Chapter Text
The room was quiet in that rare, suspended way that only existed late in the afternoon — when the palace corridors were busy elsewhere and even the light seemed to move more softly.
Bastion stood alone before the tall mirror.
He had not lit many lamps. Only one. Enough to see. Not enough to turn the moment into theatre.
His shirt lay folded with military neatness across the back of a chair. The rest of him was bare to the waist, skin still faintly flushed from the brisk wash he had taken — an old soldier’s ritual before battle, before travel, before anything that might change the course of a life.
Tonight, he supposed, it would change the course of an eternity.
He studied himself with the calm scrutiny of a man who had long ago learned to take inventory of his own body like equipment.
Broad shoulders, still strong.
Scars faded to pale silver maps across his ribs and collarbone.
Grey threading his dark hair at the temples like frost creeping over fertile ground.
His gaze lingered there.
He lifted a hand, smoothing the strands back, feeling the unfamiliar tremor of vanity tighten somewhere behind his sternum. When the turning came, this — this exact version of him — would be what remained. No further softening with age. No deepening lines earned through laughter or grief.
Frozen.
A strange comfort.
A strange loss.
He exhaled slowly and reached for the small scissors laid out beside the basin.
The moustache, he decided, would require attention.
He leaned closer to the mirror, tilting his chin, trimming with the steady precision of someone accustomed to working with blades near vital places. Tiny dark clippings fell like soft punctuation onto the marble.
There was something almost ceremonial about it.
Preparing himself.
Presenting the best possible version of the man Emil had chosen.
His mouth curved faintly at that thought.
A half-elf stablemaster turned reluctant aristocrat.
A man nearly twice the age of his beloved.
A man who, against all reason, had decided he would rather step into illness and darkness than spend decades watching the boy he loved walk ahead of him into endless time.
Madness, perhaps.
Devotion, certainly.
He paused, lowering the scissors, studying the final line of his moustache with critical focus. Satisfied, he set the tool aside and braced both hands against the edge of the basin, shoulders bowing slightly as he regarded his own reflection.
“You will do,” he murmured to the man in the glass.
There was fear there.
Yes.
But also a fierce, stubborn peace.
Outside the chamber, distant footsteps moved through the palace. Somewhere far off, a door closed. Life continuing, indifferent.
Bastion straightened, rolling his shoulders once as though settling armour into place.
Tonight he would die a little.
Tonight he would be remade.
And if this was the face he carried into forever, he thought quietly, then he would meet eternity well groomed and unashamed.
Bastion lingered before the mirror long after the scissors had been set aside.
The quiet stretched.
The decision did not.
His gaze drifted again to the silver threaded through his dark hair. It caught the lamplight differently than the rest — brighter, colder. Proof of time. Of seasons endured. Of nights survived that younger men had not.
He reached for the small tin resting beside his grooming kit.
Dye.
He turned it over once in his hands, thoughtful. Practical. There was no vanity in the instinct, he told himself — only strategy. If he was to be preserved as he stood now, then perhaps he ought to… refine the presentation. Remove a few obvious concessions to age.
He had just begun to unscrew the lid when the door opened.
Emil did not knock.
Emil never knocked when his instincts were involved.
He stopped in the doorway like a creature struck by lightning.
For a long moment he simply stared — at Bastion bare to the waist, at the tin in his hand, at the unmistakable intent forming in the quiet air between them.
Then his expression shifted into pure, scandalised outrage.
“Absolutely not,” Emil said.
Bastion blinked.
It was not the response he had rehearsed for.
“I am merely considering—”
“No,” Emil repeated, already striding toward him with purpose. “You are not considering. You are committing a crime.”
He reached Bastion in three quick steps and plucked the tin straight out of his hand with the ease of someone disarming a dangerous weapon.
Bastion stared down at him, faintly bewildered.
“It is hair dye,” he said.
“Yes,” Emil replied, as if that proved everything.
He set the tin aside with finality, then lifted both hands to Bastion’s temples, thumbs brushing reverently over the grey at his hairline.
His touch was gentle.
Almost awed.
“I love this,” Emil murmured. “All of it. Every line. Every thread. It means you’ve lived.”
Bastion felt something unexpectedly warm loosen in his chest.
“You will look like a boy,” Emil went on, frowning slightly as if the thought were deeply distasteful. “And I do not want a boy. I want you.”
He tugged lightly at one silver strand, smiling with quiet fondness.
“You look like a story,” he added.
That, of all things, seemed to undo Bastion.
Confusion flickered across his face — followed swiftly by reluctant amusement. He covered one of Emil’s hands with his own, large and steady.
“You are affronted,” he observed.
“I am personally insulted,” Emil confirmed. “Imagine thinking you need to become prettier to stand beside me.”
Bastion huffed a soft laugh, shaking his head.
“I am attempting,” he said, “to enter immortality with some measure of dignity.”
Emil’s mouth curved, bright and unguarded.
“You already have it,” he said. “The grey makes you dangerous.”
That did it.
Bastion laughed properly then — low and surprised — and pulled him closer without quite deciding to.
Confused, endeared, and quietly overwhelmed by the fact that someone could look at the marks of his years and see not decline… but something worth loving forever.
Bastion turned his head slightly, studying his reflection again while Emil remained planted far too close for rational thought. The silver at his temples seemed brighter now — as if being the subject of such fervent attention had granted it its own personality.
