extremely normal all the time

Like with most of Birdwatching, I wanted their relationship trajectory to feel recognizable to canon without hitting it beat for beat, so rather than the more classic Rookanis slow burn I decided to go for “let’s watch these idiots fight tooth and nail to unring a bell they keep swinging at.” Getting the shared understanding of mutual attraction/interest out in the open early moved the dynamic from wondering about the other’s feelings and/or trying to hide or deny their own to both of them desperately try to maintain some sort of control over something rapidly spinning away from them. Obviously, there is no point in the story where I’m trying to convince readers that this working very well, but slowly moving the two of them through the little boundary nudges and loopholes they keep inventing until even they’re barely pretending to believe it anymore was something I found so fun. 

Out loud, this collaborative bullshit starts in chapter 11, but reaaaally it starts in 7 in direct response to the moment at the end of 6 where Lucanis briefly loses his cool, kisses Rook, and then freaks out and runs away (look, some elements of canon are too classic to cut).

So first, Lucanis kisses Rook and then clearly has some conflicted feelings about it, but it’s okay! It doesn’t count! They were just keyed up.

“Rook,” Lucanis says, when he catches up. She’s already three or four steps up towards the top floor, but stops, turns halfway to face him again at the sound of his voice. There is, for a moment, a flicker of true surprise that greets him. “Saturday. The rest of it…” The surprise washes away, a wry little grin taking its place. “Don’t worry about it.” “No, I—I should explain. It wasn’t you, I just—” “It was a weird night.” She shrugs, easy and unbothered. “We were both keyed up. It really is okay. It doesn’t need to be a big, weird thing.” Another thing he hadn’t expected, in what has turned out to be quite a series of them today. “It doesn’t,” he repeats, skeptical. Rook’s grin grows wider, takes on the teasing little lift he’s more accustomed to. “Unless you want it to be a big, weird thing. Do you want it to be a big, weird thing? Because—” “No.” “—I can make it a big, weird thing, if you’re really—” And they’re back. “No ‘big weird thing’.” “Okay, then. See? No harm, no foul. That was easy.”

And they do mean it, at this point. Yes, there’s mutual attraction, and no, there’s really no maintaining plausible deniability about that–but they’re not going to do anything about it. Even if it does mean that interactions between them start to feel a little more charged, and physical contact becomes a lot risker as evidenced by the escape training which goes very well until it very abruptly doesn’t: 

When his hand comes back, it’s not to her neck. The back of his fingers brushing along the exposed skin of her arm is a weakness, more dangerous than the hold. Rook draws a quick, shallow breath.  Lucanis clears his throat. “We covered a lot today. Let’s take a break. Review another time.” “You're the boss,” Rook murmurs. Her hair’s shifted with the forward tilt of her head and left the back of her neck exposed—the faint line of her spine dipping below the collar of her shirt, a small brown birthmark just beneath the curve out to her shoulder. “How’d I do?” A hands-breadth of space between her skin and his nose, looking down like this. Not as much as there should be, but he stays there anyway, close enough to smell her perfume, knuckles still light over skin that’s gone to goosebumps beneath his.

But it’s fine. They’ve got this, even if both of their internal narration starts much more overtly identifying the pull and they both start acknowledging to themselves that they’re toeing a line they (allegedly) don’t want to cross. Rook starts redirecting herself away from riskier trains of thoughts a lot more often, Lucanis flat out admits to himself he knows what he’s doing bringing Rook back to his place for a late night dinner, they’re both constantly flirting, but it’s fine. Sure, they kiss again, sure there’s an open discussion about how they both think it’d be good between them, but they reach a very reasonable mutual agreement to just table that for the time being to focus on the problem at hand and that’s that. 

Lucanis shifts a little further down into his pillow, watching the thin strips of light cast on the ceiling through the blinds. “So you speak Orlesian?” “Ça te plairait si c’était le cas?” He set his own trap there, really, and then walked right in. He closes his eyes. “I like a lot of things about you.” “Oh, that’s not fair,” Rook says. It sounds like a sigh. Her voice has gone soft and low. “You already have Antivan. Leave something for me.”

Ok, that’s that.

His left hand’s not… quite angled the way it was before, either. It’s a tiny overlap—his index finger over her pinky. Barely counts, really. “This is you being good?” he asks, a quiet rumble in her ear that curls low in her stomach and sends a rush of heat blooming across her skin, and that, on the other hand… that counts.

That’s that, they said! And they’re sticking to it! The end!

Then the Orbis mess hits, and the aftermath, and that pretense about how fine they both are starts getting a little strained. From that point their respective narrations aren’t doing any pretending about the feelings anymore–but they do both start scrambling to make it containable, and what I enjoyed writing the most and really hope was legible to readers is that they both know they’re both doing it. These are two people who are avoidant in very different directions, fully participating in a mutual fiction that just gets more and more ridiculous the more they push arbitrary limits they set.

Every step up the ladder breaks the fiction a little more. In 11, Rook introduces the ‘exception’ language they use to justify a series of escalations outside of friendship/professional behavior, but it’s okay because it’s super quick and they don’t talk about it. A blip!

“Yeah, just, before we… the thing where we pretend we’re just two good friends on a job and that’s it?” “Yes,” Lucanis says, slowly. “Can I just get like a… a real quick exception on that? Super fast. Won’t even register, probably.” No. Absolutely no. As fried as they both are, as tired, after everything over the last 24 hours, that is… not a good idea.  “Okay,” he says. Rook lets out a breath she may have been holding; she closes the few feet between them without hesitation, reaching up to wrap her arms around his neck and drop her forehead to his shoulder, and there is no thought—none—in winding his arms tight around her and hugging her close. A soft noise escapes her. She lifts her head enough to catch the frame of her glasses with a finger, tugging them off and turning to press her face into the crook of his neck. A quick exception. Just a minute. He steadies her weight against him and angles his face down into her hair and feels the rise and fall of her breathing beneath his palm.  Just a minute. Just this once.

