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He knew it as soon as the door shut behind him.
He didn’t know how he knew it—just that he did. In the stillness of his apartment, in the emptiness he’d come to appreciate, maybe he knew so well now how it felt to be alone, that he could tell exactly how it was to not to be alone. Or knew what it was to be watched, maybe. At least in this particular way, and in the particular way that it felt.
So he glanced, cursory, around the apartment. Which was fruitless, of course. And Beef, excited, was squirming in his arms. He decided in a moment just to ask.
Muttering: “What are you doing here?”
He wasn’t sure where she was, exactly—perceptive as he had trained himself to be, he would never reach clairvoyance. But he knew enough of her subtleties to not flinch when she shimmered into view, skulking in the far corner. Past the kitchen, beside the sliding door that led to his balcony. He couldn’t see her face very well like this, couldn’t tell if she was wearing the mask, which suited him just fine. He wasn’t sure if he could stand to see her wearing it.
“Was I really that obvious?” She asked this without her usual undertone of irony; as if she really wanted an answer. “I must be losing my touch.”
Robert appraised what he could of her—weight against the wall, arms crossed, legs crossed too, at the ankles. She was the perfect picture of caution. “I wouldn’t say that.”
He set Beef on the ground, slow about his every movement when he did it, like she was a bird he’d been afraid to startle off. Beef didn’t share the sentiment—his nails clicked against the linoleum when he went to greet her, tail wagging, nose poking, sniffing around the rubber of her shoes. She didn’t bend to pet him but she didn’t nudge him away, either.
“Looks like you’ve been decorating,” she said, for some reason—maybe for no reason. For once it seemed like she was grappling to fill the silence. In the shadowed room he could barely make out that she had lifted a hand, gesturing to the space around herself. “Something about this ambience doesn’t quite scream you, though.”
He didn’t miss the accusation in her tone, and knew that she must have been trying to get something across to him, but he wasn’t quite catching her total meaning. Not that it mattered. He watched Beef move off toward the futon, looking a bit shunned.
“What did he ever do to you?” he asked, expressionless.
“Is that what we’re gonna do?” she asked him. “Pretend like everything’s normal?”
“You’re asking me? I didn’t plan for this.” He forced himself to squint, trying to see her better. “What are you hiding for?”
“I’m not hiding,” she scoffed. “I … I wasn’t sure if you’d be alone.”
“Well, I am. You can celebrate now. Outside of the shadows.”
She made no move to do such a thing. It made him feel itchy, off-guard, not being able to really see her. Unable to see if she was angry, or dispassionate, or relieved. He figured that was probably on purpose.
He gestured impatiently. “Are we just going to sit here and stare at each other?”
“I’m thinking,” she said.
“Take your time, then, I guess. Should I play some elevator music?”
“Was that supposed to be funny?” she asked him, her accompanying laugh short and condescending. “Maybe you’re losing your touch.”
It was easy to ignore her when she stooped to insults. He asked her again, because he did want to know: “What are you doing here, Visi?”
Despite how she’d dodged it before, she’d apparently had the answer locked and loaded. “Maybe I wanted to see you.”
“You’re gonna make me ask a third time?” he asked, setting his keys on the counter, taking one, two, three tentative steps into the larger part of the room.
She sighed—or at least it sounded like it. Then she said at once, “You haven’t been using the suit.”
Robert blinked. He didn’t know what he’d been expecting to hear, but it definitely hadn’t been that. He shook his head. “No. I haven’t.”
Without warning—though he felt stupid immediately after thinking it, not sure what sort of warning would have been reasonable to expect—she pushed herself from the corner and came into the light. Bare-faced, thank god, and dressed for the weather, jacket thin-looking but zipped right up to her throat.
“Out of spite?” she guessed. “I touched the Pulse, so now it’s tainted?”
“You know that isn’t why,” he told her.
She didn’t attempt to hide that she was searching his face. Analyzing his expression—maybe for a lie that wasn’t there. At length she said, “I guess our little rag-tag crew really did make you soft.”
He took a breath, unsure of any point in denying it. “Guess so.”
“Come on,” she said immediately, and she laughed again, but the sound remained short-lived and mean-spirited. “Really.”
All of this was entirely too much for Robert to wrap his head around—so he focused on the list of things he knew for certain, however short. One: she was here, really here, in his apartment, apparently for a conversation. Two: he was ill-prepared and ill-positioned, and wouldn’t be able to stop her leaving if he said something to make it happen. And three, which he was most certain of: he’d give a limb if it meant she wouldn’t leave.
