And There Was Another✔️

Chapter 22: Finding Peace

Seth opened his eyes. He was in a room, a vaguely familiar room, in a very dim light. He was lying in a bed, in a somewhat enclosed space, and someone was near him. He swallowed and found his mouth dry. For a few seconds, he simply laid there and breathed. His head hurt, but it was more of a headache than anything else. There was still some vague pain across the right side of his skull. Where was he?

Nova shifted and made a soft, unhappy sound beside him, and that finally made everything click home. He was on the ship, in their room, laying in their bed. Okay, so...he must have been knocked out during the battle. He didn't like that he didn't remember much of that battle. The last thing he clearly remembered was seeing the civilian go down, blood and pulverized brains flying out of his skull from the point-blank blaster shot.

That made a pulse of red anger shoot through him, but Seth pushed it down. He needed to find out what had happened, but he didn't want to wake Nova. Even looking at her in the dim light, (she must have left the lights on their lowest setting in consideration for him, not wanting him to potentially wake to total darkness), he saw that she looked exhausted. He knew how she felt. Part of him wanted to just roll over and go back to sleep, real sleep this time, not just unconsciousness, but he knew this was an unrealistic goal.

He was restless, and he knew that until he did something, he wasn't sure what, he would not be able to sleep. Luckily, Nova had put herself closest to the wall and pulled him up against him, draping his arm over her. He was very reluctant to leave the embrace, but he carefully pulled himself up and out from beneath the blankets. He wore nothing but his boxers. Seth slowly moved through the room, gathering up a shirt, some socks, cargo pants, and boots and slipping into the bathroom. Closing the door behind him, he turned on the light and caught sight of himself in the mirror. Well, he looked like crap even more than usual.

He was pale and gaunt and there were deep bags under his eyes. He winced when he saw that a burning groove had been cut right through his hair on the right side of his skull. There was no scar or even cut there, the flesh smooth, (Maya must have used Force heal on him and again he felt guilty), but the hair looked awful, made him look even more crazed and dangerous than he usually did. Have to take care of that sometime, but not now. Right now, he splashed some water on his face, dried it, then took a long leak.

After that, he dressed, killed lights, and slipped back out into the bedroom. Nova was still asleep, breathing softly and regularly. She really must be exhausted. Seth began to head for the door, then hesitated, seeing that he'd disturbed the blanket when he'd left. He moved over, studying her. Nova wore nothing but a pair of panties. He again felt that guilt. She must have been very worried over him, and probably pissed off at him. He was throwing a lot at her for a casual relationship, and part of him, a colder part, wanted to simply write it off, thinking that she should just leave him to his own devices and not care about him as much, he wasn't her responsibility. But he knew that was wrong, a cop out, and more than a little cruel.

Nova did care. Because they were more than a casual relationship at this point, they were comrades in arms, and friends, but more important than all of that was the simple fact that Nova cared because she was a good person. He had to stop doing stuff like this, for his friend's sake as much as his own.

He leaned down and gently kissed her forehead, then pulled the blanket over her. Still she didn't wake, but she did lose the frown on her face, looking a bit more content as she settled more comfortably into sleep. He left the room, opting to leave the light on because at some point he was going to come back and it would make more sense to have it stay consistently on, rather than to need to turn it back on since he was going to need to see when he made for the bed again. He closed the door and moved through the ship, into the central room. As he did, he saw Maya standing near the center of the room, holding a steaming mug of something.