Chapter Text
Chapter: 1
Carmen is glad, in retrospect, that she had the experience of getting to know Shadowsan after they both left VILE. Learning who he was on his terms, both of them slowly revealing their true selves after years of only knowing a single facet had been a strange experience. But it wasn’t dissimilar to what she was doing now.
In many ways, Carlotta Valdez is still a mystery to her. Carmen hadn’t realized quite how many fantasies she’d come to hold about her mother until she would see her doing something and feel a brief yet deep confusion. A sense of wrongness that makes no sense considering, for all intents and purposes, she’d never met the woman before.
Carlotta isn’t a very good cook though she always tries new recipes when she finds them. There are a few simple dishes she said she’d learned from her mother, but more often she goes to local cafes and restaurants where she is greeted fondly by the staff rather than cook for herself.
She loves old bolero music from the ‘50s and plays her CDs every evening for the children in her care. The older kids whine about how uncool it is, but the more they complained, the stronger her mother’s efforts would be to make them dance with her.
She runs a tight ship at the orphanage, managing all the expenses and accounts and paperwork by herself with the confidence of a CEO in a high rise office. She has a few employees and she doesn’t take nonsense from anyone. The children learn their manners and their basic schooling with the same firm guiding hand. Carmen watches with interest, wondering if that was the way she would have been raised if not for the interference of VILE and ACME.
Carlotta is often quiet though it doesn’t seem to be her nature. When she’s excited she laughs loudly and is prone to physical affection; swinging the children’s hands as they walk, bumping shoulders with her neighbors, mindlessly patting Carmen’s head as she passes or giving her a gentle poke and a whispered “sientate” when Carmen is slumped over in her seat. She couldn’t seem to ever get enough reassurance that Carmen is real and there with her now. And Carmen feels the same.
But other times she is silent, nearly sullen. Lost in the glint of a fine golden pen in the sunlight or a glimpse of a happy family together in the city.
Carmen knows she is thinking of her father in those moments. Knows her mother feels guilty for wishing she had more when her daughter has seemingly come back from the dead to be with her, but can’t help falling into the familiar ruts of sorrow and loss she’s developed over the 20 years that her family had been gone.
It’s something Carmen understands very well.
She decided not to live with her mother, though Carlotta had offered. Carmen had thought it would be better for both of them to have some distance at least initially. She’s sure as much as her mother surprises her, she probably isn’t exactly what Carlotta had imagined for her little baby.
Carmen hopes they can live together one day though.
She had instead gotten a small apartment close by, using the stipend she receives from ACME now that her heist and hacking days are over. As long as she keeps catching rogue VILE operatives, they’re happy to have her on the payroll.
The apartment seems minuscule after the old warehouse, and she hasn’t done much decorating beyond buying way too many houseplants. What does one put in a permanent house, anyway? A dining table, a few different types of chairs in the living room, a dish set so at least her cups all match.
She wishes she had more pictures to put up. In her line of work a selfie could get you arrested so all she had were a few candids of her friends and an absurd picture of Player he’d edited to look like an 1980s yearbook portrait. That one was her favorite though he’d had to explain what yearbooks were when he’d sent it over.
Once a week Carmen video-chats with Hideo and Shadowsan, or, Suhara, now, she supposes…He never explicitly asked her to call him that but she can tell he would prefer to leave his old moniker behind. There’s no place for Shadowsan in the house he shares with his brother, though Hideo says she’s always welcome to visit him and Suhara in Matsumoto City. Carmen is sure she’ll take them up on that offer one day. Hideo seems to like her with the same exasperated fondness that he has for his brother. She keeps meaning to ask for a photo of the two of them.
She keeps tabs on Zack and Ivy via the constant stream of emails and phone calls with Julia, who stayed with ACME primarily as a historical consultant, and occasionally she gets an update of their accomplishments from Chief.
She chats with Player every day.
Her life is full, she thinks. She has everything she wanted, everything she worked towards for all those years. She should be happy.
She puts her mother’s Trio Los Panchos CDs on as soon as she gets home every day to fend off the silence in her apartment.
She has nightmares about Gray almost every night.
