A boring morning, like any other before it.
Torch stood beside the door like a statue. His butler uniform fresh and sharp — a crime against the mess of hair above it. Eyes closed, drifting back through the past without meaning to. The guilt still stung. Her pale eyes. Her red hair, darker where the blood had soaked through it. That man.
The pain and guilt turned slowly, the way they had been turning for months now, into something harder. Determination. The promise made it easier to carry.
But something was strange.
He had time to think about all of this. Mrs. Veuren was late.
6:45. Fifteen minutes gone.
Then she came out. Her sharp gaze could still put a hole in a wall. She walked and Torch followed, the way he always did. He had lived long enough beside her now to read the small things — and she was not at full health today. A cold perhaps. A fever. She offered no information and he asked for none. Whatever it was, it wasn't his place to question.
They walked together until they reached the kitchen. First time since she had found him under that bridge that he had walked into the kitchen without a specific order pulling him there. She looked at him — the look of someone who had arrived intending to give a command and found the thought suddenly out of reach.
Mrs. Veuren: "Go and get us milk."
Torch: "We brought milk yesterday. There are still five liters in the fridge."
Mrs. Veuren: "Right. I forgot. Well — go and check the water channel for the trees."
Torch: "Mrs. Veuren, I finished the channel yesterday at 18:30 . It's done."
Mrs. Veuren: "Right. But you haven't turned the water on to feed the trees. Go and make sure everything is watered."
Torch nodded and went.
In his mind, something had already shifted. That was the longest exchange they had ever had. First time she had given an order longer than six words. Something was off — but orders came first. Thoughts waited.
As he tested the channel and ran the water through to each tree, he couldn't stop the observations from stacking. She was slower than yesterday. Her memory was slipping in ways it hadn't before. She was resting more. Something was wrong — age, body, mind, he couldn't tell which — but the pattern was there and it was new.
He was so deep in it that he didn't notice the channel had blocked. Dead leaves, caught at a bend, backing the water up quietly until it was spreading into the grass.
Maiden:"Oi — Torch! The water!"
He looked up. Not defensive, not startled — just a man pulled back from his thoughts into the present. He fixed the blockage quickly and watched the water find its way through again, moving along every branch of the channel until it reached the base of each tree.
Then a voice came from behind him. A voice he had only ever heard giving orders.
Mrs. Veuren: "Your life is this water channel. Sometimes it gets blocked — that is what life does. But you keep moving. If one road closes, you find the other."
She walked until she was standing beside him, watching the water run.
Mrs. Veuren: "I don't know what hell you crawled out of. What madness drove you to that bridge. What cruelty made you run. I never asked and I never will. But I can't help admiring how you've been slowly flooding forward. Moving, despite everything."
She paused, looking at the house.
Mrs. Veuren: "I built this house by my own will. To prove something to the world. I am what I am a free spirit born into freedom. Nothing in this life could've stopped me from reaching what I wanted. But age is catching up now. You've already felt it — how I'm slowing, how the memory frays at the edges."
Something moved in Torch's chest. Bitter and heavy. The helplessness of being small against something vast — the way humanity is always small against time, against the certainty that everything alive is built to end.
Mrs. Veuren: "My dearest servant. Torch with no past. Don't be sad when the day comes for us to say goodbye. That is simply life. I want you to know — I have nothing left unfinished. I achieved what I set out to achieve. I buried the shame that haunted my family name. I rebuilt myself from nothing. This life is growing quiet, and this back pain is genuinely insufferable."
She said the last part the way only old people can — with complete sincerity and a dry edge underneath it.
Mrs. Veuren: "Don't grieve for me. I want my ending to come the way it comes for any old woman my age. Naturally. Without fuss."
Torch looked up at the sky. A weak smile crossed his face — the smile of someone who understands something and wishes they didn't. The same feeling as the last day of school, walking out knowing you won't see those people again. The same quiet ache at the end of a good weekend, enjoying the last of the light while knowing what morning brings.
He looked at her.
Torch: "You always acted cold. Hard-hearted. Every time I came near you'd put that face on — the same face you give everyone else, so I'd feel no different from any other servant. But you always looked after me. Since the day you took me in, I kept asking myself why. What you saw in me that made you reach down under that bridge."
He paused.
Torch: "I stopped asking a long time ago. I just want to say thank you. For taking me in. For saving me from my own weakness. For not letting me stay what I was."
He looked at the water running through the channel — still cloudy, still carrying the dirt of freshly dug earth.
Torch: "I came from somewhere. I have people — family, people who are looking for me right now. People who are worried. But I can't go back. It's not that I don't want to. I can't. The old me needs to stay buried. I want to welcome whoever I'm becoming."
He let the silence hold for a moment.
Torch: "If the day comes where we part — I want you to know. You are the flame that burned what was left of the old me so something new could come through. Thank you for being exactly who you are."
Mrs. Veuren's eyes watered.
She wanted to pull him into her arms. Instead she straightened her back, lifted her chin, and said nothing — still protecting the distance, still giving him room to finish healing at his own pace without the weight of her affection pressing on it.
This was the day Torch acknowledged himself as someone who deserved to be alive.
From that day on, something shifted in how he moved through the house. The routine didn't change much — still standing at the door at six twenty-four, still using his legs more than any reasonable person would. But he found something in the garden. The trees, the channel, the quiet work of keeping things growing. He claimed it as his own — the one space that was his without being assigned.
The staff warmed to him too, gradually. The figure that had once seemed made of metal and silence was now the one helping with the dishes. The one who spent his free hours in the garden. The one who, apparently, hated coffee with a quiet but firm conviction.
One night Torch went to his room, closed the door, and waited.
He waited until every footstep in the house had gone quiet. Until the only sound left was the low hum of the refrigerator filling the silence of the ground floor. Then he opened his window — already prepared, already unlatched — and lowered himself down the rain pipe from the second floor, moving along the outside wall the way a man moves when he doesn't want to be seen or heard.
He stopped beneath the kitchen window and waited. Twenty minutes.
Two figures appeared inside. Moving carefully, quietly — the particular care of people who know exactly where the creaking floorboards are. They carried a small bag. They opened a milk carton, emptied the bag into it, and sealed it shut again before leaving the way they came.
Torch waited until they were gone. Then he came in through the kitchen window, took the carton, replaced it with an identical one from the back of the shelf, tucked the tampered carton under his jacket and slipped out of the house.
He walked until he reached the farm. The owner — a forty-year-old man who had been selling milk to Torch long enough to trust the silence between them — was waiting behind the barn. No greeting. No explanation given or asked for. They went inside together, into the small testing room used to check milk before it went to market.
They spent the entire night running tests.
First test — something present that shouldn't be. Second — the same. Third — the same.
Neither of them could identify exactly what it was. But Torch didn't need a name for it.
He understood the shape of what was happening.
Someone had opened a hunt. And he was either going to watch it take her — the way he had watched once before, standing helpless in a broken street — or he was going to hunt the hunters.
He already knew which one it would be.
He made his way back before dawn, climbed the drainpipe, pulled himself through the window and closed it behind him. Changed. Waited.
At six twenty-five he was standing beside her door.
6:41 — she stepped out. And this time, when she saw him standing there, she smiled.
Torch smiled back.
She needs to live, he thought. Long enough to order me around for years more. Long enough to be insufferable about her back pain and her milk and her fences.
I have to save the person who saved me.