Isabellaboo2025

You try to throw yourself into work – you really do try. After you bid Maria goodbye, you head straight to your shop and busy yourself with all the orders that are already backed up, the repairs that people are expecting done in time for Christmas. You sew and mend like the devil’s nipping at your heels, pricking your finger more than once until it starts to resemble a pin cushion.

He'll be fine, you tell yourself as you wrestle with a shirt, they'll all be fine. Joel won’t let anything happen. You can’t help but feel your insides melt just at the thought of him, because you trust him the way you trust the ground to be there when you put your foot down. Joel doesn’t give his word lightly nor does he break it, and you know he’ll walk through fire to make sure Dylan comes home safe and sound.

At noon, you raise your head, wince at the stiffness and take a brisk walk down to the square, breathing in the cold, crisp air, marvelling at how life simply goes on around you whilst your whole world is beyond the wall facing down whatever horrors are lurking.

“He’s out on patrol then,” Gail says when she comes upon you waiting in line in the dining hall. “How does that make you feel?”

“Are we doing therapy right here?” you ask, glancing around to see who might be listening.

“No, just asking,” she replies, blinking steadily, her gaze remaining trained on you.

“Honestly – I’m terrified,” you admit. “But he’s with Joel, so I know he’s going to be alright. And no…” you add hurriedly, as she opens her mouth. “I don’t want to talk about him here.”

Fortunately, Gail seems to take the hint and after you’ve eaten your venison, you head back to the shop for another few solitary hours where you try to focus on what’s happening right in front of you, rather than what could be happening in the snow-covered hills.

Finally, the afternoon bleeds gold toward evening and you quickly close up and make your way back to the gate. Eugene, standing guard with his rifle, waves down at you, but refrains from issuing one of his legendary quips because he can clearly tell how you’re feeling right now. Then he gives you a look that’s kind enough to make your throat tight and goes back to scanning the tree line.

You watch the gap in the trees where the trail comes down until your eyes ache and you think, the way you've been not-quite-letting yourself think all day, about tonight.

You’ve practiced the words a thousand times, thinking about your posture and tone when you deliver them. You want Dylan to know that you’re not letting his father go – you’re simply making space for someone else – Joel – a man you know your son admires and respects. You want him to know that it’s a good thing, that love and family are things to be cherished, not rejected.

That you can all be happy together.

God, you hope he sees it that way, not just because you’re anxious about the future, but because desire is already simmering deep inside you.

Eugene whistles suddenly, indicating incoming riders and your heart goes straight up into your throat. You’re on your feet at the rail before you've decided to move, and there – out of the gap in the trees, small at first and then resolving – come three horses. You count them twice, three times, your whole body a held breath, and then you see the shapes on them, and your knees nearly go.

Dylan’s at the front, alive, whole, sitting his horse looser now than he did this morning, Ellie beside him. And Joel…

Your heart swells so hard it hurt, and you feel your inner core clench. There he is, a pace or two behind, broad and steady in the saddle with that unmistakable set of his shoulders, bringing your boy home exactly like he promised. You want to laugh and cry all at the same time. You want to be down at the gate before it even finishes opening so you can put your hands on your son and then, God help the both of you and never mind who sees, put your hands on the man who's kept him safe.

The man you’re going to spend the rest of your life with.

Eugene calls the gate open and the big oak doors begin to swing. You skip down and hurriedly cross the packed dirt of the yard, your face splitting into a grin you couldn't have stopped for anything…

And then you get close enough to see Joel's eyes, and the grin dies on your face.

You know this man. You know every set his face can take, have made a study of it over the last few months, and what you see in his eyes as he rides through the gate is something you've only seen a handful of times, in the worst moments – the day a patrol came back one man short or the night he told you a piece of his own history that left him grey and hollow.

It’s grief. Held down hard, locked behind that stone face he wears for the world, but there, unmistakable, aimed – and this is the part that stops your heart – at you. He finds your face across the yard and there’s such naked sorrow in the look that your first, wild, animal thought is that something’s happened to Dylan, that the boy sitting alive on the horse is somehow not alright, that…

"Mom!"

Dylan's voice cracks across the yard and your eyes snap to your son, instant relief filling you at the sight of him. He’s fine, better than fine, his face lit up like the sun, his body half-falling off his horse in his hurry, stumbling toward you across the yard with his arms already coming up to embrace you.

