All of her adult life, Adelaide Hawkins has considered herself to be fairly exceptional at reading other people's expressions. The shades and variations, the shifts of tension around an eye or the corner of a mouth that reveal so much have just always seemed more obvious to her than they seem to other people, and it helped her extensively navigating through life in the Capitol. As she stands here by the door to Jims' trailer, holding on to Sarge and watching him react, watching his face react to her words, it suddenly dawns on her just where that skill came from.
To other people there is nothing obvious about Sarge's feelings, nothing straightforward. Maybe that's why most other people are so plain to Adelaide's practiced eye - and also why so many of them bore her so much. There is subtle here, and there is deep and there is dark and there is strange unexpected hope like unfamiliar shoes that need breaking in. There is humor, and there is the very same intensity that she feels - the only person she would ever allow might feel as much as she does for her rogue of a brother. She grew up watching Sarge, drawn to his hard-to-win affections, and so despite all the complications and all the shadowy places, he feels to her like he is just exactly as he should be.
The impulsive crush of her against his chest is equally as needed as all of that instinctive understanding, and Adelaide holds onto him in return as hard as her arms will allow, her face buried in his shoulder, her fingers gripping hard. Rodeo's absence gapes like a chasm, but it doesn't have to be a chasm that's between them. "Cockroaches," she affirms, slightly muffled in his shirt but audible. She doesn't have to explain that, either, that old mantra they've had that the three of them are just indestructible, in this new world and the one before that was never kind to them, either. They've been separated by a lot more than this before - the death penalty, for example. Half a continent crawling with undead. A corrupt totalitarian government run by a madly biased depot. It seems impossible that this could be the thing that does them in. Her heart aches and aches without Rodeo there, with the uncertainty, but it's not despair.
"You mind staying like this for a few hours or days?" she asks, balancing the smallest touch of wry levity with the truth in the words. "Just til I feel like I can let you let me go."