“Don't tell me to calm down.” But the words come out as a gasp, a wheeze, barely speech at all. “I'm so tired. I'm so tired of being the one who has to fix everything. Tired of counting breaths that stop. Tired of carrying bodies and burying names and watching everyone I love slip through my fingers while I scramble to hold on.”
“Then stop.”
The two syllables cut through the spiral, low and rough and certain.
The laugh that escapes me sounds like shattering glass. “If I stop, everyone dies.”
“Not everyone.” He's closer now, his heat reaching me through the panic. “Not anymore.”
“You have me somewhere I don't want to be.” The words tumble out before I can catch them, accusation and confession and surrender all bleeding into one. “Responsible again. Cleaning up someone else's mess again. Your enforcers are dying and I'm the one trying to save them because that's what I do. That's all I do. That's all I've ever done.”
The hysteria is rising now, a tide I've never let reach this height, and I can't find the shore.
“I walked into your receiving room and begged for my brother's life. Begged. Offered myself up like a sacrifice because I had nothing else to give, and you took the offer because why wouldn't you? A trained medic for the price of one gambling addict. Good trade. Smart business. And now I'm here, and I'm yours, and I don't know how to stop being responsible for everyone around me because if I stop then what's the point? What's the point of any of it?”
The room is narrowing. I can't breathe. I can't think. I'm falling and there's nothing to hold onto and maybe that's fine. Maybe falling is easier than fighting. Maybe I should let the darkness take me and stop pretending I'm strong enough to survive a universe that keeps finding new ways to break me.
Arms close around me. The world spins as he lifts me from the bed, gathering me against his chest with a strength that brooks no argument. I expect his mouth on mine, expect the kiss that will complicate everything further, expect the distraction of desire to pull me from the spiral.
He doesn't kiss me. He holds me. I fight, because fighting is all I know how to do, fists against a chest that might as well be canyon stone for all the damage I inflict. I can't get free. He's too big, too strong, too immovable, and I'm struggling to breathe through the panic and the tears and the rage that has nowhere left to go.
He hums. The sound vibrates through his chest and into mine, a low resonance that bypasses my ears and settles into my bones. I freeze, shocked into stillness by the unexpectedness of it. The melody is nothing I recognize, ancient and alien and achingly beautiful, notes that wind around each other in patterns that don't follow any scale I learned in human music theory.
The sound he makes is devastating, the thought surfacing through the wreckage of my mind. This male who kills with his hands, who built himself into a weapon, who terrifies half a planet with his mere existence, produces a sound like mourning and comfort woven into one thread.
His voice wraps around me like a second embrace, and I sink into his chest rather than fighting against it. The panic doesn't disappear, but it softens, edges blurring as the vibrations work through muscle and bone. He's so much larger than me. His arms could crush without effort, his hands could break me in a dozen different ways, and instead they're cradling me against heat that seeps through my sleep clothes and into skin that's been cold for so long.
He's not demanding anything. Not asking for explanations or apologies or promises I can't keep. He's holding me through the breaking, letting me shatter against his chest while he hums a melody that sounds like grief given form.
His chin settles on top of my head, and he rocks. No one has ever held me while I broke. My mother was too sick by the time I needed holding. The military didn't train for comfort.Every relationship I've had since has been transactional, and temporary.
This male is letting me exist in my grief without asking for anything in return. The realization cracks open a place in my chest I thought closed forever.
“You should sleep.” The syllables rumble through his chest where my ear presses against it.
I'm so tired. The exhaustion I've been carrying since I landed on this planet has teeth, dragging at me with a weight I can't fight. I don't want to sleep, don't want to risk another nightmare, but more than that I don't want this to end. His heat. The safety of arms that were built for violence choosing softness instead. Once. I want someone to hold me demanding nothing, and he's offering exactly that.
“Will… you stay?” The question is a surrender I shouldn't be offering, especially to him. I want him to stay anyway.
His arms tighten around me, pressure that speaks louder than words. When he answers, the single syllable barely registers before sleep drags me under.
“Yes.”
Light against my eyelids. Orange glow bleeding through sealed windows, announcing a morning that arrived while I was elsewhere.
I slept without dreams, without counting breaths that stopped, without carrying bodies through the dark corridors of memory. The realization surfaces through the fog of deep sleep, remarkable in its simplicity.
He still holds me tightly in his arms, pressing me close to a heat that has chased away the cold I’ve carried for years. He fixes his gaze on the window. The angles of his face are softer in morning glow, harsh lines eased into quiet. His coiled tension has shifted. Not the predator patience of before but a stillness.
Then he senses my attention and turns his head. His arms tightening around me before he schools his features into neutral.
“Did you sleep well, female?”
The question is formal, distant, the words of a male trying to pretend the night didn't happen.
“Yes.” My words come out rusty with sleep and tears and truths I shouldn't speak. “I did.”
He nods, and then his arms loosen and he’s lifting me, setting me on the bed, rising to his feet in one fluid motion. His heat vanishes immediately, unwelcome, and I track him crossing to the door like someone who spent the night learning the shape of what she shouldn’t want.
