Chapter Eighty-Nine: The First Sorry
With Oliver gone—slipped away at some point in the bustle, in that quiet, practiced manner of his that always left a room emptier without anyone quite noticing when—it was, for the first time, only the two of them.
Elias did not notice at once. He was still half-turned in his chair, watching the last of the Butler Pigs trundle past with a crate balanced between them, and when he looked back to say something light about the chaos, the words did not come. Because Cassian was not looking at him the way Cassian usually looked at anything—steadily, plainly, like a man reading terrain.
He was nervous.
It was such an unlikely thing to see on that face that Elias almost did not believe it. The calm, the steadiness, the quiet stone of him—all of it had gone strangely uncertain. This was a man who had crossed into the Emperor realm and emerged unchanged, who had faced down demonic beasts without his pulse stirring, and here he stood unsettled by nothing at all that Elias could see. And Elias, who had spent a great deal of his life watching creatures and learning to read what their stillness meant, understood that whatever Cassian had come to say, it was costing him something to say it.
So Elias did what he always did. He waited. He sat quietly and let the silence be a kind one, and he did not rush him, and he did not fill it. Whatever it was, it would come when Cassian was ready, and not a moment before, and pushing would only make it harder.
It took a while. Then Cassian bowed his head—to him, to Elias, a thing that should have been absurd from a man of his rank and somehow was not—and said, low and awkward and a little sour in the mouth, "I'm sorry."
It was the first sorry he could remember saying.
He did not say sorry. That was the truth of it, and Cassian knew it about himself the way he knew the reach of his own arm. Sorry was a word that changed nothing. It did not unmake a mistake. It did not pull a fallen soldier back up off the ground or turn a casualty into a man who had simply gone home. It did not reach the families—the ones who opened their doors to news of a son, a brother, a husband—and put back together what that news had broken in them. Sorry healed none of it. It was only a sound a man made to feel lighter, and Cassian had never wanted to feel lighter at someone else's cost.
So he had never bothered with it. Instead he did better. For every mistake, every fault, every misjudgment that took something he could not give back, he did the only thing that had ever seemed worth doing: he tried, in the next moment and the next and every one after, not to make that mistake again. He studied where he had failed until it could not catch him twice. He thought of the thousands he had saved and did not let himself look too long at the hundreds he had lost, because a commander who looked too long at the lost ones stopped being able to save the rest. That was how a man like him went on. Not with apologies. With doing better.
Which was why the word sat so strangely in his mouth now. He had no practice at it, and it showed.
Elias only grew more confused.
"Sorry," he repeated, gently, turning the word over as if it might make more sense from a different angle. "For—what? Cassian, I don't—" He cast back through everything, every visit, every conversation, every shared meal, looking for the offense and finding nothing at all. "I can't think of a single thing you've done that you'd owe me an apology for."
And so, haltingly, Cassian explained.
It had started, he said, when Elias said to everyone his rank—that he had crossed into the Commander rank, and at his age, and not through any of the roads Cassian understood. Not through blood spilled on a border. Not through battles survived. Elias had risen on the strength of his spirit beasts: on the love and the trust and the patient care that surrounded him, on bonds freely given and freely returned. His progress was no slower than Cassian's own.
And Cassian's own had been paid for—every level of it—in fields he did not like to remember. He had fought for each step. He had bled for them, more times than he could count. He had seen things on that frontier that did not leave a man, endured pain he had long since taught himself not to name, and stood his ground through all of it for the sake of every soldier at his back. His strength had come from their respect, their admiration, their devotion—earned the hard way, the only way he had ever known.
And Elias's had come from being loved.
"When I heard," Cassian said, and the words came slow, each one set down with care, with the pauses of a man unused to speaking of himself, "I was… jealous. Of you." His jaw worked. "It wasn't fair of me. I knew that even then." A breath. "After everything you've done. For the Federation. For the frontier. For—" He stopped. Started again. "For me. The turtles. The sheep. The horses, the men who woke. All of it was you. And still I stood there and felt that. Resented it." His golden eyes did not lift. "That's what I'm sorry for."
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A pause. Then, quieter still, almost too low to hear—the closest thing to the real reason he had come all this way. "I didn't want you to remember me that way."
