The wolf in repose

Posted on Tue Mar 31st, 2026 @ 3:17am by Ramielos Volsunga & Lieutenant Commander Yy
Edited on on Tue Mar 31st, 2026 @ 3:19am

2,479 words; about a 12 minute read

Mission: Shoreleave [3-4]
Location: Counseling Suite 1 - DS13
Timeline: Late Shoreleave

"This is a good chair. I fear that I will break your shared furniture anywhere else." Volsunga said as he settled. The eight-foot supersoldier was not suited to default Starfleet designs.

"I'm glad you like it. It's a polymorphic design. I'm sure one could be provided for you at your home and workplace." Yy said.

"My home is well-furnished. And it is where I work."

"If you change your mind, we're happy to help. How are you finding your work? I understand you've been producing tactical analyses." Yy asked.

"It is... satisfying. I cannot remember another task I've undertaken that was so... soothing." Volsunga admitted.

"That's good. What did you find soothing in your time before you arrived here?"

"Sleep. Long sleep. Little else allowed for such feelings. And it was a rare enough thing." Volsunga said.

"You are soothing too, but my training tells me it is a xenos trick. I mean, an ability... natural to your species."

"You're right. That's very perceptive. Deltan telempathy is quite subtle compared to the abilities of those like the Betazoids. But you've had experience with that too, haven't you?"

"Yes. Kakistos."

"How do you feel about what happened there?" Yy asked.

"Indifferent. He was warned. He dashed his mind against the bulwarks of an Astartes telepathic defensive structure. A suicide. He should have made better choices." Volsunga said quite calmly.

"If you feel this is too intrusive you don't need to answer it. But how many lives have you taken, in your time?" Yy asked. She knew the man was not dissimilar in age from her.

"We're trained not to see our enemies as lives. But, thousands. I don't have an exact number." Volsunga said.

"Does that bother you?" Yy asked without judgement.

Volsunga sat motionless in the oversized polymorphic chair, his great hands resting on the ends of the armrests as though he were restraining them by conscious effort. The office was quiet.

"No," he said at last. "Not in the manner you mean."

Yy did not move. "How do I mean it?"

"You mean remorse." He looked at her directly. "The answer is no."

Yy inclined her head slightly, accepting the precision. "Then is there another manner in which it does bother you?"

A longer pause, this one neither resistant nor evasive. It seemed instead that Volsunga was sorting through concepts rarely examined for their own sake. "It bothers me," he said, "when lives are spent to no purpose. When commanders waste men through vanity. When the weak are fed into a machine with no prospect of victory, only the appearance of effort. Slaughter without meaning is offensive. Necessary killing is not."

Yy let that settle in the room before replying. "So it is not death that troubles you. It is waste."

"Yes."

"And who decides what is necessary?"

Volsunga's expression did not change, but something in it sharpened. "Ideally? The wise."

"And in practice?"

"The armed." He said it with such utter absence of irony that it might almost have sounded gentle.

Yy folded one leg over the other. "You can understand why that answer might make a station counselor somewhat alert."

"I would have thought you alert already."

"I am." There was the barest suggestion of amusement in Yy's voice. "I'm assessing whether I need to be alarmed."

Volsunga considered that. "And your conclusion?"

"I haven't reached one yet."

That seemed to satisfy him more than reassurance would have.

Yy glanced down briefly at the padd in her lap, not reading from it so much as checking the shape of the conversation against the concerns that had led to it. Volsunga's history. His attitudes. The old atrocities carried in him not as trauma alone, but as doctrine. His obvious capacity for catastrophic violence. The fact that he had, so far, conducted himself with more restraint than many beings considerably smaller and supposedly more civilized.

She looked back up at him.

"You speak very calmly about things most people would find unbearable."

"Most people were not made for my duties."

"Do you believe that makes you better than them?"

Volsunga did not answer immediately. The silence was not hostile. Yy had learned that his silences were often effort, not aggression.

"In some things," he said. "Yes."

It was so blunt that Yy almost smiled.

"Thank you for your honesty," she said and tilted her head slightly. "Do you think that belief makes ordinary people contemptible?"

The answer came faster this time.

"No."

That, at least, was unambiguous. Yy watched him closely. "Why not?"

