He did not save me by any act of his own; he was an infant.

He saved me by existing, by being someone I loved more than I feared my family, someone whose belonging I would defend even when I had never learned to defend my own.

That is what a child can do, sometimes, for a parent who has forgotten their own worth: not fix them, but give them, at last, a love urgent enough to fight for.

Noah gave me that.

He was my salvation.

And the empire we walked out into that day, the one built on love without conditions, was the house I built for him, so that he would never have to be saved from the thing I had needed saving from.

He would simply, from his first day to his last, be loved.

That was the whole of it.

That was everything.