---
The portals opened above Capital Pikuwa.
Three of them.
Side by side — the three-portal formation that communicated planning, that communicated the arrivals had come from the same direction and had decided on the formation before arriving.
The portals were wrong.
Not obviously wrong — subtly, in the specific way that things that were almost right communicated their not-rightness through the almost. The color of them: very close to Tenkai's cosmic blue but carrying something underneath it, something tinted, something that the eye did not immediately name but which registered before the naming.
Xen Astra.
Xen Tenkai.
Xen Astria.
They came through.
The black kimonos were gone — the Cursed Dragon Clan uniform replaced by clothing that was close to what it should be. Close enough. Xen Astra in a white jacket over dark clothes. Xen Tenkai in something approximating the bearing of the original. Xen Astria with the silver-white hair that was her nature and which could not be changed by any choice of clothing.
They landed on the capital's main plaza.
The winter air received them.
The faint light of Senta on their shoulders.
Around them — the capital going about its morning. The citizens, the stalls, the transit lines visible in the near distance, the general warmth of a winter day in a place that had decided warmth was worth the effort.
The citizens nearest the landing stopped.
Not in fear — in recognition.
In the specific quality of recognition that preceded everything else, before the questioning, before any assessment of what was different or not different. Just: someone has arrived who is known.
The word moved outward the way words moved in close communities.
By the time Fin arrived at the plaza's edge, breathing slightly from the movement through the hall and corridors, there were already citizens gathering.
He saw the white jacket first.
He saw the silver hair.
He breathed.
He smiled.
The full warm smile of someone who had been given something unexpected and whose face had received it before the mind had finished processing it.
**Fin :** "Oh!"
He said it.
He walked forward with the forward quality he always walked with — not performing the welcome, simply moving toward the thing he was glad to see.
**Fin :** "Prince Astra! You are here."
He said it.
He said it with the warmth of someone for whom the saying was the straightforward expression of the glad.
He had not noticed.
He had not noticed because noticing required the specific attention that was looking for something, and Fin was not looking for something wrong. He was looking at someone he recognized and finding them there and being glad.
**Xen Astra :** "Fin."
He said the name.
He said it with a smile.
The smile was very good.
It was the quality of Astra's smile — the warmth of it, the specific shape of it, the way it reached the eyes. Xen Astra had this smile exactly because he had been this person once, because the smile was his from the origin point, because the genuine article was available to him the way all of your features were available to you even when the person you had become was using them differently.
**Xen Astra :** "It has been a long time. We all didn't meet."
He stepped forward.
He looked at the capital around him — at the transit lines, at the market district visible from here, at the citizens gathered and gathering, at everything.
He breathed.
**Xen Astra :** "How is my kingdom running? Since you became king."
He said it.
He said it with the quality of someone genuinely asking — not performed, asking.
Fin breathed.
He looked at the capital around him.
**Fin :** "Honestly, it's better than I expected. Which doesn't mean I knew what I was doing — I still don't always know what I am doing."
He breathed.
**Fin :** "But the people are doing well. The market has expanded since you left. The hospital district completed its east wing. The transit lines run on time."
He looked at Xen Astra.
**Fin :** "Everyone is happy."
He said it simply.
**Fin :** "Everyone is genuinely happy."
He breathed.
**Fin :** "Which I think is the thing."
He breathed.
**Fin :** "It is not perfect. Some decisions I made turned out to be wrong and Piko had to fix them and she fixed them while being very polite about the fact that they were wrong, which I appreciated."
Xen Astra smiled.
**Xen Astra :** "That sounds right."
Fin breathed.
**Fin :** "Yes. It does. Everything about her sounds very right, always."
He looked at the capital.
**Fin :** "Come. Let me show you what we have built since you left."
---
The gathering continued.
Word moved through the capital the way word moved through close communities — from person to person, each person carrying it to the next with the specific warmth of someone who has a piece of news they want to share because the news is good and good news is worth sharing.
Old Astra is back.
Not the phrasing exactly — each person's version of the phrasing, the specific shape that the information took as it moved through different mouths and different contexts. But the content: the person who had built this place has returned.
The citizens came.
The slimes from the market district, some with scarves still wrapped. The goblins from the stalls, leaving the stalls briefly and then coming back for another look and then leaving for good and coming to the plaza. The Oni family from the residential district — the eldest child not running now, walking with the deliberate pace of someone who had decided this moment was worth the proper pace, the drawing in his pocket.
