LOG: WETLAND TERRITORIES, NEW ORLEANS, AUGUST
New Orleans is staggeringly beautiful: a blue and silver maze of shining skyscrapers coming right out of the water, all connected by glittering skyways, lush green island chains of mangrove trees everywhere strung with the colorful webs of bridges and docks, thousands of houseboats and fishing trawlers and covered canoes crammed stem to stern through the sunken city’s waterways, and everywhere the jagged, mossy splinters of the city’s ancient stone bones. It’s alien enough to be thrilling and familiar enough to be gorgeous.
It’s also hot enough to make Basil feel like his actual blood is actually boiling, and not even the ocean breeze brings the temperature down to anything he considers livable. It just stirs the humidity around a little, like getting repeatedly wiped with a steamed fish. He’s never going to complain about summer heat again when he gets back to the Fleet.
The temperature isn’t the only reason his blood is boiling.
“I can’t believe him,” he says for the hundredth time.
“Yeah, well, if hiring a P.I. was going to work, it would’ve worked already,” Thena says grimly, and squints at the barely-functional landside map app they’ve been using to get around, and then up at a sign hanging from the next tier of walkways. “We gotta cross.”
“Yeah but. Why’d Ms Chau even hire him? How’d he even get the job,” Basil grumbles, and speeds up to stick close to Thena’s elbow as she takes off decisively toward a suspension bridge. A dark, slick-looking hovercar swoops low over the bridge as they cross, and Basil ducks forward to avoid it and hustles off onto the other side, following Thena down to water-level and the reassuring sway of the interlocked polymer walkway plates, bobbing on their pontoons. “I mean. I know landsiders don’t know anything about implants but how much of an idiot do you have to be not to listen to people with implants—”
Thena gives a soft throb of a growl at the reminder. “Like Rich would turn them off if he could,” she agrees, and then sheepishly swallows the growl again as a few of the civilians on the walkway coming the other way give her alarmed looks and flatten themselves against the nearest building to skirt around her, riding out the heavy bob of the platforms under her footfalls. The whole population down here is majority afro-descent, and walks with a familiar swinging gait along the rocking, water-level walkways, so Basil blends in well enough that people keep assuming he’s local and then doing wide-eyed double-takes at his accent when he opens his mouth. Thena sticks out like a sore thumb, huge and white with hazard-sign-red hair, and Basil can’t help feeling a little guilty, watching her wince and pull in on herself for the millionth time.
“Damn it,” Thena says, but quietly this time. “Okay. Left up here.”
“He doesn’t know shit about implants and he doesn’t know shit about Rich,” Basil seethes, and kicks a crumpled beer can viciously down the walkway—away from the water. He’s not on Lake Michigan anymore, but the idea of people just tossing their trash in the water still makes his skin prickle.
“‘Duhhhh I dunno, some rich guy made him a good offer and he must’ve decided going to war sounded great all of a sudden’—”
“Hastings,” Thena says.
“I mean—I know, okay, I know why he thought—”
“No,” says Thena, and nods forward, closing the app. “I mean, we’re here.”
Basil follows her gaze, and sees a corner building at the end of the block, the walkway noticeably wider and heavier-duty for half a block in every direction, with doubled pontoons underneath. The doorframe has been replaced with a reinforced metal gate, and a towering Hastings is lounging against the wall outside of it. On the other side of the door from him, there’s a mural effigy of an enormous, imposing woman even larger than her guard, wearing a helmet and a shield and nothing else, with an owl on her shoulder. The guard and the mural look at Basil and Thena with identical expressions of unreadable, unimpressed superiority as they approach.
“Who’s the NPC, cousin?” he says to Thena, when they’re close enough to address.
Basil shares an incredulous look with Thena, who he’s gratified to see looks just as bemused as he does. Hastings call people NPCs in movies, playing up the scary supersoldier persona, acting like war is a giant screen game and anybody without Hastings genes doesn’t count as a real person, just a non-player character. Basil always assumed it was another way movies got weird about supersoldiers, not… an actual, real attitude anybody actually had.
“I’m—” he starts, and Thena nudges his ankle with a boot, cutting him off, and turns a confident grin back to the Hastings like she does this every day.
