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1.
It was the coffee that did it, the first time. Strong, and black, completely unsweetened. It scalded Rusty’s tongue when he drank.
Rusty wasn’t sure what he was trying to do with this little stunt. Prove something? Learn something? He drank too-hot coffee all the time.
He looked down at his hands wrapped around the white café mug, coffee dark and steaming within, and saw another pair of hands, holding a cup of black coffee, letting go now and again to sketch plans on a napkin or tap at the paper the two men were poring over, or simply to gesture. Teasing Rusty about the foam and caramel in his own cup. Telling him to slow down as Rusty gulped his still-boiling coffee, habit from too many years snatching meals on the run as he tried to do too much at once.
“At least savor it if you’re going to put all that junk in it.”
“Better than that paint-water you’re drinking.”
“One of these days you ought to…”
“Yeah, sure.”
They laughed, and Rusty lifted his cup to mouth again and sipped, slow. The coffee tasted like metal, like charred wood and bitterness. He put the cup down and let the flavor linger on his stinging tongue. Around him, people chatted at their own little open-air tables or walked past on errands, busy with their lives, and he watched them all without seeing.
The crowd across the street shifted. Still in the mass of people hurrying by, one figure stood out.
Danny.
Danny, standing across the street, looking right at Rusty.
Rusty stood so fast he knocked his chair over and got to the edge of the sidewalk just in time to be nearly run over by a car. He jerked back and craned his neck to see past it and then the car was gone.
So was Danny. There were half-a-dozen people in the crowd who could maybe pass for Danny, if you weren’t looking closely or didn’t know him well, but Rusty was, and did. Used to. Half-a-dozen halfways, but definitely not Danny himself.
Of course. Of course, because Danny was never there. Not even the ghost of Danny, because Rusty didn’t believe in ghosts, and it was nine in the morning, for crying out loud. The sun seeped hotly through the shoulders of Rusty’s jacket.
He walked back to his table, ignoring the curious glances of the other diners. He sipped his coffee, then drained the rest in one gulp. Screw it. His tongue burned.
He stood again and walked away, and he didn’t look over at the other side of the street. There were no ghosts there to look at.
2.
He didn’t see a ghost the second time, either. He saw a hallucination, because it had been a long month, and Rusty had had a couple of drinks.
(It’d been a hell of a long month, and Rusty was completely trashed.)
Ever since the café, Rusty had been looking for Danny in crowds, seeing him in strangers or flickers at the corners of his eyes, and he thought he’d finally gotten past that. Even planning a fun little con hadn’t helped, because he’d just imagined Danny there every step of the way. And now, worse, it had gone off without a hitch. And Rusty didn’t even care.
He sprawled on the couch of his fancy hotel room, counting a nice fat wad of bills with hands that only fumbled a little (he wasn’t that drunk, really), and carefully didn’t think about pulling simple jobs like this with Danny, back when they were first starting out.
“It’s been a couple of years since we pulled one of those,” Danny said. Rusty looked up to see him leaning against the door Rusty had never heard open, because ghosts didn’t need to open doors, of course, hands in his pockets, watching Rusty with deep, soft eyes.
(It’d been a hell of a long month, and it’d just been hell.)
He was distinct this time, solid and detailed, standing still so Rusty could take in the sight of him. Speaking, even.
Rusty neatly stacked the money in his hands and placed it on the coffee table. He sat back, sinking into the couch with a slow sigh.
“So it’s like that, huh?”
“Yeah,” Danny said.
Rusty nodded and found the whiskey he’d switched to after he ran out of wine. He didn’t bother refilling his glass, simply pressed the bottle to his lips for a long, slow sip. If seeing his dead best friend was now the price he paid whenever he drank too much, he was going to get his money’s worth.
He didn’t offer Danny any.
“You know why I’m here?” Danny didn’t really say it like a question.
“Pretty easy to guess.”
Rusty watched Danny through his lashes. He didn’t want to dignify Danny by looking at him, but couldn’t make himself look away. His fuzzy brain kissed the details he knew he was only imagining: the black gullies of creases in Danny’s grey shirt, the strands of hair—just there—that wouldn’t lie flat, a little scab on one hand where he’d scraped his knuckle on something.
