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i.
A week into Rita’s job as Detective Steel’s secretary, he asks her to record an eyewitness’ account.
She probably should’ve used a recorder, but frankly Detective Steel’s desk is a mess and she left her comms in her bag in the other room and Steel’s cramming the report from last night so he ain’t looking and the eyewitness is already talking so she sits down and scrambles for a piece of paper and starts taking notes.
Steel watches her with narrowed eyes at his own desk, and when the eyewitness is gone he stomps over to her and snatches up her notes. It’s a drawing of a six-eyed cat walking on a rainbow. “What the hell, Rita, I told you to take notes!”
“But boss, I did take notes!”
“Oh, yeah?” Steel shakes the paper in her face. “What’s it say, then?”
So she rattles off the full eyewitness account and then some.
Steel stares. Looks back at the paper, then at her. “You memorized what they said?”
“No,” Rita crosses her arms testily. “I’m readin’ my notes.”
Steel stares some more. Rita waits to get fired. Steel holds the paper up to the light, walks circles around the desk, turns the notes over and over in his hands.
Then he slants a look at the closed door of Captain Hijikata’s office, at Detective Falco’s desk. “Rita,” he says, a roguish grin tugging at his mouth, “from now on I want you to manage the records for all the eyewitnesses that come in, and you can just report it to me afterwards.”
What! “But boss! That ain’t even s’posed to be my job—!”
“Thanks, Rita!”
ii.
Detective Steel’s an odd one, Rita thinks, kinda like her. He never goes home at a proper hour and he tries to chase tails that Captain Hijikata’s deemed case closed, Steel! and he can’t let go of a single tiny detail out of place.
He cuts off her rambling when she’s about to run out of air and he gets all frustrated but he’s never proper mad about it, not really, and he complains about her snack-powdered fingers and the smell but he always buys her more when she asks, so what’s she supposed to do, let them expire?
She’s not not smart. She knows most people think she’s too hard to work with. It’s why she’s been bouncing from secretary job to secretary job since she was what, twenty?
But Detective Steel keeps up with her just fine, most days.
And that’s another thing. Detective Steel doesn’t seem to know the first thing about using his comms or his stupid desktop or anything, but he figures out he can just ask Rita, so he does. And he figures out he can ask other stuff too, like Rita can you get last night’s surveillance camera feed on Argon Drive? and Rita can you jam all the comms in the area for ten minutes? and Rita can you hack this super top secret file database?!
Which… she can. Technically. But she’s spent so long learning she’s not supposed to that she’s almost forgotten this, the ease of freedom, what it felt like to push the limits of herself instead of keeping it locked up and doing as she’s told. And it’s like Detective Steel’s grabbing her by the wrist and dragging her headlong into the kind of newness she hasn’t felt in a long time, keeps up with her and asks her to keep up, too.
He’s like a puzzle, Detective Steel, Rita decides. Like a whole new programming language no one’s ever figured out before. And she can’t ever resist one of those.
iii.
“Okay—what was that last part, again?”
Rita huffs in frustration and reads back her notes again, for the fourth time. Falco left the office half an hour ago; Juno’s typing the report furiously at his desk, eyes fixed on the screen. Personally Rita’s starting to think her notes are way more efficient than his slow transcription, no matter what Juno or Captain Hijikata says.
“The neighbor saw the guy—spiked boots, blue hair, probably late twenties, black coat with the hood pulled down—he went round the back where there ain’t any cameras and picked the locks and then—”
“Right, right, right—slow down, Rita, geez—”
iv.
After Juno leaves the HCPD and Rita shows him the office, they make plans to shine the new place up. Put in a desk or two, turn it into something decent-looking, and get Juno on the PI Registry. “Tomorrow, Mista Steel!” she calls after him after he drops her off at her apartment. “Nine sharp!”
But next morning Juno’s comms goes to voicemail, and Rita marches her way into his apartment (it takes an hour ‘cause she had to figure out where his spare key was, stupid analog locks, she’s gonna do something about that) to find him passed out on the couch, cans of beer scattered around him.
“Shit,” he says when he comes to, voice hoarse and shaky. “Rita, m’sorry.”
“S’no problem, boss,” she says, forcing cheer. “We can go after lunch!” She gets water and looks for painkillers (the ones she finds are a month expired so she wrinkles her nose and orders for some new ones), and Juno watches her with guilty eyes.
“Rita,” he says, “maybe this is a bad idea. I don’t think I’m cut out for—look, you should go,” and she figures he doesn’t just mean the furniture-shopping.
Rita blinks. Flounders for a whole moment. Then she draws herself up to her fullest height (not very far) and says, “Bullshit,” and Juno looks a lot more awake.
