Chapter 9 #2
He waited, and he was damn lucky he didn’t try to interrupt.
"You do not get to stand at a distance and decide what my life should look like.
You don't get to watch me laugh and conclude that I'm whole, and therefore, you should stay away.
You don't get to make those calculations about my happiness without consulting the person whose happiness you're calculating.
" She held his gaze. "That’s not love. That’s control with selfish intentions. "
The words hit their target. She saw them land. Did they make him bleed inside? She almost hoped they did … but he didn't flinch. Didn't deflect.
"You're right," he said.
"I know I'm right."
"I know you know." And something morphed in his expression. Something that made him look almost like the old Dan. "You've always known you were right. That hasn't changed."
She opened her mouth. Closed it. Was he— "Are you making a joke right now?"
"Observing a consistent personality trait."
"That’s the same thing, and you know it."
"Is it working?"
She looked at him for a long moment.
God help her, it was. A little bit. Just a little bit.
She turned back to the window. But she didn't reach for her tablet.
"You're different," he said.
"Time will do that."
"The way you are with your people, like the men you were with at the bar. Even just watching from the outside, I could see it. You're easy with them. Warm even." He paused. "That girl existed at the compound, but Kuro kept hammering it down. She couldn't breathe there."
She hadn't expected that observation. Hadn't expected him to see it so clearly.
"The woman that girl could’ve been lives now," Raven said simply.
"I know. I see her."
There was a beat of silence that was somehow different from the ones before it. Less guarded.
"My team drives me insane," she said. "On a good day. Phantom thinks every mission needs a flaming catapult or a ramming log, and he’ll disrupt anything and everything to send a message.
Specter says approximately eleven words a day, but somehow always picks the eleven that make the most impact.
And Ring—" She shook her head. "Ring is a force of nature in the worst possible way. "
"And yet."
She turned to look at him. "And yet I would walk into hell for any of them." She said it simply, as a matter of fact, because it was. "They're mine. That's just how it is."
Dan was watching her with that expression she couldn't quite name. The one that had been surfacing at odd moments since Niger. Like he was seeing something he'd been afraid had been lost.
"You built a life for yourself," he said.
"I had to build one. You were gone."
The words came out more direct than she'd intended. But that was what pain, anguish, and anger did to a person. She didn't want to take them back.
Dan was quiet for a moment.
"I know," he said. And the weight in those two words was considerable.
* * *
Somewhere over the Pacific, the light changed.
The gray cloud cover gave way to a deep blue that only existed at altitude, above weather, above the ordinary world.
The cabin was warm, the leather seats were obscenely comfortable, and the food that the pilots had stocked was consumed.
She'd asked for his preferences without thinking about it and had caught herself too late.
They'd talked for three hours.
Not about the mission. Not about the Scroll. About everything else. He told her about Bangkok. About learning to exist as a ghost in a city of millions, about the loneliness of being invisible when invisibility had been a choice you made for someone else.
She told him about her first year with her organization.
About Fury's brutal training regime and the moment she'd finally made him stop, mid-drill, to tell him to his face that she'd been trained by a Shinobi master, and if he had anything useful to teach her, she was listening, but if he was just running her into the ground to see if she'd break, he could save them both the time.
"What did he say?" Dan asked.
"He stared at me for about ten seconds. Then he completely redesigned my training program." She smiled at the memory. "He never admitted I was right. But I was right."
"You're always right."
"There you go again."
"Consistent observation."
She laughed, then realized she’d done it again. The thing Dan had seen from a distance through a bar window. The full-body laugh that Kuro had trained out of her and Guardian had given back.
She felt Dan go still across from her, his eyes on her.
She glanced over at him but looked away before she could think too hard about what was in them.
The emotion in his eyes was easy to identify, but it was too soon.
She cherished every minute of their conversation.
It was a gift she’d thought she’d never have again, and still …
So much had changed. Changed about her, and she was sure time had changed him, too.
Life was too messy and complicated not to leave scars.
Those scars needed to heal and to fade before …
She stared at his profile. He’d aged well.
How she wished she’d been with him through the years.
If only …
Time to change the subject.
"How did you stay sane?" she asked in a direct manner, with no softening of the hardness the words implied. "All that time alone with no team and no backup. No one knew you were alive. How did you not—" She searched for the word.
"Disappear?"
She nodded. She remembered the coldness, the loneliness. "I was only alone for about a year, and I almost lost myself."
He thought about her question. She could see him actually thinking, not constructing an answer but finding one.
"I didn't always," he said finally. "There were periods, longer ones than I'd like to admit, where I wasn't sure what or who I was anymore.
Whether the mission was driving me or I was driving the mission.
Was I making choices or just executing patterns?
" He paused. "Kuro trained us to operate without attachment.
To be effective in isolation. I was effective, but effective and sane aren't the same thing. "
"No," she said quietly. "They're not."
"What kept me—" He stopped. Started again.
"What kept me from completely losing the thread was knowing you were out there.
Living. Building a life. Laughing in bars with people who I believed had your back.
" He looked at her. "You were the proof that what I'd done had worked.
That the sacrifice had meant something. Even when everything else felt like nothing, that meant the world to me. "
She thought about his words for a moment.
She wasn’t sure she was comfortable with being the weight of his reason.
But then again, he had been her reason, even after she’d believed he’d died.
But that was the bottom line, the thing she’d been searching for.
It was complicated knowledge that the thing that had completely broken her had also been, for him, the thing that had kept him whole.
"That's a lot of weight to put on a person who didn't know she was carrying it," she said.
"I know. I'm sorry."
"Stop apologizing."
He looked surprised.
"You've apologized. I've heard it. Apologizing again doesn't change anything, it just—" She stopped.
"It just makes me feel like I'm supposed to absolve you, and I'm not ready to do that yet.
" Before she could do that, she needed to crumble into a million pieces, struggle to pull herself together, and work through all the reasons she still loved him but couldn’t let him close … just yet.
"Okay."
"Okay," she repeated. Still, she needed more information, more talk, and more of Dan. "Ask me something."
"What?"
"You saw me, you found me, and we’re here. You have questions. I can see them. Ask one."
He considered her for a moment.
"Are you happy?" he asked.
Of all the things she'd expected, that was a tough one.
She looked at the window. The deep Pacific blue outside.
"Pick the easy ones, why don’t you?” She shook her head. “Yeah, I am. Most days," she said. "More than I was. Less than I could be."
"What would more look like?"
She turned to look at him. He was watching her with those dark eyes that had always seen too much, that had always found the thing she was trying to keep hidden and held it carefully instead of weaponizing it.
She knew what more would look like, and so did he.
Only, she wasn't going to say it. Because more would always look like him, with her.
"Ask me something else," she said.
He almost smiled. "You said one question."
"Ask another."
"Do you still—" He stopped.
She narrowed her eyes at him. "What?"
"Do you still keep the stones?"
She stared at him.