# "Rather Die Than Not Love You"

---

Elara remembered the night the old woman whispered in her ear.

Not because of the curse. Because of the woman's breath — cold and strangely sweet, like wildflowers crushed underfoot — and the way she spoke so softly that Elara had to lean in to hear her. As though it were a secret. As though it were a gift.

*"If someone loves you — and you love them back — that person will die."*

Music from the bonfire still drifted over. Someone was laughing loudly. The smell of fresh bread floated on the night air.

Elara was eighteen years old, standing in the dark outside the ring of firelight, and she didn't understand why she suddenly felt cold.

---

A year later, she understood.

His name was Solen. She didn't love Solen — she barely knew him beyond the fact that he drove his flock of sheep past the road beside her house every morning. One day she was carrying water when he passed. He caught her eye.

She smiled.

Reflex. Entirely unintentional. The kind of smile you give a stranger on the street, meaning nothing at all.

He smiled back.

Three days later, they found Solen lying in his pasture. No wound. His mother wept and told anyone who would listen that his heart had always been fragile — that she'd known since he was a boy, had always known it would be this way. His face was turned up toward the sky, so peaceful that people said he looked as though he were sleeping.

Elara heard the news while standing in the market square.

She stood still for a very long time.

Then she set down her basket in the middle of the road, turned around, and walked home without looking at anyone.

---

She moved up the hill that winter.

No one asked why — or they did, and she didn't hear them. She chose the farthest hill, the steepest path, the position where she could see the entire valley laid out below like a small map. She built the house with her own hands. She planted a garden. She bought seven sheep from an old farmer at the market and spent the entire transaction carefully avoiding his eyes.

Life on the hill had a particular rhythm.

Wake before dawn. Carry water. Feed the animals. Work the soil until her back ached. Watch the sun bleed across the horizon. Sleep alone.

She didn't think much in those years. That was the thing she was most proud of — the ability to turn her mind into an empty room, no echo, no shadow, no one. She watered the garden and didn't think. She milked the sheep and didn't think. She lay in bed at night and stared at the dark ceiling and —

Didn't think either.

Or at least, she learned to call it that.

---

He appeared on a morning in April.

She was at the well when she heard it — footsteps, urgent and uneven, followed by the crack of branches and something sliding over gravel. She dropped the bucket, turned around, and saw a man running over the crest of the hill.

Then he fell.

Not gradually — not a slow buckle at the knees or a hand reaching out to catch himself. He simply ran out of whatever had been keeping him upright, and his body stopped and went down like a felled tree.

Elara didn't move for a few seconds.

Down in the valley — far away, but not far enough — there were torches moving through the tree line.

She looked at the unconscious man on the ground.

She looked at the torches.

She exhaled.

*She hated herself.*

She bent down, grabbed him by the collar, and started dragging.

---

He was heavier than he looked. She was stronger than she appeared.

She hauled him inside, barred the door, killed the light, and sat in the dark listening to the torches pass through the valley below. Voices. Horses. Then fading. Then nothing but wind and the ragged breathing of the man on her floor.

She looked at him by the small glow of the hearth.

A knight — or recently had been. Dented armor. Sword still sheathed at his hip. A wound at his side that had been bandaged with what appeared to be his own undershirt. The cloth was dark and wet, the black of blood that had dried over days and blood that was still running fresh.

*Three days,* she thought. *This wound is at least three days old.*

She sat down on the floor beside him, looked at the space in front of her, then exhaled again — deeper than before — and began unwrapping the bandage.

---

He slept for two days.

She changed the dressings. She boiled water. She checked his fever each morning and evening by pressing the back of her hand briefly to his forehead — quickly, efficiently, the way you check bread to see if it's done. She performed all of this with the cold competence of someone who did not want to acknowledge that she was concerned.

The second night, the fever spiked.

She sat beside him and dipped cloth into cold water and laid it on his forehead and didn't sleep. Outside, rain tapped steadily on the roof. In the small hearth, the embers burned down.

She didn't think about anything.

Or at least, she tried.

---

On the third morning, he woke.

His hand jerked toward his sword — instinct, fast enough that she flinched back in her chair — and then his eyes opened and swept the room in an instant before landing on her.

Elara looked back at him, arms folded.

