Chapter Five: The Weight of What We're Given
The afternoon had settled into something quieter after the initial storm of reunion — the way afternoons do when they have been asked to hold a great deal and have managed it, and are now resting in the particular peace that follows managed things.
The private garden of the Yamanaka compound held what remained of the gathering: the Arkynorean delegation arranged around the low table with the ease of people who had been in enough different rooms to know how to occupy a new one, Inoichi and Akari with the attentiveness of hosts who had long since stopped performing hospitality and were simply being it, and the two bonded children who had become the center of a much larger story without having been consulted about the casting.
Tea had been brought. The marks on Ino and Odyn's wrists had stopped glowing, or rather had returned to their resting state — the faint luminosity of something that was always present but only visible in the right light, like the lines of a map seen from above. Ino had pushed her sleeve back down over it with a deliberate casualness that was not casual, the gesture of someone who needed to manage one thing at a time.
Khanna, having exhausted the most immediate of her impulses toward her cousin, had settled beside him with the quieter intimacy of someone who had known him since before either of them had formed proper memories of the knowing. She reached into her bag.
"There's something you need to see," she said, and her voice had the texture of something carried carefully for a long distance.
The parchment unfolded in Odyn's hands.
It was not official correspondence — he recognized immediately the distinction between this and official correspondence, because official correspondence had a quality of compression, of information organized by priority and stripped of what couldn't be used. This was something else. The style of the drawing was his mother's, which meant it had been made from the kind of attention that had no agenda other than keeping.
His father and mother. The drawing had caught something in both of them that a formal portrait would have corrected away — a tiredness around the eyes, a weight in the set of the shoulders that his mother would have asked any court artist to omit. She had not omitted it from herself.
His brothers, arranged the way they always arranged themselves: Roy in front because Roy was always in front, Banryu slightly to the side because Banryu always found the slightly-to-the-side position that let him see everything, little Ragna who had grown — he could see the growth even in a drawing, the way children's growth is visible in the changed proportions, the longer limbs, the face that had moved incrementally away from babyhood.
And Sarai.
His mother had drawn her honestly. She hadn't softened the expression, hadn't given her the brightness she used to have. The crimson hair was exactly right, exactly her, but the eyes — the eyes that in life were orange-flame and vivid and always moving between things because there was always something new to look at — were still. Pointed inward. Holding something that had no outward address.
He looked at her for a long time.
Then he saw the figure in his mother's arms.
The infant was small and precise, rendered with the particular care his mother gave to things that mattered enormously and that she didn't yet know how to measure the mattering of. Blue-black hair in wisps. And the eyes — even in the drawing, even at this scale, they held a quality that he recognized with the specific recognition of someone seeing themselves in an unexpected mirror.
He couldn't speak for a moment.
"Her name is Lyra," Khanna said quietly. "She was born three weeks after you were taken." A pause. "She has your eyes. Your mother says she has your spirit too — that even as an infant, she argues with everything." Something in Khanna's voice shifted into something softer. "Your mother talks to her about you every day. Shows her your portrait. Tells her about her brave eldest brother."
The word eldest landed differently than it had before.
"I missed her birth," Odyn said.
Not an accusation. Just the plain shape of a fact being said out loud because facts sometimes need to be said before they can be held properly.
"I was somewhere underground being studied when my mother was in labor." He looked at the drawing. "I don't even know what day she was born. I don't know if it was day or night. I don't know—" he stopped. Started again. "She's never seen me. I'm her brother and I'm a portrait she's been introduced to."
"Odyn," Khanna said.
"I know," he said. "I know she's safe. I know she's loved. I know my mother is with her and my father and all of that is—I know." He pressed his thumb against the drawing, gently, against the small rendered face. "I just missed it."
The grief was not the collapsing kind. It was the still kind, which was in some ways worse — the grief that stands upright and looks at what it's lost without the release of falling. He was eight years old and had been practicing the still kind for two months now and was getting better at it in the way you get better at things you do not want to get better at.
