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“You can’t ask him to work with me,” Addax said.
“Yes,” Addax said.
“I understand,” Addax said.
From beyond the shimmering projection of the video call, sitting with unnervingly good posture in the room’s only other chair, Jamil was watching him with sharp-edged interest.
He killed the connection with a twitch of the fingers, the motion nearly spasmodic, threatening to curl in on itself and settle his hand into the familiar shape of a fist, as though he could hide a feeling in it. A guilty child.
“You know why,” he told her. Footage played again and again, played for him as he was questioned, played for other agents to pull apart—his sense of the heavy materiality of that moment, of the point at which he failed and succeeded in the same few clinical motions—when a world came apart—when a world was born—all of it worn thin through constant retreading.
How many more times had Jace walked himself through those same thirty seconds, alone?
“It’s barely been any time at all,” he said, to Jamil’s expressively raised eyebrow.
“He wants to join the Rapid Evening,” Jamil said. “I think that means it’s been long enough. For him.”
Addax rubbed his fingers against the evening-rough angle of his jaw. “Apparently.”
“We need him here. Nobody better for outreach, right?”
An amused lilt to that word. Outreach.
He smiled, though he felt the heaviness of it—suspected its uncertainty.
“You don’t have to make an argument for me,” he said. “I’ve already agreed.”
“Sure, Dawn,” she said. “You sounded real sold on it.”
There was a day when Jace Rethal, young despite experience and easy in his motions, had strolled into a meeting in the company of Tea Kenridge—into the first meeting, the one that set the clock ticking down towards the end of the war—and he had seen Addax for the first time eye to eye—and he had raised his eyebrows and looked. Looked, wide-eyed, with all of that unguarded intensity, at a man he’d clashed with more than once—a man with whom he’d shared the intimacy of violence—
Addax had felt like Jace was issuing a dare, then, but he had never quite understood what the dare was. Peace had grown uneasy in him. Conflicting impulses. Then Jace fell back into motion, back into quick speech and quicker glances in Addax's direction, sidelong, alert to his moods—and he had seemed less frightening, and more—more—
What had they said in that meeting? He didn’t remember—remembered only the look—the jolting shock of Jace’s physical presence.
Ten minutes to go. Alone, Addax moved through the offices that were now configured for three agents, the lounge with its adjusted furnishings. An anxious ghost of himself. Oh, remember—how much Jace had wanted to impress him, in the months that followed. How little Addax had known what to do with that.
Five minutes. Jamil’s progress was a line on a screen, a trail from the drop point back towards the bunker. Slow progress, as it often was. Addax checked his messages, the steady flow of data pooling there. Opened a file and closed it. Tried another. The words and numbers smudged themselves somewhere between his eyes and his mind.
“—here,” Jamil said. “No, you can have your bag back once we’re in. Yeah, I know. Come on down.”
The rise and fall of Jace’s voice carried less, only a murmur.
Alright. Alright.
An open door, a knife-blade of morning sun cutting through the widening gap.
The thud of a bag being deposited on the ground.
“Addax,” Jace said. His eyes flicked from Addax’s face to somewhere just past his left shoulder and back again. Over to Jamil, who had finished the business of sealing the entrance and stepped now past Jace towards the kitchen. Back, again, to Addax’s face. “Hi.”
A lopsided smile.
Addax grasped for easy formalities and found nothing—hesitated too long—
Jace sighed. “Been a while, huh,” he said.
“A year or two,” Addax said, helplessly.
A handshake. That was the next thing.
He felt the sharp tensing of Jace’s muscles when their hands touched. Mirrored it. Reaching towards each other across a gulf of years—Jace’s mech falling from under him—the roar and crack of gunfire—fear—fear—fear—
“Make yourself at home,” Addax said.
“It’s alright,” Jace said, with a gentleness that stopped Addax’s breath in his chest. “I’ve had a lot of time to—think. About what happened.”
There was a terrible piece of muscle memory in Addax that couldn’t let go of those first and last motions he made as Order’s candidate.
