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There was a sharp knock at the door.
“It’s open,” Kelly called automatically, and then looked up from his datapad and blinked. His eyes felt fuzzy and strained, after staring at reports so long.
The door slid open, and Kelly looked over and nearly did a double take. He was expecting Kai maybe, or Lorry or Anthill. It wasn’t the right time, but things came up sometimes and nobody wanted to be caught with a suspicious amount of creds on them, or worse yet a case of illicit goods. It wasn’t any of them, though, just Carver, standing stone-still in his blacks on Kelly’s threshold with a glare etched on his brow.
“Hello, Carver,” Kelly said, his shoulders loosening up a little without his permission. “Everything alright?”
Carver’s jaw clenched, and then he took two quick steps inside and let the door close behind him.
The graft was looking very healthy, Kelly couldn’t help but notice. He was glad. Probably gladder than he should have been, in any reasonable circumstances.
“What are you doing?” Carver crossed his arms over his chest, peering over at Kelly’s desk.
“Filing reports,” Kelly told him. He folded his hands in his lap and swiveled his chair to face Carver, looking up at him. “Can I help you with anything, Carver?”
“It’s late,” Carver said. He walked over to the bunk and sat down on it, prodded with a show of curiosity at Kelly’s pillow, his bedsheets. “Shouldn’t you be asleep?”
It wasn’t just late, it was 0230, three and a half hours past lights out. Kelly suddenly felt very… very heavy. He rubbed his forehead and muttered, “What I should be doing and what I need to be doing are sometimes two very different things.”
Carver looked at him, narrowed his eyes suspiciously. He was such a prickly bastard these days; Kelly almost felt a pang of loss for the vulnerable and uncertain creature that had walked out of his medbay. He quickly squashed it. It was more than understandable that Carver would put walls up as soon as he had the mental energy to divert towards it, and if Kelly took it personally he was an idiot and an incompetent who shouldn’t have made it past second deputy nurse. Anyway. Carver had been a little shabuir from the moment he’d worked out that Kelly wasn’t planning on hurting him for it, and if Kelly was going to gloss over that, the Kaminiise ought to have snuffed him out in his growth tube for being the most useless idiotic chakaar the GAR could ask for.
“You understand,” Kelly said, not gently because he was fairly certain that if he was gentle with Carver right now he would only get himself a knife stuck in the softness. Metaphorically. Carver… probably wasn’t armed. Kelly went on, not gently, “You should be in your assigned bunk right now, and I should be in mine. But here we are.”
Carver rolled his eyes. “What’s your damn point,” he snapped.
“I’d just like to know why,” Kelly said. “I gave you my reasons, let’s hear yours.”
“Fuck off,” Carver immediately snapped.
“Have it your way,” Kelly said, deliberately unruffled, and turned around and went back to his reports. He was so tired, just all of a sudden. He hated so much to admit it even to himself. It took a long moment to force his eyes to focus on the words, to make sense of it, to remember what the hell he was doing. He brought his hand up with the stylus in it and started filling out the forms again. One letter at a time.
There was the soft sound of rustling cloth, but Kelly didn’t turn. He kept going. Slowly. Carver sighed. It was warm and quiet, and Kelly found he liked hearing someone else’s slow, soft breaths in the room with him. He glanced back over his shoulder. Carver’s eyes were shut, curled on top of Kelly’s blankets. In sleep, the hard angry lines of his expression smoothed and softened into something… something. Something that put a warm little flicker of gladness in Kelly’s chest.
It was 0317.
Kelly put his head down on the desk on top of his folded arms. Just for a moment. The light was hurting his eyes. It was so warm and dark in the crook of his elbow. He would sit up in a moment, and keep working.
In just a moment.