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quaranmine · 2 years ago

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The Incandescence of a Dying Light (Chapter Six)

Someone’s worried about Grian, and the Forest Service comes to collect Mumbo’s bike.

Chapter Six: 8,724

<< Chapter Five | Masterpost | Chapter Seven >>

The other half of the fifth chapter! I hope you enjoy this 1988 sequence especially, I was looking forward to it a lot (and it single handedly made the chapter so long it had to be split in two!)

No real CWs this time. I personally think that if you have made it this far then I don’t really have to warn you about the themes of loss and grief anymore, but just in case: yep, still very present.

November 20, 1988

It’s about noon on a Sunday, and Grian is…not doing much, actually. He has a thousand things he needs to do, ranging from cleaning out the refrigerator to trying to change his car’s oil to looking into a part-time second job, but instead he’s lying on the couch trying to watch TV. Somewhere along the way he tuned out of the program and started staring at the ceiling instead, mentally tracing out the patterns in the spackle.

The man on the drones on and on in the background, until he’s just part of it. Grian can feel himself starting to drift to sleep.

Then the phone rings.

Grian startles awake and sits up, scowling at it in the kitchen. He hasn’t the faintest idea who is calling him, other than maybe a telemarketer, but do those people work on Sunday? Well, perhaps they do. Everyone is home then, afterall.

It rings twice more, so he gets up and answers the phone. “Hello?” he says.

“Griba!” shouts a voice on the other end of the line.

And–it’s a very familiar voice.

“Pearl?” Grian says, just the slightest bit baffled. “Is that you?”

“Hi!” she says. “How are you doing? Are you busy?”

“I’m fine,” he says. “How are you? What do you need?”

“Can’t I just call to say hi?” Pearl asks.

“Of course, but–”

“But the international rates?” Pearl says. Then she laughs. “Oh, shush, I know you were thinking about it.”

“Oh noooo,” Grian says. “I don’t care about that at all, we can talk as long as you like.”

It’s a lie. He was definitely thinking about the international rates, and then immediately feeling bad about it because Pearl is a friend. He puts friends before money, of course, it’s just…well, it was expensive. But worth it! Pearl is Pearl. But every minute on the phone eats into his checkbook, and it’s hard not to think about.

Pearl laughs again. “Well, I’m glad you don’t worry about that. Not that it matters anyway; this call is local.”

Local. Local?

“Huh?”

“Yeah, you were right Griba, I did need something when I called,” Pearl says. “Can you pick me up from the airport?”

Grian’s head is spinning. “You’re at the airport?” he says incredulously. “Like, in Colorado? In Denver? Right now?”

“Yep,” Pearl says. “And I need a ride. Well, I could go get a taxi somewhere. But I figured I’d ask my friend first. Are you busy?”

Yeah, busy falling asleep to daytime TV on the couch. “Um, no,” he says.

“Great! I’ll see you there!” Pearl says. “Wait, how long will it take? I don’t know where you live, actually. Ooh, this is exciting! I’ll finally get to see your place.”

“Um, give me like half an hour and I’ll be there,” Grian says slowly.

He and Pearl say their goodbyes for now, and after she hangs up he finds himself staring at the phone for several moments. What just happened? First of all, Pearl’s in Denver, apparently. Second of all, he did not know this was happening. Thirdly, his afternoon just got way more interesting.

He grabs his keys off the counter and makes his way downstairs.

»»———-　　———-««

When he arrives at the airport, in the long line of cars waiting to pick people up and drop them off at the terminal, he does not expect to see Pearl waiting outside for him. Yet he picks her out instantly, a familiar face in a crowd of strangers.

She’s bundled up in a black hoodie. The hood is up over her head, but he can see the long wavy tendrils of brown hair peeking out from behind it. Her hands are shoved in the hoodie’s pocket, and her nose is pink from the cold. When she exhales, he can see the faintest cloud of her breath.

He can hardly remember being so happy to see someone before. The second he sees her face, any doubt or mild annoyance at her unexpected stay just melts away.

He pulls his car up as close as he can to her, and throws it in park. She doesn’t know what car he’s driving, of course–she’s never visited him here. He leaps out and calls her name.

“Pearl!” he shouts.

She spins around and a grin breaks out on her face the moment she spots him. He races up to her on the curb and she throws her arms around him in a hug immediately. They cling to each other for a moment, before letting go.

“Oh, it’s been so long since I’ve seen you!” Pearl says.

“Oh, yeah,” Grian says. “A few years, right? Not since I’ve been here.”

“Ah!” Pearl squeaks. “I can’t wait to see it. I should’ve come for a visit so much sooner.”

Grian breathes a sigh, not of any annoyance or tiredness, but perhaps–of relief? Relief from what, he doesn’t quite know, but he’s so happy to see Pearl it’s like he can hardly speak. His breath clouds in front of him.

“Let’s get you in the car,” he says. “It’s so cold out here, why weren’t you waiting inside?”

“Well, it might be cold out here,” Pearl says, attempting to pick up her bag. Grian steals it out from under her grasp before she can, though, so she just trails after him to the car. “But it certainly isn’t cold at home. It’s kind of nice, actually. Anyway, I wasn’t out here waiting the entire time, I just walked out a few minutes before you came.”

“Well, don’t freeze on me before you even get here,” Grian says. He loads her things in the car, and they hop in. He starts to navigate out of the airport traffic. “How long was that flight?” he asks. “I mean, I assume you flew in from Sydney.”

“Ugh, it was never ending!” Pearl says. “It was like 12 or 13 hours, and that only got me to Los Angeles. Then I had a connection here.” She glances at the clock on his dashboard. “Did you know it’s almost the same time I left?”

“Huh?”

“Yeah. I left around noon on the 20th. Then I landed and now it’s around noon on the 20th again.”

“Wow.”

“It feels like I got put in a time vortex or something and they zapped a whole day from me. And then I woke up and I’m repeating the day again.”

Grian side eyes her in the passenger seat. “Are you, perhaps, a little tired?”

“Exhausted.”

He smiles just a little. “I bet you’re hungry too,” he says. “Let’s get lunch on our way back to my apartment.”

»»———-　　———-««

They get lunch, and it’s great. They talk about various, mostly mundane things about their lives over the past few years. They’ve kept in touch ever since graduating university together, even as their lives diverged on totally different paths on totally different continents. But that was mostly just letters and phone calls. It’s entirely different to be face to face again. It’s so much better to be face to face again.

Grian asks about her career in Australia. “So, have you designed the next Sydney Opera House yet?” he teases.

Pearl gasps in fake horror. “Of course not! There can’t be a ‘next’ Opera House, it’s iconic!”

“Eh,” Grian says. “I think you could come up with a cooler one.”

