The Extra's Rise - Chapter 744

744: Peace (4) 744: Peace (4) By the time I woke, someone had painted a fox on the wall.

It sat above the reading nook with its tail curled around a stack of storybooks, ears pricked as if listening to the room breathe.

The paint was still tacky in places, small glints under the lamp.

Rachel lay on the rug beneath it on her side, propped on one elbow, hair unbraided and pulled over one shoulder like a length of night.

“I wanted it to be here when you opened your eyes,” she said without getting up.

Her voice holds quiet differently than other people’s-as if sound itself is relieved to be near her.

“You succeeded,” I said, sitting carefully because my body keeps a ledger of my decisions.

“How long have you been listening to the house?” “Long enough to know its steps,” she said, eyes on me and only me for a moment that lasted longer than the clock said.

Then she shoved herself up with one arm and crossed the room in a movement that made gravity applaud.

She lifted me with the other arm halfway without thinking, then remembered and corrected, setting me down with a softness that would make a nurse jealous.

“Gentle,” she told herself out loud, which is new and good.

“I’m fine,” I promised.

“I know,” she said, and that word in her mouth is both certainty and prayer.

She pressed her forehead to mine.

Strength bled off her like heat you could slide a chair toward in winter.

“You didn’t call.” “I wanted to see you want to be here,” I said, which was unkind and true only in the small corner of me that misses being irreplaceable.

“I did not,” she said honestly.

“I needed to.” Her mouth curved.

“Also I wanted.” Rachel is superhuman in the way mountains are: patiently, without noise.

She lifted the low bookcase with two fingers to nudge it an inch left because the fox’s tail wanted the space; she set it down as if the floor were made of spun sugar.

She opened a stuck paint tin by turning the lid between thumb and forefinger until the metal became a suggestion.

Stella arrived with the ceremonial rush of a person who knows the mural belongs to her too.

“I’m the color chooser,” she announced, sliding on her socks.

“Rachel said so.” “She is the prime selector,” Rachel confirmed gravely.

Stella’s job was to hand over ribbon scraps and declare which would become bookmarks and which would become braids.

Rachel’s job was to accept Stella’s choices like commandments and then-imperceptibly-steer toward outcomes that would not clash with the fox’s ears.

“Sky,” Stella said, selecting a blue that had read three picture books in its lifetime.

“And the color on the inside of peaches.” She turned to me.

“What color is the inside of peaches called?” “Hungry,” I said.

“Correct,” Rachel said.

We painted stars first.

Rachel free-handed them without sketch lines, the five points appearing under her brush like remembered words.

She reached up to the top corner without a ladder and held her arm steady longer than a human arm remembers how to behave.

Her other hand rested on the wall, tiny calluses catching light.

When the paint dripped once, she snagged the drip mid-air with the tip of the brush and flicked it into the jar with inhuman calm.

“Show-off,” I said, affection in the insult.

“Practiced,” she corrected, not looking down.

“I want your eyes to rest here and remember you are home.” Aria poked her head in with a plate of cut fruit and an apology for eating some on the way.

“Can I paint one?” she asked, not exactly asking.

Rachel nodded and handed her the brush.

“Two,” she bargained.

“And then you teach me the card shuffle you do where the deck is a waterfall.” Aria, caught being admired, glowed.

“Deal.” We did not hurry.

The fox acquired a friend: a small bird with absurdly serious eyebrows perched on the top shelf.

Stella demanded a moon, then objected to its shape, then approved after Rachel reshaped the curve with one smooth, decisive arc.

“Hand-washing,” Rachel announced after the last star.

Paint had found its way into the webs between Stella’s fingers and the creases of my palm.

In the kitchen, Rachel turned the faucet to that degree between impatience and indulgence, worked the soap without looking away from our hands, and rinsed in a slow circle.

She dried my fingers one by one, thumb on my knuckles, a ritual that requires no witnesses and creates its own.

“You’ll stay?” I asked, because part of healing is learning which questions are allowed.

“Yes,” she said, with no qualifiers.

“Until you don’t need me.

And then longer.” She does not speak in promises; she speaks in arrangements with reality.

She let her shoulder brush mine once on the way back to the mural and the contact was as warming as a good stove.

Douglas wandered in, stopped dead, and put his hands in his pockets as if he’d been warned not to touch paint since childhood.

“That fox is judging me.” “It is,” Stella said.

“For last week.” “I didn’t do anything last week,” Douglas protested.

“That’s why,” Stella said gravely.

Rachel produced ribbon like a magician who doesn’t need sleeves.

She braided Stella’s hair with three strands and then five, fingers moving quicker than the eye but with gentleness sharpened to a needle’s point.

When she reached the end, she tied the ribbon with a bow that wouldn’t dare come undone.

“Your head will not fight you during reading,” she declared.

Stella touched the bow with the careful pride of a person who recognizes engineering.

“Will you do Arthur’s hair?” “He has less of it,” Rachel said, but still wrapped a thin ribbon around my wrist and knotted it with deft precision.

“For finding your place on the page.” “I can read,” I complained, which was true and also not the point.

“Now you can remember you were,” she said.

