#analysand

She’s staring at wooden panels, but she only sees the golden, firelit lobby. The dark, iron staircase winding up. The open doors leading into the courtyard a window into a blue-black night, with leaves and flowerbeds spilling out onto clay tiles.

Obi grinning and framed in the jam, barefoot and barechested, so alive his presence burns.

Ack. Her insides leap without her skin and hit an invisible ceiling.

She should see Ryuu. She should send a letter to Garrack. She is not well.

“You can go with her, Obi,” says the chief into her cup of tea.

Obi shifts to stand. Shirayuki says, “No, I can -”

“Nonsense, Shirayuki.” The sip is loud; the cup clacks when she sets it down. “You could use a good pair of hands.”

So. Maybe not Garrack.

She’s alone, but she feels a gentle hand still circling her wrist. When she presses her palms to the door to stop it, she catches warm skin under her palms instead of cool wood, muscles tensing and twitching under her touch. Every whorl in the wood is the light scrape of a scar, and -

She snatches her hands away, presses them to her face, clenches them in air. Finally, one fist presses tightly to her lips, and yeah, she ought to go lie in bed, let the heat under her skin simmer away to sanity, but how can she trust herself when every time her mind begins to let go it’s seized again by the ghost of Miss catching on a breath in Obi’s throat -

Is this normal? Is this healthy?

Ah. So this is why Yuzuri hunts down a brandy every time Suzu mutters something that makes her blush, or when his goggles are on and his hair is up. This sudden realization that she is made of more than just matter, that she’s too much for skin and bones and blood, is - she tries to take deep breaths, but her heart is annexing more territory with every frantic pound - more than she can handle on her own.

It’s something.

But they’re not - Yuzuri and Suzu. They don’t have a something.

Obi’s laugh echoes in her head - probably something she said - sincere and giddy, the fleeting emotion she catches in his eyes every time she looks up from books and plants to find him watching her before it flees, and when Obi’s gentle smile had slipped away and turned into… something else, back there in the lobby? That is exactly what blooms in her stomach, exactly what she feels.

Her hands are shaking. She’s slipped off her shoes. There’s no way she can go to bed, so -

Yuzuri’s bright grin in her mind, eyes dancing with sheer excitement, elbow-deep in a shrub or hands cupping a bloom and saying, “Isn’t that worth exploring?”

Oh. Oh, no.

Too late. Her heart is steadying. Her head is clearing, and her utilitarian Lyrias flat comes into sharp, clean focus. Concentration guides her down the same path she’d run to leap off the edge of a tower and into the lake below, and to follow the shining water to a cavern lit like what it must be to hang suspended among the constellations.

Obi had been with her both of those times, hadn’t he, firmly at her side, bridging the gaps she couldn’t have hoped to cross on her own -

She’s a scientist before anything else. She demands answers.

Her jaw is set, her fist clenched, when she turns and shoves her door open so hard it makes the delicate material of her night shift swing and flutter against her, and she all but charges out onto the landing.

And everything in her freezes. Or ascends. She can’t tell.

Obi has frozen with his bare back to her, his hand out to grip the staircase railing in his fist, one of his feet sunk down on the second step.

Red-handed. The picture of guilt. Which one of them?

It must be her, because she is suddenly on fire.

Obi turns slowly around, shoulders bunched up closer to his ears than normal, his chin ducked. Their eyes meet, and whatever creature is lighting warm ember and flickering static alike along all of her skin abruptly grows its own heartbeat.

Obi clears his throat in the silence. “Um. Hey.”

“Hey,” she breathes.

His gaze flicks to her hand still fastened on her room’s inside doorknob. She switches her grip to the door and pulls it behind her, not shut, but the edge jutting into her spine when she leans her weight back against it.

“Was there…” He gestures vaguely. His arm falls back to his side and his bare wrist hits his pantleg. “Something you needed?”

Her knuckles whiten painfully around the edge of the door.

Her mouth is completely dry. “I forgot to ask you.” Her voice cracks a little and she has to swallow, but doesn’t get much of anywhere. “I was looking for - for Ryuu.”

“Oh.” It’s bright, finally pitched above the heady gravel in his chest. Obi blinks rapidly. “Haven’t seen him.”

“Mm. Our Olin Maris cuttings need to be rotated. But he likes to do it himself.”

A fond smile flickers to Obi’s lips. “Yeah, he does.”

“I could just do it, though.” She shrugs. “Since you don’t know where he is.”

