A brief author's notes:
THE END. I KNOW. WHO KNEW IT WOULD.
This story was stress relief for me, pure and simple. I'd like to say I had some sort of interest in story quality and pacing, or just knowing anything about Japan, but really, I puked up whatever stress had happened to me this month! onto the screen (learning to fly and defy hypothermia has been a very useful skill for me). However, as a plus, I am now deeply in love with Rowen. Through him I learn to love myself! Or rather, I tell myself neurotic morons can be cute.
Persuasion - chapter eight - part two
Rowen was pulling a charcoal sweater over his head with some difficulty, holding his dark wool coat in reserve over on arm when Sage spoke at his shoulder, "What was that about?"
He meant the obvious anguish on Cye's face. Rowen stiffened, yanking the sweater's collar past his chin. "Nothing," he hissed, jerking a glance over his shoulder. "He's over-reacting."
Sage watched him for a moment, expressionless, then observed, "You're blushing."
Rowen started, staring for moment with an honest face. Then he glowered, muttering, and shoved his way out the door and into the snow.
Sage watched him stomp awkwardly down the shoveled walk, and thought of Cye at the low table in Sage's ancestral home, brushing off questions, smiling with a hidden and enviable contentment.
He'd said – and it had seemed to Sage a strange thing to say happily - "Rowen only ever does what he's going to do. It's not worth it trying to predict him. By the time he starts making sense, he'll be bored and starting something new without ever knowing why he's doing it."
No, Sage had thought. Rowen doesn't start new things. He makes a mess of old ones.
He sighed, feeling the magnitude of all he did not know about Rowen's current thoughts. He reassured himself with the reminder that he had never understood Rowen, but at least in those days he had had more information to go on. He heard a step on the stairs, and turned.
Ryo was sitting at the landing in a tshirt and sweatpants, scratching groggily at the hair falling in front of his ear. "Where you going?" he asked neutrally.
Sage hesitated. "I do not want to be a danger to my friends," he said quietly. "I used to be afraid that if my armor had more power, I would be more dangerous, and so I tried to forget it. But now it seems like it's more dangerous when forgotten. I don't know what to do instead, but I have to try."
Ryo blinked down at his feet and said nothing, but Sage saw his hand involuntarily trace the pale scar around his left arm, exposed by the short-sleeved shirt he was wearing. Since Rowen had discovered it (or rather, Sage had shown it to him), Ryo had started to wear short sleeves again. Apparently, Rowen had been the center of his desire to hide it, since the rest of them knowing no longer appeared to bother him.
Mia came through in the wide doorway that linked the entrance way with the living room. She carried a sheaf of papers and notebooks under her arm, and it was clear from her face that she was livid. Cye trailed behind her, looking put-upon and tired, rubbing his temples to promote patience he didn't have.
"Mia," he pleaded. "Really don't."
Mia did not turn, letting out an explosive breath. "I can't believe - !"
"Mia," Cye said again. "He's not lying."
But Mia ignored him, brushing past Sage, to toss an old down coat of pale rose synthetic expertly over her shoulders like a blanket.
"Hey, Cye," Ryo said from the stairs, seemingly nonplussed by Mia's display. Cye's hands stilled on his temples. He turned his head, leaving his hands held oddly six inches apart at the side of his face.
"Oh, Ryo," he said. And then, "Hello." Ryo blinked at his stilted response, fingers wrapping around the burn scar.
At the door, Mia turned, frowning at them each in turn while Sage looked on and said nothing, not because he thought it best, but because he did not know what to say.
"We'll back whenever we're back," she announced. "Depending on success and whether I decide to commit murder."
With that she was gone, and Sage followed after.
They found Rowen reclined across the backseat of Mia's little jeep, head pillowed on his rolled up coat and feet propped on the narrow ledge where door met window. In his embarrassment, he was reverting to the aloof eccentricity with which he had long concealed an expansive awkwardness with people.
Mia slammed the door as she forced herself into the driver's seat. Unexpectedly she said nothing to the occupant of the backseat, starting the car in silence while Sage latched his seatbelt and smoothed his pants. Mia glanced at him, softening, and said sharply over her shoulder, "Put your seatbelt on, if you're going to sit like that!"
Rowen grumbled. Sage watched him through pale lashes, and again, he said nothing.
It was a long car ride.
They arrived at the snowy, boulder dotted hillside an hour later. Rowen tumbled out of the back seat blinking at the brightness of sun on snow. His back cracked gruesomely as he straightened. Sage stood silently at the front of the car, startled to find himself back at the root of his armor's power and to realize how long it had been since he'd last stood on this slope to feel Halo tug at his heart. Nearby, Mia was struggling with a file full of papers she'd opened on the hood of her car which the wind threatened to whip away.
"I'm not sure how to start," Sage admitted, eyes on the strange, scattered stones jutting from the snow, the height of a man or more.
Rowen came to stand at his side, arms crossed over his chest. "Maybe you can get another storm going. Have some lightning on hand."
"I don't think so," Sage said mildy.
"Oh. Well, I tried."
"Because you're suicidal?" Sage's tone was all polite interest. Rowen only shrugged.
"I thought about it a few times there, knee deep in dynasty mud, me against half an army. Looking for you, I might add. But this? This isn't suicide." Rowen grinned rakishly. "This is scientific inquiry."
Sage watched him seriously, pale hair tossed across his face by the wind. "I'm glad you didn't."
Rowen laughed shortly. "I had to take care of Ryo, you know? He was... fucked up is a good word. And everytime we had to call inferno, it just got worse. I don't think he knows how to tell us what wearing that thing feels like. All I know is that Ryo – Ryo who would do anything for us - didn't want to wear that armor unless he absolutely had to."
"He thought he was draining us to use it," said Sage.
Rowen shrugged. "Maybe."
Halo glanced at the clear sky. "Can you fly?"
