InsaneJournal

Who: Micah and Iris
What: Backdated, completed log
Where: The warehouse
When: After the Masquerade
Warnings: None
Notes: Posting un-posted things

It was the morning after the Masquerade, though that was something Micah was entirely unaware of.

He’d spent the past three weeks away from Bellum and Iris. It had been necessary, to prevent the people who were trailing him to use her against him, to keep them from hurting her, but he’d still hated every minute of it. He hadn’t been to work, and he hadn’t been home, but he’d checked on her therapy progress, and he’d paid for her apartment when the rent came due. He knew she was safe, and he knew she was mending, and he hoped she didn’t think he’d abandoned her. He hadn’t.

The morning after the Masquerade found him in Washington DC, providing information in exchange for a new name, a new identity, and a new life. It hadn’t been his first choice. In fact, it hadn’t been a conscious choice at all. He’d gotten caught. It was as plain and as simple as that. It was this or extradition, and extradition would have meant a death sentence. The choice had been an easy one, especially given the way he’d been convinced to cooperate in the first place; Micah didn’t take well to people threatening those he loved, which is what had happened when he’d left ICU the last day he’d seen Iris.

He’d just walked out of the CIA medical services office when the key and number appeared in his hand, and he’d barely managed to look down at it before he found himself in a wooded area he didn’t recognize. He was accustomed enough to the dramatics of Bellum to recognize this for what it was; some trick by the building. But there was no one immediately in sight, and couldn’t help but kick a tree trunk in annoyance. He wanted to finish what he was doing, and he wanted to get back to Iris, coño. He couldn’t do that if the building insisted on playing its stupid games.

When Iris appeared, she was sitting. The key had appeared in her hand before she’d really risen, and her head was still bent as she stared down at it in her palm. The change in the air, from close and warm to crisp and cool, made her look up sharply. She didn’t make a sound, however, taking whatever time she could to compose herself, and she recognized Micah’s broad back in a second. Surprised more than anything, she looked down again at the thing in her hand, as if maybe she had picked it up on accident and it had brought her here. It had her room number on it, but she didn’t recognize it.

Iris was fresh--in a way--from the Masquerade. Her hair showed signs of being swept up recently, with a peculiar wave as it settled over her shoulders, and the magnificent dress with its deep (very deep) dip between her breasts looked very odd with the blue jeans visible between hem and bare ankles. There was no one around. Perhaps they were in medieval England. She sighed, a low, deep sigh.

Micah had been wandering toward the only clearing he could perceive, and he was cursing audibly in Spanish and hoping this wasn’t like France. He still had nightmares about France; nightmares about Iris dying there without him being able to do anything to stop it. It woke him up in a cold sweat regularly, and being away from Iris and not being able to reassure himself that she was fine when it happened was maddening. He’d called her apartment more than once in the early hours of the morning once she’d gone home, just to hear her answer and know she was alright.

By the time she noticed his broad back, he was turning, having heard a rustle of sound behind him. When he saw her, he went entirely still, unsure at first if this was another dream (or nightmare). Then, a second later, he was moving toward her and stopping just short of wrapping her up in his arms. “Mamita,” he said, because it was all he could say when he was drinking in her appearance, the dress and the jeans, and looking for any signs of pain or illness.

Iris got up when she saw him take a step toward her, but she had to account for the dress, which was of considerable length, and the skirts were cumbersome enough that by the time she was upright and letting them drop back down (completely concealing the jeans) her eyes slammed hard into his. “You’re here,” she observed, still with her former surprise but with less than she might have had thirty seconds before. She knew what he was doing, and stood still. Iris looked good. She didn’t seem as tired as she always had before, and the dress emphasized her pale skin rather than making her seem garish or unhealthy. She’d lost some weight, but that was to be expected, and her eyes were clear. The dress concealed her arms. “Where’s here?”

“I don’t know where here is,” he said, “y no me importa,” he admitted. He didn’t care. He cared about the fact that he was seeing her again, and that she didn’t look anything like she did in his nightmares, and for a moment he forgot himself and reached for her. It wasn’t a careful thing; it was a thing born of fear and of missing someone, and he pulled her to him, remembering at the last moment to keep from encircling her with his arms and trapping her. “I was worried about you,” he admitted.

Old habits. Stiff at first, and then relaxing consciously. She smiled, but it was a polite, vaguely interested smile. She wasn’t going to let him get off that easy. “You could have called.” She knew very well he called. The gray eyes were icy, her skin cool, and she smelled like the masquerade: the basement, damp stone, knights’ rough metal, and sweetened alcohol.

She didn’t smell like herself. That was the first thing he noticed once he’d confessed his worry. The sweet, musky scent of her was there, but it was mingled with drink and metal and stone. It made him think of the dress again, and he stepped back just a little. “Where were you before here?” he asked.

She made herself still, pretending not to care if he was eying the long dip of flesh from collarbones down. Atop the dangerous vee, she said, “The Masquerade.”

He’d noticed the cool greeting, of course, and he’d been expecting worse than that. He cupped her upper arms, and he looked into her gray eyes. “You can throw something at my head, mamita,” he told her with a smile. Even if she was being distant, it couldn’t eclipse the contentment he felt at just being in the same area as her, as seeing her looking healthy and strong again. “I called. They told me to stop,” he admitted with a boyish, dimpled grin.

