If you caught Zaven at a quiet moment, after a couple of beers, and asked him what he does, he’d heave a weary sigh and tell you, I’m doing my best, that’s what. On the outside, he has to maintain his facade as the calm and collected captain, fazed by nothing. But on the inside, he’s a confused, anxious ball of stress, searching for answers and direction.
If the other soldiers under his command knew how Sasha scrambles his insides like eggs for breakfast whenever she’s near, they’d never take another order from him seriously. They’d mock their stoic commander relentlessly, because who wouldn’t take a chance to make a big, brawny man like him blush?
To most aliens, Zaven is intimidating. Towering at almost seven feet, he’s tall even for a davarian. He’s got talons instead of nails on his three-fingered hands and two-toed feet, piercing gunmetal blue eyes that are effective for staring down misbehaving subordinates, and a vestigial carapace that covers his head and most of his face. His brown skin is in stark contrast to his backswept ivory horns, and he has purple face tattoos in the tradition of his people.
But unlike most of her kind, Sasha has never been uneasy around him. It makes warmth radiate throughout Zaven’s chest that her tone with him has always been a combination of affable warmth and cheeky delight, straddling the respect due to a superior officer. It pains him to enforce boundaries and a professional distance even as he yearns for closeness with her.
And Sasha doesn’t make it easy for him, because she’s always slipping from his grip like a wet bar of soap. Just when he thinks he’s got her secured, she glissades from trouble to disaster, from bar fight to gun fight. When she looks up at him with those green eyes and tells him she’s going to be fine, she can handle it, throwing in a joke about how she can keep up with the aliens, he wants to grab her arm and tell her she’s not allowed to leave his side.
It’s not the fact that she’s the only human on the team that worries him; she’s a competent soldier, a military lifer. She’s proven time and again that where the physical abilities of her species fall short compared to his, her ingenuity makes up the difference. No, it’s her rash decision making that drives her to put herself in peril — with what seems little regard for how losing her would affect Zaven — which terrifies him.
She’s fiercely loyal and infuriatingly headstrong, the very qualities which earned Zaven’s admiration in the first place. To ask her to change in any way would be asking her to betray who she is, and he would never do that. So, Zaven does the only thing a man desperately in love but unable to admit it can; he follows her into whatever danger she rushes into, making sure that she always has him watching her back.
This is a character sketch for “Recruiting Phantom“.
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“When Sasha Barrett gets bitten by a snake on a mission, her squad captain’s quick actions not only save her life, but also make her realise something she may have known all along…“