Rowen followed his gaze, feeling the crisp wind prick at his face and ears. "I did - once. But... uh... yesterday, the armor wasn't so into listening to me."
Sage regarded him slowly. Rowen could see him noting Rowen's hesitation to explain 'yesterday' and deciding not to ask.
"How did you do it the first time?" Mia asked suddenly, bent over her fluttering papers on the opposite side of the hood.
Rowen considered. "I could feel the armor with me for days and days. I kept trying to figure out why." He glanced back at Mia, nodding decisively. "Then I knew I could. So I did."
"The armor was with you?" Sage asked. "Suddenly? For no reason at all?"
The confidence disappeared from Rowen's face. "I…"
Mia said for him, "Cye did it."
"Being around Cye did it," Rowen corrected immediately. Then he shrugged, affecting nonchalance. "Don't know why, kind of creepy, but, hey, flying, right?" He spread his hands helplessly.
Sage's face twitched in an interesting and skeptical manner. The blonde man turned. "Mia?" he asked. She smiled ruefully.
"As Rowen has already said, the armors are not entirely inanimate objects. You would know that better than me, however. But if I take the stories at face value rather than at the value of exaggerated myths, you – all of you – should be able to do a lot more than you can."
Sage blinked. Even Rowen came to peer over the swordsman's broad shoulder at Mia's sheaf of papers. She waved a hand to encompass the dense, hand-written notes in the file as she spoke.
"The stories my grandfather collected take place over the course of the thousand years following Talpa's first defeat. In these stories, the armor bearers are credited with all manner of spells and exceptional abilities. Foresight, healing, telepathy, teleportation... There are accounts of dead men rising to fight new battles, of mountains raised on once bare plains, of walking across the imagination to travel hundreds of miles in a day, of darkness spread acrosskingdoms, of demons and monsters bound into service, and," she said ominously, "of the taking of shapes not one's own."
They stared at her in shocked bewilderment. To hear such things attributed to an enemy would have been merely frightening. To hear it attributed to themselves...
"And flying?" Rowen suggested weakly.
Mia laughed lightly. "Yes, that too. I thought you'd read all these," she teased.
"Why would I read all those?" Rowen huffed, having done just that in the wee hours of the morning while Ryo slept and Sage, Cye, and Kento were imprisoned or worse who knew where. "They're boring."
"Who raised the dead?" Sage asked flatly.
"Neither of you, that's for sure. And honestly, it seems to have been regarded as a miracle on all counts, so I don't think it's a standard ability of the armors."
"Mia," Rowen said, "you say that in a strange, small voice that makes me very worried.
"No, no, it has nothing to do with you," she assured him, waving a hand in the air. "And the armor of inferno is always a special case in the histories anyway."
They stared at her. She hedged. Rowen, having developed his distrust of that armor through repeated battles spent at Ryo's side, in the heat of it and in the aftermath, understood her reluctance with an empathy that ran as deep and strong as instinct.
"For one," Mia continued, "it's never been associated with Talpa's armors before now, and... well... in the stories, it's always used only once." She glanced up at them, a flat, hopeless look in her eyes that told Rowen all he needed to know.
"It ate them up," he said coldly. "No second chances." Beside him, Sage stared silently at the jeep's weathered red hood.
"Neither of you seem very surprised."
The boys shared a look. Rowen's shoulders sank as though with the release of a burden. The distrust he felt for the Inferno Armor fell away from his face, and he looked simply sad.
"Mia," he began softly. It was at times like this, with that look on his face, standing tall and with such gentleness in his hands, that Mia felt he was a hundred years older than she was. It was a long time since he'd acted like that around her, always hiding and playing the child. She missed that Rowen, she thought. She'd fallen in love with that Rowen once, and then she heard was he was saying.
"The first time Ryo used Inferno, he did die. But his heart started again, both times, so..." He looked to Sage.
"I could feel it happen," Sage said quietly, with reverence for a time he had clearly never been able to forget, "through the armor. It was alright in the end, I think because we were there and our power was enough. But I remember knowing with as much certainty as I'd ever known anything that it almost wasn't."
Mia stared at them, her turn to be shocked. "And you never said."
"I know. I apologize. By the time I realized no one else had noticed, it had passed. It seemed unnecessary, even rude, to bring it up."
"But you told him?" Mia nodded at Rowen.
Sage blinked at her in surprise. As if the alternative had never occurred to him, even years later. And Rowen's temporary bearing of nobility shattered into a wince, and Mia knew he was feeling only too clearly the trust he'd abandoned when he'd turned away from these people for no better reason than he'd thought that all grown ups left their childhood friends behind.
He rocked back on his heels, hands in his pockets, tilting his face to the blue sky. His ears and the tip of his nose were red, and his breath came out in gusts of cloud like one of the serpentine dragons of the east.
"If I think too much about it," he said, switching the subject abruptly back to its beginning, "I won't be able to do it. Reality will just weigh me down."
A gust of wind struck the little car, rocking it on its wheels. Preoccupied with saving her papers from the wind, Mia didn't understand immediately what was about to happen until Sage's sharp intake of breath made her look up.
With the wind whipping at his back, Rowen lifted his arms straight out from his sides, gloved palms facing up and joy passing over his face in an expression as clear as the cloudless sky above. For a moment it was as if for all his height he weighed no more than a bird in flight, and the wind would surely catch him and toss him, tumbling and free into the air.
Then he dropped his hands, heaving a huge sigh.
He opened his eyes, grinning at Sage gawking by the car. "You go first," he said.
There was some discussion about how best to go about accomplishing what they had come here to accomplish, but in the end, Sage made his own decisions on how to proceed, which he felt were based on whimsy rather than reliable instinct, and said so.
"Luck is fine," Rowen said, after a moment's consideration.
"If not, you'll try another way," Mia said more helpfully.
