Chapter 100: The First Light

The cold had become a living thing, a third presence in their pine sanctuary, patient and insatiable. It had gnawed through Anton’s numbness into a deep, aching burn in his bones. Sabatine’s shivering had grown intermittent, a dangerous sign. The shared warmth of their bodies was a failing furnace. Dawn was a theoretical concept, a distant myth beyond the black vault of branches.

It was Sabatine who stirred first, a grim determination cutting through the haze of pain and hypothermia. With a groan that seemed to tear from his very core, he pushed himself up onto his elbows. “Fire,” he gritted out, the single word a monumental effort.

“No fuel,” Anton murmured, his own voice thick and slow. “Everything’s frozen.”

“Not everything.” Sabatine’s gaze, dulled by pain, scanned the immediate ground beneath the canopy. He pointed a trembling finger at the lower trunk of their sheltering pine. “Resin pockets. Deadfall… under the snow. Small stuff. Kindling.”

It was the operative speaking now, the survivalist pushing past the wounded man. Anton knew arguing was pointless. Survival had a logic that overruled agony. He forced himself to sit up, the world tilting nauseatingly. “Tell me what to do.”

What followed was an hour of excruciating, meticulous labour. Anton scavenged on his hands and knees, digging through the shallow snow beneath the trees for twigs, pinecones, brittle fragments of long-dead branches. His frozen fingers fumbled, dropped things, and became clumsy paws. Sabatine, unable to move far, used a sharp-edged stone he’d dug from the frozen ground to hack at the trunk of their tree, chipping away frozen bark and gouging out globs of pungent, sticky sap that smelled like hope.

They built their pyre in a shallow pit Anton scraped clear of snow, between two sheltering roots of the great pine. Sabatine arranged the tinder with the last of his precision, creating a tiny, perfect lattice of the driest twigs, smeared with precious resin. The larger sticks were stacked around it in a tepee.

Then came the spark.

Anton’s platinum pen was gone, lost in the fall. Sabatine had no tools. They had only the stone and a small piece of carbon steel from a broken buckle on Sabatine’s gear.

“You have to… do it,” Sabatine whispered, slumping back against the tree, his energy spent. His hands were shaking too violently. “Fast, hard strokes. Aim for the resin.”

Anton took the stone and steel. His world narrowed to the two objects in his numb hands. He struck. A feeble scrape, a few dull sparks that died in the air. He struck again. And again. Each movement sent jolts of pain up his arms. He lost count. His shoulders screamed. The cold mocked his efforts.

“Again,” Sabatine urged, his voice a thread.

Frustration and despair welled up, hot and sudden. Anton gripped the tools, and with a raw, wordless cry of effort, he brought them together in a furious, focused scrape.

A cascade of bright, white sparks erupted, raining down onto the resin-smeared tinder.

One caught. A tiny, hesitant orange ember glowed against the black resin. Anton held his breath. He saw it pulse, fade, then—a wisp of smoke. Then a second member caught beside it. The smoke thickened, turned grey, then white. A minuscule yellow flame, no larger than a ladybug, flickered to life, licking at a pine needle.

“Don’t blow,” Sabatine breathed. “Just… feed it. Gently.”

With trembling care, Anton selected the thinnest twig and nudged it toward the fledgling flame. It blackened, smoked, then caught. He added another. The fire grew, tentatively claiming its space in the frozen world. It ate the resin, cracking and spitting, casting wild, dancing shadows that brought the gnarled tree roots to life.

He fed it, twig by precious twig, branch by careful branch. The heat was at first an illusion, then a promise, then a physical force. It radiated out in a small, defiant sphere, pushing back the dominion of the cold.

The world, which had stretched into an infinite, hostile wilderness, collapsed. It shrank to the circle of flickering orange light, the cocoon of warmth that barely reached their outstretched legs, the sound of sap sizzling and wood crackling. The vast, silent threats—the hunters, the conspiracy, the past, the future—retreated beyond the wall of darkness. There was only this: the fire, their shared breath frosting and melting in the heat, and the unspoken truth that lay between them, as palpable as the ground beneath.

Anton finally sat back, his raw, blistered hands held out to the flames. He looked across the fire at Sabatine. The light painted his ravaged face in gold and deep shadow, softening the harsh lines of pain, illuminating the exhaustion in his eyes. He was watching the flames with a kind of vacant reverence.

