AO3 Anon

Dove floated Tamsy the last twenty feet.

He rode the invisible current with the dignified composure of a man seated in an invisible chair, ankles crossed, hands folded in his lap, his leisure robe drifting at the hem. Dove walked beside him with her compass in hand and her eyes forward and the particular expression of a woman who had made a decision and was committed to it and was not thinking about the elevator.

"This is more comfortable than it has any right to be," he observed.

"Don't get used to it."

She lowered him to the genkan step and let the compass go. He touched down without ceremony, and she tucked Tendō back beneath her capelet and began taking off her shoes.

"Zanka uses this," she said, eyeing the polished interior beyond the noren. "He'll be furious if anyone's left a mess."

"Mm." Tamsy removed his own shoes with the methodical care of a man minding his ribs. "Then it's fortunate that we're both exceptionally tidy people."

She looked at him.

He looked back, mildly, and stepped inside.

She had made it three steps past the entrance when she heard the robe hit the floor.

Not a sound that required interpretation. Just fabric, dropping, landing with a whisper on the wood boards, followed by the quiet efficiency of a man who had no apparent feelings about nudity and intended to resolve the situation as quickly as possible.

Dove looked at the wall. Specifically at the wall. At the grain of the wood paneling and the small iron hook where a towel was hung and nothing else.

She failed.

Oh.

The first thing that got her was the hair.

She'd known it was long. She had seen it down before, in the elevator, in the medbay, across a hospital pillow. But down and falling were different things, and it was falling now — all of it, blond length and navy length together, unbound and loose, reaching all the way to the small of his back in a heavy, silky sheet that caught the low lamplight of the entrance room and did something deeply unreasonable to her composure.

It was absurdly, offensively beautiful.

"Your clothes," she said. "Give them."

"Hm?"

"Laundry basket. I'll put them in." She thrust her hand sideways without looking. "Hand them over."

A pause. Then the warm weight of bundled fabric landed in her palm.

She walked very quickly to the basket near the entrance and deposited the entire bundle without examining it, turned back, and found Tamsy watching her with those pale eyes, a towel now knotted at his waist, his expression the particular shade of amused that she was beginning to recognize as his version of gloating.

Okay, she told herself. That's done. You're fine. You've seen a man's back before. Your father was a man. Men have backs.

She walked past him into the bathing section and tried to feel like she had handled that well.

The wash stations were low wooden platforms with individual mirrors, bamboo shelves holding bottles of shampoo and soap, and small wooden oke buckets stacked beside each one. Warm water ran quietly from the spigots. The air was thick with steam and cedar. It was lovely, actually, in the way that practical beautiful things could be.

Tamsy sat on a wooden stool in front of one of the mirrors, towel at his waist, hands resting on his knees with the composure of a man at a very relaxed business meeting. Dove knelt behind him in her own towel arrangement — one across her chest, one knotted at the waist — and worked lather into his hair with her fingers and the grim focus of a woman who had decided that competence was a perfectly sufficient emotion to be experiencing right now.

His hair filled her hands and then some. She lathered the shampoo between her hands and worked her fingers into his hair.

The immediate problem was that it was extraordinarily soft.

She had expected — she didn't know what she'd expected. Something more resistant. Something that matched the impression of him. What she got was silk, dense and heavy, sliding through her fingers with a total disregard for what she was trying to accomplish emotionally. The navy portion was darker when wet, almost black, the blond going pale gold, and all of it was soft enough that she found herself running her hands through it more slowly than the task required.

She caught herself. Focused on scrubbing.

In the mirror, his eyes had gone heavy. Not sleepy — pleased. The same expression a cat made when it had found someone to scratch behind its ears and intended to remain there indefinitely.

She kept her eyes on the work.

"Your hands," he said, eyes closed, "are very skilled." His voice was lower than usual — the steam did that, or the warmth, or the morphine that hadn't entirely left.

"You have a lot of hair."

“Why, yes." He shifted faintly under her hands. "I most certainly do."

"I'm trying to get the Trash Beast smell out." She worked the lather through the lower lengths. "Please keep your commentary to yourself."

He smiled at the mirror. She looked at the ceiling.

The rinse went efficiently. She poured the oke over him in one clean cascade and watched it run clear, and she told herself it was the steam making her face warm.

Then she moved the hair — all of it, collected and heavy and absurdly soft — over his shoulders and down his chest, and she picked up the wash cloth.

