Private Still Breathing

[Ironwraith]

The jungle had stopped feeling like a place and started feeling like a verdict.
Ironwraith moved through it anyway.
Weeks behind enemy lines had stripped the world down to something brutally simple. Green. Mud. Heat. The constant, patient awareness that anything alive was either watching him or waiting for him to stop moving.

He kept moving.
Echelon Corporation had called it a "high-risk infiltration and disruption engagement." That was what the briefing had said, clean and sterile, like the mission would stay that way if you named it carefully enough.

It hadn't.
The insurgent network had been deeper than intel suggested, better armed, and funded in ways that didn't officially exist on any ledger that mattered. By the time Ironwraith confirmed the scope, extraction was no longer a plan. It was a hope.

Then even that started running out.
A shot took him in the vest on day twelve. Something sharp caught his left arm on day sixteen, leaving it useless and half-responsive even now. The bleeding above his left brow was from a doorframe he did not remember meeting. The jury rigged chest wrap around his ribs was doing its best impression of structural support against something that absolutely wanted to collapse inward.

Still, the objective stayed intact.
Encrypted data core secured.
Facility compromised.
Network destabilized.

He keyed his comms again as he staggered through the undergrowth, one hand dragging along a broken tree trunk to keep himself upright.
"Echelon extraction, this is Ironwraith."
Static answered first. Always does.

He forced another breath through the pain tightening under his ribs.
"Package is live. Grid is compromised. I need evac now."
A pause.
Then a calm corporate voice cut through the interference like it was reading a weather report.

"Acknowledged, Executive Advisor Ironwraith. Extraction asset en route. Hold position."
He almost laughed.
Executive Advisor for Security Operations. That title still felt like something slapped onto him after someone in a glass office decided "asset with opinions" needed branding.

"Yeah," he muttered, forcing himself forward another step. "Working on it."
The world tilted.
The evac never sounded close enough, not even when the gunship finally punched through the canopy and turned the jungle into a storm of shattered green and burning light.

Three days later.
White ceilings. Sterile air. The soft, mechanical patience of medical equipment doing its job better than he could do his.
Ironwraith lay half-propped in a Republic-era recovery bed that Echelon had probably leased, upgraded, and billed back to itself under some internal category labeled Operational Asset Maintenance.

His chest was tightly wrapped in layered bandaging that made every breath feel negotiated. His left arm sat locked in a rigid brace, immobilized from shoulder to wrist. Stitches above his left eyebrow pulled slightly when he blinked, a constant reminder that he had, in fact, been losing that argument with a doorframe.

He'd been there a few days.
Long enough for pain to become routine instead of alarming.
Long enough for silence to become louder than gunfire.

The door slid open with a soft hiss.
A medical droid rolled in, pausing near the bed as its sensors adjusted.
"Executive Advisor Ironwraith," it said. "Due to the severity of your condition upon arrival, Echelon Corporation initiated emergency contact protocols."
Ironwraith exhaled slowly through his teeth.

"Of course they did."
The droid continued without emotion, as all machines eventually do when exposed to enough human bureaucracy.
"Your primary contact was notified."

That got his attention.
"…Primary contact?"
A pause.

"Contact designation: Anna Rix."
The room didn't change.
But something in it definitely did.

tags: Ana Rix

 

[Ana Rix]

The notification arrived halfway through a diagnostics report. Ana barely looked up at first. Echelon alerts appeared often enough that most were routine maintenance requests, security reviews, or internal notices someone higher in the company had decided absolutely everyone needed to read. She was already reaching to dismiss it when one line caught her eye. Emergency Contact Notification. Her fingers stopped moving over the keyboard as the report disappeared from her screen, replaced instead by the alert. Her eyes moved rapidly across the text until they stopped on a name she hadn't expected to see. Executive Advisor Ironwraith. Medical stabilization successful. Emergency contact protocol initiated. She read it once. Then again, slower this time, as though the words might rearrange themselves into something less alarming if she gave them the opportunity.