“Right. Yeah.” He shifts his weight, his waist bending slightly, and her gaze catches how his sliding hips shift the line of his loose pants, and her gaze jumps upward in panic, and the great, pale scar bissecting his chest catches the light, and is no place safe? Abashed, she looks at the hem of her shift instead, drifting at her calves.

“I’ll just - sorry.” Her head snaps up. He’s smiling awkwardly at nothing, eyes averted, skin beautifully aglow. “I’ll let you go.”

Obi gives her one last push of a smile, then quickly turns, padding back down the metal stairs with stilted, rocking steps.

Shirayuki lets go of her breath. And she jerks forward, away from the door.

She has no memory of him following her up the stairs - just him standing alone in the lobby, hand still partially raised as though he was still holding onto her, every line of his body betraying the same regret that was cloying at her.

Her mind imagines clearly her door slamming shut. Obi paces the clay tiles twice, grips the shoulder she can’t bring herself to ask to examine, then races for the stairs. He bounds up the steps in absolute silence, taking them two at a time, until he surmounts the landing and crosses to her door and raises his fist to knock and hits an invisible barrier, arm frozen in the air for long seconds - until he turns around, slowly making for the stairs again, and it’s probably too much to hope that her dearest friend has the exact same question burning in him as her.

Still - some things are worth exploring.

“Obi!”

Her voice hooks him like the invisible strings that had pulled his body through the night, across the grass, as she’d watched, enraptured. He stills a quarter of the way down the steps, but doesn’t turn around.

“I need to know something,” she says, in a similar tone to one she’d use to gentle a stray dog in the street.

He turns then. His face is wary. “Yes?”

“Yeah.” Her hands are bunching in her shift again. “Could you - um -”

Obi’s expression wipes itself carefully blank. Then he climbs two steps.

Three.

Why is this so hard? It’s just Obi. Just a question half-asked, easy enough to finish. If she wants, she could hit just the right note, and he’d laugh it all off anyway. “Could you come - here.”

Obi’s movements are slow, sinuous. At her every word, his body relaxes more, and the longer she watches, the closer and the larger he becomes, she sees that every step he takes is somehow… obscene. His bare foot gains the landing, pushes him up to level ground with her.

His face still shows no emotion, no reaction. But, though Obi doesn’t lie, he loves to withhold his answers until she’s snatching for them, him humming the whole while, though he’d found them long before she had. She knows he knows something.

One, thin eyebrow quirks once. “Still looking for Ryuu?”

Her breath comes short. “No.”

“Hm.” His slow approach resumes, broad shoulders framing her field of vision, light rolling languidly along deltics and biceps, and now her head is tipping back to hold his challenging gaze until her crown grazes the door’s edge. “Going to go rotate the cuttings?”

He reaches the edge of her space, then hesitates, and steps into it like he’s passing through spider’s silk. She seizes up in warmth, cheeks going hot. “N-no.”

“I see.” He is so close, she can’t see anything else, or just won’t. The sharp shadows of his collarbones cradle him in their wide vee, fixing her gaze on how his amber eyes are aglow with poorly contained heat, blazing a trail wherever he looks - her eye, the other, her nose, cheeks.

Then, for one moment - he falters, goes still. His eyes cool, unsureness crumpling his features.

Then Shirayuki’s gaze falls curiously to the curve of his lips, and one hand reaches up to grasp the door’s edge above her head, caging her in against his body, and he leans his weight into it, and the wood creaks, the door shifts at her back, there’s the slight rasp of a rough palm on wood grains, and she swears she can hear how he thrums with life.

She fixes her gaze on his, and they stare at each other, bare inches apart, shadowed.

“Then,” he murmurs, so low, “while you’re not doing that - what are you going to do?”

She can see how his pupils are so subtley narrow, like a cat’s. She can see the brown flecks in his amber irises. She can see where each of his short, thick lashes begins and ends, the curve of each one next to the other. She has no idea what her question was ever supposed to be.

His head tilts, just a little. “You wanted to know something,” he adds, helpfully.

“That’s - right.” She’s amazed that she’s still solid material and not a bubbling and popping liquid on the ground. But as she studies his face, the firm lines and the curiously delicate, feminine curves of cheekbones and bows of lips, she wonders if he’s marvelling over himself as well, and that plucks up her resolve.

“Any hypotheses?”

“Yes.” She pushes out a quick exhale, and he blinks, lashes trembling, as her breath hits his face, brushes his lips. “I just don’t know how to test them.”

