Chapter Text
The conversation about family bothers Dedra.
She tells herself that her mind is made up, but it eats away at her. It sneaks into the corners of her life that Syril hadn’t previously managed to infiltrate: her walk to work, when she should be going over her priorities for the day; the ten minute break she takes to water her bonsai; her lunch break, when she should be refreshing her priorities for the day and framing her afternoon. She worries about it when he announces his double promotion and they go out to dinner, but Syril doesn’t bring it up again.
Dedra thinks about it, but she doesn’t come to a conclusion. It bothers her. She’s always been able to come to a conclusion. Inconclusiveness is one of the things that annoys her most about her colleagues; the vacillating back and forth, the irrelevant edge cases, the constant need to wait for a proper assessments. Dedra has always rejected that uncertainty. She’s always been able to rely on her gut.
But not this time.
Partagaz summoning her to his office is unexpected enough that for the first time in a week, she worries about something other than Syril as she treads the corridors of the ISB building.
*
"I won't be here tomorrow night," Dedra says.
Syril stops chopping, hesitating with the knife resting on a board covered in knobbly beige plant matter.
"Oh," he says.Even after all these months, he still tries to hide his anxiety from her, and he still fails. "Where will you be?"
"It doesn’t matter," Dedra says. She's not allowed to tell him, and she hasn’t been told details anyway. "I'll be back in time to meet your mother."
He puts down his knife carefully, so that it's perfectly perpendicular to the edge of the board, and turns to face her.
"Will you be… with anyone else?"
Dedra realises the source of his anxiety. "Not like that. It's…"
It's incredibly secret. She hasn’t even been allowed to tell Heert she’s going off-world, or to put the appointment in her calendar where he might see it. She'll message him tomorrow and feign an illness, which is galling in itself; Dedra hasn't taken a single day of sick leave in fifteen years with the ISB. But she can't tell Syril that she's sick. He lives here.
"It's…" Dedra pauses, Syril's anxiety tripping her up. "It's highly classified." She surely isn’t supposed to tell him even that much, but it seems to soothe him. "If anyone asks for me, tell them I'm sick."
His manner brightens. "What kind of sickness? I can tell people at work you're ill, to make it more believable."
This surely won’t be necessary, but he's too happy to argue. "I don't know."
Syril's face darkens. "At the Bureau, they're usually hungover. But you could say that you have the flu?" He smiles, clearly excited by the chance for subterfuge. "I'll tell everyone that I need to go home on my lunchbreak to bring you soup and make sure you take your medicine. I can even buy soup on the way, to make it more convincing. That’s what I’d do if you were really ill."
“I-”
Dedra has never considered that Syril would bring her soup when she was ill. She’s weathered every illness she’s ever had on her own, either in the pungent-smelling hospital ward of the kinderblock or miserably hunched over her desk.
“You don’t have to do that.”
"I don't mind," he says.
She can’t argue with Syril when he looks like this, alight with a flame she doesn’t ever expect to understand. “Very well. If that’s what you want to do.”
“I do want to.” He turns back to his chopping board and picks up the carefully placed knife. "It's casserole night tonight." Wednesday is always casserole night. "But I thought I'd add potams this time. Will that be alright?"
"Yes." Dedra has no idea what a potam is. She suspects Syril knows this. He’s been attempting to subtly broaden her diet, just like she’s a child - and again the thought comes, unbidden, that he’d be a perfect father. She won’t ever get to see that.
Instead of lingering on that thought, she takes a seat at the table and watches him. He chops with quick yet precise movements, rendering a carrot into perfect half-inch slices. He doesn’t chop the meat himself, because he doesn’t like the cold and slimy texture of it - and isn’t that an odd and unnecessary detail to know about a person? She watches him, and she thinks that she doesn’t want to leave, even if it is only for one night and even if this is as important an opportunity as Partagaz had hinted.
She wants to reach for him then and there, but she waits until they go to bed and the lights are off. Over the months he’s been here, the once-unfamiliar silhouette of his face has become a shape she knows as well as the lines of her own body - better, probably. She rests a hand gently on his hip, where the sharp line of his pelvis juts out. The heat of his skin makes her feel safe, filling a hole in her chest she had never noticed until it closed.
He rolls towards her and presses his body against hers. She holds onto him tightly, crushing his erection against her. Safety is replaced by heat, a burning fever that at some point she stopped trying to deny.
He lives here, after all. He’s a floor manager now. This is allowed.
She slides her hand under his pajamas to grope his buttocks, and grinds against him. He slides a hand under her pajamas, finding her breasts - she can’t remember when he first found them or how, given that she had barely realised that they existed before then, beyond marking the way her ISB uniform fit as different. But as he runs a finger over her nipple, she sucks in a breath and almost groans. She kisses him with all the desperation her body feels. It always surprises her how easy it is to do this, and how much she needs him.
She doesn’t need to ask him to get on top of her. She rolls on her back and he follows, climbing on top of her and sliding his penis inside her. They begin to move together slowly as he slides a finger to the bit that feels good- the clitoris, Syril had told her excitedly at one point. He’s put a lot of work into understanding her body.
They start slow, Syril adjusting the angle until he finds the bit inside her that feels good. When she closes her eyes and suppresses a moan, he begins to speed up, but his movement is still gentle.
He’s always gentle with her.
She clings to him and rocks her hips, feeling as though if she holds him close enough they can meld into one person. The pleasure builds until it overflows with a groan. A moment later Syril groans too, and comes to a halt. For a long and impossibly sweet moment, he rests on top of her and they’re bound by the stickiness of their bodily fluids and the intensity of their shared pleasure. A cruiser glides past the window and casts its light over the room, revealing Syril with his hair wild.
And then the moment passes, and they pull apart.
Once he’s cleaned up, Dedra curls into Syril. Despite what they've just done, he smells as perfectly clean as he always has; soap and laundry detergent, and just a hint of the musk unique to Syril himself. It’s a scent that spreads from her lungs into the whole of her chest, filling it with warmth.
“I’ll miss you,” he whispers into the dark. “I wish you didn’t have to go away.”
“It’s only one night,” she tells him. She wishes she didn’t have to go too, but it’s a pointless concern. There will be plenty more days like this, days where she can watch him chop vegetables as the artificial sun sets over the greatest city in the galaxy and decide what they’ll do with their lives together.