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The hot-wired truck smells like stale cigarettes badly enough to make Vik’s fingers twitch with the desire for a smoke despite the scarring in her lungs. She drives carefully, staying just below the speed limit, never turning her high beams on. The curves of the road here are so familiar she doesn’t need them anyway, and she turns her lights off entirely a quarter mile out, driving up to the big metal gate across the road by only the light of the moon and stars. Vik knows better than to trust its hinges not to scream the second she touches it, and instead shimmies through a gap between the gate and the wooden fence that follows the property line. It’s awkward, her cane leaving only one hand free to support her against the fence, but the muscle memory of doing this dozens of times comes back easily as she wiggles her way through.
The barn stands like a vast hulking beast against the starry sky. It was their lab once, the place where they developed Hextech, where they cured Vik’s disease, and where they managed to catch the eye of half a dozen government agencies before Vik left to throw them off Jayce’s trail. Now it’s almost foreign to her, nostalgic in only the most painful way.
Vik picks her way carefully around the barn, grateful she thought to modify her cane with metal teeth to accommodate the icy ground of a late Wyoming winter. She peeks inside the window as she passes, noting the stationary lights of machines and experiments on standby. It feels strange to be here, as though she’s stepping backwards in time. Even the lock hasn’t changed, Jayce still stubbornly refusing to upgrade to a digital security system. The thought makes her flick her glance across the yard, eyes landing on the lighted windows of the cabin she once shared with the woman who is now a stranger at best and an enemy at worst. Vik shoves the thought away. She’s here for one thing only, and it’s not her former partner.
Her cold fingers are clumsy as she chooses the correct pick and tension wrench for the padlock on the barn door, knuckles blistering in the wind. Yet, as she falls into the rhythm of sliding her pick against the pin, everything else flows out of Vik’s mind as her focus settles solely on the lock. It’s this focus that betrays her, hearing so attuned to the metallic scraping of the pick that she misses the sound of footsteps until it’s too late. Vik nearly jumps out of her skin when the telltale sound of a shotgun cocking just behind her left ear demands her attention with chilling speed.
“You’ve gotten slow,” a voice admonishes from behind her.
“Yet you haven’t pulled the trigger,” Vik points out, forcing her voice to remain even at the sound of the familiar cadence.
Jayce scoffs, “figured I should at least give you a chance to explain yourself.”
Vik raises one hand above her head, keeping the other one on her cane. Jayce doesn't ask her to raise it.
“I need it, does it matter why?” She asks, letting accusation seep into her tone, “you never wanted to keep it anyway.”
“I promised to keep it safe,” Jayce reminds her, the cold metal of the gun coming to rest against the small of Vik’s neck. “I promised you.”
Vik doesn't answer. She can’t speak around the lump in her throat at the thought that after all this time Jayce is still out here, trying to keep promises to the woman who abandoned her and disappeared without a trace. More than that, she doesn’t want to tell Jayce how much danger she’s in; how soon she’s going to have men with guns at her door demanding the one thing they both swore never to give up; how Vik has spent so long protecting her only to wind up back here with no plan other than to make herself a bigger target. The silence stretches between them as she waits for Jayce to decide whether to blow her head off or not, the cold stars wheeling overhead their only witness.
“You want tea?” Jayce asks finally, her voice resigned as she pulls the shotgun back from Vik’s neck.
Jayce guides her across the yard, turning her back to Vik as if she wasn’t just holding her at gunpoint. This feels like some strange game, but Vik can’t figure out Jayce’s angle and she didn’t come here to kill Jayce so she follows where she’s led. In the light from the cabin windows she is granted a better view of Jayce, and is surprised by what she sees. She’s let her beard grow out, wild and unkempt, and the rest of her appearance is just as masculine. She wears men’s clothes and boots, a fleece-lined jacket that looks like it belongs on a cowboy rather than the soft, feminine scientist Vik remembers. Only her hair, kept in a long braid down her back, remains to reference the person Vik knew her as. She wants to ask, to find some familiar landmark from which to restart communication, but feels adrift at the sight of the changes Jayce has gone through.
She remembers the first time Jayce had confessed to her that she wasn’t certain she was a man. They’d been merely business partners then, tipsy after one too many celebratory drinks at a conference. Vik had offered to put makeup on her as a joke, but the shock in Jayce’s face at the sight of herself in the mirror had been anything but funny. Months later, when she’d solidified the admission with a cautious request to be referred to as she, it had felt like an inevitability, as though Jayce always was and always would be a woman and any aberration was temporary. Now, it’s Vik’s turn to be surprised, and the vertigo of it hurts nearly as much as it must have hurt Jayce that first time.
