Chapter 15
FALKIN
He made the comm from her quarters.
Aldric was going to notice, because Aldric noticed everything.
Did Falkin care?
He found he did not.
Brooklyn was in the shower. The room hummed around him.
The plants under the grow-strip. The little string of red pepper-shaped lights along the shelf.
The wall of mismatched frames.
He sat on the edge of her rug with the cuff at a comfortable notch and waited for the line to cross the light-years.
He’d rehearsed this conversation for months.
Why perform any of it now?
Aldric’s face resolved.
White hair, amber eyes, the training yard behind him going into the purple light.
A blade in his hands he did not need to clean.
“You look pleased with yourself,” Aldric said. “That’s rarely good.”
“The talks are progressing.”
“I don’t care about the talks.” He set the blade down, which he only did when he’d decided to hear something he didn’t want to.
“You made this comm at an hour when a sensible man is asleep, and there’s color behind you that isn’t your quarters, because your quarters are grey, and grey is the color of a man who lives nowhere. ” His eyes went still. “Say it.”
Falkin let the small knowing smile come.
Why not? It was earned.
“It held,” he said. “She’s mine. I’m hers. She reached back.”
The line was quiet for a moment.
On Vorjan’s world, the purple deepened a shade.
“You’re certain,” Aldric said. Flat. “Not hopeful. Not a romantic finding what he came to find. Certain.”
“I sat on her floor with the cuff shut all the way so I couldn’t cheat, and I handed her every soft true thing I own with no hook in a single one, on the worst night of her year, and she believed me anyway.
Freely. When it cost her.” Falkin held the amber eyes.
“I’m certain the way you’re certain a blade’s true. I’ve tested it. It held.”
Aldric said nothing.
“So the bet is won,” Falkin said. “You set the terms yourself, in a bar, over festival ale. If you can find a mate just like him, then I’ll even try. I found her. It held. That’s the wager, and you know it, and you’re a man of this house.”
Something crossed Aldric’s face.
Not the almost-smile.
The thing underneath it, the thing the almost-smile existed to cover.
Not amusement.
The same thing Falkin had frightened up out of him two weeks ago, sharper now that it had arrived.
“I know it,” Aldric said.
He didn’t argue.
That was the thing about him: he’d never once tried to unsay the words.
He’d only ever dreaded being held to them.
“I’ll file the application,” Aldric went on, quiet and controlled and precise.
“I’ll come to your ridiculous glowing station.
I’ll stand in that lobby and let a pink administrator with antennae match me to some Earth woman who deserves a great deal better than a man who intends, from the first day, to file the rejection at the end of the window.
Thirty days. That’s what honor buys you.
Thirty days of my standing there being pursued by an algorithm, and then I file the paper and I come home, and you will have gotten exactly the letter of what you won and not one degree past it. ”
A pause, cold and even. “I hope she’s worth what you’re feeling, Falkin. I hope she’s worth all of it. Because I remember who opened the door.”
Falkin looked at his oldest friend across the light-years. The controlled dread of a man being pulled toward the one thing he’d spent years making certain never happened again.
He considered it honestly. How much sympathy did the moment deserve?
He gave it none.
“Honestly, Aldric,” Falkin said. “The full window, honestly. That was the term, and you agreed to it.”
“I agreed to stand there for thirty days.”
“You agreed to more than that, and you know it.”
Aldric said nothing, which was as close as he came to conceding anything.
“She’s worth all of it,” he said. “And you’re not owed sympathy for keeping a promise, Aldric.
You made the terms. You made them because you were sure you’d never have to pay, which is a coward’s way to make a wager.
I don’t blame you for it, because I’ve stood where you’re standing and I know exactly what it costs to be that sure nothing good is coming. ”
He let it sit.
“So no. I won’t tell you it’ll be all right, and I won’t tell you not to sabotage yourself.
You’ll do what you’ll do. You’ve had enough people hand you soft things with no truth in them.
You’ll come. You’ll stand in the lobby. And I think—I think—the galaxy’s going to do to you exactly what it did to me, and you’re going to hate every day of it right up until you don’t. ”
“You’re insufferable when you’re happy,” Aldric said.
“I’ve been told.”
The almost-smile came back, deliberate, a curtain drawn over a lit window. But it was slower this time, and it didn’t reach as far.
