Chapter 23: Reunion
Eleanor was already moving before Mark finished the sentence, chair scraping back hard enough to nearly topple, and she was through the door and across the courtyard before she’d fully processed what she was doing, paying no attention to confused guards and onlookers...
The gate stood open ahead of her, guards stepped back to let her through and beyond it a small, ragged group of survivors stood waiting in the orange light of evening — exhausted, bloodstained and road-worn in a way that spoke of violence the group had survived.
Her eyes found him instantly, like they knew just where to look.
Lucas.... Thinner than she remembered, worn out and tired and scars that hadn’t been there the last time she’d seen him, standing at the front of a small cluster of strangers with an expression caught somewhere between hope and disbelief.
Eleanor stopped walking.
For one long, suspended moment, she simply looked at him, every emotion she’d been carrying for weeks locking itself down behind an expression she’d perfected out of necessity — the flat, unreadable calmness she used on nervous new arrivals, on desperate negotiations and on every crisis that demanded she not fall apart in front of people who needed her steady.
It wasn’t the reaction anyone standing near Lucas had expected at all...
"...Are you sure this is the right place?" Iris murmured, low, glancing sideways at him with open uncertainty. "Because she doesn’t look like someone who just found a friend she thought was dead...."
Lucas didn’t answer. He couldn’t, not with his own throat suddenly too tight to manage words, watching Eleanor’s carefully blank expression and feeling, for one terrible second, like maybe this had all been for nothing.
Then something in her finally cracked.
It showed first in her eyes, glassy and overbright even in the fading light, then in the way her jaw trembled once before she caught it and she turned without a word and walked back toward the fortress, gesturing sharply for the group to follow.
"Inside," she said, her voice rougher than she meant it to "All of you..."
The group waited for a moment and after seeing Lucas step inside the Fortress, they followed suit...
***
The inside was large... almost as large as a neighborhood.
So large that there were stalls and little cottages that the people lived in...
Lucas watched in shock as the people here actually seemed comfortable and for a split moment, one could forget they were still inside a nightmare.
All these was made possible by the woman walking in front of him...
She led Lucas to her own quarters once the others had been handed off to Mark for food, water, and whatever medical attention the fortress could offer and the door had barely closed behind them before Lucas opened his mouth, already reaching for something light to cut the strange tension still hanging in the air.
"So that whole ’stoic warrior queen’ thing outside," he started, a grin tugging at the corner of his mouth despite everything. "Really selling the mystique, Elle, very intimidating, very—"
She crossed the room and crashed into him with a hug so sudden and so hard it knocked the rest of the sentence clean out of him.
Her arms locked around him with a fierceness he’d never once felt from her in four years of friendship, face buried into his shoulder and for a moment neither of them moved at all.
"I thought you were dead." Her voice came out muffled, cracked in a way he’d genuinely never heard from her — not during finals week, not during the worst of their college stress, not even the moment the sky had torn open above their heads....
"Every single day. I kept telling myself you weren’t, and some mornings I actually believed it, other mornings I couldn’t make myself believe anything at all."
"Eleanor—"
"I looked for you." Her arms tightened further, like letting go meant he’d disappear... "Every new arrival, every scrap of rumor, every stupid secondhand story about someone who might have matched your description... I chased all of it, and none of it ever turned out to be you, and I was so scared, Lucas, I don’t...I don’t think I’ve been that scared of anything in my whole life."
Lucas stood there, arms slowly coming up to hold her back, mind working around words that refused to arrange themselves into anything useful.
In four years of knowing her, he could count on one hand— literally the times he’d seen Eleanor cry, and exactly zero times had he seen her fall apart like this, not the kind of composed while fallling apart, but genuinely, undone.
His mind was blank for several moments before he managed to speak...
"I’m here," he managed finally, voice rough. "I’m okay. I’m—"
"Let me just—" Her breath hitched against his shoulder. "Let me just be like this a little longer... just a minute more."
He didn’t say anything else. He just held on, letting her hold on too, the two of them standing in the middle of a room built by her own two hands in a world that had tried over and over to make sure this reunion never happened.
***
It had been several long minutes before she finally pulled back, swiping quickly at her eyes with the back of her hand, composure reabuilding itself piece by piece even as the redness around her eyes didn’t fully disappear.
"Okay," she said, voice steadier now, though still thinner than her usual tone. "Okay. Sorry. That was... that doesn’t happen. Ever."
"I noticed."
"Don’t."
"I’m not saying anything." He held up both hands, grin returning despite the tired aching of his body. "I’m just filing it away for future reference. Emotional breakdown, fully documented, may resurface during future arguments about whose turn it is to—"
"I will throw you out of this fortress myself." She said with a warm smile... just the ghost of old, familiar banter finding its footing again after weeks of silence.
She sat him down and told him everything — the drop, the scattered beginning with barely a dozen survivors, Mark’s Bastion’s Oath holding the line during the earliest and most desperate weeks, her own slow, clumsy mastery over four elements that had once been more of a liability than a gift.
The walls rising one hard section at a time. The Faction growing, slowly and then quickly, until it had become something with towers and banners and over a hundred people who called her, of all things, their leader.
"We’re planning to move soon," she said. "Toward the Gateway. We’ve got the numbers and the strength now, I think. Just needed to finish preparations."
"You could’ve left already," Lucas said carefully. "Sounds like you had the strength for it a while ago."
Eleanor went quiet for a moment, something more vulnerable than her usual composure flickering across her face.
"I had a feeling," she said finally. "That you were still alive. I couldn’t explain it, couldn’t prove it either, but I couldn’t shake it. And I couldn’t make myself leave the area you might still be wandering through, not without knowing for sure." A faint, self-conscious huff of breath.
"Mark thought I was being irrational. Maybe I was. But even he couldn’t bring himself to leave...."
Lucas felt something tighten in his chest, warm and aching all at once. "Elle—"
"Don’t get sappy on me," she said quickly, though her voice wavered slightly. "I already used up my one emotional breakdown for the week."
"I’m just saying." He couldn’t quite keep the grin off his face now, even with his own throat still tight. "Never seen you like that. Ever. In four years. I think I actually witnessed a historic event." The grin widened.... "Damn I gotta write this down..."
"Keep talking and I’ll make sure it never happens again."
"Worth it."
She rolled her eyes, but something in her posture had genuinely eased, some old weight visibly lifted now that the waiting was finally over.
"There’s something you need to know before we move," she said, tone shifting back tow business. "The Gateway isn’t just a walk through the park. To actually cross it, we’ll have to fight something. A beast class nobody’s encountered yet. Whatever it is, it’s apparently guarding the crossing itself."
Lucas absorbed that, filing it away next to everything else he’d learned the hard way over the past several weeks. "Great. Something new to nearly die to."
"You say that like it’s not exactly what you’ve been doing already." A small, tired smile. "Now that you’re actually here, though, I can finally move forward with preparations properly. Been putting off the final planning and now that you’re here..."
She looked at him as determination found it’s way on her face...
"We’re going to hunt that beast."
[Ding!]
[You have been made Leader of the Fortress. Accept?]
[Y/N]
Lucas stared at the notification hanging in the air in front of him, blinking, entir
ely unprepared for it. He glanced at the system, then at Eleanor...
Then, he smiled...
"You really are one crazy woman..."
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