Alyosha was a few minutes late; though not by design. Her fingers and sharp nails were faintly stained from blotting ink, and she'd entirely forgotten about the wire-rimmed reading glasses she'd pushed up onto the crown of her head a half-hour earlier.

She wore well-tailored and form fitting blacks which looked rather like some manner of military dress uniform. But there was neither sword nor knife at her belt, or a cloak, and she laughed when he did, pausing her advance over the smooth pebbles to bow grandly.

"Baron," she rejoined, teeth flashing whitely when she smiled. Touched the leg of her glasses on the way to straightening, having realised with an embarrassed start that she'd been wearing them at all. Ah, well, nothing for it now.

She pulled them off, folding them with a familiar flick of her wrist. Gestured with them to the shadow of the spire behind him, speaking as she covered the last distance between them.

"I'd meant to congratulate you somehow. It's already... quite remarkable. I'd wanted to look at it more closely when I brought Effy, but..." No time.

How long since she'd worn hair wildly long and ornamented little differently? A strange sense of homesickness welled up in her. She rubbed the thumb of her metal hand against its other fingertips to allay her sudden want to touch.

"There are only so many hours in a night," she sympathised, quietly, looking from him and back to the jaggedly rising shadow. Her smile returned, slow and full, not flashing teeth.

"I'd said when we met last that you'd been like the dark side of the moon, of late." The backs of her knuckles touched the side of his hand near his wrist. She watched him while she did it, from the corners of her eyes, far too earnest not to reveal herself for both wary and hopeful.

"Be the lighter side again?" Talk to me. You know I want to understand.

Don't we know better than to expect perfection? She nodded, assenting in her silence, body turning. One hand gripped the wrist of the other behind the small of her back. Eyes forward, she listened.

Where he chose to begin surprised her; and she frowned, vaguely, eyes dipping to consider the gravel on their path for a long moment.

She wasn't quick to answer.

"You aren't the only one in fault for it. We had things to do, and it's... a personal fault of mine, sometimes." She wet her lips with a flick of the tips of her tongue. "That anything that isn't forward momentum feels like sliding back. Been burned by inaction too many times, perhaps."

"I had other help. It was... uncomfortable, but not disastrous." Her first blood-frenzies, the horror of having made another unwittingly. Working with her mentors to end it, paying blood debts, making graves. Learning by experiment about fucking and feeding, constantly biting her own tongue the first week.

"I'd blindly trusted you with things far more valuable than my life, by that time; no bond of undeath could match the sum of that, to me." She needlessly inhaled a breath, and flicked her tongue to taste sea-salt. "I... resented you, sometimes, but... primarily out of frustrated want of information. I..." She stopped. Swallowed. Eyes forward.

"Thank you. For the apology. It means a great deal to me."

But she didn't stop there.

"I didn't... have any doubts, at least, that by some measure what you'd done was for the best. I trusted your judgement, and even now, I don't know if I'd have asked that it'd be done differently, with the vantage of hindsight." Her voice had thickened; but it was near-impossible to tell whether from anger or hurt or some tightly-guarded combination of the two.

"It was the night you came to me in Mair that broke my trust of your judgement. If I had been more myself, less in agony, I think it's likely I might have tried to kill you."

She was another long while in silence, making no more sound than the crunch of gravel underfoot. The surf swallowed the sound while waves rolled. A few speckled gulls took wing when the vampir pair drew too close.

"I wouldn't be here if you hadn't made that clear." She spoke slowly, half-haltingly, "I wouldn't have called you by wolf again. Hell's teeth, I wouldn't have left you in one piece in that madness. I..."

She shook her head, silver hand freed from its mate, mechanically jointed fingers working through the black of her short-shorn hair. "Brucolac, I've fucked up in my time. To horrifically devastating degrees. I'm not the sort of hypocrite who'll look you in the eye unfeelingly. There's not a soul that's perfect, and that some of us accomplish great things out of imperfection is... somehow more meaningful, I think. What matters is to acknowledge your mess, and to fucking mop it up. You're doing that. As far as I can tell, doing the damned best you can. Given... given everything." She made a vaguely all-encompassing motion.

"I respect that."

