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The first day he’s back, Maxwell walks him all the way. Both of them think to themselves how foolish this is — showing weakness, when everyone is talking about them anyway — but she can't help keeping Jacobi close.
Even fresh from the hospital, two fingers freshly lost to the frostbite and a new scar on his face, Maxwell expects him to look worse. Pale, maybe. Translucent. Thinned out, and tired. But he looks healthy, like he smiled when he saw her for the first time.
When she crashed into him in relief, and he wrapped his arms around her, there was a strength behind it. Maxwell knew it from somewhere, but not from him. The thought only flashed in her mind for a second.
Jacobi hesitates now, in the doorway to the office. Maxwell has already walked over to her desk. She looks up now, and watches him. Has he always been this tall? It's like his head nearly touches the doorframe, but that can't be right.
“You okay?” she asks. Jacobi hasn't talked much about what the mission left him like.
Jacobi shakes himself out of whatever thought he had, and steps inside. “Yeah, yeah,” he says. “Sure.” He reaches for his computer, tracing the screen with his fingers. “Weird.” He looks up at Maxwell and smiles. “Feels like I haven't been here in ages. Kinda… ever. I don't know.”
“You've been through a lot, Daniel.” She holds eye contact with him. “After where you come from, I don't think any of this will feel natural. You… you'll get there.” She chews on the next words for a bit, then adds, “We're really lucky to have you here.” She doesn't glance at the other door in the room, the locked one.
He'd handed her something in the hospital, a piece of a jacket. Maxwell brushed her fingers over it. Breathing felt strange for a moment — almost as if there was something in the way.
“From his uniform,” Jacobi said softly, watching her. She didn't look up at him, instead keeping her eyes on the insignia she never paid much attention to and somehow still knows so well. “I thought maybe you'd like it. To remember him by.”
Maxwell isn't sentimental. She shouldn't need a token of remembrance, it feels… silly. She found herself clinging to the patch anyway, as if it could make the images go away. Replace her last imagination of Kepler with something more dignified.
He was dead as soon as they crashed, Jacobi said. Maxwell has been picturing him facedown in the snow, his neck broken. Jacobi must have turned him around to reach the patch on his shoulder. Jacobi must have ripped it off, before his fingers froze stiff. Her stomach turning, she finally looked up.
“What about you?” she said. “You and him… you don't want to hold onto it?”
Jacobi's eyes softened a little, then. Maxwell wondered if he would be cold to the touch. She didn't try and find out. “I don't think I need it. I have… enough, to remember him.”
The office is quiet without Kepler, but it feels less empty than Maxwell expected. Even before Jacobi returns from his meeting with Cutter, a lot less terrified than Maxwell was expecting.
“What did he say?”
“What you thought he would.” He sits down, throwing her a slight smile. Is there a slight limp in his steps? Maxwell has been paying attention for it all day. “Asked me if I can keep working like this.” He waves his hand — the injured one, the one missing the fingers.
Maxwell doesn't ask, Can you? It's not really a question, not when the rules they've been operating by for so long have been function or die.
“He asked me to go into tactical and administrative operations while I relearn the dexterity.”
Maxwell's eyebrows shoot up. “He what?”
Jacobi's smile is unconcerned. “I was surprised too.”
“He offered you Kepler's job.” Maxwell listens closely to her own voice, and finds no hurt in it at all. “What did you say?”
“I said that's a very generous compromise.”
“And you think it'll work?” Kepler was… a different level, when it came to calculation and contingencies. Everybody at Goddard knows that Jacobi is smarter than he ever was, but…
“Cutter said I'm enough like him.” Jacobi shrugs. “And I think I've spent enough time with him to fill in the blanks.”
“That's good.” And it is — it's a relief, to know Jacobi hasn't outlived his usefulness. On the contrary, actually. “So I guess you're my boss now.” And when they grin at each other, Maxwell can't stop thinking about Kepler's frozen corpse.
It's about then that she starts having dreams about the crash.
In most of them, Kepler is still alive when they come down.
There's no explanation for why Maxwell is here, and maybe she isn't. She's not inside her body — not feeling the cold most of the time, and can barely see, only hearing the roar of the snow and loud voices that go quiet eventually.
