Fic: Somewhere Beyond the Sea 1/1 (Cassie Holmes/Nick Grant, Push[film], PG-13)
Title: Somewhere Beyond the Sea
Story Status: Complete
Fandom: Push(film)
Disclaimer: I don't own Push.
Pairing: Cassie Holmes/Nick Grant
Rating: PG-13 for language
Spoilers: The whole film
Word Count: just shy of 3000 words
Authors Notes: Written for allyndra
Betas and helpers:Huge thanks to wolfshark
Summary: Cassie's visions tell her she has to leave the only person she has left or lose him forever.
Kira never comes to Coney Island but Nick waits. He and Cassie spend three weeks in Brooklyn, waiting. Nick makes them even though Cassie has shown him the picture she drew of Kira and Carver on a fancy plane headed somewhere warm.
She doesn’t argue though. She gets pretty good at skeeball and Nick makes about four hundred dollars cheating at the milk bottle game but that’s it. She never shows up and Nick’s humor gets a little bit more strained every day until he’s not making jokes at all.
“We should move on,” he says. He’s been saying it for weeks but this time there’s something in his eyes that tells Cassie he means it this time.
“Okay.”
They take everything they’ve touched and bring it with them or destroy it before grabbing a cab to JFK Airport. There’s no discussion about where they’re going. Cassie’s got enough cash for their plane tickets and somehow they manage to talk the woman running the kiosk into picking their destination for them.
The one-way trip out country just happens to be headed to Mexico. It’s not her first choice but that’s kind of the point. It’s not a choice another Watchers can follow.
“Do you speak Spanish?” Cassie asks him halfway through the flight. The in flight movie is Finding Nemo en Espanol and the talking fish just aren’t as funny with dubbed voices.
“Nope hablan Epsanolo.”
“Me, either. Great.”
“I’m a quick learner. And I hear the younger you are, the faster you pick up a language. It should take you about ten minutes, kid.”
She smacks him with her sketchbook and he makes her bag of peanuts explode. She throws them at him and it turns into a small battle until a stewardess asks them, first in Spanish, and then in English to please stop disturbing the other passengers. They choke on laughter as she huffs away on shoes that cannot be functional. Nick flicks a last peanut at her as she retreats, but misses and Cassie calls him a loser.
Somewhere over the South, she lifts up the armrest between them to rest against him. He lifts his arm obligingly so that she can put her head on his chest. His arm is a weight around her shoulder and she’s asleep so fast it shocks her.
In her sleep, she sees the world underwater. She’s walking through white hallways that have to be Division base and sees Kira. She’s wearing a cream colored suit that’s floating in the current and she’s talking to Carver about them, about what kind of man Nick is and what he will do for those he cares about. “The girl’s the key,” she tells him before she washes away.
A wave crashes and she is looking at herself holding a dying Nick in her arms, all laid out like a photograph - dry as a bone and crystal clear. Coughing up blood and touching her face with a trembling hand. “You’re safe.” He chokes out. Blood bubbles out on his tongue as he speaks.
“Nick,” she hears herself sob. “Nick, please. Please don’t die. You said we’d be okay. I can’t do this alone. I can’t do this without you, Nick, please!”
Nick smiles at her with lips that are so red and liquid. His bruised and bleeding fingers try to wipe the tears off her cheeks before they fall limp to the ground. She watches herself scream at the sky and cry, so hard that she’s shaking, so hard that she has to let go of Nick’s body to puke.
She’s crying herself as the tide drags her forward. She’s standing in front of her mother, sitting in a room on a hospital bed. She rolls a small bead between her fingers, and then opens her arms to Cassie. She crawls into her mother’s lap like she used to when she was a little girl and pushes her head into her mother’s hand, stroking her hair.
“I know you’re tired. But you need to run, baby girl.”
Cassie is tired. She’s so tired of running. She’s been on the run since before she could walk. But she just sighs and leans presses her forehead into her dream-mother’s shoulder.“Where?”
“Away from him. He’s not strong enough to protect himself yet.”
“I’m not going to hurt him. I’d never hurt him.”