“It is… very visible,” Bastion said at last, cautiously.
“Which is the point,” Emil replied immediately.
There was no hesitation in him. No embarrassment. Only that relentless, luminous conviction Bastion had come to both admire and fear.
Emil’s hands slid up again, combing through Bastion’s hair with unselfconscious reverence. He leaned in as though inspecting a rare and priceless artifact.
“You have no idea,” Emil murmured, voice softening into something almost reverent, “how attractive this is.”
Bastion’s mouth twitched.
“I suspect I am about to receive a lecture.”
“You are,” Emil confirmed cheerfully. “A very important one.”
He began pacing a slow circle around Bastion, gesturing as he spoke — animated, intense, entirely invested in the subject of Bastion’s ageing like it was a matter of national security.
“The grey makes you look experienced,” Emil said. “Dangerous. Like you’ve survived things. Like you could ruin someone’s life with good manners and a sword.”
Bastion raised an eyebrow.
“That is an extremely specific fantasy.”
Emil ignored him, warming to his theme.
“It makes you look distinguished. And steady. And unfairly handsome. And—” he stopped directly in front of him again, eyes bright with fierce sincerity “—it makes me feel safe.”
That landed.
Bastion’s expression softened despite himself.
“You are very passionate about my temples,” he observed.
“I am passionate about you,” Emil corrected.
Then, as if unable to help himself, he leaned forward and pressed a lingering kiss just at the edge of the silver, lips brushing the place where time had first begun to claim him.
Bastion exhaled a surprised laugh, the sound low and warm.
“You are attempting,” he said, “to seduce me into ageing gracefully.”
“It’s working,” Emil replied smugly.
Bastion shook his head, a reluctant smile finally breaking free.
“I cannot believe,” he admitted, “that this is the hill you are prepared to die on.”
“Oh, I will haunt you about it forever,” Emil promised.
That earned a real laugh — the kind Bastion rarely allowed himself — and he reached out to pull Emil against him, still shaking his head in fond disbelief.
“Very well,” he conceded. “I surrender. The grey remains.”
He paused, studying the younger man’s triumphant expression.
“You are,” Bastion added thoughtfully, “alarmingly persuasive when you are defending my attractiveness.”
Emil beamed like someone who had just won a war.
*****
Emyrea’s presence seemed to soften the room rather than darken it.
She did not move like a predator.
She moved like someone who had performed this quiet, terrible mercy many times before.
“Come,” she said gently.
Not command.
Invitation.
Bastion felt Emil’s fingers brush his wrist — light at first, as if asking permission even now — and he allowed himself to be guided toward the bed. The mattress dipped under his weight as he sat, then reclined slowly, coat settling around him in dark, careful lines.
It was strange, he thought distantly, how ordinary it felt.
Like preparing for sleep after a long journey.
Emyrea remained standing near the foot of the bed, giving him space. Her eyes flicked between them — measuring the fragile current of devotion and fear that seemed to hum visibly in the air.
“There is one more choice,” she said quietly.
Bastion lifted his gaze.
“You may take the change from me,” she continued. “It is… cleaner. Practiced. Or—”
Her attention shifted to Emil.
“—you may take it from the one who will share your eternity.”
Silence followed.
Bastion became acutely aware of Emil’s hand sliding fully into his, warm despite the strange coolness that lived beneath his skin now. Their fingers laced together instinctively, a small human anchor against the vastness of what was about to happen.
Emil squeezed once.
“You don’t have to decide quickly,” he murmured. “I’ll stay right here. Either way.”
His voice was steady, though Bastion could feel the tremor in it through their joined hands. The younger man sat carefully on the edge of the mattress, close enough that Bastion could feel the faint brush of his knee against his side — grounding, real.
“I won’t let you be alone in it,” Emil added softly.
That, more than anything, settled Bastion’s breathing.
He stared up at the ceiling for a moment — at the familiar lines of stone and shadow that he would soon perceive with entirely different senses. He thought of years behind him. Of horses and frost and long roads. Of the boy beside him who had somehow become the center of his future.
Then he turned his head, meeting Emil’s mismatched eyes.
“If it is you,” Bastion said quietly, “then it will feel… less like dying.”
Emil’s expression cracked open with something fierce and aching and luminous all at once.
He tightened his grip on Bastion’s hand, bowing his head briefly as though absorbing the gravity of the trust being offered.
Emyrea watched them both with solemn patience — not intruding, not rushing — a silent witness to the fragile moment where love and fear and choice braided themselves into something irreversible.
Emyrea did not interrupt the quiet gravity that had settled over them.
She only inclined her head slightly, hands folding loosely before her as though she were a priestess rather than an executioner of old lives.
“You may begin when you are ready,” she said.
Then she stepped back.
Gave them the space to make the moment their own.
Bastion felt the words settle into him like the tolling of a distant bell. This was it. The last threshold. The last breath he would ever truly need.
He turned his head toward Emil again.
For all his usual boldness, Emil suddenly looked very young — not in years, but in the rawness of what he felt. Tears clung stubbornly to his lashes, unshed but undeniable, his mouth pressed into a thin line as if he were holding himself together by force of will alone.
Bastion lifted their joined hands and brought Emil’s knuckles briefly to his lips.
“Come here,” he murmured.
It was not a command.
It was a promise.