She hears Kepler's breathing — fast, loud, labored, and sharp — but never Jacobi's.
“Sir,” she hears a voice that she realizes is her own. “How are you alive? You shouldn't— you shouldn't be—”
“You shouldn't be here.” That's Jacobi's voice, and Jacobi's hand grabbing her wrist. Maxwell hears herself yell in pain — his skin is burning hot.
“Here,” he says sharply. “Press down right here. Stop the bleeding.”
He presses her hand against something soft and wet, and Maxwell does as he says immediately. The choked scream of pain must be Kepler's. Maxwell only sees the static of the snowstorm. She feels her stomach turn when Kepler's flesh seems to give way under her fingers as they sink in deeper, but Kepler's voice cuts through the nausea before she can pull back.
“Don't you dare, Doctor.”
She tries to speak, but only a choked sound comes out.
“This is what you do.” He sounds furious. “You… follow… my orders.”
The sound of an explosion makes her ears pop. Vaguely, she hears herself scream, and presses harder down on Kepler's chest.
“Come on, Alana.” Softened, his voice cuts through the wind anyway. “You can do better than that.”
“What?”
“C'mon. Open your eyes.”
“I'm not—” But she is. Opening them hurts. The world is white, Maxwell's hands are frozen red, pressing down on— on—
It's just snow. She looks up at Jacobi.
He's not hurt. He's smiling. He's wearing his uniform, covered over and over with the patch he handed her. “What are you so scared of?” he asks. “We're all from the same place. We've had worse meals, no?”
She doesn't have time to finish the thought before she wakes up, but it's right there, and impossible to shake off even in the warmth of her bedroom, staring at the ceiling.
He'd spoken in Kepler's voice.
“It's noon.” Jacobi pops his head into the office, one eyebrow raised. “Have you take any breaks lately?”
“Oh.” Maxwell blinks at him. Has he not been working across from her? Where did he come from? “No, no. Bit busy.”
“Working on the New York test site?”
“Uh—” She adjusts her glasses, looks away. She isn't sure why. Something rubs her the wrong way. “Yup.”
“Slow down, then. The deadline isn't for another week, and they'll need you alert when you go check it out tomorrow.” Jacobi hesitates here, like he's noticed it, too. Then he grins. Maybe because he didn't expect it to come as easily as it did. “I brought you some food.”
Maxwell whips up to face him. “You what?”
“Lunch. Figured you'd need it.”
Jacobi's brought her food before, and vice versa. They eat together all the time, almost as often as they remind each other to eat. Why does this feel… what's wrong with Maxwell?
She tries to remember last time she's eaten, but mentally going through her day only conjures images of a snowstorm, of stiff fingers, of eyes wide open but unseeing, and—
No. She hasn't eaten yet. She's starving, in fact.
“Thanks, Jacobi, but… I'm not hungry.”
His eyebrow goes up. “You sure, Alana?”
It's not a power play, she reminds herself. Just because that's what Kepler used to do doesn't mean that Jacobi is doing the same thing. She shakes her head anyway. Her shoulders are tense; with how hungry she is, she feels a little sick.
“Yeah. Don't worry about me.”
“Not worried, just…” He frowns, not in a worried way. More like he's thinking. “Hey, no trouble. I'll just leave this here, and maybe if you change your mind you can—”
A sharp pull flashes through her stomach, and Maxwell snaps. “Listen, I don't need you to pity me, alright?”
Jacobi blinks, much more startled than he's angry. “Pity you?”
Poor hungry Maxwell, who never learned to cook, who's too greedy, whose parents always told her she's asking for too much, asking for—
Shit. She sighs, feeling a headache coming on.
“Sorry, Jacobi. I don't know what that was about.”
Watching her, apparently stunned into silence, Jacobi nods. He's looking at her like trying to find what he's missing, the piece that this version of Maxwell appears so incomplete without.
Incomplete. Incomplete.
Maxwell turns back to her work.
“Maxwell,” Thompson greets her with a smile, “didn't think you'd deign to visit us lesser folks today.”
Maxwell doesn't answer him, just puts her things down on the workbench furthest away from the others. So much money in the Goddard complex, and yet not enough space for an R&D lab for her drones that people won't bother her in.
“This isn't intelligence work, is it? Thought you had a new boss?”
