34. The Last Almost #3
"The Kaelari have to hear it from me directly. If I go myself, if I stand in front of them and—"
"Rey."
Reyna stopped.
Charlie was in her path, not blocking it, but putting herself where Reyna would have to see her, still leaving her all the room in the world to go around.
"Look at me," Charlie said. "Please."
And suddenly, she had no more fight left. Not when she heard Charlie plead.
So she looked at her.
Charlie's face was wide open. No teasing, no deflection, no barrier at all. The nebula was all over her.
Every part of Reyna turned to her like a magnet, a compass pointing exactly where Reyna should have headed since Charlie landed on the Emberkind.
Her breathing stopped. She looked directly at Charlie.
"I can't lose—"
You.
She placed both hands over her face and stood there on the brink.
She had four seconds of standing still before it came back up. She lowered her hands and began pacing again.
"The transfer instruction is a form. It's a form. Correspondence, and correspondence can be delayed. Hell, Torvax has held Coalition paperwork under review for two cycles already. It's not that hard, and it's definitely not illegal. Frankly, it's not even irregular—"
"Reyna."
"—and if it sits in review long enough, the objection has to be reheard, and if it is reheard, I get to be in the room. And so help me, if somebody in that building has to look me in the face while they say it—"
"Reyna, stop—"
She was at the viewport again. She turned.
"I am not stopping." Her voice came out wrong. "I've never stopped because that's the job. You don't stop. You just keep going until the thing gives or you do—"
Charlie said her name again, but Reyna went past her.
She could not look at her because she had looked once already, and it had taken everything she had to not fall apart.
Behind her, Charlie went quiet.
Good. That was good. If Charlie stopped, then Reyna could keep going, and if she kept going, then eventually she would get to the next step, and there would be something on the other side of it, there had to be—
Reyna's internal rant was suddenly interrupted when the room detonated.
Sound, everywhere, all at once, at a volume that was far too loud for this room yet perfect for whatever was playing. Reyna stopped mid-stride so fast she nearly went over.
"What—"
A woman's voice, enormous, and under it a rhythm like a hammer. It was coming out of the Observation Room's own speakers, the ones that had never, in Reyna's memory, played anything at all.
Then Reyna caught movement from where Charlie was standing and watched her toss her datapad onto the bench.
And start dancing.
"Charlie, what are you—"
"Come on, Reyna," Charlie interrupted, spinning now. "It's Whitney. You cannot stand still to Whitney, it's not physically possible. Dance with me. Get your wiggles out."
"Get my what out?"
"Your wiggles." Charlie kept going. "Your pacing-in-front-of-a-viewport-while-your-hair-falls-out wiggles. Dance it out!"
"This is completely—"
"Ridiculous? Yes." Charlie grabbed her hands. "That's the point. Now dance."
Reyna pulled back.
But Charlie held on, and Reyna knew that grip. She had watched it applied to a dying engine, and a flooded bay, and a Coalition supply requisition, not to mention every immovable object this universe had put in front of Charlie Wickett in the last few months, and it had never, once, let go.
And right now, that grip was not going to let go of her.
"Come on, come on, come on—"
Reyna laughed. A real one. She heard it happen and couldn't believe it.
It came out of her before she could even have a chance to stop it.
But this wasn't the captain's laugh, the one she used professionally.
It was the other one, the one that seemed to only show up when Charlie was around.
Because she'd discovered that this laugh only belonged to Charlie.
There was a Coalition denial sitting in her chest, a Fleet Admiral three sectors away, and a woman being taken off this ship inside a cycle.
And Reyna Solas stood in the middle of the Observation Room and laughed like an idiot.
"You are insane," she said.
"Completely!" Charlie was grinning. "Do you know what this song is called?"
Reyna shook her head.
"It's called 'I Wanna Dance with Somebody.' So, can you see my problem? I have a somebody and she's pacing."
Reyna stared at Charlie, feeling the resolve slip.
"Come on, Rey," Charlie pleaded. "Dance with me."
And then Reyna started to dance.
The truth was, she was horrifically bad at it.
If the Thriller dance had been any indication, it was evident right now that Reyna was not a dancer.
She had attended state functions on nine worlds and could hold a receiving line for three hours without a single misstep, for God's sake.
But it turned out that none of that had anything to do with this.
She was stiff, and counting, and completely aware of her own arms in a way she hadn't been since she was fourteen.
Charlie didn't care in the slightest.
