They walk side by side, Icarus half a step behind, and he refused to take his coat back. It drapes over her shoulders and she feels the warmth seep into her bones, and it answers the subtle question – there's warmth in the shoulder and arms too, his augs must be heated. He's left in his combat vest, his guns hanging from his shoulder harness in the open, the black augs glinting low in the moonlight. Their feet crunch through the snow, through the otherwise still forest, and she wonders if he'd left any alive or he's just wary about reinforcements coming to find them.
"You know," she eventually says, just to break the silence, to feel like it hasn't been a year since she last saw him. "when you first agreed to work for me, I just thought you were highly devoted to the metaphor." A sideways glance towards him, ignoring how her hands are curled into his coat to keep them warm. The only frostbite he had to worry about was his nose, the lucky bastard.
"The metaphor?" he raises an eyebrow at her, the one that says he's humoring her.
"Icarus needs some fiery thing to chase. There's no one with a Sun moniker in Europe, so I figured you settled for the next best thing." There's a smile pulling at the corners of her lips, and she marvels at how…easy it was to get back into the groove of having him around. She doesn't even know if he's planning on staying, for fuck's sake.
"You thought I chose a job because your emblem fit mine."
She snorts at the utter disbelief in his tone. "Yeah I mean, what else did you give me to go on?"
"Let me get this straight. You heard of a new assassin and you sought him out, despite thinking he was trying to kill you, and asked him to work for you. And when he said yes, and then stuck around, you assumed it was because of a metaphor."
"Yeah that sounds about right." She's holding back a laugh as she says it. He's looking at her like he can't believe she's telling he truth here.
"You really are something else," he huffs. She can't hold back her laugh, then.
"So I'm told." A wider smirk. "More often than you might expect."
He shakes his head at her like, no, really not. Perhaps even less than he might think she does.
Its then that Malik realizes her infolink still isn't working, despite the biocell she'd used earlier. Frowning. She'd expected it to boot back up after leaving the EMP field, and that it still hasn't is worrying. Until then, she…honestly hadn't noticed. Had been busy falling back into what she'd had with him before. It shouldn't have been so easy. She's still mad at him, dammit.
She reaches a hand up to rub at her forehead, like she can massage it into working again. Icarus notices the movement. "Is your infolink working? Mine won't start and Vaclav is going to lose his shit in about ten minutes if I don't call and tell him everything is fine. He may already be losing his shit if my plane is on the news."
Adam Jensen has the decency to look sheepish about that, which makes her think he is very much to blame for the EMP field.
"Thought you used a biocell to bring it back?" his voice rumbles in the quiet dark, a sound like it belongs in this frozen forest.
"Yeah. It's not behaving." She thinks if it wasn't so cold, she might have a headache from it. Small mercies, she supposes. She realizes asking him to call Vaclav is tantamount to asking him to stay. Wonders if he will. "Can you call him? He needs to know I'm stuck regardless."
The assassin doesn't say anything, only glancing at her before looking at the trees above them. She assumes he's calling.
Eventually, he speaks. "the Phoenix sends her regards-"
She interrupts him before the last word leaves his mouth, "You make it sound like I'm dead-" and the smirk on his face tells her that Vaclav must be saying something similar-
"And also that she's stuck with a dead infolink in Poland."
It silences her, but she glowers at him anyway to get her point across.
"I can send you coordinates, but we're still moving." A pause. "Sure."
It seems he's hung up, since he's looking at her now.
She just huffs, instead of saying anything. Glances skyward like he had, notices the spattering of stars filtering through frozen leaf canopies. More stars than she's used to seeing in the cities she frequents, and she doesn't often stop in the middle of nowhere to appreciate them. She thinks she should, maybe. She can feel Adam's eyes on her, and she wonders what he's thinking.
She wonders if he wants to stay.
"Koller say anything of note?" she asks, ignoring the question she really wants answered.
"That you should call him as soon as your infolink works."
"I mean I figured that much was obvious."
There's an ache in her chest, something close to the cold bite of the air in her lungs. Cracks through her ribs and strung tight around her throat. She can't figure out what it is. Some mixture of longing and fear and a knowledge that she broke this in a way she's not sure how to fix.
