Disclaimer: Atlantis: The Lost Empire is the property of the Walt Disney Company.

Pillars

Once a year seems like too much for these things. But Audrey always shows because she owes so much of where she is to Whitmore, so even though he's not here (obviously; he likes his privacy), she is, in these ridiculous shoes and a dress that she had to buy because the old one is from about 1975, and the ambassador from Greece is talking to her in an accent that's charming, that's meant to charm her, and all she can do is think about who she hasn't seen. Who she wants to talk to. The old team is scattered around the room, minus Cookie, who died in shady circumstances years ago, and Vinny, who is notoriously terrible about getting to these things on time.

She wishes he'd show up.

The ambassador—Nikos, she's met him before—talks despite her empty, brittle smile. Maybe he notices, maybe not, but she has the social graces to make sure that smile stays plastered on her face for the duration of the conversation.

"If you'll excuse me, Ms. Ramirez," the ambassador says, "I hope we can speak more later in the evening."

"Of course," she replies, grasping his hand briefly.

There's always someone else to talk to, to secure some sort of arrangement with, but right then he finally walks through the door. Their eyes meet; somehow she's the first person he spots, and she holds herself back, strikes the delicate balance between rushing to him and casually making her way to his side.

"It's about time," she mutters as he takes one of her hands and curls an arm loosely around her back in sort of a half-embrace. Her dress plummets in the back and she can feel him wondering if it's really okay to brush his hand against her bare skin. Their hands stay clasped a moment longer than they should but a moment less than she wants.

"I only show up at parties fashionably late," Vinny replies, adding with a half-smile, "and I only show up at all to see you in a dress."

Like it's such a spectacle. As a matter of fact, the older she's gotten, the more she's appreciated a well-cut dress. Not to mention that she'll never complain if Vinny Santorini can't take his eyes off her, which is normally the case when she puts one on. It's maybe why he never brings another woman to these functions. It's certainly one of the reasons she never brings another man (one among so many, like no matter how much she likes a guy, it's always just like, and she can never stop comparing each and every one of them to someone she doesn't even know in that way, and-and-and—).

But right now she's not going to spar with him. She meets his eyes seriously and says quietly, "Rebecca is dying."

"What?" Vinny is visibly and audibly startled, and he cranes his neck to look for Josh while saying, "He's not here, right—Mother of God." Looking back at her, he asks, "Why doesn't he go home? She's his wife."

"You think?" There's a sudden sharp sting in her eyes and sí it's partly because Rebecca Sweet is her friend and it breaks her heart that she's not long for this world; it's more because she's known Josh since she was sixteen and it kills her to see him in so much pain.

But there's something else eating away at her too, and she has to talk to someone about it. Grasping his hand, she murmurs, "Make the rounds, okay? And talk to Josh." There's no need to tell him that. "Meet me on that third floor balcony in half an hour?"

He's watching her, trying not to look concerned. "Sure. Hey, Audrey." She has to turn around and look back at him. "You okay?"

Different answers flicker through her mind, but in the end she shrugs and replies, "Sure."

He raises an eyebrow but nods, then turns to seek out Josh, who's on the other side of the room with a strained smile on his face and a darkness in his eyes. Out of all of them, it's maybe Josh Sweet who's changed the least. He's still the big-hearted doctor he was when they met, who loves his job and his family, who settled down, who was willing to give himself completely to another person when he knew, knew, he'd lose her one day.

And she hadn't. And Vinny hadn't. And Mole and Packard and Cookie hadn't. She's a heartbreaker, Mole has divorced more women than she can count. Their only close bonds are with each other, but not Josh. And now he's facing the moment the rest of them have always feared and avoided and the really pathetic thing is? She feels like she's the one who's facing up to something.

Mole suddenly appears at her side, proffering a glass of wine, and she takes it with a wan smile. "Where's the new girlfriend?"

He gulps half his wine and most of it makes it into his mouth. "She is shy. And I am…" He pauses, then shrugs with a somewhat chagrined look on his face. "I am always looking."

"Yeah."

"And you? There is someone, no?"

There is someone. Just not the man she's been casually seeing for a few months. "Not really," she sighs.

And then the two of them are approached by another of the world's wealthiest CEOs, drawing them into more negotiations masquerading as small talk. It's just over thirty minutes until she can get away, but Vinny is waiting.

There's no one else on the balcony, which she was counting on, but it's a nice thing to see anyway. Her dress catches and swirls around her legs as she briskly joins him at the rail, but when she gets there, she doesn't say anything.

For a moment, the two of them remain silent. Then, Vinny asks, "So what did you wanna talk about?"

She licks her lips in hesitation. "Who says I wanted to talk about anything?"

"C'mon."

Before she responds, she stares out into the dark, watching the distant lights of DC twinkling in the humid evening. Then she turns her back to it, sitting down on the rail and curling her fingers around the edges. "What are we doing, Vinny?"

He crosses his arms. "You're gonna have to be more specific."

She stretches a leg out and looks at her shoe. The pair was thousands of dollars, the kind of money that when she was a kid would have lifted her family out of poverty, would have made them not rich, maybe, but would've kept them from teetering on the edge. Would have got them out of the barrio at the very least. She'd charged the shoes to her credit card and signed the money away without a second thought.

