I try to speak. Try to tell him I'm fine, just tired, just need a moment to catch my breath. But my tongue won't cooperate, lying thick and useless in my mouth, and when I try to lift my head the world spins so violently I nearly vomit.
"Stupid," Haid mutters, but his grip gentles fractionally, adjusting my weight distribution to something more comfortable. "Reckless. Could have killed yourself."
Probably true. The edges of my vision keep going dark, consciousness flickering like a candle in high wind. My heartbeat sounds wrong, too fast and too irregular, skipping beats in patterns that definitely indicate severe metabolic stress.
"The children," I manage to croak out, the word slurring slightly around edges that won't quite cooperate, tongue still thick and clumsy in my mouth. Each syllable takes conscious effort to form, muscles not quite responding the way they should. "Are they? Did they?"
"Safe." The single word cuts through my stammering attempt at coherence. Then his voice drops lower, rougher, modulated down to a register meant only for me, pitched beneath the general chaos of miners shuffling and equipment beeping and emergency systems cycling through their protocols. "They're safe. All of them. Because of you." A pause, and I feel rather than see him look down at me, that helmeted gaze intense even through whatever filtration systems separate his eyes from mine. "You saved them."
Warm pride and satisfaction spreads through my chest. The endorphin rush comes with survival after near-death experiences.
I let my eyes close. Just for a second. Just to rest them against the harsh emergency lighting and the swirling dust and the concerned faces peering down at me with expressions I'm too exhausted to interpret.
"Nyx." Haid's voice again, sharper now. Command mode. "Finish the evacuation. Get everyone to the central hub. Run full structural diagnostics on this entire section."
"Yes, Lord." Her response comes from somewhere to my left, brisk and professional despite the lingering shock I can hear underneath. "And the girl?"
"Mine." The word comes out edged with something dark and possessive. A warning. "She's mine. No one touches her."
His arms tighten around me fractionally. Armor plates pressing against my ribs, uncomfortable but grounding. Real. Solid. Something to focus on while my body tries to remember how to regulate its own systems.
I should protest. Should point out that I'm not property, not his, not anyone's. That I'm a person with autonomy and rights and opinions about how I'm categorized.
But I'm too tired to argue. Too wrung out to care about semantics or possessive pronouns or the complicated politics of exactly what relationship we have now that I've saved his people using powers my mother always told me were dangerous, unnatural, something to hide rather than celebrate.
Instead I turn my face into his chest plate and let the darkness take me.
The last thing I hear before unconsciousness claims me completely is the sound of the mushrooms still growing, caps expanding with soft rustling whispers, filling the damaged infirmary with the scent of earth and life and green growing things that have no business existing in the cold metal tomb of a dying space station.
But they do exist. Because I made them. Because I reached out and pulled life from nothing, from spores and potential and sheer desperate will.
My mother always said my power was a curse, something to be locked away and suppressed, controlled and denied. A dangerous aberration that marked me as different, as other, as something that needed to be contained rather than celebrated.
Lying here in Haid's arms, surrounded by the evidence of what I can do when I stop being afraid, when I stop listening to her voice in my head telling me I'm too much, too wild, too dangerous to be trusted with my own gifts, I wonder if she was wrong. If all those years of warnings and restrictions and fearful glances weren't about protecting me at all, but about something else entirely. Something darker and more complicated than simple maternal concern.
Or if she was just terrified I might figure that out. That I might realize the truth she's been hiding from me since I was old enough to make flowers bloom out of season. That my power isn't a curse at all, it's freedom. It's choice. It's the ability to change things, to make things grow, to bring life where there was only death and sterility and the cold efficient emptiness of controlled systems.
And maybe that's what she's always feared most of all.
10
Haid
The medical scanner beeps in my peripheral vision. Steady. Regular. Proof that her heart still beats, lungs still fill, neurons still fire in the complex organic dance that separates living tissue from cooling meat.
I adjust the chair. The metal legs scrape against the deck plating, loud in the enforced quiet of the med-bay. Around us, the station hums with post-crisis activity. Repair crews welding compromised bulkheads, engineers rerouting power conduits, miners relocating families to structurally sound sections. The efficient choreography of survival in the void.
But here, in this sterile room with its antiseptic smell and blue-white illumination panels, everything sits suspended. Waiting.
She lies motionless on the diagnostic bed, skin too pale against the dark thermal blanket someone draped over her. Her hair fans across the pillow in shades I still can't name, somewhere between gold and bronze and the color of sunlight through the atmosphere I've only seen in archived footage. One hand rests on her stomach, fingers curled loosely. The otherhangs off the edge of the mattress, close enough to touch if I were the kind of man who allowed himself such indulgences.
I am not that man.
I shift in the chair again. Cross my arms. Uncross them. Settle for gripping my knees, gauntlets scraping against armored thigh plates. The suit feels heavier than usual. Confining. Like wearing a prison instead of protection.
Nyx offered to take the first watch. So did Thanatos, with that peculiar intensity he gets when he thinks I'm making tactically unsound decisions based on emotion rather than strategy. Both of them received the same response. A flat stare and orders to focus on damage assessment.
Because I need to be here. Need to see the proof that she still breathes, still exists, still takes up space in the universe despite coming dangerously close to erasing herself through sheer stupid heroism.
