#heres smore vent writing

Satya reaches for her drafting pencil only to find it absent.

After a cursory glance around the workshop, she is thankful to see that it hasn’t taken a dive off of the tabletop. Instead, it appears to have rolled into a pile of eraser shavings in the next space over where Jamison scratches various designs in the faded pages of an old notebook.

“If you would be so kind as to hand that to me,” she says, “it would be greatly appreciated.”

“Hand you what? Got about a million things over here. Protractor? Measuring stick?” He peers up from his drawing, eyebrows raised, a red grenade shell between his metal thumb and forefinger. “Inspiration?”

She stifles a snicker behind her knuckles. “I just need the—no, the pencil there. The white one just by your elbow. No, no, your other elbow. Yes, that’s it. If you would?”

“Yeah, sure, sure.” Swiping it, he holds it out to her in the graphite smudged flat of his palm. “All yours.”

“Thank you, Jamie.”

It is perhaps a touch too late before Satya realizes her error.

Mortified that she would dare to call him something so personal—and out loud!—she clenches her fingers around her pencil in momentary panic. When she snaps around to apologize, she discovers that he is very still, statuesque, a strange sculpture of stark angles and blond fire crunched in his chair. A crease crinkles his brow as he regards her with what she can only hazard to be bewilderment, but it isn’t his usual deadpan display; there is a smile there, however faint.

“Jami—Jamison,” she amends. “That is what I meant. Jamison.”

Several moments of complete silence envelop the room, and Satya thinks she could melt into the floor.

And then, softly, “No one’s called me that in a real long time.”

“I… I apologize,” she says, squashing as much sincerity into her voice as she can possibly muster. “I misspoke. A simple mistake. It won’t happen again. If you are uncomfortable with—”

“You can call me that if you want.”

Whatever words she’d meant to use next must have evaporated because her throat is very empty. She scrambles for something to say, but despite her generous vocabulary cobbled of assorted languages, nothing of significance comes to her rescue.

“I won’t mind if you do,” he says. “Just old, is all. Been a while. A long, long while. I reckon it’s been years.”

Satya falters. “Years?”

“Don’t remember how many, but yeah, definitely years. It was—it was something Mum and Dad used to say. Them and the old man and his little missus from the ranch over the road. I used to go scouting with their grandkids sometimes. Y’know, before everything.”

Something compresses tightly between her lungs. “Clearly this means something to you. It seems very… personal, all things considered. Are you certain?”

“Junkrat, Fawkes, Jamison, Jamie. S’all the same, I suppose.”

Jamison scratches at his hairline, eyes averted to the tabletop, a charming flush in the height of his cheeks.

“So long as you’re the one saying it.”