“He’s part of my party, cousin,” she says, like she’s not also quoting some schlocky action flick. “Trust me, he pulls his weight. Now, you gonna invite me in outta the heat or we gonna have a problem?”
“If you brought a problem that’s no business of mine, little sister,” the Hastings says, and Thena rolls her shoulders and grimaces, jaw setting in distaste. Basil glances up at her, questioning, then snaps his eyes front again as the other Hastings postures right back, crossing his arms to show off several guns, a knife, and every single one of his viciously defined arm muscles, painted with vivid, violent tattoos and pale stripes of scarring. A fresh prickle of sweat breaks out along Basil’s spine, and he barely keeps from licking his lips like an idiot.
The door guard and Thena trade tough-guy banter back and forth for awhile, all attitude and offensive posturing, and Basil just stands there and tries to look as cool as a guy can get in the middle of 110% humidity and in front of a man who looks and talks like several teenage fantasies slammed together.
Eventually Thena works her way to the end of the absurdly aggressive posturing duel and the guard laughs, nods, and steps aside with an unambiguous welcoming gesture. But his rust-red eyes find Basil again as he follows on her heels.
“Word of advice, chiquita: keep your pretty little party favor close while he's in here with us. If an NPC puts a foot out of line around the children of Mars…” He grins, white teeth in a white face, casually and gorgeously predatory. “One of us might just take a bite.”
Basil can’t help the hot, reflexive shiver that goes through him at that. Thankfully, Thena just makes a disgusted growl and puts her hand around his shoulders, tucking him possessively closer.
“I don’t let go of what’s mine without a fight, cousin,” she says fiercely. “And I never lose a fight, either.”
Basil is too preoccupied with breathing normally to roll his eyes, and by the time he thinks to elbow her they’re already inside. Her hand is smaller than Rich’s, but it’s a comfortingly familiar weight anyway.
The inside of the building is cool and dim, a several-story holdover from before the city flooded. It was an office building once, maybe. Basil’s still getting used to the eerie, dead-calm stability of landside structures that anchor right into the ocean floor, and trails a hand along the wall until Thena nudges him sternly. Right, they’re supposed to be looking cool, and tough, and capable, and not like a couple of lost kids playing rescue heroes.
They make it down a hall, through a set of open double doors with another guard that doesn’t do more than nod vaguely without looking up from her paperback book, and into an atrium kind of room with a big curved desk, a few hardframe computer screens, and stacks of paper file folders.
“Huh,” the Hastings behind the desk says, and adjusts her visor. “Haven’t seen you around before. Welcome to Fort Brigette, what’s up?”
“My brother went missing a few days ago,” Thena says, walking forward until she can put both hands on the edge of the desk and lean forward, showing off her own set of arm muscles. “He was in town for the hoverboarding competition, he was abducted by some fancy southern lykoi right afterwards, and the baseline detectives won’t investigate shit. Can I hire a Hastings detective here, or what?”
“Why would you need to?” the Hastings says, baffled. “Didn’t his list status update? I mean, if he went AWOL you could hire a squad to hunt him down, maybe, to take him out, but--”
“Wait, wait, no! What do you mean, list status, he hasn’t updated anything, his comms are off, we think the lykoi disabled them.”
“So you need a kill confirmation?”
“He’s not dead,” Basil says, and then has to edge hastily behind Thena when the other Hastings lady looks at him like he's a piece of shit that just threw up: started, disgusted, utterly affronted.
“So,” the woman repeats with deliberate enunciation to Thena, “you need a kill confirmation?”
“No,” Thena growls, baring her teeth. The woman’s eyes narrow and she stands up. She’s a lot taller than Thena.
“Mind your fucking manners, cherry,” she says, her own growl thrumming and echoing in the strange marble stillness of the room. “I don’t get my kicks from sitting here and catching lip from some fresh-faced little tramp and her baseline boytoy. You wanna goddamn ask me nicely or what?”
Thena bites back her growl with obvious effort. “Sorry, ma’am,” she chokes out. “I didn’t mean to be rude. I’m new to all of this. I just want to find my brother.”
“Did you even check the list?” the woman snaps, sounding deeply exasperated.
“I don’t know what list you’re talking about!” Thena cries.
