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The war’s won, and it’s won by someone who isn’t them. Jack has his revenge, Ana has her amends, dropped on their laps by the people they had deluded themselves into thinking they were protecting. They watch Talon executives standing trial on a tiny holovid screen in a safe house in San Diego. Then they turn to each other, a little numb.
“Do you want to go back to Egypt?” Jack asks. Ana shakes her head. Fareeha isn't there anymore, she’s in Gibraltar or deployed, being the leader Ana never let her be.
“What about you?” she asks. “Do you want to go back to Indiana?”
Jack shakes his head too. “I put myself through hell getting out of that place. Seems dumb to run right back.”
“You don’t miss home?”
“It’s not home anymore.”
Ana nods. They’re both silent for a minute. Then Jack says, “Do you still want to go to Hawaii?”
Ana laughs. Jack doesn’t. “Are you serious?”
“Where else would we go?”
She doesn’t have a good answer to that. So they go to Hawaii.
-
Jack’s contact seems keen to cut ties with them. But she’s willing to buy them plane tickets, a used pickup truck, and a house on Kauai. The contact calls the house a bungalow, and that sounds nice to Ana. Like the setting of some romance movie that’s trying very hard to not be just a romance movie.
So Ana’s optimistic, until she and Jack actually lay eyes on the bungalow. There’s a hole in the roof. Something has nested under the porch. There’s a discarded diaper in the front yard. It’s an utter disaster.
“Well,” Jack says.
“Well,” Ana says.
It’s a free house. The fact that it has a roof at all is probably more than she should have hoped for. She and Jack set their packs in the empty living room.
They move in with a few bags from Target and some two-by-fours. Ana gets a ladder and patches over the hole in the roof. Jack makes spaghetti and heats up canned sauce. They sit on their sleeping bags and eat it out of bright plastic bowls.
“We should probably get some beds, at some point,” Jack says. Ana nods.
“Probably.”
Do you think there’s an Ikea around here?”
“Probably.”
Jack sets his bowl down and looks around. The electricity isn’t on yet, nor is the water. The place is still covered in crumbled drywall and some trash. It’s hard not to still feel like a squatter.
“We could pick our bedrooms now, at least,” Jack says. His tone is a forced kind of light.” Don’t think I’m giving you dibs, though.”
“I had siblings growing up, Morrison. You’re an only child. Who do you think needs to go easy on who?”
“I’m faster,” Jack says, and he’s trying to be sullen, but he laughs when Ana laughs. The sound is far too loud in the small, empty house.
That night, they both sleep on the floor of the master bedroom.
They find an Ikea and, despite Jack’s alternating crankiness and refusal to pass by an individual struggling to carry their purchases without offering to help, they return to the bungalow with a pickup filled with furniture. They sit on the ground, eating out of the same pot of room temperature pasta, and attempt to decipher the instructions.
“I think we put it together upside down.”
“You constructed Torb’s biotic rifle while on the run. I get how I could have fucked this up, but you…?”
“There’s definitely some joke I could be making at Torbjorn’s expense right now, but I’m too frustrated to make it.”
They manage to finish assembling the furniture, though, even if neither of them has any books to put on their bookshelves, or much need for a full set of dining places. Neither of them has the energy to dress the mattresses before they go to bed that night, but it’s okay. It’s still done, even if the second bed goes unused.
With the essentials finished, the two of them move on to making the house slightly more presentable. Jack goes to Home Depot and returns after far too long with far too many things. Ana isn’t particularly motivated to call him on it, though. Using the light saw is oddly therapeutic.
“You’re getting out your aggression,” Jack says, when she comments on it. She laughs.
“I don’t have any reason to be aggressive anymore.”
Jack gives the ghost of a smile. “Yeah.”
Jack leaves the sawing and hammering to her. He takes over the painting. When he’s done with the interior, he moves outside. When the sun is hot and she can see him sweating, she’ll bring him a large glass of iced tea and make him drink it.
