Does It Take a Lot of Practice?
In honor of 💚 Aro Visibility Day 💚, I thought I'd share some backstory for a character I haven't introduced yet (not explicitly, anyway).
Everyone meet Akiva! Alloaro Long Rim disaster, my Lancer pilot Jaye's ex-boyfriend. Also a pilot in the current timeline, since he's my backup character. Even though he...hasn't figured out some stuff about himself in this fic, I hope it comes across as someone who's doing the best that they can, they just don't have the words yet.
Oh, and say thank you @suchprettypieces for encouraging me to post. I am easily persuaded, but still need that extra nudge. <3
---
A rainbow of empty Devil! cans littered the makeshift table Akiva and his friends sat around, more than a few resting on the floor. Cups filled with every single combined flavor rested precariously on the edge. Every time someone’s leg bumped the table, they wobbled and threatened to spill, just shy of tipping over.
“Ok- ok. Just let me-” Ash broke off with another fit of giggles. “God, y'all are assholes. Alright. Never have I ever kissed someone I just met.”
---
In the ramshackle hideout jammed between the tavern and the station's cargo docks, shrill teenage laughter bounced off the walls. Little more than an abandoned shipping container, Akiva and his friends had staked their claim years ago, barring entry to intruders and hauling in repurposed junk until the buckled, corrugated walls housed the perfect sanctuary. The perfect nest for a couple of feral station rats.
A rainbow of empty Devil! cans littered the makeshift table they all sat around, more than a few resting on the floor. Cups filled with every single combined flavor rested precariously on the edge. Every time someone’s leg bumped the table, they wobbled and threatened to spill, just shy of tipping over.
Akiva lounged next to Jaye on the cushions and blankets they'd thrown over old packing crates. On top of her, more like it. His best friend looped an arm around his shoulders as he slouched with his back against her side, and her laughter vibrated through her ribs against his spine. A warm mixture of spices from her mothers' tavern clung to her sweater. Every inhale made him relax into her, despite the jitters in his bones from too many energy drinks. He threw his feet over the side of the old, makeshift couch. Their friend Kiran leaned on Jaye’s other side, and the flashing rhythm game on her phone reflected off of her glasses.
Ash waved their free hand at everyone to make the group quiet down. In the other, she held a cup of energy drink abomination, bringing it up to their mouth to hide a smile. They’d claimed the deflated bean bag chair that night, despite her feet popping up from the floor when she sat in it.
“Ok- ok. Just let me-” They broke off with another fit of giggles. “God, y'all are assholes. Alright. Never have I ever kissed someone I just met.”
Akiva nudged them with his foot. With all the caffeine buzzing in his system, he misjudged the distance and nearly knocked her onto her back. “The fuck kind of question is that, man?”
Ash smacked his leg and shooed him away. She held her cup away to keep it from spilling, notably not taking a drink. “Um? A fuckin’ valid one?”
“Who the hell is meeting new people on this rock? It's the goddamn Rim.”
Without saying anything, Jaye reached forward and grabbed her cup off of the table. A chorus of low oooooohs followed her as she took a sip, her eyes crinkling over the rim with delight.
Kiran immediately forgot her game. Ash's brother, Jasper, leaned forward from his spot on the floor, his constantly-fidgeting hands stilling for just a moment.
“Somethin' you’d like to share with the class, Jaye?” Ash asked.
Jaye made a face as the flavor hit, but she calmly set her drink back down and draped a long blue braid over her shoulder. She leaned back against the faded cushions and let her arm settle around Akiva again - as if she hadn’t just carved a neat little chasm down the center of his chest.
“A kid came to the tavern,” she said, “Maybe Jasper’s age - or maybe he was our age and makin’ himself look older. Pretty cute - thought I was cute too. Said he was only stopping for the night, and that-” She pitched her voice down and added an exaggerated rasp to mimic him. “‘-I shouldn’t tell you this, but I’m here with my crew. We’re pirates, you know.’”
Kiran giggled, but Akiva just frowned.