Wordlessly, Anton moved. He didn’t go back to his side of the fire. He crawled around it, the heat washing over him, and settled himself beside Sabatine, their shoulders almost touching against the rough bark of the pine. Sabatine didn’t acknowledge him, but he didn’t move away.

The silence was different now. Not the empty silence of cold and despair, but a thick, living quiet, charged with the crackle of the fire and everything they had said and left unsaid under the pines.

The warmth began its slow, merciful work. Feeling returned to Anton’s fingers as needles of painful fire. He flexed them, watching the shadows dance. The deep, core chill in his chest began, infinitesimally, to loosen its grip.

He was so tired. A fatigue deeper than any all-nighter in the boardroom, deeper than the strain of a hostile takeover. It was soul-weariness. The weight of the revelations, the violence, the fall, the cold—it all pressed down on him, and the fire’s warmth made it safe to feel the full crush of it.

His head felt heavy, a stone on his neck. Without conscious thought, guided by a need more fundamental than pride or protocol, he let it loll to the side.

It came to rest on Sabatine’s good shoulder.

The contact was electric. Sabatine went perfectly still. Not rigid, but arrested. Anton could feel the tension thrum through the muscle beneath his cheek. He waited, holding his breath, expecting to be shrugged off, for the wall to slam back up.

It didn’t happen.

Slowly, incrementally, the tension began to bleed out of Sabatine. A long, slow exhalation whispered past Anton’s ear. Then, Sabatine’s head tilted, just a fraction, until his temple rested lightly against the top of Anton’s head.

It was the most profound surrender Anton had ever witnessed.

The fire popped, sending a spiral of embers up into the dark. The world outside their circle ceased to exist. There was only the solid, weary reality of Sabatine’s shoulder under his cheek, the rise and fall of his breathing, the faint, clean scent of pine and cold and blood that was uniquely him.

“You were right,” Anton murmured, the words vibrating against Sabatine’s coat. “About the fire.”

A low, rough sound that was almost a laugh rumbled in Sabatine’s chest. “Broken clock.”

“No.” Anton lifted his head just enough to look at the side of Sabatine’s face, at the firelight catching the stubble on his jaw, the curve of his ear. “You’re not broken.”

Sabatine’s eyes remained fixed on the flames, but a muscle worked in his jaw. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I know you built a fire with frozen hands and a piece of rock. I know you took bullets and rocks for me. I know you carry a city of ghosts on your back, and you still tried to do the right thing.” Anton’s voice was soft, but each word was deliberate, a stone placed in a new foundation. “That’s not broken. That’s… forged.”

Sabatine finally turned his head. Their faces were so close Anton could see the flecks of silver in his grey irises, the soot in the lines around his eyes. The raw, haunted vulnerability there was almost too much to bear.

“I’m so tired, Anton,” he confessed, the admission seeming to cost him the last of his strength.

“I know.” Anton let his head fall back to Sabatine’s shoulder. “So am I. So rest. Just for a minute. The fire’s watching.”

It was an absurd thing to say. But Sabatine’s body relaxed another degree, the last of the operative’s vigilance softening. He was leaning into Anton as much as Anton was leaning into him.

They sat like that as the fire burned down to a bed of glowing coals. The warmth seeped into their marrow. The silence was a balm. The unspoken truth—the love that had grown in the cracks of suspicion, the partnership forged in betrayal, the trust that had survived the ghost in the code—wrapped around them tighter than any blanket.

Anton didn’t sleep, but he drifted in a warm, pain-dulled haze. He felt, more than saw, the first hint of change in the darkness beyond their circle. The absolute black began to soften to a deep, indigo grey. The shapes of the surrounding trees emerged from the void.

Dawn.

The first light of day crept through the pine canopy, a shy, pale blush filtering through the needles. It touched the smoke rising from their embers, turning it to mother-of-pearl. It illuminated Sabatine’s profile where he sat, his eyes now closed, his breathing deeper, more even. The harshness of the night was smoothed away by the gentle grey light, revealing just the man, weary and wounded, but enduring.

The fire had burned down, but it had done its job. It had held the night at bay. It had given them a space, however small and temporary, to lay down their weapons and their walls.

As the new day slowly claimed the forest, Anton kept his head on Sabatine’s shoulder, watching the world return to colour. The war wasn’t over. The explanations awaited. The scars, physical and otherwise, would remain. But in the first light, with the man he loved solid and breathing beside him, Anton Rogers, who had once believed he controlled everything, understood the only thing that truly mattered: he had found his harbour in the storm, and it was not a place, but a person. And for now, that was everything.

—-