“Oh,” the woman says, and sits down. “Oh, you are a fresh fruit, aren’t you? That hick accent, I should have known. The Wreck List—” she types something and then turns one of the screens around to show a very red-themed social media site, “—is our primary network and database—for Hastings, by Hastings. We aggregate our stats, coordinate jobs, there’s a messaging function, there’s forums and archives. What’s your name?”
“Thena—Athena Maire Merrill,” Thena says. Then adds, “My brother’s Richard Moran Merrill. But we never made any pages on there, we never heard about it before!”
“Your parent probably made profiles for you when you were born, it’s standard operating procedure,” the woman says absently. “We like to keep track of these things… Hm, but I’m not getting anything for Richard Merrill. And the only Athena Merrill on here is thoroughbred, six siblings but no Richards. Was Merrill your Hastings bloodline, or an outcross?”
“Dad’s. Our, our mom, she was Helen Bane.”
The Hastings’ red eyes gleam behind her visor. “Helen Bane!” she repeats, sounding pleased. “I’ve heard of her. Really impressive stats. Shame she was so far outcrossed. And outcrossed further to produce you, instead of breeding back to standard. Your eyes are definitely broken.”
“Okay, cool, thanks,” Thena says tightly. “And my brother…?”
The woman chuffs, tolerantly amused now, and goes back to typing. “There we go, Richard Moran Bane, age—almost twenty-four, alright. Two sisters, Angela and Athena, two parents for the lot of you, Helena Cruzada Bane and some baseline. Status, inactive. Not dead, and not on duty, either. Hm.” The woman narrows her eyes at her screen thoughtfully, like she thinks it might be lying to her somehow. “All of you are inactive, even though you’re all well into your goddamn twenties. Most of us start at sixteen, you know, and plenty of Fort sprouts are off to the races at thirteen. There’s always work for pages… Did your mom dump you lot off on your baseline sire or something? Don’t see why, even if your eyes are borked your main coloration’s fine, and with a build like that you should be good for something—”
“She died,” Thena says.
“…No, cherry,” the woman says, and turns the screen around, tapping the profile header of a woman that looks an awful lot like a middle-aged version of Rich and Thena’s big sister, Angela.
“Helen Bane’s alive and kicking. Runs a company up in Connecticut, looks like. Employer… Flask And Beaker Pharmaceuticals, personal residence of Madam Ashleigh Beaker.”
Thena is quiet for a long, long moment. After a couple days of listening to the woman growl at everything from a hangnail to a map that wouldn’t fold right to a glass of lemonade that wasn’t cold enough, it’s scaring Basil how quiet Thena’s gotten.
“What,” she says finally, “the fuck?”
–
Scene 4: Rich's quarters.
Rafael wakes up curled in a pair of strong, warm arms, twitchy and breathless, suffused with a needy heat. There's a big hand on his stomach, stroking back and forth a little and not touching Rafael's straining arousal except glancingly, and it feels like the first time he’s ever been touched, an electric revelation, intimate and burning.
Rafael goes through a few stages in a very short amount of time. For a second, he’s just warm, and being touched gently, and he’s hard, achingly enough that he must have been rousing for a good long while before he finally woke. It feels wonderful. And then five years hit him all at the same time, like a wash of ice along every nerve—the compound, the kidnapping, Carraway—Rafael goes still, resisting the urge to tense up, to flinch—
And then he feels the gentle press of a mouth against the back of his neck, that rests there but goes no further: there’s no press of fangs, no possessive bite. And he remembers…
“…Rich?” he murmurs, a bare breath, as though the silent moment is some fearful thing that might be frightened away.
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“Mmh, Basil?” rumbles a sleep-gravelly voice behind him, and then the hand on his stomach goes abruptly still.
“Oh, shit,” Rich says, sounding more awake. “Rafael, sorry, I didn’t—” the hand pulls away, the warmth of that big arm withdrawing as Rafael reaches to catch it just too slow, opening his eyes on a dark bedroom. “Forgot where I was. Didn’t meanta cross any lines.”
“You didn’t,” Rafael says, blinking sleepily. There’s a faint glow of moonlight visible through the window, and if it’s morning at all it’s well before dawn. But to have woken, thus, so sweetly… “I, hah, I assure you I didn’t mind.”