The office around her gradually faded into the background while the implications settled in. It had only been a few months since they had last spoken. There had been no argument, no betrayal, no dramatic goodbye that marked the end of whatever they had been to one another. Life had simply done what it always seemed determined to do. His assignments became longer. Hers became more demanding. One delayed message turned into another, then into weeks of silence that neither of them had intentionally created. Every now and then, she had caught herself wondering how he was doing, usually while working late into the night or after reading another security bulletin that mentioned some conflict halfway across the galaxy. She had always assumed he was somewhere impossible, doing something dangerous, exactly as he always had. Apparently, she hadn't been wrong. Yet through all of that time, neither of them had bothered changing the emergency contact information they had filled out months earlier.

Ana leaned back slowly in her chair and let out a quiet breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding. Her eyes lingered on the final line of the report longer than the others. Stable. That single word carried more weight than all the medical descriptions surrounding it. It meant she hadn't been too late. It meant there was still someone to visit, rather than someone to mourn. A faint, almost involuntary smile tugged at the corner of her mouth as she shook her head. "You idiot..." she murmured softly, the words carrying far more relief than irritation. Closing the report she'd been working on without another thought, she rose from her desk, collected the jacket hanging over the back of her chair, and headed for the door. The diagnostics could wait. The emails could wait. The network would survive an afternoon without her supervision. There were very few people who could make her abandon work without a second thought. Ironwraith, apparently, was still one of them.

The medical wing smelled exactly as every hospital she had ever visited smelled. The air was filtered to the point of feeling artificial, the corridors spotless beneath bright white lighting that seemed determined to erase every reminder that pain had ever existed within those walls. Medical droids moved with quiet efficiency between rooms while the muted hum of monitoring equipment blended into a constant background rhythm. Ana walked the corridor without hurrying, though not because she lacked urgency. Quite the opposite. She had learned long ago that rushing rarely changed the outcome once a patient had reached recovery. As she approached the room listed in the notification, however, her steps gradually slowed until she stood just outside the door. For the first time since receiving the alert, uncertainty crept into her thoughts. What exactly were you supposed to say to someone you hadn't seen in months? Hello. Sorry, life became complicated. I heard you nearly died. Every possibility sounded inadequate.

She rested one hand lightly against the doorframe, closing her eyes for the briefest of moments before letting out a slow breath. Thinking about the perfect opening line wasn't going to produce one. It never had. With a quiet shake of her head at her own hesitation, she pressed the entry panel. The door slid open with its characteristic whisper, revealing the recovery room beyond. Her eyes found him almost immediately. Bandages wrapped tightly around his chest. A rigid brace held his left arm immobile. Fresh stitches disappeared into his hairline above one eyebrow. He looked exhausted in the way only someone who had spent too long fighting to stay alive could. But he was breathing. Awake. Alive. The knot that had been tightening quietly in her chest ever since reading the notification loosened all at once.

A familiar smile found its way onto her face before she had the chance to stop it. Folding her arms loosely across her chest as she stepped into the room, Ana took a moment to look him over, silently cataloging every injury without making it obvious that she was doing so. The assessment was automatic; the engineer in her was examining damage while the woman who had once shared quiet evenings with him simply felt relieved that he was still here to be examined at all. "You know..." she began, the warmth in her voice returning more naturally than she had expected, "most people just send a message when they want to catch up." Her eyes lingered on the bandages one final time before meeting his again. "This feels unnecessarily dramatic, even for you. It's good to see you, though."

Ironwraith

 

[Ironwraith]

Ironwraith didn't answer right away.
For a moment, he just stared at her like his brain was still loading her presence into reality. Like the medbay, the pain, the weeks in the jungle all had to be reprocessed now that she was standing there breaking the pattern.

Then his mouth twitched.
Not quite a grin at first. More like his face remembering how.
"…Ana."
The name came out rough. Dry from too many days of recycled air and pain meds that did their best impression of mercy without actually committing to it.

His eyes flicked over her like he was checking for injuries out of habit more than concern, the same way he would scan a battlefield even when there wasn't one. That instinct didn't shut off just because the war changed uniforms.

"I was hoping you'd ignore it," he added.
A faint smile finally made it through, small and stubborn, like it had to fight its way past everything else happening in his body.
"It's good to see you."
That one landed heavier than the joke.