She rolls her eyes affectionately. “Alright, stop it.”

“I’m dead serious. I think you could make a better one.”

She laughs and shakes her head. “Seriously though, I mostly just do office buildings.”

“Hm, well that’s boring,” Grian says and takes a sip of his water. “We for sure don’t need any more of those.”

“That’s what most of the work is,” she says. “Lots of new development to work on! So what have you been up to? Any interesting projects lately?”

Grian hesitates a bit in replying. The answer is no, of course. Pearl’s aware of his job from some of their previous communication in the past three years, but now that they’re sitting here face to face she clearly wants to hear all about it without the constraints of a phone call or letter.

He just, well, has nothing to say. He hasn't even really received projects lately.

He and Mumbo came to Colorado a little over two years ago after Mumbo was offered an engineering job in Denver. Grian had figured he might as well dust off his completely unused dual citizenship and follow him here–it’s not like it was even a difficult process for him. It was the perfect sort of adventure to follow up five years of intense schooling, and an interesting place to put his new skills to test.

It had been that which enticed him to go with Mumbo. That, and the way his stomach had twisted when he thought about saying goodbye. They’d been inseparable for over a decade and Grian refused to accept a reality where his best friend lived so far away. Truthfully, Mumbo was a little apprehensive about moving to an entirely new country alone, so this had worked out perfectly.

Grian would go with him. They’d split an apartment and get settled in for a while and experience life in a new country. Grian would finish the rest of his architecture field training in Colorado and finally get his license. Mumbo would work on creating machines and learn about computers.

It was fine. It was fun. They had a good time–there were endless things to do, from skiing to hiking to rafting to biking.

Then Mumbo went missing, and Grian was just…still here, but missing everything that was worthwhile. He was struggling. Not showing up to work. Getting demoted.

“I haven’t really had anything interesting to work on,” he says finally. “There was this one house–way too massive, really, and the owner could never really decide what he wanted but he wasn’t so bad. But then I had to leave to…”

He trails off. Pearl glances at him and opens her mouth, but she rethinks it after a moment and shuts it again. She’s smart, and part of that intelligence is knowing when to not poke around.

“Mostly they just have me working on codes and compliance right now,” he finishes quietly.

It’s still an important part of the process, making sure that all of the projects are in alignment with local building codes. Sometimes it’s even frustrating, when he has to figure out things like getting a water line from whichever locality is closest for someone’s house perched high on a mountainside.

But he doesn’t have any of his own clients anymore. He does work for his coworker’s projects. He doesn’t do any drafting. He doesn’t touch any blueprints. He doesn’t design anything.

It’s not really the update that he wants to give Pearl. They met each other in university because they studied in the same architecture program. They spent long nights in the library together. He’s seen her rip up her papers in frustration when things weren’t working quite right, and she’s seen him start crying on the floor of her dorm room the night before a particularly major test. They graduated together.

It just doesn’t look good. Of course, he knows Pearl very well. She isn’t going to think anything less of him. It’s more, well, himself that he has to worry about.

Pearl purses her lips, and moves on. “Well,” she says, “that’s all very important. God knows we studied it enough. Don’t worry about projects, you’ll find some cool work soon.”

“As cool as office buildings?”

“With any luck, even better,” she says.

“How long are you staying?” he asks, realizing he still doesn’t know.

“Little over a week,” she responds. “I’m leaving next Monday.”

He frowns. “I probably have work, but maybe I can take off a morning to take you back to the airport–”

“I can survive in a taxi,” Pearl says. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Well, you asked me to pick you up this time.”

“Mm, well, I wanted to see you,” she says, “and I had a feeling you weren’t going to be busy.”

He hates that she’s right, but only just a little. He’s sort of glad he wasn’t busy so that he could see her, since she’s apparently decided to drop this entire trip on him with no notice whatsoever. It does not miss him that she could have done this basically any weekend in the last several months and landed on a day where he wasn’t busy.

“What are your plans for this week?” he asks.

“I want to see everything!” Pearl says, and stretches her arms wide to accommodate the words. She has to pull her arm back in quick, since she nearly smacks a waitress walking by. They both descend into laughter.

“Pearl,” Grian hisses, “we’re in public!”

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” she whispers. “I’m just so excited! I want to sightsee!”

Grian leans back in his chair and regards her with a critical eye. He’s smiling. “I don’t know if a week is enough to see everything,” he says.

“I am going to do my best,” she says, mock-serious.

It suddenly hits Grian. “Wait,” he groans. “I seriously have to work tomorrow. And Tuesday. I could ask off, but…” He winces as he trails off. “I kind of have a track record with my boss and I don’t think he really appreciates me calling out last minute.”

“That’s fine,” Pearl says. “What? I know I came here without telling you but it’s not like I wasn’t prepared to take care of myself. I’ll just see some things on my own.”

Grian nods. “I have a half-day on Wednesday,” he says, “but I think he’d be more amenable to letting me have that as a full day. Then Thursday’s off for Thanksgiving, and Friday too. Then of course the weekend.”

Pearl looks self-satisfied. “Good. I meant to plan it that way so you’d have a little time off.”

“So what do you want to do?” he asks. “One of them, I guess, since everything’s on the table.”

Pearl leans closer to him across the table. “Please,” she says. “I want to go skiing. I’ve never been skiing. Can we please go skiing? Please?”

Grian laughs again at the face she’s making. She’s so dead serious in her begging. “I’ll call around and see if any places are open. As you can see, we don’t have any snow around here right now. But further up into the actual mountains probably does.”

“Eee!” Pearl squeaks in excitement. “I’m so ready.”

“Oh?” Grian says. “I will literally bet you on how many times you fall.”

“I’ll take your money,” she says. “I’ll be the greatest first-time skier there ever was.”

“You will fall on your butt no less than a dozen times,” he shoots back.

They continue talking for a while, back and forth. Pearl tells him about various stories and adventures from Australia. She begs him to come visit–she came here, so now it’s his turn to come to her. Maybe next summer, when it’ll be cooler in Australia and hotter down here.

She’s obviously prepared for their trip and seeing him again, because she’s also brought photos to share with him. He looks through a few photos of what her house looks like, what a few buildings she’s worked on looks like, a picture of her by the ocean (she says he can keep that one, as long as she gets to go home with a photo of him), and even the two cats she has adopted.

They get the check–Grian pays for the whole thing without blinking–and head back to his apartment.

They’re discussing sleeping arrangements as they walk up Grian’s stairwell. He has his keys out already, and they clang a little step-by-step.

“I’ll sleep on the couch,” he declares. “End of story.”

“But,” she says, “I’ll feel so bad taking your bed from you.”