He guided him gently closer, shifting on the bed until Emil could lean over him without strain. Bastion’s free hand came up instinctively to cradle the back of his neck — steady, reassuring, anchoring them both.
The younger man hesitated only a second.
Then he bent, pressing a soft kiss to the bare skin at Bastion’s throat.
Another.
And another.
Each one reverent. Almost apologetic.
His breath trembled faintly as he lingered there, lips resting against the pulse that would soon cease to matter.
“Are you sure?” Emil whispered.
The question was fragile as glass.
Bastion’s fingers tightened in his hair.
“Yes,” he said simply. “I have never been more certain of anything… except wanting you.”
Something broke quietly in Emil’s expression at that.
A tear finally escaped, tracking warm down his cheek as he drew in a careful breath that did nothing to steady him. He pressed his forehead briefly to Bastion’s collarbone, gathering himself.
Then he shifted.
His mouth found Bastion’s throat again — this time not in hesitation, but in acceptance. The bite came sudden and decisive despite the tremor running through him, instinct and love and grief tangled into one unbearable act.
Bastion felt the sharp bloom of pain like lightning under his skin.
And beneath it — deeper, stranger — relief.
His hand tightened at Emil’s nape as he exhaled slowly, surrendering himself not to darkness, but to the fierce, tear-stained devotion of the man remaking his future.
****
Emil had thought he understood hunger.
He had known starvation as a child — the hollow ache, the dizzy brightness at the edges of vision, the way the body folded in on itself like something ashamed of its own need.
This was nothing like that.
This was fire.
The moment his teeth broke Bastion’s skin, something ancient and merciless surged through him. Heat flooded his limbs, his chest, his throat — an instinct so overwhelming it stole language from him entirely. He clutched at Bastion’s coat with shaking hands as he fed, tears slipping freely down his temples to dampen the dark fabric beneath his cheek.
He hated how right it felt.
He hated the relief that followed each swallow — the easing of the constant pressure behind his eyes, the quieting of the terrible trembling that had lived in his bones since the turning.
He hated that he wanted more.
A soft sound escaped him — not quite a sob, not quite a breath — as he tried to slow himself, tried to remember gentleness even while his body demanded survival.
Bastion’s hand slid into his hair.
Steady.
Warm.
Unwavering.
“It’s alright,” Bastion murmured, voice already roughening but still impossibly calm. “I’m here.”
The reassurance made something inside Emil fracture further.
He pressed closer despite himself, one arm braced across Bastion’s chest as though he might fall without that anchor. His tears blurred everything — the lamplight, the edges of the room, the shape of the man he loved giving himself over so completely.
“I’m hurting you,” Emil whispered against his skin.
“You’re saving me,” Bastion corrected gently.
His fingers stroked slow paths along Emil’s neck and shoulder, guiding without force, as if he were the one shepherding Emil through the transformation rather than the other way around.
“Breathe,” Bastion coaxed softly. “Take what you need. Don’t fight it.”
Emil tried.
Gods, he tried.
He loosened his bite fractionally, forcing himself to swallow carefully, to keep from losing control to the wild, ecstatic pull of it. Every instinct screamed at him to take more, faster, deeper — to devour until the hunger finally quieted forever.
Instead he clung to Bastion’s voice like a lifeline.
Each quiet word.
Each steady touch.
He had never felt more monstrous.
He had never felt more held.
The taste of Bastion — copper and warmth and something uniquely his — flooded his senses until it was all he could think, all he could be. His shoulders shook as the storm inside him began, slowly, agonisingly, to settle.
Relief spread through his body like dawn.
Horrible. Necessary. Beautiful in its cruelty.
When he finally drew back enough to breathe properly, his mouth was stained, his lashes wet, his whole being thrumming with a terrible new strength. He stared down at Bastion in stunned anguish.
“I’m sorry,” he choked.
Bastion smiled at him.
Even through the pain.
Even as the change began its slow claim.
“There is nowhere else I would rather be,” he said quietly.
And Emil realised, with a breaking heart and a fierce, impossible love, that he would spend the rest of eternity trying to be worthy of that faith.
Emil barely recognised the sound of his own breathing.
It came in shallow, uneven pulls — like he had run for miles through snow and shadow and grief. Warmth still lingered on his tongue, metallic and sacred and terrible, and he could feel the slow drip of Bastion’s blood sliding along his chin, cooling against his skin.
He did not wipe it away.
He could not yet bear to move.
Bastion lay beneath him, pale but calm, eyes bright with the strange, dawning intensity of the change beginning to take hold. His hand still rested in Emil’s hair, fingers tightening once as if reminding them both that this was not horror.
This was chosen.
This was love, sharpened into ritual.
Emyrea moved then — quiet as snowfall — and placed a small blade into Bastion’s hand.
Not ornate.
Not ceremonial.
Practical.
Final.
“To complete it,” she said softly.
Emil’s stomach twisted.
He knew what came next.
He had lived it only nights before — the dizzying reversal, the exchange that bound illness and eternity together like twin chains.
Still, watching Bastion’s fingers close around the knife made something primal in him recoil.
“No,” he breathed instinctively, though he did not move away.
Bastion only smiled at him.
It was steadier now.
More distant in some strange, luminous way.
“Come here,” Bastion murmured.
Emil obeyed without thinking, shifting to kneel beside him. His hands trembled as he pushed his sleeve back — baring skin marked by old grief. The faint white line at his wrist caught the lamplight, a quiet relic of a boy who had once believed there was no future left to fight for.
