She arrived twenty minutes early, which was a personal record.
She rewarded herself with a red bean bun from the stall nearest the plaza entrance — warm, slightly too full of filling, wrapped in paper that immediately became transparent from the steam — and then, because one was clearly not enough for someone who had been awake since seven and had ridden across half the city with cold wind in her face, she got a second one and a bubble tea to go with it and found a bench facing the main plaza entrance and settled in to wait.
The plaza was busy this early. Luna City's mid-district always was — commuters cutting through, market stalls setting up, the usual morning density of people who all had somewhere to be. Snow had been falling since yesterday, light and dry, and it caught on everything: the awning edges, the potted plants someone had optimistically placed near the central fountain, the shoulders and hair of the people moving through.
Nana ate her bun with the focused satisfaction of someone who had already had breakfast and considered this irrelevant to the current decision.
She was on the second one when she saw him.
He came from the direction of the east transit gate — jacket, blade kit, silver hair already collecting snow in a way that looked almost deliberate, like the weather was being cooperative on purpose. He was scanning the plaza with the quiet, systematic attention she was starting to recognize as just how he looked at any space he entered, cataloguing and dismissing, and then his gaze landed on her and stopped.
She waved.
It was a full, enthusiastic wave, the wave of someone who had spotted a person they had been looking forward to seeing and saw no reason to pretend otherwise. Her cheeks were warm from the bun and probably from the cold and she was pretty sure she had some red bean paste somewhere on her face from where the filling had overflowed but she wasn't entirely sure where.
Xavier walked toward her.
He stopped in front of the bench and looked at her face.
"You have —" he said, and then seemed to decide that completing the sentence was not strictly necessary, and instead reached out and, with the same matter-of-fact economy he applied to everything, used his thumb to wipe a smear of red bean paste from the corner of her mouth.
Nana went completely still.
He dropped his hand. Looked elsewhere. "You're early," he said.
"I'm always early," she said, which was factually the opposite of true, but she was still processing the thumb situation and her mouth was operating independently. "You're also early."
"I'm always early," he said, which she suspected was actually true.
She stood, gathering her bubble tea and the remaining half bun, and fell into step beside him as he turned toward the interior of the plaza. She noticed she had to take slightly longer strides than felt natural to match his pace and adjusted without mentioning it, which she felt was a demonstration of considerable social grace.
"So," she said. "The test."
"Mm."
"Which you wouldn't tell me about yesterday."
"No."
"And which you're going to tell me about now."
"Now," he agreed.
He led her deeper into the plaza, past the food stalls and the transit kiosks and the row of shops that appeared to sell exclusively items that nobody needed but everybody bought, until they reached the section she hadn't visited before — the arcade-adjacent corner near the back of the building, where a collection of claw machines stood in a loose cluster, their interiors lit in warm yellow-white, filled with plushies of varying sizes and levels of attainability.
He stopped in front of one.
Nana looked at the machine. Then at him. Then at the machine again.
Inside, nestled among an assortment of smaller prizes, was a bunny. Large, soft-looking, white with floppy ears that were slightly too long for its head, wearing a small blue ribbon around its neck. It had the particular quality of a prize that had been positioned in the machine by someone who either had a cruel sense of humor or a very detailed understanding of mechanical defeat.
"My cousin," Xavier said. "Lily. She turns seven next week." A pause. "I've been trying to get this for six days."
Nana turned to look at him.
S-Class hunter. Fastest blade she had ever seen in her life. Could disappear into a forest and reappear somewhere else before she'd finished blinking. Had been fighting a claw machine for six days.
Something about this was so genuinely endearing that she had to look back at the machine before it showed on her face.
"Six days," she said.
"The arm drops half a centimeter to the left of where the targeting suggests," he said, with the tone of someone who had conducted significant field research on this subject. "The grip pressure isn't sufficient for the weight distribution of this specific plushie. I've recalibrated my approach four times."
"You've recalibrated your approach."
"Four times."
Nana looked at the bunny. The bunny looked back with glossy button eyes and an expression of absolute serenity, sitting there in the middle of all the other prizes like it knew exactly how much trouble it was causing.
She set her bubble tea carefully on top of the machine.
She handed her remaining half bun to Xavier.
He looked at it. "I don't want —"
"Hold it," she said, already rolling her sleeve up past her elbow with a focus that had not been present in any other moment of the morning. "I have a new mission."
"It's a claw machine —"
"I have a new mission."
She fed the first coin in.
The next portion of time became difficult to measure accurately.
Nana played with the systematic intensity of someone who had reclassified this as a genuine operational objective. She studied the arm position. She adjusted her approach. She developed, abandoned, and redeveloped a theory about the grip pressure and the weight distribution that was — she was fairly certain — reaching the same conclusions Xavier had reached over six days, just faster, because she had his research to build on without knowing she had it.