Dragon citizens. Oni families. A cluster of small beings from the eastern quarter whose exact species was not immediately classifiable but who had been in Dragon Unite since the early days and were very much part of the fabric of it.
They gathered.
The specific quality of a community gathering around something — not organized, not ceremonial, the natural magnetic effect of something that mattered to people being present and people moving toward it.
---
From across the plaza:
Piko.
She had been on the bench in the small park adjacent to the civic district — resting, genuinely resting, the specific rare condition of Piko not actively doing three things simultaneously. She had been sitting on the bench with her robot cat in her lap and the mechanical hands in their settled orbit and her glasses resting on her nose and her eyes closed.
She had been resting for twenty-three minutes.
This was a personal record.
She had been actively not thinking about any of the seventeen projects she was in the middle of and the eleven new ones she had identified and the six infrastructure improvements she had been designing since the previous week.
The arrival communicated itself through the air before any of her systems noted it formally.
She opened her eyes.
She looked at the plaza.
She stood.
The robot cat stayed on the bench.
The mechanical hands found their active orbit.
She walked toward the plaza with the quality of someone who had received information and was moving toward the source of it.
She arrived.
She found the group around Fin and the three visitors.
She looked.
At Xen Astra in the white jacket.
At Xen Tenkai with the folded arms.
At Xen Astria with the silver-white hair.
She processed.
Her eyes moved across them with the specific efficiency of her processing — taking in the details, organizing them, beginning the comparison to the stored reference.
Then:
**Piko :** "But — Astra-sama."
She said it.
She said it from across the group.
**Piko :** "Why are your clothes black like that?"
She said it with the innocent precision of someone asking about a detail that did not match the stored reference.
Everyone looked at the clothes.
At the specific quality of the black — not the standard black of practical clothing, the black that had a quality underneath it, the black of something that carried its origin in its color.
**Xen Astra :** "Oh?"
He looked at himself.
He breathed.
He smiled.
**Xen Astra :** "That's just — we changed clothes. New outfits. The white jacket is from the old one. The rest is new."
He gestured at himself with the easy quality of someone who had prepared for this question.
**Xen Astra :** "Travel does that. You find things on the way."
He breathed.
**Xen Astra :** "Don't you think it suits me?"
He said it with the grin.
Piko looked at him.
Her eyes moved across the outfit one more time.
She was still processing.
---
From the side:
Kento.
He had come from the building that housed the gravity chamber — still carrying the towel from the training, still in the specific state of someone who had been working and had come through quickly. Yuko was beside him.
He saw the white jacket.
He breathed.
**Kento :** "Ohhh—"
He moved forward.
**Kento :** "Astra-bro! You came back! I knew you would! I told Yuko—"
**Yuko :** "You did not say that."
**Kento :** "I said it internally. Which counts."
He reached the group.
He grinned.
The full Kento grin — the specific expression of someone who was genuinely glad without any complication to the gladness.
Xen Astria looked at Kento.
She looked at him with the eyes that were Astria's eyes carrying the crimson pupils.
She breathed.
She smiled.
The shape of Astria's smile.
**Xen Astria :** "Kento. Now you did learn the lesson."
She said it.
She said it with the warmth of someone who knew exactly what lesson she meant.
Kento blinked.
He breathed.
He smirked.
**Kento :** "I did."
He said it.
He said it with the quality of someone who had come to a genuine understanding rather than the performed understanding that came before the genuine one.
**Kento :** "I wander around beautiful girls, but differently now. I see them as people worth paying attention to."
He breathed.
**Kento :** "Which turns out to be better."
He said it simply.
**Xen Astria :** "Good."
She winked.
**Xen Astria :** "Keep that mindset."
Yuko, beside Kento:
**Yuko :** "It is because she taught him that before going."
She said it with the flat quality.
She said it and she was looking at Xen Astria's face and something in her expression was doing the thing that Yuko's expression sometimes did when she was reading something and the reading was producing a result she had not organized yet.
She breathed.
She said nothing else.
---
From the right side of the gathering:
Xen Tenkai.
He had not moved much since the landing — he was in the position he was in, arms folded, taking in the crowd and the capital and everything with the flat observation of someone for whom observation was the first and most important activity.