Beside him, without deliberation, Ino moved.
Not to say anything. She simply closed the small distance between them, a gesture without the complication of words, and the warmth of it — the simple fact of another person choosing proximity — did what warmth does when you have been cold long enough to stop expecting it.
He breathed.
"I have to go home," he said. "I have to meet her. I have to see Sarai and tell her it wasn't — that none of it was—" He looked at Ino, and something in his expression had lost its management, was simply what it was. "But the bond. We're here, and you're—"
"The Vhaeryn'thal is not a chain," Lailah said, from across the table. Her voice was even and clear and had the quality of someone providing a foundation, not a consolation. "It binds you to a person. Not a place. Not a moment. It doesn't ask you to choose between your sister and your bond — it wouldn't be worthy of you if it did."
"Then what does it ask?" Odyn asked.
"To be present to both things," Lailah said. "Eventually. When you're ready. For now, it asks you to trust that the distance is not the end of it."
Lynnia Arkham had been quiet through most of this, reviewing something in the middle distance with the expression of a woman deciding whether the moment had arrived. She glanced at Saibyrh. Saibyrh gave a nod that was barely perceptible.
"There's something we haven't told you," Lynnia said. "About why the Vhaeryn'thal manifesting here, now, with this particular person, may be less coincidence than it appears."
The holographic display Saibyrh conjured was smaller and more precise than the one from the council chamber — designed for a garden table rather than a conference room, intimate in its scale. The map of Earth it projected was overlaid with pulsing points of red that distributed themselves across the surface like the early signs of something systemic.
Odyn looked at it and recognized the pattern from his father's war maps — the way a threat announces itself not through a single location but through the aggregate of many locations, each individually manageable, collectively something else.
"Dimensional weak points," Saibyrh said. "The barrier between Earth and other realms, thinning. Most of them are natural and stable. These—" she isolated a cluster, then another, "—are neither."
"Something is deliberately weakening the barriers," Alek said. He had come to stand beside the display with the posture of someone who had been thinking about this for a long time and was relieved to finally be saying it. "These new points didn't exist two years ago. The deterioration follows a pattern — not random, not natural erosion. Targeted."
"By what?" Inoichi asked. His voice was the voice of a man who had learned to receive difficult information without performing his response to it.
"Devils," Lailah said. The word was flat and exact. "Servants of the Fallen Court. Our peoples' oldest enemy. They've been attempting to breach this world for centuries, and for centuries the barriers have held." She looked at the display. "The barriers are no longer holding as well as they were."
Ino had moved closer to Odyn with the instinctive gravity of someone whose body has processed threat information faster than her conscious mind has. She didn't appear to notice she'd done it. He noticed, and said nothing, because the warmth of it was something he needed to keep.
"Why Earth?" Akari asked, with the precise medical habit of identifying mechanism before responding to outcome.
"Because Earth sits at a dimensional crossroads," Khanna said, slipping into the register she used when explaining things she'd spent a great deal of time thinking about. "Multiple realms intersect here. It's a nexus — not the largest one in the known cosmos, but the most accessible from our side of things. Control Earth, and you control the passages." A beat. "Including the passage to Arkynor."
Odyn looked at baby Lyra in the drawing he was still holding.
"You think my kidnapping is connected," he said. Not a question.
"We think everything is connected," Lailah said. "You're brought to Earth. You're rescued and begin building relationships with its people. The Vhaeryn'thal manifests between a dark elf of royal blood and a human born on the nexus world." She looked at him steadily. "This is not a chain of coincidences. Coincidences don't stack this specifically."
"So we're— what? We're supposed to stop them?" Ino's voice was asking the question with the particular clarity of someone who has decided that knowing something terrible is better than not knowing it. "That's why we're bonded? To keep the Devils out?"
