AI The glass slipped from his fingers, landing not with a crash but a dull thud on the bar's worn oak surface . Silas Blackwood stared at the amber liquid pooling towards the edge, wondering if it might spill over and onto his neatly pressed trousers. That would be inconvenient. They were his good trousers.
"Shit. Sorry." The barman wiped his hands on a tea towel and righted the glass before the liquid could escape. Silas welcomed the distraction from his thoughts, or rather, the attempt to suppress them. He glanced up, ready to offer his standard , polite dismissal to whichever weekend reveller had interrupted his contemplative drink, but the words died in his throat.
"Good, isn't it? The whiskey." The voice was familiar yet somehow changed. He knew it intimately, had heard it whisper promises in the darkness of university bedrooms and scream challenges across a crowded campus square years ago. He forced himself to look up, to meet bright blue eyes that hadn't changed at all, except perhaps for a new depth of knowledge that wasn't there at twenty-two.
"Rory." It came out as both a greeting and an accusation.
"Silas." Aurora Carter—Rory—didn't smile . Not the way he remembered. There was no wide, infectious grin that once could light up the dullest of university corridors. Instead, her expression was guarded , her relaxed-was her entire demeanor guarded? Had she always held herself that way? He couldn't recall. Memory could be both enemy and ally, and tonight, it was pulling the shades. "Long time."
"Yes." He cleared his throat, reaching for the whiskey the barman had returned. "Some fifteen years, if my arithmetic serves me correctly." He didn't feel the burn as he swallowed. It didn't cut through the sudden nervelessness playing havoc with his vocal cords. "What brings you to... Sasha's?" He realised with slight mortification that he had completely forgotten the name of the bar. Perhaps it wasn't Sasha's. Perhaps it was somewhere else entirely. Somehow, London had become less familiar , not more, since he'd retired.
"Peace and quiet, oddly enough." Rory slid onto the stool next to him, her movements economical and deliberate. She signalling to the barman, her small crescent-shaped scar—for he noticed it immediately, even in the dim light—catching the backlight of the shelf behind. "A rare commodity in this city, wouldn't you say?"
"You're being philosophical." How very odd. Rory had always been practical. The sensible one among them, while he... well, he'd been the one with a head for strategy and a willingness to bend the rules, occasionally snapping them in the process. How roles had reversed.
"Occupational hazard." She took the whiskey the barman slid towards her, raising it in a silent toast before taking a sip. She didn't wince. Good. She'd developed a taste then?
Silas studied her properly now, really allowed himself to take her in. The straight shoulder-length black hair was the same, but there were fine lines at the corners of those bright blue eyes he'd once thought could enchant any policy committee. The wrist with that telltale crescent scar—for how could he forget that little incident with the penknife in his first-year room?—was smooth now, unmarred by anything so nostalgic as university drama.
"You've... haven't changed." The lie came naturally. How many relationships had he navigated , both personal and professional, by telling people what they wished to hear? "Still looking after yourself."
"I should say the same." Her gaze flickered to the silver signet ring on his right hand, then upwards to his face. There was sadness in her scrutiny, and something else he couldn't quite place . Disappointment? "Although you wear your stress differently these days. Not bad. Just... different."
The light above the bar hummed slightly , creating a visual distortion that both exaggerated and belied the small wear-and-tear in her features. Then, her fingers traced the rim of her glass, the simple movement radiating a confidence he'd never witnessed in her during their university days. Who was she now? This was not the girl who had once followed him into unintended career conversations, nor the friend who had begged him not to take that posting to the Middle East after graduation.
The tv over the bar, playing sporting event he hadn't bothered to identify beyond recognising it as such, created a shell of conversation while they relaunched a connection spanning fifteen years. The silence that fell between them was not awkward but contemplative, weighty with untold stories and lost time.
"So then," he eventually resumed, watching the condensation on their glasses bead and run down with scientific interest, "what line of work is it that's taught you philosophy and caution now?"
She turned her entire body to face him then, crossing one leg over the other. There was a faint scent of jasmine mixed with something else—perhaps the bar's cleaning products, but something more personal too. "Bars. Among other things. Occasionally a bit of... consulting."
"Consulting?" He raised an eyebrow, expecting her to elaborate, but she merely sipped her drink, inviting nothing more. Consulting what? Relationships? Business strategies? Something more clandestine somehow? The intelligence officer in him, long retired but never fully silenced, stirred with curiosity. There was a story here, and he had suddenly very much wanted to hear it.
He angled the signet ring on his finger, the sudden metallic scrape at odds with the bar's subdued atmosphere. "And have you found that... consulting... suits you?"
"I've found it helps me appreciate the quiet," she said simply, her eyes remaining steady. "Amongst other things."
"Like whiskey," he added, attempting a smile he wasn't certain reached his eyes.
