13. Cassia #2
I walk past him toward the corridor, putting as much distance between us as the compound walls allow. The tears come before I reach the residential block, and pressing my shoulder against the wall’s surface, I clamp both hands over my mouth because the compound is full of people who need me steady.
I avoid him for two days.
The compound sprawls across enough levels and passageways that two people can orbit each other indefinitely, and I exploit all of that distance.
Exploiting all of that distance, I rearrange my schedule around his patrol rotations.
This means eating before he comes down from the upper walkways and ducking into the storage alcove when his sharp stride echoes through the ventilation ducts above the med bay.
Varrik tries speaking with me once, but a single glare sends the old war captain limping back to his repair shop.
The first morning, I almost run into him.
Rounding the corner from the supply closet with an armful of scavenged gauze, I find him standing at the opposite end of the passageway.
His broad shoulders fill the space like a wall, half-turned toward the perimeter access panel.
A single, sharp intake of breath halts my retreat before I can turn.
His entire body stops moving, one hand frozen on the panel interface while his muscles lock down with a restraint so severe the effort trembles through his wings.
He keeps his back to me. Clutching the gauze to my sternum, I hold my breath.
For three brutal seconds we exist in the same twenty feet of recycled air, the distance between us charged with everything I said earlier and everything he answered with that single, devastating yes.
Keying the access panel, he walks through it, and the door seals shut behind him, and I stay in the empty passageway until my lungs remember how to work.
The second day is worse because my body starts to betray me.
I catch myself listening for him, ears straining toward the upper levels during quiet stretches in the sickbay, noting the quiet cadence of boots and Kraaj murmurs filtering through the ceiling grates.
When someone walks past my door, a jolt of adrenaline spikes through my chest before my brain clears him from consideration.
I drop a suture tray because Dessik's shadow passes the threshold, and for half a second, the silhouette is too large and too broad, and my hands react before my eyes can correct the mistake.
Junia stops by to check on me during a lull between patients. Strolling into the med bay, Junia balances a chipped mug of lukewarm broth on her palm with her scavenger pack still slung across one shoulder. Dropping the broth onto the instrument tray, she folds her arms.
"You're going to wear a hole through the concrete with your eyeballs."
"I'm fine."
"You stitched that last bandage inside out." She kicks the gauze roll I've been mangling for the past ten minutes. "And you've reorganized the antiseptic shelf three times today. Either you're losing your mind or trying very hard to keep yourself from going upstairs."
Opening my mouth to argue, no sound comes out. Instead, picking up the broth, the warm liquid provides comfort because Junia has earned the right to be blunt with me, even—especially—when I’d rather her honesty hit softer.
"Both," I admit.
She watches me for a brief amount of time, all the chaotic bravado peeled back to the fierce, quiet loyalty underneath. Bumping her shoulder against mine, she steals a sip from my broth before leaving me to sit in the silence.
The compound feels like a body missing an organ.
The walls and stairwells are identical to yesterday, but the space inside them expands into a hollow echo, the rooms too large and the silence stretching on.
Rhykor's presence fills this place in ways I only understand now that it's gone—the faint scorch marks on door handles where his palms rested too long and the lingering trace of heat in the corridors he walked through an hour ago that my skin reads like a frequency that refuses to fade.
I read the suppression documents again on the second evening, alone in the infirmary with the door locked.
I tell myself I'm looking for details I missed, like logistics, names, dates, anything that might connect the campaign to my father's settlement specifically.
What I'm actually doing is poking the bruise to confirm it still hurts, because the alternative terrifies me more than the pain does.
The documents are thorough and operative, written in detached administrative language used by an occupying force that considered efficiency a virtue and mercy a structural weakness.
The language carries fingerprints of a military culture that shaped its soldiers into instruments and discarded them when the instrument started asking questions.
I recall the markings on Rhykor's chest—the old wounds earned through obedience, the cuts acting as a reward for compliance. I think about being twenty-two years old, standing in a command structure that measures worth by destruction, and being told that the bodies behind you are proof you matter.
Forgiveness is too large a word for what I'm carrying. Understanding sits closer, but I refuse to let the ache inside of me talk me into confusing it with absolution.
The ache persists anyway, gnawing at me from the inside, worsening when the compound goes so quiet that I hear my own breathing.
Somewhere past midnight on the second night, shouting erupts from the lower levels.
I'm on my feet before the sound registers as words, instinct overriding heartbreak once again. The freight bay doors stand open, cold air pouring through with smoke and the wet metallic scent of blood. I grab my med-pack and follow the noise.
What I find in the loading dock stops me cold.
Rhykor strides through the freight bay entrance with a human child slung across one shoulder and two more stumbling at his heels.
Behind him, three crew members carry injured civilians—humans, all of them—covered in dust and the chemical residue of a Legion-corrupted energy discharge.
I see an elderly woman with a leg bent at a sickening angle.
Beside her is a teenager clutching a burned forearm to his chest. Families huddle together, ash-streaked and trembling while blinking in the harsh overhead light like animals dragged from caved-in burrows.
The procession keeps coming until I count fifteen survivors crammed into the loading dock.
This operation came from Rhykor alone—off the books and outside the chain of command, a distress signal was intercepted and answered before anyone else in the compound stirred.
He sets the child on the nearest crate with a tenderness that guts me.
The little girl's arms lock around his neck, fingers knotting into his vest, and she buries her face against his collar.
Crouching down, one massive hand cups the back of her head while he murmurs words too quiet to catch from across the bay.
Forty minutes ago while I lay on my cot staring at the ceiling and listing all of the reasons I had to hate him, he was running toward the screams from a human neighborhood.
Navigating through the freight bay, the work begins.
The triage takes three hours. I move between patients, stitching and stabilizing, and Rhykor's crew moves around me with seamless coordination, people who have followed this man into burning wreckage and carried strangers out on their backs because he told them to.
We orbit each other across the freight bay for those three hours, and his focus shifts from carrying water to a mother to wrapping a shock blanket around the burned teenager.
Eventually, he crouches beside an old man who grabs his wrist and whispers thank you, thank you, thank you with tears cutting clean tracks through the ash on his face.
The Dragon kneels on a freight bay floor at two in the morning, letting a human man weep against his knuckles, and his face is pure, unguarded grief.
The realization enters quietly. It changes nothing about the authorization ledger, the settlements that burned, or the aid that never reached my father.
But the man kneeling on that floor, who heard a distress call and sprinted into collapsing buildings to haul strangers to safety, differs from the commander who signed those documents a decade ago.
He grew out of that commander like tissue grows over a wound, imperfect and permanent, yet undeniably alive.
Finishing the sutures on the elderly woman's chest cavity, I strip off my gloves. My hands stay solid even though my eyes burn.
Varrik materializes beside my workstation, leaning heavily on his cane. His face carries its usual severity, but the deep creases around his mouth have softened past their default glower into exhaustion.