Disclaimer: I don't own them.

I'm not afraid of the dark

The structure that hovered over the river in front of them glowed gloomily under the moon light, the flickering light of the fire Wil had managed to do with the rover's help making the shadows grow behind them. The sound of the forest around them seemed to only grow every time Amberle looked at the bushes.

The princess shivered and almost stood when she saw a movement near the first lines of trees, the smell of staled water around her clogging her senses for a second, making her mind go back to the putrid smell of the trolls they had so recently left behind, the corpses of the people they had probably left to fight for their own lives making her gulp and sigh.

"Take this" She heard, the sound of the voice the unmistakable one of Eretria, the rover girl looking at her from the other side of the bonfire, one hand holding her jacket, the other one hugging her knees. "The last thing I want is having you sick, princess"

The sentence was said with the ghost of a smile, lips curling in what seemed to be a smirk, but Amberle saw the shadow of worry on those brown eyes and so she reached for the jacket, not saying anything but a small "thanks" that got lost on the cold night of the forest, the grass and dried wood behind her boots crunching when she accommodated herself again on her spot, one small flame seeming to grow for a second under her prying eyes.

"Not needed" The grumbled response was, Eretria's eyes going back also to the fire, her now free hand hugging her knees just like the other, her newly uncovered skin seeming to glow under the flames, eyes growing distant under the golden shadows that seemed to haunt her behind her pupils.

Amberle remained silent, thinking again on Utopia, on how the village had been, the strange gifts from the past the ones that lived there seemed to hold into coming back to her.

"Do you think that's how the ancient cities were?" She found herself saying, playing with a wisp of grass. The hold of the sword glowed at her right, where she had left it once they had settled for passing the night. She wasn't quite sure if her voice had ever managed to get past her lips so after a few moments of silence she looked at Eretria when the girl's voice sounded above the cracking fire, the voice lacking its normal color, weariness touching each syllable.

"What do you mean?"

Amberle looked at the other brunette, her eyes capturing the light which licked her face, drawing each plane of it.

"The cities you used to have" She clarified, making a face when she realized the sudden stillness on Eretria's pose. "I meant…"

"I know what you meant"

Silence fell once again, both girls looking at the fire as they did so, SafeHaven's sign behind them, standing tall and proud against the sky in which a few stars were barely discernible.

"I don't know" Eretria finally said, making Amberle look at her once again, this time curious, one brow arching as she saw how the rover was smiling at her, half distant, half pained. "It's not like I was able to have an education of what they used to be"

The jab was precise and the elf found herself swallowing it, a bitter taste on the roof of her mouth as she did so. Leaving the wisp and caressing her hands, her mind went once again to Utopia; the lights of the party blinding her once again, the smells and voices she had heard seeming to surround her, her own words to the girl she was now looking at coming back, clouding her senses.

"I wasn't there because of the map" She finally said after a few seconds, her voice almost breaking with the effort, looking directly at Eretria's guarded eyes as she did so. The rover girl just shook her head and sighed. However, her whole body seemed to relax, the way her arms hugged her body changing ever so slightly, creating shadows on the until now lighten face.

"You weren't?"

The question was meant to be harsh, a reminder of the girl Amberle had found back on another kind of forest, back when she had tried to be a teacher and Eretria just a traveler. However, the princess heard the vulnerability behind the word, the way Eretria seemed about to stand up and run, the golden details that flickered over her skin glowing once as she moved, leaving the fire to do the rest.

"I… didn't tell Wil about the details" Amberle admitted, earning a scoff from the other brunette. "But that wasn't because of the map"

"Then why? And why are you telling me this?" Eretria asked, carefully looking at her boots, the heavy buckles of them clicking as she changed her position, hair falling at her right where she left it, lips curling in what seemed to be a sigh.

"Because I do care" The princess admitted, the echoes of another conversation rising between them as Wil kept sleeping soundly, his brows furrowing due to his dreams. "I didn't tell him about the map because I wanted to get you, not lose my time on telling him about the map, about what it meant"

The rover girl said nothing, a sigh rising from her form when she turned to look at Wil, a pensive look on her face. The boy seemed to have changed his dreams, now a placid look on his face, almost a smile on his lips. Amberle also looked at him, head turned to her left, her right hand now playing with the wisp once again, her right one hanging limply between her ankles. She smiled slightly at the thought of Cat and what she would have said regarding her posture. The blonde girl had always loved the kind of etiquette Amberle had always knew but hated.