In some of them she kills him. She throws him from the Eiffel tower in Paris, she runs him through with a sword in Nagano, she drowns him as they swim off the coast of Ecuador. Everything but the truth yet he still ends up dead by her hand.
In other dreams he doesn’t break her from VILE’s hold on her mind. He’s there as she kicks Zack out of the ferris wheel but this time no one saves him. He’s there as she hurts Julia and steals the eye of Vishnu. He’s there as she takes and takes and takes, never stopping her, never saying anything. He watches her with an indiscernible expression, brow furrowed and eyes hard. In these dreams she feels nothing towards him except some murky distrust, waiting for him to betray her. Almost eager for it and the opportunity for violence any action of his would bring.
It makes her sick to remember those ones.
Shortly after she’d regained her memories, she asked Chief how he was doing. ACME had taken him to a hospital while she was allowed to leave with Shadowsan. Chief had told her he was fine, expected to make a full recovery, but that he had asked that they not stay in contact.
Neither ACME nor Carmen.
Chief had said, as her hologram flickered in the warehouse’s dim lighting, that he wished them the best.
Carmen understands. She hates it but she knows why he felt he couldn’t stay. She was only a reminder of the worst parts of his life. She’d lied to him when he didn’t know who he was, she’d turned on him when he tried to help her. She was the reason VILE had meddled around in his mind. She had wanted to kill him, genuinely, and had made that clear to him.
All that is obvious to her. Logical, even. But her chest feels like it’s caving in when she thinks about how much he must hate her. She misses him. She wants to find him. But she doesn’t want to hurt him any more than she already has.
And when it’s late at night, and she’s lying awake beneath an open window because despite the danger the quiet is too heavy in her empty apartment, she thinks maybe she did kill him after all.
She doesn’t think it’s impossible that Chief would lie to her about him if she thought knowing the truth would set Carmen off. She doesn’t even think it’s improbable. It’s less likely that Shadowsan would have gone along with it, but he hadn’t had much to say on the subject either and her mental state had been so fragile then...like a porcelain vase set on the edge of a table. Waiting to shatter with the slightest nudge. It would have seemed kinder to spare her the knowledge.
Carmen remembers every detail of those last moments. And she feels, now, the horror behind her actions but when she thinks back to it there’s no emotion connected to the physical memory except some vague satisfaction. It’s like watching someone else do it. She remembers the creak of soft leather as she pulled off her gloves. She remembers the cool sensor under her finger as she’d registered her thumbprint on the crackle rod. She remembers turning the dial up far beyond a lethal voltage, feeling the power thrumming through the handle. She remembers bracing against the kickback as she released the energy into his chest.
She thinks about how his flesh would have burned and blistered, how his heart would have spasmed and then stopped. In his final seconds of consciousness he would have seen her - the person he had risked everything for, the person he tried desperately to save - smirking down at him in triumph.
How could anyone survive that. How could anyone want to.
So no, she doesn’t think it’s beyond the realm of possibility that Chief would make up a story that went along with the guilt Carmen was already feeling. One that she knew Carmen wouldn’t dig into.
And it’s true, Carmen doesn’t want to look into it. Doesn’t want Player to look into it or Julia or Suhara.
Because what if she had killed him?
Or, god, what if she hadn’t?
Would she really be okay knowing for certain that he was living just fine without her? It’s not like she wants him to suffer the way she is suffering, but she can’t imagine a world where either of them is happy without the other.
~
Carlotta suggests they take a trip to a local park. Just the two of them this time, no children to chaperone. Carmen is happy to oblige and even packs a picnic, stopping at a cafe to pick up empanadas and the little sweet croissants she knows her mother likes. They sit at a bench and watch the other people at the park, chatting happily for nearly two hours.
But as the shadows lengthen, the melancholy begins to creep up on her again. Her dream the previous night had been especially bad and when she sees a child push their friend off of the playground across the lawn she feels herself freeze up.
“Mija, what is it that has you so on edge all the time?”
Her mother’s voice surprises her out of a dark spiral of thoughts and memories. Carmen is about to wave it off as a side effect of living as a super thief her whole life, but at the last minute decides against it.
