They stayed two days.
Two days of quiet. Harvesting in the mornings — filling baskets with sunbloom citrus and ironheart nuts and starberries until dimensional storage felt like a warehouse. Afternoons spent checking the homestead — canals clear, groves healthy, the barrier still humming along the perimeter wall. Evenings on the roof, eating and talking and sitting close enough that their arms touched.
He didn't kiss her again. Not because he didn't want to — he thought about it roughly every eight seconds, which was distracting — but because the first one still sat in his chest like a warm coal and he didn't want to rush whatever this was into something it wasn't ready to be.
She didn't push. She seemed content with proximity. With the quiet understanding that something had changed between them and neither of them needed to define it yet.
On the morning of the third day, they packed up. Yuki ran a final check on the barrier, topped off the mana reserves in the perimeter nodes, and took one last look at the garden from the bridge.
"Ready?" he asked.
Lira stood beside him, the blue stone pulsing at her throat. "Ready."
He tore a hole to Millhaven. They stepped through.
The caravan yard was chaos.
Wagons being loaded. Draft animals being harnessed. Merchants shouting at porters. Varlen stood in the middle of it all, directing traffic with the calm efficiency of a man who'd organised a thousand departures.
He saw them appear.
Not literally — they'd stepped out of the teleportation behind a stack of crates, out of direct view. But Varlen had the instincts of a man who tracked cargo and people for a living. He spotted Lira within seconds of her emergence, noted Yuki beside her, and went very still.
Then he walked over.
Yuki had faced a dragon, a monster horde, and the existential terror of falling from the sky. None of those had prepared him for the look on Varlen's face.
"Where," Varlen said, his voice flat and precise, "has my daughter been for the past two days?"
Lira opened her mouth. Varlen held up a hand.
"I'm asking him."
Yuki straightened. "She was with me. At my home. I needed to check on the property and she came along."
"Your home."
"East of the Ashspine."
"For two days."
"Yes."
Varlen's jaw tightened. He turned to Lira, looked at her, turned back to Yuki. The silence was surgical.
"You took my unmarried daughter to your home. For two days. Without informing me. Without a chaperone." Each sentence landed like a hammer strike. "I don't care if you're the hero of Millhaven. I don't care if you killed a thousand monsters on that wall. You do not take an unmarried woman to your homestead for days without her father's knowledge. That is not how it's done."
Yuki's stomach dropped. He hadn't even considered — in his world, in his old world, two friends spending time together was nothing. But this wasn't his world. Different culture. Different rules. And Varlen's face said those rules were not negotiable.
"You're right," Yuki said. "I apologize. I should have spoken to you first. It won't happen again."
Varlen studied him. The anger didn't fade, but something else appeared alongside it — the calculation. The merchant's brain, always running, always weighing value.
"So," Varlen said. "You'll be marrying my Lira, then. You understand that."
Yuki's brain stalled.
"I — what?"
"You took an unmarried woman to your home. For days. In this part of the world, that means you take responsibility. You marry her."
"PAPA."
Lira materialized beside them, face crimson, mortification radiating off her like heat. "What are you saying to him?"
"I'm saying what needs to be said. He took you to his homestead for two days. The proper thing—"
"We harvested fruit! That's it! We picked oranges!"
"And stayed two nights."
"In separate rooms!"
Varlen looked unconvinced. Yuki jumped in before the situation escalated further.
"Sir — Varlen — I respect your daughter enormously. But we're both too young for marriage. I think we need to take a step back and—"
Varlen's eyes narrowed. "Is my daughter not good enough for you?"
"What? No — that's not—"
"You refuse to marry her? After taking her—"
"I'm not refusing, I'm saying we're seventeen — and I have — there are things I need to do first. I'm new to this area." He caught himself before saying new to this world. "Eventually I'll need to travel. Explore. I can't ask someone to marry me when I don't even know where I'll be in a year."
Varlen folded his arms. "And what better wife for a traveller than the daughter of a travelling merchant? She's adept with a bow. She's spent her life on the road. She knows how to fend for herself and she won't slow you down."
Yuki glanced at Lira. She was staring at the ground, face burning, unable to look at him.
"Lira is the most beautiful woman I've ever met," he said. The words came out before he could filter them. Honest. Raw. "I'm definitely not good enough to marry a girl like her. And I doubt she wants to be tied to someone like me."
Varlen shook his head slowly. "Son. You are strong. In this world, strength matters. I would feel safer knowing my daughter was with a man who can face a horde of monsters alone than with a merchant like me. I am serious."
Lira's lips moved. A whisper, barely audible, directed at the cobblestones: "It isn't true. I wouldn't mind being married to a man like you."
Yuki didn't hear it. The yard noise swallowed it. But Varlen did. His expression shifted — just slightly — from stern father to something softer.
"We'll table the marriage discussion," Varlen said. "For now. But this conversation isn't over."
"Understood."
"And you ride with us to the capital."
"Already planned on it."
Varlen nodded. Gave Lira one last look — paternal, protective, faintly amused beneath the severity — and walked back to his wagons.
Lira stood next to Yuki, face still red, eyes still on the ground.
"I'm going to kill him," she muttered.
"It's okay. He just cares a lot about you."
"He just tried to arrange my marriage in a caravan yard."
"...yeah."
She finally looked up. Her eyes were mortified but something else was there too — a fragile, hopeful thing she couldn't quite hide.
"Did you mean it? What you said?"
"Which part?"
"The most beautiful woman you've ever met part."
His face went hot. "I — yes. I was just telling the truth."
She held his gaze for a long moment. Then she punched his arm, "Hmph!", turned on her heel, and walked toward her wagon.
"Come on. We have fruit to sell."