head in the clouds

“I win!” Roseway declares, letting the door slam shut behind her before she locks eyes with Qharles and realises she has not, in fact, won. “Damn.”

“You tried,” he says, shrugging and marking his place in the book he was reading before he drops it with a thud on the floor next to his jacket. He’s lying on the empty bunk under Roseway’s—usually it’s storage for miscellaneous crud, but he’s cleared it—and she wonders how many times he’s broken his glasses by dropping that brick of a holy book on his face.

“I did try,” she agrees.

“Still a fair chance you could’ve gotten here first, I think,” Qharles says. “I ran into Evan on my way here and had to explain why I was in a rush.” He pauses, going slightly pink. “I lied, obviously,” he clarifies.

Roseway snickers. “Oh, you’re gonna love this—I ran into Manibus on my way here, that’s why I was late. It was like, small talk, and then he just went all, might I remind you to be responsible with your Potential!” she says, doing a fantastic impression of the professor in question, thanks.

Qharles raises his eyebrows. “What, completely unprompted?”

“Nah, there was context, but I just had to be like—uh-huh, responsibility, gotta go, thanks! It was fucking horrific,” she says, cringing a bit and making her way over to the bed.

“Speaking of being responsible with your Potential…”

“Yeah, yeah…” She rolls her eyes. “You still game?”

“Roseway, if I wasn’t, then I wouldn’t have showed up,” he says. “Or, I dunno, I would’ve brought someone with me.”

“Besides Ager,” Roseway says offhandedly.

Qharles actually sits up at that, looking mildly offended and severely crimson. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Oh, I dunno,” she says flippantly, “I just think he might like to see you like this.” She thinks for a moment. “Maybe Sylvie, too.”

“Shut the—no, they wouldn’t,” Qharles sputters, looking even more indignant than usual. “No. Fuck off.”

Roseway laughs, but otherwise doesn’t push it—although, she has met Ager once or twice, and she suspects he’s a little less innocent than he lets on (which, to be fair, still isn’t all that innocent), and she knows damn well Sylvie is extremely pro-messing with Qharles—but it’s none of her business, really. (It could totally be her business.)

She sits on the bed and coaxes Qharles to lie back, head in her lap. “Usual shit. Tell me the safeword and the rules,” she says, holding his face in her hands. (She says it’s so she can channel her Potential better, but it’s really just to make him blush. She suspects he knows.)

“Safeword is coldway.”

“Or?”

Qharles sighs. “Or, I can hit you if it’s really bad. Which it won’t be.”

“I know, I just wanna make sure,” she says, idly drumming her fingers his cheek. It’s only partly to annoy him. “Anyway, remind me of the rules.”

“Oh, like you need the fucking reminder,” Qharles complains, but there’s no real bite to it.

“Qharles.”

“Okay, I remember them. I should do as I’m told to the best of my ability, and I can’t lie to you,” he recites. “I still think that one’s just so you can get secrets out of me.”

“Oh, please,” Roseway huffs. “Like I’d need to do all this to get secrets out of you. All I gotta do is get you mildly tipsy.” She grins smugly. “I think you just like telling me your secrets. Or getting embarrassed.”

“I don’t!”

“And yet, here you are, still friends with me,” she says, swiping Qharles’ glasses and setting them down on the book on the floor.

Qharles rolls his eyes, slightly squinty. “Just get on with it.”

“Aww, you know you love me!”

“And every day I wonder why.”

“Every single day?”

“Most days,” he amends.

Roseway counts to ten in her head, then gasps. “Wow, that’s pretty forward. I didn’t know you even liked girls.”

“What?”

“The bad news for you is I don’t like guys, so I guess you’re just gonna have to deal with rejection,” she continues. “Though, you already knew that, right? So really it’s on you.”

Ah, the sight of a flustered Qharles. Never gets old. “I’m… Sorry? I think?” he guesses, trying his best to avoid eye contact.

“Yeah, ‘sorry’ sounds good,” Roseway says, smirking. “C’mon, look at me, apologise properly.”

“Um…” To his credit, he does look at her. “I’m sorry for… Asking you out?” he tries.

Damn, he’s good. She’s pretty impressed, actually. “Apology accepted,” she says. “Hey, can I tell you a secret?”

“Sure…?”

Roseway leans right down, dropping her voice into a dramatic whisper. “I didn’t even use Potential for that. I just fucking lied to you and you believed me.”

Qharles bursts into laughter, mercifully finding it as funny as she does. “That’s so fucked up! What’s wrong with you?”

“You make it too easy!”

“Oh, I’m sorry, is it unreasonable to believe that you made me forget something at Making-Qharles-Forget-Things Practice?”

