"Experientia et Progressus."

The start of a smile, where her lips curved upwards ever so slightly. She knew she shouldn't be pleased by that not really, but he'd chosen to come to her and that was more than she was expecting yet. Her hand returned the soft squeeze of his, and made no intention of letting go of his hand now.

Watching him as he rested his head against her shoulder, without really thinking about it she turned her head to his and kissed his forehead. "Good..." She hummed softly, "once you're feeling up to it we'll go to the bed."

She wasn't about to take no for an answer and was pretty sure he knew that well enough. Her own head gently rested against his, mentally trying to remember where she'd put the shirt she's snagged from his place the last time she'd stayed there. That was a problem for later Dylan, for now she'd enjoy the softness and affection.

"Mm. Bed sounds smart." His voice stayed low, rough at the edges, the words stretched thick with that drawl he usually kept on a short leash. He didn't move yet. The floor had claimed him for now, back solid against the base of the sofa, one knee drawn up, the other leg out long in front of him. The water glass sat forgotten in his free hand, condensation sliding cool over his knuckles, a small distant fact he registered without doing anything about.

Her admission reached him through the fog, slower than it should have, and then all at once. He turned his head enough to catch her face in the low light, the angle awkward, the closeness anything but. Something in his expression gave way further, the guarded lines that usually sat around his eyes going soft, undefended in a way he'd have caught and corrected on any other night. Tonight there was nothing standing between what he felt and what showed.

"You were gonna call me." He said it quiet, turning the idea over like he was checking it for a catch. A tired, honest smile tugged one corner of his mouth with a glimpse of the chipped canine that had created the particular lopsided habit. "And here I am. Saving you the trouble - usually I'm the one causing it."

He lifted their joined hands, the movement slow and careful, and pressed his mouth to the back of her knuckles. It wasn't precise. The drink had taken his usual steadiness and left something looser, clumsier, but no less certain for it. He lingered there longer than he needed to, eyes closing again, like he was trying to memorize the shape of her hand against his mouth before he let it drop back down between them. His thumb kept moving over her skin in slow, absent circles, some quiet current he didn't seem aware of starting.

"Missed you too." The words came out plain, stripped bare of every deflection he'd have reached for sober, every joke he might have hidden behind. He didn't look away from her when he said it. "Been missing you for a while now, actually. Not just tonight." A pause, his jaw working like the next part cost him something to hand over. "Didn't want to say it and make it a thing. Figured showing up counted for more."

He shifted his weight, testing the steadiness left in his limbs, then let his forearm settle against her knee, an anchor, a question he didn't need to ask out loud. The apartment's warmth had worked its way into him fully now, melting the last of the cold from the walk, and the floor had stopped feeling like a place he'd ended up and started feeling like a place he wanted to stay.

"Ten minutes." His fingers tightened gently around hers, like he was making sure she was still there and not just something his blood alcohol content had invented. "Then I'm all yours."

The bar was the kind of place that didn't ask questions.

That was, as far as Elias was concerned, its single greatest virtue. No one knew his name here, no one knew what he did for a living, and the bartender had the professional disinterest of someone who had seen enough to stop being curious about any of it. He appreciated that.

He'd changed out of his scrubs before he'd come. That much, at least, had been deliberate. He didn't want the reminder on his skin, didn't want the association, didn't want to sit here in the specific blue-grey of the hospital and have to look down at his own arms and think about what they'd been doing four hours ago. So he'd changed, and he'd ridden, the bike cutting through the cold air in a way that had helped, briefly, the way it sometimes did - and he'd sat down at the far end of the bar where the light was worse and the likelihood of conversation was lower, and he'd ordered.

That had been a while ago.

The glass in front of him was not his first. He wasn't counting, which was itself information he was choosing not to examine too closely.

He stared at the middle distance - not , in any meaningful sense, present in the room they were physically occupying. His jaw was set. His shoulders carried the tension of someone who had been holding something in place for a very long time and had not yet fully stood down from the effort of it, even now, even here, even with the alcohol doing what it was doing which was not enough, or was enough, or was something he'd stopped having the vocabulary to evaluate somewhere around the fourth drink.

He heard someone approach. Didn't turn his head.

ANGRY receiver is angry at sender for the first time

They'd nearly died again. Elias had covered her when she'd reloaded her own gun and suddenly pushed her to the ground, almost getting shot himself. Igraine's adrenaline had only just started to come down, the high leaving her body when she tore from the ground and pushed him. "Don't you ever do that again!"

The force she exhibited barely moved him; it was like pushing against a solid brick wall.

Igraine hadn't meant to push him; her brain only saw red, saw him almost dying before her eyes. She wouldn't live with herself if one of their team had gotten hurt because she wasn't fast enough with a gun. Her main purpose was the language and artifacts they were procuring. Elias meant more to her than all of the riches that this deserted place had to offer. The Medjai were not going to stop their assaults every few nights, trying to catch them off guard.

She pointed a finger in his face, brows knitted together, a sneer on her face from just fear, "Do not ever save me again. If I'm too slow, that's my burden to bear. I will not have you going down for me." Her finger shook, her hand trembling when she snatched it back.

"I am so mad at you right now."

"Noted," he said. Voice flat. Unbothered, or at least a convincing impression of it, the kind he'd had a lot of practice putting on for people who needed him steady more than they needed him honest.

Her finger still hovered in the air between them, trembling with leftover fury. He studied it, then let his gaze slide up to her face instead, because the hand had already told him everything he needed to know about the why. He didn't need her to spell it out. He'd heard that particular pitch of scared-mad-scared before.

"You want to yell at me? Go ahead. I'd still do it again."

He crouched, unhurried, and retrieved the rifle from the dirt where it had landed when he'd shoved her clear. Out of pure habit he racked the bolt, checked the action, muscle memory older than most of the people currently trying to kill them. Grit rasped somewhere in the mechanism he didn't like the sound of. Hardly a function ending flaw but deeply annoying.

"Sand in the bolt. Great. That's going to be a fun to fix later."

He straightened, slung the rifle, and gave the horizon a once-over out of the corner of his eye without turning his head fully, the same scan he did every ninety seconds or so without thinking about it anymore. Nothing yet. That wouldn't last.

"You want to trade jobs? I'll copy the hieroglyphs, you catch the bullets. I hear the pictograph work is very relaxing. Lots of sitting. Low mortality rate, comparatively." He adjusted the strap where it had twisted against his collarbone. "I'd probably get the birds backwards though. Is it 'the falcon means death' or 'the falcon means Tuesday.' I never remember."

He did not reach for her. Kept his hands loose at his sides and made no move to steer her forward by the shoulder or the elbow, the way he might've in different circumstances. He'd learned a long time ago, the hard way, more than once, that you didn't grab at someone still vibrating with that much adrenaline laced current running through them. You let them come down on their own clock or you got hit again, and this time he might deserve it.

Somewhere off to the east something moved, too close for his liking, and he tipped his chin toward it without breaking off from her.

"We can keep having this conversation while we walk," he said, "or we can have it never. Your call. Either way, we're walking, and preferably before our friends remember where they left us."

"It's only tactical when I can pull it off before we even cross paths, otherwise someone might think I'm just avoiding you." He aimed for something between a smirk and a shrug, the same worn-in defense he'd been dragging out for months whenever anyone got too close with their questions. Humor first, bitterness close behind it, the two so tangled together that even he couldn't say where one ended and the other started.