~LYRA'S POV~
I noticed on the second day.
Not that he was gone, he wasn't gone. Eren was present for every joint council, contributed to the unification discussions with the same careful precision he brought to everything, answered questions when asked and offered analysis when it was useful. He was there. He was functioning at full capacity in every visible way.
But the other thing had stopped.
The private conversations. The moments where he'd appear in an unexpected place at an unexpected time and say something quietly perceptive that reoriented the way I was looking at a problem I'd been carrying all day. The particular quality of his attention, the way it felt when Eren was actually watching something, not observing it from a distance but genuinely attending to it, had shifted toward something more managed, more deliberate, more like the way he paid attention in a council room rather than in a corridor at dusk.
