The knock came sometime after midnight, sharp and insistent, three quick raps followed by a fourth one that landed hard enough to rattle the door in its frame, and Ren surfaced out of a dead, exhausted sleep with his heart already hammering before his brain had even caught up to being awake. ’Whoever this is,’ he thought, dragging himself upright and stumbling toward the door with every intention of being extremely unpleasant about it, ’better have a genuinely excellent reason for waking me up after the day I’ve had, because I have exactly zero patience left in reserve for anything less than a life-or-death emergency.’
He got the door open, already halfway through composing a scathing opening line, and didn’t get a single word of it out before a hand shot forward, closed around his ear, and yanked hard enough to pull him stumbling into the corridor.
"Ow, what the actual—" Ren yelped, grabbing at the offending hand on pure reflex, and found himself face to face with a woman who shared enough of Rafayal’s sharp features and dark red hair that the resemblance hit him a full second before any borrowed memory bothered supplying a name.
"Tell me what happened, Rafayal," the woman said, voice cutting and precise, still holding his ear at an angle that made escape actively painful, "or I promise you I will not go easy on you tonight."
’Great,’ Ren thought, wincing, one hand still uselessly trying to pry her fingers loose. ’Fantastic. Add a furious older sister to the growing list of people who apparently have unrestricted access to me at any hour they please.’ The name surfaced a beat later, dredged up from somewhere in Rafayal’s memory alongside a fresh wave of secondhand dread. Alouis. His sister. And judging by the sheer, unfiltered fury radiating off her, whatever history existed between the two of them had clearly never once favored the version of Rafayal currently wearing Ren’s face.
"Could you let go of my ear first," Ren managed, "and then maybe I could actually explain something instead of just standing here in pain."
Alouis released him with a sharp little shove instead, pushing him back through the open door into his own quarters and following him in without waiting for an invitation, the door sliding shut behind her with a hiss that felt distinctly final. She crossed her arms and stared him down with an intensity that made every instinct in Ren’s borrowed body want to shrink slightly, some deep, inherited memory of exactly how badly these confrontations had usually gone in the past clearly still lodged somewhere in his nervous system even if his conscious mind didn’t have the specifics.
"I got a message three hours ago that my little brother produced a rank result so unstable it broke a military diagnostic array in front of an entire outpost, immediately after breaking his engagement to the Grand Marshal of the entire Empire, on the same day he apparently caused enough of a scene that I’ve had four separate contacts message me asking if the family is in crisis," Alouis said, ticking each item off with visible, mounting exasperation. "So please, enlighten me, Rafayal, what exactly is going on in that head of yours, because from where I’m standing it looks like you’ve decided to set fire to everything we’ve spent years carefully building, all in the space of about twenty-four hours."
"It’s not as bad as it sounds," Ren said, immediately regretting the attempt the second it left his mouth, because Alouis’s expression didn’t so much as flicker with anything resembling reassurance.
"Not as bad as it sounds," she repeated flatly. "You ended an engagement to the single most powerful man in the Empire without consulting a single member of this family beforehand. You then apparently produced a rank so far beyond classification that Command has flagged you for evaluation, which means every eye in this sector is now watching to see what the Miller family produced, and whether it’s an asset or a liability. And you did all of this without once considering that the rest of us would have to answer for it the moment word reached anyone who matters."
"I panicked, okay," Ren said, trying a different angle, "the engagement felt wrong, I ended it, and then a monster attacked my transport and something in me apparently woke up that I didn’t know was there, none of that was planned, I promise you I wasn’t trying to cause a family crisis on purpose."
"You never plan anything, that’s precisely the problem," Alouis snapped, and something about the specific weariness in her voice made Ren realize, with a fresh sinking feeling, that this particular argument had clearly been had before, many times, with the original Rafayal, and none of his attempts at damage control tonight were landing any differently than they apparently always had. "Do you have any idea what it’s like, cleaning up after you, over and over, while you throw tantrums and burn every advantage this family has ever built for you without a second thought for anyone left holding the pieces afterward?"
