Zorn's expression softened. "You're welcome. Though technically you saved his life first by getting him to the shuttle. I just prevented him from dying afterward."
"Team effort," Elena said.
"Indeed." Zorn moved to my medical pod, checking readings with the thoroughness that made him Mothership's best physician. "Your recovery is progressing well, Commander. Another forty-eight hours of monitoring, then light duty for two weeks. No combat operations, no heavy exertion, and absolutely no crawling through damaged derelicts."
"Understood."
"And you," he turned to Elena, "need to let Bea examine that shoulder. The plasma burn requires specialized treatment."
"It's fine?—"
"Elena." I kept my tone gentle but firm. "Let them treat you. You can come back after."
She looked like she wanted to argue, but something in my expression must have convinced her. "Fine. But I'm coming right back."
"I'll be here."
She squeezed my hand once more, then reluctantly stood and followed Bea to an examination area. I watched her go, tracking her movements with the same tactical awareness I brought to combat operations. Making sure she was safe, protected, cared for.
"You care about her." Zorn's observation wasn't a question.
"Yes."
"Good. She needs someone who understands what she's been carrying." He made adjustments to my medication drip. "Survivor guilt is a weight that crushes slowly. Having someone who shares that weight makes it bearable."
"You've experienced it."
"Every healer has. We lose patients despite our best efforts. Learn to live with the ones we couldn't save." Zorn's gold markings flickered with old pain. "Elena's been punishing herself for surviving when others didn't. You can help her see that living fully honors the dead better than slow self-destruction."
"And what if I don't know how to live fully? What if I'm just as broken?"
"Then you learn together. Share your brokenness until it becomes something new. Something that works." Zorn finished his adjustments, met my eyes with compassion that made his profession make sense. "Love doesn't require perfection, Commander. It requires honesty. The rest follows."
He left me alone with those words and the distant sound of Elena arguing with Bea about treatment protocols. I closed my eyes, let exhaustion pull at consciousness, and tried tobelieve that maybe I could learn to stop merely surviving and actually live.
With Elena beside me, arguing and brilliant and refusing to let me give up on either of us, it almost seemed possible.
Chapter
Seven
Elena
Blood doesn't wash off easily. Not from skin, not from fabric, not from memory.
I scrubbed my hands three times in the medical bay's sanitation station, but I still saw it, Vaxon's blood, purple-black against my pale skin, coating my fingers like accusation. Could still feel the sticky heat of it soaking through my suit, still smell the metallic tang mixed with the acrid burn of plasma wounds.
He'd bled. Because of me. Because I'd been too slow, too reckless, too goddamn determined to save Will and Lisa that I'd gotten the man protecting me shot.
The medical bay doors stayed closed. Sealed. Impenetrable.
Bea had emerged forty-seven minutes ago, I'd counted every second, with her professional mask firmly in place. "He's stable. The plasma burns were severe, but I've repaired thetissue damage. He'll recover fully, but he needs time to regenerate. No visitors for at least four hours."
Then she'd looked at me and added quietly, "He asked about you first. Before the painkillers kicked in. Wanted to know if you were hurt."
I couldn't process that. Couldn't fit it into the narrative where I was the problem, the burden, the human who kept causing disasters.
So I nodded and said nothing, and Bea had retreated back into medical to monitor her patient. Will and Lisa were in there too, still in their stasis pods while Bea and her team ran diagnostics. Two survivors pulled from the wreckage. Two people who'd stayed alive against impossible odds because Will had made a choice, had sacrificed himself to keep them breathing.
