Work Text:
Vi stares at the man for a long time, perplexed. She doesn't understand what Vander saw in him.
His dark hair is tumbling from a bun coming loose. His nose is long and prominent, demanding too much attention and giving his profile a knife sharp quality undermined by a weak chin. Thin lips pulled in a crooked smile reveal teeth cut like Mylo's. The photograph is faded, its sepia tones keeping the colour of his eyes a secret.
What's not so secret is their relationship. Vander's left hand is clasped around the man's slender wrist, his right enveloping his waist, bringing him close for a kiss that clearly hadn't been planned, and barely avoided. Vander is kissing his jaw, his face blurred by the movement. The mysterious man is twisting away, his smile frozen before it could bloom into a laugh.
Vi can imagine the scene. She can hear the laughter ringing in her ears, the ghost of an unknown voice, begging Vander to stop and to be serious. Photographs are expensive. Yet the intimacy of the moment is not something she's learnt to associate with Vander.
Their adoptive father is charming, popular. Powerful. Vi isn't too concerned by romance herself—she's simply not met the right girl yet—but she understands that Vander's celibacy isn't usual. She's seen people try their luck. Almost every weekend actually, after some customer buys enough liquid courage to make a pass at him at the bar. Vander smiles or laughs or frowns. Sometimes he even has someone stay the night, but none of these people ever stuck around long enough for her to learn their name, let alone for photographs.
She places the picture back carefully in the box she found it in. It's on top of a bundle of paper notes. One loose sheet turns out to be a call to strike, broad slogans penned in a careful hand. The edges of it are frayed.
Vi's curiosity burns almost as strong as her guilt for prying like this in Vander's secrets. She doesn't open any of the notes, almost afraid of what she'd find there. Afraid of putting a name and a voice to the stranger.
'Did you ever have someone?' Vi asks Vander the following week, when she's certain everything is as usual, her snooping gone unnoticed. 'You know, someone special?'
Vander looks up from the gauze he's wrapping around his fist. 'Why do you ask?'
'I don't know,' she says with an artfully casual shrug. 'You're popular, right? Kind of wondering why you're not settling down, I guess. I thought... Maybe you lost someone too, on the bridge? Someone we didn't meet?'
A daring angle of attack, but her curiosity has long since consumed the remainder of her guilt over her invasion of Vander's privacy. She looks at him and feels like the man preparing to spar with her is a stranger, now more than ever before. Someone she'd started to believe she knew, only for a photograph to wipe her confidence clean off.
Vander has a past he doesn't talk about, this Vi knows. Others are freer with their words and their memories. She knows about the Hound. She's even glimpsed him before, in the red smoke of that day, pummelling enforcers to death.
'No,' Vander says, tone serious. 'Lost plenty of good people on the bridge, but no one like that.'
A half answer Vi doesn't acknowledge. She tucks the gauze of her own wrappings under her wrist, flexes her fingers, testing her grip, waiting.
'Don't worry, no one will end up living with us at the Drop,' Vander says with a small chuckle, like it has anything to do with what Vi asked. 'I'm not looking.'
'You never did?' she pushes, turning the conversation to the past again.
'No, never,' he answers, getting up. He stretches his arms and shoulders, and looking into his face Vi can't see any hint of the lie. There's no trace of that man's laugh, of his thin wrists and small waist pulled close. 'I was building the Lanes, then leading the uprising... and love only gets in the way,' he adds with a sad smile.
Vi shudders.
Is that what happened to his old love, the man buried in a box under his bed? Did he get in the way?
She doesn't ask. A secret Vander will lie for can't be worth knowing.