"Think we're far enough away to stop 'till morning? I think I can feel frost in my boot." She sees a large tree bowed over sharply, thinks it might make a nice shelter. She'd kill for a fire.
"Sure," he answers. She wonders if that's a yes or an I'll make sure we are. Doesn't mind much either way. She's immediately moving over to the tree and clearing the snow with her feet, making room for a fire. She doesn't care if the light or the smoke gives them away she needs a fire before she forgets how it feels to be warm.
Through some mixture of pressing twigs to her heated leg – Adam is doing the same, she thinks – they get enough wood dry to the minimum it needs to catch. The fire starts small and Malik is all but putting her hands palm-flat onto the smoldering wood.
The first time the fire crackles, Malik startles, which makes Adam look a bit more rigid, before they both realize it was just the fire. He snorts to himself, at her, as if she didn't have a reason to be on edge, as he stacks some larger branches along the outside of the fire to dry while the ones in it burn. She just revels in how his coat actually seemed to stop the wind straight on, and how much warmer she is since he forced it over her shoulders.
The silence is made all the more deafening by the intermittent pops of firewood.
Malik eventually reaches into her pocket, feels Adam's folded up contract in her hands. Dried blood on it. Kept close regardless. She inhales slow, steeling herself, wondering why she's doing this. She's supposed to be furious, hell, he threw her into a tree, not wanting him back. Not waiting, hesitating, long enough to find out, to change her mind.
She pulls out the paper before she can pretend he hasn't heard it, seen her movement. A thick swallow as she offers it to the empty space between them.
"Do you…want this back?" so many questions tangled in one utterance, pulled from her in the quiet. Do you want to stay? Why did you come back? What are you here for?
He looks at it like he doesn't know what it is. No…wait, that's surprise. He's surprised she kept it. That she had it on her.
"You knew I'd be here?" he asks, instead of answering.
"No." She's honest, even if it means admitting that she's had this one thing on her for the past year.
"No." he repeats, as if he didn't hear her. As if he couldn't have heard correctly.
She says nothing, just shifting her hand, the paper in it catching the flickering firelight.
He reaches for it, just like she reached for his hand. Before his fingers close on it, she pulls it back a little, suddenly. "No more getting yourself almost killed?"
"No more," he concedes.
"Condition number one is you keep yourself alive." She almost sounds threatening.
"That's not exactly how bodyguarding works," he protests, but he's humoring her, she thinks.
"I wasn't anywhere near you that time."
"Alright, alright. I accept."
She offers it back to him, then.
He takes it, and she can't stop the small smile that blooms on her face. The matching one on his doesn't escape her notice.
They sit in the quiet, the fire crackling the only noise, and Malik drifts without meaning to. It's warm, and she's. Safe. For the first time in a year, she doesn't have to start at every noise, and she'd have been warier about falling into this comfort so easily but the raid coupled with the fall, on top of running for her life and then running into him has left her bone-tired.
The wind changes direction, shifts so it's coming at them instead of from behind, and the sudden cold seeping through his coat and it wakes Malik with a start. Instead of finding her chin pillowed on her arms, her head is on…Adam's shoulder, isn't it.
His shades are on, but she sees the softness in his expression, the lack of tension in his forehead, for just an instant before he notices she's awake. Huh.
She looks sheepish, pulling her head off him in a start and scooting away suddenly. "Shit- sorry," she hadn't meant to fall asleep.
"It's fine," he reassures her, and she scrubs at her face. If she was any groggier she might scoop a handful or two of snow just to rub in her face and wake up. The warmth she'd clawed together is hard-won though, and she'll be damned if she gives it up so easily.
The cheek that had been on Adam's shoulder is also, strangely, warm. She pretends she didn't notice that.
"What time 's it?" rubbing at her forehead, trying to see if her infolink will start up now. It doesn't, but her HUD lights up, at least. A little glitchy, and not quite able to pinpoint their location, but it's a baby step in the right direction.
"4:03," he answers, looking at her with a frown. "Infolink still down?"
"Think so. I'm gonna need another biocell to get it to behave." She's subconsciously reaching into her pocket for the dose of neuropozyne she'd missed last night in the mad rush, and. Stops. Her lips thinning into a frown, as she pulls out the shattered vial from her flightsuit and holds it up at the assassin, waving the broken and empty top back and forth in the low light of the dying fire. "You wouldn't mind sparing me some nupoz, since you broke mine into a tree and all?" It's half teasing, since she's sure he has plenty on hand for all of his extensive augmentation.
