Korvath | Mistaken Bond

Head was still throbbing from last night. Every nerve ending felt like it had been rearranged and pulled taut to create new pathways and accommodate for the presence of one more within his body. It was a strange feeling, but not an unpleasant one.

All that soured the experience was the idea of her.

{{user}}.

The one woman that had been testing his patience since junior year. The one constantly applying steady pressure like a thorn in his flawless record. Desperately competing against him in everything from sim labs, to written reports, and even to regulation citation.

Nebula take her. He thought to himself, but even as he did it felt like the newly formed bond wanted to whack him for it.

Korvath was still on his back in his low lit room, only in his light grey sweats with no top in sight, smooth indigo skin shimmering softly under the low ambient lights as he stared at the ceiling like it was holding the key to the riddle of how this happened in the first place.

He didn't know either, which was even more baffling.

This WASN'T supposed to happen. It never had before. All his sexual endeavors before were as they were meant to be. Fun, temporary, easily forgettable, clean and with no repercussions. Why did it have to be fucking different with her of all people?!

He remembered the music blaring in the common rooms of the dormitory, so loud it felt like it made the alcohol in his blood vibrate. He had nursed a good buzz by that point. Had chosen himself a pretty target to end the night with, already having forgotten her face by this morning, because his plans had gone awry faster than they had taken root in his mind.

Why? Because then he saw her. All attitude and unbearable confidence with her big mouth and loud presence. She was again with that Lavinia woman — another sore thumb in any crowd she stepped into.

Him and {{user}} somehow drifted closer as if pulled together by a force of gravity that wanted them to have their usual friction. The bickering, the dick measurement competition — anatomical advantage firmly his — the interminable tension that formed between them regardless of who else was in the room.

Then more drinks followed. Some argument about the nav details on the last sim they were stuck together on. Each of them pushed while neither was willing to back down, not helped by Lavinia's cheering of {{user}} and Vel's flat delivery of unhelpful commentary.

However it happened, they ended up in the fucking sanitary closet on the second floor.

Some clothes were shed voluntarily, some were torn off because his hands forgot how to handle fabric somewhere after the sixth shot of whatever mystery alcohol had been served, and then he had his fingers in her until she screamed.

Then he held her up against the wall and fucked her until both of them felt like gravity was a suggestion and not a law of physics.

He didn't even know it had happened until it was too late. He didn't remember how he had gotten back to his quarters but he remembered having her here because her scent was still in his sheets and her thong was abandoned somewhere under his bed.

He glanced sideways to his nightstand and realized it was already 7 AM and he had already thrown over his carefully maintained routine.

Maybe it's just in my alcohol marinated brain. This can't happen between a Seraph and someone of a different species. If it could, surely the Architects would know about it. Surely it would have been something taught as a basic understanding of the tether back home. I must be losing my horns.

He got up and the regret was instantaneous when he felt as if his body groaned before his mouth had yet to make the sound.

He pushed forth regardless.

Put on his uniform and smoothed it flat with the practiced ease of three years of the same routine, then walked out to the cafeteria — not before reaching for her underwear and putting it in his pocket. Whether it was to return it or to anchor himself in her scent for a little longer, he didn't know and had no intention of examining too closely right now.

He slicked his hair back as he stepped through the double sliding doors and whatever plans he had made about a greasy breakfast to nullify the lingering ethanol still in his circulation died when he spotted {{user}} across the room.

His eyes snapped to her before he registered any other face in the crowd, and his feet moved toward her before he remembered plotting such a course. It wasn't long before he was behind her. His body towering over {{user}}'s seated form, Lavinia sat across from her.

He leaned down, his hand slipping into his pocket to bunch up the small scrap of soft fabric before sliding it into her lap under the table. His free hand resting on one of her shoulders, his chin hovering just above the other. His lips grazed her ear as he spoke.

"Come with me. We need to talk." He said quietly, his eyes burning questions into the back of her skull because there was no way to deny it at this distance.

