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Of fucking course Culebras aren't the only goddamn monsters out there. It is just like that fucking bitch named Fate to throw him another fucking hurdle—and this one coming in hot (pun fucking intended since it's actually from hell). Like it had not been enough punishment to lose everything he had to this goddamn B-rated movie plot line where he is a nothing more than a flunkie (i.e. bitch) to these scaly motherfuckers, now Seth Gecko has demons on his ass?
Fuck. That.
“All of this is built on bad blood, anyway,” Seth says to Richie when the latter accuses him of wanting to abandon everything they have built in the past six months (like it's the goddamn Egyptian pyramids and not some shake-n-go startup). “And the body of a dead kid.”
A sharp pain hits his ribcage, a flash of a reminder he is never really without. His body demands needles and venom to make him forget, but Seth has long ago accepted that this reality is his penance. He doesn't get to escape it.
“I didn’t kill Kate,” Richie hisses, fury and something more in his blue eyes. “ Carlos did.”
“Don’t say her name,” Seth warns through gritted teeth (you're not fucking worthy of it).
“I went back with you, remember?” but Richie is not having it, not anymore. He has years of experience under his belt dealing with his brother’s anger, but resentment is something else entirely. He has never seen it before; not when he looked out the window of their shared bedroom when they were children after their father beat him (even if Richie had always assumed Seth contemplated running away, but would never go through with it because of him). Now resentment frayed the corners of Seth’s eyes whenever they let silence settle between them. “I wanted to bury her. I wanted to lay her to rest, to take flowers to her grave and—”
“Flowers?” Seth cuts in as he takes three furious steps toward Richie. “You think fucking flowers are going to fix this? She’s fucking dead . Gone. Forever.”
“I didn’t kill her!” Richie repeats with a defensive shout.
“You didn’t pull the trigger, but you put her in front of the bullets!” Seth snarls, gripping Richie’s jacket like he can still rough him up. He narrows eyes at his little brother and in that second he does not see him as such. All Seth sees is a culebra. A fucking monster.
It's what makes him let go.
“I can’t do this, Richard,” he says, stepping back. “Every time I look at you...I just fucking can’t.”
X
Every time he thinks about quitting, about putting miles, states, oceans, countries between him and this fucked up life, something always reels Seth back in.
Yeah, he said it was the free ticket to El Rey that made him agree to take out these demons for Lord Venganza after Skull Fucker whacked all the other Lords, but it was her. Because he saw her—Seth knows with all of his bruised and disfigured heart that he saw her out in that crowd. Sure, he was throwing out punches just as much as he was receiving them, but he has spent months thinking and dreaming about her, reliving old memories drenched in Mexican heat, that he knows the line of reality and imagination (because every time he rolls over to look at the other side of the bed it's empty and she's nowhere near to be touched by him, to reassure him he has her before bitter, cold realization reminds him two bullet wounds stole her from him). She had looked back at him, in a way that was too fucking much to process, but made his blood rush with possibility.
She is back.
“That wasn't Kate,” Richie groans as Seth attempts to help him up, his blue eyes now the color of uncut rubies.
“Fuck that,” Seth thought then just as he thinks now when he learns the Queen of Xibalba is possessing the body of the one he has been mourning for six months. “How do we get her back? How do we get it out of her?”
“You don't,” Burt says to him, pity in his dark eyes just as Seth feels something crash at the bottom of his bruised ribcage. “Kate’s gone.”
Twice Seth has heard that. Twice he has been told to face a reality set in stone, one where she is gone and never coming back, but fuckthatfuckthatfuckthat.
He is getting her back.
He once dragged her through hell for his own selfish reasons (the goddamn Titty Twister and his drug addiction up and down Mexico), now he is willing to storm in like a fucking hurricane to bring her back out to the light. No matter what it cost him.
X
The last person Seth thinks they will be receiving help from (on account that he had believed up until now that she was satan and a fucking flight risk) is Santanico Pandemonium (or Kisa, whatever the fuck she wants to call herself).
