"What does it mean?" Skye asks her, sitting down across the table with a haphazardly-made sandwich and a mug of coffee.
Bobbi looks up from her own mostly untouched plate and raises her eyebrows in question, and Skye takes a bite in response, motioning to the keychain Bobbi has been twirling around her fingers for the past half hour. She looks at the keychain and then back at her teammate, munch away through the curiosity, and she holds the small silver disk up to the light. 'Franny's Saloon' spins in and out of her view.
"It's obviously important. That's why he kept it, right?" Skye shrugs. "And now you took it from him. So what does it mean?"
"We were in the middle of a fire fight in Versailles," Bobbi stars, staring at the disk. The way it catches the light is mesmerizing, the memories she's dredging up less so. "We're back to back in an alleyway, huge ass henchmen of this powerful Parisian drug lord coming at us from either end-"
"As usual, Hunter is almost out of ammo." Mack cuts in, sliding onto the bench next to Skye. "I love this story." Bobbi gives him a look and he scoffs at her. "I may have negative opinions on most of your relationship, Barbara, but this story is classic."
"So you're in an alleyway…" Skye prompts, rolling her hand to signal for Bobbi to continue.
"Right. So we're in this alley and Hunter is trying to convince me to give his irresponsible ass my extra clip and these guys are getting closer. They start shooting and we're ducked behind a dumpster. It's getting messy and he just looks at me like an insane person and says 'if we get out of this…' and he pulls the pins out of six grenades in his pack and launches it towards one end of the alley."
Bobbi pauses at the memory; he was shot in the leg not long after while they took out the advancing forces from the side that wasn't burning. Both buildings crumbled from the blast and she'd dragged all of the bodies into the flames.
"When the fire died down and we were limping away," she says, staring at the keychain and not the two people waiting for her to get past the knot in the pit of her stomach, "he picked this up off the ground, slipped it around my finger, and asked me to marry him."
She finishes the story staring at her hands, staring at the stupid piece of metal that means so damn much, and she can feel their eyes on her.
"Are you kidding me?" Skye says and she sounds bewildered and amazed. "That's how he proposed?"
"Tell her what he said though," Mack chimes in. She rolls her eyes at him but can't stop the slight smile that follows. "C'mon, you have to tell her."
"Okay, okay. I'm practically carrying his ass out of this alley and he stops to dig through some trashed building pieces to pick up this tiny silver thing and he says…" She'd resolved once to keep this memory tucked away forever, for her own safety. Thinking too much about the way he had looked at her amidst all of that destruction made thinking about what happened next that much worse. "He says 'we can survive anything, too.'"
They didn't though, she thinks, but she doesn't want to dwell on her past so she stands and clears everyone's plates instead.
"We've never even been to the bar," she says, pausing with the stack of dirty dishes before she heads to the sink, turning on the water to drown the noise in her head.
Skye gives Mack a look like she doesn't quite believe, this story couldn't possibly be true, and Mack shrugs his shoulders. Bobbi can't make out Skye's mumbled comment over the running of the faucet, but Mack's reply is loud and clear.
"They used to be different people." He stands with a sigh. "Life just got in the way."
Bobbi waits until they both leave the room, until she can no longer feel Skye's gaze on her back, to pull the keychain out of her pocket and hold it in the light, watch it spin.
They didn't survive, couldn't survive, but she will.