Chapter Text
Davijaan got halfway to Kyurem before he pulled his speeder over to the side of the road and sat, and watched a cluster of blue birds swim in the marsh, and debated turning back.
He really wanted to go home and just. Not do this.
But if he went home without talking to Loren, Cody would be insufferable.
And, it’d been months. He was tired of trying and failing to not think about how she would react if she ever found out. Trying to guess at how she might feel, at what she might want. He’d rather ask. He’d rather know. He’d rather face this and get it over with.
Whatever she did was out of his hands. If she was upset or uncomfortable he could just stop visiting her for a few weeks. Let them both have some space. Find a way to apologize. He’d say his piece and brace himself.
He got back on the road and kept going.
***
When he arrived at Loren’s door he didn’t let himself stall; he knocked immediately and held himself ready to march inside as soon as she opened the door. But then she took forever to open the door, and by the time she finally poked her head out he had something stuck in his throat.
“Odd Ball? Hello?” Brow creased in bemused surprise, she gave him a quick once-over and opened the door a little wider. “Would you like to come in?”
No. “Sure.”
He tried to smile. It must not have come out right, because her surprise was quickly replaced by concern.
“Is everything ok?” She ushered him over to the couch. He didn’t sit, just stood awkwardly in front of it. He took a deep breath.
“Did something happen after I left? If—”
“I think I’m sweet on you.”
Silence. Total silence for one, two, three seconds while Loren tilted her head, baffled.
“You think? You think—”
“I mean, probably.” He winced. “I mean, I know. I am. Sweet on you.” It came out softer and more hesitant than he’d wanted it to.
“Sweet..?”
“You know. Sweet… um… feelings.”
Loren’s confusion cleared, and she took a single step forward, studying him eager and intent. “You mean you’re interested in me?”
It was his turn to blink in surprise. “I’ve always been interested in you?”
“No, I mean…” A blue blush slowly spread up her face. “Romantically.”
“Oh.” He felt himself flush red, heart pounding in his chest. He straightened, swallowed hard. “Yes, that.”
“Finally!”
And, a joyful shriek had not been a reaction he’d expected.
Loren spun in a circle in the middle of the room, laughing, and he stayed frozen in front of the couch, gaping.
“Finally!?” He sputtered, thoroughly unprepared for whatever the hell was happening. “What do you mean finally?”
“I’ve been waiting for you to say something since the— since—” She waved her hand in front of his face.
“Waiting for me to say something? Why didn’t you say something?”
“Well first you were recovering, and then Pa said I ought to wait—”
“Wait, wait. You talked to your parents about this?” he asked, horrified.
She huffed and crossed her arms in mock indignation. “Like you didn’t go running to Cody for advice.”
“I didn’t, actually,” he grumbled. Cody hadn’t given advice so much as he’d issued marching orders.
“I didn’t mean…” She let her arms slip until they were linked loosely over her stomach, embarrassed. “It sort of came up when I was telling them about— and I didn’t know what to do, because you hadn’t said anything straight out but you’d certainly implied, and Pa suggested I wait for you. Since you’re still sort of… settling. I figured you’d say something when you were ready.” She shrugged, and grinned. “And you did.”
“Ah. Well.”
Whatever. What was one more thing the Yangs knew about him, at this point? They’d witness the fallout of this conversation, one way or another. He took another deep breath; let it out slow. “Then, you don’t mind?”
Her mouth dropped open in shock, and then she visibly stilled herself, all the frenetic energy of her happiness concentrating into something earnest and gentle. “Of course I don’t mind. I’m interested in you, too, silly. Sweet on you.”
“Oh.” He swallowed.
“Oh,” he said again, breathless with relief. “I’d hoped…” A hand reached for her, before he caught himself and let it fall against his side. “I… May I..?”
“Come here.”
She pressed him back onto the couch and he let her, overwhelmed and suddenly unsure. She hesitated, and then climbed into his lap, and he wrapped his arms around her waist and clung to her, desperate for someone to hold on to in this rush of unfamiliar emotion.
No matter what Wolffe had said, or what Cody had insisted, or what he himself had made note of, he truly hadn’t expected her to feel the same way. Hoped, vaguely. Hoped enough to wait and consider. But the only responses he’d let himself imagine were the ones where he had to manage the pain of dismissal. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to laugh or cry, and tried to control his breathing so he wouldn’t end up doing both at once.
