Apriltober 2020 30 Guts

a/n: Vandham has a question for his ex. Lila changes her mind. Mira provides a sunset. Gino drops an unnecessarry f-bomb.

Swears. Ridiculously self-indulgent fluff. You have been warned. Prompt from Draco but he's not to blame for this.

All the good things belong to Monolith Soft. Lila and Gino have been riding in my head for over 4 years now.

She felt her skin prickle before he'd crossed the official line that marked the footage she was leasing for the skell refueling station. His boots were enough to send early warning signals a minute before he could reach them, but she counted on him swerving as he'd done every other time. Tonight he didn't. She had climbed down the ladder to a Verus in need of serious washing and was ready to greet him when he arrived. He made straight for her, and she didn't even congratulate herself on being prepared.

"Commander. What can we do for you?"

"Got some time?"

She drew a completely natural breath and topped it off with a polite smile. "Sure. Do you want to step into the office?"

"No, out here's fine. I want to run something by you, just not ..." He looked around the station. She knew his eyes were taking all the improvements of the past months. She wasn't going to ask what he thought.

"No one's in the waiting area, if that'll work?"

"Fine, fine," he said quickly.

She led him over to the garishly decorated scrap of artificial lawn that made up the customer waiting area. No coffee, that they could buy from the Quickie Quickie Mart at the back of the station, but there were a few summery lawn chairs and plastic pinwheel flowers, as well as a rotating stock of twinkly lights. This week it was yellow plastic ducks, winking cheerfully. Soon she'd switch it to something more autumnal, apples or leaves perhaps. The seasons never changed on Mira, but that didn't stop her from marking the calendar with kitschy decorations.

He kicked a deck chair out of the way and stood in the center of the area, feet planted firmly, arms crossed. He glowered down at her and she lasered back up at him. It felt very familiar. She was not going to help him out.

xcxcxcxcxcx

It was already going wrong. He'd gotten this far, however, so he launched into it. "I've been seeing Hope recently."

"H.B. may have mentioned that. Congratulations. She's a lovely person."

He practically recoiled. "Jesus, Lila, not like that. She's a baby!"

"Oh."

He grabbed at his scattered thoughts. "I've been seeing her professionally. As a Mediator."

"Oh. Oh!" He watched her recalculate and caught a glow of something. "I'm glad. You deserve all the support, sir."

"Yeah, thanks. It was getting to a point where I had to do something. It helps, talking to her about work and stress and ... us."

"There was no us," she said automatically. He hadn't expected anything different.

"I gotta let her think there is. Anyway, she said something and I can't stop thinking about it." He'd planned it this way, putting it on Hope a little. Something in his gut told him he needed to move it a little away from just the two of them. And Hope had mentioned it. "She said that sometimes things that end badly can end well, if both parties are willing to look at it."

He looked hopefully at Lila. She kept her basilisk gaze steady on him. He sighed and gestured vaguely, grabbing at something unseen. "It got me thinking. It was good having you on my team. Good to have someone to shoot ideas off of, good to have each other's back. I could use some of that. I could definitely use somebody I didn't have to hide things from."

"You have Hope."

"I can't tell her everything. I have to be careful not to let things slip, and I was thinking maybe you're in the same boat."

"Easy solution, sir. Don't talk about it."

He ignored that suggestion. "Besides, Hope doesn't know engineering from crap. If I start talking about it to other people, well, Nagi starts yawning, Pfeffen is painfully polite at my weak ass ramblings, and Lin..." He shrugged and grimaced. "There's only so much I can take of her brand of enthusiasm."

He spotted the twinkle in her eye, but there was no smile to match it. He took heart. "Look, a couple times this summer, it felt like we could manage friendship. I'm not asking for a do-over, not that that's the right term. But I could go for something better than this ..."

"Deep freeze?" she said in a voice that matched.

"I could stand something more like what we had on the Whale. It's closer to me, but I bet you could remember it, if you thought it was a good idea. I'm gonna trust you on this one though. Whaddya say? Friends?"

"Close your eyes, sir."

"What?"

"Just for a moment. Please. Close your eyes."