She also talked throughout, which Xavier had not anticipated and which he appeared to be recalibrating to in real time.
"Almost — no, come on, you had it, you had it —"
CLUNK
The arm released. The bunny settled back into position with an air of complete composure.
"Okay. Okay. Fine. That's fine. Different angle —"
Coin in. The arm swung. Missed.
"The ribbon is causing drag, I think the ribbon is —"
Coin in. The arm descended. The claw opened. The bunny moved two centimeters toward the chute.
"OH —"
Settled back.
"That was so close —"
Xavier sat down in one of the nearby chairs at some point — she registered this peripherally, the way she registered most things that weren't the immediate mission objective, which was to say: she noted it, filed it, and continued. He had her bubble tea in one hand and the cold bun in the other and was watching the proceedings with an expression that, on anyone else's face, she might have called fond, but which on his face was more like — attentive. Quiet. The same focused observation he brought to everything, just directed at something significantly smaller and more frustrating than wanderers.
Time continued to pass.
At some point she became aware that the bun had stopped steaming.
At some point after that, she noticed the bubble tea was looking less cold and more ambient-temperature.
At some point after that— she wasn't sure exactly when, because she had entered the particular tunnel-focus of someone for whom giving up had simply stopped being a category of available options — she glanced back at Xavier and found him asleep in the chair.
He was sitting upright. Back straight, head tipped slightly forward, the cold bun still in one hand, her bubble tea balanced in his other with the unconscious grip of someone whose hands knew how to hold things even without supervision. His chest rose and fell slowly. The silver hair had fallen slightly forward over his forehead.
Nana looked at him for a moment.
She looked at the machine.
She looked back at him.
*He fell asleep,* she thought. *He fell asleep waiting for me.* And then, somehow, this made her want to win more than she had before, which she would not have predicted as a possible emotional response but here she was, turning back to the machine with renewed conviction.
She would get this bunny.
She would get it while he was asleep and he would wake up and it would already be done.
She fed another coin in.
The thought arrived somewhere around attempt number twenty-seven: *I could just break the glass.* It was a practical thought. The glass was not that thick. She had a blade kit. She could be fast and apologetic about it afterward, pay for the damage, get the bunny in under ten seconds, and then she wouldn't even need to explain —
She thought about what her mother would say.
She thought about the particular expression her mother deployed when Nana did things that were technically solutions to problems but were also technically crimes.
She put the thought away.
Coin in.
The arm swung.
The claw descended.
It closed around the floppy ear — and the ribbon — and the soft middle section of the bunny all at once, and something about the angle was different this time, something about the distribution of the grip across three points instead of one, and Nana's entire body went rigid —
The arm lifted.
The bunny came with it.
It swayed. It dangled. It moved in a slow arc toward the chute and she was not breathing, she had forgotten how to breathe, the bunny was over the chute now, the arm was releasing —
THUMP !
It landed in the chute.
Nana's shriek could, conservatively, be heard from approximately two storefronts in either direction.
"I GOT IT —" The sound that came out of her was not fully a word, it was more like the concentrated audio form of several emotions leaving her body simultaneously. She grabbed the bunny out of the chute with both hands and held it up like evidence. "I GOT THE BUNNY —"
Xavier woke up.
He went from asleep to upright in a single motion — the trained reflex of someone whose body treated sudden loud noise as a possible threat — and for approximately one second he was scanning the area with the look of someone preparing for a wanderer, and then his eyes found Nana, and the bunny raised above her head like a trophy, and his face did something she had not seen it do before.
He beamed.
It was brief. It was completely unguarded, the way expressions only are when they arrive before the person has time to curate them. Both corners of his mouth, the slight crinkle at the outer edge of his eyes, the whole face for just a moment open and warm and exactly like someone who had been worrying about a seven-year-old's birthday for six days and had just been handed a resolution.
Then it settled back into something more composed, but not all the way. There was still something softer than usual around his eyes as he stood and crossed to where she was standing, still holding the bunny up.
He took it from her.
He looked at it. Turned it once in his hands, checking the ribbon, the ears, the general structural integrity of a prize that had just survived twenty-something claw attempts.
"Partnership," he said.
"Partnership," she agreed, possibly a little breathlessly from the shrieking.
He looked at the machine, then at her, then at the cold bun and the melted bubble tea he was still holding. He considered this for a moment.
"Wait here," he said.
He came back four minutes later with a fresh steaming bun and a new bubble tea, both from the stall near the entrance, and set them in her hands with the same wordless matter-of-factness that seemed to govern most of his interactions with her.
She looked at them. Then at him.
"You didn't have to —"
"You got cold waiting," he said. "Both of you." He was looking at the bunny, tucking it carefully under one arm. "It's Lily's favorite color, the ribbon. I checked."
