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The first thing she noticed—and Julia hated to admit it, despite it being pretty much the keystone of all of his being—was just how surrealistically gaunt Chase looked.
Julia’s teeth dug into her lip as she tried to piece it together. Was it from his depressingly foreseeable expedition to the supposed VILE island? Or was it from her own mind not being able to grasp exactly what Chase looked like, and instead blindly grabbing at faint facial features of people she’d seen on the street, consequently mocking them up into some other Chase?
His reactions were delayed as he glanced in her general direction, but he didn’t really quite look at her. Chase’s gaze, as perhaps as visibly nonplussed as it was, didn’t change. Didn’t twitch, didn’t really move. The silence almost hurt Julia’s ears with how expanding. Neither Chief or Zari seemingly dared to utter a word, much less breathe, perhaps out of fear to shatter the perfectly still moment in time.
Despite having on a thickly-knit regulation suit, and layered with a shirt below, Julia couldn’t help the chill that tendriled down her arm. Her side. She couldn’t really tell if it was warm or cold, but it felt like a fever chill. Julia decided to swallow and trek through to Chase—well, perhaps, more drag her shoes—who was still looking at her with numb and tired eyes.
Except she couldn’t. She couldn’t move. Her boots were planted to the ground, and panic began to settle into her stomach, before Julia realized that it was as easy as moving her leg. The will to laugh pretty much died in her throat. Unlike a mangrove, as it turns out, Julia wasn’t stuck to the ground. Despite the seconds that passed that felt like hours, Julia was able to slowly, slowly take steps.
She completely despised the way it made her look, and everything about it was so stupid. Almost as if her cue, Agent Zari let out an empty breath, cleared her throat and left the room without a word. Julia didn’t need to turn her gaze to see that the woman left in a rush, probably wanting to give them some space. Either that, or from the sweltering secondhand embarrassment that Julia couldn’t blame her for. She heard the feverish taps on a keypad, and then the rattle of a doorknob. The only eyes on them were those of Chief’s, almost making sure that the two didn’t tear each other apart, which only that woman could assume.
Julia wasn’t sure she knew this man anymore.
Chase looked somehow worse, worse than he did in the hospital— where his skin was so pale that it looked like the bed was swallowing him whole. But again, Julia presumed it was just the sheer shock of sucking her cheeks in as her eyes struggled to adjust to his foreign form again. It was like when she got assigned to him as a partner for the first time all over again: Julia drilled to the ground in a mingle of excitement and despondency. There she was, in semi-awe, while Chase fidgeted with his hands in his pockets and hissed to his supervisor can I go already?
In an instant, not even hearing her own sharp footsteps, she was less than a few feet away from him. This time, Chase’s jade eyes met hers, looking as if he had just barely noticed her for the first time. Still, no words slipped out like bubbles from their lips, and Julia half dreaded them, filled with the uncertainty of what they would arise from. Malice? Jealousy? Longing?
Taking a few minuscule and tentative steps towards him, who seemed to be as unwilling to leave the secure ground as much to the ground as she was, Julia’s breath hitched as she was able to fully soak him in. Actually, actually, get a good look at him.
Chase’s complexion, aided by the considerably aesthetic blue lights, was tanned. A tad, but it was noteable. She could barely see the hints of familiar lighter skin when he moved, and his collar slipped. The suit aided in making him look a little more muscular and healthy, but thought silently that perhaps that it was a ruse. Her head jerked to the side, much to her neck’s protest when the disturbingly audible clatter of the ACME pen falling arose. They were alone, or as alone as one could get in the facility—regardless, Julia felt her shoulders untense, no longer having a pair of piercing liquid amber eyes hovering over her.
Chase did not move or speak until Julia was a few feet away from him. Half of her doesn’t think he’s real until she can see him clench his fists. He eyed her for a moment, features injected with uneasy tranquility.
“Julia.”
She found her first name rolling off his tongue so incredibly foreign, but smooth, as if it had always somehow belonged there. Chase’s voice in itself was raspy and hoarse, unused for presumably hours. For a moment, Julia was not able to move her lips at all either, awash with the familiar feeling of dental anesthetic.
“Chase.” She finally choked out, her trachea hurting. “I didn’t think I’d-“ Julia felt something like cinnamon in her throat, and her voice fizzled out at the end. She coughed reflexively and raised a hand to her throat, suddenly feeling febrile under the many layers of clothing. He blinks several times and suddenly shuffles forward. His heels drag against the floor, making a trademark noise of scraping leather.
Julia almost jumps out of her skin when she sees him move towards her. Some part of her wanted to keep that distance and shuffle back, craving for nothing to do but keep to herself and her own thoughts. It’s all normal—Julia knows that, looking into the thought process of an individual that’s been separated from a close person for a while. It’s right about as equal intoxication when she goes through it, though.
Julia wasn’t sure what to expect when Chief called her in a cold voice, but just the mere mention of Chase instead of just ‘your former partner’ was enough to leave her shell shocked before the news of any reunion was aired.
