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Cypher has died a few times too many to be too bothered by being stranded, especially with someone capable of teleporting, but that doesn’t fix the problem of an engine unwilling to start. Having a ‘we’ll come get you tomorrow’ doesn’t fix much of anything either, other than making him feel less like he’s going to sit here uselessly while Omen finds help—Cypher is a man of action even when he panics, though action that work much worse than the ways he moves when he can make sure he can use the usual planned steps. This is both a situation where he can say it’s ’not a problem’ and a situation where he feels completely lost.
“How fast do humans starve again?” Omen speaks, quiet—a man with no need to eat, staring at him like he could collapse and die any second now. He thinks he’s being stared at but the mutual nature of both of them being masked and the way his eyes are still, regardless of how useless and difficult it’s becoming, fixed on his engine instead of his passenger.
The twilight hour closes in—or, if he is permitted to be the annoying nitpicker he often feels he gets called out for being, the period he would call twilight is the Astronomical twilight. The civil twilight had snuck past with his hands, and head, buried underneath the hood of the car with Omen permitted to occasionally turn the keys in the ignition to see what the problem could be and the nautical twilight, or most of it, had been spent with his phone pressed to his shoulder first to tell Brimstone the situation and then Klara’s voice in his ear asking him if he had checked obvious, easy to fix or identify, things. He’d spent much of it on the brink of shouting ‘yes. I know. This is my fucking car!’ but had entertained every question with emotional control found only through age.
“It’s more of a thirst thing. When people die,” he answers, gloved hands finally grabbing the open hood of his car with intent to push it down and leave his engine just be for the day, look at it again in the morning or whenever he knows he has access to an easy fix, “Your body can take a—well not your body, you don’t eat—surprisingly long time as long as it has water. It’s more of a problem if you start with food too fast after a long time.”
“So you’re not going to starve?” Omen is a pretty monotone man but the relief in his voice is still apparent. Or, maybe, he is good at spotting details in his tone since tiny changes are his specialty. He can probably settle for both Omen having an edge on his voice, usually, that disappears in his moments of relief and that he is one of very few listening close enough to tell things like this, “I was wondering, if I had to steal something for you.”
“Hah! Qalbi, I don’t starve very easily. You don’t have to do anything for me—especially not leave me here all alone to go rob someone,” he laughs, letting the hood fall half on accident by letting go just to hold his hands up—it happens a lot faster than he expected, louder too, makes Omen twitch so harshly it’s like he’s seeing double for a moment. The ‘sorry’ he whispers is quick but the ‘it’s okay’ is faster. He still feels the need to lighten the situation anyway. It’s probably a bad habit but he’s not one to let hurt linger, be it unintended or not. “Besides. I eat shit enough that I wouldn’t starve even if I could. Which I won’t. I ate this week. If anything, I’d just be a little more annoying than usual, eh? Complain and moan and all that.”
Omen hums, maybe not convinced, maybe debating if he’s lying—he’s got a tendency to do it, lying that it is, almost pathologically—he both hides and lies like it’s his natural state to let things spill from his lists. Maybe he’s gone overboard in his attempt to lighten the mood, mentioning his lack of self care. Maybe he’s thinking too much about little twitches of gloved fingers and the little tilts of his neck or maybe the consistent twitching, slowly leaning forward and grabbing knees, means something. He likes to analyse the twitches, to assign meaning to little tics people do. Maybe he’s seeing too much in these ones.
“What’s it like?” Omen asks finally, unclear as ever. He doesn’t even attempt to respond, shrugs his shoulders and waits for him to continue—he just watches him make fists of his hands and cross his arms until he seems to realise he needs to continue, “To be hungry. Or to be starving.”
