Vers wakes with a start, the distorted, familiar dream raw in her mind. But it is not the images that she can still see on the backs of her eyelids that haunt her. It is the ghost of an arm draped around her waist. A chest pressed against her back. The sensation, not of the heat of another body warming her; but of it's stark absence. Something in her subconscious tries to push through the memory of the dream. A teasing voice. Steady fingertips. Gentle brown eyes. The softness of it feels like home, and Vers grasps at the invisible strands desperately. But each one is gone before it can fully form, and she is left in the harsh bright light, the dry chill of her room.

Her body rejects the bed beneath it; too firm, too rough, rejects the room that she has never felt at ease in, and she is in the hall with her next breath. Her feet leading her to someplace that she instinctively knows they will not find. To a door that she knows does not exist. Not here.

A door opens down the hall and a couple steps out. They are affectionate; smiling at each other, touching each other's arms, talking softly. Vers' chest aches at the sight of them, tightens as she takes in each detail. She knows that she has never had that love, but it is somehow so intimately familiar.

A little girl appears between them, bouncing on her heels with excitement, and they shift from a couple to a family. Vers' breath rushes out of her lungs. 'Family.' The word echoes in her head. It takes all of her strength not to clutch her stomach, not to sag against the wall, not to claw at the ache; now raw, blistering, in her chest, over her fractured heart. She has no strength left to stop the tear. The sensation of small arms wrapped around her waist is agony. She closes her eyes against it, against the girl hugging one of her parents; against their laughs and giggles, as another set of brown eyes, smaller, more mischievous than the first, haunts her mind.

Vers tells Yon-Rogg everything. But she does not tell him about this. About how she is weighed down with longing at the sight of each and every little girl. About how she only sleeps on the right side of her bed; as though the left is reserved for someone else. About the breath she feels behind her ear, against her neck as she drifts off.

So he assumes that it is the dream that has her so rattled, that has her waking him up at dawn. And she does not correct him. Because she trusts him. But she cannot help but feel that he has taken something from her. And she will not let him take this, too.