I caught her slender pale arm and before she could pull away I drew her in gently but without hesitation, and she collided with my chest like something that weighed almost nothing, and I wrapped my arms around her and held on gently.

She stiffened immediately.

"L... let g—"

"Listen to me," I said quietly, cutting across it.

"Move—!" She pushed against my chest, but there wasn’t much force behind it.

"Just listen to me," I said, loosening my hold slightly, enough to give her space, not enough to let her walk away from the conversation entirely. I kept a careful distance, just enough that she wasn’t pressed uncomfortably close, but my hands stayed at her shoulders. "Listen, and then I’ll move. I promise."

She stopped fighting it. Barely. Her jaw was tight and her eyes were fixed somewhere below my collarbone, refusing to come up and meet mine.

"You were born the way you were born," I said. "That’s all. Your mother was a Starakian, she came to Earth for whatever reasons she had, and somewhere along the way she fell in love with your father and they built a life together in Jackson Township. They had you. You grew up there. You are from there." I said, not soft exactly, just steady. "None of that is a choice you made. None of it is something you can be held responsible for. You didn’t choose your blood any more than I chose my height."

She said nothing.

"The Starakians spread the Virus. They moved on Earth, took control, and then they found out about you and decided they wanted you back, like you’re something that belongs to them. That has nothing to do with who you are. It has nothing to do with what you’ve done." I paused. "Would I take the blame for what a human terrorist did just because we share a species? Because we’re both human?"

"It’s not the same thing," she said quietly, eyes still down.

I exhaled slowly.

"Wanda." I waited until I was sure she was listening. "I have Dullahan inside me. An S-Class Symbiote, one of the highest priority targets on whatever threat scale the Starakians use. One of the most hunted, most dangerous things they’re actively looking for, and it’s living inside my body." I let that sit for a second. "I attract just as much danger as you do. Maybe more. And I’m not willing to stand here and tell you that your existence was the main reason Jackson Township burned, because I don’t believe that’s true."

"Don’t try to—"

"I’m not trying to make you feel better," I said firmly. "That’s not what this is."

She went quiet.

"I don’t know every detail of how the timeline lined up," I continued. "But we found one of their artifacts, a Matrix. And after that I played a direct part in destroying the Fire Spitter and the Frost Walker. The Screamer incident followed almost immediately after that. I pushed something into motion. I triggered it." I said it plainly, without softening it. "You don’t know that they would have moved on Jackson Township regardless. And neither do I. But I know what I did."

"They would have done it anyway," she snapped back.

"You don’t know that," I said.

Silence stretched between us. She didn’t answer, but she didn’t push away either.

"Jasmine died because of me, Wanda," I said at last.

Her eyes finally came up, hard and burning. "I don’t need your lies to make me feel better."

"I’m not lying." I held her gaze and didn’t look away. "The Screamer was used on Jason because he was already breaking apart on the inside, and I was part of why. He’d confessed his feelings to Jasmine and she’d turned him down. And the reason she turned him down was me. Whatever she felt toward me had already shifted his bitterness in my direction long before the Screamer ever touched him. His anger, his spiral, I was at the center of it." My voice came out quieter on the next part, heavier. "And that day, I could have told her to stay in Jackson Township. She wanted to come with me. I knew where we were going, I knew it wasn’t safe, and I let her follow anyway because I was being careless and I didn’t stop to think hard enough about what could go wrong."

I felt my expression do something I couldn’t entirely control, something that had been sitting in the back of my chest for a long time, quietly waiting.

"She shouldn’t have been there that day. And she wouldn’t have been, if I had just said no. If I had just thought for one more second." The words felt like pulling something out slowly. "She died because of choices I made. Not you. Me." I paused. "And Jason, whatever he became, whatever the Screamer made of him, he wouldn’t have had anything to spiral over if I’d never been in his life in the first place."

I wasn’t saying it to punish myself out loud. I was saying it because it was true, and she deserved to hear the truth instead of a version of it that was shaped around making either of us feel cleaner.

