Work Text:
Benoit Farms and Gardens rests quiet in the hazy summer morning. A blanket of fog settles heavy on the lines of crops, green and growing and stretching toward the horizon. A few androids putter around the fields, digging into the soil and touching the stalks, and a fat, orange cat lays on the porch of the farmhouse with his belly up toward the promise of sun.
Cinder spots the Rampion as her shuttle slows. The ship sleeps in a stretch of bare grass beside the hangar, and despite a few new scratches, it looks the same as it ever has.
She smiles to see it, glad for her advisers’ assistance that she take a break. Her friends are here, there’s a ship to tinker with, home-cooked food to eat--and there is absolutely nobody paying her any kind of attention.
It is amazing.
The shuttle comes to a stop at the end of the drive. With a relieved sigh, Cinder gets out and stretches before making the easy walk to the farmhouse. The hangar doors, she sees now, are open, and Scarlet’s shuttle gone, but there is a lit candle dancing in the front window of the house that tells her whoever’s left won’t be gone for long.
Still, when she steps up the porch stairs and tries the door--it’s locked.
The cat offers no answers when she glances at him. She knocks at the door. “Hello? Anybody home? It’s Cinder!”
No answer.
She tries again. The cat yowls, flicks his tail. No answer.
The handle doesn’t budge when she grips it. It looks like a new door altogether; she could pick the lock, or she could enjoy the morning, get some fresh air after so long in ships and shuttles, after months of being trapped in the life of a queen. She shouldn’t complain. It’s not terrible--she has been through much worse, and she can do a lot of good, looking over Luna and its people, but it’s--different. Worlds away from where she ever thought she’d be.
“Mrow,” says the cat, rolling onto his feet and jumping off the porch.
Cinder steps back, intending to follow him and go snoop around in the hangar, maybe get her hands dirty, when a series of thumps comes from the other side of the door. Low mumbling follows the click of the lock. The door swings open.
Thorne looks blearily out at her, dressed in nothing but sweatpants and a hastily buckled gun belt. There’s a pink crease pressed into the side of his face.
“Cinder.”
She grins. “Were you sleeping?”
“Yeah, I was sleeping,” he grumbles, patting down a serious case of bedhead. He waves her into the house, leads her into the small kitchen. “It’s, like, whatever o’clock in the morning, what else would I be doing?”
“Whatever everybody else is up to?”
“Eh.”
Cinder sits at the table against the window, out of the way, while Thorne busies himself with the coffee press on the counter, grabs a couple things from a low shelf. With his back to her, Cinder can only hear the fondness and exasperation in his voice when he says, “Cress is introducing Kai to the cows, and Wolf and Scarlet are on a delivery. Scarlet’s been getting up early, banging around the house, trying to make sure she gets back in time for your visit. Every morning. For a week.”
“Sorry intergalactic politics got in the way of your vacation sleep, Thorne.”
“You should be.”
He pours her a cup of coffee and passes the mug to her. It is warm in her hands, and smells of vanilla and caramel. Thorne takes a mug for himself; his cyborg fingers tap against the ceramic. “You wouldn't even have intergalactic politics if it weren't for me.”
“Yeah, thank you for that.”
He waves away her dry gratitude with the air of someone who takes part in revolutions every week. Together they drink their coffee--Thorne, sitting on the counter in sleepy silence, and Cinder, thankful for some peace. Eventually Thorne finishes his drink and goes upstairs. The farmhouse groans as the shower starts.
She drinks her coffee. Pours a second cup, and plucks a few strawberries from a bowl on the counter. Watches the androids move up and down the fields.
She's through with her breakfast and staring out the window, wondering how Iko and Kinney are doing, visiting Paris, how Kai and Cress are doing, outside in the barn, when Thorne stomps back downstairs. He's dressed this time, thank the stars, in his usual brown boots and pants, his gun belt slung around his hips, and a blue button-down shirt, the sleeves rolled up and folded neatly at his elbows.
“I can do some poses, if you want,” he says, leaning against the doorway and tucking a hand in his pocket. “I was a model for a while.”
Cinder snorts. “Sure you were.”
“Haven't you seen my mugshots? Here, I’ll do the face.”
“That is certainly a face,” she says, getting up and washing both hers and Thorne’s mugs, sits them to drying in the rack next to the sink.
With a yawn, Thorne waves for her to follow him. They make their way outside. Together, they wander around the farm--stop to pet the cat, whom Thorne affectionately calls Gross--kick some rocks down the drive, walk down the tree line behind the house. The early morning light feels nice on her face.
“Pretty sure,” she begins, as Thorne kicks at a moldering stump, “You’d still be in that prison cell if it weren’t for me, though.”
He recoils as the toe of his boot sinks into the stump, leans back against Cinder, who pushes him away. “Nah. I would’ve gotten out.”
“Oh, really?”
“You severely underestimate me, Your Majesty. Before your untimely arrival, I had a plan all laid out.”
He goes on to detail his increasingly unbelievable escape as they walk. They end up making a circle around the pond, and then another, watching the heavy fog dissipate as the sun rises. Thorne’s ludicrous plan includes seducing a guard, impersonating Konn Torin’s secretary and then Konn Torin himself, stealing several royal artifacts on his way out to steal a royal ship, and then fencing the antiques and speeding his way to retirement on a tropical island.
There are a lot of holes in his plans, too many to begin to correct but she’s--glad. That everything happened the way that it did. That she stumbled into Thorne’s prison cell so many months ago.
She doubts she’d even be here without him.
He eases them out of their circles around the pond and steps slowly down the dock, kicking leaves into the water. Quiet, casually avoiding her eyes, he fiddles with something in his pocket.