He pushed it carefully down—submerged the feeling just as he at all times submerged the murmur of distant Grace.
“I hardly think—“
“I asked to be here,” Jace said. “It was my condition.”
“Condition.”
”Sure. It’s the work that matters most.” Jace’s face was less hollow than it had seemed the last time Addax saw him, softer and far less pale, but the skin under his eyes kept its darkness. When he smiled again it didn’t really matter—didn’t seem to lend his expression sadness—seemed only to be a sign of existence.
Jace had been Addax’s strange secret for so many years—had occupied such a unique space in his life—
Seeing him in a crowd, feeling that warmth—holding the strength of it as evidence of a new truth about himself—how were they meant to speak together, work together, when Addax felt—
“There are beds here,” Jamil said. Handed Jace a glass, tapped Addax on the shoulder so that he moved out of her way. “Houses and apartments here and there in the city. I sleep here when we’re on high alert or paperwork’s killing me. Addax barely leaves. Your pick. No other agents have access. Everything’s remote. Weird change for me, but—I guess it works out, after my last assignment.”
Curiosity in Jace’s expression. But he didn’t comment.
“Ok,” he said. “Thanks.” He looked at Addax. “Show me around?”
Screen on screen on screen, and Jace settled in a chair in the middle of it all, head tipped back to take it in.
"It's not glamorous work," Addax said. "Welcome on board."
"Oh, not flying all over the sector and posing for photographs? Think I'll live."
"I did a bit of the flying all over. No photographs."
"Weird. Wonder why."
Addax laughed, short but truly amused. "Can you believe they named a spaceport after us?"
Jace tilted his head further back, the chair leaning in a way that looked very definitely precarious, until he was looking at Addax upside down and Addax was braced to catch him, just in case.
"You were there on the anniversary," Jace said.
Addax blinked.
"Someone was watching me in the crowd, and I thought, well, you know, I guess someone identified me and couldn't quite believe it. But I think—"
"I couldn't," Addax said. "Quite believe it. I mean."
"You mean you hadn't been tipped off about where I was, mister secret agent?"
"Of course I had," Addax said. "That didn't mean I—I mean—it'd been ages."
"Yeah. I guess so." A moment of distance before Jace's face turned away, the stool settling into a more reasonable position again.
Breathe. Alright. Alright.
So many things to talk about, most of them formalities and routines. So many kinds of access to set up and fiddly bits of tech to explain. Jace took it in with calm seriousness, with this new stillness that Addax didn't recognise in him.
Once, they danced across the skies of Vox, and Jace was always in just the right place—sliding precisely past the line of Addax's shots, stepping into an opening just so—always half a step ahead in thought, even when he followed in action. Once they sat in a hangar bay and ran test after test, calibration and optimization a dance of a kind too.
Beautiful Jace, biting his lip in thought—face smeared with grease—his eagerness to please. His gaze, anxious, his attention a shimmering shivering thing that skittered across Addax’s awareness. His boldness punching the air from Addax—in moments.
I’m not a hero, he said one day, back then. Ask Tea. Ask Orth. An uneasy laugh. Then he got into the panther and shot twenty fighters from the sky. Just another fight.
He let Addax sit in his rigger while they worked and all Addax could think was how easy it would be for him to change something in here, a quick adjustment, a critical failsafe disengaged. How much he didn’t want to. How he would. If ordered. If it was a necessary step for Peace to prevail.
Tea had shouted all those things at Jace when she walked in on the scene, in more colourful terms, and Jace—Jace, who was so anxious about everything in the universe—had said—
It isn’t right now, so he won’t.
Weird certainty. It only made Addax uneasier—only made Tea angrier.
You have to understand, Tea said, drawing him away from Jace's line of sight before slamming his shoulder back into the wall with a diplomatically dubious but well-practiced shove. Jace doesn’t care whether he lives through this shit sometimes. But I do.
Sure, Addax said, in puzzled acknowledgement. I get that. Believe me.
A pause.
You didn’t know he gets like this, Tea said. Fucking amazing. Alright. Fine. I’m watching you.
