"Yes."
I don'tmake her finish the sentence. Don't make her ask the question we both know the answer to.
Yes. I felt her terror. Felt her pain. Felt the moments when she thought I was coming back for her, felt the realization when she understood I wasn't.
And I still completed the mission.
I still left.
She hits me.
Not with her fist. With her whole body. Launches herself across the small space and slams into me hard enough that I stumble back against the bulkhead. Her hands fist in my shirt, her face inches from mine.
"I fucking hate you," she says.
Her voice is raw, stripped down to nothing but the truth of it. The hate is old, six years old, weathered smooth by constant handling. But underneath—fresh rage, new and sharp, the kind that comes from having old wounds reopened.
"I know."
It's all I have. The acknowledgment without defense. She deserves more, but I don't have more to give.
"You left me with them."
Her grip on my shirt tightens. Her knuckles are white against the dark fabric. I can feel the tremor in her hands, the physical manifestation of everything she's holding back.
"I know."
"They—" Her voice breaks. Actually breaks, splintering into something jagged. "They hurt me. For hours. And you felt it. You felt what they did."
The words hang between us. She's not asking a question. She's forcing me to confirm what we both already know.
"I know."
My marks are flickering erratically now. The bioluminescence betraying what I'm feeling—guilt and grief and the memory of those first hours when the connection was still strong enough to sense her across kilometers. The memory of her terror flooding through me while I completed the extraction. While I walked away.
"Say something else." She shakes me. Hard enough that my head hits the bulkhead with a dull thunk. "Say anything except 'I know.'"
What is there to say?
That I'm sorry? I am. Sorry in ways that have carved themselves into my bones, settled into the spaces between my ribs. But sorry doesn't change the math. Doesn't rewrite the ninety seconds. Doesn't bring back what was taken from her.
That I'd do it differently now? I wouldn't. That's the thing that makes this irredeemable. The situation repeats itself in my nightmares with perfect clarity—the same odds, the same window, the same impossible choice. And every time, I make the same decision. The mission. The numbers. The cold calculation that says one life against the objective, one woman against the tactical success.
I choose correctly. Every time.
I hate myself for it. Every time.
But I still choose.
That I love her? She knows that already. Felt it last night when I finally said the words I should have said six years ago, before Sigma-9, before everything broke. Felt it through whatever connection exists between us now—thinner than it was when we served together, but still there, still enough for her to sense the weight of what I feel.
It didn't make her hate me less.
If anything, it made it worse. Because love that leaves you is more unforgivable than simple cruelty.
So I say the only truth left.
The one she needs to hear even if it destroys what little ground we're standing on.
