> I don’t think we’ll need to! Didn’t you hear? Donations have been at an all-time high lately, and headquarters is interviewing more support staff. We’re expecting to double our number of researchers and advocates! It won’t increase our number of people we can send down to the Clothes-lovers’ planet, but each of us will be able to manage many more cases.

>

> – Radio transmission from Voices for Non-Citizens

I lifted my left hand cautiously, touching his face, not quite believing he wasn’t some phantom or hologram. My fingers passed through the crown on his brow. It wasn’t real, a hologram. But… Gavin’s was too. This looked just like Gavin’s, if slightly shinier. I could feel his forehead beneath my fingers, even if I couldn’t feel the crown. “Vince? Is that… really you?”

He was staring at me with the same wondering disbelief that I felt. “I’m not too late.” His chest rumbled with a half-suppressed sob. “I’m not too late!”

Above me, Micah screamed. “DAD! Gavin, come on! It’s DAD!”

In a flash, Gavin’s face appeared at the hole. He barely paused after catching sight of us, grabbing Micah in his arms and dragging him downward, his tail lashing around me and… Vince? Around me and Vince…?

Gavin caught his fall before I could truly worry, lowering himself slowly toward us. “Dad! Do you see my super tail! I’m a true champion! You’re pretty late getting home from your business trip.”

“Really late,” Micah agreed. “Mom was really worried. We had to teach her aikido.”

It really was Vince. The boys could see him too. I hadn’t snapped, this wasn’t a hallucination. Somehow, impossibly, this was real, even if he looked slightly unreal. The tears streaming down his face made sense - he’d never been the kind to hide his emotions - but his eyes were overlarge. Different.

An augment, I realized. It’s really him. It’s just some augment.

Vince had looked away from me to stare upward, and when he spoke again, it was a shocked, disbelieving whisper. “The boys, too? You kept the boys… Where’s Cassie?!”

I laughed, not at his worry. Not at anything, really. “She’s fine. She’s not here! She’s safe with Pointy.”

“Pointy?”

I shook my head, trying to control myself. “You’ve… missed a lot. I’m so sorry, Vince… our house is-”

He clutched me tight. “Who gives a shit about a house? You guys are my home! You’re all alive?! You’re all really alive?”

I nodded.

“Then you protected everything that mattered.”

I looked down, meeting his eyes with the extra one on the top of my head. “We’re all a little… different.”

“Me too. Do you care?”

“No.”

“Me neither. I just wanted to get back to you guys.” He reached upward, dragging the boys down to us. “Whatever we have to face, I want to face it together.”

He followed the words up with a fierce kiss. His body and face may have been different, but somehow, the taste of his kisses was exactly the same. When he finally broke away from me, I realized that I’d started sobbing somewhere along the lines. He started to apologize, concerned that he’d hurt or upset me, but that wasn’t it. I wasn’t crying from sadness, but from utterly overwhelming levels of happiness and relief. I couldn’t even get control of myself enough to speak, so I pressed more kisses to his face and chest as I bawled, counting on my actions to communicate what I could not.

When Colonel Zwerinski anxiously checked in on me a few minutes later, I was still pretty incoherent. Fortunately, my stumbling explanation was largely unnecessary… Gavin was clinging to the top of Vince’s head like some kind of weird souvenir hat and shouting as loud as he could: “My Dad is back! My Dad is back!”

The colonel got the idea, offering shocked congratulations and leaving us in peace.

Then the Turners climbed down and we got to go through the whole same disbelief-to-delight spectrum with them, if slightly faster.

We walked over to sit next to Vince’s co-workers, who had all somehow survived too?! Davi had joined Zetadyne officially only a few months before the apocalypse hit, but she’d done two internships with them while still in college and been a regular face at our house for board game nights throughout. Seeing her battered and laid out on the floor had taken my breath away, but Gavin had been quick to dash over. He frowned for a moment and I saw a cut across her face shrink into nothingness. Then he smiled up at me. “She’s okay! Just sleepy.”

As far as the rest of his co-workers… John I didn’t really remember, although Vince insisted I’d met him. Kurt wasn’t here, but was supposedly okay and nearby. I was happy to see Byron, but I was glad he was distracted by his… grandma and cousin? I was sure there was a story there, but it was honestly really hard to care about such trivial details.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

Who gave a shit? Vince was alive. He was home.

Or close enough.

After a brief reunion, Byron and the Turners gave us space. Actually, everyone did, busy with… god-knows-what. I wondered, briefly, if they needed my help, but I pushed the thought away.

We’d done enough. This moment was ours.

“Oh man, I can’t wait to tell Cassie!” Micah said, leaning against his father, not complaining as Vince squeezed him tight against his side. “We should find a way to really surprise her.”

“I think she’s going to be really surprised no matter what, Micah,” I laughed.

“Yeah,” Gavin said. “But she wanted to come anyway. Now she will be REALLY mad we didn’t take her. She won’t want to stay home next time.”

