"Hey, Champ," Raul called out, leaning his shoulder against the doorframe. He kept his tone light, the same happy-go-lucky lilt he used on drives to 5:00 AM sparring sessions. "I made that lemon chicken Maman used to make. You know, the one that makes the whole house smell like a Sunday in Créteil? It's getting cold, man. And Elena's starting to look at the drapes like she wants to shred them."
No answer. Not even the sound of a bedsheet shifting.
Elena paced the living room, her footsteps a frantic staccato on the hardwood. She looked smaller than usual, her eyes shadowed. Every time her phone buzzed with a new analysis video from the Hub, she flinched.
Raul turned to her, offering a small, lopsided smile — the one he used to stop her from spiraling.
But Raul's hand, resting on the doorknob, was trembling. He knew the mountain wasn't a metaphor. It was a sensory-deprived cage, and he'd watched the Fighter build it around himself before.
Inside the room, the Fighter was sitting on the floor in the dark.
He wasn't crying. He wasn't angry. He was simply trying to locate the construct Delaney had talked about — the one she'd built a career on, the one Leo Vance had narrated into existence through a camera lens. He looked at his hands in the sliver of light coming from under the door. To the world, these hands were medical anomalies, evidence of something engineered. To him, they were just cold.
He could hear them. Raul's forced cheerfulness. Elena's jagged breathing, the way it caught every few seconds like a skip in a record. He wanted to get up. To turn the handle. To tell Raul the chicken smelled fine, it smelled like every good thing, it smelled like a life he wasn't sure he was allowed to walk back into.
But every time he moved, Vance's voice came back, smooth and documentary-calm, narrating him from the outside.
He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes until the voice went static.
Raul took a long breath. The mask finally slipped — not into despair, but into something quieter and more stubborn than the performance he'd been keeping up all evening. He didn't knock. He just pressed his forehead against the cool wood of the door and stayed there.
He waited.
Somewhere in the building, a window had been left open. The wind moved through it — low and indifferent, the sound of a city that didn't know anything had happened. It came and went.
That was all.
Raul didn't move from the door. Elena sat down on the floor behind him, her back against the wall, and pulled her knees to her chest. Neither of them said anything.
The chicken went cold on the stove.