36. Roma
ROMA
Alliance space arrives not as a place, but as a signal.
It cuts through the static first, thin and blue across my console, one clean identification ping threading itself through the battered silence of my ship.
Then another follows. Then six more. Friendly transponders.
Patrol beacons. Defense lattice signatures.
The data blooms across the forward display in increments, cautious at first, as if the universe itself does not trust us to have survived, then fuller and brighter until the nav screen fills with the impossible proof of it.
We are out.
Behind us, the galactic core burns in violent golds and bruised reds, gravity tearing light into ancient ribbons, the whole region snarling with radiation and debris.
Throgg’s vessel is no longer visible to the naked eye, swallowed by distance, interference, and the collapsing chaos of everything he thought he controlled.
The last telemetry ghost shows his ship caught inside the core-side interference well, boxed in by Zenos swarms, failing engines, and his own sealed command grid.
No pursuit vector follows us. No interception drone claws at our stern.
No Reaper fire stitches itself across my shields.
We are out, and Throgg is not.
Dad makes a sound from engineering that begins as a laugh and breaks into something rougher halfway through. “Well,” he says over the comm, voice hoarse, “I would like to formally submit my resignation from whatever the hell that was.”
Dux slumps back in the copilot seat, one hand still wrapped around the manual thruster control as if he expects the ship to change its mind and dive back into trouble for sport.
His face is grey beneath the soot and blood, his hair damp at the temples, his jaw shadowed with exhaustion.
When he looks at the Alliance transponder grid, his mouth opens slightly, but no words come out immediately.
That unsettles me more than the silence of space.
“Dux,” I say, checking his vitals from the seat readout because asking directly feels too large and too small at once. “Status.”
He turns his head toward me, and the corner of his mouth lifts. “Alive.”
“That is not a comprehensive status.”
“It’s the big one.”
Dad snorts through the comm. “He’s got a point, kid.”
I glance toward the engineering feed. Dad appears on the secondary screen upside down, wedged half beneath an open panel, his skinsuit collar undone and one cheek smeared black with grease. His hands are still moving even though there is no immediate crisis left for them to solve.
“Stop modifying things,” I say.
“I am stabilizing your stabilizers.”
“You destabilized them.”
“And now I am completing the emotional journey.”
“Dad.”
He looks into the camera with theatrical innocence. “What? You want to drift into Alliance space looking like we escaped by accident?”
Dux laughs softly, a low, cracked sound that seems to surprise him as much as it does me. It fills the cockpit with warmth I do not know how to categorize. The laugh turns into a wince as he presses a hand against his side, and my harness is off before I make a conscious decision to remove it.
“Don’t move,” I tell him.
He looks down at himself, then back at me. “I wasn’t planning to dance.”
“I said don’t move.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I kneel beside his seat, already pulling the med-kit from the side compartment.
The cockpit smells like overheated circuitry, recycled air, old fear, and him—sweat, smoke, blood, something clean beneath all the wreckage that my body recognizes before my mind permits it.
His sleeve is torn near the shoulder where the Reaper caught him, and the wound beneath is ugly but shallow enough to leave my lungs working.
He watches me cut the fabric away with medical shears. “You’re doing the face.”
“What face?”
“The one where you decide whether to scold me or save me.”
“I can multitask.”
“Lucky me.”
I clean the wound with antiseptic. His muscles tighten under my hand, but he does not pull away. The solution foams pink against his skin, and the sharp medicinal scent slices through the burnt-metal stink of the cockpit.
“You should have told me it reopened,” I say.
“Between the space walk, the Reapers, and your father committing mechanical crimes, it didn’t feel like the right time.”
Dad’s voice crackles through the open channel. “I hear slander, and I reject it on procedural grounds.”
“You rewired my ignition bus with a field clamp and prayer,” I say.
“Prayer had nothing to do with it. That was craftsmanship.”
“That was vandalism.”
“That was parenting.”
Dux looks between the comm panel and me, expression softening in a way that makes my hands slow against his arm. “You two sound like home.”
The words slip into the cockpit and change the pressure.
Dad goes quiet first, which is rare enough to be alarming.
I press the sealing bandage across Dux’s wound and smooth the edges down carefully, buying myself the time required to remember how speaking works.