"I wanted to believe that you would come" Eretria finally said, making the princess open her mouth, not sure of what to answer to that "I just… knew it, wanted to believe it" The sad smile was back on the rover's face and Amberle closed her hands into fists, remembering how frantic she had tried to search for her, how lost she had felt when she had found almost no trace of the other brunette.

"It wasn't easy" She admitted "But... we managed"

"Not with him at your side, right?"

The human was looking at Wil, the boy having now turned to sleep on his left side, his hair falling upon his closed eyes.

Chuckling, Amberle shook her head, giving the most non-committal shrug she could muster. The floor behind her felt dry when she touched it and for a second she bit her bottom lip before she answered, thinking briefly on Arborlon, on how everyone should be doing.

"He found half of the trail" She finally admitted. "Which I didn't"

The question of why was left on the air which seemed to suddenly turn heavier as Eretria looked straightly at Amberle, fire and moonlight lighting her face.

"I'm sorry we didn't manage to be there earlier" Amberle finally admitted, voice broken, eyes on the other's pupils. It was a strange thing to do, to look at Eretria and not receive a harsh word, a sneer or just silence. Biting her bottom lip she kept talking, remembering the way the other girl had looked at her back on the human ruins, on how she had helped her, on how they had shared a laugh. "I…"

Eretria stood and walked towards her, surrounding the fire and plopping herself down next to Amberle's right side, her eyes seeming to burn under the embers, face inscrutable.

"Don't worry princess" She said, voice low, tired "I know how to take care of myself"

Amberle tried to say something to that but the rover girl shrugged before starting to talk once again, voice growing high, tense, her muscles seeming to bulge against her skin. "I mean, I've always known how to, you guys came just in time, that's all"

Amberle glanced at her and narrowed her eyes, looking at the figure of the other girl, her own hands twitching under the presence of the brunette. "Still" She said "Thank you for saving us from the Trolls"

"Well" Eretria replied "I need to be sure that my investment is safe, don't I?"

Amberle didn't reply to that, half-sided smile appearing on her face as her eyes met with Eretria's, the girl's smirk growing bolder as she did so.

The fire cracking in front of them was the only sound that seemed to grow impossibly louder as time passed, the two of them refusing to go to sleep or to try and wake up the boy that kept sleeping next to them, eyes set in front of them, fingers playing and drawing on the floor next to the bonfire.

"You are free, you know?" Amberle said after minutes of silence, her voice hoarse due to that, eyes still set on the fire in front of them. She turned to her side where Eretria had stilled once again, her posture now rigid, hands between her crossed legs, leather shinning as she turned her body just a millimeter towards the princess, just enough to make the elf keep talking. "What you told us, about now having a say on this…"

"I remember what I said" Eretria replied, sighing when her voice rose between them, the shadows around them appearing to also stop to listen. "I was scared" She finally admitted and Amberle fought back the need to touch the girl's arm as she did so, a guarded glint appearing on the human's eyes as she kept talking, almost as she was waiting for the other shoe to drop. "I don't have any memories of myself being free, having the opportunity to think or decide what I wanted to do. I feel…"

"Trapped" Amberle finished for her, a sullen smile on her face when Eretria looked at her. "I may not be like you" She admitted "But when the Ellcrys talked to me… I thought that there wasn't a scape, that the only thing I could do was run."

"Yes, well" Eretria replied "For what I know running is not always the best option, you tend to end up eaten by a troll or something equally stupid"

"Like what's happening to us is normal"

The two girls shared a smile, a chuckle escaping both of their throats. This time it was Eretria the one who spoke first, her voice taking another edge, cautious, almost regretful. Amberle rested the wisp that had been now turned into shreds in the floor as she heard the rover's girl voice reaching for her. The fire in front of them had decreased, turned into just a pile of embers in where just a flickering flame seemed to play with the burned wood every now and them. With a worried glance behind them she fed the fire, the smell of it reaching her nostrils as Eretria talked.

"I also want to say something about Pykon, about what happened there"

Amberle hands turned into fists as she settled herself, thinking again on Remo, on his crazed eyes and the promise of pain and death that his words had inflicted on her body, on how even briefly, she had been tortured, played with.

