Chapter 25: Ugly

Chapter 25: Chapter 25: Ugly

Ren finished the last of his void-hen with Alouis still seated across from him, the conversation between them having settled into something easier than he’d expected, and when he finally pushed his empty tray aside, the AI’s projection flickered back to life above the nearby service station, its warm, ageless face reappearing with a small, pleasant chime.

"I hope the meal was satisfactory," it said. "Please do come by again. I do enjoy a guest willing to ask actual questions instead of simply pointing at pictures."

"I will," Ren said, and found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he meant it, the small exchange leaving him in a marginally better mood than he’d been in most of the day. He said his goodbyes to Alouis, promising to actually talk more later instead of only during crisis moments, and made his way out of the dining hall feeling, for the first time in what felt like ages, something close to settled.

That feeling lasted exactly as long as it took him to round the corner into the main corridor.

Lyra was coming from the opposite direction, and the moment her eyes landed on him, on the fading but still visibly mottled bruise still coloring the side of his face, her expression lit up with unmistakable, delighted malice.

"Oh my," she said, stopping directly in his path, one hand rising to cover her mouth in an exaggerated show of surprise that fooled absolutely no one. "What happened to your face."

"None of your business," Ren said flatly, attempting to step around her, and she moved to block him again, apparently far too invested in this particular opportunity to let it go easily.

"No, wait, I have to actually look at this properly," she said, tilting her head with theatrical interest, studying the bruise like it was the most entertaining thing she’d seen all week. A laugh bubbled up out of her, sharp and delighted, entirely unbothered by how it landed. "Oh, that’s bad. That’s actually bad. Look at you, all swollen and purple, you look absolutely dreadful."

"Thank you for the assessment," Ren said, keeping his voice level despite the fresh irritation crawling up his spine. "I’ll be sure to note it in my personal journal, right under the entry about how much I value your opinion."

"I’m being generous, honestly," Lyra continued, ignoring him entirely, clearly enjoying herself far too much to be deterred by sarcasm. "I almost didn’t recognize you. Which, frankly, might be an improvement, given what you usually look like." She laughed again, the sound grating and self-satisfied, and stepped closer, apparently determined to extract every ounce of enjoyment out of the moment before Ren managed to escape. "Oh, you poor thing. However are you going to manage now? All that beauty everyone always talked about, ruined, just like that."

"It’s a bruise, Lyra, it heals," Ren said, exhaustion starting to override his irritation now, the earlier warmth from dinner with Alouis rapidly draining out of him. "I don’t have the energy for this right now."

"I bet Yegard’s going to be so relieved," Lyra said, and something in her tone sharpened, the teasing edge curdling into something more pointed, more deliberately cruel. "Honestly, if he sees you looking like this, I can’t imagine he’ll be able to stand being anywhere near you. You already made such a fool of yourself with that stranger in the training yard, and now you’re going to walk around looking like this on top of it? He’s going to run so far in the opposite direction he won’t even remember your name by the end of the week."

Something in Ren’s chest tightened at that, a small, unwelcome spike of hurt that he hated feeling at all, especially over a comment this deliberately, transparently designed to wound. ’Don’t give her the satisfaction,’ he told himself firmly, forcing his expression to stay flat despite the sting. ’She wants a reaction. She’s been chasing one out of me since the landing pad, and I refuse to hand her an easy win over something as stupid as a bruise I didn’t even choose to have.’

"Funny," Ren said instead, voice steady despite everything, "considering he’s the same man who spent last night holding me through a breakdown and telling me he regretted letting me go in the first place. I don’t think a bruise is going to be what finally scares him off, but I appreciate you workshopping the theory out loud for me."

The delighted malice on Lyra’s face flickered, faltering just slightly at that, clearly not the response she’d been anticipating, and Ren felt a small, petty satisfaction at watching her scramble to recover. "You’re lying," she said, though the certainty in her voice had thinned considerably.

"Ask him yourself, if you don’t believe me," Ren said, already stepping around her while she was still off balance, done entertaining this particular conversation any further. "I’m sure he’d love to clarify exactly how much my face bothers him, in detail, right to your face."

He didn’t wait to see how she responded to that, walking on down the corridor with his chin up despite the renewed ache building behind his temples, and only once he’d put real distance between them did he let his shoulders drop slightly, the forced composure finally cracking under the weight of everything the day had already put him through. ’That was petty,’ he admitted to himself, feeling a small, guilty twinge at having used Yegard’s private, vulnerable confession as a weapon against someone else, even someone as thoroughly unpleasant as Lyra. ’Petty, and probably going to cause its own set of problems once it inevitably gets back to him that I repeated something he said believing I was asleep. But God, it felt good watching her face fall like that, even for just a second.’

He kept walking, turning the whole exchange over in his head, and found himself, somewhat unwillingly, thinking back to the specific cruelty of her comment, the deliberate targeting of the one thing he actually couldn’t control about his current situation, this borrowed, beautiful face that had never once been entirely his to begin with. ’She’s not wrong that it matters to people,’ he thought, some old, familiar insecurity from his life back on Earth surfacing unexpectedly, tangled up now with a body and a face that had never belonged to him in the first place. ’People here have spent this entire week fixated on how Rafayal looks, how beautiful he supposedly is, how much of his value apparently gets tied up in that one specific, superficial thing. I didn’t ask for this face. I didn’t ask for any of this. And apparently the second it gets even slightly damaged, people like her think that’s suddenly fair game to mock.’

He pressed a hand briefly against his own bruised cheek as he walked, the ache duller now than it had been that morning, thanks to whatever quick treatment the medical wing had applied, and something stubborn settled into his chest despite the lingering sting of Lyra’s words. ’Doesn’t matter,’ he told himself, firming his resolve with each step. ’It heals. It’s already healing. And unlike her, apparently, I have slightly more to offer than just a pretty face people can take cheap shots at whenever they feel insecure enough to need one.’

He made it back to his quarters without further incident, the corridor mercifully empty of anyone else looking to comment on his appearance, and sank down onto his bunk with a long, tired exhale, the accumulated weight of the entire day finally settling fully over him now that he had nothing left demanding his immediate attention. He thought about Alouis’s unexpected warmth over dinner, the quiet promise of something real potentially growing there if he was careful enough to nurture it properly. He thought about Reven’s gentle, careful concern in the training chamber, the surprising tenderness underneath all that possessive intensity. He thought, finally, about Yegard’s low, private confession from the night before, the words Ren had thrown carelessly at Lyra without really considering what it would mean if they actually reached him.

’I should probably tell him I heard that,’ Ren thought, guilt settling in slowly now that the satisfaction of besting Lyra had faded. ’Before Lyra does it for me, badly, in whatever twisted version of events she’s currently piecing back together in that head of hers.’ He groaned quietly, dragging a pillow over his face, muffling the sound against the fabric. ’Great. One more complicated conversation to add to the pile. Because apparently my life doesn’t already have enough of those stacking up.’

He lay there a while longer, exhaustion finally winning out over the tangle of thoughts still circling his mind, and let himself drift, slow and heavy, toward sleep, one last stray thought trailing after him as consciousness finally slipped away entirely. ’Tomorrow,’ he told himself, already dreading it slightly. ’I’ll figure out how to deal with all of this tomorrow.’