The cabin is just as Vik remembers. It’s little more than a single room with an attached bathroom, yet the sight of its cozy interior hits her like a punch to the gut and she hesitates on the threshold. Jayce has strung herbs from the ceiling, and bunches of yarrow and lavender sway in the breeze from the open door. She still has the same blanket on the bed, a quilt purchased from a state fair twenty-five years ago, still has the same dented steel teapot sitting on the stove, still has the same collection of Talis insignia notebooks, and the nostalgia of it threatens to kill Vik where she stands.
“You planning on letting all the heat out?” Jayce asks, arching her brow in question before filling the teapot with water at the sink and lighting the countertop propane stove with a spare match.
Vik steps into the cabin and shuts the door, a sense of finality to the action that alerts every one of her nerves. She watches Jayce as she makes tea. Her limp has gotten worse since Vik left, and some part of her that hasn’t caught up to the present wants to demand Jayce tell her when she last went to the doctor, if she’s been taking breaks from her brace and exercising the partially atrophied muscles of her bad leg. But none of that is Vik’s business any longer, none of it is her right. She sits down in one of the spindly chairs at the tiny table and waits as Jayce finishes their tea.
“So, you gonna tell me why you want the Hexcore?” Jayce asks, placing two steaming mugs on the table and sitting down in the chair opposite Vik.
She picks up her mug slowly, making a show of sipping it and avoiding the question.
“This tea’s not bad,” Vik sighs, “the beard is—,”
“Don’t.” Jayce cuts her off, “it’s just— easier to give people what they want out here.”
She turns away, unable to meet Vik’s eyes.
Vik understands. She’s learned the hard way how to hide in other people’s expectations, to be feminine when it would keep her from culpability and masculine when it would keep her from danger. When to keep her gun holstered outside her clothes as a warning and when to carry it concealed as a secret threat. She wants to explain this to Jayce, to bridge the distance that’s grown between them in the last two decades, but can’t find the words.
What she says instead is, “it really is good tea.”
“It’ll keep you warm for the walk back to your truck,” Jayce says, scrubbing her hand over her face with resignation.
She rises from her chair, heading for the door. Vik can’t let that happen, so she reaches out on instinct, her hand wrapping around Jayce’s wrist almost of its own accord.
“I’m sorry,” she murmurs, still not quite brave enough to look Jayce in the eye “I never wanted—,”
“I know,” Jayce whispers, “that doesn’t make it better.”
Vik raises her eyes then, forcing herself to bear witness to the sheer hurt in Jayce’s face. She came here with ulterior motives, but at this moment all she can think is that she can’t leave Jayce like this. She sees the cabin then for what it truly is, a lonely time capsule of a life Jayce can’t return to but is terrified to leave behind. It’s why Vik isn’t dead, why Jayce isn’t afraid of her, because what could be more terrifying than facing life alone after everything they went through together.
“What if we don’t talk about it,” Vik whispers, her thumb rubbing in gentle strokes along the scar on Jayce’s wrist, “what if we pretend none of it ever happened, just for tonight?”
“That’s not how things work, V,” Jayce tells her, but she’s already turning to face Vik, her hand coming to rest on the back of her chair.
“It could be,” Vik replies, voice little more than a whisper as she rises from her seat.
They’re facing one another now, only inches apart. Jayce could stop her in an instant, could utter even a single word, but when Vik wraps her hand around the back of her neck and pulls her down to press their foreheads together she comes without hesitation.
“You’ll kill me with regret, you know that?” Jayce whispers into the space between their lips.
“Maybe someday, but not tonight lásko,” Vik whispers back, letting her fingers ghost over Jayce’s cheek and into her beard.
Jayce pulls away from her at the touch, her expression terribly raw.
“Sorry,” Jayce whispers, “I just— I hate the feeling of it.”
“Do you want me to shave it?” Vik asks, the offer an echo of all the times she did this for Jayce before, when her partner couldn’t stand even the sight of her face in the mirror.
Jayce looks at her then, hesitant and guarded but so wanting, and Vik knows that when she leaves Jayce this time it will kill her with regret too.
“Where is your razor?” She asks, letting her words sound like a command.