And under the cuff, faint across the impossible distance, Falkin saw it. His friend was already carrying the thirty days like a stone he’d have to set somewhere he couldn’t yet imagine setting it.
“The talks are progressing,” Aldric said dryly. “Do try not to lose Earth. Vorjan House would notice.”
“Give Karuk my regard. Tell him the note struck after all.”
“I’ll tell him nothing that sentimental.” Then, quieter, almost against his own will… “Be happy, Falkin. Someone in this house should be.”
The comm went dark.
Falkin sat with the residue of it for a while. His oldest friend’s dread.
And under the dread, buried so deep Aldric would have denied it to his last breath, a thin unwilling thread of something else.
Something that might, in thirty days, in a glowing lobby, in front of an Earth woman not yet named, turn out to have been… hope.
Then he stopped thinking about Aldric, because the water had shut off, and there was a better thing to think about.
He got up off the rug and looked around the room while he waited for her.
Had he ever really done that?
Not with the whole thing quiet and won and his.
He’d been in her quarters before, on the floor on the worst night, in the bed on a much better one.
But he’d never once just stood in the middle of it and looked.
He looked now.
The wall of frames, none of them matching, hung at heights that had nothing to do with a level.
Everything to do with a person putting things where she could see them from where she sat.
A blanket over the chair, worn soft at one corner.
The only thing in the room made for her by someone who’d wanted nothing back.
He knew that now. She’d told him, on the floor.
The little string of pepper-shaped lights, red and cheap and glowing.
Plants under a grow-strip, thriving.
A rug, thick and warm, because a person deserved one soft thing to stand on.
Every colorful, mismatched, defiant inch of it, put there by hand, on purpose, by someone. One warm room built and kept and defended against a whole grey station.
What had it cost her to make it? He knew some of it, from a night on the floor. He was only now seeing what she’d made.
He thought about his own house.
White walls. Good light. Clean lines.
Twelve years, and never once a thing on a wall. You didn’t decorate for yourself. You decorated for someone, someone coming home who liked color, and there’d never been anyone.
He’d told her that on the floor and meant it as the truest sad thing he owned.
He stood in her warm room and understood, all at once, that it had stopped being sad.
Because there was someone now.
There was someone who liked color. Who was color, mismatched and defiant and warm. And the white walls weren’t proof of anything anymore. They weren’t a verdict. They were just empty.
And empty was a different kind of thing from alone.
Empty was a problem.
Empty was a wall with nothing on it yet.
He thought about the return home, someday, up a ramp and across a void.
A white house on a world with purple mountains and grass soft as silk and flowers that smelled like candy. He imagined it with someone beside him who put things where she could see them.
The wall by the door came to mind, the big one, the one that got the light in the morning. It had stood white and correct and useless for twelve years.
He could not now look at the memory of it without wanting, fiercely and for the first time in his life, to fix it.
Not fix her. He’d learned that lesson on a floor.
Fix the walls.
Hang a frame that didn’t match.
What would she want to see from wherever she chose to sit?
He’d find out.
Let the house finally look like someone lived in it, because someone would.
The white walls were suddenly a problem.
He wanted, more than he had wanted anything in nineteen careful dutiful years, to solve it.
Behind him the door slid. Brooklyn came out toweling her hair, warm and rumpled and unguarded in the one room where she’d never had to be anything else.
She stopped when she saw his face.
“What,” she said. “You’ve got a face. What happened.”
“The bet’s won,” Falkin said. “Aldric’s coming. Though I feel it will be under duress.” He reached out and she came, easy, no longer bracing against it.
He pressed the cuff open and felt the warm room double and land in him and go bright. “And I was thinking about my walls.”
“Your depressing white walls.”
“My depressing white walls,” he agreed. He looked around the warm defiant room she’d made, and then down at her. He let the whole of it come, plain and true and without a single hook in it. “I think they’ve been a problem for nineteen years. I just didn’t have anything to hang.”
She went still against him.
“And now?” she said.
“Now,” Falkin said, “I have some ideas.”
He felt her decide to believe him. Freely, easily, costing her nothing, her fingers already coming up to his collar.
Then she pulled his head down, and turned off the last of his careful discipline with her own two fingers on the gold, and over her shoulder the little red lights burned along the shelf.
The plants breathed under their grow-strip, and the mismatched frames hung crooked in the warm air.
Not one white wall anywhere, and nobody in the room had to be perfect at all.