Admiral's voice is quiet but it's the kind of quiet that redraws the air around it. Not a sound that demands obedience—no. It's a sound that alters the physics of the room until obedience is no longer a choice, but a law.

Tharos straightens as if yanked upright by a gravitational shift, hand dropping from the restraint harness like it's burned him. "Admiral," he says, the word flat but carrying an undercurrent I can't quite place.

"Report to the primary command ring." His words land one at a time, neat and surgical. "Coordinate the outer defense line for the first fold sequence. I want eyes on the perimeter drift calculations."

"Understood."

He flicks one last look at me-charged, unfinished-and then he's gone, sliding into place among the other officers, absorbed by the living heartbeat of the ship.

I exhale, pulse jumping for reasons I refuse to examine, and turn my attention back to the restraint system.

Regret hits fast and sharp-I should've paid attention when he was showing me

The harness mocks me with its alien logic. Straps and buckles and some kind of magnetic locking mechanism I can't figure out. I pull one strap across my chest-it doesn't click. I try another angle. It slides free. I fumble with the side buckle, yank it too hard, and it retracts with a snap that nearly takes my thumb off.

"Damn it," I mutter under my breath.

There's movement. A shadow overlapping mine on the floor.

I look up.

"Having difficulty?"

The question is soft. Painless. But it hits like a pulse rifle to the sternum.

He stands at the edge of the platform, framed by the light of the navigation dome. The gold in his eyes catches and burns, the rest of him still and self-contained, the eye of the ship's storm.

My mouth goes dry. Words scatter like startled birds.

"These straps," I manage finally, holding up the tangle like evidence of a crime I've committed against physics, "were designed by sadists."

Something shifts across his expression-something almost human. Humor. But it's quick, like lightning seen from a great distance.

Then he moves.

Not quickly.

That would be a mercy.

He closes the distance in two steps that feel like tectonic shifts—slow, inevitable, the kind of movement that doesn't ask permission from time or space.

The universe doesn't re-center around him.

It surrenders to him.

And I'm caught in the gravity well, unable to look away, unable to breathe anything but the air he's displaced.

The scent of him arrives first—something organic and alien that my brain can't categorize but my body responds to like a drug. Heat pools low in my stomach, unwelcome and terrifying. Dangerous. He's dangerous. That's what this feeling is. It has to be.

My breathing goes shallow, and I hate that I can't tell if I'm trying to avoid inhaling more of him or trying not to hyperventilate.

When his claws skim my wrist—barely contact, more like the idea of touch—my pulse jumps so violently I'm certain he feels it.

Please don't feel it..Please do.

He guides my hand away with a tenderness so clinical it becomes obscene.

Like he's handling something breakable.

Like he's done this before and knows exactly how much pressure a human wrist can take before it bruises.

The straps loosen beneath his fingers, unspooling with a faint hiss. He works with surgical focus, movements sharp and economical, untying what Tharos secured as if reconfiguring a malfunction.

"Wait-" I start, half-rising. "Tharos already-"

His eyes lift to mine. Just a look.It's not unkind-but it's a command all the same. The kind that tells you to sit still without needing to waste energy on words. The kind that bypasses language entirely and speaks directly to whatever part of the brain handles dominance hierarchies.

I sink back into the chair.

Not because I choose to. But because my body listens to him before I do.

His fingers trace the locking line, sliding the strap into place with a soundless click.

Then another, lower brace. Each motion is exact, economical, yet every adjustment feels deliberate-as if he's not just securing me to the seat but calibrating the entire system to my specific parameters.

The insignia at my wrist burns with his proximity, reacting to his biometrics, reading me, betraying me.

He tightens one strap by a fraction, checks the tension at my waist, then at my shoulders.

Every shift of his fingers echoes the dream—the weight of him pressing me into softness, his mouth on my throat, the pearl he'd placed on my tongue like a sacrament, the way I'd woken with my thighs clenched and his name dying on my lips.

Does he know?

Can he tell?