He shifted slightly, immediately regretting it. The movement pulled at his chest wrap and his ribs answered with a sharp, immediate complaint. The smile broke into a wince as a short, humorless laugh escaped him anyway.

"Yeah… don't do that," he muttered to himself.
The laugh turned into a cough before he could stop it.
It hit harder than expected, shoulders tightening as pain flared through his side. His left hand twitched in the brace like it wanted to be useful and couldn't remember how.

When it finally passed, he leaned back into the bed with a slow breath, eyes briefly closing.
"…Sorry," he said quietly. "Going dark wasn't... it wasn't personal."

A pause.
His gaze drifted toward the corner of the room, where his armor sat partially stacked and half-salvaged, like someone had tried to turn a war into luggage.

"It was the mission."
He said it like that was supposed to explain everything. Like it usually did.
It didn't soften anything now.
Another breath, slower this time. Controlled. Pain managed the way soldiers manage everything they can't fix.

"I got it done," he added. "Package is secure. Whatever they wanted… they got it."
His eyes came back to her then, more focused now, less distant.
Then, like he remembered something that mattered more than Echelon reports and medical charts, he shifted his good hand slightly under the blanket near his side.

A careful movement. Slow. Measured.
"I..." he started, then stopped, exhaling through his nose like he was annoyed at himself for even hesitating.
"Before I blacked out… I kept something."
His gaze flicked briefly toward the armor again, then back to her.

"It's in the belt pocket. On the kit."
A faint, almost embarrassed half-smile returned.
"Figured you'd get the notification eventually. Didn't think it'd be while I was still in one piece enough to explain it."


Ana Rix

 

[Ana Rix]

Ana's smile lingered as he said her name, though it softened when the effort it took him became obvious. For a moment she simply stood there, taking him in properly instead of through the detached lens of the notification that had brought her here. The bruises, the bandages, the brace, the exhaustion in his eyes that no amount of medical treatment could erase overnight. It was all there, and yet somehow he still managed to find the energy to joke with her. That, more than anything else, sounded like Ironwraith.

"Ignoring it crossed my mind," she replied, the corner of her mouth lifting just enough for him to know she was playing along. "Then I remembered you have an unfortunate habit of treating near-fatal injuries like calendar reminders." Her tone was light, but her eyes never left him. She noticed the instinctive way he looked her over for injuries before saying anything else, the reflex of someone who had spent too much of his life expecting bad news. It was strangely familiar, and somehow comforting. "It's good to see you too." This time there wasn't a joke attached to it.

When he shifted and immediately regretted it, Ana's expression tightened. Instinct carried her a step closer to the bed before she even realized she'd moved. She waited through the coughing fit without saying a word, giving him the dignity of recovering on his own instead of fussing over him. Only after he settled back against the pillows did she speak again. "You don't have to apologize for disappearing," she said quietly. "I know what your work is like." She paused for a moment before letting out a small breath of her own. "I won't pretend I wasn't disappointed when weeks went by without hearing from you, but I never thought it was personal." It was the truth. Silence had hurt, but she had never mistaken it for rejection.

Her eyes followed his toward the battered armor sitting in the corner of the room. Even from here she could see the damage etched into it, each scrape and fracture another sentence in a story she suspected he hadn't yet told anyone in full. When he mentioned the belt pouch, curiosity flickered across her face, though it was quickly replaced by something gentler as she looked back at him. "You kept something?" she asked, her voice quieter now. For a heartbeat she considered leaving it where it was. Whatever he had carried through weeks in a jungle while bleeding and exhausted clearly hadn't been an accident.

Without another word, Ana crossed the room to the battered kit and crouched beside it. Her fingers brushed lightly over the worn belt before finding the pocket he'd indicated. She hesitated there for just a second, glancing back at him as though silently asking permission one last time before opening it. Whatever was inside suddenly felt far more important than she expected. Not because of what it might be, but because through everything he'd endured, through the pain, the mission, and the desperate fight simply to survive long enough for extraction, he had chosen to carry it with him. And somehow, despite months of silence between them, he'd been thinking about her.