He breathed.
He looked at the citizens — at the gathered faces, at the warmth of the gathering.
He breathed.
He breathed again.
He looked at Xen Astra.
He said it quietly.
**Xen Tenkai :** "Ares. You are getting too emotional."
He said it.
He said it flat.
He said it the way Tenkai said things when he was observing something and was choosing directness over management.
Xen Astra looked at him.
He breathed.
He produced a tear.
A single, extremely theatrical tear.
It ran down his face with the absolute commitment of someone performing an emotion they were not entirely having.
**Xen Astra :** "Oh yes, Tenkai."
He said it.
He said it with the trembling lip of someone who had decided to go all the way with the performance.
**Xen Astra :** "Thank you for noticing that. It means everything."
He pressed a hand to his chest.
Xen Tenkai looked at the tear.
He looked at Xen Astra.
**Xen Tenkai :** "That is the least convincing tear I have ever seen."
**Xen Astra :** "I am overcome with feeling—"
**Xen Tenkai :** "It is not moving."
**Xen Astra :** "It is moving, Tenkai, it is just moving slowly because the emotion is so deep—"
**Xen Tenkai :** "It has stopped on your cheek."
**Xen Astra :** "That is where it chose to rest."
Kento was looking at this exchange.
He was smiling.
The citizens around the group were smiling.
The specific smile of people who had been around this dynamic before and had found it funny before and found it funny again now.
This was familiar.
This was exactly familiar.
This was Astra and Tenkai and nothing about this was wrong.
---
Muwa.
She had arrived from the army's training quarter — the specific pace of someone who had been in the middle of something and had decided the middle could wait.
She stood at the edge of the gathered crowd.
She looked at the three visitors.
She stood with her arms crossed and her crimson eyes moving across the scene with the reading quality she brought to everything.
She breathed.
She looked at Xen Astra.
She breathed.
She looked at the crowd.
She looked at Xen Astra again.
She breathed.
Something was happening in her expression — not the visible something of someone reaching a conclusion, the internal something of someone who was cataloguing a large number of small details and was in the process of organizing them.
She breathed.
She said nothing.
---
The crowd had fully gathered now.
The full breadth of Dragon Unite's citizenship in the plaza — every race, every kind of being, everyone who had come through the portals and had stayed and had made this place theirs.
The wave of warmth from them.
The specific warmth of a community around someone they were glad to have back.
They began.
Not organized cheering — the natural sound of many beings expressing something genuinely, the sound that was less uniform and more real than any organized response could be.
The noise of a community finding its voice.
The old goblin in the market district who had wept at Fin's cooking had come to the edge of the crowd. He stood there with the specific quality of someone who was very old and had lived through enough to know what was important and had arranged himself accordingly — at the edge of something, present for it.
The slime from the market who had come because of Astra's wave — the specific slime who had followed because a wave had been extended to him — was in the crowd somewhere, orange-tinted, one of the smallest presences in the gathering.
The Oni child with the drawing in his pocket.
He was in the crowd.
He was looking at Xen Astra.
He was smiling.
He reached into his pocket.
He had the drawing.
He was going to give it now — the drawing he had kept for all the weeks, that he had decided was the right drawing for this specific occasion, that he had been saving.
---
Fin stepped forward.
He stepped to Xen Astra's side.
He looked at the crowd.
At all of it.
He breathed.
He breathed with the specific quality of someone who was moved by what they were seeing and was not going to pretend they weren't.
**Fin :** "I actually do not deserve to have become king."
He said it.
He said it honestly.
Not as false modesty — the genuine assessment of someone who had been uncomfortable with the designation for its full duration and who said it directly because Fin did not do the indirect version of things.
**Fin :** "But since you made me this, I must protect everyone."
He breathed.
**Fin :** "I will do that."
He breathed.
**Fin :** "Every day."
He breathed.
He looked at the crowd.
Muwa, from the edge:
**Muwa :** "Astra is not just a king to us."
She said it.
She said it with the flat quality — flat because Muwa communicated her most significant things flatly, because the weight of them was in the content rather than the delivery.
She looked at the crowd.
**Muwa :** "He is our family."
She said it.
She breathed.
She looked at the three visitors.
She breathed.
She kept looking.
---
At the back of the gathering:
Drashin.
