought about it for a long time, listened to Reivon breathe and the grass move and the traffic rumble by on the other side of the fence. “I hope,” she’d answered, slow and thoughtful and her sword hand still and peaceful on Reivon’s thigh, “that it is more than it was. That it is something new... something better for my people.”
“I hope so.”
“I have never felt at home here,” Onya admitted. “I almost would have prefered to stay and fight. But I go where Leksa goes.”
Reivon’s hand stilled in her hair. Her voice was carefully neutral. “What if you didn’t? Where would you go if you didn’t have Lexa?”
//
She turned her head to look into the crowd and she heard the shot and her brain automatically pointed her towards where it came from--two gona have already forced him to the ground, weapons drawn and people scattering while guards flood the entrances. The noise is loud--the crack, but also the rush of shouting and screaming as people duck and flee. Onya hears Leksa’s voice ring out again, feels someone bump against her shoulder and she shoves them away automatically. She knows her brain goes quiet and calm when others get loud and staticky, and it doesn’t take her long to realize the threat is neutralized. She turns--
Leksa’s legs have buckled, her fingers white on the podium as she fights to keep her feet. She’s trying to speak to the crowd but the microphone has been knocked aside and the panic of the room is too loud. Onya makes it through with brutal efficiency, leaping up the steps and knocking aside Leksa’s bodyguard, Niko, to catch Leksa as she crumples. Leksa looks surprised, almost, her hand against the center of her torso, already wet and red red red. Leksa’s mouth opens. “Onya,” she groans.
“Shh,” Onya murmurs. She readjusts Leksa’s hand and orders her to press down. Reaches out and grabs Niko by the sleeve, yanking him close to stand between Leksa and the crowd, to act as a human shield while she slides her arms below Lesa’s knees and around her back and lifts her up to carry her away behind the curtain of the stage. “Stay awake.”
Leksa gasps, arching up with the effort and a noise of pain. There’s blood running wet all over her teeth, and it bubbles with a noise when she sucks in air. “On---Onya--.”
“The car,” Niko is saying in Onya’s ear. He tugs at her sleeve, pointing down the hallway. “The hospital is only a block away.”
Onya looks down at Leksa, the paleness of her, unnatural and pallid, the rattle of her lungs on the left side. “Where is Alekka?”
Leksa’s other bodyguard pokes her head around the corner. “Hir.”
Onya pauses, just at the bridge of the hallway. She knows the more she thinks the more time she wastes but she forces herself to stop, and inhale, and think.
Alekka comes closer, grabbing Niko and tossing him to where she was to keep an eye out. “Onya?”
Onya makes her decision. The snap of clarity makes her every movement precise and calculated for efficiency. “Nikko. Get in the car and drive towards the airstrip. Radio ahead and saying Heda is being airlifted for medical care.”
To his credit, Nikko only blinks twice before turning on his heel and bolting, the radio already held up to his mouth. Alekka waits, calm and quiet and ready for orders. Later, Onya will have to tell them they did well, and that she is proud of them. But not now.
“Gustus is at the back exit. We’re going to run. You go ahead and secure the hospital.” Onya fixes her in place with a look. “Who you choose to trust will affect if Heda lives or dies.”
Alekka swallows. Her chin lifts. She turns on her heel and sprints away.
“You are so soft on the young ones,” Leksa whispers. Her breath hitches and her chest spasms, her foot kicking out. “I forgot how soft you can be.”
“Shh,” Onya says again. “Deep breath.” She turns Leksa over, Leksa letting out a low noise as she’s shifted into a fireman’s carry.
“Take it--back,” Leksa gasps, muffled against Onya’s back as Onya starts off on a jog, breaking into a quick footed run. “You’re awful and I hate you.”
“Shot and still talking shit,” Onya grunts, picking up as much speed as she dares. “What will it take to quiet you?”