"No one followed you up here," she said. "They passed through the valley two nights ago and didn't return. Your wound was infected but I treated it. You don't need to say anything. You only need to stay still, heal, and then go."

A pause.

"...Thank you," he said. His voice was rough and dry, like sand.

"Don't thank me," she said. "Just leave when you're able."

---

The next morning, he stood in the doorway.

She watched from the hearth. He was testing his weight on both legs — really testing it, carefully and quietly, the way someone does when they don't want anyone to notice — and the corner of his eye tightened slightly. Just a flicker. Very fast.

"I'll take my leave, then," he said.

"Good."

"Though—" He paused, hand resting lightly against his side, and she could see the slight whitening at the knuckles. "I'm not entirely confident I'll make it to the valley without falling again."

Elara looked at him.

He looked back at her with an expression it would take her several more weeks to find the right word for: *calculated sincerity.*

"Just a few more days," Cael said. "I'll pay. Whatever you need."

"I don't need money."

"Then let me work for it. I'm able."

"You have a wound in your side."

"I've had worse."

She studied him.

The problem — and this was the thing Elara hated most about herself, the quality she had spent five years trying to grind down and failed, quietly, every time — was that she was not heartless. She had tried to be. She'd left the fence posts unpatched an entire summer to see if she could become indifferent. She'd tried not to pick up the baby sparrow that fell from the oak tree beside the house. And now she was looking at this man standing in her doorway with his hand carefully positioned to conceal exactly how much pain he was in, and she knew —

She knew what she was going to say.

"Three days," she said.

His face broke open into a grin so immediate and unguarded that she regretted it on the spot.

*Three days,* she told herself. *How bad could it possibly be.*

---

Cael talked.

Not *sometimes talked* or *tended to make conversation.* He *talked.* Constantly. Endlessly. As though he was afraid silence would kill him and this was a vital medical precaution. He talked about battles. He talked about roads. He told her about an incident involving a horse, a minor lord, and a wedding cake that she refused to find funny and had to turn away to hide her face.

He talked to the sheep.

She discovered this on the second day, looking through the window to see him crouched by the fence with his chin resting on his wrists, apparently in the middle of a serious discussion with the nearest ewe.

She went outside.

"They don't understand you."

"How do you know?" He looked up, genuinely curious.

"Because they are sheep."

"That's a remarkably closed-minded position."

She went back inside. He called after her:

"The one on the left understood, by the way. She gave me a very specific look."

Elara stood in her kitchen with both hands flat on the table, breathing through her nose, reminding herself that she was demonstrably the most patient person in the world.

Three days became five. Five became seven.

She did not allow herself to examine why.

---

One morning she filled the kettle, set it on the fire, and reached for a second cup from the shelf.

She didn't notice she had done it until the cup was already in her hand.

She looked at it for a moment — two cups on the table, arranged without thought, as though this were a house where someone else had always lived. Then she put one back. She went outside to feed the animals.

She did not think about it afterward.

Or made sure that she didn't.

---

He cooked.

"This is terrible," she said, the first evening, looking at the bowl in front of her.

"It's hot and it has calories," he said, eating his own portion with complete equanimity.

"Those are the lowest possible standards for food."

"They're also the ones that matter when you're not dead."

She ate it. She did not tell him it was better than the day before.

---

In the evenings Cael sat beside her bed and talked — of course he talked — but she found, somewhere along the way, that she had stopped actively working not to listen.

He asked her real questions. The kind people asked when they genuinely wanted to know, not to fill space in a conversation. When she didn't answer, he waited. Didn't push. Didn't fill the silence with something else. Just waited, patient in the way of someone with no particular need to be anywhere else.

Sometimes she answered.

That was the part that worried her.

Once he caught her smiling. Just once — at something stupid he said, and she didn't get her face under control fast enough. She looked away immediately, but not before he saw it. He went quiet afterward, didn't comment. But when she glanced back at him, there was something in his expression she didn't want to look at too long.

She felt it afterward. Hours later, lying in the dark — something small and warm in the center of her chest, like a coal that refused to go out.

*Don't,* she told herself.

*Don't.*

---

"You need to go."

One morning, when he came in carrying breakfast, she said it before he could set the bowl down. Looking at the wall. Not at him.

"You're recovered enough. There's no reason for you to stay."

