#please stop crying

Ghost told Price what happened the second Jamie saw him. Both men hate how terrified she is of them. Repairing their friendship with Jamie will take considerable time. Price lays in bed, staring at the ceiling, struggling to sleep. He looks at the time on his phone. Two in the morning. He’s been staring at the ceiling for five hours. Price gets out of bed and leaves the room.

The morning was a strange mix of overcast and sunny. Occasional breaks in the gray clumps of cloud only concentrated the few beams of light that hit the house and garden. Kallus did his best to shield his eyes with one hand and balance the laundry basket filled with towels and sheets with the other. Before he could even ask, the back door opened.

“Thanks, Ada,” Kallus said.

Ada graced him with the briefest of smiles before hurriedly turning back to her task of packing food for the long trip back. Kallus placed the basket on the table and watched her spread nutbutter on bread for a few moments, suppressing a sigh. They’d only been there a few weeks, but it felt like months somehow. Longer, even. He couldn’t shake the feeling they were abandoning Ada to her solitude. But they were needed on Coruscant.

They would be back soon enough.

Kallus spotted a suspicious canister just a little too close to the sandwiches for comfort. He opened his mouth and Ada turned to him, flourishing a sticky knife. “No, Alexsandr, those raisins are not for your sandwiches. Stand down.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything,” Kallus insisted, voice going high. Ada leveled him with a leery look then turned back to the sandwiches.

When Kallus opened his mouth, she turned back and gave the knife a threatening little wave this time. “And I’m not cutting the crusts off, either.”

“Alright,” Kallus said through a mock-mournful sigh. He tried and failed to bite back his smile; so did Ada. She turned back to the sandwiches and, despite what she’d just said, began carefully removing the crusts. Kallus’s smile flickered away as he watched. He took up the laundry basket once more.

They would be back soon enough.

That’s what he determinedly repeated to himself in his mind as he hauled the clean sheets and towels to their room. “Dayj?” Kallus called out as he dropped the basket to the bare bed.

“Yeah?” came the muffled response from the bathroom.

Kallus followed it to find Dayja fresh from the shower he’d decided to take after all, damp towel slung on his hips. They hadn’t even been here a month and Dayja’d managed to put on a healthy amount of weight. He was grimacing at his own reflection as he braced himself for the hated task of shaving his dark stubble back down to ISB-mandated nothing.