you know the first rule of combat?

You know what they say about time giving you perspective? Truer words have never been spoken. The funny thing is, even without being awake for it, I feel all of the years I spent asleep in that cryogenic facility. Been jaded since I woke up. Knew that I'd have to fend for myself in a world that would only seek to take advantage of me.

But, much as hindsight is 20/20, life also has a way of making you complacent when it goes too smoothly. I've grown soft since getting here. The fact that a disappearance even bothers me is proof of that.

I'm better off on my own.

I know that it isn't rational. Having Abel Nightroad as my work partner made me practically invincible by proxy. After all, his body regenerated, provided he had been feeding himself a regular supply of vampire blood, and trust me — vampires aren't hard to find in the city of Darrow. The man was even sure that he could survive being completely decapitated.

Maybe calling him a man would be a bit of a stretch.

Anyway, the point is, I know that I should be taking my danger levels down a notch without Abel around, but frankly, I've got jobs booked up through the new year and I'm not keen on backing down. Anything to keep my mind off the damn fact that I feel like I've been abandoned again, and like I was weak for letting that be a possibility in the first place. So I'm out on the prowl tonight, with the sky pitch dark around me, the only sound that of cars in the distance and the quiet clip of my heels against asphalt.

Today's mark is one I have license to kill, if I spot her. I'm hoping it doesn't come to that, not because I have a problem with killing when it's necessary, but because it always looks better if you bring them back alive.

I'm headed to one of the hidden dive bars in town when I spot him. Harley, walking through this part of town like it's nothing. Fuck.

I could leave him, but... fuck.

Muttering something incomprehensible under my breath, I put on a smile with perfectly lined lips, reaching out to loop my arm around his elbow.

"Hey, I've been looking for you," I say, tone light, even as my eyes are sharp as daggers. "Been waiting long?"

I don't give him much time to reconsider before I press a kiss soft against his cheek.

It took a while before Faye worked up the courage to soar towards the upper limits of the city. Honestly, sometimes she's still surprised that she tried. Even though the magical borders of Darrow make it seem pretty likely that the ticket out isn't as obvious as any singular mode of transportation, there's something about Red Tail that feels like just that. The one thing that she can trust to take her out of this place should the opportunity ever arise.

An escape plan.

Having everyone else's stories confirmed is at once a disappointment and a relief. The last thing that she remembers is flying up with her ship at full power, the engine roaring as she hurtled up at dizzying speeds. It'd been a while since she kicked everything up to eleven with her ship. That's frightening in its own way — the suggestion that she might someday forget the weightlessness of space, that her skills as a pilot might only deteriorate in time. It only strengthened her resolve as she went up, the clouds around fading into a soft blur and parting for the azure above.

And then, nothing. No memory. Just the awareness of passed time, and a ship gently returning back into Darrow's skyline.

She doesn't have the tears to spare for it, or the anger. Just a soft drag of breath as she circles the ship back towards the parking lot by Darrow's research labs, where a section's been quartered off for her zipcraft. Faye ignores the few gazes that she always draws as she descends towards the asphalt, and only after she feels the metal settle against the pavement does she finally release a deep exhale.

Pinching the bridge of her nose with delicate fingers, Faye releases the pressure in her ship, the windshield lifting away to make way for fresh air again.

"You win some, you lose some, Valentine," she murmurs.

They had been real eager to help out with Faye's ship in the beginning, but as soon as it was proven for the most part that Red Tail was reliable and running smoothly, the real inquiries began.

Mostly around whether or not Faye Valentine could help bring Darrow to this level of technology.

There were a couple of options where informing the rest of the population was concerned. Faye could have easily relinquished access to her ship, giving the city engineers a chance to dig through and figure out how all of the systems and design came together to make a vehicle as sturdy as her own. Minimal work, and she'd get them off of her back in a hurry, probably with plenty of money in return.

But it wasn't an option. Like hell she was going to give them full access to her one ticket out of the place. She'd turned down the offer right then and there in the room.

Which left having Faye pull her weight as one of their team, drawing up schematics and figuring out how much it would cost to build another such ship for the city, most likely to be used either in space exploration or for the military. (Faye couldn't help but wonder if someone like herself, from outside of Darrow, would have access to the space exploration program. She couldn't see it happening.)

God, in some ways, it felt like being blackmailed all over again.

Fortunately, she didn't mind spending time blueprinting and figuring out what made her girl tick. Wearing little more than a crop top and shorts, Faye's skin was smeared with grease as she tinkered around in her ship, taking notes now and again as she worked her way from front to back. At least, she thought, they weren't pushing her beyond her limits yet.

She doesn't say anything on the way back to her apartment. No sound offered save for the click of her heels and the rumble of her bike's engine, which dies as she neatly parks to one side of her reserved spot in the garage. Years of traveling across millions of miles, and never once has she invited a man back to her home, to an apartment she could arguably call hers and hers alone. There isn't any fear that stems from extending this invitation, no greater meaning that she's trying to surface.

It simply contrasts in its normalcy.

The lock clicks with a jangle of her keys, and Faye turns around, one hand groping for the handle as the other traces a line down the center of his jacket. Once he steps inside, he'll be able to see everything from her life on display, from case files for bounty heads strewn over the coffee table to evening dresses carefully draped over chairs in case of a sudden need.