"It wasn't your fault what happened there" She replied and as she eyed the other brunette she frowned; seeing a look of confusion passing by the rover girls eyes before the glow settled on something close to comprehension. "What happened with Remo" She added and Eretria shrugged and sighed, seeming to almost be about to say something but deciding otherwise.

"If I hadn't stopped to free the rest…" The rover girl started but her words floated between them, getting lost on the wind, not finding completion.

Amberle waited, curious of why the other girl seemed to be so open there, in the dark.

"That wasn't your fault either" Amberle replied softly, eliciting a scoff from the human.

"I know it wasn't" The girl said "But…"

Neither of them spoke, Wil mumbling something on his sleep before falling silent again.

"About Pykon" Amberle found herself saying and even though she had spent hours perfecting the art of lying with her grandfather she felt the tips of her ears grow impossibly hotter under the gaze of Eretria. "I'm sorry of what I said, about you not being better than Cephalo"

"He saved our lives at the end" The other girl deadpanned "Perhaps it's not a bad thing to be like him"

"Still" Amberle replied "I'm sorry, you…"

"I was trying to see how far you would want to go" Eretria said, cutting effectively Amberle's words "That's what I do, find weakness, try to get a rise of others. You weren't wrong on what you said"

"You were just doing that?" The princess said and she cursed herself on her breathy voice, on how it seemed to be almost about to break.

Eretria looked at her and smirked that same confident smirk she had given her back on the bathtub, a smirk of one who knows what they are doing, what they are about to do. The elf gulped at that, slowly, unable to stop her body from doing so.

"What princess? You wanted something else?"

Amberle closed her eyes, thinking on Wil, on what had happened between them, on what she knew had happened between him and the girl that was in front of her. On the words Eretria had said about them being in love with the same guy, on how she had felt when she had realized that the rover girl had fallen behind, wounded on the floor of that human ruins.

"No" She found herself saying "But" She added as she saw the smirk disappearing from Eretria's eyes back when she opened her own.

"But?" And there they were, the teasing smile, the dark, heavy-lidded eyes.

She sighed and licked her lips. They were at war, she reasoned herself, running against time and reason. And still she couldn't look away from Eretria's face, nor did the rover girl seem to be prone on doing it.

"You asked me if I was scared" She replied, her voice raising.

Eretria raised one brow, smiling at her, waiting for the rest of the answer.

"And I'm not"

The human girl chuckled at that, her body seeming to become the fire, Amberle painfully aware of her proximity, on the weight of her jacket on her own shoulders.

"Prove it"

The elf eyed the human, waiting for a comeback to happen, for the joke to keep going, for a word that would signal the end of their banter. Instead, the rover girl stared back at her, lips curling, eyes half-hidden, skin gold, silhouette drawn in the floor at her back, like the charcoal negative of those human pictures from the old days she had heard and read about on books.

"Eretria…" She started, a warning, something that the human girl didn't seem to hear.

"What princess?" She asked, moving closer "I thought you said that you weren't afraid"

And Amberle wasn't, she really wasn't, but as she kept looking at Eretria she felt the beginning of something back on the pit of her stomach, her chest fluttering as she kept eyeing the rover girl, the one who she had hated less than a few days ago, one that had helped her more than once even if that had been grumbling the whole time, one who had been adamant on taking care of a wound, of keeping her warm, on being sure she was ok.

"I'm not" She whispered, her eyes going from the rover lips to her eyes, noticing for the first time that she hadn't realized but they were in fact much closer than before, Eretria's smirk growing, a sigh escaping her parted lips, almost as if she was preparing herself as Amberle's lungs seemed to also maintain themselves void, unable to breathe.

"Then prove it"

The whisper came in puffs of air against the princess lips, a caress on them she almost missed, her body arching slightly as she rose, meeting the now half kneeled girl halfway, her eyes closing the second their lips almost met, a touch, a millimeter away.

Prove it

She had never backed off from a dare, not when she had been a young girl, not now.

And so she kissed her, moving her head to one said, one of her hands entangling itself on the girl's hair, touching the scalp of the human, arching her back, feeling the other's body against her own, the jacket falling from her shoulders as she did so, fire consuming the skin that touched the other's body, creating lines of ashen desire on it.

Eretria's answer was just as quick and oncw they finally parted, still a millimeter away it was Amberle's turn to smirk.

"Told you" She said "I'm not afraid"

Eretria's eyes grew darker at that and from her lips fell one single command.

"Prove it"