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Vaggie had hoped Lute wouldn’t notice.
It was such a silly thing, really. She’d been flying in search of her next target and hadn’t been watching where she was flying, and caught her leg on another exorcist’s scythe. It had cut deep through the fabric of her uniform into her flesh but she’d hardly noticed a thing. Only once she’d landed before a sinner hiding behind a dumpster and felt a sharp pain flare up in her lower leg did she realize, Oh, fuck.
Quickly, she’d bandaged it with a scrap of fabric from the sinner’s decently clean clothes, then tried to ignore it for the rest of the extermination. She spent most of her time flying when she could, and when she couldn’t, she worked with a wince to keep her slight limp slight. A few exorcists saw her pain and teased her about it—though most were too occupied by the all-consuming joy of slaughtering to care. She ignored them. She was already at more than 200 kills, which was more than most of them could ever hope to get.
Through sheer desperate willpower, her end kill count—264—was average for her, if not a record. It wouldn’t be punished. Thus, no one would give a shit that she’d gotten injured. As soon as she got to the dormitory that night she could treat the wound properly herself, and she could forget about it in a day.
As the exorcists flew their way up to Heaven then filed back to the compound, Vaggie hid herself amidst the crowd of shouting and laughing blood-stained angels. No one will notice, no one will care, she told herself. She repeated it like a mantra. No one will notice, no one will care. All she had to worry about was avoiding Adam’s obligatory party invitation—he picked seemingly at random the exorcists he found most interesting—attractive—to drag to his quarters then all over Heaven for more than a day of nonstop celebration. Vaggie had only been invited once, but her memories of it were so shitty she’d never forget them. Once was enough.
She almost made it, too. She was on her way out of the courtyard, had slipped away from the group to head to the dorms. She almost made it.
She didn’t make it.
Lute landed in front of Vaggie, touching down directly in her path. She held her sword tightly in one hand. “What happened to you?” she demanded.
Vaggie breathed out, though not from shock—subconsciously, she’d been expecting this. She hadn’t even considered Lute would notice or care, but now that she had, it made perfect sense. “I just got hurt,” she said. “Don’t worry about it.”
“An exorcist hurt you,” Lute insisted. “I can see the blood. Who hurt you?” The intensity laced in each word of the question was foreboding. What was Lute going to do to them? Vaggie knew her punishments could be…harsh.
“It was an accident,” she said slowly, trying to soothe the borderline furious woman in front of her who was still holding a very sharp blade. “I just knocked my leg against someone’s scythe.” She emphasized: “It wasn’t anyone’s fault.”
“Why should I believe you?” Lute stepped forward, probably to intimidate Vaggie into telling her what she wanted to hear. “Hurting another exorcist outside of training, especially during an extermination, is a punishable offense. If you’re lying for someone…”
“I’m not! It was just a stupid accident,” Vaggie repeated, getting not only frustrated but also embarrassed. She stepped around Lute to get out of her interrogation. She didn’t want anyone hurt for her sake, let alone someone innocent—it had been such a stupid accident—and Lute was talking like she was going to maim someone no matter what Vaggie said.
“Wait!” Lute grabbed her arm and yanked her back before she could get very far. It threw Vaggie off balance and she stumbled, wincing. Lute yielded her a stilted apology.
But Vaggie really needed to go treat her wound. “What?”
“Whatever happened, you shouldn’t be walking around injured.” She paused, remembered the dark red blood all over her own and Vaggie’s uniform and what they’d been doing for the past 24 hours. “You shouldn’t be walking around any more than you already have. You’ll make it worse, and then you’ll get an infection, and it’ll never heal, and you’ll train miserably for a week. You’ll be useless. Come on,” she said, “I’ll carry you.”
“Huh?”
But carry Vaggie she did. In one swift motion, she bent down, brought one arm up under Vaggie’s knees, held her back—between her wings—with the other, and picked Vaggie right up off the ground. Vaggie was so shocked she couldn’t get a protest out until Lute had carried her halfway to the exorcists’ very small medical building. Injuries during training that could not be walked off or treated with rudimentary supplies were rare, and the place was there pretty much only because the High Seraphim would feel even worse about herself if there wasn’t one. And now Lute was carrying her there for a small cut on her leg.
Vaggie shifted herself in Lute’s hold, trying to move herself up a bit. The most embarrassing thing about the whole position might have been how she had to look almost directly up at Lute’s ever-serious face. “You don’t need,” she fluttered a wing free from where it was awkwardly trapped against Lute’s arm, “to carry me.”