“I don’t throw things or hit people,” she said, raising both brows a little. “Not even you.” She brought her eyes away, pretending that she was not looking him over for injuries, though he was more likely to go looking for them than she. “I meant call me.”

The vee of the dress kept drawing his attention, but he did his best to ignore it, not wanting to panic her or make her back away from him. She was close enough to smell and touch and almost hold, and he didn’t want to risk losing that. “Te vez bella,” he told her lowly, because she did, and the depth with which he meant the compliment was audible in the words. “I did. I just didn’t talk,” he admitted. From non-traceable phones, early in the morning, but he had called her. “It wasn’t safe to talk, Iris,” he finally admitted seriously. “I wasn’t going to drag you down because of me. I did that before, and I wasn’t going to let it happen again,” he said, a touch of self-loathing and protective machismo in the statement.

She ignored the compliment. “It wasn’t safe to talk,” she repeated. “I see.” Her eyes scraped rather ruthlessly over his expression. “Drag me down where, exactly?” Her heels were cool on the grass, and she looked down over the surface of the foreign woods. Not here, clearly.

He raked a hand through his hair, and he stepped away. He didn’t go so far that he couldn’t grab her if he needed to protect her, and he didn’t go so far that he couldn’t smell her sweet, musky scent on the air, but he gave her (and her anger) a little breathing room. He’d known this was going to happen, he reminded himself. He’d decided he’d rather have her safe and angry, than dead. He could take all the time in the world to grovel (in a manly way), as long as she was safe.

“I got involved in something dangerous, and then I got caught,” he said, because Iris was too smart not to have caught the changes when he started stealing drugs from work. She’d already seen the man at the shooting range, and she knew he was involved in something back home. He sighed, and he leaned against the tree trunk. He hadn’t talked about this, not like this, not with someone that mattered, and he wasn’t sure he could manage it now. “En Cuba,” he started, “I got involved in something dangerous,” he said, which he knew would come as no surprise to her. “Y mataron a mi familia. I ran, Iris. I- sin cojones, I ran and hid, and they killed. Entiendes?” he asked, the self-loathing so thick on the last word that it was barely understandable.

Iris was angry, and she was so angry that none of it showed--in fact, nothing at all showed. Generally Iris let her control get the better of her when she was this angry. Naturally, she’d known he was up to something, because he had put her in that medical office and he had to know she was going to do her job well enough to crunch numbers that didn’t match. He had probably known she wasn’t going to report the mismatches when she found them, either, and only because it was him. She knew something had happened in Cuba, and she knew it was something to do with his family. She was, therefore, not surprised... but other things were getting in the way of the anger. “Did you know what was going to happen before it did?”

“Aqui?” he asked. “Or alla?” Here or there? Had he known he was going to walk out of that hospital without saying goodbye to her? Si. He’d decided that on the stairwell. Had he known at home? No. It didn’t change anything. He lifted his head, and he looked at her, so beautifully composed in her anger, and he reached out a hand to her involuntarily, not even realizing his arm was moving until it had already done so, until he couldn’t hide the movement. “Ven aqui?”

She didn’t move back, and she broke the ice to frown at him in astonishment. “There!”

“No,” he said vehemently, letting his hand drop. “If I’d known, I wouldn’t have hidden. I wouldn’t have been a pendejo sin coraje. I would have turned myself in and let them kill me. I didn’t know,” he said, and it was obviously something he’d replayed over and over in his mind. “I didn’t realize they’d go after them if I went missing. I should have known. I knew how they worked, pero it wasn’t - it hadn’t ever been personal,” he explained, looking away as he said it, hazel eyes damp with almost-tears, but he didn’t cry over them anymore. He’d stopped a long time ago, because it made him feel sick to cry for something he’d caused. He looked back at her a moment later, when he’d managed to quit gritting his teeth and clamping his jaw. “I had to leave when they came here at the hospital where you were.” He said it with no hesitation and no regret. “I’d do it again to keep you safe.”

She shifted, almost toward him, but not quite, and leaves crackled. “You didn’t know,” she said, still with the troubled expression. “En Cuba.” Effortlessly accent-less, specifically replicating what he said. “It wasn’t your fault. This time isn’t your fault either.” Another shift that might have been in his direction, but it wasn’t solid enough.

He reached his hand out again, and he let it hang between them this time, his palm upturned. “This time, I kept you from getting hurt,” he said, and it sounded like some sort of balm, like what he’d done to keep her safe had somehow bandaged some of the old hurt. “Ven.”

“No. You just kept me out. You don’t know if I’d get hurt.” She looked down at his hand as if it made her sad. At least there were cracks showing in the armor.

He reached forward this time instead of withdrawing, and he kept his palm upturned. “I couldn’t risk it,” he said truthfully. “Mis padres, I came home and their bodies were in pieces across the yard.” It was grim, and he didn’t try to make it sound like anything but the reality it was. “No podia dejar que eso te pasara. I got caught selling the next day, and I turned informant. Para ti. To keep you safe.”

Iris didn’t flinch, but only because she was deliberately not flinching. “Next time there is something wrong, you won’t tell me? You don’t think I should know something like that?” She was going to hold on to that anger even if it was petty and vindictive. She needed it to keep that control, and she didn’t want to show him anything else. The stupid forest and the damn dress did not help.

