I don't need you.

When he hears those words, they twist strangely, settle sharp between his ribs. He wonders why it feels like the knife that had so directly aimed for his Sentinel, carved deep and personal.

The hard look in her eyes wavers, and he realizes she can see his eyes. The frown, the furrow of his eyebrows, and most of his augs are offline and she's-

Gone.

He has half a mind to follow her – the other half to let her do as she pleases – but Vaclav gets in the way.

He recovers to Vaclav's standards by the next afternoon – though he'd long been well enough to leave, Vaclav kept making wounded looking puppy faces at him, and he instead focused on making sure no one had seen him limp his way to the bookshop.

He runs a test of his software, hacking augs by getting into the security cameras and going back through the logs to the night it happened. He pretends to doze off in a chair while he reviews the footage. He watches himself barely get through the door before collapsing, and listens to the accompanying infolink audio files. Vaclav's panicked call, Malik's determination. She called in all of her favors in Germany for him.

He hears the wind whistle as she jumped out of her plane, and while the sound is familiar to him, she has no Icarus landing system. The crack and crash of her landing almost pulls a reaction from him, but Vaclav is too distracted in his tablet to notice. That explained the slightly off gait she'd walked out with. And what Vaclav meant by 'she almost died to bring you that.'

He should have called her as soon as he'd escaped, given her more time to get the part. His Sentinel had still been functioning then. He'd had faith that Vaclav could fix it.

He thinks back to what had gotten him caught. The pocket secretary he'd found that led him to a computer that led him to a name he knew. A name that filled him with some cocktail of dread and guilt and he'd overextended. It was only his experimental and highly dangerous augs that let him escape once they had their claws in him, ripping –

Adam is tempted to go and finish the job. Just because he'd been fired from bodyguard duty didn't mean he couldn't kill the target that was either behind most of the annoyances he'd been dealing with over the past half year or had someone even more powerful pulling the strings.

I don't need you.

He'd let her go. If she was so certain, then she could do just that.

Icarus had put off a few assassinations he'd been interested in taking, anyway. More people whose banks and bodies he could bleed dry, more instability he could seep into the dark bricks that kept organized crime afloat.

He can't stop his curiosity, though. He watches the next gala remotely, a ghost in their security system, wondering if she really will stand up to what she'd told him. One of the other guests attempts to kill her – broadcasted his intentions too clearly, moved from the side instead of behind, and brandished a weapon – and she shatters his leg with a sped up kick, slams a knife in his gut, and reaches for a drink from a passing waiter all in one motion. He dies slowly as she walks away, and Adam is impressed despite himself. This is not the same Malik he knew. He'd taught her some things just in case he'd been away, but clearly she'd been working at it in the interim.

That is not the only incident of bloodshed that evening, and she walks away unscathed and unbothered. Or so it appears, to this security camera by the exit.

Malik is, for once, finally, relaxing with a book on her couch, when she gets a call through from Pritchard. She puts the book down.

"Mal?"

"What's up, P?" she sits up. He sounds…anxious. It took a lot to get Pritchard riled up, and she was still in one piece so it wasn't her fault this time.

"Sarif knows."

The words are like a stone disturbing a still pond.

"Knows…what?" she almost doesn't want to ask.

"That you're alive. And who you are."

That explained the lack of celebratory reaching out from the CEO.

"He's not happy, is he." She's still sifting through what this means, what she has to do about it.

"No. He hasn't gone public with the information yet, for some reason, but I've seen outgoing requests to start…'putting pressure' on you."

"Fuck." She could evade, she could hide, but her networks were not so mobile. If the police started going for anything relating to the phoenix, if they went after her mechanics' clients…

"I don't…have any evidence, but. Mal, only three people knew your name." Himself. Vaclav. Adam.

Adam.

Would he? Had she pissed him off so royally by firing him that he'd decided he'd rather her entire mission crumble than kill her personally? Maybe he'd never been fired before.

"See if it could've been anything else."

"What, not even a moment of concern for your hacker who's in the same country as Sarif?" The typing is a quiet background noise to their conversation, and it makes her think she really needs to start making plans. Dissolution, hibernation, and survival plans, for all her contacts. What to do if she disappeared, how to survive until she came back.