Loren shivered in his arms, and he relaxed his grip in case she was uncomfortable, but she just pressed closer; her cheek against his ear, her arms around his shoulders. They stayed like that for a long time, holding each other.
Finally Loren pulled back to look at him, bright and warm and absolutely elated. If she kept looking at him like that for the rest of his life he’d die happy.
His thighs were starting to go numb. He shifted, careful not to dislodge her, but with an apologetic grimace she slid off his lap to sit next to him, still close against his side, still with one of his arms around her waist. He was pretty sure he was grinning like a madman. He was absolutely sure he wouldn’t be able to stop.
“So.” He cleared his throat and smoothed a hand down her side, and then stopped, and then when she didn’t say anything did it again. “What now?”
She raised an eyebrow. “What now?” she echoed.
“One of the pilots in my squad had a partner. I think— I would like that. If you would also like that. But I don’t know how to go about, um, that.”
She hummed, considering. “We could start with dating? Something more casual?”
“Yes! That sounds— yes. That’s just, going places together?”
He’d definitely heard people talking about dating, on leave. They were at the bar with a date, or their date had stood them up, or they wanted to plan a date. He was trying desperately to remember if Mitts had ever mentioned dating his partner. He was pretty sure they’d just commed a lot.
“For the most part. Going places and doing things together, getting to know each other better.”
He snorted. “So, what we’ve been doing?”
“Well, yes.” Her eyes sparkled. “Except now we make it romantic.”
“Right.” He felt himself blush again, the grin fading into something fixed. That was the part he wasn’t sure about. The part he expected her to have expectations for. “You’ve done this before? Had a partner?”
“I dated in university, but that was mostly because everybody dated. I only had two relationships that were serious.” He wondered how she qualified a serious relationship. “You?”
He shrugged. “I could always find someone to spend time with on leave, but nothing that lasted more than a day or two."
She looked surprised, and then thoughtful. He wanted to sink back into the couch and curl into a little ball of shame. Instead, he looked her in the eye and said, “I need you to understand, I don’t know what I’m doing.”
Slowly, she nodded, scooting a little closer and slipping her own hand into his where it rested on her hip. “That’s ok. Every new relationship is different, so we can be wrong footed together.”
For a long moment he just stared at her, and then he started laughing.
“What?” She squeezed his hand, startled. “What did I say?”
“Nothing! Nothing.” He muffled the last of his laughter against the back of his wrist and got himself under control. “You just— you make everything sound so simple. I stress and worry over something and it’s like it doesn’t even register as a problem for you.”
“I am taking this seriously, I’m not trying to say your concerns don’t matter, I—”
“I like it.” He knocked his shoulder against hers, smile softening. “Makes it easy to be around you. Makes life… not so terrifying, with you.”
After a moment her own smile returned, amused, and she reached up to cup his cheek. “I’ve always thought of you as fearless.”
“Ah. Not really.”
“Courageous, then. Laughing in the face of your fear.”
It wasn’t very courageous if the only reason he was laughing was to keep from crying, and the idea that she saw him like that made him feel a little self-conscious, but also a little in awe.
He leaned into her hand and looked at her, at the care and curiosity bright in her eyes and the humor etched in the curve of her lips and the determination solid in the set of her jaw. “Do you want to start tomorrow? Dating?”
“Absolutely.” She nodded once, firm. “The sooner the better. Do you want me to plan something? Or—”
“I think I have an idea, if that’s alright?”
“Really?”
Probably.
They’d already arranged to spend the day together. Davijaan was supposed to come down to Kyurem so they could go out on the tundra. There wasn’t a good reason to change their plans, except it hadn’t been a date before. Now it was a date. Now it felt like he ought to put more thought into it.
There was still one place on Amaura he hadn’t gone. He didn’t think either of them had been intentionally avoiding it, but maybe it just hadn’t been the right time.
“Meet me at the hangar tomorrow morning? And we’ll go from there?”
She ran her thumb over his cheekbone, over the nick that had scarred into a tiny silver-brown spot, and pulled her hand away. “Sounds like a plan.”
“Good. That’s good. And—” Because he should probably check, just in case, just so he didn’t accidentally do something he shouldn’t. “— are there any Pantoran rules I should know before we— before this starts?”