There’s a moment’s stillness, and then the massive body behind Rafael’s relaxes, the titanic hand coming back to rest feather-light on his hip. “Oh yeah? Well, cool. It’s not sunrise yet, and he said I got you all night—you want me to keep at it?"
“Mmn, yes,” Rafael gasps, and arches, shivering as Rich’s hand slides across his stomach again. Reminds himself with an effort that he doesn’t have to beg, he just has to say. Rich will be unhappy, hurt, if Rafael begs. He only has to say. “Yes, please don’t stop—I, it’s so good, hha—” He can feel Rich breathing eagerly against the back of his neck and he was already brought to completion a staggering number of times over the past evening, but god, he would lie here in bed and feel like this forever if he could.
“Don’t stop?” he repeats.
Rich makes a pleased hum, a deep earthquake-rumbling sound against Rafael’s back.
“You got it,” he says, and unwraps his arms and pulls back from Rafael, which is the very antithesis and opposite of Rafael’s polite request. Then Rich rolls him onto his back and Rafael can just make out the man’s pale face in the darkness, all sleep-softened mouth and heavy-lidded eyes, warm with intent.
Rich curls down over him to nip a line across his stomach, fingers teasing at the hollows of his hips and the insides of his thighs until Rafael’s twitching into it, eyes wide and gasping. There's a brief detour up to nuzzle along Rafael's collarbone, and then to kiss him gently, and then just as Rafael is starting to settle down again Rich slides back down and puts his glorious mouth to work exactly where it’s most wanted.
“Ahhha, fuck…” Rafael whispers, startled to crudeness instead of whatever foolish, sentimental thing he was about to say. “I, I’m, hha, Rich, ahh…” He squirms, doing his very best not to choke Rich, not to ruin this beautiful thing with overeagerness. It’s a struggle: that rough-hewn intimidating face is softened by the dark, eyes cast down, and his lips are sweet and so soft, and—and Rafael is still only half-awake, dizzy and disbelieving, and it feels so good…
Rich doesn’t linger or string Rafael out, either. He sinks down and swallows, coaxes Rafael to a shaking, panting point of no return and then beyond it without so much as a pause, without even considering making him beg. And then he works Rafael through the aftershocks and lets him go when it becomes too much, before he can even gather the words to ask for mercy. Rich rubs a huge, gentle hand along Rafael’s thigh one last time, and then comes up next to him and gathers him close, cradling him in one sturdy arm, looking sleepy and softly pleased with himself.
“Oh,” says Rafael dumbly, and then, because his ability to mind his foolish, fanciful tongue gets severely compromised under that kind of assault, “hha, beautiful awakening more glorious than sunrise, haha. Ha. More, nnh. Fair, than the dawn…”
Rich chuckles, nuzzling Rafael's cheek.
“Good morning to you too,” he says, and presses a gentle kiss to Rafael's lips. “You mind if I take care of myself?”
“I could—I’m willing—” Rafael interrupts himself with a yawn, and feels Rich give a hard twitch behind him, a furtive grinding down against the sheets. “I’d gladly help…”
“You just take it easy, man,” Rich says, low and rough. “I don't mind. It's nice enough just to have you here like, mm. This.”
He's hardly even grinding against Rafael, just petting him with a hot, greedy intensity, kissing him very softly, and touching himself with an increasingly quick, driving rhythm. Rafael keeps telling himself he should rouse, roll over, return at least a few caresses, but he keeps… it's just so nice to lie here, is all. To feel cherished and held tight.
“Fuck, aren't you sweet like this, aren't you perfect,” Rich murmurs, so deep and soft it’s more percussion than voice, and makes a beautiful low throbbing groan as he comes, curled around Rafael, lips soft and breath hot against the crown of his head. Then a slow but profound upheaval as Rich leans over and grabs something from the bedside table, and the soft sounds of those huge hands setting things back to cleanliness and order. And then Rafael is being held again, a damp palm petting up and down his side as Rich murmurs clumsy, heartfelt endearments in the dark.
Rafael was so suspicious of Sol’s jealousy, his protectiveness over this man, but… May every great, good thing preserve his foolish heart, perhaps for the first time in years he truly has been given a stroke of good fortune.
“Oh kindest and loveliest of men…” he mumbles, eyes slipping closed again, and slides as quickly back into sleep.
