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It’s been over two years since they last caught even a rumor of anyone looking for them, and Aaron is starting to think they can have this life. Really have it, keep it, live it. The first seven months after Manila were fraught, constantly on the move and never making it longer than a couple of weeks anywhere before either something concrete happened (the time they’d had to flee Argentina with nothing more than about forty bucks in Marta’s back pocket and a compromised cell phone in Aaron’s; the time in Beirut with three guys shooting at them from a beat-up sedan while they twisted and turned through narrow alleys and lanes looking for an open(able) doorway), or Aaron got the sense something was coming, but at least—with the benefit of hindsight—it was a useful kind of fraught. They were able to learn each other’s strengths and habits and tells deeply and broadly, and that meant that finally, in Lisbon after a year on the run and a slightly quieter six months of only intermittent red alert moments, they found themselves starting to make a real list of where they could go. What they could do. Who, and Aaron still found this concept a little bit heady, they could be.
Lisbon led to Rome led to a deeply weird and tense interaction in Greece with Bourne, who had every skill Aaron did (and more years of practice and a higher baseline if Aaron was honest, which he was) and casually sat down with them one night as their waiter was just bringing their souvlaki to introduce himself.
He wasn’t, it turned out, a threat; he was merely making it known to them that they were known to him, in case it was ever relevant. But – “Nice work, ditching Kovacs in Lucerne,” he said, and Aaron hadn’t even known who was chasing them there, only that he’d felt the eyes on him and grabbed his bag and Marta’s hand.
“Uh, thanks?”
Bourne nodded and turned the conversation away, turning it into one of those complex interplays about the state of intelligence that agents can have in public, and Aaron felt his stomach twist. They were never going to be free.
Except, not long after that, they got a card with a picture of Lucerne from the water and a note that just said, “You’d like it here.”
Aaron waffled for a while, but Marta argued that unlike some parts of the world, in Switzerland she could get along in three languages and if nothing else it was a beautiful area.
Aaron had to agree with her further assessment that probably no one would look for them in the same place again, only a year later. Although really, there was nowhere that no one could think to look.
They stayed there for a year, with a couple of odd contacts (another postcard; a flyer stuck to their door or windshield) and no real trouble. Bourne was looking out for them, clearly, and for the first time since… maybe ever, Aaron felt like being safe was a thing he could imagine.
It didn’t hurt that in that year they had the time to talk about incredibly inconsequential things like hopes and dreams, which, it turned out, were not inconsequential at all. Aaron had always been very goal-oriented: as a teenager and young man because his life was directed by others and the only way for him to feel successful was to meet directives, and more recently because part of the protocol was about making his brain really, really good at developing and implementing plans toward the goals of his agency. Hopes and dreams could be goals, but they weren’t; every time they talked they went further into wishes and aspirations, no planning, no outcomes, no lists. It freaked Aaron out and sometimes left him in a cold sweat, but he also found it grounding and reassuring in some deep way that he wasn’t able to quantify.
The first time they had one of these conversations in bed, post-coital and philosophical, they mused and meandered until late and then Aaron woke at three in the morning without even an instant of wondering who was in the room. That was when he realized he would do anything at all to keep what they had.
He didn’t understand how Marta could say the same, but she’d said often enough that she meant to stay, and when he said that evening that they should get married, make it real, she just laughed. “It’s already real. But I’ll marry you, yes. What names should we use?”
Twenty-six months after Manila, they came home, still married and still real although Aaron had never thought DC was home and Marta had no ties to the burned out splinters of beams that had once been her home. They settled on Oregon, east of the coastal mountains but west of the Rockies, in an area that met every stereotype about considering people newcomers for a generation or two, but where self-sufficiency and a healthy mix of neighborliness and solitude were the norm.
They’ve been here for as long as they were on the run. Their lives are stable now: Eric and Mara, him a field geologist and instructor for the local college and her a medical assistant for a GP in town, an older fellow with white hair and a pleasant round face who has two young interns working for him now with the intent to eventually take over the practice. They're known among their neighbors as outdoorsy, pleasant, and calm, and in the spring Aaron found himself cat-sitting for the Rodriguezes for three weeks. The Rodriguezes' cat is basically a demon with dainty white feet and pink toes that she uses to her best advantage; Aaron fell in love hard and isn't sure how to deal with that.
