Stifling a yawn, she keyed the dose of medication into the pixis droid. Her neck was still sore from falling asleep on the sofa. The door jammed, as usual, so she slapped the side of the droid and the little white pills finally rattled down the shoot. She caught them in a medication cup and handed it to the pilot. The pilot threw the pills back into his mouth and swallowed drily. She offered him water every single time, and Puck always refused. His medication was dosed daily, so this dance they did was well practiced.
"Thanks," he said, handing her the medicine cup.
"Anything interesting on the manifest today?" Beatrice asked.
"In fact, I'm flying General Hux to that new base as soon as my flight checks are done," he said. Beatrice fought to keep her face bland.
"Coming back later today?" she asked as though she didn't care at all. She made a show of putting the cup in the sink so he couldn't see her expression.
"He's not. I am."
"Well, I hope you have a safe flight."
"I always do, that's why they make me chauffeur so much."
As she sat down to document in the pilot's chart, she found herself striking the keys with force. But what else had she expected? Armitage was important, of course he would be stationed elsewhere. He did not owe her an explanation, just like he didn't owe her an apology for forgetting her in his room. It showed her how insignificant she was to him: an evening's diversion and a disappointing one at that. Waking up with him glowering over her had shattered the illusion that she was more than a small part in a big machine. He could easily destroy her.
Her hands were tense, her heart erratic, her chest tight. The physical sensations were nothing compared to the maelstrom of emotions whirling in her. Beatrice's emotional range was usually limited, rocking gently between crests of satisfaction and troughs only as low as mild irritation. She very seldom experienced anything of greater amplitude; she had no great joys or deep sorrows. But now she felt a surging anger, pointed at Armitage and swollen by her own embarrassment from assuming that she meant something to him. And in her chest, there was a hollowness now that he was gone.
She took a deep breath and stilled the anger with disappointment. This was an easier emotion for her. She could accept that she was nothing to him because she was nothing to everybody, and while she had felt dizzy and exhilarated under his regard, that was now over and she needed to focus on the tasks at hand. She needed to see her patients, help out her triad. The infirmary did not care that she felt hollow, and to think that she had ever deserved more than this was hubris. She lost herself in her work, treating rashes and diarrhea, conjunctivitis and ankle sprains. Forgetting him became a kind of revenge.
Following sign out, her triad made their way to the gym, a massive midship complex with weight rooms, a swimming pool, and a track that surrounded a field of fake black grass. After her usual argument with the equipment droid about why she needed two supportive chest bands, she changed and met her triad on the track. Bard took off at a sprint to meet his weekly Metabolic Equivalence Task requirement faster while Adriana and Beatrice settled into an easy jog. For the first three laps, they complained about the new documentation program that made writing notes take twice as long.
"So, General Hux couldn't sign you off on some of your METs?" Adriana teased as Bard sprinted by, crowing about only needing to do three more laps before he hit his requirement.
"No." Beatrice was not eager to have this conversation. While she and Adriana had the closeness of sisters, they were not friends.
"Really? You came in so late last night. I just assumed."
"It's over anyway. He got transferred."
"Probably for the best. Bard and I talked about it last night. A proposition is one thing, but our triad would become unstable if he was constantly calling you away. The only way we will raise to MO III is together."
"Though if I had his ear, we'd make MO III much sooner," Beatrice said darkly. Adriana said nothing, and it was obvious that she hadn't considered how Beatrice's relationship might benefit her personally.
"We'd get better shifts. But we'd be stuck on the Finalizer, with no chance of ever making it to the Spire," Adriana said pragmatically.
"All of this speculation is just academic now. He's gone."
The trilling of her pager woke her from sleep. She was so conditioned to it that she was already jumping down from the bunk, heart rate elevated, a stone in her stomach, when she processed the request. Curiously, it did not summon her to the infirmary but requested a conference call.
She crossed the hall to the MO rec room. There was a sofa that no one sat on, a few old books that no one read, and a picked-over selection of stale crackers and peanut butter arranged in front of stained coffee pot and a basket of tea. The walls were papered with outdated management protocols and highlighted arrhythmia strips, interspersed with amusing typos from medical notes. She shut herself inside the small console cubicle next to the weathered sofa.