“You’re doing a good job,” she says, as she sits in the patchy grass next to him. He smiles.
“It’s good for getting me out of my head,” he says, dragging his roller aimlessly through the tray of paint. “It’s good to have something to focus on, you know?”
Ana does know. And she thinks about it that night, when the only thing to focus on is Jack’s snoring. She’s still thinking about Gabriel too. They check the news the same way they set about clearing out the mongoose den from under their porch: cautiously, fearfully, but with a grim sense of duty. She hasn’t seen a word about Gabriel, and whatever forces are at play in this game, she doubts they could cover up the apprehension of an undead Gabriel Reyes. So they know he hasn’t been arrested, but that’s about it. He could still be working at Talon, he could still be out hunting them, or he could be dead, again. Ana has no clue what the answer is.
And to be honest, she has no clue what she wants the answer to be. She doesn’t want Gabriel to be dead– but she also has had years to process that reality, before she saw him again. She misses him terribly, but Gabriel being this murky, unknown face, with a motivation she can’t quite make sense of, is incredibly destabilizing. And what she likes best about this house is that despite the rotting bits she’s spotted in the foundation, it’s the most stable place she’s been in a long time.
And If she doesn’t know what’s happened to him, she doesn’t have to deal with him anymore. It’s an incredibly cowardly position to take. Ten-odd years ago she armed herself and threw herself back into war, because she hated herself for it so much. But she feels safe here. She doesn’t know if she’s happy, but she thinks that here, that’s a possibility. It never was when she was fighting.
So she stops thinking about Gabriel, and sleeps instead.
-
For all his bluster, Jack is the first one to use the guest bedroom.
It’s after they’ve been living in Hawaii for about a year. They’ve gotten rid of the mold from the bathroom and the weeds from the yard. They’ve gotten a dog, and Jack takes Makana on long walks down to the little strip of shops near their house every morning. Sometimes, he’ll walk her down to the coffee shop there in the evening too, and he’ll come back with a slice of cake or some other dessert for Ana.
Ana falls asleep one night reading in bed, a luxury she hasn’t had since she was a child. When she wakes up, Jack isn’t there. She panics, until she sees the styrofoam box on the counter. There’s a dark chocolate cupcake inside. Once she knows that Jack has, in fact, arrived home safe, her panic easily transforms into annoyance. Makana is whining at the back door. He couldn’t have at least walked her, before he went out to wherever the hell he is?
Then Jack steps out of the guest bedroom. And so does a pleasant, slightly chubby middle-aged man. Jack freezes up when he sees her, not in any kind of fear, but in a complete and utter loss for what, exactly, to say. The man looks between the two of them, and gauged the mood, smiles appropriately awkwardly.
“I’m Mike,” he says, and holds out his hand. “You must be Jack’s roommate.”
Jack winces, but Ana’s not any kind of angry. God knows she’s never been good at vocabulary for her relationships with Jack or Gabriel. The simplest– partner– easily scares off any potential romantic kind, and back when people cared who they were, more descriptive attachments to that word sent people down an obnoxious and intrusive calculus as to whose sexuality was what. God knows she has no corrections for Jack on hand.
She does have other words for him though. So after she shakes Mike’s hand, and after he leaves, not necessarily in a hurry, she pours them both a cup of hibiscus tea. She likes it best iced, with mint, but she’s experimenting on how best to serve it hot. “So,” Ana says. “You didn’t tell me you had a boyfriend.”
Jack gives a resigned sigh. “He’s not my boyfriend.”
“Is that so? You dog, you.”
Jack groans, and she giggles. “This was a mistake,” he mumbles.
“Did he say something about expecting something? He seemed fine leaving without breakfast.”
“No, I– I don’t know.” Jack rubs his face. Ana takes a sip of her tea. She added cinnamon this time, and that’s nice. She can’t help but feel like it’s still missing something though.
