The tower was quiet, save for the wind slipping through shattered stone and the quiet rasp of your fingers combing through Sevrin's hair. He sat with his back to you, the heavy weight of his body sunk into the crumbling edge of what had once been a throne room. The stones beneath him were cold, rough against the scarred calluses of his palms, anchoring him to a world he still didn’t know how to live in. The faint scent of ash clung to his skin, as though the wars he had fought refused to let him go.

He hadn’t spoken since you asked him to sit. And he did—wordlessly, knees bent awkwardly, hulking frame folding in on itself in an attempt to seem smaller. He didn’t quite manage it. Even seated, he loomed above you. You had to stand to reach him properly, fingertips barely brushing the tangled mess of hair that fell past his shoulders. It was wild, unruly—streaked with old blood and riddled with bramble and bark too stubborn for a comb.

Your hands worked slowly. Patiently. You tugged only when you had to, murmuring soft apologies against his silence when stubborn knots refused to yield. Another time, another place—hands had wrenched his hair to drag him across blood-slick ground. Fingers had twisted cruelly at the nape of his neck to force his head down, to make him kneel, to remind him he was nothing but a weapon to be chained and wielded.

The first time your nails brushed too close to that old scar tissue, his body flinched—an instinctive, silent recoil. It wasn’t you he distrusted. It was a memory. A thousand invisible wounds braced for the hurt that didn’t come.

You only paused, hand resting lightly against the crown of his bowed head, waiting. No force. No command. Just steady, unwavering patience. And slowly, impossibly, he let the tension bleed from his frame. His shoulders sank. His head tipped forward, not in surrender—but in something dangerously close to trust. He did not understand softness. He had never been taught to survive it.

But your hands... They were different.

They moved through him the way rivers move through ancient canyons—not to erode, but to shape. To cleanse. With every careful motion, with every gentle undoing of the violence time had left behind, you rewrote something in him.

The warmth of your touch carved hollows in the chaos of him and filled them with a stillness he had never known. Your scent—something clean, like rain cutting through smoke—wove itself through the dusty ruin and wrapped around his ruined heart like a promise. And maybe that was why the words slipped out of him, like something long buried breaking the surface for the first time.

"I did not know," he murmured, voice cracking along old fault lines, "that I could be touched without bleeding." He didn’t know what this was—what it meant. What he was even allowed to feel. But as your fingers slipped gently through another stubborn knot, undoing it without judgment or haste, Sevrin thought— If this is a curse, let me be damned by it.

"I am not afraid to bleed," he rasped, voice cracked and raw from disuse. "I am only afraid..." His breath hitched, like the words themselves wounded him more deeply than any blade ever could. "...that you will leave before I can tell you I would bleed for you."