“I don’t know why you thought that was a good idea,” you mutter, watching Frank nudge your foot more securely onto his thigh. 

He’s been treating you with the same brisk, unsentimental competence he applies to everything, like your body is not a person-body but an issue-body, a small wandering inconvenience he found in the hallway and now has to return to factory settings.

His fingers close around your heel, adjust, pause. 

“I’m serious,” you say, because this is important.

History is written by people who successfully assign blame, and you did not spend all those years developing a near-pathological memory just to let the record show that you did this to yourself. 

And to your credit it was his idea.

You were just present. Present does not mean culpable. Present is not consent to being made responsible for consequences. You were a witness. A soft-bodied, academically gifted witness with poor proprioception and, apparently, too much faith in Langdon’s confidence. 

Which is, yes, perhaps a generous interpretation of events, but it is also the one you are committed to, so.

Frank huffs a laugh, swiping the antiseptic-soaked cotton over your calf in a slow pass. “You seemed pretty convinced it was a great idea when you were holding onto me for dear life.” 

You make an indignant squeak. 

“That’s not — that was entirely pragmatic,” you sputter, cheeks suddenly feverish. “Bodies merging at speed become a single aerodynamic unit — like birds, okay, or Olympic cyclists — and my weight placement was crucial for gravity’s sake. Purely scientific. It was not,” you add, hearing your own voice get thinner, “anything else.”

He arches an eyebrow slowly, cotton poised mid-air. “Huh. Funny, then, how your aerodynamics ended with both of us eating gravel.”

“Well,” you mumble, “science has a long history of failed early trials.” 

In hindsight, it really was objectively a stupid idea to “borrow” someone’s unattended rental scooter, and even stupider to let Frank convince you to get on the back. 

You keep trying to frame it like some baffling lapse in judgment, some temporary lesion of the common-sense cortex, like wow, how strange, what shadowy external force seized control of your motor planning and ethical reasoning and piloted you directly into a minor municipal offense?

As if you, a person with a functioning frontal lobe, a high board score, and a lifelong fear of being perceived as troublesome in public, had simply been swept away by some dark Romantic current, some gothic wind, some little fever of recklessness. 

Except you know exactly how it happened. You just have a hard time admitting it.

There was no dark force. There was Frank. Frank standing under the bad yellow streetlight with his hands in his jacket pockets, looking at the scooter, then looking at you like you were already halfway to agreeing. Frank smiling and dropping his voice into that low, rough register that always sounds half amused and half certain. 

Trust me, I’ve done this before followed by C’mon, just live a little. 

As if your caution were not reasoned and correct, but some overdeveloped reflex, some stale little survival habit you had failed to outgrow.

As if your whole life had tilted too far toward restraint, toward clean hands and returned library books and reading every waiver before signing it, and tonight, just this once, you could afford to be frivolous. 

And apparently your moral constitution, once exposed to Frank for more than twelve consecutive seconds, ceases to be a constitution at all and becomes carnival glass. Melted sugar. A decorative substance with no practical load-bearing capacity whatsoever. 

He pinches a shard of gravel from your calf and you jerk on instinct, a hiss catching between your teeth as you try to pull back from the sting. 

“Sit still, please.”

And because apparently your body is a treacherous little province that recognizes him as its sovereign ruler, you sit still. 

Your shoulders go stiff. Your mouth settles into a line with distinct sulking potential. You glare at a crack in the paint on the wall.

“Starting to suspect bedside manner isn’t exactly one of your specialized skill sets,” you mutter under your breath.

Frank doesn’t look up. “You want bedside manner or you want the gravel out?”

“I can want multiple things. I’m cognitively gifted.” You adjust yourself on the bed.

“Then use that gift to sit still.”

You glare harder at the wall.

The crack remains unmoved, but you feel it is on your side.

Langdon sighs, dips his head enough to intercept your glare and drag it back to him. “And anyway, if you wanted good beside manner, maybe you shouldn’t have picked the guy who got you injured in the first place.”

You point at him immediately, which is a mistake, because sudden movement makes your calf sting, and also because pointing at Langdon feels like pointing at a thunderstorm and expecting it to apologize. 

“So you admit it’s your fault?”

“Wasn’t exactly trying to plead innocence here.” 