She felt slightly less anxious. Being summoned to the console almost certainly meant that there had been an outbreak of something obscure, and she would much rather give advice about quarantine duration and antibiotic dosing regimens than have to go upstairs to help manage a dying patient. She turned on the terminal, arranging her pen and paper to take notes.
She was shocked when Armitage appeared on the screen. In an instant the simmering anger she'd suppressed all day evaporated, the hollow feeling suffused with a bright limerence. He seemed unprepared to see her, immediately becoming flustered, translated across the lightyears in asynchronous throat clearing and a frozen and pixeled image of his startled face.
"Are you alright?" she asked.
"Yes," the audio stuttered, "It's only that I didn't expect you to have quite so little on."
It took her a moment to process what he was saying. Confused, she looked down and saw only her own functional body, her own freckled skin clothed in the sleeveless undershirt that she had been given to wear as part of her off-duty uniform. Obviously, she wouldn't see patients in it, but she and other MOs had gone to the mess hall garbed similarly.
"I can cover up," she muttered, embarrassed, as she looked around the small cubicle for some discarded blanket or jacket.
He was trying to backtrack but she couldn't make out the words through the static, his hands flying in front of his face as he gesticulated, the image stuck as twin white blurs on the screen. He stood and grabbed the hem of his shirt, pulling it over his head so that he sat before her naked from the waist up.
"There. Now we're similarly attired," he said, "And the quality of the call is terrible. Give me a moment." He turned to another monitor and after some clicking and typing the image sharpened and it was as clear as if they were in the same room.
"Aren't you worried about being overheard?" she hissed. Everyone knew that outgoing calls were monitored and she imagined an otherwise sleepy room of intelligence officers gawking at what appeared to be the universe's most awkward striptease. But Armitage laughed: an abrupt bark.
"They were all sacked months ago. The call will be archived but no one is listening, I assure you."
She struggled to find something to say. Red islands were blooming on his chest and creeping up his neck, and she could tell that her own body mirrored the geography of his. She understood that he had been trying to compensate for his reaction to her image, but his solution to the situation was so bizarre that she was wordless.
"Have you checked your inbound box today?" he asked suddenly.
"No," she replied, confused. He pursed his lips as though disappointed and they stalled out once more into silence.
This was not a normal conversation at all. She couldn't even look at him. Everything felt far too intimate, which was insane because physically, they were lightyears away from one another. So she fled into what felt normal and found herself again in her identity as a MO, in the scripted confines of her training, culture, and role, and examined him from that remove. She traced the lines of his clavicles, she noted the rhythm of his breath. The dark circles under his eyes were more pronounced. She had not been the only one to sleep poorly. He was in utilitarian room with a camp bed set up in the back. The walls weren't fully complete, the gaps patched with plastic sheeting that billowed into his room with loud snapping sounds.
"Aren't you cold?"
"No. They haven't figured out the air controls system yet. It feels quite tropical." He seemed to reach a decision and took a deep breath, assuming the cadence and tone that she'd heard him use in speeches, "There is something that I need to say. I'm-well, I'm a bastard. My mother couldn't have been older than twenty, a servant, when my father started dogging her steps and calling it courtship. She never had a choice. And I've treated you just the same. I have behaved abominably. I don't want you to feel that you have to come when I call you, that you don't have a choice about our..." He trailed off, searching for the right word and coming up with nothing. He gave up with a sigh, staring miserably at her. They still lacked a word for what they were doing. Too innocent so far to be courtship and too fraught for acquaintance, nothing had actually happened at all yet.
"Anyway, I left you something in your inbound mail before I left. That way, if you are afraid of me, you can run," he finished.
"I'd like to continue our acquaintance," Beatrice replied and his face blazed with a brilliance like light on water, "I think you had a good idea in cold storage. When it's just us and the doors are shut, we stand on equal footing. I can call you by your name without fear of reprimand."
"I haven't sent you to the brig for that yet, have I?" His eyebrows raised and he pulled the corners of his mouth in, which she had come to recognize was his version of smiling.
"No, but I have not been terribly insubordinate."
"Would you like to be?"
Her immediate thought was that if he was not across the galaxy, she would grab him by his ears and kiss him senseless and see what he made of that insubordination. But that was shockingly inappropriate, and she had to look away as she felt her skin betray her as it blared red, as her mouth twisted up in a smile. His comm trilled.
"Oh for-damn it!" he swore, "What do you want Bollinger?"