"I'm pretty sure that even if Sarif took down my whole web, you'd be the last one he found."

"You're not wrong…"

"Be careful anyway." A small smile turns the corner of her lip upward, and he snorts in derision over the line.

"Now you're just faking it."

"You'll never know." She'd stick her tongue out if this were a vidcall, playful despite the grim news because how else could she get moving? Despair wouldn't be helpful.

"I know everything."

"Sure, snake. Thanks for the tip."

"Anytime – as long as it pays the bills."

She hangs up on him. She has work to do.

The attempts on her life don't stop just because Adam is gone, though thankfully she's lost most of the ones who were doing it to make a name. A smuggler killed without a legendary bodyguard isn't really something to put on a resume of successful kills, for which she is very grateful.

It's been a year since she fired Adam, and she only notices the time has passed by the fact that winter blankets the continent again. Crisp white snow reflecting the city lights and muffling everything. Muffling her thoughts on the fact. She hadn't heard anything from him, and she doesn't know if she's avoiding him, he's avoiding her, or both.

It's been six months since Sarif found out she's alive, and Pritchard hadn't been lying. The man had been trying to make her life hell, and where the assassination attempts had lessened, the police interference had multiplied. A few of her mechanics had dropped out of her network from the pressure, and she'd stopped stamping phoenix wings on her augs to let those who needed her help most stay under the radar.

They'd even arrested her, once. Of course, they'd taken her to a station where she new the chief personally, because she'd brought his seven-year-old girl a new pair of lungs, and he'd 'accidentally' misidentified her and let her go. But it was a good warning nonetheless. She had to be more careful.

She's returning home form a pickup of Sarif parts – a whole crate, and she'd personally assisted in the actual break in – when her thoughts stray back to Icarus. She hadn't slept as well after he'd gone, almost like she'd gotten…used to him being around. She wonders how he always slept so light, stayed so alert, constantly. It's draining, always looking over her shoulder, analyzing every single person in her view. Maybe he had augs to help with it, but that still required some incredible diligence.

She wonders who he used to be, before he picked up killing for fortunes.

Maybe there wasn't that much to it. Maybe he was just a mercenary. Somehow that doesn't fit right.

She'd spent the whole flight there and half the raid telling herself she wasn't getting these parts just for him, but some small part of her hoped he still used her mechanics. Pritchard hadn't been able to find anything pointing Adam to speaking with Sarif about her identity, but she still…

Well. She was undecided.

But just because he was fired didn't mean he didn't have a lot of money to throw at her very-much-in-need mechanics. He could pay for the work now, she'd told them all to demand he do so.

Her radar lights up with a police warning a moment before two bouts of fire appear in her cockpit, streaking towards her plane. She twists sharply, and it's just enough to avoid the missiles aiming straight for her.

Or. Mostly. The whole plane rocks with the impact of one of them into her left jet. She braces, pumps more power into the other one to try and keep herself mobile, swerving away from another attack. She fires back at them, trying to escape, but with black smoke trailing behind her she'll have to think of something else.

The decision is made for her when the plane jerks hard again, the other engine whining sharp and pleading. A quiet curse to herself and she jams the stick back as hard as she can, giving herself as much time as possible.

She's unbuckled in an instant, racing for the back of the plane, grabbing a chute as she passes – she'd learned her lesson thank you, no more walls, please. A night chute, black to help her hide. As she's throwing it on, she grabs a wrench and pries open the box of augments. Digs in one-armed, pulling out a handful – a few spare parts, a couple of fingers, two eyeballs. Small, expensive, but at least something.

Malik slaps a small tracker on the inside of the box before closing it again, popping the bay door and shoving the crate out. Fuck her if she let these guys have free augs on top of everything else.

They'd been labeled as police, and maybe Sarif's efforts were paying off, but far more likely it was someone else masquerading. Easy enough to pretend to be official authority, when all you needed was the right paint and the right frequency. Police should have given her more warning before opening fire.

She raises two fingers to her lips, kisses them and presses the fingers to the inside wall. "I'll miss you, girl." This bird had been by her side for so much, she'd even managed to get her hands back on it after leaving it with Vladimir – who had somehow convinced the police that the painting on his roof was actually a peacock, not a phoenix, and he was really a civilian plane. She'd have to get him on her crew someday.