“I know, baby. But they’re going to use you against him. If you want him to live, you need to leave him behind.”
“He’ll come looking for me,” she says. She believes that. He waited almost a month for Kira to come back to him. He would search for her.
“Then make sure he doesn’t find you. He’ll stumble into you when you’re both ready. If you care for him, you need to get away as soon as you can.”
“I don’t want to.”
“I don’t want you to either, baby, but you want him to be alive more than you don’t want to be lonely.” Her mother kisses her forehead. “You should wake up now. You only have a few hours left with him.”
Cassie comes awake with a gasp. Her face is soaked with tears and Nick is looking at her with warm eyes.
“Are you okay?”
The pilot had long ago turned off the fasten seatbelts sign so there’s nothing stopping her from clinging to him. It’s like she was in her vision with her mother, feeling safe in his lap and against his body. She wraps her arms tight around his neck and god, she feels so stupid but she cant stop crying. She’ll miss him as much as she misses her mom.
His hands rub up and down her back. They stroke her hair. They squeeze her tight. He’s gotten so much better at hugging since the first time he held her. It has been so long since anyone has held her like this and the last thing she wants is to leave.
“Cassie, come on, talk to me. Are you all right?”
“Nightmare,” she mumbles and it’s true. It was a nightmare. It just wasn’t one from her imagination.
“It’s okay. I’ve got you. You’re gonna be okay.”
It sounds too much like what she heard in her vision and she knows she has to leave. So she pulls back and gives him a watery smile. His returning smile is broad and lights up his whole face and she wishes she were a better artist. She wants to remember this better than she can capture it.
“We’re going to be okay this time,” he promises and she nods. Yes they are.
She tells him she’s got to go to the bathroom after they get their bags at baggage claim in Mexico City. He says he’s gonna grab something to drink that won’t give him Montezuma’s Revenge and she smiles at him and laughs before darting off in the general direction of the bathroom.
But she goes left instead of right and ducks out of the automatic doors while he’s buying a bottle of water from a vending machine. She doesn’t think, doesn’t make a decision, just gets on the first bus that stops in front of the airport and lets it take her south to the depot. One more bus and she’s heading south out of the city and she knows that by that time he realizes she’s gone. Her mother had a Shadow friend who should still be in Panama and by the time Cassie reaches her, she’ll be too far gone for Nick to catch up.
~*~*~
He spent two years thinking she was captured. He was positive she was another Kira - that someone had taken her from him and that if he just kept looking, he could find her again. He picks fights he isn’t ready for. He makes decisions Watchers can follow as an invitation. He’s reckless and angry.
And then Kira appears in his apartment in Prague, dressed in a suit of grey, sunglasses on. She’s gorgeous. Icy and strangely stunning. He has never been more angry at anyone in his whole life - including Carver.
“What did you do to her? What the fuck do you think she’s going to give you?”
“Stop it, Nick,” she snaps as he lifts his hand to Move her. “Don’t embarrass yourself or I’ll Push you.”
He grits his teeth and points at her with a shaking finger. “You crossed the line when you took her, Kira.”
“I didn’t do anything. We,” she puts her hand on her chest, “didn’t do anything. Your little oracle isn’t with us, Nick. And it’s been cute, really. You’ve been a great training exercise for a lot of our up and coming agents. But now you have to stop harassing my people or we’ll take you in. Hong Kong is the only reason we haven’t yet and you’re pushing our patience.”
“What do you mean you don’t have her?”
She tilts her head to the side, studying him. Her thick eyebrows knit together as she did so. “I think you were smarter when we were together.”
It’s good news but Nick feels like he’d been punched in the gut. Thinking the Division had her, he’s had somewhere to look. But if she’s not there, then where the fuck did she disappear to?
“Then where is she?”
“We have no idea,” Kira says lightly. “Maybe she’s down the street at the Golden Lotus having dim sum, maybe she’s dead in a ditch. The Sniffers have nothing and the Watchers have more important things to focus on. Her mother might know but she’s not talking and we’re not foolish enough to try and get that out of her. We’re animals under it all, Nick, and the amount of interrogating it would take to break the motherly instinct would make her useless to us.”
