Work Text:
They always like to say that if you love something, you should let it go. If it comes back, it's yours. But if it doesn't, then it never was yours at all.
She was starting to get used to letting things go, whether she liked them or not. She tried not to think too much about the fact that the only thing that had ever come back to her, she had never, ever, ever wanted. That was a harder thought to escape from at night, in the quiet anguish of not sleeping.
The chart at the foot of her bed said 'Ripley, Ellen'. The only times she ever heard both those names together were from people holding clipboards. Sometimes she wondered if things would be easier if she just let them go, too. See if they came back, or not.
Everyone she'd ever let go of had given her a different name. Her parents had saddled her with Ellen and then called her Ellie instead, something softer for a round-faced little kid with a shock of curls. That name died with them.
She'd been El to the handful of friends she'd managed to hang onto before boarding the Nostromo and leaving her entire world behind. Mommy to Amy, not yet old enough to start insisting on Mom instead, and frozen forever in her mind at that tender age as if the fifty years she'd lived without Mommy hadn't happened. It was still hard to accept that they had. Then again, Ripley supposed she still hadn't, subjectively, had very long to absorb the news yet.
Ripley was the name of her adulthood. She'd started out thinking of her father every time she heard it from someone's mouth, but now it just felt like hers. She'd been Ripley at work, she was Ripley in a crisis. She was always in a crisis, apparently. And always doing a job.
Hearing Ms. Ripley was the warning sign. Nothing good ever followed people calling her that.
"Ms. Ripley," said the nurse inching carefully into her room. "Are—oh, you're awake. There's someone here to see you."
Ripley flailed for her bed controls and tilted herself up into a sitting position. "Visiting hours already?"
It was always some Weyland-Yutani motherfucker, constantly coming back to poke her with a stick and see if she bit. Today's sacrifice was a young blonde woman in a cream suit with black shoes. "Ms. Ripley," she said as she clacked confidently across the tiles to the bedside, offering a business card instead of her hand. "My name is Sophie."
The card said Sophia. 'Sophie' was trying to be friendly and personable. Good for her. Ripley blindly tossed the card in the general direction of her bedside table, not caring when it missed by several inches and hit the floor with a little tap. She wasn't about to go looking for it later, anyway. "What can I do for you, Sophie?" she asked gamely.
"You asked for an update on Rebecca."
Three weeks ago, but who was counting. "Newt," she corrected, gently by her standards.
Sophie blinked. "I'm sorry?"
"Her name is Newt. Nobody calls her Rebecca." Despite the slow-boiling ire at having to talk to a Company suit, the memory of her wide-eyed, earnest, dirty face punctuating everything she'd said still brought a little smile to Ripley's lips.
Sophie smiled back, but placatingly. "Of course," she said, dismissing the very idea that a person could be anything other than what was stored in a Company database. "Anyway," she went on, straightening a little, "I'm sure you'll be relieved to hear she's finally got a stable foster placement."
Ripley let absolute silence hang for a moment while she tried to process that. "Why," she said slowly, watching Sophie shift nervously from foot to foot, "would I be relieved to hear that you ignored my wishes and put Newt into foster care?"
That startled Sophie's spine back into place. "I—Ms. Ripley," she said chidingly. "Look around! You're in a medical facility. Reb—Newt," she corrected herself with an air of suffering, trying to placate the crazy lady, "needs a real home! And a guardian who can keep up with an energetic child, and take her to therapy, send her to school—" She cut herself off just as she was starting to gesticulate, folding her hands in front of her and visibly resettling herself before she finished, "She's in good care."
Ripley eyed her for a moment. "Are you new to the Company?" she asked finally.
"Pardon me?"
She shifted her shoulders more comfortably against her pillows. "I think that's the first time I've ever seen one of you get worked up about something other than money." She picked at a fingernail. "You must be new."
Sophie tilted her head and examined Ripley right back, pursing her lips a little, and then said, "Ms. Ripley. If you want to get out of here, you need to sign that NDA."
"Ah, there we go. Back on course."
"If you think you're going to wait us out, I'd reconsider. We've already spent 60 years on this matter. What's another 60?" she finished with an airy shrug.
This was, at least, infinitely preferable to the Burke-types they also liked to send over. She always preferred to have everything on the table; there was no need to fuck around with subtext, as far as she was concerned. But she was getting better at these little games just from all the practice.
