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"Back already?" Buddy asks as Juno and the Big Guy stumble inside.
"What do you mean by that?" Juno gets out. He's not exactly steady on his feet, given the recent surgery, so the Big Guy is propping him up. He could probably be holding Juno up if he needed to; Juno is still a little annoyed about the dumpster. Juno is desperately glad that the THEIA is out of his skull, but having his vision halved again is immensely frustrating and it is not helping him keep his balance.
"Well, I'd assumed it would take longer if -- our dear friend had to bury you in the desert," Buddy says, and Juno glares at her. Both for the comment and the way she'd just barely tripped over not saying the Big Guy's name. Fair enough, respect people's choices about their names and who gets to know it (Juno has learned that lesson from -- from someone before), but please can Juno have a name to call him by.
'Our dear friend.' Right. He'll stick with calling him the Big Guy.
"I warned her that it was a possibility," the Big Guy says to Juno.
Juno is aghast all over again. The Big Guy hadn't mentioned the likelihood of death to Juno until they were at Hanataba's, but apparently he'd felt the need to warn Buddy he might be late getting back because he was busy burying Juno's body. "Exactly how likely is it that I was going to die?"
The Big Guy considers this. "You did not, and that is what matters," he says eventually.
"That is not at all reassuring."
"Would you like to sit down, Juno?" Buddy asks. She's seated at one of the tables scattered around the bar, a glass of water near one of her hands and multiple datapads strewn out across the table. Not waiting for an answer, she slides the chair opposite to her out invitingly.
The Big Guy proves that he can, in fact, pick up Juno at any time and drops him into the chair.
"Wh -- hey! Ask a lady!"
"Apologies, Juno," the Big Guy says. "You can, of course, sit anywhere else you would like. Or leave the room."
Juno doesn't move. It's not because he would fall over without support if he stood. It's only because he...doesn't want to move right now. No other reason.
Buddy returns to her datapads. The Big Guy moves further into the lighthouse, going back behind the bar towards either the kitchen or the staircase to where the living quarters are.
Juno sits there and thinks. He thinks about Benten's smile. He thinks about Sarah Steel and all her flaws.
He thinks about Jack Takano. Ramses O'Flaherty.
He needs to get back to Hyperion City.
"Whatever you're planning, you need to wait," Buddy says, not looking up.
Juno startles. "I wasn't--"
"You're a very loud thinker, darling," Buddy says. She sounds amused.
Juno grimaces, but changes tack. "Why should I wait?" He needs to know what's happening in Hyperion. He needs to know what O'Flaherty is doing. What Juno helped him do.
People he loves are still in the city. They could be in danger.
"Far be it from me to stop you, Juno, but I sincerely doubt you can even stand up right now," Buddy says.
Juno gets to his feet immediately, just to prove her wrong. He sits back down very quickly. She...might have a point.
At least she's polite enough not to say I told you so.
Buddy lets Juno lean on her later as they make their way into the kitchen. Juno is too grateful for the help to bother being embarrassed. He'd thought that he was having trouble walking because of the sudden change of going back to one eye, and maybe because of the leftover anesthesia, but the fact that it hasn't worn off by now is strange.
Honestly, he shouldn't have assumed it was because of losing his eye again, either. He's lost an eye. He could still manage to walk. Maybe not in a straight line, and maybe to get back to the Ruby 7 he'd needed to lean on Nureyev, but that was just as much blood loss as anything else. And the hospital visit afterwards had fixed him all up.
This is...not like that.
"Here you are," Buddy says, dropping him down in a chair at a different table. Juno straightens himself slightly; he'd nearly missed the edge of the seat. It's going to take time to readjust. He's not looking forward to it.
The Big Guy is already in the kitchen, fiddling with something on the stove. A few moments later, he places a cup of tea in front of Juno.
"Uh," says Juno. "No thanks."
The Big Guy doesn't take the tea back. He leaves it there. Juno squints at it. He wonders if this one has any hidden properties.
"It is only tea," the Big Guy says.
All right then. He's still not going to drink it.
