For the first time in weeks, the Victory was not rushing anywhere. She hung at the edge of the Expanse, a slow roll turning the stars across her viewports. Far behind her, the First Temple was now a problem for the Corps of Engineers. Ahead lay hearings, debriefs, and recuperation.

Ayres walked the ship’s corridor with the slightly abstracted step of a man who had run out of immediate tasks. He could have gone to the gym. He could have gone to the observation lounge. He could have locked himself in his assigned cabin and started drafting the statement that would, in all likelihood, be used against him in his own court martial.

Instead, he found himself outsideParr’s door. He stood there for a moment, hand hovering near the chime, aware of the absurdity of hesitating now. He had followed her through subspace corridors and out of Vezda tombs. He touched the control.

“Come in,” her voice said.

The door opened on to a room that was technically an officer’s cabin and practically a convalescent ward. Medical had left a diagnostic unit on the small table. A stack of PADDs sat beside it. The lighting was low. Parr sat on the bunk with her legs stretched out, boots off, feet bare. She wore the standard uniform without the overshirt and had her hair scraped back into an untidy knot.

Her mouth moved, briefly, towards a smile. It did not quite get there. “You look rougher than I feel,” she said.

“That’s a fair summary,” he replied. “I imagine your debriefing was as thorough and unpleasant as mine.”

“Oh, delightful,” she said. “I’ve been answering questions about whether I’m still hearing voices, whether I feel an urge to murder anyone, whether I’m capable of distinguishing reality from induced delusion. I passed, apparently.”

He stepped inside. The door slid shut behind him. “Hardy spoke to the corps,” he said. “Chen is bringing a sarcophagus for the tomb.”

She gave a short, dry huff.

“Good,” she said. “One less thing whispering in the Expanse. Sit, if you like. Or stand and loom. Whatever makes you feel most like a captain again.”

He sat on the edge of the chair opposite her bunk. For a moment there was only the hum of the ship and the faint clink of the diagnostic unit adjusting itself.

“I wasn’t sure whether you wanted to see me,” he said.

She looked at him then with something sharp under the fatigue.

“I’ve been wanting to see you since Orantei,” she said. “Which is part of the problem.”

He swallowed. There it was, sooner than he had expected.

“You ordered me to leave you,” he said quietly. “On Orantei. To protect the Farragut and our crew.”

“I know precisely what I did,” she said. Her voice had edged. “And you followed the order, for once.”

He stared at her.

“You would’ve preferred,” he said, “that I watch the Pilgrims tear into the Farragut without any warning at all?”

“I would’ve preferred,” she said, “not to look back and see you walking away while the pattern closed over my head. You didn’t even look back.”

“I was trying not to change my mind,” he said. The words came out more sharply than he had intended. “If I’d have looked back, I wouldn’t have gone. I would have dragged you out, yes, then the Pilgrims would have had a Nebula-class starship at their command.”

“I’m aware of the logic,” she said. “I’m very fond of logic. I’m less fond of the memory of you disappearing through an airlock.”

He breathed in, steady.

“And I,” he said, “am less fond of the memory of you sending your command codes to the enemy and not telling me you were hearing things long before that. We’re sharing grievances, right? Shall we do it properly?”

Her eyes flashed.

“Don’t you dare turn this back on me,” she said. “I was the one with that thing in my skull. I wasn’t in my right mind!”

“You were trying to keep it from me,” he said. “As your captain and as the man you were sleeping with. You decide which you prefer, either one should have been told. But you didn’t tell me about the first reliquary already embedded in our systems. You didn’t tell me that it was pushing at you until after you’d given it access to our ship.”

“Do you think I enjoyed the notion that part of me might be compromised? That it might be using me as a conduit? I thought I could manage it! I thought I could keep it out of anything that mattered.”

“And you didn’t trust me to help you,” he replied.

“That is not fair.”

“It is uncomfortably fair,” he said. “Emilia, I’m not accusing you of malice. I know exactly why you did it. You didn’t want me to look at you and see a problem rather than an executive officer. You didn’t want Starfleet to look at you and see a liability.”