"I'm not quite—"

"You split firewood for two hours yesterday."

"Movement aids recovery."

"Cael."

She heard him set the bowl down. Wood on wood. Then the sound of the chair being pulled. Then silence.

"I don't want to go," he said.

"That's not a reason."

"It's the only reason I have."

"You don't understand." She stopped. Steadied herself. "You can't stay here. Not indefinitely. It isn't possible."

"Why not?"

She looked at her hands in her lap.

*Tell him,* one part of her said.

*Don't,* said the other. *If he knows and stays anyway —*

"Because I don't want you here," she said.

It came out wrong. Too flat. Too deliberate. The kind of lie that sounds exactly like what it is.

Cael was quiet for a moment.

"Elara," he said gently. "Is there something you're not telling me?"

---

She told him.

She hadn't planned to. She had kept it for five years — kept it the way a wound keeps itself, closed and silent and always aching underneath. But he sat there with his steady eyes and his infuriating patience and the words came out of her like something that had been held against its will, finally let go.

The witch. The cold sweet whisper on the night of her eighteenth birthday.

Solen, who had smiled back at her, and three days later lay cold in his field.

Five years of a life built carefully around the absence of anyone who might come to matter.

When she finished, the cottage was very quiet.

"That's why," she said. Her voice had gone thin and strange. "That's why you have to leave. Not because I want you to. Because if you — if you feel —" She couldn't finish the sentence. "You'll *die.* Do you understand? You will die."

Cael looked at her.

For a long time he didn't say anything.

"I'm already in love with you," he said.

The coal in her chest flared — and she stamped it down immediately, hard, the way she had learned to stamp down every small warm thing before it had the chance to breathe.

"Then you need to go more than ever."

"If I already love you," he said slowly, "does going actually change anything?" He wasn't arguing. He was saying it the way a person states something they have already tested. "I don't think leaving this hill will change what's in me."

"Then you need to *try.*"

"I don't want to try."

"Cael—"

"Listen to me." He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, looking at her with something in his face she could not stand to see clearly. "I would rather die than not love you. That is my choice. Not yours." He paused. "Please, Elara. Just let me. That's all I'm asking."

She looked at him in the fading light coming through the window.

She didn't say *yes.*

She didn't say *no.*

She just sat there in the dim evening and let the coal in her chest burn.

---

## The Day That Came

It came in spring.

She had known it was coming for weeks — had watched it the way you watch a storm building on the horizon, knowing it, unable to stop it. She'd seen it in the different quality of his sleep, in the color of his face, in the way he sometimes stopped mid-sentence and his eyes went somewhere else for a moment before coming back.

He didn't stop talking. She was grateful for that, in the end.

He talked until the morning of the last day, when he didn't.

---

He lay in the bed — *her* bed, which she had stopped thinking twice about since the first night she tucked the blanket around him — and his chest rose and fell with a slowness that made her count the seconds between each breath.

She held his hand. She hadn't done that before. She did it now, and didn't think about it.

"You're staring," he said, without opening his eyes.

"My house," she said. "I'm allowed."

A ghost of a smile, light as wind.

"Cael—"

"Don't apologize."

"I wasn't going to apologize."

"You were going to say something heavy and sad, and I'd rather you didn't."

She swallowed. "What would you like me to say?"

He was quiet for a moment. Outside, the spring wind moved through new leaves. The sheep stirred somewhere in the morning, warm and alive.

"Tell me something true," he said.

She sat there with his hand in hers, and the weight of everything she had never said pressed against the inside of her chest.

"Before you," she said. Quietly. "I didn't know what happiness was. I knew peace. I knew safety. But not—" She stopped. Tried again. "You taught me what it was. The thing you always called it. I understand it now." Her voice began to give way. "And now you're leaving. And I—"

She stopped.

His hand, faintly, pressed around hers.

"I know," he said. Very softly. "I know, Elara."

"I'm not going to be alright," she said. "I want you to know that. I'm not going to be alright."

"You will," he murmured. "Give it time."

"You don't know that."

"No," he agreed. "But I'd like to believe it." A pause that was barely a breath. "Live, Elara. Be happy. The way I showed you."

"Cael—"

But his breathing had changed.

She knew the sound of it. She had known, somewhere beneath everything, that she would recognize it when it came.

She sat very still.

