Chapter 49 Episode 49: Dependent

Kael’s POV

I woke at two in the morning for no justifiable reason. This was unusual. I slept with the efficiency I applied to everything else, in all the hours allocated and at the depth required.

I did not wake in the middle of the night without cause because my body understood that it needed enough sleep hours in order to run an exact pace. Two in the morning with no gate alert, no bond signal from the Phoenix, no council emergency flagged in the monitoring system.

No cause. Except for the memory of the column.

I lay in the dark and looked at the ceiling and the column was there in exactly the way it had been in the dungeon, specific and immediate. The way things were immediate when they had happened recently enough that the body hadn’t finished processing them.

His forehead against mine afterward. The breath adjustment. My hand still on his jaw because moving it had not been the thing I had wanted to do.

The kiss. Fucks sake the kiss.

I had been precise about most things for most of my life. Precision was the discipline that kept everything functional. It kept the gap between what I was capable of and what the world could produce manageable.

It kept things that required careful handling from becoming the things that couldn’t be handled. I was precise about this too, lying in the dark at two in the morning. I had kissed Akira Renshi in a dungeon behind a column, with a Winged Lion at the far end of the chamber, and he had kissed me back, and neither of us had said anything about it after.

The ’Thursday’ had landed between us on the street outside the gate the way it always did, carrying what it carried. And we had walked in different directions and the gate had logged complete and the mission chip had recorded and the world had continued.

I had been precise for thirty-four years.

That precision was not helping right now. So I got up.

***

The office at two in the morning had the atmosphere of a space that belonged to work and resented being occupied for other purposes. I sat at the desk but did not open any files. My gaze seemed to be stuck at the window which showed the city in its nighttime configuration.

The gate monitors were running their automated cycles on the eastern horizon, the particular dark of an hour that belonged to nobody. The Phoenix was awake.

She was always awake when I was awake, one of the things about the bond that I had stopped finding strange and started accepting as a feature of a connection that ran too deep to have conventional limits. She sent nothing through the bond. She was simply present at the edge of it, which was her way of being available without making demands.

I thought about it’s availability. The feeling of it that had developed over the past several months, the way my awareness of where Akira was had become a background constant that I only noticed when it was absent.

The phone link. The mission logs. The Thursday schedule cleared indefinitely. The ramen shop on Thursday evenings and the gate surveys and the perimeter checks and the industrial district steps.

I had spent a career being the person other people cowered to be around. The S-rank hunter at the centre of an operational gravity. A fixed point. I had not, in fifteen years, found myself floating around someone else.

I was rotating around Akira Renshi.

The recognition arrived with the same quality as the recognition of his scent... it wasn’t a sudden encounter and it wouldn’t be described as something new. But rather something that had been present for long enough that the moment of acknowledging it felt less like discovery and more like finally looking directly at something that had been in peripheral vision for months.

His scent.

I had been thinking about his scent since my visit to the ramen shop on the first day. When I was standing on the pavement and having it come through the door and stop me before I had made a conscious decision to stop. Since the northern district, three days without it, the background noise I had misidentified until it named itself.

His scent was stronger now.

That was the thing I had been sitting with since the dungeon, since the column and with his forehead against mine. The proximity produced it at a different intensity from distance, which was not surprising, scent was proximity-dependent.

What was not standard was the way the intensity had been increasing over time, not just with physical closeness but as an ambient quality. In the way he was present in a room before he appeared in it, the way the ramen shop carried it even when he was at the guild.

In the dungeon, behind the column, it had been the most present it had ever been.

I was not going to examine what that meant at this time in the morning.

I was going to look at the city and think about our Thursday schedule, the standing authorization and the way his breath had adjusted when my hand moved from his shoulder to his jaw and come to no useful conclusions.

Then I was going to go back to sleep.

The Phoenix sent something through the bond. Dry and unhurried. The feeling of it was something like; ’good luck with that’.

***

My mother arrived on Wednesday, which was the day before Thursday. She let herself in with the key she had always had, she used it with the frequency she considered appropriate.

In my opinion, it had never been successfully incorporated. She found me at the kitchen table with the morning reports and with the look of someone who had been carrying something since Tuesday and had not slept well in the interval.