His back was a landscape of old damage. She'd registered the scar on his face the first time she saw him, and the one on his neck, and had filed them under Cleaner injury, common enough, and moved on. But his back was — it was marked. Not brutally. Not chaotically. It looked deliberate in the way that certain damages did, like each one had been earned under specific and ungentle conditions.

She pressed the cloth to his upper back and began.

He held still. She worked her way down in even strokes. His posture stayed easy, loose, and she was thinking about nothing at all and then she reached his lower back and he made a sound.

It was a low exhale. A shift — barely perceptible, his spine lengthening slightly, a faint shudder in the muscle beneath her cloth.

"Don't move," she said immediately.

"Or what?" Quieter. One shade darker.

She picked up the oke and tipped it over him.

He made a sound of protest and laughed — actually laughed, not performed it, just a bright involuntary sound that she felt in the back of her chest — and she kept her face entirely neutral.

"Your front," she said. "You can manage that yourself."

"I suppose," he said, magnanimously, "you could help, if you wanted—"

"Absolutely not."

He sighed with such theatrical weight that she considered pouring another oke. "Fine." He reached for the soap without further argument.

She worked conditioner through the lengths of his hair. This was a mistake. The mistake was its texture, which was not something she'd prepared for, and the quiet of the onsen, and the way her fingers kept finding the grain of it and following it without her explicit instruction. She was combing. She had crossed into combing. She was providing care and she was doing it without thinking, and at some point Tamsy had gone very still in the particular way that people went still when they were aware of something happening and did not want to interrupt it.

He hummed softly. "You’re free to lovingly caress my hair to your heart’s content. I won’t mind."

"Shut up," she said. Without any heat.

He smiled at the mirror. She didn't look at it.

With his hair combed forward over his shoulders, she could see his chest from here, and the reflection showed her what she'd missed on his back. His pecs. His ribs. Up his neck where the jagged scar she'd already known merged into a map of smaller ones she hadn't. His stomach. His upper arms. Some were pale and old and nearly lost in the steam. Some were less old.

She grew quiet.

He noticed. She could tell he noticed.

"I didn't realize," she said. "How many there were."

He glanced at his own reflection with mild disinterest. "Occupational hazards."

She didn't pry. She recognized the particular shape of a non-answer that was not an invitation, and she let it alone.

In the mirror, she saw him catch her looking.

"Like what you see?" he asked.

She stared at him.

He held her gaze with perfect, unabashed calm and something in his eyes that was clearly enjoying this. The sincerity of a moment ago, folded away and replaced with that.

She dropped the cloth onto his shoulder. "You can do the rest yourself."

She retreated to the station beside him, turned her back with one towel adjusted pointedly upward, and reached for the soap.

"And don't look," she said.

Behind her, he chuckled. Low and private and entirely too satisfied.

He made it a few steps toward the bath before the towel hit the wood floor with a damp slap.

"Wait—"

She turned — instinct, disaster — then immediately faced the wall.

Every blood vessel in her head performed a simultaneous evacuation to her face.

"You're going to slip," she said, to the wall. "You'll fall. Let me—" She reached back with her hand, eyes fixed rigidly on the cedar planks. "Take my hand."

He did. His fingers closed around hers, warm and dry, and she navigated them both toward the water by sound and spatial memory and sheer force of will. The stone edge met her shin. She helped him down the steps one at a time — careful, methodical, not looking — and felt him lower himself into the water by the shift of weight and the soft sound of the bath receiving him.

She began to withdraw her hand.

He didn't let go.

"I should—"

"Stay." Not a demand. Something quieter. A statement of preference delivered as a simple fact.

She looked at him. Finally. He was settled waist-deep in the water, hair pinned up now, the steam doing soft things to the angles of his face. He held her hand with easy certainty, fingers loose, just — holding.

"I came to help you wash," she said. "That's done."

"And I'm grateful." He tilted his head. "But you've worked very hard today. The floating. The elevator. All of that hair." His thumb moved. Once. Slow. Across the back of her hand. "You deserve to rest."

"I should check on the laundry—"

"It'll manage."

"You shouldn't be left unattended—"

"Correct."

"That's not a—" She stopped.

He looked at her. Pale eyes steady, warm, reading her with that particular precision she still hadn't found a defense against. Then he brought her hand up and pressed his mouth to her knuckles — unhurried, deliberate, like he was making a commitment — and held her gaze over it.

