[ from this post ]52. “Can I kiss you?”Satya almost doesn’t hear it.It is an ancho

[ from this post]

52.“Can I kiss you?”

Satya almost doesn’t hear it.

It is an anchor weighing at the very end of a stoppered bottle of calamity, one that had burst between her lungs and sunk its shards into every tender lining, every little crease, every hidden nook. A choking tangle of disjointed syllables amalgamates into a stone in her throat as she rocks, and despite the strained ache she must swallow down and the swell of unintelligible river static in her ears, she catches only a sliver amongst the clamor, a palpable weight in the tomb of her palm: you.

She looks up from her lap and the shattered mess it contains.

(It had been her last reminder.)

Warm amber stares back.

(The very last.)

She should say something, but it hurts.

(Her family is no more.)

Is it supposed to hurt this much?

(Home doesn’t exist.)

She doesn’t know.

(It isn’t even something she can create.)

Jamison has crooked down to her level, pretzeled in front of her onto the stark chrome of the workshop floor. His left hand frames her prosthetic fingers, cradled against the backs of her knuckles as a slinking shadow. His body language rewrites his brazen bluster; instead of hot sparks and wicked firelight, hesitance has carved out a space, and concern has taken residence somewhere in its midst.

His mouth moves again, and he sounds like water. Like the ocean. Like crashing volume and crushing depths and rapids rushing through eroded systems that want to pool deep into her head. And she’d let them, if she could.

The blinding lights cast all of the precious fractures around her in glitter, and he sidles forward on his knees (he’s so careful not to let the metal scrape) with a twist in his brow, the orange of his prosthesis splayed open, reaching, an are you okay sequestered amongst its screws.

She isn’t, of course, but it doesn’t need to be said.

“—must’ve really meant a lot,” bubbles up between the waves, and it’s… sad, she thinks, but not quite mourning, not the way she is.

Satya nods—nods—because words have failed her.

Pressure registers on the knot of her shoulder. It works across tensed trapezius planes and down the dip of her back, testing, waiting, and when she does not resist, it coaxes her into a half embrace. Before, she never would have expected such a delicate motion from a hand so crude, but she knows better now. Strange intricacies compose him in ways her past self wouldn’t have even thought to consider.

“—be that hard, can it? Probably won’t be the same, yeah, but… well, better than having it in pieces.”

There are pieces of her everywhere, it seems.

Hyderabad.

Utopaea.

Vishkar.

Rio.

And now Gibraltar.

Her eyes sting.

His left hand still rests against the back of hers, keeping it aloft. Gently, his fingers curve around from the side and settle in toward the center of her palm. Each one eclipses the moon sepulchered where her lifelines once were, and perhaps it should bother her that this is something she cannot fix, that this is one thing she could not recreate even if she’d tried, but she focuses on the callused pads of each finger and the grooves marking every knuckle and draws a long, long inhale through her nose.

His forehead meets hers, and he leans into her with every subtle sway.

“Can I kiss you?”

Recovery places her in a mystifying limbo. Several moments pass before it occurs to her that this must mean something because it is the first time he’s ever asked. Before, confident smiles and casual glances were all the implication he’d needed, and now, as she steeps in the shuddering aftermath of something she cannot keep bottled in, he is asking permission.

Satya nods again—nods, because the words will not come—and encloses her fingers over his.