Buddy's lighthouse has a few spare rooms available. Juno stayed here before they went after Rasbach and Vespa; his bed still has fresh(ish) sheets on it. The Big Guy helps him up the stairs and Juno collapses face down onto the bed.
"Good night, Juno," the Big Guy says.
Juno grunts. He immediately feels bad, given how much they've all helped him. "...Thanks," he says.
The Big Guy doesn't say anything. He might have nodded before he closes the bedroom door and walks further up the stairs toward his own rooms.
Buddy and Vespa already retreated much earlier. Juno had gotten too caught up in thinking, still sitting in front of a cold cup of tea. He'd tried to make it up the stairs by himself, but everything was too disconnected. He'd fallen over almost immediately, though fortunately he'd been able to catch the edge of the chair to break his fall. He'd sat there on the ground until the Big Guy came to collect him.
Buddy really might have had a point.
The next morning, Juno manages to make it downstairs without killing himself. He may or may not have accomplished this by keeping a death grip on the railing to stop from losing his balance, and by taking the steps at an exceptionally slow pace. And by sitting down a few times. A lot of times.
Point being, he makes it.
Then he's standing in the doorway to the kitchen, one hand braced against the wall, staring at the straight open distance between him and the table near the center of the room.
There is no way he's going to make it over there.
"Where did my balance go?" Juno spits after the Big Guy drops him in a chair like he's a particularly snippy kitten.
"The THEIA Spectrum is not kind," the Big Guy says. "It is not a gift."
"Figured that one out on my own, thanks," Juno says. "Doesn't answer my question."
The Big Guy levels him with a look. It is a very expressive look. It implies a lot of things about Juno's intelligence.
Buddy sighs from across the table. "Juno, what side effects did you notice from the THEIA? Why did you want it gone so badly?"
"It kept glitching," Juno says. He grimaces, because that's not right. "It didn't keep glitching. It was told to glitch. It wouldn't work right. And it --" He swallows. Oh. "It overrided control of my body."
Oh. Of course.
Things inside your brain that aren't supposed to be there. That do things they aren't supposed to do. Last time that had happened, it was a tumor that left him bleeding out of multiple orifices at a time and wrapped its way wholly around his optic nerve. Of course there would be side effects of some cybernetic monstrosity puppeting his body around.
"This is going to get better, right?" Juno asks. He hates how small his voice sounds. How vulnerable.
"You survived," the Big Guy says. "You will make your way through this."
Juno wants to believe that. He really, desperately wants to believe that.
"I believe I have a spare cane around here somewhere, Juno," Buddy offers.
Juno, clinging to the edge of a counter and trying to shake away the feeling he usually only gets when he's up higher than about three feet, considers this. Experimentally, he leans slightly away from the counter, pulling his hands back to his side as he does so.
"That might be nice," he says, once he's managed to catch and brace himself again.
The cane helps. Juno still likes having a wall to his other side in case he needs something stable to lean against. Unfortunately, now that he's mostly moving under his power, this leaves him in the unenviable position of having to relearn how his lack of depth perception works.
"Fuck," Juno spits when he slams his shoulder against a doorframe for the third time that day. He's going to have a bruise.
"Would you mind helping me chop the vegetables, Juno?" Buddy calls from the kitchen.
"I have one eye, Buddy!"
"What better way to practice dexterity? You can even sit down while you do it," Buddy says, abandoning whatever she was doing to lean over the counter. Buddy can't eat food herself, but she apparently enjoys cooking. Or enjoys helping others. Or feeding others? Juno's not sure.
"If I chop off my finger, I will pass out on you," Juno warns. Buddy has a valid point, though. And if he's being honest, Juno has experience chopping vegetables while working with only one functioning eye. He knows that he can do it. Not that he'd been up for cooking very often during those long months after --
But he'd cooked some. Enough that he can probably handle a knife.
"It's fortunate my Vespa is such a good medic, then," Buddy says, and ducks back into the kitchen. Juno makes his way to the kitchen, washes his hands, and sits down at the table to gamely whack at veggies with a knife. On the other side of the table, Vespa is picking at her nails with what is definitely not a kitchen knife.
