Chapter Text
Part 1:
Chara II, present day
In the hazy moments between dreaming and waking, not quite one or the other yet, he thought she'd left. So, he did what had rapidly become automatic and cast a clumsy hand out to her side of the bed, expecting cold sheets, and was therefore pleasantly surprised to knock against warm skin.
Nance didn't need the same amount of sleep Arnie did; even now, with her hardlight hologram and a very detailed frame of reference for what it was to live in human skin thanks to her foray into the past, she still only averaged about five hours a night to his eight or nine. Sometimes more, though rarely. Sometimes less. Her staying in bed until he woke up wasn't a guarantee, nor would he ask her to. Combined with his tendency to turn limpet in bed -- something he hadn't learned about himself until over three centuries had passed -- and they were still working out the fine points of being in a committed romantic relationship.
It probably didn't help anything that they kept getting yanked apart; that every time they managed to get some traction, some other crisis popped up. It put an uneasy edge on everything they did, even as they tried hard to achieve some kind of stability.
At least it was an edge they navigated together, instead of a wedge to drive them apart.
"I have a barnacle for a boyfriend," Nance commented, her smile in her voice, as she took his hand and picked his arm up so she could wiggle under it and back up against him.
Arnie not only wrapped that arm around her once she was settled, he threw a leg over her, too. Though that might have been to avoid retaliation as he asked, grinning into the hair on the back of her head, "Don't those usually attach to whales?"
"Better to be the whale than the parasite." She freed a hand from the tangle of limbs and gave his hair a quick and painless tug, not quite payback.
"Oh, I don't know, Nance. It doesn't sound too bad." He smirked, squeezing on her. "Attaching myself to your skin and getting a free ride?"
He hadn't even opened his eyes yet, but since he could all but hear her eye roll back, he figured he might have won that round.
That was, until she shifted enough in his arms to look at him; when he did pry his eyes open, she was smiling that pleasant sort of smile that always -- always -- meant she was about to verbally obliterate him. "You're long past due for a new callsign. How's Barnie-cle sound?"
It took him a few seconds gaping incredulously before he could reply, with some awe, "Like absolute unholy hell."
She quirked her eyebrows, entirely smug; he waved the metaphorical white flag by stuffing his face into the pillow and laughing hard enough that it made his chest ache.
Still, while he had already learned that he couldn't leave any sucker-bites on her hardlight skin, once he was done laughing he made a valiant attempt to, in decidedly nonverbal retaliation.
It had turned out that weekends didn't come naturally to either of them. The simple act of not working left them both at a loss. The renewal -- or building -- of their romantic relationship had largely taken place in the spaces between their respective duties, and if that wasn't a recipe for hardship, a lot had happened in the past year and a half or so. Ever since they had been kidnapped out of their universe and turned into labrats for the Chilo, they had been trying to tread in unknown waters.
Complicating matters, the shift in their relationship had taken place during that god awful time. And when they were dropped back into the same moment they'd been taken from, Arnie remembered everything, but Nance hadn't.
That had ranked up there, in terms of awful and bitter moments he'd faced; he had snatched for her hand across the briefing room table, disoriented and -- according to Nance -- paler than the ghost he often acted, and his fingers had gone right through hers.
He had been following the impulse he'd had as the Shikra had gone up like the antimatter bomb it was, expecting her hardlight hand to hold on back. When it clicked that she couldn’t, his stomach had hit the floor.
Nance was clearly worried at that moment; she just as clearly didn't remember any of it. In a panic, he'd managed to excuse himself long enough to go and piece together what he could. He dodged her concern for a few days, enlisting a very reluctant Phil to cover for him, and once he'd confirmed that Scott didn't remember either, he'd gone back to his cabin and paced and argued with his most-talkative poltergeist about whether or not to tell Nance about what had happened to them.
And what had happened between them.
Then, before he had time to try to tell her, the journal had been found that detailed that they had a rogue ShadowKnight who had used Nance's knowledge of the Guardian of Eternity to go back into the past, in order to kill Nance's parents and ShadowKnight's future. Nance, naturally, had enlisted Andy and Scott and had gone back in time herself to keep her parents alive, leaving Arnie behind to guard the homefront.
