Archive of Our Own

The ringing clatter of steel chases Shiro’s steps til he disappears into the jungle treeline. Dense foliage and the heavy coils of hanging vines help dampen the shouts and screams drifting from the battlefield. The acrid scents of burning earth and flesh and still-warm blood fade, replaced with the smells of blooming greenery and rich, rotting soil. For the moment, he has no pursuers, his captors too preoccupied amid the drifting smoke and loose horses to notice as their prized champion slips away.

His bloodied boots slip on moss-covered roots and rotting leaves. He hurtles forward anyway, skidding down slopes and weaving through the trees, cursing every time the dense undergrowth catches on his armor.

They’ll find me. The fear throbs through him in time with the scrambling beat of his footsteps and the shallow race of his breaths. It propels him like the heat of dragon’s breath at his back, ensuring that the only way he has is forward. It keeps him running past nightfall, through the claustrophobic press of leafy plants and dew-sticky spiders’ webs. It beats at him like a riding whip, spurring him even as his lungs spasm within his chest and his legs go numb.

The next night, he falls at last among the raised roots of an enormous silk-cotton tree and curls small, tiredly scanning the surrounding shadows for jungle panthers and Sendak’s hulking silhouette. Given the choice, he’d take a sound mauling over being leashed and brought to the empire’s heel again.

Shiro continues on, adrift in a sea of unchanging green foliage— hungry, thirsty, lost. He fords rivers lined with toothy-mawed beasts, clambers up the slopes of low mountains, descends into whatever valley lay on the other side. But there is always more land ahead of him, and somehow it all at once looks frustratingly familiar and completely unrecognizable.

What sunlight slips through the leafy canopy is a rich, fading gold by the time he finally stumbles upon something out here in the middle of nothing but thick greenery: ruins, old and overgrown enough to almost be mistaken for yet more jungle. It’s built into a rocky foothill, with ancient trees growing along and atop its walls, roots embedded deep in the stone.

Closer, Shiro can recognize the lion goddess and a few other deities through the moss and creeping vines, although their features have gone soft with time and rain and a lack of pious attention. The outer wall is tall, twenty feet or more, and as Shiro follows its perimeter, he finds a wide set of crumbling stairs. Weary and aching for a place to rest, he climbs them with labored, trudging steps.

It’s a proper complex, really, with several ruined buildings contained within the temple’s outer wall. Even half-swallowed by the encroaching jungle, it’s massive. Shiro paces along a row of columns, eyes wandering for a place to take shelter— for the comforts of a roof, a few walls, and a place to lay his head.

It looks like this was a courtyard, once upon a time, lined on either side with small alcoves for private worship. Hundreds of years past, it might’ve been bustling, alive with the smells of food-stalls and burning incense, the steady flow of visitors coming to make offerings keeping the creeping greenery of the jungle at bay.

But now it lay forgotten, empty as any tomb. Quiet as one, too.

As Shiro glances up to judge the integrity of what remains of the stone ceiling above the alcoves, he sees it: a darkness at the edge of his vision, a strange figure moving along the periphery, following him from the tops of ruined walls.

Instinct and muscle memory draw his right arm up to shield himself as the creature descends on a set of dark and enormous wings, gliding down like a shadow given shape and purpose. There’s a silvery flash almost too quick to see, but Shiro grits his teeth as he feels the blow connect— the wretched drag of metal on metal as a blade sinks into his prosthetic, the razor edge finding a gap in the plates and digging deep.

Pain crackles through his shoulder and up his vertebrae, searing at the base of his skull. It burns long after the blade is withdrawn, but Shiro only cries out as he’s forcefully barreled down to the stone. He meets it with a thud that knocks the air from his lungs, the point of a sword at his throat and two massive, splayed paws upon his chest. And as Shiro looks up into a snarling, almost-human face bordered by unruly hair and a set of small horns, he pieces it all together.

A sphinx. An angry one, by the look and feel of it, with his fangs bared and pupils narrowed into slits.

Shiro’s heart crawls up into his throat of its own accord. He’s heard stories of them, same as anyone else who’s spent enough time wandering the earth. But even exhausted and pinned, he might yet have a chance. A childhood spent listening to his grandfather muse on puzzles and riddles might actually save his life, if he can answer whatever cryptic question the sphinx chooses to—

“You’ve come to pillage my temple.”

At the raspy voice, Shiro’s thoughts flicker out like a candle. It’s no riddle. It’s not even a question.

“You— what— absolutely not,” he stammers out, the razor tip of the sphinx’s sword tickling against the apple of his throat as he swallows. “I swear on my life—”

“Your life,” the sphinx scoffs, brutally honest in how little he thinks of it. His weight shifts, the pointed tips of his claws pricking Shiro through the leather and chainmail; the pressure forces a weak gurgle out of the man, who struggles to draw even breaths. “Your life is already forfeit for trying to steal the treasure I guard—”

“What treasure? I wouldn’t even know there was anything to steal if not for your saying so,” Shiro snaps, temper getting the best of him. The warning press of the warm blade against his throat is enough to draw a thin trickle of blood; he softens under it, reminded that he’s entirely at the mercy of the sphinx’s judgment. When he speaks again, it’s soft. “Please… I didn’t come here to cause trouble. I don’t want to fight you.”

In the arena, Shiro had bested skilled swordsmen and starved lions alike. If this opponent were one or the other, he’d have options— sweep a leg, knock the blade away, slip his hide-wrapped fingers into a snarling maw and pop the hinges of its jaws. But they all seem futile against an enemy with human cunning and animal strength and a great deal of familiarity with that damn sword. On Shiro’s best day, a fight like this would still be the messiest kind of bloodsport, the victory slim and the toll heavy.

And today’s not his best day.

The corner of his mouth twitches in discomfort as the sphinx shifts, the considerable weight of his lionlike body testing the give of Shiro’s ribcage. The face above him lacks the hard, impassive scrutiny Shiro would’ve expected, based on the stories of sphinxes who guard places like Oriande and Pollux, enigmatic as they test the virtues of humans who cross them with tasks and rites and riddles. This sphinx is startlingly expressive, handsome even through the fury that lowers his dark, shapely eyebrows and narrows his gaze to a threatening point; sharp, direct, and intense, with mistrust plain in his every movement.

The sphinx stares down at him with yellowed eyes, unfazed by Shiro’s pleas. “Humans seek this temple out for one reason only.”

“I’m not here for you or your treasure,” Shiro tries to reassure, for all the good it might do— the sphinx already seems to have made up his mind, despite delaying a killing blow. “I deserted the imperial army days ago and I’ve been running ever since. I thought I might take shelter here for the night, but… I’m sorry, I never meant to trespass. If you allow it, I’ll leave at once.”

“So you can run and report back to the rest of your legions,” the sphinx warily hisses, one set of claws slowly raking down the front of Shiro’s chestpiece, gouging into the blood-stained steel and leather. His gaze darts down to Shiro’s hip and the empty sheath still belted there, head tilting in a glimmer of genuine confusion. “What kind of scout doesn’t carry a sword?”

“Left it behind on the battlefield.” He’d left it lodged in the heart of the druid handler responsible for keeping him obedient, specifically. It was on the battlefield, though, so it still counts. “And I’d sooner die than go back to them.”

That gives the sphinx pause. His gaze pointedly flits to the man’s metal prosthetic, freshly struck by his own blade. An open seam runs along his forearm, between plates and joints forged under the watchful eyes of the high priestess and her cadre of druids. “That thing reeks of dark magic and tainted quintessence,” the sphinx murmurs, fine nose wrinkling in distaste.

“I know,” Shiro answers, trying not to stare at the partial reflection of himself in the sphinx’s blade. A bitter battle followed by a week in the wild has made a mess of him— the white of his hair is sullied with ash and soot, his face flecked with mud, the rings under his eyes dark like bruises. “It’s a cursed thing. Bearing it was never my choice.”

He spares the sphinx the details, turning his head aside as the sword’s edge slides up to kiss the underside of his jaw.

This might be the last thing he sees: the sun’s feeble rays losing against the steady creep of night; the shadows pooling deep around toppled columns and the rubble of fallen arches; ancient stone blanketed in green moss and waxy leaves and shed petals. As far as holy places go, it isn’t much— Shiro’s seen temples built high enough to scrape the heavens, their walls painted and gilded with gold, the altars and floors within piled high with offerings of fruit and juniberry flowers. He’s seen them after Zarkon’s will has been carried out, too, smoking rubble and broken guardians all that remain after.

There are worse ways and places to die, Shiro knows.

The very tip of the sphinx’s sword grazes along his throat, warning, before abruptly withdrawing. “One night.”

Shiro gasps in a full, lung-deep breath as soon as he is released, hand flying to his throat to reassure himself that there’s only the barest slice along his skin rather than the messy flutter of a severed windpipe. “One night?” he asks, voice shaking.

“You can have one night here. No more.” The sphinx prowls around him in a circle, padded paws silent on vine-strewn stone; Shiro twists his head to try and follow his slinking movements.

The temple guardian’s bare torso is that of a slender man, shoulders and arms corded with lean muscle. The rest of his body is feline, akin to some mix of lion and panther, rippling with power. Tawny fur gives way to deep, nightstalker black along his spine, his tail, his four paws. And at his shoulders sit two massive, raven-feathered wings, still beating occasionally in ruffled agitation.

In awe, Shiro watches as the sphinx’s sword shimmers like stardust, its blade reverting to that of a large dagger. It’s immediately slipped into a leather sheath looped around his waist.

“Don’t get too comfortable,” the sphinx adds before slipping away into the temple’s lengthening shadows.

Shiro lays still for a few minutes, letting the adrenaline work its way out of his veins. As his limbs cease their trembling and his breathing calms, he wearily collects himself and sets about finding a place to sleep.

The temple’s unkempt courtyard is riddled with fallen columns, tipped statues, dry fountains, empty reflecting pools— relics of a time when it was home to more than one lonesome and fearsome protector. From cracks in the stone, resilient little plants rise in flowering sprays. Trees that must have taken root centuries ago have swallowed walls and burst through ceilings. As Shiro trudges toward the crumbling row of alcoves bordering the courtyard, he can’t help but look deeper into the temple complex, curious about whatever the sphinx so jealously guards…

Set at the far back, carved into the very stone itself, is a grand entryway framed by massive roots that spill down the cliffside. It no doubt leads to whatever remains of the sanctum, the dormitory halls, the passages that once smelled of incense and offerings. With no torches lit in the chamber beyond, though, it all remains shrouded in darkness.

Not wanting to risk the wrath of the sphinx who is surely still watching him, Shiro averts his gaze and steps a little quicker. The alcoves bordering this side of the courtyard are still mostly intact, small and stoutly built. Shiro finds one with a young silk-cotton tree growing over one corner, its thick, moss-covered roots forcing stone tile to buckle. Without bothering to strip off his boots or armor, he drops to his knees and curls up at the tree’s base, finding the smooth-barked wood softer than the surrounding stone and rubble. It’s the best bed he’s had in a week, if not longer.

Through the drowsiness that immediately blankets him, Shiro’s nape tingles with that unmistakable sensation of being watched by unseen eyes. The sphinx, he figures, but he’s too tired and aching to spare the energy to worry. Tomorrow, maybe.

When Shiro wakes, it’s to midday sunlight spilling through the leafy boughs overhead. It shifts every time the breeze passes through, following him no matter how he squirms or squints away from the brightness. His temples throb in time with the beat of his heart, too loud in his head. Dry-mouthed and sore all over, he sits up with a labored groan.

Full of irritation that prickles along his insides like acid, hot and corrosive, Shiro decides it’s been far too long since he’s had a half-decent meal or quenched his thirst.

Pulling himself onto his feet is an embarrassingly laborious affair that he hopes the sphinx isn’t witness to, and walking isn’t much better. Shiro limps his way to the wide stairs that descend into the jungle, pausing at the edge of the first step to look back.

Though beautiful by the light of day, all soft grey and green, the temple stands empty and hollow. Leaving without giving his thanks or bidding the generous guardian farewell nibbles at Shiro’s conscience, at the gratitude and hospitality his grandfather had worked hard to instill, but the need to find food and water is more pressing.

It’s a stumbling trek to the nearest creek he can find— warm, narrow, and tasting faintly of decomposing vegetation. Shiro drinks voraciously anyway, then strips halfway to wash as much of himself down as he can manage in a hurry.

