Alex stared at the young woman encased in clear crystal, her form frozen mid-breath, caught in a single moment of quiet acceptance just before life had stopped keeping time for her.
A smile spread across his face, radiant, unguarded, the kind that rarely any moment demanded.
But his eyes betrayed something else entirely.
Normally dark as the abyss, giving away nothing, offering no window into whatever moved behind them, they now carried a clear, glassy sheen, a tear building at the edge of falling and, for the moment, refusing to actually fall.
"Zahra." His voice came out quiet. "Can you believe we met in this place a decade ago." He shook his head slowly, as if the number itself refused to sit comfortably in his mind. "I feel like it was just some time ago."
He smiled, his eyes tracing the familiar lines of her frozen face the way he must have done a hundred times before, in a hundred different quiet moments just like this one.
