The town came up after a long curve in the road. A small coastal place with white-painted buildings and orange-red roofs and a few fishing boats bobbing in a tiny harbor. Everyone here knew everyone so outsiders got stared at, though it was more of a "who are you and why are you here and are you buying anything" stare than a hostile one.

He parked near the town center and they got out together. Emily looped her arm through his the second her feet hit the pavement and pulled herself close enough that he could feel the warmth of her through his jacket. She always did this around humans. It wasn’t really about affection, it was about marking territory in front of every woman within fifty meters.

Back on Aradne she never bothered because the whole village already knew she’d kill for him. But here, surrounded by human women, she got clingy and her grip tightened up the second any woman let her eyes rest on him too long.

She took down orc raiders without blinking but a Turkish lady holding a shopping bag turns her into a guard dog.

He thought it was hilarious and he kept his mouth shut about it, because the one time he’d teased her about being jealous she’d given him the silent treatment for a full day.

"So what do we actually need?" He nodded toward a row of shops as they passed a bakery that smelled like warm sesame, and his stomach reminded him he’d only eaten stew.

Emily pulled a folded scrap of paper out of her jacket and squinted at it. She’d written the list in Elvish first, then crossed it out and rewritten everything in Turkish underneath for practice, and the handwriting looked like a six-year-old wrote it even though every word was spelled right.

"Soap, shampoo and a bunch of cleaning stuff for the buildings.." She counted on her fingers. "..towels and new shoes."

He glanced down at her feet. "What’s wrong with the ones you’ve got?"

She stopped and lifted one foot to show him the bottom, where the sole was worn paper-thin on the ball and the left shoe had a crack splitting the heel.

"You go through shoes faster than Mel goes through daggers." And Mel went through a lot of daggers.

Emily put her foot down and bumped his shoulder hard enough to make him step sideways. "Then buy me good ones. Rich husband."

He snorted. "I’m not rich and we have two hundred mouths to feed." She was joking but money still made his chest tight these days.

"Still richer than anyone back home." She said it without any bitterness while watching a seagull fight a pigeon over a dropped chunk of simit. "The richest elf in my whole village was Oldir and his biggest treasure was a chair he carved himself sixty years ago."

He couldn’t argue with that. By village standards he was basically rich. By Turkish standards he was a guy with a farm he couldn’t legally own and a car registered under a stranger’s name.

My life makes zero sense. I can’t explain it to a single person alive.

The shoe store was on a quiet side street and the owner was a short man in his fifties who looked at Emily, then looked at Emily again, then looked at Eren with a face that clearly said where did you find this woman and does she have a sister.

Emily tried on four pairs of sneakers and rejected all of them. The soles were too thin so she could feel every pebble through the rubber, and her enhanced perception turned each little pressure point into something genuinely annoying. The fifth pair were hiking boots with thick treaded soles and reinforced stitching, and she put them on, walked three laps around the small shop and came back looking very pleased.

She stomped a heel against the floor to test the grip. "These. These are the ones."

He leaned over to check the tag and immediately regretted it. "Those are eight thousand lira."

"They feel nice." She wiggled her toes inside them and looked up at him with a grin that she knew worked on him every time.

Eight thousand lira. About a hundred and sixty bucks for boots she’ll destroy in a month. He looked at her face, all lit up over a pair of shoes, and gave up before the argument even started.

He paid and the owner threw in a free pair of socks and wished them a good evening, with the whole thing aimed about eighty percent at Emily.

..

The cinema was a single-screen place crammed between a pharmacy and a phone repair shop. The poster out front was for some Turkish comedy Eren had never heard of, but his phone said the reviews were decent and the next showing started in fifteen minutes.

"Have you ever actually been inside a cinema?" He handed his card to the bored teenager behind the ticket counter.

Emily turned a slow circle in the lobby and took in the popcorn machine and the dim yellow lighting and the carpet that had been red sometime in the last ten years. "No. But Mel explained it. She said it is a very big version of the laptop."