"Mom! Mom, you're not gonna – you have to…"

He can’t get it out for laughing and crying at once, and behind him, another rider swings down, someone you can’t quite see past Dylan's shoulder – and your son’s shaking you, gripping you, his eyes enormous, and he screams words into your face like the best news that has ever existed in the history of the world.

"It's Dad! Mom, it's Dad! We found Dad! He's alive!"

The yard tilts.

For a second you genuinely don’t understand. The words arrive in your ears as sounds with no meaning attached, a sentence in a language you've forgotten, because the thing they describe is not a thing that can happen, is not a category of thing that exists. It’s something that’s closed and buried and grieved and gone.

“No,” you hear yourself say softly. “No, Dylan…”

And then the rider steps out from behind Dylan's shoulder into the low gold light of the yard, lean and sun-dark and bearded and older, so much older than you remember, his face a ruin of hope and disbelief and two years of hell.

It’s him.

"Hey," Matt says, his voice breaking on the single word.

He stands there ten feet from you with his hands hanging useless at his sides, tears already spilling down into his beard, looking at you like you’re water and he's been dying of thirst for two years.

He says it again, wrecked, barely a sound. "Hey, sweetheart, it’s me.”

Something comes up out of you that isn’t a word, but rather a sound you haven’t known you can make. Your hand goes to your mouth, and you realise you’re shaking your head – not in denial, just a helpless side-to-side, the body's refusal to hold something too large for it – your eyes streaming.

Dylan’s saying something as he grips your arm, and you can hear the pure delirious joy in his voice. Your boy, who has struggled so much with the loss of his father, made whole in a single afternoon. And some enormous part of you is breaking open with a joy to match his, because Matt’s alive. Matt’s standing in front of you, the man you had loved and married and made this child with and buried is standing in Jackson's yard like an angel’s vision.

And yet, underneath the joy, in the same instant, so fast and so quiet and so shameful that you try not to feel it even as it happens – your eyes go to Joel.

He hasn't moved from his horse, still standing at the edge of the scene, reins loose in his hands. He isn’t looking at Matt or Dylan, but rather at you, and when your eyes find his, he doesn’t look away or let anything show. He just holds your gaze for one single heartbeat then gives you the smallest nod, like he's read the whole thing off your face already, all of it, the joy and the horror and the guilt and the love and is telling you it’s alright.

Telling you to go to your husband.

You tear your eyes off him and then Matt closes the last of the distance between you, pulling you into his arms, and you both cry, standing in the middle of the yard with Dylan wrapped around you, the whole grief collapsing in on itself.

Matt says your name into your hair over and over like he's forgotten every other word he's ever known, and God help you, your arms come up and hold him, because your body remembers him even where your mind is in freefall. Because you had loved this man once with your whole young heart and buried him and here he is warm and breathing and real and clutching you like you’re the only solid thing in a dissolving world.

"I never stopped," he says, ragged, into your hair. "Two years, sweetheart, and I never once stopped. Every day I pictured you safe, with a wall around you. That's the picture that kept me breathing, and you're here, you're really here, and you kept him, you got him here and you kept him…"

He pulls back just enough to look at you, both his hands coming up to hold your wet face, his eyes move over you starving and reverent.

"Look at you, sweetheart. Oh my God, look at you. You're okay. You're really okay…"

"Matt…" His name comes out of you cracked and thin. "How…I don't…we ran, we ran like you told us to and then we waited. We waited and watched the gate because we thought you were coming and…”

"I know." He presses his forehead to yours, and his is hot and damp and shaking. "I know…you did right, you did everything right. You got our boy to safety and there is nothing – hey, look at me – there is nothing you have to explain to me, you hear? Nothing. You saved him. You've been saving him for two years while I was…" His voice fails briefly. "You did everything right."

Dylan presses against your side, one arm around you and one around his father, laughing wetly. “We’re a family again, Mom, a whole family…”

And every word of your son's joy is a gift and a blade at once, because over the top of both their bowed heads, your traitor eyes go looking, one more time, for Joel.

He's dismounted by now and started seeing to the horses, making himself useful, giving you the yard and the moment and taking himself out of the frame of it. He has his back half-turned, loosening a cinch and, even from here, even through the blur of your own tears, you can see the effort in the line of his shoulders. The effort of a man holding himself very, very still, bracing for something to be ripped back.

