The Other Side of Silence

Posted on Wed Oct 7th, 2026 @ 5:49am by Blake Hayes & Niamh (Neeve) Keane

10,307 words; about a 52 minute read

Mission: Fallout
Location: eXcelsior
Timeline: 4th August 2026

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The first thing Blake became aware of was the gentle vibration beneath him. It was subtle, almost rhythmic, the kind of movement that his half-conscious mind initially mistook for the memory of a dream. Then came the faint creak of the vessel around him, the distant hum of machinery and the unmistakable sensation of something moving beneath the floor. He opened his eyes slowly, staring at the unfamiliar ceiling above him. For several seconds he simply lay there, disoriented, before his gaze drifted towards the small porthole across the cabin. Beyond it was open ocean, pale morning light catching the tops of slow-moving waves. He frowned. He didn't remember going to sleep.

His body supplied the answer before his mind did. Every muscle felt heavy, as though he'd spent hours in a gym rather than lying in bed. His shoulders ached, his head felt thick and sluggish, and there was a dull pressure behind his eyes that seemed to linger somewhere just beneath the surface. Blake pushed himself upright, wincing quietly as his muscles protested. He looked down at himself, then around the cabin, trying to piece together the last thing he remembered. The forest. Leilani. The Sentinel. The cold air he'd dragged down from the upper atmosphere. The freezing vortex. The machine collapsing. Then running back towards Leilani before the damn thing could get back on its feet.

He rubbed a hand over his face. The memories came back in fragments after that. Someone getting him aboard the Excelsior. Voices. Medical personnel. Questions he had been too exhausted to answer. He remembered sitting somewhere, or perhaps being carried, and then there was nothing. No dreams. No nightmares. Just darkness. Blake looked towards the small digital display beside the bed and stared at the date for several seconds before it registered. His brow furrowed. He checked it again, then reached for the discarded clothes on the nearby chair, finding his phone amongst them. The screen lit up beneath his thumb. Two days. Blake stared at it in disbelief. "You're kidding me."

He swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat there for a moment, elbows resting on his knees. Two days. He had slept for almost forty-eight hours. Not fitful sleep, not the few broken hours he'd managed since Lily's death, but the kind of deep, complete exhaustion that had apparently shut his entire body down the moment it had been given somewhere safe to do it. There was something strangely unsettling about that. For months, sleep had been something he fought rather than welcomed. Every time he closed his eyes, his mind found its way back to Lily, to the gunshots, to the storm over Manhattan. Yet here, aboard a ship full of strangers, he'd apparently slept through two entire days without waking once.

Slowly, Blake stood. His legs felt unsteady beneath him, and he caught himself against the edge of the desk until the room stopped moving. His eyes wandered over the cabin properly for the first time. It was modest but comfortable, unmistakably part of a working vessel rather than some military barracks. A small desk sat beneath the porthole, a mug beside a collection of equipment and a few personal items someone had apparently left for him. His jacket hung over a chair. There were photographs and books tucked into the limited shelving, small signs that people actually lived here rather than simply worked aboard the Excelsior. It was strange. After the abandoned mansion and the chaos in the forest, the quiet felt almost unnatural.

Then his eyes settled on the porthole again. Beyond it stretched nothing but ocean and sky, the horizon uninterrupted in every direction. Blake found himself standing there for several seconds, watching the clouds move across the distant blue. Instinctively, almost without thinking, he reached for the atmosphere. The sensation was faint but immediate—the pressure outside, the movement of air above the water, the moisture carried across the ocean. His hand stopped halfway towards the glass. He remembered the Sentinel. The cold rushing down from above. The tornado of ice. The strain behind his eyes as he'd held it together. He lowered his hand again. Two days aboard this ship, and he had already learned one thing about himself: his body knew when it had reached its limit, even if he didn't.

A quiet knock at the cabin door pulled him from his thoughts. Blake turned towards it, suddenly aware that he probably looked like hell, and ran a hand through his dishevelled hair. For the first time since waking, something approaching a smile touched his face. Whoever was on the other side apparently had some explaining to do because he had questions, and plenty of them. He took a breath, steadied himself against the lingering weakness in his legs, and crossed the cabin towards the door. Whatever had happened during those two days, he suspected the Excelsior had been busy without him—and he was finally awake enough to find out what he'd missed.

Niamh knew Blake Hayes was awake before anyone came looking for her.

She felt the change while standing near one of the narrow windows overlooking the sea, a mug cooling untouched between her hands. For almost two days there had been another presence woven through the background of the ship, restless even when the man responsible for it hadn't moved from his bed. Then, sometime after morning had spread pale across the water, it changed. The pressure loosened. Dreams gave way to the uneven edges of consciousness, confusion gathering itself into wakefulness.

Niamh closed her eyes for a second.

A week aboard the Excelsior had taught her that ships were never really quiet.

There was always something beneath the silence. Engines transmitted themselves through the deck in a vibration she had started feeling through her feet before she consciously heard it. Pipes shifted inside bulkheads. Doors opened somewhere along the passage. Metal answered the sea with the occasional low groan, and outside there was nothing in any direction except water. No traffic lights. No motel walls thin enough to hear the couple next door arguing. No sirens approaching slowly enough for her to decide whether they were meant for her.

The first few nights, she'd slept with her bag packed beside the bunk.

She hadn't told anybody that.

Nobody had asked why her boots stayed beneath the chair with the laces loose enough to pull on quickly, or why the few belongings she'd unpacked never made it farther than the nearest shelf. There had been no lock on her door from the outside. Nobody checked whether she'd taken the medication she'd refused because there wasn't any medication. Nobody asked where she was going when she wandered the deck because sleep wouldn't come, and nobody followed her back to her cabin afterwards.

That should've made staying easy.

Somehow it hadn't.