"Because worth and capability are not the same thing." He looked toward the viewport for a moment, where the traffic lights of the station moved like disciplined stars. "A child is not contemptible because he cannot lift a cannon. A civilian is not contemptible because she fears war. An unaugmented human is not contemptible because he was born into a softer age. They are merely... not built for the same purpose."

Yy heard the shape of the danger in that answer, and also its restraint. The creed was still there: hierarchy, utility, the brutal taxonomies of a life forged by war. But there was no random hunger in it. No twitch of predation. No eagerness.

"And if one of these softer people obstructs you?" Yy asked.

Volsunga looked back at her. "That depends. Is it ignorance? Fear? Duty? Treachery?"

"You categorize quickly."

"I survive by it."

"And on DS13?"

"On DS13," he said, "I am attempting to categorise more slowly."

Yy let out a small breath through her nose, not quite a laugh. "That's probably the most encouraging thing you've said since you came in."

"I can be more discouraging, if that would aid your professional balance."

"It won't."

For a moment, there was quiet again.

Yy's empathic sense continued its low, careful work around him. Volsunga's mind was not easy terrain. Much of him felt fortified, compartmentalized, ritualized by centuries of conditioning and battle discipline. But he was not fraying. He was not disorganized. He was not hunting for excuses to unleash himself. Beneath the adamantine structure there was fatigue, loneliness, what she thought was grief ground down so long it had become almost indistinguishable from endurance, but not instability.

She shifted the subject, gently but deliberately.

"I want to ask you something more personal."

Volsunga's eyes narrowed a fraction. "You have been doing that throughout."

"More personal than this."

That made him wary, which Yy took as a sign she had found the right door.

"Before your induction," she said, "before your chapter took you and remade you, what were you like as a boy?"

For the first time since he had entered the room, Volsunga looked caught off guard.

Not wounded. Not angry. Simply unsure.

Yy said nothing. She did not press.

When he finally spoke, his voice was lower.

"I do not know."

"Not at all?"

"Not in the way you mean." He frowned, and Yy had the distinct impression that the expression came not from irritation but from effort. "My memories of the time before I became Astartes are not whole. There are fragments."

"What sort of fragments?"

Volsunga's gaze drifted, not unfocused but distant, as if he were looking through layers of steel and years.

"Cold," he said. "Snow. Hunger. Running." His brow creased. "A sky the color of ash. The smell of old smoke in cloth. A dog, perhaps. Or something like one." He was silent for a beat. "I recall being smaller. Alone. Angry often. Quick to strike. Resolved to endure. Even when the tribe admitted me, things were still hard and violent."

Yy listened without interrupting.

"I remember wanting..." He stopped.

"What?" Yy asked quietly.

He gave a minute shake of his head, as if the memory itself were faintly offensive. "Not power. Not then. Safety, perhaps. Or certainty. They amount to much the same thing, on worlds like Fenris."

"And when the chapter found you?"

"I believed they were what men were supposed to be." He said it as one might recite a line from an old, half-broken prayer. "Certain. Unafraid. Incorruptible."

"And now?"

His eyes returned to her.

"Now I know they were also hungry boys, gathered early and sharpened into weapons before they could become anything else."

That answer changed the room.

Not dramatically. There was no confession, no collapse. Volsunga did not soften into a different man. But Yy could feel the truth of the statement sitting in him like a heavy thing he had only recently chosen not to carry at arm's length.

"Do you grieve for that boy?" she asked.

"No. There are few greater offerings one can make to the Emperor."

It was immediate enough to be reflex.

Yy waited.

After several seconds he added, "But I acknowledge him."

That was more than enough.

Yy set the padd aside. "There are people on this station who are concerned by your attitudes. Frankly, so am I."

"I had assumed as much."

"You have a history soaked in war. You evaluate life in terms of purpose, utility, and strength. You can sound, when you are being candid, like a man who was raised by a theology of violence and found it convincing."

Volsunga's mouth tightened very slightly. "That is not inaccurate."

"No," Yy said. "It isn't."

He regarded her steadily. "And yet you don't have security here."

"If I thought security could meaningfully contain you, this would be a different conversation."

That drew the faintest shift in his expression. Not humor, exactly. Recognition.

Yy continued, "My concern isn't that you're secretly waiting to murder the crew. I don't think you are. It's subtler than that."

"Explain."

