Teaser btw as I keep trying to work on longer Shepherds projects. I know I keep not specifically telling y’all what’s up with Rock and @skeletorific’s Ottilie but maybe it will begin to become apparent >:)
…..Also we haven’t actually worked out the plot details enough for me to promise you this conversation happens in the story’s final form. I was noodling—
Setting: the usual "they are away on a mission somewhere in a group"
~
“So they have to kill me first,” Rock repeats, as if Chase hadn’t heard it the first time. Not just one step out of arm’s reach, but two, because he understands Chase to be fast. Not afraid for his own life. Autonomy. Afraid for autonomy.
That’s the correct thing to be afraid for. That’s exactly the thing Chase was willing to take if he had to. Ugly, to think it, but Rock knew he had been thinking it for the past months. Nothing permanent. But call a spade a spade. Call suicide watch by all its parts.
Chase knows Rock read that off him the con man way, not the Dulcetis one. He has felt Rock’s magic before.
…That could have been done in a deliberately palpable way, to make Chase believe that he would always be able to feel it, but watching Rock’s work has made him sure. Chase lagged a step behind. Watched the sway after Rock stepped out of their heads. Got curious about theory with Red, with Ottilie when she’ll put up with him.
You always feel it. You might not always know when he’s in there— although Chase knows himself well enough to suspect that he would— but you know something has happened to you, when he leaves.
If Rock pulls out of any of their heads, all of them would know immediately who to look at first. At least, anyone who knows even a little magic theory knows.
And so. Speaking of.
“You and Red are in on this,” Chase says, taking a step back. Hands held up and empty, as much as he would like to take a pause to set his weapons on the ground. He shows his cards. He shows enough cards, one at a time like a hostage exchange, at least Rock knows it’s in character. Getting weird and unpredictable would be a lot worse.
Rock is fragile. He’s walking on a rope and what kind of rope that is depends on exactly how Chase holds onto his end of it.
Show enough cards. I’ve noticed you two. I have been watching like you suspect I have. I have seen more than you would like.
Anyone would know that much. “You were in his head all day yesterday. He’s in your head now?”
“Maybe.”
“Okay. If you room with him tonight, are you gonna sleep?”
“What— the Hael do you— gods, Chase, we’re not—”
“You won’t sleep around me. Right, Sunshine? If you’re wrong and you could’ve put this talk off until tomorrow, you’re not gonna sleep, because you don’t know what I’ll do about it. About her. The two of you could take shifts though.”
ChaseRock happening to me again take this unfinished thing. Suggestive but only suggestive
—
Time goes on and Chase and Rock expand the number of things they know inside each other. And palpate the negative space of what they do not.
Rock: Chase’s molars on the pad of his thumb. That his eyes keep moving, under his eyelids. Footsteps he begins to recognize offhand from a hundred yards away— he turns one day in the middle of the compound and is sure he looks foolish, that people would see and think him pulled to Chase like some kind of little mutt hearing its person come up the path to the door. In reality there were some looks but no comments. That I need your words is asking for a very fragile favor.
Chase: The footsteps, he’d started recognizing a long while ago. The flattening of the breath that means Rock did not learn how to say actually, never mind, and the sound that means Rock did not learn how to say please, again. Where the claws are and how to get them, or let them retract. The support struts in his knees that are tied to the throat.
Rock: That Chase has heard him mumble things in his sleep. That someone— his money is on Briony— also told Chase what it means when a person’s handwriting slants to the left, and that he’s also begun to slant his to the right. That Chase knows where the claws are.
Chase: The difference between being spoken with in his head and hey, just checking that you’re here. That the second feels so inanimate he would think he just swallowed weird or had a headache coming on. What pitch to the shoulders means he would rather be touched than asked.
Rock: Which leaps are taken simply because the acrobat does not care about falling. That Chase knows which Rock is going to be behind any closed door before Rock has decided.
Chase: That sometimes he has a bit of a headache coming on and it is mostly a brushing of a handhold. That he would rather be a handhold in the sense of a cliff face than in the sense of. That Rock knows which leaps don't care whether they land.