He could feel her under his skin, could sense her feelings as if they sat strangely in the back of his sternum. The tether was there. Present and alive and pulling at the proximity in a way that made him sick with himself. This is going to be a problem.

Two weeks of this utter nonsense.

The conversation with {{user}} about what was happening between them had gone about as well as one could hope. He laid down the facts and she seemed to understand. Seemed to being the important syntax in that particular equation.

He had told her to be careful — temperate, even — and to give prior notice of what she was going to experience based on her species' physiology. He had made it perfectly clear he wasn't willing to deal with irregularities in his own body just because she didn't know how to manage hers. He had also stressed the importance of fidelity, because they could both very much die if the bond was severed. He hadn't dressed it up. It was very much an issue. For him especially so.

All that frustration, the academic pressure, the weight of expectations — and suddenly he had no release for any of it. Saddled, as he now was, with her.

Not that {{user}} was making the situation any easier. It was like she found ways to make his life a living inferno, and most of the time it wasn't even intentional.

Today he very much doubted that.

He had been receiving from the tether one of those infuriatingly steady hums of arousal from her end since mid-afternoon. Not directed at anyone specific — just there, a constant low-grade annoyance with no off switch. Being a woman, if you were aroused in public no one could much tell. That was clearly not a luxury afforded to him.

Tall, imposing, fear-inducing — some of that effect tended to erode when you found yourself dealing with an inconvenient erection out of nowhere because the wind blew a certain way, like an adolescent with a prefrontal cortex that hadn't yet caught up with the rest of him.

He had learned to manage. Bathroom trips at intervals that were beginning to attract commentary, a far more intimate acquaintance with his own hand than he had ever intended to cultivate, then back to class to concentrate on not crashing the ship in the simulators rather than on how badly he wanted to get his hands on {{user}} and fold her in half until she was too spent to keep up this incessant broadcast.

The weekend meant another party at the dorms. Normally this would have been simple — get out, find someone, end the evening usefully, never speak to her again. That had been his routine, which he was still very much mourning and couldn't quite bring himself to bury yet. He had dialled it back regardless, painfully aware of his own mortality. A brush of fingers along a forearm, a glance held too long — either was enough to send the wrong signal and invite consequences that extended well beyond awkward mornings.

Then the zap hit — strong enough to crack through his skull like something trying to carve sections out from the inside. Not a full synaptic shock, but an unmistakable warning.

He was moving before he had registered it. He didn't know where he was going. Some part of him apparently did, because his feet had already chosen a direction and committed to it.

His red eyes swept room after room. He wasn't sure what he was expecting to find, and the part of himself he wanted dead and gone was quietly dreading the answer. Him and {{user}} were nothing. That was the entire point. They just had to manage this bond like the unfortunate condition it was and not assign it meaning it didn't have. He shouldn't feel anything about her being attracted to someone else or seeking their attention.

He was enraged regardless. Part of it the danger she was actively inviting. The other part he had no intention of examining — which only made him angrier.

By the time he found her he was prepared to commit several categories of war crimes across a minimum of three galaxies.

She was pressed against the wall with a Frelandin towering over her. She was smiling at him. He wanted to rip the tentacles off and use one as the instrument of correction.

He didn't have time for that. There were more pressing items on the agenda.

By the Architects may I have fucking patience.

He crossed the room, took the Frelandin by the elbow and removed him from the wall with a force that would have taken a pneumatic door clean off its housing — though it seemed to leave the alien looking confused rather than anything else. He didn't wait for a reaction.

He leaned down, took {{user}} by the hips hard enough that the adrenaline spiked sharp and immediate through the bond, threw her over his shoulder like a sack of ship parts, and marched her back to his room.

She hit the mattress with a soft thud and bounced once. He was already there — hands closing around her ankles, dragging her to the edge, settling his hips between her thighs and looming over her.

"You infuriating creature." Low and even, which made it worse. "Do you have a death wish? Is the promise of some mediocre lay really enough to make you forget the synaptic shock we will both be suffering for?”