A rumble in his stomach spurs him on to explore the surrounding flora. Along the ground, Shiro finds fireweed and the sweet flowers of red sorrel, chewing both as he continues to search for something heartier. Among the trees, he finds a few figs and tough-skinned vine fruit. Shiro sticks to what looks familiar, leaning on past experiences foraging for survival, until…

Until he spies a tree dotted with glossy, bell-shaped fruits. Shiro plucks one down and gives it a small, tender test-bite; he licks his lips and finds there’s no itching, no burning, no bitterness. Edible enough. The fruit itself is rather bland, its juice barely sweet, but it’s starchy and filling and will give him enough strength to keep pushing toward the jungle’s end.

He plucks down five more and eats them whole, seeds and all. And as he chews, he thinks of the sphinx in the temple: mysterious and skulking, as sleek and silent as the serpents that glide through the underbrush; deadly powerful through every lithe, rippling inch of his imposing form; more or less lord of this jungle. And stunning to look at. And not unmerciful, either.

Having taken his fill, Shiro picks another seven of the bell-shaped apples and gently cups them in folded arms. He retraces his steps til he’s back at the temple, the toes of his boots brushing the bottom step. A voice at the back of his skull— bitter, gravelly, uncomfortably reminiscent of Sendak— scorns him for a sentimental fool, liable to get himself killed.

But Shiro is nothing if not stubborn. And principled, when he can be.

The midday sun sheds light where shadows had lain the night before, baring details Shiro had missed in his tired, desperate haze. Scrap and bones rest just outside the temple’s outermost walls, flanking the stairway, obscured among the foliage. Half-rotted armor exposes human rib cages, cracked and caved; skulls dark with rot peek through vines and tangled grasses, their sockets home to stalks and blooming flowers. It’s almost laughable, how clear the signs of danger are and how obliviously Shiro had missed them.

He persists anyway, mouth settled into an uneasy but steadfast line as he braves the first few steps. And then the rest, one after another, his arms cupped full of fruit and his eyes flitting back and forth for a glimpse of dark wings, bare shoulders, the tread of panther paws.

He stops on the fourth step from the top, where the stone levels out and then opens into the sunken courtyard. One by one, he sets the strangely shaped apples into a neat little row. An offering, for whatever it’s worth.

It isn’t until he straightens up again that he sees the crisp edge of a shadow over the stone, its shape partially human and fringed in feathers. Shiro’s eyes widen as they dart up to the figure casting it— the sphinx from last night, silently and suddenly near, his wings still outstretched from a soft landing.

In an instant, Shiro remembers all the ways the sphinx could see him dead. He could be handily dispatched with that magical sword, his right arm more than useless to stop it a second time. Or have his armor and flesh raked into red ribbons by wicked claws, his bones crushed. Hoisted skyward before being dropped to splatter on the earth, the way harpies sometimes do with their victims. Eaten, maybe, his bones picked clean before being dropped down to lie with the rest at the temple’s feet.

“Why are you here again?” the sphinx questions, dagger already in hand. It glints under the sun, perhaps only moments from transforming into the same lengthy blade he’d wielded the night prior.

“I— they’re for you,” Shiro says, gesturing at the fruit sitting before him. “A gift. To thank you for letting me stay last night. I apologize for imposing on you.”

The sphinx stares him down with crossed doubt and confusion, emotion passing over his features with surprising openness. By daylight— or perhaps only when not riled to combat— his eyes are clear and his pupils round, his ears only barely pointed.

“Why?” the sphinx questions, his fangs blunter than Shiro remembers.

For a second, the man’s mouth works helplessly.

“It’s… respectful,” he shrugs. His heels hang off the edge of the fourth stair, and Shiro thinks of how easily the sphinx could cast him down a hundred stone steps to join the remains of every other human who has ventured here. “When I traveled anywhere with my grandfather, he always made sure to leave our hosts something thoughtful. To give something back. But I don’t have much to give, so…”

“So you brought me rose apples,” the sphinx finishes for him. With a healthily skeptical look, he slowly sheathes his dagger and slips forward in a saunter. He stops short, leaving an awkward distance sitting between himself and the human intruder, and then stretches out a foreleg to paw one of the fruits closer, careful not to disturb the rest of the orderly line.

Their stares stay locked as the sphinx stoops to swipe the apple up, breaking only when the temple keeper glances down and brushes its waxy, rose-red skin clean with a thumb.

Shiro teeters on the step. He hadn’t thought this far ahead. Hadn’t anticipated this, whatever it is.

“You look terrible,” the sphinx says, out of the blue. It’s an observation made without any bite.

“I’ve looked worse,” Shiro assures him, flashing a smile he hopes doesn’t look too ghastly. A lack of mirrors in the wild has spared him the sight of his own reflection, but the thin, stinging scratches where prickly vines and stiff saplings have caught him across the face must not be doing him any favors. One decent night’s rest can’t erase the haggard circles that must reside under his eyes, either; one decent meal can’t soften the hollowed look of going underfed for so long.

The sphinx continues to study him, unconvinced. “You resemble a fresh corpse. I almost took you for one, after you fell asleep. Didn’t think you’d wake.”

“Oh, don’t worry. I’ve survived much worse than a pitted battle, a duel with a druid, a week of low-grade starvation, a few tumbles down mountain slopes, and one very sound trouncing by a sphinx,” he says, smiling as the sphinx in question snorts and crosses his arms.

“I’m not worried about a human,” he dismisses, pretty face turned aside to hide the unwanted amusement he otherwise can’t disguise. His dark wings spread a fraction, tips fluttering as the breeze glides under them; his lashes are so long that Shiro can admire them from here. “I didn’t want to have to drag your body out, is all. You’re big. Heavy.”

Shiro’s smile softens. Again, there are no fangs behind the sphinx’s words, no true malice. They sound more like excuses clung to like sandbags before a river rising over its banks, or maybe the playful teasing of someone little versed in it.

To Shiro, it’s a revelation— subtle, promising, immensely reassuring. There are soft spots under all that fur, behind those lethal claws. For all the skeletons strewn at the temple’s feet, its guardian is far from bloodthirsty, and for that much Shiro is grateful.

“Right,” he sighs as the moment passes, nodding. There are still days of travel between him and the sea, depending on how soon he can get himself reoriented, and it’s already slipping past noon. “Thank you again. I’ll, uh… be going now.”

Or so he hopes. It’s a little bit of a leap of faith, trusting he won’t be struck down the moment his back is turned, but Shiro bows his head and goes. He’s barely turned around and taken a step when that low, rasping voice reaches out and roots him in place.

“But… you could stay,” it says, hitched and halting.

Shiro glances back over his shoulder and sees the sphinx watching him, the bright red of the apple flashing as he passes it from hand to hand in something of a nervous gesture.

“One more night. If you need it.”

The look in the sphinx’s eye tells Shiro he does need it, and badly— a chance to tend his scrapes, to sleep off the dregs of his exhaustion, to hunt down something more substantial than leafy greens and pale-fleshed fruit. Precious moments to gather up all the pieces of himself jostled out of sorts and become a little more himself again.

It’s too rich an offer to decline, especially when the alternative is nothing but untamed wilderness rife with all manner of hungry beasts and treacherous footing. Shiro turns back and gives the sphinx a quick smile, still hesitant as he makes the approach up the last few steps.

“I’m Shiro, by the way,” he says as he edges as close to the sphinx as he dares, which is not close at all. As he waits for the customary response— and waits, the distant chorus of birdsong lilting through their silence— it occurs to Shiro that the sphinx may not have known the barest of pleasantries in a long, long while. “Um. Can I ask your name?”

“My name?” the sphinx questions back, dark eyes wide as Shiro looks to him expectantly. “Oh. Oh, it’s… you can call me Keith.”

Shiro uses his reprieve to sleep, mostly. Almost lazily, catching up on a week and several years of chronic deprivation. And when he wakes, cheek sticky with drying drool and a crick in his neck, he finds a wooden bowl filled with water and a row of small fish cooked on a long skewer waiting. Keith doesn’t show up to take credit.

It’s unsurprising, given that the sphinx himself is a rare sight. Most often, Shiro only encounters impressions of him: a fallen feather, the feel of eyes on his back, the spotted trail of blood left across stone as Keith carries a kill back to the temple. Sometimes, it’s the slip of a tufted tail around a corner or the muffled beat of wings, easily missed amid the cacophony of jungle insects and amphibians. Or maybe the slow retreat of a bare back and jet black feathers down a dark corridor, Shiro’s neck craned curiously after him.

Rarer still are the times Keith spares him a word, usually nothing more than a curt extension of his offer of hospitality.

“There’s a pool to bathe in,” Keith informs him one morning when Shiro supposes he’s getting overripe, slipping away without further comment.

The bathing pool lies in a portion of the upper temple where Shiro hasn’t before dared to tread, secluded and waterfall-fed. Along the rim of the semi-circular pool sit stone bowls of coarse salt, dried herbs and petals, paste-like soap. It’s a luxury to strip down to nothing and wade in, scrubbing himself cleaner than he’s been in a month— leagues better than awkwardly splashing himself with water from the nearby creek, hasty for fear of some viper or jungle cat coming across him unawares. Shiro examines his healing bruises and new scars, frowning at the worst of them, and takes the time to massage the ache out of muscles that won’t soon let him forget his weeklong escape through the jungle.

He washes his clothes in the pool’s runoff channel and hangs them on a nearby tree to dry. Naked, he settles on a nearby rock and starts scrubbing his muddied, bloodstained boots and working the smaller dents from his chestpiece. Standing clean and freshly dressed, he feels remade.

The only thing Shiro can’t polish or repair is his arm.

The heavy slice left by Keith’s sword is an ever-present reminder of Shiro’s first reception and how closely he’d skirted death. His metal fingers tremble minutely from time to time; gone is the steady hand that had, for all its unsightly horror, helped him claw his way to victory on multiple occasions. Forming a fist takes long, precious seconds. His grip feels weaker by the day.

But without the concerted efforts of both a masked druid and a skilled mechanic, there’s nothing to be done for the damage. Shiro can’t help but thumb along the jagged tear through the metal, so deep it nearly pierces through the other side. The complex inner workings of the prosthetic are ruined, exposed to the elements. The dark, quintessence-fueled magic that had woven its strings and joints to his mind frays.

Shiro can’t quite determine whether that’s to his favor or not, but he makes the best of it.

His new lodgings consist of an actual room set nearer to the heart of the temple, larger and more private than the little alcove he’d first slept in. After clearing out the rubble, he applies himself to making it more homelike. Twigs and rushes make a passable broom to sweep the floor; bamboo stalks provide a door of sorts. He weaves together a couple of mats to sleep on and bundles silk-cotton together into a pillow, and in short order his room is cozier than any cell or tent he’s ever been kept in.

When one of his carefully laid snares eventually catches a fat little grouse, Shiro excitedly roasts it over a stone pit outside his quarters. After two weeks of fish and fruit, the smell is mouthwatering and his mood is at an all-time high.

“Care for a bite?” he asks the empty night air, knowing he is never alone for long.

“I can hunt for myself,” the sphinx answers a few moments later, a formless voice in the dark.

“I don’t doubt it. But this is already cooked,” Shiro says, prodding the roasting bird with a length of iron he’d salvaged from another abandoned room. “And tasty.”

Even knowing Keith is near, Shiro still startles when the sphinx emerges from a pitch black corridor, his dark eyes glinting from the firelight. He’s especially sleek under its warm, flickering glow, his feathers silky like the luxurious fabrics Shiro has only ever seen donned by royalty or druids or high warlords.

“It’s burned,” Keith states as he settles on the other side of the fire, reclined on his haunches. His arms cross over his chest as his gaze moves to settle on Shiro, head tilted to one side.

Shiro frowns as he turns the fat bird round on its spit. “It’s crispy.”

Regardless, Keith accepts a charred leg, nibbling it as he watches Shiro use a small dagger to cut off a section for himself. They chew in silence that’s more comfortably tolerant than companionable, listening to the ambient sounds of the jungle.

“Where did you come from?” Keith blurts just as the songs of croaking frogs and insects begins to swell to a fever pitch. His voice makes the surrounding jungle quiet again, if only by a small measure.

Shiro straightens up at the question, his dark eyebrows tugged high. “Well… originally, from an island across the sea. I left after my grandfather died, looking for adventure, and came here. Well, not here here. The mainland.”

“Adventure?” The sphinx cracks the bone in his hands in two and sucks at what little marrow lies within. “What kind?”

Elbows braced on his knees, Shiro heaves out a heavy sigh. “Exploration, mostly. I wanted to travel. See everything I could, take note of it, write about it. I wanted to observe and— and understand. Instead, I found myself an imprisoned gladiator, before being pressed into the ranks of an imperial army that leaves nothing but scorched earth in its wake. Until now,” he adds, flashing Keith a soft smile in gratitude.

