[Backdated: before zombie mission]

It's while Jordan is working on the knife that the thought comes to him: Maybe this is who I am.

His hands slow, then stop, holding the strips of leather that he's weaving around the hilt absently taut, keeping his work from unraveling while he examines this thought, turns it over in his mind like some small and mysterious artifact whose purpose he has not yet divined. Maybe this is who he is. He likes to work with his hands, likes to craft and construct. But the thought goes deeper, goes below the surface layer of this, of what he's doing now; what he's doing now is performed for himself and nobody else.

Nobody is here to watch him or to make any demands of him, explicit or implied. Nobody is here to expect anything of him. Nobody is here to control him.

He likes to make things partly because it's useful, partly because it gives him solid evidence of his own capabilities, partly because it imposes a form of control on a world that can't easily be controlled. Order out of chaos, and he fears what's out of control, what can't be controlled. In another place, another world, another him responded to that fear by reaching out with every tool at his disposal (mind and voice and hands) and taking control, bringing as much of the world as he could to heel by any means necessary. Here, his answer has been to be invisible, in one way or another, to be what others expect; if nothing sees him, nothing can touch him, nothing can hurt him.

It's true enough, and not true at all.

For the first time, he has nobody to care for and be responsible for but himself. The world has not collapsed in on itself. He is lonely, but after a hazed panicky time in which he had no sense of balance or stability without a reference point, he has oriented himself. It's not unlike a wave engulfing him, tumbling him in a confused underwater roar of light and dark and foam. The recovery technique is the same: hold your breath, relax, ride it out. Look for the light. Follow the buoyant tug of the air in your chest, swim up and away from the drag of gravity until you break the surface and you can breathe again.

He is breathing again. He knows how to swim.

This, then, is who he is when he's alone: he likes to make things, he likes quiet as much as he likes noise (and vice versa), he likes to have a certain amount of order in his spaces; he likes to know what he's doing, he likes to be in charge of himself, he likes to know. He prefers to have company, but he needs time alone to settle his thoughts and stabilize himself. He trusts actions more than he trusts words; words are only a tool, but he can't forget that that's not true for everyone. He prefers to be useful, to be needed, but he is finding, now, that he can be useful to himself.

He's broken. They're all broken here. Anyone who doesn't seem broken is only hiding it better. But there's a difference between being broken and being shattered, and he has learned that he needs to know the shape to put the pieces back into. Find the edge pieces first, construct the outline, and the rest of it can be contained within. Letting anyone else dictate the shape of who and what he is will distort the rest of the picture.

This is who I am, he says to Ferros, who has been present in every thought, and doesn't need a verbal assent to know that his weapon agrees, nor to sense that Ferros has known some of this already. It doesn't make him angry that Ferros didn't tell him; he knows as well that this was a thought process he had to have himself. Constructed from within, rather than imposed from without, although Ferros is both and has been with him throughout the chain of reasoning, flavoring it with his knowledge and observations. Thanks, Jordan says, and doesn't need words for the dragon's warm and relieved response.