After the plane's miraculous landing at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, located in the northeast of the city, Eric and the company found a restaurant in the airport and decided to have an early dinner.
They were all exhausted from the flight, especially Ruby and Zoe, who were still shaken from how close the plane had come to going down. For a few unbearable minutes up there, they had genuinely believed it would be their last day on this beautiful green earth, and the feeling hadn't fully left them yet.
The four sat around a rectangular table, Eric and Ruby on the left, Max and Zoe across from them. A waiter came and went with menus, and Ruby's hand trembled slightly as she tried to hold hers steady enough to read.
Being near death just a few hours ago had a way of putting things into perspective. Both women found themselves thinking, more than once in the space of a single meal, about how much they valued the people sitting across from them.
Ruby ordered without really looking at the menu, her eyes drifting instead to the window, to the runway beyond it, where another plane was taking off. Her breath caught for half a second before she made herself look away.
Under the table, her right hand found Eric's left and held on. She didn't grip it hard. She simply kept it there, needing the weight of it more than anything else, and went on eating with the rest of her attention.
Zoe was faring worse. Every time a tray clattered somewhere in the restaurant, her shoulders jumped, and her grip on Max's arm tightened by reflex before she caught herself and forced it to loosen again. She'd barely touched her food. When the waiter walked past a little too quickly, she flinched hard enough that her fork clinked against her plate, and she let out a small, embarrassed laugh that didn't quite reach her eyes.
"Sorry," she muttered. "I don't know why I keep doing that."
"You don't have to be sorry," Max said, already reaching for her fork. He speared a piece of chicken and held it up to her mouth without ceremony. "Eat. You'll feel more like yourself with something in you."
She opened her mouth automatically, chewed, swallowed, and only then seemed to notice what he'd done. "I can feed myself, you know."
"I know." He did it again anyway, grinning when she rolled her eyes but let him.
Somewhere between bites, she leaned into his side, and he shifted without a word to make room for her, one arm draping loosely around her shoulders. When the overhead speaker crackled with a boarding announcement for another gate, she stiffened at the sound, and Max, without even glancing over, pressed a kiss to the top of her head and murmured something low enough that only she could hear. Whatever it was, her shoulders came down from around her ears a moment later.
He kept at it in small ways through the whole meal, an arm around her, a hand smoothing her hair back from her face, his forehead briefly resting against her temple while she caught her breath. Every time her grip on him turned white-knuckled, he simply let her hold on, murmuring nonsense into her hair until her fingers loosened again on their own.
Ruby watched all of this from across the table, and something in her chest ached, quiet and a little envious. She glanced sideways at Eric. He was cutting his food into neat, even pieces, utterly unhurried, as if the last few hours hadn't happened at all.
A cart rattled loudly somewhere behind her, and Ruby's whole body tensed before she could stop it. She glanced instinctively at Eric, half hoping, half embarrassed to be hoping.
Eric didn't turn his head. He didn't reach for her with his other hand or pull her close the way Max kept pulling Zoe. He simply tightened his grip around her fingers under the table, just enough that she felt it, and kept eating as though nothing at all had happened.
That was all he offered. It was also, somehow, enough.
Ruby understood, the way she'd come to understand many small things about him over the years, that this was simply how he loved her: quietly, steadily, without needing to make a show of it. She let her thumb trace slow circles over the back of his hand instead, and felt her own breathing start to even out, matching some private, unshaken rhythm of his that had nothing to do with words.
Her lips curved into a small smile despite everything, and a faint blush rose in her cheeks, quiet and pleased, hidden mostly behind the rim of her water glass.
After they finished their early dinner, Max pushed back his chair and announced he was heading for the bathroom. Zoe's grip on his arm tightened for a moment before she let go, reluctant but no longer frantic.
"Five minutes," she said, pointing at him like it was a binding contract. "Not six."
"Five minutes," he agreed, pressing a quick kiss to her forehead before she could protest. She had calmed considerably since they'd first sat down, enough now that she managed a small smile as he straightened up. He gave her hand one last squeeze, then turned and jogged off, weaving through the crowd until he vanished somewhere past the gift shop.
Eric watched him go without turning his head fully, and it was only once Max was truly out of sight that he noticed it: the quiet, steady calm he'd carried through the entire meal had begun to thin, fraying at the edges like a signal losing strength.
It wasn't his intuition. He knew that feeling too well to mistake it for anything else. This was something older and far less explainable, a sense of familiarity that only ever surfaced around Max, one he'd first noticed when he was six years old and had never once managed to make sense of since.