He folds his arms tightly over his chest. He’s not hugging himself, he tells himself. No, he’s stopping himself from strangling her with his bare fucking hands. “And you just thought you’d let me know?”
“For old time’s sake,” Kira says with a sad smile. “I’m glad to see that you learned to keep looking.”
After Kira disappears there’s another couple years there where he asks everyone, every Sniffer, Watcher, Stitch, and Shadow he meets on six continents, about her. He feels like a character out of a noir film, obsessed and desperate. But one winter, sitting in a tavern in Germany, he comes to the heavy and ugly conclusion that she’s dead.
He gets drunk on thick German beer and falls asleep under the table. He wakes up with tears on her face and nothing to hope for anymore. Because if she’s dead, if she’s been dead since Mexico City, then the last five years have been a pointless waste. He’s spent countless hours searching that he could have spent on something more productive - like vengeance.
It’s not like he’s the only person to ever lose someone in this war. He just doesn’t think he should have had to lose fucking everyone. It makes him angry. And then he has to laugh at himself because maybe this is what being Batman feels like.
So he takes out a page out of the DC handbook and starts practicing. His father had power- epic, scary power. And for the first time Nick is certain that he does too, somewhere. The decision that he’s going to hone his Moving is one of the few Watchable choices he’s made since Prague.
He spends eight months in Tibet in a monastery Emily told him about. It’s a good starting place but the monks are particular about their property and there’s too much risk for any active practice. So as soon as he gets somewhere with working phone lines, he calls another Mover he knows in Mossad and moves on to Israel.
The institutionalized military service has changed the situation with psychics and they have training centers within the army. It’s just another assignment in the IDF. You do your time and you get on with your life - less a trap and more an obligation, granted one riddled with secrecy and Shadowing. Gilad is career military and once he vouches for Nick, the Army grudgingly agrees to let him help Nick train.
The other reason he stops there is because there’s a great beach in Tel Aviv and he can practice on rocks in the Negev without much backlash. It takes about a year but after he blows a sixty foot hole in the side of a mountain about five kilometers from David Ben-Gurion’s grave, he counts himself ready and gives himself a break.
Sunset on a Friday, he sits on a rock on at the beach, moving the sand back and forth around the base on an empty beach. He keeps his eyes locked on the blue Mediterranean slide back and forth against the shore. It’s hypnotic and soothing and for the first time in an incredibly long time, he doesn’t have to think.
“It’s beautiful,” a voice says and no. No, no, no, he’s not going to turn and look at her because he’s hallucinating. Or worse, he’s somehow being Pushed. Because it can’t be her and this can’t be real. She’s been dead for five fucking years and he’s not going to let himself be Pushed now.
“Yeah,” he says with a raw throat. “It’s not bad.”
“I missed you, you know.”
He keeps his eyes locked on the slowly sinking sun. “You have no idea.”
A hand lands on shoulder and Nick squeezes his eyes shut. Her hands are bigger, longer. Her fingers are slender but strong pressed against him. This has to be a Push. He wants to know if its Kira or Carver and what they could possibly hope to gain by making him think that Cassie-
“I’m sorry, Nick.” She says. “I am so sorry. I wouldn’t have left if I didn’t have to.”
“I looked for you.”
“I knew you would.”
“I couldn’t find you.”
“That was kind of the point.”
He turns with his eyes still shut against any further Pushing and slides off his rock. He falls blind and hits the sand with his knees. It’s soft and doesn’t hurt but she moves to catch him. It brings her body against him and he can’t seem to stop himself from wrapping his arms around her waist. He presses his face into her stomach and doesn’t care if this is a Push. It’s better than the reality he’s been living with.
“Tell me you’re real.” He murmurs as her hands cradle the back of his skull. “I need you to be real.”
“I’m real. Open your eyes. It’s okay.”
He pulls back from her and opens his eyes. Her hair is shorter, brown with streaks of blue, and she’s tall. A woman. Her smile is the same, and her eyes, but the face has changed - thinned and lengthened. She has breasts and her hips curve and she’s not the little girl he cared for so deeply. She’s the woman he’s missed for half a decade.