He still didn’t touch her, and he still didn’t withdraw his hand. It hung between them in the forest still, and he just looked at her with hazel eyes that understood where her anger stemmed from. “Next time the people who killed my family because I wasn’t an hombre about my actions come around and put you in danger, I’ll do whatever I have to do to keep you safe.” He said. He could have lied, could have apologized for what he did, but the fact was that he would do it again to keep her from getting hurt. She was too smart for him to lie to, she always had been, and he cared about her too much to pretend he didn’t.

“Leaving without telling me won’t help. You could say something.” Iris found it supremely ironic that the men she wouldn’t have minded in her life had a habit of leaving it without saying why. She felt this was a sign of what might have been normality, and the fact she had so many other problems that would legitimately give a man an excuse to leave, but none ever ended up being that reason--that was irony.

“I didn’t disappear, Iris. You knew that,” he said, because he assumed she had to know, had to have known that he could never just leave her. He smiled a moment later. “And you’re too smart to tell.”

“You wouldn’t disappear willingly.” The gray eyes glinted steel for a bare moment before she got hold of her anger again. Choosing a direction that seemed more lit and least likely to bear gun-toting rebels or rabid tigers, she strode off through the trees, obviously expecting him to follow. She had known he had gone willingly, but only after some investigation and pressure in various places that tracked the regular calls checking on her status. She hadn’t liked the time period when she didn’t know what had happened to him, not one bit. At least Evan had left a goddamn note.

Of course he followed. “Mami,” he said, voice calm as he watched her move. The anger and the way she carried herself served to reassure him that she really wasn’t injured, that she was doing better. “You know I wouldn’t leave you,” he said, because there was no point in pretending otherwise. Then, quieter, “I keep dreaming you died in France,” he admitted. He closed the gap between them, then. “Estas encabronada,” he said knowingly, reaching for her upper arm and tugging her to a stop. “What do you want me to say? That I’m sorry I didn’t turn around and lead dangerous people into your ICU room? I’m not sorry about that, Mamita. You’d do the same for me, and we both know it. If something dangerous from your past walked through the door, you’d try to get it as far away as you possibly could from anything that mattered.”

She was silent for a little while. The dress was heavy and long, and the multi-layer hem trickled over the grass behind her as if she wasn’t wearing jeans at all, and if it had not been for the intentionally blank expression, she would have looked uncharacteristically ethereal. She let him pull her back but then she lifted her elbow out of his grip without an explanation or reply. She knew very well how close France had been to the end, but she wasn’t going to discuss it. There wasn’t anything to say about it. Yes, that near death experience wasn’t fun for either of us. Hardly.

“I’m in dangerous situations all the time. You could have told me.” She was going to pretend she didn’t speak a word of Spanish because his little observations made her grit her teeth and she wasn’t going to be so cliche.

He firmly planted his feet, his legs slightly spread, and he kept enough of a hold on her arm that they weren’t going anywhere, not immediately. “Next time, I’ll tell you,” he finally said, but added. “But you know I’m right, Iris.”

Silence. They both knew very well she would just take off if she thought it was necessary, and not only was further communication difficult, it would have been uncharacteristic. “No,” she said, defiantly. “What happened to your family isn’t your fault. And if something happens to me, that’s not your fault either.”

“Nothing is going to happen to you,” he said stubbornly, shoulders straightening and entire body tensing. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you.” It was a possessive sentence, one that spoke of things beyond the immediate now, and it was intentional. Yes, he’d gone, but only because he’d had to. It was never meant to be a permanent thing; it was a thing done out of need and to set up a safe future for her. He stepped in front of her, and he looked into her eyes. “Mamita, ven conmigo. We can keep each other safe, si?”

She looked away, not to be swayed but puppy eyes. “Well, things happen, Micah. That’s life. I was perfectly fine before you came along. What are you going to do, live right next door the rest of my life?”

He smiled a dimpled, cocksure smile; one that said he had higher hopes than that, actually. “You weren’t perfectly fine, Iris,” he said with the sort of quiet certainty he always had, one that didn’t need to scream or stomp to make his point. “Estabas tratando,” he said. She was trying to be perfectly fine, but she hadn’t been, not really.

She didn’t like hearing that, not one bit. The muscles in her jaw flexed and she drew her head and shoulders away from him. The temperature dropped. “I will be.” She reached down unthinkingly for her skirts and made to sweep around him. She was going to get somewhere in this godforsaken forest.

He followed, letting her lead and staying quiet for a few minutes. He knew she was livid, and he knew she’d burn with it for awhile. In his mind, it just meant she’d been worried about him, that she’d missed him. He’d hurt her by disappearing, but he could fix that with time. All they had was time, or at least that’s what he was trying to ensure. Time. For a time, there was only the sound of their feet on the grass, and as they neared the clearing, he slowed. “Slow down, Mamita,” he said quietly, reaching for the gun that wasn’t where it normally was. Dammit.

She slowed. Iris wasn’t stupid enough to let her emotions get the better of her and run into something dangerous just because she wanted to slap Micah upside the head. She bunched the front of the dress a little higher above her jeaned knees in case she needed to move, peering into the clearing.

He stopped just behind her, his breadth and height warm against her back through the dress and denim. The warehouse on the far end of the clearing was dark, hollow looking. He didn’t like it, and he wasn’t about to let her walk toward it. “Iris,” he said softly, just wanting to catch her attention, only that.

She didn’t look back at him, watching the building for movement. “Ten to one that’s where we’re meant to go. You see another option?” She waited for an answer before she moved.