God, what if someone saw? Vaggie craned her neck to look over Lute’s shoulder, saw empty buildings. They were either all still in the courtyard, or Adam’s party was quite the large affair this year. Regardless, she was extremely anxious she would go down in history as the exorcist who had to get carried bridal-style to unnecessary medical care by the fucking lieutenant.
“Shush. We’re almost there.”
Lute struggled to open the door, cursing under her breath, for a good minute before she gave up and set Vaggie down safely on the ground. She kept an arm around her waist, though—she wouldn’t be letting her get out of this.
The door swung open, and the saddest, darkest place Heaven had to offer was exposed to the greater world for the first time in what was most likely months. Lute turned on the lights. There were a few beds in two rows, cabinets and counters and sinks on one side, and one curtained window. It wasn’t entirely decoration-free—a vase of purple and yellow artificial flowers sat on a small table next to the door. Vaggie’s eyes lingered on them as she was led past. That was funny. Nowhere else in the compound was there anything that could be called a decoration. Only here, in the medical building they never used because even the act of coming here was admitting weakness…
Lute insisted on sitting her up on the bed herself. Vaggie laid back onto the fluffy pillow. Again, it was much nicer than the usual mattresses and pillows they got. Vaggie found herself relaxing into against her will. Everything was always so sore after an extermination, would it be so bad to just let herself let go?
“We need to get that bandage off,” Lute said, disgust in her voice. Vaggie nodded absentmindedly. She was lost in thought.
Would it be so bad to relax…?
Yes, it would. She all but slapped herself. This was an exception to the rule: she was a soldier, nothing more. She was not made to relax. She was made to exterminate. She trained to kill, she killed, she did it again. Whatever this was, it was not going to last. She could not relax. She could not…
Lute was looking at her with so much concern. That look made Vaggie’s heart threaten to beat slower, heavier. With an amused half-smile she could not help, she noticed how Lute’s brow furrowed quite adorably, and how that made it hard to believe she could ever hurt a thing. Vaggie also noticed how her hand worried the blanket, messing it up and straightening it out again, in a physical display of her concern. It made Vaggie want to reach out her own and stop her. There’s nothing to worry about, she wanted to say, pressing her hand under hers. It’ll heal soon. You don’t have to worry about me.
She focused on the pain to keep herself in control.
Her leg was propped up onto an extra pillow, and ever so gently Lute peeled off her makeshift bandage. She held it up to the light of the window to properly take in its filth before flicking it into the trash like it was radioactive. Then she bent over to examine the wound, which maybe did look a bit worse than Vaggie thought it would. Dirt had found its way in, flesh was discolored at the edges of the gash, and it seemed bottomless as golden blood continued to seep out. Lute touched at it around the edges, examining it thoroughly; Vaggie tried hard not to wince, or, worse, make a sound.
Lute went over to the sink to soak a cloth in warm water. “Does it hurt?” she asked, her back to Vaggie.
“A bit,” she said. It was a pain that kept with her, never fading away, but not pressing or overpowering. Really, she didn’t need any of this. “It’s fine when I’m resting.”
“You should have told me.”
“During the extermination?” Nothing could have been done. They both had too many sinners to kill—too high a standard to meet—anyway.
She was wringing out the extra water. “Right after, then.” The water fell, splashing loud and free, into the deep, silverish basin. “You were going to your room. You should have come to me.”
“Sorry.”
Lute walked back over to Vaggie, rag in hand, with sharp steps. She had found some hostile spirit inside her; her look of soft concern had hardened into burning-cold distrust. As if Vaggie really had betrayed her. She knelt down at the bedside and pulled the leg of Vaggie’s pants up over the wound.
“You’re always doing that,” she said, dragging the cloth over the long gash. At least her treatment stayed gentle, even though her voice and expression and body language didn’t. Her wings had bunched up close to her back, guarded. “Running off to be on your own. I don’t like it. You should—” Her body tensed somehow further. “You can—” Lute looked up at Vaggie’s concerned face laid on the bright white pillow. The flame-like intent in her eyes said more than she did. “I won’t hurt you.”
“Why…?” Why won’t you hurt me? Why are you telling me this? Why should I believe you? By trailing off, she asked all of those questions at once. This strange event was entering dangerous territory that she didn’t dare tread first.
