The classroom returns the way certain smells do—chalk and sun-warmed floorboards and the faint, clean bite of window glass. Dust turns slowly in the beam like a patient galaxy. The light is the same light, the benches the same benches; the clock eats the seconds with the same small teeth. Even the boredom feels identical, like a shirt put back on after too many days.
Breuk is at the window again. Of course he is. Chin in palm, the heel grinding a small ache into the cheekbone. His other hand drifts on the desk, carving thoughtless lines into the soft scar of the wood. He watches the flag outside do the work of wind, and the wind outside do the work of time.
Back here… again.
He lets his gaze drift across the room, like you trick an animal by not looking directly at it. Lig is exactly where the memory keeps him: blond, composed, uniform so correct it looks like it came with the bones. The smile sits softly on his mouth, the way sunlight sits on a lake: not because it has to; because it can. He's talking to the girl—braid, ribbon slipping, eyes bright with wounded logic. On the blackboard behind them, a proof has paused halfway, halfway right and halfway useful.
The slap arrives like punctuation.
PATSCH.
Paper in the room trembles. The girl leaves with the briskness of a verdict. Lig does not move to follow. He angles his chin, almost saintly, as if offering his profile to a portraitist. The smile remains, no larger, no smaller.
Breuk watches him watch Breuk.
This time the glance does not bounce. It holds. Too direct, too long. Lig's eyes do not blink. The dull classroom noises die obediently—the chalk-scratch, the flag, the hallway cough. In their place, a listening silence moves in and takes a seat.
What—?
Lig is no longer where he was. He is here, standing in front of Breuk's desk as if the space between were an inconvenience easily redacted. His face is shadowed by nothing Breuk can name. The voice is quiet and sharpened to a point.
"What do you actually want?"
Breuk opens his mouth. Nothing. The throat is a clenched fist. His tongue has no language. He reaches for the old tricks—joke, shrug, smoke screen—and finds only air. Lig leans forward, a fraction.
"You always talk," he murmurs, almost kindly, "but you say nothing."
Breuk's eyes go wide, the way eyes do in firelight and in confession. The voice comes again, doubled, as if it has found an echo chamber behind his ribs.
"You want nothing… do you?"
The words are both accusation and diagnosis. They weigh almost nothing and everything.
A breath rips out of him. The world tears along the seam of the voice.
He wakes on the inhale, like a diver breaking the surface with teeth bared to water.
Darkness, but not the honest kind; this has edges. A single, shivering light above—fire nesting in a cut-down can, a wick fat with oil, the flame hunched in its own heat. Shadows muscle against patchwork walls: metal sheets scavenged from old vents, cloth nailed where the metal wouldn't forgive, wood splints arguing with rust.
He is in a bed if you're feeling generous: fabric and leaves and something that used to be a coat, all pretending to be soft. He is still a body, which surprises him a little. He listens to the sound of being alive. It isn't pretty. The breath saws, catches, finds a rhythm and loses it again.
He lifts his right hand (the hand that is his) and locates himself: brow—bandage, sticky with antiseptic that smells like solvent and mint; cheek—a bruise that argues its case; sternum—cloth, wet in a starburst where water decided to bless or mock. His palm finds the breast pocket and presses. There: the hard, cold circle beneath, a small planet against bone.
Still here.
He doesn't know if the thought is relief or new trouble.
He lets the right hand stray left and stops. The absence announces itself with politeness, then insistence. He looks down because not looking is worse.
His left side has been decided without him. Where the machine once pretended to be a limb—Tara's craft, Tara's stubbornness—there is now weight, then nothing. The stump is wrapped in clean strips and smarter knots than his own hands could manage. The dressing darkens in places, then calms. A fine tremor walks his shoulder and refuses to leave.
Phantom fingers clench. The mind is slow to understand a vote it lost.
He tries to swallow the sound. It comes anyway—a raw breath that thinks it's a word. His chest answers with a small rebellion of pain. He rides it until it puts him down.
The little room breathes with him. Metal pops softly as it remembers heat and changes its mind. Fabric wall sigh. Somewhere close, water chooses a ledge and lets go, drop by careful drop.
A hinge murmurs. He looks toward the door—a door only in the sense that a thing that opens and closes is a door. A thin shape fills the crack, then the room's ragged light.
"Don't move," a young voice says. Not snapping, not sweet. Instruction, not request. "You'll bleed again."
Breuk's mouth finds the old rasp. "Who… are you…?"
A gloved finger lifts to a covered mouth. "Quiet," the young man says. "I'll explain later." The face is half cloth, half dirt, the eyes the sort you see in the glass of a window and think is yours until it moves. The clothes are everyone's castoffs and no one's. "You should… actually be dead."
He thinks about correcting the actually. He doesn't. The effort looks too expensive.
He tastes the inside of the word dead and finds a memory of classroom light hiding there, the word want hanging like a coat from the line of Lig's mouth.
Maybe I was.
The thought surprises him by being gentle.
His gaze floats up, finds the candle again. The flame leans, returns. A draft walks through the room, learning the map. The kid stands in it like a small flag.
"Drink?" the voice offers, softer now, holding up a battered mug that steams like a modest miracle.
He nods because nodding is the only rhythm he can afford. The young man kneels, careful as a mechanic, slides a hand behind his head, lifts it the way you lift something precious you found broken and want to keep. The mug touches his lower lip. The liquid is not water, not entirely—something boiled with something else, leaves or bark, a taste that wants to be medicinal and settles for being warm.
He takes a sip. The throat protests, relents. The warmth speaks to the part of him that still thinks in street maps. The young man does not take the mug away too soon.
"You got lucky," the voice says, so matter-of-fact it sounds like kindness.
He does not answer. His right hand, disobedient and honest, drifts to his chest again, as if to soothe a pet only he knows he owns. The disc is colder now, and calmer. He cannot tell if it sleeps or watches.
The young man notices the gesture and politely pretends not to.
Silence ambles between them, sits down on the floor, folds its legs. The small flame puts a gold edge on every junk piece in the room: a bent wrench; a jar with three screws, one wrong size; a strip of cloth hung to dry that never will. The walls carry stains that might have been maps once.
From somewhere behind the wall—roots or pipes or an old duct that learned how to sing—a slow hum begins, the sort you feel more than hear. He thinks of water moving where no one can see, deciding to be merciful to no one in particular. He thinks of Lig standing too close and asking a question with no polite answer. He thinks of a necklace choosing his chest over the floor.
The young man's shadow leans and lengthens and then remembers its manners. The last image his mind keeps is the mug beside the bed, the steam writing nothing in particular into the cold.
Black finds him, soft-fingered.
Maybe I was, he tells it, more sure this time.