Page 226 of Immune

Broken.

Animal.

Then I move.

I don’t even decide to move, but I crawl into him before my brain can fully process the movement. There’s no grace, no dignity, and not a single plan. One second I’m pressed against Kaito’s leg, and the next I’m scrambling across the tile and crashing into Maine hard enough that one of the medics curses again, my arms banding around his shoulders so tight that he makes a wounded sound.

His arms close around me anyway. Instantly. Like they’ve been waiting those six years for an instruction. Like no time has passed at all. Like all of it did.

The hat comes off. I don’t even know if I knock it loose or if his hand catches the brim by accident when he reaches for me. Either way, it falls free and drops next to us on the tile, forgotten for the first time in six long, nightmarish years.

My bandana slips next. Not all the way, but just enough to bare my mouth, my chin, and the shape of my face I’ve spent years turning into someone else’s shadow.

The room sees.

Hale sees.

The fucking guards see.

I simply don’t have it in me to care. Let them see. Let the whole compound take a look. Maine is alive, and I don’t have a disguise big enough for it to matter anymore.

My hair spills free next, too pale and too long. Too me.

The room reacts then. It’s a tiny ripple through the guards and medics and Hale and whoever else is there to witness the small Beta boy become something else entirely.

And you know what? They can choke on it. Because I don’t care. I do not fucking care.

Maine’s hand goes to the back of my head, not holding me down but holding me tighter. Holding me together. His fingers shake through my hair in such a familiar way that it feels foreign.

“Kota,” he whispers again, but there’s no strength left in it. It’s loaded with grief and horror. It’s my brother.

My arms tighten over his shoulders, clutching him like I can hold him in place by sheer force alone. My chin lands on his shoulder, and I still can’t seem to get my lungs to work as they should. I can’t breathe.

He smells wrong.

He smells right.

He smells like blood and infection risk and six years of pure nightmares. He smells like fresh-cut grass under all of it, faint and battered but there. Somehow, still there, and my body breaks so hard that I feel it happen.

It’s not pretty.

It’s not neat.

There is no graceful sob tucked into his shirt. There’s only a horrendous sound that claws its way out of my chest, too sharp to be considered crying and way too wet to be anything else. My hands fist tightly into his ruined jacket, gripping hard enough that my knuckles ache with it.

He’s alive.

He left.

He’s alive.

He didn’t come back.

Maine’s arms tighten around me, and he makes another sound that might be my name if names could be crushed into tiny, pointed pieces before they leave the mouth.

“I looked,” he says roughly. The words shudder close to my ear. “Kota, I looked for you.”

I go still. It’s only for a second, but I feel it. And so does he.