The trek back was slow, a grueling rhythm of muffled footsteps and heavy breathing. The cyan glow of the city was receding, leaving the streets of Londville in a hollow, bruised gray. Riven was the only thing keeping Freddie upright; his shoulder was shoved firmly under Freddie's arm, his grip on the bear's waist tight and functional.
Freddie's movements were heavy. Every few steps, a faint, metallic click echoed from his chest—a cooling fan struggling to find its rhythm. He kept his head down, watching their shadows stretch across the pavement. In the reflection of a dark window, he caught a glimpse of himself. Above his eye, cutting right through the yellow fur of his eyebrow, was a thin, jagged line. A scar. It wasn't a crack in a casing; it looked like a memory etched into his skin. It throbbed with a dull, heavy heat, giving his quiet face a new, sharper edge.
Freddie leaned a fraction more of his weight into Riven, his ears twitching low. He didn't look up, his voice barely a breath, soft and sincere.
"Thanks, Riven. For... not leaving."
Riven just let out a low, dry breath—a sound that was more of an exhale than a laugh. He understood the weight of those three words. Coming from Freddie, they were as loud as a shout.
Riven adjusted his hold, pulling Freddie slightly closer to his side to ensure he didn't stumble. His expression remained stoic, but the usual hardness in his eyes was replaced by a quiet, singular focus on the path ahead.
"Just walk, Freddie. Save your strength for the stairs."
They moved as one through the empty hallway of the apartment building. Riven didn't let go until they were inside the apartment and the door was locked behind them. He guided Freddie to the bed, his movements careful and deliberate, marked by a silent respect for what they had just survived.
Freddie sank into the mattress, his head dropping as his systems began a forced, noisy cooling cycle. Riven stood over him for a moment, his chest heaving, his own seams still weeping dark red.
The silence of the room was thick. Riven finally stepped closer, his gaze locked on the jagged mark cutting through Freddie's eyebrow.
"That scar,"
His voice rough but devoid of any edge. He reached out as if to touch it, then stopped, his hand hovering in the dim light.
"How? You're... not supposed to have those."
Freddie didn't answer right away. He couldn't. His fingers traced the edge of his brow, flinching as his touch met the jagged ridge of the scar. It felt hot—feverish—unlike any mechanical malfunction he'd ever experienced. It wasn't just a mark; it felt like it had always been there, waiting for the skin to split.
He looked up at Riven, his yellow eyes dimming as the last of his power reserves ebbed away.
"I don't know, it feels... like it belongs to me."
Riven's didn't like his response. He hated things he couldn't track or fight, and this transformation was moving faster than he could calculate. He saw the way Freddie's hand trembled, and the stoic, protective wolf took over. He reached out, finally letting his hand settle firmly on Freddie's shoulder—not to test him, but to ground him.
"Stay here,"
Riven commanded, his voice a low, rough anchor.
"Don't move. I'm getting the kit."
"But, you don't know my apart—"
"I'll figure it out myself."
He moved through the dark apartment with the casual grace of a predator who knew the terrain by heart. He returned a moment later with a small, worn medical bag, sitting on the edge of the bed beside Freddie. Freddie was genuinely impressed that he found the medkit in the bathroom. The mattress dipped under his weight, the space between them closing until the smell of iron and the lingering chill of the late night air was all that remained.
Riven didn't ask for permission. He began to work, his movements precise and surprisingly steady for someone whose own body was still leaking dark red from the seams. He took a damp cloth and gently wiped away the residue around Freddie's eyebrow, his focus so intense it felt like he was trying to read the code hidden in the wound.
Freddie watched him, his ears lowered, his breathing finally slowing into a rhythmic, soft whir. The silence wasn't awkward anymore; it was the kind of silence that happened when two people had stopped being strangers and started being something else—friends.
Riven's thumb lingered there, a calloused weight against Freddie's skin. He looked Freddie in the eye, his crimson gaze searching. The contrast was startling—the warmth of Riven's hand against the feverish, unnatural heat radiating from the new mark. In the dim light of the apartment, the crimson of Riven's eyes seemed to catch the faint, rhythmic pulse of Freddie's cooling fans, searching for a logic that wasn't there.
"It's deep,"
His voice was quiet, softening the mood with a slight gruff.
"It didn't just break the surface. It's like the skin grew around the damage instantly."
He turned back to the medical kit, pulling out a small vial of antiseptic and a clean roll of gauze. His movements were clinical, a shield against the uncertainty of what they were seeing. As he worked, the dark red fluid from Riven's own seams stained the edges of his sleeves, but he ignored it. His priority was the bear sitting in front of him, the one who wasn't supposed to bleed, yet now carried a mark that felt more human than mechanical.