Struck with a thought, Faye offers a small, amused grin.

"I'm Faye, by the way."

You know what I've discovered as time goes by? The good ones never linger. It's the kind of thing that makes you hope that there's something that comes after this, because life itself is too hard, and the good ones never deserve half of the burdens they're shouldered with. If life is supposed to be this precious thing, then it makes no sense to strike the good out when they're young.

God, maybe I'm getting sentimental.


It's been about a month since Bolin disappeared from the city, and somehow, bounty hunting doesn't feel quite the same without him. The kid wasn't present at all of Faye's assignments; she always knew that he didn't really have the stomach for all the work she puts herself to. And, well. Maybe she just didn't want to shred that innocence entirely to pieces. It's a wonder he still thought so highly of her in spite of everything that she gets up to.

None of it really matters anymore, because he's gone, and so is half of Faye's drive.

That's why she finds herself at a bar tonight, seated on an unused pool table near the back of the dive, gambling right in the open. It's nothing complicated, nothing likely to get her into too much trouble in the midst of an unobservant, drunken crowd. Just a bit of dice, and a magnetic circlet on her ankle.

She's just making some easy cash until the next distraction comes.

There are some aspects of society that seem to linger no matter how great or small the population. They slip out of the background, familiar and subtle, a breath permitted in the midst of a busy day — the stares from passerby, the free drinks at a bar, the sound of a breath harsh in the shadow of a deserted alley. Every detail worms its way underneath Faye's skin like a call for complacency, but that isn't how she takes it, no matter how much the way of life coaxes her. This is no time for relaxing, she thinks.

This is nothing more than an opportunity to use her skills to keep afloat. A game that sharpens her reflexes. Nothing more than that.

Individuals still disappear in the crowd as easily as they ever have, and so when Faye goes to insert herself as a more direct solution for the crime that permeates the city, plenty of people take her up on the offer. Today, the small slip of paper with the description doesn't tell her much:

Broad-shouldered, Asian, medium height. Likes to wear earth tones, plenty of green. Don't let the smile fool you. Frequents the noodle shop across the street from the park.

But it's more than she's done in weeks, so she keeps an eye out and waits for more details, a cup of yellow wine standing still in the middle of lightly brushing fingers as she surveys her surroundings.

He's a little younger than she expected, but when the man steps in, Faye wonders just how obvious she can get, how she can pull as much fun out of the chase as she can.

So she slides herself in the seat right across from him, playfully dropping her chin against the heel of her palm.

"Hi."

At first, she'd assumed that Edward had disappeared. It would fall in line with how everything happened back home, with how each individual Faye came to care for vanished one after the other, by choice or by circumstance. Edward wasn't necessarily a person Faye understood, but she'd been a constant, one of the few that remained in the space after all the years Faye spent frozen, and that in of itself made her valuable. Grounding. Family, in a strange way. So to have that taken yet again only threw into sharp relief that which Faye feared most, and the reason why she was so hesitant to settle with Dean, or to show any level of happiness over having a child. Because everything, on the island, was transient.

But a couple days afterwards, Faye became smarter about the way she searched for anything Edward left behind. Began asking other islanders whether or not they'd caught a glimpse of the olive-skinned redhead, usually with a dog in tow.

Rumors led her to the junkyard. It took a fair amount of waiting that afternoon to finally catch a glimpse of Edward in the open, but Faye could wait.

She didn't appreciate being left behind.

Every time that Faye thought she'd finally learned to accept her pregnancy in full, something came about to prove her wrong. In some ways, it felt like taking regular steps towards some blurred and as of yet uncertain destination. Telling Dean had been the first big step, one that left her feeling exposed and shaky at best, to learn that someone else was much more prepared for the changes to come than she was herself. Recognizing each symptom thereafter had been an almost painful process, one which drew out a sense of lingering paranoia. Were her aches caused by the pregnancy? Was she losing sleep because of anxiety? Was she, could she, had she— an endless myriad that never seemed to solve for itself, because some answers simply couldn't be had no matter how great the effort to root them out.

And that morning, she'd come across yet another problem: the clothes that she'd picked out for herself at the beginning of the month, skin-tight and every bit as capable of exuding confidence as the bright yellow she used to wear, were somehow too small around the waist.

Naturally, Faye knew that the changes had taken place since day one. But in some way, the baby was still a distant notion at the start. Fatigue, she could blame on the mental stress. Nausea, she could blame on poor eating habits. But a thickening of her waist felt somehow undeniable, because Faye Valentine was not one to let herself go to any extent, and her size had remained constant since she woke up in that chamber those few years ago.

Something else was changing, and still Faye felt like she was digging her heel stubbornly against all of it.

For the time being, her solution was to snag a shirt out of the several that Dean sometimes left at her place, before slipping on the loosest pair of jeans she had. Maybe she didn't look like much, but at least it masked the constant thrum of her chest as she took a deep breath, setting out for the common dining room, even if she had the lingering suspicion that her nausea would make it hard to keep anything down.


[ Dated April 20th, this is the post for anyone who knows Faye and wants to hear about baby stuff first-hand from her! ST/LT welcome, no limit, go wild. (Sorry for being slow enough to require backdating.) ]