“I...lost a friend recently. We used to be really close but now he doesn’t want me in his life at all. I guess it’s been difficult to move on from that.”
Her mother hums thoughtfully, “You know, your father tried to pull that act once. We had been seeing each other casually but as soon as I wanted to get more serious, he cut me off saying I would be safer if we didn’t get any more involved. Obviously that didn’t stick.”
She ruffles her daughter’s hair and Carmen laughs as she goes to straighten it.
Once her hair is combed back to an acceptable level of unruly, she sighs and her arms flop back into her lap. “It’s funny, dad said that to you, I said it to Gray once, and now he’s saying it back to me. He didn’t even give me a reason why. He just said he wished me the best and then, nothing.”
Her mother offers her the tea they’d been sharing. “You should try to find out why, then. If he just got tired of you then you can - and should - leave him in the dust, but if he left because of some misplaced heroism like your father? Well...it’s a noble impulse, to save the other person while you suffer alone. But it’s not just you suffering, is it? When you told this Gray that you couldn’t see him anymore, did that stop you from wanting to? And now that he’s the one saying it, don’t you feel lost? And left behind?”
Carmen frowns and holds the warm thermos close to her chest. Her mother is right to a certain extent but there is so much of the situation that she doesn’t know, that Carmen doesn’t ever want her to know. How could she possibly explain what they were to each other? Would her mother understand both the betrayal and the relief of having him by her side while she’d been brainwashed into the worst version of herself? Was Carmen capable of explaining the hollowness inside of her as she killed him, and the fear that maybe she hadn’t?
Carmen looks back at the playground where the children are playing as if nothing happened. Tears prickle in her eyes. “Mamá I, I really hurt him. I don’t even know if he’s still alive.”
It’s the closest she can get to admitting the truth.
Carlotta’s arm reaches around and pulls her close, knocking the empty picnic basket to the ground. “Nena, nena,” She soothes, her other hand pushes Carmen’s hair out of her face, “at least start with that then. For your own sanity, and for mine.”
Carmen nods. She lets herself be held by her mother the way she always wished for as a child.
Could it really be so simple? It would be better to know, wouldn’t it? Rather than any more of this horrible teetering between guilt and grief.
They stay like that for a little while, until Carmen sniffs wetly and pulls out of the embrace to blink back her tears.
“I probably seem very young and stupid, don’t I?” she asks, laughing through her embarrassment at such an easy solution to the problem that had plagued her for almost two months now.
Her mother smiles, “Young? Yes. Stupid? Never. These things are just a part of growing up, trust me, I had the same thoughts when your father broke it off with me. I’m just glad I’m still able to offer advice even though we lost so much time.”
Carmen gets up to retrieve the basket. “I’m sure I’ll always need your-”
She’s cut off as two individuals in suits burst out of the bushes behind her and tackle her to the ground. One of them gets her in a chokehold while the other wraps his arms tightly around her legs.
“Carmen!” Her mother jumps up and starts towards them. Carmen squirms, grappling with the arm around her neck until she hears the voice above her head.
“WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING JUST LEAVING US IN THE LURCH LIKE THAT HUH?! YOU THINK YOU CAN JUST RUN AWAY TO ARGENTINA AND WE WON’T FIND YOU?! YOU THINK WE DIDN’T LEARN ANYTHING FROM WORKING WITH YOU?! YOU’VE GOT ANOTHER THING COMING!”
Carmen stops fighting and looks up, recognizing Ivy’s red hair and snarling face. She looks down to see Zack angrily pouting up at her from where he’s pressed his head into her knees.
“Carmen, are you okay? Who are these people?!” Her mother has her cell phone out and looks like she’s torn between calling the police and jumping into the fight herself.
“It’s okay Mamá, these are my friends I promise.” Carmen tries to look reassuring from her awkward position on the ground.
“WHO DOES THAT?! WHO JUST WRITES A NOTE AND THEN DISAPPEARS?! AS IF WE WEREN’T GONNA LOOK FOR YOU! ARE YOU CRAZY!?”
“Wait, is that really your mom?” Zack belatedly registers Carmen’s words.
