Transporting into Kiddrick was one of the more annoying connections on the grid.
The principalities that nested between the southern border of the country and the coast tried to pretend a sense of isolationism, so they did what they could to discourage general movement through their borders. They would never completely shut themselves away, though. The seduction of capitalism was too strong. Pulling out of the connected worlds wouldn’t let them use their port cities to their highest commercial potential.
But then there was the magic low-zone, a field of lower density magic that took a large bite out of the southeastern lobe of the continent. Not enough magic to sustain transportation pads or gates in that area, so they’d built all their infrastructure to work without it. In the echo of this, Kiddrick and all the coastal principalities were served by an easily countable number of public circle pads through the interior of the country, the rest of their transportation needs filled in my other means, modes and technologies.
“Why does a train freak you out this much?” Lidea proffered eir hand to Sunny as they both came down the steps of the steam train.
“We weren’t made to go this fast,” Sunny replied, stumbling down from the last step.
“I think the Latolan trains go faster,” Lidea replied.
“Yeah, but you can’t feel them going fast.”
Lidea shook eir head. There wasn’t a way to argue with that brand of logic.
The train had pulled into the city of Fumaire from a western heading. The fastest route from Obeluang would have been crossing the ocean via the artificial islands then coming down through the Frost Planes. However, despite the heated travel stations, it was still winter and the name for the region was deadly serious in its description.
Instead, they headed southeast out of Obeluang, over the borderless territories, and through the isthmus that separated west from east in terms of trade agreements. The Cluster Countries weren’t the first choice for most travelers, the ephemeral nature of their politics turning passports and travel visas into hopes and prayers. That was one of those little secret benefits of having an interworld professional title. The travel agreements often superseded any local politics.
The professional shielding that let them traverse the isthmus without friction didn’t extend to the border agents at Kiddrick. For all the average civilian knew, no one was allowed to circle directly into the country, a relic of older mandates more than modern sensibilities around trade and tourism. They worked around this by having circle pads on either side of the border, no more than a quarter mile apart, an eighth in some places. Only however much they needed for the infrastructure.
After a long walk over a clogged pedestrian causeway, ending in a winding queue to get through a slow circle pad transfer, Lidea had liked the steam train. It was exponentially faster than a traditional carriage would have been, and there was something charming about sitting in a passenger car watching the world go by. Outside this part of the world, steam trains were almost exclusively for cargo that couldn’t ship by circle, barge, or caravan cart. Ey was embarrassingly old before ey even realized a person could go by steam train in different circumstances.
And if Sunny, in trying to avoid looking out the window, kept his head pressed to eir shoulder, well, that was sort of charming, too, wasn’t it? Not that ey’d ever admit to it.
The congestion around the narrower parts of the station suggested that Fumaire didn’t normally get this level of traffic. Which, in itself, felt odd. It seemed as though all the science and research facilities should have drawn a stronger crowd. It was the reason the Correlan Artificer’s Association met here for their annual convention and gala.
“Wait, why Correlan Artificer’s Association?” The question flashed through Lidea’s brain as they moved down the concourse toward a package delivery and postal desk. The gala part of “convention and gala” required fancier clothing than usual, so they had enlisted some lesser mages to pack some formal wear for them from their closest at home on Latolan. If everything had gone according to plan, their trunks were shipped cross-wold in time to be waiting for them. They had certainly paid a high enough fee to ensure it. It probably would have cost lest just to rent something, on-world, but they were nothing if not creatures of habit, right down to what they wore.
“Latolan doesn’t have its own Association. We pick which one we want to Master under.”
The attendant behind the counter had already silently taken their package tracking numbers and returned in under a minute with the first of them. It was Sunny’s, according to the sticker on top. The height of the counter, Sunny’s stature, and the weight of the trunk all competed with each other in such a way that Sunny couldn’t get it down to the floor on his own. Lidea did it for him, the case landing with a thunk as they waited for Lidea’s delivery.
“Any particular reason you chose Correlan? Just a roll of the dice…”
Sunny shook his head, spinning the trunk around to get it on its back wheels.
“Goblins take Miraalan. Ariesians take Purvailan. Triangle species take Correlan.”