Every morning aboard felt like another decision she hadn't expected to make. She could leave. That was the part her mind kept circling. Liam hadn't lied about that. There were boats, ports, ways off the ship when circumstances allowed, and nobody had put a hand around her wrist and told her that gratitude came with conditions.

She could leave.

And every day so far, she hadn't.

Niamh looked through the glass at the long movement of the Pacific and felt something uncomfortable settle somewhere beneath her ribs. She still wasn't sure what to call what she was doing here. Joining sounded too permanent. Staying sounded too passive. She'd spent so long measuring freedom by the distance between herself and whoever wanted to own her that she had no idea what it was supposed to look like when running stopped.

The Excelsior hadn't answered that for her.

It had simply given her somewhere she didn't need to run from yet.

Then Blake had been brought aboard.

She hadn't been involved in whatever happened out there. By the time she'd seen him, he'd already been unconscious, his body having apparently reached a conclusion his mind hadn't. She'd learned the broad pieces from what people aboard knew: a Sentinel, another mutant, far too much power pulled through one exhausted body. Enough to put him down for nearly two days.

The rest had come to her without permission.

His first night aboard, Niamh woke with gunshots in her head.

She came upright in darkness so fast her shoulder hit the wall beside the bunk, heart hammering before she'd even understood that the room around her was her own. For several seconds there had been rain where there wasn't any, grief so fierce and immediate that she'd reached instinctively for a child who had never been hers.

Lily.

The name came with warmth before it came with loss.

A little girl contained in pieces too intimate for Niamh to have wanted them. The shape of a small hand. A voice. A father's love so uncomplicated it hurt to stand near, followed by the sickening drop into everything that came afterwards. Gunfire. Helplessness. Weather breaking over Manhattan as though the sky had found the same rage he had. Guilt returned again and again through different dreams, changing its clothes without ever changing what it was.

Niamh had sat on the edge of her bunk that first night with both feet against the cold deck until she was certain she belonged entirely to herself again.

She could have followed the connection.

That knowledge frightened her more now than it once would've.

Blake's mind had no training against someone like her. Exhaustion had stripped whatever natural boundaries people normally carried in sleep down to almost nothing, and his nightmares came out with enough force that it would've taken very little to turn fragments into memories. She knew how. She'd been taught how before she was old enough to understand what an obscenity that could become.

SAAG would have called it access.

A dead daughter would've become leverage. Emotional dependency. Predictive behaviour. A neat little paragraph in somebody's assessment of how to break a man if persuasion failed.

Niamh got out of bed instead.

She walked until the sea air took some of Lily's rain out of her lungs.

The dreams returned the next night.

She was better prepared for them then, though that didn't make them gentler. Blake kept reaching backwards through sleep towards things he couldn't change. His daughter. The life before. A motorcycle left behind when he'd been pulled out. That last part had almost seemed absurd amongst everything else until Niamh caught what his sleeping mind attached to it.

Hair.

A small lock of Lily's hair kept with the bike.

Nothing more than that, physically. Something that could disappear into a closed hand.

To Blake, it was enormous.

Niamh had gone looking for whoever was dealing with the recovery before breakfast.

She hadn't explained herself very well.

There was a bike still out there. It mattered. More than they thought. Could somebody please make sure it came back with everything still on it?

When somebody asked how she knew, she'd stared at them long enough that they stopped asking.

The motorcycle was recovered.

So was the lock of hair.

Niamh had held the little protected packet once after it was brought aboard. She hadn't opened it. She'd only stood there with it resting against her palm, impossibly light for something that had carried a man's sleeping mind across half the ship for two nights.

For a moment, she'd thought of Galway.

Not anyone in particular at first. Just wet pavement, her mother's hands, Aoife arguing about something that had once mattered terribly, Oisín small enough that he'd still reached for her without embarrassment. Memories she had spent years teaching herself not to touch because wanting something you couldn't have was another way to let people hurt you.

She gave the packet back to the person cataloguing Blake's belongings and told them she would take it to him when he woke.

Perhaps that was selfish.

She'd been thinking about it ever since.

Now he was awake.

Niamh left the window and made her way through the ship with the packet tucked carefully into the pocket of her jeans. The Excelsior moved beneath her as she walked, the working sounds of the vessel following her through the passageways. People had begun recognising her during the week. A nod here. Someone stepping aside without staring. A passing greeting she still occasionally took half a heartbeat too long to answer because some part of her expected every acknowledgement to become a question.

Nobody stopped her.

Blake's cabin was quiet when she reached it.

She stood outside longer than she meant to.

He was there on the other side of the door, properly conscious now. She could feel that much without reaching for anything private. Awareness had shape to a telepath. Sleep spread. Wakefulness gathered. His had gathered suddenly after forty-eight hours spent spilling pieces of himself into places he'd never intended anybody else to see.

Niamh's hand moved towards the door, then stopped.

She knew his daughter's name.

She knew what the packet in her pocket meant.

He didn't even know hers.

Something about that felt horribly unfair.

For years, knowledge had made her powerful. Names, memories, fear, love, shame. Find the right thing inside somebody and the rest became easy. She'd been good at it. Better than good. People had praised her for knowing where to put the knife without ever needing to touch one.

Now she stood outside a stranger's door wishing she knew less.

Her fingers closed briefly around the little packet through the denim.

Maybe this was what staying was for.

Not the ship. Not Liam. Not whatever Project eXcelsior expected her to become.

Maybe just the chance to learn what else she could do with everything SAAG had left inside her.

Niamh knocked.

Movement answered from inside. She waited, listening only with her ears this time, and heard footsteps approaching. No spoken invitation came, but he'd reached the door and stopped there. She gave him another second before touching the control and easing it open enough to see him.

He looked exactly like somebody who'd slept for two days and somehow hadn't rested at all.

Niamh remained on the threshold.

"Hi."

For once, she didn't reach for a joke to make the moment easier.

"I'm Niamh. We haven't met."

Her hand stayed inside her pocket.

She wasn't ready to give him Lily back in the first breath.