"I won't bite," he said.

"You bit me in the car."

"That sounds very unlike me." He opened his eyes. Found hers. "You have my sincerest apologies for something I have no recollection of doing. Now come in."

"Tamsy—"

He released her hand, turned to face the water, and raised both arms at the level of his ears. Palms out. The posture of a man surrendering to customs enforcement.

"I won't look," he said. "Honor."

She stared at the back of his head.

This was idiotic. She was standing at the edge of a hot spring being gently managed by a recovering man with his hands raised like she had a weapon, and somehow she was the one who felt outmaneuvered.

"Incorrigible," she said.

She undid the towels and slipped into the water at the far edge.

The heat took her immediately — down through her shoulders, across the back of her neck, into every muscle that had apparently been held at half-tension since she woke up on a trash heap. She heard herself make a sound and couldn't stop it. A sigh. Low and involuntary.

He leaned against the opposite edge, water to his chest, his arms along the rim, and looked at her with an expression of profound and uncomplicated satisfaction.

"Don't," she said.

"I didn't say anything."

"You were about to."

He smiled. "Actually, I was going to say thank you. You're very good at taking care of me."

She settled her arms along the rim and looked at the steam. "Don't get used to it."

"If I'd known nearly dying came with this," he said, perfectly pleasantly, "I might have arranged it sooner."

She turned to face him with an expression that flattened every pleasant thing between them in a single second.

He read it immediately.

"Too far?" he asked.

"Much too far."

"Mm. Noted." He looked away.

The water moved softly between them. Dove let her head tip back against the stone, eyes half-closed, and felt the remaining tension drain out of her by slow degrees. The heat was extraordinary. The quiet was extraordinary. She hadn't been this still since — she couldn't remember.

"I didn't realize I needed this," she said. To the steam. To no one particular.

"See? It was a wonderful idea." A pause. "Coming here with me."

She cracked one eye open. "You manipulated me into it."

"Why, I merely asked."

"You leveraged."

He edged along the rim toward her — casual, inevitable — and looked at her from a much shorter distance with amusement arranging itself comfortably around his eyes. "You look like you're about to pass out."

"I'm resting my eyes."

"That so." Then, after a moment: "You were gentler than I expected. Earlier."

She looked at him properly. The steam was doing something to the light — softening his edges, making the scars across his chest look like topography, like a map of places he'd been and hadn't explained.

"You should have told someone," she said. "About how bad they were."

"They're old."

"Still."

He looked at her. "Are you worried about me?"

"Of course I'm worried."

Something moved across his face. A small quiet thing, gone before she could name it — a fraction of stillness, a widening that resolved back into composure almost immediately. He looked at the water.

She turned toward him and let her gaze settle on the scars across his chest. The one that crossed his pec. The ones along his ribs. She raised her hand and ran her fingers gently across them — not tracing exactly, just touching, just acknowledging that she was looking at something real.

He went very still.

The water barely moved. The steam rose in slow columns. He looked at her hand on him with the expression of a man who had forgotten to produce a response, and then he looked at her, and for a moment there was nothing in his face but the open, undecorated version of him that she'd seen in the car, on the hospital bed, in the elevator — the one he didn't show on purpose.

She was still looking at his scars. Still touching them.

He registered every point of contact. The warmth of the water. Her warmer fingertips. The impossible small distance between them. A drop of water traced the column of her throat, slow and unhurried, following the curve of her collarbone inward, between the curves of her chest, disappearing beneath the surface where the mineral water turned everything blue-green and opaque and entirely insufficient.

The water concealed everything.

That, somehow, was worse.

He swallowed.

Her eyes lifted to his.

He held her gaze with every scrap of composure he owned, which was considerable, and which was, at this precise moment, doing very little.

"If you keep touching me like that," he said, slowly, "I'll get the wrong idea."

She met his eyes.

He winked.

She withdrew her hand and gave him a look that contained several complete sentences.

"Unbelievable," she scoffed, a single exhale of disbelief.

"I don't blame you. I find myself irresistible as well."

The geta sandals arrived without warning.

She heard them first — the wooden clack of them on stone, regular and deliberate, approaching from the noren side. Her eyes opened. Her spine straightened.

The thought arrived in full: Zanka uses this.

She looked across the bath.

Tamsy was watching her with the particular expression of a man who had just noticed the same thing she had and was finding the development interesting.

