Peace did not arrive as a single moment.
It arrived as a series of absences.
The absence of continuous monitor rotations outside the bedroom door. The absence of foreign static at the outer edge of the bond. The absence of the particular morning tension that had come from waking up already listening for the next pressure wave. Days began to open without the immediate requirement of fortification drills or residual-network updates. The Alpha house, which had lived for weeks as a command structure with sleeping quarters attached, slowly remembered how to be a home again.
I noticed the change in small, physical ways first.
My shoulders dropped a fraction lower during ordinary conversations. Tristan’s sleep deepened enough that the bond carried fewer midnight spikes of hypervigilant checki