"To be part of keeping them out," Lailah said, with care. "You are eight years old. You are six years old. Whatever role you are eventually meant to play, it is eventually — not now, not soon, not before you have had the years to become the people capable of it." She looked at both of them in turn, and the look held the specific weight of a person who had been carrying information about a child she loved and had decided the child was now ready to carry some of it. "You have time. The Devils are patient — they've been patient for centuries. You have time to grow, to learn, to understand what you're facing before you have to face it."
"But not unlimited time," Saibyrh added, in the tone of someone completing a thought that had been left tactfully incomplete.
"No," Lailah agreed. "Not unlimited."
The garden absorbed this. The flowers did what flowers do, which is continue being flowers with complete indifference to dimensional politics, which was either comforting or absurd depending on the moment, and was just then something closer to comforting.
"I'm not staying on Earth because I can't go home," Odyn said slowly, working it out as he said it. "I'm here because this is where I need to be. While this threat is building."
"You're here because you need to be, and because going home doesn't have to be a permanent departure from that necessity," Lailah said. "Both things are true simultaneously. You can see Lyra. You can help Sarai heal. You can be present for your family in the ways they need you — and then return here to the training and the work and the people who need you in a different way."
Odyn looked at Ino.
She was looking at the holographic map with an expression that he had learned, in the past two months, to read: the expression she wore when she was being honest with herself about something frightening rather than performing courage or performing calm. Honest to herself. That was Ino's specific version of bravery — not the loud kind, not the defiant kind, but the kind that looks clearly at what is actually there.
"Partners?" he said, quietly, because it was the word they had found earlier and it was still the right word.
She looked at him. The expression didn't change — it just expanded to include him. "Partners."
It was Alek who said it first: "Wouldn't it be better if Ino visited Arkynor too?"
He said it with the candor of a child who has not yet learned to disguise practical reasoning as something more elaborate, and who was therefore occasionally more useful than people twice his age. "The bond works both ways. She's part of our people's future now. She should understand what that means. And Sarai—" he paused, calculating, "—Sarai is going to want to see the person Odyn talks about. I think seeing that he's connected to someone real, someone kind, would help her understand that he's been okay."
The quiet that followed this was the quiet of people encountering an argument they hadn't expected to be as correct as it was.
Ino's face ran through several expressions in rapid succession. "I'm just an Academy student," she started.
"You're bonded to a dark elf prince and apparently destined to help defend a dimensional nexus," Sakura's voice came from the doorway, where she and several others had been present long enough to qualify as participants regardless of whether they had been invited. "I don't think 'just' applies to you anymore."
"How long have you all been standing there?" Ino asked.
"Long enough," Sakura said, with the completeness of someone not elaborating.
"The eavesdropping wasn't intentional," Ichihana said, which was at least honest about it.
"It was a little intentional," Lilian admitted.
Lailah looked at the assembled children with the expression of someone revising their assessment of how much the younger generation of this world processed things, and revising it upward. "Ino," she said, bringing the conversation back, "would you like to come? To Arkynor. Not for the full visit — a few days, enough to understand the world Odyn comes from, to meet his family, to be known by the people he needs to return to."
The pause that followed was the pause of someone understanding the full weight of a question and giving it the respect of actual consideration rather than an immediate response.
"I don't want to make it worse," Ino said carefully. "If seeing Odyn brings up everything for Sarai — the day he was taken, all of it — and I'm there as the reason he stayed, as the person he—" she stopped. "I don't want to be the thing that makes the healing harder."
Odyn turned to look at her.
She was looking at her hands.
"You're not the reason I stayed," he said. "I stayed because this is where I am, and because there are things here that need doing, and because Inoichi's family gave me somewhere safe to be while we figure out how to do them. You're—" he paused, finding the words with the care he brought to things that mattered. "You're not a reason. You're a person. Sarai will understand the difference."
"She's seven years old," Ino said.
"She understood that I was trading myself for her when she was five," he said. "She understands more than we give her credit for."