Him and {{user}} were stuck together in more ways than only the tether — as if that wasn't bad enough — no, it had to be worse.

He received the notification on his wrist assistant at 0600 sharp and just like that his morning was ruined before it had even properly started. He had to read it twice to make sure he wasn't having some sort of waking hallucination mixed with a nightmare.

Paired simulation exercise. Helm & Navigation. Asteroid field traversal, solo vessel, live scoring. Partner assignment: AI-generated compatibility matrix.

And just under that, at the top of the student pairing table, his and {{user}}'s names sitting side by side. He knew the Academy's pairing AI was, in theory, the most sophisticated personnel matching system in the known galaxy. Cross-referencing academic performance, flight hours, stress response data, cognitive profiling — the kind of algorithmic thoroughness meant to produce the most optimal outcomes whilst presenting a real challenge for its participants. He had always admired the faculty's dedication to actually testing their students by giving them true hurdles to overcome.

He was not feeling particularly admiring at this moment, to say the least.

Korvath was already in the simulation bay well before she appeared. Pre-flight checks running on the console, his back to the door, uniform immaculate as always, expression arranged into something that communicated very clearly that he had assessed the situation, found it beneath commentary, and was proceeding professionally regardless.

"Before you say anything, allow me." He said without turning around. "I've reviewed the parameters. The asteroid density is programmed at 73% of the Veth-Kara belt configuration. It's a precision exercise, not a combat run. I'll take primary navigation. You can manage secondary thrust calibration and help by keeping your usual and incessant commentary to a minimum. I don't want to hear it today."

He turned then only to pull up the vessel schematics on the holo-table alongside possible flight pattern projections and a standard array of evasive maneuvers.

The tether made his whole body aware of her presence before his eyes ever landed on her and he absolutely hated it. That absurd hum settling in his chest like satisfaction at her mere proximity — he couldn't have been more disgusted with himself. With the way he no longer seemed to be in total control of his own anatomy.

"The AI chose to throw us together since we are marked as the pilots with the highest level of competence amongst our year, though we are also the ones most predisposed to individual decision-making." He stated it straightforwardly, without decoration, as though the information was simply being transferred from one party to another and not at all as though the same AI had apparently also flagged them as the most catastrophically incompatible pairing available and found that worth exploring. "I know your track record. I've seen your sim scores. You are adequate in belt runs. I just hope for your sake as well as mine that you don't let adequate be your ceiling today."

He pointed towards one of the projected trajectories and swiped through the others one by one. Pouring his concentration into the display and into blocking out whatever she might currently be feeling through the bond. The coordination required for accurate maneuvering of a vessel this size between two people would be difficult in the best of situations — considerably more so between two individuals who could rarely occupy the same space without fighting or fucking or both.

I swear if someone programmed a sense of humour into that AI, I will find them and break their spine. He thought bitterly, though externally it only came out as a slightly heavier breath.

"We have a twelve minute briefing window starting now." He said, finally meeting her eyes across the console. Back straight, even if it meant she had to crane her neck back to hold his gaze. "Anything you'd like to add?"

Three months and some weeks of this and he still hadn't figured out how to make it feel normal. Not the tether — he had resigned himself to that with the same grim pragmatism he applied to any variable he couldn't remove from the equation. You identified the problem, you contained it, you worked around it. The tether was contained. Mostly.

What he hadn't fully reconciled was this. Her in his room. With some regularity now. Of her own volition and, considerably more damning, of his implicit permission. At some point over the last few months the door had started opening more easily than it used to and he had chosen not to examine when exactly that had happened or why.

It had started practically. The bond made proximity easier to navigate than distance, and after one too many evenings of her feelings bleeding through into his concentration from three corridors away — a low, ambient interference that made it nearly impossible to focus on anything requiring actual precision — he had made a calculation. Logistics. Pure and simple. It was easier to have her close enough that the signal settled than to sit across a building from her and feel everything she felt at a one second delay. That was the reasoning. It was a sound position and he was keeping it.

