A/N: I swear to god, these two are going to kill me. (I mean seriously.) This follows immediately on from 'The Real Fake Car Job'. Also references the last scene from 'D.B. Cooper Job', because that's still on my mind, too. (Seriously, these two omgggg.)

"Wanting to move on, with or without you? It matters. We matter."

"That's nice to hear," she said after a moment, as something a little bit tight and tense loosened in her chest. Her eyes fell away from his, dropping to the bartop between them. "Sometimes I have to wonder, though. About... all the things we still aren't telling each other. The things we still don't talk about."

"Keeping secrets, Soph?"

Was she keeping secrets? Well, of course she was, but then, he knew about the secrets she was keeping. Most of them, anyway. She couldn't say the same for him. Did he really think she hadn't noticed that something was going on?

That wasn't her point, however.

"But then it occurs to me," she went on, "Why all of that, somehow, doesn't seem to matter so much. Only think, Nate, where we were just a few years ago. I didn't know myself; you were trying to forget yourself. We kept bringing up the past because we had no idea how to negotiate the present. And look at us - here we are, talking about the future. Our future. It's been a strange, uneasy path getting here, hasn't it?" She smiled crookedly as she looked down at the bar, her fingers tracing an idle, swirling pattern following the wood grain. "Sometimes it's hard to believe we ever made it at all."

"None of us knew where this was going when we first started out."

"No one ever does. How does a control freak even begin to deal with the uncertainty? Doesn't it drive you mad?"

"You play the odds. You plan for the worst."

"You still have to roll the dice, though, in the end."

"It comes down to our choices. We can control our choices, that's all." His face took on a half-smile of amusement. "I could have been a priest, you know. Avoided a whole lot of trouble."

"Mm. Bet you could have been a lot of things. Still could be, clever man like you. I'm sure you've got a bright future ahead of you."

"A cowboy. An astronaut."

She picked up her empty glass and indicated with it. "A bartender."

He took the glass and made his way around behind the bar, slinging a cloth over his shoulder for effect before pouring her drink, and then another for himself.

She accepted the refill and held up the glass. "To the future?" He nodded and they drank together. She swallowed slowly, appreciating the burn. "Eliot thinks I wouldn't make it, settling down. Being normal."

He shrugged. "Why would he know any better than you? You've tried it before."

"Tried, being the operative word."

She knew he was thinking of the day when he had come to find her in a little theatre in Chicago.

She was thinking of an earlier time; of a girl who married a man she had honestly loved - only to find it wasn't nearly enough.

"You were a different person, then," he spoke into her silence, and she had to wonder how much he knew - or thought he knew, about that time in her life. "You know yourself better, now, don't you?"

She knew what was important. She knew what she wanted. She'd come to believe those were more or less the same thing.

"A normal life," she mused. "Well, there's normal and there's normal, isn't there?"

"Exactly. You know, a bartender, a priest, a... whatever job title you want to call whatever it is I do now. They all have one thing in common. People, they -"

"They tell you their troubles," she finished for him. "Funny, that. What were you saying about choices?"

He shook his head, taking a sip from his drink. "No, nothing is predetermined."

She set her elbows on the bar, her chin in her hands. "If I tell you I believe in fate, will your head explode?"

"You don't believe in fate."

"Don't I?" He frowned; he wasn't sure now. She laughed a little. "Nate, you may not be the hero in this little story of ours, but you're not like the sirens, either. You use the siren song as a tactic, and you use it well. They doom themselves with their own weaknesses. But these are no hapless sailors, no innocents. They doom themselves. Remember that."

"So it's, what, the hand of fate?"

"Call it poetic justice - easier to swallow. And don't argue with me on this, I know my literary devices."

He smirked. "Of course you do."

"You know, I think I should have asked you which character you think I am. Could be quite revealing. Don't say Penelope," she ordered quickly, before he even had a chance to consider the question. "All that virtue, all that waiting. Please, the woman's rich, she's got her own bloody island, and a bunch of Greek men jumping at the chance to woo her. We should all have her problems. And what does she do? Cry her eyes out every night waiting for her idiot husband to learn how to read a map."

"So... not Penelope."

"No."

"Okay, then you would be -"

"And don't you dare say Circe, either." He tried once more to speak and she jumped in again. "Or Helen."

"Hey, you know, Helen had to have been more than just a pretty face. To cause that much trouble?"

"I think you're vastly underestimating the shallowness of men, but whatever. She was a pawn, poor thing. You'll have to do better than that."

He took a breath, waited to see if she would interrupt again, and then said: "Athena."

"Hmm. Goddess of Wisdom and War. Known for her wit and wiles. Acceptable."

"Stand beside me, Athena," he quoted. "Stand by me, my bright-eyed one - and I would fight three hundred men, great goddess, with you to brace me. She was his patron, his greatest ally. He couldn't have done any of it without her, you know."

"I thought you weren't Odysseus."

He shrugged. "It's not a perfect analogy."

"Yes well, the heroic sagas - none of them were ever much ones for self-determination. It was always the gods guiding their paths, directing their actions. Saving them from folly."

"Give me a choice, any day. Even if I'm the one dooming myself in the end."

"Control freak," she said, but she said it fondly. He was her control freak, after all.

He spread his hands, not disputing the label. Then he picked up the bottle again. "Another?"

She shook her head. "It's late."

"So. You, uh, you ever take the bartender home with you?"

"No, no, Nate, come on. There you go, focusing on the past again. What you want to be asking is, will I take the bartender home with me tonight?"

"You could tell me your troubles."

"Perhaps I could."

The truth was, they seemed less troublesome these days - less present, less painful than she could ever remember them being. Funny the power a little thing like happiness could wield.

"I suppose you'll do," she said after a moment, reaching over to take the cloth from his shoulder and lay it aside.

"And tomorrow? The day after?"

"Well, I suppose we can figure it out together - make a choice - isn't that the idea?"

He smiled, and then he was coming around the bar as she stood to meet him, his arm sliding around her back to draw her to his side. "Let's go home," he said.