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These days, Tom finds himself watching Hester sleep.
They rotate their sleeping schedule around each other -- eight hours for Tom, eight hours for Hester, and eight hours awake together. That way there's always someone on watch, and it's safer even though they've locked the Jenny on course.
Now, Tom leaves the airship on auto and spends the remaining few hours before Hester awakes just... watching her. Staring. Like a creepy dude, maybe, but up in the sky like this, there's really not much to see aside from Hester.
The land below is a blurry mess of greens and browns, and the sky starts to look pretty repetitive the more they spend up here. The stuff aboard the Jenny, well, they're more Hester's thing. Miss Fang, as it turns out, has a whole collection of weird, useless knickknacks that she stores in various nooks around the airship. To Tom, they hardly have any historical value -- it's highly unlikely a skilled aviator like Miss Fang would leave valuable Old-Tech lying around -- but Hester seems intrigued by the most unremarkable things.
Kind of like Shrike, thinks Tom, although Tom doesn't technically know what Shrike was like outside of his killing spree mode. But if he did, he imagines it'd be similar to Hester in the way that she builds new things from the items she finds on board, glues them all together in ways Tom wouldn't have thought of, creates beauty from broken pieces.
Tom figures, she's a lot like Shrike, drowning in the things that she thinks most resemble herself. Broken things, Hester once said about her adoptive dad, and Tom agrees, he does, because he can see that Hester's clearly broken too, but even broken things can be beautiful.
Tom watches, now, the scar on Hester's face, the tear across her brow and her eye and her cheek -- soft, soft cheek -- and her mouth all the way down to her chin. How her lips part in her sleep, her lashes fluttering slightly in the chill of the night air.
Tom has had his fair share of dreaming of pretty Londoner girls like Clytie and Kate, but Hester -- she's a different kind of pretty. A... more kind of pretty. Tom always has the most random urge to touch her hand, her cheek, the back of her neck. When she smiles, really smiles, her cheeks colour and her eyes shine. How can someone be so broken, yet so whole?
Wind blows through the windows of the Jenny, and Hester's hair brushes against Tom's face.
Red strands, long and unruly but somehow very soft, swipe past his cheek, ever so slightly, and before he knows it, he's leaning in, caving in. He buries his nose in Hester's hair, just a little bit, and breathes in. She smells like ashes, dirt, a little bit of the canned food from Miss Fang's pantry, and a hint of sweet too.
Tom leans closer. He's sitting down on the floor, beside the bed, and he pushes his palms against the metal flooring, inching his face closer to Hester's face. His nose brushes against her cheek, the touch so light it tickles, until he can almost feel the warmth of her breath.
Her lips are... right there...
The plane jerks.
Hester startles awake, and Tom wrenches away hard, scrambling across the floor like he's been caught stealing one of those rare six-pointed star screws from Chudleigh Pomeroy's secret stash.
He can't even bring himself to look at Hester.
"What are you doing?" hisses Hester, bolting out of the bed. Bloody right, what was he doing? "Great Batmunkh, Tom, the plane!"
Tom looks up to Hester glaring down at him. "Oh," he says. "Oh!"
He stumbles up, nearly tripping over his own feet to reach the steering wheel and steady the airship, ignoring how huge his heart feels in his chest, lodged against his throat, as Hester crowds into his space, hasty hands fumbling with the control knobs on the ceiling.
Tom sucks in a huge breath -- smells too much of Hester -- and immediately turns away. Tom has a problem, and it's a problem for another day.