“More of this should do it---” Leksa’s voice breaks, going breathy and barely there, and Onya can feel her start to slump.
She reaches the door and Gustus is there, his face drawn and pinched. He reaches out and--just for a second, Onya pulls away and snarls. But she stops herself, passing Leksa off as gently as they’re able. She meets Leksa’s eyes. “Ste yuj.”
“Ste yuj,” Leksa says in barely a whisper, her eyes drooping.
They run.
Gustus is like a freight train. Once he gets going, he barrels, and he doesn’t seem to notice the extra addition of Leksa to his payload at all. Onya couldn’t have done it like him. She thinks she would have figured it out somehow, but she’s always been quicker than she has been stronger, quick enough to keep pace with him and even range around him, going ahead to check corners and fading back. Most of the people, she knows, will have fled out the front, but they’re still two people covered in blood sprinting down a street, one carrying another person and the other an unsheathed sword. Even in Trigeda, it’s not a common sight.
The streets are quiet, though. The occasional person gaping from a window or across the street, but most people went to the address or went home to watch it, Onya figures. Most of the shops are closed, and the streets were shut to traffic the day prior in preparation. They make it to the hospital in record time, and Alekka is waiting. She’s doubled over with her hands on her knees panting, but she’s got a gurney standing by with two nurses, two doctors, and three nervous looking security guards. She stands when she sees them drawing near, and helps stabilize Leksa as they all lower her down onto the gurney.
Onya moves with her sword up and her hand on Leksa’s ankle until they tell her she can’t go any further. She watches Leksa disappear behind the doors, off again to somewhere Onya can’t follow. Leksa’s blood is all over her, staining her clothing and starting to dry, stuck under her fingernails and tacky in the creases of her skin. She’s dripping it onto the tile.
“Onya.”
Onya turns her head. She thinks Gustus might have said her name a few times before. He says something quick to Alekka and shucks his coat into the trashbin nearby.
Alekka reaches out and stops short of touching Onya’s wrist. “Fos?” It’s a bit of slang that sprung up while they were away, Onya knows, meant as an honorific, but it still makes her frown. She is a fos, but not to her. She stands, abrupt.
“I do not require assistance.”
She goes into the bathroom and locks it. Strips off her jacket and her shirt and her pants and leaves them in a bloody heap under the sink. Scrubs her skin pink with the gritty soap and the tepid water and wads of paper towels. Uses her teeth to suck Leksa’s blood from under her nails and swallows it down. Walks out in her underwear and her bra, holding her boots, and Alekka’s eyes go wide as she scurries way, muttering about scrubs.
Onya lets her boots thump to the ground. She sits next to Gustus and they stare straight ahead together. They wait.
Onya’s phone buzzes against her hip where she’d propped it. Good luck! the text says, in clumsy trigedasleng. Reivon had signed it with a heart.
//
Nia had told Onya that she’d buried her family in an unmarked grave in the forest. That even if Onya had survived and made her way back to the village she was born in, she’d never be able to find them and put them to rest on a pyre.
Still, Onya searched. She doubts Nia’s troops would have dragged the bodies a hundred miles and she walks around her village for miles into the trees. It’s been too long, she knows, but she looks, she looks, she looks.
Afterwards she’d sat in the center of what she thinks used to be her father’s bakery and closed her eyes. Tried to remember his face and the sound of his voice. Realized she’d forgotten her mother’s given name and what her younger brother used to sing in the garden. Stood up and dusted off her palms and knew there was no reason for her to ever come back to this empty place.
//
Onya stands outside the cell. Titus sits on the bench inside, his broken nose swollen and painful looking, a cast on his left arm. They say he fought the guards after he turned himself in, a lie that Onya will have to address at some point. At the very least, the gona should be able to cook up a better story. He watches her watch him for almost ten minutes before he speaks. “It wasn’t supposed to be her.”
