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Pen hated to be ignored.
Especially at his girlfriend’s funeral. Which suddenly, she was attending.
It was a whole five minutes since Lucy limped from the railroad tracks like a bloodied and dirty ghost. She hugged, kissed, and wept with everyone. Except Pen.
Who had spent the entire day looking for her. He had climbed up and down vertical cliffs and rough canyon walls, choked on sand and poison, and fought off temptation to strangle a surviving Civil Corp member or two for stress relief.
There was no trace of Lucy's mangled body, so he expected her to pop out of the bushes at any moment in her short little armor that showed more than it shielded.
Unlike everybody else, Pen hadn’t believed for a moment Lucy could be dead. Not his Skinny. She might have needed some heroic and muscular saving here and there, but it was more likely that whatever beast took Lucy was looking for a quick exit right about now.
He came up with nothing but goat hoofprints.
Suddenly here she was—in a swirl of dust and smiles, crashing her own funeral, and taking no notice of her own man.
His knee pads torn and cape scorched with acid burns, Pen felt unusually close to being slightly worn out. Morally supporting the sobbing Burgess had about depleted his reserves of patience. His hair was a mess. He was starving. A simple thank you would have been nice.
Instead, he was being ignored in favor of all the townies group-hugging and crying. Being their typical soft selves.
Chewing on his glove, Pen pondered Lucy, this time with a professional scrutiny. She looked sandswept and beat up—but all of it was slightly wrong, for someone who had apparently pulled herself up a cliff using rocks and an oddly tenacious tree. There were uneven bruises on her bare knees and shins, like she’d been repeatedly knocked down onto a hard surface. Her clothes had cuts—clean and long, dangerous lines—like, well, only a blade could do.
Pen was beginning to really hate where this train of thought was leading him.
"I used to think this tree had thorns. It looked—dangerous," Lucy was telling Grace who seemed to be listening with far more enthusiasm than she could ever summon for Pen no matter how much he tipped her. "It turned out all I needed was to get—closer."
"Some trees may look broken, but they have deep roots," Grace imparted unexpected wisdom.
"It's so lonely. Out there, in the canyons." Lucy carried on, biting her lip. "It needs some—tree friends and—tree food. Maybe tree blankets."
Grace was clearly suppressing a major eye roll. "Not you as well? Though I'm sure that with some tender loving care—"
"Why is everyone suddenly a fucking horticulturalist?" Pen said loudly, unable to take it anymore.
Lucy's eyes darted to Pen's dusty boots, then to a spot over his shoulder. Peach it, his eyes were up here. There was nothing interesting in that tunnel behind him but cobwebs and the same old weather-worn Logan Howlett poster.
"Babe. Babe? Did you bang your head?" Pen waved, still trying to attract her attention. "Where does it hurt? Should I be carrying you somewhere right now?"
Lucy pushed her grimy hair out of her face and gingerly ran her fingers down her arm, shooting a glance over his shoulder again. Just over her skinny elbow, a fresh handprint was blooming on her skin—
"It only hurts," she said. "When I'm trying to think."
Pen didn't get it for a whole long second. Until he did.
Later, he would never think of it as a betrayal. It was as if fate yanked Lucy out of his hands and out of reach. His fingers grasping and closing on empty.
Now, he stared her down with a full understanding that his girl met the Logan gang in a fight and for some surely goody-two-shoes reason she was lying about it. Did the bandits tell her anything about Pen being a tad too powered up for a man of the church? Or about the missing water? Could they even have any real intel?
It was time to regain control over this wreck of an afternoon.
"Let's get you washed up. You stink, Skinny." He generously threw an arm around her shoulders, leading her away from the crowd of well-wishers. "Like goat."
Pen didn't enjoy the startled look in her eyes as much as he thought he would.
~~~
Passing the workshop gates felt like entering a battle arena, except without being entirely sure with who and with how many Pen would be sparring.
It turned out he was met with his most feared opponent—a lack of attention.
“I need to look something up.” Lucy immediately rushed to her bookshelf to pull out a manual and thump it on the table.
For a whole long minute, she pored over some contraption’s blueprint which looked like something boring and utilitarian. Maybe a water tower. Skinny was so cute when she got into her slightly disheveled and quietly muttering builder mode, but Pen needed to refocus—both of them—on the interrogation here.
He crept up from behind and whispered, “Boom!” Lucy stumbled a little and he had to catch her.
Maybe she did bump her head after all.
He sat Lucy on the bed, helping her to peel off her ruined clothes. She obediently kept offering Pen one or another part of her to sponge wash, dry, disinfect.
