Ravi lay with blankets tangled at his feet, watching the circling blades on the fan above his bed. He'd been awake for an hour, but so happy he didn't want to move. Lio was curled against his side, having stolen his pillow for the fourth night in a row.

Best dispensation break of his life.

For two weeks, they'd navigated around each other at the outpost. He'd gotten back into the habit of keeping space from Lio, even if they did still talk and tease and smile at each other for too long. That first dispensation day had been weird. Waving the crew off to the mag lane, and then turning around knowing that the only people left at the outpost were the two of the them.

And then he readjusted to a reality he could barely believe existed. Lio was with him all the time. Making him laugh. Kissing him. Sleeping in his bed. No more slipping away in the middle of the night to avoid being caught. Waking up with Lio next to him was a goddess blessing. It had the added benefit of leading to some truly glorious mornings, extending into glorious days. They'd barely gotten dressed yesterday.

Careful not to jostle the bed, he reached for his holowatch. It was already morning-ten. What he should be doing was getting his slate and tackling some of the shit he'd been neglecting for the entire break. Instead, he rolled onto his side and tucked his chin against Lio's bare shoulder. He curved his arm around the steady rise and fall of Lio's ribs. Happiness had found him.

Lio shifted and turned, snuggling into him, head tucked beneath his chin. Ravi wrapped him up and squeezed him close. "Morning."

He got an unintelligible mumble against his neck. Lio could sleep past noon if Ravi let him. Probably longer. Too bad they didn't give out commendations for sleeping, because Lio would've represented the team pretty well.

"Today," he said, "we are getting up."

"Yes," Lio murmured. "Later."

"At least I'm getting out of bed," he amended. "I need to get outside."

A sigh, and then Lio hoisted himself up on one elbow, blinking at him from beneath heavy-lidded eyes. "You sound very determined." His hand trailed across Ravi's stomach. "I don't know that I shall allow you to escape my lair."

"Okay, hang on, my room can't be your lair. Get your own lair."

"Too late. I've claimed it. You must be my minion." Lio grinned and threw a leg across him, which was very effective distraction, mostly because morning wood was real and his dick was apparently fully on Lio's side about this.

"I'm still getting up—"

"I'd say you're up enough as it is." Lio rolled his hips, and Ravi couldn't control the shudder in his breathing.

"I'm...I will eventually...at some point...get out of this bed." Lio was on top of him, and if he wanted this to stop, he should probably get the bottle of lube out of his reach. But he didn't really want it to stop. So he just lay there kissing Lio and touching him and letting Lio's fingertips tease him. On his way to another glorious morning.

He did actually stumble out of the bed later, body still woozy with satisfaction. A towel wrapped around his waist, he left his holowatch on the dresser. He stooped back to the bed and kissed Lio's cheek. "Gonna go shower."

"Can I watch?" Lio asked sleepily.

Ravi grinned. "No." And he ran from the lair before Lio could convince him otherwise. As much as the idea of Lio in a shower with him was appealing, the gloomy, minimalist facilities at the outpost weren't what he pictured. Even with no chance of someone else walking in, it was still shared space, and the idea of having sex in it made him uncomfortable.

Afterwards he kept well away from the bed while he dressed, which finally coaxed Lio out of it. Ravi hummed into the mess hall while Lio had a shower, and by the time the omelettes were done, he turned to see Lio laying plates on the table, his hair in a dripping braid.

While they ate, he broached the topic of the rest of the day. "I was serious about going outside. And I really do have to get some work done before the crew comes back."

Lio propped his chin on his hand. "Aziri sent me his translations to read the other day. If I promise not to distract you, can I tag along?"

He smiled. "I hoped you would. Although"—he traced one of Lio's arching eyebrows and down his cheek— "you're distracting even when you're not trying to be. But I like it."

Lio caught his hand and kissed it, and then kept their fingers interlaced for the rest of the meal. Ravi had never really understood people who couldn't stop touching each other no matter where they were, but with Lio, he got it.

They seemed to need some kind of contact all the time, bumping into each other on purpose while they tried to clean up, walking hand in hand to the trees above the Amphitheater, Lio swinging their arms wildly, and laying on a blanket with their legs tangled, even while he tried to work. He was a grown-ass man, and he still felt giddy and breathless and too far in it already.

Focus. He could be giddy and breathless while working. He stretched out on his stomach and set his holowatch beside the slate so it could project the extra screen he needed. The crew was back in two and a half days, and it was time to kick Opalina into another gear. They had enough talent for the competitions, but the next one he was looking at offered only group challenges. Trickier to do well with such a small crew competing against bigger teams that could split among more challenges. He sketched out possible variations for a while, and then switched to working on Teres' portfolio and rec. Three months or so, and she'd need to be prepared to submit to Enforcer crews.

The Enforcer crew rankings were familiar enough that he didn't need to spend much time narrowing down which crews would be a good fit for Teres. Although one did catch his eye, and he smiled before he could help it. Gadsen's crew had dropped eight slots since he'd left. And damn if that didn't feel kind of great to see. He linked all the best options up in a set for Teres to look at and folded the slate shut.

He glanced over at Lio, who was reading and eating all the snacks they'd brought. "At least save me some green grapes." Ravi poked him in the ribs.