You’ve done this to him. It’s your face he's been bracing against since the gate, your joy he's made himself nod at, your husband whose arms you’re standing in. And you want, with a desperation that shames you in the middle of your own reunion, to cross the yard, take his face in your hands and say something, anything.

But what would you even say? There are no words for this, no shape for this. You’re standing in the arms of the husband you buried, with your overjoyed son clinging to you both, watching the man you meant to build a life with tend to horses with his back turned so you won’t have to see his face. The whole thing is so far past anything language can hold that you just stand there, shaking and crying, letting both feelings tear through you at once – the joy and the ruin. There’s no choosing between them, because they’re both true, because your heart has gone and gotten too big to sit whole in your chest anymore.

People start coming, the yard beginning to fill as word moves fast. A patrol coming back with a stranger doubled up on a horse is news, and a stranger who turns out to be a man raised from the dead is the kind of news that empties buildings.

Maria suddenly appears, Tommy behind her, both of them looking from Matt to you to Joel with shock on their faces and Dylan pulls free of you to rush forward and grab Tommy’s arm, yelling that Matt’s his dad and that he’s finally come home.

All of a sudden, Maria’s gaze meets yours and you can see the naked pity within it, the sheer irony of the fact that having finally accepted you’re a widow, entitled to move on with another man, your husband has now reappeared.

You don’t have time to think more on it however, because Matt suddenly sways.

You feel it before you see it – the sudden lean of his weight against you, heavier than it should be, his hand tightening on your arm and then not so much gripping as clutching, hanging on. You pull back to look at him and see the light draining from his face, his skin going grey and slick with a sweat that isn't just weeping, his eyes having trouble finding yours.

"Sorry," he slurs. "Sorry, I'm…I'm alright, I just…"

"Matt?" Your hands come up to hold him. "Matt, hey…"

"He's hurt."

Joel's voice is sharp, and suddenly he’s there, his hand under Matt's other arm, taking his weight and easing him down.

"He took a knock in the leg two days back that he didn't tell me ‘bout til we were halfway home. It's gone bad."

His eyes are flat and professional and don’t once now meet yours.

"It's infected. Not the kind that turns, the regular kind. The kind that kills you slow if it ain’t seen to. He's been runnin’ a fever and hidin' it." A muscle moves in his jaw. "Stubborn son of a bitch wanted to make it home before he said anythin’. Wanted to make it to you."

"I wanted…" Matt gets out, half-conscious now, his head lolling toward you. "Wanted to come in on my own two feet. For you. I didn't want you to see me…carried in…" His eyes roll, find you and hold on with the last of his strength. "Made it, though, didn’t I? I made it home."

"You made it," you tell him, your voice breaking clean apart, and you don’t know anymore which of the two griefs it’s breaking over. "You made it, Matt. You're home. You're home."

"He needs to get to the clinic."

Joel’s already got Matt's arm across his own broad shoulders, is already taking the dead weight of him like it’s nothing, the way he's carried God knows how many broken people out of God knows how many bad places. He hitches Matt higher, steadying, and his voice never lifts, never cracks, but instead stays flat and certain.

"Tommy, get the other side of him. Dylan…”

“I’m coming,” Dylan says, his voice high-pitched and panicked. “Dad, you’re going to be okay. You’re going to be okay.”

The crowd breaks and reforms into a corridor and Joel and Tommy carry your husband across the yard toward the clinic with his boots dragging twin lines in the dirt. You and Dylan follow, your son’s face white with a new terror, the earlier joy curdling into the oldest fear he owns – that he's got his father back only to lose him in the same day.

Dr Vee appears the moment Matt’s carried through the clinic doors, barking directions to the nearest cot. Joel steps out of the way when his weight is no longer needed, moves back into the corner of the room and becomes a still shape against the wall with his arms folded and his eyes on the doctor's hands.

You kneel at the head of the cot with Matt's hot damp hand crushed in both of yours, Dylan crowding in beside you. Dr Vee cuts Matt’s trouser leg away and the smell of it hits the room. It’s bad and deep, but she nods with almost grateful satisfaction.

"I can work with this," she says grimly. "His fever's high but he's strong – God knows how, look at the state of him. I need room. I need everyone who isn't holding him down out of my light." She looks up and finds you. "You stay. He's going to need someone he knows when I start, and this is going to hurt him. I need you to talk to him, keep him here."

