PolyamPotato

If the exchange had happened two months earlier, Clay would have argued purely on principle. Unfortunately, right now there’s a partially-healed stab wound in his chest cavity. He’s had to be a little more selective about the battles he picks. If Blackquill feels so strongly about making him sit down, Clay doesn’t care enough to put up a real fight. He’s kind of morbidly curious to see where this is going, anyway. He sinks into the nearest chair. It’s only once he’s sitting still that he realizes his chest is heaving with strained breaths, achey and uncomfortable. Ugh. That’s what he gets for still power-walking around like he’s not fresh out of the hospital. It is getting to be about the time that his morning round of painkillers wears off.

“Right,” he wheezes. ‘Morbidly’ curious was maybe a little too close to true. He instinctively folds in on himself, arms crossed over his chest defensively. “S-sitting’s good, good call, thanks.”

“Fool,” Blackquill mutters, sweeping out of the GYAXA HR break room in a flair of long hair and dramatic coat-tails. Just like that, he’s gone before Clay can thank him or, y’know, try to introduce himself.

Wow. AJ was right. He is a melodramatic bastard.

---

The second time Clay runs into Simon Blackquill, it’s quite nearly literal. He’s on the way out of GYAXA, leaving a meeting with Sol and the rest of the HAT-2 team; Blackquill is evidently on his way in. Blackquill gives him a brusque nod, beginning to sweep past dramatically again, only to pause just before he can pass Clay.

“Terran-dono. Do you have no umbrella?”

“No?” Clay says, before processing both the implications of the question and his view of the weather beyond the building’s overhang. There’s a complete downpour. “Aw, man.”

Blackquill stops fully to turn towards him. “How are you traveling home?”

“Bus,” Clay says, glumly. GYAXA’s on a bus line—luckily for Clay and his current inability to drive—but that doesn’t mean the bus stop is right at the door to the building. It’s all the way on the other side of the parking lot. He will get soaked on his way over. If it was just him and his clothes, that’d be whatever, but his laptop full of confidential files and data is in his backpack and his backpack isn’t waterproof. He glances at his watch. Five minutes until the bus comes. If he waits out the rain, he’s gonna miss it, which means he won’t get back to Pa’s place until later, which means he’ll be late taking his next round of painkillers, which means—

Blackquill shoves an umbrella into his hand.

“What?” Clay says, bewildered. Blackquill is already storming past him to head inside. “Don’t you need—okay! Thanks!”

(He appreciates the loan a little less when he has to awkwardly ask Apollo, later, if he could pretty please return something to Prosecutor Blackquill on Clay’s behalf. AJ looks at him like he’s just admitted to attending a drug-fueled orgy. “Why were you socializing with Prosecutor Blackquill?”

“I wasn’t!” Clay protests. “I didn’t! We ran into each other outside GYAXA the other day when it was raining, and he asked if I had an umbrella and then just handed it to me when I said I didn’t!”

Apollo makes a skeptical sound, but after eyeing Clay for a minute, evidently finds no tells. He grudgingly accepts the umbrella.)

---

The third time Clay meets Simon Blackquill, Blackquill wordlessly shoves a shitty paper cup of break room tea at him before beginning to put a proper mug together for himself. At this point Clay realizes something aside from general chivalry is going on, because general chivalry doesn’t cover a guy you barely know making you tea unprompted while you wait for your friend in the break room of the prosecutors’ office. Like, making Clay sit down before he hurt himself made sense. Lending him an umbrella was plausibly a kind thing to do for someone who’s basically a stranger. There’s no reason for this one. Clay is just sitting here dicking around on his phone, waiting to see if Apollo’s suspiciously-too-long visit to drop off some files he borrowed from Klavier will end in them taking the bus home like they planned to, or if a rockstar prosecutor is gonna trail out of the office after him like a lovesick puppy, offering to drive. Blackquill didn’t even say anything to him when he came into the break room. Didn’t even return Clay’s friendly smile with a nod. One minute Clay thought he was being ignored, the next minute he was being handed tea.

Blackquill’s own mug of tea takes very little time to assemble, and his attempt to escape the break room is swift. Clay only barely catches him by the wrist before he can vanish in a whirl of dark hair and dramatic coat and emo bad-boy vibes again.

“Hey, thanks for the tea,” he says. Blackquill grunts nonverbal assent and gently attempts to shake off Clay’s hand. Clay’s grip holds. He’s not that weakened by pain and drugs. “And the umbrella.”

"You’re welcome,” Blackquill says, although it kinda looks and sounds like it pains him. “Kindly release me. I have other business to get on with.”

“Nah. Tell me why, first.”

Blackquill eyes him warily. “Why?”

“Why the umbrella and the tea and stuff?”

