And she’d co back and built sothing beautiful and was in no way waiting for him anymore, because she didn’t rember that she ever had been.
He held that reality carefully, examining it without flinching. She deserved that happiness. She’d earned it across centuries and lives and had paid for it with grief he’d caused by being what he was.
So how can he say that she was his mother and tell her that he loved her greatly, more than a son should have?
Then Kate.
He’d walked through that hospital door with no expectations, focused entirely on assessing the environnt and understanding what Martha needed.
And then Kate had looked up from the hospital bed with those gray eyes, and he’d stopped functioning for four seconds.
He’d known her in another face. Had loved her—differently than Rosaine, but no less completely. Had watched her sacrifice herself for him with a selflessness that had broken sothing fundantal in him and had woken from the dead knowing that she was gone.
He’d spent three centuries sealed in darkness, knowing that Magdalyna was gone. Had processed that grief in the compressed non-ti of imprisonnt until it beca sothing he could carry rather than sothing that carried him.
And then Kate Buchanan had looked at him with gray eyes that held none of Magdalyna’s recognition and said hello in a voice that carried none of Magdalyna’s mories.
Two people.
Two souls that had loved him and lost him and co back into the world without him, living full lives entirely independent of his existence.
The world had moved on.
He understood that intellectually. Had told himself that during the long imprisonnt whenever consciousness surfaced enough for coherent thought. Three hundred years. Of course the world had moved on. Of course everyone he’d known was gone.
But knowing it and sitting in a hospital corridor experiencing it directly were entirely different things.
Dane cleared his throat softly.
Jolthar looked up.
The old man was watching him with eyes that held no demands.
Just patient, careful attention. The look of soone who understood grief because he’d carried his own for a long ti.
"Do you need anything?" Dane asked.
Jolthar considered it.
"No," he said.
Dane nodded and returned to silence.
Sofia was watching too. Younger, less patient than Dane by nature, but she’d learned restraint through hard experience. She was reading him the way she’d learned to read every uncertain situation—assessing, calculating, and waiting for the right mont.
He could feel her urgency. The years of running, of losing people, of believing in sothing that everyone else dismissed. The resistance she’d given everything to. The questions she needed answered and the help she desperately needed him to provide.
He understood it. Didn’t resent it. But he wasn’t ready to carry anyone else’s hope yet.
He was still standing up on his own.
From the nursing station down the corridor, he could hear Martha’s voice, low and professional, working through paperwork with the attending physician. In Kate’s room, the monitoring equipnt kept its steady rhythm.
The world had changed completely.
He looked at his own hands resting on his knees.
Ordinary looking, the hands of a young man, by physical appearance. Carrying inside them power that had grown for three hundred years of imprisonnt, fed by chaos energy that had been steadily corroding the seal since the mont it was placed, accumulating slowly in the dark.
He was stronger than he’d been when they sealed him.
He was possibly stronger than anything currently existing in this world.
But he doesn’t care about it; what he wants to know right now is about the two won. How were the two of them able to have the sa faces as the two people who were close to him at the sa ti, and none of them knew what happened before?
*
A few days later.
The Buchanan residence was quiet in the late afternoon.
Kate had returned ho from the hospital. She’d taken a week of dical leave from Ardan Motors, which had required three separate argunts with her assistant, two with her physician, and one very short but decisive one with herself before she accepted that her body needed rest regardless of what Callahan might do with the opportunity.
The house had adjusted to its additional occupants with the particular organic quality of spaces that were well-designed and generously sized.
Sofia and Dane occupied the guest wing. Jolthar had been given the room at the end of the second floor corridor, with the balcony that overlooked the silver birch trees at the property’s edge.
He spent a great deal of ti on that balcony.
Kate was curled into the corner of the living room sofa with a cup of tea she’d made herself, despite Martha’s instructions to rest, watching the afternoon light move across the polished floors.
Martha sat across from her in the reading chair, her laptop open but ignored, her eyes on Kate with the particular quality of attention she reserved for things she found genuinely interesting.
"I want to ask you sothing," Martha said.
"And I want you to answer honestly rather than practically."
Kate raised an eyebrow over her tea cup.
"Those are usually the sa thing for ."
"Not always." Martha folded her hands.
"How do you feel about having him here?"
Kate was quiet for a mont. Through the ceiling above them, they could hear the faint sounds of the second floor. The particular silence of soone sitting still rather than moving around.
"Strange," Kate said finally.
"But not uncomfortably strange. That’s what I can’t explain."
"Try."
Kate looked at the ceiling, considering. "When I’m around him, I feel... settled. Calm in a way that doesn’t make logical sense given that he’s a complete stranger who appeared from nowhere and whose background we know essentially nothing about."
She paused.
"If I had to express the exact feeling..."
"It’s similar to how I felt about you, like you love one too much and missed them for a longer period of ti."
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