The penthouse felt smaller at night when there was only one person in it.
Will had been awake for six hours. He knew this because he'd checked the cracked wall-clock approximately every four minutes since Zeraya left, and each time the number had moved less than he expected, like time itself had decided to be difficult about this specific night.
She'd gone alone. A solo job, something quick and clean for Vesper, the kind of run she'd done a hundred times before he ever met her. I don't need backup for this, Will. Stay off the leg. She'd said it like it was obvious. He'd agreed like it was obvious. Neither of those things had been true even as they said them, and both of them had known it, and neither of them had said so.
He paced.
Not because sitting still hurt — though it did, the leg throbbing worse now in stillness than it ever did in motion, some cruel joke of healing tissue — but because sitting still meant his brain had room to work, and his brain kept producing images he hadn't asked for. Not specifics. He couldn't picture what might have happened to her, not really, not in any detail he could name. Just shapes. Wrong shapes. The particular flavor of dread that doesn't come from evidence, just from absence stretched out long enough.
He picked up the sugar cookie pouch. Put it down. Picked it up again. Put it down again.
Every creak of the building, every drip from the pipes in the back room, registered for a half-second as the door before his brain caught up and corrected itself. He was starting to hate the building for lying to him so consistently.
She has killed things larger than this city for breakfast, Khan said, somewhere behind his left eye. Sit down before you wear a groove in my floor.
Will didn't answer. He kept pacing.
She is fine, boy.
"I know."
I am aware that you know. A pause — longer than Khan's pauses usually ran, and when he spoke again something underneath the bravado had gone quiet, careful, like a man testing ice. I am telling myself.
Will stopped pacing.
He didn't say anything. There wasn't anything to say that wouldn't make it bigger than either of them wanted it to be right now. But he filed it — the fact that Khan, eight hundred years dead, a man who had personally orchestrated the deaths of more people than Will could comprehend, was also standing very still in the dark of Will's skull, also listening for a door.
Nine months, and Will had never once considered that Khan might be scared of something too.
He went back to pacing. It felt better to do it together.
The door opened at 2:47 a.m.
Will heard it before he saw it — the specific rhythm of Zeraya's footsteps, the particular weight-shift of someone in field gear moving through a doorway sideways out of habit, a sound he hadn't realized he'd memorized until this exact moment when it was the only sound in the world that mattered.
She walked in. Mud on her boots. One fresh scrape along her forearm, already scabbing — nothing, the kind of mark that didn't even rate a comment most days. She was already shrugging out of her gear with the bored efficiency of someone whose night had been, professionally speaking, a non-event.
Will was across the room before he'd decided to move.
He didn't think about the leg. The leg would make its opinion known later, loudly, and he would deal with that later. Right now there was just Zeraya, solid and present and here, and his arms were around her before either of them had said a word — not a casual hug, both arms, the kind of hug that was checking for damage as much as it was anything else, hands moving across her shoulders and down her back like he needed to confirm with touch what his eyes were already telling him.
"Are you okay?" The words came out fast, stacked on top of each other, no smoothness to any of it — eleven months of careful phrasing gone, replaced by something raw and immediate. "How'd it go? You're not hurt, are you — what happened, why'd it take so long—"
"Whoa." Zeraya's voice came muffled against his shoulder, equal parts surprised and amused. "Whoa, okay — big guy, I'm fine. It was fine. Zero issues. Completed the raid, got paid, here I am."
She pulled back just enough to look at him properly.
For one half-second, something crossed her face that wasn't part of the joke she was about to make — a flicker of genuine surprise, the kind that comes from looking for something you're used to not finding and finding it anyway. She'd come home from solo jobs before. Nobody had ever looked like this about it. She filed the half-second away without examining it too closely, the way you'd file away a sound you couldn't place, and let her usual register take back over — but it had happened, and some part of her knew it had happened, and that part didn't go away just because she changed the subject.
Her amusement sharpened into something more pointed.
"You need to calm yourself down," she said. "Seriously. You're gonna give away how much you like me."
It was meant as a joke. The kind of line built specifically to let both of them off the hook — she'd already half-turned to set her gear down, expecting him to laugh, deflect, say something about her ego or her aim or anything that would let this slide back into its familiar shape.
Will started to do exactly that.
He felt the old reflex kick in. The half-step back, the rearrangement of his face into something easier, the joke already forming, deflect before it lands, that's the job, that's always been the job. He got about halfway through the motion before something in him simply refused to finish it.
His hands tightened instead. He pulled her back in. Closer than the hug had been.
Zeraya's gear hit the floor. She hadn't been holding onto it anymore — she just hadn't noticed until it was gone.
She went very still.
"...Will?" The joke had drained out of her voice entirely. "What's going on?"
He didn't have a line ready. For the first time in eleven months. For the first time, possibly, ever. Will didn't have a line at all. Nothing smooth, nothing deflecting, nothing that turned the moment into something smaller and safer than it actually was.
"I just realized," he said, "how much I actually like you."
The kiss that followed wasn't like the dome. The dome had been adrenaline and survival and two people confirming they were both still alive after something had tried very hard to make that not true. This was slower. Less certain. The kind of kiss that happens because neither person fully trusts what they'll say if they open their mouth again.
Zeraya's hands found his collar — not pulling him closer, just holding on, the same way his hands had moved across her back ten minutes ago. Checking he was real too.
The night that followed didn't happen in any particular order, and neither of them tried to make it happen in one.
The sugar cookies got demolished sometime around 4 a.m. — the whole pouch, gone, with a heated and entirely serious argument midway through about whether protein paste counted as an acceptable midnight snack. (It did not. Zeraya was extremely firm on this point. Will conceded gracefully, mostly because he agreed.) The shower ran cold at some point and neither of them cared enough to fix it. Zeraya laughed — actually laughed, loud and unguarded, a sound Will had never heard her make in eleven months — hard enough at something Will said that she had to sit down on the floor to recover, back against the workbench, still laughing.
Neither of them slept. Neither of them minded.
Somewhere near dawn, in the quiet stretch after, with the neon outside finally starting to fade against actual daylight, Khan spoke.
There was no joke in it. No marriage proposals, no horde, none of the noise that had defined the last nine months.
Nine months, Khan said, quiet, almost to himself, of listening to you climb buildings politely.
A pause.
This is what I was waiting for.
Another pause — and then, because eight hundred years of being a hedonistic bloodthirsty conqueror apparently came with an allergy to leaving a sincere moment alone for too long:
Try not to ruin it.
Morning light came through the shattered windows in long, pale bars across the floor. Zeraya's head rested on Will's chest, her breathing slow and even, finally still after a night that hadn't had a single still moment in it.
The sugar cookie wrapper sat where it had landed hours ago, crumpled near the foot of the couch. Across the room, by the door, Zeraya's gear lay in the same pile it had fallen into — untouched, unpicked-up, the first time in eleven months either of them had left equipment on the floor overnight and not cared.
Neither of them moved to fix it.
For the first time since the world had ended, the quiet in the room didn't feel like something borrowed from somewhere else. It just felt like morning.