She gazed at me across the kitchen.

"You’re distracted," she stated.

"I had a full week," I said.

"You always have a full week baby." She moved to the counter and put the kettle on with the ease of someone entirely at home in a kitchen she did not live in. "This is different."

"It’s not different."

"Kael." Her voice carried the specific quality she reserved for statements she wanted me to understand were not questions. "You have that look."

"I don’t have any look."

"You have several of them actually." She took two cups from the cabinet. "The one where you’re managing something large and operational, the one where the council has done something you find inadequate, and this one." She glanced at me. "I’ve only seen this one once before."

I said nothing.

"You were nineteen," she said. "There was a boy in your cohort whose name I’ve forgotten. You had that look for about six weeks and then whatever it was resolved itself and you never mentioned it."

I looked at the morning reports. I wouldn’t be lying if I said I had not been reading this for the past twenty minutes.

"This one has lasted longer than before ," she said. She poured the tea and brought both cups to the table and sat across from me with the directness she brought to conversations she had been planning for longer than the conversation’s surface suggested. "Who is it?"

"It’s not..."

"Who is it?" She sounded more firmly this time. With the same voice she used when bossing around my whipped father.

I looked at her.

She looked at me with the dark eyes that had been reading me since before I could form the vocabulary to manage what they found, and the patience of someone who had thirty-four years of practice and was not going to be outwaited.

"It’s complicated," I said.

"It always is," she said. "Who?"

I picked up the tea. "Someone I work with."

"At the guild?"

"Yes."

She was quiet for a moment, which was how she processed things she found satisfying but wanted to receive carefully. "How long?"

"I’m not going to put a timeline on it."

"Bullshit!" It was rare for her to swear as well.

"Several months." She shocked tge answer out of me.

She looked at me. Something in her expression shifted, the look of a woman who had been watching her son for thirty-four years and had been waiting for a particular thing to happen and was now receiving confirmation that it was happening.

She did not perform satisfactorily. She held it quietly and looked at me across the kitchen table with the warmth she reserved for things that mattered.

"Are you happy?" she asked.

"It’s complicated," I said again.

"Are you happy?" she said again, the same words with more weight behind them.

I thought about the column. Our foreheads against each other. The warmth. The fact I was awake at two in the morning, his scent and the way the city looked from the industrial district steps in the early morning with his shoulder against mine.

"Yes," I said.

She picked up her tea.

"Good," she said. "Bring her to dinner." That ’her’ stuck like glue.

"I’m not..."

"Not now," she said. "When it’s time." She held my gaze with the certainty of someone who had already decided how this was going to go and was giving me the timeline I needed to catch up. "Especially when it’s time."

I said nothing.

She drank her tea with the expression of someone who had gotten what she came for and was content to let the rest of the morning be ordinary.

I was not going to bring him to dinner yet. The conversation with my mother was one thing, the specific container of it, the privacy of a kitchen table at nine in the morning with two cups of tea.

What it became when other people were in the room was something I was not ready to manage, because managing it required having arrived somewhere I had not yet fully arrived.

The column. The kiss. The time in the morning.

The scent this morning, faint, carried on something in the air from the direction of the ramen shop two neighborhoods over, which should not have been detectable at this distance and was.

I was dependent on him.

The word arrived with the same precision the scent arrived with, clear and specific and definitely not something I could attribute to anything other than what it was.

I was dependent in the way that things became necessary rather than desired, in the way that absence produced a quality of wrongness that presence corrected.

In the way that a man who had spent thirty-four years being a fixed point had found a different fixed point and had oriented around it without deciding to.

I was slowly becoming dependent on Akira Renshi.

The recognition sat in the kitchen at nine in the morning with two cups of tea and my mother reading the news on her tablet across the table, ordinary and unremarkable, simply true.

"Thursday," I said, without meaning to say it out loud.

My mother looked up.

"I have something on Thursday," I said.

She looked at me with those eyes.

"Of course you do," she said.

She went back to the news.

I drank my tea and thought about Thursday and did not examine the feeling attached to it because examining it was not necessary. The feeling knew what it was. I had already accepted that I did too.