"Now, how am I supposed to discuss that NDA with my lawyer when you've got me confined to a secure hospital?" she asked.
"Since when do you have a lawyer?" Sophie asked calmly.
"Well, that's the problem, now isn't it? At this point, I think I really do need one, except I spent 57 years in hypersleep and then when I woke up, I got sent right back out to that doomed colony," she said that part a little louder just to watch Sophie's face pinch up, "and then spent another—how long was it?"
"Eighteen months," said Sophie reluctantly.
"Another year and a half in hypersleep again before I got rescued and dumped directly in this hospital bed. So I haven't really found the time to go shopping around for a lawyer, no."
They stared each other down some more.
"I'll see what I can do," said Sophie finally.
A bitter victory, since their turnaround time on any request she'd made so far was measured in weeks, and she never saw the same corporate drone twice. "Lovely to meet you, Sophie," Ripley dismissed her, and she took the cue to leave.
***
Three days later, she got Ms. Ripley'd for a new man in a suit—very tall, dark hair in a sensible haircut—but the business card he handed over had a law firm's name on it.
She frowned at the card and then up at him. "Who…"
The corner of his mouth quirked up. "Ellen Ripley, I presume? I heard you might need a lawyer," he said cheerfully.
"I was bluffing," she said automatically, still stunned.
His grin got a little wider. "Were you, though? Because a little bird told me you're currently staring down the barrel of what some of us in my line of work like to call a 'Weyland-Yutani Special'."
Oh, shit, she was going to let her guard down if he kept this up. "Was that little bird named Sophie?"
"There were a few degrees of separation in there. Had to be, to get past the potential conflicts of interest. Now, you can rest assured that I have no such conflicts and am prepared to vigorously advocate for you." He shrugged his eyebrows at her. "So, how about it?"
She looked back down at the card and actually read his name this time. "Why the hell not. Show me what you got… Richard."
He beamed at her. "Call me Rich. And may I call you Ellen?"
"Ripley is fine." She set his card down on the blankets next to her as Rich opened his briefcase and pulled out what looked like a copy of the NDA, already covered in sticky notes with scribbles on them. "Where'd you get that already?"
Rich looked up from where he was dragging a chair over to join her at the bedside. "Sophie had it couriered over after I accepted the referral."
"Huh," said Ripley, and then set that aside in favour of finding out what lawyers were actually good for.
***
In the end, she signed the fucking NDA, but in exchange for no less than immediate discharge from the hospital she was jailed in, a 'retirement bonus' that had made her eyes bug out when Rich casually pitched her the number (and then told her they were going to start at a number 30% higher than that), reinstatement of her pilot's licence with private registration, and a 5-year agreement that the Company couldn't contact her for any reason.
("Anything else you want?" Rich asked her when they were discussing terms of her surrender, casually like he was asking what she wanted from the store instead.
"Are you kidding me? I already think we're overreaching. They're not gonna give me all this for one lousy signature."
"Oh, they really want you to sign that agreement, Ripley. They're desperate. I doubt there's much you could come up with to demand that they wouldn't agree to, just to get this over with."
"I want Newt back."
Rich paused, tellingly. "That one," he said, "they couldn't give you even if they wanted to, anymore. She's out of their hands and in the system now. I mean, yeah, they have their fingers in every government pot, but yanking a kid back out of the foster system is something not even they have the mojo to pull off. Sorry to say."
"Well, fuck," she said.)
She signed the final agreement from her hospital bed, using the clipboard of her medical chart as a hard surface to write on, and Rich witnessed the signature for her.
"Congratulations," he said when she was done. "It's over."
"It's never over, not with them," she said, but then she resolved to find the silver lining, for once. "Thanks for your help. I really thought they had me over a barrel."
Rich grinned down at her as he got to his feet, then replaced her chart at the end of the bed. "I mean, they did, but just because you had to give in didn't mean you should do it without a fight. They just always hope you will, because that's a lot less expensive for them."
"I like the sound of that. Maybe I should have been a lawyer."
Rich extended his hand for her to shake. "Ripley, you would have made an absolutely terrifying lawyer."
She couldn't help smiling. "Flatterer."
"Take care, now. Enjoy your millions."
And that was the hell of the thing: it really was millions.
Ripley leaned her head back on her shitty hospital pillow and breathed out slowly.
***
If there was one thing life had taught Ripley, aside from the value of nuclear weapons, it was that power came from money and no matter how long she spent in hypersleep, that wasn't going to change anytime soon.
