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This isn’t the first time someone’s knocked at his front door in the middle of the night. Hell, it isn’t even the twelfth time, after every iteration and reiteration of Hera forgetting how to open the door with her tail / Renée misplacing her keys and being too paranoid to have a spare hidden even though they were in her pocket the whole time / a very exhausted graveyard shift pizza guy who Eiffel has a strong tendency to grossly overtip out of a pure hatred for basic math his own generosity and overwhelming appreciation for good ol’ Chicago deep dish, because he is definitely, willingly, and genuinely a good person, thank you very much.
This is definitely the first time that the ‘someone’ has been Daniel, though. It’s extra the first time that Daniel has shown up at his door soaked in rainwater and grinning concerningly and dripping hand-blood all over Eiffel’s favorite potted plant.
“Oh, cool, you’re awake,” he says to Eiffel before the door’s even fully open.
Eiffel sighs and fights the urge to slam the door in his face, and the second, more worrying urge to kiss this weirdo for literally no reason at all. “Daniel, it is literally three in the morning.”
“I was bored.”
“You saw me less than seven hours ago.”
“Oh, neat, is that bread? I love bread,” he says, and instantly invites himself into Eiffel’s home. He doesn’t even go for the bread. He just collapses onto the (now soaking wet) couch with his legs crossed and pulls his phone out, which he immediately stops doing about fifteen seconds later, leaping up and pacing in circles around the coffee table, looking like he might just carve right through the floor with the urgency of his steps.
“Daniel? Buddy? You… okay?” he asks hesitantly, dragging out the ‘y’.
He stops pacing in front of him, blinking absently. “Yep. Just, y’know, bored.”
“Do you… need a bandage for your hand?”
“Nah.”
“That was rhetorical. Give me your hand.”
“I already cleaned it, it’s fine.”
“And then immediately got filthy city rainwater all over it?”
“Believe it or not, I’m a lot better at cleaning wounds than you, amnesia boy. I’ve killed people for money a whole bunch.”
“See, that, that’s not really a great thing to say at three a.m. after entering my apartment uninvited.”
His responding smile is soft and warm and Eiffel forgives him instantly is definitely still very confused and frustrated and still wants to kiss him really wishes he would stop dragging mud all over the carpet. Renée just vacuumed that, like, a week and a half ago, and she’s on vacation right now, and Eiffel sure as hell isn’t doing it.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Eiffel urges.
“Trust me, as far as hypomanic episodes go, this one’s actually super chill. Just gets a little worse during nights, a.k.a, like, now.” He roots through the freezer, pulls out some raw chicken breasts, and tosses them onto the counter. “I’m making chicken parmesan. Where do you keep your breadcrumbs? Panko, if you have ‘em.”
“I’m probably gonna regret asking, but what the hell is a hypomanic episode?” Eiffel pleas, grabbing Daniel by the shoulders and guiding his bloodied hand / unsettling demeanor away from the exposed food and kitchen knives.
“I got Bipolar II. Oh, cool, found the breadcrumbs.”
“You’re bipolar?”
“Yeah, but it’s, like, fine. Had it for ages, used to it by now, no biggie. I already took my medication and everything. Go me.”
“I — I had no idea. That sucks, man. I’m sorry.”
“The hell are you apologising for? You didn’t fuck my brain chemistry up. Genetics and shitty parenting did that.” He spins around and smiles again. “Nah, actually, change my mind. Not hungry. Put the chicken away for me, I’m gonna grab a rag for my hand. Didn’t notice it was bleeding again. No, wait, it stopped, I’m good, nevermind.” He plops back down on the couch and snatches a book from the floor. “Good book. You reading this?”
“How’d your hand get hurt?” Eiffel says, sitting gingerly next to him and taking Daniel’s hand into his.
“I mean. Like. Broken glass.”
That’s just vague / dismissive / frightening enough to be cause for concern. If Jacobi is a danger to himself — like, more than usual —
“You’re thinking too much. I can feel it,” he interrupts. “People always do that when they’re around me. I don’t like it.”
“Daniel, I don’t want to sound accusative, but… ”
“Didn’t do it to myself, chill out, stop worrying. Too stubborn for that sort of shit.” He freezes and chews on his lip for a second. Constantly moving / constantly shifting / tapping his fingers erratically / he seems more anxious than energetic, really, but who is Eiffel to judge? “To be fair, though, it was technically my fault, and it has been a while since my dosages and shit have been adjusted.”
