The office had all the easy comfort of a room that had never been shot at. But for all he could care, it was a luxury lounge. It was decorated in gold accents and light blue walls. The lighting was warm and carefully indirect, which meant someone had spent a lot of time and effort making sure no one felt interrogated in here. There were potted plants that were currently being tended to by a pair of maintenance drones drifted between them with delicate little pruning tools. And the worst part of it all: The chairs were too soft, like the seating was designed by someone who believed that comfort was a moral imperative. The thing tried to swallow him every time he shifted. The soft cushions rose up like they wanted to hug him into emotional vulnerability.

  Not today, furniture.

  The entire office had clearly been assembled according to some well-funded doctrine about healing environments. Soft colors. Gentle lighting. Plants carefully distributed to suggest life without ever threatening to become untidy. Somewhere in a Union administrative archive there was probably a document explaining exactly how many leaves it took to help a traumatized mind step over the smaller obstacles in its path.

  Hugh found the effort mildly irritating. Still, he gave himself a small, private nod of approval for noticing that irritation instead of simply stewing in it. Progress, according to the literature. Awareness of one’s emotional responses. Gold star material.

  He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, hands loosely clasped together. The posture came easily. Muscle memory settling into place like an broken in jacket.

  For a moment, if he let his attention drift just enough, if he closed his eyes and really let himself drift, the faint buzz of the gardening drones behind him blurred into something else entirely. A deeper vibration. The familiar thrum of a reactor somewhere beyond the spine of the seat. The imagined weight of a cockpit frame lowering around his shoulders, systems waking one by one like a beast stretching its limbs.

  It was almost convincing.

  Then the illusion slipped.

  No reactor. No armor.

  Just upholstery that had never experienced a day remotely comparable to the ones Hugh Crowe had spent sitting in things that were beastly and monstrous.

  Across from him, Dr. Elia Navarro watched him with the sort of patience that probably required certification and several continuing education seminars. Navarro had served in the Union Navy, much like him. Logistics officer. Twenty years shepherding supply chains across half a dozen systems. A different kind of war, fought with spreadsheets, cargo manifests, and commanders who believed raw materials appeared by divine intervention.

  Hugh respected logistics officers. Some of his best friends were logistics officers. They were, in one way or another, the only reason pilots ever got to come home.

  They sat in the too-comfortable office, staring at each other. It had been a bad thing to ask, in retrospect, maybe a bad thing to say, considering the circumstances.

  "When do I start to feel normal again, doc?"

  Dr. Navarro had been letting that one hang for a while now. She had done that a few times before when she felt that there was something worth 'holding space for' and, despite himself, Hugh could nearly grasp the idea of slowing down to comprehend something.

  It was just something he didn't really do anymore. Not that he did not need to slow down sometimes, he could still see the need for slowing down, it's just that his sense of slow did not seem to match up to everyone else's sense of slow.

  Oh, don't worry, doc, I can slow down and hold space for emotions and thoughts. Don't worry about breakneck speed, I do it at though, just part of the job. He turned the line over in his head and decided it would land poorly. Therapy had rules. Some he knew, some implied. Sarcasm was technically allowed, but only if it wasn’t doing all the heavy lifting.

  “It sounds like,” Navarro started, after having judged the moment to have had just enough space that it was not a threat anymore, "You’ve been asking that question for a while.”

  “No,” he said mildly and cocked up an eyebrow, "Pretty sure this is the first time I’ve asked that exact one."

  “I’ll concede the wording,” she said. “But I do not concede the intent. I think you’ve been circling the idea for a while now.”

  Hugh leaned back a fraction of an inch, just enough for the chair to attempt another ambush of plush comfort and relaxation.

  The cushions swallowed him another centimeter.

  Sneaky bastard.

  “Oh yeah?” he said. “How do you figure?”

  Navarro folded her hands.

  “A few weeks ago,” she said, “you mentioned that dating has been difficult.”

  Hugh straightened instantly.

  The chair seized its opportunity and slid him back into its plush depths like a tractor array with memory gel. He tried to make it look intentional. A casual repositioning. A man choosing to recline. Inside his skull, a small voice was laughing. For a moment, Hugh studied the thought that followed, turning it over the way a bomb tech might inspect something suspicious with a long non-conductive stick.

  Am I treating a session with my therapist like an engagement?

  The idea hung there. He didn’t like the way the answer felt a lot like "No shit, Sherlock, that's what you've been trained to do. That’s what twenty-three years in a cockpit does to a person".

  He’d shifted automatically the moment the conversation touched something vulnerable. Straightened up. Braced. Looked for angles of attack that didn’t exist.

  Another gold star for situational awareness, Crowe, he thought dryly. Maybe bring it up with the nice doctor. She’d probably appreciate the report.

  The thought barely made it halfway to the launchpad before he shot it down.

  Stay on track, he told himself. She has a point. Hear it out.

  “Dating’s hard,” Hugh said finally, spreading his hands a little. “That’s not exactly a revolutionary observation.”