He had descended from above the capital when the portals opened and had not joined the crowd — he was positioned at the crowd's outer edge, the position he occupied in rooms, in gatherings, in every space.
The corner.
His corner was the crowd's edge.
He stood there.
He looked.
He had been looking since the portals.
His eyes were on Xen Astra.
On the face.
On the jacket.
On the smile.
He breathed.
He breathed again.
He was very still.
The stillness of someone who had found something in the looking that had moved from the category of observation into the category of certainty — the specific transition between those two states, when the reading finished and the result was known.
He breathed.
He looked at the crowd.
At the warmth of it.
At the faces — at Fin and Kento and Yuko and the citizens and all of it.
He breathed.
He looked at Xen Astra.
He breathed.
He kept looking.
He did not move yet.
He kept looking.
**Drashin :** "Astra."
He said it.
He said it from the crowd's edge.
Quiet. Direct.
Everyone near him heard it.
**Drashin :** "Where is Gyumi."
The question landed in the gathering.
Not loud — the specific quality of a quiet question that received quiet because the question itself communicated that quiet was the appropriate response to it.
Fin looked up.
He had not thought to ask.
The crowd's warmth shifted slightly — not into concern, into the specific quality of something that had been moving and had been asked to pause.
Xen Astra looked at Drashin.
At the flat eyes.
At the stillness.
He smiled.
**Xen Astra :** "Oh, Gyumi?"
He breathed.
**Xen Astra :** "She just—"
**Drashin :** "Stay clearly."
He said it.
He said it with the flat quality that was his when he had decided to be direct.
**Drashin :** "She was with you three. That was the group. She was specifically part of that group."
He breathed.
**Drashin :** "Where is she."
The question again.
Not the same question — the second asking, which was not a repetition but an escalation. The second asking of someone who had heard the hesitation in the first answer and was asking again for the full answer.
Xen Astra opened his mouth.
**Piko :** "Drashin!"
She said it.
She said it from across the gathering with the energy of someone who had found something to address and was addressing it.
**Piko :** "Shut your mouth up! They just arrived three minutes ago and you are questioning already!"
She breathed.
**Piko :** "Gyumi is probably on the spaceship. I gave them a device. A compact ship device. You know the device."
She looked at Xen Astra.
**Piko :** "Right? She stayed on the ship?"
Xen Astra breathed.
He smiled.
**Xen Astra :** "Oh — yes! That's it! I'm sorry, I forgot the name of the thing for a second."
He smiled.
He laughed slightly.
**Xen Astra :** "The device. Yes. She is on the ship. She's resting."
He breathed.
**Xen Astria :** "You should take memory medicines."
She said it.
She looked at him with the look.
**Xen Astria :** "Old man."
He looked at her.
**Xen Astra :** "Hey. I am not old."
**Xen Astria :** "You forgot the name of a device. A device that your engineer built and gave to you personally."
She looked at the crowd.
She breathed.
She laughed.
The laugh was the shape of Astria's laugh.
The sound was very close to right.
---
Drashin.
He had not moved.
He was looking at Xen Astra's face.
He was looking at the moment of the name forgetting and the recovery from it — the smile, the transition, the smoothness of the transition.
Too smooth.
Not smooth in the way of someone who forgot a word and remembered it. Smooth in the way of someone who had navigated toward an available answer and was landing on it.
He breathed.
He breathed again.
He looked at Xen Astria.
At the eyes.
At the crimson in the blue.
He breathed.
He was very still.
He was putting things in order — the specific internal organizing of someone who had multiple observations and was assembling them into a conclusion.
The clothes.
The eyes.
The hesitation.
The smoothness of the recovery.
The word that was not quite the right word.
He breathed.
He opened his mouth.
---
**Fin :** "Okay, Astra."
He said it.
He said it with the warmth of someone who had received enough for now and was moving toward the next natural thing.
**Fin :** "Let's go and eat something."
He said it.
He turned.
He started walking.
The casual walk of someone who had decided on a direction and was in it — the forward quality of Fin moving through his own kingdom with the ease of someone who had learned the ease.
He walked.
His back to the group.
Three steps.
Four.
Xen Astra watched him walk.
He watched Fin's back.
He breathed.
He smiled.
---
Nobody saw it but Drashin.
The smile.
