Brad walked in first, and behind him, close enough together that they had clearly come up from the lobby at the same time, Marcus and Corrine.
Eli looked up and took them in. All three of them standing in the doorway with the particular quality of people who had arrived recently enough that they hadn't settled into the space yet, still carrying the energy of wherever they had come from, coats not fully off, bags still on shoulders.
Marcus stood off to the side just inside the door, hands loose at his sides in the way they got when he was working out what to do with himself. He looked older somehow, or maybe Eli just hadn't seen him in long enough that the gap registered differently. His hair was a little longer, his jaw sharper, and there was something in how he was holding himself that was more contained than Eli remembered.
Corrine was a step behind him and slightly to the right, angled toward Eli without fully committing to the room yet, like she was still deciding something.
Brad moved past both of them and stood near the wall, arms at his sides, watching without inserting himself into the middle of it.
Eli shifted in the chair, sitting up a little straighter.
Brad looked at him.
"While you were out," he said, "I used your phone."
Eli's eyebrows shifted slightly.
"I saw their messages," Brad continued. "Figured it was easier to reach out directly than wait for you to do it when you woke up." He nodded toward Marcus and Corrine. "Let them know where you were and that you were alright."
Eli took that in, the pieces of it assembling without much friction. Three days unconscious. Messages piling up from people who had no idea what had happened or where he was. Brad making a call in the space that created.
"Yeah," Eli said. "That's fine."
His voice was rough but it held together, the words landing cleanly enough.
Brad held his gaze for a moment. "I hope that's okay with you."
The line sat differently than the rest of it, more deliberate, like Brad had decided it needed to be said separately from the explanation.
Eli looked at him. "It is."
Brad gave a small nod, then stepped back toward the wall, clearing the space between Eli and the other two without making a production of it.
Marcus spoke first.
"You look better," he said. There was a pause before the last word, a half second where he was deciding how honest to be, and the slight delay made the statement feel more real than if he had just said it clean.
Eli let out a small breath. "Feel better than yesterday."
It wasn't smooth. The words came out with the roughness that had been sitting in his voice since he woke up, each one requiring a little more effort than it should have. But they came out.
Marcus nodded, but something in his expression didn't fully match it, the nod doing the work of a response while the rest of his face was still processing something else.
Corrine stepped in a little closer. She had her arms crossed loosely, not closed off, just gathered, the posture she usually had when she was paying close attention and didn't want it to look like she was. "How are you actually feeling?" she asked. "Not just compared to yesterday."
Eli considered it. "Still heavy," he said. "Breathing's better. Voice is…" he gestured vaguely at the air in front of him, indicating the roughness, the stops and starts.
"It's getting there," she said.
"Yeah."
She held his gaze for a second longer than the exchange needed, reading something in his face, then let it go.
Marcus turned and looked around the room, taking in the controlled precision of it, the way everything sat in its place without anything extra. The window with Aurelion's skyline sitting clean and organized beyond it. The equipment tucked close to the bed, screens dimmed. The walls that looked like they had been built to function rather than to be looked at.
"This place is something," he said. "They don't have anything like this back home."
Eli glanced around. "Different out here."
"Yeah." Marcus turned back to him. "Different's one word for it."
He said it lightly enough, but there was something underneath it that Eli recognized, the specific dryness Marcus used when he had an opinion he had decided not to fully state.
The room settled for a moment. Outside the window, the city moved at its usual pace, unhurried and indifferent, traffic sliding through the clean intersections in the timed flows that Aurelion ran on.
Marcus exhaled through his nose, a small sound that wasn't quite a sigh.
"They said you were out for three days," he said.
"Almost four," Eli said.
Marcus turned that over. "That's a long time to be gone."
Corrine added, quieter, "We didn't know what had happened. Brad's message was pretty short on details."
Eli nodded once. He could picture it, Brad composing something that gave enough to stop the panic without giving anything that needed to be explained. Terse, informational, engineered to contain rather than illuminate.
"Yeah," Eli said. "I know."
There was a pause, the kind that had weight in it.
Marcus shifted his weight. He started to say something, his mouth opening, then his jaw tightened and he shook his head once.
"What?" Eli said.
"Nothing." Marcus looked off toward the window. "Forget it."
Corrine looked at Marcus for a moment, then back at Eli.
"We came as soon as we heard," she said. "Brad reached out yesterday. We drove up this morning."
Eli looked between them. "You drove up from Port Virel?"
"Yeah," Marcus said, still looking at the window.
Six hours each way. Eli sat with that.
"You didn't have to do that," he said.
Marcus turned back to him, and there was something in his expression that was past the contained version of himself he had been presenting since he walked in.
"Yeah, we did," he said. Not aggressive. Just honest.
Eli looked at him.
Corrine stepped in before the silence could turn into something harder than it needed to be. "We just didn't hear from you," she said. "For a long time. And then Brad messages us saying you're in a hospital in Aurelion." She kept her voice level, not accusatory, just stating the sequence of events the way they had actually been. "That's a lot to get all at once."
Eli's shoulders shifted. "I know."
"You had time to message us," Marcus said. "We know you did. Brad told us you had a new phone."
"Yeah." Eli looked down at his hands for a second. "I did."
Marcus waited, like he thought more was coming.
Nothing came.
"So what happened?" Marcus said. "Why'd you go quiet?"
Eli exhaled slowly. "I don't know," he said. Which was partially true. "I kept thinking I'd say something when things made more sense. When I had something that wasn't just…" he trailed off, searching for it. "I didn't know what to tell you."
"You could've told us that," Corrine said.
