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“We should get married, for the hell of it.” The first thought in her head is that it’s too cold for this. His nose is pink with it, sitting next to her with his legs swung over the edge of the abandoned skyscraper they’ve made their picnic spot. She’s angled slightly behind him, tucked into the stiff fabric of his overcoat against the wind, letting the darkness shield her from the moment, the way she’s let herself curl over her work, her own hair a slightly tangled mess spooling out of her cap. It’s too cold for this, with the only thing keeping them warm is heatpacks in the pockets of their (slightly battered) winter coats and a bottle of bourbon tucked between her legs while she rebraids his hair, just to keep her bare hands occupied. She’s never been one for gloves.
“Why?” she says instead, eyebrow arched though he can’t see it from this angle. He can read her tone well enough to hear it, always able to read it better than most.
His laughter is as sweet and rich as the drink, burning a path down the back of her throat. Here’s the trick, she wouldn’t mind either. But it’s fun to watch his mind work, hear the gears spin after twenty hours awake and half a bottle in him.
“Why not? It would be easier to pay rent, the girls would throw a helluva party just to burn the cash..” he half-turns back to her as he trails off, something bordering on syrup in his voice, that kind of smooth hum that reminds her of his instrument, “leave it all behind for a bit, right?”
It almost makes her wince, the earnesty. Years ago she’d told him she ran from a wedding, botched the affair so terribly she’d got the rest of the Syndicate on her tail. It wasn’t all the way a lie, and he’d grinned when she told him a couple months later how much of an idiot they were to try and cement her allegiances. She tells herself the wedding was the lie. It’s that odd space of metaphor she’s always lived in, right but not right, honest but not without reservations, blunt as she needs to be. It feels too easy to call it a wedding. Too simple. Babysitter, she tells him, trainer, traitor, shackled to the both of them. She never liked them, the petty complaints, the obsessions, the habits. She knows it was a fluke they were thrown in together, and knows even more the strange softness to Spike’s curly hair and the calluses on Vicious’s palms, from a work that predates their work. They’re all tangled around each other it feels like, enmeshed in barbed wire and sleepless nights where for a moment the three of them were on equal footing, with equal skills and companionship of some kind. She remembers Vicious the way one remembers a rottweiler. She knows he would find the description apt. Spike makes something in her skin twitch uncomfortably, trying to find the trigger on a gun she’s no longer carrying. It was one of the things she never told Vicious about, now that she thinks of it, it wasn’t a particularly short list, but it wasn’t as if their relationship was as narrow as her and Spike’s. She doesn’t love them, but she misses them. She’ll have to go back, eventually. She knows this, more than anything else. That little voice in the back of her mind that knows she is a creature of comfort, and that it’s what she does, that work. That’s how they work, and without her it crumbles, and without them there’s this odd hollow space where that comfort used to sit. A half-truth. She forgets, sometimes, where the lie is.
Gren shifts to sit back next to her, not moving to touch her, but be back in focus. She knows she’s been silent too long, and there’s a bit of her that cringes at the thought. Wasted too much time remembering again, he’s noticed the distance, the way she’s dropped the mask of pleasant preoccupation she never quite got out of wearing. She knows she looks colder. She knows he doesn't care, but the slip stings like a blade to her throat.
“You can say no to me.” he says finally, quietly, and gives her an out with as little thought as it takes for him to mark the exits and count the footsteps, “You value your privacy, and it would probably be dangerous to put your full name on any kind of paperwork right now with your ex and the rest of them out looking for you.” and finishes the thought with a shrug, waiting for her cue to do anything more. He’s always been good at that, and she’d be lying if she said she didn’t appreciate it.
She finds herself nodding absentmindedly, like clockwork, still trying to pass off the mistake despite all the knowing, all the actions that have underscored those assertions he’s made. Something about old habits. Minutes pass slowly, staring into that middle-distance horizon of a cityscape as war-torn as she imagines Titan to have been. Distantly Julia wonders if she’s got the same illness he does, that emptiness behind the eyes, that ghost in the cupboard. She doesn’t wake from nightmares screaming, or stay lost in phantoms of the places she’s seen. But sometimes when they sit together in the early morning and they talk she finds herself lost in that same state of being, that lost and haunted feeling, detached so completely from herself she forgets she’s not still on Mars, that it’s been years. God, it’s been years.
“Maybe not an official one.” she says finally. It sounds more hollow than she means it to. Miserable.
“Sure, if you want.”