Jayce sits on the closed lid of the toilet in the cramped bathroom, her eyelids fluttering gently as Vik smears shaving cream along her jaw, noticing how many more white hairs she has than the last time they did this. They’ve both gotten old, both gotten slow, if they hadn’t Vik wouldn’t be doing this right now and Jayce certainly wouldn’t be letting her.
Jayce has always preferred the close shave of a straight razor and Vik is careful as she follows the grain of the hair, swiping gentle strokes down her chin. She bares her throat easily, as though it still doesn’t occur to her to be afraid even after all this time. But then, she hasn’t spent the last twenty years running and hiding; hasn’t been through half a dozen identities and more than a dozen states trying to keep herself one step ahead of the feds and whoever else wants to use her body for research and her research for profit.
“You’re staring,” Jayce says gently, eyes meeting Viks as she realizes that yes, she has been staring at the half-revealed column of her throat.
“I’m sorry I–,” she stutters, “I’m surprised you trust me, I suppose.”
“Vik, you’re probably the only person left that I do trust,” Jayce tells her, eyes closing and head tilting back so Vik can continue her careful ministrations.
When she finishes shaving Jayce’s face, Vik makes a final pass with the razor against the grain, shaving close enough that she’s certain Jayce will approve of the smoothness even if she curses the irritation later. She wets a towel with cool water and gently cleans the residue of shaving cream from her face and applies moisturizer in place of the juniper-scented aftershave that has never been opened despite collecting dust in the medicine cabinet.
“This is expired,” she notes, looking at the bottle.
“It’s been a while,” Jayce replies, a smile tugging at only one corner of her mouth.
She looks beautiful, radiant even as she sits on a toilet under the glare of the overhead light. There’s a stillness to her, as though whatever uncertainty might have made her hesitate or try to get rid of Vik has dissipated and she’s truly comfortable now. Jayce runs her hand along the line of her chin, her smile turning from uncertain to almost coquettish as though she’s just realized she’s got Vik wrapped around her finger.
Just for tonight, Vik promises herself. Tomorrow she’ll be on the run again, hopefully with the Hexcore in her possession. But for tonight, she’ll be whatever Jayce wants.
“I hope you know this doesn’t mean I’m giving you the Hexcore,” Jayce tells her, as though she can read Vik’s thoughts.
“Love, I don’t give a shit about the Hexcore,” Vik replies, her own hand wrapping around Jayce’s chin and guiding it upwards so she can lean over and kiss the other woman, “at least not tonight.”
Jayce stretches up into the kiss, her hands on Vik’s thighs to stabilize her as she leans over out of long-remembered habit.
“Not tonight,” Jayce confirms, her breath hitching as Vik breaks the kiss.
“Come, I don’t want to spend the night in the bathroom,” Vik commands, taking her cane from its place hanging on the counter and making her way into the main room of the cabin.
She sits on the bed, reaching to take her boots off and catches sight of Jayce at the bathroom mirror, a look of almost surprise on her face, as though she’d forgotten what it felt like to see even a glimmer of herself.
Vik laughs, “did you doubt my skill, darling?”
“Never,” Jayce shoots her a look that’s full of a terrible sort of gratitude, the kind that will kill her just as easily as regret.
She comes to stand before Vik, bad leg making her stance uneven, and her face a question Vik somehow already knows the answer to.
“Come here, love,” she says, patting the bed beside her and making space for Jayce to sink onto the mattress.
Jayce begins the work of taking her own boots off, her brace creaking as if it needs to be oiled.
“Do you want—?” Vik asks, gesturing at Jayce in an unspoken offer of whatever Jayce might need.
“Help me with my clothes?” Jayce asks, almost plaintive.
Vik is cautious as she unbuttons Jayce’s shirt, as though this is their first time all over again. She’s surprised when she pushes the shirt away from Jayce’s shoulders to reveal tightly-wound bandages flattening her breasts.
“Oh Jayce,” she whispers, unwinding the bandages carefully.
Vik kisses all the places where the bandages have rubbed the skin raw, carefully pulling back when Jayce squirms under her touch.
“Are you alright?” She asks, but Jayce doesn’t answer.
Instead, Jayce pulls the covers around them both, a soft cocoon against the cold of the cabin. They lay together, half clothed and half-awake. Jayce traces lazy patterns over Vik’s chest, as though the strange scarring from the failed Hexcore fusion is a maze she’s trying to work her way out of.
