37. Dux
DUX
The first thing I learn about peace is that it is loud in all the wrong places.
Not battlefield loud. Not the scream of hull plating buckling under fire, not the vicious snap of weapons discharge, not the ugly percussion of boots hitting deck while death chases close behind.
Peace has smaller noises, sneakier ones, the kind that creep under your skin because nobody trained you to survive them.
A kettle whining in the kitchen. A wrench clattering off Roma’s workbench at two in the morning.
Dad arguing with a nursery cabinet because he refuses to read assembly instructions on principle.
A baby monitor crackling with the soft, indignant snuffle of a child who has apparently inherited everyone’s stubbornness and no one’s patience.
I stand barefoot in the doorway of the workshop with a mug of coffee cooling in my hand, watching Roma try to calibrate a propulsion model while our daughter gnaws on a teething ring in a padded sling against her chest. The morning light spills through the high windows in pale gold sheets, touching the dark coils of Roma’s hair, catching on the tiny metal components scattered across her bench, turning the whole room into something half domestic and half dangerous.
Which, honestly, is Roma in architectural form.
“You are staring,” she says without looking up.
“I’m admiring.”
“That is staring with better manners.”
“I’ve been working on manners. Thought you’d appreciate the growth.”
Roma adjusts a microspanner between two fingers, eyes narrowed at the hovering schematic above the bench. “Growth would be not leaving your boots in the hall.”
“Those boots have been through a lot.”
“They are not honored veterans. They are footwear.”
“They have stories.”
“They have mud.”
Our daughter, Lyra, spits out the teething ring and makes a furious little sound against Roma’s chest, as if she too has opinions about my boots and intends to file a formal complaint.
She is six months old and already rules three adults with the absolute tyranny of someone who cannot sit upright without assistance.
She has Roma’s eyes, which means I am doomed twice over, and my unfortunate habit of smiling like trouble has just become a viable option.
Roma glances down at her. “Yes, I know. Your father is impossible.”
Lyra kicks one socked foot.
I lift my mug in salute. “She gets me.”
“She tolerates you because you provide entertainment.”
“And snacks.”
“You are not supposed to give her snacks without checking with me.”
“I meant emotional snacks.”
Roma’s mouth twitches, and that tiny almost-smile still hits me like sunlight through armor.
Years ago, I would have fought through monsters and collapsing ships for one glimpse of it.
These days, I get it over coffee and baby drool and the ongoing legal dispute regarding hallway boots, and somehow that feels more miraculous than surviving the galactic core.
From the next room, Dad’s voice booms, “Who moved my stabilizer bracket?”
Roma closes her eyes for half a second. “It is under the blue cloth, exactly where I told you it was.”
A pause follows, full of muffled rummaging and wounded pride.
“No, it isn’t.”
“Yes, it is.”
More rummaging. Then, quieter, “Found it.”
Roma says, “Miracle.”
Dad appears in the workshop doorway a moment later with the bracket in one hand and Lyra’s stuffed moon-bear tucked under his arm.
He looks older than he did when we dragged ourselves back into Alliance space, but not weaker.
Never that. The years have softened the edges of him without dulling anything important.
His hair has gone more silver, his limp is worse on rainy days, and he has developed the deeply suspicious hobby of pretending he is not sentimental while carrying a baby toy everywhere “in case of tactical need.”
He points the bracket at me. “You. Tall menace. Why is there a pair of boots in the hall?”
I spread one hand. “Thank you. I was beginning to feel outnumbered.”
“You are outnumbered,” Roma says.
Dad nods. “Always have been.”
“I married into a tribunal.”
“You married my daughter,” Dad says, “which is what we call a high-risk decision made by a man with questionable self-preservation instincts.”
Roma looks at me then, and there is warmth under the dry line of her mouth. “Accurate.”
I cross the room and set my coffee on a shelf far away from anything explosive, glowing, or emotionally important.
I learned that lesson the hard way when I once placed tea beside a live ignition manifold and spent the afternoon being lectured by Roma in three languages, two of which I’m fairly sure she invented specifically to insult me with scientific precision.