Whenever Max was near, something in Eric simply settled. His mind grew quieter. Whatever noise or disturbance normally lingered at the edges of his thoughts fell away entirely, and his focus sharpened into something clean and effortless, as though some part of him had been waiting its whole life just to stand next to this one particular person.
He had spent years trying to trace the feeling back to its source and had never found one. Max was, as far as either of them knew, an ordinary man who had simply been his friend since childhood. And yet the calm was real, undeniable, present every single time Max stood within a few feet of him.
Now, with the distance between them growing by the second, Eric could feel that calm slipping away in slow, measurable degrees, and he didn't like how aware of its absence that made him.
After five minutes, Max ran back to them, and the two couples were about to take a taxi when Eric's intuition was triggered. His eyes widened slightly; he straightened his back and looked straight ahead. On the other side of the road, there was a small family consisting of three and a half members walking on the footpath.
Across the street, an ordinary family walked the footpath in the late afternoon light. A burly man led the way, his plump frame carrying itself with an easy, practiced confidence, the kind that suggested he'd been handsome once and had simply grown comfortable in whatever he'd become since. Dark, faintly blue hair. Eyes so deep a blue they read almost black. He laughed at something his wife said, the sound carrying warmly across the road, and shifted the small girl in his arms so she could get a better look at whatever had caught her attention in the sky. The girl licked at her melting ice cream without looking away from it, black hair, blue eyes, utterly unbothered by the world around her.
Beside him walked his wife, dark hair with the same faint tint of blue, her eyes catching the light like something out of the ocean. Whatever years she carried hadn't touched her face; she looked untouched, unlined, still beautiful in the particular way that made people glance twice without quite knowing why. One hand rested against the curve of her belly, rubbing slow, absent circles over it as she walked, the gesture of a woman deep into a pregnancy she clearly hadn't stopped marveling at. Six months along, if Eric had to guess. Maybe closer to seven.
It should have meant nothing to him. A stranger's family, crossing a stranger's street, on the other side of a city he'd been in for less than an hour.
Then it hit him.
Familiarity, sudden and total, slammed into his chest like a physical blow, stealing the breath right out of him. It was weaker than what he felt standing next to Max, a pale, thin echo of that same recognition, but what it lacked in strength it made up for tenfold in everything wrapped around it. Rage tore through him first, hot and sudden, followed immediately by something colder and far more dangerous: hatred, thick and ancient-feeling, as if it had been sitting coiled inside him for years waiting for exactly this moment to wake up. Envy came next, senseless and consuming. And beneath all of it, quiet and patient, bloodlust, the kind that didn't ask permission before settling into his hands.
The calm he'd carried his entire life, the steady, practiced stillness that had never once failed him, simply vanished. Gone, as if it had never existed at all.
He didn't understand it. He had never felt anything like this before in his life, and the sheer force of it left him frozen mid-step, his mind scrambling for an explanation that refused to come.
Then the voice arrived, and whatever fragile grip he still had on the moment shattered completely.
It came from somewhere far beneath conscious thought, ancient and heavy, dragging itself up from a depth he hadn't known existed inside him.
Kill them.
The words landed with the weight of something that had been waiting centuries to be said.
Especially the baby in that womb.
The voice shook with barely restrained fury, each word dragged out through gritted teeth, rage bleeding into every syllable like something volcanic straining against its own walls, one heartbeat away from erupting entirely.
Eric stood frozen on the sidewalk, his own pulse hammering in his ears, staring at a family of strangers he had never met in his life and somehow, impossibly, already hated.
He didn't move. He couldn't, not yet. The rage was still there, sitting heavy and foreign in his chest, refusing to fade the way emotions usually did once he acknowledged them. He'd spent his entire life able to name what he felt and set it aside when needed. This one didn't listen. It simply sat there, coiled and patient, daring him to look away from the family across the street.
The voice's words hung in the air of his mind long after they'd been spoken, refolding themselves over and over. Kill them. Especially the baby in that womb. He turned the sentence over uselessly, searching for context that wasn't there, some thread that might explain why a voice buried somewhere he couldn't name would demand something so absolute from him over people he'd laid eyes on for the first time thirty seconds ago.
Across the street, the father laughed at something again, oblivious, adjusting his grip on the girl in his arms. The mother rubbed slow circles over her belly and said something that made him laugh harder. Ordinary. Achingly ordinary. And still every part of Eric screamed that it wasn't, that something underneath their ordinary faces was wrong in a way he had no language for yet.
Seconds passed. He wasn't sure how many.
Somewhere at the edge of his awareness, the city carried on without him, cars easing past, a bell chiming somewhere in a shop, a stranger's laughter rising and fading. None of it reached him properly. He stood in the middle of it, hollowed out and burning at the same time, caught in a feeling he had no name for and no memory of ever having felt before.