Loren frowned. “Hm. Well, traditional Pantoran courtship mostly centers around escalating gift giving. There are… quite a lot of rules.” He knew it. “One of us would give the other a gift to show interest, and they would use it or wear it or whatever to show the interest was returned. And give their own gift after the appropriate amount of time had passed, and so on. So, maybe no gifts? At least not yet. Not until we decide where we want this to go.”
“Alright. I can do that. No gifts.” She was the one who was always giving him things, anyway, though food probably didn’t count.
“Not yet,” she repeated, deliberate, and then shifted so she was sitting sideways, almost facing him. “And, are there any Kaminoan courting practices you’d like me to be aware of? I actually, um, tried researching them once, but the only information on Kamino I could find was about their contribution to the war effort.”
Davijaan went utterly still.
“Kami— what?” He tried to laugh, but it sounded dry and cracked to his own ears.
Loren raised an eyebrow. “Well if we’re discussing Pantoran rules, shouldn’t we also discuss the Kaminoan ones?”
“There’s no— I don’t— I’m not Kaminoan, so.” He stood, abruptly needing to be out of her arms. He’d forgotten Kaminoans ran cold, though the scientists had always had gloves on when they’d touched him.
“Weren’t you raised there?”
“I— That’s different.”
“Ok?”
“When I said I didn’t know what I was doing, I really meant I didn’t know.”
Loren looked up at him from where she knelt on the couch, one hand hovering in the space where he’d been sitting, just as confused as when he’d been clumsily trying to explain how he felt. “I’m not sure I understand.”
“No.” He choked down some hysterical giggles. “No, you don’t.”
He shoved his hands in his pockets and stood in the center of the room, feeling a little like punching something and a lot like running far away and never coming back. Which was silly. He was being silly. She was trying to be considerate.
He tasted bile at the back of his throat.
“Do you..?” She sat back on her haunches, her hand falling to her lap. “Would you mind explaining?”
She was speaking evenly, carefully, but there was an edge of annoyance in her voice. With a surge of anger, he found he didn’t care if it was for herself or for him.
He opened his mouth to say he did mind, actually, and that he didn’t owe her anything and especially not this, and then closed it, and breathed.
He didn’t think he could talk about this right now, but he wanted to be able to talk about it later.
“Not right now,” he forced out, and he tried to make it even and careful but he was pretty sure it just sounded strained.
“Ok,” she said, standing, and as suddenly as it had appeared the annoyance was gone, replaced by worry. “I’m sorry if—”
“It’s fine.”
“I didn’t mean to bring up a sensitive subject.”
“It’s not a sensitive subject.”
From her uncertain nod he could tell she didn’t believe him, and honestly he wouldn’t have believed him either. He wasn’t sure what expression he was making but it probably wasn’t very pleasant to look at, and he wasn’t bothering to cover it up. All of a sudden he was exhausted.
“Too bad we’re not doing gifts, or I’d ask for patience,” he joked. “Or does it count as a gift if you have to ask for it?”
“It does if I choose to give it to you. But patience isn’t something you have to ask for.” She offered him a contrite smile. “Sorry if I was being pushy again.”
“You just wanted to know. I’m the one who...” He cleared his throat. “I think I’d better get home. Don’t want Cody to burn the house down making supper.”
“You could eat here. I was just about to get something started.”
“I think I’d rather…”
“Ok. Ok, that’s fine.”
He edged over to the door and laid a hand on the controls, but couldn’t make himself open it. He wasn’t running away. This wasn’t running away. But he still felt… “Will I see you tomorrow?”
“Of course you’ll see me tomorrow,” she said, firm, and stepped up beside him to squeeze his hand. “Bright and early.”
And Davijaan leaned in and carefully kissed her cheek, the same way she had for every goodbye for the last few months, and then made his way outside into the sunset.
***
Cody was waiting on their porch. He took one look at Davijaan’s face and his expectant grin fell away.
“What happened?” he demanded, blocking Davijaan’s way in the door.
Davijaan heaved a sigh and shouldered past him. “Loren was being dumb.”
“Loren was being dumb!?”
“Yes.”
“Alright…” Cody followed him inside and watched wide-eyed as he kicked his boots off with unnecessary force. “Care to elaborate?”
“No.”
“... Alright?”
“We're going on a date tomorrow.”
He left Cody sputtering in the living room and thumped down the stairs.
