The bite wound had fully closed.
Crisanta checked it on the third morning in Casa de Esperanza and pronounced it clean — no infection, no necrosis, the tissue healing the way tissue was supposed to heal. Marco had looked at it himself afterward with the particular expression of someone who had spent two weeks not entirely sure he deserved to still be here, and then he'd rolled his sleeve back down and gone to find Ivan.
He needed more napkins. He'd run out.
◇ ◇ ◇
Ivan gave him a full notebook.
Not one of the café guest books — a proper one from the school supplies he'd found in a classroom on the fifth floor, spiral-bound, seventy pages, slightly water-damaged along the spine but otherwise intact.
Marco held it like Ivan had handed him something significant.
"For the building," Ivan said. "You keep sketching things and running out of napkins and I keep finding them stuck to walls with charcoal marks on them. Use the notebook."
"These are architectural studies," Marco said. "Not napkin doodles."
"The napkin I found stuck to the bathroom door with a drawing of the pipe routing system on it would like a word."
Marco looked at the notebook. "I was going to fix the pipe routing."
"I know you were. That's why I gave you the notebook." Ivan sat down on the corridor floor across from him. "Show me what you have so far."
Marco opened the pages he'd been filling since they arrived — floor plans, elevation sketches, notation about load points and material substitutions. Ivan leaned forward and looked at them with genuine attention, the same way he looked at anything structural, and the two of them spent an hour on the floor talking about the western wall reinforcement and whether the fourth floor could support a water storage system and what Spanish colonial rebar actually looked like versus modern construction.
At the end of it Ivan pointed to a sketch of the courtyard gate mechanism and said "I built this differently" and Marco said "I know, it's better than what I drew" and Ivan looked at him for a moment with something close to respect.
"You're going to be useful," Ivan said, like this was a conclusion he was formally reaching.
"I've been useful," Marco said.
"More useful," Ivan said. "Going forward."
Marco looked at the notebook in his hands.
"Yeah," he said. "Going forward."
◇ ◇ ◇
Lira found him on the fifth floor in the afternoon, sitting at a window with the notebook open on his knee, sketching the view.
She looked over his shoulder and didn't say anything for a moment.
The sketch was Intramuros from above — not as it was now, not the crashed cars and broken streets, but something imagined and careful. The colonial buildings restored. New structures in between them, lower and open, built around the existing walls rather than against them. Green space in the courtyard areas. The outline of the old gate visible in the new design rather than replaced.
"That's what it could look like," Lira said.
"Eventually." Marco didn't look up from the page. "Maybe. If enough people—" he paused. "If it ever becomes possible again to think about eventually."
Lira sat down beside him and looked at the sketch. She was an arts student. She understood the specific way a drawing was both what it showed and what it meant underneath.
"The walls are still there," she said.
"They've been there four hundred years." Marco shaded in the curve of the old bastion. "It'd feel wrong to take them down. They've held everything. Invasions, earthquakes, the whole last century." He paused. "And now this. They're still standing."
Lira looked at the sketch a moment longer.
"I'd want to live there," she said. "In the version you drew."
Marco looked up at her. Something in his face went slightly unguarded — the way things did when a person said exactly the right thing without knowing they were doing it.
"Me too," he said.
He went back to sketching. Lira stayed beside him at the window, and they didn't talk much for the rest of the hour, and it was the kind of quiet that didn't need filling.
◇ ◇ ◇
Ayesha found him at dinner.
The group had started eating together on the third floor — someone had pushed two corridor tables end to end and it had quietly become the thing they did every evening, everyone finding their spot without being assigned one. Marco always ended up in the middle somehow, which none of them had consciously arranged.
Ayesha sat across from him while the others were still getting food and said: "How's the arm."
"Good," Marco said. "Crisanta says it's clean."
"I heard." She looked at him. "I don't just mean the wound."
He held her gaze for a moment. Then looked at his plate. "It's strange," he said. "Being normal. After—" he stopped. "For a while I was so sure I was going to turn, every time I woke up I was surprised I was still myself. And now I wake up and I'm just awake." He paused. "I don't know what to do with just being awake."
"You're drawing," Ayesha said.
"I'm always drawing."
"You're planning." She looked at him steadily. "The building. The pipe routing. The courtyard. You've been thinking about what this place becomes, not just what it is right now." She tilted her head slightly. "That's not nothing, Marco. That's exactly what we need."
He was quiet for a moment.
"I want to see it finished," he said. "However long that takes. I want to be there when it's actually done."
Ayesha looked at him with something in her expression she didn't say out loud.
"You will be," she said.
◇ ◇ ◇
He came to Lucian that evening.
Lucian was in the courtyard running footwork drills with Hollow Fang, working the diagonal Void Step angles until they arrived without thought. He stopped when Marco appeared at the courtyard entrance, notebook under his arm, and waited.
"I won't take long," Marco said. "I just wanted to show you something."
He opened the notebook to a page near the middle and held it up.
It was a full rendering of Casa de Esperanza's facade — not the building as it was now, not the broken windows and stripped gate, but the building as it had been designed to look and several degrees better than that. He had drawn the courtyard with proper paving, the gate restored with additional ironwork, planter boxes along the ground floor windows. The upper floors had a rooftop garden sketched in — thin lines suggesting trellises and solar panels and a water collection edge.
But what Lucian looked at was the lower right corner, where Marco had written in small, careful lettering:
Casa de Esperanza. Intramuros City. Rebuilt, 2028.
"I know it's not realistic yet," Marco said. "Not for a long time, maybe. But I wanted a picture of what we're working toward. Something concrete." He looked at the drawing. "I needed to know it existed somewhere, even if it's just on paper."
Lucian looked at the drawing for a long time.
Then he said: "Keep working on it. When the time comes, we'll build it exactly like this."
Marco stared at him.
Lucian almost never made promises.
"Yeah?" Marco said.
"Yes."
Marco looked back at the drawing. Something settled in his face — not relief exactly, more the quality of a weight being redistributed rather than removed. Like he had been carrying this image of the future alone and someone had just said I'll carry that with you.
He closed the notebook carefully, like it contained something that needed protecting.
"Okay," he said. "Yeah. Okay."
He went back inside.
Lucian stood in the courtyard for a moment, looking at the gate Ivan had fixed — the restored hinge, the new locking pin, the draw-bar seated in its slot exactly as Marco had said it would be.
Rebuilt, 2028.
He went back to his footwork.
The diagonal angle, thirty more times.
Then he went to sleep, and the notebook sat on Marco's desk on the third floor, and outside the moon hung bright and constant over the old walls of Intramuros, and in the building Marco dreamed about something none of them could see yet.
Something that looked, in the dark behind his eyes, very much like what he had drawn.