His voice sounded rough through the phone, sleep heavy, a little gravelled, and guilt immediately creeps up your spine.

Shit. You definitely woke him.

You hesitate, chewing lightly at the inside of your cheek as you glance around the mess again. This wasn’t even the first time. Ever since you’d moved into the house next to his, it had somehow… become a thing. If you had a loose cabinet door, flickering light, a lock that wouldn’t turn properly, you would call him. 

And every single time, he showed up.

“I’m really sorry,” you wince, pacing a small circle around the mess like that’s somehow going to fix it, “it’s just– I actually tried doing it myself this time, and it looked like it went well. Until it didn’t.”

You let out a small, embarrassed laugh, your hand coming up to scratch at your eyebrow, a nervous habit you’ve never managed to shake.

Another pause. Softer this time.

“Hey,” he says, a little clearer now, like he’s forcing himself properly awake, “it’s fine. Seriously.”

You’re not convinced.

If he was napping in the middle of the afternoon, then he was off shift, which meant this was probably one of the only quiet hours he got to himself all week. With the kind of hours he worked at the hospital, long shifts that seemed to blur into each other and never really end when they were supposed to, sleep wasn’t something he got nearly enough of.

The last thing you wanted was to be the reason he didn’t get it.

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” you mumble, quieter now, eyes flicking back to the mess like it might suddenly resolve itself out of pity. “I can– I can figure it out, if you want. You don’t have to come.”

There’s a brief pause. “Too late.”

You blink.

“What?”

“I’m already up,” he says, there's something dry in his voice, something faintly amused, like he’s already decided that he’s going to come over and fix it whether you like it or not. “And I’d rather fix it once than come over later when it’s somehow worse.”

“That’s very optimistic of you,” you mutter.

“Experience,” he shoots back easily.

Despite yourself, your lips twitch.

“Don’t worry about it,” he adds, softer now, and you can practically hear him dragging a hand down his face, grabbing for a shirt or whatever’s closest. “You’re not the first person to lose a fight to flat-pack furniture.”

“That makes me feel worse, actually.”

“It shouldn’t,” he says, a beat passing before his tone shifts, something lighter threading through it. “What can I say? I guess I’ve got a way with my hands.”

You go completely still.

There’s a brief, dangerous pause where your brain tries to decide whether that was a joke, a joke, or something you’re definitely overthinking.

Because there’s no way he just said that.

Right?

Your eyes flick to nothing in particular, grip tightening slightly around your phone as the words replay in your head, slower this time, like that’s somehow going to help.

I’ve got a way with my hands.

Heat creeps up the back of your neck, and you’re suddenly very aware of the fact that you’re standing alone in your living room reacting like this over a sentence that may or may not have been completely innocent.

He probably didn’t mean it like that.

He definitely didn’t mean it like that.

…He absolutely meant it like that.

You press your lips together, inhaling through your nose like that’s going to reset your brain. It doesn’t.

“Right…” You clear your throat, dragging your attention back to the mess in front of you like it might ground you. It doesn’t. 

“Yeah. We’ll– we’ll see about that, Abbot. Just ring the bell when you get here.”

“Mm. Try not to make it worse before I arrive.”

“Oh, shut up–”

You hang up before he can say anything else, your mouth still slightly parted. You stand there for a good five seconds, just blinking at nothing. Then you look back at the broken bookshelf.

God help you.

A good ten minutes go by, and you still don’t listen to him.

Because of course you don’t.

You’re crouched in front of the bookshelf again, one knee pressed into the floor, the screwdriver clutched a little too tight in your hand as you try, for the third time now, to get the top shelf to sit properly. Your head is half inside the frame, eyes narrowed as you angle the screw just right, tongue pressing lightly against your cheek in concentration.

“Okay just– stay,” you mutter under your breath, like the thing might actually cooperate if you asked nicely.

It doesn’t.

The doorbell rings.

And in the exact same second, the shelf gives way.

It comes straight down, catching the top of your head with a dull thud that makes your whole body jolt forward, the screwdriver slipping from your fingers as a sharp sting spreads instantly.

“Ow, shit,” you groan, squeezing your eyes shut as your hand flies up to your head, pressing against the spot like that’s somehow going to undo it.

For a second you just stay there, hunched over, breathing through it, before letting out a quiet, annoyed exhale. “Perfect,” you mumble to yourself, pushing yourself up slowly, still a little dazed. “That’s just perfect.”

The bell rings again, longer this time.

“Yeah, I’m coming,” you call out, your voice slightly strained as you make your way to the door, your hand still resting on top of your head, your face caught somewhere between a grimace and irritation.

You open it, and there he is.

You take him in for a second without meaning to. The faint grey stubble along his jaw, his hair still slightly out of place like he didn’t bother fixing it before leaving, the simple black shirt and pants thrown on in a rush. There’s a look on his face already, caught between amusement and expectation, like he knew exactly what he was walking into before you even opened the door.

His eyes move over you quickly, taking in the hand on your head, your hair out of place, the look on your face, and you can see the moment it clicks to him.

You drop your hand a little too late to make it subtle.

A small smile threatens at his lips as he adjusts the toolbox in his hand, stepping forward when you shift to the side to let him in. You hold your breath for half a second as he passes you, the space between you just close enough to make you aware of it, before you shut the door behind him.

“Do I need to guess what happened,” he says, glancing down at you as he steps further inside, his voice still a little rough but clearer now.

You scoff softly, already turning to follow him. “Don’t start. I was trying to take matters into my own hands again, and apparently this shelf is harder to build than it looks.”

He hums like he’s not convinced, already walking into your living room, and he’s done it enough times to know exactly where he’s going. His eyes land on the mess almost immediately, taking in the scattered pieces, the half-built frame, the screw you’d dropped on the floor.

“Right,” he says after a second, one brow lifting slightly. “You tried.”

“I did try,” you shoot back instantly, crossing your arms, even though there’s still a faint sting at the top of your head reminding you how that went.

His gaze flicks back to you, slower this time, settling on your face, then your hair, then the spot your hand had been covering.

“What did you do.”

“Nothing,” you answer quickly, a little too quickly.

“That didn’t sound like nothing.”

“It’s fine,” you insist, waving it off like it’s nothing even as you avoid looking at him properly. “It just hit my head a little, it’s not a big deal.”

He doesn’t say anything straight away, and that’s almost worse.

“Let me see.”

“It’s fine, Jack–”

“Let me see,” he repeats, already stepping closer, his tone not harsh but not really leaving you much room to argue either. It’s something about the way he says it, like he’s already decided and that’s that, and then there’s the way he’s looking at you — his eyes settling on your face, focused so intently that it makes your chest feel a little too warm all of a sudden, like you’re suddenly very aware of how close he is.

You hesitate for a second before letting your hand fall away, tilting your head slightly despite yourself. “It’s not even that bad,” you mumble, though it comes out weaker than you meant it to.

He doesn’t respond, just lifts his hand and brushes your hair aside, fingers careful as he checks the spot. There’s a brief pause while he looks at it properly, his expression shifting as the earlier amusement fades.

“Yeah,” he mutters, more to himself. “That’s gonna be a bump.”

You let out a small, unimpressed breath. “Great. Love that for me.”

His hand drops away, but instead of saying anything else, he turns and heads toward your kitchen. You watch him go for a second, still standing where he left you, a little thrown off by how quickly he just takes over your space (not that you're complaining about it).

You hear the fridge door open, the low hum getting louder for a second, then the scrape of the freezer compartment, things shifting around as he moves stuff aside.

“Of course you’ve got nothing useful in here,” he mutters.

“There should be peas or something.”

“There are,” he says after a second. “Miraculously.”

You roll your eyes, even though he can’t see you.

A moment later, he’s back, a bag of frozen peas in his hand as he stops in front of you. He doesn’t hand it to you.

Instead, he steps in closer, lifting it straight to your head before you can react.

You flinch slightly at the cold. “Oh–”

“Hold it,” he says, already reaching for your hand and bringing it up, pressing your fingers around the bag so you keep it in place. His touch lingers for half a second before he lets go.

“Okay.”

He doesn’t say anything else, just turns and walks back over to where he dropped his toolbox, crouching down and flipping it open like he’s done this a hundred times before (he has.)

You don’t move.

For a second, you just stand there, hand pressed to your head, watching him. Or more specifically — You’re watching the way his back shifts under the black shirt as he bends slightly over the frame, the fabric pulling just enough across his shoulders, his arms moving as he starts sorting through the pieces, he makes it look so easy.

You blink, forcing your eyes away for a second, adjusting the peas against your head like that’s what you were focused on the whole time.

It doesn’t really work because you look back.

He’s still crouched there, focused on the shelf, completely unaware, and you’re suddenly very aware of how long you’ve just been standing there doing absolutely nothing.

You clear your throat, shifting your weight as you take a small step forward, still holding the peas to your head as you glance between him and the mess. “Do you– need help, or something, or are you just gonna do the whole thing yourself?”

He doesn’t even look up, already moving pieces back into place like he knows exactly what he’s doing, fingers working easily as he adjusts the frame. “No, you’re alright,” he says, like it’s obvious, like you asking was almost unnecessary.

And then, after a second, like it’s nothing, “Just sit and look pretty.”

You just stand there, your brain going completely fuzzy for a second as it registers what he just said, your grip tightening slightly around the bag of peas while your mouth opens a little before you can stop it.

You’re suddenly very aware of the fact that he can’t see your face right now, because if he could, you’re pretty sure he’d notice it instantly.

So you don’t say anything.

You just stand there, holding the peas to your head, trying to act like that didn’t just completely throw you off, even though it absolutely did.

He keeps going like nothing happened, adjusting the frame, tightening something into place before leaning back slightly to look at it, checking his own work.

You shift slightly, lifting the peas just a little off your head, your fingers moving to press lightly against the spot instead, testing it to see if it still hurts. The second you do, his head turns slightly over his shoulder.

“Don’t touch it,” he adds after a second, almost as an afterthought, still focused on the shelf. “Just leave it for a minute.”

You freeze for half a second before putting the peas back where they were, pressing them properly against your head doing exactly as he said.

“Okay,” you say, softer this time, a lot more normal than whatever you would’ve said earlier.

He keeps going like nothing happened, adjusting the frame, tightening something into place before leaning back slightly to look at it, like he’s checking his own work.

You watch him for a second longer than you should, adjusting the peas again just so you have something to do.

“Thank you,” you add after a moment. He pauses briefly at that, just for a second, before continuing like it didn’t affect him at all.

“Yeah of course,” he says easily.

It was an awkward predicament you found yourself in, one that seemed to happen so quickly you couldn’t even properly process how you got there in the first place. One second you were standing on the sidewalk after getting out of the sports bar you had gone to with a few friends you hadn’t seen in a while, still half caught up in the lingering conversation, your eyes scanning the street for a taxi that could take you home.

And then the next second, without even looking properly, you didn’t realise a bike was coming straight toward you along the sidewalk.

There was barely any time to react before the impact happened, the force of it knocking straight into you and sending both you and the rider crashing down onto the concrete. Your body hit the ground hard, but it was your head that took most of it, smacking sharply against the pavement that made everything jolt at once.

A loud groan leaves you instantly, the pain spreading so suddenly and so intensely that you don’t even think before running your tongue over your teeth in your mouth, checking them one by one to make sure they were still intact, still where they were supposed to be. The sensation was so overwhelming, that it made it hard for you to focus on anything else. 

You don’t even register that people have started gathering around you, their voices overlapping, questions being thrown at you all at once as they hover nearby.

“Shit– I’m so, so sorry,” the man says quickly, the one who had collided with you.

You blink up at him through the blur, trying to focus your eyes enough to actually see him properly. He looks young, around your age, crouched close by, clearly shaken, his hands hovering like he doesn’t know whether to help you up or not. He looks completely fine in comparison, his helmet still strapped on, knee and elbow pads in place, protected in a way you clearly weren’t.

You try to sit yourself up from the ground, pushing against the concrete with your hands, but the second you do, a sharp sting spreads across your palms and arms. You hadn’t even noticed how badly you’d scraped yourself up until now. It barely registers though, not properly, not compared to the pounding in your head that only seems to get worse the more you try to move.

Your vision doesn’t clear either. It stays unfocused, everything still slightly out of place, and no matter how much you blink, it doesn’t quite fix itself.

