No wind, no birds, no human being for miles. When Blue sprawls on his back in the middle of the raft and looks at the cloudless sky, he feels more alone than if he were drifting in space. More lost -- presumably, in space, he would have a spaceship around him, and a ship is a place. More than a raft is, at any rate.
Sometimes he feels like the sky will swallow him up, erase his existence utterly. No one will notice, him first; the notion would be horrifying, but he's too exhausted for horror. The most he can conjure up is dumbfounded awareness and a faint twisting in his guts, but that might just be seasickness.
"Move over."
Right. One human being. Blue isn't sure he counts for a full one -- at first he was a nice distraction, but Blue can't even concentrate long enough to keep in mind that Arun's there when he's out of his line of sight, and he's too tired to make it impossible to not be aware of Arun via fighting. He moves over, after a pointed few seconds, for the principle.
Blue can hear Arun breathe, a little fast and deep -- he's been diving. But when they're both lying on their backs staring up at the sky, it's almost as if he were alone again. He tilts his head imperceptibly, and then it's almost worse, almost like sharing the raft with a corpse. It occurs to him suddenly that he wouldn't know. If Arun died, Blue wouldn't know until the body went mottled gray and green.
Blue takes a deep breath. And another. He's never going to have enough of them, and there's the -- irrational, he's sure -- fear that he will dissolve into the sky, so in the end he asks. Though really it's more of a mumble.
He'll never live it down. Right now he doesn't care. "Can I touch you?"
"...Whuh?"
He closes his eyes, for strength, but the dull red behind his eyelids is almost worse. "Can. I. Touch. You." He pauses. Stares at the sky. It's still blue, with that very faint hint of purple that always throws him off, but he's glaring so fixedly it's starting to turn weird lightless colors.
"What the hell kind of pervert reason do you have to want to touch me. Especially now. Like we have any body fluids to spare--"
Arun's inherent scientificness chooses the oddest times to pop up. And Blue is not, as he assumed, welded to the raft. He can still move his limbs. His foot, especially, skids sideways to crash in Arun's wetsuit-covered ankle particularly well.
"Not like that." There's no annoyance in his voice, only weariness, and even so, it mostly shows by the absence of any other feeling; he's too exhausted to bother with even minor inflections. "I just... It's quiet."
"... Huh. Making me yell 'pervert, pervert' will help?"
Blue's eyes close again. Too empty for jokes. "I'm an empath." He hopes Arun's brain works faster than his because he's not explaining any more.
It does. Takes Arun a minute or two, but it does. "Ah. I'm quiet?"
"Like the tomb."
There's a frown in Arun's voice next. "Don't want you spying."
Blue manages a snort. "Like you don't tell me what you think anyway. At length." There's no reaction -- no annoyance, no how-did-he-know, no reluctance -- nothing. He sighs then, relents. "I don't get many actual thoughts even when I listen anyway. As for your feelings, I don't care what they are. I just --"
What is Arun feeling now? Fear, anger, perverse amusement? He might as well be dead. Blue forbids himself to look and check.
Instead he gets nothing but thoughtful contemplation. "Ah. Sensory deprivation, hm?"
Blue gives the sky a slow blink. "...Oh. Never thought of it like that."
Arun sighs a little sigh that was trying for horrendously put-upon and misses by a mile. "Any port in the storm, I guess. Whatever. I'm too tired for my brain to be all that fascinating anyway."
Blue knows then that even as he made the effort to ask, he expected a no. And then, he doesn't know what he would have done -- not a fight, they might tip the raft and he'd drown, but he maybe could have poked Arun, pretended it was to be an ass, and tried to get something through the wetsuit.
Instead he got permission. He's sure he'll resent Arun for it later.
Blue's hand isn't welded to the raft either, but it weighs as much as a small whale so it might as well be. He lifts his elbow off the planks and bites down on the thick, stretchy band around his wrist, and uses gravity to peel away the reinforced work glove he hasn't taken off since before that big, huge thing he's not thinking about. A little weird, isn't it, to bare so much skin right there under the sky. A little indecent.
He's never been a very decent guy. His elbow hits the planks again, hand flops down -- contact. The back of his hand against the outer side of Arun's, flat on the raft.
There -- someone else. Someone living and thinking and full and complete in himself -- tired and suspicious and worried and so bloody tired and maybe kind of amused and also very, very tired; and maybe, maybe there's some concern-for-ally-who-is-not-friend-but-still-kind-of-mine-but-annoying, a weird tangle of feelings that's low-key enough that he doesn't try very hard to untangle it. He just basks. Because when there's someone else, it means he's there too. When he knows where others start, he knows where he ends.
When Arun's hand twitches, fingers gathering like a spider preparing to skitter away, Blue's palm covers his, and he squeezes hard, and maybe later he will be embarrassed at the uneasy compassion that follows that first, sharp burst of expected shock and unease. But now he closes his eyes to block out the sky and he breathes and basks in the presence of the current center of his universe.
A half-hour later, a breeze starts blowing.