Tommy is sitting on the floor.
His back is against the server rack. His legs are stretched out in front of him.
His glasses are askew on his face, knocked sideways by whatever evasive movement he made when the surge hit, and hehasn't straightened them. His hands are in his lap, and they're shaking.
A fine, low tremor that runs through his fingers and makes them flutter against his thighs.
The hands that type faster than anyone I've ever seen. The hands that built this system from bare rock. The hands that adjusted my workspace lighting and left Mountain Dew where I'd find it and learned my body in the dark with the same thoroughness he gives to everything that matters.
I enter the server room. Close the door behind me.
The hum wraps around us, restored and steady, and the cold air carries the smell of ozone and overworked hardware and the particular scent of a room that just absorbed an electrical surge powerful enough to kill a person standing in the wrong place.
I sit down beside him. The floor is cold through my jeans. The server rack vibrates against my spine.
My shoulder touches his, the same deliberate elimination of the gap between where he is and where I am.
I take his hands.
Both of them. Lift them from his lap and fold them between mine.
His hands are bigger than mine. Rougher. Cold in a way that has nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with what he just spent.
My warm fingers wrap his cold ones, and the tremor transfers through his skin into my palms.
I hold it. Absorb it. Let the vibration pass through me the way the primary core absorbed the surge, taking the hit so the system behind it can keep running.
His shaking slows. Incrementally.
The fine flutter becoming a low vibration becoming an occasional twitch. I feel each stage of the deceleration through my palms, and I adjust my grip at each one, tightening when thetremor spikes, loosening when it ebbs, reading the data in his hands the way he reads data on his screens.
His fingers curl around mine. The grip tightens, testing, confirming, the physical handshake of two systems reestablishing a connection that never actually went offline.
"The hum is back," I say. Because it's true, and because the truth is the only language I've ever been fluent in, and because the hum matters to him the way the overlook matters to me, and naming it is a way of telling him that his world survived.
"Yeah." His voice is hoarse. Thin. The version of Tommy that exists when every layer of humor and deflection and performance has been stripped away, and what's left is a man sitting on a cold floor with shaking hands and the knowledge that he just did the bravest thing of his life in a room full of machines. "It's back."
We sit. The hum fills the silence. His hands stop shaking. Mine keep holding.
In the quiet, Tommy says one word. Low and rough and carrying the weight of everything that's happened since a single word arrived on a channel that shouldn't exist and changed the trajectory of two lives that were running in parallel without ever intersecting.
"Stay."
One word. Sent into the space between us the same way I sent one word into the space between my loft and his mountain.
A signal. A request. A vulnerability offered without encryption, readable by anyone close enough to hear.
My fingers tighten on his. The tapping is gone. No code cycling through my knuckles, no subroutines processing kinetically through my hands. Just stillness.
The choice to be motionless, which from me is the most eloquent answer I know how to give.
I don't say yes. Not yet. Not because the answer is uncertain but because the weight of it requires something more robust than a single syllable spoken on a server room floor at the end of the hardest day of both our lives.
But my hands don't let go.
My shoulder stays pressed against his. My breathing matches the rhythm of the hum, which matches his breathing, which matches the pulse of a mountain that went dark and came back to life because two people who built their whole lives behind screens chose to step in front of them.
The server room holds us. The hum steadies. The lights hold green.
