Lover of Pixels

Excerpt from Chapter 32: All Your Lonely Thoughts and Fears

Heinrix stared at her for a long moment, heart thudding in his chest as her fingers brushed across his face. Yes, he was hurting. But what good did it do to admit it? All it did was give voice to his weakness and invite more attention from the forces of chaos at work here. And yet, against his better judgment, he found himself wanting to confide in her—wanting to entrust her with the pieces of himself he rarely acknowledge. Hoping that somehow it would ease the hurt…

And, Throne preserve him, he didn't want her to pull away.

"To be honest," Heinrix began, his voice a low murmur meant only for Visenya. "I keep having moments where I think I'm back there…on the ship that took me from my home. They're cruel memories, Visenya."

She squeezed at his hand, listening to him as if he were reciting lost Ecclesiastical doctrine rather than confessing to his feebleness.

"We're both being haunted, is seems," Visenya said with a grim sort of humor, her eyes flicking past him and back the way they'd come.

Heinrix's curiosity, and the sudden closeness between them, got the better of him.

"What was that?" He asked, a hesitancy to his words—worrying he may be overstepping. "That manifestation we saw?"

Visenya seemed to draw into herself for a moment, eyes dimming with some troubling thought. Heinrix had been about to apologize for mentioning it when she looked back at him with a small smile.

"A cruel memory of my own, though what it's doing here I don't know." Her hand had slipped from his face to rest on his arm, and when she next spoke he felt her grip tighten. "I don't want to be alone with it, though. Do you, with yours?"

It struck him that no, he didn't. Of course he wanted her near, but "want" should not factor into any of this. Heinrix had, over the last year, developed a concerning attachment to the Rogue Trader—his attention to her safety no longer stemming from professional concern alone. it blurred the boundaries between want and obligation—calling his reasoning into question should he sink too far into his thoughts alone in his bunk at night.

Sleep, rarely restful, had never come easily to Laline, always on the move or under attack, yet as she began to wake in the bed she shared with Arthur, she found that she held a certain sort of energy to start her morning. Her eyes fluttered open to the dawning sun streaking through the windows of the backrooms, a place she’d offered to him when her nightmares had caused her to sleep in his micro-apartment more often than her own — something Quincy and Amir had been quick to point out over dinner one night much to Arthur’s embarrassment. With her hand still curled against his chest, she slowly tipped her head up to find him still asleep, his lips parted ever so slightly as each deep inhale made his chest rise and fall. He was different like this, less burdened, but as she carefully sat up she noticed how his grip tightened at her hip, his brow furrowing as his working eye barely opened to gaze up at her with a disgruntled huff.

“Mmn. Too early,” Arthur groused, tossing his free arm over his eyes to cover them from the sun as he deliberately tugged her back against his chest. “Don’t you ever sleep in?”