The door clicked behind her, soft as a held breath.
He didn't startle. He stayed on his knees, head bowed, the tag clenched in his fist, back a ledger of raised surnames, skin a topography of old violence. The metal of his right leg caught a thin strip of light and gave nothing back.
"You carved their names into your skin," Rose had said. "But you wear everyone else's death like a shroud. You idiot. You didn't have to carry it alone."
His breath rasped once; when he spoke, the words scraped.
"Who was going to wear it, Rose? Hmm?" He lifted his head. The blue didn't soften. "The mothers I had to look in the eye? The ones who looked at me, breathing, walking, and saw the ghost of the child I couldn't bring back? Or my own mother?" His voice dropped to a shredded whisper. "She didn't just lose a son today. She lost her favorite. The one who made her laugh. The easy one. And she had to learn it from me, while she saw this." He tipped his chin toward his right leg. "You think I should add my tears to hers?"
"The only reason I'm alive is because I fell, buried under parts of people I knew…" The tag cut his palm. He didn't look at the blood.
He squared to her, scars catching the dull light. "This? These aren't trophies. They're my failures. Every single one. I lived. They didn't." The next words broke wrong and honest. "And I know… I should've been there for you. You lost him too. I left you alone with it. I'm sorry."
The apology sat between them, unadorned. He straightened, jaw set.
"But I couldn't falter. I had a duty. They deserved it. Explanations. Someone who knew their names, not just their numbers. I asked to be the one. Because I was the only one who loved them enough to let their grief carve me out, too."
He took a step closer and stopped himself there. "But me and him… we shared a heartbeat for sixteen years. You lost him today. I've been losing him every single day for the last four years. I died that day too, Rose. I died in that silence, covered in the absence of my friends, my brother." His hand swept his own body like a verdict. "What you see today, you won't see again." A beat.
He set his palm to the scarred names. The sound was flat and bad. "For all of them, I have to live. I don't need other people to wear my grief. They are my grief. And I will carry them."
Rose's throat tightened around too many truths. Don't be grateful, she warned herself. It's his mouth, not his voice. It's his arms, not his promise. If I reach for him, I'm reaching through him to a ghost.
"You want to know what happened."
She didn't need to answer.
"It was a fog," he said. "A living kind. It ate sound first. Then edges. We were on patrol. Zack was on point." His mouth stopped, started. "He made a joke. I didn't catch it. I turned to hear—" He pinched the bridge of his nose, breathed once. "Then there was nothing where he'd been. Not a strike. Not a body. Absence."
His gaze fixed past her shoulder, seeing it again on a wall she couldn't see. "We tried to pull back. Miller went white and gone like chalk. Rodriguez screamed until the fog took the sound and then him. I felt my right leg vanish from the middle and keep vanishing. I fell. I should have gone, too." He swallowed. "Something heavy came down on me. I couldn't move. The fog moved on."
Rose's hands had knotted in her sleeves without her noticing. She made them open. The blue isn't him, she told herself, and the body didn't listen.
Her breath went thin. She didn't mean to move; her body did it for her. The floor came up.
But he was there.
Before gravity could claim her, his arms, corded with muscle and mapped with silvered evidence of a hundred near-deaths, caught her. They trembled not with weakness, but with the raw, live-wire energy of his own barely contained explosion. He didn't let her fall. He sank with her, a controlled descent to the floor, his back finding the worn sofa, and gathered her into his lap as if she were the last precious thing left in a ruined world. He held on like a man at the edge of a cliff.
She collapsed into him. Her face pressed into the warm angle where neck met shoulder, a frantic, animal search for shelter. He was terribly, vividly warm. Through her clothes she could feel the brutal topography of him, the raised ridges of claw marks, the rough pucker of a burn. His heart hammered against her ear. Copper, dried salt, and the faint, clean sting of ozone from the prosthetic: the scent of a battlefield he had never fully left. He is alive. He is alive. He is alive, she thought, as if that alone could bargain with the universe.
His arms locked around her and became the only reality that mattered. One hand, large and calloused, cradled the base of her skull; his fingers tangled in her hair with a desperate gentleness. The other pressed the shaking planes of her back together. His grip tightened, as if any slack would drop them both.
And then the storm broke. Not gentle rain: convulsion. Deep, tearing sobs dragged up from a place so far in they felt like birth pains. She cried for Zack. For the forty-eight surnames cut into the boy holding her. For the boy Caellum had been and the man he was now, a breathing memorial. He kept his inhale slow so hers could catch.
The tears were not delicate. They soaked his skin, mingled with the blood from his split knuckles. Her nose ran. She drooled. She didn't care. Her fists locked white on the fabric at his hip. Ugly, yes. Honest, finally.
He didn't speak. He didn't offer meanings where there were none. His chin rested on her crown; the tension in his jaw buzzed against her hair. His own breathing shuddered and steadied, as if he were wrestling something vast back into place.
Slowly, the quake ran out of earth. Wild gave way to ragged; ragged to spent. The hitches faded to the heavy pull of a body past its limit. Her cheek stuck warm to his skin. Her fingers unhooked from his clothes. It was his mouth saying the words. Her body kept hearing Zack, Rose thought, and the thought hurt cleanly.
He held her long after she went under. When the light outside the window thinned, he moved with the practiced care of someone used to carrying broken things. One arm under her knees, the other behind her shoulders. The prosthetic whirred, too loud for the small room. He moved with the care of someone afraid to wake her.
His bed was a narrow cot that had once held two boys with more future than they could spend. He laid her down like a relic, pulled the rough blanket up, smoothed it at her shoulder. In the half-light, the blue of his eyes looked almost black. He bent close enough that his breath warmed the shell of her ear.
"He loved you," he said, barely air. "You were his reason." A pause. "I'm sorry I didn't bring him back."
"To you."
He stayed a moment longer, not touching, the unsaid gathering and then dispersing. He straightened. The floorboard near the door gave its small complaint; the hinge answered. He left her in the blanket's held warmth and walked back into the dim house and the long night.
Sleep pulled her under and let her surface only once. In the hush beyond the door she heard a spring complain, the soft thud of a body finding a couch, the quiet click of metal on wood. Then a long, strangled breath, caught and swallowed, as if someone were being careful not to wake a house. After that, only the small sounds of a room learning how to hold sorrow without a voice.