Danny came closer, stopping a few feet away to look down at Rusty.
“I mean, you look like shit.”
“Thank you,” Rusty said, and took another drink, and then, because he couldn’t help being spiteful, even though he thought he had passed anger for so, so tired, said, “You look great yourself for someone who’s dead.”
“I try,” Danny said, but the warmth didn’t reach his eyes.
There was a silence. Rusty drank again. Danny looked away and then back.
“I can’t stay,” Danny said at last.
“You came just for that?”
Danny shrugged.
“It’s enough, isn’t it?”
He at least had the decency to look ashamed when he said it.
Rusty laughed, because he laughed when he was pissed, and raised the bottle in Danny’s direction.
“Sure, sure.” He paused to drink, early, because his own hallucination couldn’t give him a half hour, so why should he give it a proper toast? “Here’s to us, then, and all the jobs we pulled, good and bad.”
Then he drank again, for a long time. Danny was still there when he lowered the bottle, though, halfway across the room as if paused on the way to the door he didn’t need to use.
“Rusty…”
Rusty teetered on the edge of an abyss, and at the bottom was Danny’s voice saying his name. But he pulled himself back, waving a careless hand at his ghost.
“Aw, go on with your busy afterlife,” he said.
Danny hesitated a moment longer, then kept walking away.
Rusty closed his eyes so he didn’t have to watch Danny dissolve or melt through the door or whatever he was going to do, resting his head against the back of the couch. The words whispered out of him into the dark silence.
“I loved you, you know, you bastard.”
3.
Maybe it was seeing Debbie. (He hadn’t in a while. The last time he came close was that damn funeral.) Maybe it was seeing everyone—somehow you always kept in touch and never worked with the same team twice, yet here they all were, together again. “Ocean’s eleven,” they’d been called once, in another life. Maybe it was because Lou hadn’t watered the booze for once, and Rusty was drunker than he meant to be. Maybe (probably) it was standing up there giving that speech they all knew should have been Danny’s.
He’d called off from the funeral at the last minute; he just couldn’t face it. He almost called off this time, too, but he thought Danny might actually come back to haunt him if he skipped their little sister’s wedding. Plus Lou and about half Debbie’s team would simply shoot him.
So he went, and he gave the stupid speech, and he watched Debbie and Lou be horribly soft in a way thieves weren’t supposed to be allowed. He clinked a few too many glasses with Tess, the pair of them tipping the drinks back like they were twenty-five and invincible instead of on the wrong side of fifty and just a bit bitter with the world. He felt the party choking him, the warmth, the honey-colored lights, laughter, music, flowers and their scent heavy over everything—and pushed away from the table with an excuse about finding a bathroom.
Rusty’s mouth curled out the words smoother than the drinks, but Tess still looked at him a little too knowingly. Isabel’s hand was soft on her arm where it had landed a few drinks back, though, and she let him go.
Out in the dark garden, the night breeze felt good against his overheated skin. He noted the slight stumble in his steps, and scolded himself. It came out in Danny’s voice in his head. Rusty lingered over the thought instead of pushing it away like usual: what would Danny say, what would Danny think, if he were here? The drinks and the sounds of the wedding drifting toward Rusty made him sweetly maudlin.
He was drifting himself, wandering about the party’s periphery and thinking of diving back in, when he saw Danny. Danny, just standing in the deep shadow of a tree, watching his little sister feed her new wife cake with a smile, like he hadn’t up and broken the hearts of half the people here, little sister included.
Rusty was striding across the lawn before he knew what he was doing. Danny was gone when he reached the tree, of course. Danny was never there. Danny wasn’t an ocean; the world was, and it swallowed Danny whole. And now the night had swallowed whatever was left.