“You’re a guest!” he says. “I’m not letting you sleep for a week on the couch! You can take my bed.”

Neither of them mention that there’s a third option. Or really a fourth, because Pearl could always get a hotel room if it didn't work out, but she had asked to stay with him. She must have spent so much on flights already, it was the least he could do.

So there’s really only three options, and only two are being discussed. The apartment is a two bedroom. Mumbo’s room has sat empty for five months now, completely untouched. But that room isn’t up for grabs–it’s a time capsule, frozen from the moment he left it. Grian doesn’t mention it. Pearl is smart enough to not ask about it.

“Ugh, fine,” Pearl says, rolling her eyes. “I guess I’ll take your room. If you make me. I still feel like it’s weird though.”

Grian freezes on the top step, and Pearl nearly bumps into him. “Oh no,” he mumbles. “My apartment is–Pearl, listen, I didn’t know you were coming, so I didn’t really take a chance to clean up anything, so it’s definitely a little messy in here, and–”

She cuts him off, voice bright. “So what I’m hearing is the couch might be better than your room?”

“No, ugh, I’m just saying I’m sorry that this place looks so bad.” He sighs.

“I get it,” she says. “Don’t worry.”

“It’s not how I wanted it to be,” he says softly, and slots the key into the handle. “Just let me work on it, I’ll get it fixed up.”

They go into the apartment. Really, it isn’t that bad, but he’s embarrassed about it nonetheless. It isn’t filthy or grimy, it’s just cluttered. He’s always been a cluttered person. There’s stuff lying randomly about, like the somewhat muddy shoes by the door, the jackets shed across chairs, or the laundry basket of unfolded clothes sitting on a dining room chair. At least three random empty drinking glasses are sitting on the coffee table in the living room. And, well, he could have probably bothered to do the dishes from the last three days, but there’s only one of him and he doesn’t cook much, so really it isn’t very much even if it looks bad.

Everything in here would be so fast to clean up, but whenever he tries it feels like an insurmountable barrier. He does things a little at a time, so that it never gets too out of hand, but he can’t remember the last time it looked good. It’s just something that’s continually slipping further and further away. It feels like one day he’ll wake up and it will finally be completely out of control.

Pearl doesn’t say anything. She just walks in and drops her bags–which she had insisted on carrying since he insisted on paying for lunch–on the floor and puts her hands on her hips. “This is a cute place,” she says. “I like the lighting from the windows. And you’ve got a view of the mountains!”

“It’s cute when it’s clean,” he mutters. It’s like he knows how to be ashamed of how the place looks, but not how to do anything about it. He’s got the external motivation of another human being seeing it now though, and he’s itching to work and hide everything here.

Maybe it’s concerning that his main motivation after months on end is just so that he can hide. This thought does not cross his mind, because the sort of people who hide things from others are fantastic at hiding things from themselves, too.

“I saw your dorm room in university,” she reminds him. “You can’t seriously think I wasn’t prepared for your clutter.”

“This is worse,” Grian groans.

“Eh, not really,” Pearl says. “I think you’re doing well, all things considered.”

All things considered. Grian bites his lip. It’s nice that she thinks so. He isn’t sure where she got that impression, but if he can spend the rest of the week cultivating it then maybe she’ll stop worrying.

She walks over to the laundry basket on the chair. “Is this clean?” she asks.

“Yes, of course,” he responds, and he wants to add “I’m not that bad" to the end of the statement until he remembers the floor of his bedroom, which is exactly “that bad.”

“Great!” she says. And then she sits down. And starts folding it.

“What are you doing?” he asks, and snatches the basket away from her. “You’re a guest! You’re on vacation! Don’t be doing that?”

Pearl frowns. “Um,” she says. “Just helping?”

“I don’t need you to help,” he says, and it comes out a bit harsher than intended. “Just, like, go relax or something. Take a nap. I know you’re exhausted.”

A brief look of hurt flashes over her face, and vanishes almost as quickly as it arrives. “Grian?” she asks. “What do you think I’m here for?”

“To see me?” he says, confused.

“Yeah,” she says. “Of course it’s to see you, I missed you. But also to help.”

“I missed you too,” he says automatically, but when the rest of the sentence catches up to him he shakes his head. “I don’t need help.”

She raises an eyebrow. “You don’t? Then why can nobody get a hold of you, Grian? Why does your apartment look like this? Why do you deflect phone calls and make excuses? We’re all worried about you, you know. We don’t know what’s going on.”

“We?” Grian says. “You’re talking about me behind my back? Who’s we?”

“Well, we wouldn’t be talking behind your back if you talked to us,” Pearl replies, matter-of-fact. “And the ‘we’ is your friends. Your family, Grian.”

“I’m fine,” he snaps. “I’m sorry to have you worried but you don’t need to be.”

“You don’t get to try that on me,” Pearl says firmly. “I know you too well.”

“Maybe that’s why I don’t talk to you,” he says.

Pearl looks back at him, for a long time. He doesn’t return her eye contact, and instead begins to pick up the glasses from the coffee to take them into the kitchen. He knows looking at her will just make him sad. He also knows that he really, really wants to look back at her.

He misses her so hard it hurts. Mumbo hasn’t come back, but she did. She was never really missing, though–just separated far, far, away by circumstance.

She takes a deep breath. “Well. Maybe that’s why I didn’t tell you I was coming.”

He says nothing, and turns on the tap. It’ll take a moment for the water to heat up.

“You always try to hide,” she says. She picks up another item out of the basket and begins to fold it. “But you can’t hide if you didn’t expect me to come.”

She reads him like a book every time. It was a definite contributing factor to their friendship–they’d clicked fast and gotten very close in university. They understood each other well, and shared not only the same area of study but also the same ideas about pulling mischief on campus. There used to be a point in time where her reading him like a book served both of them well, but not today.

“I told you to stop folding that,” Grian says.

Pearl drops it with a huff. “No,” she says. “I’m not going to stop. You said I was the guest, right? Guests get to do what they want. And maybe I want to help you clean up.”

He finally turns to look at her. Her blue eyes are wide and just the slightest bit watery. He’s done that–he’s been the one to make her that worried. He turns back to the sink.

“Okay,” he says quietly, words almost lost in the water running into the sink. He says okay because he can’t imagine even trying to fight her on this. “We can work on it together.”

»»———-　　———-««

The cleaning goes well, up until it doesn’t.

“Grian, what is this?” Pearl says from the other room, loudly. She’s finished folding his things and has fortunately just left them all in the basket for him to put up himself, declining to go rifling through his dresser and closet. The next task she has taken upon herself has apparently been working through the clutter in the living room area, which is always a dangerous place.

Grian sticks his head around the corner from the kitchen. He’s finished doing the dishes, and is just drying them off now to put in the cabinet. “Let me see,” he says.

