37. Dux #2
So we stood there while the night insects sang in the hedges and the kitchen light glowed behind us, and she listed every safe thing she could verify until my breathing remembered it didn’t have to fight.
That is marriage, I think. Not the vows, though we made those too, Roma with her eyes bright and her hands steady, me trying not to cry like a fool while Dad loudly failed to pretend he wasn’t crying first. Marriage is someone standing next to you in the dark, naming the safe things until you can believe in them again.
Dad taps the schematic with the bracket. “Your thrust distribution is still favoring port.”
Roma blinks. “No, it is not.”
“Yes, it is.”
“It is compensating for anticipated mass variance.”
“It is favoring port.”
I raise a hand. “As a humble man who has crashed fewer ships than both of you have built, should I leave?”
“No,” they say together.
Lyra yells at the same time, delighted by the volume.
I kiss the top of Roma’s head again. “See? Tribunal.”
Roma tilts her face up toward me. “You enjoy it.”
“I enjoy parts of it.”
Dad mutters, “Careful, son.”
I meet Roma’s eyes, and the room narrows in that familiar dangerous way.
Years have not made wanting her quieter.
They have made it deeper, threaded into ordinary things until it catches me unprepared.
Her hair coming loose from its clip. Her fingers stained with engine grease.
Her voice in the hallway at midnight, low and soft as she sings Lyra back to sleep, always the same old spacer tune she claims is not sentimental despite all evidence to the contrary.
“I enjoy most of it,” I say.
Roma’s gaze warms. “Most?”
“I reserve judgment on the boots tribunal.”
“Wise.”
Dad makes a gagging noise. “I’m taking my granddaughter before the air gets sticky.”
Roma unclips the sling with practiced care and transfers Lyra into Dad’s arms. The baby immediately grabs his collar and tries to eat it. Dad softens so completely it would ruin his reputation if anyone outside this family saw it.
“There’s my brilliant girl,” he murmurs. “Don’t listen to your parents. They’re both dramatic.”
“She cannot understand you yet,” Roma says.
“She understands tone.”
“She understands fabric texture and milk.”
“Exactly. A genius.”
Lyra babbles at him, and Dad nods gravely as if receiving classified intelligence.
He carries her toward the doorway, then pauses and looks back at us.
For once, no joke arrives first. His eyes move from Roma to me, then to the room around us—the workshop, the house, the ridiculous life we built from wreckage and nerve.
“You two did good,” he says.
Roma stills.
I feel it through her before I see it.
Dad adjusts Lyra against his shoulder, voice rougher when he adds, “Not just surviving. This. All of it. You did good.”
Roma’s throat works. “Dad.”
He waves one hand like he can swat away tenderness after delivering it. “Don’t make a thing of it. I’m going to introduce Lyra to the concept of breakfast pastries before one of you says something vulnerable.”
“She is too young for pastries,” Roma says automatically.
“Educational pastries.”
“Dad.”
He disappears down the hall with our daughter, already whispering conspiratorially. “Your mother fears joy. We’ll work on her.”
Roma lets out a long breath after he is gone, and I turn her gently to face me.
The morning light has shifted higher, laying gold across her cheekbones and the faint scar near her jaw.
I know that scar. I know most of them now.
I know the ones she lets people see and the ones hidden under skin, under old habits, under the sharp little silences that still surface when memory bites.
“You okay?” I ask.
She studies my face. “Yes.”
I wait, because with Roma the second answer is often the real one.
Her mouth softens. “Actually yes.”
That one gets me.
I cup her face in both hands, careful of nothing because she doesn’t need careful right now. She needs certain. Her hands settle at my wrists, thumbs moving over my pulse points, and I know she feels how my heart changes when she looks at me like that.
“I love you,” I say.
Her eyes flicker, not with surprise anymore, but with the strange wonder that still comes when she hears it and believes it will remain true after the sentence ends.
“I love you,” she says, and it still sounds like courage every single time.
I kiss her slowly, with morning all around us and no alarm screaming, no hull tearing apart, no enemy voice crawling through the comm.
She tastes like coffee she forgot to drink and the mint she chews when concentrating.