“Feels pretty bad. Well… no. Your stomach hurting becomes background noise eventually, if you keep yourself busy. It’s weirdly calm when you get to the point where you’re starting to have no energy—things hurting and the feeling of being hungry kind of escape you. When I went to bed really hungry as a kid, I wasn’t scared of the dark because I didn’t have the energy to panic. It’s kind of comforting in that sense. But I’m not scared of the dark anymore so it would probably not even have that going for it now—it’s probably more noticeably painful once you’re closer to actually dying though,” he shrugs while he talks, watches the way Omen continues to sink into himself until the realisation hits him, “Are you cold?”
“I’m always cold.” Omen looks up, faces his mask with his—he can’t really read an emotion behind his movements. Perhaps it truly is just a statement of fact with nothing ulterior to it and this isn’t a moment where he’s been asked for something. He’s not being reprimanded for his broken car or for being in the cold or anything of the sort—Omen doesn’t try to teleport, either, despite all the twitching.
“You know there’s probably some warm spot for you if you just do your thing and leave. I’d be fine on my own.” He would rather die than attempt teleporting with Omen, to be honest. He’s pretty sure he’s split in half, if the attempt was made. Yoru’s abilities have been proven to be safer, having carried other people into the rift and back out before, both radiants and humans, and even that is a painful experience that makes every hair in his body stand up and his head feel like it’s going to be torn apart. Omen’s methods are unconventional, untested, and he is in no hurry to force his bodybag into Valorant’s morgue of a medical bay for Sage to attempt to repair.
“I’m not that cold.” The man attempts to sit up straight, or at least straighter—he is not capable of convincing Cypher, no matter what he does, they both know that much. He’s far too perceptive of the way the spots not hidden by bandages look, of the way he continues to twitch. Now that he’s figured it out, Cypher won’t be tricked again. Omen settles for something else when lying doesn’t work. “I don’t want to leave you.”
“I’d be fine,” he takes his hat off, throws it onto one of the front seats before Omen can manage to even question it, staring at it for just a moment longer than he had intended to just to make sure he hadn’t been too careless with it, “But if you want to stay, I’m not going to force you to leave—but don’t stay for my sake either, I can handle myself for a night.”
“I’m here for a reason.” Omen doesn’t sound that different when he’s amused, maybe not different at all—at a baseline, he thinks Omen may just feel less when he is feeling positive emotions than negative ones, too much of a pessimist to feel strongly about happiness or too afraid of it slipping away or a million different theories he longs to ask him, one by one, like a therapist attempting to diagnose him. He wants to know every reason for every oddity in Omen, and wants to be an expert in the study of him. He wants to write research papers only he gets to read about him, to know every step—the fondness chokes him, a little. “I’m okay being cold if it means being with you.”
His coat isn’t the easiest item of clothing to take off—there’s easier things to do, and he really doesn’t need to do it, but it's almost instinctual to start taking it off anyway. Of course this could be easier if he had the trust to give himself his own eyes, to take off the mask and look at it with squinted eyes and all—his lenses technically make his vision better but his gloves make his hands feel foreign and the green tint of see-in-the-dark technology makes pieces of the fabric blend together more than he’s used to—and he wants to trust Omen, he does. He’s seen beneath the hood before, held his tongue when taunted and called it ‘beautiful’ in moments of vulnerability. But his hands can’t quite find the edges of his mask to take it off, no place feels safe, nothing makes him feel invisible enough.
“If you’re cold,” he finally manages to take the coat off, sleeves still long underneath—both his collarbones and the space right below feel naked and exposed, almost tingle like a poorly healed wound, but he extends his coat with a, thankfully still gloved, hand towards Omen. He twitches, hands still by his sides—he can’t tell if this is confusion at what he’s doing or confusion at the offer, a polite way to refuse his poorly thought out but genuine aid. He doesn’t know what makes him insist if not some old instinct left over from his brief stint with both marriage and fatherhood, used to a child begging to not take a sweater and sobbing about being cold anyway like he’s used to dresses meant for parties so thin in cloth he has to wrap his arm around another body and breathe against hands as soon as the sun comes down. “Come on. I’m offering. Take it.”
“It’s yours.”
