Chapter Text
Tumbling white clouds billowed over the bay. Clive ordered a black coffee, and picked out a table on the highest patio, in the full sun. Gulls fought over fried potato strings on the cobbles. His eyelids briefly weighted themselves shut. He ignored the bzzt of the arete against his brain. A quick mental glance—you didn’t need your eyes open for the arete—at the board told him it was just the confirmation details for the flight out. He scrolled and selected accept.
He breathed in. A light, fresh smell threaded through the heavy green brocade of Port Isolde. Something else, too. He smiled even before she spoke.
“Is that your luggage?” Jill asked. The sun caught the stray strands of her long hair and lined her silver head with white light. She let herself into the restaurant patio.
“Yeah,” Clive said. A silver hard shell case beside him contained most of his belongings. He tried to make himself less sleepy. “Yes. Sorry, I just got off the shuttle.”
“There’s nothing to apologize for,” Jill said. She swept her skirt to one side as she slid into the seat opposite. The scent of nostalgia—long mornings and afternoons before and after lesson, mucking about outside in the sunshine, under the oaks, playing or watching kineos on rainy days—wafted pleasantly over him. She waved at the woman at the counter through the big windows. “Hello, Molly!”
“The usual, Jill?” the woman—Molly—asked. She was already fishing out a scone with tongs from the container.
“Oh, two, please,” Jill said. “And an iced coffee. And a sandwich.”
“Oh ho,” Molly said.
“Just the coffee, thanks,” Clive said.
Molly nodded. She disappeared inside the cafe. Port Isolde was so tactile. People did things. It wasn't just bugs scuttling around, toting trays and buckets under transparent energy fields.
“Did you just come back to port today?” Jill asked. Her cheeks were pink from walking.
“Yeah,” Clive said. “Flew in from the islands this morning.”
“It’s a beautiful view at dawn,” Jill said. The wind stirred her bright hair. She tucked it back behind her ear.
Clive relaxed for the first time in several horrible weeks. She sent him daily messages, of course, long transcripts detailing her daily doings, but there wasn't a way to send a scent through an arete, and from that scent Clive was able to know she was happy. Maybe it was cheating, but everyone knew that the alpha nose could pick up those things, and Clive was more sensitive than most for reasons he did not completely understand. It was nice to be here, see her even for just a half second, before going to Dzemekys and dealing with its shitty, stressful messiness.
“Stunning,” Clive said. He thumbed the edge of the table, because despite how good it was to see her and scent her, he immediately ran out of things to say.
“What have you been up to today?” Jill said. “Other than traveling between the motherstations, I mean.”
This was basically the message she sent him nearly every day. Usually he snapped an image of the scenery and sent that to her without comment, to experience in the arete as he did. Then they'd transition into petty complaints about the shuttle port (for him) or the shoot (for her), and then Jill would send a beautifully and professionally composed framed image of her supper. He fell asleep waiting for her next message, which he would open and answer when he woke at the crack of dawn to go on jobsite.
Molly approached with the scones, the sandwich, and a clattering glass of iced coffee on a tray before he could think of something witty, funny, original, or even half-decent to say. Under the heavy sugar smell was another scent, one that raised the hairs on the back of his neck. Clive held out his hands to intercept them before he could stop himself.
Molly raised an eyebrow, took a sniff, and let him, relinquishing the food as a matter of respect, one alpha to another.
“Ham?” Clive said, awkwardly. He passed the food onto Jill. “Looks good. Can I get one?”
Now both Molly's eyebrows shot up. Jill laughed behind her hand.
“I've been craving it,” Jill said. “On me, Molly.”
“No,” Clive said automatically.
“Please,” Jill said, simply.
“Alright,” Clive ceded at once. His neck felt a touch hot. Molly took herself away.
Jill’s eyes drifted slightly as she engaged her arete. “I’m happy to treat you.”
“Your work going well?” Clive guessed, eager for a conversation topic to dust away his embarrassing display.
“Yes,” Jill said.
He waited for more. He hadn't heard about this latest one. He'd noticed her falling off a little in the messages recently. Usually, it was his schedule that meant he was in and out.
“What’s the subject on this one?” Clive asked, when she didn't elaborate.
“Hm?” Jill said. She shook herself. “‘Outside the bounds, the eye looks inward.’ I'm a bit stressed about it.”
