Work Text:
Suburbia.
She should have known.
A soft, amused sigh traveled through her throat as she slowly made her way to the porch steps that led to the white, two-story house. The smell of freshly-cut grass permeated throughout her short walk to the porch stairs, and as she sat down on the bottom step and turned her back on the fairytale lifestyle, she tried to imagine the sight of Ryan riding on a lawn mower. Or, more likely, he'd be pushing one of those reel lawn mowers across the lawn, arms flexing as he walked back and forth across the yard, the grass growing shorter with each step.
She didn't want to knock on the door yet; she had to find the words first. When she left her cabin in the woods, all she knew was that she wanted to see Ryan, she had to see him. She never worked out what she was actually going to say, though.
Should she just open up with what she'd been doing these past few months? It wasn't much to be told, honestly. Just a lot of thinking and remembering and writing and grieving that she didn't have the energy to get into. She'd spent three months in her head, she didn't want to go back there. She was done now.
Maybe she should just pretend like everything was fine now and just go up to him and kiss him. Or, what if he was the one who wasn't interested anymore? No, kissing would have to be out. Or, she could—
Her eyes flew up as the sound reached her ears. A car had sputtered to a stop at the curb in front of her, the noisy engine dying quickly.
It was him.
Her heart was suddenly in her throat, blocking any air from filtering in. She wasn’t ready. She didn’t have the words.
But, it didn’t matter. He had already seen her.
As soon as the recognition took hold of him, the little brown bag that was cradled in his arm fell to the ground, forgotten about. This was literally the last thing that came to mind when she thought about this moment, how they would find each other again. She’d thought it’d be super intimate and romantic, even. Maybe she would have knocked on his door and he would've answered, the black eye patch over his eye no longer a guilty reminder of what they'd been through. She’d tease him about how his pretty boy looks were what she came back for, and he’d smile and tell her to shut up, and then he’d kiss her.
Now, though, as she stood tall, it wasn’t happening like she pictured. So, she gave him a hesitant smile, which was innocent enough. She couldn’t misinterpret anything with a smile, right?
All of her anxious worrying was for nothing, it turned out, because Ryan strode over to her, taking wide strides to get to her quicker, and she started forward. They caught each other when he reached her first, and their arms sought each other out immediately. He was hard and firm under her fingertips as she ran her hands up past his arms and to his shoulders, clutching onto him like he was her last lifeline—which he very well might have been.
Ryan’s own hands were wandering across her upper half, going from her arms to her shoulders to cradle her around her back, holding her to him with a tight grip she had missed these past few months. She’d missed contact with another person.
Before the whole mess with Nathan went down, she had many moments of forced solitude where she closed herself off from anyone and everyone around her. It hadn’t been so hard, though, because she wasn’t truly alone, not with Aiden around. But, being in the cabin, taking her moment to find herself again without Aiden there to keep her mentally tethered to her surroundings, she had been well and truly on her own.
Ryan was the first person she’d made eye contact with, let alone touched, in more than three months, and she didn’t think she ever wanted to give this up again.
His warm hands came up to cradle her jaw, and his breath ghosted across her lips in question. The heady scent was almost too much for her; she didn't even wait for Ryan to make his move. She surged forward, closing the tiny gap that teased them and captured his lips in hers softly. There was no need to hurry along right now, there were no outside threats that battled for their attention. It was just him and her, and they had all the time in the world to relearn each other.
***
For the very first time in Jodie's life, she had everything she felt she wanted. She'd never wanted much, but the little she had coveted throughout her life had always seemed like the impossible dream to her.
Freedom shouldn't have sounded so unattainable.
Ryan's perfect little suburbia get-up wasn't as ideal as people made it out to be, and their neighbors were too nosy for her liking, but this life that she led now was normal, it was her own. She left the house just after sunrise each morning to go for her morning run around the cul-de-sac. Ryan joined her sometimes, but those days were few and far between. He bartended at night at a bar not too far away from their house, and she was lucky they even found the time to fool around with their conflicting schedules.
During the day, she'd found work at a cozy bookstore that didn’t demand too much of her. When there was no one in the shop, her boss didn’t even mind when she brought out some of her schoolwork to work on. She was taking a few classes at the local community college to try and widen her scope. She didn’t want to be working at a bookstore forever, and while Ryan worried that she was taking on too much all at once, he agreed that going to school was a good idea for her; was something normal for her.
Life with Ryan was a beautiful and messy affair. They went out and had date nights at restaurants and movies; they took to playing cards and board games together on Friday nights; they took mini road trips whenever they could, even if it was only a two-hour drive roundtrip, just because they loved being outdoors together. It wasn't all perfect, though; they had their moments when they got lost to the heat of an argument, but it felt freeing to argue with someone and not have that dread in the back of her mind that Aiden would get involved, that he would escalate the simple disagreement and ruin what she had carefully cultivated on her own.
Aiden. Her heart squeezed painfully every time she thought about him, and she tried not to most days.
Lately, though, he was on her mind more than she liked to admit. It wasn't that she was stuck in the past, stuck in the myriad of bad experiences she lived and fought through; she'd gotten over that as much as she was ever going to, and it was enough to get her through the day without feeling guilt for the things she'd done. This wasn't why he had plagued her dreams and waking thoughts.
About three weeks ago, she'd felt his presence in this house for the first time.
She'd noticed it one morning when she was lying beside Ryan, who was spread out on his bare stomach and asleep to the world. She had been softly tracing her finger along the pink of a scar on his bicep that she'd once witnessed him receive. She was hardly breathing as she explored him, but as her finger reached his shoulder, she'd sworn she'd seen a few stray, sweaty locks of Ryan's hair blow across his forehead.