Rusty leaned his back against the tree, feeling the bark rough and steady through his nice suit which Debbie had called an abomination and which was now going to have mossy smudges on it. He tipped his head back and contemplated the stars, blotchy through the shadowy foliage. One hand found a pack of gum he didn’t remember putting in his pocket. He absently pulled out a stick and chewed it while he remembered other nights. Nights when he and Danny would look at the stars and talk about their future, young and careless, when the worst fate they could imagine was growing old in a quiet, normal life.
Debbie’s laugh cut across the night. Rusty looked over to see her and Lou burying their faces in each other’s necks and shoulders, hair mingling, as they laughed and laughed. From this distance, their linked hands were one solid shape.
Rusty looked back at the shadow-scattered stars. A quiet laugh bubbled over his own lips, but there was no real humor in it. He wasn’t quite sure what he was laughing at—himself, maybe.
Because Danny was an ocean. Of course he was. Beautiful and dangerous, and you couldn’t help falling into him. Now he was gone, and Rusty damn well better learn how to get out of the current, or he was going to drown.
“Right,” he said aloud as he pushed away from the tree. “Better get on with it, then.” And then he made himself say it out loud, so he had to finally accept it. “He’s dead, Ryan.”
Saying it hurt like ice in his lungs, so he said it again.
“Danny’s dead.”
He nodded, and ran a restless tongue over his lips as though he could taste the sour residue of the words, and then he went back to the party, where he chatted, and laughed, and got very, very drunk.
1.
He couldn’t blame the alcohol—Lou and Debbie’s wedding was several days and a plane ride behind him. He couldn’t really claim hallucinations from lack of sleep, either, because he’d slept fine in the hotel room once the party finally wound down, and on the flight back; unfortunately, he’d always been able to nap anywhere, anytime. Honestly, he blamed the flight: jet lag.
Of course, the wedding hadn’t actually been in a different time zone. Rusty would have really liked to blame jet lag anyway.
He leaned back against his kitchen counter and glared at Danny’s ghost, wondering how early was too early to start drinking. Danny’s ghost had the decency to fidget.
“So,” the ghost said, then left it there, like that was good enough.
“Yeah?” Rusty said.
“Figured we needed to talk.”
“Yeah?”
Rusty turned his back on Danny to rummage through his fridge. He lingered over the beers a moment, then started pulling ingredients out and slamming them onto the counter, even though he’d eaten a late breakfast and it was really too early to make anything big or fancy for lunch, even for Rusty. But Rusty could always eat, and that’s what you did, wasn’t it, when your best friend died. You made proper meals and got on with your life.
Danny’s ghost stayed, though, walking closer with his hands in his pockets. Rusty didn’t look at him. (Mostly, mostly; his eyes kept flicking toward Danny but it wasn’t Danny and he refused—)
“Rus.”
Rusty closed the fridge harder than necessary. He wouldn’t say Danny’s name back, because this wasn’t Danny; this was Danny’s ghost, and Rusty refused to see ghosts.
The ghost was right up against the counter now; Rusty could have reached out and touched Danny as he grabbed a cutting board and started in on the onion, except that, of course, he couldn’t have. He didn’t try.
The ghost sighed.
“Could you look at me for five minutes? I came all the way out here, and you’re acting like I’m not even here.”
“Because you’re not,” Rusty said, smiling at the ghost. It wasn’t a very nice smile.
The ghost sighed again, more exasperated than before, and it was such an utterly Danny sound that Rusty worried he might drop the knife as he dissolved under the sound of it. But it was only a flash, he kept on chopping, and the ghost said:
“That’s why I’m here, actually.”
Rusty didn’t ask. Rusty refused to ask. He kept his gaze on the onion. The knife flashed up and down.
“I’m not dead, Rus.”
Rusty dumped the onion in a pan and moved on to the tomatoes.
“Rus—”
He wasn’t listening. He was moving on.
“Rusty!”
The ghost grabbed Rusty’s arm, and the shock of it skittered the knife from Rusty’s grasp. He gasped and told himself it was the pain as red bloomed on his fingers and the knife clattered to the floor.
“Aw, damn.”