“I’m just saying—”

“And, for the record, I do like girls,” he continues, “it’s just not relevant to my current relationships.”

“That’s what offends you?” While he’s distracted, she takes the opportunity to actually start using her Potential.

“No, I just—” He blinks a couple times, re-processing what he’s looking at. “You’re… Awfully close to my face,” he comments. Squints. “You’re practicing Potential on me, aren’t you?”

“Bingo,” Roseway says, grinning. “D’you know what clock it is?”

“Uh…” She can see the gears in his head turning and failing to catch. “Tetra?”

“Yeah, but you don’t know that, do you?”

“No,” he agrees. “Educated guess. Only time we can reliably get this place empty.”

“Nerd. I really gotta mess you up more if you can figure that out,” she says, then pauses. “Tell me the safeword.”

“Coldway, or I can hit you if it’s really bad,” Qharles recites. “You know I still remember deciding on that? Like, the whole conversation. It’s weirdly clear, all things considered,” he says, his face flushing even as he smiles.

Roseway snorts. “Who knows, maybe you’ve got some extra space up there now,” she jokes, tapping his forehead; inwardly, she’s relieved that she hasn’t accidentally tampered with the memory.

“If that’s how it works, we’re doing this again right before exam season so I can actually revise,” Qharles says. Roseway assumes it’s a joke, but he looks to be half considering it. She can’t blame him, really.

The conversation dies there, so Roseway takes the opportunity to concentrate really hard and stop him from even forming a memory. Qharles once told her it’s somewhere between sleep and anaesthesia, suddenly feeling like time passed without him. Roseway really wants to see him try and talk in this state, but it’s hard for her to hold a conversation while she’s doing it. Maybe if someone else tried to talk to him, but…

This thing they have—whatever it is—works. It’s too complicated to explain to someone else, anyway.

She leans down and plants a furtive kiss to his forehead, being extra careful to keep her Potential up. If Qharles somehow remembers this, she’ll never fucking hear the end of it.

She sits up, counts to five, and only then lets her Potential go. “Last thing you remember?”

“Something about exams, I think.”

“Sounds about right. Am I good to keep going?”

He nods. “Yeah, you’re good.”

Masters above, she hasn’t even done anything and he already sounds wrecked. “Well, that’s good. I’d hate to leave you with blue balls.”

“I know damn fucking well that’s not true.”

Roseway can’t help but cackle. “Yeah, you got me,” she says; she hasn’t yet decided if she feels like being nice to him, but she can always figure it out later. “You can touch yourself, if you want.”

“Thank you.” Aw, he’s trying so hard to sound sarcastic, thanking her for permission to jack off.

It’s tempting to make fun of him for being so compliant—despite the fact that she’s at least halfway responsible via positive reinforcement—but she instead concentrates on making him forget she’d said anything at all. Making fun of Qharles can wait—she wants to see if he’ll even notice she’s tampered with his memory.

She’s briefly not sure if it works, but then she sees him wrench his hand back in her peripheral vision and she can’t help but grin.

“You stopped?”

“Didn’t have permission,” he explains, looking away. “Sorry.”

“Fuck, you’re good. You can keep going,” she says, tangling her fingers in his hair and guiding him to look back at her. It’s true that she isn’t really attracted to him, but that he lets her do this—shit, that he asks her for this—it’s something pretty fucking potent. He’s the stupidest guy in the world, inviting her to fuck his brain up like this; he’s a fucking genius for somehow knowing she wouldn’t take more than he offered.

By his face, Roseway guesses he has to be pretty close by now. “Stop,” she says sharply, tugging his hair for good measure. She must’ve guessed right—Qharles makes a noise that sounds like he’s been shot, but he does pull his hand away. “Good boy,” she says, only mostly to piss him off.

“Fuck you.”

“I bet you wanna, huh?” He doesn’t argue, really, only stutters a bit, so she continues. “C’mon, don’t act like you wouldn’t. You’re shit at lying, and we all know you were in love with me when we were Novices anyway. Besides,” she says, grinning like a shark, “fucking look at yourself.”

He really is a sight. Face red as his hair, eyes frantically trying to dodge meeting hers. He’s breathing all shaky, too, which she assumes has him a bit fucked up. Something about Wind users. She wonders how much Potential he’s got right now, then immediately makes a mental note to try and catch him when he’s run out sometime. It’d be a bit unfair, but if it was fair there wouldn’t be any point.

Qharles takes a deep breath. “Can I please touch myself?” he asks, clearly trying to hold onto his remaining dignity. He’s doing a poor job.

“I dunno, can you?”

