Look I know we all talk about "nureyev saw Juno climbing out of a window and was like 'yeah I want that one'" and I totally believe that and think it's really funny but also? Personal hc?
Nureyev knew he was safe with Juno during the aftermath of the case. The personal, emotional connection came from watching Juno become outraged that a woman who killed her father was put in handcuffs, not because he didn't believe she did it, but because he knew it was an accident, because he knew she was manipulated, because he knew she was scared and angry. Juno looked at someone who killed their father and chose to feel empathy for the situation that forced their hand.
And maybe, just maybe, he'd do the same for Nureyev too.
I think its funny how we all sometimes write nureyev as pearl-clutchingly proud despite this man having genuinely SO little shame. Like. He pretended to be a sick old lady so he could tail his at-the-time-boyfriend without him knowing. He LOUDLY and PUBLICLY declared his very dramatic, fake love for a woman Just so she would give him money. EVERYTHING about Perseus Shah. How he posed for Rita (with a broken leg, mind you) and absolutely No questions were asked and he had fun doing it. Peter Nureyev is so fucking ready to do Literally Anything For A Bit and I think we collectively forget this sometimes
Nureyev sets down his pen. Wherever he’d been before now, whatever space his mind occupied, washes away with cold water. The voice behind him (on the bed, he imagines) sounds only mildly curious. “Again?” He barely breathes the question into the air in front of him, and it doesn’t reach that far back.
“You know, in a cold ditch somewhere,” Juno continues, teasing. Nureyev knows what he’d see if he turned around, down to the last detail, so he looks at the desk in front of him instead. It’s familiar - the same whorls in the wood grain he’d seen hundreds of times, the same scattering of papers and the other paraphernalia inevitably collected when one lives in one space for an extended amount of time. Most of them don’t exist anymore, purposefully and dispassionately removed by his own hand. Left behind and lost in the chaos, not to be found again.
Something traitorous in his mind supplies: Just like the person behind you, isn’t that right?
Juno doesn’t say that. Not this time. They’ve had this conversation often enough that Nureyev thinks every barb and biting word his detective could possibly come up with have already been aimed and fired into his back with the expert eye of a sharpshooter, but they’re still here. If there’s a right answer for that question, Nureyev hasn’t discovered it yet.
“Why would I think that?” The opening salvo is a hand he’s played before, and Nureyev wonders if Juno is disappointed. He doesn’t sound as if he is; he never sounds like much, while they talk around each other.
“You read the file.” A shifting of sheets. Juno is making himself comfortable, and Nureyev picks up the pen again. Anything else. Anything to keep his hands full, his eyes pointed in front of him. Anything to prevent him from giving in and walking to that bed, because that would be a mistake. “One shot, lethal, aimed at the heart. And if that’s not bad enough, tossed into the airlock that was opened, what, no more than a minute later? I think she had it down to the second, didn’t she? For someone with no one left to report to, Wire still writes up one hell of a report.”
“That doesn’t mean anything.” It’s a weak denial. It even sounds weak, worn thin with use.
“Optimistic of you,” Juno says, still mild. Still not accusatory, or angry, or any of the things he should be. “Especially since you know how many prisoners were on the ship out of there. You think I would have let that asteroid blow up with Rita on it if I was alive to do anything?”
Nureyev clutches the pen. It creaks with the pressure. There’s a fresh wound that Juno’s poking at now, prodding into bleeding; Nureyev tried. The moment he’d realized the prison had a prisoner less than it should have, the moment he’d ferreted out a sliver of information that might lead him in the right direction… He’d looked anyway. He’d wasted valuable days sifting through debris, unsure if it was a relief or new agony every moment he didn’t find anything. He didn’t find anything. The exhaustion broke down a wall in him, and he’d had the fleeting thought that maybe it was better that Juno was gone if it meant he didn’t have to know Rita followed him.
The thought had been unkind to Nureyev. It had teeth, and it tore at him until all he could do was find a quiet corner, retreat, and let it do its damage until his breath could squeeze out from his chest again and his heart stopped pounding like footsteps running from a threat somewhere above him. He left that moment more damaged than he’d entered it, and he’d left the asteroid still in pieces with no answers.
“You don’t know that. You can’t know that.” The words sound breathless, forced around the pressure pushing at his chest. Nureyev is bent double over the desk, his forehead close to brushing the surface, and he doesn’t know when that happened. He doesn’t remember moving, but isn’t that just another facet of his new life? Lost, skipped time, when he doesn’t know where he goes except that the dark and hollow feeling of it chases him down?
The bedsheets rustle again. It’s an act of strength that Nureyev is quickly running out of, not to turn and look. “You would have found me by now. Or Sasha. Maybe I would have found you. What do you think it means, that I’m not anywhere?”
“That you’ve gotten better at hiding. That I’ve taught you how to run.”
“You know better. I know for a fact that you know better than that.”
There’s a shift, a creak, as bare feet rest their full weight on metal floor. Nureyev thinks he can feel every footstep behind him, getting closer - stalking him, cornering him, hunting him down until the darkness has him again. He doesn’t look. Juno keeps talking. “You’ve looked for me. I know you have - used every trick I taught you about chasing someone down who doesn’t want to be found, and all you got for your trouble was what Sasha Wire could tell you - the make and model of the blaster that fired the hole into me, the timestamp of how many seconds elapsed before I entered the airlock and exited the other side, the final count of who left on that Dark Matters ship. You thought about going to my office, until you did a little digging and realized the lease was up and someone else was there now. Called every contact of mine you knew, and even got some answers - but no one heard from me, not recently. So where did I go? Where am I now?”
