Three days passed.
The College administration moved with bureaucratic efficiency—sealing the north tower, confiscating all consciousness manipulation equipment, placing the thirteen freed individuals under supervised medical care. Archmagister Mordris was transferred to a secure facility pending formal charges. The Ministry of Magical Affairs established a permanent oversight presence on campus.
And Elarion Voss was officially, publicly, undeniably visible.
He hated it.
Not the visibility itself—he'd made peace with that decision. But the constant attention. Students staring in hallways. Whispers following him to classes. The weight of being known after sixteen years of being forgotten.
"You look like you want to crawl into a hole," Lira observed.
They were in the dining hall—sitting together deliberately, visibly, making their association clear. Part of the agreement with administration: no more covert operations, no more secret meetings. Everything above board, transparent, supervised.
It felt like wearing skin inside out.
"I look like someone adjusting to sudden fame," Elarion corrected. "There's a difference."
"Barely." She pushed her plate toward him. "Eat something. You've lost weight."
"I'm fine."
"You're running on coffee and stubbornness. That's not fine. That's how people collapse during lectures and become campus legends for the wrong reasons."
He took a piece of bread to satisfy her, even though his appetite was still suppressed from the aftermath of extreme magical exertion. His body was still recovering—the migraine had faded to manageable background pain, the nosebleeds had stopped, but exhaustion clung like fog.
"How are you handling it?" he asked. "The attention."
"Better than you. Medical students are used to being associated with dramatic events. We patch people up after they do stupid things—sometimes we're complicit in the stupid things." She sipped her water. "Plus, I'm not the mysterious former military asset who destroyed a consciousness manipulation network with his bare hands. That's you. I'm just the medic who provided support."
"You did more than provide support."
"I administered drugs and checked vital signs. You fought a hive mind with physics." She smiled. "We both know who the hero of this story is."
"There's no hero. Just people who did what needed doing."
"That's very humble. Also very wrong. But I'll let you believe it if it helps you sleep."
Elarion almost smiled. Their dynamic had settled into something comfortable over the past three days—careful banter, mutual support, the slow exploration of what they were becoming to each other. No grand romantic gestures. No dramatic declarations. Just presence. Consistency. The steady building of trust.
It was terrifying in its normalcy.
"I'm resuming training tonight," he said quietly. "My abilities were pushed beyond safe parameters during the tower incident. I need to recalibrate, make sure I didn't cause permanent damage to my neural pathways."
"Where?"
"The old gymnasium. East side of campus, near the medical building. It's rarely used after dark—outdated equipment, poor lighting. Perfect for privacy."
"You want me there?"
He paused, considering. His instinct was to say no—training was solitary, personal, something he'd always done alone. But that was the old pattern. The isolation habit.
"Yes," he said. "If you want. But it won't be interesting. Just repetitive exercises and concentration drills."
"I'll bring a book." She finished her water. "What time?"
"Midnight."
"Of course it's midnight. Because normal hours would be too reasonable." But she was smiling. "I'll be there."
The old gymnasium lived up to its reputation. Dust motes danced in moonlight filtering through high windows. Ancient equipment—wooden training dummies, rope climbing apparatus, weights that predated modern metallurgy—lined the walls like museum pieces. The space was vast, echoing, and utterly empty.
Perfect.
Elarion stood in the center of the floor, barefoot on worn wood, and began the ritual he'd performed thousands of times.
Breath first. Control the body's most basic function. In for four counts, hold for four, out for four, hold for four. Repeat until heartbeat steadied, until conscious thought separated from autonomic response.
Then friction.
He started small. A single square foot of floor beneath his right foot. Reducing the coefficient gradually, carefully, monitoring his mental state for signs of strain or instability. The wood's surface became slicker. His foot slid fractionally.
He maintained the effect for thirty seconds. Released it. Rested for thirty seconds. Repeated.
Muscle memory, but for the mind.
After ten repetitions, he expanded the area. Two square feet. Same process—reduce friction, maintain, release, rest. His concentration sharpened, finding the familiar grooves of practiced technique.
