I made it. I actually made it through, whole.
He sat a long while simply breathing, letting the reality of his surroundings settle over him in careful, deliberate stages, the way a person eases into cold water rather than diving in all at once.
The grass beneath his palms felt exactly the way grass should feel — cool, slightly damp, individual blades bending and springing back beneath the pressure of his fingers in a way that felt, after seven months of ash and metal decking and alien soil, almost unbearably ordinary. A insect he couldn't immediately name buzzed past his ear, and he found himself laughing, quietly, disbelievingly, at the sheer mundane miracle of something as simple as a bee going about its business in a field that had never once needed to worry about ash squalls or skarn packs or the desperate calculus of survival on a world that wanted nothing from its inhabitants but their continued endurance.