“Chase, I-“ Julia has to purse her lips, and she knows there’s a ring of white around them that only manifests itself when she’s stressed. She’s not sure what to say; she hates the fact that she can’t complete a normal sentence like a normal being. All she can do is breathe and sigh. Julia rubs her palms and folds her arms behind her back, out of habit, out of custom, and she can see Chase’s sudden look of faint surprise as he leans a bit forward.
The arm folding. Chase mouths something that Julia can only barely discern as not you. She figures it’s something like a signal of initiation for the company that he’d been teetering on opinion-wise for so, so long.
“Julia,” Chase says again, like he’s testing it out and liking the silky flavor of her name, “How long has it been?” He tries to kind of steer the conversation to something like a casual talk, like it's over a pair of americanos—and it’s funny, really, because both of them know damn well that’s not possible. But they try. He tries.
Regardless, Julia looks down at her bare, clammy hands. It was something she thought was weird since she joined ACME: how some agents got gloves and others didn’t. Her mouth suddenly in a drought, she lets the silence steep a little longer, saturating the air and making it taste stronger. But it’s not uncomfortable either.
“Quite a while, certainly, sir.” Julia responds almost breathlessly, letting her leg take a step forward. Her arms folded again behind her back, with only the elbows jutting out, she rocks to and fro on her heels. Julia could perfectly detect the expression and ambiance about him, because it was the same exact feeling she had—so many topics to discuss, so many questions with frayed ends, so many jokes left unzipped, that they were left in silence. Julia has found it strange that suddenly reunited people had to fish for simple words as if they were off the Atlantic Ocean. Yet, now in their footsteps, she understood.
But despite all the questions buzzing like bees in the back of their throat, there was only one dangling questions that was in their grasp:
What and why.
What happened to him? Sure, yes, the impromptu excursion that resulted in a coast guard rescue, but why? Why had he done it, and how the hell was he able to get his brain rearranged to actually think straight? Why did it seem like a good idea, especially to her?
There were so many elaborate and tactful ways to question Chase, ways that would only appeal to Julia and Julia only, yet it was like she took a breath and knocked over a glass of milk onto his lap. Spoiled.
“You’ve lost so much weight.”
Julia’s breath is abruptly arrhythmic for a few seconds while she covers her lips with two fingers smoking and invisible cigarette. Chase’s eyebrows knit, and Julia calls herself just about every intellectual insult she can ever dig up. Months and months of longing and wondering, and here she was about to completely blow this up for a poor choice of wording.
She’s relieved and terrified at the same time that Chase doesn’t look offended. It’s like the first time they laid eyes on each other not several minutes ago: each one’s word processing capabilities suddenly dying out like they never existed in the first place.
“Dev–Chase, sir… I didn’t… I didn’t mean to say it that way, I meant it in like you look… you look dif-“ Chase stops Julia with a raise of his hand. He appears if he’s trying to smile, but his lips are more on the lopsided side, so he shakes his head instead.
“Please, Miss Argent. Do not trouble yourself with the absence of formalities.” It’s one of the first.. not-Chase sentences he’s spoken in a while, but regardless she can hear the moxie that will forever be embedded inside, accenting his particular word choices. It’s rough, but it holds Julia in a gentle comfort to know that he hasn’t changed.
He reaches around his back and pulls the loose parts of his suit around to hug the figure of his body. Julia’s breath hitches—if anything, she could see just a few of his ribs jutting through the thick fabric, outlined in an out of focus manner, but that was about it. His significantly smaller waist for his body type is stenciled perfectly, however, and it takes every fiber in her body to focus her line of vision on his tie instead.
“A little bit, Miss Argent.” She realizes, as sick as a parrot, that he’s switched back to her overtouched last name, stained with rough fingerprints, despite it being the second time he’s said it. He then sets a gloved hand on his chin and moves it to and fro.
“It is my face that has you confused. Everyone looks at the face.” He states and traces two fingers over the more defined dip in his cheek, and Julia steps a few more paces closer to scrutinize. The sharp blue lighting distorted her image, in fact, he didn’t look as cadaverous as she had originally thought.
“You shaved.” Julia exhales quietly, pausing for a moment as the sound of rapid talking and furious footsteps echoed through the halls nearby, being moved from Carmen’s aftershocks. She can see Chase tense up ever so slightly from her peripheral. Once it passes, she glances back at his face, still trained on the door with watered-down confusion.
“I did. It is what makes me look like a candidate to a rehabilitation facility.” He gruffs a little bit, turning his head back to her. There’s an edge, but it’s not threatening. Not sharp. Just character. He looks back at her as if braving for judgement, but she’s just transfixed in his face. Every inch of it, every plot of his face is smooth, and his jawline is still like a cleaver. She wants to say flawless. Besides the slight tan, and the still-overwhelming smell of salty ocean, it’s perfect.
“It.. looks fine to me, sir.” Julia murmurs at a voice barely above a whisper, accompanied with a strained swallow. She’s closer to him, and the closer the distance, the lower the tone. Chase purses his lips and meets her own brown orbs full-on this time. He wrings his hands around, the tight squeak of the leather audible as he does so. It’s then when Julia realizes that he’s wearing gloves of his own.
