Chapter Text
Juno feels sick. Unsurprisingly so: he’s been eating nothing but increasingly adventurous flavours of ice cream for long enough to give a snowcone a brain freeze, and his eye aches from crying and staring at a TV screen for hours at a time. He can count on one finger the amount of times he’s changed his clothes since he got home two weeks ago, and he holds a newfound appreciation for Rita’s resilience as she continues to let him slump against her in spite of it. She’d always been the perfect companion in heartbreak, what with her 200 terabyte hard drive of sappy movies and an iron stomach that could happily subsist off of nothing but sugar if given the chance, and it had served them well for years. But now...
“...Rita?”
“Yeah, boss?”
“I don’t think this is helping.” Her eyes go big and wide, tears welling up at an alarming speed, and her hands flail about as she frets.“Oh Mista Steel, I’m so sorry! You were just so sad after you came back from talkin’ with Mista Nureyev, and this usually helps but then you just kept lookin’ sad and I didn’t know what to do–oo!”
“Oh, no, Rita, it’s okay!” He grabs her hands in his, because he’s a little worried that if he doesn’t she’s going to blacken his one remaining eye. “This was— Thank you, for this. I just meant… I think I’m gonna go take a shower.” He knows she’s been seriously worried when she doesn’t immediately bounce back from her bout of tears with a comment on how he really does need one, Mista Steel, I mean I know you like rabbits an’ all but that dont mean you gotta smell like ‘em.
“Okay,” She sniffs. “Do you need me to get you anything?”
Juno shakes his head, patting her on the shoulder before making his way to the kitchen. “No, but while you’re waiting for me, why don’t you think about where we should go for lunch?” He glances at the round, powder blue clock on her wall and winces. “Or dinner.” He pours them each a cup of water and steals the bottle of acetaminophen from her medicine cabinet, taking two with a large gulp of water before pressing the other glass into her hands. “And drink that, or you’ll get a headache.” Juno would know. He hopes the pounding in his head abates at least a little bit before he has to go out in public.
Five hours later finds him sitting cross legged on her bathroom floor, thighs sticking to the pink checkerboard tile where the equally pink skirt he borrowed is riding up. A towel is draped around his shoulders, covering the bright floral pattern of one of Rita's “oversized” sweaters that fits him more like a crop top. Rita herself is perched on the lid of the toilet behind him, slathering globs of white bleach into his hair.
“Are you sure you know how to do this?” He asks, definitely too late to change his mind.
“Just trust me, Mista Steel. I ain't never let you down before, now have I?” She hasn't. It doesn't really matter if she messes this up, anyways— Over the past year, he had shaved his hair close whenever he got the chance, too busy running towards or away from something to be able to maintain anything more involved. It can stand to be shaved one more time, and Juno will try again in a couple months. He briefly considers the possibility of this ending up with chemical burns on his scalp and down his neck instead of just an ugly dye job, but decides they can cross that bridge when they get there. If. If they get there.
She manages to successfully bleach it to an (albeit slightly patchy) light orange colour without burning the flesh off his body, before toning it and sectioning it off into little twists to be dyed a muted pink. Rita had a difficult time in the store deciding on what coloir to give him after Juno told her she could choose— which he should have anticipated, honestly. She had a hard enough time deciding on a colour of nail polish, and usually wound up with a glittering rainbow across her nails, each one topped with a design from a different stencil. Juno had unequivocally rejected the bright rainbow locs she had presented him, however, (he was willing to do a great many things for Rita, but a parrot cosplay with hair so plastic it audibly crinkled in her hand was not one of them) so she ended up with a set of still synthetic, but notably higher quality locs in pink and a package of box dye to match.
The gentle pull of her crocheting the locs into his hair should be relaxing, but mostly it's just giving his brain enough space to ruminate. It’s not all about Nureyev; he’d nursed this heartbreak for months in the cold, lonely abyss of space. He wasn’t… over it, exactly, as the cartons of ice cream in their trash can attest, and when the hope he’d been cradling to his chest had been snuffed out it hit him hard. Is still hitting him hard, maybe even harder than the initial betrayal because, without any force in the universe pulling him towards his next goal, he finally has to figure out what comes next. And every part of it reminds him way too much of an era decades past; another death, another found family that grew apart, another “love of his life” that left him in the lurch.