"I’m trying to explain that this time is actually different," Ren said, and immediately heard how weak it sounded even as the words left him.
"It’s always different, according to you," Alouis said, voice climbing, and Ren watched with a rapidly sinking heart as his attempt at reassurance somehow made everything measurably worse instead of better, her frustration compounding with every word he offered instead of easing at all. "You said that after the incident with the trade envoy. You said that after you nearly got a Sentinel officer discharged over some imagined slight. You have said that exact sentence to me more times than I can count, Rafayal, and every single time it has meant absolutely nothing changed at all."
’Okay,’ Ren thought, watching her fury build in real time and realizing with real dread that nothing he said in defense of his own actions was going to land right, not when every word out of his mouth was getting filtered straight through years of Rafayal’s actual, documented history of exactly this kind of disaster. ’I am actively making this worse the more I try to fix it. Every reassurance sounds like the same excuse she’s heard a hundred times before. I need to stop talking and just let her finish, because clearly nothing productive is coming out of my mouth right now.’
He fell silent instead, and Alouis seemed to take his silence as some kind of confirmation, drawing herself up straighter, some of the raw fury in her expression settling into something colder, more resigned.
"You should prepare yourself," she said finally, "because Father is going to come here. I don’t know when, exactly, his schedule has never been predictable and I doubt this situation will make him move any faster than he intends to, but he will come, eventually, and when he does, you had better have a considerably better explanation ready than the one you’ve just given me, because I promise you, whatever leniency you think you’re entitled to as his son ran out years ago, and this stunt has not bought you any of it back."
Ren felt something cold settle low in his stomach at the mention of the father, some instinctive dread crawling up from Rafayal’s borrowed memory that didn’t need words to communicate itself clearly. ’Right,’ he thought, watching Alouis turn toward the door, her fury apparently spent for the night, replaced by something closer to exhausted resignation. ’The father. Of course there’s a terrifying father somewhere in the wings I haven’t even had to deal with yet. Because apparently just surviving an engagement collapse, a monster attack, an off-the-charts rank test, and one deeply unhinged encounter with a man named Reven wasn’t quite enough chaos to cram into a single day.’
Alouis paused at the door, glancing back at him one last time, and something in her expression softened just slightly, just for a second, before she caught herself and let it harden back into something more composed. "For what it’s worth," she said, quieter now, "whatever actually happened out there on that moon, it clearly changed something in you. I don’t know what to make of that yet. But I’d advise you to be very careful about who else notices it before you’ve figured it out yourself." Then she was gone, the door sealing shut behind her with a soft hiss, leaving Ren alone in the sudden quiet with a headache building steadily behind his eyes.
He sat back down on the edge of his bunk, dropping his head into his hands, and allowed himself a long, tired breath. ’No one survives this family,’ he thought, the realization settling in with the same cold, sinking weight as everything else that had piled up today. ’Not really. Not even the version of me that used to live inside it.’ He thought about the book again, about how little space it had ever spared for Rafayal’s family beyond a few cold references to political weight and old money, never once bothering to show the actual, exhausting weight of surviving inside it firsthand. ’This is all that villain’s fault,’ he thought bitterly, lying back against the thin pillow and staring up at the ceiling. ’Every single mess I’m cleaning up right now, every single relationship already in ruins before I even got here. I really did get handed the worst possible inheritance in this entire galaxy.’
He closed his eyes, and somewhere in the exhausted, half-formed thoughts drifting through his head before sleep finally pulled him under, one clear, stubborn resolution held steady above the rest. Whatever was coming, whoever else showed up demanding explanations he didn’t fully have, he wasn’t going back to being the villain everyone already expected him to be. Not for Alouis. Not for the father waiting somewhere in the wings. Not for anyone.