Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

        The man opens his eyes to darkness. Even squinting doesn’t help. The panic hits first, then some unpleasant combination of pain and exhaustion, but he’s not alone. Avon, it appears, has not abandoned him despite all threats to do so, though his mind is rather more chaotic than the man would have expected. Probably shock, come to think of it. At least the order with which he alternates between cursing Blake’s naïveté, the Liberator crew’s treachery, Federation traps and his own foolishness for letting himself get caught up in it all is somewhat predictable, like clockwork. The name Blake sounds familiar, for some reason, like it has some relation to the man in pain, but before he can quite work it out he’s gone again.

        He wakes again at movement. Avon is no longer there within some sort of reach he can’t quantify, not with the throbbing pain in his skull and back. Without that anchor, safety of some sort is no longer guaranteed. He tries to make his way to at least sit only to hiss weakly at the strain. The footsteps falter, something dropping to the ground, then begin to run, and he gives his position up as helpless, at the mercy of whoever approaches.

        “You were dead,” Avon spits, hands on his arms disbelieving and pressing a little too hard, though the man does not begrudge them.

        “Evidently not.” Though it might still be a near thing, if the sudden pang of cold that strikes him to his core is any indication.

        “Your heart stopped,” Avon responds, never one to let the possibility of an argument fade, and in response the man simply feels tired. Tired, and a little sad.

        “My left heart, yes,” he responds quietly, trying not to give in to the urge to let his head fall and rest against the cold rock at his back. He can feel the one on the right struggling to keep up, but he’s not meant to exist this way, with only one functional. The quiet suggests he has said something wrong, but he has neither the energy nor inclination to care.

        “The poison has overcome what little is left of your reason, I see.” Avon pries open his eyes, in case that would be in any way helpful; judging by the continual state of darkness and the disgusted sound Avon makes, it is not.

        “Unless you listened carefully or had instruments, I doubt I have any way to prove it to you. And given the circumstances, I’m not sure I’ll last long for your fact-finding.” This is, in fact, an urgent matter. If they don’t get it restarted, he probably will succumb to the poison if not to the cold—Avon’s diagnosis sounds right, if rather vague—but fighting through this fog in his mind is rather difficult.

        “You’re going to keep up worse nonsense than usual, Blake?” Avon is annoyed—that much can be communicated without touch.

        Blake. That must be his name. It rings true, and yet not at all, but he’ll accept it for the moment. He tries to speak, to respond, but the coughing rather catches him by surprise. When he finally manages to breathe again, his clothes feel like there’s a spattering of something warm and wet quickly cooling in the air of the cave, and there’s a hand on his pulse. This time he can disentangle his own shock and panic from Avon’s own.

        “You’re thinking rather loudly,” he manages thickly. Some of the blood, he works out, is from a cut on his tongue, making the whole rather itchy and throat sore. He’d bitten it at some point, it seems, but when is a nebulous quantity he cannot determine at the moment. Funny, that.

        On cue, Avon’s thoughts come to a complete stop before continuing again, much more precise and probing. Pictures of animals he’s only ever seen in vistapes are projected. Then why does he know their names?

        “Pink elephants, Avon, really?” Of course, the absurd is the point, a test. The specificity allows no room for error or fake.

        “This is a new development,” Avon muses quietly, barely audible but for the slight stereo thanks to the continued touch of skin. “Cally would have been overjoyed if she’d had the slightest hint we weren’t all human and therefore boring.” He’s already worked out that it’s due to touch, but—surprisingly—doesn’t pull away. Sure he has control of himself, that he can keep his secrets locked down. Futile, when it comes to some species, particularly those more powerful, and of course the fact that Avon is letting him in means that were he so inclined (never mind not dying) very little could be hidden, but as it happens, neither are true.

        “Fascinating.” A thought, but this time more deliberately thought, as if in his direction, accompanied, no doubt, by one of Avon’s smiles that are all teeth and nothing reaching his eyes. The choice of communication calculated to lessen their chances of being heard by pursuers seeking them in the caves. “But irrelevant at the moment. Who are you really?”

        Possession. A thought that would be laughable, if not for past experience. If anything, his head only hurts worse. He answers telepathically himself, a fit of pique making him send the answer before he means to. “It feels like I’ve been trying to answer that question all my lives.”

