Work Text:
Riley had always found the sounds of typing to be oddly soothing, especially when she was thinking or trying to work. In fact, she found computers in general to be soothing. They were familiar, and made sense. They did what you told them too, and they didn’t, you tweak the code and start over until they do.
Today was one of the days it was not doing what Riley wanted it to do. She sighed, and rubbed her eyes, before making another swipe over the computer screen. When an old professor of hers from college emailed her asking for help, Riley agreed, not expecting to spend her entire weekend looking through code.
Riley jerked back when a hand appeared between her face and the computer screen. Attached to the hand was the grinning face of Felix.
“What’s the point of having a day off if you're gonna work all day?”
“Oh this? I’m just trying to fix some possibly imaginary coding errors. For a project an acquaintance of mine is working on.”
“What for?”
“He’s a professor at the university I went to. I’m not actually sure what the project he’s working on is though. He only sent me the part of the code that isn’t working.” Riley shrugged. “The problem is that there doesn’t seem to be a problem. I’m having no trouble with the program he sent me, and everything in the code looks fine. The only thing I can think of is that the error is in a different part of the code. Then again it’s hard to be certain when I am not sure what the overall goal of the program is.”
Felix plopped on the couch next to her, and leaned forward to look at her computer screen. “You’re pretty amazing. Did you know that?”
Riley blinked and turned to look at him. “What?”
“I can’t believe you understand any of that.” Felix gestured at the code displayed on her computer.
“You understand more than Nat.”
“That’s true,” Felix agreed, laughing. “You know what?”
Riley looked up at him and tilted her head. “What?”
“You need a break! We should play a game.”
“I need to finish rifling through this code,” she corrected.
“You won’t make any progress wearing yourself out. Come on, it’ll be fun.”
Riley sighed. “What do you want to do? You’ve got an hour.”
“Hmm… Actually what do you do when you’re not working?”
“I’m pretty much always working.”
“Even more reason why you need a break!” He exclaimed.
“Sometimes I read or play computer games. When I was younger I used to play games with my siblings.”
“What kind of games would you play?”
“Ohh, All kinds of things. Lukas’s favorite was always when we dressed up as the teenage mutant ninja turtles, except we would always fight over who got to be who. We would also pretend to be the three musketeers sometimes. Areylia always tried to convince us to play Narnia, except one of the girls always had to be Edmund, and none of us wanted to be a guy. We used to play Just Dance. Oh, and Hide-and-Seek.”
“What’s Hide-and-Seek?”
Riley’s jaw dropped. “It’s a kid’s game where one person closes their eyes and counts, usually to ten, but sometimes more depending on how big an area you’re playing in while everyone else runs and hides. Then the counter has to find everyone, and whoever gets found first has to be ‘it’ next round.”
“That sounds awesome, we have to try it!”
“Fine, but count all the way to 100, and cover your ears. Let’s at least try to make it fair. I promise I’ll stay in the building.”
As soon as Felix started counting, Riley grabbed her laptop and darted down the stairs. Where was the loudest part of the warehouse? Vampire hyper senses definitely gave him an advantage, but she was quite a good Hide-and-Seek player. She wandered down to the basement where there was always noises coming from the utilities, and a musty smell that should help cover her scent. Finding a spot in between the furnace and the back wall just big enough for her to slide in and stick her elbows out without touching either, Riley slid inside and pulled open her laptop. She had just reopened the program she was working when a pair of feet appeared in front of her.
“Found you!”
“Already?” Riley gasped in disbelief. For one thing, she had put careful thought into her finding place, for another she had always been really good at this game. “How’d you do that?”
“I recognized the sound of your heartbeat.” A part of Riley warmed at the thought that he knew her well even to have memorized the way her heart beat, but another was still annoyed that she’d lost so quickly.
“Even over all the noise in here?”
“Everything about you is more intense. I don’t think I could stop sensing you if I tried.” Riley wanted to respond to that, but what could she say? People rarely noticed her, and certainly no one had ever admitted such an intense draw to her before. She was saved from having to respond however when Felix noticed her laptop.
“Are you trying to do more work?”
“To be fair, I am usually able to hide for at least half an hour before someone finds me.”
Now, it was Felix’s turn to be surprised. “Really?”
“The fastest I've ever been found is 15 minutes, so I thought I’d have some time to finish while you were searching. Typically I can get at least a half-hour. The only person who ever gets less than that is Areylia.”
“How long was the longest?”
“About 4 hours, give or take,” she shrugged, keeping on hand on her laptop to keep it from falling, then brushed a lock of hair out of her face. “There was a rainstorm, so we had recess inside, and decided to play hide-and-seek, and I managed to hide until it was time to go home. Although, now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure everyone just forgot about me.”
“Riley, that’s awful! You must have had terrible friends.”
“I mean, we were 6, no one is a good friend when they’re 6.”
“Even if I was 6, I would never forget about you.”
Riley looked up in his amber eyes, and felt her own soften. It was nice to have someone feel so strongly about her even if it only lasted a moment. “Thanks Felix. I don’t think I could ever forget about you either.”
Riley closed her computer, so she could stand up, finding him holding out a hand for her. He pulled her up with enough force to make them collide, her laptop the other thing separating their chests. The proximity made her face heat up a bit, and her heart beat a bit faster. She quickly stepped away, gripping the laptop tighter.
“Thanks for the game, but I really need to finish this code.” Still clutching the laptop to her chest, she stepped around him, and walked back up the stairs, telling herself it didn’t matter how that moment could have ended. She was eventually going to ruin whatever it was they had, so it was best to just prevent anything from happening at all.