Chapter Text
Martín doesn’t know what to think.
He has known Sergio Marquina for a great many years, almost as long as he knew Andrés. To have the man show up out of the blue and ask for help with pulling off the heist his brother planned all those years ago in little more than a month...is somehow not any great surprise. However, to discover that Sergio – the Professor, as he styles himself now – has as a part of his new team a woman who he has been living with for the past year, and seems very much in love with, is no less than astonishing.
The fact that this woman also happens to be the former police inspector who was in charge of hunting him down is actually less surprising than the fact that she exists at all.
Martín has never seen Sergio with a woman – or a man for that matter – and had honestly assumed that he just wasn’t interested in such things. Sergio had always been ice to his older brother’s fire, careful and analytical by nature, hardly the type to get swept up in passion. If someone had held a gun to Martín’s head and asked him to imagine a romantic partner for Sergio Marquina, he probably would have conjured up something like a female version of Sergio himself; someone staid and serious, and given to rambling explanations. The fastidious librarian type, complete with glasses.
Lisbon is about as far from that mental image as is possible to get – she’s steely-eyed and quietly confident, but warm too, in a way that she never allows to diminish her air of authority. There’s a power to her, simmering just below the surface, not denied but consciously restrained; she is a woman who always seems to be in complete command of herself. Impossible to intimidate, difficult to lie to. Not one to suffer fools gladly. She is the kind of woman who Andrés would have greatly admired, for her beauty as much as anything, because beautiful she certainly is.
Martín studies her in the same way an entomologist might study a particularly rare and fascinating new species of beetle. He has no particular interest in her as a person in her own right, but since she is now Sergio’s partner he can’t help but be curious.
She doesn’t like him, he can tell, though she hides it with a degree of professionalism that suggests this is far from the first time she has had to work with a man she can’t stand. She is the sort of woman who would have despised Andrés too; women always either adored or despised Andrés, there was very little in between. It doesn’t matter particularly to Martín what Lisbon thinks of him anyway, as she is clearly competent at her job and seems to get on with the group as a whole tolerably well, but he is fascinated to see that she appears to genuinely adore Sergio.
She listens with rapt attention when he speaks, her eyes soft and affectionate. She smiles when he makes some reference or quiet aside that goes over the heads of the others. She pulls him into secluded corners when she thinks no-one else is around to see and kisses him like a horny teenager sneaking around with her first boyfriend.
Martín finds the whole thing disconcerting. Andrés would have loved every second of it, he is sure, never one to pass up a chance to tease his little brother about his personal life, or – up until this point – lack thereof.
You wait until he falls in love, Andrés had said, on more than one occasion. Just you wait until he’s married. He’ll get off that high horse of his then, and have to eat every single word.
Sergio and Lisbon are not, as far as Martín knows, married, though they may as well be. They have that settled air about them, the thing that Andrés never managed to work out, in spite of his many attempts at marriage. He was always looking for the excitement, the thrill of the chase. Andrés de Fonollosa had believed in the concept of love with the passionate fervour of a religious devotee, but as with many such disciples of lofty ideals, he had found the day to day reality of it boring.
For his part, Martín is mildly contemptuous of the whole thing. At best it’s a distraction, at worst a dangerous one. And there had been a time, not so long ago, when Sergio would have seen that too.
On their last day at the monastery Martín wakes early to see the sun rise over the mountains, and then heads across the courtyard to the vast stone kitchen to eat his breakfast. None of his new associates seem to be early morning people by nature – save for perhaps the Professor himself – and besides, they were all up late last night, drinking and psyching each other up with the usual bravado that people display before this kind of big job. He revels in the solitude of the morning; the calm before the storm.
He selects a pastry to enjoy with his morning coffee, and sits down at the large wooden table with a newspaper (three days old and in Italian, but what could you do) to read idly as he eats. Usually he is strictly a fruits and cereals for breakfast kind of person – a person’s body is their temple, after all – but today is an exceptional day. In the small hours of tomorrow morning they will leave for Spain. If this is the last breakfast he has as a free man, he may as well relax his rules and enjoy it.
