NICK

I resumed my rounds with a mechanical competence that was almost frightening.

My body knew how to read a chart, how to palpate an abdomen, and how to deliver a prognosis without involving my brain at all.

My mind was elsewhere.

It was back at the apartment, anchored to the image of Cyan on my couch, drowning in my spare clothes and watching cartoons.

I kept seeing the cut on his palm. I kept seeing the way the morning light hit the sharp line of his jaw.

And then, the dream. The reach. The "almost."

"Dr. Bennett?"

I snapped back to the present. A patient was looking at me, her expression a mixture of confusion and mild offense.

I had missed something. My silence had stretched too long.

"I’m sorry," I said, the words arriving clipped and cold. "Repeat that last part."

She repeated it. I filed it, responded correctly, and moved on, but the gap had been noticed.

I could feel the eyes of the floor nurse on me. She was careful, her tone carrying that specific weight of someone who thinks they’ve caught a crack in a previously perfect façade.

"You alright, Dr. Bennett?" she asked.

"Exhaustion," I replied. It was a simple, final word. I didn’t give her room to follow up.

As I moved through the halls, I noticed the whispers. A hospital is a high-speed processor for information.

The low current of gossip was moving faster than usual today, a restless energy vibrating through the staff.

They knew something. They were distributing it in increments, like a slow-release sedative.

By mid-afternoon, I headed toward the intensive care wing for the post-operative check.

It was standard procedure, but the atmosphere changed the closer I got to the private suites.

The guards were the first sign. These weren’t hospital security guards... the kind who spend their shifts helping elderly patients find the cafeteria.

These were men with hard eyes and the specific, heavy posture of people who are armed and waiting for a reason to prove it.

The floor nurse caught up to me, her voice dropping an octave as she fell into step.

"Dr. Bennett. Did you hear? Someone leaked it this morning. A media outlet ran the story about the shooting and named this hospital."

I glanced at her, my expression neutral.

"It was scrubbed within the hour," she continued, her hands moving in a frantic gesture. "But you know how it spreads. The internet doesn’t forget that fast."

I understood everything simultaneously. The extra security. The restricted access. The whispers I’d been hearing since I clocked in. 𝘧𝑟𝑒𝑒𝘸𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝓁.𝘤𝘰𝓂

And, most importantly, why Lila had been calling me like her life depended on it.

"When?" I asked.

"Around ten. XUM released a statement by eleven calling it false. They said he was fine, but people aren’t sure what to believe."

We reached the ward entrance. The guards straightened as I approached. I didn’t slow down.

I held my credentials up with a look that suggested any interference would be a career-ending mistake.

"I operated on him," I said.

They let me through but blocked the nurse. I stopped, turning back with the patience of someone who has exactly none to spare.

"She is a clinical nurse assigned to this ward," I said, my voice echoing in the sterile hallway. "Her presence is medically necessary for the patient’s care. Unless you’d like to explain to the patient’s family why post-operative care was obstructed by a security guard, I suggest you step aside."

I gave them a beat to do the math. They stepped aside.

The private suite was large, quiet, and offensively expensive. It was the kind of room designed for people who have made sure that cost is never a variable in their survival.

Cassian was unconscious, a mountain of a man reduced to a series of readings on a monitor.

The surgery was holding; the lines were clean, the drainage was minimal, and the vitals were as stable as could be expected after seven gunshot wounds.

He was doing what bodies do when you give them enough resources—he was surviving.

I ran the clinical inventory. I checked the medication lines and the wound sites with a detached, professional eye.

To the nurse, I gave specific, rapid-fire instructions on what to monitor and what to flag.

Then, for a brief second, I just looked at him.

This was the same man who had looked at me across a dinner table, cataloging my flaws.

This was the man who was the center of Cyan’s universe... the reason a pink-haired boy was currently dissociating in my living room.

I felt a strange, sharp pang of something I didn’t want to name. I pushed it down. "Call me if anything changes," I said to the nurse, and I left the room before the personal thoughts could gain any more ground.

My phone buzzed again as soon as I hit the quiet of the corridor. Lila. I found a corner away from the main desk and answered.

"Finally," she exhaled. She sounded like she was vibrating. "Do you know how many times I’ve called? Where have you been?"

"I was working, Lila. I’m at a hospital. That’s what people do here."

"Whatever," she pivoted instantly, her voice dropping into a conspiratorial whisper. "The news this morning. Cassian Wolfe. Is it true? Is he at your hospital?"

"No," I said.

"Nick."

"It’s a rumor," I replied flatly.

The lie was clean. It wasn’t because I was protecting Cassian, or because I had any loyalty to XUM.

It was because information in Lila’s hands was like a lit match in a fireworks factory.

It would create a specific set of problems... questions about how I knew, why I was involved, that I didn’t have time to answer today.

"Really?" she sounded genuinely disappointed. "Because my source was pretty—"

"Your source is wrong. XUM already put out a statement. It was false."

"I’m gonna have to tell everyone I was wrong," she muttered. "That’s so embarrassing."

I said nothing. Lila’s definition of tragedy was always remarkably self-centered.

"So, can I come over tonight?" she asked, her tone shifting back to its usual chirpy register. "We had plans, remember?"

An image flashed through my mind: Lila walking into my apartment, finding Cyan in his borrowed clothes, eating my food and watching my TV. The disaster of that encounter would be legendary.

"I won’t be around," I said. "Come another time."

"We literally had—"

"I have to go, Lila."

I ended the call and stared at the dark screen. I wondered why I had just protected the situation.

Not just the hospital’s secret, but the situation at home. Why did having Cyan in my apartment feel like something that needed to be guarded?

"No," I whispered to the empty corridor. I wasn’t going down that road.

I returned to my rounds, performing the role of the diligent surgeon for another two hours. The afternoon was bleeding into something quiet when I saw him.

A figure was standing near the nurse’s station, talking to a staff member.

He looked distressed... the kind of frantic, wide-eyed distress of someone who has seen something terrible and is begging for someone to tell them it isn’t real.

I recognized him before the recognition was even conscious. The hair was lighter, but the height, the build, and the face were a haunting echo of my own.

Noah.

He was here. Which meant the news leak had reached him, and the subsequent scrubbing hadn’t been enough to convince him it was a lie.

He was standing there, his hands trembling as he spoke to a nurse who was looking at him with a growing sense of confusion.

The nurse looked up as I approached, and I saw her eyes go wide. She looked at me, then at Noah, then back at me.

The double-take was immediate. The resemblance was too strong to ignore in this proximity.

"Thank you," I said to the nurse, my voice carrying an absolute dismissal.

She got the message and moved away quickly, though I could see her glancing back over her shoulder.

I reached out and put a firm hand on Noah’s arm. I guided him away from the open corridor, toward a quiet corner where the conversation wouldn’t carry.

He was cooperative, mostly because the shock seemed to have drained the resistance out of him.

We stood in the shadows of a recessed doorway. Up close, looking at him was like looking into a distorted mirror.

He had the same eyes, the same set of the jaw, but everything about him was softer, more vulnerable.

He looked at me, and I saw the question already formed in his eyes. He didn’t even wait for me to speak.

"It’s true, isn’t it?" he asked. His voice was a jagged, broken thing. "Cassian is here. He’s here, and he’s hurt."

He looked at me, pleading for a lie I couldn’t give him. He wasn’t Lila; he wasn’t looking for gossip. He was looking for a lifeline. And for some reason, standing there with this boy who shared my face, the clinical detachment I’d spent all day building began to feel very, very thin.

"Noah," I began, but the name felt heavy in my mouth.