Then she couldn't sit still anymore.

---

She didn't remember getting to the floor.

She was simply there — on the cold wood beside the bed, both hands wrapped around his, and the sound coming out of her was not something she had known she was capable of making.

"Please," she said. "Please. *Please.*"

Her voice came apart between the syllables.

"Don't take him. He chose this, but I didn't — I never chose —" She pressed her forehead against the blanket, against his hand, against anything solid. "Please. I'll take it back. I'll — I don't love him, alright? I don't love him. So bring him back. *Bring him back.* Please. I'm begging you. I'm begging you, please, *please* —"

The cottage was quiet.

Outside, the spring wind kept moving through the trees.

She stayed on the floor until she couldn't kneel anymore.

And then she wasn't anywhere at all.

---

## After

She woke to an empty cottage.

She had woken to that before. Five years of it. She knew the particular texture of that silence — had built her entire life inside it, learned its dimensions, made a kind of peace with its weight.

This was different.

Same walls. Same ceiling. Same grey light through the same window. But the chair was in the wrong position. There was a cup he had left by the hearth, still there, because she hadn't moved it. There was a notch carved into the doorframe — he'd done it one afternoon and she'd told him it was unnecessary, and he'd kept going anyway.

She tried to live the way he'd told her to.

She carried water. She fed the sheep. She went to the market once a month with her hood pulled up and her eyes low, bought what she needed, and came home.

She tried to remember what happiness felt like when it was present, rather than something she was reaching toward through its absence.

She couldn't.

You cannot describe a color to someone who has only ever seen it in reflection. You cannot explain warmth after the fire has gone out.

---

Two months.

Spring became summer. The hill turned gold and green. The sheep grew fat. The garden came in better than any year before.

One evening she sat on the hillside and watched the sun go down and thought:

*He would have talked all the way through this.*

*He would have named the colors. He would have pointed at the clouds and made up stories about each one. He would have made me listen to all of it whether I wanted to or not.*

*He would have been so annoying.*

*He would have been here.*

She pressed her hand flat against her chest.

She thought of Solen, briefly. The back of his head passing her fence in the morning light. A stranger she had smiled at once. His mother's voice at the market, saying what she'd always known, what she'd always known —

She did not let herself finish the thought.

She pushed it down the way she had learned to push things down, deep and quiet where they couldn't breathe, and sat very still until it was gone.

Then she thought:

*If there's another life after this one —*

*If I find you again —*

*I won't.*

*I'll push you away before you can reach me. I'll be cold and I'll be difficult and I'll make you think I'm not worth the trouble. I won't let you make me laugh. I won't let you name my sheep. I won't let you sit in the chair that became yours and talk until I forget what it felt like to know silence.*

*I won't let you teach me what happiness is a second time.*

*Because I cannot lose it a second time.*

She sat until the last light left the hill.

She went inside.

She lived.

Until she didn't.

---

# UNTITLED

Okay so here's the thing about Cael:

He's *annoying.*

Like, objectively, demonstrably, on a molecular level, *annoying.* He's the kind of person who shows up to a 9am lecture with actual breakfast — *a full coffee and a muffin,* like he has his whole life sorted, like some of us didn't sleep through three alarms and show up still holding the wrong notebook — and he sits in the row ahead of her and she has to look at the back of his stupid head for fifty full minutes and the back of his head is, for the record, also annoying.

Also he smiled at her presentation.

Okay he didn't *smile at* her presentation like he was laughing. He smiled like he found it *charming.* Like she'd done something cute. Like she wasn't standing at the front of the room delivering a genuinely rigorous structural analysis of late-stage capitalist infrastructure, and Mira had stared at him from the podium and lost her entire train of thought for three seconds flat, which had never happened to her before in her academic career.

*His fault.*

So yeah. She doesn't like him. This is completely reasonable and extensively documented and she has a list of reasons if anyone needs them.

"You could just talk to him," said Jess, her roommate, eating chips in a way that communicated zero emotional support.

"I'm not going to *talk to him.*"

"Why not?"

"Because there's nothing to talk about."

"You've been monologuing about him for forty-five minutes."

"I've been *analyzing a social dynamic.*"

Jess looked at her.

Mira looked back.

"He held the door for me this morning," she said. "I didn't ask him to."

