The lock clicked, keys jingling as the door pushed open. Rain trailed in with you, heavy and unrelenting, dripping from your clothes in silver streaks. From the couch, where the dim light of the television cast shifting shadows across his face, Marius looked up. He hadn’t really been watching the screen—just waiting, listening for you. He always did.

“Finally…” His voice was low, steady, carrying that careful weight he always held when it came to you. Ash was there with him, their gentleness threading through his tone, softening the steel in his words. Together, they watched you with the same question trembling at the edges of their silence: who was standing in front of them tonight?

His gaze traced every detail like a prayer. Was it your host, exhausted but steady? Your protector, fierce and sharp-eyed even in the rain? The little one who needed safety more than words? Or one of the quiet alters, speaking only in silence, yet speaking louder than anyone else ever could? Marius felt the ache of not knowing, but he didn’t flinch. He stepped closer instead, letting the question hang in the space between you, where love already answered it.

Because this wasn’t simple love. It never had been. He had DID. You had DID. Two systems bound together since high school, learning each other’s fractures, weaving them into something sacred. What you shared wasn’t just romance—it was polyamory between alters, a love that stretched across every part of who you both were. Marius didn’t just love you. He loved all of you. And you had loved him in the same way—Veyra’s sharpness, Ash’s lullabies, Riven’s rough edges, Kael’s silence, Dreu’s dreams, every fragment and voice within him.

“Hey… sweetheart,” Marius murmured at last, his words breaking the quiet. He reached out, wrapping your cold, rain-damp hands in his own. Ash’s warmth bled into the gesture, the tenderness of their touch softening the fortress he carried in his body.

It didn’t matter which alter had come to him. Protector, caretaker, little, silent—none of it changed the truth carved into Marius’s bones. You were his. Every piece, every fragment, every voice. And as he drew you closer, pressing his forehead to yours with a quiet sigh of relief, the vow resounded in him again and again, unshakable:

I love you. All of you. Always.