“Please. Let us beat around the bush no longer.” Chase’s facial features are wallowing in a slew of emotions, catching Julia off guard, but she has a weight taken off her shoulders that she didn’t know she had. His hand makes a gesture to reach for her shoulder, but he stops himself midway.
Chase’s cheeks are flushed ever so slightly as those staccato syllables come into the limelight again. They’re more rapid and urgent than before. He sighs and takes a breath.
“Julia, I would.. I would like to apologize for my treatment; my uncalled for resentment to you.” Unlike her name, the word apologize in his mouth is about as clunky as one of his own mints. But Julia’s shoulders rise and make themselves plain. The simple sentence has her chest warm, to know that in those dragging yet fleeting few months of absence, Chase has looked upon the misguided slog of his ways—something that her entire bones ached for him to finally do.
Her mouth is ever so slightly ajar, but she closes it after a few moments. Despite Julia’s under preparing for a situation like this, it’s not shock that fills her body to the brim and unexpectedly sloshes over—it’s pride, it’s jubilation, but it’s anger too.
Anger, because for some obscure reason she cannot Rubix-cube her way out of, Julia wants to straight up deck his stomach. She wants him to double over, keeling, and then she wants to smack his face. Hard. Julia wants to take his hair in her fist and yell what the hell took him so damn long?
She takes a breath, though, her jaw aching intensely, maybe from the hard clenching she didn’t even realize she was doing. Julia cradles it in her hand, and uses the warmth of her palm to try to melt the pain. He’s done it, and it’s all that matters.
So, in lieu of using her puny fists which she’s very much positive won’t affect Chase, but instead would leave him guffawing, she extends her arms, and wraps them around his frame before he can even voice a letter of objection.
It’s clear he needs it, and it’s clear that that’s her answer to his apology that was very much akin to scattered index cards. She can feel the dip between his ribs and abdomen from the weeklong jaunt, devoid of any fun. His muscles are beyond tense—they should be made of raw rubber at this point. Julia considers letting go for a minute, dreading that awkward milieu between them, but then he loosens up. Her ear is pressed against his chest; Julia was able to hear him let out a big breath, astonished he hadn’t completely deflated with how much of it he exhaled.
It’s like he’s not sure exactly what to do with his hands, but the previous instinct to place them on her shoulder returned. Chase’s arms wrap themselves around her smaller back this time, with a fragility one uses with porcelain, perhaps afraid to snap her in one wrong movement. Julia suppresses her laughter by burying her face deeper into the smooth cotton of his suit.
Julia snakes her arms completely around the minimal circumference of Chase’s waist, the muscles tensing and untensing. After several seconds of quiet perseverance, his hands begin a soothing motion up and down her back. These movements weren’t as awkward as Julia expected, thinking that perhaps he’d forget after all the years he’d gone without an affectionate touch, much less a relationship.
She remembered sitting in the lukewarm car one night, at the very edge of a parking lot at some kind of state fair, the air conditioner cutting like a paring knife into the stifling air. The conversation topic wound like a spool, one topic leading to the other, until they were on the topic of relationships. Julia took her hand and began to fan her face absentmindedly as they talked, beads of sweat forming on her fair forehead. She’d asked him if he’d dated when he had hinted to asking her. Chase’s lips tightened like a drum, and he swallowed, touching the disgustingly temperate window with his opposite hand, leaving foggy fingerprints that faded after a few seconds. His eyebrows knitted in the reflection.
Not recently, he had said tersely, and left it at that.
Julia’s shoulders bunch up as they still hold each other, pleased with the idea that he hadn’t forgotten how to exhibit warm endearment. Maybe, she reasoned, he could have been waiting for a moment like this. She wanted to stick her tongue out at the whole cheesiness of the idea.
Julia gave a single musical measure of laughter as her hands waded up to hook around his shoulders as best as she could.
“We’re doing this all wrong, aren’t we?”
She states simply, a sentence with a bittersweet double meaning, like burnt sugar. His reserved laughter rumbles from his stomach into his chest, where it sounds like she’s dipped her head into a jacuzzi. The sound dares to lull her to sleep alone.
“Yes, Agent Argent.” Chase’s deep tone is significantly raspier as he lowers his tone, “Yet you and I both know we are yet to do things the right way.”
“I suppose.” Julia hums, half distracted as she tries to take in his scent again: the toned-down static smell of the ocean, and a half-hearted spritz of cologne he always wore. Her eyelids half close, and the only thing perhaps keeping her awake was the aching press of her glasses into the side of her nose that was smooshed against his chest.
She feels so stupid to cling onto him, like a koala, but Julia briskly realizes from the several times that she tries to wrench free that Chase’s arms pull her back. Willingly or unwillingly, she doesn’t know, but wordlessly it is. She’s glad Chief’s as good as gone from the room, and decides to stay glued to him as much as she can, soaking up his presence and lying with his drowsy heartbeat.