Learning to Dance

still revelling in the celebrations, he found himself heading
automatically for the place he knew she would be, if she
was still here at the Academy at all – the gym.
He stepped in quietly. She moved like a goddess of war,
twisting and twirling a rifle in her hands like it was an
extension of her, turning ceremony into an act of
aggression. She swung the rifle around her back and flowed
into a kata pose, and then another. He could see new
strength in her arms, her back. She’d cut her hair short, and
wore an ensign’s camouflaged pants with boots and her
white tank top, a red band keeping the sweat from her eyes.
She was so familiar to him, and yet he felt like he was
meeting her for the first time.
She was goddamned beautiful.
He cleared his throat, and she went entirely still, her
back to him.
“I told you I would come back,” he said.
She turned, slowly. The years they’d lost had changed
her, just a little – she looked older now, her cheeks more
slender. Black bangs fell into her eyes, but the short hair
suited her. She looked at him, and he wondered what she
thought of him, dressed in the grey and black of a
Commander’s uniform, his blond hair turned nearly entirely
to silver, aged ten years in three. She took him in.
“I knew you would,” she said. They stood there, six feet
apart from each other, and Up hated that he didn’t know
what to do, now that he was here. She approached him first.
“Your eye-” she said, and reached up a hand as if to
touch the scar he now wore there. She drew her hand back,
and the air between them burned.
“Still in working order,” he said. It wasn’t the only new
scar he’d acquired. “I won’t win any beauty contests, but-”
She shook her head. “You look like a hero.”
He didn’t want that word, not from her. “There was a job