The territory was quiet, and that was unusual for this hour.

Alistair sat at the long oak table in what had been called the war room, even though no war had been fought in it for over a month, and there was a dispatch in front of him that he had already read twice.

Elara had gone to bed hours ago, and Silas was somewhere along the perimeter, in one of those positions where the Characteristic refused to give Alistair any sense of his location, no matter how hard he reached for it.

However, Due was still working.

It was not urgent work, but more the kind he did out of habit, his pen moving in the steady rhythm of a man transcribing a section of the civic appendix that he had already drafted in his head days ago.

Alistair, on the other hand, was doing nothing at all, which was something he had not allowed himself in months, and the cup of tea sitting in front of him had gone cold while he sat with it.

’There is nothing left tonight that needs me,’ Alistair thought, leaning back into his chair. ’It is strange, sitting like this.’

After some time, Due noticed.

"You are doing nothing," said Due, without looking up from his page.

"I am aware of that, yes."

"That is unusual for you, Alistair, and I would be lying if I said it did not catch my attention."

Alistair clicked his tongue, then exhaled through his nose, leaning further into the chair.

"Maybe I am simply tired tonight."

"Eventually, you would have been tired before tonight."

"That is fair."

Following that, Due set his pen down and adjusted his collar, then turned slightly in his chair so that he was facing Alistair more directly.

"Alistair, I have been meaning to tell you something for a while now, and I think tonight is as good a night as any to bring it up."

Alistair raised a brow, his curiosity piqued.

"Speak then, Due."

Due was quiet for a moment, gathering himself, and when he finally spoke, his voice carried the faint stiffness of a man who had rehearsed something only slightly, because he had not wanted to rehearse it too much and make it sound rehearsed.

"It is about the underground palace, the day you first walked into it."

"What about that day?"

"I had been alone in that palace for nearly two years before you arrived, and in all that time, I had memorized every corridor, every chamber, every echo, every place where the stone hummed differently because the air pressure was different. I knew how I walked through it, the rhythm of my own steps, and the shape my movement made in that space."

"Get to the point, Due," Alistair said, though his tone was not unkind.

"The point, Alistair, is that when you walked through it the first time, you walked through it the same way I did when I first arrived. The way a man walks through a place he has been carrying around in his head for years, without ever knowing he had been carrying it." Due looked down at his hands. "Not like a visitor, and not like an intruder, but like someone who had arrived, unexpectedly, at the answer to a question he had forgotten he had asked."

The silence pressed against the room as Alistair simply stared at him, his jaw tightening for a moment.

He did not ask what Due had understood from that, because he did not need to, and because Due had already said the useful part of it.

The useful part was that Due had been carrying the observation for eight months, and had only chosen to bring it up tonight, in the quiet, when nothing else in the territory was demanding either of them.

"Thank you for telling me, Due. I mean that."

Due adjusted his collar, then waved a hand dismissively. "You are welcome, but please do not make it strange. I cannot stand it when you make things strange."

"I was not going to make it strange."

"Alistair, I could feel the sentiment forming on your face from across the table, and I am telling you now to stop forming it."

"You cannot feel sentiment, Due."

"No, I cannot, but I can read the pause that always comes right before sentiment, and you were sitting in that pause."

Alistair’s lips twitched into the faintest hint of amusement, and he picked up the cold tea and drank half of it regardless of how unpleasant it had become.

Due went back to his writing for a few minutes after that, and Alistair, having assumed the conversation had run its course, allowed himself to drift back into the quiet of the room.

However, the conversation was not finished.

Without looking up from his page, Due spoke again, his voice lower than before.

"The bind between us, Alistair. The death bind."

Alistair turned his head slightly, his eyes narrowing.

"I have been reading it for eight months, and I know its texture. It changed, somewhere around the morning after the crater, and I did not mention it at the time because I was not sure what the change was, and I did not want to name something I could not yet describe."

"And now, Due? What of it now?"

"Now, I am still not sure I will ever truly be sure, but I have been reading it long enough that I am willing to tell you the change happened, even if I cannot put words to what it became." Due paused, then added, quieter, "I simply thought you ought to know."

Hearing this, Alistair sat with it for a long moment.

The bind had been there since the cave, since the fall, since the moment both of them had understood that neither of them could die without the other dying along with him.

It was a Characteristic-forged tether, and for months, it had been the simple reason they were both still breathing.

Alistair had felt its weight, its direction, the constant pull of Due alive at the other end of it, and that had been enough for him.

However, the texture of the bind was something he had never thought to track, because that was Due’s nature, and not his.

"Yeah, Due. I know."

Due raised his eyes from his page, obviously surprised. "You know?" 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝚠𝚎𝚋𝗻𝗼𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝚘𝐦

"I felt something change, the morning after the crater. I did not understand it at the time, and I assumed it was something on my end, something I had done by mistake." He looked at Due, his gaze steady. "But it was not just me. It was both of us."

"Yes," Due replied quietly. "It was both of us."

Neither of them said anything for a while after that.

Due returned to his writing, the candle on the far side of the room burning down another notch, and outside, the territory was quiet in the way it is when the patrols have rotated and the night has fully settled.

Regardless, before the night could end, Alistair spoke once more.

"Due, whatever the bind became, if it is something you did not plan to carry, you can tell me. I would rather know than not."

Due was quiet for a long moment, then he set his pen down again.

"I did not plan to carry it, Alistair, and you are right about that part. But I am not carrying it anymore. I am walking with it, and walking with something is lighter than carrying it, in my experience."

"In your experience."

"Yes, in my experience, which I will admit is weirder than most people’s."

"That is the most accurate thing you have said all night, Due."

"I know, and I take it personally."

Alistair exhaled through his nose, obviously amused, and the silence that followed was the silence between two men who had been bound to death long enough to have made something out of the binding that neither of them had a word for yet.

Then, his eyes drifted back to the dispatch on the table, the one he had already read twice, the one he had been refusing to read a third time because a third reading meant acting on it.

He picked it up at last and read it slowly, line by line.

His grip tightened on the parchment.

’So they finally moved.’