She turns around and Grian’s heart sinks immediately. She’s standing by his desk, the nice one by the window that he always liked to sit and draft at. She’s holding a few pieces of paper that Grian really didn’t mean to leave out. Because he definitely did leave them out–Pearl is nosy, and she’ll fly all the way across the world to drop in uninvited, but she isn’t the kind of person who goes through drawers.

But he did just say she was nosy. Nosy enough to read something he left out.

He drops the dish towel. “Give me those,” he says, and crosses the living room to the corner she’s in. He tries to snatch it out of her hand.

“Nope, not so fast,” she says, and holds them higher, squinting at them so she can read. Grian is, at this moment, extremely annoyed that she is so much taller than he is. He can’t quite grab them out of her hand.

“Pearl,” he whines.

“Shh, I’m reading.” Her eyes widen, and she looks back at Grian. He feels the slightest bit locked in her gaze’s intensity. It’s equal parts scrutinizing and empathetic. Like she feels bad for him, but is also a little disappointed. “Are these late notices?”

She files through them one by one. Grian cringes. He’d rather melt into the floor than be here. “Most of them are already paid,” he says feebly.

“Most of them?” she looks back at him. Her brows are knit up, and it creases her forehead.

“I, uh, get paid this week,” he says. This is another lie. He gets paid at the end of the month, but she doesn’t need to know that.

She doesn’t seem fully convinced, but she hands them back to him and he takes them from her so sharply he almost tears the paper. He puts them in the drawer and slams it shut. It rattles the whole desk.

“The top one was about your credit card payment,” she says slowly, as if she’s halfway between deciding whether to say something and not, but was already saying it before she could finish the debate.

Grian fixes her with a glare and she wilts under it, immediately looking away. He shoves his hands behind his back, because suddenly they seem shaky. His chest is tight, and his jaw is set, and–he’s angry. He’s so, so angry, and it feels like it’s burning him up, white-hot.

“Why did you read those?” he demands.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to find it, it was just laying on the desk–”

“You could have ignored it.”

Pearl crosses her arms. He’s activated her fight mode, and he rarely does well against her when she tries to be stubborn.

“I’m just worried about you,” she says.

Grian shakes his head. “I can’t with you right now,” he says. His tone is icy even while his whole body feels hot. “They were laying on the desk because I didn’t expect to have any guests.”

He turns away from her and walks partway across the living room floor toward the kitchen, and then whirls around again. “You’re just..showing up uninvited, messing with my stuff, reading my mail? Is that where we are now?” his voice cracks a little on the last time. “It’s the first time I’ve seen you in three years and this is where we’re at now?”

Pearl takes a breath. “I just wanted to help,” she says. It falls flat.

“It isn’t your business.”

“You never said you needed money.”

“Because it isn’t your business.” He enunciates every syllable clearly.

She runs a hand through her hair in a nervous, agitated gesture. “None of know what’s going on with you, Grian,” she says. “We didn’t know about this, so what else don’t we know about?”

He doesn’t answer.

“Okay, fine,” she says desperately. “This wasn’t my business. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have looked at it. But I meant what I said, okay? We don’t know anything about what’s going on with you!”

“There’s the ‘we’ again,” he says.

She shakes her head, incredulous. “Do I have to literally spell it out for you? Did you forget our names when you moved to America? It’s Jimmy, and Joel, and Martyn, and Netty, and Lizzie. It’s your mom. It’s Mumbo’s parents.” She pauses for just a moment, taking in a short, if slightly hysterical, breath. “It’s me.”

He doesn’t want to hear their names again. He misses them enough already.

“I’ve talked to them,” he says instead. Simple.

Pearl throws her arms in the air. “For hardly more than five minutes!”

“Well,” he says, with a bitter laugh, “you certainly know I don’t have the money for long-distance calls.”

“I guess I walked into that one,” she says. She stops, but there’s a funny look on her face that keeps Grian quiet. He’s still standing a few feet away from her after he walked off earlier. Her face scrunches up, like she’s trying not to cry, and after another moment she speaks softly: “Mumbo was my friend too, you know.”

It’s soft, but it still hits Grian like a ton of bricks.

She continues, and doesn’t look him in the eye. “I know he was your friend first, but I cared about him too. We all did.” Suddenly she’s crossing the floor toward him again, closing the distance he had put between them. “But it almost hurts just as bad to know you’re still out here alone. And that you aren’t okay.”

Grian swallows back against the lump that is rapidly forming in his throat. “I’m fine,” he whispers.

“I don’t believe you,” she says.

“I’m fine,” he insists.

“You need to go home to visit,” Pearl says. “Even just for the holidays. Please. Everybody’s worried about you.” She huffs a small little laugh. “They’re all worried and then they’re calling me because they think I know what’s going on. Because I always used to know what was going on with you. And then I have to tell them I don’t know either.”

Grian doesn’t respond.

“They’d be so happy, you know,” Pearl says. “To see you.”

“I’d never come back,” Grian mumbles. “If I went.”

“What?”

“They wouldn’t let me leave,” he says, stronger. “If I went home they wouldn’t let go.”

“Is that such a bad thing?” Pearl asks.

Grian shakes his head like he’s breaking free of her request. “I have to stay here, because Mumbo is here.”

Pearl blinks, and then sighs. “Okay. I still think you should visit, though.”

Her eyes drift away from his face and over to the hallway behind him, the one all the bedrooms and bathrooms break off of. She speaks again sharply. “The money problem, it’s because of Mumbo isn’t it? You used to split all of the rent and stuff because he was your roommate. But now it’s all on you.”

“Something like that,” Grian admits, and it feels like he’s speaking around a block sitting in his mouth.

Their apartment is nice. Not luxurious by any means, but still a decent place to live. His neighbor down the hall yells at him sometimes if he comes back home too late and their door used to slam unpredictably until the landlord finally fixed it months later, but isn’t that all just everyday woes of having an apartment?

The apartment is nice, but it was never meant to be paid for by one person. Well, maybe a well-paid person. It’s not like his landlord wouldn’t have rented it out to a single person if they could pay. But Grian had never planned to pay for it by himself. And while architecture could be a well-paying job, he was very much still at the entry level. He’d only barely gotten his license after years of schooling and on-site training.

And then he’d gotten demoted for not showing up. The demotion wasn’t in job duties only, as he’d discovered on his very next paycheck.

So now he does what he can. He pays the major, important things first. Sometimes they’re a little late, depending on if his check has hit his bank account yet, but it gets done. He starts to depend more and more on his credit card for other things. He pays his minimum payment every month but he doesn’t feel good about watching it accrue.

“I can help you pay it off-” Pearl starts to say.

