"It still makes no sense you know. I mean… Why would you split the twins if Anakin Skywalker didn't even know he had any children...?" she says as I walk into the smoke-filled room, armed with an axe and an expression that tells her I am not discussing Star Wars right now.
I really underestimated how much those stupid space fairytales get to people. Which is what I tell her even as I instruct her to back away from the glass in the same breath.
"Here's Johnny..." I grin as I bury the axe in the transparent wall of her cell.
"What?" she asks automatically. Then, realizing what happened, again, she just rolls her eyes at me and does the rest of the brute work of wrecking the wall, getting herself out in under a minute.
"I'll have you know that was hilarious," I say as she joins me on the other side, in the lab that's getting smokier by the second. "This bromance is going too be high maintenance, isn't it?" I mutter, shaking my head as I hand her a coat she can put over the simple tunic she wears in her capacity as a lab rat.
"What's a bromance?" she asks, now almost automatically, because it's been new terms all the time ever since she got unfrozen.
"Oh, you know. An unspeakably stupid word for a friendship. That only exist because you're apparently not supposed to create deep bonds with people you don't want to have sex with, especially if you're afflicted with the y-chromosome, because god forbid... it's really dumb," I sigh in closing, since this is really no time for me to start ranting. This is a time to start hurrying through the maze of corridors towards the getaway vehicle I have stashed between two buildings I had the sneaking feeling are about to demonstrate just how flammable they are.
"So this is a bromance," she says in just-so-I'm-getting-the-terminology-right tone.
"Basically. But – and let me get this straight right now – not one that has the power to have me discuss the Skywalkers while everything is on fire. Even though that would be a nice metaphor for what their family drama did to the galaxy."
"I thought they saved the galaxy," she says, easily keeping up with me even though she's been stuck in a tiny cell for something close to two weeks now.
"It's… complicated. The galaxy wouldn't need saving if one of them wasn't both incredibly powerful and sooo easy to manipulate."
Which is where I thankfully get to drop the subject because we made it outside, both sporting only a mild case of carbon monoxide poisoning and both ready to get on with leaving the premises before the whole place goes truly explosive.
"You know," I say, taking the driver's seat and quickly wiping my eyes, tearing up from all the smoke, "days like this make me feel like I need to make some major changes. This is the third goddamn time I had to..."
"Break out a prisoner?" she says, raising her eyebrows.
"No – run from a burning lab," I explain.
"Three labs burned around you…?"
"Well, the first one wasn't really this kind of super secret Hydra operation. Still flammable though. So flammable," I say, shaking my head to clear those memories.
"You know," she says, forcing herself to look on the road as the car heads off into the darkness of the nearby woods, unnoticed in all the chaos, "you would think, considering what I do and what you do, one of us should have a more eventful life. How come we come out about the same…?"
"Because you can't have things uneventful when you work for these people. They're the Evil Galactic Empire. Or want to be. Couple of decades to get that underway and… yeah, you may have noticed, we are not ruling the world yet…"
"They."
"What?" I say, turning to her in confusion.
"They are not ruling the world. You are not one of them – not anymore. Wasn't that the point of all this…?" she reminds. And dammit, she's right. It'll get some getting used to but, yes, having done this I got my Hydra credentials revoked once and for all.
"Feels great," I smile to myself. "Even if all I can smell is singed hair and all I can hear is that voice telling me how disappointing my parents would find me. Which is good. I want to disappoint them. That's how I know I'm doing the right thing… Anything those psychopaths would disapprove of must be right just by default."
She says nothing, just leaves me to my self-satisfaction for the time being. And as the fire rages further and further behind us and the night progresses towards a bleak, Siberian dawn she once again starts to interrogate me on the subject of a certain galaxy far, far away. Which helps. In a way only introducing normalcy into what seems on a surface a perfectly insane situation can. Because while I'm trying to explain to her the convoluted weirdness that are the prequels it's a lot easier to silence that voice inside my head – the one that insists on panicking because what did you do? where are you going – with a complete stranger you've known for less than a few days and who is NOT TO BE TRUSTED?
But while she might, yes, objectively be incredibly dangerous, at least she's not a specialist on machine assisted brainwashing – like my father before me, and isn't that one hell of a legacy…?
"So… where are we going…?" she asks finally a few minutes later.
"Japan, by a very convoluted route. We may have to steal a ship and… why did I know you'll get all excited about that…?" I say, finding I'm grinning at her immediate response to those news.
"I'm a woman of action. And I didn't do anything other than pace my cell and sat through interrogations since I woke up in this century."
"And got infected by one of its most pervasive popculture memes. I mean…" I grin apologetically, since the word infected startled her as it would anyone from a time period of less than effective medicine. "Star Wars. It's a meme. An infectious idea that roots itself in people's minds and next thing they know they don't even notice they just referred to something as fully operational…" I shrug.
