Back in his quarters, Ren dropped onto the edge of his bunk and immediately grabbed a fistful of his own hair, dragging it forward to glare at it like it had personally wronged him. "This is killing me," he announced to the empty room, tugging at the long, dark red strands that fell well past his shoulders. "Genuinely. I’ve been in this body for what, two days, and I already hate how much maintenance this hair requires. How does anyone fight monsters with hair this long, doesn’t it just get in the way constantly, doesn’t it get grabbed in combat, isn’t that just an obvious weakness someone should’ve addressed by now."
He flopped backward onto the bunk, still holding a section of it up, turning it slightly to catch the light. ’Does this place even have a salon,’ he thought, running through the mental image of the outpost’s layout as he’d seen it so far, mostly training chambers and administrative wings and vaulted assembly halls, nothing that screamed personal grooming services. ’Probably not. Probably everyone here just deals with their hair being a liability because nobody’s bothered building anything that isn’t strictly mission-critical.’ Still, the idea, once it took hold, refused to let go easily. He pictured it short, practical, something that wouldn’t catch on branches or claws or get grabbed by anyone with bad intentions. He pictured it silver, too, on a whim, mostly because some small, petty part of him liked the idea of looking less like the villain from the book and more like someone new entirely, someone who hadn’t spent years being hated by an entire outpost before he’d even had a chance to prove otherwise.
’Later,’ he decided, letting the strand fall back against his shoulder. ’Once the father situation is handled, whenever that ends up happening. Showing up freshly cut and dyed silver in the middle of an already tense family visit feels like exactly the kind of detail that gets misread as some kind of statement, and I do not need one more thing for Alouis to interrogate me about.’
With that settled, at least temporarily, restlessness took over, and Ren pushed himself back up off the bunk, deciding a walk was in order, something to clear his head after the tangled mess of a day he’d had. He left his quarters without any particular destination in mind, just following the corridors wherever they led, and it didn’t take long before he found himself somewhere he hadn’t explored yet, a wide observation deck near the outpost’s outer edge, floor-to-ceiling viewports looking out over the terrain beyond the walls.
He stopped there for a long moment, genuinely startled by the view. The book had never bothered describing any of this properly, a handful of throwaway lines about the Empire’s frontier territories, nothing that came close to capturing the reality of it. Beyond the outpost’s perimeter, the moon’s jagged silver rock formations stretched out toward a horizon lit by distant twin suns, their light catching against drifting mineral dust in the atmosphere and scattering into faint bands of color that shifted slowly as he watched, violet bleeding into gold bleeding into something closer to deep blue near the edges. Far off, barely visible against the terrain, he could make out the silhouette of some kind of settlement built into the rock itself, lights flickering warm against the cold landscape, and further still, impossibly distant, the curve of a ringed planet hung low against the sky like something out of a painting.
’Wow,’ Ren thought, pressing a hand flat against the cool glass, something in his chest loosening slightly for the first time since he’d woken up in that expensive Capital bed. ’Okay, this is actually incredible. The book really undersold this. Two lines about frontier terrain and not a single mention of any of this, what a waste, what an absolute waste of a setting.’ He stood there longer than he meant to, just looking, letting the sheer scale of it settle something restless in him that two days of chaos hadn’t managed to touch.
Eventually he pulled himself away, mind considerably calmer than it had been, and started back toward his quarters with a route that wound through an unfamiliar stretch of corridor, still half-distracted by the lingering image of that horizon. He turned a corner too fast, not paying nearly enough attention to his surroundings, and his boot caught wrong against a slight uneven seam in the flooring, sending him pitching forward with a sharp, undignified yelp.
He didn’t hit the ground. A hand caught him first, closing firm around his waist and hauling him upright before gravity could finish what it started, and Ren found himself steadied against a solid chest, close enough to catch the faint, unfamiliar scent of him before he’d even fully registered who it was.
"Careful," Reven said, low and amused, not letting go despite Ren clearly having regained his footing. "You might fall."
