Chapter Text
(three months later).
Puppy:
sy?
Sylus’s phone lit up against the table. Grey suit—a senior representative of the tech company angling for a protocore sourcing deal with Onychinus—barely noticed, too absorbed in his proposal, polished and practiced to perfect tedium. Elysium’s VVIP room’s lighting had been dimmed to its lowest setting, as it always was when Sylus occupied it, a concession Aislinn made for his photo-sensitive pupils. Whatever promising shape the proposal had taken an hour ago had long since dissolved into noise.
Forty-two minutes past three in the morning. What a waste of time.
Sylus:
Youre up late.
Sylus’ eyes flicked towards Grey Suit’s chest. The pin was tiny, tucked behind the button flap of Grey Suit’s front jacket pocket. Aislinn’s scanners were thorough; most things didn’t get past them. This one had, until Grey Suit reached for his pen and the flap shifted—just enough to catch the light on the angular lines of a stylized C.
Or perhaps not a C at all. The rumors circulating about the company’s young chairman described a particular fondness for canines.
Sylus kept his phone in his hand.
Puppy:
busy?
Three in the morning—or ass o’clock, as Kieran often grumbled—and the message was still a question. Sylus’ thumb hovered over the screen. Somewhere above Skyhaven, the night sky was choking with smog, and Caleb was lying awake asking for permission.
“You seem preoccupied.” Grey Suit remarked, no doubt noticing Sylus’ waning attention. “Is our proposal not to your liking?”
“There is a saying,” Sylus said without looking up. His thumb moved across the screen with a precision of someone who had, on stubbornness alone, outlasted every technological inconvenience ever foisted upon him—physical keypads, stylus, voice recognition, all of it, until the world caught up and gave him something he could actually use. “That a deal’s only as good as the one who makes it.”
He sent the message.
Sylus:
Give me a minute and Im all yours puppy.
“Tell your Chairman,” Sylus said, his voice dropping to something almost conversational, “that the next time he sends his lackeys to negotiate a deal with Onychinus’ leader—” He let the sentence hang in the air, unhurried, giving time for Grey Suit to process. A senior lackey was still a lackey, after all. “—will be the last time he has lackeys.” He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to. He fixed his gaze on the pin and held it there until his right eye glowed red. A warning.
“Now leave.” Sylus’ attention had already returned to Caleb. “And do not come through Elysia again, or Miss Aislinn will have your head.”
Grey Suit gathered his files in quick, stiff movements and did not look back on his way out. Good instincts, at least.
A short gesture, and Luke and Kieran left the room without a word, and then it was only him and Mephisto.
Sylus:
Call?
Caleb:
Oh.
wait no
I don’t wanna take you away from anything important :x
As if he was less important than anything Sylus could have been doing.
Rafayel would have called him after the first message—because he knew he took precedence over anything and anyone—and Zayne or Xavier would have given him just long enough to find privacy. Whether Caleb’s hesitation came from not yet feeling at home with them, or from some failure on their part to make him feel that way, Sylus didn’t know.
It didn’t matter. He intended to correct it regardless.
He called.
Caleb took four rings to answer.
“You’re more important than whatever work can conjure up tonight.” Sylus said, careful to let the words land with honesty. Caleb had an innate observance that allowed him to sense insincerity, even communicated through technology. That was what made him so personable. Always. This time, Sylus stopped himself from adding the word. “Trust me,” he added, softer now, not quite a command, just an offering.
From the other end of the line, Caleb made a non-committal noise. He said nothing else.
Sylus waited. He recognized the wet raspiness that clung to his breathing, how it caught on the back of his throat, aching to be released. Sylus slowed the rhythm of his own, spaced each inhale and exhale with intention. It was an old trick, older than Caleb’s nightmares, one he’d learned to do through the trial by fire that cemented his relationship with Rafayel. It was an invitation, not an order.
Sure enough, after a while, Caleb began to match his tempo, the jagged, uneven pulls of his breath smoothing themselves out.
