Chapter 50 What Rhydan Does In The Dark
I find out by accident.
Thursday evening, nine PM, I cannot sleep, which is not new, and I am in the east corridor heading for the restricted archive because reading case documentation at nine PM is apparently who I am now, and I am passing the door to the inner training hall when I hear it.
Ice.
Not the main arena. The small practice rink built into the academy's east wing for individual sessions, rarely used after six PM, and the sound coming from it is not a team drilling.
One pair of skates.
I push the door open.
Rhydan is alone on the ice.
No helmet. No gear beyond his skates and practice clothes, and he is not running drills, not executing plays, not doing anything with a purpose that I can identify.
He is just skating.
Fast. Faster than he skates in games, faster than warm-ups, the full length of the rink end to end with his head down and both arms loose at his sides and both natures fully surface-level, dragon and wolf running together in that alignment they find on ice, and the cold air in the rink is ten degrees warmer than it should be from the heat his dragon nature is throwing off.
He doesn't know I'm here.
I stand in the doorway and watch him and my chest does something large and unmanageable because this is the version of him that nobody sees, not the hockey captain, not the pack heir, not the boy who makes cold decisions and fixes things at five AM before anyone notices.
This is just Rhydan...
Moving through the only space that has ever given both his natures somewhere to be without fighting for it.
He skates three more lengths before he feels the bond register my presence and his stride breaks, just slightly, and he looks up and finds me in the doorway and stops.
We look at each other across the empty rink.
He is breathing hard, chest moving, hair damp at the temples, and his eyes are full silver right now, the dragon nature fully present, and he doesn't cover it.
He just lets me see it.
"Couldn't sleep?" I ask.
"No," he replies, rough and quiet.
"How long have you been in here?"
He glances at the clock on the wall. Something moves across his face, a flicker of something almost sheepish that looks so unlike his usual composure that I want to keep it.
"Two hours," he admits.
"Rhydan."
"It helps," he says simply. "When there's too much... the ice helps."
I look at him standing in the middle of the empty rink with his silver eyes and both his natures finally quiet and the heat still coming off his skin in waves, and something in me makes a decision that my brain has not quite caught up to yet.
I sit down on the boards bench and pull off my shoes.
He watches me.
I look at the skate rack on the wall. "Are any of those my size?"
A pause.
"Third from the left," he says. "Petra's. She leaves them here."
I go pull them on.
Lace them badly, unintentionally. He skates to the boards and leans over and relaces them properly without asking, his hands quick and sure, and when he finishes he doesn't move back immediately, stays close, and I look at him from six inches away with both his natures warm and present and his silver eyes on mine.
"I don't know how to skate," I tell him.
"I know that," he replies.
"This is going to be embarrassing."
The corner of his mouth pulls up in a smile, the real version, full and warm. "Probably," he agrees.
He steps back onto the ice and holds out his hand.
I take it and step on and immediately understand why people train for years to do this because the ice beneath me has strong opinions about where I should be and none of them are upright, and Rhydan's grip tightens and his other hand finds my waist and suddenly I am not falling.
"Move with it," he says quietly. "Don't fight the surface."
"Easy for you to say," I mutter, concentrating fiercely on not dying.
"You fight everything," he says. "The ice is no different. Stop bracing and move with it."
I look up at him sharply and he is watching me with warm focused attention and the ghost of the smile still at the corner of his mouth, and something about being told to stop bracing, by Rhydan Valecrest of all people, is so specifically and perfectly absurd that I laugh, genuinely, and in the half second of laughing, I stop bracing and the ice stops fighting me.
I move with him.
Badly. Slowly. With approximately forty percent of my weight leaning into his hand. But moving.
"There," he says quietly.
We skate the length of the rink like that, his hand in mine and his other at my waist and both his natures quiet and warm around us, and the empty rink is cold and lit by the low practice lights and completely, perfectly still.
"Rhydan," I say after a while.
"Mm?"
"The Supernatural History class today," I say carefully. "The removed working retaining the caster's signature..."
"What about it?"
"If Bram preserved the residue from your shoulder..."
"He did," he replies. "I asked him this afternoon."
I look at him sideways. "You already thought of it."
"You asked the question in class and I thought of it simultaneously," he says. "Which means we think the same way about certain things."
Something warm moves through my chest.
"We can match the signature to Greymoor's captain," I say. "And from him to whoever sent him."
"And from him to my grandfather," Rhydan replies quietly. "If the chain holds."
"It will hold."
He looks at me and the silver in his eyes is warm in the low light, not cold, not threatening, just his, and both his natures are running steady and I am learning to read the difference between when he is managing them and when they are simply present, and right now they are simply present.
He is simply present.
"Veyra," he says quietly.
"Mm?"
"When the anchoring happens," he says carefully. "Afterwards... what does the documentation say you will feel?"
I look at the ice moving under us. "Complete," I say honestly. "The case documentation describes it as feeling complete. Like something that was always slightly open finally closes."
"And for me?" he asks.
"Stable," I say. "Both natures fully aligned permanently. No more management. No more pressure."
He is quiet for a moment.
"What we feel through the bond now," he says, "does it change after?"
I look up at him.
He is watching me with an expression that is careful and open and asking something considerably larger than the words he used.
"It deepens," I say softly. "The documentation says it deepens."
He holds my gaze.
Nods once.
And neither of us says anything else, and the ice moves quietly under us, and his hand stays warm in mine, and somewhere far below the academy floor, the dragon pulses slow and patient and waiting.