25. Forever Young #4
She looked up at the window, looking at the stars outside. Charlie was in space, deep space, places humans could only dream about, her included. Yet, she didn’t know where to belong. Unless...
“Is there a version of this where I just... stay?” She asked softly.
She wouldn’t look at Reyna. She didn’t want her to see the plea of being accepted show more than her accepting she couldn’t go home.
“Not as the human who fell into Borran’s batter.
” She turned to Reyna now. “As someone who’s supposed to be here. ”
Reyna was quiet long enough that Charlie began to feel the itch of making a wrong decision at the nape of her neck, making her almost take it back, burying it under a joke and letting the stars swallow her truth.
“I don’t know,” Reyna said. Then, because something must have moved in Charlie’s face, she went on, faster than Charlie thought she’d meant to.
“I mean I don’t know yet.” Charlie watched as Reyna’s face changed slowly, turning from trepidation to consideration.
“There are tons of bullshit Coalition protocols for displaced persons including placement, status, even standing within Coalition hierarchy.” Reyna’s gaze bore into Charlie’s.
“But this is unprecedented in so many way. For one, I have never had to apply the protocols to someone who isn’t able to be repatriated.
And that’s only one piece. So, the full answer is, I don’t know yet which one fits your situation, your placement. Your future, Charlie.”
Reyna turned the pen once between her fingers, a small tell Charlie was starting to learn.
“But what I can promise you is that I will not have you filed as a variable with no assignment, Charlie Wickett.” Reyna’s eyes held Charlie’s hostage, and Charlie put up no fight. “These protocols do exist, but if not a single one of them fit our situation, I will find something that does.”
Charlie looked at her. She didn’t have words for what that felt like coming from Reyna. Instead, she felt the pain that had been present in her chest, free-falling since the Med Bay, catch on hope and hold.
“Okay,” she said, quietly. “That... that means a lot. Thank you, Rey.”
Reyna looked back out at the stars, but her shoulder stayed exactly where it was against Charlie’s. “Don’t thank me yet. I haven’t done anything.”
“Yes, you did.” Charlie said this with intent beyond what she was willing to admit. She didn’t say the obvious thing, which was that Reyna had taken the worst question Charlie had ever asked out loud and answered it by turning it into a problem she could solve.
Charlie was beginning to understand that this was Reyna’s whole language, solving problems. She just hadn’t learned yet how much it meant when Reyna decided to stay for you.
After that, they both came back the next night.
And the next, resuming their pattern from before.
The Observation Room became theirs because of their repetition.
It became theirs by the slow accumulation of nights on the same bench in the same starlight, talking around what was growing between them, both of them refusing to be anywhere else at three in the morning.
Some nights they talked for hours. Charlie told Reyna about Caltech, about the professor who’d said she thought like an engine and meant it as the highest compliment he had ever given a student.
Reyna told her about Novahall, about the two-truths exercise and the table Elena had claimed with a tray and a dare.
They passed the stories back and forth, each piece handed over without being asked, insights into each of their souls, shared for the first time with someone they each wanted to know.
Some nights they didn’t talk at all. They just sat and the silence was more than enough.
Somewhere in the accumulation of those nights, Charlie’s nightmare stopped.
The corridor with Katie aging at the end of it came less, and then it stopped altogether.
Charlie woke in the mornings to the ship’s hum and the smell of whatever Borran had decided was for breakfast. She did still think about the math, the bracelet on her wrist tying her to a sister whose time ran three times faster than her own now.
The weight of that concept hadn’t gone anywhere.
But it had stopped being the only thing she was holding.
Because if Charlie was being honest, she was holding the Observation Room now, the bench, the steady gold of a captain who was there with her at 0300, not asking why Charlie kept coming, every night, because she didn’t need to, even on the nights she arrived back inside her quarters before dawn.
She also held the weight of the Emberkind around her as well, the parts that mattered like Tavi’s hands going warm around hers when she’d said the worst of it out loud, or Maren’s steady hand on her shoulder, or even how the two of them sat with her grief and didn’t flinch or leave during a moment she didn’t realize how much she needed them.
Reyna had caught Charlie in the dark. And her friends were the ones keeping her upright in the daylight while the wound began to close.
And somewhere in the small hours between cycles, in a bay that smelled of coolant, in a room that smelled of nothing but starlight, Charlie Wickett stopped surviving the Emberkind and started living on it.
Cael blocked three of her repair requests that week. Not just denials but full-on blocks. Charlie realized this was worse, because a denial could be appealed. Instead, he left them sitting in the approval queue, waiting indefinitely while the systems they addressed kept quietly degrading.
Charlie routed the most urgent one through to Maren who had the authority to flag a safety priority, skipping Cael's queue entirely.
It was the same maneuver she'd learned as a woman at Caltech.
She was good at it, even though she hated being good at it.
She hated more that on this ship, the one place that had started to feel like somewhere she belonged, she still had to be good at finding her way around people with authority who underestimated her.
But in the background, Maren flagged it without a word, her shimmer flickering every time she noticed, and every time Charlie had to route through her, filing the request and the reason and the date, the way she'd been filing Cael's failures for seven years.
Noethans didn't forget. And a ledger that long would eventually be read out loud, whether they wanted to or not.