He has barely been sitting there for five minutes when Lisbon walks in, hesitating briefly when she sees him, in the awkward manner of one who clearly also assumed she would be the only person awake. Martín is more amused than annoyed at the intrusion. He realises that in spite of the weeks they’ve lived here at the monastery, this is the first time they’ve ever been alone together, without either a whole group of people around or at least the Professor in tow. Lisbon has presumably left him in the midst of last minute planning. She doesn’t look like she’s had much sleep, and for once not for any fun reason. He suspects they fuck most mornings, given Sergio’s usual talkative good humour over breakfast, and the way Lisbon practically glows whenever she looks at him, not to mention the eagerness with which they both shovel down their food. But today their fearless leader is no-where in sight, and Lisbon looks slightly wan, with dark shadows under her eyes.
She registers his presence with a curt nod of her head, and then heads straight over to the stove to start boiling water for coffee. Martín continues to eat his pastry, watching her out of the corner of his eye.
“Just one day until we leave,” he says aloud, in an offhand fashion. “Nervous?”
“It would be stupid not to be, don’t you think?” says Lisbon. Her brusque tone suggests she is not much in the mood for conversation, which he gleefully takes as encouragement.
“You always are, your first time,” he smirks, and doesn’t miss the brief slight tensing of her shoulders that is the full body equivalent of an eye roll. “But I’m sure the Professor will tell you if you don’t make the grade.”
“I wouldn’t know,” says Lisbon, continuing her preparations without turning around. “It’s never happened yet.”
“Of course you’ll have him to hold your hand through the whole thing,” says Martín. “And afterwards, no matter what happens, you’ll be going back to your little island paradise together.” He puts just enough mockery into the last words to be aggravating rather than openly rude. He’s not sure why he’s needling her, other than to provoke some kind of reaction.
She pours coffee into a mug with a generous dash of milk, and finally turns to look at him.
“Of course,” she says, coolly. “And where will you go after this is all over, I wonder?”
Martín grins. “Jail perhaps, if it goes badly,” he says. “Otherwise...” He spreads his hands in an expansive gesture. “The usual. Beautiful people, beautiful art, beautiful places. Perhaps I’ll buy an island of my own.”
Every word is a lie, of course. He doesn’t think about ‘after’. As far as he’s concerned, such a term is meaningless. He knows the stakes better than anyone. He knows how, in all likelihood, this will end. ‘After’ is a fantasy that would be childish to entertain.
He sees Lisbon watching him with a strange look in her eye, and he is suddenly uncomfortably aware that she may realise this. It is an unpleasant realisation to have; that all the while you are studying someone else, you are not going unobserved by them either. She holds his gaze for just a moment too long, and then nods. Martín finds himself strangely relieved that she isn’t interested in questioning him further, and then annoyed at himself for the feeling.
“You don’t like me, do you?” he asks, suddenly struck by the somewhat childish urge to make her embarrassed, or uncomfortable, or just to throw her off. But the blow doesn’t land. Lisbon simply shrugs.
“I don’t know you,” she replies calmly.
“And you automatically dislike people you don’t know?”
“I do what everyone does – I form a first impression and then change my opinion based on new evidence, as and when it presents itself. If it does.”
Martín grins. It is the most polite and clinical ‘fuck you’ he’s heard in a long time. He has no answer for it that wouldn’t be picking a fight, which he has no particular interest in doing in this moment. Nothing would be served by it. But at least he’s sure of where he stands with this woman now, and he is beginning to catch some glimmer of what Sergio might see in her too.
She must have seen right through the poor bastard. He wouldn’t have stood a fucking chance.
“Well, don’t let me keep you then,” Martín says, although acting as though he has the power to dismiss her is probably a petty way to score a point off her. Of course, to then insist on staying when she obviously doesn’t care for his company would be equally petty, so Lisbon doesn’t rise to the bait, just gives him a cold look and heads towards the door, coffee in hand.
Then, unexpectedly, she stops in the doorway and turns back to look at him, a slight crease between her eyes, contemplation rather than annoyance, he thinks.
“You have no personal stake in this,” she says. “So tell me; do you believe this plan is going to work?”
Martín pauses for a beat and then surprises himself with the truth:
“No,” he says.
Lisbon doesn’t look surprised, or angry, she just raises her eyebrows at him, obviously expecting an explanation.
“It was never the Professor’s plan,” Martín says baldly. “And he is not his brother. He won’t take the risks necessary to make it work.”
Lisbon regards him thoughtfully. Then, to his surprise, she smiles.
“Perhaps you don’t know him as well as you think,” she says.