Sixty seconds of silence in the air floated in awkwardness before Derek said, without looking away from the road, "Pack your bags."
Salvar opened his mouth but he couldn't utter anything as Derek chose to rap instead of talking.
"Hungover is no excuse, I want your room to be empty before the sun rises." Derek's voice had the quality of a man who had made a decision and was not entertaining discussion. "Because if you don't, I am going to inform your father and your brother."
Salvar looked out the window.
The city passed by in streaks of amber and neon.
"Okay," he said quietly.
He wanted to leave nonetheless. It didn't matter but still, it stung that he wasn't going to be around any familiar figure other than Milo.
All alone, all over again.
Derek drove in silence too.
Neither of them said anything else.
Then Derek's hand moved to the stereo.
A familiar bass line filled the car. Slow, warm, the kind of RnB that belonged to late nights and old feelings. Salvar's chest did something involuntary before his brain caught up with what was happening.
It was his song.
His specific, embarrassing, played-on-repeat-at-seventeen song.
His shoulders dropped without his permission. The tension he had been carrying since the police station, since the bar, since William's smug face and Federic's bleeding nose, quietly left his body like a guest who had overstayed and finally read the room.
"How did you know where I was?" Salvar asked, his head tilting toward Derek.
Derek kept his eyes on the road. "Secret."
"Papa."
"Secret."
"Derek Beladore."
"That is my name yes."
Salvar turned in his seat to face him fully with the energy of someone prepared to repeat themselves indefinitely. Derek lasted approximately forty seconds under that stare before exhaling through his nose like a man surrendering his last bargaining chip.
"I hired a bodyguard."
Salvar blinked. "You hired a what."
"A bodyguard. Someone who follows you and makes sure you do not end up in situations like tonight." Derek paused meaningfully.
Salvar turned back toward the windshield.
A bodyguard. He had a bodyguard this entire time and had spent the evening engineering a bar fight, vomiting on his best friend, punching a rich kid, and getting questioned at a police station while shirtless.
Somewhere out there a professional was having the worst performance review of his career.
But then the thought settled differently.
If he had a bodyguard in this life.
Did he have one in the last?
And if he did, where exactly had that person been when everything went wrong. When Damon convinced him to sign. When George disappeared. When the doors closed and there was nobody left.
Was this new? Was this the butterfly flapping its wings in a different direction this time?
"How can you trust someone you barely know?" Salvar asked growing suspicion of that person.
"He is the best underdog under Willard Security and Protection." Derek said it the way people say things they have already decided are not up for debate. "Seven years in the field. Zero incidents on record."
"What if he is a spy."
"He is not a spy."
"You don't know that."
"Salvar."
"I am just saying, you know, my instinct they won't trust someone easily."
"He is not a spy." Derek's voice was patient in the specific way of someone who had raised children and developed an immunity to circular arguments. "We hired him a week ago. Right around the time you started the tantrum and I aged approximately four years in seven days."
Salvar said nothing.
Derek exhaled as through he felt relief, "Best decision of my life. Tonight confirmed it."
The car took a sharp turn and rolled to a stop in front of a small cloth shop, still open, its fluorescent light spilling onto the empty pavement like it had nowhere better to be.
Derek looked pointedly at Salvar's bare chest.
Salvar looked down at himself.
"Thanks, my bare skin has been bothering me this whole time and nobody asked." Salvar announced as he climbed out of the car,
Derek pressed his lips together in the way that meant he was not going to laugh and then laughed anyway.
Inside the shop Salvar grabbed a plain grey sweatshirt and pulled it over his head. He looked in the small mirror propped against the counter. Acceptable. He turned to Derek and gave a thumbs up.
"George and Damon," Derek said, without preamble, watching Salvar in the mirror. "Finally showed their true colours eh? Or you wanna reconsider as they are your friends."
There was a hint of mockery in Derek's voice.
Friendly counter hits the deepest and manages to double the damage.
"There is nothing to reconsider."
"They have been your friends since..."
"They were never my friends." Salvar said it simply, the way you state something that has always been true and simply required the right moment to say aloud. "It was a mask. Both of them. They wore it because they had nobody else and neither did I. That is not friendship. That is two people using the same shelter and calling it a home."
Derek was quiet.
He had watched Salvar cling to Damon for years. Had watched him go strange and moon-eyed every time George entered a room. Had assumed it was the particular foolishness of being young and not yet knowing the difference between people who chose you and people who simply had not left yet.
"For how long did you know that?" Derek asked.
Salvar met his eyes in the mirror and smiled. "Secret."
Derek shook his head slowly.
They paid for the sweatshirt and walked to the convenience store two doors down. Derek went directly to the freezer without discussion and came back with two butterscotch ice creams.
Winter outside. Neither of them mentioned it.
They sat on the low wall outside the shop, shoulders almost touching, ice cream in hand, the city quiet around them the way cities get at 3am when even the noise has gone to sleep.
"What got you in the mood to eat ice-cream?" Salvar questioned, licking the melting puddle.
Initially Derek didn't said anything but later he placed his hands across Salvar shoulder and replied. "Want to spend a memorable night with son before he is gone."
"You are talking as if I am enlisted for military." Salvar chuckled and continued, "Why don't you come along?"
"I had to choose between duty and family. What would you have choosen in my place?" Derek asked.
"Duty, my goal and my dream. Family is important but if I choose it, the family working under me will collapse. I don't blame you Papa, but I can't help but blame Alex."
"It is not Alex's fault," he said. "I need you to know that." He paused. "The world was built a certain way and omegas got the worst end of the architecture. That is not your fault either."
Salvar licked his ice cream and said, "Have you ever wanted to bring a change, or ever wanted to show what we are capable of? The Alphas degrade is to birth giving machine, and I hate it."
"I wanted to change it when I was younger." Derek continued. "I genuinely did. I thought if I was strong enough, visible enough, if I proved enough times that an omega could stand where alphas stood." He stopped. Smiled at something private. "Then I got older and I realized that burning yourself to light a room only works if someone is actually looking."
He turned the ice cream stick slowly in his fingers.
"A body with muscle but no brain is a vase that cannot hold flowers. You understand? Strength without direction just breaks things including yourself."
The street lamp above them buzzed faintly.
"Nobody in this life is waiting to give you credit, Salvar. They are waiting to take it." Derek looked at him directly then. Not the look of a parent managing a difficult child. The look of someone handing over something they had carried a long time. "Work for yourself. Be happy. Be safe. That is the whole thing. That is all of it."
Salvar stared at his butterscotch ice cream.
The same flavor they had shared every time since he was small enough to sit on Derek's shoulders. But the same flavor he had not tasted in ten years of a first life that had no room for small sweet things.
He felt something press behind his eyes.
"Thank you," he said quietly.
Derek nodded once.
They finished their ice cream in comfortable silence.
The kind that does not need filling.