Work Text:
“Do you know any German?” Jacobi asks Maxwell as they stand in the lobby of a mid-level quality hotel in Munich.
“A bit,” she says, shrugging.
He’s not really surprised. He’s only known Alana Maxwell for about a year, but he already knows she’s leagues smarter than anyone he’s ever met. Or, well, he’s had that idea since he first met her, but she just keeps proving him right, and he supposes that today isn’t the day the exception to that rule is about to rear its head.
“Teach me,” he says.
Maxwell looks surprised. “Do you not know even the most rudimentary German?”
“Eh. Slept through the briefing.”
She gives him a look that says I am very aware of how rapt and at attention you were during the briefing because you are not a man who slacks off when it comes to his work and furthermore you are not a man who slacks off when it comes to Warren Kepler .
Which is very loquacious, as looks go.
He gives her a look that says, quite succinctly, Shut the fuck up and play along.
Maxwell sighs. “Guten tag,” she says.
“Yeah, I mean, I know that much.”
She rattles off an insult in a language he barely understands. He raises an eyebrow. She shrugs and smiles. He scoffs. It’s a little unnerving how good they are at nonverbal communication, but he supposes it’s just a side effect of how naturally they work together.
It’s been like this from the start. They just get each other. It’s nice. It feels like she could really mean something to him. Which is a bit of a scary thought, true, but it’s also somewhat comforting. He tries to not think too hard about it.
Kepler strides over, glinting grin on his face and keycard in hand. “Acquired!” he announces. “Here’s yours.”
Jacobi accepts the keycard with a nod. Room 509. Kepler’s a few doors down in room 503.
“I’m going to sleep,” Kepler says, despite the fact that it’s only half-past nine in the evening. “Got to adjust to a new time zone, make sure that I don’t let jet lag get to me. I’ll see you at breakfast tomorrow, then.”
“Aye aye,” Maxwell says.
“Yes, sir,” Jacobi seconds, his salute toeing the line of sarcasm.
As soon as Kepler’s gone, Maxwell says, “Wanna go out?”
Jacobi smiles. “Jesus. Yes. Let’s just drop our stuff first, yeah? Then we can have fun. While also keeping a low profile,” he says, stiffening his posture and adopting an over-the-top, cheery, possibly Kepler-esque affect to his voice. “And being responsible, and making good choices.”
“Daniel Jacobi, known font of responsibility and of making good choices,” Maxwell says dryly.
“You’re one to speak,” he replies. Because it’s easier to joke about the fact that they’re both working for a hellish and violent organization with whose crimes they’re entirely complicit than it is to actually address that reality head-on. Besides, Jacobi made his peace with that sometime in 2012. It’s been years since. He’s more than happy to blow off the harm he and Maxwell inflict on people, which is another thing he tries not to think too hard about.
He has a lot of those types of things, actually. Which is a third thing he tries to not think too hard about. It’s a never-ending cycle of not thinking too hard about it, so he just doesn’t think about any of it at all for more than a few seconds at a time. And even then, it’s usually on late nights when he’s had some amount of alcohol and he’s listening to music Maxwell would laugh him out of Goddard for listening to.
“I’ll take your stuff up,” she offers. “But that means you have to scout around for a place to grab something to eat.”
He gives her an over-the-top salute, echoing the one he gave to Kepler minutes earlier, and she rolls her eyes. “Just give me your backpack, Jacobi.”
It turns out there’s a lot of options. He takes a quick walk up and down the block to check things out, and there’s a noodle place, a cafe that’s still open, a bakery, and one more shop that’s selling a food he can’t identify or translate the word for, but that looks delicious nonetheless. When Maxwell gets back, she decides on the bakery, and he’s more than happy to go along.
This is far from the first mission he’s gone on with Maxwell and Kepler as a team, but walking the streets of a foreign city at night with a friend never really gets old. He’s got sugar and carbohydrates in one hand and an unopened city map in the other, because it’s always much more fun to get lost than it is to walk with any destination in mind.