He had almost forgotten it existed.
Bastion had not.
Emil watched, stunned, as Bastion’s gaze settled there — not with judgement, not with pity, but with a fierce and deliberate tenderness.
“Here,” Bastion said.
The blade kissed skin in a clean, decisive line.
Pain flared — sharp, bright — and Emil gasped softly, more from the symbolism than the wound itself. Blood welled at once, vivid against blue flesh, sliding in a dark ribbon down toward his palm.
For a heartbeat Bastion simply looked at it.
At the place where despair had once tried to claim the man he loved.
Then he leaned forward.
His mouth closed over the cut with quiet certainty.
Emil felt the world tilt.
The sensation was different from feeding — more intimate, more disarming. A slow pull, deliberate and reverent, as if Bastion were not merely taking what he needed but acknowledging every fractured piece of Emil’s past and choosing to carry it with him into whatever came next.
Emil’s free hand found Bastion’s shoulder, fingers digging in without meaning to. Tears blurred his vision again as the strange, electric bond between them deepened — a current passing from vein to vein, heart to heart, reshaping both their fates in the same breath.
Bastion drank steadily.
Not greedily.
Not cruelly.
Like a vow being sealed in blood.
And Emil realised, in that trembling, suspended moment, that they were no longer just lovers standing at the edge of eternity.
They were becoming something irrevocably entwined — two lives rewritten into one long, relentless forever.
The moment Bastion’s mouth left his skin felt like the snapping of some invisible tether.
Emil swayed.
For a second he did not understand why the room had gone so quiet — why the air itself seemed to be holding its breath. Then he saw Bastion’s hand still curled around the knife, knuckles pale with the effort of holding on to something as simple and human as control.
Blood glimmered darkly along the blade’s edge.
“Bastion…” Emil whispered.
He reached for him instinctively, pulling him upright before the older man could even begin to fall. Bastion’s body felt different already — heavier and yet strangely fragile, like a structure in the moment before it either collapses or transforms into something unbreakable.
Emil wrapped his arms around him, pressing Bastion’s head against his chest as though he could shield him from what was coming.
“You’re alright,” he murmured, voice shaking. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”
The words were a promise.
A prayer.
A desperate attempt to give back even a fraction of what had just been given to him.
Bastion’s breath hitched once.
Then again.
His fingers finally loosened from the knife. It clattered softly onto the stone floor, forgotten, irrelevant. One hand lifted instead, gripping the back of Emil’s shirt with sudden, startling strength as the first true wave of the change broke over him.
Emil felt it happen.
Not just saw it — felt it.
A violent tremor passed through Bastion’s frame, muscles tightening, then locking as though his body were being rewritten from the inside out. Heat radiated from him in uneven pulses. His heart hammered once, twice, then seemed to fall into a strange, slowing rhythm that did not belong to any living creature Emil had ever known.
“Stay with me,” Emil whispered, pressing his cheek to Bastion’s hair.
Bastion made a low sound — not pain exactly, not fear. Something deeper. Something vast.
When he lifted his head at last, Emil drew in a sharp breath.
The familiar blue of Bastion’s eyes was still there.
But the whites around them were changing.
Darkness seeped slowly into the sclera, spreading like ink through water — a deepening grey-blue that mirrored Emil’s own altered gaze. It gave his expression an otherworldly gravity, as if eternity had already begun to look out from behind his face.
Bastion blinked, disoriented for a moment.
Then he focused on Emil.
Recognition flared.
Relief followed.
“You’re… still here,” he said hoarsely.
Emil laughed through the tears spilling down his cheeks.
“Where else would I be?”
He tightened his hold, anchoring them together while Bastion’s body continued its quiet, relentless transformation — the tremors gradually easing, the frantic edge of his breathing settling into something colder, steadier.
Something new.
Emil did not let go.
He would not.
As the turning took root and spread through the man he loved, Emil held him like a promise that would not break, whispering soft reassurances into his hair while the night remade them both into creatures of the same long, shadowed future.
Emil did not realise he was rocking him until several breaths had already passed.
It was an old instinct — something buried deep from childhood nights when comfort had been the only medicine he had known. He held Bastion against him with fierce gentleness, one hand cradling the back of his head, the other braced wide across his shoulders as if he could physically keep the world from touching him.
“You’re here,” Emil kept whispering.
“You’re still here.”
The words were soft, almost rhythmic, threaded with the tremble he could not quite contain. Tears slipped freely down his face now, catching in the curve of his mouth, dampening Bastion’s hair where he pressed his cheek there like a man clinging to the last warm place left in existence.
“I’m so sorry,” he murmured brokenly. “I’m so sorry for what this is… for what I am… and you still came with me anyway.”
Bastion’s body shuddered once more — not with the violent spasms of the change, but with something quieter and more devastating.
Emotion.
He clutched at Emil’s shirt, fingers curling hard enough to crease fabric, as if anchoring himself to the one constant left while everything else inside him rearranged itself into unfamiliar patterns. When he lifted his face, tears had begun to track silently from the corners of his newly darkened eyes.
It startled Emil more than anything else had.
Bastion did not cry easily.
He had always been carved from steadiness and endurance and careful restraint.
Now his expression was open in a way Emil had never seen — stripped bare by sincerity rather than pain.