Rita tugs a little too hard on the next twist and it brings him out of his head, reminds him of another similarity:
He has Rita. Juno built a life with her before, and he can do it again, he’s sure of it. A subtle wriggling in his pocket reminds him that he also has Ruby, just as Rita finishes pulling in the last loc. “All done!” She says, and hands him a mirror.
He looks at himself, tugging gently at the ends of his hair. Pink suits him, surprisingly, bringing out the warm tones in his skin and eyes. The extensions aren’t made to last, and when he has to take them out he isn’t sure he’ll replace them— it’s too much of a time commitment to do it every few months for the synthetic hair, on top of the maintenance for his baby locs, and real hair is too expensive. But right now he looks good. Like a vision from the future; someone he could be forever, in time.
“Thanks, Rita.” Juno says, still smiling even as she kicks him to get him up and out of the way, stopping her as she moves to leave. “Hey, aren’t I gonna get to do your hair?” He asks. Rita’s hair is already dyed, so instead he holds up a packet of curled hair tinsel he found shortly after he’d rejected the rainbow extensions. Ben had to wear them for a costume once, and he’d done a lot of complaining about the sparkly fallout on his pillows. Somehow, Juno doesn’t think Rita will mind.
“Mista Steel!” Rita squeals, so loud and high pitched he’s genuinely concerned for the glassware in her cabinets, not to mention any dogs her neighbours might have. She allows herself a few seconds of bouncing vigorously on her heels before she speaks again. “Okay this is really nice an’ all but if we’re gonna do this then we’re gonna do it in my bedroom, because it’s gettin’ kinda late and I will not sit on a dirty bathroom floor unless I am puking my guts out or trapped there by a creepy puppet like in any of the 427 remakes of Saw .”
“I— Yeah, okay,” Juno says, wondering why he hadn’t thought of moving out of the bathroom when they were done with the dye. What’s done is done, so he follows her out to knot the strands of glitter into her curls while she watches the latest episode of some reality TV show he pretends he has no interest in.
They don’t get to sleep until almost four in the morning, but Juno wakes up feeling better than he has in almost a year.
Rebuilding his life is both harder and easier than he thought. On one hand, he wakes up every day fighting the urge to do nothing, to linger in a nebula of zero obligations or purpose. On the other hand, it is so much easier when he isn’t absolutely miserable, drinking himself to death, and pushing his family away because them having their own lives makes him feel abandoned.
Juno ends up moving in with Rita, who had kept paying rent for her old apartment as well as their old office this whole time. He tells her he can get his own place, but she insists that being shipmates with him on the Carte Blanche was one of the best years of her life, and so he stays and struggles through putting together a new bed to turn her former office into his bedroom. (He has no idea why she even needed an office in the first place, she kept all her computers in her own bedroom. It was less of an office and more of a room with an empty bookshelf and a desk.)
Being roommates with her is sort of a mixed bag. She leaves her dishes in the sink and dusty orange fingerprints on everything. At one point she decides she wants to repaint her walls and then gets distracted not even a quarter of the way through, leaving him with several buckets of bright yellow paint and an unbearable frustration at the idea of living with two half-painted walls. She also buys the good snacks at the grocery store, things he would never even think to get himself, and redyes his hair when the roots grow out. Most importantly, she's his best friend, and he's one hundred percent sure he wants to spend the rest of his life as close to her as possible. Figuratively speaking— again, orange fingerprints.
She's not the only person in his life by far— He makes time every week to call Mick, and Puck, and Buddy and Vespa. He listens as Mick talks about the new book he’s writing (It’s about an aspiring necromancer trying to bring back his dog. Juno thinks he might be working through something too), Puck fills him in on the latest gossip from middle-of-nowhere Io (it’s juicier than you would expect), and Vespa promises him that she’ll slit Nureyev’s throat if she ever sees him again (He tells her not to, but he can’t deny that her validation of that deeply hurt and slightly vindictive part of him is kind of nice) and complains at length about the customers at the bar. Sometimes, he suspects, even when they are sitting directly in front of her. Buddy usually has a couple of stories of her own, but she always manages to coax more out of him than she reveals about herself. He suspects that emotional vulnerability is something she should probably be working on herself, but as a wise woman once said, he is not her therapist, so he lets her steer the conversation whatever way she wants.