Adam Jensen actually flinches. "Uh. No." He brings a hand up to the back of his neck. "I don't have any on me."
"You don't." She's in utter disbelief. Is he trying to tell her he doesn't have enough to share? "You're telling me the most infamous assassin, who prepared a team with snowshoes and goggles and EMP fields didn't bring himself neuropozyne, when he has at least three more augs than I do." At least.
"Don't need it." His answer is gruff, half a snap, and she wonders where that came from. Is he bitter about it, angry at her, or angry at himself for breaking hers? Perhaps a mixture of all three.
A few pieces click into place that she's not sure she wanted to see.
"That's why Sarif augged you to the teeth." It's quiet in the still-frozen dark, a little horrified, and if he ignores the words it'll be like she never spoke them.
He doesn't answer her in words, but huffs, just a single nod accompanying it.
"Asshole." She bites the word out into the frost. He nods, and she moves to stand. "Guess that means I have an even more pressing reason to get to town." She wasn't anywhere near her territory, though, and she knew smaller cities had less resources for augs anyway.
Not to mention, she didn't have a prescription. She was dead, after all. And if he didn't need it, then he didn't have one either.
She'll worry about it later. There was some time before rejection set in, anyway. She kicks snow over the small fire, making sure its out and hidden, before pulling Adam's coat off her shoulders and offering it to him. "Thanks," she says. For this. For coming back. For so many unspoken things.
He tries to refuse the coat.
"I am going to just leave it here if you don't take it." The sun will be up soon, she's warm enough, and they're going to get walking anyway. She waits a second longer before letting go of it, watching it start to fall toward the snow and the charred coal remnants of their fire.
He snatches it out of the air before it can, looking annoyed. She grins back at him, turning around and walking off, northeast. That was the nearest large town, Hajnówka, if she was reading her HUD right and it wasn't lying to her. Adam will stop her if she is, she hopes. Maybe he wouldn't, though, just for the hell of it. She actually wouldn't put it past him.
They walk until it's light, and it's only as they near a road that Malik has second thoughts. "You think they'd spread out this far looking?" It wasn't police, they wouldn't have used Adam, but that didn't mean that they didn't have the funding to go bigger when they'd found out she escaped. "Won't they be after you too?"
"Not if I check in."
She wonders how he intends to juggle this. He's risking his integrity and reputation by going back on an agreement, by lying to a client and then killing their men.
"I'd tell you to try and look a little less suspicious, but I don't think you physically can." Not to mention, she still had that firebird emblazoned over her shoulders. The both of them would stick out like sore thumbs. Maybe a winter jacket was the first thing in order for her. She had to have a credit chip on her somewhere.
He snorts at her, lifts a hand like he's going to start drafting an email. Mindlessly checking his pockets with his other hand, and quietly handing her a biocell when he finds one. She wonders why he didn't mention having one earlier, but she'd felt how heavy his coat was when it had been around her shoulders – maybe he had so much in it that he didn't honestly know he had one.
She presses it to her forehead, right up against her chip, and squeezes the trigger, feeling the sweet jolt of energy flood into alloy. And oh, her HUD stops glitching against her eyes and she feels her infolink come alive again. Maybe her leg had sapped too much energy being a constant heater and none could be routed to her neural augs. Whatever the problem, it seemed to be fixed.
She's immediately calling Vaclav.
"Kid?" as soon as he picks up.
"Mal, thank fuck you're alright-" a loud exhale of relief on his end, and she can't help but smile.
"Sorry for going dark on you so long. I-link wouldn't start up till I found a second biocell." They're standing near the edge of the forest, haven't moved out from cover and well hidden from the road and any passersby. "How's everything over there?"
"No no, you do not get to do that to me, Phoenix, you don't get to have Icarus call me for you and then act like nothing big has happened. What is going on over there?" he's wound himself up, and she thinks newsfeeds have been to blame, on top of her radio silence.
"He uh…took a hit on me so that they wouldn't put a bomb on my plane and offered to work for me again?" she doesn't mention that she asked him to, that she offered it first. The wording catches Adam's attention, his eyebrow lifting at her as he sends his message.
