Archive of Our Own ^beta

He tells himself he’s going to see her because that’s what he’s been ordered to do.

She’s there in the room just like she always is today, the day before tomorrow when she died a thousand times that have never happened, and now won’t. She pops up to her feet when she spots him there, in the midst of all that heavy, swirling machinery - you’d be forgiven for thinking she’s the singular point of calm at the eye of the storm if you don’t know her the way he does - and she plants her feet solidly and she sets her taped hands at her hips. Even now, even after everything she’s taught him that was nothing he wanted to learn, he knows she could flatten him in thirty seconds or less and he wouldn’t even be embarrassed by it because it’d be so familiar. She’s familiar, as familiar as a beach in a country he’s never been to, a farmhouse where she died a thousand times, where he died to try to save her but never could.

Of course, she’s never seen him before in her life and he thinks that’s what it is that strikes him as so damn funny, so incredibly bone-deep goddamn hilarious that he actually laughs out loud like a totally inappropriate idiot jerkwad. Yesterday that’s tomorrow and now never, Rita who knew him might’ve said that’s exactly what he is. She might not have. He guesses that would all depend on which reset it was.

“Major,” she says, coming to slightly sweaty attention when she sees the uniform, notices his rank in that awkward way she’s never had to before. It’s what jars him out of his inane chuckling.

“Rita,” he says, and he shrugs and he smiles and he tilts his head like he’s admitting his moment of over-familiarity was a mistake or at least a misstep. “Sergeant Vrataski.” And she gives him a look and a not quite roll of her eyes that says he’s not the first slimy douche in an officer’s uniform who’s taken that particular liberty. If he’s honest, it’s not even the first time he’s taken it, but it’s never been in uniform before because he was always a private. She’s never been expected to take his shit and she never has before.

“No disrespect, major,” she says, though he knows she doesn’t mean it because precisely was she does mean is disrespect, “but I’m busy. So, unless you need something…” She gestures vaguely at the drones spinning around her out there on the training floor. She wants to get back to it. She’d rather she hadn’t had to speak at all.

“I need something, sergeant,” he says, and he smiles at the way she looks at him, that expression that says I swear to God, if what comes next is crap innuendo… Being who she is, she might even get away with striking a superior officer, so he snaps to, like he was taught back in ROTC, like you see on TV, like the Marine Corps ever meant much to him before all this at all, chin high, back straight, smile fading quickly. She reacts to it, even if all he can really manage is a half-decent facsimile of a US Marine. She stands tall with her hands tucked in behind her back and she looks at him levelly.

“We have orders, sergeant,” he says. “You’ll drop with me in the morning, on schedule.”

And they do have orders, because maybe the war is over but there’s always more work to be done. The difference is now he’s not afraid to do it.

---

The beach is different now they’re not taking fire from all sides. They’re not taking fire at all so it’s almost like a totally different place, or would be if he didn’t know it so damn well.

They’ve dropped in because their producer, a French guy whose name is François but who makes them all call him Frank, says the drama of it will add a certain something to the footage and Cage can’t say he disagrees; he would have, once upon a time, back when the dropship’s dropaway floor dropping away still made his stomach lurch. He was never really afraid of heights but there was something about seeing the sea appear fifty yards or more beneath his feet while the fleet blew up in the sky around him that hadn’t exactly inspired great confidence the first few times around. He never meant to be a marine and Christ, even after he was he was never meant to see combat, so he’d say his apprehension was pretty darn sensible back then. But it wore off. He got used to it.

It’s different now, though, standing there on the beach. The drop was easy, textbook, though everything he knows about dropping he’s learned in action and definitely not from some crappy pamphlet back at Quantico or Parris Island or wherever the hell marines are taught that bullshit these days, like officer school or basic training has ever really prepared recruits for a day like today was yesterday. But there’s J Squad, playing up to the camera just like he knew they would and he guesses that’s why he requested them, all of them, even Kimmel in his TV-unfriendly jock under his suit, clowning around in the midst of all the other teams’ landings, while Rita watches them mutely and pretends she’s doing nothing of the sort.

He thinks maybe she was like them once, rowdy and inexperienced with a smile on her face, back before Verdun, before they painted her suit black and red and didn’t even try to stop the troops calling her the Full Metal Bitch. Not that he’ll ever know, of course, because everyone who knew her then is dead. He knows that because he’s checked; he’s tracked every last name in her squad to a tombstone. After that, he hasn’t needed to ask her about Hendricks. He didn’t like the look she gave him when he said the name anyway.

“How many times have you dropped, major?” Frank asks, pointing him to one of two cameras, diverting attention from the other one that’s mounted on the shoulder of the suit of a guy who’s busy chucking up his breakfast. The three of them, Frank and his cameramen, have all had more training than Cage ever did before his first drop, but he guesses he understands how the guy feels.

“Officially?” he says, flashing the camera a winning smile that feels harder to fake than it used to. “Never.” Then he strides away, lets the camera pull wide on the scene, the sand, the sky, the other teams coming down around them. It’ll be effective, he thinks. He knows the danger’s passed but they need to show the world that’s the honest truth of it, too. They’ve been scared for so long that it might be a hard sell.

The camera’s still on him as he looks up and down the long stretch of French coast there, as he takes a moment to system check his suit and he knows the way he does it all says he’s done it many times before. Back up in the ship just minutes ago, Rita looked like she expected him to crash and burn, or at least land face-first in wet sand. She’s been eyeing him not quite suspiciously since his perfect landing. He’s wearing the same suit he’s worn a thousand times before but then, officially, he’s never worn it at all. He knows how it must look.

“Let’s move out, master sergeant,” he calls to Farell, and Farell starts to collect the troops. Cage moves, and Rita falls into step beside him.

“You’ve been here before,” she says, and she looks at him sidelong, almost accusing.

After a moment, he shakes his head. He looks away.

“First time,” he says. Maybe he’s even convincing - he knows how to lie, after all - but then again, she’s seen straight through him from the start.

There’ll be time to tell her later. He just needs to find the words.

---

It’s nowhere near as hard as he thought it’d be to pretend he doesn’t know where the mimics are. They’re all dead now so it doesn’t matter who finds them, or when or where. He can pretend they don’t exist at all and never did.

As they move across the countryside, they see other squads find six or seven, hidden in houses, half-buried in the ground, a couple just lying out dead in the road. They’re hacking them into pieces, pulling them apart in their power-assisted suits like gory alien rag dolls with some great goddamn whoops like they just killed the damn mimic and didn’t just dismember its corpse, and the cameras are catching it all. It’ll play well on the news, even if it’s fucking disgusting. He’s killed thousands of them, sure, but the troops look like they want to keep the torn-off limbs like trophies, like they’d look good stuffed and mounted on the wall of their local pub so they can all tell the story of the day the war ended well into their old age. They might even get a free drink or two out of it now and then.

The military vehicles weren’t all lost in the drop this time - none were, because there was just nothing to lose them to - so they don’t stop at the trailer park, or at least not for long, because they don’t need to. They don’t need to avoid the village nearby so they go in, find all the locals either dead or fled and there’s a detail hashed together to gather the corpses and take them out to the churchyard, take photos like that’s not really fucking macabre so they can maybe be identified later. Some of them are so torn up he’s not sure even dental records will help. Others look like they went to sleep one night and woke up dead in the morning. He’s not sure when seeing shit like that stopped making him want to throw up, but there it is.

When it starts to get dark, the troops gather in the village square and light a fire; they climb out of their suits and bed down, drink a bit once they’ve raided the bars and cafés with scribbled IOUs and promises to camera that they’ll repay the debt sometime. It’ll play well, too, a few squads of what’s left of the UDF troops there celebrating the end of the war, but it’s not a celebration that Cage wants any part of because hell, frankly he’s still surprised to find he’s alive. So he replaces the battery in his suit and he walks out of town while the cameras are pointed elsewhere. Even in the dark, under a waning crescent moon with a flashlight in his hand that keeps crapping out on him, he still knows where he’s going. The farmhouse isn’t far.

He knows she’s following him; he could lose her in the dark but he lets her.