“When the kitchen interrupts.” Reika passed by and, without breaking stride, handed Rachel a sandwich and me a glass of water.

“Rest your shoulder,” she said to Rachel, and somehow turned it into a compliment about endurance.

Rachel bit the sandwich obediently, then looked at the fox again.

“Something is missing,” she decided.

“A hat,” Stella suggested.

“A friend,” Aria added.

“A book,” I said, helpless against narrative.

Rachel considered.

Then, with a stroke that turned the fox from clever to companionable, she added a thread of ribbon in its mouth, trailing down to a small tangled heap near the floor-exactly the shade that now circled my wrist.

The room exhaled.

“Better,” she said.

We took a break because the light moved and made the wall want to dry in peace.

Rachel lay on the rug and stretched one leg up, foot flexed, the sort of movement that in a different life would have prefaced a fight.

Here it looked like respect for a muscle that has served well.

“Come here,” she said, reaching without looking.

I went.

She put her head on my knee and closed her eyes.

“You’re allowed to sleep,” I offered.

“I can wake you with arguments about moon shapes.” “I am awake,” she said, already half gone.

“Your knee is a good pillow.” She slept for nine minutes, the kind of sleep that lives between breaths and seems to do more work than an hour.

When she woke, she looked five years younger and then immediately her age again, which is the age of a person who has learned to be careful with power in rooms that also hold ordinary hearts.

We finished the mural with a border so thin it was almost an idea rather than a line.

Stella dictated a sentence to be painted in the corner; Rachel wrote it in strokes that made the wall look like paper: Quiet is a kind of magic.

She paused then, brush lifted, checking my face.

“Approved,” I said.

“Fully.” She smiled, the private one that loosens in increments.

“Good.” Evening crept like a cat.

The paint dried.

We tied leftover ribbon around three bookmarks and one spoon because Stella wanted a fancy spoon and there is no good reason not to have one.

Rachel lifted the couch one-handed so Stella could retrieve a pencil that had rolled underneath three days ago and declared lost.

She set the couch down so gently even the coasters didn’t complain.

At the sink, we washed our hands again.

I dried hers this time, knuckle by knuckle, because fairness is a love language.

“Stay,” I said, not a plea, just an alignment.

“Here,” she said.

“Yes.” We didn’t vanish.

We ate simple things on the floor under the fox’s gaze; Douglas pretended to teach the bird eyebrows how to be kinder; Alice told a story about a library that rearranged itself if you sang in the stacks.

Aria shuffled cards into a waterfall and then made rain backwards.

Reika set a basket beneath the mural for blankets and declared it a rule that feet belong under blankets once the lamp is on; no one objected to that version of order.

When the house yawned, Rachel curled on the rug again.

She opened a book and did not turn the page for a long time, content to read the room instead.

I sat with my back against the couch.

At some point, her fingers found my ankle and stayed there, light as a bookmark.

The fox watched us be people.

The ribbon at my wrist remembered its knot.

The sentence in the corner stayed true.

Later, when Stella’s blinks came slower and heavier, Rachel unfolded from the rug in one smooth line and scooped her up as if lifting steam.

Superhuman without the spectacle-forearms like quiet cables, hands precise.

She adjusted Stella with a fingertip beneath the knee so the weight settled along her own spine instead of mine, and padded to the bedroom.

The door clicked shut on a whisper; when she returned, there was a ribbon imprint on her wrist where Stella had hung on, and she looked pleased to be marked.

“Milk?” she asked, already in the kitchen.

She loosened a stubborn honey jar with a casual half-turn that made the metal sigh, warmed the milk just to the threshold, and tapped in cardamom from a height that made the kitchen smell like a promise.

She did not watch the pot; she watched me, and when my shoulders crept up in the old soldier’s way, she tapped them down with a knuckle.

“I didn’t pull on mana,” I said, mostly to hear it aloud.

“I know,” she said, as if she’d counted the moments I might have and been proud of every refusal.

We carried two cups back to the mural.

The fox glowed a shade warmer in lamplight; its ribbon seemed to point at the stack of books as if it had opinions about bedtime.

Rachel set the cups down, dipped a fine brush, and added a single dot of white on the fox’s paw-small enough that only someone who lives here would ever notice.

“For Stella to find tomorrow,” she said.

We sat against the couch again.

She took my left hand-the one with the ribbon-and tied a second, smaller knot beside the first.

“Box,” she said.

“Breath has corners.” She guided me: in for four, hold for four, out for four, rest for four; the ribbon under her fingers measured the count better than any clock.

On the second square, she placed my palm flat between her shoulder blades so I could feel the slow spread and settle of her own breath, the steady weight of a heart that knows how to come home.

When the cups were empty and the room agreed to dim, she tugged the blanket up to my ribs with two fingers, a gesture as easy as the way she had lifted the bookcase, and lay back down on the rug where the fox could see us.

The ribbon at my wrist cast a thin shadow that looked like a line in a margin waiting for a note.

“Quiet is a kind of magic,” Rachel read from the corner, already half-asleep again.

“And ours,” I said.

The house held still.

The paint finished drying.

Somewhere, the tiny white dot on the fox’s paw kept its secret until morning.