“You think,” Bastion said hoarsely, “that you dragged me into this.”
Emil swallowed hard, unable to answer.
Bastion reached up, cupping his jaw with a hand that trembled faintly but did not falter.
“I followed you,” he said. “Because I love you.”
The simplicity of it broke something wide open inside Emil’s chest.
A sound tore out of him — half sob, half laugh — and he pressed their foreheads together, breath hitching as he tried to speak around the flood of feeling rising like a storm tide.
“I love you too,” he said desperately. “More than anything I have ever been afraid of. More than the gods. More than the dark. I would have chosen you even if you had walked into fire instead of this.”
His voice cracked.
He did not care.
“I don’t want forever if it isn’t with you.”
Bastion closed his eyes at that, another tear slipping free as his arms finally found their way fully around Emil’s waist. He held him with quiet, reverent strength — not the grasp of a man clinging to survival, but the embrace of someone who had just realised he had been given something impossibly rare.
A love that did not turn away from ruin.
A devotion willing to walk willingly into shadow.
They stayed like that while the last tremors of the turning settled into Bastion’s bones — wrapped around one another in the dim lamplight, crying not from fear anymore, but from the overwhelming sincerity of having chosen the same impossible future together.
*****
When Bastion woke, the world had changed its weight.
At first he did not understand why.
The room lay in deep blue shadow, lamps long since burned low, moonlight leaking thin and silver through the tall windows. For a suspended moment he simply existed there — suspended between memory and sensation — listening to the strange, quiet absence inside his own body.
No frantic heartbeat.
No tight pull of breath in his lungs.
No dull ache of mortal exhaustion.
Only stillness.
Then he became aware of warmth at his back.
Arms around him.
Holding him.
He did not move immediately. Instinct — older now, sharper, newly born — urged him to catalogue, to observe, to feel the altered shape of himself in the dark.
Emil was curled behind him on the bed, wrapped along his spine as though shielding him from some unseen storm. One leg tangled loosely with his. One hand splayed across his ribs in a possessive, unconscious claim.
His face was buried in Bastion’s shoulder.
And he was singing.
Softly.
Half asleep.
In a language that slid like river water over stone.
Elven.
A lullaby Bastion did not know but somehow recognised in the bones — something ancient and aching, threaded with longing and gentleness and the promise that the night would not last forever. Emil rocked very slightly as he murmured the words, the motion instinctive, protective, as if he were still soothing a wounded creature back into life.
As if Bastion were fragile.
The realisation struck him with quiet force.
He shifted a fraction then, testing the new strength coiled through his limbs. The movement was smoother than he expected. Lighter. More precise. His senses flared awake in a rush — the texture of linen against skin, the faint scent of Emil’s soap and smoke and iron-sweet blood, the distant murmur of guards changing watch far down the palace corridors.
Everything felt sharpened.
And yet the only thing that mattered was the man clinging to him like he might vanish if released.
Bastion’s throat tightened.
He reached back carefully, covering Emil’s hand with his own. The lullaby faltered for a heartbeat, then resumed, softer still.
“It’s alright,” Emil mumbled, voice thick with sleep. “I’ve got you… you’re safe.”
Bastion closed his eyes.
He was no longer alone in time.
He turned his head slightly, pressing a slow kiss to the inside of Emil’s wrist where it rested against his chest. The skin there still bore the faintest memory of the wound he had opened hours before.
A vow etched in flesh.
“I know,” Bastion whispered into the dark.
Behind him, Emil’s arms tightened unconsciously, the lullaby drifting on — fragile and tender as dawn waiting somewhere beyond the horizon of their new, endless night.
Bastion did not move at first.
He lay there a while longer, letting the altered rhythm of existence settle fully into him — not sleep, not waking, but something suspended between both. The palace breathed around him in distant murmurs, every footstep, every rustle of fabric carried to him with startling clarity.
Eventually, carefully, he eased himself upright.
Emil made a soft protesting sound behind him but did not wake, his arms loosening only enough to allow Bastion to slip free. The lullaby faded into a faint murmur against the pillows, unfinished but somehow complete all the same.
Bastion sat on the edge of the bed and drew in a slow, thoughtful breath that did not truly fill his lungs anymore.
So.
This was eternity.
He rolled his shoulders experimentally. Strength answered at once — smooth, immediate, almost alarming in its efficiency. No stiffness. No lingering ache. His body felt… newly forged. Balanced. Quietly powerful.
His hand lifted to his throat.
Where Emil had bitten him.
He expected tenderness. Perhaps a rawness that would take days to settle. Instead his fingertips met only a faint ridge — a nearly healed mark, pale and decisive as a signature on parchment.
Bastion huffed a quiet, incredulous laugh.
“Well,” he murmured to the dark. “That was efficient.”
He turned then, intending to check on the man who had guided him through the night.
And stopped.
Emil had collapsed sideways across the mattress at some point, one arm still stretched toward the place Bastion had been lying. His shirt was rumpled open, skin streaked with the evidence of everything they had done — Bastion’s blood dark and drying along his jaw, his throat, the delicate line of his collarbone. The cut at his wrist had clotted messily, crimson smeared across his fingers like careless war paint.
He looked… feral.
And utterly exhausted.
A corner of Bastion’s mouth lifted.