The Snake Queen returns just how she disappeared: out of the blue, in leather, and pissed off beyond belief.
“I told you to leave it alone,” she hisses at the brothers, but grips Richie’s throat as she holds him over the table in the Lords lair that has now become unofficial headquarters (even though Seth protested against it seeing as one demon had already broken in). “I already fought one war, Richard, I don't want to be dragged into another.”
“Hey,” Seth growls, cocking his gun and pointing it at her head, “put him down, Elvira, or I'll make Amaru’s job much easier.”
Santanico drops Richie like a weightless heap at her feet (not before sinking sharp nails at the sides of his neck) and turns glaring yellow eyes at all those gathered behind her.
“You don't go straight for the queen,” she tells them with a tone of authority (like she had been a strategic commander and not a stripper for a thousand years), “you bring down her army first. You take down her general.”
“Brasa,” Ximena mutters in frustration.
Santanico nods. “We all know the stories. He's devoted to her. He loves her.”
Seth tightens the grip around his gun when the Snake Bitch flashes him a smirk on her way over to Burt and the Peacekeeper.
“Solid plan,” Ranger Gonzalez crosses his arms over his chest, looking away from the tablet the professor brought over depicting the ranking of hell with Amaru at the top of the food chain. “But there are a lot of these ugly bastards. We've barely made it out as it is. We’re going to need to recruit.”
“I know a guy,” Richie says, rubbing the left side of his neck with a frown furrowed between his brows. “He fucking hates us, but he's good with swords.”
“No,” Seth hisses, putting a finger up in warning. “No fucking way.”
They have already ruined all the Fuller family as it is; was there any need to drag in the only surviving member?
“Actually, that might work,” Tanner interjects as he stands over his tablet, running a finger over it like he is looking for the last sentence he left off on. “Possession is not always entirely consuming. The remnants of the host might still be present. If something from her past—if someone Katie-Cakes loves shows up, then maybe she can resurface.”
X
Seth tells himself it's guilt what made him keep tabs on Scott Fuller, but, really, it's her. It's her memory. She had loved her brother just as much as Seth loved his—except since his conversion to vampirism, Seth often debates with himself if he would give up his life for Richie just how she gave hers up for Scott.
After the incident at Jacknife Jed’s, Scott hung around for a few days like a lost puppy until Seth kicked him to the curb (he had practice with that, didn't he?).
“Why?” Richie demands in frustration. “We could've kept him safe.”
“No, Richard, we couldn't have,” Seth tells him as he pours himself another shot (full glass) of whiskey. “We can't keep anything fucking safe. He's better off without us.”
While the Gecko Brothers became bag men for the Lords of the Night, Scott Fuller became the frontman of Fanglorious , a band of young Culebras feasting on the sinners that attended their shows. He had even gotten himself a little snake girlfriend by the name of Gypsy (or Regina Gallagher, a small town girl who ran off on her alcoholic parents when she was eighteen according to the police report Seth had the Ranger dig up).
As it was to be expected, Scott is all fangs and swords when they force their way into his dressing room.
“Listen here, Vamp Halen,” Seth hisses, whatever patience he had is long gone now. “There are some real pissed off monsters from hell—actual fucking hell—turning the goddamn world upside down. We need all the help we can get.”
“And I’m supposed to help you ?” Scott snarls, his brown eyes flashing yellow. Gypsy puts a hand on his shoulder, keeping him still. “You kidnapped me—you kidnapped my family. You led us to a temple of doom rigged up the ass with Culebras that you,” he now turns to Santanico, hate and blame burning his eyes brighter, “and your leech-of-a servant Carlos let loose on us.Then he turned me into a fucking culebra. And you....” If he hated Seth and Santanico, unfathomable loathing is what appeared on Scott’s face when he looks at Richie. “You’re the reason Kate’s dead.”
The name feels like poison every time Seth hears it. The name feels like an unforgiving tsunami tide. The name feels like a nightmare. The name feels like unshakeable regret.
He never says it out loud. Not when hearing it makes him remember a teenage girl’s broken body left at the side of a bloodwell. A girl he had abandoned with shattered promises of protection.
