closing in / closer to you

And Battler freezes, because —

She wants something, but she doesn't want to ask for it. She wants to offer, to give, instead. She wants Beato to take it from her, to take charge of her, as gently or as roughly as she wants.

Battler remembers Lust saying sometimes games are games, but sometimes games are excuses, and is forced to admit, once again, that her friend was right. That whatever abject horror existed in the second gameboard has long since melted away in memory and left aching want behind.

"Helloooo?" Beato asks, waving a hand over her face. "Metaverse to Battler? You're staring at me like a lost puppy."

Battler has never been so grateful to be teased. She swallows and nods, holds her head down just long enough to focus on the chain dangling from her neck.

Beato's smile widens until it's almost grotesque, tearing at the sides of her face, her eyes lighting up even as they narrow. It's the expression Battler associates with her perfect witch's cackle, when Beato knows, for at least the next few moves, that she's won.

Her hand reaches to the key on Battler's neck. She doesn't even grasp it fully, just curls her index finger into the curved circle of the key's base, and she tugs.

Battler barely resists the urge to collapse into her at the gesture. She holds herself just straight enough that the tug runs through the chain to her collar, that she gets to feel the gentle force pull her to Beato, until their faces are practically touching.

"Well?" From her tone alone, Beato probably raises an eyebrow, although her face is close enough that the whole picture is obscured. "Do I have to do everything for you?"

Her finger is still looped into the key, a trigger Battler still desperately wants her to pull. But she realizes that Beato doesn't want to need to. Is in her own, teasing way, asking Battler to closs the gap.

So she does.

Battler hasn't kissed enough to know what to do beyond pressing lips together, but even that is enough to make her heart skip a beat in her chest. She can feel the curl of Beato's grin against her own, feel just the tiniest pressure of a fang against her lip, feel the way Beato's finger is tugging her just slightly deeper into it, until she has to open her mouth to fit any closer, and it's —

Perfect is wildly embarrasing, so blatantly the nerve-riddled thoughts of a girl in love, and… also completely true.

Maybe Battler needs to blanket assume Lust is correct about these things.

When they break apart, it's to laughter: Beato's filled with a warmth that Battler almost doesn't recognize from how rarely she's heard it, her own shaking the last of the nerves from her chest.

She leans forward again and pulls Beato into a hug, buries her head into her shoulder. If they'd been this close a couple games ago, Battler would probably be distracted by how close their chests were pressed together. She won't pretend she's above noticing it now, the soft pressure of Beato's bust, but what she's focused on is her own heartbeat and that rumbling laughter, slowing and lowering until it's almost a purr, reverberating through the both of them.

Beato's hand leaves her collar, rests instead on the plane of her back. Battler can feel the subdued sharpness of her nails, the sensation dampened by the thick hoodie she's been wearing lately. Another reason to change once they get back to the Studio.

Two thoughts rocket through her, each more embarrassing than the last, and yet she lets herself say them anyways, as impulsively as she'd ramble any asinine theory. "I'm glad we did this when I was a girl," she admits first, "And I'd… like to do it again, as… as all the things I end up being."

She can feel Beato's hand fist in her jacket as if to pull her closer. "Well," she says, "you can make that two of us."

In a moment, Battler knows they'll blink back to the game world, separate from each other as if none of this had happened. She'll have to figure out how to compose her nervous grin to avoid catching Hood's suspicion, and eventually how to catch up Lust and Viktor in a way that won't share more than Beato wants known or make Battler so embarrassed that she'd rather earn a point for the first time in this game.

But she's okay not worrying about that for just a little longer.