He wants things he doesn't want to want. God. It was one thing to imagine this as sex, explosively incredible sex, and it's another to wake himself pining for things he shouldn't have. He misses his family, but he can't have them back: twenty years without him, and why would they have him now? Younger than his youngest son, a burden, an omega, and then he'd have the privilege of living long enough to lose them all again.

If he's been brought back for a reason, it must be this, he thinks. It feels like Fate moves the two of them. Like it matters, the way the gentle, small things at the end of stories matter.

This isn't the end for Alexander, though. He has to live on after Burr, now. His turn.

He meets Burr's eyes one morning, and knows that his refuge in denial is done. He flinches back from Burr's touch, like he is burned, and curls his legs up in front of him. Curling protectively around the so-soft, so-small swell at his belly.

The nausea and the nosebleeds are less, but his emotions are stronger. He shouldn't have let them get the better of him, at the party three days ago. He'd just wanted to punish Burr, for all of it, for the failure of the cotton root, for the inadequacy of even his small, new-life plans, for everything.

He buries his face in his arms, curled up tight. What is he going to do?