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They sit together on one of Speer’s smaller beaches, only a tiny inlet of sand between the ocean and the face of the craggy rocks of the green-studded cliffs behind them. He’s pretty sure Hanelai only tolerates him for the green, indica he coaxed into thriving within palace flower pots. It’s good stuff, especially for this climate— not just the seeds and stems you have to dig for in the Sinegard markets. Ziya’s proud of his pot, thank you very much. Riga would be pissed off by the garden if he wasn’t taking full advantage of it.
Hanelai idly packs it into the pipe— they used to bring separate ones but they just share now. Ziya feels like it should mean something but he doesn’t know what. These days Ziya likes his girls to have as little in common with Tseveri or Daji as humanly possible, and Hanelai, with her bronze skin and coarse curls, fits the bill well.
That’s what he told himself at the start of it. Hanelai lights up the pipe with a firecracker-snap of her fingers and Ziya watches the smoke drift up in curls.
She’s always there with him and Riga on the front lines— he paints the sky in beasts and watches dirigibles drop like flies, Riga cuts his way through generals like a dancer, and Hanelai he can recognize even through the pillar of flame because her fire burns the brightest out of all their Speerly soldiers. Whoever he pulled into his lap at night meant absolutely nothing compared to the plain strength of the bond they built by risking their lives next to each other again and again and again. He hangs out with her on Speer for the same reason he still trusts Daji and Riga— because if one of them falls, they all do. They’re in this for the long haul.
He snatches the pipe out of her hand and takes a drag. They’re not much for small talk. He leans into her side and listens to the ants scream, squinting down at her.
When she looks away and scooches a bit to the side he can still feel the warmth of her shoulder on his side and more than anything he wants to feel it again.
“I’m not contagious,” he says, instead, frames it like a joke.
“What you are is a creep,” Hanelai tells him with a sniff, but she’s grinning. He likes her grin, the way it breathes life into her entire sullen face, makes her look so human.
He grunts. “I’m the creep that can drop four dirigibles in five seconds.” Hanelai rolls her eyes, then frowns.
“That’s not why—”
Ziya blinks. “Hm?”
“Don’t think much of it,” Hanelai says, so he doesn’t. She moves back closer to him and he rests his head on her shoulder again and looks up at her.
You’re so pretty, he thinks, and doesn’t realize he means it until the words are there. There’s something about the red chapped lines in her lips and the dark streaks of her eyebrows that makes him feel warm. He doesn’t say it, both because she won’t believe him and because he’s not in the mood to get slapped today. Maybe it’s just the smoke, but somewhere in him there’s a sort of fondness for her choleric temper, her impulsiveness. He’s too tired to be a spitfire these days, but she isn’t.
She makes him feel like he could forget to grow old. Forget to die.
“There’s really not a normal way to say this,” he starts with.
Hanelai’s eyes narrow. “Not a great way to start a sentence.”
“Mhm. Ever been kissed before?” Ziya asks, cheerily, and Hanelai chokes on the smoke. It takes her a good five seconds to get it all out, tears in her eyes, and she rubs the bridge of her nose.
“Why do you ask?” She mumbles, stilted and awkward, still catching her breath a little.
“For a friend,” he says. “Come on. You aren’t a fool.”
Hanelai looks at him with more consideration then, sets the pipe down. “My mother tells me stories," she says, mildly, "about a cousin of hers that got lynched for an affair with a Nikara girl. They found them fucking in the hay and her father said it was a rape. Pitchfork to the neck. He was still inside of her."
Ziya's stomach drops. “I’m not a Nikara girl,” he says, carefully. "And I've never had a father."
She measures him for another brief moment. “You aren’t, and you don't,” she agrees, and laughs, and he’s laughing with her too. Nowadays, this is the only place he finds himself laughing often, when he doesn’t have to look at the bruises on Daji’s wrists, take mincing steps when Riga’s in the room.
He loves them so unbearably much and he wants to rip his veins out with a toothpick every time he lays eyes on their faces. Hanelai makes him feel like none of it matters— the Scarigon Plateau, the airships he rent out of reality, the bodies left in their wake. She makes him feel young again, unbound again, free again. That, more than anything, is what makes him lean in.
Hanelai kisses him and he feels like a prisoner seeing the sun for the first time in years.
(For the first time since Tseveri.)