Location: Midgard Company Medical Annex, Armathane Compound
Time: Day 208 After Alec's Arrival
The infirmary smelled of clean linen, sun-warmed stone, and rosemary boiling in shallow copper pots. A window was open just enough to let the late spring air in — crisp, but not sharp.
Mira stood over a table of herb bundles, sorting them with the precision of someone who'd done it since girlhood. Her sleeves were rolled to the elbow. Her hands moved without thinking.
She heard the door open before she turned.
It wasn't the click of boots.
It was the silence behind them.
"Alec," she said.
Not Lord. Not Overseer. Just his name.
He closed the door behind him.
"Mira."
It wasn't cold, but it was familiar but distant still.
Just Alec.
She gestured toward the table. "They said you wanted to observe progress in the sector. I didn't think you'd come in person."
"I don't supervise from a distance."
She smiled a little. "Yes, I remember."
"You haven't visited me since i arrived, I thought you were avoiding me" she added.
"I have been busy. Surely you know that" he said to her.
She didn't respond.
He approached, eyes moving across the bundles. He didn't touch them.
"You're organizing by heat?"
"Heat and moisture retention, yes," she said. "It lets me pair faster-evaporating plants with damp roots for mixed remedies. Cuts down shelf life loss."
He nodded once.
"You learned that in Branhal?"
She hesitated. "Partially. Some of it I… adapted."
That got his attention.
"Explain."
Mira stepped aside and pulled a parchment from the wall — not official, just hand-drawn. A looping system of herb symbols, broken into quadrants.
"I started tracking reactions," she said. "Not just patient recovery, but the feel of the symptoms over time. A boy with a gut rot might stop vomiting, but still feel tight in the chest if the mixture was too dry. That kind of thing."
She placed the parchment in front of him. "These are intuition. But I'm working on quantifying them."
Alec studied it.
His silence lasted almost thirty seconds.
Then: "This isn't folk medicine."
She tilted her head. "No?"
"This is the beginning of medical indexing."
Mira looked at him — not smiling now.
"You say that like it's a threat."
"It's structure. That means consistency. That means the end of improvisation."
"I know what it means, Alec."
She walked around the table, facing him directly now.
"I may have been a village healer, but I wasn't guessing."
"I didn't say you were."
"No," she said. "You never say much at all."
The pause stretched.
Alec didn't step back. But his voice was quieter now.
"You expected something else."
"I did," she said. "I thought when I got here — when I joined this thing you're building — that we'd talk. Like we did before. Like we were two people, not just two roles."
His expression didn't change.
But she pressed forward anyway.
"You trusted me once. Back in Branhal. When everyone else saw a man fallen from the sky, I brought you into my home. I stitched you back together."
"You did," he said.
"And now?"
A beat.
"I remember it," Alec said. "But I don't… assign it weight. That doesn't mean it wasn't important. Only that I don't react to it."
She exhaled. Not frustrated. Just… tired.
"You mean emotionally."
"Yes."
There was silence then — the kind that doesn't demand to be filled.
Then Mira pulled off her apron, set it aside, and leaned back against the table.
"You know, I used to think you were lonely," she said.
Alec said nothing.
"But now I think you just… exist on another line. Not above us. Not below. Just far enough that we can't touch it. And sometimes I wonder if that's your strength or your curse."
He looked at her — really looked at her now.
"That's not how I see it."
"How do you see it?"
"I'm not avoiding feeling. I'm… not ready to experience it properly. If I move before I understand it, I risk corrupting my choices."
"You talk like a machine."
"No," he said. "A machine doesn't know it might be wrong."
The room was quiet again.
Then she chuckled.
"Always so damn literal."
Alec blinked once. "I'm not being evasive."
"You're being you," she said. "And that's the thing. I didn't come here to romance the man who fell from the sky."
She crossed her arms. "But I did wonder if you'd remember who offered you bread before you had a name."
That stopped him.
And then, quietly — not awkwardly — Alec said:
"I remember you offered it without asking for anything."
Mira didn't reply.
She didn't need to.
He finally moved — stepping past her to a second table where a set of glass vials were arranged in rows. Labels in her hand-lettered script: cough-root, boneflower, dewblossom.
"You're integrating fast," he said.
"I adapt," she replied. "Like someone else I know."
He gave the faintest ghost of a smile — so faint it didn't even reach his mouth.
Then: "I'd like you to work with Ferin on codifying this process. Herbal diagnostics. Dosage standardization. If we can cross-reference recovery time with your intuitive grouping, we might build the foundation for field treatment manuals."
She blinked.
"You want to scale my work?"
"I want to scale what works," Alec said. "Whether or not the system invented it."
That surprised her.
It pleased her, too.
But she didn't show it.
Not entirely.
As he reached for the door, Mira said quietly:
"Alec."
He turned.
"You don't have to feel anything for me," she said. "That's not what I'm asking."
He waited.
"I just want to know that somewhere, behind all that function and design… you still remember that you weren't born here."
He was still.
Then nodded.
"I remember."
And left.