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After Nona has gone to bed for the night, and Pyrrha has washed the day’s grime from her skin, she lights a cigarette and throws her feet up on the table with a pleased grin.
Cam, predictably, knocks them to the floor with a deft jab of her elbow and a whispered command of ‘quiet’ when the chair rattles under her ass. As if that's her fault.
Still, when Cam sits across from her and touches her forehead to the cool table in a rare show of weakness, Pyrrha takes one for the team and snubs out her hard earned smoke. To sweeten the peace offering, she even goes to the fridge and pulls out the fresh fruit Cam pretends she doesn’t favor because it is outrageously expensive, which yeah, it fucking is, and Pyrrha knows because had to haggle for it from the meanest old lady in New Rho. She slides it across the table without a sound. It had cost her, but she’d make up for it eventually.
“We can’t afford this,” Cam says, not lifting her head, low kept low so as not to disturb the sleeping beauty in the other room.
“You can’t, maybe. I’ve got my ways.”
John should have called her the ‘Saint of Pity.’
“By charming your poker buddies out of their chips?” Cam deadpans, looking up with clear stone grey eyes.
“It’s always worked for me,” Pyrrha shrugs in false modesty, running her tongue over her upper lip. She’s in desperate need of a shave.
As another gift, she pretends not to notice Cam’s blatant fucking stare as she nibbles at Pyrrha’s fruit.
Ha.
She isn’t exactly the woman she used to be, but she’ll be damned if she still doesn’t have that special something. Besides, she’d always told Gideon he would pull with a little more personality.
Pyrrha leans back in the chair until her spine makes a satisfying ‘pop!’ with the drifting thought that she misses when Mercy would go around fucking with everyone’s spine until she had a skeletal symphony going and they all felt golden. Good times. She lets out a sigh, and the sound leaving her lips is less about indulgence and more about filling up the silence.
Trapped behind Gideon’s eyes, she was always busting at the seams with shit to say. Alone in the driver’s seat, she can’t remember a damned thing that was so important to get out.
From the hallway, the sound of a crackling, distorted voice drifts in – a song on the radio of their new neighbors, likely. Cam doesn’t think they’ll last a month. Sextus estimated three weeks. Pyrrha gives ‘em three days, tops.
Still, the noise is better than nothing, and she’s pretty sure she even knows this song –
from one of her ‘dates’ with Wake, fucking until they bled, tangled up so close it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began, harder especially for her since she hadn’t been a ‘one’ for a myriad
– and so it’s with little thought that she stands and offers her open palm to a blank faced Cam.
“Don’t tell me – no dancing on the Sixth?”
Cam blinks, chewing slowly. Juice gathers in the corner of her mouth, but she wipes it away before Pyrrha can get the chance.
“The Warden took lessons from a Third House diplomat, for a time. I learned in the Nireids.”
She takes Pyrrha’s proffered hand in a firm, calloused grip, and slots herself neatly in the larger woman’s arms. If she wants to lead, she doesn’t fight for it, which suits Pyrrha just fine – for now.
“They put you in the Nireids? I would have guessed Alexandrites."
“The Warden and I agreed it would be best not to show our hand too early,” Cam says, simple as. Pyrrha feels the laugh rumbling somewhere between her stomach and her throat.
“Fair enough, but Sextus doesn’t seem the dancing type.”
“He wanted to be prepared before we went to Canaan House.”
Pyrrha has her by the waist, letting her fingers dig appreciatively into the svelte muscle. They step into a simple waltz, the kind Cytherea taught them all during their days of learning that has fallen out of favor in the Nine Houses. Like a good cavalier, Cam moves with ease even if she doesn’t recognize the steps. Their feet glide across the floor silently.
“A shame the lessons went to waste. Not really the place for parties, anymore.”
Pyrrha would know better than anyone. They traded late nights of sweat and spit for bloodied hands and sainthood, all those years ago, and left the party streamers to rot in a box in Valancy’s room.
“There was one, for Abigail Pent,” Cam says, but does not elaborate.
The radio changes, and the next song comes though much clearer, their neighbors finding a better channel with a stronger signal. Tough luck for them; they’d pay for it soon enough. It’s one of those old ass tunes, pre-Resurrection, the type of shit BoE eats up and immortalizes; Pyrrha’s lips form the words without any effort.
“Everybody hurts…”
She leans down to croon in Cam’s ear, nose and lips brushing against blunt cut hair and soft brown skin. Cam’s resulting snort is more musical than any other shit Pyrrha’s heard in the past twenty years.
