Chapter Text
Part I
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In summary, it took less than five seconds to conclude that you’d never moved on.
Not really.
To accept that you’re still taken with him as the day you’d first met. It percolates, anticipation. You see him again in all his glory and ceremonial whites. It threatens every piece of your hard-won control. You’d perfected that over the decade—an unrelenting force that commanded you to put one foot before the other, day in, day out, one step, then another, amidst an apocalypse . . . and now you’re here. Entrenched within Peng’s regime, standing on the opposite side of a foyer from the first man you’d ever loved.
You’d thrown yourself into the business of career. Moved to a different town, city, country, every eighteen to twenty-four months. Filled your time with regiment, meaningless encounters, and every piece of structure that the United States Navy could provide, then carved the name Tom Chandler from your life. Eventually you’d discovered deep cover. Switched to DIA-HUMINT for this allowed you to hide. It had been enough to forget that you’d ever wanted more . . . for a while.
By the time Tom’s eyes meet yours, you conceive that you’re absorbed.
Subject again to the force of his magnetic gaze. The pull is almost stronger now than it had been. Maybe because you know what it’s like? To be loved by him, that feeling you’d never quite replicated since. He’d always been attractive. Disarmingly handsome. Charismatic. Kind. Powerful yet gentle in demeanor and delivery—the list of adjectives endless—but now? Now he possessed that which only experience could provide. He was distinguished, and it was exquisite. He’d grown into his features; strong jawline and high cheekbones, more pronounced now that he’d lost the buccal fat of youth. His hair was cut short enough to hide its curl, still thick, though grayer than it had been, but his eyes—how expressive they were—the dimple of his cheek when he so much as grinned . . . that hadn’t changed.
“Cooper?” he’d asked. “Your married name?”
Your heart lurched, pierced by a memory held secret for fourteen years.
“I’d make you my wife in a heartbeat if I thought it could make you stay.”
“Believe it or not, I found love after you.”
Not a lie.
It was different—quieter.
The kind that made sense and fulfilled a desire. In the aftermath, there’d been guilt. The knowledge that you’d deprived not only yourself but your late husband of something that ignites.
Left you breathless and raw.
“I was sorry to hear about Darien,” you offered.
Also not a lie.
All you’d desired was to see Tom Chandler achieve a life fulfilled as envisioned. Before, you’d been inadequate. Didn’t check the prerequisite boxes to be with a man of his ilk. Darien was kind, but most importantly, she was present. Content to be the stay-at-home wife; happy to raise the kids in the perfect house with a white picket fence and a two-car garage. That was never on the table for you. Knowing still hadn’t spared your heart, though. You never did figure out how to cut ties, physically, yes, and though you hadn’t actively interacted with Tom in a decade, there were moments. A fleeting check-in to see which part of the world he was destined for next. An anonymous session spent idling over picturesque photographs on Darien’s page, lost in the occasional throw of nostalgia. Rare. Only twice, after a morbid curiosity to know what exactly you’d forfeited had flared. Those feelings always came and went, and you’d learned to exist around them; owned your contentment.
In the end, you both got everything you’d wanted. Almost.
Maybe this was why.
It always had felt unfinished.
You don’t believe in fate, ascribing to reason and logic above all, and though largely un-in-touch with forms of spirituality, when you’d learned of the cure—and most crucially—the Naval Captain delivering it, somehow you’d known.
Before all the official reports, before everybody knew his name, you had been sure. The notion had spoken to you—there was a Russian, hunting a British scientist aboard an American ship—it told you to have faith.
Keep going.
Hold on.
You were right.
You wonder if he feels the same—if he still cherishes what you had the way you do him. From afar. A dusty corner in the heart. Part of you hopes that he does, but the more logical understands that he moved on a long time ago.
Fell in love with a woman he’d never leave, present circumstance included.
That could have been you.
Instead, you broke his heart and that’s why you’re sure that Tom hasn’t wondered about you much, if at all, over the decade.
* * *
“So you’ll be okay?”
You smiled. He’d insisted upon his man, Wolf, staying for a few extra days “just until I know it’s safe”. Asked you no less than three different ways if you had an exfil plan. Quizzed you on how Peng could have pulled this off in Vietnam, and told you that you were about to become collateral. He wasn’t comfortable leaving you here with no COMMS and no flight back to the States.
But Tom couldn’t order you to leave. If he could, he would have done that by now. No, you reported directly to Michener, and your work was only just beginning.
It was the way he’d stopped on the tarmac, leaving everything unsaid that made you wonder. How he’d regarded you, lips parted like he’d wanted to speak or do the opposite of what was to be done. You recognized that expression well. It was the face of competing loyalties: the conflict that Tom Chandler wore when his duty became incompatible with a personal need.
You’d seen it before. In Kosovo.
Unfinished.
You got the message loud and clear. “I’ll come back for you.”
To your surprise—come back—happened less than five minutes later.