Sage decided against calling the armor with the orb, the simplest and surest way of getting a result. Not only did it seem most likely to attract attention they did not want, but it was not that skill which Sage was trying to learn. The trouble caused by the armors – Sage's lightning strike, Cye's trouble with waves, Ryo's dragon – had been caused without the medium of the orb. Rowen had flown with his orb strung around his neck and without having to speak any mystic catchphrases or commands. So Sage sat cross-legged on a snow-covered rock at the Pinnacles in the icy wind and did his best to call his power without help.
Leaning against the jeep, Mia carefully folded her files back up and held them against her chest. Rowen glanced at her, then turned back to where Sage sat across the plain in lonely meditation. He didn't look at Mia again until she appeared at his side, linking her hand with his elbow, her files clutched against her coat in the other.
She looked at him thoughtfully and he raised his eyebrows in a silent challenge. Mia turned her head back to Sage's still figure.
"You know," she said, and did not sound as precisely mad at him as she had before, "I didn't really figure you for the type to be afraid of sex."
Rowen did a sort of double-take, trading looks between the sky above him where it was the deepest blue and her head where it rested lightly against his shoulder in knitted hat which fit snuggly over her ears. Feeling his own ears burn, he wished he'd thought of that. "Why not?" he said finally.
"I didn't say it was a bad thing. I just didn't think you'd be afraid of sex. Or men. Though maybe that makes more sense."
"I have had sex before." The wind had stung color into his cheeks; it was impossible to tell if he was blushing.
"You're not really acting like it. Cye told me what you said."
Rowen shrugged deeper into his scarf. "Cye," he said obstinately, "is scary."
It was Mia's turn to stare. Rowen swallowed visibly, lifted his chin almost defiantly from the bundle of scarf, and then, abruptly, turned away.
"I've never..." he started, "never worried about him. In this whole time. Not when he was fighting Talpa, not when he'd been caught, not afterwards when he just thought he'd never get a date. I never worried about him. I think he thinks everybody else has that skill with taking care of themselves. That it's average. He doesn't understand that I'm the most..." he grimaced with self-directed fury, "useless person..."
Mia grabbed his hand with both of hers. Rowen blinked slowly at her hands on his wrist, startled by the violence of it. Her files fell, scattered across the snow. "Rowen," she said fiercely, "when I go to work I am surrounded by people who are supposed to be geniuses in their field. You are smarter than any two of them put together. Any three!"
Rowen relaxed, smiling disarmingly at a point on the snow by her feet. "I didn't say I wasn't smart. I said I was useless. I'll always complicate things. It's much easier when we're all in fear for our lives," he added. "I'm simpler then."
Then he leaned forward, unexpectedly mischievous, cupping one hand to his mouth secretively. "Sage told me that," he whispered.
Mia eyed him tolerantly. "Oh, did he? Well, I'll admit to the complicating part of that. And the rest, I don't think I'm going to convince you. So. Here's my input. It probably won't be easy to forget what happened between you two and I don't understand how you got into it in the first place, but dicking around without deciding anything is worse.
"Rowen, first response, no dithering, tell me the first thing that comes to mind – what do you think about Cye as a person?"
Rowen blinked at her, and she saw his face close off in surprise, though she thought it wasn't at her. "I don't know," he lied.
"You're full of it, Rowen Hashiba, and I know it!"
"I..." and now there was no way that blush could be entirely from cold, not with the way he was trying very hard to look at her without meeting her eyes, "he's Cye," he said helplessly.
"Which means what?"
"That he can do anything. Especially if I can't do it. I'm only good at one thing, fixing things that have gone bad a hundred times over. Things that have gotten complicated. I have no idea how to keep them from getting that way in the first place." And then, dispirited, "I don't know what I want."
"So you think he's all kinds of wonderful," she said wryly, regarding her files scattered across the snow with comic distaste. "But not attractive?"
"Not attractive? You don't think Cye's attractive?"
Mia frowned up at him, interrupted in the middle of putting together her final analysis. "Rowen," she said, in a moment of pique, "You don't deserve him."
Rowen pulled back. "Well," he said, "That's. Yeah."
"That's not what I mean, Rowen. I just don't understand the problem."
"My armor – "
"I gave you dating advice in Cye's apartment! Was the armor involved then?"
Quietly. "No." He bent down and began to pick up her scattered files, now damp with snow.
"But when you jumped off my balcony into thin air because you had a hunch you could fly... it was okay to listen to the armor then."
"No... Yes. That was... different."
"Was it."
He looked away from her, a disordered stack of papers dangling limply from one hand, directing his exasperation at the horizon hidden by mountains. "I told you, I don't know what I want. That's not fair. No one should deal with the consequences of that but me."
"Most people don't, you know. Cye included."
"No," Rowen said with certainty. "Not Cye."
Rowen watched from the shelter of the front seat of the Jeep and saw Sage's shoulders sag beneath his coat, head dipping almost imperceptibly, and Rowen knew he was done. There had been no brightness, no power, no summoning of Halo.
Mia stirred in the driver's seat when he clicked open the car door; she had been napping there with her papers spread across her lap.
"Anything?" she asked.
"No," Rowen said, disinterested, ducking his head into the wind as he slammed the door, the wind making any gentler closing impossible.
Sage's head lifted. Rowen met the intensity of those grey eyes across the snowy plain and smiled and shrugged. He began stripping off his coat and scarf, and the sweater beneath. Sage watched him, startled but silent. Mia came out of the car, confusion mingling with a little bit of worry on her face. For the moment though, something kept her from objecting. It was long enough. A gust of wind struck and Rowen shivered uncontrollably from head to toe. The air was icy and sweet against his skin.
Sage and Mia both lost their silence at the same time, mouths opening to ask explanation or to offer rebuff.
Rowen turned his face from them. Shaking snow from his hair and regretting that he had not stopped to remove his shoes, he took two steps forward and a hop and suddenly ceased to be in contact with the earth.