When he wakes again, early morning light is streaming in the window and Rich isn't in the bed. Rafael blinks drowsily at the vast emptiness of his absence for a long moment, and then some lazing piece of his mind finally engages and he sits up in a sudden panic and stares around. No Rich in the bedroom, no light on or sound from the bathroom—he's gone.
Did he attempt to wake Rafael, was he expected to rise before dawn as well? Was Rich angry Rafael fell back asleep, especially after—god, such a beautiful way to be woken.
Rafael’s alarm falters as memory returns; Rich’s head bowed between his legs, one huge, pale hand wrapping around half Rafael’s thigh, silver in the moonlight, the press of gentle lips to his hip…
No, he can’t afford to think too deeply on that, not when he doesn’t know what mood Rich is in now. And it does no good to worry over if he offended the man, if Rafael’s already ruined this new life, having barely tasted its sweet promise—he’s almost certain Rich isn’t so capricious as to have given up on him already.
He seeks out distraction in the form of a very hot shower, and conditions his hair for the first time in somewhat too long. There’s little else to be done with it—his braids had been lovely, once, and Sam had been there to help him care for them. And to help him care enough to care for them. And once Sam was no longer there—
…Once Rafael had truly begun to fall apart, the care and keeping of any part of himself became a task too onerous to endure. He had shorn his hair almost to the skin, and simply stopped paying attention to it. He lingers a moment, feeling what little growth he’s managed since his last haircut, imagining the glittering weight of what he’s lost, and then marshalls his will and busies himself removing the hair everywhere else with the deftness of long practice.
It’s a small consolation that if Carraway is going to be so damnably insistent that all his captives be smoothly hairless, at least he provides generous quantities of depilatory cream and allows them to request whatever lotions and cosmetics they might want from the quartermaster. God knows Rafael didn’t often have the money for high-quality cocoa butter when he was a traveling player. His world might be a crushed and flattened farce of the life he once had, carelessly rewritten by a tyrant’s vicious claws, but at least he has no razor burn anywhere intimate and his elbows aren’t ashy. What a mercy indeed.
He hadn’t realized how long it had been since he looked in a mirror. This morning, the lights are bright and the world is sharply present, and when Rafael finishes patting a towel at his hair and raises his face to the mirror, his own eyes catch and pin him for a startled, breathless moment.
His fine features remain, at least, his father’s wide eyes and rounded cheekbones and his mother’s elegant jaw and strongly-arched nose—although it’s only the darkness of his skin that disguises a new, unbecoming hollowness to his countenance. A starkness to the former fullness of cheeks and throat, a flatness to his gaze. The body has reduced itself, without the attention of a soul or animation of a heart. But still the face regards him, blank and pleasant as any doll’s.
Rafael shifts his countenance, drawing up one mask after another, and watches the man in the mirror smile shyly, frown in confusion, balk in fearful surrender, each mask seamless and genuine. And when he puts those faces away, the man in the mirror returns smoothly and obediently to an expression of quiet, pleasant regard, thoughtless and lovely. The doll’s face, with a faint, becoming smile and docile, empty eyes.
A swell of revulsion pushes Rafael away from the mirror in a rush, breathing harder than he has any reason to.
Clothes. He needs to—yes. All merciful angels, his composure is a ruined mess today.
Making an effort to dress presentably from the limited selection of clothing he brought with him is some form of distraction, at least. Before he was brought up to Rich’s room it had been some days since he made his way to the communal wardrobe in the harem to refill his waning supply—waning simply because the harem’s clothes, if they’re whole enough after Carraway’s ministrations that the compound laundry can save them, are certainly not carefully separated and returned to whatever boytoy was jealously hoarding them. He’ll have to begin making the journey downstairs to the wardrobe much more frequently, if he’s to be alive again instead of a drifting specter.
For now, the thought is daunting enough—and his remaining collection sufficient—that he makes do. The only pants he has that make a pretense at being slacks are suffocatingly tight, but no moreso than any other pair he’s worn since he’s been here, and the loose, brief halter-top he eventually chooses is cut to show a broad slice of his chest and a flash of his piercings when he bends forward. Not the clothes of a man with any dignity or directorship over his role. But there’s no clothing available that won’t make it clear exactly what Carraway intends him for, and none that will preclude the disdainful looks of the manor staff. If nothing else, at least Rich may find some part of the whole attractive as well.
