[Her fingers are well calloused as if, for all her delicacy and how narrow and fine she seems here in this light mottled garden, there is a history of labor there. But the way Cathway folds her fingers closed around his hand is light, infinitely breakable. Certainly she couldn't hold him here like this against his will -- could she?]
Don't be frightened. [She says, smilingly slyly up at his through her pale eyelashes.] We don't bite.
[The warmth of the joke - because that's what it is, good humored and utterly harmless - blooms between them like a flower in the sun. Like a drop of ink in a water droplet. Like a sunbeam traveling the length of the floor through an open window as the day passes. Like a cable unraveling into its component threads, leaving them in the strange negative space between: a place that is and isn't part of the whole. The gap between two stitches. The seam between two pieces laid flush. Her mind flexes in that empty space, a cup cracking open and all the liquid crumbling apart as shale stone under an uneven footstep.
His hand is warm-- because its set against a sun warmed railing of a place both familiar and strange. The light reflecting off the glass structures of the city doesn't read right to his eye: melting into a pane of marbled color and the dim sound of something that--
(doesn't fit; it's the low hum of a machine and the rhythmic tapping of a pen against the top of a clipboard)
--She (he) (they) touch their temple. Focus, they think and for a second this far off place clicks sharper by a series of degrees. The breeze up here on this walkway is warm, tinged with a sulfurous metal smell and the walkway itself is crowded with long-faced creatures in sharp chrome and black clothing. With the clarity comes pieces of of things that he knows. Things that of course he knows. Things he's known all along (how could he have forgotten?). They are:
He can't take off his helmet (he'll suffocate). He shouldn't tell anyone his name (Daron). He has twenty minutes to report in (Madeline is expecting him). He's waiting for something to happen (in the cross section of city below). He isn't frightened (even though this walkway is about to become very dangerous).
Tap, tap, tap goes that pen on the top of clipboard somewhere else.
'How's it shaking, Encyclopedia Brown?' asks someone somewhere else and somehow it's relevant in the place where the pen is tapping and in the glass city and here in the garden where Cathaway's hand is set gently inside the curl of Kaji's fingers. In a cross-section of city below a suspended walkway, something black forces its way up through the underside of the pavement. Their grip on the pen slips and it bounces off the clipboard and out of their hand into their lap.
'Oh shit,' they say.
'Don't worry about it. I don't meant to surprise you, buddy,' says someone. 'Is something wrong?']
( No ) [she thinks or says or feels in the garden on the Station as she slips her hand from Kaji's.]
HECK I totally misplaced this notif please forgive me
Don't be frightened. [She says, smilingly slyly up at his through her pale eyelashes.] We don't bite.
[The warmth of the joke - because that's what it is, good humored and utterly harmless - blooms between them like a flower in the sun. Like a drop of ink in a water droplet. Like a sunbeam traveling the length of the floor through an open window as the day passes. Like a cable unraveling into its component threads, leaving them in the strange negative space between: a place that is and isn't part of the whole. The gap between two stitches. The seam between two pieces laid flush. Her mind flexes in that empty space, a cup cracking open and all the liquid crumbling apart as shale stone under an uneven footstep.
His hand is warm-- because its set against a sun warmed railing of a place both familiar and strange. The light reflecting off the glass structures of the city doesn't read right to his eye: melting into a pane of marbled color and the dim sound of something that--
(doesn't fit; it's the low hum of a machine and the rhythmic tapping of a pen against the top of a clipboard)
--She (he) (they) touch their temple. Focus, they think and for a second this far off place clicks sharper by a series of degrees. The breeze up here on this walkway is warm, tinged with a sulfurous metal smell and the walkway itself is crowded with long-faced creatures in sharp chrome and black clothing. With the clarity comes pieces of of things that he knows. Things that of course he knows. Things he's known all along (how could he have forgotten?). They are:
He can't take off his helmet (he'll suffocate).
He shouldn't tell anyone his name (Daron).
He has twenty minutes to report in (Madeline is expecting him).
He's waiting for something to happen (in the cross section of city below).
He isn't frightened (even though this walkway is about to become very dangerous).
Tap, tap, tap goes that pen on the top of clipboard somewhere else.
'How's it shaking, Encyclopedia Brown?' asks someone somewhere else and somehow it's relevant in the place where the pen is tapping and in the glass city and here in the garden where Cathaway's hand is set gently inside the curl of Kaji's fingers. In a cross-section of city below a suspended walkway, something black forces its way up through the underside of the pavement. Their grip on the pen slips and it bounces off the clipboard and out of their hand into their lap.
'Oh shit,' they say.
'Don't worry about it. I don't meant to surprise you, buddy,' says someone. 'Is something wrong?']
( No ) [she thinks or says or feels in the garden on the Station as she slips her hand from Kaji's.]