“Duck,” Val said, and Kazu dropped to the ground.
Dust flew up around him, clouding his sight, but a half-second later, when his brain caught up to his body, he risked a glance up anyway. A clean slice of energy shot through where his head had just been, boring straight through the spider mech’s central cannon. It staggered, and Kazu leapt back to his feet, taking advantage of the mech’s momentary weakness to slice through first its legs and then its body, leaving it smoking and useless in his wake.
There wasn’t any more movement in the scrublands. Kazu waited, extending his senses and sensors as far as they could go. “That the last of them?”
“Yes.” Val paused, and Kazu could easily imagine the smile on her face. “Neatly done.”
“Couldn’t have done it without you.” Kazu saluted in the direction of her shots and her half-felt presence beating against his heart.
Val’s laughter echoed in Kazu’s ears as he sheathed his sword and said, “End simulation.”
The barren scrublands flickered out around him. Plants dissolved into pixels, the midday sky darkened until it was nothing, and the rocky ground lightened until it met the sky from the other end, static crackling for a brief moment before Kazu stood once more in the private Ether-like server that Cammie had built for them. Cammie being Cammie, the landing site looked like an old video game loading area: cartoony designs, oversized houses, bright colors, and cheery electropop music.
She hadn’t coded anything that would change their avatars, at least. As incongruous as both his and Val’s looks should be in the Ether, dark against the brightness, they at least matched each other. Sort of. Val’s space-patterned suit was much preppier than his own old punk jacket. Equally dramatic makeup, just in different directions. None of them had much bothered changing their avatars since joining genLOCK, and for Kazu at least that meant it was still a time capsule to being a teenager, just before he enlisted.
For Val, he suspected it meant something else. He remembered, in the way of dreams, an avatar that looked more like Val’s physical body did now, sharp lines and closely-tailored curves. The avatar in front of him kept the same smile, the same piercing eyes and long-fingered hands, but on a frame that he was fairly certain wasn’t as different as the clothes made it seem. Sometimes Kazu thought about what it would be to see this Val in the kitchen, stealing bites of vegetables Kazu had cut but not yet cooked, or seeing if noodles had finished cooking, and generally being a nuisance.
Now, though, Val slung an arm around him, completely ignoring the blunt shoulder spikes (or, he corrected himself, pointedly moving close enough to make sure they weren’t an issue, simulated body pressing warm against his neck and side), and said, “We’re getting better.”
“You’re getting better,” Kazu corrected.
Val raised his eyebrows at him. “You really don’t see it in yourself, do you?”
Kazu looked away. He knew what Val saw. He just didn’t want to hear it.
He said it anyway. “You’re getting better at teamwork, Kazu.”
“I left the army because I didn’t play well with others, Val. This is different.” Kazu crossed his arms, telling himself that he wasn’t hiding or scrunching in on himself or anything. “Look, can we have this conversation—it’s not less face-to-face, but—”
“You’re more sure of yourself, in other spaces.”
Kazu tried to hide his surprise, and Val just smiled at him, soft. His fingers drifted up to Kazu’s face, gentle on his chin. “I’ll meet you in the kitchen in five.” With a brief squeeze that was almost a hug across his shoulders, Val faded out into static.
Kazu looked up at the endless data-field of the sky for a moment, wishing—
Wishing everyone didn’t seem to be able to read him without a thought, but he did the same thing with them when in combat (when he let himself), and he wouldn’t be a hypocrite like that. He sighed heavily, and closed his eyes to disconnect himself. A glissando rang in his ears as the ghost of a cloud washed over him, and then he dropped out of the Ether and back into his body. The others probably felt the movement between states differently (8-bit tones, the scent of the sea, the living silence after jet engines shut down, the feeling of a heavy coat), but it felt too intimate to ask about, even for them.
Instead, he pushed the half-remembered sensations back, falling back into his newest habit; ever since they fought Nemesis, those echoes have haunted him. Haunted the rest of them, too, as best he could tell, but nobody had talked about it yet except Cammie, and, well— He didn’t want to be the first to talk to her.
The pixelated static resolved into the darkened neutral state of the VR headset. Kazu sat up and pulled it off his face, setting it neatly on his table. The ship was quiet, as he expected when they were at base. Cammie and Yaz spent little time here, preferring the labs. Val’s choice of where to be varied with the day and her mood, as best he could tell. Chase made himself present where the people were, when he wasn’t training or letting scientists study him. He and Val also spent much of their time around people, but for this kind of training he preferred his bunk on Renegade, where people were far less likely to stumble loudly in by accident.