Nana held her warm bun in both hands and felt something settle in her chest — not the adrenaline thing from the forest, not the excitement of the claw machine, but something quieter. The kind of warmth that came from finding out that someone who appeared to have no soft edges had, in fact, been carrying around a carefully researched ribbon color for a seven-year-old's birthday.
"She's going to love it," Nana said.
He nodded. Matter-of-fact. Like he'd already decided that was the only acceptable outcome and it was simply good that the situation had aligned with that decision.
They walked out of the arcade corner together. The snow was still falling outside. Nana bit into her bun — hot, the filling perfectly intact this time — and thought: *I have a mission partner.* And then, because it was true: *I have the best one.*
.
.
.
.
.
She called Caleb at nine.
He picked up on the first ring, which meant he had been waiting, and she loved him for it even though neither of them would ever say so.
"I got it," she said, before he could speak.
He was at his desk. A screen with reports on it that he'd pushed slightly to the side when the call connected. His face in the lamp light did the thing she loved — the small unwinding, the careful adjustment toward something that was not quite smiling but was in the same family. "The bunny."
"The bunny. Twenty-something tries, I lost count, it took most of the morning." She was cross-legged on her bed, the empty bubble tea cup beside her, feeling pleasantly full and pleasantly tired in the way of someone who had expended a genuinely disproportionate amount of effort on something that worked out. "He fell asleep in the chair waiting."
"He —" Caleb paused. "Fell asleep."
"Sitting up. He was holding my bubble tea."
A moment of quiet that she didn't try to interpret too hard. "And the partnership."
"Official," she said. "We shook on it. He bought me a new bun and everything." She smiled at her own knees. "He's been trying to get that bunny for six days, Gege. For his seven-year-old cousin's birthday. He knew the ribbon was her favorite color."
Caleb looked at the screen.
"He knew the ribbon color," he said, with a careful neutrality.
"I know." She rested her chin on her hand. "I wasn't expecting that."
The something that moved behind his eyes — she saw it, brief and complex, before his expression settled back into composed. He reached for his tea. He drank it this time. Set it down with a small precise motion.
"You're happy," he said. Not a question. Just — naming it, the way he sometimes named things, quietly and without ceremony.
"Yes," she said, equally simply. Then: "Are you okay? You look tired."
"I've been working more." He shifted the report screen back into view slightly, the practiced gesture of someone demonstrating that there was a reason for the tiredness rather than worrying her. "Trying to finish before next week."
She sat up straighter. "Next week?"
"Pending final clearance." His mouth moved at the corner. "I thought I'd come back. See the parents. Check on the hamster situation."
The noise she made was not dignified. She didn't care. "Next week? You're coming next week?"
"If clearance holds."
"Caleb Gege —" She was already doing the mental calculation, the list assembling itself in her head with the speed and enthusiasm of a person who had been waiting three weeks for this. "We have to go to the amusement park, they just opened the new east platform section and there's the freefall ride —"
"The one that goes over the edge —"
"The harness is rated, Gege —"
"I said we'd go —"
"And there's the new noodle place near the station Mama keeps mentioning and I found a new comics stall in the market district I think you'll actually like, they have the import editions —" She was holding the phone with both hands now, the weariness of the day evaporating. "I've been saving things. I have a list."
"Of course you do."
"It's a good list."
"I don't doubt it." He was looking at her with that particular expression — the one she knew meant something she'd never tried to name, the one that showed up when he thought she wasn't paying close attention. His voice was warm in a way that was different from his usual warmth, softer at the edges. "Send it to me."
"You'll plan around it?"
"I'll read it," he said. "And then we'll see how many things you've crammed into a seven-day visit that I have to gently remove."
She laughed. "You won't remove anything."
"I might remove the freefall ride."
"You won't," she said, with complete certainty, because they both knew he wouldn't, because he never actually removed anything from her lists, he just pretended he might while making quiet arrangements to accommodate all of it.
He looked at her, and the expression did the thing it sometimes did — stretched very briefly into something it didn't quite hold, and then eased back. He picked up his tea again.
"Next week," he said. "Get some sleep before then. You sound like you spent your morning fighting a claw machine."
"I spent my morning winning a claw machine —"
"Sleep, Nana."
"Fine." She was already horizontal, the phone above her face. "Gege."
"Mm."
"I'm glad you're coming."
He was quiet for a moment. Outside his window, SKYHAVEN turned its slow circle through the upper atmosphere, and somewhere far below, Luna City glowed.
"I know," he said.
It was not, technically, the same thing as *I'm glad too.* But she heard it in the space underneath, the way she had always heard the things he didn't say — in the pause, and the warmth of it, and the fact that he stayed on the call for another hour after she fell asleep.
She always fell asleep first.
He always stayed.
She had never thought to wonder why, before.
.
.
.
.
.
To be continued.