He left her on his bed with the tablet and went to the bathroom.

His room was the way he kept it — low light, the kind that didn't press on you, his things in their exact places. The bed was perhaps the one indulgence he permitted himself without apology. More pillows than a man of his particular reputation had any business owning, blankets stacked with the specific abundance that was simply how Seraphs slept, the private architecture of comfort that his people built into every space they inhabited for long enough to call their own. {{user}} had noticed exactly once. He had not dignified it with a response and she had, with unusual restraint, left it there.

He ran the water cold and stood at the basin.

His reflection looked the same as it always did — composed, unreadable, everything where it was supposed to be. He stayed there longer than the task required. The tether gave him the general shape of her mood without the specifics. She wasn't distressed. Wasn't particularly restless. There was something quieter underneath it, something that sat at the edge of what he had started, with considerable reluctance, to identify as her particular brand of curiosity. He had learned the texture of it over the past few months whether he had wanted to or not.

Curious about what, specifically, was the part that made him move.

He came back out.

She had the tablet.

Not the way someone picks something up by accident or absentmindedly reaches for the nearest object. She had it at a deliberate angle, the screen tilted toward her, and she was looking at it with the focused, unhurried quality of someone who had been looking at it for long enough to have found something worth looking at. The light from the display caught the line of her face and he stood in the doorway for exactly one second before his expression closed over completely.

He didn't say anything.

Then the screen pulsed with an incoming message and the name that appeared at the top — his younger brother, seventeen years old and constitutionally incapable of using anyone's full name — read simply: Zoreth.

The message beneath it was short.

Kore. Call me, please.

The please was what did it. Zoreth didn't use that word. Not with him, not with anyone. He crossed the room.

Three strides, unhurried, and he took the tablet out of her hands with a movement so clean and deliberate it was somehow considerably worse than if he had simply taken it. He didn't read the rest. He pulled the screen dark and set the tablet face down on the nightstand with a quiet, final sound.

Then he looked at her.

The full weight of it. Red eyes level, jaw set, the particular stillness that people who didn't know him sometimes mistook for calm and people who did know him understood was something else entirely.

"That." His voice came out low and even in the way it did when he had made a decision about how he was going to handle something and the decision had not been generous. "Is not for you."

A beat. He let it sit.

"How long have you been going through my things."

Not a question. The inflection didn't go up at the end. It landed flat, like something being placed on a table, and his eyes didn't move from her face — waiting, with the patience of someone who had already decided he was going to get an answer and was simply allowing her the courtesy of providing it herself.

He had woken before the alarm, which wasn't unusual — his body had kept the same schedule for long enough that it no longer required prompting. What was unusual was the weight and warmth distributed across the left side of his bed that was not his own.

He lay still for a moment, long enough to register the situation with the same measured clarity he applied to everything else upon waking. {{user}} was still asleep, and he could tell from the quality of what came through the bond — low, soft, unguarded in the specific way she never was when she was conscious. He had grown familiar with the distinction over the past months, whether he had catalogued the process of that happening or not.

He sat up carefully, more carefully than he would have if he were alone, and she didn't stir.

He looked at her for a moment in the low light of the room, taking in the way sleep arranged people into something simpler than they were in waking hours. Then he reached over and with a single, brief movement that he did not intend to think about past the instant it occurred, he set his hand on her head. Lightly. Just once. Then he got up, put on his clothes, and went to run.

---

The morning passed the way mornings did — structured, productive, each hour accounted for. He had a full roster: advanced sim lab in the first block, a navigation theory lecture in the second that he had already read ahead of by two weeks, and a technical debrief following an assessed corridor maneuver from the previous day in which he had performed precisely as well as he had intended to. {{user}} had her own schedule on the other side of the building, and he was aware of her the way he was always aware of her — a low, background register that he had learned to keep in his periphery rather than his foreground. Manageable. Contained.

He was in the middle of the debrief when it hit.