"Assuredly. Will three be enough? Two and a half?" Lio asked, without taking his eyes off his own slate.

Ravi stole the grape bag from him and rolled over onto his back, lobbing up one of the grapes and catching it in his mouth.

Lio glared at him. "Why must you be good at everything?"

He laughed. "I'm not. I'm good at things I practice. This is just how I've eaten grapes since I was a kid."

"Let me try." Lio flung his slate aside and imitated him. Sort of. He threw the grape way too high and it bounced off his forehead. Another one bobbled off his cheek. When the third one hit him in the eye, Ravi cut him off from wasting grapes.

"My dreams of being a grape catching champion are dead," Lio howled. His voice ricocheted off of the mountain around them, and Ravi smothered him in a kiss. It was the squelchy, joking kind, until it wasn't. Goddess, he loved kissing Lio.

Ravi sighed gently when they parted. "Yeah, but you are really good at kissing." He leaned his head on his hand, Lio flat on the blanket.

"I would say I'm good at what I practice, but that, ah, doesn't quite sound as impressive as when you said it." Lio pursed his lips and squinted at him. "When you were a kid," he said suddenly, "what were you like?"

"I was pretty quiet. Shy, I guess. It was just me and my mom, and we moved around a lot. Hard to make friends that way. Plus, my mom is...she's a little wild." He grinned. "She'd approve of you. She likes fearless."

Lio wriggled closer to him on the blanket. "I'm not sure being ridiculous counts as fearless."

"It does. You don't care what anyone thinks, and you keep trying shit no matter what. Fearless." He dropped a kiss on Lio's nose. "Were you always like that?"

Lio frowned slightly at the brittle tree branches shading them. "I don't know. I'm more that way out here than I am at home. Perhaps I was as a child, and then it got harder to trust that what people said they liked about me was real. I don't know if this makes any sense."

Ravi slid his fingers into the thick waves of Lio's hair. "Makes sense to me. Why did it get harder to trust people?"
"I just...became more aware that people had other reasons to be close to me. Reasons that made them pretend they agreed with me or liked me that...actually had nothing to do with me."

"Your family is—" He hesitated. At the mention of the word family, Lio looked as though he wanted to sprint away. Too late to escape saying it. "Your family must be pretty high up, huh?"

"Um." Lio swallowed. "Yes." Then he shot up onto his knees, so quickly Ravi startled backward. "But it's not as if I'm a terrible, spoiled jerk who only cares about—well, perhaps I am a little—but hopefully I'm not entirely ruined, and my family, I swear, is somewhat normal, it's just we get treated differently, and I know we shouldn't—"

"Hey." He put a steadying hand on Lio's shoulder. "I don't care that your family has a lot of credit. And you're not a spoiled jerk. Definitely not ruined."

"Oh." Lio sagged back down to the blanket. "I..." He pressed both hands over his face and mumbled through them. "I don't know why I keep having these massive reactions with you. Sometimes I think what I hear is completely different from what you actually said."

Ravi gently pulled Lio's hands away and gave him a reassuring smile. "It's okay. Really." He cocked his head. "What's the other reaction you were talking about? You said it like that's happened more than just now."

"Three weeks ago." Lio flushed, chewing at his lip. "In the office...you sent me away, and I know why, and it made perfect sense. But it was like there was a panicking voice telling me you didn't...maybe you just didn't like me that much anymore."

"Lio." He groaned and dipped down to kiss him. "I wish you'd told me that at the time. I'm sorry."

"You didn't do anything that requires an apology—"

"Yeah, but I don't want you to feel that way. At all. Even accidentally."

Lio let out a slow breath. He looked down while he spoke, eyes hidden by long lashes. "It's been a very long time since I had a...someone. I want to keep you. And apparently it causes me to temporarily lose my mind."

Hearing him say it made Ravi's heart stutter and then expand. He pulled Lio against his chest and rolled onto his back, Lio in his arms. "I want to keep you, too." They stayed like that until the heat was too much, and Lio eased onto his side, still in the crook of Ravi's arm.

"Am I a terrible com if I don't want the crew to come back?" Ravi mumbled.

Lio laughed. "Yes. I'm telling them you said that. Aziri will be outraged."

"Aziri's permanent state is outrage, so I think I'm fine with it." He kissed one of Lio's dimples, just because he hadn't kissed him in the last ten seconds. Goddess, he was so far gone on this one. "How was the translation about the Mastali? Anything interesting?"

"Fairly confusing actually." Lio shrugged. "It made sense when Aziri first showed it to me, and then Orvaska said he'd done it all wrong, and the new translation is far less...intelligible. Full of descriptions of the large dishes of rock the Mastali supposedly—" He stopped abruptly and sat all the way up, whirling toward the Amphitheater.

"Lio?" Ravi pushed up after him.

"Large dish," Lio whispered. "It's a large rock dish."

"What is?"

"The Amphitheater! Goddess, the Mastali were right here!" And then he was up and away, bounding over the uneven ground, down to the lip of the smooth, scooped out rock they'd walked over a hundred times. Ravi grinned, watching him run back and forth like a malfing bot.

Lio—silly, fearless, Mastali-obsessed, gorgeous man that he was—wanted to keep him.