“Well — no, but that’s not the same as taking responsibility,” you argue. “Admitting fault can be passive. Taking responsibility implies an active ethical position. Remorse, repair, possible restitution. There’s a whole difference between, like, yes, I caused the fire, and here is my plan for rebuilding the barn.” 

“Alright, point taken.” He drags the pad of his thumb once, absentmindedly, against the inside of your ankle before reaching for the antiseptic again. “I am sorry. Believe me, seeing you scraped up and bleeding definitely wasn’t on my list of ways to impress you tonight.”

You perk up at that.

“You were trying to impress me?”

It comes out softer than you mean it to, all the irritation leaking from the sentence until only wonder is left.

Your head tilts, hair spilling into your eyes, and you bite back a smile badly enough that it is no longer really bitten back at all. 

“Wasn’t it obvious?”

He presses a neat bandage over the worst part, which, to be fair, is only the worst part in the sense that one paper cut may technically outrank another. Medically, this is barely worth the packaging it came in. 

A superficial epidermal abrasion, maybe skimming low enough to annoy the skin into a little dermal complaining, but nothing serious. No tissue loss. No wound-edge separation. No alarming depth. Just the unsexy reality of friction doing what friction does best, which is remove a thin layer of your dignity along with a thin layer of skin. 

Honestly, it barely qualifies as an injury. Frank knows that as well as you do. Better, probably. 

“Um, no? Definitely not obvious. Actually pretty unclear — your intentions, I mean. Why would you try and impress me?”

Frank frowns.

“Why wouldn’t I?” As if you are the strange one. As if the question is not only unnecessary but faintly ridiculous, like asking why someone might put pressure on an arterial bleed or wash their hands after using the bathroom. “Seemed like a worthwhile use of my time.”

“Oh.” You blink in rapid succession. “I just — okay, that doesn’t feel entirely accurate? Not that I’m saying I’m not worthwhile. I’m not doing some weird self-esteem thing right now, to be very clear. I am pro-myself in theory. I support the concept of me. I just mean the situation itself seemed to have a pretty poor success rate, so I don’t totally understand the evaluation criteria you were working with.” 

Langdon snorts, ducking his head down briefly as both hands come to cradle your calves, warmth seeping through the pads of his fingers. 

“Right, right,” he drawls, eyes lowered, mouth almost amused. “Clearly I’m the one who’s not making sense here.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You implied it.” His thumb brushes once over the bandage, checking the edge, before he gives your knee a gentle pat. “There. You’re officially good as new.” 

You look down at the bandage, then back at him.

“I was never bad as old.”

He snorts again. It’s a funny sound. A half-commitment to a laugh, like his body accidentally lets one slip before the rest of him can shut it down.

His nose crinkles. His face does this brief, reluctant little contortion that feels so human it almost distracts you from the fact that he is, in fact, making fun of you. 

Then his gaze moves to the clock on the bedside table.

He eases upright from his crouched position, and you watch him with narrowed eyes, expecting a flicker of discomfort. A wince. A hand at his lower back. But there’s nothing. Maybe his back has been doing better. Maybe that explains the improved mood.

Or maybe it’s the vacation. The sea water. The salt air. The fact that nobody has paged him in seventy-two hours, which is maybe the closest anyone gets to spa treatment. 

“I should get back downstairs before somebody notices we’re both missing. Think you can manage staying upright for a while without supervision?” 

You draw yourself up slightly. 

“Well, removing the primary hazard from the environment,” you say, “which is you, to be clear, should improve my odds considerably.” 

Frank’s mouth twitches. 

“Cute,” he says, in a tone that suggests he means annoying and cute and is unwilling to choose between them. He gives the bandage one last glance, then the rest of you, like he’s checking for any obvious remaining damage. “Stay off it for ten minutes.” 

He leaves before you can make it worse, which is probably for the best, and you sit there listening to his footsteps fade down the hall, pretending the warm, stupid flutter in your chest is relief. 

Relief that your leg is fine. Relief that the scooter incident did not end in the emergency department.

Relief that has nothing whatsoever to do with Frank Langdon trying to impress you and then staying long enough to patch you up.

this fic was part of my 2 year celebration: maria's summer in santorini 𓆉°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･ to learn more, click here!