So she sat down and budgeted out what she'd need for rent, groceries, cigarettes, and then went to the bank and set herself up with investments for the rest of her hard-earned blood money. Then she promptly put it all out of her head, letting her unread monthly statements pile up as she focused her energy on relearning how to be a person.
She lasted about six months before realizing she couldn't tell the difference between relaxing and being bored stiff, and then she went out and found a job again—flying, this time. And she thought about the invested money even less, sparing it a bare second of recognition once a month before adding the new earnings statement to the pile.
It didn't matter yet, anyway. She didn't know what she was going to need the money for, not yet. Someday, she'd figure it out.
***
The doorbell interrupted her dinner, and she raised her head in confusion. It was a Tuesday evening and she didn't talk to any of her neighbours; she'd have assumed it was some asshole from the Company but there were still more than three years left to go on the no-contact agreement.
When she answered the door, she dug her fingernails into her palm to make sure she wasn't dreaming. But it hurt, and the Newt standing in front of her was several inches taller even if she still, somehow, looked like she'd been living in a trash pile.
"Ripley," she breathed, squeezing her eyes shut in naked relief before flinging herself directly into Ripley's middle.
And so, the first thing she said to Newt in several years was "Oof," as they staggered several steps back into the house.
"IfoundyouIfoundyouIfoundyou," Newt chanted against her collarbone. Ripley wrapped one arm around her as she maneuvered them back over to the door. There was nobody else outside, so she shut and locked the door and then finally breathed out, collapsing them both onto the doormat and hugging back properly as Newt just continued to cling.
Once she was fairly sure she could form words again, Ripley cleared her throat carefully and said, "You, little Newt, are awfully dirty for someone who was being taken care of." She could hear the edge in her own voice, so she let her chin rest on top of Newt's head as she added, softer, "Well. Not so little anymore."
A choked-off giggle came from the space under her chin, and Ripley leaned back and shifted her weight to make eye contact. "So?" she said. "Spill. Let's start with where you've been."
Newt breathed quietly for a moment, still sitting with two fistfuls of Ripley's t-shirt, and then said, "I ran away."
Ripley bit back the 'why' on the tip of her tongue and instead started with, "How long ago?"
Newt shrugged, predictably enough. "Dunno."
"This looks like more than a couple days' worth of dirt, kiddo."
"It is," said Newt quietly.
"Okay." Ripley let her curl back in again and asked the air over her head, "How'd you find me?"
"Been looking."
Ripley raised an eyebrow down at her. "I didn't think I was that easy to find."
"You're not," came the tart reply instantly.
"Are the cops going to come kick the door in looking for you?"
"Doubt it."
"Alright." Ripley put aside all her other questions and instead said, "Now how about we clean off a couple layers of that dirt and get some food into you?"
Newt's face lit up but her stomach growled before she could answer, and they both collapsed giggling before finally hauling themselves off the floor to get Newt into the shower.
***
It took two weeks of regular bathing and meals and the cops not showing up to kick in the door to get the full story out of Newt: this had not been her first time running away from a foster home, but her record time on the lam before had been two and a half days. This time, she'd spent three months on the street by herself. Ripley thought, not for the first time, that Newt had a powerful combination of survival skills and the devil's own luck working for her.
Thankfully, it sounded like her foster families' greatest crimes had been that they weren't Ripley, insisted on calling her Rebecca, and didn't believe the aliens were real. Newt had no idea if any of them knew where she'd come from before she was in the system, but they all treated her like she had paranoid delusions.
("'Paranoid delusions' is quite a mouthful for a kid your age," Ripley mused.
"I read a lot now," said Newt around bites of apple. "When I can't sleep.")
She'd started seriously trying to find Ripley about three months before ditching her last foster home, and her offhand description of the search she'd undertaken had been staggering: she'd started with using her school 'net access, then moved onto two local libraries for research help from the librarians, then ended up haunting the county tax roll and land title offices, conning them all into helping her access records by telling them she was trying to find her birth mother.
("You're a devious little shit, you know that?" said Ripley, knowing her face was nothing but impressed.
Newt looked away from the TV to make sure Ripley saw all of the smug, self-satisfied smile on her face.)
And then she'd had enough of her foster home where they gently treated her like a crazy person, and had chosen a few months of dumpster diving and sleeping in youth shelters or unlocked sheds while she finished hunting down Ripley's home address. It had been quite an adventure, but Newt's life so far had left her with the firm opinion that nothing that wasn't an alien was worth being scared of. Ripley found herself hoping that Newt would live a long life without having to change that opinion.
