The beach shrank as the afternoon wore on.
It was simple arithtic, fewer monsters ant less territory worth defending, and two teams working from opposite ends of the sa coastline would eventually find themselves occupying the sa stretch of sand. Don noticed the other group closing in gradually, the way you notice weather: first as a distant condition, then as sothing requiring attention.
When the distance finally collapsed to nothing, both parties stopped at the sa mont.
A sea elf priest and a dark elf warrior. The combination wasn’t unusual on paper, warriors occupied the sa agile, precision-focused niche as rogues, heavy armor and weak-point attacks compensating for a constitution stat that sat as low as a thief’s. Pairing one with a dedicated healer for duo grinding made obvious sense. Don had seen the setup before.
He had not seen these two people before, and yet he knew them imdiately.
The man was close to Don’s height, with a broad forehead and a jaw that looked like it had been drawn with a ruler, the kind of face that photographs well and projects authority without trying to. The woman standing beside him was sothing else entirely. She was small, barely over one-sixty, but the figure was the kind that made small irrelevant, a double curve that the dark elf racial design had done nothing to diminish. Her skin carried the grayish-brown tone of the dark elf template, but her face was flawless in a way that the ga engine alone couldn’t manufacture. Crescent jaw, willow-leaf brows, eyes that were large and genuinely bright. The kind of face that made other faces feel approximate.
Lily had gone completely still beside him, phoenix eyes wide and unblinking, staring at the woman opposite with the expression of soone encountering sothing they hadn’t prepared for.
Neither of the two players had their IDs displayed. It didn’t matter. Don had spent enough years in the sa spaces as both of them that forgetting was not an available option.
He said, quietly and mostly to himself, "Faye. Brother Vic."
Kira glanced between them with the calm of soone who had been paying attention. "Three non-disclosures in the sa place," she observed. "Interesting odds."
Victor. Sea and Sky in One Line. Chairman of the Victor family out of Singapore, a na that ant sothing in certain circles and everything in others. And beside him, Faye Langston. Phoebe’s Ordinary. Vice chairman of Dionysus Industry, top-five ranked on the Arican server consistently, and a presence in Don’s past that he had been successfully not thinking about for a carefully managed period of ti.
Faye was looking at him with the focused attention of soone working through a recognition problem. "Do I know you?"
"Important people tend to have poor mories," Don said.
Victor crossed the remaining distance between them in a few easy strides and put his hand on Don’s shoulder with the weight of soone who had been waiting to do exactly this. "Don. I’ve been looking for you for a while." A pause, warm and direct. "Co ho."
The word landed with more weight than it should have. Don stood inside it for a mont and felt the shape of what Victor ant, the Skyrise team, the guild structure, the particular world they’d all inhabited during the Battle Online years. It was a real offer from soone who genuinely ant it.
It was also not his ho. His ho had been sothing else, sothing that had run its course and closed, and you didn’t rebuild a thing like that by stepping into a different version of it.
While he was still forming his response, a private ssage arrived from Faye.
’Don’t tell him which studio you’re in. Or you’re dead.’
No warmth in it. No teasing either, just the flat, direct weight of soone who ant what they said. Don looked up and found her watching him with a smile that didn’t reach her eyes, and felt a chill that had nothing to do with the sea air.
He understood, in the approximate way he usually understood Faye, partially, from the outside, with the awareness that the complete picture was not available to him. He made a decision.
"I could agree to certain things," he said carefully, "but you know how exchanges work. Terms first."
Sothing moved in Faye’s expression, a fractional acknowledgnt. She turned away from the conversation and walked toward Lily instead, reaching out and taking the girl’s hand with the easy familiarity of soone reclaiming a connection that had simply been interrupted by geography.
"You brat," she said, and her voice changed entirely, warr, looser, the professional edge gone. "You’ve actually gotten taller than ."
Lily patted the top of Faye’s head with the cheerful disrespect of soone who had been waiting years for the height differential to reverse itself. "Faye. How are you still one-sixty?"
"I will end you," Faye made a grab for Lily’s waist and Lily twisted away laughing, and the two of them devolved into sothing that was half reunion and half physical altercation, entirely unconcerned with the audience they were providing.
The three n observed this in shared bewildernt.
Yates, who had better social instincts than he generally let on, caught Bernita and Kira’s eyes and tilted his head toward the monster spawns further down the beach. "Ladies, shall we? Give these two so space."
They withdrew without ceremony.
Victor waited until the sound of the girls’ laughter had moved far enough away, then turned back to Don with the patient expression of soone who had been having a version of this conversation in his head for so ti and was finally having it out loud.
"You haven’t answered ."
Don’s shoulders settled slightly. "Brother Vic. I can’t go back. I’ve got a small setup here, a few people I’m working with. It’s uncomplicated. It suits ."
"It’s not where you belong."
"That’s a kind thing to say." Don looked at him directly.
....
A/N:
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