‘Cause it is bullshit, is what it is—Juno’s the best sharpshooter in Hyperion, she doesn’t know all that much about shooting but everyone says so, and he’s damn good at case-solving, and he’s a good person, when he had the guts to try, better than all those people in the HCPD—but it’s not just that, really. It’s that Juno is her friend, and to her, those come rare enough that she ain’t in the business of giving up on them.
And she tells him all of that, and makes sure he’s listening while she’s at it.
So Juno, looking a little shell-shocked, peels himself off the couch, and showers. Rita half-wonders if she ought to give him space, if this is where she backs off. But then, leaving anything alone’s never been her strong suit, and not following through on a course of action sure isn’t Juno’s, either.
They get to the furniture shop, but Juno takes one look at the prices and tugs her all the way to Oldtown, where he talks a smiling old man with sawdust-covered hands into giving him a discount.
Juno settles on a dark brown desk—thirdhand, apparently, but sturdy—for himself, and a slightly smaller, lighter one for Rita, side shelves for files attached. He looks between the desks and his car like he’s trying to figure out how it’ll all fit, and even Rita knows that’s a bad idea, so she’s glad when the man waves a hand and says he can get it delivered, free of charge.
“Mercury told me you quit the force,” he says, laugh lines crinkling.
Juno snorts, scuffs his shoes against each other. “Kicked out, more like.”
The man does laugh then, deep in his chest. “Even better.”
“Yeah, well,” Juno says, eyes somewhere far away. “Wasn’t what I thought it’d be.”
v.
It’s harder than she thought it’d be. ‘Cause cases go belly-up more than half the time, and when that happens all that’s left is Juno drunk and not himself for weeks and weeks—and Juno gets mean about it a lot, those first few months. Says your investment’s a bust after all, Rita, might as well cut your losses. But Juno hasn’t given up on her, she thinks, so what right’s she got to give up on him?
And she’s not seen anything worth giving up on, she thinks, whenever she watches him finally pluck the pieces of a case out of thin air and put them together, bright-eyed and grinning, and she’s not sure why other people do.
So she keeps going to work. And for all his meanness and his spirals and his half-hearted threats to quit—Juno does too.
vi.
And the office does start looking a little more presentable, eventually. Juno wages war against the dead rats in the walls and Rita brings in some spare file organizers she’s got at home—hot pink, which Juno says doesn’t look professional, but what does he know?
Bad art from questionable sources goes up on the walls and a coffee maker takes permanent residence near the back. Rita stocks up on sour candy and oddly-flavored snacks. Juno replaces her hard-backed chair with something that isn’t hell on her back and Rita returns the favor. By the end of the second year, their jar of bets even goes towards a nice carpet and a tiny couch (still secondhand, but Juno washed it himself and Rita sewed robot patches over the worn parts, so good as new, really).
And that’s just the least of it. Thing is, Juno doesn’t mind taking the cases the HCPD rejects out of hand and clinging to the cases they try to take jurisdiction over, doesn’t mind tending grudges or trudging knee-deep in shit for it.
Slowly, painstakingly, the Steel Detective Agency starts making a name for itself.
vii.
“Y’know, technically,” Juno tries once, “you’re my investor, so technically I should be calling you boss—”
Rita squeaks and flaps her hands, face going red. “Nope, nope, no, Mista Steel, that just sounds weird, I ain’t having it—” and her protests are lost in the sound of Juno’s laughter.
viii.
Rita maintains that her age is impolite to ask, which frustrates Juno to no end (he could just look it up, duh, Rita thinks, but he’s rubbish with stuff like that so it works out for her this time) but on her 35th birthday Juno gets her a new monitor, all glowing and sleek and pretty and Rita doesn’t even know how he knew which monitor’s got the latest specs at the store (she suspects Sasha Wire was involved) and he keeps saying it’s, y’know, for work, it’s for the office, not for your stupid stream marathons, Rita!— but he lets her hug him real tight that night, and that’s a way better gift than the new monitor, even.
ix.
Juno traditionally spends his birthdays alone with two bottles of whiskey, until Rita finds out. Then she wrestles him into a day out— a small one, boss! she promises, just a stream and a snack after.
“Fine,” he says, shiftily, worn down. “But I wanna be home before sundown.”
Rita goes to see the new streams by herself sometimes, when she feels like it, but she finds out it’s a lot more fun with Juno. They’re swapping theories and jokes and nooo, Mista Steel, she’s obviously not gonna get together with the princess, she’s in love with her bodyguard! don’cha get the subtext? all through the stream, snickering over their popcorn, and the people in front of them are shooting mean looks but Rita’s too happy to care.
He still goes home too early, eyes shadowed, but before he leaves he says: “Rita…. thanks. Today was—nice.”
x.
She hates it when Juno disappears on her.
Worse, she hates that he makes a damn habit of it, running after a lead until he’s in so much trouble she can’t follow. ‘Cause it’s on her, it feels like, to call up the comms he won’t check and leave a million voicemails and track where he is and not ask any questions after ‘cause he doesn’t like reliving whatever hell he went through.
