6. The Chair #5
But something told her that this relationship, that this woman, though she was important to Reyna and to Reyna's life, was not the answer.
She wasn't it. And that was okay.
The next day, Reyna watched Vessi walk through the airlock to the transport shuttle that would take her to her new position.
As she watched her go, she felt that specific absence of a presence she had become fond of no longer being there.
A tender ache of a chapter ending well. If anything, there was a lesson to be learned from this for Reyna.
That one could experience a real relationship and let someone in, and then come out the other side, completely and wholly intact.
"You okay?" Elena asked her quietly as she stood next to Reyna watching the shuttle depart.
"Yeah," Reyna answered. "I'm fine."
"You always say that."
Reyna turned to Elena. "That may be true, but, I am."
"Promise?"
Reyna smiled. "Promise."
And she meant it.
"I'm going to hug you now," Elena informed her. Reyna actually laughed, letting her be enveloped in between Elena's long arms.
And this was why she meant it when she said she was fine. Because she had people in her life that could carry her through the pain of this ending, no matter how long it lasted. She had Elena and Jere to be her support team, and she was grateful beyond measure for that, and that alone.
? 1977 / CYCLE 487 | EMBERKIND CV-0417, THE FRONTIER ?
Over ten years on the Emberkind, and Elena, Reyna, and Jere still hadn't found a way to not argue about mission leadership.
The next mission on the docket was routine. They would be answering a distress beacon from the Frontier, with a standard animal-rescue protocol. It would only require a small crew, who would deploy to assess and retrieve as needed.
Elena was the one to assemble the team herself because she'd beaten Jere in the round this time. Jere had pouted. Reyna had rolled her eyes.
Reyna was on the bridge with Elena at the airlock. Forty meters of corridor between them with a standard pre-deployment checklist they were checking off together, even though both of them could recite from memory.
"Got your trinket?" Reyna asked without looking up from her console, the last item on the checklist to complete.
Completely routine. It was sentence she had said before every deployment since her appointment to First Mate granted her leader privileges while Elena was off-ship.
Elena had always answered it the same way every time.
Elena patted her suit's padded pocket and nodded. "Got it. What about you? Got your trinket?"
Reyna touched the pen inside her uniform. "Got my trinket. Always." Elena walked into airlock, switching to comms through her suit. Reyna could hear her through the command console.
"Do me a favor, Solas, and try not to reorganize my entire filing system while I'm gone. Again."
"With all due respect, Captain, your filing system is an insult to the concept of organization."
"And yet the ship runs."
Reyna actually looked up from the console and stared at her best friend through the airlock window. "The ship only runs because I reorganize your filing system every time you leave."
Elena laughed, her violet markings pulsing at their steady, warm rhythm. The purple light caught the airlock frame and threw a faint glow across Elena's suit as she turned around in the airlock, ready to board the shuttle.
Reyna watched her and the rest of the team walk toward the shuttle bay. Once on board, she watched the shuttle doors close.
"All aboard, Solas."
"Affirmative, Captain. Waiting for launch from shuttle flight."
"Affirmative."
And minutes later, the shuttle launched, Reyna stationed at her console, ready for the mission ahead.
Elena's most recent hire was a Tessarae named Tavi Breck, a software engineer from Solmari who had arrived three months prior with more enthusiasm than Reyna knew how to reasonably accommodate.
He was a small, bright young man, possessed with the particular Tessarae gift for making every room he entered feel slightly warmer than it had been before he walked in.
Reyna hadn't quite figured him out yet, but Elena had been insistent.
"Trust me," she'd said. "The engineering department needs what he has.
" Reyna had asked what, exactly, that was.
Elena had said, "Heart," and refused to elaborate.
He was somewhere on Deck 3 when Elena left for the mission, running diagnostics on a subsystem in preparation for the launch. But she would remember him later as one of the people who stayed.
It was four hours into the mission when comms went irregular.
They became sparse, whole blackouts lasting for thirty seconds, sometimes more.
Reyna was at her station, tension strained between her shoulders, but they were handling it.
The crew knew what to do, how to complete the mission, even if comms continued to be erratic or even go out completely.
"I had a feeling that planet's atmosphere would mess with our instruments," the Bridge Engineer stated from his console.