“Why?” It’s a broken plea but it’s all he’s wanted to know since the moment she was gone.
“You were going to die. I had to protect you.”
“We protect each other, Cassie.”
“That was the problem.” She sighs “You wouldn’t have lived through one where we were together before now and in most of them I ended up in a cage. The only way for us to protect each other was for me to leave.”
“Who asked you to do that?”he bites out.
“Somebody had to look out for you,” she says again. She strokes a hand down his back. Once, he was the one comforting her. Things were always changing all right.
He rises off the sand and god, she’s still small. Taller than before, but only coming up to his chin. He takes her face in his hands and stares at her, at those blue eyes that have been haunting him since the day he lost her.
“You should have told me.”
“And if I had - do you think you’d have been able to let me go?”
No. He wouldn’t have. She was and had been the only thing he had. He’d have clung to her until his hands were bleeding.
“I had to go, Nick.” She reaches up and strokes his cheek with the back of her hand. Her fingernails are painted three different colors and he can’t help but lean into the touch. “I’m so sorry. I know what you’ve been through and I’m sorry.”
“I thought-“
“I know. But I’m not. I’m here.” She covers his hand with her own and squeezes. “I’m here now. And I’m okay. I’ve been okay. I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you but I’m alright. The future’s finally changed enough and we’ve got a real shot of being alright now, Nick.”
“Don’t you dare fucking disappear on me again,” Nick breathes and then he’s kissing her. It isn’t a decision, it just happens. There’s nothing else he can do, no other way he can show her how often he’s thought of her, how long he’s looked for her, how hard it’s been to live without her.
She grabs at his back with both her hands and opens for him, sighing into the kiss as the sky turns orange and red. They break apart and he kisses her forehead, her eyelids, her cheeks, her nose, her neck and her lips because she’s here she’s right here.
“Oh. Of course. I saw the sea,” she whispers in his ear as she looks over his shoulder at the water. He kisses the side of her neck, winds his arms around her waist and doesn’t care what she means. But maybe, he’ll ask her later. He hasn’t decided yet.
Story Status: Complete
Fandom: Push(film)
Disclaimer: I don't own Push.
Pairing: Cassie Holmes/Nick Grant
Rating: PG-13 for language
Spoilers: The whole film
Word Count: just shy of 3000 words
Authors Notes: Written for allyndra
Betas and helpers:Huge thanks to wolfshark
Summary: Cassie's visions tell her she has to leave the only person she has left or lose him forever.
Kira never comes to Coney Island but Nick waits. He and Cassie spend three weeks in Brooklyn, waiting. Nick makes them even though Cassie has shown him the picture she drew of Kira and Carver on a fancy plane headed somewhere warm.
She doesn’t argue though. She gets pretty good at skeeball and Nick makes about four hundred dollars cheating at the milk bottle game but that’s it. She never shows up and Nick’s humor gets a little bit more strained every day until he’s not making jokes at all.
“We should move on,” he says. He’s been saying it for weeks but this time there’s something in his eyes that tells Cassie he means it this time.
“Okay.”
They take everything they’ve touched and bring it with them or destroy it before grabbing a cab to JFK Airport. There’s no discussion about where they’re going. Cassie’s got enough cash for their plane tickets and somehow they manage to talk the woman running the kiosk into picking their destination for them.
The one-way trip out country just happens to be headed to Mexico. It’s not her first choice but that’s kind of the point. It’s not a choice another Watchers can follow.
“Do you speak Spanish?” Cassie asks him halfway through the flight. The in flight movie is Finding Nemo en Espanol and the talking fish just aren’t as funny with dubbed voices.
“Nope hablan Epsanolo.”
“Me, either. Great.”
“I’m a quick learner. And I hear the younger you are, the faster you pick up a language. It should take you about ten minutes, kid.”
She smacks him with her sketchbook and he makes her bag of peanuts explode. She throws them at him and it turns into a small battle until a stewardess asks them, first in Spanish, and then in English to please stop disturbing the other passengers. They choke on laughter as she huffs away on shoes that cannot be functional. Nick flicks a last peanut at her as she retreats, but misses and Cassie calls him a loser.