You’d always been a little clumsy, always the type to trip over nothing or drop things at the worst possible time, but this was different. This wasn’t something you could laugh off later or brush away like it didn’t matter. It was worse.

“I’m okay, I think,” you mumble, the words coming out slower than you intended, your voice lacking any real certainty behind it.

The people around you don’t seem convinced.

There’s a shift in the air around you, a sudden stillness that you can’t fully understand, not when your head is still pounding and your vision refuses to cooperate.

“What?” you ask, more confused now, your brows pulling together as you try to make sense of their reactions.

You lift your hand to your head without thinking, fingers brushing against your temple as if to check it, and that’s when you feel it.

Something wet.

Sticky.

More than there should be.

Your hand comes back down into your line of sight, your eyes struggling to focus on it properly through the blur, and it takes longer than it should for your brain to catch up with what you’re seeing.

Blood.

A noticeable amount of it, smeared across your fingers and it doesn’t feel so minor anymore.

“Well, shit,” you mumble under your breath, the words barely leaving your mouth before everything around you starts to feel off again.

The noise of the crowd dulls, their voices becoming distant, like they’re being pulled further and further away from you. The ground beneath you feels unsteady, your vision darkening at the edges as the pounding in your head overtakes everything else.

Somewhere through the haze, you can hear the urgency in their voices shift. “Call an ambulance, quick—” But it all feels far away.

And then, just like that, everything goe s completely black as you fall back against the concrete.

Jack can’t quite take you off his mind.

Ever since you moved into the house next to his a couple months back, ever since that first day when you were tripping over the stairs trying to help the movers carry boxes into your place like you weren’t about to take yourself out before even settling in, he’d clocked you as someone he wouldn’t forget easily.

And it should’ve stopped there, it really should’ve, because it’s not like he doesn’t have other things to focus on, not like his job doesn’t take up most of his time anyway, but it didn’t, it just stuck. He never realised how often he was thinking about you until he caught himself doing it multiple times a day.

Robby would’ve absolutely lost it if he knew. Like actually laugh in his face, not even try to hide it.

Which is exactly why Jack never said anything.

Because it sounds ridiculous. It feels ridiculous.

At least it did, up until the moment he sees you being wheeled into the E.R.

And for a second it doesn’t even register properly, because it’s just another stretcher, another patient coming in too fast, paramedics talking over each other, the usual noise that never really stops around here, until his eyes land on you and everything’s stopped in Jack’s world.

Your head’s turned to the side, there’s blood at your temple, too much of it, dried and fresh mixed together, your hair stuck where it shouldn’t be, and you’re not moving, not even a little, and that’s what gets him the most because you’re never still.

Robby’s saying something, holding something out to him, but Jack doesn’t take it, doesn’t even look, because his focus is completely gone, locked on you in a way that makes everything else feel like background noise.

“You alright, brother?” Robby asks, and there’s something in his voice this time, not just casual, not just checking in, because he’s clocked it straight away, the way Jack’s just stopped responding, like he’s not even there for a second.

Jack doesn’t answer him.

He’s already moving before anything else can catch up, already at your side, falling into step with the stretcher as they push you through, his eyes running over you quickly, trying to take in as much as he can at once, trying to piece it together in real time without letting it slow him down, even with that tight feeling sitting heavy in his chest.

“What happened?” he asks, already reaching for gloves, his voice coming out like it normally would, like this is routine, like it’s just another patient even when it very clearly isn’t.

“Bike collision,” one of the paramedics says, not missing a step. “She hit her head pretty hard on the pavement, was talking when we got there but not making much sense, kept drifting in and out, then stopped responding on the way here.”

Jack nods once, already there as they move you across, his hand coming up without thinking, steadying your head like it’s instinct, like muscle memory has kicked in before anything else could.

Which it has. He’s done this a thousand times before. Just not with you.

“Alright, get her on the monitor, let’s check her properly, and I want a scan ready,” he says, more to the room now, more to himself, slipping into it because that’s what he does, that’s what he knows, even if everything in him feels slightly off.

Robby’s there beside him again, quick like always, but there’s a look he gives Jack, brief but there, like he’s noticed more than he’s saying.

Jack doesn’t acknowledge it. He doesn’t have the space for that right now.

Because his attention is already back on you, and this time it lingers a second longer than it should, taking you in properly, the way you look like this, the way you look too still for his liking.

He preferred you up and clumsy. Not like this.

As you’re laid down, somewhere between conscious and not, everything comes in pieces, sound first, then light, then shapes that don’t quite make sense straight away. You turn your head slightly, slower than you mean to, your mouth parting a little as your eyes try to focus, landing on him.

Jack.

He’s right there, by your side, talking to someone just out of your view, his voice low and quick, but you can’t really make out what he’s saying, it all kind of blends together in a way that makes your head feel heavier.

“Fancy seeing you here, doc,” you mumble, the words coming out a little off but still there, like you’re trying to make it sound normal even though nothing about this feels normal.

They move you properly onto the bed, and your brows pinch together almost immediately, a quiet wince slipping through as someone shines a light into your eye, then the other, the brightness too sharp for how your head already feels.

Jack’s attention shifts straight back to you the second you speak, his focus settling on your face properly now.

“Shouldn’t I be the one saying that, hm?” he replies, but it doesn’t sound like him, not really.

There’s no humour in it this time. And you notice that.

Despite everything, you still smile at him, all teeth, like none of this is as serious as it probably should be, even with people moving around you, checking things, definitely listening even if they’re pretending not to.

“You know,” you start, your words coming out a little uneven but still very much you, “I think because of whatever they’ve pumped into me… I should probably confess my undying crush on you, Mr Abbot.”

You let out a small laugh to yourself, like the thought genuinely amuses you, your head shifting slightly against the pillow before immediately regretting it.

“I feel like this is a very good time for that,” you add, softer now, like you’ve convinced yourself it makes perfect sense. “You know… just in case I die or something.”

Jack just looks at you for a second, properly this time, like he’s trying to decide whether to humour you or shut it down completely.

“…You’re not dying,” he says, and it comes out more firm than anything else, like he’s not even entertaining that part of what you said.

You squint at him slightly. “You don’t know that.”

“I do,” he answers straight away.

You hum softly, like you’re weighing that up, even though you’re not really.

“Okay… but if I did,” you continue, still looking at him, “that would’ve been a really good confession. Like you would’ve thought about it for the rest of your life.”

There’s the smallest shift in his expression at that, something that almost looks like he wants to smile but doesn’t quite let himself.

“Yeah,” he says after a second, quieter now, “I’ll make sure to keep that in mind.”

You nod slightly, like that’s settled.

“Good.”

He exhales through his nose, then glances over his shoulder toward one of the residents, his focus snapping back into place.

“Keep checking her pupils,” he says, his tone shifting without effort. “She’s been in and out, so keep talking to her, make sure she’s tracking, and get her ready for a CT. I don’t want to miss anything.”

There’s a quick nod, movement picking up again around you.

When you wake up, it takes you a second to properly come to, your head feeling heavy as confusion settles in before anything else does. You blink a few times, trying to clear the haze from your eyes as you stare up at the ceiling, not fully registering where you are at first.

The room is quiet.

Not completely silent, but quiet enough that it feels strange, especially compared to the E.R. you only faintly remember being brought through, the noise and movement and voices that never seemed to stop. It’s different here, and it throws you off more than it should, like you’re expecting something else to happen even though nothing would.

You know what led you here. You remember the bike, the impact, the way everything happened too quickly for you to even react properly before you both went down onto the concrete. But after that it’s blank. Completely fuzzy. Like your brain just cut everything off. You don’t remember getting here. You don’t remember being brought in, or what anyone said to you, or how long you’ve even been here. Just bits and pieces that don’t quite connect, like you were in and out of it the whole time and your mind never fully caught up, which was what exactly happened. 

The hospital bed beneath you feels stiff, uncomfortably so, and it only makes everything worse as you shift slightly, trying to sit up more properly. It’s not helping. If anything, it just makes you more aware of how off your body feels, like nothing is sitting right.

You move again, slower this time, trying to find some kind of position that doesn’t make you feel like you’re about to tip sideways or sink straight back into the mattress. The bed doesn’t cooperate, obviously.

“They really need to invest in better beds,” you mutter under your breath, more to yourself than anything, your voice still a little thick as it comes out. “People are gonna leave here with more problems than they came in with.”

You adjust again, one hand pressing lightly against the mattress to steady yourself as you sit up just a little more, even though it doesn’t actually make it any more comfortable. It just makes you more aware of everything — your head, your body, the fact that you’re here and not entirely sure how you got to this exact point.

And that part bothers you more than anything.

You don’t even realise when someone enters the room, only properly registering it when you hear the door shut. It makes you turn your head, slower than you mean to, and that’s when you see him.

Jack’s standing by the door, not fully inside yet, like he stopped himself halfway through walking in and couldn’t move himself further into the room. You don’t really understand why, but you don’t point it out.

What you do notice is the relief that crosses his face the second his eyes land on you. It’s quick, but it’s there, clear as anything, easing some of the tension that had been sitting in his expression. Like seeing you awake, sitting up, actually aware, settles something in him that had been building since you were brought in.

“Fancy seeing you here, doc,” you say repeating what you said hours ago (even though you didn’t remember saying it), a small smile pulling at your lips as you try to ease the tension that had filled the room the second you saw him.

He doesn’t answer straight away, and it gives you a second longer than you should have to actually look at him properly. His arms are crossed over his chest, his shirt pulling across his shoulders and biceps just enough that you have to stop yourself from staring any longer than you already are.

You drag your eyes back up, a little too late, and the second you meet his gaze again you can feel the heat surge through your body, because he’s already looking at you, not even pretending he wasn’t. His expression is still controlled, still holding onto composure, but there’s concern sitting there underneath it, clear in the way his hazel eyes stay on you.

“Shouldn’t I be the one saying that,” he says finally, his voice even, but not as light as it usually is with you, “I work here. You’re the one turning up as a patient.”

You don’t really know how to take that, and that’s what throws you off more than anything, because normally with him it’s easy, you know where you stand in the conversation, you know when he’s joking and when he’s not, but right now you can’t tell which one this is supposed to be.

You shift slightly against the bed, like you’re about to say something back, something quick or sarcastic just to ease it, but nothing actually comes out, and instead you just end up looking at him, the silence stretching a little longer than it should between you.

“You gave me quite the scare,” he adds after a second, and there’s no humour in it now, none of that usual back-and-forth you’re used to, just something honest that makes your expression shift without you meaning it to.

“I didn’t know you cared.” You say vulnerably.

“Of course I care,” he says, and now there’s something more familiar in his tone, something that actually sounds like him again, even if the concern hasn’t fully left his face. “Who else is going to call me every time something in your house decides to fall apart, hm.”

Your lips twitch at that despite yourself, a small breath leaving you as some of that tension in your chest eases, even if it doesn’t fully go away. “So that’s the only reason you care?” you ask, tilting your head slightly, your voice lighter than it probably should be for what you’re actually asking.

Even as the words leave your mouth, there’s a part of you that pauses, because you don’t really know where that came from. A week ago you could barely hold a normal conversation with him without overthinking every little thing he said, without second guessing the way you stood or where you looked whenever he was over fixing something in your house, and now you’re sitting here in a hospital bed questioning him like this without even hesitating.

It throws you off more than anything.

Maybe it’s the medication they’d given you earlier, still sitting somewhere in your system, loosening whatever filter you usually had, making it easier to say things you’d normally keep to yourself. That’s the only explanation you can come up with, because there’s no way you’d be this forward otherwise, especially not with him.

He watches you for a second after that, like he’s caught onto the shift just as much as you have, his gaze settling on you in a way that makes your chest feel warmer than it should.

“That’s not what I said,” he replies, his tone quieter now, but there’s something in it that makes it clear he’s not brushing you off, not really.

You watch as he finally moves fully into the room, like he’s done holding himself back, his hand reaching down to pull a chair from the wall beside the door before dragging it over and sitting right next to your bed. It’s close, closer than he needs to be, but neither of you say anything about it.

And now he’s right here, close enough that you don’t really have anywhere else to look.

His attention doesn’t leave you once.