"So how's it going?" Juno asks, for lack of anything else better to say.
Vespa pulls out a whetstone and starts sharpening her not-a-kitchen-knife. The half-healed stab wound in Juno's side throbs.
"Cool, good talk," Juno says.
Juno is going stir-crazy. He hates not having something to do. He'd lost his comms during the whole mess with Pereyra and the Piranha, and with it he'd lost Rita. He has her number memorized, he could call her from Buddy or the Big Guy's comms, but he doesn't know if it's safe.
He doesn't want to put her in danger. He doesn't know if she is already in danger.
He misses her.
Watching the news would probably give him a heart attack, given there is nothing he can do about it. He can barely make it across the room without assistance of some kind. He has no idea what is happening in Hyperion and hates it, but not knowing just barely edges out the helplessness of knowing and not being able to act.
The sheer stress is probably going to give Juno an ulcer if he doesn't find something--
"Here," the Big Guy says. He hands Juno several books.
"Uh," Juno says.
"You do not enjoy enforced idleness," the Big Guy says.
"This is...still kind of idleness, Big Guy," Juno says, spreading the books out to look at them.
"But it will keep you distracted," the Big Guy says, a small, satisfied smile making its way onto his face.
Fair enough.
"How is the book?" Buddy asks in passing.
Juno is a little over halfway through it. "It was the youngest granddaughter," he says distractedly, flipping to the next page.
Buddy laughs.
Juno wakes up early and can't fall back asleep. There's a ringing in his ears. No one is screaming from the other room. No one is depending on him being able to spit out answers fast enough. The dampness on his cheeks is not blood. It was a dream.
It was only a dream.
Juno doesn't want to sit around in this small, dark room. He stumbles his way downstairs. There are various maps and other papers still spread out on the kitchen table from where Buddy and Vespa had been talking about something last night; only innocuous ones, because Buddy is an experienced thief, and there won't be evidence of whatever she's planning next that could be easily picked out. Her home or not, the lighthouse is still a bar. Juno usually hides out upstairs during what few hours the lighthouse is actually functioning as its intended purpose.
Juno starts going through the maps and papers anyway. He's curious.
(He doesn't want to think.)
At some point, around when the blue-ish light of dawn starts poking its way through the windows, Juno lays his head down on the table and falls back asleep.
Juno startles awake as the Big Guy sets a steaming cup of tea across from him. Juno doesn't know how he missed the sound of the kettle boiling or the Big Guy moving around, but apparently he had. He has a crick in his neck.
He does not want the tea. He eyes it and wonders just how desperate he is for caffeine.
At his yawn, the Big Guy must read some of this in his expression because he says, "If you need caffeine, you will not get it from the tea."
"Literally why do you drink it then?" Juno grumbles.
The Big Guy shrugs. "I find it soothing."
Juno really wants some coffee.
"So what are you working on?" Juno asks Buddy. He can't help it; he's too curious. It's like an itch he needs to scratch, and reading the Big Guy's mysteries aren't cutting it. He needs something real to sink his teeth into.
"That would be telling, Juno," Buddy says. Juno must look as frustrated and disappointed as he feels, because Buddy takes pity on him and follows this up by saying speculatively, "We could always exchange information. Story for story."
"Case for heist?" Juno suggests drily.
"Well," Buddy says, smirking. "There's only so much you can get to know a person by looking them up. It's always nice to hear the story direct from the source."
Ha. Sure. That's all that she's interested in; there's definitely not a deeper interest in how a lady who was both formerly a cop and currently a PI tracks down information for cases. Juno bets there's all sorts of information she can pull out of any stories Juno tells her. There's no way this is altruistic.
Juno doesn't have anything better to do, though. He has to use the cane less, but it's still easier to get around while using it. He can't go back to Hyperion like this. "You've got a deal," he says.
