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The fluorescent tubes in Jacob’s garage are humming quietly. The light they cast is flickering and restless on her hands, rippling like water over the gauze glowing dully against Mike.
The gash on his bicep is red and raw and ragged at the mouth. Jacob’s needle winks at her, starbright, as it traces ugly, black lines through Mike’s skin. The shadowy trail of a comet, leaking down the length of his arm. Jacob is working with an unsympathetic efficiency bordering on callousness, but Mike says nothing. His jaw is set at a hard angle and he is gripping the edge of the counter with a restless, simmering energy. Tension stretches taut like a cord between the two of them.
Julie is staring at Mike, the long, defiant lines of him. The bruising under his eye has flushed into deeper shades of blue and violet. Dark against the cuts scrawled messily over his face in red ink, dark under the tousled fall of his hair. She is staring at him with her hands in tight fists and her heart in her mouth and she is seeing what she has always seen. Mike, blazing like the sun in this cloudless place. Good and pure and bright. Alive.
Unable to meet her gaze.
Abruptly, Jacob ties the last of the sutures tight with deft fingers, standing to gather up his supplies. “Julie, I’ll leave the rest of this knucklehead to you,” he says. There is no real bite to his words. “The boys and I’ll be waiting up in the diner.”
He pauses for a moment, then passes a hand over Mike’s hair. Ruffles through it so that it stands up on end. Julie catches both the tail-end of Mike’s expression, something caught halfway between surprised and pleased, and the meaningful look Jacob gives her as he ambles past.
Then, they are alone and time wavers into something soft and quiet.
The remaining first aid materials are scattered over the countertop, a haphazard constellation next to where Mike leans gracelessly in a self-conscious jumble of limbs. Too tall and too still. Confined to this small space next to her. Julie is watching her hands move as though they belong to someone else. The bend of her wrist is certain and the flex of her fingers is precise. She watches them clean away the grit and blood from him, apply disinfectant, blot and wrap his cuts. Over and over. Her hands are steady and they do not falter and the minutes dribble by like syrup.
Then Mike shifts suddenly, awkwardly, and Julie unthinkingly shifts with him. Follows the distracted trajectory of his arm and fastens the bandage in place. Always just behind, in tandem. She feels the heavy weight of Mike’s gaze turn to catch and hold her in place.
They stand there, her hands lingering over his skin, not quite looking at each other. Both their feet planted in this moment, even as it fades.
Blood blooms vivid and sleepy, like a flower, underneath the bandage she has just tied.
“…Thanks for helping me out, Jules,” Mike says finally. His voice is deliberately light. Cautious.
Like the world hadn’t just shifted, barely falling back into place. Like Julie hadn’t seen him fall, hadn’t pounded desperate, helpless fists against the red walls of her prison, knowing that she wasn’t there to catch him this time. She had watched Mutt burst into a hazy inferno midair, crammed the scream down her throat to rattle against her ribs. Felt her heartbeat jolt back to life, like an engine turning over, when she’d spotted Mike plummeting through the billowing smoke on his bike.
I almost watched you die, she thinks.
He’d dragged her, all the Burners, through hell and back. Hand in loyal hand. Julie scowls before she can help it, then reaches over to press antiseptic extra hard into one of the cuts on Mike’s shoulder. She hears the ghost of his easy smile melt into a wince.
Outside, the sky darkens into evening. The garbled sounds of Texas and Dutch fighting weave together with Chuck’s voice, high and urgent, and the tinny music playing from the diner. Familiar noises. Comforting in this place.
Home.
Julie had tumbled out of the red-walled forcefield as soon as it had released her, scrabbling to her feet and radioing for Nine Lives in a flurry of muscle memory. When she’d torn out of Deluxe, rubber squealing over rubble, she had felt raw and electric—like every nerve and fiber of her had been lit and vibrating, focusing on the quickest way back to Mike. Metal and muted color blurring behind her.
In the aftermath, they had been waiting for her a little beyond the city limits. All of her Burners. Smiling and bruised and singed to varying degrees. Leaning on each other, shoulders hunched, eyes bright. A chimera-like beast of odd ends and sharp angles, many eyed and many tongued, with arms draped over itself in loose embraces. And Mike in the middle, the beating heart. Blazing good and pure and bright. Alive. Looking at Julie with that lopsided grin of his, like she was something irreplaceable.
Somehow, she’d managed to keep everything. Somehow, she’d held onto both pieces of herself. Just barely.
“Just don’t get too close, you know? It’ll only make it harder in the end,” Mike had told her, voice low. He’d pulled her close to him as she’d stepped into the huddle. Breathed the words in her ear, even as someone clapped her on the back, someone else tugged on her arm.