If he’s gone for a day but he’s back at his desk no worse for wear the next, she figures she’s lucky. If it’s over two days, she’ll start hacking into his comms location and remotely disabling any comms jammers. If it’s a week and the tracking thing ain’t working, she’ll wring her hands and leave him sixty missed calls and threaten to call Miss Sasha.
It’s two weeks now. Gone two weeks. And not a word from him since—
I want you to close up the office. Take a week off. Take a month, hell. And if you don’t hear from me by then, there’s a safe underneath my desk. I want you to take—
Rita feels sick thinking about it. A month off. She wants to shake him. Who was he kidding? She’s never letting his calls go to voicemail again.
She’s tried most things at this point. She looked up Rex Glass and figured out he wasn’t real the first day, and she tried hacking his comms after that first voicemail but either it’s out of battery or out of range, ‘cause there isn’t even a signal.
And she’s been rolling Miss Sasha’s number in her head for a while now, and Captain Khan’s too for good measure, but she just— can’t bring herself to do it. ‘Cause for one thing, the way he’d spoken that night, it makes her think that he’s up against something bigger than both the HCPD and Dark Matters. And for another… well. She knows about half the missing persons cases they’ve handled just get declared dead, and she can’t—she won’t have it. Not yet.
So instead she opens up her desktop again, checks her comms just in case. What’s another trial and error.
xi.
It wakes her up in the middle of the night. For weeks, nothing—and then the office is up and open at 5 AM and her comms is going off like a siren to tell her so.
He’s in the office. Rita hightails it so quickly she doesn’t even change out of her pajamas. When she gets there he’s looking out of his window at the city like a ghost.
“You!” Rita shouts.
He turns. His eye is bandaged, a terrible splotch of red.
“Rita, I—”
She’d meant to hug him, she thinks, that was what she’d wanted to do, but something in her heart hurt something awful and by the time she gets close her hands are balled into fists and shoving uselessly at his chest.
“Oof— Rita, Rita, what—”
“It’s been weeks, Mista Steel, d’you know that! It’s been nearly a month! And I was trying ta get ahold of your comms for ages but it wasn’t working and I didn’t know where—I thought you were dead!”
“Rita.” He catches her wrists. He sounds so surprised. Rita wants to kick him and shake his shoulders and yell Mista Steel don’t you get it, don’t you get it, I care about you, but instead her breath hitches into a sob and her head falls forward to knock into his collarbone.
“Are you okay, Mista Steel,” she mutters, muffled into his shirt. She doesn’t say you can’t do this to me again, Mista Steel, because she’s said it, before, and he tried to promise it, before, and look where they are.
“Fine,” he says after a pause. His arms fold awkwardly around her. “Are you?”
“Uh huh,” she chokes out. They aren’t, but they will be.
xii.
The day Juno turns 40, after they finish the stream, he hesitates outside the diner they usually get burgers at, and when Rita turns a questioning look on him he says, “Actually, I was wondering if you’d… come with me? I’ll buy you dinner after.”
He says it almost pleadingly, like I’ll-make-up-for-it, sorry-for-the-inconvenience vulnerable, and Rita puffs out her chest indignantly. She hooks her arm through his and marches him off. “Don’t be ridiculous, Mistah Steel, it’s your birthday, you ain’t buyin’ me anything!” Then she pauses on the sidewalk. “Where to?”
Benzaiten Steel’s grave, when Rita first sees it, is simple stone, no fake grass or candles around it, but clean. Sarah Steel lies beside him, but Juno doesn’t spare her a glance.
He looks restless with Rita there, hands sunk into his coat pockets and chin low in his upturned collar, and he can’t seem to do much but stare quietly at Benzaiten’s name. So Rita excuses herself for a moment, citing the flower shop nearby—“I think it’ll really brighten this place up, boss!” and she rushes off before Juno can stop her.
When she comes back, great yellow sunflower stalks in hand, Juno’s sat cross-legged on the red dirt, talking comfortably, easily. Rita realizes a little late (hey, she’s no private eye) that this isn’t just a whim, not a sudden strike of longing—it’s a ritual, a birthday party, the only one he’s ever needed. And he’s invited her in.
Rita stops in her tracks again, afraid to shatter some kind of peace. But then Juno turns to look at her, and offers an uncertain smile. “Hey, Benten,” he says. “Someone I want you to meet.”
xiii.
They both spend more than a few nights in the office, in the first week or two after they take down the THEIA Soul. Juno seems afraid to take his eyes off her, pretends to be working when he’s actually just replaying the same old Newtown reports. Rita, for her part, throws herself into research, looking for new cases or some stray piece of evidence or someone who can do something about it. Because it’s like the Tower fell when they were the only ones there to see it, and now she can’t tell if it happened at all.