He leaves his suit at the door and goes inside and by the time she joins him there, looking pissed and tired but still inquisitive and he’s still pretty damn surprised her resets didn’t knock that shit right out of her, he’s sitting up on the counter in the deserted kitchen with a cup of coffee already in his hands that he’s brewed over a sputtering camp stove. There’s one on the table for her with a handful of lit candles that make the room flicker around them, a cup that he gestures to so she pulls out a chair and she sits down, drags the mug closer over the worn wooden tabletop. She holds it in both hands because it’s warm and she’s shivering. He’d offer her his jacket but she wouldn’t take it and he wonders if she wonders why he doesn’t at least offer, if she thinks he’s a self-absorbed Yankee bastard and if he should care if she does. He does. He knows he does because yesterday before the war was over he was ready to die for her, so apparently he cares. He’s not self-deluded enough to believe the world was the only thing he wanted to save in the end. It wasn’t even his primary target.

The coffee gave him away once before and so he hasn’t made it the way she likes it, not quite, though she still gives a semi-appreciative murmur once she’s taken her first sip. Then she sets it back down and she pushes her dirty hair back out of her eyes and she leans forward, her elbows on the table.

“How did you know this was here?” she asks, and gestures to the coffee, to the room, to the house, to the farm.

He just shrugs in response and pours himself a second cup.

“How many times have you been here?” she asks.

“I’ve never been to France before,” he says. “Today’s my first time.”

She rolls her eyes and she sits back heavily in her spindle-backed wooden chair that’s like something out of a history flick, like they’ve stepped straight into occupied France in the 30s and it’s not nearly a hundred years later. He guesses time’s relative.

“Neither had I, before Verdun,” she says. “Have I ever told you how many times I was there in the end?”

“Your service record says once.”

“Bastard,” she says, and she shakes her head. “Don’t be an arse. You know exactly what I mean.”

He does. He knows exactly what she means and he’s not sure why he doesn’t just admit that he does and then tell her the story, except now there’s no do-overs and he’s not sure when he started to regret that instead of giving a God-almighty fucking cheer about it. But he thinks he’ll say the wrong thing because he knows there’s any number of wrong things he could say and Rita Vrataski is a minefield just as surely as the beach was the day before the day it was suddenly disconcertingly safe. He hasn’t found the words yet, not the right ones.

“I don’t know what you want me to tell you,” he says.

She sighs so deeply that her breath almost blows out half of the candles. They flicker dangerously.

“The truth would be a good place to start,” she says.

“Sure, when I know what that is you’ll be the first to know,” he tells her, because he thinks there are probably as many truths as there’ve been days.

Rita drinks her coffee in stony silence, takes her time about it but he’s not in a hurry and wouldn’t try to hurry her. Then she leaves her seat to refill her cup from the pot sitting over the low flame of the camp stove and she leans back against the counter where he’s sitting, his muddy heels leaving marks against a cupboard door but he doesn’t even know if the owner’s still alive so he can’t quite bring himself to care about it.

“Just tell me one thing,” she says in the end, after the next few minutes standing there in silence, just close enough for him to feel uncomfortable when her elbow brushes his knee every now and then, and she glances at him sideways over her newly empty cup. She moves to put it down in the sink across the room like maybe someone will come back there at any moment and find it and wash it and put it back in the cupboard where he found it, and maybe they will. Then she comes back to him and she steps in close and she rests her hands against his thighs; he can feel how warm her palms are now through the fabric of his pants right there above his knees. “Are you still resetting the day or is it over?”

He takes a long breath that tastes of coffee and dust and candle smoke and the grease that’s still clinging to their clothes and their skin from their suits. She’s so close and so real and she’s living and breathing and he’d been so sure she was gone and then so was he, just for a second, for the blink of an eye between Paris and London, between drowning and the thwip-thwip-thwip of a helicopter’s rotors. He should kiss her, he thinks, she’s right there and this time she’d remember it, and maybe she wouldn’t even break his jaw. Maybe she’d let him get away with it or maybe that’s just so much wishful thinking.

He slips down from the counter in front of her. In a second he’s pressed against her from belly to thigh and she’s still looking at him steadily, doesn’t move away because he’s obviously so much more uncomfortable with it than she is. She’s unflappable. She puts her hands at the edge of the counter either side of his waist and she leans in till she’s almost too close for his eyes to focus on her.

“It’s over,” he says, and he pushes her away just far enough to step aside and make some space. She lets him, and has the good grace not to look triumphant.

He’ll sleep in the house tonight, he thinks. It’s late and it’s a couple of miles back to the village where the others are, and he’s tired because he’s been tired for a lifetime of a day that’ll never happen. He goes into the lounge, takes a candlestick with him though he’s pretty sure he could find the way in the dark if he needed to, and he sits down in the worn leather armchair. It’s as good a place to sleep as any, he figures. It’s not his bed back in his place back home in DC but at least there’s a roof over his head and J Squad aren’t keeping him awake passing a bottle of something that’s got more in common with paint thinner than liquor. It might make him feel better but he’d regret it at oh-dark-thirty when they have to move out. He can’t remember the last time he was drunk, one reset or other, but at least he’d known he wouldn’t have to deal with the hangover.

In the morning, she’s stretched out under a blanket on the couch across the room and she’s watching him, in the early-morning sunlight through the faded lace curtains at the window. He realizes he didn’t expect her to stay and the rest of J Squad probably thinks they’re fucking but if she doesn’t care then it’s not much like he can.

“You snore,” she tells him.

He chuckles. “You’ve accused me of worse,” he says. “We should move out.”

It’ll be the first time they’ve both left the farm alive. He’ll make coffee first, he thinks, and maybe she’ll join him.

---

There was shitty footage taken from cellphones pasted all over the news channels the day the mimics took Paris. It seems like forever ago, years at least, but he’s pretty sure it’s only been something like ten months. The idea of war and all his petty personal crap on top of it distorted his view of time almost as badly as the resets did, it turns out.

They’re not the first squad to make it to Paris by any means. While they were coming south from the coast on the ground there’ve been others airlifted up north from Algiers and west from Stockholm, companies stopping off in Marseille and Lyon and Berlin and Hamburg and Brussels, but there’s still thousands of them that’ve converged there in Paris, their dropships skimming up the Champs-Élysées, half a squad dropping in right on top of the Arc de Triomphe like they did it for a dare. It makes a pretty damn inspiring picture, he thinks, the men and women of the United Defense Force cheering as they raise a French flag up there on top of the arch and then the UDF’s own flag right next to it. Maybe they’ve not so much won the war by force as by default and maybe the top brass around the world will speculate on what exactly it was that happened for a while longer but in the end it’ll all be academic, a question for people like Carter who’ll ask what that power surge really was and if that was the cause or an effect or just a total coincidence, if there was some kind of cascade reaction or hell, maybe it was just plain old Earth bacteria that did them in or some such bullshit. In the end, what the war will be is a photo of a flag in a half-ruined city that meant life would go on.

Cage doesn’t really give a shit about the French flag or the UDF or the celebration, the fact someone’s turned on music and someone’s turned on French radio and the two things are fighting it out with all the hollering, or the fact the cameras are rolling and the booze is flowing. Maybe once it would’ve been his scene, before this, maybe back in college when drinking and womanizing and frat parties and all that shit he mostly can’t recall were pretty much his passion in life. He remembers how his CO in the ROTC frankly despaired of him and most of his colleagues. He wonders if he’d do things differently if he had them to do again.

So, he says his piece to camera, the one he’s been working on in his head since they left the coast that morning and headed inland under General Brigham’s orders, and then in the aftermath, as the cameras turn to the crowds, he disappears. If he heads straight down the Champs-Élysées he’ll reach the Place de la Concorde; cross the square between the fountains that quit who knows how long ago and he’ll be standing in the Tuileries; from there he’ll see the big glass pyramid in the courtyard where they ended the war the way only he remembers. He’ll go in and he’ll go down and he’ll see for himself what’s left there.

