Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTXC5MW7MACX5F4HWY6E617

The green neon above the doorway buzzed like a small, patient animal. It cast a sickly light over the rain-slick pavement and painted the brass handle of the door the colour of old coins. Inside, the Nest breathed low and warm. Maps crowded the walls, their edges curling like pages that had been read one too many times. Black-and-white photographs clustered over the back of the bar: faces without names, a city without mercy. Silas stood behind the counter, towel folded across one forearm, his limp barely noticeable until he shifted weight to find the same old balance. The signet ring on his right hand caught the neon and blinked. He had the habit of setting the towel down beside the glass and listening to the room first, to the small conversations and the scrape of stool legs, the way people placed their breath into silence before they spoke. He kept an ear for the kind of stories that might come undone if given a single prompt. The door opened and closed with less ceremony than it used to when the street still mattered to him. She came in smelling faintly of soy and chilli, the souvenirs of a kitchen shift clinging to her like a second skin. Her black hair cut at the shoulder swung as she moved, bright blue eyes scanning the room with that same unflinching calm he remembered, though something in the set of her jaw had changed. Silas folded the towel and watched her hesitate at the threshold, hand on the bar like a sailor checking the rail. Rory stopped in the middle of the bar and let the light find her. Her wrist, tucked under the cuff of her jacket, hid a crescent of pale. When she stepped forward, the scar flashed like a punctuation mark. Silas steadied the glass he was polishing as if it were the only thing keeping him anchored. The room shrank to the distance between them. "You," she said. Her voice had matured into something with edges. It struck cleanly, without the old hesitation. Silas's smile arrived late. "You came back," he said. His fingers tightened once on the glass. "From where, though? Cardiff hasn't done you any favours with the weather." She gave a small laugh that folded into the bar's hush. "You always did like to start with the obvious." Silas leaned on the counter and the limp showed when he shifted his weight. He set the glass down and left it there as a quiet piece of furniture. "You went quiet for years. You disappeared while I was still making plans to keep tabs on the city." "You made plans." She looked around like she was trying to place the maps, the photographs. "You still keep tabs." "I get bored with not knowing." His fingers marked a line along the bar's varnish. "Where had you fled to? Or were you busy ghosting everyone?" Rory traced the scar at her wrist with the pad of her thumb without intending to. The motion was small, habitual, protective. "A lot of places," she said. She pushed a strand of hair behind her ear and the gesture made her look younger and older at once. "Mostly staying. Delivering. Living above a restaurant. Doing things that paid and didn't ask for neat explanations." Silas watched her mouth. He remembered her in suits, exams spread out like weapons, her laugh when she had been sure of something. He had been the one to tell her not to cut her hair for law interviews; she had ignored him. "You work for Yu-Fei now," he said. "Golden Empress. I saw a delivery bike with a cracked basket last Tuesday." Rory's mouth tightened. "You notice things." "You notice the right things if you look up from a bar long enough." He let that sit like a stone dropped into still water. "You didn't tell me you were in trouble." Her shoulders lifted as if she were shrugging off something that had nothing to do with the room. "It wasn't your fight." "I always thought it might become mine." He tapped the ring on his hand once, a small metallic punctuation. "You used to be the sort of person who wrote letters and made lists. I kept thinking you'd call. I didn't expect you to vanish without a postcard." Rory smiled in a way that didn't reach her eyes. "Postcards were the privilege of people with tidy lives." Silas studied the crescent on her wrist the way one studies a map for a hidden ravine. "How long since the crescent?" "Since when?" She rolled her wrist, exposing the pale like a small moon against the sleeve. "Since Evan." The name slid out with no softness. It had the shape of a question but no right to an answer. Rory's throat worked. "Ages." The word shrank her face. "Long enough for me to forget how to be annoyed by him. Long enough to learn how to sleep without expecting the city to break into pieces." Silas rested his palm on the bar, the ring warm