Somewhere over the South, she lifts up the armrest between them to rest against him. He lifts his arm obligingly so that she can put her head on his chest. His arm is a weight around her shoulder and she’s asleep so fast it shocks her.
In her sleep, she sees the world underwater. She’s walking through white hallways that have to be Division base and sees Kira. She’s wearing a cream colored suit that’s floating in the current and she’s talking to Carver about them, about what kind of man Nick is and what he will do for those he cares about. “The girl’s the key,” she tells him before she washes away.
A wave crashes and she is looking at herself holding a dying Nick in her arms, all laid out like a photograph - dry as a bone and crystal clear. Coughing up blood and touching her face with a trembling hand. “You’re safe.” He chokes out. Blood bubbles out on his tongue as he speaks.
“Nick,” she hears herself sob. “Nick, please. Please don’t die. You said we’d be okay. I can’t do this alone. I can’t do this without you, Nick, please!”
Nick smiles at her with lips that are so red and liquid. His bruised and bleeding fingers try to wipe the tears off her cheeks before they fall limp to the ground. She watches herself scream at the sky and cry, so hard that she’s shaking, so hard that she has to let go of Nick’s body to puke.
She’s crying herself as the tide drags her forward. She’s standing in front of her mother, sitting in a room on a hospital bed. She rolls a small bead between her fingers, and then opens her arms to Cassie. She crawls into her mother’s lap like she used to when she was a little girl and pushes her head into her mother’s hand, stroking her hair.
“I know you’re tired. But you need to run, baby girl.”
Cassie is tired. She’s so tired of running. She’s been on the run since before she could walk. But she just sighs and leans presses her forehead into her dream-mother’s shoulder.“Where?”
“Away from him. He’s not strong enough to protect himself yet.”
“I’m not going to hurt him. I’d never hurt him.”
“I know, baby. But they’re going to use you against him. If you want him to live, you need to leave him behind.”
“He’ll come looking for me,” she says. She believes that. He waited almost a month for Kira to come back to him. He would search for her.
“Then make sure he doesn’t find you. He’ll stumble into you when you’re both ready. If you care for him, you need to get away as soon as you can.”
“I don’t want to.”
“I don’t want you to either, baby, but you want him to be alive more than you don’t want to be lonely.” Her mother kisses her forehead. “You should wake up now. You only have a few hours left with him.”
Cassie comes awake with a gasp. Her face is soaked with tears and Nick is looking at her with warm eyes.
“Are you okay?”
The pilot had long ago turned off the fasten seatbelts sign so there’s nothing stopping her from clinging to him. It’s like she was in her vision with her mother, feeling safe in his lap and against his body. She wraps her arms tight around his neck and god, she feels so stupid but she cant stop crying. She’ll miss him as much as she misses her mom.
His hands rub up and down her back. They stroke her hair. They squeeze her tight. He’s gotten so much better at hugging since the first time he held her. It has been so long since anyone has held her like this and the last thing she wants is to leave.
“Cassie, come on, talk to me. Are you all right?”
“Nightmare,” she mumbles and it’s true. It was a nightmare. It just wasn’t one from her imagination.
“It’s okay. I’ve got you. You’re gonna be okay.”
It sounds too much like what she heard in her vision and she knows she has to leave. So she pulls back and gives him a watery smile. His returning smile is broad and lights up his whole face and she wishes she were a better artist. She wants to remember this better than she can capture it.
“We’re going to be okay this time,” he promises and she nods. Yes they are.
She tells him she’s got to go to the bathroom after they get their bags at baggage claim in Mexico City. He says he’s gonna grab something to drink that won’t give him Montezuma’s Revenge and she smiles at him and laughs before darting off in the general direction of the bathroom.
But she goes left instead of right and ducks out of the automatic doors while he’s buying a bottle of water from a vending machine. She doesn’t think, doesn’t make a decision, just gets on the first bus that stops in front of the airport and lets it take her south to the depot. One more bus and she’s heading south out of the city and she knows that by that time he realizes she’s gone. Her mother had a Shadow friend who should still be in Panama and by the time Cassie reaches her, she’ll be too far gone for Nick to catch up.