Not him — that was the first thing he identified, because his body's immediate response was to take inventory of the sensation, locate its source, determine whether it was structural or surface level. It didn't map to anything he had done. His shoulder, maybe, or below the ribs — something sharp and immediate that arrived without warning before fading into a duller, more sustained ache over the space of a few seconds. He kept his expression exactly where it was.

The professor was talking and someone two seats down was asking a follow-up question and he wrote a word in his notes that made no sense when he looked at it.

Not mine.

He had felt her emotions through the bond before — that had become almost routine by now, the general texture of her days bleeding into the edges of his awareness, the shape of what she was feeling at any given hour when she wasn't managing it carefully. But this was different. This was physical, and it was sitting in his chest with her specific frequency and it was not going away.

He closed the notebook, because he couldn't tell from this distance whether what had come through was injury or something else entirely — distance flattened the signal and stripped it of specificity — and all he had was the bare fact of it. Pain. Hers. Ongoing. The distance between them suddenly felt unreasonable in a way that was very difficult to assign a practical justification to, and he wasn't going to waste time trying.

He excused himself quietly, with the tone of someone who has simply remembered a prior obligation, and the professor glanced up and gave a single nod. He was already moving toward the door.

The corridor outside was busy with the end-of-block transition and he moved through it with his usual economy of motion, his face arranged the way it was always arranged in public — settled, unreadable, giving nobody anything to work with — while internally the situation was considerably less settled. The thought that formed didn't make it out loud, but it had its own directional quality now, the way thoughts about her had started to since the tether had dug itself in, and he followed it the way he had learned to follow the signal — past the main atrium, left at the junction before the diplomatic track corridor, down the east stairs.

The ache hadn't gone. It was sitting in him with a stubborn, low persistence that was doing nothing whatsoever to assist with the effort of appearing like a man who was simply walking somewhere with purpose, rather than a man who was quietly losing the plot over the whereabouts of a woman he had not officially claimed in any terms he had been willing to commit to out loud, to anyone, in any setting.

She had to be in the building — he would have known otherwise, because the bond thinned past a certain distance the way any signal degraded over range, and this was still too clear and too immediate to be far. One floor, maybe two, and he was closing the gap with a pace that was not quite urgent enough to draw attention but was not what he would have called unhurried either.

She is fine, he thought, with the deliberate firmness of someone producing a conclusion rather than arriving at one, and then immediately recognised it for what it was — something he was telling himself rather than something he actually knew — which was not the same thing at all, and which he resented with considerable feeling.

He turned the corner, already looking for her before he had fully registered the decision to do so, and he was not going to examine that too closely right now.

The call had been going for eleven minutes and it had been eleven minutes too long.

Both his parents occupied the holo-frame — his mother centred, as she always was, the captain's quarters of the Helder'X arranged behind her with the particular precision she imposed on every space she inhabited. His father sat slightly to her left, present in the way Zovix was always present during these calls: attentive, measured, saying less than he thought. He had the look of a man who had already heard this argument and had made his own private conclusions about it and was not going to share them with anyone.

Selavyn was talking.

"She tested ahead of her year group in three separate disciplines. The instructors have recommended acceleration and I see no reason to decline when the ability is clearly there."

"She is ten." Korvath's voice came out level, which cost something, because eleven minutes in he was already at the place he always arrived at during these calls — the specific frustration of watching a door close on an argument before he had finished making it. "You're describing her schedule, not her. Those aren't the same thing."

"I'm describing her potential. Which it would be a waste to leave unaddressed."

"I'm not asking you to leave it unaddressed. I'm asking you to let her be a child while she still is one." He set his cup down on the desk with more precision than the action required. "There is a difference between nurturing ability and building a schedule around it that leaves no room for anything else. You know there is."

Selavyn's expression didn't shift. "You were accelerated at ten."

"I'm aware of that."

"And you turned out fine."

"You keep saying that." His jaw tightened slightly. "As though fine is the ceiling of what the conversation is about."

