Half a year later, a smoothie, or what was left of it, rested in her hands. The cup was wrinkled in her fingers, battered and bruised by the way she had twisted it in a spurt of fury. To her left, Blonko eyed her, but refused to offer her words of comfort and Shar was glad of it. She didn't deserve them. She deserved to train until her breath left her body.

Because Kundo had almost killed her. And it had been up to her brother, as usual, to save her, risking his own body in the process. One day, she swore, her fists crinkling the cup into a crumpled mess, she would be strong enough to return the favour.

Then she frowned, lost and thoughtful, as space whizzed by and the streaked lines of the stars vanished past the glass of the window.

She had seen – she was not sure – but she had seen something that struck her as strange. For Her brother's armour had been torn, stripped away as though it was mere paper. And yet, despite her fussing, he had refused her aid.

'It was a glancing blow,' he had admitted, 'but I am used to such things now. There is no need to fret. Besides, Ben will aid me. I mean no disrespect, sister, but he is more used to 'patching me up' after the battle is done. '

Ben Ten had looked up at this and rolled his eyes. 'You look fine to me,' he pointed out. 'Still standing and everything. Buuut if you really want my help...' He shrugged. 'Well then, I'm happy to oblige.'

And then both he and her brother had disappeared, cutting her view of them firmly off by the smooth sheen of a closing metal door. But not of course, to the cameras. It was stupid, a stunt only Young One (now Rook Ben, she reminded herself) would pull, but she had hurried to a nearby control panel and typed in the codes she had spent months memorising from her Plumber handbook. But what she had seen there had caught her breath.

Because Blonko had not been leaning on a bench or supporting himself against a surface like an injured person should have been. And Ben had not been hurrying to unload bandages or even trying to pry apart the lid of a medical kit. No, instead he was standing under the shadow of her brother, that familiar blue hand closing over the thin line of the human's neck as the fingers reached down to brush against a cheek, before sliding up into hair and leaving a careful ruffle of brown to gloss over the fur.

This hadn't seemed to annoy Ben, though he had swatted the hand brieftly, as though to blame it for distracting him and then he tried to squint at the ruff of white that exploded past the layers of cracked armour plating. He had had to lean forward, a little on his toes as he peered closer, his own fingers moving softly over the exposed fur as though to check for a loose wire. And she saw her brother shiver slightly in response and say something.

Ben had frowned, looking Shar noted wryly, a lot more worried than his earlier cavalier attitude had led her to believe. In some ways, it reminded her of her Father's behaviour, trying to hide things until it was too late to get the people who mattered most, like Blonko, to believe they did not mean anything by it.

'What is this strange new hapening?' she had whispered to herself. 'Oh Brother, what dangerous new venture have you thrown yourself into now?'

And yet, hours away from that moment of tenderness or comfort or whatever it was, she still felt like an outsider. Her gut ran cold as she remembered how she had felt forced to turn her eyes away from them both, to flick the camera off, just as her brother dived down to leave something wet and glistening against a human forehead, the human beneath arching up onto his toes to receive it and-

She could not continue. It was not her secret to keep, not even hers to guard. And yet, guard it, she knew she would.

Training was hard, ruling over a steady balance to her life, and in some ways it was a little too similar to being back on Revonnah, locked in by both tradition and the watchful gaze of neighbours. She could still remember their words and the gnawing, prying nature of them, those whispers following her in the fields back when her brother had first left home. Of course, she was sure they did not whisper anymore. She doubted that her departure had managed to stir up even a single conversation behind the backs of her sisters and brother.

And yet there was freedom here. More slop, more spillage of food in the mess halls than she had ever seen in the orange-infused dishes of home. Weapons, metal, more techniques, more books to stretch the halls, libraries of files that ran computer hard-drives into the ground. For the first time in her life, she could wander freely, without someone waiting to shove a scythe into her hand. Now she could fight and punch and find approval in the eyes of her tutors, approval that had not mellowed after witnessing the superior grace of her brother, such as it had been when her father had first watched her kick out dust into their fields.

And now she had made friends too, the lines of the faces untouched by familiar purple fur. Some of them did not even have faces, at least not ones she readily recognised as such. She was...she was...

Happy. There was far more here for her here than there ever was on Revonnah.

And if she was ever haunted by the memory of what she saw, of the strange courtship ritual her brother had been engaged in, his hands as careful on Ben's skin as they were years ago, on the gleam of his metal toys-

No. She was learning too much here, to be shocked by that.