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Heinrix was deep in contemplation of his remaining ecclesiarch when Evanelia let out a pained exhale. He raised his eyes from the board to find her rounded over her knees, the heels of her hands pressed against her eyes.
He rose from his seat, the game quickly forgotten. “Are you alright?” He knelt alongside her. “What’s wrong?”
She lowered her hands and squinted at him for a brief moment before batting her eyelids shut. She groaned softly. “Sorry,” she said, her voice taut, “it’s the light. I thought I felt a migraine coming on, so I covered my eyes to see if the dark would help.” She sighed and covered her eyes again. “And it did. Which confirms my theory that whatever the Drukhari did to me screwed up the wiring of my neural implant… or maybe the way my brain wires itself around the implant…Mmph.”
He had placed a tentative hand against her temple and swiftly withdrawn it at the noise she made, but now she grabbed blindly for his wrist.
“No, put it back,” she mumbled. “The cold feels nice.”
He cautiously replaced his hand and resumed his inventory of the cranial nerve endings. He recited their formal names like a litany, an anchor to keep his focus on the task at hand and away from intrusive thoughts about other contexts where he could evoke pleased sighs from her.
Evanelia hissed as his exploration touched a sensitive area. Heinrix winced sympathetically.
He spoke in a soft voice and hoped it would be enough to avoid aggravating the pain. “I’m wary of trying to make permanent alterations to someone else’s neural circuitry,” he said. “It’s not my area of expertise, and it’s not the same as modifying my own body where I have immediate feedback.”
Her hair was beginning to fall into her face, teased and coming loose from the tail she’d put it in. Heinrix realized that she must have been rubbing her head before he’d noticed she was in pain.
He gently brushed her hair back and tucked it behind her ear.
“You will still need to speak to the chirurgeon or a specialist to get it fixed. But I think I can soothe the nerves a bit, just for now. Unless you would prefer I call a medic?”
She shook her head. “Here is good.” She adjusted her hands to peer at him, though still shading her eyes from the lamps. She smiled sheepishly. “First, can you help me turn the lights out? … and get to my bed in the dark without bruising my shins?” She hesitated. “And without carrying me because I’m not sure what the swaying would do for my equilibrium or my nausea.”
“Of course.” He offered her his arm. “Let’s get you settled then I can go around and turn the lights off.”
Her eyes were closed again. “Thank you,” she said with audible relief.
He helped her shuffle from the regicide table to her chambers without running into anything, guiding her around corners with a hand on her waist. When they reached her bed he steered her hands so she could feel where the bed was and lower herself onto it.
“I’ll be back.”
Then he went between the rooms turning the lights off, leaving only a dimmed lantern in the hall and in the bath chamber to guide him. It struck him as he darkened the last how strange it was to be navigating the Rogue Trader’s chambers in such a way. As if they were his. As if he belonged there. The path back to her room already felt as familiar as finding his own bunk without light.
She had taken her hair down completely when he returned to sit beside her. She hadn’t bothered to change, but she’d kicked her stockings off and he caught a shadowed glimpse of a hastily discarded undergarment draped over the bedframe.
“Thank you,” she said again, her hand fumbling for his in the dark.
He squeezed it and raised her knuckles to his lips. “Think nothing of it.”
“What if I like thinking of it?”
He smiled faintly, reluctantly untangling his fingers from hers so he could press them to her temples. “I suppose I can’t stop you.”
She replied with an absentminded hum of approval as he began to soothe the nerves.
It never felt quite the same, working on someone else’s nerves… coarser, less tactile. Like touch through a glove. But he knew how to amplify the sensitivity of others’ nerves to increase pain; he’d done it so often he could practically do it in his sleep. Pure muscle memory. Inverting the process wasn’t significantly harder. It was certainly easier to observe. He much preferred sensing the tension in her body melt away over witnessing the results of an interrogation.
And perhaps with time, he mused, the workings of her body might become more familiar, like the pathways he walked in her chambers. Already he’d subconsciously synchronized his heartbeats to hers. It was as if there was a string tied between them, the space inside their chests resonating in unison with its strumming.
With time. But how much time would he have? How much time could he expect before Xavier summoned him back?
Why did part of him recoil at the realization that he might not remain by her side long enough to grow familiar with the pathways of her body? Was it really a shock? Had he really let himself imagine he might remain with her indefinitely?
His chest ached.
Heinrix gingerly disentangled his awareness from her nerve endings. “Any better?” he asked quietly, his voice unexpectedly hoarse.
Evanelia sounded half asleep when she replied. “Much.”
“Good.” He delicately kissed her knuckles and began to get up from the bed.
She gripped his hand and pulled him back towards her, surprisingly determined for one on the brink of falling asleep.
“Stay,” she mumbled. Perhaps startled into wakefulness by the unexpected force of her own request, she added in a clearer voice: “Please stay with me.”
Heinrix could no more refuse her than he could in the aftermath of her return from Commorragh. As quietly as he could, he kicked off his boots and eased himself onto the bed, where Evanelia wasted no time in nestling against his side.
He ran his fingers through her hair as her breathing once again began to slow.