Chapter 26: Two Days Gone

Chapter 26: Chapter 26: Two Days Gone

The dream started the way it always used to, unremarkable and comfortable in a way Ren hadn’t realized he’d missed until he was suddenly, completely back inside it. He was lying on his old couch, the one with the sagging middle cushion he’d never bothered replacing, phone propped up against a throw pillow, scrolling through the latest Chapter release notifications with the specific, familiar contentment of a Friday night with absolutely nothing better to do.

Empire of Thorns had updated. So had three other novels he followed religiously, all BL, all with increasingly convoluted plots he’d stopped trying to track with any real seriousness months ago, content instead to just enjoy the ride Chapter by Chapter without worrying too much about the larger arcs. He opened the first one, sinking deeper into the couch cushions, and felt a warm, uncomplicated satisfaction settle over him that he hadn’t realized, until this exact moment, he’d been missing so badly.

"You’re going to ruin your eyes reading on that tiny screen," his father’s voice said from somewhere in the kitchen, familiar and warm and utterly unremarkable in the way only a voice you’ve heard your entire life can be.

"I’ll be fine, I’ve got the brightness turned down," Ren called back, not looking up from the screen, already three paragraphs deep into a scene where the male lead was doing something typically broody and overprotective toward his equally typical, long-suffering love interest.

"That’s what you said last time, right before you needed new glasses," his father said, appearing in the doorway with a plate of something that smelled like leftover stir-fry, setting it down on the coffee table without being asked. "Eat something. You’ve been on that couch since I got home from work."

"In a minute," Ren said, still scrolling, comfortable and warm and completely, blissfully unaware that any of this was strange, that any of this shouldn’t have still been available to him, that somewhere else entirely, in some other version of events he’d apparently misplaced, none of this technically still existed anymore.

The dream shifted, the way dreams do, seamless and untethered from any real logic, and Ren found himself at a small table in a noodle shop down the street from his apartment, the same one he always ordered from, the delivery bag sitting untouched beside him while he read one more Chapter before actually eating, the phone screen glowing soft against his face in the dim evening light. Someone at the next table laughed at something on their own phone. A car passed outside, headlights sweeping briefly across the window. Everything smelled like broth and soy sauce and the particular, specific ordinariness of a life he’d once complained about being boring, back when boring had still been a luxury he hadn’t yet learned to appreciate.

He read Chapter after Chapter in the dream, comfortable and unbothered, the plots blurring together into a warm, familiar haze of tropes and cliffhangers and overwrought declarations of love between fictional men who never once felt real enough to actually threaten anything, and somewhere in the deep, dreaming corner of his mind that still understood, distantly, that something was wrong, Ren simply didn’t want to wake up from it. Not yet. Not when waking up meant a bruised face and a terrifying father and two men fighting over him and a rank he couldn’t fully control and a plot he was somehow trapped inside of instead of merely reading about from the comfortable distance of a sagging couch cushion.

He didn’t know how long he slept. He didn’t know, drifting in and out of scene after warm, familiar scene, that his body lay motionless in a narrow outpost bunk for two full days while the world outside his quarters continued on without him, alarms and training schedules and family politics all proceeding regardless of whether Ren himself was awake to participate in any of it.

He surfaced eventually, slow and disoriented, blinking against unfamiliar light, and for one long, terrifying moment genuinely could not place where he was. The ceiling above him was wrong, plain gray metal instead of the water-stained popcorn texture he’d stared at every night back home, and the sheets beneath him were wrong too, coarse and unfamiliar instead of the soft, worn cotton he’d had for years. His body ached in strange, unfamiliar ways, muscles stiff from stillness, throat dry and scratchy, and it took him several full seconds of pure, disoriented panic before the memories reassembled themselves properly, sliding back into place with a rush that left him gasping.

’Oh,’ he thought, sitting up too fast, his head spinning immediately in protest. ’Oh, right. Interstellar empire. Villain’s body. Two men fighting over me. Terrifying father. Right. That’s real. That’s actually my life now, not a couch, not stir-fry, not a phone glowing warm in a noodle shop.’ The disappointment that followed hit harder than he expected, a fresh, raw grief carving through him at the loss of something he’d genuinely, briefly forgotten wasn’t real anymore, and he pressed both hands against his face, breathing hard, letting himself feel the full weight of it before forcing himself to focus on anything else.

The door chimed almost the exact moment he managed to sit upright properly, sliding open before he’d even called out permission, and Alouis burst through it with an expression somewhere between fury and genuine relief, crossing the room fast enough that Ren barely had time to register her presence before she was gripping his shoulders, checking him over with sharp, assessing eyes.