Maxwell doesn't look up. “I thought you were a week behind schedule on your schematics?”
“Must be weird to have an engineer do a management job, huh? Jacobi taking well to it?” Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Thompson exchange a look with one of the other scientists. “They say he didn't hesitate for a second to accept the promotion.”
Hesitation is deadly, Maxwell thinks to herself, but doesn't say. It doesn't matter that they don't get it. Maxwell does.
Doesn't she?
“You know what else they say?”
She snarls. “You know, Thompson, I really don't care.”
“They say Jacobi is overdue a report of the full incident. They say that the rescue team had some trouble recovering Kepler's body. Or, you know. What was left of it.”
Maxwell doesn't move. She'll twitch and they'll… use it, for whatever it is they're working on.
Maxwell and Jacobi as the entirety of SI-5 are a new construct. They're vulnerable, unproven, scrutinized, hungry, and they can't afford—
Hungry?
“I thought it was crazy, too.” Thompson is smiling. He must be happy with his performance. “They all say the people in strategic intelligence are nuts, but that sounded a bit much. Don't you think, Maxwell?”
Maxwell switches on her pad and reaches for a pair of goggles.
“I don’t get it,” someone else says, barely under their breath. Maxwell doesn’t look up to see who it is. “How can she not care?”
She sneaks in and out of Jacobi's apartment, because he's been quiet and barely told her what happened out there, because people in corridors of headquarters have been whispering rumors that make her want to stick close, to not replace her best friend's face with that of the person they're talking about, and— and yeah, sue her, because he was missing a long while and it's a little hard still to believe he's really back, and more or less in one piece.
It's easier to wrap her head around Kepler being gone than Jacobi being still here. Kepler always made sure they thought he was only half alive anyway, didn't he? But Jacobi… he's like a bomb if it grew legs. It seems only fair to be prepared to lose him at any given moment.
But… she didn't. He's right there, in his apartment, recovering. Maxwell turns the key in the lock and steps inside.
Mostly when she comes at these times, Jacobi is asleep, either in bed or on the couch. Today, she hears him sobbing in the kitchen.
She's in there faster than she can blink, expecting panic to rise up inside but only feeling relief — she hasn't seen any of the grief she's been expecting from Jacobi having lost Kepler, and she'd been wondering for weeks about why Jacobi could be hiding it.
It's been difficult to figure out her own reactions to the crash, after she's gotten so used to mirroring whatever emotions Jacobi put into the world, like a voice and echo. Jacobi never seemed to grasp that it was on purpose.
(Kepler did. He always thought it was so amusing.)
Jacobi is bent over the sink now, shaking all over, and he doesn't even notice Maxwell when she comes closer.
“Hey,” she says as gently as she can, grabbing him by the neck. “It's okay. It's okay, Jacobi.”
Jacobi jerks to face her, his eyes wide, wide, wide. His face is wet with tears. Maxwell feels small. “Alana?” His voice is raspy. “I didn't— I didn't know you were here.”
Something in her chest stings. “Of course I'm here,” she brings out. “What do you need?”
“I didn't— I don't—” Another sob escapes him, and he presses his hand to his mouth. Maxwell's grip on him tightens, leaning in to press her forehead against his. It feels like a panic reaction. He's not cold. His blood is pumping, probably better than her own. “I don't know what to do. I don't… I don't think I can do this. I just can't do it.”
“Daniel… you don't have to do anything. You're alright, okay? You're home.”
Jacobi just shakes his head. He twists out of her grip and bends over the sink. It takes Maxwell a few seconds to register that he's no longer sobbing, but gagging. She understands, then, why she found him here of all places.
She tells him to breathe, watches him retch into the sink, but nothing coming out.
It stops, eventually, with Jacobi jerking back, staring at her, at the room around her, before shivering, his hands digging into the counter. “Where's Kepler?”
Maxwell's breath hitches. “Jacobi…”
“He was so cold. How do they go so cold so fast?” He stands up straighter, then. He wipes the tears off with his sleeves and shivers. “I didn't even have time to make a fire.”
“It's not your fault.” Her voice is soft, but Jacobi must be able to tell that she's terrified. “That's the only thing you could do — make it out alive.”
