"You're staring," Seth said, not looking up from the potato.
"I know."
"It's creepy."
"I know that too."
Seth looked up. Green eyes. Still sharp, still guarded, those edges would never fully soften, and Zain didn't want them to. The sharpness was what made SethSeth,the refusal to be anything other than exactly what he was.
But underneath the edges, something new. Not soft.Settled.The look of a man who had found ground that would hold.
"I want to stay," Seth said.
"I know."
"Not just with you. With Lakefront. With the work. With…" He gestured at the kitchen, at Jack and Ghost and the smell of dinner and the sounds of men living together in the aftermath of what mattered. "This."
"I know that too."
"Are you going to say anything other than 'I know'?"
Zain took the potato out of his hand. Set it down. Turned Seth to face him and put his hands on either side of Seth's jaw, tilting his face up.
"I'm going to say that I've spent six years building walls because the last person I let in used my trust to protect the people we were supposed to be fighting. And you walked through every single one of those walls like they were made of paper."
"They were made of paper."
"They were not."
"Zain. You let me in. The walls didn't fall, you opened a door."
Something pressed against the inside of Zain's chest. The thing he couldn't say yet. Three words too heavy for a man who'd spent his adult life turning compression into a weapon. Three words that felt, in this moment, less like a sentence and more like a surrender.
He didn't say them.
What he said was, "Stay."
NotI love you.Not yet. Butstay,which was the same thing in the language they'd built between them, the language of violence and tenderness and the terrible, beautiful certainty of choosing someone in the middle of a war.
Seth's eyes went bright. His hands came up to cover Zain's.
"That's not even a question," Seth said.
"It wasn't meant to be one."
They stood there in the kitchen, Jack pretending not to watch while absolutely watching, Ghost pretending not to notice while absolutely noticing, the safehouse full of warmth and noise and the messy, imperfect architecture of a family built from broken things.
Seth leaned in. Rested his forehead against Zain's.
"I'm going to be very annoying about this," Seth whispered.
"I would expect nothing less."
"I'm going to leave my stuff everywhere."
"You already do."
"I'm going to mouth off during ops."
