She had been pacing for forty minutes.
Not nervously — Nana didn't pace nervously, she paced enthusiastically, which looked almost the same from the outside but had a fundamentally different energy behind it. Back and forth across the living room, checking the door, checking her phone, checking the door again, occasionally stopping to rearrange the decorative cushion on the sofa for no reason before resuming.
"Angelina," her mother said, from the kitchen, without looking up from the stove. "You're making the floor anxious."
"He said the transport landed an hour ago —"
"And transport from the dock to the house takes time, which you know, because you've done it."
"What if something happened —"
"Nothing happened."
"What if —"
"Nothing happened."
Her father was at the table with his phone, refreshing something at intervals that he was trying to make look casual and was not remotely casual. Her mother was stress-cooking in the particular way she stress-cooked when she was happy — too much food, three things on the stove simultaneously, the kitchen smelling of everything at once. The house had been in a low hum of anticipatory energy since morning, the kind that built up in a space when someone who belonged to it was coming back.
Nana stopped pacing and stood at the window.
The street outside was ordinary. A few neighbors. A delivery hover passing low. Snow still on the ground from earlier in the week, compacted now, the edges going grey.
She pressed her forehead against the glass.
"Hamster, you'll fog it up," her father said.
"I'm looking —"
"You're fogging."
"Baba."
She was already turning back to the door when the knock came.
It was not a dramatic sound. A knock was a knock. Three measured impacts, the way someone knocked when they had both hands occupied and were managing a bag and a box and the coordination of a person who had just come off a long-haul transport and was operating on the particular determined competence of someone who had learned to function on insufficient sleep.
She knew the rhythm of it.
She had known it her entire life.
The sound reached her ears and something in her chest simply went— unraveled from whatever careful waiting shape she'd held it in all week — and she crossed the living room in a movement that could not technically be called flying but was as close as a person without wings could reasonably get, yanked the door open —
He was still in his uniform.
Dark jacket, the SKYHAVEN insignia on the shoulder, the chain visible at his collar, the Colonel's rank on his sleeve. He had a bag over one shoulder and a box under his other arm and his hair was slightly windswept from the walk from the transit stop, and he was looking at her with those quiet purple eyes that she had been seeing on a three-inch screen for three weeks and that were, in person, so much warmer.
She hit his chest at what was probably an unreasonable velocity.
The box survived. The bag shifted. His free arm came up around her immediately, automatic and certain, like a door closing — there and done, no hesitation, pulling her in while he adjusted his balance with the practiced ease of someone who had been on the receiving end of this greeting for years.
She was crying.
She hadn't planned to cry. She was aware, on some level, that she was doing it, which did not appear to have any effect on the process. It was the laughing-crying thing, the one that happened when too many things came out at once — relief and happiness and three weeks of a too-quiet apartment and the specific grief of missing someone who was fine and safe and just *not there.* She made sounds that she would later describe, if asked, as normal human emotional expression, and that her mother would later describe to the neighbors as *my daughter greeted her brother like he came back from a war.*
"Okay," Caleb said, above her head. Low and even. "Okay. I'm here."
His hand came up to her hair. Palm flat, the way he had done since she was small — not patting, just resting, warm and steady, the weight of it meaning *I've got you* in a language that predated all the words they'd ever exchanged.
She laughed into his jacket. Cried a little more. Laughed again.
"I'm going to get your uniform wet," she said, muffled by the fabric.
"It's been wet before."
"From mission things, not —" she made a vague gesture at her own face, "— this."
"This is also a mission thing," he said. "Arguably."
She laughed properly then, pulling back enough to look at him, her hands still gripping the front of his jacket because she had decided she was not letting go of him for the foreseeable future and she was prepared to defend this position if necessary. He looked the same. He looked exactly the same, the dark hair and the purple eyes and the mouth that almost-smiled at her, and the fact that he was standing here in the doorway of their house in his SKYHAVEN uniform instead of on a small screen felt so simply, completely right that she had to laugh again because she didn't know what else to do with it.
"You're here," she said.
"I said I would be."
