Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTRK2S0EADEWA2TD5THW7P1

Night pressed against the windows of The Raven’s Nest. London mist curled and faded under the foggy glow of the green neon sign outside. Inside, a perpetual dusk shimmered in the trembling candlelight scattered across mismatched tables. Lines of lamplight caught the stacked glass bottles behind the bar, throwing wavery shadows over the faded photographs and curling old maps on the walls. The hum of conversation fizzled and rebuilt itself in unpredictable eddies, punctuated by Silas’ limping passage behind the bar as he polished tumblers with a white cloth. Aurora Carter pressed her shoulder against the wall near the entrance, letting her breath out in a long, shivered line. The collar of her battered delivery jacket crumpled under her chin. She traced the rim of a half-empty cider with her finger and stole glances at the dartboard, the tables, and, most persistently, the bookshelf that concealed the secret room at the back. The Tuesday night crowd looked different from weekends: singular drinkers hunched over novels, a couple whispering about someone’s failed audition, nobody expecting to see anyone they knew. Except, just then, someone did. “Rory?” The name spun through the dust-lit air with the old Welsh lilt she’d heard a thousand nights growing up, running races across windswept Cardiff schoolyards—except now there was grit in it, and the voice folded the years together strangely. She turned. Eva Llewellyn—or whatever remained of her. Gold hair chopped close to her scalp now, dark roots showing. Her body, once coltishly tall and athletic, had hardened somewhere in the shoulders. A deep line furrowed between her brows above the odd, knowing smile. Aurora blinked at her pint glass, bought herself a second before responding. “Didn’t think I’d see you here. Thought you’d left the city for good.” Eva let a laugh roll out, half hollow. “I did, for a while. But you know London: swallows what it wants and spits you back if you’re lucky. Mind if I sit?” She’d already dropped onto the cracked green vinyl chair opposite. Aurora’s gaze caught the smudge of ink at Eva’s wrist—a new tattoo, letters knotted in a script Aurora didn’t know. Eva drummed her knuckles against the table, nerves at war with bluster. “Still drinking cider. Didn’t befriend bourbon like the rest of us?” “I never liked the taste of burning. Or pretending I liked anything just to fit.” Aurora heard defensiveness curling each word. She couldn’t help it. “Not everyone feels the need to reinvent themselves every six months.” Eva jerked as if she’d been cuffed. Her tongue pressed at the inside of her cheek. “Maybe we all have to run from something, eventually. Even you.” Aurora’s eyes darted. The old urge to apologise jostled against the need to defend her own brittle shell. She settled on neither. “What brings you back, truly? Thought you’d ended up on a beach in Goa or… wherever your last postcard was from.” “Dover, as it turned out. My mum got sick.” Eva avoided Aurora’s gaze, letting her thumb circle a stain on the table. “I stayed until—well. Everything ends up unfinished.” Aurora’s knuckles went white on her glass. “I’m… sorry.” Silence swept in—a thick, humming pause, punctuated by a Buzzcocks track lurking beneath the conversation swirl. From behind the bar, Silas glanced up. His hazel eyes flicked from Aurora to Eva, lingering a moment too long. Eva forced brightness into her voice, like sunlight squinting through rain. “So. You’re still with—no, wait, I heard you left Evan for good. Fuck, that must have taken guts.” “Not much left, just muscles knotted tight enough to turn me inside out. Ended up here sleeping above a bar, chucking spring rolls and waiting for another bit of luck.” Aurora grinned, bracing herself for pity leaking out of Eva like water from a cracked glass. Instead, Eva’s mouth scrunched into something nearly rueful. “I envied back then, you know. Your stubbornness. You seemed so sure you’d make it out.” “Did I? Felt like I spent most of sixth form watching everyone else make plans while I paddled behind. You just never noticed—always busy plotting an escape to the next big thing. I thought the running would work for you better than it did for me.” Eva leaned back, arms crossed defensively over her chest. She studied Aurora’s face, finding someone rewritten by exhaustion and city air, as if she missed