This is a super short chapter and uh. Remember how I said I would update more frequently since I finished... haha... ha...ahem. 100% Elwin content because I am 100% Elwin fan. Pls vote and comment! Enjoy :)

I appeared in the Healing Center and collapsed, coughing until my arms could no longer hold me up and my lungs hitched without air.

Elwin kneeled in front of me, settling a hand on my shoulder gently. He handed me a cup of water. "Drink."

I downed the cup, and coughed again. "How —" But the word came out a wheeze, and my eyes burned when I looked at him. I closed my eyes, curls falling in a curtain around me. "How are they?"

"Who — Dex and Lucky?"

I nodded weakly, tipping the cup into my mouth for the last drop of water to touch my parched lips, but none came.

"Aria." His voice was so kind, so gentle, so caring. I wanted to scold him for being so open to the world when all it would do to him was hurt and hurt and hurt. He took my hands and helped me to my feet. "Come. You should sit down."

He led me to a cot, and took my empty cup. Blearily, I saw Lucky's form on one cot and Dex beside her.

Elwin returned with my refilled cup, and I sipped it slowly, savoring the sweet taste. "Do you want to tell me what happened?"

"No." My voice was rough, and another cough rattled out of me.

His eyebrows rose, unamused.

"What happened to Dex?"

"He inhaled a lot of smoke in his lungs. It'll be a process to expel the last of it."

The cup shook in my hand. "And Lucky's shoulder?"

"It was dislocated. I already set it straight, but . . . Do you think you're okay?"

"I'm fine." I waved dismissively towards Lucky and Dex, peering at the water wavering in my cup. "Take care of them."

Elwin hesitated. "Did you hit your head? Or —"

"I'm fine. No concussion. No random memory break. I didn't inhale as much smoke. Nothing happened to me." I squeezed my eyes shut, tears stinging beneath my eyelids. The lights were much too bright.

He let out a soft, disgruntled exhale, but he did as I said.

I curled up, taking deep breaths of fresh, clean air. The taste of ash still weighed heavy on my tongue, caking in my throat, filling up my lungs. I was drowning. Was that it? I was drowning in the phantom of the fire while I sat in a perfectly ventilated room. I sank into the white cotton pillows, ignoring the burn on my skin and the scratches across my arms and legs.

The two bodies Elwin tended to lay perfectly still across the room.

My mind thundered, and my heart roared in step.

I left them. They never would've been hurt if I hadn't left them. If I'd found the crystal sooner — If I hadn't dragged them into this at all. I could've done it myself. I could've done something myself. Even if I didn't have Dex to experiment with containing the fire or Lucky to help with the research.

Containment. It hadn't even worked. I could've easily done this stupid mission myself, even if my work was a little less refined, a little too hasty. Even if I couldn't alter my registry pendant feed or do all the research on my own. I could've set the fire and found the crystal and left.

The crystal.

It weighed heavy in my pocket, begging to be touched, to be looked at, to whisper glorious promises in my ear. The key to Charlotte's whereabouts, glimmering and ornate, felt like a weight on my chest, grounding and suffocating at once.

I could finally find her. I can finally bring her home.

Dex and Lucky's unmoving forms flashed again in my mind, branded itself onto every thought.

I'd go alone. More people meant more questions, more mistakes, more casualties.

I still don't trust you.

There'd been enough casualties of this war already. I'd bring Charlotte home, and once my mind shattered, I'd vanish from their memories. A distant figure, a girl who lied, who hurt them once, but that was all.

"Are you awake?"

My headache flared as I sat up, searching for Lucky and Dex. "Is — are they — ?"

Elwin readjusted my pillow. "They're okay. They're going to be okay. They'll need time to recover, but neither of them have permanent injuries."

The words echoed until they settled into place. I nodded and pulled to my feet.

"Where are you going?" he said.

The world blurred. My gaze focused on him like an ancient camera. "Home."

He looked at the cot and then back to me, his messy hair brushing against the top rim of his lenses. "You're bleeding. I — everywhere."

He was right. Streaks of blood soaked my torn sleeves, dripping to the floor slowly, tauntingly. The sheets I was on were stained red.

"Sorry."

His eyebrows drew together. "I should treat those wounds."

I looked away, my shoes clicking on the tile. "It's okay. I can do it myself."

"Hey. Aria." He grabbed my wrist lightly before I could pull out my leaping crystal. "I'm sure you can, but I'm here so that you don't have to. I think you've lost quite a bit of blood. Let me help you."

Something soft lingered in his blue-gray eyes, steady like a stream of sunlight. I stared at him, this strange puzzle, this little flame that promised impossible things. The world wavered before my eyes, tipping side to side, but he stayed still.

He seemed to take my silence as agreement, guiding me back to the cot and lifting one hand. He cleaned the blood away with a white cloth and a tender sort of touch, like he'd give his own breath just to save a stranger. Why did he care so freely?

