SAGE (under edit)

Chapter Twenty Three - Promises

Sage woke suddenly, the image of Chase charging towards her still lingering behind her eyes. She was silent as she regained her breath and calmed herself, but that didn't loosen the knot in her stomach or the lump in her throat.

Sitting up, Sage scrubbed at her eyes in irritation. Hadn't she come to terms with her decision? Hadn't she made peace with it? No. It wasn't the simple, and she knew that – she just couldn't admit it.

Sage looked across the room to Raidan's futon, but found it empty. It wasn't the first time she had woken to find him missing, and each time she was reminded of when he told her he didn't sleep. Still, Sage wondered if it was because he wouldn't or simply couldn't.

She then looked to the open window, her eyes pausing on the faint yellow-pink in the sky that hinted at morning. Pulling on her boats and jacket, Sage slipped through the window, straddling the windowsill for a moment as she reached up to the eaves of the rooftop above her. Then she pulled herself up, and wasn't surprised to find Raidan sitting on the roof and watching the sunrise, dressed only in the black slacks he had went to bed in.

He regarded her as she climbed onto the roof, the angle of his jaw and the blue in his eyes catching the distant morning light while the rest of him was still doused in shallow darkness.

'I wasn't talking in my sleep again, was I?' she asked softly, turning her back to the sunrise just as he gaze settled onto it.

'You weren't,' he assured her.

'Good,' said Sage, climbing a little higher up the slanted, ramshackle tiles from where Raidan sat so she was just behind him, and within arm's length. But from here, Sage could see the scars across Raidan's bare back. Even in the pre-dawn darkness, his scars stood out in a shade paler than the rest of his back and although the sheer amount of them was impressive enough, Sage was floored by a single, long scar that ran from his left shoulder blade diagonally down to the curve of his waist.

She was reaching out before she gave it a second thought – or any thought at all – and his back stiffened instantly at the contact. He glanced over his shoulder at her and she let her hand hover, the pads of her fingers just barely grazing his skin.

'How did you get this scar?' she asked.

'Fighting,' he replied, rather unhelpfully.

She took the hint. 'If you didn't want to tell me, you just had to say so,' she remarked, pulling back her hand – but Raidan reached over his shoulder, his hand catching hers, and then he turned just slightly to look at her.

'It happened during my first confrontation with Bryce, once I finally tracked him down one year after being with the Shadow Soldiers,' he told her. 'But he knew I had been tracking him, and during our fight Crest Soldiers appeared – ones that he had anonymously tipped off that I would be in the area. He escaped, and I was left to fight them off.'

Sage vaguely recalled a time when the Soldier community had been abuzz about a sighting of Raidan. She had been fifteen, two years had passed since her brother's death, and there had been rumours that a Crest Soldier squad had engaged Raidan. They had, naturally, lost against him but not killing by him. Raidan had let them live. He had sent them home with some impressive wounds, but they had been left alive nonetheless.

'If... if Bryce hadn't set up the trap and had chosen to fight you, do you think... you would have defeated him?'

Raidan considered the question for a moment, his eyes sweeping back to the brightening horizon. 'No, I wouldn't have.'

But maybe that had been the point, Sage mused. Maybe he hadn't cared whether he lived or died, only that he at least tried to avenge Dean; a feeling Sage understood all too well.