The gymnasium door opened quietly.
Lira slipped inside, medical bag on one shoulder, book in hand. She found a spot against the wall, settled down on a mat, and opened her book. Said nothing. Just present. Witnessing without interfering.
Elarion continued his exercises.
Next: silence manipulation.
He generated a sphere of acoustic dampening around himself—two feet radius, sound cancellation at approximately seventy percent effectiveness. Not combat-grade, just enough to muffle his breathing, his footsteps, the rustle of his clothes.
Maintained for one minute. Released. Rested. Repeated.
The technique required perfect mental modeling of wave interference patterns. Any lapse in concentration and the sphere collapsed. Any overcorrection and it could expand uncontrollably, affecting areas beyond his intention.
During the war, he'd once accidentally created a silence field that encompassed an entire building. Forty soldiers suddenly unable to hear each other, panicking in absolute quiet. He'd been fourteen.
He didn't make that mistake anymore.
After silence came confusion—the most delicate, most dangerous manipulation.
Elarion approached this cautiously. Rather than targeting another person, he practiced on himself. Inducing minor perceptual distortions in his own visual cortex—making the far wall appear slightly closer than it was, or shifting colors fractionally left on the spectrum.
Gentle alterations. Nothing that would cause lasting damage.
Each successful manipulation, he logged mentally. Duration, intensity, recovery time. Building a detailed map of his current capabilities versus his pre-tower baseline.
The assessment was concerning.
His friction manipulation was at approximately eighty-five percent effectiveness. Good, but not optimal. The neural pathways were slightly scarred from the strain of affecting thirteen targets simultaneously.
Silence manipulation was closer to ninety percent. Better. This technique drew on different neural structures, less affected by the tower incident.
But confusion manipulation—the most complex, most demanding technique—was down to seventy percent. Significant degradation. The perceptual scrambling he'd maintained on thirteen bodies simultaneously had burned neural grooves too deep, left cognitive scar tissue that would take weeks or months to heal.
If it healed at all.
"How bad?" Lira asked from across the gymnasium.
Elarion released his current exercise, walked over to sit beside her. "Manageable. Nothing permanent, probably. But I need to retrain the neural pathways carefully. If I push too hard too fast, I risk making the damage worse."
"What does that mean practically?"
"It means I'm weaker than I was a week ago. If another threat emerges, if I need to fight something—I'm not operating at full capacity."
"Good," Lira said firmly.
He blinked. "Good?"
"Good. Because maybe being slightly weaker means you won't immediately volunteer to grab the next consciousness manipulation device you encounter. Maybe you'll actually work with people instead of trying to handle everything alone."
"That's not—" He stopped. She was right. That was exactly what he'd done. Grabbed the apparatus, pushed himself beyond safe limits, nearly died in the process. "Fair point."
"I know." She set down her book. "Elarion, I understand the impulse. I really do. When you've survived by being self-sufficient, asking for help feels like weakness. But you have allies now. Use them."
"I'm trying. This is trying." He gestured at her presence. "Letting you watch me train. Admitting my capabilities are reduced. That's not something I would have done a week ago."
"I know. And I appreciate it." Her voice softened. "I just don't want you to fall back into old patterns when stress increases. Because stress will increase. That's how life works."
"You sound like you're speaking from experience."
"I am. After Blackridge—after losing my squad—I isolated completely for six months. Told myself I was fine, I could handle it alone, that asking for help was admitting defeat." She looked at her hands. "Then I collapsed during a practical exam from exhaustion and malnutrition. Woke up in medical care with a psychiatrist explaining the concept of 'self-destructive coping mechanisms.'"
Elarion had suspected something like this, but hearing it confirmed added weight to the knowledge.
"What changed?" he asked.
"Mandatory therapy. Forced social interaction. And eventually, grudgingly, accepting that maybe isolation wasn't actually helping." She smiled wryly. "Still working on it. Still default to handling things alone when I'm stressed. But I'm trying to catch myself, to reach out before I spiral."
"And this—us—is part of that?"