"Can I come in?"

Blake saw that she had pushed the door open slightly, waiting for him to give her some indication that she was actually welcome inside. For a moment, he simply stood there, one hand resting against the edge of the door, his mind still struggling to catch up with the fact that he was awake at all.

Then he suddenly realised he was nearly naked.

His gaze dropped briefly to himself before he looked back at Niamh. Normally, he wouldn't have thought twice about being seen in his underwear. He had spent years working on his physique and was quietly proud of what he'd built. But Niamh looked young—she couldn't have been much above twenty—and the sudden awareness of the situation made him clear his throat awkwardly.

"Yeah... come in. Just give me a second."

He stepped back and crossed the cabin towards the chair where his leather motorcycle trousers had been left. He pulled them on quickly, fastening the waistband before running a hand through his dishevelled auburn hair. It wasn't embarrassment exactly. More a belated awareness that perhaps opening the door half-dressed wasn't the best first impression.

"Better," he muttered, mostly to himself, before turning back towards her.

He regarded her for a moment, then offered a small, tired smile. "Blake. Nice to meet you, Niamh."

There was something guarded about her that he noticed almost immediately. She seemed cautious, watching the room and him with an attentiveness that suggested she had learned not to trust unfamiliar places too quickly. Blake recognised that instinct. He'd spent years doing much the same thing, even if he'd hidden it behind a police uniform and the appearance of an ordinary life.

He gestured towards the cabin. "Sorry about the state of the place. I haven't exactly had much chance to tidy up." A faint smile touched his face. "Actually, judging by the fact I've apparently slept for two days, I'm not sure I've had much chance to do anything."

His expression became more serious as he looked back at her.

"I remember the forest. The Sentinel. Getting back to Leilani." He paused, searching his memory. "After that, nothing."
He let out a quiet breath.

"So..." His eyes settled on her again. "What exactly have I missed?"

Niamh stepped inside once Blake moved back from the door, giving him the room he'd clearly been asking for without making anything of the fact that he'd answered it in his underwear.

There had been a time when somebody else's discomfort around nudity might've amused her. SAAG had burned most of that novelty out of her early. Locker rooms, medical bays, surveillance work, field assignments where privacy simply hadn't existed; she'd seen more of both sexes than she cared to catalogue, and occasionally been expected to use her own body as another tool in the box. Whatever instinct other people had for making nakedness intimate had become tangled up with too many other things for her.

So when Blake glanced down at himself and cleared his throat, Niamh simply turned her attention towards the porthole for the few seconds it took him to pull on his trousers. It cost her nothing to give him the dignity of pretending she hadn't noticed.

When she looked back, he was still bare from the waist up, and there was no mistaking that he took care of himself. Broad shoulders, a strong chest, the kind of build that came from years of work rather than vanity alone. She registered it automatically, the same way she'd once been trained to notice reach, balance, dominant side, old injuries and whether somebody could put her through a wall if things went badly. The habit arrived first.

Niamh let it go.

"You're grand," she said when he apologised for the cabin, glancing around the modest space. "Mine's somehow worse and I came aboard with one bag, so I think that's probably more embarrassing."

The smile that accompanied it was small but genuine.

There still wasn't much in her own cabin. A few clothes had finally made it into drawers instead of staying folded inside the holdall. Jane Eyre lived beside the bunk now. Her boots still stayed close enough to reach without getting up properly, although she'd stopped noticing that until she caught herself doing it. Tiny concessions to staying had appeared without permission, one object at a time.

Niamh listened while Blake pieced together what he remembered, and whatever lightness had been in her expression softened when he reached the forest and the Sentinel. She'd read the report afterwards. The official version had been clinical enough to make what he'd done sound almost tidy: atmospheric manipulation, rapid temperature collapse, severe physical depletion. Words that fitted neatly into boxes and left out the part where a human body had somehow dragged enough cold out of the sky to bring down a machine built for hunting people like them.

His question was easier.

"Honestly? Not much."

She moved a little farther into the cabin, but didn't take a seat without being offered one. The ship rolled almost imperceptibly beneath them, a slow movement Niamh had started adjusting to without thinking.

"You've mostly missed ocean. Quite a lot of it." Her gaze flicked towards the porthole. "The ship's been moving, people have been doing whatever it is they do on a ship when nobody's trying to kill them, and medical have been making sure you weren't planning on sleeping through the rest of August."

There was warmth in her voice rather than mockery.

"You pushed yourself pretty hard back there. From what I was told, once they got you aboard your body basically made the decision for you."

She hesitated for a moment, aware of how strange it was to know pieces of what had happened while standing in front of someone she'd technically only just met.

"They got your things back too."

That mattered enough that she didn't bury it beneath anything else.

"Your bike's aboard."

She kept the words simple, almost casual, and left out the part where she'd kept asking until someone finally went back for it. Left out how stubborn she'd been when there were easier things to recover, more obviously useful things, things that made sense on a manifest. None of that mattered now.

The bike was here, and that was enough.

She looked towards him again. "Everything that was with it came back too."

Her fingers closed lightly around the small protected packet in her pocket before she made herself let go.

Not yet.

She wasn't going to tell him that his sleeping mind had reached for the motorcycle again and again, or that she'd understood why before anyone else aboard had. She wasn't going to tell him she'd woken with pieces of his grief caught inside her own head, or that something as small as a lock of hair had carried more weight than half the equipment they had recovered.

That belonged to him.

Niamh had learned enough about taking things from people.

"You didn't miss anything important," she said, quieter now. "You just slept."

For somebody whose dreams had spent two nights telling her how badly he needed to, Niamh wasn't sure that was a small thing at all.

For a moment, Blake simply stared at her. The relief that came with her words was almost disproportionate to their simplicity. His motorcycle was aboard the ship. After everything that had happened, after leaving it behind in the woods with no certainty he'd ever see it again, knowing it was here felt like one small piece of his old life had somehow survived the journey with him. He hadn't realised how much he needed that until now.