~*~*~
He spent two years thinking she was captured. He was positive she was another Kira - that someone had taken her from him and that if he just kept looking, he could find her again. He picks fights he isn’t ready for. He makes decisions Watchers can follow as an invitation. He’s reckless and angry.
And then Kira appears in his apartment in Prague, dressed in a suit of grey, sunglasses on. She’s gorgeous. Icy and strangely stunning. He has never been more angry at anyone in his whole life - including Carver.
“What did you do to her? What the fuck do you think she’s going to give you?”
“Stop it, Nick,” she snaps as he lifts his hand to Move her. “Don’t embarrass yourself or I’ll Push you.”
He grits his teeth and points at her with a shaking finger. “You crossed the line when you took her, Kira.”
“I didn’t do anything. We,” she puts her hand on her chest, “didn’t do anything. Your little oracle isn’t with us, Nick. And it’s been cute, really. You’ve been a great training exercise for a lot of our up and coming agents. But now you have to stop harassing my people or we’ll take you in. Hong Kong is the only reason we haven’t yet and you’re pushing our patience.”
“What do you mean you don’t have her?”
She tilts her head to the side, studying him. Her thick eyebrows knit together as she did so. “I think you were smarter when we were together.”
It’s good news but Nick feels like he’d been punched in the gut. Thinking the Division had her, he’s had somewhere to look. But if she’s not there, then where the fuck did she disappear to?
“Then where is she?”
“We have no idea,” Kira says lightly. “Maybe she’s down the street at the Golden Lotus having dim sum, maybe she’s dead in a ditch. The Sniffers have nothing and the Watchers have more important things to focus on. Her mother might know but she’s not talking and we’re not foolish enough to try and get that out of her. We’re animals under it all, Nick, and the amount of interrogating it would take to break the motherly instinct would make her useless to us.”
He folds his arms tightly over his chest. He’s not hugging himself, he tells himself. No, he’s stopping himself from strangling her with his bare fucking hands. “And you just thought you’d let me know?”
“For old time’s sake,” Kira says with a sad smile. “I’m glad to see that you learned to keep looking.”
After Kira disappears there’s another couple years there where he asks everyone, every Sniffer, Watcher, Stitch, and Shadow he meets on six continents, about her. He feels like a character out of a noir film, obsessed and desperate. But one winter, sitting in a tavern in Germany, he comes to the heavy and ugly conclusion that she’s dead.
He gets drunk on thick German beer and falls asleep under the table. He wakes up with tears on her face and nothing to hope for anymore. Because if she’s dead, if she’s been dead since Mexico City, then the last five years have been a pointless waste. He’s spent countless hours searching that he could have spent on something more productive - like vengeance.
It’s not like he’s the only person to ever lose someone in this war. He just doesn’t think he should have had to lose fucking everyone. It makes him angry. And then he has to laugh at himself because maybe this is what being Batman feels like.
So he takes out a page out of the DC handbook and starts practicing. His father had power- epic, scary power. And for the first time Nick is certain that he does too, somewhere. The decision that he’s going to hone his Moving is one of the few Watchable choices he’s made since Prague.
He spends eight months in Tibet in a monastery Emily told him about. It’s a good starting place but the monks are particular about their property and there’s too much risk for any active practice. So as soon as he gets somewhere with working phone lines, he calls another Mover he knows in Mossad and moves on to Israel.
The institutionalized military service has changed the situation with psychics and they have training centers within the army. It’s just another assignment in the IDF. You do your time and you get on with your life - less a trap and more an obligation, granted one riddled with secrecy and Shadowing. Gilad is career military and once he vouches for Nick, the Army grudgingly agrees to let him help Nick train.
The other reason he stops there is because there’s a great beach in Tel Aviv and he can practice on rocks in the Negev without much backlash. It takes about a year but after he blows a sixty foot hole in the side of a mountain about five kilometers from David Ben-Gurion’s grave, he counts himself ready and gives himself a break.
