It began with rain.
Not the measured kind that fell in polite sheets over marble and stayed respectfully outside — the reckless kind. Sudden, warm, uninvited. The kind that arrived without announcement and covered the distance between sky and stone before anyone had thought to close a window.
The Diamond Palace did not accommodate weather like this. Rain was meant to be observed through glass, softened by distance, given the dignity of a frame. I
Instead it fell directly into the courtyard, and everything followed from that.
Tomo was through the archway before the second wave of drops hit the marble, arms thrown wide, a sound leaving his mouth that would have aged his etiquette tutor by several years.
"Rain!"
He skidded on the wet stone, boots losing their argument with physics, caught himself against the fountain's edge with a laugh that went up into the archways and came back changed by the stone.
Xeno followed at his own pace. He stepped into the rain without announcement, water darkening his hair and moving along the lines of his face in quiet channels. He didn't perform anything. Didn't shout or spin. He simply stood in the open courtyard while rain fell on him, which was a form of participation that suited him entirely.
Shion stopped at the archway's edge.
Beyond her the courtyard blurred into silver motion, droplets catching light between the arc of their fall and the moment they struck marble. She stood with one hand resting against the stone frame and watched the two of them — Tomo already circling the fountain with the energy of someone who had been waiting for exactly this kind of permission, Xeno standing in the center like something planted.
Tomo spotted her.
"No thinking!" he called across the courtyard. "Thinking is suspended. Rain jurisdiction only."
"That isn't how jurisdiction works," she said.
"It is in this courtyard. I'm establishing precedent."
"You can't establish legal precedent through weather."
He was already moving toward her. "Watch me."
She read his trajectory and took a step back, which was tactically correct and strategically too late. He scooped a handful of water from the fountain's rim as he passed and released it in her general direction with the accuracy of someone who had decided that accuracy was not the point.
Cold water hit her sleeve.
She stopped.
Looked at the spreading dark patch on the fabric.
Looked at Tomo, who had the expression of someone who had committed to a course of action and was now conducting a rapid assessment of its consequences.
"That was," she said, with the deliberate pace of someone choosing each word, "not well considered."
"Probably not," Tomo agreed. He did not retreat. "But also — did you just almost smile?"
"I did not almost smile."
"Your left corner. Moved. Measurably."
"It did not move measurably."
"Xeno," Tomo called without turning. "Did her left corner move?"
Xeno, still standing in the rain with the equanimity of a man who had made his peace with weather, glanced at Shion briefly. "I wasn't watching."
"Helpful," Tomo said.
Shion's composure held for another three seconds. Then something small slipped its tether — not laughter exactly, more the pressure that preceded it escaping through the only available opening, a breath that curved the wrong direction.
Tomo's face did what it always did.
"There," he said. Quietly triumphant, without the volume he usually brought to triumph. As if this one was worth treating carefully.
Shion stepped into the courtyard.
That was when they both noticed Abel.
He had been at the opposite arch, which faced east and caught the rain's approach before the rest of the courtyard did. He stood with his hands folded at his back in the particular posture he occupied when observing something he hadn't yet classified — not the posture of a child watching other children play, but of someone running an ongoing analysis that hadn't resolved yet.
Tomo pointed at him.
"No."
Abel looked at him. "I didn't say anything."
"The standing there says something." Tomo was already crossing the courtyard toward him, water spraying from each footfall. "You're doing the statue thing."
"I am observing."
"You're hiding behind observing."
Abel considered that. "Those aren't the same."
"Sometimes they are." Tomo stopped a few feet away, fully soaked at this point, rain flattening his hair against his forehead. He tilted his head, and the expression underneath the rain and the exhilaration was more serious than he usually allowed to show directly. "You've been standing there since it started. That's a choice."
"Staying dry is a reasonable choice."
"Staying separate is what I meant."
A beat of quiet between them, rain filling the gap.
Abel looked at him. There were moments, occasional and unpredictable, when Tomo's instinct cut past every layer without warning. Not because he was reading the situation with Shion's analytical precision — he wasn't. He felt his way to it, the way he felt his way to things, arriving at correct conclusions through a completely different path than the one Abel would have walked.
Staying separate. Yes. That was what he'd been doing.
"You're wet," Abel said, which was not a response to what Tomo had said and both of them knew it.
"Extremely," Tomo agreed. He didn't press the point. He didn't need to — he had made it and now he let it exist. "Come out, or don't. But you look cold standing there and you aren't even getting the benefit of the rain."