Julie knew he had meant Abraham, and yet the relief clenched between her teeth crumbled and curdled into something sour.
“Hey,” Mike murmurs. The fluorescent tubes in Jacob’s garage are humming quietly. The light they cast is flickering and restless on her hands, rippling like water over the gauze glowing dully against Mike. “Where’d you go, Jules?”
Her eyes are on the faint shadows pooled under the jutted angle of his collarbones, at the hollow of his throat. Just at the corners of her peripheral vision, Julie can make out the blurry, faded outline of Mike’s shirt. Torn and streaked with dirt and rust-red. Piled on the counter next to bloody rags.
I almost watched you die, she thinks.
And then she is dragging her fingers from Mike’s shoulder, skimming the heated expanse of his chest to brush over his heart. She pushes into the warmth of him before she can stop herself, drawing a little grunt of surprise from Mike. But he doesn’t move away and neither does she.
They stand like that, together. Not quite looking at each other. Mike thrumming under her fingertips. Quickening, accelerating.
See? It’s still beating, stupid girl.
“Nothing was supposed to happen to you,” Julie says instead.
Her voice is calm and careful. The bend of her wrist is certain, the flex of her fingers is precise. Belatedly, she realizes that her hand is trembling over Mike’s chest.
“…Julie,” he says to her, in a voice softened into something unnamed and unfamiliar. Something that cradles her name tenderly in his mouth.
She shakes her head once, fiercely, not trusting herself to speak. Then Mike’s heartbeat jumps under her touch, pushing into her palm, and she hears her breath catch and burn in her throat. Every nerve and fiber of her lit, charged with current, vibrating electricity.
Gently, tentatively, Mike places his hand over hers. As though Julie might pull away from him at any moment. When she doesn’t, her breath clouding shakily over his scarred knuckles, she feels Mike shift closer. Carefully. And then he is tipping her forward, tucking her into him. The familiar, comforting weight of his chin rests on the crown of her head and Julie feels her eyes slip shut. Feels the steady thrumming of him pressing into her, everywhere at once, beating under his skin and sparking against her. Tinder to a flame.
Blazing good and pure and bright. Alive.
“About what I told you, back in the cell…” Mike starts. He pauses uncertainly, but Julie knows what he means. “…I meant it,” he continues. Each word reverberates through her, seeping and settling into her very marrow. “Jules, if something happens-”
“Nothing was supposed to happen to you,” she hisses.
Julie pushes back, then. Feels the delicate haze enveloping them catch and tear as she drags her gaze up to Mike’s at last. His eyes are glowing, darkening to umber when she presses her fingers over his mouth, over the edges rubbed raw and red. Something flits over Mike’s face, like daylight deepening into dusk, and then Julie’s unshed tears blur the outlines him into something soft and dreamlike. Something just out of reach.
“Don’t,” she grits out roughly. “Don’t you dare say that to me.”
The tears are falling now, faster than Julie can will them back. They trace wayward lines down her cheeks and spill salt onto her tongue. In that blistering, corrosive daze, Julie feels Mike’s hands on her. Warm and strong and solid. Clasping at her hand over his mouth, cupping the curve of her shoulder. Anchoring her to him. She feels Mike’s lips brush against her fingertips, almost like a kiss, and hears his whisper slipping out from between the gaps of her fingers.
“Shhhh, hey, hey…”
Mike is holding her like something precious, like she’ll break.
“I c-can’t have you s-saying things l-like that,” Julie stammers, cursing herself inwardly.
A childhood tic of hers that never really went away: words that bubble too fast when she cries, the syllables sticking and tripping. Dashing away the composed façade Julie needs to draw the drapes over her feelings and hide them in shadow.
“Julie bear, you can’t be exposing yourself like that,” her father had always told her.
She’d hiccup through the tears, bitter disappointment over Abraham missing a dance recital, a tennis match, something else inane yet stupidly important once upon a time.
“You can’t let people see how you really feel when you’re upset,” Abraham would say. “They’ll take advantage of that, use it against you. You can’t trust anyone.”
Maybe that’s why she can’t ever remember seeing her father cry. But he’d been right, after all. The kind of life Julie has chosen to live simply doesn’t have the room for slip-ups or vulnerability. She has to be like steel: cool and smooth and polished, always. Any less and she could lose everything. Everyone. And she almost had.
This, it seems, is Julie’s breaking point. She’s become so used to both the gleaming structures of Deluxe and the beautiful, oily decay of Motorcity, that she has forgotten that she’s not made of metal, too.
And neither is Mike.