The ghost—Danny—the ghost let go of Rusty’s arm, and Rusty’s skin was cold where his hand had been, but then the ghost was around the counter. He took Rusty’s hand with sure fingers, like he had the utter right to come into Rusty’s life and do whatever he wanted to it, because that was Danny Ocean for you, even fucking dead— The ghost examined the cut, hands warm and calloused, then made a could-be-worse sort of sound.
“Sorry about that,” he said, tugging Rusty toward the sink. He had the water on before Rusty remembered to pull away. His hand felt cold.
“I can do it,” he said, then mentally cursed for talking to the ghost. He plunged his hand under the water, back to the room.
A pause, then the sound of the ghost picking up the knife. The ghost opening a cupboard (because of course he knew exactly where Rusty kept the paper towels), and wiping up the blood-and-tomato spatter on the floor.
The ghost was doing a lot of touching things. The ghost was warm. Rusty’s hand shook as he turned off the water. He told himself it was the cut, though he wasn’t sure that even made sense, and his hand was numb from the cold water anyway.
When he turned back around, the ghost was still there. He tried to catch Rusty’s eyes with his own as he handed Rusty a paper towel, and Rusty almost let him. Rusty dried his hand, and the ghost followed him to the bathroom, watched him rummage in a cabinet and fish out a box of band-aids. Tossed Rusty a look as he fumbled to get a band-aid on one-handed, and accepted it when Rusty shook his head.
And then they were just standing there, cold tile under Rusty’s bare feet and the ghost’s shoes, box of band-aids watching them from the edge of the sink because Rusty couldn’t care enough to put it away. Couldn’t care about anything except breathing, maybe, because if. If he cared then he’d either have to spend the rest of his life living and moving on and caring that Danny was dead, or he’d have to figure out what he felt before he faced the fact he felt it, and it’d still be too much, because the other option was if Danny was—if, if.
“You okay?” Danny asked, gesturing at Rusty’s hand.
Rusty shook his head ruefully, huffing out some rough sound that might be a laugh, because Danny did not get to stand there and honestly ask him that.
“Sure,” he said, and put the band-aids away. “But I want details.”
He met Danny’s gaze squarely as he said it, and god Danny looked so real.
Danny nodded.
“How, or—”
“Everything.”
Rusty walked back out to the kitchen (brushing past Danny in the hallway, so close his shoulders burned with the tension of not leaning into Danny, just to check), looked at the mess on the counters, then shrugged. He headed to the living room instead. He was tempted to swing by the fridge for those beers first, but he needed to be sober right now.
He flopped onto the couch, carefully off to one side. Danny hesitated a moment, and Rusty watched him hesitate. Then he took the invitation Rusty had left. Rusty felt the couch shift as he sat down.
“I didn’t mean it to go so far, at first,” Danny said. “I was just looking for a way to make the retirement stick. The last couple of times…”
“Mm,” Rusty agreed.
They realized at the same time they were doing it again. They exchanged a rueful look, then laughed—soft, wry, but damn it felt good. Hearing Danny’s laugh was so good Rusty had to look away from him, chewing on his lip a little so he could focus on the pain instead.
Danny tried again, making himself use full sentences. Rusty made himself listen, without filling in the blanks. It felt ridiculous, like discussing the weather and mentioning that the sky was blue, not green or purple. Rusty knew the sky was blue; Danny knew Rusty knew. But Rusty had known that before, too, and turned out the sky had been golden.
So they went through the idea, and the plan, and the execution. How Danny had pulled it off and where he went. What he’d intended and what had followed him, uninvited.
“Come on, who wouldn’t be curious?” Danny said with that disarming smile of his, and Rusty wondered which one of them he was trying to charm. “Getting to see how people really take your death.”
“Just for your ego then?” Rusty tried to keep the tone teasing, tried not to sound bitter.
Danny grinned, mouth opening to retort something, then sighed and held Rusty’s eyes. His own were serious, soft, and intense with something that Rusty could barely stand to look at, but damned if he’d be the first to look away.
“I wanted to see how everyone was doing, too. I knew you’d all manage—I don’t think that much of myself—but…”
“That was kind of you,” Rusty said, and there was the bite he’d been trying to hold back.