Munich’s beautiful at night, lit up and alive. It’s easy to forget that he’s here for a reason. It’s easy to forget he’s going to leave this country with more blood on his hands than he had when he entered it. It’s easy to forget he and Maxwell are coworkers, even, and that they’re not simply two good friends who enjoy each other's company and travel together for fun.
“Cupcake me,” Maxwell says. “Or, well, I think that’s a cupcake. Is it a cupcake?
“Uh. Hell no, I’m not cupcaking you. You could have gotten your own thing from the store back there. I paid for this with my money, so it’ll be going into my mouth, thank you very much.”
“Your money?”
“Yes,” he says, nodding somberly. “Who is this Goddard? They’ve never paid for my sweets in my life.”
“It’s my birthday,” she says, looking at him pleadingly.
“Puppy dog eyes don’t work on me, Maxwell.”
“No, really! It’s actually my birthday!”
He stops. “Seriously? You’re not joking?”
She shifts her weight from side to side. “Yeah,” she says, sounding like it’s a forced confession. “It is. I’m twenty-six today.”
Jacobi does a double-take at that. “Hold up. Twenty-six? I thought you were…” He trails off, because, actually, he had no idea how old he thought she was. She’s smart enough and sure enough and generally confident enough that he wouldn’t have been surprised if she was in her mid-thirties like him, but she looks young enough to still get carded if she went to buy alcohol.
And, thinking about it, he doesn’t know much about Maxwell at all. Sure, he knows that her favorite thing to snack on while she’s coding is sour gummy worms, and he knows how she takes her coffee. He knows that she likes to wear her hair half-up, half-down, and that she dyes the blue streaks in it with box dye that’s much too shitty for her Goddard salary. He knows that she doesn’t snore. He knows that she’s never had a girlfriend for more than five months.
But he doesn’t know her birthday. He doesn’t know where she’s from. She’s never mentioned family, friends, a past before her years at MIT. To Jacobi, Maxwell entered the world like some kind of Athena, full-grown and from the split skull of whoever decided she would be a good fit for Goddard Futuristics.
“You didn’t tell me,” he says, and he manages to not sound hurt when he says it.
She spreads her hands wide, in a what can you do about it sort of gesture. “Yeah. Well. Kepler gave me some new toys to play with on the flight over as a gift, and I was fine with that being the end of all the pomp and circumstance.”
“So that’s what those metal scraps were,” Jacobi muses.
“Hey! Not at all scraps. Just because something’s small doesn’t mean it can’t contain greatness within.”
“You’re proof of that,” Jacobi says, waving a hand up and down to indicate her not-even-five-three frame.
Maxwell gives him a grin. “Hell yeah I’m proof of that. So, cupcake me?”
He hands over the remainder of what he’s been eating. There’s only about half of it left, and it wasn’t fantastic-tasting in the first place, and now he feels bad, because Kepler knew it was Maxwell’s birthday and probably got her a jacked-up Arduino or something to celebrate, and Jacobi’s empty-handed. “Let me get you something,” he says. “It’s not every day a lady turns twenty-six.”
“No,” she says. “It’s– Jacobi, no, it’s really nothing. I just played the birthday card because I wanted your food. It’s nothing to go over the top about.”
“Nope,” he says, popping the ‘p’ for emphasis. “We are going to go have a good time tonight, and I am going to pay for it, because even though this is all Goddard’s money, your birthday gift to me can be pretending that I am so fucking great that I’d pay for your birthday extravaganza.”
“Jesus,” Maxwell says, pinching the bridge of her nose. “That’s not how birthday gifts work. You know that, right?”
“Where to first?”
The breeze pulls stray curls out of Maxwell’s two tightly-wound space buns and blows her dangly UFO earrings to the left. She lets out a stream of air out from between pursed lips, turning away from him, shoulders tensing. And maybe she’s got issues with the concept of birthdays, or something, because when she turns back, her eyes are steely and cold. “Back to the hotel,” she says, voice firm.