The Phoenix leaps, and doesn't look back.

The wind whistles in her ears, and she pulls her arms wide in a snap, unfurling the flaps in her wingsuit. The sudden wind resistance buffets her, and she rolls just for the hell of it. Her first real dive since she'd been strapped to a box of an aug, and it felt so much nicer to have free range of all her limbs. She makes sure to drift as far as she can from her plane, diving fast.

Not far enough to avoid watching the explosion as her plane dives into the ground. She doesn't miss the flames licking up the wings, one broken off and the other lit in this eerie glow. The phoenix afire, and she swears that won't be her too.

She turns away, seeking a target, the direction closest to a city, and misses the next impact of something hitting the ground.

When she's three hundred feet above ground, almost too close, she pulls her chute, and the snap of it picking up as much air as it could is almost enough to slow her fall perfectly into the field she'd been aiming for-

She'd waited a heartbeat too long to pull, and crashes into a tree instead.

She was very glad there was no one here with her, suddenly. She drops from the tree, unbuckling her harness, and while she'd much rather there be no proof anyone jumped from the plane, she doesn't have time to climb up and get it.

Malik lands roughly on the ground, rolling her shoulder and straightening up.

Her breath fogs in the air, and she wishes she'd grabbed a jacket too on her way out.

A northern European forest in the dead of winter, and the nearest city lights she'd seen had been almost on the horizon from ground level. Well, it was a good thing Vaclav had given her a weaponized heater. She could always just curl up around her leg and stay warm.

After she got away from all this. She was more than certain that whoever had shot her down wouldn't be satisfied with just the exploded plane. They'd want to make sure she had been in it too, and she's not as far from the crash site as she'd have liked. They'll have come prepared with infrared goggles – no wonder there hadn't been any attempts on her until winter had fully set in.

She wonders how long this has been planned for.

She walks quietly, arms crossed and her hands shoved up near her armpits. Made for harder walking but she'd rather keep her fingers. She'd turned on the leg heater a while back, hoping the warmth would seep into her thigh and from there into the rest of her.

She only realizes the heat moves outward too when her next footstep sinks deeper than her right foot goes. She must have warmed up her boot too. Maybe she'll ask Vaclav later if he can give her a heater setting that only channels upward.

Half an hour passes before she hears distant shouting, and she hopes that it's just them finding her chute and not her footprints. She picks up the pace regardless, uncrossing her hands and reaching for her gun. She hopes they don't have snowshoes.

They do. Of course they do. Or she thinks they do, since she hears something closer now, not a voice but noise regardless. They'll catch up to her soon at this rate and has to change plans. She walks a little further, snapping a branch as she goes, and then doubles back at a small creek, erasing her new footprints as she does and hiding further back. She doesn't like the thought of being surrounded, but it's that or take however many are following her head-on and that sounds worse.

Malik crouches by a large bush, leaning against a tree and she covers her mouth, keeps her breath from fogging into the open air. They don't pass too close by, but she hears one say "Where the hell is he?"

They'd gotten this close to her, planned so much, and didn't even know she was the Phoenix? How was that possible?

"Whatever," says another one. "The tracks end here. Fucker can't've gone far."

"Yeah, alright. Priming."

Priming? She should've gone farther. If she's about to explode because of some ground-bomb when she had gotten this far-

A crackle of blue fills her- well it's not her sight but she feels it. Her neural augs flicker and die, and her leg goes dark, the heat leeching out of it suddenly. She bites down a curse – they'd been priming an EMP field. They knew she had an augmented leg. She was trapped.

So who was the he?

A gunshot rings out, a thud, and she's hauling herself up. She'd limp on her dead leg if she had to, but if someone was opening fire she needed to get gone. She pulls out a knife too, braces it under her gun, and hobbles away from the source of the noise.

There's another shout, of recognition, a triumphant snarl, and she's turning to fire first-

Another gunshot cracks and-

Electric gold crackles from the corner of her vision and slams into her hard. The force of it carries her into a tree, her cheek grinding against bark and she lashes out at it with her knife. Her blade slides off against metal, sparks falling and she can't see, she's pinned against the wood and one of her legs isn't working-

A growl cuts into her ear. "Faridah. Quiet."

