His face flickers in and out of sight as he pulls the file across Escaflowne's giant blade, his muscles tensing and relaxing in rhythm with the rise and fall of her voice from where she sits on the scaffolding behind him.
The sound of liquid through a straw fills the periodic pauses in the flow of her speech, which tells him she's finishing off the juice in the piscus gourd he gave her. She must have decided she liked it, or else she didn't want to make him feel bad—either way, he's gratified. He knows it's an acquired taste, certainly not as sweet as some might want, but he's grown to love it. Of the two reasons for her to drink it, he rather hopes it isn't mere politeness.
He can see the heat on his face reflected in the silvery surface below him—there and gone, there and gone—and he can sense hesitation in her words and in her thoughtful pulls at the sour beverage—here or there, here or there—and he speaks without thinking.
"Hitomi...I want you to stay with me from now on."
Silence from behind, and he doesn't know just what he's done, or just what he's doing, but the file has stopped moving and he is rising to his feet.
"Van...what did you say?" she asks, after what seems an age, and again he responds instinctively.
"I want you to stay with me." Not right, somehow. "I want you!"
The piscus gourd crashes to the ground.
"Your...." What is it? "Your...." He hasn't taken a step, and yet somehow he feels himself moving towards her.
Just as he whirls to face her his brain switches on and he remembers Allen and Merle and the wars, the wars, the wars. "Your power," he says, by way of explanation or obfuscation.
The heat is radiating from both of their faces now, and he covers it with a torrent of words that mean nothing. The "please" he tacks onto his request sounds false, as though it belongs to another conversation.
She stares at him, quivering, and for one long minute he wonders if he will ever know what it was he had been going to say, and if she could tell him right now, and then her eyes set hard and her palm makes sudden and violent contact with his left cheek.
The hair that has fallen across his field of vision makes a good excuse not to look at her, to keep his head down as she rushes out of the windmill, and when she is gone he takes a long, deep breath and goes back to Escaflowne.
He watches the file, not the blade, as it flicks back and forth, and he feels the sting of her touch, but she is gone and his mind is clear now, focused. It's better this way, alone. It is.
When she's around, he never knows what will happen next.