There had been three days between the pull's first arrival and the pull's final claiming of him, and Ash had spent every hour of them trying, without much success, to memorize her.
Not her face — he'd never once needed to work at that, it had settled into him early and completely, the exact set of her eyes when she was thinking hard about something, the way her mouth tucked sideways when she was fighting not to smile at him for no good reason. What he'd found himself memorizing instead was smaller than that, harder to hold onto on purpose: the particular rhythm of her breathing when she fell asleep sitting up against his shoulder, the warmth of her hand shifting slightly in his every few minutes even in sleep, as if some part of her needed to keep checking he was still there.
He hadn't understood, before Maren, that a person could be afraid of losing something they didn't yet have the words to call theirs. He understood it now, in the three slow days before the second Mission finally claimed him, with a clarity that felt almost like grief arriving early, borrowing against a loss that hadn't happened yet.
"You're doing the thing again," she said, on the second evening, not opening her eyes, her voice thick with the edge of sleep. "The staring thing."
"I like looking at you."
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"You like worrying at me," she corrected, gently, finally cracking one eye open to find him exactly where she'd expected. "I can feel it. You go very still when you're scared. Stiller than usual, even for you."
"I'm not scared."
"Ash."
"I'm not scared of the Mission," he amended, honest, because lying to her had never once occurred to him as something worth attempting. "I'm scared of three days from now, when I'm somewhere you're not, and something happens, and you're not there to — " He stopped, unable to finish it, the shape of the sentence too large and too raw to say out loud.
"To what."
"To be the reason I remember how to come back," he said, finally, quiet, and felt her go still against him in turn, some of her own carefully-held composure slipping for just a moment before she gathered it back up.
"You'll remember," she said, with a certainty that sounded, to him, like something she'd decided to believe rather than something she actually knew, though he loved her too much in that moment to point it out. "You always remember. That's the whole shape of you, Ash. You don't forget things that matter. I've watched you not-forget for over a year now. I trust it more than I trust almost anything else in this whole strange, gray world."
He held onto that — held onto her, and the sentence, and the specific, stubborn faith underneath it — for the whole of the third day, right up until the pull finally, fully claimed him and the hillside folded away and he was alone with nothing left to hold onto but the memory of her voice telling him he wouldn't forget.