She follows him. He thought maybe she’d given up but he should’ve known better and up to the obelisk at the end of the great wide boulevard, past soldiers drinking in the street who might be giving a quick guilty glance at the oak leaves stenciled on his suit as he passes by, she follows him maybe ten yards behind like maybe that’ll mean he won’t notice her. He sees the gawking faces of marines reflected in half-smashed storefronts as she passes them, the stage-whispers of her name because if the war has one celebrity it’s Rita Vrataski. But then, by the Egyptian obelisk that’s crashed down and broken, that went down on a hundred cellphone videos the day the mimics came to town, she catches up with him and she falls into stride. Yesterday, he’d’ve been the chatty Cathy who couldn’t’ve shut his big mouth if you’d paid him; today, he’s got nothing to say.

She doesn’t ask what happened as they pass the dead mimics in the atrium, though he guesses she’s guessed why he’s come here. She doesn’t ask about the visions or the omega or the resets or if he ever met Carter or if she was there with him when it ended, when whatever happened finally happened; she just walks with him and when he looks at her she looks at him and he knows she wants to know everything, every detail, every move they made, every word they said, every sound, every smell in the air like any of it was pleasant, like it makes good memories. She wants to remember the day that never happened. He mostly just wants to forget.

“You died here,” he tells her.

“That’s my job,” she replies, and he smiles and he turns away.

“Yeah, Rita, I know,” he says. “You volunteered.” But he doesn’t mean he wants to prove her theory. That’s not what’s in his head as he peers over the edge, down to where the omega was and the omega died and he did. He just needs to know, once and for all, that it’s really done and he didn’t fuck up on some interesting new level. He wants to see if the glow’s still there like it was before, eerie, otherworldly and he guesses that’s the right word for it; he’s wondering which other world out there they come from, in the sky that’s likely not been so dark above the city for whole decades, when he slips and he falls and it’s dumb and maybe it’s ironic or maybe it’s poetic because he’s lived a thousand lives or more but now there’s no do-overs he’d just have to die the stupidest death humanly possible. He’s going to drown somewhere in the filthy water under the Louvre, dragged down by the weight of the suit that’s saved his life more times than he can count. He’s already gulped a fucking lungful of water, freezing and brackish and he’d gag if he could but he can’t. He’s going to die there after all.

But she catches him. Of course she does.

“Clumsy arse,” she says as she yanks him up out of the water and as he hacks up everything that’s in his lungs and breathes again she smiles at him, but that’s before she topples backwards with his gloved hands in hers. She skids on the marble floor and for a second, as she falls, the smile’s still on her face. For a second, as the long length of rebar pierces her chest, she’s still smiling. Then she’s pale and white and she coughs up blood that trickles down over her chin and her neck and for the first time in a long time, he’s terrified. He’s scared shitless. This brilliant woman he’s loved in spite of all her barbs and her rough edges or maybe it’s because of them is coughing blood because of him and he can’t reset the day to stop it.

When the medics come, minutes later that feel like every reset he’s had all strung out from end to end, he doesn’t know if she’s alive or if she’s dead; all he knows is she’s cold and his hands and his clothes and the floor are all soaked in her blood.

If she dies this time, it’ll be for keeps.

---

General Brigham is a stone cold son of a bitch with nothing like a beating heart in his chest. It took all of ten minutes there in his office in London for Cage to figure that out the first time, the time that happened but didn’t in the end, though he guesses attempting to blackmail the guy was really his bad. But it turns out even stone cold sons of bitches do the right thing sometimes, even if they don’t realize they’re doing it.

Rita’s damn grouchy when she’s bedridden, it turns out, so he’s been thanking every god he doesn’t and doesn’t believe in that she’s been mobile for three whole weeks now. They’re living in the US embassy like that makes any sense when she’s British and the idea of governments and embassies and politics and all of that just seems like so much bullshit right now, at a time like this, but it’s not like there’s staff returning there yet anyway so it’s turned into more like the unofficial Marine Corps barracks. They’ve taken over half the block, all buzzcuts and oorah and so far he’s still the highest ranking Marine officer in the place, amidst corporals and privates, two first lieutenants from the engineers and a gunny named Nickerson who reminds him of his high school football coach. But he’s more than twenty years out of high school now, more than thirty years if he’s honest about it. Time’s a funny thing.

“Where are we going today?” Rita asks, as she swans straight into his room. She’s been doing a lot of that, catching him at some damn unfortunate moments, but somehow he’s never thought of turning the lock on the door.

He glances up from where he’s kneeling, tying his bootlaces. “We?” he says, with a quirk of his brows. He’s putting on his utility gear, not the service uniform that looks so good on TV, no cap, no shiny belt or shiny shoes, so he knows she knows he’s going somewhere. He’s been going places every couple of days with the camera crew for the past seven weeks, since Paris was officially cleared for inhabitation and Brigham officially stationed him there, to show the world how they’re putting France back together, how they’re keeping the people and all the national treasures they have left safe from looting, how they’re keeping the peace. They filmed at Versailles yesterday, J Squad in their gear strolling through the palace. They got back from Bordeaux three days before that, toting bottles of wine like Paris didn’t have enough of the stuff already. Rita had two big glasses then took the bottle back to her room and he’d’ve liked nothing more than to’ve gone with her and helped her finish it off. She might even have let him. She’s still brusque but apparently he’s been growing on her - like mold, she’d probably say.

“Look, I’m fine,” she says, and puts her hands on her hips like that emphasizes her point somehow and doesn’t make her look kind of like a petulant schoolgirl. “I can’t just stay inside till I’m old and gray. Come on.”

He sighs dramatically. “What does the doc say?”

“She says I’m fine.”

“Yeah, really?”

“Yes,” she says. “Really.”

He tilts his head at her. He puts his hands on his hips just like she has but he likes to think she knows he’s not mocking her, not really, or at least not much. He pauses, looks her up and down like he’s some kind of a shitty drill sergeant at boot camp and she rolls her eyes and hides a smile just like he’s doing. He knows the doctor cleared her for duty; he’s been asking every morning for weeks.

“Then you’d best grab your gear, soldier,” he says. “We’re wheels up in ten.”

The salute she gives him is not regulation, but it makes him laugh and shake his head as she leaves the room. She’s been teasing him for weeks. Turns out the Full Metal Bitch has a wicked sense of humor.

She doesn’t ask where they’re going and he doesn’t tell her but he thinks somehow she already knows, as they sit there in the ship and skip on up out of Paris. She’s quiet in the dropship, not that that’s unusual because it’s not, she’s pretty darn taciturn for the most part, most of the time, but there’s something different about it this time and it’s not just because she’s been out of action for nearly two months now. She keeps glancing at him and then looking away. She keeps tightening her grip on the hilt of her weapon, the one only she ever uses, then relaxing it again. He’s never seen her nervous before, not once, not on the battlefield, not at the farmhouse, not even any of those times when she was right at death’s door; he’s got no basis for comparison, but he thinks maybe that’s it. Maybe Rita Vrataski’s actually nervous.

Then they land and the cameras roll and they step out into the ruined streets of Verdun.

“What’s it like to come back here?” Frank asks Rita, when they reach the bridge by the big old Porte Chaussée that the engineers have been busy rebuilding. He watches her look out over the Meuse, down the river past the half-sunk tugs and narrowboats, then she looks at him and then she looks at Frank and then she looks at the camera.

“It’s haunting,” she says, actually sounding human on camera for once, and then she walks away before Frank can ask her another awkward question. But Cage doesn’t need to ask what it is that haunts her.

The crew goes to chat with the engineers so he catches up to her and leaves them to it. It’s pretty easy to imagine what happened here, he thinks, looking at how the façades have been torn off of half the buildings along the riverbank, trees torn up and withered or growing at odd angles. And he’s read the reports. They’d already pulled half the city down before Rita’s squad landed but then she went to work. He’s seen shaky footage shot from one of the dropships, seen her pull off her helmet to get it out of her eyes then save so many civilian lives it’s a surprise they’ve not canonized her. She was like a goddamn superhero. She still is, even if she can’t see what’s coming.

There were no functional hospitals in Paris the day he fucked up and almost got her killed for real - though he guesses it’s not like any of the other times felt any less real - and there were next to no trained medics. He remembers radioing for help with one hand with the other pushed up against the wound in her chest, how shrill his voice sounded echoing off the stone walls, too loud, the words too fast. When the medics came he was on his knees out of his suit with his jacket pressed up hard around the place where the length of rebar was jutting straight out of her chest like something fucking obscene. They took over and he stepped back because that was just for the best - he’s an ad man, after all, he’s in marketing, he’s employed to make the war look good from five hundred miles behind the front lines. He couldn’t have saved her and has no idea what he’d’ve done if she’d died that day. He can’t even speculate.

