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When Walter's eyes open--laboriously, in cringing, hesitant movements--Maxim Brailovsky is hovering several inches above him, near enough to be in focus; he’s not quite leaning down, but definitely leaning towards, with Walter propped at a low grade incline. His hair is disheveled as if he, too, is recently woken. His face is a little bit flushed, and his grin innocent, cherubic. He is so handsome, Walter had not really internalized this. “Ah, how very lucky. Katerina will be jealous!”
Walter scrubs his face with his hands, attempting to orient himself; the sound of Brailovsky's voice is doing strange things to his heart rate, making him feel terribly hot and sticky inside. His hollow stomach is turning, end-over-end, and feeling strangely punctured.
“She was not sure when, when you would wake up, you see? I happened to come by, to r--eplace, сменять , for her,"--he becomes more animated as he talks, gesticulating with vague and low-meaning movements of the hands, an improvisational air to it--"and to send you on your way, if you did: here you are. Do you feel okay?”
His fast, stilted Russlish, eased up and made esoteric--insular--by his time untutored on the Leonov makes a slight dissonance with the warmth in his voice, without the friendliness bullied out or turned to cunning. In the sulfur-colored light, Walter had not quite realized, but now he sees: his eyes are large, a resonant sort of blue, and slightly in shadow, his brows steep and dark.
Walter, looking at this near face, is really very pleased to hear his voice--and he relaxes. Why shouldn’t he be relaxed, why shouldn’t he feel a warmth and tenderness towards a man who had been reliable, constant, and, perhaps above all, successful, in a time of duress? A young man with an attractive, open face, a vigorous attitude, a technical competency, and an unreaped air of weakness to him, enticing as the silver underbelly of a trout.
“Walter?” He repeats, cocking his head slightly, then putting his hand just above Walter's knee, which makes the skin burn intensely, the sensation spreading in concentric pulses from the point of contact.
"I am okay!" He replies, louder than intended, and less colorful, almost without intonation. His heart rate is still unusually high, which makes him grateful for Katerina's absence. With a breath, he manages friendliness, makes himself genial and smooth, "Just groggy--waking up still."
Walter drapes a hand over his brow and reaches from the cot with the other, finding, by touch, his glasses reliably snapped into the dish at the bedside. Max watches him struggle with the latch for a few moments, his shoulders surging upward and his fingers slipping past each other--still uncoordinated--before he covers that hand with his own. Gently, he turns away Walter’s fingers, plucks the frames loose, and moves to settle them on his open face, with lifted brow and parted lips. Even just by his ears, his hair is soft, and slightly waxy with sweat, which makes him feel real.
The feeling of his bare skin is satisfying, in some way, a fulfilling that makes his stomach heavier, and the skin of his face tighter. Drifting long in the empty between Discovery and Leonov, suspended between Io's hellfires and the vastness of unmixed, pin-pricked black, they had hung at pendulum to the other, tethered, completely dependent, and equally so. And Max had swept them through that dark. Then, in that unlit, labyrinthian place, their bodies bound to its wayward will, with its eerie voice and stench of death, their skin becoming bleary with sweat (a dripping sweat, surreal!) despite the deep, penetrating chill: Walter had trailed one open hand behind him, towards Max, as if desiring to hold his hand, with his voice as bright and strong as a nylon cord, like red thread glowing in the untempered gloom. Nearly forty-eight hours like this; they are mad men!
A circuit, once established, and running unceasingly between them. His hands drift around the man's hairline; this swinging motion that draws them near without threat of destruction, some powerful linkage amplified or perhaps made more obvious by this satiating touch. These are foreign thoughts, not placed quite so--Max knows only the sweetness, the clamminess of Walter’s hairline, and the motion his brows make, and a prevailing sense of trust between them.
“Max,” Walter says, and when Max looks at his face--it takes him a few moments, still smoothing the lithe, dark softness that had fallen over his brow in his chemical sleep--and sees that he is smiling, almost crudely.
“Thank you, Max.” His enunciation is television crisp.
Max flushes, through his head and out to his ears, then Walter is touching his jaw, folding the slenderness of it into his warm, uncovered paw, and his smile becomes less salacious, rather open, transparent , which a strange look on his face, one of variegation and manifold concealments.
Beneath his overlarge grin and the wireframes, he has the face of a shepherd, slightly archaic, and slightly arcane, strange for a low-minded man of salt, as he professes to be, and as he truly seems to be as well. It may be wrong to see this so clearly; he had seen something of the same look with the diffuse, reflected edge of his flashlight beam as he had bent over a panel in Discovery’s gullet. Max's heart struggles with this knowledge; it feels revelational.
His other hand covers Max’s now, the both of them resting flatly on Walter’s upper thigh. On the zero-grav Leonov, all pressure is a result of their own will.
“Do not tease me." It is a conscious effort, not to append the plaint with a please. "How are you feeling?"
When he speaks, Walter rubs his hand against his shifting jaw--not caressing, just feeling, an almost diagnostic touch. It is the intimacy of being studied, being committed to memory. It makes Max self conscious.
Walter leans into his arm, forward, towards Max's face; Max, unmeaningly, and with a few blinks, cranes towards him as well, as if this proximity will better equip him for Walter’s reply. In every way, he is receptive, and he is only surprised by the touch of Walter’s mouth to his eyelid--the warm, dryness of his lips, the slight scrub of his facial hair against the temple--in the moments after he has withdrawn, his hand, too fallen away.
His smile is conspiratorial, as if he has gotten one over on the young engineer. Max is not offended, though he is slightly puzzled.
"I'm hungry!" He half-whispers, baring his teeth by Max's face. Then, drawing totally away, flush to the stiff-backed cot, raising his arms overhead in an exaggerated stretch. Walter likes these big postures, and it makes Max think of storybook illustrations, crisp-lined, in powdery colors, and hugely communicative.
He smiles in a magnification of that prior conspiracy, barking to the world, and releasing them from their suspension as he makes to rise, "And ready to raise Hell!"
Watching him go off huffing into the hall, Max follows with a charmed, happy look, only a few feet behind, feeling the tug and slack of that heart’s tether.