He gained fifty feet in the first gust, not bothering to look back and see the shock (and the wonder!) on the faces of his companions. In the next thirty seconds, he made it up to 200 ft, swooped down to 100 in a mostly intentional maneuver and fought his way up to 350. He found it nearly impossible to breath. He found that breathing didn't really matter.
Up here the wind was colder than it had been below, cutting through his thin cotton shirt and the thicker denim, making him shiver with each moment of impossible flight. He did not know what he was doing. He knew that he didn't. And that was as far as understanding went. Every moment that he stayed airborn was not so much a matter of understanding as it was of remembering – over and over again with every second and every second just in time – something he'd forgotten how to do.
But it was glorious. Frigid and breathless and the best freedom there was in the world and there was no one – no encroaching armor – that could pull him back down against his will... Until the moment that memory slipped inevitably out of his reach, and the earth remembered instead that he was a heavy thing and did not belong away above the sky.
Rowen heard a shout when he hit the ground, aware at some level that Sage was rushing towards him. He rolled from the depression in a daze, sitting back to admire the dent he'd carved in the ground, a violent excavation of the bleached snowscape down to the level of dirt and mud.
He lifted his arms before him. They were pale with cold and unmarked.
"Huh," he said. He felt a little dizzy.
Then Sage was pulling him up. Lifting Rowen's arms to get his own look at the unbroken skin, the healthy way they bent, the lack of shattered bones. Running his hands in their soft sheepskin gloves from Rowen's wrists to his shoulders. Staring at Rowen's head which wasn't smushed like old bananas and Rowen's eyes blinking at him with a cheerful sort of puzzlement.
"You idiot," Sage breathed. "What did you think you were doing?"
"Flying?" Rowen remembered how to grin; shook his brain back into focus. Sage's face was tight around the edges, paling into something decidely unhealthy. His skin caught the light of the sun weirdly, giving off a glare like a titanium toaster. His hair was spun gold and eerily metallic.
"Crashing," Sage said. He stomped a few away, then back, running both hands through his hair. His breath hissed between his teeth. Rowen could all but hear him counting to ten inside his head. Then to twenty. "My god, Rowen! You just – fell."
Sage lifted an arm, tracing Rowen's path through air, complete with a sudden downward turn. He turned and goggled at the ditch the impact had ripped in the earth. Then at the archer, picking dead wintery grass from his hair. He reached out, putting his hands on Rowen's shoulders while Rowen stilled obediently, though he twitched an eyebrow at him when Sage's eyes passed over his face, looking for blood.
"Crashed, Rowen," Sage repeated.
"Yeah, yeah," Rowen said. "Did you know that you're glowing? And did you see how high I went?"
Sage eyed him. Rowen smiled. "Yes," Sage said flatly. "I did. See."
Mia might have had some indignation of her own to express, but she had been mad already and Rowen thought it was hard to stay mad through such a stunt. Also, she seemed more determined to wrap him back up in the layers he'd discarded as soon as possible. Sage helped.
"Shoulda taken m-my shoes off," Rowen offered, shivering violently. Oh, he thought. Hadn't noticed that.
"No!" Mia said, outraged. "No, you shouldn't have."
"Easier that way," Rowen protested. "Not c-cold if'm flying." He grinned unsteadily at her as she wrapped the scarf three times around his neck and knotted it at his chin. "Should fly naked."
And Mia could only laugh helplessly.
Cye and Ryo were playing video games when the adventurers returned. On old game on the old playstation while Cye studied a battered old cheat book and dictated complicated directions to the last secret stash hidden behind a muddy, pixelated wall.
Sage walked in backwards, arguing with someone still in the hall. He was somehow too bright for the indoors, ethereal in a way that made Cye, looking up from the cheat book, immediately assume success. Ryo put the controller down.
"I knew you were insane," Sage was saying seriously, "the day I met you. The first thing I saw you do, you jumped in front of that dynasty soldier. The first thing you said to me, later, was that you had no idea how to beat them."
Rowen appeared, following after him, wrapped up in coat and scarf, his gloved hands tucked under his arms even as Sage began to peel off his coat. The scarf didn't hide the devilish grin or the michievous arch of his brows. "Somebody turn out the lights," he suggested with a glance at the occupied living room, an apparent non sequitor. Sage ignored him.
"Your back should be broken. Your head should be pulp!" he recited as though he had done it many times before.
"The lights!" Rowen roared. "Make them be off!" His eyes landed on Cye, and his expression flickered but did not dim. He stepped forward, one hand snaking around the wall to flip the light switch for the living room and for the entryway.
"You should be flattened!" Sage shouted back. And Cye suddenly understood what was strange. What ethereal quality had struck him at Sage's entrance. Like a picture with a hint of overexposure, there had been no shadows on Sage's face.
Now, in the dimness, the effect was striking and umistakable. Light had fled as Rowen dropped the lights and now it clung to Sage, in his hair, his eyelashes, the folds of his clothes, shining deeply within his skin like the most absurdly romanticized complexion.
Sage stopped speaking, robbed of words, staring at his graceful, long-fingered hands that shone with their own luminescence. He hadn't known, Cye realized. Until this moment, he'd had no idea at all.
Rowen leaned forward, nose to nose with tall, proud Halo. "I told you you were glowing," he said. Cye felt a stab of envy.
"I thought you were joking," Sage whispered, folding and unfolding his fingers.
Rowen reached behind him and flipped on the light without looking. Cye loved it for the casual gesture of competence that it was. Rowen interacted with the world around him in a way that said, so easily, I know what I'm doing.
"Yeah," Rowen said. "I know." He nodded at Sage and the still barely visible brightness that clung to him. "You should probably go someplace and figure that out. Otherwise... you'd stick out pretty badly in a movie theater, huh?"
"Cye." A voice beside him. Cye felt his heart rate go from zero to oh god in no time at all.