“Gren.” It sounds like it's being dragged over gravel when she says it, cold fingers finding the bottle in her lap again, lifting it to her lips for a swig before she starts again, “if you don’t stop being nice to me I'm going to shove you off the edge.”
That earns her a laugh, and it makes her feel like herself again, letting it burn away the sick in her stomach. “Fine, fine. But really,” and here he puts on the affect of the war vet, the dealer, the Callistian in him, “Julie no-last-name what the fuck are you talking about “not an official wedding” isn’t the point of those things to be witnessed by the interstellar bureaucracy–” his voice drops to a whisper, “--to skim on taxes and insurance?”
She takes another drink, passes the bottle off to him, lets it carry her past the shrieking voice in her head that chirps about loyalty and debts and fear, “just throw the party. Tell your comrades to hold up the bars for their finest booze and tell them you got hitched. Hell, I can forge the papers if you want that discount. The government won’t give a shit, most of their “citizens” aren’t giving out their legal names anyway.”
“Would you?”
“Use my legal name?”
He nods, tapping on the side of the bottle with his piano-players fingers like he can make it sing.
“I don’t have one, not really anyway. “Julie” is close enough.”
“You need a last name.”
She cackles, shoves his shoulder with hers and stays there, leaning against him, “I know that, dumbass. I’m thinking.”
She stays thinking for a while, listening to his little melody and the empty space around them, probably more privacy than she’s had in a long time.
“Wyvern ,maybe.”
“Why Wyvern?”
“I’m leaving it behind, right?”
“You don’t have to take my last name.”
“I might as well.”
He hums, finds her hand in the low lights, waits for her to reach back before entwining their fingers. “Julia Eckener. That’s got a weird sound to it.”
“Well it’s not like it’s actually my name, it’s just there for the paperwork.” she lets her eyes rest for a moment, focuses on the music, that tune so familiar and so far away, “everyone calls me Julia anyway, it hardly matters.”
“I guess it doesn’t.”
There’s more silence there, the warm kind now, wordlessly passing what remains of their bourbon back and forth until it’s empty and she’s tossing the empty bottle off into the night, waiting until it shatters far below them on the sidewalk. It wasn’t their first of the night, and they don’t need more in the kitchen collecting dust and the occasional flower. Too damn hard to find yellow roses on Callisto. It feels like hours, maybe only minutes.
There’s a radio playing somewhere, a docking ship or late-night delivery service blasting the golden age through shitty rusted speakers. It makes her smile, that simplicity, the imperfect nature of it all. The world at her fingertips so high above it. A crows-eye-view.
“We should go dancing.” maybe it’s the alcohol in her blood, the desperate clawing to not dwell on any of it, to live, just to live. She doesn't know if she’s imagining the slight careless giddiness to her voice, her movements. She knows it wouldn’t matter even if she was, they know each other well enough. They do.
“That’s what people do at weddings isn’t it?” there’s something playful in his voice again, something cut open on the idea and willing to bleed. She knows he had a family once, and she knows they're long gone. One day she’ll pick his brain on the subject, find every scar and worm her way under the skin there to see what caused it.
They’re clumsy at this step, numb with the weather and the booze. He hasn’t let go of her hand, but he rearranges them until they’re in an approximation of good form. (no amount of Syndicate training ever taught her how to dance properly) and it takes him a moment, to find the music, the tempo, the beat, the singer, if there was one. She lets him lead, this facsimile of a waltz, swinging each other around to music neither of them can hear clearly.
It doesn’t matter. That they aren't perfect at it, that he stumbles and she catches him, that he dips her too low and the back of her skull brushes the cold cement, that she’s got ice in her hair. It’s fun, and more freedom than she’s ever had doing something like this, witnessed by no eyes that aren’t their own, no audience to hear the startled laugh that breaks out of her when he twirls her on a patch of ice and she goes careening back into his arms. No one else to witness the way she’s pretty sure he’s crying, and she’s pretty sure her eyes are watery with more than the frigid wind tearing through her lungs and that the numb sting on her hands and purple tint on his is frostbite and god, that’s not going to be fun to deal with when they stumble back inside.
It doesn’t matter, because this is her world now, this quiet emptiness not born of loss but of rest, this night trespassing to get drunk and dance, to be somewhere else, to watch the stars.
She can’t say she loves him, or that she’s loved anyone in her life, or even that she wants to. But she can say she wouldn’t mind spending a lifetime here, in the snow and the ice, the grease and dirt of city streets not built to last. No, she wouldn’t mind at all.