At some point, the timeline had destabilized, and once again, Arnie was the only one left who remembered how things were supposed to be. And the only one who carried the memories of that defunct timeline when returned to their own, as Nance's mission succeeded.
Still, after passing back through the Guardian, Nance's memory of the pocket universe had returned. And then he'd had no choice but to come clean about remembering himself.
There was nothing that wasn't harrowing about all of that.
Arnie had spent most of the last century in neutral. He worked, he handled a majority of ShadowKnight's covert operations planning for the field, he trained new recruits so that they would live to come back home. He had long-since been given the informal title of Field Commander, which was a legacy he was proud of, even if he was the only one who knew why. He acted as Nance's hands and occasionally as her weapon, be it to cut regular rebellion leaders down to size or to carry out missions that no one else was able to, the delicate stuff that some two-and-three-quarters centuries training was required to do.
It wasn't that he was miserable or anything, because he wasn't; he just wasn't too emotionally engaged with any of it. The days -- and months, and eventually years -- blurred together, undifferentiated from each other except by the occasional stand-out moment. Work was his purpose and his hobby; he didn't draw, or paint, or pick up his sax, or any of the things he used to occasionally do to pretend he had a life outside of whatever the day's duties were.
The Chilo kidnapping had kicked him into gear with all of the smoothness of a clapped out Morris Marina.
It was the memories that the whole bloody affair had dredged out of the depths; a sharp renewal of the emotional engagement he'd managed to avoid. And it was impossible to be disengaged when Nance looked at him like he was worth wrecking an entire multiverse for.
That wasn't the first time they had saved one another, but it had been a long, long time since those dark days.
Once they both had their memories back, they had started making a go of it; of shifting lifetimes worth of friendship into something more romantic. And in that arena, neither of them were experts; Arnie had precisely two love affairs behind him (and put together, their duration was less than an Earth solar day!), and Nance had none and was only just getting used to having a physical form. Sex had been awkward, though heartfelt, and there was always a sort of quiet desperation that lingered over them no matter how slowly they went, that something would come along and obliterate this thing they were trying to build together.
Then, fairly recently, Nance went missing again. Vanished entirely. Arnie had been beside himself. Somehow, between him and Phil, they managed to keep ShadowKnight afloat and working, but the stress of it had left him so shaken that once she reappeared several weeks later -- alive, unharmed, but emotionally wrecked -- Phil had ordered them both to get the hell away from headquarters and rest.
Thus, the weekends.
What had started as an order by their CMO had recently turned into a tentative attempt to be normal. Or, as close to normal as they could get. Arnie's cabin on his mountain had gotten more use the past month than it usually got in a half-year's time, since he often slept in his old room or Nance's new one at the base. He now actually bothered to stock some groceries and build up his firewood pile for the rapidly approaching winter. They talked more shop than was probably healthy, but they slept in the same bed and wove around each other in the kitchen and cuddled on the couch sometimes.
Just like real people did.
He drifted back from his brief, post-coital siesta to Nance tracing the band of scars left around his wrist from the Chilo stringing him up; she did that, sometimes, especially when she was feeling pensive. It wasn't the first time he'd felt her fingers mapping out old wounds, as if she could erase them or at least apologize for them; she knew where and when he had gotten the majority of them, after all. Even if Arnie didn't pay much mind to them himself.
"They'll fade," he said, offhandedly, freeing his hand just so he could reach over and tuck her hair behind her ear. Outside, the low gray light of dawn was starting to show through the window, which meant the weekend was over and it was back to headquarters in an hour or so.
"You still have that one on your side from two hundred years ago," Nance pointed out, sliding her hand under the blanket just to trace it.