Sunset on a Friday, he sits on a rock on at the beach, moving the sand back and forth around the base on an empty beach. He keeps his eyes locked on the blue Mediterranean slide back and forth against the shore. It’s hypnotic and soothing and for the first time in an incredibly long time, he doesn’t have to think.
“It’s beautiful,” a voice says and no. No, no, no, he’s not going to turn and look at her because he’s hallucinating. Or worse, he’s somehow being Pushed. Because it can’t be her and this can’t be real. She’s been dead for five fucking years and he’s not going to let himself be Pushed now.
“Yeah,” he says with a raw throat. “It’s not bad.”
“I missed you, you know.”
He keeps his eyes locked on the slowly sinking sun. “You have no idea.”
A hand lands on shoulder and Nick squeezes his eyes shut. Her hands are bigger, longer. Her fingers are slender but strong pressed against him. This has to be a Push. He wants to know if its Kira or Carver and what they could possibly hope to gain by making him think that Cassie-
“I’m sorry, Nick.” She says. “I am so sorry. I wouldn’t have left if I didn’t have to.”
“I looked for you.”
“I knew you would.”
“I couldn’t find you.”
“That was kind of the point.”
He turns with his eyes still shut against any further Pushing and slides off his rock. He falls blind and hits the sand with his knees. It’s soft and doesn’t hurt but she moves to catch him. It brings her body against him and he can’t seem to stop himself from wrapping his arms around her waist. He presses his face into her stomach and doesn’t care if this is a Push. It’s better than the reality he’s been living with.
“Tell me you’re real.” He murmurs as her hands cradle the back of his skull. “I need you to be real.”
“I’m real. Open your eyes. It’s okay.”
He pulls back from her and opens his eyes. Her hair is shorter, brown with streaks of blue, and she’s tall. A woman. Her smile is the same, and her eyes, but the face has changed - thinned and lengthened. She has breasts and her hips curve and she’s not the little girl he cared for so deeply. She’s the woman he’s missed for half a decade.
“Why?” It’s a broken plea but it’s all he’s wanted to know since the moment she was gone.
“You were going to die. I had to protect you.”
“We protect each other, Cassie.”
“That was the problem.” She sighs “You wouldn’t have lived through one where we were together before now and in most of them I ended up in a cage. The only way for us to protect each other was for me to leave.”
“Who asked you to do that?”he bites out.
“Somebody had to look out for you,” she says again. She strokes a hand down his back. Once, he was the one comforting her. Things were always changing all right.
He rises off the sand and god, she’s still small. Taller than before, but only coming up to his chin. He takes her face in his hands and stares at her, at those blue eyes that have been haunting him since the day he lost her.
“You should have told me.”
“And if I had - do you think you’d have been able to let me go?”
No. He wouldn’t have. She was and had been the only thing he had. He’d have clung to her until his hands were bleeding.
“I had to go, Nick.” She reaches up and strokes his cheek with the back of her hand. Her fingernails are painted three different colors and he can’t help but lean into the touch. “I’m so sorry. I know what you’ve been through and I’m sorry.”
“I thought-“
“I know. But I’m not. I’m here.” She covers his hand with her own and squeezes. “I’m here now. And I’m okay. I’ve been okay. I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you but I’m alright. The future’s finally changed enough and we’ve got a real shot of being alright now, Nick.”
“Don’t you dare fucking disappear on me again,” Nick breathes and then he’s kissing her. It isn’t a decision, it just happens. There’s nothing else he can do, no other way he can show her how often he’s thought of her, how long he’s looked for her, how hard it’s been to live without her.
She grabs at his back with both her hands and opens for him, sighing into the kiss as the sky turns orange and red. They break apart and he kisses her forehead, her eyelids, her cheeks, her nose, her neck and her lips because she’s here she’s right here.
“Oh. Of course. I saw the sea,” she whispers in his ear as she looks over his shoulder at the water. He kisses the side of her neck, winds his arms around her waist and doesn’t care what she means. But maybe, he’ll ask her later. He hasn’t decided yet.