"Mia?" He relaxed a little, but he could feel his heart beating furiously in his chest.
She was smiling at him, as surely and as wonderingly as Sage was by the door. But she was looking at Cye. She reached forward, taking his hands in each of hers. "Come!" she said, "Come with me!" And dragged them both up and away.
In the kitchen she turned to him, twisting her hands one around the other, smiling and then not smiling and then smiling again wider than ever. "I have to tell you. But I'm not sure how to tell you."
"What?" Cye asked, putting his hands on her shoulders to keep her still. "Tell me what? How did it go? There's Snow White with her own power source in there – something must have gone right."
At that she dropped her hands, bouncing up on her toes. "Oh, you should have seen him!"
Something about the way she said it told him she wasn't talking about Sage.
He thought, Didn't you swear fury and retribution on him only this morning? On my behalf? What's all this now? Is he so forgiveable?
Yes.
"Yes," he said, "I should have. But that's not my privilege."
"It is." She saw he did not believe her and her smile twisted without losing any of it's joy. Green eyes gleamed; long locks of auburn fell across her face from the pretty mess the wind had made of her hair. Watching her, Cye thought with more bitterness than he would have preferred: If I were Rowen right now, you could ask me for anything you wanted and I would say yes.
He shook his head. Mia let out an exasperated breath.
"He was flying, Cye!" she said.
His fingers dug into her shoulders involuntarily as he stared at her slack-jawed. Some of her awe crept into his face. In retrospect, he didn't know why it surprised him so much.
"Think of what your armors can do," she said. "Things you only dreamed of!" There were devious plans in the curve of her lips. She said, "You should be up there with him."
"Mia – " he said again uselessly, disoriented by all she had told him. He touched her hand, taking it from his cheek.
Sage came into the kitchen then, and Cye looked up, searching Sage's face for the telltale signs of his armor, hidden in the absence of shadow. What power could be his, if Torrent were set loose?
"He's still shivering," Sage said to Mia.
They heard from the other side of the door: "We come for soup!"
Mia turned away from Cye, slipping back into the business-like demeanor of caring for five rowdy boys. "He's being very good natured about this. Ryo is impossible to deal with when he's ill." She glanced at Sage demurely. "So are you."
"Mia," Sage said, as incapable of putting his feeling into words as Mia had been before he came in, "he can fly."
"He's got a point," Cye told her wryly, feeling as lonely as he had ever felt. He understood that Mia was trying to communicate the wonder she felt, but he did not understand why she thought it was necessary for Cye to know it too. All it told him was how completely Rowen had blocked him from this part of his life. A new and glorious journey on which Cye was distinctly Not Invited.
She laughed with delight.
Rowen was in the dining room, hid back pressed against the wall and his hands in the pockets of his dark coat. When he smiled his teeth were obviously chattering. His face was pale except for bright spots of red in his cheeks, rubbed raw with wind. He grinned gleefully as they came in.
"So if skinny dipping is swimming naked," he said, "what's flying naked?"
"Superman drunk," Cye said automatically. Then to Mia, "He didn't, did he?"
"Not for lack of trying..."
Sage pushed open the door behind her, carrying a steaming bowl of soup. He blew on it gently, comically focused and looking very unlike the dignity he had once upheld so rigidly. Cye took Rowen by the arm, bullying him up the stairs into a dim bedroom, lit by cold sunlight and snow reflections filtered through the curtains. Science fiction books and posters lined the walls. He left Rowen by the bed.
By the time he returned with the extra comforter, Rowen's happy glow had begun to wear off, and there was a tiger pressed up against his back, pale as the moonlight. Rowen was protesting vigorously while Mia carefully removed layers of clothing which he swore – teeth chattering harder with each layer that came off – "I c-can do that myself-lf!"
Cye stepped forward, unfolding the blanket as he did so, and dumped it onto Rowen's unsuspecting head. White Blaze whuffed at the corner that flopped onto his face. Mia reached up under it, yanked, and came away with a pair of snow encrusted jeans, efficiently tugging them the rest of the way off of Rowen's skinny ankles. Rowen's head emerged from the top of the mess, glaring with offended dignity. Ryo peered in from the border of door and hallway with his hands shoved in the back pockets of his jeans. Sage set the soup by the bedside table.
"Hm," Mia said and gathered up the discarded clothing as she left.
"Maybe she'll feed you the soup," Cye observed aimlessly from the corner of bed and window, "if you ask nicely."
Rowen cussed him out. Stuttering.
Cye stared out the window at the snow with his back to the bed and drooped. "Alright then," he said, and turned to leave.
"C-cye," Rowen said with difficulty, sitting crosslegged on the bed, half-naked and robed in blankets like a child playing king. Without thinking, Cye reached out and pulled the make-believe robes more securely around the archer's ungainly form. Rowen's skin was icy to the touch.
Rowen snaked out a hand, caught Cye by the collar, and pulled. Cye realized the room was empty of any but the two of them and a silent tiger.
Rowen's lips were icy too.
Cye had only a moment to notice before something more powerful eclipsed all human feeling. He felt the echoes of power in the lake and in the water running within the earth and farther away in the ocean, calling implacably with its slow, surging mass. He felt in that moment all the wonder that Mia had tried to make him understand and more because it was tied into his own armor and so into his self. Then the feeling of water, river, ocean fell away in a dizzying vertigo, left behind on a distant earth.
This power was not his own. He gasped into Rowen's mouth. Felt Rowen's chilly fingers tighten at the back of his neck, then loosen. Cye fell forward onto the bed, his face against the soft, tangible texture of the comforter over Rowen's chest. Rowen caught at his arms, lifted him up.
"I... sorry," Rowen said. "But... you thought you were the villain. It... it wasn't you at all. But you can see... It has to be obvious..."