Of course Emil had not thought to clean himself. Of course he had spent the night clinging to Bastion instead of tending to his own state. The devotion was equal parts maddening and deeply, profoundly moving.
“You absolute disaster,” Bastion murmured fondly.
He reached out, brushing a gentle thumb along Emil’s cheek. The younger man stirred faintly but did not wake, only leaning instinctively into the touch like a creature that trusted without question.
Bastion studied him for another long moment — the beautiful wreckage of love and illness and survival sprawled across their shared bed — and felt a quiet amusement settle alongside the awe still echoing through his veins.
Immortality, it seemed, began with bloodstains and lullabies.
He could live with that.
Bastion let him sleep for as long as he could bear it.
Which, it turned out, was not very long at all.
He sat beside him a moment first, simply watching — the slow rise and fall that no longer meant breath but still looked like peace, the faint smudge of dried blood along Emil’s temple, the way his lashes cast delicate shadows against blue skin in the low light.
Then he reached out.
“Emil,” he said quietly.
No response.
He tried again, brushing his knuckles lightly down the side of Emil’s neck — not enough to startle, just enough to tug at whatever instinct still tethered him to wakefulness.
“Love.”
That did it.
Emil jolted upright like someone dragged violently out of deep water.
His eyes snapped open — mismatched, dark-rimmed, wild with the reflexive panic of someone who had learned too young that waking often meant danger. His hands came up at once, searching, grasping—
They found Bastion.
Relief slammed into his features so fast it was almost painful to witness.
“You’re awake,” Emil blurted, voice rough with sleep and fear and leftover tears. He surged closer without hesitation, grabbing Bastion by the shoulders, turning his face this way and that as though expecting to find cracks in him.
“Are you hurting? Is it worse now? Can you breathe—”
He stopped himself mid-sentence, horror flickering briefly at his own words.
Bastion caught his wrists gently.
“I do not believe breathing is the central concern anymore,” he said dryly.
Emil stared at him.
Then his hands slid free again — not to escape, but to continue the inspection with renewed urgency. He pressed his palm to Bastion’s chest, then his throat, then his jaw, as if mapping the shape of the change by touch alone.
“You look…” Emil swallowed. “You look different.”
“Better or worse?” Bastion asked.
Emil’s mouth trembled into a fragile smile.
“Terrifyingly handsome,” he admitted. “Which is very inconvenient for my nerves.”
Bastion laughed softly — the sound deeper now, edged with something unfamiliar and newly resonant. He reached up, smoothing Emil’s hair back from his face, only then fully noticing the streaked blood and the disarray.
“You,” he said, “look like you fought a duel with a butcher.”
Emil blinked down at himself as though only just remembering the state he was in.
“Oh,” he said faintly.
Then he leaned forward abruptly, wrapping Bastion in a tight, almost desperate embrace.
“I thought you might…” He stopped, unable to finish.
Bastion held him easily now, strength answering without effort. He rested his chin lightly against Emil’s crown, letting the younger man cling as long as he needed.
“I am still here,” he murmured.
Emil nodded against him, already fussing again — fingers adjusting Bastion’s collar, brushing imaginary dust from his sleeve, searching for any flaw in this newly remade man he had been so terrified of losing.
to check you were still real.
Bastion had barely finished reassuring him before Emil decided, with sudden and absolute authority, that he was now in charge of everything.
Which, Bastion suspected, was how most of eternity would proceed.
“You need to lie down,” Emil muttered, already reaching for the fastenings of his coat with brisk, anxious efficiency. “You’ve just died. You don’t get to start pacing the halls like nothing happened.”
“I feel perfectly capable of pacing,” Bastion replied mildly.
Emil shot him a look that could have stopped cavalry.
“That is not the point.”
His hands were gentle despite the scolding — working Bastion out of his formal clothes piece by piece, movements automatic, intimate in the quiet domestic way of someone who had done this before in smaller crises. He peeled away the coat, folded it without thinking, tugged at shirt buttons with impatient precision.
Bastion allowed it.
There was something oddly soothing about being managed.
“You realise,” Bastion observed, “that you are treating me like an invalid.”
“You are an invalid,” Emil said immediately. “You are a freshly minted immortal invalid and I refuse to let you ruin the carpets before breakfast.”
He pushed the shirt from Bastion’s shoulders, frowning faintly as he checked for lingering signs of strain, fingers skimming along ribs and throat with clinical worry. Satisfied — or at least resigned — he reached for the soft dark pyjamas folded nearby.
“Arms,” he ordered.
Bastion lifted them obediently, amusement ghosting across his expression.
“You are enjoying this,” he accused.
“I am surviving this,” Emil corrected, tugging fabric into place with unnecessary force.
He settled Bastion back onto the mattress once he was dressed, arranging pillows with military seriousness before guiding him down with both hands on his shoulders. The care in the gesture was almost fierce.
“There,” Emil murmured. “Rest.”
Then, as if remembering the broader implications of what they had done, he scrubbed a hand down his face and groaned softly.
“Oh gods… Anton is going to kill me.”
Bastion blinked up at him.
“I believe,” he said thoughtfully, “Anton will be somewhat preoccupied with the metaphysics of his uncle joining the ranks of the undead.”
“No,” Emil insisted grimly. “He will skip straight to murder. Possibly dramatic murder. Possibly with speeches.”
He began fussing with the blankets next, tucking them around Bastion with careful thoroughness, still muttering half to himself.