Val had been here, too, but right now she was more purposeful—less avoidant—than he was. With another sigh, Kazu made himself start walking towards the kitchen. It wasn’t big, but when they were refitting Renegade as an official long-term mobile staging platform for genLOCK (a fancy way to say “this airplane is your home now”, Kazu thought, but that was bureaucracy for you), he’d insisted, and the rest of the team had backed him up. Not that Migas had needed convincing, but other admins complained about the expense until Chase and Yaz gave a speech about group meals fostering community and also what if they needed to run away again. (Kazu was pretty sure the second part had been what convinced them, but everyone else liked the first part more.)
The kettle was already on and beginning to whistle gently with steam. Val had pulled out a pair of avocados, a small onion, a tomato, and a couple of cloves of garlic. She was also perched on a counter with a bag of chips next to her. Kazu looked between her and the helpfully arranged cutting board and knife and sighed. “You could just ask for guacamole.”
“You’re more comfortable talking if you can do something with your hands.” Val crunched down on a chip. “This way we both get something we want.”
Kazu flipped the bird at her, but did move over to the cutting board and begin removing the skin from the garlic and onion. He was aware of Val’s warmth off to his side, even when he wasn’t looking at her. Even though they were far enough apart that there was no way he was feeling literal heat from her body. It was constant, and specific to her, and it took him until he was most of the way through mincing the garlic by hand to say, “I can feel you, even when we are not merged.”
If Val was breathing, he couldn’t hear her. His impression of her sharpened, pressure on his hands like her own were tight.
Kazu kept his attention on the knife in his hands. He didn’t want to fuck up just because he was talking about feelings. “It’s just you. I don’t feel any of the others like this. I only feel them when we’re locked in. But you—” He swallowed, almost wishing that Val would say something, just to make this feel less weird. “When you’re nearby, I feel warmth, and I can tell where you are from the direction of that warmth.” He stopped, as much because he didn’t know what else to say as because he’d run out of garlic to dice. Carefully, he slid all the garlic into a bowl. Only once he had nothing in his hands did he risk looking at Val.
Her hands were pressed tightly against the countertop (the same place as the pressure across his palms, Kazu realized), and her face was as tightly shuttered as he’d ever seen it. All he could get was tension, which—well, if that was being mirrored across his body too, then he couldn’t tell, because he’d been nervous enough already.
He almost reached out, the gesture aborted as his mind caught up with his body and asked What would you even do?
“...yeah,” he said, instead, and turned back to the cutting board, where he could pretend that the tears prickling at his eyes were just because of cutting up the onion into tiny precise pieces, not some kind of emotion that he wasn’t even sure was his anymore.
He had just begun on the tomatoes when Val started talking, her voice quiet. “I asked Dr. Weller what the inspiration for gen:LOCK’s second stage was. The part where we can share minds and act as one body. It took him some time to answer, because he dithered around the point—” Kazu smiled at the fondness clear in Val’s voice “—but it was simple, in the end. He told me about how he’d always wanted gen:LOCK to foster community. It was simply too dangerous otherwise. If his creation must be used for war, he said, then he wanted to be sure that the people in the middle of the war never forgot what, and who, they were fighting for.”
Kazu carefully cut out the tomato’s stem. He told himself he was waiting to see if Val would continue, but he already knew she’d finished. He started slicing the tomato up and said, as calmly as he could, “You aren’t the only one I’ve merged with individually. And I know I’m not the only one you have, either. But—” he swallowed, and focused back on making clean, precise cuts with his knife, letting the tomato’s juices spill out. “Do you feel something too?”
Movement. The lightest, softest sound that he only heard because he was listening for it, as Val slid off the counter and stepped across the kitchen, two paces that felt like they took forever as Kazu stilled his hands and waited. The warmth across his back bloomed into a blazing sun, and Val’s forehead rested on the nape of his neck. “Yes,” she said, and he felt it in his bones. “I do. I’m a compass. You’re a lodestone. It’s... frightening, to realise that you can always know where I am.”
He set down the knife and wiped his hands on a towel. “I try not to.”