"Yeah." Eli looked at her. "I should've."
The room held that for a moment.
Marcus looked away again, toward the window, his jaw working slightly. He had the particular look of someone who had arrived prepared to be more upset than they currently felt and was working out what to do with the excess.
"It's not that I'm mad," he said finally. "I just don't get it."
"I know," Eli said. "I'm sorry."
Marcus shrugged, a movement that was trying to be casual and didn't quite get there. "You're here. You're awake. That's what matters."
It wasn't all that mattered and all three of them knew it, but it was where Marcus had decided to put it for now, and Eli wasn't going to argue with that choice.
Corrine looked at Eli, and there was something in her expression that was separate from the conversation about the messages, sitting behind it, quieter. "You could've told us things were hard," she said. "We knew something was going on. We knew it for a while."
Eli looked at her. "Yeah."
"You didn't have to manage it alone."
"I know," he said. "I kept thinking I was about to have something figured out. And then I didn't. And then more time had passed."
Corrine nodded slowly, processing that. "That's very you," she said.
"Yeah," Eli said. "I know that too."
Something in her expression shifted, not quite a smile but adjacent to it, the specific expression of someone acknowledging something that was both frustrating and familiar in equal measure.
Marcus turned back from the window. The sharpness had come down a notch, replaced by something more like the version of him Eli actually knew, the one that led with honesty rather than positioning.
"How long are you in here?" he asked.
"Don't know yet," Eli said. "Few more days maybe."
"And after that?"
Eli glanced toward the wall, then back. "Back to KMI probably. When they clear me."
Marcus raised his eyebrows slightly. "You're going back."
"Yeah."
"After all this."
"Yeah."
Marcus studied him for a moment, and Eli could see him deciding whether to push it. He decided not to.
"Alright," he said simply.
Corrine had been watching the exchange. "Is there anything you need?" she asked. "While you're here. Or when you get out."
Eli thought about it. "No. I'm okay."
She looked at him in the particular way she had, the one that didn't quite let things go without at least registering them. "Okay," she said.
They stayed in the room for a while after that, the conversation finding its way into easier territory, Marcus telling him about something that had happened at school in Port Virel involving a teacher Eli had never liked and a fire alarm that may or may not have been accidental, Corrine filling in details that Marcus left out and correcting the ones he embellished. It was normal in the specific way that normal felt when it was being reassembled after a long time apart, slightly deliberate, not quite automatic yet but working toward it.
Eli listened more than he talked, partly because talking still cost him more than it should have, partly because he had missed this specific quality of sound, the two of them filling a room with something that had nothing to do with anything serious. It sat in him differently than it would have a few months ago, or even a few weeks ago. He understood the weight of it more clearly than he used to.
Eventually the energy in the room shifted in the way it did before people left. Corrine checked her phone. Marcus stood up straighter.
"We should let you rest," Corrine said.
Eli nodded. "Yeah."
Marcus stood, his hands finding his pockets, back to the contained version of himself now. He looked at Eli with the directness he used when he meant something and wanted it to land without a lot of packaging around it.
"Get better," he said.
"Working on it," Eli said.
Marcus held his gaze for a second longer, something in it that covered the larger distance the words didn't, then turned and headed for the door.
Corrine lingered. She looked at Eli with the steady attention she had carried the whole conversation, the one that didn't perform concern but also didn't minimize anything.
"I'll text you," she said.
"I'll answer," Eli said.
The words came out rougher than he meant them to, the voice still unreliable around the edges, but they came out clearly enough. She heard the weight in them, the thing underneath that was different from just saying yes, and gave a small nod that said she had.
Then she followed Marcus out.
The door closed behind them with the same quiet click as everything else in this building.
Brad stayed where he was.
The room went quiet, but it was a different quiet than the ones that had come before it. Not empty. Not suspended. Just still, the way a room was still after something had happened in it that needed a moment to settle.
Brad pushed off the wall and looked at Eli with a measured expression that wasn't quite readable.
"You handled that," he said.
Eli looked at him. "Didn't really feel like it."
Brad didn't try to correct that. He stood there for a moment, like he was considering saying something more, something in the set of his jaw suggesting the presence of a thought that hadn't decided whether to become words yet. Then it settled back.
"Rest," he said.
He stepped out. The door closed.
Eli sat in the chair for a while after that. Not thinking particularly hard about anything, just letting the afternoon sit around him. The light through the window had shifted again, dropping lower toward the horizon, the buildings outside catching it at an angle that turned the glass towers amber for a few minutes before the sun moved on.
He went over the conversation in pieces, not to analyze it but just because it was there. Marcus with his hands loose at his sides, working out what to do with himself. Corrine with her arms gathered and her eyes reading him the whole time. The specific silence where Marcus had started to say something and then stopped. The six hours they had driven.
He had let them think he was fine. Or not fine, but handling it alone, which was its own kind of message. He had done it for so long that it had stopped feeling like a choice and started feeling like the way things were.
It hadn't been the way things were.
It had just been what he kept doing.
His fingers pressed lightly into the arm of the chair, the texture of the material solid under his palm. He held it for a second, the simple fact of something that pushed back.
He had said he would answer when Corrine texted.
He meant it.
Not as a resolution. Not as a promise to be a different person. Just as the next thing, the immediate thing, the one he actually had the ability to do from where he was sitting.
He let out a slow breath. His chest moved with it more freely than it had this morning, the tightness a little further back than before.
He leaned back in the chair and looked at the ceiling.
Steady. White. Holding exactly where it was supposed to.
He closed his eyes and let the room be quiet.