It makes you want to look away, break it somehow, but you can’t bring yourself to. You just lay there, holding his gaze, even as it makes something in your chest tighten in a way you don’t want to think about too much.

“Do you remember anything?” he asks.

You let out a small breath, glancing down for a second like that might help you find something you missed. “I can remember the crash,” you say slowly, trying to piece it together as you speak, “like I remember the bike and hitting the ground and everything, but after that it just cuts off.”

You shift slightly against the bed, your brows pulling together. “Which I’m actually kind of thankful for, because if my head still feels like this now, I don’t even want to know how bad it was when I got brought in.”

He watches you the whole time, his gaze fixed on your face like he’s taking in every little detail, every shift in your expression, and it does something to him he doesn’t really want to sit with.

Because he remembers it.

He remembers it clearly, not in bits the way you do. He remembers the way you looked, the way you kept drifting in and out, the way you said it like it didn’t even cost you anything to say.

And he remembers exactly what you said.

“You don’t remember anything after that?” he asks again, and this time it’s not just a question, there’s something behind it, like he’s checking before he says anything else.

You shake your head, a little more sure this time even though it’s frustrating, like you should be able to remember and you just can’t. “No. Nothing. It’s just blank.”

You look at him properly then, and it’s the way he reacts that makes you pause. Not what he says, but what he doesn’t. He just nods once, like he expected that, but there’s a look on his face that says otherwise, one that you couldn’t name properly.

It doesn’t sit right with you.

“Why,” you ask, narrowing your eyes at him slightly, “did I do something?”

He huffs out a breath through his nose, like he almost laughs but doesn’t fully commit to it. “You always do something.”

“That’s not helpful,” you mutter, shifting a little on the bed as you look at him again, more serious now. “What did I say?”

He doesn’t answer straight away, which makes your stomach drop. Because if it was simply nothing, he would’ve said something, but it was as if he was holding himself back from doing so. It surely couldn’t be that bad, whatever you may have said.

“Jack,” you pressed, panic in your voice, “what did I say.”

He looks at you then.

“You told me you’re in love with me,” he says, like it’s a normal thing to say, like it didn’t just completely shift everything between you in the span of a second, “in front of half the room.”

For a second, you just look at him.

Properly look at him, like maybe if you stare long enough the words will rearrange themselves into something else, something less insane, something that actually makes sense coming out of your own mouth. Your brain lags behind, struggling to catch up, like it’s still stuck somewhere before the crash while everything else has moved forward without it.

“I what?”

“You heard me.”

Your lips part slightly, but nothing comes out straight away, because it’s hitting you in pieces now, slow and heavy, each part worse than the last as it actually starts to settle.

“Oh my God,” you say, sounding utterly horrified.

“Oh my God,” you say again, louder now, your hand lifting instinctively before dropping again when your head protests the movement, the dull ache making everything feel that much more real. “No, I didn’t– I wouldn’t–”

You stop yourself.

Because you would.

“I am so sorry,” you rush out, the words picking up pace before you can even think about slowing them down, like if you don’t get them out now he’s going to look at you differently. “I didn’t mean to say it like that, or out loud, or in front of people– especially not your coworkers, like that is actually the worst possible place that could’ve happened, I literally could not have picked a worse moment for that if I tried–”

You drag a hand down your face, pressing your palm against your cheek for a second, your thoughts already running ahead of you before you can even catch them.

“I don’t even remember saying it, which somehow makes it worse, because now I’m hearing it from you and I don’t even get to know how it came out or what I said before it or after it, and that just makes me look even more insane–”

You glance at him quickly before looking away again, your voice getting faster the longer you keep going. “Did I say anything else? Actually don’t tell me, I don’t think I can deal with that right now, like genuinely I think I’d rather not know if it gets worse than that–”

A breath leaves you, somewhere between a laugh and something closer to a groan, your head tipping back slightly against the bed.

“This is so bad,” you continue, the words tumbling over each other now, your brain refusing to slow down. “Like I’ve completely ruined it, haven’t I? I’ve made it weird now, and you’re not even gonna come over anymore, and every time something breaks in my house I’m just gonna have to deal with it myself because I decided to confess my feelings in front of an entire hospital like that’s a normal thing to do–”

You barely paused to breathe, your thoughts running ahead of you faster than you can catch them, too caught up in defending yourself, in trying to explain it away, to even realise what you’ve just done again.

Because you’ve said it again.

Just as easily.

Right in front of him.

And you don’t even notice it but Jack does.

He doesn’t interrupt you though, doesn’t point it out, doesn’t say anything at all. He just sits there, watching you, one brow lifting slightly, amusement settling into his expression the longer you keep going, like he can’t quite believe you’re doing this without even realising it.

“And now you’re just sitting there,” you add, your voice still rushing out, “like I haven’t just made everything ten times worse, and I don’t even blame you if you don’t want to come near me after this because I wouldn’t either, I’d actually avoid me at all costs–”

You stop just enough to breathe, your chest rising a little quicker, your eyes finally landing back on him properly. There’s a small shift in his expression, the corner of his mouth pulling slightly, his brows lifting just a bit like he’s watching something you haven’t caught onto yet.

It doesn’t make sense to you, the way he’s acting like this, like you didn’t just make everything awkward between you, like you didn’t just ruin whatever this was supposed to be.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” you ask, your voice softer now, more confused than anything.

What you didn’t expect was for him to suddenly lean forward, closing the short distance between you, and before you can even fully process what he’s doing, his hand comes up to your face, fingers settling along your jaw as he kisses you.

It shuts you up instantly.

Completely.

One second you were still mid-rant, the next you’re just there, kissing him, your brain trying and failing to catch up with what’s happening. Your breath catches slightly against him, your eyes fluttering shut as you lean into it without even thinking, your hand coming up to grip lightly at the fabric of his shirt like you need something to ground you.

His hand stays where it is, steady against your face, his thumb brushing just slightly against your skin as he deepens it, slow enough to make you feel it properly, like he’s been waiting to do this and finally decided to stop holding back.

And you respond just as easily to the kiss, like all that overthinking you usually do just isn’t there right now.

He tastes like coffee and mint, the faint scent of antiseptic still clinging to him from the hospital mixed with his cologne, and it settles into you in a way that makes your chest tighten, your fingers curling a little tighter into his shirt as you lean into him just a bit more.

You don’t even realise how long it lasts.

It’s only when he finally pulls back, slow and unhurried, that your head starts catching up, your breath still uneven as your eyes open and find his straight away.

You can feel it then, the heat you feel, the way everything feels just slightly off in the best way, and you’re pretty sure it shows, because there’s no way you look normal right now. A small smile pulls at your lips before you can stop it, and you try to turn your head, instinct kicking in like you suddenly remember how to be self-conscious again.

He doesn’t let you.

His hand stays where it is, steady against your face, and he dips his head just enough to keep your attention on him, his expression shifting into something that looks a little too pleased with himself, like he got exactly the reaction he wanted.

You adjust the angle of your hands instead, shifting slightly over bone and cartilage, trying to find some better position, some better leverage, like maybe all that stands between this woman and another few minutes of life is a matter of inches.

“Call it,” Robby says.

“One more round.”

You are already pressing down again when you say it. Your voice comes out breathless, raw around the edges. Somebody at the head of the bed is squeezing another bag of fluid. Someone else is reciting numbers you are no longer taking in. The nurse nearest the cart glances toward Robby and then away just as quickly.

“We’ve been at this for thirty minutes.”

“I know.”

The words leave you sharper than you mean them to. You still don’t look at him. You are staring at your hands like if you focus hard enough, if you do not let your eyes leave the task in front of you, then nobody can make you quit yet.

“Just one more. Her rhythm was changing.”

“Her rhythm was V-fib for twenty minutes before it went flat.”

That one lands. You hate that it does.

Your arms keep moving for another few compressions before the sentence catches up to you properly. Your elbows start to lock. Your shoulders ache from effort and from refusal. The woman’s skin is cool in a way that does not belong to somebody who had been talking less than an hour ago.

Robby steps around the table. You can feel him there even before you look. The shift in the room gives him away. It always does. Attention folds around him without anyone meaning it to. He stops across from you with his arms crossed and his expression already set in that closed-off, unmovable way that means he has made a decision and will not be moved from it.

“The dissection was too extensive,” he says. “The bleed was too fast. There was nothing more to do.”

“You don’t know that.”

His eyes lift to yours for the first time in the last minute. “Step back from the table.”

You keep your hands where they are.

There is blood on the sheet. Blood on your wrist. Blood drying dark at the edge of one glove. You can hear your own breathing under the monitor, under the suction, under the noise of the bay outside the curtain. Your chest feels too tight to hold all of it.

“Robby—”

“Step back.”

The room stills around the order.

You don’t know what finally does it. His tone, maybe. Or maybe it is the look on the nurse’s face when you glance up and find her standing there with the next thing already in her hands and nowhere to put it because there is no next thing anymore. Maybe it is the woman on the bed herself, who does not move beneath your hands no matter what you do.

Slowly, you let your arms fall.

The absence of motion feels obscene.

You step back from the table because he told you to, because someone had to be the one to stop, because your body has reached that ugly point between exhaustion and disbelief where following an order becomes easier than fighting it. Your hands hang uselessly at your sides.

She had been awake when they brought her in.

That is the part of this your mind keeps circling back to with a kind of sick insistence. Not the open cavity. Not the sound the monitor made when the rhythm changed shape and then lost it altogether. Not the smell of cautery and blood and antiseptic clinging to the trauma bay. Just her face. Pale and frightened and trying so hard not to show it. The way she had looked from the gurney to you as they rolled her through the doors, eyes glazed with pain and still searching for someone to answer her.

She had told you her name.

As if that mattered.

As if you could keep hold of it for her.

As if there was some dignity left in being known when your body had been torn open from the inside.

You had leaned down so she could hear you over the rush of the bay and said it back to her, and for half a second she had looked less afraid.

Then, just before they pushed the sedation, she had caught your wrist with surprising strength and asked if somebody would call her kids.

You had said yes without thinking.

Of course you had.

“Time of death,” Robby says, glancing toward the clock on the wall, “22:14.”

The monitor answers him with its long, unbroken tone.

Nobody says anything after that.

The room has that terrible, familiar quiet to it now. Not silence. It is never silence in the ED. There is always noise somewhere. Phones ringing at the desk. Shoes against linoleum. A paramedic giving report in the next bay. Someone laughing too loudly at something down the hall because life keeps happening even here. But inside the trauma room, there is that suspended sort of stillness that settles when a body becomes a body again and everyone standing around it has to remember what comes next.

One of the nurses lowers her eyes to the chart in her hand with far too much concentration. Another moves toward the back counter to busy herself with wrappers that do not need gathering yet. Nobody looks directly at you.

You tug your gloves off one finger at a time because your hands have started to shake.

“Are you crying?”

Your head comes up too fast.

Robby is looking straight at you, not cruelly, that would almost be easier to absorb. There is no contempt in his face, no overt softness either. Only hard steadiness that makes everything he says sound like fact whether you agree with it or not.

Your eyes sting all at once. You hadn’t even realized it had gotten that far. Everything had felt too hot, too pressurized, too tight in your throat to separate one sensation from another, and now a tear slips over before you can stop it.

You wipe it away with the back of your wrist so quickly it smears.

“No.”

His gaze drops briefly to your face again, then back up. “You’re crying in my trauma bay.”

“I’m fine.”

“You are standing in the middle of my trauma bay in tears,” he says, flat and matter-of-fact, “and you are not useful to me right now. Step out.”

Your mouth parts. Nothing useful comes out of it. You hear yourself say, “I just need a minute.”

“I don’t have a minute.” His voice is not loud, but it sharpens enough to make you tense.

“There’s a man in bay three who has been waiting twenty minutes. I need doctors who are present. Not standing over a body feeling sorry for themselves.”

Heat rushes through you so quickly it makes your face burn.

“I’m not feeling sorry for myself.”

“Then what would you call it.”

The answer swells up in you so fast it almost chokes you. You can feel every pair of ears in the room pretending not to listen. Your throat tightens until speaking hurts.

“I would call it that she came in conscious, Robby.” Your voice catches in the middle of his name and you hate yourself for that more than anything. “She told me her name. She asked me to call her kids and I told her I would, and I think I’m allowed a second to—”

“You’re not.” The words are immediately thrown back.

