Chapter Text
Juno Steel was reported dead 24 hours after Dark Matters agent Director W boarded the Carte Blanche.
Peter Nureyev knew this because he had read the report exactly 73 times in the past 42 days. He could recite it word for word at this point, forwards, backwards, omitting every second word, in other languages. But none of that would change what the report read.
JUNO STEEL: FATAL LASER BLAST TO THE HEART
CURE MOTHER PRIME DESTROYED AS COLLATERAL.
BOTH DISPOSED OF.
Following that opening succinct paragraph read Director W's slightly more detailed account of the event. Nureyev honestly doubted her superiors read any further than just the opening.
It told you what had to be known.
Nureyev read further.
All Aurinko Family criminals detained. Ensuing struggle resulted in the death of 6 Agents. Juno Steel and Jet Sikuliak - The Unnatural Disaster - attempted a negotiation, hiding in airlock/docking bay while in possession of Cure Mother Prime. Door was locked from Steel and Sikuliak's side. Outside interference useless. Hacking the door failed. Forced to agree to temporary terms. Upon agreement the two opened the door. Juno Steel shot, set to kill. Attempted to use Cure Mother Case as shield over heart. Laser blast destroyed the Cure Mother and killed Steel. Struggle to detain Sikuliak. Upon detaining, airlock door was closed and flushed - Steel's body and the remaining Cure Mother were ejected.
Aurinko criminals remain in my possession.
The words had blurred when he had first read it, tears clouding his vision. He still cried reading it the 73rd time.
Because Juno Steel was dead.
Because Peter Nureyev loved Juno Steel.
Because Peter Nureyev abandoned Juno Steel.
Again.
The first few days were...fuzzy. Peter's memory blurred and mushed facts together. He knew he escaped on the Ruby, got it to drop him off on a nearby asteroid, and the Ruby had then promptly left. That was fine. He booked a hotel room, called his creditors, he had a plan. He had to sell off the Globe, Book, Blade and Key, to give them to his creditors. Once he had done that he could go back to Juno, to the Carte Blanche. He had always planned on running. Had been ready for it. Until he thought about just leaving Juno there. Until he watched Juno drop to the floor from where Peter himself was hiding in a vent. He had stared horrified, unsure if it was a stun or not until Rita had freaked out and Sasha had eased her screaming by telling her it was a shock. Even knowing that, seeing your girlfriend, even a girlfriend you had known you would need to leave eventually, just drop to the floor cold - it makes you re-evaluate things.
He had been on the asteroid in that hotel room for 7 hours and 19 minutes when his comms beeped. A notification he had set up over 2 years ago that was set to report him of any mention of Juno's name in the Dark Matters system.
After that he doesn't remember much.
He shattered the bathroom mirror. Sent knives flying into the wall. Tore a blade through a pillow causing a puff of feathers to almost comically fall around him, all while mascara tracked lines down his cheeks and he fought to not let out a scream of pain and anger and grief.
It was three days later he checked out of the hotel and met his creditors.
They met him and greeted him with predatory smirks all while calling him Peter Nureyev.
He wasn't honestly sure if he was Peter Nureyev any more.
Who was Nureyev without Juno?
No, his emotions were so flat, so blunted down to apathy that whoever made that hand off, he wasn't 'Nureyev' any more.
'Nureyev' was a name given as a gift to a clever detective after only two days.
'Nureyev' was a murmur in an ancient Martian birthing chamber a mile below the surface of the Martian desert.
'Nureyev' was a whisper in a ship's cabin that was as much theirs together as it was just Juno's.
And now Peter Nureyev was a man without debts to pay. And nothing to show for it.
Without debts, without something to run from, without a love to run to, who the hell was Peter Nureyev.
It was almost like sleep walking after that. A dream he wanted nothing more to wake up from.
Since leaving Brahma at 17 covered in blood he had always had a destination in mind. He had made his life flitting from planet to planet, wearing a new name every week.
Caesar Stone, Raj Vermillion, Crystal Marchess, Jasper Sultan, Basileus Crimson, Prinz Edelsteine, Perseus Shah, Rex Glass, Duke Rose.
A million names and not one of them was who he was right now.
