Chapter 328: Far far away
Noah
"I’m sorry," I choked out, the apologies rushing out of my mouth before I could even think to stop them.
"I know you’re hurt, I know you have the lines in your wrist, I just... I couldn’t—" The words completely dissolved into a wet, broken mess against the wool of his pillow.
Everything I had kept locked behind my teeth for three weeks and four days came pouring out in ragged fragments.
"I thought you weren’t going to open your eyes. Every single morning I sat in that chair and you wouldn’t move, and then yesterday with the monitors... I didn’t know if you were going to die right there in front of me. I was so scared, Cassian. I was so fucking scared."
I said it plainly, burying my face straight into the hollow of his shoulder, not caring about the tears or the snot or the complete and total absence of dignity.
I was just a person falling apart against his coat.
Cassian went completely still for a moment.
It was that rigid, unmoving stillness of a man whose body has just received something it didn’t anticipate, an unexpected weight it didn’t know how to carry.
Then, slowly, his right hand came up off the linen. His long fingers moved through the air until they found the back of my head, his palm resting right against my hair.
He didn’t make a grand gesture; he just left his hand there, a solid, heavy weight that felt like an anchor holding me to the floorboards.
He didn’t speak for a long time. He just let me stay there, my face pressed into his shoulder, letting the shaking run its course without trying to interrupt the grief.
Then I heard his voice, quiet and rough against my hair. "You were really that frightened?" he murmured. There was a faint hint of his old, teasing dryness in the words, but underneath the dry edge, it wasn’t teasing at all. "Really, Noah?"
The embarrassment hit me like a bucket of ice water. I snapped my spine back, pulling away from the bed so fast my boots skidded on the floorboards.
"S-sorry," I stammered, my face turning bright red as my hands flew out to find each other in front of my waist. "I am so sorry, Cassian. I didn’t mean to just jump at you like that. That was completely unprofessional—"
I stepped back and performed a sharp, rigid bow... the full, formal gesture of someone who has no idea what else to do with his own limbs when everything has gone wrong.
"I apologize for the intrusion," I said, dropping my head even lower.
My forehead hit the metal side rail of the bed with a loud, sharp clang.
A long pause hung in the room.
"Ow," I whispered, keeping my eyes locked on his slippers.
Cassian stared down at me from the pillows, his face holding an expression I couldn’t fully categorize as if he had just witnessed a creature from another planet perform a ritual he had no name for.
"Are you entirely finished?" he asked, his voice dropping into that lethal, quiet tone that made my whole nervous system instantly reorganize itself into straight lines.
I straightened up slowly, my fingers pressing against the reddening spot on my forehead. "Yes," I said, my voice coming out very small. "Sorry."
"Sit down," he commanded, gesturing to the vinyl chair.
I sat down immediately, dropping onto the cushion on pure instinct, the old, reliable instinct that had kept me alive in his office for months.
Cassian looked at me properly now, his blue eyes moving over the dark hollows under my lids and the pale tint of my skin.
It was that full, thorough attention of a man who notices every single broken thread before he decides what to do with the cloth.
"You look absolutely terrible," he said flatly.
"I’m sorry—" I started automatically.
"That wasn’t an insult," Cassian interrupted, his brow furrowing. A brief beat passed between us. "When was the last time you slept for more than two hours, Noah?"
I opened my mouth, then closed it, my fingers twisting together in my lap. "I’ve been sleeping fine."
"When?"
"Regularly," I lied, looking at the floorboards.
Cassian just gave me that long, steady look that required no words at all to tell me he knew I was full of it.
"I’ve been... there was a lot of work to handle with the logs," I mumbled, trying to find an excuse in the plaster. "The department needed—"
"How many days?" he asked, his voice cutting straight through the falsehood. He already knew the exact shape of the answer before I could even form it.
I didn’t answer him, which was the most honest answer I could have given.
Cassian went quiet for a moment, his fingers tapping a slow rhythm against the white blanket. "The nurses told me you came every single morning," he said, and his tone changed completely. The flat, sharp edge left his voice, replaced by something very quiet, very careful. "Every single day, Noah."
"I... someone had to handle the office queries," I stammered, my throat tightening up again. "And someone needed to be in the corridor if the specialists had an update on the charts—"
"Noah."
I stopped talking instantly.
"Thank you," Cassian said simply. He didn’t use any grand performance, and he didn’t wrap the words in that heavy irony he used to shield himself from the world. It was just an honest statement.
"Thank you. I mean it." He paused, his gaze drifting toward the window before coming back to my face, something subtle working through his jaw.
"I think... I think perhaps your voice is part of why I came back at all."
What happened to my chest in that moment cannot be described in any way that makes sense. It felt as if the entire room had run out of air, leaving me spinning in the center of the linoleum.
I looked at him... at the gauntness in his cheeks, the dark bruises still healing around his temples, the blue lines taped to his arm, and the actual man sitting inside all that wreckage.
He had been somewhere dark, somewhere I couldn’t follow him for thirty long days, and he had actually chosen to come back to the room.
"I talked to you," I said, the truth slipping out before I could stop it.
"Every single morning I sat in that chair. I didn’t know if you could hear a word I was saying, but I talked to you anyway." I paused, my fingers digging into my trousers.
"I told you to come back. A lot of times. I was... I really didn’t think you were going to wake up, Cassian. Every afternoon the numbers would just sit there, and I kept coming back to the building anyway because I didn’t know what else to do with myself if you were gone."
Cassian watched me through the entire speech, his gray eyes unmoving. "I know," he said softly. "I think I heard you." The specific weight of those three words seemed to fill every empty corner of the ward.
I blinked, my eyes widening. "You... from inside? You actually heard me?"
He didn’t elaborate. He didn’t tell me about what he had been dreaming of; he just gave me that long, steady look that confirmed the truth of it.
Wherever his mind had been wandering during those three weeks, my voice had been there like a string in the dark, reaching through the mist until he could grab onto it.
The silence between us changed then, turning fuller, heavier, and less frightened than it had been since the monitors started screaming.
Then Cassian cleared his throat, the familiar dryness returning to his features. "I wasn’t going to die in a place like this anyway," he muttered, looking at the plastic tubing on his wrist. "I still have several things left to take care of in the city. I am not that easy to finish off."
A real smile finally arrived on my face... tired, worn-out, but completely relieved beyond any words I had left. "I know," I whispered. "I know that now."
Cassian looked at me for one long moment, something deep and unreadable passing behind his pupils, but he didn’t offer to explain the look, and I didn’t ask him to.
A brief pause hung between our chairs.
"Good," he said simply, closing the door on whatever that thought was, quietly and cleanly.
"I’m just really glad you opened your eyes," I said, letting my shoulders drop back against the vinyl. "That’s all. I’m just incredibly glad."
Cassian didn’t answer right away. He turned his face toward the wide glass window, his eyes fixing on the pale morning light rising over the city roofs outside.
I saw his jaw tighten, the muscles in his cheek setting into that familiar, rigid line of a man who is carrying an incredibly heavy weight but has chosen not to put it down on the floorboards. Not here. Not in front of me. Not yet.
"Yeah," he said finally, speaking the word directly to the glass pane. His voice was very quiet, very far away. "Yeah, Noah."