against the wood. He had been a man of different dangers once. He had known the logic of extracting someone from ruin, but not the logic of letting them rebuild with new hands. "You left Cardiff because of Eva," he said. "She got you out." "She did." Rory's fingers tightened into a fist on the lip of the bar. "She shouted at me until I moved. She knocked on my door at three in the morning and told me to pack. She threw keys at me and said I couldn't spend another minute pretending I wasn't a crime scene." Silas's shoulders shifted. "You never called me." "I didn't know who you'd be when I needed you." Her voice narrowed into a blade. "You were an enigma in a different city." Silas let a breath roll out through his nose and took it back in. "People don't like being enigmas to their friends," he said. "They like clarity and maps." "I couldn't draw a map that wasn't full of exits." She pushed at the ring of her finger as if it were a coat she'd been expected to put on. "So I ran. And then I learned that running meant carrying a light pack and learning new streets." "You married a new life instead of speaking to an old one," Silas said, and the words were neither accusation nor absolution. He lifted a bottle to set it down, paused. "You look...different, Rory." "So do you." The sentence sounded like a test. "Grey in the right places. Still talks to walls still filled with maps." Silas laughed, a sound that thinned quickly. "Prague didn't teach me the kindness of days." Rory blinked. "Prague?" "There was a job." Silas's finger traced the rim of the glass again. "Things got messy. I came back with a knee that doesn't let me forget it, a stubborn dislike of daylight, and a bar. It seemed sensible. The maps felt like old friends." "You were always a man of sensible plans," she said, and the weight behind it made the room tilt. Silas pushed the glass aside and picked up a coaster. He rolled it between his fingers like someone spinning a coin. "Sensible plans have a way of mutating. You become a bar owner who left his old life like a scarf at the end of the season. People come in, tell him what they want, and he tries to give it to them." Rory's laugh was rougher now, edged by something that tasted of grief. "You never could hold a facade, Silas. You'd take it apart to see if the screws were well-made." "I'd like to think I learned that from failing at being good at one thing." He set the coaster down. "What I hadn't expected was running into you on a wet Tuesday." "Or me living a five-minute walk from where you used to stage legends and pour pints." Rory's shoulders loosened, the tension in her neck uncoiling into something slightly softer. "I sleep above the bar most nights. The landlord's a philosopher with a bad back." Silas inclined his head. "Missed conversations stacked like unopened mail, then." He reached into the shelf behind him and pulled out a bottle with a leather label. He uncorked it carefully. "You want something? Tea? Coffee? We keep jasmine for people who look like they want to listen to stories." Rory watched him uncork the bottle as if she were watching a ritual she vaguely remembered. "Tea," she said. "Two sugars. Like you used to make for my first night shift when you promised me you knew the best way to keep a person going." "You preferred sugar because you were young and thought saccharine solved all disagreements," he said, pouring. She snorted. "And you thought your age solved arguments." Silas slid the cup across to her. Steam braided up and vanished. He watched her take it and clutch it like something that had been promised and then owed. "You always kept your hands steady," she remarked, and her mouth softened. "Even tonight. Even with the limp." "It had to be steady for other things." He wiped a bottle with more care than the bottle deserved. "I kept up the bar because people need places to be honest, even if they don't know how. The maps remind me of routes I took and routes I didn't. They keep me from making the same mistakes." "You could have called." Her eyes cut to him, bright and hard and suddenly very young. "If you'd wanted me off the street, you could have said so." "I didn't know how to ask you to stay in a life you wanted to leave," Silas said. His hands had a way of telling truths he didn't say out loud. "When people ask me to go back into those other parts of myself, I imagine doors I can't open without spilling something that smells like oil and static." Rory's cup trembled. She set it down and traced a ring with her thumb. "You were the man who taught me to read lips on the telly when the room was too noisy. You taught me to notice when a liar's eyes flinched. You taught me to be suspicious of offers that looked like rescue." Silas