Now, in the heat of summer Aaron is halfway through a metals analysis that doesn’t interest him deeply but doesn’t bore him either and teaching a lab group on core samples, and at home they’ve started talking about whether they could ever have a kid. Like, an actual kid. Which, ‘ever’ is a weird way to put it because Marta’s coming up on forty-two so since biology is a thing if they’re gonna do it old-school, they need to get on it, but it’s a thing Aaron never expected to seriously consider at all, and it gives him chills every time they even touch on it, that she would consider it, that his souped-up body would probably make a smart kid (well, and she’s got that covered anyway), that he could make a safe place in the world for anyone. Hell, making one for the cat kind of blew him away.
Every time they make love, and again, Aaron kind of never had any idea that sex, consistently with one person whose interests are more aligned with his than the simultaneous chasing of orgasms, could be something he thinks might be similar to a religious experience, even though they haven’t made any decisions and are still taking careful precautions against a pregnancy they aren’t prepared for? He thinks about it and gets goosebumps all over again.
Naturally, this is the setting of their lives when he wakes up in the middle of the night in late August with the flu.
Marta frowns as he stares confused at the thermometer, which inexplicably says 100.2. “You never get sick,” she says, and yes, yes he knows that. Which is why this is freaking him out.
“That one time,” he says. It sounds to his own ears about exactly as desperate for there to be a reason as he is, and he swallows against the twisting feeling in his stomach which might be actually because he’s sick but might not be.
“Yes, but we did that on purpose.” She feels his forehead again as though that’s going to tell a different story, then shrugs. “New strain, maybe. Your body knows how to kick just about everything we had on hand to design against, but something could have mutated pretty far by now. We'll see how you feel in the morning.” She's maybe a little concerned, in the general way one might be concerned about whether one has enough deviled eggs for everyone to get one, but not noteworthily worried.
Aaron, though. He's worried. He’s not a fan of this whole being sick gig, mostly because Jesus Christ what is he going to do with all this mucus? And seriously, he does not get sick. Like, ever. So when she figures out he's kind of flipping out right there in the master bedroom at 427 Jessup Lane, she tells him to stay in bed, and then brings him tea (which is good) and soup (which is so unappealing at three in the morning he can’t manage to choke down more than three spoonfuls, but that might be because Marta is a terrible cook), and lets her pet his hair for a while until he sleeps. She seems (and is) totally calm, and that helps.
She’s at work when he wakes up again, which is good and bad. Turns out, he’s no longer used to waking up alone (he’s always up first; sleeping in is maybe something his body is never going to learn to do) and he kind of has this weird moment of panic at the silence in the house because even if he wakes up while she’s up to pee or something, it’s a different kind of alone. But, that she went in only confirms that she’s not worried.
Well, his fucking smart lateral-thinking brain comes up with, unless she is and went to work to sneak into a lab and run some tests. It’s not like he didn’t teach her a lot of skills, the first two years. He irrationally examines his body for needlemarks that would betray a draw site (there are none; however, he heals fast (shut up, brain!) and maybe it wouldn’t show?), and tries to assess whether the cotton feeling in his mouth is like, cotton-swab cotton, or just the kind of dry mouth that comes with breathing open-mouthed from a gummed-up nose.
Finally, even though he feels hot and weird and chilled and generally uncomfortable, he gets out of bed and goes to take a shower.
This takes longer than expected, mostly because even though it’s 9:30 and the day is warming up, he gets hit with a hard, sudden chill about three steps away from the bed and the shudders give him cramps so there he is, a guy that can kill you six ways silently with his hands and/or a shoelace, huddled in the fetal position on the floor (also cold, wood, pretty and he usually likes it but today he kind of wants to swear at whoever invented uncarpeted floors (shut up, brain, obviously they came first, this doesn’t change his opinion)).
