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“There is no getting out of this Dominic.” Garin only managed one shot when he leaned out before returning fire forced him back in again. “There’s only not getting killed right now.”
Dom didn’t reply for a second and a distant part of Garin that he didn’t have time to indulge felt for the younger man as he reckoned with the sort of danger he’d never been in.
Garin snuck one last glance around the corner and his heart thudded in his chest. He pressed his back to the inside wall of the room. This was about to be a close quarters fight.
When Dom finally spoke, his voice was hard and determined. “I’ll get it closed.” Garin heard the click and clack of Dom’s fingers flying over the keyboard. “Just get me twenty seconds, Garin.”
“I can do twenty seconds.” Garin rolled his shoulders and focused his hearing on the nearing stampede of footsteps.
When they sounded a split second from running him over, he swung through the doorway, gun blazing.
Instinct guided his shots as he emptied his clip into the men two feet away from him. A few of them fell, some of them dodged, some retreated screaming. When his gun clicked in his hand, Garin turned it into a club, bludgeoning the first man to lunge at him.
He caught the man in the temple and cracked his head back. He caught the second in the mouth, bursting the man’s lip across his teeth.
But the third man slammed into Garin center mass, driving them both into the server room. The room with Dom.
“Garin!” Dom yelled from behind him, but Garin barely heard him over the blood pounding in his ears.
Garin roared and snapped his head forward, smashing his forehead into the man’s nose. The man reeled back with a scream, clutching at the bloody mess of his face.
“Garin, I got it! I got it! It’s closing!”
Garin cocked his leg up, then slammed his boot into the man’s chest, throwing his entire bodyweight into the blow.
The man flew through the closing doors.
But something knocked Garin’s victorious bellow from his lungs.
“Garin?”
He stumbled back, hand going to his stomach where it felt, distantly, like he’d been punched.
“Garin!”
Garin knew what he’d see before he even pulled his fingers back from the warm wet of his clothes to look at them.
Sazahk wanted Garin.
He didn’t want to want Garin, and he didn’t want to admit it and he wouldn’t admit it, but as he walked beside Patrick down the gleaming main thoroughfare of the Qeshian Tazal Station, he wanted Garin.
For ten years, Sazahk had fought for this moment. A quarter of a mile before him, an operating room waited for him, ready to insert the piece of himself the Senate had taken from him. And a quarter of a mile behind him, his pardon percolated through the vast Qeshian bureaucracy, scrubbing his so-called sin from history.
But for ten years, Sazahk had woken in a cold sweat from the nightmares and his scar had throbbed with pain whenever someone touched him too firmly. And a quarter of a mile—no, a fifth of a mile given his and Patrick’s pace—across the station waited a room with restraints and paralytics and surgeons with scalpels and all the things that made Sazahk’s breath rattle in his chest.
He’d never told anyone about the trauma of the event. Only the indignity. The more observant of his companions, the ones that recognized his brand of trauma because they’d felt it themselves—Bar’in, Zyk—had intuited it. But he’d never told them.
He’d never told anyone until Garin.
And he wanted the man with him now. He didn’t want to go into that operating room alone. He wanted Garin by his side, steady and soothing and supportive.
“You alright?” Patrick asked in a low voice as they crossed into the station’s medical district. He couldn’t tell what was wrong, not like Bar’in or Zyk could, but he knew something was, and caring commanding officer that he was, he’d insisted on accompanying Sazahk to and from the operating room himself.
“Have you heard any word from Dom or Garin?” Sazahk appreciated Patrick’s concern, but he wasn’t interested in sharing. He kept his skin clear for the same reason. No one would believe that he had no feelings about his pardon or his implant, but they didn’t need to know what those feelings were. They didn’t need to know that all he felt at the moment was fear.
“No, nothing.” Patrick shook his head as he opened the door into the surgery center and held it for Sazahk. “They both seem more likely to reach out to you before me, though.”
And yet it had been two days since Garin left and neither of them had. Sazahk could understand Garin’s lack of communication. After all, they had no acknowledged reason to keep in touch. In fact, Garin might not have a reason at all. Garin might have contentedly moved on with his life, and it was only Sazahk who pined.