“I don’t want to have sex,” Jayce says, breaking the comfortable silence, “I feel like I should want that, like this should be a reunion, but all I want is to be close to you.”
She punctuates the statement by pulling Vik closer, rubbing her smooth cheek against Vik’s chest like a cat. Vik cards her fingers through Jayce’s hair, pressing a single soft kiss against her forehead.
“It’s our reunion,” Vik points out, kissing the scar in Jayce’s eyebrow and feeling the raised skin against her lips, “we can do what we want with it.”
Vik suspects that Jayce doesn't want to negotiate around a body that doesn’t quite feel like hers, but the truth is Vik doesn't want to have sex either. She doesn’t want this to be a thing of desperation or making up for lost time. She wants to keep this moment like a fragile flame for as long as she can, until she inevitably has to snuff it out and move on.
In the morning she’ll find the hexcore, one way or another, and she’ll disappear again, leaving Jayce with an empty bed to face the world alone. Vik has done it before, and not just to Jayce. She can’t remember half the names of the random lovers she’s picked up in nowhere towns and then left without a trace. Yet, as Jayce falls asleep on her chest, snoring gently, Vik remembers the reason it was so much easier with everyone else. They may be older, greyer, but Jayce is still the only one who really knows Vik, the only person Vik can fall asleep next to without being afraid.
Vik wakes to the sound of Jayce gently setting down a mug of coffee on the table beside the bed, feeling more rested than she has in a long time.
“Morning,” she grumbles out, shivering at the cold air beyond the blanket.
“Morning,” Jayce replies, her voice almost a whisper as she sits on the bed beside Vik.
It takes Vik a moment to realize why, to see the black plastic case in her lap, almost certainly lined with lead to keep the Hexcore contained. Vik can still feel it, despite the precautionary measures she’s certain Jayce has taken, a sensation like pinpricks along her chest where the Hexcore was once fused.
“I didn’t expect you to just—,” she gestures vaguely, too blunt without enough coffee, and terrified of the way Jayce looks like she’s on the verge of tears.
“Take me with you!” Jayce blurts out, her eyes meeting Vik’s filled with the zeal of her demand.
“Jayce—,” Vik starts, trying to be gentle.
“Why not?” Jayce interrupts, pulling the hexcore case back towards her.
“It’s dangerous,” Vik replies.
“And I’m not in danger here?” Jayce asks, her fingers white knuckled against the Hexcore case.
Vik hesitates. Yesterday she would have refused, told Jayce bluntly that she’s not suited to a life on the run, or simply pulled the gun still sitting on the nightstand from its holster and demanded the Hexcore. But something has shifted between them, and Vik is far less willing to leave Jayce to this terrible time capsule of a cabin and the half-life of hiding her partner has fallen into.
“I never stay in the same place more than two nights,” Vik says gently, her fingers resting over Jayce’s white knuckles, “you would have to be willing to move constantly.”
Jayce, expecting another refusal, looks surprised at her words. Vik takes advantage of her surprise, carefully prying the hexcore case from Jayce’s grip. Every atom in her body screams against her next words but, like Jayce, Vik is coming to realize that being alone is its own kind of danger.
“If you want to come, you’ll need to pack a bag,” she says, sliding the last of Jayce’s fingers off the hexcore case and sliding it onto her lap.
Jayce stares at her for a moment, her face an odd expression of fear and something else. She likely thinks that Vik will leave while she’s trying to pack, or perhaps she’s simply terrified of what Vik will do with the hexcore when she opens the case. Vik looks down at the black case in her lap. It’s heavier than it should be, and the prickling sensation in her chest only intensifies as she opens it to confirm the device is still inside. ‘Device’ isn’t quite the right term anymore, not when the Hexcore has morphed into something far more organic after absorbing her tissue. It still responds to her, its movements matching her breathing in a terrifying echo. Vik closes the case.
“My bag is in the truck,” Jayce says, breaking the silence that falls in the Hexcore’s wake, “my guns too, and enough food for a few days.”
Vik huffs a laugh, unsurprised at Jayce’s persistence.
“If I come with you,” Jayce continues, unwilling to meet Vik’s eyes, “you have to promise you won’t leave me at the first half-decent place we stop.”
“Darling,” Vik says, pulling her hand from the Hexcore case and resting it against Jayce’s cheek, “if you come with me I won’t know how to let you go.”