***
Leo is in the corridor.
I don't know if he felt me coming through the bond or if it's coincidence but he's there, coming around the corner from the direction of the common room, and he stops when he sees me and his whole face shifts. I close the distance before he does, walking into him, and his arms come up and around me and I push my face into his neck and just breathe.
He holds on. I hold on.
He smells the same. That's the thing that gets me — the specific scent of him, Leo, unchanged, the bond carrying it into my chest and staying there. I've been feeling him at a distance for days.
It's nothing like this.
This is warm and real and him, and I press closer, my face in his neck, his arms tightening as he lets out a low, rough sound.
"I missed you," he says. Into my hair.
"I missed you too," I say.
He pulls back and looks at me. At the black shirt. The boots. The jeans that fit. His eyes move over all of it and then come back to my face and what's there isn't Leo performing composure — it's Leo holding something down with both hands.
He takes my jaw. Presses his mouth to my forehead once, hard. Steps back.
"Come on," he says. Rough.
***
The common room.
Jake is on his feet before I'm through the door. He crosses the room without hesitation and wraps me up the way Jake wraps things he's been worried about — both arms, no ceremony, the full-body grip of someone who has been carrying something and is putting it down for a second. I feel the bond flare warm and bright when he holds on and I hold back.
"Hey," I say, into his shoulder.
"Alex," he says. Low and rough, my name doing the work of everything he's not going to say.
He pulls back and Jim is right there. His hand finds my arm, my shoulder, and his forehead drops to mine and we stay like that for a moment — the bond running warm between us, the wonder and the ache and the reaching, all of it present and close. I squeeze his hand. He squeezes back.
I pull him in and hold on and feel him breathe.
Leo is against the far wall with his arms crossed, watching all of this with his jaw clenched.
We stay like that for a moment. All of us just breathing.
Then I pull back and wipe my face with the back of my hand.
"How is he," I say.
Jake's jaw tightens.
"RJ," I say.
"Not good." Flat. Honest. "Since you left. He's gotten more withdrawn. Even for RJ."
The wanting at my wrist sharpens — not a bond, never quite a bond, but present and insistent and tuned specifically to RJ's frequency the way it always has been.
"Sven's with him," Jake says. "Stone takes him to the yard when he'll go. Cal's been in." A pause. "He went to the fence yesterday."
The south fence. Our fence. His hand through the chain link, his thumb on my marks, the cold, the distance that wasn't this distance.
"He sat there for a long time," Jake says. "Just sat there."
