Chapter 9
Astra
Pain is the first thing. Not sharp, not clean, but deep and grinding, the kind that lives in bone and radiates outward like a signal fire broadcasting from somewhere near the base of my spine.
I try to catalogue it before I open my eyes.
Old habit. Know the damage before you let anyone see you're awake.
Bandages. Tight across my lower back, wrapping around my left side. Medical adhesive pulling at skin every time I breathe. The hum of the ship's recyclers overhead, that low, constant drone I've spent weeks sleeping under. Gravity stable, which means we're in transit, not docked.
And warmth. Close. Too close. The kind of warmth that comes from another body, from someone who has been sitting beside me for longer than they should have.
I open my eyes.
Dexter is in the chair beside the med bay cot, and he looks like hell.
His jaw is shadowed with stubble, his hair pushed back from his face in a way that suggests fingers raked through it a hundred times.
But it's his marks that tell me the truth.
The bioluminescent lines tracing his forearms and throat are dim, barely flickering, the faint amber of a fire burning on its last fuel.
I've never seen them this low. Even when he was bleeding out on the laboratory floor, they burned brighter than this.
He's been afraid.
The realization slides through my chest like a cold needle, and I shove it away.
"How long?" My voice sounds like gravel. Like someone scraped my throat with a wire brush and left the debris.
"Two days." His eyes don't leave my face. Bloodshot, ringed with shadow, and focused with an intensity that makes me want to look away. "The shot was close to your spine. Another inch and..."
He stops. His jaw works once, the muscle jumping beneath the stubble.
"But it wasn't another inch," I finish for him.
"No." Something moves behind his eyes. Something he's choosing not to say. "It wasn't."
I try to sit up. My body vetoes the decision before I've lifted three inches, a white-hot lance of pain splitting through my lower back and dropping me flat. I hiss through my teeth and stare at the ceiling, counting breaths until the room stops pulsing.
"Don't." His hand hovers near my shoulder but doesn't land. Smart. "The tissue regenerator sealed the wound, but the nerve inflammation needs time. Another day, minimum."
"I've worked through worse."
"You haven't been shot an inch from your spinal column before."
"You don't know that."
His mouth thinens. He doesn't argue, which is how I know he's exhausted. The Dexter Torrence I remember would have pushed back, needled me, turned it into a game. This version just watches me with those dim, flickering marks and says nothing.
"You should rest," I tell him.
"So should you."
"I'm not the one who looks like he hasn't slept in two days."
"And I'm not the one who got shot saving my life."
The words land between us like a grenade with the pin already pulled.
Silence. The ship hums. Something in the recycler clicks, a rhythmic tick that sounds almost like a clock counting down.
I hadn't thought of it that way. When the shot came, when I saw the muzzle flash in my peripheral vision and calculated trajectory in the fraction of a second before conscious thought could intervene, I hadn't been thinking about saving anyone.
I'd just moved. Instinct firing faster than reason, my body putting itself between the bullet and him before my brain could weigh the odds, run the numbers, make the cold and rational choice I've always prided myself on.
I just moved.
For him.
"Don't." My voice comes out rough, scraping against something raw. "Don't read anything into it."
"I'm not reading." His marks pulse once, a faint ripple of amber that traces up his throat and fades. "I'm feeling."
My chest tightens. "That's worse."
"You can't hide from me right now." He says it quietly, without triumph, without the smug edge he'd usually coat a line like that in. Just fact. "You're too weak to keep your walls up."
I try anyway. Reach for the cold, the distance, the partition I built between us out of six years of rage and silence and the faces of strangers I killed because they reminded me of his jawline, his height, the way he held a glass. I reach for the wall and my fingers close on nothing.
Everything I'm feeling bleeds through. I can see it in the way his marks respond, flickering and shifting color, amber sliding into something warmer, then catching with a sharper light that looks almost like pain.
He's reading me like a signal broadcast, every frequency I can't shut down pouring into him through whatever connection his people's biology creates.
He's feeling all of it.
