"Promise?"
"Promise." I squeezed her hand gently. "Now go get actualsleep in your quarters. Bea will lecture both of us if you aggravate that shoulder injury."
"Not leaving." Elena settled back into her chair, hand still holding mine. "Someone needs to make sure you don't die while I'm not looking."
"I'm in a medical bay. Monitored by advanced technology. Bea checked on me five minutes ago?—"
"Don't care. Staying." Her expression turned stubborn in that way I was learning meant further argument was futile. "Get used to it, Commander. You're stuck with me now."
I looked at her, compact and fierce and refusing to leave despite obvious exhaustion, her wild dark hair and bright eyes and the determined set of her jaw, and felt something shift in my chest. Something that had been frozen since I lost my unit, kept behind walls and discipline and the belief that I didn't deserve happiness.
"I could get used to that," I said softly.
She smiled, small and real and beautiful. "Good. Because I'm not going anywhere."
Her comm unit chirped. She glanced at it, frowned. "It's Dana. She wants to know if we're both alive and not killing each other."
"Tell her we're alive and not killing each other at the moment."
"At the moment?" Elena typed quickly, one-handed since she refused to release my hand. "That's not reassuring."
"It's honest."
She laughed, bright and unexpected, the sound cutting through medical bay sterility like a flare. "Fair point. Though Dana's going to have questions about why I'm still in medical instead of my quarters."
"Let her have questions. We'll answer them when I'm not held together by Zorn's medical genius and spite."
"You're assuming spite is involved in your treatment?"
"I know Zorn. He considers keeping difficult patients alive a personal challenge."
"Then you must be his favorite patient." Elena's thumb traced small circles on the back of my hand, the gesture unconscious and intimate. "You've been difficult since day one."
"Says the woman who tried to work on live power conduits at oh-three-hundred."
"That was necessary maintenance?—"
"That was you punishing yourself for surviving the Liberty disaster."
The words landed harder than I intended. Elena flinched, her hand tightening on mine.
"Sorry," I said. "That was?—"
"True." She looked away, toward the viewport showing endless stars beyond Mothership's hull. "I've been punishing myself for months. Taking dangerous assignments, working impossible hours, trying to earn the right to be alive when so many others aren't." Her voice dropped. "The people in that derelict, Will, Lisa, the rest who didn't make it, they were my section. My responsibility."
"You couldn't have known they survived."
"I should have looked harder. Searched longer. Been more obsessed about finding survivors instead of just moving forward with my new life."
"Elena." I waited until she looked at me. "You found them. You never stopped searching, even when everyone else said to let it go. Those two people are alive because of you."
"And six others are dead."
"Which isn't your fault. Any more than my unit's deaths were mine." The words felt strange, like trying on clothes that didn't quite fit yet. "We both survived something that killed people we cared about. That's not a crime. It's just what happened."
She studied me with those analytical eyes. "You don't really believe that."
"Not yet. But I'm trying to learn." I squeezed her hand gently. "And having someone beside me who understands the guilt makes it easier."