the girl she’d once known but didn’t know where to look for her. “I notice things now. Can’t afford not to. Turns out the world doesn’t actually owe you a soft landing.” For a breath, laughter broke through. The echo of how it used to feel, slipping chips from each other’s trays and racing through drizzle between lectures at university. Eva’s hand twitched toward Aurora’s, hovered there without landing. “Remember the time we broke into that construction site? The security guard never found us, but I lost a shoe in the mud.” “And you made me swear never to tell anyone. I let slip to Carys—months later. She was furious.” Eva’s brow quirked up. “That’s what I miss. Not the running. Not the parties. Just laughing without something underneath it.” Aurora’s blue eyes flickered, shadows assembling at their edges. “We can’t be those girls now. I don’t know how.” Eva’s reply rasped from somewhere lower in her chest. “Neither do I. I tried. Got nowhere. Mum gone, job’s a temp line at a bookshop in Islington, and my boyfriend can’t stand the version of me that takes up any space.” Aurora sipped, cider tart on her tongue. “Life’s just a room with the door half-closed. I leave work and come down here. Silas lets me use his kitchen after hours for midnight toast. Sometimes I don’t go upstairs for days. Sometimes I think I forgot how to want anything else.” Eva’s mouth twisted on a line of regret. “I thought I’d come back and find my old world untouched. That maybe you’d still be—” Her words dropped off like pebbles sinking in a canal. “What?” Aurora’s stare sharpened, brittle. “Still what?” Eva looked away: “Still yourself. Still my friend.” From behind them, Silas started running the tap, the gurgle covering a moment’s awkwardness. He caught Aurora’s gaze, a flicker of empathy pulsing in the pooled shadows of his face. He nodded toward Eva, as if to say—go on, don’t waste tonight on secrets. Aurora squared her shoulders, mouth tightening around words she’d never quite had for Evan, or for leaving Cardiff: “Eva, I’ve changed. I’m not the girl you used to rescue in pubs or drag onto trains for weekends in Bristol. I don’t know what’s left for us to hold onto.” Eva’s fist closed, knuckles creasing her skin. “So what? We sit here like polite strangers and pretend we don’t remember everything?” “When I left Evan,” Aurora’s voice dropped low, coiled with the certainty she’d needed all those months, “I slept on the floor of that shoebox flat. I worked two jobs. I stopped speaking to my parents. No one here saw me cry. Not even Silas—not really. You forget: I’m good at surviving. But I’m not good at forgiving. Not myself, not you.” Eva flinched. “You think I don’t carry regret? Not calling, not visiting, not even sending a text when I first heard you’d run off to London? I thought you’d hate me for bailing. Truth: I hated myself already.” Aurora turned her wrists over, trailing her thumb along the old scar, the thin, pale crescent barely visible in the dim. “Funny. We built all these plans and I can’t remember the colour of your bedroom door.” Eva’s smile faded. Her voice ground down, quieter than before: “It was blue. You’re thinking of mine. Yours was yellow, chipped in the corner where you’d kick it shut when your dad lost his temper.” A thin surge of laughter—almost involuntary—escaped Aurora, ragged and shaky. For a moment, something loosened in her chest. She let her eyes drift closed, drew in the tobacco-damp air, and met Eva’s gaze again. Words hovered unsaid. Eva’s heel tapped against the leg of her chair, sharp and uneasy. “I came back for… I don’t know what. Closure? Or proof I wasn’t the only one struggling. Now I see it. You made it through. I’m proud. Even if it’s strange, even if I missed my shot at being here for you.” Aurora’s hand curled around the edge of the table, grounding herself in the rough wood. “There’s nothing finished about this. I don’t forgive you, not all the way. But maybe you could buy me another cider. Maybe we could sit a little longer. Not as those girls, but as who we are—strangers who remember each other.” Eva breathed out, relief and ache knotted tight. “Yeah. Let’s do that, then.” She stood, walking to the bar with her shoulders straighter, and Aurora watched the way her old friend became something new beneath the uneasy light—familiar and unfamiliar, layered with regret, memory, and the heavy, flickering distance that only time could weave.