“Roseway.”

She snickers, but gives him a nod. “Yeah, go ahead.” He mumbles something that sounds close enough to a thank you that she lets it slide.

She watches his face; Qharles isn’t that hard to read in the first place, but Roseway still likes to think she’s gotten pretty damn good at it. Mostly she’s keyed in to the difference between him being bad-embarrassed and good-embarrassed, or at the very least okay-embarrassed; given how much time he spends being flustered, she finds it a useful distinction to make.

“Stop,” she says, quietly and casually enough that he either doesn’t hear or doesn’t listen. She tightens her hold on his hair. “I said stop—good. What’s your safeword?” she asks, just to rub salt in the wound.

“It’s fuckin’ coldway, I want you dead,” Qharles growls.

“Uh-huh, you totally want me dead.” Roseway pulls his hair again and he actually fucking moans, high-pitched and breathy and pathetic. “The noise of someone who really wants me dead. Sure. You sound like a girl, by the way,” she says; Qharles unsuccessfully bites back a whine.

“S-shut up…”

“I’m just calling it how I see it, Qharlie,” she says, shrugging. And, before he can object to the nickname: “Touch yourself.” She waits until he obeys, somehow both reluctant and desperate, before punctuating with a sneer of horny bitch.

He can’t really hide his face or look away—Roseway’s got one hand in his hair and the other cradling his jaw—so he instead opts to just shut his eyes, which… Eh, she’ll let it slide. Between the edging and the way she’s been talking down to him—not to mention the fact that she’s been poking around in his brain—it shouldn’t take long before he’s begging anyway. She knows he’s not gonna come without asking, which is either the saddest or hottest thing she’s ever seen. Possibly both. (Probably the latter.)

Qharles swears under his breath, and his movement slows in her periphery; Roseway grins. “I didn’t tell you to slow down.”

It’s not a question; Qharles answers it anyway. “I can’t—I’m so fucking close.” With his free hand, he pries Roseway’s palm off his jaw and grabs her hand tight. “Fuck— Roseway, please just let me come.”

He begs like it’s for his life; how can she say no? “Go ahead.”

“Thank you.” he gasps, and she sees the tension in his face snap as he comes.

Roseway’s a good person, really, so she gives him time to recover before doing anything else. Waits until his eyes are open and looking at her, still wide and desperate. Waiting for permission.

Cute, she thinks; then, with as much indifference as she can manage: “Go on, ask.”

“Please let me keep this one,” Qharles breathes.

It’s routine at this point—he doesn’t mean it and they both know it—but he sounds so wrecked and it always throws Roseway off kilter. Luckily, she has fucking memory powers—she can script this part, and he’ll never know.

“Why would I do that?” she asks, doing her best to make the question sound rhetorical. Though if he does ever come up with a good reason, she’ll be extremely impressed.

Not today. “Please,” he begs, “Just this once, I want to remember this.”

“I thought the whole point of this was so I could practice?” It’s cruel. It’s because she’ll have to be cruel in the field. It’s not just because she likes to be. “It’s not about you.”

That shuts him up; it always does. Roseway takes a deep breath and concentrates, visualising the memory. It’s like unwinding a reel of film, beginning to end; this one’s a delicate thing, full of holes and distortion from the way she’s been prodding at it. Easy to break entirely, and she guesses that’s the point, but she tries her best to make it go smoothly.

Sometimes Qharles shuts his eyes for this. He doesn’t today, just looks up at her with those big, too-trusting blues. She knows her eyes flash bright when she uses Potential like this; she wonders what goes through his mind when he sees it. Panic? Dread? Actually, now that she thinks about it, he probably just finds it hot. It’s not like she can ask him after the fact, anyway.

She draws it out. Gives him ample time to say coldway or hit her or get up and leave, but he doesn’t. She still draws it out, just to make him squirm now. Lets him savour whatever feelings he’s feeling before she steals them away from him.

Her Potential is just starting to wear thin when she cuts off the memory—that’s good, though, means she’s getting better at rationing it out, better than running out halfway through—but that’s still most of her energy gone for the next bell, unless she feels like hauling ass to the Arch later.

“Fuck,” she murmurs, just to break the silence. She does her best to un-fuck his hair and occupies herself with counting down from 100 while she waits for him to recover. Normally people don’t even notice she’s using Potential, let alone need time to adjust, but normally she isn’t probing that deeply for that long. Normally the other person isn’t asking her to do it and jacking off, either.

She’s gotten sidetracked, restarted counting, and made it back to 58 when Qharles’ grip on her hand loosens and his eyes focus back in. “Hi there,” he says, giving her a smile.

“Hi. You want your glasses back?”

