Elara walked the perimeter of the habitation ring. Without her magnetic boots, her steps felt light, almost frivolous. She wasn’t marching to a briefing; she was just… walking.
She spotted Kael near the viewports. He was a squadron leader she had trained—a good pilot, but one who flew with his nerves exposed. He was pacing, his hands chopping the air as he argued with a datapad.
When he saw her, his face didn’t light up with friendship; it lit up with relief. He saw the Strategist.
“Elara!” He crossed the distance in three long strides. “Thank the stars. You have to hear this. Command just reshuffled the rotation schedules again. They’ve got rookies flying point on the asteroid belt run. It’s suicide. I’ve been trying to draft a counter-proposal for an hour, but the phrasing is all wrong.”
He thrust the datapad toward her. “Look at this. Tell me how to make them listen. You know how to talk to the Admiral.”
Elara felt the tug. It was violent and immediate.
Her brain instantly flooded with solutions. Tell the Admiral it burns 4% more fuel to have rookies correct course. That gets his attention.
The words were right there, stacked in her throat like ammunition. To say them would be so easy. It would calm Kael down. It would prove she was still the Vanguard, still valuable. For twenty years, that was how she had said “I care about you”—by fixing the things that scared the people she loved.
But she stopped. She looked at Kael. He was vibrating with anxiety, waiting for her to take the weight from him.
She realized suddenly that she didn’t need to do anything to show him she cared. She didn’t need to rewrite his roster or solve his puzzle. She just had to look him in the eye and acknowledge him.
“It sounds like a mess, Kael,” she said softly.
Kael blinked. He shook the pad slightly, as if she hadn’t seen it. “It’s a disaster. If I send this memo as is, they’ll laugh me out of the office. What’s the angle, Elara? How did you get the budget approved for the Mark-IVs last cycle?”
He was begging her to take the wheel.
Elara felt the ache of it—the desire to make his fear go away. But she knew that if she took the pad, she wasn’t trusting him. She would be treating him like a passenger in his own life.
“I don’t have an angle for you,” she said.
Kael froze. “You don’t know? You wrote the protocol on belt navigation.”
“I did,” Elara said. She didn’t reach for the pad. Instead, she reached out and briefly touched his arm—a gesture she never would have made in uniform. “I can hear how worried you are about your crew. It makes sense that you’re scared. They’re lucky to have a leader who worries this much.”
Kael stopped shaking the pad. He looked at her hand on his arm, then up at her face. He looked confused, waiting for the “but”—the part where she gave him the solution.
“But… what do I write?” he asked, his voice smaller.
“You’ll write the truth,” Elara said. “I trust you to find the words.”
It felt terrifying to leave it there. It felt “incomplete” to her old self. But as she watched him, she saw the panic shift into something else. The frantic energy dissipated, leaving behind a heavy, somber reality. He realized she wasn’t going to save him.
“Right,” Kael said, pulling the datapad back to his chest. He looked tired, but he looked steady. “I guess… I guess I just have to tell them it’s dangerous.”
“I guess so,” Elara said.
She stayed with him for another moment, not fixing, not strategizing, just standing witness to his struggle.
“Thanks, Elara,” he said. It wasn’t the enthusiastic thanks of someone who just got a cheat code. It was the quiet thanks of someone who felt seen.
He turned and walked away.
Elara watched him go. The old instinct screamed that she had abandoned him. But deeper down, beneath the noise of the old armor, she felt a new, quiet warmth. She hadn’t fixed his problem, but she had given him something better: her belief that he could fix it himself.
She didn’t have to perform. She just had to be there.
WE&P by: EZorrillaMc&Co
Travel in Life 