Ino sat with this. Then she looked at Lailah. "If I come — if I meet your sister, and she doesn't approve, or it's too much for Sarai, or—"
"Then we'll manage it," Lailah said simply. "That's what families do with the unexpected. They manage it. Imperfectly, with effort, and together." A beat. "Hyatan will want to meet you. You have been a consistent subject of her eldest son's correspondence, which in the vocabulary of our royal household constitutes a formal introduction already in progress."
"Thirteen pages," Khanna said, to Sakura, in a tone calibrated to be just audible enough.
"Khanna," Odyn said.
"I'm providing helpful context."
"The context was not requested."
"It was clearly needed."
Later, when the formal discussions had concluded and the delegation had moved to their preparations and the garden had returned to something like its ordinary self, Odyn sat at the edge of the veranda with the drawing still in his hands.
He had been looking at Lyra again. Not continuously — he'd look away, talk to someone, look back. As if reassuring himself each time that the image was still there, that it hadn't been a thing he'd wanted badly enough to imagine.
The marks on his wrist pulsed, faintly, with the warmth that had come to mean she's nearby before he'd consciously registered it as meaning anything, which was something he was still getting used to. He looked up.
Ino sat down beside him. Not close enough to be deliberate about, but close enough that the warmth was real.
"Can I see?" she asked, nodding at the drawing.
He handed it to her. She looked at it with the attention she brought to things she was genuinely trying to understand — not quickly, not performing attention, actually doing it.
"She does have your eyes," Ino said, after a while.
"Khanna says she has my stubbornness too."
"I believe that." She traced the edge of the parchment without touching the drawing itself. "Sarai's expression in this—"
"I know."
"It's not—" She stopped. Started again. "It's not empty, exactly. It's more like she's listening for something that isn't making any sound yet."
Odyn looked at the drawing from this angle — the angle of Ino's description — and found that it was a more accurate reading than the one he'd been carrying. Sarai wasn't absent. She was listening. Holding very still so as not to miss it when it arrived.
"She's waiting," he said.
"Yes," Ino said.
The garden did its quiet work around them. A bird somewhere in the upper branches of the tree beyond the wall was engaged in a conversation with itself, or possibly with something too far away to hear. The marks on their wrists pulsed in the same rhythm.
"What do I say to her?" Odyn asked. "When I see her. She's seven years old and she watched them take me and she's been not speaking for two months because—" he stopped. "What do I say?"
Ino thought about this honestly, which he knew because when she was thinking honestly she had a specific quality of stillness that was different from her other kinds of stillness.
"I don't think it's going to be about what you say," she said finally. "I think when she sees you—when she actually sees you, standing there, alive—the words are going to matter a lot less than you think."
"And if she's angry?"
"Then she's angry. That's allowed." She glanced at him sideways. "You told me I was allowed to feel my emotions. That's not a rule that only applies to you."
He recognized his own logic arriving back at him and felt, despite everything, a small and genuine amusement at the precision of it. "When did you get so wise?"
"I told you, I've always been wise."
"You did tell me that."
"You should probably start believing it."
"I'm working on it."
Three days before the journey — Ninja Academy:
Iruka Umino was a man who had developed, over the course of his teaching career, a fairly comprehensive working knowledge of when a classroom's surface attentiveness was concealing its actual attentiveness, and where the actual attentiveness was directed.
He was aware, as he concluded the day's lesson on transformation technique, that the ambient focus of approximately twelve children was located roughly in the vicinity of two students at the third table from the front.
He was also aware that the two students in question were working with visible effort to appear to be paying full attention to his lesson, which was its own form of courtesy that he elected to respect by not calling it out.
Until the moment came when calling it out served a pedagogical purpose.
"Yamanaka, Albanar," he said, during a natural pause. "Since you're both clearly very present and attentive—front of class, please."
They came up with the synchronized response that had been happening with increasing frequency over the past two weeks, and which several of their classmates had already begun commenting on with the relentless enjoyment of children watching something that they have decided belongs to them as an ongoing source of entertainment.
Ino went first. The transformation was clean and practiced — Iruka himself, reproduced with the accuracy of someone who had been looking at the original regularly enough to have the details memorized. The class responded appropriately.
