Chapter Text
The hotel on the far rim of Acmetropolis had been built after the last meteor shower, when the city still believed that glass and chrome could keep the future from leaking in. Its lobby smelled of ozone and synthetic citrus. The clerk, a tired crane with a badge that flickered between languages, tapped the reservation twice and then looked up with the particular apology of someone who has already decided that the guests will not like the truth.
“One room,” he said, and the words landed between Tech E. Coyote and Rev Runner like a dropped wrench. “The convention absorbed the rest. One bed. I can offer extra towels.”
Rev’s crest feathers lifted a fraction, the way they always did when his body received news before his mouth had finished arranging it. He bounced once on the balls of his feet, gloves squeaking against each other, and then he laughed the laugh he used when he intended to make a problem smaller than it was. “One-bed-is-fine-we’ve-slept-in-worse-right-Tech-remember-the-vent-shaft-over-the-core-reactor-that-time-Duck-teleported-us-into-the-wrong-maintenance-closet—”
Tech set his travel case down with the precision of a man placing a detonator he did not yet wish to arm. His green uniform caught the lobby light and threw it back in quiet rectangles. He adjusted the strap across his chest, not because it needed adjusting, but because his hands required an occupation that was not reaching for the roadrunner standing too close. “The vent shaft,” he said, voice low and even, “had the courtesy of being vertical. Gravity, at least, understood the assignment.”
Rev’s grin faltered only at the corners. He rubbed the back of his neck, talons whispering against the red of his collar, and looked at the clerk as if the clerk might yet produce a second mattress from the air. The clerk did not. The elevator accepted them both with a sigh of hydraulics that sounded, to Tech, uncomfortably like a verdict.
The room was smaller than the schematic had promised. A window looked out over the river of lights that was the eastern expressway. The bed occupied the center of the floor the way a theorem occupies the center of a proof: inevitable, and slightly accusing. One pillow. One quilt the color of old brass. A lamp that hummed when Rev flicked it, because Rev flicked everything, because stillness sat on him like a coat two sizes too tight.
Tech stood with his back to the door and catalogued exits. There were two. Neither of them led away from the fact that Rev Runner, descendant of the bird his entire lineage had spent centuries failing to catch, was already toeing off his boots and talking about the mission briefing as if talking could sand the edges off the night.
“Zadavia-said-the-signal-originates-from-the-old-Acme-freight-yards-and-Lexi-picked-up-that-harmonic-spike-again-the-same-one-from-last-month-when-Duck-almost—” Rev stopped. He sat on the edge of the mattress and the springs complained. His hands, usually a blur, went still on his knees. “When Duck almost lost her.”
Tech’s ears tipped forward before he could stop them. He set his glasses on the nightstand with a click that felt louder than it was. “Duck did not almost lose her,” he said. “He found her. There is a distinction, even if he spent the following week pretending the distinction was heroism instead of terror.”
Rev looked at him then, really looked, the way he looked at blueprints when the numbers refused to lie. His pupils were dark in the cheap lamplight. “You-saw-his-face-after. In-the-medbay. He-wasn’t-posing.”
Tech had seen it. He had been the one holding the scanner while Danger Duck sat on a gurney with his feathers flattened and his usual swagger folded small, watching Lexi Bunny breathe through an oxygen mask because the villain’s frequency had found the exact pitch that could unmake a rabbit’s inner ear. Duck had not made a single joke. He had held her hand as if the hand were a live wire he had decided, at last, not to drop. Later, in the corridor, Duck had told Ace that he was fine, that he was always fine, and Ace had believed him because Ace needed to believe that someone on the team still knew how to lie prettily.
Tech had not believed him. Tech believed in data, and the data of Duck’s silence had been louder than any quip.
“They have been circling that particular gravity well for two years,” Tech said, unfastening the high collar of his uniform with fingers that wanted to tremble and were not permitted to. “Lexi calls him insufferable. He calls her the only person who has ever made him want to be less of a spectacle. Last week he asked me, in the laboratory, whether a man who has spent his life performing courage can learn the quieter kind. I told him courage is not a performance if the audience is one rabbit who already knows every trick.”
Rev’s mouth opened and closed. A soft sound escaped him, not quite a meep, not quite a word. He pulled his knees up onto the bed and wrapped his arms around them, a compact knot of red and gold. “That’s—that’s really something, Tech. That’s—she-deserves-that. He-does-too-even-if-he’d-never-say-it-out-loud-without-turning-it-into-a-bit.”
“Yes.” Tech hung his jacket on the single chair. The room had begun to smell like them already: metal polish and the faint sweet dust of Rev’s feathers, ozone from the speed that never quite left Rev’s skin. “Which is why we are going to sleep, and in the morning we are going to the freight yards, and we are going to be colleagues who share a professional inconvenience. That is the entire shape of this evening.”
Rev’s laugh this time was smaller. He lay back without asking permission of the quilt and stared at the ceiling as if the ceiling might offer a second bed if he stared hard enough. “Colleagues. Right. Professional. Super-professional. The-most-professional-two-heroes-who-definitely-don’t-think-about—” He bit the sentence off and rolled onto his side, facing the window, presenting Tech with the line of his back and the restless twitch of his tail feathers.
Tech turned off the lamp.
Darkness did not help. In the dark, Rev’s breathing became a metronome Tech’s regeneration could not outpace. The bed was narrow in the way cheap hotel beds are narrow: mathematically adequate and emotionally punitive. Tech lay on his back and counted the seconds between Rev’s inhales. He made it to four before Rev shifted, and the shift brought the heat of a roadrunner’s shoulder against a coyote’s upper arm.
Neither of them moved away.