I really wanted to make it clear in the narration that even as it’s happening, Lucanis knows this is not safe territory and does it anyway. And it actually kind of works! They stabilize and are able to move forward from the night before. Likewise later the same day, when Rook initiates another step on the ladder and asks him to let her not push for details she operationally should like it’s a favor to her.

 “...do you really want to do this right now?” He’s exhausted. He owes her this. It’s not good enough, and Neve’s not wrong. He doesn’t know where to start. “No,” he admits. “But we should.” “Eh. Well. We should probably do a lot of things.” Rook stands. She takes her empty mug with her and bends to collect his as well. “Maybe we put ‘should’ away on this one. Take some time, figure out what we need to know. Keep the rest till you’re ready.” “Rook—”  “Let me not be work-first on this. Just this once.” She shrugs, a coffee mug in each hand, close enough on the tight landing that they’d brush against each other if he stood up straight. “Call it a… a real quick exception.” 

And that works too! Not neutral territory but plausibly deniable and it lets him get himself together, so it’s okay! Doesn’t count. 

By 12 the physical containment fully cracks but they’re now still clinging to the pretense because it’s just one night! So they can focus! That’s okay, right?!

“A one night exception,” Rook manages against his lips, barely. “We… just for tonight. Just—” Lucanis pulls his head back enough to look at her, eyes heavy-lidded, bottomless black in the dark. “What?” Rook swallows hard. “Tomorrow, we go back to being good,” she whispers. “Focused. But maybe, just tonight, we pretend it’s easy.” “Just tonight,” he echoes, slowly. One hand comes up, the back of his fingers grazing along her cheek before his hand settles to cup her face, terribly gentle compared to the tight grip on her hips just a moment before.  “No weirdness,” Rook promises. “Nothing changes. Like a… a…” “Pressure valve.”

But they immediately start telling on themselves. They’re saying this is just a ‘pressure valve’ but I tried to work in a lot of tells that this is absolutely already emotionally meaningful for both of them. Lucanis keeps slowing down and slipping into more overt tenderness, Rook slips in her narration that she’s already grieving getting “only this,” they end up face to face with their fingers laced which is about the least emotionally neutral body language I can think of. When Lucanis picks up narration in the next chapter and looks back he doesn’t actively use the L word, but it was certainly my intent to imply him consciously circling it, and he recognized it going in to all of that! He knew it before he even touched her! It’s so stupid, you guys. 

And they know it’s stupid. They know immediately walking back ‘just tonight’ by nudging the definition of ‘tonight’ to mean ‘overnight' and then nudging the definition of ‘overnight' to mean ‘weeeeell it’s still dark’ is ridiculous. The biggest crack in the pretense forms here, not because of the sex, but because they both start cooperatively looking for ways around their own rules. 

Staying the night after the Ossuary? Doesn’t count! Just emotional support. Holding each other in bed? Doesn’t count! Strictly physical comfort. By the time they hit the phone scene and start in on the absolutely paper-thin hoop jumping to justify it, it’s already borderline a joke.

She barely gets out, “Tell me about your book,” before she needs to press her lips shut again, and the laugh sounds nearly punched out of him.

This is where their experience climbing the rungs of absurdity splits, because at this point he’s playing along but also starting to recognize how ridiculous this whole situation is, but Rook is still clinging. She is trying so hard, and while Mr. Compartmentalization can stay within the framework here and do just fine, she really starts to struggle. She’s getting frustrated, on his end he comes back down and hears what’s starting to sound more distressed than pleasurable, and so when they hit:

“Let me hear you,” Lucanis murmurs

It’s the sudden jump out of the shared lie that gets her as much as anything else–and he does it for her, because he can hear that she needs it. Just like he does it for her the following day, implicitly dropping the pretense by making only the vaguest little wave at it:

“This doesn’t count either,” he mumbles against her lips. “Okay.” It—sure. Okay. No problem. “Why not?” His hand snakes up beneath her shirt, palm broad and cool against the overheated flush of her skin. “I don’t know,” he says, catching her lip in the pause. “One of us’ll think of something.”

And like he does for her the day after that, finally breaking it completely the moment he recognizes that the stakes have flipped and where once he saw giving in to temptation as the riskier move, they’ve hit the point where continuing to pretend is actively more dangerous than just calling things what they are: 

“I’m in love with you,” Lucanis says, and Rook stops short, frozen mid-word. “I don’t get to play games with that anymore. No more… exceptions, or loopholes, or saying it doesn’t count. It counts. It—” She’s gone a little pale, and it’s the absolute last way he wants to have this conversation, but they’re out of options. “It counts for me. He knows it.” 

In general, Rook’s the primary instigator of most steps of the “doesn’t count” game throughout the story, which felt right to me because one, it feels like a very “devil in the details” lawyer-ly way of thinking that she would gravitate towards anyway, but two, there is a tendency of Rook’s which (I hope) becomes more apparent over the course of the story of minimizing or deflecting what she wants and oh boy is this part of that. Meanwhile, as much as she's convinced herself that this is something she's doing to make things less serious and more palatable for him, he's consistently the one who sets it aside and eventually throws it away completely on her behalf, because that has a operational justification he can't bury under whether or not he 'deserves it'.