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Out of all the things Jenny could have been doing on a Saturday night, she has somehow found herself sat up in bed with a glass of wine and a stack of Kord Industries contracts in her lap. The documents are lengthy, wordy, and needlessly complicated because that is their entire purpose.
When she had first announced that Kord Industries would be ending their weapons division, she had expected it to be harder than simply hanging up an out of business sign and walking away, but she hadn’t expected the contracts Kord had established with several foreign and national military powers to be quite so binding. So now, here she sat, with the multiyear contracts looming before her and her eyes beginning to hurt from the strain of reading them as she searched for a loophole out. Kord’s legal team was of course doing this work as well – all ivy league graduates who had been meticulously taught the art of lying and double entendre, all self-important assholes who she respected but couldn’t stand. Jenny wanted her first memorable act as CEO to be driving the final nail in Aunt Vicky’s coffin, so she was determined to find the loophole to the contracts first.
Even if it meant staying up well past midnight.
She flips to the next page of a forty-five page document detailing Kord’s agreement to produce “aforementioned artillery weaponry” for the U.S. government and takes a sip of wine to steel herself. It’s a malbec, a deep red that tastes vaguely of leather, so Jenny is careful not to spill any on her white sheets or on the man snoring softly beside her.
Jaime Reyes, curled against her with one hand resting on her thigh, is nothing more than messy brown hair and tanned skin peeking out from under the duvet. The one hand that isn’t holding her wine glass has been threading its way through his hair for the better part of an hour, her fingernails just barely scratching along his scalp. The weight of him against her and the body heat that roils off him in waves is a comfort she has grown familiar with. He is not the first person she has had in her bed, but he is the first to stick around. It’s nice to have someone to wake up next to in the morning, even if he does move around so much in his sleep that she’s also grown used to with waking up with bruises.
Even now, he shifts beside her, just a small twitch. His fingers on her thigh flex. She continues running a hand through his hair and hopes that he can somehow sense the comfort, but already she can see the beginnings of a nightmare forming. This too, has unfortunately become familiar.
Jenny sets her wineglass down on the nightstand, gathers up the documents to set at the foot of her bed, and then turns her attention to Jaime. His jaw is tight, his brow furrowed, tension winds its way through every part of his body. He always looks as if he’s in actual pain when the nightmares hit, and though he refuses to tell her the details, she can put together the pieces.
Milagro says he didn’t used to have nightmares before, not to the level they’re at. It’s not hard to guess what she means by that - before the scarab, before Jenny indirectly caused the events that had brought him and his family so much anguish to begin with. It’s hard not to think of her part in all of this, when Jaime cannot even go more than a few hours of sleep before he’s being jerked back awake again. In the month and a half they’ve known each other, she has watched the circles under Jaime’s eyes darken and felt utterly, uselessly, helpless.
“It’s okay,” Jenny soothes, knowing he won’t hear her, but trying anyway, “you’re okay.” She runs her hand along his twitching jawline, brushes a thumb along his cheek. His shaking only worsens.
When he moans, quiet and low, it sounds pained.
“It’s okay, Jaime,” she tries again.
“nngh,” comes his reply. He doesn’t usually say anything, most the time he will just shudder in silent pain until the dream jerks him awake. Jenny knows it’s bad when half formed words slip past his lips. She shifts down in the bed until she’s lying beside him, close enough to wrap him in her arms. He clings to her immediately, fingers grabbing fistfuls of her pajama top and digging against her back until it’s almost painful.
“I got you, gatinho,” the nickname, born from the many times she has caught Jaime sitting on her balcony railing, legs casually kicking in the air as if he were not seventy stories above the ground, is relatively new. She has let it slip out in the few times she would tease him, masking real worry with faux annoyance as she told him to get his scrawny ass off the railing before he fell. Saying it now, as Jaime trembles against her, caught in the throes of his own mind, feels uniquely more intimate.
“I got you,” she kisses the crown of his head. He smells like her shampoo.
Jenny holds him until the whimpered sounds become broken pleas, which become choked cries, and then he jolts in a way that she knows means he’s woken up and she lets him go. He comes up violently, jerks up out of the bed like there’s an actual assailant to fight, with a strangled scream dying in his throat. It takes a moment for him to reorient himself. In the dim lamplight of the room, he blinks owlishly and pants, eyes flitting around until they land on Jenny and something like recognition flashes across his face.
“Hi,” Jenny says.
He swallows, she watches the way his Adam’s apple bobs with the movement.
“H-hi.”
“You had a nightmare.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re okay.”
“Yeah?” It comes out a question, and Jenny catches the way his hand shakes when he raises it to run raggedly through his hair – landing at the notch on his spine where Khaji Da lies embedded. There’s a blue light emanating from the scarab, the soft glow just barely continuing under his skin, arcing in spidering veins down his back and up to his shoulders. It will fade to nothing once he’s regained some sense of calm.
“It’s all good, Khaj,” Jaime mutters, and the blue glow flickers.
He pauses as the scarab presumably says something that Jenny cannot hear, and then continues in an exhausted tone, “Do not do that. I’m fine.”