“Your family,” Rev whispered into the dark, as if the dark were a confessional that would not report them to Ralph Runner, “still sends you those letters. The ones that talk about bloodlines and the proper order of things. Pa still won’t say your name without calling you ‘that coyote.’ Ma tries. Rip just stares. I keep telling them you’re the reason half their gadgets even work, that you fixed the harmonic stabilizer on Pa’s old line when I couldn’t, that you’re—” His voice frayed. He turned his face into the pillow. “I keep telling them you’re my friend.”
Tech’s throat worked. He stared at the faint geometry of the ceiling and thought of his own mother, who still kept a framed schematic of a rocket that had never caught anything worth catching, and of the way she had touched his face the last time he visited and said, very gently, that friendship with a roadrunner was a noble experiment and experiments, historically, exploded. He had not told her that the experiment had already detonated, quietly, years ago, in a laboratory at three in the morning when Rev had fallen asleep on a stool with his cheek on Tech’s schematic and Tech had not woken him for forty-seven minutes.
“Friend is an accurate term,” Tech said, and the accuracy tasted like rust. “It is also an incomplete one. Incompleteness, however, is a condition we have both agreed to inhabit.”
Rev made a sound that might have been a laugh if it had not broken in the middle. His hand, traveling without permission from its owner, found Tech’s wrist on top of the quilt. The contact was light. It was also the entire room.
“I-know-we-said-we-wouldn’t,” Rev murmured. His thumb rested against the tendon of Tech’s wrist, counting a pulse that Tech could not slow. “Heroes first. Families second. The-team. Acmetropolis. All-the-reasons-that-are-good-reasons. I know them. I can recite them faster than I can run. I just—” He exhaled, and the exhale warmed the side of Tech’s neck because at some point in the last minute Rev had closed the last of the distance. “I just wish the reasons were less good.”
Tech turned his head. In the grainy dark he could see the wet shine of Rev’s eyes. He could see the small, traitorous tilt of a beak that had spent the day smiling at civilians and was done, for one night, with smiling. Logic arranged itself into a sentence about duty. The sentence dissolved before it reached his mouth.
He lifted the hand that was not captured and set it, carefully, against the side of Rev’s face. The feathers there were softer than any schematic had a right to predict. Rev leaned into the touch as if leaning were the only speed he had left.
“If I kiss you,” Tech said, and his voice had dropped into the register he used for truths he did not intend to publish, “I will not be able to unsay it in the morning. I am very good at unsaying things. I would prefer not to discover the limit of that talent tonight.”
Rev’s eyes closed. His lashes—ridiculous, dark, wasted on someone who moved too fast for most people to notice them—brushed Tech’s thumb. “Then-don’t-unsay-it. Just—just for the length of one night. One-bed. One-stupid-hotel-that-couldn’t-even-give-us-a-cot. Please, Tech.”
The please undid the last of the architecture Tech had built around himself since college, since the first time a roadrunner with rocket skates had crashed into his lab and called him a genius without irony. He closed the distance.
The kiss was not elegant. Rev made a small startled sound against his mouth and then another sound that was not startled at all, and Tech’s hand slid from cheek to the back of Rev’s neck where the crest feathers began, and the quilt tangled around their knees because there was no extra room in which to be careful. Rev tasted like the mint he always stole from the tower dispensers and like speed itself, a bright mineral sharpness. Tech kissed him as if kissing were a problem he had been designing a solution for in secret for years, which was, if he were being precise, exactly the case.
When they parted, Rev’s forehead rested against Tech’s. His breath arrived in uneven packets. “Okay,” he whispered. “Okay. We can still be friends in the morning. We can. I’m-very-good-at-pretending-too.”
Tech did not answer with words. He drew Rev in until the roadrunner was tucked against the line of his chest, one arm a careful weight across Rev’s back, and he listened to the city move beyond the glass. Friendship, he thought, was a word that would have to stretch. In the morning they would stretch it. Tonight the bed was only wide enough for the truth.
Rev fell asleep first, because Rev’s body burned through everything—calories, conversation, fear—at a rate the rest of them could only admire. Tech remained awake long enough to memorize the exact pressure of a sleeping roadrunner’s hand fisted in the front of his undershirt. He did not call it anything. He did not need to. The night had already named it.
Toward dawn a siren moved along the expressway far below, and Rev stirred without waking, making a small questioning sound against Tech’s collarbone. Tech’s hand found the back of Rev’s head and stayed there, a weight that said remain. In the thin gray that preceded official morning he allowed himself a full minute of imagining a life in which this configuration of limbs was not an exception granted by a clerk’s shortage of keys. He imagined a kitchen. He imagined Rev talking at a speed the coffee could not match. He imagined not having to unsay anything when the light arrived. The minute ended because minutes do. He kept the imagining anyway, folded small, like a schematic he was not ready to show the team.
When Rev woke he did it the way he did most things: all at once. His eyes opened and found Tech already watching him, and for a fraction of a second there was no performance in his face at all, only a soft, stunned recognition. Then the world returned—the mission, the freight yards, the families, the word friend waiting in the hallway like a coat they would both have to put on. Rev touched Tech’s mouth with two fingers, a goodbye that refused to be one, and whispered, “We can carry it. We don’t have to drop it just because the sun came up.”
Tech kissed those fingers because leaving them unkissed would have been a lie larger than the one they were about to walk back into. “We will carry it,” he said. “Quietly. Until quiet is no longer the price of keeping it.” They rose. They dressed in the choreography of men who had shared cramped spaces on missions before and who were now pretending this cramped space had been the same kind. Rev tied Tech’s collar for him and let the gesture last a second longer than a friend’s gesture should. Tech smoothed a crest feather that had bent against the pillow and did not apologize for the intimacy of knowing which feather it was. Then they left the room, and the bed, unmade, kept the shape of them for the housekeeper like a secret it had not been paid to keep.