With a twist of her heel and a squeeze of her hand, Cam stops them mid twirl. Pyrrha’s got a good head on her, so she has to look down to see her face.
To most people, the expression that greets her would be inscrutable – but Pyrrha always knows the spark of a blaze when she sees one.
In the hot evening air, crackling radio waves in the background, Pyrrha Dve bends her neck and presses her lips to Camilla Hect’s.
See, Pyrrha’s kissed a lot of people. She’s kissed Lyctors and Cohort troops and her best friend and refugees and God and one bombshell of a BoE commander. So she’s pretty good at judging how a person will kiss before it even happens; how soft or hard the press of their lips will be, how fast they’ll use tongue and how sloppily, whether they’ll be coy or aggressive or somewhere in between.
So she knows, and has known for months, that Camilla Hect is the kind of gal that will kiss like a knife – more teeth than tongue, and not an ounce of shyness.
(Funnily enough, she thinks Nona would be all teeth too, if any poor bastard was stupid enough to let her kiss them.)
That is why when her kiss is met not with the cut of a tooth but with a slack lipped acceptance, it is no surprise when she pulls back to see brackish grey eyes staring up at her.
Palamedes pushes his fingers up the bridge of his nose, face wrinkling at the lack of glasses perched there. Like all of his expressions, it doesn’t sit right on Cam’s stern little face.
“Sorry to interrupt,” he says, completely sincere and totally apologetic. Pyrrha waves it off, sits back down with enough force to make the chair groan in sympathy, and re-lights her cigarette despite Sextus’ disapproving tongue click.
“You should be more sorry for being such a lousy kisser. They don’t teach that on the Sixth?” She takes a long drag, letting it burn in her throat. Mmm, menthol.
“It was an optional class for those of the appropriate age. I’ve never kissed anyone before, so my lack of aptitude for the art has partial explanation.”
“Really? Never?” Pyrrha watches him push the fruit away and pull out his notebook. Thanks to the Lord Undying that she is long past shame, because she can only imagine how Sextus is going to explain this loss of time to his cavalier. At least Nona isn’t awake. Small mercies.
Sextus hums in the affirmative. “I had always hoped my first kiss would be with Dulcinea, so I never made time for any extracurriculars outside of my studies.”
He says this matter of factly, and without a hint of disappointment or despair, despite admitting that Pyrrha just stole the one goddamn thing he had been saving for someone else.
A dead girl, but still.
Guilt is familiar and sour on her tongue, but she’s still not acquired a taste for it. She snuffs out the cig for a second time, half burnt away, and stands to put the fruit back in the fridge before it spoils in the heat.
Then, because the universe will never cease its unending but well deserved torment of her immortal soul, Palamedes Sextus has the gall to say without a hint of humor,
“If you and Cam want to have sex, I can postpone our switch; I just require advanced notice.”
Pyrrha slams her hand in the fridge door. It doesn’t hurt really, but she swears anyway, in two different languages for good measure.
“Quiet–”
“Camilla and I are not having sex,” Pyrrha grits out.
“Not right now, no, but if you both–”
“We. Are. Not. Fucking.”
Sextus looks up at her with a raised brow and quirked mouth. It would almost be endearing, if she wasn’t so unsettled – because honestly, it would be nice to fuck Camilla Hect, to feel a fellow warrior’s strong hands on her borrowed skin without judgement or strings attached – but she isn’t that goddamn desperate. She has her pride. She is not going to arrange a booty call through a virgin necromancer.
“Well, if you change your mind,” he says, because the Master Warden is the type who loves to give options, leave openings. His pen scratches across the paper, giving her the phantom pains of a headache.
“I’m going out to smoke,” she grunts, and grabs her lighter and dust jacket and leaves before things can get any more awkward. Of course, she forgets her cigarettes in her haste; she kicks the side of the Building for some relief until one of their neighbors peeks out to take a look.
When the music comes on the same time the next night (she’s just waiting for that neighbor to lose their kneecaps, she’s got a bet going with Nona) Cam pretends not to notice Pyrrha’s blatant fucking staring, and sips calmly at her water. Pyrrha smokes an entire pack out of spite and spends the next week in a state of irritable withdrawal.
But Cam still stares when Pyrrha pulls off her shirt after a particularly nasty shift, and kicks her hard enough in the mouth to make her skull rattle when they spar, so no one can say Dve still doesn’t got it.