Not to mention Ruby, who basically lives on his person, squirming in his pocket or slithering up his arms like a liquid metal snake when she's not in car mode. He wonders, sometimes, if that's what she really wants, but she feels content to be here with him for now, so he's not complaining.
Juno starts a new detective agency with Rita— or re-starts an old one, depending on how you think of it. He’s avoiding cases with spouses, at least for now. He’s not really in the headspace to get in the middle of another relationship soured by double life, but he’s solved a couple of thefts, one murder, and ended up smack in the middle of a gang war. So it’s going better than he expected.
He takes his wedding dress out of storage and pawns it, but he sticks a couple photos of him and Diamond in a photo album, right next to ones of him and Sasha in the Academy. It’s not about forgetting them, it’s about letting go of what never was, not getting caught up in a person he will never be.
Which is why, after careful consideration, he gets rid of Nureyev’s journal, and the note he’d left him what feels like a lifetime ago. He sorts through the gifts Nureyev got him, and tries to be honest with himself about what he can keep for himself, moving forward, and what will only leave him longing for someone who is never turning back. There’s less to sort through than he’d thought, the destruction of the Carte Blanche taking care of most of it.
He gives up what he can and very deliberately does not tuck the rest away, where he knows it will fester in his mind like a wound. Pictures go in scrapbooks and photo albums, clothes in his drawers, accessories in his jewellery box, and tchotchkes on the shelves next to Rita’s. Juno won’t pretend he doesn’t still think about him, but he’s making progress, he thinks, maybe even moving on. The life he’s built for himself feels solid, if not unbreakable, steady and certain of the future in a way he’s not sure he’s ever felt in his life.
And then, two months after Peter Nureyev breaks his heart, Juno hears a knock at the door.
The knock at his door turns into two, and then turns into a series of loud raps. Honestly, they could at least give him a second to answer the door before trying out their impression of a Uranian hail storm.
“I’m coming!” He yells, pulling his hair back into a ponytail as he rushes down the hall. He opens the door and… there he is. In his dreams, he throws himself at Nureyev, catching him off guard in either a tackle or an embrace— even he can’t tell which until the moment they hit the ground. In his fantasies Nureyev always reaches out first: strong hands with long fingers cupping his jaw, sliding around his waist and then pushing up his skirt.
In his nightmares the only constant is blood. Nureyev slips a knife between his ribs or shoves it deep into his gut. Nureyev pulls an alarm and thick white gas fills the room, leaving Juno to cough red blood and purple flowers onto white tile floor as he makes his escape. Nureyev pulls him into what could feel like a lover's embrace, if he ignores the sharp acrylic nails pressing crimson half-moons into the meat of his thigh and the words being mouthed into the crook of his neck. I never loved you. I don't ever want to see you again.
The worst one is this: Nureyev teeters on the edge of a cliff and Juno stands across from him, scared. He steps forward and Nureyev steps back, or they argue until Juno stomps his foot on the ground, hard enough that the fragile stone fractures and breaks, or he grabs Nureyev’s hand only to have it slip through sweaty, clumsy fingers.
Or. Or , he watches from somewhere outside of his body as he rests his palms flat on Nureyev’s chest and shoves him back over the edge.
It doesn’t really matter. Either way it ends the same: Nureyev falls, and Juno turns and walks away before he can hear the crack of Nureyev’s skull when it hits the ground.
There’s none of that here. Neither of them leap into the other's arms, and there are no bloodied hands or mangled bodies of ex lovers smeared across the ground behind them. Instead, Peter Nureyev stands in front of Juno, unarmed and unhurt, giving him the most pained, unnatural looking smile he’s ever seen in his life. Including the time Benten suggested they try and switch places for a day, “you know, like in the movies!” , and Juno had been immediately accosted by a gaggle of theatre kids begging to know about his next recital.
“Oh.” He says, and it comes out flatter than he expected, everything he had been feeling and trying not to feel mixing together into something as grey and hard as Rita’s homemade cookies. “It’s you.”