New piece for my Ocean's Echo fan characters! Masterpost here.
Saelin Cor had long since stopped judging the people around him for the stray, incidental thoughts that flitted past his awareness like minnows. A lot of them were just silly and shallow. Many were unreasonable - petty, unfair, disproportionately angry.
Most people knew it, too. It just wasn’t something anybody could help.
What mattered the deeper patterns of thought that Saelin had to focus on to sense. Actual intention, action and deliberate choices.
Saelin could quite happily judge people on those.
Davi had just had a whole morning full of briefings and seminars. It would have been nice if Saelin could be excused from that kind of thing, since Davi would send him all the information he needed to know and nobody ever asked his opinion. People rarely even acknowledged him where he sat beside Davi (or sometimes slightly behind, which felt just great). But that didn’t seem to be allowed.
Now, as they walked down the corridor into the mess hall, past the streams of military personnel, Saelin took a deep breath and steadied himself against the flash and flutter of hungry, thirsty, I can’t believe he did that, ugh what is taking this bitch so long, wow look at them, longing…
“If you go get the food, I’ll get coffee,” Davi said, turning away.
A quick scan of the crowded mess hall didn’t detect any of the handful of people he knew, so Saelin didn’t have any real cause to object to Davi’s assumption that they’d sit together. Probably with some of the other pilots, none of whom were synced except Davi. Fantastic. Exactly what I need.
Saelin wove his way between the crowds of people, through the billowing clouds of noise that nobody but him ever perceived, towards the food lines.
… did she see me, Lights my back hurts, for fuck’s sake not this guy again…
And it was then, collecting his tray and weaving his way through the crowd, that Saelin realised he had gone all day without once consciously thinking about the sync bond or the looming counterweight of Davi Antrell’s mind on the other end of it.
It was just… there. He had not thought about it.
He wanted to throw the tray in his hands. The urge, the need to do it rose up in his chest and made his hands tremble; he wanted to dump its contents on the ground and fling the whole thing as hard and as far away from him as possible. Maybe it’d break. He wanted to break it against the ground, and scream or cry, and run. To break something, to make noise, to show some kind of external sign of the horror and grief and rejection that pressed against his skin. No. No. No. Can’t.
He’d been here for six months.
And this was normal now.
Saelin took a deep breath, resettled the weight of the tray in his hands, and resumed walking. Probably the mugs and bowls wouldn’t have broken anyway, he told himself distantly. Not the way he wanted them to.
He was aware of the sync bond now. So was Davi; there was no way he wouldn’t have felt that sudden tempest of emotion. Here he was now, sliding alarm, inquiry and concern down the bond.
Saelin pushed back, more firmly than he probably should have. No need. Wait.
When Saelin slid the tray onto the table and dropped into the seat beside him, Davi frowned at him.
“What was that?” he asked, aloud, but under his breath.
“Nothing,” Saelin said.
Irritated concern pulsed across the sync. “Did somebody say something to you?”
The protective edge to the question was annoying. “No.”
“Saelin…” Davi glanced behind Saelin, his eyes scanning across the crowded mess hall. “Don’t pretend you didn’t flip out just now. If somebody did or said something, you need to tell me about it.”
No, I don’t, Saelin wanted to say. In fact, if I were being bullied, telling you so you could pull rank on whoever it is would probably not result in anyone thinking better of me.
The murmuring of thoughts pressed in around Saelin, distracting him from the conversation. Someone two tables back was engaged in a furious argument with the supervisor they’d just left, sitting alone and stabbing a fork at their meal viciously.
The non-synced pilot sitting across from Davi was carefully keeping his face blank and wondering with queasy fascination about the sync bond and what it felt like.
“Agent Thirty-two…”
He needed to give more than this, he realised, Davi didn’t respond well if Saelin gave him nothing.
He sighed, put his hands up to massage his temples as if they hurt. They didn’t, yet. “Nobody said or did anything wrong,” he managed to say. “I just - it’s just one of those days. Nearly dropped something, and I just... Overreacting to minor inconveniences. You know how it is.”
Davi’s face cleared slowly. “Okay,” he said. “Yeah, I get it.”
That was an odd thing about this. Saelin had thought, when this began, that the sync bond would let Davi hear his thoughts the way he heard everybody else’s. That it would convey reader powers onto Davi somehow, even if it was just Saelin it worked on.
It didn’t. Unless they were sunk really deep into the sync, one bilobed mind with the ship as its metal body, Davi had no more idea of what Saelin was actually thinking than anybody else did. Emotions came across if Saelin wasn’t careful, intentions sometimes, but conscious thought? No. Saelin could still lie to him.
“You always do get a bit oversensitive at lunch,” Davi said, offhandedly. “Low blood sugar or something?”
And every so often Davi would say something that showed two things simultaneously: that he was actually paying attention to Saelin’s moods and preferences. And that he no more understood what powered those moods than Saelin understood the inner workings of the coffee dispenser.
Saelin fought back another wave of grief and refusal, took a deep breath. He swiped his coffee from Davi’s tray and used it as an excuse not to speak for a moment.
Caffeine made his barriers worse, if anything. But the coffee was the way he took it; Davi remembered without asking now, just as Saelin remembered to snag an extra bread roll and ignore the dessert option when he got Davi’s food.
He kind of wished he had gotten the wrong things on purpose. But that was one of those mean, self-destructive little impulses he already knew decent people pretended they didn’t have.
He should give Davi credit for trying, should extend that little bit of grace that said ‘he didn’t mean that to come out as rude as it did, let it go’.
Saelin didn't want to.
“Or something,” he mumbled. “Sure.”