He turned and went back toward the fountain.
Abel stayed for another moment.
The marble beneath the arch was dry. The marble two steps forward was dark with water, reflecting the grey-white sky in broken pieces. A straightforward border between controlled and uncontrolled environments, easily read, easily respected.
He took one step forward.
Then another.
Rain touched his face — not the tentative edges of it but the real thing, direct and immediate, colder than he had calibrated for. It pressed through his hair and moved along his jaw and found the collar of his jacket with the cheerful indifference of water pursuing gravity.
He stood still for a moment and let it.
Shion had moved to stand near the fountain's edge, not with Tomo's energy but not separate from it either, rain catching in her lashes and on her shoulders while she watched the courtyard with the particular attention she brought to things she had decided were worth studying.
Xeno stood nearby, arms crossed, doing the thing he always did — occupying his space without requiring anything from it.
Tomo came to stand beside Abel.
He didn't say anything immediately, which was its own form of commentary. Tomo's silences were always deliberate. He was quiet when something mattered enough to not fill with sound.
"Does it feel different?" he asked finally.
The same question Shion had asked in a different context, on a different day, about different information. But the same shape of inquiry — the kind that trusted Abel to give a real answer rather than a managed one.
"Yes," Abel said.
Tomo nodded, satisfied, and looked out at the rain-blurred courtyard. "Good. It should."
"Why?"
He thought about it with the brief, genuine consideration he gave things he actually cared about explaining. "Because you spend most of your time inside your own head and the rest of the time making sure no one can tell that you do. Being rained on is harder to overthink." He paused. "You can't optimize being wet. It just happens."
Abel looked at him sideways. "That's a more precise observation than your approach to most things."
"I have moments."
"I've noticed."
Tomo grinned — and then, in a register shift that was very Tomo, immediately ruined the seriousness of the exchange by announcing: "New rule. Whoever falls first loses."
"That is not," Shion said from the fountain's edge, without looking up, "a structurally sound game concept."
"Why not?"
"Because you're the only one here likely to fall, which means you've constructed a rule specifically designed to punish yourself."
Tomo considered this with the expression of someone confronting a logical flaw they had hoped wouldn't be noticed. "That's a fair point," he admitted. "Let me revise. Whoever falls first gets to make the next rule."
"That's worse," Shion said.
"That's much worse," Abel agreed.
"Xeno?"
Xeno looked at him levelly. "It's worse."
"Outvoted," Tomo said, and then immediately ran toward the fountain at full speed.
He slipped precisely as everyone watching had predicted he would slip — both feet leaving marble at the same moment in a spectacle of complete physical commitment, water spraying outward from the impact zone, the sound of it sharp and startling under the arches.
For one suspended second, the courtyard held its breath.
Then Tomo started laughing.
Not the sharp surprise of a laugh before you decide how you feel about what just happened. The fully committed version, the one that didn't leave any space for embarrassment to find purchase because all the available space was already occupied by something better.
Xeno looked down at him.
Then looked at Abel.
He shook his head once — the smallest possible movement, barely visible, the motion of someone who has witnessed an entirely predictable event and has run out of whatever reserve they used to keep the reaction contained.
And something shifted.
Abel felt it in his chest before he understood it — a pressure that didn't correspond to any feeling he had practice naming. Not fear. Not anticipation. Something without a clean label, rising through the careful architecture he had built around himself with the unhurried certainty of water finding a path through stone.
The sound escaped before he could assess it.
A breath that went the wrong direction.
Then another.
He was laughing.
Not the measured version he deployed in social contexts — the exhale that signaled approval without exposure. This was something that came from below language, below management, below the fifty years of learned control he carried in the body of a child. It arrived without asking and it didn't fit neatly into anything and it went up into the arches and came back changed by the stone the same way Tomo's shout had.
It startled him.
The surprise of it made it worse — or better, depending on how you measured those things — and for several seconds he stood in the rain and laughed at Tomo on the marble and at the situation and at nothing in particular, the way people laughed when the reason didn't matter as much as the release.
Tomo, still on the ground, pointed at him.
"There he is," he said. Delighted. Certain. The tone of someone confirming a belief they had held for a long time.
Abel could not respond. He was still laughing.
Shion had turned to look at him with the expression that was not quite a smile but contained all the components of one held carefully in suspension. She watched him with the quality of attention she gave to things that confirmed structural theories — not surprise, because she had not been surprised, but the particular satisfaction of evidence aligning with hypothesis.
