Selena crossed the remaining distance and put her arms around him.
No speech. No careful architecture of reassurance built word by word. Just her—arms around him, forehead dropping to his shoulder, her warmth pressing against his chest where the bondlived closest to the surface. He stood rigid for two full seconds, the way he always did when someone tried to care for him, the deep instinct that said he should be the one holding rather than held.
Then something in him gave way.
His arms came around her. He bent his head over hers. The teal thread of their bond hummed—resonant, full—and he held her the way he should have let himself be held an hour ago, two hours ago, the entire length of this interminable night.
She didn’t say anything for a long moment.
Just held on.
“Zirene has survived decades of front-line combat,” she said at last into his shoulder. Steady, not gentle-false. She was not a person who minimized, and he had learned to trust that. “He survived before he had a clan. Before he had any of us.” A breath. “He has more reasons to come home now than he’s ever had in his life.”
“I know that.”
“V’dim and Z’fir are commanders. They’ve run fleet operations across half the quadrant. They know how to protect themselves and each other—they’ve been doing it since before you were born—and they’ll have the orbital defense net behind them. They’re not going somewhere without resources. They’re staying in the system.”
“I know that too.”
“Then say the part you actually mean.”
He pressed his mouth to the crown of her head. A gesture that needed no translation.
“I can hold every fact you’ve named,” he said. “Believe all of them. And it doesn’t touch the thing that keeps me in this room. Because healing is the only power I have, and it only works when I can use it. And right now every person I love is moving out of range.”
She pulled back enough to look up at him. Her hands slid to his chest, thumbs tracing the galaxy-light patterns along his collarbone—a gesture she’d developed soon after they’d first met and that he had come to understand as her way of confirming him. Real. Present. Here.
“Your job,” she said, with the quiet certainty of someone who had decided something and meant it down to the bone, “is to be home.”
He started to speak.
“Listen.” Firm but not harsh—she was never harsh with him. “Be the steady presence. Be ready. Hold the cubs when they’re scared—and Neazzos will be scared, even if he performs warrior stoicism for a week before he admits it. Be there for Odelm, because his anxiety will spiral the moment the landing pad is empty, and he needs someone whose calm he trusts.” She held his gaze. “Keep this room ready. Not because it proves something about your usefulness. Because when we come back—”
Her voice shifted on the word. Not softer. More certain. Nails-in-stone certain.
“—battered and depleted, whatever shape we’re in—there will be healing hands waiting. A healer who has not worn himself hollow trying to control from a distance what he cannot control.” She paused. “A home worth returning to. That’s not a small thing, Xylo. That’s the whole thing. That’s what we’re fighting to get back to.”
The knot in his chest didn’t dissolve. He hadn’t expected it to. Fear didn’t close like a wound—it faded with time and evidence and the particular mercy of things not going wrong—and what Selena had given him wasn’t an absence of fear. It was a reframing: the more honest kind of comfort. The weight didn’t lift. It redistributed.
“You think Odelm doesn’t look at you and feel steadier?” she said. “You think the cubs don’t know, at some instinctive level, that as long as you’re in the villa the world has a fixed point?” She paused. “V’dim and Z’fir are leaving in two days knowing you are here. That you’re holding this. That everyone they leave behind has you.” Her thumb pressed against his sternum where their bond ran warm. “That matters to them. More than you know.”
He had not thought of it that way.
He was, by nature and training, a counter of things. He counted supplies, counted doses, counted the variables that could turn a treatable wound into a fatal one. He had spent this entire evening counting distances and deficits and all the ways he might fail the people beyond his reach. He had not once stopped to count what his presence here was worth to Odelm, to the cubs, to the quiet machinery of a clan that needed its anchor as much as it needed its warriors.
He had not, if he was precise about it, thought of remaining behind as anything other than failing to go.
“And if someone doesn’t come back,” he said.
She held his gaze.
“Then you’ll do what healers do,” she said. “Keep going. Hold the ones still here. Grieve and rebuild and keep the light on.” A breath. “But that’s not tonight’s question. Tonight’s question is whether you’ll come to bed.”
He kissed her.
He’d meant it as something small—gratitude, or the particular tenderness of a mate who has just been shown a part of himself he couldn’t see from the inside. But she made a sound against his mouth and leaned into him, and small became something else entirely.
She slid her hands to the back of his neck. He found the curve of her waist, the familiar warmth of her—familiar the waybreath was familiar, the way the bond humming between them was familiar—and the supply room ceased to be a room full of medical inventory and became simply the space that contained her.