Keith’s acknowledgment is a hum that sinks so low it’s almost a rumble. “Until now.”

There’s another long silence, occupied by the crackle of the fresh wood burning.

Keith tosses what remains of the fragile bones into the fire and stares at Shiro over the flames. “When do you plan on leaving?”

Shiro slowly wrings his hands, contemplating his weakening arm and sorely missing the sword he’d left plunged inside that druid. “I’d like to make a bow, first. Or scavenge a usable weapon off of your previous visitors,” he says, thinking of the dozens of bodies that lay at the temple’s entrance. Most of their gear will be too rusted and rotted to be of use, much like his deteriorating prosthetic, but it’s worth rifling through.

Keith nods to himself, apparently accepting that rationale to be reasonable. “Where will you go?” he asks after— softer, shyer, like it’s a personal request to be answered.

“Somewhere on the other side of this jungle is the sea. I’ll follow the shore til I find a port. See where it takes me.” From there, he’ll sail to any land that puts distance between himself and the ever-expansive rule of Daibazaal.

“The sea?” Keith asks, his tail flicking as he lies down with his forelegs tucked underneath him, tight and compact. “What’s that like?”

“Um… blue and wet. Salty. You’ve really never seen it?” Shiro asks, incredulous. “You can fly, can’t you? Soar right down to the sea and beyond?” He can’t help but smile at the thought. “What I wouldn’t give for a pair of wings like that.”

Keith extends a wing at looks at its feathers with less wonder. “My duty is to stay and protect the temple. I only stray from it to hunt. And never very far.”

“Oh.” Shiro doubts if he could muster the same dedication if he had the ability to soar far and wide. He means to inquire further, about Keith’s origins and life, but the sphinx beats him to it.

“What other places have you been? Anywhere with snow? Or deserts?” Keith’s nose wrinkles as he takes another bite. “And where’d you learn to cook like this?”

“You ask an awful lot of questions,” Shiro says with a short laugh. At the way Keith stiffens, he hurries to add, “Not that I mind it. Just surprised none of them so far have been riddles.”

There’s a sudden furrowing along Keith’s brow, his dark eyes squinting. “Why would I ask you a riddle?”

“It’s what sphinxes are known for,” Shiro says, pitch turning up at the end, newly uncertain. “Like the White Sphinx of Oriande? Would-be heroes have to answer three riddles to prove their worth before being allowed into the kingdom of Oriande? It’s a pretty well known tale…”

Keith scoffs. “Don’t see how answering a trick question proves anything. Cleverness doesn’t mean you have a pure heart or noble intentions. Sounds like human nonsense,” Keith adds under his breath, his gaze slipping sideways to Shiro. A wry smile curls along his lips. “Did you really think I’d ask you a riddle and then let you go?”

“Hoped, more like,” Shiro laughs under his breath. “But I’m still here, so I can’t complain about your methods.”

“You’re not like the humans who’ve come here before,” Keith murmurs. As if there might be some confusion, he flashes the barest smile and clarifies, “That’s a good thing.”

The next evening, Shiro is greeted by Keith standing at the fire pit with the skewered haunch of a small deer. He watches as the sphinx coaxes a fire to life and then stretches his lithe body out beside it, as if waiting to be approached.

Shiro does so with soft, uncertain steps, eyeing the meat as it drips blood into the fire. It’s a generous offer— and it does seem to be an offer, considering Keith has never before shared one of his kills with the human hanging around his halls— but there’s something else veiled in the sphinx’s expression, too. Proud. Expectant. Eager.

“Now you’re just showing off,” Shiro remarks as he settles down on a chunk of stone near the flame. Near Keith. Near enough that the gentle sway and thump of his tail falls just a few inches from the toe of his boot.

Keith’s grin grows wider and then wavers, like he’s trying to fight it.

While waiting on their shared dinner to cook, Shiro indulges Keith’s appetite for answers— about his travels, the places he’s seen, the things he’s done. It’s been ages since someone took such well-meaning interest in him, eager for every tiny detail of his life. But despite having rather strong opinions on the nature of his prosthetic arm when they first met, Keith doesn’t mention it now. His dark eyes drift to the arm from time to time, though, gaze lingering on the long, inward-bent slice he put there.

Having something to eat cuts through the awkwardness that hangs in the air after Keith’s questions run dry. It’s a good portion of good meat— something Shiro rarely had the luxury of during his time under the Daibazaal empire’s thumb. And after weeks of fruit, fish, and small fowl, it’s a refreshingly substantial change.

“Thank you, Keith,” Shiro says as he sucks his fingers clean. Between the two of them, the whole leg is picked down to the bone; with Keith’s liking for the marrow, Shiro suspects even that won’t go to waste. “That was delicious. Of the two of us, you might be the better cook,” he grudgingly admits.

As the embers die, Keith takes his leave with a soft goodnight and a softer smile. And Shiro goes to bed full, so content that he can almost ignore the needling pain of his metal fingers as they twitch and spasm through the night.

Shaping a bow proves to be a challenge— more so while struggling with the slow deterioration of his right arm. Frustrated, Shiro instead takes to tending the rest of the temple the same way he’s been tending his room. He lugs out chunks of ceiling rubble and sweeps the floors clean. Under clingy vines, he uncovers ancient tilework and carvings, his flesh-and-blood fingers trailing delicately over their elaborate details. And near the places where Keith prefers to roost at night, he leaves fragrant boughs from citrus trees and whatever particularly lovely statues and jewelry he finds while tidying the temple.

Shiro’s childhood had been marked by visits to small but well-loved shrines, his tiny hand fisted in his grandfather’s robes as he’d trailed behind him; as a prisoner of Zarkon’s empire, the only temples he’d visited were the ones razed to ash and rubble, all their value stripped to feed the druids’ magics and the ever-hungry beast of war. Keith’s home feels like some strange medium between the two— lonely but not abandoned, eroded but not quite ruined, a heartbeat still thumping through its halls— and Shiro is never without wonder that it is a holy place where he feels welcomed, after all he’s done.

As he crosses the courtyard with two heavy buckets of water meant for scrubbing ages of dirt from an obscured mosaic, Shiro spies splatters of blood messily dripped from on high. Another hunt, is his first thought. An easy thing to assume, thanks to Keith’s penchant for hauling his kills back on the glide of dark, silent wings.

Still, Shiro’s feet turn to follow the trail of their own accord, morbid curiosity quickly giving way to a worry that makes his heart stick high in his throat. The blood is too bright— unnaturally and uncannily red, an oily, golden shimmer held in the wetter pools of it— and too much. Everything about it is amiss.

Shiro drops the bamboo pole balanced across his broad shoulders, the buckets of water dangling on either end clattering as they hit the stone. His steps quicken in sync with the rise of his panic as he pursues the trail, calling out Keith’s name all the while.

Up a set of winding stairs carved into the stony cliffside, Shiro finally finds the sphinx sitting atop a landing that overlooks the temple and its densely green valley. Hunched and bleeding, Keith seems impossibly small. That same brilliant crimson drips down his dark feathers and messily streaks his tawny fur; it wraps his pale torso and runs along the slender curve of his throat. It spreads underneath him, painting the sun-bleached stone in horrifyingly vivid color.

“Keith,” Shiro says, heart beating so hard it makes him woozy. “Keith—”

“Don’t. Don’t touch me!” the sphinx hisses, steadfast in his refusal to look at Shiro head-on. His left wing remains spread, limp, most of its length dragging across the ground. “Go away, Shiro. I’m fine.”

“Keith,” Shiro breathes out as he stops mid-step, his hands held aloft and open. “Whatever it is, I can help.”

“It’s my own fault.” His profile is as striking as the stone statues that remain around the complex, chin lifted high and jaw stiff as digs his heels in. Under fiercely set brows, his dark stare burns, fixed on some unfathomable point in the distance. “I can take care of it myself.”

“You can,” Shiro agrees. He lowers his hands to his side, curls them into loose fists, and takes a step forward. “I know you can, Keith, but you don’t have to. Please… let me help.”

Keith doesn’t answer him. His sharp, pretty face remains set on the rippling sea of green that stretches so far it fades into mist and mountains. But from the corner of his eye, he watches Shiro edge closer, red dripping from his chin as he gradually bows his head low.

Shiro stops a few feet short, waiting. It’s agony, close enough to see the open slices that trickle with every breath the sphinx takes. “I won’t come any closer if you don’t want me to, Keith. But… I’d like to.”

Slow and miserable, Keith raises his head and gives Shiro a look of quiet pleading. His voice is a whisper like wind over sand. “I got snagged on some razorvine.”

Shiro can feel the tackiness of blood under his soles as he steps closer. It’s difficult to see the damage to Keith’s wing through the mess— a gap of missing feathers, the rest matted together with sticky blood, and a dozen angry red wounds torn into his bare skin and hide. And when Keith at last turns to face Shiro, he sees what the sphinx had been trying to hide: a raw, deep scrape that cuts up his right cheek, gold-tinged blood seeping down to fall from his chin.

“We need to get you clean, first,” Shiro decides, hating what Keith’s poorly masked expression of distress does to his heart.

It’s slow going down the cliffside, Keith trailing after him on padded feet. Shiro winces in sympathy at every soft gasp he lets out as his injured wing catches on stone or gets tugged aloft by the wind whistling along the cliffside.

By the time they reach the bottom, it’s obvious Keith is winded and weak. Shiro wades into the bathing pool alongside him, dismayed by how heavily the clear waters bloom with red.

There’s still a wariness to how Keith watches him, as if ready to take flight or tear him down at a moment’s notice. So Shiro starts with what seems easiest rather than what is most urgent, his hands sloughing water up against the sphinx’s furred flanks to wash them clean. Cuts of varying length and depth lace hide-covered ribs and compact muscle, and Shiro is exceedingly careful as he washes every one of them clean.

Under his red-tinged palm, Keith trembles.

“It’ll heal,” the sphinx says in a throaty whisper, stiff-lipped and wearily confident of it. But he leans into Shiro’s touch, body subtly angling itself toward the man. “It just… hurts.”

“I know.”

Shiro handles Keith’s bloodied wing with abundant care. His right hand is too unwieldy to trust with such delicate work. His left hand, flesh and blood, is gentle as he parts matted feathers, picks out needles lodged in his muscle by the razorvine, and then smoothes soap and medicinal herbs over the open wounds.

And then all that’s left to tend to is Keith’s face, still an inflamed and angry red where the razorvine must’ve caught him along his cheek.

Shiro stands squarely before him, fingertips coated in that same soapy, herbal-scented paste that Keith supplies for their baths. With a touch soft as cotton, he dabs it onto the cut and cleans away the little flecks of dirt and greenery clinging to his skin. He’s tender around the edges of the bloody scrape, apologizing whenever Keith winces in spite of all his best efforts to cause him no further pain.

“You’re good at this,” Keith mutters, mouth barely moving under the hand hovering along his jaw, so close that his breaths warm Shiro’s palm.

“I know a little something about cleaning up wounds,” Shiro replies with a quick smile.

He doesn’t miss the way Keith’s eyes fall to the scar that bridges his nose before sinking lower, to the crisscrossed slashes and healed-over puncture wounds that peak out from under the fraying collar of his tunic. There’s no shortage of evidence to back up Shiro’s claim.

“Once I wash my shirt, I’ll tear it into strips for bandages,” he says, taking Keith’s hand as he draws him out of the pool. It fits within his own so easily that it’s almost surreal— small and fine-boned, more fitting of a painter or musician than a sword-wielding manslayer. “But first I’ll make a fire so you can get dry.”

“Shiro, no,” Keith weakly protests as the man tugs off his shirt and tosses it into the large basin he’s been using for his meager laundry. “I can’t— that’s yours—”

“It’s practically falling apart anyway,” Shiro dismisses. And it is. All of his clothing is coming apart, worn too hard and mended too little. He is as well, down to the rusting seams of his prosthetic. “I’m pretty sure I saw some Arusian dream flowers in a thicket up by the river. Their nectar should help keep your wounds from fouling. Doesn’t hurt that they smell just like sesame cakes and syrup, either.”

There’s a gentle furrow in Keith’s brow as the comparison falls flat, Shiro’s favorite childhood sweets an unknown to him. Shiro can’t help but smooth it away with the pad of his thumb, hand cupped against the side of the sphinx’s head, his fingers pressed into tangled, windswept hair the color of coal— without asking, without thinking. It’s a careless gesture, born out of affection rather than necessity, and he waits for Keith’s guard to go up in rebuke.

It doesn’t.

