Chapter 31 Episode 31: The Kiss

Kael’s POV

The fourth floor was empty. I stood in the doorway for a moment and looked at the space and the absence of him in it was more present than it had any reasonable right to be.

The equipment was where it always was. The floor was clean. The light was the same light. Everything was exactly as it should have been and the thing that was wrong about it was simply that he wasn’t there.

I walked in anyway.

I sat against the fence post along the near wall, which was where I always ended up eventually, and looked at the empty training space and did not think about the corridor two nights ago.

The forearm across his chest. The way his voice had said his name... my name... with the particular voice it had sometimes that I had been carefully not examining. The image I had been carrying since Reiss handed me the incident report, the one I had constructed from Jen’s notation and the mana monitor data before I pulled it from the review queue.

A blood fiend with a blood contact already made. A dungeon running above classification. Akira with his suppression down and a technique he had never tested live and nobody in that space with the output to cover him if it failed.

I had built that image from data points and it was worse than if I had been there, because the version built from data points had no resolution. It just stopped at the moment the screen either held or didn’t, and both possibilities lived in the same image, and I had been carrying both of them since reading the report and I could not seem to put one of them down.

Twenty minutes.

I sat against the fence post for twenty minutes and then I stood up and left because sitting here was not productive and his absence was not something I was going to address by occupying the space he had left.

I had Reiss clear the remaining afternoons. All of them, not just Thursdays, the full week’s afternoon block. Reiss asked no questions. He updated the schedule and confirmed and I moved on to the rest of the evening.

Except I didn’t move on to the rest of the evening, because I was in the corridor outside the fourth floor and instead of going to the elevator I was standing there, and I became aware, after a moment, that I was listening.

The guild building at this hour was mostly quiet. The evening mission crews had gone out. The administrative staff had cleared. The building ran on a skeleton presence after seven, the overnight monitors and the duty officer and that was largely it. So the sound, when I heard it, was distinct.

Someone was in the stairwell.

The sound was specific. The particular rhythm of a person not going somewhere but staying somewhere, the shuffle of weight shifting and then stilling. I walked to the stairwell door and pushed it open.

He was sitting on the stairs between the fourth and fifth floor, his back against the wall, his knees drawn up, the dagger resting across them with the cloth wrapping he still hadn’t replaced with a sheath. His head was tipped back against the wall and his eyes were closed and he looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with training.

The specific tiredness of someone who had been carrying something heavy for a long time and had found a quiet corner to set it down in for a moment without anyone watching.

He heard the door. His eyes opened and found me immediately, the spatial awareness that never fully switched off.

Neither of us said anything.

I let the door close behind me and sat down on the stair beside him, which was not something I had planned to do but which I did anyway because the alternative was standing over him in a stairwell and that seemed worse.

The stairs were concrete and cold through the fabric and the stairwell had the particular acoustic quality of enclosed spaces, every small sound present and distinct.

He looked at me for a moment. Then he looked back at the wall across from him.

"The fourth floor was empty," I said.

"I know," he said. "I am not ready yet."

I thought about that. About what not being ready yet meant, and about the corridor two nights ago, and about the image I had been carrying since the report.

I looked at the side of his face... the angular jaw and the silver hair that had fallen slightly across his forehead and the line of tension across his shoulders that was present even when he was sitting still against a wall with his eyes closed.

"The blood fiend," I said.

He didn’t react. "I thought we already ended that talk."

"We talked about only the technique you used. We didn’t cover the rest of it."

He turned his head to look at me. His expression had the careful quality it had in the corridor... something kept just below the surface, the management of it visible in the slight set of his jaw. "The rest of it?"

"If that screen had failed..." I said.

"News flash, it didn’t."

"If it had..."

He was quiet for a moment. The stairwell held the silence the way enclosed spaces did, completely, without giving it anywhere to go.

"I knew the risk, even before making my move" he said.

