I'm trying to update this one every Wednesday. A few of the chapters, like this one, are short (this was born of a drabble, after all!)
Happy Wega Wednesday!
Vega greeted him with a smile when he met her after work to head to the airport. But Wylie quickly noticed a shift in her as they parked, went through security, and boarded the plane. She withdrew, growing quiet, body language not suggesting an interest in conversation. Wylie tried to get her to relax, cracking a few jokes, even a couple League of Legends puns, but the most he got out of her was a few brief smiles and one word responses.
"Are you okay?" he finally asked her, as the plane lifted off the ground.
She kept facing forward, hands resting on her lap, nodding. "Yup."
Wylie kept looking at her for several seconds, wondering what was wrong. "Okay," he relented, sitting back. "I'm...I'm going to listen to this book on tape...thing..." he said after a long silence. "You need me...I mean if you want to talk about anything..." he cleared his throat. "Just tap me on the arm."
"Okay." She nodded, still not looking at him. Wylie cleared his throat again, putting in his earbuds and closing his eyes. If she wasn't wanting to talk, she wasn't wanting to talk.
It's not that I don't want to talk.
Vega stared at the same spot on the seat in front of her until the little red thread stuck to the top seemed as large and obnoxious as the Grand Canyon would be in the middle of Miami. She knew Wylie wasn't sure why she wasn't making conversation – usually they couldn't stop talking to each other. Sure, things were different now, since the shootout, but even up until today, they'd still been quite chatty with one another. She knew that he was wondering if he'd done something wrong. She knew he wanted to know why she suddenly was being so anti-social.
But things were so...different now.
She was so grateful that he was taking her home. She was just beginning to really feel like a functional human being again, and missing going to her father's grave on the anniversary of his death would have hurt badly. She could not find the words to express how thankful she was that he was coming with her, and how touched she was that he hadn't asked her many questions or prodded her to "lighten up."
But Vega hated that she was really forced to let him in, forced by this injury, this war wound that had stripped her of her independence, her physical prowess, and her privacy. She had been without her father for two years this weekend, and it had been much longer since she'd had a mother or grandparents. She hadn't been on a date since she was eighteen. And now she was sharing a part of herself that she'd never had to share with anyone, and it wasn't because she felt she was ready. It was because it was her only option.