"And now," he said finally, voice scraped down to almost nothing. "Now Eden's still standing. Still breathing. And you're still here. And I'm still here. And you didn't get to finish the transaction."
"No."
"Does it feel like anything? That you're still alive? Or is it just leftover — like you're running on inertia."
A very long pause.
"Some days," Alex said carefully, "it feels like both."
Dolph absorbed that. It sat in him alongside the other things he was carrying — the cracked rib and the bleeding hip and the six years of unconditional love for a man who had pre-emptively grieved him as a mercy and called it clean.
"I loved you," he said. "Love. Present tense, if I'm honest, which I hate." He stared at the ceiling. "I would have thrown everything away for you. The mission, the unit, the cause — all of it. Not because you asked. Not because I thought it was right. Just because it was you and I didn't know how to put conditions on it." He paused. "You knew that. You knew exactly what I would have done, and instead of trusting me with your plan — instead of letting me make that choice — you burned me first."
"Yeah," Alex said again.
"You loved me with conditions I didn't know existed," Dolph said. "A list of things that mattered more. And at the top of the list was a future you were never planning to live in." He laughed, short and broken. "You burned me for a world you weren't even going to stay for."