I tilted my head as Elwin smoothed a salve across the burn and wrapped the bandages around my wounds.

Just because, I realized. How terrifying that somebody like this existed. How rare.

How beautiful, something else whispered, something naive and small, something this angry life hadn't quite stamped out yet.

"What happened?" Elwin's voice was soft. He shifted to my other arm. "I mean, this is . . . All the cuts, and burns, and smoke. What happened to you?"

We saved lives, I wanted to say. We destroyed the poison. We won. My gaze flickered to Lucky and Dex behind him. But we didn't. If I hadn't run away, if I'd gotten to them sooner, maybe they would've been okay.

"Hey." Elwin squeezed my hand gently. "Look at me — Aria, look at me. Are you okay?"

No. The lights were too bright, reflecting in his eyes, and my head was burning, and my hands shook.

But I was curious. Somewhere inside him, he held little light determined to shine. Wasn't that funny? It'd be snuffed out the moment the world found it. It would be foolish to try to protect it as much as I wanted to.

"Why did you become a doctor?" I whispered. He had a heart so big. That much I could tell. People like him, people who cared too much, they never lasted long. Eventually, the part of him that expected the world to be fair and bright and loving would turn into a broken memory in a dusty cage.

So why wasn't it snuffed out of him? How did he survive in a world that only ever hurt and hurt and hurt?

Elwin hummed thoughtfully, shifting my arm to survey the rest of the damage. "I guess I like to help people."

"I know," I said quietly, watching as he cleaned another wound. "But that's not it, is it?"

There had to be something that shielded him. Anything. At this point, I was willing to believe in a magic amulet, or protection spell because nobody could be that strong by himself.

He paused and his gaze flickered to mine, eyes glinting. More gray than blue, like the ocean in a storm. Was there something he saw when he looked at me?

For a moment, he was silent. The trees outside paused their dancing as if to listen. The air caressed his words sorrowfully, reminiscing.

"When I was seventeen, I had a friend. Her name is Thea, and she was . . . beautiful." The word was barely a breath. A wisp of a smile flickered over his lips, sweet and lonely, but I wasn't sure if he realized it. "In so many ways. Her eyes could've outshone the stars. Her smile — once you saw it, you couldn't go another day without hoping to see it again."

He was here, tangible, but with just those words, he was somewhere else, too. Somewhere beautiful, another world.

"She liked to dance." The smile returned, and he looked at me with a light in his eyes that couldn't have come from the sun or the stars or the fluorescent lights above. The kind of light that life hungered for greedily. "She was an incredible dancer.

"It felt like there was nothing she couldn't do. She was so good at making you laugh, and listening to you, and making you feel important. She was amazing." His smile vanished, and he looked back at his hands like the world he'd been in only moments ago was crumbling to bits in front of his very eyes.

"The day after midterms, the elite levels had a break. We could go home for a couple weeks. She was so excited to see her family. She used to talk about her little brother, and about her pet murcat, and her dad's cooking, and her mom's jokes. But that moment, when she was leaping home, I saw . . . I don't know what I saw. A flash of light. A distraction." He adjusted his glasses, twisting the bandages in his hand. "And her eyes. I saw her eyes. She wasn't going home. She was fading away."

Elwin always had a laugh in his eyes, even when he wasn't smiling, like there was a sun inside him that would never dwindle, a flicker of joy that would never die. But no matter how I searched his gaze now, I could not find it.

I reached for his hand.

He squeezed my hand and smiled again, but it was hollow, and his eyes still did not shine.

"I didn't think. I couldn't breathe. I just did. One second I was too far to reach her, and the next, she was in my arms. I wrapped my consciousness around both of us. But when we reached home, I . . ."

"Are you okay?"

He took a soft, shaky breath. "Yeah. I just . . ." His voice dropped to a whisper, like he didn't mean to say it, but the words tore out of him anyway. "I can still hear her screams."

So he did hurt. Tragedy had found him, and it took, as always, only enough so that he could see the empty space it left behind.

"Her leg had faded partially. Partial fading is rare, and it's impossible to cure. I couldn't imagine her pain, but it kept her in the Healing Center — this Healing Center for weeks. Months. I don't know."

How could he come back here? He worked here. Every memory he'd ever had of Thea lingered here, wrapping claws around his heart and squeezing a little tighter every day. And now, with Sophie's grave injuries and my reckless behavior, with children coming in every day with wounds he never should have to treat — how did he wake up every morning knowing he'd have to return?

"I stayed in that chair. I couldn't leave." He pointed to the one next to my cot. My heart stuttered. "She was in this cot. She couldn't dance anymore. That look in her eyes — the one that made me feel like I was the luckiest person in the world — was gone. And over, and over, and over, from everyone I knew, everyone I asked, I heard the same thing. There's nothing we can do." His voice was raw. He blinked, lost again in that broken world of his, in the cruelly calm aftermath of a disaster. "Nothing I could do."