“Kaminoan,” he muttered under his breath as he threw open the bedroom door. “Kaminoan. Fucking hell. Does my neck look like a toothpick to you?”
He was still sort of angry. Not with her so much as with himself. The ride home had given him plenty of time to obsess over every second of their conversation. It’d been going so well, not just fine but perfect, better than he’d dared to hope, and then— and he’d tried to brush it off, but— and he hadn’t run out on her exactly, but he hadn’t left in the best way either, and what if—
He groaned and flung his jacket onto the bed.
Cody hadn’t followed him down. He waited in the middle of the room for a minute, but when he didn’t hear footsteps on the stairs he thumped his way back up.
He found Cody braced against the railing, critically studying the stairwell and debating if he wanted to brave it.
“What are you doing?” he scoffed.
“Didn’t know if you wanted me to bother you.”
“I almost always want you to bother me. Get over here.” He dragged Cody into the kitchen and put water on to boil.
Cody didn’t go down into the bedroom at all anymore. Not without permission. It was firmly Davijaan’s space. He’d moved his stuff into the empty closet in the hall, and he kept his blankets and pillows there when they weren’t on the couch. He’d said something the other day about buying another bed, and Davijaan was mostly fine with that, except he didn’t know where they would put it. Not in the bedroom, obviously.
Now that he’d been in so many other houses and offices and stores, he understood how small their own little house was, a mile past the edge of the village. And it was theirs— it was his; filled with his things and his brother— but it was still small. And maybe they wouldn’t always fit in it. And maybe that was alright.
He slumped at the table and Cody finished making them tea, because he’d watched the most picky tea maker in the galaxy fix his morning tea almost every morning for almost four years. His personal opinion on the taste may be neutral but his professional opinion on the technique did not allow room for Davijaan to dump loose leaves into a glass and pour lukewarm water over them and call it good.
“She thought we were Kaminoan,” he said, sudden and shattering in the easy silence of tea making. Cody almost dropped a mug.
“Um.”
“That’s what I said, and then she wanted to know why, and…”
“You did tell her though. Not why, but before all of this, you told her—”
“Yes I told her! I said, we’re going on a date!”
“Uhuh.”
“We are. Tomorrow morning.”
“After having a fight?”
Davijaan threw his hands up, exasperated. “We didn’t have a fight!”
Cody rolled his eyes. “Was she mad?”
“Sort of. Not really.” He looked down at the table, at the knife scars from before they’d got slab to cut on, at the stains and scars from accidents with colorful vegetables and hot pans. “I said I’d explain sometime. Maybe.”
He dragged his eyes up to Cody’s face as his brother set a steaming mug in front of him. “I don’t even know what I would say. We’re not Kaminoan, but what are we instead?”
Loren had said he was a Pantoran pilot. He’d started tentatively thinking of himself as Pantoran after that, just to see how it felt. It felt pretty good. But if she hadn’t meant it, if she’d been saying it just to say it… You weren’t really a member of a community unless the community thought of you as a member.
Cody was tense, his gaze distant. “We’re siblings. We’re veterans. We’re people. Do we need to be anything else?”
“We could have been Kaminoan.”
“We could have,” Cody allowed. “Or we could have been Mandalorian. Or Coruscanti.”
Davijaan breathed in the smell of the tundra in the steam from his mug. “I think I want to be Pantoran.”
Cody nodded, a faint smile settling over his features. “That wouldn’t be so bad. If we’re going to be here, might as well make ourselves at home.”
“But if she doesn’t— If that’s not how she sees—”
“Loren’s opinion isn’t the only one that matters, you know.” Cody raised an ‘are you really that dumb’ eyebrow and took a long sip of his tea, leaning against the counter. “What does the average Pantoran know about clones? Loren was right in the middle of the Coruscanti media scene, and she’s been your friend for a year. She knows more than most. Mx. Calen didn’t even know Kamino was a planet until I asked why it wasn’t on their starmaps.”
Davijaan scowled. “It does matter, though. Her opinion.”
“I’m not saying it doesn’t! I’m just saying, Loren isn’t the reason we moved here.”
She was. But also she wasn’t.
Davijaan drank his tea and thought back to those days and weeks on The Negotiator following the end of the war, almost exactly a year ago now, and the aching need to be anywhere else in the galaxy. He looked around his house, the living area with the couch and desk and woven hangings he and Cody had bought, the kitchen with the cupboards full of foods they knew how to cook. The bedroom downstairs that was his.
