“You two did a lot together,” Hawkins says outside the coliseum in Rome, and that draws Jules out of her reminiscing, draws her away from the memory of Carmen’s victorious smirk when they finally slapped the cuffs on the boss of that smuggling operation. “What happened? I mean, why did she leave ACME?”
“...Maybe I’ll tell you sometime,” Jules manages to reply around the rising lump in her throat. “For now, let’s concentrate on tracking her down.”
It’s easier to dodge the question than to admit she has no idea.
~
Carmen was always a loose cannon, even back when she worked for ACME.
Once, on a stakeout in the dead of night, she and Jules trailed a suspect to a warehouse where the heads of a trafficking ring were temporarily hiding out. Carmen peeked inside to survey the situation while Jules called the Chief to send backup, but any teams were at least two hours away and the culprits were already in the process of clearing out.
“There’s no time,” Carmen concluded. “We have to catch these guys ourselves, now.”
“We can’t!” Jules hissed in protest. “There’s got to be at least ten of them in there!”
“Fourteen,” Carmen said. “But we have these.” She pulled out two pairs of night-vision goggles from her bag and shoved one into Jules’s hands. Then she dashed for the circuit breaker before Jules could stop her.
Once the lights went out, it was too late to turn back, so Jules went along with her partner’s crazy plan as her heart hammered in her throat the whole way. In the end, with the cover of darkness as their aid, they successfully neutralized all the suspects, but Carmen got a bullet graze wound to her shoulder because one trigger-happy goon got lucky.
After everything was over, Jules punched her in that shoulder. Carmen laughed through the pain.
That’s just who Carmen was. She knew she could do anything, she was an unstoppable force, and nobody could ever hope to rein her in. Not even Jules. So whatever reasons Carmen had for leaving ACME, she made that choice on her own, and everyone who blamed Jules for her partner’s betrayal honestly gave her too much credit.
Nothing Jules did could have made Carmen leave.
(Nothing Jules did could have made Carmen stay.)
~
Hawkins thinks he can do anything. He almost reminds Jules of Carmen in that sense, except Carmen didn’t think she could do anything, she knew it. And Jules knew it, too. Hawkins, though, is still an impulsive and overconfident rookie, and he doesn’t truly understand what he’s up against.
Jules cautions him in Cape Town, keeps him from breaking down the door because recklessness will only get them in trouble. But then Carmen leaves the scene in her chopper, and Hawkins is livid.
“What were you thinking, Jules?!” he cries. “Did you want her to get away?!”
He doesn’t really mean that, Jules knows, he’s just lashing out because he’s frustrated. But those words still hit her, somewhere deep inside.
So Jules dodges the question. She’s found herself doing that a lot with Hawkins.
~
What Carmen and Jules had wasn’t a romance.
They agreed on that from their very first kiss—Carmen was just doing what she wanted, and Jules wanted that, too. So they kissed, they fooled around, they made each other feel good, but the relationship was never serious. Sure, Jules was a little in love with Carmen, but loving Carmen also meant accepting that she was the type of person who could never be tied down to anyone.
So Carmen never opened up about herself, and Jules never asked her to. Jules never asked for anything more than what she got. Being Carmen’s partner was enough, and Jules was happy with their life together at ACME.
It never really occurred to her that maybe Carmen wasn’t.
Carmen had been MIA from ACME for a week when she announced the success of her very first heist via a video broadcast to the world. “I have stolen the Crown Jewels,” she proclaimed, and that was definitely Carmen on screen holding Cullinan I in her hand, her smug smile and twinkling eyes framed by a bright red fedora Jules had never seen her wear before. “And this is just the beginning. For I, Carmen Sandiego, am going to become the world’s greatest thief!”
The next morning, the Chief called Jules to her office, asked very seriously if Jules had ever noticed any signs that Carmen had been planning to defect. Jules told the truth: she hadn’t had a clue. Protocol demanded that Jules be taken off all her cases and thoroughly vetted anyway, but for what it was worth, Chief seemed to believe her.
Nobody else did, though.
“Maybe she and Sandiego had a fight,” her coworkers whispered amongst themselves, when they either didn’t know Jules could hear or didn’t care that she could. “There must be something Argent isn’t telling us. I mean, how couldn’t she know? She was her partner.”