Elias listened to all of it without moving, his expression calm and open, the way he listened to anything that mattered to him. He did not interrupt. He did not rush to comfort him or wave it away or tell him it was nothing, because he could see plainly that to Cassian it was not nothing. He let the man reach the end of it and lay the whole of it down between them, every awkward, honest piece.
And when Cassian had finished, Elias said, simply, "Thank you. For telling me. That couldn't have been easy." A small breath. "I accept your apology."
Something went out of Cassian's shoulders that he had not known he was holding—a weight, weeks old, carried all the long road back from the frontier, set down at last. For a moment he simply breathed, lighter than he had been in a month, and the relief of it was so plain on that usually unreadable face that it was almost its own confession.
"But," Elias went on, and there was something in his voice now that had not been there a moment before, a small mischief threading underneath the warmth, "I do have a request. It might be a little rude."
Cassian, lighter than he had been in weeks and willing in that moment to grant very nearly anything the man asked of him, inclined his head without hesitation. "Anything."
"Could you lower yourself a bit?" Elias rose from the chair he'd been so firmly planted in, closing the small distance between them, tilting his head back to look up the considerable way from his own height to Cassian's. "You're rather tall, and this won't work otherwise."
Puzzled but obliging—still soft with relief, still trusting—Cassian bent. That great frame folded down, crimson hair falling forward, golden eyes coming nearer and nearer until they were nearly level with Elias's own.
Elias reached up and took that sharp, handsome, perpetually composed face in both his hands.
He studied it a moment—the bent commander, the uncertain golden eyes, the careful stillness of a man bracing for something he could not name. Then he sighed.
"I think you need this," Elias said.
And slapped it. Once, briskly, both cheeks at the same time.
It was not a hard slap. There was no anger in it at all. It landed with a sound more startling than painful, and it left Cassian—Emperor-realm, heir of the Sagittarius Legion, terror of the frontier—blinking in pure, blank astonishment, his face still held in the breeder's two hands.
Elias looked straight into those shocked golden eyes. "I am not one of your soldiers," he said seriously.
He let go of Cassian's face. And then, in a calm, even voice, looking straight up into his eyes, he explained.
"Cassian, jealousy is such a normal thing to feel. I'm jealous of how my dad can stay calm in any situation, no matter how bad. I'm jealous of how decisive my mom is. Of how easily Kyle gets along with everyone he meets. I'm jealous of how clever Oliver is with words, and how optimistic Rowan always is, and how much Iris notices that the rest of us miss, and how steady Seraphina is no matter what." He did not rush any of it. "And I'm jealous of you. Of how capable you are, and how kind, and how strong, and how independent—of how you could go through everything you've gone through and still come out of it caring more about your soldiers than anyone I've ever met. I'm jealous of all of those wonderful things about you."
Cassian had gone very still.
"It's normal to feel jealous," Elias went on. "And feeling it doesn't make the feeling wrong. Especially among family—because family sees each other's strengths and weaknesses more closely than anyone else ever will. How could we not feel a little jealous sometimes? But that doesn't mean we care any less. Or respect each other any less. Or trust each other any less."
He held the golden gaze and did not let it go.
"Cassian, I'm not your soldier, and you're not my commander. You're family. And family doesn't have to feel bad for being jealous of family, and they don't have to apologize for it either." His voice gentled, but the seriousness stayed. "You don't have to impress me. You don't have to make me feel safe, or protected. You don't have to earn my trust, or my admiration, or my loyalty. You already have them. I trust you as much as I trust anyone in the world." A small breath. "So please—from now on, try to remember that."
And with all of that said—every serious word of it landing exactly as he'd meant it—Elias looked down at his own two hands. The hands he had just used to slap an Emperor.
They had gone faintly red.
He wiggled his stinging fingers and winced, the gravity draining out of him all at once, replaced by the dawning, sheepish regret of a gentle man who had just struck the always-perfect face of one of the strongest people he knew and was only now feeling it in his palms. He flexed his hands and frowned at them and did not look up.
Which was a shame.
Because if he had looked up—just then, in that small foolish moment—he would have seen Cassian Sagittarius, heir of the Sagittarius Legion, watching him rub his reddened hands with an expression no one on the frontier would have recognized.
He was almost smiling.
Cassian apologizing to Elias