"I’m fine, you can let go now," Ren said, pushing back slightly, though the hand at his waist didn’t loosen at all, if anything it tightened, fingers pressing firm against his hip in a way that felt distinctly deliberate.
"I don’t like what belongs to me to keep falling," Reven said, and something in his voice had dropped into that same low, private register from the training chamber, the words settling over Ren with a weight that made his pulse spike immediately despite his best efforts to stay unaffected. "You should be more careful."
"I don’t belong to anyone," Ren said, trying for firm and landing somewhere closer to breathless, acutely aware of exactly how close they were standing, of the fact that Reven still hadn’t released him, of the way his own hand had somehow ended up braced against Reven’s chest without any conscious decision on his part.
"Mm," Reven said, entirely unconvinced, the sound rumbling low enough that Ren felt it more than heard it. His free hand came up, tucking a loose strand of Ren’s long hair back behind his ear with a gentleness that felt jarringly at odds with everything else about him, the same hand that had pinned Ren to two separate walls now moving with a kind of careful, deliberate softness that Ren wasn’t remotely prepared to process. "We’ll see about that, sweetheart."
Ren’s brain short-circuited slightly at the word, heat rushing up the back of his neck before he could stop it. "Excuse me, what did you just call me."
"You heard me," Reven said, mouth curving into that familiar slow smirk, though something in his eyes had softened just slightly around the edges, something that made the whole moment feel less like a threat and more like something else entirely, something Ren didn’t have a name for and didn’t particularly want to go looking for right now. "Does it bother you?"
"It’s ridiculous," Ren said, finally managing to step back properly, and this time Reven let him go, hand sliding away from his waist slow enough that it felt deliberate, like he wanted Ren to notice exactly how reluctant the release actually was. "We’ve known each other for two days. You’ve pinned me to walls twice, sniffed my neck once, and now you’re calling me sweetheart like we’re something. I don’t even know what you are, half the outpost thinks you don’t officially exist, and you want me to just accept pet names on top of everything else."
"I want a lot of things," Reven said, tucking his hands back into his pockets, that unnerving stillness settling over him again despite the lingering warmth in his eyes. "Patience isn’t usually one of my strong points, but I’m making an exception, for now. Consider the name a preview of what you’ve already agreed to, whether you meant to or not." He tilted his head slightly, studying Ren with an expression that was somehow both amused and entirely serious at once. "You told the Grand Marshal today that you don’t answer to him anymore. I heard all of it, in case you were wondering. I’d advise you not to make the mistake of thinking that rule doesn’t apply to me just as much."
Ren’s stomach dropped at the confirmation that he’d been overheard, a fresh wave of frustration rising up fast. "You were listening."
"I listen to everything that concerns me," Reven said simply, entirely unbothered by being caught. "And you concern me a great deal, sweetheart. That was never going to stop just because you’d prefer it did."
He turned then, unhurried as ever, offering nothing further, and started off down the corridor in the opposite direction, leaving Ren standing there with his pulse still racing and absolutely no coherent response ready to throw after him. ’This is a problem,’ Ren thought, watching him disappear around the corner, one hand pressed briefly against his own chest like that might slow his heartbeat down through sheer willpower. ’This is a genuine, serious problem. I left the Capital specifically to avoid getting tangled up in exactly this kind of complicated, possessive nonsense, and instead I’ve apparently traded one terrifying man for two of them, and this one has decided pet names count as a legitimate negotiating tactic.’
He made it the rest of the way back to his quarters in a considerably more distracted state than he’d left in, the observation deck’s calm entirely undone, replaced by a restless, unsettled energy he didn’t fully know what to do with. ’Stay alive,’ he reminded himself, dropping back onto his bunk and staring up at the ceiling for what felt like the hundredth time that day. ’Stay rich. Stay away from Yegard.’ He paused, frowning at the ceiling like it might have an answer for him. ’Nobody said anything about staying away from Reven, apparently, and at this rate I’m starting to think that was a critical oversight in my original plan.’