Gypsy pulls her hand back from Scott. He moves to grab his guitar, lowering his sword with intent on heading back out to do what he does best: drown out reality with blaring music.
“She’s alive,” Richie calls out, halting Scott from being free of the people he blames for ruining his life. “Kate’s alive.”
“I buried her,” Scott tells him through clenched teeth. “She’s gone.”
“You buried an empty casket,” Seth says, his tone matching Scott’s as his hands ball into fists when the memory tries to resurface. “We never found her body.”
“She’s being possessed by the queen of hell,” Freddie cuts in, stepping further into the room. The cheap, yellow light of the dangling bulb casts a shadow over his austere expression. “If there’s anyone who can get Katie back, if there’s anyone that can make her believe in God again, it’s you .”
The look on Scott’s face is one Seth knows too well. He doesn’t need jedi mind tricks like the Snake Queen or Richie, he knows what the kid is thinking. Seth thinks about it all the time, too. They were the things of nightmares (both monsters in their own way)—nightmares that invaded the rare hours of sleep they got. In them, she died every single time. Over and over again. All because of them.
“If Kate’s coming to destroy the world, then let her,” Scott looks behind his shoulder at the past that refuses to stay buried with those he once loved. “We all have reasons to die at her hands for what we did to her.”
“You’re right, kid,” Seth does not hesitate to agree with what he has known from the moment Richie declared her dead. “She has every right to come for all of us, but we can't give up on her . She’s still in there. She’s gotta be.”
Richie nor anyone else in that small, hot room miss the desperation in Seth’s voice. Burt, the once great hunter of demons, had told them Amaru would never give Kate back, but Seth refused to listen to reason. He was so consumed by his guilt and grief that it blinded him from what really would happen.
They would have to kill Amaru, even if Kate was imprisoned inside her own body.
X
Poison from a different variation fills his veins when he sees the general from hell look up at Amaru like she hung the moon in the sky. Seth would not have given a single fuck how demons get off, but that evil bitch was wearing the skin of a fallen angel. He felt like burning down the fucking world when Amaru allows Brasa to caress her.
Burt told them all to be wary of Amaru. She is cunning just as she is wicked. She would use anything inside Kate’s head to break them down, to destroy them before they got in her way of letting Xibalba pour through the door of her fucking batcave.
Seth knew he should have expected the cheap shot, but when Amaru stands before him, so close enough to touch the body that so many times he held close to his to shield from oncoming onslaught, he shatters.
“You owe me a toaster, Paul Newman,” Amaru moves her borrowed-mouth, but it is not her voice that comes out. This one is tender, kind—the sound that haunts his dreams.
Amaru takes her borrowed-hands to cup Seth’s face, stroking the side of his right cheek like in a drug-induced hallucination from another life (one where his partner still lived).
He holds his breath, gun rattling as his hands shake like a fucking prepubescent asshole feeling the warm touch of a girl for the first time.
He knows it isn't her, but it is.
Amaru pulls herself closer to him, one hand now on his shoulder as she presses lips that don't belong to her on his neck. It feels like a whisper. Something so soft, he thinks he might have missed it if she had not pressed them on the sharp edge of his jaw.
She hovers over his mouth, right at the corner to whisper, “I could never leave you.”
Seth feels her nails dig into his skull just as her eyes transform into a devious red, a wretched leer on a face that isn't hers. He can feel everything he is inside rushing out, like it's being yanked by magnets through his eye-sockets. He is pretty fucking sure he is going to die and he can't fucking find it in himself to feel terrified as the Queen of Xibalba feasts on his soul—not when it looks like her .
Then blood splatters down his chest and Amaru gets launched back.
“Seth,” it cries and he gasps for air, pulling his gun up, finger skimming the trigger. Amaru stands and it's not her anymore. The body she possesses is shaking, tears dripping out those kind, green eyes he wished every day he could find again. “Don't let me go, Seth.”
“ Kate ,” the name slips past his mouth like a plea. It awakens something inside of him, something broken he believes in that moment can be fixed if she is present.