“No,” Grian says. “You aren’t doing that.”

“I can help you pay it off,” Pearl repeats stubbornly. “But Griba, if you can’t afford this place by yourself, you need to just move to someplace else. Smaller. Cheaper.”

“You know I can’t do that,” he says.

She tilts her head, expression gentle in a way that makes him instinctively recoil. “You can’t keep living here if you can’t pay. This is bad.”

“It’s okay,” he says distantly. “It’s only temporary.”

Pearl pauses. She has a horrible look on her face, so Grian looks away from her instead. “Temporary?” she asks. The word is tentative.

“Until Mumbo gets back,” he says. He grabs her hand, and pulls it closer to him, feeling suddenly like it’s very important that she hears him and understands this. “I can’t leave,” he says earnestly. “All of his stuff his here. It’s his home too.”

Pearl’s eyes are wide. “I can help you pack it,” she says. “You don’t even have to mess with it, or look at it, I can do that for you.”

He drops her hand. “No,” he says, baffled. “I’m not moving anything of his out of here. When they find him, he deserves to actually come home. He can’t come back to a strange place!”

Pearl squeezes her eyes shut. “Griba, please,” she says. He notices all at once that she’s brought his nickname out these past few times, which is a fact that should be comforting but instead starts to set off alarm bells in his head.

“I’m not moving, and that’s final,” he says. “I’m not going to abandon him.”

“You’re not abandoning him, you’re just…”

“Just what?”

“Being smart.”

It hurts Grian. “He deserves to come home,” he bites. “I don’t care if it isn’t the smart thing to do, it’s the right thing to do.”

Pearl backs up. “Okay,” she says. “Okay.” She takes a deep breath and exhales long and slow. “You’ll stay. I’ll just help you then, yeah? Bills, cleaning, everything else…”

She turns away from him, and starts picking up various items once more to organize them. “I’ll just help,” she repeats.

She wanders around the room. She’s not getting much done, but she looks busy, inspecting everything around her for one more easy thing to do. Grian just stands in the middle of the room stock still, and both says and does nothing.

Pearl continues to busy herself for a few minutes before grinding to a halt again. “Griba?” she asks, and Grian turns to her again as an answer. “You do have other people to talk to, right? People who live here?”

It’s a valid question. It’s a hard question.

“Of course,” he says.

“Stop lying to me,” she pleads. “I already told you I know you too well.”

He swallows hard. “I have people,” he defends. “Had people.”

It’s just that–it was difficult, after Mumbo disappeared. The new friends that Grian and Mumbo had made, they had mostly made as a pair. They each knew a few people from work, but nobody to really hang out with. So most of the friends they met were people they met while doing an activity together some weekend or evening after work.

So the new friends missed Mumbo too, when they heard about what happened. But they didn’t know Grian the way Mumbo did, or the way Jimmy or Joel or Martyn or Netty or Lizzie or Pearl did. They knew Grian as one half of a pair who was missing his other half. And Grian didn’t know how to interact with them alone. He didn’t know how to go to them for help when they’d barely been in his life for a few months or a year or two.

There’s layers to friendships, everybody knows that. None of the people Grian had met in Colorado had made it to the layer where he could talk to him. They were nice people. They wanted to help. Grian didn’t know how to let them.

So he withdrew.

“You had people. But not anymore?” Pearl asks.

“I didn’t know them very well,” is all he says.

Her expression breaks again. Grian has to stop doing that. “But you know us and you still don’t talk to us.”

“I just want to be alone,” Grian says. “Please, it isn’t personal. I just want to be alone.”

“I guess you’ll have to suck it up,” Pearl says. “Because I’m staying here for a week. And I will drag you outside to go skiing with me. I’m going to make you leave this house and we’re going to have fun together. Because I think you need that. And so do I.”

He turns and stalks back into the kitchen. He’s flipping between so many emotions that he doesn’t know which to settle on, so he seeks out something to busy his hands with instead: the dishes on the counter that still have to be dried.

If he stays in the living room, he might start arguing with her more. He might say something that will make her not want to visit again.

He’s angry at Pearl. Furious, even. Offended. He could look past her coming unannounced to visit, but the whole thing seems like a plot now. She’s got ulterior motives. She’s purposefully trying to catch him unaware and sneak past all his guard walls. She’s snooping through his things–his mail. It makes his spine crawl to think about. She’s literally trying to get him to move, even though she’s barely been in the state of Colorado for three hours, and even though it means Grian would have to disturb Mumbo’s belongings.

And still there’s another part of him that just really, really wants to go skiing with her.

Because–he misses her. He cares about her. And he misses even the simplest things, like getting out of the house to go do something with a friend. It’s just the littlest piece of normalcy.

So he dries the dishes, and she finishes up in the living room. Then he goes to his bedroom and starts working there–without her, because he doesn’t want her in the room until he’s made it look nice. Safe, even. Clear of any items that could incriminate him in anything at all. The sheer irritation of the afternoon fuels him harder than anything in months, and he finishes the task even quicker than expected, his movements stiff and jerky with anger.

On one of his trips back and forth to put things back where they need to go, he spots her sitting at his desk. She looks a little sad, staring at the pattern of the wood grain instead of the pretty view outside. He ignores her and goes back to work.

They exist like this in silence, for a little over an hour.

Then Grian walks back into the living room, picks up the phone book from the shelf, and sits down at the table by the kitchen where the phone is.

Pearl whirls around and he can feel her watching him with intense eyes. “Griba, I…” she trails off. “I wanted to say I’m sorry again. I shouldn’t have pressed you like that. I shouldn’t have looked at your bills. And I shouldn’t have come here without telling you.”

Grian just nods slightly. “Yeah.” He flips through some more pages. He doesn’t say anything else to her, just continues on his search.

She cocks her head slightly. “What are you doing?” she asks.

“Trying to find a ski resort to call,” he says with a weak smile. “Because I still really want you to drag me out skiing with you.”

»»———-　　———-««

June 1989

It’s two days later when a pair of rangers come to collect Mumbo’s bike.

They ask him if he has everything he needs, or if he has any requests for supplies that they can pass on to the main office. So Grian takes the first opportunity to ask them about the Cloud Lake Trail, and if it was really closed last season.

It’s then that he realizes that these two probably aren’t actually rangers at all. They may be dressed in uniform, but they’re just a couple kids several years younger than Grian is. They want to be helpful so earnestly, and their disappointment is clear when they can’t answer his question.

They inform him that it’s their first season working here, so they’re not exactly sure about what the Cloud Lake Trail was like last year, but that it’s open right now if he’s interested in it! Grian realizes that they’re a couple of seasonal workers just like he is, except they’re on summer break from college and Grian’s floundering on the cusp of his 30s.