You kneel in the lamplight with Matt’s hand in yours and you talk to him, low and steady, the way you once talked Dylan through his nightmares many years ago.

“You're safe now, you're home. I've got you. I've got you, Matt, stay with me…”

Matt's glassy eyes cling to your face like you’re the only fixed star in a spinning sky, and every so often his lips shape your name, and you answer it every time because you can’t not. Because he’s crawled up out of two years of hell holding the picture of you safe and you won’t let go of his hand now, not for anything, not for the whole world.

At some point, Joel moves to the door. You catch him at the edge of your vision, unfolding himself from the wall and crossing the room quiet as weather.

“Dylan,” he says softly. “Come with me.”

“No,” Dylan says, “I want to stay. Mom…”

“Go with Joel,” you say calmly. “I promise I’ll come and find you the moment it’s over.”

“But…”

“Go, Dylan, please.”

Stepping forward, Joel tugs gently on Dylan’s sleeve and even though you can tell he’s desperate to stay, he eventually nods, rises and follows Joel. Sliding his hand onto Dylan’s back, Joel gently manoeuvres him back out through the door, then he pauses and looks back at you.

For one moment – one single moment stolen out of the middle of the worst and strangest afternoon of your life – your eyes meet his over the whole ruined distance of everything that’s changed.

You want to say his name. You want to ask him to wait. You want to say, I don't know what this is, I don't know what happens now, don't go, please, just – don't go yet, don't decide it all standing in a doorway, don't take yourself out of my life without letting me even…

But you don’t say any of it. You can’t because your husband's hand is in yours and the doctor’s reaching for the first instrument, and there are no words, only Joel's face showing you nothing, holding it all down hard and being the man who doesn’t let his own grief become anyone else's burden.

And then he says it, quietly, just for you, under the doctor's murmur and Matt's ragged breathing. He says it gently, kindly, like a man laying something down that he doesn’t have the strength to keep holding. It’s the last thing in the world you want to hear and yet the truest thing he can say.

"Your place is here, with him."

He doesn’t wait for you to answer, because there is no answer and he knows it. He gives you one more look, and in it you see, just for the length of a heartbeat before he smooths it away, everything he isn’t saying. You see all of it cross his face, get folded down and put away, never once believing he would get to keep it.

Then he nods to you, one last time, steps back through the doorway and disappears.

You turn back to Matt’s fevered face, squeeze his hand, and tell him you’re there, because you are. Because that’s the truth too. Because both things are true and will go on being true. Dr Vee bends to her work, Matt cries out, gripping your hand hard enough to hurt, and you hold on.

Meanwhile, out in the yard somewhere in the gathering dark, a man who’s brought your whole family home to you is standing under the first cold stars, his arm across your son’s shoulders murmuring words of comfort, breathing in, breathing out, and beginning, very quietly, to let you go.

❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

You don’t like Reed Richards.

You tell yourself this the moment you meet him. He barely acknowledges your existence. He doesn’t shake your hand. Doesn’t even make eye contact.

You say something polite—something like, "Pleasure to meet you, Dr. Richards."

He says, without glancing up from the display in front of him, "The data’s unstable. Did you notice the gravitic skew in quadrant six?"

Oh.

Okay. That kind of guy.

Later, you categorize him like you’re filing a report: Brilliant. Socially stunted. One of those too-smart-to-be-nice types who treats human interaction like a necessary evil.

It makes your job easier. You’re not here to be liked.

You’re here to assist with the joint-mutant initiative. Quietly. Professionally. Keep your head down, do your work, keep the mental channel muted unless someone explicitly asks for help. Your mutation makes people nervous. Not everyone wants to know what they’re broadcasting.

But Reed Richards?

Reed Richards is broadcasting filth.

The first time it happens, you think you’ve misread. You’re across the lab, checking output from a cracked containment dome, and his thoughts slip past your mental wall like a hot breath on the back of your neck:

God, what those lips would look like around my cock.

How tight she’d be, wet and warm and surprised.

Bet she tastes sweet. Fuck, I’d drag it out. Make her beg.

She wouldn’t beg. She’s too proud. I’d make her anyway.