She’d lost so much blood that she needed a pretty immediate transfusion but there were no functional hospitals in Paris back then and no stored blood to give her. The medics asked him his blood type, repeated the question twice and he laughed and he laughed and he said O-neg, fished his dog tags out of his shirt to show them. If felt like two steps to the left of vampirism when they shoved the needle into his arm and they did it all manually, pumped his blood bit by bit while they worked on her. He watched. He was there when they took her back to the makeshift camp by the Arc de Triomphe, in the med tent with the poorly tethered flappy edges not ten yards from a bunch of drunk Australians singing a song he couldn’t place, on a crappy cot where they let him stay the night because he’d given so much blood he’d nearly passed out. He remembers waking up in his bloodstained clothes with a clean pink band aid stuck there incongruously in the crook of his arm and everyone was quiet outside, sleeping it off. Rita was still there, still unconscious but still alive, because she’s just as strong as everyone gives her credit for.

She was out for nearly two full days then woke up groggy with an IV in her arm and enough gauze on her chest that he could’ve wrapped it all around her and made a pretty effective mummy. He was there; they’d stopped trying to make him leave.

“I guess I should apologize,” he said, and she gave him a look that told him no shit, Sherlock, but he was holding her hand and she squeezed it; granted, she squeezed it tight enough he almost felt like something broke, but that wasn’t the point.

They moved into the embassy two days later, his suggestion because the place was empty and still standing and probably a hell of a lot more comfortable than a camp bed in a tent on the side of a road, and he came in with her breakfast every morning he wasn’t out on assignment for the first three weeks, babbled at her like the goddamn village idiot while they both ate omelets from overpriced plates with what were probably real silver forks because apparently J Squad had caught chickens on some trip into the countryside and the US embassy was just the place for that. Sometimes she even talked back, and sometimes it wasn’t to tell him to shut the fuck up.

He helped her move when she needed to move, though she complained pretty damn bitterly in the start till she got used to the fact she just couldn’t move on her own and hell, at least they hadn’t sent Kimmel. Later, he helped her to walk till she found her legs again, helped her dress because she couldn’t get her arms up over her head for the first couple of weeks, even with the souped-up, super-advanced meds and dressings and all that shit that they hadn’t had when he’d been a kid. He helped her wash her hair over a bathtub one night when she bitched about it feeling like she’d dunked her head into a barrel of motor oil and she raised her brows at him in the harsh bathroom light when she caught him looking while she twisted and turned to try to get out of her newly damp shirt without assistance.

“You’re going to help me train,” she told him as he dutifully turned away, not that she seemed to care a whole lot about her modesty, or his for that matter. She’d been walking into his room without knocking since she’d been able to get out of bed without calling for a nurse, and she’d hated calling for a nurse so it hadn’t been long. She’d caught him dressing more than once and just sat there on his borrowed bed while he finished, caught him naked in bed with an erection roughly the size of the Eiffel Tower and proceeded to lounge there telling him she needed to get out and get working or she’d go stir crazy or get cabin fever or something like that. He’d just covered his face with a pillow and muttered something about thinking about it if she’d leave him to jack off in peace. She’s not got a subtle bone in her body but he guesses he likes that. Besides, it’s not like he told her when he got himself off, even if he suspects she’d find it fucking hilarious.

“I am, am I?” he replied.

“You are.” She dropped her shirt to the floor and put her hands on his shoulders, standing there half naked behind him. “I can’t remember it but I think I trained you. Besides, you nearly killed me; it’s the least you can do.”

So they trained. They’ve trained every day he’s been there since she was finally fit enough to be able to, sparring without their suits out in the courtyard because it’s not like they want to bring the whole place down their ears, getting her fitness back up while J Squad and some of the others pretend they’re not watching her hand him his ass on a regular basis. They tease him about it and he lets them but it’s not like any of them have done any better the times they’ve tried. She’s had more time to practice than any of them except maybe him, after all, and it’s not like he’s ever had that much natural talent for it. Playing high school football didn’t prepare him for warfare.

She was loitering in his doorway while he video-conferenced with Brigham back over there in his cozy office in London and took their orders to stay there in Paris, because the only secret he has from her is the only one she wants to know. Brigham said now the mimics were dead the civilian refugees wanted back in so the UDF would be law and order and J Squad would be hope and cheer and make the rebuild look like a big, happy success, along with the Angel of Verdun. The whole world knows J Squad now, and today Verdun’s angel’s back where she got her name. And Cage, well, Bill Cage just feels like some shitty motivational speaker half the time and a shitty marine the other half, but he knows how to do his job.

“Did I ever tell you how many times I was here, in the end?” Rita asks.

“I never asked and you never told me,” he says. “Does it make a difference?” And he shakes his head at his own fucking idiocy because of course it makes a difference and the look she gives him says she knows he knows that, too.

“What were you like before?” he asks her.

She looks at him as she leans against a railing there by the river, like she might actually tell him, but the moment passes. “What were you like?” she asks instead.

He doesn’t miss a beat. “Different,” he says.

She smiles so tightly that it’s almost a grimace. “So was I,” she says.

---

Three weeks after Verdun, the new base was ready. It’s not far past bare and sparse even now so back when it opened it was pretty damn basic and it’s not like it’s even inside the city itself, but if life’s going to go on there in the French capital then they really can’t be using the Champs-Élysées as a military base. That’s just good sense, even if it’s made a pretty good airstrip in a pinch.

It’s been three months since then and now there’s a gun range and a fully-operational med bay and a shitty officers’ club that he avoids like he’s been told Brigham’s going to be there. Of course, he was there a couple of weeks ago, and all the goddamn officers in the vicinity of Paris all turned up in their dress uniforms just so the big, fancy general could inspect their shitty base with a look on his face like they’d just pissed on his parade, then he told them all how he envied the difference they were making or some happy horseshit though his expression said he’d rather be anywhere than there. Brigham’s not made for peacetime leadership. Brigham clearly knows it and so do they.

Back when the base first opened all it was was storage and shower blocks and a row of huge barracks buildings like he remembers back at Heathrow but he guesses that makes sense since all they’ve done is moved out to another airport, Charles de Gaulle this time instead of Heathrow. There are officers living on site, sure, but most have been invited to stay in Paris just like Cage was; the embassy offered him a room when the skeleton crew of staffers moved back in and then offered three more for Frank and his camera crew. Like an ass, he turned it down, and Kimmel and Griff called him a jackass and Rita gave him that little half-assed salute like she likes to give him, the one that says congratulations, you’re a moron without her needing to say a word at all.

Still, the whole lot of them turned up in his new quarters the day he moved in, a couple of days after they did, took up all his chairs and sat on the bed and the floor and his footlocker full of personal crap that they’d shipped over from the States with his shiny new silver oak leaves. Apparently someone a hell of a lot higher up than he was thought Lieutenant Colonel Cage sounded good, or sounded like it’d make a good story for the camera at least. He hadn’t been expecting promotion so it took him by surprise. He’d’ve liked to’ve turned it down and not just because Rita treats him differently as an officer than she ever did as a private. Not by much, of course, because that’s just not her, but by enough that he notices and wishes he didn’t.

She was there that night when he moved in. She was the last to leave, lying there stretched out on his bunk with her hands tucked under her head and her boots on the blanket, crossed at the ankles. He raised his brows at her then raised a glass of what was left of his good scotch to her before knocking it back and finishing it off. J Squad had made pretty short work of what had once been a $500 bottle and he just hadn’t had the heart to stop them, maybe because as cash-obsessed as he’d once been, before, who gave a fuck about the price of scotch? Besides, he likes them well enough even if they’re all technically under his command. Technically, so is Rita.

“I think it’s time you tell me,” she said.

“Tell you what?”

She sat up on the bed, crossed her legs in front of her and leaned down with her elbows on her knees. “How you saved the world,” she said. “What did you think I meant?”