He lets go of her legs immediately and walks over to introduce himself. Carmen takes the opportunity to bring her feet under her and bears down on her toes. She grabs the bottom edge of Ivy’s coat and flips over her head, breaking the hold and tangling her friend in her own suit jacket. She makes it to the picnic basket this time, and rejoins her mother at the bench while Ivy fights her way out of her coat.
“ZACK YOU CHOWDERHEAD YOU HAD ONE JOB!”
Carmen and Zack ignore her. Carlotta distrustfully shakes the redhead’s proffered hand.
Zack babbles cheerfully, “Sorry about the weird introduction there. We really are Carmen’s old teammates! I’m sure she’s told you about us, the daring duo of getaway drivers? The fearsome twosome who always saves the day? I’m Zack, the smart, handsome one. That’s Ivy, the brainless muscle.”
Ivy pulls herself up off the grass and joins them. She still looks angry though she doesn’t make any more movements towards Carmen. “Speak for yourself, idiot.”
She looks to Carmen’s mother. “Hey. I’m Ivy, like he said. I’m the real smart one.”
She doesn’t offer her hand.
Carlotta grabs Carmen’s wrist and pulls her slightly behind her. “Right, the one who’s always hungry and the one who likes punching things.”
Zack looks at Carmen, aghast, “That can’t be all you said about us!”
Carmen laughs, resting her chin on her mother’s shoulder and allowing herself to be protected, “Of course not, I did your legacy proud. It’s you two who have gotten off on the wrong foot here.”
She looks around and takes in the concerned looks of the other park-goers. From where she stands now, she can see Agent Zari standing among the trees near the parking lot. She looks unimpressed, but then, Carmen thinks, she always looks like that.
Carmen slips her arm out of her mother’s hand as she walks around to go behind her old teammates. “Why don’t we talk more at my apartment? I think if we stay here much longer we’re going to have the cops called on us.”
She wants to put her arms around the siblings as she would have before. But she can still feel the anger coming off of Ivy in waves, and even Zack seems like he wouldn’t be too ecstatic about the idea. Carmen knows she’s the one who left them, but their rejection still hurts.
She shepherds them along without touching them. Her mother falls back to walk behind her and keep an eye on these troublesome new kids.
They reach the parking lot just in time to see Agent Zari driving away in the standard ACME issue black sedan.
Ivy steams silently while Zack watches the white haired woman take off down the road without a backwards glance. He turns to his sister, “You think she had business somewhere else? She didn’t say anything about it on the way here.”
“She didn’t say anything at all on the way here.” Ivy grinds out.
“Yeah. Well, do you think it would be ACME sanctioned to steal a different car then? Since Zari took our ride and all.”
Carmen interrupts before anyone can hear whatever argument is about to ensue, “How about we just take my mom’s car instead? We can drop you guys off back here when we’re done if you like.”
Ivy shoots her a grumpy look. “Fine. But who knows what that woman’s doing. We’d be better off calling HQ from your place than waiting around for her to come back.”
The statement feels very targeted despite its agreeable sounding nature. Carmen tries not to think too much about it.
~
Carmen and Zack sit at her small dining table. She had hurried to pull a few extra chairs out of the closet but her mother immediately went to the kitchen to make coffee and Ivy apparently decided that pacing the length of the room was preferable to sitting.
Carmen tries to not fidget too much while she waits for one of the siblings to speak. Zack finally pulls himself away from admiring her picture of Player long enough to start.
“You know, Ivy was convinced you guys had been kidnapped or something. You and Shadowsan both.”
“Shut up Bro! I was not!” Ivy barely restrains herself from smacking her brother upside the head.
Carlotta pretends not to watch from the attached kitchen.
“She totally was. Wouldn’t even listen when Chief said you were fine because she thought it was some deep-cover trouble or something.”
“ZACK!”
Carmen doesn’t know if she wants to laugh or cry. She definitely wants to hug her friend but she thinks that would be a really good way to get a fist to the face right now.
Zack is laughing, though, always happy to embarrass his big sister. “It wasn’t until Chief called Julia who called Player who called us that she accepted it at all. Then she was just wicked angry.”
