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It hadn’t meant to come out. And it wouldn’t have, if she’d been honest with herself so long ago and acknowledged the feeling, rationalised it, buried it. Learned to live with it.
But she’d run from it.
And that was why, with the burn of the line wire cutting into the tender skin of her inner elbow and down her forearm, slicing open her palm, her fingers, tearing through the fabric of her combats and into her leg, biting deep into the ankle twisted around the wire for an anchor, with his head thrown back to look up at her with those eyes, every feature of his face blown sharp with shock and panic, his fingers bruising her wrist with the crushing strength of his grip – that of a man thrown clear over the edge of the world with no hope of rescue-
It had just. Come out.
Suspended, in time as they were in the dead air above the endless chasm, the words were all that existed.
And the moment was gone, and she’d kicked the handle with her other foot and rocketed them to the sanctuary of solid ground. Blessed be Pathfinder, who had wrangled them both with one sweep of his arm and swung them across the death of open ground to shelter.
She’d stitched her own leg, a long winding laceration that snaked nastily from ankle to mid-thigh, and pulled on combats to match, Mirage’s fine stitch work a good sight better than her own handiwork.
Pathfinder had to pull her from the floor, her weight heavy against him, not that anyone would have known, and guide her in a limp to the bundle of her bunk kit so she could rest. She’d known before he told her that her wrist was badly fractured from their squadmate’s grasp. Catching dead weight falling at that speed, it wasn’t a surprise.
Pathfinder fussed, and Wraith was too sore and too exhausted to even make an attempt of waving him off. The high-grade painkillers put her halfway out, and fatigue took her the rest of the way. Even if it hadn’t, the vial from the medkit that was regrowing and knitting her bones would be too taxing to stay conscious.
That save was all anyone could talk about when the Game was over. She lost count of the number of suits who approached her for authorization and signatures for Promo footage and other dull self-promotion she could never be bother to care about.
The Hub was buzzing with excitement over it, the Rec rooms playing re-runs for days. There was real, long-lasting hype over what was quickly being acknowledged as the ‘Save of the Century’. Every Elite and any lower ranker with the courage to speak to her had congratulated her on it. Even Pathfinder, who was usually shockingly astute when it came to Wraith’s disdain for systematic breakdowns or reminiscence about their matches - outside of how they could improve - had mentioned twice how impressed he was.
It seemed she was one of only two people who wasn’t talking about it. The other had been notably absent from her vicinity, which was unusual these days. She’d long since lost the ability to shrug him off effectively, send him off with his tail tucked low between his legs. And she’d grown used to his presence anyway. One does, when the nuisance is persistent and frequent.
Maybe that was why she was here. Maybe she’d subconsciously sought him out. Not that she couldn’t survive the month until their next game without his God awful chattering. Not that she missed his noise and his flirting and his jokes.
But she noticed, alright?
It wasn’t as if her days felt sluggish and her mind wouldn’t focus.
It wasn’t like she was lying at night with sleep escaping her, feeling like some phantom piece of her was missing.
It wasn’t as if the nightmares had grown bold and fierce as though tasting weakness.
She spent afternoons in the library alone. Dusks, wandering in the quiet of the town without a shadow. Meals, uninterrupted, in the cafeteria.
It had taken her two days to notice his absence, and assume he’d gone home to visit his mother as he sometimes did.
That was before she saw him across the courtyard beside the window of her quarters. Before she watched him turn down a street with an almost perfect performance of not spotting her.
Before she passed him at the library entrance slipping through the door he held open for her as he avoided her eyes. She’d come so close to brushing shoulders with him, but he’d ducked away.
He’d never done that before, and that was what had her recalling the words, the ones that weren’t supposed to exist even in thought, yet had sprung from her mouth from somewhere unknown when she’d dropped from the seam between worlds and tumbled into a hasty Zipline with not a hair’s breadth of room for error and shot her arm out for him.
Wraith drew the mug closer to her chest atop the dinged wooden table, guarding it almost, as she could do nothing else but watch him. The bar was sparser than it had been in the weeks following the last Elite match. Those who’d left the Hub for home, travel, visiting friends and relatives in the lull between matches, had thinned the herd.
Karaoke night was usually a satisfying way to be invisible, cloaked in low lighting while live performances drew away any unwanted attention. It was a near perfect compromise between solitude and social interaction. Even if she wasn’t chasing the way alcohol would lift the weight from her. Elliot’s bar was the one place she could be sure to get a good cup of coffee at any time of day.
The old-timey lights lit strands of pink and green in the curls spilling over his forehead in the dimmed room. The stage was framed by hot white lighting, just enough to spotlight whatever poor fool dared step up for drunken renditions of songs so old Wraith had never heard most of them in their correct key. His eyes glowed like fireside whiskey as they swept the room.
Not that she’d ever tell him, but Elliot’s singing voice... Well. It had qualities she found... Appealing. Singing was the only time she never heard him stumble over words or unwieldy syllables, where his pacing was even and each word clear and pure. His range had long since stopped surprising her, but every now and then he could still impress.
