Work Text:
It's not like things go back to normal immediately.
Zoe turns to Mio as they're walking away from Rader Publishing and says she'd gotten a hotel a few blocks away for the duration of the program. She asks if Mio wants to come with her, something jagged-edged and pleading in the tawny-green of her eyes.
Before today, Mio wouldn’t have hesitated to decline. She’d watched too many cold case Youtube deep dives to think going to a stranger’s hotel room was ever a good idea.
But today has been a lot of things, and Mio has a flat in the city but trying to find an Uber at this hour and enduring the fifty minute trip across town sounds like a nightmare, and they’ve already had to give their statements to the police, and she’s been killed a thousand times today in as many imaginary hours. Exhaustion drips into her like a cold compress, turning bones to lead and muscles to jelly. She’s feeling more emotions right now than it’s probably possible for a person to feel at one time.
She looks at Zoe, this person she realistically met a scant nine hours ago in an elevator, who she has lived through seventeen stories alongside. Zoe, who against all odds and reason never stopped believing in her, never stopped fighting for her, even when she was shitty about it. Zoe, who listened to her talk about her dying father, who listened so kindly even when her sister was dead the whole time and she’d taken the blame upon herself alone. Zoe, who’d thought she deserved to die there with Ella and she’d still been brave enough to ask Mio for help. She’d found Mio’s hand in that dark, heartless place and she’d held on.
Zoe isn’t a stranger. She couldn’t be. So, Mio says yes. As if she could ever say anything else.
Mio kicks awake at two-thirty-three in the morning to the sound of Zoe muffling a scream into her hand. A low, mournful noise, like an animal keening in pain, wind between the teeth. In the shards of moonlight cutting through the blinds, she can see the wet streaks of tears on Zoe’s cheeks.
“Zoe?” she says, rapidly trying to get her bearings as she hurries to turn on the dim, yellowed bedside lamp. “Hey, what’s going on? What’s wrong?”
Zoe turns over on her side and starts to cry, a harsh, fractured sound. Mio shifts and wraps her arms around Zoe’s waist firmly, holding her tightly from behind.
“I miss her,” Zoe whispers between one ragged breath and the next. “I’m going to miss her forever.”
“That’s okay,” Mio whispers back, lips kissing the baby hairs at the back of Zoe’s neck, tenderness in a foreign shape. “Because you’ll love her forever, too, and we saw all the beautiful things you made with that love.”
They fall asleep like that, curled together like commas. Come morning, Zoe’s back to her usual self, and Mio doesn’t have the heart to bring it up again. But she catches Zoe’s wrist when she goes to brush her teeth, and she squeezes it once gently, and she hopes that’s enough to say all the things she doesn’t have words for right now.
Two days at the hotel turns into five, and when Mio gathers herself to leave she stops and turns and looks back at Zoe and says she has a flat across town. It’s an open invitation, a question she doesn’t finish. Zoe’s eyes go molten with relief and she steps forward and hugs Mio and Mio doesn’t complain.
One week of sharing Mio’s cramped studio turns into two, which turns into four, and Mio gets a second key on a whim and offers it to Zoe and musters up the courage to tell her she might as well stay, and Zoe does. Of course she does.
Zoe shows her Lord of the Rings and Excalibur and Willow and the Neverending Story, and Mio shows her Tron and Starship Troopers and Gattaca and all the Alien movies in chronological order. They nitpick and pause every ten minutes to explain the plot and annoy the hell out of their neighbors, and Mio feels alive in a way she didn’t realize she was missing until now. She looks at the side of Zoe’s face as she cries watching Ellen Ripley die for the last time, and Mio thinks oh, I get it now. I get it.
Mio gets a call from the hospital. It’s time, they tell her. It’s time.
She looks at Zoe as she sets down the phone, and whatever Zoe sees on her face is enough for her to step forward and draw Mio into the circle of her arms, holding her there, secure and solid.
“I can drive,” Zoe offers, which is an odd thing to say because Mio didn’t think she’d said anything since she hung up. She’s drifting, hardly here at all, a ghost of grief anchored only by the warm palms at the small of her back. “Whenever you’re ready, we can go.”
We, because of course Zoe would come. Zoe knows her— knows she could never ask, but she’d wanted her to come. She can’t do it alone. She doesn’t know how she ever did.
“I have a motorcycle,” Mio points out, suddenly caught on the thought, her voice emerging faintly over the burn in her eyes and the hard lump in her throat. “Do you have a license?”
“I fought a tank with a motorcycle. I think I can survive traffic,” Zoe counters, and it’s such a bizarre response that it rips a choked laugh out of Mio, painful all the way up.