When he talks to Khaji Da, his eyes always drift somewhere unseeing, like he’s picturing the scarab as more than just a voice in his head. Jenny tries not to be unsettled by it, but something about her boyfriend communing casually with the alien technology that’s latched onto his spine is always sort of unnerving. He pulls the duvet that’s pooled around his waist closer to himself, hand that’s not on his back picking at the fabric of her sheets blindly. Jenny watches for a moment, biting on her lower lip, before placing her hand over his and stalling the motion.
When he looks back at her, blinking to clear the fogginess that still lingers, Jenny squeezes his hand and asks, “To the balcony?”
Jaime nods, “Yeah. Yes. Please.”
Jenny takes her wine and her phone, curls up on patio sofa and scrolls through social media as if this were a normal Saturday night. As if Jaime were not a few feet away from her, once again perched on the railing of her balcony with one leg pulled to his chest and the other swinging listlessly in the open air. He’d grabbed her sweatshirt from their tangled pile of clothes in his blind rush to reach fresh air, it’s tight enough across his shoulders and back that she can see the outline of Khaji Da. The bug seems to stare at her accusingly.
The swig of wine she takes is not enough to wash the bitterness from her mouth. Guilt, heavy and tasting of bile, settles in her gut. It is not a stranger to her, but it weighs heavier tonight.
Jaime takes longer than usual to piece himself back together. Jenny gets through the entirety of her Instagram feed, catches up with her Twitter timeline, and is regretting not bringing the contracts outside with her, when Jaime climbs down from his perch and pads over to her like the apparent cat that he is. He collapses next to Jenny on the sofa with a groan, before falling over dramatically and landing with his head in her lap.
“I’m so tired.” In the shadows of the balcony the dark circles under his eyes are nearly black.
Jenny sips the last bit of her wine and tries to swallow the guilt down with it. For a moment, only for a flash, she looks down at Jaime and sees her father; bloodshot eyes and unkept stubble, grief written into every line of his face. Only, Jaime has the misfortune of carrying with him the very creature her father would have willingly taken. That Jenny herself would have allowed to fuse with her skeleton, if it meant that Jaime might have the smallest chance of still having his dad with him.
She tries not to let her self-condemnation show in her expression when she brushes the loose curls of hair back from his face and soothes away the last bit of tension in his brow with the pad of her thumb. Jaime closes his eyes at her touch, lips parting slightly as quiet breath escapes him. Distantly, she thinks that he shouldn’t be this trusting of her, that he is giving himself over too easily to be safe. She is the niece of the very woman who burned down his house and took him forcibly from his final moments with his father. She is the daughter of the man who dug up the scarab when it should never have been allowed to see the light of day again. He should not be resting in her lap, wearing her sweatshirt, at her loft, when she is the reason his life has been irreversibly changed.
And yet she cannot find it within herself to tell him to leave. Jenny, selfishly, wants to grant herself the illusion that they are normal. That he will be the person who finally stays, and though every instinct she’s ever had is telling her to push him away, she cannot make the words leave her mouth. They stick in her throat with the guilt as Jaime lies in her lap unknowing.
“Khaji Da thinks I should talk to someone,” he says.
Jenny, who’s gaze had drifted to the Palmera skyline just peeking over her balcony, turns to look back down at him.
“What?”
“According to them, I am reaching ‘unhealthy levels of suppressed emotions’.”
His voice goes robotic for a moment and Jenny can’t help the smile that pulls at the corner of her lips.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. Khaji Da, the world destroyer and built in therapist apparently,” he laughs.
Jenny’s smile widens. Jaime possesses within him an infectious sort of energy, something light and warm. Even in the shadows, his eyes shine, as he looks up at her. But that light can only go so far, and Jenny enjoys it for only a moment before reality sinks back in. His nightmares, the ones he won’t tell her about, that he refuses to acknowledge once he’s woken from them – she has some idea of what they could be about. Jenny now owns the company her aunt had used to create the OMAC, she has seen the plans for the perverse forms of Khaji Da, and the immense power they draw upon. Tucked under her bed are the blueprints to a machine whose intentions she has guessed at but has been too afraid to ask Jaime to confirm. A machine that is engineered to draw out the energy needed to make the OMAC work, no matter the cost.
When her smile falls away, Jaime stops laughing. The somber mood rushes back in.
“You…you could tell me, you know?” Jenny says, and it’s so quiet it’s almost a whisper, “about the nightmares. If you wanted to. You could tell me.”
Jaime looks up at her with parted lips, before he’s swallowing down whatever it was he was going to say and sitting up sharply.
“No. Yeah. No, I know. It’s just- it’s not even- it’s not even a big deal,” he rubs at the back of his neck as he talks, pulls at the hem of her sweatshirt, looks down at his lap and refuses to meet her gaze. “It’s silly.”
“Jaime-.”
“It’s nothing. Honestly, Jenny it’s- it’s just normal nightmares.”
