18. Saren
SAREN
"You're not sleeping," Elsyn says, which is his way of asking a question he already knows the answer to.
I'm in the medical bay because it's the one room she isn't in, and being where she isn't has become the closest thing to discipline I have left. "I sleep when she's beside me. I don't, when she's not. Make of that what you will."
"I'll make the truth of it." He sets down the salve he's grinding.
"Separation is starting to cost you physically.
You feel it — the ache when she's two decks away, the way your attention drags toward her like a compass needle.
That's not weakness and it's not madness.
It's the bond doing what it was built to do, which is make two people unwilling to be a danger to each other through distance and neglect.
" He fixes me with his failing eyes. "The danger is in fighting it.
A bond half-accepted is the worst of both — all the need, none of the steadiness.
You are living in the half, Saren, and it is making you exactly the thing you're afraid of becoming. "
"Possessive," I say. "I put a smuggler against a wall for touching her arm."
"Then stop starving the thing and feed it, and watch the teeth go back in." He says it dryly, and I almost laugh, which surprises us both.
I find her after, in the galley, and instead of standing guard at a careful distance I sit down across from her with a bowl of the same poor stew everyone eats, and we share a meal like two ordinary people, and it is the most frightening thing I have done in years.
"Tell me a thing you wanted," I say. "Before Armstrong taught you not to."
She thinks. "A door that locked from the inside," she says. "That's it. That's the whole dream. A room that was mine, with a lock only I held, where nobody could decide what to do with me while I slept." She looks at the stew. "Stupid, for a dream."
"It is the least stupid dream I have ever heard.
" And because she has given me hers, I give her mine, which I have never said aloud: "Children who carve for beauty instead of grief.
A generation of us who do not know the taste of famine.
I used to think wanting that was an insult to everyone who died not getting it.
" I turn the bowl in my hands. "You are making me think it might be the opposite. "
She reaches across the table and hooks her fingers through mine, and for one watch the ship stops feeling like a thing we are only waiting to die aboard. It is a home with two people in it learning each other's wants.
And because it is, I let myself stop listening — for one meal, one watch — to the cold voice that has not gone quiet since the relay room, the one that knows a hand at my own table has been feeding us out into the dark and has not yet let me learn whose.
I will pay for the quiet later. Every captain pays for every quiet eventually.
For the length of this one meal I decide the bill is worth it, and I let her fill the silence where the dread usually sits.