Dux does not look away. He sits there with blood drying at his temple, exhaustion carved into every line of him, and still he looks at me as though I am not a blade, not a weapon, not a problem to solve or a danger to survive.
He looks at me as though I am a place he intends to return to.
“That is a dangerous thing to say,” I murmur.
His voice drops. “I know.”
“I have not been safe for anyone.”
“Neither has most of space. I’m still fond of it.”
“That is not a sound comparison.”
“It’s the one I’ve got.”
I should stand. I should check the drive temperature, answer the Alliance hail now pulsing patiently at the edge of my console, confirm shield integrity, verify Dad has not introduced a new and artistic flaw into my ship.
Instead I remain kneeling beside Dux’s chair with my hand still resting against the bandage on his arm, feeling his body heat through the edges of the dressing, listening to the soft rhythm of his breath through the filtered air.
The comm light blinks.
Dad clears his throat from engineering, quieter now. “I’m going to mute myself for thirty seconds and pretend I’m not old enough to understand subtext.”
“Dad,” I warn.
“Thirty seconds. Maybe forty-five. Depends how sentimental you two get.”
The engineering channel clicks to private, though I know perfectly well he can override it whenever he likes.
“He gave us privacy.”
“He gave us performative privacy.”
“Still counts.”
I rise from the floor, but only enough to sit on the edge of the console beside him.
My knees feel unsteady, which is absurd.
I have crossed hostile hulls under fire.
I have ruptured Throgg’s systems with a knife.
I have flown an unstable ship through a Reaper firing pattern and treated uncertainty like a tool instead of a failure.
Sitting near Dux in a quiet cockpit should not be the thing that threatens my equilibrium.
Yet here I am.
He reaches for my burned hand, slow enough that I can refuse.
I do not. His fingers close around my wrist with a gentleness that makes my throat ache, and he turns my palm upward to inspect the damage.
The glove is ruined. The skin beneath is reddened, blistered in places, still trembling slightly from the electrical surge.
“You hid this,” he says.
“I prioritized.”
“You hid it.”
“I did both.”
His thumb traces the uninjured edge of my palm, careful as breath. “Roma.”
My name in his mouth no longer sounds like a warning. It sounds like a door opening.
I look at the Alliance grid shining beyond him, the distant lights of safety waiting on the screen.
We have spent so long in motion that stillness feels hostile.
My mind keeps reaching for the next threat, the next calculation, the next reason not to step fully into what has been building between us.
Throgg is trapped. The Reapers are behind us.
Dad is alive. Dux is alive. I am alive, and for once survival is not an ending.
It is an invitation.
“I chose you,” I say.
His hand stills around mine.
“I know.”
“No,” I say, because precision matters and because hiding behind implication has become exhausting. “You know what I did. I am telling you what it means.”
He sits forward slowly, eyes locked on mine. The cockpit lights flicker once, soft across his face, and outside the forward glass Alliance beacons blink like patient stars.
“Tell me,” he says.
The words are simple. The space between them is not.
“I chose you when the faster escape route required leaving you. I chose you when the old version of me would have made a cleaner decision. I chose you again when we launched because I allowed imperfect variables to stand instead of cutting them away.” My voice wants to tighten, but I refuse to let it.
I am tired of translating tenderness into strategy to make it easier to survive.
“I am still afraid. I am still difficult. I will likely continue to be insufferable about systems, protocols, and your tendency to bleed without reporting it.”
“That last one feels fair.”
“I am not finished.”
His smile fades into something deeper, something almost reverent.
I draw a breath and taste metal, antiseptic, smoke, and the terrifying cleanliness of truth.
“I want you. Not as an emergency. Not as a battlefield exception. Not as something I explain away when we dock and the lights are bright enough to make everything feel less desperate. I want you in the aftermath. I want you when the engines are quiet. I want you when there is no immediate death making honesty efficient.”
Dux’s eyes shine, though he would probably blame exhaustion, decompression, or atmospheric particulates if pressed. He stands, a little stiffly, and steps close enough that my knees bracket the space between us where I sit on the console edge.
“Roma,” he says, and his voice is rough enough to scrape sparks from me, “I don’t want to be something you survived.”