"Yes. And no. It's not therapy. It's not a coping mechanism. It's..." She searched for words. "It's choosing connection despite the risk. Choosing to be vulnerable with someone who understands vulnerability. Does that make sense?"
"Perfect sense."
They sat in comfortable silence, the gymnasium vast and empty around them. Moonlight shifted through windows as clouds passed. Somewhere distant, a bell tolled the hour.
"Tell me about the war," Lira said quietly. "Your part in it. The things that made you want to disappear."
Elarion tensed instinctively. This was territory he'd avoided with everyone, always. The classified operations, the assignments that blurred the line between soldier and assassin.
But he'd promised honesty. Vulnerability. The willingness to try despite fear.
"I was mostly deployed behind enemy lines," he said slowly. "Reconnaissance, sabotage, targeted elimination of high-value assets. The kind of work that officially doesn't exist."
"Assassinations."
"Among other things. Yes."
"How old were you?"
"Started at twelve. Became fully operational at fourteen. Retired at eighteen when the war ended."
Lira's expression showed carefully controlled horror. "You were a child."
"I was a weapon. There's a difference." He looked at his hands—clean now, but memory was persistent. "They took a traumatized six-year-old with useful abilities and turned him into something that could move through crowds unseen, eliminate targets without trace, disappear before anyone realized what happened."
"That's not making you a weapon. That's child exploitation."
"Functionally, it's the same thing."
"It's absolutely not." Her voice was fierce. "Weapons don't feel guilt. Don't choose to disappear because they can't live with what they've done. Don't spend sixteen years trying to erase themselves from existence because the person they were forced to become is unbearable."
Elarion felt something crack in his chest. The careful compartmentalization he'd maintained for years, the separation between what he'd done and who he was.
"I killed people, Lira. A lot of people. Sometimes they were soldiers, enemy combatants, legitimate military targets. Sometimes they were..." He trailed off. "Sometimes the definitions were murkier. Political targets. Suspected collaborators. People whose deaths served strategic purposes whether or not they'd personally committed crimes."
"How many?"
The question was direct, unavoidable.
"Confirmed? Thirty-seven. Probable? Closer to fifty." He met her eyes. "I don't remember all their faces. Some of them I never saw clearly—just shadows I made fall silently in darkness. But I remember enough. Remember wondering if they had families, if anyone would mourn them, if their deaths actually accomplished anything strategic or if they were just names on a list someone decided were expendable."
Lira took his hand. Held it firmly.
"You were fourteen," she said. "And someone gave you a list of people to kill. That's not your failure. That's the failure of every adult who should have protected you instead of weaponizing you."
"Doesn't change what I did."
"No. But it changes the context. You were a child soldier. Exploited, manipulated, given impossible choices in situations designed to destroy you." She squeezed his hand. "I'm not saying you don't carry responsibility. But I am saying the adults who created those situations carry more."
Elarion wanted to argue. Wanted to insist on full culpability, on the guilt he'd carried so carefully for so long. But her certainty was compelling. Her refusal to let him claim all the blame.
"It doesn't feel like enough," he said quietly. "Blaming the system, the adults, the strategic necessity. It feels like excusing myself."
"There's a difference between understanding context and excusing actions. You can acknowledge you were exploited while still holding yourself accountable for choices you made within that exploitation." She leaned against his shoulder. "It's complicated. It's allowed to be complicated."
They sat like that for a while—physical contact without pressure, presence without demand.
"Thank you," Elarion said eventually. "For not running when I told you."
"Thank you for telling me. For trusting me with it."
"Did you... want to run?"
"Honestly? A little bit. The analytical part of my brain noted that getting involved with someone who has that much blood on their hands is objectively a terrible decision." She smiled slightly. "But then the rest of my brain pointed out that I'm not exactly innocent either. I've made medical decisions that prioritized some patients over others. Performed triage that meant choosing who lived and who died. It's different than direct killing, but the moral complexity is similar."
"That's not the same—"
"It's not identical. But it's adjacent. We've both been put in positions where impossible choices were required, where any decision caused harm, where surviving meant accepting we couldn't save everyone." She looked up at him. "So no, I didn't run. Because I understand that people can be both more and less than the worst things they've done."
