Misaki woke to find Sera sitting cross-legged on the floor beside Riyeak's bed, her dark eyes fixed on him with the patient intensity of a child who'd been waiting for hours. Kyn slept in her lap, the infant's tiny fist clutched around her finger.
"You're awake," she said quietly, as if she'd been rehearsing those words.
Misaki sat up, rubbing sleep from his eyes. The refugee quarters' single window showed early morning light—Ulth'rk just beginning its long climb across the northern sky. "How long have you been sitting there?"
"A while." Sera's voice was small but steady. "I needed to talk to you. Before you left for the bridge."
Something in her tone made Misaki's chest tighten. He'd heard that particular kind of careful courage before—from soldiers about to ask questions they were terrified to hear answered. From refugees requesting information about family members they knew were probably dead.
"What is it, Sera?"
She took a breath. Then another. Her free hand twisted in the fabric of her dress—clean clothes provided by Seleun'mhir's refugee services, but still too large for her tiny seven-year-old frame.
"I never thanked you," she said finally. "For carrying me. For carrying Kyn. For not leaving us when we were too slow, when we couldn't keep up. The other adults... some of them wanted to. I heard them talking. But you said no."
"Sera, you don't need to—"
"And for letting us sleep in your room. For sharing your food. For..." Her voice cracked slightly. "For being kind when everything else was terrible."
Misaki felt something break inside his chest. This child had walked through genocide. Had carried her infant brother across a hundred forty kilometers of hostile terrain. Had watched her village burn and her parents die and everything familiar transform into ash and memory.
And she was thanking him for basic human decency.
"You're welcome," he managed. "But Sera, I didn't do anything special. Anyone would have—"
"No." The word was quiet but absolute. "Not everyone. Not anyone." She looked down at Kyn, then back up at Misaki, and her next words came out in a rush like she was afraid she'd lose courage if she slowed down. "Will you adopt us? Me and Kyn? Will you be our family?"
The question hit Misaki like physical impact. Adoption. In a world where people lived eight hundred years. Where parental responsibility wasn't eighteen years but potentially centuries. Where saying yes meant binding himself to these children for the rest of his natural life.
His mind raced through objections. He was twenty-one years old. A refugee himself. Working a temporary engineering job with uncertain future prospects. Living in government housing. He barely understood this world's laws, customs, social structures. He'd been on Vulcan for less than a year.
He had no business raising children.
Sera was watching him with those enormous dark eyes, and Misaki could see her preparing for rejection. Her small shoulders were already beginning to draw inward, her expression shifting toward the careful blankness that traumatized children learned to wear when adults disappointed them again.
And Kyn slept peacefully in her arms, completely trusting, completely vulnerable, completely unaware that his entire future was being decided in this moment.
"Yes," Misaki heard himself say.
Sera's eyes went wide. "Really?"
"Yes. Really." The words felt simultaneously terrifying and absolutely right. "I'll adopt you. Both of you."
The little girl's face crumpled. Not sadness—something bigger. Relief so profound it looked like pain. She set Kyn down carefully on the bed and then threw herself at Misaki, her small arms wrapping around his neck with desperate strength.
"Thank you," she sobbed into his shoulder. "Thank you thank you thank you—"
Behind them, Lyria dropped the medical text she'd been reading, the heavy book hitting the floor with a sound like thunder.
"Misaki," she said, her voice strained with shock and concern. "Do you understand what you just agreed to? Adoption in Seleun'mhir is legally binding. Permanent. You can't—you just—" She stopped, visibly struggling for words. "You're twenty-one years old. You just committed to raising two children for potentially the next seven hundred years."
Misaki looked over Sera's head at the healer, this woman who'd saved his life, who'd become something like a friend over their months together. Her amber eyes showed genuine alarm mixed with something that might have been respect or might have been horror—he couldn't quite tell.
"I know," he said quietly, still holding Sera as she cried. "I know exactly what I just did."
And the terrifying part was that he did. He understood the magnitude. The weight. The absolute transformation of his entire future that had just occurred because a seven-year-old girl had asked him a question while looking at him with eyes that had seen too much suffering.
But when he looked down at Sera—at this tiny survivor who'd carried her infant brother through hell and somehow still had enough faith left to ask a stranger to be her family—saying no had simply been impossible.
Some bridges you built because they were practical.
Some you built because they were necessary.
And some you built because a child looked at you and asked if you could carry them across the darkness into something that might eventually feel like home.
Lyria closed her eyes and took a long, slow breath. When she opened them again, her expression had shifted from shock to resignation to something almost like pride.
"Then I'll help you file the adoption papers," she said quietly. "Because you're going to need a witness. And someone who can explain to the Seleun'mhir family courts that you're not completely insane."
"Am I insane?" Misaki asked.
Lyria looked at Sera crying tears of relief in his arms. At Kyn sleeping peacefully on the bed. At Misaki's face, which showed terror and determination in equal measure.
"Probably," she admitted. "But sometimes the best decisions are the ones that terrify us most."