Scene 29 — Exhausted Comfort.md

The cave is dim when you arrive.

Kai has the LEDs on their lowest setting, the amber barely there, just enough to tell stone from water. The pool breathes against its edges, slow and quiet. The shelf holds its stones and its gift and asks nothing of either of you.

He looks up when you come in. Reads you instantly — the particular weight in how you're moving, the grey quality of a body doing something difficult in the background. He doesn't ask. Just opens his forelegs.

You settle against his chest and he closes around you without a word.

His temperature is cool against the feverish edge of you, and you feel it the way you always feel it here — the immediate exhale, the tension dropping out of your shoulders before you've decided to let it go. His chin rests over your head fin. His tail finds yours in the water and holds, that familiar anchor weight, and neither of you move to do anything else.

*I've got you,* he says, barely sound. *Just let it come down.*

He knows. He always knows. His paw moves in slow circles on your back, no urgency, just presence. The pool reflects the amber light across the ceiling above you both in lazy patterns and you watch them drift without needing to track where they go.

Your body is working. Correction in, levels dropping, the grey weight of it easing by increments. Kai doesn't rush it. Doesn't fill the quiet with anything. He just stays exactly here — solid, cool, present — his heartbeat steady against your ear while you wait.

The cave breathes.

His forelegs tighten around you, fractionally, just once. The way that means *I know, and it's okay, and I'm not going anywhere.*

You close your eyes.