Avery shook her head, “It’s a good thing there’s some brewing in the next room,” she told him with an affectionate smile, poking his leg again when he knocked her foot. It wasn’t a stretch to say that Hector was her favourite person here. He got her in a way that not many others did. Theo did too, but differently. For someone who was compulsively driven to fill any silence, Avery valued their company for the fact that she often didn’t need to. Not because they both talked but because they didn’t, because the silence was easy and thin and comfortable. Because, in their own way, Avery felt safe around them.
Hector had been her friend for over ten years, when she’d first arrived he was one of the first people she’d met and even now she struggled to join up the person she saw out in the field with the man who she loved like a brother. She never understood why people feared him, even when she knew why on some level she didn’t understand.
When he laughed at her, she screwed her nose up and kicked him gently. “That’s rude, I’m not gonna get you coffee now.” She huffed out a breath and then leaned back in the chair, feeling the ache in her shoulders and neck from having been writing paperwork and also just from healing people. It took a toll on her body. She might not have had to physically recover from the injuries she absorbed from people (though where they went she had no idea), but she did feel drained afterwards and her whole body hurt as if she’d been run over by a truck.
She dug her fingers into where her left shoulder met her neck and pressed them into a particularly sore knot of muscle.
“He does mean well,” she agreed, “but he’s a taskmaster nonetheless. He wants to start doing weapons training now, too. I’m thinking of taking the Hippocratic oath just to get out of it.”
She snorted. “Also, Minesweeper? Your age is showing.”