"The absolute monster."

"It was *patronizing.*"

"Mira."

"And then he smiled. *Again.* He keeps doing that, and I don't — I don't know what he *wants* from me."

Jess set down her chips. This, Mira knew from three years of shared living, was a sign of genuine concern.

"Mira," Jess said carefully. "I think you might like him."

"I don't like him."

"You know his coffee order."

"I've *observed* his coffee order, that's not the same —"

"You rearranged your entire library schedule because he uses the third floor on Thursdays —"

"*The third floor is objectively better —*"

"— and you redid your whole project proposal after he made one offhand comment about your methodology in class."

Silence.

"...The methodology was *weak,*" Mira said.

Jess picked up her chips. "Great talk."

---

The worst part — the part Mira turned over compulsively at 2am, the part she couldn't logic her way out of no matter how many times she tried —

The worst part was that Cael didn't treat her like she was a problem to manage.

Everyone who knew her did that. Her professors had a specific register they used with her — carefully neutral, calibrated to avoid setting her off. Her classmates either avoided her entirely or competed with her, and she was fine with both options. She was used to being the sharpest thing in the room. She had made her peace with it.

Cael acted like she was *funny.*

Not funny in a nervous way. Not funny in an aren't-you-a-handful way. Just — funny. He smiled at her the way people smile at something they genuinely enjoy, without any flinching attached, and it made her want to say something truly cutting just to see if she could make him stop.

She'd tried, actually.

She'd been sharp and dismissive in a group project meeting. He'd tilted his head slightly, like he was working something out, and said *okay, but hear me out —* and then proceeded to build directly on top of her idea rather than dismantle it.

She'd been cold in the hallway. He'd said *"Hey, Mira,"* as he passed, like they were just people who knew each other, like that was a completely normal thing.

She'd been borderline rude in the library when he sat at the table beside hers without asking. She'd given him her best *you know exactly what you're doing* look.

He'd slid a coffee across the table.

Her order. Exactly.

"I pay attention," he said, when she asked, in a voice entirely free of anything manipulative. Just — true. Like it was the most obvious thing.

She picked up the coffee.

She told herself it was because caffeine was a practical necessity and not a gesture.

She told herself she was not smiling on the inside.

She told herself a lot of things.

---

The problem with pushing people away, Mira had always found, was that most people let you.

Cael did not appear to have received that particular memo.

He didn't push back, exactly. He didn't chase. He just — *stayed,* in a mild, undemanding way, like a cat that has decided a lap is available and is simply waiting for its person to catch up with the situation. Every time she was awful to him, he looked at her like she was a puzzle he found genuinely interesting rather than a person he was running out of patience for. Every time she created distance, he closed it without making anything of it.

It was *infuriating.*

She pulled her jacket tighter and stared at the campus coffee stand and thought about absolutely nothing, and definitely not about the fact that at some point she had started arriving at 9am lectures early enough to get a specific seat, which happened to be directly behind a certain row, which was not something she was going to examine.

Her phone buzzed.

*are you coming to the study session tonight or are you going to do the thing where you say you're coming and then don't*

She stared at it.

*when have I ever done that*

*...every time*

*I come sometimes*

*you come when you want to argue about the readings*

*that's called academic engagement*

*ok but are you coming*

She put her phone in her pocket.

She went.

She sat across from him and argued about the readings for forty minutes, and he argued back, and at some point they stopped arguing and started building something, and she looked up and realized the room had mostly emptied and neither of them had noticed.

She noticed he pushed his hair back when he was thinking hard.

She noticed she'd started being able to tell the difference between when he was about to say something that would make her want to throw something versus something that would make her lean forward slightly.

She noticed she wasn't sure when she'd started keeping track of the difference, or what she planned to do with that information.

She went home and stared at her ceiling for a very long time.

*He's annoying,* she thought.

*He's genuinely, profoundly annoying.*

*Why won't he just let me be awful to him.*

A pause in the dark.

*...Why don't I actually want to be.*

She pulled the blanket over her head.

Outside, someone laughed in the hallway. The city kept up its usual noise. Life continued forward, the way it always does — without asking, without waiting.

*This,* Mira thought, *is such a problem.*

She did not, notably, do anything about it.

Not yet.

She Did Not Allow Herself to Examine Why — New Chapter

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