He turned towards the chair and picked up the white vest top that had been left for him, pulling it over his head before smoothing the fabric down across his chest. His attention remained on Niamh, however, particularly when she added that everything that had been with the bike had been recovered. "Thank you," he said quietly. "Seriously. I wasn't sure I'd ever see it again."

But something in her manner had changed.

It was subtle enough that most people might have missed it. Blake probably wouldn't have, even without the instincts he'd developed during years on the job. There had been a slight hesitation in her answer, a moment where her fingers had closed almost imperceptibly around something inside her pocket. Her expression had remained composed, but there was a carefulness to it now, as though she were weighing what to say and, more importantly, what not to say. Blake had spent enough years reading witnesses, suspects and grieving families to recognise the difference between someone who simply had nothing else to add and someone deliberately holding something back.

He didn't immediately call her on it. Instead, his eyes lingered briefly on the pocket before returning to her face. There was no accusation in his expression, only quiet curiosity. Whatever she was keeping from him, she didn't appear to be doing it maliciously. If anything, she seemed almost protective of whatever information she carried.

"There was something with the bike," Blake said eventually, his voice softer now. He paused, the words requiring more courage than he'd expected. "Something that was very important to me."

The admission left him unexpectedly vulnerable. His gaze dropped for a moment, and he drew a slow breath before looking back at her. He didn't need to explain what it was—not yet. Niamh had already understood that there was something more behind his question, and Blake wasn't ready to put a name to it in front of someone he'd only met moments ago.

His eyes settled on her again. "You know something about it, don't you?" There was no sharpness in the question, no suspicion in his tone. Just the measured calm of a man accustomed to noticing what people left unsaid. "You don't have to tell me if you're not ready." He hesitated, then added quietly, "But if it's been recovered... I'd like to have it back."

Niamh saw his eyes drop towards her pocket and knew she’d waited too long to pretend there was nothing in it. Her hand stayed there for another second anyway, fingers resting against the small packet through the denim. Blake had asked gently, which somehow made answering harder. Suspicion she understood. Anger she could meet head-on if she had to. There were habits for that, old ones, built around keeping her own expression still while somebody else lost control. This was different. He was standing in front of her barely awake after two days unconscious, asking for something he clearly cared about without demanding anything from her, and she had knowledge of him he’d never chosen to give.

“Yeah,” she said eventually, her voice much quieter than before. “I do know something.”

She glanced down, searching for a way into the conversation that didn’t sound rehearsed, then gave up on finding one. “There’s something I should tell you before I give it back. I’m a telepath.” The words sat between them while the ship shifted gently through the water, the faint vibration of the engines coming up through the deck. Niamh had become so used to it over the past week that she rarely noticed anymore, but now every little sound in the cabin seemed sharper. She kept her eyes on Blake’s face and made no attempt to touch what was behind it. “I didn’t go looking through your head. I know that probably doesn’t make much difference from where you’re standing, but... you were dreaming. Hard. For nearly two days.”

Her thumb rubbed once against the seam of her pocket as she tried to put the rest into words without making excuses for herself. “Sometimes that carries. Especially when somebody’s exhausted, or hurt, or there’s a lot of emotion behind it. I tried to pull away when I realised what I was picking up. I didn’t follow anything deeper.” She paused, dissatisfied with her own explanation almost as soon as she heard it. “But I still heard things. You didn’t choose that, and I know saying it was an accident doesn’t suddenly make it feel private again.”

That was the part she couldn’t soften for him. If she woke tomorrow and discovered that somebody aboard knew about Galway, the collar, the white rooms, the sound of her mother’s voice or the things she had done because somebody else had pointed her at a target and called it duty, she wouldn’t care much whether they had gone hunting for those memories. She would only know they possessed them. Blake had every right to feel whatever came next when he understood the same thing had happened to him, and Niamh wasn’t going to reach into his head now just because knowing his reaction would make this easier for her.

For two nights, pieces of his grief had found her anyway. They hadn’t all been terrible. That had surprised her more than anything. There had been warmth mixed through the nightmares, moments that arrived without context but carried their meaning with them: a little girl laughing, the easy familiarity of somebody loved completely, the sense of a life that had once contained ordinary mornings and ordinary problems before everything narrowed down to absence. Niamh had woken from some of those dreams carrying feelings that didn’t belong to her and sat awake until she could separate herself from them again.

“There was someone with you a lot,” she said, and her voice caught slightly despite her effort to keep it steady. “In the dreams, I mean.” Niamh looked towards the porthole for a moment, the morning light on the water giving her somewhere else to put her eyes. “Lily.”

The name hurt differently once it had been spoken aloud.

“She wasn’t only in the bad memories.” Niamh looked back at him. “You remembered her happy too. Little things. Nothing dramatic. Just...” She stopped, shook her head faintly and tried again. “You loved her. That came through more than anything else.”

Something inside Niamh tightened with the admission because she knew exactly what SAAG would have done with that knowledge. Love had been useful to them. Find the person someone couldn’t bear to lose and you understood where the leverage was. She’d been trained to recognise those attachments almost instinctively, to know when a name mattered, when a photograph should be noted, when somebody’s fear for a child or husband or wife could turn resistance into cooperation. She had helped break people that way. There were men and women who had gone into operations with Niamh and never returned to the children waiting for them at home, and for years she’d been very good at not imagining what those children did afterwards.

Blake’s dreams had made that distance harder to maintain.

Niamh finally slipped her hand into her pocket and drew out the small protected packet. The lock of hair inside barely seemed substantial enough to cast a shadow against her palm. She looked at it for a moment before stepping closer, careful to stop well short of crowding him. “This was with the bike. When I realised what it was...” Her voice softened and she let the sentence trail while she found the courage to finish it properly. “I knew you needed it back.”