She smiled, serenely. Replaced her hand behind her back, but not before using her elbow to nudge his side. "You know, things can be simple, if you let them be. I've missed you. I've been glad to hear of what good you're doing. And you know... I won't ever ask the world of you: I can very well take it for myself. Just... this."

"This is enough. Explain to me what directions your mind takes, because it's not a book I can read. Apologise when it's appropriate, fix your fuck-ups, and focus on the good. We can both of us self-flagellate in privacy when we're oppressed by the need, and I could always bite you if you're boring."

She said it all in an easy deadpan, watching him. Her fingers flexed with new nervousness.

"Why did you ask me here?"

Alyosha's hands had gone to their sides as they slowed, remained there; the one still pinching the hinge of her glasses. At some point while he spoke, it fell from her nerveless fingers, the fine clatter of the lenses, the thin metal frames upon the pebbles lost in the rushing sigh of the waves.

Her living hand shook; flew to her mouth when he had no more to say. Just as swiftly, the back of her hand went to her brow like one dizzied or faint-feeling, fingers curled together to stop (or hide) their shaking while she pinned him with a wildly hopeful look. "You.. you can't... do you mean it? Are you certain you mean it?" She said it all too fast, gasped like a secret, her inner monologue spilling out. "You haven't even heard my proposal for it, I'd drawn up... and... and had plans with references, contingencies, and..."

The last thread of calm snapped with what sense she had to say something coherent, and both hands flew to cover her mouth now, and she stared at the Brucolac over her fingertips, a furrow between her brows, made by the force of Alyosha willing herself not to cry.

But she was absolutely, certainly, without a shred of doubt, going to cry.

She caught his eyes, shoulders shaking, held them for a long while. Before she was forced to move her hands, snuffling uselessly, to knuckle away pinkened tears. Her fingertips wicked them away in clear frustration at herself.

"Of course I want them. With... Just, dizzyingly, I want it. I'd always... in the back of my mind, the way we all have fool's hopes and dreams, imagined a future, a one day when I might again, and time just... had just crept on and on and on. It was... fuck was..." She snuffled again, more delicately brushed tears from her thick lashes. "Was nights after I'd first risen like this, stumbling from one realisation to the next. Didn't hit me 'til those nights after, like someone had reached into me and pulled out my heart, I'd never have a family again. Not the same way. It was..."

Hard, she wanted to say, though her tear-tightened throat couldn't croak the word. And hard wasn't what she meant. Who could measure the worth of dreams forever lost?

"I want this," she whispered instead, hoarsely. "I want this. I'd determined weeks ago if not the children you'd sired, then some others needful of mothers."

She breathed a startled puff of laughter, self-aware and goodnaturedly embarrassed. "I— that silver tongue of yours, I swear— how the hell was I to know you'd made such kind judgement of me? And it... it seemed very pragmatic at the time, to prepare to make my case..."

Her smile was still tremulous, but at least she'd stopped crying, dark eyes red-rimmed and very honest. She made some helpless gesture, I couldn't very well do nothing, you realise, and leaned to fold herself against him, face tucked toward his shoulder, and hugged him hard.

They were very still together. She grew steadier, saying nothing, and after the long moments ticked by gave the Brucolac a last, smaller squeeze before leaning away. Mouth crooked into an expression not quite fully a smile, she reached to delicately divest him of her glasses, murmuring a quiet,

"Thank you."

She watched him rubbing his shoulder; a corner of her mouth hooked down in knowing sympathy. But at his thanks, her eyes dropped down to her hands. She made a small motion with the one which held her glasses.

"The world... all worlds... are nearing their ends. If the Unseelie don't claw out a victory before the Seelie win by default, if I can't find a more sensible solution to the dilemma of the gem... all the stars will wink out, and us with them. A rare sort of gift, I suppose, to know that... and sound reason to give myself license to just... do what makes me happy. And what might spread a little more happiness into the world beyond me."

She touched the backs of her knuckles lightly to his arm, drawing him on to walk with her again. "I'd want you to name him. Or them. A father-name, at the least, in the northern tradition." She watched him with care from the corners of her eyes. "Would you want to be known, as their father?"