It’s a quiet dream this time. The wind is still sharp, but there’s no storm. Not even Jacobi is there. It’s just her, sitting in the snow, looking down at Kepler’s mangled corpse.
And Kepler, sitting next to her.
She makes sure she’s not looking at him. Even as she’s dreaming, the idea of seeing both Keplers at once — the dead and alive one, the real and imagined one, the one that is missing and the one that’s inevitable — makes her stomach turn.
She refuses to talk to him. Unbothered, Kepler’s humming.
His fingers are restless; he’s playing with the insignia on his jacket. He must be freezing — he’s not dressed for the weather at all. Jacobi wasn’t either, when they came down.
It’s a miracle he made it out alive. It’s…
She flinches with every muscle in her body when a weight settles down on her; there’s no choice but to look up.
Kepler’s breath is fogging up in front of his mouth; there’s no smile on his face, just a vague hint of amusement. Seeing it makes everything inside Maxwell twist, and if she wasn’t so cold, she’d probably yell at him.
He’d only find that funnier.
It’s his jacket — he’d put it around her shoulders. It’s heavy, and warm. It smells like him.
“You looked cold.”
She sniffles. “You’re going to freeze.”
“You’re going to need something to eat sooner or later.”
Looking up at him makes her nauseous with hunger. When was the last time she had this conversation with a Kepler that was alive?
“There’s nothing to eat here.”
Instead of an answer, Kepler puts an arm around her, he pulls her a little closer — he feels neither warm nor cold to the touch, like he’s not even there — and ducks his head to press a heavy kiss to her shoulder.
They find their own moments of lightness, no matter how heavy the something in Maxwell’s stomach feels, or how tightly the grief might have Jacobi by the throat. They’re the most powerful people Maxwell can imagine, and they find their moments all the time.
Maxwell is grinning the first time she tells Jacobi about Thompson and his refusal to shut up, and Jacobi does her the favor of laughing. It’s true, she doesn’t mention what he implies — but there’s enough implications floating around Goddard corridors that are laughable, so they have their good time anyway.
“You know what I heard today?” Jacobi is sitting at his old desk today — he’s been going back and forth between them, and Maxwell has never mentioned it to him once. “I don’t think you could guess, honestly, it’s that funny.”
“Tell me.” Maxwell’s feet are propped up on the desk, and she’s turning from side to side on the chair. A quiet little pain shoots up and down her back. Normally, Kepler is the one to tell her to sit up straight.
“Well,” he snorts, “I think I should be worried, because I’ve heard multiple rumors today saying that you’re jealous.” His eyebrows wiggle, waiting for a reaction.
Maxwell blinks. “They told you that?”
“Huh?”
“I’m not.” She swallows when she realizes how defensive it sounds. Correcting herself, repeating it — “I’m not,” — slightly softer, doesn’t really help making her look less guilty.
“What the fuck?” Jacobi leans forward, catching her eye. “I know, Maxwell. Of course you’re not.”
“Of course not?” Her shoulders drop in horrible, stupid relief.
“Yeah.” He crosses his arms and leans back. The corners of his mouth are twitching. “Come on. I trust you.”
“I- good. Yeah.”
“Of course I do.”
“Of course you do.”
Carefully, his eyebrows start wiggling again. “I mean,” he says, “it’s not like I’m your actual boss now.”
Maxwell exhales without understanding. “My actual boss.”
“Yeah.” He snorts. “I think if you were actually after my job, you’d be a lot worse at hiding it.”
Oh. Maxwell’s heart does a quiet double take, then continues beating.
Jealous. Of Jacobi’s command position.
Of course that’s what he means.
She laughs, and tells Jacobi she thinks they’re all stupid, and ignores the feeling of hunger that’s been creeping around her all day.
She hasn’t seen Jacobi eat anything today. It’s like he doesn’t even need to anymore.
Maxwell has been to her fair share of memorials and funerals, but it’s not often that she attends them in a corporate setting, in what’s clearly a meeting room with the tables removed and the blinds pulled down.
They don’t have a picture of him anywhere; Maxwell assumes there aren’t any that exist anymore. The memorial itself is a rushed affair — they blocked half an hour on their calendars, and the expectation is to never mention him again once it is over.