“You’ve got me confused with someone else,” he said, and he shook his head and put his empty glass down on the table that was already covered with empty glasses that they’d probably stolen from the mess hall after hours. “Visiting hours are over, sergeant. Get your ass out of here.”

She stood and she saluted that mocking little salute and she left him there alone. He should’ve just told her.

She did it again three days later after they’d finished sparring, in a full-size training hall this time, suits on. Maybe she was fixed now, like the dumbass accident had never happened at all, but somehow they’ve kept up the tradition, fighting, Rita telling him to stop acting like he’s scared he’s going to hurt her until they’d hitting each other with padded mitts and his right eye’s been black three times since the move and when he split her lip she just laughed, spat blood and shined him on.

She did it again a week after that, hanging around after the drinking and the gambling that Farell still hates was over. Farell’s good at what he does but Cage can’t say he likes the guy, not just because of the first day or the second day or any of the thousand days after that but they’ve got a fundamental mismatch of character. It actually makes them pretty effective as a CO and his squad leader, even if they can’t stand the sight of each other.

She did it again four days after that, after she’d started training the rest of the squad, after a couple of the guys said can you teach us to fight like that? and she shrugged and said maybe she could. They’d got the basics but they all knew they could be better, maybe not better like she was or he was but better than average, even if she could beat the whole lot of them in ten seconds flat, even Master Sergeant Farell. The guy took it in pretty good humor, Cage guesses he has to give him that, and Rita’s been tighter with the squad ever since.

She did it again after they came in from an exhausting three-day tour of the south coast and Monaco, where somehow the casinos were already back up and running and Farell hated that. And then, afterwards, there was Rita, lounging on his bed in his quarters like she owned the goddamn place. He kicked her out, as much as he could ever say he kicked her out. He wouldn’t’ve been able to make her go if she’d said no and he knew it, he knows it, so that was when he started doing his best to avoid her.

He’s been avoiding her for four days now but on the fifth day she tracks him down, not that he takes a whole lot of finding so he guesses there must’ve been some part of her that didn’t want to find him. He’s been avoiding her, had breakfast this morning with the other officers living there on base instead of with the squad - he regretted it the instant he realized the only seat left in the room was next to a stuck-up Navy pilot with whom he does not get along. He dealt with some tedious and long overdue paperwork after that then jogged circuits around the hangars for an hour and a half till he felt like he might just keel over dead from an enormous coronary at any given moment. His dad went that way so maybe it’s not too much of an exaggeration but okay, his dad was a used car salesman with no great love of exercise beyond the walk to the refrigerator to grab his next beer and he’d preferred not to do that either if he could help it. Cage remembers spending his pre-teen years thinking fetching beer for his dad while he watched the game on TV so he wouldn’t miss a play was fun somehow, or was meant to be. When he got to high school, he realized his dad was just really fucking unhappy, probably had been since his wife had died, so he told himself he’d never be like that; fifty years old now, no kids, never married, a failed business and a bankruptcy and memories of a thousand days no one else remembers, he guesses maybe that doesn’t spell success. Except the way Rita Vrataski looks at him sometimes, he could be convinced otherwise.

“You’re avoiding me,” she says, as she pops into the shower block. The men’s shower block, of course, not that four guys in their birthday suits are anywhere near enough to intimidate her. Two of the guys depart post haste, unequal to the challenge, wrapping towels around their waists and donning crappy flip flops though it couldn’t strike anyone as warm enough there in the fall in the north of France for that shit to be comfortable outdoor apparel.

“Well, yeah,” he replies, like that’s obvious because he’s pretty sure it is, with a quick glance at her over his shoulder. The other remaining guy turns to her, nude, with what Cage guesses the guy thinks is a provocative smile, but she just waves him on with a look of perfect disdain. He makes a swift exit.

“Was there a reason or are you just a capricious son of a bitch?” she asks, and he shrugs and he shuts off the shower, turns to her naked with his hands on his hips. She raises her brows. “I’m sorry, is that supposed to intimidate me? I’m not some kind of scandalized Victorian gentlewoman, for God’s sake.”

He snorts. Then he goes closer, walks barefoot and nude to the other side of the room where she is, leans up to her so close his wet skin almost drips on her and she swallows, not intimidated, no, never that, but there’s color in her cheeks that wasn’t there before when he leans past her, grabs his town and steps back. Then he turns away, toweling off his wet hair.

“What do you want, Rita?” he asks.

“I want to know what happened.” She crosses her arms over her chest as he turns back around toward her, as he wraps the towel around his waist and leans against a bank of lockers, wincing at the chill of the metal against his bare back. “How many times did you reset?”

“Well, that depends,” he says. “Do you mean how many times you killed me, how many times I killed myself, or are we talking about mimics?” She sighs. He shakes his head because damn if this isn’t the closest he’s ever come to really talking about it. “Do you know how many times you reset?”

“I lost count.”

“Then why do you think I remember?”

“Well, was it more than a hundred?”

“Was it for you?”

“Yes. Was it for you?”

“Yeah, Rita, it was more than a hundred.”

“More than a thousand?”

“It must’ve been. You?”

“Yes. More than two thousand?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” He pauses, frowns, bangs one fist against the locker behind him because damn, this wasn’t how he meant it to go. “More than two thousand for you?”

She shrugs. She pales. “Maybe,” she says. And he realizes his mistake.

She sits down heavily on the bench by the wall, leans back against it, rests her head back against it as she watches him across the room. He knows what she’s thinking, it’s obvious because he knows her and not just in the way that he knew her on the worst day of his life that really wasn’t the worst day of hers because that’d come a long time before. It’s been nearly six months since the beach and the farmhouse and that motherfucking helicopter and she’s not different but sometimes the situation brings something else to the fore in her and maybe that’s not always the soldier, like right now.

“Hendricks,” he says, and she frowns but this time her jaw doesn’t clench and her hands don’t curl into fists. She looks tired more than she looks angry now, though he guesses she looks angry too. There’s a lot of that in her sometimes.

“Hendricks,” she says, and she draws a breath and sighs it out. She can tell he knows. She doesn’t have to say more than that.

He traced every name in her squad back to tombstones and Hendricks wasn’t one of them. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense at first because she’d dropped into Verdun with her squad and not another, but then he looked at the bigger picture; he conned his way into secure archives back in London, spent six resets to get it right till he had his hands on a hard copy of the casualty lists and the sitreps and the debriefs and there were only two soldiers named Hendricks there in Verdun that day, out of tens of thousands who landed. One spent the whole day up by what was left of Fort Douaumont overlooking the valley, 19-year-old Private Ryan Hendricks from Birmingham who survived the day with injuries that took him out of the war and sent him home. The other was a captain with the British SAS, or at least he had been before the UDF, a guy from a little town on the Northern Irish border. Captain Arthur Hendricks was the division commander on the ground that day in the city, a decorated officer with service in Iraq and Afghanistan before the mimics, service in Berlin and east on the Ukrainian front after the mimics. He died there that day in Verdun. The debriefs said they found Rita unconscious right there with him, covered in his blood and in her own.

He’d thought she’d known Hendricks before the battle but she hadn’t. But by the end of her last reset, Captain Arthur Hendricks - the man she’d met that morning on the battlefield then loved for years before the day was over - was dead, and she’d lost the power to bring him back to a fucking blood transfusion.

He walks over to her. He walks over and he goes down on his knees in front of her, scowls at the feel of rough concrete under his kneecaps and sets his damp palms on her thighs. She lets him for a second like maybe it’s what she wants but then she pushes him over and she stands up quickly as he sprawls on his back on the ground and he laughs though he thinks he’s probably jarred his back and grazed his elbows, hears it echo while he’s pulling himself back up to his feet. She’s looking at him warily as he steps back in, shoves him hard in the middle of his slippery chest but she doesn’t mean it, the look on her face like total fucking devastation and the fact that she hasn’t knocked him out cold means she doesn’t mean it and he’s right; they push at each other, pull, shove, but in the end his damp fingers are in her hair and her forehead’s resting down against his bare shoulder and she’s pressing him back against a nearby wall.

“I was your Hendricks, wasn’t I,” she says, as she pulls back just far enough to look at him. He thinks maybe she’s mocking him but he nods anyway.

