#nero dash

Despite her initial nerves at being in the colony where she had committed her crimes, Lux is enjoying the return to Dionysus, to decadence and upscale and exclusivity. Sure, the people are as horrid as she remembered, but the fashion, the food... Lux intends to enjoy her time back in the pocket of wealth and conspicuous consumption. 

But she doesn’t necessarily intend to spend it alone. Her heels only give her the slightest extra height so Lux still has to do a bit of straining as she searches for the tips of metal horns in the crowd. Between her mission with Na, their mission to find a hand, and the shopping that had to be done, it had been a few days since Lux had seen Nero. There’s something heavy at the center of her chest, something that bursts into bubbles when she thinks of seeing them again: she misses them. In a way unlike what had been before. 

There aren’t words for it, at least not in Lux’s vocabulary. For what shifted between them, since that moment in the greenhouse, since that night that Nero held her... She can’t even be sure that it isn’t all just in her head. Whatever it is, though, it makes her a little more sensitive to everything about Nero, as if they have the intensity on them turned way up. 

It isn’t long before she does spot Nero, their mask and the glitter of their boots. She beams under her mask and, once she reaches them, drops her hand to their shoulder. “Hi,” she says eagerly. “You look amazing.” And then, as she’s taking in the whole of their outfit, she sees it. The hand, where there had been none before. “Oh,” she exclaims softly. Her hands cup this new one, fingers running along the lace of the gloves covering it, trailing up to their elbow. There’s nothing spectacular about it, except that it’s there when it wasn’t before. Yet Lux can’t take her eyes off it for a moment.

But then she tips her face back up to smile at Nero, bright and shining even through her mask. “You really look amazing, Nero.” They do, all of them.