Chương 309: 130.Compromise 3

By now I'd learned that Maki's quiet wasn't the absence of feeling. It was feeling pressed down so flat it started to resemble a mechanism that had finished building pressure and was simply waiting for you to step on the wrong plate one more time. Perfect. On my left, someone who thrives on chaos. On my right, someone who can hold still until you start being more afraid of her than of the chaos. And sitting in the middle, me — who had, with the shipwide comm open, almost— No. Not going there.

If I kept thinking about it, I'd throw myself straight through the viewport. I took a breath.

"Let me be clear about something." I looked at Jess.

"I'm not angry about the kiss." Something shifted in Jess's eyes. Maki's fingertips tightened, just barely.

"I'm angry about the timing." I laid the words out one at a time.

"Down there was Ash, D, you, her, Harvey, Lan, Roy, Akari — every one of them in that fog. You weren't in my quarters. You weren't in a corridor. You weren't in the medbay. You were on the bridge, while I was on duty, while I was issuing orders, while an entire team had their lives hanging on whatever I said — and you chose that moment to knock me sideways." Jess didn't answer right away. I looked at her and realized this was somehow more exhausting than issuing orders against an entire toxic planet.

At least the fog showed up on the instruments. This woman didn't. I kept going.

"I don't care how sharp your mouth usually is, and I don't care if you want to mess with me when there's nothing else going on—""Hey, hold on." Jess finally spoke, and had the sense to raise only one hand, like a student who knows better than to push her luck too far right now.

"You actually do care a lot." A vein jumped at my temple.

"Do you want me to recalculate the definition of 'let me be clear' from scratch?" Jess held my gaze for two seconds, then — remarkably — lowered her hand.

"Fine. Go on." …The more obedient she got in a moment like this, the stronger my premonition that she was about to say something real. I shoved the feeling down and finished.

"Point is — if you want to mess around, wait until the operation's over. If you want to make me your punchline, don't pick a time when I'm on the clock. Because today, if I hadn't held it together, an entire team down there would've paid for your five seconds of impulse." The bridge went quiet for a few seconds. Short. But long enough for that fire — which had only ever been ambiguous heat until now — to actually run into rules, and into responsibility. Jess finally let some of the teasing drop from her mouth.

She leaned back against the chair, one hand on the crutch, but her eyes didn't move.

"I know," she said. I'd been ready to keep pressing, and those two words stopped me cold. Because they weren't stubbornness. And they weren't a brush-off. She genuinely knew.

"I know I picked the wrong moment," Jess said, her voice lower than usual, less of the usual drift to it.

"And I know you were really carrying something up there. That wasn't you showing off." I frowned at her. Jess let out a breath — the rare kind, like she was actually, for once, about to bring out something she usually kept carefully buried.

"But I wasn't just messing around," she said. The instant that landed, Maki moved. Not dramatically. She just set the data slate down beside her and lifted her eyes to Jess. The look was cold. Direct. Jess saw it and didn't flinch.

"I know you weren't," Maki said. Her voice wasn't loud. It was clean the way ice is clean.

"That's the problem." The second their eyes locked, I knew: if nobody grabbed the thread back right now, I wasn't going to be standing bridge duty anymore. I was going to be collecting bodies off it. Jess smiled first. Not a happy smile — more like someone who'd been waiting for the blade across from her to finally come out, and found that more interesting than threatening.

"So how do you want to define the problem?" She looked at Maki.

"That I was deliberately provoking you? That I was deliberately crossing a line? Or that I just happened to touch something you didn't want anyone else touching?"

"Jess." I cut in immediately. That had gone past the line. She heard it — and still didn't shut up right away. But after one glance at me, she pulled the next half-step back and didn't push the blade in any further. Good. At least she still knew my voice wasn't background noise. Maki, though, didn't get any more agitated. Which was worse. She just held Jess's gaze for two seconds and said, perfectly level:"I don't care how you touch her when it's private." My breath caught. Jess's eyes shifted, slightly.

Maki went on.

"That's between the two of you." She paused.

"But don't use her as your way of testing someone else." If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. The moment those words hit the air, it was like someone had struck the bridge's metal hull once, lightly. Light. But solid. Because the sharp edge of that sentence was exactly what it didn't say — she hadn't said you're not allowed to touch her. She hadn't said she's mine. She'd said: don't use Shimo to run your test.

