Work Text:
Between one moment and the next Zeke goes from sitting slumped on the floor against Cal’s bed, barely able to hear Mick’s voice calling his name from his phone to in a car sitting at a red light that’s turning green.
Startling at the honking that comes from the cars behind him, Zeke automatically taps his foot at the accelerator and, feeling like he’s in a haze, drives until he can pull over onto the side of the road and focus on not hyperventilating.
Everything is as confusing as it has been these last few years since the Stones saved him from that cave but the one thing Zeke know for sure is he should be dead. Knows beyond a doubt that taking on Cal’s cancer absolutely killed him beyond even the divine consciousness’ ability to save him.
And besides, he’s already beat his death date once and he has never been the kind of person to deserve a second chance, let alone a third.
For a moment he considers that he’s back in the glow somehow but then why would the glow be his cab in New York City?
For the first time it registers to him that the radio is still on; Zeke finally calm enough that he can actually hear it for what it is beyond the white noise it was while he was panicking.
The date the announcer says is what sticks out the most.
The seventh of April, twenty-thirteen.
A day ago… ten and a half years ago? Does time even matter? Zeke is dead; he has to be because the only other option means that he’s alive. He’s alive and the plane Mick is on has just failed to land.
Has disappeared entirely; every last soul on it to be declared dead within the week. No one is going to know what happened to it. Not for another five years and that’s only if the past ten years really happened and weren’t some bizarre near-death delusion and he’s really still just in that cave in the cold.
And if that’s true than maybe Mick doesn’t exist. Maybe she never has. Even just thinking it feels like a betrayal of the promises he’d made her in their few short years together. Maybe he’s just been dying from the cold all this time.
Zeke drives to the JFK International airport anyway.
He leaves the radio on as if it could tell him anything he doesn’t already know if this isn’t all in his mind. Zeke shakes his head at the few travellers who choose to knock on his half open window, gives them an apologetic look to make it look as if he’s waiting on someone specific.
He is even if part of him is convinced that none of this is real.
He’s barely paying attention, too lost in the memories of a time that maybe never happened with a person who probably doesn’t even exist, when the next person he’s going to turn away leans down and then hears her apologising.
“Can you just… This is my husband,” she says and Zeke can barely bring himself to turn and look. Because not seeing her there would break the illusion so if he doesn’t look he can keep on pretending that she’s out there somewhere. “Do you mind taking another cab?”
But Zeke has been weak for Mick since before they met when all he had was the page of a magazine and the words ‘find her’ branded into his brain like they were the only two words he knew.
Twisting his head just enough to glance out the window at the two people Zeke feels like he’s floating away. His own voice saying, “hi, honey,” sounds like a distant echo. Only coming back down, slamming into his body when Mick –his Mick. His wife. His love and his light– opens the cab door and settles into the seat beside him, making herself comfortable not even an arm’s length away from him.
It was just a few hours ago and ten years in the future since she left him and Cal alone at the Stone’s house but it could have been decades ago and Zeke would still know his wife.
It’s how he hears the nervousness and fear in just three words as she cracks a small smile saying, “Thanks for that.”
“That usually work for you?” he can’t resist teasing.
“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve never tried it,” Mick admits and her breathy laugh bubbles under his skin.
“Where to?”
“Um, could you actually just drive? I kind of have nothing but time.”
“Any general direction? Queens? Brooklyn? Manhattan?” Zeke suggests when she just keeps looking at him. That part of his brain that was always convinced he didn’t deserve Mick screams that the husband line was just a line or wishful thinking on his own part, fighting back harder at the growing possibility that this Mick knows him.
It’s taking everything in him to not reach out and touch her, run his hand through her hair, feel her skin under his lips. To check she’s not just a figment of his imagination come to life.
“It’s all connected, right,” Mick says, glancing down at her lap for a second before looking back at him.
Zeke has barely managed to pry a hand off the steering wheel to shifts the cab into gear, releasing the foot break and is about to carefully crawl out of the cab zone when out the corner of his eye he catches sight of a family exiting the airport and almost crashes the cab even though they’re still basically stationary.
His world turns sideways as in his mind’s eye the sight of the Cal he’d first met –running around his parents with an Olive his own age– is overlayed with the Cal he saved, the man that boy grew into. Both of them surrounded by the endless white of the glow. The glow feels like too much and nothing at all but all Zeke really remembers is Cal’s body slamming into his. The way he’d drawn back a second later just to shove at Zeke’s chest as he hissed and snarled at him. The way Cal had been glowing an unearthly blue, one that had felt as familiar and alien as the glow itself. Zeke had laughed, hugging Cal –weird glow and all– close.
