After it's all over, she goes home. Not one of the penthouses, broken and beaten by her fellows. Not the streets where she spent her nights prowling and protecting. She goes to the dingy, dank apartment she'd once struggled to make her own. The stolen things she'd filled it with are long gone, stolen again or traded away. It's shockingly bare, but the gas still works and there is a mattress and the water that comes out of the rumbling taps is cold, but it washes snow and ash out of her hair and the stuttering pressure brings relief to aching bones.

She finds her go bag untouched in the place where she'd hidden it, which comes as something of a surprise. What also comes as a surprise is the man standing in her doorway when she turns around.

"Hello," is what she might say, if she were in the mood to be polite. Instead she takes a more direct route and slaps him so hard that her nails rake scratches along his cheek.

He holds a hand to his face to ward off the sting and laughs a bit. "I guess I deserved that," he says. His voice is husky and low and it sends shivers down her spine and she hates it. She hates him. She tells him so, and he laughs again. "I deserved that, too, didn't I?"

She doesn't have an answer for that, really, so she just tells him to wait here while she gets dressed. She seriously contemplates leaving him there and making an escape through the window, but something keeps her there, makes her turn around and go back inside and find him putting a kettle on her stove and checking her cupboards for anything worth cooking. She can see, now, that he doesn't look good. He's standing at a funny angle, as though to protect his side, and he's putting all of his weight on one leg.

With a huff, she stalks over to where he's standing and lifts up his shirt, ignoring his swearing and protestations. He must still be wearing whatever he had on underneath the armor, because it's stiff with dried blood. Her eyebrows go up when she sees the shoddily applied bandage. "Yeah, that's not gonna fly," she mutters to herself. "Go sit down, before you open that up again."

She bumps him away from the stove with a hip check and reaches as far back as she can into the cupboard to find a box of tea bags. A little more scrounging produces a sleeve of saltines and a half-empty jar of peanut butter. As she sets them on the table, she finally gives him a winning smile. "So are you going to tell me how you survived death by exploding helicopter or what?"

He blinks. "Technically it's not a helicopter. It's a highly advanced—"

"Blah, blah, blah," she says, running over him. The kettle starts to whistle. "You can call it whatever you want, it's still a black helicopter with way more gadgets than it needs."

Across from her, he starts to smile.