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Vespa’s stalking the Carte Blanche when she sees it.
Ransom, the slippery bastard, is passing her as she does her usual rounds of the ship, jittery with caffeine and paranoia, and had she not been laser focused on him in an attempt to shake her father’s long-dead voice, she wouldn’t have spotted it. A flash of red, inset on a delicate gold band.
Vespa’s heart kicks into overdrive. It could be anything: a blade — a blaster? Her hand darts out, quick as a snake, and she twists the damned thing from the thief’s grasp, only to reveal...
A ring. Just a ring.
No.
No, not just a ring. Buddy’s ring.
The ring that she remembers Buddy lost so long ago.
Vespa may not know much anymore, but she sure as hell knows one thing for certain: Ransom should not have that ring.
“So,” she begins, waving her stolen prize in the air, faux-civil as she can get with her heart in her throat and her hands itching for her knives. "Where’d you get this thing?”
The thief frowns. “Pinched it from an auction in one of Pluto’s higher end speakeasies," he drawls, raising a delicate eyebrow. “Why do you ask?”
He’s lying, alright. Not like he can do anything else. Some days, Vespa just wants to shake him until he admits that he physically can’t tell the truth anymore, just so that the others would believe her.
(Nureyev, for his part, was sure, sure that he’d managed to file away that old heist with his idols. Buddy and Vespa, Vespa and Buddy. Unknowable. Untouchable. Uncatchable. But it seems he’s been reaching into his “For Future Consideration” folder a bit too often during his talks with Juno, lately, because he knows that Vespa is staring right through his facade. What she sees, however, what she sees is inscrutable, and that’s what really frightens him.)
Vespa is the one to break their silent staring contest, huffing out a ragged breath that flutters faded green bangs across her vision. “Fine,” she spits, palming the ring, letting its comforting weight roll between her fingers. “You won’t have any problems if I borrow it for a minute, then, will you?”
Ransom blinks, something flickering over his face before disappearing, like so many of the things Vespa sees. “Be my guest,” he says, waving a careless hand by the way of Buddy’s ring. “Wouldn’t have pegged you for the jewelry type, but to each their own, I suppose.”
“Great,” Vespa growls, and stuffs the thrice-damned thing in her pocket. She stalks past him roughly towards her and Buddy’s quarters, ring burning a hole through threadbare cargo pants, and she distantly clocks Ransom stiffly walking in the direction of Steel’s room like a man on his deathbed. Vespa doesn’t much care. She’s seen too many men on their deathbeds for it to phase her anymore.
She bursts into Buddy’s room, garnering an alarmed look from her wife and a respectful nod from Jet as she cuts a swath through orderly quarters to the bed where Buddy’s seated. Jet glances to her, a question in his eyes, and she just shakes her head. Not now, pal. Not now. He clocks it, bowing out gracefully and closing the door behind him with an ominous whir.
And then...
And then there were two.
“Vespa, love” Buddy says, turning to face her with that worriedlovingscared look of hers that’s been so ever-present since they reunited. “What’s going on?”
“There’s something with Ransom, Bud.” Vespa rasps. She curls in on herself, arms folding across her patchwork top as she suddenly finds herself uncomfortable on her own mattress. “And- and I know, I know, you think it’s just in my head, but this time it’s- he’s- something funny’s up with him, Bud; something’s different and I don’t like it. Don’t trust it.”
Buddy frowns, forehead creasing, and she takes a long breath. Then, a shared glance, that silent dance of wills Vespa remembers they used to have so often when they were younger. Buddy’s visible eye gentles. She pulls her into a more natural position, hand gently gliding down Vespa’s arm in a grounding touch, and Vespa leans in, grateful for the contact.
“Alright, darling,” she breathes into her ear, because she’s wonderful and understanding and endlessly patient and Buddy. “What happened?”
“I passed him in the halls,” Vespa says, stilted, sharper than she means it. She takes a breath. Settles her nerves. “Saw a flash of something in his hand — think I thought it was a knife — so I grabbed it. But it...”