The anger. He knows that one. It's been my constant companion around him since the day I walked into that hangar on Veridian-7 and saw his face. The anger is familiar, almost comfortable, and I let him have it because it costs me nothing.
But underneath the anger, there's pain. Physical and older. The ache in my back and the deeper ache that has nothing to do with a bullet, the one that lives in the hollow below my sternum where something used to be before I burned it out. Or tried to.
And under the pain, there's fear. Not the clean kind.
Not the fear of dying, which I've made my peace with a dozen times over.
This fear is messier, uglier, harder to name.
The fear of this. Of what's in this room between us, filling the space between his chair and my cot like pressure building before a hull breach.
And underneath all of it, beneath every wall and weapon and carefully constructed defense, the thing I've been hiding for six years. The thing I hid from myself so well I almost believed it was gone.
I never stopped.
Never stopped wanting him. Never stopped loving him.
Even when I hated him so purely it felt like a religion, even when I was hunting contracts across the outer systems and finding his ghost in every corridor, even when I lay in the dark on stations that smelled like recycled air and nothing and told myself I felt nothing.
Both. Always both. The hate and the love, tangled together so completely I couldn't kill one without killing the other, so I tried to kill them both and failed.
His marks blaze. A sudden, sharp flare of light that turns the dim medical bay gold, and I watch the knowledge land in him like a physical blow. His whole body goes still. His breath stops.
"You love me."
"Shut up."
"You've loved me this whole time." His voice is barely above a whisper, but it fills the room.
His marks are burning bright enough to cast shadows on the ceiling, and I can see every line of his face in that amber glow, the exhaustion and the wonder and the terrible, ruinous understanding.
"Even when you wanted to kill me. Even when you were killing strangers who looked like me. You loved me."
My throat closes. My eyes burn. I stare at the ceiling because I can't look at his face and survive this conversation.
"I said shut up."
"I love you too." He leans forward. The chair creaks. His hand finds mine on the cot, and his fingers are warm and shaking, and his marks are so bright they hurt my eyes. "I never stopped either."
I pull him down.
It's not a choice. It's not calculated, not weighed, not run through the risk-assessment matrix that governs every other decision I make.
My hand fists in the front of his shirt and I drag him down to me and I kiss him like violence, like reopening a wound that never healed right, like tearing stitches out because the thing underneath needs air even if it bleeds.
His mouth tastes like recycled water and the stale bitterness of too much caffeine and no sleep.
I bite his lower lip hard enough to feel skin split, and he makes a sound against my teeth that lands somewhere between pain and relief, and then his hands are on either side of my head and he's kissing me back with six years of silence behind it.
My back screams. I ignore it. Pain is just data, and right now the data that matters is the heat of his mouth, the way his fingers tremble against my jaw, the rough sound of his breathing when I pull back just far enough to see his face.
His marks are incandescent, amber and gold shifting to something hotter, something that pulses in time with his heartbeat, and I can feel what he's feeling through the thin barrier of air between us.
My want reflected back at me doubled. My fury. My need.
"Your injury." His voice is wrecked. "Astra, your spine, we can't..."
"Get on the cot."
"You can barely move."
"Then don't make me come to you."
He stares at me. I watch the fight happen behind his eyes, the war between the version of him that wants to protect me and the version of him that has wanted this for six years and knows that if he stops now I will never let him this close again.
The second version wins.
He stands. Pulls his shirt over his head, and the marks trace down his chest and stomach like a map of something ancient, every line burning gold.
I can see the scar I gave him on the station, still pink and healing, and beneath it the older marks of a life lived in places that leave evidence.
He kicks off his boots. Unfastens his belt with hands that aren't steady.
I watch him strip in the amber glow of his own biology, and I feel something in my chest crack along a fault line that has been holding for six years.
He climbs onto the cot carefully, trying not to jostle me, and I don't give him the chance to be gentle.
I grab his shoulder and pull, rolling him onto his back beside me, and the movement sends a bolt of white heat up my spine that I swallow without sound.
I've trained myself not to show pain. That training holds now.
I throw my leg over his hips and sit up.