“I turned his favourite uncle into a vampyr. I can already hear the lecture. It will be long. And emotional. And probably involve knives.”
Bastion could not help it — he laughed, low and newly resonant, reaching up to catch Emil’s wrist before he could continue rearranging the entire bed in a panic.
“If it does,” he said gently, “I am certain you will survive.”
Emil looked down at him, worry and exasperation and exhausted devotion all tangled together in his expression.
“I might not,” he said. “He loves you more than he loves most laws.”
Bastion squeezed his hand.
“Then we will face him together.”
That seemed, finally, to steady something in Emil. He sat down at the edge of the bed, shoulders loosening fractionally as he let himself simply stay there — close enough to watch, close enough to reassure himself that Bastion was still real in this strange new version of the world.
Emil was still sitting there, shoulders hunched with the lingering tension of someone who had not yet permitted himself to believe the danger had passed. His hands twisted restlessly in his lap — stained dark where dried blood had worked itself into the creases of his skin.
Bastion noticed before Emil did.
He always had.
With quiet deliberation, Bastion reached toward the small table beside the bed and retrieved one of his handkerchiefs — the good linen, fine-woven and faintly scented with the clean sharpness of cedar. He unfolded it once, neatly, as though the act itself required ceremony.
“Come here,” he said.
Emil blinked.
“I’m fine.”
“You are,” Bastion agreed. “And you look like you wrestled a butcher.”
A reluctant, embarrassed breath of laughter left Emil as he leaned closer, allowing himself to be guided without protest. Bastion took his chin gently between thumb and forefinger, tilting his face toward the lamplight.
There it was.
A smear of dark red along the curve of his jaw. Another streak caught beneath his lower lip. The evidence of survival, of love, of something violent and necessary that had rewritten both their futures in the space of a single night.
Bastion began to clean him.
Slowly.
Carefully.
The linen moved in soft strokes across blue skin, lifting away the dried traces with patient precision. He did not rush. He did not make a spectacle of tenderness. It was simply… what one did for someone beloved.
Emil went very still under his touch.
“You don’t have to—” he started.
“I do,” Bastion said quietly.
His gaze flicked up once, meeting Emil’s mismatched eyes with steady reassurance before returning to the task. He wiped the last of the blood from the corner of Emil’s mouth, then shifted his attention to the cut at his wrist, cleaning around it with the same gentle thoroughness.
The handkerchief darkened in small, stubborn blooms of red.
Emil watched him as though he were witnessing something almost sacred.
“You always use the good ones on me,” he murmured.
Bastion’s mouth curved faintly.
“You are worth ruining linen for.”
He finished by brushing his knuckles lightly along Emil’s cheek, checking for any missed trace, any lingering mark that might distress him later. Satisfied at last, he folded the cloth again — despite the stains — and set it aside with quiet finality.
There was a softness in his expression now.
Not pity.
Not indulgence.
Only the simple devotion of a man who had chosen to carry this life — this strange, blood-threaded forever — with him, and intended to make it as gentle as he could where gentleness was still possible.
Bastion sat in the quiet aftermath of being cleaned and settled, feeling the new stillness of himself like an unfamiliar garment he had not yet decided how to wear.
He studied Emil for a long moment — the way the younger man hovered close without seeming to realise he was doing it, the subtle tension that had not yet left his shoulders. Then something practical occurred to him.
“Did she bind me?” Bastion asked at last.
Emil blinked.
“Bind you…?”
“To the crypt,” Bastion clarified gently. “My soul. As she did yours.”
Understanding flickered across Emil’s face. He bit down lightly on one of his lip piercings — an old nervous habit — and nodded.
“She did,” he said quietly. “While you were… settling. I told her it had already been moved to our rooms.”
Bastion absorbed that in silence, gaze drifting briefly toward the far side of the chamber where the marble lid lay closed and solemn like a promise waiting to be kept.
A strange calm spread through him.
Then he made his decision.
“I would like,” he said slowly, “to spend the rest of the night there.”
Emil’s head lifted at once.
“In the crypt?”
“Our first night,” Bastion replied, voice thoughtful rather than grim, “should be… honest. I would rather meet this new life where it truly begins.”
He did not sound afraid.
If anything, there was a quiet curiosity in him now — the same steady courage that had always carried him through war and winter and the long loneliness of mortal years.
Emil searched his face for a moment, as if trying to decide whether this was bravery or madness.
Then he nodded again.
“Alright,” he murmured. “I’ll come with you.”
Of course he would.
Bastion reached for his hand — not because he needed support, but because he suddenly understood that immortality, like everything else worth surviving, would be easier if it was faced together.
The palace had gone quiet in that deep, listening way that only came in the small hours.
Their footsteps were soft against the stone.
Bastion did not rush. He moved with the deliberate steadiness of a man walking toward something inevitable rather than something dreadful. The corridors felt different now — sharper, clearer, every draft of cool air and distant shift of shadow registering in ways his mortal senses had never quite grasped.
Behind him, Emil kept pace.
Close enough that Bastion could feel the subtle pull of his presence like gravity at his back.
They entered the chamber without ceremony. The crypt stood where it always had — pale marble, solemn and beautiful in a way that might once have seemed macabre. Now it simply felt… true. A place of rest. Of binding. Of strange, necessary belonging.
Bastion paused beside it, resting one hand briefly on the smooth stone lid as if greeting an old adversary turned ally.