"Alright," Ripley said once she'd filled in most of the blanks. "Now what?"
Newt looked up at her. "Now I'm here." The finality with which she said that made it clear that finding Ripley had been her endgame.
That meant there was nothing to be done except keep working on carving out a life. "And you also need to be in school, Newt."
She made a face. "I guess."
Ripley snorted. "But I don't know how we're going to pull that off when you ditched your foster care. I don't think anyone would let you stay here if they knew."
"Why not?! There's nothing wrong with you!" Newt didn't normally raise her voice except in sheer terror. Ripley decided to choose her next words carefully.
"And there's nothing wrong with you, Newt. Except that we're both very tired and would like some peace and quiet."
Newt nodded solemnly.
"But they say you have paranoid delusions. And I promise you, they're not saying anything better about me."
Newt's brow furrowed; she was clearly thinking that over. "They'll say you're an unfit mother," she concluded.
She couldn't help laughing at that. "Among other things, yeah." She was starting to crave a cigarette something fierce, but she'd been trying to only smoke outdoors since Newt had moved in. She started chewing her lip instead.
"Well, that's bullshit."
"Language!"
Newt looked chastised, but still said, "But it is."
"Find other ways to say so."
Newt sighed through her nose and shifted her position on the couch, moving from hugging her knees to sitting up cross-legged. "Well, I'm not going back," she declared.
Ripley leaned over to kiss the crown of her head. "I don't want you to. But we'll have to figure something out."
"I don't have to go to school."
"Yes you do. You were already a couple years behind on your education when we brought you to Earth."
"School was boring. It was too easy."
Ripley smiled at her warmly. "Well, then when we get you back in there, you won't have any trouble catching up on all the time you've missed since you ran away."
Newt sighed loudly, and Ripley mussed her hair a little before getting up to go pick through her desk drawer. When she'd fished out the card she wanted, she excused herself to the phone in the kitchen and made an audio-only call.
"Rich," she said when he answered the phone, "are you keeping out of trouble or do you want some work?"
Rich rallied admirably from that greeting. "Ripley! Am I to guess that you're not keeping out of trouble yourself?"
"Newt showed up at my door a few weeks ago. And I don't think anyone could extract her with pliers now, not that I'd want them to."
He made a considering noise. "Wasn't she in foster care?"
"Yep."
"I see. Can I talk to her?"
Ripley turned around and saw her already hovering in the kitchen doorway; she shook her head with a rueful little grin and said, "Yeah, she's right here."
Once she'd beckoned Newt over to the phone and flipped a piece of hair back to the correct side of her head for her, Ripley turned on the video pickup for the call, showing Rich sitting behind a dark wood desk.
"Hi, Newt! I'm Rich. Nice to finally put a face to your name."
Newt shot her a startled look.
"Yeah, you can trust him. He solves problems, and he keeps secrets really well." Ripley smoothed a hand over Newt's hair, and then tilted her chin up to make eye contact and said, "Listen: answer all his questions and don't lie to him, got it?"
Newt nodded, just a little. "Got it," she said softly.
"Thanks, Ripley. Now, please don't take this personally, but: shoo." He waved her off a little.
"I'm going, I'm going. I'll be outside," she said, and went out the back door to finally have that cigarette.
***
Rich had taught Newt a new word, one on the fast track to becoming her favourite: emancipation.
"Because I guess I'm almost fifteen already?" she said, scratching the side of her head absently. "Even though it doesn't feel like it, since I was asleep. He also said I could sue the Company," she added with a perplexed little frown. "I don't get why, though."
"Money."
"Oh. Do we need money?"
Ripley shook her head. "I got you covered, kiddo."
Newt beamed and then shuffled in to hug her. "You always do," she said against Ripley's shirt.
"You're damn right," said Ripley, giving her a squeeze back around the shoulders and a kiss on the crown of her head.
Newt leaned back a little. "When are we gonna find Hicks?"
That stopped her cold.
"Ripley?" There was an edge of worry in her voice, and Ripley snapped out of… whatever… to reassure her. But she could only tell the truth.
"Sweetheart, I haven't seen Hicks since we got in the sleep pods on the ship."
"Not once?" Her voice was small.