“Mm.” Danny made an unoffended sound, but his gaze fell away. “I didn’t plan to come in person. Even dead, there’s still the network.”
“I’m special?” Rusty was really, really trying not to be an ass about this, and really, really failing.
Danny looked at him again, way too serious all of a sudden.
“Always have been.”
Rusty didn’t know what to do with that. He made a noise he hoped sounded like an appropriate response, but his throat was very dry.
“I heard you weren’t taking it well. I wanted to be wrong, so I came to check…”
Danny shrugged.
“The café?”
“Yeah.”
“You wrong?”
Danny huffed out a laugh.
“Of course; that’s why I showed up in your hotel room.”
Rusty laughed too, though the memory felt grungy and embarrassing, like being caught wearing week-old clothes. If Danny really was…well, Rusty hadn’t wanted Danny to see him like that. He’d seen Rusty worse of course, but it was different when it was because of Danny.
“So you meant…?” Rusty said.
“‘I’m not dead.’ What did you mean?”
Rusty’s face heated a little. He pretended it hadn’t while he didn’t quite meet Danny’s eye.
“I was pretty drunk. Thought you were…”
They were supposed to be saying everything out right now, but Rusty was glad when Danny didn’t hold him to it, nodding as Rusty trailed off.
“I figured that out at the wedding.”
He looked away for a moment, and when he looked back his eyes traced Rusty’s face as they worked their way to Rusty’s own eyes.
“The hotel room… I heard what you said.”
Rusty searched his hazy memories. What had he—Oh. Oh fuck.
His face burned and his mind ran through half a dozen casual replies without actually getting anywhere.
“Well—you know—” Rusty shrugged. He risked a glance at Danny out of the corner of his eye, but Danny was looking at him, and looking at him, so Rusty instantly gave that up.
“You know why I came back?” Danny asked, and his voice was just like his eyes had been: deep and serious and soft.
Rusty made a vaguely inquisitive noise.
“I was waiting for you to move on—to get used to things this way.” To get used to life without Danny. “Then I realized you couldn’t.”
Rusty wanted to protest—he’d just spent so long as one half of whatever-this-was, it’d take him some time to get used to being on his own again; he was someone before Danny and he’d be someone after—and then Danny’s finger was pressing against his chin, gently but firmly turning Rusty’s face toward him. Alarm sirens screeched in Rusty’s head while Danny smiled at him.
“I realized I couldn’t either.”
Danny’s smile faltered, and Rusty realized he’d been gaping for a while. Good. He wanted, needed, to see there was something human beneath that damn Danny Ocean smile.
He smiled back at Danny. His heart was beating fast, but in the excited way it did before the best kind of con: high stakes, loads of fun, no sane person would think this was a good idea—honestly, the kind of con Danny often came up with. Rusty felt his smile turning into a grin.
“I’m gonna need you to spell it out. That’s got us into a bit of trouble, the last year.”
Danny snorted softly as he looked away and back, not quite rolling his eyes, but he was smiling again too.
“I’m out here throwing away a perfectly good fake death—which I worked very hard on, by the way—”
“You did a good job.”
“Thank you—for you and you want me to tell you I love you?”
“I’ll say it back, if it makes you feel better.”
“Alright then.”
Danny looked at him expectantly. Rusty realized they’d leaned toward each at some point, their faces only inches away.
“I love you,” Rusty whispered.
Danny’s smile deepened, and his hand found the back of Rusty’s neck without looking as he crossed the last bit of space.
It was as awkward as all first kisses, and far more practiced than it had any right to be. They’d never had to learn how to fit together. Danny was warm and soft, pressing against Rusty’s mouth and cheek and holding his neck and leaning into him, and Rusty could smell him and feel his stubble and taste the horrid black coffee he’d drunk earlier and no ghost could be this real.
They broke apart, but Rusty didn’t pull back, content to stay in Danny’s space. He leaned his forehead against Danny’s, feeling Danny’s breath drift softly against him every other second, an invisible tide promising Danny wasn’t going anywhere.
“I’m not dead, and I love you,” Danny said softly.
“I can work with that.”