“We could just not go,” he said, because they could. They could go back the way they came until they found a road or a house or some sign of life. Micah had long since stopped trusting Bellum, even before the mess in France. But France, France had pushed him over the edge in a way nothing else had before or since. There, she almost died. There, he almost went mad on the edge of a volcano. He didn’t trust that warehouse. If she insisted on going, he’d follow, he’d cover her, and he’d damn well keep her from taking any bullets this time, coño, but he’d rather not go at all. “Why do we let it do this to us?” he asked her. “Porque? Why go there?”

“Because it probably isn’t going to give us another option. Eventually we’ll get tired or cold, and we’ll probably come back here.” There was no movement in the warehouse, and her eyes turned up to him for the first time in many minutes. “But if you want to try, we can walk.” Iris wasn’t thrilled about Bellum either, but she hadn’t left it yet, an oddly telling feature.

He was looking at the warehouse when she looked up at him, and when he looked down to find her eyes turned up to him it stunned him into silence for a moment. He smiled at her, dimpled and slow, and he almost forgot what he was about to say. It was an entirely besotted smile, and he chuckled at himself before looking back at the warehouse. “If we go in there, if we play the game this time, it’s the last time we’re doing it, Iris,” he said. She could argue with him all she wanted, but they were getting out of this cycle of mierda once and for all.

She’d forgotten how intense that look was. She didn’t look away this time, to her credit, and she was hard put not to smile back, but she endeavored in the end. “There’s a ‘we,’ is there.” Her tone was flat, and she shook her head a little bit. Unbelievable. “Like I said, we can try to avoid it, but I think it will spit us back here.” The building was capable of all manner of things, and Iris preferred to overestimate it rather than under-.

“Another ‘we,” he said, with more than a touch of smug approval that he couldn’t keep out of his voice. “And I meant once we get out whatever this thing is, Mamita. We pack our bags, and we leave for good.” It was a statement, not a question. Enough. Bellum had treated them like single-celled creatures in petrie dishes for long enough.

As usual, she didn’t allow the self-satisfaction to get to her. Instead she looked back at the warehouse in the distance, and said, distractedly, “I’ll have to talk to some people first. Or maybe after.” Not for the first time, she wondered why she bothered.

“After,” he said, and then he stepped in front of her, to block her from anything horrific that might wait in the clearing. “Quedate cerca,” he said, even as he began moving. He knew she wasn’t necessarily going to like that, but that dress, as pretty as it was, kept her from maneuvering as well as he knew she could, and he glanced back at it and gave her a grin, so she wouldn’t start boiling about his machismo on top of everything else. Not that he minded it when she boiled; quite the opposite.

Precisely why Iris was doing her damndest not to boil. Not boiling at the fact the dress did not allow her to flank him immediately. At all. She set out after him, slightly to one side at an angle, and said no more. She didn’t think the warehouse was likely to explode, because the building wasn’t necessarily trying to kill them. That was the working theory, anyway. She preferred it.

He pulled the key and number out of his pocket, because they would obviously open the building that loomed ahead. He hoped Bellum hadn’t moved them here, to some strange, abandoned building in an unfamiliar place. He stopped when the outline of the limos beyond came into view, and he put his arm back, to stop her as well. He had a bad feeling about this, but he had a bad feeling about most things lately. He nodded toward the line of cars, and he looked over his shoulder at her.

Iris just blinked and stared. “Don’t have any clue. Do you?” It was a soft undertone, shoulders in the wide collar lifting up then down. She didn’t accuse him of being paranoid nor brush off the presence of the limousines. She didn’t much care for what they stood for either, not just then.

“We aren’t getting in those,” he said, as if the decision was entirely his, and then he lowered his arm and started forward again. “I was in Washington DC this morning,” he said as he walked. “In a CIA office, which is why I don’t have my gun,” he explained. “I was talking to them about clean identities,” he said, looking back at her. Clean identities, he suspected, was something she knew about.

No argument from Iris about the limos. Sometimes limos were a good thing, and sometimes they weren’t. “You went to the CIA for that?” The CIA were not to be trusted, just because entities like the CIA were in it for themselves--and they had so many motivations it was impossible to guess what they might be and protect yourself. She actually stopped walking and narrowed her eyes.

He’d expected her to stop, and he wasn’t sorry she had. The longer they stayed out of that building, the better, as far as he was concerned. “No. They came to me. The people I was stealing for, they’re breaching el bloqueo, the embargo against Cuba, Mami. It was either work with them or be extradited. I’m not a citizen. Mis padres, they were loyal to the communist government. They never filed my birth certificate or bothered with dual citizenship for me,” he explained, as if it was all matter-of-fact and didn’t involve an insurrectionist organization with significant weaponry.

Iris let out a long, irritated breath. She didn’t have any argument for that. “So you are stealing for the CIA, then?” Iris wasn’t pleased. First she was angry, and then she was irritated, and now she wasn’t pleased. Rather than replacing, it was just layering. The lines at the edges of her mouth were flattening out.

“No, I was informing on the people I was stealing for,” he explained. “And informing on what I was stealing,” he told her. He could tell she was getting angrier, but he couldn’t tell why this time. “I have to testify, pero then I’ll be in the clear. Un cuidadano with papers and a new life, a new name. We can be safe.” He paused. “Juntos.”