“Do you take me to be incapable of simple human kindness?”

Clay rolls his eyes. “No, but if I’m being honest, man, your reputation doesn’t pin you as a person who usually goes out of his way to be Mr. Nice Guy for someone you haven’t even bothered to do real introductions with.”

Blackquill glowers down at him. For a second, Clay thinks he’s about to get brushed aside, chivalry or not. Then, entirely begrudging:

“If the Phantom had been found seven years ago, he wouldn’t have had the chance to assault you.”

“Oh,” Clay says, a little dazedly. “Oh wow I was not prepared for this to be that serious of a conversation. Um, okay. Hey, you know you’re not, like—personally responsible for that, right? Like there were a lot of other people who also didn’t catch him seven years ago.”

Blackquill’s jaw clenches in the same argumentative way Clay used to see on Aura when she was in a bad mood. “My arrest brought the search to a premature halt.”

“Okay?” Clay says. “So? Cosmos knew it couldn’t be you, and he made the plan that got me shanked. Knowing whether or not it was you wasn’t the problem.”

Blackquill makes a face that suggests that whatever he does or doesn’t blame himself for, Cosmos isn’t necessarily off the hook. “I suspect you’re missing my point intentionally, Terran-dono.”

Clay shrugs. “Yeah, because your point is stupid.”

“I failed to realize Foolbright was an imposter, either,” Blackquill insists.

“Did you even know Bobby Fulbright? Like the actual guy, before he was replaced by an imposter?” Clay snorts when Blackquill scowls in a losing-the-argument kinda way. He finally lets go of Blackquill’s wrist. “Yeah, okay, dude. Look, don’t… not to sound like a macho jackass, but I don’t need pity. If you wanna be nice just to be nice, awesome, I’ll take that. I’m down to be friends in a screwed up GYAXA-crisis-solidarity way. But don’t do some weird guilt thing with me. I made my own mistakes to get stabbed, and I’m enough of an adult to take responsibility for that. I can’t absolve you of shit I don’t blame you for in the first place.”

Blackquill’s jaw sets again. Despite being released, he doesn’t move to leave the room. After a painstakingly long minute, he demands, tersely, “What are you even doing here?”

Now you fucking ask, Clay doesn’t say, because he has manners. Instead he says, “Apollo had to drop something off with Prosecutor Gavin on our way to my dad’s place. I’m waiting out here so I don’t overhear any top secret lawyer shit.”

Blackquill’s eyes narrow suspiciously. “How long does it take to make a simple drop-off?”

“AJ must’ve gotten lost,” Clay says, lightly, instead of they’re probably making out and lost track of time, because he has no idea what Blackquill’s stance on fraternization with the defense is. Blackquill gives him an unimpressed look. There’s no branches in the hallway. Straight shot, from one side of the building to the other. Apollo couldn’t get lost if he tried. “He’s special like that.”

“I’m right here, you asshole,” Apollo says, from the doorway. Klavier is standing behind him, twirling his keys around his finger. When Clay glances over, he gives him a sunny grin and a wink. “Gavin said he can give us a ride, but now I’m thinking we should leave you here.”

“You can’t. You’d have to tell Pa you left me behind for being annoying, and he’d judge you for letting this be the last straw after putting up with all my other shit for eleven years.”

“True,” Apollo says, mournfully.

“Ach, come on, you two,” Klavier says. “You can bicker in the car. Herr Samurai, danke for keeping Herr Astronaut company.”

Blackquill grumbles something under his breath and ducks around all of them, bolting down the hall and out of Clay’s sight. Clay sighs. If this was a weird guilt thing all the way down, he figures that’ll probably be more or less the last he sees of Blackquill, aside from occasional passing in the halls at GYAXA. Which kinda sucks, because it was sort of nice to have a hot guy watching out for him and doing little nice stuff for him out of nowhere. It does hurt Clay’s brittle little pride to think it was probably just a pity deal. But whatever! Better to know now if it was, right? Better to cut it off before it could get out of hand.

---

The fourth time Clay meets Simon Blackquill, it’s at meeting number five thousand or whatever for debriefing about the HAT-2 crisis. Clay is five minutes early, which is basically ten minutes late, at GYAXA. Blackquill is already sitting at the table, shitty break room tea at his elbow. Clay offers him a distracted friendly smile as he tries to figure out where to sit. Both of the seats next to Sol are taken—no surprise there, Clay's not the only one with a case of hero worship—but where does that leave him—?

Very deliberately, without looking at Clay, Blackquill slides a second cup of shitty break room tea onto the table in front of the open seat beside his. Clay thinks—for a second he’s pretty sure he’s reading into something that’s not there. When he stays frozen in the doorway for a second, Blackquill huffs with irritation and kicks the chair a few inches back from the table.