Obi bites something back. Then his hand above her on the door shifts, and she’s falling - just a little - as he eases the door shut against her back. She has to adjust her feet to keep from stumbling sideways. It touches the jam, Obi’s shoulder flexes, and the door clicks shut, the jerk of it fitting into the frame jostling her, and she gasps.

A smirk curls his mouth. “I have -” and then he’s biting his own lip, hard.

Her hands slide over his sides, fingers falling into the grooves between his ribs. His diaphragm expands and contracts under her palms, pushing the bones out and back in, and he’s warm, and the pads of her fingers push down where they skip over the rough lines of scars, x’s and lashes, and yes, this must be her answer for the fondness that overcomes her when he lets go of a thready, stuttering sigh, so she reaches up to cup his cheek without a second thought and his eyes go wide like she’s startled him.

Yes. There it is. She grins, so wide and so bright her cheeks hurt. Her thumb sweeps gently back and forth over the line of his cheekbone. “I knew it,” she whispers, happy. This is it, this is what she was looking for - the summit of the steady burn inside her and the tightness in her chest that could burst apart with how much she adores that stunned look on his face.

If she’s satisfied with this, then all is well. She has a friend. It’s enough. And she -

A large, warm hand grips her hip. Kneads her once.

Aha. Oh.

Not even close.

It happens completely by accident. She - she doesn’t mean it.

One moment she is being carved open - something surpressed under fondness, something clamoring upward from beneath her heart - and the next Obi is stroking the knob of the bone set just at the line of her waist and she… just.

His hand flat against the door above her head leaves the whole of his bare, bronze arm resting along her neck, her shoulder, and she tilts forward and her lips are on his skin. She kisses the firm curve of his bicep, senses smooth textures and a shudder under her lips, and Obi makes - a high, soft noise -

They burst apart. He pushes away, she slides out from beneath the curve of his body, stumbles back toward the steps. He turns to keep his eyes on her, stunned, lips parted, and she rocks backward toward the steps once.

She crosses the space between them in two steps, reaches up to cup his face, and slowly, her eyes fixed on his wide, golden ones until the very last second, guides his mouth down to hers.

One touch. Two. They are both still, skin barely touching, eyes closed. She’s done this before, but never to will words onto lips, and she seals her mouth to his, brow creasing in concentration. Lips release, meet once more - Obi’s move, sliding slowly, slowly against hers. His head tilts. One of her hands curves around the back of his neck, soft skin under her palm.

There’s pressure. Their mouths part with a gentle sound, and Obi’s nose strokes along hers, air sighs over her cheek, and he goes to kiss her again.

Shirayuki finds herself smiling. She pulls back, keeping their mouths just apart, and Obi tries another angle, then hesitates, huffing as she avoids him, “Miss -”

He is so close, and it must be a reflex. Something warm, damp, and spongey touches her lower lip, drags briefly. A tongue - not hers - come out to wet nervous lips.

Something in her snaps.

Her hand is on his abdomen, pushing. Obi’s back hits the door with a solid thunk, and Shirayuki is gone.

She doesn’t know - she might never know - where it comes from. Her mouth opens against his, both her hands slide up over the perfect ridges of his flat stomach, up the solid planes of his chest, and Obi’s hands grasp her head, rake through her hair.

This. This is why, she thinks distantly, the kiss deepening, his tongue dragging along her lip, sliding between her teeth to slowly, savoringly fill her mouth, that Obi laughs and jibes her, never to be taken quite so seriously. As he moves and arches gently against her, movement that reminds her of the powerful and beautiful way he’d moved on the lawns. He’s been hiding this all along.

And maybe she has been, too.

“Mmm.” He pulls back. “Obi,” she tries, and his mouth finds her jaw - “I -”

An arm grasps her suddenly around the waist and drags her against him, her bare feet lifting just barely off the cold tile floor, the other hand strokes a wide, hot trail right down the whole of her side, and her arms go around his neck, she’s gasping, his mouth at her neck, and, yes. His hands drop to her hips, then grasp her under her thighs, and he’s lifting her and turning all at once. Her back meets the wall and the soles of her feet try to find purchase on the rough material of his pants right before he hitches her higher up his torso, and when the kiss resumes and her hands are mapping a tense, graceful neck, curves of triceps and the motion and flex of his scarred back, he husks his approval against her lips: soft groans, a whispered Miss, a yes and then a -

“Wait.”

She stops, her face buried in the juncture of his neck and shoulder. His low voice vibrates against her cheek.