        The wording, he realizes, as Avon pounces on every word as if it’s the key to the mystery, with all his intent, unbreaking concentration, was indeed odd, but it doesn’t feel wrong. Fine, he’s feeling all fuzzy. Let Avon pry into the cracks of his mind and work it out. And of course their cautious comp tech thinks it could be a trap, but curiosity propels him forward anyway. It’ll be a difficult job, the man (Blake?) thinks with difficulty, sinking back into waves of steadily increasing pain, gritting his teeth against the possibility of making a single sound with only the vaguest idea as to why. There’s little there to work with, but it all feels remarkably consistent. If not for the bit where he’s poisoned, he’d feel as whole as he’s likely to ever feel—some memories are probably irreversibly lost. Efficiently the other man calls up responses to queries, as if Blake’s mind were nothing more than a computer program. He isn’t sure whether to take offense, but given that he can barely move concentrates all efforts instead on trying not to die.

        Resistance gives way. On both sides, Avon’s disbelief and Blake’s remnants of self-preservation. Mostly, this happens to be due to the fact that in his mind like this Avon can feel, just as Blake can, how hyper-aware he is of his own right heart valiantly struggling to keep beating. They have yet to encounter anything that physically changes a subject after possession, which does not necessitate that such a thing is impossible, but even then Avon cannot fathom it occurring so quickly unless such a change was expected and already prepared for.

        It is undoubtedly unwise to let someone so single-minded in so deeply, because even as he seeks confirmation of the man’s identity and problems to be solved he’s keeping an eye out for vulnerabilities to be ruthlessly exploited later, but Blake hasn’t made it this far being wise, and in any case one of the few facts he knows with certainty in both his hearts (however unbeating) is that he trusts Avon. This momentarily baffles and distracts their comp tech, but after a mere pause he presses on, shoving that confusion aside in favor of continuing to work until he’s been satisfied with the data that has been presented.

        Avon attempts to find what rewrote the code. Blake’s mind spits out two distinct moments that merge into one, a headpiece that rewrites his entire being, and when he returns he has Avon’s coat sleeve stuffed in his mouth and is half dizzy with apparently screaming into it, throat raw and pained (though his own equilibrium probably isn’t aided by the looming possibility of his second heart failing). Upon noticing his return, Avon quickly shrugs back on the coat, swapping which hand is touching Blake’s. The other man’s touch is freezing, but then, he personally can’t be much better off. Chameleon arch. The meaning of the words is out of reach, at the moment, but that is the name of the device. That, and—

        Ah.

        The pocket watch, the one that Blake somehow still had on his person with no memory as to how it had gotten there. It had piqued Vila’s interest—why would a man carry a pocket watch and a wrist watch—and Blake’s own quickly fading curiosity and even remembrance of the incident coupled with the admonishment not to open it must have been too much for their thief, who likely just had to see what was inside. Blake could not remember how, at the moment, but therein lay the key.

        “That’s enough to be getting on with,” Avon thinks definitively, satisfied for the moment. “Since you can’t remember, the facts are these: we are on a cave on an ice planet. Despite my warning, you decided to blindly trust old alliances. At my most generous, they were accounted for the same way you had been, though it is considerably more likely they merely weighed their options and found selfishness more valuable than charity. At my probing specifics one of them had decided we were better off dead. The knife was distinctly cruder than the poison it was laced with. The Liberator is not answering, and while the signal might be weak in these caves, it was not on the surface.” He is also carefully not adding the fact that he had dragged what he had to have presumed was a dead or dying Blake with him to safety rather than just abandoning him, which warms Blake’s remaining beating heart considerably. A threat to not reveal this information to anyone is added with deliberate urgency, speed calculated so as not to appear hasty. A moot point, if they can’t manage to keep him alive. There’s another word—regeneration—but useless and out of reach with only one heart beating.

        “Do you have any idea as to how to save your life?” Avon continues smoothly, stilling as the sound of shuffling and voices becomes audible. Blake attempts to breathe more quietly, heart pounding even faster under Avon’s fingers.

        “If we—” he starts to respond, losing track of the sentence and coming back what feels like mere seconds later, though Avon’s carefully controlled panic suggests it’s been rather longer, “...if we can manage to get the second heart started, I should be able to purge the poison and start to heal. Or at least regenerate.” The concept is vague and nebulous; he’s not even on his first, whatever that means, but the thought skitters away before he can grasp it.