“I had self-preservation instincts,” I say. “They just got overruled.”
“By what?” Dad asks.
I lean down and kiss Lyra’s soft, dark hair first, then Roma’s temple. “Better priorities.”
Roma’s hand pauses on the schematic controls.
She does not melt. Roma does not melt. She simply goes very still in the way she does when feeling catches her in public and she has to decide whether murdering the feeling would be inefficient.
Lyra grabs at my collar with a damp fist, saving us all from excessive sincerity.
Dad clears his throat with no subtlety whatsoever. “Well, that was disgusting. Do it again later when I’m not holding precision equipment.”
“You’re holding a bracket and a stuffed bear,” I say.
“Both require respect.”
Roma finally sets the microspanner down and shifts Lyra carefully in the sling. “The model is stable.”
Dad moves closer, squinting at the hovering schematic. “Stable enough or Roma stable?”
“Define the difference.”
“Stable enough means it won’t explode. Roma stable means it won’t explode unless provoked, insulted, overheated, underfed, miswired, or looked at with insufficient reverence.”
I grin. “That does sound familiar.”
Roma gives both of us the look, the one that should have lost power years ago through overuse but somehow remains fully operational. “This model is for Alliance civilian rescue vessels, not combat retrofits. It is designed to improve emergency acceleration without sacrificing passenger safety.”
Dad arches a brow. “Look at you, building engines for people who want to live.”
The words land soft but deep.
Roma looks down at the schematic, and I see the old shadow pass behind her eyes—not taking over, not swallowing her, just passing.
It happens less often now, but it still happens.
Some things don’t disappear because love shows up.
Some things have to be met again and again, in kitchens, in workshops, in quiet rooms after nightmares, in the careful choice to stay when every old instinct says distance would be cleaner.
She reaches for Lyra’s foot and rubs her thumb over the tiny sock. “People wanting to live does improve design parameters.”
Dad’s face gentles before he hides it behind a grunt. “Sure. Parameters.”
I stand behind Roma, one hand resting lightly at her waist. She leans back into me by the smallest degree, a movement so natural now that I still sometimes forget to breathe around it.
The first time she did it, months after we came home, I froze like an idiot because I knew what it cost her to trust another body with even that much of her weight.
Now she does it while arguing about propulsion models with a baby strapped to her chest, and I swear there are victories medals don’t know how to measure.
Lyra catches my finger and squeezes with shocking baby strength.
“Ow,” I tell her. “Tiny warlord.”
“She has excellent grip control,” Roma says.
“She has your interrogation style.”
Dad scoffs. “Please. That child gets her intimidation from me.”
Lyra squeals, pleased with the accusation, and Roma’s laugh slips out before she can contain it. Full. Clear. Still rare enough to feel like a gift, but not fragile anymore. It belongs here now, among the tools and schematics and coffee rings on my reports.
My reports.
That still feels strange.
I’m not on active combat rotation anymore.
Not really. I consult. I train. I help rebuild defense protocols that don’t treat living bodies like convenient shields.
Some days I teach young pilots how to keep their heads when panic climbs into the cockpit with them.
Some days I sit with soldiers who came back breathing but not whole, and I tell them the truth no one told me gently enough: that surviving is not the same as knowing how to live afterward, and needing help doesn’t make them broken. It makes them here.
At first, I hated it.
Not the work. The stillness around it. The absence of orders screaming through comms. The way my hands twitched when a door slammed.
The way my body waited for an explosion every time the house went quiet.
Combat gives you purpose like a knife at your throat; peace asks you to choose one without bleeding for it.
Roma found me one night in the garden, three months after Lyra was born, standing under the dark with my pulse racing because nothing was wrong and my body did not know what to do with that.
She didn’t ask if I was okay. She knew better.
She stood beside me in her robe with the baby monitor in her hand and said, “The perimeter system is active. Dad is asleep in the chair pretending he is not. Lyra is breathing normally. The house is not under attack.”
I remember laughing once, badly. “You checking the facts for me?”
“Yes.”
“Does it help?”
“It helps me.”