The ceiling fan clicked on every third rotation. Karma had counted it forty-seven times since they'd stopped talking, which meant either the fan was broken or his brain refused to shut off. Both. Probably. He lay on his back with one arm tucked behind his head, the sheets pulled loose at the foot of the mattress, the city humming its usual indifferent noise through the cracked window. "Honestly?" Murphy tilted his head toward Kayden, voice still carrying that quiet, almost shy tone he used when he wasn't performing anything for anybody. "Pilot. Or... uh no, wait! Musician first. Pilot second." He paused, reconsidering with the gravity of someone settling a very important internal debate. "Maybe both? In that order. Fly cargo routes during the week, play dive bars on the weekend. No press. No team channel notifications at three in the morning." He almost smiled at the picture of it but caught himself. Because the thing about a quiet mind was that it never stayed quiet long enough to actually be useful, and already the edges of the last op were bleeding back in. It was the kind of memory that didn't knock, just slammed straight through the wall like the Kool-aid Man.
The Kickstarters. The fight they hadn't won. Hadn't won was the generous version. He could still see the sequence of it like a film with the audio slightly out of sync. The movement, then impact, then the particular sound of things going wrong in a way that no amount of debrief language could clean up and make reasonable. There was no slapping a bandaid on what had happened. Pain still radiated through his head where he had been rag-dolled and slammed through a wall. Half the time I don't even know what I'm doing out there. He'd said that out loud tonight, somewhere between the second drink he hadn't finished and now. Murphy wondered if Kayden heard it as confession or deflection. He hadn't entirely decided which it was himself. He didn't even recall how they had gotten here. Or who initiated what. Had it been mutual? Was this weird? Was he being weird? Were his hands glowing? Shit... shit! He looked. Okay, okay... not glowing. 'Good. Cool. Cool cool cool...'
As he drew in a breath the picture across the room shifted just a degree or two off-level, some framed print he'd bought because the apartment felt too bare and not lived in. He felt it. Subtle. Then it dropped. The frame hit the hardwood with a crack that was too loud for the size of it, glass skittering across the floor. Simultaneously the overhead light surged. Not a flicker, a surge, the bulb throwing the room into a brief, ugly overexposure before settling back to normal like it was pretending nothing had happened. "Damn it..." His pulse was doing something it shouldn't be. He could feel the particular texture of it in his blood. That low, crawling, wrong energy that meant his control had slipped its leash, even just for a second. Even just enough. He turned to look at Kayden with the specific expression of a man who had no particularly graceful exit from this moment and knew it. His smile sheepish in a way that didn't sit naturally on a face more accustomed to deflecting things with humor, one corner of his mouth pulled somewhere between apology and resignation. "So..." He sighed. "That's... yeah. That's the other thing. Prolly would end up electrocuting someone at a concert or... no plane, obviously." He gestured vaguely at the fallen frame, the light fixture, the general chaos of his own involuntary making. "…Sorry."
