Work Text:
Trust me, Nureyev had asked of him so many times, in variations or implications or action or even outright verbatim word for word. And wasn’t that crazy? Trust a thief, a liar, a relative stranger, someone who’d tricked him before, someone he’d handcuffed and given up to the police? How unreasonable did you have to be, to say trust me in a tone of voice and with a look in your eye after all of that like it was the most reasonable thing in the galaxy? As reasonable and wanted and needed and expected as gravity. Like Juno not trusting him was the strange one here.
Nureyev had asked it of him, worked like and acted like the trust was there, moved so that it would be the only thing that could catch him if he fell, and Juno had had no choice but to give it in the face of that. And then, he’d wanted to, because Nureyev trusted him. Wholly, completely, dangerously. Had no one ever told him how dangerous it was to rely on Juno Steel? He’s going to get himself killed.
He nearly got himself killed.
Nureyev didn’t seem to mind. He just smiled at him and touched him and let himself be touched, like he still trusted Juno completely, utterly. The idiot was going to die at this rate, pulled into the inevitable ending that waited all that stuck around for long enough with him, close enough, intimate enough.
Juno left, and showed Nureyev just how little he could trust him while he still had life left to save. Like shoving and locking him out of a tomb with a bomb, except it made him feel heavy and cold instead of dizzy with relief that it’d be all over, and with such a noble excuse too. There’s not going to be an end here. Just more of Juno and nothing else. God, Juno’s so sick of Juno Steel. He can’t stand the guy. Lady can’t take a hint, doesn’t he know that he’s overstaying his welcome? That he should leave? Stop bothering everyone?
It had been another sacrifice to save him, except he’d been giving up Nureyev instead of life itself. No wonder this time hurt so much worse than the first; one was clearly worth far more than the other.
Trust is the last thing Juno deserves. It’s like giving an angry drunk a gun; it’s reckless and irresponsible and bound to end in lost lives. If Nureyev won’t see that, will keep pressing it on him again and again, then Juno will just have to throw it out himself. A breathtaking gift ungratefully smashed to pieces. That should do it.
Juno can’t stop himself from trusting Nureyev any longer though, but there’s not much he can do to help that. And it doesn’t matter anyways, Nureyev isn’t here and he isn’t coming back. So long as he stays on Mars, he’s safe. And besides, it’s never mattered if Juno gets hurt.
He was born hurt.
Juno trusts, and Ramses hurts him for it, hurts others for it. Juno trusts, and Rita and Mick and Strong shove their trust in him in right back in his face hard enough for him to get road rash from it, and somehow, magically, miraculously, they don’t die. No one who Juno loves dies. No one who trusts him dies for the well meaning mistake. Against all odds and close shaves.
Juno kind of sort of wants to live. It’s a weird feeling. He can’t remember the last time he felt it. Probably back when he was a kid, or an idealistic, cocky cop with a living brother.
Hyperion City’s a mess in the wake of the Soul Incident, but it’s not his to clean up. Not this part, at least. Although it was really more Rita who did all of the cleaning. Really Rita. The city’s a mess in the wake of being mass mind controlled and the day was saved and no one died, specifically, because of putting their trust in him. This is the happy ending. Life keeps going on, but at least they’ve all still got their free will.
And despite all of that, here he is. In his apartment, with the blinds closed, the lights off, in the middle of the day. Thinking about Ramses being dead even though he was a meddling busy body and manipulative and controlling and arrogant and wrong and honestly pretty terrible. Thinking about how beautifully clear everything had been while he’d had a Soul. Absolutely everything, black and white, clear and simple, victory and heroism and goodness and safeness and happiness forever so easily achievable if he just did the simplest thing in the world: do everything that was told to him. Kill these certain people. Protect this thing with your life. Never break the rules. Victory is certain and solid if you just do these simple, easy things and never ever doubt.
Most awful of all: how familiar it had been. He hadn’t even noticed drifting away from thinking like that in the midst of all of the drama and angst and almost dying, but briefly diving back into it felt like a glass of cold water in the face once he resurfaced; sharp and shocking and unpleasant.
