34. The Last Almost #2
Because there was one thing Reyna could always count on with her Admiral, and that was that Vondra didn't lie. She didn't soften things or sugar-coat them, even if the information was difficult to deliver. But more importantly, Vondra never used the word friend.
Reyna stood in her office with her hair down around her face. Her hands were shaking violently and her gold was holding, holding, holding.
"Fuck the committee," Reyna said.
Then the marks along her forearms brightened, all at once, the way a banked ember comes up when you open the door.
She watched it happen and did nothing to stop it.
Vondra remained quiet.
"You can't do this to me," she whispered.
Reyna heard it about a half-second after it left her.
To me.
Every argument she had ever made in this office was on behalf of what was best for the ship or her crew, and she had made a great many of them. Not one had ever been about her.
But she didn't take it back.
"I can't," Reyna said, her voice quieter than before, and so much worse. "Admiral. Please. I just... can't."
The station's ambient light moved across the geode of Vondra's eyes, slow.
"Reyna," Vondra said, her voice changed. "How long?"
And whatever had been holding Reyna up suddenly let go. Now, she was just a woman, feeling her heart break into a million pieces in slow motion.
Because the answer was part of her before the Admiral even finished asking. It had been sitting in her the whole time, fully formed.
Waiting on nobody but her.
Reyna stood in the wreckage of her own composure.
"Admiral." She lifted her head to the screen, her voice coming out flat, small, and very far away. "There's nothing? Not a single thing can be done?"
There was silence as Reyna waited.
"I would tell you if I thought there was something, you know that," Vondra said finally. "There is nothing, Captain. Not that I can see now."
Reyna nodded.
She let her head drop and didn't say a word. The silence went on long enough that the voice came back, changed.
"Reyna, do you require—"
Reyna cut the channel.
Despite the vid screen being dark, the office was very bright.
The wall display was blank, having taken all that dark water with it. And now the room was just a room, lit the way it always had been, but now Reyna had to blink against the brightness.
She had hung up on a fleet admiral.
She waited to feel something about it.
Nothing came.
Suddenly, she had to move.
She pushed off her desk and went for the door because staying in that room was not survivable.
The corridor ended up being worse, but she kept going anyway.
Everything was coming up now. All of it.
Everything she had spent months sitting on, every night in that observation room with her hands in her lap, every time she had watched Charlie laugh at something and didn't react the way she wanted to.
She had held it together the whole time, telling herself she was doing the right thing.
She had been so good at it that some part of her had started to believe there was nothing there to hold.
But there was. There was so much there that Reyna didn't know she could even carry it all.
It tore through her in the corridor between her office and the lift, slicing through her like something ripping. Reyna stopped and put a hand on the wall.
She had not known it would hurt like this.
That was the thing she couldn't get past. She had known that everything she was avoiding would hurt. Hell, she'd built her entire life as a captain around knowing how much grief can hurt.
But this was so different. This wasn't grief. She knew grief, had lived inside it. She could handle and battle and twist grief around in her sleep.
This was Charlie Wickett being taken out of her life, and there was nothing in Reyna's experience that had prepared her for what that felt like. But then, that was because there had never been a Charlie Wickett before.
Soul match.
That was what her mind produced, unhelpfully, in this corridor at God knows what hour. Reyna felt her body shudder, and she staggered, placing her other hand on the same wall to catch herself. She leaned her forehead against the cool surface as her world crashed down around her.
She knew she couldn't go back to the library. There was not a galaxy available where she could stand in a warm room, full of her own crew, with the weight of what she was actively losing as each second ticked by, letting Tavi just hand her a drink.
And underneath all of that, further down in a place she didn't want to access, she knew she couldn't face Charlie.
That frightened her more than she knew how to conceive.
She wanted Charlie so badly right now that she could not trust herself in a room with her. Every part of her was pointed at that woman with nothing left in front of it, and Reyna did not know what she would do if she got within arm's reach of her.
Because Charlie would look up at her. That was all it would take. Charlie would look at her, and it would be better. But then it would be so much worse, because Reyna knew now that they were taking her, and she would not be able to look at that woman and hold any of this back.
