24. What We’ve Lost
TWENTY-FOUR
WHAT WE’VE LOST
Reyna had told herself she would only stay for ten minutes.
That was a reasonable amount of time. She figured it was long enough to acknowledge the possibility that Charlie might wander here after the Med Bay, but short enough that the act could still be explained if she didn't show.
Ten minutes was just a captain making herself available after a catastrophic event occurred to a member of her crew.
Reyna always found prudence to be a useful word to fall back on when honesty felt like an inconvenience, and ten minutes was no exception.
Thirty-seven minutes later, she was still on the bench.
The stars filled the viewport in front of her, the whites and blues stark contrasts against the black of space.
She had sat in this room after the nightmares that plagued her and after some of Vondra's worst calls.
She'd escaped to this room on the anniversaries she remembered only because it was more important to honor the person tied to them.
She even came in here on ordinary nights when her quarters felt too small.
She looked at the empty space on the bench beside her.
She left it open. There were other benches, but she had taken the bench on the corner of the viewport, the one where they usually sat, and left precisely enough room for one particular human who never once admitted she'd come here on purpose
That was the problem with facts. They didn't really care what you'd prefer to believe.
Reyna understood that the truth was, Charlie might not come. She could very well be back in her quarters with her datapad. She might want the entirety of the Emberkind starship between herself and what Kess had told her that afternoon. And honestly, Reyna couldn't blame her for any of it.
But if Charlie did come here, and the room was empty, Reyna would never be able to forgive herself. Maybe for reasons she wouldn't name but could admit were beyond the expected.
So, she stayed.
It wasn't because she felt she could fix anything.
She knew she couldn't do more than she'd already done.
She'd already called Vondra, already pushed every channel that non-contact law would give her, and she'd keep pushing until there was absolutely nothing left.
That was her job in this, and she would do it well.
But what she was doing here in this room was not part of the job. This was a particular room at 0300 and a particular space left open on a bench and the particular chance Charlie might walk through that door, with a grief too big for her quarters, and nowhere else on the ship to bring it.
Charlie was standing in the doorway. She was barefoot, her overshirt pulled wrong at one shoulder, and the bracelet she always wore pressed against her wrist. Her fingers were curled into the shirt's fabric, her knuckles white in their grip.
She wasn't crying, but her whole demeanor was something worse than that.
Whatever had been holding her together since Med Bay, it was gone.
Reyna could see that from across the room.
Reyna was on her feet before she even made the conscious decision to stand.
"Hi," Reyna said softly.
She crossed the room slowly, carefully, afraid that the wrong step would make Charlie bolt out of the room. She stopped close enough to see the knot marks the bracelet had left on Charlie's palm and the dark beneath her eyes.
"Charlie," she said. Just her name, soft and controlled.
She didn't ask if she was okay. The question would only make it worse, and Charlie didn't need Reyna to add one more thing right now.
Charlie's eyes closed.
Reyna stopped mid-step, watching as Charlie’s whole demeanor changed.
And Reyna watched as her breath caught, her shoulders dropped, and she leaned forward. It wasn't a collapse, but instead a giving-in. The weight Charlie had been holding only because nothing had been close enough to lean against.
Reyna caught her.
Reyna brought both arms around Charlie, letting Charlie settle against her. She felt Charlie turn her face into Reyna's shoulder and make a sound, low and broken and muffled by the uniform, and Reyna went still.
Charlie's hands found the back of Reyna's uniform and gripped, hard. This wasn't the polite, measured contact Reyna had spent thirteen years knowing how to return. Charlie was holding on like she meant it, and Reyna couldn't remember the last time someone had.
Reyna tightened her arms.
The ship could wait. Vondra could wait. Everything outside this room could fucking wait.
She rested her cheek against Charlie's hair, next to her temple. She didn't tell her it would be all right, because it wouldn't, at least not tonight. She didn't promise Vondra would find an answer, because she wasn't sure there would be one. She didn't speak at all, in fact. She just held Charlie.
Thirteen years ago, Reyna had believed you got through grief by staying on your feet.
By never stopping yourself long enough to remember why it was you were pushing so hard.
Reyna lost Elena, then Jere, and the bridge of the ship she'd made a life on with the people she considered her family, went quiet.
The crew supported her in the way they could.
She was a newly appointed captain for reasons that affected everyone on board, so they could only do so much.
People like Kess stayed close while Borran made sure to keep her fed.
And Orion provided a space for her to speak when she wanted to, and even when she didn't.
But none of them had held her like this. No one had. She'd made sure of it. She hadn't let them.
Charlie's breathing was hot and uneven through the fabric, and Reyna knew, with a clarity that should have alarmed her, that she would stand here until the ship's dawn cycle if that was what Charlie needed. Her alarm over it was real, but it didn't change a single thing.
After a long time, Charlie's breathing finally slowed. The desperate edge left it while her grip eased on Reyna's uniform, though she didn't let go. Reyna loosened her arms and let the space between them open without stepping back.
Charlie didn't leave it.
She shifted just enough to breathe, her hands moving from Reyna's back to the side of her uniform. They were close enough that Charlie had to look down slightly to meet her eyes.
She looked at Reyna for a long moment, eyes red and bright in the starlight. Then past her, at the bench.
Reyna understood immediately. They moved to the bench without separating fully, Reyna turning first, Charlie following close enough that Reyna could feel her there the whole way to the bench.
Charlie rested her forearms on her knees, her fingers following the circle of her bracelet around her wrist as she toyed with the knots.
"She didn't know me," she said, so quiet Reyna almost missed it. "In the dream. Katie didn't know who I was."
Reyna's hand went still against the bench.
"I... went back to Earth, somehow. But she was... older, and didn't know me at all."
Reyna didn't know what to say to that. She could easily reroute systems and file requests, even push Vondra until the woman stopped answering her vidcalls.
She could cause a ripple in Coalition demands if she chose to do so.
But she couldn't give Charlie back her sister.
She couldn't undo what Kess had told her, and she couldn't make a dream lie.
So she stayed.
"You know what Katie did for me," Charlie said.
Reyna nodded, because of course she remembered.
The doorway, the nineteen-year-old with no qualms about following her sister and no plan beyond that.
"But, she also knew every part of me. In fact, she was the only person on Earth to know every side of me. "
Charlie looked at the bracelet on her wrist.
"She knew me before I was Charlie to anyone else.
Before Frank and Helen, before California, before any of it.
Back when it was just the Wickett house with not enough air in it.
" Her thumb moved over the knot. "She's the only person alive who ever called me Charlotte and lived to tell about it.
" She almost laughed. "She didn't just know the kid who fixed the toaster because nobody else was going to.
She understood the girl who came home smelling like motor oil because Frank let me take apart things I should absolutely not have been trusted with. "
"She knew me when I was bossy and when I hovered. She knew the way I could turn love into a checklist if nobody stopped me." Her fingers tightened. "She stopped me."
Reyna didn't ask how. Charlie told her anyway.
She told Reyna the full story about Frank and Helen Beckman, four houses down, who had seen her when no one asked them to.
How Frank had let a neighbor kid take apart his car engine before she was old enough to drive it.
How Helen kept a yellow kitchen table always set with four place settings.
How two neighbors became the parents her own never figured out how to be.
She told Reyna how Katie had been there before any of it, since the very beginning, when it was just the two of them.
Reyna listened. She didn't interrupt or try to fill the spaces Charlie left between sentences. She understood that what Charlie had told her weeks ago, with her parent's rejection and Katie walking out with her, had only been the short version. This was the rest of it.