It’s happily ever after, and Juno is lying down in his dark apartment feeling overwhelmed and crushed by how much he’s changed for the better, instead of being out there and celebrating his freedom with everyone else who isn’t busy being traumatized. If that’s not a sign that he was born broken and hurt, what is.
This will pass. He’ll get thirsty enough to get up to get a drink or Rita will call him and he’ll crawl his way out of the quicksand in his mind and be, at least, content. Functioning. He’ll smile sometimes, and he’ll even mean it.
He didn’t used to even have that. He couldn’t think about how it would pass, and he wouldn’t be content even after it did. He’s getting better, and it’s a bit terrifying because it makes the way he used to be so… visible. So visible and clear in all of its pathetic horror. If he’s better now, then that means he could’ve been better back then, but he spent so long not moving at all. Worst of all, it opens him up to the horrible hope that he could keep getting better. That there’s even better than this, and it’s waiting there for him. What he’s got to do isn’t really simple and clear and black and white, but if he tries then it’s there. It feels like too much, impossible, unbelievable.
Improvement shouldn’t feel so terrifying.
Someone opens his second floor window. Juno’s mind is slow and full of quicksand, so it doesn’t click instantly. Rita uses the front door and uses heels too, he’d hear the clicking and her yammering besides by now. Mick still gets lost on the way to his apartment every time without fail. Strong would already be shouting for him, impatient and unimpressed and unwilling to deal with his bullshit. Sasha doesn’t--
What kind of person enters through a window when a perfectly fine door’s right there?
“Juno,” Peter Nureyev says.
For a long moment, he just kind of lies there. Then he moves his head to peek up at him from the couch. Then he makes himself sit up to look at him properly because, right, eyepatch.
There he is. What more is there to say. He looks just like he had when Juno had last burned the sight of him into his mind’s eye. Well. Less bandages. More tan. His cheeks aren’t quite as hollow any longer. The circles under his eyes are gone. He looks good. Like he’s been somewhere warm and beautiful, eating good food and not getting almost killed by a monstrous anthropologist. Sleeping well.
He’s staring at Juno like-- he doesn’t know. Like he’s a ghost? A stranger? The lady he thought he loved who left him without so much as a word?
Nureyev is staring at him, standing only a few feet away from him, and Juno hasn’t said a word yet.
This must be a dream, Juno thinks, and relaxes. That makes so much more sense than Peter Nureyev ever willingly stepping foot on Mars again, much less in his apartment, within his line of sight, where he could so easily stand up and approach, touch. The apartment is dark and warm and he’d been lying still for hours, thoughts slow like sludge, eyes closed, ready to slip in and out of sleep whenever his brain would let him. He’s dreamt of Nureyev before. This is nothing new.
So he says, like he’s only ever distantly thought of doing before, “Peter.”
Nureyev does something that can’t be called a flinch because he’s too controlled to really do something like that. But his face flickers like he wants to for just a moment.
Oh. It’s one of those dreams. Juno had been hoping that it’d at least be one of the ones where Nureyev was cruel to him. It feels more deserved. The other way around is just… too unfair. Too wrong.
Even though, of course, Juno has always been the one to snap at him, to bat his hands away, to scowl at him suspiciously, to shove him out of tombs to listen to him die on the other side of a door and leave him behind to wake up to an empty bed. Nureyev just says Juno like no one else does, looks at him like no one else does, says trust me like it’s the most important thing in the world for him. Nureyev’s always been… sweet. It’s Juno’s that’s always been the problem. He just wishes that Nureyev would see it too.
(There is of course the worst kind of dream of all, which is the one where Nureyev is there and Juno is there and he can’t even remember the tomb or Miasma or leaving or any of it. There’s just the two of them and nothing in between in the way, and he can’t even begin to think past it. Waking up from those kinds of dreams only to be met by reality can only lead to bad days.)
Juno gets lost in his head real easy when he’s like this, sluggish and slow, time like sand in his fingers. And it’s a dream, anyways. Time doesn’t work in those. It does work for Nureyev though, apparently, because his face is back to being unreadable, untouchable, as he says, “I heard about what happened.”