Jules vowed to be the one to capture Carmen Sandiego, if only to prove to her peers that it wasn’t her fault. That just because she’d been Carmen’s partner didn’t mean she’d been anything more. She’d certainly never been Carmen’s confidant. Perhaps she’d never even been Carmen’s friend—
Except, Jules remembered: Carmen once took her to the top of the Eiffel Tower on one of their nights off, and kissed her breathless as they watched the Paris lights. Carmen once agreed to try all of Jules’s favorite restaurants in Chengdu, persevering even as her face flushed red because Jules liked her food much spicier than Carmen did. Carmen once went undercover as a musician for a case, and for a moment as she performed on stage, strumming her guitar and singing a love song in her native Brazilian Portuguese, she stared right at Jules’s spot in the audience and for those beautiful three seconds, it felt like the song was just for her.
...Okay, so maybe Jules was more than a little in love with Carmen.
(And maybe the idea of locking Carmen behind bars was just as painful as her coworkers’ censure, if not more.)
~
“You’re practically burning holes in your journal,” Hawkins tells Jules, during the plane ride to Germany right after retrieving the Mayan calendar. “What are you thinking about?”
Jules looks up from the entries she was reading: the ones from the mission where they retrieved the Mok’o fish gong. “I’m remembering the wolf statue in Quebec, and that Sorbonne poster in Paris.” The proof that Carmen Sandiego donated a lot of money to causes she cared about. “There is some good in Carmen,” Jules murmurs, an echo of what she said back in Mexico.
“There was some good in Carmen Sandiego,” Hawkins says. “I’ll believe that much. But Jules, she’s not your partner anymore. The past is the past. You need to focus on now, on this case.”
“I am focused on this case,” Jules insists. “If...if I can just figure out Carmen’s reasons for doing all this, I can figure out what she’ll do next.”
“Figure out...” Hawkins repeats, and something seems to click into place in his mind. “You don’t actually know why she left ACME, do you?”
Jules might as well admit it to him now. “I really don’t. When it happened, it surprised me as much as anybody.”
She’s half-expecting Hawkins to express disbelief like everyone else: How couldn’t you know? You were Carmen’s partner. But instead, he just cocks his head to the side and asks, “In that case, what makes you so sure she even had a reason?”
“...It’s Carmen,” Jules says, unable to produce a better answer. “There must have been a reason.”
Hawkins doesn’t really seem convinced at all, but he doesn’t push the subject any further.
Jules appreciates that.
~
Jules knew Carmen better than anyone else did. That didn’t necessarily mean she knew Carmen well, but at the very least, she was positive that Carmen wanted to make the world a better place. Whenever Carmen had talked about conserving the environment, about preserving world cultures, about learning from the past so that we may improve the future, there was real, undeniable passion there.
But the Carmen who Jules knew, the Carmen who had wanted nothing more than to do good—how in the world had she become the Carmen who stole, who laughed at the law, who left taunting and sometimes cruel messages behind?
Hello Julia. Still trying to prove yourself?
Maybe you’ve lost your edge, Jules.
You’ll learn, Agent Hawkins, that Julia can get quite frustrated at times. Not to mention opinionated.
The remarks hurt, honestly, but they also just didn’t make sense. Carmen hadn’t cared enough about Jules to stay, obviously, but...she had cared. Jules knew Carmen leaving ACME had never been about her, yet now, Carmen was acting as if she had something personal against Jules all of a sudden.
It’s almost as if, a voice whispered in the back of Jules’s mind, Carmen is trying to make you hate her.
And when Jules thought about it like that, she realized: if the Carmen she knew had, for whatever reason, believed she could somehow better the world by making herself into the villain...
She would have.
One hundred percent, she would have.
~
“Maybe she masterminded these thefts so the whole world could benefit,” Jules ponders aloud, after Carmen escapes her and Hawkins in the lost city. Even as she says it, she knows there’s no proof. There’s nothing there but her own intuition, and maybe too much hope, and a love for Carmen that will never truly be able to leave her heart.
Hawkins doesn’t believe it. The Chief probably doesn’t either. And even if Jules ever caught up to Carmen, even if Jules ever managed to pin her down long enough to ask if her theory was correct, Carmen would never answer her honestly.
That’s just who Carmen is. And Jules will just have to live with that.
“I still think Carmen Sandiego is a bad apple. Rotten to the core,” Hawkins says, because he and Jules don’t agree on a lot of things and will likely never agree on Carmen. But even so, his can-do attitude as the Chief reports Carmen’s next heist is contagious, invigorating. It honestly makes Jules feel better.
Carmen would never answer Jules honestly. But there is still the possibility that Jules could find out the truth for herself.
So, with the chase back on and her confidence renewed, Jules turns to Shadow and smiles.
