Nothing came back.
The channel was always open. The silence on the other side of it was concerning. Aurelion was quite aware of the stakes, and he was well aware that Flash had found Lechuza. He was waiting for Flash’s response.
Flash held the channel for a long count, uneasy. Without a reply, there was nothing to be done, but the concern remained in his bones. He'd try again in the morning.
Tonight was for her. He looked at her across the soft tawny distance. "How are you holding up?"
She looked back at him. She gave herself away in increments, the slight tightening at the corner of her mouth, the recalibration in her eyes, her body a quarter inch stiller while she chose her next move.
"I made it through dinner without shooting any of you. I'd say I'm over-performing."
He smiled at that. He couldn't help it. "In other words, you like to choose your own path. I get it."
"Do you?” She huffed something close to laughter, looking away from him at the lamp. He watched her profile and felt the same low thing he'd been feeling all night, drawn to her in body and soul, with recognition that didn’t stack up to the amount of time that he’d known her. Somewhere, some other time, he had looked at her face in a flickering circle of light, but not this pale hue. One more luminous, with a deeper orange and reddish-amber with the scent of…pine. But sweeter, citrusy. Pushing the awareness aside, he had enough to manage tonight without trying to understand these strange perceptions, naturally hating being tied to them.
“Not many people think I’m very cooperative."
He reached across the couch, moving slowly enough that she could refuse it. “I like that about you.”
He turned his palm up, halfway between them, an offering with no weight behind it. She looked at his hand, then, his face.
She slid forward and settled her fingers across his palm, and the warmth of her hit him in three places at once, the hand, the chest, the back of his neck, where his hair stirred in a way that was so much more than sexual.
Her eyes ignited, that molten gold with a thread of orange, the color of that strange perception. "I’ve been drawn to you from the moment you offered me your shirt," she said quietly. "I don’t know what that means, but it just keeps getting stronger the more time passes, which is strange since we’ve been apart."
"Yeah, and you wish it weren’t true. Don’t you?"
"I want to be angry at you, and I can't find the angle."
"You're allowed to find one. I'll wait."
"That's the problem." Her fingertips moved along the edge of his hand, slow, exploratory, like she was reading something written there. "You keep being so reasonable. It's harder than if you'd pushed."
"I'm not going to push you."
She looked up at him then. The dark in her eyes had gone soft at the edges. "No surprises there. But I do feel pushed, and I don’t like having my back against the wall with no way out."
He let the silence sit between them for a beat. He felt her thumb find the place where his hand met his wrist and stroke once over the pulse point, and he had to pull air slowly so she wouldn't see what it did to him. His body, everything in him was humming again. He let it hum, holding her gaze.
"What I said when I got here. That was a message, not a question. You've already answered the question, the one we need your consent on. I told you everything because you needed that data to make a choice."
She held still, her hand in his and waited.
"The world ends if the font doesn't open. I want to be clear that I'm not saying that to push you. The world ending isn't me asking. It's the fact you're going to weigh against everything else. This ask requires you to trust me as the key to your lock. I also have no context for what that means. I'm asking because I want you to choose me with all of it on the table. Not because I'm leveraging the apocalypse."
“You might not be leveraging the apocalypse, but the universe is. I don’t give a damn about what the universe wants. I dislike being a lock that someone has to open. That’s insulting.”
“I don’t know what it means, babe. Really, I don’t. The last thing I would do is coerce you.”
“You could, you know. I’m already losing my perspective around you. You do something to me I can’t fight against, and that pisses me off and makes me want to know you even more to get at what it is about you.”
Her hand tightened on his. He felt the change. She didn't speak for a moment. The light moved on her face. He watched a muscle work at the corner of her jaw as she fought the tears forming, and the way she won, by the narrowest margin, against the thing trying to crack her open.
"Don't kill the messenger," he added, lighter, because he could feel her shaking under that strong, still surface, and he didn't want her to have to hold it without an exit. "I just got here. I'd hate to die in your living room before you've even let me make breakfast."
A breath of a laugh broke out of her with a telltale shiver. "I make no promises."
"That's fair."