“How… long?”
“Oh, you know. Like. Eiiight.”
Please say months please say months please say “Months?” Eiffel asks, already knowing it’s absolutely not months.
“You really gonna make me say ‘years’ out loud?”
Eiffel considers glaring, but he’s already settled on burying his face in his hands, which would make that rather difficult. Daniel’s arm has dropped to the space between them, brushing lightly against his knee.
“We’re going to your psychiatrist tomorrow,” Eiffel states, voice muffled between his fingers.
“Gonna be honest with you, I definitely don’t have that nice Goddard insurance anymore, given my participation in the murder of their CEO,” he deflects.
“If you can afford to refill your prescriptions, you can afford to get them adjusted. Stop making excuses.”
“Oh, blah, blah, whatever. Until then, let’s do something. Wanna watch something? Let’s watch something.”
Eiffel shrugs. “I mean, I was kinda just enjoying talking to you. And also sleeping, that was nice, but it’s a bit too late for that now.”
“Well, I’m super not in the mood to talk about me anymore. Let’s talk about you. How’s your estranged not-really-your-family doing? What’s it like not remembering your own daughter?”
He crosses his arms at the defensive sudden shift in topic. “We haven’t communicated much. Renée’s been a bit of a mediator, I guess, but it’s just… too complicated and messy of a situation to reasonably work out well. Also, I definitely don’t know sign language.”
“I can teach ya’ a bit, one day,” Daniel says, twisting around to sit upside down on the couch, draping his arms across the floor and rasping his knuckles against a tiny rainwater puddle he’s dragged across the floor.
Teach him… sign language? “Why the hell do you know sign language? Required class to graduate high school?”
“I went to MIT, bitch , but thanks for the vote of confidence.”
“Nah, really, why’d you learn? Had a deaf friend or something?”
Daniel shakes his head. “Explosion went off in my face a handful of years ago, hence the — you know — all this.” He sits back upright and pushes a few strands of hair away from the side of his face, better revealing the series of chaotic / bright / jagged scars there, the ones which he very rarely draws attention to. There’s a chunk missing from the shell of his ear, near the top, and Eiffel’d be lying pretty blatantly if he said it was something hasn’t noticed before, from his many hours of enamored, lovestruck staring completely friendly and platonic observation for platonic friendliness purposes and not from thinking Daniel’s incredibly cute whatsoever, because that would be weird, and Eiffel is definitely not weird at all. (Not that he remembers, at least.)
Something about it reminds Eiffel of a cat he swears he once knew gives him vague stray cat vibes, but not of any stray cat in particular, because he doesn’t know of any stray cats in particular, couldn’t possibly, except for the fully-eared one which sometimes swings by his windowsill and screeches at him on random nights at whichever hour it determines to be most ungodly till he finally relents and lets it in. (He gave in a couple weeks ago and grabbed it a strangely familiar interestingly branded little bag of kibble from the Circle K on the corner. Now it won’t leave him the hell alone. He’s one late night of meowing and one subsequent visit to the vet to make sure it’s gotten all its shots away from just adopting the damn thing. This will remain a secret from Renée and Hera until the literal second it happens.)
“The shrapnel and burns weren’t too bad after I gave ‘em a chance to heal. Lost my hearing in my left ear for a while, though. Did the whole ‘panic and immediately teach yourself sign language in case it happens again permanently to both ears’ thing, which I’ve since heard through the grapevine is actually pretty a pretty common thing for anxious motherfuckers who build bombs for a living to do,” he continues, instantly snapping Doug back into reality as he tries his best to focus again. “Never got it fully back, the left-sided hearing, which Kepler wasn’t too fond of. ‘Worse hearing’ roughly translated to ‘easier to be snuck up on and killed’ in his book, kept me away from missions for a while, y’know, the works. But I also scared myself so badly that I never fucked up and blew myself up again, so, overall, a win as far as violent mutilation and third degree burns go.”