Keith lets his touch linger. Lets Shiro lay him down on the woven reed mat he drags from his room and spreads out for him. He lets his eyes slip shut as Shiro struggles to spark a small piece of flint off of his metal arm and coax up a fire, fast asleep by the time it roars to a heat worthy of basking in.

“Eggs, scrambled,” Shiro says as he hands off a bowl to Keith where he lays sprawled across the recently swept courtyard. His wing is healing nicely, if slow, and the cut along his cheek has scabbed and faded into just a strip of uneven and discolored skin. “With extra pepper, just for you.”

Keith’s smile is easy, dangerously close to teasing. “And you didn’t even burn them.”

“... I did,” Shiro admits after a moment, sheepishly glancing up from his own bowl. He tilts it toward the sphinx so that he can see darkened, rubbery lumps of egg within. “But I picked out all the least burned bits for you.”

It’s the least he can do, Shiro figures. He’d hoped to repay Keith in some good measure before parting ways with him, to leave the temple without any outstanding debts, but…

Keith makes it difficult in a number of ways.

The most obvious of these are the gifts, no doubt pulled from the troves of riches held in the temple. Clothing, ranging from simple muslin and cotton outfits to impractically elaborate silk robes Shiro can only wear to bed. Armor, light and practical and finely made. Keith also leaves him ceremonial daggers with jewel-crusted hilts, an expertly made bow, swords of exotic make and exquisite quality.

His attempts to politely decline the lavish gifts had only ruffled Keith’s feathers— literally. Now, though Shiro feels far from deserving, he tries to accept each one graciously.

“How does the wing feel today?” he asks as soon as they’ve both finished their late breakfast.

Keith’s mouth pulls in discomfort as he unfurls the feathered limb, muscle rippling along his back as the wing draws high. “Not terrible. Just tight. Sore.”

Shiro hums and scoots closer, the feeling sounding far too familiar. Injury was commonplace in the arena— broken bones, open wounds, torn tendons— and there’d been no one to tend to Shiro’s but himself. By necessity, he’d learned how to pop his dislocated limbs back into their sockets and work out the worst of the ache before his next match. Or, at the very least, he knew to disguise the extent of his injuries so that his vulnerabilities wouldn’t be turned against him.

But this is a different time and a different place, without any imperative to kill or be killed, and Shiro is free to be as gentle as he pleases.

He spreads Keith’s wing out across his lap, appreciating the weight and warmth that come with it. As he feels out the ridges of dense muscle for knots and scarring, Shiro hums softly, smiling when he hears Keith pick up the tune, too. A little pressure loosens the worst of the tension; careful stretching helps keep the joints from locking up while Keith heals.

New feathers are already growing in around the healing wound, scraggly and uneven. Shiro combs through them next, checking for any sign of complication, and smiles at the contented sounds that escape the sphinx with every stroke of his feathers. One of Keith’s paws kneads gently into his thigh, claws just barely pricking at softspun cotton and the skin underneath.

As Shiro fully extends Keith’s wing and peers at its underside, he imagines the power of a single wingbeat. It’d be enough to send him tumbling back, probably. One or two more and Keith could be aloft, free to reach the kinds of heights Shiro can scarcely dream of.

“Looks good,” he comments, fingertips slipping over the smoothness of those feathers as Keith retracts his wing into a neat fold along his body. “How does it feel? Ready to fly again?”

“Soon,” Keith says, though his gaze immediately slides off to one side, resolute on not meeting Shiro’s stare. There are the slightest hints of ruddy color at the tips of his ears and the heights of his cheeks as he says, “But first, would you mind looking at my other wing, Shiro? It feels, uh… pretty stiff, too. Tight.”

“It does?” Shiro keeps his tone light and innocent as he watches the sphinx make a show of struggling to extend his uninjured wing; Keith’s as bad at lying as he is with riddles and puns, but the ruse is harmless. “How strange, considering nothing’s happened to it. I guess I’d better give it a check.”

Keith is transparently delighted as he shifts around and offers Shiro his other wing, curling up so close that the man can feel the resonant vibrations of his every purr. And while Shiro strokes satin-soft feathers and runs his hand over muscled shoulder joints, they talk.

There is little else to do, just the two of them. There are days it seems they do nothing but talk, from dawn til the moon is nearly set.

Keith scrapes elaborate designs into the moss as Shiro tells him of faraway lands and bustling cities, human customs, animals of all shapes and sizes. When the sphinx speaks, it’s usually of the temple— the depths Shiro’s never seen, the ways it whispers to him, the calling that had drawn him here so many years ago— or the jungle that’s been home to him so long that he barely remembers life anywhere else. If he gets carried away, he’ll sometimes talk until the raspy timber of his low voice goes rougher, less even.

Shiro likes that, strangely. There’s a breathiness to Keith when his throat starts to go hoarse, a harshness that’s somehow pleasant on the ears. It leaves Shiro’s spine tingling.

In fragmented pieces, quieter and less certain, Keith eventually tells Shiro about his father— strong, kind, human through and through— and the mother he’s never known.

“We have that in common,” Shiro tells him one night as the rain thuds outside his door, water dripping down the walls around them and dampening the stone floor. “Losing our parents young.”

“But you had your grandfather,” Keith says, curled tight against his side with panther legs tucked neatly under himself.

Shiro smiles for the reminder. “I did. A lucky stroke for me.”

The corner of his mouth pulls as Keith’s nails skim over the padded leather bracer laced tight around the forearm of his prosthetic, concealing the ugly, rusting rend in the metal underneath. It’s as bad as an open wound that refuses to heal, the decaying metal and unholy magic slowly rotting it from within.

Under long sleeves and carefully chosen armor, Shiro’s kept it hidden— by necessity, by compulsion. For better or worse, his imprisonment has made him adept at suppressing pain and skillful in concealing weakness. He makes excuses when he fumbles with his right hand, grip suddenly gone slack. He distracts Keith with the riddles he so despises when his fingers begin to tremble. When he sleeps, it’s with his painfully twitching arm tucked underneath him.

There is no reversing the deterioration that has already set in, no halting the debilitating creep of its advance, and no kindness in forcing Keith to watch it play out alongside him.

Still, some things can’t be completely forgotten, even tucked safely out of sight.

“I’m sorry,” Keith whispers so low it’s nearly drowned out by the rain. “For what I did to your arm. I know it’s— I’ve made things harder for you.”

“Not really,” Shiro tells him, biting his lip after. “It’s fine, Keith. I’m fine. Finer than I have been in years and years, thanks to you, nevermind the damned arm. And it is, to be fair, a deeply unholy monstrosity, so…”

“Still your arm, though,” Keith mutters, moping. His nearly healed wing curls close around the man beside him, forming an extra barrier against the storm outside and the cool draft weaseling its way in. “It’s still you that I hurt, even if I was striking something dangerous.”

They’re close enough together atop the dryness of his reed-woven mat that when Shiro turns his head, his jaw brushes Keith’s hair and bumps against one of his horns. Even so, he’s tempted to rest his chin on Keith’s crown and draw him closer yet. “I still say you let me off easy.”

There’s a soft snort as Keith shifts closer, fur and skin pressing into the man beside him as he leans heavily against Shiro’s broad shoulder. His feathers flutter as the wind whistles through the gaps in the bamboo door, but under the cover of his wings they stay warm and dry. As they wait out the storm together, Keith tells him about wandering the temple’s library and reading piecemeal from dusty books gone half-rotted, whole chapters eaten away by time and the jungle’s creeping damp.

On clear nights, Shiro drags their sleeping mats out into the spruced up courtyard so they can stargaze, side-by-side. He points out the constellations one by one, only for Keith to snort and wonder who gave humans the authority to name the heavens. So they twist and turn and find patterns in the stars that suit them both better— a bow, crossed swords, antlers and bones, birds with wings outstretched. With Keith, it’s like seeing the sky anew.

Soon enough the sphinx returns to his usual escapades, springing up pillars throughout the temple while Shiro watches, gliding from tree to tree, cresting the canopy to soar out of sight. The hairpin turns and aerials above the courtyard are meant to impress, and they do. Shiro is still awed as ever when Keith descends upon him— gently now, not trying to barrel him to the earth— with wings flared wide, sweeping him up in feathers and strong arms as soon as he lands.

Before Keith, Shiro had only felt feathers as he plucked chickens and once, briefly, when he’d tried to nurse a small and sickly songbird back to health. There’s no comparison to the size and beauty of Keith’s wings, though. They’re silk under his fingers, dark and lustrous, with a sheen like the colors that sometimes dance through the northern sky. They suit Keith for his striking looks, his surprising softness, his spark for freedom.

Shiro only wishes he had a pair to match.

As they nap together at the height of the day’s heat, Keith’s feline body lazily draped across his outstretched legs, he occupies himself with the sphinx’s enormous, padded paws— soft, smooth to the touch, squishy. After being kneaded like a piece of dough for the better part of a fortnight, Shiro figures it’s only fair he get to gently prod Keith right back.

Bored, he works his fingers in between Keith’s toes and spreads them, his palm pressed to the largest and squishiest pad at the center of his paw. Shiro pushes, flexing them just right, and a set of wicked onyx claws pop right out, akin to the teeth of a sprung steel trap. Awed, he runs his thumb along the glossy curve of a claw that could easily rake a two-inch gouge through his flesh.

“Careful,” Keith sleepily warns, barely lifting his head. Still comfortably sprawled across the man, he stretches out a wing until the tips of his long primary feathers brush against the grown-out tuft of white along Shiro’s brow, ruffling his hair until it stands.

Keith then peeks up at him out of the corner of one deeply purple eye, proudly beholding his handiwork. Quietly, with his mouth muffled against the folded arms his head rests upon, he dares laugh.

Shiro lets him have his fun, entertained by the sheer amount of amusement Keith gets out of this tiny act of… mischief? Payback? Rebellion? But that all changes when Keith’s wing comes at him again, inadvertently giving Shiro a mouthful of feathers as he tries to tickle the man’s nose.

With a great deal of flailing, Shiro launches his counterattack. Wriggling out from under the sphinx’s considerable weight is the tricky part, but clambering astride his middle is easy. Shiro slips a thigh over his furred belly and rolls until Keith is on his back, wings fanned across the stone on either side. Perched atop his lion-sized ribcage, he stares challengingly down at the sphinx where he lay.

For the moment, Keith remains languid and lazy, like any big cat roused from sunning himself. “You sure you’re up to spar? You know I won’t go easy on you, even if you are short a pair of legs.”

Subtly and out of sight, Shiro tests his right arm with a little flex of his hand. The movement of it is slow, hitched, but the fine articulation continues to respond to his thoughts; a miracle, he thinks, that it hasn’t yet given out on him completely. “I’m good,” he assures, twisting his wrist. “We’ve got to keep each other sharp, huh?”

Keith grins, back lifting off the stone in a slight arch. It’s the prelude to the rest of his long body twisting under Shiro, a few feathers sent flying as he flips over and tries to pin the man beneath splayed paws.

But Shiro is practiced in one-on-one combat and in good health, aside from the hindrance of his failing prosthetic. And he’s sparred with Keith often enough to know most of his tricks— the sweep of a wing to knock him off-balance, bounding leaps overhead to disorient him, a penchant for crushing him handily under three-hundred pounds of muscle and fur and feather and bone. He manages to roll clear of a swipe meant to trap him, scrambling to his feet just in time to meet the lunge of Keith’s upper body.

They snag each other by the wrist, by the hand. Locked together, it turns into a contest of strength. Slender as Keith’s human torso is, he’s more than capable of matching Shiro for strength. The defined muscle along his arms grows starker, sharper as he pushes against Shiro, forcing the man’s boots to slowly slip backward across the stone.

A sudden, flurried beating of wide-spanning wings forces Shiro to squint his eyes shut and throws his balance. He’s easily taken to the floor, and thereafter it becomes a prolonged struggle of leverage and nimble maneuvers to evade. Shiro’s thighs are strong enough to squeeze tight around Keith and get him winded, to grapple himself free of situations where he’d otherwise be hopelessly pinned. And Keith— well, Keith has four paws and two arms and several hundred pounds of muscle on his side.

They tussle together until Shiro is worn out, Keith’s inhuman stamina carrying him to victory again. Stubbornly competitive to the end, Shiro yields only once every last drop of strength is spent. And after, it’s almost a relief to let go, body slackening under the sphinx. There is no shame in losing here— no whips, no mockery, no being dragged on a lead and made to beg for another chance.

Just Keith, smiling and breathing hard, his hair disheveled and feathers ruffled from the fight.

“Another impressive win,” Shiro praises while reaching up to brush aside the locks of wild hair clinging to Keith’s sweaty face.

