@kerothi said : “ are you sure you’re okay? ” (to marco!)
Through wide windows sunshine poured like wild honey, lying in puddles on the floor of the bustling Sinian teashop. Together, they were painted into a picture of sophistication, surrounded on all sides by the almost musical hum of bone-achingly polite and banal conversation.
Lying was not a talent gifted to boys who wore their hearts on their sleeves, nor to men who held fast to the final fraying threads of old optimism. Deception was a skill that went undesired even now. Even when Jean’s question, reiterated, struck Marco like the fist of god.
What answer could he possibly give?
Nobody needed to know of the herculean effort it took to rise every morning, to extract himself from his mattress like a tooth rotten at its roots. Nobody needed to know how it felt to wash his corpse and brush its hair, to string his ruined body together with linen and leather. There was no articulating the grief and loneliness that came with walking a path parallel to that of his friends, how letters lacked the warmth and presence of flesh.
Nor was there any describing the crushing misery of finally taking a boyish dream between his teeth only to find it sour, spoiled like soft summer fruit. This was the bed he had begged for, and Marco would lie in it with all the grace he could muster, or could be tipped from a murky, amber bottle. Half a coderoin dissolved under his tongue filed the sharpest edges of his pain and kept his speckled fingers from trembling. Half a coderoin could cost him his police badge and more.
A patron breezed past with a slice of cake in hand. In the wake of their passing the scent of rosewater perfume washed over the pair, but Marco was consumed wholly by the weight of Jean’s gaze. It was like a living thing, warm and curious and concerned. Those eyes stroked over his face, sifted through dark hair now overdue a trim, traced the white linen wound around his skull, obscuring the ruin of his unseeing eye. To buy time, Marco stacked their empty plates – previously bearing pastries, now reduced to sticky crumbs and a sugary veneer on the lips – then he refilled both of their teacups. Starting with Jean’s, naturally. His movements were very careful, mostly fluid save when the spout of the teapot clattered against the ivory rim of his cup. Reduced to one eye, his world had fallen in on itself and become strangely flat. Marco had no choice but to navigate this two-dimensional plane, to move forward, to murmur apologies for moments of newfound and seemingly unavoidable clumsiness.
Only once he had served them both did he dare to look Jean in the face, to muster an answer. To his disappointment, it arrived anaemic and underwhelming:
“I don’t know. As far as I can be, I suppose.”
Marco shrugged affably, apologetically, with shoulders that had broadened in recent weeks. Fed on the rich and varied diet of the Interior, he had lengthened in the limbs, building on the muscle formed during the years of their shared training. His body was damaged, incomplete, aching, but it was nourished – and his smile remained much the same, save perhaps the sorrow that touched its edges. How easy it was to smile sincerely, for his expression to smooth into one that was fond, for his care to carve out a new and less confronting avenue of conversation. After all, Jean sat across the table from him. Tired and pinched with worry, but otherwise alive and well and here. How lucky he was to have someone care enough to come all this way, to ride into the glittering and polluted heart of Paradis.
“It’s strange. This was our dream, wasn’t it? I never saw a future with me in the Military Police without you.”
To his black tea Marco added a splash of milk, and a half-spoon of sugar. As he stirred, silver sang against porcelain.
“I’m proud of you, Jean, for going where you are most needed. I know that must have taken a great deal of courage.”