She didn’t tell him how hard she’d pushed to make sure the motorcycle was recovered, or how often she’d checked while he slept. She didn’t need him to know that. There was nothing noble in returning something that should never have been lost in the first place, and she wasn’t standing there looking for gratitude.

“I haven’t opened it,” she said. Her eyes lifted to his again. “I wouldn’t.”

For a few seconds she simply held the packet between them, and some of the composure she’d carried into the room began to thin. She was twenty-two years old beneath everything SAAG had layered over her, and there were still moments when she didn’t know what to do with the person left underneath once training stopped supplying the answer. “I’ve done things I’m not proud of, Blake,” she said, the words coming slower now. “To people who had families. Kids. I don’t know what happened to most of them afterwards, because back then I made sure I didn’t think about it.”

She looked down at the lock of hair again. That was as far as she could take that confession without turning his daughter into a path towards absolution for herself, and she wouldn’t do that to him.

“When this came back, I kept thinking about how small it was.” Her mouth tightened briefly. “How easy it would’ve been for somebody not to know what they were looking at. Throw it in a box. Lose it. Leave it behind.” She swallowed and extended her hand towards him, palm open, the packet resting lightly across it. “I couldn’t do anything about what happened to Lily. I know that. But I could make sure this got back to her dad.”

The last word nearly undid her, though she kept herself together. There was no grand revelation in it, no redemption arriving because she had managed one decent act. Just a young woman standing in a cabin on a ship she still wasn’t entirely convinced she belonged aboard, trying to do something kind with knowledge that once would have been used to hurt someone.

“I’m sorry you had to find out I knew any of this,” she said. “And I’m sorry it got into my head at all.”

Her hand remained where it was, leaving Blake to take the final distance himself.

“But this is yours.” Niamh looked at him, eyes bright but steady. “It should be with you.”

For a moment, Blake simply stared at the packet in her hand.

The first emotion that rose in him was anger. Not the hot, directionless fury that had consumed him in Manhattan, but something quieter and more immediate. She had been inside his mind. Even if she hadn't meant to be, even if she had tried to pull away, the fact remained that pieces of him had been exposed to someone he barely knew. Lily. His grief. His guilt. Memories he had never offered and would never have chosen to share. His jaw tightened as he looked at Niamh, some instinctive part of him wanting to demand how much she had seen, how much she knew. But the questions died before reaching his lips. There was no accusation in her expression. Only an uncomfortable honesty that made anger feel increasingly difficult to hold onto.

His eyes dropped to the packet.

Slowly, almost cautiously, Blake reached out and took it from her. His fingers closed around the small bundle with extraordinary care, as though even the slightest pressure might somehow damage what remained of his daughter. For a moment he simply held it there, staring down at something so impossibly small that it seemed absurd it could carry the weight it did. His breath caught.

He turned away.

Only for a moment. Just long enough to face the porthole and draw one unsteady breath after another, his shoulders rising and falling as he fought to keep himself together. The ocean beyond the glass remained indifferent, stretching endlessly beneath the pale morning sky, and Blake pressed his lips together as the first tear escaped despite everything he did to stop it. He lowered his head, closed his eyes and let the grief pass through him rather than trying to fight it. When he finally turned back, his eyes were wet, but his expression had steadied.

He looked at Niamh differently then.

The anger was still there, somewhere beneath the surface, but it had changed shape. She hadn't chosen to hear him. She hadn't gone searching through his mind. She hadn't taken those memories from him. His own mind, battered by exhaustion and grief, had spilled them into hers while he slept. The thought left him with a strange, almost painful realisation. In a way, he had violated her as much as he had felt violated by her. She had been forced to carry fragments of his pain simply because she happened to possess an ability neither of them had asked for. She couldn't help what she was any more than he could help what he was.

And suddenly, the thought of everything she must have felt while carrying those memories made his anger seem terribly unfair.

His gaze flicked briefly towards her pocket, then back to the packet in his hand. "You were the one who made sure they got the bike back, weren't you?" he asked quietly.

He didn't need her answer immediately. Somewhere in the way she'd spoken, in the care with which she'd returned this tiny piece of Lily, he already suspected he knew it. She had gone to someone. She had insisted. Perhaps she had simply refused to let something important be lost because everyone else had been too busy dealing with the larger crisis to understand what it meant.

Blake swallowed.

"Thank you."

The words were almost painfully inadequate.

He looked down at the packet again, his thumb brushing gently over its edge without opening it. There was so much he could have said about Lily, about the dreams Niamh had witnessed, about the violation of privacy and the strange reversal of it all. But somehow none of it seemed necessary. She already knew. Not because he had told her, but because his mind had apparently done what his voice could not.

His expression softened.

"I'm sorry," he said quietly, his eyes remaining on the little packet. "I never meant to put any of that on you. My thoughts, my feelings... all of it. You didn't ask for any of it, and you shouldn't have had to carry it."

He lifted his eyes to hers.

"I don't think you owe me an apology for being what you are."

For a moment neither of them moved.

Then Blake stepped forward.

It wasn't sudden or dramatic. There was no hesitation in the movement, only a quiet decision. He closed the small distance between them and carefully wrapped his arms around her, mindful of the packet still held safely in one hand. The embrace was brief but genuine, carrying more than he could seem to put into words: gratitude for bringing Lily back to him, forgiveness for something Niamh had never deliberately done, and an apology for a mind so turbulent that it had forced its way into hers without either of them choosing it.

He held her for only a few seconds before letting go.

When he stepped back, his eyes were still damp.

"Thank you," he said again, almost a whisper. "For this. And for trying to protect me from something I didn't even know you'd seen."

His fingers closed gently around the packet.

For once, Blake didn't try to hide what he was feeling. He didn't need to.

She already knew.

