The hum of the transport filled the silence on the ride back from the docks, city lights flickering beneath them, fading as the carrier sped toward base through the last gray hour before proper morning.
Iancu was the first to break the quiet, leaning forward, arms braced on his knees. "We take the hits, they take the headlines. Typical."
Sorina snorted softly, still favoring the arm that had taken a stray fragment of splintered crate. "You saw how the crowd looked at Overrun even with his arm half-useless. Like he was a storm in uniform. Who remembers the ones who kept the storm from actually killing somebody?"
Liviu gave a calm shrug, his bandaged forearm resting in his lap. "The mission was clean, in the end. That's enough."
But Iancu shook his head, restless. "It wasn't clean. Not like usual. We were reacting. Guessing. That defender nearly took Overrun's arm off. That's not how we fight."
The words hung there, sharp in the recycled cabin air.
Elena's gaze snapped to him, her tone steady but carrying real weight. "We adapted. That's how we fight when the world doesn't hand us a script. Tonight proved it." Her hair shifted as she turned back toward the window, voice firm. "Not every mission comes with perfect clarity. Sometimes we work with what we have. That's the system. And it works — even when it costs something."
Iancu grumbled, sinking back into his seat, but said no more. Sorina smirked faintly at the exchange, and Liviu simply closed his eyes in quiet agreement, exhaustion finally catching up with all of them at once.
Pereteanu sat still, arms folded, his eyes on the floor of the transport. He didn't speak. But the thought pressed in anyway, silent and heavy: *She believes in the system. Believes the victories are earned, even the difficult ones. But without the General's hand, they stumble. Without it, they're just another unit — capable, but not untouchable.*
He locked the thought down, hidden behind the soldier's mask, the way he'd learned to lock most things down.
The months that followed passed in the particular rhythm of a unit that had survived something together and come out the other side changed by it, though none of them would have said so directly.
Missions continued — some with the General's uncanny precision restored, others closer to the docks operation's harder-won shape, depending, Pereteanu had come to understand, on whatever variable made Folly's shadow fall across a given target or not. Training continued alongside it, the unit's coordination sharpening in ways that owed less to prophecy and more to simple accumulated trust.
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Elena sought him out more often than she once had. Not dramatically — nothing about it announced itself as anything worth remarking on to the others — but in small, accumulating ways. She fell into step beside him on the walk back from the mess hall more nights than not. She saved him a seat during briefings without ever quite admitting that was what she was doing. She asked him, once, without any particular occasion prompting it, whether he still hated the heat as much as he had as a boy, and listened — really listened, the way she'd listened under the orphanage's oak tree — when he told her that he'd made his peace with it, mostly, though peace wasn't quite the word for something you simply learned to carry.
One evening in early autumn, several months into that quiet accumulation, she found him in the mess hall long after the others had cleared out, a single tray in front of him that he'd been picking at more than eating.
"You eat like it's a chore," she said, dropping into the seat across from him without waiting for an invitation.
"It is, somewhat."
She reached over and stole a piece of bread from his tray without asking, the way she'd apparently decided, sometime in the last few months, she was entitled to do. "You didn't used to talk this much," she said, chewing. "When we were kids. You'd just sit there and let me fill the silence."
"I still let you fill most of it."
"You do," she agreed, and something in her voice had gone softer than the words themselves accounted for. "But you talk more now. Actual sentences. Sometimes even ones I didn't have to drag out of you."
He considered that, turning his fork over once before setting it down. "You said you'd see me again. At the gate. Before you left."
Something shifted behind her eyes — surprise, he thought, that he'd kept the memory this long, or perhaps only that he'd chosen tonight to bring it up. "I did say that."
"I didn't believe you."
"I know." She held his gaze steadily, none of her usual restlessness in it. "I wasn't sure I believed it myself, if I'm honest. It felt true when I said it. That's not the same as knowing it would be." A pause, small and deliberate. "I'm glad it was true anyway."
Neither of them said anything further for a while. The mess hall's fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, and outside the small window at the end of the room, the base had gone dark and quiet for the night, and Pereteanu found, sitting there with a cooling tray of food neither of them was properly eating, that he didn't particularly want to be anywhere else.
It became, without either of them naming it as such, a habit. Some nights it was the mess hall. Other nights, the sparring room after hours, trading blows that grew less about training and more about the simple pleasure of moving in sync with someone who never flinched from him, had never flinched from him, not once, not since a courtyard and an oak tree years before either of them had understood what any of it would come to mean.
He caught himself, more than once during those months, cataloguing small things about her the way he'd once catalogued the exact shape of the cold that kept his body steady — the particular furrow of her brow when a briefing ran long, the way she tied her hair back tighter before a mission and looser after one, the small, private half-smile she gave only him, never quite matching the one she gave the rest of the unit.
He didn't examine too closely what any of it meant. There would be time for that later, he told himself, in the vague and comfortable way people tell themselves such things when the present feels stable enough not to require urgent understanding.
He didn't yet know how little time that actually was.