“Sorry.” Caleb whispered, barely audible, the phone muffling the word as if he’d spoken it into his pillow.
“Mm, try again.” Sylus said. He wasn’t unkind about it. There was nothing to be sorry about needing comfort, after all.
There was a pause, longer this time. “Thank you.” Caleb’s voice was steadier, almost shy.
“Anytime.” Sylus said, and put the full weight of his approval behind it, letting it linger before moving on. “Are you feeling better now?”
“Yeah.” The word came out thin, as if Caleb had used up the last of his energy. “I had a nightmare.”
“Ah.” Sylus said. He knew that particular way Caleb was holding his breath—the hesitation before each word, almost unheard.
“You’re not gonna make me talk about it?” It wasn’t quite a statement, or a dare.
“Do you want to?”
A wet laugh, barely a sound at all. “Not really. It was the same damn thing, when I…” there the sentence trailed off, deepening into a shuddery inhale. “Can we—” Another pause. “I’d like to just stay like this for a while. Please.” Caleb finally said. He sounded so tired, so damn sad, that Sylus felt the urge to fly to Skyhaven just so he could hold the younger close.
“As long as you need, puppy.” Sylus was prepared to wait for a long time. “We don’t have to talk about it. Or anything at all. I’m here as long as you need me.”
The rustling of blankets, of Caleb curling tighter into himself, carried through the line. Sylus settled back into his chair, propped one ankle over his knee, and let the silence of the emptied room settle around him. He conjured an ancient coin from the ether and let it roll through the back of his knuckles. Patient, the way that only those who had watched the world age around them could be.
He’d learned the value of holding back until the right moment. Even if it took years. Even if it never came. Most things did, in the end.
On the other end of the line, Caleb’s breathing had evened out—slower, heavier—but Sylus could feel something hanging in the air still, something that wasn’t quite taste but more like a feeling on the back of his throat.
He didn’t swallow.
He wondered, not the first time, what the inside of Caleb’s dreams looked like. Whether the walls of the research center were as stark and white as he remembered twenty years ago, whether it still carried the smell of eerie nothingness—like they had scrubbed the air clean together with the fear and pain of the children he’d found there. That was the part of Caleb’s nightmares that he knew, if only visually.
Sylus knew Caleb had other nightmares.
Eventually, Sylus switched the call to speaker and set the phone beside him on the table. He let his coin vanish, closed his eyes and listened, focused on the whisper of Caleb’s movements.
He could have stayed like that for hours. He had, before, on days when Rafayel or Xavier or even Zayne ghosted into their own silences. He knew the value of presence, how it made loneliness bearable even when it never went away. Maybe that was all any of them could ever do for Caleb—stand sentry at the gates of his nightmares, so that when he was done facing his monsters, he would always have someone to catch him and soothe his pains.
The thought was interrupted by a soft inhale, not quite a gasp but a preparation to speak. Then:
“They didn’t find Adler.”
It took Sylus a moment to place the name.
Three months after he recovered from pneumonia, Caleb went on a month-long exploratory mission to map out uncharted areas of the deepspace tunnel. The DAA did these missions semi-annually, spending months preparing for it—refining procedures, updating security protocols, every single aspect to make sure that these dangerous missions were safer with each launch. These were blackout missions, which meant no contact, only the DAA’s weekly notifications routed to Grandmother Xia and Zayne.
Sylus had known something was wrong the moment Caleb returned home. It wasn’t an injury—or at least, not a physical one. Caleb had been unusually withdrawn, and he’d mentioned Adler only once, in passing. A physicist that vanished during a routine procedure. A space pod, there one second, gone the next. Caleb had kept a tense kind of hope, then, that they would be able to find the physicist the way they had found him, once. He’d said it like he was trying to convince himself more than them.
The DAA had denied Caleb’s request to join the search and rescue. Told him they needed him home.
Caleb had not said much else about it after that.
Sylus had not pressed. He had been, privately, relieved.
