Ensign Ivalyan Keros - Counselor Mode Deactivated
Ivalyan Keros
The ground felt more solid than Ivalyan had any right to expect after that descent.
She was still cataloguing herself — hands scratched from the rockface, pine needles embedded in her knees, heart rate doing something embarrassing — when the Orions below began to argue over a crate and handed them, completely by accident, three names. Haukea was already whispering them to herself like a prayer. Ivalyan filed them away too, quieter, and watched Leda's face.
That was a mistake.
Whatever Leda was feeling, it was old. Layered. The kind of weight that didn't arrive all at once but had been accumulating for years, and now something below had just added the last impossible measure to it. Ivalyan didn't have words for the shape of it. She just felt it land in her own chest like a stone dropped into still water, and had to breathe carefully through her nose to keep her expression neutral.
Sylvax: They're moving research.
Willow: Research on the Grevad.
Ivalyan heard the words. Understood them, technically. But her attention was on Leda — the flare of her nostrils, the strangled sound she made, the thing underneath it that Ivalyan was already drowning in secondhand. She pressed her lips together and said nothing, because anything she might have said belonged to someone else's grief entirely.
The plan came together in pieces. Leda's voice was controlled and precise and Ivalyan did not believe for one second that she was either of those things right now. She looked to Haukea, then Ryden, and gave a single small nod when her input was invited. She was the least qualified person in this treeline to have an opinion on tactical ingress and she knew it. She'd follow their lead. She'd be useful where she could.
And then Leda sank to her knees.
This is my fault.
Ivalyan was moving before she'd made a decision to move. She dropped down beside her in the pine needles, graceless, but quiet and pulled her in, one arm around those small shoulders, tucking her close. She opened her mouth.
Ivlyan: St-st-...p-p-...
The stutter found her immediately, closed around the words she'd meant to say, and she let them go. She pressed her cheek against the top of Leda's head instead and just held on, and waited to see what Leda would do with it.
Leda: Response
Ivalyan blushed. She had broken protocol and knew it. Sometimes being a counselor came second, when people needed a friend. She knew how this whole mission was shaping up in her personnel record. And strangely? She didn't care. Nothing about this was normal. Nothing was fine. But she had learned so much. And her bosses wanted her to sneak up on a team of pirates now? Sure. What's the worst that could happen?
She nodded to her superiors, straightening her appearance.
Ivalyan: On your command.
All business, stutter gone.
Leda/Willow/Sylvax: Response