Ripley shook her head. "Not even once. I have no idea what happened to him. I could barely get them to tell me what happened to you, so I thought I'd better not push my luck and make them more suspicious of Hicks."
"That makes sense," was heartbreaking to hear, but Newt had been through a lot more fucked-up situations. "Maybe I can find him, too? I'm getting good at it."
"You can certainly try, kiddo. Remember he was a Marine, though. Sometimes where they go is a secret."
"That's true. Hmm."
Ripley decided to think of it as a new hobby that would keep Newt occupied and out of trouble. "Just don't go off by yourself to butter up any county clerks, alright?" Or colonial military admins with a security clearance.
Newt saluted her crisply, and then spun on her heel and headed back to the living room.
***
Rich quite frankly couldn't get Newt emancipated and back into school soon enough, because entertaining a kid that inquisitive was a job and a half. She hadn't been lying that she read a lot these days; she was a voracious reader, and no piece of paper or terminal screen in the house was safe when she got bored enough. Not that Ripley particularly cared about anything she had that Newt might read, but it was ridiculous all the same.
And one day right after Ripley got home from a work shift, it led to Newt wandering into the kitchen with a letter-folded sheet of paper in hand and asking, "Why do you own the Company?"
Ripley almost choked on her glass of water. "Pardon?"
Newt flapped the piece of paper at her in response, and when Ripley took it she saw it was one of the bank statements she never looked at. "Kiddo, this is just the statement from my investments, that's all." She barely skimmed it before setting it down on the table between them.
"Oh," said Newt, who knew by then where their money had come from and approved of the price Ripley had charged for her silence. But then she said, "Okay, but it still says here that you own them. The Company."
"I don't," assured Ripley, pulling the paper over to skim it with slightly more attention. There was certainly no 'Weyland-Yutani' jumping off the page at her; she would surely have actually noticed if it had appeared there at some point. "I own shares—little pieces—of a bunch of companies and other things. But I definitely don't own them, or even a little piece."
As she picked up her water glass again, Newt made a frustrated noise and stabbed a pointing finger into the page, then pushed it over under Ripley's nose. "It's right there," she said, pointing at a line that said Ripley owned 50 shares in a company named 'Weyu'.
"What?" said Ripley blankly.
Newt looked back and forth between her and the paper like Ripley was missing something very obvious. "That's them," she said insistently.
"What?" She picked up the paper like that might help it make more sense.
"They changed their name a couple months ago," said Newt. "And their logo, and their slogan." She paused. "Like when we painted my bedroom and now it looks different even though it's the same room. Except my bedroom is good."
Ripley stared at her. "What?"
"It was in the news."
Ripley tended to skip watching or reading the news these days, especially when it was about the Company. But Newt, precious Newt, read absolutely goddamn everything and that especially included the news.
Still, she asked, "Are you sure?"
Newt gave a long-suffering sigh and pinched Ripley's sleeve between her fingers to tow her into the living room, where the 'net terminal was. Then she tossed her hair back over her shoulder and leaned over the keyboard to type something in, and when the page loaded, there was the article Newt had been talking about. Ripley sat down in a daze and read the whole thing twice.
"'We Are You'?" she echoed when she was done.
"Yeah," said Newt.
"That's the shittiest slogan ever."
"Yeah."
She turned in the chair to face Newt, who was starting to giggle. "Especially for them," she said, and Newt cracked up, so all Ripley could do was join her in it.
"Dammit," she said when they calmed down enough to breathe again.
"Are you gonna keep the, uh… shares? The pieces?"
"No way in hell," she said, and got up to go call her account manager.
***
The call didn't go well.
"You seem to be having trouble understanding me," said Ripley, grasping for the last threads of her patience. "I don't care if it helps my portfolio's diversity, or whatever the fuck. I don't care if their stock is up because the piece of shit has a new coat of polish on it and everyone fell for that. I don't care if it was in the mutual fund. I don't care if I made money from these goddamn shares before figuring out who the hell they were. It's not acceptable for you to invest my money into that festering sludge pile they call a company, and there was already a note on my file to that effect!"
"Ms. Ripley, I keep telling you, this is a mutual fund. Naturally we do what we can to accommodate your preferences, but—"
Ripley hung up on him.
After five deep, held breaths, she called him back and said, "You're fired. I'll handle my own money," and hung up again over his spluttering protests at the prospect of losing several million credits in investment funds all of a sudden.
"Goddammit," she said to the kitchen light.