She couldn't make out the reply through the static. Armitage drew his hand across his face and groaned, "Another one? Where is it coming from? Well, find out and get back to me."
"Is everything okay?"
"Yes. I've had fourteen tilers become incapacitated from smoking spice since landing. I don't care what people do off base, but how can someone lay tile when they're high?"
"It would be better for them to be snorting stims instead," Beatrice said.
"You can snort stims?"
"Haven't you wondered why you can only get the liquid now? This was a huge issue a few months ago."
"I was curious why I couldn't get the tablets anymore. Who was snorting them?"
"Mostly bridge officers."
"What?" Armitage's face was comically shocked, "How did I not know about this?"
"Your bridge officers party hard when they aren't on duty," Beatrice teased, "It was a simple fix. The liquid burns like hell if you put it in your nose and it can't be injected because it's too viscous. It just sits under the skin."
"I think I will stick with wine as my vice."
"I prefer beer."
"Are you joking? Are you a peasant? A gangster in a cantina? Beer?" Armitage shook his head and tutted, "My dear Beatrice, this will never do."
The third hour of their conversation found them debating the famous circular epic from Arkanis, with Beatrice taking the position that it was too depressing to read, and Armitage arguing that if she started with the fourth cycle she would come around to his point of view: that it was depressing but definitely worth reading. He'd been faithful to his promise not to enforce his rank, and Beatrice felt comfortable in their banter. When she teased him, he had a way of looking embarrassed and pleased at the same time, pressing his lips together and trying to frown. He always looked away from her as he did this.
He was wearing that expression when Bard burst into the rec room cubicle.
"I'm so glad I finally found you! The wound culture of that ulcer finally came back and-" Bard's sentence died as he took in the scene before him, his dark eyes ticking between her and the monitor.
"We were doing a telemedicine consult," Beatrice lied quickly.
"I will do as you suggested, thank you for your time," Armitage said as he abruptly ended the call.
Bard's silence filled the small cubicle and Beatrice did not like the weight of his judgement.
"I don't want to know what is going on here. But I think it's a really bad idea," he said finally. His arms were crossed.
"It was a telemedicine-"
"We both know that isn't true." Bard ducked his head out of the cubicle door and looked around the empty rec room before enclosing them inside once more, "This is dangerous for everyone. If this goes the wrong way, he will destroy you and everything that happens to you also happens to me. If you piss him off and get transferred to some outer rim shithole, Adriana and I have to go with you. We shouldn't have to be punished for your bad decisions."
"Nothing has happened. We're only friends."
"Bullshit. I saw whatever that was. I know your face and I've never seen that expression before."
"I didn't exactly have a choice," she said icily.
"So go to HR and get us transferred somewhere good before this blows up. I'd be sad to leave the Finalizer, but-"
"He isn't forcing me and I didn't pick him after making portfolios of candidates and a pro and con chart. It just happened."
"'It just happened'. Like you were passive and the universe just threw you at each other." Bard rolled his eyes. She had never seen him this upset.
"I know this is hard for you to understand," Beatrice spat.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"You didn't used to be like this. You used to be more open-minded. But now you're a perfect, bloodless Alcean."
"You could be too. It's a choice."
"Exactly! We never saw that we could choose to feel something."
"Don't give me that crap. You aren't feeling anything except your own hormones. You can't see that what you two are doing is selfish. It's not that I don't feel anything. But I understand that if I give in to irrational emotions, this whole thing falls apart and we resort to familial tribalism like everywhere else. He sits in the place he does because of nepotism and he exists because his dad couldn't keep it in his pants. There is a better way: I put our triad before myself. I wish you would too.
"Adriana and I are yoked to you, and I can't believe that you would be so selfish as to pull us into this looming disaster. You won't know what do as this accelerates and you'll go back to being bloodless, just like me. He'll hurt you if he doesn't get what he wants. And you can't give him what he wants. Sure, you can rut but you can't possibly think that you, you Beatrice, will know how to behave in one of their relationships. And let's say you do figure out how to bleat back to him, what do you think is going to happen? Do you think he's going to marry you? This only ends one way: badly." His tone was scornful, marriage was antiquated, humans weren't meant to be monogamous and his comment had another implication. Should Armitage marry, he would wed someone well placed with obvious political advantages. His bride would not come from the bowels of his own ship. Bard dropped his voice and leaned next to her ear, whispering so softly that she felt the words more than she heard them. "Do you really want to be transferred to 'Death Star 3'? We have two examples of how that will end."
