I let him.
Across the room Jim and Dalton are talking — low, halting, the conversation of two people rebuilding something piece by piece. Dalton telling him things. Jim receiving them. The fragments surfacing, a name here, a memory there, the bond with me and Gray and Leo and the cracking-open that came with it giving him access to a before he thought was gone.
I watch Jim's face change as the memories come.
Not all at once. He gets something and sits with it and gets something else. Dalton watches him get each one and his facedoes something different every time — relief, grief, wonder, all of it moving through him without the professional mask to sort it.
The room holds them.
Lumi, quiet beside Stone. Stone with his hand over hers. Jake against the wall, present and private. Leo's hand in mine.
And me, watching Jim get his name back, watching Dalton find what he came here for, watching the thing that survived nine years and a mountain and a feral episode and a bond and a laugh in a yard finally become what it was always going to be.
Brothers.
I press my face into Leo's shoulder.
He puts his arm around me.
"Okay?" he says quietly.
"Yeah," I say. Into his jacket. "Really okay."
***
It goes for a long time.
At some point someone brings water. At some point Jake moves from the wall to the chair nearest Jim and sits there without saying anything, and Jim reaches out without looking and grips his forearm once, and Jake lets him.
At some point Lumi and Stone slip out so quietly I don't notice until they're gone.
At some point Dalton looks up and finds me across the room and holds my gaze. Something in his face that I don't try to read completely. Something that includes gratitude and more than gratitude.
I nod once.
He nods back.
Jim says something to him low and Dalton turns back and they keep going, and I let them, and I stay until the room is ready to let them go.
Chapter twenty-three
Lumi is in the corridor.
She's waiting the way she waits for things — not pacing, not checking, just present, standing outside the common room door with her hands loose at her sides and the patience of someone who knew I'd come out when I was ready. She looks at me when I appear and doesn't say anything. Just falls into step beside me.
We walk. I don't ask where we're going. My feet take us toward my room and she follows. When we get to my room she comes in without being invited, which is the most unLumi thing she's ever done.
She sits on the chair. I sit on the bed. The room is dark except for the corridor light coming under the door.
I don't say anything for a while.
Neither does she.
"He got his name back," I say finally.
"Yes," she says.
"David." I try it out. "He's been Jim for so long. And before that he was nothing. And before that he was someone's little brother who called his older brother Billy because he couldn't say William at two years old." I stop. "Nine years. And Dalton spent nine years becoming someone who could get close enough to find him."