"You’re awake," she said, voice tight with barely restrained emotion. "Do you have any idea how long you’ve been asleep? Two days, Rafayal. Two entire days. Medical ran three separate scans trying to figure out what was wrong with you, half this outpost thought you’d slipped into some kind of Sentinel coma from overexertion, and I have had to physically stop three different people from breaking down this door out of sheer panic."

"Two days," Ren repeated, the number landing with a fresh jolt of alarm. "I was just tired, I don’t understand how that turned into two days—"

"Neither does medical, which is precisely the problem," Alouis said, releasing his shoulders finally, though she didn’t step back, watching him with the same sharp, worried attention. "They ran every scan available and found nothing conclusive, no injury, no illness, nothing that should have kept you unconscious this long. Whatever happened, it seems to have simply resolved itself, which is somehow more unsettling than if they’d actually found something wrong."

Ren sat with that for a moment, running through the disorienting memory of the dream still clinging to the edges of his consciousness, the warm, comfortable pull of a life he no longer had access to, and something uneasy settled into his chest at the possibility that it hadn’t simply been an ordinary dream at all. ’Two days,’ he thought, turning it over carefully. ’Two days lost entirely to dreaming about a life I don’t get to have anymore. That’s not normal exhaustion. That’s not just my body catching up on rest after a hard week.’ He thought about the rank test, the berserk episode, the dual classification results still apparently pending official processing, and wondered, with a fresh thread of unease, whether whatever slept beneath his skin had simply decided, after everything, that it needed considerably more from him than a single night’s rest to recover.

"Was everyone worried," Ren asked instead, mostly to fill the silence, still working through the disorientation clouding his thoughts.

"Worried is an understatement," Alouis said, something dry entering her voice despite the lingering worry still evident underneath it. "Your father postponed his departure to stay and personally oversee the medical investigation, which I promise you is not the reassurance it might sound like. Reven apparently canceled every other Sentinel’s training sessions for two straight days so he could remain stationed directly outside this door instead. And Yegard—" She paused, something considering flickering across her expression. "Yegard hasn’t left the command wing in two days either, according to everyone who’s tried to reach him. I don’t think he’s actually slept."

Ren absorbed that slowly, a complicated knot forming in his chest at the picture she’d just painted, three separate men, each in their own particular way, apparently thrown into some version of crisis over two days he didn’t even remember losing. ’Great,’ he thought, dragging a hand down his face, exhaustion still heavy despite having apparently slept for an entire two days straight. ’Fantastic. I finally get some actual rest and somehow still manage to cause an outpost-wide incident in the process. At this rate I don’t think I’m capable of doing anything quietly anymore.’

"I should let people know I’m okay," Ren said, already trying to gather the energy to actually stand, his limbs still heavy and uncooperative from two days of stillness.

"You should eat first," Alouis said firmly, already moving toward the door. "And drink something. I’ll have food brought to you, and then you can deal with the small army of people currently losing their minds over your continued existence." She paused at the door, glancing back at him with an expression that had softened considerably from the sharp worry of a few minutes ago. "I’m glad you’re awake," she said, simply, and then she was gone, the door sealing shut behind her before Ren could formulate a proper response.

He sat alone in the quiet aftermath, still processing the disorienting whiplash of it all, the warm comfort of the dream slowly fading at the edges now, replaced by the sharper, more immediate reality of everything waiting for him outside this room. ’Two days,’ he thought again, still turning the number over uneasily. ’Two days lost to dreaming about a home I don’t get to go back to, while apparently three different men were falling apart in three completely different ways over whether I’d wake up at all.’ He pressed a hand against his chest, feeling his own heartbeat steady and present beneath his palm, a small, grounding reminder that whatever else had happened, he was still here, still breathing, still very much alive despite everything determined to complicate that fact.

’I need to figure out what’s actually happening to me,’ he thought, the resolve settling in clearer now than it had in days. ’Not just the rank. Not just control. Whatever’s underneath all of this, whatever keeps pulling me under for days at a time without warning, I need real answers, not vague reassurances that everything will stabilize eventually.’ He thought about Reven’s classified file, about the dual classification results still pending, about the strange, distant thread of memory that kept surfacing in fragments whenever the plot demanded it and going frustratingly silent everywhere else. ’Because whatever this is, I have a feeling two lost days is only the beginning of what it’s going to cost me if I don’t figure out how to actually control it.’