“It’s just weird,” Jack says. Ana says nothing, particularly not about how he sounds like a teenager. “It’s weird. I hadn’t had sex in a couple years, if we’re being honest. I hadn’t dated anyone in a little over a decade now, and one of my exes and I spent the better part of that decade trying to kill each other.” He laughs hoarsely. “And so what, now I’m just supposed to hook up with nice guys who give me good tips about where to fish? And date them? This is just– it?”
“How were you expecting it to go?” Ana asks, bemused.
“I wasn’t.”
“Okay, then, how were you imagining it could go?” Jack looks down at his cup and Ana sets her hand on his. “I know when it feels so impossible, it’s hard to think about. But you must have thought about having someone at some point these past few years.”
“I had someone,” Jack says. Ana frowns, and racks her memory.
“Us tracking Gabe, it was–”
“Not Gabe,” Jack says quickly. “You.”
Ana sets her cup down and thinks about that for a minute. “You deserve a boyfriend too, though,” she says. “Or a husband. Something. I know you regret never being able to start a family.”
“You’re my family,” he says. “Right?”
He looks anxious now, and so Ana doesn’t waste time hugging him, smiling into his shoulder.
“Yeah,” she whispers. “I am.”
-
Jack goes out with Mike a second time, on an actual date. He buys a button-down shirt for it and everything. There isn’t a second, and he doesn’t really talk about Mike after that. But he doesn’t seem upset, so Ana isn’t upset.
They talk about Gabriel around then. Jack brings it up after they’ve lost almost all their capability to track him, and that kind of tells Ana everything she needs to know. But it does only seem right to talk it through. And talking about Gabriel on the porch, with the sun setting and insects singing and Maka sleeping at their feet, is as palatable as talking about Gabriel will ever be.
“I don’t know what we could even do for him now,” Jack says.
Ana nods. A comment on how there probably was never anything Jack could do for him, not when Gabriel refused to ask for help, would lead them down an entirely different, already walked, path. She wants them to stick to this one. “He isn’t trapped there, I don’t think,” she says. “If he wants help, he has the means to seek it out. Even after everything he’s done, Angela would still treat him.”
“She would,” Jack says. His baseball hat is in his lap, and he’s playing with the snaps. “I don’t think we should try to keep tracking him.”
“I agree,” Ana says. And it’s not the weight off her shoulders she had hoped it would be, because Jack doesn’t look the slightest bit relieved either.
“It just feels wrong,” he says, after a while. “It feels like we really, really should be doing something.”
“Jack,” Ana says gently. “We can’t do anything. I don’t think this feels wrong because we’re wrong. I think this feels wrong because we might have lost Gabriel. And that…”
She trails off. Jack is staring straight ahead. She really hopes he doesn’t cry, because then it’s a guarantee that she will too.
“He was such a big part of our lives, Ana,” Jack says. “I knew him for– so long. And even when things broke bad, I didn’t think things would end like this. I thought they would end, period. I thought I’d–”
He puts his head in his hands. He’s crying, the bastard. Ana blinks her tears away and remembers watching the rubble of the Swiss base on her holovid, and how all she could think about were her last words to Jack and Gabriel. They had been purely strategic, professional. And they had been two of the people she loved most in this world. After that, she would lie in bed and write lists in her head of all the things she wished she had said to them.
She can see Jack making his own list, right now. Somehow she knows that wherever he is, as much as she might disagree with its contents, Gabriel has a list too.
“If he’s out there, he’ll find us,” Ana says. “And I do think he’s out there.” She surprises herself with how much she believes what she’s saying. “And if he doesn’t– this isn’t that bad an ending, is it?”
Jack wipes his eyes. He looks down at Makana, who’s snoring like a truck. Their porch chairs are cheap plastic and Ana still hasn’t nailed down the recipe for the hibiscus tea they’re drinking. Nothing here is perfect. But when he raises his head, he’s smiling, and he tells Ana, “No, it’s not a bad ending at all.”