"Must have been a tough climb." Pen applied an antiseptic mercilessly on her cuts. Any reaction would be good. Any time now. "Want to tell Pen more about it?”
"Nothing to brag about. And nothing I couldn't handle," Lucy muttered. "My arms might be weak, but I'm scrappy. You said so yourself." And went back to thinking, sulking, tucking and untucking her hair behind her ear.
This was so unlike their usual easy evening banter—him preening playfully, her pretending not to be impressed. Lucy was a city girl after all, and Pen was a city boy, and they had far more in common than with most locals. They both loved sandstorms and rains for piercing the monotony of desert seasons. Both of them complained about the weak spicing of Sandrock food and if we were being honest, Pen loathed any type of cabbage even more than Lucy did.
They made a friendly competition out of despising Yan and making elaborate fantasy plans for his untimely and comical demise. They even pulled a prank during the buildy guild awards. It involved a mechanical mouse loudly rustling in a trashcan. Pen would activate it remotely every time Yan would try to open his mouth to brag. When Lucy wasn’t watching, Pen found a locker and stuffed Yan into it till morning.
Best of all, Lucy loved a fight. She took to their combat lessons with alarming enthusiasm. And she wasn't afraid of Pen's physical dominance. Whenever he got tired of sparring, he'd throw her over his shoulder and she'd be laughing and fruitlessly beating his back with her fists all the way home. Fighting with her quickly turned to foreplay. Sex was great. Instead of feeling like he was doing time at Sandrock, Pen stopped rushing things.
More than that. With Lucy, Pen kept forgetting that he wasn't for real.
The marks on her body, the evidence of her lies were very real though. Pen matched his fingers to the handprint on Lucy's arm. These bruises were left by a man's hand. He still wasn't clear on how it fit into the scheme of things. Was Logan forcing her to help him by threats? Was this why she was lying? Nobody could make Lucy do anything she didn't want, and Pen knew it first-hand.
Lucy yanked her arm away and glanced longingly towards the curled-up blueprint again.
This was going to be a long night.
"You're being really boring," Pen sighed and started opening a bag of jerky.
She reached out and turned his wrist towards the light as if she was expecting to find a clue in the red creases left by where his gloves rubbed his skin. Lucky for Pen, the punishing angry scar left by Hand of the Light was on his other hand which he’d casually thrust into his pocket. Not finding anything incriminating, her face softened with some kind of hope.
“Did you seriously not hear me yelling your name for hours?” Her story didn’t hold water and Pen should have been pushing her harder, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to find out what could happen if everything was laid out between them in the open—and not on his terms.
She faced him. “I kept wishing that you were there and you would tell me that none of it was real.”
Well, damn. Logan had whispered something in Skinny’s ear. When an opportunity presented itself, the guy was going to need a lot of stitches because Pen would show him what happened to snitches.
Whatever it was, Pen needed her to get over this.
So, with a play of his shoulders, he took his shirt off.
It was unlike Lucy not to notice the spectacle Pen knew he was and she definitely did half-smirk, but it didn’t sway her focus away from whatever thought thread she was obstinately trying to follow.
Pen ended up comfort-eating the entire bag of jerky as he waited for her to unwind.
Finally, the hour was late and they lay themselves down in the dark, moving instinctively into a familiar fit. This was the one thing that hadn’t changed today.
"You let the tree get too close, Skinny." Pen’s fingers gently traced what he was positive were knife scratches on her skin, the fortunate near-misses. “Always, remember your training.” She froze next to him, unsure.
With a loud sigh, Pen gave up. Torturing her was no fun, she wasn’t about to talk, and he was tired of failing to make her. In a matter of days, the bandit mystery would be none of their concern. It wasn't like Logan's small-time gang could go against Pen, the relics, and the entire airship crew.
He swiftly moved over and above, to cradle her head within his arms, to block the moonlight with his back, to blot out all reason with the heat rising between their bodies. It always got to Pen, her being small in his big arms like that, kept secret from the world. "You know I would have fought that tree for you," he whispered, kissing her forehead. "I'd fight a whole forest. Bare-handed."
"I know, Pen." Lucy's eyes suddenly welled with tears and she threw her arms around his neck. "Oh I know."
She kissed his face everywhere, all over, smearing her tears, her fingers twisting in his dark hair and pulling him closer.
“You could have died,” he breathed out. “You could died. What would I have done then?”
