He didn't let go of her for a long time.
She didn't ask him to. She just stayed exactly where she was, arms around him, face in his neck, and let him hold on with both hands like she was something he was afraid of losing to a version of events that hadn't happened to him. Not here. Not this life.
Eventually his breathing evened out.
She felt it — the slow return of him, the particular quality of his stillness shifting from something raw back into something controlled. His hands didn't loosen though. She noticed that. He'd gone back to being Kairo but his hands hadn't gotten the message yet and she was glad about that, actually. She was keeping that.
"Hey," she said softly.
"Mm."
"You okay?"
A pause. "I don't know what that was."
"Me neither." She pulled back just enough to look at his face. He let her. He looked — different. Not broken, nothing like that. Just open in a way he usually wasn't, like something had been moved slightly to the side and he hadn't put it back yet. She reached up and pressed her palm to his jaw without thinking about it and he went completely still. "Sorry," she said quickly. "I didn't mean to—"
"Don't apologise." He turned his face into her hand. Just slightly. Just enough. "It's fine."
She looked at him. He was looking back at her and not doing anything about it, not managing his expression into something neutral, just — looking. She felt her ears go warm and tried very hard to be a normal person about it.
She failed completely.
"Kairo," she said.
"Mm."
"You're looking at me."
"I look at you a lot."
"Not like this!"
"Like what."
She didn't have the word for it. She turned slightly pink trying to find one and he watched her do it with an expression that was almost — she couldn't believe this — soft. Genuinely soft. On his face. Kairo Azren's face, which had communicated approximately three emotions in the entire time she'd known him, was currently doing something that had no right being there and she was absolutely going to remember it forever.
"Never mind," she said, and pressed her face back into his chest before she said something embarrassing.
He put his arm back around her immediately.
She smiled into his shirt where he couldn't see it.
The laptop was still on the floor, screen dark, sitting exactly where it had landed when neither of them could think about it anymore. Yuki looked at it from the bed. Kairo followed her gaze.
"Later," he said.
"Yeah." She pulled his robe tighter around her shoulders — she'd grabbed it at some point without asking and he hadn't said a single word about it. "What did she say? In the vision. The other me."
"I couldn't hear it."
She was quiet for a moment. "I couldn't hear you either. I just felt it." She looked at her own hands. "The sound of it. Even through her body — I felt the sound of you."
He didn't answer.
She looked at him. "Does that bother you? That I saw that?"
"No," he said immediately. Then, slower: "I don't know what it was. Where it came from. But whatever that version of me felt—" he stopped. Started again. "It was real. It wasn't — I'm not embarrassed by it."
She stared at him. Kairo Azren had just voluntarily said the words it was real about his own feelings without being forced. She was witnessing history.
"What," he said, reading her face.
"Nothing! Nothing." She looked at the ceiling. "You're just. You know. You."
"You keep saying that."
"Because it keeps being true!"
The corner of his mouth moved. Just barely. She caught it and pointed at it.
"That!" she said. "Do that more."
"Do what."
"That thing your face just did."
"My face doesn't do things."
"It absolutely does things. It just did a thing." She sat up straighter, entirely invested. "Is that a smile? Is Kairo Azren smiling at me right now?"
"No," he said, and he was very clearly lying.
She launched herself at him.
He caught her, which he always did, and she ended up with her arms around his neck and her face in his shoulder laughing and he had both arms around her and was doing absolutely nothing to stop any of this and that was honestly the best part.
"You smiled," she said into his shoulder.
"I didn't."
"I saw it!"
"You saw nothing."
"I'm telling everyone."
"There's no one to tell."
"I'll tell Rina!"
"Rina is in hospital."
"I'll tell her when she gets out! I'll lead with that!" She pulled back just enough to look at him, still laughing. He was — he was looking at her with the thing again. That face. The open one. The one that had no right being on him and was there anyway, just for her, apparently, because she seemed to be the only thing that produced it.
She stopped laughing.
"Kairo," she said softly.
"Mm."
"How long have you been looking at me like that."
"Like what."