“Oh…that tracks, I guess.” The other trunk had arrived, and it slid unceremoniously into Lidea’s waiting hands.
“Childress!” A voice boomed over the crowd.
“Oh god,” Sunny muttered. “It’s Demeter. He spotted me.” A full-blooded wood elf strode through the center of the crowd, people parting around him not out of deference, but annoyance. Everyone who worked out of Latolan knew Demeter, the Master Artificer that led the pit of the mercenary guild. He could be a Grandmaster if he wanted. He didn’t. That would give him “responsibilities he damn well didn’t need.” He was a young wood elf, though. He had a century, at least, still to make that kind of decision. Or perhaps change careers altogether. Neither of them would likely live long enough to see him temper with age. Demeter smacked Sunny on the back as he arrived.
“Congratulations! Are you excited?” he said. Lidea squinted at Sunny. For a fleeting moment, ey wondered if somehow news of their “engagement” had twisted through the working-wanderer world into something that was bigger than either of them had ever intended. That seemed unlikely. There had been no grand announcement. No telling of friends and families. They had only barely formalized anything.
No.
This was something else. Something that Sunny had failed to mention.
“Excited for what?” Lidea asked. Demeter cast at em, askance and questioning.
“Demeter, don’t,” Sunny tried and failed to plead.
“The award he’s winning,” Demeter replied.
“Sunny, what kind of award is it?”
“Liddy, I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Fuck you, you’re going to talk to me about it.” Their argument dropped down into a whisper as they got off the tram and wheeled their trunks toward the building where they were staying.
God it was big. Lidea knew buildings this big existed, conceptually, but approaching it flooded em with the kind of anxiety ey didn’t have a name for. Ey of course had been near factories and warehouses. The Squall was held at a old fort on Latolan, but that felt more like a walled village than a singular large structure. Maybe the Palace at Cai Balor, but even that had the odd trick of looking smaller on the outside than it was on the inside.
This thing was a colossus, a thrum of steel and concrete and glass that consumed the entirety of eir vision. The convention itself was in the lower part of the building, two extremely tall stories based on the location and size of the windows. Sunny had mentioned their room number had a “teen” in it, so ey assumed their lodging was in the tower jutting up from one corner of the building.
Demeter had been on the same tram and he overtook them from behind, this time in more of a hurry to get where he was going. That didn’t stop him from giving a passing apologetic glance at Sunny. Instead of the large doors that led into the convention area, Sunny guided them hard toward a door at the base of the lodging tower section. He spoke low, even more under his breath than usual.
“I don’t want to fight about this right now. Can we save it for later?”
“I don’t want to fight about it, at all,” Lidea hissed back.
“Are you sure? Because you sound like you want to fight.”
Lidea’s hand did that stupid thing it did where it gripped tighter around whatever it was holding. This time it was the handle of the trunk, and ey hurt eir fingers trying to squeeze them into the limited space. Instead, ey shifted the tension to eir jaw. That made the pain worse, but it kept eir from biting back in irritation.
Around them, the crowd of arriving professional artificers became a hot press of people all sharing the same limited space as they queued up for the vertical people lifts. Ey hated these. The asychonous mechanical stairs were one thing. They were tricky at first glance but easy to master once you had the timing down. These small, enclosed, moving tombs were supposed to make it easier to haul people and their packages up and down. They didn’t feel easier. They felt like being slowly crushed to death as you were being swung around a central, revolving belt. There had to be a better way to build these things.
“Sunny, go ahead,” Lidea said. “I’ll catch up with you. You know how nervous these things make me.”
Sunny only bothered half a look before shrugging and moving on down the line, stepping up onto a platform that whisked him away clumsily.
“I didn’t mean to make you guys fight.” Demeter was over eir shoulder, and ey managed to keep emself from jumping in surprise.
“Weren’t you behind us a minute ago?”
“My room’s only on the second, so I’ve already been up and down. I travel light.” He rocked back on his heels, bundling his curly hair up into something that vaguley resembled an updo.