Iris jerked her chin straight in distaste. Government. “They always just want you to testify. Are they bothering with WITSEC or they just figure they’ll find someone else just like you if you get killed?” Definitely getting angrier. Her voice wasn’t rising, it was getting blanker and emptier, softer and more dangerous.

Admittedly, Micah wasn’t used to the politics of the United States in the way she was. They’d told him his options, and he’d taken the only one that made sense. “They said they’d give me and mine a new identity, new work, a new home. Iris, until I have citizenship here, I don’t have the same rights someone else does to protection, entiendes? They don’t need to let me stay. I can’t even apply for citizenship until I’ve been here a year and a day. I don’t have a choice, no matter how much protection they do or don’t offer me.”

“I know. That’s just the kind of thing they do. Of course, it would be better if you cooperated.” She snorted. She had difficulty seeing straight, she was so angry. She wasn’t even sure who exactly she was angry at. Turning, she started striding off toward the building again.

“Talking from experience?” he asked, expression going tight and grim. His own situation was one thing, but he didn’t like the idea of Iris having to face whatever her nightmares were, and he suspected that was what this was about. He followed after her. “Once it’s done, we can leave. Leave the country, leave the radar. Leave,” he said with a boy’s faith.

“When it’s done. However long it takes them to set a court date, if you last that long.” Blank, jaw clenched. She refused to answer his question. “I’m not. Not wherever they want me to go, not at a court, not here, not anywhere.” To prove it, she was heading right toward the warehouse. Whatever was there, she just wanted to find it, deal with it, and forget it.

He pulled her back, fully aware that eventually she was going to react to all the grabbing. “Esta bien,” he said. “Where do we go then? If I don’t do what they say, we can’t stay in this country, Iris.” The we in the sentence was pronounced. He’d tried to stay because of her, after all. If she was willing to go somewhere else, then fine, they’d go somewhere else.

“They’re not going to let us leave,” she snapped at him, shoving back toward him and pulling her wrist sharp out of his hand when he stopped pulling. “Now let go. I want to get this done.”

“Us,” he said; a statement, not a question. “Is that the same arrangement you have?” he asked, even as he let her go, even as he moved in front of her and began walking toward the warehouse again. He pulled his key and number from his pocket, where he’d stashed them, and he held them out to her as they neared.

“There is no more arrangement,” Iris said, in a voice so steely that the subject was finished before it even started. She ignored his key and pulled out her own, walking down the edge of the warehouse toward her number.

“Because you’ve done what you had to do? Or because you decided it was done?” he asked, following her (even when she stubbornly refused to take the key). The warehouse was dark and cold and dank, and it was so unlike home that he hated it immediately. “Remember, we’re us now,” he told her, reminded her. She wasn’t going to be on her own anymore, no matter how she pretended she wanted to be. He passed her, and he pulled her key and number from her fingers.

Like hell. She snatched at the key even as he pulled it back. “Stop trying to take my life away from me. I’m making my choices, Not You.” She shoved at him again, rather dangerously (ruthlessly?) low.

He put his hands up when she shoved at him, a gesture of surrender. “I’m not trying to take your choices away, Iris. You can barely move in that dress, and we don’t have any idea what’s behind the jodio door that key opens. What kind of an hijo-de-puta would I be if I let you open it? I’m bigger, taller, broader, I can move faster, and I didn’t almost die last month,” he said, voice raising at the last phrase.

“Chance!” she shouted--shouted, really shouted--back at him. “You might have died, in fact I’m shocked you’re not lying dead somewhere in a French gutter, getting involved in their politics. Don’t even bother denying how well you would have done fighting for the république, Micah, it’s half-killing you just to work in a medical office and not on live patients, and now you’re going to go testify against a bunch of moral-impaired thieves. That’s just like you and your goddamn hero complex!” She waved one fist with the key in it inches from his nose.

He grabbed for the key, because how could he not when she was waving it under his nose. He did smile, for just a moment, because damn did she look magnificent when she got really angry, but the smile turned into a determined thing as she continued on. “I like the idiotas I’m stealing things for, Iris. They want to help people who can’t get their hands on medicine to keep them alive, just because there’s some stupid political embargo going on, a political game. I wanted to help in France. I can’t help if it’s who I am, and you wouldn’t care about me nearly as much as you do if I was as selfish as you pretend you want me to be,” he said, entirely blunt and entirely candid.

Iris didn't care if she was angry because he had left her (left her when she had told him to, but not because she had told him to), or because he never took care of himself the way he should, or because he kept coming back to his causes--her included--to get hurt again and again. All that mattered was that she was angry.

She was frustrated by that smug little smile that said he thought he was invulnerable, and in that moment, she wanted to prove to him that he wasn't. She yanked her hand and good arm back, as if harshly possessing that key, but then she dropped it behind her, and without warning, decked him with a solid roundhouse two knuckle to his jaw.

The shock overtook his hazel eyes well before her fist came into contact with his jaw, and while he raised a hand to grab her arm, he hesitated at the last moment, drawing back and letting her connect her fist with his jaw without attempting to stop her. It wasn’t enough to knock him back, not being as big and solid as he was, but his jaw did snap to the side a little.

He flexed his jaw, rubbed at it, and instead of getting angry, he smiled. And once he was done smiling, he laughed. He closed his fingers on her wrist, and he dragged her closer to him with a grip that was loose enough for her to get out of easily. “I’m sorry, Iris,” he finally said, his eyes smiling.