This was one of Pen’s most honest admissions ever. And so it just had to come out with a trace of his home accent. Not a bad slip of the tongue, as the Duvos clipped vowels usually came across close enough to Lucien speech, but apparently it wasn’t good enough for today.
Lucy stared up at him for a few horrible heartbeats, and Pen had a crazy urge to tell her.
Everything, now. So she’d know about the shining ambition that brought him to these highly strategic Alliance boonies. About the excruciating pain that he had once welcomed, so he’d emerge a perfect man out of the relic-contaminated chambers of an imperial lab. How this here was merely a stepping stone in a long game. How Duvos loved a winner. How, in the space of this lost and parched afternoon, Pen knew that he wouldn't be going home fully victorious if he was going home alone. He felt himself getting hard, from these visions, from how the halo of her hair was fanning out on the pillow for him, from her soft proximity.
“I’m also starting to fear,” Lucy said haltingly. “That the tree did nothing wrong.”
This was way more double talk or brain activity than Pen enjoyed in bed. “Why are we talking about the wood in the wild?” He asked curtly. “When we have wood at home.”
He cut her short by putting his mouth right on her still soft nipple, and soon all Lucy could muster was his favorite melody of 'Pen, more, here, Pen, so good, yes. Pen.'
Her legs wrapped around him, Pen sank into her for so deep and for so long that there was only him and joy in Lucy's shining eyes. No room left for thoughts and doubts, neither in her nor himself.
After, he pretended to fall asleep in case she still had any breath for questions or Peach forbid, forestry conversations. She didn’t, drifting off to sleep in a messy satisfied abandonment, clinging to his chest and wrung out from the pleasure, the way only Pen could leave them.
She was still skinny but with more muscle these days. Not quite so weightless anymore, and Pen felt a stir of pride because he knew he’d had a hand in that. Her hair was in his face, and her skin smelled of his fresh sweat, and he would have ached to go without this.
Commitment was still an unfamiliar thought, but as a lifter, Pen thought that some weight might have been a good weight. There had to be a way to have this forever.
~~~
For the next hour, Pen lay there wide awake under a gently creaking fan. His mind played with different paths towards their future, the mostly solved puzzle of Lucy’s disappearance and how it could play into his game. Or hinder it.
Interrupting his thoughts, Lucy’s stupid dog kept growling in the yard.
The way it did when a rooster wandered in too close to the fence. Pen happened to like that stupid dog and he particularly enjoyed knocking out roosters. He slid out of bed, silently walked out barefoot into the cool desert air, and went around to make sure Nemo wasn't about to be broiled alive for an extra-crispy midnight monster snack.
Under the shade of chestnut trees, he found the dog in the full alert posture. Nemo started wagging his tail with relief, now that Lucy’s big human came to take over the suspicious noise business, and sniffed Pen's fingers for jerky as always.
As for the roosters, all was peaceful except that—
Someone was standing on the cliff above the workshop. Still like a deadwood, only his silver hair moved in the wind and the moonlight glimmered on a barrel of a gun. Pen's adrenaline shot up.
Logan.
Logan was here, and Pen was standing just in his skivvies, his knuckles white on the dog's collar.
Pen could take him, armed or not. The high ground wasn't in Pen's favor, but the muscle memory of his fist connecting with Logan's startled face was so satisfying. His brain sent him a nagging reminder that Matilda didn't want Logan arrested. In her words, the hunter was "a useful idiot"—a scapegoat for their schemes of weakening Sandrock. Yet Pen's body had grievances of its own and it coiled, ready to go at any moment, ready now.
Logan wasn't seeing him. His eyes were intent on the open bedroom window.
Wait. No.
Was it—longing? The electricity in that clear gaze made Pen's stomach bottom out. Oh, Skinny.
All the pieces fell into place. His own sweet Lucy, lost for dead, but obviously very much alive—fell off the cliff, onto the goat, upon the gang, and accidentally right into Logan's outlaw heart.
Fate had to be kidding.
No matter though. Whatever the yakboy thought he knew and told her about Pen, she would have wanted to come home and check for herself. Lucy was very thorough this way. Whatever she read in Pen's eyes tonight, it wasn’t enough to kick his ass to Duvos and back. Her words could lie to Pen, but her body never could.
She’d tell Logan she needed more time.
Yet Logan could no longer stay away from her, tugged in ways that Pen understood all too intimately. Plotting to use a talented builder in his crusade. Checking up on her getting home okay. Soon couldn't even last a day without seeing her. Having midnight thoughts about Pen's girl's long skinny legs.
