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“What's your real name?” She asks, prodding the leftovers of pie with her fork, she doesn't find herself to have much of an appetite.
“J, you know we can’t discuss that.” K says, her own pie completely untouched. The cream on the top sliding down the side from where they have been sat in the booth for probably hours.
“It's not like I’m going to remember anyway.” J retorts, swirling the cream in with the biscuit crumbs, shrugging her shoulders as she does so because she was right- she won’t remember a thing. The past 8 years, 7 months, 3 days, 9 hours and 12 minutes to be exact. Still counting though, the longer they sit here.
“We can’t sit in this diner forever you know.” She adds, looking up to the grumpy forlorn look on her partner's face and she tries not to let it break her. J doesn't want to spend their last moments together being sad, even if in the morning she wont have the faintest of ideas that she was even upset.
“I’ll keep my glasses off.” K finally speaks up, slamming her hands on the table and leaning herself that far forward a bit of cream gets on her crisp black suit. Her eyes are wide like saucers as if she just had the best idea in the world and J can see the shine of the imaginary lightbulb above her slicked back hair, reflected in the gel.
“Don’t fucking do that.”
K slumps back against the table booth in defeat, crossing her arms and pouting like a spoiled child that has been told they can't have dessert because they didn't eat all of their dinner.
“Okay, I’ll just do it to myself after I neuralyze you, so you won't even know to be mad at me.” She speaks with the clear intention of provoking a reaction, see : a spoiled child.
“K, I'm serious. Don’t you dare. You’d hate it.”
“Hate what?” She asks, as though even the possibility of hating anything relating to J is ridiculous. Just absolute poppycock.
“Normal life. You love your job, you can't just throw it away. Do you really think you'd be able to work in a place like this?” J raises her hand to gesture around herself, at the diner that she took them to. It's the same exact one Agent B brought her to when he made her neuralyze him, that was quite possibly the hardest thing she ever had to do. Till now.
“If I was with you, I would be fine.”
J sighs, shaking her head to return her gaze back down at her pie. She’d gotten cherry of course, the tartness of cherry and the sweetness of the syrup a perfect match. Much like her friend.
“You wouldn't even know me, and we both know that’s not true. Real life would drive you fucking insane, you love saving the world.”
“But I lov—“
“Don’t even!” She lifts her hand up in protest, she cannot handle hearing the words right now, giving them the space to resonate worries her that she will give in to the idea. Be stupidly selfish and let K rid her memory to live a life that they wouldn't even have known they didn't want, just for the sake of being together. It's fucked up, so fucked up that if she’d just been more careful—
J had thought about it, of course she had, if the shoe had been on the other foot and it was K about to lose the memory. What she would do with herself once she never got to walk into work and see that stupid cocky grin saying that ‘ she's late again’ . Which is not true, she’s never late, K likes to come just that few minutes earlier to say the same dang phrase every day.
She knows she’d suffer with that loss greatly, it'd be such an awful thing to know that it's not because she’s dead that she would never be able to see her again, but the fact she's not allowed to. Somehow that feels worse.
Because of that she can forgive K for wanting to neuralyze herself, but it still doesn't mean she supports it.
“Let’s go for a walk.” K suggests already getting out of the booth, and now that's an idea J can give in to.
_______
“It's Katrina. My name.” K says, staring ahead onto the street, as New York life continues on even at night. One of her favourite things in the universe is knowing that none of these people even know that aliens exist, they're just going about their lives only wondering if there's life out there. Not knowing that it was bigger and vaster than their tiny little brains could imagine with their movies and TV shows.
J turns to her, moving her eyes up and down her body, pursing her lips to the side in questioning. K looks right back at her, bending her body back on the bench with an offended look prevalent on her face; creased brow and squinted eyes.
“ What ?” She lets out, defensively.
“Just doesn't really suit you, that's all.”
“Well I went by ‘Kit’ during school.”
“See that works, it’s nice. K-i-t.” It's then she realises that she hasn't heard anybody call her that name in 5 years, it's bizarre. By now she’d fully come to accept that she was never going to be Kit again. But it coming from J’s mouth, hearing her own name just a couple more times before never ( again ), it aches of her past.
“Mines Jade.”
She won't admit it, but a couple times in the past years, she’s sat on the floor of her bedroom with notebook and pen in hand and wrote as many names beginning with ‘J’ as she could think of. Ranked them in varying lists; her favourites, the ones that suited her most and the ones it probably was. Each one had ended up with a chewed pen cap, the piece of plastic mangled while she came up with hundreds of J names, ‘Jade’ always ranked top 5, in every list.
Kit can't help that even in her upset, she smiles brightly because it's perfect.
