Chapter 36
Mighty Pawn
Seeing the warmth fade out of Davik’s soulful, dark eyes was worse than when she had seen him bloodied on the floor of The Argent. She was trapped in the moment, watching her words spear into him, witnessing the spirit and hope in his face slip away.
“What do you mean?” Davik asked, and she could hear a tremor in his voice. “You said we could make this work. I don’t care if you have to fight. I can handle that. Just stay, Fia, please. You can’t just—”
She watched as his pain turned into something sharper, and his shoulders rose as he visibly braced himself and inhaled.
“Why?” he asked, his tone shifting to the flatness of forced calm.
“I cannot stay. And even if I did—”
She paused, swallowing the waver in her words before it could take hold.
She couldn’t explain that. She couldn’t explain that staying behind would destroy her. How she could not bear to have him see her as a weak, purposeless thing, stranded in a star system while her people struggled without her.
And if she had stayed? He had said that the risk she brought to his life was acceptable, but she knew he was saying it through the rose-tinted lenses of heady lust and na?ve excitement.
There was no way he could truly understand what a life lived with her would be, what hazards her existence around him would bring. Especially if she was wracked with restless guilt while the Fleet she swore an oath to serve made its final exodus.
He deserves to live a normal life.
“It is too dangerous. Where we are going, I cannot take you,” she concluded. A truth, but an unsatisfying one.
“Bullshit!” he yelled, pointing at her as he spoke.
“It’s my life, and I get to decide what’s too dangerous.
You didn’t even ask me! You ran some sort of risk assessment and made a decision without considering me!
” He threw his hands up in the air in exasperation.
“Or maybe you decided that the risks of this, whatever it is we are, aren’t worth it. To you.”
It didn’t matter that she was right in her decision. Being right did not make this hurt less.
Fia’s hand twitched. She felt the urge to bolt forward and sweep him up in her arms. To drown him in words, to explain the how, the why, the cruel importance of this.
But that would only be a selfish gesture.
It would make her feel vindicated and take away any solace he might have in his anger, his loathing.
Hate was an easier emotion to manage. Hate is better than sorrow. And she couldn’t bear to subject him to more sorrow, not after everything he had been through.
So, she held back her urge to touch him, to clarify that she was doing the morally right thing. To tell him that she was being noble, virtuous. That this was for him, that she was saving him from sacrificing his future to be with her.
It didn’t matter. There would be no words of comfort she could offer him.
Everything she had would only delay the pain.
Instead, she tucked her arms behind her back in the poised posture of the officer she always was.
She could not risk a bold lie, nor could she tell him she did this out of love.
A bitter half-truth would have to suffice.
“I swore an oath.”
His eyes were welling with tears. Hers were still tightly held back. She couldn’t let that bubbling heave of sorrow form in her chest. She wouldn’t collapse. The sensation of a sob rose, but she suffocated it with a pained swallow.
“So what? The last few months were what, Fi? You had an oath this whole time. You had an oath when we held each other, when we dreamed of what we could be together.” He nearly spat the words at her, his fingers pointing and jabbing towards the space between them with every syllable.
“We were talking about what sort of fucking vegetables you would want to grow in a garden with me. Hell, you nearly killed your own goddamn commander, so your oath clearly isn’t as ironclad as you say! ”
This was good. He was becoming angry. Venomous was better than vulnerable.
“I was wrong.” Her vision clouded with the precursor of tears, and she struggled to see the man she was pushing away through the haze.
Her throat tightened, but she remained resolute.
“You let me indulge in a fantasy of a life after this conflict, and I am grateful for that. But there is no path forward here for my people. Not now. Not ever.”
“Bullshit,” he hissed quietly. The fire in his words dimmed.
“You won’t even look at me. You won’t even give me the decency to look me in the eye and tell me.
You said that the term hivemind was inaccurate, but you dipped one toe in that pond, and all the sudden you are a model soldier all over again.
” He sucked in a quick breath. “You’re terrified of stepping outside your comfort zone, even if that comfort zone is a goddamn warship.
Even if what waits outside of that warship is a man who—”
Don’t say it. Please. Please, Davik. Don’t.
“No, you know. You don’t realize how insane this is. You were gone. You were filed as a lost cause and a mysterious casualty. You know that, right? They moved on. They moved on, and you could have, too.”
His figure was hazy in her vision, but she could see his hands raking through his hair, pulling angrily at his beautiful, soft curls in frustration. He ground his palms into his temples and let out a sob that shook into a weak laugh.
“You’re strong, Fia. You’ll be such a fantastic pawn for them, I’m sure of it.”
The commander presented Davik with payment for services rendered. He accepted it. Words were exchanged, but Fia stayed put behind the walls of her returned home. She couldn’t bear to witness it.
She risked a peek when his ship was departing. Fia followed the path of The Argent as it left the dock with her heart in her throat. It slid off into the black ocean of the sky, and a small part of her went with it. She couldn’t feel the shape of what she had lost yet, just its absence.
An attendant brought her the things Davik had gathered from the ship.
Her pack, her clothes, her stickers, tinctures, toiletries, and a tightly rolled black and orange kerchief that tumbled out of the side of her pack as she unzipped it.
It unfurled as it rolled across the floor, and a small chestnut-colored trinket slipped free.
It was a stone carving of a llevir, about the size of a tangerine. The one she had bought on Tescatua Station. The memento she took from the night he poured his heart out to her.