Elliot could nail almost anything he tried. He twanged just enough for country, sang almost like silk for those strange Spanish love songs. Octane sulked, when those came up. Competition would break out as an inevitability and the entire evening would be eaten away with Spanish ballads, one after the other, testing the patience of other patrons.
That night, Elliot sang with a mournful ache that stirred something secret in her chest. He hadn’t seen her come in, busy with a group of fans and his friend behind the bar, already at least a few drinks in and his usual loud, playful persona fully in place. She’d slunk to the bar when he was busy elsewhere, found a table in a corner furthest from the lights, and slowly nursed a coffee as she let the atmosphere she was so removed from wash over her.
She hadn’t been sure he was going to take the stage, so busy being social, signing the odd autograph, dancing and drinking and looking for all the world like the Game they’d played two weeks ago had never happened.
But then he did, and he grinned at a rising wave of wolf whistles and cheers, and he’d given some droll little speech about satisfying his fans as the sharp staccato notes of an intro started.
And it wasn’t until right before he drew breath and sang the first word that Wraith even noticed the change that had come over him. His hands stilled around the microphone stand. His shoulders settled back. Something shifted in his expression. And a Voice whispered uneasily right as his first note rang out across the room.
Remember when you said you loved me?
Remember when you said that it would all work out?
Wraith’s throat had gone dry.
He was... Alien, standing slope-shouldered in the shock of the spotlight, his skin like caramel and his voice carrying across the new hush with an almost desperate note.
And I’m swirling, softly, drifting like the cream in your coffee.
And then- And then his eyes flickered over, and she knew he was looking at her. A shiver, the realization, like prey spying the hunter that already knew they were there.
And you’re talking, calmly, but I’m scared-
Raw, the sound bending, almost breaking. Her heart rate picked up.
To be on our own, when the thrill is gone.
Her chest lurched, constricted. Elliot’s gaze burned into her, unflinching even as he bared his soul, even as his face showed trace of just how true it was.
He’d avoided her, been avoiding her, and it had been because of that moment. The Save of the Century. The moment everything in existence had shifted from the impact of words she hadn’t even known she was going to say. The adrenaline had waned, the Game had kept them in tandem until it was over and-
And then he’d just... Vanished.
And Wraith realised that he had run away from it, too.
Voices were arguing, interrupting each other and overlapping in the back of head but all she could hear was him.
Wraith couldn’t even escape, locked into place, the chill of the Void ghosting her skin. The air was thin and hot in her throat. His gaze flashed in the strobe lights, unnatural shadows rising and falling across the face she knew so well, and every stroke and curve and edge told her everything.
Baby can you keep your promise?
Unbelievable, to be doing this. For anyone to hear and understand, the stools and the dancefloor full of bodies, of fans, of people who- who could know, could know something so intimate she’d never breathed it to anyone. That they’d sworn their lives into each other’s hands every single time they’d stepped onto that drop ship. That they’d shed blood, their own, the others’, that somehow, somewhere, the one thing she’d striven for every game for years had recalibrated. Survival looked different, now.
Somewhere along the line, it was only survival if he lived to fight beside her another day.
Wraith had to get out of there. She couldn’t fill her lungs, couldn’t feel her fingers, like the Void had taken hold.
Only she was burning up from something other than-
There’s nothing in the sky above me,
Nothing strung below us baby if we fall-
We’re caught between a spark and lightning-
Wraith’s wrist twitched under the memory of crushing fingers, of sparks and heat flash.
On the stage, somehow too close and yet far enough away to be in another world, Elliot tilted his chin, eyes flickering away as though afraid, his voice softening and breaking and the surge in her own abdomen, flooding from her toes, aching with it.
I’m sorry, I love you, but even those words are getting see-through...
All at once, a thousand moments, a thousand memories, screamed in her head, flashing hard against her skull as though torn up by the Voices.
Promises, light-hearted comments, over-the-top declarations, flirty innuendos delivered with all the levity of bad jokes, jabs, compliments she’d growled at, shoved away, arms slung over her shoulders that she’d jabbed him in the ribs for. Furtive looks after particularly dicey situations, protein bars handed wordlessly to her before she even knew she needed them, tired glances of exhaustion when they spent comfortable hours of silence recovering in front a screen playing movies she couldn’t even remember. Moments in places she can’t even recall, brief seconds of feeling like the world was unbalanced before he said something that didn’t sound like what he meant, and flashed her that smile and it all righted once more and she was sure she’d imagined that she wasn’t in her own timeline.
He’d been telling her for two years. Maybe longer. And, as he always did, as if he’d heard, Elliot found her again, tucked far across the room in a corner dark with shadow.
When you say you love me, are we ever really gonna feel safe?
Like he’d stolen the words right from the depths of her own soul, a fear she’d never even spoken to herself. A thing he couldn’t ever, possibly know about her. And yet she couldn’t tear her eyes from him, couldn’t convince herself that he didn’t know it.