“And you believed him?” he asked. He hadn’t meant for it to come out so harsh, but if Jaye took offense to it, she didn't show it. No one else seemed to notice him either.
Kiran raised an eyebrow. “So, you kissed him?”
Jaye nodded, looking rather pleased with herself.
"When was this?" Jasper asked.
Jaye shrugged. A smug grin tugged the corners of her mouth and broke her casual facade. "A few days ago."
"What?"
Kiran nearly launched herself off of the couch and jabbed a finger at Ash. "You knew!"
"Wha-? No, I didn- I didn't!"
The group devolved into more finger-pointing and chaotic arguing, but Akiva stayed silent. His hands burrowed into his sweatshirt pockets, and he slid further down against Jaye. This was stupid. Jaye was being stupid. Everyone’s reactions were stupid. Who cared what so-called pirate Jaye kissed, or who knew about it beforehand? The hollow space behind his ribs ached a little more.
Ash paused her fight to escape the beanbag chair when she looked his way.
“Hey dude,” she asked. “Are you alright?”
“Oh my god.” Kiran sat up and peered around Jaye, eyes lighting up like a cat spotting an unattended pile of string. “Kivah, are you jealous?”
“What-? No, that’s-” Akiva’s face heated, and his heart kicked in his chest like someone had just pulled a knife on him. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“You totally are! I knew it!”
Akiva’s nails dug into his palms, and he glared at her. “Shut up-”
“Hey,” Jaye said, a warning tone directed at Kiran. “Stop teasing him. I think it’s Jasper’s turn, anyway.”
The arguing died down, and Jasper rocked back against the packing crates as he thought of something to ask. Everyone settled back in their seats, eager to see who would be the butt of the joke for the next round, but Akiva couldn’t quite relax. Something in his stomach – aside from the unholy mix of honey-pomegranate-elderberry-citrus-green tea – refused to settle. Even with his body pressed against Jaye’s, he couldn’t shake the sense that a glass wall had just fallen in front of him, dulling all his senses. Separating him from the rest of his friends. From Jaye.
No one else seemed to notice – just him.
Akiva held onto his best friend's arm across his chest and snuggled against her side a little more. He stayed quiet for the rest of the night.
Two days later, Kiran’s question still wouldn’t leave him alone. He had a time card of observation hours to fill, and this month's assignment was the water recycling plant. The work kept him busy enough, and he could ignore his own thoughts for most of the day. But as the hours ticked by - on the walk to the plant, at least a couple times during his half-shifts, in the seconds of silence between songs when he had his earbuds in - that…gutting feeling returned.
Every time he remembered that stupid game, his stomach turned over on itself. And every time he tried to shove it away, his friend’s voice wormed its way into his head.
Are you jealous?
The more he thought about it, the more annoyed he became. Irritation knotted in his gut like a tangled bit of string, made even worse by the locker for his borrowed PPE refusing to shut. The latch wouldn’t catch, and it nearly clocked him in the face when it bounced back open. He batted it aside with a huff.
Why would Kiran even ask that? When had he ever shown interest in girls or boys or whoever else the way the rest of the group did? He always fell quiet whenever it came up. Hell, he’d been giving Pirate Empress Mei Ling as his celebrity crush for years now, despite not knowing what the concept even was, or how other people chose theirs. He didn’t want any of that. He didn’t care.
And besides…Jaye was his best friend. He’d never thought of her like…like that before. It almost seemed wrong. Furthermore, when Akiva ever did fall in love - maybe, someday, in four or five years from now - he wanted it to be real. Not because someone else put the idea in his head.
At this rate, it seemed like everyone else had figured out what love was except for him. One by one, every member of the group fawned over fictional characters, or admitted to a crush, or asked someone out on a date. It cut a little deeper every time. Akiva had thought…maybe if they grew up together, they could avoid growing apart. He thought-
The locker door bounced open again, and he slammed it shut. The sudden noise turned more than a few heads in the crowded locker room.
Are you jealous?
Akiva didn’t know what he thought. He didn’t know anything.