Onya stays silent. She meets the eyes of the guard and after just a few seconds he nods, dipping in the faintest of bows, and leaves, his shoes clicking on the stone floor, the door creaking shut behind him. They are alone. “And who was it supposed to be?”
Titus looks surprised at her question. “You.”
The surprise jars Onya forward, her face twisted in fury. “I was nowhere near her!” She takes a jagged, rough inhale, her fists clenched and her face up against the bars. “Traitor.”
Titus stands. “You are the traitor. It was your duty to keep her head clear. To keep her focused--she speaks with an accent! She loves a baga!” He shakes his head at her, all that disapproval tinged with anger Onya remembers from when she had to sit in uncomfortable wooden chairs and listen to him describe the old rituals. Onya never was a particularly book attentive student. He takes a breath, expression flickering. “I provided the credentials, they changed the plan without me. It’s not your fault,” he adds. “The Ascension wasn’t carried out properly. She is not what she would have been.”
Onya hisses. She speaks clearly, her accent perfect and polished and not a syllable with the dust of living in America left on them. “She is everything. She was every inch Heda even before her Ascension.” Onya reaches through the bars, lightning-strike fast, and grips him by the collar. Her index finger is against his throat and she can feel the rabbit of his pulse, fast and uneven and so afraid. “You will not live to see Trigeda rise.”
Titus looks at her like he pities her. His voice is quiet and his eyes are wet and tired. He looks older than anyone Onya has ever seen, that bone deep weariness she used to see in her own face when she looked in the mirror, lost and hopeless and waiting for the end. “Nia killed Trigeda years ago. Some things can’t be unbroken.”
//
Onya used to sit with her back against the wall and her hands hanging between her propped up legs and watch Leksa sleep. Not always, because she’s felt exhaustion like she’s never known since the first bomb went off and she can still smell the dust and the sharp blinding flare of heat on her face when she closes her eyes. But sometimes. When the day’s been long and hard and her eyes hurt from trying to read gonasleng and make it lay straight in her head. When she thinks of Tris when she doesn’t mean to and is surprised by the rip of grief in her chest. When she dreams of her father’s big gentle hands and how her mother cried when she left and never came back.
Now she watches Leksa’s face, softened by sleep and the continued rise fall of her chest as she breathes and her fingers on the sheets and promises, over and over and over, until her chin hits her chest and she falls asleep for a few hours before she gets up and starts everything all over again: I go first, Leksa. I die first.
//
Onya sits at Leksa’s bedside, facing the door. Leksa is pale and still and quiet and every so often Onya has to touch her chest to feel her heartbeat through the bandages and the stitches, not quite ready to trust the beeping of the machines.
Gustus comes in, sometimes. Onya can hear him telling Alekka to go home and take a shower and her mumbled refusal. “You look terrible.”
“Sha,” Onya agrees, too exhausted to argue.
“The doctors say she is doing well.”
“Sha.”
Gustus took her by the elbow, firm, and made her stand. “Go eat something.” Onya snarled, jerking in his grasp, and he shakes her very slightly. “I will watch Heda.”
Onya frowned, fierce and stubborn, but she’s wobbly and she’s tired and her stomach hurts and she lets Gustus gently steer her out and push her into the hall. Alekka points her towards the staff bathroom and helps her flip the sign to closed so she can use the shower stall. There isn’t any soap or any towels but the water feels good on her skin and she shakes herself once the tap is off, putting on scrubs that stick damp to her skin. Her hair's a mess of tangles and still hangs limp but she does feel better.
She sits on the bench and calls Reivon.
“Onya,” Reivon answers, sounding like she rushed to pick up. “Are you--how is Lexa?”
“Alive.”
Reivon waits a few more seconds. “And how are you?”
Onya swallows. “Alive.”
Reivon breathes, quiet. “You’re in the hospital.”
“They say she will wake up soon.”
“What can I do?”
Onya takes a breath, feels it shake into her lungs. “You are already doing it.”