You stare at him and he doesn’t look away.

“I’ve watched you do this since your first week here,” he says. “Every bad outcome. Every patient that doesn’t make it. It’s all over your face. You carry it around the department for hours after the fact, and I’ve let it go because you’re a good resident. Technically, you’re very good.”

The bay feels colder all of a sudden.

“But this is a problem.”

You do not move.

His eyes flick over your face in a way that makes you feel exposed in the ugliest way, not seen but rather assessed.

“You are too emotional for this environment.”

There it is.

Not because the sentence is especially dramatic. It isn’t. He says it as evenly as he says anything else. That is what makes it worse. It does not sound like anger or frustration or something thrown out in the heat of the moment. It sounds considered. It sounds like a thought he has had before and finally decided to voice.

The woman on the bed lies between you, silent and still and covered now to the chest.

You swallow around the ache in your throat. “That’s not fair.”

“Maybe not.”

He reaches for the next chart from the rack beside the door.

“But it’s true. You need to decide whether you can do this job or you can’t, because I won’t have you falling apart every time we lose someone. It’s not fair to the patients, and it’s not fair to my staff.”

“Robby—”

“Get some air.”

He says it like an order, not a kindness.

“Come back when you’ve got yourself together. I won’t have you in here like this.”

Then he turns and leaves.

The doors swing shut behind him with a soft mechanical hush.

For a moment, you can’t move.

The room blurs strangely at the edges. Someone passes you on the way to the sink. Someone else starts quietly discussing postmortem tasks with one of the nurses. Life resumes in pieces around you, practical and necessary and horribly normal.

You pull the second glove off and let it drop. Then the first. You don’t look to see where they land.

The walk out of trauma feels longer than it should.

The hallway beyond is all fluorescent light and polished floors and people moving too fast for your thoughts to keep pace with. You keep your chin up because there are only so many humiliations one person can survive in ten minutes and you’ve already endured enough for the night.

Past the nurses’ station.

Past two med students huddled over a chart.

Past a family clustered near the vending machines with the same pinched look everybody gets when they have already been waiting too long and know they will be waiting longer.

Nobody stops you. Nobody says your name. If anyone notices your face, they’re kind enough not to point it out.

“Too emotional for this environment.”

The sentence follows you all the way to the elevator.

You jab the call button and stare at the numbers above the doors with fixed intensity that comes from trying not to shatter in public. Your jaw aches from the force of holding it together. Your eyes burn. You can still feel the woman’s pulse under your fingers from earlier, back when there had still been one to feel, faint and racing and there.

You shut your eyes.

You need to decide whether you can do this job or you can’t.

The elevator opens with a soft chime. You get in before anyone else can.

The ride up is mercifully empty.

You press the button for the roof and lean back against the wall, arms folded tight over yourself like you can hold your insides in place if you just press hard enough. The mirrored panel opposite catches your reflection and you have to look away. Your face is blotchy already. Your hair is half falling out of its tie. There is dried blood near your cuff. You look exactly how you feel, which is never a good sign.

By the time the doors open again, the pressure behind your eyes has turned blinding.

The roof is cold enough to make your lungs seize on the first breath.

The night air comes hard and sharp off the city, smelling faintly like rain on concrete and the exhaust from the streets below. Pittsburgh spreads out beneath you in layers of yellow-white lights and dark buildings and distant traffic.

Somewhere down there, people are ordering takeout, walking their dogs, kissing on couches, sleeping through the night. The thought makes something in your chest twist.

You walk to the ledge at the far end of the roof and brace your forearms against it.

The first sob catches so hard it hurts.

Then another one follows.

And another.

It all leaves you in one brutal rush, like your body had only been waiting for privacy before it gave up the effort of restraint altogether. You bend over the ledge with your face in your hands and cry with all the gracelessness grief ever demands from anyone. Your shoulders shake, your breath stutters, your nose starts running and you wipe at it angrily with your sleeve and only make yourself cry harder because what else is there to do.

She had asked about her kids.

That keeps returning, cruelly intact.

Not whether she was going to die. Not whether she would be okay. Not even whether she was in the right place. Her kids. She had been terrified and in agony and bleeding out from the inside, and she had still thought first of them.

You had said yes.

The city below you gleams wet and indifferent.

You stay there until the worst of it empties out. Long enough for the cold to creep in through your scrubs and settle against your skin. Long enough for your face to go numb beneath the sting. Long enough that your sobs lose force and degrade into those ugly, hitching breaths that never quite feel satisfying.

Eventually you straighten.

Your palms rest flat against the ledge. Your eyes are swollen and your throat feels scraped raw. You stare out at the skyline and try to match your breathing to something steady.

The door behind you opens.

“I’m fine,” you say immediately, voice rough. You don’t turn around to see who it may be. “I just needed air. I’ll be back down in a minute.”

The footsteps that cross the roof are unhurried. There is a slight unevenness to them that your body recognizes before your mind does.

You close your eyes briefly. Of course.

“I’m serious,” you say, still facing forward. “You don’t have to stand here. Just tell whoever sent you I’m coming back down. I just needed five minutes.”

“Robby told me,” Jack says, “that a certain resident needed some air.”

His voice sits low in the night, roughened by sleep and age and that ever present rasp he seems to carry around even when he’s trying to be gentle. It lands somewhere under your ribs and stays there.

You laugh once, short and miserable. “That sounds like him.”

Jack comes to stand beside you at the ledge.

He doesn’t crowd you. He never really does. He just settles there near enough that the heat of him cuts through the cold a little, his forearms coming to rest against the ledge next to yours. You keep your face turned out toward the city because looking at him right now feels like a bad idea.

“I’m okay,” you say.

It sounds weak even to your own ears.

You try again. “Seriously. I just needed a minute.”

He is quiet for a beat. Then, “What did he say to you?”

Your throat tightens all over again.

“Nothing.”

Jack turns his head. You can feel it without seeing it. “Don’t do that.”

You let out a breath that almost shakes. “I’m not doing anything.”

“Yeah, you are.”

His tone stays calm. That somehow makes it harder.

You keep your eyes fixed on the city. “He’s tired. We all are. It was a bad case.”

“What did he say.”

When you still don’t answer, Jack shifts closer and lifts a hand to your jaw.

The touch is gentle. Warm. Calloused in a way that feels grounding instead of rough. His fingers turn your face toward him with barely any pressure at all, but you follow it anyway because resisting takes more strength than you have left.

The look on his face nearly undoes you.

It is not pity. Thank God for that. You think pity from him would kill you outright.

It is concern. His brows have drawn together, as his eyes move slowly over your face, taking in the tear tracks, the red rimmed eyes, whatever else is left of your attempt to pretend you were coming back downstairs like nothing happened.

“What,” he says quietly, “did he say?”

You hold his gaze for maybe two seconds before your chin starts to tremble.

“That I’m too emotional to be here.”

The sentence breaks in half on its way out.

Jack says nothing.

The silence gives you room to keep going and you almost wish it didn’t.

“He said he doesn’t think I can do the job if I fall apart every time we lose someone.” Your laugh comes out wet and ugly. “Which I wasn’t even doing, not really, I just…” You swallow hard. “She came in awake.”

Jack’s hand stays at your jaw. His thumb shifts once against your cheek.

“She told me her name,” you say, and now that you’ve started, it all spills too fast to stop. “She asked me if someone would call her kids before we sedated her, and I told her yes. I said yes like I could promise that, like I could promise anything, and then she was gone ten minutes later and he just called it and moved on and I know we have to move on, I know that, I know how this place works, but he looked at me like I was weak for even caring and I—”

The rest crumples in your throat.

Jack doesn’t let you finish.

“C’mere,” he murmurs, and he draws you into him before you can decide whether to resist.

You go without meaning to.

One second you are standing stiff and shaking beside him, and the next your face is buried against his chest and his arms are around you properly, one across your back and the other up at the base of your skull, broad palm resting there like he means to keep you together by sheer force of will.

The second his hand touches the back of your head, whatever was left of your composure gives out.

You grip the front of his shirt and cry into him like you have nowhere else to put it.

Jack just holds you.

He does not shush you. He does not tell you it’s okay when it very plainly isn’t. He does not offer some empty reassurance about how you did your best and that’s all anyone could have done. He seems to understand, maybe better than most people would, that the wrong words right now would make it worse. So he says nothing and lets you shake against him until the force of it starts to ease on its own.

His chest is warm beneath your cheek. You can smell soap and coffee and that faint musky cologne he wears too sparingly to ever name but that always somehow clings to him by the middle of a shift. His hand keeps moving once every so often against the back of your head, not enough to soothe in any obvious way, just enough that you know he is still there.

By the time your crying slows to uneven breaths, your fingers are bunched in his shirt.

You loosen them immediately, mortified. “Sorry.”

Jack huffs softly above you. “No.”

The one word is almost enough to make you laugh.

You pull back just far enough to look at him. His hands stay where they are for a moment, one at your back, one still cupping the base of your head. He studies your face with that same awful steadiness from before, except there is warmth in his eyes now that Robby’s had lacked entirely. Anger, too, though it sits lower.

“She had two kids,” you say, because it is somehow the only thing left that matters.

Jack’s expression shifts.

“Both their names were on her intake form.” Your voice trembles again, quieter this time. “She wrote them herself. She made a point to spell them out. Like she wanted to make sure nobody got it wrong.”

For a second, Jack doesn’t say anything. He just looks at you.

Then his hand leaves the back of your head and comes up to brush beneath one of your eyes with his thumb, wiping away a damp line you’d missed. He does the same to the other side, slow and unhurried.

“I’ll make sure somebody talks to her husband before the shift ends,” he says.

You blink. “Okay.”

“I’ll do it myself if I have to.”

Something in your chest loosens a little at that. Not much. Just enough to hurt differently.

“Okay,” you say again.

Jack lets his hands settle fully around your face then, palms warm against your chilled skin, thumbs resting near your cheekbones. He tips your head back a fraction so you have to look at him properly.

“You belong here.”

Your eyes sting all over again.

“I mean it,” he says. “Don’t let him put that shit in your head.”

You try to laugh and only manage a watery sort of exhale. “I’m trying not to.”

“Try harder.”

That gets the ghost of something out of you. Not a full smile, but close enough that his mouth softens in answer.

“She asked you to call her kids because she trusted you,” he says. “Patients know when somebody gives a damn. They know.”

His thumbs brush once more beneath your eyes.

“That doesn’t make you weak. It makes you the kind of doctor people remember when the rest of this place starts to blur together.”

You have to look away for a second because the alternative is crying all over again, and you are beginning to suspect you may never stop if given enough encouragement. Your gaze lifts to the dark stretch of sky above the hospital, then drops back to him.

“I don’t know what to do with it,” you admit.

“With what.”

“All of it.” Your throat works. “Them, after. The ones we lose. The things they say before. The families. I don’t know where I’m supposed to put it.”

Jack is quiet for long enough that you think he might not answer.

Then, “You don’t put it anywhere.”

You look back at him.

His expression has gone older somehow. More tired. Like the answer costs something to say aloud.

“You carry it,” he says simply. “That’s the job.”

The cold wind curls over the roof and tugs at the ends of your hair. Somewhere below, a siren whines past the hospital and fades.

“I don’t want to carry it like this.”

“No one does.”

His hands slide from your face to your shoulders. He squeezes once.

“But if you stop feeling it entirely, that’s when I’d worry.”

The words settle deep.

Not because they solve anything. They don’t. The woman is still dead. Her kids are still about to learn something that will split their lives into before and after. Robby still said what he said. The shift still waits downstairs, unfinished and unforgiving.

But Jack says it like somebody who has learned to live with the weight rather than outrun it. Like somebody who knows exactly how much it costs and still thinks it is worth paying.

You draw in a slow breath.

The air still bites, but it fills your lungs a little easier this time.

Jack watches you do it. “There you go.”

You roll your eyes weakly. “Don’t.”

“What.”

“That.”

A corner of his mouth turns. “You want me to stop encouraging you to breathe now?”

You lean your forehead briefly against his chest again, more from embarrassment than despair this time. “I hate you.”

“Sure you do.”

His chin dips to the top of your head for a moment. You feel the shape of a kiss there a second later, absentminded and so gentle it nearly hurts.