Sure, Addax said, back then, back then, long ago. Glad someone’s got his back.
In the lounge, Jace had moved the table out of the way and stretched himself out on the floor—was working through a series of exercises with a look of blank focus. An absent-minded wrinkle of his forehead when his body resisted. Addax, coming out of his office, followed the reaching line of Jace’s arm, the twist of his shoulder—noted in a distracted way the angle of Jace’s collarbone.
“Being in a coma for years is pretty bad for your body, it turns out,” Jace said, turning, sitting up, moving into another set of exercises. A glint of humour, flickering around his eyes and the corners of his mouth. “Who knew?”
The correct response to this certainly wasn’t forgive me, but it was right there in his mouth waiting to be said.
“Coffee?” he asked instead.
“Sure,” Jace said. “Thanks. Want to pick me up off the floor while you’re here?”
Warm skin.
Jace’s fingers curled against Addax’s wrist, dug gently into the place where his pulse was jolting, jolting, jolting.
It became a frozen moment, Addax uncertain how to pull away, Jace’s expression going still. His lips were slightly parted.
Addax dropped his hand heavily, sharply, putting weight into it so that Jace would have to let go or grasp for him. A desperate attempt to save himself from—
“Are you afraid of me on something?” Jace asked.
“That’s not,” Addax said. “I don’t—no. No!”
“Ok,” Jace said.
I don't believe you—?
He trailed after Addax into the kitchen, where Addax found he didn’t have nearly enough to do with his hands, the convenience of their appliances made suddenly and profoundly inconvenient.
It would be far too easy, right then, for Addax to use Jace as a confessional.
"Seriously, Addax," Jace said. "We worked together pretty well once. It's not like we didn't have differences then. I don’t know how you go from terrifyingly professional to not looking me in the eye in about half a second flat."
"I don't understand you," Addax said. ”Aren’t you the one who’s meant to be afraid of me?”
Behind him, Jace laughed, a strange sound, edged with some hidden sadness or pain.
“I might be afraid of Order. But it doesn’t matter. I’m afraid of plenty of things.”
Footsteps, the thud of Jace hopping up to sit on the counter, close and living. He took his coffee, looked down at Addax over the hazy edge of it.
“I’ve run enough,” he said.
Addax ached—to touch him, to make things right, to remove the damage he had done.
“Don’t look like that,” Jace said. Sighed, drank—eyes closed, features blurring in the steam and the diffuse light and the soreness behind Addax’s eyes. “You taking the orb—“
“Don’t.”
“Nothing else would have ended it.”
Jace’s fingers were steady on Addax’s face. His thumb drew a hot line along the ridge of Addax’s cheekbone.
He knew it. He knew it. He knew it. How must it feel to be someone like Sokrates, who refused to casually sacrifice his people to achieve his ends?
No, Integrity would never have chosen Addax.
But the Rapid Evening did. Not a shield to maintain peace or order, not a hard shell of integrity to pull around himself. Rather a scalpel, or a pruning knife.
”I know,” Addax said.
There were days and weeks of routine, then—an apocalyptically heavy sort of routine—a whispering time, Grace pressing in on him with greater and greater urgency—the problem of Rigour heavy against the back of Addax’s neck however well he stretched at the end of a work session, pushing down on the place where he used to feel Peace most keenly. Contingency on contingency and Jace dissatisfied with every one of them, in his unnervingly sure way, until Jamil started slamming cupboards and Addax started taking incrementally longer breaks to work out and, after another week, changed up his routine to involve more punching things than usual. And between it all they moved through each other’s space—argued strategy around a desk in the afternoon and then bumped into each other in the bathroom doorway in the early hours of the morning, dark-eyed and slouching. Jace and Addax, most of all. But not only.
Jamil had a taste for experimental food, and Jace had let it be known loudly that he really, really didn’t. Of all the possible ways for them to rub each other the wrong way, that wasn’t one Addax had thought to be braced for.
”I just think,” Jace was saying. ”I just think that it’s nice to know what I’m eating before I actually bite into it.”