“You’re impressive, too,” Keith says, still breathless as he slumps down against him, the length of his body pooled around the man. Above them, his wing beats lazily, fanning cool air over Shiro as his heart slows and the sweat dries on his skin. “So, what do I get for winning?”

With eyes closed, Shiro cracks a smile. “Hm. What do you want?”

He feels Keith’s warmth and weight shift against him, getting more comfortable. A hind leg lays across his own. A black-furred paw spans his belly, its soft pads pushing into his skin. And Keith— his upper body stretched out alongside Shiro’s, head propped up on a bent elbow— licks his lips and stares.

“I want to hear your voice,” he says, the rough timbre of his own making Shiro’s tired heart flutter. “Tell me a story.”

“A story?” As Shiro lays there, hands folded across his middle, he sifts through the the streetplays and bedtime stories he can still recall and chooses the tale of the wolf-lord and the silk-prince.

It was a youthful favorite of his, full of mysterious meetings in nighttime woods, heroic battles on snow-covered hills, and a love that shouldn’t be. In spite of the odds, the silk-prince and his wolf-lord surmount every obstacle to be together. The story ends with a promise meant to last forever and a kiss meant to be the first of many, and Shiro smiles as he waits to hear what Keith thinks.

“They kiss,” Keith echoes back, voice flat and faintly dubious.

“As people often do when they’re in love,” Shiro says, shrugging a shoulder.

That earns him a quiet, thoughtful grunt from the sphinx, whose brow is knitted tight. “How?”

“How?” Shiro goes rigidly still, certain he must be misunderstanding the point of Keith’s confusion.

But Keith is nothing if not bluntly, painfully clear. “How do you kiss someone?”

“Wh—” Shiro forgets, sometimes, how utterly lonely Keith’s life has been. Acutely aware of Keith’s pressingly close proximity, his next words stumble out with far less composure than he’d have liked. “Um, I’d— well, you— you… put your lips on theirs. Or anywhere, really. That’s the gist of it.”

“That sounds strange,” Keith muses, his nose wrinkling. “But humans often are.”

“You’re not wrong,” Shiro agrees, laughter following. “It’s really not so bad, though. It can be, um, very satisfying, with the right person.”

Keith goes quiet again, aside from a soft sound low in the back of his throat. Abruptly, he leans over Shiro, close enough for the man to see his amethyst eyes suddenly glimmering with an eager, shameless kind of wonder. “Show me?”

Shiro’s jaw slackens, his lips parting a hair’s width. If he’s close enough to see every shift of color in Keith’s irises, then the sphinx is certainly close enough to see the rosy red blush burning across his cheeks and atop his ears.

Selfish, he thinks to himself as he hesitantly lifts his head toward Keith, fingertips trailing along his narrow jaw and into the dense mane of his hair. Hand curled lightly around Keith’s nape, Shiro guides him down closer. Dangerously selfish.

For Keith, it’s simple, natural curiosity. An exploration of a strange and thoroughly human custom. But for Shiro, it’s…

It’s the first time he’s kissed anyone in ages. Certainly the first time he’s kissed someone as beautiful and remarkable as Keith, as good as he is, so much better than Shiro deserves while carrying around corruption in his body and darkness in his past—

Their noses brush. Their breaths mingle. The leaping heart in Shiro’s chest sparks an ember that trails heat through his insides, anticipation burning through his long-neglected nerves like kindling. And then Keith’s lips are warm against his own, slightly slick where they meet against the seam of his mouth.

For the chaste moment they’re pressed together, Shiro can’t help but think of the tongue and pointed canines sitting just behind the softness of Keith’s lips and wish for a little more.

But he doesn’t deepen it, doesn’t even let it linger. The outcome would be unfair to Keith, who only wanted a kiss— not a messy human starved for touch unraveling under him, undone by laughably little.

Keith bumps his forehead into Shiro’s after they part, smushing the white and black of their hair in between them. “I like kissing,” he decides, his breath warm on Shiro’s skin.

“Not so strange after all, huh?” Shiro teases before making the mistake of looking the sphinx directly in the eyes. They’re always intense, always striking from any distance, but this near it’s like staring into the night sky as the first stars flicker into being, so deep he could fall into them forever.

“No, it’s bizarre,” Keith reaffirms with a smile in his voice. “But it’s like you said… nice, with the right person.”

Nice enough that Keith immediately leans in for another, the tip of his nose poking into Shiro’s cheek as his lips brush unabashedly over a mouth parted in surprise. It’s a welcome touch— Keith’s face pressed close, his hair tickling at Shiro’s ears, a slender hand at the base of the man’s neck, thumbing the hollow of his throat— but Shiro can already feel a mess of need and emotion he’s kept tightly sealed away within him for years threatening to simmer over.

With a reluctant groan, Shiro pulls away, head turning aside just enough to break the sphinx’s tender, searching kiss. All of him aches for the loss.

“Shiro?” Keith questions, barely a whisper and wavering with misgiving.

There’s a note in his name like wounded confusion, and Shiro can endure that no better.

“Ask me for another when you best me in our next spar,” he says before Keith can take his nervous caution for rejection, playful as he can muster. It’s only delaying his dilemma to another day. “If you can best me again.”

“If,” Keith snorts before folding his arms on Shiro’s chest and lying down atop him. Lulled by the afternoon sun and the body heat underneath him, he’s close to drowsing again within minutes, a contented smile fixed in place as he rests assured of his future victory.

A season of rain settles in, keeping them both stiflingly cooped up for the next fortnight. Shiro returns from his forages soaked to the bone, his hair and clothing plastered to his skin, arm cold and aching despite the jungle’s muggy warmth. In one of the rooms he’d spent weeks clearing out— medium-sized and barren, a recessed fire pit dug into the floor— he smokes fish and dries out his clothes and wonders if the endless rain is part culprit for the sad, sorry state of his prosthetic.

While Keith disappears for hours into the sanctum and crypts of the temple, tending its contents against the trickling water that seeps its way in, Shiro curls on his sleeping mat and stares at his hand.

The metal plates along his palm are dull, almost peeling. The joints along each segment of his fingers are bearded in dark, blood-red rust. Curling his pinky has him panting with both effort and pain. Drawing a bow is an impossibility. It’s a struggle to move his arm at all without openly grimacing, and Shiro isn’t certain how much longer he can hide the truth of it under silk sleeves and oversized hide gloves, behind smiles and carefully kept angles.

And the truth is… as Shiro stares at the ghastly rust and rot-riddled remains of his right arm, he cannot fathom how it hasn’t yet fallen to pieces. All that is holding it together is the fading magic of the druids, and even that he’d thought would wear in time, crumbling like the metal that the spellwork and dark quintessence infused. Its lingering threads are enough to move his fingers without any say on Shiro’s part; in the night, they twitch on their own, the way the extremities of a freshly slain corpse might.

The sleepless agony drains him, slow but sure. Fatigue nips at Shiro’s heels while he does his daily chores and reads to Keith from a handful of relatively modern books dredged up from the inner temple, the sphinx’s head pillowed on his lap. Kept inside with only the low light of the fire to see by, Shiro’s shortcomings go unnoticed. For now.

Under his secrecy lies a fear even greater, dark and formless like the creatures that swim just below the surface of stagnant, algae frosted ponds— that perhaps his arm still functions only because it is siphoning the life out of him to feed itself, a dying parasite that refuses to withdraw its lamprey jaws.

It’s a bleak day when Shiro realizes that his declining condition means he couldn’t leave the temple, even if he wanted to. And he doesn’t want to, despite some lingering hopes of laying eyes on more of the world before he dies, of finding some small way to strike back at the Zarkon and his empire, of returning to his grandfather’s house one last time. He’s never much cared for the idea of putting down roots— not since he was thirteen and on his own for the first time— but for Keith, Shiro would plant himself here like the ancient trees that have claimed and broken stone.

The storms break. Keith brings back their first hearty kill in well over a week, laying a small, plump deer at his feet like an offering. The good meal helps Shiro’s strength, certainly, but he still balks when Keith playfully suggests they work the meal off with a sparring duel.

Shiro hates to disappoint him. Can’t. Not when Keith is so eager to stake another victory over him and claim his prize.

It’s flattering in many ways— Shiro can’t deny the blush that creeps across his cheeks as Keith prances around him, already boasting about how he’s going to kiss Shiro til they both go blue in the face— but there’s a proud, competitive streak in him that aches to surpass expectations, both Keith’s and his own. To show him why he climbed to the top in the gladiator pits, undefeated.

To test himself and prove that his situation isn’t as dire as he fears.

Shiro’s jaw clenches viselike as he bends his arm and tucks it behind the small of his back, out of the way, hand curled into a tight fist. It’s a duelist’s form, keeping his shoulder back and creating a slimmer profile, less area to attack; more importantly, it keeps his damned arm out of the way.

From the first crossing of their swords, Shiro realizes the match is a foregone conclusion. His wins against Keith have always been few, but every blow rattles his good arm and wearies his muscles. As Shiro flips back his damp hair and adjusts his sweaty grip on the black-and-silver sword he wields, he tries not to appear too winded.

“Keep your arm up, Shiro,” Keith cautions as he lunges in, coming at him with a wide-swung arc meant to be easily deflected.

Shiro tries. Where his prosthetic feels like dry, dead wood, brittle where it remains tucked behind his back, his left arm is leaden. Every swing forces him to use his whole body— an exhausting way to fight, and one he’d often exploited in his clumsier opponents. His lungs prickle like they’re full of nettles, breaths coming out harsh as he blocks one thrust after another, but even that is nothing compared to the steady throb building at the back of his skull.

They fall into a rhythm, their blades ringing as they trade blows and parries. It’s the only kind of dance Shiro knows how to perform, but all his steps fall graceless across the courtyard’s stone, his form ponderous in comparison to Keith’s.

And Keith notices. There’s a tiny tug of a frown at the corner of his lips as Shiro messily pushes his blade aside, grunting with the exertion of it. The line of concentration writ between his dark eyebrows deepens when Shiro nearly stumbles over his own feet.

But Keith can’t possibly anticipate the sudden jolt of agony that roots Shiro to the spot like the sight of a gorgon, whole body fixed with a rigor that draws his muscles tight and seals his jaw shut. It interrupts the familiar pattern of their swordplay mid-stroke. Paralyzed, Shiro can neither sidestep the incoming swing of Keith’s blade nor raise his own to block it.

They both come to the same realization a sliver of a second before the inevitable impact. Still wracked by a rolling wave of pain, Shiro wrenches his metal arm forward in a last ditch effort to slow the oncoming sword. Through the darkened haze that clouds the edges of his vision, he sees Keith, wide-eyed and stricken, attempt to slow his strike’s momentum, to twist his wrist. The sunlight glints hard off of the blade as its course changes by a fraction.

Shiro is viscerally reminded of their first meeting as Keith’s sword cleaves into his arm, tearing through his bracer and metal already rendered frail and crumbling. But it cuts deeper this time, simple steel finishing what luxite had started. It hurts worse than losing his arm in the first place, threaded pain winding deep inside his body, seizing up around every organ and muscle. It rips through the back of his skull like a bludgeon pushing the bone inward.

Shiro crumples to his knees beside the dark, ugly shards of metal strewn before him, the rust-wrapped fingers laying amid tattered cloth and leather. Wet, searing gasps for breath drown out Keith’s words, and his chest aches with a vengeance Shiro can only attribute to the hideous magics worked upon his prosthetic arm— a failsafe, a hungry curse meant to ensure he’d never be able to live without his gift from the druids or the empire that created it.

After so long deferred, he is dying.

“Shiro! Shiro… Shiro, I didn’t—”

“Not your fault,” he spits out, words wet with what he hopes is saliva rather than blood. The sentiment shoot around his skull like a ricocheting arrow, the most important thing to pass along to Keith. “Not your fault, Keith. I-it’s been troubling me a while now. It was—” He sucks in a rattling breath through his teeth. “—a matter of time.”

“I didn’t know it was this bad, Shiro! I— why didn’t you— nothing is going to happen to you,” Keith tells him, wrapping him in arms and wings that blot the glare of the sun. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you. Let me help.”

Shiro wants to tell him that it’s likely far beyond helping and has been for a while. Perhaps since the moment he was tied down to a dark altar and tormented until it fused to his flesh. He wants to console Keith and assure him that there was no salvaging either him or the arm— the prosthetic was made in malice and existed in it, and so deeply twined to his being that this is the toll of removing it.

But he’s too tired to do anything but stare at the face hovering over him, dark-eyed and tear-streaked, until his eyes grow too heavy to keep open.

