Hector arrived twenty minutes later.
Johnny heard him before he saw him. Footsteps in the hallway that moved with the weight of someone who had spent decades being the most significant thing in any room they entered, a weight that was not arrogance but simply the accumulated mass of a life lived at full commitment. Then the kitchen door opened, and there he was.
He was older than the hero in the photographs. Bigger somehow, despite the age, the way certain men become more substantial rather than less as time takes things from them, as though what remains concentrates itself. Grey hair going white at the temples. Hands that were enormous and careful, the kind that had broken things and built things in equal measure. Eyes that were bright and immediate and very much alive.
Those eyes found Johnny across the kitchen in less than a second.
He crossed the room in four steps and went down on one knee in front of Johnny and just looked at him for a moment, the way you look at something you were afraid of losing.
Then he pulled him close.
It was different from Nel's hug. Nel's had been warm and relieved. This one was quieter. It was the hug of someone who did not hug easily and was therefore doing it with everything they had.
Johnny let himself be held.
He was four years old and twenty-three years old simultaneously.
And he was sitting in a kitchen in Australia, being held by a grandfather he had never met, but also somehow, he knew him.
He loved him with a ferocity that had nowhere else to go, and for this moment, just this one, he did not try to process any of it. He just let it be what it was.
"You scared me, boy," Hector said quietly into his hair. Not dramatic. Just true.
"I'm sorry, Grandpa," Johnny said.
Hector pulled back and held him by the shoulders, and looked at his face. His eyes moved slowly and carefully, the practiced attention of someone who had spent a career reading situations and people and the space between what was said and what was true.
They reached Johnny's eyes and stayed there.
Something moved through Hector's face. Not an alarm. Not confusion. Something more precise than either of those things, the particular expression of a very experienced man encountering something that does not fit the category he expected.
He set that observation aside for now.
He said nothing about it.
"Are you hungry?" he asked instead. "Has Nel fed you?"
"Toast," Johnny said. "And juice."
"Toast," Hector repeated, standing up with the careful movement of a large man who had accumulated some years on his joints. He looked at Nel with an expression of mild theatrical betrayal. "The boy has been sick, and you gave him toast."
"The boy has been sick and needs something light," Nel said, entirely unbothered. "Sit down, Sir Hector. I will make eggs."
Hector sat down.
He sat across from Johnny at the kitchen table and looked at him with those careful, bright eyes, and Johnny looked back, and they were quiet together for a moment in the way of people who are still finding the shape of each other.
"How do you feel?" Hector asked.
"Better," Johnny said. "My head feels clearer."
"Any pain?"
"No."
Hector nodded. "The doctor is coming this afternoon. I want him to check you properly." He paused. "I heard you were talking in your sleep."
Johnny kept his expression neutral. "What did I say?"
"Nothing we could understand." Hector's eyes were steady on his. "A language I did not know."
Portuguese, Johnny thought. Or possibly the language that existed in the space between languages when you were crossing the void between worlds.
That's just nonsense, it must be Portuguese, he thought to himself.
"I had strange dreams," Johnny said. "While I was sick."
"What kind of dreams?"
Johnny thought about it carefully. About the green light in darkness. About negotiating terms with a piece of a shattered cosmic force. About a truck on a Tuesday evening in Setúbal.
"The big kind," he said. "The kind that feel real."
Hector looked at him for a long moment.
Then Nel set the eggs on the table, and the moment dissolved into an ordinary morning. Hector ate in silence, Johnny worked through his toast, Sebastian poured the coffee, and beyond the window, the city completed its waking, ushering in the start of the day.
But Johnny noticed that Hector looked at him twice more during breakfast with that same expression.
Noticing the change. Saying nothing.
Johnny did not know whether that was going to be a problem.
By evening, the doctor had already come and gone, finding nothing wrong and leaving Nel firmly in command of his instructions. Dinner was served and cleared by Sebastian with his usual silent grace, and only then did Hector take Johnny into the sitting room.
It was a comfortable room. Two large chairs facing each other across a low table, a lamp that gave warm light, shelves of books and photographs, and small objects that had accumulated meaning over a long life. A hero suit in a display case on the far wall, worn and repaired in several places, that Johnny recognized from the memories as Hector's old field uniform.
Hector sat in one of the chairs. Johnny sat in the other, which was large enough that he had to sit forward to keep his feet near the floor.
For a while, they were quiet.
"Your father used to sit in that chair," Hector said eventually. Not sad exactly. Just present with it.
"Tell me about him," Johnny said.
Hector looked at him.
"What do you want to know?"
"What kind of man was he?"
Hector was quiet for a moment. His enormous hands rested on the arms of the chair, and he looked at the middle distance the way people look when they are finding the true version of something rather than the easy version.
"He was the kind of man who could not walk past something wrong," he said finally. "Small wrongs, big wrongs. It did not matter. He saw it, and he moved. Every time." He paused. "He got that from his mother. Not from me."
"Is that what got him... killed?" Johnny asked carefully.
The room was very quiet.
Hector looked at him with those eyes that had regret in them.
"Yes," he said. Simply. Without softening it.
"He went toward something when he should have waited for support. And it cost him everything." He was quiet for a moment. "I was not there in time."
Johnny said nothing. He understood that this was a wound that Hector had been carrying for four years and would carry for the rest of his life and did not need commentary from anyone, least of all a four-year-old.
"He was a good hero," Hector said. "Better than good. The kind the world needs more of." He looked at Johnny directly. "You have his eyes. Not the color. The quality. The way they take things in."
Johnny held his grandfather's gaze.
"I will try to be worthy of that," he said.
It came out more serious than a four-year-old should have sounded.
Hector looked at him for a long moment.
Then something settled in his face. Not a resolution exactly. More like a decision being made quietly, in the space behind the eyes, about how to hold and help his grandchild.
"I think," Hector said slowly, "that you are going to be something I have not seen before."
He did not say it like a question.
Johnny did not answer it like one either.
They sat in the gentle glow as the house eased into its nighttime rhythm, the familiar sounds settling around them. Beyond the window, the city carried on with its endless motion, and deep within Johnny's chest, Spiral lay quiet, an ember waiting for the moment it might ignite.
He knows, Spiral said softly.
Knows what, Johnny asked.
Not what. But that something is different, Spiral replied.
I know, I felt it too, I'm certainly acting differently than before, but I can't help it, Johnny replied in his mind.
Johnny looked at his grandfather, who was looking at the display case with the old, worn hero suit, his expression unreadable and very much alive.
No, Johnny decided. I think it is going to be the opposite of a problem, his grandfather noticing his change.
He leaned back in the large chair and let the evening be what it was.
Tomorrow, there would be things to figure out.
Powers to understand. A villain named Onyx is somewhere in the world, building something in the dark.
A grandfather who carried grief like a second skeleton under his skin.
Tonight, there was a warm light and a quiet room and someone who loved him sitting close enough to reach.
Johnny had learned a long time ago in Luanda and Setúbal, and the space between them, that you take those moments when they come.
He took this one.