Val’s hands on his hips, light as leaves, unerringly polite. “I know. I don’t— I’m scared, but I think I like it. That you know where I am.”
Kazu reached down to take Val’s hand. At his touch, her fingers wrapped around his, gripping hard enough that he was almost worried it’d leave a bruise. “I like knowing that you know I’m in danger before I do.”
“You don’t seem to pay attention that well, sometimes.”
“I pay attention better when I’m truly on my own.” Kazu drew Val’s hand around to his front, until her other hand joined their clasped ones and she was embracing him, squeezing him tight. “I don’t need to, with a team like this. Especially with your eyes watching over everything.”
“You’re still the one I need to rescue most.” He could feel Val’s mouth moving against his skin now. The blazing heat was settling into his bones, like the way it felt to enter a sauna after a long winter day.
Kazu took a breath, and started turning around, slowly, so that he couldn’t scare her away. She didn’t move a muscle, waiting until he was facing her, their faces mere centimeters apart. He knew she could feel him breathing, and suspected she could feel the tension, too. “Val— what does this mean?”
She looked him over, considering, and then smiled, mischievously. “There were stories I heard, growing up, about people whose souls have known each other throughout the ages. Who, when they meet, feel a pull towards each other that’s impossible to deny.” She paused, and her smile widened. “Usually they end up kissing.”
Kazu flushed abruptly. “Do you want—”
“Kazu, I thought I had made it abundantly clear from the beginning that I want to do more than just kiss you.” Her hand slid down to the top of his pants and stayed there, fingers brushing across the waist. “I just couldn’t tell if you wanted it too.”
“I— Ah— That is—”
“We could also just stay with kissing for now,” Val suggested, voice soft, hands sliding up to his shoulders instead.
Kazu nodded. Heat wasn’t the right word for what he felt right now. It was more like gravity; something that he took for granted right up until he started falling, and then thought about in great detail. Something beautiful and frightening, too, because of how inexplicable it seemed. Val’s lips, canted up towards him, were magnets, and he was iron scrap pulled towards them inevitably and inexorably, until they met and—
He’d kissed people before. Contrary to what most of the team seemed to think, he’d kissed both women and men before. None of those kisses, from childhood dares up to his army girlfriend, had ever felt like this. They’d been nice, sure, and he’d enjoyed them most of the time, but Val kissed him like she was breathing in everything he was.
It felt like gen:LOCK.
Val’s lips were on his which were on hers and he (she?) could feel it all, from the way the edge of the counter bit into Kazu’s back to how Val wanted to tangle her fingers in his hair and pull him closer. The texture of Val’s lipstick. The way it felt to lean against Kazu’s chest, and the way it felt to have Val leaning on his chest, layered over and over and over each other until there was no beginning or ending, just the sensation echoing through two bodies.
He didn’t know who pulled back. Whose lips fell away first. In the aftermath, Kazu couldn’t think, or say anything. He just stared at Val, looked at her wide eyes and still slightly-open mouth, and knew that it had been different for her too. Carefully, he swallowed, and watched her eyes flicker to the motion and the—relief, he thought, as she realised that she couldn’t feel it. Just like he couldn’t feel the way she stepped back, keeping just one hand on his, save through the lack of physical pressure and warmth on his body (her own radiance was still there, but banked).
“Kazu,” she said, like every syllable had to be specifically formed in her mouth, “I think you should finish making the guacamole. And then I think we should, ah, discuss this further? In our quarters?”
“That sounds like a great plan,” Kazu said, and it took him until he was mixing everything up properly, five minutes later, to realise that he was very certain that Val did just mean that she wanted to talk. There was no room for innuendo in what she’d said. Or. There was. There was just also an underlying certainty that he didn’t need to worry about anything else.
Kazu grinned, heart light. This relationship, whatever it turned out to be, was certainly going to be interesting. “You want the guac to eat while we talk, right?” he said, not bothering to turn and check to make sure Val was still there. Of course she was, perched right back on the counter where she’d begun.
“Of course,” Val said, laughter lilting through her voice. “Just because we kissed doesn’t mean I don’t want my snacks.”
Kazu snickered. “Oh, see, I was worried that the only snack you’d want was me.”
Val laughed, deep and loud and echoing through the kitchen, and Kazu thought that he was happier than he’d been in a very long time indeed.