“I don’t think I can do this,” she says, and it’s like the floodgates open, the sobs coming in painful waves. Zoe holds her close and shushes her and kneels them to the floor.
“I think you can,” she says when it’s over, pulling away only to take Mio’s face in her hands and brush the tears from her cheeks. “You’ve already done a thousand impossible things. What’s one more?”
Mio swallows hard and shakes her head, burrowing further into Zoe’s chest. “I don’t want him to go. We fought so hard. He fought all the way until the end, and it didn’t matter.”
“Of course it mattered. The hurt is proof of that. Getting to say goodbye is a gift. He won’t be alone when he goes. He won’t be afraid.”
And it hurts because Zoe’s right. It hurts because Zoe is shaking against her and she must be thinking about Ella like an old scab she keeps picking at just to see if it still aches. If anyone knows how much this hurts, it’s Zoe, and it’s not fair.
But, then again, it’s never been fair, and here they are in spite of it. What the hell is she supposed to do with that?
It’s hard, saying goodbye. Harder than she’d imagined, and she had imagined it, a hundred times over. All that careful preparation amounts to nothing in the end.
He’s not conscious— won’t ever be conscious again, but the brain activity says he’s at least somewhat aware. He can hear her. So, she talks to him for a long time, tells him of all the lives she lived with Zoe, all the things she saw and endured. She tells him about a giant octopus swimming free in an endless ocean after years of captivity. She tells him she’s happy. She tells him she’s not alone anymore. And then she presses a kiss into his weathered forehead and says goodbye.
Zoe is waiting for her outside the room, and she stands to meet Mio as she collapses and she holds her for a long, long time as Mio fists her hands into her sweatshirt and cries like her chest is going to crack apart.
In the end, it’s a funeral with two guests and a mortician. Her dad wouldn’t have wanted anything bigger. Mio drops a fistful of dirt into a six-foot hole and feels a part of her heart go with it, and then she steps back and Zoe’s hand finds hers, holding tightly despite the way it shakes.
The weeks that follow are hard. She distracts herself by writing. She sits with Zoe at the small table by the kitchen window, their laptops close enough to touch, and she pours her grief out into the pages.
And, eventually, time starts to do its thing. It doesn’t hurt less, but it gets easier. Easier to live with, easier to manage. Zoe’s presence is constant in the form of gentle reminders. To eat when it’s been a while, to drink something, to shower, guiding her through the motions of being a living, functional person until she starts to get a feel for the rhythm again. One day, she wakes up unreasonably early and she looks up a recipe for buttermilk pancakes and she makes it for the hell of it. When Zoe rouses eventually and is greeted by the sight, her smile is blinding, and Mio starts to think that maybe things will be okay again.
The next week, it comes to a head. They’re both sitting at the kitchen table, as is their ritual, Zoe on her second mug of coffee and Mio on her third cup of tea.
Zoe chews on the end of her pencil, staring down at the scattered thoughts of her notebook as she works to translate the mess into a viable chapter. “You know,” she says, apropos nothing, “I didn’t know it at the time, but I think you falling into my story was the best thing that ever happened to me.”
Mio looks up from her laptop, blinking several times as her brain struggles to digest that statement. “You’re so cheesy,” she says, awkward around the lump in her throat.
“Maybe,” Zoe says with a small shrug and a twitching smile. “But it’s true.”
And Mio kicks her under the table if only to disguise the pathetic thump-thump of her heart between her ribs, attempting to pry its way out and expose itself to Zoe like a prey animal begging to be killed. Mio doesn’t do romance, hadn’t ever thought that she’d be the kind of person, but she types an experimental Mio Foster onto the page and stares at it for a long, long moment before deleting the entire line and slamming her head into her keyboard.
It’s nothing special when it happens. Neither of them write romance, so it’s not like they have much to compare it to, but it’s entirely unexceptional except for all the ways it is.
Mio is working at the kitchen table, an ache in her shoulder from sitting hunched for too long. Zoe had made some passing comment about going out some time ago, and Mio had hummed something in response but she hadn’t really been paying attention— she’s stuck on the part where they wake up, unsure how to piece together the ending after everything that came before it.
The door squeaks and groans in a marked indicator of Zoe’s return as she steps inside and toes off her sneakers, setting a large paper bag of food on the kitchen counter.
“I got food from that Thai place you talked about,” she says by way of explanation when Mio looks up at her in question. “You looked like you were having a rough go of it, and, well, I was feeling a bit peckish, and—”
“I think I love you,” Mio says, and Zoe’s eyes go wide and they stare at each other for a few seconds in silence.
“Pardon?” Zoe says eventually. Mio thinks she should be panicking, but all she feels is strangely calm, like everything in her brain and her heart have clicked into place.