Her hands slide to my chest, fingers curling into my shirt, and when she steps closer, it is not desperation that brings her there.
It is choice. Ordinary, extraordinary choice.
Eventually she pulls back just enough to breathe. “You have training at ten.”
“I do.”
“You are going to be late.”
“Probably.”
“I am not writing you an excuse.”
“I’m a grown man. I can be late without documentation.”
“You told the cadets punctuality is respect.”
I groan. “Low blow.”
“Accurate blow.”
I rest my forehead against hers. “Come with me later? To the academy. They keep asking about the new rescue engine project, and I like watching you terrify young pilots into better decision-making.”
“I do not terrify them.”
“You made one cry.”
“He was already emotionally unstable.”
“He was eighteen.”
“He proposed bypassing shield diagnostics with intuition.”
“Monster.”
“Exactly.”
I laugh, and she smiles against me. This is the life, then.
Not quiet, exactly. Not simple. Never smooth.
A house full of tools, arguments, baby socks, half-fixed systems, and people who love each other with a ferocity that does not always know where to put its hands.
A life where purpose is not handed to me through orders or emergencies, but built piece by piece in the aftermath: training pilots to come home, holding my daughter while she sleeps against my chest, loving a woman who learned to stay and teaching myself to do the same.
I used to think I came into Roma’s orbit to die well.
That sounds dramatic now, but it was true in the way young, damaged men mistake endings for meaning.
I knew how to throw myself at danger. I knew how to make my body useful.
I knew how to stand between death and someone else and call it purpose because it was easier than asking what came after the smoke cleared.
Then Roma looked at me inside a dying ship and chose me when every old instinct told her not to.
She let go of the clean plan. I let go of the glorious death I had been carrying around like a medal.
We crawled, fought, flew, and stumbled our way into a future neither of us knew how to ask for properly, and somehow the asking became less important than the staying.
From the kitchen, Dad calls, “Dux! Your daughter has requested you by name.”
Roma arches a brow. “She cannot speak.”
“She has advanced opinions,” Dad shouts back.
A tiny shriek follows, happy and imperious.
“That does sound like a request,” I admit.
Roma takes my hand before I can move, her fingers sliding between mine with the ease of habit and the weight of promise.
The first time she did that, she looked like she expected the universe to object.
Now she does it while stepping over a dropped teething ring and reminding me with a pointed glance to retrieve my abandoned mug.
I pick it up.
She nods approvingly. “Growth.”
“Be still, my heart.”
“It rarely is.”
“No,” I say, looking at her, really looking, “but it’s steady.”
Her expression changes, and for a moment I see all of it reflected back—the core, the ship, the choice, the vow, the long nights and longer mornings, the child laughing in the next room, the family waiting beyond the doorway. Roma squeezes my hand once, not hard, not desperate, simply certain.
We walk toward the kitchen together.
Dad is at the table with Lyra on his knee, pretending not to feed her a microscopic crumb of pastry while she smacks both hands against the tabletop like a tiny judge demanding tribute.
Sunlight spills over the plates, the tools Dad left near the fruit bowl, the schematic Roma will absolutely complain about him bringing into a food area, and the boots I still have not moved from the hall.
Roma sees the crumb immediately. “Dad.”
He looks up with outrageous innocence. “What?”
Dux from years ago would have expected the peace to shatter.
I don’t.
I pull out a chair, sit beside my wife, and take my daughter’s sticky little hand when she reaches for me.
Roma leans into my side as she argues with Dad about pastry protocols.
Dad argues back with the confidence of a man who knows he is loved even when outnumbered.
Lyra laughs at all of us, bright and wild, a sound so alive it fills every corner of the room.
I didn’t come here to die.
Maybe I thought I did once. Maybe I needed to believe that because dying bravely felt simpler than living honestly.
But I stayed.
I stayed for the woman beside me, for the child with my smile and her eyes, for the father who became family by insulting me into place, for mornings noisy enough to drown out old ghosts.
I stayed for boots in the hall, coffee going cold, arguments over stabilizers, kisses between responsibilities, and the astonishing labor of building a life no one has to bleed to deserve.
Roma’s hand finds mine under the table.
I hold on.
And this time, there is nowhere else I would rather be.