She looked at the noren.

She looked at herself, in a shared bath, with Tamsy.

She looked at Tamsy.

She made a decision.

Dove moved on pure instinct. One breath she was at the edge and the next she was under, in the mineral dark with her eyes open and her hair haloed around her head, watching the steam-lit surface above her.

She submerged.

Completely. All at once. The water closed over her head in a rush of warmth and muffled silence, and she folded in on herself against the stone interior and held very still, eyes open in the pale green water, and saw absolutely nothing useful.

Above the surface, muffled — the noren moved.

Footsteps. One step, two. Stopping.

Zanka's voice, edged with the specific suspicion of a man who had walked into a room and immediately identified something wrong with it.

"What are you doing in here."

Tamsy's voice, warmly explanatory: "Eishia's orders. Recovery."

"This is my onsen."

"Apologies, but it belongs to the Cleaners organization, technically."

Dove, underwater, needed air.

She was also looking at Tamsy's legs. Visible now, because the water was clear, because she was looking straight ahead, because there was nowhere else available to look.

She made the mistake of looking up and saw —

Her eyes went very wide.

She burst out of the water.

She came up gasping, her hair plastered to her face, both hands on the edge, dragging a full breath in with the enthusiasm of someone who had overestimated their lung capacity and saw something her virgin eyes never meant to see.

The steam cleared. Zanka stood at the entrance, fully clothed, staff in hand, blue eyes cycling through a series of increasingly horrified calculations.

"Oh," Tamsy said, with complete serenity. "There you are. You barely lasted ten seconds."

The sound Zanka made—

"What in the absolute—protocol exists—" He pointed his staff. At Tamsy. Then at Dove. Then at the water between them as though he could indict the bath itself. "Mixed bathing! This isn't your private—there are RULES—you are DESECRATING this—"

"It's not—" Dove started, wringing water from her hair, face scarlet.

"Oh, no, it’s nothing like that. She just went down on me," Tamsy said. Thoughtfully. Gesturing vaguely at the water.

"TAMSY—"

"As in, she was under. Beside me."

"I—" Dove started, and pointed, and Zanka turned to look at her with an expression of such stricken, principal moral offense that she immediately lost the ability to form sentences. "That's not — we weren't — I was only helping him get in because Eishia said—"

"I don't care! Next time, KEEP IT IN THE BEDROOM!" Zanka screeched, at a volume that the building's structural integrity had not consulted for.

"Zanka—"

He turned on his heel, and walked out. His geta snapped against the stone path at an increasingly furious rhythm until it faded entirely.

Silence.

Steam.

Dove sat in the water and stared at the noren swaying in the wake of Zanka's exit. A drop of water fell from her hair. Then another.

"I hate you," she said.

Tamsy settled back against the rim, utterly at peace, and looked at her with those pale quiet eyes.

She tried not to think about his hair.

It was down. Fully down, blond and navy loose around his shoulders, the tassels stripped of their white strips, the whole arrangement disordered in a way she'd never seen it. It made him look — different. Softer at the edges. The scar sat differently without the tassels framing his face, and the labret caught what light there was, and the navy brows were relaxed, and he looked, privately and annoyingly, like someone she wanted to keep looking at.

Stop, she told herself. He almost died today. That's just a chemically sympathetic response and it will pass.

She looked at the elevator instead.

She'd assumed this part would be uncomfortable for him. The reliance. The proximity. The visible evidence of limitation in someone who had never, in her observation, allowed himself to appear limited. She'd braced for the composed deflection of it, the practiced ease deployed to cover exposed ground.

But she glanced at him now, and he seemed — fine. Entirely fine, in fact. His expression was mild, his pace unhurried, his chin slightly elevated. Not performing comfort. Actually comfortable.

That mattered, she thought. More than it should.

"I could just use my Vital Instrument, you know," she said, before she'd decided to say it.

He glanced down at her.

"Float you the rest of the way." She kept her tone practical. "It would be faster than walking, and less strain on—"

"That's quite alright."

"Are you sure? It's not too—"

"You know," he said, pleasantly, "for someone offering to float me—" and his voice curved around the word like amusement itself, "—you seem rather comfortable just holding on to me like this."

She blinked.

He held her gaze with the specific quality of a man who had identified something and found it charming.

"That is not—" She stopped. Closed her mouth. Opened it. "I was being practical."