"What a strange concept," she shakes her head. And proceeds to interrogate me about it. Because she may be many things – deadly and deeply traumatized and still shaken by the timejump she was put through… and curious. That too. And so I indulge her because Siberia is huge, getting to the nearest city of decent size will take most of the day and, well, we do have to kill the time somehow.
And so we do.
We murder the hell out of the next few days. They just slip by in a series of increasingly exciting events that all somehow feel like the kind of thing you ought to do if your bonding roadtrip begun by burning down a Hydra compound. Before I know it I'm boarding a private place that will deliver me and Dottie to Tunisia because where else would we go? It there ever was a duo destined to hang around Mos Eisley's it's us.
"I think the term problematically evil sums it up best," I say after frowning at the problem of phrasing for a few moments. "Because we're both definitely not good people, right?"
"I don't mind being called evil. I make it look good," she adds with a smirk. I roll my eyes, though, obviously she has a point.
"But then you look at our track record of late and it's like… we should get our evil credential revoked. I mean sure, we blew up a building. Definitely evil. But, plot twist, it was a secret lab full of evil scientists. And I worked with those people. If we accidentally killed some of them, that's just further good guy points."
"I think you're overthinking this."
"Am I?" I frown, suspecting she might be right.
"You're also treating this as a mathematical problem, which it's not. There are no… good guy points," she says, making a face. "Life isn't an equation that needs to be balanced. Life just… is. You try to survive as much of it as you can."
"That's a good philosophy," I comment. And mean it. Simple as her theory of life, the universe and everything seems to be it still strikes a cord with me. And so I find myself asking the obvious question. "So are we still going to…?"
"Ask me when we get there."
I do. I ask her the same question the second I can get my laughter over her complaints over sand under control because unknowingly she just went full Annie and… "Never go full Annie…" I say between bursts of laughter. Which is obviously not the explanation she wanted. "Sorry. Just… please don't treat sand like your nemesis. I know it's coarse, rough and irritating… and it gets everywhere…"
"Is that a popcultural reference?" she says, eyes narrowing.
"Maybe," I grin. "So… I have some neurotoxins on me…" I say then, which might be a little to brutal a change of subject but it does need to be said. Because I already know what she's going to tell me…
"Why don't we do that tomorrow?" she suggests casually. And it's not because she suddenly found a liking for the mostly barren desert you're stuck looking at out here. She just knows - dead is an inevitability and life is a choice. And the life she lived? She so rarely got to make choices for herself...
"One more day won't hurt anyone…" I agree, smiling at the single sun just about deciding to sink bellow the horizon. "Good night, Westley. I'll kill you in the morning," I add under my breath because I couldn't have stopped myself if I tried.
"What was that?" she asks. In a tone that isn't really annoyed, even as it lets you know she knows that was yet another popcultural reference she couldn't help but miss.
"Princess Bride," I reply. "It's this fairytale adventure…"
"What it is with you and fairytales?" she says, shaking her head at me. Even though she's the one wearing mostly beige as one would on Tattoine, which is something I refuse to point out. Letting her stay in denial about her liking for those space magic stories is far more amusing.
"I actually didn't get to see that many back when I was target audience because my childhood…"
"Was a nightmare…?"
"Yep. So I first saw it… In a safehouse surrounded by some seriously scary mercenaries," I say, recalling the details. "It was a supremely weird situation from the get go and... yeah. This was the same day I got broken out of prison and officially disappeared off the face of the Earth. Good times. And somehow it's still a fond memory. Might be because it's a great movie," I shrug as she turns to me with a questioning smile. "And hey, since we're postponing the whole double suicide thing and have no better plans for the evening…"
She agrees surprisingly easily. Well, yes – what life she had back in the forties was so obviously lacking in entertainment it stands to reason she's all for indulging, now that there are no enemies to keep an eye out for. What people she had to fear she managed to outlive. Which is definitely the best way to go about it, even if she had no say in it.
"Alright. Let's go," she says as the sun finally sets over the annoyingly coarse, rough and irritating desert before turning around to head back for the car.
"As you wish," I grin.
"Was that another one…?"
"Maybe… Look, it's fun to play this game with you, alright? Because you can always tell I did something and never have any idea what and it's obviously low key pissing you off… It gives me an excuse to catch you up on popculture. Which is far more pleasant than catching you up on the current events. It's gone really crazy over the last few years. I'm talking the Norse gods are real and have tech like you wouldn't believe and one has been roughing it on Earth for a while and his brother went all dark side and tried to enslave us with this army of aliens from god knows where a few years back and… Wouldn't you prefer to watch a fun fairytale over getting a dose of that…?"
"I would," she admits.
"Alright then. So let's go back to the hotel and watch Princess Bride."
Which is exactly what we do. And the next day, unsurprisingly, she wants to postpone the fatal dose of neurotoxins I smuggled from the compound just one more day. Watch just one more sunset, spend just a few more hours of late night googling discovering how much the world has change since she was doing her Sleeping Beauty routine.
And so the days go by.
Life goes on. Even for the villains.