Ivy looks like she wants to strangle him, her face red enough to give her hair a run for its money. “Well, could you blame me?! That was suspect as hell! We come back from a drive and you two are just gone, with only a note on the wall? A note can easily be faked! I could do it right now!”
Carlotta comes back to the table with Carmen’s stove-top espresso maker. “Cariño, did you really disappear with only a note left behind?” She makes a disapproving tsk sound while pouring mugs of coffee for each of them, “To think my daughter would have such poor manners.”
Carmen wishes she could melt into the floor. It’s only years of Countess Cleo’s etiquette lessons that keeps her upright. She is ashamed, of both her actions and of her instinct to fall back on VILE’s teachings rather than her mother’s steady example or even Suhara’s quiet strength
She grips her mug tightly and sips the searing, bitter drink without meeting anyone's eye. It’s not the way she usually takes her coffee, and while her mother brought cream and sugar to the table she thinks - stupidly, irrationally - if she lets go of the mug for any reason that she will fall apart and she will not be able to put herself back together.
It takes her a few moments to compose a thought out of her hurricane of emotions.
“I’m sorry I made you worry.” She begins slowly, watching the reflection of the window shake in the ripples of black coffee. “I’m sorry I didn’t say goodbye the way I should have. The way you deserved. The only reason I left so suddenly was because I knew if I stayed any longer, or if I tried to say it to your face, I would have never left at all.”
“Then don’t leave!” Ivy burst out, stopping her pacing, “Why did you have to go in the first place?! Was living with us really so bad?”
“No! I loved living with you two! And I miss it every day! I just thought that if I stayed, you would have followed me forever. I wanted you to find your own path!”
Zack pipes in, “What, so you just said ‘heck with it’ and threw us in the deep end? We would have got there eventually! It’s not like we ended up going very far anyway, you know, career-wise.”
Carmen huffs out a breath of laughter that’s half panic and half stress. She takes another sip of coffee that burns her lips.
Zack continues, “And anyway, we didn’t follow you just because we didn’t know what to do with ourselves. We followed you because we believed in your work, Carm. If we didn’t, we would have ditched you for the racing circuit years ago.”
The plain honesty of the statement makes Carmen’s hold on the mug loosen but she still doesn’t let go. “I guess I just thought we all needed something drastic to get us moving. I didn’t want you to be like me, realizing after sixteen years that what I was doing wasn’t right.”
Her mother finally sits down next to her. “That’s your father talking again, sweetheart. He was always one for grand gestures. It’s a beautiful thing to have such close friends to begin with, wouldn’t you rather watch them grow from next to them? Instead of from far away in the shadows?”
Carlotta gestures to a picture of Zack and Ivy’s ‘suiting ceremony’ that Julia had snapped from the audience. They weren’t even looking at the camera. Carmen had hung it on the wall regardless.
Ivy reaches over the table, gently working Carmen’s hand off of the coffee mug so she can hold it. Zack gives her puppy-eyes until she gives him her other hand to hold. She notices that their hands aren’t any softer now, even with their cushy corporate job, and wonders how many ACME vehicles they secretly soup up. Carmen doubts Chief would give the okay for two formerly criminal rookies to go poking around inside her fancy cars, but doubts even more that the older woman could stop them.
“Look boss,” Ivy stops to clear her throat, more embarrassed now than angry, “for all three of us, people have been leaving our whole lives. Whether or not it was on purpose, we all ended up alone. But then we found each other, right? So we should know better than anyone that when you find something good you hold on to it. People like us, we gotta stick together or else we’ll be alone again! And there’s nothing worse than that!”
Carmen doesn’t hold back this time, standing up abruptly to go around the table and wrap her arms around her friends. She suddenly wishes she had done this more when they had lived and worked together, wishes she had held them and listened to them and stayed with them even when every cell in her body had screamed for justice.
They’d had so much time to spend with each other before, and they had squandered it saving the world instead.
She laughs as they revel in their embrace, limbs tangling around one another, and laughs harder when her mother joins in. Ivy is crushed against her left side while Zack reaches as far as he can from her right and holds them all together.