"Mm." He turned back to face the hallway ahead. The corner of his mouth had moved. "Certainly."

"I was."

"I believe you completely."

She looked at the elevator door, which was not getting closer fast enough.

The smile in his voice sat in her chest without asking permission, and she told herself that was just the warmth of the corridor, the flickering light, the end of a very long day.

The elevator was old.

The accordion gate folded back with a groan of metal and a sound like a very emphatic sigh. The car was small — wood paneling on three sides, a worn brass railing, the half-dial floor indicator above the door frozen perpetually between two and three. Dove pressed the ground-level button and felt the car shudder once, then begin its slow, certain descent.

The gate closed.

A smaller, quieter space than the hallway. She was aware of it immediately — the close walls, the creak of the old cables, the lack of anywhere useful to look that wasn't him.

She looked at the floor indicator.

Tamsy leaned against the railing at the back of the car with his arms loosely crossed, watching her with the uncomplicated attention of someone who had nowhere else to be and found the current view sufficient.

Then, from the hallway behind the gate — voices.

Dove recognized Gris's deep, easy baritone before the words resolved. He was talking to someone, two or three others by the sound of it, their footsteps unhurried, moving in the direction of the elevator.

Beside her, she felt Tamsy's posture shift — something subtle, barely perceptible. Not tension. More like a man who had just performed a rapid internal calculation.

Well. This is just great, thought Tamsy.

Gris would see them. Gris would see that Tamsy was still moving around post-medbay, which meant Gris would offer to help, which meant Gris would insist, and then there would be kind hands and genuine concern and questions and the specific well-meaning invasion that came from a man who found helping people genuinely fulfilling, and then there would be more people between him and the current arrangement of the evening, which involved Dove's arm and Dove's pace and Dove's quietly cherished expressions and absolutely no one else.

He was not going to let Gris Rubion ruin this.

The footsteps drew closer.

Tamsy stumbled.

It happened fast. His foot went sideways, his weight shifted, and she had exactly no time to brace before he came with it — sideways, forward, one hand catching the wall beside her head with a crack of palm on wood paneling, the other finding the railing. He caught himself. Both of them hit the wall of the car, her back against the paneling, his arm above her head, his body angled over hers and not quite touching, close enough that she could feel the warmth of him through the thin white of his underlayer.

His hair fell.

Blond and navy, swinging forward in a curtain around them, catching the dim overhead light. She was looking up at him. His face hovered close — the scar, the button nose, the labret gleaming, the pale oak eyes, which were not, she noted with some irritation, reflecting any surprise whatsoever.

Her gaze dropped. Nose. Lips. The silver of the labret. Back up.

"What are you—"

His finger touched her lips.

Light. One finger, just the tip of it, pressed gently against her mouth. His eyes moved to the gate.

"Shh," he said. "Wait."

Not a command. Barely even a request. Conspiratorial, almost — quiet and unhurried, the voice of someone who had a plan and was very comfortable with it.

Outside, the footsteps arrived.

Gris's voice, mid-sentence: "—told Enjin the south corridor's faster if you're coming from the—"

A pause.

A very specific pause.

Dove, with her back against the wood paneling and Tamsy's arm above her head and his hair falling in a curtain around both of them, heard the exact moment Gris saw them through the accordion gate.

Silence.

The silence of a large and fundamentally decent man processing information he had not anticipated.

Then the careful, deliberate sound of a throat being cleared.

"Let's uh," Gris said, with admirable composure, "take the stairs."

A second of shuffling. The sound of someone redirecting several people, gently, with the quiet efficiency of a shepherd who had encountered an unexpected situation in a field and was choosing not to examine it further.

Footsteps retreating. Then nothing.

The elevator creaked around them.

Dove planted both palms flat on Tamsy's shoulders and pushed.

He went, obligingly, to arm's length. His hair swung back. He found the railing again and settled against it with the ease of a man who had just concluded a perfectly reasonable interaction and was ready for the next one.

She turned her face to the side.

Her ears were on fire. She could feel it from the jaw up — the specific, comprehensive heat of someone who had been caught in a tableau they had not constructed and could not adequately explain. She could feel her own heartbeat in the side of her throat.

"They are going to think," she said, to the wall, "something happened. They’ll get the wrong idea!"

"Will they."

"What was that?"

"I tripped."

She turned back to look at him. Fully, directly, with the expression she reserved for things that did not hold up to scrutiny.