“Are you alright, Jill?” Clive asked.
He frowned. She didn't rattle easily, especially since the talent—as she very casually termed her subjects—she captured for kineo tableaux were usually household name celebrities or important industry figures. He ignored all the other scents, and breathed in the fragrance of flowers and sea air.
Though it was a gorgeous late summer afternoon, the pier was mostly empty. People were at work and their children at academy. There were a few exceptions to the rule, ambling down the boardwalks or loitering at shop windows.
“Is everything alright, Jill?” Clive repeated.
She ran her tongue along her upper lip. It caught on the tiny points of her underdeveloped canines. She smiled.
“Yes,” she said. “And I suppose … sort of. I'll be perfectly alright, though I might not be completely happy about it. I just have to get through it.” She hesitated. “You can probably tell why.”
Clive inhaled a little more deeply. He wasn't scenting something. Under that floral perfume of hers was a subtle, tight range pheromone block. It was good manners to pretend blocks were not noticeable, since broad range blocks usually made a omega smell like nothing. There were only a few reasons why an omega would put one on.
“Is it your heat?” Clive said in a low voice.
“Yes,” Jill said, just as quietly. “I got the augur a few months ago. It's been three years since my last proper one. I can’t keep putting it off, but it falls right before this shoot and the matchmaker was utterly useless.”
Jill had not mentioned the matchmaking service in a long, long time. If it had done its job successfully, he would have had to hear about her bonded alpha, who would not be him, but someone who could make her happy. It was something he believed, or tried to believe, that he was ready to hear about, if that day ever came. It never did.
“Is it … easier with profiles?” Jill said. She swirled the ice of her coffee in its vessel.
There was very little he wouldn't discuss with Jill. She knew every sordid detail about the situation with his mother and father’s messy bondbreak; his mother's abuse, before and after his presentation, which had been painfully late in life; his anxieties about clashing with Joshua. But he left out anything to do with sex, because it seemed unfeeling and cruel. She knew that he had a profile only because the first time she mentioned the matchmaker, he had let his irresponsible, irrepressible jealousy get the better of him. He wished he could have taken it all back the minute he hit send.
“It's fine,” he admitted. “No one is interested in courtship rituals.”
Jill fell quiet. She couldn't look him in the eye.
Clive ran his tongue over the points of his fangs, testing their sharpness. He volunteered himself for plenty of heats. It was a setting to be checked in the app profile interface. He knew what he was doing in a nest and what he was willing to offer. He'd never once been tempted to bond. That within him which was of Ifrit mostly slumbered. Rarely, if ever, did Ifrit wake; but in this moment, he felt Ifrit crack open one eye, and fix him with a plaintive stare.
Had they both waited long enough? Was it now time to face the truth?
“I’m in a hotel in Dzemekys for the next two weeks,” Clive said, abruptly. “I leave in an hour. I'm really quite lucky you had time to see me.”
Her eyes widened.
“Ah,” she said. She huffed. She folded her hands in her lap. “I didn't realize. That's right. You must be so tired.”
“It's alright,” Clive said, wishing he could take that back, too.
His arete gave another brisk buzz against his mental awareness. Cid, probably, tacking on another note full of really important things that he forgot to include in his first briefing message. Clive let it through, hopeful that it would let up the tension in his chest, or at least redirect it, in the form of employed annoyance, at Cid.
Don't need you after all, Cid said bluntly. Take some time off.
That's nonsense, Clive shot back, immediately.
No response.
He was shuttling direct from Port Isolde to Dzemekys because his expertise was needed, because the situation was identical to the issue he'd been flagging and correcting nonstop for the last few months. Cid knew that because Cid read the reports, though he sometimes pretended like he didn’t.
The ocean breeze picked up again. His nose wrinkled.
Founder. That block bugged him now. If you got close enough to the gland, you could smell through the block and get a noseful of real pheromone. All he would have to do was hold Jill down and take a long whiff to get the proper stuff. Most omegas he heat-fucked loved it when he held them down.
“It was good to see you in person,” Jill said. Her disappointment was physically painful, particularly because he knew she was hiding it.
She set aside her sandwich. She had pulled it apart but not taken a bite. She should have eaten more; she needed her strength.
“It was good seeing you, too,” Clive said, standing up.
