Prelude

***

Somehow, they end up on the dry tarp. If he thinks about it, he knows there's a perfectly logical reason for it; they're both old and the youngins would feel guilty if they didn't offer up the choice spot. There's also a perfectly logical explanation on why they're left curiously alone to stare at each other. After all, they need to patch things up so that they can get the hell off this soggy ball of rock.

Mostly, he's just glad to have a place to sit down and not tramp all over uneven and rocky terrain anymore. He is no longer thirty and he's just had major heart surgery. He's allowed to get a little winded.

"Are you okay?"

He looks over at her then. It's odd to see her in such casual clothing. He has no idea where she got the panttss and sweater, but they both look just a little too large on her small frame. Strangely, he finds himself missing the tight little suits he got so used to.

"Not really," he says, because he decided to stop lying to her on the way down here. "To be frank, I'm exhausted, wet, and annoyed."

She laughed then. "I know how you feel. Well, minus the major surgery bit."

They both smiled at each other then. It was an echo of dozens of other little quiet moments of amusement they'd shared over the last few months. He'd forgotten those somewhere.

A bit ashamed, he looked away first. This was going to be hard to do. He was bad at admitting that he was wrong about things. Spectacularly bad. The shape of the relationship with his sons - and the one with his ex-wife - seemed rather concrete proof of that. He needed to stop relying on second chances. They seemed a lot thinner on the ground then they had been.

"We need to talk, don't we?" Her voice is soft in the open air. He looks up to meet her eye and nods.

"We do."

-fin-

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