Chapter Text
Her hands move steadily, the only sound in the otherwise silent apartment that Tobias can hear aside from the faint noise of his own heartbeat, the quiet patter of his vitality. It feels like it might be the only thing he has that resembles vitality these days – he feels muted, silenced by the media that demands his human morph and his girlfriend, who demands nothing, and by doing so silences the instincts of his hawk. He watches Rachel as she bends to her task, scrubbing diligently at the stubborn wine stain on the edge of her favorite white dress. It had been nothing, she had insisted not twenty minutes before, when she returned from some fancy press meeting with Jake. Just got clumsy, babe. Don’t worry about it.
Tobias ruffles his feathers, unsettled, but it garners no reaction from his girlfriend. She gets like this sometimes. Since the war ended, after that final battle where Tobias almost lost the one person who he’s ever truly felt a connection with, Rachel has struggled with something she refuses to name out loud. He hasn’t pressed her – hell, he knows he has his own issues he’s not very good at working through himself – but the helplessness of being unable to fight with her against it is wearing on him. Him and Rachel are partners. Comrades in arms. He doesn’t like it when she tries to fight through things on her own.
The last time she tried to fight through things on her own, he almost lost her.
{Hey Rache?} he asks, going for casual, as the wine stain fades to pink under a violent rush of water.
“Mmm?” Rachel doesn’t bother looking up at him, her eyes still trained attentively on her task, but he gets the feeling that she’s not seeing her poor dress, either. The faint smell of the soap Rachel uses on her hand-wash dresses reaches him as she shakes the skirt out, muted by the hawk’s sense of smell. Tobias is almost temped to morph to human, just to smell it properly, that whiff of Rachel that he associates with fancy clothes and late nights and their first true, proper date.
Tobias drags himself back to the present as Rachel purses her lips at the still-present stain and throws the dress back in the water. He shuffles his talons on the clothes rack he’s perched on. {Think its salvageable?}
She stiffens a little, and he watches her count her way down from wherever she just went, the same way her therapist told her to last week, before she came home and raged about it for an hour and half. Ten, nine, breath in, seven, don’t kill your boyfriend, five, four. “Nothing to salvage it from,” she snaps. “Just a little wine.”
Tobias knows he’s hit some kind of nerve accidentally, knows it’s not her fault, but he’s so tired of taking the brunt of her anger that he bristles before he can stop himself. Before he can speak, however, Rachel ekes out a muffled, “Sorry.” It comes grudgingly and angry, but she’s never acknowledged her random fits of temper before. It’s a step. {You wanna talk about it?} he asks hesitantly, sure he’s about to get a grizzly in his face.
Predictably, Rachel stiffens again, but then she sighs and the fight goes out of her. “No,” she says tiredly. “It was nothing.”
Rachel was wearing tall white heels when she left. Tobias knows, because he morphed human to say goodbye and she laughed at him when she had to lean down to kiss him. Her bare feet look cold on the grey tile floor, mud a thin layer around the pads of her soles, her toenails dark and filthy with miles of dust. {You sure?} he presses after a long moment. He winces at his own words. God, if she wasn’t embarrassed before, she’s going to kill him now.
“Just dropped my glass,” Rachel mutters, scrubbing at the stain again. “That’s all it was.” Her voice sounds weak, though, and with Tobias’s sight he can’t help but notice the faint tremor along the muscles in her back. A bead of sweat drips out of her hairline, and rolls slowly down the side of her face. This close to her, he can pick up the individual fibers on the dress under her hands as the last of the stain bleeds down the drain. Red flecks appear around the beds of her nails as the cuticles tear, but she keeps scrubbing like she doesn’t even notice.
{Do you want to go on a road trip?}
Rachel finally stops and looks up, her eyes clearing of cobwebs, and there’s the Rachel Tobias has been missing. “A road trip?” She smirks at him fondly, and Tobias feels a rush of something entirely human flow through his hawk’s body. “Like, in a car? You can barely drive to the movies with me, babe.”
Tobias feels temped to point out that that was one time, and that he was perfectly justified in getting a little carsick when he hadn’t been in a vehicle since before the war started, but he decides not to press his luck. {Not a…driving road trip. Just a road trip.} A trip away. A few weeks without lunch meetings, without the press and the war and the government. A few weeks for Rachel to be Rachel and Tobias to be Tobias, and for him to lose himself in her all over again. He thinks about being out of the city, out of Rachel’s apartment, in the free and open air. {I hear the Grand Canyon’s nice.}
She laughs in surprise, finally putting down the dress and leaning back against the counter. “You want to drive to the Grand Canyon?”
{Well…maybe not drive.} His wings twitch and he folds them back, even though all he wants to do is fly. Spin and twist and spiral like he hasn’t had time to in weeks. Freefall and play in the updrafts. Join talons and spin and spin and spin. {We could fly.}
Her smile softens into something shy and reverent, and Rachel abandons her laundry and takes the two steps over to him. She runs a finger gently up under his beak and preens it over his head. It’s their version of a kiss in this morph, and this close, Tobias can smell that soap just like he was a human. “We could do that,” she says softly, and Tobias can’t help but morph human after that just to kiss her properly.