nodded. "And you taught me to be honest about when I'm tired." The bar hummed around them like an animal that had learned to sleep with one eye open. A woman at the end of the counter laughed at something private to herself. A couple argued softly in a corner about which map was of the city and which was a memory. Rory lifted her sleeve, more purposely this time, and the crescent scar caught the bar light. "I didn't do law," she said. "I started it because it felt like a ledger I could balance. I left it because there were too many columns I couldn't justify." Silas's expression shifted into something that had been carved by years of listening to confessions. "Did you regret it?" She considered him like one might consider a burning match. "Sometimes." The answer arrived like a small, firm stone. "Other times I didn't. Regret is not a singular thing. It's a shelf with several things on it. Some days the shelf was empty and I liked the light. Some nights it buckled and things fell." Silas's fingers hooked over the counter. "I feared you were alone with too many thrown-down things." "I was with too many tins of takeout and the knowledge that stairs could be used as weapons," she said. "And then the flat over the restaurant had a vacancy and I took it." Silas's eyes moved to the bookshelf that hid the Nest's secret room, to the spine of books that didn't match and the faint seam that suggested more than the sum of its pages. "You live above Yu-Fei's?" he asked. "Third floor. If you keep going, you'll find me past the sound of clattering pans." She softened, a little. "It was less terrifying than the idea of staring at a law book and trying to make it love me back." Silas returned her slight smile with the weight of someone who had watched his own love affairs with work end in quiet divorce. "Perhaps you finally found a job that paid attention to what you needed instead of what you owed it." Rory's fingers found the crescent again, rubbing that pale moon with the pad of her thumb. "What about you? Did you ever write yourself a different ending than the one you took in Prague?" Silas's laugh was smaller now. "I wrote several, tore them up, and then opened a bar because it was the least tidy of all the endings." "You could have been anything," she said. "You could have been gone. It's odd to find you behind a counter." "Funny to find you with a scar I didn't know about." He tapped the ring again, then the wood. "We both turned in different directions." "Different directions." Rory repeated the phrase like a litany. "We keep turning until the map looks like a scribble." The room filled with the kind of silence that wasn't empty but rather full of missed appointments, of unanswered letters, of trains they could no longer catch together. They sat across from each other with cups like small demands. "You could come upstairs for a night off," Silas said suddenly, as if throwing a rope. "Help me sort maps for the wall. You used to have a very particular sense when it came to where things belonged." Rory's laugh came out small—astonished and almost grateful. "Are you trying to recruit me as a curator of your nostalgia?" "Perhaps I'm trying to be less of an enigma to someone who knew me when my face was less lined and my jokes less bitter." He reached out and, without making a show of it, pushed the coaster toward her. "Or perhaps I'm merely asking for the company of someone who remembers." She let the coaster sit under her cup like a ballast. "You always asked for good company," she said. "And you often settled for less." Silas looked at her as if measuring the distance between what was said and what remained. "Did you ever want me to be part of the same life?" he asked, the question gentle enough to be unthreatening. Rory's gaze dropped to the pictures on the wall: a child on a scooter, a woman laughing into a camera, a man half-shadowed with a beer in his hand. The maps seemed to whisper with routes they might have taken. "Sometimes," she admitted. "Sometimes I wanted someone who knew the lines to stay inside them with me. Other times I was terrified of being traced." Silas's hand paused midair, a clean movement that didn't quite become a gesture. "We traced each other enough to make maps that didn't belong to anyone but ourselves," he said. "Maybe that's enough for now." Rory's laugh dissolved into a sound that was almost a sobless laugh. "Maybe," she echoed. Behind them the Nest kept turning, a book whose pages had been creased and read by others. Rain picked at the neon outside, persistent and patient. They did not close the distance; they did not stitch old seams together. They sat with the maps between them, letting the light from each other's eyes do the rest for a while.