Finally he manages to crawl back to the bed (ugh! Being sick sucks; how can he feel this weak from a fucking cramp?) and hauls the comforter that’s at the foot, which just a couple of days ago he’d wondered why they hell Marta liked to keep it there even in the summer, off and wraps it around him, then sits there until the shivers stop. Then he gets up and tries for the shower again.
There’s a note on the mirror: Normal people call in sick when this happens. I called you in. Sleep, fluids, sleep more. I’ll check on you at lunchtime. ♥
He can’t help a sort of dopey grin at the heart.
Then he catches the grin in the mirror, which means he catches his face in the mirror, and...and oh god. He looks like… all right, he looks stupid, like before. His face is pale, his eyes look all wrong, and his hair… his hair has distinctly gray streaks at the temples. And those were not there yesterday.
He leans in closer, examining each strand, then stares at his eyes for a long time. Is the treatment failing? Is he falling apart all at once? Is this the beginning of the end? His bloodshot eyes tear up and he can feel the panic rising and all at once he’s curled over the toilet bowl, retching up the nothing in his stomach and shaking again.
Finally, when it seems like his knees can maybe hold him up, he gets up and flushes, keeping his eyes away from the mirror because he’s a fucking coward, and turns on the shower. He does reach back for the note and stick it to the shower wall instead because that’s the best part of his day so far, and he knows better than to not take beauty where he finds it.
He stays in the shower a long time, keeping it warm despite the season, and mostly just standing, shaking, under the spray. He remembers reading that he shouldn’t make it too hot because he might pass out, and probably if he’s reverting he doesn’t really need a blow to the head from falling in the tub.
(His traitorous brain says well shit, son, hit it hard enough it’d probably be a mercy, but he tells it to fuck off because yes, yes it would, but if it comes to it and he decides to go, he’s going to do it somewhere Marta doesn’t have to see it, thanks.)
(He does, in that moment, start a list of what he might do, who he'd call on to help him. Bourne, of course, but maybe also Jack Raymond at the firing range up by the pass, who Aaron is 90% sure was a paratrooper at one point. He has a list of supplies he might want made up by the time he's done lathering shampoo in his hair, and a second list of ways to keep Marta out of it. Fine, so it's a little morbid, but Aaron is comfortable with plans and even more so with contingencies)
It’s almost eleven by the time he turns off the spray and carefully, slowly like a little old lady, steps over the edge of the tub, one foot out and deliberately firm on the mat before he considers moving the other. The post-it ins already on the floor, steamed loose a few minutes ago, but he can't bend to pick it up, so he just looks at it for comfort and reaches for the towel. He starts to chill again, but he sort of expected that could happen and so instead of a towel he just grabs the comforter from the counter where he left it, wraps it around him again irrespective of his dripping (gray) hair. Screw towels, all he cares about is not winding up on the floor again. He already hurts everywhere, sore and weird like he maybe ran a marathon unfueled then held a sniper’s position for a day and maybe had to get out through a rockfall. Actually, he has that scenario as a point of comparison, and this is, at least subjectively, worse.
Marta had a bad cold last winter, and Aaron remembers being maybe a little disrespectful about her discomfort. Not on purpose, but just, he might have scoffed a little. Or been less than as absolutely helpful as he could have been. Never again. Jesus.
He starts to go back to bed, then remembers: fluids. And because since they started to settle down he pretty much always assumes Marta is right, a habit that has served him well because except when they are in his particular wheelhouse, she has a shit ton more general life experience than he does and also his choices are kind of often driven by just a tiny pinch of paranoia, he goes to the kitchen and makes tea.
It’s scalding hot, and his eyes water when he tries to drink it, and fuck fuck fuck, this is also new and unwanted. He dumps an ice cube in it and tries again, gulping it down once he gets started because oh hey, turns out he totally needs fluids. Who knew?
He makes another cup, learns from experience, and cools it off before drinking it, and then that’s it, his energy is completely done and he shuffles back to bed and crawls miserably under the sheet.
Which is clammy and too cold and not what he wants at all, but getting up seems impossibly hard.