On autopilot he picked up an easy heist. It was child's play really. A painting by some Venusian artist from a century ago that had had a breakdown and attacked her own work, leaving it with a massive score through the centre of the canvas. It had since become an embodiment of artistic struggles and a sort of patron saint of tortured artists. Very tragic. He couldn't find it in himself to care. Orpheus Black took the job and turned around the profit within 48 hours.
After most jobs he would look at the money in his account, holed up in the bombsite that had been his room on the Carte Blanche, and had staved off the oncoming panic attack at the knowledge it wasn't enough, it would never be enough to pay off his debt. Juno had come in so many times to find him bent over his comms screen staring at numbers and red writing. It was written in Brahman but Juno hadn't needed to understand Peter's mother tongue to know what he was looking at. His lady love would always just gently guide him away with an arm on his elbow.
Now he looked at the money and was only faintly aware of the knowledge that this money was actually his. Two decades years of being in the red and now he could actually own that money for himself. Somehow it wasn't as exciting a prospect as a 20 year old runaway terrorist had always imagined it to be.Perhaps that would be because his younger self had always imagined a partner in crime to love by his side on the day he did get to pay off his debts.
He took 4 days of downtime before Orpheus Black found a new job. Industrial espionage this time. Two rival mining colonies on Io, one of which wanted Orpheus to steal the most recent mining plans, hoping to get the precious gemstones hidden within the ice planet's crust before the other company. It was tedious. Boring, even.
A younger Peter would have had fun with this one. He would have posed as an employee, worked there for a few weeks, maybe even slept with a few of the other office staff to solidify his place with his co-workers. He would have strode in with confidence in stiletto heels and a pencil skirt and worked the mind numbing desk job for a while, stolen the files he needed on the second week, and disappeared on the third.
Orpheus Black found he couldn't be bothered with that.
Instead he snuck in through a window at 3AM and left a night guard in a puddle of his own blood.
He delivered his documents through dead drop and the creds were in his account within the hour.
He looked out his window. Since arriving on Io he had set up in a little town that had once been a mining hub itself but was now just quiet. It was oddly serene. Even the architecture looked quaint. It wasn’t the towering skyscrapers that dominated most large cities in the galaxy, but rather smaller buildings no higher than 3 stories, built with solid stone exteriors. He could vaguely remember reading once that this was common on the ice planets and moons. Vicious snowstorms could quickly erode tall buildings up where the wind whipped faster, and the thick stone exteriors prevented metallic interiors suffering the same fate - and on mining planets especially there was always an excess of stone at hand. He wasn’t certain when he had started to say all of this out loud.
“Did you know on earth ancient civilisations at times built their homes out of the ice around them, they called those houses-” He turned away from his hotel window, expecting to see Juno sitting listening to his rambling explanation but- no. Of course not. Juno was gone.
It was an old habit, almost every job that Buddy sent them on-planet for Peter would give Juno a run down of history or archaeology or something about the political climate of the planet, occasionally he would ramble about the native flora or fauna. It was all so new to Juno and ever since that hotel room in Mars he had wanted to be the one that showed the lady it all. Juno himself just listened, a soft smile on his face and a reassurance that he loved listening to Peter talk about something he was interested in.
There was no one to listen to him now.
He fled Io the next day, jumping on the first space shuttle going somewhere else, he didn’t care where.
(That was a lie. He cared only that it wasn’t going to one specific planet that held memories of a snarky detective and a train heist where he played husband to that very detective.)
It was day 21 that he checked Dark Matters for information on his Fam- his ex- family. If he was ever one of them.
Perhaps he should have checked if they were alive sooner than 3 weeks after the fact. Perhaps it should have occurred to him that Juno would have already tried to save them. Perhaps that made him a bad person.
(Of course he was a bad person. It had taken less than a week before he was murdering people again - he had stopped for Juno, the lady so hated blood on his hands that Peter had gone largely non-lethal in the past year in sympathy and support, now look at him. Juno wouldn’t want him now. Wouldn’t want this man. If he squinted he could see a fleck of dried blood under his fingernail. He suddenly felt a little queasy.)
There was no further information he could find on the Dark Matters systems about the Aurinko family other than a brief report that seemed to indicate they were still being held prisoner and that they were all still alive.
