When a knock sounded on my office door a few days later, while I was working out a game plan for bringing Ryan home and Billy was off with the others doing what it was that Billy and The Boys did when they weren't in my direct line of sight, I shouldn't have been shocked at who stood on the other side.
It wasn't as if my position was unknown to the general public, much less the inner CIA intel. It wasn't as if I didn't expect to come face to face with him sooner or later.
"Joe," it came out hushed, as I had a flash of just how cowardly my retreat from our marriage had been. From the smirk on his face, I could tell that he knew precisely what my memory had allowed to resurface.
He waited, clearly for me to invite him in, and then cleared his throat and gave me a pointed look that shook me from the vision that had invaded of our apartment with me throwing everything I couldn't bear to leave behind while he was on assignment and that note, fuck the note that I left behind on my pillow on a bed that I had remade without even noticing.
"Right," stepping back, I gave him a path to enter, then once again retreated - this time behind my desk. "Welcome back?"
The soft laugh, the one I'd told him once upon a time I could feel from my toes to the top of my head, and then he was seated across from me. "Sound less sure by the minute, Veronica." His eyes were twinkling, and I noticed how the lines framing his eyes had deepened from all the smiling he must still be prone to doing since I'd seen him last. "You look great," he was studying me as intently as I'd ever witnessed him taking in a target or a suspect. "Tired, but still gorgeous."
Given the late nights that Billy and I seemed prone to have, I wasn't surprised that I had a few subtle signs of being less than well rested. Oddly no one else seemed to notice them. "And you look," I gave myself permission to really take a tour of my ex husband's exterior, so to speak and thought that he looked thinner, older, yet nowhere near less attractive. "A little more seasoned." His smirk deepened into a real smile and I knew he understood what I was saying since he always seemed to be capable of making me have to search for the right words.
"How've ya been?" He was lounging in the visitor's chair, making it look far more comfortable than it would ever be, but that was Joe - he could almost make his body liquid it seemed. "I mean aside from the near death experience and all."
"I shouldn't be surprised you know," especially since Billy had to make a fucking public announcement concerning my condition during the 'will Ronnie self-destruct or won't she' period of our relationship. Sighing at the reminder that Homelander's attempted destruction my body was still trying to fight off, or adapt to depending on how I looked on it, I just shook my head to try to free myself from the pain and wreckage that asshole had tried to force on us. "I'm still processing it." He nodded, his gaze never wavering from me. "You?"
"Still processing how my wife," his tone hadn't changed, nor had his smile dropped, but there was a tightness around his eyes that I knew meant what he was about to say wasn't going to be easy for either of us. "How the woman who I planned on spending forever with," a cut, almost a scrape, but not quite seemed to tear at me as he went on. "Chose to pack up and leave while I was out of the country," that would most definitely be me he was speaking about, not that I really had a doubt. "And leave me with a note that told me her mommy and daddy warned her that I was a golddigging asshole who couldn't possibly love her, but definitely loved money that I had not a single fucking ounce of interest in." That was the long and short of it, fuck. "And then, I was barely processing that absolute fucking ridiculous notion and note when the next bullshit hit." Right, that one. "That might have been the quickest I ever got anything from a court or judge in my life, Veronica."
My face was burning from the shame at how my parents managed to fast-track the divorce. But there was one point I knew I had on him in the entire affair, and damn it if my tongue didn't release it without my permission. "It wasn't as if you fought it." Fuck. Shit. The look that crossed his face was one I knew well, even if it had never been directed in my direction before.
"Fight it?" His voice hadn't risen, that was one of his most useful abilities within the agency. How no one could ever really know how pissed off or even if he just fucking knew he had what everyone was looking for - no, Agent Kessler was the coolest head in the game, and his tone matched. "Veronica, I couldn't fight it. Not if it was what you wanted," the smirk was gone, and in its place was the intensity that had pulled me into his orbit to begin with - charming, magnetic (not supe type of magnetism to be clear), and the aura of just knowing he was the smartest asshole in the room. I'd wanted to learn from him, the calm and cool he seemed to come perfectly equipped with, and I wanted to prove that I was as smart, if not smarter, than him. "I could never deny you anything."
And there it was - the final slice that cut away the one point that I thought I had in the dissolution of our marriage. My parents had pointed out that if he loved me and not my trust funds then he would have come thundering to me, to fight for me, for us. I guess I really was fucking blind and stupid, because the words he just used, the very phrasing of it, was something he'd told me from the first moments we move beyond mentor and mentee, when candlelight had mellowed the coolness, the calm fell away and it was just Veronica and Joe - alone and in love.
My eyes landed on my stapler and a flash of Billy flared into my mind and I knew I had to push past the tour through a time long gone and remain in the future - a future I shared with Billy Butcher and not what could have been.
"Is this just a trip down memory lane or did you come for a more professional reason?" I knew my voice wasn't as steady as his, and that my entire being must be vibrating with tension, but I had to move forward - move on.
Joe's eyes were locked on me when I looked away from my desk, but I knew that he'd noted where they landed, even if he had not a fucking clue what glimmer a stapler could five me.
"You ever meet someone that you just want to chuck the biggest fucking thing in reach at their fucking head?" I waited, knowing that he had something more to get off his chest. "There's this guy," he settled into his seat to get more comfortable and I knew that somehow this was going to get awkward. "He's a dick," his smirk returned when my eyes narrowed, and I knew that he was enjoying my irritation. "Cocky to the point of insanity, chip on his shoulder the size of the fucking Titanic, and if that isn't enough -"
I was eyeing the stapler again, this time with an entirely new target in mind. "Are you anywhere near a point?" It came out in a snap as I tucked my hands under the desk, far away from the temptation of tossing anything heavier than a marshmallow at his head.
That fucking smirk grew into a smile that I knew so well - my stomach gave a twist that I would swear was simply from frustration, or a need for sustenance - and I could remember all the times I'd seen it cross his face. Usually right before he -
"I can't decide if you traded up or down," I took a moment to thank God that I wasn't still afflicted with Homelander's spawn and the fucked up variant of V that made me literally steam - I wasn't sure this building was equipped for that much heat. "Billy Butcher?" He said it in the same way my parents had once said his name. "I've read the report you compiled on him." Of course he had, his clearance was slightly higher than mine, after all. "Usually when you create background profiles they make you less likely to jump the subject."
"Usually," we both knew of at least one report I compiled that had the same outcome, or at least it had in the beginning. Fuck. "Again, is there a point to all this?"
Joe huffed out a breath and leaned forward. "Veronica, I think you've been ignoring a major part of your assignment." What the hell - "I know you're not looking through the surveillance that keeps being sent through, and you're missing shit that the Dr. Taylor I knew wouldn't."
He didn't stay much longer, for which I was grateful, and he seemed resigned to the impersonal parting I gave him. What did he expect? He showed up and dropped a huge nugget of bullshit on my lap with a heavy dose of memories that I wasn't prepared to face just yet - if he was hoping for hugs and kisses, maybe show up with flowers and a card or better yet, lunch.