Tristan reached forward, resting a hand on Libby’s arm, and started tapping the pattern of the motion.
“Is there something that feels like that in this room?” he asked her.
She closed her eyes again, frowning. Then she reached for his hand, pulling it just below her clavicle, resting it on her breastbone and jarring him slightly out of his rhythm, his fingers brushing bare skin.
“Sorry,” she said. “Need it somewhere I can feel it.”
Right. It would ricochet through her chest that way.
Tristan located the precise beat he was looking for and tapped the pattern again, waiting. For another ten, twenty beats, he tapped it out like a metronome, and by the time he reached forty beats or so, Libby’s eyes shot open.
“I found it,” she said, and then, with a motion of her hand, the pattern Tristan had been watching went still.
To his disbelief, everything went still.
The clock on the wall had stopped. Tristan himself, the motion of his breath, had been suspended, and he suspected the blood in his veins had been, too. Nothing moved, though he could look around somehow, or feel around, experiencing himself newly within the space he’d taken up. His hand was still resting on Libby’s chest, his thumb below the collar of her shirt, no longer tapping. She had the strangest look on her face; nearly a smile, but somehow louder. It burned with resilience, with triumph, and then he processed it: she had done this with intention, with skill.
With his help, Libby Rhodes had stopped time.
She blinked and everything fell back into place, careening into motion. It had been nothing more than a lag, a momentary resistance that had been nearly unidentifiable, but even so, Tristan could see the sweat on her brow. It had not cost her nothing.
She rose to her feet too quickly, spinning to face him in her fervor, and nearly collapsed. He caught her with one arm around her ribs and she struggled upright, grasping his shoulders for leverage.
“I could do more if I had Nico,” she said, staring at nothing. At his chest, but also at nothing; staring down the barrel of her thoughts, rapidly calculating something. How to do it again, or do more, or do better. “I couldn’t hold it alone, but if I had him, or maybe Reina… and you showed me how to move it first, then maybe we could—Well, maybe if I’d just… drat, I should have—”
“Rhodes,” Tristan sighed. “Listen—”
“Well, I don’t know what we could do, to be honest,” she confessed worriedly. “If this is how time moves, then everything is a bit different, isn’t it? If time is a force that can be measured like any other—”
“Rhodes, listen—”
“—at very least we could model it, couldn’t we? I mean, if you can see it, then—”
“Rhodes, for fuck’s sake!”
She looked up, startled, to find Tristan staring （exasperatedly, he assumed） down at her.
“Thank you,” he said, and then exhaled, irritated. “Jesus, fuck. I just wanted to say thank you.”
That abysmal fringe of hers was getting outrageously long; it had fallen into her eyes. She brushed it away with one hand, lowering her chin slightly.
“You’re welcome,” she said, her voice soft.
The silence that followed, a rarity indeed, was filled with things Tristan generally hated. Floaty, swollen things, like gratitude, because now he understood that he hadn’t imagined any of it; she had proven that for him. She had proven that whether what he had was blindness or madness, it could still be put to use somehow. True, he might be little more than a lens through which to view things, but he was a scope, a necessity. Without him she could not see it. Without him, she could not do it.
What a relief it was, being a cog in something that actually turned for once.
“What’s this?” came a voice behind them, and Tristan immediately released her, taking a jarring step back. “Odd,” remarked Callum, sauntering into the room as Libby felt for the chair behind her, rapidly flustered. “Doing homework, children?”
Tristan said nothing.
“I should go,” Libby mumbled in reply, and dropped her chin, hurrying to the door.
Callum watched her leave, half-laughing to himself.
“Can you imagine? Being like that. Born with all that power and still not good enough, still desperate to flee the room. Sad, if you think about it.” Callum pulled out one of the free chairs, sinking into it. “Someone really ought to take that power away from her and put it to good use.”
Explaining what she had just done was unlikely to change Callum’s mind. If anything, it only served to prove his point. “At least she’s relentless,” said Tristan.