"If you think that was bad, you should have seen the teeth marks I left in my belt when Daanish stitched it up. Much more impressive." It had been a parted guy wire that had whipped across his side while he was disabling a trap, back in the days when he measured his life by his missions south of the Canadian border. It was also the first time he'd bled as a rebel, and the first time he'd ever gotten stitches without so much as a local. Memorable, yes. Pleasant? Absolutely not. "It's pretty faded now, though. And I don’t regret it."
"I know." She propped her head on her hand, resting on her elbow, and just because he could, Arnie mirrored her. Then she reached up and brushed the backs of her knuckles lightly against the line of his jaw. "I don't know where this one's from. Or the one on your back."
Those two were almost as old as he was, and unlike the ones he'd picked up since his return to flesh and blood, those left from his first life hadn't really faded over the years. He didn't know why they were the exception. "Nothing so exciting as rebellion," he said, grinning a little, sliding his fingers up and down her forearm and marvelling even now that he could feel the fine hairs projected there. "I got attacked with a VHS case. A childhood squabble about which movie to watch with an old acquaintance."
Nance raised an eyebrow, looking amused despite her pensiveness; she didn't ask about the anachronism of a man born in 2149 still using VHS tapes. "And here I thought it was going to be something daring," she teased, deadpan. "What about the other one?"
My brothers stuck a live land-mine in my sandpit when I was six; give it a couple inches and I probably would have been paralyzed, wasn't the kind of answer Arnie wanted to give her. That opened doors to places he wouldn't wish anyone through, let alone Nance. Hell, let alone himself.
So, instead of answering, he leaned over and pressed a kiss to her brow before divesting himself of the warm blankets. "I have to go shower and shave."
"Yeah," Nance answered, but he still felt the look -- maybe sad, maybe knowing, probably both -- all the way out the door.
Okay. Leave one thing at home, he thought, staring at the array of survival gear sitting neatly on the kitchen counter, down from where Nance was making tea.
This shouldn't have been a problem, since he was standing in his own kitchen, on Chara II, a half-hour drive from their base and as safe as anyone could possibly be in this universe. But after that whole business where the Chilo snatched them from said base in the middle of a morning briefing, Arnie had taken to carrying all of his emergency survival gear on him, making use of all those jumpsuit pockets.
Just in case they were kidnapped from their lives without warning again. It wasn't like there wasn't precedent now.
Admittedly, most of it wouldn't have made much difference on that particular kidnapping, because they were in space, or floating around in subs on an ocean moon, or being held captive and tortured, but having it still made him feel better now. There were some things he carried before while in uniform (handlight, fireflash, bo) and there were a few common-sense things he added after that which he wouldn't stop carrying (boot-knife, paracord), but some of it was probably just a teensy-tiny bit extreme.
He looked over the array and chewed on his lip, then switched to chewing on his thumbnail and tried to figure out what to leave behind.
It was taking a lot more willpower than it should have to keep from pacing back and forth.
"Still getting to you?" Nance asked, as she finished pouring the tea into the thermos so they could sip on it on the way to work.
The tone was sympathetic; when Arnie looked up from his rather hopeless attempt to whittle his survival gear down from 'highly paranoid' to 'within the realm of sensible', she had a mild wince written on her features. Phil had taken them both to task -- separately, thank everything -- and while Arnie didn't know what Phil had said to Nance, if it was anywhere near as hard to swallow as what Phil had said to him, she was probably still struggling with it herself. "Yes," he answered, after a moment, looking back over the gear on the counter and wrestling with half a dozen nervous ticks. Then he blew a frustrated breath out. "I think he's made me more paranoid, not less."
Nance, probably wisely, didn't make a comment on that; she just capped the thermos, then came over and leaned next to him, back to the counter.
The sight of sunlight through the window catching her hair, setting the color ablaze, made him smile despite everything. It was enough to knock the edge off his frustration, anyway, and after a moment he turned and leaned next to her, adding, "I'd leave the fishing gear, but we were on an ocean moon--"
"With a replicator," Nance answered dryly, crossing her arms and bumping her shoulder off of his affectionately. "I wonder if our tech in this universe will ever catch up to that. Scotty mentioned that it seemed to be related to transporter technology while we were building the frame to lift the Shikra. But he didn't know too much about it, either." There was a long moment there where she was no doubt thinking about the engineer and all of the pain that went with him, then she sighed out quietly. "Phil told me that recovery isn't a linear process."
