"And I'm not the one who got shot saving my life."
The words land between us like a grenade with the pin already pulled.
Silence. The ship hums. Something in the recycler clicks, a rhythmic tick that sounds almost like a clock counting down.
I hadn't thought of it that way. When the shot came, when I saw the muzzle flash in my peripheral vision and calculated trajectory in the fraction of a second before conscious thought could intervene, I hadn't been thinking about saving anyone. I'd just moved. Instinct firing faster than reason, my body putting itself between the bullet and him before my brain could weigh the odds, run the numbers, make the cold and rational choice I've always prided myself on.
I just moved.
For him.
"Don't." My voice comes out rough, scraping against something raw. "Don't read anything into it."
"I'm not reading." His marks pulse once, a faint ripple of amber that traces up his throat and fades. "I'm feeling."
My chest tightens. "That's worse."
"You can't hide from me right now." He says it quietly, without triumph, without the smug edge he'd usually coat a line like that in. Just fact. "You're too weak to keep your walls up."
I try anyway. Reach for the cold, the distance, the partition I built between us out of six years of rage and silence and the faces of strangers I killed because they reminded me of his jawline, his height, the way he held a glass. I reach for the wall and my fingers close on nothing.
Everything I'm feeling bleeds through. I can see it in the way his marks respond, flickering and shifting color, amber sliding into something warmer, then catching with a sharper light that looks almost like pain. He's reading me like a signal broadcast, every frequency I can't shut down pouring into him through whatever connection his people's biology creates.
He's feeling all of it.
The anger. He knows that one. It's been my constant companion around him since the day I walked into that hangar on Veridian-7 and saw his face. The anger is familiar, almost comfortable, and I let him have it because it costs me nothing.
But underneath the anger, there's pain. Physical and older. The ache in my back and the deeper ache that has nothing to do with a bullet, the one that lives in the hollow below my sternum where something used to be before I burned it out. Or tried to.
And under the pain, there's fear. Not the clean kind. Not the fear of dying, which I've made my peace with a dozen times over. This fear is messier, uglier, harder to name. The fear of this. Of what's in this room between us, filling the space between his chair and my cot like pressure building before a hull breach.
And underneath all of it, beneath every wall and weapon and carefully constructed defense, the thing I've been hiding for six years. The thing I hid from myself so well I almost believed it was gone.
I never stopped.
Never stopped wanting him. Never stopped loving him. Even when I hated him so purely it felt like a religion, even when I was hunting contracts across the outer systems and finding his ghost in every corridor, even when I lay in the dark on stations that smelled like recycled air and nothing and told myself I felt nothing.
Both. Always both. The hate and the love, tangled together so completely I couldn't kill one without killing the other, so I tried to kill them both and failed.
His marks blaze. A sudden, sharp flare of light that turns the dim medical bay gold, and I watch the knowledge land in him like a physical blow. His whole body goes still. His breath stops.
"You love me."
"Shut up."
"You've loved me this whole time." His voice is barely above a whisper, but it fills the room. His marks are burning bright enough to cast shadows on the ceiling, and I can see every line of his face in that amber glow, the exhaustion and the wonder and the terrible, ruinous understanding. "Even when you wanted to kill me. Even when you were killing strangers who looked like me. You loved me."
My throat closes. My eyes burn. I stare at the ceiling because I can't look at his face and survive this conversation.
"I said shut up."
"I love you too." He leans forward. The chair creaks. His hand finds mine on the cot, and his fingers are warm and shaking, and his marks are so bright they hurt my eyes. "I never stopped either."
I pull him down.
It's not a choice. It's not calculated, not weighed, notrun through the risk-assessment matrix that governs every other decision I make. My hand fists in the front of his shirt and I drag him down to me and I kiss him like violence, like reopening a wound that never healed right, like tearing stitches out because the thing underneath needs air even if it bleeds.
His mouth tastes like recycled water and the stale bitterness of too much caffeine and no sleep. I bite his lower lip hard enough to feel skin split, and he makes a sound against my teeth that lands somewhere between pain and relief, and then his hands are on either side of my head and he's kissing me back with six years of silence behind it.