Niamh saw the anger come into Blake’s face and stayed exactly where she was. It was there in the set of his jaw and the way his eyes held on her for those few seconds before falling to the packet in her hand, and she understood it well enough that she didn’t try to defend herself from it. He had every right to hate the thought of somebody else having heard what she had. If their places were reversed and some stranger walked into her cabin knowing about Galway, about SAAG, about the rooms she still sometimes woke believing she was back inside, she wouldn’t care how accidental it had been. She would only care that somebody knew. So when he reached for the packet, Niamh let it go without allowing their fingers to touch, then turned her eyes towards the porthole as he faced away from her. His breathing changed. She heard it catch, heard the long effort to bring it back under control, and gave him the small mercy of not watching.

His mind was harder to avoid now that she was standing so close, but she didn’t reach for it. There were scraps she couldn’t help catching, loose words brushing the edge of her awareness because his thoughts were already running hot beneath everything he was trying to contain. Lily. The bike. Home. A memory beginning somewhere and collapsing before she could make sense of it. Niamh withdrew from each fragment as soon as she recognised it, concentrating instead on the vibration of the ship beneath her feet and the line where ocean met sky beyond the glass. It was strange how difficult it could be to ignore another mind once you knew it was hurting. People assumed telepathy was curiosity made supernatural, as though she spent her life hungry for secrets. Most of the time she wanted the opposite. She wanted not to know.

When Blake turned back and asked whether she had been the one who made sure the motorcycle was recovered, Niamh’s expression betrayed her before she could decide what to say. Her gaze dipped briefly to the lock of hair in his hand and then returned to him, but she didn’t answer the question. There was no reason to. She hadn’t spent those hours pushing people about the bike so that one day he would know she had done something decent. She had done it because a sleeping man had spent two nights reaching for something he thought was gone, and because she’d been in a position to make sure it wasn’t. His quiet thank you made her look away anyway, uncomfortable with the weight he seemed to put behind it.

Then he apologised to her.

That was what cracked something open.

At first Niamh thought she’d misunderstood him. Her brow tightened slightly as he spoke, and for a few seconds she simply listened while Blake apologised for his own thoughts spilling into hers, for making her carry things he hadn’t meant anyone else to carry. She had spent most of her life learning that other people feared what she could hear. She understood why. Thought was the last locked room people believed they owned completely, and Niamh had been born with a key she’d never asked for. What almost nobody seemed to understand was that the door opened both ways.

There had never been real silence for her. Not the kind other people meant when they used the word. Distance helped. Empty rooms helped. Books were good because they gave her something deliberate to follow, someone else’s words chosen and printed and safely fixed on a page. Alcohol softened everything if she drank enough, turned a crowded bar into a dull blur where other people’s thoughts stopped catching so sharply against her own. The drugs SAAG had given her had done it better. She had hated them for the fog they poured through her head, hated the slow heaviness in her limbs and the way whole days could lose their edges, but there had been nights when she had begged for another dose because the alternative was hearing everybody.

That was the secret underneath the power nobody envied properly. Sometimes the hidden things hurt the worst. A stranger walking past with the image of somebody they wanted. A mother thinking something cruel about her child and hating herself for it a heartbeat later. Fear arriving in somebody else’s words with enough force that Niamh’s body reacted before she remembered it wasn’t hers. The beginnings of fantasies she never wanted to see. Nightmares from behind walls. People smiled while thinking ugly things and screamed inside while telling everyone they were fine. Niamh had learned young that minds were not clean places, including her own.

And Blake had just apologised because she had been forced to hear his.

For one precarious second she felt dangerously close to crying. 'Don’t.' The thought came hard, reflexive, the same command she had given herself in interrogation rooms and motel bathrooms and once on a pavement in San Francisco with blood running from her nose. She drew a breath and managed to hold his gaze, but before she could find anything sensible to say Blake stepped towards her.

Her body reacted instantly. One foot shifted backwards, her shoulders tightened and her hands came away from her sides before she even understood what he intended. 'Move.' Years of conditioning compressed themselves into that one thought. Too many hands had meant restraint. Too many people had approached her because they wanted something from her body, her powers or both. SAAG had taught her that attractiveness was useful, that closeness made suggestion easier, that there were situations where somebody lowering their guard around her was more valuable than dignity. She had learned how to touch without wanting to be touched, how to let someone believe intimacy meant safety while she was already inside their head.

Then Blake’s arms went around her, and Niamh went rigid.

Physical contact always made it worse. The psychic distance between them collapsed so suddenly that a few thoughts broke through before she could shut them out. Lily. Then something about gratitude, fractured and unfinished, followed by the lingering shape of anger still caught around what had happened between them. Nothing neat enough to be a confession, just words and images moving too close to the surface while Blake held her. The overload rippled outward before Niamh could stop it. A ceramic mug scraped softly across the desk behind her, a pen rolled several inches and the edge of the curtain stirred despite the sealed porthole. Her eyes closed as she fought the sudden pressure back down. 'Hold it together.'

The strange thing was that he wasn’t restraining her. There was no grip tightening around her wrists, no instruction murmured against her ear, no expectation buried inside the contact. Blake was simply hugging her, awkwardly and sincerely, because words had apparently failed him too. Niamh’s hands hovered for a moment before one settled against his back. The second followed more slowly. She returned the embrace with an uncertainty she would have hated anyone noticing, careful at first, almost as though she were remembering something her body had once known before other people taught it different meanings.

By the time he stepped away, Niamh had pulled most of herself back together. Her eyes were bright, though she blinked quickly enough to keep anything from falling, and her gaze flicked once towards the desk where the mug now sat noticeably closer to the edge than before. She hoped he hadn’t seen it. When Blake thanked her again and told her she didn’t owe him an apology for what she was, Niamh looked down at her empty hands. For a few seconds she couldn’t answer him without trusting her voice to hold.

“I know you didn’t mean to put any of it on me,” she said eventually, rubbing one palm lightly against the thigh of her jeans. “I know that.” Her voice was softer than before, stripped of most of the guarded ease she usually wore around strangers. “It’s just... nobody’s ever apologised for that before.”

