“Fuck, no. And neither does Rake. Seriously—not a word.” Jackin breathed out a sharp hissing noise. “I never should have told you.”
Emery’s gaze drifted over, and Cavalon met her questioning look with a shrug. He had no idea what they were talking about.
“Relax, North,” Griffith said, “I’m dying, remember? Your secret’s safe with me.”
“You can’t truly think she needs me,” Jackin said. “That she can’t do this on her own.”
Griffith scoffed a laugh. “Of course she can, but that’s the whole problem. She doesn’t need you, so she’ll push you all away, distance herself from everyone, and still find a way to die trying to save you all. But by then, you’ll all be too far to reach her. She needs a stick-in-the-mud like you—”
“Eh, fuck you too,” Jackin interjected grumpily.
“—to moderate her, or she’ll throw her life away trying to save something that can’t be saved.”
Neither man spoke for a few long moments. Cavalon thought the connection had been lost, but then Griffith’s deep voice cut back in.
“I know you don’t owe me anything,” he said, his voice softening, taking on an oddly pleading tone that Cavalon had a hard time imagining coming out of the man. “But you’re the only one I trust. I’ve seen you two together—you already make a good team, a great one. Just don’t give up on her once I’m gone.”
“Shit, I won’t,” Jackin said, then the firmness in his tone broke. “You know I won’t.”
“Thank—”
A rash of heat clawed up his neck, and Cavalon reached over and swept the connection closed. The static cut out, leaving only the steady thrum of the warp engine in the silent common room. He’d already let it go on too long.
To his surprise, Emery didn’t react adversely. Closing the nexus screen, she slouched as a conflicted expression tightened her lips—part pout and part sympathy.
“Well,” she said. “That was a lot less juicy than I’d hoped for.”
Cavalon cleared the lump from the back of his throat, but his voice still came out thick. “Juicy? What’d you think was going to happen?”
“I dunno, maybe some fraternization? They’d make a cute couple, don’t you think?”
Cavalon shrugged, though he couldn’t really disagree. Then again, you could put pretty much anyone on Griffith’s arm and it’d turn out adorable.
Emery’s sullen look thawed slightly. “The Beards of the Argus. Could be a radio drama.”
A chuckle rose in his throat, though it didn’t lessen the knot of anxiety tightening in his chest. Because Bearded Protagonist #2 was right. Even if they survived, there was no way this ended with fanfare and a warm, gin-soaked welcome back at the Core. Definitely not for Cavalon.
However, something else nagged at him, something more nebulous, harder to quantify.
The sincerity of the centurion’s words hung in the back of his mind, constraining his chest-knot even tighter. Griffith was a good friend, a painfully good friend—or whatever he and Rake were to each other. Good in a way Cavalon had no frame of reference for, a way he could hardly interpret as real human behavior.
After being ripped from his own space-time continuity, Griffith had earned an accelerated expiration date on life, but he wasn’t spending his last hours regretting how he’d lived, or what he had or hadn’t done, or worrying about what came after death, or having an existential breakdown. He was making sure the people he cared about would continue on. Be alive, be the happiest they could be, once it was out of his control to affect it otherwise.
Something about that concept settled in Cavalon’s brain with surprising ease, a thought at once daunting and exhilarating. The reform he’d wanted—the reform the SC needed—everything he’d pitched to the Quorum before being summarily rejected by Augustus’s machinations … He’d told himself it was all to stop his grandfather.