"Something wrong?" Sylvia asked quietly. Her hand was still resting on his shoulder, light and steady, and the firelight moved across both of them in slow warm pulses. "You’ve been making that face for a while now."

Lucas looked up at her for a moment. His eyes had that half-lowered quality that came from carrying something in your head for too long rather than from actual tiredness, though he looked that too. Then he turned back to the fire.

"It’s nothing," he said. "Just something stuck in my head. About someone." A short pause. "It’s getting annoying, honestly."

Sylvia’s brows moved slightly.

She looked at the side of his face, at the tired set of his jaw, at the way he was staring into the flames like they owed him an answer.

’So something is bothering him and he’s calling it nothing,’ she thought. ’Which means it’s been bothering him since the island and he’s been carrying it by himself this whole time.’

Then the word someone landed properly in her mind, and she turned it over.

’Someone from his past, maybe. Or his family.’ The thought arrived with the particular softness of someone filling in a gap they can’t see clearly. ’Either way, he’s not here right now. His body is here but his head is somewhere else entirely.’

She was quiet for a moment, considering.

Then she shifted slightly and sat down beside him near the fire, their shoulders coming together in the easy way that had stopped feeling like a decision a few weeks ago. She looked at the flames ahead.

"Let me give you an example," she said.

Lucas turned slightly toward her.

"Someone trains for months for an important battle," she began, her voice unhurried. "Works themselves past the point of sense getting ready for it. The day finally arrives, the enemy is right in front of them—" She paused. "But instead of being present, their mind keeps drifting. Old memories, old regrets, things that already happened and can’t be touched anymore. All of it pulling their attention away from the thing that’s actually in front of them."

The fire crackled between them and the island’s night sounds moved quietly through the trees.

"That person loses," she said simply. "Not because they weren’t strong enough. Because they were somewhere else when the fight started." She lifted her hand from his shoulder and placed it on his arm instead, fingers resting there. "Right now, Lucas, that’s you."

He didn’t say anything, but he was listening. She could tell by the way he’d stopped moving.

"Whatever happened back there — whatever you saw, whatever is stuck in your head — it already happened," she continued, her voice quieter now. "You can’t reach back into it and change it by thinking about it harder. What you can do is be here." Her fingers tightened slightly. "And you’re our strategist in this round. The one who figured out the first round when the rest of us couldn’t. So being in your own head right now is the one thing you can’t afford."

She glanced sideways at him.

"And you always think alone," she added, something faintly exasperated in her voice. "Like the thoughts will work better if nobody else is near them. Try relying on people once in a while."

The fire settled into a quieter rhythm.

Lucas was still looking at the flames, but something in the set of his face had shifted. The tension that had been sitting around his eyes since the beach had loosened slightly, like something had been said that he’d needed to hear and hadn’t known how to ask for.

He stayed quiet for a moment.

Then — ’Was I really that obvious?’

The thought came with a small uncomfortable recognition. He replayed the last several hours honestly and found Sylvia in all of them, watching him drift back to the dark place again and again while the group moved around him. The figure, the throne, the red eyes, Shadowfang in someone else’s grip, the system’s silence — he’d been turning it over since the shore and carrying it alone because that was the habit, the default, the thing he did.

He turned his head toward her.

She noticed all of it without me saying a word. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞

The laugh came before he decided to let it, small and quiet, the kind that arrives when something lands in a way you didn’t expect.

Sylvia’s eyes narrowed at him immediately. "What exactly is funny right now?"

"Nothing," he said, and the smile was still at the corner of his mouth. "Sorry. I was just thinking."

"That answer," she said flatly, "is getting genuinely annoying. Thinking about what?"

He looked at her for a second. Then, casually, like the observation was simply true and worth stating: "You know, just now you really sounded like my girlfriend."

Sylvia looked at him.

Held the look for a moment.

Then sighed — a short, tired sound — and brushed her hair back from her face. "According to roughly half the academy," she said, "that’s already our relationship status. Which your brain apparently keeps forgetting."

Lucas blinked. "...Oh. Right."

"You’re really not functioning today."

"Probably not," he agreed.

The quiet laugh came again, softer this time, and he looked back toward the fire. His expression had shifted properly now — the weight from earlier still there but sitting differently, like it had been set down somewhere he could pick it back up later rather than being carried constantly.

"Still," he said, and his voice came out quieter than before, "thanks, Sylvia. For pulling me back to the present instead of letting me stay stuck."

Sylvia looked at him from the side. Something passed through her expression that she managed before it became a full thing, and she clicked her tongue once. "Don’t suddenly go sincere on me. It’s strange." The smug look that arrived afterward was quick and certain. "Besides, you already act like one of those completely hopeless boyfriends from bad romance stories, so—"

Something landed in her lap.

It was heavy and warm.

Sylvia stopped talking.

She looked down.

Lucas’s head was resting against her thighs. His eyes were closed. His breathing had slowed into the deep, even rhythm of someone who had been fighting sleep for hours and had simply, finally, lost the fight — completely and immediately, the way bodies give out when they’ve been running on stubbornness for too long and the stubbornness runs out all at once.

Sylvia sat very still.

"...What," she said, to the sleeping person in her lap.