The Fey clan should have rules, he said. Terms. Leave holes in the fence and predators will slip in. So he spent his entire first week out of prison holed up in the spare room, cross-legged on the floor, reading really boring textbooks by candlelight. Not that he needed a light, but Maya insisted: a friendly little light was the best she could offer.
She tried to read a page once, standing over his shoulder, breathing in the ever-present smell of coffee. It made her eyes cross but Mr. Armando sat there focused, tightness knotting his shoulders together.
She made rice, she offered. She leaned farther, and the floor boards squawked.
He wasn't hungry, he said. Maya wondered about the eyes under that visor, because his frown could melt lead all by itself.
She brought him some anyway, and left it while he wasn't looking, like the fleetest of ninja. The least she could do was look after him for a while. Mr. Armando brought the empty bowl back -- holding it like a disobedient puppy -- and thanked Maya like he couldn't remember what for.
He began to write the next week. Maya went to the spare room for her meditation, drifting off on the scritch-scratch of his pencil. She'd always surface to evening, shadows and a halo of candlelight around him. He frowned steady thought at those papers, he probably hadn't moved as long as Maya hadn't and she tried out Diego in her head, there in the quiet.
Working hard was no excuse for wasting away, so she made him a sandwich. Maya wasn't convinced that he liked tuna, but he hadn't complained yet. He replied with a fresh pot of coffee, and wordlessly stirred milk and sugar into her mug.
Mr. Armando wasn't fooling anyone, Maya decided. He nodded to Pearly when she scurried back with fresh, crisp paper. He didn't flinch at Maya's hand on his shoulder, when it lingered long enough to feel body heat seep through his shirt. She kept doing that because it was a nice reminder, like a little glass keepsake so she knew he was real, he was here, they'd both made it this far so how bad could things be?
The document stack started looking sure of itself: clean-edged and important. She got the weirdest feeling that this day was special -- she did have E.S.P., after all -- so she spent a few hours getting the family noodle recipe right. Mr. Armando's steaming coffee got a steaming bowl for a friend, and he motioned her closer.
This was the biggest part of it, he said, going over the existing Fey estate and legal rights. Mostly solid the way it was, but he'd tied off a few loopholes. His voice slumped out of him like wet string. He just needed her to sign.
Okay, Maya said. She picked up a pen.
He shook his head, and rubbed as much of his forehead as the visor allowed. No, no, making coffee in the dark was a good way to get burned. She needed to understand first. He'd explain.
It occured to Maya later that she could have sat beside him. But there was something grand forming in Mr. Armando, rising on all that coffee-gritty determination and pouring out onto the paper. So Maya got in the middle of it. That was the only way to really appreciate things. If he minded her sitting in his lap, he didn't complain any more than he had about the tuna, and Maya decided that she understood as she learned about legal ownership in his arms.
The family noodles, it turned out, were just as good cold. And Diego's coffee machine wasn't that hard to work once she exploded it a few times. The document pile looked close to being done -- how much taller could it get? -- so Maya asked him, after a few more days. She'd stopped tracking the weeks but it looked like about a forever's worth, weighing on him like sandbags.
He said there wasn't much more.
She brought him a salad. Not that he seemed like a salad kind of guy, just because he was so grey now, and people were supposed to get more green vegetables and fresh air when that happened. After making sure the smiley face of cucumber slices faced him, Maya sat, and leaned on his arm, and asked how it was going.
He took off the visor. That was so wonderfully bizarre that she forgot to breathe, watching his thumbs spider under the plastic, glimpsing white eyelashes under his rubbing fingers.
Not bad, he sighed. Like the last savoury drops falling into the coffee pot.
The visor clicked back into place and Maya kept on watching it, imagining how it stayed on like a bionic arm in a sci-fi movie, imagining how Diego looked at her in these past long days.
He slid a hand around her waist, and left it there just long enough to warm her inside. He was going for a refill, he said, care to keep him company?
She did. She really did.
It was done, Diego told her, two days later as he leaned very casually against the door frame with his hands in his pockets. There was nothing in the spare room but his books and stack of documents, but the air felt tingly and new around them. Maya was in his lap the second he sat, his arm winding wonderfully around her middle, the text as dry as ever but this was exciting anyway.
After a forever or five, and lots of flipped pages, Diego stopped. He took a slow gulp of coffee, and clicked the mug back down. He explained that, long story short, the slightest suspicion of foul play would cause automatic inelegibility and forfeit of the Kurain Technique rights. Anyone who played dirty lost the game.
That growl in his voice stirred up the sad things, and Maya hated those things because she could smile as much as her face would hold, and they'd still never really go away. She shifted, and settled facing him because he let her, he'd always let her.
Why do all this, she asked? It was great and everything, really, but why?
The breeze hummed outside. He stirred, like the hatching of some dark, twitching mood.
Because they needed protecting, he muttered. Maya, Pearl, all of them. Because it had been too close, that one cold night, and the only weapon he was any good with was the law.
Diego pulled her close then, swallowing her up in his arms, nuzzling her forehead and speaking lowly there. No one could steal the Master birthright now; no one would try to hurt Maya or her loved ones ever again. He'd make sure of it.
The growl hummed through her now, which her hands on his broad chest, with his throat close enough to smell leather-sharp aftershave. Maya breathed in, and breathed out, and hurt because she was still thinking. She didn't have to think so much with someone there to watch over her, and that had to be why she looped arms around Diego's neck, and dragged him down and kissed him. Diego held tighter; he didn't seem to mind at all.
It took time to get his work verified, and notarized, and all the other big important words. Every time Maya came into the spare room, now, she found him reading -- slim, cultured books, just for pleasure -- and curled up with him. Then the letters arrived, and then came the train trip where Diego took Maya's hand in his. He was watching, always taking care, and he took her to a soft-lit restaurant that night because, he said, they made good coffee there and the steak was better than any burger Maya had ever known. She'd have to let him take care of meals more often. He looked proud like this.
Maya's copies of the documents went in the safe, flashing gold-leafed and then locked in safe, Diego tugging the handle to make sure. And then they made love, not because it was anyone's idea but because it just happened. Maya should have guessed but she wasn't thinking about words anymore, not with Diego kissing her with a fire he'd just found again, memorizing the shape of her hips with his hands and suddenly, they were going through the halls to her bedroom with a glittery, thrilling sense of right now. His whiskers tickled, and he said he was rusty but from the way they fit together, Maya didn't believe that for a second.
It was buttery calm afterward, cool air on damp skin, letting out a sigh as Diego stroked her back like anyone else would pet a cat. There was all the time in the world to lay there and drink each other in, now that the work was done.
Hey, she said, as sure as she could make herself in the dark. If no one could hurt them anymore, then he didn't need to fight, either.
Men always had causes to fight for, Diego mumbled. He stretched, blankets muttering around his feet, and gathered Maya toward him. He said that all his life, he had never really known what he needed until he fought for it.
He nuzzled the bare skin of her collarbone. And she held him and buried her nose in his hair to smell the both of them, mingled. He was calm and she was sore and it couldn't have been any better if it were all wrapped in cotton candy.
He couldn't keep fried egg yolks whole for the life of him; Maya didn't care because she liked her eggs scrambled. Everything was happiest when it muddled along, together.