Penitent needed a lot of blood. I was happy to provide, as was Mirena. That aside, Castecael was confident Penitent would recover, as what skeletal injuries Penitent endured were a simple fix for our medicae. As Mirena did for me, I kept Penitent company by her medicae unit, albeit in far lesser proximity than Mirena had. The injuries our Sister Repentia had sustained saw her to unconsciousness for three days and nights, and I did not leave her side for a second, save for lavatorous needs. I ate with her, read to her—I thought she might like to hear some Ecclesiastical works—and slept in a chair next to her.
And the irony of it all is that when she eventually awoke, I was not the first person she saw. Instead, she found Castecael checking up on her, routinely. After confirming that Penitent was healing well, Castecael left us to our reunion, and I rose to stand where the medicae had, by Penitent’s side. I took Penitent by her arm, with my still-real hand, and grasped her firmly. She did the same, but otherwise we said nothing to each other for a time.
Eventually, a tear slid out of one of Penitent’s eyes. I shook my head at the sight of it and said, “Don’t do that.”
“I’m very good at failing you, Cal,” she replied.
“You’re very good at thinking you’ve failed me,” I corrected her. “It is by far your worst trait,” I added.
“It is wrong for me to rely on you to be saved,” she shook her head.
“Is it?”
“Of course!” she chuckled. “Cal, you are my ward. I am oathbound to protect you. That oath is not two-way.”
“You offer me no protection if you are dead, Penitent,” I told her. “I will save you any time that I can. And this time, I could. And you have saved me countlessly more often than the reverse,” I reminded her. “You can let yourself rely on me, Penitent, as I rely on you. I am not your better, nor your master. I am your friend.”
Penitent closed her eyes, looked to the ceiling of the Bird, and heaved a deep breath in and out. “Is that all you want to be?” she asked me then, eyes still closed.
“Come again?”
She opened her eyes and looked back to me. “I am not blind, Cal, not to what is plainly visible nor the subtleties of your actions. You treat us all well, but you treat me…as more. You want us all to stay with you, but you want me…don’t you?”
To that, I sighed, lowered my head before her, and released my grip of her arm. “I…do not want to come between you and your oaths. Your devotion to the Throne is the second most beautiful part about you. I do not dare interfere with that.”
“I know,” Penitent replied, nodding, and sat up. “That’s what makes you good, Cal. You do not deny yourself the pleasantries of life, save for in service to Holy Terra. You are wise, and kind, and devoted in your own way,” she explained, and then planted her hands on either side of my head, holding my face before hers, before nodding forward and tapping our foreheads together. “You are, on account of that, beautiful in turn. But you haven’t answered my question.”
“Yes, Penitent, I want you,” I replied, sighing again. Her eyes, amber like the Harakoni sunset I viewed in Luther’s mind, beamed on toward mine.
“And I want you,” she admitted. “Yet we both know we cannot have each other. That fate is not for us,” she sighed as well. “My repentance demands solitude. We cannot be.”
“Which does lead to the next point, of the nature of your repentance,” I started, and Penitent nodded but backed away, laying back down in her medicae unit.
“You believe I have overcome the measure of my sin,” she explained, shaking her head in disagreement. “Foolishness, Cal, does not become you. The failures I have accrued in your service do not in any way atone for my—”
“Damn it, Penitent!” I shouted, loud enough to garner a few eyes from others. That I punched an augmetic fist against her medicae unit probably did not help the former subtlety of our conversation either, but at least I did not damage the unit. “I will not have it! Never have you failed me, Penitent, not once. I will not hear otherwise from you. The measure and devotion to your oaths I recognize and submit to, but I will not allow you to chastise yourself as having failed me. Never,” I insisted, wincing in disgust with the idea of her supposed failures.
Penitent looked on at me with humiliated concern, perhaps intimidated by me to some extent. When she replied, she softly noted, “I’ve never angered you before.”
“You’ve angered me every time you’ve claimed to have failed me, Penitent,” I grumbled. “I can only endure so much of that.”
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She nodded, then sighed in and out once. “I’m sorry, Cal.”
“Apology accepted. Don’t do it again,” I asked of her.
“I make no guarantees,” she grinned. “Cal, in the cryo room, you used my name. I’ve asked you not to do that.”
“I know. And I’m sorry for that. Stressful day, I wasn’t thinking as well as I should have been,” I admitted. “I’ll try not to repeat that error.”
“Thank you. Guilty pleasure—I think I liked hearing you say my name,” she smiled. “But an oath is an oath. It must be kept, even if it pains us to,” she added, glancing to me. I nodded. “Cal, when I’m on my feet again and able, would you be willing to continue dueling with me?”
