Work Text:
"Will you keep the name?"
Yuri glanced over at her without otherwise moving. It was the first thing she'd said since they'd settled down on the grass together. The night sky overhead was dotted with stars, and between them and the nearly-full moon he could see her face clearly — but he still had trouble reading the expression there. She looked casual enough and her question had sounded casual enough, but you could never be sure with Judy.
As well as he liked to think he knew her these days, he could still never be sure.
"Hmm?" was his eloquent response.
If he straight-out admitted that he didn't understand, she might explain — or she might smile one of her mysterious smiles and look away from him, as if the question had never existed. Meanwhile, if he said nothing at all, she was almost sure to drop the subject. Yuri had found that he got the best odds with something like this: a nonverbal little nothing, almost asking but not quite. Letting her decide whether and how much he was interested.
Conversations, like so many other things, could be a game for her. And if he played with her, instead of against her...
Judy turned to gaze at him, her eyes moving slowly over his face, and then looked back up at the sky. She said, "Vesperia. It was named after a star, but now you know it isn't a star at all. Will you keep the name?"
Yuri propped himself up on an elbow. "I think that's more Captain Karol's department," he pointed out, bemused.
She raised her eyebrows ever so slightly, and stroked her fingers idly through the grass with a thoughtful hum. "All right," she said.
But the question still lingered in the air between them, and after a moment Yuri found himself stretching out to lie back down on the grass. "...It doesn't make any difference, to me," he told her.
"No?"
Still her voice was light, unconcerned.
"Nope." He rolled over, so that he was facing her. So that he could watch her face closely as he went on, "We didn't really name ourselves after a star. We named ourselves after a hero. An ideal. Even if that ideal isn't all we thought it was, that—"
And then Yuri cut himself off.
There was a smile on her lips, but then there was almost always a smile on her lips. He couldn't quite be sure it was directed at him or a response to anything he'd said. Except, of course, that it absolutely was.
"...It's not the same thing," he told her, but even to his own ears he sounded sulky.
"What's not the same thing?" Judy asked, all innocence now.
He grabbed a handful of grass and tossed it irritably into the wind. "Alexei's not the man we thought he was, but that doesn't matter. The memorial is about what he stood for, what we all believed in, and Flynn especially. That's what you're trying to say, right?"
She pointed a thoughtful frown up at the stars. "Strange, I don't think I said anything like that..."
"Really. And I suppose you weren't also trying to tell me that I should go."
Judy brought a hand up to her throat, fingers splaying over her collar bones in an extremely practiced gesture of surprise. "Do you think the Commandant would like that?" she asked, as if it had only just now occurred to her.
He tried to hold the scowl — he really, genuinely did. But he felt it tremble and then he couldn't keep himself from laughing softly. "You know? I think he just might. Damn, you're tricky."
"I don't know what you mean," Judy said, but her amethyst eyes were dancing as she reached up to curl her fingers in the front of his shirt. "I only asked you a question."
That made him laugh, too, and he let her pull him down until their lips were almost touching, her breath warm on his mouth. "Like hell you did."
She arched her eyebrows delicately, opening her mouth for what would definitely have been even more unconvincing denial, but he silenced her with a long, firm kiss.
How long, he wondered, had she known? Was this the whole reason why she had brought him out here? Had his brooding over the stupid memorial really been that obvious...?
And here he thought he knew her. Really, she was the one who knew him — and maybe a little bit too well.