"Three days," I say.
"Maybe less." His voice is low, pitched for me alone, though there's no one else to hear it.
"I've survived worse."
"I know." A pause, filled with the almost inaudible hum of the station's environmental systems and something else, something that lives in the space between our bodies like heat from an open wound. "I was there for some of it."
My jaw tightens. He was there for some of it. He was also the cause of some of it, the worst of it, and we both know which parts I mean.
The stars don't care. The void doesn't care. The cold glass against my skin doesn't care.
I open my mouth, and what comes out is not what I planned.
"When the fighting starts." My voice is steady. I trained it to be steady the way I trained my hands not to shake on a trigger. "If it goes wrong."
"It won't."
"But if it does." I turn my head. He's looking at me already, his face half-lit by the glow of his own marks andthe distant starlight, and his expression is so open it almost breaks me. Not soft. Never soft. But open, the way a wound is open. Like something inside him has stopped trying to close. "I need you to know something."
He doesn't speak. He waits. And I realize this is what I came here for, not the quiet, not the stars, not the tactical clarity that the observation deck usually gives me. I came here because time is a fist closing around this station the same way the Vex fleet is, and some things can't survive being left unsaid.
I turn to face him fully. My walls come down, and I do it on purpose, brick by brick, a deliberate demolition that I feel in my body as exposure, as cold air against bare skin, as the particular vulnerability of standing in front of someone who has already proven they can hurt you and choosing to give them the opening anyway.
"I don't forgive you."
His marks flare. A ripple of pale light that runs from his wrists to his throat like a shockwave.
"I may never forgive you." My voice is quiet, but each word is a thing I've carried for six years, heavy and sharp-edged, and setting them down feels like setting down a weapon. "But I don't want you to die thinking I hated you."
The light in his marks is doing something I've never seen before, shifting through colors I don't have names for, patterns that pulse and cascade and tell me he is feeling everything, all of it, more than his control can contain. His hands are at his sides and his fingers are curled in, not fists, not quite, but the effort of keeping them still is visible in the tendons of his forearms.
"What do you want me to think?" His voice is rough. Stripped down to its foundation, nothing left but the rawmaterial underneath six years of distance and silence and separate wars.
I step closer. Close enough to feel his breath on my face, to smell him, that particular combination of clean skin and something warmer underneath, something that has always been specific to him and no one else, the scent that lived in my sheets for weeks after he left and that I buried my face in every night until I couldn't anymore.
"That I loved you." The words come out without the armor I usually wrap them in. Naked. Honest. Terrifying. "That I love you still. That sometimes hate and love are the same thing, and I've spent six years not knowing which was which."
His breath catches. The sound is so small it would be inaudible from two feet further away, but I'm not two feet further away. I'm right here, and I hear it, and it breaks something open in my chest that I've been holding shut with both hands since the day I walked onto this station and saw his face.
"That if we survive this," I whisper, and my hand comes up to rest against his chest, over his heart, where the marks glow brightest and the heat of his body bleeds through the fabric like a promise, "I want to find out."
He doesn't move for a long moment. His heart hammers against my palm, rapid and forceful, and his marks are acascade of light that makes the darkness of the observation deck feel like a living thing, like we're standing inside something luminous and fragile that could shatter if either of us breathes wrong.
Then his hands come up.
They frame my face with a gentleness that hurts worse than any violence he's ever done to me. His palms are warm and rough and they cradle my jaw like I'm something he's terrified of breaking, and the contradiction between those hands and everything I know they're capable of makes my vision blur.
He kisses me.
Soft. So soft it almost isn't a kiss at all, more like a question pressed against my lips with the full weight of six years behind it. No urgency. No demand. No war in it at all, just his mouth on mine, warm and careful, the slowest and most devastating thing he's ever done to me.
I kiss him back. My fingers curl into the fabric of his shirt over his heart, and the tears I didn't feel building are suddenly there, hot and silent on my cheeks, and he must feel them against his thumbs because he makes a sound. Low in his throat. The sound of a man who has been holding something so tightly for so long that his hands have forgotten how to open.
For three seconds, maybe four, the universe is just this. His mouth and mine. The warmth of his palms on my face. The glow of his marks reflected in my closed eyelids like captured starlight. The silence of the observation deck holding us the way the void holds everything, without judgment, without mercy, without any promise that it will last.
The alarm hits like a physical blow.
Red light floods the deck, turning his face crimson, turning the stars into something that looks like bleeding. The alert tone is a sound I know in my bones, the specific frequency that means breach, that means incoming, that means everything you prepared for is happening right now.
