The apartment had settled into something almost resembling normal.
Not normal. But the shape of it â the Fighter on the couch with a blanket pulled up, Elena in the kitchen making tea she probably wasn't going to drink, the low sound of the city outside. The specific quiet of people who had been very loud and were now just breathing. Raul had claimed the chair by the window, his laptop open on his knees, and they'd let each other be for a while without needing to explain it.
He hadn't meant to end up on Feldup's channel . He'd been looking for something else entirely ; an old training clip, a file he'd misfiled months ago ; and then the algorithm had done what algorithms do, and suddenly there it was. A Feldup video from four years ago. The thumbnail alone had stopped him cold.
He put his earphones in and pressed play.
In the French corner of the internet, Feldup was not a small thing. He wasn't famous in any way that crossed borders â he'd never been famous in any way that counted outside a very specific pocket of people who had found him and kept him like a secret â but within that pocket he was the guy. The master of the deep dive. Lost media, forgotten forums, digital ghosts, things the internet had tried to delete and hadn't quite managed to. He turned internet mysteries into something that felt like a shared inheritance, like he was handing you something that had almost been lost and trusting you to take care of it.
But Raul hadn't watched for the horror of it, or the mystery. He'd watched for the sincerity. He talked about abandoned things like they deserved to be found. Like it mattered that someone was still looking.
Raul had found him the same year he'd moved in with the Fighter and Elena.
That apartment had been ; the word that came to mind was honest. Brutally, unromantically honest. Two rooms and a kitchen the size of a reasonable person's patience. The heating worked on its own schedule. The upstairs neighbor had a dog that paced at 3 AM in perfect rhythm, like a metronome nobody had asked for. The Fighter trained at five and came back smelling like a building and ate whatever was in the fridge standing up, which was fine because there was rarely enough in the fridge to justify sitting down.
Raul had been the one who cooked. Not well, not consistently, but with a commitment that made up for the gaps. Three recipes on rotation, managed with the seriousness of someone running a small operation. The Fighter ate whatever appeared and said nothing about it, which Raul had initially read as ingratitude and later understood was the highest compliment the man was capable of. He didn't comment on things he trusted.
Elena had come on weekends at first. Then more. Then she had a drawer and a side of the couch and one day Raul looked up and she just lived there, which had happened so gradually none of them had marked the moment.
Feldup had been the soundtrack of all of it. Raul would watch at the kitchen table while the Fighter shadowboxed in the living room, the audio leaking from the earphones â that specific, unhurried voice talking about digital ghosts, about things people tried to erase. Once, without breaking his rhythm, the Fighter had asked: what is that?
Raul had said: just a guy from back home. He finds things people tried to delete.
The Fighter had shadowboxed for another few seconds in silence. Then: he sounds like he actually gives a damn.
That was the whole conversation. But after that he'd sometimes stand in the doorway and watch over Raul's shoulder without saying anything. Just the voice coming through, soft and serious, talking about whatever had almost been lost that week.
Then Feldup had just stopped. No announcement. No explanation. The last upload was a deep dive into a forgotten forum, and it ended mid-sentence, and then nothing. That had been eight months ago. For a while Raul had checked every few days, then weekly, then he'd stopped checking and just left the tab open in a browser he never closed, the channel page sitting there like a forwarding address for someone who hadn't moved yet.
He was watching that last video now. He'd watched it maybe twenty times over the years and he still didn't know what Feldup had been about to say.
He was so absorbed that he didn't hear them coming.
The Fighter appeared in the doorway first, then Elena behind him, and Raul's hands moved before his brain did â laptop shut, earphones yanked, the particular speed of a man with something to hide.
The silence that followed lasted approximately two seconds.
The Fighter had his hand over his mouth. His shoulders were shaking.
The Fighter lowered his hand.
Raul looked at him.
Elena looked between them. The outrage had gone out of her face.
Raul opened the laptop. Found the last video ; the deep dive, the one that ended mid-sentence, bad audio, purple light in the background, Feldup's face half in shadow the way he always filmed. He turned on the English subtitles without being asked, the little white text appearing at the bottom of the screen, and pressed play.
The Fighter didn't go back to the couch. He migrated across the room without making a thing of it and stood behind the chair, arms folded, watching over their heads. The same way he used to, in the old apartment, in the doorway, pretending he wasn't interested.
The video ended mid-sentence. The screen went still.
None of them said anything for a moment.
The Fighter looked at the blank screen a moment longer. Then he went back to the couch, pulled the blanket up, and said nothing â which meant he was thinking about it too.
Outside, Chicago did its late-night thing, indifferent and enormous. It wasn't normal. But for the first time in four days, the apartment felt like the old apartment, just slightly â the shape of the three of them, the borrowed quiet, someone's voice coming through a speaker talking about things that almost got lost.
It felt, just barely, like home.