It was an open secret that he used chemicals to permanently maintain the shape, but ey wasn’t entirely sure why anyone was privy to that sort of knowledge. Ey didn’t know where ey had gotten this knowledge from or why ey had held onto it. Maybe because it was just a little weird without being outright rebellious against typical wood elf customs. So it stuck out.
“What kind of award is he winning?” Lidea asked, plowing through Demeter’s attempts at self-pity.
“It’s got this stupid long name, but it’s an educator’s aware. He’s been nominated by his students every year forever it feels like. Finally worked this time.”
“His students at Giddington?” Lidea asked.
“Yeah, those but also the field schools.”
“The…field schools…what the hell are you talking about?”
“I mean, he hasn’t done one since last summer, but when he’s out in the field in the really rural areas, he does these…I don’t know…classes? You’ll really have to ask him about it, but he sets up these little pseudo-artificery academies. Gets resources out there.” Demeter’s cadence picked up speed a he realized Lidea wasn’t able to meet him halfway. He checked his watch, but the glance was a fake one. “I have a…thing…I’ll talk to you later.” The crowd parted around him, then he disappeared into it.
Lidea gritted eir teeth and moved up to the lift.
Lidea prayed eir way up the lift and found their room, pausing on the other side, thinking. Sunny sense em and opened it for eir, grabbing eir trunk to drag it inside.
“I was getting worried,” he muttered.
“It’s an educator’s award in honor of all the technical schools you apparenetly set up out in the countryside.”
“Uh…yeah,” Sunny admitted, standing dumbly in the middle of the room.
“And why didn’t I know any of this?”
“Because it’s not that big of a deal.”
“Yes, it is, Sunny.” Ey pulled eir voice down as it reached the crest. “You want to spend our lives together, yet, I apparently don’t know anything about yours.”
Sunny pressed his face into his palms and sighed.
“Can we get through the weekend? If you love me, can we get through the weekend, then come back to this? Please?”
Lidea felt eir arms lose weight and ey dropped onto the bed, suddenly exhausted. Sunny sighed, hooking his thumbs into the waistband of his pants.
“There’s a little dinner…thing…I have to go check out. Do you want to come with or stay here?”
“I’m tired,” Lidea said. “I think I need a nap.”
“Yeah…okay.” Sunny leaned down and pressed a kiss to eir forehead. “I’ll be back.” His whole body stayed tense as he left the room again.
If you love me…
That was certainly a way to leverage himself out of the discussion.
###
“I wish you had told me you were speaking on a panel this morning,” Lidea murmured as they came down off the lift and moved toward the convention hall area. It had taken until they were literally leaving their hotel room. Ey had hoped to have a slow morning with a nice breakfast, but apparently they had a schedule to keep.
“I’m sorry. I was distracted.” Sunny walked a few steps ahead of em.
“Can you please tell me if there’s something else we’re appointed to this weekend? I don’t even know when your award ceremony is? Is it at the gala?”
Sunny lifted his hand in dismissive wave as he moved faster ahead of em.
“I’ll get you the schedule. Just let me do this thing first.” He started moving even faster, a trot that turned into a run from the length of his legs.
Lidea hovered near the colossal doors as Sunny disappeared into the panel room. It felt like storming off after a fight to just leave him. But had it really been a fight? In the traditional sense? Ey felt like ey were fighting, tension sitting in eir gut over what other unknowns Sunny might have tucked away that would suddenly be opened in front of em.
If you love me…
“Damn.” Ey angled away from the meeting room toward one of the more open halls, hoping to find to something to eat at the end of it. Not that ey had kept eir appetite through the tense elevator ride.
The crowd was thin, most of the professionals already tucked away into their lecture rooms. Ey could read the “plus one’s” in the wandering gate of the few people ey passed. No specific place to be or thing to do.
Eir search for a drink stopped short as ey approached a small convergence of people entering a T-shaped offshoot of the main hallway. Lidea peeked around the corner to see an open room. The visual clutter refused to resolve quickly, and ey tried to mentally pull up the map of the building from the front foyer. Ey couldn’t overlay one on the other, though, the ubiquitous sickly mustard seed color of the walls all bleeding together into a monotonous mass of architecture.