Yeah, he thought, she's getting ready to say no. I'll be lucky if she doesn't slug me first.

xcxcxcxcxcxcxcxcx

Lila pressed both hands flat against her mouth, stifling whatever was trying to come out. A sob, probably. She'd find out later, when she tried to fall asleep tonight. When she knew she could take a soundless breath, she lowered her hands and checked her eyes with her fingertips. No tears, that was good. That meant she'd be ready very soon.

Her chest wasn't feeling stable yet, though, so she'd risk a few more seconds of his patience while she tried to pull herself together. Unbidden, her eyes were skimming over his body, stealing what they could for the long cold future. Stop it, she ordered her brain. If we're doing this, let's do it right, bottom to top. Take it all in and be done with it.

His boots. She liked his boots. They were solid and meant business and were fearless about what anyone else thought. They made her feel safe and ready.

His pants. Rough fabric, ugly even, there to get the job done. She knew the defense levels on them, had helped improve them on Mira. She decided she should move on quickly.

His chest, and she had to breathe twice, because she hoped like anything they'd cleared up the ugly scar from the attack. It wasn't any of her business now, but she checked the edges of his tank for any clue that the sunburst that had swallowed his heart had been smoothed away. He had his arms crossed again, and she lingered over his tattoos. She'd miss those, the lower one especially. She liked that he declared his love for his tools on his arm. There was a time when she'd traced that wrench, that hammer, as she fell asleep.

She forced her eyes upwards, to his face, his dear face. Here she was greedy, because unlike his chest, she could be sure that the scar was gone. His forehead went smoothly into his hair, his jaw line melted into his neck. His nose was as pugnacious and straight as before. If he opened his eyes, she'd see their deep-water grey.

She was ready. She'd tell him to open his eyes, say a polite no thank you, and return to the refueling job that would become the whole of her life. One solid breath first, one more moment staring at his face. She watched his silky eyebrows quirk suddenly.

She stared with amazement and the beginning of fury. She knew that expression. She'd seen it often enough on the ship. He was working on a problem. Here she was, trying not to let her heart break (again), and he was mentally tinkering with some engineering puzzle. She opened her mouth to complain, but her lungs squeezed tight as a realization hit her.

He was solving something, and she wanted to know what it was.

Frontier Nav could place a probe marker directly under her feet, a crimson light rising from the deepest core of the planet straight through her heart and into the heavens, and it wouldn't be clearer. She wanted to know, she would always want to know, and she would always want to have a part in it.

That was nothing to the second realization: she deserved to have that happen.

She had enough breath left to say, "You can open your eyes now."

xcxcxcxcxcxcxcxcxcx

She was going to say no, and the worst of it was that she might be trying not to cry. He listened carefully, but he couldn't pick up much of a hint from the woman he knew was still standing there. She'd be fine, he reassured himself. He listened, but all he could catch was the mechanical white noise of the Industrial District.

Not a bad sound to have as company. He concentrated harder, identifying all the familiar components, trying to calm himself. A construction skell rumbling past, reminding him of a complaint about emissions in the residential quarter. A team returning through the gate, their skells sounding smooth and cool. Must have been a local mission, no flight, those packs still got overheated, which was another thing on the to-do list to solve. A small whirring, sharp and insistent, pulled at his attention. Something about the twanging echo that came from the floor made him think it was Ma-non technology. He'd seen a few of those tiny automatic skell parking roombas running around Lila's station. He'd heard that they were a big part of the efficiency of the station, removing any need for humans to move the skells in and out of her bays, automatically removing finished jobs and bringing in the next. They looked like golden toasters and could lift a heavy skell and twirl it. Now that was something with possibilities, he thought. If BLADE could convince the Ma-non to make a few to do maintenance on Frontier Nav sites, maybe they wouldn't be risking teams every time they needed to change a fuse. Wouldn't want the Ganglion to get their mitts on that kind of thing, though. Maybe attach a Pathfinder to the set-up? He wouldn't mind sending H.B. on a vacation to Cauldros to monitor how well that worked. Temporarily, mind you.

"You can open your eyes."

She was frowning up at him impatiently, and his face grew hot. Holy crap, she had changed her mind. He fought to keep from grinning. "So, you okay with the idea?"