        “There is no mechanical injury, then?” Blake is starting to drift again, but that strand of hope—he is unsure if it is his own or Avon’s, but he will clasp it tightly with both hands.

        “No,” he answers slowly, distantly, that memory, at least, not completely out of reach. “The problem is proximity.” Aiken’s hand had been shaking, he realizes with perfect clarity—the only moment in the whole tour he can recall so vividly. He had meant to stab the heart, but missed—but the poison had managed to stop that heart quite effectively anyway, and if they take too long, the second will as well, simply on a delay. And the torment of his biology rewriting itself a second time blended in perfectly with the agony of the poison working its way through his system. If not for that, though...he’d have quite likely already been dead.

        “Blake, focus,” Avon insists. It would be annoying if not for the reason behind it, that Avon is very determined that Blake should not die—not here and now, at any rate. “If that is the case, how do we restart it?”

        It’s a pity that most of his time as a schoolboy had been spent daydreaming about stealing a TARDIS and going off to fight injustice like The Doctor, rather than actually paying attention to his studies. Such as biology.

        “Blake.” The warning, Blake realizes, is no mere impatience. The hand on his wrist has determined something rather crucial—his heart rate is growing more erratic.

        “Force—chest compressions will work best.” He can feel Avon working out the spot using symmetry, since his hearts aren’t quite located where they would be on a human. “If that doesn’t work, I might need a shock.” Avon could probably repurpose one or more of the gadgets they took with them to make something—well, it’s not likely to be anything like a defibrillator, but it’s the best they can do. Blake could, possibly, if he’d even felt like he could lift his arms.

        “And that won’t stop your other heart?” Avon queries out loud once more. The shuffling of clothing suggests he might be trying to warm up a little so as not to jeopardize the attempt. Probably replacing the glove. Blake mourns the loss of contact. No wonder Cally had been so despondent at times. It’s hard to miss something you don’t know, but now that it’s gone, he’s suddenly feeling even more lonely than before. Particularly when he still can’t see.

        Blake swallows down sudden nausea and bile to respond, quieter than he even intends. Avon has to lean down to try to hear him on a second try. “Shouldn’t think so, but at this point, I suspect we might be a little desperate.” He’s not entirely sure they have a choice, either, but doesn’t have the breath to say so, not with Avon arranging him meticulously before beginning in earnest, a sharp, cold pain tearing through Blake at every movement. His breathing hadn’t been particularly good before this, but now it’s all he can do to gasp, brain sluggishly attempting to grasp the pattern. Somewhere in the middle, the darkness and pain engulf him again.

Chapter Text

         The Rebel wakes feeling considerably less foggy, taking stock. His chest is still sore, but the wound at his back is almost fully healed. And, fortunately, his vision has returned, for what little good it does him in a cave he can hardly remember entering. He’s still got several vague points in his memory—for one, he’d been forced into a ship to escape a war, but what war—but on the whole he’s far more, well, whole. He could name several Time Lords and Ladies who would find the whole situation humiliating, living among humans, meddling in their affairs—but while uncomfortable he doesn’t find himself regretting a single second of it. All life deserves the chance to live unruled by tyrants, petty or otherwise. So there hadn’t been too much difference, after all. A cheering thought, as you never know, when Chameleon Arches get involved—a pale imitation of regeneration, perhaps. Not that he’d know, not yet. And then the shiver reminds himself of something crucial. Avon had mentioned an ice planet, hadn’t he? If not for a Gallifreyan physiology The Rebel—Blake, he doesn’t mind using the name given to him by the Chameleon Arch—would be suffering quite badly. On the other hand, Avon must be on the verge of hypothermia, if not in it.

         For a moment, he panics at the utter lack of his sometimes savior—had Avon had been captured and they’d left him for dead—before he turns his head and there he is. At least he’s shivering, which means he hasn’t got the signal yet to stop, the point at which it gets really dangerous. “Avon.”

         No response, which won’t do. Shaking him does nothing. They’ll have to get somewhere the Liberator can actually read their signal. Carrying him will be a challenge, but he’s hardly going to abandon a friend down here, particularly when Avon had gone through the trouble to save him before. If they run into trouble, though, his hearts very well might not be able to take it. Even the reverse situation, him half-carrying an unconscious Avon, is already taxing enough. It’s dangerous to tempt fate by exposing themselves to these temperatures for too much longer, but it might be better to move quiet than quick. Though he might just be making excuses, given that he’s not sure he can move any faster.

