Page 21 of Star Bright
The robotic arm spun away. “Take two analgesics and update this med unit in the morning.”
Bolstered by the idea that her situation wasn’t as pathetic as a holiday exile to the middle of nowhere Montana might seem, Darcy guided the cart back to the lobby. This late, the big room was almost completely dark except for a couple small pools of light near the pillow forts at one end and the rope lights behind the bar.
Vash was slumped there on a stool, his elbows on the bar and his head in his hands.
She almost left, but the kids might need something for breakfast and she could at least leave him that. Quietly she began unloading the cart onto the counter. Everything that had been left behind was shelf stable and just needed to be heated or cooled right at the bar. She wouldn’t even bother Vash unless he—
“How could I have forgotten her?” His voice was muffled by his big hands, but the anguish seeped through anyway.
Darcy paused, a package of something squishy clenched in her hand. “Crash, poisoning, head injury, shock,” she listed, as if they were ingredients in a terrible recipe. “And you didn’t forget her. You called out her name before you even heard your own.”
When he lifted his head to stare at her, his gray eyes were red-rimmed, not with rings of fire, but grief. “I forgot she is…gone.”
With a sigh, Darcy went around the bar to perch on a stool beside him. “Doesn’t that make sense? Under the worst of circumstances, you blanked that out. Because part of you didn’t want to remember.” She touched his elbow. “I’m so sorry for your loss, Vash.”
He let out a shuddering breath. “Five sols ago. No, a hundred and five sols ago. But it still feels…” He looked down at his hands clenched on the bar. “She loved to fly in the night storms of Skyearth.” Darcy swallowed back a distressed noise, but he must’ve heard her unvoiced judgment. “I told you our planet is turbulent. For us, storms are—were—a way of life. We even celebrate the powers of the winds and the fires of volcanos in our holidays. Except one time, such a storm was Shanya’s death.”
He swiveled on his stool toward the windows, black with the night outside. “It was late. Atsu was already in bed, so I stayed to watch over the fledglings while Shanya flew by herself.” The reflection of the low lights around the tented sheets onlyemphasized the darkness in his gaze. “Our aerie is—was—in a quiet valley, not so different from this place, and I heard the change in the storm. I, of all people, should’ve known how it might turn. But it was too late. Thunder cracked the sky, and the lightning rods were almost screaming. Then I realized it was Yadira screaming. She was in her room, watching the storm, and she saw her mother fall.”
Darcy’s eyes prickled. “Oh, the poor baby.”
“I… I left my fledgling there, still crying, and I flew as fast as my beast could carry us. The lightning was still striking all around, so violent…” Trailing off, he shook his head. “But I was too late. No, that’s not quite true. It didn’t matter how fast I might’ve been. I should not have let her fly at all. I should have—”
Darcy put her hand over his, muting the words. “Vash. I saw that beautiful creature in your hologram. Your mate was a drakling who loved storms. Would you have really stopped her?Couldyou have stopped her?”
After a moment, he twisted his hand under hers to hold her tight, as if pulling himself back from some precipice. “I loved her. I would have given her all the storms.”
He bowed his head and his body shook as if he’d been struck again. Not knowing what else to do—even her new implant offered no suggestions—Darcy put her other arm around his shoulders as he grieved.
+ + +
It was a different kind of storm, devastating in its own way. Vash let the horrible recollections sleet through him, tearing empty holes in his soul. Shanya as she’d launched from their aerie, leaving him behind. The devastating sight that had knocked him from the sky, of her crumpled among the stones, motionless. Clutching her tight, the feel of her achingly belovedbody becoming chill in the midnight rain, ever more distant as his own hands turned to ice.
Keenly aware of his fledglings sleeping nearby, he made no sound, just endured the punishing beat of his loss and turmoil again.
But even as the most ferocious storms on Skyearth eventually exhausted themselves, his emotional upheaval finally passed. Not peace, not with so much debris strewn around him, but a sort of numbed calm.
At least until his fledglings woke again.
He let out one more breath before raising his head.
From Darcy’s shoulder? She had held him through the mayhem of his memories. Even if his IDA contract hadn’t expired, that was more than should be expected of her.
With a wince of chagrin, he straightened away from her, averting his face. “My apologies, Darcy. I should not have—”
“Stop.” The warm weight of her grip squeezed his arm. “Nothing here is your fault.”
“Maybe not on Skyearth,” he countered. “But here, everythingismy fault. I decided we needed a change. I took the fledglings from their home. I crashed us here…a hundred years away from everything we had left.”
Darcy was quiet for a long moment. “What did the medical scans say?”
“That everything is ‘within normal physiological parameters’, as if that is enough.” He hunched into himself. “Coward that I am, I explained everything to them while we were in the med bay, in case I might need to sedate them again. But I think Atsu doesn’t quite comprehend; he thinks a different time is no more a stretch than a different world. And Yadira… Susu is right that she is very angry.”
“Losing her mother must’ve been traumatic for her. I know drakling development isn’t the same as Earther, but… Myparents divorced, angrily, when I was young, and then my older sister, who was always my rock, died when I was just out of college and barely into my new life, and it was so hard to feel those relationships just…fading one by one, gone.”
He gazed at her. “Yadira is of the age that her beast should rise, and yet she was showing no signs. Instead of sparring with her friends and classmates, training and testing her own strength, she withdrew from everything except her required classes. We’d always been close—she loves engineering too—but I couldn’t reach her anymore. She wanted nothing to do with me.” He met Darcy’s sympathetic gaze, awaiting her judgment. “I think she blames me for her mother’s death.”
Darcy settled back on her stool, her lips pursed to one side. For some reason, it reassured him that she did not immediately seek to reassure him. “I can imagine she’s still very confused and sad, even years afterward. You have therapy on your world?” When he confirmed, she continued, “But sometimes therapy and reality can’t challenge what you feel in your heart. I wonder if she blames you any more than she blames herself.” She sat up a little straighter. “Neither of you can blame Shanya, even though flying into the storm was her choice.”