Lidea was only sure ey could make it back to the all where ey left Sunny because it had been one of the remarkable straight lines. Ey was suddenly fraught with the realization that ey was less than certain ey could make it to their room without him.
Eir eyes drew back to the cacophony through the open door, body following, drawing closer to the opening.
“Exhbition hall?” ey muttered to eirself. Giving the thought a voice forced the colors to take shape and form. Flashing metal pieces became new, fancy toolsets nestled in crushed velvet-lines wooden boxes. The splashes of colors on fabric were canvas bags embroidered or painted with pithy sayings about the life and work of an artificer. Lidea found em self crossing the threshold.
Ey didn’t have much interest in the vendor offerings, but if ey had understood the map correctly, there were exhibition items further back into the hall.
Past tables of tools and books and kitchy homegoods, the tables opened up into long lines of singular large items with
Instead of immediately purchasable items, these tables held display pieces from master artificers or the companies and guilds they worked for. New models of magic fluctuation meters. Cut-away scale models of engines with labels showing improvement points between generations. A cardboard display that wondered if nature-generated electricity could ever completely replace magic-generated energy in general density areas, and wouldn’t you love to talk to a consultant about it for your home or business? Just contact the Purvailan-based company for more information.
Something in the distance caught Lidea’s attention, though. Something familiar.
“Are you actually working now?” ey muttered as ey walked up to the dual-point magic field generator. The one that [made] and Ajax broke before Lidea ever got a chance to exhibit it at the Tourney. Ey flipped through a notebook of carefully redacted schematics and technical information. Two pages in told a sanitized version of the story under the guise of “improvements to durability and ease of use.”
“Clever,” ey decided. Lidea lifted eir head and scanned the room, looking for something else interesting to examine. A familiar bun of partially dyed hair caught eir eye.
“Paul.”
The elf reacted immediately to his name, turning toward Lidea and giving a blink of recognition behind the glasses he only wore half the time. The pink hair had been replaced with an ombre that started blue at the roots and faded into a muddy gray-purple at the bottom. Like the dye had been layered over itself. He wasn’t alone, walking alongside another wood elf in a conservative A-Line skirt and blousy top. A little frilly for typical wood elf wear but suited to her frame. There was something vaguely familiar about her that Lidea couldn’t immediately place.
“Was heading over here to look at this thing, too,” Paul said, extending his prosthetic arm to point at the generator machine. “Wondered when I would run into you.”
“Good to see you again, Alpha Lidea,” the other elf said. Lidea stared at her, waiting for the connection to click. The woman, for her part, saw the confusion and had the tact to prod the situation gently. “You rescued me from the river.”
“Oh! Right!” Lidea said. “You okay?”
“Right as rain,” Hades replied. “I’m here to keep my brother out of trouble. He’s an artificer.”
Lidea put those pieces together immediately.
“Demeter’s your brother,” Lidea said with an assured nod. “I don’t know why I assumed he was an only sibling.”
“He tries to distance himself from the family name, for obvious reason,” Hades said with a grim smile.
“What are you up to, Paul?” Lidea asked, not trying to hide that ey was changing subjects.
“Oh, my partner, Tien, is an artificer. I’m in your shoes as a plus-one.”
“I…are you not with Ivan?”
“Ew. No.”
“I massively misjudged your relationship,” Lidea whistled. “Why haven’t I heard anything about this partner?”
“I don’t know, why haven’t you and Sunny officially come out as being in a relationship when we literally all know, already.”
“It’s complicated,” Lidea replied. Paul made a spread gesture with his arms.
“It’s complicated,” he mimicked. Lidea clucked eir tongue at him.
“You going to the gala, dance thingy?”
“Yeah,” Paul nodded. “Saw Childress on the award reception list. Good for him.”
“Why does everyone know, but me?” Lidea grumbled, only becoming fully aware of the whiny nature of it after the words left eir mouth.
“It was in the program they mail out every year,” Hades said with uncertainty. She reached into her satchel and pulled out a paper program. “And in here.” Lidea took it, flipped through it idly, saw the glimpse of where Sunny’s name was mentioned as an award recipient, then handed it back.