Just as he’s trying to marshal his resources to get up and get sweatpants so he can move this game to the couch, he hears Marta’s car pull up, and then he hears her key in the door. His eyes water again because apparently crying with relief is a thing he will do when he is sick.
Then she’s there, looking him up and down and putting her cool, so cool, so wonderful, hand on his forehead again.
“Hey, you’re worse. And damp. Shower?”
“And tea.” He grimaces. “I’m freezing and I burned my tongue and being sick is terrible and I’m sorry and thank you for coming home.”
“…Sorry? For what?”
“February.”
She chuckles. “Do you think you can eat anything?”
“No soup.”
“Okay. Eggs?” While she’s talking she’s already pulled out sweatpants and a warm fleece pullover, and she’s standing there holding out the shirt like she’s going to help him put it on. Which he’s going to let her because there are newborn underweight sloths with more energy than he has.
He makes a face and sticks his arms through the sleeves. “I love you and if you are cooking them, no.”
“Good call. More tea?”
“Nah.” He shrugs. “I had a couple cups not very long again.”
“All right. Maybe I’ll set some brewing on the stove. You want sweet?” She tosses him the sweatpants to manage for himself, and heads for the kitchen. He puts on the pants and follows her.
“I found your note.”
“Good. I left it for you to find.”
She gets out a saucepan and a couple of teabags. “Sweet? I tend to want sweet when I feel shitty.” Which is true; he’s seen her go all in for sugar a few times, and it’s always seemed gross to him but now he kind of sees the appeal. Maybe it’s that his taste sense is all messed up because an international snot factory has set up shop between his eyeballs.
“Yeah, maybe.”
She dumps in sugar and sets the whole thing to heat while she stirs. Her back is to him, and he sits down on one of the high bar stools, more a lean than a proper sit.
“My hair turned gray.”
She shrugs. “Mine has been going for a long time.”
He stares at her. “No, I mean, my hair turned gray.”
She glances over her shoulder. “Did you expect this to never happen? Also, you’ve had gray strands for a while.”
“I have not!”
“You have, really. Don’t know if you know, but I occasionally watch you sleep in weird light. You’ve had individual little silver sparkles going on for, I don’t know, six months?”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“But they just turned visible to me the same day I have the first plague of my life?”
“You don’t have the plague, Aaron. You have the flu.”
“You’re not worried?”
“I’m not worried.”
“But I don’t get sick. Injured, damaged, sure but that heals, but sick? No. And my hair. And my eyes have wrinkles and they’re all puffy and—“
Marta turns the burner down and puts the spoon aside, then comes to his side. “Aaron, you look like you usually look, only with the flu. You just never look at yourself much because…” she shrugs. “Because you know who you are and it’s not about how you look, just what you can do.”
He leans toward her a little and she takes the hint, pulling him against her and petting his hair some more. “What if the treatment is failing?”
“Seems unlikely. If it was going to, I’d think it would have long ago.”
“How would you know? There’s no one like me left. No longitudinal studies. No way to know if there are side effects or catastrophic failure rates or—“
She puts a finger to his lips. “If you revert, I will try to fix you if that’s what you want. But I don’t actually need you to be everything you are, just anything you are, you know?”
“You can’t fix me, Mar. You know there was stuff in that lab you never had access to…”
“But I’ve gathered a lot of it back up over the years.”
He pulls away and stares at her. “You what now? That’s risky! We agreed!”
She shakes her head. “It’s not risky, because someone taught me to be a secret agent and hide my tracks. But, even if it were, it’s risk for you, which is always something I can do. Just in case, though; I don’t think anything is failing.”
He stares some more. “I really don’t deserve you.”
“I reject your premise.”
“That I don’t deserve you?”
“That people have to be some kind of special way to deserve being loved.”
He lets her pull him back in against her chest. “I can agree in a perfect world,” he mutters, “but you’re above and beyond any baseline I’d have guessed was reasonable.”
She chuckles, her heartbeat steady under his ear, and then backs up, pulling him with her back to bed. “Come on. I’ll bring you a cup if you’re still awake when it’s ready. You want me to call in for the afternoon? I told them I might stay with you if you seemed a lot worse.”
