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Piper’s staring at him again.
She knows she does it a lot. He’s always focused, though, on what he’s doing. Cooking, making blueprints, inventing and scrapping and re-inventing. Always so hyper-focused. He never notices, so she watches on.
He tightens another wire wrapped string into the wooden contraption, a meticulous step that he’s performed over a dozen times already. His nimble and calloused fingers make quickly calculated adjustments, tightening the strings until he’s satisfied with the result. His brown eyes seem to twinkle when it’s just the way he wants.
She’d never thought she’d be so content with just watching someone. Usually, she wouldn’t give most strangers a second glance. With him, however, she could watch him work all day, even on the most tedious tasks.
What a difference not being alone makes.
He’s not even halfway finished, she doesn’t think. The patience he has for tasks like this is admirable. Piper would have given up already, opting for a quicker, easier solution. It’s how she’s operated nearly her entire life.
But not him.
He’s an optimist. He’d sit at his workbench all day, come heat or hail, to make significant progress on his projects. Even when the mechanics are dull and tedious and he’s concentrating so hard he breaks out into a sweat. Piper will frown and ask if he’s sure it will work. He’ll wipe his brow off with the collar of his shirt, give her a cheeky grin, and tell her to trust the process.
Piper has a tendency to be cynical. Of people, of the gods, of the railroad track that disappears beyond that big and imposing wall. But if he says to trust the process, she will. She trusts him.
“Are you okay?”
He’s moved his attention to her, Piper too caught up in her own consciousness to realize. She briefly wonders if he caught her staring. He raises his brow, waiting quietly for her response. He’s patient with her, too.
Piper nods, and he sets the invention aside. Right. She came out to tell him it’s time to go inside. He’s been at it all day, even through the worst of the heat at high noon. If he’s out here when the temperature drops he’ll fall ill, and Piper wouldn’t know the first thing to do if that happened.
Piper doesn’t even get the chance to convey all of that. Wordlessly, he stands up from his bench, giving his limbs a quick stretch before turning to her. He reaches up to delicately cup her face is his palms, and Piper is proud of herself for not flinching this time. He presses a warm kiss to her forehead, the sensation causing pleasurable tingles to tickle at her scalp and all the way down her spine. Perhaps she’s more touch-starved than she’d like to admit.
“Look,” he says, pulling away. Piper tries not to frown at the loss of touch. He plucks his work in progress up off the table and presents it to her with a giddy smile. Piper’s not sure how she should react.
“Progress,” is what she says. He looks more proud of her than of himself, and she hasn’t even done anything. Not yet.
“We’re trusting in it,” he reaffirms. He turns the half-finished project in hands, marveling at his handiwork. Piper tries to school her expression into something he won’t be able to read, but to no avail. He catches a glimpse of her face and immediately Piper can tell he’s looking right through her.
She watches as he carefully sets the contraption back down. He looks at her with fondness and something else in his eyes. Something like pity. No, maybe not. Piper’s been pitied for so long, but no one was ever willing to hold out their hand to her like he was.
Still, it makes her feel a bit small.
He reaches for her hand, lifting it up to his mouth in another kiss. “I’m done for tonight,” he murmurs against her fingers. Piper silently nods again.
“I found us flour,” she tells him, wanting to escape the bubble of vulnerability she feels trapped in. His eyes light up. Wheat flour was hard to come by. It simply doesn’t grow in these extreme temperatures anymore.
“Piper, you’re incredible.”
She gives a half-hearted smirk, shrugging. “Yeah.”
He snorts, poking at her ribs. “Not very humble.” Piper merely shrugs again. There’s hardly any benefit to being humble these days.
Suddenly, she’s being scooped into his arms. She grunts, surprisedly, unattractively, but recovers after a second and returns the embrace. She feels him smile into her neck, and the cold that was creeping up on them is forgotten momentarily. It’s warm. He’s warm. Piper feels like there’s sunlight all around her.
When he’s finished and it’s finally ready to fix what the gods have broken, she hopes the weather will feel just like this.
He hugs her for a minute more, but eventually the chill comes back. She clings to him even more tightly, as if her hold on him was enough to keep the cold out. Maybe it could, if she tried hard enough.
He shivers, reluctantly pulling away. Again, Piper finds herself frowning when he removes himself from her.
He makes an exasperated noise, something between a laugh and a groan. “Piper!”
“Leo.”
He laughs at the monotone response of his name. “We can’t stay out here forever.”
Piper raises an eyebrow. “I know that.”
Leo rolls his eyes at her. “Really? Because you looked insulted when I stopped hugging you.”
Piper blinks at him, neither confirming nor denying his statement. He merely laughs at her expression and entwines their fingers together, kissing her temple once more.
“I missed you,” he says into her hair. Butterflies flutter around between Piper’s ribs. “Cmon. Let’s go inside and make dinner. You got your hands on flour. That’s crazy.”
Piper smiles, following alongside her husband as they turn their collars to the wind. Together.