“Because—” She cut herself off with a deep breath in. Lute kept wiping at her wound despite the fact that all the dirt was long gone, collected on the cloth, staining it, and her efforts were just irritating the tender exposed flesh. But Vaggie didn’t dare say anything—every twitch in Lute’s face as she spoke was a sign of what was coming. “I want it to be different.”
Vaggie frowned, didn’t answer.
It was not going to be different. It was never going to be different. Lute knew that.
Once or twice a week, they would train together late then Lute would take Vaggie back to her room. They would not look each other in the eyes the next day when Lute returned to her regular duties as a shadow at Adam’s side, or say anything to each other the day after that, but by the third day Lute might watch Vaggie closely or hang around her, say a thing or two about her form while she trained, and on the fourth day the cycle would repeat all over again. The connection between them was indefinable and Vaggie tried not to think about it, just how she tried not to think about a lot of other things.
(She had not made it to her room, so she had not had a chance to change out of her dirty uniform yet. Below her line of sight there were spots of dark red on her she could not forget in the same way she could not forget the aching throb in her leg.)
It was never going to be different.
Lute growled like she always did when her situation confronted her and she couldn’t admit it. She threw the cloth into the trash, standing up, wiping off her hands on the pants of her uniform. They were covered in more blood than her hands, so it didn’t help much. “What do you want?” Again, she looked up at Vaggie, this time glaring.
“I want to sleep,” Vaggie admitted. She half-chuckled, though it came out exhaled and exhausted. “I’m tired.”
Lute glared at her a minute longer—waiting for her to say something else, anything that meant something—then she sighed and turned away. She went over to the cabinets without another word. Vaggie watched as she rooted around in them, searching for bandages, muttering graphic expressions of frustration with increasing passion as she hunted. She smiled once it became clear Lute was struggling.
“Where are the fucking bandages?” Lute growled, pulling out and promptly throwing back a box of pain medicine. “Who organized this?”
“Having trouble?” Vaggie teased.
“It’s not my fault!” Lute shouted over her shoulder. “The only thing an exorcist would ever need out of all this crap and I can’t fucking find them.” A bottle of what looked like vanilla-scented lotion offended her so deeply she threw it straight into the counterside trash. Bracing herself against the counter in a gesture of barely maintaining her sanity, she said, “Who organized this?”
“The cabinets under the sink.”
“What did you say?” Lute glanced back at her.
Vaggie sat up. She was getting invested in Lute’s stupid quest. “I said you should check the cabinets under the sink.”
Lute narrowed her eyes. “Why would they be there?”
“I don’t know, why—” she threw up a hand—“why was there hand lotion in the cabinets? Someone was just shoving things in over there.”
“They wouldn’t be under the sink,” Lute assured her with unreasonable confidence. She went right back to to eviscerating the upper cabinets—she’d started just dumping anything that wasn’t bandages on the counter, and a pile was growing.
Vaggie let her continue until her pile reached the edge of the counter, then, sucking in air through her teeth, she swung her legs over the side of the bed. She called, “One second, I’m coming over.”
“No!” Lute whipped around, a finger pointing sharply at Vaggie. “You stay there.” She knelt down, maintaining eye contact all the while, like Vaggie was a wild animal who’d bolt if she broke it. “I’ll check under the sink.”
And lo and behold, the infirmary’s entire supply of bandages was sequestered under the sink for some stupid reason. Lute screamed in pure rage at the sight of them. When she picked up a box of a standard duty, beautiful bright white, entirely unopened roll of bandages, her tight, trembling grip almost crushed it.
Vaggie wanted to tease her, but the embarrassment poorly disguised as frustration written all over Lute’s face kept her to just a smiling, “I think the bleeding’s done now.”
“Good,” Lute muttered. She kept her eyes focused on Vaggie’s wound, but there was genuine, near-tangible relief in the word. Kneeling down, she tore the box open and unrolled the first bit of bandage.
Lute held her leg gentle yet firm as she methodically wrapped. Vaggie forgot to think about anything as she did. In their own way, this was trust. Vaggie trusted that Lute would not hurt her, even though she could be cruel, and Lute trusted that Vaggie would let her care for her, even though she’d never learned how to want that. In this moment—just in this moment—they were with each other like they could love each other.
The faintest breeze slipped through window. It played with Vaggie’s hair and brushed at the stinging nerves until Lute covered the cut with a press of her hand. There was no other sign of the outside, or influence from it. Not right then. It was so quiet out there, and when Vaggie looked out, she thought she saw nothing but pastel skies.