“Yeah, you were,” he agrees, because she was, because she is. And maybe she’s not mocking him and maybe she is but he really doesn’t care. He’s been in love with her for longer than anyone can remember.

He should kiss her, he thinks. He should kiss her before he loses his nerve because though he’s changed so much and in so many ways, he’s still a coward in all the ways that count. He should kiss her because she’s the only one who understands or ever could; he should, but she gets there first.

It’s different from the first time because they’re not about to die grisly deaths to save the world. It’s hard and urgent and she presses against him, her hands on the wall behind him and her mouth on his, pushing his head back with the pressure of it but that’s not bad, the edge to it isn’t bad, it’s just unexpected. Then her mouth’s on his neck, it’s at his collarbone and her hands are on him, squeezing his biceps, skimming his sides down to his waist, then her mouth’s back on his again, hotter, harder, more insistent, tasting just like the strong coffee she loves and he has two handfuls of the back of her UDF-issue black cotton t-shirt. They let her wear whatever she wants to look different because even if they don’t know why, she is different. She’s not the pencil skirt and stilettos type he used to go for with the perfect hair and lip gloss and thousand-dollar purses. She’s not pretending to be anything she’s not and he knows that and he knows her, he knows that and he wants her, wants the way her hands are straying to the towel around his waist, wants whatever it is that she wants, but he pushes her back. He eases her back by her shoulders then he brushes back her hair from her forehead.

“I’m not him just because I’m an officer,” he says, and she laughs bitterly as she jerks back, as she turns away, her fingers going up into her hair and twisting tight. She shakes her head as she paces.

“You’re nothing like him,” she says. And she glances at him just for a second as he stands there, half-hard under his towel and utterly pitiful, exposed because what other word is there for it, before she walks away and leaves him there.

“Wheels up in thirty, sergeant!” he calls after her, like he’s not just hit a new personal low. She flips him off over her shoulder.

Maybe it’s for the best, he thinks, as he turns to his locker. After all, they still have to work together.

---

They spend two weeks bouncing around Europe, Dusseldorf and Dresden, two days in Prague, an afternoon in Munich where Kimmel decides lederhosen are totally his style. Venice has sunk into the lagoon but they stay a night nearby. Parts of Florence are ruins but Rome is virtually untouched and it’s a great photo op, Frank says, J Squad by the Coliseum, J Squad soaked to the skin like total idiots in the Trevi fountain, J Squad being surprisingly respectful outside the Vatican. The pope’s back in residence after a few nervous months in South America and maybe once upon a time Cage would’ve called himself a Catholic, but now it doesn’t mean much to him at all. For some people, what happened to him would’ve been a religious experience, the hand of God and all that crap. It wasn’t for him. He’s pretty sure it pushed him further the other way.

They swing by Tunis and Algiers, come back up through Valencia and Barcelona before they’re back in France then back in Paris and back at UDF Station Charles de Gaulle and that somehow feels like home, more like home than anywhere has in years. Paris is back in business by now, of course, cafés and bars and cabarets and even the Eiffel Tower open all hours now the locals have moved back in in droves and military troops and civilian contractors are still swarming the streets at night. It’s late when they get back in but that doesn’t keep J Squad from deciding to hit Paris and they ask him along like they ask Frank and the cameramen, Jack and Jacques though he still has no earthly idea which is which.

“C’mon, man, it’ll be fun,” Kimmel says, and Nance slaps him on the back and they’re all excited to be back because somehow it’s like Paris is their home, too. He doesn’t tell them it’s where most of them died one night they don’t remember, not just because they’d look at him like they did so many times when he tried to tell them he’d lived that day before. And, against his better judgement, though all he really wants to do is shower off two weeks’ worth of shitty transports and faked smiles and then crawl straight into bed, he says he’ll go. He’s more like one of the team than their CO, after all. He’s never tried to be professional.

Rita’s already there when he arrives, nursing a strong black coffee at a table out at the front of the café where they’ve all agreed to meet, though it’s December now and not even nearly warm enough for that. She’s wearing a massive scarf wrapped around her neck about six times and a leather jacket that doesn’t quite fasten all the way over her huge woolen sweater and she looks at him as she huddles there with the coffee cup cupped in both hands. They’ve barely spoken a word since they left base two weeks ago and he likes to think that’s as much her fault as it is his, but she nods to the seat beside her, so he takes it.

“I’ve been offered a job,” she says.

“Doing what, exactly?”

She offers him her coffee cup and he shrugs, takes it, takes a sip. It’s too strong for him, which he finds amusingly ironic, but it’s hot.

“Training,” she says. “Brigham wants me to be an instructor.”

“The recruits’ll hate you.”

“I think that’s the point.”

He takes another sip of the coffee then he hands it back to her. “Are you going to take it?”

“I think I might.”

“I guess you probably should.”

She gives him a look like all she wants to do is dump what’s left of her cup of hot coffee straight into his lap. Mercifully, she doesn’t.

“What are you going to do?” she asks, the question seeming somehow pointed.

“What I’m told, I guess,” he says. “Turns out I’m a career marine after all. There’s an idea they might assign me to the Pentagon, if you can believe that.”

She scowls but she doesn’t say it’s a bad idea. Of course, she doesn’t say it’s a good idea, either, and then it’s too late to ask her what she thinks at all because there’s Master Sergeant Farell coming down the street toward them, the squad leader J Squad doesn’t really want but probably deserves, fearlessly leading the troops their way. The conversation ends abruptly and he doesn’t know if that’s good or bad.

It’s three weeks later when he gets his orders; he’ll be a Marine Corps talking head based out of the Pentagon where he’ll wear his service uniform every damn day and he’ll never need to set foot inside the same room as an exosuit ever again, let alone wear one. J Squad’s been ordered out to somewhere in Afghanistan and Rita leaves for England in a week. It really is over. He didn’t think he’d have regrets.

She’s in his quarters when he gets back in from his video conference the following evening, twenty excruciating minutes with some bigwig Navy captain he’ll be serving under when he’s made it back Stateside in four or five days’ time. She’s sitting cross-legged on his neatly-made bed with her boots still on, like the chairs weren’t even a consideration because they never are.

“So, you’re leaving,” she says.

“Yeah. With the transport on Saturday night.”

He takes off his cap and he tosses it onto the table. A really long time ago, his officer’s service uniform felt like just a kind of military business suit and he’d been wearing one of those almost every day past the age of twenty-three. He’d trade it for enlisted utilities in a goddamn heartbeat now if he could; Private Cage made a lot more sense to him than Lt. Col. Cage does, back when time meant nothing and he didn’t have four or five days till chances were he’d never see Rita Vrataski again.

He takes off his jacket and he throws it over the back of a chair, watches it slide off and fall to the floor where he leaves it with a shake of his head. His tie’s next, as he’s toeing off his shoes without untying the laces, and he turns to her as he’s unbuttoning his khaki shirt.

“Do you need something or are you just going to sit there and watch me undress?” he asks, and untucks his shirt, pulls it off, tosses it onto a chair.

“Well, it’s nothing I’ve not seen before,” she says, and for a second he flashes to that day in the goddamn showers, to her mouth on him and her hands on him and what she might’ve done and what he could’ve let her do, what he’s thought about since when he’s gotten himself off like the perfect fucking daydream because they haven’t been as close as they were back in the embassy for months now. Were he feeling particularly assholish he’d unbuckle his belt and he’d finish undressing right down to his skin because screw her, really, he didn’t ask her to be here, all he wanted to do was sleep. He lies down next to her on the bed instead, half dressed and tired, and she stretches out on her back beside him. There’s not really enough room so they’re shoulder-to-shoulder and even then one of his arms is hanging over the side of his crappy bunk and she has to turn onto her side so she doesn’t fall off just from breathing too deeply. He’s tired. He’s really goddamn tired and maybe that’s why he doesn’t form some kind of objection when she slides one arm over his waist. He’s fucking exhausted, so maybe that’s why he doesn’t do more than sigh when she presses her mouth to his bare shoulder, by his collarbone. He’s vaguely aware that he should stop her but he doesn’t even move a muscle when she slips her hand up under his undershirt and drums her fingertips against his abdomen, when she slips her fingers an inch beneath the waistband of his pants and rakes his skin with her blunt nails. It makes him shiver, makes a jolt of something dangerous spark straight through him, makes his pulse quicken and his muscles tense. Her hands are rougher than his are though he’s twenty years older than she is and sometimes he feels every single second of it, like some kind of a dirty old man, but that’s not right now. He just wants her to keep doing what she’s doing.

