Just as his thoughts threatened to circle the emptiness again — that small pressing absence where another certain someone should have been, sitting on his heart with all the quiet weight of a mountain — something cool and familiar wrapped around him from behind.
Eira.
She shrank herself down to her smaller size and settled across his shoulders like a living shawl, legs dangling idly against the side of his stomach, her little hands lacing around his neck.
She buried her face against the side of his throat and breathed him in — long, deep, unashamedly hungry, the way she always greeted him after even the briefest separation, as though the scent of him were a thing she'd been rationing.
"I missed you," she murmured against his skin, and he felt her smile form there. Then, lower, the smile fading into something else:
"Master. Did you talk to Cassiopeia?" A pause. She had seen everything and him too but she asked anyway "She seemed out of it. In the other car. I don't like it."