She thinks it’s probably been there since Zoe broke her dad out of prison with her. She just didn’t have a name for it until now for lack of knowing what it was supposed to feel like, knowing what signs she was supposed to look for. It’s painfully obvious in hindsight. It’s jet skis on water and train heists and it’s the terror gripping her throat as she’d searched for Zoe in that darkness, unwilling to entertain the thought of leaving without her. In the end, it’s them, saving the world, saving every world, together.
“I think I realized, just now,” she clarifies. “I’m in love with you.”
Zoe keeps staring at her. “Oh,” she says, very quiet and a little shell-shocked. Her ears have gone pink. “I— well. Logically, I knew that was always a possibility. I mean, we have been living with each other for quite some time, haven’t we? And I did borrow a great many of your clothes that I neglected to return, and you bought me that book I mentioned offhand and I really didn’t expect you to remember, considering it was so far beyond your tastes, and I thought that was a little odd at the time, but oh, all of this makes sense now. Er, do you want to eat first? Or—”
And Mio laughs, feeling calm and brave as she stands from her chair and crosses the threshold to cup Zoe’s face in her hands. “You talk too much,” she says, and Zoe’s eyes soften, her thumbs finding Mio’s waist.
“Yes, well, apparently you love me for it, so I’ll assume I’m forgiven.”
And Mio rolls her eyes and steps forward and kisses her silly, kisses her back into the counter, and the sofa, and the bed. Kisses down her throat and down, and down, and down, and then she doesn’t do much thinking for a long time after that.
She wakes up the next morning alone and in nothing but her boxers, and there’s a beat of panic, cold like ice water down her spine, and then she hears the sound of Zoe humming in the kitchen as something savory sizzles in a pan, and she exhales slowly and presses her hands against her eyes and fights not to grin.
Zoe brings her breakfast in bed dressed in nothing but Mio's Star Trek t-shirt, and they sit pressed together on the old box springs, and when she’s done Mio sets down her plate and kisses Zoe again and goes for seconds.
Zoe calls her parents eventually. It’s a long conversation, muffled behind the closed bathroom door. When she finally emerges, she looks thoroughly cried-out, but maybe lighter for it, too.
She collapses next to Mio on the sofa, her nose pressing against Mio’s throat. It’s a lot of touching, and Mio pauses Tombstone to shift to accommodate her, carding her fingers through blonde strands in what she hopes is a soothing, repetitive motion. It takes a while before Zoe talks, but that’s alright, Mio thinks. She’s gotten better at waiting.
“They want me to come home for a visit,” Zoe says quietly.
“Okay,” Mio says, unable to read the wobble in her voice. “Do you want to go?”
Zoe goes quiet again, just breathing with her, lips against her collarbone. “Yes,” she whispers. “Yes, I think so.”
“Okay,” Mio says. “Then we’ll go.”
They get back from England and life doesn’t stop. The book is finished, and they found a publisher eager to take it on in light of the fame the Rader Publishing scandal has earned them. They’re booked and busy and on their way to the release party when Mio has the Uber driver stop and make a detour. It’s not really an achievement worth celebrating unless Mio tells dad all about it, so she does. Zoe doesn’t question it, only agreeing to meet her there when she was done running her mystery errand.
For now, Mio stands above her father’s resting place as the sky bruises into a roseate evening, and she tells him she’s in love, tells him she hopes she made him proud and knows that she has. She tells him she wishes he were here to see it and thinks maybe he is. Maybe he could be, if she wrote it.
They’re late to the release party. Mio finds she doesn’t really care.
It’s a swanky, expensive venue, paid for in full by the publishing company and the guest list carefully curated by their agent, who might just be the only man Mio trusts now that her dad died off that list.
Zoe, of course, is all smiles and excited ramblings about the book to just about anyone that will listen. Mio’s social battery taps out after about twenty minutes and she spends the rest of the party getting drunk at the minibar and people-watching.
Zoe is easy to pick out in a crowd, speaking animatedly to someone Mio thinks is the editor in chief of the New Yorker. She’s drawn all the attendees over to her, all of them caught in her orbit, and maybe in another life Mio would be jealous that Zoe’s reaping all the social credit for their book, but she’s not. Split Fiction is their project, together, and Mio knows that her heart exists in every page of it just as much as Zoe’s does. She couldn’t be jealous, not when her heart feels like it might implode from how proud she is of her, of them both.
Zoe catches her eye mid-sentence over the crowd, and something in her expression changes, all that exuberance mellowing into something soft and private. She says something to the people around her that Mio can’t quite make out, and then Zoe is threading the crowd toward her. Mio is seven margaritas deep, but even if she were sober, she is certain there couldn’t be anyone more beautiful than Zoe Foster.
