Archive of Our Own

Ten years was a good run, really, Dan tells himself, especially for two people who found themselves thrown together in a situation like 1985. He figures it lasted as long as it did because he and Laurie really do like each other, and once they even loved each other.It just wasn't the kind that lasts, he thinks, and eventually they split off into their separate interests, her teaching and his tinkering. In the end, they were left with just two things in common - adventuring and the girls - and since the adventuring was over, it was just the girls. Girls who didn't deserve the stress of being the glue that held their parents' marriage together.

Adrian looks almost exactly the same, Dan thinks as he watches the interview over Isobel's coppery head and Zoe's dark one, taking a sip of his coffee as his daughters eat their breakfast cereal and argue over the comics section in the New York Times. His face is nearly as smooth as it was fifteen years ago - hell, he thinks, except for a few lines earned from years of public smiles and private worries, his face is nearly as smooth as it was thirty years ago - but his hair has gone from sleek blond to equally sleek silver. Or platinum, Dan thinks with a half-smile; for Adrian, it would be platinum.

"Who's that, Daddy?" It's Zoe. She's only eight to Isobel's eleven, but she's the inquisitive one, the focused one, the one that notices details and questions them. Like her father, Laurie always says with a laugh, and he always blushes and rubs his hand over his hair and looks sheepishly pleased. She looks like him too, Dan thinks as he looks down at the table. Isobel looks more like Sally Jupiter than anyone else, with her sleek red hair, smattering of freckles and chocolate-brown eyes, but Zoe's all him. Her dark hair falls in unruly waves down her back, her eyes are bright and blue behind the glasses she's had to get just that year, her lips full in a way that will give him an endless set of fatherly worries when she's old enough to discover lipstick and boys.

Dan opens his mouth to reply, and then pauses. There are several things he could say. That's Adrian Veidt, he's the president of Veidt Enterprises. That's Adrian Veidt, he's a philanthropist. That's Adrian Veidt, your mother and I knew him when we were younger. He doesn't say any of them. He smiles as he passes his hand over Zoe's tumbled hair and then focuses his attention back on the television. The interview with Adrian has been completed and the hosts have moved onto the next thing - something he doesn't really care about, he realizes, and he flicks the power off before answering.

"Someone I knew once," he says.

He puts Isobel and Zoe back on an American Airlines flight from JFK to SFO - non-stop, because he can afford it, and the idea of his daughters spending a layover in Chicago or Dallas is enough to turn the rest of his hair gray. It's the end of August, and New York is still in the grips of a Mid-Atlantic summer, the humidity so high it practically hangs in the air like an unwelcome blanket. But fall will be coming in not too long, he thinks as he takes the subway from Howard Beach back into Manhattan. Occasionally he can feel the cooling, crisp breeze that heralds the upcoming change of the seasons.

He spends his first week alone catching up on his reading and repairing the house after three months at the mercy of two pre-teen girls. But even that kind of serious rehabilitation only takes so long, and by the next Tuesday he finds himself stepping outside onto the steamy streets of downtown Manhattan. He sticks his hands into the pockets of his cotton pants, gives a smiling nod to the edgy wife of the investment banker who bought the house next door, and turns towards Sixth Avenue.

It's too hot to walk. It's especially too hot to walk along the shadeless Sixth Ave through Greenwich Villiage, then Soho, Noho, and Nolita, and finally into Midtown, but he does it anyway. Sweat starts to dampen his salt-and-pepper hair long before he reaches his destination, and as he stands at the foot of the glass and steel skyscraper that was painstakingly rebuilt after 1985 he wipes a hand across his brow and smiles. It's a different building, the 1970s style of non-nonsense commercial architecture having given way to a more avant-garde design that makes the most famous corporate headquarters in the world look like nothing more than an organic, mystical crystal. The windows are tinted lavender - of course they are - and that just adds to the air.

He's not sure why he's here. He goes inside anyway.

He's admitted almost immediately, which both surprises him and doesn't surprise him at all. Adrian Veidt has always been busy, of course, and it has always been impossible to get in to see him personally. But then he isn't a normal visitor, Dan thinks; he's likely to rouse enough curiosity to move to the top of the list.

It's a little like déjà vu. He's standing in the corner, examining the contents of a cabinet - models of Veidt Enterprises' energy innovations, now, instead of models of them - and Adrian's leaning against his desk, his professionally charming smile fixed on his face as a reporter stands in front of him. But this time it's not Doug Roth, Dan thinks; it's a finance reporter from CNBC, and she's asking about Veidt's plans for expansion, not about an era that's been over for more than twenty years now.

Adrian looks so similar to how he did in 1985, Dan thinks as he watches him in the reflection of the glass. His hair is pure silver now, gleaming just as brightly here as it did under the studio lights at NBC, but in a way that's not so different from the pale golden blond he'd been familiar with years before. He's even dressed the same, or nearly the same, in charcoal wool trousers and a muted eggplant shirt that showcase how graceful and lithe he still is. There are a few more lines now, Dan notes; around the eyes and the mouth, and in between his arching eyebrows.

His green-hazel eyes look tired now, Dan muses as Adrian's terrifyingly efficient assistant leads the reporters out, as he turns away from the display case and smiles. That's definitely new.

"Dan," Adrian says, and he steps forward to clasp Dan's hand in his, his eyes quizzical and wary even as his lips curve in a smile warmer than the one he gifted the reporters with. "It's been a long time. What can I do for you?"

Now, Dan thinks, he's nervous. He hasn't been up until now. "I was in the neighborhood," he begins, "and I thought I'd stop by, and..." He brings himself to a halt, draws a deep breath, and begins again. "It has been a long time," he says quietly. "I thought it had been long enough. I...missed you."

They both go still at the words Dan hadn't even really expected to say, but then Adrian smiles - faintly, but truly. "Have lunch with me," he says.

It's Adrian's way of saying he missed Dan, too.