***

What, truly, is family? What is home?

Rainer had found himself turning those questions over from time to time, a few years back.

Does sharing blood make people family? Then why did being among them leave him feeling so fractured?

The imperial palace — what he had always called home — was never a place where he could set his heart down and rest.

And so he had come to think:

Family must be whoever makes you whole simply by being near. Home must be wherever you can return to, at any hour, and feel at ease. And there was no reason, he thought, that such a place had to be a place at all.

The person who became that for him — he met her seven years ago.

Among the officer cadets dispatched to the southern front for live training exercises, one stood out from the rest.

Someone almost excessively upright and incorruptible, who seemed to carry the weight of the entire world on her own shoulders.

Judith Grein.

“To write off isolated allies as sacrificial pieces — people are not chess pieces, Your Highness.”

She pressed her finger to the southern withdrawal route on the tactical map spread across the table — the one marked over with diagonal lines.

That was the point Rainer had chosen to seal off, isolating a small rear unit in order to draw the enemy’s main force.

“What exactly do you mean by that, Cadet Grein?”

Rainer, chin propped in his hand, studied her.

He thought it rather bold — a cadet presuming to second-guess a commanding officer’s tactics.

“This strategy may be efficient. But it is cowardly.”

“Cowardly.”

A familiar word. He had heard it applied to him before.

He had long been notorious for his ruthless tactics — tactics that, in the pursuit of victory, cast aside honor and pride without hesitation, driving the majority of his own forces into harm’s way.

Rainer stopped twirling his pen and settled deeper into his chair.

On the battlefield, his methods were often called cowardly by the enemy — but to hear it from an ally, and a fresh-faced cadet not yet even commissioned, was a first.

Rainer smiled faintly.

He found himself curious what she would say next.

“Why cowardly? Thanks to it, more men survive, and the fastest possible victory is secured.”

“Because for the sake of winning a little sooner, you are sending hundreds of perfectly able soldiers to their deaths.”

Judith kept her eyes fixed on the diagonal lines crossing the map.

“They did not fall behind through incompetence. They held their positions because they trusted your orders — and were trapped when you cut off the route.”

“…….”

“Throwing comrades who are fighting to the last in faith of us as bait — that is not a tactic. That is betrayal. Do not use the lives of my fellow cadets for your easy victories, Your Highness.”

Rainer’s eyes went cold and still.

Judith did not look away. She held those dark red eyes directly, without flinching.

As though the fearsome force of his reputation and the authority of imperial blood meant nothing to her — her gaze held only the will to correct the unjust tactic laid out before her.

Looking into those cool, unwavering dark green eyes, Rainer felt something stir inside him.

“Sharp eyes, for a cadet. But if we follow the route you want, we spare our own losses — and add three days before we can report a victory.”

Rainer tapped the red pen against the map, once, twice, as he asked. It was not a simple question. It was a test: can you bear the weight of more than just your answer?

Judith pressed her finger calmly to the map and replied.

“To endure three days more and bring every last one of them home alive — that is the pride of our imperial army, as I was taught it.”

Not a moment’s hesitation.

All his life, the looks directed at him had been careful and pitying — the glances people gave a rejected prince. To have someone plant their convictions squarely in front of him and say, without flinching, you are wrong — that was a first.

Meeting those stubbornly principled eyes, Rainer felt something strange move through him: a sudden, inexplicable sense of liberation.

That day, for the first time, Rainer revised a tactical plan. Less efficient — but, as Judith had put it, not cowardly.

After Judith was commissioned as an officer in the imperial palace guard, Rainer found himself frequenting the garrison far more often than his own office.

When Judith came walking over after training, wiping sweat from her face, Rainer would be leaning against the pillar at the garrison entrance, calling out to her as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

“Grein. Have you read the report on the Karpels deployment?”

“……Your Highness, you are here again.”

Judith, who had initially found his visits uncomfortable, gradually grew accustomed to his presence.