Arnie would have been happy -- no, thrilled -- to have discussed replicator tech all morning, if he could have dodged the whole mental health thing. A lifetime of habit had him wanting to go recovery from what? But the fact he had an entire cache of survival gear laid out on the counter and couldn't seem to bring himself to leave even a single piece of it at home without getting anxious made that a willfully foolish question, and Nance deserved better than that. At least she was up front about the fact she had issues to work out, when she was able to recognize them. Which made one of them.
It felt like they were trying to pick their way through a mine-field, and even though Arnie knew very well that he'd dug the majority of those himself, he didn't always remember where or how to get through them.
Or how to disarm them, for that matter.
"The network connections?" he asked, because while that wasn't exactly a 'safe' topic, it was safer than anything he had to bring to the table; Nance had been talking about it since she'd been jerked into another temporal anomaly. It was a sore and painful subject for her, but one she had been willing to try to discuss.
She nodded, gaze on their shadows on the brightly polished floor. "Every time I open one, I half expect to get yanked away." A beat. "And-- maybe even hope, a little, that I will. And it's still hard to close down the connections knowing that I'm going to have to re-open them later."
“Even on safe networks."
"Yeah."
It hadn't seemed to sink in after the incident with the Chilo in the pocket universe, but then again, Nance hadn't remembered until months after it happened. But the second snatching -- unintentional as it apparently was -- seemed to cement both events into a kind of anxiety, which in itself was rather unprecedented. It wasn't that Nance had never felt anxiety before, Arnie knew full well she had, but never the kind that couldn't be resolved by action. Before, she'd always been able to do something about her fears. Now, they kept looping back around, catching her off-guard each time and offering no resolution.
He wished he knew what to tell her about managing it, but most of the techniques he'd picked up over the years himself were proving-- decidedly unreliable of late. Repression wasn't working. Emotional detachment only went so far these days; he'd loved Nance for centuries, but being in love with her opened doors he'd half forgotten existed and couldn't bring himself to close again.
And his ability to compartmentalize had gotten spotty, though it still worked enough for him to at least function in their day-to-day. Even if that required a whole array of wilderness survival gear laid out on the counter just in case.
"I'm supposed to be adaptable," Nance said; the note of weary bewilderment in her voice made his heart ache. "I'm written to be adaptable. To analyze variables, and make value judgments. But I just keep coming back to this over and over again, and no matter how many times I tell myself that it doesn't make any sense to keep assigning such a threat-level to something that's only happened twice, and that we both survived..."
She trailed off there, tightening her arms against her chest.
This kind of scene had played out enough times of late that Arnie at least had some idea of what to do, even if not as much of one as he wished. He reached out and took her shoulders and drew her in close; rested his cheek to her hair and breathed in the clean, thunderstorm scent of her before saying, honestly, "I'd fix it, if I knew how."
"I know," Nance answered, sliding her arms around him in turn and pressing her face into his shoulder. "This helps, though."
That was a truth for both of them. The simple act of just holding on. It didn't erase the anxiety, but at least in moments, it made it bearable. Breathing room, maybe; wrapped around each other, that meant nothing would really come between them, and if they had survived this long, then maybe nothing could.
"I think I'll leave the fishing gear," Arnie said, squeezing Nance a bit, after a long moment where the only sound was of them breathing.
"The trout of Chara II all heave a watery sigh of relief," Nance quipped back, right on cue, but she held on a little tighter herself.
They bantered back and forth some after that -- whales and barnacles came up again, of course -- as they got ready to head back to work for the day; as Arnie pushed the mint-tin sized fishing kit to the back of the counter and put the rest of his survival gear in the various pockets of his jumpsuit before grabbing his fall field coat, and as Nance grabbed the thermos, then took a deep breath and opened up her network connection to ShadowKnight's servers.
Only minutes before the end of everything.