"You were wondering if you could still do that," she said.
He managed to stop. Mostly. "I wasn't wondering anything."
"You were." Not an argument. A quiet correction, the kind she offered only when she was certain enough to bother. "You do it sometimes. Approach the edge of something and then step back before anyone sees you consider it."
He looked at her.
Rain fell between them.
"I don't know what you're describing," he said. Which was not untrue — he knew the behavior she was naming but had not given it a name himself, had not looked at it directly.
"You have a very clear idea of who you are," Shion said, "and you treat anything that doesn't fit it as a potential threat instead of new information." She said it the way she said everything — without cruelty, without apology. Pure observation, offered because she thought it was worth offering. "Laughter is new information."
Tomo had gotten to his feet, dripping, entirely unrepentant. He came to stand on Abel's other side, completing the loose configuration the four of them had been occupying in various arrangements for weeks now.
"She's right," he said cheerfully. "Not that I knew how to say it like that."
"You say it differently," Abel said.
"I just point at the thing."
"It's effective."
Tomo looked pleased. "I think of it as a complementary skill." He looked across at Shion. "She understands the why. I locate the what. Xeno makes sure none of it falls over."
Xeno had not moved during any of this, which was consistent. But he was watching the three of them with the particular quality of attention he gave to things that fell into the category of worth protecting. Not the objects of protection — the configuration. The arrangement itself.
"You're all soaked," he said. This was not concern. It was acknowledgment of a condition he had assessed and found acceptable.
"Deeply," Tomo agreed.
"My jacket is going to need attention," Shion said.
"My jacket is going to need considerable attention," Abel said.
Tomo looked between them. "Worth it, though."
No one disagreed.
Rain softened around them, the intensity dropping by degrees; the courtyard beginning its quiet return toward legibility. Water found the drains. Servants at the archway edges resumed gentle motion. A maid who had been standing with a tray paused rather than passing — too close to the moment's edge to walk through it without disturbing something. She waited instead, which was itself a form of recognition.
Abel stood with rain in his hair and wet fabric against his shoulders and the residue of something he hadn't expected still somewhere in his chest.
He thought about the boardroom. About the quality of the last months of his first life — the weight of importance, every hour purchased by consequence; every relationship evaluated its position in a system he was perpetually trying to balance. He loved that work. He believed in it. He had not understood until this moment, standing in a rain-soaked courtyard in a body that was not the one he had built that belief inside, that he had never stood somewhere in fifty years and allowed time to simply pass.
Not managed it.
Not converted it.
Allowed it.
"Tomo," he said.
"Mm."
"You said earlier I was hiding behind observation."
"I did."
"You were right."
Tomo looked at him. This was one of the careful moments — the ones where he recognized that Abel saying something directly was a different thing than most people saying the same words, that it cost differently and meant differently.
"I know," he said. Quiet, for once. "I wasn't sure you'd say so."
"I wasn't either."
They stood there in the thinning rain, the four of them in their loose formation — Tomo still dripping with the cheerful enthusiasm of someone who had no intention of wringing out his clothes before it was strictly necessary, Shion holding her wet jacket away from her arm in a futile gesture toward dryness, Xeno solid and still at the edge of it all, the anchor point around which the rest of them, without choosing to, organized themselves.
"Same time tomorrow?" Tomo asked. "Assuming it rains."
"It won't rain tomorrow," Shion said.
"It might."
"The cloud formation this morning suggested a clearing pattern. Tomorrow will be dry."
Tomo looked at Abel. "She reads clouds now?"
Shion's left corner moved. Measurably.
Tomo made a quiet triumphant sound that he had the grace to keep small, acknowledging victory without announcing it, and led the way back toward the sheltered archway as the rain finished making its decision to stop.
Abel followed.
Something remained in him that didn't follow the same direction as the rest of his careful machinery — a warm fragment that didn't fit neatly into any of the categories he used to organize his internal world. Not strategy. Not data. Not even the slow, structural hope he had been building quietly since the night he heard acceptable losses spoken in a voice without grief.
Something smaller than any of those.
Warmer.
The kind of thing that didn't announce itself or explain its purpose.
It simply stayed.
And though years would come that buried it under silence and steel and choices that cost more than he had planned for — the morning would stay intact somewhere beneath all of it.
A boy in the rain. Laughing. Surprised by himself.
Before the world learned anything about what he would become.