“Enjoy kicking my ass, do you?” I asked, smiling, and garnered a laugh from her as well. She opened her mouth to defend herself, but I did not give her the chance. “Yes. I would like that, very much so. I imagine our audience would like it too. Rest well, Penitent, you need it. I’ll join you in that chair tonight,” I said, gesturing to the seat I had been spending my nights in next to her unit. “For now, a bit of business,” I told her, and turned to leave, but she raced to sit upright, dizzying herself in the process, to grab my hand with one of her own. I looked to her, waiting for her to speak.
She took a moment to get her bearings from having dizzied herself so. And then she took several moments more thinking through a loss for words. Eventually, however, after holding hands with me for perhaps a minute in full, she said, “Cal, I want to fail you.”
“What?” I asked, almost laughing at the absurdity of the statement, though I knew I did not then grasp the whole of it.
“I mean,” she started, and then sighed and hung her head down between us. “I don’t want to actually fail you, but…under my oaths, if I believe that I have atoned for my sin, I am to return to my sisterhood and seek their judgment. And if they agree, I may never return. I don’t want to leave you,” she explained, and looked up at me again. “I want to be with you, to serve the Throne by your side and nowhere else. So please, Cal, let me fail you.”
I had sorely misjudged the scale of her devotion, and recognizing it, then, froze me. Where I owed her some measure of a response, I instead broke some measure of her oaths, and embraced her. She did not object, and held me likewise. It struck my mind to wonder whether any of my retinue witnessed us bend Penitent’s oaths, but the thought was short-lived. I instead focused on the feeling of her heartbeat against mine; hers was powerful and pounding, but graceful all the same, not unlike its owner. Her chest rose and fell against mine as she breathed in and out, deep, not unlike her heart. I clung to the red leather on her back while sinking my head against the crimson cloth around her head, all the while still in awe of her.
So in awe, in fact, that I undoubtedly made things awkward for her. “A verbal response would be appreciated,” she told me at the tail end of our impromptu but lengthy hug. That prompted a laugh from me.
I at last released her, and she—reluctantly, I may like to think—did the same. “Thank you for allowing me to understand, Penitent. If you wish to fail by my side, there is nowhere I would rather have you be,” I nodded to her. “Thank you, Penitent, for the honesty and for revealing the extent of your devotion. As I said, it is the second most beautiful part about you.”
“And what’s the first?” she smiled.
“All the rest,” I replied. “Get some rest, my friend. I’ll return tonight.”
“For more reading?”
I chuckled. “If you’d like, yes. Or perhaps silent prayer.”
“Both sound exceptional. Go do what you need to, Cal,” she replied, and laid back down on her unit, closing her eyes and heaving out one final deep breath before entering a sort of trance, perhaps meditating. I left her to her devices.
***
Penitent spent another two days in her medicae unit before receiving the go-ahead from Castecael to emerge and rise to her feet, reportedly in good health. Unlike me, she had the patience to await medicae approval of that sort of thing. Even despite said-approval and her natural strength, she still allowed herself to rely on me for aid in walking through the Bird in pursuit of the outside world, which I was happy to offer for her. And as we strolled through the Bird, a voice I had not heard in ages finally called to me.
“Boss,” Luther spoke up, voice hoarse, as he wrestled to move within his medicae unit. His eyes gradually fluttered open. “I miss anything?”
Before I could reply, Castecael was upon him, and shortly thereafter, Silas and the rest of his fireteam. Mirena and Okustin soon followed to swarm around him as well. Even as the group mounted about his medicae unit, he kept his eyes locked with mine. “Not too much. Welcome back, Luther,” I messaged him, nodding. He smiled and nodded back before at last responding to the group around him.
While I would have been happy to continue speaking with Luther then and there, I was still focused on bringing Penitent outside, as she had requested. But even so, I was assaulted by another member of my crew. “Well, that’s a welcome sight,” Zha spoke up behind me, smiling. But I got the sense she was smiling more because she had finished the task I had assigned her, as usual, and had something to report.
“Ms. Trantos?” I greeted her.
“Mr. Blackgar, sir, I have concluded with the evaluation of the information you provided me coupled with that derived from Mr. Okustin’s interrogation of Mr. Merek. I believe I have some idea of plausible production sites as you’ve outlined, totaling eight, as you described. Shall I give you that report now, verbally, or transcribe in for permanent record?” she asked me.
“Transcribe it please, if you would, thank you, Ms. Trantos,” I replied.
“My pleasure, Mr. Blackgar. Right away,” she nodded, and dutifully turned to leave, still smiling for having been given another (if comparatively minor) task to work on.
“She is very eager,” Penitent whispered to me as we resumed our exit from the Bird, chuckling to herself.
“Which is undoubtedly as much a boon for the Imperium as it is for me personally,” I replied, nodding in agreement. “Do you wish to spend another night under the stars?”
“I would, I think, yes,” she nodded.