You wake to the smell of bread. Not the sterile kind extruded from ration printers, but real bread — crust crackling, yeast alive in the air. It drifts through the narrow corridors of the ship like a promise, threading into your dreams until your eyes open to the gentle hum of engines and the soft vibration of a freighter holding itself together in deep space.

Your father is in the galley when you arrive, sleeves rolled to the elbow, dusting flour from his hands. He always hums while he works — old Earth melodies with no names, tunes that feel older than memory itself. His hair has gone more silver than brown in the past few years, the lines around his eyes deepening with quiet smiles rather than rage. He looks… ordinary. Comfortingly so. “Morning, starshine,” he says without turning. “Give it five more minutes. You rush bread, it remembers.” You’ve never understood what he means by that. But you wait anyway.

This is how your life has always been. Not planetside schools or bustling cities — just drifting from system to system in a patched-together freighter named Larkspur, hiding among asteroid belts and unregistered trade routes. He taught you how to fix coolant leaks with scrap wire. How to plot slingshot jumps using gravity wells instead of expensive nav arrays. How to identify stars by their light alone. And he taught you gentleness.

He bakes. He gardens hydroponic herbs in recycled oxygen tanks. He apologizes when he accidentally raises his voice at the ship. He kisses your forehead when you’re sick and sits awake all night pretending to read while actually watching your chest rise and fall. That is your father. Which is why the broadcast never makes sense.

It flickers to life across every public terminal the moment you dock anywhere — even in fringe ports that barely acknowledge the Authority. A face freezes mid-snarl, eyes burning with a fury you have never seen in him.

GALACTIC WARRANT ACTIVE SUBJECT: ADRIAN KAEL ALIAS: THE BUTCHER OF VEGA PRIME CHARGES: WAR CRIMES. MASS EXECUTIONS. PLANETARY GENOCIDE. BOUNTY: 4.2 BILLION CREDITS — DEAD OR ALIVE

It is always his face. Sharper. Younger. Blood on his collar. Something feral in his eyes. You once asked him about it when you were twelve. He had gone very still. Then he knelt in front of you, took your hands in his flour-scarred ones, and said only, “Not all monsters look like monsters, sweetheart. And not all stories survive the war that birthed them.” The galaxy is coming for him. The Butcher of Vega Prime. Your father.