”Addax doesn’t seem to mind,” Jamil said mildly, and took a little ball of whatever-it-was from out under Jace’s nose.
”I saw what Addax thought was good food during the war. That’s not an argument.”
”Get your own food, then.”
”I can’t go out,” Jace said, with his mouth full and a look of curious consternation on his face, eyes raised to the ceiling. ”Too famous.”
And then they were both laughing, and Addax wasn’t even entirely sure why, but Jace stole a piece of the apparently deliberately unidentifiable food back from her, and she rolled her eyes, and he remembered—he remembered—that she’d thought of Aria Joie as some sort of a friend or sibling or love interest once. Or still.
He hadn’t asked.
But he could imagine them in a room together like this, sketch out the shape of Aria where Jace was sitting now—the spread of her skirt in a puff around her, her hair bouncing as she moved her head to whisper conspiratorially insignificant things in Jamil’s ear. An artfully styled pair, so that you might manage to miss that they were both, in their own ways, soldiers.
Word was that Aria had Jace’s whiteblade now—no real significance to the change of position, but a curious symmetry of a kind that it was always tempting to ascribe meaning to.
At night, not infrequently, Addax lay awake and knew that Jace was a thin partition wall away—hoped that he was breathing in a quiet rhythm—that he was warm and relaxed and at ease.
Let me ease your mind, and his, Grace murmured, sometimes, and that was when Addax knew to give the night up for lost.
This night, when he got up, he found Jace already in the lounge with a blanket pulled haphazardly around him, only one screen illuminated, splashing light and shadow in ripples across his face.
He blinked when he saw Addax, with the delayed reaction and lethargy of exhaustion.
”Jamil gave me some stuff to watch,” he said.
”You’re working?”
Jace laughed. ”Really hard.”
Addax stepped into the room—turned to look. A spiralling fight in space, cutting rapidly from shot to shot—animated ships—their designs too coherent and their pilots too well-dressed.
”Huh.”
”They’re going to save the day in the end,” Jace said. Sank further down into the sofa.
”It looks—” Addax considered. ”Bad?”
”That’s the point.”
He always did have the worst taste in—most things, really, now that Addax thought about it. Media, definitely. Clothes, almost always—not that the Oricon bunch had ever really been able to help it.
The thought, a stray fragment of another time summoned into the present, relaxed some piece of tightness around his ribs. He felt, when he took his next breath, that it came a little more easily.
”Have fun,” he said, and heard humour in his own voice as it left him.
Oh.
”I’ve got some blanket to spare,” Jace said. He was looking at the fight play out on screen with a half-focused gaze.
Oh—
”Maybe another time.”
”Sure.”
Generally, Addax would file paperwork when subjected to this kind of insomnia, but he got only as far as sitting in his desk chair and staring at a dark array of screens—saw his own face emerging from the shadows of terminal after terminal, a poor reflection—saw that he was older—that he wore more of it on his face than Jace did—although neither of them was old, not really.
Just older than they’d expected to become.
If he had imagined finding Jace, before it happened, before he really put together all the pieces, he would have envisioned the reverse—Jace worn from the difficult process of keeping himself out of sight of the world—his face more lined than his age would typically merit—a bit like Orth, who worked himself thin. He never saw Jace after the war, of course—saw nobody after the war—not for—well—not for some time. But he read reports. He listened to messages. They were unclear, then, but with enough space and enough hindsight an image could be made to emerge. Jace waking up in a hospital bed with a terrified cry—flinching from contact from this friend, this former lover—Jace going blank and empty in the middle of some conversation. I can’t do this. I can’t do this. I can’t do this. And they told him again and again that he could, and then he—didn’t. Didn’t even leave the hospital and go to the memory den to dive into himself—just didn’t wake up one day, the force that made a planet turning stubborn, a wall jammed inelegantly between him and everything else. They took him to the den, Orth and Tea, because they didn’t know what else to do. And so he was just—Jace. Not marked, outwardly, by those years.
It can’t have taken long for Orth and Tea to fall apart once the common purpose that was Jace’s wellbeing was removed.