He took the tickets back and laughed. "That’s.. honestly not wrong."

"She also said the sound is very loud." Emily eyed the double doors to the screening room. "And that sometimes the chairs shake."

"The chairs only shake in the fancy ones." He nudged her toward the snack counter. "This town doesn’t have a fancy one."

She insisted on popcorn because she’d seen people eat it on cooking shows and had been curious for weeks, and by the time they got to their row she’d already eaten half the bag. Her metabolism burned through snacks faster than he could afford to keep buying them.

The theater was nearly empty with three older women up in the front row and a teenage couple in the very back who were clearly not there for the film. Eren and Emily took seats in the middle, and the second she sat down she put both boots up on the chair in front of her, because she’d seen someone do it in a movie once and decided it was normal cinema behavior.

He reached over and tapped her knee. "Feet down."

"Why?" She didn’t move them.

"Because it’s rude."

She looked around the empty rows. "Nobody is even here."

"Still rude."

She put her boots down with a sigh, then looked right at him, grinned, and slowly lifted them back up onto the seat.

She’s doing it on purpose. She thinks she’s hilarious.

He let it go because it wasn’t worth the fight.

The lights went down and the opening scene came in loud, an explosion big enough to rattle the cheap speakers, and Emily flinched hard and grabbed his forearm with a grip that would have bruised a normal man. At Level 51 her body treated a sudden boom like a threat and reacted before her brain could tell it to calm down.

He covered her hand with his and leaned in close enough to catch the warm clean smell of her under the cheap shampoo. "Relax. It’s just speakers, nobody’s attacking us."

She didn’t let go for a solid ten minutes. But once the comedy actually started she eased back into her seat and went back to her popcorn, snickering at jokes she only half understood because her Turkish wasn’t sharp enough yet to catch the wordplay.

He translated the parts she missed by murmuring them into her ear as they came, and being that close to her neck with her thigh pressed against his was doing more for him than the movie was.

Focus. We’re in public. There are old ladies in the front row.

At some point he put his arm over her shoulders and she leaned into his side without looking away from the screen, and her hand found his on her thigh and laced their fingers together.

The movie was nothing special. The acting was fine and most of the comedy was slapstick that needed no translation, and Emily completely lost it at a scene where a man fell fully clothed into a swimming pool, because a guy falling into water was apparently funny in every world.

They walked out into the cool evening air. The sun was low over the harbor and the sky had gone orange and pink across the water, and Emily stopped on the sidewalk and just looked at the sea without saying anything for a while.

"It really doesn’t end," she said quietly, almost to herself.

He stopped next to her and looked out at the water too. "It does end. On the other side there’s Greece, then Italy, then eventually the whole Atlantic ocean."

She didn’t look away from the water. "How far is the other side?"

"Greece is actually close. A few hundred kilometers maybe." He put his hands in his pockets. "But the open ocean past it goes for thousands."

She kept looking at it with the evening light on her face, and for a second she looked the way she had the first time he saw her in his bathroom doorway six months ago. Beautiful and completely out of place and staring at something she’d never seen before.

He took her hand and they walked back to the car. She carried the new boots in their bag and kept the old cracked ones on her feet, because she wanted to save the good pair for "real walking," which as far as he could tell meant forest patrols on another planet and not Turkish sidewalks.

The drive home was quiet. Emily fell asleep in the passenger seat with one hand on her belly and her beanie slipping crooked until the tip of her left ear poked out, and he reached over at a red light and pulled it back down to cover her without waking her up.

Some things stayed the same whether you were a desperate copy clinging to a tree branch trying to survive the night, or the original driving home on a coastal highway with a pregnant elf asleep against the window. At the end of the day you held onto whatever good you’d found and tried not to think too hard about how impossible all of it was.

And for the first time in a long time, Eren was happy with his life on Earth.