“Oh. You sure? You wanted to go ou–”
“Yeah, I’m sure,” she says sharply. At his reaction, she sighs, softening a bit. “I don’t wanna talk about it. We went out, we got our cupcake, we saw the lights and the city, and we shouldn’t get too attached to a place that we’re leaving in a few days. It’s so awful that this mission is so short, isn’t it?”
“No saying the mission word in public,” he reminds her.
“Right,” Maxwell says. “That’s a rule we all adhere to with the absolute utmost strictness.”
“Okay, miss millennial. I don’t need your sass.”
She lets out a clip of barked laughter. “You’re a millennial too, aren’t you?”
“It’s not a generation. It’s a state of mind, and currently, it’s the state of mind that you’re occupying. Also, do you remember how to get back to the hotel? Because I do not.”
She loops her arm through his and drags him to the left. “What would you do without me?”
“Die, probably.”
“Well. We better not get separated, then, for fear of death.” She checks his hip against his, and it doesn’t exactly work, considering that he’s a half foot or so taller than him, but he indulges by shoving her right back like they’re a pair of dumb teenagers.
It’s a peaceful walk back to the hotel, intercut occasionally with one of them pointing something interesting out to the other. Despite the fact that Jacobi’s been traveling around the world for black ops missions for over four years, new cities never fail to get old. There’s something so beautiful about the bustle of life, about the complete anonymity a metropolis provides. Plus, the food is always fantastic, and the peoplewatching can’t be beat.
“Bet she’s in a loveless marriage,” Jacobi says, pointing at a woman tottering under the weight of various grocery bags.
Maxwell slaps his hand down. “Hey. English comprehension, remember? What if she heard you?”
“She’s across the street! She’s not gonna hear me if she’s across the street.”
“Hm. Fair. Also, you’re wrong. You see that engagement ring? With the giant diamond that’s glinting like crazy?”
Jacobi kicks the back of Maxwell’s legs, aiming for her knees, and whoops a bit when she stumbles. “No fair,” he complains to her. “You have better eyesight. No fair. Also, it’s not fun if you care about being right.”
“It’s not a matter of caring. It’s a matter of me actively being correct and you actively being wrong. It’s not the principle, it’s the sheer act. And maybe if you actually wore your glasses you’d be able to see!”
Jacobi huffs, mock-offended. “Excuse me if I didn’t put in contacts because I thought all I’d be doing today was taking a flight to Munich and going to bed. It’s your fault for dragging me out here.”
“Yeah, I’m a real criminal,” Maxwell agrees.
Jacobi wants to respond, wants to make a joke or say something bitchy or otherwise be predictably him, because that’s all he knows how to do in situations like this. Yeah, she’s a real criminal. Yeah, he is too. Not much to do about it except lean into it.
Before he can say anything, though, Maxwell points at a couple down the street and starts making predictions about their home life, and for the rest of the walk home, they’re caught up in an argument about how easy it is to spot a breakup coming.
“Last chance,” Jacobi says when they reach the entrance to the hotel. “You sure you don’t want to stay out for a bit longer?”
“I’m sure,” Maxwell says, slipping her arm out of his. “Come on. You need to see the awful color the room’s been painted.”
When the lights flick on, Jacobi is taken aback. “Jesus.”
“Yeah,” Maxwell says. She kicks her shoes off and falls ungracefully onto one of the two beds.
“Yikes. Did something, like, die? Did something forcibly kill itself repeatedly against the walls of this hotel?”
“Wait till you see the bathroom.”
He roots through their bags to get their toiletries and braces himself for what the walls will look like in the bathroom. It’s somehow even worse than the sleeping area: a disgusting green-gray-yellow hybrid that brings to mind nothing other than vomit. Also, the toilet looks like it’s made out of wood, which is just weird.
When he emerges from brushing his teeth, Maxwell’s changed into an oversized MIT shirt and garishly red and orange plaid sweatpants. She’s in the process of removing her earrings, one of which he’s greatly thinking about borrowing one of these days.
“Anything good on TV? I’m feeling too keyed up to get to bed just yet.”
“Shocker.”
