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The first time it happens, they don’t have a word for it.
They have after.
After Cal goes still on the catwalk, hand clamped around a rusted strut like he’s afraid the ship itself might drift away. After his eyes unfocus, pupils blown wide, breath stuttering in little sharp pulls. After the sound he makes—half laugh, half sob—scrapes something raw out of the back of everyone’s throat.
After Wold swears and lunges forward, grabbing Cal around the ribs to keep him from pitching sideways into open air.
After Prauf’s voice cuts through the wind and the grinding metal—too loud, too sharp, wrong—telling everyone to freeze, to slow down, to get Cal seated, seated now—
After.
They sit him with his back to a bulkhead, legs folded wrong and twitching, fingers jerking like he’s trying to grasp something only he can see. His eyes track nothing. Tears leak sideways into the grime on his face.
Nobody moves right away.
Shrouuk melts into stillness like a shadow pinned in place. Ylri drops to one knee without thinking, hands hovering uselessly because she doesn’t know where to touch. Leidra scans the catwalk for dangers—sparks, loose plating, incoming supervisors—because if this is some kind of Guild thing, they can’t afford witnesses.
Virmis is already counting time under his breath, lips moving. Harlo swears again, quieter this time, like he’s afraid sound might shatter something fragile.
Prauf crouches in front of Cal and says his name, gentle now. Over and over.
Cal doesn’t respond.
Then—just as abruptly—it stops.
The tension drains out of him all at once. His head slumps forward. He sags into Wold’s chest like a cut marionette.
Wold freezes, terrified he’s holding a corpse.
Cal coughs. Breath wheezes back in. His hands unclench.
“I’m—” he starts, then winces hard enough to curl in on himself. “Sorry.”
That’s when Prauf’s hands start shaking.
They get him down to a quieter level, away from the open wind. Nobody says much. Cal keeps apologizing in a thin, automatic voice, like he’s reciting something he’s said before and expects to have to say again.
No one asks questions.
Not yet.
The second time, they recognize it faster.
Not because it’s smaller—if anything, it’s worse—but because there’s a pattern now, and patterns mean preparation.
This one hits in the yard, down among the stripped ribs of a Venator where sound echoes wrong and the air tastes like old fire. Cal’s cutting through a panel when his torch flickers and dies. He doesn’t even curse.
He just… stares.
His knees buckle.
This time, Ylri catches him first.
“Hey—hey, I’ve got you,” she says, steady as stone, lowering him to the deck with a practiced care that surprises even her. Shrouuk is there an instant later, turning their body to block sightlines, broad and silent and present.
Cal’s jaw tightens. His teeth chatter hard enough to click. His hands claw at empty air.
Wold doesn’t grab him this time. He remembers the way Cal flinched afterward, remembers the wild animal terror in his eyes. He stays close instead, braced like a wall.
Prauf drops beside Cal’s head, murmuring nonsense. Harlo paces three tight steps and back, fists clenched, fury with nowhere to land. Leidra stations herself at the corridor mouth, helmet tipped just enough to see reflections.
It’s Tabbers who finally says it.
“Hey,” the Chadra-Fan murmurs, voice soft but certain. “This looks like… I mean. I had an uncle. Back on Ques. He used to do this.”
Everyone looks at him.
Tabbers swallows. “Seizures,” he says. The word feels too clean for what’s happening in front of them. “Not the convulsing kind, always. Sometimes he’d just—go. We were supposed to keep him from hurting himself. Not restrain him unless we had to. Let it pass.”
Prauf exhales slowly, like he’s been holding his breath for years.
“Does it hurt?” Ylri asks, eyes never leaving Cal.
“After,” Tabbers says. “Sometimes during. He never remembered much.”
Cal’s breath stutters. A sob rips out of him, sharp and humiliating.
Prauf reaches out, careful, and rests a hand between Cal’s shoulders. Just weight. Just warmth.
“You’re safe,” Prauf says. “You’re here.”
The episode burns itself out like a dying engine. Cal sags, exhausted past words.
No one moves until he opens his eyes.
He looks around at the ring of them—too many, too close—and something like shame flashes across his face.
“I didn’t mean to,” he whispers.
Harlo crouches down so fast he almost topples. “Hey. No. Don’t you start that.”
Cal flinches anyway.
Later, after Cal’s asleep in a bunk with Prauf sitting watch like a sentry, they talk in low voices over bad caf.
They don’t say epilepsy.
They say episodes. Fits. Eventually seizures, carefully, like testing the weight of the word.
Virmis reframes schedules. Leidra flags safer work zones. Ylri volunteers for paired assignments without explaining why. Wold starts hovering in ways he pretends are accidental.
Shrouuk adjusts routes through the yard so there’s always a wall to lean against.
Nobody tells the Guild.
The third time is the worst.
It happens after hours, when Cal shouldn’t even be working—shouldn’t be touching scrap alone—but there’s a piece he wants to finish, something old and quiet and heavy with history.
Prauf feels it before he hears it. The wrongness. The silence where there should be noise.
He finds Cal collapsed beside a half-dismantled console, body rigid, back bowed like he’s trying to tear himself in half. His limbs jerk in sharp, arrhythmic snaps. Tears stream unchecked down his temples.
“Maker,” Prauf breathes.
This time, Cal doesn’t respond to his name.
The crew converges without being called. Someone brings water. Someone else brings a blanket. Someone swears. Someone prays.
Tabbers keeps talking, low and steady, narrating the present like an anchor. “You’re on Bracca, kid. You’re not alone. This passes. It always does.”
Virmis counts again, jaw clenched tight enough to ache. Harlo plants himself between Cal and the door like he could fistfight whatever’s doing this.
Ylri takes Cal’s hands gently when the jerking slows, grounding him with contact he doesn’t pull away from.
It takes longer than the others.
When it finally releases him, Cal curls in on himself and makes a small, broken sound that doesn’t resemble a word.
Prauf gathers him up, consequences be damned.
Later—much later—when Cal’s breathing evens out and his eyes stay focused, Prauf cups his face and looks at him square.
“This is not something you apologize for,” Prauf says, voice iron-steady despite the wet shine in his eyes. “Do you hear me?”
Cal nods, because arguing takes too much strength.
The crew doesn’t talk about why it happens.
They don’t need to.
What they talk about is how.
How to keep him safe. How to spot the signs. How to stand between him and the Guild, the Empire, the endless hungry machinery of Bracca.
They build routines around him without ever saying his name.
And Cal—aching, exhausted, profoundly embarrassed—learns something new and terrifying:
That when his body betrays him, they don’t flinch away.
They close ranks.
They wait.
They refuse to let him fall through the cracks.
And somehow, impossibly, that helps the episodes pass faster too.