Author's Note:

What a surprise, another one-shot. I should be doing homework - another surprise - but I swear I cannot get these two out of my head.

Is it January yet?

You learn things about people when you're on the run together. It was inevitable, really, and to be expected. There was a lot of time spent in cars – mostly stolen – and less-than-quality hotel rooms and occasionally planes for the longer stretches, when the money was available. That was the first thing that Anana learned, in a way; Sergio had a pretty good amount of money kept in off-shore accounts under various aliases and knew how to pull from them as efficiently as possible without drawing attention. Ilaria had taught him not to trust anyone, and it had worked. He hadn't ever really trusted them either, and the man had a number of elaborate plans to evade their notice. This came in handy.

Technically it was his knowledge of evading notice that she learned first. The first airport they used in Canada wasn't exactly a major one, but he was still wary and she got a crash-course in not raising suspicions. They went through customs separately, boarded at different times, and he kept his face out of as many camera views as possible. It was the ease with which he fell into it that surprised her at first, but at the same time seemed entirely natural. That was the point, she supposed, and no one seemed to give either of them a second glance.

They landed in Tacoma without a problem, promptly got drenched with rain, and Sergio set right to work hotwiring a car despite her best disapproving looks. They were only looks, of course, since she knew as well as he did that there weren't many other options at this point, and right now survival was the most important goal.

After everything at ABS, Anana felt like she shouldn't be surprised by much anymore. Still, she found herself watching Sergio as he drove, far too comfortable for her tastes in the early-morning traffic, and started to rearrange a few previous notions. He kept glancing in the mirrors more than entirely necessary and had the radio tuned to a local news station, just loud enough to be able to catch anything that might be important.

After a few minutes the man finally noticed and glanced over at her with a raised eyebrow.

"What?"

She didn't answer right away. When she did it was nonchalant and with a bit of a shrug.

"You're good at this."

Sergio scoffed, one hand rubbing at his hair – much shorter now, thanks to the explosion burning so much of it off – and giving the area around them another sweeping look.

"Not the first time I've had to vanish."

She learned that he didn't drink coffee. At least, he claimed, not in the States. Apparently living in Brazil had succeeded in ruining him for any of the stuff they made this far north, even the so-called "real Brazilian coffee." Anana found herself living off the stuff a lot of the time, especially when she got the night-shifts driving. That would always receive a slightly disdainful face from him when she came back from the gas stations with a cup, but he was smart enough to not actually say anything about it.

This proved to be a slight problem when she pulled into Starbucks once, because hell she hadn't had Starbucks since college, and asked if he wanted anything. Sergio was in one of his half-asleep modes and simply gave a vague wave and a muttered "Whatever."

Like that was helpful. The guy refused to touch the coffee and she was tempted to get that anyway just to spite him but decided that the attitude wouldn't be worth it. What the hell did a trained mercenary get at Starbucks if not coffee?

She ended up staring at the menu for a few minutes before deciding that it really wasn't worth that much thought and picked something at random. Sergio was a little more awake when she got back out and didn't actually pull a gun on her for opening the door like had happened once or twice before. Anana handed him the drink wordlessly and he stared down at it as she pulled back onto the road.

"What's this?"

"Green tea frap," she told him. At the skeptical glance her eyes rolled briefly. "You did say whatever."

He didn't argue that, at least, and stared at the cup for a few seconds more before relenting and trying it.

He had a regular Starbucks order after that.

She learned that he didn't sleep well. That was surprising at first, but made sense the more she considered it. There were a good number of things that made her wary to doze off, and he had to have even more. The fact that they were trying to avoid detection from one of the world's largest pharmaceuticals was one very good reason. They both knew what Ilaria was capable of and completely willing to do, and Sergio had a more in-depth knowledge of this than she did. That combined with the anxiety that came every time they turned on the news, searching for any sign of another outbreak, didn't make sleep easy to come by.

It wasn't just getting to sleep, though. There were rare nights when they weren't verging on actual exhaustion, when sleep actually seemed like it might be normal. That was when the nightmares started up. The first time it was the sound of Sergio sitting up so abruptly that woke her, and she had her hand on the gun on the nightstand before realizing what was going on.

He was perched on the edge of the bed, forehead resting on tightly folded hands. Every muscle looked tense and there was a very, very slight trembling in his arms, though that may have been from holding them so rigid. Anana pushed herself out of her bed, going around to sit next to him. She kept a bit of distance instinctively. Sergio was still iffy about any contact that wasn't carefully thought out – hell, they still got double beds when available, because hell if either of them knew what exactly this was yet – and when he was this tense it might be an even worse idea.

They sat in silence for a few moments before she spoke, the only question that seemed relevant at this point.

"Anything I can do?"

It seemed to take a bit of effort to unclench his jaw enough to speak and when that was achieved the only thing that came out was a muttered stream of Portuguese that she couldn't quite catch. He cut off quickly and settled for shaking his head sharply. Anana nodded and they remained silent after that.