They pass stories back and forth for a while. Juno avoids talking about cases within the past two years. They all either involve Ramses or they involve...other people he doesn't want to bring up around Buddy. Things he doesn't want to think about. That doesn't leave him without stories, of course; he's been a PI for fifteen years. He has a lot of stories.
He doesn't even bother trying to keep the softness from his voice when he talks about Rita and her involvement. She's an integral part of the Steel Detective Agency. Juno doesn't think he's told her that enough. Once he gets back, he swears he will.
On the flip side, Juno almost wishes he were taking notes on Buddy's stories; he's good at catching thieves, but hearing about it from the other side is something else. Some of the stunts she's pulled -- Juno wants to doubt her, but he can't. He is suitably impressed.
It's all going well until Buddy circles her stories away from her (and Vespa's) own exploits and into rumors of Martian heists.
"I try keep track of the movers and shakers in the galaxy," she says. "And it's always fun watching for who pulls of the heists everyone thinks are impossible -- or near enough. Plus it's nice to know who your rivals are." She smiles, and says, "I hear tell that last year someone finally successfully robbed the Utgard Express--"
Juno, who had been fiddling with a pencil up until this point, flinches. He drops the pencil to the floor and watches it roll away.
That, my dear detective, was a train. And you and I are going to catch it.
He clears his throat. "Yeah, I - I think I heard something about that. Didn't they catch the guy?" As soon as he says it, he knows he's made a mistake. He doesn't actually know what happened to Engstrom. He'd never bothered to check. Miasma had scooped them up during what was supposed to be their getaway, and by the time Juno was in a place to look, he'd -- he hadn't wanted any reminders. So he hadn't checked.
"They captured Engstrom, certainly," Buddy says. Her eyes are sharp.
Someone finally successfully robbed the Utgard Express.
Successfully.
If you get caught, that's not successful. And we didn't get caught.
Valencia was dead. They'd left Engstrom alive, if unconscious, for Utgard security to take in. He and Nureyev had made it off with exactly what they'd boarded the train to steal. Much good as it did them.
"Right," Juno says. His mouth is dry.
It's not that he cares that Buddy knows -- or thinks she knows -- that he helped rob the Utgard Express. What's she going to do, turn him in?
The problem is that she might want him to talk about it. And if she wants him to talk about the Utgard Express, he'll have to talk about Nureyev. And Juno -- he can't do that.
"I, um," Juno says. "I have. A headache? And I'm going to go lie down." He scrambles out of there as quickly as he can without making it seem like he's running.
Even if that's exactly what he's doing.
(Buddy watches Juno leave.
Interesting, she thinks.
Ransom had put down Juno as a reference, but he'd neatly dodged the question of what job or jobs they'd worked previously. Buddy had let it lie. If she and Jet couldn't find those jobs through what Ransom had provided them, they'd simply figure it out from the other direction and track Ransom through Juno. And Juno had been at the Oasis Casino during the timeframe that the Ruby 7 was stolen from Engstrom.
The same day the Utgard Express had been robbed.
Juno isn't a terribly good liar. That dodge had been embarrassingly apparent. Almost as stark as the pained panic that had lit up Juno's remaining eye.
The question was whether that was because of robbery itself, or because of the man with whom Juno had pulled off the heist.
Buddy would like to press further, but she doubts how much she'll be able to pull out of Juno. She also doubts that she needs to. She has a pretty good idea of his character by now. If Ransom felt secure enough to put Juno's name down as a reference, he must have thought that Juno would back him up. Or at least provide a source for Buddy as to what kind of person he is.
Ransom can't be that bad if Juno is the kind of person he would choose to fall back on. Juno is a rather exemplary lady, and if Ransom has managed to gain his trust--
But then, Juno is sitting in her bar because someone else had managed to gain his trust. Someone that Juno had let stick a cybernetic eye in his face and then betrayed him. Used him. Violated him. Buddy can't preclude the possibility that Ransom is someone else who doesn't deserve Juno's faith.
She supposes she'll have to wait and see. Let Ransom on, but keep an eye on him. You can never be too careful.
As for Juno himself...