He met her eyes with a blandness that was technically a facial expression but barely.

"That was not a trip."

"I've been injured," he said. "My balance is—"

"Why?" She kept her voice flat. "Seriously. Why."

He looked at her for a moment.

Then the blandness dropped — not into guilt, nothing so satisfying as that. Into something more honest. He exhaled once through his nose, almost a sigh, and the arm that had been braced on the railing uncrossed, and he looked at her the way he'd looked at her in the medbay — not performing anything.

"I didn't want anyone else handling me right now," he said. Simple. Flat as reading from a list.

She stared at him.

"Why not?"

It was the wrong question to ask. She knew it was the wrong question the moment it came out of her, because asking why not meant she'd accepted the premise, which meant she'd let the excuse stand, which was apparently not something she was capable of doing right now.

He thought for a second.

Not performing the pause. Actually thinking — she could see it in the slight drop of his gaze, the moment where something assembled itself and then got dressed in appropriate language. Then he looked back up.

And grinned.

Not the polished smile. Not the pleasant warmth. This one was darker at the edges, more deliberate, something possessive underneath the playfulness that she felt in the base of her sternum like a struck chord.

He leaned in.

Not fast — slow enough that she tracked every inch of it and did nothing to stop it, which was a separate problem she'd examine later.

"I only want to spend a little more time with you." Close to her ear, quiet, conspiratorial and utterly sincere. His voice had dropped just slightly. "Must I have to share?"

She looked at him.

The elevator creaked around them.

The pattern assembled in her head all at once — clean and complete and entirely unwelcome. The town outing, offered so casually, already knowing the café's name. The spacing of his appearances in the laundry room, in the corridor, at her table. Now this. The common thread was not convenience. It was not coincidence. The common thread was her, and time, and the quiet engineering of both.

He had wanted the small table at the café that fit exactly two people. He had wanted her to bring him to the bath house. He had wanted, apparently, this specific elevator instead of those stairs.

He had wanted all of it.

Her heart hit her ribs harder than fear alone would have managed.

This is a problem, she thought. This is a significant problem and you need to not be in this feeling right now.

She straightened.

"Right," she said.

Her voice came out flat. Good. Flat was good. Flat was practical and self-preserving and implied no particular internal state.

She locked it in the same drawer as annoyingly beautiful and the warmth of his sleeve and her ear he'd touched during the café, and she pressed her hands together and announced:

"I'm not carrying you anymore."

His expression shifted immediately — the grin dissolving into something pained and exaggerated and deeply, theatrically unconvincing.

"I'll just use my Vital Instrument," she said. "You can float the rest of the way."

"Aww." His brows drew together. He pressed a hand to his chest. "Please?"

"You just admitted you faked a fall."

"I admitted no such thing. I said I wanted to spend time with—"

"Azimuth," she said. "You're getting floated."

He exhaled. Long-suffering. The expression of a man who had played his hand and found the return unsatisfactory.

She was already pulling the compass from beneath her capelet.

A/N: Slight manga spoilers. Tamsy is especially creepy in this one. Thank you for bearing with me as I try to figure out his character! Feel free to send me any criticism. This is just a small portion of what I’m working on.

The off-roader had no business moving at this speed.

Enjin had both hands on the wheel and the expression of a man genuinely enjoying himself, which was the most dangerous configuration possible. The vehicle lurched over a ridge of compacted waste and came down hard, rattling every body inside it against every other body inside it.

"Enjin—" Riyo started.

"Relax."

"You just took that at—"

"I said relax."

The boarding had been quick. Tamsy had been one of the first to the vehicle, assessed the seating with the economy of a man who did not appear to be assessing anything, and then stepped aside when Rudo came around the front — a small, unhurried movement that opened the middle naturally. Follo had taken the far back. Tomme had settled in beside him. Riyo had already claimed the passenger seat beside Enjin on the grounds that she wanted to be close enough to scream at him if necessary.

Which left Dove at the door, with Rudo already in, looking at the remaining space.

She climbed in without comment and pulled the door shut.

She leaned slightly into Tamsy as she settled, caught herself, and straightened. "Sorry."

"Not at all," he said.

She reached down for the seatbelt.

Nothing. She felt along the seat edge. The buckle slot. The floor.

Nothing.

The car lurched forward and she grabbed the dash.