Do Zypherians read human faces well enough to see the flush creeping up my neck, the way my breath just shortened? Can he read the shape of himself in me?

His gaze holds too long, like he's taking in a diagnostic. Like he's reading me-layer by layer, flaw by flaw.

Something flickers there-Or am I projecting, reading want into the blank space of his alien composure?

Act normal.

Just—God—act normal.

But my body is a riot I can't suppress, my pulse is a drumbeat of denial.

The ache in my chest that might be fear or might be something infinitely more dangerous.

The warmth spreading through my core that I pretend is adrenaline.

The way my lips have parted without my permission, as if my mouth knows something my brain refuses to acknowledge.

I want to run. I want to—

No. Don't finish that thought. Don't.

His hands are steady, purposeful, betraying nothing.

Mine aren't.

“Why am I here?” I whisper, though I already know the question isn’t what I really meant to ask.

He leans closer, studying the final buckle.

When he speaks, his voice is a low resonance that seems to travel through the deck itself.

"It is the first fold," he says. "I prefer to know where you are when the ship forgets what direction means."

The words punch straight through the armor I pretend to have. Something loosens and stings.

My throat tightens. I hate that a single line can make the room tilt the way gravity does before a fall.

His hand stills on the strap at my shoulder. I glance up. He's watching me, head tilted fractionally, the way he does when he's analyzing something.

"Are you experiencing distress?" he asks.

His tone-sterile.

His gaze-scalding.

Something in me falters. The part that always holds still, always braces for impact, suddenly doesn’t know what to do with safety.

"No," I say, too fast, too brittle. "I'm fine."

He doesn't believe me.

He reaches for the final buckle near my ribs, and his knuckles brush the side of my breast—accidental, brief—and I flinch.

But it’s not the touch that wrecks me.

It’s that he stops.

The pause is almost nothing—half a breath, half a heartbeat—but it’s there. A stillness that shouldn’t exist in someone built of command and precision. He draws back by a fraction, careful, deliberate, as though my skin were something sacred instead of inconvenient.

That care—so quiet, so exact—breaks me open.

No one’s ever paused for me before. Not once. The world always took and kept taking, and I learned early that survival meant smiling while it did. Meant pretending the impact never hurt.

After my parents died, Shraddha and I learned how to disappear in plain sight—how to be small enough not to invite pity, quiet enough not to irritate the relatives who took us in out of obligation. We taught ourselves not to need softness because it only made the taking hurt more when it came.

And it always came.

I built my life around that silence, the kind that keeps you safe if you never ask for more.

But he does.

My breath shudders out of me, sharp and uneven. My body doesn’t know what to do with this… kindness.

It feels foreign. Like being seen in a language I don’t speak.

The ache rises anyway, lost and directionless, searching for a place to live—

Between my ribs.

In my throat.

Everywhere that’s ever had to hold itself together.

Something inside me trembles. A small, frightened thing that’s been silent for years suddenly awake and gasping.

“Kridura.”

His name slips out before I know it’s forming.

A sound so fragile it barely qualifies as a word—half breath, half confession

Horror crashes through me like ice water.

No, no, no—what did I just do? I don't mean to say it.

My stomach drops like I've just stepped off a cliff.I want to take it back.

Swallow it.

Rewind time by three seconds and clamp my traitorous mouth shut.

Why did I say that?

What's wrong with me?

The silence that follows feels like suffocation.

I can't look at him.

Can't breathe.

Can't think past the mortification clawing its way up my throat.

His name feels wrong in my mouth. Too intimate.

Too raw.

Like I've just revealed something I didn't know I was hiding.

My voice breaks on the last syllable, and I hate myself for it.

Everything stills.

Not just him.

The air.

The ship.

The universe itself seems to hold its breath.

I want to apologize—to explain it away as a mistake, a slip of the tongue, exhaustion, anything—but my voice has abandoned me entirely.

His reaction is immediate and involuntary—the kind of response that bypasses all the layers of control he's spent decades building.

