Yegard made it exactly three corridors away from the training yard before Lyra caught up to him, her heels clicking sharp and fast against the metal floor, still clinging to his arm with the same proprietary grip she’d worn the entire way there.
"Can you believe him," she was saying, voice pitched somewhere between outrage and poorly disguised delight, "kissing some stranger in the middle of the training yard, in broad daylight, like he doesn’t have an ounce of shame left in that whole ridiculous body of his. Honestly, it’s almost impressive, the sheer nerve of it, though I suppose that’s exactly the kind of thing you’d expect from someone with his reputation—"
"Stop," Yegard said, and something in his voice came out sharper than he intended, sharp enough that Lyra actually flinched back a step, her grip on his arm loosening in surprise. He hadn’t meant to raise his voice. He rarely raised his voice at all, had trained himself out of the habit years ago because a commander who lost control of his own tone lost control of a room, but something about hearing her narrate the scene out loud again, replaying it back at him in that gleeful, satisfied cadence, made something in his chest twist tight enough that composure slipped before he could catch it.
Lyra stared at him, clearly startled, and for a moment neither of them said anything.
"I need time to think," Yegard said finally, gentler now, though the effort it took to soften his voice was considerably more than it should have required. He extracted his arm from hers carefully, deliberately, and stepped back. "Go find something else to occupy yourself with tonight."
"Yegard—"
"Lyra," he said, and something in the single syllable carried enough finality that she pressed her lips together and said nothing further, watching him with an expression that flickered between confusion and something closer to genuine hurt before settling into something colder, more calculating instead. He didn’t wait to see which one won out. He turned and walked, leaving her standing in the corridor, and didn’t look back once.
He made it to his own quarters before he allowed himself to actually think about what he’d just watched, and even then, alone, door sealed shut behind him, he found the thought considerably harder to sit with than he’d expected.
He had never kissed Rafayal. In the entire duration of their engagement, years of formal dinners and political appearances and carefully staged public moments meant to project unity to a watching Empire, he had never once let it go further than the bare minimum required by protocol, a hand at the small of the back, a chaste press of knuckles to knuckles during a ceremony, nothing more. He had told himself, at the time, that the restraint was strategic, that he simply didn’t trust the man enough to let anything real pass between them, that keeping distance was the only sensible choice given everything Rafayal had done in the years leading up to their engagement. He had believed that reasoning completely, right up until the exact moment he’d watched someone else’s mouth find the corner of Rafayal’s jaw in a training yard and felt something violent and unfamiliar tear through his chest at the sight of it.
’That should have been mine,’ the thought arrived, unbidden, sharp enough that Yegard actually sat down on the edge of his own bed like the weight of it had physically staggered him. ’Whatever that was. Whatever he let that man do to him. That should have been mine to take, mine to earn, mine to have, and instead I let him walk away without a fight because I convinced myself it didn’t matter, because I told myself I didn’t want it, and now some stranger with no verified history and a classification I can’t even access has already—’ He stopped the thought before it could finish, dragging a hand down his face, disgusted with himself for how quickly the possessiveness had surfaced, how completely it had overridden every ounce of the careful control he prided himself on maintaining in every other part of his life.
He thought about the receiving hall, replaying it now with a clarity that felt almost cruel in hindsight. Rafayal standing there, asking to end things, and Yegard agreeing in under ten seconds, no hesitation, no argument, because some old, deep-seated resentment toward the man Rafayal used to be had made the decision feel easy, obvious, correct. He hadn’t considered, not even once, that the man standing in front of him that night might already be someone different, might already be worth reconsidering, and by the time the evidence had started accumulating, the rank test, the strange fearless honesty, the way he’d stood up to Reven and to Lyra and to Yegard himself without flinching, it had already been too late to take the agreement back without looking exactly like what Lyra would undoubtedly accuse him of being. Jealous. Possessive. Regretful.
’I should never have agreed,’ he thought, and the admission settled into his chest with a weight that felt almost physical. ’I should have asked him to wait. I should have asked him a single question about why, instead of simply granting what he wanted the moment he wanted it, because I was too proud, too resentful, too certain that letting him go easily proved something about how little he’d ever actually meant to me.’ He closed his eyes, and the image returned again anyway, unwelcome, persistent, Reven’s hand at Rafayal’s waist, the angle of that near-kiss, the flicker of something on Rafayal’s face that Yegard hadn’t been able to read from that distance and now couldn’t stop trying to interpret from memory alone.
He was, he realized slowly, becoming something he had never once allowed himself to be with another person in his entire adult life. Obsessed. The word sat uncomfortably, foreign and unwelcome, and yet he couldn’t find a better one for the specific, gnawing need currently occupying every corner of his thoughts, the compulsion to know exactly where Rafayal was at any given moment, exactly who he was with, exactly what that man Reven actually wanted from him and how quickly it could be stopped.