“Next time you fight a tree that’s a third the size of an aircraft carrier?” Vince had clearly intended to sound amused, but his voice was shaky, and his grip tightened around my mangled hand. He’d obviously noticed the missing fingers, but he hadn’t asked me about it yet.

I still had no idea how he’d gotten here, either. I was sure that we would get around to figuring out the “Hows” and the “Whens” and the “Whats” of the past few months, but we hadn’t yet, simply enjoying the present. Still… as reluctant as I was to let go of the moment and focus on the grim reality, his comment was one I had to respond to.

“It might happen,” I said softly. “Next week, odds are that Cassie will have an Intensifier, too.”

“How…? No… More importantly… if she does, you’d bring her to something like this?”

I was sure he hadn’t meant to sound accusing, but I still felt my shoulders hunch defensively. “What else can we do? Colonel Zwerinski said we only had two Shards left when this treezilla died. If I’d left the boys at home, if Priya and George hadn’t brought Samar…”

“If it hadn’t knocked us out of the sky… Me and Byron and Davi all have Intensifiers too. You would have been one short.” Vince frowned, his face tight and pale. “Didn’t someone say that the treewalkers would spawn on their own?”

“Sure. But do they appear faster than the tree regenerates? How much faster? It certainly would have drawn out the battle, and…” I lifted a hand, gesturing to the rows of sleeping bodies nearby. They’d been healed of all their injuries, but exhaustion couldn’t be healed. There’d been several here when we entered, but now 13 people were asleep, the others having been carried down from the upper floors. “Casualties would have been higher. Even if the fight had lasted only a minute more.”

My husband didn’t respond to that immediately. Instead, Gavin spoke up from his place on Vince’s lap, voice quiet. “I tried to heal a guy on the floor after we came down here and I couldn’t. He wasn’t alive anymore. I’m sorry I didn’t come down faster. I was happy we won and I thought things were okay.”

I let go of Vince’s hand to grab Gavin’s. “Ohhh, no, sweetie. That’s not your fault. It-”

Vince interrupted me. “That man died in the middle of the fight. You couldn’t have gotten to him in time.”

Gavin craned his neck to peer up at his father suspiciously.

Vince met his eyes, his free hand joining mine on Gavin’s. “I have Healing Touch, too, and I checked him as soon as he got hurt. It would have been my job to fix him, and I was still too late.”

My middle son’s face scrunched up as he stared at his father, seemingly undecided about something. Finally, he looked away, wiggling down further in Vince’s lap. “I still feel really sad. I don’t like when people are hurt, but I like to fix them. That guy is just going to be broken forever.”

“It is really sad.” I gave his hand a squeeze.

“Did… He wasn’t the only one that died, right Mom?” Micah asked hesitantly. “There was a guy with a crazy beard with us at the fire station and I didn’t see him after we got inside the tree.”

Why the hell are you kids so observant?!

I swallowed. “No. He wasn’t the only one.”

“Was it… a lot of people? How many?”

“Two from our floor. Fourteen people total from the attack force.” I wouldn’t have volunteered the information, but… there was no point in lying. If Micah was curious, he would be able to find out. I was certain a memorial would be put up in Fort Autumn. In fact, if no one else was organizing it, I’d do it myself. The names of the two dead I’d been responsible for were seared into my memory: Greg Horne and Jamie Moore. Even my delight at my husband’s miraculous return couldn’t fully banish the twisting worms of guilt.

I wonder if they have any family in the area. I wonder if there’s anything I can do? Or should do? What’s the etiquette when your stupid mistake gets someone’s loved one killed?

Vince bumped his shoulder against mine. “Hey, what’s that? I recognize that look. You’re blaming yourself, aren’t you? Cut it out. It’s not your fault. It’s not like you were responsible.”

Micah spoke up before I could. “Uh… she actually was the one in charge of our floor, Dad…”

The look of shock on Vince’s face almost made me laugh. “But… I thought there was a colonel… wasn’t this a military operation?”

“Mom gets to be the boss of lots of things,” Gavin chimed in. “This one was bad, though. Worse than the dinosaur war.”

“The… dinosaur… war? Wait, you three had to go to that Challenge? I heard almost no one survived!”

“It wasn’t worse than the dinosaur war,” Micah argued, glaring at his brother. “You were asleep for most of that. How would you know?”

“I was awake for all the dinosaur parts! There weren't any dinosaur fights after I went to sleep! Mom said!”

“Yeah, but you slept through all the volcano parts. There was lava everywhere.”

Gavin matched Micah’s glare, rebellious. “Not where we were.”

“Almost!”

Vince looked back and forth between his sons’ standoff, clearly having a hard time believing what he was hearing. Finally, he looked up at me.

I gave him a helpless shrug. “We’ve been busy.”

He nodded, slowly. “Tell me about it? Please?”