"You always say —" she tugged his jacket, "— come inside, Gege, Mama has been cooking since this morning, she made everything —"
"I can smell it from here."
"Come inside."
The evening settled around them like something that had been waiting.
Her mother put food on the table in quantities that suggested she had been feeding up for siege conditions, and nobody mentioned this, because it was love and love expressed through provision did not require comment. Her father asked about the transport, about SKYHAVEN, about the mission schedule, with the particular eagerness of someone who had been worrying quietly for three weeks and was now collecting evidence that everything was fine. Caleb answered with the measured thoroughness he brought to everything, and between answers he ate, and her mother watched him eat with an expression of profound satisfaction.
Nana sat beside him.
She had not let go of his hand.
This was not, objectively, the most practical arrangement for eating dinner. It required some one-handed chopstick management on her part. She had made her peace with this.
He let her keep it.
He talked about his missions — not the difficult parts, the careful edited version that he always offered here, but enough. Stories with the danger filed down to anecdote, the kind that made her father chuckle and her mother's expression only tighten slightly before releasing. He had the gift of making hard things sound navigable, and she had always loved that about him even though she also knew what it cost.
At some point she started talking about the hunter missions. The Haeun forest, the claw machine victory, the partnership. She described the wanderer encounter with slightly more bravado than the reality had warranted, and Caleb listened to all of it with his chopsticks moving at the correct intervals and his attention entirely on her and the specific quality in his eyes that meant he was memorizing her face.
She didn't notice that last part.
He didn't mention it.
Her mother put more food on both their plates.
The gifts came after dinner, from the box he'd carried in.
The bread — wrapped in the same wax paper she recognized from three years ago, the east dock market, the cream-filled strawberry kind — landed in her lap and she made a sound that her mother would also describe to the neighbors later. The comics, the new volume, third in the series with the spine she had allegedly not bent on the second. The phone case with the butterfly pattern on it, pale blue, exactly the right size, which meant he had checked what model she was using before he left, which meant he had thought about it specifically, which was such a Caleb thing to do that she had to hug him again with the bread still in her hands.
"You remembered the butterfly," she said into his shoulder.
"You mentioned it in March."
"I mentioned it once —"
"You mentioned it and then showed me a picture of it and then mentioned it again two weeks later when you were looking for a new case," he said. "So. Three times."
She pulled back and looked at him. He was looking at the bread in her hands with the expression of someone who was not going to comment on the fact that she had already started unwrapping it before dinner had technically finished.
"You remember everything," she said.
"Most things."
"Everything," she said. "You remember everything I say."
He didn't answer that one. He looked at the table instead, at the empty dishes, at her mother already moving to clear and her father already helping.
She watched the side of his face.
There was something she almost asked, right then. Some half-formed thing that lived at the edge of the moment and that she wasn't sure she had the right words for. But her mother said something from the kitchen and the moment shifted, and she let it go, and tucked the phone case into her pocket and went to help clear the table.
.
.
.
.
.
The house went quiet around ten.
Her parents to their room, the kitchen clean, the lights in the common areas dimmed to the warm low setting that meant evening-proper. Caleb's old bedroom — kept, always, in the particular way her mother kept things that mattered, nothing moved, nothing changed except the fresh linen — had the lamp on, the window cracked the way he always liked it.
Nana went to her room.
She lasted eleven minutes.
She came back down the hall with her pillow tucked under one arm and her blanket bundled under the other, the end of it trailing slightly on the floor because she hadn't folded it so much as gathered it into a vaguely portable shape. She stopped in front of his door.
Knocked twice. Softly.
"Gege?"
A pause. "Come in."
She pushed the door open. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, still in the white shirt from under the uniform jacket, which he'd draped over the chair. He looked at her. At the pillow. At the blanket. Back at her face.
"Can I sleep here?" she said. "Just — like before. I won't kick you. I know I kicked you before, but I've gotten better at the sleeping part, I have more spatial awareness now —"
"Nana."
"I just —" she stopped. Pressed the pillow against her front. "The apartment's been very quiet," she said, and it came out smaller than she meant it to, and she didn't try to fix it.
He was still for a moment.
Just a moment.
Then: "Sure, hamster."
