If youâre wondering where Matcha went to, dear readerâwell, thatâs a question with more answers than stars in the sky. The details of his first voyage are between him, the Watcher, the stars, and @templarskyverse. Sometimes stories donât give you every map they draw; sometimes the journey is meant to be a secret held close, a constellation glimpsed only by those who know where to look. Youâll find out in time. Or maybe you wonât. Thatâs how some stories work.
What matters for now is this: the ship is gone, the thread is quiet, and in the mountain lab, Eclipse is alone.
He does what he has always doneâwhat he learned to do in the long cycles of war and survival, in the hidden observatory, and in the silent hours between timelines. He works.
Every morning, Eclipse rises before the sun and sits at the Window, watching the code of the world braid and ripple, logging the drift of nearby AUs. He keeps meticulous records, annotating every fluctuation, every anomaly, every potential sign of movement at the edge of the bleed-through. The instruments hum, the lab is orderly, and the routines are unbroken.
He tends the decoyâsending it through town on its daily circuits, updating its responses, watching how it moves through the rhythms of the place theyâve called home. He observes the gaps that only he can see: the way Lax lingers a little longer by the bar, the way Trentâs debriefs grow more thorough, the way Lesterâs Tuesday reports seem to circle a problem he canât quite name.
He keeps in touch, in his own wayâsending the quietest pings along the thin connection thread woven into the shipâs design, waiting for a reply that is never more than a simple status, a heartbeat of code. He files each one, carefully, as proof that one half of the story is still out there, moving.
He walks through the empty house at night, sometimes pausing beneath the constellation ceiling in the old room, looking up at the map Matcha paintedâeach star a memory, each line a thread back to something that mattered.
He keeps the thermos clean, just in case.
He waits.
He does not pace or fret or break routine, but the code around him is restless, and the space between things accumulates tension the way a sky gathers weather. Sometimes, in the stillness, he catches himself listening for the sound of a second set of footsteps in the lab, the bright echo of a laugh, the careless orbit of gold hands.
When the ache of absence grows too loud, Eclipse does what he always does: he works. He builds. He improves the Window, refines the Untangler, drafts letters heâll never send. He keeps the promise he madeâto hold the thread, to keep the home fires burning, to be here when the door opens again.
Because that is what you do, when youâre the one who stays behind.
You trust the story is still moving, somewhere out there, between the stars and the Watcher and @templarskyverse.
And you wait for your brother to come home.