When had this come in the mail? While they were still in the in the townhouse? Had the message been forwarded to him by telegram while they were traveling? Sunny had been informed somehow. Through what means?
Should Lidea have naturally have known about this independent of Sunny sharing the information with em?
The fact was ey didn’t know. Ey didn’t know if ey had been inadvertently negligent or the victim of Sunny hiding things from em again. Obviously this wasn’t as egregious as finishing off a man who was already trying to kill himself, but that didn’t mean there was no precedence for Sunny failing to share the full details of a situation, intentional or not.
“You guys eaten breakfast, yet?” ey asked instead of the ten other things ey instintually wanted to ply them with. “I’m starving.”
###
“Childress.”
“Stop stalking me, Demeter.”
Sunny physically ducked away from Demeter as he tried to corner him after the panel. It would have been more stressful speaking in public if the panel weren’t so terribly dry even by his standards. He was, by all metrics, an expert in naturally occurring magic reserves across different geologic strata. But Scholar Jennigale Oliviera out of Catalon circled him a few times in terms of raw academic knowledge. She also loved to talk, and he was happy to let her field every question and eat up the entire hour. When he did have to speak, it was the kind he preferred. All information. The mere recitation of things that were objectively true. He could handle that.
It was always the impromptu speaking of natural conversation that gave him trouble. The sort that Lidea demanded.
The kind that Demeter was about to do his damnedest to rope Sunny into.
“I’m sorry about the thing with Lidea,” Demeter persisted. “I never would have thought that you hadn’t told em.”
Demeter managed to shuffle them out the door and into the hall without rampaging through the crowd.
“What are you trying to imply?” Sunny chuffed.
“I have no interest in trying to preserve your ego or feelings,” Demeter said sharply. “I mean that very literally. The idea that you would actively keep that kind of information from your spouse is entirely foreign to me.”
“We’re not married, yet.”
“Missing the point. I assumed even you would share things with someone important to you. Tien. Come here.”
And now he was dragging someone else into it as they passed them in the throng of people. Either iad or sylvan. Dark hair quaffed up into something architectural that exposed the rows of piercings on their square ears. Deep tan skin that was ever so slightly freckled. It was difficult to get read on their magical inclination in the sea of other people.
In this different context, it took him a moment to realize who Demeter was calling over. Tien was one of the newer artificers in the pit at the Mercenary Guild. He had only been there a few times in the last year, and Tien hadn’t left a very strong personal impression. That wasn’t a bad thing. Far from it. The best artificers faded into the background before bursting onto the scene with something incredible and revolutionary.
Maybe that would be Tien, maybe not.
“I don’t have a lot of time, Demeter,” Tien grumbled. “That rock tumbler we brought keeps overheating, and no one knows what happens if it gets too hot.”
“Rock tumbler?” Sunny asked.
“Yeah!” Tien’s placid face lit up in interest. “We’ve been doing this little experiment with friction differentials between raw gemstones. Very informal. Thought it would be fun to get input from everyone else, but you know how this sort of thing goes.” It was a probably a throw away comment, but then most people would have hear about the incident at the tourney with the energy replicator.
“Do not distract him,” Demeter said. “Would you hide an award from Paul?”
“No?” Tien replied.
“Wait, arm Paul?” Sunny asked. “Are you with Paul?”
“Yeah, a couple years at this point,” Tien replied in confusion.
“I don’t think I fully understood his dating life.”
Demeter clapped his hands.
“Distractible! The both of you!” He shoved Sunny in the shoulder. “The point is, I could ask ten more people if they’d hide an award like this from their partner, and I’m going to be generous and guess nine of them would say no. So I don’t know why you did.”
“You didn’t tell Lidea?” Tien admonished. “Yeah, I’m going to have to agree with Demeter on this one. That’s kind of messed up.”
“Why is everyone in my business?”
Demeter flicked his hands out in annoyance.
“Because we’ve all been secretly rooting for you two to get together properly for what feels like a decade at this point, and I’m watching you ruin it.” Demeter shoved him in the shoulder again. “Just fix it before the conference is over, okay?”
###
“Liddy? Are you back in the room-oh.”
