two weeks

[sideways]

Title: Two Weeks
AO3: Link
Rating: PG
Series: Moon Knight (MCU) (Layla El-Faouly, Marc Spector, Steven Grant)
Wordcount: 5,092
Summary: They've never been good at talking about the real things. This time, with a little help, they try.
Tags: No Archive Warnings Apply, Post-Canon, Angst, Getting Back Together, Emotional Constipation
Remarks: I don't think I've ever felt so conflicted about a fic. In the one corner, my deep-seated loathing of the Disney+ corporate monstrosity and their calculated strategy of churning out underworked content en masse with the full expectation their supersized fandom will fill in the gaps for them. In the other corner, me doing literally just that but as a consequence smashing several milestones, including a) the longest fic I've written since I was about 19, b) the most overtly shippy fic I've submitted to AO3, and c) the most bewilderingly positive ego shock I've experienced in a while. (Big fandoms. Whoo-ee.) All I can do is shrug helplessly and say that I'm fond of the characters and weak as hell for a good ot3.

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"I never wanted this for you."

 

Marc says it to his hands more than to her, clasped in a white-knuckled knot between his knees. He is a gargoyle perched on the edge of his bed, hunched and rigid - a half dozen available seats scattered around the London flat, and he chooses the only one with a shackle.

 

She sits straight-backed in her own, hands neatly folded in her lap, running shoes on her feet. Mirror images inverted, she thinks, and it's almost funny.

 

"Well," says Layla Abdallah El-Faouly, Avatar of Taweret, aide to the Mistress of the Horizon, and Marc Spector's wife, pending two signatures on the piece of paper they still haven't talked about. "That sounds rather a lot like a 'you' problem."

 

--

 

It is their third attempt at this conversation.

 

The first is brief by necessity: their stage the ruins of the judgement chamber still littered with its fallen, their audience the malicious sliver of a god glaring out of the wheezing body of her puppet - and of course, spotlight centre, one ex-Knight managing a truly spectacular swoon.

 

"Oh, bloody hell." Steven is gasping in her arms, her hands hooked under his armpits to brace his dragging weight, preventing the broken nose courted by a knee-buckling plunge towards the ground. "Is- Is that it? We're done, right? Because, fair warning, sort of want to puke right now; really hoping that means we're done and not that we ate a bad kebab or summat-"

 

"Steven," she says for the fourth time, "Steven, are you alright?"

 

She sweeps a fierce glare behind her, to the towering sharp-headed god from whom she will demand an answer, an action, some fucking recompense; but where Khonshu had stood there is only dusty air and steeped sand. When she looks back, Steven grins lopsided and sheepish up at her, ever and always with an open sincerity so out of place on these familiar features that it steals her breath.

 

"Sorry," he says. "That was a bit dramatic, wasn't it? Don't fret."

 

A flutter of dark lashes, a deeper breath: as little as she'd known her husband in the end, there's a bittersweet irony in knowing him now, every time, at a glance. Marc confirms, hoarser, "We're alright. He's gone."

 

"Khonshu." Instinct says she wants it written, signed, printed in triplicate. She's felt the pressure the bird exerts on those he marks for his own. "For good?"

 

"Yeah. Seems like it." He tries to get his balance, staggers and lands heavily against her shoulder. "Shit."

 

"Marc?"

 

"It's fine. Just-" He presses the grimy heel of a hand to his forehead, grimacing. "Hell. I don't know. Thought it'd feel different." Another fleeting twist of the lips, darkly amused; it's not for her, his gaze turned inward. "Have you ever even had a hangover, Steven?"

 

"You're in pain." One arm is around his waist now, steadying him; her free hand goes to his face, automatic, turning his chin to her. He seems unmarked, save the pinch between his brows - but she doesn't know what to look for when a god has torn itself out of someone by the roots. "Unbelievable. That… plucked chicken-"

 

"Kept his bargain," Marc cuts in. "That's all I care about right now."

 

He might as well have swatted her hand away. She drops it for him, leaning back.

 

"Of course," she replies, unable to keep the bite from her tone. Marc Spector's infamous priorities. She is intimately familiar.

 

Instantly his face softens, distressed. "Heaven's sake, Marc - I'm sorry, don't mind him, he's trying to pretend like he's not wigging out and doing a terrible job of it, oh yes you very much are." Steven clasps her hand briefly in one of his own, warmly, reassuring. "Really though, right as rain, I promise. It's not pain, exactly, it's… Well." He darts an uncertain look at Harrow then. "I suppose this is 'quiet'."

