Run with endurance

He stops at a vendor’s booth that’s a cluttered mess of chipped figurines, cracked pottery, and one very… conspicuous statue.

The object is unmistakably carved into a phallic shape, glossy with age and far too anatomically optimistic. Luthen picks it up to inspect it and immediately freezes when Kleya steps up beside him, watching him like a hawk through lowered lashes.

‘What’s that?’

He clears his throat, loudly. ‘A fertility idol.’

Kleya’s eyebrows lift with painstaking innocence. ‘A what?’

He blinks, opens his mouth, and quickly closes it again. ‘A… cultural symbol.’

‘What kind of culture?’ she presses.

Luthen rubs the bridge of his nose. ‘The kind that— well, it encourages… ah— how to phrase this… propagation.’

‘Propagation?’ she repeats, tone sweet as medicated syrup.

‘Yes.’ His voice cracks. ‘You know. The… interpersonal method for creating future citizens.’

She stares blankly back at him and takes deep satisfaction in the panic that churns beneath the surface of his eyes.

‘Intimacy,’ he continues, blurting the word. ‘Physical coordination between, erm… compatible participants.’ Kleya watches in amusement as his hands wave vaguely in the air, as if he’s trying to wrestle an abstract concept into submission. ‘A joining.’

‘Joining of what?’ Kleya drawls slowly, frowning slightly for effect.

He looks like he wants to eject himself into orbit, and Kleya sees the vendor from the corner of her eye biting back a grin.

‘Bodies,’ he chokes out. ‘For reproductive… alignment.’

‘Is this something you elderly discuss often?’ she asks. ‘This reproductive alignment?’

The look of betrayal on his face is exquisite. ‘It’s not an elderly topic,’ he hisses. ‘It’s an everyone topic. It's normal. It’s—’

‘Sex?’ she says plainly.

He goes corpse-white. ‘Yes!’ he blurts, far too loud. ‘It’s— that… precisely that.’

Kleya keeps her face perfectly serene while something bright and wicked sparks pleasantly under her ribs. She’s toying with him and now he knows it, but there’s a moment, just a flicker, where she sees the man beneath the former Imperial soldier: awkward, earnest, flustered beyond belief.

The absurdity cracks through her armour before she can stop it, and she snorts.

Not a delicate laugh, but a startled, graceless sound.

Luthen stares at her, stunned.

Then he laughs too; a low, reluctant, bewildered laugh, like he never expected such a sound to exist between them.

For the first time since he found her in the smouldering wreckage of her world, they are just… two people.

Not weapon and wielder. Not guilt and survivor.

Just a girl pretending innocence, and a man hopelessly out of his depth trying to explain a very explicit statue.

The vendor, emboldened, asks, ‘So, are you buying the fertility idol or not?’

‘No,’ Luthen and Kleya answer at the same time, and when their eyes meet another spark of laughter escapes her.

They walk away quickly, Kleya’s shoulders still shaking, Luthen muttering something about ‘ridiculous carvings’ and ‘never bringing her near a market like this again’. And the strange warmth of shared humour lingers between them: fragile, uneasy, unexpected.

She shouldn’t be laughing with him.

She shouldn’t feel anything warm towards the man whose past actions helped put her in the path of tragedy.

And yet, she cannot deny the truth blooming quietly at the edges of her hate—Despite everything he saved her. And he is still trying to.

Back aboard the Fondor, she sits on a crate while he unloads their purchases, muttering like an old navigator. The ship hums around them, familiar now, in the way that shelters become familiar when survival demands it.

‘For the record,’ he begins stiffly, ‘I handled that conversation with impeccable professionalism.’

Kleya lets her lips tilt. ‘Of course. I’ve never heard someone avoid a three-letter word with such… creative exertion.’

He pointedly ignores her. ‘You knew,’ he says after a moment. ‘You weren’t actually confused about the idol.’

Her smile softens into something small and rueful. ‘My parents taught me plenty.’ She glances at the floor. ‘Before.’

Before the ashes. Before the Empire. Before him.

Luthen’s expression darkens, guilt and something sharper tugging at the corners. But Kleya stands before he can apologise, because she will not let him place that weight between them again. Not now. Not when they’ve just begun to share something that isn’t grief or obligation.

‘You’re easy to unsettle,’ she says lightly.

He huffs. ‘And you’re… impossible.’

She allows herself a quiet breath; a steadying one.

‘I can be,’ she says truthfully.

He glances at her—really looks—and for a heartbeat she sees the blueprint of the man he will become: the strategist, the gambler, the architect of Rebellion. But she also sees the man who carried her through smoke and shrapnel, the man who stumbles through softness like it’s foreign terrain.

Maybe she hates him a little less today. Maybe she likes him a fraction more. Maybe that’s dangerous.

But when he passes her a wrapped bundle of new tools—bought quietly, without announcement—something in her chest loosens.

‘For your work, cleaning the relics,’ he says. ‘If you’re staying.’

She takes them carefully, deliberately, letting their fingers brush for the tiniest of moments before drawing her hand and her newly gifted tools back.

‘For now,’ she says.

And for the first time, it feels like the beginning of something.

Messy, reluctant, half-broken.