Somehow, they had managed to effectively avoid each other for nearing on two days. Lidea had hung out with Paul and Hades, meeting up with some of the other plus-ones kicking around the convention halls. It had been fun, actually, meeting new people that shared this singular thing. Namely, a stubborn artificer that they loved despite their better judgment.
Sunny had been in and out of panels and meet-and-greets, forced to interact with people he only liked on a surface level. People he tolerated. At the same time, it was nice to catch up with what was actually happening in different parts of the industry.
Night two was the gala night, though, and he was getting his award. His little secret that he had been keeping from Lidea for reasons he still didn’t really understand. Why had he kept this information so close to the chest? What was wrong with him? To get through the night, they needed to address it.
Lidea was already ready for the gala.
Elven formal attire had this stern, fine quality to it, layers of embroidered jackets on wide legs pants that hid the form underneath. But Lidea was only half-elf, eir human side pressing against the seams of the elven wear to reveal more of eir form underneath. It was…different. Sunny had never seen em dressed up fancy like this. Hair braided through a silver half-crown that settled along the back of eir head.
“Do you need to shower before you change?” Ey didn’t look up.
“No. I figure I’ll sweat anyway.” Sunny went into the closet where he’d hung his suit. It was an old-fashioned human style, charcoal gray jacket and pants, crimson vest, ivory button-up shirt. They both sat in the moment, looking at each other. Doing the math.
“If we’re going to be married, we’ll have to change clothes in front of each other at some point,” Lidea said.
“You’re not wrong.”
Still, ey turned eir body away just slightly while Sunny changed.
“I’m not going to apologize for being upset. I feel as though I have a right to be.” Lidea’s palms pressed tightly to one another, hands squeezing until the blood pooled in eir knuckles.
“You’re right to be upset, and I’m sorry for upsetting you,” Sunny said carefully. “But I’m not sorry about not mentioning the award because I don’t want the damn thing.”
“That’s bad logic, Sunny.”
“I can live with that.”
“Hell, Sunny,” Lidea muttered. “And what about the schools you’ve been helping build, apparently?”
“That was an honest omission,” Sunny said. “It’s not a project that’ve really done a lot of work on, recently, so I just never thought to mention it to you.”
“I don’t buy that, Sunny.” But then how often did he really go into the details of his jobs? Any of them? “Do you not trust me with this information about your life for some reason?” Lidea ventured.
“What would make you think that?” Sunny replied, defensiveness coloring his voice without him meaning to put it there.
“What else am I supposed to think, Sunny? Come on. This is not me being overly sensitive or picking a fight for no reason. You had this good thing happen to you, and you actively hid it from me. That makes me feel like shit, and I haven’t heard you acknowledge that, yet.”
Sunny had only dressed up to his shirt, vest and jacket still draped over the back of a chair. He had taken off his usual magic-focus gauntlet to replace them with thinner metal and leather bands that rested in the divot of his wrists.
“Why should it hurt your feelings? It’s my stupid fucking award. It has nothing to do with you.”
“Because I love you?” Lidea replied sharply. “Because we’re, in theory, getting married at some point. You’re the one who asked me, yet you only want to act like it when it’s convenient. Spouses share stuff, Sunny. All the stuff. If you can’t share the good stuff, then you’re certainly not going to share the bad stuff. And if that’s the case then what’s the point? What’s the point of being together?”
Sunny threw his body against the closet door.
“Demeter’s right. He’s fucking right. I’m screwing this all up. We were friends. Things were fine. Then I got greedy and fucked it all up.”
“Is that why you didn’t tell me? Because it’s too many good things?”
“I don’t know,” Sunny murmured. “Maybe.” He turned back to the chair to put on his vest and jacket, doing everything in his power to avoid meeting Lidea’s gaze. Ey glanced at the clock on the side-table instead.
“We should go down. We’ll be late.”
They took opposite walls on the lift but didn’t try too terribly hard to pull away from each other. The area at the base of the lift swarmed with people, chattering excitedly as they all made their way to the large room where the “gala” portion of the event should be happening soon. Sunny reached for Lidea’s hand, touching around the edges of it to take them around the side where he had been previously instructed to gather with other people receiving an honor. This brought them into a much quieter side hallway.