(Except the important one of course. He wasn’t alive. Why did it have to be him.)
Peter was in the midst of trying to dig deeper when he was suddenly locked out of Dark Matters system, his burner comms screen glitching and warping. He turned to ask Rita to help and found only the empty safe house of Pluto. He swallowed down the pain and bit into his lip. The points of his teeth drew blood. He still didn’t care.
He spent the next few hours trying to find another back door in the system but he wasn’t the best hacker. He could do coding beyond most people but this was beyond him. He swore as he threw the now thoroughly virus riddled burner comms at the wall. It was impaled by a throwing knife within a split second, leaving it pinned against cheap peeling wallpaper that was a sickly yellow.
Day 24 found him watching a Rangian news feed. It wasn’t often he travelled in the Outer Rim nowadays - for rather obvious reasons - but another well paying heist had appeared for Orpheus Black. This one required him to bide his time a little, wait for the right moment. It made him uneasy staying still. It was only his second day in this safe house. The constant news stream helped take the edge off his nerves. He wasn’t fluent in Rangian, not exactly, but it shared enough similarities with Brahman that he could understand it just fine - even if the verbs were at the end of the sentence, which really that makes no sense, Vespa, how do you know what you are talking about if the verb is the very last idea in the sentence-
He was speaking aloud again. This was a discussion he had brought up once before. There was no Vespa to answer him now.
Sometimes, before everything that had happened in the past month, Peter found himself thinking too quickly for his own mind to comprehend. He would flit from one idea to the next every second and every idea seemed like a good one, to the point where he would forget to actually check whether he was safe or not. Mag had scolded his ‘flights of fancy’, and so back then Peter had attempted to repress it, but it didn’t stop his internal monologue running a mile a minute. He could never predict when they would happen. Sometimes it was advantageous, an aspect he could use in a new persona he was acting as that week. Duke Rose was born from a similar emotionally high phase. He had been so high and pleased with everything that making Duke and Dahlia Rose was the best idea in the world. Duke had existed before, it was a little used alias so caught up on the fantasy of being Juno’s partner Dalia was created to be Duke’s other half. He’d been so excited by the concept he hadn’t even considered whether Juno would ever agree to be his partner.
Somehow Juno could recognise when one of these times was coming on. To this day he had no idea how Juno saw it because even Peter couldn’t see it himself. Sometimes it wasn’t even until Juno told him to take a breath he even realised his mind had begun to spin and his words had begun to tumble and take on the slightest twinge of his native Brahman accent - that slight flattening of the harsh consonants he had been taught to eradicate from his voice always crept back in when he was excited. How did he get so lucky to have a girlfriend that didn’t need mind reading abilities to know Peter’s mind better than he knew his own. When that happened Juno often made him go sit with Jet in the engine room or the garage, or told him to go down and work on the Ruby7. Every time Peter would scoff and laugh that he would only end up annoying Jet with his rambling, and yet every time Juno seemed to have known what it was Peter needed, as as soon as he was sat with Jet the calming presence of the mountain of a man seemed to bring Peter down with him, until the two of them had a pleasant peace about them.
It took a day for Peter to notice he was climbing again up to that feverish place. He had come to think he was immune to it in light of recent events. How could he get emotionally high when he had been so flat for weeks. The only emotions he could identify from the past month were sadness, grief and anger - but mostly it had been just apathy, an absence of feeling anything. Over that day his pacing around his safe house turned more frantic, as if he were a trapped animal, which in itself became fevered and frustrated and angry. How could he be feeling so much and so little all at once? How can you be angry and be hyper and be sad and want to claw your way out of your own skin and want to curl in a ball and die? It shouldn’t be possible to feel so much, too much, all fighting for a place in his head and it wouldn’t stop. Juno would tell him to go see Jet. Instead he kept pacing back and forth for the next 4 hours straight. Even when his leg ached enough that he had to sit down, his other still bounced until he fell asleep, his right hand flapped uselessly trying to expel energy. It didn’t work.
