Vanya sat alone near her apartment window long after Harold had gone to sleep, the rain tracing its familiar path down the glass, and let herself do something she rarely permitted — remember.
She hadn't relived it fully since the night it happened, not really, not beyond the fragmented edges that surfaced sometimes in her sleep and dissolved before she could hold onto them. Tonight, for reasons she couldn't fully name, she let it come all the way through.
Helix.
The explosion. The mangled bodies scattered across the wreckage before she'd even fully processed the ambush. Dean, half his body gone, still talking hours earlier about his upcoming marriage. Priscilla, her final mission before retirement, a son waiting for her back home. Jonah, missing an arm and a leg, who'd planned a surprise trip to the green star for his wife and boy.
And Helix, dragging her toward the cave, bleeding from his own abdomen, insisting he'd be fine even as the wound in his side said otherwise.