Maybe he was jealous. Jaye had her vampire romances and her dating sims, and he’d never understood those things, but she’d never asked him to. If they wanted to talk, they talked about something else. Things that interested both of them. And up until now, they’d always had each other.
Four days later, and the question now ricocheted around his skull with the violence of a gunshot in zero gravity. He glowered at the recycling machinery and kept his headphones in until a technician scolded him, and he could barely focus on his checklist over the heavy static in his head.
During their lunch break, when Ash brought up the episode they'd just watched of their favorite bootleg omnidrama, he found himself scowling. It was some low-budget Kav college serial Jaye's family had brought back on one of their runs. It spent more time on the web of relationships and dorm drama than the actual mechs. Tired of the premise without even watching it, Akiva had passed on his turn to borrow the tapes. That didn't stop his friends from talking about it, though.
“Never in my life did I think I would get behind it,” Ash said, “But holy shit. If those two don’t kiss by the end of the season, I’m going to riot. I don't care about the hazing thing."
Akiva resisted the urge to roll his eyes. Next to him, Jaye sat with one leg crossed on their shared bench, the other bumping into his every time she moved. She looked cute with her coveralls tied around her waist. Would he have noticed a few days ago? He tried not to think about it.
She shook her head. “Really? I was rooting for Mielikkoli, personally.”
Ash waved a thumbs-down in Jaye’s direction and booed loudly. Jaye kicked them under the table, and they turned to Akiva.
“Kivah, back me up here,” she said. “They’re totally gonna kiss, right? And it’s SO gonna be better than whatever nonsense is happening between Nikolai and Mielikki.”
On most days, questions like that garnered a simple I don’t know, I haven’t seen it, let me eat my sandwich. Today, it banked the smoldering coals of his anger. He’d shoved it away as hard as he could, but they flared with little blue tongues of fire, and he cracked open his juice a bit harder than necessary.
“None of it’s real,” he said. “The writers care too much about ratings to let either of them be happy. Not much point in caring.”
“Wow.” Ash’s eyebrows shot up, and she threw back a gulp of her smoothie. “Puttin’ effort into being a jerk today, huh?”
"Oh, come on. They’ll be together for one episode before breaking up for no reason. You think interesting storytelling comes out of Karrakis?"
Jaye nudged his shoulder. “Be nice - we all know that. Doesn’t mean we can’t have our fun while we watch, though.”
The spot where Jaye touched him burned under his sleeve. Akiva blinked. He’d expected her to agree with him; now a cold sense of betrayal squeezed the place where his heart should be.
He hunched his shoulders and frowned, then looked back down at his lunch. Jaye's lunch, really, the half that she'd brought for him. She turned back to Ash, and the conversation moved on without him. Kiran’s question returned, pulsing at his temples like a headache.
Are you jealous?
Are you jealous?
How stupid could he be, anyway? Did he really think that he could stop everyone from growing up? That even though Jaye had clearly expressed attraction before, she’d never go after it? Never seek attention from the people she was attracted to? Of course, she'd kissed that pirate at the tavern. The only surprise about this whole thing should have been that it had taken this long for her to do it.
If Akiva didn’t follow after her, did that make him immature? Or - when Jaye did get herself a boyfriend - would she ever want to spend time with him anymore?
Would she, like everyone else in his life, leave him all alone?
When the bell rang at the end of his shift, he tapped out a message on his phone with one hand, only half paying attention to the people walking around him.
AKIVA: you free to hang out today?
AKIVA: got something i wanna talk to you about
KIRAN: sure
KIRAN: everything ok?
AKIVA: totally fine
AKIVA: it’s not serious i promise
AKIVA: just need some advice
Half an hour later, Akiva perched on the roof of his friend’s house and rapped his knuckles on her window.
Kiran shook her head as she let him inside. “Would it kill you to enter my house like a normal person?”
Akiva flashed the points of his teeth. He let his backpack slide to the floor and kicked off his scuffed sneakers. “What, and be predictable?”
“It’s more unpredictable for you to use the door at this point.” The window slid shut. “My folks are fine with people coming over, you know.”