Charlie grabbed her by both hands and pulled her around in a circle, and then let go and danced around her, orbiting her like a small, determined moon, before coming back and taking her hands again. The whole time she was laughing, and Reyna kept going where she was pulled.
"Okay, wait, wait, wait." Charlie was still holding on to her, still moving, and she was grinning like she'd just remembered something. "Here it comes. This part."
"What part—"
"Just listen."
Reyna listened.
The woman was making a demand, and she had gotten pretty specific about it. Nothing cautious or temporary, that she wanted the kind that was still going in forty years, and she wanted it, she was very clear about this, from a man.
And Charlie stopped dead when that word hit and shook her head, big and slow, all the way to both sides, with her whole face making a production of it. She pointed one finger straight up at the speakers like the song had personally offended her.
"Nope," Charlie said.
"Nope?"
"Not for me." Charlie was laughing again. "Wrong. Whole thing, wrong."
"It's your song."
"It's a great song! She's just wrong about that man part." And Reyna laughed again, boisterous and resonant.
Then Charlie spun herself under Reyna's arm, which made Reyna lose the beat entirely. But she didn't even care.
Charlie stopped and put a hand on Reyna's side.
"Okay," Charlie said. "Give me your hand."
Reyna didn't hesitate.
"Other one," Charlie said, grinning. "God, you really are bad at this. This one. Up. Out. Like that. Now hold on."
Charlie's hand was flat against her ribs. Reyna's other hand was up in the air, locked into Charlie's. There was a pattern in Charlie's feet that Reyna's were apparently supposed to answer, and she got about half of it.
They went around the Observation Room in a wide crooked circle. The nebula wheeled in the viewport behind them while their reflections danced across the glass.
"Where did you even learn this?" Reyna asked.
"Television."
"What?"
"Late-night television," Charlie said, like that explained it. "Ask me later. For now, just spin."
"Spin?"
And Charlie took both her hands in one of hers, and spun her in her arms.
But the part that Reyna didn't see coming was that one second she was upright, and the next, Charlie supported her entirely and the room went over sideways. Reyna made a sound she had never made in her life, a short, undignified yelp.
And then she was laughing so hard she couldn't stand up.
So Charlie hauled her upright, but Reyna went straight back down again, folded over, one hand on Charlie's shoulder, wheezing. Then Charlie was laughing too, and the two of them stood in the middle of a nebula holding onto each other, laughing so hard they couldn't breathe.
"What the hell was that?”
“A dip!”
“A dip? Is that something that happens in dancing?”
“It does.”
“So you dipped me!?"
"You bet your ass."
"Pardon?"
"Something my dad used to say."
"But I'm the captain of this vessel!"
"Not right now you're not." And then Charlie reached for her again. "Come here."
And then Charlie spun her out to the end of her own arm before reeling her back in and catching her.
Somewhere in between the dancing and the spinning and the laughter, the running commentary in Reyna's head stopped. The part of her that had always been standing behind her left shoulder for as long as she could remember, watching her, assessing how she looked doing it, just went quiet.
So she let Charlie lead, she let Charlie spin her, and she let herself be ridiculous, out loud, for the first time she could ever remember.
Then the song ended.
They stopped in the middle of the room, both of them breathing hard, Charlie's hand still in hers.
"See?" Charlie's face was bright and lit up, her cheeks pink, and a wide grin etched on her face. "Dancing always makes everything better."
Reyna just looked at her.
And kept looking.
It went on too long, Reyna was completely aware of that. There was a point where a reasonable person would have said something, but Reyna went past it. She stood in the middle of the Observation Room, looking at Charlie Wickett, and couldn't stop.
And the whole night came back up. The denial, the Admiral, the transfer instruction, all of it, except this time there was nothing to fight.
They are taking you.
And I've never said to you what I should.
And I let every night of it go by because I was afraid, afraid of the completely wrong thing, and I would give anything, anything at all, for one more—
Charlie caught her staring.
"What?"
But then another song began to play.
Reyna didn't move.
"What just happened?"
It came out of her breathy and strange, and she watched Charlie take a moment before she answered.
"Autoshuffle."
Reyna laughed. "Autoshuffle?" She was trying to stifle the laugh and failing. "What is that, exactly?"
"Uh, well." Charlie shifted her weight. "Tavi invented it. For the music program."
"The music program."
"Yeah. The, uh. The one we use on our datapads. To play music."
"I am familiar with it," Reyna said.