That could mean so many things. What the hell could that mean? Juno slumps back into his couch, head tilting tiredly at Nureyev as he waits for him to explain.
His bruises ache against the pressure of the couch. His body is one constant hurt from tearing himself apart over and over again in desperately trying to kill Rita, god.
Maybe that’s what he’s talking about. Maybe his brain’s finally caught up to current events and his subconscious is gonna start adding that day to the rotating roster of recurring guests that visit the back of his eyelids whenever he goes to sleep too sober and not tired enough. That makes sense.
His body really hurts. The couch springs are digging into his back. He can smell its mothballs, taste the copper that keeps oozing from the cut on the inside of his mouth that keeps reopening, hear the echoing laughter of some drunks shambling down the street outside. Nureyev doesn’t look soft and hazy at the edges, the environment around him doesn’t fade away and rearrange to make him the focus of the universe, the gravitational center. He looks very, very detailed, sharp and perfect and utterly real and present in the half light of his messy living room.
Juno’s mouth goes dry and his brain starts to stall. His heartbeat starts beating faster, and he starts, very, very belatedly, to feel painfully awake.
“With… the mind control devices,” Nureyev goes on in Juno’s silence. He can feel his eyes going wider, his hands fisting in the couch, as he sits utterly still like a rabbit caught in headlights. “It’s in the news.”
Oh god, Peter Nureyev is actually in his apartment.
“Why are you here!?” bursts out him suddenly, abruptly, shattering the surreal, dreamy air of the quiet apartment with a frantic, confused blunt hammer.
That not-flinch again. God, it’s not a dream. Oh god, it’s not a dream.
“I mean--” he says, having no idea what he means or how he even feels about this situation because he thought he’d never see Peter Nureyev again, and here he is, gracing him with his presence, and his heart aches and Juno is messing this up.
Nureyev looks away, shoulders casually tilting in another direction like there are more interesting places in this apartment for him to rest his eyes. That’s fair, but Juno’s apartment is also full of mostly garbage and dirty laundry. “I just thought that I would see if you were… well.”
His heartbeat feels more like the unforgiving spike of a migraine located in his chest. Nureyev’s voice, face, is carefully neutral.
But he came to Mars to see if he was okay.
Juno hadn’t imagined that Nureyev would continue to be sweet after what he did to him, but of course he would be. Juno just isn’t the sort of person who can imagine, predict… he’s not like him. His heart aches and his body hurts and there’s something lodged in his throat and burning his eyes. He hopes the apartment’s too dim for Nureyev to catch the shine to his eyes, not that he’s even looking at him in the first place.
“I’m fine,” he rasps, and damn it, his voice is doing that thing again. When Buddy and Vespa close the distance between them, when he begs Rita for forgiveness, when Mick breathes in after Juno’s blaster shot stopped his heart. Crackly and fragile and humiliating, impossible to smooth out and control, too many emotions for him to contain leaking out into the world through his throat.
Nureyev shoots a look at him at the sound of his breaking voice, alarmed, and his eyes widen at whatever look is on his face. Juno can’t feel the expression he’s making past how hot his face feels. Nureyev cares. He might not want to be with him or smile at him any longer, but he cares, and that’s so damned much. Juno’s hands are now on his elbows, and he digs them in hard to try and stop himself from falling apart.
“Juno,” Nureyev says again, and Juno missed the sound of his own name said by that voice so much it hurts to hear it again, and he takes a step towards Juno, distressed concern so clear and genuine on his face that Juno has to look down into his lap to keep it together. His throat clicks when he swallows.
Nureyev keeps walking closer like he can’t stay away from Juno, and Juno wouldn’t be able to stop him even if he could bring himself to try. If he so much as twitches then his composure will be lost, nothing more than faint cologne lingering in the air. He can’t break while people are watching, you’re not supposed to do that, especially when it’s Peter Nureyev who stole his heart who’s standing there. Stole his heart and then gave him his own to make it fair, not knowing that Juno breaks things, always.
He can see out of the corner of his one eye, Nureyev’s hand, outstretched, hesitating.
He’s going to touch me, he thinks, incredulous, not believing it. He doesn’t deserve-- why would Nureyev ever even want to again--
Nureyev’s close enough that Juno can smell that goddamned cologne, and he makes the mistake of looking up at him.
