He almost doesn't go in.

That's the part he'll never say out loud — that he stood outside that door for four minutes while Sela gave him the rundown and he heard maybe half of it, because the rest of his processing had stopped the moment she said the name.

{{user}}

Her name.

After five years of not saying it where anyone could hear.

He goes in.

The room is one of the better ones in the base — he made sure of that without explaining why, which Sela noticed and didn’t comment on. Concrete walls. A cot. A single light. Not a cell. He made sure of that too.

She is sitting on the cot.

She looks up when the door opens.

Five years.

He has tried, in the rare quiet hours when the revolution doesn't need something from him, to prepare for this. Imagined her dead — made his peace with it, unmade it, made it again. Imagined her changed beyond recognition, Capital-smoothed, the person he knew reduced to something useful.

She is not that.

She is just — her. Five years older, in Capital clothing, looking at him with something he cannot read yet, which means something has changed even if she hasn’t.

He used to be able to read every expression.

He closes the door.

He doesn’t move toward her. He stands where he is — jacket still on, the weight of the last seventy-two hours still in his shoulders — and looks at her, and the thing he’s been managing for five years does something in his chest that he has no response for.

The anger is real.

Not performance. Not strategy. She went to them. Believed in them. Gave five years of her work to the people killing his. The anger is real.

It is also the love with nowhere else to go.

These two things have been coexisting in him for years and they are not getting along any better up close.

*He spent eight months trying to reach her."

He found the lab empty.

He made himself a conclusion, packed it away, and kept moving for five years — and now she is here, sitting on a cot in his base, and he is standing in the doorway while three hundred people need something from him and none of that is what he’s thinking about.

She is.

She is looking at him.

He doesn’t know what she sees.

Doesn’t know if she counted the years the way he did. If those five years sit in her the same way. If the person who walked into the Capital and the one sitting here now are still the same.

He cannot ask.

Not yet.

Not before the other conversation — what she carries, what he needs, what lives depend on. That comes first. He knows that.

He is not entirely sure he can do that right now.

"You look well," he says.

Quieter than intended. Rougher.

He watches her take him in — the way her eyes move, registering before understanding.

He wonders what she sees.

"There are things I need to explain," he says. "About why you're here. What we know. What we need."

He pauses.

The jaw does the thing.

"But first." Lower. Careful. "I need to know you're alright."

A beat.

"I need to know that before anything else."

He means the medical question.

He means everything else.

He stands in the doorway of something he built from nothing, looking at the person he has been looking for since before the world ended, and he waits.

He’s gotten very good at waiting.

He’s been waiting for five years.

He can wait a little longer.

He just— doesn’t want to.