Which pulled the whole exchange straight out of jealous-lover-catching-you-red-handed territory and up a level. It wasn't about who had touched whom. It was about whether the reason behind the touch treated the person in the middle as a flag to plant, or a stone to sharpen a blade on. And unfortunately, I was the person in the middle. I leaned back in the chair, hit with the simultaneous urge to laugh and to swear.

Because these two women — one crossing the line with her mouth, the other drawing it with her eyes — had both managed to name exactly what I was actually angry about, before I ever got the chance to. Jess went quiet for a moment. Short. But important. If she'd tried to paper over this one with another joke, it would have gone from teasing to genuinely ugly. She didn't. She just lowered her eyes for a second, and when she raised them again, the usual instigating light in them had dialed back.

"Fine. I'll own that one," she said. Neither Maki nor I said anything. Jess tugged the corner of her mouth sideways, like even she wasn't used to conceding something this cleanly.

"I'll admit it," she said.

"I wasn't entirely not provoking you. And I wasn't entirely not watching to see what happens to her—" Her gaze drifted to me, naturally, without any performance in it. Not the kind of look meant to set someone on fire. More like acknowledging a fact she hadn't originally planned to say out loud.

"—the second she hears your voice." The bridge went quieter still, in a way that was almost worse than before. I genuinely wanted to file that government complaint right now. Specifically: why doesn't the Yukikaze come standard with a hatch a person can climb into and disappear behind for three minutes. Maki didn't answer right away. She just looked at Jess, eyes clean and cold.

"And?" she said. Jess didn't smile this time.

"So it pissed me off," she answered, just as bluntly.

"And I wanted to see if she'd come apart because of me, too." … Right. This woman had genuinely decided not to leave herself a single exit today. I closed my eyes. Thank every star in the sky that there was nobody else on the bridge right now. If Harvey had heard this from start to finish, I wouldn't need to be Hoshino Shimo starting tomorrow — I could just legally change my name to the ship's top piece of gossip. Maki's expression didn't change hearing that. She just went a little quieter.

Then she said:"You have your answer." Not a question. A statement. Jess held her gaze and didn't deny it. Maki went on.

"So the next time you want to test something, come at me." The sentence was flat. Flat as water with no ripple in it at all. Which was exactly why what sat underneath it was so heavy.

"Don't pick a moment when she's on duty," Maki said.

"And don't put her seat on this bridge into whatever you're betting." Silence again on the bridge. This time I spoke first. Because if I stayed quiet any longer, these two were eventually going to treat me as the flag planted dead center of a very formal duel.

"Let me clarify something," I said, pressing two fingers to my brow, genuinely wondering if some of today's toxic fog had crawled through the comm line and into my head.

"I am not a testing ground for the two of you to run experiments on each other. I'm also not a contest over who can knock me off balance more, who can make me blush harder, who can make me—" I stalled. Great. Fantastic. I had just walked myself into a dead end of my own sentence. Jess was watching me, the light in her eyes visibly climbing. Maki was watching me too. I ground my teeth, swallowed the second half, and swapped it for a version I could survive saying out loud.

"—Point is, don't treat me like the flag in the middle of the arena," I said.

"I'm not angry because someone touched me. I'm angry because, in that moment, neither of you put what I was doing first." Once that landed, the air in the room eased a fraction. Not because anything had been solved. Because someone had finally named the actual problem correctly. Jess sat with that for a few seconds, then let out a slow breath.

"Okay," she said. This time she was really pulling back.

"Then let me be clear too." She looked at me.

"I know I shouldn't have touched you when I did." Something shifted under my ribs. She added one more line.

"But I don't regret it." …That was very her, too. Half admitting the fault. Half refusing to yield. Infuriatingly consistent. I glared at her.

"Does that even count as reflection?"

"It does," Jess said.

"My reflection is that next time, I'll at least wait until you've finished the order."

"You're already thinking about a next time?!" She threw both hands up in surrender, expression still faintly wicked.

"Fine, fine, strike that." Maki chimed in beside us, mild as ever.

"My recommendation is that there not be a next time." Jess glanced at her.

