They did not repeat the experiment immediately.
Not because Ira was afraid.
Because Devansh was.
The recognition unsettled him more than any battle ever had. It lingered in the way his awareness refused to return to stillness, in the faint tension in his chest that did not fade with time.
He had lived centuries without direction.
Now something in him insisted on one.
They stood in one of the narrow corridors overlooking the inner wells, pale light drifting between high arches. Ira watched him carefully, sensing the strange dissonance in his emotional architecture.
"You're not empty right now," she said quietly.
"I am unaltered," he replied.
She shook her head. "No. You're… unstable."
The word was not accusation.
It was observation.
He did not deny it.
"When you touched me," he said, "something aligned that should not have."
She folded her arms lightly across her body. "And that's dangerous."
"Yes."
"But also," she added, "necessary."
Devansh studied her. "How do you know?"
"Because structures that never change… break instead."
The heaviness inside her shifted faintly, echoing the truth of it.
She stepped closer.
"I don't want to take your centuries from you," she said. "I don't want to rewrite you."
"Then what do you want?" he asked.
She lifted her gaze to his.
"I want to see what you were meant to be before someone decided you couldn't feel."
Silence deepened.
Then, carefully, she reached out.
This time, Devansh did not remain still.
He turned his wrist beneath her fingers.
Chose the contact.
The sensation struck Ira first—not the crushing wave she had known, but something shaped. Focused.
A narrow channel of emotion uncoiled.
Loneliness—not vast, but intimate.
A singular absence.
A place inside him that had never been named because nothing had ever approached it.
Ira's breath hitched.
She did not absorb it.
She held it.
Aligned it.
And for Devansh, something did not break.
It surfaced.
A tight, unfamiliar ache gathered beneath his sternum.
He inhaled sharply.
It was not pain.
It was not memory.
It was an orientation toward something outside himself.
A pull that did not command.
It invited.
He pulled his hand back slowly.
The corridor felt altered.
The city's hum faltered.
Somewhere below them, something deep resonated in answer.
Ira's knees weakened.
He steadied her instinctively.
Their proximity shifted the air.
"This is costing you," Devansh said.
She nodded faintly. "Everything does."
He watched her closely. "And me?"
She met his gaze.
"You are not free," she said. "But you are no longer untouched."
The words lingered between them like a fault line.