The air in the crowded, noisy pub was thick with the smell of fried food, soda, and a hundred overlapping conversations. It was a familiar, comforting chaos. Kairos hadn't realized how much he'd missed it until he was in the middle of it, wedged into a sticky booth with Robin, Sam, and Drake.
A massive platter of buffalo wings sat in the center of the table, a mountain of crispy, sauced-up carnography. It was a beautiful sight.
"So let me get this straight," Robin said, around a mouthful of wing. "The great fight… the thing that had you looking like a kicked puppy… was about whether a number was a number?"
Kairos sighed, already regretting his moment of vulnerability. "It was about data serialization and validation, but yes, that's the simplified version."
Drake shook his head in mock awe. "Poetic. Truly. I'm getting emotional. 'He said number, she said string…' It's like a modern-day Romeo and Juliet."
"If Romeo was a backend dev and Juliet was a frontend dev, they'd have never gotten past the balcony scene," Sam deadpanned. "'I'll throw myself upon the rocks below!' 'Wait, are the rocks an array or an object? The error handling is unclear.'"
Kairos threw a napkin at him. "Laugh it up. It was a legit problem."
"Oh, it's legit," Robin agreed, wiping sauce from his chin. "It's the most legit nerd problem I've ever heard. I'm just glad you made up. The world needs more love stories that are resolved by deleting rogue middleware."
"We didn't 'make up,'" Kairos insisted, though he was fighting a smile. "We came to a technical resolution."
"You apologized," Drake said, pointing a celery stick at him. "You used the words 'I'm sorry.' Don't try to refactor your humanity into code, bro. We heard you."
Kairos gave up. He grabbed a wing. "Fine. Yes. I apologized. She accepted. The map works now. It's all good."
"And she said… what was it?" Robin pressed, his eyes gleaming. "She said 'same'? As in, she'd also rather be stressed with you than bored without you?"
"That's a… generous interpretation of the word 'same,'" Kairos mumbled, his ears turning pink.
"It's the only interpretation!" Robin crowed. "Face it, man. You're in it. You're building a whole app together. You're having fights and making up. You're basically married. You just need to combine your GitHub repositories and get a joint bank account for cloud hosting fees."
The table erupted in laughter. Kairos buried his face in his hands, but he was laughing too. It felt good. The tension of the week was finally, truly, melting away in the heat of the wings and the warmth of his friends' relentless, affectionate teasing.
"Speaking of the app," Sam said, once the laughter died down. "How is it actually going? Beyond the lover's spats."
Kairos's face lit up. He couldn't help it. "It's… it's really cool, actually. She set up this whole CI/CD pipeline so our code automatically deploys when we push to the main branch. The map is integrated now. You can drop a pin on campus. It's slick."
He pulled out his phone and pulled up the test build. He showed them the simple, clean interface. He demonstrated creating an issue, dropping a pin right outside the pub.
"See? Now it's on the map. And if you guys all had the app, you could upvote it." He demonstrated, tapping the upvote button. The count went from 0 to 1.
Drake whistled. "Okay, that is actually dope. So it's like a 'fix this please' heatmap for the whole university?"
"Exactly," Kairos said, a proud grin spreading across his face. "And we're building an admin panel next, so facility teams can actually see what's reported and update the status."
There was a moment of respectful silence as they all looked at the little app on his phone. The silly fight was forgotten, replaced by genuine appreciation for what he was building.
"Damn, Kairos," Robin said, his teasing tone gone. "You and the princess are actually going to do it. You're going to build a thing that matters."
The words landed heavily and warmly in Kairos's chest. That was it. That was the feeling he couldn't articulate. It wasn't just a project for a grade. It was a thing that mattered.
"Yeah," he said, putting his phone away. "Maybe we are."
The conversation moved on. They argued about professors, complained about assignments, and planned a disastrous-sounding camping trip for the following month. For a few hours, Kairos wasn't a developer wrestling with bugs or a partner navigating a fragile new dynamic. He was just a guy at a table with his friends, eating terrible food and laughing too loud.
As they were getting ready to leave, sticky-fingered and satisfied, Robin slung an arm around Kairos's shoulders.
"Seriously, though," he said, his voice low. "I'm glad it's going well. And I'm glad you're not holed up in your room anymore. We missed you, you know."
Kairos nodded, the simple sentiment meaning more than any of the jokes. "I missed this too."
"Good," Robin said, giving him a shake. "Now don't be a stranger. Or else we'll have to stage an intervention involving more wings and more teasing."
Kairos laughed. "Noted."
Walking back to his hostel, the cool night air felt clean and new. The fight with Ares felt like a necessary step, not a setback. The approval of his friends felt like a anchor. He had his people. He had his project. And for the first time in a long time, everything felt exactly as it should be.