Iris gave him another halfhearted thump to the chest and took in a very shaky breath, avoiding his gaze because hers was watery. "Stupid man," she said, thickly. "You always do stupid things like this, and eventually you'll get hurt and sit there and pretend it was for someone else." And then she would be hurt and sad. She didn't want to be hurt and sad. She sniffed.

He wrapped her in his arms slowly, gently, so as not to spook her. “You just have to keep a closer eye on me,” he said, resting his chin against her hair. She felt soft and strong all at once, and she smelled like coming home.

She let him touch her, and turned a wet cheek to his chest. Muffled: "I'm sorry I hit you." Her hand hurt. Stupid man.

He smiled, and he tried to look down at her muffled face, all without letting her go. “I deserved it. I should have apologized from the beginning, si?” he asked, then he chuckled softly, adding, “I bet that dress looked beautiful before the jeans. Did you meet anyone interesting while you were pining for me?” he asked.

She had her chin down, as always, so there was nothing to see. “Yes, you should have apologized.” It came out something like ‘apologzsmph.’ “And the dress looks fine now,” she added, resentfully.

He chuckled. “Didn’t meet anyone as amazing as me entonces,” he said, and then he slipped his fingers down beneath her chin and tipped it up. “There’s no one as amazing as you,” he added, tempering the cockiness with the compliment.

“Neither of us are very amazing. You are suicidal and I have no shoes.” She was a little peaky, eyes red, and some of the fatigue she’d been hiding was readable. Sigh.

“I have a hero complex and you,” he said, not giving her the slightest bit of warning before sweeping her up and off her feet as if she weighed nothing at all, “don’t need shoes.” He smiled, familiar dimples in place. “Next time, Mamita, less fabric?” He could tell she looked tired, and he vacillated between carrying her to the unit (her key was still behind him on the ground), or insisting they turn the hell back around.

“Stop criticizing my dress,” she said, curling a little closer into the safety of his chest and trying not to think of anything. There was a ridiculous amount of fabric, though. Every layer was transparent, but with enough layers, the dress was opaque and even modest, if you ignored the low curve of the bodice. Iris liked it, and Iris had taste. It wasn’t a dress made for dancing or very much moving; she hadn’t planned to do either. “You weren’t at the Masquerade?”

“No,” he said. “I didn’t even know there was one,” he admitted, crouching down with her still in his arms, and getting her close enough so that she could reach for the key on the ground. “What have I missed, Mamita? Besides you dressing up and dancing with other men?” He sounded jealous, because he was jealous at the thought, but he didn’t bother to hide it.

“I don’t know. I stayed home and I worked. I don’t want to know what they’re doing.” She reached out and took her key, but not enthusiastically. At one point she might have lifted her arm to hook around his neck to support her weight, but she couldn’t raise it that high and didn’t try. “Irene stayed home too.” The additional phrase sounded empty though she tried to say it casually.

“She missed Holmes,” he said knowingly, not letting her down as he started back down the dark hallway. The further he walked into the building, the colder and darker it got, and by the time he stopped in front of her door the number was barely visible. “Are you going to let me open it?” he asked, because if not, they were going to have to fight about an alternative. No way in hell he was letting her put herself in the line of whatever was on the other side.

“No. You can open yours.” She looked up into his face, and sighed. “First, if you want. To see what happens. Since you’re invulnerable.” The sarcasm was thick and unyielding; she didn’t like talking about Holmes. “Put me down if you’re going to brave the unknown.”

He waited a long moment before letting her feet slide to the floor. “You owe me a dance, Mamita,” he told her, even as he fished his own key out of his pocket. “Or I’ll get celoso and punch someone,” he added with a wink, which wasn’t so far from the truth. He looked at his number, and then he held his hand out to her in much the same way he had done earlier, palm upturned. “Watson hates it here,” he added, as if that was anything new.

She took his hand and pretended it was normal while she focused on not clinging. She was right in the middle of all that pretending as he spoke. “There isn’t anyone to punch,” she said, scathingly. “I said I stayed home otherwise.” She made that little jerk of her chin that she used when she was being stubborn and avoiding at the same time. “If the moon comes, we’re going separate places. She doesn’t want to talk to him.”

“Why?” he asked, buying time and not bothering to hide it. The door loomed over her shoulder, but Iris (and Irene) mattered more to him than whatever trick the building had planned for them. He cupped her cheeks. “Porque?” he repeated. He’d never understood Irene’s motivations. He waited a beat before smiling. “I can get jealous of you staying home too, if you want.” The dimples in his cheek let her know that yes, he probably could somehow.

“I don’t know,” Iris lied, evenly. There was nothing Irene knew that Iris didn’t, and vise versa. As usual, she turned her chin out of the way of his fingers. “And I don’t like you jealous, remember?” Touching her tongue to her lower lip she sighed (God, she was doing a lot of sighing), and pointed at his door. Get on with it.

He knew she was lying. He’d already figured out that Iris’ relationship with Irene was very different from his own with Watson. As for not liking him jealous, he didn’t believe that. He strongly believed, as a male of the species, that women liked jealousy; it made them feel cared for in non-psychotic amounts. But, at the end of the day, he wanted to get on with this door business as much as she did, even if he wanted to put it off forever at the same time.

He nudged her behind him, and he put the key in the rusty keyhole.