He leans forwards further into the car when Omen attempts to move away. With his lean, he has to put the hand not holding the coat on top of his centre console, right by his cup holder, for balance but he manages to not make his day worse by crash landing onto his front seat and puts the coat over Omen’s shoulders, smoothing it out while he twitches at the touch. He can’t decide if he finds the insistence on not taking things from endearing or saddening. Is it a polite gesture like when Sage has to say ‘I can do it but thank you’ three different times before someone can help her or if it’s a shutoff ‘why are you trying to help me’?
“I wouldn’t give it to you if I needed it. I’ve always run—ran—? I hate English.” He hears a sound, not quite a snicker but something close, cascade out of Omen like a waterfall—it’s louder than he expected but it does not fill a room, doesn’t even fill the car, deep and dark but filled with that little bit of whimsy he’s always so glad to see. He likes when Omen manages to stay on this side of ‘neutral’ or ‘numb’. “Listen—I’m not cold is the point! Just.. take it and do whatever you want with it. I don’t want you to be cold either.”
“…Thank you.”
He feels his own smile, hidden beneath his mask—it would probably be weird to say anything else, he supposes, so he sits in his own passenger seat and closes the door behind him while Omen figures out what he wants to do with the coat. He watches when the debate he seems to be having internally, one he desperately wants to be able to hear, to read the transcript of, ends and he goes to put his arms through the sleeves. He watches the ways he struggles with the coat, fascinated by his choices of how to tackle putting it—Omen is definitely as much a human as any other radiant to him, by which he doesn’t know if they qualify technically but he counts them anyway. However, sometimes, the way he moves has something so fascinatingly alien about it that he has to almost reach out and inspect each inch of him and beg to see his brain. He’s a scientist at heart, he supposes, or maybe he feels so disgustingly entitled to knowledge that he has to justify it.
“…You died recently.” Omen starts, looks up with his hands buried within the sleeves of the coat—its a little interesting to see how much he twitches when he mentions the concept of him dying. He, a person used to the sensation, is more worried about the strain it puts on Sage than the feeling of being dead. “Why is it always you?”
“Suppose the choice to wear white?” He laughs. He’s gotten used to the period of being dead, the feeling of both heaviness and weightlessness, a paradox only death can produce—he thinks, if he smoked, he would feel the same way on weed. He’s gotten used to everything but the pain of the return, how Sage looks at him, how useless his body feels when it happens to him again. He’s not shot down as much as his alternative, the man that looks exactly like him, maybe sees the dead face of a love long since lost and rushes forwards to hold her for a second only to come back with a fierce thirst in his throat and aching that reaches his bones.
“Can you try to do it less?” Omen looks at him again, twitching in place—the instability of his form is a known fact but he still feels the need to reach out, to hold on, like the twitching means that he is going to somehow break down and disappear. He can both know things and be tempted to stop the irrational, he thinks, because Omen too must know that he could be the perfect man on the field and bullets would still gravitate towards him.
“Wear white?” He asks, to be funny. Omen almost growls with annoyance, doesn’t find him as funny as he wishes he did and he’s immediately struck by the fact he has nowhere to hide from a serious conversation—he cannot flee, cannot lock himself up in an office to work until the idea of being serious disappears. To discuss hunger, something that feels far away and like he’s better now, but it’s different to discuss the current. He knows himself to be awful for wanting to flee anyway.
“Dying, Amir.” His voice is clear, cuts through his thoughts in half and slows them—it’s the clearest it has been in a while. Omen echoes in every room, rumbles both like a motor and a pleased cat depending on his mood, both quiet and powerful. His body, his existence, his voice and presence all twitch and roll in ways that look concerning when you don’t know him but he finds himself more concerned by how he lacks the noises. “What happens when Sage can’t revive you anymore?”
“How do you expect me to die less?” He laughs, humourlessly but still attempting to be good natured about it—he knows how it feels to grieve alone, to be sitting with his knees to his chest in a broken house with tears that just refuse to escape, refuse to come. He knows the pain of an empty bed, the momentary lapse in memory where you call their name into an empty house as if they could answer. He knows where this comes from. He knows, so intimately, the pain that cleans Omens voice of all the grit that makes it echo—but his mouth can’t quite form the syllables for the words ‘I get it’.