“Help me,” she tells him before her eyes hardened and burn red again, unleashing the vengeful queen hijacking her bones.
There is no fucking way Seth is letting Kate go now.
X
The final battle of Culebras versus Demons arrives in the middle of a Texan desert. Everything is dirt, blood, sun, guts, and monsters. The entire world is hanging on a fucking thread—Richie is fighting off another big ass Olmeca, Gonzalez is firing shot after shot at the stampede of demons heading his way as Ximena tears off their heads with her fangs, Scott is pinned down, Santanico is pulling fallen Culebras out of the warzone, and Burt and Sex Machine charge at Brasa—but all Seth can fucking see is Kate bleeding out over a boulder like the sacrifice Amaru offered up to her own Gods of hell.
“You stay the fuck away from her,” Richie growls, shoving Seth against the bolted, wired gate outside their new desert hideout. “She makes you fucking stupid, Seth, and it's going to get you killed.”
Seth laughs at the irony of it all because, really, Richie is the last person who can point a finger when he let the Snake Stripper into his head and followed her on a path of vengeance and human trafficking (all for a fucking throne the Lords did not end up giving him). It was his fucking poor choices that got Kate killed in the first place.
“You don't care,” Richie adds, his tone rough and barely audible when he understands the glint that has taken residency in his brother’s eyes since his first encounter with Amaru (since he knew Kate was still in there).
It is not that Seth has tried to deny it, but it is more like he never (not even for one goddamn delusional second) believed he was worthy of the fucking overwhelming feeling that breathes in his chest.
“You love her,” Richie states, absolutely fucking sure of it, leaving no room for debate, that Seth has to look away. “You're in love with Kate.”
Yeah, he fucking is.
“And it's going to get you killed,” Richie says, pity and fear and anger in his blue eyes.
Yeah, it fucking will.
So Seth charges toward the fallen and discarded angel in the distance. These fucking monsters can kill each other, destroy every fucked up empire they built, the whole fucking world could turn into ash, but he did not care. The only thing that mattered was her.
Seth takes a bullet to the shoulder, but he never stops running. Not when Kate is waiting for him to get there.
X
Seth looks at the wooden cross nailed over the frame of his bedroom door. Richie said it might give Kate peace to see something familiar, something she has so much faith in when she wakes, but in the meantime it's he who can't stop looking at the thing. There are words at the tip of his tongue he doesn't know how to form into proper, coherent sentences, but he knows it's something like a prayer. Something drenched in gratitude and relief.
He once had promised Kate she would make it out without any bumps or scrapes, but he had failed her. Seth had not vowed it while looking at the cross, but he would spend the rest of his goddamn miserable life trying to make it up to her.
When they make it out of the war against Amaru and her army from hell, Seth feels like he is driving home. Not because the destination is the operation he and Richie spent six months building, but because Kate is in the backseat asleep in her brother’s arms.
She is with them again.
She is alive.
She is theirs .
Seth opens the backdoor when they arrive, carefully pulling Kate out of Scott’s embrace to cradle her close to his chest. Neither he or Richie seem to find any words to stop him from leading her to his bedroom. He just lays her down on her favorite side of the bed, takes off those red heeled boots she (the real her) is too sensible to ever wear in a world of the supernatural, and pulls a blanket up to her neck. Like they are in a rundown motel in Mexico again, Seth sits on a chair beside the door, cleaning his gun out of habit as he watches over her.
For three days he does not move from his place. He is hardly aware of Richie and Scott alternating visits, bringing water and food while they check to see if Kate has stirred awake. It is in one of their appearances that Seth thinks he hears Richie say Santanico (fucking Kisa, whatever) has shown up (or something). Seth doesn't really fucking care about the world outside his bedroom. Not until those green eyes that have plagued his days and nights finally open.
“Police sirens,” is the first thing Seth hears come out of Kate’s mouth. He looks up from his gun, jaw slackening when he realizes the dry, raspy voice is not a figment of his imagination.