“And you did?” she shot back. “You were so eager to be reasonable! I saw your face every time we mentioned the reliquary in the lab. You wanted to throw it out of the nearest airlock.”

“Yes,” he said. “Because I’ve got to think of a crew. Or had to think of a crew. Sometimes there are no good choices and it’s better to ask for help.”

“You didn’t call for help when you took that Valkyrie and came after me,” she said. “You didn’t wait for Hardy. You didn’t wait for anyone. You just hurled yourself into the unknown.”

He was silent for a moment. She had moved beyond sharpness into something like bewildered anger.

“That,” he said, hotly, “was because by that point I couldn’t imagine just sitting in a ready room and wondering what they were doing to you.”

“You preferred to imagine dying alone for a cause,” she said. “Very convenient for your sense of nobility.”

He rose without meaning to, as if the chair had become too small for him.

“And you preferred to imagine being the one who took all the risk so no-one else had to. Have you any idea how utterly infuriating it was? Knowing that we were together all the time that thing was inside your head and you didn’t say a word?”

She stood up too, the bunk springs creaking behind her. They were suddenly close, two paces apart.

“What would you have had me do?” she demanded. “Come and sit on your lap and say, by the way, Michael, there is a god in my head and I think I’m going mad? You had enough to deal with. And in the end, I figured it out and was critical to putting an end to it.”

“Yes, you were” he said. “But I would have preferred to know! Because then at least I would’ve known what you were carrying. I would’ve had the chance to say that we can handle this together, instead of discovering after the fact that you had been negotiating on our behalf with something that regarded us as nothing more than infrastructure in a grand evil scheme!”

Her expression cracked, just slightly, around the eyes.

“You weren’t there,” she said quietly. “In the chamber. When I killed her. When I heard it properly for the first time. You were safely on the Victory by then. I had a dead woman at my feet and a sickening sense of my mind full of someone else’s thoughts. I didn’t have you. But I clung to the hope that if I survived long enough, you would come.”

“That was the plan,” he said. His voice had dropped. “I came after you not because you were my executive officer. Because you were you.”

“So you admit that now?” she said. “That it wasn’t just about nobility and duty.”

Her eyes were bright. His own throat felt thick, the words harder to come out, or at least harder to come out with any anger.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “It’s never been just duty since the day you told me my flight plan was sentimental and inefficient.”

She blinked, baffled, then gave a breath that might have been a laugh.

“You remember that?” she said.

“I remember everything,” he replied. “Including the way you look when you’re about to cry and would rather set something on fire. Including the way you looked at me on Orantei.”

Silence stretched. Her hands were clenched at her sides. His were not much better.

“You think I’m angry about command decisions,” she said at last. “I am. I’ll always have opinions about your judgement. But mostly I’m furious that you were willing to die for me and not willing to admit that was what you were doing.”

He opened his mouth, found he had no good answer, and shut it again. When he did speak, it was with less armour.

“I’m angry,” he said slowly, “because you were willing to suffer alone, to struggle and fight for us all but without telling me how much you were breaking to manage it. I bet you called that duty as well.”

Her gaze went to his, steady now. “We’re very bad at this,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “Spectacularly bad.”

They stood, breathing, the edges of the argument raw and jagged round them. The words that came next were smaller.

“I have been more afraid in the last month than in the rest of my career combined. Not of the Pilgrims. Not of the Vezda. Of coming back to a ship where you were either dead, or so changed I wouldn’t recognise you, or standing at the other end of a briefing table pretending we were just colleagues again. I’m tired of pretending.”

She swallowed.

“I have been afraid,” she said, “that you would come storming in, shout at me, and then go back to being Captain Ayres and never quite look at me the same way. That we would go through all of this and end up back where we started, telling ourselves it was safer to keep the rules intact than to admit we were having this conversation.”

“Our careers,” he began.