Tension crawls into the lines of Nureyev’s back, holding him taut. Juno is behind him. Juno is leaning over him. He can feel warm breath on the back of his neck, and the fear of what he’d find wars with the need to lean back into that embrace - the hollow, lonely core of him that won’t stop bleeding, has no closure to either patch itself whole or tear wider into something more final and fatal. He wants. That want terrifies him, as much as the possibility Juno speaks into his ear.
“You wouldn’t plan on breaking into that prison,” Juno tells him, voice low and empty like he has no energy left to summon more emotion than that, “If you thought you needed to get back out. You’re gonna try at freeing our family, and it doesn’t matter to you if you die in the attempt. Am I wrong, Nureyev?”
He lets the last few inches go, a puppet on a string with a wire cut, his head resting on the desk. He’s run out of tears a few times already, and even though his eyes sting he finds the well is still dry. “Why are you doing this.” It isn’t a question, because he’s already heard the answer. “Why do you keep telling me this.”
Juno leans closer. Nureyev half expects hands at his throat, but Juno would never, not even here. The weight of him, warm, presses against Nureyev’s back. His arms wrap around Nureyev’s chest from behind, and the dry sob cuts through him.
Anything else would be kinder. Anything else Juno could do would be more merciful than this, but Nureyev doesn’t fight him away; he needs with a sudden desperation that can only hurt him later. One more second, his mind negotiates. I’ll pay whatever I have to for just one second more.
“Because I’m dead,” Juno says. There’s a tired compassion there, a gentleness Nureyev doesn’t want. Anger would be easier. “I’m dead, and you know this is the only place you’ll see me again. So you keep bringing me back, to have this conversation again and again - so you can hear my voice, before you forget what I sound like.”
Nureyev whines out something sharp and pathetic, past words. Juno holds him closer, and he leans back into the embrace… breathes until he feels like he can talk without breaking. “And do I still have it right, love?”
There’s a kiss on his cheek. It feels like a knife, quick and cutting. “I think so.” They stay that way for a stolen moment - before Juno shatters it the way he always does. “Look at me?”
How can Nureyev not? When it could be his last chance, when Juno asks in that voice he remembers from the quiet of their shared bed after a moment of vulnerability, after a nightmare, when he might never have another opportunity to do anything for Juno… how can he say no? Juno pulls away just enough to allow Nureyev to turn in his chair.
Blood. It’s all Nureyev can see, soaking into Juno’s shirt from the… from the hole punched through him. It’s dripping onto the floor. It’s lining every footstep Juno took to reach him, sinking into the bed behind him, covering Nureyev’s back and dripping onto his hands. Nureyev can’t breathe. He’s seen it all before, every night for weeks, but he can’t breathe through the fresh horror of it.
“Juno,” he chokes out. He reaches for the wound with some detached thought of stemming the bleeding, stopping this from happening, while he looks up and confronts dark eyes that are already empty and glassy. Juno can’t see him. Juno can’t hear him. Juno is already gone, and Nureyev fights the relentless truth of that while his face contorts, unbidden, into the strange shapes that grief inflicts on him. “Juno, no, you… you can’t…” His hands reach Juno’s chest, and the blood is tacky. Juno is cold. Nureyev’s breath dragged out of him. “No, no, this isn’t - this isn’t real, you aren’t -”
Dead.
But he is, isn’t he?
He comes back every night to remind Nureyev of that. Nureyev brings him back every night to lose him all over again.
The sound that comes out of Nureyev is too soft and too tired to be a scream; it’s just the echo of one, grown worn with use. He doesn’t think about the feeling of blood sticking to him, or the cold, stiff, unyielding sensation of a corpse. He leans closer anyway, wrapping his arms around Juno and holding him in place as if that will do any good - as if he can recapture the warmth of seconds and more than a month ago.
“I love you.” Broken words, whispered into the wound, falling from his mouth to fracture on the floor. Too little and too late. Juno doesn’t answer.
When he wakes, more tired than when he fell asleep, he’s not sure if he can remember what Juno’s voice sounds like. He’s not sure he’s strong enough to try.
yes he’s off-screen more than half the time and yes all the other characters in the series are very important and i love them too but it’s not my fault that every single tiny thing revealed about peter nureyev is 1) objectively hilarious, and 2) incredibly endearing.
he keeps halves of sandwiches in his pockets! he drinks milk with nutrient paste instead of coffee! his room is so messy that there are knives balanced on the doorframe! he has an obscenely long skincare routine! he doodles pictures of cats and parties when he’s bored that are so bad they can be mistaken for secret codes!
and all of that despite also being a genuinely very intelligent, competent, charismatic person. what a legend. what a mess. i want to kiss him on the mouth
“I think you already know the answer to that question, Steel. I’m you.” There’s a beat, and then the stranger smiles. “You from three years in the future.”
Standing in that grimy alleyway under that flickering neon light, face to face with his mirror image, Detective Juno Steel can only think of one thing to say:
“What.”
Rated T | Multichapter (will be 50-60k) | updating Mondays and Thursdays
A Juno focused (but still Jupeter) story about time travel, love, grief, and a cross-species connection spanning thousands of years.
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