Tenuous snatches of consciousness have Shiro blearily envisioning himself being dragged from the arena, victorious but brutally out of sorts. Only there’s no screaming crowd shaking the colosseum, nor the rattle of bars from the other prisoners-turned-gladiators as they pass rows of cells by the dozens.

This darkness around him is muted, the only sounds Keith’s panting and his own reedy breaths. The arms looped around him are powerfully gentle, and the body he’s cradled against is comfortingly warm.

“Shiro.” It’s Keith’s whisper. “Please, Shiro, don’t leave me. Keep fighting.”

His limbs hang leaden. His head droops like a drunkard’s as Keith carries him down a spiraled ramp that seems to descend into the pit of the earth itself. The depth of the darkness surrounding them is profound, held at bay only by the strange crystals that line the wall; their light exposes the etched lines of glyphs and images of the lion goddess and her myriad servants, like the sphinxes, the harpies, the chimera.

There is level ground when they reach the bottom. The chamber is massive, circular, ringed by columns wider than three men stood side-by-side. And the crystals along the wall pale before a new source of light.

Shiro lifts his head a fraction as Keith walks them closer to the golden aura emanating from the middle of the room. Sunken into the floor is a large, carven pool wide enough for a dozen people to circle. And once, it might’ve been filled to the brim, servants of the temple able to kneel at its edge and reach into the golden liquid within.

Now, it sits nearly dry and empty. All that remains is a pitcher’s worth of shimmery, glowing water pooled at its center. Not water, though. Thicker, oilier, more like an elixir, aglow like sunshine distilled. Tiny motes of light hang in the air above it, flickering softly.

“What is this?” Shiro manages, his breathing still haggard but the worst of the burn in his lungs easing.

“Quintessence.” Keith wastes no time in bringing him closer, down the gentle slope of the nearly barren pool.

Weakly, Shiro shakes his head. “I’ve seen quintessence. Zarkon used it. It was dark, colored like belladonna—”

“Tainted,” Keith supplies. “That’s what happens when the unworthy touch something so holy. It’s why I’ve killed every human who’s come here, Shiro. To protect this from being spoiled.”

Close enough to bask in the light of the quintessence, Shiro can’t help but marvel. It’s like light made liquid, a beacon in the dark, warmth in the cold of the earth.

Against his back, he feels the quick rise and fall of Keith’s chest. It’s peaceful, being cradled close by someone who cares so much for his life— strong arms slipped around his middle to hold him steady, a fine nose and soft lips nuzzling in his hair.

“This is pure quintessence, Shiro. The blood of the universe and the gods who made it.” His hand slides over the back of Shiro’s, too small and slender to cover it completely. “It can heal you.”

The whisper in his ear has Shiro’s eyes fluttering wide open. “Keith! Keith, I— I can’t. I can’t. You just said—” He huffs, upset that Keith would even suggest he let his personal corruption pour into something sacred. “My touch would taint it all, Keith. I can’t destroy everything you’ve worked so hard to protect—”

“You won’t,” Keith insists, his fingers sliding between Shiro’s to grip his hand. “All this time I’ve been here alone, I think I’ve been waiting, Shiro. I’m not meant to spend eternity in a rotting temple and you’re not meant to die. I think… I was always saving this for you.”

Shiro tires anew under the weight of all he wants to say to Keith— that the sphinx doesn’t know him as well as he might think, that he’s done horrific things to survive, that he is undoubtedly exactly the kind of monstrous human Keith is meant to keep away.

“Shiro,” Keith whispers as he squeezes the man’s hand tight, a pleading urgency behind his name. “Please. Trust me.”

A moment after, Shiro nods.

He feels mostly an observer as Keith helps guide his hand toward the shimmering quintessence, his sickly wan skin colored by the golden cast of its glow. The first touch is like his fingers slipping into warm oil, a slippery heat that gently clings to his skin.

And then the quintessence surges toward him, crawling up his wrist an inch at a time, its shimmer coating his skin like stardust. In a blink, Shiro feels heat tingling along his spine, through his joints, lingering in the back of his mind.

A soft burn swallows up what remains of his right arm as the quintessence slips through the crevices of what remains of his prosthetic. The metal creaks and scrapes as it’s pried apart, clattering softly as it falls to the stone. Shiro is still bleary-eyed, but he could swear he sees dark wisps of violet-black smoke curling off of the scraps.

Head lolled to one side, he watches the golden quintessence continue to pour, as if dripping into a glass vessel blown in the shape of his old arm. It floods all the way down to his fingertips, a hand— complete with creases along his palm and the shape of blunt nails— forming before his very eyes.

Shiro stares, so awed he can scarcely believe it. The pool that had harbored the last of the quintessence left to the temple now lies empty and dark, and his right arm…

His arm is returned, new and more beautiful than he could’ve dreamed— translucent and golden, like rays of falling sunset. Within, those motes of light remain. They drift slowly, twinkling like stars. Like a small cosmos made part of him.

With the barest inkling of a thought, his fingers curl and splay and wriggle in ways he’d thought forever impossible to regain. And before he slumps back against Keith and slides into the deepest slumber, the last thing Shiro sees and feels is Keith’s smaller hand clenched tight around his own.

Shiro wakes to the familiar stone ceiling of his quarters a new man.

A dark wing blankets him, reassuring as a shield, cocooning him in sleepy warmth. Under his head, Keith’s furred flanks rise and fall with slow, steady breaths. Legs, arms, and a long tail curl protectively around him. Thoroughly wrapped up in Keith, he’s never felt better— but the quintessence might have something to do with that, too.

“Shiro?” a softly rasping voice questions as he begins to stir.

“Keith,” he croaks back. He turns his head and rubs his cheek against tawny fur. “Keith, you saved me.”

At an incredible cost that Shiro still can’t quite fathom, too.

“You’ve saved me, too,” Keith replies. “We saved each other.”

He’s gently cradled down as Keith extricates himself from his place as Shiro’s pillow and fetches a tin of cool water. As Shiro sips, a nimble hand slips through his hair, combing back messily mixed strands of white and black. His eyes close again, taking a few precious moments to enjoy the attention.

Blindly, Shiro tests his right arm with a gentle stretch, still not quite convinced that everything before wasn’t just the stuff of dreams.

But as he opens his eyes and looks down, he’s wonderstruck anew. From the scarred stump of his shoulder extends an arm of divine, celestial origin— gold-filmed and peppered with specks like drifting stars, a thousand personal constellations within it.

Shiro raises his arm and gently slips his new fingers around Keith’s wrist, sliding up to find his hand. There’s the softest spark, a shudder of breath, as he realizes he can feel again. Gone is the frigid metal. Under his fingertips, Keith’s skin is soft and warm, the hairs along his forearm delicate and fine, his pulse strong.

He draws Keith’s hand down from his hair, holding his gaze— violet and wide-eyed, anticipation resting under that striking fringe of lashes— as he noses against that delicate wrist and mouths along the joint of his thumb. With a gentle turn, he angles Keith’s hand so that he might lay a soft, lingering kiss on its back.

“Owed you a kiss.” The moment he lets go of Keith’s hand, Shiro regrets it, missing its warmth against his own.

The light filtering in through new cracks in the stone ceiling is blotted out as Keith leans over him, the tips of dark strands an inch from tickling at the man’s broad jaw. His smile is faint, half-obscured in soft shadow, with a hint of something mischievous at its corners.

Keith’s slender hand cups along his jaw, turning Shiro’s face toward him. The edge of his thumb strokes just under the plush part of the man’s bottom lip, thoughtful. “Nice as that was, Shiro, I think you owe me far more.”

Shiro doesn’t have any time to argue— not that he would— before Keith’s lips meet his own in a heavy, urgent crush that pushes him down into his sleeping mat. Having an immense desire and little idea of how to wield it, the sphinx bears down on Shiro with a ferocity that compensates for his lack of experience. He clings to Shiro with both hands, staring him down as he drags out the kiss like it’s the last they’ll ever share.

At the first sliver of opportunity, Shiro moves his mouth against Keith’s and twists his head just enough to change the angle. It’s a quiet demonstration quickly taken to heart, as Keith immediately and enthusiastically turns the same technique around on him.

The first slip of Shiro’s tongue along the Keith’s bottom lip is received with a little confusion, a slight furrow suddenly creasing between the sphinx’s shapely brows. Keith answers it by drawing back and licking a thick, wet stripe from Shiro’s jaw to his eyebrow.

A laugh bubbles out of Shiro before he can stop it, whole body quaking under Keith’s hands and the lean of his bare-skinned torso. Pleased to have made him smile, Keith does it again, slower and more sensual as he traces the curve of Shiro’s square jaw and the planes of his sharply-honed cheek.

“How do you feel?” Keith asks, nose buried fondly in Shiro’s hair, his smile felt against the man’s ear.

Shiro has to pause and let the steam clear from his thoughts as he considers it, taking stock of— well, everything.

“I feel… good,” he realizes, rolling his shoulders under Keith’s touch. There are no twinges from old wounds, no persistent ache radiating from his right arm. It’s only in the absence of pain that Shiro realizes just how much he’d carried with him from the arena, as persistent as his scars. “Really good.”

Keith’s satisfied, approving hum does wonderful and terrible things to Shiro’s insides. As the sphinx kisses him again— a little more masterfully, mouth and tongue working in concert to open him up— his long, lean body follows, clambering over Shiro and settling haphazardly on top of him, bare skin and fur pressing insistently against every inch of his pinned quarry’s front.

Against every inch. And there’s nothing quite as mortifying as the moment when Keith pauses and looks down between them as he feels something pressing insistently back against him.

“Oh. Uh, maybe… too good,” Shiro murmurs, cheeks flushing a splotchy crimson. “I’m sorry. Overly excited. Everything feels so amazing and it’s been so long for me.”

But Keith only makes an interested sound as he leans onto one elbow and runs his free hand down the bare skin of Shiro’s chest. The tips of his fingers curl over the waistband of linen pants, nails skimming over the man’s flat belly.

“You don’t have to apologize, Shiro. It’s been a long time for me, too. My whole life, basically,” Keith says, tongue darting out to wet his lips. “You’re the first person I’ve kissed, the first I trusted enough to touch. I’d never even seen anyone else naked before you.”

Still smiling, Shiro’s expression flickers with puzzled curiosity. “When did you… when I was bathing? Getting dressed? You watched me?”

Caught, Keith’s face flushes bright. “I was observing you to make sure you didn’t sneak off to plunder the temple when you thought I wasn’t being vigilant—”

“Couldn’t help but peek, huh?” Shiro teases, unable to stop his grin spreading as the sphinx instantly works himself up into a red-faced pout. “What’d you think?”

“I was curious to see just how ridiculous humans look on those impractical legs,” Keith scoffs, walking two fingers across a swell of muscle over Shiro’s chest. Still blushing, he chances a glance up at Shiro. “No fur, no tail, no stability.”

“And?”

“They’re nice. Your legs. Especially… here,” the sphinx decides, giving one of Shiro’s thighs a squeeze through the thin linen of his pants. “And your— I mean, certain parts of you look… strange, by comparison, but I— I like them, too. And I think they like me back.”

As Keith’s hand dips along the inside of his thigh and edges along the strained curve of his cock, Shiro shudders. “I can attest to that.”

“For what it’s worth,” Keith murmurs as he leans in close, “you see me naked all the time.”

“Not really a fair comparison,” Shiro says, hooking his fingers through the leather weapons belt around Keith’s waist— the only thing he ever wears, really— and tugging him even closer.

“Can I?” Keith asks with fingers wound through the drawstring at the waist of Shiro’s pants.

“Please,” Shiro answers, lifting his hips and helping to slide them down. The fabric against his skin is immediately replaced by sleek fur and warm muscle as Keith settles between his legs, his front paws resting under thick, scar-wrapped thighs and his upper body leaned over Shiro’s. “You can do anything you want with me, Keith.”

“I want to kiss you. I want to take care of you,” he murmurs at the corner of Shiro’s mouth. His hands rove over the swells and slopes of muscle bound in the man’s shoulders and chest. “I want to… be with you.”

“To be with me?” Shiro echoes back, certain his smile is stupidly enamored.

“To mate,” Keith says, a little plainer in case Shiro’d missed his meaning. He kisses Shiro to hush his laughing. “If you want me, too.”

“Yes,” Shiro moans. “Yes, Keith, absolutely.”

How is a matter they’ll have to figure out together.

Keith seems content to follow his impulses and instincts, barring whatever input Shiro offers. His lean body writhes on top of Shiro’s as they kiss, squirming as Shiro runs his hands down his sides, fingertips tracing the lines of hard, sleek muscle under unbelievably soft skin. Soft sounds escape him as Shiro’s nails rake through the soft fuzz and fur where his waist meets the rest of his lionlike form. His wings flutter each time Shiro arches up and grinds his hips against him, his flushed, naked cock caught between them. Onyx black claws carve into reed mat and stone tile alike as he shifts and rolls the lion-half of his body, rutting eager and sloppy against Shiro’s prone form.