"But you found a way, didn't you? You're — I mean, you're Elwin Heslege. You're brilliant. There's nothing you can't . . ." My voice trailed off as he shook his head slowly, as though he wanted to savor my naivety, my hope. As though he wished he wasn't the one breaking it.

"I tried. For years, I tried. Sometimes, I wonder — what if I'd been a few seconds faster? Or a little bit closer? What if I'd gone into another field, one a little more related to leaping accidents? I wonder . . ." He closed his eyes. "So many things."

"But she's okay, right?"

"Yeah, she's okay. She walks with a cane, and she wears a permanent nexus, and she's still . . . suffering. But she's okay."

"Because of you."

He smiled ruefully.

I could hear what he was not saying. "She's okay. But she's not . . . good."

His gaze grew distant again. "No. She's not."

"Do you love her?"

Elwin snapped out of his thoughts. "What?"

I bit back a grin and busied myself with my torn sleeve. "You seemed — I mean, you know. I'm just wondering."

He laughed, but pink bloomed across his cheeks and over his nose; he looked away. "Of course not."

"Hm."

"No — Aria. No." He gave me a stern look.

I returned the look.

He ran a hand through his messy hair. "Out with it."

"'She was beautiful.'" I laughed when he threw a pillow at me. "You shaped your entire career around this girl, and you're telling me you don't love her?"

"It's adorable you think you have my love life all figured out." He set aside the medicine and the roll of bandages he'd used to treat my wounds.

"Love life," I repeated pointedly.

Elwin rolled his eyes.

"Have you talked to her recently?" I said, tossing the pillow back. "Thea, I mean."

His mouth opened, then closed. He nudged his glasses up his nose, glancing from one thing to the next, like if he stared too long at any one thing, it'd catch fire. "No. I haven't . . . I haven't seen her in years."

I stared at him, twisting the blanket folded at the edge of the cot. "Why not?"

He let out a soft breath, almost a laugh, maybe a sigh. "I don't know."

I didn't like the look in his eyes. It made him seem like he carried the weight of the world on his shoulders. "Maybe you should."

"Yeah." His eyes flickered to the chair next to the cot, the one he said he'd stayed in for as long as Thea had recovered. "Maybe."

He looked away again, studying his empty hands, and I wonder whose ghost he saw in them.

All of that, and the fire inside him still burned just as bright. Maybe there was something I could learn from him. Maybe he didn't even see it in himself. I wrapped my arms around him, as if maybe that could protect him, hide him from this angry world.

Elwin froze, bewildered. "Sorry," he said with a little laugh. "I didn't mean to be so gloomy."

Or maybe I was hiding myself in his warmth. Maybe I was afraid.

"Are — are you okay?"

He was stiff for another moment. But then he wrapped his arms around me, and suddenly I was a little girl again, in my father's arms, my mother's laugh entwining with the scent of sweet pastries wafting through the kitchen. Suddenly I was a little girl again, a heavy lump in my throat, ready to fall apart.

I squeezed my eyes shut before the tears could fall.

"Aria?" Elwin's voice was barely a whisper. "Breathe, sweet thing. Just breathe." His heart beat steadily, the beginnings of a silent tune.

My traitorous breath trembled, but he didn't question it. I took another. Then another, and another, until my words didn't threaten to choke me.

"Sorry." I pulled back with a shaky laugh. "You give really good hugs."

Elwin only tilted his head, not in the least bit fooled. It was uncanny, the way he looked at me like I was merely a piece of glass. He could at least pretend like it was hard to read me.

I ran a delicate hand across my bandages, the fabric of gauze catching against my dry skin. "You have two of them."

"Sorry?"

I pointed to the counter where Stinky, the peach stegosaurus stuffed animal sat, grinning widely. Beside it, a little cream-and-brown goat sat on its hind legs, eyes wide and shy.

"Yeah." Elwin straightened excitedly. "His name's Mocha!"

There was a boyish gleam in his eyes, and I had to smile. "Two emotional support stuffed animals? Are you doing okay, Elwin?"

He grinned like he couldn't quite contain it. "I didn't get it. It came with a note — an anonymous thank you gift."

I glanced at Mocha again, shaking my head. "The amount of joy this brings you is disproportionate to the gift itself."

"Counterpoint: he's adorable, and I love him."

I laughed, and I think his delight was contagious. Was that how he did it? Maybe stuffed animals were his version of a magic amulet where he got the energy to love so freely despite the world and its bloodstained hands.

"Maybe I should get a stuffed animal."

Elwin caught my gaze and nodded seriously. "They're therapeutic."

April 5th, 2024, 6:01 p.m.