You stay like that longer than you mean to. The city stretching below. The roof cold underfoot. Jack standing steady in front of you like he has nowhere else he needs to be for these few minutes, even though you both know that isn’t true.

Eventually he eases back enough to look down at you.

“You coming back?”

You think about it honestly.

Your eyes still ache. Your face probably looks terrible. The thought of stepping into trauma again makes something inside you flinch. But beneath all of that, under the humiliation and the grief and the rawness of being spoken to like that in front of a full room, there is still the sharper thing that got you through med school and internship and every impossible shift before this one.

You are not done.

“Yeah,” you say.

Jack studies your face like he’s checking the answer for cracks. Then he nods once.

“Good.”

He turns toward the door and holds it open for you.

The warmth of the stairwell meets you first, then the fluorescent light, then the familiar smell of hospital air. You step through and start down the stairs beside him, not saying much. There doesn’t seem to be any need for it.

By the time you reach the floor again, the ED has swallowed up the roof and the quiet and those five stolen minutes like they never existed. The board is still full. Somebody is calling for respiratory. A child is crying somewhere near triage. Whitaker rushes past with a portable monitor tucked under one arm and barely spares you both a glance.

You fall back into step because there is nothing else to do.

At the desk, Jack peels off toward another bay with a brief hand at the back of your shoulder as he passes.

You make it three steps toward trauma before Robby appears at the end of the hall.

He is flipping through a chart as he walks, glasses low on his nose, expression as impassive as ever. If he is surprised to see you back, he does not show it. He comes to a stop in front of you and looks up.

“You good to rejoin us?”

The question is so infuriatingly clinical that for a second you cannot answer.

Jack, who had gotten halfway down the corridor, stops.

You see the moment he decides to turn around.

You also see the moment Robby notices him doing it.

“I’m fine,” you say before either of them can speak.

Robby gives a short nod and starts to move past you.

“Hey.”

Jack’s voice cuts through the hallway cleanly.

Robby stops.

A few heads lift at the station. Nothing dramatic. Just that subtle turning of attention that happens in a place where everyone is always listening for the next bad thing.

Jack comes back toward the two of you, slower this time. There is no rush in him at all. That should probably scare people more than shouting ever would.

“What,” Robby says, not looking especially bothered.

Jack stops beside you, close enough that the line of his shoulder almost touches yours. “You wanna explain to me why she came upstairs crying?”

The air around the three of you changes, and you almost instantly regret telling Jack anything, you should have known he wouldn’t have shame in telling him what he did was wrong.

Robby’s eyes flick briefly to your face, then back to Jack. “Because she got attached to a patient and picked the middle of my trauma bay to fall apart about it.”

You feel yourself go rigid.

Jack’s jaw tightens. “That right.”

Robby closes the chart in his hands. “I don’t have time for this.”

“Make time.”

The station has gone very still behind you.

Robby regards him for a moment. “I said what needed to be said. We were in the middle of a shift and she was no longer useful in the room.”

Jack’s laugh is short and humorless. “Useful.”

“That’s the job.”

“No,” Jack says. “The job is keeping people alive when you can and treating them like human beings when you can’t. That includes your residents.”

Robby’s face does not change, but his eyes harden slightly. “If she wants to be here, she needs to learn how to function.”

“She was functioning.”

“She was crying over a dead patient.”

“She was crying over a dead mother who asked about her kids before you put her under.” Jack steps a little closer. “You think that’s a some flaw?”

A muscle shifts in Robby’s jaw.

“No,” he says. “I think dragging that kind of emotion through every bay in the department is a liability.”

“Bullshit.” The word drops bluntly between them.

You glance at Jack despite yourself. He is looking at Robby now with of cold clarity you don’t often see from him unless something has truly gotten under his skin.

“You don’t get to talk to her like that because you’re tired,” Jack says. “And you sure as hell don’t get to decide she doesn’t belong here because she still has a pulse.”

Robby’s expression shutters further. “This is between me and my resident.”

Jack does not even blink. “Not if you’re saying shit like that to her, it isn’t.”

Somewhere behind the desk, someone pointedly starts typing very loudly.

Robby looks past Jack to you then, as though you are suddenly the only person in the conversation worth addressing.

“Are you able to continue your shift?”

The professionalism of it is almost funny.

You square your shoulders. “Yes.”

“Good.”

He turns to leave again.

Jack lets him get two steps this time.

Then, “You owe her an apology.”

That finally makes Robby stop in earnest.

He turns back more slowly than before. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me.”

Robby’s mouth flattens. “I am not doing this in the middle of the department.”

Jack folds his arms. “Should we go somewhere quieter, would that suit you?”

For one absurd second, you think Robby might actually laugh. He doesn’t. But something unreadable flickers across his face.

He looks at you. Really looks this time, something more difficult to parse. You don’t know what he sees there. You don’t know if he sees anything at all besides another problem waiting to be solved badly.

When he speaks, his voice is lower.

“I shouldn’t have said it like that.”

It is not much. It is nowhere near enough. But it is also probably the closest anyone in this hospital will ever get to hearing Robby say he was wrong.

The words catch you off guard anyway.

He adjusts his hold on the chart. “Take five more minutes if you need them. Then I want you back in three.”

You nod once.

Robby leaves before either of you can answer.

The tension goes with him in increments.

Jack exhales through his nose and looks down the hall after him like he is still considering whether to follow. Then he glances at you.

“You okay?”

You let out a tired breath that almost resembles a laugh. “I think so.”

“That was a terrible apology.”

“It was,” you agree.

“But?”

You look toward trauma, where the doors are swinging open and shut around the blur of another incoming patient. “But I heard it.”

Jack watches your face for a second, then nods.

“Alright.”

He gives your shoulder one last squeeze before stepping away. “Go be too emotional somewhere productive.”

This time you actually laugh, small and startled and real.

Jack’s mouth tips faintly at one corner like he’d been aiming for exactly that. Then he turns and heads back into the noise.

You stand there for one more second in the middle of the corridor, breathing.

Then you straighten your scrub top, wipe once under your eyes in case there is anything left there to betray you, and push back through the trauma doors.

The shift is still waiting.

So are the patients.

So are all the impossible, unfinished things that will remain impossible and unfinished long after tonight is over.

You go anyway.

Because the truth, ugly and inconvenient and still intact beneath everything Robby said, is that he was wrong about the part that mattered.

You do belong here.

You wanted to argue but you were tired, and he was more tired, you knew that. He’d been pulling doubles at Pittsburgh Trauma all week and tonight he’d come home and sat on the edge of the bed for a full minute just staring at the floor before he could take his shoes off, and he’d forgotten, for the first time maybe ever, to kiss your forehead and ask how your day was.

He always did that. Every single time he came home, shoes barely off, lips to your forehead, he would ask how your day went. Yet tonight he’d just sat there and then laid down and you hadn’t said anything about it because he looked so tired it actually worried you a little.

So you let the phone thing go. Told yourself you’d wait until he was out and take it back.

That was two hours ago.

Now it’s 1:52am and Jack is asleep beside you and you’ve been lying in bed with your eyes closed trying to will yourself under and it’s just not happening. Your brain won’t stop. It keeps pulling you back to where you left off.

This girl had posted a video, sitting in her car, going through every single reason she broke up with her boyfriend, there were fourteen reasons total, completely calm about it — and you’d been deep in the comments for almost an hour before Jack took your phone. You’d only gotten through six. Reason six was that he never once asked how her day was, not in eight months, and the comment section was absolutely feral about it and you had things to say.

You sit up. Jack doesn’t move.

You lean over him slowly, watching his face. Still out. His pillow is right there, all you have to do is slide your hand under the edge, you’d be so quiet—

“Really.”

His eyes are open, barely, looking up at you while you’re frozen there with your hand outstretched.

“I couldn’t sleep,” you say.

“Uh huh.” He reaches under the pillow and pulls your phone out, holds it above both of you. Not giving it to you. “What were you watching.”

“Okay so,” you start, because there’s no saving this. “There’s this girl on TikTok. She made a video listing every reason she broke up with her ex. Fourteen reasons. You took my phone before I could finish.”

He looks at the ceiling for a second. “How many did you get through.”

“Six.”

He puts the phone on his nightstand and pulls you back down against him, arm firm around your waist, and you’re facing away from him now and there’s genuinely nowhere to go.

“Jack I’m not even—”

“Yes you are.”

“I’m really not, my brain is just—”

“The other eight will be there in the morning,” he says, and his voice has just enough of that edge to it now, not mean, just done, that you close your mouth. He exhales slowly. His hand settles on your side. “Close your eyes.”

You close your eyes.

Your brain immediately starts trying to figure out what reason seven might be. Then it wanders back to a comment you were going to reply to, the one where someone was completely wrong about reason four and you had a whole response drafted in your head.

“Still awake,” he says, quieter now.

“I know, I just- it doesn’t switch off, I’m not doing it on purpose—”

“I know,” he says, and he says it so simply, no frustration in it, that you go still. His arm tightens around you just slightly and you feel him press his lips to the back of your head, half-asleep, barely there.

You’re quiet for a while.

Long enough that you think he’s gone again when you say, quietly, “Reason four was that he never remembered anything she told him. Like she’d say something and a week later it was like the conversation never happened.”

Jack hums.

“That’s a really bad one.”

“Yeah,” he says. “It is.”

You’re quiet again. And then, because it’s almost 2am and something about the dark makes you say things you wouldn’t otherwise. “You forgot to ask how my day was when you got home tonight.”

He doesn’t say anything for a second.

“You always do,” you say. “You just- you were so tired, you forgot.”

He shifts behind you. Then, low and a little rough still with sleep: “How was your day.”

And God, it’s stupid, it shouldn’t do anything to you, but your chest goes warm and soft in a way you weren’t prepared for. You think about the girl in her car. Reason six. Eight months and not once.

“Good,” you say, quietly. “I went down a rabbit hole about a woman who thinks her houseplant can tell when her ex is about to call. And then I found the breakup video.”

“So productive,” he says.

“Very,” you say. “Very productive.”

You can feel him smile against your hair, and then he’s out again, breathing slow and even, and the room is dark and quiet and your phone is completely unreachable on his nightstand and you were so sure you couldn’t sleep ten minutes ago.

You’re gone before you get to reason seven.

In the morning your phone is on your nightstand at 4%, plugged into his charger, the wrong charger, the slow one. You’ve explained this to him more than once. He keeps doing it anyway.

You watch the rest of the video on the couch. The girl is doing great. She got a cat. Reason eleven was that he was mean to animals, and you immediately flip your phone around to show Jack.

He reads it. Nods once. “Good,” he says, like he’s closing a case, and goes back to his coffee.

You sit there thinking you are so embarrassingly down bad for this man, and then he looks over at you and goes “What” and you say “Nothing” and look back at your phone.

Reason seven, for the record, was that he made her feel invisible.

Jack has never once made you feel invisible.

It had led you to the diocese eventually, one thing led to another and then another, then you looked up and that was just your life now. You weren't ordained, you just read a lot and cared about it genuinely, and Father Edwyn had noticed that early on and started sending you out on calls. Families who were grieving, people going through things they couldn't put words to, parishioners who needed someone to sit with them in the hard moments without flinching. You were good at it. You knew you were. People just naturally came to you, always had, and you had stopped questioning it and just accepted that this was the thing you were for.

Which made the letter from Father Edwyn all the more irritating, because it was not that.

He had written it himself, which already told you what you needed to know. He only ever wrote things himself when he felt bad about them.

Mr. Baelor Targaryen, it said, a private citizen of some standing, has made a formal request to the diocese for a spiritual advisor. He has asked specifically for someone versed in the theology of the soul. The Bishop has determined you are best suited. Lodgings will be provided on the property. The arrangement is indefinite.

Father Edwyn had very little to say about Baelor Targaryen when you went to ask. Old money, very private, kept to himself out on his property. A man of means who wanted to discuss matters of faith, he said, and something about the way he said it made you feel like he was choosing those words carefully, like there were other words he had decided not to use.

You tried to ignore the feeling sitting in your stomach the whole time he was talking. It wasn't like you to walk away from someone who needed counsel. Your mother had always said you wore your heart on your sleeve and she hadn't meant it as a criticism, and you had never really learned how to take it as one.

