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Natia was sitting in the living room of the apartment she shared with Tanis when she heard it.
Screaming.
The screaming, of course, was mental, because her fiancee was asleep, and every so often Natia learned more about the war than she ever wanted to from Tanis’ nightmares (though they were really just memories).
Everyone on the battlefield was screaming-
Tanis was running through the war zone, the no-man’s land that seemed so easy to claim when they landed-
Abandoned house-
Blockade, safety, refuge-
An alien.
Alien, enemy.
Tanis was about to pull the trigger, and someone else did it for her.
A body too small to be a soldier's hit the ground, and Tanis’ gun followed it seconds later.
Oh my god- Oh my god, that was a child-
Tears, pain, choking on the weight of what had happened, what she’d done she couldn't protect couldn't save them -
Tanis woke up in tears. Natia could actually hear her crying.
This wasn’t abnormal for the rare memory-turned-nightmare nights. This particular one-
She never told me that.
Tanis never told me that, and she told me everything about her time in the wars-
Well. Evidently not.
Sometimes, this happened. Natia learned something she didn’t want to know, and it took some getting over, and until then she avoided whoever it was she’d learned something about.
She’d never told anyone why. She’d never needed to.
Natia put her book down, grabbed her phone, and walked out of the apartment.
When Tanis had composed herself enough to talk to Natia without having a goddamm panic attack- well, without worsening this one- Natia wasn’t there.
The space ambassador wandered the apartment, looking for a note, or- something. No texts, no missed calls…
Natia sometimes did this, getting up, grabbing her phone and vanishing for days on end. Whatever nightmare Tanis had had this time had already faded, and Tanis glared at the empty spot where Natia usually left her purse.
Dammit, I hate it when she does this and I have to go track her down to make sure she’s not dead or something.
Tanis grabbed her keys, shoving her phone in her purse and heading out.
Natia was usually found, during episodes like this, in a bar, or some late night cafe. Tanis found that she’d left all her usual haunts unoccupied, which made the search that much harder.
When she called, Natia didn’t pick up (she’d heard the ID and silenced her phone, because the last person she wanted to talk to right now was Tanis), and Tanis cursed, calling Eli instead.
“Tanis? What’s going on, it’s like… midnight.”
“You know Natia’s episodes, where she just grabs her stuff, goes somewhere, and hides for half a week?”
“Oh. Well, she’s not dead.”
“...I thought you only had Alex microchipped.”
“I lied.”
“Great. Do you know where she is?”
“Uh… currently? In the… Regdin… War… exhibit… is the museum even open this late?”
“No. Do you have any idea what she’s doing there? I mean… she just… asked me, when she had war questions.”
“Maybe she’s playing art critic.”
“Natia is blind, jackass.”
“I’m your boss.”
“And I’m your senior. Respect your elders, grasshopper.”
She could almost hear Eli roll his eyes as he hung up.
I may be a little more irritable than usual, but every time this happens, I have to track her down, and when I do she never tells me why she up and ran in the first place.
The drive to the museum was quiet, and Tanis got in easily.
Natia was sitting in front of the memorial to all the alien civilians who remained nameless and lost.
The memory of her earlier nightmare came rushing back, and Tanis gulped.
But- Nati can’t hear dreams.
She would have said something, if she could.
Right?
“Tanis.”
“Nati, what are you doing here?”
“I can hear dreams. It just. Never seemed important, until now.”
Tanis could pretty much feel her heart fall into her shoes.
Shit.
Shit, shit, shit, if she can hear dreams she knows- she knows, oh my god she knows .
“Why didn’t you tell me ?”
Natia turned around, matching tear tracks staining her cheeks. Tanis took a step back, as memories she’d buried too deep for even Natia to find came crashing back.
“Why, Tanis, why ? I could have helped! I get it - the fact that you can't save everyone, and no, it doesn’t make it hurt any less, but I thought- I thought you’d trust me with something like this! I thought you knew I’d love you no matter what, I thought- I thought you trusted me!”
Tanis’ eyes started stinging, and she looked at any place in the room but the memorial and Natia.