"Yes, I agree. We can be friends."

"Great." The grin he was hiding was threatening to wrap clean around his head. He tugged at his mustache instead. "We could do coffee. Thursday?"

She hesitated, then twisted her head wryly. "The Quickie Quickie mart has coffee."

He nodded, backing away from the original thought of ... he kept that thought elsewhere. "Fine, I can do my bit to keep you guys afloat. I'll bring you a pastry though."

Lila looked off into a corner of her station. He followed her gaze and tried to spot what she was noticing. Could have been a lot of things. He waited. He was ready when she snapped her glance back to him. "Do you have 15 minutes, sir?"

"For you, twenty." Very suave. He was proud of that answer.

"Gino," she shouted over her shoulder. "I'll be back in 15."

"Fuck you!" came her tech's standard reply.

"It's been clear all day, and it's almost sunset. There's a view I'd like you to see," she explained. She was walking around the Quickie Quickie mart, back towards the West Gate.

He followed, still curious. "You don't know about views, Lila."

"Not me. You said it was one of your favorites. It's an area that's pretty much out of use now. I just thought, you might not have seen it." They climbed the open metal stairs to an elevator platform. Lila punched the call button.

"You okay to go on this?" he asked.

"I can manage. The city walls help. At the top it opens up and you'll have to help. There's a tunnel off to the right. Help me get there and I'll be all right."

He stood behind her on the elevator platform. He noticed the moment that her fingers curled into the edges of the control panel. She didn't hunch, but he knew she would be too busy struggling against her agoraphobia to hear a word he said. He moved closer and curved his arms around her so that his hands rested just above hers on the metal frame. He didn't touch her, merely formed a shield against whatever she was fighting. He was glad to see her fingers relax enough to lose their bone white color, but that was nothing to what he felt when she leaned slightly back against him.

They reached the top in silence and he guided her gently to the corridor she had described. One step in and she looked up and shook herself free briskly.

"Thank you."

"Glad you noticed."

"I'm not barfing so someone must have helped. You're the only one here." She nodded. "It's this way."

He hadn't been down this corridor since the Whale was still in flight. He certainly hadn't been down it on Mira. The light from the planet was flooding down the tunnel, making the wiring and disabled panels sharp and edged in gold. She stopped about a meter from the exit.

"I'll let you go on, sir. There's a platform a few steps up from here. You promised to show it to me when we were restored." She fluttered a hand, then continued. "I'm glad I get to show it to you, more or less. I've got to get back now, so you'll have to go on alone." She nodded sharply in the direction of the platform and repeated, "Go on."

The moment he stepped into the fresh air, he knew it would be glorious. He caught the edge of a curving rock peeking over the stairway's railing. The tail of a sky whale flicked and vanished. He turned to thank her, only to see her small back retreating into the dimness.

Five steps and he'd caught up to her. She was not pleased to see him.

"Sir!" she chided him. "You're going to miss the sunset."

"I'm getting you back down safe. Can't have you falling down the elevator shaft."

"I've suffered worse. You really should take this chance. You never know if ..." She dropped her eyes to stare at her boots, then continued quickly, not looking at him. "The weather changes so much. You won't know when you'll have another chance."

"I know what it is and where. I'll come back for it." He gently took her arm under his. "Hey, did I ever say anything about the sunrise?"

"Not that I remember."

"Good. Maybe I'll get a chance to figure something out on my own for a change."

a/n: NO dot EX01 on loop to get editing DONE. Lila and Jack had a quite the thing (The Lily and the BLADE) and then they broke up because mumblenotwrittenyetmumble (short version: shot and reset to factory settings, go see Inktober 2017/2/Divided, he's better now, don't worry), and I have been working very very hard to get them back together in my head. This was utterly self-indulgent nonsense, do not blame Draco for the prompt. I was going to do exactly what I wanted to because (counting this one) ...

YOOOOOOO I WROTE 34 STORIES IN 30 DAYS SO I DESERVE THIS OKAY?

Happy May and remember that May 29th is only 4 weeks away. We got this kids. If there was something you wanted to see, drop me a note and it may happen (years from now but it may happen).