Newt called from the living room, "It says here that you have to get a direct account for, um, investing in stuff, on your own, but I guess once you do that, then you're fine?"
Ripley wandered over to the doorway and leaned her head on the frame as she watched Newt twirl in the desk chair. "Is that so?"
"Uh huh. Everything I read says you gotta 'keep up with the markets', though. I don't know what that means."
Ripley smiled, letting it pull up one side of her mouth. "I think it means you have to read financial news. Keep track of when companies are doing well or not."
"Or when they change their name to try and look better to people?"
"Or that, yeah," she grinned. "Think I got my work cut out for me."
Newt hummed and twirled some more. "I could help."
"You like reading financial news?"
Newt shrugged.
"Do you understand the financial news?"
"Today it says Crunchy Oats fired their CEO—" she said the letters with separate emphasis, bobbing her head with each one, "—and that probably means their stock is gonna go down, but then once they get a new one, it'll go up again! Because of confidence!" She pointed a finger in the air to punctuate that. "'Stock' is the shares you can buy," she earnestly explained.
Ripley bit the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing, but it came through as joy and delight in her voice when she said, "Sounds like you've got this stuff nailed down."
"Easy," said Newt, tossing her hair. Then she tilted her head and said, "I like Crunchy Oats. I wonder why they fired that guy."
"Probably the oats weren't meeting targets for crunchiness."
Newt grinned. "That would be bad."
"Can't call them Crunchy Oats unless they're crunchy," said Ripley with a one-shouldered shrug.
Newt shook her head very solemnly, and then after Ripley drifted over to the couch to sag into the cushions for a while, she said, wide-eyed, "What if you bought all the shares in a company?"
"Then I actually would own it," said Ripley, lacing her fingers together over her stomach and staring into the middle distance. "But then if the company went broke, I'd lose all my money. That's why people buy little pieces here and there. So if one fails, you still have others that didn't."
Newt was back to spinning in the chair, quarter turns back and forth as she pushed her foot against the floor. "But I read that if you own enough shares—not even all of them, but like, a whole bunch—they let you be in charge. And give you a piece of wood."
Ripley blinked several times until she realized what Newt must be talking about. "Do you mean a board?"
"Yeah."
"That's actually a group of people here, not a piece of wood."
"Oh."
"They have meetings and make decisions about the company together."
"Yeah! If you did that, the board thing, you could be in charge and then the company wouldn't go broke."
"You have a lot of faith in me, kiddo."
Newt just nodded happily, and Ripley inexplicably teared up a little. She cleared her throat and rubbed the wetness out of one eye.
"I'm not sure I have what it takes to keep a company from going broke. Just because the Company people we meet are always dummies, doesn't mean they all are." Probably.
Newt was unconcerned. "You're really good at making people do what you tell them. It would work."
Ripley grinned helplessly at nothing. "If you say so."
"You could buy all the shares for 'Weyu'," she said, making a face and using air quotes, "and get on the board and make them stop trying to catch aliens."
Ripley sat bolt upright.
"No," she said then, relaxing a little. "No, it wouldn't be that easy. And it would take more money than I have."
"How much more?"
"I don't know, Newt, but definitely more. They're worth a lot of money."
Newt swung the chair back around to the terminal. "How do we find that out?" she asked.
Ripley sagged back into the couch. "I think they have to have that written down somewhere, where people can read it? But I'm not sure."
"If you own shares, they have to tell you, don't they?" Newt guessed.
"Maybe? I really don't know much about it, kiddo. Above my pay grade."
"Hmm," said Newt, and Ripley left her to it and drifted off into a nap.
***
"I wanna call Rich," said Newt one day over breakfast.
Ripley swallowed her mouthful of cereal. "Didn't he say he'd call us when he gets a court date about the emancipation thing?"
"Yeah, but I wanna ask about something else."
Ripley decided it wasn't really her business, and that Rich probably wouldn't lead Newt astray. "His card is on my desk. Call him whenever you want. You might have to leave a message, though. I'm sure he's busy."
"Okay," said Newt, and went back to shoveling down her cereal.
Ripley put it out of her head then, and three days later Newt announced over dinner, "Rich is gonna help me sue the Company for 20 million in damage. Damages?"
Ripley dropped her fork with a clatter even as she automatically said, "Damages." Then once that was out of the way, she said, "Pardon?"
Newt just shrugged and played with her mashed potatoes instead of eating them as she casually said, "I have to do it by October if I wanna do it at all. And I decided I wanna do it."
