Re-Awakening: I Became a Pay To Win Boss Monster

Chapter 1038: Eating

Gaia watched it all without much investment. People were interesting in aggregate. Individually they required more effort than she usually had patience for, which was part of why the current situation was surprising her as much as it was. Rael required very little effort.

She wasn’t sure if that was a quality of his specifically or if she had simply gotten used to him faster than expected. Both possibilities were worth considering.

“Can I ask you something?” Rael said.

“You’re going to regardless.”

“Probably.” He turned his cup slowly on the table. “The place we’re going tomorrow. You said something was left there a long time ago. How long?”

She considered how specific to be. “Before the current era.”

“Before the current era is a wide range.”

“Yes.”

He waited, and when she didn’t elaborate he let it sit, which she appreciated. Most people pushed. He had a way of making space without making a point of it, which was harder than it looked.

“It was left by someone who is no longer around,” she said, eventually. “They had a habit of recording things that weren’t meant to be recorded, and then leaving those records in places that were unlikely to be disturbed.” She paused. “They were paranoid. Justifiably, as it turned out.”

“And you know where one of those places is.”

“I know where several are. This one is relevant.” She looked at him. “You’re not going to ask who it was?”

“Do I need to know right now?”

“No.”

“Then I’ll ask later.” He picked up his drink. “Does anyone else know about it?”

“One or two people might suspect. No one knows for certain.” She folded her hands on the table. “Which is part of why I want to move on it before we do anything else. If Lilith’s situation in the Demon Realm is connected to what I think it’s connected to, then it won’t stay quiet for long. Someone will start looking, and when they start looking, they’ll eventually look in the right places.”

Rael was quiet for a moment. “How bad is it, if they get there first?”

“Depends on who they are.” She looked out the window. “But with your current level of power, it doesn’t exactly matter.”

“Right.” He set his cup down. “Then we go tomorrow, early.”

“Early,” she agreed.

It wasn’t a long conversation, and it didn’t need to be. She had worked with people before who felt the need to talk problems into the ground — to circle them from every angle, to reassure themselves through repetition that they had considered everything. It was exhausting. Rael took information, sat with it briefly, and then moved. She found that functional.

She found a lot of things about him functional, which was a word she was using deliberately because the alternatives felt like more than she was ready to commit to.

“You went somewhere,” Rael said.

She looked back at him. “Thinking.”

“About?”

“Tomorrow.”

He looked at her for a moment with an expression she was becoming familiar with — the one that said he didn’t entirely believe her but wasn’t going to press it. “Okay,” he said.

She looked back out the window.

The green out there was deep enough that the light didn’t fully penetrate it, just filtered down in broken pieces, moving slightly when the wind moved the canopy.

She had always liked old growth. There was something honest about it — it didn’t pretend to be anything other than what it was, and it had been doing what it did for long enough that it had no reason to. She respected that in things.

“What was it like?” Rael asked. “Before. When you were — doing whatever you were doing, before all of this.”

She glanced at him. “That’s vague.”

“I know. I asked plenty about your past, so answer it however it fits.”

She thought about it. The honest answer was complicated, and she was not always in the habit of giving honest answers to questions about herself, but she found that the dishonest ones felt wrong in a way they didn’t always. “Quiet,” she said. “Largely. There were periods that weren’t, but they passed. Most things pass.”

“Did you prefer the quiet?”

“I thought I did.”

Rael looked at her steadily. He didn’t say anything, just waited, and she exhaled slowly.

“I’m not sure the question applies anymore,” she said. “Preference implies options. I didn’t choose the quiet, I just — had it. It was the default state of things.” She turned her cup in her hands. “You don’t miss something until you have a reference point.”

“And now you have one.”

She didn’t answer that directly. “It’s an adjustment,” she said instead.

He smiled, small and genuine, and looked back out the window. “That’s fair.”

The plate between them was nearly empty. She hadn’t noticed herself eating most of it. Outside, the wind moved through the canopy again and the light shifted briefly before settling.

“Rael.”

“Mm.”

“When we’re done with all of this.” She stopped, reformulating. “After the place tomorrow, and the first part, and whatever the second part turns into. What do you do?”

He looked at her. “What do you mean?”

“I mean —” She wasn’t entirely sure what she meant, which was unusual. She was lost.

He was quiet for a moment, but then he said, “We’ll see when we get to it, I guess.”

She looked at him steadily. “I’m asking because it’s relevant to how I plan.”

“Is it.”

“Yes.”

He looked at her for another moment, and the smile that came then was different from the usual one — quieter, like he was keeping it from going further than he intended. “Then factor in that I’m not planning on going anywhere that takes me too far from where you are,” he said. “For the foreseeable future.”

She held that for a moment, examining it from a few angles. Then she looked back out at the trees.

“That’s acceptable,” she said.

Behind her she could hear him trying not to laugh, and she kept her expression where it was and said nothing, and the morning finished itself out around them at its own pace, green and warm and asking nothing at all.

They stayed a little longer than they needed to, which neither of them acknowledged directly. The lounge had filled up slightly since they’d first come down — a few more people, a little more ambient noise, nothing that disturbed the particular quality of quiet they’d managed to carve out at their corner table. G

aia didn’t mind the company at a distance. It was comfortable in the way that background noise sometimes is, present enough to remind you that the world is still going but not so much that it asks anything of you.

Eventually Rael stretched and stood, and she followed without needing to be told, and they left the lounge the same way they’d come in — without ceremony, without discussion, just moving together in the easy way that had somehow become natural without her deciding that it would be.

Back upstairs, the room had the particular stillness of a space that had been left alone for a few hours. She crossed to the window and looked out at the same green as before, different angle now, and Rael dropped onto the bed behind her and pulled out his interface for something or other. She could hear the quiet sounds of him navigating it without looking.

“I’m going to reach out to Nyx,” he said. “About Lilith.”

“Keep it vague,” she said.

“I know how to talk to Nyx.”

She glanced back at him. He was already typing, unbothered, and she turned back to the window.

The light had shifted since morning, the sun having moved enough that the green outside looked different now — less soft, more substantial, the kind of afternoon light that made things look exactly as solid as they were. She liked it. Morning light flattered things. Afternoon light just showed them.

She heard Rael make a quiet sound behind her — something between amusement and acknowledgment — and assumed Nyx had replied to whatever he’d sent, and didn’t ask.

“She says hi,” Rael said.

Gaia glanced back at him. “Tell her I said she still owes me from the third era.”

A pause while he typed it. Then a short sound of amusement from him. “She says the debt was settled when she didn’t tell anyone about the thing with the northern coast.”

“That wasn’t a settlement, that was basic courtesy.”

“I’m just relaying.” He was clearly enjoying this. She could hear it without needing to look. Another pause, another reply coming in. “She says, and again, just relaying — that you’re welcome, and also that your standards for courtesy are unreasonable, and also that she likes your hair better when it’s down and she doesn’t know why you’re only just now spending time with someone worth spending time with.”

Gaia was quiet for a moment.

“She can’t see my hair,” she said.

“That’s the part you’re responding to?”

She turned back to the window. “Tell her I’ll contact her myself when I have something worth saying.”

“She says she’ll be waiting with great anticipation.” A beat. “I think she likes you.”

“Nyx likes anything she finds interesting,” Gaia said. “Don’t mistake it for warmth.”

“Maybe it’s both.”

Gaia didn’t answer that, and looked back out at the trees, and let the afternoon do what it was doing.