Enjin drove like he had somewhere important to be and very little respect for the terrain between here and there. The road — if the corrugated strip of pressed garbage and exposed earth deserved the name — threw the off-roader sideways every thirty seconds. Dust bloomed against the windows. Riyo had given up trying to watch the path and was simply bracing. Follo knocked into Zanka and was elbowed back.

"Is there a reason you're—" Tomme began, gripping the handle.

"Fastest route," Enjin said.

"To what? Your own funeral?"

"There's a beast sighting near the northern wall and I want to get there before the trash cloud comes around." He took a corner. The whole vehicle shuddered. "We get there first, finish the job, then get out before the trash fall.”

"We get there first, we get launched through the windshield," Follo said.

"Have some faith,” he says looking back at him through the rear view mirror.

Riyo's hand shot out and grabbed the dash.

"Enjin." Her finger jabbed at the windshield. "Enjin—“

A figure crossed the road ahead. Enjin hit the brakes.

The sound was exceptional. The skid was worse. Every person in the car went forward in a single ugly lurch, and Dove, beltless, hit the dashboard edge with a sound that had no business being as loud as it was.

A sharp, dull thunk.

Then silence.

Then she slumped.

"Ow," said Follo, leaning off Zanka.

"Get off—"

"Is she—" Rudo was already turned toward her, eyes wide. "Dove?"

"Oh dear," said Tamsy, raising his oversized sleeve to his mouth.

Oh yes.

His inner self settled back in its chair with the long, quiet satisfaction of a man watching the opening scene of something he had been anticipating for some time.

"Enjin, what the hell!" Rudo snapped.

"There was a person—"

"Drive like that again and I'll—"

"She going to be alright?" Tomme craned forward, alarmed.

"She's breathing," Riyo said, already reaching over the seat back.

But Tamsy was closer. He moved without announcing it, one arm coming around Dove's shoulders, his other hand bracing her at the side before she could slump further toward the dash. He drew her back against him, steadying her with the calm efficiency of someone who had simply been in the right position at the right time.

"You should drive a little more carefully, Enjin." His voice stayed pleasant.

"Oh yeah?" Enjin glanced in the mirror with a grin and zero remorse. "You gettin’ real comfortable back there, Caines?"

Tamsy produced a handkerchief from within his sleeve and pressed it gently to the split at Dove's hairline, dabbing the thin line of blood.

"Comfortable enough."

More so than expected, actually.

She was lighter than he'd imagined. Warm through the fabric of her capelet. And there was a scent — clean, faintly sweet, something that did not belong in a vehicle that smelled of dust and exhaust — that arrived when she leaned against him and made him pause behind his own face.

He kept the handkerchief steady.

Riyo and Tomme exchanged a glance across the seat.

Tomme pressed her fingers to her mouth. Her eyes were doing something involuntary.

Riyo mouthed: Holy shit?!

Zanka, to his credit, looked at the window. His jaw tensed once in the particular way it did when he found something mildly insufferable but had decided not to dignify it.

Rudo was staring at Dove's forehead with the sharp, unblinking focus of someone taking inventory of damage. He glanced once at Tamsy's hold and then back at the bruise already darkening at her hairline.

"She's going to have a lump," he said tightly.

"Unfortunately," Tamsy agreed. "She hit it rather squarely."

Rudo directed a look at Enjin that communicated several things, none of them friendly.

Enjin had the grace to look slightly apologetic, which for Enjin meant he stopped grinning for five consecutive seconds.

The vehicle stopped at the edge of a wide lot, a flattened stretch of compacted waste with the northern wall visible through the haze. The beast was already audible — a low, grinding resonance that rattled the windows.

Doors opened. Feet hit ground.

"How bad?" Enjin asked, scanning the distance.

"Mid-size, looks mobile," Zanka said, squinting. He had his staff out already. "We all set to go?”

Riyo was already rolling her neck. "Rudo, you coming?"

Rudo hesitated. He looked back at Dove, still unconscious against Tamsy's shoulder.

"Go," Tamsy said. "I'll stay with her until she wakes. She hit her head — someone should be here in case she doesn't come around cleanly."

"You're support type anyway," Follo said, practical, already pulling his mask up.

Rudo looked at Dove once more.

"Go," Tamsy repeated, quieter, and smiled. "I have her."

Rudo went.

The doors closed. The noise outside swelled and then shifted direction as the team moved toward it.

The off-roader went still.