When Addax woke up it was to Jamil setting a cup of coffee down heavily on the desk in front of him, and to the gritty feeling of bad sleep in his eyes and his mouth.
”Jace was asleep on the sofa,” Jamil said. ”I swear, Dawn. Drink this and check your damn alerts. That order. You’re going to need it.”
He opened his alerts.
Jamil made a small noise of disgust.
”They did what on September,” Addax muttered. He rubbed his eyes, pulled the closest image up into a higher magnification, grainy and indistinct, noise against stars, ships in a mass, September orange-red below. ”Is that an ice cream transport?”
Jamil laughed. ”Trust the Steigers, I guess.” Leaned in against him, warm and reassuring along his side, a moment of familiarity, the way they hadn’t really had since Jace arrived. She peered at the image too. ”Huh, yeah, it sure is.”
He flicked the transport and its dubious branding away. ”The September file’s a mess,” he said. ”Guess it’s time to get to work on it again.”
”Coffee,” Jamil said.
In the doorway, Jace yawned, Jamil and Addax turning at the same moment to look at him.
”I’ve got some ideas,” he said. ”Some—uh—feelings, too, I guess.”
”I’m pretty sure you’re getting paid to have feelings,” Jamil said. ”Let’s have them.”
And there was work to do, and work to do, and work to do—work until everything blurred—work until his hands ached—reassigning assets, arguing for deployment, pushing, pushing—
Jace might call it feelings, but there was such an acuity to him in those days—the first time Addax had really stopped and thought about just how smart Jace was, really smart, in the most typical sense—not unnervingly accurate in predictions only but quick to assess what they could mean—
We’ll work ourselves to death, I guess. But if that’s what it takes.
They laughed at the idea, uneasily. The name of their enemy, spoken around.
Rigour stood.
Jace’s old blade, in Aria’s hands—and Jace’s hand faltered when he saw it—for a second. A second. Went so still, when he saw the young Stratus on the shoulder of the thing. Jamil’s eyes went again and again to Aria.
They’re all going to die—we’re all going to die—impossible not to think the thought—when you knew. When you were the Rapid Evening. And they’d known already, but to see—not Natalya’s fragmented distress signals—but to see—
Natalya was taken by the damn thing, Addax thought, testing how it felt to name the fact to himself—the result was painful—just as well, right? If it didn’t hurt, then that would be—it’d be something. Nothing hurt when he was a Divine. Let it hurt now.
”Addax,” Jace said, with the distortion of nausea creeping into his voice, ”I can hear—”
Voices across the sector.
Jace sat with his back to the wall, legs stretched out in front of him.
”It’s fine,” he said. ”It was just a moment. Stop looking at me like that. Pass my phone down?”
The hum of Rigour, a tangle of wordless fear.
”Steady,” Addax said. The phone. A glass of water.
He could hover, sit down beside Jace and keep an eye on him.
He had too much work to do.
Jace clearly felt he had too much work to do himself. He was already writing frantically, his shoulers tensing in concentration, hunching in on himself. Another signal must go out.
The blip of acknowledgements in return, and Addax could by now decode them by the alert tones. Too few.
At the last of them, Jace raised his eyebrows.
”Ibex is quick on this one, for him,” he said. ”He usually likes to pretend I’m not important enough for him for a while. Huh.”
”You get Ibex to respond to you at all?”
”Yeah.” Jace leaned his head back against the wall so that he was looking up at Addax and Jamil through his eyelashes. A considering pause. ”He’s the one who woke me up.”
Jamil knew the history, of course she knew the history, but she had a terribly searching look on her face, glancing from Jace to Addax—the outsider in any talk of the war, however well they worked together. It was Jace and Addax who fought with each other. Against each other.
”I threw up on him,” Jace added.
”Oh my god,” Jamil said, and then she was back to coordination, and Jace was sending out a second round of messages—and Addax, suppressing the slightly hysterical laughter that came sometimes when one felt oneself balancing on the razor-edge of destruction, and also when Ibex was involved in anything, called up Command.
