Page 34 of Thexan

He hadn’t moved.

For a few seconds after I became fully aware again, I didn’t move either. Movement no longer felt like the default state it had before. Everything had shifted, not just in him, but in me, in the space between us, in the quiet that had settled into the room as though it recognized something had changed and adjusted around it.

The connection between us hadn’t released.

I felt it immediately, not as pressure or discomfort, but as a steady, undeniable awareness that there was no distance left to create, no space I couldn’t step back into even if I had wanted to. It held us where we were, not forcing stillness, but making it unavoidable all the same.

I drew in a slow breath and let it out carefully, testing the edges of that awareness without disrupting it. My body responded differently than it had before, not wrong, or unstable just… aligned in a way I didn’t yet fully understand.

“Don’t move,” I said quietly.

It wasn’t instinct.

It was an assessment.

“I am not,” Thexan replied.

His voice was lower than before, not strained, but steadier, the underlying tension I had grown used to hearing in it no longer present in the same way. I shifted my focus to him then, really looking this time, taking in the change I could already feel without having to search for it.

His breathing had evened out, no longer forced or controlled through effort. It sounded natural.

The tightness that had held through his shoulders and along his chest had eased, the constant strain replaced with something more contained, more stable. Even the subtle irregularities I had tracked earlier—pulse, temperature, the way his system had resisted its own repair—had settled into a pattern that no longer felt like it was fighting itself.

“You’re stable,” I said.

“Yes.”

I let that sit for a moment. I needed to feel the confirmation of it myself, to match what I was seeing with what I had been expecting.

It held.

The instability that had been escalating only minutes before was gone.

I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.

“All right,” I said, more quietly now. “That worked.”

“Yes.”

There was no hesitation in the answer. No uncertainty.

Just fact.

I shifted slightly then, not enough to break the connection that still held us, but enough to check the bandage along his side, my attention snapping back to the part of this that I could quantify. The dressing was still in place, but the tension beneath it had changed. The uneven pull I had felt earlier had eased, the tissue beneath responding in a way it hadn’t before.

“Your system isn’t fighting itself anymore,” I said. “Whatever this did, it didn’t just stabilize you—it corrected the interference.”

“Yes.”

I glanced up at him. “You sound like you expected that.”

“It is consistent with the function of the bond.”

I raised slightly, careful, aware now of exactly how much movement mattered and how little room there was to make it.

“Then maybe you should have led with that,” I said.

A faint shift crossed his expression, not quite humor, not quite something else, but enough that I noticed it.