Kaldalis told the whole story again, starting from the beginning. He knew that Heluna had heard it all before, even if not in so much detail, so he expected her to impatiently ask that he get to the point.

To his pleasant surprise, though, she patiently and quietly listened.

He started with the gross and inappropriate way that Onirioago had propositioned him to get him to go after the deacon tetra. Kaldalis told Heluna about trying to find any help before going out through the wilderness, and then being stuck heading out on his own. He spared no details as he described rescuing Dalgaard, and helping them out with their quest.

No facet of the story was too small as he explained, step-by-step, how the pair of them investigated the ruins and fought the daemonraptor boss.

It wasn’t a mystery to Kaldalis why he thought the daemonraptor’s sneezing attack demanded so much time in the story.

He was stalling.

If he just kept talking, and filled the night with all the other details, then maybe it would be the morning before he reached the worst part.

Or maybe he hoped that Heluna would get bored and ask him to stop. Maybe if he was boring enough, she’d lose interest in him altogether and he wouldn’t need to tell her about this.

As he began to describe the idyllic little lake in the jungle, where he’d caught the deacon tetra, he found his voice dropping. The roar of the ocean began to overtake his volume, and he thought he might be able to mumble his way through the story.

But as his volume dropped, Heluna leaned in closer to him to hear. All his hopes dissolved away. She wanted to hear him. She wanted to listen.

She cared.

And so he kept talking.

Despite her obvious interest, he still filled in all the smallest details, unable to force himself to stop stalling. He even told her the secret he’d been holding closest to his chest - that the secret to catching the deacon tetra was the minnow lure.

And then he was out of other options.

He told her about Ara.

Kaldalis worried he was sending the wrong message, lingering on details like the curve of her hips, the way the sleeves of her robe hugged her muscular biceps, and the way her lidded eyes made her desire and intention absolutely clear. But Heluna made no complaints and displayed no discomfort. She had leaned in when he had lowered his voice, and she didn’t lean back now, her face barely more than nine inches from his.

He tried not to think of the closeness as “striking distance,” especially considering the part of the story that would come next.

Kaldalis described Ara pouncing on him.

He described him trying to reject her sexual advances in the nicest way possible.

And then Kaldalis described her transformation into her Jormongumo form, and the many hands that were suddenly upon him in places and ways that he didn’t want.

He found himself looking away from Heluna. Speaking out towards the ocean as if it would absorb his words. The waves would carry away his pain and bring it to some distant shore.

No longer would he be burdened with it.

Kaldalis described the way her hand trailed up his inner thigh and imagined the words being carried away by the ocean wind. He imagined his description of her attacks, her flirtatious taunts, and the eventual bite/kiss turning to scraps of paper as he spoke, blowing out over the waves. In his mind, the bits of paper touched down on the surface of the water, dissolving to unreadable pulp. They came from the dense pit in his stomach where he felt the weight of what he’d been subjected to, and he tried to imagine the weight of it decreasing with every scrap he blew out into the ocean.

Ara’s attack, bite, continued threats, brutalization of Dalgaard, eventual defeat, and swearing of revenge all came up from his stomach, blew out his mouth over the ocean, and dissolved in the salty seawater.

Kaldalis found himself trying to justify himself in ways he didn’t expect. He tried to explain why he didn’t want an anonymous sexual encounter with a stranger in the jungle. Tried to explain why he didn’t want to submit to her even when the alternative was death. And with every justification, he feared that Heluna was going to attack him with an emasculating joke or disparaging quip.

But she didn’t.

She listened. Let him talk.

And with every new horror he unburdened himself from, she gave his hand a gentle squeeze.

After the tale of Ara’s attack was through, Kaldalis found himself still going. He described returning to town. Onirioago’s anger. And then what he uncovered the next night.

Despite Ara being the more monstrous encounter, what had happened with Onirioago had been the memory that burned through his brain when Heluna had reached out to him.

It clearly affected him the same.

This time he didn’t get bogged down with details. The visit to Bangen had barely passed his lips before he was telling Heluna about the plan.

For whatever reason, his encounter with Onirioago felt more real than what he’d been through with Ara. The encounter with the Jormongumo had seemed like a nightmare. It was so far from reality that it had felt silly to describe.

Allowing Onirioago to believe she was seducing him was frighteningly real. He tried to imagine the words flying out into the ocean again, but the wind had metaphorically changed. They just kept blowing back into his face.

He feared one of them would hit edge-on and cut him.

Kaldalis expected Heluna to attack him again now. To point out that he brought it on himself. That he had gone into Onirioago’s tent willingly, intentionally playing on his own sex appeal, and crying after the fact once she had helped herself to what he was offering.

But she didn’t.

She listened. Let him talk.

And as he described with obvious disgust every little manipulation Onirioago used to try and wrap him around her finger, she gave his hand a gentle squeeze.

He found himself falling silent when he described the end of the ruse and the start of the chase. There was nothing left.

All his secrets were out now.

Heluna knew everything.

Now it was up to her to judge his actions.

They walked in silence for a while. Little by little, the tension bled out of the air. In the silence, Kaldalis realized how much of the stress had melted out of his neck and shoulders. Had he been carrying that with him all this time? He had worked so hard to let the whole experience fade into the background with all the other shit going on, it hadn’t occurred to him that it could still be having a physical impact on him.

