Vaelor
It’s been six days.
I’ve been counting.
Six mornings of checking her breathing before I do anything else.
She’s still on the couch. I tried to move her to the bed upstairs the third night and Locke looked at me like he might kill me.
I understood immediately that we weren’t doing that yet.
The couch is temporary. The couch means she’s waking up soon and everything goes back to normal. Whatever that means.
Moving her upstairs means something else.
So she stays on the couch.
I get up before the others. Always. I don’t set an alarm — my body just does it now, some internal clock recalibrated around her. I come downstairs and I check her breathing first thing. The rate. The depth. Whether her color is better or the same.
It’s been the same.
Until this morning.
I’m crouched beside the couch with two fingers at her wrist when I notice it. Her chest rising. Falling. Rising again.
Slower than it’s been. But fuller.
I check again. Keep my fingers where they are and count. Her pulse is still slow but it’s steadier. And her breathing — the shallow, wrong quality it’s had for six days — is just slightly less wrong this morning. Different from yesterday.
I don’t move for a long time because I need to hear it.
I’m still thinking about it as I go make coffee.
Beckett comes down first. He always does, right after me. He doesn’t say anything when he comes into the kitchen, just goes for the coffee like it’s the only thing keeping him upright. He pours a cup and stands at the counter with his eyes closed.
I wait until he’s had half of it.
“Her breathing is better this morning.”
He opens his eyes. Looks at me over the rim.
“How much better.”
“Not much. But different from yesterday.”
He sets the cup down and goes to the couch. Crouches where I was crouching. I watch him check the same things I checked, in the same order, and come to the same conclusion.
He comes back to the kitchen.
“Yeah,” he says. That’s all.
We stand there and drink our coffee.
It might be a different kitchen now, but it’s the same Beckett.
For some reason that gives me hope.
Upstairs, the hammering starts around mid-morning.
It’s been the rhythm of the house since we got back — Locke up there with Cal, occasionally Brent, sometimes Rane when Locke will tolerate it, which isn’t always. Nobody asked him to build anything. He just started. Nobody said anything about it because we all get it.
I look over at the nine loaves of bread on the counter.
Just in case she wants some when she wakes up.
Trey helps when Locke lets him. He comes downstairs around two, sawdust in his hair, and drops into a chair at the kitchen table.
“Cal says the frame’s done,” he tells me.
“Good.”
“Locke wants to finish it today.”
I glance at the ceiling. The hammering has a particular quality right now — focused, rhythmic. Locke in his version of prayer.
“He will,” I say.
Trey looks at Nova. He does this — comes in from upstairs and immediately looks at her, like he needs to confirm she’s still there before he can settle.
She is. Still. The thermal blanket Kree left is pulled up to her chin because her temperature keeps dropping at night and going back up during the day. Small. Her silver hair spread across the pillow Rane repositioned four times yesterday until he found the angle that looked right.
Trey looks at her for a long moment. Then he looks at his wrist. Her mark there, clean and whole on his skin.
He does that too. Both things, always in that order.
I put a bowl of soup in front of him and he eats it without asking what it is.
We’ve been sitting like that for a few minutes when I say it.
“He’s still not talking.”
Trey looks up.
“Laith.” I don’t know why I need to clarify. There’s only one he. “Six days and nothing. I bring water. Food he doesn’t touch. He just sits there.”
“He’s waiting,” Trey says.
“For what.”
“I don’t know. But that’s what it looks like.”
The back door opens and Rane comes in, mug in hand. He looks at us and already knows.
He sets the mug down and pulls out a chair.
“He has answers,” Rane says. Not a question.
“He has to.” The words come out harder than I intend. “He ran that facility. Whatever they did to her in that chair — he knows what it was. He knows what she needs. And he’s just—” I stop.
“Sitting there,” Trey finishes.
“Yeah.”
Rane’s jaw is tight. “So we make him talk.”
“Locke’s already suggested that.”
“I’m not suggesting what Locke suggested.”
“Then what are you suggesting?”
He doesn’t answer. He picks up his mug and puts it down again without drinking from it.
The thing nobody’s saying is sitting in the middle of the table between us.
We have him. We actually have him. We did the impossible and we got her out and we got him and he’s forty feet away in a bunker and Nova is still on that fucking couch.
He won’t say a single word and there is nothing — nothing — we can do about it.
“Kyron’s working on something,” Trey says quietly.
“I know.”
“He’ll figure it out.”
“I know that too.”
Rane looks at the nine loaves of bread on the counter. Looks back at me. Doesn’t say anything.
He doesn’t have to.
The hammering stops around late afternoon.
The silence of it is louder than the sound was.
I look up from the counter. Trey looks up from the table.
Footsteps on the stairs. Then Locke in the doorway, sawdust on his shirt, knuckles abraded in that new way they have from the work.
“It’s done,” he says.
Nobody moves for a second.
Then we all move.
Up the stairs, nearly shoving into one another.
I get an elbow to my side. “Fuck.”
“Sorry!”
Rane is not sorry.
We shove in and stop.
The room is ours.
I don’t mean that in a small way. I mean Locke looked at what we had — walls, a floor, a ceiling — and made it into something that couldn’t be anything but ours.
The bed takes up most of the space and it should feel like too much but it doesn’t.
Cal helped him build the frame and you can see where the wood is different, where two people with different hands worked the same piece, and it doesn’t look wrong. It looks right because he made it.
For her.
For us.
There’s enough room for all of us.
Rane has his hand on the frame like he’s checking it’s real. Locke is watching us look at it. I don’t miss the hope in his eyes. What this means.
The room smells like sawdust and wood and the window is cracked and the last of the day’s light is coming through.
Nobody says anything for a long time.
Then Rane says, quietly, “She’s going to love it.”
Locke looks at the floor.
I put my hand on the frame beside Rane’s.
The wood is solid. It doesn’t give.
“Yeah, she is.”