In retrospect, he should have known better. It was day 43 and Orpheus Black was working yet another job, another museum heist. It was a statue this time, something from Earth carved in marble. It was a wonder it had survived so many centuries with next to no damage. In retrospect, he should have cased the place better, should have remembered the floor plans more accurately. In retrospect, it should have been suspicious to receive a job directly to his comms asking for Orpheus Black instead of having to contact the client himself, at the time however he just hadn’t cared enough to do all the checks he should have done. In retrospect, he knew fine well that you shouldn’t work so many jobs in such a short space of time - gets you noticed.
That was how Orpheus Black found himself with a knife deep in his hip and a woman above him holding a blaster level with his eyes.
She was talking, he realised somewhat detached, talking directly to him, explaining something. Or possibly gloating. Something about the most recent job Orpheus had pulled, it had been an assassination. Dirty work, but well paying and he had assured himself the mobster in question deserved it. Now he realised that he had been using the name Orpheus Black too often and had become too well known and he may be getting a little light headed and oh, goodness, the knife buried to the hilt in his flesh, he knew he was forgetting something, blood loss! That’s what he was forgetting.
“Anything you wanna say, pretty boy?” The woman’s words snapped him out of his stupor. Peter Nureyev through the guise of Orpheus Black stared up at the woman. She was all tanned skin and wild red curls that was almost the right shade of red that he could almost convince himself she was someone else. A famous criminal called Buddy Aurinko that a young Peter Nureyev had admired and fawned over and been desperate to meet and prove himself to.
Funny then, that if the real Buddy Aurinko ever saw Peter Ransom again she would probably do the exact same thing this woman was doing and put a bolt set to kill right between his eyes.
Perhaps this was for the best, he found himself thinking.
For the first time Peter Nureyev’s otherwise constant, steadfast survival instinct stalled. You see, not even in his darkest moments had Peter suffered from the death wish which had hounded at his love’s heels. Where Juno Steel’s brain told him to lie down and accept death, to just give up, Peter Nureyev’s brain told him to keep fighting, keep running, never look back and never give up, keep going until you fall. Even miles below the sand in an ancient Martian monument he was still adamant he would get out, keep going, not give up yet. It was likely just as destructive a mentality, really. It often led to him working himself to exhaustion.
Now though there was no instinct to keep going.
For the first time in two decades Peter Nureyev just...stopped.
Gave up.
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath in. The perfume of his killer was wrong to be Buddy, it was closer to Juno’s actually, and reminded him of nights spent bundled in blankets and tangled in one another. Space was cold and Juno so often complained about it, they curled around each other in bed every night. It was a soothing memory, of closeness with a lady he had fallen for in all of a day. One he couldn’t feel again in the flesh.
He dropped the knife in his right hand and figured if he was going to go, it would be thinking about the lady he had loved. Still did. Always would, considering his imminent death, not like he was going to get the chance to get over Juno. He wasn’t sure he wanted to.
He heard the telltale whir of a blaster charging up, felt the heat of the barrel on his forehead, could smell the scent of it in the air.
Laser bolts and sweet perfume made up the majority of his memories of Juno. The unique mix of the two scents, of burnt o-zone and honey sweet air, it reminded him of when Juno had just come up from the firing range. Didn’t they say smell was the strongest sense when connected to memory? He could believe that now, drifting in an odd mindspace.
It went off.
The blast must have hit - at that range it couldn’t have missed. He must be dead. So why was that tang and sweet air still invading his mind? Perhaps it was a ‘life flashes before your eyes’ moment. Yes, that made sense. That would be why he could hear the yell of Juno calling his name and the clatter of heels on-
Wait.
What?
That wasn’t right.
He heard the body of the person that should have just killed him hit the ground, felt the slight scuff of them brushing against his leg. And then those heels that he had thought he had heard before. And the voice of-
“Ransom!”
Nureyev could feel the presence of the other person come close. A person that couldn’t exist. It shouldn’t - couldn’t - be possible. That was the voice of Juno Steel - who was dead. Peter Nureyev knew he was dead. He had read the document detailing his death every day for 43 days and that’s why Peter Nureyev knew there was no way this could be happening.
And yet.
“Oh, shit, that’s your blood. And your knife. Fuck.” There was a repressed gagging sound from the person who didn’t exist.
The hands that couldn’t exist were pushing at his blood soaked shirt around the stab wound he had almost forgotten about. Funny how a stab wound doesn’t seem so vital when you look a blaster in the eye and prepare to meet your well deserved fate.
