But her patience was thinning. Sage could feel it, a fraying at the edges of her tolerance. She was tired of being treated like an acquisition. She was tired of Elizabeth's mechanical affection. She was tired of being the only one investing vulnerability while Elizabeth remained perfectly, coldly controlled.
"I want to go home," Elizabeth said finally, not bothering to specify whose home.
They returned to Elizabeth's apartment. Elizabeth collapsed on the sofa while Sage hovered uncertainly, caught between her own growing resentment and the impulse to care for someone who refused to admit she needed care.
"Just leave me alone," Elizabeth said, not bothering to soften the instruction. "Your concern is exhausting."
Sage felt something in her crack. She stood there, looking at Elizabeth's perfectly composed face even in the midst of obvious pain, and for a moment she considered leaving. Just walking out. Choosing herself over this endless cycle of giving and not-receiving.
But then Elizabeth opened her eyes and looked at Sage with an expression that was almost vulnerable, and Sage recognised that this was the moment where Elizabeth's facade would crack completely if Sage abandoned her. This was the moment where Elizabeth would be forced to actually feel something.
And despite everything, despite the mechanical affection and the transactional dynamic and the collecting, Sage couldn't do it. Couldn't walk out and leave Elizabeth alone with whatever was actually happening inside her body and her carefully controlled mind.
So instead, she dimmed the lights, brought water and additional painkillers, and sat quietly on the opposite end of the sofa, present without being intrusive, offering comfort without demanding gratitude or acknowledgement.
She watched Elizabeth in the half-darkness and understood something clearly: Elizabeth didn't know how to accept comfort. Elizabeth had been trained, by something or someone, to interpret care as weakness. To experience vulnerability as failure.
And Elizabeth was experiencing something right now that forced her to be vulnerable, and it was clearly terrifying.
Hours later, as the migraine began to recede and Elizabeth drifted toward sleep, Sage moved closer and, carefully, infinitely gently, ran her fingers through Elizabeth's dark hair. It was a gesture that suggested care, tenderness, and genuine concern for Elizabeth's well-being, the kind of gesture Elizabeth usually rejected or ignored.
But this time, Elizabeth didn't push her away. Elizabeth's breathing slowed. Her shoulders, which had been tensed throughout the evening, began to relax. And for the first time since Sage had known her, Elizabeth appeared to simply accept being cared for.
Sage continued the gesture long after Elizabeth had fallen asleep, her fingers moving through that dark hair with the tenderness she normally kept carefully locked away. Because underneath everything, underneath the resentment and the exhaustion and the justified anger, Sage loved her. Sage loved the person Elizabeth was trying so desperately not to be. Sage loved the vulnerability that Elizabeth had just permitted, however reluctantly.
But she couldn't keep doing this forever. Sage knew that with crystalline clarity. She couldn't keep being the person who gave while Elizabeth remained perfectly controlled and untouched. She couldn't keep accepting mechanical affection in exchange for genuine emotional vulnerability.
Something would have to break. Something would have to give. And Sage was beginning to understand that if Elizabeth continued to treat her like an acquisition rather than a person, Sage would have to break it herself.
But not tonight. Tonight, she would sit beside Elizabeth and run her fingers through her hair and let herself pretend that this moment meant something to Elizabeth, that the acceptance of care was the beginning of something real rather than just another respite before the walls went back up.
Elizabeth woke to sunlight and the sensation of Sage's hand still in her hair, and the first feeling that moved through her was irritation at the violation of her boundaries. The second feeling was something far more complicated.
She lay motionless, not wanting to alert Sage that she'd woken, and tried to process what had happened. She'd been vulnerable. She'd accepted care. She'd permitted Sage to touch her without strategic calculation.
The experience was deeply unsettling.
Elizabeth should have felt nothing. Should have recognised that this moment changed nothing, that Sage's tenderness was just another tool Elizabeth could use to maintain control. But something in her chest was moving in a way she didn't recognise, a sensation that felt dangerously close to gratitude.
She pushed it away. Gratitude was weakness. Gratitude suggested that she owed Sage something in return for the care offered. Elizabeth didn't owe anyone anything.
But as Sage began to stir, as she slowly withdrew her hand and opened her eyes, Elizabeth found herself unable to maintain the complete coldness she usually deployed.
"You stayed," Elizabeth said, the words surprising her with their vulnerability.
"Of course I stayed," Sage replied softly. But there was something in her voice, not anger exactly, but a kind of weariness that suggested her patience with this dynamic was not infinite.
Elizabeth understood, in that moment, that Sage was beginning to break. That the constant giving without reciprocation was finally catching up with her patience. That if Elizabeth continued to treat her like an acquisition, Sage would eventually leave.
The thought terrified her in a way she didn't want to examine too closely.
"The migraine- " Elizabeth started, then stopped. She'd been about to dismiss the incident as irrelevant, to perform recovery and competence and to return to perfect control. But something in the way Sage was looking at her, with such clear exhaustion and such persistent care, made the performance feel hollow.
"I know," Sage said quietly. "I'm here."
Elizabeth didn't respond. She couldn't respond. Because responding would mean acknowledging that Sage mattered to her, that her presence mattered, that the vulnerability of the previous evening meant something.
And Elizabeth Wynsor had spent her entire adult life learning never to acknowledge such things.
She filed the moment away as she always did, tucked it into the corner of her mind where she kept all the things she refused to process. But something had shifted. Something had cracked in the architecture of her perfect control.
She didn't know yet what that crack meant. She didn't know yet that it was the beginning of something that would eventually reshape her entire understanding of what it meant to want something real rather than something acquired.
She just knew that for the first time in her carefully constructed life, Elizabeth Wynsor was afraid of losing something other than power or money or status.
She was afraid of losing Sage.
And she had absolutely no idea how to process that fear.