“I miss you,” Reivon admits, and Onya’s feels her lips twitch, just for a second.
“And I you.”
Onya hesitates just next to Leksa’s bed. Gustus is standing above her, face shuttered. He watches the spike of the monitor. “She is all of us. Her heart beats for Trigeda.”
He leaves, pausing to grip her shoulder in solidarity, and she nods at him. Tells him to take Alekka’s post so she can go eat something. Takes up her seat by Leksa’s side and adjusts the way the top sheet is lying over her. Wonders who her own heart beats for.
Leksa wakes up. Her fingers twitch first, and then the slow blink of her unfocused eyes. Onya waits until she finds the rasp of her voice. “Onya.” Her palm turns up and Onya fits their hands together.
“I’m here.”
//
Before they even kissed, they talked once in Reivon’s workshop garage.
Onya sat quiet against the wall watching Reivon’s fingers on the handles of her tools and delicately strong around wires and the arm of her lamp as she adjusts her light, and Reivon was rambling, talking in a steady stream of calm nothing, the book she saw at the store this morning and what she had for breakfast and the movie she saw on television with Okteivia the night before.
“And then the main character was like--” Reivon pitched her voice low and mocking, “--’I think I’m just afraid to love’. Can you imagine?”
Onya blinked twice. “Why?”
Her sudden addition to the conversation made Reivon yelp, and jump, hand to her heart. “Jesus Christ. Have you been listening the whole time?”
“No.”
It made Reivon laugh a little. “Oh, of course. Do you really want to know about the shitty movie we watched because we couldn’t sleep?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I was delirious from not sleeping and also drinking dimestore tequila, but this guy just kept going on and on about how he was so afraid to feel anything and it was so fucking annoying I wanted to climb in the tv like the dead girl from The Ring and shake some sense into him.”
Onya parsed the nonsense out and tries to address the emotion behind Reivon’s words. It echoes something she’s heard her entire life. “Caring is weakness.”
Reivon snorted.
Onya unfolded herself from the wall, standing and oddly curious. “You don’t think so?”
Reivon paused. She looked at Onya sideways. “Do you really want to know, or are you just bored?”
Onya was as surprised as Reivon was to find herself saying: “I want to know.”
“Well.” She put down her tools and turned to face Onya, leaning back on the worktable, elbows propped. “I think… that life is short. And everything is scary. So just… fucking get over it, and be happy while you can.”
Onya frowned. “You make it sound very easy.”
Reivon shrugged. “Maybe it is.” She waited a bit longer but Onya just stared at the floor, thinking, and Reivon turned back to her whatever she’d been doing. She flicked the radio on and the music thrummed soft and Onya thought her very astute to know that Onya didn’t want to talk just then--and very kind to accommodate.
It was almost three hours later than Onya spoke, rough and tired. “Life is hard.”
Reivon paused, still bent over. She didn’t turn, her voice quiet and gentled. “I think just surviving is exhausting. I think you have to make room for things that make life worth living.”
//
Onya glowers. “You are displeased with my failure.”
Leksa rolls her eyes from where she’s been forced to take bedrest. “Onya--”
“You think it’s my fault. That I could have stopped it if I’d been more vigilant.”
Leksa throws a pillow at her and then winces. “Fuck.”
Onya holds out a pill on her palm and stares deadeyed until Leksa huffs and swallows it with a glare and a grimace.
“Onya. Stop being so dramatic.”
Onya draws herself up. “I am not… dramatic.”
Leksa rolls her eyes. “You need a break. Everything has been slowed down for my recovery. Gustus stands outside the bathroom while I shower. I could not be safer.”
Onya frowns. “You are sending me away,” she says, and she means it to be accusing and grouchy but it’s almost uncertain.
Leksa grips her hand. “Never. But you deserve a break. Something for yourself. If you could go anywhere, where would you go?”