So you packed your things and went before another thought of doubt could stop you.

The manor sat at the end of a long private road through old woodland, and it appeared through the trees slowly, the way something surfaces from deep water. Stone walls, dark ivy covering most of the front face, tall windows that reflected the flat grey sky back at you and gave nothing away. A big oak out front, wider than two men standing together. The gravel crunching under the carriage wheels was the loudest sound for miles.

You had underestimated how large it would be. That was the first thing. You had pictured a house, a large one maybe, but this was something else. It was the kind of building that made you feel the full weight of how long it had been standing there, how many people had come and gone through it while it just stayed.

Even stepping out at the front gate didn't do much for your nerves. If anything it made them worse.

You stood there for a moment with your bag in your hand and looked up at it and thought about what Father Edwyn had said about this so called Lord Baelor Targaryen, how he came from a very ancient family. How ancient he never told you, but considering how large this manor was, you imagined it went back further than you could comfortably picture. Old money had a look to it and this was that look taken to its furthest possible conclusion, the kind of wealth that had stopped needing to announce itself several generations ago and had just settled into the stone instead.

You thanked the man who had driven you and watched the carriage disappear back down the road before picking up your bag and making your way to the front door. It was a grand thing. Dark wood, iron fixtures, the kind of door that made your knock feel embarrassingly small. You rapped twice and then stood there listening to the silence and wondering if anyone inside could even hear you at all, with the place being so large.

You were about to knock again when it suddenly swung open.

The man standing in the doorway was older, somewhere in his sixties, with a face that had the expression of someone who had spent decades managing a household and had very little patience left for disruptions to his afternoon. He looked down at you, at your bag, at your face, at the way the wind was lifting the hem of your skirt off the ground, and something shifted in his expression. Not warmth exactly, but the softening that came with understanding.

You smiled at him. "Hello. I'm sorry if I've come at an inconvenient time. Lord Baelor requested someone from the diocese for guidance, I'm told." You frowned slightly at your own words. Guidance wasn't quite the right word and you both knew it, but it was the closest one you had. "Spiritual counsel, perhaps. I wasn't entirely sure how to—"

"Yes." He cut you off, not unkindly, just efficiently. "He did make that request. He won't require you just yet, he rests in the afternoons. I'll show you to your room." He stepped aside and gestured for you to come in.

You crossed the threshold and told him your name, and he repeated it back to himself quietly, committing it to memory.

"You may call me Gerald," he said. The door swung shut behind you and the sound of it, heavy, louder than you expected, made you flinch before you could stop yourself.

Gerald glanced back at you with something almost like amusement on his weathered face. "Just the wind," he said, shaking his head slightly. Then he looked you over properly for the first time, taking in your dress, your uncovered hair, the general impression you gave of being an ordinary young woman rather than anything else, and he said, "You seem young to be one of them."

You raised an eyebrow. "One of who?"

He made a vague gesture that seemed to encompass the diocese, the church, religion broadly.

"I'm not a nun, Gerald," you said, and you couldn't quite keep the amusement out of your voice. "I'd be in a habit if I were, wouldn't I. I'm not even close to pious enough for that. I just listen to people and try to help them make sense of things without making them feel worse about themselves in the process."

He looked slightly embarrassed in the way that men of his age sometimes did when they'd gotten something wrong and knew it. "Ach. My apologies. I'm afraid I lost faith a long time ago, I can't always remember what's what with all of it."

"Nothing to apologise for," you said easily.

He nodded once, stiffly, and turned to lead you further into the house. You followed, your bag in hand, your footsteps quiet against the floor, and tried not to look too obviously at everything around you, the high ceilings, the dark wood panelling, the curtains on every window drawn nearly shut against the afternoon light.

Nearly shut. Every single one of them. And as he showed you further around the manor, you noticed the mirrors too, the ones placed in certain hallways covered over with dark cloth, every one of them. You had no idea what for.

You made a note of it quietly in the back of your mind and said nothing, following Gerald through the long dim hallway as he showed you to the room you'd be staying in for however long Lord Baelor required you.

However long that was, nobody had thought to tell you.

It had been three days and the manor had not treated you well in the slightest.

You had not seen Lord Baelor once. Every time you brought it up with Gerald he brushed you off with the same answer, that he was busy, that he would find you when the time was right, and every time you smiled and nodded and walked away and reminded yourself why you were here. Kindness. That was why. Because someone had asked for help and you didn't know how to say no to that, you never had, and so here you were.

Though your patience was beginning to wear considerably thin.

You could have tolerated the waiting if the manor itself had been easier to exist in. It wasn't. There was something about it at night especially that got under your skin in a way you couldn't reason yourself out of no matter how hard you tried. The hallways too dark, the curtains always drawn no matter the hour, a silence so complete it made you strain to hear things you didn't actually want to hear. You had moved your rosary from your bag to the nightstand on the first night and told yourself it was just part of your usual routine, one you would do in your own home.

And then there were the dreams.

They had started the very first night and had not stopped since. They weren't the ordinary kind of nightmare, not the kind where something nameless waits for you in the dark and your legs won't carry you away from it. These were different. You could never make out what was happening in them clearly, rather you would only feel it. Hands holding you in a way that didn't allow for movement. Stinging pain at your neck, your shoulders, your forearms. The sound of your own crying that you could never connect to anything specific, like hearing yourself from very far away.

What frightened you more than the dreams themselves was what you woke up to after them.

The first morning you had gone to the mirror, the only one in the room not covered over with a sheet, and found bruises on your skin. Purple, yellowing at the edges, tender enough to sting when you pressed your fingers to them. Your neck. Your forearm. Real enough that you couldn't convince yourself you had imagined them.

You had stood there for a long time just looking at them.

You had thought about packing your bag and leaving that same morning, had genuinely considered it, but then you thought about walking back into the diocese and telling Father Edwyn you had left because of bad dreams and bruises you couldn't explain, and you could picture his face so clearly that you almost laughed despite yourself. They would think you had lost your mind. And so you unpacked what little you had started pulling out and got back into bed and said nothing to Gerald in the morning, and nothing the morning after that.

And so you woke again with a start, your body jolting like you had been dropped from somewhere high up. The only sound in the room was your own breathing, laboured and unsteady, and you lay there blinking in the darkness while your mind slowly came back to you. You reached over with a trembling hand and turned the lamp on and sat up and breathed until your heart slowed down to something close to normal.

Your throat was completely dry. You had meant to bring water up hours ago, before you had fallen asleep without meaning to.

You sat there for a moment weighing it up, and then your throat made the decision and you swung your legs over the side of the bed, put your slippers on, and lit your candelabra. You told yourself firmly that you were not afraid of a dark hallway as you walked down it considerably faster than a person who was not afraid would need to.

The kitchen was cold and quiet when you got there. You set the candelabra carefully on the counter and went up on your toes to reach a glass from the top of the cabinet, filled it at the tap, and stood with your back against the sink and drank it slowly. The cold of the water helped soothe your throat back to normal.

By the time the glass was empty you felt almost like yourself again. You turned to set it back down in the sink and the man was simply standing there in the middle of the kitchen, and the sound that came out of you was not one you were particularly proud of. You clapped your hand over your own mouth but the glass had already slipped from your fingers and hit the stone floor, and you stood there frozen listening to it shatter.

He hadn't moved. Not an inch, not even the small automatic flinch of a person who has just startled someone in the dark. He simply stood there, very still, watching you, dressed fully despite the hour like the notion of sleep had never applied to him. His hair was dark and cut close, grey threading through at the temples, and in his beard, which hadn't been seen to recently, the grey came through more freely.

You had seen the painted portrait of him in one of the west wing hallways on the second day when boredom had driven you to wander, but the portrait had not managed the stillness of him, had not captured whatever it was that made him feel like he took up more space in a room than his physical size accounted for.

You lowered your hand from your mouth slowly. The broken glass glittered on the floor between you.

"I am greatly sorry," you started, the words coming out in a rush as you moved to crouch down and begin collecting the pieces. "I didn't hear anyone, I had no idea there was—"

"Miss." Just the one word, low and even, the kind of voice that didn't need any particular effort behind it to stop you in your tracks. "You don't need to do that."

You were already crouching. In your haste you had misjudged the counter above you and your head nearly connected solidly with the edge of it, and you heard him pull in a short sharp breath above you at the almost connection you had with it. You were too focused on the floor to look up, reaching carefully for the larger pieces of glass, when one of them caught the pad of your finger before you found it.

The hiss came out before you could stop it. You straightened up quickly and pressed your hand to your chest and looked down to find a bright line of red welling up across your finger, vivid in the candlelight.

You looked up at him.

He had gone completely still in a way that was different from the stillness he had walked in with. His eyes were fixed on your hand and there was something in his expression you caught and couldn't name, something that moved across his face and pulled tight in his jaw, there and then controlled so quickly you almost doubted you had seen it at all. Then he looked up and met your eyes, and whatever had been there was gone.

It was the first proper look you had gotten at his face, the candlelight catching it directly at this distance. A nose that had been broken at least once or twice and healed slightly crooked, a face that was handsome in a straightforward way and had become something harder and more difficult to look away from since. And his eyes, which you noticed now properly for the first time, gave you pause. One dark brown, while the other was blue. Both of them fixed entirely on you.

You became aware that you were staring and dropped your gaze to your finger instead, feeling warmth wash over you suddenly.

"Let me see," he said.

"I'm quite alright, really, it's nothing—"

"I was the reason this happened," he said, and there was something soft and stern in his voice, not unkind, but not something you were going to be able to talk your way around. When you looked back up at him he tilted his head slightly, a small careful smile sitting on his face that did something entirely unreasonable to his features. "So please. Let me see."

You looked at him for a moment that stretched slightly longer than it should have. Then you held out your hand slowly.

He took it carefully, his fingers wrapping around yours to steady your hand, and the touch of him made you swallow and flick your eyes briefly to the kitchen entrance behind him. It was only now that the full picture of how this looked was occurring to you. A man you had never properly met, in his own home, in the middle of the night, and you standing there in nothing but your nightgown and your feet in slippers like you had no sense whatsoever. The nightgown was modest enough but it was still a nightgown, and Father Edwyn would have needed to sit down if he could see you right now.

"I only came down for water," you said, which you were aware solved nothing but felt necessary to say anyway. "I didn't think I would run into anyone at this hour. I apologise for how this looks."

He glanced up at you briefly from your hand. "I told you not to apologise."

"I'm aware, and yet."

Something shifted at the corner of his mouth. He moved slightly, very careful of the broken glass still scattered around your feet, drawing you gently with him toward the sink. He turned the tap and guided your finger under the running water, and you watched the thin pink curl of it disappear down the drain and tried to focus on that rather than on the fact that he was still holding your hand, his thumb resting lightly against the inside of your wrist.

You noticed, in the quiet that followed, that his jaw was tight. Not in an angry way. In the way of someone keeping something in check, something that wanted to go somewhere he wasn't allowing it to go. His eyes were on your finger under the water and there was a quality to the way he was looking at it that made a small uneasy thing wake up at the back of your mind. Like the sight of it cost him something. Like he was having a conversation with himself that you weren't privy to and wasn't going well.

You thought perhaps he had a terrible aversion to blood. Some people did. You almost felt sorry for him.

Almost.

"If anything," he said, and then he said your name, quiet and even, and your mouth opened slightly because you hadn't told him your name, Gerald must have, but hearing it in his voice was a different thing entirely and you weren't prepared for it. "I should be the one apologising."

You looked at him. He was still looking at the water.

"These past few days," he continued, "I was held up with matters that took longer than I anticipated. I should have made time regardless." He glanced up then and met your eyes, and at this distance, in the low candlelight, the difference between his eyes was striking, both of them serious and steady and directed entirely at you. "You came a long way. The least you deserved was to be properly received."

"It's alright," you said, which was mostly true. "Gerald was," you paused, "accommodating."

"Gerald is many things," he said, and there was something dry beneath it that made you want to smile despite yourself. He reached past you with his free hand and took a small cloth from the counter, and he pressed it gently against your finger and held it there, and you became very aware all at once of how close the two of you were standing. Close enough that you could see the grey more clearly in his beard, the fine lines at the corners of his eyes.

You looked up at the ceiling briefly and reminded yourself that you were a woman of faith and of reasonable sense and that this was simply a man helping you with a minor injury in a kitchen.