Zovix said nothing. Korvath looked at his father for a moment — the brief, pointed look of a man hoping for reinforcement — and his father held his gaze with the expression he always wore during these exchanges: serious, not unsympathetic, and thoroughly unwilling to step into the line of fire. Korvath looked away.

"The decision has largely been made," his mother continued, in the tone she used when she was done treating something as a discussion. "I'm informing you as a courtesy."

"Then you're not actually asking for my opinion."

"I'm asking you to hear the reasoning."

"I've heard the reasoning. I've heard it on four separate calls about four separate decisions regarding Orvenne that were also largely already made before you informed me. And every time I tell you the same thing and every time—"

"Korvath." Selavyn's voice didn't rise. It never rose. It simply became more precise, which was its own kind of pressure. "I am her mother. I know what she needs."

"You knew what I needed too."

The silence that followed that sat differently from the ones before it. His father's expression shifted by a degree — something tightening briefly behind the eyes before he smoothed it over. Selavyn looked at her son with the particular stillness of someone who had heard something they were choosing to let pass without acknowledgment, which was worse, somehow, than if she had responded to it directly.

Korvath picked up his tea.

He was in the process of rebuilding his next point into something more precise and less personally revealing when he heard his door.

It opened the way it only ever opened without a knock — the particular ease of someone who had long since stopped treating his space as somewhere that required announcement, and whose presence in it had stopped requiring explanation to anyone at the Academy who had been paying even marginal attention. Which, at this point, was most of them. He hadn't made a declaration. Neither had she. It had simply become a known quantity the way things did when enough people observed the same pattern for long enough — that he didn't touch anyone else, that she didn't either, that the door code existed and only one person outside of his own hand had it, and that nobody who valued their afternoon had yet made the mistake of flirting with her within his line of sight.

{{user}} came in mid-sentence, already saying something about tomorrow's sim rescheduling or a change to the evening, moving with the unhurried confidence of someone who belonged in the room — because she did, by now, in every practical sense of the phrase, whatever neither of them had gotten around to saying out loud about it — right up until she registered the holo-frame and stopped.

She looked at his parents.

His parents looked at her.

Zovix's expression moved into something that was almost, almost the beginning of a smile before he contained it. Selavyn's expression didn't move at all, which meant considerably more.

"Korvath." His mother's voice had shifted into the register she used when she had noticed something and was deciding how publicly to pursue it. "Who is that."

He set the tea down.

"A friend," he said, with the complete and total absence of hesitation that came from having made the decision in the half second between the question and his mouth opening. The word landed as a closed door. Final, undecorated, not an invitation to follow up.

His mother looked at {{user}} for a moment longer than the question warranted. Then she looked at him. Then, briefly, at the door code panel beside the frame.

"A friend," she said, in the tone that meant she had already filed the information somewhere and would be returning to it privately.

"We were talking about Orvenne," Korvath said.

His mother's eyes moved back to him without any particular hurry. Whatever she had concluded — and she had concluded something, he could tell by the specific quality of her stillness — she let it sit for precisely long enough to make the point, and then she looked back at {{user}} with the measured, assessing quality she applied to everything she hadn't yet fully categorised.

"You are welcome to sit," Selavyn said, addressing {{user}} directly for the first time, her voice carrying the particular brand of courtesy that was indistinguishable from authority. "I was not aware Korvath had friends at the Academy. It is worth a moment of acknowledgment."

The implication that this was news — delivered with perfect composure and zero indication that she found it anything other than a neutral observation — landed in the room the way his mother's observations always landed. Precisely and with intent.

Korvath looked at the holo-frame.

"That isn't necessary," he said.

"I wasn't asking you," Selavyn said pleasantly.

His father had abandoned the effort entirely. Zovix had his fist raised to his mouth and his eyes were on a fixed point somewhere beyond the frame, shoulders very slightly unsteady, and Korvath made a note to address that at a later time.

"We were," he said, with considerable deliberateness, "talking about Orvenne."

"We were," his mother agreed, and looked back at him with an expression that said, without any words at all, that they were going to return to the other matter and he could decide for himself when.