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When Grendel woke, she found Stella curled up at her side. Her white hair glowed dimly in the darkness of the room, casting a halo of starlight around her head. She must have come to bed late, long after Grendel had fallen asleep.
Her voice modulator, a black screen across her neck with a glowing white line, was fully exposed; she had taken her spacesuit collar and shoulder guards off sometime before coming to bed, then. For a moment, Grendel wondered where she had left them. White bars flashed along Stella's throat as she hummed in her sleep, pulling Grendel closer. Grendel, in response, gathered the android in her arms and pressed a kiss to the top of her head.
Four hundred years ago, she wouldn't have ever thought that she would be here, resting aboard the Stellosphere with Stella, fully separated from her old life of villainy. But here she was; her sword and Stella's staff propped up on the wall next to each other alongside a shield that read TTA in the same font as Stella's spacesuit.
It hadn't been long after their first meeting when Stella reached out to her again, the soft humming of her voice in Binary comforting across the void of space. Grendel had begun to become lonely; ships rarely passed by Treimdar anymore, not since news had spread that she had made her home there, and so there wasn't much to do except build puzzles for an imaginary foe to solve.
Come to Alarbus, she had said. My crew is staying there for a few days.
Of course, the moment Grendel had landed on the planet, she had been surrounded by Alarbus’ robots and taken to a holding cell while Stella and her crew puzzled over what she had done to deserve immediate imprisonment.
They had laughed over it later, and Grendel had gone to meet Stella the next day with a simple blue doublet and dark leggings instead of armor so no one would recognize her as the Militissa.
Their paths crossed occasionally after that. Grendel would find herself skipping across the galaxy to attend a TTA ceremony involving Stella's crew, and Stella would sometimes land on Treimdar between missions to visit her.
A hundred years after her captain died, Stella had been named one of the four Galilean Commanders, and they had officially gone public with their relationship.
Grendel remembered it all; the way Stella would glide through her garden, the sight of her crouching to talk to a child during open houses, even the moment Stella gave her the shield that represented her official acceptance into the TTA.
If Stella's family was watching, she thought, then they should be glad her life turned out the way it did.
Stella moved again, pressing her cheek against Grendel's chest. Her hand found its way up the knight's back, past her folded wings, tangling itself in Grendel's dark orange-brown hair. Her eyes opened, just slightly, as she stirred. “Mm. Grendel?”
Grendel replied in Binary. “I am here, beloved.”
Stella murmured something, then closed her eyes. In moments, she had entered sleep mode again.
In the morning, Stella would leave to water the plants in her bio-garden. Grendel would stay in bed for a while longer, most likely, before clothing herself in her day wear and joining her wife in the bridge. Perhaps they would go through the star maps that Stella had received from the Ancient Builders and still hadn't had a chance to fully explore, or maybe they would be called away on a mission.
Whatever the cosmos threw at them, Grendel would be happy to endure it; as long as she had Stella by her side.