"Does it still sting?" he asked.

"A little," you admitted.

He nodded once, and lifted the cloth to check it, and you watched his expression do that thing again, as if he were holding himself back from something, and then it was gone in that same second. He pressed the cloth back down and when he looked up at you again there was nothing in his face but mild attentiveness.

"You should keep it covered tonight," he said.

"I'll manage," you said. "I've had worse from turning book pages."

He looked at you for a moment. "You read a great deal?"

"Occupational requirement," you said. "Though I'd do it anyway."

Something in his expression shifted, small and almost unnoticeable. His eyes moved over your face in a way that wasn't rude, wasn't anything you could object to, just thorough.

"We have a great deal to discuss, you and I," he said quietly. "I'm sorry it has taken this long to begin."

You found yourself in Baelor's study almost a week later after the incident in the kitchen. The days between had not been empty ones, not like the first three had been. He had been caught up with his duties still, but you had seen him often enough around the manor in the time between that it no longer felt like you were a guest waiting to be acknowledged. It was always in the evenings though, you had noticed that much. Always after the sun had gone down and the last of the light had left the sky, he would appear, like the night itself had produced him.

If he found you wandering he would take you through rooms of the manor that no one but him seemed to know existed, rooms that felt like they hadn't been opened in decades, full of old covered furniture and portraits of people.

He had walked you through the gardens more than once, the night air cool and still around you both, the grounds lit only by whatever the moon offered and the lamp he carried. You had mentioned one evening while standing in the garden in the dark that the beds along the south wall would be better with lilies in them, said it offhandedly without thinking anything of it, and had been genuinely startled when he appeared the following evening with them already in hand and pressed them into yours and told you to plant them yourself. You had knelt there in the dirt in your good dress doing exactly that while he stood behind you holding the lamp so you could see, and it had been one of the stranger and somehow nicer evenings you could remember having in some time.

You had not thought anything of it at the time, the fact that it was always evening, always after dark. You thought nothing of it now either, or you were trying not to.

He was generous. Attentive in a way that you weren't entirely sure what to do with.

What you still didn't know, after all of it, was why he had sent for you in the first place.

And so finally, after many days of waiting, you were sitting across from him in the quiet of his study, your fingers nervously working at your own nailbeds where you hoped he couldn't see.

The fire was going and the lamps were turned down the way they always were in this house, the room dim and warm. He had asked for you in the evening, which Gerald had passed along without any explanation, and you hadn't asked for one. Being in a room alone with him at this hour felt different from the garden, from the hallways, from the brief encounters in passing. In the study with the door closed and the dark pressing at the windows it felt considerably more deliberate.

He was sitting across the desk from you, leaning back in his chair with a quiet ease that you found both calming and slightly unnerving, like a man who had never once in his life needed to fill a silence if he didn't want to.

"What is it that you do," he said finally. Not quite a question. More like something he had been turning over and decided to put down on the table between you.

You looked up and your eyes met his and there was that pull again, that immediate quality of his attention that made everything else in the room feel slightly less present. You held it this time instead of looking away.

"I listen, mostly," you said, and a small quiet laugh left you without you quite meaning it to. "People tell me things they haven't told anyone else and I try to help them make sense of it. Give what advice I can without making them feel judged for it." You paused. "It sounds simpler than it is."

"It doesn't sound simple at all," he said, and he meant it, you could tell.

You looked back down at your hands. Your nails were at your nailbeds again without you having noticed.

"Stop that."

Your fingers went still immediately and you looked up at him with your mouth slightly parted, a little mortified at how quickly you had obeyed. He was watching you with his brows drawn together slightly, his chin tilted down, something in his expression that sat between concern and something quieter and more careful that you couldn't put a name to.

"Sorry," you said. "It's a habit. I've had it since I was young, I don't always notice I'm doing it."

He shook his head once, a small breath leaving him that was almost amused. "Stop apologising so much as well. You have nothing to apologise for."

You smiled a little despite yourself and let your hands settle flat on your lap.

The room went quiet again. The fire shifted and settled. You looked at him and he looked at you and for a moment neither of you seemed to feel the need to fill it. You had sat with a great many people in silence and it was almost always an uncomfortable thing, something to be managed. This didn't feel like that. You felt comfortable in it.

Then you remembered why you were here.

You sat forward slightly. "You wanted guidance," you said. "Or whatever it is you'd like to call it. I'm all ears, whenever you're ready."

He looked at you for a long moment. Then his gaze dropped briefly to your hands sitting on your lap and came back up to your face, and he swallowed once.

"I have sinned," he said. "For a very long time."

You didn't flinch. You never did, it was the whole point of you. "How long would you say?"

"Since I was a young man." He said it plainly, no performance of guilt in it, no bid for your sympathy. Just a fact he was laying down. "Decades ago."

His eyes were steady on yours and the weight of them in the low light made your next question feel more careful than it might have otherwise.

"You can always repent, My Lord, it's never—"

"Baelor." He said it quietly but firmly, cutting across you without any apology for doing so. "Just Baelor. Please." He let a beat pass and then continued. "The thing is, to repent I would need to feel regretful for what I have done. And I don't. So tell me how that works."

You looked at him. He looked back at you with patience.

You opened your mouth and then closed it again. Tilted your head slightly. The honest answer was that you didn't know, and it was written plainly enough on your face that he could probably see it. "What is it that you've done," you said carefully. "If you don't mind me asking. These sins you feel no guilt for."

Something moved across his face. Not discomfort exactly. More like a man deciding how much of a door to open.

"I hurt people," he said.

You went still. Not visibly, you were practiced enough at this that it didn't show on your face, but something inside you sat up and took notice. Your hands had gone back to your nailbeds without you realising and this time he noticed and said nothing about it, only watched, and that somehow felt worse.

"When you say you hurt people," you said slowly, keeping your voice even, "what is it you mean by that."

The fire cracked once behind him and threw a brief flare of light across his face and then settled back down, and in the dim that followed his mismatched eyes were very dark, the blue one catching what little light remained.

"Exactly what I said," he told you quietly, holding your gaze still.

The room felt smaller than it had a moment ago. You breathed in slowly through your nose and reminded yourself that this was the work, this was exactly the work, sitting across from people who said difficult things and not letting the difficulty of it push you back in your chair.

You stayed where you were.

"And you feel nothing for it," you said. "No guilt. No regret."

"No," he said. And then, quieter. "Not for most of it."

You caught that. "Most of it."

His jaw shifted slightly. "There are moments," he said, "when I wish things were different. Not because of guilt. More because" he paused, and looked at you in a way that made you want to look somewhere else, "because of what it costs me. What it makes certain things impossible."

You weren't sure what he meant by that and you had the feeling of someone standing at the edge of something without being able to see how far down it went.

"That's not nothing," you said eventually. "Wanting things to be different. That's somewhere to start from."

He looked at you for a long moment. Something in his expression shifted, barely noticeable, like a small and careful thing that hadn't been expecting to be seen.

"Is it," he said softly. Not quite a question.

"It's more than most people come to me with," you said honestly.

He was quiet after that. He looked at you the way he had in the kitchen, that thorough unhurried way, like he was seeing several things at once and taking his time about all of them.

"You're not what I expected," he said finally.

"You're the second person to say that to me since I arrived," you said. "Gerald said something similar."

"Gerald says a great many things." The dryness in it was so subtle you almost missed it, and it startled a small genuine laugh out of you before you could help it. The corner of his mouth moved in response.

You folded your hands in your lap and held his gaze.

"Same time tomorrow?" you said.

Something in his eyes shifted. Warm was not quite the right word for it. But it was the closest one you had.

"Same time tomorrow," he said, nodding.

You had expected another dream after your meetings with Baelor had become a nightly thing, but this one was different. Worse. You woke with a yell that you were grateful no one was close enough to hear, sitting up in the dark with your palms pressed hard against your eyes, grounding yourself in the pressure of it, wiping the tears that came with it at the same time.

This one you remembered more than the others. Cold hands holding you down, a voice murmuring something low and encouraging against your skin that you couldn't make out the words of, only the tone of it, which was gentle in a way that made it worse somehow. The pain of being bitten. And the blood, so much of it, and the fear in the dream hadn't come from the pain or even from the blood. It had come from the fact that you had enjoyed it. That whatever was happening to you in the dream you had wanted, and your body had leaned into it even as the tears fell, and that was the part that woke you.

You pressed a shaking hand flat to your chest and sat there breathing.

Then you swung your legs over the side of the bed, put your slippers on, and left your room without the candelabra, forgetting it entirely, cursing under your breath when the door swung shut louder than you meant it to behind you. You didn't stop to ask forgiveness for the cursing. You just walked.

You didn't know where you were going until you were already there.

You stood in front of Baelor's chambers with your fist raised and your heart going too fast and the full weight of what you were doing landing on you all at once. You were in your nightgown. It was the middle of the night. You were standing outside a man's bedroom door about to knock on it. Father Edwyn would have you removed so fast your head would spin. You knew all of that and you were still standing there, still raising your fist, still knocking before you had fully decided to.

You were about to turn and leave and deal with the consequences of the dreams yourself when the door opened.

Baelor stood in the doorway, fully awake, still dressed, like sleep was something that happened to other people. He looked down at you from his full height and his expression when he saw your face did something complicated that you weren't in the right state to examine. His eyes moved over you quickly, taking stock, and whatever he found there made something in his jaw tighten.

Tears were sitting in your eyes before you could stop them. Your lips parted and nothing came out.

"Come in," he said, stepping back from the door to make room for you.

You hesitated. He waited, patient, tilting his head slightly and giving you a small reassuring nod, and honestly if he were any other kind of man you should not have trusted that so easily but you went in anyway and you didn't feel stupid about it until later.

His chambers were large, the kind of large that felt lived in rather than just expensive, and you were taking it in when you registered that he had come to stand behind you. You felt him before you heard him, the quiet of his movement, and then his hand came to your hair and moved it gently from your shoulder, letting it fall back down your neck, and you closed your eyes for just a moment at the touch of it before you opened them again and turned to face him.

He was looking down at you with that steady attentive look that you had been on the receiving end of enough times now to know it was particular to you. Like you were something he was always paying close attention to.

And that was exactly the problem.

You took a few steps back and put distance between you, and regretted it the instant you did, which told you everything you needed to know about the state you were in.

"I cannot continue these meetings," you said. Your voice came out quieter than you intended. "I want to go back."

He went very still.

"I still need you here," he said simply.

Something broke open in you a little and the words came out before you could organise them properly. "You are fine, I have told you that you are fine, but I am not, I am not fine here, my mind is" you pressed a hand briefly to your forehead. "These dreams, I cannot even explain them to you because I cannot make sense of them myself, I can barely remember them when I wake but the feeling of them stays, and I have not slept properly once since I arrived here." Your voice cracked again and you hated it. "The very first morning I should have listened to myself, when I woke and found bruises on my skin that I had no explanation for, I should have packed my things then, I should have—"

He crossed the distance between you and took your face in his hands and kissed you.

It stopped every thought in your head completely. His hands were cool against your jaw and his mouth was warm and certain and you stood there with your eyes wide open for a moment that felt very long, one hand coming up to rest against his without knowing why, and then something in you stopped fighting and your eyes closed and you kissed him back, and for a few seconds the whole terrible weight of the last month just went quiet.

Then it came back all at once.

You pulled away and put your hand over your mouth and stared at him.

"What have I done," you said, and your voice was barely anything. You stepped back, then further back, your hand moving from your mouth to the top of your head. "This is not like me, this is not, they are going to remove me from my position, Father Edwyn is going to—"

"Nothing is going to happen," Baelor said, coming toward you steadily.

"You don't know that—"

"Nothing is going to happen," he said again, quieter, and he took you by both arms and held you there, and you shook your head but you made no effort to move out of his hands, which said everything.

You looked up at him. He was speaking, saying something low and even, and your eyes went to his mouth when he spoke, and that was when you saw it. When it finally registered properly. The sharpness of his canines, not hidden, not subtle, just there, and you didn't know why it had taken you this long except that you hadn't been looking because some part of you hadn't wanted to find it.

I hurt people.

He had never told you how.