“Value your life.” Omen plays with his wrist, eyes clued to a bandage slowly coming undone—he, too, finds himself drawn to the visual while he waits for him to continue. He knows to keep his mouth shut and not call him a hypocrite because he is both old enough to know this isn’t a fight, to not make it one, and knows that Omen has both the power to teleport away and has a form more flexible around a wound and harder to hit these fatal shots on.
It’s no mistake that, when they’re forced to kill, Cypher’s sheriff knows where to hit his lover's mirror with frightening accuracy—he knows where his heartbeat is strongest from the feeling of a chest pressed against his. He knows where to hit the heart, knows the best blind spot of a mirror version. Omen is, of course, capable of being shot in the head like anyone is. He knows the places where Omen won’t sense the bullet as fast, knows how to strike, knows weaknesses people cannot hope to have Omen express—the horror of having seen his mirror kill his lover must hit Omen as harshly as it does Cypher. It’s both a horrifying kill to get and to witness, nobody wins.
“You shouldn’t let that me kill you so easily.” Omen confirms for him the reality of why he is so upset. Frankly, he finds it a little ridiculous because Omen had been a trained assassin years before all this, had more muscle memory for the feeling of a ghost than writing with a pencil. To die to Omen is not something that shows him as weak but he knows, intimately enough to ache, the feeling seeing Omen take a bullet from a version of him. The look of him crumpling, the feeling in his throat, the pain in his chest and the odd sense of self hatred in the fact he and his clone are both capable of such intimate, hurtful and cruel, violence.
“I’ll try to be more careful.” He can’t promise anything about not dying on the battlefield because, as much of a private military operation as Valorant is, it is still a military operation and death is a guaranteed outcome once in a while but Omen seems satisfied enough with his answer. He moves a hand to tighten up his bandages, doesn’t object when he reaches out to do it instead. “I… I don’t think I want to die anymore. It should be easier to stay safe now.”
“I would take it personally if you did.” Omen faces him again, arm extended to give him a better angle on the bandage—he likes how much more the sound of his voice reverberates this time, more normal, more comfortable and natural and Omen. It sounds a little otherworldly again and that’s the best thing that could happen to his voice. “I have been knitting something for you. If you wanted to die while I was putting in all this effort, I would’ve been angry. I’m joking by the way. I know it’s hard to tell with me.”
“Not for me,” he finishes with the bandages, finds Omen’s wrist and grabs it with another smile—he’s got such a fascination with them, how they manage to be so abnormally thin and delicate but hold strong against recoil, against every attempt by a weapon to push them back. Omen never even complains about shoulder pain when he holds a gun and uses it, let alone wrist pain—something so delicate but so used to violent instruments. He thinks he could write poetry on the divergent nature Omen’s body has and the feelings, good and bad, that brings to him, “I can always tell when you are.”
“And I’m assuming you can tell what I am making.” Omen stares at his hand on his wrist too, thinks about something he can’t possibly know. It’s probably not bad thoughts because there’s no twitching with shame, with anger, with anything—he simply pulses at a steady rhythm underneath his thumb. He has long since figured out this is definitely a pulse becoming more pronounced, most obvious at the wrist like it is for many people.
“Obviously.” He laughs, wraps his hand around the wrist like one would their pinky around another’s when making a promise. “I’ll act surprised either way.”
“Good.” Now, instead of an engine, the shake in his voice sounds like a happy cat—it’s a rumbling like a purring. He can’t help how fond he feels yet again, over and over again—all he can seem to feel is the fondness of the moment like it’s crashing on his heart in waves. “Please act grateful too. It took me a really long time. You know that.”
“I don’t have to act like I am. I am grateful,” he laughs, pressing his forehead against his lover's wrist like a cat pushing up against the leg of an owner to make an affectionate move with his mask still on, “Thank you.”