It's her. It's Kate .
She is sitting up on the right side of his bed, her long, red hair tangled and matted past her shoulders, pale face covered in bruises and dry blood. Her green eyes are open, looking up at Seth in a way that is all too familiar and foreign at the same time.
“What?” he barely manages to sound out.
“All that's missing are police sirens,” she says with slow words passing her cut and chapped lips, “and it's Mexico again.”
Seth drops his gun at the side of his chair in order to stand. He feels unsure on his feet, like a fucking rookie on his first real gig. It mind as well have been; for six months he had thought Kate dead, he had lost practice in approaching her. He had lost practice being with her.
His hands shake so he reaches for the glass of water on his nightstand, extending out to her like a peace offering.
She turns her head.
Seth has been too caught up with getting Kate back (with being the selfish bastard he's always been), he had forgotten (forced himself to, actually) that she had died hating them. She had died broken and abandoned and betrayed.
A small hand wraps around his wrist.
Seth looks up, breath catching in his throat when the overwhelming emerald in Kate’s gaze digs into him.
“Thank you,” she murmurs, “for not giving up on me.”
He wants to tell her so many things, so many things that burn in his chest and sting in his eyes, but like the prayers he has been squashing down with inability to materialize, he just glances down at her thin fingers slipping down to his palm.
“I'll get Scott—”
“Can I shower?” she interrupts him. “I'd like to be clean when I start seeing people.”
“Yeah,” Seth returns with a firm nod. “There are towels in the bathroom and anything else you'll need.”
Kate manages a dim smile before shakily standing from the bed. Seth wants to reach out to help her (to touch her) but he keeps expecting to see her disappear. She did in all of his dreams. Those agonizing dreams were all he had in months; to have her here, really here, is going to take him a while to accept.
When she closes the bathroom door behind her (so many Mexican memories resurfacing by the sound), Seth turns to the cross again.
It takes Seth twenty minutes to realize something is wrong. Kate had spent months trying to get back to her brother, researching old books and myths to find a way to save his soul; she had even given herself over to Carlos and Malvado for him, but now she rather shower first than see him again? Seth might have believed she is nervous to see Scott, but when she was trapped in her own body, she yearned for her brother more than anything (anyone) else. That did not just go away.
If he had not felt fear flood his chest, Seth would have knocked on the bathroom door. Instead, he kicks it off its hinges when his fucking intuition tells him he is right.
Guilt was one of the prominent emotions Seth felt when he was told Kate was dead, but outright terror is what overwhelms him when he sees her slumped against the tiled wall of the shower stall, the water around her red as it travels down the drain.
Her wrists are sliced.
“No, no, no,” Seth growls as he dives un, gripping her face, tilting it up. “Kate! Kate, what did you fucking do?”
Her eyelids flutter, water droplets clinging on to her thick lashes. “I'm tired,” she rasps out to him. “I'm so sorry, Seth.”
“No!” he yells again, shaking her a little too roughly to keep her looking back at him. “You don't get to fucking do this, you hear me, Fuller? You don't fucking get to leave me! Not again!”
“Let me go,” she murmurs.
Seth can't . He never has been able to.
From the moment he first laid eyes on her, beer bottle in hand looking in on the glass window of the ugly fucking RV she was driving, he knew he was not letting her out of his sight just as he knew he was going to use her to cross the border. From then on, he had not had her more than arm-length away. The one time he did walk away, the one time he let her go, she died .
He is never going to let that happen again. He is a real fucking selfish bastard that way.
Because he is, he pulls her naked form up into his arms. He barely has a chance to grab a discarded towel to throw around her as he shouts, “Richie!”
X
Kate doesn't want to see him. She doesn't want to see anyone. Despite no one wanting to give in to her request, they give her room to breathe and only ask that she reaches out when she's ready. Seth? Well, Seth can give a flying fuck what she wants. He is staying right here, checking drawers, cabinets, nooks and fucking crannies for any potential weapon.
He doesn't care (visibly) that she doesn't speak to him; as long as she's breathing, he will thrive on her silence.
