Chapter Text
It had started, she had thought, all rather innocuously.
Tristan was a physical man. Domineering, not only in presence but also mental fortitude. She had supposed, that was all due to his training as an Arbiter of Protectorate Law, since he was just a young lad.
So when he picked her up after a gunfight, scraped her off the floor and held her face squished between his clumsily gloved hands, she had thought nothing of it.
His thumbs, blunt and solid through the embossed leather, smeared grime and what might have been blood from her cheekbones. His gaze wasn't on the cut above her brow or the grit in her hair. It was spearing into her eyes.
"Your tactical assessment was flawed, Commander." His voice was a low rumble, barely audible over the ringing in her ears from the concussive blast. "Advancing without a verifiable perimeter sweep violated three standard protocols for hostile engagement."
She should have been angry. She was angry. He always did this to her. Made her so unbearably angry she'd…
Think about this later in the closed confines of her Commander's Chamber. The way his hands had completely encompassed her jaw. The unyielding pressure. The heat of him through the gloves. She’d replay the moment and feel a fresh, furious flush— at her own treacherous stillness. She hadn’t kneed him in the groin. She hadn’t even slapped his hands away. She’d just… taken it. Let herself be held and scrutinised. Maybe even enjoyed it.
God, she was pathetic.
"Your protocols are written for a parade ground, Tristan," she finally managed, her voice tight. She willed it not to shake. "Not a live firefight in a collapsing refinery."
"A sound principle does not become unsound due to inconvenient surroundings." His eyes, that infuriating, focused darkness, didn't waver. But his thumb shifted, just a millimeter, a rough catch of leather against the sensitive skin just below her ear. A spark shot down her spine. "Chaos is not a strategy."
"Let. Go." The words were ground out, low and dangerous.
For a heartbeat, he didn't. He held her there, and she was frozen again, as though back in her cryo-pod. Then, with a final, almost imperceptible tightening of his fingers, he released her. The sudden absence was a shock. She stumbled back a step, her own balance betraying her.
He took a deliberate step back as well, as if establishing a proper, regulated distance between a Protectorate Arbiter and a wayward Earth Directorate Commander. "The objective was secured. This time. Do not rely on luck to supplement poor judgement."
He turned and walked towards the smoldering wreckage of the security drones, already cataloging the scene for his inevitable report. A report that would no doubt cite her 'emotional volatility' and 'disregard for procedural safety.'
She touched her cheek where his gloves had been. The skin felt feverish, singed.
She already knew she wouldn't be able to visit a medic for this particular malady. It was one she would have to sort out herself, however much she didn't want to.
She watched him catalogue the casualties, drones and wayward Protectorate soldiers. He moved with an efficient, solemn grace, pausing once to straighten the collar of a fallen man whose insignia marked him as a higher ranking officer. A gesture of respect, even for the misguided. She'd always wondered why Tristan had never minded them killing them, but then she supposed they did always shoot first, and he was an Arbiter. They'd called him a traitor when they’d sought his beloved's tutors messages in her old office. But she knew, he'd never be a traitor to The Protectorate. Not in his heart. His rebellion was a temporary exile, a fracture in his loyalty caused by a higher, more personal law. Once this was over, the fracture would heal. The institution would reclaim its perfect instrument.
He would return to gleaming halls and clear chains of command. He would file reports in triplicate and marry some sharp-chinned, ideologically pure daughter of the Protectorate gentry. A woman who arranged data-slates in aesthetically pleasing grids and whose greatest rebellion was using an unofficial blend of tea. A woman who was a complement, not a complication.
She could already picture her: neat, quiet, orderly. Everything the Commander was not.
She was grit and improvisation. She was bending rules until they snapped and then using the pieces to jury-rig a solution. She was loud laughter in the mess hall and stubborn dirt under her nails. She was a chaos engine wrapped in a command jacket, and the mere thought of trying to fit herself into the clean, narrow box of the life he was destined for made her feel like she was suffocating.
And she could never be that.
With a final, lingering look at his broad back as he conferred with Inez by a shattered console, the Commander turned away. The phantom heat on her cheek cooled into a stubborn, cold residue. She walked back to the ship alone, the echoes of the firefight fading into the hum of the Incognito’s systems. She had a mission report to file. She would note his exemplary combat performance and his valuable adherence to procedure. She would not mention the way his hands had felt upon her cheek, or the fire in her lower belly.
She would lock this away with all the other inconvenient things—the fear before a jump, the grief for lost crew, the secret, shameful hope for a home that was more than just the next star chart. It would sit there, alongside the memory of his eyes in that moment of suspended time, another thing to be managed. Another silent, personal war to fight in the closed confines of her Commander’s Chamber.