~~~~
They don’t end up going to the Grand Canyon, but Tobias doesn’t really mind. They take off on a Tuesday morning with nothing but a credit card and a hundred dollar bill in a little black bag tied around Tobias’s foot, and spend the day chasing each other through updrafts and racing to the top of the next hill. Tobias feels free like he hasn’t in months, and Rachel’s eagle’s scream is strong and clear and powerful, everything he knows his girlfriend is and knows she’s had trouble coming to terms with since the end of the war. By the warmest part of the day, they’ve reached the coast, and Rachel drags him into a thrift shop for proper clothing and bemoans his fashion choices every time he brings something back. He starts picking gaudy things just to upset her, playful like he can’t be with anyone but her, and she laughs like his glee is infectious. It’s not long before she starts trying to outdo him, which is how the two of them end up on the beach in a 60’s polka-dot dress, tiger print swim trunks and a terribly yellow polo shirt, and matching bowler hats. Rachel gloats all the way to the beach that she totally won and looks way more ridiculous than he does, but Tobias can feel himself glowing, because she still looks fantastic and he’s just about ready to burst that nothing-and-no-one Tobias is walking down the street with such a gorgeous creature on his arm.
At the edge of the beach, there’s a patch of scrubby flowers, but Rachel finds two that are perfect and threads them into the ribbons around their hats. She uses a kiss as a distraction and pulls off his awful yellow shirt, laughing as she pulls it over his head and renders his elbows useless, until suddenly she’s sprinting down the beach full tilt, her prize held triumphantly in her hand. Tobias stumbles after her with a laughed-out yell, but he’s not as used to human legs as she is and she beats him to the water. The shirt is gone when he catches up, but he half-tackles her and dips her low enough that her flyaway blond hair catches in the waves, and she shrieks and kicks him. They find a hidden corner of the beach and make out like teenagers (because even though they haven’t hit 20 yet, the two of them have never really been teenagers), and Rachel buries him in sand and builds a castle on his stomach and then tortures him with slow kisses while he’s helplessly buried. They eat terrible beach food when they realise they’re starving, and by the time they finish there’s a dollop of ketchup on Rachel’s new dress and Tobias has finally stopped his back from burning (even though technically, he demorphed behind the dunes an hour ago and came back white as a fish), and they tumble back up the beach to the main town. Rachel cajoles him into windowshopping, which turns into window-arguing about how much weight a red-tailed hawk can carry (“Babe, no. I’m not carrying shoes all the way there and then all the way back.”), and she play-pouts at him until he finds the perfect B&B on the beach where they can stay the night. Rachel insists on hand-delivering the clothes they bought to a charity in the morning while Tobias accustoms his human body to the wonders of caffeine, and then they take off down the coast.
Wednesday and Thursday are repeats of the day before, full of sun and beach and water, and Rachel finds them swim suits by the time they reach a proper swimming beach and they swim until their arms and legs hurt, morph dolphin, and swim some more. Thursday, they hit a town with a carnival parked in the lot just outside, and they spend the night stuffing themselves with greasy doughnuts and cotton candy and riding on the fifty-cent spinning rides until they’re stumbling and giddy. There’s more people here than the beach, though, and Tobias still isn’t good with people. Rachel notices the third time he jumps away from a happy scream, his hair standing on end, which is how they find themselves cuddled up on the Ferris wheel as it creaks its way into the sky.
Rachel makes a content little noise in the back of her throat as the Ferris wheel climbs higher, passing to where the heat and noise of the carnival is muted and distant, and snuggles deeper into the jacket she bought Tobias this morning in a New-To-You in the basement of a church, settling herself firmly under his arm. “This is nice,” she sighs, her words a doughnut-sweet breath against his neck.
Tobias nods solemnly, looking up at the sky as they slowly creak higher. The height calms him, makes it feel more like home, and his eyes track the hills on the horizon where the pink of the sunset is bleeding into the first of the stars. “I’m glad we did this,” he says softly, his fingers absently playing in her hair.
“Me too,” she whispers. After a moment, she slips her fingers into his hand where its resting across his stomach, and he twines his fingers between hers. They stay silent like that for a while, just watching, but when they get to the bottom, Rachel pulls a twenty out of their money pouch and hands it to the operator, and they go around again. Tobias waits, a little confused, and her voice is small when she finally starts talking. They go around and around and around, and the war and the politics and Rachel’s anger and Tobias’s fear passes between them in words and tears and touches.
Tobias thinks that, even though they’ve taken their relationship to a much more physical level in the past few months, this is the closest the two of them have been since the war.
~~~~
They head back home on an inland route on Friday, and spend a lazy night nestled together in someone’s vineyard, counting stars as they fall asleep. Tobias is almost sad to see the first peaks of the towering sky scrapers of their city as it comes into view, but Rachel lets out a happy screech and dips into a playful dive, and he has no choice but to follow. By the afternoon, the two of them are lounging in their own living room again, and the apartment looks dull and boring and yet, surprisingly, feels more like home than it had before they left. There’s a package waiting for them when they arrive, but Rachel won’t let him open it and dances into the bedroom with it with an impish grin plastered across her face, and Tobias morphs human and follows her to make full use of her mischievous mood.
On Monday, when Rachel has already left for work and Tobias is pawing through the closet to find something to wear to some stupid book signing thing with Marco where he actually needs hands, he finds what was in the mysterious package. The 60’s dress from that beach town is hanging between his good suit and Rachel’s favorite white dress, his shorts tucked around the same hanger. He grins at his girlfriend’s tenacity, running a finger over the material of it, and realises Rachel has washed the ketchup stain off already. He pulls it out and inspects it, and realises as the material holds steady that he’s in human morph, about to go out in public, and for once, he isn’t not shaking.
The dress is crisp and clean and smells like summer beaches and Rachel’s soap, and when Tobias holds in close and breathes it in, it feels like the patter his own vitality – valiant and raucous and loud.