Her arm was warm under his hand. That was the first thing Vane registered, absurdly, after everything, the simple ordinary fact of her skin being warm rather than cold, alive rather than something he'd been fighting.
The black in her eyes didn't clear all at once. It happened the way ice breaks on a lake in early spring, a single crack first, then a slow, widening network of them, the depthless dark fracturing into something that had color again, grey at the edges, then a thin ring of opal, then more, until she was looking at him with her own eyes, actually her own, wet and wide and utterly lost.
"Vane."
His name came out of her cracked and small, nothing like the voice she used for teasing him, nothing like the composed valedictorian cadence from an hour ago that felt like a different lifetime now.
"I'm here," he said. "I'm right here."