When the door creaked open, it wasn’t anything he was expecting. Inside, the furniture from his apartment was neatly stored, boxes piled high beside the bed and couch. He looked over his shoulder at her, but he kept his arm across the door, not letting her enter in case it was a trap. “El edificio esta loco.”

Iris stared around him, and then stepped to one side to peer through the gloom at everything he owned. She blinked in astonishment and dropped the train of her dress. If all his things were here, what was happening back at the building? "It wants us to move out?"

Without waiting for an answer, she turned and strode purposefully out of the container in sweep of heavy fabric, looking grim and heading for her own room number--where she found exactly the same thing. There wasn't anything different about it; her furniture seemed even more spare and less than usual, lying there heaped at the back. His picture was laid across one of the chairs.

He chased after her and that jodio dress, and he stayed close to her as she opened her door. Nothing had grabbed her yet or put her in the path of a bullet. In fact, if the building wanted them to move out, he’d send the damn thing a thank you card. He smiled when he saw the painting, and he focused on that instead of on the clear message of ‘get the fuck out’ the building was delivering. “You kept it?”

"I left it in the apartment," Iris said, noncommittally. She moved in, managing the dress with a sort of elegance that came with being in awkward situations in dinner-dress all the time. She looked around and began moving things forward and back. "It's all here."

Micah had given up why the building did what it did ages ago, but this brought it all back to mind, all the research he’d done, all the searching and dead ends. “Maybe it doesn’t need us anymore,” he offered. Watson would be overjoyed. “Has anything happened while I was gone? Anything especial?” He stopped behind her in the dark space, and he put a slow and gentle hand on her upper arm. “Freedom, Mami. Maybe that’s what it is.”

She turned around to face him. The compartment smelled musty and dank and there wasn't anything in it she wanted to take while he was standing there. She pushed a little into his space to get him to back up out of hers and out of the container. "We'll see. Irene isn't gone. When she is, then we'll talk about freedom."

He backed into the hallway without any push back at all; staying in the containers wasn’t something he had any interest in doing. Her comment about Irene, however, gave him pause, and he cocked his head to the side. “What’s she been up to?”

"Nothing. I said that, remember?" Iris and Irene were entirely innocent of all endeavors, legal, illegal or otherwise. People are so suspicious.

Yeah, he didn't believe that. In fact, he thought Iris and Irene working in tandem on anything was exceptionally dangerous. "You just asked me not to lie to you or keep things from you," he reminded her evenly.

"I told you to tell me if you decide to take off." It was an exceptionally American thing to say, and she laid it on thick. Deliberately, she began to move down the warehouse aisle, toward the docking doors and the line of limousines.

He followed her. “Trust goes both ways,” he said, because she hadn’t said that at all, not really, and they both knew it.

"Easy for you to say. You tell it when you're ready."

He reached out a hand, and he stopped her. “I thought we were talking about changing that.”

“You don’t trust me?” She raised both eyebrows so high that her chin came up with them.

“I think you’re lying about Irene,” he said, because to him that was a completely separate thing. “Protecting her. Why?”

Iris hesitated. “She doesn’t want any contact with Holmes or Watson,” she replied, finally.

“Why?” He didn’t need to ask anything more than that.

“The mess with Moriarty. And it’s not likely they’re just going to let her go about her business, are they?” Holmes was like a hound on the scent sometimes, and though he was not in the building, Irene was not reassured. Iris had no objection to her paranoia--or the shame at what Irene had been prepared to do--and both had enough at stake that concealment was a better alternative than confrontation.

“They aren’t going to be a problem once we leave,” Micah insisted. Unlike Iris, he didn’t have a whole lot of faith or trust in their stories. Irene had tried to keep Iris isolated in a way Micah found entirely reprehensible, and he didn’t really care why she’d done it. Iris put up a strong front, but she needed people more than anyone Micah knew.

Iris felt differently about Irene. They were alike enough to be one and she worried what might happen if the wily Victorian lady actually vanished. Some of her expression may have shown this, but she said, "Maybe not." Iris clung to her independence in a way that verged on ridiculous. She took "commitment issues" far out of the usual relationship problems.

“Iris,” he told her, his hand on her elbow and his expression entirely serious, “you’re going to be fine without her,” he insisted, finally understanding that Iris feared the idea of being free of Irene. He had been looking at it from his point of view entirely, and so he hadn’t realized that Iris, fragile as she was, probably drew strength from Irene.

Iris kept her voice mild. "How do you know that?" She stopped at the border of the lawn again, but not so he could pick her up. She was enough on edge as it was. "It's not like you and him." Iris turned the key over in her palm, moving it between her fingers clumsily, without concentration. It was the bad arm.

“Because I’ll be here, and I’ll make it fine,” he said, and it was clear from his intonation that he believed it without even a hint of a doubt.

"There you go again," she said, annoyed. "You going to show up in my dreams and dig into that too?"

“Iris, I’m not trying to take anything from you. I want to be here for you, entiendes? You don’t need to do everything alone. I’m not leaving, and you’re not going to be stuck handling it all. Let me in,” he said, not mincing words.

“No. It is too dangerous. For both of us. You know that, or you wouldn’t have left.” She didn’t intend it to be an accusation, but that’s how it came out.

His back went ramrod straight at the accusation. Of all the things she could have said, that was definitely the worst. Hadn’t he managed to get his entire family killed, after all? All his bravado and certainty disappeared with her words. He had managed to convince himself he could protect her, that history wouldn’t repeat, but that certainty was a deck of cards and it had just toppled.