As neat and put together as he can get, Rafael stares at the closed bedroom door and debates. He doesn’t know where Rich is, and the compound is extensive. If Rafael goes out searching he could miss him multiple times, and if Rich comes looking for him here, where he left Rafael, he could very reasonably be annoyed to find him gone.
Arguing with himself about this, of course, is even more useless than creeping around the mansion searching. If Rich arrives and is angry with him, then it’s better to present himself as passive and obedient than overreaching. He’ll simply have to stay here until he’s given other orders.
That said, there’s very little to while the time away in this fiercely neatened room. Rafael looks around, uselessly dressed and cleaned and awake, and falls back, as he has backstage of a hundred plays, on running his lines.
Much Ado About Nothing has an appealing depth of wordplay and variety of characters. He skips across the narrative as the mood takes him, growing in confidence and ease as his rusty voice warms to the task, affecting a slightly guilty rendition of a patrician’s proud tone of demand for Leonato, a more delicate Manhattan royalty for Hero. Then nobility of the Silicon Technocracy, then a more local drawl, shifting between contested Appalachian territories as he might when he used to travel them. The words are ever the same; Rafael changes their voices, the make and meter of them, their postures and posturing, reshaping the characters with the slowly-growing ease of a long-cramped limb beginning to move.
He’s just finished an impassioned argument with himself as both Benedick and Beatrice in a style of distant European authority, English formality foreign and familiar on his tongue, and has skipped to the reading at the monument of Leonato—for the which, with songs of woe, round about her tomb they go—when he turns and sees Rich standing in the open bedroom door.
Rafael stammers to an abrupt halt, belatedly aware that he heard the door open quietly some minutes ago. He intended to amuse himself, but he didn’t intend to distract himself so thoroughly that he would forget what he was waiting for, or that he was in another man’s quarters who might soon return.
“You don’t have to stop,” Rich says plaintively. He’s wearing a scantily cut gym shirt and another neatly appointed bedsheet kilt, and the sheer mass of his bare arms and shoulders and calves is startling all over again. It’s an incredible amount of pale muscle on display, and Rafael can’t help but be cautious of it on some level. But Rich isn’t looming or reaching for him, and he doesn’t look angry or annoyed with Rafael for being inattentive. He’s just leaning in the doorway, looking at Rafael as though…
It’s been a long time since somebody thought Rafael was worth the time to pay attention to, since someone watched him like they thought he was worth watching, instead of like a bored predator waiting to see if its prey will continue to struggle. It’s embarrassing to suddenly have an audience to what he thought was a private recitation, but—he has an audience. It’s a heady hit of a drug he forgot he craved.
“I could recite a different play, if you… have one you like better?” Rafael offers, and glances up shyly at Rich’s face, which is still startled and fascinated, he’s interested, he wants to watch. “I know most of them, all the parts, if you want…?”
“You know all the parts of most of the plays?” Rich says, staring. “Holy fuck, man, you don’t even have implants!” He steps into the room with a deliberate slow care, as though Rafael might startle and bolt, and closes the door behind him. “Can you do Puck, from the one last night? I bet you’d make a great Puck.”
Rafael has and does, if he says so himself. He laughs a little, rolls his shoulders, cups his hands to his face and changes himself, opens his mind to a new page, becomes somebody different. It still aches a little, like flexing a muscle that’s been still for too long—like opening something that’s been closed for so long it’s nearly sealed that way.
Puck lowers his hands, and smiles wickedly.
“The king doth keep his revels here tonight,” he starts, in a hushed, wicked, conspiratorial whisper that beckons Rich to lean in closer. The words flow better to an audience, pouring out of the depths of his heart the way they always used to. “Take heed the queen come not within his sight…”
He’s only and entirely Puck, for a long, shining moment. He’s aware of Rich watching him, but wonderfully free from all concern, focused on the lines and the character, on playing for someone how he used to, when he was a bright and beautiful thing that could hold a man’s eye with any single word. When he could play with someone, speak the word and turn to Gabe, waiting for his cue, Sofia waiting for her line—
There’s a breathless and smiling moment of delight as he turns to look for them, lit up under the eyes of an audience that finally cares to see them—It’s like missing a step in the dark, a sudden, hollow drop in his stomach. The room is clean and quiet and the only person there with him is Rich, watching him with fascination and wonder that’s slowly turning to worry as Rafael stands frozen.
