Author's Note: Thank you for the reviews! I'm sorry the first chapter was short, but I'll work on that. This chapter is less interaction than I'd like, but I wanted to set up the basis on their new lives and hint at their new pasts. (As odd as the phrase 'new pasts' feels.) Future chapters may get longer, I'm not sure. There's a lot of ground to cover and story to tell and matching them up with Sonnenburg quotes can be tricky.

Disclaimer(s): All of the podcasts mentioned, while real, are owners of their respective broadcasters. All I know about Marines and drinking I learned from an ex-Marine teacher I had. The Defense Intelligence Agency is not as bad as the interservice rivalry they have with the FBI, CIA and NSA implies. 2048 is a real internet game I also don't own.

This would not be a tragedy, so long as they never quit having hope.

He drank. He was a Marine; that was what they did.

At first he'd resisted with everything he had in him. His father lived his life in bottles and that had been what led him to join the Marines in the first place. That and the chance to be something more than a deadbeat dad living in a rundown part of a bad town had made him scramble for a way to leave. Back then he'd been eager to run away. Sure, there was a war on, sure, he could die, but it just didn't matter. His neighborhood was the kind of place where he'd heard gunshots in the night before. At least this way he might die doing something to help someone. He couldn't help his father, his mother denied anything was wrong, yet out there was a place where he might be useful. He could change things, could make a tiny bit of a difference. Afterwards he'd go to college and get a real job. His plans had been big.

The war was bigger. It remained bigger. His will held out through celebrations, where he sipped at a beer all night. The first time a guy he went through Basic Training died, he folded. With each death he folded more quickly. When he saw bodies on the street, a part of him slowly began to give out. He was beginning to crack. One night or two getting plastered turned into a habit. If there was booze on site, he was there. Like clockwork he sobered up back in the States other than his nighttime recipe of a brandy Mountain Dew and two sleeping pills before bed.

Today was a McDonald's and early drink kind of day. He could hear birds chirping. If he went outside the door of his first floor apartment he could go breathe in fresh late summer air, walk to the park where little slices of Virginia's natural beauty lay in waiting. He'd always loved nature, loved the squirrels and hardy little animals who made it in the city. The world outside, though, was full of people who wanted to talk. He couldn't do small talk anymore. To act normal he needed to be drunk. Linka's number sat untouched on the table along with his uniform, just laying there, armor he could put on to take on the world alongside the writing of a woman who seemed to be fully capable of undoing it.

Finding her had been like finding some long-lost best friend. All he could feel was familiarity that eased the tension out of him, put a smile on his face, made him more of who he used to be, the kid from Brooklyn who just wanted to make a difference. She made him feel like he was home again. Everything in him told him that with her, he would be safe. With her, there would be no need to pretend. Unfortunately, the fact of the matter was that he wasn't sure what he was anymore if he wasn't pretending to be fine or acting the part of a good Marine. Whatever he was, he wasn't that kid from Brooklyn.

So why he'd hit her up for her number, he'd never know. He'd even wanted to make a cheeky remark. For a second he'd been a teenager again. There wasn't a reason. That was too much to deal with. That was a layer of questions rising he couldn't try to face at the moment. He could barely pick at his food, debriefing quotes and pictures and horror they'd examined too clinically playing in his head like a private snuff film. For now he just needed to get some substance in his body to keep the ensuing booze down. He'd try to see if he could get the latest set of international man of mystery bullshit factoids out of his head for long enough to sleep after that.

He couldn't deal with today, let alone the future. It was made of too many yesterdays.

She had on The Best Of The Left podcast as she went over documents in her office; normally that was frowned on but Akilina has proved a long time ago she did her best work when multitasking.

