Page 74 of Shadows of Stardust

I nod again. “You don’t have to. I wouldn’t expect you to—”

“It was… a military thing. And I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Alright,” I murmur.

Just like I shouldn’t be thinking about what it would be like to touch her, I shouldn’t feel a stab of soul-deep concern over what she’s not saying.

Roslyn doesn’t owe me anything.

She doesn’t owe me any explanations or details about her past. There’s no reason for her to lay herself bare and share her pain.

But… I want to know.

If I were any less honest with myself, I could chalk it up to my obsessive, unrelenting need for information. To know and catalog and hoard each detail like they might help me figure out a universe that so very often makes no sense at all.

But that’s not the only reason.

Even if I’m not fully able to admit what the real reason is.

Not yet.

I think she’s done, that she has nothing more to say. I think we’ll leave here with this added layer of tension between us and make the prospect of facing the evening all that much more difficult.

But then Ros speaks again.

The words are a surprise, and seem to be to her as well as they come out in stops and starts, like they haven’t quite formed before they leave her lips.

“It’s just… something I haven’t… talked about. You know? One of those things that I… I…”

She huffs a frustrated breath through her nose and shakes her head, hunching into herself as she rests her forearms and elbows on the counter.

I hate it. Seeing her make herself smaller, watching her disappear into whatever memory is attached to those scars. I hate it enough for my own half-formed words to escape before I can think better of them.

“I think I… I understand what you mean.”

She glances over, expression still guarded, but with a sliver of something that keeps me talking. Hope, maybe, for someone to know. For the unspoken to be heard.

“The scars I carry are not physical, but…” I pause, trying to find how best to say it. “They feel very… present. Every day, I feel their weight.”

Even that bare bit of information feels like a file wedged beneath my nails. An arm twisted behind my back, demanding surrender. Demanding I stop talking, stop thinking about it, stop before I say something truly idiotic.

“Yeah? In what way?”

Ros’s question is soft, searching. It loosens my tongue, shakes forth confessions that rasp from me in a rush of dusty, ill-fitting vulnerability.

“It’s more than my position I hope to regain with the Aux.”

Ros’s keen emerald eyes scan my face, her brow furrowing. “What do you mean?”

“I joined the Aux when I was barely more than a boy.”

Ros sucks in a sharp breath, but doesn’t speak, giving me the space and time I need to sort through my thoughts.

It’s time I need.

As hastily as I entered this conversation, I find I can’t continue it without effort. A strange tightness in my chest and a thickening of my throat. A wall of some fatesdamned emotion I can barely speak past as I continue.

“Revexor… the planet where I was born, it fell to war and ruin when I was a child. My parents, too, they were… they were soldiers who…”

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