So when she’s not chasing some tiny little lead she stays in the office and puts one of those 24-hour streams on, Juno snoring on the other end of the couch, his overcoat repurposed into a blanket.
On the second day of her Alice: Down the Black Hole binge, Juno blearily lifts his head somewhere in the 36th episode. He looks at her for a long moment, like there’s something not adding up, which is silly ‘cause he’s missing the best part!
“Bad dreams?” he asks, tone sleepy but shrewd like he’s seen through to the core of her.
She waves him off, eyes still fixed on the screen. “I ain’t dreaming, Mista Steel, m’wide awake!”
“Yeah, I can see that,” he huffs.
He lets the stream play for a bit, half his face pressed into the cushions, and then he sits up— too quickly, maybe, or too close, because Rita startles, a tiny squeak slipping past her lips that’s too obvious to slip past him. Juno stills.
It’s totally not his fault, of course, Rita’s known her boss Mister Juno Steel for like two decades now, and he’s never tried to hurt her, only she’s been awake for like 30.5 hours and it was the blue light of the stream on his face and for a moment she’d thought—
“Rita,” Juno says quietly, and oh, Rita might’ve let her mouth run away with her again.
Juno sidles closer, keeping his movements slow and deliberate this time. He fumbles with the eyepatch on the side table and puts it on. His overcoat gets kicked gracelessly around till it’s covering them both. Then his fingers lace together with hers. “S’jus’ me, Rita,” he says, his eye still half-shut.
Rita exhales. “I know, boss.”
xiv.
Come with me, Juno asks, and Rita hears what he means, even though he never promised: I don’t want to disappear on you again.
He tells her where he wants to go, who he’s planning to go with, and it sounds like something out of a stream. No, it feels like the early days again, like he’s surprising her at every turn and taking her to the knife edge of everything she’s never tried before.
Still, she has some self-preservation, especially against a bunch of criminals she’s never even met, one of whom Juno apparently doesn’t even know by name, so she tries to put up a fight. Tries to get him to think about what he’s saying for a minute, ‘cause Juno used to be so adamant about staying in his city, about making it better, and she didn’t notice how they got from there to here.
But the moment Juno says if you want to stay here, then I’ll stay here, too—well, that’s when she realizes, clear as water:
If you want to go, then I’ll go, too.
xv.
A few days after they get the Book, Juno catches Rita after she was chatting with Ransom.
“So,” Juno says, “you and Nureyev seem—good.”
“Oh, sure, Mista Steel!” she says. After they’d cleared it all out, she’d found Peter-Nureyev-Ransom was real fun to be around. “Me an’ Mista Ransom got it all figured out.”
“Right,” Juno says doubtfully.
She supposes she can’t blame him for being a little bewildered, ‘cause for the first couple of months aboard the Carte Blanche she’d been too caught up in her own questions to relax around Ransom, and Ransom had been a bit caught up in his wariness to relax around her, too.
So she tells Juno about it, now that she can, the whirlwind of suspicion that’d been spinning in her stomach until recently: She really hadn’t been sure about him, at first. All she’d known was that Peter Ransom was Rex Glass, and last times Juno had gone off with Rex Glass he’d 1) gotten real drunk a lot of nights in a row and 2) lost an eye.
And yeah, most of those suspicions had been smoothed over by time, but Rita liked to be sure. So Rita went digging. And it was a long history, what she’d found, Rex Glass and Peter Ransom like the very tip of a glacier and Peter Nureyev like a whole bottomless ocean.
“I… had a suspicion you knew,” Juno says. “I mean, it’s not like I don’t know how well you can research someone’s identity. I wasn’t sure, though, and obviously I couldn’t just ask.”
And then she starts laughing, ‘cause— “Boss, I was wonderin’ the same thing!” she giggles. “‘Cause you two were real close, and ‘course I know you worked with him before but I wasn’t sure if you knew him knew him, y’know, and what if there was something he wasn’t tellin’ ya? And I was so worried! But I couldn’t just ask, either!”
Juno’s laughing too, under his breath like he can’t believe the situation they’d put themselves in, ‘cause they haven’t tried to keep a real secret from each other in years and really, this is the only way it could’ve turned out.
“So— you think it’s alright?” he asks, trying to sound casual and failing. “You think, um, Nureyev’s—okay?”
He lowers his voice at Nureyev, even though they’re the only ones in the room and the walls on the Carte Blanche are thin but not that thin. No, it’s different, Rita thinks, because she’s heard how Juno sounds when he’s hissing something top secret and this isn’t it, this is just soft and careful and reverent. And Rita smiles ‘cause she thinks she knows what he’s really asking.
“Oh, I think he’s really sweet on ya, Mista Steel, just as sweet as you are on him,” she says, pressing her shoulder into his and feeling gratified when he blushes, “and I know he makes you real happy.”