You jolt. Your pen jerks off the page. A shaky line across your log sheet. You don’t dare look up. You’ve never heard him speak like that. You’ve barely heard him speak at all. Reed is curt. Precise. Dismissive, even. But now you hear it in his head, like it’s on a loop, layered with vivid images — your thighs spread across his desk, his fingers prying you open while he murmurs clinical observations that make your cheeks burn.

She’d be wet already. I’d test her reaction time. Graph her pulse. Hypothesize what makes her shake.

You swallow, shift in your seat, force your hands to stay still. You should block him out. You usually do. No one wants to hear what people are really thinking. It’s invasive, and it’s dangerous, and it’s too much to carry.

But this? This is—

“Is something wrong?” His voice cuts across the room. Crisp. Flat. Like he doesn’t have his hand buried in your imaginary cunt.

You look up. Just once.

He’s watching you. Eyes sharp behind his glasses. No heat in his expression — none of the filth you just heard. He looks the same way he always does. Unreadable. Detached.

“No,” you say. Too quickly. “Nothing’s wrong.”

Reed nods once and returns to typing, but his thoughts don’t stop.

I wonder if she’d moan when I touch her or bite her lip to stay quiet.

Bet I could break her composure. Bet I could ruin her neat little posture.

You grip the edge of the counter until your knuckles ache.

You’ve made a huge mistake.

Because now that you’ve tuned in, you don’t think you can stop.

-

The worst part isn’t how filthy it is.

It’s the contrast.

Reed Richards — Dr. Richards, to everyone — never even swears in conversation. He refers to the human body like it’s a schematic. He’ll say “pleasure response” instead of orgasm, and you’ve heard him refer to Sue’s divorce attorney as “a challenging presence,” which you think is his version of calling someone a dick.

So the first time you hear him think the word cunt, your brain short-circuits.

Bet it’s tight. Warm. Slick around my fingers. Her cunt would grip me like it knows me.

You grip the edge of the lab table.

Reed hasn’t moved. He’s still typing, back straight, posture annoyingly perfect. A model scientist. The embodiment of control.

But in his head—

I’d stretch her out with my tongue first. Just to taste. Just to make her shiver.

Then I’d fuck her open with two fingers. Maybe three. Just to see how much she could take.

You feel your face flush hot.

His voice in your head is the same one he uses when he’s narrating quantum anomalies. Methodical. Fascinated. Detached.

Like your body is a phenomenon he wants to understand. Just for the data.

She’s got sensitive tits, I think. Would need a gentle mouth. Then a rough one.

I’d chart how many licks until she breaks.

You turn away before he can see the expression on your face. Not that he’d be looking.

Reed doesn’t look at you.

Not unless you speak first. Even then, his gaze usually lands near your shoulder or just past your head — like you’re a part of the room’s architecture. Necessary. Functional. Forgettable.

Which is why you can’t fathom the sudden, overwhelming specificity of his thoughts.

Would she come if I sucked on her nipples and slid my thumb over her clit?

Or would she need to be fucked?

Deep. Slow. Me inside her while she tries not to cry out.

You have to leave.

You mumble something — “back in ten” or “need a break” — and Reed doesn’t respond. He doesn’t glance your way. Just lifts a hand absently in acknowledgment, still facing the board, still immersed in whatever algorithm or image his mind is chewing on.

Except now you know that algorithm is you.

Your wet heat. Your thighs. Your pulse as he imagines pressing his mouth to it and whispering, “Come for me. Let me see.”

You flee to the hallway, breath stuttering in your throat, shame and heat and disbelief running a relay race in your chest.

You’ve heard dirty thoughts before. You’ve had them.

But never from someone so composed. So quiet. So far removed from the possibility of ever touching you.

And that’s what makes it dangerous.

He has no idea you can hear him.

And worse — he’s not trying to stop.

-

The rest of the day, you try to block him out.

You build mental walls. Steel-plated. Brick-layered. Reinforced with every ounce of discipline you’ve learned since puberty, when people’s thoughts started bleeding into your skull like background noise you couldn’t shut off.

But Reed’s thoughts don’t bleed. They pierce.

They stab through.

You’re elbow-deep in diagnostics when it happens again — no warning, no break in his typing cadence, no shift in posture.

Just a whisper inside your head like a hand between your thighs.

She’d come so pretty if I rubbed her clit just right. Not hard. Just enough to make her beg.

Your knees go weak.

You drop the calibration tool.

It clangs against the lab floor and rolls under a counter.