 

Semi-conscious on the broken makeshift altar, the sprawled body would be a pitiful sight if not for the malevolence permeating the air about it like a toxic leak. Harrow and Ammit, man and god, bound together tighter than any bargain. The creature they've made, she and Marc and Steven. Their reptilian, unblinking stare prickles unpleasantly on Layla's skin, blue eyes glazed and maddened. She can't tell how much understanding they're managing.

 

She squeezes Steven's hand in silent thanks, then eases away, and this time he stays on his feet - haggard as she's ever seen him, and she wants to say there is a trade-off, that he looks lighter and freer too. Mostly he looks about as direly in need of rest as she feels. "If you're truly both alright," and at her glance, he offers a wobbly thumbs-up, "then we need to get him, them, out of here."

 

Harrow-Ammit curls their lips back unevenly over cracked teeth and looses a low, animal hiss.

 

"Right," Steven says, having progressed from uncertain to downright dubious. "We're just toddling them off to the nearest paddy-wagon, then?"

 

"Definitely not," she says grimly. It still rubs her wrong, a little, to butt up against this gentle ignorance; but of course it is not Steven's fault he is unaware of their previous investigations, of exactly how deeply she and Marc dug into Harrow's pit of scorpions. The last thing they can afford is to place Ammit straight back into the hands of her own cult. "I'll think of something, but… one thing at a time. For all we know this place is still feeding them power somehow." She flexes her own fingers consideringly, assessing the foreign strength still humming inside, then curls them into fists. "Try to find me something to bind their hands with-"

 

"Wait." It's her wrist that's caught before she can take more than a step towards Harrow, pulling her short. Marc's grip. Marc's voice. "You first."

 

"What?" she says, for a bemused second thinking he means her to bind herself - maybe hand herself in too, make a whole parade of them, the sinners three. (Four? Five? Steven had said something about vandalisation.)

 

He turns her arm over, and runs his thumb over the inside of her wrist - over the rim of the golden bracers, skin-warm and finely etched beyond the skill of the most masterful craftsman. The ceremonial armour of the gods. She is honestly still just relieved it's not a chainmail bikini.

 

Marc regards it with such a flat, shuttered expression that it might as well be. "Your deal. Whatever, whoever this is - you did it to bring Harrow down, right?"

 

"Taweret." Half for him, and half for any divine ears that might be listening, she adds, "It's just temporary, Marc."

 

"It's done. He's down. Get her to cut it off now, before anything else happens."

 

Under the light, the bracers might be shackles clamped around her arms - except they sit too comfortably for the metaphor to fit, the same way the weight of the khopeshes is snug against her back. She cannot see even a hint of scarring on the gold from bullets she knows struck sparks off the metal.

 

She glances, again, at Harrow.

 

"Layla."

 

"That's a god over there, Marc." She leans in closer, hisses it like she doesn't want to give Ammit the satisfaction of acknowledgement. "That's - I don't even know how many dead on Cairo streets tonight. I don't know what your definition of 'done' is, but this isn't it."

 

"No." There is fear in Marc's eyes; real and wriggling. Wigging out. "Layla, do not give her an excuse-"

 

She slaps her hand over his mouth, quick and impulsive, and knows it is startlement more than anything else which quietens him.

 

"My turn to play this card," she says, forcing the calm she does not feel. "We are not doing this right now. Okay? This isn't about you and Khonshu, it's about the human ushabti who just tried to destroy my home and whether or not I have to carry him out of here by myself. Which I can, for the record."

 

He folds his hand over hers - but doesn't yank it down as she half-expects. Marc folds his hand over hers and holds it there, for a long moment, just as his eyes hold hers, dark and unhappy. She is very aware, suddenly, of the warm press of his lips against her palm.

 

His eyes close. The lips move, mouthing a single word against her skin. Okay.

 

She draws in a steadying breath, raises her eyebrows. "Okay?"

 

He lowers her hand then - pulls away from the curl of her fingers, lifts his chin, sets his shoulders back, expanding the distance between them. "Let's get it done."

 

--

 

The second attempt doesn't bear repeating.

 

Under the suit Marc is still wearing the clothes he'd died in, cloudy pink staining the white fabric like the fading dawn.

 

Under hers, Layla is wearing the guise she'd cobbled together for the sole purpose of getting close enough to Arthur Harrow to sink her belt-knife into his back as many times as she could before his mob descended.