The fact of the matter was that when a woman became as fluent in as many languages as she was in the way she became fluent in them, it was nothing to do translation work, listen to a podcast, and have a tab open on her computer to half-watch field reports to check if anything she was translating didn't match up with the facts on the screen. There was an in-joke at Langley that they drank more coffee than the rest of the CIA combined, one which might've been true, as she subsisted on it for huge stretches of her time there. The CIA: travel abroad, get shot at and try every country and region's coffee. They could've gotten her in the doors on that last bit, really, but at least Jalal-Abad had been a mostly nonviolent affair composed of real-time interpreter work. Some of it was even on embassy grounds, which was a nice change of pace from the usual hot sun or ice-wind nights that she ended up working in. Her office was almost foreign to her after her last outing; they alternated it between a few people who worked there in the same field. Her presence meant somebody else was off somewhere on assignment.

Akilina was unique in that she could set herself to go through podcasts and work through whole nights without being tired. So long as nobody told her what the time was, so long as she kept the clock off the wall, she could pull hours no one asked or expected her to be able to. In no way was she the smartest person in her profession, but she worked hard. That was why end of the week reports made it look like she'd been running marathons while the other translators were standing still by comparison. She only needed coffee and audio and visual stimulation to block out physical needs like sleep, hunger, sluggishness. Once upon a time on a very critical day she'd been sleepy, eyeing the clock, distracted. Everything had gone so wrong there was no room for error ever again, even on the most 'minor' of assignments or slow days. It had been a very slow day when all her work was for nothing, when she'd snapped from sleepy to furious and stormed into the Director's office to demand why her work had been ignored.

They never ignored her now. She never let them. Blonde bombshells with flawless records, insane output and fluency in six languages weren't something to ignore. The men around her quit remarking on how cute she was after she became an Internal Affairs ally, after her ability to read between the lines cut people down, cost people jobs, protecting the agency from within at the cost of quite a few friendships. There was no bridge she wouldn't burn, no line she wouldn't cross. And sometimes, though she'd never admit it, that made for some very lonely days. That was why she filled the void with the voices of podcasts. As much as Amir, the only person who consistently stopped by her office, joked that they got enough political news around here as it was, she lined up Best Of The Left, Eco Alert, Democracy Now, This American Life and Redacted Tonight podcasts in long playlists on her computer so she was never left in silence.

She wasn't sure what set her on edge more: the sound of a ticking clock or utter silence.

"Coffee alert," Amir's voice said from the door, and she hit pause on the podcast, but continued writing with her other hand, preferring to work out her thoughts on paper before transferring a second draft to the computer's Word processor. "You know, one of these days someone's going to trip on the clock outside the door."

"Assalamu alaykum," she greeted him without looking up, then sniffed the air. "That doesn't smell like coffee."

"Wa alaykum as-salam," he returned cordially, setting a box down on top of her notebook just to get her attention. "I got you this thing. It's called 'dinner', and I think it'll really catch on. All the cool kids are doing it."

"…dinner?" She finally looked up, and her eyes lit up. When the smell hit her, her body would always remember to be hungry. "Marry me, Amir. Become Mr. Akhatov."

"Wouldn't you be Mrs. Massoudi?" he asked, quirking an eyebrow and leaning against the wall.

"It'd ruin the alliteration in my name. And I don't wear dresses, so you'd have to do it." There was no room in her voice for argument as she closed her notebook, opens the Styrofoam box and looked at the food. Vietnamese take out, of course. That and the Hungarian place in Langley were CIA hotspots due to how fast they were with their orders.

"At this point, so long as she gets grandkids my mom would completely approve of that. But rumor has it you're off the market," he said, causing her to gag but not choke on her nem cuon. He held his hands up in a 'don't shoot' gesture. "Reliable sources have it that you gave some tall redheaded guy your number in the lobby. Unreliable sources have him as a pilot for Air Force One, an old Russian flame, or even, God have mercy, an FBI agent."

"Don't even joke about that last bit," Akilina said, shaking her head. "He's a Marine. Sergeant, not Marine One, not Russian. Certainly not FBI. Why is this even news in the Central Intelligence Agency? We have jobs to do."

The pause was four seconds too long. She looked at Amir. He looked away a little too quickly.