Cye lifted his head. Rowen's face was flushed. Though he struggled for words, he was no longer stuttering. He blinked down at Cye as though fighting shock or intoxication. His pupils had dilated so wide as to devour their irises in blackness.
"You're right," Cye said. He could still feel the armor stirring within his chest, calling out to its kin. "We shouldn't do this. If that's what it's like, and you can't stop it... you're obviously not in control of yourself."
He pushed himself up away from Rowen. He did not touch Rowen's skin or reach out to trace a blue curl that fell between Rowen's eyes. He was mostly lost in thought, and so he was surprised to look up and see Rowen so unhappy.
Rowen said, "Oh."
"What?" Cye snapped. "Wasn't that the point?"
"Yes." Rowen ducked his head, lifting a hand from his blankets to scratch absently behind White Blaze's ear. "Sorry. I mean, sorry for doing that to you. I hated it and then I – "
"Don't be," Cye said coldly. "I understand what frightened you, but I didn't feel your fear. It was a feeling unlike any I know of - to feel my armor, my world, and yours. It was one of the best feelings I have ever had. I will try to avoid in in the future." He could not help adding acidly, "for your sake."
When it turned out that finding Mia meant, by extension, finding Ryo as well, stretched out on the couch chest to chest with his hands linked between her shoulder blades, Rowen balked at the edge of the rug, curling his hands in his layered sleeves. He was wrapped up in thick socks and dry pants and layers of cotton and wool, a turtleneck and a sweater that itched. A footstool dragged to the edge of the couch made a convenient seat, and he sank down onto it, glaring at Mia's closed eyes where they fluttered above Ryo's collar bone.
"Mia," he hissed, poking at her shoulder, and she rolled onto her back in Ryo's arms, yawning, while Ryo shifted in his sleep. She blinked awake slowly, mouth stretching into a slow smile at the sight of her audience.
"Hello," she said, licking her lips like a satisfied puppy. "Feel better?"
Rowen hunched his shoulders miserably. "Other than the fact that Cye hates me, yes. Toasty warm."
"I doubt it's quite that bad."
"No, no, really. He-– " Rowen trailed off. Ryo's fingers tightened reflexively, and he opend eyes which in the half-darkness caught the light oddly like a cat's. Mia had smiled to see Rowen there. Ryo had no reaction at all except maybe a small tilt of his head.
In a rush, preoccupied by thoughts like blue and utter humiliation, Rowen said, "So – uh – sorry, about the – " and waved a hand between them in a gesture which might have indicated lips and mutual contact, "no hard feelings?" Ryo peered at him in a confused daze, and Rowen sighed. "You can't hold a grudge against anybody can you?"
Ryo glared at him muzzily, turning his face into Mia's neck. She bit back a giggle as his breath tickled her skin. The entire sappy scene was giving Rowen cavities.
"You should go find him," Mia said suddenly with the confidence that comes of being blissfully happy. Rowen eyed Ryo's hand which hand moved to cover her own over her chest and Ryo's legs tangled with hers and did not comment that in similar circumstances he might be blissfully happy too.
"I think I burned that bridge already," he said instead.
She frowned minutely. "I thought you loved him."
"Mia," Rowen said reasonably, rather than pay attention to the unexpected hitch that had caused in his chest, "who is this room am I not in love with."
"Me?" Ryo suggested from the vicinity of Mia's neck.
Rowen stared at him.
"You're-–obsessed with me," Ryo accused, lifting his head to watch Rowen with his cheek resting on Mia's hair.
"Gosh," Rowen said finally. "I bet that feels awkward."
Ryo hid his face in Mia's hair, groaning, and she started giggling for entirely different reasons. "Yeah," he grumbled into Mia's skin, causing another rush of breathless giggles. "Kind of."
Rowen dropped his head into his hands, feeling exhausted down to his bones, grateful only that he was no longer cold. He thought about falling asleep like this, about the unholy cramp he'd get in his neck, until gentle fingers brushed his skin, pushing the hair from his face. He looked up into Mia's soft smile.
She said, "Cye can breathe water like he breathes air. Why would it ever occur to him that it could be suffocating? Or that it would feel like a prison to be pulled from the sky?"
He leaned forward, catching Mia's hand in his own, putting his mouth against her ear. "Mia," he whispered, "has anyone ever told you you give really optimistic advice when you're horny?"
And then she started laughing and Ryo asked what about except he was still speaking against her skin and Rowen supposed that didn't help with either the laughing or the... well. So he got up and stole Mia's car keys on the way out because her jeep was better in the snow than his little car and he'd prefer not to die in a wreck while he was looking for Cye.
Because maybe really optimistic advice was better than no advice at all. And besides, his natural pessimism would even things out in the end.
The plan bottomed out sometime around the point where Rowen realized for it to work, Cye had to be someplace where he could be found. After a respectable time period of unanswered calls and unsuccessful searches, he found himself on Kento's doorstep, cell phone held dejectedly against his ear. Kento's mother woke Kento up, and when Hardrock stumbled down the steps, Rowen stood up from the couch and thrust the cell phone at him.
Kento said, "Gotcha covered," like he knew what the hell was going on, folding his hand over Rowen's cell, closing it in Rowen's hand. Rowen paced while Kento dialed from the house phone in the corner. There was chatting and less than serious reprimanding and when Kento held out the phone, Rowen heard the click on the line before he'd even reached for it. Kento pulled it back, looking sheepishly pink.
"I am so depressed," Rowen told the wall behind Kento's head.
"Look," Kento began, "apparently you're the moodiest boyfriend ever–-which I was not expecting–-and I guess he's teasing the hell out of you." He added, "In a slighty malicious and petty way."
"Great," Rowen said, running a thumb over the silver edges of his tiny flip phone.
"He left yesterday for his mom's house," Kento was saying. "In Yamaguchi. He won't be back until after Christmas." He said some other things like "You going home?" and "See you at Mia's then," and also "We probably shouldn't get the tiger drunk this year."