Not the warm smile. Not the genuine version or the performance of it. The other smile — the specific smile of someone who had arrived at the moment they came for and was now in it.
The mysterious smile.
The smile of a decision being executed.
Drashin saw it.
His eyes went hard.
He moved.
He was already moving.
He was not fast enough.
---
Stab.
The sound of it.
The specific sound that this kind of thing made — the entry and the body's report of the entry, the two sounds together, one of them the action and one of them the receiving of the action.
A crimson-silver blade.
It pierced through Fin's back.
Clean. Direct. The specific directness of something that had been aimed at a specific point and had reached it without variance.
Through his back.
To his heart.
Fin stopped walking.
He looked down.
At the blade.
At the crimson-silver of it — the light catching it, the color of it, the specific wrong color of something that should not be here.
He looked at the blade.
He breathed.
He breathed.
His eyes.
The warmth in them — still there, finding the thing that had just happened. Still the warmth, trying to process what the warmth was receiving.
He turned.
The turning took everything he had.
He turned barely.
He looked.
**Fin :** "What?"
He said it.
One word.
The word of someone for whom the word was the only available word — the specific word that arrived when the thing that was happening was too far outside the available categories for the specific word.
He breathed.
He breathed again.
Xen Astra stood behind him.
He was smiling.
The ruthless smile. Not performed — this one was real, the specific real of the worst available version of a genuine expression.
He looked at Fin.
**Xen Astra :** "Don't move."
He said it.
He said it with the tone of someone who was not giving a warning.
He breathed.
His hand withdrew the blade.
The wound.
Fin's body — the specific response of something that had taken something it could not fully process.
The silver began.
Not Fin's silver — the crimson silver of the blade's energy, spreading from the wound into the body, the specific corruption of the wrong energy finding living tissue and doing what it did.
Fin's body began burning with it.
---
**Kento :** "FIN!"
He said it.
He said it at the volume of someone whose body had produced the sound before the mind had the full accounting of what the body was responding to.
**Kento :** "NO—"
He moved.
He was already moving.
The atomic energy rising from him — the green of it, the specific green of Kento's nature at full expression, the energy of someone who had been training daily and who had found a direction for that training.
**Fin :** "Astra."
He said it.
He said it with the voice of someone who was using what they had for the saying.
He breathed.
He looked at the blade.
He looked at the figure behind him.
**Fin :** "What is that."
He breathed.
**Fin :** "Why—"
He breathed.
The burning spreading.
The crimson silver moving through him.
**Fin :** "After all this."
He breathed.
**Fin :** "After everything we built."
He breathed.
He was looking at Xen Astra with the eyes that were his — the warm eyes, the genuine eyes, the eyes of someone who was trying to understand a thing that could not be understood because the understanding required a framework that did not exist for this.
Xen Astra looked at him.
He looked at the confusion on Fin's face.
He looked at the warmth in it.
He breathed.
He smirked.
**Xen Astra :** "Actually."
He said it.
He said it pleasantly.
**Xen Astra :** "I am not that Astra."
He breathed.
**Xen Astra :** "The one you know."
He breathed.
**Xen Astra :** "The one who named this capital."
He breathed.
**Xen Astra :** "Who sat in the broken chair with the Oni children."
He breathed.
**Xen Astra :** "Who built this kingdom from the fear of losing something real and gave it to you to run from love."
He breathed.
He raised his foot.
He kicked.
Fin hit the ground.
The sound of it — the specific sound of the kindest king Dragon Unite had ever had being kicked to the ground of his own kingdom's plaza in front of his own people.
**Xen Astra :** "He is real."
He looked at the crowd.
At the faces — the warmth draining from them as the accounting arrived.
**Xen Astra :** "I am the other version."
He breathed.
His aura rose.
The crimson silver of it — both colors simultaneously, the Dragon Goddess compression and the corruption that had been done to it, expressed together, rising from him in the specific way of power that was not performing itself but was simply present at the level it was.
It moved through the plaza.
Through the winter air.
Through the warmth of the gathered community.
Through all of it.
His silver eyes glowed.
**Xen Astra :** "And now."
He said it.
He breathed.
He looked at the crowd — at the citizens, at Fin on the ground, at everyone in the plaza.
**Xen Astra :** "Everyone here."
He breathed.
**Xen Astra :** "Dies."
---
**Drashin :** "I TOLD YOU."
He said it.