Onya gets in at three in the morning. She takes a cab to the house and inhales deep while she stands in the driveway, the sense memory hitting her. It makes her think of Leksa standing in the kitchen stirring at the stove and lying in her bunk looking at the ceiling and the garage, where she kissed Reivon and laid in the grass in the yard under the moon and felt Reivon shudder under her fingers.
She finds Klark’s window and crawls through, catfooted, until she’s sitting motionless on the foot of Klark’s bed. Klark sleeps so deeply, she thinks, with a sigh. Hand tucked under her chin and her blanket twisted over her hips and eventually she stretches, her leg reaching out until her foot nudges against Onya’s leg. Her eyes fly open and she screams for a ludicrous amount of time while Onya rolls her eyes and is thankful she texted Okteivia and Reivon she’s here so they don’t barge in or call the police.
“Does Leksa know you are this loud?” Onya asks when Klark finally stops to breathe, the blankets clutched to her chest and her lamp raised in her right hand.
“What the fuck,” Klark hisses, her eyes huge and wide. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” Her eyes dart from side to side. “Oh my god, did you kill everyone?”
Onya rolls her eyes. “They’re fine.”
Klark looks suspicious. “You told them, didn’t you. And then you climbed in here to freak me out.”
“You told Leksa to discuss her feelings for me,” Onya shoots back, feeling petulant and grumpy. “Consider this payback.”
Klark puts the lamp down and glares. “I hate you.”
“We will speak in the morning,” Onya says. Leksa has asked her to be nice, so she waves on her way out, enjoying the way it makes Klark’s eye twitch.
Onya pads down the hall to Reivon’s room and is pleased to find Okteivia not in it, down the hall with Linkon in Onya and Leksa’s old room. Reivon is awake, sprawled out and peering at her, sleepy eyed. She scoots over to make room and Onya shucks her shoes and her socks, her pants and shirt. She slides under the sheets and tugs Reivon nose to nose by the hips. “Hello,” she greets, lazy smirking.
Reivon kisses her chin and tucks her face into Onya’s neck, humming. “Lo,” she mumbles, sleepy and fumbly. “I missed you.”
“Good.” Onya kisses her, once and easy, and wiggles down to nose into the juncture of Reivon’s throat and shoulder, licking out to taste her skin and suckling a mouthful against her teeth.
“Mm,” Reivon says. She arches, slightly. “Fuck. I gotta get up early.”
“I can stop,” Onya teases, starting to pull away.
Reivon grabs her by the back of her head and keeps Onya’s teeth on her. “Don’t you fucking dare.” Onya rolls on top of her, careful of her knees and her elbows, and drags her teeth across Reivon’s collarbones.
“Tell me you missed me again.”
Reivon’s fingers gather her hair up away from Onya’s face before nudging her down, kicking the blankets away and canting her hips up. “I missed you,” she says, lifting up so Onya can slide her sleep shorts down. She huffs out a giggle when Onya tickles her ribcage, drawing her legs up around Onya’s hips.
Onya rocks against her, fingers up the inside of Reivon’s thigh, seeking and gentle and curving the way Reivon likes. Reivon digs her nails into Onya’s back, yanking off her bra and drawing her chest down to Reivon’s mouth. The room grows hot, their sweat slicking between them, quiet panting and the creak of the mattress.
“Say you missed me,” Reivon orders, her head thrown back and their chests pressed tight. “Onya.”
“Always,” Onya promises, their foreheads leaned together, slick damp skin and dripping hair. “Always.”
Onya wakes when Reivon slips away from the circle of her arms. She gets to see what Reivon looks like first thing in the morning with sour breath and messy hair and stumbling her way to the shower while Onya yanks the curtains up and stays sprawled on the blankets in a sunbeam until Reivon returns. “I’ll be back later,” Reivon whispers, dipping to kiss her. “Go back to sleep.”