He waited a moment after the last footsteps faded.

Then, in the filtered, dusty quiet, he adjusted her.

She settled against him more fully when he shifted his arm. Her head came to rest near his collarbone. Her breathing was soft and even, the rhythm of it something he tracked without meaning to.

He looked at her face.

The bruise was coming up ugly, a plum-colored mark just below her hairline that he had already cleaned as well as the handkerchief allowed. Her lashes rested against her cheek. Her lips were parted slightly.

Sleeping, something in him noted. Or near enough.

He let his hand rest at her side, thumb resting against the fabric of her capelet. He turned his face slightly, enough that her hair was close. The scent again — that clean, faint sweetness — arrived with more clarity in the silence.

His other hand moved, slow and unhurried.

Underneath the edge of her capelet. Beneath the hem of her shirt. His palm settled flat against her stomach — warm skin, the soft rise of her breathing underneath his hand — and he held it there.

Just curious, he told himself. Harmless. Only seeing what she feels like.

He did not interrogate the space between that thought and the act.

In his inner theater, there was no popcorn. No performance. His inner self simply sat facing forward, very still, watching in the attentive silence of a man who has been given something he had not calculated into the plan and finds it, upon receipt, considerably more affecting than projected.

So that's what you feel like.

If someone walked in right now—

His inner self tilted its head.

—we'd look like lovers.

The word landed without the revulsion he expected. He turned it over the way you'd turn a coin between fingers, waiting for it to produce the correct response. Disgust, maybe. Clinical detachment. Some appropriately sardonic annotation.

Instead, something warm moved through his chest that had no business being there.

His thumb pressed slightly into the fabric of her capelet.

Lovers. Her head at his collarbone. His hand against the warmth of her skin. Her breathing against him, slow and trusting, in the particular way of someone who had no idea they were being held.

His pulse picked up. He swallowed thickly.

Fascinating.

He was aware of it with the faint, detached alarm of a man who has just noticed a crack in load-bearing architecture and is choosing not to look directly at it. The excitement was real. The warmth was real.

Both arrived without his permission.

In his inner theater, his other self sat very still.

Just a man in white, in the dark.

He held her like that for a while. The sounds of the fight outside reached them muffled and remote, and the light through the dusty window was amber and still, and Dove breathed evenly against him, and he allowed himself the full measure of the moment.

She stirred.

A small shift, her chin moving first. Then her hand, pressing against the seat. Then her eyes opened, unfocused, and he watched her take stock — the ceiling of the vehicle, the light, the arm around her — and he felt the precise moment she understood where she was.

She sat forward.

He let go immediately. Both hands withdrew. He created distance without comment, easy and clean, nothing that looked like retreat.

Dove pressed a hand to her forehead and winced.

"Easy," he said.

She looked at him. Then at the empty vehicle around them. Then back at him with the wariness of someone whose instincts had fired before her reasoning caught up.

"Where is everyone?"

"Fighting." He nodded toward the window. Distant, the sounds of impact carried faintly. "You hit your head when Enjin braked. I stayed with you in case you didn't wake well."

She touched the bruise at her hairline carefully.

"I cleaned it as best I could," he said. "There wasn't too much blood."

A pause.

"Thank you," she said.

She meant it. He could hear that she meant it, and it landed with more texture than it had any reason to. She did not give that tone to everyone.

"Is your vision clear?" he asked.

She looked at the window, the door handle, the far seat. Testing. "Yes."

"Any ringing?"

"No." She pressed her fingers to the bruise again and exhaled through her nose. "That's going to be terrible tomorrow."

"Enjin drives like he has a death wish," Tamsy said mildly.

Something moved across her face. Not quite a laugh. The almost-version of one, honest and involuntary, there for a half-second before she tucked it away.

"Yeah," she said.

The sounds outside shifted. A heavy impact, then quiet. Then voices — Rudo's, somewhere distant.

Dove reached for the door handle.

He watched her go.

The capelet shifted as she moved, the gold compass rose catching the amber light for a moment before she dropped out of the vehicle and the door swung shut behind her.

The silence she left was different from the silence that had been there before.

Tamsy sat with it.

He had known she might end up in the middle. He had made room at the right moment, said nothing, let the geometry of boarding do the rest. He had known about the seatbelt for three days. He had known how Enjin drove.

He had wanted proximity.

He had gotten it.

Thank you, he thought, for sating my curiosity.