It wasn't quite a dream. It was too textured for that, too heavy with the specific weight of things that had actually happened. More like a room he'd been locked out of for years that the fever had quietly opened, letting him fall back through the door without asking whether he wanted to.
Everything was slightly soft at the edges. The way memories got when time had worked on them long enough, sanding down the sharp parts without erasing the shape of the wound beneath.
But he remembered this.
He remembered all of it.
He was ten years old, and he was on his knees on the dojo floor, and his father was looking at him the way Matthew Parker looked at most things — as though they had not yet proven themselves worth a different expression.