Lute pulled the bandage tight then tore the roll off with her teeth. “There,” she said, shoving the roll back into the ruined box.
“That’s it?” Vaggie blinked herself out of her trance as she leaned forward to see what Lute had done. The cut was wrapped up in layers of bandages such that only a faint line of gold bled through to visibility.
Vaggie found Lute, still close at her side, with sparkling eyes and a meaningful smirk. “What, do you want me to kiss it better?”
“Oh—it’s okay,” Vaggie said quickly, more flushed than she wanted to be.
But Lute, laughing lightly to herself, pressed a soft kiss to the deepest stained spot on the bandage. Through the fabric, the touch tickled and ached ever so lightly that Vaggie flushed deeper. She pushed Lute’s head off her as Lute all but giggled.
Trying not to smile, she scolded, “Enough of that.”
Lute refused to move any further than a few inches away. She kept one hand on her leg, too—but her felt so natural Vaggie didn’t care it was there. “Does it feel better?”
Vaggie pressed her lips together but couldn’t help a fond exhale. “Yeah, it does.” The pressure of the bandage around her leg was its own, new, comforting presence. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” Lute said, standing up at last. She stared at Vaggie from her new angle for a moment. Her smile stayed, seemingly unconscious, on her face. Then, before Vaggie could say a word, she fell in for a kiss on the lips.
Vaggie was in shock at the first contact. She hadn’t expected it. But it felt right, like the best thing in the world, so Vaggie leaned into it, pulling Lute closer. Lute let her. They kissed each other on the infirmary bed as if everything was a dream and they would wake up soon.
As it was that kiss could only last for a moment, though. Lute pulled away with a long, soft sigh. Vaggie touched at her mouth—she wasn’t going to forget that kiss, no matter how she tried.
“I’ll take you back to your room,” Lute said.
She did not carry Vaggie any more, but she did lead her by the hand even though they both knew there was no need for that. Her hold was secure, almost comforting, and if Vaggie closed her eyes she could imagine they were going on a walk through the park and not the loveless exorcist compound she’d known all her life. Vaggie’s wound hardly even bothered her anymore. Despite Lute’s care being absurd and unnecessary, it had helped. Whatever that was worth.
No one partying would be back for hours yet, so it was still quiet and empty in all directions. There was no reason for them to hurry, or worry about being seen. They could take all the time in Heaven they wanted to walk together in wordless silence.
Lute kept looking over to Vaggie, unable to keep her eyes off her for very long. Vaggie knew she did because she kept looking over to Lute, desperately wanting things she couldn’t have. She knew that things could not be different. She wanted them to be different so badly she never wanted to want anything ever again.
Was there a chance of change in Lute’s own wanting look? As they came up on the steps of Vaggie’s building, their eyes happened to find each other. Lute, flustered, averted her gaze. Maybe…Maybe there was enough there for something better.
They rode the elevator up to the third floor, and together, they walked down the hall. But Lute’s hand slowly, reluctantly, fell away from Vaggie’s.
She stopped at the door to Vaggie’s room.
“You could come in,” Vaggie offered. She faced Lute from the doorway, one hand set against it. “Stay with me.”
Lute hugged at herself, grimacing. “I can’t. I have to go find…him.”
“Please. You know he’s already so wasted he forgot you existed. Besides—” Vaggie smiled with every bit of hope she had—“you’re here, right now. Stay.”
Lute covered her face with her hands. “I have to go,” she told herself. “I have to….I can’t.” Her hands moved slightly, revealing an eye that pleaded with Vaggie against her will. “I can’t.”
Vaggie reached out to pull her hands away from her face and hold them in both of her own. “You can.”
Lute breathed in, then out. Vaggie could watch all her impossible conflict fade away. Then she smiled in a hopeful way that matched Vaggie, made Vaggie smile brighter, and stepped closer—over the border.
They moved inside, Lute shutting the door softly behind them. In minutes their bloody uniforms were thrown onto the floor and, in a way they never had before, they fell onto the bed laughing quietly to themselves. They lay on it facing each other, holding hands and touching legs and keeping faces only inches apart, as close as they thought they could get. Vaggie kissed Lute’s hand and then face over and over, loving how she blushed and laughed each time. It didn’t take too long for Lute to realize she could do the same and achieve the same delightful effect. Then they were just kissing each other to their hearts’ content for a long while.
Eventually, they fell asleep. But they didn’t move from the bed for hours, and stayed together until Heaven’s surreal sun had set and risen all over again and then a little bit longer after that.