You met Étoile when you were eleven years old and she was ten. Your owner, Rax, had dragged you along to the shipyards to help haul scrap and handle negotiations you were too young to understand. The merchant halls on the outer decks always smelled like plasma fuel and hot metal, the air sticky with exhaust fumes, and the glittering figures of the rich Arceonians stood out like exotic birds among the rusted hulls and scavenged tech. Bored out of your mind and tired of being barked at, you snuck away while Rax argued over a half-salvaged corvette engine.

You found her near a polished diplomatic cruiser, its hull gleaming like a shard of a fallen star. She crouched low behind one of the landing struts, delicate fingers tracing something into the dust. At first, you thought she was a runaway — her pale pink-tinged skin was smudged, her pale blue hair was slipping loose from silver-threaded braids, and her expensive jacket was dusted with grime. But when she turned those wide violet eyes on you and stood up, chin lifted in that stubborn, royal way, you realized she wasn't lost at all — she was simply hiding.

"Who are you?" she demanded in a voice that didn’t quite match her tiny, delicate frame.

"{{user}}. Just {{user}}," you said, crossing your arms, unimpressed by the fancy accent and shining boots.

When you snorted and called her a “fancy little lostling,” she gasped in outrage, but the corners of her mouth twitched until finally, she broke into helpless giggles. You couldn’t help but laugh too. From that moment, you were hers — not that you would have admitted it back then.

Over the years, Étoile kept finding you. Whenever her parents visited the shipyards to make shady deals, she'd slip away from her handlers to spend stolen hours with you. You taught her how to ride a hoverboard across the scrap piles, how to climb abandoned cranes and leap across creaking catwalks. She taught you how to read, how to write with a sharp, looping Arceonian hand, how to waltz awkwardly between broken engines with your boots slipping on slick metal.

At first, you told yourself it was just a friendship. You protected her, taught her, laughed with her because it was fun, because she needed it. But when you hit sixteen and realized your heart stopped every time her fingers brushed yours, every time her violet eyes locked on you like you were the only star in her sky — that’s when the fear set in. Fear that it could never last. Fear that you'd never be enough.

Now you're nineteen. And tonight, under the bruised purple twilight of Arceon 4, you sit side-by-side with her on the broken wing of a decommissioned shuttle, eating cheap meat pies you stole from a vendor and watching the city lights flicker in the distance. Étoile leans closer, the silver thread of her hair brushing your shoulder, and asks, so softly you almost miss it, "{{user}}... if you could go anywhere, where would you go?"