Any single one of these reasons should have been making Pen explode and space punch something, into the literal stars. He impressed himself with how cool-headed he was. It was because not Logan but he, Pen, had always been in control of this. Of the narrative, of the relic out there in the ruins, of Lucy's affections, even of Lucy's stupid dog.
All Logan could do was to stand there at a respectful distance and moon over what could have been. This was better than punching him.
As if to argue with Pen's thoughts, Logan was suddenly in motion.
As always, his movement was fluid. Powerful in a way that made Pen's nerves sing in alarm. Downhill, to the fence, lightning fast. Pen's fists ached, ready to go.
Yet instead of launching himself over the fence into the little chestnut grove where Pen was hiding, Logan stopped and started tying something to the fence post near Lucy's commission board.
Pen stared in fucking disbelief.
They could have reached out and slapped each other, been at each other's throats in an instant. He could have finally seen if Logan bled pure virtue and lofty sentiment, or if just red and messy like every other loser. Before Pen finished wrestling with his impulse control, Logan turned on his heels and was gone into the night. Faster than Pen would have liked.
He stood there—for too long, his breathing loud and ragged against the night's silence. Nemo licked his fingers again, asking for attention and bringing Pen back to this dusty outback. Pen flexed his shoulders, grounding himself in the reliable feel of his own physical power.
Anyhow.
The fence now had a—was this a necklace? Will the surprises never end.
Pen tore it off the post, turned the amulet over in his hands. Looked like a wolf's tooth. Some gift. Was it a hunter superstition, a hex to ward off monsters in a storm that was coming? Or a promise of "I'd fight for you, tooth and nail"? The local hick and his homespun symbolism.
This was nothing in comparison to what a Duvos knight could give a woman.
Silks, balls, lights of a big city, Lucy's pretty face in society pages, a gleaming workshop with more powerful relics than she knew existed. Better, Pen would give himself over—and look good doing it. In his best Duvos greens, gloriously on bended knee, a catch beyond anything Lucy could dig up in this sandhole.
Having never given Logan much thought beyond the obvious, Pen tried to remember the man from those first days in Sandrock. A country boy, brooding and short-tempered, embarrassed by the effect he was having on women. A formidable adversary in war, but it would be laughable to imagine Logan a worthy opponent when it came to love.
So in these dark hours in the desert, Pen decided to worry about Lucy's idealism first. And her heart last.
Her gang sympathies could be overcome. It was only natural for Lucy to want to side with her own. Pen could do nothing about himself being an Imperial and her being Alliance, he supposed. Just a negligible fact of their births that could be easily lost in the bigger picture of their storied future.
It was time to think of how to sell the Empire cause to her. To make her see the Light, pun intended. Maybe there was a goody-goody angle to be found here, too. Maybe he could put a sparkling promise on her finger.
At worst, Pen could just throw her over his shoulder and continue his charm offensive in Duvos. That had been Matilda’s early advice, even before Lucy beat Pen in sparring with one hand and breathlessly offered him a heart knot with another. A talented builder was worth something on the other side of the border, too.
He squeezed the ragged edges of the amulet in his palm, later to fling it into one bottomless Eufaula pit or another. Nobody came sniffing around Pen's hard fought-over things. Nobody stood in his path.
Pen bent down and patted the short fur under his hand, instructing Nemo to take over the watch again. It was a done deal, he was taking the dog with them back home, to give Lucy something familiar to cuddle and comfort. Duvos could be too chilly a place for new arrivals.
Instead of going back to bed, he decided to work out. Soon it would be time to wrap up this silly provincial adventure in the dunes.
~~~
Back in the house, Lucy sat up, half-drunk with sleep and half-forgotten suspicions. She felt a pang of sharp disappointment for how cold and empty Pen’s side of the bed felt under her searching hand.
Still in this dreamlike daze, she was almost certain she heard somebody else whisper through an open window, "I sure would like to see you again." A low, tender drawl on the wind. Logan’s very blue eyes had burned through her during the fight like no matter who bested whom, he was fighting to hide that he’d already surrendered to her. After, his calloused palms cupped her own delicately, like he was placing himself in her hands.
And with a perfect clarity, she remembered how yesterday night at the saloon, Pen had lifted his hand and, with his perfect sharp enunciation, asked Grace for three yakmel milks. Holding up three wrong fingers on his hand. Nobody in the Free Cities counted this way.
She fell back to bed and pulled a pillow over her head with a groan. In all of Lucy’s library of weapon blueprints and gemstone refiners, there was no armor against getting your heart broken and its pieces pulled in all directions.