Kepler’s the dead one / well, alright, one of the dead ones / the dead one that Daniel never ever talks about Daniel’s old commanding officer, right? He talks about the others, either when it’s dragged out of him by Renée’s thoughtful conversations or — in the case of the dead coworker / friend / snarky computer woman / ‘Maxwell’ — when Daniel is remarkably, exceptionally drunk and / or sad, which is still rather often. But not Kepler. He’s never once mentioned Kepler. Eiffel wonders why.
Daniel seems to notice his slip-up, a violent blush staining his face, but he doesn’t bother backtracking, which Eiffel personally thanks the heavens for. He likes when Daniel’s in a sharing mood, which is, quite frankly, almost never. Is he kind of a dick for letting Daniel ramble his way through a manic episode? Maybe a bit. But Daniel literally murdered and robbed people for a group of mad-scientist corporate overlords for a living not so long ago, so, like, oh well. They’re not exactly good at being good people. They’re barely even good at being people.
“That was before Maxwell joined the team, even, now that I think about it. I think we still had a burner employee in SI-5 at that point. Some sharpshooter or something. God, Kepler hated him.” He’s got that look on his face, that look where he wants to tell a story. That look where he thinks everyone’ll be horrified if he tells the story. (That look where he wants to tell it anyways.)
“What was his name?” Eiffel coaxes, a playful grin hinting at the corners of his mouth.
“Brax,” he mocks, scrunching up his nose and kicking his feet up onto Eiffel’s knees. “And he talked in this awful Cockney accent, which I swear to god was fake. Who the hell fakes an accent? And who the hell names their kid Brax?”
“He sounds awful.”
“Right?” He changes the way he’s sitting again, resting his head on Eiffel’s shoulder and glaring a hole right into the wall instead.
“Why’d Kepler employ him, if he sucked so bad?”
“Nah, Kepler didn’t hire him, Cutter did. Said that until we actually got Maxwell to agree to join, we’d have to put up with one of Goddard’s standard agents in the meantime. He was, like, this bigshot ‘sharpshooter’ that worked with Young’s team a couple times, which to Kepler was already a real bad first impression. And, honestly, he wasn’t even that great of a shot, not compared to Kepler. You shoulda seen Kepler with a sniper rifle. Damn. What a view.”
Eiffel laughs. “Not a big fan of guns, actually, but I’ll take your word for it.” He slips his arm across Daniel’s chest, reaching protectively for his injured hand again, but settles on just the closeness. The closeness is nice. He really super still wants to kiss him, like, a whole lot, which is very distracting. “How come you’re talking so much about Kepler? You haven’t so much as mentioned him to me before now. I mean, not complaining, it’s really — sweet of you, I guess. To trust me.”
“Call me sweet again, and I will fight you,” he jokes. “But, I dunno. I want to talk about him occasionally, y’know, just like I sometimes want to talk about everything and everyone else. But with Alana — I mean, I got a chance to mourn her. I got a funeral. Warren, though, he died and I didn’t even know. You think that when you go through that much with a person — when they mean as much as he did to me, when they’re family to you like he was, no matter how much of a backstabbing, triple-crossing, secretive son of a bitch he decided to be — you just think that you’d know if they were gone. That you’d notice some shift in the air, some heavy ache in your chest. But he died, and I didn’t even realize, not until I swept the ship afterwards, saw Young’s corpse outside the airlock, and put the pieces together. I never really got that same closure with him. I can’t even prove that he was on our side, other than a gut feeling which could very easily be lying to me.”
Eiffel doesn’t know what to say decides that comfortable silence is the best response to this.
“I really don’t even know if that would make it better or not,” Daniel continues. “I feel like — like if I was wrong about him, if I’m just projecting, if he really never was anything but a monster, that I fucked up somewhere along the way. I feel like it’s my fault for not seeing it sooner.”
He moves again — he’s always moving, so much, so often — and poises himself in front of Eiffel, hands pinning his shoulders to the back of the couch. His expression is unreadably conflicted, and, when he looks Eiffel in the eyes, strangely, faintly fond.
“But if he was secretly on our side that whole fucking time — the dramatic bastard that he was, I wouldn’t doubt it, really — if he did stage a coup against Cutter from the inside, then I let him die terrified in a fucking airlock, believing that he was alone in the world, believing that no one gave a shit when he stopped breathing. Which, no matter how much fucking misery that man deserved after what he let happen to Alana, is an awful death. He didn’t deserve that. He never deserved that.”