It was only when the weight of it finally began to loosen, just slightly, just enough for his own thoughts to surface again, that he remembered where he was and who was standing beside him.
He shook his head once, sharply, and turned.
Max hadn't moved either. His jaw was tight, his brow drawn low over eyes fixed on the same family, and his hands had curled into fists at his sides, knuckles pale, as though it were taking real, physical effort to keep himself rooted to the pavement instead of crossing the street.
Eric let a thin trail of golden liquid rise from the back of his hand, and a moment later it vanished with its familiar quiet spark.
"Stay calm," he said. "Not here."
Max's shoulders didn't relax so much as they simply stopped climbing further, his fists staying clenched but his feet, at least, staying planted.
A car horn sounded nearby. Eric glanced over to find Ruby waving them toward a taxi she and Zoe had finally managed to flag down, both women already climbing inside, entirely unaware of what had just passed between their husbands in the span of a single street crossing.
Eric took one last look at the family before following. By the time he settled into the taxi beside Ruby, whatever had gripped him moments earlier had folded itself back down into something small and contained, hidden neatly behind the same composed expression he always wore.
Only the faint curl at the corner of his mouth gave anything away.
"Interesting," he murmured, quiet enough that only he could hear it.
...
Pitié-Salpêtrière stood among the most renowned teaching hospitals in Europe, and in its main office sat the man largely responsible for its reputation.
Dr. Murphy House looked up briefly from the paperwork spread across his desk, curly golden-brown hair catching the light, his white eyes carrying a warmth that seemed to settle over anyone they landed on. He was thirty-two, though nothing about him suggested it. If anything, he still looked closer to eighteen. A small, faint smile rested on his face, the kind that seemed permanently at home there.
On the wall to his right hung a simple cross. To his left, a painting of the crucifixion, the Virgin Mary's grief rendered in careful, aged brushstrokes.
A knock sounded at the door.
House set down his papers and folded his hands together. "Come in."
The door opened, and Claude stepped inside, closing it gently behind him. His blue eyes had dulled to gray with the cataracts, but the smile on his face remained as easy and warm as ever.
House gestured toward the chair across from him.
Claude crossed the room, touched the edge of the table twice to be certain of it, then lowered himself into the seat. "Good afternoon, Dr. House. Please walk me through the procedure."
"Good afternoon, Commissaire." House clasped his hands atop the desk. "Let's start from the beginning."
He walked Claude through each stage of the surgery, patient and thorough, and once he'd finished, he rose and explained that they'd need one final test before the operation the following week. Claude stood with him, and the two made their way toward the test room, Claude's steps careful and deliberate, one hand trailing along the wall, his foot testing the ground ahead before each step. Even so, he still clipped his shoulder against a passing cart, then a doorframe a few paces later, wincing both times but saying nothing about it.
A nurse offered him a cane near the front desk. Claude waved it off with a small, stubborn smile, insisting he was managing just fine.
"High-ranking police officers and their pride," House thought, amused, as they passed the nursery.
He didn't get more than a few steps beyond it before something made him stop.
His premonition flared, sharp and sudden, and he turned back toward the nursery window without quite deciding to. Through the glass, the room looked exactly as it should: rows of white cradles, most holding babies either asleep or blinking up at the ceiling with the wide, unfocused wonder newborns always seemed to carry. Along the walls, cabinets and drawers sat neatly labeled, medical supplies within easy reach of the staff desk near the door.
Nothing about it looked wrong.
And yet his pulse hadn't slowed.
Every crib held exactly what it should.
Every crib except one.
In the cradle at the center of the room, a baby lay fully awake, unmoving, its head tilted at an angle that seemed a fraction too deliberate for something so small. Its eyes were black, wet, and enormous the way infant eyes always were, but there was nothing infant about what looked out from them. No curiosity. No confusion. Nothing searching for a face to latch onto the way newborns searched, blind and hungry, for something familiar. Just a flat, patient stillness, fixed directly on House through the glass, as if it had been waiting there for him specifically, and had known exactly how long it would take him to notice.
House's breath caught somewhere behind his ribs and refused to move.
The chill came first, crawling slow and deliberate up the length of his spine, followed by something heavier, an invisible weight pressing flat against his back, curling his shoulders forward before he could stop it. Cold sweat broke out along his hairline in an instant. His pulse hammered somewhere too high in his throat. He wanted, more than almost anything he could remember wanting, to look away.
He couldn't.
The baby didn't blink.
"Are you all right, Dr. House?"
