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“He did,” Leon assured her with a sharp nod, not allowing for a second the idea that Sebastian had failed in a mission. “But it took him a day to get there. Some got out before he got in. Let’s hope we’ve seen it all.”
Joan took a deep breath and nodded, then backed away. “I’ll let you rest.”
Leon didn’t argue and started down the hall again to his quarters on the most direct route he knew in this twisting, still unfamiliar building. Resting seemed like an impossible task, but he desperately wanted to be alone.
He picked up his pace as he got closer to his rooms, not wanting to be waylaid so close to sanctuary. When he finally pulled the door open and closed it behind him, he let out a deep sigh. The room was small and unfamiliar—some office of some low-level bureaucrat that the Resistance had stuffed a cot into—but it was full of familiar things: his own blankets and pillow, his chest of clothes, a few pictures of him with Martha, Hilda, Garrett, some lost comrades, and Farlon. His muscles loosened. His bones settled.
He dragged himself over to a chair by the window that overlooked the courtyard. The sun had just set, leaving the sky still smears of red and orange, and Leon deemed that plenty enough light and didn’t turn on his desk lamp or the overhead.
A room of his own.
Leon never took the luxury for granted, but he didn’t know if he could ever give it up. A lifetime spent in bunkers and barracks and camps was not a life that had a lot of privacy or peace. And while Leon still didn’t have much peace in his life, at least he got a few pockets here and there. And at least now he could fall to pieces in the privacy of his own four walls.
So Leon put his head in his hands and let it all hit him. He let the memories, the feelings he’d suppressed and the feelings he hadn’t, shudder through him again. The fear. The chaos. The faces of his men—brave, scared, determined, trusting. The sounds of their guns booming, the sounds of the Klah’Eel’s.
And then the crushing news of defeat out of nowhere, unprepared for, shocking.
The loss of Kaston. The loss of all those men. And the loss itself. Defeat as the very first outcome of this war he had started.
Sebastian.
Leon stood, kicked his boots off, and took off his clothes. The sun had faded, but the light pollution from Ralscoln and the floodlights and spotlights they had in the courtyard lit his small room bright enough. He opened the door to the tiny bathroom. It didn’t have a shower, but it had a sink, and right now, Leon would rather rub himself down with a cold, wet towel than go through the public army showers they’d rigged up on the lower levels.
Leon had made the wrong call with Sebastian every step of the way.
At every decision point he’d come to in his relationship with that man, he had chosen wrongly.
First, to avoid him.
Then, unable to do that, to hold him at arm’s distance—not near as close as he wanted but too close to nullify his feelings.
And then to be dismissive and cruel, to lash out just because he didn’t know how else to keep his feelings in.
He could have been kind or—god forbid—honest. Would it have been so terrible for Sebastian to know what Leon thought of him? For Sebastian to know that Leon thought him awe-inspiring, captivating, and terrifyingly competent? Leon chuckled grimly at that as he wiped some water from his face. It seemed ridiculous now because Leon knew Sebastian would have loved to know that.
Sebastian may not—certainly wouldn’t have—returned his feelings, but he would have still loved to know that someone thought that of him, eager to please as he was.
And when Leon’s feelings, or some twisted version of them, at least, finally had come out, he could have chosen to be kind and honest. Kind and honest but still firm in his duty to the Resistance first and above all else. Instead, he’d been domineering and physical and had still fucked up as a leader at the last second.
Every. Wrong. Decision.
He was a hopeless and inadequate disaster, and Farlon should have chosen someone else.
Leon threw the now filthy towel he’d used to clean himself into a corner and stalked back into his room. He pulled on a pair of pants and his favorite threadbare shirt and sat next to the window again.
After a moment, he pulled out his data tablet and opened up Farlon’s speech—their speech.
Farlon had worked on the speech for as long as Leon had known him. Leon could remember sitting in bunkers and hollowed-out buildings and in the holes in the ground between operations while Farlon read it to him aloud, trying out the phrases and the words and the intonation. At first, Leon had just listened and learned, but as he got older, he began to give opinions and feedback, and Farlon listened to him and adjusted the words and read them back to him.
The victory speech.
The speech Farlon would give when they finally drove out the Klah’Eel, that now he never would. It had changed over the many years as the invasion ended, the occupation dragged on, and the situation became more hopeless. But Farlon had never stopped working on it until the day he’d caught half a bomb’s shrapnel.
It was Leon’s speech now, Farlon had told him as he lay dying a slow death in a Resistance hideout. It was Leon’s speech to write and give for both of them.
Leon read through the words again and his latest additions recounting the capture of Ralscoln. Then with a heavier heart, he set about adjusting it to include the loss of Kaston. He wrote and tweaked and rewrote and read quietly out loud to himself in the harsh artificial light from the courtyard as the night dragged on.
* * *
