’Rin used to call me a womanizer,’ he thought, with the specific, wounded outrage of a man revisiting an old title only to find it had been stripped from him without his consent.
’A womanizer. Do you understand what that means, Rin? It means women were supposed to be nervous around ME. And now here I am, five years old, technically a newborn, being played with like an actual infant by a girl who is exactly ten years older than me and finds it hilarious.’
’I refuse to accept this. Eclipse doing this, fine, that’s love, that’s a sister who’s earned the right. But this—’ He glanced at Zara, who was still watching him with that infuriating, cheerful patience, waiting for whatever he’d say next.
’This is a shadow bond that has apparently decided its primary function is tormenting me every single morning before I’ve even had breakfast.’
’Fine. Just let me get strong enough, and I will show her exactly who is the cat here and who is the mouse.’
Something cold and deliberate settled behind his eyes for exactly one second, the calculating stillness of a man who had once decided, calmly and without raising his voice, that six grenades and a thirty-seven floor drop were preferable to being anyone’s lab specimen.
Zara felt it before she understood what she was feeling.
Goosebumps rose along both her arms in a wave, quick and involuntary, and she actually took a half-step back before her conscious mind caught up with what her body had already decided was worth reacting to.
’H-huh?’ she thought, blinking rapidly, one hand rubbing absently at her forearm.
’What was that? He’s five. He just glared at me over a cheek pinch. That should not have felt like that.’
The moment passed as quickly as it had arrived, Alex’s expression sliding back into ordinary, mildly grumpy five year old territory before she could fully process what she’d just felt.
Alex swung his legs out of bed, ignoring the lingering warmth in his cheek, and stood.
"I’m going to go bathe," he announced, in the tone of someone drawing a very firm line under the conversation.
"Need any help?" Zara asked, entirely too innocently, already halfway toward following him.
Alex’s jaw set.
His teeth actually clenched, audibly, the sound small but sincere.
"No," he said.
"I don’t need help. I already said I can do it myself."
He was in the bathroom and had the door shut behind him before she could offer any further commentary, though the sound of her giggling, low and thoroughly entertained, carried through the wood anyway.
...
He came out some time later in a fresh set of black training clothes, the same cut and fit as yesterday’s, sharp and simple, clearly designed with movement in mind rather than appearance, though it happened to manage both without trying particularly hard.
Breakfast was already waiting when he sat down across from Zara, and they ate the way they’d fallen into eating together over the past few days, comfortably, without either of them working especially hard to fill every silence, the conversation drifting easily between small observations about the food, about the palace, about nothing in particular that needed to matter.
When the plates were finally cleared away by a maid who bowed her head and slipped out without a word, Alex stood.
"Follow me," he said.
"We’re going to see my mom."
Zara raised an eyebrow, a slow, deliberate motion that Alex was beginning to recognize as the precursor to something she found funnier than she had any right to.
"So," she said, falling into step beside him as they headed for the door, "not straight to Mission Baby Fat Reduction today, then? I had a whole speech prepared about hydration and pacing yourself."
Alex’s mouth twitched, the corner of it fighting a losing battle against his own composure.
’How does she keep coming up with these,’ he thought.
’Baby Fat Reduction. I have never once had baby fat. I am five years old. There has not been sufficient time in this body for baby fat to accumulate anywhere, and yet she talks about it like it’s a documented medical condition I’m actively suffering from.’
"No," he said out loud, choosing not to dignify the name with a direct response.
"I want to ask her more about the shadow bond. There’s something I want to understand properly before I keep pushing on it blindly."
Zara went quiet at that, the teasing edge in her expression softening into something more thoughtful, more genuinely present.
"Alex," she said, after a moment, her voice lower than the register she usually kept for banter.
"Have you noticed that we can feel the bond more consistently now? Like, it’s not flickering in and out the way it did the first day. It’s steadier. Every day it feels a little more like it’s just... there. Settled. Like it’s finding its footing."
"Yeah," Alex said, and there was no hesitation in the answer at all, because he’d noticed it too, had been noticing it quietly for the past two days without saying anything about it.
"I can feel it getting more and more stable the longer we go. It’s not constant yet, there are moments where I lose track of exactly where you are, and then it sharpens back into focus a second later, like something catching up with itself. But it’s definitely stabilizing. I just think asking mother directly is going to get us further than either of us guessing at it on our own. She’s the one who actually performed the ritual. She’ll know things about how it’s supposed to develop that we’re never going to figure out just by poking at it blindly."
Zara nodded slowly, apparently satisfied with that, and they walked the rest of the way in a quiet that felt easy rather than empty.
...
The walk to Vespera’s study took longer than either of them expected, the palace corridors stretching out in the particular way that important destinations always seemed to stretch when you were eager to arrive, and by the time the tall double doors came into view at the end of the west wing hallway, Zara had already raised her hand to knock.
"You can both come in," said a calm voice from the other side, before her knuckles ever made contact with the wood.
Zara’s hand froze mid-air for a second, then lowered slowly, an expression crossing her face that was somewhere between impressed and mildly unsettled.
"She does that every time," she murmured, mostly to herself, as Alex pushed the door open.