“Hey!”
“No remote,” she says. “I couldn’t find it.”
“Oooh,” Jacobi says. “Minibar? Want some overpriced peanut M&Ms? I’m paying for your twenty-sixth, remember?”
He was banking on her laughing at that, but she just sits on the edge of her bed with a deep sigh. “Look,” she says. “Daniel.”
And that shuts him up, because Daniel means it’s serious. “Yeah?”
“Drop the birthday thing. Just drop it, okay? I haven’t had a fantastic experience with birthdays in my past, and I’m not sure if you’re aware how science works—”
“Harsh,” he mumbles.
“Jacobi. I’m making a point here. Anyway, I’m not sure if you’re aware how science works, but typically when a trial gives you repeatedly negative results, you change something about the trial. It’s a bad setup. It’s a flawed hypothesis. It’s to be scrapped, alright? No matter how many times you add two and two together, you’re never going to get anything other than four.”
“Really?” Jacobi says. “Because I could have sworn second-grade me once got five.”
She gives him a look. One of those looks that says I’m actually trying to say something here . It’s not a look he gets often, because she’s usually right alongside him, a sister-in-arms when it comes to acting like all of it is nothing more than water off a duck’s back.
He shuts up.
“In short,” she says. “Birthdays? Bad. Not my thing. That’s that. I know you want to celebrate, and I get your burning desire to party without the Major hounding our asses, but this isn’t the time.”
Jacobi’s not about to give up that easily, though. “It’s different,” he says. “With me.”
Maxwell raises an eyebrow.
“I just mean that I’m not the same as everyone else,” he explains. “Everyone in your past. I’m not a bad egg. I’m not gonna turn your birthday into a gross omelet. It’ll be fluffy scrambled eggs. And, look, I’ll drop it if you seriously want me to, but the offer stands. I don’t know why you don’t like your birthday, but I get it. There’s days that I’m not so fond of, too. But I can promise you that it’s good to repurpose them.”
Maxwell sighs. “Toss me the M&Ms, will you? Remember. You’re paying. Also, you’re bad at metaphors. Never let the STEM kid attempt to use rhetorical devices. He’ll say stuff like fluffy scrambled eggs .” She catches the candy in one hand and tears the packet open with her teeth. “Thanks,” she says around a mouthful of packaging. “I mean, I guess you’re right. I can see your point, you know? It makes sense.”
“But…” Jacobi says.
“But.” Maxwell falls back onto the bed with a thump , tiny multi-colored chocolates spilling around her hand. “It’s… look, I don’t want to say that it’s difficult, because I’m not a child. I’m twenty-six, and making peace with the concept that a day exists, that the world keeps spinning, is not that tricky of a thing to do. I graduated from MIT at nineteen, for Christ’s sake.”
“Maybe that’s your issue. So young,” he says, and instantly, he regrets it, but he can’t take it back.
“I get that I’m young,” Maxwell says. “I get that I’m young, and I get that I’m a year older now, and, yeah, I went to college too early, and I didn’t have a regular experience, and I know that I was too young, I know that I’m still too young, even though I’m twenty-six today, dammit. I get that I’m way too grown up for my age, and I get that I’m not grown up, and I get that my development went at an uneven fucking pace, and the oh, look at Alana, she’s so young thing isn’t funny after the first few times, because a joke stops being funny after the first few times, because that’s the thing about repeated trial, isn’t it? If you’re getting the same results you’re getting the same fucking results. Why keep trying when you know it’s going to end badly?”
“Maxwell—” Jacobi starts, reaching out a hand, but she raises her own in a clear no thanks motion.
“I get it,” she says, shaking. “I get it. I— fuck .”
Maxwell looks like she’s having a very hard time collecting herself. She breathes in and out, and then she does it again. Slowly, she sits back up, and picks up each and every M&M off of the slightly scratchy sheets.
Jacobi sits down on his bed, faces Maxwell, and says, “I’m your family. You know that, right?”