Cinder waits. A dragonfly skims across the surface of the murky pond, alights on a clump of moss at the edge of the water before taking off again.
“Thorne,” she says. “Out with it.”
“What?”
“You're chewing your words over there. Just say it.”
With a sigh, Thorne pulls his fist out of his pocket. He takes her wrist and turns her hand palm-up, then places something into her hand. A coil of warm, gold metal, and a pendant buried in the chains.
“What…?”
“Just--take it.”
Thorne releases his grip, steps back. She pulls the chain up so that the pendant dangles against her hand. It's… half a heart. A broken heart? The jagged edges cut to the left; engraved on the surface, and filled in with shiny black ink, are the letters ST NDS VER. There are little lines before the N and the V that look like a part of cut off letters--and Cinder is about to wonder if this is some kind of puzzle when she remembers Pearl and her friends buying cheap necklaces like this at the summer solstice carnival, showing them off to anybody who cared to pay them any attention--and she looks up, and Thorne is grinning--
“You got me a friendship necklace,” Cinder says.
Thorne, already wearing his, pulls his side of the pendant out from his shirt collar. BE FRIE FORE. “We visited this bazaar in Texas and this woman had all kinds of junk laid out and--well, it's definitely not real and might turn your skin green sooner rather than later, but… look, you don't have to wear it, if it'll clash with your royal gowns--”
Cinder brushes his hand away when he reaches for the necklace, deftly unhooks the clasp and hooks it again around her neck. “Shut up. I'm wearing it.”
The little broken heart rests right at her sternum and slips easily underneath the collar of her shirt. She's--wearing a friendship necklace, despite having hated Pearl and her annoying, terrible friends and their stupid matching jewelry--and she looks at Thorne’s smug smile, and she can't bring herself to hate this one.
It's ugly and stupid and she loves it. Even if it will turn her neck green.
“Too bad you can’t steal anymore, huh?”
He laughs, sits down at the edge of the dock and pats the planks next to him for her to join. “Too bad,” he says. “Saw these old binoculars at the bazaar, too. Different stand, bigger guards. They didn't even know what they had--these things predated the Third World War. Could’ve paid off the Rampion and then some.”
“President Vargas would have your head.”
“If he found out.”
“Which he would. You know he has eyes on you everywhere.”
“Yeah,” Thorne sighs. “Would’ve been easier.”
Cinder shakes her head. She leans sideways, bumps his shoulder with hers. “Too easy.”
“Hey. I look like the kind of guy interested in hard work?”
“Sure you do, Captain. I've heard you're a hero.”
Thorne huffs. He ducks away from her gaze again, nudges a few pebbles off the dock.“Pretty sure that’s just Cress projecting. She… does that.”
“I’m pretty sure Cress just--makes people want to be better,” Cinder says.
“She makes me want to be better at a lot of things,” Thorne says, wiggling his eyebrows.
And there it is.
Disgusted, and not at all surprised, Cinder smacks his arm. He squawks as Cinder goes for his chest, then starts yelling as she lunges forward and pushes him off the dock and into the pond. He goes flying pretty easily, caught off-guard and already nearly off-balance at the edge of the wood planks, and tumbles into the water with a big splash.
When he emerges, Cinder’s laughing--at the weeds in his hair, and the algae on his neck, and the murder he’s got written all over his face. She’s on her feet before he can think to reach for her ankles; instead, he starts splashing her relentlessly, throwing big handfuls of pond gunk at her as she backs down the dock, back and back, holding her aching stomach as she laughs--
As she misses a step and backs right off the dock--
Gravity yanks Cinder into the pond. She goes down hard, flailing for purchase, heart galloping in her chest. Water closes around her. Warm, dark water pulls her down, and she imagines she can feel it already sinking into the joints of her new cybernetics, frying her wiring, seeping into her lungs, and she can't breathe, can't reach the muddy bottom even though she knows it's there, right there, right there, all she has to do is find it and push herself back up, it's right there--
Sounds filter strange though water--her pulse pounds in her ears, and she thinks she can hear the back of her neck hissing--but above all that, above her, she hears loud shouting.
Someone grabs her arm.
Cinder holds on tight as she's pulled up. Thorne is there, when they break the surface, when she can see again--Thorne, with his floppy, wet, algae-green hair, the gold of his half-heart necklace glinting in the sun. He pulls her close as she coughs and struggles to tread water. “There are easier ways to get into my arms, you know.”
She splutters. It comes out hoarse and watery, almost the laugh she meant it to be. “No kidding.”
“Oh, stars, Cinder!”
“Cinder!”
Up on the dock, just a few feet away, Cress is on her knees, almost tipping forward over the water in effort to reach for Cinder and Thorne. Kai is right behind her--shirtless, frozen in the process of taking off his boot. In the process of disrobing in order to jump in after her?
“Hi,” she calls.
“Are you okay? We were coming over from the barn and saw you fall in,” Cress says, leaning impossibly closer and waving for them to swim faster. Thorne grunts, and she motions harder, says to him, “I didn't think you were awake yet!”
Kai puts his boot back on. He bends down and takes Cinder’s slippery hand. Holds tight. “Certainly surprised me.”
The three of them manage to pull Cinder--cyborg-heavy and waterlogged--onto the dock, and then go back for Thorne, who pulls himself up and immediately starts fussing with his hair.
Cinder leans against Kai and takes a few deep breaths. Kai rubs carefully, gently, at the back of her neck.
The pond settles.
“Cress,” Thorne says solemnly as she pulls a tangle of weeds from behind his ear. “Go get the rice.”
Cinder kicks him.