Dani
Iwoke past three in the morning to something I felt before I heard: a thin, acute distress signal threading through my chest like a wire pulled taut, like an echo of something wrong coming from somewhere outside my body. It took me a few seconds to understand what I felt.
Pip.
I was in Pip’s room before I’d found my second shoe.
She was curled in the center of her sleeping nest, an elaborate construction of blankets and soft materials arranged over several weeks, and she was shaking. When I placed my hand on her, I felt a tremor run through her small body, and she felt warmer than normal, as if she were fighting something.
“Oh, Pip.” I pulled her into my arms. She made a low, miserable keen and pressed her face against my collarbone, and my chest tightened until it hurt. “Hey. Hey, sweetheart, I’ve got you.”
I don’t know if I called for Andrek or if the sound she made reached him through the walls, but he was in the doorway within two minutes, alert and dressed. The military training kicked in. He crossed to us and put one hand on Pip’s back.
“How long?” he asked.
“I just found her. I don’t know.”
“I’ve got her. I need the med kit. The full one, not the field kit.”
“Where?”
“It’s in the lower storage, third cabinet. Blue case.”
I went. By the time I came back, he had Pip arranged on her blankets and was assessing her. She let him fuss over her, which told me more than her temperature did. Under normal circumstances Pip would roll around thrusting all her limbs in every direction possible.
“Respiratory fever,” Andrek said. “Yxian are susceptible. It’s not uncommon in juveniles. It needs to run its course. We manage the symptoms, keep her hydrated, and monitor for complications.”
“How long?” I wiped my fingers on my sleep shirt. “I met someone who works in the medical facility on the transport here. Her name is Seri Koth. She said if I needed anything to reach out.”
“We shouldn’t need her, but if we do, we’ll go. It should clear up in two days. Maybe three.”
Pip made her sound again and turned her face toward me. I gathered her in my arms and held her against my chest.
“Okay,” I said. “What do we do first?”
We did not sleep that night.
We divided the hours in a way that came natural to both of us.
Andrek took the first watch and made me lie down on the small cot he’d brought in from the storage room, and I lay there for an hour listening to Pip’s breathing and the quiet sounds of him humming before I gave up on the pretense of rest and sat up.
He looked at me. He didn’t tell me to go back to sleep.
After a moment he poured a second cup of something warm and set it beside me, and we spent the rest of the night at Pip’s side without discussing whose shift it was.
The first day was the hardest.
I felt her fever spike in the morning before the monitor showed it.
The sharp flare through the bond made me hiss and press my hand to my sternum.
Andrek was already at the med kit adjusting the dosage before I could speak.
He talked to Pip while he worked, low and quiet, in a language I understood some of but didn’t recognize.
Must be his home dialect, I thought, and she tracked his voice with her eyes even when she couldn’t lift her head.
“What are you telling her?” I asked, somewhere in the middle of the second hour.
He glanced up. “That she’ll be all right. That she’s handled worse.” He paused. “She hasn’t, but she doesn’t need accurate information right now. She needs a confident voice.”
“You’re lying to her and acknowledging her feelings,” I said. “I’ve been a bad influence.”
The hours compacted and expanded at random, the way they do in sustained crises.
There were long stretches of near-stillness where we sat on either side of Pip’s nest, monitoring her vitals, saying almost nothing, and shorter stretches of intense activity when her temperature shifted and required response.
We ate when we remembered to. We took turns in short rotations that neither of us was strict about enforcing, which meant neither of us actually slept.
We talked, though. In the quiet hours, in the low amber light he’d dialed the room down for Pip’s comfort, about nothing that required our attention.
He told me about a mission three years into his captaincy, a rescue op that had gone sideways in a way I only half followed, but I understood his meaning.
“You couldn’t have known,” I said.
“No,” he agreed. “But you carry it, anyway.”
I thought about my mother’s illness, the one that spurred her desire to see me married, and the choice I almost made. “Yes,” I said. “We do.”