"I carry her death with me every single day since it happened," I said. "I don’t think that’s going to go away. I don’t think I’d want it to, forgetting it would feel like its own kind of wrong." I held her gaze. "But I didn’t kill her. And I would never have. It happened, and I own my part in it, and I’ll keep it with me. But if I let that guilt push me toward the idea that disappearing, going off alone, removing myself from everyone’s lives would somehow make things better for the people around me?" I shook my head slowly. "That’s just my own thinking. That’s just pain looking for an exit. The people around me don’t want that. They never would." I paused, letting the next words land carefully. "It’s the same for you."

"I only have my grandfather," Wanda said quietly.

"That’s not true," I said, looking down at her. "And I don’t want you to leave. Not for his sake alone, for mine."

She raised her red eyes to mine slowly.

"Why?" She asked.

"Because I don’t want you to," I said simply. "I think you know by now that I don’t do things for the sake of appearances, Wanda. I’m not standing here because it seemed like the right thing to do. I care about you."

She held my gaze for a long moment. Long enough that my own words came back to me with more weight than I’d intended when I said them. Long enough that I became very aware of what I’d just said, out loud, without thinking it all the way through first.

I pulled back from her, putting some distance between us, feeling the heat of embarrassment creeping in.

"A...anyway." I cleared my throat. "Don’t go down that road of thinking everyone would be better off without you around. That’s not true, and it’s never been true. Your grandfather would be devastated, and he’s not the only one who would be. I’m not only speaking for myself either."

"You’re the only idiot besides my grandfather who has decided to care about me," she said, and the harshness in her voice was real but thinner than usual, worn around the edges. "For absolutely no reason."

"No.... I gave you the reason," I said. "I told you."

"For what, exactly?" Wanda asked.

For what, she asks.

"I don’t want you to be alone," I said after a moment, settling on the truest version of it. "I know what that feels like, and I’m not going to stand by and let it happen to you. That’s all." I said. "And you still have choices, Wanda. It’s not like there’s an army with your name on it closing in right now. What happened at Jackson Township, Jason, all of it, it caught us off guard. We weren’t ready. But we’ve grown since then. We know what’s coming and we know what we’re dealing with. When they come again, we’ll be standing on different ground."

I meant it. After Jackson Township, there had been nothing, no follow-up, no second wave moving toward Wanda specifically. Part of me wanted to believe they’d quietly reassessed, decided she wasn’t worth the continued resources. Maybe that was wishful thinking. But even if they came again, I wanted to believe, needed to believe that we’d be capable of handling it this time.

I understood her reasoning, in the deep-down honest part of myself. That particular pull toward self-sacrifice, toward the idea that removing yourself from the equation protects the people you love, I knew it from the inside. It was familiar in a way that was almost uncomfortable to admit. But Wanda had options. She had people. That mattered.

I was still looking at her when I noticed it, the faint glisten surfacing in her red eyes before she could stop it. Her hand moved fast, pressing against her face before anything could fall.

I didn’t think. I just pulled her gently back in.

She was so slight, easy to fold into an embrace without effort, her head barely reaching my chest. This time she didn’t fight it. She didn’t tell me to let go. She just stood there with her clenched hand pressed against her face, shoulders pulled inward, holding herself together by will alone.

"It’s going to be fine," I said quietly. "I won’t let them take you. I promise you that."

I felt her shudder once, and I kept my arms around her and my gaze forward and gave her the time she needed.

A minute passed.

Maybe a little more.

"Ryan, you’re here—?!"

I turned at the voice.

Maribel was standing a few feet away, eyes wide, blinking at the two of us like she’d walked into a room she hadn’t expected to find occupied.

I didn’t even get a word out.

Wanda’s pale hands came up against my chest and shoved with more force than her frame had any right to generate, and I stepped back instinctively. She was already turning before I’d fully caught my balance, and then she was gone, moving quickly if not running around the far side of the building without a word, without looking back, her footsteps fading before I could think of anything useful to say.