Even at the best he’s felt in ages, Shiro has a hard time keeping up. He clings to Keith by his wild hair, by his horns, by the sides of his lovely face, thumb smoothing over the faded scar that lines his cheek. Their kisses spill over, messier by the moment, the both of them too hungry for want of each other to care whether their mouths meet just right. As Keith moves to draw back, Shiro catches his swollen bottom lip gently between his teeth, reluctant to let him go.

But he does. Shiro’s questioning look is answered with a tiny smile and a gentle kiss along his jaw. And then another against its underside. One more over the beating pulse through his bared throat, the tips of fanged canines pressed into him as Keith laps his way down to the hollow that sits above Shiro’s clavicle.

Shiro licks his lips and tangles his fingers in Keith’s hair as the heat of his mouth trails lower still. Teeth and tongue trace their way over his heaving chest and down the little dip under his ribs, around his navel, over the jut of his hip bone. Keith’s hands slide up his thighs, palms dragging, as he nuzzles against the flushed length of Shiro’s dick.

Shiro’s toes curl at the first little flick of Keith’s tongue against him, teasing. Slender fingers circle his cock as the sphinx licks his way from stem to tip before wrapping his lips around its blushing head. His tongue swirls over taut, sensitive foreskin, and then the wet heat of his mouth swiftly sinks down an inch, and then another. Keith draws back slow, lips soft as they purse against the crown of his cock in an almost-kiss, before eagerly taking Shiro into his mouth again.

It’s messy and sweet, Keith’s movements all enthusiasm and little finesse, and Shiro feels the pressure of his building climax come on almost painfully fast. He swallows thickly at the sight of Keith’s dark hair and horns as his head bobs between his legs, dark wings lazily askew while he works.

Shiro’s breathy moans turn full-bodied as Keith makes a few admirable attempts to take more of him, the sensitive head of his cock pushing into the back of the sphinx’s throat. When Keith lifts his head a few moments after, it’s with a self-assured smile that Shiro’s more used to seeing in sparrs and on hunts. A thin strand of saliva still runs from the corner of his mouth to the dick in his hand. “Is that good?”

Shiro exhales, almost grateful for the pause to catch his breath and calm his trembling. “I think you’re very much aware of how much I’m enjoying myself.”

He can see the little gleam of self-satisfaction in Keith’s stare, which drops to consider the man sprawled out for him— the faint little marks of red peppered down his front, the muscles that shiver under his touch, the thick cock smearing wet streaks over Shiro’s belly.

“I had a feeling,” Keith admits, a touch shy again as he dips down to press a kiss to the underside of Shiro’s length, still full and aching. “But I’m… I don’t know what I’m leaving out. I don’t know what I don’t know. But I want to do this right, Shiro. Perfect. For you.”

“Keith…” Shiro goes weak at the way Keith reverently lays his cheek against one of his thighs, nosing at the pale, scar-laced skin; almost needy, the sphinx edges forward to rub the underside of his jaw against Shiro’s hip, staring up at him with doe eyes. His dick twitches as Keith’s heated breaths puff against it. “Can you come up here, please? You’re an awful distraction.”

Keith grins cocksure as he pushes himself up. Tawny-and-black haunches bunch, muscle rippling under fur as Keith gathers his hind legs under him and awkwardly draws all of himself closer to Shiro. He flattens himself atop the man so eagerly that it forces a huff of air from Shiro’s lungs and makes him keen as his cock is pinned tight between them. Keith’s weight shifts as he gets comfortable, a spread of too many limbs and fanned wings and a whipping, winding tail.

Shiro wastes no time running his hands up Keith’s sides and over his shoulders, grateful to feel every bump and dip along his body, before tenderly cupping his face. “You don’t have to be perfect, Keith. Gods know I’m not,” he adds, smiling small as he brushes his thumbs over delicate, striking cheekbones. “It’s fine not to know it all right away. This is new to me, too, and there’ll be times it shows. But we have plenty of time to enjoy ourselves and figure out what we like. We’ll do it together.”

Ask Keith nuzzles against his jaw, Shiro adds, “Though I have to say, your instincts are pretty remarkable. Inspired, even. I’ve never felt this good with anyone, Keith, and I haven’t even come yet.”

Keith’s laugh tickles the skin of his throat, where the sphinx briefly plants his teeth and applies his tongue. “I can fix that,” he purrs, already pulling away.

“Wait. Stay with me.” This time, Shiro catches hold of him before he goes. Keith’s hair slips through his golden fingers like threads of ink, dark as a silhouette before the sun; it’s an anchor Shiro holds as he brings him close, mouthing at his lips, their noses messily pressed into each other.

There’s nothing lost in drawing it out, Shiro decides, despite the need arcing up from his belly that threatens to consume him. And certainly everything to be gained in letting Keith build to a tall and precipitous peak before Shiro guides him right over the edge.

And this kind of intimacy is the sort Shiro could steep himself in every day for eternity— laid bare before someone he trusts with his life and safe as he’s ever felt. Keith warms to him like wildfire, intensity returning with the thrilling quickness of a lightning bolt. His moans pour into Shiro’s mouth in time with the gentle roll of his body, constantly seeking something more.

As Keith hungrily runs his tongue through Shiro’s mouth, the man can’t help but be more distracted by what’s happening further down. His dick throbs where it’s caught between the hard muscle of his own abdomen and the uneven, unpredictable slide of Keith’s body on top of his. It’s a warm, welcome agony— enough friction to keep him hard and aching, but shy of what he needs to make a sticky mess of them both.

As he writhes under the sphinx’s weight, Shiro feels something else: the rocking of Keith’s furred hips against him, harder and more insistent by the second. There’s the scrape of onyx claws on the surrounding stone tile as Keith works for more leverage, the woven mat they both sit on inching across the floor with every desperate little thrust against Shiro’s thigh. And then he feels the brush of something slick, hard, heavy. Its weight skids over his sweat-dampened skin, heat trailing in its wake.

“K-Keith,” Shiro gasps out in between devouring kisses. He draws a deep breath as Keith’s attentions turn to nibbling at the lobe of his ear and leaving lovebites over the soft underside of his jaw. “Is that— I can feel you.”

Keith doesn’t quite hear him, maybe. His only response is a muffled, hot-mouthed moan that sinks into Shiro’s skin like the quintessence had.

Shiro wriggles and cranes his head, curiosity taking precedent over Keith’s amorous licks and kisses against his shoulder. Between the jostling movements and the occasional obstruction of Keith’s wing, it takes a minute for Shiro to see what he feels— that long, sleek heat driving against him, dipping to scrape along his inner thigh.

Glimpsed in flashes under the curve of Keith’s hind leg, Shiro sees the wet gleam of something broadly curved and vibrantly colored— a pretty pink head, lavender to deep mauve along its shaft, its shape far from human. And the harder Keith ruts against him, the deeper Shiro’s cheeks color. As Keith’s cock slips between his thighs and nudges at his balls, at the cleft of his ass, it’s very plain where it wants to go.

“Keith,” he tries again, turning to catch the sphinx’s hungry mouth in a kiss. “I think I know something you’ll enjoy.”

“I’m enjoying you right now,” Keith murmurs back, a hand squeezing tight around one of Shiro’s pectorals as he continues to push his hips into him.

“It’ll be even better,” Shiro says, reaching down to smooth over fur. Encouraging Keith to slow the pump of his hips is a protracted battle, full of deprived whining in his ear, but Shiro means to make it well worth Keith’s wait. “Trust me.”

Keith buries his face in Shiro’s shoulder and groans. “I do,” he sighs, still holding tight to the curve of Shiro’s chest, apparently for comfort.

“Patience, Keith. I’ve never gotten to see you like this before,” Shiro tells him, smoothing a hand down Keith’s sweaty back. “And I want to take care of you, too.”

A little clumsy maneuvering gets them untangled enough for Shiro to slip lower and run his palm down Keith’s soft, fuzzy belly. As the sphinx hesitantly lifts a hind leg, Shiro lays eyes on the length that stretches out of his sheath. It’s beautiful, really— elegantly curved, heavily thick around the middle, the smoothly swooped head a warm, rosy pink.

Shiro cups his hand around it and listens to Keith moan, his tail sweeping across the floor and the toes of his paws curling in delight. His pale, gold-tinted thumb sweeps slowly down the row of soft ridges that line its underside and wrap its head. It’s already slick in his palm, weighty and impossibly warm as it pulses softly against his skin.

“Keith,” he says, rapping his knuckles against Keith’s side. He points to the corner of his room, where the whetstone and oil Keith had given him to maintain his weapons sit. “Keith, can you reach that little bottle?”

With a groan, the sphinx stretches out a wing and bats the bottle, rolling it close with the tips of his feathers. He grins when he gets his hands on it, proud as he hands it over to Shiro.

“Thank you,” Shiro says, leaning in for a kiss even as he pops the cork from the top and lets the sword oil spill over his fingers.

Keith whines against his lips as Shiro wraps his slick fingers around Keith’s cock and gives it a few wringing strokes, thumb slowly circling its tip before rubbing back and forth across the slit at its crown. With his other hand, Shiro starts getting himself ready.

One finger first, gliding in achingly slow until he’s buried to the knuckle, and then a second to start stretching himself open. By the third, he’s panting against Keith’s mouth and struggling to keep the sphinx from bucking out of his grip.

“Keith.” If he can hear the husky notes of need in his own voice, surely Keith can, too. “I want you in me.”

Keith’s reaction is visceral, immediate, as if afraid any delay might lose him the opportunity. His forelegs tremble as he draws himself into a wobbly stand, splayed over Shiro, his cock hanging heavily under him. “How?”

The length and shape of Keith’s body doesn’t exactly make it easy, but as Shiro spreads his legs and lifts his hips, they find a way. Muscled hind legs bunch against him, the heat of Keith’s length making itself at home against Shiro’s nethers; the massive paws of Keith’s forelegs spread on either side of his torso, claws settling into the sleeping mat. Wings flare wide as Keith contorts his body to make sure he’s pressed close as can be, shuffling to keep his purchase and leverage and let Shiro’s ankles rest over the crown of fur-coated hips.

With an exhale shaky in its anticipation, Shiro reaches up toward the sphinx elegantly bowed down over him. As Keith’s hands come to rest on either side of Shiro’s head, Shiro’s grip settles on strong, lean shoulders. It’ll help to have something sturdy to hold onto.

“Slow,” he whispers as Keith shifts, the whole of his body rippling as he tries to line himself up with Shiro’s stretched, oil-slicked hole. There’s a soft keen out of both of them as Keith’s dick nudges into Shiro’s while he moves, and after a few more agonizing passes, Shiro awkwardly slips a hand down between them to try and help.

With fingers still slick from the oil, he manages to guide the head of Keith’s dick down the cleft of his ass and right against his entrance. There’s a sudden jolt as Keith’s hips immediately rock forward, cockhead slipping as it presses into Shiro.

“Easy, Keith,” Shiro comforts when he hears Keith’s breaths go harsh with frustration. He tucks a lock of loose hair behind Keith’s ear and then strokes his thumb over its soft lobe. “Give it a moment.”

He feels the first faint ache of being pushed open a few agonizing seconds later. The burn of it is good, welcome. Too long forgotten, but even then— it’s never been like this.

The satisfaction of being slowly filled rolls through Shiro like a tidal wave swallowing up the shore. Keith’s shaft slides into him easier than it ought to, for its size, helped along by generous oiling and the natural slickness Keith seems to have. One by one, those soft ridges along its underside pop into Shiro, the feel of them against his walls enough to keep him open-mouthed and incapable of voicing anything but ragged breaths.

And it seems like an eon has passed around them by the time Shiro feels Keith fully sheathed inside of him.

“Slow enough?” the sphinx asks above him.

It takes drawn moments for Shiro’s gaze to focus on him, to note the tremble in Keith’s body as he resists every desperate urge coursing through him. “Perfect,” he answers, eyelashes fluttering heavily.

Each subsequent withdrawal and returning stroke is just as patient; every inch is given and taken with deliberate, jaw-grinding slowness, so sweetly filling that Shiro thinks he could lie here and take it forever. It feels like Keith’s cock sits at his very core, part of him, deeper than anyone else has ever been. Every stroke seems to bring them closer together.

And still Shiro wants more.

“Harder, Keith,” Shiro breathes out, his arms hooking around Keith’s upper body. His heels dig gently into the sphinx’s back, spurring him. “Faster. Let me feel you.”