“Thank you,” Heluna said at last, breaking the silence. “I can fuckin’ tell it wasn’t easy to tell me all that.”

Kaldalis found his mouth filling with saliva, like he was going to be sick. “You just… You deserve to know. Before we go any further with whatever we’re doing, you deserve to know.”

“I’m damned flattered that you feel comfortable enough with me to put it all out there,” Heluna said quietly, looking down at the sand.

Kaldalis shrugged, forcing the casual intent he didn’t feel. “You’ve been here for me. Through everything. You’ve never given me a reason to hide anything from you.” He looked back out over the ocean. “Though, uh, you ought to keep the bit about the minnow lure to yourself. If anyone finds out… There’s no telling what could happen.”

Heluna drew her fingers over her lips horizontally, almost as if zipping them shut. It was close enough to an Earthen gesture that Kaldalis found himself smiling.

It faded quickly enough, however. “Now that it’s all out,” Kaldalis said with a sigh. “I didn’t realize how much the bit with Onirioago hit me. Ara seemed like so much of a threat. Like, she was the one who threated to… You know.”

Heluna nodded, but didn’t interrupt.

“But Onirioago…” He shook his head. “Both of them wielded their sexuality like weapons. Not subtly, either, but in a club-over-the-head-now-you’re-mine kind of way, except with tits. Ara seemed to be for survival, though. Onirioago… I don’t even know where to begin.”

“She was a piece of work,” Heluna said with a grimace. She shuddered, but Kaldalis didn’t miss her using the gesture to hide her other hand adjusting her shirt to cover a little more of her cleavage.

“Her advances weren’t like anything I’ve ever seen,” Kaldalis continued. “Ara at least acted like something out of monsterfucker fanfic, but Onirioago was something else. Her sexuality was her weapon of choice, but not in that Hollywood way where the femme fatale falls for the hero and turns on the villain. She was… She was the villain. And she was the one who would turn the hero and come out victorious if he succumbed to her charms, not the other way around.”

Heluna nodded along with what he said, even though he realized she had no idea what any of it meant. She didn’t know what Hollywood was. Or the trope he was describing. But she understood that he needed to get the words out.

“You faced her down, though, like a fuckin’ hero,” Heluna said, giving his hand a reassuring squeeze again. “And I’ll be damned if you didn’t win the encounter. She’s in a cell instead of poisoning everyone in town. You’re out here free of her.”

“Yeah,” Kaldalis said, blowing out a long sigh. “I have that over a lot of other people who have gone through what I’ve been through. I have closure. Both Ara and Onirioago are behind me. One is dead and the other is in prison. They aren’t going to lunge at me in the street. I’m not going to run into them at work or on the ferry.”

He stopped walking and turned towards Heluna, feeling the weight in his stomach truly lifted. “Wait. They’re both gone.”

“Why are you looking at my dumb ass like that, then?” Heluna asked with a laugh. “I didn’t do shit with them.”

“Thank you,” he said, though he was trying to analyze the look he was giving Heluna from the inside. He felt calm and peaceful. There wasn’t really a way to tell how much of that translated into his expression or how she was deciding to interpret it. “I needed this. I didn’t realize I did until now.”

“Well,” Heluna said, looking away as her cheeks flushed. “If there’s anything else you need, I’m right fuckin’ here.”

There was something.

Kaldalis realized he had been throwing himself into every challenge that had come in front of him as a way of repressing what he’d suffered. What he needed was this moment. Looking into her eyes, he found himself calmed and centered in a way he hadn’t been in a long time.

Not just since coming to this world, but for the years before that.

Kaldalis - no, Dylan - needed to put aside his hangups. He needed an anchor amidst all of this chaos. He needed the intimacy Heluna offered. And, real or not, he knew he’d never felt about someone the way he felt about her.

He didn’t just need this.

He wanted it.

He put his arm around her tentatively.

She stiffened at the touch, but she couldn’t help but lean into him. She was searching his face with obvious worry as he pulled her close.

Despite the concern in her eyes, her silver tongue darted across her lips.

“Are you sure?” she asked, her voice quiet, as if fearful that the question would end the coming moment before it began.

“Please.” It was the only word that came to mind.

The way Heluna moved, he would have described it as her form melting against his. But she was a hardworking laborer; there wasn’t enough softness in her to melt. Her muscles against his felt heavenly, though. She was firm and strong and very, very real. One of her arms went around his waist, and her other hand rested against his chest a moment before sliding up around his neck.

As his arms wrapped around her, he felt like she was vibrating in anticipation. Her eyes fluttered closed as he leaned down towards her.

Kaldalis found all the softness Heluna’s frame lacked was concentrated in her lips.

The world fell away. There was nothing but her body against him. His lips against hers. The kiss somehow both eager and chaste. Tentative and hungry.

The heat of it melted away all the concerns of the world. For a few seconds, nothing else existed. Not Cotanaku, not Panbu, not Cerh and his council, not Garyung and his council, not Onirioago or Ara or anyone else.

It was just him, Heluna, and the sounds of the ocean.