He looked at me across Pip’s sleeping form. The amber light did something to the sharp angles of his face, smoothing them a fraction, making him seem more human.
On the second night, Pip’s fever broke, and she slept in peace.
While we weren’t out of the woods yet, I felt relief.
Andrek took the shift so I could shower.
As the water sluiced down over my shoulders, they dropped from somewhere around my ears, and I shook as my body released the tension it had held for two days.
I was sitting against the wall beside Pip’s nest with her small body sprawled half in my lap, and Andrek was beside me.
We migrated from opposite sides of the room to this position.
He stared at something on his data pad, monitoring her vitals, and I stared off into space, letting my body run through the relief it needed to process.
One moment things were normal, but a weight pressed against my shoulder in tiny increments. I turned and saw Andrek’s head resting on my shoulder. He’d fallen asleep in a gradual surrender.
His data pad stayed in his hands, but his breathing slowed and deepened.
His wing shifted as he relaxed, extending slowly until it curved over both of us in a broad, warm canopy. I don’t think he knew he’d done it. I don’t think he was awake enough to know anything.
I went still.
Above us, his wing. Around us, the amber light and the soft sounds of the monitoring equipment and the deep silence of the estate at whatever ungodly hour this was.
I should have shifted and repositioned him or woken him so he could sleep in an actual bed.
I ran through all these reasonable options and rejected them.
In his sleep, he looked younger, more relaxed.
There was a line between his brows that showed while he was awake, but in rest, it disappeared.
His mouth was open, and I realized he was not as old as he sometimes seemed.
I didn’t want to admit it, but I was falling in love with him.
Not had fallen, because I wasn’t sure I was there yet, but I suspected it had been happening for quite some time.
I was falling in love with a man who’d gone completely silent when I’d asked about his mate.
He’s grieving, I thought. You don’t know what for, or how long or how deep the grief runs.
He hasn’t told you, and you’re not going to make yourself into a complication in someone else’s grief, Dani.
Do not be the person who sees someone carrying a weight and think you can fix him.
Pip stirred in my lap. Her temperature was down. Her breathing was easy.
I closed my eyes and let myself have the time we needed together under the warmth of his wing and the head on my shoulder. Then, I succumbed to sleep.
Pip recovered on the morning of the third day.
She sat up on her own, demanded food in unambiguous terms, and bit me on the thumb when I was too slow with the water. Andrek identified that as an indicator of full recovery.
Over the next two days, I was careful around Andrek. I wanted to give him space and not push him. I didn’t want him to read more into the overlook, and our cuddle session when Pip was sick.
He noticed. Of course he noticed. He was a man who had spent years reading situation rooms and making assessments with incomplete data.
Three days after Pip’s recovery, I stood at the sink washing up after dinner when he stood in the doorway. I felt his presence before I saw him.
“Dani.”
“Almost done,” I said, to the sink.
I could feel him parsing the silence.
“Are you,” he stopped and started again with different words. “Did something happen with the bond during her fever?” He chose his words with caution. “If the bond caused you distress, the literature suggests it can sometimes alter how the imprinted person feels about…”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Pip’s fine. Everything is fine.”
Another silence filled the air. “I see,” he said after a moment.
But he didn’t see. I knew he didn’t see, because he felt my withdrawal was about the imprint, or that I was reassessing whether this was what I wanted.
He was protecting himself; I realized. Granted, it was with a wrong answer because he had no way of knowing how I felt.
I understood because I was doing the same thing, except I was protecting myself from throwing myself at him.
“Goodnight,” I said. I dried my hands and went to my room and sat on the edge of my bed in the quiet.
And I stayed where I was.
Through the wall, or in my chest, the bond pulsed. Pip was peaceful and asleep. She was healthy and unaware of the bond she’d made possible between two people.
I put my hand over the place in my chest where the bond sat.
You’re fine, I told myself.
The bond, warm and steady, offered no opinion.