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Zekiel had had a number of business visits with Tacrith over time—for reasons of varying levels of official merit. All the same, he considered the physician a good friend after the combination of time they’d spent together. In the aftermath of meeting with the man’s brother, however, the weight of Tacrith’s seriousness and enduring solitude had felt especially potent. Zekiel had invited Tacrith to visit him in the Sanctum on multiple occasions and he had eaten there, particularly frequently before Ottolo’s departure.

This, though, was different.

He had never been invited into Tacrith’s home, and made no mistake that it must have taken some thought on Tacrith’s part to decide to do so. Regardless, Zekiel was thrilled to bear the invite and spent the better part of the day with it on his mind. When it came time to actually preparing, it was possible he became distracted, but he managed to arrive more or less on time, a replacement coat (since the one given to Finn), tucked close about him to ward against the evening’s chill as he surveyed the prospective building, and knocked.

He folded his fingers before himself as he waited, silver eyes straying down to study the surrounding street as he did. It was not a bad place to be, but as he looked on it, he could not help but think it would be a stranger, more empty scene to behold if it was something he would come home to alone every evening.

“Tacrith!” Immediately, Ze beamed to see him, pleased too to spot a hint of a smile, though there was a seriousness that still weighed about him—perpetual, so far as Zekiel could tell—that inspired him to encompass the man in a hug. “It is wondrous to be here.” He leaned back, listening, and then nodding as he stepped in, folding his hands back behind himself as he waited for Tacrith just within the door frame. “I am. Did you cook it? Do you cook? Oh, your house is very clean.”

His eyes skipped about after he said it, beginning to take in his surroundings in full and then flashing Tacrith a smile. “It is almost a house version of you. Small and very clean and proper and good but somewhat lonely looking I think. It smells good, though. I could cook for you sometime you know, if it would please you—I’d like to.”

He peeked, attempting to determine what was for dinner from his vantage point without immediate success.

“Ohh, then I shall one day,” Zekiel promised. “Perhaps soon. I’ve gone to market with Marleya recently to buy foodstuffs and spices for dinner, and then she would tell me how to cook it because her fingers are old and when I visit, it’s easier to have the help. We could even also go to market together before if you like, and you could tell me what sort of things to eat please you best.”

At Tacrith’s gesture, he moved, slipping out of his coat, folding it, and setting it on the hook by the door before stepping to the table and seating himself. “If you live alone often or long, learning to cook as well as being a doctor would be pleasant too, I think. Then you could make whatever you wished, and it would give you something to do with your hands besides hold books.”

After brushing his own hands down the fronts of his pants, he folded them there, and smiled. “And, in winter it makes a nice heat.”

“You needn’t apologize to me,” Zekiel said, adjusting himself and watching Tacrith as much as the food when he went to fetch it. There was a moment where he almost stood—it was a worry that the man with an unreliable leg would be straining it without him at least near to help—but it was a short distance, and Tacrith seemed to manage with nary a wobble for once. So Zekiel held his seat and smiled.

“It smells wonderful,” he said, “and am very well as I am. Please sit. If you would like water, though, I can fetch it if it please you. It was good to see your brother, wasn’t it?” He watched Tacrith as he took one of the two bowls and then carefully cut loose a hunk of bread from the center piece. “He was small, but had great energy in him.”

Zekiel watched his friend carefully, listening until he finished. He ate a bite, and it was good, so that seemed reason enough to smile at least. “He is your brother,” he said with the same easy tone he applied to most things, though perhaps just a touch softer in this instance. “Even if he has grown and been changed by the life he had while apart from you, it does not make him any less that.” He took up his spoon. “It is wondrous that he is alive, though, yes. And that you are, you know. Oh, when I first began to speak with him of it, he said that his brother was Tacrith and that he had died, and I thought there was another Tacrith who had, and I wondered if that Tacrith would have liked the same flowers you do.”

After blowing on a spoonful, he ate, and hummed his appreciation after. “And of course it wasn’t at all. It was wondrous coming to see you. It isn’t so very far, and the evening is beautiful. I counted to twenty-seven stars once, but then I became distracted.”

“I did,” Zekiel said, smiling. “Come alone, that is.” He ‘did’ also make it to twenty-seven, but since that had already been said it didn’t seem to bear repeating. “The Sanctum keeps no guards of its own. If I am to travel far, I may be accompanied by city guard, but when I first came to see you, I had not left the Sanctum’s walls often before. It was thought best that I have escorts to see that I did not become lost or be pulled astray…”

Zekiel trailed off for a moment because, while this might have seemed like a small or unlikely thing to someone like Tacrith who had surely known the city well most of his life:

“I had become lost before,” he admitted. “On my first trip anywhere of distance as a prentice, I traveled with several sisters of the church to a neighboring village. I was permitted then to walk as I much as I pleased to see it and the people there after our work had been done. And so I did walk and continued to, and then walked some more, and it began to rain. I met a girl with a bird of many feathers—though it was not so fond of the wet as we were, and she helped me to find my way back. Since I met her then I thought it was quite wondrous, but Sister Ilera was particularly distressed to find so much of the weather and the street on my clothes. After, they took to having me escorted when possible.”

That had of course changed again since his prenticehood, though gradually. In his years as an acolyte, he still had supervision more often than not, but the work of the church brought him all over the city—and in no small amount, given the amount he took on—such that Pajore was now intimately familiar to him, and Zekiel felt he knew it nearly as well as the Sanctum itself. As a cleric, at least within the familiar borders of his home city, he traveled it as he pleased.

Blowing on a spoonful of soup, he ate and hummed his enjoyment. There was always something innately more pleasant about eating with company than the alternative.

Zekiel’s eyes, already naturally aglow thanks to his homeland’s particular chemical properties, warmed further at Tacrith’s story, intent and curious as he listened. It was rare enough that Tacrith talked much in a given sitting, and rarer still for him to talk about himself. The insight was a rare and surprising treat, made better still by the fact that he wasn’t apparently the only one to get lost in their home city.

“It is wondrous that you learned the way to another village,” he said. “And strange to think of you not knowing your way even long ago. You are so careful and attentive.”

There was a greater truth, though, to Tacrith’s later words. He didn’t often think of his life in retrospect. There was so much going on in any given moment that it seemed unfair to give time already passed more attention than that currently being lived. But much had happened. More than seemed to fit in his head at once such that it did feel almost as though he had met Tacrith not that long ago after all.

But it had been years now.

“It is different to think of things passed and the time between…and how there will only ever be more time between the moment we are living and all those moments we have lived before…” He studied his spoon, raised a half inch over his bowl but unmoving, casting a shadow over the broth. “I think of Ottolo sometimes.”