“I- I get it, Tanis! I’m never going to understand what it was like, because I wasn’t there, I didn’t fight, but the least you can do is explain when you donate ten thousand dollars to this freakin thing!”
Natia stood, fists clenched and tears streaming down her face, and all Tanis felt in that moment was rage.
“Explain!? EXPLAIN!? You grab your stuff and run off for days at a time without so much as a TEXT and you want ME to explain!? What the HELL, Natia!?”
Natia’s fists clenched tighter, and she stepped forward.
“Oh, REALLY!? YEAH, I WANT AN EXPLANATION! YOU SWORE YOU’D TELL ME EVERYTHING ABOUT WHY YOU WORK SO HARD! ABOUT THE MEMORIES THAT YOU STILL HAVE NIGHTMARES ABOUT! I TRUSTED YOU!”
Tanis snarled and took a step towards Natia (“Stand your ground, Tanis, or they’ll take it.”).
“YOU TRUSTED ME!? YOU TRUSTED ME !? THEN HOW ABOUT YOU TELL ME WHY , ALL THOSE TIMES I TRACKED YOU DOWN SO ELI DIDN’T HAVE TO, WHY YOU NEVER EXPLAINED YOURSELF! WHY YOU NEVER ONCE TOLD ME WHAT WAS GOING ON!”
“WE-”
It took Tanis less than a second to figure out what to say.
“No. No. I’m done , Natia, I’m done chasing you down and getting no explanation. Next time you vanish, I’m not coming to find you.”
Tanis turned around, and walked away.
Natia blinked back tears.
It was a talent Tanis had- turning the argument in her favor whatever way she could.
And it had been nice. Finding things out, needing time, and finally, finally , having someone willing to pull her out of it.
Because no matter how bad it was, she could always count on Tanis to track her down and cheer her up.
Apparently it wasn’t as carelessly fun as Tanis made it out to be.
Natia sat in front of the memorial, and cried her eyes out, because this time, there was no one coming to disturb her.
There was no one coming at all.
They didn’t speak to each other for a week. A week of Natia avoiding Tanis and Tanis avoiding Natia.
One fine morning, Eli called a meeting, and Tanis and Natia got there before everyone except Elliot.
Tanis sat as far away from Natia as she could.
“Okay, guys? I get that you two are probably fighting about something personal, but for the last week you've both been a mixture of pissed and miserable, and I don’t know if you’ve noticed but Zipper is now in a perpetual state of mentally breaking down while Eli struggles with not sending you on missions together and everyone else hopes this is resolved soon, so… your tiff hasn’t gone unnoticed. And you’re like. Forty. You’re supposed to be able to resolve shit.”
The rest of the Vindicators filed in before they could answer.
Three days after Elliot’s unsubtle check in, Tanis was fighting… something.
She didn’t know what it was, beyond ‘tentacles’ and ‘big’. It had been flinging everyone around for some time now- only she and Alex had avoided it, Alex because he kept running or shifting away, Tanis because she flew out of it’s reach.
Natia was somewhere. Maybe she’d vanished again. Tanis didn’t know.
She tried to tell herself she didn’t care.
Alex shouted something over the comms about finding its scource, to which everyone responded ‘KILL IT’, and Tanis banked left as it swung again.
A squelch came over the commlinks, and she could hear Alex muttering about how gross it was (Samira’s response was ‘then spend a week in the bathtub, at least you have unbruised ribs’), when the tentacles died and began falling.
And, because it was the Vindicators, and nothing ever got to be just ‘normal’ or ‘standard’ one of them smashed full force into Tanis.
She blacked out before she even started falling.
Isaiah was scrambling out of the grip of the now-dead thing when she saw one of the falling limbs hit Tanis.
The commlink crackled as Tanis’ line was broken- likely smashed- and for a second, Isaiah was only wincing, before she realized that Tanis wasn’t slowing down.
She untangled her legs, activated them, and prayed.
The prosthetics were in perfect shape. Isaiah wrapped her arms around Tanis as tightly as she could when she slammed into her.
