The ground floor garden had more than he expected.
Steven moved through it with the unhurried attention of someone on a genuine errand — self-assigned, entirely optional, but genuine. The evening air had the particular quality of late afternoon becoming something else, the temperature dropping by a degree, the light going golden and long.
Four roses. Two blue lilies. Seven china roses. And beyond those, thirteen others whose names he didn't know — beautiful, unnamed, filed under *investigate later.*
He was crouching near the base of a rose stem, directing water through a small portal toward its roots, when he registered the voices.
Anjila and Adrena. Near the far end of the garden.
He looked at them for exactly as long as it took to confirm what he was seeing. Then he looked back at the rose.
*Not my situation.*
---
Anjila had noticed him the moment he entered the garden.
She had been trying not to notice him all day — in the classroom, in the canteen, in every corridor where their paths had come close enough to make not-noticing an active effort. She had succeeded each time through the specific determination of someone holding a decision against pressure.
But here, in the open garden, with the evening light doing what it did, and Steven crouching in the dirt among the roses like someone who had simply decided that was where he wanted to be — the decision became harder to hold.
*He looks the same,* she thought. *He always looks the same.*
Not entirely true. Something had changed — something in the quality of his stillness, the way he moved without caring whether anyone was watching. The old Steven had always carried a slight self-consciousness in public spaces. This version of him didn't.
She thought about what she knew to be true, and what she knew to be constructed, and how much space existed between those two things.
*Roman has good looks,* she thought. That was true.
*Steven has a better heart.*
Also true. And the one she had been trying not to think about since January.
She had been the one who ended it. She had been the one walking with Roman in the courtyard on Steven's birthday. She had seen Steven's face in that moment — not rage, not the dramatic reaction she had half-prepared for. Just a quiet, genuine hurt, and then the decision to walk away without making it anyone else's scene.
*I did that,* she thought. *I made that choice. He took it quietly. And then the whole school decided he was the villain.*
The guilt had a specific texture. She had been carrying it since February and it had not gotten lighter.
*Why did I leave Steven for Roman,* she thought, watching him tend to the plants with the same calm he brought to everything. *Roman said the right things. But Steven always did the right things.*
There was a difference. She was only now understanding how large it was.
She was still looking at him when Roman arrived.
---
He moved toward her with the easy confidence of someone who didn't consider his approach worth announcing — tall, blonde, the kind of presence that had charmed her in December and felt, lately, like something she had to manage rather than something she wanted.
"Come on," he said, voice low. "Let's go inside. Just the two of us."
Anjila looked at him.
Then, involuntarily, at Steven — still crouching among the plants, still entirely focused on something that wasn't either of them.
"Anjila." Roman's voice had taken on its edge. Soft, but present. A pressure she had learned to recognize.
She pressed her notebook into Adrena's hands — automatic, her fingers needing something to do — and went with him. Because going with him was the path of least resistance. Because she didn't yet have the words for what she was feeling, and until she did, the path of least resistance was what she had.
She did not look back.
Adrena watched them leave with an expression that was satisfied in a way that didn't quite reach her eyes. Then she turned —
And found Steven.
---
He was already moving — navigating back toward the gate, his flowers collected, his afternoon's work done. Their paths converged at the narrow section where the stone edging made passing each other without acknowledgment impossible.
Adrena's grip on the notebook slipped.
Steven caught it before it reached the ground. Straightened. Held it out.
She looked at his hand. At the notebook in it.
"I don't take things," she said, with the precision of a rehearsed position, "from someone like you."
Steven looked at the notebook.
"Then take it like you're rescuing it from me," he said. "I'm helpless. You're doing charity. Your hands stay clean."
Adrena stared at him.
"We are standing," Steven continued, with the unhurried quality of someone laying out something they have thought about, "under the same sky." He looked up briefly, then back at her. "We are breathing the same air. Right now, this second — the same wind that just touched your face touched mine. We are standing on the same earth." He looked at her steadily. "And you are treating a notebook like it becomes impure because my hand touched it first."
The silence had weight.
"I'm not saying this to argue with you," he said. "I'm saying — we share all of this. The sky. The air. The ground under our feet. Whatever you think I am, whatever story you've decided is true — I am still here, in the same world you are. We already share more than you're willing to admit."
Adrena's expression moved through several stages.
"That doesn't make you a good person," she said, but the certainty in it had shifted slightly, become something she was maintaining rather than something she held naturally.
"Go ask Anjila," Steven said, "whether I ever touched her without her consent. Look at her face when she answers."
"She'd cover for you."
"She's been trying to talk to me since I arrived back." He looked at her evenly. "Does that look like someone who is afraid of me?"
Adrena had no answer for this.
She took the notebook.
Not warmly. But she took it.
"You're still annoying," she said.
"I know," Steven said, and walked away.
---
*What a complete waste of a flower-collecting evening,* he thought, with genuine irritation, heading back toward the dormitory. *I came for roses. I got a philosophy lecture that I had to give myself.*
He deposited the flowers into his inventory — catalogued, stored — and lay on his bare mattress and looked at the ceiling.
The ceiling was unchanged. Reliable. Consistent.
He was almost asleep when movement outside the window caught his attention.
He sat up.
Drikun was below, in the courtyard — moving in the particular way of someone who was pretending to be fine and was not fine. One hand pressed to her side. Pace uneven. Alone, without Draken, navigating toward the medical block with the self-sufficient determination of someone who had decided not to ask for help and was now executing that decision at significant personal cost.
As she walked, she talked to herself.
"Why does pain exist," she said, to no one in particular. "If the body simply didn't register pain, everything would be significantly more efficient. What is the function of this specific pain. Is there a way to communicate to the pain that it has made its point and can now—"
Steven was already in his inventory.
He found the bandages. The pain relief tablets. He opened a portal in the courtyard — positioned carefully, chest height, directly in her path.
Drikun stopped.
Looked at the items hovering in front of her.
Looked at the portal.
"Hello?" she said.
"Take them," Steven said, through the portal.
"Who are you?"
"Take the bandage. Take the tablets."
"But who—"
"The bandage goes on the injury. The tablets you swallow with water."
"Which is which?"
"The flat one is the bandage. The small round ones are the tablets."
"And you are—"
"Someone helping you. Take them."
She took them.
A pause. Then: "This is which pathway?"
"Goodnight."
"But I haven't finished—"
"Goodnight, Drikun."
"Why did you help me now and not earlier when—"
Steven reached through the portal, delivered one firm tap to the top of her head — not hard, just present, the specific gesture of someone whose patience has reached its boundary and is communicating this fact physically — and closed the portal.
He sat back on the mattress.
*Draken asks questions because he's curious,* he thought. *Drikun asks questions because she physically cannot stop. They are the same habit in two different people and I have now interacted with both of them today and I am very tired.*
He reached for his pillow.
Then his door opened.
Not knocked. Opened — directly, without announcement, with the casual confidence of someone who had decided the preliminary step was optional.
Steven looked at the doorway.
Someone was standing there.
He looked at them with the expression of a person at the end of a long day encountering one more thing, and thought:
*In this building. With this reputation. At this hour.*
*Who, exactly, decided knocking was optional?*
---
*End of Chapter Fifteen*