He ignored the slither of unease at the thought of talking to parents of any kind, even if they weren’t his own. “It’s no fun that way.”
“If you say so.” Kiran plopped onto her bed with a little bounce, then held out her hand. “Could you hand me those pretzels? On the desk behind you.”
Akiva turned to find a pile of pretzel rods set next to an ancient and abused tablet reader. The little cloth napkin held enough for two people. He passed them over to his friend, taking a few for himself and idly nibbling the ends.
“You can take more if you want,” Kiran said, snapping a pretzel in half with her teeth. She sat cross-legged on her bed. “Need anything to drink? The neighbors downstairs have tea.”
Akiva shook his head without saying anything. He didn’t reach for any more pretzels, either. He’d been in Kiran’s room before, of course. The band posters and dusty lavender walls weren’t quite as familiar as the warm glow from Jaye’s fairy lights, but they still radiated that same comfort. Someone else’s space - someone else’s home.
But as reassuring as he usually found it, he couldn’t shake the thought that he should bolt out of the window - right out of the room the way he’d come. He tangled the chewed strings from his sweatshirt around his fingers and wondered if it was too late to tell Kiran to forget the whole thing.
“Dude. You can sit down.”
Akiva startled out of his thoughts. Right. Sitting. He pulled out Kiran’s desk chair and sunk down a little stiffly, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and shoving an entire pretzel in his face. His friend raised an eyebrow at him.
“You look nervous as hell. What did you want to talk about?”
He took a deep breath, made shaky by the up and down, up and down, up and down of his leg. Both legs, now. He pressed his hands together and tried to swallow away the dryness in his mouth. Maybe he should have asked for tea after all.
“So…” he said. “Remember how you said - you know, when we all hung out last week. You said I was…jealous? About Jaye kissing that pirate?”
Kiran nodded. “Yeah- wait.” Her eyes lit up the same way they had when she’d asked the stupid question, but she stopped when she saw Akiva’s hackles raise. She visibly reined in her excitement and waved her hand at him. “No, go ahead. I’ll let you finish.”
Akiva’s hands tensed in his lap, and he frowned. “What were you going to say?”
“It doesn’t-” Kiran sighed. Something like guilt twisted her face, and she toyed with the pretzels in her hands. “Look. I shouldn’t have asked that. I didn't think it would make you uncomfortable, but clearly, you're still upset. I’m sorry.”
The apology took him by surprise.
"No, I-" Akiva huffed in an attempt not to give into frustration. "Thank you. That- it means a lot. But I didn’t really come here for an apology. I wanna know what you meant by that."
She blinked. “About you being jealous?”
He nodded.
“Oh. Okay.” Kiran looked to the ceiling and rubbed the back of her neck. “I guess…I meant that maybe, by hearing that Jaye had kissed someone else, it made you…wish you'd kissed her instead. You two are really close.”
Akiva frowned. The implication made the back of his neck flash heat. Was that what this was? He hadn't really…considered wanting to kiss someone before - not anyone he knew, anyway. He'd had fantasies, of course. Dreams that made him blush to remember, a nebulous want that came and went. But never attached to someone specific.
In a five second experiment, he thought about kissing Jaye. The scene unfolded like one of Ash's shitty omnidramas. He’d hold her close and press his lips against hers. He imagined her rising on her toes, but then he remembered she'd grown taller than him over the past few months. So, he'd rise up to her, then. She'd smell like cloves and nutmeg, like she always did. It would be soft, and sweet, and…and…
The images blurred as soon as he conjured them, slipping away the second he brought them into focus. He couldn’t make them real.
“Are there other reasons someone could be jealous?” he asked. “Besides the kissing thing, I mean.”
“Oh, sure. If you're jealous it could mean you want a relationship with the other person. You know - spend time with them and hold hands on dates and stuff.” She paused. “General ‘you’, of course.”