They’re friendly. Grian tries his best to match the energy, for the sake of politeness.

He asks them what the plan is about Mumbo’s case, and doesn’t really expect much. Apparently, there’s a bit of gossip about the case around the ranger’s office, so they do know a little. The plan seems to be to conduct a few aerial searches of the area the bike was found in with a helicopter. They also told him he could expect a more detailed phone call soon from the main office.

That’s a little amusing to Grian, given his tower does not have a phone line.

He bids them farewell at midday and watches them disappear into the woods. Then, he decides it’s about time for lunch. He takes an hour, locks up the cabin behind him, and heads to a rocky outcropping he knows nearby to the tower.

It’s a beautiful spot to sit and stay a while, and a good vantage point into a little valley. Grian sits on a boulder and finishes his lunch, and tries to think about things that aren’t so negative for once.

He’s so used to looking. Looking for fires, looking for helicopters, looking for storms, looking for lightning, looking for Mumbo. It’s what he’s good at, so he tries to challenge himself to look at something else for once.

A few feet from him, there’s a small stand of light purple flowers with narrow, silvery green leaves growing. They’re snagging their spot in the ground amidst the surrounding rock. One of the features of his tower is a somewhat excessive amount of posters left there from years past, most of which were fire, forest, rock, or plant related. Grian thinks he’s seen this little plant several times before. He’s watched it spread from just a few sprouts in May to coating the meadows in a wash of purple the past few weeks.

It’s a lupine. Growing alone, but steadily.

He looks more into the mini valley below. It’s not so much a vast sweeping valley as it is a wide little canyon for the stream that flows at the bottom. It’s fascinating to look at though. To think how long it might have taken for that little body of water to have carved it down like this. There’s some small rocky cliffs along the edges in some places, and he can see the darker parts of the rocks where the water pours off during a storm.

It’s as quiet as the forest can be. Which, in the summertime, isn’t very quiet at all. There’s cicadas buzzing all around him right now. That was something new for Grian ever since he moved–they didn’t have cicadas in England. But as loud as they are, it’s a pleasant background noise he’s become adjusted to.

He leans back on the rock and stares into the sky for a bit, watching the handful of clouds that there are today drift along. There’s a hawk or an eagle or something flying high up there too, gliding effortlessly along the air currents. He watches it for a while.

When Grian’s hour is up, he gathers his things, and walks back to the tower.

Scar calls him on the way.

“Are you there, G-man?” he asks.

Grian pulls out his radio from his pocket.

“Yeah,” he says. “I am. Some kids came and took Mumbo’s bike away earlier.”

“Yeah?” Scar says. “How was that? What did they say?”

“They didn’t know much,” Grian says. “A couple of seasonal workers. But it’s fine, I guess. I know the main office will be looking into this again. They told me there might be some aerial searches in the future. I just wish it was higher on the priority list, I guess.”

“Well, they have their priorities and we have ours,” Scar declares. “But I think I can shed a little light on it, maybe. I spent most of the morning on the phone.”

It’s kind, what Scar is doing for him. That Scar is helping him like this at all, not even accounting for spending time scouring his notes from the prior season or spending all morning on the phone. Grian needs to thank him, or convey his appreciation somehow, or apologize for snapping at him so much, but instead all he says is: “What did you find?”

“I wish I had better news,” Scar says.

Grian locks away the part of him that is always stabbed with instant anxiety over statements like that. He takes it, locks it away, and smooths it over. He’s walking on the trail back to the lookout right now, one foot in front of the other. He can handle just another conversation.

“Well, I seem to always be lacking in good news,” Grian jokes lightly. “So just give me what you got.”

“I talked to a friend in the main office, she’s really sweet. She went to pull the records for me.”

“They’re still on file? Good.”

“Everything’s on file, Grian,” Scar says. “The government will keep an old shoe for a decade if they think it’s a record, let alone anything that relates to an open case.”

Grian grimaces a little. “Well, go on then.”

“She found his backcountry permit information from last year. And…” Scar trails off for a bit. “He’s permitted for Cloud Lake Trail. He even had designated camping spots, she even told me which ones.”

“So the trail was open?” Grian says.

“Not exactly,” Scar says. “The trail was closed.”

“What?” Grian says. “They permitted him for a closed trail?”

“Apparently?” Scar says. “That’s what I got.”

“Why?”

“I wish I knew.”

“What else did she say? Who issued the permit?”

“She didn’t say anything else, so I don’t know. I’ve never worked in the main office. I don’t think she was even supposed to tell me that, honestly, but we’ve always got along pretty good since she started working here.”

“Right,” Grian says. “You’re not an information wizard…”

“I have no more information to give, unfortunately,” Scar says. “I am a wizard, though.”

“You are not a wizard.”

“I’m many things, Grian. You’re just a nonbeliever.”

Grian just shakes his head at that, leaving that thread of the conversation behind. There’s just so many questions that keep coming up.

“So we can agree he was on Cloud Lake,” Grian says. “Right? Regardless of all that, we can assume this right? He told me he was going there, his car was there, he was permitted for it, and someone said they saw him there. So he was there, right? We searched there, and he was there.”

But…

“It seems likely,” Scar says. “At one point, at least.”

“But then someone found his bike over on Pinnacles. How did it get there? Did he go there for some reason?”

“There isn’t an official trail that connects Cloud Lake and Pinnacles. It’s not a loop or a network or anything. Maybe he could have found a way between them or went on an unofficial side trail. There’s a lot of things that look like they could be a trail that aren’t really trails.”

“No,” Grian says. “He knows better than to take an unmarked trail. He said he was getting maps at the office when he got his permit too, so he would have known where the trails were. He wouldn’t have done that.”

“Grian.”

Just his name, the weight it holds, and nothing else.

Grian’s face crumples a bit. He doesn’t want to admit it. It hurts to admit it. “Okay, fine!” he cries. “Maybe he did go off-trail, maybe he did make a mistake, whatever. But it’s not his fault if something bad happened, okay? It isn’t.”

There’s another option to all of this that Grian hasn’t said out loud yet. He’s been thinking it off and on though for a long time, as he tries to fit these pieces into the larger puzzle. Nobody had any reason to think about foul play but him. There’s no evidence. But what other evidence do they have?

He went camping. He went missing. The search failed. Some of his belongings were found in the wrong place.

And that is, essentially, it.

“Do you think what happened to him…” he trails off. “Do you think it could have been someone else?”

Maybe Mumbo never did make a mistake. Maybe he was exactly where he was supposed to be, sans closed trail, and there was just something else that got in the way.

“Someone else?” Scar says, tentatively.

