"I will." 

He doesn't say thank you, Chris. He doesn't know what he'd be thanking him for. 

"As always, it is my job to talk to you if you have any feelings or emotions you would like to talk about."

He nods. "Thank you, Chris." 

(He should figure out what his feelings are before he takes Chris up on that, probably.)

"You can go."

He goes. 

He finds — something to do with himself for the next few hours. 

Meanwhile--

"So, you and Lev, huh?" Loki asks.

"Me and Lev," he agrees. Talking about it is probably not going to be comfortable but not talking about it is really bad optics, so. 

"What is he like?"

He considers his answer. 

"He's... sweet. He worries a lot, he's very cuddly. — It's a pretty recent development, there isn't much to say." 

"He never talks to anybody." Loki paddles. "As far as anybody can tell he just works all day when he's not sleeping."

Sasha paddles with her. "That's more accurate than it isn't, he works a lot." 

"I think it's about time, honestly."

"Yeah." He remembers how desperately Lev had kissed him, remembers the closet half-full of what were presumably Asher's clothes. "I do too." 

"I guess I'm going to especially have to keep you alive. --Not that he'd do anything, you know, but you didn't see him after Asher died."

"I'd hope you were keeping me alive before!" He's smiling. "— more seriously, I might not have been here for it, but I... think I get it." The shotgun on the wall; you're the second person I've ever kissed. 

"Sorry, if you wanted to be on forklift duty, you should have started dating Marlo instead."

He debates talking about what happened with him and Marlo, and then decides to not do that. "Good thing I don't, I guess." 

Then they can talk about movies. 

Loki is outraged to have discovered that the Ender's Game movie was in fact bad.

Sasha has a whole bunch of opinions about the adaptation decisions it made and where exactly it went wrong! That being said the shots of Battle School from the outside were really really cool. 

(He keeps remembering what happened last time he left home to go on a scavenging mission. He does his best to distract himself but it doesn't quite work.) 

Loki gives no visible sign that she's noticed, but she's talking more than she did on the way in, and at dinner that night (various kinds of fish, roasted, the small ones whole and with the scales still on) one of the other scavengers suddenly acquires a fervent desire to hear him recite poetry.

That's really, really sweet of them. 

He recites poetry for them — not Inland, but Gather and Blackberry Picking and Monet Refuses The Operation and My First Peacock and the verses of The Old Astronomer that he knows by heart, they're a little out of order but that was never the point — and the image of coming back to Nova to find — what he found — is behind his eyes when he blinks and he is not thinking about that, he isn't, he has a task in front of him and he can concentrate on it and that will be okay, it has to be. 

His tentmate checks the zipper of the tent thoroughly, then says, "do you want to check?"

Yes. Yes, he wants to check, and then check another two times to make it three, and making it nine is a little bit excessive but he makes it nine anyway.

It — isn't really him he's scared for, though, he's not remembering nights spent with the Something waiting outside, he's remembering coming home to find —

It's summer and Orion isn't in the sky but he prays before he falls asleep anyway. 

That night, Lev goes to the sleeper room, walks through the narrow hallway that separates the two rows of sleepers, and holds Asher's hand. (Asher gets a bed, not a spot on the floor; unlike many sleepers, he gets visited regularly.)

"I'm sorry I didn't talk to you last night," he says. (Asher grins in his sleep and makes a soft happy noise like he just started petting a cat.) "But I think you'd approve of the reason. I met someone. His name's Sasha and he's so good. He knows lots of poetry and he's really smart and he-- thinks about things, like you used to. And he's really pretty and soft.

"He kissed me. I don't think he's going to want to kiss me again, I kind of cried on his shoulder for five hours afterward and I don't think that's very attractive. I know, you'd tell me to be more confident and that I'm really hot and anyone would want to date me. But it is hard to believe. I guess we'll see.

"It was nice to get to kiss somebody at all. Part of me feels like I should feel like I'm betraying you? I mean, we are monogamous, and it's not like you're dead, and it's not like you can tell me not to. But I think you wouldn't want me to not kiss anyone until you woke up. I think you'd want me to be happy. Maybe that's wishful thinking. 

"I miss you. I miss you so much."

He kisses Asher's lips. They're still warm, and it almost feels like he's kissing back.

The rest of the scavenger crew continue to not say anything about Lev or about Sasha's anxiety, but they do continue to try to distract him as best they can. Sasha learns the plots of several books he has yet to have read and a good deal of gossip. (Chris insists he's gay but is definitely married to a woman and they are definitely having sex. Pilots have extremely interesting and complicated sex lives, except for the three Catholics, who are all monogamous with their anchors. The eight-year-old bishop who is next in line for the papacy keeps announcing his plans for when he becomes pope, which he seems to believe will happen sometime in the next two or three years.)