The next morning, Pip stands before a mirror in Vuvi's room, performing his own private morning ritual, something he rarely gets the chance to do, since a quiet moment alone is a rare enough commodity these days. The room around him sits soft and gray in the early light, curtains still drawn, Vuvi's clothes from the night before draped haphazardly over the back of a chair, one boot fallen on its side beneath it.
He inspects himself leisurely while he waits for her to wake, turning his shoulder plates this way and that, checking the gleam along his wraith-glass, tilting his faceplate to catch the light from every possible angle. His processors drift back over the last few days, thinking back on their arrival in the Dwarven Kingdom, his time with the Saint Sisters, and every other woman he's been with since, before settling finally on the new well of holy magic now humming quietly somewhere within his divine core-crystal, warm and constant as a second heartbeat.
