Chapter Text
“I don’t regret it, y’know.”
They’re sitting on the yellow-flower carpet of the den in his cramped apartment, watching the news on a little box TV, wrapping up precious heirlooms stolen by a dead funeral home owner to mail back to their rightful families. Hunk is exhausted, physically and mentally, and the sheer amount of his secrets have been weighing on him like the world on Atlas’s back ever since Pidge sat up in her coffin and walked back into his life. She keeps poking and prodding at him to open up, and after today’s slip, he feels like he owes this to her, at least.
“...Huh? I think it fits fine the way it is.” Her attention doesn’t pull from the pearl necklace she’s trying to squeeze into a box without damaging. Good. Eye contact might kill him right now, drop him dead upon impact like the funeral home owner.
“No, no, not the box, I mean--- I made a decision, keepin’ you alive.” Not that he had any say in her dying the first time, of course. He wish he could’ve prevented it, could’ve kept in touch with her up until then, so she would’ve had somewhere else to go instead of traveling alone, so she could be sitting in front of him right now and he might be able to hold her hand or touch her shoulder or something, anything physical. “I made a decision and I did it on purpose, letting the guy die instead’f you. I mean, I--- I didn’t, like, handpick him or anything, it’s close-proximity. But I think... but if I did know who, I would’ve made the same decision. And if I had to do it again, I’d do the same thing. Hell, throw me in a time loop, make me do it over and over, I still wouldn’t change my mind.
I… I know that’s pretty selfish, and it probably makes me a bad person, and… I’m sorry if it does. But I’m not sorry you’re alive.”
Pidge takes a deep breath of key-lime pie and air fresheners, fiddles with the pocket watch she’d picked off the corpse of the guy who had picked it off her corpse in the first place. She’s suddenly aware of how she’s living on literal borrowed time , a life that doesn’t belong to her, a life somebody took from someone else and gave to her. By all means, she shouldn’t be here, and being here has deep consequences as a result. She can’t ever go home to her books, to her bees, to Aunt Ezor and Aunt Zethrid. She can’t call herself Katie, because Katie isn’t alive anymore, Katie is the famous victim of the Lucky Tourist Murder who was buried two weeks ago in a white coffin and a pretty yellow dress. Pidge is sitting cross-legged on the floor across from her childhood best friend who still makes her stomach flip in the same way he did fifteen years ago when Katie saw him last, but she can’t ever touch him, can’t ever hold his hand or push his hair back or take him dancing, because the moment she makes that connection she’s dead again with no third chance waiting for her.
But… that’s why she’s got to make her second chance count. She doesn’t intend on losing Hunk twice.
“Mm… well, I’m not dead, so I’m glad you made that choice,” she says, and pops the pocket watch shut. “Plus, the fact you did it on purpose makes it a lot more fun for the both of us than if you did it by accident. So… thanks for that.”
She smiles up at him, and he smiles back, and she can feel the unspoken something between them and suddenly she’s ten years old again, stomping around with her best friend in the yard without a care in the world, and she feels as light as a dollop of whipped cream.
“I think I’d kiss you if it wouldn’t kill me,” she says then, in a spontaneous burst of courage. “Bet it’d be real nice.”
And before he can gather his thoughts and give a real answer, the timer on the table dings, and he settles for a simple, “Pie’s done. You want a slice?”