[ complete ] 𝐌𝐀𝐅𝐈𝐀'𝐒 𝐈𝐍𝐃𝐈𝐀𝐍 𝐖𝐈𝐅𝐄 || 𝐉.𝐉𝐊 𝐅𝐅

87. Back Home.

The drive home felt unreal - like the world had been stitched back together and someone else had sewn the seams. The city slid by in streaks of light: neon, traffic, the blink of a roadside sign. My hands tightened on the wheel until my knuckles ached, not from driving but from holding everything in place. Aarohi was strapped in the back, fast asleep against the seat like a little wrecked ship. Advait was quiet beside her, eyes closed but not asleep, the way people pretend to rest when the body has to hold itself together.

Kian rode shotgun, silent except for the occasional update in my ear from Ryker or Ivan - confirmations, routes, men still on the hunt. But in the car, under the armored metal and tinted glass, it was only the soft sound of two children breathing and the jagged thrum in my chest.

When we turned into the drive, I felt the world tilt. My house rose out of the darkness like something that had been waiting for me to break everything and still hold its doors open. Lights were on. The garden smelled like jasmine and rain; the air had the strange, small holiness of ordinary things.

My phone buzzed - Y/N. Her picture made my stomach tighten. I hadn't spoken to her since the first phone call, not really. There had been plans and movements and blood and noise. Now there was the small, impossible hope of coming home.

"Stay in the car," I told my team quietly, not breaking my concentration. "Ivan-watch the perimeter. Kian-come with me."

Kian nodded. "You sure?"

"How sure do I look?" I asked, and he only had to look at my face to understand. He was already at my side, hand on my shoulder once - a quiet anchor - before I stepped out.

The front door opened before I reached it. Y/N was there, hair pulled up in a careless knot, eyes red-ringed and raw. The moment our gazes locked, the world dropped away. For a second she looked like she would crumble into the porch, and then she ran. She barreled into me, arms wrapping around my waist like she would push through my bones to get to the center of me.

"Jeon-" she sobbed into my chest, voice broken into shards. The sight of her made every plan I'd made, every metric and route and ledger, mean what it did: survival was not only strategic, it was sacred.

I held her. My hands went to her back, fingers digging into the small of her spine because touching her was the only way to make sure she was real. "I'm here," I said, the words small and enormous in one breath. "I'm here."

She pulled back enough to look up at me, eyes searching, fierce and fearful. "Are they-are they-" Her words dissolved. She was shaking. She was everything I'd been imagining on the worst nights.

"They're safe," I said. "Aarohi-Advait. Both of them. Both in my car." My voice was steady because it had to be. I could feel the tremor underneath it, but I didn't give that up. Not now. Not in the way her lips parting into a sound halfway between a laugh and a cry looked like a prayer.

She sank to her knees like she'd been cut and couldn't stand. Her hands went to her face and she sobbed in a way I'd never wanted to hear again. I crouched with her, arms around her, and it felt like the world finally calibrated itself.

"Kian - bring them." I heard my own voice order into the dark. He moved like a shadow and then he was there with the car doors open, two small bodies emerging, blinking like animals who had been away from daylight for too long.

Aarohi saw us first. Her little face split into a sobbing, hysterical grin. She launched herself into Y/N's arms, and the two of them folded into one another like they had been cut from the same cloth and finally sewn back together. Advait stood for a second, rigid and watchful, and then my wife's hand reached for him and he let the tension go, collapsing into her like a soldier finally given leave.