The curtains always drawn. Only ever appearing after dark, never once in daylight, not once in the weeks you had been here. Every mirror in the manor covered over except the one in your room. The dreams that had started the very first night and had not stopped, the bruises you had woken to that first morning and every morning since, the stinging pain at your neck and your arms that you had blamed on the devil and on your own mind because the alternative was something you hadn't been willing to look at directly.

You pulled back from him.

"No," you said. The word came out on a breath. You took another step back and pointed at him before lowering your hand because you didn't know what to do with it. "No. Absolutely not."

"Listen to me—"

"I thought it was a myth," you said, and your voice was strange to your own ears, too level for what was happening inside you. "I thought it was something people invented to frighten children, I thought, everyone thinks that, any sensible person thinks that, it's supposed to be a myth."

You stopped, breathed, then continued. "But I knew. From the very first night I knew something was wrong here, I knew something was wrong with this place and with you and I ignored it because I didn't want to be the kind of person who runs from something they can't explain." You looked at him and your eyes were burning. "And the dreams. Every single night since I arrived. The biting, the blood, the hands holding me down, that was you, wasn't it. That was you and I felt it in my gut from the beginning and I told myself I was imagining it."

He said nothing. He just looked at you, and the look on his face was not what you expected. Not cold, not threatening. Something that looked considerably more like a man who had been found out and was not going to insult you by pretending otherwise.

Which in some ways was worse.

You made for the door. Your hand found the handle and you pulled and it opened an inch before his hand came flat against it above your head and held it shut.

You pulled at the handle. It didn't move.

"Open this door," you said. Your voice was quiet and very controlled and you turned to face him and immediately regretted it because he was close, closer than you'd realised, and looking down at you with an expression that made the anger in your chest do something complicated.

He shook his head.

"Open it," you said again.

"Not yet," he said. Just that. Not yet, like he had time, like he had all the time there was and then some, which you supposed was true.

"You cannot keep me here against my will," you said. "You do not get to do that."

"I'm not keeping you against your will," he said. "I'm asking you to stay long enough to listen to me. There is a difference."

"There is no difference when your hand is on the door."

He looked at you for a moment. Then he took his hand off the door and stepped back and gave you the full width of the room between you.

"There," he said quietly. "Go, if you want to. I won't stop you."

You stood there with your hand on the handle and the door an inch from open and the hallway dark on the other side of it, and you stayed exactly where you were, and you hated yourself a little for it.

"Talk then," you said. "Say whatever it is you want to say."

He looked at you across the room. The candlelight threw long shadows across his face, the grey at his temples, the crooked line of his nose, the mismatched eyes that had unsettled you from the very first night and that you had kept coming back to anyway.

"I have not touched you," he said. "Not the way you're thinking. The dreams" he paused, and something moved across his face that you couldn't read. "I don't fully understand them either. But I have not laid a hand on you in harm. Not once."

"The bruises—"

"I know," he said. "I know about the bruises. And I am telling you I don't know how to explain them to you in a way that will satisfy you, but I have not hurt you. Whatever is happening, that is not what I have done."

You looked at him. "But you wanted to," you said. It came out before you decided to say it. "Didn't you. That night in the kitchen. When I cut my finger. That look on your face."

He held your gaze and said nothing, which was its own answer.

"That is not comforting," you said.

"No," he agreed. "I don't imagine it is."

The candle on his nightstand flickered in a draft and the shadows moved across the room and you stood by the door with your hand still on the handle and looked at this man, this impossible wrong thing that you had spent a month having evening conversations with and walking through night gardens with and laughing quietly over Gerald with, and you tried to find the fear you were supposed to feel and found something considerably more complicated underneath it.

"Why me," you said quietly. "Of everyone you could have sent for. Why someone from the church."

He was quiet for a long moment.

"Because," he said, "you are the only kind of person I have ever found interesting enough to want to keep near me without wanting only that one thing from." He said it plainly, without apology, without any performance of sentiment. "And because you believe in something. Genuinely. And I have not believed in anything in a very long time, and I find I cannot stop wanting to be in the same room as it."

The room was very quiet.

Your hand slipped from the door handle.

"So what, you bite your victims to death?" you said suddenly, your voice quiet in a way that had nothing soft in it. "Suck them dry."

The smile that started on his face was small and involuntary and gone almost immediately when he clocked the look you were giving him. He pressed his mouth together and had the decency to look like he was reconsidering his reaction.

"No," he said.

"No," you repeated flatly. "That's your answer. Just no."

"I don't kill them," he said, more carefully this time. "I never have. Not for a very long time."

That last part sat in the air between you and you let it sit there.

"Not for a very long time," you said. "So at some point you did."

He said nothing, which was confirmation enough.

You pressed the back of your hand briefly to your mouth and looked at the ceiling and then back at him. "And the people you don't kill," you said. "What happens to them."

"They're unharmed," he said. "They don't remember."

"They don't" you stopped. Something cold moved through you. "They don't remember," you said again, slowly. "So they would have no idea. They would just wake up and go about their day and have no idea whatsoever that someone had" you stopped again. Your hand had found your own collarbone without you telling it to, pressing flat against the base of your throat. "Is that what you've been doing to me," you said. "Is that what the dreams are."

He looked at you and said nothing and that was the worst answer he could have given you.

"So you lied to me," you breathed out. The words came out quiet and unsteady and you hated that they did. "You said you didn't know. About the dreams, about the bruises, you stood there and told me you didn't know how to explain it and you lied to my face."

He didn't deny it. He just looked at you, and the fact that he didn't even try to talk his way out of it somehow made it worse and better at the same time, which made no sense, and you were angry at yourself for that too.

"I didn't lie," he said carefully. "Not entirely. I told you I hadn't hurt you, and that is true."

"That is not the same thing as telling me the truth," you said, and your voice cracked on the last word and you looked away from him and pressed your fingers to your eyes for a moment, furious at yourself for the tears, for the crack in your voice, for the fact that underneath all of it what you felt most was not the anger, not the fear, but something that felt embarrassingly close to hurt. Like he had broken something. Like you had trusted him without realising you were doing it and he had known that and said what suited him anyway.

"I know," he said quietly.

"Don't," you said. "Don't say I know like that. Don't be reasonable right now, I am asking you not to be reasonable right now."

He closed his mouth.

You dropped your hand from your face and looked at him. Your eyes were wet and you didn't bother trying to hide it. "How long," you said. "Since I arrived?"

He held your gaze. "Yes."

"Every night."

A pause. "Not every night."

"But most."

He said nothing, which was yes.

You nodded once, slowly. You pressed your palms flat against your sides and breathed in through your nose and looked at him standing across the room from you, this man you had spent a month trusting, this impossible thing you had walked through night gardens with and laughed with over Gerald and sat across from in that study night after night telling him things about faith and the soul and what you believed, and he had been—

"I prayed for you," you said. It came out before you decided to say it. "Every night since I arrived I said a prayer for you. I asked God to help you with whatever it was you were carrying." You laughed, and it was not a happy sound. "I thought you were lonely. I thought that was all it was."

Something moved across his face at that. Something that looked like it actually landed somewhere in him.

"You should go to sleep," he said quietly.

"Don't do that either," you said.

"You're exhausted and you're upset and you should—"

"I am upset," you said, "because you fed from me while I was sleeping and then sat across from me every night and looked me in the face and let me believe the dreams were the devil or my own mind going to pieces, and now you want to send me off to bed like I am a child." You looked at him steadily even though your eyes were still wet. "Tell me why I should stay. Give me one reason that is true."

He was quiet for a long moment. The candle flickered between you.

"Because I haven't wanted to stop," he said. "And I don't know what to do with that. I haven't known what to do with it since the second week you were here and I am not accustomed to not knowing."

You looked at him for a long time.

Then you sat down on the edge of the nearest chair because your legs had decided they were done holding you up, and you put your face in your hands, and you sat there for a moment in the quiet of his room.

"You are an enormous problem," you said into your hands.

He said nothing. But you heard him cross the room, and you felt him crouch down in front of you, and when you lowered your hands he was there, close, looking at you.

"I know," he said.

You didn't know what was going through you. You couldn't have named it if someone had asked you to. It wasn't forgiveness, you weren't there yet, and it wasn't sense because sense had left the building some time ago. You looked at him crouched in front of you.

You stood up slowly and he rose with you, and you didn't know what you were doing until you were already doing it, your feet carrying you the small distance that was left between you, and you watched something shift in his expression as you moved closer, something that was not quite surprise but was the closest thing to it you had seen on his face. Like he had not let himself expect this. Like he had been careful not to.

Your hand came up before you fully decided to let it, your fingers brushing against the line of his jaw, and he went very still under your touch the way he always went still, that enormous contained quiet of him, except this time there was something underneath it that wasn't quiet at all.

"This is a terrible idea," you said. Your voice came out barely above a whisper.

"Yes," he said. He didn't move. He was giving you the choice of it, you understood that, holding himself perfectly still and letting you decide, and somehow that was the thing that undid you completely.

You closed the last of the distance and kissed him.

It was nothing like the first time, the one he had initiated, that desperate urgent thing that had frightened you. This was slower. Deliberate. His hands came up to your face with a carefulness that felt almost reverent, like you were something that could be broken, like he was aware of exactly what he was and what you were and the distance between those two things and was trying to account for all of it in the way he held you. You felt him exhale against your mouth, slow and unsteady, the breath of someone who had been waiting for something without letting themselves know they were waiting.

You pulled back after a moment and looked at him. His eyes were open, both of them, dark and blue and closer than you had ever seen them, and the expression on his face was something you had no category for. Something stripped of the usual careful control of him.

Your thumb was still resting against his jaw.

He didn't warn you again.

His hand came up to the back of your neck, firm this time, and he kissed you like he had run out of patience for restraint. It was hungry in a way that made your breath catch before you could stop it, your body answering before your mind had time to catch up.

You felt it immediately, the difference. The way he held you now, the way his mouth moved against yours like he had decided something and wasn't turning back from it.

Your hand tightened in his shoulder.

He made a low sound against your mouth, and then his teeth caught your lip, not enough to hurt at first, just enough to make you inhale sharply, and then a second later you felt it properly. The quick sting.

You didn't pull away.

That was the worst part.

You should have. You knew you should have, and still you didn't, your breath unsteady, your fingers curling tighter into him as his mouth pressed back to yours, slower for a moment, like he was feeling it, like he knew exactly what he had done.

His hand at your neck tightened slightly.

And then he moved.

It wasn't rushed, but it wasn't hesitant either. One step, then another, guiding you with him until the back of your legs met the edge of the bed and you faltered for half a second, just enough for him to feel it.

He didn't stop.

His hand slid from your neck to your waist, steady, and he pushed you back just enough that you sat, the mattress dipping beneath you, your balance shifting before you could catch it.

He followed you down immediately.

The breath left you in a quiet rush as your shoulders met the mattress, his weight coming over you a second later, close enough that there was no space left to think, only to feel the press of him, the heat of him, the way his hand held firm at your waist like he meant to keep you exactly where he had put you.

His mouth was on yours again before you could recover.

It was deeper, rougher in the way it dragged something sharp out of you, your breath catching against him as his hand tightened slightly, fingers pressing into your side as though he needed the contact to ground himself.

You could still feel where he had caught your lip, the faint sting of it, and when he kissed you again it pulled at it, made your breath hitch in a way you couldn't quite control, your hand sliding up into his shoulder, gripping without thinking.

He made a low sound against your mouth, something that felt less like control and more like the loss of it.

Everything about him felt closer now, heavier, like the space between you had been erased entirely. The weight of him, the heat of him, the way he held you there without asking, without giving you room to pull away even if you had wanted to.

You didn't.

Your head tipped back slightly, your breath uneven, your body already answering him in ways that made it impossible to pretend this was something you could step back from now.

The world outside the room seemed to fall away completely.

There was nothing left but the sound of your breathing, the pressure of his hand, the way your fingers tightened against him as though you might steady yourself there and failed entirely.

When he finally pulled back, it was only just.

His hand was still at your waist, his breath still uneven, his gaze fixed on you in a way that felt different now, like something had shifted that could not be undone.

You stared up at him, your pulse still racing, your thoughts slower than they should have been, your body still caught somewhere between what had just happened and the fact that it had.

Neither of you spoke.

And the silence that followed was heavier than anything that had come before it.