His whole body locks. A predator who's just caught the scent of something it thought extinct.

His pupils blow wide, black swallowing gold.

The hand at my ribs trembles—once, minute, but I feel it like an earthquake

His touch tightens-not painfully, but like a claim.

He inhales once, slow.

Like he's dragging the air through glass.

His eyes close briefly, as if he's pulling himself away from... what? From me?

"Say it again," he says.

Low.

Rough.

Not a question. Not even a request.

More like a fracture that escaped before he could seal it.

The sound vibrates between us-through the harness, through my bones, into my bloodstream.

It's the kind of tone that doesn't belong in polite space. It belongs in darkness, in heat.

In dreams.

And now there's no space left in my lungs.

No air.

No logic.

Just his breath, his nearness, the warp of reality around the two of us.

My voice won't work.

My thoughts won't form.

There's only the sensation—his hand at my ribs, the heat of his body, the way every cell in me is leaning toward him even as my mind screams to pull back.

I'm trapped between terror and something that feels dangerously close to surrender.

My body wants something I can't articulate.

My pulse is pounding in my throat, my wrists, between my legs—everywhere, a drumbeat I can't silence.

"Admiral..." The word comes out broken. "I shouldn't have—I didn't mean—" The words scatter like sparks underfoot.

His eyes snap open. Something is burning there-want, regret, and the unbearable effort of restraint.

"Don't," he says, voice scraped raw. "Not like that."

"Like what?" I can barely get it out. It's not curiosity. It's survival instinct. My body needs to know the rules, needs him to give me something solid to hold onto.

He watches me, gaze heavy. Hungry. Worn thin by control.

"Like you remember," he says, each word shaped by a truth I don't know how to hold, "who I am."

The word slices into me. Foreign. Familiar. A bruise I don't remember getting and can't stop pressing.

"Remember?" I echo, breath uneven. "I don't-"

He looks away, as though he's just reminded himself where we are. Who's listening. Who's watching. The walls, the eyes, the command deck.

Remember?

My pulse stutters. What is he talking about? His voice, the look in his eyes-He swallows, pulls back the smallest possible distance, mastering his voice again.

"There," he says quietly. "Now it's correct."

The space between us feels too close and too far all at once. His gaze digs into me, unblinking, searching-like he expects me to understand something impossible.

In that stillness I can't tell if he's reading me, testing me, or simply waiting for me to breathe.

"Thank you," I manage. My voice sounds small, unsure. Not a person in command of anything-not even myself.

He inclines his head-exact. Formal. No trace left of the storm that just passed through him.

His body steps back with unsettling grace, reassembling the distance like armor being reapplied. But his eyes-they linger a beat too long. Seeing me. Still.

Then he's gone-moving back toward the center console. His voice rises just enough to carry discipline, authority, finality.

"All stations, status check. Fold sequence initiates in 15 solar minutes. I want confirmation on every system."

And just like that-he's Admiral again. One command, and the ship around him hums to new life, like the vessel itself recognizes the live wire at its helm.

I sink deeper into the seat, close my eyes, and try-so hard-not to think.

Not about the dream. Not about his hands. Not about the way he just reacted like my voice was a memory he'd been holding under the surface, and hearing it again nearly drowned him.

Or the fact that in few minutes, reality is going to fold in on itself, and I'm not sure which will be more disorienting-the spacefold, or the way Kridura looked at me just now like I was something breakable and worth protecting.

Around me, Command blossoms with escalating light. Orders fly. Systems flare. The hum beneath the floor grows teeth.

The countdown begins.

The fold point swells across the dome- a bruise blooming in violet and void, beautiful and predatory. Something the universe did not invite, and has no power to refuse.

Every science class I ever slept through sits up in my head and starts yelling. My brain scrambles for metaphors that can hold this, and of course it reaches for cinema, for the one story that tried to teach us how to look at a throat in spacetime without blinking.

This isn't Interstellar. It's worse and better.