“Did he love you?” Eiffel asks, because, while still deeply invasive and not a great thing to ask about your maybe-love-interest’s ex-maybe-love-interest, it’s miles closer to regular-person two a.m. small talk than did you love him.
“We had… a joint bank account.” He sighs and laughs, nails digging slightly into Eiffel’s shoulder. “That’s why I can afford cool shit. That’s why I don’t need a fucking job any time in the near or distant future. I gained full control of the account when he died.”
He dips down lower, breath ghosting across Eiffel’s skin, and smiles slightly. He smells like burnt plastic and five hour energy. It’s fascinating. He’s fascinating. Eiffel can’t look away.
“He made seven figures, and I got paid like dirt — still had mounds of debt of debt from college, too, but he didn’t care. He got sick of me refusing to let him buy me food and then stealing all his fries, so he just added me to his account without telling me, and threatened to fire me if I didn’t use the card instead of mine. That was three weeks after we met. Was Warren Kepler capable of love? God fucking knows. But I do know that whatever the Kepler-equivalent of love was, he probably felt it for me, and I probably broke his icy, venomous excuse for a heart a nonzero amount of times.”
He pulls back a bit, but at his point, he’s still practically straddling Eiffel’s lap. His expression shifts to something dangerously playful.
“Alright, now that we got all the dark shit out of the way, back to the topic at hand!”
“Wh... what topic at hand, exactly? You kinda just stormed in here and started making a mess —”
“You kissed me. What’s up with that?” Daniel asks with a wicked grin, in the exact tone of voice which would immediately be followed up with a joke about airplane food. “What, did you really think I wouldn’t mention that at some point?”
Eiffel winces. “I mean, to be fair, you didn’t kiss me back?”
“Because you immediately panicked and stormed away?”
“I remember precisely zero panicking or storming away during that entire interaction.”
“Of course you wouldn’t, amnesia boy.”
“I liked it better when it wasn’t Pick On Eiffel Day.”
“Hey, how come you kissed me, though?” he says, and his smile is brighter than ever.
His face feels hot. Is he blushing? He better not be blushing. “You… looked… cute.” Oh god no wait that was a really lame thing to say abort abort abort —
“Do I normally not look cute? Low blow, Doug. I’d have thought better of you”
(He keeps a calm demeanor even though fucking air raid sirens are going off in his head right about now because Daniel does look cute as fuck, like, all of the time, literally all of the time, especially now, all smug and smiley and overly-proud of himself and absolutely covered in rain and is he flirting? he’s definitely flirting and he’s really, really hot and it’s the actual honest-to-god worst.)
“You normally look stupid,” Eiffel says instead, but he’s grinning and blushing and so is Daniel and this is obviously not working, it’s definitely time for Plan B — what the hell is plan B —
“Hey, Eiffel?”
don’t panic don’t panic don’t pa— “Yes?”
“Shut up,” Daniel says, and plants a kiss on the corner of his lips.
Before Eiffel can even work up the courage to respond, Daniel’s already off his lap and out the door. Nowhere to be goddamn seen.
“Oh, you bastard. You motherfucker,” Eiffel whispers into the air, but the smile on his face is undeniable, and he knows it.
A good forty seconds pass — most of which are spent putting the raw chicken back into its rightful place in the freezer in flustered, ridiculous panic — before his phone pings with a text.
now u know how it fEELS BITCH
Hey so are we like dating? he shoots back.
we lowkey have been for months
thanks for fuckin noticing
luv u
????????!!!!!!
in a platonic bro way bro. we’re bros bro
WH
HUH
see u tomorrow? ;)
It is tomorrow???
damn if u wanna get all up in semantics
hey say it back loser
Say what back
bitch!!! you know what!!!
I love you too
…
:O
:D
:DDDDD
What
didn’t think ud actually do it lmao
You’re lame
And stupid
so see u tomorrow tho?
It’s still already tomorrow
i change my mind i hate u
Too late for that now, I already have screenshots
>:((((
He smiles, tosses his phone onto the kitchen counter, picks it back up to make sure he hasn’t accidentally cracked it, and curls up in a ball on his couch, praying for literally just five goddamn minutes of uninterrupted sleep time, if that’s not too fucking much to ask, universe.
(The stray cat chooses this exact moment to start screech-meowing bloody murder at his window.)
— — —