"What do you think of him?" she asks Vespa, who has come slinking in from the kitchen as Juno left.
"I don't like him," Vespa says. She sets down her bowl of soup and pushes one of the two glasses of water she'd been balancing toward Buddy. Buddy takes it with a quiet thanks.
"Not even a little?" Buddy asks, hiding her smile behind her glass. Her Vespa and Juno are rather similar people, once you get past the surface -- though Juno seems to live in perpetual mild fear of Vespa. Buddy isn't sure whether it's the assassin or medic part that scares him more.
"No," Vespa says mutinously, scooping a spoonful of soup into her mouth. Her face scrunches up slightly in the way it always does when she's misjudged the temperature of her food but is trying to play it off.
Buddy snorts. "Would you mind checking on him tomorrow?" she asks.
"Seems like he's doing fine so far," Vespa says. Her spoon taps the edge of her bowl, belying her words. Vespa is a good medic; she takes care of the people around her. She's a good assassin; she likes knowing the exact weaknesses of the people around her.
Buddy doesn't press it. Sometime in the next few days, she's sure that Vespa will be cornering their erstwhile detective.)
Juno is not sulking, and he's not avoiding Buddy.
...He might be avoiding Buddy a little bit. For a woman who can't eat anymore, she sure is in the kitchen a lot. Juno grabs food and leaves as quickly as possible when he sees her. So far, Buddy has let him. In all honesty, Juno should suck it up, pull up his big girl pants, and interact with her like a normal human being, but the prospect of any questions she might ask him about the Utgard Express make him want to break out into a cold sweat.
Juno muffles a groan into a pillow. Then he rolls over, gets up, opens his bedroom door--
--and lets out a very undignified yelp when Vespa is standing on the other side.
Oh god where is my blaster? is the first thought that races across his mind. Vespa scowls at him.
"Steel," she says. Juno is pretty sure she's come here to murder him. WHERE IS MY BLASTER, his brain screams. "How bad is your vertigo?"
"Uh," Juno says, thrown off balance.
Vespa's scowl gets deeper. "On a scale from one to ten," she says, like she's talking to a child. "How dizzy are you?"
Oh no. This is worse than Vespa trying to murder him.
Juno wonders if he can slam, lock, and barricade the door fast enough to keep Vespa distracted while he climbs out a window. Except, wait, there's not any fire escapes, so he'd have to knot bedsheets together to make a rope, and anyway if Juno has to combine his medical vertigo with the usual vertigo he gets from heights, he might pass out on the spot, and --
Vespa grabs him by the collar. "Downstairs, now. Medical exam."
The Big Guy hands Juno another cup of tea once Juno's finished with the exam and managed to escape Vespa. Juno downs it like a shot and waits for the soothing effects to seep in.
Buddy does not ask Juno any questions about the Utgard Express. He probably should have seen that coming. Buddy knows exactly when and where to press people. The fact that she'd let him run in the first place should have told him he could avoid it.
He's pretty sure she sent Vespa after him, though.
(Juno makes a mental note to never get on Buddy Aurinko's bad side. He'd half-written that note after everything with Rasbach, but now he stars and underlines it.)
The good news is that Juno is mostly recovered. He'd noticed that himself, but Vespa confirms it. She also gave him a full physical, which Juno squirmed all the way through. The last time he'd seen a doctor, other than getting the THEIA Spectrum installed, was--
Ah. Right after Miasma. Yeah.
Vespa tests his knee's reflex a little viciously when he says he doesn't know the last time he'd been to a doctor. Any doctor. About anything other than his eye.
Apparently you're supposed to visit a doctor annually for a check up. Juno treats this information with the skepticism it is due. Although now that he thinks about it, he's pretty sure Rita might have said something along similar lines at some point.
Anyway. Juno has pretty much bounced back from having the THEIA removed. He can go back to Hyperion City.
He can go home.
"Thanks. For everything," Juno says to Buddy, standing in the shadows of the lighthouse's door.
"Take care of yourself, Juno," Buddy says. She smiles. "I hope I'll see you around."