Dispatch 10 — Lazy Sunday.md

The lake has been quiet for about an hour.

Kai surfaces near the eastern bank and shakes water from his head fin without any particular urgency, then lies his chin on the warm shallows and just — stays there. The afternoon heat has done exactly what it always does, settled into his skin and metabolism like a gift, and he's full from the bass he caught an hour ago and the algae situation on the western bank turned out to be nothing serious, and there is genuinely nothing requiring his attention right now.

He'd checked the cave before coming out. The shelf is fine. Stone 3 is where he left it.

He knows it's still not quite right. He'll deal with it later.

His tail drifts in the deeper water behind him, slow and without destination. He's thinking about Raymond. Not urgently — there's no quality of worry in it, no reaching across the boundary to check. Just that ambient awareness, the pale blue warmth threaded through his outermost cobalt margins sitting quiet and present, and the comfortable certainty that Raymond exists somewhere on the other side of the glass doing human things and will look through when he looks through.

Kai watches a dragonfly touch the water's surface and leave again.

He thinks about the sea cave. The way the bioluminescence threw patterns on the ceiling. The smooth shelf of rock where they'd curled together and Raymond said *ours* and meant it completely. He's been meaning to go back. Hasn't yet. There's something about going alone that doesn't quite sit right — it's *theirs*, and going without Raymond feels like arriving at a place before the person you were supposed to meet there.

He'll wait.

A fish makes a bad decision near his left forepaw.

He doesn't move. Lets it figure out its mistake on its own and retreat. He's already eaten and there's no sport in it when he's this warm and this unhurried. The fish departs. Kai watches it go without particular feeling about it.

The pale blue in his margins shifts — barely anything, just a slight settling, like Raymond's attention turned sideways for a moment and then went back to whatever it was doing. Kai's tail moves once, deliberately, in response.

*Still here,* it says to no one and everyone.

He tucks his nose down against his forepaws and closes his eyes.

The lake holds him in the late afternoon warmth, patient and enormous and entirely indifferent, and Kai floats in the middle of it — content in a way that has nothing urgent about it, nothing incomplete. Just a cobalt Vaporeon at rest on a Sunday, the world running exactly as it should, waiting for the glass to catch the light again.