She was so upset after her fight with Bard that she forgot Armitage had sent her something until she saw the white envelope tucked beside a medical journal and the very book they had been debating in her inbound box. She rolled the journal around the envelope and tucked it into her pocket where it waited for a private moment. She started the novel during her breakfast and Armitage hadn't been wrong. It did have a kind of horrible beauty to it.
She did not have a chance to read the note he'd written until well into second shift. Her triad had received sign-out, rounded, reviewed labs, administered medication, checked all the drains and tubes and the vent settings, lanced the boils and changed the dressings before she had a minute to slip into an empty alcove. There was something else inside the envelope; she could feel its heavy weight.
She slipped the metal coin into her hand, gasped, and immediately thrust it back into her pocket. It was a captain's medallion, used to secure landing privileges anywhere she wanted to go. They were carefully guarded and now she had one. She traced the cold ridges of the metal with her fingers. He hadn't lied to her; he had given her wings. She could run away from the First Order. The thought gave her a kind of vertigo, like looking out over a high ledge. Beatrice's steps had been set for her for as long as she could walk and leaving was too terrifying to contemplate. The implications of the coin underscored the stakes of what she was doing. The only way out was to rip herself away from her triad, the infirmary, and the safe, circumscribed limits of her life.
She had a moment of misgiving. It was still early enough that she could politely decline, deal with him at a professional remove, and return to the staid routine. She could feel that sepia-tinged life closing around her, pacing between the infirmary, dorm and mess. Maybe when they passed in the hall for a while there would be an awkwardness, a moment where Armitage regarded her before he continued on to more important matters. While she faded into obscurity, he would rise. Perhaps at some point they would call her back to Alcea, turn off her birth control and breed her. After she carried, birthed and handed over her baby she would be sent back to whatever infirmary needed to be staffed and she would work there until she died. She couldn't imagine what going forward with him would look like; it felt like taking a blind jump into nothingness, the end almost certainly dire, gnashing and dark.
The note read: "Bea, I am so utterly sorry. Yours, Gage."
The word utterly had been underscored, the pressure of his pencil slashing into the paper. She traced the furrow with her fingers. It was obvious to her that he had used the pet-name to obscure his identity should anyone else read the note. Because she was the only person on the ship, indeed in the whole First Order, who knew him by that name, it did indeed make him hers.
Shortly after that, the klaxon sounded in the wards. All of the medical officers aboard the Finalizer were to be transferred to Star Killer Base. They were to sign out to the recently arrived auxiliary medical corps. Bard glared at her as the orders were being read over the loudspeaker, his dark eyes burning into her body. He was so brusque with her that the other MOs noticed and gave him a wide berth as they returned to their dorms. Adriana chirped awkwardly around them, pretending that the tension wasn't there. Beatrice packed her meager bag, tucking in the novel and the note, and they loaded into the transport vessel, clicking their belts into place.
Even though he wasn't speaking to her, Bard sat on the jump seat beside her, thigh to thigh. Beatrice kept her eyes shut tight: she still couldn't get used to space travel in the smaller ships. Bard suspended his irritation with her enough to narrate the steps of the journey to her, as he always did.
Once they landed, they picked up their identical bags and filed out of the transport in an ordered line. The hangar of SKB was huge, deafeningly loud, and frigidly cold. They arranged themselves in the open middle area, trying to not to wince as the small aircraft zoomed directly overhead. The grey MOs all grouped together in their square, the mechanics behind them, black-clad artillery corps in front. They weren't equipped for the cold and they tried to hold formation without shivering.
She had positioned herself at the end of the row so she could see him. She stood at attention, her hands clasped behind her back, her posture perfect. He came in behind them, walking through the rows of troopers and like a wave each row successively straightened up before him, so she knew when he was approaching her. Two gloved fingers flicked against her wrist and the sleeve of his coat brushed her arm.
She wasn't allowed to turn, to even move her face to acknowledge him, but she couldn't control her blush. Out of the corner of her eye she could see him in profile. He never truly smiled, never showed his teeth, but she saw his version of this expression fade from his face as he continued down the row in front of her. It had been for her alone.