  Navarro’s mouth twitched a little at the corners.

  “No argument there, Hugh.”

  “People here don’t exactly… relate,” Hugh continued. “Most civilians hear ‘twenty-three years piloting mechs for the UN’ and suddenly I’m a museum exhibit.”

  He was careful, but he knew that he had slipped a bit in his tone there. Specifically, he slipped in, 'And by that I mean that people treat me like a hero instead of a proof of the law of big numbers'. It seemed that Navarro understood that as she nodded.

  Right. She also retired. She knows about the feeling, but... It's different. His thought rumbled for a moment before it settled in his skull.

  “You also mentioned that other veterans can’t quite meet you where you are.”

  Hugh shrugged.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  “Different jobs. Different wars. Everyone carries their own shit, right?”

  Logistics officers moved fleets. Infantry held ground. Pilots lived inside machines that could turn cities into very interesting geography.

  "Mhmm," Navarro nodded slowly and hummed an affirmative. Navarro watched him quietly for a moment, then said, “You talked about food, too.”

  “The food’s good,” Hugh said immediately.

  Navarro smiled.

  “Yes. It usually is when it isn’t extruded from a tube and labeled nutritionally sufficient.”

  Hugh barked out a small laugh before he could stop himself. It was the damn chairs' influence, he was sure.

  “Technically edible,” he said.

  “Technically.”

  For a moment, the room held the kind of quiet that follows a shared joke between people who have both eaten things that should have required a waiver. In fact, upon reflection, Hugh was sure that there was some waiver in all the recruitment paperwork he had signed a lifetime ago.

  Then Navarro leaned back again, the movement easy, deliberate. He never saw it coming; the chair was doing its dreadful work. Softening him up before the blade was drawn. Before the claws came out.

  “You keep pointing at pieces of what you think normal life looks like,” she said. “Dating. Food. The gym.”

  The word gym slipped in like a knife under hardsuit plate.

  Hugh felt the flinch before he could stop it.

  Navarro didn’t pounce on the reaction. She never did. That was the unsettling part; she'd let the moment sit there, raw and wriggling, until Hugh had no choice but to notice it himself. She put him in mind of a patient apex hunter in the jungle. Not pushing him toward a conclusion so much as herding him from the underbrush until the path forward was directly into her jaws.

  Navarro had likely been wasted in logistics; She might have been a legendary pilot—one of those names that ended up carved into bulkheads and sung about in mess halls from here to Cradle like some ancient warrior goddess. Though maybe that was for the best.

  Still. The gym had been... awkward. Not at first. At first, it had just been a room full of weights and mirrors and people pretending cardio was fun. It was just that people watched him.

  Sure, his skin tone was patchy and slightly pink from all the flash cloned replacements, and there were obvious implant scars as well. That went a long way for him to explain away the looky-loos for a while. But there were long gazes too, the kind people give monuments or the wreckage of famous disasters. Curious. Respectful. Slightly afraid to get too close because what if it happens again, right now, when I am standing here? How many times can a volcano erupt before we know it's safe?

  Hugh pumped his printed iron with everyone else and enjoyed his delusion of just looking strange for as long as he could. It wasn't until Taj came and introduced himself and asked for an autograph, and, if it would be alright, if it was not a bother, it's just that his kids love watching the pilots' showcases on the omninet, could he take a picture with Taj? After the selfie and the handshake, he understood why they were watching him. His wonderful little delusion fell apart with ease.

  After that, the atmosphere shifted in ways that made him order a license to print a set of weights and a treadmill to work out at home. They treated him like he was special, and worse, that they were special for just sharing a gym with him, for merely breathing the same air as him. Conversations faltered when he walked past. A few people smiled too widely at him. One guy had actually shaken his hand like Hugh might dissolve if he didn’t handle the moment properly.

  Hugh Crowe. Decorated pilot.

  Veteran of the Alum conflict.

  A pilot who had survived to retirement.

  The phrase carried a strange weight when other people said it. Like survival had been a skill they drilled into you during basic training. As if it were something accounted for in any of the simulations. Like survival had been something he’d earned through bravery instead of stubbornness and a statistical miracle that kept happening long after it should have stopped.

  If Hugh had a proper ledger of the people who hadn’t been as fortunate as him, Navarro’s office wouldn’t have needed paint. The walls could be papered in the names of the dead and unlucky instead—tight lines of them, packed shoulder to shoulder in a font so small the light blue underneath would show through only in thin veins, like mortar between bricks.

  Navarro’s voice softened, the smile fading from it.

  “Integration takes time, Hugh," Navarro said, "Twenty years of combat doesn’t unpack in six months.”

  The chair had taken enough from Hugh today, and he returned to his position at the edge of the seat, where it was just that bit more solid against his ass. He looked away from Navarro and sighed.

  He looked away from Navarro and let out a breath.

  Was that a sulky sigh?

  The thought hovered.

  Am I being sulky? Well, hell. Another gold star for the record. Keep collecting them like this, and maybe they’d promote me to something impressive.