“Well,” he murmured. “This is home now.”
Emil’s fingers tightened around his sleeve.
“I’ll make it comfortable,” he said softly, almost apologetically. “I added more blankets earlier. And your coat. I thought you might—”
“It is perfect,” Bastion said.
He slid the lid aside with quiet strength, the marble moving more easily beneath his hands than it ever would have before. The interior waited — lined in dark fabric, softened by the careful domestic touches Emil had insisted upon.
He climbed in first.
It was an oddly intimate act, lowering himself into what had once been a symbol of ending and finding instead only stillness. He settled back against the pillows, testing the strange sense of rightness that followed.
Then he looked up at Emil.
“Come here,” Bastion said gently.
Emil hesitated only a heartbeat before stepping closer, allowing himself to be guided down into the narrow space beside him. Bastion adjusted the blankets automatically, drawing them up around Emil’s shoulders, one arm curving instinctively around his waist.
The closeness was different here.
Enclosed.
Quiet.
Almost womb-like in its isolation from the rest of the world.
Emil let out a slow breath as he settled, tension finally beginning to ebb from his body.
“You’re not frightened?” he whispered.
Bastion considered that honestly.
“No,” he said. “I am… curious.”
His hand found Emil’s hair, smoothing it back from his face with a tenderness that had not diminished in death.
“Besides,” he added, voice low with quiet warmth, “if this is where my soul rests now, I would rather it rest beside yours.”
He reached up then, grasping the edge of the marble lid.
The weight of it was nothing to him now. He drew it down slowly, carefully — not sealing them into darkness as a prison, but closing them into something shared.
The last sliver of lamplight narrowed…
dimmed…
vanished.
Inside the hush that followed, Bastion tightened his arm around Emil.
Bastion adjusted them carefully, drawing Emil closer until there was no empty space left between their bodies. The narrowness demanded intimacy; he found he did not mind that at all. One arm settled securely around Emil’s shoulders, the other resting warm and possessive at his waist.
For the first time since waking into this strange new existence, a deep, bone-level calm began to spread through him.
Relief.
It came like cool water after fever — sudden, undeniable. He felt Emil exhale against his throat, felt the younger man’s muscles finally begin to loosen as the binding magic of the crypt settled over them both like a quiet hand smoothing wrinkled fabric.
“So this is what you meant,” Bastion murmured.
Emil nodded faintly, pressing closer without thinking.
“It feels… like the hunger steps back,” he whispered. “Like the noise in my head softens.”
Bastion understood at once. The stillness inside himself deepened, turning almost meditative. If eternity was to be lived in fragments like this — small, dark sanctuaries of shared rest — then perhaps it would not be so terrible after all.
He tilted his head and found Emil’s mouth in the dimness, kissing him softly.
Not urgency.
Not heat.
Just reassurance.
Emil’s lips were cool but responsive, familiar even in their altered state. The kiss lingered, slow and grounding, until Bastion felt the last sharp edge of the night ease somewhere behind his ribs.
When he drew back, curiosity — practical and oddly boyish — flickered through him.
“What did I taste like?” he asked quietly.
Emil blinked in the darkness.
“You’re asking that now?”
Bastion’s mouth curved faintly.
“It seems relevant.”
There was a pause. Then Emil huffed a small, disbelieving laugh, his forehead coming to rest lightly against Bastion’s jaw.
“Warm,” he said at last. “Stronger than anything I’ve ever… needed. Like safety and danger at the same time.”
He hesitated, then added more softly,
“Like you.”
Bastion absorbed that in silence, fingers idly tracing slow circles at Emil’s back.
“Good,” he murmured.
The quiet inside the crypt deepened until it felt almost sacred.
Bastion lay very still for a long time, simply listening — not to the world beyond the marble, but to the strange new absence within himself. No breath to measure the passing of moments. No heartbeat to mark the rhythm of existence. Only the steady awareness of Emil’s body pressed along his own like an anchor in an unfamiliar sea.
Eventually, without quite deciding to, he shifted closer.
There was room only for closeness here.
No space for distance.
No place to pretend they were not bound in ways far deeper than blood.
He drew Emil fully against him, one leg tangled with his, his arm tightening instinctively around the younger man’s waist. Emil responded at once — even half asleep, even worn thin by fear and feeding and grief. He curled inward, fitting himself to Bastion’s shape as though this had always been the natural order of things.
A soft sound left him.
Relief more than exhaustion.
Bastion pressed a slow kiss into his hair, breathing in the faint scent of smoke and soap and something colder that now belonged to them both. The crypt held that scent gently, like a secret shared only between two conspirators.
“You’re safe,” Bastion murmured, though he was no longer certain which of them needed to hear it.
Emil’s hand slid across his chest, settling over the place where a mortal heart would have beaten. He did not seem to notice the absence. Or perhaps he simply did not care.
The darkness wrapped around them like deep water.
Gradually the tension left Bastion’s limbs. The sharp alertness of the turning softened into something quieter — not sleep as he had once known it, but a suspended rest that felt more like sinking into stillness than drifting into dreams.
He allowed himself to surrender to it.
Allowed the centuries ahead to wait.
Curled together in the narrow sanctuary of marble and shadow, they became a single warm shape in the dark — two newly remade lives settling into the fragile, wordless peace of having survived the night and found one another still there.