 

There is an argument they haven't finished about lost months and ignored calls, lone wolf shit and secrets. There is an argument they've barely started, raw and red hot as a third degree burn, about what happened at her father's digsite on the night of a watchful moon. And in the middle of it all, there is Steven.

 

(Steven, and a kiss, and a gaping void represented by five minutes of silent, brutal carnage they cannot put a name to. The argument they're not even sure how to begin.)

 

It's a shitfight, plain and simple. A minefield they are crossing with magnetised shoes. Not 24 hours after the chamber they are wearily discussing dinner, then suddenly it's about Taweret, and then it's about everything else, and it's too much, too soon, too raw.

 

She says at least three things she doesn't mean and four she unfortunately does. He slips back and forth, unbalancing her with the new rhythm he has built with Steven, still unsure themselves in their execution of it. It frustrates her, and she hates the frustration, hates Marc for putting her in a position to feel any of it in the first place.

 

It is because of Steven, though, that they pull up before some final, irreparable fireball crash. Time-out! Marc. Layla. Please?

 

They find agreement: two weeks. Phone calls permitted if it's an emergency - otherwise, it's hands off and space allowed. Two weeks to get heads together, deal with the external urgencies without all our shit, as Marc would say, sticking like a thorn in every sensitive place. One final deferral of us for the greater good.

 

It's reasonable. It might even be mature, which would be something of a first for them. Certainly two meditative weeks is better than two frantic months spent as a pendulum swinging endlessly between fear, rage, and a despair so potent it seemed synonymous with a simple, inescapable truth.

 

This is broken, she had thought, still blissfully unaware that the next day she would find divorce papers in her mailbox. We're broken and I don't think he even wants to try and fix us.

 

The two weeks are restful, in contrast, if not altogether in practice. Full of haggling and bartering and the plucking of strings instead, her true talents at the fore: with the Cairo contacts that she trusts, with a facility in New York willing to ask fewer questions than they should, and with an enthusiastic goddess apparently possessed by the spirit of her great-aunts.

 

(Not the easiest negotiation that one, not least because of the effort involved in holding both sides of it in a hotel bathroom, feeling her throat and lungs vise up around someone else's words, the muscles in her face contort painfully around unfamiliar expressions. As much as godly apparitions had haunted Marc, they'd seemed the better option in that moment.

 

"Oh, I can't," she'd said apologetically to herself in the mirror, drooping with a woebegone expression Layla had never known her face was capable of making. It was no easier to picture it on a giant hippopotamus. "I really, really can't. I'd love to pop up for a proper chat, but we're rather short-staffed at the moment, you see. And, well, we're not altogether as clever as you humans in some ways. No autopilot on this vessel!"

 

"Right," Layla had wheezed once she had that luxury again, death grip on the sink keeping her upright. "No email either, then."

 

"Er, afraid not. Any body less than 12 hours old should do the trick though, haha! Say, now there's an idea - I know pyramids have gone a bit out of fashion, but I've had some very snazzy dressers through, so someone's got to be out there doing right by the dead. And it's good for an Avatar to have a day job, you know, helps keep you lot grounded. Ooh, I could give you so many tips!"

 

"Okay," she'd muttered, rubbing her temples. "Next condition: I do not have to work in a mortuary.")

 

She tests the limits of her powers - Taweret makes no demands of vengeance, but she doesn't seem to mind either when Layla intervenes in an untimely death. And they are both in firm agreement that the further Ammit's followers are scattered, the better.

 

High on the warm night winds, she wonders, guiltily, how Marc could have ever surrendered flight.

 

--

 

She doesn't realise something of the despair has stayed with her until she steps off a plane at London International and sees them - sees Steven, tousled curls and bright buttoned shirt, bouncing on his heels by the gate, gaze flitting about with distracted interest in the passing people, the flashing advertisements, the caterpillar trails of baggage carts out the window.

 

Then he sees her in return, and his face lights up like a burst of sunlight, crisping the shadows in her heart.

 

The hug is warm and crushing, startling a laugh out of her. He still smells like Marc underneath, but there's coconut from some body wash or shampoo, pleasantly sweet in her nose, and cheap laundry powder from his clothes that speaks to a careless splashing of it in the load rather than Marc's meticulous allotments.

