The kiss that followed wasn't urgent like before. No collision, no heat-driven hunger. It was slower. Intentional. His hand settled at my lower back, grounding, possessive in a way that made my pulse stumble. When he finally let me go, his thumb lingered at my jaw, as if committing the shape of my face to memory.
"You're a sight for sore eyes," he sighed quietly.
I exhaled a laugh, resting my forehead briefly against his chest before stepping back. "That's one way to say you missed me."
His mouth curved into a warm smile—it looked strange on him. "You were… missed."
That admission did something reckless to my chest. And before I could melt into the floor like an idiot, I forced myself to breathe and asked, "What are you doing up here?" My tone came out lighter than I felt as I moved toward the secondary console. "You look like you've been arguing with the universe."
"I usually win those," he deadpanned.
I snorted and dropped into the seat beside him, my attention pulled immediately to the layered displays surrounding us. Star maps. Threat vectors. A projected course arcing outward from our current position.
"Cronack?" I asked, following the trajectory.
"Yes," he replied.
I tilted my head, studying the data a moment longer before looking back at him. "How are we going to get Nythor out?"
He looked at me then, really looked at me. "I'll handle it," he asserted quietly. "This isn't yours to carry."
"We're in this together," I reminded him.
He exhaled slowly, as if choosing his next words with care instead of instinct. "We are. But together does not always mean side by side."
I frowned. "That sounds dangerously close to a speech."
One corner of his mouth twitched, but his eyes stayed serious. "What Nythor is entangled with… it isn't just confinement. It's pressure. Proximity to forces that erode sanity by existing."
I folded my arms, unwilling to yield without a fight. "You think I'm afraid of danger?"
"No, but I won't let you step into this one." He looked more serious than I'd ever seen him, "Not when the threat is not just injury, but unmaking."
I looked back at the data, at the Ohrur markers scattered along the projected route. "You said it yourself. The Ohrurs are weak."
"They are," he agreed. "Which is why this won't be hard."
I turned back to him sharply. "Then what's the problem?"
"The problem is not the Ohrurs."
His hand moved across the console, pulling up a secondary overlay, energy distortions, erratic spikes that made my skin prickle even before I understood them. "Nythor is not simply being held. He's… bleeding into the space around him. Whatever the Ohrurs think they're controlling, they're wrong."
I swallowed. "And you?"
"I'm better equipped to survive proximity." He evaded answering my question directly. But the wordsurvivemade my heart stutter, and I didn't have the energy to dig deeper.
"So what am I supposed to do?" I asked quietly. "Sit here and wait while you go do… god work?"
His gaze softened at that, just a fraction. "You anchor me. You will organize what I bring back. You make sense of what should not make sense."
"That still sounds like staying behind."
"It's not," he pushed gently. "It's just as significant."
I let out a slow huff. We weren't there yet. We still had to travel to Cronack, so there was no sense in arguing about it now.
I remembered why I had sought him out in the first place. "You should start recording everything. Every noise, every word, every fragment, every impression you receive from Nythor. Even the parts you think are irrelevant. So that I can take a look."