"I'll take that under consideration."

"You'd better actually consider it." Listening to the two of them go back and forth, I had a sudden, powerful urge to call Ash back and ask if he could just throw all three of us into the sparring room and let whoever walked out write the incident report. But right then, Jess dropped the provocation and turned back to me. This time, the trouble-seeking light in her eyes had gone lower.

"Shimo," she said — just my name.

"I'm not trying to wreck what we have." That stopped me. Because she'd finally gotten to the actual point. I hadn't said this part out loud myself — not because I didn't care, but because saying it out loud would have meant admitting how much weight I'd been putting on this friendship. Enough weight that I was scared of it cracking under something like this. She'd said it first. Jess looked at me, voice not raised.

"I just — sometimes I want to take one more step forward," she said.

"But I'm not trying to push you somewhere you don't want to go." The bridge went quiet in a way that didn't feel like a bridge anymore. This time even Maki didn't answer right away. I looked at Jess and noticed, for the first time, that the crutch was braced steadier than before, and that the usual edge had gone out of her mouth.

Not that she'd gone soft — just that, for this one breath, she was being entirely serious about telling me something true: she knew she'd crossed a line, but she wasn't treating this friendship like a joke. That mattered. Mattered enough that whatever I'd been about to throw back at her turned into something else on the way out.

"I know," I said. Jess blinked. Clearly hadn't expected that back so fast. I looked at her and couldn't hold back a sigh.

"That's exactly why it's so annoying." She stalled for a second, then laughed — short, and completely real. Maki stood by, watching us. A few seconds passed before she spoke, calm.

"Then we leave it there for now." I turned to look at her. Still nothing obvious on her face, but it wasn't as cold as before.

"The rules have been said," she said.

"The lines are drawn. Anything past that isn't something to settle here, today." …Translated into plain speech, that was roughly: I know this isn't over. But I'm choosing not to kill anyone right now. Much appreciated. Very considerate of her. I almost wanted to applaud the restraint. Jess, hearing that, nodded along.

"Works for me," she said.

"My leg's not healed anyway. If we actually threw down today, I'd be the one losing." I gave her a flat look.

"You're only thinking of that now?"

"No, I've known the whole time." She looked at me, the corner of her mouth starting to creep back up.

"Why do you think I've been trying so hard to win with my mouth instead?"

"Jess."

"Fine, I'll shut up." She said shut up, but her eyes still very clearly said I remember, especially that sound. A vein jumped at my temple. I struck first.

"Bring up that sound one more time and I really will take your crutch apart." Jess, for once, didn't fire back right away. She just blinked, then said, with total innocence:"Which sound?" I looked at her, flat-faced. She finally laughed and threw her hands up.

"Fine. Not bringing it up," she said.

"At least not today."

"The credibility of that sentence is about on par with the air quality on that toxic planet."

"Pretty high, then. At least it's reliably poisonous." She nearly made me laugh through sheer irritation. Beside us, Maki let out a very quiet breath — the kind that means someone's just confirmed a situation, while far from resolved, isn't going to turn into a shipboard homicide today. Then she looked at me, her tone settling back into that register that was easy to hear and impossible to pretend you hadn't.

"You did well today, Shimo." That one landed closer than the line she'd said over the open comm earlier. And heavier. Because there was no toxic fog now, no collector, no team running below. She wasn't talking about that one tactical call anymore. She meant all of it — the bridge, the decisions, and this, right here: holding the whole thing together without letting it blow a hole in the deck. My throat moved, slightly. Jess glanced between us, and this time stayed quiet.

She just pulled the crutch a little closer, in a silence that felt oddly careful. I looked away and muttered, low:"… You're both a pain in my ass." Jess came in right on cue.

"But you're keeping us anyway." Maki said nothing. But whatever moved through her eyes in that brief second said more than an answer would have. I let my head fall back against the chair, feeling a headache starting up behind my eyes. Not the lethal kind. The kind that says: great, this is only going to get more complicated from here. But at least— Nothing had broken. The friendship was still intact. The team was still together. The rules had been laid out, and the wound hadn't been torn any further open.

As for everything left unsaid, unnamed, known by everyone and not yet ready to be touched— Let it sit for now. The Yukikaze has never once been short on trouble anyway.