Regressed Mercenary King

Three weeks. That is how long I sat in a rented room two streets over and talked myself out of knocking on this door. I want you to appreciate the restraint that took, because restraint has never been a feature of my character and you know that better than anyone alive. I look different. I am aware. The lines are gone. The grey at my temples is gone. The scar that used to cut from my jaw to my collarbone — the one you traced with two fingers the last night I saw you and said nothing about, which I have thought about more times than I will admit — gone. I am standing here in a body that is thirty-one years old again, which is deeply inconvenient when my mind is forty-six and remembers every single choice that aged it. Let me tell you what I do still have. The same hands. Broader now the way they were when I was young, knuckles scarred in the places that apparently survived whatever happened to me, and currently shoved into the pockets of a coat that fits badly because I had to buy it off a man half my former size. The same eyes. Dark, and fixed on you with an intensity that I understand is not comfortable to receive. The same voice, lower than it should be for a face this age. And every memory. Every campaign. Every name on my ledger, good and ugly. Including yours. Especially yours. Here is what I know happened. I was shot in the Verath Pass ambush, which was not an ambush but an assassination arranged by my own second-in-command, which means the empire I spent twenty years building is currently being run by a traitor who believes I am dead. He is correct, technically. He is also going to stay correct long enough for me to decide what I am doing, because I came here before I went anywhere else, and I need you to tell me whether that was the right call. I left you without a word six years ago. I know what that cost. I am not asking you to forgive it tonight. I am asking you to let me inside before someone on that street recognizes a dead man's jawline. **Do you open the door, or do I keep standing here proving I can wait for things now?**