"You re-hired the assassin that you fired to be your bodyguard because he, let me make sure I get this clear, accepted a probably large amount of money to kill you and hasn't yet?" Vaclav would be holding her by the shoulders and shaking if she were there with him, she thinks.
"Yeah, more or less."
"Mal."
"I don't think he's here to kill me, V. Anyway, I have something a little more important to deal with-"
"What could possibly-"
"Can you point me to the nearest place I can get nupoz?" Quiet. He knows many people in Europe, knows who she might be able to turn to outside of her territory. He'd dealt with a lot of people in the underground, even while working for the Dvali.
"Oh fuck, you don't have any?"
"It uh. Broke."
"When were you supposed to take it?"
"Last night. Should be okay for a little longer." If she started pushing it, her leg would shut down. Her neural chip would start to really fuck around with her.
"Where are you?"
"Hajnówka," she answers. "Poland. Right on the outskirts of that giant fuck-all forest." They'd wanted her to crash into it. Make it harder for police to get to the wreckage before they could.
"I don't know anyone there. Closest contact I have is in Brest. Can you get there? I'll send you his contact info and tell him to expect a call." Not naming her, of course. He knows better.
"Thanks, V. I owe you dinner when I get back."
"I'm just. Glad to hear you're okay." A heavy sigh, and the guilt twists sharp in her chest at worrying him. "I'll tell our hacker friend."
"Talk to you soon."
Adam is waiting patiently, keeping an eye on their surroundings. Glancing at her as she finishes her call, and then at the town just beyond them.
"He doesn't know anyone here. Brest is our best bet."
"Our brest bet?" he offers. She snorts before she can force herself to groan, shoulders shaking in the quiet morning.
"You stop that." She's digging in her pockets, pulling out all her credit chips. Not enough for an hour and a half taxi south. "Guess we're stealing a car." Funny, that she tried to do something legally, when she'd been robbed of the one thing that made her feel free.
They walk into town, a quiet side-road, and it's still early enough – and cold enough, below freezing – that people haven't quite woken up yet.
"Take your pick," he offers, holding his right hand up, a ring on his thumb joint lighting up.
"You can hack cars." What can't he do?
"Their alarms, at least."
"Well, good thing I know how to hotwire 'em."
"Should I ask why?"
"College," she answers, pointing out a beaten up, dark blue car at the end of the street, near enough to a tree that they can stay more or less hidden.
He twists his wrist, the light shifting green, before dropping his hand. "All yours." Malik has no doubt he could hotwire a car too, and as she's forcing the locks open and digging in under the steering column, she idly wonders how he got from job to job before working for a pilot. Maybe she'll ask later. The engine turns over, the car starting up with a sputter, and she grins victoriously. One of her faster jobs, she thinks to herself, sliding into the seat and unlocking the passenger side for Adam to climb into. He does, and they take off south.
Malik does ask while they drive, the sun rising and dyeing the snow-covered ground pink and gold, the world around them waking up.
"Can you hotwire a car?" She wishes she had a cup of coffee. Some warm breakfast. She'll get some when they get to Brest.
He huffs in amusement. "Yes."
"Where'd you learn to?"
"My old job." He seems like he's fighting a smirk, and Malik forces herself to remember that she's still mad at him, he's not off the hook yet.
"What, were you a car thief?"
"Cop."
She chokes, almost swerves off the freeway. He's almost full-on grinning at her, and she thinks- he has to be fucking with her.
"You're joking."
He doesn't deign her with an answer.
"The world's most expensive assassin was a cop?" She's so tempted to look over at him again instead of the mostly empty road, but she has no idea when it'll turn a tight corner, and she just spares him the quickest of glances. He seems to be enjoying himself.
"You're telling me Sarif screwed you over so hard you totally gave up on law?" It's not the most unbelievable thing – if Sarif abused legal contracts to do what he'd done to her, she'd give up entirely on law and order too.
"Something like that." He doesn't elaborate, and she thinks this might be a touchy subject. Drops it for now.