They don’t have much time for grief at Goddard. It’s not all that different from what the rules were like growing up.
Cutter sent out an email about a week ago, asking around for anyone interested in saying a few words. Maxwell and Jacobi have declined — she doesn’t have anything to say about Kepler in front of these people, Cutter and Rachel and all the other Goddard administrators. Jacobi just looked a little sick when she asked him.
Whatever there is to remember about him, they’ll do it together, and they’ll do it elsewhere.
They sit down in silence, and watch Cutter take his place at the front, giving them all a blinding smile.
“Warren was what — in my field — we call a once in a lifetime investment,” he says softly. “No one else is ever going to be able to be what he was, to this company.” His eyes rest on Jacobi for a second, before he continues. “He was unique, in how versatile he was. No one else could shape themselves so endlessly — take on whatever form that was most useful to complete his objective. A skill he nursed and held onto until the very end.”
Did he? Maxwell wonders. What kind of use could the shape of a corpse possibly have?
Cutter continues, and Maxwell lets his words float away from her, watching the front of the room and wondering what a real funeral would look like, if Kepler had one. She goes through memories of his faces to pick the right one, a proper picture to put in front of a nice casket, a speech about Kepler and his strangeness and inexplicable indulgences. All the times he surprised Maxwell, or made her laugh.
What would Maxwell tell his mother, if they’d invited her? Not what he’d shaped himself into, probably, even though it’s all Maxwell ever met.
But that’s the kind of funeral a person gets. From the moment she met him to the moment he died in that horrible arctic snowstorm, Kepler must have been something else.
There was an email to the whole floor in her inbox this morning. Unscheduled maintenance work leading to all the heaters being down for the first half of the day. They assume things will be fixed after lunch. It’s perfectly routine, they assure the reader, and really nothing to worry about.
Having clocked in, Jacobi finds Maxwell on the floor, curled against the door to where Kepler’s office used to be, shivering.
“Woah,” he says, keeping his voice more soft, more controlled than she’s used to from him. “Hey, what the hell? Is everything alright?”
Maxwell feels her face strain with how wide her eyes are. She stares up at Jacobi and feels herself gasp painfully once, twice, three times before she manages to force out a, “Cold.”
“Cold.” His brows furrow, and it feels much better to watch him think than to watch him soften just a second later. “You’re cold?”
Maxwell knows it’s foolish and childish, but she can’t help but letting the words slip out anyway. “Have to keep the cold out.”
“Keep it out where?” Jacobi’s hand settles on her shoulder; it feels burning hot. She flinches, but he doesn’t pull away.
His eyes wander through the room, and settle on the door Maxwell is pressed against, her chest heaving with a panic she hates more than she’s hated anything in a long time.
“Kepler?”
Maxwell sobs. The sound just comes out, more to her own shock than Jacobi’s, and when he flinches back for a short moment, all she can do is break down into more of them.
“Hey.” He sounds pained, a little clueless. “Maxwell, come on. I’m sorry, I- he’s gone.”
She presses closer against the door, behind where Kepler used to sit, where Maxwell used to be able to hear him type when she focused enough.
He’s not coming back. Maxwell knows this, but maybe… if she can just keep the cold out for long enough.
But her fingers feels stiff. The only warm things in the room are the hot tears running down her face, and Jacobi’s hand gripping her shoulder.
Jacobi exhales, then. “Okay,” he says. “I get it.”
She doesn’t look up at him. His voice is quiet, calm. A little focused, like he’s paying more attention to the single words than the sentence as a whole.
He doesn’t sound like Kepler at all, Maxwell tells herself. No one ever possibly could.
Jacobi gets off his feet, sits down next to Maxwell, both of them leaned against the wall.
Jacobi doesn’t put an arm around her. He doesn’t pull her closer. He just waits for her to stop shivering, and to stop sobbing.
And once she does, as if to reward her, he leans down and kisses her shoulder.
She feels nauseous and she's freezing. The snow isn't obscuring her vision this time. She can see Kepler just fine. His eyes are empty and staring up at nothing, his limbs contorted, but he's still twitching and breathing. He doesn't look scared. Maxwell leans over him, trying to get his attention.