“For God’s sake, are you going to touch me or do I have to write you an invitation?” she says.

He turns his head to look at her, too close to really focus. “Yeah, I think you do,” he says, so she rolls her eyes and she moves, nudges him this way and that till she’s got one knee planted firmly either side of his thighs and she’s sitting there on top of him. He watches her as she pulls the tie from her hair and shakes it down, as she tugs her shirt off over her head and tosses it across the room and it looks like neither of them gives a damn where it lands. He certainly doesn’t.

She unbuckles his belt then she unbuckles her own then apparently remembers she’s still wearing her boots and he watches as she contorts, sitting on his shins to try to untie them without standing up but she ends up standing anyway. He watches her toe off her boots and stand on one foot then the other to pull off her socks and drop them to the floor then she raises her brows at him, hands on hips.

“Take off your fucking clothes,” she says, looking somewhere between angry and amused by the whole situation, and really all he can do is stand himself up too and comply, pushing down his pants and peeling off his highly appealing tighty-whities while she unhooks her bra then pulls off her pants and Christ, she’s something, pale and slim and muscular in places and he wants her, badly, like all the times he’s wanted her before this were just dumbass preludes to how much he wants her now. He’s half-hard already and her cheeks are flushed and they move, they both take a step and stop abruptly when they see one another moving, shake their heads like total jackasses and then go in the rest of the way. She kisses him or he kisses her or maybe it’s as much one as the other and his fingers go to the scar there just under her left breast, trace the contours of it with his fingertips while she pushes him back toward the bed. There’s a matching scar on her back and he’s seen them before but he’s not touched. He doesn’t know if she’d’ve let him.

She goes down first, stretches out on her back on top of the blanket then he follows her, settles over her, shifts between her thighs as he pushes up on both hands and looks down at her, her hair splayed on the pillow, the slightest quirk of amusement at her lips and a flush in her cheeks. She slides one leg over the back of his as her hands skim down over the line of his spine and he guesses that’s an invitation if he ever saw one, maybe not written but so strongly implied. He fumbles himself between her thighs like a goddamn virgin with an unsteady breath, pauses then rubs the head of his cock against her, rubs it in against her clit and makes her shift against him. Then he nudges himself down lower and damn, she’s wet, and hot, and he pushes inside her slowly, makes her muffle a curse against his shoulder that he hears anyway. He chuckles at her breathlessly and she slaps him on the ass in retaliation.

It doesn’t last long. Her hands go up to the metal bedposts and she wraps her legs tight around his waist and he goes down on one arm, slips his other hand between the two of them to rub her clit in slow circles with the pad of his thumb. She pushes against him, tilts her hips higher and goddamnit if he doesn’t get in deeper, making his breath catch, making her curse again in that colorful way she does sometimes. He’s not sure exactly how long it’s been since the last time he’s done this, had sex, had a woman, seven months or eight, maybe it was the makeup girl at some TV station whose name he’s forgotten because the girl he picked up in London on one of his resets he guesses really doesn’t count. He wonders if she ever took a day off from the resets, and she probably did and maybe one day he’ll ask. He wonders how long it’s been for her and he’s still thinking that as she’s arching her back so hard it looks like it hurts and she tightens around him and oh God, that’s it, he jerks against her twice, three times and he’s done, they’re both done, sweaty and flushed and slightly confused.

“Not bad,” she says, half breathless, her voice unsteady as she pats his ass and he’s still wondering when her last time was, if it was Hendricks, if she ever had him or if the battle always got in the way.

“Not bad yourself, sergeant,” he says, though that’s not what he wants to say at all. It’s not even what he meant to say. So she pats his cheek and she pushes at his shoulders till he pulls back and pulls out and lets her up. He watches her dress and she keeps glancing at him like she expects him to say something or do something or maybe a combination of the two but he stays uncharacteristically silent. In the end she shrugs, and she pulls on her jacket, and she walks out the door. He watches her go. She looks back and sighs and she closes the door behind her.

It’s not until four days later that he realizes. He’s on the Navy transport plane with all his shit in his footlocker that’s lashed to the floor with a jeep and a casket covered in the American flag like any of that’s normal to him and he realizes, somewhere over the Atlantic. All that time they were together but not together, he was too busy trying not to fuck it up to realize that was fucking it up. She made the first move and he was too dumb to follow her lead.

He should’ve asked her to stay. He should’ve told her the story. And now it’s too late.

---

He retires aged sixty-three, a full bird colonel with more grey in his hair than brown. He’s done good work over the years, he thinks, really good work, really earned that last promotion instead of getting it handed to him for the sake of good PR. He’s never exactly felt like a real marine, not like the guys and girls who died on the beach in France that day that never happened, not like the troops they’ve still got on the ground over in Afghanistan and the Middle East, but he worked at the Pentagon till his retirement and no one ever took him for a charlatan. He took over from his old CO and then took a sidestep into something else, into something that used the things he’d learned on the day he’s never talked about, but everything he’s really done has been for veterans of the Mimic War. Sometimes it’s like he’s the only one left who cares.

Before the war, he spoke English and semi-fluent Spanish and knew the right words in German and Russian and Portuguese to order himself a beer and hit on his waitress. He speaks Arabic now, knows the Farsi and Urdu and elementary Hebrew he needed to do his job on a daily basis, but now he’s learning French. He rides his motorcycle to the bakery and buys fresh bread every morning then parks outside the café and drinks coffee the way Rita always liked it while he practices his French on the owner, an attractive woman in her fifties who finds his mistakes hilarious but always corrects him patiently, every time. He thinks he should probably have married her or at least asked her on a date but somehow he’s never gotten round to it.

He practices his French and then he gets back on his bike and he goes home, to a wilting houseplant and a moody old black cat that decided to adopt him maybe a week after he’d moved in. He goes home and maybe he’ll work on his rustbucket of a classic car or he’ll take a walk or he’ll try to cook and probably just end up eating bread and cheese because he’s pretty sure he could burn water if he tried. He goes home just like he does today and the farmhouse isn’t far. He could walk, sometimes does, sometimes jogs into the village and back because even though he’s north of sixty now and well and truly retired, he tries to keep in shape. But he rides the bike because he likes how it feels. It’s as close as he’s gotten to an exosuit in a decade.

The phone’s ringing when he opens the front door. He’s there in the place where Rita died that day no matter what he did when he hears that the mimics are back; they’re in the States this time instead of Europe, touched down forty minutes ago. The general says his country needs him and so he goes, packs a bag in five minutes flat then he’s back out of the door. He has to, because even if he’s still the coward inside that he was before he ever met Rita Vrataski, he’s also the man she made him into. When he leaves, he’s only been gone seven months.

It’s not the mimics. He hears that on the plane back over to DC but it doesn’t change a thing because he knows he has to go. He puts on his uniform and he’s escorted to the Pentagon and they watch the screens, watch what’s happened in California, Oregon, Washington, up into Canada and down into Mexico and it’s obvious to him that all they need is troops in battle suits and enough spare batteries and ammunition and they’ll have them beat, unless there’s another wave. But no one’s trained in the suits anymore, and most of the suits themselves have been broken for parts, so they just give him what’s left, give him marines and all the Army Rangers they can afford to pull out of Kandahar. They give him a star to replace his bird and they give him command. He thinks they just want someone to blame when it all goes wrong. He’ll take that chance; he’s the man for the job.

There’s another wave. There’s another wave after that, and his men are dying and the forward operating base at Denver has a hospital that’s full of injured soldiers, a morgue that’s damn near overflowing. Two months become six then twelve then two years and he hates the job and he hates himself. He’s a fucking coward again, hiding behind the lines, sending others in to die but they all keep telling him he’s doing fine, the enemy is gaining no ground, they aren’t losing. They’re losing. Planes go down and ships sink and he drinks. And then one day his office door opens and in walks Rita Vrataski.

“We can win this,” she says, and she gives that familiar old half-assed salute. “General.”

