Chapter 51 Episode 51: Morning jitters

Akira’s POV

I woke up at six in the morning. My heart running faster than usual, my face still warm and the full understanding of what I had just dreamed about sitting in my chest with entirely nowhere to go.

I lay on my back and looked at the ceiling. Then realized that staring at the ceiling was unhelpful.

So I got up, washed my face with cold water, stood in the kitchen drinking tea I had made too strong, and I told myself with the focused discipline of someone who had managed harder things, that this was a dream and dreams were the brain processing things it hadn’t finished with during waking hours.

I also tried convincing myself it meant nothing beyond the fact that I had been in a dungeon behind a column with Kael Vixar few days ago and my brain had decided to continue the scene without consulting me.

The idea was exactly what I needed it to be. Reasonable. Manageable. Fine.

I was fine.

My mother came out of her room at seven, looked at me standing at the kitchen counter in the posture of someone who had been arguing with themselves for an hour, and said nothing.

I made her tea while she sat at the counter. The morning moved through its early rhythm and I kept my eyes on the window and my thoughts on nothing in particular and I was fine, I was entirely fine, I had kissed Kael in a dungeon two days ago and dreamed about it last night and I was completely, thoroughly, unremarkably fine.

"Is he good to you?" my mother said.

I choked at the sound of his name.

She was looking at her tea cup, not at me, in the manner of someone who had decided the question could be delivered sideways if it needed to be.

The morning light made her silver hair catch at the edges and her hands were around the cup in the way she held things she was being careful with.

Every nerve I had misfired simultaneously.

"I’m sorry," I said. "What?"

"Kael," she said. "Is he good to you."

The dream was extremely present. As well as the feeling of his cock in my ass. I was acutely, specifically and devastatingly aware of that dream and of the fact that I was currently standing in my mother’s kitchen at seven in the morning being asked about the person the dream had featured.

My face seemed to be doing something I could not fully control and I was grateful she was looking at her tea cup.

"Yes," I said, and my voice was level, which was a genuine achievement.

She looked up then. Read my expression with the thoroughness she applied to everything, which under the current circumstances felt like an invasion of privacy on a cosmic scale. Whatever she found, she filed it without comment and looked back at the cup.

"He’s honest," I said, because saying more than that was not safe right now and saying nothing was worse. "He says what he means. He doesn’t..." I stopped and reorganised my statement.

"He doesn’t make things easier than they are. But he doesn’t make them harder either."

She nodded, the slow considering nod of someone receiving information they find coherent. "That’s good then," she said, in the tone of someone who had been given enough.

What followed then was silence.

I drank my tea. The morning continued. The dream receded to a manageable distance, which was approximately three feet rather than zero feet, and I breathed and looked at the window and felt something close to normal returning.

Then she said, "He told me what happened to you."

I paused then slowly put the cup down. Turned to look at her in a way I hadn’t planned and she was looking at me now with those dark steady eyes and the expression she used when she was being careful with something fragile.

"Not the details," she said, before I could find words. "He wouldn’t give me details I hadn’t earned the right to have. He said it was bad. That you survived it. And that you were stronger than you looked." A pause. "He said the last part like it was the most important thing."

I looked at her.

Something was happening in my chest that was not the dream-warmth and not the usual warmth and not anything I had adequate vocabulary for. It was sitting in the same place the other things sat but it was different in texture, quieter and more disorienting.

Kind of like the feeling of someone having done something for you that you hadn’t known you needed until it was already done.

Kael had told her.

Not the truth though, even he didn’t know the truth. But he had the shape of it, the outline reconstructed from the gate records and the behavioral patterns and four months of watching me move through the world with the particular habits of someone shaped by something he couldn’t name.

He had taken that shape and gone to my mother with it and given her what she needed to stop worrying in the dark without telling her anything that wasn’t his to give.

He had given her something within the contexts of; he’s okay, it was bad, he made it through.

He had given her that on a random evening in a closed ramen shop over ’edible’ broth as he called it, without being asked and precisely without telling me he had done it.

I did not know how to feel about this.

I stood in the kitchen and tried to locate the feeling and found several things at once, layered over each other without clean separation. Relief that she knew something, even the outline.

The particular discomfort of someone having moved in your spaces without your knowledge and the discomfort being complicated by the fact that what they had moved there was something good.

Gratitude, which sat badly next to the discomfort and next to the dream and next to the warmth and next to all of it at once.

"He had no right," I said quietly.

"No," she agreed. "He didn’t." She said it without heat, a simple acknowledgment. "But he also knew I was carrying something I didn’t have enough information to put down. And he gave me enough to put it down."

She looked at me directly. "He didn’t tell me what it was. He told me you were alright."

I looked out the window.

The street outside was going through it’s normal routine. A dog walker. A delivery vehicle slowing at the corner. Ordinary.

"He shouldn’t have done it without telling me," I said.

"Probably not," she said. "Will you talk to him about it?"

I thought about our next meeting this Thursday. About what every Thursday now carried that it hadn’t carried before the column and the kiss and a dream I was not going to think about in this kitchen.

"Yes," I said.

"Good." She drank her tea. "He meant well."

"I know he meant well."

"And you’re not actually angry?"

I looked at her.

She looked back with the eyes that had always seen more than the surface of whatever I was presenting, the eyes that were exactly the same as the eyes on another planet in another life that I had thought about every day for the first three months and thought about less now but still thought about, and she was waiting for the honest answer.

"No," I said. "I’m not angry."

She set her cup down with the small sound of something concluded.

"Stronger than you look," she said. "He was right about that."

I said nothing.

"I knew it before he said it," she said. "I just... it was good to hear it from someone who had experienced it."

The kitchen was warm and the morning light was coming through the window at the angle that made the counter glow slightly.

She was looking at me with the warmth she kept quiet most of the time, the warmth she showed in the way she put the cup down and made the tea and stayed in the kitchen when I needed company without making the staying into something I had to respond to.

I had time to decide how I felt about Kael having told her.

I had the whole morning, and beyond the morning, and there was no deadline on this feeling, it could exist in its complicated layered state until I understood it better.

I decided that was sufficient for now.

"I’m going to be late for training," I said.

"Thursday?" she said.

Something crossed her expression when she said it. Something small and knowing and entirely deliberate.

"Yes," I said.

I picked up my jacket.

At the door she called "Tell him the soup is fresh this evening."

I stopped and turned to her.

She was already moving to the kitchen with the unhurried certainty of someone who had said exactly what they intended to say and had no interest in clarifying it.

I went to training.

The dream was three feet away the whole walk there.

I was working on it.