Chapter Text
“I take it this is it, huh.”
“What do you mean?” Jolyne paused with the gas pump in one hand and the other on the car’s hot bonnet. Her palm prickled from the heat.
“I mean... like, the finale. In the movies when the good guys finally face the villain and everything goes to shit in the last ten minutes,” said Hermes. She’d rolled the window half up and rested her folded arms on the glass edge, hanging partway out the car and frowning up at Jolyne. “It’ll be big.”
“Yeah, I suppose.”
“D’you think that, like, we’ll-” Hermes seemed to change her mind about what to say, and began again, “Have you thought about what might happen to us?”
Jolyne dropped the pump back into its place above the station tank and shrugged. “We’ll probably get our asses kicked, but that’s pretty much par for the course at this point. But you know me, Hermes. I’m tough as shit. He could tear me limb from limb and I’d still find a way to kick the holy spirit out of him.” She squared her shoulders and grinned. Blinding bravado.
Hermes grunted. “That’s not what I meant.”
“Then what was it?”
“Nothing.”
“Hey.” Jolyne leant down be level with the car window and gave Hermes a grin. One of Jolyne’s front teeth was chipped; she’d smashed her face off a table ledge once as a kid and when the new tooth grew in it was already missing the tip. It was only noticeable from this close up. When Hermes had first asked about it, Jolyne jokingly referred to it as her very first scar of many. “Don’t be all coy with me now, Costello. This could be our last day on earth.”
Hermes stared up at Jolyne for a moment, then snorted. She raised one hand from the window’s edge and tucked it under Jolyne’s chin, pulling her face a fraction closer to her own. “I just wanted to know what you thought about us,” she said. “I don’t wanna know about what kinda hell Pucci’s gonna throw at us once we catch up to him. I’ve always sucked at thinking far enough ahead when it comes to serious shit like that. My head hurts when I try to come up with any idea to throw back at him if he actually, y’know, does what he’s tryin’ to do. It’s a dead end. Because it scares the shit out of me. All I wanna know, Jolyne, is what you think could happen afterwards.”
“You mean if we win?”
“When we win, yeah,” Hermes corrected. “Us two, after this is over. That’s all I’m thinking about right now and I’ll be real with you it’s a lot nicer to think about this than about what’s waiting for me at Cape Canaveral right now. I just wanna know if you’re thinking about it too.”
Jolyne took Hermes’ hand away from her chin and lowered her eyes to their hands where she ran the tips of her fingers over the many tiny knots and scars covering Hermes’ knuckles. Finally, after a couple comfortable empty beats, she replied, “I’ll make the most of it. Because it’s been real shitty, the time we’ve been given so far. We were in prison and then we were breaking out of prison and now we’re running towards the man who wants to kill us. Once this is over I’m gonna spend every second I can with you and not a single one of them will be as shit as what we’ve had until then.”
“You promise?” Hermes met Jolyne’s gaze again.
“Yeah. It’ll be great,” Jolyne said with a crooked smile. “I promise.”
Jolyne kissed Hermes then, leaning through the car window and gripping her hand firmly, possessively, in her own. The hot air around them stunk of petrol and car fumes.
The sound of the ocean had always put her at ease. Even if the waves were raging, if a storm roared during the night, Jolyne would ebb away into sleep listening to that sound. And if the ocean was calm it sounded like somebody’s breathing. On high winds - like cheering.
When she stood on the shore with the water just brushing her ankles she even felt like a part of it. Because as the roaring rose in her ears and the tide pulled her away from the land and the rich spit of sea salt bit at the bare skin on her arms, it was beautiful. It was a living thing and it was always so beautiful. The sound of the sea’s voice when it breathed like she did as she fell asleep and cheered as she took another step deeper into the tide, was her strongest and oldest memory. She remembered those smells and sounds now just as vividly as when she was young.
And it was the last thing she remembered before dying. Cold water kissing her closed eyelids, rushing in her ears, louder than ever before. She was surrounded by water. And by blood, but it wasn’t all her own, and that was the worst part.
The sky darkened. The sun was gone but that didn’t matter because day and night had already bled together in the heady centrifuge of Made In Heaven. The air was thick with moisture as the surface of the water she was lying in got whipped up by a stronger wind above her head. Everyone else was silent and they must have been lying around her just as still as she was. She couldn’t hear anything but rushing water. She couldn’t hear their voices.
That was the very last thing she thought of as the ocean finally swallowed her thoughts up. She drowned, then. The girl who was known as Jolyne ended in that moment - trapped between the sea and the sky.
Jolyne thought that was a pretty cool way to go. She’d gone down swinging and passed on one last shred of hope over to a small boy who had looked at her like a child at his mother as he clutched in his tiny hands what would save a world somehow, that final disk. Even if she wasn’t there to see it happen, she was proud of that and she could be satisfied with this death. A cool death. The kind of death a superhero in a comic would get; Heroic and badass and a little sad but still cool enough to leave a good impression on the reader. She’d been a badass. Her dad would have been proud.
And then, dimly, it occurred to her that dead people don’t usually think. Dead people stay dead and probably don’t very often reflect on their final few moments like this.
It was an even bigger shock to her when Jolyne then began to feel slightly less dead overall.
What gave it away was a horrible pain blooming in her chest and skull. Dead people definitely don’t hurt like this. Dead people don’t feel anything like this. Dead people don’t think, and dead people don’t complain.
Jolyne was not dead. She was alive and the world had not ended and her entire body really fucking hurt.
Not long after the pain arrived it was followed by a new noise: a whining and a low rumble. Then a greyish light slipped into her perception. It was blurry and made her head hurt even more. As she focused on it she felt her heavy eyelids begin to open and then-
Everything exploded around her into light and noise and even more pain. She was lying in a moving vehicle and two people were standing over her. A neon strip above her head was screaming bright white light into her eyes and she closed them again after less than a second. A voice asked her a question, but she didn’t catch what it was.
Jolyne decided she must be in an ambulance. The sirens were drilling into her skull. The two people she’d seen above her were pressing down onto her chest and shouting words at each other and maybe to her too.
All this swirled around in Jolyne’s shaky consciousness and she parted her lips to croak out a single question for whoever had dragged her corpse out of that ocean at the end of the world.
She asked them, “Why the fuck am I still alive?”
And then suddenly she was pulled back out by the heavy tide and the noises and the lights dropped away and Jolyne was unconscious once again.