“I have already finished reviewing the report. Though, Your Highness — I understand the need for bait, but if the terrain allows for an ambush, could we not draw the enemy in without any sacrifice at all?”

Judith criticized Rainer’s ruthless methods — and yet, paradoxically, she held in high regard the sheer creativity and range of approaches that his ruthlessness made possible, and she trusted the battlefield insight that made him formidable.

The Rainer she had observed was not a villain.

He was, she thought, closer to someone genuinely without malice — a person who, in the process of finding the most efficient path toward an objective, simply lacked whatever faculty would have let him consider the ethical consequences of that path.

And then, one night. The door to Rainer’s office opened quietly.

Judith had come late, a revised proposal in hand.

“Please scrap the plan to burn the entire village and cut off the retreat route.”

Judith let out a breath and drew a new line across the map.

“Even without ill intent, this cannot be allowed to stand. Every time Your Highness produces a scheme like this, I truly……”

Rainer looked at the line she had drawn and laughed softly.

“No ill intent, you say — Yudi, you think far too well of me.”

He had been quietly shifting the way he addressed her for some time now, closing the distance little by little. Judith, for her part, had met him in kind — her reproaches growing more unguarded with every exchange.

Rainer leaned back in his chair and looked up at her from a slight angle.

“Everyone else says I am a heartless man. Why is it that you alone see me so differently?”

“……Your Highness is simply without guile. You were never taught which path was right — that is all.”

Judith gathered the map, ink still not fully dry, and pushed it to the side of his desk.

Then she straightened her uniform and looked at him squarely.

“Which is why I intend to set Your Highness back on the right course myself.”

At those words — strange blend of compassion and responsibility — Rainer revised the plan as she asked, as though helpless to refuse.

In truth, it may have been something simpler: that she believed him capable of being a better man, and he wanted, more than he could say, to be worthy of that belief.

He watched Judith’s back as she walked away, and felt a quiet, peculiar satisfaction settle over him.

The peace he had found — the first of his life — was shattered not long after.

Some days after the Third Laurif Pirate Suppression Operation ended in failure.

When he finally clawed his way back from the edge of death and opened his eyes, what awaited him was the news of Judith’s dishonorable discharge — and the news that she had vanished without a trace.

***

When the last firework faded, a profound silence fell over the room.

‘He wants me.’

Flashing light scatters and makes illusions. Judith found herself thinking that, suddenly.

Everything that had come from his lips felt distant, like something from a dream.

The tension of the past several days broke all at once, and exhaustion and drowsiness surged in to take its place, blurring her mind. Her judgment was slipping.

The reason she had clung to like a lifeline ceased to function — and in its absence, feelings without names began to surface.

Judith looked inward at her own state and wondered: if she were to give this feeling a name, what would it be.

“……Do you love him, Captain?”

Love.

……She didn’t know.

The love that lingered in fragments of her past memories was something clean and noble.

To step back and wish for the other person’s happiness. To willingly erase yourself from the picture, if that was what was needed.

That was how Judith had always defined love.

But what she felt now did not fit that definition in the least.

This was something far more viscous and ungainly than love. It was desire.

The arrogance of wanting to claim this man — desperate enough to kneel before her — as wholly and entirely her own, if only for a single moment.

The foolishness of stepping forward anyway, knowing full well that whatever lay at the end of this road was ruin.

Judith finally understood the name of the twisted longing she had not noticed growing inside her.

‘I want him.’

I, too. Want him.

The blur of her unrecovered memories screamed at her that she could not afford to go any deeper with him — but in this moment, instinct moved faster than reason.

“……Is this what you mean, when you say you want me?”

Judith parted her lips, her voice low, and reached out.

Her fingertips grazed the buttons of his ceremonial coat and trailed slowly down across his chest. The touch that landed over firm muscle was an unmistakable invitation — and a question.

Rainer’s body went rigid as stone.

As though he had not anticipated this, he exhaled a ragged breath and caught her wrist, stopping her hand where it was.

“……Judith.”