"What's the complete version?"
He set his coffee cup down, his gaze drifting toward the viewport, studying the blurred starlines that surrounded the ship while ittravelled in slipspace. I looked too and was reminded of how large our galaxy really is. The kind of vastness that made individual suffering feel both insignificant and unbearably specific.
"There was a patient," he said finally. "Early in my training. A young Zorathi child. She had a degenerative neurological condition. Something in her neural pathways was slowly erasing her ability to process all sensation. By the time I met her, she could no longer feel pain." He paused. "You might think that sounds like a mercy."
"It wasn't?"
"No. Pain exists for a reason. It tells us where we are injured, what needs attention, and when to stop. Without it, she was constantly hurting herself without knowing. Burns, fractures, internal damage. Her body was being destroyed by the absence of warning."
I watched his expression, the way the starlight caught the sharp angles of his face. "Were you able to help her?"
"There was a treatment. Experimental, even for the Reach. It would have restored her pain response, but the process itself—" He stopped, and something shifted in his expression. "The treatment would have caused her tremendous suffering. Weeks of it. And there was no guarantee it would work. A thirty-six percent chance of success. A certainty of agony."
"What did you do?"
"I wanted to try. I was young, and I believed that action was always better than inaction. That if there was something to be done, it should be done." He turned to look at me then, and his hazel eyes held the weight of years I couldn't imagine. "My mentor refused. She said that sometimes the most ethical choice is restraint. That causing certain harm in pursuit of uncertain benefit is not medicine, it is arrogance disguised as compassion."
My chest tightened. "So you did nothing."
"No." His voice was gentle but firm. "We did everything that did not cause additional harm. We managed her condition. We taughther family how to protect her. We stayed with her, week after week, adapting our care as her needs changed. We could not cure her, Kira. But we did not abandon her to the cure's absence."
He leaned forward slightly, and his next words landed in the center of my chest.
"That is when I understood what medicine truly is. It isn't stopping death from happening. It is refusing to look away when it does."
The words hung in the air between us. Through the viewport, a distant ship's running lights blinked once, twice, then vanished into the dark.
"You're talking about Kaedren," I said. It wasn't a question.
"I am talking about Kaedren. Whose shoulder will heal, but whose mind will have a longer path back. I’m also talking about the patients in this ward, and the hundreds more across the ship who are living with the aftermath of choices that cannot be unmade." He paused. "Including your choices."
I flinched. He didn't soften.
"Your guilt is not misplaced, Kira. Harm was done. Some of it flows directly from the decisions you made, the strategies you authorized, and the risks you deemed acceptable. That is the truth, and I will not insult you by pretending otherwise."
Something in me cracked open. The part I'd been holding together with busy hands and measured tasks. "Then what am I supposed to do? If I can't fix it, if I can't undo it—"
"You hold it."
The simplicity of it stopped me cold.
"Holding it isn’t surrendering to it," Lyrin continued. "It is not redemption. It does not erase the harm or balance some cosmic ledger. Holding it is simply the choice to remain present with the consequences of what you have done. To keep seeing the damage. To let it cost you something, every day, and to do the work anyway."
"That sounds like punishment."
"It sounds like love." His voice softened, just slightly. "And leadership. And medicine. All of them require the same thing in the end: the willingness to not look away. To remain with the people you have impacted, even when, especially when, you cannot make it better."
I thought about Kaedren, suspended in his terrible stillness. About the woman whose trust had been shattered. About the choices I had made, promising that those who followed me would know the risks, and about how knowing had not protected anyone from the cost of what we'd chosen together.
"Our fifteen minutes are up," Lyrin said, rising. He extended a hand to help me up, a practical gesture, not tender, and somehow that made it easier to accept. "Bandages need changing. And there is a young engineer in cot seven who requires monitoring."
I stood. My legs felt steadier than they had in days.
"Lyrin." I stopped him before he could turn away. "Thank you. For letting me work here. For not—" I struggled to find the words. "For not trying to make it hurt less."
Something that might have been a smile flickered across his features. "Making it hurt less was never the point. Making you present for the hurt, that was the point."
He walked back toward the central ward, and I followed. Not because the work would absolve me. Not because staying would fix anything.
