It's late, now. Two in the morning, maybe closer to three. Everyone else has drifted to bed. Jedao replaced his champagne glass with a hip flask sometime after midnight, although he's been nursing it with a careful slowness, enough to keep him from locking up when the house creaks, not enough to make him say anything too bitter, too maudlin, not enough to let his nightmares crawl up his throat like bile and slosh out acrid and ugly onto the nebulous gossamer thing between them.

Jedao's cap is on the table but his dress uniform has otherwise survived the day crisply unscathed; Fives' jacket is over his chair, his tie untied and hanging. He hasn't talked much since he got back, or he feels like he hasn't - but it's easier, with the weight of Fives' unwavering attention to settle him, clever and serious and not yet ruined, his bright lovely eyes.

He reaches out, suddenly, an impulse he doesn't bother to deny himself. He has great instincts, except when he doesn't, and he spent too long alone in the dark, feels the dark pressing too often, still, at his sternum and the corners of his vision, to push away flickers of selfishness when he encounters them. He catches Fives' left wrist and undoes his cuff link, palms it away, tugs his shirt sleeve up, traces the dark vein under warm brown skin with two fingertips, then with a sweep of his thumb.

"Has anyone ever told you," he asks, voice low and dark, a concentrated espresso-shot kind of voice, "How absolutely fucking beautiful you are?"