Odyn went second.
The transformation did not use hand seals. The mana moved through him with the particular quality it had been developing over weeks of careful practice — less raw, more directed, with the beginning of the fluency that comes when a skill starts to internalize below the level of active management. When the light cleared, he stood in Ino's form.
The accuracy of it was, for several seconds, the complete attention of the room.
He had not simply reproduced her external details — the hair, the eyes, the face, the posture. He had reproduced the specific quality of her, the Ino-ness that was composed of a hundred small things that you had to have been paying attention to accumulate: the way she stood with her weight very slightly forward, as if she was perpetually just about to move; the small set of her jaw that appeared when she was determined about something; the way her head tilted at a particular angle when she was listening.
He had reproduced, in precise and entirely unintentional detail, the expression she made when he said something that surprised her.
"You've never seen me make that face," Ino said, when he released the transformation.
"You made it this morning," he said. "When Naruto asked whether you'd practiced—"
"We don't need to revisit Naruto's question," Ino said firmly, her color rising.
"I'm just providing context," Odyn said, with the specific blank neutrality that meant he was performing innocence.
"Khanna taught you that phrase, didn't she."
"I have no idea what you mean."
Iruka, who had been watching this exchange with the expression of a teacher who knows exactly what he is witnessing and has decided it is an educational opportunity of a different kind, let it settle before sending them back to their seats. He made a note, in the portion of his mind he kept for observations about students, that the dark elf prince had been building a detailed vocabulary of a specific person's subtle expressive habits over the course of weeks, and was not aware of how much this said about him, and that this was probably fine and certainly not his concern, and that it was nonetheless going to be a memorable component of this teaching year.
After class:
The walk to the Anuyachi estate happened the way good things happen when they are not being forced — which is to say, with a naturalness that made it difficult to identify the point at which it began, because the beginning was continuous with what came before it.
Ichihana had arranged it, which meant it was arranged well. Ino had asked Lady Yui, which meant it was allowed. The group that assembled at the Academy entrance had the quality of people who had decided something would happen and were now in the process of making it happen, which is a different quality from the quality of people who have been told to do something and are doing it.
The estate was everything Naruto's enthusiasm had anticipated and then some things beyond that.
Odyn walked beside Ino and Ichihana through the compound entrance, and the familiar quality of the Anuyachi family's particular integration of function and elegance was something he'd been aware of in the background of his time in Konoha — their wards were good, their spatial intelligence was evident in the layout, and the compound had the quality of a place built by people who had been thinking carefully about the same problems for generations.
He noticed Ichihana watching him notice things.
"You assess places," she said. Not an accusation. An observation.
"My father's training," Odyn said. "He used to take me into unfamiliar rooms and ask me, afterward, to describe the exits, the weight distribution, the number of people, the likely defensive positions." He paused. "I never stopped doing it, even after it stopped being a lesson."
"That must get exhausting," Ino said.
"It gets quiet," he said. "After a while it runs in the background. I don't have to think about it anymore."
"Like how I count flower varieties in new spaces," Ino said. "I don't even notice I'm doing it until someone asks what I'm looking at."
"What are you looking at right now?" Ichihana asked.
"The wisteria climbing the eastern wall," Ino said immediately. "It's over ten years old based on the trunk diameter. And there's a rose variety I haven't identified yet near the pavilion — the petal structure looks like a Damask, but the color is wrong for that classification."
"I told you," Odyn said.
"Told her what?" Ichihana asked.
"That she always knows what she's looking at," he said. "She just doesn't always announce it."
Ino gave him the sideways look that had become something he waited for, the look that said you are paying attention in ways I have not yet fully mapped, and said nothing.
"Are you nervous?" Ichihana asked him, after a moment. "About going home."