He was already moving — not toward Xen Astra, across the crowd, creating the space between the crowd and what was coming.
**Drashin :** "I told everyone! From the beginning! He is not our people!"
He breathed.
He breathed again.
**Drashin :** "The eyes! The clothes! The hesitation when I asked about Gyumi!"
He breathed.
**Drashin :** "He is the corrupted version! The Xen timeline version! He is NOT—"
**Piko :** "YOU—"
She said it.
She said it at a volume and with a quality that was not Piko's standard volume or quality — the volume and quality of someone who had received a betrayal and whose body was communicating the receipt before any other channel had the information.
Her mechanical hands.
All of them — not the settled orbit, not the professional configuration.
Full activation.
Every mechanical hand that Piko had built and packed and brought and maintained moved from their orbits into the combat configuration simultaneously — the specific configuration that looked different from every other configuration, that carried in its arrangement the understanding that this was not for building or maintaining or calculating.
This was for the other thing.
**Piko :** "PREDATOR."
She said it.
She said it at the full volume.
---
Xen Tenkai.
He had been still since the blade — still with the specific stillness of someone who had been waiting for the moment and who recognized the moment's arrival.
He breathed.
He breathed.
He unfolded his arms.
He raised one hand.
The cosmic energy — not the honest cosmic of the main timeline's Tenkai, the Xen version of it, the energy that was the same origin and had traveled through different things and had arrived different.
It gathered.
Not slowly — the full gathering speed of someone who did not need to build toward the full expression because the full expression was always available.
He looked at the crowd.
At the buildings.
At the transit lines visible in the near distance.
He looked at all of it.
He breathed.
He released.
**BOOOOOOOM.**
The explosion of it — the crimson-cosmic burst that came from the full output of the gathering, released without aim at the sky above the plaza, the shockwave of it moving outward and downward and through everything in its radius.
The winter air became the explosion.
The plaza became the explosion.
The ground cracked.
The buildings in the near distance — the ones that had been built in one day by Piko's engineering — shook.
**Yuko :** "No—"
She was already moving.
The metal — from everywhere, every metallic surface in the plaza's vicinity, the transit lines and the market stalls and the braziers and everything, responding to her call.
She called it.
It answered.
The metal moving toward her hands with the specific speed of something that had been waiting to be called.
**Yuko :** "You betrayed—"
She breathed.
**Yuko :** "You came into our home and smiled at our people—"
She breathed.
**Yuko :** "You let Fin believe you were him—"
She raised her hands.
The metal formed.
---
From the ground of the plaza:
The ice.
Crimson-edged.
Not the honest ice of Astria's healing precision — the corrupted version, the ice that had Blizzard Dragon origin and wrong everything since. It spread from Xen Astria's fingers with the efficiency of something that had been waiting for permission.
The crimson ice covered the plaza floor in the time it took for a breath to complete itself.
Moving outward.
Finding the cracks in the broken ground.
Filling them.
Becoming the ground.
The citizens nearest it scrambled backward — the instinct of beings encountering something that was changing the surface they were standing on, the specific bodily response of legs finding new positions when the floor made a decision they had not been consulted on.
Xen Astria watched the ice move.
She breathed.
She looked at the crowd.
At the Oni children.
At the slimes.
At the old goblin.
She breathed.
She breathed again.
Her hand was raised.
The ice continued.
She breathed.
She breathed.
She was very still.
---
Drashin.
He gritted his teeth.
He looked at all of it simultaneously — the fallen Fin and the ice and the explosion's aftermath and the crowd and the mechanical hands and all of it.
He breathed.
He breathed.
The destruction energy.
Purple burning around his hands — the energy that operated on the physics of unmaking, that was not fire and not force in the conventional sense but the foundational pressure of something that had decided a thing should not be.
He breathed.
He breathed.
He looked at Fin on the ground.
At the wound.
At the crimson silver spreading through him.
He looked at Xen Astra.
At the smirk.
At the aura.
He breathed.
He looked at the Oni child with the drawing.
The child was holding the drawing with both hands.
The drawing of Astra in the small chair.
The child was looking at the fallen Fin and the drawing and Xen Astra and was in the process of understanding something that was too large for the available categories and which the available categories were going to have to expand to accommodate.
Drashin breathed.
He breathed.
He breathed again.
He moved.
---