Feet on the access rungs startle Andi awake, and then Vin’s face crests over the edge of Church’s cockpit. She props her chin on the rim, and silently waits for Andi to relax her reflexive death-grip on the shotgun.
“You ain’t due back for two days!” Andi says accusingly. Vin can see her shaking.
“Cindy-Lee ratted you out,” Vin says, because it’s a mite more diplomatic that Cindy-Lee and your own mech both did. Cindy-Lee alone, Vin might have simply taken under advisement, just to know what to expect when she got back. “You been in there the whole time I’ve been gone?”
“Fuck it all, Vin,” Andi says, as aggrieved as she can manage, and Vin carefully climbs a rung further up and reaches an arm into Church’s cockpit, wraps gentle fingers around Andi’s wrist. They can both feel, in the contact, the pulse hammering inside it.
“Come on inside,” Vin tells her quietly. “I’ll put tea on.” She pauses, slightly over-long, face giving her away: “I can fix you a bit of Christabel’s zucchini loaf—”
“Rather be under mortar fire,” Andi snaps, and climbs down out of the cockpit after Vin’s self-amused cackling.
Vin is kind enough to let her start talking in her own time, and in her rare unyielding mood where she’s definitely going to wait until Andi does. So Andi gets halfway through a second mug of tea, and cracks.
“You should be with your family.”
“Saints,” Vin says, in suffering tones. “Ain’t I? Ain’t I right now, you cantankerous asshole?”
Andi slides down in her kitchen chair a little, scowling into her mug. Vin sighs at her, comes round the table, and reaches out — slowly — into Andi’s personal space, pushing her hair behind her ear.
“If I could put a cable in your head, climb right in there with you and hug you from the inside, if that’s how anythin’ worked, I’d have done it years ago,” Vin says. “You know that, don’t you?”
Andi buttons her lip tight.
“You keep actin’ like you’re a gangrenous leg I’m refusin’ to chop off.” Vin inches closer. Gives Andi’s hair a tentative, experimental stroke, light as a spider running across it; then, emboldened, a ever-so-slightly firmer one. “Tell me you can sometimes see far enough out of this to know that ain’t true, Andi,” and it hurts too bad to do anything but give a little, let the delicate pressure of Vin’s hand guide her head to nestle against Vin’s sweatshirt.
Andi lets a breath out, all the way to empty lungs, juddering all the way out on her sharp edges.
“Sometimes,” she allows hoarsely, and closes her eyes against Vin’s own breath of relief.