She doesn’t know how to finish the sentence, so she doesn't. Instead, she wordlessly digs into her pocket, then holds up Buddy's ring. Her wife picks it up, brow furrowing in confusion and something else Vespa can’t quite name as she returns it to her finger, finally reunited after decades of separation. There’s some sick irony in there, Vespa figures bitterly, but she doesn’t let herself think too hard on it. She meets Buddy’s gaze. “He told me he picked it up at some auction, but I could tell he was lying. I just.. I just couldn’t tell why.”
Buddy admires the ring. Twists it around on her finger. Takes in every chipped, gleaming edge. She’s rattled, but Vespa can't place a reason for it, and that makes her uneasy. She swears she hears a distant scream, but blinks it away with a grimace. No. Now's not the time to get bogged down in her brain's bullshit. Now's the time to comfort her wife.
Vespa drums her fingers on Buddy’s arm, an old, comforting gesture the two of them used to use as a good luck charm before jobs. “Bud?” she presses, gently as her voice allows. “What happened to that ring?”
Buddy swallows hard. Vespa’s fingers clench for the briefest of moments. If that little rat did anything to hurt her, she was going to-
“Vespa, darling?”
The clear, smokey voice breaks through her thoughts like a stream cutting its way through a meadow. Vespa’s fingers relax. “Yeah, Bud?”
“Do you remember the Forsetti job?”
The Forsetti job, the Forsetti job; shit, that was a while ago. Vespa’s memory isn’t great anymore, not after years of radiation ate it away as it poisoned her mind, but she could still remember their old jobs well enough. After all, she hadn’t had many other good memories to cling to during those years alone. But the Forsetti job, huh?
“I remember...” she starts slowly, eyes alert but breathing even, “I remember a museum. We’d taken the job for free, to help some rebellion happening up on one of their moons. An easy gig, but we.. we couldn’t use our normal tactics, could we? Not for this. We had to keep quiet, didn’t we?”
Vespa lets out a deep breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. And then it clicks.
“There was someone else on the job.”
Buddy remains silent, the paused stroking of Vespa’s hair the only indication she’d even heard her, but it was enough. It was enough.
The pieces fell into place like a crumbling tower, the museum, the mark, the kid, thundering down until there was nothing left but rubble. Vespa swallowed, throat suddenly dry, the everpresent humming in her bones now an incessant buzzing roaring through her ears, her blood, her body. The kid, the kid, the stupid, scrawny, selfless kid, and what had the little bastard grown up into but a fucking living mask. Of course. Of fucking course.
Vespa exhales heavily, shakily, and Buddy turns to her, a question in her eyes.
“I’m going to walk into his room,” Vespa mutters, en lieu of an answer, “and I’m going to wring that bastard’s scrawny little neck. Peter Ransom my ass; fuck!”
Her breathing is ragged, like she's run a marathon. Her mind is racing with the best of them, memories and mishaps clicking into the fucking mockery of a jigsaw that is her life. She runs a hand through her hair, desperate to move, to run, to fight. And then, the most miraculous thing happens. Buddy laughs. And the frenetic energy washes away like it was never there.
“No you aren’t, love,” Buddy tells her, patting her softly on the arm she’d been stroking. “We still need him, after all.”
“Says you,” Vespa grumbles, leaning into her wife’s embrace. “I vote we dump the kid on the next junk planet we land on, master thief be damned.”
Buddy snorts, an inelegant, beautiful sound, and Vespa wants nothing more than to stay in her arms for the rest of her life. “Tell you what,” Buddy says, grinning like a wolf. “If you don’t kill Ransom before we dock, I’ll do you one better, hm?”
Vespa raises an eyebrow. Buddy melts into her.
“How do you think our little Indigo will react when we tell his lady friend that the first thing he did when he met us was ask for my autograph?”
A beat.
Then, just like that, Vespa laughs.
It’s a rusty thing, a long unused muscle, neglected and weak, but it’s genuine, and it rings out through their room like Venusian temple bells. The man who posed as Indigo Viceroy is long dead, as well he should be in their line of work, but it seems he only shed that damned skin in favour of another. More scarred, yes, more battered, more broken — but fuck, who‘s Vespa to talk? And as she lays in Buddy’s arms, on the spaceship they’d built their love, their life, their family on, she smiles.
Because for the first time in her life, Vespa Ilkay cannot fucking wait for family breakfast in the morning.