Jill rose, too. She was pushing through her humiliation, like she tended to do. He leaned in for a quick embrace. He bent a little too far forward, too near the gland positioned behind her ear.
There, this close to the skin, he could tell. It was like being hit by the musk of a rose, sweet and unmistakable. The heat would be soon. Maybe as soon as a day. Yet she had chosen to see him, at a moment’s notice, despite what must be terrible discomfort. Now that he had her in his embrace, he could tell she was trembling. His teeth ground together. His chest rumbled with a deep but short-lived purr. She needed to go back to her nest, she did not need to suffer like this for him, not when he was the worst choice she had.
Jill purred back, just as briefly. It was a sweet, friendly, and emphatically platonic purr. The purr you'd use for a nestmate sibling or something. He'd heard it plenty of Solstices when she embraced Joshua, who had been the sole alpha in the family for years. She had never once used it on Clive, and its vibrations repulsed him. He had to concentrate on not responding with a rebuke. His arms locked up.
Ifrit rarely woke. Maybe a handful of times in his entire life. Perhaps he was tired of Clive's nonsense.
“I am so glad to have gotten to see you even just a little bit,” Jill said into his shoulder. “I know you're busy saving the world.”
“It’s good to see your face,” he murmured back.
“It's so funny,” Jill said. “I miss you, even though you're always in my head.”
“Tell me how your shoot goes?” Clive said.
“Of course.” Jill pulled away.
He wished he had chosen to do anything else. But when he had realized what was happening, really happening, he could not leave it for others. He had to do something. It just came at a cost.
“It might be a week or so before you hear from me,” Jill added. “So don't worry.”
“A week?” Clive said, surprised.
“Maybe two. Shiva takes her time,” Jill said, obviously smiling and laughing so he wouldn't fret. “And I have been putting her off.”
“Jill—”
“I'll be fine, Clive,” Jill assured him. “Send me a message when you land?”
“Of course,” Clive said.
He was already down the steps when he heard Molly wondering aloud what she ought to do with his sandwich. He wrestled with further embarrassment as he walked away. He could not hear what Jill said back. The ocean breeze blew the perfume of her hair from his nose. He composed a more civilized note in the arete back to Cid than the one he had sent before.
I don't need to take leave, I'm good. We need to proceed.
There was a brief pause.
Then, Clive, lad, you've been active for the last eight weeks.
Clive experienced an anger that was sharper and keener than it needed to be. It was alpha rage. Jill had needed him, and he had said no, and now he was reacting to the irritating disorientation between his actions and his desires. Being annoyed about it made him even angrier about it.
Dzemekys is S-level and I'm qualified, he shot back. You gave me this. I'm doing my job.
The response was lightning fast. Cid paced in the emptiness. He shrugged.
Have it your way. Just thought you might like the break.
Cid disconnected. Gav, the other S-level engineer, would be out at the Aire. No matter how critical Dzemekys Motherstation was, unless the origination point was at risk in an seriously existential way, they wouldn’t pull Gav off his assignment to fix it, and that meant downtime. That was, in layman's terms, really, really bad, but in a kick-it-down-the-road sort of way that did not trigger the alarms in the general public or elected officials that it should. Cid knew how important it was. Clive couldn’t just take his leave from the aether slowly boiling out of the land. It had to be done.
Clive stewed, riding the public tram to the shuttle port. Cid was a hands-off manager, actually. Clive slumped on the bench with his case perched beside him, feeling irritable and sorry for himself.
The arete buzzed. Fucking Cid—
I realized didn't think to ask you if you were alright.
It was Jill. She projected her image into his head.
Even though he had just seen her, he felt his body unclench at the touch of her mind against his. He stared at her face internally, without answering the open line she had cast at him, until the speakers announced that the tram was now arriving at the Lazarus International Shuttle Port.
Clive jumped off the open side of the tram. The shuttle port was a single massive spire, from which multiple shuttles dispatched daily. Departing right now was the direct service to Rosalith, from the northern facing lowermost port. One of the others would be his shuttle, which would take him as the crow flew to Dzemekys and the motherstation, one of the final remaining monuments to the sins of their ancestors’ gods.