“Gimme a minute.” He scrunches up his nose.

“There should be tissues in my jacket pocket.”

Roseway kicks his jacket up from the floor and catches it from the air like a fucking champion. Any decent person would ask which pocket he meant—but if she were a decent person she wouldn’t take the opportunity to rummage through all of them.

“Explain why you have rocks?”

“Wrong pocket,” Qharles doesn’t explain.

Roseway eventually finds the tissues, along with a couple of hawks, a pocket Luminary (why does he have a second one?), and some loose bullets for some reason (three regular and two of the weird glowy Relics).

She picks up the hawks.

“Stop stealing from me.”

She put the hawks back. “You’re no fun,” she grumbles, handing him the tissues.

“Not my fault you’re predictable.”

“I am not predictable!”

“So you didn’t go through all my stuff, right in front of me?”

She’s out of Potential, and there’s nothing she can say that isn’t a lie. “No,” she lies.

Qharles snorts, balling up the tissues. Instead of getting up and walking like a normal person, he throws them across the room into the bin with accuracy that would be absurd if he wasn’t a Wind user.

“Nice one, Mallow,” Roseway teases.

“Listen,” Qharles says, apparently not too tired to be defensive, “I am not fucking moving. Besides, I hit the fuckin’ bullseye on that.”

“You think that counts towards your marksmanship training?”

“If this”—he gestures vaguely to the whole situation—“actually counts as your Potential training.”

“This counts, okay?” she huffs. “You guys get to do your shit all the time, I still have to wait like, four turns until I can do anything other than fuck with you.” She doesn’t mean to sound pissed off, but she is a tiny bit. Qharles seems to pick up on it.

“Okay, this counts,” he concedes. “If it helps, I think you’ve been improving.”

“You don’t sound too sure of yourself.”

“Yeah, well—call that a win for the memory powers.” He looks mildly anxious; Roseway is pretty sure he’s doing it for the bit, but she throws an arm around him anyway just in case he’s not.

“You wanna debrief?” she asks, cringing internally at her own phrasing—this isn’t a crew meeting, for crying out loud—but he just nods, leaning in to what is quickly turning into an actual hug.

“Probably a good idea.” She feels him relax, slightly, in her arms.

‘Debrief’, as official and boring as it sounds, used to be an accurate word, with Roseway keeping a long mental checklist of questions (do you know where you are? Why you’re here? Tell me something you did yesterday) to make absolutely sure Qharles hadn’t forgotten anything he wasn’t meant to. Now it just boils down to checking that he’s not too badly disoriented and calling it a day.

“How much do you know?”

“I know you actually let me come this time,” he says, ungratefully.

“You’re welcome,” she retorts. “Anything else?”

He thinks for a moment. “Nothing I can’t guess from context, I think. Like, I know you kept pulling my hair,” he explains, “but I’m not sure if I actually know that or if I can just feel it.”

She nods. “Gotcha. How much do you remember, then?”

“Nothing.”

It’s the agreement they made when they started doing this—it’s only fair that he gets to keep something—but it’s also a technique she doesn’t get to use much. Probably won’t have to use much, but it’s a fun trick regardless.

People always act like memory is just one thing, but that’s bullshit. There’s muscle memory, obviously, but even in the head there’s a difference between a set of facts and an experience. Usually, one eventually decays to the other; even the most eventful clock in a Kin’s life, given enough time, might be recalled like they weren’t even there.

Roseway’s just done that to Qharles in about three ticks.

“You alright?” Qharles asks suddenly. “You zoned out.” Maybe not so suddenly, then.

Roseway grins. “I’m good. I was just thinking about how you looked while I was wiping your memory.” She can’t see his face, but she can see his blush spread down his neck. “Seriously though, how are you doing? I kinda did a number on you today.”

“You did,” he agrees, laughing softly. “I think I’m okay, I just need some quiet for a bit… On a related note, how long until the others get back?”

“We’ve got…” Roseway thinks for a moment. “Ages, actually. Like, I think Stadia might be around in a couple of chimes, but I don’t think anyone else is gonna show until low three.”

Qharles nods; after a moment’s pause, he starts humming something under his breath.

It’s a Brightlander prayer for safety that she’s heard him sing a thousand times. It’s meant to be a duet—a mutual blessing that the other person may live to see the Masters return—but he’s always done it as a solo. She’s heard him sing it properly maybe twice, running into his sister before tournaments and trials.

Roseway doesn’t sing. She especially doesn’t sing the prayers. But she knows all the music and all the words, so embedded into the fabric of her home that she doesn’t remember learning them, and finds herself picking up the other half of the tune.