Amaron looked at him. "Why?"
"Because you’ve been doing this alone and it’s clearly exhausting. And because I’ve spent the last two months working with you and not noticing you were carrying sothing this heavy, which ans I wasn’t paying attention. And because—" He stopped. Reconsidered. Started again. "Because you ca to dinner at my house and my mother made you food and you looked at the table like it was the first ti anyone had done that for you. And then you disappeared for two weeks on a monitoring contract and ca back and went directly back to work without telling anyone you’d been training the entire ti. And then you saved five people at the cost of your own cover and walked out like it was just another day."
Amaron said nothing. There was nothing to say that wouldn’t require more honesty than he was prepared for.
"So I don’t know what you’re building," Elian continued. "And I don’t need to know all of it. But I know you’re trying to do sothing good in the most complicated way possible, and I think you’d do it better if you stopped trying to do it entirely alone."
He said this with the straightforward sincerity that Amaron had co to recognize as Elian’s default mode — not manipulation, not performance, just the direct expression of what he thought was true and worth saying.
It was, Amaron thought, possibly the most dangerous thing anyone had said to him in either life.
Because accepting help ant trusting soone with information they could use against him. It ant giving up control over who knew what and when. It ant allowing soone else into the architecture he’d been building so carefully, alone, in the dark.
It also ant not being alone. Which was sothing he had not realized he wanted until Elian had offered it.
"The reassessnt is in four days," Amaron said. "After that, we’ll talk about what cos next."
Elian nodded. "All right. But Volg—" He paused. "Amaron. I ant what I said. You’re not doing this alone anymore. Whether you wanted help or not, you have it now."
He stood, clapped Amaron on the shoulder in that brief, friendly way he had, and left.
Amaron sat at the desk for a long ti after the door closed, looking at the survey coordinates he’d been copying and trying to process what had just happened.
He had not asked for an ally. He had not planned for one. Allies were variables. Variables were risks.
But Elian Solhart had just walked into his workspace, figured out more than Amaron had intended to show, and offered help anyway. Without conditions. Without demands for explanation beyond what Amaron was willing to give.
It was the kind of thing that happened in the stories Amaron had spent nine years observing from the outside. The protagonist extending trust. The team forming without anyone planning it. The mont where soone decided to stand beside you without needing to understand everything first.
He had never been on the receiving end of it before.
He was not entirely sure what to do with it now.
— ◆ —
That evening he walked to the Solhart residence without deciding to.
He knocked. Vela answered. She looked at him with the warm recognition that still felt foreign every ti he encountered it, and smiled.
"Amaron. Good timing. I was just making tea. Co in."
He ca in. Sat at the kitchen table in the chair that was starting to feel like his chair, even though it wasn’t. Accepted the tea. Drank it while Vela moved around the kitchen with the efficient grace of soone who had done this ten thousand tis and found it grounding rather than tedious.
"Elian told about the Marrin Survey," she said after a mont. Not a question. Just a statent of fact.
Amaron looked at his tea. "He did."
"He said you saved five people."
"I intervened during an ergency. The outco was favorable."
Vela made a sound that was half-laugh, half-sothing else. "That’s one way to describe it." She sat down across from him with her own tea, looked at him with the particular quality of attention that suggested she was about to say sothing direct and he should be prepared for it. "He also said you’ve been hiding what you’re capable of. And that you’re not anymore."
"The hiding beca impractical," Amaron said.
"I imagine it did." She drank her tea. "Can I ask you sothing?"
"Yes."
"Are you all right?"
The question surprised him more than it should have. Not because it was unreasonable — people asked that question all the ti, usually as a formality that required a positive answer regardless of truth. But because Vela Solhart was asking it in the tone of soone who actually wanted to know the answer and would accept an honest one.
He thought about the past seventy days. About the training and the planning and the performance and the weight of carrying a second life’s worth of mory while pretending to be sixteen. About the Marrin Survey and the choice he’d made and the fact that his carefully constructed cover was now irreversibly compromised. About the notebook under his floorboard and the things he’d written there that he had no one to show.
"I don’t know," he said.
Vela nodded as if this was a perfectly acceptable answer. "That’s fair. You’ve been carrying sothing heavy. I don’t know what it is, and you don’t have to tell . But you should know that this door is open. You don’t need a reason to co here. You don’t need to have sothing figured out. You can just co."
Amaron looked at her. Then at the dark green door visible from where he sat. Then back at his tea.
"Thank you," he said, and ant it in a way he had not ant most things in a very long ti.
They sat in the kitchen and drank tea and did not talk about anything that mattered, and it was the first ti in seventy days that Amaron had felt sothing that was close enough to peace that he allowed himself to call it that.
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