“I know what Orion is.”
“Just checking. You were a hockey player, not an astronomer.”
“Those aren't mutually exclusive.”
“Name another one, then.” He sounded almost sleepy, voice loose and low in a way I didn't hear from him often. Usually Soren was in motion — talking, deflecting, filling silence with noise. But right now he was still, weight settled against me, and something about it felt like a gift I hadn't been offered before.
I scanned the sky, found what I was looking for. “Cassiopeia. The W shape, up and to the left.”
Soren was quiet for a second. “Huh. Okay, you actually know things.”
“Told you.”
“My dad used to do this thing when I was little. He'd drag me out to the backyard late at night, past when I was supposed to be in bed, and he'd point out all the constellations and make up stories about them. Not the real myths. His own ones. Usually involved a lot of dragons.”
“Did the dragons ever win?” I asked.
“In his version, yeah. Always.” A short exhale, not quite a laugh. “He said the dragons were misunderstood. Just big and loud and bad at being gentle.”
I sat with that.
Soren shifted slightly, getting more comfortable, and I felt him let out a slow breath against my shoulder. Above us, the stars were doing what they always did — staying exactly where they were, indifferent and permanent and weirdly reassuring for it.
“You ever feel like—” He stopped. Started again. “Like you're looking at all of it and you can see exactly how it's supposed to go. The whole picture. And then you look at your actual life and the two things just don't match up at all.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know that feeling.”
“Yeah.” He said it quietly. “I figured you did.”
We went still again, and I could hear the wind moving through the tree line at the edge of the clearing, and somewhere down in the valley a dog was barking at something that wasn't there.
Then a shooting star crossed overhead. Fast, clean, gone in about a second — a bright scratch across the dark and then nothing.
“Oh—” Soren lifted his head just enough to track it, then dropped back down. “Did you see that?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you make a wish?”
“No.”
He made a noise of genuine offense. “Rook. You're supposed to make a wish.”
“It was already gone by the time I processed it.”
“That's not how it works. You make the wish retroactively.” He tilted his face up, close enough that I could have looked directly at him without moving much. I kept my eyes on the sky. “What would you have wished for if you'd been faster?”
I thought about it. Genuinely thought about it, which wasn't something I usually did with questions like that. “That the people I care about end up okay,” I said finally. “The actual kind of okay, not just the version they tell me about.”
Soren was quiet for long enough that I started to wonder if I'd said the wrong thing. Then he settled back against my shoulder, heavier than before, and said, “That's a good wish.”
“What would you have wished for?”
He didn't answer right away.
“More time,” he said finally, and his voice was so level I almost didn't catch it.
I turned my head then. He was still looking up at the sky, face tipped back, jaw tight in a way he usually only got when he was holding himself somewhere between calm and not. The starlight caught the line of his cheekbone and the curve of his mouth.