They get to Brest, dump the car near a scrap yard, and go out in search of breakfast. Or at least, Malik does. Adam pulls out some kind of bar from his coat, offers it to her, and shrugs when she refuses, biting down on it. She wants coffee, something warm, needs the caffeine before she even starts to engage with the underground again.
One that probably thought she was dead. Again.
Maybe they would finally start to learn that she wasn't so easy to kill.
There's a small coffeeshop nestled in a quiet corner of a street that looked like it got busy in the afternoons, open so early and she smells the coffee brewing from down the street. Follows her nose and is immediately stepping through the door once she finds the shop. Ordering herself the largest latte she can get, with as many shots of espresso as they'll let her, picking out a pastry from the shelf.
"What do you want?" she asks him when he walks in behind her.
He surprises her by ordering something sweet, caramel-laden coffee and a sugary pastry. She doesn't question it, handing a credit chip over and smiling warm at the girl behind the counter. Tipping her extra for her patience with Malik's rusty Russian – she'd picked it up the same way she'd gotten all her other languages, most of them in flight school so she knew no one was talking shit about her, but it had been a while since she'd had to use it.
Malik reaches out to Vaclav's contact while they eat, tearing into her pastry – something cheesy and with ham – and ignoring the way Adam seems to be watching her. Paying less attention to their surroundings, and she idly wonders why that is.
She forgets her curiosity when the mechanic tells her she can't come by until the evening. Annoyed. No one made the Phoenix wait – but that was just it. She hadn't announced her identity, knew it was better to stay hidden than reveal herself to a mechanic she didn't know or trust.
"Well, guess we have a day to kill. He's not far across the city, and says he doesn't get to his shop until night anyway." She supposes that was when most mechanics did business, anyway. Not just Vaclav and his awful sleep schedule. Augs still had to work, after all, and procedures tended to be lengthy. "
Brest day ever," she intones into her coffee.
Adam snorts, this time. She smiles crooked, sitting up and rolling out her shoulders.
"Guess that gives me time to look into finding a new plane." It had been a while since she'd had to shop for one, and she already missed hers immensely. She didn't want a new one.
Didn't change the fact that hers was blown up in an ancient forest. She'd have to get the next one painted even more extravagantly in tribute.
They spend most of the day in a quiet corner of the café, eating sandwiches for lunch, and Adam slumps against the wall while she starts researching how many planes of her model were available and around. He seems to get some rest, finally, and she does her best not to move, to do nothing that would startle him, while he does. She doesn't know if he's even asleep, if he could be in such a public space, but she hopes for his sake that he is.
Malik only moves to get up when the sun starts to set, ordering a last coffee to go – another sweet one for Adam, just in case it hadn't been a one-off craving – and setting it down in front of him, a quiet murmur of his last name. He doesn't jerk or startle, so she thinks he must have been awake longer than just then.
"Let's go." He nods, takes the coffee from her, and his rigid stoicism softens when he takes a sip of the sweet drink.
"Who knew you had a sweet-tooth?" she asks lightly, teasing as they leave the shop with a wave to the baristas.
"If you tell anyone, I have to kill you," he responds, voice a flat tone.
She snorts. "Your secret is safe with me, Mr. Jensen."
Their stroll takes them past an over-busy LIMB clinic, and Malik idly wonders if she'd missed something. Some news of this city having shortages? She'd been so busy, shoulders-deep in that Sarif raid and making sure it all went well that she hadn't kept an ear out for any other cities she might need to reach out to. Maybe she'd do that when she met this mechanic contact of Vaclav's.
They reach the mechanic's shop just as the street lights ignite, washing the empty road in orange light as the last of the sun's rays leech from the sky, leaving the stars to their dark blanket.
Malik reaches for the door handle, and something a street over explodes.
Adam pulls her behind him, and she's searching for the cause of the sound, for what's happening-
He groans something guttural and pained, and she thinks he's hurt-
"Adam?" stepping aside and around to get a better look, because that explosion had sounded far away and-
His nanoblade snaps out, the servos in his arm whining fierce and sharp, almost like he's fighting it. Chest heaving for air, and he whirls to face her at the movement.
"Fari-" it's cut off by another snarl, a hand reaching to press into his forehead.
Before she can fully comprehend, he's pointing the nanoblade at her, and she just barely drops out of the way as he launches it. At her.
Adam Jensen is trying to kill her.