I Am the Strongest Femboy, So Stop Protecting Me!-Chapter 35: Quiet Morning.

The room hadn’t really changed much when Aris came to again. His consciousnesses came in droves as always, the feeling of touch first, then his hearing, then his vision, his awareness and finally, his connection with mana itself.

Surprisingly enough, he was feeling somewhat rested.

This was suspicious, off putting, even.

He lay still for a moment, cataloguing the room the way he catalogued everything, though slower this time with the grogginess of deep sleep still clinging to him. Methodically, without moving, he let his awareness expand before his body committed to being awake. The mana in the space had settled overnight into something calmer, the agitated density of the previous evening smoothed out the way turbulent water smoothed after the thing disturbing it had stopped. The medical equipment beside Regulus’s bed ticked in its steady rhythm. The curtain was still drawn.

He turned his head.

Silas was asleep in the chair he’d pulled up sometime in the night, arms folded, head dropped to one side, breathing with the deep uncomplicated rhythm of someone who had decided to sleep and had simply done it, which was, Aris thought, extremely impressive. The jacket was still on. He’d apparently not considered removing it a worthwhile investment of energy before losing consciousness.

’I should tell him to fix it before the meeting.’

Amari was at the table. Asleep sitting up, cheek resting on her folded arms, notebook closed beneath her elbow, pen still in her hand. Her breathing was slow and even. There was something almost ethereal about the way she slept—contained, precise, even unconscious taking up exactly the space she’d decided to take up.

Virginia was in the chair by the door.

She was not asleep.

She was sitting with the composed stillness of someone who had been awake for the full four hours and had chosen to spend them thinking. She had a cup of something warm in her hands—tea, probably, he couldn’t smell it from here but he knew her, she always liked her tea light—and she was looking at nothing in particular with the focused distance of someone working through a problem that didn’t have a clean solution.

She noticed him looking soon enough.

For a moment neither of them said anything.

Then she held up her cup slightly, the small gesture of someone asking a question without asking it.

He nodded.

She rose quietly, without waking the others, and disappeared into the small anteroom adjoining the ward.

Aris heard the faint sound of a kettle that someone had apparently sourced at some point in the night. Lyra, probably. Lyra had a talent for ensuring that certain things were simply available when they were needed, the same way weather was available—without announcement, without requiring thanks.

He sat up slowly.

His body felt better than it had any right to feel given the last forty-eight hours.

The compression behind his sternum was present, as always, the familiar ache of entropy held too tightly, but it was manageable. Settled, somewhat. The short sleep had done something that the weeks of careful performance and the Aberrant dungeons and the evaluation and all the rest of it had been steadily undoing, and he was aware of it the way you were aware of a headache only when it receded.

He looked at his hands.

Then at the curtained bed, at the barely visible silhouette of the man behind it.

Then at Silas, still asleep in the chair, the morning light from the window doing something unreasonable to the line of his jaw that Aris noted, catalogued, and moved firmly past.

Virginia returned with two cups. Set one on the table beside him, pulled her chair close, sat down with the unhurried ease she only deployed when no one who required performance from her was watching.

She wrapped both hands around her own cup.

Aris noticed that she was sitting closer to him than yesterday, the restraint devoid of her now that there wasn’t anyone looking.

"How are you feeling," she said. Quiet. Not the clinical how-are-you of the previous night, the real version.

"Better," he said.

"Good." She slowly looked at the curtain. "He moved in the night. Twice. The monitor didn’t flag anything critical but..."

"He’s close," Aris said.

"Yes." She paused. "He could wake up before the meeting."

"I know."

"That would complicate things."

"Considerably."

They sat with that for a moment, the shared understanding of two people who had long since stopped needing to spell out the full shape of a problem to each other.

The warmth of the cup in his hand felt nice.

"Virginia," he said after a moment.

"Mm?"

"The fifth." He looked at her. "You knew what you were doing when you said four."

She didn’t answer immediately. Looked at her tea. At the window. At the slow morning light doing its patient work on the room.

"I suspected," she said finally.

"When Lyra called and told me who you’d carried out." She paused. "I wasn’t certain until I saw him."

"And now."

"Now I’m certain." She looked at him directly. "Which means the association’s version of events is already wrong before the meeting starts, and I need to decide how wrong I’m willing to let it stay."

He looked at her.

At the woman she’d become, in the years he’d been away.

The heir of Halcyon, the composure, the careful architecture of someone who had closed her heart and rebuilt it as something that could bear more weight. He’d been studying the distance between who she used to be and who she was, trying to map it the way she’d been mapping him.

He was beginning to think the distance was smaller than either of them had been pretending.

"Don’t let them have the correct version of the prophecy," he said. "Whatever else you give them. Don’t let them have that."

"I know."

"If they understand what the five means. They..."

"I know, Aris." She said it gently. "I’ve been thinking about nothing else for four hours."

He nodded.

Picked up the tea.

It was exactly right.

A subtle smile pulled at his lips, and surprisingly enough, he didn’t do anything to hold it back.

Of course it was perfect, they had spend years making tea for each other.

He looked at her over the rim of the cup.

"Thank you," he said. "For the soup. Last night."

Virginia looked at him with a certain kind of unreadable expression, the one that Aris never knew how to categorize.

"You already thanked me," she said.

"I know." He looked at the tea. "I mean it more now."

The room was quiet. Outside the window the city was fully awake, the morning going about its business with the cheerful indifference of mornings everywhere. Somewhere above them the association was preparing a meeting that was going to require all four of them to be several different kinds of careful simultaneously.

From the chair by the window, Silas made a sound. Shifted. Settled back into sleep with the ease of someone who had a few more minutes and knew it.

Aris watched him for a moment, aware that Virginia was studying him in the process.

"He’s going to be fine in there," Virginia said, following his gaze. Something in her voice was almost amused.

"He’s remarkably difficult to rattle."

"I know," Aris said.

"You sound almost fond of that."

A long moment of silence.

He looked back at his tea.

"The meeting is at nine," he said.

Virginia’s mouth did the thing it did when she was choosing not to pursue something, the small composed retreat of a woman who had learned that timing was most of the battle.

"It’s eight fifteen," she said. "Finish your tea."

He finished his tea.