Rowen nodded almost politely and headed for the door.
Cye answered his phone once later that evening to say, "Why would I be angry? I thought we did talk about it. Call me back in a week," and after that his voice mail message politely informed all callers that he would be unreachable until after New Year's. Rowen went back to his apartment and screamed into his pillow.
Things were different after the flight at the Pinnacles. He was cold all the time, like another layer of clothing against his skin. Not uncomfortable, but omnipresent. He jumped up half a flight of stairs at work the next day without thinking about it and, after checking for witnesses, was almost gleeful the rest of the day. He also resolved to avoid official doctor types with official thermometers and official scales (the scale in the bathroom thought he weighed slightly more than his mother's cat) and official ideas about healthy human bodies until further notice.
After that it was Christmas Eve and he was technically on vacation.
"Mia," he said, and she turned with a smile that reminded him of finding an unexpected home. His fingers clenched nervously around the picture frame.
"So... I..." He held it out. "I don't think I need this anymore."
Mia curled her fingers over the edge, mug poised by her chin. When she smiled, her eyes crinkled. "I always feel like I'm taking shots in the dark with you," she said nonsensically. "Throwing rocks in the right direction and having no idea what they'll hit or what will happen when they do."
Rowen shrugged. Talking to Mia was throwing rocks at a VCR and never knowing when he'd hit 'play' on the sweeping character statements. He ducked his head and so he didn't see her leaning forward, pressing her lips to the side of his mouth in a sweet, silent gesture that smoothed out the edges of his anxiety like no one but Mia had ever been able to do. She smelled of chocolate and perfume.
There was only one thing to do after that.
Rowen flew to Yamaguchi.
Or rather, that was the plan. He waited until the tiger wasn't looking and Kento was in the kitchen swearing up and down that really! he knew how to make eggnog, before he stripped down to a t-shirt, stowing the sweaters in the closet next to his coat. He kept the shoes only because it seemed stranger to show up barefoot at someone's house than coatless. In his back pocket he had a folded map of the route he'd take if theoretically the universe were sane and he were driving and not flying.
Ryo said, "You should probably eat something first," and Rowen jumped half out of his skin.
"Oh my god!" He knew his expression must show some strange species of confusion because he wanted to glare but thought he should still feel guilty, and could Ryo stop wearing shirts that made him look skinny and muscular at the same time?
But Ryo dragged him back into the kitchen, underneath Kento's waving arms, past a protesting mixer and Mia, curled around her neverending cocoa mug. Yuli was the one making any progress--stealthily whenever Kento stopped to brag--and he blinked speculatively at Rowen when Ryo pulled him into the kitchen and made him choose from a stack of energy bars and fruit. Rowen glared at him and shivered and picked the lemon flavor, and Ryo stared at him with this puzzled look on his face like Rowen was insane but ok that was normal; and that's when Rowen knew that everything was okay again.
Which was all that kept him from getting really pissed and throwing his shoes at cars when he totally got lost fifteen minutes from Cye's house despite that stupid map.
He shivered, but ignored it. Shivering was normal. It felt normal, like it was supposed to happen, for all he'd only really done this twice. Standing in the doorway, which was actually a windowway, he watched from a strange, distant perspective as Cye tugged his body inside, closing the window and generally not looking surprised at all.
When Cye asked him why he'd climbed onto the roof instead of ringing the bell, Rowen said, "I flew," and Cye's eyes bugged out a little before his expression smoothed. Rowen added, "From Mia's," like that was any less surprising and realized that Cye looking not surprised to see him wasn't so much reality as Cye putting on a brave face in the face of Rowen's perceived insanity.
"Okay," Rowen said in response to nothing in particular, and Cye stared at him covertly while shutting the drapes.
"Good," Cye said, equally weirdly. "If you're here, you can help cut down the tree."
"What?"
"A tree," Cye corrected himself. "Not the tree. It's a forest. There's more than one."
Rowen eyed the curtains. "What--now?"
"What?" Cye goggled at him. "It's past ten."
Rowen wondered if Cye thought that weird powers of flight implied other weird things like urges to cut down Christmas trees at all hours of the night. "I know that," he snapped, except it turned into a sad mumble as he crossed his arms and shivered once, violently from head to toe.
Cye said, "Oh my god, tell me your coat is outside or--I don't know. Of course it's not."
Rowen freed one hand, pretended it wasn't shaking, and reached for his back pocket, meaning to pull out the map and explain the sad tale of getting horrible, sadly lost a few hundred feet above the ground because, really, he had no idea what else to talk about. Instead, he said, "Oh, I forgot to eat my lemon bar."
Cye goggled at him again, "Oh god," and pulled him down the hall to the door painted the same pale blue it had been the first time Rowen had been here years ago and inside to the narrow kid's bed against the wall.
"I thought you were mad at me?" Rowen asked, when Cye was pushing him under the covers.
"Shut up," Cye said. "Maybe when you aren't shaking so hard that you--didn't you learn a lesson last time? Of any kind?"
By this time, Cye had begun throwing blankets at his head and Rowen had wound one arm, snake-like, around one of Cye's to stop him, but now he held up his free hand, blinking in surprise at the tremors. "Oh," he said, "I am. Again," and also, "oh my god, I'm freezing!"
Cye gaped at him, mouth working soundlessly. He stuttered, "Of--of course, you are, you moron!"
"But--I know I am, but usually--I don't feel it feel it, I just--feel it. It's just there. Oh my god, I'm freezing." And he tugged on Cye's captured arm, scooting back under the covers and trying to burrow into Cye like children into Christmas.
Cye said, "Why am I surprised?" and let Rowen fall asleep against his collar bone.
In the morning Cye took him out to cut down a Christmas tree. It started like this: He woke up to Cye standing over him with an axe.
"Isn't that an outside toy?" he slurred sleepily.