 

"Oh, wow! It's so good to see you. Was the flight alright? We've seen you on the news, I'm sure that was you - all that nonsense at the palace in Helwan, right? God. You must be exhausted. I've never been good at sleeping through flights - I mean, sometimes that was on purpose, you know, didn't want to wake up and find myself jumping out the airlock… Bugger, listen to me go on. Did you check anything in? I'll get us a trolley."

 

"Hello, Steven," she laughs, helpless. "It's good to see you too."

 

He beams at her. When he leans in close, her traitorous heart skips a beat; but it's just his voice in her ear, whispering, "Marc says hi as well, but we're trying not to advertise the old flip-flop in public, you know?" He moves back, though his hand stays at her elbow, a crack in the gentlemanly restraint, the same way his eyes keep flicking to her lips. "Might have had a bit of a gamble about who got to do the honours."

 

"And you won, did you." She's not entirely sure she's flattered, but a crooked smile demands occupancy all the same. "A coin toss?"

 

He grins, crinkly-eyed and cheeky. "Thumb war, actually."

 

He's easy conversation all the way back to the flat - not the one she'd seen so briefly, packed to the rafters with a personal library, but what they could find after a hasty exodus, dropping their piece of shared history like a lizard's tail in the pursuit of safer anonymity. Steven shrugs pragmatically about it, but she can see the shadow of real sorrow behind the gesture, the flow of chatter faltering at last. He has so much lost history already.

 

"No bloody lift," he murmurs, peering resignedly up the stairs. "But bring on the cardio, I suppose, we might actually need it now. Not exactly on the same exercise regime."

 

She tries a smile, hefting the pack slung over her shoulder. Habit, as much as anything; she was living out of a single bag by the time she was ten. "Good thing I didn't bring that much baggage, then."

 

Steven catches her eye, and maybe it's just her imagination that inserts a rueful glint.

 

--

 

There would be a certain justice in hiding the truth. In letting Marc find out about her continuing status as an Avatar the same way she found out about his: some life or death situation, backs to the wall, wild disbelief battling with relief and awe and the first stinging cut of betrayal.

 

But even if it weren't in the news (and she hadn't heard about that, is unsure whether she's surprised or a little alarmed to think of her silhouette showing on international channels - New Hero in Egypt?) it would somewhat undermine her high ground to start old patterns all over again.

 

Besides: Harrow has boot marks on the side of his face that say something for her ability to make an entrance.

 

The new flat is cramped, borderline claustrophobic - temporary, she has been assured. If she stretches too far she risks bumping a tower of books that may start a domino fall across the room. Their plates stack precariously in the tiny sink, the tart smell of tabbouleh sticking in the air.

 

Marc sits on the bed, and she sits on the chair, and she tells him. No bullshit, to be given or received.

 

"On the long, long list of calls that aren't yours to make, Marc? This is pretty high up there."

 

"I know," he says, so they're already off to a better start than attempt number two. Layla lets herself relax, minutely. "I know."

 

The filter in the fish tank burbles quietly in the silence. It is such an innocuous, domestic sound that it makes her absurdly uneasy. Back then, it had been the first thing to crack her certainty in just who she'd been tracking, who she'd scraped off the street only to have any knowledge of her denied. A fumbling accent was one thing - but Marc, owning fish?

 

There are two in the tank now. Maybe he does.

 

Marc's nose flares on a short exhale, still mostly directed at his hands. She's starting to consider reminding him where her eyes are when he says, "I just need to say something."

 

"Oh, do you think so?" She manages a tight smile to blunt some of the edges on the words. "This is the talk, remember. We're talking. So." She spreads her hands. "Say what you need."

 

"You don't know what you're getting into." Before she can even draw sharp breath he's barrelling on: low and urgent in that rapid-fire pace she knows, that will always be him, clipped and strategic where Steven ambles around to investigate the verbal scenery. "It's not about you. It's not about you, it's about them, it's about what they are and what they do." Finally his eyes find hers, dark and forbidding. "They're not human, Layla. They don't think like humans, they don't feel what people feel. You'll think you're agreeing to one thing, and you just..." A hand jerks up, a choppy cut through the air. "You don't know."

 

The implication being that he does, of course. He'd never used the word tricked, or manipulated - no, it was always a deal. A two-way agreement. Only over time could she see what he wouldn't admit; he is hardly the first debtor in denial she has known.

 

She folds her arms, shrugs her shoulders. "All the more reason to make sure you complete the formalities." When he frowns, she clarifies, "I wrote the contract up myself. Four pages, double-sided."

