Page 41 of Property of Prophet

That lands somewhere I wasn’t prepared for. “You don’t know that.”

“I do.”

“You didn’t even know your own name.”

“Didn’t need my name to know I didn’t want to leave.”

Something shifts in his expression. It’s the softening that happens to his face when something lands, and he’s allowing himself to let it.

Prophet picks up the cut, but he doesn’t put it on right away. He holds it in his lap, both hands around it, and I watch him be alone with it for a minute. This is nothing compared to what I’ve handed him. He knows his name now. He’s known it for weeks, has had it from the patches themselves when he was coherent enough to read them, but this is different. This is the full weight of the thing, the worn leather, the stitched skull, the word ‘Chaplain.’ Whatever memories are still trying to surface through the damage of the fall would want something to hold onto. Something real to pull on.

Prophet pulls on the cut.

The change is subtle enough I could almost miss it if I weren’t paying the kind of attention I’ve apparently been paying to this man since the night I hauled him out of a crater. It’s not a memory flood, nothing cinematic, no visible surge of recognition crossing his face. It’s smaller. The way he holds his shoulders. The way he occupies the chair. Something always present in him but slightly untethered finds its anchor. The settling is something I can see, even if I couldn’t describe it to anyone who wasn’t already watching for it.

I’ve been watching for it for weeks.

That’s a fact I don’t examine too closely. I’m at my own table in my own deliberately constructed solitude, with a fallen angel who’s wearing a motorcycle cut across from me. Some facts are better received as facts rather than problems. I’ve been watching for his settling, not anxiously, only attentively, because it tells me something important about the season I’m in.

Prophet’s hands rest on the table, palms down. The leather sits on his shoulders the way it was always going to sit. Cut for him. Worn in by him.

He looks, for the first time since I found him, entirely himself. I don’t know him well enough to say what that means. I’ve only known the diminished version, the one who woke up in my cabin with no name, no memory, and hands that healed too fast. But some knowledge doesn’t require evidence. He looks the way he is.

“I need to contact them,” he says.

“I know.”

He looks at me. “You knew this was coming.”

“Yes.”

“Since week three?”

“Since week three.”

Something moves behind his eyes, not quite amusement. It’s the particular expression of a man who has had his own patience used back at him and finds he has no complaint about it.

“You could have made this call weeks ago,” he says.

“I could have.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No.”

“You know what happens when I make it.”

I do.

“They come for you.”

“Yeah.”

“And you leave.”

Prophet’s eyes stay on mine. “That’s not what I said.”

He’s quiet for a moment. Not pressing, only sitting with it, the way he sits with most things. Bear moves back to Prophet’s knee.