Zhou Mill, Té Shezekia

Alec Illuminaire had never been poetic.

When he spoke, the words felt like a heart attack or a drunk man who lost his temper in a bar fight. He could never spin words to make them sound like they'd come from an old classic tucked away in some beautiful ancient library with dust in the pages and beauty between the covers.

He wasn't exactly beautiful between the covers, either. 

That was alright with him. 

Rather than poetic or beautiful between the covers, Alec was angry. It was the sort of anger that rubbed against his bones and could have ground his skin to the very membranes that made it up if anger was a tangible noun of its own volition. It was anger that pulsed and seethed and burned the lining of his throat whenever he swallowed. 

For the past two weeks since his failure to destroy the magical dimension, his anger towards everything morphed into an absolute lack of ambition, motivation, or hope. He grieved his loss the way parents grieved dead children: hopelessness gripped him hard. 

Today, he was able to work in the lab. 

He had avoided the lab ever since he'd gotten back to his home at the Zhou Mill on the northeastern edge of Té Shezekia. He'd walk past it and the glasses waiting to be filled with precious stolen liquids seemed to glare at him. He'd stop in his lab's doorway, watch the frosted glass doors leading out to the balcony glitter as snow swirled around in silver clouds outside, feeling utterly disgusted that snow existed. 

He knew he needed to get back to work—the others counted on him to create a plausible way to knock the Shifter World out of existence. Now it was late afternoon and he'd decided that he was angry because he'd been angry for so long, and that anger was simply too exhausting to bear any longer. He walked into his lab, freshly showered and clean-shaven, rubbed his scarred knuckles against each other, and shoved down his sense of failure long enough to succumb to the childlike wonder that spawned from working. 

Not even fifteen minutes later, his revulsion and failure lay forgotten in the dregs of the past, and he was lost in the experiments and botany and alchemy, watching colors explode beneath his creative fingers. 

It was raining outside. The sky's belly growled with thunder. The corners of the room had grown dark. An hour into his work, placed candles along the base of the large windows, at the edge of the doors leading out to the balcony, and atop the old tables he pushed to the side to make room for the twelve-foot-long banquet table he used as his lab. The candles threw a warm flickering yellow glow over everything and sent delightful waves of heat wafting over his skin. 

The door slid open behind him. Alec looked up from his scalpel as Aleena poked her head in. "Are you working on anything that could potentially take my head off?"

"It's safe." Alec gestured for her to come in while slicing open some dried orchids. "Have you ever wondered what would happen if you put dried orchid parts into papersmoke?"

Aleena was now on the far side of the table, her hands raised in mock-caution. "You said this wasn't going to be dangerous."

"I said it wasn't going to take your head off." Alec grinned. "Toss me that bottle—the one with the mermaid painted on the side."

"Tossing things across a table full of smoking beakers and odd liquids and plants isn't dangerous at all," Aleena said sarcastically, but she tossed him the bottle anyway. 

"I'm glad to see you back here. The others thought you'd given up alchemy." 

 "If Isaac makes a joke about escaping explosive butterflies, I'll cut out his tongue." Alec popped the lid off the bottle. White steam hissed out, and ribbon-tendrils tangled to form a web of papersmoke above him. He tossed the orchid petals into the bottle, gave the contents and good hard shake, and set the bottle back on the table. Aleena ducked as if a ball of fire was going to explode out of Alec's end of the table. 

A moment later, silver smoke twisted up and out from the bottle; it was the color of mist in the morning. The smoke smelled of mornings, too...not the stink of saltpeter that sometimes came from bottled papersmoke, but a fragrance of crisp fir trees laden with dew and the sharp sweet fragrance of the permafrost that plagued this part of Té Shezekia. 

"See?" said Alec as the smoke spread its glittering silver canopy above their heads, "not remotely dangerous."

"Just interesting?"

"Interesting indeed."

Aleena closed the distance between them, craning her long neck at the mystery of the orchid-papersmoke webbing, twining, spinning above them, a lacy ceiling in constant motion. Alec was more interested in the mystery of Aleena herself—the way the highlights on her neck flickered, silver and gold across brown, the way the world took form in her eyes, the way her lips spread into a small smile.

He understood papersmoke properties and space-physics. He understood orchids and why they created silver glittery coloring out of papersmoke—yet he feared he would never understand the woman standing before him.

It was raining and she was here and he was still awful at what Emma used to call being smooth so he just stood there and desperately hoped she would say something, anything—

"You're not finished yet, Alec," she said quietly, catching him completely off guard. 

"Beg pardon?" 

"One setback won't win the war." 

"I want to win it now."

"Be patient. Isaac and Emma and I are here to help you." 

"But we don't even have a plan." 

"We'll figure it out together." She slipped her arms through his and laced her hands around the back of his neck. He bowed his head and leaned in. Her breath was hot on his already-warm inch of skin beneath his ear. Their bodies were a perfect fit together: Her chin in the crook of his neck, his lips on the curve of her ear, the pieces falling out of her messy bun tickling his temples, his cheeks, their ribs, their arms, their legs. Embraced together like this, it was hard to tell where he started and she began. 

Embraced together like this, Alec felt like he could give up his thirsty pang for revenge. He felt like he could forget watching his mother and siblings burn to death, the years spent in the Bloom's captivity, the years of assault, the Bloom's secretive plans. He could have a life that was not untangling the puzzle of how to make all Shifters save for him, Aleena, Emma, and Isaac extinct. 

He reached up to stroke a flyaway back from Aleena's face. She was so sure, so confident in him, and it made him completely bow to the weight of his situation. He loved the stillness that transpired between the two of them; he adored this type of embrace where everything was close and there was no space between them. It was body against body. Their energy tangled together. Here, in moments like this, Alec's heart turned tender and vulnerable. She had his heart, he had hers, and love was these moments.

Often, Alec thought that love was either flamboyant shows of his power—like showing the Shifter World he was back from the dead—or the moments when everything was right, but Aleena had an astounding way of reminding him his favorite kind of love...the love that was this moment, this stillness, this peace Aleena poured into him when he desperately needed it and the strength Alec gave her when she was gasping for calm. Love was the in-between moments, love was them, love was this commitment they shared together. 

These moments hit him like a train wreck.

It's going to be okay.

Love was such a hard concept to grasp for him that Alec had to shove down the discomfort of trying to fit the logical pieces together. His fingers reached down from Aleena's hairline to her hand, where he entwined his fingers with her long ones and said after a moment of complete, absolute stillness that only came to him when Aleena was around, "Is there anything I can do for you? Anything at all?" 

"Actually." She pulled away. Her smile was big as she leaned back into the lab table, tilting her head up to look at the silver ceiling of papersmoke waltzing around them. "I love just being here."

Alec took his thoughts away from monsters and storms and little girls with space thieving magic long enough to feel the love-moment swelling between them, while the world around them collapsed by their own hands. 

They kissed, moved the language of hands against shoulders and shuddering breaths, and he forgot all about the Bloom's plans to destroy every other world in the continuum. 

They loved on each other like they had not been apart for eight months, like Alec had not been stuck in a slump for the two weeks he had come back, and Emma Ci came bustling in like always with a sassy joke, a half-hearted apology, and news that the Acids were pouring out of their underground cities because the beasts were gone. 

Alec and Aleena tore away from each other. Aleena sighed, grinning, exasperated. 

"Moment-ruiner," said Alec. 

"I have a plan." Emma held her breakfast in her hand: a coffee mug full of cheap sour beer. "It involves my daughter."