Wraith’s blood flushed hot with... With fear, with flight, with- with- She didn’t know, she couldn’t name it, couldn’t bear to think it.
She knew who Mirage was. She knew the level of facade he had built, an almost unshakeable act. Intricacies upon riddles almost futile to unpick.
But in that moment, every inch of his face bore Elliot as his eyes slid closed. He almost howled as the music swelled, melancholic, painful, transfixing. The lights danced dangerously down the smooth exposure of his throat, and it stirred in Wraith.
Is it better if I walk away?
The revulsion snapped fast across her nerves, lighting like battle. No, it isn’t. Not now. Not him.
Wraith yearned, suddenly, fiercely, with a depth that terrified her even as it swept her over.
Cause I’m scared, to be on our own.
And I’m scared, thinking what we’ve done.
Baby can you keep your promise?
Baby can I keep you honest?
When he looked to her again, Wraith knew what her path had to be. His voice was a whisper, the music dropping away to leave him alone and small on the stage, his words pure, true, piercing even as they faded.
Cause I’m scared.
And though the room exploded, cheering and whistling and screaming unintelligibly, his gaze never wavered.
It seemed only right to Wraith that she shouldn’t either.
The sun wasn’t too far from rising when the place finally emptied, the last of the voices calling goodnight and talking far too loudly for the time as they filtered away, out into the pre-dawn.
Elliot was dragging a rag over the bar top, the dishwasher running almost comfortingly behind him as he hummed absently along with it. The main lights had been shut off, the coloured strobes too, and he worked under the gentle yellow of a solitary desk lamp whose neck draped down from one of the shelves.
Wraith hadn’t stopped buzzing with the unfamiliar cocktail of emotion once in the hours since Elliot had sung. It had been excruciating to wait, to find other shadows to lurk in, too afraid that her next words might be overheard to risk him coming over.
But now, she was almost nauseous. It was deeply unsettling, feeling so rattled. Like a rookie on the field for the first time, her footing uncertain, her heartbeat irregular.
She made it almost to the raised bar door before he must have sensed the movement.
Wide, startled eyes found her, stealing her breath for a second.
“Hey.” he finally breathed, his expression smoothing into neutral.
“Hey.”
He polished the rail along the inside of the bar top, the dishwasher punctuating the stilted air by beeping and falling silent. Elliot glanced back at her briefly, a nervous glance, furtive. She swallowed.
How was it, that they killed so swiftly and so confidently in battle when there was clearly a risk of death, yet they stood now in fragile silence?
“Elliot...” she dared, and he turned towards her again.
“I thought I saw you, earlier.” he tried, gentle and light and neutral once more.
It would be on her, then.
“You did.”
Elliot nodded.
“Thought so.”
Impatience sparked along her fingertips.
“I hadn’t heard that one before.”
Elliot’s arm stilled.
“Had- heard what before?”
Soft, skipping over the problem word as it raised its head. Emotion swelled in her chest. Breathtaking, forceful, impulsive.
Wait-
It doesn’t end here-
Be careful!
Wraith-
It’s worth the exposure-
Wraith tensed, moving into his space as his head lifted to look at her properly in question.
“Wrai-?”
He tasted like raspberry, and the heady burn of bourbon. The initial squeak of surprise melted into a querying hum, but he didn’t move away. If anything, Wraith was sure he’d leaned into the kiss.
A further step and they were together to toe, her hands shaking as they found his jacket, curling hesitantly into the dark leather.
Without thought, without plan, she tipped her chin up further to meet the next press of his lips, terror a tornado in her gut. Feather light, something brushed her cheek, nudging her gently back into him as she made to pull back.
Something akin to a sob tumbled in the back of her throat. And then his palm sealed against her cheek, his hand pressed firmly against her lower back, and her hands were sandwiches between their chests. And all the tension just fell away.
An endless, sweetly torturous moment, an endless, sweetly torturous kiss, and she was tearing away with a startled gasp, her diaphragm unsynced as her heart jackrabbited and her lungs seemed to forget their function.
Inches from her face, Elliot’s eyes shot open. His pupils blown wide, his chest heaving hard, his lips slack with shock.
Her tongue felt heavy in her mouth as she swallowed.
Panting like they’d raced the Ring, they stated at each other for a second, then two, and five others.
“Well that was- unep- inexp- un- a surprise.”
Endearing.
Someone whispered.
Tiresome.
Said another.
Wraith choked on the unexpected humour of it, warming further under the lopsided tilt of his lips that replied. His eyes twinkled, like a storybook hero.
It was a hopeless battle.
“Yes," her breath hitched over the sound, “Yes, it was.”
Elliot gave a hitching laugh, gaze flittering over her as he regarded her curiously.
“Warn a guy, Huh?”
His grin was familiar and yet it felt like it took her knees out from under her that time.
“No.” she eventually answered, her voice sounding much more like her usual wry repartee.
Elliot laughed again.
“Okay, then. Don’t warn a guy.”
And while she was rolling her eyes and formulating a response to the cheeky tone of his words, Elliot pulled her face towards his own and kissed her back.