I searched his expression, and I saw the regret, the hurt. How very hard it had been.

Searching his expression, I saw him in a wholly new light. How clear his skin was, the proportions of his eyes. Even the smell of him, it was subtly different from someone like Anelace.

“You’re a teenager,” I said. “Mistakes happen.”

His finger traveled down my arm, shoulder to wrist. Then it reversed direction. It stopped at a scar, the one Mukade’s centipede had given me. It passed an abrasion, then reached another scar from Mukade, with skin that rippled around the scar, because the acid had burned and the burn had scarred.

His expression was sad.

He looked so very young, and it shook me, because somehow, in my mind, he had grown up with me. To see him now, he looked faintly smaller, he looked more like one of the students I would have taught in the Patrol than someone who would have been beside me.

There was insecurity in his eyes. Even the comments, the little details. The faint pushiness, that someone a few years older might have matured out of.

I leaned forward, and gave him a kiss on the forehead.

Then I sat up.

“You can stay,” he said.

I shook my head.

“No?”

“If I end up staying, it’s because a tragedy happened. I should move on,” I told him.

“Did I do something wrong?”

I shook my head.

“Feels like I did.”

You’re perfect because you’re in the past. Unchanging. I can keep the best memories and gloss over the worst ones. But you’re a teenager and you’ll always be a teenager.

“I love you, Dean.”

“I love you too.”

I picked up my sweater, and I carried it to the balcony. Dean got up from the couch, and stepped out of view.

I could have flown off, but I wasn’t quite sure where to fly. Every place I could go had connotations. Fights had happened in most of those places. Or sparring, or patrols.

Instead, I stood there, looking out over Brockton Bay.

“I like your sweater.”

I turned my head.

Swansong leaned into the railing, black makeup smeared around her eyes, almost like a blindfold, her white hair was short, with bits of black, like she’d wiped her fingers clear of the makeup in it.

I held up the sweater. Black, of course she liked it.

I smiled. “Want it?”

She reached out and took it, before slinging it over one shoulder. I glanced past her, and saw the apartment we’d shared in Earth Gimel. No Dean. The ground was only two stories down, not twenty.

“Did you get what you needed?” she asked me.

“I expected something entirely different.”

“Oh, did you?” she asked me.