Reed doesn’t turn around. He never does.

But in your head:

Imagine her on my desk, shaking. Panting. Just a little ruined.

Would her thighs tremble when I pull out, or when I sink in?

Fuck. I’d edge her until she sobs.

You squeeze your eyes shut. Grip the counter. Count backward.

Ten. Nine. Eight.

It’s not enough.

I wouldn’t even fuck her the first time. I’d make her ride my face. Learn how she moves. What makes her lose rhythm.

You suck in a breath and drop to your knees, fumbling under the bench for the runaway tool. Your fingers shake as you grab it.

You’re burning from the inside out.

He’s just standing there — chalk in one hand, the other curled around the lip of the console, muttering numbers under his breath.

As if he doesn’t know what he’s doing to you, like he isn’t narrating how he’d make you come.

You crawl out from under the counter, wiping your palms on your lab coat. Try to focus. Try to breathe.

But the thoughts keep going.

She probably moans softly. Gasps, maybe. One hand on my wrist, the other gripping the sheets.

Would she let me come on her face? Or just in her mouth?

Your hand slips on the console. The system glitches — an alert flashes red on the screen.

“Everything okay?” Reed says, without turning.

His tone is bland. Neutral. The same one he uses when he’s asking about error margins or component failures.

You force your voice to steady. “Fine. Sorry. Just bumped the interface.”

“Run the sequence again,” he says.

You do.

But your fingers tremble the whole time. And every time you glance up, you see the line of his spine, the tension in his forearms, the methodical tap of chalk against board — like he’s not thinking about bending you over the lab bench and pressing his mouth between your thighs.

But he is.

And now you know.

-

It’s not supposed to be a social thing.

You’re huddled in the lab with Reed, Johnny, and a visiting biophysicist from MIT who talks with his hands and keeps spilling his coffee. It’s late afternoon. The conversation’s circling around particle harmonics and neural feedback delay — nothing you haven’t heard before.

Reed, as usual, is silent. Focused. His back to the room, one hand scrolling equations, the other holding a piece of chalk he hasn’t used in fifteen minutes.

You think maybe you’ll survive the day without hearing anything from him. You’ve built the walls again. Brick by brick. You’re not letting him in.

And then Johnny goes, “I still don’t get why you didn’t just read her.”

You blink. “What?”

Johnny laughs. “Come on, don’t play dumb. You could’ve. You always say that trick comes in handy when people lie.”

Your blood goes cold. You look up slowly. “Johnny…”

“Oh shit. Was that not public knowledge?” He raises both palms in mock defense. “Sorry. I mean, I thought everyone knew.”

They don’t. Not everyone. But Sue, Ben, Johnny — they do. Reed, you’d assumed… maybe. But not definitely.

Until now.

Because Reed goes still.

Not visibly. Not to the average eye. But you see it.

His hand halts mid-scroll. The chalk pauses just before touching the board.

He doesn’t turn around. Of course not. He never does.

But the entire current in the room changes.

The MIT guy, oblivious, whistles low. “Telepathy? That’s incredible.”

“Yeah,” Johnny says, grinning. “She’s like a human lie detector. Except it’s not like she goes digging, you know? She just picks stuff up.”

The scientist nods. “Is it active or passive?”

“Both,” you say, voice light, controlled. “Depends on the day. And the person.”

“Must be fun.”

You shrug. “Sometimes.”

Johnny leans on the console. “Sometimes not, huh?”

Your eyes flick briefly to Reed’s back. His hand is still frozen in midair, like he’s been caught in amber.

You look away.

“Yeah,” you murmur. “Sometimes… not so much.”

The conversation moves on.

Someone cracks a joke about lab gossip being unsafe around you. The MIT guy asks a question about psi-shielding. Johnny starts talking about that one time you ruined a poker night by knowing someone’s cards.

But Reed doesn’t speak, doesn’t move.

For the first time in days, his thoughts are silent.

You feel the absence like a blow.

No whispers. No fantasies. No wondering what your cunt tastes like or how you sound when you come. Just—

Nothing.

A void. You should be relieved.  Instead, you feel like you’ve been locked out of something you didn’t know you needed.

Behind Reed’s still frame, you can sense it — the slow, dangerous coiling of tension.

Not shame, not guilt. Only awareness.

He knows, and now he’s thinking about what you’ve heard.

-

You don’t sleep that night.