         His guess had been accurate, as it happens, which also aids his mood considerably, despite the circumstances. From the sound of booted feet, they are in fact still being hunted. Always in the wrong direction, thankfully, but it’s an improbable situation growing yet more improbable by the minute. His breath is starting to come shorter, feel less effective.

         He can feel the strands of what-ifs and what-could-bes on the air. How drastically things could change based solely on what happens in the next hour. If they’re captured, even further if Avon dies here. Redundant, at best. He hadn’t needed a Time Lord’s senses to know that. And it’s not as if it works like a danger sense. That would be altogether too convenient, he thinks, expression wry.

         “Blake, we’re trying to find you.” Human Blake had never quite been comfortable with the feeling of Cally projecting into his mind, even as he’d acknowledged its use and the fact that, for her, it comes as easily as breathing. For him, it barely registers; he’s too busy trying to remember if he’s ever been told about her precise range to have a better chance of navigating tunnels of ice and rock that he’d been unconscious for on the way in. He’ll last long enough to hopefully make it to the Liberator, at which point some rest and a little tissue regeneration will likely be all he needs, but he’s starting to get rather worried about Avon, who remains unconscious. Still shivering, though, which is better than not.

         He can feel Cally accidentally project her confusion at getting a response for once, and—interesting, that’s right, she had mentioned that she could actually read a telepath’s mind. Handy.

         “Feel free to poke around a bit as long as you can multitask and keep moving. We’re both in need of medical attention and I’m not sure how much longer I can haul Avon around.” A Gallifreyan might have better endurance but there’s a limit, and between the shock to his circulatory system, the wound at his back, and the bitter cold there’s so much an improved constitution can help.

         “It shouldn’t be too much further,” Cally promises, encouraging. “It’s getting easier to hear you, and not just because you’re projecting your thoughts. Gan’s keeping their scouts occupied chasing him. He’s surprisingly quick on his feet.”

         The exhaustion is bone-deep, but through it he feels a warming glow of pride. They’re all very resourceful and clever people and he is honored to work alongside them. “All right. I’ll try to keep projecting so you can guide me, but I can’t promise I’ll stay coherent.”

         “Some might say that’s nothing new,” Cally responds. It’s remarks like this that make, say, Vila concerned she isn’t too fond of them, after all, but it’s not Cally’s fault that the rest of them aren’t telepathic and can’t see the rest of the context, just as valuable as body language in communicating for her people. She’s gently (fondly) mocking anyone who might say such things, as well as Blake himself.

         “Very funny, Cally.” He doesn’t hide the amusement very well behind the stern tone, but to be fair, he hadn’t meant to conceal it.

         “Just trying to keep your spirits high.” She’s speaking lightly to avoid thinking about her previous fear. And then, a little trace of homesickness prompts her next question. “What was your planet like?”

         “Warm. Not just physically temperate, but also to look at. I used to go walking through the woods in the morning, just to watch them turn fiery in the dawn.” He considers continuing, but realizes words are inadequate here, when images will do, so he shares them. No wonder he hadn’t realized something was missing, when sneaking outside the domed cities into the so-called wastelands beyond, defying prohibitions in the search of a greater cause, was nothing new.

         He’s in the midst of describing an ill-fated expedition he’d launched into the frozen mountains accompanied by several of his cousins prompted by absolutely nothing in particular when Cally hisses a warning. He flattens himself and Avon as best he can against the wall without question or hesitation. The guns discharging are, at least, familiar, though he doesn’t dare move, even at the sound of bodies falling, until Cally calls out mentally. “It’s all right now, Blake.”

         When he moves into view, he’s sure he must look a sight, but Cally is nothing but relieved. Vila’s relief looks rather like guilt.

         “We would’ve rescued you earlier, only...well, we thought you were dead.” Vila just sounds surprised, not concerned, but Blake doesn’t take that personally. It’s just his way.

         “I’ll survive, thanks to you and Avon,” Blake manages, breathless. This appears to be the last straw for a heavily abused body, because he’s out again before he even falls. Later, he suspects it might be because he knows himself to be safe, now that they’ve found him. That he’s achieved what he meant to. Avon’s efforts would not be for nothing.

