Emery. Josh went weak at the knees. He'd found him. Emery was here, sounding haughty and impatient. Josh would know his voice anywhere, despite the cough and how long it had been. His vision swam with the comforting familiarity of it; he suspected the hardest part was yet to come, so he'd take whatever comfort he could get. His throat worked, but it took him a few moments for it to form anything other than jagged gasps. "Em... Emery."

"Josh," the other man replied, as casually as if they'd ran into one another at a coffee shop.

"Emery," he repeated, words failing him now that he had the other man in front of him, "I saw you on TV."

"And now you've seen me in person," Emery rasped, in between bouts of coughing, "so feel free to leave."

There it was. The stubbornness that defined him hadn't taken long to make an appearance. "No, I haven't. I can't see a thing. Can we go somewhere else? Please."

"What are you doing here, Josh?"

"Trying to see your face, for starters. Can we please go where there's light? Or," he continued, anticipating resistance, "I can keep right on yelling while you walk away from me, if you'd rather?"

"If you'd do that here I have no choice but to conclude the years haven't been kind to your intellect," was Emery's unflappable reply.

The other man hadn't lost his touch — he could still wrench helpless laughter out of Josh with a straight face. Or what Josh assumed was a straight face, considering his light was still pointed at Emery's ankles. "Want to prove you're the grownup and go with me somewhere else, then?"

He suspected Emery would have offered a long-suffering sigh, if he hadn't been busy coughing. As things were, he simply said, "Very well. Follow me."

Josh would have gotten lost — or rather, he'd have remained lost — if not for Emery, who could apparently navigate better in the dark than Josh ever could during the daytime. He walked through the twisting paths slowly, his shoeless feet hindering him, but he never stopped to figure out where he was going. Soon they were out of the winding paths and onto the main one, street lamps finally making a timid appearance; Josh put his phone away in his pocket and sped up to walk side by side with Emery, drinking in the sight of him at last.

The first thing he noticed was that Emery wasn't wearing a jacket; he was dressed in the torn remains of what Josh could only guess had been one of his tailored shirts and a pair of ugly sweatpants two sizes too big. His usually impeccably shaved face now sported an overgrown unkempt beard that somehow only seemed to emphasize the weight he'd lost. He'd always been a thin man, but now he looked downright gaunt. His face was bruised, blood having crusted near his eyebrow; a likely clue as to why he wasn't wearing his glasses.

He couldn't see properly without his glasses, Josh remembered, a knot forming in his throat. How long had he been out on the streets without even being able to tell expressions apart?

Emery halted as Josh made to unzip his jacket. "Do not."

"It's freezing, and your shirt's seen better days," Josh pleaded. "Mine's warm enough for a bit."

"It's freezing," Emery echoed, "and you were just running as though Cerberus were at your heels. Exposing yourself to this temperature when the sweat hasn't even cooled is asking to catch your death."

There was no arguing with him on the best of days, and Josh had bigger battles to pick. He dropped his hand from the zipper, hoping it would only be a little longer before Emery was safely in the car. If the car hadn't been towed or stolen — Josh couldn't remember if he'd locked it. But that wasn't important right now.

Emery sat on a long narrow bench opposite a lamplight, gesturing for Josh to sit as he once had in his office, whenever they had something to discuss. Something told Josh to maintain his distance as he complied.

"Very well," the other man cut straight to the point. "You've seen my face. Do you require anything else?"