The yard is different today.
Jake is loose — genuinely loose. He's got one shoulder against the fence saying something to Jim that makes Jim shake his head, then Jake shoves him, shoulder into shoulder. Jim shoves back without looking up. Jake almost smiles.
I watch this and feel something uncomplicate in my chest.
It's been weeks of everything weighted. Everything careful. Everything building toward something or recovering from something or bracing for something else. Today nothing is immediately wrong and everyone in the yard seems to know it.
Leo is on a run. There's no other way to describe it — Leo when he's fully himself, sharp and present and finding the joke in everything. He's been going for twenty minutes and has covered topics including: the structural inadequacy of facility breakfast, Stone's programming curriculum, thephilosophical implications of Jake having a sense of humor, and his own ongoing excellence, which he feels is insufficiently acknowledged.
"I'm just saying," Leo says, to nobody and everybody, "that Stone's programming has significantly improved my upper body strength and I want that acknowledged."
"Nobody asked," Jake says.
"I'm asking. On behalf of myself."
Stone, from across the yard, without turning: "No."
Leo gestures at Stone like he's been personally betrayed. Jim's mouth does the almost-smile. Jake shoves Leo now, lighter than he shoved Jim, and Leo stumbles dramatically and rights himself with great dignity and says something that makes Jake actually laugh — a short rough sound, there and gone, but real.
The sound of it does something to the yard. Jake laughing is rare enough that everyone registers it without acknowledging they've registered it — Stone's posture shifts a fraction, Jim's head comes up, even Leo seems briefly startled by his own success before pressing his advantage.
"See," Leo says. "Excellent. I'm excellent."
"You're something," Jake says.
"That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me."
"It was not a compliment."
"I'm choosing to receive it as one."
Jim is still watching Jake with that specific attention he pays to things that matter. Jake catches Jim watching him and looks away, not bothered.
I glance toward RJ's side of the facility. The door to his corridor. Closed. Somewhere behind it he's having his own time, and think about the fence and whether they'll allow outdoor time soon. Cal thinks maybe another week.
Soon.
I turn back.
Dalton is at his post near the building — notepad, monitoring, doing his job. Leo has decided this is a problem.
"—purely professional concern," Leo is saying, angling toward Dalton with the expression of a man who has found a new project. "Just asking how you slept. As the security consultant."
Dalton looks at him flatly. "Fine."
"Fine." Leo repeats it like it personally offended him. "That's all you've got."
"What would you like me to say."
"Something true." Leo's eyes cut sideways to me, brief, a gleam in them. "Did you sleep well. Were you comfortable. Did anything—" a pause — "interesting happen."
My face goes warm. Jake makes a sound that might be a suppressed laugh. Jim has gone very still but I'm not paying attention to that yet because Leo is still going.
"I'm just saying, some people had a very eventful evening, and—"
Dalton laughs.
The real one. Sudden and loud, head tipping back, completely escaping before he catches it — the laugh I've heard only once before, the one that's purely him, unmanaged and unguarded. Then the gesture that follows it, the one I've seen him make before without knowing what it meant — his thumb dragging across his nose as he pulls the laugh back under control.