It took almost half an hour before he seemed to pull out of whatever nightmare had followed him out into the waking world and when he moved to lie down again she took the cue and went back to the other bed without a word. That became some kind of unspoken ritual. If she woke when he did, which was often enough, she'd sit with him until things had passed again. Anana was fairly certain she didn't end up waking up every time, but it felt like it was enough to maybe help a little.

It was at least two months before any of that changed, and she nearly pulled the gun on him the first time. She was startled awake by a heavy weight settling on her bed and it took a few seconds to realize that it wasn't someone trying to kill her. Sergio had the same look on his face as always – that thousand-yard stare that still somehow looked like it could cut through steel – but the fact that he'd actually moved this far was impressive.

Anana sat up, watching him for a few moments before deciding that, hell with it, she could help more than this. He tensed even more for a brief moment when she took his hand, but after a few moments a little bit of the tension seemed to seep out with a heavy sigh. It was enough to let her slip her fingers between his and they sat in the usual silence like that.

It just didn't take as long to pass that night.

She learned that he didn't actually swear in English very much. It happened, but usually more in a frustrated manner than anything else. When something made the man legitimately angry, all semblance of English vanished in a few seconds.

It was first apparent when he drove, ironically. Sergio did most of the driving in the cities – it wasn't that she didn't know how, but since the largest city she'd driven in had been Anchorage, there was just far less experience, and rush hours in some places required experience. Sergio had experience. He also had a very small tolerance for stupid drivers.

Anana was fairly impressed, really, at how quickly he could switch between languages. That was how she found out he knew not only Portuguese, but also some Russian, French, and a little of what sounded like Swahili. She had no way of telling exactly what he was yelling out the window, but context could help infer that it wasn't anything very pleasant. Once she asked if it actually ever helped anything, and he'd muttered a gruff "It helps me."

It was a little different when the situation was more stress than anger. The first time he had recognized an Ilaria agent in Los Angeles, the swearing returned full force, but it was more rushed and much quieter this time as he pulled her by the arm into an old bookstore. They nearly got kicked out within a few seconds because apparently the shop owner spoke Russian, but put enough distance between them and the agent as quickly as possible.

It was only then that the English came back, and this time it turned into a quiet rant interspersed with expletives in other languages. Most of it was regarding Ilaria, and of course they had an office here, and how many agents were around that he wouldn't recognize, and they were getting out of this damn city the next morning.

After a while Anana began taking mental notes of the phrases that were used more often than others and took to looking them up when she had access to the internet. It was better actually knowing what he was saying, and hell, some of those were pretty creative.

She learned that he wasn't a good man.

This should've been obvious from the start, and in a way it had been. Their first introduction hadn't exactly been a great one, and she'd pinned a few assumptions on him from the start. After all this time, not all of them had been removed. Sergio was a mercenary. He was a very good mercenary, and that hadn't just been erased. It wasn't the most prominent part of him these days, but she got reminders on occasion still.

The first time was in Seattle, when they were lying low for a day or two before moving on to the next city. Places with so many people always made everything a little more tense, but blending into crowds was easier than trying to not stand out on a deserted sidewalk. Cities had resources they needed and the benefits outweighed the risks, but it was still risky as hell. It made Sergio high-strung, hand always hovering over the handgun he had concealed.

Anana still wasn't entirely sure what had possessed the stranger to try grabbing Sergio's arm when they were headed back to the hotel at night. He seemed drunk or high or something similar, but it wasn't exactly a stretch to see why it had seemed like an attack at first. The guy was on his back within a second with a nose that looked broken and a look that said he immediately regretted his move.

She could tell from just a brief look at Sergio's face that he had fallen back into survival mode. It took a good deal of fast talking to get him to holster the gun again and get the other guy to leave, now. There wasn't a single doubt that there would've been a body left behind otherwise, and he stayed in a sour mood the rest of the night only to shrug it off as it if hadn't been a big deal the next morning.

He was a killer. That hadn't changed. She had to convince him a few times that there were other ways of getting past security that didn't involve a body count, and though he went along with it, it was apparent that simply killing the guys wouldn't have been a hindrance. It wasn't a surprise; Iliara had trained him to be efficient and to kill without blinking. He was good at it. No need for overthinking it, no need for second guessing, no need for attachments…

Except now he'd apparently decided that Anana was not supposed to die, and when Sergio set his mind to something then he'd damn well see it through. That meant, of course, that she was around to push her morals onto him. It was likely that this wasn't entirely convincing him of those morals and more that he was just going along with it because they were sort of stuck together for the foreseeable future. If she weren't there, that restraint would probably vanish in an instant.

He was still a soldier. He was still a mercenary at heart, and she knew that. It would be naïve to think that a few months working against Ilaria instead of for them would make some drastic alteration to what the man had been for his entire life. The important thing was that he knew it too. Anana had seen it from the first few days she knew him; he knew exactly what he was, and, in some well-hidden reserve, he hated it.

Sergio wasn't a good man. He was terrifying at times, and she knew exactly what he was capable of, what his upbringing and training pushed him to do.

She also learned that he was using every ounce of his stubbornness – and that was an impressive amount – to push back.