Ironwraith

 

[Ironwraith]

Ironwraith watched her cross the room in silence.
Despite the pain, despite the stiffness that seemed to have settled into every muscle he owned, he found himself smiling. A genuine one this time. Small, tired... but genuine.

As Ana opened the pouch and withdrew its contents, a quiet chuckle escaped him.
"There it is."

The pendant caught the sterile light of the medbay, a polished crystal suspended from a simple chain. It looked unremarkable at first glance, little more than an attractive piece of jewelry.

"I found it while I was undercover," he said. "One of the merchants had it sitting in a box of odds and ends."
His eyes lingered on it for a moment before returning to her.

"They thought it was just a decorative crystal."
Another faint laugh.
"I may have encouraged that assumption."

The corner of his mouth tugged upward.
"Picked it up for next to nothing."
His voice grew quieter.

"It's actually an old data crystal. Still intact, too. I never got around to seeing what was on it." He shrugged carefully, mindful of the protest from his ribs. "Figured if it turned out to be worthless... it'd still make a decent necklace."
There was a brief silence before he added,
"When I saw it... I thought of you."

The admission came simply, without flourish or embarrassment. Just a statement of fact.
He shifted, planting his good hand against the mattress.
This time, instead of trying to muscle through the pain, he moved deliberately. Slow enough that the bandages held, careful enough that the room didn't spin.

With a quiet grunt, he managed to sit fully upright against the raised back of the bed.
"That's probably enough heroics for today," he muttered, more to himself than anyone else.
His attention returned to Ana.

"So..."
The smile returned, softer now.
"How've you been?"

Months had passed between them.
There were countless questions he could have asked.
How's work?

Are you sleeping?
Have things gotten any easier?
Instead, he settled on the simplest one.
"I've been wondering."

Ana Rix

 

[Ana Rix]

Ana turned the crystal over carefully in her fingers, the polished surface catching the sterile lights overhead as she examined the precision of its cut. It was in remarkably good condition for something so old, the facets still crisp despite however many hands it had passed through before ending up in a merchant's box of forgotten odds and ends. A small smile tugged at the corner of her mouth as she looked back at him, equal parts amused and impressed that he'd managed to bargain for it without knowing its true value. More importantly, through everything he'd endured in that jungle, he'd still chosen to carry it back because it had reminded him of her. That realization settled somewhere warm in her chest.

"You definitely got the better end of that deal," she said softly, rolling the crystal between her fingers. "I have a reader at home, so we can find out what's stored on it." A quiet laugh escaped her. "They're not common enough that I carry one around with me all the time, but they're not impossible to find either." She let the chain drape across her palm before adding, "Even if it turns out to be empty, it's still beautiful."

As he slowly worked himself upright, Ana resisted the urge to help. She could see from the careful way he moved that he wasn't trying to prove anything; he simply wanted to sit without reopening half-healed wounds. Instead, she crossed the remaining distance to his bedside and quietly pulled the nearby chair closer before settling into it. It placed her close enough that neither of them had to raise their voices, but far enough that she wouldn't accidentally bump the bed or tug at one of the countless bandages holding him together. "I'm staying over here," she said with a faint, knowing smile. "I don't want to jostle you and hurt you any more than you already are."

His question lingered between them for a moment. It was deceptively simple, the kind people asked every day without really expecting an honest answer. Somehow, coming from him, it felt different. Ana leaned back slightly in the chair, the crystal still resting loosely in her hand as she considered how to answer. "Getting by day to day," she admitted with a small shrug. "Work has been...work. Networks break, people click on things they shouldn't, executives panic because someone forgot a password and suddenly it's an emergency." A quiet laugh escaped her before she looked back at him. "Nothing nearly as exciting as disappearing into a jungle for weeks, apparently."

She fell quiet again, her eyes studying him for a moment longer before dropping briefly to the crystal in her hand. Months hadn't been enough to erase the familiarity between them. If anything, it had only made it more obvious. The conversation still came easily. The silence still wasn't uncomfortable. She rolled the pendant gently between her fingers before meeting his eyes once more, the warmth returning to her smile. "I've missed talking to you," she admitted simply. "Even if your timing for catching up could use some work."

Ironwraith