“I’m sorry to hear that, puppy.”
“They decided to pull the plug on the S&R today.” A shuddery exhale, long and slow. It was audible even from the speakerphone. “And I get it. It had gone longer than it should have—we were already running on fumes. Even if we’d found him by now, he wouldn’t…” The sentence dissolved. “Yeah.”
“I can’t… stop thinking about him in that pod. Alone.” Caleb’s voice gave out on the last word, going wet and small. Sylus’ chest tightened. “That he was just… left behind. That nobody cared enough to f-find him.”
The shape of Caleb’s nightmare was becoming clearer in Sylus’ head.
Sylus knew what grief was like, had experienced it countless times through his long life. He’d worked through the whole cycle until he could predict his own patterns, knew them like the back of his hand. The universe, as it turned out, repeated itself in perpetuity, and now, hundreds of years older, he found himself listening to one of his loved ones shrinking into the smallest, coldest part of himself.
For a while, only the sound of Caleb’s hitched breaths filled the air. Sylus didn’t rush him. Some wounds became easier to live with if you let them breathe, and Sylus carried many of them. They said time healed all wounds, but Sylus had catalogued enough suffering to learn that companionship infinitely made it easier. Whatever Caleb had experienced in his childhood had made him believe that asking for comfort, expressing a need, carried a risk: be weaponized, or worse, ignored. Sylus had seen it in his oldest partner, Rafayel, when they’d made the decision to stay together and allowed each other to learn the shape of their trauma.
He’d also seen it in countless children who’d survived EVER’s inhumane experimentation and took his offer to join Onychinus, thinking they were entering a new kind of prison.
But Caleb was different. He was younger, hadn’t entirely lost his capacity to love, to keep his heart so stubbornly open, even though he was afraid.
(Sylus remembered a glass enclosure at the far end of a compound in the frozen belt outside what would eventually be Linkon. The other children had been accounted for. This one hadn’t been on the list that Jeremiah had handed them at all.
He remembered Rafayel’s voice going very flat and very cold as he told Sylus to take flight. The boy wouldn’t have survived the land route. He’d weighed almost nothing—all jutting angles beneath a thin sterile uniform—and even delirious and in pain from an interrupted procedure, he’d turned his head as Sylus carried him skyward, watching the compound disappear into the crimson bloom of Rafayel’s inextinguishable flames until there was nothing left to watch.
Sylus hadn’t connected it to Caleb until Zayne mentioned Caleb’s past, how there had never been any question that once Zayne loved someone, that they would too. As if Zayne's love was a kind of prophecy, and they had already been written into it before any of them had known it
Even then, Sylus had needed Mephisto to be certain.
Sylus still hadn’t told Caleb—wasn’t sure if he ever would.)
Caleb’s nightmare was another old wound. He wasn’t grieving Adler alone; he was grieving every time he’d been left behind, every time he’d had to survive not knowing if he was facing a certain death. What happened to Adler had reopened that wound and he was too tired to stop the bleeding.
“I don’t know why it’s hitting me so hard,” Caleb said at last. “It’s not like I even knew him that well. Adler. He was just… nice. He didn’t deserve it.”
“You’re allowed to care, puppy,” Sylus said. “Even if you think you shouldn’t.”
A soft, bitter laugh. “Yeah? I wish my brain would get the memo.”
“I think it’s your heart that needs the memo.” Sylus heard the cliché even as he said it, but with Caleb, that kind of thing always worked. If anything, Caleb was the only one in the household who still had the capacity to be embarrassed by his own feelings.
The line went quiet again.
Sylus pictured Caleb in his room—tucked into a bed that had never really been his, sheets pulled up around his ears, the light from the phone barely illuminating the shadows. He thought of Rafayel, in the first months after Lemuria went dark, lying awake every night and counting the number of survivors by memory. He thought of Xavier, alone in the cockpit of a ship that had become a coffin, staring into a void that contained what was left of his planet.