Nureyev’s expression is heartbreaking, tentative. Like he wants to do something but doesn’t know what’s safe to do. Peter Nureyev loves a challenge and a thrill and lives miles away from anything that can be called ‘safe’, but he’s always been tender with Juno, like a precious, ancient vase he needs to steal or a delicate, finicky security system. Touching him gently when they’re alone in their cell after a day full of Miasma, dragging him to a hospital at the first opportunity, kissing him with more tenderness than Juno knows what to do with.
Nureyev deserves to make every move that happens here, to draw every line and boundary and limit, but Juno collapses into him anyways. Like a house of cards at a gentle gust of wind or a building that’s been quietly rotting on the inside for years finally giving up the ghost and falling to pieces.
Nureyev’s arms go around him instantly, and he starts making these nonsensical, soothing, comforting noises that just wreck him further, but at least the only sound in the room isn’t just Juno losing it. Damn it, damn it, damn it. Juno had been fine, down at the very bottom of his personal pit of quicksand. He’d dig himself out eventually, like he always did, and more importantly it was quiet and numb and no one else had to see him do it. It wasn’t loud or messy or mortifying or pathetic or needy. Nureyev has already seen enough of Juno’s bad sides, he doesn’t need Juno throwing more of them at him.
But here he is anyways, holding Juno softly, tightly, and it feels better than the quicksand, somehow. The quicksand feels like nothing but dying so slowly that it doesn’t even matter, after all. This feels like something. This feels like a-- a, raw, tender wound or something. Immediately felt, immediately dealt with, sudden and overwhelming, like ripping off a bandaid, or that feeling of relief that hits him once he’s emptied his stomach and his body stops making him convulse for more. Pain and relief at once. It feels real, and he feels, and it’s. Different. Painfully refreshing.
Juno tastes salt and breathes in the scent of Peter Nureyev, digs his hands into his back, and Nureyev hums and strokes his hand over the back of his head like Juno’s an animal in pain who needs comfort. He shivers uncontrollably. He doesn’t deserve this.
“I’m so sorry that happened, darling,” Nureyev says. “You didn’t deserve that.”
The one two punch of being called darling and then followed up by that is enough to make him laugh hysterically, wetly.
Nureyev loves pet names. It doesn’t mean--
“Anything you need,” Nureyev says, so sincerely, he always says grand things like that with all of the sincerity in the world and Juno believes him. “I’ll get it for you. Even if-- if you want me to leave, Juno--”
Juno clutches at Nureyev tighter. “No,” he says, like a child. He’s upgraded back to human language, single syllables at least. He’s getting himself back under control, feeling a bit raw and drained and empty in a way that leaves him feeling light instead of hollow. He feels dizzy with how much he just cried, and it somehow lets him say what he’s always known is too selfish and unreasonable for him to ask for. “Stay.”
Peter sways into him, curling around him in a way that seems like more for him than for Juno, unlike the soothing murmuring and closeness of only moments ago. “Okay.”
Every single part of Juno knows that he doesn’t mean forever, or even for long. It’s just not possible. And Nureyev doesn’t belong to Mars anyways. But something in him still unclenches, because Nureyev isn’t like him. Nureyev doesn’t sneak away from Juno. He leaves with a grand declaration and words that stick with him for months afterwards. Nureyev won’t disappear once Juno stops clinging to him like some sort of desperate creature. He’ll stay. He’ll stay for a bit, which is so much more than nothing.
It occurs to Juno that he should apologize to Peter Nureyev right now. Not for forgiveness, but just because it’s the least he deserves. He opens his mouth, and then the audacity of apologizing makes the words halt and stick in his throat. He thinks he’s got the right to say sorry? To make himself feel better? To--
Nureyev lets go of him, shocking the beginnings of the quicksand trickling back into the cracks in his brain into stopping abruptly, like scaring hiccups away. Nureyev takes half a step back, hands still on his shoulders, and looks down at him. Juno’s shoulders creep up without his sayso, and he gets the sudden strong urge to hide somewhere. Behind the couch, maybe.