Freddie flinched as the antiseptic stung the wound. It was a sharp, biting sensation that shouldn't have registered in his sensors quite like that. It felt visceral.
"Steady,"
Riven grunted, not pulling his hand away.
He applied a small, adhesive strip over the brow, his fingers surprisingly nimble despite their size.
"There. It'll hold. But if it starts to... change again, you tell me. Immediately."
Freddie let out a slow, shaky breath. The cooling cycle in his chest was finally winding down, the metallic clicks spacing out until the room returned to a heavy stillness. He looked at Riven's own wounds—the weeping seams that marked his torso and arms, evidence of the brutal defense he'd put up in the plaza.
"You should take care of yourself, too. You're still... leaking."
Riven looked down at himself as if noticing the damage for the first time. He gave a dismissive huff, a ghost of his usual stoicism returning.
"This? This is just surface level. I've had worse."
He began to pack the medical kit back together, the clink of metal instruments the only sound in the room. But he didn't stand up. He stayed on the edge of the mattress, the weight of his presence a solid, grounding force in the center of Freddie's world.
He looked around the darkened apartment—the neat stacks of books, the quiet corners, the life Freddie had tried to build here. It felt like a lifetime ago that they were just two students in a lecture hall.
"We'll be starting our investigations soon. Once the sun is fully up in Londville, we will start looking for its 'glitches.' And after tonight, we're the biggest ones on the map."
Freddie leaned his back against the headboard, his eyes dimming as he felt the final pull of his power reserves.
"Where would we go?"
"Somewhere the code doesn't reach."
Freddie felt unsure about all of this.
Riven saw the flicker of doubt in Freddie's eyes before the bear could even speak. It was a look he had become intimately familiar with—the deep-seated skepticism of a mind trying to force logic onto a world that had clearly discarded it. Freddie's ears were pulled back tight against his head, his posture rigid with a tension that threatened to snap.
"It hasn't even been a few months, Riven,"
Freddie whispered, his voice cracking with a raw, visceral exhaustion.
"Look at us. You're covered in blood, and I'm... I'm barely standing. We can't keep chasing things we don't understand."
Riven didn't back down. He leaned in, his gaze burning with an intensity that forced Freddie to look at him.
"That's exactly why we go. The city is changing. These glitches aren't just accidents; they're a map. If we wait—if we just sit here and try to 'pretend' things are normal—who knows what happens?"
Riven's grip on Freddie's shoulder tightened, his hand steady and warm.
"Think about it. If we play along, do we just fade away? Do we become part of the background noise until we aren't 'us' anymore? I'm not waiting around to find out which scenario sticks. I almost died tonight. I'm not doing that again just to sit in a bedroom and wait for the world to decide our fate. We explore the peak. We find the fractures in the other cities. We find the truth before it finds us."
The sheer conviction in Riven's voice acted like a current, pulling Freddie along. The bear took a long, shaky breath, his fingers ghosting near the bandages Riven had just applied to the jagged cut on his brow. The fear was still there, heavy and cold, but it was being eclipsed by a grim, shared necessity.
"Okay, I'll stick with you."
A heavy sense of resolve settled between them—a silent pact to dive into the hidden layers of the city.
"Sleep,"
Riven commanded, his voice softening just a fraction, though it remained a firm anchor.
"You're no use to me if you're collapsing."
Freddie didn't have the strength to argue further. He sank back into the pillows, his body finally surrendering to the fatigue. Within minutes, his breathing slowed into the deep, rhythmic pace of a profound sleep.
Riven didn't move immediately. He stayed seated on the edge of the bed, his crimson eyes tracking the slow rise and fall of Freddie's chest. He watched with a quiet, singular intensity—not the gaze of a predator, but a protective, ancestral vigil. He studied the jagged mark on Freddie's brow and the quiet vulnerability of the only person who truly understood the weight of the night.
As he sat there, the blood that had been seeping from Riven's own wounds began to still. The ragged edges of the cuts on his arms started to pull together, the flesh knitting itself back together with a faint, tingling heat. His self-healing awakening worked passively in the silence, closing the worst of the damage. He looked down at a deep gash on his forearm, watching it fade into a thin, silver line before disappearing entirely. He shrugged it off; it was just a part of him now, a tool for the hunt.
He gave Freddie one last, lingering look before standing up, his joints popping quietly in the still air. He turned off the small lamp, plunging the room into the soft, velvet blue light of the Londville moon.
Riven moved silently toward the door, his own exhaustion finally catching up with him now that Freddie was safe. He made his way downstairs to the living room and collapsed onto the couch. He didn't close his eyes right away, instead staring at the ceiling and running through the possibilities of the coming night, waiting for the peak of the Reign to call them back out into the fray.
And the memory of the scar stayed with him. This wasn't an aftermath. It was a starting point.