Ren was halfway down the corridor leading away from the training wing, still replaying that entire session with Reven in his head against his better judgment, when the watch on his wrist buzzed to life, a soft chime followed by a faint purple glow pulsing along its surface. He stopped walking and lifted his arm, watching the holographic display flicker awake above the watch’s face, a small incoming-transmission icon spinning in slow rotation.
"Incoming call," the watch announced in a smooth, synthetic voice. "Priority channel. Unidentified sender requesting immediate connection."
Ren stared at it for a second, brow furrowing. ’Unidentified,’ he thought, turning the wrist slightly like that might reveal more information than the display was already offering. ’Great. Very reassuring. Very normal way to receive a call. Who exactly is looking for me now, because I genuinely do not have the bandwidth today for one more mysterious person demanding my attention.’ He ran through the short, increasingly stressful list of candidates in his head. Alouis, already furious with him twice over in the space of a single day. Command, wanting more answers about the diagnostic array or the training results. Reven, somehow, even though he’d just left the man’s chamber ten minutes ago and the idea that he might already be following up made Ren’s stomach twist in a way he refused to examine.
He tapped the display to accept, bracing himself, and Yegard’s face flickered into view above his wrist instead, composed as ever, though something in the set of his jaw looked tighter than usual.
"Oh," Ren said, caught off guard enough that it came out flatter than he meant it to. "It’s you."
"I need you to come to the command wing," Yegard said, no greeting, no preamble, just the same clipped efficiency he applied to everything else. "Now, if you’re available."
"I was available about ten minutes ago, I’m considerably less available now that I’ve just survived my first training session," Ren said, rubbing at his still-faintly-aching wrist with his free hand. "Can this wait until I’ve had actual food today, or is this another emergency where the entire outpost needs to gather in a hall and stare at me?"
"It’s not an emergency," Yegard said, though something about his tone suggested otherwise, some careful control being exercised over each word. "I reviewed today’s training assignment roster."
Ren’s stomach dropped immediately, the pieces clicking into place a half second before Yegard finished the thought, and he closed his eyes briefly, silently cursing whatever cosmic force had decided his life needed this many overlapping disasters in a single week. "Right," Ren said slowly. "The training assignment. With Reven."
"With Reven," Yegard confirmed, and the two words came out flatter than anything Ren had heard from him yet, stripped down to something almost dangerously neutral. "Command wing. Ten minutes." The transmission cut before Ren could get another word in, the purple glow along the watch fading back to standby, leaving him standing alone in the corridor with a headache building fresh behind his eyes.
’Fantastic,’ he thought, already turning to head toward the command wing because arguing with a dead transmission wasn’t going to accomplish anything useful. ’Absolutely fantastic. I haven’t even eaten yet and I’m already being summoned to explain myself for a training assignment I didn’t request, didn’t approve, and would have actively vetoed if anyone had bothered asking my opinion on the matter first.’
The walk to the command wing felt considerably shorter than Ren wanted it to, and he found Yegard waiting exactly where he’d expected, standing near a window that overlooked the training yard below, hands clasped loosely behind his back in a posture that read as calm to anyone who hadn’t spent the last two days learning to read the subtle differences in his stillness. This particular stillness, Ren was quickly realizing, had an edge to it.
"You wanted to see me," Ren said, echoing the exact words Yegard had used on him back in that Capital receiving hall what felt like a lifetime ago now, mostly because he couldn’t resist the small, petty satisfaction of throwing them back.
Yegard turned from the window, and for a moment neither of them said anything, the silence stretching just long enough to feel deliberate. "You’re being trained alone," Yegard said finally, "by a man who has no official record of instructor certification, no documented history at this outpost prior to yesterday, and no explanation on file for how he came to be assigned to your case specifically within hours of your assessment."
"That’s a lot of information you apparently pulled together very fast," Ren said, crossing his arms. "Should I be concerned about how thoroughly you looked into my new instructor, or is this just standard Grand Marshal due diligence you’d extend to literally any Sentinel’s assignment?"
"I looked into it because Reven doesn’t officially exist in any personnel record older than six months," Yegard said, and the flatness in his voice had shifted into something sharper now, something that made Ren’s earlier irritation cool slightly into genuine unease. "He appeared on this outpost’s roster with credentials that trace back to a classification tier I don’t have clearance to view fully, under my own command, at my own outpost. Which means someone significantly above my authority placed him here, quietly, and then made sure he was the first name attached to your case the moment your rank test broke Command’s equipment."