He watched Cody drink his tea and ignore the attention. Cody, who still had days where he was distant and silent and angry, and who would probably never be Kote again, but who was alive. Who was still beside him. Who had many many more days where every other word out of his mouth was the usual confident condescension; days where he teased and laughed and went to work and came home and cooked too much food.
He knew he’d changed too, he must have, but he wasn’t sure exactly how. He didn’t feel different. Maybe a little more calm, maybe a little more steady, maybe a little more comfortable in his skin. Maybe a little less terrified.
He liked slow changes better than sudden ones, he decided. You couldn’t really get out of either kind, but at least slow changes were gentle. They gave you time to adjust to the idea of them; to watch curiously for them rather than wait on edge to be found by them. For the first time, he let himself wonder how he would change in the next fifteen years.
***
It was still dark when Davijaan got to the hangar. He spent almost a half-hour pacing, knowing Loren would show up but not knowing what mood she would be in after yesterday.
But when the sun rose and Loren arrived, she was smiling. Sort of hesitant, sort of nervous, but smiling. So he let himself relax.
“Hello, Loren.”
“Hello,” she said, and then they stood in the space between their speeders and looked at each other until they both started to giggle.
“Ready?” he asked, and she nodded, and they climbed onto his speeder and he drove them to the trailhead.
She must have realized what he had planned long before they got there, but she marched over to read the marker anyway. She didn’t say anything, just waited for him to collect his pack and then took his hand as they started on the trail.
Neither of them had much to say at first, and they were both nervous, he thought, though not just because of the way things had ended the day before. They’d done this same sort of thing before many, many times, but this time there was a new understanding between them. Neither of them were trying to make it different, but it still felt different.
It was a long hike. Honestly, starting before dawn would have been smarter, but Davijaan was not about to walk up a mountain in the dark. As the sun rose they watched light and shadow play across the boulders and pines along the path, and listened to the wind in the branches and the infernal dripping and the birdsong.
There were still patches of muddy snow and ice scattered in the scrub, but the trail was dried out enough to walk on without fearing for their boots, and it was warm enough they both took their jackets off as the day went on.
As they started to leave the trees behind more flowers appeared between the rocks. Purple and blue and white, and yellow. Loren picked a few dandelions, and she kept the blooms a good distance from his face but had him try one of the leaves. It tasted fresh and bitter and almost like it was biting him back.
He watched as she knotted the flowers into a bracelet. The contrast of sunny yellow and grass green against her sky blue skin drew his eyes to her wrist all morning, until the blossoms started to close and she took it off and tossed it into the scrub.
The last few trees they passed were scraggling sprouts, fresh and pale. To his bewilderment, Loren insisted they stop a moment so she could coo at them.
“But it’s a tree!”
“But it’s smaller than a regular tree, so that makes it cute!”
Davijaan stared at the tree in question, scruffy and short and just about as thick around as his pinky finger. “How does being small automatically make something cute?”
“It just does,” said Loren, matter of fact, kneeling in the dirt in front of it. “It makes me want to pet it.”
“Pet the tree?”
“Stroke its leaves, smooth out the scuffs in its bark, pat the dirt down nicely over its roots.”
“What the fuck. Loren. Loren what—”
“Tiny little trees are adorable, Odd Ball, and the only reason you can’t see it—”
“Is because—”
“You’re—”
The argument over the relative attractiveness of tiny little trees left them both at ease, and they kept up the teasing as they climbed higher and higher, neither letting go of the other’s hand.
They reached the peak of Amaura just after noon.
They sat on a broad slab of rock, overlooking the cliff but well back from the edge, reluctantly releasing each other to dig out their thermoses. Davijaan had packed food, but he waited to get it out, enjoying the warm stone under him and the arching sky above. Everything was still this high up; still and calm and quiet.
Loren leaned against his side, arms looped around her knees, and they sipped their water and regained their breath and gazed out past the cliff in silence.
When he felt settled, like a bit of the mountain’s calm and quiet had seeped into him, he set his thermos aside and said, “So. About yesterday.”
Loren buried her face in her hands and groaned. “I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have made assumptions, I should have—”
“No! That’s not— It’s a fair assumption to make. We were raised there.” And he’d mostly decided he wasn’t going to talk about that part. Ever, if he could help it. But— “You really thought of me as Kaminoan?”