Elarion felt his throat tighten with emotion he wasn't sure how to name. Gratitude, maybe. Or relief. Or the strange vertigo of being seen completely—the terrible and the tender—and not being rejected.
"I don't deserve you," he said.
"That's not how this works. Relationships aren't merit-based. They're choice-based. And I choose this. I choose you. Complicated history and all."
"Even though it's objectively a terrible decision?"
"Especially because of that. All the best decisions are at least slightly terrible."
He laughed—surprised out of him, genuine and rare.
"What?" Lira asked.
"You. Us. The absurdity of sitting in an abandoned gymnasium at midnight discussing child soldiers and medical triage and calling it romantic."
"Is it romantic?"
"Strangely, yes. In a deeply dysfunctional way."
"Good. I prefer my romance dysfunctional and honest over functional and fake."
They lapsed into silence again. Easier now. The weight of confession shared, the burden of truth distributed between them.
Elarion stood after a few minutes. "I should finish my training. Another hour of calibration exercises."
"Need help?"
"What kind of help?"
"I could be a target. For the confusion manipulation. Give you something to practice on that isn't yourself."
He hesitated. "That's potentially dangerous. If I miscalculate, I could cause actual perceptual damage."
"I trust you not to." She stood, brushed dust from her pants. "And you need to practice on actual targets if you're going to rebuild your capabilities. Might as well be someone who understands the risks and consents to them."
It made tactical sense. And more than that—it was trust, offered freely. The kind of vulnerability that matched his confession.
"Okay," he said. "But we start extremely gentle. Minor visual shifts. Nothing that causes discomfort."
"I'm a field medic. I've had worse than discomfort."
"That's not reassuring."
"Wasn't meant to be reassuring. Was meant to be permission."
They spent the next hour working together. Elarion generated subtle perceptual shifts—making distant objects appear fractionally closer, adjusting color saturation by small degrees, introducing minor temporal delays between visual input and processing.
Lira reported her experiences clinically, helping him map the relationship between his manipulation intensity and her perceptual effects. They worked methodically, scientifically, building a detailed understanding of his current capabilities.
By the time they finished, Elarion had better data than any solo training session could have provided.
And more importantly, he'd proven to himself that he could practice vulnerability—both in confession and in collaboration—without the sky falling.
"That was productive," Lira said as they prepared to leave.
"Very. Thank you for being willing."
"Thank you for trusting me." She shouldered her bag. "Same time tomorrow?"
"You want to do this again?"
"I want to support your recovery. If that means being your practice target, so be it." She smiled. "Besides, it's kind of fascinating from a neurological perspective. Most people don't get to experience controlled perceptual manipulation."
"Most people have better survival instincts."
"Probably true."
They left the gymnasium together, walking across campus under stars that seemed brighter than they had a week ago. Perhaps because Elarion was looking up for the first time in years instead of keeping his eyes on the ground.
At the dormitory entrance, they paused.
"Elarion?" Lira said.
"Yeah?"
"What you told me tonight. About the war, the assignments, the kills. That doesn't change anything between us. You know that, right?"
"I hoped. Wasn't sure."
"Now you are." She stood on her toes and kissed his cheek—brief, soft, deliberately casual. "Goodnight."
She disappeared inside before he could respond.
Elarion stood for a moment, hand touching his cheek where her lips had been. The first deliberately intimate gesture between them. Small, careful, but unmistakably intentional.
Something was growing here. Something fragile and precious and terrifying.
He smiled—alone in the darkness, no one watching, just himself and the strange new feeling of hope that maybe, possibly, he could learn to be human after all.
To be seen.
To be known.
To be loved, despite everything.
It was early yet. Too early to use that word. But the potential existed.
And for someone who'd spent sixteen years believing he was unlovable, potential was revolutionary.
He went inside, climbed to his room, and for the first time in longer than he could remember, he slept without nightmares.
Just peace.
And tomorrow's promise of continued existence.
Together.
That was enough.