Grief has a texture the morning after. It settles into the body like sediment, weighing down limbs that already feel borrowed, filling lungs with something heavier than air. I wake with Monarch's name on my tongue, bitter as copper, and for a moment I don't remember where I am.
Then the ceiling comes into focus—unfamiliar wooden beams, a water stain shaped like nothing I recognize—and reality reasserts itself with all the gentleness of a crash landing.
Remnant. Safehouse. Child's body. Monarch gone.
My eyes feel like someone packed them with sand and then poured acid on them for good measure. When I try to swallow, my throat protests with a raw ache that speaks to hours of sobbing I barely remember. My ribs hurt. My hands hurt. Everything hurts in that particular way that says *you're still alive, congratulations, now deal with it*.
I push myself upright on the cot they've given me, and my spine crackles like radio static. The room smells like coffee and toast—breakfast smells, normal smells, absurdly domestic for a criminal safehouse in an alien dimension. On the table near the workbench sits a plate with two pieces of toast, already going cold, and a mug of coffee that's stopped steaming.
Roman left this. The thought arrives with a strange detachment, like I'm observing someone else's life from a distance. The flamboyant criminal who rescued me from demon wolves also makes breakfast.
I don't touch it. My stomach has folded itself into a shape that refuses food.
Neo sits across the room in a chair that looks too large for her, legs drawn up beneath her, watching me with those color-shifting eyes. Her phone is already in her hands. She's been waiting, I realize. Waiting for me to wake up so she can—what? Interrogate me? Comfort me? With Neo, I'm beginning to understand, the line between those things might not exist.
She types. Holds up the screen. [ARE YOU GOING TO DIE IF YOU STAY HERE??]
The question is so direct, so utterly devoid of social niceties, that something in my chest almost cracks into laughter. Almost. What comes out instead is a sound that might be a cough or might be the ghost of amusement haunting my ruined throat.
"I mean... probably not immediately?"
Neo tilts her head, considering this response. Her fingers move again. [THAT'S NOT A NO]
"No," I agree. "It's not."
She seems to accept this with a small nod, as if my ambivalence about my own survival is a perfectly reasonable position. Maybe in her world, it is. I'm beginning to suspect Neo's world operates on rules I don't have the energy to understand. [WHERE DID YOU COME FROM? ]
I stare at the question for a long moment. Where did I come from. How do you answer that when 'where' no longer exists in any meaningful way? When the sky you navigated by has been replaced with wrong stars and a shattered moon?
"Far away," I manage. "Very far away."
[YOUR GUN IS STRANGE]
"It's a Beretta M9. Standard sidearm." The words come automatically, muscle memory from a thousand briefings. "Nine millimeter, fifteen-round magazine. Though I only had ten rounds when—" I stop. When everything ended. When the world tore itself open and swallowed my partner whole.
Neo types furiously into her device, and this time she doesn't hold up the screen immediately. She studies whatever she's written, then deletes it, types something else. [THE MAN IN THE PHOTO. WHO WAS HE]
My hand moves to my chest, where Monarch's photo rests in the breast pocket of a borrowed shirt. I don't remember putting it there. I don't remember much of last night after the dam broke. But somehow, in the wreckage of my breakdown, I managed to keep him close.
I pull out the photo. My fingers are smaller than they should be, and the image looks larger in my grasp than it did two days ago. Three days ago. However long it's been since I was the right size for my own life.
"His name was Mon- Jack," I say. "He is my partner."
Neo studies the withered image of Jack laughing, me grinning, the F-4 behind us looking battered but whole. She looks at me, then back at the photo, those chromatic eyes eyes cataloging details I can't hide. She started to type something else but was interrupted.
Footsteps in the hallway. Roman appears in the doorway, his white coat slightly rumpled, coffee cup in hand. He sees the photo, sees my face, and his expression shifts into something almost gentle beneath the theatrical mask.
"Ah. Your parents again." He moves closer, peering at the image with what might be genuine interest. "Good-looking people. Strong jaw on the old man. You have his eyes... I think."
I don't correct him.
The energy required to explain what a WSO is, what Hitman Team was, what we were to each other—I don't have it. Can't summon it from the hollow space where my reserves used to live. So I just nod, allowing the misunderstanding to settle between us like a blanket over something too wounded to expose.
Roman seems satisfied with this. He pats my shoulder awkwardly—the gesture of a man who doesn't know what to do with children but feels obligated to try—and retreats to another part of the safehouse, muttering something about checking the perimeter.
Neo watches him go. Then she types.
The screen comes up slowly, deliberately, like she's giving me time to prepare. [ROMAN IS MY PARTNER-SOMETIMES DULLARD, I THINK I GET IT? YOU WERE CLOSER?]
The words hit me somewhere between my ribs and my spine. I stare at them. At the blunt truth of them. At this strange, silent woman who sees too much and says nothing aloud.
The pause stretches. One heartbeat. Two. Ten.
"...yeah." The word escapes as barely more than breath. "I was."
Neo nods once. She doesn't type anything else. Doesn't offer comfort or platitudes or any of the things people usually say when they've accidentally uncovered something too raw to touch. She just sits there, present, bearing witness to a grief she can't fix and doesn't try to as she just goes back into her own little world.
I look at Monarch's laughing face in the photo. I look at my own grin, frozen in a moment when I still believed we'd have time.
"Yeah," I whisper again, to no one, to him, to the broken moon outside the window. "I wish I was."