After filing her report—a dry, lifeless document that catalogued the event without a single hint of the seismic shift it had caused in her—she came to rest in her chamber. She downed three shots of Zero Gee Whisky ("This'll Get You Into Orbit!") in quick succession, the burn a welcome punishment. Then she rose and flumped down on her bed unceremoniously, the world tilting slightly.
It was then that she remembered how her cheek had felt. Not just the heat, but the specific, blunt pressure of his thumbs, the rough grain of the leather. She remembered how his eyes had seared into hers, and the terrible, shameful truth: she hadn't minded. Had in fact, rather liked it. Had liked the sheer, undeniable focus of it. For those few seconds, she hadn't been the Commander responsible for everything. She had just been his to assess, to hold, to… correct.
A flush, hotter than the whisky, bloomed across her skin. The anger was still there, a hard knot in her chest, but it was melting, transforming under the weight of a loneliness so acute it was a physical ache.
Before she knew it, one hand was snaking its way down her body, towards the zipper of her trousers. Her breath hitched, not in pleasure but in a kind of furious surrender. This was pathetic. This was the lowest, most clichéd capitulation.
As she lowered the zipper slowly, she could feel it drag slightly against her underwear, a tiny, mundane resistance. She sighed, a shaky exhalation, and let the pad of her finger rub gently at the crossroads, a tentative exploration.
Tristan would not be so gentle with her, she reckoned.
The thought was a lightning strike, vivid and brutal. There would be no tentative touch with him. No sighing permission. His hands, those heavy, thick instruments of judgment and brute strength, would be definitive. He would handle her the way he handled his hammer or a breached door: with absolute purpose, overwhelming force, and a complete disregard for anything as frivolous as delicacy. The thought of those hands on her, made the fire in her belly deepen into a molten pool.
A soft, involuntary sound escaped her lips. It was swallowed by the hum of the environmental systems.
She rolled her trousers and pants down over her hips, over the curve of her buttocks, just enough. She left them there, bunched at her thighs, the fabric a rough constraint. A practical precaution—lest she be interrupted and need a quick change—that felt, in this moment, like the most pathetic of metaphors. Always half-ready, half-armored, never fully committed, even in her own solitude. Even in a fantasy of him, she couldn't fully let go.
She let her head fall back against the pillow, the cool cotton a shock. Her fingers grew bolder, chasing the heat his memory had ignited. In the darkness behind her eyes, it wasn't her own touch she felt. It was the imagined scrape of calloused fingertips, the blunt pressure that would brook no argument. It was the ghost of his breath against her neck, hot and uneven for once, his perfect control fraying because of her. She imagined the low, guttural sound he might make, not of censure, but of surrender to a different, more primal law.
It was a fantasy of being overtaken. Of her chaos finally meeting a force that didn't seek to cage it, but to match it.
Her movements lost their initial frustration, becoming sharper, more urgent, driven by the vivid, illicit script in her mind. The empty room filled with the soft, rhythmic sound of her breathing, now coming in ragged pants. She was chasing the shadow of a man who lived in absolutes, trying to capture a feeling as fleeting and contradictory as he was: the fantasy of being completely mastered by the one person whose respect she desperately wanted to earn.
Just as the tension coiling within her began to spiral towards its peak, a sharp, intrusive triple-chime shattered the silence.
It was Val.
COMMANDER. ARBITER RAO IS AT YOUR QUARTERS. HE INSISTS HIS BUSINESS IS URGENT.]
At her quarters.
The words didn’t compute at first. Then they did, landing with the force of a hull breach. He was there. On the other side of that metal door. The man who lived in her head was standing in her hallway, likely in that exact same, rigid posture, while she was on her bed, her trousers around her thighs, her fingers…
That man, and his timing. It was as though he knew.
Except she knew he never would. For all his observational skills, the man was truly as dense as two short thick planks when it came to romance. He hadn't even noticed the very obvious infatuation the Junior Arbiter had had upon him. He wouldn't recognise the scent of desperation and arousal if it vented into the corridor. But he would notice if she took too long to answer. He would note the delay in his mental logbook under ‘Commander: Unaccountable Latency.’
Panic, sharp and cold, doused the last of the heat. She scrambled off the bunk, yanking her pants and trousers up in one frantic, graceless motion. Her fingers fumbled with the zipper, catching the fabric. “Acknowledged, Val. Tell him I’m—I’m securing personal gear. One moment.”
Her voice was too high. She cleared her throat, swiping a hand over her face as if she could wipe away the last few minutes. A glance in the reflective bulkhead was a mistake: hair wild, lips swollen from being bitten, a flush painting her neck and chest.