Bones and muscle and blood. Nerves and tendon. Tissue that can bruise and break. Mike is finite, she has to remember, no matter how much sunlight spills out of him. Blinding, dazzling, crowning him with a halo Julie thinks only she can see. Steeping everyone around him in something golden and comforting. Something larger than life itself.
Mike’s arms are still looped loosely around her, burning through the fabric of her shirt like fire. Embarrassed, Julie lets go of him, scrubbing her hands self-consciously over her face.
“T-that was s-supposed to b-be just some s-stupid thing y-you said to m-me,” she presses on. Her tears are running over her lips, dripping down her chin and wetting his skin. Mike’s eyes are on hers, flickering in and out of focus in between teardrops. “I’m s-supposed to m-make sure t-that doesn’t h-happen, b-but I almost f-failed you, a-all of you, and if y-you w-want me t-to, still, I’ll… I’ll d-do it, but don’t m-make it r-real, don’t s-say it-”
There is something else Julie wants to say. Something more articulate and straightforward than she can fashion her jumble of thoughts into. Miss Deluxe with rough palms and the scent of gasoline in her hair, struggling to say sorry.
Sorry for not being stronger. Sorry for lying. Sorry for putting you in danger. Sorry for getting you hurt. Sorry for being who I am.
I’m sorry, I can’t do this without you.
This is what Motorcity, what Mike, does to her. They unmake, unravel her. Pretense and excuses come slower, here in front of them. Boundaries bend, lines blur, and metal melts into something soft and delicate and wanting.
“You didn’t fail me, or any of us, Jules,” Mike says, placing the words between them quietly. “We’re going to do this until we’re free. No matter what might happen to me.”
He squeezes her shoulders gently, calling her eyes back up to his. There is something lurking in the furrow of his brow, in the shape of his grip on her, that Julie can’t quite make out. She stares at him and smothers a hiccup, sucking in a breath through gritted teeth. Mike holds her gaze and, slowly, her breathing evens out.
“I’ve got some good, dumb luck, but also a lot of skill to back it up,” Mike smiles wryly. “You know me.”
I do.
“I had told you that because I trust you, Julie. I want you to know that I trust you, always. You’ve proven yourself to us, to me, so many times.”
Mike is staring at her, hard. Like he is trying to tell her something. Distantly, Julie can hear her blood roaring in her ears, revving like an engine. Her tears have subsided and her hands have stilled and Mike is holding her like something precious. Standing in place, for once. Waiting. Julie has no idea what kind of face he is watching her make, but she can’t bring herself to care. This brief stretch of quiet that teeters between them feels almost holy. Like something radiant is ringed around just the two of them.
“…I just… I can’t pretend that my dumb luck is always going to hold out, Jules,” Mike tells her, gently. “And I need to know that you’ll be there.”
Can you promise me that? He doesn’t say it, but Julie knows. She feels the question echoing in this brief, sacred stretch of radiant quiet. Hears it ringing through the gentle thrum of him against her, pulsing with life. Like the neon glow of city lights, like the rumble of a car, like the ceaseless certainty of the sun. Like Mike’s heartbeat, cupped in the palm of her waiting hand.
Mike has never taken the safe or easy way out of anything. Julie knows this. He is careless and brash and all heart and it's what they all love best about him. She can't, wouldn’t, change him. Mike had changed her, instead. Pulled her alongside him, like a thread follows the needle, and showed her the size of the world, the sprawling underbelly of her bubble. Popped it and caught her, led her through the pipes and wires and guts of Motorcity. Showed her color and sound and streets teeming with messy life. Showed her a better tomorrow in his palms and asked if she would follow.
Julie, always just behind, in tandem. Hand in loyal hand.
“I promise,” she says, the words tumbling out of her.
And then she is sliding her hand up Mike’s jaw. Pressing a thumb over his cut lip, to the corner of his mouth, and pulling his chin close. His face almost nose to nose with hers. Mike’s eyes are wide and amber like fire, ocher like earth. Julie thinks that she can almost see it, there in his gaze: the beginning, the end, everything in between. Their silhouettes together, slanted in sunlight.
“And I also promise that your dumb luck is gonna hold out,” she tells him, lacing the words with barbed wire.
Mike is looking at her, her red-rimmed eyes and the tearstains smeared over her face like tire tracks. Like there is nothing else beyond this room, beyond the two of them. Like she is irreplaceable.
“I have nine lives, after all,” Julie continues. “I’m not going anywhere for a long while, so neither will you.”
Mike grins at her, then. Blinding, blazing, brilliant. Like the high beams of a car, like the sun in this cloudless place, and Julie is grinning back. Drinking it in like a sunflower.
She knows that she will never look back and regret any of this.