"Okay," said Ripley, because what else could she say? Newt's entire world had been destroyed and her life ruined, and if she wanted to claw money out of the Company for that, why shouldn't she? The Company loved money, after all. "That's a big number," she noted.
"Rich thinks I can get thirty, but I don't need that much."
Ripley paused. "How much do you need?"
"Twelve million," said Newt easily, back to eating her potatoes instead of digging trenches in them.
"And for what?" she asked lightly.
"So we can buy a… controller? No, controlled share in the Company."
Ripley stared at her for a second, then put her hand over her face to smother the inappropriate laugh. "Did your research, huh?"
"Yep! You were right, it's gonna cost a lot."
"So, I guess we're doing this, then?"
Newt nodded. "Oh. I just remembered. Rich said it's really funny that we're gonna buy the Company with the Company's money. He's excited!"
Ripley let the laugh out that time, because he was right. It was fucking funny. Shakespearean, even. "Guess I better start figuring out how this is gonna work, then, huh?"
"He said if we settle, it won't be for six months, for the amount I want. But he thinks they'll do it so I don't get to tell people about the aliens or Hadley's Hope."
"Are you okay with that?"
"For this, I am." Newt stuffed another forkful of food in her mouth.
***
Rich beat Ripley to making the phone call. "Figured you might be looking for some information," he said casually.
"Teach me, wise man."
"I think you're gonna want to do this without them figuring out it's you buying up all their stock, so to hide your identity you'll need a shell company to buy it all up. Or two."
"Should I be taking notes?"
"I'll send you a message later with the notes. For now, just listen. Start slow, so you might as well get your own assets in there while you wait on this lawsuit to resolve. And I can't stress enough that it's colossally stupid to put all your eggs in one basket like this."
"Oh, I know," said Ripley dryly. "But it's not about the money. Not really."
"And that's why I'm going to help you out," said Rich, so Ripley settled in to get her crash course on hostile corporate takeovers.
***
She walked into her first shareholders' meeting in a nice suit that felt like a Halloween costume, and only three of the existing directors recognized her name immediately when she introduced herself (as the representative of the company that owned the five other companies that had bought enough stock to plant her straight on the board of directors, without much argument to be made from anybody against it). Ripley took her moment to savour the slow growing confusion and then panic on their faces, watched it spread through the rest of the board like a fire.
Within ten minutes, they were hissing at her that she couldn't possibly expect to buy out Weyu stock with settlement funds, bleating about conflicts of interest, threatening to void her NDA and recall all the funds she'd been paid out.
"Well, if you're going to do that then I can't possibly stop you," she said calmly. "You're right, though, that all those funds are tied up in Weyu shares. So, I guess I'll have to divest to raise the money to pay you for that breach of contract, huh?" She laughed a little. "I'll have to dump them all at once to have a hope in hell of raising that kind of money back for you. Hope that's okay."
Everyone in the room—the whole room—stopped.
Ripley waited patiently while several of them checked the shares report to see exactly how much stock she was threatening to dump.
Her understanding of the stock market was still sketchy, but she knew for sure it was enough to torpedo the Company's share value and trigger an actual hostile takeover by an actual company, some mergers and acquisitions vampire firm waiting out there in the shadows for just this type of corporate stupidity to fall into their laps.
The board chose to resume the meeting from the agenda. Ripley took her seat and followed along gamely in the reports.
"I have a question," she said finally, raising her hand and stopping the meeting, "about this colonial venture on LX-215. And about the proposed cleanup operations on LV-426, naturally."
"Fuck," the president muttered audibly.
***
It happened at the grocery store, of all places. She was scanning the cereal aisle for where the hell they'd moved the Crunchy Oats to this week, mostly thinking about what Newt might want for a snack when she got home from school later, when she registered a presence behind her left shoulder.
"I think they're out of Crunchy Oats," said a voice in her ear.
He caught the corner of the shopping basket before she managed to drive it straight into his guts, but left himself open to a knee strike that almost collapsed him.
When she saw it was Hicks now holding himself up by one hand on the floor and saying, "Jesus, Ellen," she stopped just short of blowing out his knee with her right foot.
"Did that seem like a smart idea when you had it?" she demanded, her voice a little high-pitched with her indignance.
"I've never been known for my smart ideas," said Hicks, accepting her hand to haul himself back up onto his now shaky knee. "Fuck, you definitely haven't lost your edge."