As their laughter dies down Carmen has another thought, “If you all don’t mind staying until this evening, we could call Suhara and get a proper family reunion going.”
Zack looks down from where he’s leaned against the top of her head. “Who the hell is Suhara?”
~
A month later and Carmen is on a rooftop on the outskirts of downtown Perth, Australia. It’s across the continent from Sydney, and she hopes Gray didn’t move all the way just to escape the few moments they’d shared in the harbor city.
But maybe she’s getting ahead of herself.
Maybe he doesn’t think about her even that much anymore.
Her lookout is across the street from a small theater company. It had almost exclusively good reviews of its shows and the website had said the usual stuff about the cast and crew all being one big happy family dedicated to their craft. She’d skimmed most of it, looking for a specific name in their archived blog updates. No variation of Graham Calloway had come up in the search results, but there had been a short update three months ago about a new chief electrician who had previously worked at the Sydney Opera House.
It fit her timeline, and she tracked Gray’s general location to an apartment complex nearby.
She doesn’t need to actually see him, she thinks. Isn’t it enough to know that he’s alive at all? Shouldn’t she respect his wishes to be left alone? Wouldn’t it be better, after all, if he’d moved on from the nightmare they’d shared? If he’d found a way to forget, to move forward without her, couldn’t she simply let it be?
But she can’t stand the thought that the last time she’d seen him was when she tried to kill him. His frightened eyes and pained grimace, washed sickly green in the light of the lethal electricity, is seared into her mind.
Carmen has to see him again. She has to see with her own eyes that he’s living and breathing and not motionless on the floor as he is in her memories.
So she perches on the roof of some legal firm and she waits for the last show of the day to be let out. She thinks it would have been a good spot to watch the sunset but the sky had been heavy with rain clouds all day. As inconvenient as it would be, she wishes it would just rain already to get the anticipation over with.
It’s nearly 9pm by the time the first guests start leaving.
Another hour and she spots two stage-hands leave through a side exit and head around back to the staff parking lot. From where she sits, she can tell neither are Gray, but she can’t quite see their faces from this far away.
She makes a sudden change of plans and slips down the side of the building.
There’s a small alleyway that connects perpendicular to the side walkway that the crew uses. It runs behind a few buildings on that block, connecting to another street farther up the road, and seems to mainly be used for garbage pick-up. It hadn’t been labeled on her map but she’d taken note of it while scouting that morning before the theater opened.
Carmen makes her way there now, hurrying to the nearest crosswalk and then back. While normally she wouldn’t think twice about jaywalking, this is a fairly busy street and she doesn't want to take any chances with the local law enforcement today.
She isn’t wearing her trademark hat and coat, and the number of people searching for her has significantly dropped recently, but paranoia is a hard habit to break. It’s more instinct than worry that has her stepping into a large crowd of theater-goers as she crosses the street, looking for a comforting anonymity in the colorful jumble of people. She ducks into the alley a few buildings up and makes her way back to the theater, praying she didn’t miss Gray leaving.
The cast and crew spill out the door and into the night, their voices blurring into a background hum as Carmen keeps watching for a familiar face. She doesn’t know how many people work backstage with him, isn’t even one hundred percent sure he works here himself, and she gets more and more anxious the longer she doesn’t see him.
The flow of people slows to a trickle, then stops after about 15 minutes. She steps out from behind the dumpster she’d been hidden behind, debating if it would be worth it to break in and try to look for him or if she should just come back another day and wait again.
What was that thing her mother had once said about the definition of insanity?
She takes a step forward, the tip of her shoe just leaving the darkness of the alleyway when she hears a voice from behind her.
“Looking for someone in particular?”
Carmen spins, startled.
It’s Gray. Casually standing in the dirty alleyway with her as if he'd been there the whole time. He’s close enough that if she reached out her arms, her fingertips would barely brush against his shirt. She thinks the distance of an entire hemisphere is nothing compared to this few feet of cool, damp air.
She hadn’t meant to get so close, hadn’t meant to interact in any way, only to see him walk past and then go. But now that he’s here she drinks in the sight.
