Chapter 314
Three weeks pass and nothing tries to kill anyone I know.
Some part of me keeps flinching at the quiet, half expecting a monster to come crashing through it, but the quiet just keeps holding. EDEN keeps climbing without me having to do much more than watch the numbers move, which honestly feels like cheating after two years of everything else requiring blood, sweat, and at least one near-death experience per arc.
A school district in Jersey signs on for a pilot program, kids running chemistry labs inside EDEN instead of blowing up a real one. Peter forwards me a video of some seventh grader accidentally recreating a small explosion in the sim and laughing about it instead of getting suspended, and that's the kind of headline I didn't know I needed. Somewhere in Ohio, a physical therapy clinic starts running rehab sessions through it, patients relearning how to walk inside a world where falling doesn't actually hurt. Gwen finds a forum thread where people are arguing about the "best" EDEN builds like it's a video game strategy guide, completely unaware that the guy who wrote the underlying architecture is seventeen and currently supposed to be doing algebra homework.
The one that actually gets me is an email. Not fan mail exactly, DSD gets plenty of that and most of it goes straight to a folder nobody opens. This one's from a woman whose husband is deployed overseas, and she says EDEN's the first thing that's let her kid feel like his dad's actually in the room during a bedtime story instead of a laggy video call. She doesn't ask for anything. She just wanted someone to know.
I read it twice, then forward it to Gwen with no comment, because I don't trust my own voice not to get weird about it.
okay that's not fair, she texts back. you can't just send that and not say anything
i know. i'm choosing violence
this is emotional violence and i hate it
I grin at my phone longer than the joke deserves.
Missions thin out too, or at least the world-ending kind do. Gatomon and BlackGatomon spend an entire evening arguing about whose turn it is to pick the movie, which somehow escalates into BlackGatomon hiding the remote inside a couch cushion out of pure spite, and Gatomon retaliating by hiding BlackGatomon's favorite snack somewhere in the apartment neither of us will disclose. Cutemon just watches the whole thing happen with the kind of delighted, wide-eyed attention usually reserved for actual television. Agumon offers to mediate. Nobody asks Agumon to mediate. He mediates anyway, badly, and somehow makes it worse.
It's a dumb, small kind of good, the stretch where I get to just be a guy with a company and a bunch of chaotic roommates instead of whatever I am the other fifty percent of the time.
Gwen texts me on a Thursday. rooftop. bring nothing. i mean it, don't bring your laptop this time
i have never once brought a laptop to a rooftop
you brought a laptop to the beach, ethan.
that was one time and i had a very good reason
you wanted to check server load during a bonfire
a very good reason
She's already up there when I climb out through the access door, sitting on the ledge of the building two blocks from DSD, the one with the water tank nobody uses and a view that somehow still makes Queens look decent at golden hour. She's got a bag of takeout between her feet and she doesn't look up right away, still scrolling through something on her phone with the particular focus she gets when she's pretending not to notice someone.
"You're staring," she says, without looking.
"I'm admiring the view."
"The city's behind you."
"I know where the view is, Gwen."
That gets her to look up, and there's a second where neither of us says anything else, which is somehow louder than if we had. She rolls her eyes and shoves the takeout bag toward me with her foot instead of dealing with whatever that second was.
I sit down next to her, close enough that our shoulders line up without either of us making a thing of it. The city noise down there sounds distant and unimportant from up here, sirens and traffic reduced to something you could mistake for weather.
"Heard about your email," she says, unwrapping a container of noodles like this is a completely normal follow-up to what I sent her.
"I figured you'd bring that up."
"I'm not bringing it up. I'm noting it happened." She pauses, chopsticks halfway to her mouth. "For the record, you built something that made a kid feel like his dad was home. That's not nothing, Ethan."
"I built the thing that lets people play a video game together."
"You built the thing that let a kid pretend his dad tucked him in." She hands that over the same flat way she hands over anything she actually believes, no flourish attached. "Those aren't the same sentence."
I don't have a comeback for that, which happens rarely enough that I actually notice it happening. I eat instead of answering, and she lets the silence sit there without trying to fill it, which is its own kind of comfortable I've gotten used to over the last however many months.
The sun's dropping fast now, turning everything the color of a filter Peter would apply to a photo and then deny using. Gwen finishes her noodles and sets the container aside, tucking her knees up and wrapping her arms around them, and for a while neither of us says anything at all. Talking would only get in the way of whatever this actually is.
Her hand's resting on the ledge between us. I don't decide to move mine so much as it just happens, drifting over until my fingers brush against hers, and she doesn't pull away. She doesn't say anything either. She just turns her hand over, slow, until our fingers actually fit together instead of just touching, and keeps her eyes on the skyline like this is the most natural thing in the world, which maybe it is by now.
I don't say anything either. I don't have the first idea what I'd even say, and for once that feels less like a problem than like the actual point.
The city keeps doing whatever the city does below us, cabs and construction and a thousand people who have no idea two of them are up here doing absolutely nothing that matters, and for a while that's exactly enough. Her thumb moves once against the side of my hand, small, easy to miss if you weren't paying attention. I am paying attention, more than I probably look like I am, to the light and her shoulder warm against mine, filing it away somewhere I don't examine too closely. Some things stop feeling like this the second you look straight at them.
We stay up there until the sky goes the color of a bruise healing, purple fading into something darker, and neither of us moves to leave first.
***