The silence pressed on him, pushing everything else out of his body like a sieve. He didn’t know what he was doing, but maybe that was the key. That he didn’t know how to do this.
Sunny turned on Lidea.
“I love you.” The words were sharp. Clean. An overflow that had been building up inside him and needed to unfold. “And I want getting this award to be a happy thing we both enjoy. Please. Don’t let me keep messing this up.”
Lidea released eir hand from his, resting them instead on his shoulders, creeping up to his neck to cup it around the back. Ey leaned down and kissed him. First his forehead. Then his cheek.
“You’re a fucking idiot,” ey said quietly. “You’re cute, though, so I can give you a pass for now.”
“Am I?”
“Cute? Yeah, I’ve always thought so. Very handsome.” Ey ran eir thumbs over his jaw. And something….shifted. A feeling that had been living in eir gut but never quite surfaced. The anger mixed with attraction turned to something that was almost sexual fervor.
And sexual fervor wasn’t something ey was overly familiar with. Ey could count the number of times, including this one, one a single hand that the feeling had overtaken eir. It was…uncomfortable. In a way that perplexed and frightened em. Because ey was still mad. A sort of burning anger, that didn’t quite want to unhook itself from eir ribcage.
But, by god, ey also wanted to take him upstairs and take his clothes off again.
Maybe something was wrong with em.
An alarm blared somewhere in the building, siren swinging through the hallway with a whine, red lights clipping at the corners.
“What is that?” Lidea said.
“I don’t know,” Sunny admitted.
“It’s a fire alarm.” Paul and Tien burst through a door at the end of the hall, trying desperately to keep their hands latched as they pinballed a little against the narrow walls. Tien grabbed Lidea’s hand as they passed, then Lidea reached for Sunny’s in turn. As a group, they stumbled back out into the main concourse. Tien didn’t let go until they had moved out a set of double doors into a patio/garden/plaza area with everyone else.
“The fucking rock tumbler,” Tien breathed as they landed against the edge of some stiff bushes. “Someone changed the settings.” They were panting too hard to get through the rest of the explanation. “Gotta go figure it out.” Then they were off, meeting up with some members of the fire brigade that were quickly arriving. Paul gave a sigh, dropping his shoulders.
“Ow,” he said sharply. Then a few more quick, spiky sounds of distress. Then he became frantic, hurrying to remove the prosthetic arm that doubled as his magic focus. “Shit. I’ll be back.” And he, too, hurried off.
Sunny felt it next. A prickling heat that bubbled up under his wristlet and fried his skin underneath. Lidea had left eir focus upstairs, but ey could feel the charge in the air. Ey grabbed Sunny around the arm and hauled him to a nearby bench.
Lidea moved quickly, rolling up his pants to find the magical foci he kept around the curve of his calves. Ey found eirself reaching up the leg of his pants, up to eir elbows, to drag the bands down and take them off. They rattled on the bench next to him with his bracelets as he managed to unlatch those himself.
Lidea breathed out then flopped down on his other side.
His wrist had already started to burn from the magic discharge, and ey ran eir fingers over the red marks, wondering if ey needed to flag down a medic.
“I expect this kind of drama at The Squall,” Lidea said. “That many mages in one place. Thought artificers would be a little more low-key.”
“Not the first time an exhibition item exploded,” Sunny muttered. “Not usually quite this bad.”
“Hm.” Lidea leaned forward, elbows on eir knees. “Feel like half the time we get into one of these big, existential arguments, something happens and we never get to finish it.”
“Maybe there is no finishing it,” Sunny said quietly.
“What, are we always going to be arguing over something?”
“No…more…” Sunny dropped his head against Lidea’s shoulder, and ey wrapped eir arm around him on habit. “I’ve never had something to fight for before. I’d life to fight for you.”
“I’d like to not fight at all,” Lidea responded sharply.
“Can we do my thing first, then?” Sunny asked.
Lidea brushed eir fingers through Sunny’s hair, testing the familiar spring of his half-curly tresses. God help em, ey loved him. No turning back now.