Chapter 14 Bound by Blood #4

She picked up the pen with her left hand. She finished the documentation.

Thor was awake when she came out of the office. He looked at her. "The arm," he said.

"Is splinted," she said. "Seventeen hours until hospital."

"Sixteen," he said.

"Sixteen," she agreed. She looked at the tea. "Is there more of that?"

He made her tea. The domestic act of it, the kettle, the cup, the milk that Aroha's station kitchen was well stocked with, was performed with full attention and complete care. He put the cup in front of her, on her left side, so she didn't have to reach across.

She looked at him. The engagement had cost him in ways that his body was not fully hiding. "You're injured," she said.

"Surface," he said.

"How surface?" she said.

"By tomorrow it won't be notable," he said.

"That's not the same as 'not injured,'" she said.

"No," he said. "It's not."

She looked at him for a moment. "The command source," she said.

"Retreated," he said. "I know."

"It has sixty percent," she said.

"Without the relic, sixty percent isn't sufficient for the activation," he said. "We know this."

"It's not static," she said. "Sixty percent is where we went in.

Without the relic, the accumulation is slower, and the network is severed, but it's not zero.

It will still accumulate." She looked at her tea.

"It's going to take time to understand what the recovery timeline looks like. Whether it's months or years."

"I know," he said.

"And Odin's meeting," she said.

He was quiet for a moment. "Heimdall told me,” he said. "The request."

"Not the content," she said. "Freyja told me Odin didn't tell you the content."

"No," he said.

She held her tea with her left hand and she looked at him and she decided with the same honest directness she brought everything that she was going to tell him.

Not because Freyja had said the conversation was going to be complicated, because he should know, and because not telling him would be the thing she didn't do.

"Odin wants to discuss the Iðunn gift," she said.

His face did something that she watched and catalogued. It was not one thing. There were several things, the surprise of it, and underneath the surprise something that was not simple, something that had layers, the layers that Freyja had told her would be there. He was quiet for a long moment.

"Freyja told you,” He said.

"Yes," she said.

"She should have" he started.

"She was right to tell me first," Elara said. "It's about me. I should know first."

He absorbed this. The processing is the way he processed things that hit the particular intersection of his operational instinct and his personal investment.

"What are you thinking?" she said.

He looked at her. "I'm thinking that I'm not going to tell you what I think about it," he said. "Because what I think about it is" he stopped “what I think about it is going to sound like me wanting to choose for you, which is not I am not going to do that."

"I know," she said.

"And I'm aware that I want it," he said. "I'm aware of exactly how much I want it and I'm also aware that my wanting it is not a factor in your decision."

"What do you feel?" she said. Not about the gift. "Right now. What are you feeling."

He held her gaze. "Afraid," he said. "That you'll say yes for the wrong reasons.

That you'll say no for the wrong reasons.

That either way the decision will be made in the aftermath of a very significant operational event when everything is large and present and urgent.

The aftermath is not the same as ordinary time.

" He paused. "And afraid that asking you to wait is another way of choosing for you. "

"It's not," she said. "Asking me to think carefully is not choosing."

"And afraid," he said, and his voice had dropped to the lower register the honest register, the one that didn't perform anything “that if you say no, I will have to watch you" he stopped. "And that I've known from the beginning that that was the nature of it, and that knowing doesn't make it"

"Smaller," she said.

"No," he said. "It doesn't make it smaller."

She looked at him for a long time in the station kitchen with the tea going warm in her hand and the South Island night outside.

The forty-one people sleeping in various parts of the station and the gods in their various positions.

The relic in its containment case and the command source in the deep rock somewhere to the north.

"I don't know yet," she said. "I want to be honest about that. I don't know what I'm going to decide."

"Yes," he said. No pressure.

"I'm not going to decide tonight," she said.

"No," he said. "Tonight you need to sleep."

"I know," she said.

She finished her tea. She put the cup down and she stood up and she looked at him and she went to bed.

He sat at the kitchen table for a long time after, in the South Island night. Outside, the high country was dark and still. The geological formation to the north was quiet. The root note fractured and withdrawn.