Onya dozes, lazy and indulgent, and spends fifteen minutes stretching before and after a half hour shower. All that and when she goes into the kitchen, Klark is still asleep. She rolls her eyes and has breakfast on the front porch, sitting on a chair she drags out from the kitchen and watching the birds flit along the power lines and the few passing cars. She’s making more coffee when she hears Klark’s door creak open and her shuffling heavy steps.
Klark comes at her at an angle, suspicious and narrow-eyed, and Onya pours her a cup of coffee, sliding it across the table and kicking a chair out for her. “I don’t know how you take it,” Onya says. She slides the ceramic sugar jar across the tabletop. “You seem like the sweet type.”
Klark adds a spoonful. “Why are you being nice to me?”
Onya looks away so Klark can add three more spoons of sugar. “This will be… a difficult conversation. There is no need to start off badly.”
“Lexa told you to be nice, didn’t she.”
Onya feels her face twist, remembering. “Even worse than an order; a request. I have always found it difficult to deny Lexa her requests.” She looks up, catching Klark’s eyes. “She makes them so very rarely.”
Klark sits. She sips her coffee. “I see.” Onya waits her out; she’s patient and Klark is more than impulsive. She breaks first, easily. “I’m surprised you’re here, so soon after Lexa’s… injury.” Onya feels her own lip curl and Klark must see it, because she rushes to add: “Not that it’s your fault, I just--I’m surprised. That’s all.”
Onya frowns at the tabletop. “I am on ordered vacation,” she mutters. “The destination is of my own choosing.” She has a flash of memory, sudden and vivid; Reivon in her lap, naked, head tipped to the side and eyes closed in bliss as her hips rock. “Reivon is… fond, in my heart.” Klark smiles and Onya yanks the memory from her face back into her heart, flattening her tone even further. “I also need to talk to you. You need to make a choice.”
Klark blinks rapidly, something shuttering on her face. “Oh?”
Onya has never been one to mince words. “Leksa came… quite close. Her fight was nearly over.” Klark flinches. “These experiences provide clarity, but she’s stubborn. She will never ask you to leave your home.”
“Um,” Klark tries to say. Onya ignores her.
“It may not be fair, but it’s on you. Commit or break it off. You can’t keep talking every other day.”
Klark shakes her head, pulling back, her mouth set. “We’re friends.”
Onya has said all that she has meant to say. Reivon will be home soon and she’s never seen the point in arguing with stones. “You will never be friends.” She stands, carrying her own mug to the sink. “Make her happy or put you both out of your misery, I grow tired of her teenaged sighs.”
//
Onya remembers how Reivon sounded when she made her come for the first time, that almost shocked inhale and the way her legs shook and her eyelashes fluttered. Onya’s heart was still thumping irregularly and her breathing ragged and rough and she felt it. It wasn’t an abrupt spark or a lightning bolt, nothing like she’s seen in movies or read in the old poems.
It was slow, and creaking, and it felt more like acceptance than surprise. Accepting that she wants more of this. More of happiness. More time with Reivon in her arms and her nose tickled by Reivon’s hair.
A pen had fallen out of the pocket of Reivon’s pants and Onya picked up and twirled it in her fingers. Doodled her family’s old clan markings on Reivon’s ankle and tried not to feel too pleased about the look of it on Reivon’s skin, her claim in ink and fingerprint bruises. “What’re you doing,” Reivon asked, breaking away from where she’d been sucking bites into Onya’s collarbones. She peered down. “Are you trying to tattoo me? Because I know that means marriage, and I need a proposal before we tie the knot.”
“A gift in return,” Onya had said, turning her wrist to look at her newest tattoo in the moonlight. She thinks maybe she’ll tell Reivon later about the significance of having inked Onya twice, once using the old ways.
Reivon’s eyes glinted, a little satisfied herself to see her namesakes on Onya’s wrist. “You sure you want that on you? Tattoos are forever.”
