A/N: Written for FemFeb this year. Felt like doing some fresh-grown pining.
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"Come on, Lottie," says Nautica, smile radiant with encouragement as she watches over the top of the datapad clutched in her hands. "You know this."
"I do not know this," says Velocity, decidedly less smiley. She hugs her knees to her chest and only doesn't bury her face against them because then she'd lose sight of Nautica's smile. She settles for pressing only her pout into hiding, so her words come out a tad muffled. "I assure you that if I knew this, I'd have answered you already."
Nautica sets aside the datapad– face-down, Velocity notes with a glance– and shifts forward, hands coming to rest over top Velocity's. Her thumbs soothe across Velocity's knuckles, slow and soft, and Velocity is ninety-nine percent certain that doing so shouldn't wipe Nautica's question from her brain, yet there it goes. Nautica's smile softens at the edges and Velocity nearly forgets that there was a question to begin with.
"You're just overthinking," Nautica tells her, "it's the nerves. Cycle some air through your vents, here," there comes the sound of displaced air as she leads Velocity through a few rotations. "This is just the chapter we went over yesterday, remember?"
Oh, Velocity remembers the study session well enough. She remembers Nautica's legs crossed with hers as the two of them reclined across from each other. She remembers Nautica's voice dancing over question after question, lilting with the tip of her smile whenever Velocity answered correctly. She remembers idly comparing Nautica's tones against those she used when sharing something out of one of her seemingly endless books and wondering, as naturally as she might have wondered which treat from an assortment to try first, whether they might taste different licked off her lips.
Expecting her to remember anything else, Velocity thinks, is entirely unfair.