“Unless,” Rafael tries, but he’s lost the thread of it, wavering, pain rising up through his throat, hungry and tenacious, to dig its claws up into his empty skull. He can remember the words, but they bite his tongue, burn his eyes.
“Unless I mistake—” he chokes, swallows. “Either I mistake your shape or… or making… no. I’m—I’m so sorry.”
“For what?” Rich asks. “Man, that was so cool! I gotta get you to put on a show sometime, you're really good!” He comes over, puts a tentative hand on Rafael's shoulder. “You… um. Do you want a hug?”
Rafael doesn’t think anyone’s asked him that since he was a child. Either of his siblings would’ve known without asking if he needed the reassurance, would have dragged the other over and ignored Rafael’s huffing at both of them, his brother and sister holding onto him until he forgot about any bad performance, any tight budget, any worry or—God. If only he could stop thinking. Letting himself think about them is like taking a knife to his own flesh, there’s no point in the practice save to carve himself smaller and more miserable. He has to stop thinking about it.
“Raf?” Rich says, low and steady as a gentle earthquake.
Rafael focuses on the rug under his feet, trying not to blink as his eyes blur and sting and water, and nods.
Rich wraps him up in a hug, thick arms warm and tight around him, one hand rubbing circles on his back. He doesn't speak, doesn't ask questions, just holds Rafael and kisses the top of his head once.
“I need to go,” says Rafael, weak and small, and utterly fails to go anywhere or do anything about it. Lifts his hands, wraps his arms cautiously around Rich’s tree-trunk waist and holds on. “I should—help you work. Something.”
“Buddy, we got at least two hours before the boss’ll make it to the office,” Rich says. “Maybe three or four, he’s always one quick hop from full freeloader. There's plenty of stuff to get done before then, but it's your first day here with me, you can take a couple minutes to breathe. It's fine.”
Something small and vital inside Rafael’s heart gives a plaintive, painful twinge. He thinks nonsensically of proud, cold Titania waking up with a love potion bespelling her eyes—imagines Puck hovering in the corner of this painfully neat little room, watching Rafael press ever further into a Hastings’ moon-white arms as Oberon calls his familiar home: How now, mad spirit? What Night-rule about this haunted grove?
And then Puck, wild, careless: My mistress, with a monster is—but no. Not so. Not yet, here, this, them. They’re companions, allies, perhaps friends. Not—God’s teeth, but it's been so long since Rafael lost himself like this.
Rafael breaks away from the embrace, takes a deep breath and crowds all those complicated, painful feelings back down deep in the pit of his desiccated soul, gathering himself enough to give Rich an almost-steady smile.
“I’m going to go freshen up,” he says, and clears his throat until his voice comes out steady. “And then you can show me the accounting.”
“Breakfast first?” Rich says. “We'll need to get you a set of rings to use, and I don't know if the quartermaster will give me one or if we'll have to ask Carraway. We've got other stuff to take care of before office work, though, so yeah, take your time.” He smiles at Rafael, only looking a little concerned now, and goes to make the bed.
Rafael goes into the bathroom, splashes some water on his face and takes a few minutes to breathe. When he has command of himself again, he steps back out.
“Should I do my face?” he asks, and Rich gives him a careful glance, looking up from brushing a wrinkle out of the blanket.
“Maybe before we go into the office, if you want,” Rich says. “I think you’re pretty enough without it, and—and you’re—Well, anyway. I don’t think you need it.” He’s going pink again, looking shy. How old is he, what kind of life has he lived until now, that he uses his mouth like he could make a career out of it, but blushes over giving such a simple compliment?
Stranger yet, the bashful sweetness has Rafael’s cheeks warming in kind, although his own shyness won’t show. As though he hasn’t been called pretty more times than he’s had hot dinners.
Rich doesn’t linger in the moment, at least. Only straightens the bedclothes to his own exacting specifications, and then holds open the door for Rafael and leads the way off into the cool morning quiet of the mansion.