 

He stares a second, then abruptly snorts; a softer sound than she expects. "Of course you did."

 

"And she's agreed. To all of it."

 

"Sure. Yeah. You're going to legally bind the hippo lady who floats around the underworld on a nightmare yacht."

 

"It's more of a barge, if you want to get into the technicalities," she says, and he pops his eyebrows, rounds his mouth around a sardonic ah.

 

She glares at him, irritation and unhelpful, intolerable affection both demanding front and centre.

 

"Is it really so hard?" she demands. "To believe that maybe I learned something from your situation? That I know how to cover my own back?"

 

"You're twisting my words. I told you, it's not about you-"

 

"No, Marc, it's not about you." She gestures as best she can in the space, hemmed in by clutter and resenting it. "Enta mabtesmaʿle, I swear to god - I don't know how else to put this for you. There is no 'be my fist of vengeance'. Or- or 'do what I say or I go after your loved ones next'." It slips out, but he doesn't correct her. "It's not Khonshu."

 

Marc shoves his hands back roughly through his hair. "Yeah. Yeah, that's the other thing, though, isn't it."

 

"What is?" she snaps.

 

"It would be better," he says, "if it was him."

 

It floors her. Rocks her physically, back in her seat, blinking. "You'd rather I had accepted Khonshu's offer." Bewildered frustration turns her voice sharp. "This is a hell of a mixed message, Marc."

 

"He fought with us." Old habits ghost over his face: the lowered voice, eyes shifting like he's searching for the spectre looming from the shadows to interject at any blaspheming of his name. "Like I gotta give the old buzzard that much credit, he fought with us. Where were the rest of the gods, huh, when Harrow was ripping through their Avatars?"

 

Where were you? she could say. Dead, of course, while she had been crawling past the Avatars' corpses, trying and failing to salvage even one so the choice would not fall to her. Dead and then alive again, while ancient masonry collapsed around her, and Harrow's fanatics hunted her through the tunnels.

 

But it has been two weeks. She can do better too.

 

She leans forward. In the small space, their knees bump together.

 

"Trust me," she says. "I'm not going to ask you to trust them. I'm not even asking that of myself. But for once I need you to just trust me." Emotion swells in her suddenly, aching and insistent. "God. That's all I've ever asked you for."

 

Trust - that she can hear a truth and bear it, be offered a choice and choose with love as much as pain. Every secret has come from him so unwillingly.

 

Marc looks up at her through his lashes, and it is a look so intense and miserable that the years fold back like paper, falling in a near-silent rustle past her ears: a shower of wedding invitations, forged border passes, grubby restaurant napkins, fragile parchment from darkest tombs. A Desbordes-Valmore first edition, his handwriting (a simple happy anniversary baby - no poet, Marc Spector) pressed so deeply into the first page she could feel the indents on the next ten. A filing for divorce, crisp and unmarked.

 

Her throat is tight, lungs vising - but there is no goddess speaking through her. Only two weeks, two months, two years.

 

"Can you trust me?" she asks, as she should have then.

 

Something brushes against her thighs. She glances down, and finds his hands, palms up. It's an awkward position; not only for their forced closeness, more stifling than the boat, but for the conscious effort of the gesture.

 

Layla lays her hands overtop, and their fingers twine together in a gentler knot than he had wound on his own.

 

"You are," he says haltingly, "the most capable person I know. And I'm including myself in that statement."

 

"Good. You should. But, Marc - that's not an answer."

 

He's quiet a long moment. "Steven trusts you. Unreservedly."

 

Her lips twitch despite everything. "Steven is Steven."

 

"Steven is Steven because I'm not Steven." For a second his hands pull back against hers, and she has to quash the urge to either clutch after them or throw them off altogether before he has the chance to fold her up again, set her aside, disappear; but they still before she has to decide which urge is stronger. "You get that, right? Strain all of that out, the… trust and the honesty and everything-" He swallows a word at the end she fears might have been 'good'. There is a terrible resignation in his voice when he says, "I'm what's left."

 

Then his face twists, head jerking back and forth - she can't tell if it's rejection of some silent argument, or Steven himself pushing fervent denial to the fore.

 

"Steven has something to say about that, doesn't he," she asks softly.

 

Marc laughs unexpectedly: a single bark of sound, damp but genuine. "God. Wish he'd make up his mind. What was it - couple of weeks ago he's yelling at me, telling me off for abandoning my wife?" His thumb slides gently, settling on the pale crescent of skin at the base of one finger, bare now as it has been for months. "For ruining everything."