Chapter Text

        It happens both before and after the Rebel is ready. He had expected to be confronted the instant he was conscious again, but instead they wait until he’s gathered some of his wits about him and can walk, if a little unsteadily, to one of the chairs in the medical bay (it seems the most appropriate) and even until Avon himself is conscious again and sitting up, if unusually silent and with a scowl somehow even deeper than before. It is, he gathers, probably a practicality for his crew; there’s little use seeking answers if he’s too incoherent to give them properly, and they probably believed correctly that Avon deserved to hear (and perhaps wanted to check for any sign that Blake himself had done something to the man that would become clear with proximity). Avon himself is likely brooding at how the new state of affairs affects all his carefully cultivated plans, as well as maybe being a trifle disturbed at another near-death experience. He also feels Cally reach out and touch his mind, likely to verify his answers, and instincts collide with memory and he flinches, withdrawing slightly before he catches himself and forces himself to be more open.

        He’d say maybe he’s gotten used to outsiders meddling in his brain, but it’s more...he’s finally starting to recover from that trauma, perhaps. Though, and he groans to realize this, the paranoid secret-keeping was probably an extension of that desire to regain control—that, and being told that someone had betrayed them, shortly before a second massacre. Understandable, but entirely unacceptable, Roj, he thinks, temper quieting as Cally actually stifles a laugh.

        She trusts him, now—not that she hadn’t before, but she understands him now in a way she hadn’t any of the rest of them, and the similarities are enough to quell a little of her homesickness. They’re both cloned. Well, the looms aren’t cloning, exactly, but he wasn’t born either, and the process is familiar enough for her to grasp it easily, unlike Terran customs that she often finds bizarre.

        It is not surprising that Vila be the first to actually broach the subject, though. He may be a coward, but if he has rigged the game or is in a situation where he is fairly sure of himself he can be surprisingly proactive, and here, in a situation where he is fairly sure of the outcome and has the rest of the crew backing him up, he is almost brave.

        “I’m not against taking any sort of credit for a heroic rescue. I’m just...a little lost on what I did, and maybe you could remind me?” That’s amusingly a particularly Vila way of putting it. He’d also potentially had time to consider the phrasing—he’d probably said something along the lines before, only to an audience too comatose to give any kind of useful answers.

        That’s straightforward enough, and a good enough place to start besides. “Ignoring my orders, though I shouldn’t like you to do it again—taking the pocket watch and opening it.”

        “I knew it was important!” Vila exclaims with a distinct sense of triumph, and then adds, “...Though I thought I could hear a voice, sometimes, giving me advice.” He had probably, Blake realizes, vaguely amused and resigned, been hoping for advice that could lead to riches.

        And, of course, that is, itself, a fascinating development, though he obviously does not agree with Vila about why. “Do you know, that’s not actually entirely new? Well, if the literature is to be believed. I don’t know any Gallifreyan that has actually used a Chameleon Arch.”

        “Except you,” Gan rumbles, sturdy and supportive, and at least there’s a relief.

        “Well, yes.” All in all, he’d come out of it rather well, so he’s in a good mood.

        “So you’re not human?” Jenna clarifies. She’s still more standoffish than she’d been in quite some time. She’d come round on Cally. He rather hopes she can find it in her heart to do the same for him; he’s fond of her and not particularly in the mood to try to find another pilot. And in any case, he has the feeling that this was the last straw, the moment where she decides she doesn’t have it in her to continue to pursue him with all his complications along with everything else going on in their lives.

        He answers solemnly, taking the question with the gravity it deserves. “I’m afraid not.” At Cally’s mental cough, he adds, somewhat reluctantly, because he doesn’t need to see the future to know the precise next response by his crew, “I also achieved the rank of Time Lord.”

        “Time Lord? Does that mean you can see the future?” Vila’s eyes gleam with avarice, but he’s interrupted by Avon, intense by even Avon standards.

        “You can travel in time.” It’s a confirmation of something he’d gathered through his own jaunt through The Rebel’s mind, importance only mattering now that they have both survived.

        “Theoretically, yes.” Avon steels his jaw, and the others likewise seem disappointed, but he cannot change the truth. “Even with my memories returned, I can’t recall the location of the TARDIS. It must be one of those memories damaged however inadvertently by the Federation.” He isn’t sure how exactly it works—more biology he never learned, though to be fair, while there almost certainly had been studies on the effect of mental alterations through regeneration and Chameleon Circuit in the past, any results would have been held in libraries even a young Rebel hadn’t been able to infiltrate. His best guess is that the damage caused caused the equivalent of bad sectors in a computer, in a way that not even Time Lord healing can undo, though there is no means of testing the hypothesis. Though, in some ways, a damaged memory in this case is probably for the better. The world does not need another war over time.