He considered giving the diplomatic answer. Decided against it, because Ichihana was not the kind of person who worked well with diplomatic answers — she processed honest ones better, and he respected that. "Terrified," he said. "I keep running scenarios. Sarai not recognizing me. Lyra crying. My father looking at me and seeing the person who got captured instead of the person he trained. My mother being so relieved that she says something that makes it worse somehow—"
"That sounds exhausting," Ichihana said, with the straightforward compassion of someone who does not offer comfort as a performance.
"It is," he agreed.
"You know none of those scenarios are what's actually going to happen," Ino said.
"I know that they're not the most probable outcomes," he said. "That doesn't stop the mind from running them."
"So stop running them," she said, with the particular firmness she deployed when someone she cared about was doing something unhelpful to themselves. "You're not going to walk through that gate with a script. You're going to walk through it as yourself, and your family is going to see you, and whatever happens after that is going to happen after that. You can't plan your way through a reunion."
"You can try," he said.
"You can exhaust yourself trying," she corrected. "Which is what you're doing." She looked at him. "Stop planning. We go. We're present. It goes however it goes."
He held the instruction for a moment.
"We," he said.
"We," she confirmed. "I'm told I'm going too, if I want to. And I want to."
"Even with the formal presentation ceremony?"
"Even with that."
"And my father wanting to spar with you."
"I'll cross that bridge when I reach it," she said, with the determined expression that was one of the ones he'd accidentally reproduced in the transformation technique. "I've been training my whole life. I can handle a sparring session with a king."
"He's very tall," Odyn said.
"I've fought Naruto," Ino said. "He's chaotic in ways your father probably isn't. I'll manage."
The training yard:
The matches happened because Naruto wanted them to, which was frequently the mechanism by which things happened. Odyn had come to understand this about Naruto over the past weeks — that his enthusiasm was not recklessness but a specific kind of social intelligence operating at full volume, the intelligence that understood that people needed something to do together before they became something to each other.
Alek had organized the teams with the efficiency of someone who had been thinking about this since before the suggestion was officially made, and the matches proceeded with the competitive warmth of children who were playing seriously and taking it seriously without mistaking the taking-it-seriously for the point.
When Ino and Odyn stepped onto the field, something shifted.
He was aware of it before it was visible — the bond doing what the bond did, which was create a resonance that was not communication exactly, not thought-sharing exactly, but something adjacent to both. A felt awareness of her positioning, her attention, the direction she was looking. Not intrusive. More like peripheral vision that had been extended.
She was aware of it too — he could tell because her stance adjusted to account for him without her looking at him, a small automatic incorporation of his position into her tactical geometry.
When Kiba came from the left, Odyn moved right. When Takeshi circled to the flank, Ino was already there. Not because they had coordinated it. Because the coordination was happening at a level below coordination.
He heard Hinata's voice from the sideline: like a dance. The Byakugan seeing the energies, the harmonics, the resonance moving between them in the way of things that have found their frequency.
They won, eventually, through the simple mechanism of always being where the other needed them and never requiring the other to cover a gap that they'd already moved to fill.
Standing afterward, slightly breathless, the marks warm on their wrists—
She was grinning.
Not the polished smile, not the composed expression, not the deliberate brightness. The grin of someone who had just discovered a thing about themselves that they had not known before and had found it to be very good. The grin of someone surprised by their own capability.
He felt it arrive on his own face before he'd decided to let it.
"That was—" she started.
"Yes," he agreed, before she finished.
She looked at him. He looked at her. The marks pulsed once, warmly, and went back to their resting state.
Behind them, Naruto had a great deal to say about this. He said all of it. Mito redirected approximately forty percent of it and let the other sixty percent stand because it was accurate.
Yamanaka compound — that evening:
The journal was open to a new page.
Odyn sat at his desk with the drawing of his family beside him — Lyra's face turned toward the lamplight, those orange eyes that were his eyes looking up at him from the parchment with the direct intelligence of a child who had just arrived in the world and had not yet decided what to do with it.
He had been trying to write and finding that the writing kept becoming the wrong shape for what he was trying to say, which was a problem he was familiar with and had no consistent solution for.
He tried again.