She gave a small shake of her head, almost embarrassed by how much the admission had cost her. There were dozens of things she could have explained, but suddenly she didn’t want to. She didn’t want Blake’s first real conversation with her to become a catalogue of every way telepathy had hurt. She didn’t want to tell him about being thirteen and taking pills because she couldn’t sleep, or about discovering years later that whisky could reproduce enough of the same quiet to become tempting. He didn’t need to carry that simply because she had carried part of him.

“People usually worry about what I can hear,” she continued after a moment. “Which... fair enough.” A faint, humourless breath escaped her, but nothing about it was really a joke. “I would too.” Her eyes lifted to his again. “They don’t normally think about what it’s like hearing it.”

That was enough. She left the rest where it belonged.

Her gaze moved to the packet in Blake’s hand. Seeing it there did something to her she couldn’t quite name. Lily’s hair was back with her father. Such a small thing, and yet it seemed to change the whole shape of the cabin. Niamh thought about the people she had hurt over the years because someone above her had decided they were obstacles, threats or acceptable losses. Some had been mothers. Some had been fathers. She had known that at the time in the abstract and trained herself not to care about what waited beyond the edge of the mission. A husband wondering why somebody hadn’t come home. A child sitting beside a phone. A bedroom that remained exactly as someone had left it because nobody could bear to move anything yet.

Blake’s dreams had dragged those possibilities into the light.

“I’ve done things to people who had families,” Niamh said quietly. The words came out before she could decide whether they should. She didn’t elaborate. Didn’t tell him numbers or names or try to make his grief into a place where she could confess her own sins. Her gaze remained on the little packet instead. “People who had somebody waiting for them.”

Her throat tightened and she stopped there, because anything more would become about her, and this wasn’t.

After a moment Niamh looked back at him, the composure she’d spent years perfecting worn thin enough now that she looked every bit of twenty-two. “When I heard you dreaming about her...” She faltered, found another way through. “You weren’t only remembering how she died. That’s not what stayed with me.” Her voice softened. “You remembered her being happy. You remembered being her dad.”

She swallowed and glanced down again.

“I think that’s why the bike mattered so much.”

There was no need to say she had fought to recover it. No need to ask for thanks.

Niamh took a slow breath, then met his eyes again. “I’m glad you’ve got that back.”

Her gaze settled briefly on Lily’s hair.

“Whatever else happens, you should have that.”

Blake remained quiet for a long moment, the weight of Niamh's confession settling over him with a strange heaviness. His fingers stayed curled carefully around the small packet, his thumb tracing absent-mindedly along its edge. It was almost impossibly light, yet holding it felt like holding a fragment of Lily herself. A few strands of hair. Something that had once belonged to his daughter and, somehow, had survived everything that had taken her from him. He wasn't sure he would ever be able to explain what that meant to him.

He became aware that Niamh was still standing. Something about that suddenly felt wrong. Perhaps it was the way she held herself, guarded and uncertain, as though she was waiting for him to decide what she was worth now that he knew what she had done. Blake knew that feeling. He had spent years wondering whether the worst thing about himself was the thing people would eventually see.

“Sit down,” he said quietly.

He nodded towards the chair beside the desk, then towards the unmade bed.

“Either there. Wherever you're comfortable. You don't need to stand.”

There was no authority in the words. No command. It came almost instinctively, the same quiet protectiveness that had once made him kneel beside frightened victims on Manhattan streets and speak to them until they stopped shaking. Except this felt different somehow. As Niamh moved towards the bed, Blake found himself thinking that there was something almost strangely familiar about the moment. He had never met her before today, yet there was an odd sensation of being the older brother speaking to a younger sister who had finally admitted that she was hurting.

Perhaps it was because she looked so young to him. Perhaps it was because, beneath everything she had just confessed, he could hear the same uncertainty he had carried for most of his adult life.

Once she had settled, Blake leaned back against the edge of the desk. His arms folded loosely across his chest, not defensively, but simply because he needed somewhere to put them. The packet remained secure in one hand.

“I don't know what to say to that.”

He let the words sit between them.

There was no anger in his voice. No absolution either. Blake didn't think either of those things would be honest.

“I don't know what you did. I don't know the people involved, or what was done to you before you ever had a choice in any of it.” His eyes remained on her, searching her expression without trying to pry anything more from her. “And I'm not going to stand here and tell you that everything you've done can simply be forgiven because you regret it.”

He paused.

“But I don't think regret makes you a monster either.”

The words felt important to him. Not because he knew enough to judge her, but because he knew enough to understand what it was like to be afraid of becoming something you couldn't take back.

His gaze dropped to the packet again.

“You heard me remember my daughter,” he said more quietly. “You heard the worst part of it. The gunshots. The storm. The guilt. Everything I've spent the last few months trying not to think about.”

His throat tightened, but he continued.

“But you heard something else too.”

He looked back at her.

“You heard me being her dad.”

For a moment, the grief was there again. Not the violent, suffocating grief he had carried through Manhattan, but something quieter. A memory of Lily laughing. Lily calling him Daddy. Lily asking for pancakes. The ordinary things that had once seemed so insignificant and now felt like pieces of a life he would give almost anything to have back.

“And instead of using any of that against me, you made sure this came home.”

He raised the packet slightly.

“That tells me something.”

Niamh said nothing. She simply watched him.

“Maybe it doesn't erase what happened before,” Blake continued. “Maybe it shouldn't. Some things probably shouldn't be erased just because we're sorry for them.”

He took a slow breath.

“But it means you're capable of making a different choice now.”

The engine beneath them gave a low, almost imperceptible vibration. Somewhere beyond the cabin, the sea moved steadily against the hull. For a few seconds, neither of them spoke.

“I think that's all any of us can really do.”

A faint, almost humourless smile touched Blake's mouth.

“Make a different choice when we get the chance.”

