Page 240 of Red Scale Daddy
Dad clears his throat from engineering, quieter now. “I’m going to mute myself for thirty seconds and pretend I’m not old enough to understand subtext.”
“Dad,” I warn.
“Thirty seconds. Maybe forty-five. Depends how sentimental you two get.”
The engineering channel clicks to private, though I know perfectly well he can override it whenever he likes.
“He gave us privacy.”
“He gave us performative privacy.”
“Still counts.”
I rise from the floor, but only enough to sit on the edge of the console beside him. My knees feel unsteady, which is absurd. I have crossed hostile hulls under fire. I have ruptured Throgg’s systems with a knife. I have flown an unstable ship through a Reaper firing pattern and treated uncertainty like a tool instead of a failure. Sitting near Dux in a quiet cockpit should not be the thing that threatens my equilibrium.
Yet here I am.
He reaches for my burned hand, slow enough that I can refuse. I do not. His fingers close around my wrist with a gentleness that makes my throat ache, and he turns my palm upward to inspect the damage. The glove is ruined. The skin beneath is reddened, blistered in places, still trembling slightly from the electrical surge.
“You hid this,” he says.
“I prioritized.”
“You hid it.”
“I did both.”
His thumb traces the uninjured edge of my palm, careful as breath. “Roma.”
My name in his mouth no longer sounds like a warning. It sounds like a door opening.
I look at the Alliance grid shining beyond him, the distant lights of safety waiting on the screen. We have spent so long in motion that stillness feels hostile. My mind keeps reaching for the next threat, the next calculation, the next reason not to step fully into what has been building between us. Throgg is trapped. The Reapers are behind us. Dad is alive. Dux is alive. I am alive, and for once survival is not an ending.
It is an invitation.
“I chose you,” I say.
His hand stills around mine.
“I know.”
“No,” I say, because precision matters and because hiding behind implication has become exhausting. “You know what I did. I am telling you what it means.”
He sits forward slowly, eyes locked on mine. The cockpit lights flicker once, soft across his face, and outside the forward glass Alliance beacons blink like patient stars.
“Tell me,” he says.
The words are simple. The space between them is not.
“I chose you when the faster escape route required leaving you. I chose you when the old version of me would have made a cleaner decision. I chose you again when we launched because I allowed imperfect variables to stand instead of cutting them away.” My voice wants to tighten, but I refuse to let it. I am tired of translating tenderness into strategy to make it easier to survive. “I am still afraid. I am still difficult. I will likely continue to be insufferable about systems, protocols, and your tendency to bleed without reporting it.”
“That last one feels fair.”
“I am not finished.”
His smile fades into something deeper, something almost reverent.
I draw a breath and taste metal, antiseptic, smoke, and the terrifying cleanliness of truth. “I want you. Not as an emergency. Not as a battlefield exception. Not as something I explain away when we dock and the lights are bright enough to make everything feel less desperate. I want you in the aftermath. I want you when the engines are quiet. I want you when there is no immediate death making honesty efficient.”