A long conversation—call it an argument—another one. But they were listening. They had to listen. Pay attention. To a network in motion, to a disparate set of actors closing in on a critical point, on an annihilation class piece of technology that reached up from the surface of a world, clawing at the sky.
And it ended.
A victory—a delay—a moment to breathe, breathe, breathe.
”Point acknowledged, Agent Dawn,” came the last message from Command. ”Resource allocation granted.”
Addax slumped—tension falling—some essential thing that had kept him straight-backed and blank-faced severed. He would think, later, in terms of ambition. Maneuvering. He would think, later, about how to strengthen their position further. He would take action.
For now, there was Jami’s hand on his shoulder. A reassuring squeeze.
Jace was the one to dig out champagne—opened it badly, fumbling and laughing, and Addax had to leap in and save the thing—hands brushing against Jace’s as he caught the bottle—a sparking sputtering moment of contact. Jamil’s arm around his shoulders was more comfortable, a slow pleasant warmth.
Addax leaned his head against her arm and drank and felt—felt how far he was from the war. For once.
”Really colour coordinated,” Jace said—took a step back to consider them both. ”Is that cool or uncool?”
”Cool,” Jamil said, tugging at a coil of hair to inspect it, laughing when she saw that it was for the moment the same colour as Addax’s own. ”Fashion, darling. Fill me up.”
Foam ran down over her fingers. Jace put down the empty bottle.
Addax felt light and unreal with relief, hazy. When Jace wormed his way into the space between his body and Jamil’s, he felt himself beginning to unravel—become only a mass of neural connections, of electrical impulses flickering in time with Jace’s heartbeat.
Become possibility. A thing that could tip in any direction.
Become a mass of soft static.
Jace’s laughter vibrated against Addax’s ribs.
”Good work, Agent Quartz-Noble,” Jace said, head turned to Jamil—took her glass and drank from it, their weird compulsion to steal each other’s stuff apparently still not letting up. He put the glass carefully down on the table without looking—leaned in close to Jamil—kissed her, shoulders still shaking with laughter, upon the mouth.
Jamil grabbed Addax’s shoulder for balance—got an arm around Jace’s waist and dipped him backwards, so that Jace made a muffled amused noise of false alarm against her lips.
Oh, Addax thought.
Look at the way Jace’s eyes flicker under his lids. Look at the casual curl of his fingers against her neck.
They stumbled apart, Jace falling against Addax, tripping perhaps over his own feet—perhaps just playing.
Unsteady as Addax felt, he couldn’t tell which—
”Good work, Agent Dawn,” Jace said—the same tone of voice he’d addressed Jamil with—and Addax thought—
Oh. Oh.
Oh—
Heat.
Did Jace mean this kiss to be as playful as the last?
Did he mean—
Jace’s lips trembled against Addax’s, and Addax though—he thought—
I want you, I want you, I want you—
Jace clutched at Addax’s shoulders, and Addax gasped—couldn’t help it—felt Jace’s breath in his mouth as he did.
Hands in Jace’s hair, sliding through its loose curls, Addax held him—unsteadiness matching Jace’s own.
When Jace pulled back, Addax could only look at him, at the slow surprised blink of his eyes, lashes dark, pupils wide. The dampness of his lips.
”Addax,” Jace said, and his voice was uncertain and rough—searching—surprised—?
”Yeah,” Addax said, like an answer to a question.
”Okay,” Jace said. His breath ghosted across Addax’s lips. He reached out to touch Addax’s jacket, drew his hand down the lapell, a slow smoothing motion.
”Hmmmm,” Jamil said. ”Alright.” Amused.
Addax turned, leaned over towards her for an casual sort of kiss, as though they were in the habit of it. Brief and affectionate. She laughed.
”Maybe another day, Dawn.”
When they settled back into chairs, Jace curled himself up against Addax. Should it have been difficult to talk as normal? To make quiet jokes himself and laugh at their louder ones? It wasn’t. But he was aware, always, of the lightning knowledge that later there would be—could be—
He felt unlike himself. He felt more entirely himself than he had for—oh, too many years.