Some days, however, he pretends to sleep when she cries into his pillow (because how can he keep his eyes open and not want to rush toward her, holding her together before she breaks off into a million pieces again and again?). This one is no different, expect his bedroom door opens without a knock.
He tenses when he hears the sound of heels on his floor.
“You have been avoiding me,” Santanico says, closing the door behind her. “You have been avoiding everyone.”
Kate is cut off mid cry to hold her breath. Seth opens his eyelids a fragment to see the Snake Queen reach for Kate’s forearm, fingers slowly tracing down to bandage covering the slice on her left wrist.
“I did horrible things,” Kate mutters, averting her eyes to the blanket over her lap. “Every time I look at all of you... I remember it all.”
“You didn't do anything,” Santanico says firmly, her grip on Kate’s wrist tightening a little too harshly for Seth’s liking. “Amaru did.”
“Her thoughts...her actions were just as much mine as mine were hers. I felt every death, I—” Kate pauses, knot in her throat. She looks and sounds like grief.
She finds courage somewhere deep inside of her (courage Seth always knew she had) to look up at Santanico.
“I could feel everything they felt. And she loved you, Kisa. Manola wasn't scared to die. She was scared of leaving you.”
Santanico loosens her hold on Kate. “I don't blame you,” she says low and steady, raw emotion in the words. “I don't look at you and fill up with revenge, Kate. You forget I, too, have been the victim of a puppet master. Hell, I have been the one to possess. Richard did not kill that bank-teller because he was a cold-blooded murderer then. He killed her because I made him. He doesn't carry the weight of that, so neither should you.”
“But you loved Manola—”
“I did,” Santanico interjects immediately, raising her chin to hold the tears back. “I do . So I destroyed Amaru, the real monster. Manola can rest now.”
A new wave of tears fall down Kate’s cheeks. “I don't think I can.”
Santanico turns, sharp brown eyes narrowing in Seth’s direction. He closes his own before she points out he's been awake the entire time.
“You say Manola wasn't scared of dying, but of leaving me. Despite all I had done in my thousand years of life, she loved me. She loved even the parts of myself that I hated. I know of so many people who feel the same for you, Kate. One is in the room right now.”
“Seth doesn't... Not like Manola...”
Santanico laughs. “No, not like Manola loved me. The pendejo loves you a hundred times more.”
X
Months pass, bringing new suns and moons over the horizon, and Seth begins to see light come back to Kate. It's a slow process—there are so many tears, so many screams consequences of nightmares that are not really nightmares at all, but her memories as the host of Amaru—that she swears to him past swollen eyes, a ragged throat, and red scratch marks up and down her arms that she is never going to make it.
“I'm not letting you go,” he whispers into her ear a thousand times, hoping it will travel in and be engraved in her bones so they become a part of her. He tightens his arms around her, pressing his face into the crook of her neck as she does the same to him. “Ever, Kate. You fucking hear me?”
The tears don’t really stop, but sometimes she allows herself to be in the present. Sometimes she listens to Scott play his guitar while Gypsy sings, or she lets the Ranger read her newspapers of Bethel like there’s still a chance all of this is not real and she will go back all caught up on the town’s doings, or she helps Santanico trace down wayward culebras that need a home, or just hangs around the Gecko Brothers.
“You're doing it wrong.”
“Well, I'm fucking sorry, Richard, I don't have much experience with this.”
“Follow the directions, they're right fucking there.”
“I'm going to make you eat that fucking paper if you flash it at me one more goddamn time.”
A soft laugh makes Seth stop himself from murdering his brother. It comes from the girl sitting between his legs. It comes from Kate.
She turns in an angle, raising an eyebrow at them as they hover over her (Seth with plastic gloves and Richie dividing her hair into sections, holding them up with black clips).
“I can do this myself, you know?”
Seth frowns at her and Richie scoffs in disagreement.
“What's your tactic when you get to the back sections?” Richie asks in his fucking know-it-all tone. “Unless you’re now Mr. Fantastic, you can't reach behind to properly and effectively distribute the product.”