“Sir?” Her voice is shaking. “Sir, can you hear me? C'mon, it's important that you try to answer. Sir, Major Kepler, I—”
“Are you trying to figure it out?” She flinches, looks up to meet Jacobi's eyes.
He's not hurt, thank god. At least she can't see any injuries on his body that might point to where the blood smeared around his mouth is coming from.
God. Maxwell's stomach turns, and this time she actually doubles over and throws up. There's so much of it.
“Whether I asked him first? If I lied about him dying in the crash?” Jacobi laughs, quietly, looking with her with endless fondness. “Maybe we had a conversation about it first?”
Maxwell is shaking. “Jacobi…”
“You've been wondering for weeks. Maybe I was begging him not to say it. Maybe he ordered me to, right? You can barely picture it any other way.”
A horrible, piercing choking sound comes from Kepler's throat. His hand reaches for Maxwell, helplessly, and she holds it, circling her thumb over his skin.
“He never would have let you do that,” Jacobi notes, looking at the two of them. “Not while he was alive. Not for kindness.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Maxwell. Come on.” Jacobi leans in closer, reaches for Maxwell's face. This time, the warmth in his hand is just comfort, gentle, and not at all like Kepler's stiff and freezing fingers. She leans into the touch and feels her eyes slip closed. “You miss him so much. You're so glad to have me with you. Have you ever considered just asking me?”
The only sound coming from Kepler now is a tired, fading gurgling sound. He will have no last words.
“I'm just—” Maxwell chokes, tightens her grip around Kepler's hand, lets her head sink down on his chest, where his heart is going to stop any moment now— “I'm just so hungry.”
“You okay?” Jacobi nudges her, letting her lead the way down the corridor. The AC had been cranked up in Cutter’s office; it’s like Maxwell has been cold for months now. “You were really quiet in there.”
She looks up, manages to give him a smile. “I am,” she says. “Really. Don’t worry.”
The look on his face almost seems relieved, to Maxwell. They keep walking.
“Do you have lunch plans? I was thinking maybe we could try the new cafe on campus.” It’s a strange offer — she can’t remember the last time she asked Jacobi to grab lunch with her. It’s been mostly the other way around.
“Ugh.” He pulls a face. “Normally yeah, but I have a thing with Rachel for lunch.”
“Oh, shit?”
“She invited me earlier this week. I figured saying no might not be a clever idea, at least not until I know what she wants from me.”
“You didn’t tell me about that.”
“Probably was trying not to think about it too much.”
“Oh.” That makes sense. “Did Kepler ever have lunch with her?”
“Nope.” He rolls his shoulders. “Guess I’m not Kepler.”
They’ve reached the office, Maxwell walking behind her desk and Jacobi staying in the doorway, watching her as if to make sure she’s going where she needs to be. It’s not until Maxwell has sat down that she looks at him, and the words slip out.
“Jacobi?”
“Yeah?”
“You know you—” She hesitates, shooting Kepler’s office door a look. Would he let her talk like this? “You’re the only person who’s ever loved me. Unconditionally, I mean.”
Her family definitely didn’t. Kepler definitely didn’t. But Jacobi didn’t even know what she could do, when he told her he’d do anything for her. That has to be unconditional love, right? That has to be the thing that will make you be anything for the other person, that—
“Maxwell.” Jacobi’s voice is soft. She makes sure she isn’t looking at his face, and he doesn’t step into the office or come closer. “I… likewise, Alana.”
She looks up then, and sees the same question in his eyes that must be in hers as well. The conversation didn’t answer it, like she thought it would.
He’s not Kepler. Is he?
Jacobi excuses himself, carefully, so Maxwell boots up her computer; having forgotten that she was going to get food as soon as he disappeared from the doorway.
There’s an email from Cutter in her inbox — not for the team. Just for her.
They just came back from the meeting. Did she do something wrong? Have a badly timed eye twitch? She opens it.
We’ve had some delays with regards to this mission, it says, but now that Daniel’s reports are finally all in, I figured maybe you’d like to read them. They, after all, the last thing we have left of Warren.
The email has an attachment. Maxwell leans back, shivering, and says out loud, to the office with the door still open, “It’s not the last thing left.”
Jacobi went to lunch, though.
Likewise, he said. There are no conditions.
Are there?
She opens the file, and reads.
Her stomach grumbles.