Chapter 200: What She Isn’t Ready to Feel

Chapter 200: Chapter 200: What She Isn’t Ready to Feel

Vanya sat alone near her apartment window long after Harold had gone to sleep, the rain tracing its familiar path down the glass, and let herself do something she rarely permitted — remember.

She hadn’t relived it fully since the night it happened, not really, not beyond the fragmented edges that surfaced sometimes in her sleep and dissolved before she could hold onto them. Tonight, for reasons she couldn’t fully name, she let it come all the way through.

Helix.

The explosion. The mangled bodies scattered across the wreckage before she’d even fully processed the ambush. Dean, half his body gone, still talking hours earlier about his upcoming marriage. Priscilla, her final mission before retirement, a son waiting for her back home. Jonah, missing an arm and a leg, who’d planned a surprise trip to the green star for his wife and boy.

And Helix, dragging her toward the cave, bleeding from his own abdomen, insisting he’d be fine even as the wound in his side said otherwise.

I fell in love the moment I first saw you, he’d told her, in the last minutes either of them had left. I always made sure to stay in your unit. Just to be close to you. I bet you never noticed.

She hadn’t. Years of serving beside him, training beside him, trusting him with her life more completely than she’d trusted anyone — and she’d never once let herself consider that the steadiness she felt around him might be love rather than simple comfort, until he’d said it aloud with a missile bearing down on both of them and nothing left to lose by finally speaking it.

We’ll meet again, she’d told him, the last words either of them had.

Then the ship had gone, and Astrid had pulled her soul free in the same instant, and Helix had simply ceased to exist in any form she could ever reach again.

She pressed the heel of her hand against her eyes, and for once, didn’t try to stop what came after.

The grief arrived the way it always did when she finally let it — not gentle, not gradual, but sudden and total, closing over her chest until breathing itself became something she had to consciously manage. She thought of his laugh, worn and easy even in the middle of a warzone. The particular way he used to check on her without ever making it feel like checking, a hand briefly at her shoulder, a look that asked are you actually all right without ever needing the words. Years of that. Years of him quietly choosing to stand beside her, and she’d never once let herself see it clearly until it was already ending.

She cried without trying to stop herself, silent, controlled even now out of old habit, tears tracking steady down her face while the rain did the same against the glass outside.

I should have told you, she thought, the words aimed at no one who could hear them anymore. I should have told you years before you had to say it first, dying, with nothing left to lose by finally admitting it.

She didn’t know how long she sat like that — long enough that her chest finally began to loosen, the worst of it passing the way it always eventually did, leaving behind the same hollow, exhausted ache that had become almost familiar to her these past weeks.

Astrid.

Present, Commander.

The old title slipped out before she’d fully decided to use it, some worn, familiar groove her mind still occasionally fell back into even now.

I miss him. Some nights it’s manageable. Tonight it isn’t.

That is grief functioning exactly as it should, Astrid said, careful. I would be more concerned if it had already stopped costing you something.

It doesn’t feel like something that’s supposed to ever stop costing.

Perhaps it isn’t meant to, Astrid said. Some losses are not designed to be resolved. Only carried.

Vanya wiped at her face slowly, some of the tightness in her chest finally easing enough to breathe properly again. She sat with the quiet a while longer, letting Helix’s memory settle back into whatever place she kept it — not gone, never gone, just quieted enough to function around.

It was only once that grief had settled that the other thought surfaced, unwelcome, threading in beside it the way it had been doing more and more often these past weeks.

There’s something else, she admitted finally, reluctant. Something I don’t know how to name. Around Erik.

Elaborate, if you’re willing.

I don’t know if I can. It’s not — I wouldn’t call it anything as simple as attraction. It’s not even something I’d know how to categorize as feeling, exactly. Just a pull. An awareness of him that doesn’t match how little time I’ve actually spent in his company. Like some part of me already knows him, and the rest of me hasn’t caught up yet.

You have described this sensation before, Astrid said. I do not have an explanation for it. I have searched what records remain accessible to me and find nothing that accounts for it.

I don’t like that it exists at all,’ Vanya admitted, quiet. ’Tonight especially. I’ve just spent an hour grieving a man I loved for years and never told, and here I am, still turning over something I can’t even properly define about someone else entirely. It feels wrong to hold both at once.

Grief and confusion are not required to cancel each other out, Astrid said. Nor does the presence of one diminish the legitimacy of the other.

It still feels disloyal.

To Helix?

I don’t know who to, Vanya admitted. Myself, maybe. I don’t understand what I’m even feeling well enough to know if loyalty is the right framework for it at all.

Astrid was quiet a moment, careful. Then perhaps it does not require a framework tonight. You are permitted to simply not understand something yet, Commander. That has rarely been true of you before. It may be worth allowing it now.

Vanya let out a slow, unsteady breath, the ache of the evening finally settling into something quieter, more bearable. "That’s uncharacteristically gentle advice, coming from you."

I am capable of gentleness when the occasion calls for it, Astrid said, something almost dry threading through the words despite their sincerity.

Vanya managed something close to a tired, genuine smile at that, small and brief, and let the silence stretch a while longer, Helix’s memory settled quietly back into its usual place, the unnamed weight around Erik left equally unresolved, unexamined further than she currently had the strength to take it.

I don’t need to understand it tonight, she thought finally, echoing Astrid’s own words back to herself. Tonight I just need to grieve him properly, for once, instead of pushing it down the way I usually do.

She rose eventually, checking on Harold one last time before turning in herself, the rain still falling steady and endless beyond the window, and allowed herself, for the length of that quiet walk down the hall, to simply miss Helix without trying to solve anything else alongside it.

Goodnight, she thought, the words quiet, private, carrying weeks of unspoken grief finally given proper room to breathe. Wherever you actually are.