Well fuck a duck. I can’t even act like I was shocked.

If I were younger I would’ve called it magic. Just think—the very moment I decide to let it all go, to move on, to get off my ass and go forward—that’s when he decides to stand in my way, teasing me with the implication that he might be the destination.

Cheek saw him first, of course—I mean, he was flying right in front of me, wasn’t he? I knew the moment Chico saw that pale speckled pelt cuz he wasn’t mentally prepared to hide it from me, and I’m not sure if he was gonna hide it anyway. It was a mark of how much older he was, how much more mature, that he didn’t immediately go looking for those super cool owls he had always looked up to; nah, what he did was zip down to the ground, zpsnk!, and suddenly he was be-maned and be-fanged and be-winged and all other types of shit, bedazzled to all fuck. A short sentinel but a sentinel nonetheless, standing, watching Lee and catching the stick across his back and a bag hanging at his side, standing and watching and waiting for me to catch up. Like…a sentinel (I said that already, right?)

Protecting me, I realize. From what, I’m not really sure. He was good at hiding that from me.

(Sick of nightmares.)

My breath caught when I saw him in my inner eye, and I hadn’t meant to do it, but there it was, my breath stopping and my heart pounding all that much faster, my insides pouring molten something. Warmth. It was warm. I wasn’t sure if it was the good warm either.

(Joy? Panic? What am I supposed to do—)

There was a part of me—a huge one, a really distinct one with a lot of clout—that wanted to turn-tail and run for it. But that didn’t make sense cuz I was trying to leave the Edge, dammit, and the way out was this way, not behind me. I’m not even sure why I wanted to run so bad—isn’t this what I wanted in the first place? (The very first place, I mean, the place I was hiding with the lie about seeing my Ma—)

And then there was the possibility of—hey why not just go around him? Casually snip that warm red thread between us out of sheer fear of something vague, like his identity (I don’t know a Mow-ya). This notion didn’t have as much pull, purely because I wasn’t sure if I had the balls to do something so shitty. I’m still not sure why I wanted to run.

I came up on him way too fast; I saw his white silhouette but I couldn’t stop myself from going forward. There was no reason to. I had every right to walk this way, dammit, there was no reason for me to stop just because he was there, I had places to go, shit.

But I did stop.

Sure enough, there was that stick up there on his back, the same one he had tried to give to Tembovu (and some crazy jealous part of me wondered: Is he gonna give it to me, next?) (Kinda sexual) (Shut up) There was that bag, too, that Chico had seen on him, a bag I don’t remember him having, all this shit hanging off of giving the idea that he had packed up all his worldly possessions (time to hit the road, jack). And there he was, too, just as big as I remembered, just as blue-eyed and sad--but he was thinner and scruffy and sad sad sad that pulled at him from all four corners, a sad I wasn’t surprised to see, even though it hurt to look at. His daughter had died; he had been a wreck way before that, years before that, and then his daughter had died. The most shocking thing is that he was still standing, looking at me.

I don’t know what my face was like cuz my brain had froze up on me; maybe my eyes were wide, and maybe they were shining with stuff, but I don’t know what kind of stuff, good or bad or whatever. “Hey,” slipped out of me like the wind knocked out my lungs—shocked, because I hadn’t expected him to be here; glad, cuz my heart had been breaking from his absence; pained, cuz it was still breaking anyway, after seeing him like this. Ruined, ruined. (Hmph, like I ever knew him any other way.)

What do I say to him?

Hey, but I already said that.

My name is Ros, because I wanted to meet him, finally.

Why didn’t you tell me you had a family? cuz there was still this green, hurt nasty thing in me that refused to tuck away its ugly head once and for all.

It always boils down to this: my speechlessness in front of him, cuz I only know how to speak the truth and I don’t always know what it is at the moment. All I can do is open my maw and let it spill and figure it out like everyone else. So that’s what I did. I opened my mouth, and out came the tiny, hesitant, glad, pained truth.

“I missed you.”