"Is there anything you can do to try and get a clear channel through?"
"Nothing that I haven't already thought to try, Second. But I'll keep doing what I can."
"Affirmative, Cadet. And appreciated."
Garbled transmissions they were used to, nothing unusual about those in the Frontier.
Between signal interference from nebular debris, solar interference, and the particular electromagnetic noise that came with operating in deep space, Reyna knew it was sometimes just an adjustment of the comm array that would fix the problem.
But not here.
"Second, I'm getting some weird energy readings transmitting through the comm array."
"What kind of readings?" Reyna asked. Was that even possible?
"I," the Engineer started. "I don't know, Second."
Reyna stood up and walked over to the Engineer's console, looking over the readings herself. She was looking at the same thing he had said to her, but she couldn't make sense of it either.
Then crew members began PERS-ing back, one by one, materializing in their designated return zones on the Bridge. Reyna spun around and saw, as each one arrived, how they were rattled and frightened.
"The equipment," one began. "It was failing. We were losing time—"
"It was an environmental cascade, Second, right on the surface—"
"We just—"
"It was an emergency—"
"It's okay," Reyna said, approaching them all, touching their arms and turning around as more arrived. "It's okay."
Then Jere made it through.
"Jere!" Reyna shouted, not even bothering to cover her relief. She ran to him and threw her arms around him. He stumbled into her embrace, but raised his arms to envelope her. "Are you okay?" She asked.
"I'm okay," Jere said, a bit too flatly for Reyna's liking. She pulled out of the hug but kept her hands on his arms.
"What happened?"
He looked at her. She noticed a scrape over his eyebrow, small droplets of blood dripping from it down the side of his face. "Everything, Rey," he replied, his voice sounding hollow. "All at once."
"What do you mean?"
"Everything just... failed. All the equipment, all the instruments, all the systems. They just shut down, or exploded even."
"Exploded?"
Jere nodded. "I have no idea what happened. But whatever it was, it knocked our whole set of shuttle equipment clear on its ass."
"Did anything make it back?"
Jere shook his head. "I doubt it. Everyone saw what was happening and Elena shouted to activate emergency retrieval protocol over comms. So we all began PERS-ing back."
At his words, Reyna's blood ran cold. She turned away from Jere, looking around at all the crew members surrounding her. She stood on that bridge and counted them, one by one. She knew the entire team roster by heart. It was the same team Elena always took with her when she accompanied missions.
Reyna mentally counted each name against the list in her head, ticking each of them off as the PERS beacons activated and her people came home.
She got to the end of the list, and only two names remained.
"Where's Elena?" Reyna asked, looking towards Jere. Jere's sudden attention at her words made Reyna's stomach drop out from under her.
"She's not here?"
Just then, another PERS beacon activated, flickering against the floor as the person came through.
It was not Elena.
"Are you okay?" Reyna asked the crew member when they made it completely through. "What happened?"
"I was..." the crew member started, trying to get it together.
"I was away from the team when everything happened, working on the containment enclosures.
I... I heard the Captain call for PERS activation, but something wasn't working.
" The crew member began to tear up, and Reyna bent down, sitting next to them on the floor, reaching out and placing a hand on their shoulder.
"It's okay, you're here now," Reyna remarked. The crew member nodded, taking a shaky breath. "Can you tell me what happened next?" Reyna asked, as Jere joined her on her right, sitting next to her and listening to the crew member's story.
"I called for help. That's when I saw the Captain running to me."
Reyna's heart skipped a beat.
"She came to me and took out her datapad, trying to reconfigure my PERS device on the ground."
"That's our Elena," Jere said.
"She obviously got it to work," Reyna commented.
"She did," the crew member replied. "She told me I was good to go, backed away, and activated her own PERS device. That's when I activated my own and, well, here I am."
Reyna's throat went dry. "You're saying Captain Voss activated her PERS device before you?"
"Yes," the crew member responded. "Where is she, by the way? I need to thank her properly."
Reyna felt her world suddenly close in. A black shadow began to cloud her vision, making details disappear.
Sounds began to buzz around her, no longer making sense.
All she could feel was the sudden presence of Jere holding her tightly again, his hands gripping her shoulders as they sat on the floor.