She looks up at him through big glasses and bigger eyes, and something inside of him breaks. “You don’t need to say things like that,” she tells him, voice steady, voice guarded.
Jacobi knows this trick. Knows it far too well. He does it every day. Turn off the feeling, turn on the charm—or the annoying fuck-all attitude that tries to pass as charm—and act as if nothing can touch him. Oil and water and a wry smile that deflects it all.
He’s not about to let Maxwell make the same mistakes he’s been making for far too long. “It’s true, though. You’ve been here for, what, five months? Six months? You spend the vast majority of that time around me, and you even spend time you don’t have to with me. I think that makes us pretty damn close. Even if we’re not family yet, we’re friends. Yeah, it’s lame for me to be friends with a kid who’s almost a foot shorter than me, and a math nerd to boot, but it’s my lot in life and I’m gonna deal with it. And so will you, okay? Even if we’re not family yet, we’re gonna be one.”
She looks at him oddly. It’s a new expression, one he hasn’t seen before. He’d thought he’d seen all of it before. Today’s been proving him wrong. “I had an older brother,” she tells him. “Two, actually. And then I didn’t.”
“Oh,” Jacobi says. “Did they d—”
“No,” Maxwell is quick to explain. She waves her hands around frantically, cutting off his train of thought before Jacobi can finish. “No, they’re both still very much alive. Everyone in my family is. Both older brothers, my older sister, and the twins. They– the twins are younger than me, by the way. A younger brother and a younger sister. So, yeah, the kids of our family were three boys, three girls. But I haven’t spoken to any of them, or to my parents, in… well, since right about when I transferred to come work with you.”
“What, couldn’t have more than one brother in your life and I just ended up being the best one?”
Maxwell looks at him. Doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t change her expression. Just looks at him, and it’s a look filled with a bit of resentment (placed at whom, he doesn’t know) and a lot of affection and just a hint of melancholy.
“That was another joke,” Jacobi says.
“Yeah,” Maxwell replies, though Jacobi isn’t sure if she’s agreeing with his multiple brothers comment or just affirming that he has an awful sense of humor. She shakes her head a bit, flicks imaginary water droplets out of her hair. “What was it you were saying earlier about repurposing?”
“Uh,” Jacobi says, running a perpetually-bandaged hand through his hair. “Repurposing days? Sure. We’ve all got bad ones. Just… you can’t let the bad ones be only bad. Because then you’re expecting it, you know? If you expect a day to be awful and you prepare for a day to be awful, it’s going to be awful, because you’re going to convince yourself that it’s awful. And maybe it does end up being awful, but maybe it doesn’t.”
“How advanced and philosophical of you,” Maxwell says. “Maybe it does and maybe it doesn’t.”
“I went to MIT, too,” Jacobi reminds her. “I mean it, though. If you let yourself make new, better memories on an old, bad day, it’s healing. Which—” he pulls a face “—sounds bullshit and New Agey and… ugh, and therapy or whatever. But, I mean. It works.”
“And you’d know because…”
Jacobi laughs. “Oh, no. Nope, this is not deflect-from-talking-about-your-own-crap-and-do-a-therapy-session-for-Jacobi time. You can put your alternative timeline degree in Psych away, Maxwell.”
She climbs off of her bed and onto his and tries to shove him to the ground. It’s not successful, because he’s over a half-foot taller than her and also sitting down in the center of his bed and while her grip on his shoulders is strong, she doesn’t have a ton of torque to her push. He ends up falling backward onto the bed and she lands on top of him, laughing idiotically, and he instinctively wraps an arm around her back, hugging her into him.
“Thanks,” she says, so quiet that he almost can’t hear it.
“Any time.”
He rubs a circle into her back and feels her relax. She’s been holding too much tension in her, too much stress, too much expectation. He knows that one hug from a friend isn’t going to get rid of that, but he hopes it can help. She’s young and she’s bright and she might be voluntarily working for a deeply sketchy organization, but Alana Maxwell is a genuinely wonderful person, and she doesn’t deserve whatever she’s gone through. He might not know what it is, exactly. He might never know. That doesn’t matter, though. That doesn’t mean he’s any less willing to fight for her.
