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There was a terrible foreboding in the simple sound of her heels clinking against the metal decking. Each timid strike ringing clear in her ears.
An awful kind of déjà vu.
The air cycle started up as she pushed open the hatch, the stale cold lifting her hair like a clammy breath, setting gooseflesh in her skin.
“Ms Roslin, I’m sorry to inform you-“
A small, low whimper escaped past the hard lump that had risen up in her throat. It was a foreign sound, almost alien, as if it did not belong to her. She had heard it exactly five time before… she never wanted to hear it again.
“-that your father and sisters were all killed-“
The handle to the door was cold. But the icy bar barely registered beneath bloodless fingers, her eyes burning hot.
She blinked furiously, drawing a long, deep breath through her nose. Setting her shoulders rigid.
“I’m so very sorry.”
But it escaped in a quick pant, her gaze drawn automatically to the most familiar face in the room… though his presence was absent.
She forced a little scream back down with the rest, setting her hands on her hips before her fingers tore open her skin.
“Is this is what you gave them?” Unblinking, even as tears welled.
“It was a calculated risk.” Was all he could answer. But he could not bring himself to look.
Coward.
“It wasn’t worth it.” Every consonant striking the backs of her canines, hissing like poison from between clenched teeth.
She grabbed for the seat as her vision swam. Reaching for the wall as that terrible sound rose up in her chest again until she thought her lungs would burst.
But pushed it down with a sniffle and dabbed at the corner of her nose.
She could have stopped this. This was within her power.
She could have saved him.
This poor boy.
Who had kept her, dressed her… loved her enough to stand close as he watched her die… what kind of dreadful exchange was this? That she could not even protect him from his.
“Ms Roslin?
“Oh dear,” numb fingers flinched across his cool skin, arranging his fringe carefully with all the tenderness she could afford, until it fell with that clumsy earnestness she recognized so dearly. “There. There, that’s better… that’s better.”
A feeble attempt to straighten something that was beyond fixing.
“Laura?”
“He was so young.” But the pressure in her chest would not be denied, and she weathered a single, wrenching sob with a staggered gasp. Before burying it back down in the graveyard of her memories.