“Well, formerly of Kamino, currently of Pantora. I knew you had good reasons for moving here.”
He nodded once, relieved, because somehow it mattered less that she thought of him as Kaminoan if she thought of him as Pantoran at the same time. “I always thought of myself— I don’t know, maybe some of my brothers think differently, but I always thought of myself as part of the GAR. A soldier. Or, I used to.”
Loren shifted, her trousers scratching against the stone, and turned to meet his eyes. “I know there was a lot very wrong with the GAR; with how you grew up. There’s still a lot wrong with the general public perception, and— anyway. I know I misunderstand some things, but I also know it wasn’t… How the media chose to portray it.”
You can just say slavery.
But if she wasn’t going to say it straight out, then neither was he.
He shrugged. “Didn’t pay much attention to the media.”
“No,” she said, slowly, studying him with a creased brow. “I suppose you didn’t.”
Looking out past the cliff, he could see the village spread across the valley under the noon sun; larger buildings clustered tightly around the grey lines of the main roads, smaller buildings thinning out as they climbed the low slopes, becoming interspersed with pine trees and flowering scrub. The grey and brown and blue smudges of roads and trails and the river wandered in and out of the village before winding up to the white peaks of Amaura and her sister.
It was so small, it was almost like looking down through a viewshield, except he didn’t have to focus on flying. He could just sit and rest and look.
“Peace wasn’t real for me until I met you.”
Loren startled. “What wasn’t?”
“Peace,” he said. “Life without war. It wasn’t something I’d ever let myself think about. But, that first day, listening to you describe your life— your ma is a pilot. A civilian pilot. I’d never— and the way you described the mountains and the village and the sunrise. I didn’t know that was something I could want. So.”
He took her hand again, running his thumb over the back of her knuckles. “Thank you, for giving a bit of your peace to me.”
If it really had been goodbye, if he’d never seen her ever again, if he’d stayed on Coruscant and watched Cody fade away, he’d still have that. No matter how things ended with whatever they were trying to do, he’d always have that.
“I’m sorry.” He offered her a rueful smile. “War was a poor gift in return.”
“Don’t be sorry.” She shook her head and took his hand in both of her own. “I know I said… But I didn’t mean it as a bad thing, I meant war finally had a face, and it was yours, and you were…” She straightened, unfolding her legs so she could scoot around to sit facing him, gold gaze intent, pinning him in place.
“You are one of the most selfless people I know. You’ve been there for me through some of the worst times in my life, and you always laugh at your own pain but you’ve never laughed at mine. It’s been— it’s been so good, to be a part of your life in peacetime. To see you happy. It makes me so happy to see you happy.” Her grip tightened. “Odd Ball, I think—”
“Davijaan.”
She blinked.
“That’s… That’s my name.”
“Your name?”
He swallowed hard. “The one I made up. For myself.”
“Oh.”
She looked a little like he’d just punched her in the gut.
Last night he’d decided to tell her, because this was one thing he knew wasn’t going to change, and because if they were going to try and do whatever it was they were going to try and do then she deserved to know. Maybe not what it meant, maybe not why he'd chosen it, but it was getting harder and harder to listen to her call him Odd Ball like Fox used to. Like the troops under his command, like General Kenobi, like every civilian he'd ever introduced himself to.
He’d been waiting for a good time. But there was not a good time, there was only a limit to how long he could wait, and if this conversation was going to continue he needed to say this before he was too overwhelmed to say anything, but now she looked—
“You can keep calling me Odd Ball, if— if Davijaan sounds wrong. You don’t have to—”
She took his face in her hands, breathless and a little awed. “It sounds perfect, Davijaan.”
And then she kissed him. And, after a moment of shocked surprise, he slipped a hand under her hair to cup her neck, and kissed her back.
***
They stayed up at the top of the mountain under the sun and the sky for most of the afternoon, and there was a lot of kissing but also a lot of talking. By the time they headed back down, linked hands swinging between them, Davijaan felt much more certain of this, of them.
He wanted this. He wanted a house with his brother in the mountains and to fly every day in a clear blue sky and to spend every second he could with Loren. He wanted this life, and he had it. And he didn’t ever have to let it go. And part of him was still trying to understand that, but most of him was at peace.
He looked at Loren, walking beside him in the sunset, and knew she’d still be there in fifteen years.