She couldn’t let him in. Not like this.
She stomped to the door, hitting the comm panel on the wall beside it. “Rao.” She aimed for crisp, annoyed command. It came out breathless. “What’s so urgent it can’t wait for a debrief?”
His voice came through the speaker, filtered but unmistakably his. It wasn’t the calm, analytical tone from the bridge. It was lower, threaded with a strain that felt… personal. “Your report. Section 4, Sub-paragraph B. The omission of the environmental sensor data is a critical oversight. It invalidates the tactical analysis of the third engagement wave.”
Of course. The report. He was at her door, insisting on urgency, over a data-point omission.
A hysterical laugh bubbled in her throat. She choked it down. “And this couldn’t wait ten minutes? You’re auditing me at my door, Arbiter?”
A beat of silence. She could almost see him on the other side, processing the emotional payload of her words, separating the useful data from the noise.
“The anomaly in your report coincided with a notable deviation in your post-engagement behavior,” he stated, his voice shifting into that terrifyingly careful cadence he used when navigating a complex moral breach. “You withdrew immediately. You filed a report with an uncharacteristic lapse. And now you are… delaying.” Another pause. “Your ‘personal gear’ appears to be causing you significant difficulty.”
Her blood ran cold, then hot. He wasn’t just noting the omission. He was conducting a field assessment on her. Connecting the dots between the fight, the way he’d held her, her retreat, and the flawed report. He’d followed the trail of breadcrumbs right to her door. His logic was a searchlight, piercing and unbearably intimate without him meaning it to be.
He was solving for x, and x was her unraveling.
She leaned her forehead against the cool metal of the door. The war was no longer in the confines of her chamber. It was here, in the charged space of the threshold, with only a few inches of steel between his relentless scrutiny and her devastating secret.
“My gear is fine,” she said, her voice a tight wire. “The data is logged in the raw sensor feed. Append it yourself if it’s so damned vital. I’ll re-issue the report in the morning.”
Silence again. Longer this time. She could picture him weighing her tone, her refusal. Judging it.
“Very well,” he said finally. The word was not acquiescence. It was a placeholder. “I will append the data. But the discrepancy stands noted, Commander. In my file.”
In his file. Of course he had his own file. Another black mark in the ledger of her unsuitability.
She heard the solid, measured tread of his Protectorate issued boots as he turned and walked away from her door. The sound faded down the corridor.
She slid down the door until she was sitting on the cold floor, knees drawn up. The emptiness that followed wasn’t relief. It was the silence after a near-miss. He had been so close. He had seen right through her report, through her excuse, and had come to her door demanding answers she could never give.
And the most terrifying part? A treacherous, hungry part of her wished she’d just opened the damn door.
Ten years in a cryo-pod, and she fell in love with the most unsuitable man in the galaxy. Who didn't even notice her as a woman. Not in the way he'd noticed Inez.
She was pathetic for even thinking that, she knew it. A leader of men and women, a survivor of the Long Thaw, reduced to jealous fever dreams over a man who valued correct data entry over any human smile. But all she wanted was him to see her, not as a command variable, not as a tactical asset prone to lapses, but as her. And every time he truly looked, she came across as a blithering idiot: flushed, disheveled, forgetting sensor data, hiding behind her own door.
She deserved this shame. It was the only fitting punishment for such a monumental failure of judgment. The heat in her belly had been a lie, a biological prank. This, now, the cold floor against her thighs, the hollow ache behind her ribs, the acidic taste of humiliation, this was the truth.
She didn't move from her spot by the door for a long time. The ship’s night cycle hummed around her, the gentle, artificial twilight of her quarters feeling like a mockery. Eventually, she pushed herself up, her body stiff. She finished what she’d started with the whisky, not for pleasure, but for obliteration. The burn was a cleaner feeling than the one in her chest and throat from the acidt.
The next morning, she found the report on her terminal. It had been re-filed. RAO, T. was listed as a co-author. He had, true to his word, appended the environmental data. His additions were meticulous, flawlessly integrated. He had also, she noted with a sinking feeling, added a new subsection: 4.C: Commander’s Post-Engagement Assessment & Anomalous Behavioural Indicators.
It was a clinical, dispassionate log. Withdrawal from common areas. Uncharacteristic error in primary documentation. Delayed response to direct inquiry. Recommend observation for stress-induced cognitive degradation or potential physical injury incurred during engagement and not reported. Mental Refreshment may be necessary.
He wasn't judging her for wanting him. He was diagnosing her as malfunctioning.
The worst part was, he wasn't wrong. She was malfunctioning.
Because of him.