He didn’t sleep well that night. He told himself it didn’t matter.
By morning, the story had already changed shape.
Ren heard the first version of it secondhand, passed along by a junior officer who clearly hadn’t realized who she was talking to when she mentioned it to a colleague within earshot, something about the Miller heir and an unknown stranger and considerably more detail than a near-kiss in a training yard should have reasonably produced. By the time he tracked down the full scope of it later that morning, cornering a Sentinel from his own barracks section who looked deeply uncomfortable being asked directly, the rumor had metastasized into something almost unrecognizable from what had actually happened.
"They’re saying you slept with him," the Sentinel admitted finally, wincing as she said it. "In the training ground. In broad daylight. I don’t know who started it, but it’s everywhere now, half the outpost’s talking about it."
Ren felt something cold settle low in his stomach. "That’s not remotely what happened," he said, though even as the words left him he already understood how little that particular fact was going to matter once a story like this got moving on its own momentum. "It wasn’t even a real kiss, it was staged, it was—" He stopped himself, aware of how thoroughly none of this was going to sound better with more detail attached to it. "It doesn’t matter. Where did this even start."
The Sentinel hesitated, glancing around before answering. "Lyra," she said finally, quiet. "She’s been telling it to anyone who’ll listen since last night."
’Oh,’ Ren thought, dragging a hand down his face, exhaustion crashing back in fast and heavy. ’Of course it was her. Of course a fake almost-kiss designed purely to needle Yegard has somehow, in the span of one night, transformed into a full-blown scandal about me sleeping with a stranger in broad daylight, because apparently subtlety and accuracy are luxuries this particular story doesn’t believe in extending to me, ever, under any circumstances.’
He didn’t have long to sit with the full weight of that realization before his watch buzzed against his wrist, the purple glow pulsing to life with an incoming transmission, and Ren’s stomach dropped the instant Alouis’s face flickered into view above the display, her expression already carrying a particular, controlled fury that made his previous run-ins with her look mild by comparison.
"Tell me it isn’t true," she said, without preamble, without greeting, voice tight enough that Ren could practically feel the effort it was costing her to keep it level. "Tell me you did not sleep with an unidentified man on an open training ground, in full view of witnesses, less than three days after ending your engagement to the Grand Marshal of the entire Empire."
"It’s not true, none of it happened the way it’s being told," Ren said quickly, already bracing himself for whatever came next. "It was staged, it wasn’t even a real kiss, someone twisted the story and it’s spread completely out of control since last night, I promise you this is not what actually happened."
Alouis stared at him through the display for a long, heavy moment, and something in her expression shifted from fury into something considerably worse, something closer to genuine dread. "It doesn’t matter what actually happened," she said finally, voice dropping low. "It only matters what Father has already heard. And he’s heard the version everyone else is hearing, Rafayal. I received a transmission from his office twenty minutes ago." She paused, and when she spoke again the words landed like a physical blow. "He’s arriving at the outpost within the week."
Ren felt every scrap of air leave his lungs at once. ’No,’ he thought, staring at her frozen image above the watch’s display, dread pooling thick and immediate in his chest. ’No, absolutely not, this cannot be happening, I have had this rank for barely three days, I have not even finished a single week of training, I have not figured out Reven, I have not figured out Yegard, I have not figured out a single thing about this entire mess, and now I’m supposed to add a furious, terrifying father arriving in person on top of all of it.’
"I need you to fix your reputation before he lands," Alouis said, and the exhaustion bleeding through her own voice now told Ren exactly how little she believed that was actually possible in the time remaining. "I don’t know how, and frankly, given your history, I don’t have much confidence you’re capable of it. But you should know exactly what you’re walking into, because Father doesn’t forgive embarrassment easily, and this is shaping up to be considerably more than mere embarrassment by the time it reaches him properly."
The transmission cut before Ren could respond, leaving him standing alone in the corridor with his heart hammering and a headache building fast and sharp behind his eyes. ’Great,’ he thought, sinking back against the nearest wall, letting his head fall back against the cool metal. ’Fantastic. Wonderful. A rumor I didn’t start, about an event that didn’t even really happen, has apparently done more damage to my standing in this family than every single thing the real villain actually did over the entire course of the original story.’ He closed his eyes, already dreading whatever the coming week had planned for him next. ’And somehow, in the middle of all of it, I still have to figure out what Reven actually is, whether Yegard’s regret means anything worth trusting, and how exactly I’m supposed to survive a father everyone in this family seems too terrified to even properly describe.’