“I am satisfied,” is all Onya had said. But she looked at her wrist and her calf and what marks Reivin left that won’t ever fade and she’d thought, quietly and deeply and for the first time, about that. About forever.
//
Onya lays on the bed and watches Reivon get dressed. Reivon adjusts her outfit in the mirror and turns with a little twirl. “So?”
Onya reaches out and snags her by the hem of her blouse, pulls her close and topples her over, Reivon’s little yelp of surprise and Onya’s grunt when she’s hit with Reivon’s bony elbows and knees. She pushes Reivon’s hair to the side so they can kiss. “You look amazing.”
Reivon kisses the tip of her nose to make Onya’s eyes cross. “Flatterer.” She hauls herself up, neatly avoiding Onya’s protesting hands, and peers at herself in the mirror. Her lipstick is a mess and she sighs, reaching for a wipe.
Onya rolls onto her belly and watches Reivon reapply. “And there’s no way--”
“Yeah,” Reivon interrupts. “You are not getting out of my birthday party.”
Onya sighs. She grumbles under her breath in trigedasleng and Reivon rolls her eyes at her in the mirror. “Klark,” she mutters clearly, and Reivon rolls her eyes again.
It’s not as bad as Reivon thought. Linkon is there, for one, and she doesn’t dislike Okteivia. Klark avoids her and Onya ignores Bellamy and after they cut the cake Reivon smashes a slice on Onya’s face and eats it off, her face flushed with alcohol and good company.
It winds down and Onya finds Reivon in the hallway, against the wall to rub gently at her knee. Onya kneels in front of her, nudging Reivon’s hands out of the way to massage from her calf to her upper thigh.
“Oh,” Reivon breathes. “You’re so good at that.” Her head tips against the wall, fingers playing in Onya’s hair. She draws Onya up to her lips. “Take me to bed?”
Onya links their fingers. Reivon leans on her side, a kiss to her shoulder through her shirt. “Of course.”
Onya wakes in the night and Reivon isn’t in her arms. She sits up. Her first drowsy thought is that Reivon is in the garage, but she sees her after a few blinks, sitting in her chair with a blanket around her shoulders, watching the moon. “Reivon?”
Reivon turns. She wipes at her eyes. “Hey. Did I wake you?”
Onya starts to stand, naked, but Reivon makes a protesting noise. She stands in Onya’s shirt and nudges her back down on her belly, Reivon sitting on the backs of her thighs. Onya pillows her head on her elbow and sighs, satisfied. She can feel Reivon’s fingers on the scars of her back, the twisted ugly mess of them, unable to feel the warmth of Reivon’s touch through the rough dead tissue. “What’s wrong,” she asks, eyelids drooping and making herself wake up a little.
“You leave soon.”
“Mm,” Onya acknowledges. She has been trying not to think about it. They’re quiet for a long time, and Onya lets her eyes droop close, enjoying the pressure and the weight and the warmth of Reivon’s body atop her own.
Reivon kisses the back of her neck and sighs into her hair. “You’ll remember me, won’t you?”
Onya cracks open an eye. “I have nerve damage, not dementia.”
Reivon snorts. She bites Onya’s ear with a mock growl. “Don’t joke, I mean it.” Her voice goes whisper soft, almost unhappy. Tentative in a way that’s unlike her. “Will you remember me when you’re with some warrior girl?”
Onya blinks. She sits up, Reivon tumbling off with a thump. “What are you talking about?”
Reivon sits up. “I mean---can you put a shirt on for this, it’s like I’m arguing with your tits.”
“We’re not arguing,” Onya argues. “And you’re wearing my shirt.”
Reivon rolls her eyes. She tucks the blanket about Onya’s chest. “I just mean--you know. I--”
Onya presses their foreheads together. Her hand grips the back of Reivon’s neck, suddenly sweaty. “I have no intention of any other girls.”
Reivon exhales. “You had no intentions for me.”
