The bed was empty when Sunny woke up. It had been every day so far. He was the first to go bed, as well. Lidea was purposefully giving up little margins of eir own sleep to not be in bed with him while they were both awake. 

The days ending out the weeked had been…odd…He had taken em around, got some clothes that were more "work appropriate" for the bindery job ey had decided to take, went swimming in the spring-fed pool before it got too cold to bear. But Lidea refused to hold the ends of the conversation up, and that had dunked them into a weird, tense silence. 

It was something Lidea had noticed a long time ago but had born it out because it seemed like such a minor quirk of their relationship. When ey thought about having to drag conversation out of Sunny for the next eight weeks solid, the weight started dropping heavier. Whey ey extrapolated that out to the rest of eir life, the thought turned eir bones brittle and eir muscles drawn. Maybe ey would grow used to it. Maybe it would become a pattern ey one day grew to miss when Sunny invariably preceded em into the planes beyond life. Ey wouldn't go down that road without fighting it, though.

And Sunny had picked up the change. Of course he had. Lidea suddenly fading into silence beside him meant he was barely talking. So much so he'd noticed his voice croaking and complaining in even just a short time. There was probably a full panoply of wrong things, but he was too stupid to figure them out from one another and address it. He needed Lidea to walk him through it, but that also didn't seem entirely fair. 

He found em in his workshop down the hall, sitting in his rolling high-backed chair, staring blankly at the wall of tools. 

"I knocked some of your books off the shelf by accident," Lidea said. "One of them was a photo album. Didn't look." Ey glanced toward where it had fallen on the floor, open to a page in the middle. Ey didn't know any of the faces in the photos except for a young, beardless, short-haired Sunny. The baby-face clean-cut affectation of a twenty year old artificer-in-training still trying to prove himself. Lidea was telling the truth, but only barely. Ey had squatted down, fingers to the edge of the page planning to turn the page. Ey didn't. Couldn't. It was peeking into Sunny's past without his permission. Ey didn't want that. 

When Sunny looked, he saw a flash of one of the worst weeks of his life. Of Echo's face next to his in a class photo just before everything so bad for everyone involved. He toed the book shut. It still wasn't the right time to bring all that up. He picked up the others — reference manuals and notebooks with calculations — and stacked them back on the nearby shelf sloppily. He immediately hated that and set them up straight and tucked them in properly. That still wasn't good enough, so he shuffled them into the right order, moving some other things on the shelf so that it made sense again. 

Lidea watched him the whole time. 

"Okay, this shit. This is the thing I've been thinking about most." Lidea swiveled the chair toward him dramatically. Sunny shifted back and forth on his feet in front of Lidea. 

"What are we talking about?" he asked, glad for the seed of conversation. 

"If I'm going to be here for the next eight weeks, it has to feel like my home, too. It's only been a few days, so I haven't had a chance to really fuck up your environment yet, but it'll happen. Can you be cool when I do?" 

"Yeah, absolutely." He wasn't going to ask em if he'd been particularly particular. He knew who he was, and Lidea was a saint for putting up with it so far without making a big deal out of it. Lidea swiveled in the chair, rocking on eir heels. 

"I don't…hm…I've never had a place that's just mine. Long term, you want me to share this place with you, I need to figure out what that means."

"Understood." 

Lidea glanced over him some more, giving him a chance to elaborate on his own terms.

"Something else." Ey tapped eir fingers along the crest of eir knee. Sunny felt his own hands tense to prepare for whatever this was. "I'm realizing that as much as I know you, I also don't. I don't know the version of you that lives here, just the one out there. I'd like to get to know this version."

"Okay."

"And I'm bad about this, too, but I want to know more about you before we met."

"Um." And they both felt that hesitation like a lake of sludge. "Alright," Sunny agreed. 

"Alright."

"Okay."

The phone on the wall behind him rang, and Lidea jumped. Ey technically had a phone in eir room at the Thýlalykófoton, but it never rang. It hadn't gone off at Sunny's either, so ey sort of forgot they existed. 

Sunny picked it up on the second ring.

"Sunny, you busy?" Yasira said through the phone. 

"Yes and no." 

"Come over and check the energy transfer unit on my bike."

"Is this an excuse to hang out because I never gave you an answer about going for drinks?"

"Yes." 

"Fine." 

Sunny hung up the phone with no additional conversation. Yasira would know. 

"Want to go over to a friend’s house?" Sunny asked. Lidea wanted to know this "version" of him better. This was the best he could do, for now. Yasira would certainly spill some semi-convenient truths of Sunny's existence. 

Lidea nodded. 

"I'll break out one of my new pairs of pants."