Yegard carried him the last few steps to the bunk himself, easing him down with a careful, deliberate gentleness that felt entirely at odds with the composed, clipped commander Ren had spent the last several days learning to expect. He drew the thin blanket up over him without being asked, hand lingering a moment too long against the fabric before finally pulling away, and Ren lay there with his eyes shut, breathing slow and even, doing his absolute best impression of someone already asleep.
He wasn’t asleep. He was nowhere close to asleep. Every nerve in his body still hummed faintly with the aftershock of whatever had just happened to him, and his mind was racing too fast to let unconsciousness anywhere near it, but the alternative, opening his eyes and actually looking at Yegard right now, actually having to find words for whatever had just passed between them on the floor of this room, felt entirely beyond his current capacity. ’Just a little longer,’ he told himself, keeping his breathing carefully measured. ’Just pretend a little longer, and he’ll leave, and then I can actually fall apart properly, alone, the way I’d prefer to do it.’
Yegard didn’t leave immediately. Ren felt him linger at the edge of the bunk for a long moment, the weight of his attention settling over him like something physical, and then, quiet enough that Ren almost missed it entirely, Yegard spoke, voice low and rough in a way Ren hadn’t heard from him before.
"I don’t know what you remembered," Yegard said, barely above a whisper, clearly not expecting an answer, clearly believing Ren was already too far gone to hear any of it. "But whatever it was, whatever you’re afraid of becoming, I meant what I said. You won’t face it alone. Not while I’m still capable of standing between you and it." He paused, and Ren, eyes still shut, felt something shift in the air, a hand hovering close to his face before pulling back at the last second, like Yegard had thought better of whatever he’d been about to do. "I should have asked you to stay, that night in the receiving hall. I should have asked you why, instead of simply letting you go because it was easier than admitting I didn’t actually want to."
Ren’s chest tightened at that, something complicated twisting hard beneath his ribs, and it took every ounce of self-control he had left not to let his breathing hitch and give the whole performance away.
Yegard stayed a moment longer, and then, finally, Ren heard him rise, footsteps crossing the room slow and quiet, the door sliding open and sealing shut again behind him with a soft mechanical hiss.
Ren’s eyes snapped open the second the lock engaged.
He lay there in the dim quiet of his own quarters, staring up at the plain metal ceiling, heart still hammering, and let out a long, shaky breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding through that entire quiet, one-sided confession. ’What was I thinking,’ he thought, dragging both hands down over his face, mortification flooding in fast now that the immediate danger had passed and left him nothing to focus on except the sheer, undeniable fact of what he’d just let happen. ’How could I just lay there like that, letting him hold me, letting him carry me to bed like I’m something fragile that needs protecting, when the entire point, the entire plan, was staying as far away from him as I possibly could.’
He sat up slowly, still shaky, and pressed the heels of his palms hard against his own eyes, replaying the whole disaster from the moment the sound had started tearing through his skull to the moment Yegard’s voice had somehow, impossibly, cut through all of it and pulled him back from whatever edge he’d been standing on. ’It worked,’ he admitted to himself, reluctant and frustrated in equal measure. ’It actually worked. His voice, specifically, out of everything, was the thing that grounded me, and I don’t know what that means, and I don’t want to know what that means, because knowing what it means is exactly the kind of complication I do not have room for right now.’
He thought about the confession Yegard had left behind, believing him asleep, believing the words would simply dissolve into nothing once spoken, unheard and unanswerable. I should have asked you to stay. Ren turned the sentence over in his head several times, feeling something in his chest ache in a way he didn’t have a convenient explanation for, and forced himself, with real effort, to set it aside entirely. ’That doesn’t change anything,’ he told himself firmly. ’Regret said out loud to someone you think is unconscious doesn’t count as an actual conversation. It doesn’t obligate me to anything. It doesn’t undo three days of watching him say nothing while Lyra hung off his arm in front of half this outpost. It doesn’t undo agreeing to end things in under ten seconds without a single question asked.’
He pulled his knees up, wrapping his arms around them, and sat there in the quiet for a long moment, letting the exhaustion of the day finally catch up properly now that the adrenaline had fully drained out of his system. The rank test. The training. The rumor. The berserk episode. Yegard’s arms around him, steady and warm in a way Ren hadn’t expected and definitely hadn’t asked for. It all pressed in at once, heavy and disorienting, and underneath all of it sat the one clear, sharp memory that had triggered the whole collapse in the first place, the word Fallen Sentinel sitting in his chest like a stone he couldn’t quite dislodge.
’That’s what actually matters here,’ he reminded himself, forcing his thoughts back into some kind of order. ’Not whatever complicated feelings are apparently trying to grow in the middle of all this chaos. The actual problem. The fact that whatever happened to me tonight is connected to exactly the thing that got the original version of me executed, and I nearly lost control in my own quarters after barely three days of having this ability at all.’ He pressed his forehead against his knees, breathing slow and deliberate, trying to find something solid to hold onto in the middle of everything currently spinning out of his grip.
’Once my powers are stable,’ he thought, the resolve settling in clearer now, sharper, something to actually hold onto instead of the tangled mess of everything else crowding his head. ’Once I actually know how to control this, once I’m not a danger to myself or anyone standing near me when it decides to go off without warning, I’m leaving. Exactly like I planned from the very first day. Away from this outpost, away from Yegard, away from Reven, away from whatever tangled, complicated mess keeps forming every single time I try to hold a single line. Stay alive. Stay rich. Stay away.’ He let out a slow breath, some of the tightness in his chest easing at the familiar shape of the plan, even if some small, traitorous part of him no longer felt entirely convinced it would be as simple as it sounded. ’I didn’t come back from the dead to spend my second chance getting fought over by two men with matching god complexes and completely different ways of showing it.’
He lay back down slowly, pulling the blanket up properly this time, and stared up at the ceiling until his eyes finally grew heavy enough to close on their own. The last thought that followed him down into actual sleep, this time, was quieter than the rest, less certain, harder to fully silence no matter how firmly he tried to bury it beneath the plan he kept repeating to himself like a mantra.
’His voice was the only thing that reached me,’ the thought whispered, stubborn and unwelcome. ’What does that actually mean.’
He didn’t have an answer for it by the time sleep finally took him, and he suspected, somewhere in the exhausted, half-formed edges of his own mind, that the answer wasn’t going to get any easier to find in the days ahead.