The way she says it, he’s inclined to believe her. A week later, she’s proved wrong.

He knows it’s against protocol when he goes out into the loading bay three weeks later and stands in front of the troops. He knows they’re all watching him as he climbs into the suit and buckles in, as he brings it up online and steps forward out into the bay. They’ve all taken a knee to wait and listen. They’re his people, though they’ve come in from all around the world. Somehow, they still have confidence in him that he doesn’t have in himself.

It’s a rousing speech he gives them if he says so himself and Rita nods when he’s done so it must’ve been okay by her, too. But it’s maybe not even important at all because he knows this is it, this is the end, make or break, win or lose, all or nothing at all. He doesn’t want to die but he’s done it so many times before; what he hates is asking them all to die along with him. Then the dropships take them up and it’s time to see whether he and Rita and J Squad saved the world just to see it burn ten years later.

They drop into the Hollywood Hills and ten seconds later it’s absolute fucking carnage. It’s like every war movie he’s ever seen, the gunfire ringing in his ears, adrenaline pumping, shouts, screams, blood and gore and fire and bullets. He remembers how the suit works because it’ll be a cold day in hell before he can forget; it’s muscle memory, it’s reflex, even if he’s more than ten years older now, closer to fifteen if he’s honest. And there’s Rita just a few yards away from him, weapon in hand, her suit painted black and red, just as fierce as she ever was. She looks at him, and he knows she knows they’re going to lose. He knows she knows they’re going to die, so they’ll go down fighting. They’ll go down fighting together.

The troops rally when they see the two of them, how they move, how they fight, how they kill, but it’s not enough. In forty minutes they’re overrun and he knows that means they’ll lose Nevada by sunset and the fucking things will be in Texas in two days’ time, they’ll keep marching east till there’s nothing left and there’s nothing they can do to stop it except evacuate and then nuke the west coast, hope it works and hope the fallout doesn’t wipe out everything that’s left. But then Rita’s hit in the chest and somehow none of that matters because Rita’s hit, right under her left breast and if he had to guess he’d say it’s the exact same spot where her scar is. He’s already dragging one leg behind him, a piece of something hot and sharp wedged down deep into the muscle, so dragging Rita from the battlefield is just like nothing at all.

“We could have won,” she says, on the ground in the first building they come to. She’s in his arms and there’s blood in her hair and on her hands and everywhere, and he wants to believe her. He really does want to.

“Maybe,” he says. “But I guess we can’t always save the world, Rita. Maybe one shot was all we got.”

“But I don’t remember it.”

He brushes back her hair and she looks at him. Her breath’s shallow already, halting, irregular; she doesn’t have long left, he knows it and she does, and so he tells her. Before she dies, he tells her everything from start to finish. He tells her how they met the first time, tells her how she trained him, how many times he tried to save her but watched her die. He tells her how they saved the world that night in Paris and before she dies, she smiles and she squeezes his hand so tight he almost thinks she’s got more living left in her after all.

“None of us want to die, Cage,” she says, rasping. “You’re not even half the coward you think you are.”

He shrugs. “I was.”

“People change. I did.”

“I wish I’d known you before.”

“I’m glad you didn’t,” she says. “Besides, you knew me after.”

He did. He knew her. And all he ever did, like some fucking self-sabotaging idiot, was push her away. All he can do now is be there with her while the world ends and she does.

When she’s dead, it feels wrong to kiss her lips and so he presses a kiss to her forehead instead. Then he raises his sidearm to his temple and he pulls the trigger.

He wouldn’t’ve lasted long without her anyway.

---

When he startles awake in the chopper, he almost throws up the breakfast he can barely recall ever having eaten all over his neat service uniform. He’s alive and he doesn’t know why and for a moment he doesn’t even know where he is. But then he does know, in a gut-wrenching moment between the end of the world and the saving of it. He’s back in London. He’s been here before.

He knows what to say to Brigham to make him give that curt nod of acceptance that means he can take J Squad and take the Angel of Verdun when he drops into France just as long as he does his job and sells the end of the war to the world. He knows he can do it because he’s done it before but all he wants to do is leave that strangely claustrophobic fucking office and Brigham’s cigar smoke stink and hop back onto the chopper that’s waiting for him outside. He wants to get out there to Heathrow. He wants to walk into the training room and find Rita there where she always is and always was like the eye of the storm though he knows she pretty much is the storm. She’s the best soldier he’s ever known but he doesn’t want to see the soldier. They’ve got ten years to figure out how to save the world; he’s got ten years to tell her how everything she is and does has made him better than he was before, and knowing her will make him better till maybe one day he’ll deserve her the way he wants to.

The chopper lands. A British private picks him up from the airfield in a jeep and drives him, painfully slowly, dodging supply trucks and squads out on PT until he’s almost convinced he could’ve run there faster, even in his uniform and the matching shoes that practically cripple him just with walking. But then he’s there, striding into the building, cap tucked in under his arm. And she’s not there when he gets to where she should be. It’s the right place and it’s the right time, he’s sure, he’s beyond sure, but for the first time she’s not where she’s supposed to be.

“Sergeant Vrataski,” he says to the corporal on duty there who’s overseeing the training room this shift.

“She ran out five minutes ago, sir,” says the corporal.

“Any idea where she was heading?”

The corporal shakes his head and says, “Sorry, sir.” And so he starts back for the door, feeling sick, feeling two points to port of his course. And so, of course, the door is where he runs into her.

“Cage,” she says, and it’s like a starburst of adrenaline just went off inside him.

He frowns. “You know me?”

She smiles a sarcastic smile. “No,” she says, “it was just a really good guess. Or maybe I read your nametag.” She bats at it demonstratively with the back of one taped hand.

He sighs, grimaces, fucking hates himself for his optimism. “Yeah,” he says, and he steps aside, so much for all his plans. “Sorry, sergeant. It’s been a really long day.”

But she doesn’t walk by. She steps closer instead and she shoves him by his shoulders, and he stumbles but catches himself just in time, just inside the door.

“Look, don’t be an arse this time,” she says. “I’m not going through all that again.”

“You remember.”

“So do you.”

“But how?”

She spreads her hands. “Does it matter?” she asks. But she doesn’t wait for an answer, she just walks him back behind the nearest rack of exosuits and she slaps him then she kisses him then she slaps him again and all he can do is laugh as his cap slips to the ground from under his arm and he shakes his head at her. He’s reeling. He’s practically giddy and he’s reeling and Rita Vrataski knows his name.

“You’re crazy,” he says. “I love you, Rita, but you’re out of your mind.”

“Then I guess you’d best get used to it,” she says, like he’s made no admission at all, like what he’s just said that he’s never been able to say isn’t even news and maybe it isn’t maybe she’s always known. “We’ve got ten years to work out how to save the world.” But her fingers are messing up his nice neat haircut as she says it. Her mouth’s pressed up to his throat.

He’s not Hendricks, that much is obvious. He’s William Cage, Bill Cage, failed businessman, bankrupt, son of a widower used car salesman from Pittsburgh, a marine who never really wanted to be a marine and certainly didn’t want to fight. But apparently that’s not all Rita sees when she sees him. It’s a mistake to think she doesn’t know him just because she can’t remember all those days that never happened. He never needed to know the woman she was before to fall for her; she doesn’t need to recall all the times she died or he did to know the man he is because of it. She knows the man he’ll be in ten years’ time, the one that men will die for. She knows the man he is now.

They have ten years to save the world, and maybe they’ll do it and maybe they won’t. Maybe they’ll end up right back here again and then again until they figure out the right way, reset by reset, till the war that hasn’t happened yet’s prevented. They’ve done this before; they can do it again. Only this time the refresh rate’s ten years and not just one single day.

“Can we start tomorrow?” he asks, as he wraps his arms around her waist the way he’s wanted to for years but somehow couldn’t.

She laughs against his jaw as she presses against him the way he’s wanted her to for years but couldn’t ask for.

“We’ve got time this time,” she says. “Just don’t fuck it up again, okay?”

He agrees and so he kisses her to seal the deal. She lets him. Enthusiastically, she lets him, like she might’ve let him all along.

He’s not Hendricks but she knows that. And maybe if they can find a way to save the world, they can find a way to be together.