“I’m not five.”
“And you’re not experienced being a grownup who gets sick. Want me to call in?”
He sighs. “I’m just going to sleep. Boring.”
“Not like I can’t putter.”
He really does want her to stay and take care of him, and he really can’t bring himself to ask her to. “Nah,” he says. “I think I can manage a few hours of sleeping all by myself.”
She smiles gently at him. “I know you can.” She tucks him in, sweatpants and all, and stays, rubbing his back, until he conks out.
When he gets up again, probably less than an hour later, she’s gone, but when he gets up he does feel …less terrible, which only means he is less gross than previously, but it only takes him a few seconds to get over his freakout at being alone this time, and when he gets up, there’s a new note on the bathroom mirror: Sleep, fluids, sleep (still). Turn off the burner if you drink much of the tea or add more water. Call JB, you know you want to and he’s expecting your call, you are fine. ♥ P.S. don’t even look at your reflection and we are going to work on your self-image problems later, buddy. You’re perfect just the way you are. ♥ again.
Aaron reads through while he empties his bladder, smiling at the hearts. Wait, what? Call JB, who is expecting his call? What ?
He picks up the phone. He can’t not-know the emergency number; it’s one of the things Bourne had left them with in Lucerne and his brain can’t not-remember pretty much anything. Actually, wait, that’s encouraging, isn’t it?
But no, they were only going to call if it was urgent.
This isn’t urgent; this is Aaron Cross freaking out his wife because he is a coward.
But he keeps the phone in his hand.
Damn it.
He calls Marta.
“Hi,” she says when she picks up. “How’s the fever?”
Oh. Hm. He hadn’t checked. But it seems better. “I don’t feel as wrong as I did, so maybe it’s better?”
“Probably. Did you need me to pick something up on the way home?”
“Um, no, I needed, um, nothing.”
“Uh huh.” She isn’t fooled; she knows this is him needing to hear her voice. Actually, it occurs to him right in that moment that one of the things he loves about her is how secure she is in what she means to him. She should be; there is literally nothing that could happen that would make him want to leave, but if television is representative, it’s also weird that she never exhibits jealousy (of his time, of who he speaks to, of anything), and it suddenly occurs to him how much he counts on that. God, he’s lucky.
“God, I’m lucky.”
“What for?”
“Of all the lab rats in all the world, I got you.”
Now she laughs. “Honey, are you delirious right now? Maybe check your temp again?”
“No, I feel better. Mostly because of you.”
“All right. Well, I’ll bring noodles when I come home. Love you.”
“I thought maybe, from the hearts.”
“See you in a couple hours.” And she hangs up.
Two minutes later, the phone rings, and he’s going to blame the remnants of the fever or the hangover from feeling weird or, well, something, for picking up without looking. “lo?”
“I heard you were in need of reassurance.” Bourne doesn’t introduce himself, so Aaron doesn’t use a name because recent stupid feelings notwithstanding, he does understand operational security.
“Jesus, I told her I was fine.”
“Check your texts.”
Aaron pulls the phone from his ear and clicks on the text icon. There’s a picture of a guy he only recognizes as Bourne because he’s talking to him; he’s had some work done on his nose and chin, has a new scar Aaron suspects was made deliberately messing up the line of one eyebrow, and is wearing his hair long, long enough to pull into a six-inch tail at his nape. And steely gray throughout.
“When did that happen?” Aaron put the phone back to his ear as he spoke.
“First time I got sick in twenty years. Took nine days to go from just a handful of shiny whites to a full head like this. ‘Bout eight months ago now. Nasty flu, day and a half long for me during which I was weak as a kitten and unable to tolerate even the smallest additional discomfort. Which, based on other people around me who got it, that was a cakewalk, so if you haven’t already laid in supplies for Mara you maybe should just call her back and have her stop on the way.”
“You got sick?”
“I know. My background was not like yours in about eight ways we’ve identified—“
“We?”
“We, me and Mara. Stop making that face, Eric, we’re good at this shit. Anyway, I didn’t know going gray was a symptom and I still can’t definitively say your case is like mine, but actually it makes it more likely that it is, right?”
