He went home to New Orleans in September, a month after the battle of Manhattan, with no plan and no agenda except to be there.
This was intentional. He had been going home to New Orleans for five years with a plan — the New Orleans visits had been strategic as well as genuine, the crossroads practice and the garden time and the Moreau visits all serving developmental and intelligence purposes even while they were also genuinely home. He had not been able to fully separate the two. The planning habit was too deeply ingrained.
This visit he did nothing useful. He sat in the herb garden for entire mornings. He went to the crossroads and stood there without activating the Sight, without reading the shimmer, just standing at the intersection that had always been his first crossroads and feeling it be what it was. He went to red beans on Monday at the Moreau house and ate and talked and did not once assess any capability or monitor any shimmer or file any piece of information for later use.
He walked through the Bywater. He visited the bookshop on Magazine Street where he had spent hours at age nine. He went to the Saturday Market and bought a bunch of herbs for his mother's garden that she did not need but that he wanted to buy because the transaction of buying herbs in New Orleans was a complete and sufficient thing in itself.
He was sixteen and the war was over and he was home.
He felt the specific quality of this — of being in a place after a long time away during which the place had continued being itself. New Orleans had not waited for him. The city had its own life, enormous and ancient and completely indifferent to his specific history, and being in it was a reminder that the world was larger than his plans and his preoccupations and his carefully built architecture of preparation.
The city was large. It was older than Camp Half-Blood. It had survived things that made the Titan War look like a local dispute. It had music in it that had emerged from suffering so profound that the transformation of that suffering into beauty was its own kind of divine act.
He walked through it and felt small in the specific good way — the smallness of being a person in a city rather than a plan in a world. He was grateful for it.
✦ ✦ ✦
On the fourth day, he went to the crossroads at dusk and sat on the curb and waited.
Cece came, as she always came, because she always knew when to come. She sat down next to him with the ease of someone who has been doing this for eleven years and finds the familiarity of it completely adequate.
They watched the street in the September dusk for a while.
'After,' he said.
'After,' she agreed.
He looked at her. Sixteen, with the specific quality of a person who had grown into the fullest version of themselves through consistent, serious practice — the Vodou work, the attention her mother had trained her in, the years of correspondence with someone who told her the real version of things because she had always required the real version. She was not ordinary. She had never been ordinary. She was entirely herself, which was rarer.
He said: 'I want you to know that the thing I feel about you is not a delayed thing. It is not something I have been waiting to feel until it was safe to feel it. I have been feeling it for eleven years and choosing not to say it because I was waiting for the right moment and I have arrived at the right moment.'
She looked at him with the direct grey eyes that always saw what was actually there. 'I know,' she said. 'I have been feeling the same thing for approximately the same length of time, with the same patience.' She paused. 'We are both, apparently, very patient people.'
'It's a professional hazard,' he said.
She laughed. He thought: that is the best sound in either of my lives.
He took her hand at the crossroads. The shimmer was present and deep and warm. The city moved around them. The evening was specific and real and his.
He thought: this is what after feels like. All the long preparation and the weight of it and the work and the grief and the sixteen years and it comes to this: a warm September evening in New Orleans, at the crossroads, with the person who has always known the real version of him.
He thought: I would do it again. Every part of it. For this.