 

This day here which, to ruin all, she thinks, love set on fire. Says aloud, in French, "Never did we need others as that day we needed them."

 

There is a quick intake of breath. When she looks up, it is to meet wide, understanding eyes.

 

"It is a bit like that," Steven whispers, "isn't it?"

 

Her smile is weak, and he returns it with a shaky one of his own. It fades slowly, smoothly; no more the shuddering transition from one to the other, just a dozen subtle shifts that tighten the lines of the face in front of her.

 

"Fuck," Marc says, quiet and emphatic and tired.

 

She has no idea what that means. His gaze slides around the room; not Steven's quick, curious flicks, but the distant, restless roaming she knows too goddamn well. It slows to a stop on the window behind her head, the night sky beyond it washed out by London city lights.

 

Once it would have sent the wrong signal - been the wrong signal, even. She does not think she is mistaken in thinking that reflections have not often been a source of solace.

 

Now she waits. Watches his mouth move slightly, silently; the set of his shoulders sink.

 

"Yeah." It has all the heaviness of a boulder heaved off a labouring chest; all the finality of a contract signed. "Okay."

 

Her chin is wobbly. She presses her lips together until she can say with approximate calm, "Okay?"

 

In answer he lifts her hands in his own, leans forward on his elbows until he can press them to his lips. His eyes are squeezed shut over them, his thumbs hard against her pulse.

 

"Okay," he says roughly.

 

This isn't unbroken. It is maybe not even a good thing that it has taken three tries just to reach this point, to find even this most fragile acceptance. It is not as though he could stop her.

 

It is the first time in weeks, however, that those unsigned papers have felt like something other than an exhausting inevitability.

 

"Thank you," she says, sincere and heart-full.

 

Marc clears his throat, a scratchy, wet sound.

 

"She's no different, though," he says. His eyes glitter in the light. "Taweret. Just need you to know that. She'd have left Steven for dead in the sands."

 

She has heard the outlines of this story. A confusing jumble of pieces pulled from three perspectives, the briefest account Marc's own: Had to pass a trial or something. Wasn't great, but - hell, it worked, I guess.

 

He won't understand this yet - never seemed to get that he owed Khonshu nothing, that he had a balance of power all his own and she would have spent the rest of her life denying the damned bird if that's what it took to preserve it. The world belongs to the humans now; the power of an Avatar is theirs to give to the gods.

 

And if Layla needs to have another conversation with the Taweret on that front, so be it.

 

She bites her lip; traces the line of an old scar along the outer edge of his palm, a relic from before the gods had ever touched their lives.

 

"Tell me about it?" she asks.

 

This time, when he pulls away, she simply slackens her hold; he sits back, shoulders hunching high, shaking his head like he's trying to shake something loose. "Not tonight. It's… Not tonight." A pause, and Steven adds, apologetically, "It's a rather long story. Um. Happy ending, but?"

 

"That's alright," she says, and it's even mostly true. Steven quirks a small, tremulous smile. His fingers fidget a little on his knee, and when she reaches across with one hand he turns them over, touches the tips to her own. "But - someday soon, maybe?"

 

"Absolutely. Cross my heart and all that. He wants to, you know, it's just - sensitive stuff."

 

Layla draws a breath, and says, "How about we set a date?"

 

--

 

Steven rides with her to the airport, a warm weight against her side. She finds herself contemplating leaning that much further, her head on his shoulder, and thinks: this will have to be a 'someday soon' too.

 

It is Marc who says farewell last. This means the hug is not so all-consuming in its earnest affection, but also that her chin tucks neatly into the crook of his neck, and that his fingers brush briefly over the nape of her own.

 

"Try not to find any trouble," she says when she pulls back. "And make sure you keep your phone on."

 

There is a certain resigned dryness in the way Marc says, "We'll do our best." They have never lived in each other's pockets, even when they lived in the same flat, but she allows that this is still a change: for him to be the one left with both feet on the ground.

 

She snorts, pats a hand against his chest - for both of them. "Good."

 

The man at the gate calls her seat number, and she glances over her shoulder, past the bag on her back, and hesitates.

 

"Well," says Layla Abdallah El-Faouly, Avatar of Taweret, aide to the Mistress of the Horizon, and Marc Spector's wife pending the silent agreement to cast away a piece of paper. "I'll see you in two weeks."