“Do you think someone out there might have taken him? Hurt him?” Grian is back at the base of his tower now, and he looks up at its spiraling staircase. He begins to take the steps one by one, watching as the horizon slowly inches into view as he climbs above the trees. “Did someone steal his bike? Is that why it’s somewhere else?”

“I…” Scar trails off. “I guess we don’t know if something like that happened. G, there’s a lot of ways someone can get in trouble back here.”

“And one of them could have been someone else,” Grian says. “Doesn’t this connect some of the dots, Scar? So much of this doesn’t make sense, but if someone else was involved, couldn’t that answer some of these questions?”

But the words hang heavier in the air now that he’s spoken to them.

If Mumbo had just gotten lost, or injured, or something else while alone in the woods, Grian has some hope of saving him. Mumbo is blindingly smart, with an engineer’s eye for designing devices and contraptions. He could be okay. He’s a little lost, but Grian can find him.

But if Mumbo’s incident was linked to another person, the odds in Grian’s mind plummet. If Mumbo ran into someone bad at some point during his trip, would he have escaped that confrontation? If someone had decided to hurt him, or take him, or rob him, or whatever–then Mumbo’s continued absence just looms more and more ominously.

Would he make it out of something like that? Would he survive it?

Grian reaches the top of his tower. If he looks straight through the windows of his cabin and out the other side, he can see Scar’s little cabin far in the distance.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “But I don’t think I want to talk about this anymore. Thank you for the new information though.”

He turns his radio off and goes inside. He spends the rest of his work day in silence, watching the smoke twist in the air.

<< Chapter Five | Masterpost | Chapter Seven >>

#grian #hermitcraft #hermitcraft fanfic #goodtimeswithscar #gtwscar #pearlescentmoon #hc_firewatch_au #quara fanfic

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autumntouched · 2 years ago

Text

Talk to Me | Ch. 2

Rooster pulls up to Snooze A.M. Eatery. Home of some of her favorite french toast. They made the discovery in Denver while he was helping her drive her car across the country and they stayed with one of his college friends. She went back for breakfast the next day and even delayed leaving the following morning so she could pick up an order for the road.

He parks and waits against her side of the car while she pulls his hoodie over her sports bra. It envelops her like a cozy hug and smells of salty air, old leather, and him. She pushes the too long sleeves up her forearms and his borrowed aviators onto her head.

“You could have saved some gas, you know,” she tells him. “There’s one near base.”

Rooster smirks because of course she knows that. “Seemed like you could use the drive,” is all he says, swinging the door open for her. As she climbs out past him, he pops her ponytail out the back of the sweater. He waves it against her cheek until she bats his hand away. Secretly she likes this rare, playful side of him and enjoys it even more when he smooths her hair down her back.

Inside, the early morning weekday crowd is thin but Rooster still requests a table near the back. He lets her have the orange booth seat and takes the chair. Their waitress pops up nearly instantly, barely concealing her appreciation for the way his black tee shirt clings to his sculpted chest and biceps. While Jen sets out their waters, her gaze darts between them and then down to Natasha’s left hand so fast that she would have missed it had her brain not been trained to slow down things moving at lightning speed. The woman looks a little disappointed when they place their orders without a glance at the menu.

“Can I get you a coffee, sir? Anything to drink?” she prompts hopefully.

Rooster shakes his head. “Water’s great. Thanks.”

Again, the disappointment.

“I’ll have a coffee,” Natasha offers, just to see how long it takes Rooster to notice that Jen is looking for any reason to come back as often as possible. This is why she likes going out with Rooster, Payback, and Fanboy, and even will put up with Hangman from time to time. Excellent service. Only Payback is smart enough to make her return the favor when he gets the chance.

Jen brightens. “I’ll be right back with that!”

Natasha ducks her head so her grin doesn’t give away her setup. When she looks up again, Rooster is watching her. “Hungry yet?” He swirls the ice in his water and takes a sip. The question is casual, but her BOQ mini fridge is stuffed with meals she has picked over and he knows it.

“This was a great surprise,” she assures him. And it is, even if the french toast ends up feeling like lead weight in her stomach.

He raises an eyebrow but lets her deflection go. “I hear you and Bob went shopping.”

That story got around fast. Men gossip worse than any group of women she’s ever been part of. After their first night out in civilian clothes, she gave her WSO a much needed wardrobe upgrade so it didn’t look like he did his shopping in the retiree section of the Navy Exchange.

Natasha folds her arms on the table, enjoying the feeling of falling back into the ease of their friendship. Everything was so tense before the mission and after she has found herself coming up with excuses to be alone outside of their group activities. “What happened to those shirts I bought you ,” she teases. “You still look like a sunburned dad on vacation. You’re just missing the fanny pack.”

Unfortunately, Jen bounces back with her coffee just then to undermine the jab. She’s definitely reapplied her lip gloss and touched up her blush. While Hangman would be eating up the attention at this point, Bradshaw seems entirely unaware or unwilling to further the advantage if he’s clocked it.

“They’re for special occasions.” He takes another sip of water but that doesn’t hide the blush creeping up his neck. Huh. “Don’t want to mess them up,” he mumbles.

“I’ll pick out new ones if that happens,” she promises. Anything to get him out of those stupid Hawaiian print shirts. Although, in all honesty, they hadn’t managed to deter her or anyone else Rooster lured in with his brooding aloofness, reluctant smile, and green stare.

She tastes her coffee. Decent. Steering the conversation to something less personal, for her at least, she ventures onto the topic of Maverick.

Rooster’s mustache twitches. “He’s a bit busy with Penny, but things are good between us now.” He leans forward and rests his arms on the table with a sigh. “Or they’re getting better.”

Although she could see that Maverick’s love for Rooster was always there, waiting and ready as soon as his surrogate son changed his mind about their relationship, she also knows that Bradshaw struggles to let things go. Especially the things that hurt him. Behind all the walls he put up to keep people out or appear affected, he was deeply sensitive.

“So you forgave him?”

His mouth quirks upward. “You know, he’s the reason my name is Bradley Bradshaw.”

This she didn’t know. They’ve all wondered how he got his name, some, like her, privately and others, like Hangman, gleefully aloud. Who wouldn’t? Why would anyone name their child Bradley Bradshaw unless they wanted to subject him to a lifetime of teasing? And from what little he said about his parents, that didn’t sound like them.

His pointer finger traces the circle of condensation left by his glass. Sadness touches his smile. “It used to be one of my favorite stories. I don’t have too many memories of Mom before my dad died, but the way her face lit up when she told it reminded me of the old her. She used to say my name was a bet that stuck.”

In response to her raised eyebrow, he goes on. “My dad and Maverick were best friends from the day they met. They used to get in all sorts of trouble, mostly because, as my mom liked to say, Maverick flew fast with planes and women.”