Claude's hand landed on his shoulder, and House nearly flinched out of his skin. "Do you want some water? I can find someone to bring you a glass, even like this."
House forced his spine straight, dragging in one long breath that did almost nothing to steady him. He wiped at his forehead with the back of his hand, and the smile he offered came out thin and unconvincing, stretched too tight at the corners.
"It's nothing, Commissaire. I promise." His voice came out lighter than he felt, forced through a throat still half-closed with something he couldn't name. "Would you believe I was just standing here thinking about having a baby of my own someday? And then I remembered I don't have the time. Or, well." A short, brittle laugh escaped him, nothing like his usual warmth. "Or anyone to have one with. Silly, isn't it?"
Claude's brow furrowed, clearly unconvinced, but he let the hand fall from House's shoulder anyway, choosing to take the joke at face value rather than press.
"That's an easy fix, Doctor." A grin spread across his face as he turned to walk on, entirely unaware of what stood only a few feet behind the glass he'd just passed. "You're young, handsome, successful. I know plenty of people. Just tell me your type, and I'll have someone lined up by the end of the week."
He laughed, warm and easy, and kept walking.
House didn't laugh with him.
He allowed himself one last glance through the nursery window, and the baby was still there, still watching, still utterly unmoved by anything that had just happened, as though the entire exchange between the two grown men had barely registered as worth its attention.
House turned away first.
He caught up to Claude in three quick strides, matching his pace, and didn't look back toward the nursery again, telling himself, without quite believing it, that whatever he'd just felt had already been left behind him.
The baby's gaze lingered on the glass long after Claude and House had disappeared from view. Only once the hallway beyond it stood empty did his attention shift, sweeping slowly across the nursery to confirm what he already knew. There were no nurses. Nothing but rows of sleeping infants, oblivious to what shared the room with them.
He sat up in his cradle.
A thin golden flame rose from the skin of his left hand, flecked with drifting motes of light, and burned out a moment later without a sound. When it faded, the air above him filled with thousands of golden strings, drifting weightless and untangled, each one distinct from the rest. He scanned them without urgency until he found the one he wanted, brighter than every other thread around it, and fixed his focus there.
The string answered, glowing brighter at his attention. The instant the connection took hold, every other strand vanished, leaving only the single bright line stretching off into whatever distance held its other end.
The baby settled back down into his cradle and began his report.
"Father. I've been reborn again. Eleventh time, if I'm counting right. A faint pause, almost bored. The second and third have already reached Paris. I've spotted the first myself, and if I had to guess, the seventh will be the next to surface.
There's something else. Another person with powers like ours, here in this hospital. He's the CEO. Doesn't understand the system at all, from what I've seen. Low level. Weak, but not useless. Worth recommending for recruitment, if you want him.
One more thing. A patient he's been treating has been tainted. That means at least one of our competitors has already made it to Paris. A brief silence stretched through the connection. That's everything. Any orders?"
He sent the report and closed his eyes, waiting.
Five minutes passed before the voice finally answered, resonating deep in his mind, heavy and deliberate, carrying the particular weight of someone used to being obeyed without question.
"Focus on hiding for now. No contact with the other competitors."
"Fine," Michael thought, already half bored.
"Don't bother with the tainted one either. He's as good as dead. No value in him, even without the taint."
"Obviously."
"As for the surgeon, leave him be. He's suited for the Truth Seekers, and they already have their eye on him. Approach him, and you'll only expose yourself to people far more dangerous than you're ready for."
Michael's small brow furrowed. That part, at least, was worth actually listening to.
"What you need to do is find the third one. Soon. Ally, quietly, before anyone notices you're here at all."
"Yeah, yeah. I have already planned on it."
"Do not attempt to recruit him. Do not attack him. Do not let your guard down around him, not even for a moment. Your passive ability and your premonitions will warn you of danger, but that man has more ways to kill you than you have ways to see it coming. Use the alliance to recover your strength. Nothing more. Stay hidden until the right moment arrives, and contact me the instant anything—"
"Yeah, yeah, I get it." Michael cut in aloud this time, more from habit than necessity, his small voice flat with exhaustion. "I wanted orders, not a lecture. I've done this ten times already. I'm not the clueless version of me you keep talking to like I still am."
He severed the connection before his father could answer, the golden thread dissolving back into nothing above him.
For a moment he lay there, small and still, entirely unbothered by having just hung up on a man old enough to remember empires that no longer existed.
Then he yawned, wide and unguarded, every bit the picture of an ordinary infant, and drifted off to sleep as if none of it had happened at all.
A small wooden tag hung from the edge of his cradle, two words carved neatly into its surface.
"Michael Voyage."