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The knock on Yon-Rogg's door in the middle of the night is faint and tentative, but it rouses him from sleep as surely as any alarm warning of a Skrull attack. He can guess the identity of his visitor long before he fumbles with the keypad and opens up. "Nightmares again?" he says, blinking and squinting against the dull white light from the corridor.Vers nods once, sharply, and drops her gaze to the floor. Her shoulders are hunched and her arms are wrapped around herself. She looks lost, smaller and weaker than he knows her to truly be. As usual, he can't resist her. "Better come inside, then," he says, with a gruffness he doesn't want to admit he doesn't feel. The door is sealing shut behind her even before he finishes speaking.Yon-Rogg's quarters are still darkened for sleep, but Vers doesn't bother turning on any lights as she pads barefoot toward his bed. Whatever phantoms plague her rest don't seem to be driven away by the light of day. Only physical activity, performed to the point of exhaustion, has ever helped to soothe her troubled mind. Sometimes that means sparring with him until she's dripping with sweat and unable to rise from the mats. Other times, it means this.His night vision is ruined thanks to the light from the hall. But he can follow the whisper of Vers's footsteps and the rustle as she slips out of her sleepwear. He does the same, dropping his pants to the ground. His desire for her is already stirring. He can't remember how this arrangement began, or how many times she's come to him like this while the rest of the garrison sleeps. He can't even be certain it's only ever her nightmares that bring her to his door. It doesn't matter. If comfort is what she wants, for whatever reason, comfort is what he will give to her. He'd be lying if he said he didn't enjoy it.When he reaches the bed she is waiting. He lies down next to her and his mouth finds hers in the dark, their tongues probing and tasting. His hands move across her breasts, along the curve of her waist, into the warmth between her thighs. And when she pushes him down on his back on the mattress and climbs on top of him, he can be certain that her mind (like his) is anchored nowhere but the present moment.Later, when they're finished, when Vers is lying curled around him with her muscles slack and her anxious breathing finally slowing, Yon-Rogg listens to her hammering heartbeat and thinks but doesn't say, My blood will always be inside you now. He wishes sometimes that it didn't have to be. The Kree Empire doesn't begrudge it soldiers seeking physical release from each other; in fact, they encourage it as a method of reducing unnecessary distractions. What they cannot condone is the sort of emotional connection that might lead a soldier to save one comrade at the expense of another, or a commander to treat one subordinate differently from the others. The sort of emotional connection Yon-Rogg has long felt for Vers.She's asleep now, her head pillowed on his shoulder. For the moment, her nightmares have subsided. He wonders, as he often does, if it's wrong not to tell her that he is their ultimate source. But then he remembers his training, and the orders the Supreme Intelligence gave him, and the benefits they will all gain when Vers finally learns to control her emotions and bends her full power to the will of the Kree Empire. Does the truth honestly matter if she can never go back to the life she once had? I rescued her, he reminds himself. She would be nothing without me. She doesn't need to remember what she left behind when she can be so much more here as a Kree. Her past is not what will save her, in the end.So he pulls away from her and rolls over, chasing sleep that he knows won't come. It doesn't matter who she used to be, or what he feels for her, or anything other than what the Supreme Intelligence commands. He serves a power greater than himself, and he can only trust that it knows what's right when he doesn't. He has always been well accustomed to doing as he is told, even when he can't grasp the reasons behind the orders he receives. For now, he can only hope that when they both have finally become the best versions of themselves, she'll see what he's been trying to prove to her for all this time.* * *Carol sees him again, years later, across a marketplace on some backwater border planet the Kree Empire barely bothered to colonize. Yon-Rogg still wears the same Kree uniform as always, but the rank insignia on his chest and the fact that he's checking customs documentation at the entrance to the spaceport instead of hunting Skrull insurgents both suggest a substantial demotion. She can't help smirking to herself as she thinks, He must have hated that. He's too absorbed in his work to have spotted her, and she ducks behind a graffiti-covered pillar to make sure it stays that way.She still thinks about him more often than she wants to admit. The extent of his lies, the depth of his betrayal - and all the things before that, too, the things she can't forget even knowing they were built on falsehoods. He was her mentor, her advocate, her lover, her model of everything a Kree soldier could and should be. Like it or not, some part of her was still shaped by the time they spent together. He supported her, comforted her when her nightmares threatened to overwhelm her, gave her pleasure and took it from her in return. For six years her first memory was his blood entering her veins. She relied on his strength more than she relied on ther own. A bond like that cannot be easily broken.But she isn't a Kree soldier, or even a Kree. She never was, and never would be, no matter how valiantly she might have tried to become one. The line that divides her true past from her false one is as stark and unmistakable as the terminator splitting night from day across the face of the Earth. All the same, her emotions are not nearly so distinct.Everything used to be so much more straightforward. She had a mission, and a chain of command to follow, and Yon-Rogg on her side and watching her back and sharing her bed. She still had a purpose, of course - a better and nobler one now - and friends and allies cheering her on from far away. This purpose is well-considered and hard-won, wrestled into being through constant questioning and relentless self-examination. But the one the Supreme Intelligence gave her was always so clear, sharp-edged and ascetic in its purity, and she never had to doubt it because she knew it had been handed down by something wiser than herself. It would be so simple to go back to what she had when she was Vers, to lose herself in what might have been if she'd let the Kree fit her into their terrible grand design.Simple. And wrong.Yon-Rogg is still oblivious to her presence. Carol clenches her fist and feels her power surging and crackling beneath her skin. It would be so easy to kill him where he stands and remove her last temptation. A proton blast launched at him from across the bazaar and aimed at his vital areas wouldn't be precisely stealthy, but it would do the trick. She's sure she could outrun anyone the Kree might send after her. But she lowers her hand and lets the energy dissipate, knowing the thought for the foolish fantasy it is. Taking away his future won't erase the past. Nothing ever could.Reluctantly, she turns away and loses herself in the crowd. Yon-Rogg may have made Vers what she was, but Carol grew beyond that. So much has changed since the last time she faced him, and even more since the last time they made love. But her determination won't change, or her power, or her will to use it to do the right thing no matter who or what she has to leave behind. She made her choice already, guided by the same emotions he would have wanted her to suppress. Her blood may never again be entirely her own, but the path she follows always will be. And she knows there isn't anything left for her to prove.