"I know you knew the risk." Something moved through my chest that I had been managing since reading the incident report and which was not staying managed the way I needed it to.

"I know you assessed it and made the call and the call was correct and the outcome was the right outcome. I know all of that." I looked at him.

"What I am telling you is that I have been carrying the version where the outcome was different and I cannot seem to put it down or get that image out of mind."

He looked at me.

The expression on his face was doing something I didn’t have a clean language for. The careful management had shifted, not completely gone but different.

Something underneath it that was closer to the surface. He was reading me the way he read things when he had decided to actually look rather than observe, the full weight of his attention finding whatever it was finding.

"Kael," he said.

My name in his mouth. The thrill of it. Sending trails down my spine. Doing things I never even knew existed.

"You should have told me," I said quietly. "About the mission. Before you even embarked on them. Any of them."

"You said that."

"I’m saying it again."

"Why?"

The question sat in the stairwell between us and I looked at him and he looked at me and the space between us on the stairs was not very much spacious anymore.

And something that had been running under all of it since the training room and the ramen shop and the fence post was present in a way it usually wasn’t, the management of it strained by two nights of a specific unresolvable image.

I reached out.

My hand found the back of his head, the way you steadied something you were afraid of losing, and I pulled him forward and pressed my lips to his forehead and held them there.

His breath caught. The silver hair was soft against my hand and his forehead was warm and I stayed there for a moment that was longer than intended and shorter than I wanted.

Then I let go. I sat back. He was very still. The stairwell was very quiet.

I looked at the wall across from us and thought about the image from the report... the blood fiend, the unresolved screen, both outcomes living in the same moment... and thought about his forehead warm under my lips and thought about the fact that I had done that and could not construct, in this moment, a version of myself that regretted it.

"Kael," he said again. Quieter this time.

"You should have told me," I said. Third time. The repetition was doing something different now, carrying something the first two times hadn’t.

He looked at me for a long moment. Then, slowly, he leaned sideways and his head came to rest against my shoulder, and I did not move, and the stairwell was quiet around us and the building was mostly empty and the city outside was doing whatever it was doing.

My arm moved before I decided to move it. Around his shoulders, adjusting him closer, and he came without resistance, and we sat like that in the concrete stairwell between the fourth and fifth floors with his head on my shoulder and my arm around him. His scent invading my senses. Slowly but surely driving me to an insanity only he could save me from.

He was warm. That was the thing I was most aware of. The specific warmth of another person at close range, present and real, not the abstract knowledge of it but the actual physical fact.

I thought, I have been managing this for the wrong reasons.

I didn’t examine what that meant yet. I let it sit, the way I let most significant things sit when they arrived before I was ready for them.

We stayed like that for a while. Long enough that the tension across his shoulders gradually released, the tiredness that had been there when I found him slowly settling into something quieter. Long enough that my arm around him stopped feeling like a decision and started feeling like a fact.

Then he straightened. My arm came back.

He stood up and I stood up and we were in the stairwell again, on the stairs, the normal geometry of the space reasserting itself.

He looked at me. Something in his expression was different from anything I had seen in it before... still managed, still careful, but with something underneath the management that was not the same something as before.

"I can still see you every thursday?" I asked quietly. Afraid he would suddenly draw away from me.

He held my gaze for a moment.

"Sure," he said.

I went down the stairs while he stayed where he was. I did not look back because looking back was not something I was going to do, not tonight, not with the specific quality of that moment still sitting in my chest in the way of things that had arrived and had no intention of leaving.

Once in the car, I issued tge order to Reiss, "Clear every afternoon. Indefinitely."

And he replied with just one word, "Done."

I looked out the window at the city and thought about the kiss to his forehead and about his head on my shoulder and the image from the report, which was still there but different now, the unresolved version of it quieter than before.

I had been managing this for the wrong reasons. I let that sit.

I would look at it directly. Eventually.

Just not tonight.