“I don’t know what kind of answer you’re looking for,” he admitted, hands hanging limply at his sides—he had no earthly idea of what to do with them, and she was staring at him so intently he was afraid any move he made could be interpreted as something she’d want to run from. “It just … hasn’t felt right.”
“That’s not good enough,” she said.
Robert huffed—he let his gaze wander away from her for a moment, but only for a moment. Wetting his lips, he told her, “I’m sorry to disappoint you.”
Her mouth twitched. For a second he thought she would scowl but she began to smirk, instead, and began to reminisce: “You know, I’ve missed that dry humor of yours. Could really use it these days, too.”
Robert didn’t know what to say to this. So he asked something instead. “Where have you been?”
“Here and there. The details don’t matter.”
He fought down the rising lump in his throat with a hard swallow. “Are you safe?”
She gave him a queer look. “What, you wanna know if I’ve been using protection while the universe has been fucking me?”
He just blinked at her. “You know what I mean.”
“I’m fine,” she told him, and naturally he wasn’t convinced. “You don’t have to worry about me anymore.”
“Have you considered,” he said, gambling, “that I can’t help worrying about you?”
“No,” she retorted, petulant. “If I were in your shoes—”
“You’re not,” he said sharply, not interested in hearing what she’d do if their positions were swapped because it didn’t fucking matter. “You don’t know how I feel. You certainly don’t get to choose it.”
“That’s just like you, Robert. ‘Rules for thee, not for me,’ right?”
“I’ve never told you how to feel, Visi.”
“No, just what to do—because you think you know what I’m feeling already.”
Robert squinted. “Hard for me to speak around all those words you’re shoving into my mouth. Sure you came to hear me give an explanation for something?”
“Shut up.” Her shoulders dropped—her hands gestured toward him. “I asked what I came here to ask you.”
“Oh yeah?” He nodded toward the door. “Then leave,” he said, while thinking on a desperate loop: stay.
“You should be out there,” she continued, ignoring him. “You know this city could use you. The team could use you. I just—I don’t—” She cut herself off with a huff, fists clenched. “Why the fuck aren’t you back in the suit?”
“I don’t know.”
“Bullshit,” she snapped.
“Yeah, well, maybe it’s none of your fucking business,” he said, taking a step in—unsurprisingly, she mirrored it, stepping in too. “Maybe I don’t want to be Mecha Man anymore.”
“And now’s when you make that decision? Not months ago, when Royd was breaking his back getting it up and running for you? When I put my neck on the line getting the Pulse back for you?”
“I explicitly told you not to do that, if you recall.”
“You love being a hero,” she said, like an accusation. “It’s all you’ve ever known, helping people, fighting on the front lines—”
“God, are you—” Robert passed a hand over his face, frustrated. “Are you actually lecturing me about hero shit? Are you serious?”
Her whole body seemed to shrug. “Someone fucking should.”
“And you don’t think I feel the same way about you?” he asked, shrugging too.
There was silence between them for a moment, because she only looked at him after that. Saying nothing. Maybe she wasn’t expecting it.
He exhaled. Tried his damndest to gather himself—and told himself to say something honest.
What he managed was, “It’s good to see you.”
Her mouth twisted—she was smiling, but it didn’t look friendly. “It’s good to see me?” she echoed.
“Yes,” he said, emphatic. To him it was obvious.
“You might be as stupid as you look, Robertson.”
“Ouch,” he said, deadpan. “Any other stinging words you’ve got for me? I’m still glad that you’re—” Fuck, he was terrified of scaring her off. “I haven’t heard from you in weeks. Is it really that insane if I’m happy you’re not dead?”
“At the rate we’ve been going? You should want me dead,” she told him.
Unthinkable. His stomach disappeared altogether at the thought of it. “Well, I don’t.”
“I didn’t kill him as a favor to you,” she said.
“I know that.”
“Then why …” she trailed off, pressing her lips together until they turned white. His heart ached to watch it. As sure as he was that she wanted to seem like she had it all figured out, he didn’t think he had ever seen her so lost. She admitted, quiet as death: “I don’t get you.”
It was a drop of the truth in an ocean of playing pretend, but he clung to it nonetheless. Blinking sadly at her, wholly unsure of what he could do to make it alright again. “I’m sorry,” he said, because he felt it—and because it was something to say.
The silence swallowed them again. It wasn’t so long ago that he might have liked for the air to hang still between them like this, but not like this—because this was unbearable. And he hated it. He wanted her back—the person she’d shown him she was, beneath her power, beneath being a hero or a villain, beneath the bullshit every day kept bringing to his doorstep, to her doorstep.