Dear Sarai,
I don't know whether to write to you the way I always wrote to you before, or differently. I don't know what two months has done to how you receive things. I don't know if my voice in your head sounds different now, if the way I used to talk to you has changed into something that hurts instead of helping.
So I'm going to write to you the way I would talk to you, if you were here, and hope that it carries the same thing.
I'm alive. I'm well. I'm in a place called Konoha, which is a village in a country called the Land of Fire, on a planet called Earth, which is the nexus world that the old books talked about in terms too abstract to mean much when I was young, and which turns out to be a real place with a real flower shop on the corner of a real street where a girl named Ino taught me the difference between a Damask rose and a variety that looks like one but isn't.
I've been training. Not the way we trained at home, but not entirely differently either — the principles are the same. Father would recognize the fundamentals. The techniques are different but the logic underneath them is the same logic he taught me, and that makes it easier to learn.
I've made friends. Real ones. People who have been kind to me when they had no particular reason to be, and who are becoming important in the way that people become important when they keep showing you who they are.
I'm coming home soon. A few days. I'll see you and tell you in person what I'm telling you now, which is this: none of it was your fault. It was not your fault that I was taken. It was not your fault that I chose to go. It was my choice, made freely, because you are my sister and you were worth it and I would make the same choice again without hesitation.
I am not angry. I am not gone. I am here, and I am coming, and I need you to be there when I arrive.
Aunt Lailah tells me you haven't been speaking. I'm not going to tell you to speak. I know what it feels like to hold something that doesn't have words yet. But I want you to know that when you are ready — if you are ready, in whatever form ready takes for you — I will be there, and I will listen.
Get stronger, Sarai. Like I asked you to. Not because we need warriors right now — we have time, Aunt Lailah says we have time — but because getting stronger is the thing that's true for us. It's what we do with what happens to us. We don't let it make us smaller.
I'll see you soon.
Your brother, Odyn
P.S. — I met a girl. Her name is Ino. She's coming with me when I visit, and I want you to meet her properly. She is very important and somewhat alarming and I think you will like her very much.
He closed the journal.
The lamp threw its steady warmth across the desk and the drawing and the closed cover of the book and the window beyond all of it, where the night sky of Konoha was doing what it always did — presenting its different constellations in their different arrangements, keeping the same physics as the sky over Xenia while wearing a different face.
Three days.
He thought about the gate. The dimensional transit Lailah had described — like being pulled through water but you can still breathe, don't fight it, let the magic carry you — and tried to imagine the moment on the other side when the gate opened into something familiar. His mother's voice. His father's height. Roy's determined energy. Banryu's quiet. Ragna's growing face. Baby Lyra's orange eyes looking up at him from his mother's arms, blinking at a brother who had been a portrait until this moment.
And Sarai. Standing somewhere in the room. Still. Listening for the thing she'd been waiting to hear.
He would walk through the gate and she would see him and whatever happened after that was going to happen after that.
He was not going to plan it.
He was going to be present to it.
He was, as Ino had told him, allowed.
Downstairs, the house was settling into its evening sounds — the particular domestic music of the Yamanaka compound, which he had been learning the way you learn the vocabulary of a place you have been living in long enough for it to become background rather than foreground. Akari's voice in the kitchen. Inoichi's reply. Ino and Ichihana, somewhere down the hall, their voices the specific overlap of sisters who had been talking to each other since before either of them remembered starting.
He listened to it for a while.
Then he got up, went to the window, and looked at the stars.
Three days.
I'm coming, he thought, in the direction of one particular star that he had not been able to identify in Earth's sky and had therefore decided, with the practical logic available to eight-year-olds managing impossible distances, was the one that was Arkynor.
I'm coming, and I'm bringing someone you need to meet, and I will be there before Lyra's eyes have had time to forget what orange looks like.
The star did not respond.
He went to bed anyway, holding the certainty of three days like something warm in both hands, and slept better than he had in months.
To Be Continued in Chapter Six: Through the Dimensional Gate