Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMPAWKN9CJ2BJFPD62413S6

Rory pushed through the heavy green door marked with the peculiar bird logo, stepping into The Raven's Nest for the first time since she was 17. The ambience hit her like nostalgia: the same worn wooden bar top, the same Wellies on the shelf, even the same godforsaken neon sign buzzing outside. She didn't know what made her come back. Curiosity. Recklessness. Or just plain loneliness. The place was dimly lit, even more so than she remembered. A dozen regulars hunched over pints at splintered tables, trading idle chatter around the fried bits of bullshit on their plates. Front and center, nursing a tumbler of something amber - was that actually Silas? Silver-haired Silas, who'd given her a pocket knife on her 18th birthday and chuckled when she fumbled with the steel. The man was clocking toward 60 now, joints probably stiffening up like his lame-ass sense of humor. Rory started toward the bar, then stopped. There he was, at that old wooden table by the window where they'd plotted their adolescence. Cameron. Her jaw clenched. She almost turned around right then. But something kept her feet planted and her eyes glued to that window table, watching his hands fiddle absently with a coaster. The night played it forward in slow motion. Rory found herself cheated into a pivot, into a stride, into a chair across from Cameron. Siting. Sliding her pint glass to center, leaving the empty table between them a goddamn wasteland. "Been hide n' seek for a spell, have we?" Her voice cracked. This was more confrontation than she'd anticipated. "Haven't seen you in ages. CCTV assumed you vanished off the face of the earth." "Nope." Cameron said with a chuckle, popping the P for punctuation. "Just pursuing some pipes and other psychic exertions." He swiveled back into bar code. Said nothing. Waited. Rory drank deeply from her glass. Tasted only regret. "No cigarettes tonight?" Cameron finally asked, his hazel eyes bright in the shadowed room. "Haven't had 'nem lately." Rory cottonmouthed. This bar was definitely the same. Silence stretched between them again. It'd always been this way, when they were younger. They were each both scorpions and frogs, bucking at getting pinned down, at having to divulge even the tiniest peek across the veil of their identities. Sticking to surface-level sass, like salt that failed to disguise the dirt. Cameron looked older than his 40 years. For the first time since they'd crossed paths again, Rory noticed age lines parenthesesing his mouth. Newer, not deeper slabs of steel that barbed his strong jawline. He still dyed his short hair a raven black, the same monochrome cut he rocked in high school. There'd been a time when they were kids that she almost called Cameron by his given name - Marcus. That's what the flurry of church ladies called him back then. But she'd stopped using it after they'd long drifted apart, after she'd become an adult, after the world had broken her. Something about seeing that secret smile, that cheeky scruff, that same old dapper magic in his eyes reminded her of Silly, the boy she grew up with, not the marked-up paper pusher's pawn she'd heard lean security types draw as the Spymaster's main apprentice. Rory tried again, from a better angle this time. "So how's the straight life treat ya?" She tried to keep her tone light, her delivery spiked similarly to when she used to tease him about his "fancy pants." But her voice crackled with resentment. You've become just another tool of the Crown, was what she really meant. While I'm ached on the edges of the underworld. Cameron responded, of course, with a smug quirk of the smirk. "Not bad, not bad at all. Unlike some people..." The inference dripped like blood from the barbed end of a rust-eaten hook. "What about ye? Still chaslat about? What that Welsh blood be tellin' you to do out there, running streets, insurgent lasses abusing country mods?" "Aye, like that. Yeah, I'm still me, luv." Rory elbow to jaw, unfurling the hey-what's-up banner of bravado over their non-starter conversation. "Just wearing muck on muck out there, that's alright. Life's all fine. delivery-truck, 20-year olds a'mσκε. Some big plans with Em inerding catching up and whatnot." Her lie felt heavy, and seeing him - this him, now older, quieter, being delivered in hasty, evocative snapshots in her mind that were just flashbacks of the past. Seeing him and seeing that place - two things for one, two pillars of once-known extremes standing stark comparison to what and who they've become. Her mind raced. There was too much backlog, too many years to process. What had sum up? What missing chunks to cut from the core to fit in their allotted catching-up time? Rory cleared her glass in one swift, heavy motion. Purposeful, but bordering on desperate. "Look, luv, I gotta 'ead out. You..." She paused. Part of her wanted to kick him out, to banish this reel of the past from her mind, never to be stacked with flannel clothes in the back of her brain's closet ever again. She couldn't allow this to progress beyond today. She couldn't turn back into the same her/his, the we/here. Not after the road she'd walked alone for so long now. But this was Cameron, the same arrogantly smirking face used to leer back at her through young sarcasm and middle school frustration. "I gotta 'ead out. You..." repeat. Then a pause, the hanging space of her brutal decision. "Wanna grab a cab or something? Catch up more?" Maybe she wanted to know. Maybe she was too curious. Or maybe, just maybe, she was ready to trade the fight for a truce. Tonight, British Summer's windblown night was heavy with Kettlehead's smoke and ale, but it felt almost logical, breathing approximately into the same space as Cameron. Maybe it was the booze talking. The way the booze makes each person breathe, in roughly calculated beats. One inhale per speech, instant turnaround between tenses. Maybe it was the booze making them drink their words in grande, ghosting from past to present, as if a decade of extra skin pinned down their old movement of fancy flames. "Sure." Cameron's reply came out smooth, measured, all in the same tone as Jimmy's BandAM. "Let's take that cab." Rory left the pint on the table, nodding to go. Her mind clouded over as thick as CCTV's bars. She was drunk, but she figured if he was game, so be it. Cameron was still the game, and she was back in it to win it. Buhjeez, she was back in the game. What's this nostalgia? These déjà vu's that littered her life, that followed her around like old ghosts threatening to smother up her space? Or just little moments, little touches, yesterday's memory bleeding into this phase of her life? "Cause they are in each other's minds, now more than ever. Not just her thoughts, but his. What he did that led here. So ended that day. And then... Well, here in, here now - the future - though unseen in advance-her talk is in the now, translated through booze, for her and him both. "And so, to her surprise, Rory found herself sipping and noshing tales of past and present in draught-and-bite fashion, face to face with that old devil Cameron, marveling at the ebb and flow of life that only seems to make any sense through the lens of cold hard ale comps."