She crossed to him through the dark easily—she’d always moved well in the dark, his nestqueen, a bright golden light living inside her even when she wasn’t burning it—and stopped an arm’s reach away. Close enough that her warmth registered through the cooler greenhouse air. Close enough that through their bond he felt her settle: the slight easing of the tension she’d carried since the morning’s training, the way she arrived in a space and let herself stop moving.
She looked at the tessara bloom. “You grew that?”
“Transplanted from Circul stock.” His vines traced the shelf edge without thinking, habit-touch that he rarely managed to stop. “It only blooms at night. It takes about year to grow its first flower.”
She was quiet a moment, watching the pale cup catch moonlight. “I know someone else like that.”
He looked at her instead of the plant.
They walked the beds slowly. He showed her what he’d built here—not with any premeditated intention to show it, but because she asked, and he found he could answer the questions she asked more easily than the ones he asked himself.
The tessara and its year wait. The climbing stellarvine’s preference for the northwest panes, where it could track the later moonrise. A bed of root-herbs from the Circuli homeworld that he’d managed to keep alive in Destima’s lower humidity by adjusting the soil chemistry twice a week. It was labor-intensive in a way that Xylo had politely questioned once and never brought up again. A row of Aldawi night-slicestars that villa’s household staff had gifted them while Selena was away to distract him. He’d relocated them to this corner of the greenhouse after determining the southern light angles served them better. A trailing vine from a system he couldn’t identify by species, which had arrived in a shipment of Circuli supplies mislabeled and without documentation. One he’d kept alive anyway, cataloging its growth habits until it had made itself known. Unremarkable work, probably, to anyone watching from the outside. But his hands had done it without being asked, and the plants had grown without being demanded, and there was something in that quiet equation that made sense to him in a way conversation didn’t always manage.
“This is how you think,” Selena said. Not a question. They’d stopped beside the vine wall, her fingers tracing the silver stellarvine where it wound the glass frame. “Through these.”
He considered deflecting. Considered something easier to hold. “I suppose it is.”
“You tend things.” She turned to face him, and in the moonlight through the glass her expression was careful—not cautious, but precise, the way she was when she was about to say something she’d been building toward for longer than theconversation. “Quietly. Without making it obvious. And then one day you look over and everything is rooted and growing and you realize it’s been happening the whole time.”
His petal wings flexed once against his back.
“V’dim,” he said, and stopped. Tried again. “V’dim tells you. Every day, in a hundred ways. He has—” His vines tightened involuntarily against his sides, the small reactive movement he’d spent years learning to control and they couldn’t—not entirely—whenever his nestqueen was around. “Words aren’t—” The vine nearest her hand curled inward. “I don’t do it the way he does.”
“No,” she agreed. “You don’t.”
He wasn’t entirely sure if that was meant to reassure him.
“V’dim is the sun,” he said, quietly enough that the words felt less like confession and more like what they were—honest assessment. He was better at those. “Warm. Visible. People feel him when he enters a room. You feel him.” He looked at the tessara bloom instead of her face. “I’m the roots. Necessary, maybe. But underground. And you don’t notice roots until something needs them.”
She was quiet.
He’d learned not to fill her silences. V’dim filled silences like he filled rooms—naturally, generously, without cost to himself. Z’fir let them sit, and sometimes they resolved into something useful, and sometimes they resolved into nothing, and he’d learned to accept both outcomes with equal weight. There was no percentage in demanding a silence become something it wasn’t.
“Do you think I don’t see you?” she asked.
The question landed precisely where it was aimed. He’d been waiting for it, or something shaped like it, for longer than he’d have admitted to anyone, including V’dim.
“I think,” he said carefully, “that you see V’dim first. And then you look around and find me.”
“That’s not—”
“I’m not asking you to fix it.” His vines uncurled, slowly, the way they did after a long hold. “It isn’t a wound. It’s just true. He’s easier to find than I am. He wants to be found. He’s built himself to be findable.” He paused, because the next part was harder and he’d learned to approach harder things with the same care he gave fragile root systems. “I’m not always certain I do the same. I build walls the way I train vines—systematically, and so gradually I don’t always notice how tall they’ve grown until someone has to reach over one to get to me. It isn’t intentional. I don’t build them to keep anyone out. I build them because structure is what I know. Because the vine goes nowhere without a frame to climb.”
Her eyes moved over him in the greenhouse. Dark and unhurried.
“Then why are you telling me this?” she asked.
He didn’t answer immediately because the true answer required the next thing—the thing underneath the roots and sun metaphor—and that one was harder in a different way. He hadn’t planned to say it. It had been sitting at the bottom of the greenhouse at midnight for three hours, patient as a tessara waiting to bloom.
He moved to the bench along the rear wall and sat. The greenhouse felt smaller at this hour, more honest perhaps, because the plants didn’t care what he looked like when he was working something out.
“I’ve been in the Yarrkins War,” he said. “Before you. Before the clan. V’dim and I both held our Circuli fleet commission for over a decade without a nestqueen, which isn’t—” He stopped. Started differently. “Most Circuli males don’t survive that stretch without bonding to a nestqueen’s clan. The biological instinct degrades. The drive to protect, to serve, to build something that lasts—it turns inward without an anchor.You lose parts of yourself, and the parts you lose first are always the soft ones.”
She sat beside him on the bench—not across from him, beside him, close enough that her shoulder pressed his arm—and listened.
“V’dim held onto his. Somehow, even in the war, he came out of it still able to feel things the way he always had. Still able to want words and warmth and the kind of connections that fill a room.” A vine pressed flat against his thigh. “I came out of it differently.”
“Harder,” she said. Quietly. As if she’d already known this without being told.