And Charlie would get all of it when she deserved much better than that. Charlie deserved better than that since the day she fell into this ship. It was Reyna who had spent six months giving her exactly nothing, and the last thing she was going to do was make this the first thing she ever gave her.
Her body vibrated again, the need to move so visceral Reyna almost worried something was medically wrong. But she knew there wasn't.
So instead, she walked.
She didn't choose a direction. Her body chose one, and Reyna went with it, one hand out against the wall to stabilize herself, the deck no longer feeling level.
Reyna moved through her ship like a ghost, not registering a single turn she made.
At one point, she reached a dead end. As it registered, she came back into her body, finding herself standing still in front of a door.
She knew which room this door belonged to before she even looked up.
The Observation Room door was open.
Charlie was sitting on the bench. Their bench.
Her legs were drawn up, arms wrapped around her knees, still in the clothes she had worn to the party. Her button down's sleeves were rolled up her arms, the shirt now untucked.
A nebula had come around while Reyna was in her office, and now the Observation Room, serving its intended purpose, was completely full of the violets and rose pouring through the viewport and across the deck.
It was covering Charlie's hands, face, and mixing with the colors of the bracelet on her wrist.
But Charlie was not looking at the stars.
She was looking straight at the door.
She did not move when Reyna appeared. Her eyes found Reyna's and would not let go, and Reyna lost any chance of being able to leave.
Reyna put a hand on the doorframe because she should have known Charlie would be here.
She should have known Charlie would be sitting in their room, waiting.
This woman had walked out of a party she'd built and come here to wait for Reyna to come and find her.
Because that was what Charlie Wickett did.
She showed up.
She showed up even when Reyna never once had to ask.
Reyna held onto the doorframe for another second before letting go and walking in.
"Hey," Charlie said carefully as she rose to her feet.
"Hey," Reyna said.
Her own voice sounded as though it belonged to somebody in another room.
Hold it. She had made herself a promise in a corridor sixty seconds ago, and she intended to keep it. Charlie was going to get a captain who was fine. All Reyna had to do was stand in this room and hold her face still for the length of one conversation.
"Captain." Charlie took a step. "What's wrong?"
One question. That was all it took.
Reyna felt it happen. That was the worst, to feel everything crumble, everything she'd sworn she'd hold together. She turned away from Charlie so fast that her hair fell free from the style from the party.
And then she started pacing.
"I can't let this happen," she muttered.
She had not meant to say it out loud.
"Can't let what happen?" Charlie asked.
"There has to be a way." Reyna pushed her hair back off her face with both hands, and it fell forward again immediately. "The Kaelari delegation has rank, and I have never once asked to use it. If I can get a formal objection filed before the cycle turns—"
"Reyna—"
"—and the field reports. The last three missions specifically." She reached the viewport, turned around, and started back. "The data is right there. It's right there. Nobody in that room has probably read a single word of it. I doubt they've even read a form."
"Reyna, please—"
"I just need time. That's all I need. If they gave me time, I could take it apart properly. Find a way through. There's always a way through. There is always something somebody hasn't even looked at—"
Her voice cracked in the middle of it.
She heard it but kept pacing anyway. Stopping wasn't an option, because the second she stopped talking she was going to have to look at Charlie, and she knew she wouldn't survive that.
"I can fix this," Reyna whispered. "I have to fix this."
"Fix what?" Charlie's voice, behind her, following her across the room. "Reyna. Talk to me."
But Reyna couldn't.
There was a hand in her path. Charlie's hand, out in the air where Reyna would pass it, open, palm up, held within Reyna's orbit as she went by, so that Reyna would know it was there.
Reyna didn't take it, didn't say another word.
She knew what she should say, she had the sentence. It was fully assembled and had been ready since the doorway.
They are taking you away from me.
All she had to do was turn around and say it, and Charlie would know.
No. Not tonight.
Tomorrow.
Tomorrow, Reyna would figure something out, and then she would tell her.
It was a bad plan. Even Vondra said there wasn't anything to be done.
But it was the only one she had left.