Chapter 29| Never knew I had family.

Chapter 29: Chapter 29| Never knew I had family.

His eyes.

His exact eyes in someone else’s face.

He looked at the photograph for a long time and the cottage held its quiet around him and the fire in the hearth moved the way fires moved when a room had been warm for hours and Eren Jaeger stood at the edge of the room and watched him look at it with the expression of someone who had imagined this moment many times and was now simply present in it.

"She was seventeen when that was taken," Eren said. "Two years before Nexarion found us." He paused. "She used to say the camera was the only thing she’d ever met that she couldn’t talk her way around."

Damian looked at the photograph and said nothing.

Sable had stopped just inside the door. He could feel her not moving. The specific stillness of someone reading a room and understanding what was happening in it didn’t require her to do anything except be present and quiet.

"You built the system," Damian said. Still looking at the photograph.

"Yes," Eren said.

"You hid the trail in the archive."

"Yes."

"You put the notation in my file."

A pause. Something shifted in the quality of Eren’s stillness.

"No," he replied.

Damian turned to look at him.

Eren met his gaze with the steadiness of someone delivering information they had spent a long time deciding how to deliver and had ultimately concluded that the only way was directly.

"I didn’t put the notation in your file," Eren said. "I didn’t have access to Nexarion’s internal system from the outside. I tried for years. The encryption was beyond anything I could breach remotely." He looked at Damian. "The notation was already there when I found a way to access the archive eight years ago. Someone inside the system put it there." He paused. "Someone who has been inside Nexarion for thirty years and who apparently found a way to access your file from whatever classification they’re holding her under."

The fire moved in the hearth.

Outside the grey sky sat above the cottage and the cleared space and the hedgerow tunnel running back toward the regional road and the world that didn’t know this property existed.

Damian looked at Eren Jaeger and felt the shape of what he’d just said arrive in full.

"She put it there herself," he said.

"Probably ," Eren said quietly. "Your mother has known where you were and what was happening to you for six years." He held Damian’s gaze. "And she has been doing everything within the extremely limited power available to someone under a Level Five suppressed designation to make sure you survived long enough to find me."

The cottage was completely silent.

Damian looked at the photograph above the fireplace. At his eyes in someone else’s face. At the girl who had been seventeen when it was taken and was somewhere in one of eleven facilities right now, thirty years older, doing whatever she could from inside a classification that shouldn’t have allowed her to do anything at all.

"Where is she," he said.

Eren Jaeger looked at him for a moment.

"Sit down," he said. "Both of you." He moved toward the kettle on the hearth with the unhurried pace of someone who understood that what came next was going to take time and that time was the one thing they finally had enough of. "There is a great deal I need to tell you. And some of it is going to be difficult to hear."

He looked at Damian over his shoulder.

"But you should know before I tell you anything else. She’s alive." He held his gaze. "She has been fighting from inside that place every single day for thirty years. And she has never once stopped."

The fire moved in the hearth.

Damian sat down.

Eren Jaeger made tea.

Not as a delay. Let’s say as some form of formal ritual. The specific deliberateness of someone who had learned that the most important conversations went better when the hands had something to do and the body had something warm to hold. He moved around the small kitchen with the economy of someone who had been living alone long enough to have reduced every domestic action to its essential components, and by the time he set three cups on the table and sat down across from them, the cottage had settled into the particular quiet of a space preparing to hold something significant.

Damian looked at the cup in front of him and didn’t touch it.

Sable had her tablet open. She’d asked with a look and Eren had nodded and she’d taken it as the permission it was. She would document this, which was what Sable did with everything that mattered, and Eren Jaeger apparently understood that and had no objection to it.

"Start with her," Damian said.

Eren looked at him. Nodded once.

"Your mother’s name is Aria," he said. "Aria Laine". She was sixteen when the Prior Collective first documented her pathway. The youngest naturally occurring Dual Axiom awakening we ever recorded and the most significant by every measurable metric." He wrapped both hands around his cup. "She didn’t come to us. We found her the way the Collective always found naturally occurring Subjects, by following the anomalies. Unexplained events, localized environmental disturbances, the specific signature that a Dual Axiom awakening left in the surrounding environment when it happened without support or management." He paused. "She was living with a foster family in the north of the country. She’d been in the system since she was eight. No family documentation. No traceable origin." He looked at Damian. "Sounds familiar?."

Damian said nothing.

"We brought her in," Eren said. "Not the way Nexarion brings people in. She came voluntarily, with full information, because we explained what she was and what it meant and treated her like a person capable of making her own decisions about her own life." Something moved in his expression. Old and complicated and not fully resolved even after thirty years. "She was with the Collective for two years. The most significant two years of our research. What we learned from her pathway alone advanced the theoretical framework by a decade." He looked at the fire. "She was also the most remarkable person I have ever known. In thirty years of living with that statement I have not found a reason to revise it."