Aaron’s still stuck on this apparent long-standing collaboration he didn’t know about, and also he’s still a little stupid because he’s really bad at feeling like shit. “You’ve been calling my wife?”
There’s a long pause, and then Bourne laughs. Like, really laughs. “I dare you to make that accusation at her.”
“I didn’t accuse—“
“Bullshit, you didn’t. There was no other meaning in that tone, man. But because evidently you need to hear it: there is nothing I have that she wants compared to you. We’re all about understanding you.”
“She said she was trying to recreate it. The stuff.”
“Right, but that’s about you. Me, I go back to being the kind of guy that teaches math at the local high school, maybe coaches track and helps kids out with their parkour or something. You…”
“I know. I know who I really am.”
“Fuckin’ stop that. Who you are now is who you really are, no lie. Now go learn to love your grays and appreciate the shit out your wife when she comes home, right? Also, I'm going to guess you freaked the fuck out and started planning an exit strategy,” Bourne says. “Unplan it. She'd kill you for thinking about it, and also, there's no need to panic.”
“'Mnot panicking,” Aaron says. “I just don't want to be--”
“A burden. I know, but like I said. You're fine, and if you're not she'll fix you, and if she can't you owe it to her to have an honest conversation about what that means. Just like the last time.” Bourne leaves it at that, closing the connection, and Aaron stands in his living room trying to cope with overwhelming snot and a knot of feelings in his chest and a completely unreasonable urge to run downtown and hug his wife.
Of course, he actually can't do that; he's not completely convinced he can run to the end of the driveway right now. Also, it would be weird and one of the key principles of living a normal un-attention-grabbing life is to not up and do weird shit in public.
Still, Bourne is right that he would owe her the courtesy, and also it's very clear to him on reflection that she would never let him decide without voicing her opinion anyway.
He finally goes and gets another mug of tea, sweet and hot and even though it's nothing he's ever drunk before at a time like this because when he was Kenny he never got treated to anything and when he was Aaron, well, scalding coffee was more his speed, still it's exactly what he wants. He sits on the couch with the afghan wrapped around him and watches something on Netflix, a show that Marta's already seen half of so he decides to catch up. He concludes it's a drama (maybe? He's never been a consumer of video media, and the categories slightly elude him) about two couples who are getting divorced because their husbands are lovers. Except neither husband is exactly leaving neatly, and one of them in particular spends a lot of energy helping his almost-ex wife through various tribulations. Of which she has a lot; she's the sort of person who falls into trouble easily. He likes her.
“Is this how you feel with me?” he asks when he hears Marta come in. The wife is under a table, and the husband who is leaving her for someone else is crawling in with her to soothe her earthquake fears, and Aaron's voice sounds like shit because apparently he has moved into the scratchy-voiced squeaky phase of the plague.
She stops behind him and kisses the top of his head, setting a bowl of soupy spicy noodles in his lap. “Sometimes,” she says. “Mostly because I know that even if, somehow, our marriage fell apart, you would always take care of me.”
That wasn't what he meant, of course; he's pretty sure he's the wife. But when he looks up at her upside-down, he can see she's completely serious. And completely right; there is no universe in which he would let her struggle. Which is basically what she's been trying to tell him, isn't it?
For a smart guy with the genetic enhancement bona fides to prove it, he's kind of stupid about certain things.
He stares up at her and offers a lazy smile. “Yeah, I think we'd do that for each other, huh?” He can also see her nose is a little red, her eyes a little glassy, and he adds, “Did you stop for cold medicine at the store? Because apparently I heal faster than average, but for the bug to get me in the first place it's probably going to have a field day with you...”
Marta crinkles her nose. “But I hate being sick.”
Aaron pats the couch next to him. “I have a spot right here under this afghan where you can ride it out,” he says. He waits for her to cuddle in with him, then kisses the top of her head and starts on the noodles . “Don't worry. I have it on okay authority I'll feel mostly better sometime tomorrow. I'll go get you soup in the morning.”
“Wasn't worried,” she says, again. And this time, he feels no impulse to wonder if she's telling the truth.