It was a good thing, Clive always thought, that the Ultima and the Ancients had annihilated one another. He looked out across the sea at the Drustanus Motherstation, an elaborate cake of a structure built around the looming orange tongue of crystal jutting out of the mountain, and felt an existential relief that the damage the great old ones had tried to do unto Valisthea was reversible.
He didn't want to lie to Jill. She would know that he was lying, anyway, because Jill knew him. The truth was embarrassing, but nothing worse than that. She would understand.
Sorry, he said, getting up his courage. The pheromones took me by surprise. Not your fault.
There was a brief pause. He held his breath. Omegas approaching estrus tended to be a little irritable. A shuttle glided down from the patchwork of white clouds. Clive approached the boardwalk and leaned one elbow on the rail. He watched the sea roll in and out.
Perhaps a little my fault, Jill sent back. She smiled. She had not disconnected her image. To him, it appeared as if he were half in and half out of two worlds, Port Isolde and the great empty expanse of the twilit world of the mind. I could have warned you. I suppose I didn't know how. And I genuinely thought the block would do the trick.
It worked, Clive assured her. I know your scent, though.
If anyone does, it's you, Jill replied.
Perhaps she was just being playful, but his heart squeezed tight in his chest. Clive stared at the horizon until the discomfort of that passed. The gulls squabbled in the air overhead and on the boardwalk behind him. Tourists zipped by on hoverers. The direct line Rosalith shuttle docked, sending out blue streamers of aetherial exhaust.
Clive couldn't hurt the railing, no matter how hard he gripped it.
Cid had all but told him that he wasn't necessary. Clive was a coward, hiding behind the Dzemekys Motherstation. Frankly, it was always a headache regardless of what anyone did.
Jill needed someone, and she had been ready to ask him. He had no doubt that he was her strong preference. The thing that existed between them was a badly kept secret. He could not have gotten through the misery of childhood—or, years later when they reunited for the first time in ages, his presentation—without her friendship. She had told him once that whenever she felt lost, she turned to him. They had guided one another for years. But whenever she reached out for him like that, he backed away.
The alpha and omega physical reaction had been designed in a literal laboratory over a thousand years ago by the unscrupulous Ancients, hungry for power denied them by the gods. The people of today’s age—the rest, the ‘etcetera’ listed in the monolithic computing towers within which reposed the oldest historical data available—lived with those designations, after breaking free from containment. Perhaps if the Ultima had lived, they would have obscured the knowledge of the Ancients from those survivors.
Instead, the damage done to Valisthea by their antecedents and Ultima was being fixed. Little by little, by those who were both the last people of the old world, and the first people of the new. It was a duty he took seriously. A bond was meant to overtake everything. He remembered one night, home from university with a head full of dire warnings, lying on his back and looking at the swirl of galaxies overhead, and telling Jill that he couldn't just walk away. He had to do something to save Valisthea from itself.
His hands ached. He had done a lot of good with them since, even if Drustanus looked like it always did. It was impossible to tell how he had improved the flow or where he had restored the deteriorating fields. His work was invisible. He let go of the railing.
The pull towards her was more than a pheromonal static, though, and Jill had wanted to kiss him that night. He nursed the memory of her leaning towards him in the moonlight, hopeful and anxious. It had been just before his presentation, when he was still designated as a beta. It would have been a nonstandard match but not unheard of. He almost kissed her back.
But then he would have to leave her for Ash to finish his last year of school. And then, when he was done, his choices would take him away from her again. He could not live his life like this and nurture a bond the way she deserved. She would always be waiting for him to come home and then leave again. And yet he could not … she needed … he stalled, battling his self-imposed war of duty and desire, and losing on every front. Jill decided it for them. She had never tried again.
Would you want me to match with you? he said, before he could think better of it.
The sea’s steady churning in and out matched his insides perfectly.
Clive, she said.
He shook his head. There's no obligation. I want to, if you want to. It's you, Jill.
Another long silence.
Then, tightly, What about your work? I thought you had to be onsite for two weeks.
Clive struggled to phrase it. He wanted casual, but he did not want blasé. He did not want her to think she was a mere whim. Neither did he want to completely undercut the reason that he had never offered before.
I'm due for some leave. They're pestering me about it, to be honest, though I bet they'll miss me when I can't take their calls. I'd be focused on you.
His heart thumped painfully.
Alright, Jill said back, relief evident in her voice. Then I believe we're meant to exchange protocols.