Work Text:
Vel wants what she can’t have most in the mornings, before dawn when Cinta starts to stir and the mist of ice that settled on their hammock’s bedding overnight starts to melt. Cinta’s gaze is still soft with sleep, the grainy textures of the night printed in the corners of her eyes. Vel knows that she is in love and hasn’t told Cinta yet, and even if she ever got the inadvisable courage to do so, she wouldn’t ever tell Cinta this— that she loves the parts of Cinta that Cinta hates most, the vulnerable moments in between sleep and wakefulness, the flutter of her eyelids as Vel brushes her hair out of her face.
Cinta has a way of looking past Vel entirely while looking straight at her, because her gaze isn’t fixed on Vel as much as it’s measuring the length of the future. To look at her and see the predator is to miss that she’s stopped living in the present, that she isn’t looking at her prey as much as towards the inevitable arrival of her death. Vel tries not to think about it, and instead, in the encroaching dawn, kisses Cinta’s throat and starts to move against her the only way the hammock allows her to.
Cinta comes silently on Vel’s fingers an age and a few minutes later, then kisses Vel while she grinds her orgasm out in abrupt circles on Cinta’s thigh. Cinta’s eyes are lovely and brown and for the moment, just resting on Vel and not spinning out into the world. Then the night is no longer night, and Vel, still twitching, can hear Nemik slip out of his hammock to go relieve himself, and the sound of Skeen clearing his throat of the night’s phlegm. If either of them notes the sway of Vel and Cinta’s hammock, they don’t say anything.
They know each other by sight and by sound, and just as Vel knows the depth and pattern of Nemik’s steps, she understands they must know just as much about her and Cinta’s habits, but decides it's not worth trying to hide. They’re all professionals, if nothing else.
It is in the cocoon of their bed, that Cinta tells her about her family. Vel is almost asleep, her head tucked against Cinta’s neck. Cinta’s lips are at her ear and as she whispers the story, the mumble of her mouth moves against Vel’s temple.
I wasn’t young then, I was still older than all my siblings, I was older than other children are at that age, because we didn’t have much. Someone said our family was harboring fugitives from the empire. We weren’t, but they came anyway.
Vel waits, holding her breath in the dark.
My siblings ran. I ran, my parents stayed behind. We hid in the woods for hours, and slowly, they picked us off. I don’t know why I survived, only that I did.
Vel doesn’t need to know the rest, or what that kind of guilt can do to a person. She’s very quiet, thinking that maybe Cinta still thinks she’s asleep, until Cinta says, That’s why I’m here.
The implied accusation isn’t lost on Vel.
Vel met Cinta two months after her vow, the pledge that she had taken in a room with a man who she didn’t know well enough to trust and a woman she disliked as much as she envied. She thought there would be blood, silly, she knew, the expectation that there would be some kind of exorcism of her from her past, the severed sack of it no longer dragging behind her like a wound.
The wound, of course, is the point. Her mother sitting with her in the antechamber of another family’s home as they brightly discussed her future. The escape, and return, and escape. The constant cycle of running and being brought back, the disappointed faces, the throat-burning unfairness of it, the older kinder cousin with the fancy job.
The beginnings of the rebellion wanted her because she had no record, she was a clean slate from a clean family who’s greatest transgressions were contained inside her slightly radical university days. And didn’t everyone have those? Her mother had wiped all evidence of the engagement away. It looked bad for the family.
Vel had bartered for her freedom a long time ago, but this one promise, this one act of absolute and covert rebellion, somehow she thought it would buy her more.
She admits this to no one, but she thinks Cinta can smell it on her, just as she wrinkles her nose imperceptibly when Vel throws away jokes about rich families.
By the time she dragged her older kinder cousin in behind her, Vel had reconciled what she was doing everything for, and gotten her head clear. Luthen saw this, and finally gave her the big job, after all the smaller ones. Aldhani. Five person crew including a contact within the Imperial Garrison. Six months to figure out how to get in and out with the payroll.
Six months is plenty of time to plan a heist, and plenty of time to fall in love. Vel falls very quickly, in between all the planning and training and hiding. Nemik is finishing his manifesto, Vel can hear him some days in the near distance, reading aloud, then pausing for long periods of time to mumble over editing. Vel is charmed by him, just as she is by the rest of them, she finds it easy to spend the days working beside them. Skeen’s grumbling, the precision with which Taramyn chops wood, Gorn’s love for the place that he had a hand in destroying. Cinta, and her focus, hard on the horizon.
She has never been so invigorated by something in her life, even as the days wax and wane around whether the Dray want to be milked and whether or not her feet are frozen in her socks in the morning. She never had cause to sleep in a hammock with a beautiful woman for warmth before, or take frigid half-baths in the nearby river while that woman laughs and laughs at her, and she ducks her head to her chest, grinning.
What could she say to Cinta? They were going to marry me off at fourteen to the worst little bully of a boy. I hated it. I hated it. I hated them. I’m here now. Please.
She wants to think this will last, that it means something to Cinta the way it means something to her, and she thinks it might. She thinks, somewhere warm and soft inside her chest, that Cinta might be waiting for their mission to be over, and then, she will become something slightly softer than a knife.
She knows this is a lie she tells herself. The only way to care for a knife is to sharpen it.