Jodie had quickly halted her slow moving and squinted at the top of Ryan's forehead, wondering if she was still half-asleep. Chills swam over her, goosebumps dotting her skin immediately as she realized.
Aiden had come back.
She'd called out his name softly, wanting to make sure she was right before that small flicker of hope inside of her could truly spark and flare. The flickering of her bedside lamp that followed had been confirmation enough.
For days, this welcomed haunting went on, and Jodie had been so elated at the semi-return of her best friend, her brother, that she didn't question any of it. She didn't even tell Ryan, at first, and she didn't try to think about why that was.
It became very clear to her why she kept it to herself once she did share the news with Ryan about a week later.
He was completely skeptical. He bombarded her with questions and started to bring up things from the past that they had both agreed to never speak on again, and why couldn't he just be happy for her?
They slept in separate rooms that night.
Jodie hated it. It almost felt like all the other times she had gone to sleep alone with no to care for, no one to care for her. But, she knew what it felt like to be loved now, she'd gotten her taste of it and she'd promised herself that she wasn't going to do anything to sabotage herself.
And what were they arguing over? Aiden? Someone who wasn't even a part of their realm, anymore?
The next morning, she'd made coffee for two and sat down on the edge of the coffee table. Ryan had arranged his makeshift bed on the couch in front of her, and her heart clenched at the sight of him cuddled up into himself. She'd nudged him awake until he groaned tiredly but sat up anyway. As they'd shared their hot coffee, she'd explained to him that she didn't want to fight. In his early, tired stupor, he was unguarded, and as she gazed at him, she could see what truly had him shaken up about the whole thing.
He was scared. She could see it in the pinching of his eyebrows, how they drew down over his eyes as he gazed at the floor. Could see it in the tremble in his wrists as he brought the mug to his lips with two hands. Could hear it in his voice as he apologized to her for being so brash the night before.
She'd taken his hands in hers and waited until she had his full attention before she adamantly reassured him not to worry. The past was over with, and no one from the agency had bothered them in over a year. They had nothing to fear, and if something ever did come up, they would deal with it together. He'd smiled gratefully at her before pulling her in for a kiss.
She didn't bring up Aiden again, but she knew he was still hovering over her shoulder. After her argument with Ryan, she couldn't seem to help the bit of doubt that crept into the back of her mind. Why had Aiden showed up again after a year of silence? Why now?
It could have been her nervous energy, or something too dark she didn't want to dwell on, but as soon as the doubt began to cloud her mind, the nightmares started.
These weren't like the night terrors that used to grip her those first few months after she shut down the Black Sun. Those had been dreams full of regrets, full of people she'd let down or had let her down, full of painful goodbyes and hard times.
These nightmares weren't anything she knew at all. From the pieces she could remember in the morning, she was always walking toward the same cliff as waves of winds tore through her, pushing her back and away from the ugly center of it all. She pushed her way through it, though, fighting like hell to see what waited for her at the edge of the mountainous rubble.
She was stuck in the nightmare now. It was weird because she knew she was dreaming, knew she was asleep right now beside Ryan, but she couldn't find her way out of this recurring nightmare. As she studied the scene around her for the hundredth time, searching for any clue she was supposed to be seeing, she noticed something that hadn't always been there.
Someone was standing by the cliff.
Jodie ran; her uniform was bulky, and the winds whipped and howled at her through the air, but she reached the edge of the cliff before the new addition to her nightmare could disappear.
Aiden was beautiful. He was standing tall before her, not glancing at her, but studying something else, something she didn't care about because Aiden was here, and nothing else even mattered compared to that.
Dark, floppy hair covered his head in slight waves, curving across his forehead like the bangs Jodie used to wear. The bright blue polo shirt and dark jeans he wore were out of place in this apocalyptic hell of a nightmare, beside her own steadfast protective gear, but she thought that made him look even more like the pure soul he was now.
She spoke his name softly, like it was something to be held close to her heart, and she hadn't really been expecting an answer. How could someone as pure and beautiful as Aiden really be here in this hell? In the end of the fucking world?
But, then his head swiveled around to her at her request, knocking the breath from her lungs at that first gaze. Warm, wide eyes caught and held her attention, the brown so much like her own she almost cried. His skin was smooth, no scar or blemish distorting his round face, and she thought she could spend hours just gazing at him to try to learn him as a person.
She blinked, and everything around her came back to life, rushing at her with an urgency that caught her breath in her throat. She glanced back at the ominous edge of the cliff, and finally took the final steps toward glancing past it. All around her, all she could see were dark, crackling entities swimming around through the air, squealing and rushing through the air with malice. Restless souls wandered below her, hundreds of them filling the cracked roads of the city as they ghosted through one another.
A weight fell on her shoulder, and she glanced down at the hand on her before her gaze followed the path of his arm and connected with his troubled eyes. She could feel the emotion radiating from him, just like she always could when they were connected. Sadness emanated from him in waves, almost drowning her with the weight of his gaze until all she could feel was sadness herself, every bit of happiness she'd felt at seeing him again washed away.
Aiden squeezed her shoulder, and she felt more than heard him when he spoke to her, a somber tone making her quake all over. "Get ready."
The world around her began to shake and blur, and already her spike of confusion gave way to the increasing panic she felt clawing at her, the desperation taking hold of her. She couldn't leave him. She couldn't, she didn't want to—not again.
His name had barely formed on her lips before the apocalyptic landscape she had been thrust into night after night finally disappeared.
Jodie gasped harshly awake as she scrambled up in bed, a hand flying to her heart. Ryan was still sleeping soundly beside her, untroubled, his arm a heavy weight across her lower abdomen. The steady thrum beneath her palm comforted her for all of a second before her dream came back to her, vivid and in full detail.
A storm was brewing, and it was heading straight for her.