🍲 Soup: share a snippet where a character does something kind.
:D
Thanks for the ask 💜 If by kind you mean lovingly enabling a friend's alcoholism, I think this fits?
Also, thanks for giving me a reason to share some Rafe and Freyja interaction. Platonic physical affection between people who are aggressively protective of each other but hate almost everyone else is one of my favourite things to write.
I head to Subomnia for the first time since before the mission because there’s something better about a drink you don’t have to pour yourself. Freyja’s perched on the bar, feet swinging, holding court over a bunch of wasted assholes hanging on her every word. She’s good at that. People shut up and listen to her. She knows how to rule a room when it suits her.
She sees me and jumps down, runs over and launches herself at me in a full-body assault, wrapping her arms around my neck and her legs around my waist. “If you keep staying away for so long, I’m going to think you don’t love me anymore.”
I walk over to the bar and set her down on it, but she doesn’t let go. I know she’s winding me up, but there’s something about her voice that makes it feel like maybe she needs some reassurance. “No way,” I tell her. “You’ll always be my number one girl.”
She knows how I mean it and how I don’t mean it. Plenty of people say shit like that to her all the time, but it isn’t the same coming from someone who doesn’t want what they want from her.
Now she lets go, but she doesn’t move away. “Where have you been, baby?”
I rest a palm on either side of her face, taking in what it looks like when someone’s just happy to see me. “Work.”
She reaches up and holds my hands, then a flicker of recognition crosses her face. “Woah. Are those new?” There’s a way grafts feel when you touch them with other grafts, a kind of interference pattern.
“Yeah.”
I trail my fingertips along her bare skin from her shoulders to her wrists, as if I’m the kind of person who knows how to be gentle. She smiles at the subtle electric buzz we can both feel, but it doesn’t knock the worry out of her voice. “What happened?”
I don’t want to talk about it. “Shit hit the fan. I don’t remember the details.”
She nods like she gets it, like there’s something in her head that’s weighing her down and it won’t let her go. “Sometimes it’s better that way, right? The details aren’t always worth remembering.” She touches my hands for a moment longer, then climbs down to the other side of the bar, gets a bottle of whiskey with only a little out of it, and sets it in front of me. “Here,” she says. “Forget as much as you want. On the house.”