Of course. Akiva stared at his hands. Heat climbed up from his neck and warmed his cheeks, and all the words that he wanted to say piled up at the front of his mind like some cartoonish multi-transport collision. He’d make himself sick if he didn’t get them out, but the idea of actually saying them made him want to bolt out the door and never look back. He took a deep breath before continuing.
“...How do I know if I'm attracted to someone?”
Kiran stayed quiet for a moment. Akiva couldn’t bring himself to look her in the eye. He focused on trying to disappear into the floor instead.
“Well. It's different for every person, I guess,” she said. “You care about them. Want to be with them all of the time. Sometimes you get the urge to touch them, or want them to touch you. And it doesn't have to be touching touching, you know? It could just be a hand on their arm, or bumping them under the table or something.”
A feeling like a heavy stone weighed down in his stomach. He remembered Jaye’s knee nudging his from earlier that day, and the room’s temperature spiked about ten degrees. “Oh.”
“There’s aesthetics too - though I guess, not always,” Kiran continued. “You think they’re hot. You enjoy looking at them and get flustered if they sit next to you or bump you by accident.”
Akiva wrung his hands together. His forehead ached from frowning so much. He supposed…all of that made sense. Jaye was very pretty. And he liked hanging out with her, being her friend. Sometimes, she’d hug him from behind and bury her face between his shoulder blades, and his brain would short-circuit until she let go. He wanted to press his hands to his mouth and scream.
“I’ve just-” He raked loose curls out of his eyes and let his leg bounce up and down again. “This whole thing's been driving me nuts. Just, all week. I like Jaye. I really, really do. But she’s always been my friend, and I’ve never wanted to change that. But now she’s apparently chasing after people she’s attracted to, and I don’t do that. I don’t really want to? But I can't stop thinking about it, and that has to mean something, right? If you can't stop thinking about something, it has to mean something.”
“It can, yeah.”
"And…and…if her kissing someone else bothers me so much, that must mean I’m jealous, right?"
Kiran didn't say anything. Akiva swallowed hard.
“I think…I think you’re right. I am jealous.” Hearing the words out loud again made them resonate and echo in his head. His mouth went dry, and the pattern of Kiran’s carpet blurred a little as he stared at it. He stopped, out of breath and finally out of things to say, and looked up at his friend. “I don’t know what to do.”
Kiran kept her hands folded in her lap, staring at him across her room calmly and without judgment. “Would you want to ask her out?”
“I wouldn’t want to date anyone if it wasn’t her.” Akiva bit the inside of his cheek and looked at the wall. “I don’t want her to leave me.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he caught Kiran's expression soften. She held her arms open for a hug. “Hey- Kivah. Come here.”
He gave himself a few moments to breathe away the burning behind his eyes. Akiva stood and slunk across the room, ducking his head like a dog with its tail between its legs. He climbed onto Kiran’s bed and let her pull him against her side. The springs creaked with the weight of an extra person, but the blankets and pillows underneath him were soft, and Kiran’s arms squeezed his shoulders until he forgot his anxiety.
“We're not leaving you, buddy,” she said. “I promise. If you wanna ask Jaye out, I can help you - but if you don’t, that’s okay too.”
He nodded without saying anything. He didn’t fully trust his voice to stay steady. Kiran brisked her hand over his arm and jostled him a bit, and he linked his hands around her ribs to stay holding onto her.
“Feel better?” she asked.
Akiva nodded again. “I don’t even know what to do with a girlfriend.”
Kiran laughed, but it didn’t feel malicious. “You hold hands. Go on dates. Share each other’s ice cream. Kiss, sometimes.”
His nose wrinkled. “I don’t…I don’t know if I want to do any of those things.” He shifted in his friend’s arms, still not wanting her to let go. “Is it enough to just tell her I like her? And that I want to keep spending time with her?”
“Sure. If that’s what works for you. There aren’t really any rules for dating someone, just what makes you happy.”
He could work with that. All of that other stuff…it sounded too much like the plot of a romance novel. He didn’t think he could do any of it and not feel like he was playing pretend. But he already spent more time at Jaye’s house than his own, so much so that her parents set out four places at the table whenever he came over, not even asking if he’d like to stay for dinner anymore. Not much really…needed to change, he didn't think.