When Jamil, later, stood up with decisive quickness and took her glass with her when she left, Jace was the one to sit up and throw his leg over Addax’s lap—to press his fingers into the underside of Addax’s jaw with newly regained strength—to lay him back down on the sofa. To kiss him until Addax could have sobbed, his body restless and wanting under Jace’s—Jace’s weight heavy on him. He was hard. It was driving Addax to distraction.
”There,” Jace said. ”There. There. Easy. Addax. Oh.”
Fingers sliding across Addax’s cheek. The whole of it burned in Addax’s throat like the threat of tears.
”I’ve got you,” Jace said. ”Come here.”
And he had Addax—he had him—held him—touched him with trembling careful hands until Addax finally unravelled the way he’d felt ready to all night, every thought in him unspooling at once, so that he could only pant open-mouthed into Jace’s kiss.
”You’ve got me,” Addax said. Laughed, a painful ecstatic sort of joy and relief, bitten off. A sigh, rough as a gasp. ”You’ve got me. Whatever you want.”
”Okay,” Jace said, simple and open. Smiled. ”Okay. That’s good. Me too.”
And Addax, held down and anchored by beloved, long-lost Jace, through uncertainty and guilt—allowed himself, for once, to believe it. Allowed himself conviction. Allowed himself, later still, to take Jace back to his room although the bed was cramped—to undress Jace with reverent hands.
Jace shuddered as Addax’s fingers ghosted over him, the deliberate appearance of incidental touch—bit his lip—twisted his body to test the limits of the game until Addax had to hold him again, hands pressed flat to the curve of his back. To hot bare skin. Jace pressed the side of his face to Addax’s shoulder, turned away, his expression unseen, and when Addax drew a finger down the line of his spine, skull to shoulderblades, he made a small indistinct noise and turned, all in a rush, for a kiss.
Laughter crept into it, tumbling with relief through both of them at once—and then it faded and they were stumbling again, grasping—were on the bed with Jace on his back, the whole of him bare to Addax’s gaze. When Addax pressed a thigh between Jace’s, Jace shuddered and shifted so that he could rub against it—demanded more and more and more, and Addax, who had been longing to give it, obeyed. A hand. His mouth, while he knelt on the floor, Jace’s hand on his head—not pushing, only resting, in a kind of benediction. His pulse was heavy in his cock, against Addax’s tongue. Addax had reached the point of arousal that threatened to tip into pain and he thought he might never want to leave it, if Jace kept looking at him like that—if Jace would just keep being so relaxed and easy and gorgeous.
Once, close to the end, Jace and Tea and Addax sat in Jace’s room, Jace full of restless anxiety and Tea measuring him with a knowing look—glancing sidelong at Addax with an expression he didn’t at all understand.
They had placed a projector on the floor and let it fill the room with shimmering approximations of their ships and riggers, the great unclassifiable bulk of Peace. The dance of their fingers maneuvered the players. The light on Jace’s and Tea’s faces tinged blue, the translucent ships blurring now one of their faces, now the other’s.
Tea had said something, and Addax had barely understood it—not through obliqueness or artifice but only because he was too focused, until she had nearly finished speaking, on the images in front of him. And Jace—Jace had relaxed. All at once.
Just the right thing. The right words at the right moment, from someone who knew him intimately, and Addax had realised—
Jace might want to impress him, eager and enthusiastic, leaping before looking, but what Addax wanted—what Addax wanted—
Was that.
Just that. To see Jace suddenly lose the tension that lived in him. To have that small grateful smile turned to him. A selfish sort of desire, although it might be Peaceful.
Now, here, with Jace under his hands, there was a moment—a moment—half way through a third kiss—when he felt it—the loosening of Jace’s body against him, the ease spreading in him—laughter, laughter—
If anyone could have given Jace that moment, now, in these uneasy times, Addax would have felt some sort of gratitude to them. But he was glad, desperately, hopelessly—that it was him. With words and touches. With simple closeness.
Him, after all.
”Come here,” Jace said, with a rasping, happy voice. And Addax went.