"Yes," Cye admitted, "but I thought it would make a good impression." Rowen thought he seemed a bit put out that it hadn't.
"Don't people usually get their tree before Christmas morning?"
"Usually," Cye agreed. "Now get up or have you forgotten you're here because I'm supposed to be mad at you."
Rowen found that strangely encouraging, so he did. Cye took him down past the breakfast table, cluttered with a mother, a brother-in-law, and two boys with an uncanny resemblance to Cye who were actually his nephews, and out past the rocky cliffs and the rickety stairs to the sea side. Rowen smelled salt and cold and listened to the roar of wind and waves breaking against the rocks with something approaching awe. He felt a weird, undefinable rise of emotion tied to Cye's fingers on his wrist.
Cye said, "Why did you come?"
Rowen couldn't remember. He wanted it to sound good.
"Okay," Cye said, sounding tired, and made him put on a coat. "Why do I put up with you?" he asked, winding a scarf around Rowen's throat.
"I'm not--" Rowen started, faltering as Cye stepped close to pass the scarf behind his head. "I was, uh, wondering that too."
"Just so long as we're both clueless." Cye picked up the axe and started walking up the snowy slope behind the house.
"No matter what my sister tells you," he said as they reached the trees, turning to frown over his shoulder, "I did not seriously consider jumping you until you kissed me. And. That was a surprise. Why-- " Rowen's world narrowed awkwardly to Cye's pink tongue running nervously over his lips, "Why did you do that?"
Startled, Rowen spoke honestly. He thought of Mia and said, "You're the most terrifying person I've ever met."
Cye stared at him.
Rowen's hands darted nervously. "You're this total badass. I mean, even if you couldn't kick my ass with a giant spear--and you can--you don't--hesitate when you decide what you need to do."
"What are you talking about," Cye said, horrified. "I always hesitate!"
"About what!"
"About everything! About you! About fighting! I was the weakest one!"
Rowen stopped dead. Cye had turned and was staring at him with round, shocked eyes. There was snow in his hair, which was disordered and red against the paleness of the snow covered trees.
"Are you kidding?" he said. "No, wait, obviously not. Cye--did you see Sekhmet's spikes? Cale, your evil twin, or hey, remember when you couldn't find me because I was in space and you suggested going on without me because we didn't have time? You complete hardass! You could totally break me in half!"
"What about Kayura?" Cye countered, though his heart wasn't in it. He twisted his foot in the snow self-consciously.
"I--I lost to Kayura," Rowen swallowed restlessly, watching the strong line of Cye's jaw. "Any luck I had before losing was a complete accident."
Cye turned back to him with eyes gray like a winter sea and one eyebrow raised consideringly. "You do a lot of things by accident," he said.
"Yes, well," Rowen retorted, "I used to take the time to recheck my work, but then there were demons after my soul and my friends, oh, and earth, so I learned to skip that step."
Cye was ineffectually hiding a smirk. Rowen added, "Which felt unbelievably scary and also like I was high all the time."
"Usually worked," Cye said.
"Oh god yes," Rowen said, breathless with the memory.
"Possibly the single sexiest thing I've ever seen," Cye said distantly. He was turned and walking down the path before Rowen was done goggling at him long enough to scramble after him.
"Mia made a big deal about those chocolates you gave me," he tossed out awkwardly when he caught up.
"Mia enjoys getting me drunk," Cye said and nothing else.
Rowen stared at him.
Cye glared.
"Right, I guess," Rowen mumbled. "Uh. I gave back the picture."
The glare gave way to polite curiousity.
"The one in the picture frame. From my apartment, in my closet. The incriminating photograph?" He knew Cye understood what he was talking about because suddenly Cye's face went completely blank and turned away.
Rowen grabbed at his hand. "Wait, Cye!"
"The one thing," Cye said without looking at him, "that I am absolutely certain I do not want to talk about is you and Ryo." Then he was stalking up the path away from the house, pausing only the pick up the discarded axe where it rested against the base of a tree..
"Hey! The point was I'm not after Ryo! And I feel like a total idiot for doing it in the first place!"
Cye rolled his eyes, the axe hanging ominously from his left hand. "Oh come on, if he'd been agreeable, you'd be like bunnies right now."
"Cye..."
"Rowen," Cye mocked.
"Yes, fine! The sex would be hot and frequent and wild like a wild, wild thing!"
Now Cye turned, smiling sharply without teeth. He spread his arms in a maneuver that was scarier than usual with the axe gripped below the blade in one hand. "You see? Everyone feels like an idiot for getting turned down, and yes, it would nice if we were all psychic and only ever took risks that turned out okay in the end." He gestured with the unarmed hand.
"I'm starting to think I don't have any of the risks that turn out okay in the end," Rowen admitted, eyeing the axe.
Cye gave him one incredulous look from head to toe that had Rowen lifting his chin and straightening his shoulders. "I could probably help with that," Cye said faintly.
"Really?" Rowen said, straightfaced. "Because I thought I'd maybe screwed that up."
"I was getting tired of waiting for you to make up your mind, yes."
"And you told Kento I'm the moodiest boyfriend ever," Rowen added.
"Because you are! You're boyfriend who cried 'Yes, no, yes, wait, I'm afraid of sex, nevermind, can we fuck?'"
Which, unexpectedly, made Rowen grin like a madman and there went his plausible deniability about mood swings. He stepped forward, sliding his arms between jacket and sweater and wrapping himself around Cye's warmth, feeling the strength and competence under his hands that Cye treated as so casual and unimportant, as though everybody had it. He put his lips against Cye's neck and wondered whether he could make Cye laugh like Mia. "Very moody boyfriend," he murmured, feeling an odd sort of calm that might be bliss.
"Oh god," Cye said, his free hand falling involuntarily to Rowen's hip, and Rowen grinned against warm skin.
"Hey," he said. "Aren't we supposed to cut down a tree?"