“Do you think you could- you know. Help me figure out what to say? If I decide to ask her out, I mean.”
Kiran gave him another squeeze before pulling away. She held him at arm’s length and smiled warmly. “I’d love to.”
---
Akiva sat on the roof of the Faulkner’s tavern, legs crossed, knee rubbing against Jaye’s as she sat next to him. The overhead lights of the station dimmed with the afternoon hour, a simulated sunset.
“So,” he said.
Jaye beamed at him. “So.”
“We’re dating, now, I guess.”
Jaye nudged his shoulder with her own and giggled. “Yeah.”
A bubble of nervous laughter tumbled past his lips, and he fixed his eyes on his hands in his lap. He worried at the chipped black varnish on his nails, but forced himself not to pick at it. “What do we do now?”
“We can just keep sitting here.”
“...Ok.”
Jaye leaned back on her hands and looked out over the station terminal, at the half dozen or so ships docked for replenishing supplies. Warm yellow light reflected off of her hair, making the blue shine in a soft glow. The two sat here often to watch the traffic come and go, oftentimes joking about which ones looked the easiest to sneak aboard. Wondering which ones were secretly pirates, or when the Starwatcher would show up next, her family tumbling out with new faces among them, new stories from the void. Akiva shifted in place.
“Do I…” His shoulders hiked up to his ears. “Am I supposed to kiss you now?”
Jaye giggled. “Not if you don’t want to.”
Akiva looked back at his hands as his ears and cheeks warmed.
“...Do you want to?”
He stiffened, eyes widening with sudden panic. Jaye returned to watching the spaceships.
“No,” she said, as if reaching a decision. “We don't have to.”
She closed her eyes and leaned against him. After a few breathless seconds, Akiva let himself relax into her weight. He filled his lungs with air to savor the quiet that had settled between them. The familiar smell of cloves and nutmeg calmed him, but something still weighed on his mind. He gnawed his bottom lip until he summoned the nerve to say it out loud.
“If you’re my girlfriend now,” Akiva started, still avoiding looking up at Jaye, “Does that mean we have to stop being friends?”
Jaye erupted with a short laugh. She covered her mouth to try and hide it (not very successfully), and shook her head. “I’m sorry. I'm not laughing at you. People are generally friends with whoever they’re dating. I’m fine with keeping things the way they were before all of this. You’re my best friend, after all.”
Something in Akiva’s chest uncurled, a coiled spring unwinding, and he perked up. Relief washed over him stronger than he expected. “Really?”
“Of course.” She said it so casually, so matter-of-fact. “Why do you think I let you stick around all of these years?”
Akiva shrugged one shoulder and tried to look away casually. “I figured you just couldn't get rid of me. Like a stray cat or something.”
Jaye nudged him again, and he nudged her back. It felt right. Natural. Just like it always did.
“You're silly,” she told him. “But also very cute.”
If he hadn't been blushing before, he certainly was now. It only got worse when she hugged his arm and pulled him close. She propped her chin on his shoulder and looked up at him.
“We’re having fried rice for dinner, by the way,” she said. “You wanna help?”
“Y-yeah. Of course.”
She grinned. “Great. Come on, let's go back inside.”
Jaye tucked her feet under her and scuttled back toward her open bedroom window. Akiva followed after her, but before she could step out into the hall, he grabbed her wrist.
“Hey, could you-?” He grimaced and lowered his voice. “Would you mind if we didn't tell your parents just yet? I…I don't think I'm ready.”
Jaye's surprise softened into an understanding smile. “Not at all. Take your time.”
Before he could react, she stepped forward and planted a kiss on his cheek. She giggled furiously, and the sound followed her as she opened her bedroom door and darted down the hall. Akiva blinked at nothing in dumbstruck surprise, feet stuck to the floor. The place where his heart used to be pulsed a little, like maybe it wasn't empty after all. The corner of his mouth curled up.
He laughed, and ran after her.