  He scrubbed a hand across his jaw before the thought could spiral into full brooding. That way lay long silences and concerned glances, and Hugh had already provided plenty of both.

  Six months of civilian life had taught him many things. None of them quickly. Grocery stores. Public transit. The delicate social choreography required to stand in line for coffee without evaluating the exits and angles of fire. The whole world moved differently out here.

  “I know,” he eventually said, letting the Sulk carry into his tone.

  Navarro watched him for a moment and twisted her frown around a bit as she chewed on a thought.

  “I think,” she said after a moment, “you’re still trying to approach learning how to live like it’s a mission.”

  Hugh let out a short snort.

  “Probably, yeah. Bad habit.”

  “An effective one,” Navarro said easily. “Just not especially useful for the problem you’re facing.”

  Navarro folded her hands together and leaned forward, settling onto the edge of her chair.

  Hugh noticed immediately. Of course he did.

  Two decades of watching shoulders, hands, posture—tiny mechanical shifts that telegraphed intent before words ever arrived. UN pilots didn’t get to turn that kind of training off just because the room smelled faintly of lavender and nice paper. She was mirroring him.

  The realization produced a small, polite sting of guilt. Not enough to stop him noticing. Just enough to remind him that this wasn’t a briefing room and Navarro wasn’t an opposing commander trying to outmaneuver him with psychology.

  Probably.

  “The military teaches us how to operate under pressure,” she said. “Procedures. Chains of command. Objectives.”

  Her tone carried the comfortable familiarity of someone who had lived inside those systems for a long time.

  “What it doesn’t teach particularly well,” she continued, “is how to stop doing those things.”

  Hugh watched the maintenance drones tending the plants behind her. One of them clipped a leaf with surgical precision and drifted sideways to inspect the soil.

  “We’re very good at getting people into war,” Navarro said. “Less good at explaining what comes afterward.”

  She spread her hands slightly.

  “Everyone who leaves eventually has to figure that part out themselves.”

  Hugh nodded once and stood up before he had quite decided to.

  Navarro raised one eyebrow but didn’t stop him. She simply inclined her head, granting the movement the same patient permission she granted most things in this room.

  Hugh crossed to the line of potted plants along the wall.

  The drones were small, smooth things, their quiet little rotors whispering through the leaves as they fussed over soil moisture and stem angles. Somewhere in a municipal omninet, there was probably an entire procedural doctrine about therapeutic horticulture.

  He watched one of them rotate slowly, scanning a cluster of leaves with a faint green beam.

  He wasn’t angry. There was anger in him, sure. A constant low-pressure hiss under the skin. The sort of thing every human carried around once they noticed how the universe liked to distribute suffering. Anger, the real kind, had a certain weight to it. Heat. A sharpness that made the world feel briefly solvable if you could just hit the right thing hard enough.

  No, he was... unbalanced. He had been coming to see Dr. Elia Navarro every week for six months, and while he had been skeptical, he couldn't deny that things were progressing, if not getting easier. Certainly not better. Nothing about this made sense to him. What did he know about being a civilian? He was only one for a short while as a kid, and even then, it's not like he was a very good civilian either.

  “I don’t know, Doc,” he said finally, still watching the drones. “It’s just… a lot. I know we’re making progress, I can see that. I’m not blind. But you know as well as I do that pilots don’t really retire.”

  Navarro said nothing.

  Hugh turned slightly, leaning one shoulder against the wall.

  “I went to the Veterans Assembly,” he said. “Whole room full of people who’ve either been shot at professionally, or facilitated the ability to be shot at.

  “I met exactly two other pilots. We talked for a while. Swapped stories. Compared scars.” He made a vague gesture. “Tried very hard not to mention the people who weren’t there. And we all said we would have to go out for drinks sometime, and it was polite. They were trying just as hard as I was to be normal. I felt it, Doc.”

  “I know how it goes,” Navarro replied and nodded. Hugh huffed slightly, doing his best to keep his eyes on the drone.

  “You know the joke, right?” His mouth twisted as he said it. “Infantry might die when sent to the front,” he said. “Pilots always do.”

  He tried to chuckle, but the sound came out crooked. Something between a laugh and a sneer, like the humor had taken a wrong turn halfway out of his throat.

  Navarro seemed to consider that as Hugh did his best not to give in to whatever dark pit was opening up in his chest.

  “The logistics version of that joke takes longer to tell,” she said calmly. “And rarely lands.”

  A real laugh escaped Hugh this time, sharp and brief but genuine enough to startle him a little. Navarro chuckled with him, a satisfied smile on her face before continuing.

  “So,” she said, as though the conversation had simply taken a scenic route rather than wandered off a cliff.

  “Have you thought about what we discussed last session?”

  Hugh frowned, considering everything they had gone over in the last session. There was something there, he was forgetting... Something.

  “Which part?”

  Navarro’s expression remained serenely neutral. He knew it was a trap.

  Brace, Pilot.

  “A hobby.”

  Shit. I forgot my homework.