Lidea laid on the couch with eir head on the armrest, still wet hair wrapped in a towel to keep it off the upholstery. Ey had found a broadcast of a crime thriller from Purvailan that ey was mostly following. Ey didn’t know much about cars, but ey was pretty certain they didn’t explode all the time. Still, it was entertaining.
By the time they had made it back from the grocers, eir stuff had arrived from the storage locker. The afternoon had been spent picking apart haphazard boxes someone else had packed quickly to save eir stuff from the burst pipe. Spread out in the company of Sunny’s material existence, the transience of eir life flashed in stark contrast.
The discomfort in this new environment hadn’t started fading yet, but ey was accustomed to that specific feeling at this point. Ey was always in a state of readjustment, of constant adaptation. Lidea had become good at it, being in that state of flux and movement. Were eight weeks enough to lose that ability?
Ey traced the sound of Sunny's footsteps above and behind em. He'd dry his hair, go to bed, and probably fall asleep quickly. Ey counted the moments in the tension of eir jaw, trying to math how long all this would take him. Ideally, ey would just wait for him to be asleep and ey could slip into bed without conversation. Ey just wanted to sleep, right now, not face new and terrible patterns of existence. The show eventually ended (the husband was ultimately the murderer, of course), and that felt like enough time.
Sunny heard Lidea trying to walk as softly as possible down the hallway and laid still as ey opened the door, letting em have the space without the weight of his attention. He opened his eyes a slit and felt guilty immediately. But then Lidea's bare back was pale in the moonlight coming in through the window, and he couldn't pull away, memorizing the lines of eir spine and shoulders. Then ey slipped another, more billowy shirt on and moved toward the bathroom to brush eir teeth.
Sunny gripped the blanket tighter as ey came back toward the bed. Ey sat on the edge, hands resting on eir bare thighs.
"I can feel you still awake, Sunny," Lidea said quietly, low enough that he probably wouldn't have heard em if he wasn't wide awake still. He poked em in the hip. Ey smacked him a away a little and laid down, bringing the other blanket up to cover emself from the waist down, arms falling to eir side to lock eir body into place. Sunny reached over and touched eir hand. Ey let him but hesitated before reciprocating, turning eir hand over to let his fingers interlace.
"I know what you're trying to do." Ey had figured it out in eir nervous system before the ideas drifted up into eir brain to ruminate and form coherence. Sunny waited for em to elaborate, but he was fairly certain he knew what path eir brain was heading down. "You're boiling me alive." Sunny waited again, but Lidea had stopped. Maybe he didn't understand after all.
"I don't know what you mean."
"You asked me to marry you, and I didn't give you a hard yes. And now you're freaking out because you don't handle that kind of thing well. So you're boiling me alive. You're going to press little changes on me without me noticing until, suddenly, I’m waking up to make us breakfast before heading off to my office job while you get our two and a half kids ready for school.”
"Neither of us planned to have kids."
"That's not the point." Lidea pinched the bridge of eir nose. "The point is you're doing it, and you're not subtle."
"I’m not trying to do anything," Sunny countered, knowing immediately, as he said it, that he has probably been nudging them both without thinking about it.
Both of them were stubborn and struggled with change, but he had one big, specific alteration he wanted to make to his life: having Lidea be a part of it permanently. He kept thinking ey just needed to be shown what that life could look like, to bring the image that lived in his head into a space where Lidea could see it, too. So if he could just…push em…a little…
And now he saw exactly what ey was saying. What ey'd been saying this whole time and he was continuing to struggle to accept. They had always flowed together so easily, he didn't know how to handle real friction between them.
Lidea rolled over, away from him.
"I'm tired. And I've got that meeting at the bookbindery tomorrow."
"Are you thinking about taking the jo-"
"I'm tired," Lidea said more firmly. Sunny rolled over away from em, as well. He touched his shoulder-blades to eirs, and ey didn't pull away, at least.
"So…what do you think?" Dana made a dramatic sweeping gesture through the windows that looked down over the bindery floor. The tour had been cursory, Dana running em through the basic process of receiving material to copying and printing it. This printer focused on informational and educational texts. They printed almost every medical pamphlet in the entire city.
The only set of machines they lingered on was the responsive magic ink process. It was an old and refined enough process, it could be used to create everything from tattoos to commercial food labeling. Here, they pressed ink into paper that could respond to various stimuli as needed by the brochure or pamphlet. Maybe a scroll of medicine side-effects or highlighting different parts of a diagram with just a tap. Once it was set up, the printer only needed an artificer for repair and maintenance, but workplace regulations demanded a magician be in the building while they ran. Whatever anyone’s personal opinion on the matter, the laws were stringent enough to have Dana recruiting in a grocery store.
Lidea wouldn't actually have to do anything, though. Not really. Dana said she'd find em something to do to fill the time if ey wanted, but honestly they just needed a warm body, for now.
"You know," Dana said when Lidea didn't respond, moving up next to em to look out the window. "Sunny mentioned you were big on social systems."
Lidea attempted a professional shrug. Ey wasn't like Sunny with his hyperfocus on geology and engineering. Ey just sort of picked things up as ey went, collected information about the world bit by bit as ey moved through it, let it wash over and through emand leave whatever flotsam behind.
"It's an interest, yeah," Lidea finally affirmed. This was the real world where people abided by social norms, not out in the wilds. Ey needed to resettle into the patterns of civilized conversation. "Does Sunny actually talk about me?"
"Oh, all the time. Only good stuff, I promise." Dana gave a vague pat on Lidea's arm. "So we've been taking some customer feedback for one of our off-world clients." Dana moved around to a small crate next to her desk and brought it up on top. It was full of loosely parceled papers with scrawly hand writing on them. "We haven't really had a chance to go through and process them, though. Could be a great little side project while you're here warming a chair."
"This feels like you're trying to hard sell me on the job," Lidea said. Dana rolled forward on her toes a little.
"Look, you'd be doing me a huge favor. I'm not going to sugarcoat it. We can't afford to shut down our magic printer, so I made a deal with guild Thannaly that they could throw whoever was available at me to make sure we have someone in the building. However, I don't need a bunch of random street mages I don't know coming through and having to do the paperwork over and over again. Sunny knows and trusts you. I trust Sunny. Transitive property." Dana gave em a pat on the back.
"Hey, it's basically a paid vacation. Give it a day to think on it."
Lidea shifted on eir feet, mirroring Dana's uncertainty. Maybe that was the way to think about this. Not a cage. But a break.
A rest. One ey needed.
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