You lie in bed with your mind reeling, blankets too heavy, your chest too tight. The silence in Reed’s head echoes louder than any of the filth that came before. You didn’t realize how much you’d come to expect his thoughts. Not want them — not exactly — but… count on them. Like a metronome. Like proof he was human under all that restraint.

Now?

Nothing.

No late-night fantasies. No secret hypotheses about your body. Just a wall — colder and more deliberate than anything you’ve ever put up yourself.

He knows.

And now you’re waiting for the fallout.

You think about packing.

You think about going to Sue and getting ahead of it — telling her you’re sorry, you didn’t mean to listen, you never asked for the thoughts to come in like that, you tried so fucking hard to block them out.

You think about how Sue would tilt her head, lips pressed together in that gentle, unreadable way of hers, and say, “I’ll talk to Reed.”

That thought alone makes you want to crawl out of your skin.

You don’t go to the lab the next morning.

You call in sick — stomach flu, maybe food poisoning.

You spend the day in your apartment, curled on your couch with a half-drunk mug of tea and the soft buzz of muted news. You try to distract yourself with papers, textbooks, even an old simulation of Mars terrain scans.

None of it sticks.

Because the only thought that plays on repeat is this:

You’ve ruined it.

You had one shot. One internship. One thread of hope that could’ve led to something real — something bigger than the lab, bigger than Earth.

You’ve wanted space since you were old enough to name constellations. You were supposed to be part of the next crew rotation. If you did well, if you impressed the right people, if Reed thought you were worth keeping—

But now all he sees is a liability. An intruder. A mind he can’t trust.

Maybe he’s already filed a report. Maybe by Monday you’ll be reassigned to inventory. Or security compliance. Some corner of the building where they can keep you out of people’s heads and off the launch manifest.

You curl tighter. You don’t cry but your throat aches like you might.

You’d rather he shouted. Rather he confronted you. Rather he called you invasive or perverse or unprofessional.

Instead, he just disappeared.

That silence — the absence of his voice in your head — feels like the worst kind of punishment.

-

You come in early the next day.

Earlier than usual. Earlier than anyone else should be there.

Except he’s already in the lab.

You hear the soft click of the console keys before you see him. The low whir of cooling fans. The faint scratch of chalk across board.

When you step inside, Reed doesn’t turn.

He’s where he always is — back straight, eyes forward, sleeves rolled, a shadow of stubble softening the sharp lines of his jaw. His body is still, but his mind—

His mind is deafening.

F=ma. ΔS = Qrev/T. Entropy is always increasing. Entropy is always increasing. Entropy is always increasing—

You press your hand to the doorframe.

It’s not that he’s shut you out.

It’s that he’s replaced the thoughts. Stuffed the filth back into its cage and barricaded the door with math. With precision. With the cold comfort of numbers.

But it’s loud. So loud.

Equations loop over and over, like static, like punishment, like he’s trying to drown himself in calculus and thermodynamics until there’s no room left for want.

You don’t say anything.

You just take your seat. Log into the console. Pretend the silence is normal. That the walls haven’t shifted. That this isn’t your fault.

But then, after twenty-eight minutes of stillness—

He turns.

Slowly.

His eyes meet yours for the first time in days.

And then, like the flip of a switch, the equations stop.

The noise cuts.

And what follows is even worse.

“I owe you an apology.”

The words land like glass.

You look up — stunned, unsure you heard him right.

Reed continues, voice stiff, almost formal. Like he’s reciting something practiced.

“I was unaware that my thoughts were… accessible. To you.”

He swallows. His gaze doesn’t waver. “If I caused any discomfort, or crossed any boundary—”

“You didn’t,” you say, too fast.

But he doesn’t stop.

“I understand if you wish to leave the internship. I will personally ensure a neutral letter of recommendation and full academic credit, if you—”

“No.” You shake your head, your throat tight. “I don’t want to leave.”

Silence.

Your breath trembles in your chest.

“I’m not upset,” you say, softer. “I never was.”

Reed stares at you.

You’ve never seen him look so unsure.

“I should not have allowed those thoughts to form,” he says, quieter now. “I certainly shouldn’t have repeated them.”

You offer a breath of laughter — too hollow to be real. “You didn’t say them.”

He blinks. “I thought them.”

You nod. “You did.”

A pause.

Then you add, “But I heard more than what you thought.”

