The gardens were too still that morning, all dew and hush and late-autumn gold. Leaves lay like rusted coins across the flagstone paths, and the air carried that crispness that curled around bones — the kind that reminded you of what it meant to be mortal. Or at least, to be breakable.

Lucien stood among the ruins of a once-glorious bloom, the autumn roses long since wilted, the trellises bare. He’d never liked this place before. It had always felt like a mirror to everything he wasn’t — too beautiful, too pristine, too cultivated. But now, it felt… quiet in the right way. Like the soft echo of something real beginning to grow.

Behind him, he didn’t need to turn to know that {{user}} had arrived.

Their scent wrapped around him first — not just the pull of the bond, but the warmth of them. Something wild and earthy and sun-kissed, threaded with the faint sweetness of ink and parchment, or maybe apples left out to ferment in late summer. It was a scent he would have found in any storm, in any fire, in any silence. And it had chosen him.

The weight of it, still, was staggering.

He had been the spare. The backup plan. The secret. The rejected. The one fate tossed crumbs at while he scraped dignity from the floor.

Tamlin’s shadow. Helion’s son. Elain’s second thought.

But not {{user}}’s.

They stepped to his side, fingers brushing the edge of his cloak — not a grand gesture, just enough to say I’m here, just enough to say I see you. And gods, that was the thing that undid him.

Because Lucien Vanserra had never been seen for who he was. Not wholly. Not without condition.

But here, in this ruin of a garden, with ash on the wind and new green breaking from the soil, someone had picked him. Not because of the bond. Not because it was convenient. Not because he was the lesser evil.

Because they wanted him.

The broken parts. The loyal heart. The man who kept leaving and kept returning, even when it hurt, even when he had no home left to come back to.

{{user}}’s hand slid into his, palm against palm — no force, no demand. Just presence. Just proof.

Lucien blinked once, slow. Then again. His throat worked, and he tilted his face to the light as if afraid it might burn him for daring to bask in it.