"Amongst other things," she repeated, a small smile touching her lips this time . And then she turned on her stool, her body language shifting entirely, adopting the posture of someone suddenly with business to attend. "Silas."
"Mm?" He followed her gaze across the room towards the bar's entrance where two figures stood conferring with a third man who looked vaguely familiar . One he recognised from a file he'd reviewed last week, a quartermaster for a local operation, someone who knew how to make things disappear. Disappear, or appear. Depended on the day.
"The bartender said you owned a place now," she said conversationally, putting her glass down precisely between themselves and the newcomers. "The Raven's Nest."
"Indeed. A rather different world from our office days." He watched her profile, how everything about her had gone from relaxed contemplation to controlled observation, as if flipping a switch . He had missed this, this alertness that could transform in an instant. Had he possessed it long enough to notice how quickly he'd lost it?
"How quaint," she murmured, though there was nothing whimsical in her tone. "I'd heard."
"The building came available. It was... serendipitous." He deliberately kept his voice casual, but energy passed between them like static electricity across a well-worn circuit. This was extraordinary, she appearing here, now, when half of London knew he was meeting this quartermaster and a second floor operative tonight. Whom could she possibly be consulting for?
"Serendipity or inevitability, Silas? I've never quite been able to tell with you."
The quartermaster and the second figure now moved towards the staircase leading to what he assumed were the restrooms, comparing notes on something a bartender had just shown them. There was a focus in their gait that screamed importance, a tension in their shoulders that spoke louder than any whispered conversation could.
"If I recall, you never knew what that meant either." He gestured to the newcomers with his glass, marveling at how naturally they fell into this dance of partial truths and unspoken understanding. "Working on something interesting?"
She followed the direction of his gaze briefly, then her attention snapped back to him. "You could say that. Though I suspect," she leaned slightly closer, her clear eyes glittering in the dim light, "that you already knew precisely what I was working on. Much like how I knew you would be meeting with Jamison and his assistant tonight."
The cold from the whiskey glass in his hand had absolutely nothing on the chill racing down his spine . He suddenly realised the TV noise had receded, replaced by the thrum of his own pulse in his ears. "Excellent work, Rory. Memory serves you well."
"I read the London Times charities page," she said with a sincerity that didn't quite mask the electric current beneath her calm exterior . "Mr. Jamison founded something called Pathways a couple years back. Helps ex-offenders find housing, believe it or not. Also helps certain items find new homes. News travels, as they say."
Silas placed his glass with deliberate care on the bar, the movement an ancient ritual of control to counter the sudden spinning of his thoughts. "Your development is impressive, Rory. You were always clever, but there's a... precision to you now."
She smiled, genuine this time, and it transformed her face in startling and unexpected ways. Fifteen years fell away momentarily. "A girl can't just sit back and watch the years accumulate, Silas. Not in our line of work, anyway." She winked, raising her now half-empty glass once more in a toast that hung uncompleted, that deliverable question mark between them.
"Indeed," he replied, caught in the compelling tension of having one foot planted solidly in his past and the other in a future he hadn't known awaited him. "You should come by the Nest sometime. We could reminisce. Or not." He watched her, this changed and un-changed friend, turning back towards her drink. "I've finally got that rare commodity you mentioned."
"A rare commodity?" The question hung in the air between them like ozone after a storm.
"Peace and quiet, Rory. Yours truly does own a bar, after all."
She laughed then, a warm, delighted sound that seemed to lift the suddenly heavy atmosphere in their small corner of the bar . "I'll keep that in mind, Silas. But I actually have a date in about ten minutes. Can't be late." That bright smile flashed once more before she stood, retrieving a satin jacket from the back of her barstool with practiced elegance. "Don't disappear on me again, though. I found you once, I can do it again."
"And if I were hiding, wouldn't you have found me already?" He posed it as a hypothetical question, though the reply felt both plausible and terrifyingly truthful.
She paused half-turned, that brilliant blue gaze pinning him to his barstool. "Maybe. Or maybe I wanted to hear you say what you want me to hear."
Silas watched her across the room, making her way towards a different door than the one Jamison had disappeared through, her intentions as inscrutable as they had been fifteen years ago. She vanished from sight, leaving behind only a faint trace of jasmine, the ghost of whiskey, and the unsettling certainty that Aurora Carter had not come seeking peace and quiet at all. Rory had come seeking answers—and in his questions, she had found them both fascinating and profoundly worrisome. His phone vibrated , the subtle buzz rippling against his thigh. He fished it out, the display giving promise of an impossible meeting location. He glanced back to the door through which she had departed, then at the staircase where Jamison had gone, each destination representing a different version of himself. The barman collected his glass with a practiced hand, unaware he was standing between the past and future of the man who might have been a friend. In that space, in that deliberate moment, reality itself seemed to waver.