2. Two Truths #6
"Growing up there, I learned to map rooms to avoid trouble of any kind, even if it was just kids playing games," she continued, because they were listening and she found, unexpectedly, that she wanted to keep talking.
This was new. "I learned to assess people by how they moved, not what they said.
I learned that the safest place in any space is the one where you can see trouble coming and have an exit route open and planned before it arrives.
" She looked up. "That's what I was doing in the mess hall, the night we met.
I wasn't being antisocial. I was just...
surviving, the only way I ever known how. "
Jere didn't say anything right away, but he was looking at her with an expression she'd come to recognize as him feeling something he wasn't trying to hide, because Jere had never in his life tried to hide any feeling.
Elena was the harder to read, remembering how she had mimicked Reyna's actions that first night. And now, her markings didn't fluctuate, but her eyes were softer than Reyna had ever seen them. But it wasn't pity, instead something closer to recognition.
"That explains the exits," Elena said.
"It explains a lot of things," Reyna said.
And then, because the vulnerability was starting to weigh her, preparing to put a wall back up before she lost the ability to do so, she continued.
"It's fine. I don't need anyone to feel sorry for me.
I'm not telling you both for sympathy or anything.
I'm telling you because you asked and, apparently, I trust you both enough to answer honestly, which is inconvenient and, if it's alright with the two of you, I'd like to stop now. "
Jere laughed gently. He reached over and put his hand on top of hers on the table, just resting it there.
"You know you can change your narrative," he said distinctly. "You have one now, a family." Reyna looked at him, her eyebrows pinched together. "Us, you beautiful, stubborn bonehead," Jere replied, his laugh returning. "You're stuck with us."
"I didn't ask for that," Reyna said, working so hard to contain her reaction, as if this were not the most significant thing anyone had ever said to Reyna in her life.
"Nobody asks for family, Rey. That's the whole point."
Elena looked at Reyna across the table. "He's right," she started.
"I decided this a long time ago, only shortly after we met and I watched you take in that mess hall the same way some of the most diligent captains I've ever worked with try to do.
" Reyna's heart began to beat faster. She didn't know Elena had been examining her skills that closely right from the beginning.
"I've just been waiting for you to be ready to hear it. "
Reyna looked at Jere's hand on hers, then back to Elena's gaze. She looked around the kitchen, warm and low-lit, with the chef's silhouette moving gently in the background.
And she didn't pull her hand away.
She didn't say thank you, not that she didn't want to, but because uttering the words out loud would have broken her. And she never cried, especially in the kitchen no matter how many perfect statements Jere and Elena had said while sitting with her, talking about family, holding her hand.
Instead, she stayed, like she'd learned to do while at student at Novahall. And when the chef appeared thirty seconds later with a fresh drink to replace her, now, cold one, he set it down with care, Reyna knowing he had heard every word. And that was okay.
They sat there for a long time after that.
As time went on, they firmly developed a shared language between the three of them, woven through with Jere's creatures and Elena's ambition and Reyna's startling competence.
Once, an instructor suggested they'd make a great team, with animal handling completed by Jere, operations handled by Elena, and Reyna as lead or captain, insisting she displayed command potential. But Reyna shut that down. Quick, clean, and final.
"I'm not captain material. Elena is."
Elena had pulled her aside after, pulling Jere in with them. She stared Reyna down, making her squirm slightly at the center of those determined eyes.
"You're wrong, you know," Elena said simply. There was no argument and, what Reyna believed, no evidence. But Elena said it as though it was plain fact, delivered as though she knew the universe would rearrange itself to comply.
"I'm not," Reyna insisted, getting frustrated with this repetitive anecdote that didn't make sense.
"But you are, Rey," Jere added, gentle and certain. Reyna realized it was the same voice he used with frightened animals. "You just don't think you're allowed to believe it."
Reyna looked between them. Two people watching her with an expression of pure patience, having decided something about her and were willing to wait as long as it took for her to catch up.
She didn't agree, and instead changed the subject. They let her, for now, and nobody mentioned it again for a long while.
But after that conversation, pulled aside outside a simulation room in the corridors of Novahall, she felt it.
Their certainty, pushing and pressing against the walls she'd built.
They weren't trying to break through, but instead would just keep leaning, gently, and persistently, against them until they were no longer there.
She wasn't ready, not yet.
But she stayed, and didn't leave the table.
Two weeks before their time at Novahall would be over it was the day the postings went up. Reyna stood in Novahall's main assembly hall, feeling as though the ground was rolling beneath her.
But not for herself. She hadn't expected any type of leadership posting.
She'd done well enough, better than well enough, if she was being honest, though being honest about her own competence was something she was still learning to do.
But leadership postings went to cadets with connections and lineage, with the kind of confidence that filled a room.
Leadership postings went to people like Elena.
Captainship. Reyna read the name on the board and felt a swell of pride so fierce it startled her. Captain Elena Voss. Assigned: CMS Emberkind.
Reyna was familiar with the Emberkind. It wasn't exactly a prestigious vessel.
It wasn't one of the Coalition's gleaming new cruisers or diplomatic flagships.
The Emberkind, reading about it in the academy archives, was an ancient ship, centuries old in fact, and had passed through so many crews and so many purposes that it had become a kind of institutional 'hot potato'.
Once a collection vessel, sent to explore the universe and transport back anything found, wanted, or needed, including research specimens, rare materials, and valuable resources.
Now, it was limping through its final decades of service with a skeleton crew and core systems that hadn't been properly updated in longer than some species had been in Coalition's records.
Some graduates smirked while a few even offered Elena condolences that were really hiding their own celebrations that they hadn't drawn the same assignment.
Reyna knew that the Emberkind was considered a joke, like the Coalition's footnote to their long list of competent starships.
It seemed this ship only existed because nobody had gotten around to decommissioning it.
But Reyna reveled that Elena didn't even flinch.
Not once. She stood in front of that posting board with her chin level and the violet light of her markings pulsing steadily, unbothered.
Reyna watched the smirkers with a cold fury.
These people didn't know Elena. They didn't know what she could do with a ship nobody else wanted, that she looked at broken things and saw what they could become.
The same way she looked at me.
The thought arrived before Reyna could stop it. But it was true. As much as Jere believed in everything good and gentle in this universe, Elena knew its hardships. She'd seen Reyna that first day, and could see her potential. Reyna just hadn't realized it until now.
Later on, when celebrations and discussions about postings had moved to the mess hall, Elena found Reyna in the crowd. She walked straight to her, past the others still around.
"Operations officer," Elena said, without preamble.
Reyna stared at her. "Excuse me?"
"I need an operations officer. I'm requesting you."
The assembly hall noise seemed to thin. Reyna's mouth went dry. "Elena, I'm not...," she began, bile rising in her throat. "You should pick someone with command experience. Someone—"