Sonny sees it too. “Jack,” he presses, because his instinct for timing, for all his chaos, is better than most people give him credit for. “You need to do this now.”
Jack’s face goes white around the edges.
Jamie hears it and panics fresh. “No, no, no?—”
He clings tighter, this time not to Caly but to Jack, and the sight of it is almost unbearable. Jack bends around him, forehead pressed briefly to Jamie’s temple, eyes screwed shut against whatever is trying to wreck him from the inside.
“I know,” Jack whispers. “I know, little mate. I know.”
Then, because he’s the adult and because sometimes the shape of love is monstrous in the face of what it makes you do, he eases Jamie back again.
Jamie fights him.
Not violently. Not with any real force. With grief. With refusal. With the pure helplessness of a child who’s found safety and belonging in the strangest possible place and is being told he has to leave it before he’s ready.
Caly steps close once more.
He doesn’t touch Jamie this time until Jamie reaches for him, and then he catches his hand in both of his, bowing his head so their foreheads almost meet.
I can’t hear all of what he says, only pieces carried by wind and static and the ugly hammering of my own heart.
“…not the end…”
“…find me…”
“…remember…”
Jamie sobs once.
Not loudly.
That almost makes it worse.
Caly lets go first.
The precision of the movement wrecks me. He’s clearly thought this through in the space of only seconds. If he hesitates, Jamie won’t go. If he breaks, Jamie will stay. So he gives him calm instead, and kindness, and whatever promise has just passed between them in a language deeper than words.
The sky shivers. A jagged piece of the rift’s edge folds inward and vanishes.
“Now,” Solan says.
No theatrics. No growl. Just command, because there’s no room left for anything else.
Jack moves like a man walking himself into a fire. He takes Jamie by the shoulders, turns him towards the tear, then stops because Jamie’s gone rigid.
“I can’t,” Jamie says.
My head snaps towards him.
He’s staring at the rift with the full-body terror of someone looking at height or deep water or any other natural threshold of human refusal. Going through was never something he chose. Being sent through on purpose, stepping willingly into the impossible, is something else again.
“You can,” Jack says.
Jamie shakes his head hard enough to make the medallion flash. “I don’t want Earth if you’re not there.”
Jack makes a strangled sound and then pulls himself together with visible effort. “You won’t be alone,” he says. “You hear me? You won’t be alone. You’re going to your parents. You’re going to people who love you and know you and have been waiting for you.”
“But you?—”