“Are important,” she said. “We’ve both fought very hard for them. We’ve done things we’re proud of and things that are questionable. But if the last few weeks have taught me anything, it’s that no amount of pips on a collar is worth waking up without you in the room.”

He let out a breath he had not known he was holding.

“I keep thinking,” he said, “of the first time we put into dock with the convoy. You were furious with the refuelling schedules. I thought: this is a woman I could annoy for the rest of my life.”

She snorted, wetly.

“You were already annoying. I just thought it would be more efficient if we annoyed each other with benefits.”

He moved then, because standing like that with his hands empty felt intolerable. He stepped forward, close enough that he could feel her breath, and put his hand very carefully against her cheek.

She did not flinch. Her skin was warm. There was a faint, angry heat at the corner of her eye where unshed tears had sat.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “For walking away on Orantei. For the things I did and the things I couldn’t do. I would, if I had the choice, find a way to both save you from the Pilgrims and keep the Farragut safe.”

She closed her eyes briefly and leaned into his hand.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “For not telling you earlier. For thinking I had to manage it alone. For giving them my codes. For being used. I thought I could dance on a tripwire and not fall. I was wrong.”

He bent his forehead to hers.

“We’re alive,” he said softly. “You are you. I’m mostly me. That’s a win.”

“And there is still the matter,” she murmured, “of two senior officers conducting an inadvisable relationship across the chain of command. And of them both having stolen a Valkyrie.”

“Yes,” he said. “There is that.”

She opened her eyes.

“What do we do?” she asked.

He took a breath.

“We tell the truth,” he said. “To Hardy. To Aloran. To whatever board they assemble. That we care about each other. That we’ve made mistakes because of that and in spite of it. That we’re not willing to go back to pretending that our feelings don’t exist in order to preserve the illusion of model careers.”

“And if they split us up?” she said.

“They probably will,” he said. “At least for a while. They may decide we shouldn’t serve in the same chain of command. They may be right. They may strip me of a captaincy and park me somewhere safe where I can give lectures on what not to do when in command of a starship.”

“You would hate that,” she said.

“I would hate it less,” he said, “if I knew that when I went back to whatever quarters they gave me, you were there, and this wasn’t something we’d sacrificed on the altar of professional aspiration.”

She looked at him, really looked, as if weighing that against the shape of the future.

“I’ve spent most of my life,” she said slowly, “trying to be the best version of what Starfleet wanted. The perfect Academy file, the perfect bridge record, the perfect balance of aggression and restraint. Then the last month has destroyed any illusion I had that perfection is either possible, useful, or particularly admired. If they tell me I have to choose between you and a chair at the centre of a bridge, I know which I’ll regret losing more.”

He felt something loosen in his chest, a knot he had not noticed until it began to uncoil. “I’m not worth that,” he said.

“That’s not your decision,” she replied. “It’s mine.”

She lifted her hand to his face, thumb brushing along the line of his jaw, brushing through his beard. It was a light touch and it shook slightly.

“I love you,” she said. The words came out almost stubbornly. “In the very inconvenient, unprofessional way that makes all of this of questionable judgement. I’m angry with you, often. I’m likely to continue to be. But I don’t want to spend whatever time we have left pretending that is not the case.”

He closed his eyes briefly, then opened them again.

“I love you,” he said. “Enough that I was prepared to die for you. I would prefer, if it’s all the same, to live less dramatically with you instead. Even if that means fewer pips and no-one to do my paperwork for me.”

She laughed then, properly, the sound catching and breaking and remaking itself. He kissed her, gently at first, then with the urgency of someone who has been holding back for far too long. She kissed him back with equal heat, fingers curling in his shirt.

After a moment they broke apart, breathing a little harder, foreheads still touching.

“We’re going to get into trouble,” she said.

“We’re already in trouble,” he replied. “At least this way, it’ll be honest trouble. And fun.”

She leaned back, tugging him down with her onto the narrow bunk, making room with the graceless efficiency of someone utterly familiar with starship furniture. He lay beside her, one arm under her shoulders, the other hand still holding hers.