“Come back to SDN,” he said, before he could stop himself.
Her eyes flickered with something, but it was so quick that he didn’t catch it. She began to shake her head, turning for his balcony. “If I knew you’d come out with that shit right away, I wouldn’t’ve—”
“What, Visi, you want me to sing you a little song first? Warm up the room?”
“Fuck you,” she told him, and her voice was airy but it was tense, too, corded with something, as if the moment she got out of there she was planning to scream. She stopped, though. Turned to look at him again, mouth scowling. “I don’t want to hear any more of your hero bullshit. Not now, not fucking ever. Because I tried that, remember?”
“Courtney,” he tried.
“And you know I wasn’t half-assing it. At first, maybe, but not—not when it counted. I tried.”
“I know that,” Robert told her. “Fuck, of course I know that.”
“Then stop,” Courtney said. “I can’t—fuck, I can’t take it when you’re—how many reasons do I have to give you for you to really give up on me, Robert? What else do I have to do?”
He didn’t have a reply for this. Not one that would have satisfied her, nor one he would have felt comfortable providing. He felt sad—and heavy, so heavy, like if she really had gone to the balcony the wind would have knocked him right over.
Impatient, or maybe mistaking his silence for something it wasn’t, she made a desperate sound and rushed forward, closing the gap between them to put both of her hands on his chest and push. He stumbled backward a step, not resisting.
“Answer me!” she demanded, desperate.
Just as desperate, he told her: “I don’t have an answer.”
“I need you to hate me,” she pleaded, eyes wide and dark and shining in the dim glowy light. “I can’t—I can’t go on like this anymore, okay? Is that what you need to hear? That you’re—fucking everywhere—in every corner, every place that I look? Living fuckin’ rent free in my head, like you’re under my skin?”
His heart was hammering. “You haven’t run out of chances, Courtney. Not from me.”
“I’m—” A funny sound escaped her, something incredulous, a half-hysterical bolt of laughter, and she lifted her arms to clutch either side of her face. “I feel like I’ve taken crazy pills. How can you still trust me enough for that? Are you stupid?”
“It’s not about trust.”
“What, so this is because you like me?” she asked, and she sneered when she did it, like the idea was ridiculous. “Do you think I came here for your sage advice and a fuck?”
“Sage advice, maybe,” he deadpanned. “Though I wouldn’t put it past you to throw in the fuck as a bonus.”
“And if I told you that you had it backwards?”
“I’d be even less surprised, but it’s not happening. Not like this, not when it’s—” He began to gesture between them but it died halfway through, an aborted attempt to insist upon a connection that maybe just didn’t exist anymore. “This isn’t you, Courtney.”
She made a face, then, like he’d insulted her worse than she’d ever experienced. “Are you kidding?”
“It’s not a line,” he told her. “You’ve made some shitty fucking mistakes, okay, show me someone who hasn’t. Do you think I walk around without a single regret weighing on me? That any of the Z-team does, or Chase, or—”
“Blazer?” she guessed, voice crackling like fire.
“Or Blazer,” he said, nodding once—pointedly ignoring what he knew she meant to imply. “Or any of us, for fuck’s sake. It’s not too late. Let me help you.”
“You can’t help me,” she said, mouth quivering—resolve withering. She began to shake her head. “It doesn’t matter what you do. Do you get it? I’ll hurt you. I’ll keep fucking up every time.”
“Then do that,” he told her. “Fuck up. Make mistakes, say the wrong thing—that’s normal.” He braved a step forward, and then another, reaching for her, touching her arm. “If you’d just let me—”
She slapped his hand away. “Don’t,” she snapped—but her voice was quiet, and her sentence broke in the middle. She swung that same hand forward and it connected with his chest, fighting, and she was telling him, “Shut up, don’t—no, don’t—”
Fighting because he was taking her by the wrist, stopping her from hitting him again. Her other arm swung around in an attempt at a right hook but he caught that, too, not letting her fight, forcing her to still.
“Stop,” he said, calming, hopefully calming, trying to calm her—she tried to yank backward, tried to twist from his grip, but he wouldn’t let her, holding her in place. “Courtney, stop.”
She did stop. Her struggling slowed, and she only gave a few more pathetic tugs before a sob escaped her and her shoulders bowed in. “Fuck,” she cried, hands gently uncurling. She looked at him, and he looked at her. Then she came forward in a rush and kissed him.
And he let her. God help him, he let her, releasing her wrists so she could lock them around the back of his neck. She pushed against him, firmly, warmly, and he touched her, held her—pulled her flush against him with trembling hands, clutching tightly at the small of her back.