Nureyev’s hand finds the side of Juno’s face, that spot he knows that he likes to hold when he kisses him. He isn’t leaning down, but Juno melts into it anyways, instant surrender. Nureyev freezes for a moment like he hadn’t meant to do that, like turning around to find that his hand had started picking a pocket without his permission, but the stiff line of his spine and shoulders ease as Juno’s eyelids fall closed without him telling them to.
He’s been sleeping all day, but god, he’s so tired. He feels like a towel someone wrung all of the water out of. He could fall asleep like this so easily, with the smell of Peter Nureyev in the air, the warm and long fingered touch of him cradling his face.
“Let’s get you to bed, darling,” Nureyev says quietly.
There’s something about Nureyev and Juno and bed that feels fraught and forbidden, but it’s starting to be impossible to think about anything but lying down somewhere vaguely horizontal and/or nestling into Nureyev’s warmth and smell and sweet, tender kindness like it’s the best thing in the entire galaxy.
Nureyev hauls him up carefully by his arms, leads him away from the lumpy couch, and Juno stumbles after him like a drunk, trying to blink his eye open for longer than three seconds at a time and failing. Suddenly, bed. Covers pulled over him. The mattress sinking a bit as--Juno forces his eye open--Nureyev gets into bed along with him, jacket and shoes suddenly gone. He gets under the covers, and Juno stares at him blankly.
Nureyev gets comfortable, and then looks at Juno. “Is there a problem, Juno?” he asks carefully, like the problem isn’t obvious. The problem is can you seriously trust me enough to get back in bed with me again? Do you think I deserve that?
But Nureyev is a thief who’s doesn’t fully believe in deserve and trusts wildly, recklessly, dangerously. He lives miles away from safe, and he enjoys it.
Juno hurts. THEIA almost tore his body apart and Ramses betrayed him yet again and then died and Sarah Steel’s influence flows through his veins and will never stop, only ever wax and wane, and he never thought he’d see Peter Nureyev again and now he’s here, in his bed, being sweet with him. It hurts. It’s too good to be true so Juno should break it before it breaks him first, so that he at least knows when to brace himself for the blow. Nureyev is warm and beautiful and close and Juno’s a fool for him.
And he’s so, so tired.
“No,” he says.
Nureyev goes from being pointedly not-tense to smiling softly, and then he closes his eyes and lies down as well. Juno wonders how far away he was in the galaxy when he heard about what happened on Mars, how quickly he came.
Juno is tired enough to want to stay asleep for a week straight, and yet he can’t close his eye now that Nureyev’s closed his. Can’t tear his gaze away.
He’s back. He’s really back. He’s not angry or cold. He’s hurt. Juno created a crack, a fissure, distance and bad history, just like he always does, but he’s back and he’s falling asleep in Juno’s bed along with him. He would never dare hope for something like this. He thought he’d killed the possibility of this as firmly as Sasha’s little sister was in the grave, as his mother, as his brother, as so many good things that have trusted him and touched him and then died for it.
People have trusted him and not died for it, though.
It’s only a matter of time, Sarah Steel in his veins whispers.
Yeah, well. Sarah Steel was sick and messed up and Juno had never listened to anything she said when he was a kid, so he doesn’t see why he should start as an adult, just because it’s her blood that’s saying it instead of her mouth.
The room is quiet but for Nureyev’s quiet breathing, and yet his heart is hammering. Improvement shouldn’t feel so terrifying. But it does. And for Nureyev (and Rita and Mick and everyone that deserves it and maybe even himself) he’ll be brave in the face of it. It doesn’t feel anything like the relief of giving up in the face of death. It’s hard. It’s trying. Sarah Steel had prefered to live as a monster for over a decade and then kill her son and herself to trying after a hard enough blow knocked her down. Trying is the hardest thing in the world.
But Nureyev and his friends still somehow trust him, and there’s really no other option but to try in the face of that. It’s the least they deserve.
He closes his eye, and on the edge of dreaming he thinks he can hear the covers shift, feel the mattress dip, and lips soft as silk steal a kiss on his forehead.
But Juno has cruelly kind dreams sometimes. It’s nothing new.