POV: Caroline
The nightmare reaches me before the monitor does, and my body is already moving through the dark hallway with the song forming in my throat before my brain finishes waking up.
Bare feet on cold concrete. The guest wing corridor stretches ahead in the low emergency lighting, the compound runs between midnight and five.
Dylan's room is the third door on the left — the same threshold I have crossed eleven times in fourteen nights.
His breathing is rapid, the sheets twisted around his legs, his stuffed wolf pressed against his face with both hands.
"I am here, Dylan." I keep my voice low and even as I lower myself onto the edge of his bed.
"The trees were too loud." His eyes are open but unfocused, caught between dream and room.
"You are not in the trees right now." I place my hand flat against his back between his shoulders.
"They were calling and I could not find the right answer." His breathing hitches around the words.
"You do not have to answer anything tonight." I begin the hum — low, tuneless, close enough.
"The moon lady was there but she was far away." His voice drops to a whisper beneath my hand.
"She is not here right now — just you and me and this room." I hold the pressure steady.
"And my wolf." He clutches the stuffed animal tighter against his chest beneath the blankets.
"And your wolf." I let the hum carry the agreement, the vibration traveling through the mattress.
His breathing slows. The rapid rhythm gives way to longer intervals — a slow draw in, a slower release out, the pattern I have learned to count because my body has memorized his recovery cadence.
Claire appears in the doorway. I feel her presence before I see her.
"He is settling." I whisper it toward the door without turning my head or lifting my hand.
"I can hear that." Claire's voice carries no accusation, only the flat exhaustion of 3 AM truth.
"Do you want me to move?" I offer the space because it belongs to her before it belongs to me.
"Stay until he is fully under." She leans against the doorframe and closes her eyes briefly.
"The tree dream again?" She opens her eyes and watches Dylan's breathing from the threshold.
"Trees too loud, could not find the right answer." I relay the details with clinical shorthand.
"The moon lady was present but distant." I add the detail that will matter to Claire's records.
"That is new — she has not been distant in his episodes before." Claire files the variation.
"I noticed." I hold the pressure until his breathing reaches the deep, steady rhythm of true sleep.
I lift my hand slowly. Dylan does not stir. His face has gone slack with the particular peace of a child who dropped through the nightmare and landed in a place that held him.
Claire steps back from the doorway. I stand, adjust the blankets around his shoulders, and cross into the corridor where the low light holds us in the honest pallor of 3 AM.
"Thank you." Claire's voice is barely audible in the corridor between us. "For being faster."
"I was already awake." I close Dylan's door with careful pressure on the handle.
"You are always already awake." She studies me with an accuracy that costs her nothing.
She turns toward her room. I do not follow. Instead, I sit down against the hallway wall outside Dylan's door because going back to bed would require my brain to stop running.
The concrete is cold against my spine. The corridor hums with overnight systems — ventilation cycling, the generator's rhythm, the distant footfall of a patrol wolf completing a circuit I will never hear the way Lysander does.
I sit with my knees drawn up and think about the song I just hummed to a child who is not mine through a nightmare about trees and moonlight and a presence that has been visiting him since before he could form sentences.
I loved doing it. Completely, without reservation, without the distance I maintain in every other part of my life inside this compound.
For those few minutes in that room, I was not a former Montgomery or a woman whose body refuses to cooperate. I was the person who knew the song, and that was enough.
Lysander finds me sometime later. I do not know how much time has passed, but the corridor is the same and my position has not changed.
He sits down against the opposite wall, legs extended, facing me across three feet of hallway that holds everything we have not finished.
"Are you okay?" His voice is quiet and stripped of everything except the question.
"Yes." I answer automatically, because the reflex is older than the honesty it replaces.
The silence holds for a beat. Then the reflex breaks, because 3 AM in a cold hallway does not tolerate the same architecture that daylight allows.
"No." I press my forehead against my knees and close my eyes against the corridor light.
"Tell me." He does not move closer or reach for me. He sits and waits across the corridor.
"The tracker is in the drawer." I lift my head and look at him in the low light.
"I know where it is." His voice carries no deflection, only acknowledgment of shared geography.
"Three years in that drawer." I feel the words building with the pressure of a cracking dam.
"Years of flat lines and mornings where I held the test and already knew." I grip my knees.
"And tonight I held a child through a nightmare and I loved it completely." My voice cracks.
"I loved every second of being the person who got there first." I press the words out steadily.
"And I still cannot give you this." My hands tighten around my knees until the pressure aches.
Lysander does not move. His grey eyes hold mine across the hallway with the particular stillness of a man hearing the weight behind every careful silence, every drawer closed without comment.
"I have never spoken this out loud." I take a breath that shudders through my entire chest.
"Not to Elara, not to Thalia, not in my own head where it might become real." I release my knees.
"I am afraid that I will never carry a child." The words leave me and fill the corridor between us.
"I am afraid that the one thing my body cannot do is the one thing I want most." I hold his eyes.
"And I am afraid that loving Dylan the way I do is the closest I will ever get." My voice breaks.
"The closest I will ever get to what I wanted to build with you." I let the break hold.