        “So the Federation has a timeship?” Gan sounds rather alarmed, even for Gan—with good cause.

        He hastens to reassure them. “It’s not just a matter of keys. A TARDIS is like the Liberator, a living organism, though far more complex, of course, and a rather similar similar ability to protect itself. Even a clone of myself as I am now would not fool one. And the Chameleon Circuit was working, so if anything it is blending in nicely and no one, not even me, is the wiser.”

        “The Liberator is alive?” Jenna asks, quiet and subdued, and he smiles at her.

        “Mostly directed by Zen, yes. She can regenerate her own circuits,” he points out sensibly. It’s hardly the same, but if he reaches out, he can feel the ship, feel her and Zen reach back, and as amazing as the connection feels, the slight incompatibility would be a little too much if not for Cally in his mind, steadying him with fascinated wonder. “I wouldn’t worry too much—they both favor you.”

        And then she’s grinning at him, an expression he can’t help but meet, and there’s one less worry; Jenna will, at least, be all right.

        “Without the translation circuits, though, we’re all fortunate that I bothered to learn English at the Academy. None of the rest thought it worthwhile.” From the way Avon smirks however weakly at him, it’s fairly clear that he’d found the truth of the matter, that it was more a matter of him teaching himself because he was fascinated rather than any officially approved study material, but he’s hardly going to start defending his choices to Avon again, among other things because he is starting to feel his own strength fade.

        “We’re not calling you the wrong name?” Jenna asks suddenly.

        Blake finds himself running a distracted hand through his curls. “Not as such,” he hedges, realizing suddenly from the glances, sympathetic and understanding, from, say, Gan and Jenna, an echoing touch in Cally’s thoughts, that the question is genuine. Not merely an attempt to discern if he is, in fact, still the same man, but an offer, for the first time in a while, to let him define himself. “I was called The Rebel, but there’s no need to stand on ceremony. I’m perfectly content to remain Roj Blake.”

        He feels time settle, soothing against the misadventure. Cally apparently finds this fascinating, but then, perceiving time even secondhand would be interesting to even an Auron.

        “Well, fascinating as all this is...how can we use this?” Vila wonders out loud.

        Blake considers. “Well, as you’ve seen, I’m more resilient, so can take on the more dangerous missions, rendering the rest of you are probably safer than before.”

        Avon apparently feels this an appropriate time to interject, snarling and clearly offended, somehow. Well, he hadn’t believed, despite the man’s best efforts, that he was quite the cold fish he’d made himself out to be. “What, so you can experience a ‘regeneration’? Do you believe yourself to be possessed of infinite lives, Blake?”

        “I am not,” he responds mildly. “More than a cat, but yes, there is a limit, one I don’t plan to reach anytime soon. In any case, I can sense time. There aren’t words in your language that can describe every detail, but I can sense nexus points, events with the most effect on time. To some extent, traps, though obviously I am not infallible. No more scrambling in the dark. We can be much more effective, complete surgical strikes.”

        “It’s still Blake,” Vila announces with a sigh, though given the fact that he hasn’t completely given in to despair, he still believes they might be able to profit from it, somehow.

        “That’s a relief.” It’s mostly surprising that Jenna allows herself to voice that out loud, but then, she’s always been one of the more honest among them, and Blake can’t blame their suspicion.

        “I never doubted,” Gan replies, patting Blake on the back.

        Cally smiles and says nothing, but then, she hadn’t needed much persuasion in the first place, not when she could read his thoughts.

        “I was completely convinced from the moment you admitted to having been an insufferable idealist even when not human,” Avon pauses, rallying his strength. “You’re going to still keep fighting for this meaningless crusade?”

        Blake smiles, a touch of laughter in his voice. “Of course. You have an objection?”

        “Always.” It’s not a particularly nice smile, but it’s not one of Avon’s more mocking, and if anything, it might be an inside joke, Avon’s way of saying this changes nothing. At least, not unpleasantly, not in a way that would drive him away. If anything, he’s probably a little more secure knowing that Blake is hardly going to be risking their lives without so much as a guarantee.