"It's been almost three years," he managed to almost-casually say, only the set of his jaw betraying how aware he was he was he was walking into a minefield conversationally. "And people look up to you for what you do, myself included. So people are happy for you – Melissa in Filing, Danny in Communications, just, y'know, people who see you work yourself to the bone without any breaks. You're kind of a hero around here, remember?" She threw the box into the trash without looking, shut her laptop and grabbed her leather jacket. He winced. "Akhatov-"

"Nyet." She slipped her laptop into her bag fluidly, leaving the files where they were. That was one line she could never stand, a title she'd run to Jalal-Abad to get rid of. Hero. Her stomach turned and threatened to evacuate its' coffee-intensive contents, so she left before she could say something she'd regret. Amir let her. She wished someone wouldn't let her. Sometimes she wanted someone to ask her what was wrong even if they knew, just so she could say it.

Only when she got to her car did she stop to let the night air cool her head, wind blowing her hair into her face. The lack of wind in the States had made her start growing out her bangs as a teenager when she was an exchange student, just to feel the air's force around her properly.

If it was a strange thing to take comfort in, well, she was a strange woman.

At least Jason Joseph Walker was just as strange to match.

She found him in the park at two in the morning.

Silently, she sat on the swing beside his.

He was pretty sure this should have felt more awkward than it did. Under the full moon, her hair got paler, her eyes pools of blue. He should have been at least a little intimidated by a gorgeous woman finding him in the dead of night when she'd met him once.

"Come here often?" Walker asked instead, leaning back so his feet were off the ground, tilting his head to try to get a solid look at her face. A gust blew her hair forward, obscuring her features.

"Da." She never used Russian in the States. Now she'd done it twice in one night. A feeling of normalcy settled over her, a smile curving her lips as she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and studied his face. He wasn't older than her by much. War had taken a toll, but she was used to seeing that on the people she worked with. "Is this how the Marines stave off boredom at home?"

"Yep. The Air Force use the slides and the Army goes on the merry-go-round and get nothing done, just like they do when they're working.

A short burst of laughter escaped her. "Oh, so they're like the FBI, then."

"Hey, at least they're not the Navy."

"That's what we say about the Defense Intelligence Agency." The blonde paused for a moment, and said amicably, "Nobody calls me Linka anymore. I haven't gone by that since I was in college. We're all 'last-name-basis' at work. Makes us sound official. Except for when we're acting like the agency is high school."

"Life is high school, babe." He was as stunned as her that he'd just said that last word. Where had that come from? "Don't taze me, I'm not hitting on you, I swear."

"You New Yorkers and your tazers," she scoffed jokingly, looking almost-serious. Somehow, she wasn't offended by the word babe even if maybe she should've been. "I'm Russian; I'd glass you. It's tradition – or maybe a law. I was never clear on that."

He laughed. For the first time in months, maybe half a year, he laughed and was sober while doing so. The thing of it was, it wasn't even that funny, he just missed this. Walker was a social creature even if he didn't want to be. He wanted to crack jokes and fire back at someone and hang out. God, it had been forever since he'd just done that because he wanted to and not because he was trying to make people believe he was okay. After a moment of subdued chuckling, she giggled too. Walker felt a sort of pang, like he'd missed her specifically, like he was coming back from his first deployment to a waiting girlfriend. There was so much wrong with that sentence he didn't know where to begin. He didn't want to, for once. Walker had Googled Jalal-Abad. He hadn't gotten drunk. He hadn't touched his drink. He'd gone on a jog and had a pointless conversation with his landlady and played an infuriating free game online called 2048 and felt so… so… free. It was like he could breathe again.

This was still weird, he'd just decided that for now, at least, he didn't care. "Do you wanna get dinner? I mean, I'm not a gourmet cook or anything, but I know a diner around here that has burgers so greasy you could fashion bombs outta 'em. The fries are worse and-or better."

Now it was her turn to grin. "Well, with that sales pitch, how could I say no?" She got up, and offered him her hand. "Come on, Yankee. I'll drive."

He didn't let go of her hand until they got into the car, and didn't question the nickname.

She reached over and took his hand in hers, and drove one-handed.