His other hand curls into a fist at his side. He knows he’ll have to use it for her one day, and when that day comes, he’ll be more than willing.
Before long, Maxwell’s almost completely melted into his side, curled against him, more vulnerable than he’s ever seen. Her arm is across his stomach and her head is against his shoulder and she’s not trying to get to sleep but she is trying to get some rest. Some peace and quiet. She’s taken her glasses off and put them on his chest, and he watches as they rise and fall in time with his breathing.
In their reflection, he looks warped. Too small. Compressed. But he looks like himself, too, and that’s a strange thing to reconcile with. He’s used to ignoring the truth of his face, of the deliberate set to his jaw, of his half-closed eyes.
That’s not what he looks like now. He’s relaxed, and his teeth aren’t grinding. He’s looking at himself through eyes that aren’t intentionally narrowed. His hair falls in a way that isn’t flattering. Instead of fixing it, he uses his hand to squeeze Maxwell’s shoulder just a little bit tighter. She’s solid and real and at his side, and he hopes that they go on like this forever.
Maxwell says, “Do you wear fucking Axe ?”
“Jesus, Maxwell.”
“I’m just asking. You’re a grown man. You should not be wearing fucking Axe.” She pulls herself out from his arms. Her hair is a bit of a mess, blue-and-brown curls falling out of two small buns on top of her head. The rest of it hangs to her shoulders and it catches on the angles of his face as she drags herself up from his shoulder.
“Ew,” he says, spitting out a hair. “Also, no, I don’t wear Axe, and if I did wear Axe, you would have the legal authority to put me down.”
“But you did in high school, right?”
“I’m very much not the same person I was in high school and I can’t be held accountable for any of his crimes.”
“I’m always glad to have more pieces of Jacobi trivia.” She tucks her legs under herself, sitting criss-cross.
Jacobi stretches out further, one hand behind his head and the other lazily resting against Maxwell’s knee. He drums a pattern there, a steady beat.
“That tickles,” she says, but she doesn’t indicate that she wants him to stop.
“You want more trivia? My middle name is Kenneth,” he offers. “Which, I mean, yikes.”
Maxwell absolutely howls with laughter, which makes him feel better. “That’s terrible.”
“Thanks!” he says brightly. “Chose it myself."
“Yeah, I picked Sarah for mine, which is, you know, sane. That was a sane idea on my end of things. Yours? Not so much.”
“Rude,” he says, but there’s nothing in his voice but affection. “Biblical, too.”
Something dark and unreadable flits across her face. “Yeah,” she says. “She was a bit of a jealous hag, wasn’t she?”
“I mean, yes, but I’m not going to say that in the same breath as you associating yourself with her,” Jacobi agrees cautiously. “Though, to be fair, I haven’t gone to Hebrew school in, uh, a very long time, so I could be misremembering.”
“Ha,” Maxwell says. “Sarah lived to be a hundred and twenty-seven; Sarah bore a child from faith alone; Sarah lived to see her son grow to be older than I am now. Sarah was a devoted wife and a strong woman. Sarah was the source of many sermons that I listened to in my childhood. Sarah was the first matriarch. Sarah… Sarah was a complicated character.”
“They kind of all were, weren’t they?” Jacobi asks, deeply unsure as to why Maxwell is delving into liturgical philosophy, but going along with it nonetheless.
“Oh, certainly. Well, let’s take Daniel,” she says, throwing herself backwards so that she’s lying next to him again. Her head rests on his shoulder. “Survivor of the lion’s den.”
“I don’t mean to be presumptuous,” Jacobi starts, and Maxwell cuts him off by covering his mouth with her hand.
“I can already think of about ten ways you might end that sentence, and all of them would end with you getting summarily shoved off of this bed, and because I’m a kind birthday girl, I’m not going to do that to you,” Maxwell says.
“Wow. So kind,” is Jacobi’s flat response.
