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It had taken Jordan a few days to gather up the courage to go down to the pod room. To find out for himself, one way or the other. He took pod duty seriously, keeping an eye on the displays and readouts, but he didn't know how the pods worked nor what the displays meant beyond the most basic and obvious functions, and he'd never had anything go wrong on his watches, so he'd quickly learned to bring a book to combat the boredom and stay alert for anything out of the ordinary. He hadn't looked extensively through the silent rows, because he found the utter stillness of faces in sleeping stasis unsettling. Now, though, he checked in with the bored hunter on duty, signed in (when had that become a thing for visitors?), and walked slowly down each row, looking at each face in turn as he had never done.

Further back, he found what he was looking for. A face nearly as familiar to him as his own, pale-blue eyes closed in what Jordan preferred to think of as sleep. There was no mistake, but he looked down at the display beside the pod anyway. Andrew Miller. Jordan laid his hand flat on the curved surface of the pod. How many times had he sat up in the monitoring booth, reading, while the video monitors cycled past a face he would have been utterly shocked to notice?

The narrative of what had happened three years ago rewrote itself in his mind, and he reflected on how deftly and expertly he'd been played. They must have been under observation for some time, and Deus had decided to approach both brothers. Whoever had been in charge of their recruitment had judged, correctly, that Jordan wouldn't accept the offer if Andy remained at home, and they'd approached Andy first. Jordan didn't know what they'd said to his brother, how they'd convinced the kid, but he could believe that the hallucination might have some grain of truth to it; maybe Andy had indeed come away partly to help protect him. Then, while Jordan was still reeling from the shock and horror of the staged accident, they'd approached him, and his anger and his sense of grief and loss had certainly helped fuel the decision to cut ties with his old life.

He couldn't even be angry about it. Whoever had been in charge of that particular piece of manipulation had done very well with it, and Jordan had Ferros now, and whatever doubts he might sometimes have about Deus as a whole, he preferred this life to the paranoia and secrecy with which he'd lived his life as a civilian. And there were the guys, too. He wouldn't have met either of them or any of the friends he had now if he'd turned the offer down, as he certainly would have done before Andy's "death."

"Wake up soon, kid," he said quietly. "I miss you." The tearing ache of grief and loss he'd carried for three years had been wiped away. He didn't quite know what he'd do with the empty space where that pain had been, but he felt lighter without it. Freer. He didn't know why Andy was still asleep, but it didn't even occur to him to doubt that his brother would bond with a weapon, maybe soon. Maybe Andy's weapon just hadn't arrived on the island yet.

He stood looking at the pod for a little while longer. Then he let his hand drop to his side again and turned to go.

Usually Jordan was better at avoiding outright collisions, but just now he was far away, wrapped up in his own thoughts and not paying a lot of attention to the world around him. The slight figure only registered in his mind at about a foot away, and he stopped suddenly, startled out of his fugue and blinking at Peyton, his expression for a moment unguarded, oddly ambivalent. Then he smiled at her. "Hi Peyton. Pod duty today?"

Jordan's eyebrows went up a little. "You too, huh." He looked back towards the row from which he'd come. "My brother's here. It ... took me a while to check. Thought it might have been just ... wishful thinking." He shook his head. "Wasn't sure I could deal if that was true. Even if it was just a hallucination in the first place, it would've been like losing him all over again."

He tucked his hands into his pockets, his mouth taking on a faint, embarrassed quirk. Why was he spilling this to Peyton, unasked? Because, he answered his own question, her sister's here. She'll probably understand. "Did you know she was here, before the dream?" he asked. He'd been too preoccupied with his own family reunion to really notice anything else happening around him; she might have seen her sister there, but it was possible that she'd found the pod beforehand and was just continuing her visits.

Jordan nodded. "I don't know which would be better. I guess she decided that one." He looked back in the direction of Andy's pod again. "It was the other way around for me. They approached him first. I -- thought he was dead." A small, painfully wry smile. "It never occurred to me, even after I learned that my death had been faked to tie up legal and social loose ends."

He rested a hand briefly on her shoulder. "Don't blame yourself. It was her choice."

"Yeah. I'd like to meet her when she wakes up." When, just as certain, because neither of them could afford that doubt. He quirked half a smile. "It was pretty smart of them to go to Andy first," he said. "I wouldn't have gone if he'd still been there."

"I always knew Andy could see them, too," Jordan said, his eyes going briefly distant. "I guess I shouldn't be surprised that he decided to do something about it. Kid never was very normal," and there were shades of fond teasing in his voice, even though the subject of the joke wasn't awake to hear it.

"Yeah, Andy was like that too. I heard overactive imagination a lot." Jordan sighed. "I figured out pretty quick that I could agree with that to cover for him. If I talked about him pretending and having imaginary friends, they passed it off as just more of that. It worked while we were still little."

Jordan's mouth pulled down in a sympathetic grimace. The thought resonated powerfully with him. "I don't know," he admitted. "I don't - he's an adult now, and he'll have a weapon to take care of him, but he's always going to be my kid brother who I took care of since he was tiny. I'm going to worry. I can't help that. But he's alive," he added, and there was still an edge of shocked joy under the words.