"I'm not happy," she says. "I've been alive for a hundred and thirty years. Shouldn't I have figured out how to be happy by now?"

Another pause, then Vinny sighs and sits down next to her. "Y'know, I've got twenty on you, and I still don't have any idea."

In a small voice, Audrey says, "I always thought Josh made the wrong choice. Here he is, watching his wife get old and his kids get old and eventually his grandkids, and…"

"And now you see he actually made the right one," Vinny finishes for her, raising his eyebrows and looking at her. "Yeah. I know the feeling."

She tucks her hair behind her ears, winces as a few strands get caught in her earrings. It's cut stylishly short these days, but it's never stopped being unruly. Watching her sister—her strong, tough-as-nails sister, who held seven titles, owned a boxing club, and could still beat Audrey at chess until the very end—get old and frail, had been bad enough. Nena Ramirez had lived a long time—but not long enough to marry the love of her life when the laws finally started changing. But at the end, Audrey was the same, and Nena was someone else. She misses her sister like hell. She can't imagine going through that with a husband. With children.

Feeling that old ache radiate out through her chest, she says, "So now he has his family, and we have…well, what do we have?"

"Money, fame, fortune?" Vinny tries, and when she just looks at him flatly, he shrugs. "Okay, so not a whole lot. But this isn't it for us."

"No, but…what's gonna change? This is it. What's to figure out?"

He looks at her, but his eyes don't stay with hers; they roam over her face, like he's searching for something. "We could go see Rebecca, for a start," he finally says gently.

"I know. I've got the plane ready. I'm flying straight there tomorrow."

That draws a nod from him, not quite satisfied, but maybe mollified. There's a look in his eyes like he wants to say something that's not quite a fully-formed thought, and normally that incompleteness would keep him quiet. He thinks everything through first, and even if the end results are questionable, it's never for lack of consideration on his part. "So basically, you're wondering if living forever is such a great deal after all?"

"I guess. Yeah."

He holds her gaze. "So get rid of the crystal."

Her stomach clenches violently at hearing someone say what she's been too terrified to even think. She knows she'll never do it, but all the same, it's a concept that's horrifyingly, thrillingly possible.

"Now personally, it's a little too much like suicide for me." Vinny shrugs, then adds, "I don't think I go to confession enough to get away with that."

It's hard for her not to smile at his always-black sense of humor. "Same here."

The night air is chilly, thick with damp humidity, and Vinny's human warmth at her side is like an anchor. Their hands are just barely touching. It's comfortable.

"Y'know," he begins, then stops to think for a moment. When he speaks again, he says carefully, "It wouldn't be too tough for you to get married. There's plenty of fish in the sea. At least, so I'm told."

"I have high standards," she mumbles, looking away from him. "Not to mention I'm sort of looking for someone with an unnaturally long life span."

"There's always Atlantis."

The derisive guffaw that escapes her isn't meant for him. "Ay dios mío, can you imagine spending eternity with someone who doesn't understand—all of this?" She gestures vaguely at DC, at the balcony, at the room below them full of people, all of it ephemeral as a mayfly's life, all of it crumbling into dust in slow motion while the blessed or cursed team that discovered Atlantis stands unchanged in its midst. They're like pillars doomed to watch their homes collapse but what can they do but look back? Looking forward hasn't brought Audrey any joy.

"No," Vinny says quietly. She hadn't expected him to answer her rhetorical question. "I can't."

Their fingers brush again, and Audrey thinks, they could stop this, all the dancing around, all the pretending. They could say out loud what she's been thinking for decades but has been too scared to say. They have, all of them, a reputation for fearlessness, for living on an edge that started tasting like desperation to her too long ago. Is it fearlessness when you're just looking for something to feel?Something to surprise you, something to marvel at, something to hit you deep inside; a gut punch rush of wonder at the endless possibility of the world that all of them had taken for granted before they'd accepted the gift of immortality?

Yes, she could stop wearing the crystal. There is something in this long stretch of days, though, that still fills her with the sort of effervescent fire that had burned out in her somewhere between her ninth and tenth decades.

"Why did Josh do it?" she asks.

Vinny looks at her, deadpan as always. "Thought someone would have told you this by now, Aud. When a man and woman love each other very much…" But he stops at her look, full of sadness, and turns his eyes back towards the door to the balcony. Light spills out in a diffuse block, fuzzing at its edges until it twilights into dark stone. Party-goers pass across it, their shadows on the ground like ghosts. "Maybe 'cause Josh knew better than us," he says. "He wanted to fix people, you know? Me, I just wanted to blow it all up."

"You're exaggerating, tonto," she says.

"Si, cara, but Josh figured out the important stuff faster than we did. We all thought we knew better, right? Like we had all the time in the world. Except you wait too long and everything starts looking the same." Audrey makes a noise, and Vinny pauses. He still keeps a matchstick stuck behind his ear most of the time. "So maybe he knew exactly what was gonna happen. He's never been like you or me. He gets people."