“Take Daniel,” Maxwell repeats, laughing, insistent. She offers no resistance when Jacobi wraps his arm around her and rubs his thumb over her bicep. “Survived a den of hungry lions through faith alone. Just like Sarah. Blessed with the impossible because they believed.”
“Are you getting at something?” Jacobi asks, not unkindly.
After a minute of silence, Maxwell says, “I think so.” And then she says, “You know, you’d never have to do that.”
“What?”
“Walk into a lion’s den with nothing but your faith.”
“Well, sure,” Jacobi says. “I’d have some weapons on me, I’d assume.”
“You know that’s not what I mean,” Maxwell tells him.
“Yeah,” he agrees. “Yeah, I know.”
She turns towards him a bit more, and he looks down at her, at the girl—because no matter how much she dislikes being reminded of it, she’s so young to him—lying next to him, at the rare vulnerability written across her face like equations on a whiteboard, easily decipherable. He’s more than capable of solving for x.
“Happy birthday,” he tells her.
“I grew up in Montana,” is her response. “Rural Montana. Three older siblings, two younger siblings, a pastor for a father and a stay-at-home mom. And that’s the most you’re getting out of me about anything that happened pre-MIT tonight.”
“You don’t need to tell me anything more,” Jacobi assures her.
“I know,” she replies simply. “I might want to. I might not. But I’m not going to spend my birthday on Bible verses and the past. Repurposing days, you said? That sounds… that sounds kind of nice.”
Jacobi sits up, the bed creaking a little under his weight as he shifts. “That’s good,” he says. “Like I said. Repurposing days is good. And your birthday… I think your birthday should be a good day for you.”
“Eloquent,” she snorts.
“I was going to offer to pay for the alcohol in the minibar, but I will rescind that offer quicker than you can say off-brand vodka ,” Jacobi threatens.
“Again, Goddard’s money, not your own.”
By the time Maxwell’s pulled herself to her feet, Jacobi has three tiny bottles of alcohol opened and sitting on the top of a very ugly desk, and he’s busying himself with the fourth.
“You get to pick first,” he says through a mouthful of shitty cork-like material. “Birthday girl.”
Her hand hovers over them, contemplating, and finally swoops down to select a thing that looks like it’s probably gin, but for the life of him, Jacobi could not tell. He really doesn’t know that much German.
Soon enough, they’re both pleasantly drunk, and Jacobi doesn’t know when Maxwell started playing an insanely sappy playlist off of her Spotify, but he must be further gone than he thought he was, because he can’t even bring himself to tease her for it. She’s standing on one of the beds and laughing at something, and Jacobi’s struck through the heart with a hot poker of love.
“Maxwell,” he says, and then, when she doesn’t respond, he says it again, louder. “Maxwell!”
She stops midway to a dance move. “Yeah?”
“Nothing,” he says, smile playing across his lips. “It’s just—look, I know you said you didn’t like the whole you’re a kid thing, and you’ve got your whole, uh—” he waves a hand vaguely “—your whole whatever about growing up at a weird rate and also family, but I just wanted to say. I couldn’t ask for a better little sister.”
“You’re drunk,” Maxwell says decisively.
“In vino veritas,” he shrugs.
“Kepler’s gotten to you,” she accuses, gasping, and if he’s sticking to the whole truth-telling thing, he can’t exactly deny that.
“Come dance,” Jacobi insists. “It’s your birthday! Dance!”
“I’m already dancing,” Maxwell laughs, but she obliges. She clamors off of the bed and falls against him, fingers slotting through his, stepping on his toes.
They sway together for a bit, drunk and happy and staying up far too late for two people who should be trying to avoid jet lag. They sway together to a song Jacobi doesn’t know, to a song he can feel Maxwell singing into his shoulder.
When it ends, he spins her around in a dizzyingly giddy circle. One of her hands is on his arm and the other is thrown outward and Jacobi thinks, again, that it’s so easy for them to forget who they really are.
“Happy twenty-six,” he says for what must be the tenth time tonight.
“Thank you,” she tells him, and it sounds like she really, truly means it.