She came in.
She arranged herself with the efficiency of someone who had been doing this her whole life — pillow on the left side, blanket pulled up, the immediate rolling-settling that happened when she got horizontal, the specific way she took up approximately seventy percent more space than her size suggested possible. He watched all of this from his side of the bed with an expression she didn't see because she was already burrowing.
He turned off the lamp.
Laid down beside her.
The dark of the room was familiar — the shape of the ceiling, the thin line of street light through the curtain edge, the smell of the house that hadn't changed in all the years she could remember. She lay on her back and stared at it and felt the warmth of him beside her and felt the three-week quiet of her apartment recede like a tide going out.
"Okay," she said, to the ceiling. "Tomorrow."
"What about tomorrow."
"The amusement park — the new east platform section, the freefall ride —"
"We talked about the freefall ride —"
"The harness—"
"Is rated, I know, you've mentioned it —"
"And then the festival in the afternoon, the one near the river, they have the honey skewers that Baba likes, and also I want to try the boat rowing near the bridge —"
"You want to row a boat."
"I've always wanted to row a boat —"
"In winter."
"They have blankets on the boats, Gege, it's a whole thing —"
He made a sound that was not agreement and not disagreement but was, she had learned over a lifetime of listening to him, the sound of someone who had already decided they were going to do all of this and was maintaining plausible resistance for the principle of it.
She smiled at the ceiling.
"I've missed this," she said. Quietly. The dark making it easier. "Being in the same house. All of us."
"I know."
"Does it —" she turned her head to look at him, at the dark outline of his profile against the dim light. "Does it feel different to you? Being back?"
He was quiet for a moment.
"No," he said. "It feels the same."
She turned back to the ceiling.
"Good," she said. And then, on a yawn that arrived without warning: "Same is good. Same is my favorite."
He didn't answer.
She was asleep within the next few minutes — she always dropped quickly when she felt safe, like a switch, one moment present and the next simply gone into the particular deep sleep of someone who had been holding a small tension they hadn't acknowledged for weeks and had finally set it down.
He lay beside her and didn't move.
The room was very still. The curtain edge was very thin. Somewhere outside, a hover passed and faded, and the city continued its quiet nighttime turning.
He looked at the ceiling for a while.
Then he turned his head.
She was facing him — had rolled without realizing, the way she always did, some automatic gravitational pull that she had never grown out of. Hair spread out, lashes against her cheek, one hand curled near her chin. The starfish clip still in her hair, slightly askew. Her face completely undefended in sleep, the cheerfulness gone quiet, just — her. Just Nana. Just the person who had been the first thing his parents showed him when he was Ten years and they'd sat him down and explained that someone needed them, and who had proceeded to follow him around the house for three weeks before he figured out that she was afraid to talk first.
*Same,* she'd said. *Same is my favorite.*
He reached out.
His hand was steady. It was always steady. He tucked a strand of hair back from her face, very carefully, the way he had done ten thousand times — straightening her hair ties, pulling her hood up in the rain, fixing the starfish clip when it slid — and then he didn't move his hand away quite as quickly as he should have.
He leaned forward.
Pressed his lips to her forehead.
Soft. Brief. The way he had always done it — or the way it had always looked from the outside, from anyone who might have been watching. But there was something different in the duration, something different in the staying, in the moment before he pulled back where he simply — stayed. Where the distance between what this was allowed to be and what it actually was felt very thin and very immediate.
He straightened.
Laid back.
Stared at the ceiling.
"Goodnight, hamster," he said, very quietly, to the dark.
She didn't stir.
He closed his eyes.
He did not sleep for a long time.
Outside, Luna City carried on in its ordinary, luminous way — the neon and the hover-traffic and the distant sounds of a city that had no idea, not yet, not for a few more days, what was coming for it.
They slept in the same house.
The bread was on the kitchen counter.
The comics were on her nightstand.
The phone case was in her pocket, which she had forgotten to take out before bed, which meant she would find it in the morning and laugh about it, and he would watch her laugh, and he would think: *seven days. I have seven days of this.*
Be enough.
.
.
.
.
.
To be continued.