At another time, she probably would have acted offended at this, smiling all the while, knowing he would know it was a big joke to her. He's right though. She's always understood machines better than people. Everyone thinks machines are just parts, but they aren't. They have their own quirks, their eccentricities, entire personalities hidden in spinning gears and belts, oil coursing like blood through their engines. And as the years have gone on she's learned new skills, so that wires and computers don't scare her the way they did at first. They can all be touchy, temperamental. Like people, only she never got the hang of dealing with people, even after all this time.

Except Vinny.

"I guess Josh is braver than us, is that what you're saying?" she asks.

Vinny takes in a long, slow breath through his nose. Thinking. She remembers when she first met him, she thought he was crazy, impulsive. She can't really remember when she realized he's the opposite. "I guess," he agrees. Then, he turns to look at her.

His hair and mustache are as black as the day they met, a full one hundred and fifteen years ago. Dad had brought him around the shop after they'd found the Shepherd's Journal—they'd always gotten along, Dad and Vinny. She'd been on her back under a Marion Roadster, the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen, and she'd always remember the look on Vinny's face when she'd pushed herself out from underneath it because Dad wanted to introduce her. She remembers it because of how there was no expression on his face, how she walked up to him with grease streaked across her forehead, a skinny fifteen-year-old girl in baggy dungarees, and he shook hands with her like it was nothing, like this was something he saw every day.

He opens his mouth, hesitates. Grabs the match from behind his ear and sticks it between his teeth. Audrey watches this. His movements are as familiar to her as her own. "What?" she asks.

The match twitches. "You want to try it?" he says.

Audrey's heart does something that doesn't feel healthy. Some sort of stop-stutter-skip that makes her think about how Dad died of a heart attack, which is stupid because no heart attack is going to kill her, not with that crystal sitting at the hollow of her neck. Not for tens of thousands of years, at least. "Try it?"

"Yeah. Being brave." His eyes are holding hers. "We got the standard brave stuff down, don't we? You know, like sky-diving, driving really fast, getting dropped into a room full of spiders—"

She shudders. "Don't remind me."

A smile twitches at his mouth. "And the free-climbing. Don't forget the free-climbing."

"That stuff's easy."

"I know." He chews at the match. "So like, maybe we should try the hard stuff."

Maybe his heart is doing the same thing hers is, but he'd never give it away, just like she knows she doesn't. Their hands are still next to each other, the only point of contact between them, and it's barely contact. It's just possibility. The possibility of something amazing. The possibility that they could ruin everything. While it's only possibility, it stays uncomplicated. Clean. The only messiness both of them have ever liked is with their work. Maybe that's the problem.

She moves her hand and slides her fingers into his waiting grip, and he closes his hand around hers so their fingers are twined tightly together. With his other hand he takes the match out of his mouth and sticks it behind his ear again. "Easy-peasy," he says, but she can see from the look in his eyes that it's anything but.

"Ser pan comido," she agrees as her heart pounds. "Want to see something really brave?"

When he nods, just once, he's got the same look in his eyes that he does just before he sets off a really big explosion.

Audrey leans forward, hardly breathing, and brushes her lips against his.

Ay dios mío, she's wanted to do this for so, so long. His mustache tickles, and his lips are warm and a little chapped. The kiss is over almost before it's begun, and the two of them look at each other. There's nothing, and everything, to say, and so neither of them speak.

Vinny lifts her hand to his mouth and kisses it gently, and the gesture is so…so Old World, that she laughs, from nerves and fear and relief and joy and every emotion she's ever felt; they're all scrambled together in her chest and she holds his hand tighter and doesn't break eye contact with him. She feels like the fifteen-year-old she was when they met, not the one-hundred-and-thirty-year-old that she is now. But what's one-hundred-and-thirty supposed to feel like, anyway?

He raises his other hand and runs a finger along the kiss curl pasted down on her cheek. "So," he says.

"Yeah," she replies, and despite the sadness of the night, this, this is so good, that something light and frothing courses through her.

His fingers trace the wave of her hair and he says, "Maybe we should try that again, huh?" And when they kiss this time, it's surer, easier; there's less fear and more of the effervescence that Vinny's always caused in her. Maybe they should have done this a long time ago, but it's only tonight that she's found the courage. An ache knifes through her, knowing that it was Josh's loss that had brought her here. Brought them here.

"Come with me to see Rebecca," she says.

Vinny nods. "You didn't even have to ask." Which is true, but she likes hearing him say it, anyway. Then he stands up, pulling her to her feet, and they stand on the balcony silently for a moment, still holding each other's hands tightly. Someone peers out the door and spots them. Audrey thinks it might be the Greek ambassador. Right now, she doesn't care about mingling, about deals, about playing her part.

"Are we gonna call this something?" he asks, looking down at her. Even with her heels on, he's still much taller. That look is still in his eyes, and she realizes he's been looking at her that way for years, watching the slow-burning fuse that's the two of them all that time.

Reaching up and straightening the match behind his ear, she replies, "Sure. Sometime. We don't have to, now." There's nothing else to call it except love, she's known that for a long time, but she also knows that the two of them have waited a century to say it. They can wait a little longer.

This, she thinks, has been worth waiting for.