Natasha laughs at this glimpse of a younger Maverick. That’s exactly how she would describe Hangman. Although never aloud because he’d be even more insufferable if it ever got back to him.

“No, seriously. Penny? He’s known her for years. Her dad was an admiral when Maverick was an ensign. Apparently while she was home from college one summer, Mav took her on an all night motorcycle ride and then never called back and her dad wrote him up. Pretty sure it’s still on his record.” This likely explains part of why Maverick is still a captain despite all his years of service. Bradshaw shakes his head as if that’s only the tip of the iceberg then continues with the story. “My mom was pregnant with me while they were deployed, and Maverick bet my dad his child’s name that he could get a date with this woman who’d turned down every other guy in their squad.”

If he was anything like Hangman, she guesses, “And Maverick scored the date?”

Rooster groans, more animated than she’s seen him in a long time. “Unfortunately for me, he did. By telling her that his friend would name his son Bradley Bradshaw if she didn’t go out with him. My dad used to tell my mom everything, and when he told her about the bet, she thought it was so funny. They all started referring to me as Bradley. They didn’t even know that I was going to be a boy. It was supposed to be a joke. But then Dad realized Mom was really thinking about naming me that. He and Mav spent like fifty dollars each calling her to try to talk her out of it, but I was born before they got back and she went through with the bet. ‘Better stick to betting a round of drinks next time’ was all she’d say when Dad said anything about it. So, that’s how I became Bradley Bradshaw. Fucking Maverick.”

They’re both laughing now. Before, he avoided talking about his parents unless he was drunk to the brink of incoherence. Maverick even less. She realizes that she is sitting forward, her face close to his, their hands stretched toward one another across the table. The tenderness in the way he watches her smile makes her drop her gaze.

Jen sweeps in with their food, and Rooster looks away, ending the moment. Natasha pulls her arm back to make space for the plate of french toast. She doesn’t make it through half her food, but she makes it through half while he tells her more stories about his childhood. That’s more than she’s been able to eat in a few days. And the sweet, custard filled bread settles warmly into her stomach instead of like a stone plunking into a churning sea.

He tells her about the time Maverick borrowed a plane only for him to projectile vomit all over it during a rather audacious maneuver he begged Maverick to do. And his fourteenth birthday when Maverick mixed up his presents and accidentally gave him a box of condoms in front of his family and friends. Rooster still blushes at the memory. Mostly because while his grandmother and aunt reacted in horror and all his friends started snickering, his mom clapped and cheered, announcing that she used to tell his dad to “take her to bed or lose her forever.”

Natasha chokes on her coffee refill and does her best to spit it back into the mug instead of down his sweatshirt. Jen had come and gone once again with Rooster barely noticing.

“You were fourteen?” she clarifies. She tries to think of what her mom would have done in his mom’s place. Probably thrown out whoever gave her the condoms but then told her in private not to get rid of them because she would need them anyway and that was less money spent.

He shrugs sheepishly. "My mom wasn’t shy about saying it, even when I was younger. Usually that was Maverick’s cue to babysit. I didn’t mind because that meant a Happy Meal and an extra one if a woman gave him her number for carrying around a cute kid that wasn’t his.”

She files his mom’s phrase away to borrow some time and wishes she could have met Carole Bradshaw. His dad too. His parents sound like a lot of fun, if a bit chaotic.

Bradshaw clears his throat and sets down his fork. He folds his hands and props them beneath his chin, his face suddenly grave. A pit opens in her stomach as she senses an emotional ambush. There is a twinge of guilt in his eyes because he knows he maneuvered her here, away from Fanboy and Payback who obliviously go along with her jokes, away from Bob who watches her quietly but trusts her silence, away from Hangman who would take the first opportunity to make the conversation about him, and away from an excuse to bow out.

“Come on, it’s your turn. Talk to me Phoenix,” he says gently.

Natasha glares at him, furious he has flipped her own tactics for getting him to open up on her. Rooster insists on once again picking at the scab he hasn't let alone since they came back.

At her prolonged silence, Rooster rubs his thumbs over his eyebrows. When he looks back up at her, his mouth is set in a grim line. “I knew the risks of going back for Maverick. What were you going to do? Get yourself and Bob killed? Get court martialed for insubordination? Do you know Hangman was demoted for disobeying Cyclone’s direct orders? Warlock, Maverick, and Hondo had to talk Cyclone down before he put in the paperwork.”

Actually, she had no idea Hangman had been in that much trouble. She pulls the sleeves of his sweater over her hands while his words sink in. Logically, he is right. It’s what she tells herself when she wakes up in a cold sweat after dreaming of his plane exploding to pieces in the smoky sky. But she was the one who pushed Bradshaw to make this mission, even after she understood the depth of his emotional attachment to Maverick. She wanted to prove herself, to be the best in a way no one could question. And her friend nearly died for validation no one but her needed. If it hadn't been for Hangman...

She is a goddamn good pilot. But what kind of person is she?

Bradshaw stops her from twisting his hoodie’s cuffs into strangled knots. Stroking her hand through the fabric, he insists again, “Talk to me. Please?”

Guilt burns up her throat and closes it off so it feels like she’s drowning in air. She’s suffocating on the words she doesn’t know how to say, the apology he won’t accept.

“I shouldn’t have left you,” she manages to whisper, unable to look at him. “I should’ve gone back when I knew.”

“Sash.” His voice shatters on her name. Bradshaw blinks up at the ceiling and swallows thickly. He clears his throat several times, but his voice is still raw and brittle when he continues. “Sash, when your comms went dead after the bird strike. Jesus, I thought I wasn’t going to see you again. Not alive.” His grip tightens on her hand. “You did what you were supposed to do, and I'm only so fucking grateful you made it out alive.”

He sniffs and swipes his nose with the edge of his hand, trying to shake the tears out of his eyes. Beneath the table, his leg is shaking at having to open a part of his heart to her.

She tries to move his aviators to her face before he can see her cry, but Bradshaw is too fast. His chair scrapes across the floor and then he’s squeezing into the booth next to her, pulling her into his arms and pressing her face into his warm, firm, very much alive chest while she cries.

“Natasha,” he murmurs. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

She curls her fingers into his sides. “I’m the one who should be sorry,” she says into his shirt. "I pushed you into it."

He strokes her hair, his chest rising and falling beneath her cheeks. “Okay,” he says finally. “It’s okay. You didn't push me anywhere. I wanted it as much as you. You just helped me get out of my own way.”

And although they’re in a diner, and Jen will be back soon for another chance to catch Rooster’s eye, it feels good to let go of holding herself together and cry while he holds her.

Masterlist | Chapter 1 | Chapter 3

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