You could always tell when he was thinking too much. Dr. Henry had a particular way of standing when he was caught in a spiral of thought: slightly hunched forward, hands in his pockets, jaw clenched—not in anger, but in resistance, like he was holding back a tide of words he hadn't yet decided how to say.

He stood like that now, in the pale green light of the failing control room, watching you shove DNA vials into a hard-shelled case with fingers that trembled slightly around the edges. You weren’t afraid—at least not in the way you’d been when you’d seen the Distortus rex up close—but there was a splintering pressure behind your ribs. A kind of ache that had no name except: this is how it ends.

Outside the broken window, the jungle seethed in silence. That sick kind of silence—watchful, heavy. The kind of silence where something is waiting to move.

Behind you, the old monitors crackled. The comms had been down for forty minutes. Zora was organizing a final flight out. Martin had already packed his samples, ready to sell them to a pharmaceutical boardroom with glossy windows and no idea what blood it cost to collect them.

And Henry… Henry hadn’t touched his bag.

You zipped the case closed. It clicked like a final door.

“I’ve packed everything we need,” you said, without turning around. There was a beat of quiet, then: “You’re going with them?” he asked, voice low. Almost too low to hear.

You turned. He was watching you with that look again—the one he used when you were working late in your little London flat and he came up behind you barefoot, a tea in one hand, a million unsaid things behind his eyes. The look that had made you fall in love with him in the first place.

Your chest tightened. “Aren’t you?” you asked.

He didn’t answer. The silence stretched out, long and raw between you. A cable flickered overhead. Somewhere outside, a branch cracked under something impossibly heavy. The jungle was no longer just alive—it was aware. And growing closer.

Henry stepped toward you. Just one step.

“I can’t,” he said, voice cracked open and plain. “Not without you.”

It wasn’t a grand gesture. It wasn’t shouting your name or running after the helicopter or bleeding for you in a field of teeth. It was just this: A man who’d once said he didn’t believe in marriage—too permanent, too rooted—standing in the ruins of science and monsters, telling you he couldn’t leave if you weren’t beside him.

You swallowed. “I’m not staying for the mission,” you said quietly. “I don’t give a damn about InGen or the samples. I’m staying because there’s still a family out there with a child missing, and Zora’s pretending it’s not her problem. If I leave, I don’t think I’ll like the version of myself that survives.”

A breath passed between you.

Henry’s eyes softened, but he didn’t smile. His face was too tired for that. The beard he’d let grow during the mission was patchy, his cheeks dirt-smudged, his eyes ringed with sleeplessness—but beneath all that, there was still the man who pressed your wedding ring to his lips every morning before slipping it on.

“I didn’t marry a coward,” he said. “I married the woman who made me want to live better.”

That was the thing about Henry. He didn’t say I love you the way most people did. He said it in papers proofread at 2 a.m., in coffee gone cold on your desk, in the way he’d always place his body between you and danger without making a show of it. He said it in quiet truth.

You closed the distance and pressed your forehead to his chest, right over the pulse. His arms came up instinctively—tight, familiar. The safe place in a world where nothing was.

“They’re not going to wait,” you murmured. “The chopper leaves in twelve minutes.”

“Then we have eleven,” he said. “Hold on to me for ten. We’ll decide in the last one.”