Her body betrays her mind and relaxes despite the fact that Adam fucking Jensen is pinning her to a tree and she hears his glass cloak engaging. What the hell was he doing here?

"I fired you. Let go of me," she snaps, trying to twist out of his grip and his hands are on her arms, gripping them tightly, and they're freezing. She hisses through her teeth.

"Means I don't have to listen to you. Quiet." His chest is pressed solidly against her back, and she feels his body armor dig into her shoulder blades, gritting her teeth.

Indignation flares up in her chest, but the sound of a shout is enough to make her stop fighting him.

"Icarus?" the voice calls and…huh. Maybe he was here to kill her.

"Yup." The assassin answers, the 'p' popping from his lips, shifting fluidly as the glass cloak disengages and she hears the all-too-familiar sound of a nanoblade as it launches toward his target. The man crumples with a gurgle and Adam lets go of her suddenly.

She stumbles away, her leg still a dead weight, clutching her gun tightly, knuckles white. He'd knocked away her knife, and she's staring him down, unsure. Of what he's going to do. Why he's here.

"If you wanted me dead, you could have just come and done it yourself. You didn't have to tell Sarif." She starts with that. See his reaction. If she was going to die at least she'd have this one mystery solved.

His brow furrows in what she'd learned to be mild confusion, maybe annoyance. Like he doesn't know what she's talking about. "Sarif?"

"Yeah. He knows my name. Only three people had that information."

He puts the pieces together quickly enough. "You think I told Sarif?" He doesn't bother hiding the incredulity in his tone.

"Where else would he get it?" It's an honest question. Because if it wasn't Adam, she has a much bigger problem.

"I would rather see that man burn than give him any modicum of help and you think-"

"Then why are you here?" Her arms relax, the gun pointed downward and held loosely. Really, she'd only been holding it so tight on instinct, as if she'd be able to do anything against Adam and his TITAN shield. She ignores how strange her voice sounds. A weight behind the words she hadn't been aware she was carrying.

For what it was worth, the question seems to stall him. He doesn't answer, as if there's more than one answer to her question and he's choosing which.

"A hit." He finally says.

"On me?" If Icarus was working with them, then no wonder they had EMP fields ready, infrared goggles, snow shoes. He would oversee an operation so prepared. So why did he shoot them?

He doesn't answer, but the silence is answer enough.

"And you killed your coworkers becauseeee…" she really has no idea on that one.

"If I hadn't taken the job they were going to put a bomb on your plane."

Huh.

They'd thought he was deadlier, and he'd…proven to be the opposite? So far, anyway.

She sighs. Stows her gun so she can cross her arms again and try to warm them up.

"Why do you care?" there's that heaviness again. She almost sounds…despondent. Why does this bother her so? She should take advantage of it and run, not try and figure out why.

He doesn't answer her, his gaze snapping off to the distance, and she's reminded that they are very much not alone in this forest. He glances in the other direction, the one she'd been heading in, and she starts moving before he says anything.

Whatever. He'd do as he pleased, that much was clear. She'd get out of the EMP field and she'd jam a biocell into her leg to kickstart it and either he'd kill her or he wouldn't. It wasn't worth tangling her mind up over.

Faridah walks. And Icarus follows.

They walk in silence, the snow crunching under their feet, and Malik hates that he won't speak, won't answer her question.

Eventually, he disappears. Takes off in a flash of gold, and she's…relieved. If he's not here she doesn't have to keep asking herself why he won't say anything.

She's also tired of walking, tired of being cold. She'll just curl up by one of these big trees and curl around her leg until she can feel her hands again. She'll call Vaclav and have him reach out to her nearest crew and have them pick her up.

Icarus will either come back and kill her or he won't. She's done trying to calculate what he's going to do next.

She drops against the roots of a great old tree, leaning her back away from it and into the wind, and curls tight around her leg. Her hands on it feel like heaven, like the warmth of a mug of tea in her window, hands wrapped around it and home. She presses a cheek to her knee, sighs in relief and soon turns her head to rest the other cheek against it.