“Tanis is down!” She shouted.
“ Shit . Does anyone know where Natia is? We need someone to take her while we get out of here. Alex, you’re doing press, mainly because you have the slime-shower as an excuse to get out of it.”
For someone who’d joined so recently, Elliot had adjusted well.
“Do I have to?”
“ YES !”
There was a moment of silence for everyone’s eardrums, but since they’d all screamed at Alex two seconds ago they really had no one to blame but themselves.
“Okay, you children go talk to Eli, I’ll take Tanis to the infirmary, and someone tell him I’m eating all his thin mints if he gives me shit for not filing a report.”
“Damn, Isaiah, I get you two are pretty much married but thin mint theft is harsh ,” Kim said.
“Shut up and sign your paperwork.”
Natia was sitting in front of the memorial (again), thinking about the argument they’d had a week and a half ago and how painfully sincere Tanis’ words had been, when her phone rang.
She picked up.
“Isaiah?”
“Your fiancee is in the infirmary. She’s unconcious, but stable. So far we’re thinking concussion, maybe some breaks, and a lot of surface lacerations and some really awful bruising.”
Natia didn’t get to respond before Isaiah hung up, and so she did the only logical thing:
She stayed where she was.
Tanis was horribly injured, and Natia needed processing time.
A few hours passed before the samoan headed to Mission Control, going straight to the small hospital they kept just in case one of them was injured too badly to get them out of uniform before sending them to the hospital, or the injury was too obviously caused by their job.
Tanis was paler than normal, lying on a hospital bed, and Natia pulled up a chair next to her, gently brushing her fingers over her fiancee’s scar.
She’d once told Natia that it helped calm her down.
Natia sighed.
“Well. We should probably resolve our issues before one of us winds up in the hospital next time.”
The mind reader tried for something like a smile, and found that none would come.
Beep beep beep-
The heart monitor next to her spiked, and Natia had her hands framing Tanis’ face and was diving into her head before she could stop herself.
She was standing on a nebula, in the middle of space.
Granted, since she was Tanis Jackson, she could actually have done this without dying immediately. Currently, though, she was in something like a coma, so shit didn’t have to make sense.
Tanis sighed. It wasn’t surprising that this was what the inside of her head looked like.
“Tanis!”
The native american whirled, coming face to face with Natia.
“You- you’re in my head !? You can jump into other people’s minds !? Jesus, there’s no privacy in this world!”
“Look, I’m sorry about- not explaining. I just… it was nice. Not… not having to. Because whenever I found out something I wished I never had, I could run off, and then… and then I met someone willing to come find me.”
"...Well now I just feel like a bitch.
“You’re not a bitch.”
The worst part about Nati’s powers is that she literally can’t deactivate them.
“Agreed.”
We could have an entire conversation without me saying a word.
“I think we are, Tanis.”
I’d like to wake up now.
“Oh. Yeah, the reason I broke into your mindspace in the first place was because your heart-”
Tanis woke up.
Natia was sitting next to her fiancee on the bed they shared, gently tracing Tanis’ scar with one hand and holding Tanis’ hand with the other.
“I’m sorry I never told you. About… the kid. I just-”
The mind reader ran her thumb over Tanis’ knuckles, rubbing circles into the back of her hand.
“You don’t have to say anything, Nissie. I understand as much as anyone ever will.”
“I just- I couldn’t stand thinking about it- and they- they weren’t even five - Nati, and I watched them die! ”
Natia pressed a kiss to her fiancee’s tear-streaked cheek, climbing into their bed and wrapping herself around Tanis.
“Shhh. It’s going to be okay. I love you.”
Tanis buried her face into Natia’s shoulder.
“I love you too.”
Tanis cried herself to sleep, and Natia pressed kisses into her hair, and maybe it wasn’t alright then. Maybe she’d find out more things she didn’t want to know. Maybe Tanis really wouldn’t come after her. Or maybe, now that she knew why, she would.
Maybe it wasn’t alright at that moment, but as Tanis curled into Natia’s torso and Natia rubbed circles into her back, they had a feeling it would be.