All of them, in the end, afraid of the same thing—that their suffering was singular, and no one would ever come for them.
“Do you remember,” Sylus said, “the first week you stayed here with us at the Bay?”
“Mhm.”
“You barely slept. You kept asking if it was okay to be in the kitchen in the middle of the night. You apologized every time you passed any of us in the hall.”
“I was a bad housemate.”
“You were perfect,” Sylus replied, the word effortless and true. “And you got better at asking for what you needed. Even if it was just someone to stay on the phone.”
That seemed to land. Sylus could hear the beginning of a protest, then nothing, then Caleb’s breath hitch in a way that suggested tears held just behind his eyelids.
“I don’t want to be a burden,” Caleb finally said. A familiar sentiment.
“You’re not,” Sylus said. “Never.” It was an old script, one they had all recited to Caleb at different points.
Caleb sniffed, a small surrender. “I know I used to just… suffer through it. But I’m trying to be better. I do.” A pause, then the words came faster, as if he were afraid to lose them. “It’s just—I’ve always been the one that made it out. Like even when they threw shit at me, I was faster. Or I could hide better. Or I got lucky. I was saved. It’s not fair.”
“Survivor’s guilt.” Sylus let the words settle. “It doesn’t care about being fair.” He thought of Xavier, sitting across from him at the kitchen table with both hands wrapped around a mug that had gone cold, saying those exact words. He thought of Rafayel, of Zayne, who still needed to hear them sometimes, even now.
Caleb let the moment stretch again, then filled it with the sound of another shaky, fortifying breath.
“I keep thinking… that if I’d done something different, Adler wouldn’t have been lost. It’s stupid. I wasn’t even on shift when that happened. But maybe if I had—” The sentence trailed away.
“You’re allowed to want better,” Sylus said. “Even if the universe is against you.”
Caleb made a noise, the closest thing to a laugh he could muster. “That sounds like something Rafi would say. Except with more swearing.”
Sylus smiled, and was glad that Caleb could not see it, because the smile was sadder than he liked to admit. “It should. He’d been saying that to himself for a long, long time.”
They let the silence settle between them. When Caleb spoke again, his voice was muffled and small. “Did you ever get lonely?”
The question was so unexpected Sylus almost missed it. “Lonely?”
“Yeah. Before. You and Rafayel and Xavier. Or even before them.”
Sylus considered this. There were a thousand ways to answer, and every one of them was true. He thought of the centuries before Rafayel, before Xavier—when he had been more myth than man, something both the dragons and humankind hated, belonging fully to neither world. He’d believed himself incapable of being known, much less loved, then.
“I did.” Sylus said, his voice a low hush, meant for late-night confidences.
“When you were away on that mission…” He paused, shifting on the soft cushion of his armchair. “We were… not exactly coping well. Especially that first week.”
Caleb’s quiet, “Yeah?” floated through the line.
“We never told you, but it’s been a long time since we’ve been that anxious… or afraid.” He paused. “Well, about something we couldn’t muscle into submission.”
“But… you know I’ve been on these missions for years.” Four missions since he’d become a full-fledged pilot. They knew being chosen for these missions was a point of pride for anyone in the academy, more so for Caleb, because it had meant overcoming his old trauma of being stranded in that tunnel.
Sylus imagined him in the cockpit’s cold glow, where pride and fear always warred. “You weren’t ours then.” His words slipped out soft as feathers. To worry over, to keep safe.
“Oh.” Caleb’s single syllable trembled.
Sylus closed his eyes and pictured the chaos of those days. “Rafayel barely spoke. He stopped painting, or singing. Half the day, he was submerged in the backyard without a sound. It was… unnerving.” It reminded Sylus of when they’d first found proof of a systemic Lemurian experimentation. It was not the same, of course, it just had the shape of it. Enough to put Sylus on edge.
“And whenever he wasn’t bathing, he clung to one of us like an octopus, wrapping his arms around shoulders and arms—any excuse to anchor himself. He nearly came to blows with Zayne once because Zayne was doing the exact opposite.” Sylus smiled, though the memory twisted his chest. “Zayne just… disappeared.”