“Mm,” Onya agrees. She hesitates. “I am not a soft person.” A flicker of a memory touches the surface of her mind, echoing. “Some things can’t be unbroken.”
Reivon sighs. “You are so hard on yourself. Why are you so down on yourself?”
“I am,” Onya swallows. “I am not an easy person to love. I will not apologize, but I understand the difficulty.” She thinks through the conversation and her face creases, confused. “Are you--breaking up with me?”
Reivon yanks her closer. “No! Christ, I actually.” She sits back. “Okay no seriously, can you put some clothes on.”
Onya rolls her eyes. She stalks to her bag, tossing the blanket off, and finds a shirt that hangs long and a little bit loose. She pads back to the bed and sits crosslegged, looking at Reivon expectantly.
Reivon clears her throat. She stares past Onya’s right shoulder, expression clouded in the dark. “I think--and not that I need your help, alright, I’m a fucking genius--but I could move, after I graduate.”
Onya blinks. “Move?”
“Not just because of you,” Reivon says, pointing a finger into Onya’s chest. “I’m not that kind of girl. I do my own thing.”
“Yes,” Onya says, impatiently waving it away because--obviously. “But, if you did. We could…?”
“Right,” Reivon agrees, quickly. “If you want.”
“I do.”
“Me, too.” Reivon flickers her eyes to Onya. “At some point, one of us should say it straight.”
Onya shifts. “English is my second language,” she tries.
It makes Reivon smile. “You fucking coward,” she mutters. Then she takes Onya’s hand in hers. “It’s official. After I graduate, I’m coming to Trigeda and we’re--we are official. Starting now.”
Onya doesn't hide her flicker of confusion well enough. She immediately pastes a flat look on her face but Reivon’s eyes have already narrowed.
“You thought we were already official,” Reivon concludes.
Onya looks to the side, shifty.
Reivon presses her knuckles to her temple. “Since when?”
Onya mumbles something. Raven glares. “Since the hammock,” Onya repeats, a little louder.
Reivon rolls her eyes. “Oh my god.”
Onya huffs. “I said you had my heart! I made an American reference.”
“You made a joke.” Reivon looks up and addresses the ceiling. “I thought my girlfriend was a warrior princess, not an idiot.”
“I’m not a princess,” Onya mutters.
“Give me something romantic,” Reivon teases. “If it were raining I’d make you go outside and do it, no pants and all.”
Onya’s breath catches. She touches Reivon’s jaw and looks at the way she’s sprawled on the bed beside her, in Onya’s shirt and her toes in the moonlight, her hair a mess and her breath sleep sour. “I am many things. I have been a soldier and a refugee and an outlaw. I’ve killed people. I’m Trigeda’s, and Leksa’s, and yours. I feel real when you touch me.”
Reivon’s eyes go wide. “Shit,” she blurts.
“There’s a poem,” Onya tells her. “It used to be popular at joinings. About the sun kissing the trees and waiting every day for reunited lovers. Makes more sense in trigedasleng.” She kisses Reivon, teasing, high on the apple of her cheek. “I could wait a thousand days for you.”
“I was joking,” Reivon says, toppling Onya back and climbing into her lap to straddle her. She yanks impatiently at the hem of Onya’s shirt. “I can’t believe you’re a fucking sap and you’ve been hiding it so well.”
Onya lifts her arms, obedient. “First you want me to put on clothes, now you want me to take them off--”
“Shut up,” Reivon says, and kisses her. She slows it down, ramping lower and lower, gentling. Onya makes a questioning noise and Reivon leans back, drawing Onya up with just the allure of her presence and the promise of her kiss. “We have time, don’t we?”
Onya was born in a river. She’s gone so far from the front steps of her village and and back again and she wears her history in ink and scars on the map of her body. She kisses Reivon, soft, hanging still in the rush of time and the rumble of the world. She doesn’t know if her heart as ever been so full.
“Forever,” she promises.