Jenny wants to say normal nightmares don’t occur as frequently as his do, they don’t cause a person to scream so loudly sometimes that it sounds like the sound is being forcibly ripped from his lungs. She wants to show him the blueprints, to let him know it’s okay. She’s seen the truth, and he doesn’t have to hide it from her and his family anymore. But she does none of these things because Jaime goes quiet and then says the last thing she was expecting from him.
“But I think…I think I died?”
“What?” Jenny tries to swallow, but the guilt has grown and now she thinks she’s maybe choking on it.
“I don’t know. I don’t- I woke up and I was…I was in this machine? With this- this thing around my neck. Khaji wasn’t saying anything, I was alone. And it hurt already, before they even turned it on, I-,” he chokes on a breath.
Jenny offers him her hand and he takes it, gripping so tightly her fingers go cold and then numb. She doesn’t pull away, half because she wants him to continue and half because she needs him to.
“They wanted Khaji, and they didn’t care what it did to me to get it. I screamed for them to stop, I tried, but I was invisible to them. And then…and when they turned it on I- it felt like I was on fire, Jenny. Like I was burning from the inside? But so cold…and then. And then there was nothing.”
When the suit fallen away from him back at her parents abandoned mansion, Jenny had caught a glimpse of his neck before he’d managed to wrap himself completely in a dust covered blanket Cesar has produced for him. One quick look at violently raw pink skin ringed by charred black. She hadn’t been able to see how far down it spread, but she’d seen enough to know it didn’t stop at his neck. She’d assumed it was simply a product of his fight with Carapax, that he could just sleep it off and be okay. His mom was the one to catch him when he basically collapsed trying to go up the stairs out of her father’s blue beetle lair. They’d all rushed to him with varying sounds of panic, but Jaime was already unconscious in his mom’s arms. Jenny had gone ahead to find a suitable place for him to sleep for a few hours, and then it was his mom and nana who had sat with him as he rested, so by the time she saw him again Jaime was already healed – physically at least. She hadn’t realized how bad it was. She’d maybe been too scared to know.
But now, with Jaime refusing to look at her and his voice choked with tears, Jenny realizes with a worsening sense of shame that it was all so much worse than she thought. Victoria Kord may be dead, but in that moment Jenny was sure if she had the power to bring her aunt back she would kill her all over again.
She squeezes Jaime’s hand, and he squeezes back. It helps.
“When I woke up, my apá was there and it felt real, but I don’t know,” he sounds utterly miserable, “it didn’t hurt there. I didn’t want to leave.”
Jenny doesn’t realize she’s crying until she feels the tears hot on her cheeks, she’s quick to wipe them away with the palm of her free hand.
“That’s where I go. In the nightmares. I- I see him, and then I lose him all over again, and I wake up in that stupid machine. And it just hurts.”
He finally looks up at her, tears clinging to his lashes and trailing down his cheeks, dripping in splotches onto her sweatshirt. Jenny reaches for him, and he lets her, and they end up with their foreheads pressed together as Jenny cradles his face in her hands like he’s some fragile thing. He trembles against her, clings to her wrists with his hands, his breath comes in great heaving gulps.
“I’m so sorry, Jaime,” she cries, wiping his tears away just as fast as they fall, “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay,” he tries to say, but he can’t quite get it out around his tears, and Jenny knows it wouldn’t be the truth anyway. She didn’t strap him into that machine, but she did hand him a burger box with an all-powerful alien bug inside like the world’s most fucked up happy meal. She’d asked him if he would do anything for a job, and now he’s nearly died for it.
“It’s not your fault,” Jaime manages to get out. Jenny tries to believe him, but it’s hard when she can only think of the blueprints hidden under her bed, can only hear Jaime’s raw screams in her head. But in the end none of that matters, because Jaime is still trying to console her as if he wasn’t the one who nearly died.
When she pulls away from him, his grip tightens on her wrists like he’s scared she’s going to leave him, driftless and floating in the overwhelming mess he’s found himself in. His fingernails press against her skin, like he’s trying to find an anchor. Jenny things of Khaji Da and their legs buried in Jaime’s spine, thinks she maybe understands why the scarab chose him.
They stay that way until both of them have calmed down enough that breathing comes a little bit easier. Until their tears are dry, and Jaime is so drained that he can do little more than slump against Jenny on the sofa. She lays them both down gently, his head on her chest. They’re a tangle of limbs on the too small patio furniture. Already, she can feel Jaime drifting to sleep against her, his body going limp and heavy. If they fall asleep here, they will both be unimaginably sore in the morning, but Jenny doesn’t have the strength or heart to move him.
She trails a hand along his back, careful to avoid the tender spots where Khaji Da sticks out of him.
“You’re not invisible, Jaime,” she mumbles against his hair, just so he can hear someone say it.
He makes a sound of acknowledgement, but she can already tell consciousness is slipping from him fast. She hopes he actually gets to sleep now, but if he doesn’t she will wait beside him like she always does. She will hold him when he needs her to, and give him space when that’s what he asks, and she will listen to him in the way that he has listened to her so many times before.
She will be the Kord that sees him, that shows him she is more than her last name.