She shuddered against him, gasped like she was holding back a sob. She lurched forward again, kissing him harder, and he rocked with the motion. It made him turn her, move her, to steady them against a wall, and she didn’t panic when her back connected roughly with it—she only broke the kiss to speak desperately into the windstorm of breath between them:
“Fuck, I can’t take it—” a hiccup, like she really was sobbing— “I can’t.”
She pulled him again, into a sucking kiss that made him scramble for purchase at the side of her neck. His thumb traveled clumsily up the column of her throat and when it swept across the hard line of her jaw he found it slick with flowing tears.
“It’s okay,” he told her, even though it wasn’t, it wasn’t, none of this was, but he didn’t care, couldn’t think, didn’t want to. He clutched her hip with one hand and wanted to say it again but with her insistence at their closeness he could only breathe the words into her open, pliant mouth: “It’s okay.”
Her arms came down, hands opening against his shoulders, flexing there and then squeezing, pulling at his shirt so that the seams strained. They kissed again, or kept kissing still—the breaks between them were little more than smears of their mouths as they drew air in and the string of them was unpatterned and hurried, breathless and hot, slowly mixing his mind into a slurry. Her hands traveled down to his chest, thumbs touching above his sternum, and he tempered a moan, moving his hand from her waist to the wall, an anchor for him to lean his full weight against.
She wouldn’t allow it. She clawed at that wrist with a hand, making a point of dragging his hand from the wall to her belly, then from her belly to her clothed breast, pushing it into his open palm.
She said—or whimpered, or begged: “Please.”
He swore, and sighed, and at length he told her, turning away from a kiss, “We shouldn’t—we can’t, it’s—”
Her mouth, searing, moved to his jaw and then to his throat, and he shivered at the press of her teeth. “Fuck me,” she told him, pleaded with him, “I want you to—”
“Courtney,” he rasped. He couldn’t—except that wasn’t true, he could, and he wanted to, wanted to see her bare, kiss her all over, hear what kind of noises she’d make beneath him in bed. He wanted to make her say his name, again and again, until her voice gave out. He’d do anything to keep her here, that’s what he’d told himself, what he believed, and she was—she was—
She was fumbling with the buckle of his belt and he couldn’t do it. He clutched her hands with both of his, stilling her movements, and she made a desperate little noise that devastated him.
“Why,” she demanded, and he put a hand on her face, hooked a thumb beneath her jaw. He pulled her face up to make her look at him, and she did it. Her cheeks were flushed and her mouth was swollen and her eyes were bloodshot but she did it, looking at him, gasping between open sobs.
And he answered her. “I love you.”
She breathed. Her exhale was audible, visible, and he felt her chest sink in with it. For a moment it was like he hadn’t said anything at all, because she was staring at him, silent, only staring, only breathing. But gently, slowly, her expression began to shift—and it was slight, almost imperceptible. Her eyes weakly squinting, her mouth dropping open.
And he knew she understood. Desire notwithstanding—and he desired so much more than her body, more than her soul—he couldn’t do it when she could be gone again, so easily, like smoke or like sand. Things that slipped away when he would try to lift them up.
She was nodding. A slow, shallow movement he might have missed if he wasn’t holding her. Then she pushed, peeling away from him—and he didn’t force her to stay.
He wanted it, instead, staring helplessly at the wall. And he said, “Don’t leave.”
“I have to go,” she told him simply. He heard the click of the sliding glass door and turned at once to look at her.
“Why did you come here?” he demanded. Maybe he was angry—he couldn’t tell. Picking a singular emotion out of the flurry of them he was feeling seemed impossible. God. He just wanted to know.
“I told you already,” she said. Voice lowering, sobering: “I wanted to see you.”
He put a fist against the wall, clenching it. Hopeful. Hopeless. “I want you to stay,” he admitted. He did it bodily, folding in a bit. He wanted to stand, to be strong, but it felt as though she’d drained all the strength right out of him. And he ached. He ached more than he knew how to express to her.
“I can’t,” she whispered, over her shoulder. “And I … I wouldn’t have. Even if …”
Even if. He scrubbed at the side of his face with a hand, feeling numb. Feeling everything.
“Will I see you again?” he asked.
She turned a bit more. Just enough to look at him, to really look at him. Her silhouette was so striking there, in the pale streaming light of the moon; she was beautiful, and ephemeral, and everything he wanted. And he hoped. He hoped.
“Don’t hold your breath,” she said, and in a moment, vanished.