Kate blinks at Seth, looking for assistance.
“What he said, princess,” he answers with a shrug as he shakes the plastic bottle in his hand.
“Fine,” she concedes almost instantly (because she knows Richie does everything precisely or not at all). “Just don't get it on my skin. It takes days to wash off completely.”
Richie smirks. “Not to worry, Katie-Cakes. I can lend you a hand in the shower if you need it.”
Seth squirts the chestnut-brown hair-dye into his brother’s eyes (how fucking lucky is it that he's not wearing his glasses?).
Sometimes, when she is having more good days than bad, Kate seeks only Seth out.
She never really says much when she brings a book to his and Richie’s office, just sits on the chair across his desk, kicks up her feet, and reads (until she forsakes the story to stare at him, not that Seth will admit to it without giving himself away on how much of his working time is actually spent watching her absentmindedly nibble on her thumb before gently turning the page), or when she rides shotgun on his way to anywhere, cranking up the volume on whatever is playing as the Texas sun pours in through the open windows, letting the heat wash over her as she hums along.
He grows fascinated every single time. More than he ever thought he could ever be.
“You ever gonna tell her?” Richie asks with a grin as they watch her move around their makeshift kitchen in Seth’s old wife-beater and boxers.
“No,” Seth tells him without having to contemplate it. “I can’t.”
“Why the fuck not?” his brother demands. “What about all that shit you said about there being nothing wrong with being caught up on a dame?”
“She spent half a year in the claws of a monster, Richard. Before that, she was trapped with me. Once she’s better, she can leave, she can find something...someone better.”
And Seth fucking means it.
He never fucking knew he had it in him to love someone so much their happiness—completely un-fucking-dependent of him—mattered more than anything he wants for himself. And, fuck, how he wants her; in more ways than he ever wanted anyone before, in more ways than he ever had someone before, in more ways than he can ever have her.
So he does look at the wooden cross over his bedroom door and vows to never say those three words.
He just doesn’t count on her saying them first.
Kate climbs onto her side of his ( their ) bed after brushing her teeth, her long, brown hair tied up at the top of her head, woolen knee-high socks and his old t-shirt on. She flashes a lovely smile at him, one he still can’t believe is fucking real after he mourned her for so long, and turns on her side.
Seth lies completely still.
He doesn’t know how much more he can fucking take of this—of having her so goddamn close to touch, but not being able to (not allowing himself to). Because she makes him crazy and now he is beginning to understand why Richie could not resist the fucking Snake Queen when she was in his head, because now Kate is in his and he can’t get her out.
She rolls over, resting her head on his bare chest. Her hands splays over his ribcage, fingertips slowly tracing circles on his skin.
“I love you,” she whispers without looking up at him.
He freezes beneath her, no longer sure he is actually awake.
She presses her pink lips on his ribcage, on the center of his chest, on his left collarbone, on his neck, on the edge of his jaw, and on his cheek before meeting his eyes. There is something fearless and fearful about her all at once. It reminds him of the preacher’s daughter with a chainsaw back in the Twister.
“I think I have for a while, before...before Amaru and the bloodwell. I think I loved you since bad heists and rundown motels with no pools or air-conditioning.”
“During drug addictions?” Seth asks with gritted teeth. “After I kidnapped you and your family? No, Kate, you don’t—”
She places a finger on his mouth, stopping the words from coming out. There is a flicker of annoyance in her green eyes that almost makes Seth laugh (like he once used to when they were like this).
“I don’t deny the parts of yourself that you hate, Seth, but I love you through them. I lost so much time with myself, before and after Amaru, and I don’t want to do that anymore. You don’t have to love me back, I don’t care. I just wanted—needed—to say it. And if you want me to leave because I do, I will—”
It is his turn to silence her. He does it by taking her lips hostage, one hand gripping the back of her neck and the other the back of her thigh.
“I fucking love you,” he tells her in between kisses that she hungrily returns.
Because, really, despite everything, Seth is a fucking selfish bastard and he is never letting Kate go again.