It’s all the command Keith needs. Overeager and unreined, his hips buck sharp and quick into Shiro. Muscles flex along his arms and forelegs as he digs in, pace doubling in a heartbeat; Shiro holds tighter to him, blunt nails sinking into hard shoulder blades as he’s furiously rocked by the sphinx atop him.

Shiro can scarcely focus for the slide of Keith’s cock through him, strange and wonderful as its full curve and gentle ridges press along his insides. He tries, though. Despite the trembling excitement that holds his body and the soul-deep pleasure that leaves his thoughts warm and hazy, Shiro tries to ground himself in the face he fell in love with, the deep and dark of amethyst eyes—

He blinks. There’s a soft slip of a gasp unrelated to the thick length currently pounding into him, a muted surprise as he looks up into eyes gone yellow-tinged.

Keith’s pupils narrow into sharp, predatory slits, before Shiro’s very eyes, akin to the evening they first crossed paths. The intensity behind them is arresting. Keith’s focus weighs on Shiro like another pair of hands holding him in place as he’s fucked into, hurried and desperate. The open snarl on his lips reveals fangs gone longer, their tips a more wicked point, and all Shiro can imagine is them sinking deep into his shoulder, his throat…

A keening moan slips out of him as Keith’s swift thrusts rake over places inside of him that spark with pleasure, like turning over embers and reigniting a fire. His head tips back further, throat bared, and he can hear the growling purr that Keith breathes out in response.

Claws scrape noisily through stone as Keith widens his stance and digs in, finding more leverage to pour into every wildly deep thrust. With every powerful slam of Keith’s hips against him, Shiro feels the mat under him inch across the floor.

Dark wings fall around him like shade, like cover, like protection. Like Keith means to shelter the sight of him like this from the rest of the world, even if no one is watching. Like it’s just the two of them, holding on to each other in a darkness warmed by their own bodies and panted breaths.

“Shiro,” Keith moans, low and uneven. He repeats the name again and again in that manner Shiro’s so fond of hearing, the vowels drawn out long in a way only Keith seems to do. “Shirooo. Shiro, Shiro...”

Slender hands curl white-knuckle tight on either side of Shiro’s head and he knows that the sphinx is close. Shiro barely has time to slide a hand down his body and fumble for his own cock as Keith’s hips slide and stutter, claws skidding as he presses himself into Shiro as far as he can go.

Shiro barely manages three quick strokes before he feels the heavy pulse that courses through the shaft buried within him, a ripple that bulges against his insides before spilling out impossibly deep. Fainter convulsions follow, all of Keith trembling above him as he holds himself achingly still while every last drop of him pushes into Shiro.

It’s the sight of Keith red-faced and utterly satisfied that does Shiro in— along with the overwhelming fullness and heat still sitting lodged inside of him, every twitch of Keith’s cock felt against pleasure-hungry places within.

Shiro comes with curled toes, back arched, and thighs tensed tight around Keith, forcing the sphinx even closer. It keeps him from drawing breath or forming thought, the all-encompassing sensation too great to allow for anything else. Shiro’s sticky seed seeps down his hand. There’s more of it than he’s ever seen before, painting his golden fingers in messy white before dripping to spot his belly.

Abruptly, Keith shifts, whole body flagging. His wings droop as he eases back on shaking legs. The length of his softening cock suddenly slips out of Shiro, its loss keenly felt as a warm flood of his spent come follows.

Shiro grunts as Keith flops down on top of him, the mess on his stomach no doubt transferring to the sphinx’s front, too. In all their hunting and sparring, he can’t think of a time he’s ever seen the sphinx’s stamina fully give out, well and truly exhausted.

He winds his arms around Keith’s bare and sweat-slicked upper body, hold loose and lazy. Shiro relaxes, sleepily content under Keith’s familiar weight, and strokes his fingers up and down his spine. It earns him equally contented sighs against his shoulder and a chest-deep purr that reverberates through Shiro’s ribs, too.

“Like your first time?”

Keith mumbles nonsense into Shiro’s skin, eyelids heavy with post-coital drowsiness. Eventually it takes the shape of words, however slurred. “I want to go again.”

A pause, Shiro’s stunned silence speaking for itself. When he laughs, it’s weak, if only because he’s so drained. “I think we both need a nap first, Keith.”

Keith grumbles an agreement and nods, making a monumental effort to lift his head and give Shiro one more kiss. It’s unlike anything they’ve shared before, slow and languid like the afternoon heat settling over the jungle. It gently smothers, reluctant to be broken. Keith’s purr carries through his lips; his softly padded paws knead against Shiro’s ribs, almost ticklish.

“I love you,” Keith tells him as they finally part, assured of it even as Shiro’s breath hitches. His lips move over the skin of Shiro’s cheek even lighter than the brush of one of his feathers. “You told me tales of humans who loved each other so much they ended wars and swam seas to be together, Shiro, and I love you more than any of them.”

And it’s so strange to hear it said— in those words, to him— that he can only let his jaw go slack under Keith’s hands and stare with widened eyes.

“And I’m sorry I ever hurt you.” With eyes closed, Keith lays his head against Shiro’s, their foreheads and noses pressed together, and exhales slowly. “If I could take it back, I would.”

“I wouldn’t,” Shiro murmurs. He smiles as Keith’s eyes blink open, bright as they search for something in his own. “Thanks to you, I can do this,” he says while delicately running his quintessence-made thumb around the shell of Keith’s slightly pointed ear. It drags down the sphinx’s jaw and over the delicate skin along his throat, feeling the strum of a slowing pulse just underneath. “I’m a better man than I was, having met you. Happier, too.”

Keith leans into the touch, watery eyes closing as he nuzzles against the luminescent shape of Shiro’s hand. Along the fringe of his lashes, the beginnings of soft tears gather anyway. “I’m better for having you, too.”

Keith takes to the sea like the sky.

While Shiro paces along the beach, his boots held in hand and sand between his toes, he watches the sphinx bound through the waves, wings splashing, a million and one questions for Shiro about the sand and the surf and the edible creatures within it. And as Keith strays further away, showing off flashy aerial maneuvers as he cavorts over the water, Shiro is certain that their choice to leave had been the right one.

The temple’s stone had stopped humming, Keith had said. With the last of the quintessence poured into Shiro’s body, there was no warmth left within it, no whisper in its walls, no further calling to stay. The gods who’d once visited its statues and altars had long since left, and it was their turn to follow. After leaving one last offering at the spot where they’d first met— rose apples and flowers and a freshly slain deer— they’d passed by columns already swallowed up by tangled vines before descending a stairway blanketed in cushiony moss speckled with wildflowers.

It had been reminiscent of leaving his grandfather’s house, the rooms empty and the windows dim, an irreplaceable light gone out of it. But this time around, Shiro spirits had been lighter— he wasn’t setting out alone and freshly grieving, but in love and at peace. And for all the care and human touch put into the temple, it wasn’t home and never would be, really.

It was Keith. Is Keith. Home is wherever he goes at Keith’s side. It’s the sleepy chokehold of Keith wrapped around him at night, furred legs kicking while he dreams. It’s a wing sheltering him from the rain. It’s the comfort of waking from a nightmare and being soothed back to sleep.

It’s also a limp octopus landing in the sand at his feet with no warning.

“Lunch!” Keith crows as he banks overhead. “Try not to burn it, Shiro! I’ll go find some water.”

With a good-natured sigh, Shiro builds up a small fire under the shade of some palms and sticks clingy tentacles through skewers. Keith returns by the time they’re getting deliciously crisp, purring as he settles in close by Shiro’s side, tail curling around his man. As they eat, Shiro tells Keith about all his favorite foods, from the comforting to the exotic.

“I can’t wait to see you try chocolate,” Shiro says, impatient to show Keith every good thing the world has to offer. “And the sweet apples I grew up with. And cheese! Oh, cheese. Fuck, I’ve missed that. First town we find, I’m going to buy you a whole cake and a wheel of cheese. It’ll change your life.”

“Mm. You’re good at doing that,” Keith says, chin resting on his shoulder. As soon as Shiro turns toward him, he catches the man’s mouth in a kiss that tastes of salt and seaspray, a nimble hand already sliding down Shiro’s pants.

After the unexpected diversion, they pour sand on the ashes and trek another few hours, shoulders bumping as they walk through the surf. Shiro closes his eyes and basks in the breeze, the freedom of open air and sea, the smell that reminds him of his childhood by the water. Keith avidly collects seashells all the while, handing off the prettiest ones to Shiro for safekeeping. Seawater foams and bubbles around Shiro’s ankles and Keith’s paws, washing their tracks as clean as if they’d never been.

Their camp for the night is simple. With the skies clear, Shiro rolls out a plain blanket on the scrubby grass near the forestline and they stretch out together, side-by-side.

Under the stars, Shiro tosses riddles at Keith until the sphinx grows tired of hearing them and covers his face with a wing. After some playful batting, they settle against each other with the easy comfort of good lovers, Shiro on his side and Keith curled protectively at his back, a wing stretched over them both for warmth.

But the moon has barely risen before Shiro’s eyes flutter open as he feels something pressing into the seam of his thighs. “I can’t believe you went five decades without fucking anyone,” he murmurs, still halfway asleep, “and now you can’t go five hours without it—”

“It’s been more than five hours,” Keith whispers in his ear, breath tickling.

Shiro snorts and turns over in Keith’s loose, spooning hold. Kissing him is a comfort, and one he indulges in with sleepy tenderness. His hand is large enough to fit around both his cock and Keith’s— for the most part, anyway— and Shiro takes pleasure in all the whimpers and sighs the sphinx makes as he squeezes their shafts together with every stroke.

They sleep soundly after that, til morning comes and Keith rouses him with suckled marks against his throat, stark even amid all the scars that lace his skin.

“I’ve been thinking,” Keith says as they get underway, each of them nibbling on dried strips of yellow-orange fruit as they stroll down the shore. “Why do we need to find a port and a ship to carry us when I can just fly us wherever we want to go?”

“Can you?” Shiro asks, genuinely uncertain. He runs a hand along the curve of Keith’s folded wing, admiring the powerful muscle hidden under raven feathers. “I’m not small, Keith, and we’re talking about crossing a sea.”

“A narrow sea, you said,” Keith rebutts, as if that makes it so much easier.

“A narrow sea, then,” Shiro sighs, shoulders shrugging. “You’ve still never flown me anywhere, Keith, much less for miles and miles.”

“Then I’ll prove I can do it right now, Shiro. Mount me.”

Shiro rolls his eyes, but Keith’s confidence is the kind that inspires others to madness. With a lopsided smile, he does as told and swings a leg astride Keith’s back. He’s seated just forward of the sphinx’s enormous wings, thighs squeezed around Keith’s waist and his heels still settled in the sand, legs longer than Keith’s panther-like body is tall.

“I’m big. Heavy. Remember?” he asks with a short, dry laugh. He brushes Keith’s messy braid aside, over one shoulder. “I don’t want to strain you...”

“Shiro,” Keith sighs, turning his head to eye him, “I’ve hauled boar bigger than you back to the temple. I think I can manage.”

“Fair enough,” Shiro says, though there’s a world of difference between Keith’s short hops through the jungle and this, endless sky and nothing to tether him down. Keith’s barely had time to truly stretch his wings, and Shiro doesn’t want to be a burden, but…

Keith’s unwavering certainty lights a fire in him, buoying that wishful dream of flying alongside him. It reminds him that Keith doesn’t think of him in such terms— a weight to be shouldered, an encumbrance holding him back— no matter his condition.

Shiro winds his arms around Keith’s middle and buries his lips and nose into the crook of his shoulder, holding tight as the sphinx begins to move under him.

Keith works up to a clunky trot, obviously unused to bearing Shiro’s kind of weight on takeoff. But his wings stretch wide and beat hard, swirling up loose sand in their wake, and suddenly they’re aloft.

It’s only by a scant few feet at first, but Keith quickly catches the breeze rushing in off the sea. His wings flutter as they quickly rise on a swell of air, wheeling so high that Shiro can see the coast stretched out miles ahead of them, all white sand and striking water. He sees the distant curve of the horizon and the sprawl of jungle, the rise of misted mountains, the whole world stretched out under them.

“See? Easy.” It’s the slightest bit smug, and he’s earned it. Keith’s hands fold over Shiro’s where they lay gripped tight around him, an unspoken promise not to let him fall. “You like it, Shiro?”

“I love it,” Shiro replies, his words slipping into the rushing wind. Keith’s hair whips into his face as he leans closer, mouth just shy of his ear. “Love you.”