“He never went home.” Caleb murmured. A statement, not a question. Like someone who was familiar with the way Zayne navigated the world.
“Home, no. Maybe once to grab a file—not even to rest. Mostly, he spent that first week in the hospital. It was bad enough that Pearl,” their ragdoll cat who adored Zayne and was adored in return. “was moping. It was upsetting, but especially to Rafayel. They almost came into blows.”
“How did they get past it?”
“Distraction,” Sylus said, voice warm with amusement, remembering that afternoon in the backyard with Rafayel’s head on his lap, trying to get through a book. They’d heard Zayne’s car pull up and Rafayel had stomped back into the house without a word. There were raised voices. When Sylus went to check on them, they were clawing at each other’s clothes on the floor.
“They needed to drain all that nervousness. Something to turn off their brains. Tire them enough to stop thinking.”
A soft, choked “Oh” answered him. Sylus pictured Caleb, cheeks pink, eyes wide. He smiled. He wished Caleb was there when it happened. Sylus had been pulled into that tangle of bodies more than once, often with nothing but a token resistance. And who could blame him? They were beautiful, individually—Zayne kept his clean lines and tightly-controlled expressions, concealing a storm of emotions underneath; and Rafayel was all color and passion. Rafayel had always had a gift for ruining Zayne’s composure, and anxiety, it turned out, had only sharpened his aim.
“Xavier started sleeping in the strangest places. Just to make sure he got enough. And to avoid them.”
Sylus could almost hear the laughter. “Like where?”
“I caught him once on the roof.” Curled into an impossible position that made Sylus’ back ache just looking at him. “Another night, in the meadow—just him, a blanket, and the stars. Sometimes with Pearl, when she got tired of our bullshit.”
“Poor baby,” Caleb sighed, a tender smile in his voice.
Sylus swallowed. “Did you know that Xavier glows?”
“What—you mean, like a lantern?”
“Like a lantern made of starlight, just bright enough to spot in the dark if you know where to look. I asked him why he’d slept outside when we’ve got rooms with locks.” Sylus closed his eyes, savored the warmth that filled him when he thought of this memory. That was the night he’d decided to join his fair-haired partner and their snoozing kitty.
“He told me that sleeping outside made him feel closer to you. That maybe if he’d willed it enough, he’d be able to sense you if you were in danger.” Sylus could almost feel the softness of Xavier’s moon-kissed hair beneath his fingertips. “He said he didn’t mean to glow, but he was glad because maybe then—if you ever got lost again, you’d be able to see him and find your way back.”
Because you’re worth finding—worth bringing back home where you belong.
Caleb’s breath hitched.
“And you?” he whispered. “What did you do while I was gone?”
“I became very proficient at delegating.” He chuckled, picturing Luke and Kieran weaving baskets of groceries through the islet’s protective ward. “I drafted delivery runs for Luke and Kieran—our glorified couriers—so we stayed untraceable. I ran the wards, learned how to make pizza, and found new ways of cleaning surfaces with my Evol.”
He closed his eyes. “Had to keep the house standing for when you come home.”
(Sylus had let himself, quietly and methodically, process after Caleb was safely back home with them. No one but Rafayel needed to know that.)
Another pause. Sylus pictured Caleb curled up in his bunk, shoulders drawn in. “Come home to us, puppy,” he said softly.
“I wanna—” Caleb’s voice cracked, taut with longing. “I wanna go home.”
“I’ll come get you in a few hours.” Sylus’s promise felt warm in his chest.
“Okay.” Caleb’s voice leveled, fragile but determined. “ I’ll apply for leave first thing.”
“Good.”
“Also…” Caleb hesitated.
“Mm?”
“Can you—stay? Until I fall asleep?”
Sylus’s heart clenched in fierce relief. “As long as you need, puppy. I’m not going anywhere.”
(fin).