She’s in the pond outside the ranch house and her dress is getting wet—turning green at the hemline and she doesn’t seem to care. Her hair’s coming out from her braid, the winds picking it up, splashing it over her bare shoulders like little snakes. She’s bending over, looking into the murky water, eyes alight with a fervent excitement for everything she sees and König’s staring. He’s staring. He’s unable to do anything but that, just stand there and look at her.
“There’s tadpoles,” she says, looking up at him with that smile of hers. That little crooked, sneaky grin. There’s the cut across her upper lip that he finds himself drawn to. Kisses softly once, twice and three times for good luck.
Like the moon pulling in the tide, she draws him forth. He starts wading in slow at first, not caring that he’s fully clothed and the water is seeping into his boots. Not caring about anything as he starts to pick up his pace until he’s practically running in the water to her. It splashes up around him, pulls at him, tries to drag him down but nothing could stop him. Nothing could ever stop him from reaching her.
And when he does, he picks her up. Arms braced around her, yanking her from the water and pulling her into his chest. Her laugh pulls from him a sense of warmth and belonging he’d never felt before, not here in Austria, not anywhere KorTac had ever sent him. His heart beats the truth; she’s home, home, home.
“Leon,” she says his name, his real name, and it makes something inside him uncurl. Awaken. The little box inside his head he’d shoved himself into so long ago, stuffed inside a closet, locked up tight, key swallowed by a beast—she pulls him out of it. Right out and into her arms that close around his shoulders, her laugh up into the air when her head falls back and her beautiful throat becomes bared for him.
“König,” she says and that’s him too. That’ll never stop being him too—but he can be both now. Would be for her. He watches her lay back in his arms, her own swinging to the sides, her laughter louder and louder as her fingers skim the water. “Don’t you want to look at the tadpoles too?” Every part of him feels awake and alive, and he can’t imagine ever hiding again. He trembles, his giant palms holding her lower back as she holds his forearms and looks at him like he’s the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen. It swells something inside his chest, painful, but so deliciously sweet.
Still handsome.
“Show me everything, Maus.”
For him, it’s only ever going to be her.
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