She nods. Once. A clean, precise movement, the kind a soldier gives another soldier.
Then she turns back to the target wall and fires again.
It isn't forgiveness. I know what forgiveness looks like, and it's softer than that, messier. This is acknowledgment. Recognition of what happened, filed and stored and carried forward without the need to revisit it.
Maybe that's better than I deserve. Probably it is. I take it anyway, tuck it into the space between my ribs where I keep the things I haven't earned, and I walk away.
Our quarters aredark except for the viewport's spill of starlight and the soft amber glow of the environmental panel by the door. Tomorrow, we launch. Tomorrow, we fly into a tear in the fabric of space-time and hope that what's on the other side doesn't kill us in the first ninety seconds. Tomorrow, everything becomes theory and risk and the kind of faith I was never built for.
Tonight, Aura is sitting on the edge of the bed, unwinding her hair from the pins that hold it in the elaborate Consortium style she wears like armor, and the sight of her fingers working through the dark strands does something to my chest that has no business being this devastating.
I close the door behind me. She looks up.
Neither of us speaks for a moment. The silence isn't empty. It's full of everything we've already said, every confession, every fight, every time I told her the truth when lying would have been easier and every time she chose to believe me when doubt would have been safer. The silence is the accumulated weight of forty-one days of becoming whatever we are.
"Come here," she says.
I cross the room. She reaches for me when I'm close enough, her fingers curling into the front of my shirt, and she pulls me down until my forehead rests against hers. Her breath is warm on my mouth. She smells like the station's recycled air and the faint sweetness of the oil she uses on her hair and underneath it something that's just her skin, something I've memorized so thoroughly I could find her in a lightless room by scent alone.
"Hi," she says, and there's something in the word—a question wrapped in greeting, a test to see if I'm still here, if I'm real, if this moment is actually happening and not some desperate dream the exhaustion has constructed.
"Hi." My voice comes out rough. I clear my throat. Try again. "Hi."
Her laugh is barely a breath, more air than sound, and it ghosts across my chest like she's already touching me though there's still distance between us. "We might die tomorrow."
The words land differently when she says them—not a threat, not a warning, but an acknowledgment of the kind of math I've spent my entire life calculating. Probability. Odds. The cold assessment of what the universe might take from us.
"We might." I don't soften it. Don't offer false comfort wrapped in gentle lies. She deserves better than that, and we both know it.
"I'd like to not think about that for a while." Her eyes meet mine, and there's a vulnerability there that costs her something—I can see it in the slight tension at the corners of her mouth, the way her fingers curl tighter into my shirt. "I'd like to pretend, maybe. Just for tonight."
"What would you like to think about instead?" The question comes out almost rough, because I'm already moving forward, already closing the space between us, already imagining every possible answer and knowing that whatever she says, I'll give her. "Tell me."
Her fingers tighten in my shirt. She tilts her face up, and her mouth finds mine, and the kiss is slow enough to ache. Not the desperate collision of our earlier encounters, not the combative push-pull of two people who wanted each other and resented it. This is something else. Something that feels like the first time, if the first time came after you'd already survived each other.
I bring my hands up to her face. Cup her jaw. Feel the delicate architecture of bone beneath skin, the pulse point under my thumb where her blood runs quick and close to the surface. She's so precisely made. Every line of her deliberate, elegant, lethal in its beauty the way a blade is lethal. And she's letting me hold her face in my hands like this, tilted up to me, eyes open.
"May I?" My thumbs trace her cheekbones.
"Yes."
I kiss her again. Deeper this time, slower, tasting the warmth of her mouth with a care I haven't shown anything in years. I've handled explosives more carelessly than I'm handling her right now, and the strange thing is that the care doesn't feel like restraint. It feels like the first honest thing my hands have done.
She pulls my shirt over my head. Her palms flatten against my chest, and I feel her fingers trace the scars there, the topography of every mission, every fight, every time I walked into something that should have killed me and walked out carrying new damage. She knows them now. She's mapped them with her mouth on other nights. But tonight she traces them like she's reading something written in a language she's only just learned.
"You're beautiful," she says, and I almost flinch because no one has ever said that to me and meant the scars too.
"Aura."
"Shut up. I'm telling you something."
I shut up. She pushes me back until my knees hit the bed and I sit, and she climbs into my lap, knees bracketing my hips, her weight settling against me in a way that makes my breath catch. Her dress is some soft, unstructured thing she wears in private, nothing like the structured Consortium fashion. I find the hem and slide my hands underneath it, up the warm skin of her thighs, and she shivers.
"May I take this off?"
"Yes." She lifts her arms and I pull the dress over her head, and she's bare underneath except for a thin band of fabric at her hips. Starlight from the viewport catches on her skin, and I watch her in the blue-white light, the swell of her breasts, the line of her waist, the way her stomach tightens when my hands settle there.
"You're staring."