His eyes lowered for a moment.

“I've spent twelve years being terrified of what I am. Hiding it. Controlling every little thing I could. Convincing myself that if I never let anyone see it, then maybe it couldn't hurt anyone.”

His jaw tightened slightly.

“Then Lily was shot, and I lost control.”

He gave a small, rueful shake of his head.

“I nearly destroyed three city blocks of Manhattan.”

There was no pride in the admission. Only disbelief. Even now, remembering it, part of him struggled to reconcile the man who had stood beneath that storm with the man sitting here now.

“So I'm probably not the best person in the world to tell you that you're defined by your worst moment.”

He looked at her again.

“But I don't think you are.”

The words came more firmly this time.

Blake let the silence return, giving her room rather than trying to fill it. He didn't expect her to respond. He didn't need her to. For once, he wasn't trying to fix something. He was simply trying to make sure she understood that he had heard her.
His gaze fell once more to the packet in his hand.

“And I'm glad you remembered that she was more than the way she died.”

His voice caught slightly. He swallowed against it, but didn't look away.

“Because she was.”

A softer expression settled across his face.

“She was funny. She was stubborn. She could drive me absolutely bloody mad.” A tiny smile appeared despite himself. “She loved pancakes.”

His thumb brushed carefully over the packet.

“And she was my little girl.”

He looked back at Niamh.

“That part matters too.”

Niamh chose the bed.

She sat near the edge at first, then drew her legs up beneath her and crossed them, hands resting loosely in her lap while Blake spoke. It was a strangely ordinary position for a conversation that felt anything but. A week ago she would probably have taken the chair without thinking, somewhere with her feet already on the floor and the door easy to reach. Now she sat on somebody else’s unmade bed aboard a ship she still hadn’t quite decided she belonged on, listening to a man she’d met less than an hour ago tell her that one decent choice had to mean something.

She kept her eyes on him for most of it.

There were places where she could have interrupted. When he talked about regret. When he said he didn’t know what she had done, or what had been done to her first. He was right about both, and Niamh wasn’t about to fill in the blanks because he’d been kind to her. Whatever strange closeness Blake’s dreams had created between them ran one way. She knew things about him that he had never chosen to tell her; he barely knew her at all.

'Keep something for yourself.'

So she did.

When he said that making sure Lily’s hair came back told him something about her, Niamh lowered her gaze to her hands. It was uncomfortable being seen through one good thing when she knew how many uglier things sat behind it, but she didn’t argue with him either. Maybe that was part of this too. Learning not to slap away every decent thing anybody offered because accepting it felt suspiciously close to owing them.

His story about Manhattan drew her attention back up.

“Twelve years?” she said quietly, disbelief touching her expression before he reached the part about losing control. Three city blocks made her brows rise. “Three blocks?”

There was just enough of a pause for the weight in the room to loosen.

“Honestly, Manhattan probably needed the facelift.”

The smile that followed was small and gone quickly. She wasn’t making light of why it had happened. They both knew what stood at the centre of that storm.

Niamh tucked a loose strand of copper hair behind her ear and looked towards the porthole for a moment. “I get the hiding part,” she said. “More than I’d like to, probably.”

She could have stopped there. Almost did.

“There are things I regret.” Her fingers worried briefly at the cuff of her jeans. “There are things I don’t. That’s... probably the bit I haven’t worked out yet.”

Her mouth tightened faintly as she looked back at him. “So I’m not going to give you the tragic life story and let you decide it was all somebody else’s fault. It wasn’t.”

That was more than she’d meant to say, and the realisation showed in the way she drew back slightly into herself afterwards. Not physically away from Blake so much as behind whatever internal line she kept between what people were allowed to know and what still belonged to her.

“It’s not really a first-day conversation anyway.”

There was a trace of warmth in that, not quite a joke but enough to tell him she wasn’t shutting him out entirely.

What stayed with her was what he’d said about different choices. Niamh looked down at the packet in his hand and thought of how many years of her life had been made up of somebody else deciding what the next choice would be. Who she spoke to. Who she touched. Who she frightened. Who she made believe something that wasn’t true. Running from SAAG had been the first choice that had felt entirely hers in years.

Joining the Excelsior might have been the second.

“Maybe that’s enough for now,” she said eventually. “Making a better choice when you get one.”

Her voice had softened, some of the Galway returning around the edges without her noticing. “I can probably manage one at a time.”

Then Blake spoke about Lily.

Funny. Stubborn. Pancakes.

Something in Niamh’s face changed as he gave his daughter back all the ordinary pieces grief had nearly buried beneath the way she died. She looked at him while he spoke, and for once the memories she had overheard didn’t feel like something stolen. Not because they belonged to her now, they never would, but because Blake was choosing to put words around them himself.

“Pancakes,” she repeated softly, and a smile found her before she could stop it.

That fit.

She had no idea why it fit. Maybe because in everything his sleeping mind had thrown at her, Lily had never felt like the solemn little ghost grief wanted to turn dead children into. She had been noisy and loved and alive. A daughter who could apparently annoy her father and demand breakfast and occupy more room in his life than the tiny packet in his hand could ever suggest.

Niamh’s eyes dropped towards it.

“That’s what I meant before,” she said. “What I heard wasn’t just what happened to her.”

She hesitated, careful now because these memories still weren’t hers to narrate back to him.

“There was loads of normal stuff mixed in with it. Her laughing. You being driven mad by something she’d done.” A faint smile returned. “Apparently pancakes.”

Niamh looked back at him.

“I’m glad that part was louder.”

The words came quietly and without anything added afterwards.

She shifted slightly on the bed, folding her hands around one ankle as the Excelsior moved beneath them. For the first time since entering the cabin, the silence didn’t feel uncomfortable. Blake had Lily’s hair. He knew what Niamh was. She knew a little more about what he was.

Neither of them seemed to have run yet.

For Niamh, that was probably enough for one morning.

 

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