"I think you are accustomed to a universe in which extreme violence solved moral uncertainty. Here, it usually doesn't. Here, most people will meet you with compromise, confusion, bureaucracy, or emotional need. Those things are not attacks. But I can imagine they might feel... intolerably inefficient."

Volsunga considered the point and, to Yy's approval, did not reject it.

"Yes," he said. "They often do."

"But?" She asked, wide-eyed.

"But inefficiency is not threat. Fear is not weakness in the moral sense. And confusion is common among those who have not seen the things I have seen."

"That's a very important distinction."

"Yes."

Yy leaned back slightly. "Then let me ask directly. Do you wish harm on anyone aboard this station?"

"No."

"Do you believe the crew are beneath your protection because they are weaker than you?"

Volsunga's eyes hardened, but not at her. At the proposition.

"No."

"Do you feel any urge to impose your own order on DS13 through force?"

At that, he actually seemed to think. Yy appreciated that more than an automatic denial.

"I feel the urge often," he said at last. "But urge is not intent. And intent is not action."

Yy nodded slowly. "Good answer."

"Your ways work for you. I would not presume to know better."

"I'm glad."

She let the silence sit a moment longer, then spoke more softly.

"I do have concerns about your attitudes, Ramielos. About what was done to you. About the ways you were taught to think of people, enemies, sacrifice, and virtue. I think there are areas of you that are deeply damaged and so well-armored they can masquerade as certainty."

Volsunga did not bristle. If anything, he seemed to accept the blow as a fair one.

"But," Yy said, "I do not see evidence that you pose any specific threat to the crew."

He held her gaze.

"You are dangerous," she went on. "Objectively. Inarguably. But danger is not the same as menace. You're controlled. Reflective. Capable of restraint. Capable of hearing a boundary and keeping it. That matters."

Volsunga was quiet for a long time. Finally: "You believe I am fit to remain at liberty."

"I do." Yy nodded.

"Despite all that I've said."

"Partly because of what you've said."

That seemed to puzzle him more than condemnation would have.

Yy explained. "Unstable men hide behind easy lies. They tell counselors what they think we want to hear. You have done the opposite. You have been direct about the severity of your beliefs, and just as direct about the limits you place on them. I don't have to wonder whether there's some hidden appetite in you waiting to surprise me. Maybe you're better than I give you credit for, but I think you have told me who you are, and I believe you."

"I see."

"And," Yy added, "you've shown repeated awareness that DS13 is not your old battlefield. You may not always like our methods, but you are adapting to them."

Volsunga looked at the viewport again. The station lights cast pale reflections across the scars on his face.

"This place is..." He paused, searching for a word that was probably not native to any tongue he respected. "Unusual."

Yy smiled faintly. "Yes. Even by our standards."

"It contains beings and polities that should, by all logic, be at war at every waking moment."

"Also yes."

"And yet it persists."

"Most days."

He gave a slow nod. "That is worthy of acknowledgement. Perhaps even defense."

There it was. Not warmth. Not conversion. But commitment in the shape Volsunga knew how to make it.

Yy rose, signaling the session's end without abruptness. "Then my assessment stands. I have concerns. I will likely continue to have concerns. But no, I do not consider you a specific threat to the people on this station. I will say as much in my report to the Captain."

Volsunga stood as well, towering up from the chair with the solemn gravity of a statue deciding to move.

"You have my thanks, Counsellor."

"Don't make me regret it."

"I will endeavor not to."

Yy clasped her hands behind her back and looked up at him. "And Ramielos?"

"Yes?"

"If fragments of that earlier life return to you; before the chapter, before the armor, before all the doctrine, I think you should tell me, and we should talk about it."

He was still for a moment. "Why?"

"Because there can be great strength derived from learning what the boy may have to say about the man you became."

Volsunga considered that with the same seriousness he might have given a command received on the battlefield. Very slowly, he nodded. "Very well."

He turned toward the door, then paused. "The chair," he said. "I would like one of my own."

Yy's smile deepened by a fraction. "I'll note that in my report."

"I would prefer you did not."

"Then you'll have to settle for being recorded as stable, impossibly lethal, psychologically scarred, doctrinally severe, and unexpectedly civilized."

Volsunga looked at her, almost offended on principle. "...That is an undignified summary."

"Yes," said Yy. "But it has the virtue of being true." Her smile deepened again.

With a nod, the giant warrior stepped back out into the strange, crowded station.

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