She couldn't describe it. She put her hand on his face again, properly this time, both palms, and he let her, and she looked at him up close and he looked back at her and didn't hide anything.
"Like that," she said.
"A while," he said.
"How long is a while."
"Floor 100," he said.
She stared at him. "That was — that was the first day. That was the beginning of everything."
"I know."
"You didn't even know me!"
"I know," he said again, and the way he said it made it very clear he'd thought about this and had made peace with exactly how irrational it was.
She pressed her forehead to his. He let her. They stayed like that for a moment, close enough that she could feel him breathing.
"Same," she said quietly.
He turned his head and kissed her temple. Then her cheek. Slow and unhurried, like he had all the time in the world and intended to use some of it. She closed her eyes.
"Kairo," she murmured.
"Mm."
"We have things to figure out."
"I know."
"The file. The synchronisation. Sixteen more nodes somewhere."
"I know."
"You're not worried?"
"I am," he said. "But you're right here and the file isn't going anywhere and I'd rather be doing this."
She pulled back and looked at him.
He looked back at her like he hadn't just said something that would have been physically impossible to get out of him four months ago.
"Did you just say you'd rather—"
"Don't make it a thing."
"It's a thing! It's absolutely a thing!" She grabbed his shirt with both fists. "Kairo Kato — sorry, Azren — just said he'd rather sit here than solve a mystery! That's monumental! That's historic!"
"Yuki."
"I need a moment."
"You don't need a moment."
"I need several moments." She pressed her face into his chest again. "Okay. Okay I'm fine. I'm normal." She was very clearly not normal. Her ears were fully red. "Say something cold so I can recalibrate."
"No."
"Please."
"No."
She made a muffled sound into his shirt. He pressed his chin to the top of her head and said nothing and she felt him exhale, slow and quiet, and that was somehow worse — the most unbearable thing, the quiet calm of it, the complete certainty of it.
She was not going to survive him.
The laptop eventually got opened.
She sat between his legs, back against his chest, screen on her knees. His chin was on her head. She'd stopped pretending this wasn't her favourite place to exist and had just committed to it.
The archive loaded. The synchronisation file. Still 5%. Still paused.
"It'll move when it moves," he said.
"What do we do until then?"
"Look at what we have." He reached around her and navigated without asking — she watched his hand, the economy of it, no wasted motion. "The node in Sapporo activated when you touched the fog wall. Before that it had been running for six hours saying the same thing on loop." He paused. "It needed you specifically. Your touch."
"The origin sequence," she said.
"Sixteen more nodes. Sixteen more gates we haven't cleared yet." He was quiet for a second. "But we don't know which ones."
"So we clear all of them," she said. "Every gate we hit from now, we look for the room."
"Yes."
She looked at the screen. Looked at the file dates, nine years before the game launched. Twelve years ago altogether. Someone patient. Someone who'd built something very large around something that already existed — around her, or whatever she was before she was her — and had been waiting for a sequence to complete.
"They knew we'd find each other," she said quietly.
"The synchronisation stat appeared when I looked at your window," he said. "It was always there. It just needed me to look."
"Do you think that was planned too?"
"Yes," he said. No hesitation.
She leaned back into him. His arms came around her from both sides and he just held her there, chin on her head, and they both looked at the screen with its unanswered questions and neither of them felt urgency about it the way they probably should have.
"Kairo," she said.
"Mm."
"Whatever we find out — whoever built this and why — it doesn't change what I said on the plane."
He was quiet for a second.
"I know," he said, and he meant it differently than usual. He meant it the way he'd been meaning things since the vision, since the mud and the fire and the sound of himself coming apart in some version of the world that wasn't this one.
She turned and kissed his jaw.
He caught her face and kissed her properly, briefly, and she smiled against his mouth.
"We're going to figure it out," she said.
"Yes," he said.
"Together."
"Obviously," he said, like there was genuinely no other option, and she laughed, and he held her there in the small apartment that was almost too small and would soon not be theirs, with sixteen mysteries sitting in sixteen unknown gates and a file that would open at whatever pace it wanted.
Some things could wait.