"My mandatory therapist said that was the trauma," she said flatly.
"Oh, yeah, mine might have said something like that, too." He attempted a rakish grin once he could stand on both legs again. She felt slightly infuriated that it was working on her.
She looked him over quickly. His face was in much better shape than she'd left him, so either the Marines or the Company had shelled out for some plastic surgery. "Does that eye work?"
He huffed a little laugh and shook his head. "Yeah, they grew me a new one."
"Sounds expensive. How'd you swing that?"
"I dunno, how'd you swing twenty percent ownership of Weyland-fucking-Yutani, Ellen?"
She raised her eyebrows and said, "My silence was even more expensive than your new eye. And face."
"That's pretty expensive," he said, straight faced. Then he leaned down slowly and picked up her basket, passing it off to her with one hand as he reached out to grab two scattered cans off the floor. Their eyes met over the basket when he straightened up again to dump them back in for her.
"Hi," he said.
It was getting harder to hold back the smile. "Hi," she said.
He grinned, slow and warm.
"Where the fuck have you been for the last several years?" she went on, keeping her voice calm and steady.
The smile fell off, and then he shuffled a little, waving vaguely at his healed and repaired face and then stuffing his hand in a jeans pocket and shrugging. "Tied up with stuff," he said finally.
"Ah," she said, and then violated his personal space to reach past his shoulder, savouring the little hitch in his breath before she stepped back again with a box of Crunchy Oats in hand. "Found them," she said, giving the box a triumphant rattle before stuffing it in the basket.
Hicks fell in step with her as she kept winding her way through the store. "So are you going to tell me why you stalked me to my local grocery store?" she finally asked in the freezer aisle.
"I've been looking for you," he said. "Kinda figured you'd be out in the black somewhere, though. Imagine my surprise when my news alert feed for 'Ellen Ripley' finally coughed something up, but it was 'Former Pilot Ellen Ripley Joins Weyu Board of Directors'." He waved his hand in front of him to illustrate the marquee of that headline as he said it. "So. What gives?"
She grabbed a pint of ice cream and carried on to the bagged vegetables section. "I finally figured out that it's pretty hard to beat them unless you're playing the same game." She let the freezer door shut with a thump. "Once you learn their rules, though, boy is it ever simple to run rings around them."
"How do you feel about using that blood money from your dividend payouts or whatever to buy your groceries?"
"Same way I felt spending their blood money from my paycheques on groceries at any point in the last century: I'm pretty okay with it, Hicks." She stepped in close to add in an undertone, "Better, even, because last month I got them to agree to raze LV-426 right to the bedrock."
That was definitely news to him. "How the hell did you manage that?"
She let her smile go as wolfish as it always felt when she thought about these things. "I own a fifth of the Company's stock, and the only thing stopping me from dumping all of it, cratering their share value, and leaving them to be picked over by vultures at any given moment is goodwill."
His smile started to match hers, and at this distance the way he looked her up and down was hard to miss. It made her a little hot under the collar.
"I missed you," he said.
"Guess you must have, if you followed me into the store just to say hello."
"I'd follow you into worse places than this just to hear you say hello to me, Ellen."
She arched one eyebrow. "Just for a hello? You have low standards."
"Oh, the list of places gets a lot longer if we're going past hellos."
She remembered abruptly that they were standing in the middle of the freezer aisle and backed off half a step before she did something extremely silly. "Well, you've gotten your hello, so you should take a hike," she said, nodding with her chin for him to make himself scarce.
He actually looked a little hurt at that, but she cut him off before he could do more than start opening his mouth to protest.
"Then you can take care of whatever you need to before you come over for dinner later." She smirked a little. "Newt will be thrilled to see you."
He looked a little stunned. "You have Newt?" he asked, hope cracking through his voice with it.
"Come see for yourself. Six PM. Don't be late."
"It's a date," said Hicks, doing that goddamned rakish grin again and making her itchy. In the grocery store.
"It's dinner," she corrected.
His face lit up with some other smartass remark, so she added, "Family dinner."
Hicks paused, and she watched that sink in.
"I'll be there with bells on," he said.
When he brushed past her to leave, the absolute bastard trailed one hand along her arm, and the touch burned like a brand.
She was left looking down at the contents of her basket, as the background noise of the store filtered back into her awareness.
"I've forgotten my entire goddamn grocery list," she breathed. "Shit."
THE END