“This is gonna need stitches but I don’t think you’ve lost enough blood to be dangerous. Just gotta get you up, yeah? Peter? Nureyev? Hey, can you hear me?”
Of course he could hear Juno, when didn’t he, Peter heard him all the time, saw ghosts of him in every corner of the universe. Could hear him chastise Orpheus Black for his cold blooded murder over the past month, every body Orpheus had drained the life from was accompanied by the sneer of a morally outraged private eye from Mars. He had woken up bolt upright from nightmares of his love’s face, dead and cold and ashy because Peter Nureyev, or Peter Ransom, or whoever he was did not save Juno Steel.
So yes, he could hear that voice in his ear but he refused to obey. He wouldn’t look up.
I won’t. I can’t. You aren’t real. I won’t open my eyes just to disappointment.
Peter hadn’t realised he had spoken aloud until he heard a wounded noise and- oh. Juno . That sound, the soft wounded noise reserved for nightmares and particularly troubled nights. It would be so tempting to believe it was real.
“Peter, what are you-? Of course I’m real.” The Juno that couldn’t exist laid his hands on Peter’s face. “Just look at me and see.”
“No. You died. Dark Matters reported it. You’re dead and it’s my fault.” Peter was vaguely aware his eyes were watering and his head was somehow spinning even with his eyes closed.“It’s just a hallucination. I’m dying and my brain is playing tricks.” He raised his hands slightly even as he didn’t dare open his eyes. For a moment he was caught between pushing the definitely-a-hallucination away or holding it close.
“‘Reyev…” By the Stars, he liked the way Juno had always said that.
“Stars, Juno, I’m so sorry. I should have been there. It’s okay. I’ll be with you properly soon.”
“No. Babe, no.” The voice was harsher now, scolding. How rude, even his own dying hallucination couldn’t at least pretend at being soft for a little longer. “You won’t die, ‘Reyev.”
Peter felt himself getting dragged upright.
“We are definitely gonna need to talk about this later - probably at length - but babe I’m gonna need you to trust me this time. We need to move.”
Pointedly, Peter Nureyev made no effort to move. To be fair, the knife still lodged just above his hip bone meant his leg would probably buckle even if he did decide to move of his own free will.
“Peter. You’ve never once given up. Not with Miasma. Not here. We are leaving. Now.”
Peter was about to come up with a weak quip or one liner about something or other when he felt himself suddenly weightless. It was an odd sensation with his eyes closed.
The movement jarred his injured side and he bit a sharp fang into his lip to swallow the pained noise. Even with the pain though, it was undeniable that he had just been lifted up.
A ghost couldn’t lift their boyfriend. A hallucination surely couldn’t be so believable and tangible. But that meant Dark Matters had been wrong, and Dark Matters wasn’t just wrong. For some reason, he decided that perhaps the maybe-hallucination would be able to weigh in on his internal debate.
“The Director reported you dead.” It came out blunt and lacking intonation, “It was put on Dark Matters secure server. She shot you.” Valiantly his voice only cracked slightly on the word ‘shot’.
In return came a grunt of effort and the click-clack of heels, and a side to side sway.
“Then Sasha wasn’t paying attention. I’ll tell you everything later, babe, right now this place isn’t safe.”
“And I’m going to be saved by the hallucination of my dead lover?” He barely stopped the words from coming out vicious and bitter.
“A little less of the dead, if you don’t mind, but yeah. You’ve been my knight in stolen armour plenty before. My turn.”
It was funny. Peter knew he should pass this whole conversation off as blood loss. Fatigue. Perhaps downright insanity. But in the soft sway of the arms that he was at this point pretty sure were real, with the smell of sugary perfume, oddly 43 days of pain and grief took a backseat. He felt himself relax a little, slumping further into strong arms that held him close.
“Hey, that doesn’t mean you can fall asleep on me.”
If he had the energy Peter Nureyev would argue that sleeping is not the same as passing out, thank you very much.
But it was an argument that would have to be saved for later.
A later that, perhaps, held a not dead Juno Steel.
Yes, that sounded like it would be nice to wake up to.
Ignoring a further protest from Juno that fuzzed at the edge of his consciousness, Peter let himself slip into unconsciousness.
