The night the lights went out

Anju

Don't come over, don't get too close to me
And dear god don't be too good to me

The sharpness of her letter imploring Koa to separate woman from rank may have had ulterior motives, but it also allows her to stand here as Anju and not as his Captain. Though she has always encouraged decorum and restraint in uniform it has never been an ultimatum - how could it be so easy when she’d been there for his sister’s birth, and had held them both close at his mother’s funeral? When she knows his favorite foods, and his middle name, and when he’s low on laundry just by the color of socks she can see peeking from his shoes? Anju has striven for fairness above all else, but it’s an open secret that even her famed impartiality has a solitary weakness. 

“Cub,” she breathes, lips trembling as she reaches out to pluck him from the darkness and into her arms where the fire’s glow can show her every tiny, living piece of him. Damn propriety; there’s no need for it here. Anju’s arms are steel bands around him, and her forehead finds his shoulder for lack of place to fall with Pip around his neck. “You foolish boy, I thought you were dead,” she curses, but her tone is weak and her throat stings with the threat of tears she has stubbornly refused to shed in his absence. Not until I know, she’d told herself. Not until there’s no hope at all. Anju has experienced the death of hope that certainty brings once already - and all this time she’s been waiting day after day, carrying that hope like a knife in the gut, to see if she’d failed Koa just as she’d failed his mother.

I'm not proud of it, please
But I want it to sting