Iris realized the mistake far too late, blinking and drawing back. "I didn't mean..." Maybe she had, she didn't know. He was pushing and she was defensive, and she just struck at him to make him stop.

He nodded, an acknowledgement of her words. “Es la verdad, no?” he asked, and then he nodded again, this time toward the clearing and the limos. “I think we’re supposed to get into those,” he said, turning his attention entirely away from what she had said. He wasn’t going to tell her not to get in the black, lurking vehicles; not now.

Iris pressed her lips together and didn’t push. She knew she’d screwed up, and regretted it, but there wasn’t anything she could do about it now. Resigned: “Where do you think they’ll take us?”

He stopped short of the cars, and he just looked at them, then at her. His entire body bristled at the thought of getting into unknown, Bellum-controlled vehicles. They would have no idea where they were going and no power to keep from going there, and while that wasn’t very different from daily Bellum life, it was more pronounced if they had to walk into it knowingly. “Why?” he asked her. Why did she want to get in? Why did she want to keep doing this? Just, why?

She turned to look at him through the dark, again patient as she had been at the edge of the woods, a whirling, unpredictable dervish of emotion. How she could scream at him one minute and then stand there looking thoughtful and absent... “You have another option?”

“Not let it control us anymore,” he said, but he would go wherever she went, even if he thought it was an absolutely terrible idea. He didn’t really understand her relationship with Irene, her need to stay in a place that controlled her, when she so hated being controlled, and it showed on his face in that moment.

“I mean an immediate option. So we don’t get in the limos. What do we do instead?” Choose Your Own Adventure. To camp in the forest, turn to page 7.

“What if it takes us somewhere worse than France?” he asked, because France was clearly his benchmark for all bad Bellum related things. He sighed a moment later, and he touched her shoulder lightly, fingers just short of where she’d been shot. “It’s not going to let us leave. I know that, Iris. I’m just tired of it. And I don’t want you hurt again, entiendes? I want us out of this mess.”

“You weren’t responsible for France,” she said, some of her former anger returning.

“No, the people or powers behind the limos were responsible for France,” he said simply.

That got through. The hackles went down. “Yes. Them and chance. So you want to walk, then?”

“Mamita, I'll follow you into those limos and back to France, if that's what you want, and we both know it," he said, because it was the truth, and there was no reason not to put it out there. He reminded himself that he cared about the people back at Bellum, that they mattered, because they did, and he reached out a hand and pressed it to the small of her back. "Vamos. Let's go see what the building wants this time. Pero just this once, Iris. Si? After that, we go.”

"I don't know where you think we're going, if there's any place to go, afterward," she muttered. She stood there for a minute, staring at the gleaming metal, and then she turned back around and looked at him. The expression was new, it was a warning look, a don't you say a word look. "If we're getting in those, I want my pictures," she said, clipped.

He didn't say a word, but he did smile just enough so that one dimple showed, and then he turned and started walking back toward the warehouse, a definite bounce in his step and maybe, just maybe, a whistle on his lips.

She followed along behind, cold and silent, because she didn't want to discuss it, and she knew he was enjoying this. When they got back to her container, she dug into the small heap of clothes and pulled out the picture Peter had given her. She took it out of its frame, found a spare purse of blue cloth, and tucked it inside. She found a small wallet and threw it in there just because it came to hand. A little cosmetics bag. Then without looking at him, she pulled the picture frame off the chair, flipped it over, took the contents out, and rolled it up. "Alright, let's go."

He was still smiling in the doorway, that same smug smile that said he’d won something particularly impressive. He was, however, curious about the other picture. His brow quirked, and he pointed at it. “Who’s my competition?” he asked.

"It's from Peter," she said defensively, glaring at him. She should fold it up and stick it down the front of her dress just to annoy him. Only she wasn't that petty.

That made him smile a little more, because he wasn't particularly worried about Pedro. He'd befriended the man, after all, and Pedro wasn't the sort to move in on Micah's territory. He chuckled a little to himself, because Iris would absolutely hate being territory, but he wasn't about to tell her what he was thinking. "Ven," he said, refraining from offering to help her carry anything, even though he very much wanted to.

This was a wise choice, it was clear, because Iris was the type that preferred to pretend she didn’t need anyone or anything, and that she could be so concerned about items that clearly had some kind of an emotional value made both herself and Irene very leery. Besides, Micah was on very thin ice already.

He held the door open for her, even though that was something he assumed she would also dislike, and he allowed himself to bow his head and kiss her cheek chastely as she passed. No hands, no leaning, none of that.

Iris tipped her chin sideways and up to look up at him in with an expression that closely resembled surprise. “You are being presumptuous,” she informed him, managing to sound mildly disgruntled as she stepped out of the container and back into the hallway. She lifted the long rolled picture and bopped him with it.

He chuckled, not at all put out by her statement or by the bopping. He was being presumptuous, but dammit if he didn’t feel positive enough to do so, even with the limos lurking just beyond the walls of the facility. He followed her out, her and the painting he had given her, and he laid one, almost-not-there hand on her back for a moment.

She said no more, and led the way to the limo, which stood open in black leather and silver trim. She looked at him once, smiled faintly, and lifting the tubed picture, slid within, making room for him next to her as the engine caught and started.