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Eli made it as far as the hallway outside of the hangar bay before his resolve cracked, unleashing a flood of emotions in him. He didn’t even bother looking over his shoulder; he knew Thrawn wasn’t watching him disappear. In a daze, he stumbled to his quarters and peeled off his uniform, which now felt oppressively tight, tossing it into a crumpled heap in the corner. He’d worry about returning it to regulation neatness later, cursing the Ascendency, Csilla, Cheunh—anything Chiss-related was fair game. He yanked on a pair of old shorts and made his way to the Steadfast’s exercise room, which, to his great relief, was deserted.
He’d been aboard this ship for nearly a year, and today marked the first time he had set foot in the exercise room. He felt reckless and destructive, and he moved around the room, searching for an outlet for his pent-up rage. Weights? Satisfying, but too stationary. Running? Too draining; he’d look like a fool gasping for breath. He wasn’t in the mood to sit at a machine and strain his muscles, either. His eyes finally settled on the far corner, where a punching bag hung from the ceiling, swaying ever so slightly with the ship’s motion.
His first swings were purely cathartic, lacking any form or technique, and he yelled just as much in pain as anger as his fist bounced off the bag. Flexing his hands, he took a few steady breaths before he settled into the moves he’d been taught at the academy. As he worked, it was like his muscles woke up, remembering the fine-tuned details of a good punch, and the sound of his fist against the bag began to echo with a satisfying thud.
That’s right, Eli thought as the bag went spinning. That’s all you’ve got? His fist connected again. Good day, Lieutenant Vanto? Another kick. Good day, Lieutenant Vanto? He screamed. Say good day to this, you fucking freak, he thought, landing two hits in quick succession.
“What the hell,” he yelled aloud, now unleashing a barrage of punches. “What the HELL.”
He felt humiliated and stupid. For almost an entire year, he’d been dreaming about the moment he’d see Thrawn again, a hope that sustained him through the loneliness of his isolation aboard the Steadfast.
The dream had never been the same twice; sometimes he confessed exactly how he felt right before they fell into each other’s arms, while others, it was Thrawn who shared his feelings first and swept Eli off his feet. But never had it gone like that.
Good day, Lieutenant Vanto.
A fresh wave of anger rolled over him, and he bared his teeth as he resumed battering the punching bag.
“Fucking coward,” he said, unsure if he was talking to himself or Thrawn. “Say what you mean, you fucking coward.”
“An admirable strategy,” said a voice behind him, knocking him off-balance. “Though not always the most tactically sound.”
He turned, and there was Admiral Ar’alani, looking at him with an eyebrow raised.
“Excuse me, Admiral,” Eli said, going rigid as he felt himself blush. He hadn’t heard her enter, and he had no idea how long she’d been watching him. “I’m sorry.”
“No apology needed,” she said as she selected a pair of weights from the rack and carried them over to a bench. Eli remained rooted beside the punching bag. “Don’t stop on my account,” she said, beginning a set of bicep curls.
Eli looked at his fist.
“You’re upset,” Ar’alani said, pausing to set the weights on the floor.
“It’s nothing,” he said.
“Don’t lie to me,” she said, and Eli flinched at the sharpness in her voice. “I need my crew focused and alert. It’s not nothing,” she said, her voice softening.
Eli looked at his commanding officer. He knew Ar’alani cared deeply about her crew. From the moment he joined the Steadfast, she’d made it clear she gave her best effort to support her officers not just through the intricacies of interstellar combat but also the highs and lows that came with sharing a small space far from home—which included the messy, ugly, complicated feelings gnawing at Eli right now.
But from the way she looked at him, he couldn’t tell if she was talking to him as his commander or—he couldn’t quite put his finger on the right word. Friend was too intimate, and acquaintance was too distant. She was looking at him like she understood how he felt, which made him uneasy. He preferred to keep these things private.
“Well?” she said.
“It’s stupid,” Eli said, feeling like a lost child. All of a sudden, he missed Lysatra, and he wished he’d never gotten curious about what lay beyond the familiar shipping lanes his family travelled as he’d been growing up. He could be at home right now under a sky of familiar stars and speaking a language whose words his mouth didn’t struggle to form. The Chiss could have remained the stuff of legends and bedtime stories. “Seeing him today—Thrawn, I mean—I was just expecting…I don’t know,” he said, looking down. He dug his toe into the floor mat. “Something more, I guess.” He shook his head. “Not whatever…that was.” He looked back at Ar’alani. “I don’t know.”
Whether she knew it or not, he’d just told another lie to his commanding officer. He knew what he wanted; he’d known for years, carrying his longing in silence as he waited for Thrawn to return any of the quiet, increasingly-pleading hints Eli left in his wake. But now, the silence that separated them seemed uncrossable.
“I don’t know what he wants,” he said finally, and to his surprise, Ar’alani offered him a half smile.
“You’re not the first person to ask yourself that, you know,” she said.
He felt the hairs on his neck stand up. He should have known it was a poorly-kept secret, understood by everyone except the one person he needed to understand.
“Once, back when we were students, he told me he had a surprise for me,” Ar’alani said, and Eli’s eyebrows shot up before he could stop himself. “It’s embarrassing how long I spent wondering what might happen—and what I was hoping would happen.”
In Eli’s mind, Thrawn had never been a student; he’d simply appeared one day in some remote corner of the galaxy, his head already full of tactics and strategy and experience. He’d been there when the galaxy came into being.
“He invited me to his quarters,” she said, and Eli felt a pang of jealousy flash through his stomach, but it disappeared when he saw the look on Ar’alani’s face. She wasn’t reliving a happy memory. “And I sat on his bed for two hours while he talked about a ceremonial robe from some distant civilization, how the plant dye the artist used meant he had a connection to a particular planet or something like that.”
Eli had never considered that Thrawn might have been an outsider among his own people, too.
“I felt so embarrassed when I realized what was—and wasn’t—happening.”
“You wanted more?” Eli said in a small voice, and Ar’alani nodded, the movement of her head so slight that he almost missed it. “Still?”
“No,” she said. “Not anymore. That was a long time ago.” She was smiling now. “I’m happy with what we have now.”
“What’s that?”
I don’t know what it is,” she said. “But if it was with anyone else, I’d call it friendship."
“Yeah,” Eli said. “Friendship.”
“But you want more.”
“I don’t even know if we have that.”
Eli had always admired how deeply Thrawn threw himself into what he cared about; he could only hope he was interesting enough to warrant—and sustain—such intense scrutiny. Part of him believed that if Thrawn loved him back, he would already know, but something about that felt unfair. Thrawn wasn’t omniscient, and he didn’t read minds. Eli had always left himself a space of plausibly deniability—so could he really blame Thrawn for not taking the hint? A spark wasn’t the beginning; it was the result of one object striking another. Incandescence took two.
“I think you know that’s not true,” Ar’alani said. “You said it yourself; say what you mean. Don’t make the same mistake I did.”
“What mistake was that?” Eli said, frowning.
“Silence.”
Eli looked down at his hands, his knuckles raw and stinging from the punching bag. His feelings seemed beyond words—deeper and wider than language could contain. Anyone else would have understood a long time ago what Eli had been trying to say, but, well, Thrawn had never been like everyone else.
Good day, Lieutenant Vanto.
It was a start—an invitation. He could try to say the rest out loud. It was better than silence.