The officers didn’t waste any time once the hall started clearing out. Ren barely made it two steps off the platform before a pair of them intercepted him, both looking like they’d rather be anywhere else in the galaxy than dealing with whatever he’d just become in front of several hundred witnesses, data pads clutched tight against their chests like shields.
"Command needs time to review the incident before proceeding with anything further," one of them said, not quite meeting his eyes. "You’re to return to your quarters and remain there until you’re called for questioning. This isn’t a punishment, it’s protocol, given the... irregularity of the result."
"Sure. Irregularity. That’s one word for it," Ren muttered, already turning toward the exit before either of them could say anything else, because standing around waiting for more people to stare at him like a science experiment sounded exhausting on a level he didn’t have the energy for right now. ’Ha,’ he thought, weaving through the thinning crowd, catching fresh whispers with every step. ’Go to my room and wait to be summoned like a suspect. Very normal. Very not-alarming. Cannot wait to find out what happens when a bunch of military officials decide I’m either a weapon or a threat, those are definitely the only two options they’re going to consider.’
He didn’t get far before Lyra caught up to him, cutting across his path with a deliberate little sway to her walk that told him this wasn’t over yet, not by a long shot. She’d apparently regrouped fast after her first attempt at getting a reaction out of him had landed flat, because this time she didn’t bother approaching alone. Yegard was right beside her, and before Ren could even process what he was walking into, Lyra reached up, curled a hand around Yegard’s jaw, and pressed a slow, deliberate kiss to his cheek, angling it just enough that her eyes stayed locked on Ren the entire time she did it.
Ren felt something in his chest twist, sharp and immediate, and it took him a full second to identify it correctly, because it absolutely was not jealousy, he refused to let it be jealousy, it was something closer to secondhand disgust mixed with a genuine, bone-deep exhaustion at having to witness this specific performance twice in one day. ’Are you serious right now,’ he thought, watching Yegard’s face register precisely nothing in response, not pulling away, not leaning in, just standing there like a very expensive, very unbothered statue while this woman used his own face as a prop. ’You couldn’t even wait until I was out of eyeshot. You had to do this right here, right now, less than an hour after I nearly fried an entire diagnostic array in front of half this outpost. Truly excellent timing. Truly a masterclass in reading a room.’
"Are you done," Ren said flatly, and something about his tone must have carried further than he meant it to, because a few nearby Sentinels who’d been pretending not to watch stopped pretending entirely.
Lyra pulled back from Yegard’s cheek slow, unhurried, clearly savoring it. "Jealous?" she said, tilting her head with a smile that had absolutely nothing warm behind it.
"No, actually, I’m just tired," Ren said, and he meant it, the exhaustion in his voice coming through real and unforced in a way that seemed to throw her off more than any sharper insult could have. "You and him can do whatever you want, kiss his whole face if that’s the itch you’re trying to scratch, genuinely, be my guest, because neither of you means anything to me, and I don’t have the energy left today to pretend otherwise for your benefit. I just spent the last twenty minutes breaking a piece of military equipment with my own arm, so forgive me if watching you mark your territory doesn’t rank very high on my list of things I care about right now."
Something in Lyra’s expression flickered, the smugness cracking just slightly at the edges, like she’d been braced for anger or hurt and gotten simple, weary indifference instead, and Ren didn’t stick around to watch her recalculate a second time.
He turned and walked away before either of them could get another word in, cutting down a side corridor that led away from the main hall, half-listening to his own footsteps echo off the walls while his mind ran hot with everything he wanted to say and hadn’t bothered to. ’Anything to him,’ he thought, still fuming quietly as he walked. ’That’s rich. That’s genuinely rich, coming from a man who agreed to end our engagement in under ten seconds flat and hasn’t looked twice at me since except to point out how broken my diagnostic results are. Let her have him. Let her kiss every inch of that unreadable face if she wants to. I did not survive getting hit by a truck to spend my second life competing for a man who looks at me like I’m a logistics problem.’
He was still deep in that particular spiral, moving fast and not paying nearly enough attention to where he was actually going, when he turned a corner too sharp and slammed directly into someone solid enough that it knocked the breath clean out of him.
Ren stumbled back a step, already opening his mouth to apologize on pure reflex, and then actually looked up at who he’d hit.
The man was tall, dressed in a Sentinel uniform cut differently from the standard issue Ren had seen everywhere else in the outpost, darker, sharper at the edges, with an insignia on the collar Ren didn’t recognize. His eyes were the first thing that really registered, a strange, pale color that seemed to catch the corridor’s lighting wrong, unsettling in a way Ren couldn’t immediately name, and his expression held a kind of stillness that made Yegard’s cold composure look almost warm by comparison. There was something about him that set every nerve in Ren’s body on alert at once, some instinctive, animal-deep recognition that this was not a person to bump into carelessly in an empty hallway.
’Geez,’ Ren thought, staring up at him and momentarily forgetting every ounce of frustration he’d been carrying two seconds ago. ’This guy looks actually terrifying. Like, worse than Yegard terrifying. Like the kind of terrifying that makes Yegard look like a mildly stern librarian by comparison.’
The man didn’t move, didn’t step back, didn’t offer any kind of reaction to being run into at all, just looked down at Ren with that same unsettling stillness, pale eyes tracking over his face like he was cataloguing something Ren couldn’t begin to guess at, and the silence stretched out long enough that it started to feel less like an accident in a hallway and more like something else entirely, something Ren didn’t have a name for yet.
"Who are you," Ren finally said, because someone had to say something, and apparently it was going to have to be him.