“Hey,” Zoe says as she reaches her. “Are you ready to head home?”
Mio is seven margaritas deep and here is Zoe, who took one look at her and knew she was ready to leave, that the alcohol had become less a fun distraction to pass the time and more a shield against the impending overstimulation. That the only celebration she’d really needed for the launch was to see the smile on Zoe’s face when she’d unveiled that first copy at dad’s grave. Zoe took one look at her and knew all of that, because of course she did, and here she was, willing to make an escape from their own party on Mio’s behalf.
“I love you,” Mio sighs, lashes fluttering as Zoe laughs and sweeps Mio’s hair out of her eyes.
“You’re drunk,” she says gently, moving to help Mio to her feet.
“Drunk, not dumb. I don’t say stuff I don’t mean,” Mio protests, letting herself be led out to the taxi their agent must have called for them.
“Never dumb,” Zoe says amiably. “On the contrary, you’re actually quite smart, most of the time.”
Zoe helps her into the taxi. The back seat is spacious but they cram together into one seat anyway, just because they can. Mio rests her head on Zoe’s shoulder and watches the city pass her by, lights and colors buzzing inside her skull.
”We really did it,” she says like it’s a realization, and maybe it is. Her brain is struggling to keep up with her body, her lips a little numb from the alcohol, an ill omen for the hangover sure to bury her tomorrow.
Zoe reaches up to run a hand through her hair, blunt nails scraping against her scalp as she turns and presses lipstick into the crown of Mio’s head.
“We really did,” she says.
The book sells. Record-shattering numbers, their agent says. They’re already being contacted for all sorts of TV show and video game deals, flooding in faster than either of them really have time to process. For the first time in Mio’s life, she has more money than she reasonably knows what to do with, so, naturally, the first thing she does is buy herself a pinball machine.
Zoe laughs uproariously when it arrives, because it’s massive, and it doesn’t fit in the doorway, and they have to keep it in a storage unit until they figure out what to do with it. Mio gets herself an electric guitar and three expensive swords and dumps as much as she can into medical GoFundMes because she’s been there, and she knows.
Zoe buys herself a top safety-rated SUV, a deed of land in the English countryside, and the worst pair of matching shirts for the two of them that she subjects Mio to wear on a trip to Harry Potter Land. She ropes Mio into browsing for furniture, and one thing leads to another and then they’re tangled together at three in the morning apartment hunting on Mio’s phone. The question never comes up. It’s just written into fact, a known truth.
In the end, they decide on a larger apartment in a nicer part of town: a two-bedroom unit on the fourteenth floor. Nothing luxurious, but it has tall windows and heated floors and good water pressure, and that’s all Mio really needs to be happy. They turn the second bedroom into an office that Zoe fills with all manner of herbs and plants, and they adopt a tiny, ill-tempered cat off the street and name him Ice King.
Mio wakes up late every morning and finds Zoe in the kitchen, sipping on a mug of coffee while tea steeps on the stove for Mio. She presses sleepy kisses into Zoe’s neck until she relents and comes back to bed, and they stay there for a long time, luxuriating in the sun and the feel of one another.
Mio does local book signings and they have a tour scheduled for next year in cities across the globe, and she is wildly, relentlessly, unapologetically happy.
Not every day is easy. Weeks pass where it feels like the grief is a physical weight in Mio’s chest, threatening to rend her apart. She locks herself in the office for days and storms through her hard drive, leaving a wreckage in her wake, and then it passes, and she opens the door, and Zoe is waiting for her. Zoe takes her out on long walks in the park down the street and lets her explain the plot of Armageddon until she feels like she can breathe again.
There are days where Zoe calls Mio in a panic, almost incoherent through her tears, and Mio races through the city to find her and hold her and bring her home. The attacks are sudden and always a surprise, unpredictable in their severity. It takes a fight neither of them are proud of to convince Zoe to see a therapist, and even that is hard, Zoe’s knee-jerk reaction to smile through the pain proving a difficult beast to put down.
It’s hard, but it gets easier as the days pass. Rader gets ten years in prison and thirty-million in damages. They receive a hefty cut of that, along with the other participants in the trial, but it still feels paltry compared to what they endured at his behest. Even then, though, the resentment doesn’t last, doesn’t become anything more than a story to laugh at down the line.
And one day Mio will wake up and that iron kedge in her chest will be gone, and she will roll over in bed to find Zoe watching her already, propped up on her arm, brilliantly gilded in the mid-morning light.
“Zoe,” she will say, “I think I’m happy.”
“Good,” Zoe will say back, all mirth and love like honey, a half-smile playing on her lips. “I was waiting for you to catch up.” And she will bend down and kiss her, and Mio will think about the ring sitting in the pocket of her jacket and kiss her back.