Mick isn’t paying attention at all, completely oblivious to Zeke and whatever was happening to him as for the second time that night it felt like someone was pouring memories by the bucketload into his brain. Instead, she’s asking about the salty snacks department and rooting through the glove compartment, coming up a moment later with a smug grin on her face and his packet of pork rinds in her hand. “As I suspected,” she gloats and it’s this off all things –despite the memories of Cal and the glow– that that allows Zeke to start letting himself believe that this is real.
Even with that smile on face, the bag of pork rinds in her hand and his heart in his throat, Zeke still isn’t quite brave enough to ask outright it the Mick before him is his Mick and not the Mick that belongs in 2013.
“Have we met before?” is the closest he can make himself come to asking.
Mick cocks her head in that way of hers. “Yeah, we kind of have. It's all part of a... never-ending story.”
“Yeah?” Zeke can’t keep the grin off his face, emboldened because somehow he knows that he only ever told Mick that after he’d died, coming to her from the glow as some kind of calling knock-off, as he pulls back in to the cab zone, having moved all of about ten inches tops. “Maybe you could tell me under the stars.”
Mick freezes and Zeke doesn’t think he’s ever seen her so scared before. Despite all the close calls they’ve both had she’s never once looked at him like this before. Not when either of them almost died any of the multiple times it happened. Not when Zeke actually died in the process of surviving his death date.
“Zeke.”
His name comes out as a sob and the pork rinds get dropped to the floor of the cab and Zeke is really glad he had the sense to re-engage the hand brake.
“Zeke.”
A fist shoots out and just like her nephew before her, Mick yanks at his shirt and even as she’s pulling at him so they collide over the gap between their seats she’s rearing an arm back to punch his shoulder.
She’s holding back when her fist slams into his shoulder a second and then a third time, but by then Zeke has managed to get an arm around her, pulling her close with a hand tangled in her hair at the base of her skull.
Her skin is salty from both their tears when he finally kisses her, his lips missing hers and landing more than half on her cheek but it’s still the best kiss he’s ever had because it’s one he never thought he’d get to have. One when they’ve both survived their death dates and have nothing –no callings, no world to save. Nothing but their life together in front of them.
“Hi, honey,” he says again, but this time the words are breathed into his wife’s temple with a grin.
Mick shudders against him, both her hands squished between them to clutch at the fabric of his shirt and hoodie, her face shoved tight into the crook of his neck.
“Hey. Hey, Mick. Come on,” Zeke murmurs when her breathing keeps getting faster instead of evening out. “You gotta breathe for me, Mick.”
Mick fights to keep them pressed together but eventually she lets him pull away enough to hold her face in his hands.
Zeke doesn’t know how long it takes, but he’d have sat there forever if that’s what it had taken, twisted sideways in the driver’s seat with his forehead pressed to Mick’s as he coaxes her back until they’re breathing in sync.
“Open those eyes for me, Mick, please.”
But it only makes her screw them shut even more, shaking her head in a clear ‘no’ even as she keeps her forehead pressed to his.
“You died.”
Zeke is rather well aware of that. He doesn’t have the words to explain that while Mick was the reason he’d found the will to wake up each day. How she lit up his world and made him want to be a better person not just for her but for himself, that Cal was the one who saved him.
It was Cal who had saved him and there isn’t a single thing Zeke wouldn’t do to repay that. Because Cal saving his life had led him to Mick and there isn’t a life he lives where and when Mick isn’t the love of it.
So they could both push and shove and punch and snarl their anger out at him but Zeke would never regret saving Cal’s life. Because saving Cal meant saving Mick because if Zeke had known anything about the callings and the glow and the divine consciousness’ plans for them all, it was that Cal was essential to any hope they had of surviving the passenger’s death date.
“I had to,” is what he says instead.
“I know,” Mick murmurs and when she opens her eyes they’re streaked with red and blurry with tears but it’s the best thing Zeke has ever seen because all he sees is his wife and all the love he has for her reflected back at him.
And then she’s smiling, all giddy and disbelief that Zeke knows is all over his own face. Their second kiss is less of one than their first because neither of them can stop smiling long enough for it to really count.
Zeke misses how Mick goes from clinging to the front of his clothes to having his face in her hands. But when she leans away to look him in the eye and say, “do it again and I’ll kill you myself,” it’s a promise and forgiveness and understanding all rolled into one messy declaration of love and its entirely Mick. And Zeke can’t help but to turn his face in her hold to press a kiss to the palm of her hand.