There's a protocol when something like this happens, there has to be valid reasoning behind people being gone for decades. A couple of months they can get away with temporary amnesia, but the longer they work for the MIB the harder it is to conjure. Jade hasn't existed for almost a decade, it's a long time, but the fact she has no family makes it easier. They can go for section E with close to complete ease, the hospital is awaiting her arrival and it's just across the street. Ready to take Jade in when it happens, ease her back into her life after her ‘coma’. There will be support groups ready to help with one day waking up and your body being 8 years older than your last memory, help integrate her back into society, help her with a job and a place to stay.
She’ll be taken care of, it's in the protocol.
They both look ahead at the hospital, it's the final stretch now, but Kit doesn't want to look at it anymore. Would much rather look at her partner, soon to be ex-partner, and try very very hard to remember her face. She’ll still be able to see it, in pictures at work and things like that but in person it's the last time and it reminds her of all the stuff the two of them never got to do together. As well as the stuff they had done and how she wants to do it again.
“Please let me kiss you.” Kit begs, all pleading blue eyes and a bottom lip that sticks out a bit more than it usually does, she's pouting and not like earlier in the diner. That was frustration and her trying to mask her hurt with her brattiness but now shes exposing herself; she’s fucking heartbroken.
“Kit—“
“Please Jade, just one more time.” They'd kissed a devastatingly little amount in the 5 years they've known each other. All of which had only been in the past 3 weeks, such a short passage of time that they had no idea would end so soon.
Gods , three fucking weeks ago they had kissed for the first time against their Mercedes-Benz and in about 10 minutes it was never going to happen again.
Kit wouldn't care if the world was destroyed this instant, she would actually go far enough to say she wished it, for the cruel thing it's done to them.
It starts as a tender brush of their lips, just like their first had been, light in uncertainty; which it was right to be. Their budding physical affections were the reason they were here now, no matter how much Jade would argue it wasn't. It was Kit's mistake too, but somehow she wasn't the one losing her job over it, just losing instead what could have been her lover and what most certainly was her best friend.
Had time and the safety of the world been on their side, it wouldn't have happened. They could have been secret and happy.
Kit pulls away knowing it's not enough and that she must take again, there's no more time for tender, only the grappling need to hold her so so close and kiss her so so much. Jade lets out a deep whine from the back of her throat that Kit swallows and hopes it will nest and vibrate inside her forever.
It goes on like that for not long enough, when Jade has to pry Kit's hand off her body to stop delaying the inevitable.
They just hold hands for a moment, looking down at them as they slide over one another, tracing the patterns of their palms. Jade has beautiful hands, long fingers that were not as freckled as the rest of her body but were still sparsely speckled along the digits to her always painted nails. Black, obviously, and there's a hangnail on her right pointer finger that Kit wants to bite at so it won't catch on anything.
Then Jade is freeing herself of the grasp to search inside the blazer of Kits work uniform, pulling out a pair of sunglasses and the metal rod that is the Neuralyzer, adjusting her own settings. It's smart not to trust Kit with it, because she would have set it to 8 hours instead of years. To where Jade doesn't even know what happened that has caused disaster to happen.
Eventually their headquarters would know that she hadn’t carried out the task set, end up chasing them down and doing it themselves. There wasn't much she could do.
Jade slips the glasses over Kits eyes and the world turns black and white, maybe stuff would be simpler if her feelings were monochrome too. Kit still thinks about it -removing the glasses at the last moment- but that millisecond of disapproval she’d see on Jade's face brings a ghost of shame to step through her.
The shadow of it still stands behind her as tears slip freely down Jades cheeks, her nose reddening already. Kits own vision blurs and she attempts to blink the tears out faster so her image of Jade, this Jade, her Jade is as clear as it can be with tinted glasses.
“I love you.” Kit avows and before Jade can say a word or say it back (she didn't need to, she knows) she presses the button.
__________
There's a flash, bright white and Jade blinks furiously to get the spots in her eyes to leave.
A woman stands in front of her, shorter and older, a black pressed suit on and— Then she feels the temperature of the air and notices her surroundings. When she looks up at the sky, she feels the breeze of autumn, the threat of winter and the night sky. But the woman’s wearing sunglasses?
Jades dreaming surely, but it is New York City, she's certainly seen a lot stranger. She’s not quite sure how she got here, how it's dark and cold now and she's not wearing the hoodie she’d thrown over herself in a rush. She's also wearing a suit, exact to the one of this woman.
Her face feels wet but it isn't raining, maybe it had been? But the suit is dry and so is her hair and the ground.
Then the woman starts talking, at first a croak and hiccup snaking themselves in with the words till it transitions into deep monotonous rehearsed speech.
Jades is now aware of how her brain feels all cotton soft, fluffy around the edges. In a way it's a shake of relief, to have these all questions but almost not worry about the answers. She would like the answers, yes, but she doesn't mind if there aren't any, she's not sure why that is because she craves the answer to all, hates interpretation.
Maybe it was the suit, but she trusts the woman in front of her and follows along with her words and instructions without hesitation. Lets herself get walked to the entrance of the hospital.
Even though she’s never seen her before in her life.