Ren felt the floor tilt slightly under that information, the earlier unease sharpening into something closer to real alarm. ’Okay,’ he thought, processing that fast, ’that’s considerably less reassuring than I was hoping for. That’s not just some overprotective ex-fiancé jealousy talking, that’s an actual, legitimate security concern, and now I feel genuinely stupid for spending the last hour standing very close to a man whose entire existence is apparently classified above the Grand Marshal’s own clearance level.’
"So what exactly are you telling me," Ren said slowly. "That my new instructor might be dangerous, or that he might be here specifically because of me?"
"I’m telling you both are possible, and I don’t like either option," Yegard said, and something in his voice had dropped lower now, quieter, less carefully controlled than Ren had heard from him since the whole ordeal began. "I’m telling you that whoever placed him here did so with enough authority to bypass my own oversight of this station entirely, which doesn’t happen by accident, and it doesn’t happen for Sentinels whose ranks fall within normal parameters."
"Great, so I’m apparently important enough to attract classified attention from people even you don’t have clearance to identify," Ren said, dragging a hand down his face. "Wonderful. Exactly what I wanted to hear less than forty-eight hours into figuring out how to summon a glowing sword out of my own arm."
"I’m not finished with the training arrangement," Yegard said, and something in the shift of his tone made Ren look up sharply, catching an edge there he hadn’t expected. "I want it reassigned. A different instructor, someone with a verifiable record, someone I can actually vouch for the integrity of."
"You want to pull me out of training with the one person who’s already gotten actual results," Ren said, disbelief coloring his voice now. "The session today worked, Yegard. I held containment longer than most first-week activations manage, that’s a direct quote from the man himself, and you want to throw that away because his paperwork is classified?"
"I want to throw it away because I don’t trust him," Yegard said, voice sharpening further, and something underneath the words felt less like tactical caution now and more like something rawer, something Ren didn’t fully expect from a man who’d agreed to end their engagement in under ten seconds flat without so much as a flicker of visible feeling. "I don’t like that he’s spending hours alone with you in a sealed chamber under a classification I can’t access. I don’t like that he was placed here specifically the day your rank broke every threshold this station has ever measured. And I don’t like—" He stopped himself abruptly, jaw tightening, something crossing his face that looked almost like frustration with his own words.
"You don’t like what," Ren pressed, watching him carefully now, something in his chest tightening in a way he didn’t have the energy to properly untangle in the middle of everything else currently spinning out of control around him.
Yegard held his gaze for a long moment, something unreadable and heavy passing behind his eyes, and when he finally spoke again his voice had dropped back into something more careful, more controlled, the crack from a moment ago sealed neatly back over. "I don’t like the arrangement," he said simply, though the way he said it made it clear that wasn’t the whole sentence he’d originally intended to finish. "I’d ask you to be careful around him. More careful than you were yesterday. Let me have it reassigned."
Ren considered it for exactly as long as it took Yegard to finish the sentence, and then shook his head. "No," Ren said, and watched something flicker across Yegard’s face at the flat certainty of it. "You don’t get to reassign my training. You don’t get to decide who I spend my hours with, or vet my instructors, or stand there acting concerned like we’re still something to each other, because we’re not, not anymore, and the entire point of leaving the Capital was so I could stop having people like you make decisions about my life without asking me first."
"Rafayal—"
"I appreciate the warning about classified paperwork, genuinely, I’ll be careful," Ren said, cutting him off before this could turn into another conversation he didn’t have the energy for. "But careful doesn’t mean letting you fix it for me. I’m keeping the assignment. If Reven turns out to be a problem, I’ll deal with it myself." He turned for the door before Yegard could argue further, ignoring the tight set of his jaw, the words clearly still sitting unfinished behind his teeth. Stay away from Yegard had been the plan from the very first day, and Ren wasn’t about to let one classified personnel file talk him out of the only rule he’d actually managed to keep so far.
He didn’t notice, on his way out, the faint shimmer near the far corner of the command wing’s outer corridor, a subtle distortion in the air that resolved, once Ren was well out of sight, into Reven leaning casually against the wall, arms crossed, having heard every single word of the conversation through the door he’d apparently been standing behind for its entire duration.
His mouth curved slowly into a smirk, sharp and satisfied, pale eyes tracking the empty space where Ren had just walked past without ever knowing he was there.
"Mine," Reven murmured to no one at all, low and pleased, already turning to head back toward the training wing like the matter had just been settled to his complete satisfaction.