He’s wearing a light jacket over a plain shirt. His jeans are cuffed at the bottom as always, but now they have a few dusty patches around his knees, and his shoes are similarly scuffed. One hand holds the strap of a thin backpack and she can see black grease stains on his wrist where it pokes out of the jacket sleeve.
He looks tired. Apprehensive.
He doesn’t say anything else.
Carmen realizes she’s just been staring at him in shock and she rushes to fill the silence.
“I’m sorry for stalking you like this, I didn’t- what I meant to do was just see if you were okay. You know, after everything. Chief said you would make a full recovery but that you didn’t want to stay in contact with us and I completely understand, I do, I just wanted to make sure that was the truth I guess. I had to see if you were okay.”
Gray still doesn’t respond. If anything he looks a bit stricken at her words.
God, what was she thinking? This was a terrible idea, she should have stayed on the rooftop. She never should have tracked him down at all. It was the only thing he’d asked of her, and here she was flaunting her own selfish desires. What was it about her that just couldn’t leave well enough alone?
His form blurs as tears fill her eyes. She wants to get closer but she keeps talking instead. “I’ll leave soon, I promise. I just...never mind. It doesn’t matter. I totally get it if you never want to see me again. If you’re...afraid of me or-or you hate me and-”
Gray steps forward and Carmen’s jaw snaps shut. She watches him come in close and raise his hands to her face. He pauses just before his fingers make contact, giving her time to step back if she wants to.
She doesn’t.
One hand cradles her cheek while the other gently wipes away the few tears that escaped. Carmen leans into the touch with a soft sigh. Her hands flutter around his wrists, overwhelmed and unsure if she should hold on. She settles on softly hooking her fingers around them, giving him an easy way out as well.
His pulse beats under her fingertips. Warm, steady, alive.
Gray tightens his hold by a tiny fraction. Her eyes flick up to his for a second as he pulls her closer, nuzzling into the top of her head in something so close to a kiss it makes her heart ache.
She feels the heat of his breath as he murmurs into her hair, “I could never hate you, Carmen. I would never, ever, send you away.”
The words are a kick to the chest and a balm all at once. Carmen feels the last brittle part of her break, like a single post holding up a ruined house, and she collapses into him. Her arms wind beneath his jacket and around his chest, her face digs into his shoulder as a sob tears loose from her chest.
“I thought I killed you!”
She feels his breath pause beneath her hands, then resume. Gray’s hands had slipped from her face when she moved, and now he wraps his arms tightly around her shoulders. Somehow pulling her closer still. “I thought Chief told you-?”
Carmen shakes her head, burrowing further into the crook of his neck. “I thought she was lying.” Her voice is thick and it’s difficult to get the words out, “It’s hard to know what’s real from back then.”
One of Gray’s hands moves to the nape of her neck, his thumb slowly stroking the skin at the base of her scalp. She can feel that he is speaking where his cheek is pressed to her temple but she can’t make out the words over her own crying.
She doesn’t know how long they stay like that, entwined and grieving in the shadows. Long enough that she runs out of tears and a headache blooms hot behind her eyes. But Gray seems content to stay as long as she is holding him, so they remain even then. Once she calms down she realizes he’d only been saying ‘It’s okay. It’s okay.’ over and over as she’d sobbed into his shoulder.
They’re both quiet for a moment, then Gray clears his throat, “Not to hurry you along or anything, but maybe you’d like to pick this back up at my apartment? It, uh, kind of smells like garbage here.”
Carmen laughs weakly and pulls out of the embrace, finally realizing what a mess she’s made of his coat. She apologizes, trying to wipe her face with shaking hands.
“No worries, nothing a washing machine won’t fix.” He says, as he pulls a plain cotton handkerchief out of his pocket and offers it to her. It has a few grease stains on it as well. She thinks he probably uses it to wipe his hands after tinkering with something, and she tries to avoid those spots as she cleans off her face.
She must not do a very good job, though, because when she hands it back to him his mouth twitches with a quickly subdued laugh and swipes his thumb over her cheek.
She’s exhausted from her crying and he’s tired after a long day of work. But they’re both smiling now, which is more than she’d dared to dream of for months.