Slowly, she thaws.

The forest is still, quiet and dead around her, and no one appears. Neither her hunters, nor the assassin.

She closes her eyes.

What feels like hours later, a sparking dash jerks her awake. She stays still, unmoving, wondering despite herself.

He rounds the corner, she hears his footfalls despite the aug silences – the snow still crunches, after all – and she hears a sharp inhale. "Malik?" Is that…concern?

She deigns him a glance with only one eye, the other still closed in warm bliss against her leg. Honestly, how was he not cold with that many augs? They should all have been leeching heat from him, unless each individual one had an internal heater. Maybe they did.

He moves suddenly, and she tenses, bracing herself. His coat is off and before she can comprehend he's draping it over her shoulders and trying another "Fari-"

And it's too much. She can't take this. Her feet against the root and she slides herself backwards, out of his reach and the coat slips out of his grasp over her, warm despite it all and-

"Why. Are. You. Here?"

His hands drop to his sides, crouching a mere few feet away from her, this living weapon who had devoted himself to protecting her, had almost died for her, and had just as easily left.

He's certainly smart enough to know that 'because you're the only real Sarif supplier' isn't going to cut it. No one was that reliant on a single supplier, not anyone who wanted to live long. There's something else at play.

Finally, he shifts. His shades flick open, almost like an olive branch extended, and. He inhales slowly. "Because it's my fault you died in the first place."

Faridah Malik is well and truly lost. "What?" It's the barest sound, and the only way she knows she even spoke it aloud is the accompanying puff of breath into the frost-bitten air.

He has the audacity to sigh. "When Sarif hired me, he hired me to be his chief of security, but mostly to find out who was stealing from him. I had a few suspects, but you were a likely candidate. I looked into your flight plan and knew you'd be going into danger but I didn't warn you. I thought you'd bail and your employer would hide you away. When…." He pauses and she wonders why she didn't remember any of this when she first learned his name. Why hadn't it rung any bells? Had she just never met him? Maybe she'd deliberately stayed out of his way, skittish and nervous, afraid to be found out.

"When you didn't come back, I thought I was right. And then they found your plane."

She's brought back to her other question. Why does he care? Why hadn't he washed his hands of her then? She says nothing, feels like if she interrupts he'll never start again.

"I knew I had sent you to your death. And even if I was right in the end…it wasn't worth it."

Malik feels like she can't put the pieces together as fast as he's laying them out.

"I told myself I wouldn't do that again. If I found you, I wouldn't be the reason you died."

And he almost had been, again. He'd done something to piss her off enough that she fired him and then she almost got killed who knew how many times in the interim when he could have been there.

"Why me?" she crosses her arms, looking at him warily. It didn't make sense. "You have no qualms killing others." It is not an accusation, just a statement of fact. She is the same.

"You're different," is his only answer.

Helpful.

"You don't even know why I fired you, do you?" It's a quiet realization, a reminder of the fact that she still carries his contract in her pocket, hadn't been able to set it down. She had no idea what kept drawing her to him, but she ignored it as best she could and just…kept the damn paper.

"I ignored orders," he answered, like it was obvious, an eyebrow raised. The expression is aching in its familiarity and yet she feels like the mere feet between them is a gaping canyon's maw.

"No," she snaps. "Because my life isn't worth yours!"

The silence hangs in the air, as brittle as the leaves on the tree above them. Waiting to be shattered.

"Oh." A soft exhale.

She stares hard at him, trying to read him now more than ever, and he just looks at her like he's…stunned. Like she dealt him a blow he wasn't even expecting.

For a moment, she thinks he's about to say something else, but a rustle in the distance catches both their attention, and he stands suddenly, offering her his hand. Arm outstretched, palm up, the black metal glinting in the low light of the night, the only light sources the moon filtering through the leaves and her leg beneath.

An offer.

She hesitates for a single heartbeat, before reaching up and clasping it, letting him pull her up. Just what this was, she didn't know, but.

Maybe there was something here.

Something that kept bringing them into each other's orbit. Drawing them into this spiraling dance where neither knew what the other was thinking but thought that…maybe it was the same.

That maybe they should stick together.