His brows draw together. “Meaning?”

“I heard how hard you tried not to.”

“I’m truly so, so sorry,” he says.

The words sound foreign in his mouth — like he doesn’t quite know how to say them aloud. His voice drops as he says it, too, like he wants to bury the sentence somewhere low between you.

“It was unprofessional.”

You blink. It hits different when it’s said that plainly — not just the apology, but the weight of the word.

Unprofessional.

He means it. You can hear it in his thoughts now, the edge softening — shame curling in the quiet corners. He’s not just sorry you heard him. He’s sorry he thought it at all. Sorry he let himself want. Sorry his discipline failed.

“Reed,” you say, gently. “It’s alright.”

He doesn’t move, he doesn’t breathe, for a second.

It’s not the kind of apology that’s waiting for forgiveness. It’s the kind that assumes none is possible.

“I should have—” he begins, but the sentence crumbles.

You step closer before you can think better of it. Not too close. Just enough to catch the tiniest flicker in his eyes — a shift, like he’s bracing for something more than your words.

“I’ve heard worse,” you say, lips twitching in the ghost of a smile. “You just think very… graphically.”

His mouth parts — just slightly.  For the first time, you see something almost human flicker behind his usual impassivity.

Embarrassment.

He opens his mouth to speak again, but nothing comes.

You reach for the console behind you, just to give your hands something to do.

“If you’re wondering whether I was offended,” you say, “I wasn’t.”

His gaze lifts to yours slowly. “You weren’t.”

You shake your head. “I didn’t say it wasn’t… surprising.”

Something changes in the set of his shoulders. The faintest drop. Like a gear slipping in a machine.

You can hear it again, too — faint, fainter than before, but real: She’s not angry. She’s not leaving.

You lean back against the edge of the table, arms crossed loosely. “I’ve had these powers my whole life, you know. You hear people think things they’d never say. Half of them wouldn’t even admit it to themselves.”

Reed doesn’t respond. But you feel the shift. The stillness that isn't emptiness anymore — it’s presence. It’s him, fully here, not hiding behind data or circuits or chalk.

“It can be fun sometimes,” you admit. “Other times…” You trail off. “Not so much.”

His fingers flex slightly where they rest at his sides.

You almost expect him to end it there. To nod, turn away, retreat to the board, drown himself in equations again.

But instead, he says, quietly:

“I didn’t mean for you to feel like an object.”

Your chest tightens.

You meet his gaze.

“I didn’t.”

You watch him for a moment, unsure what to say next.

The lab is quiet. Still. The hum of the equipment blends into the background like white noise. Reed hasn’t moved since his last apology — hands loose at his sides, eyes lowered just enough that you can’t quite tell if he’s looking at you or through you.

You shift slightly on the edge of the table.

“Are you okay?” you ask, softly.

It’s the gentlest question in the world. You don’t expect much. A nod, maybe. Or the barest deflection.

Instead, he huffs a laugh.

Short. Quiet. Almost self-deprecating.

And so out of place coming from him that it draws your eyes back to his face immediately.

He still doesn’t smile. Of course he doesn’t. But there’s a flicker at the corner of his mouth, like he might have once, in another life, remembered how.

Your chest eases — just barely — and you smile at him. Tentative. Careful. The kind of smile you give a wounded animal when you’re holding out a hand.

Reed blinks, and this time his gaze meets yours without hesitation.

He doesn’t say yes, or no, or I will be.

But he doesn’t look away.

He doesn’t turn back to the board.

You take that as enough.

The air between you settles, not warm exactly, but less charged. Less sharp.

You glance down at your tablet, then back up. “Do you want to… work on the gamma dispersion scan?”

A pause. Then he nods.

It’s quiet again as you both fall into rhythm — screens blinking softly, files opening, measurements calibrating. For ten minutes, it almost feels normal. Like none of this happened. Like your body hasn’t been the subject of his private curiosity. Like you haven’t heard, in his own voice, the words tits and cunt wrapped in awe like he’s discovering a new element.

But every so often, you catch the stillness in him.

The way he doesn’t quite type as fluidly as before. The way his thoughts — no longer loud, no longer obscene — hover just out of reach. Reined in. Scrubbed clean.

Control, you hear him think, a little later. Keep control.

You bite the inside of your cheek.

Because now that you’ve forgiven him — now that you’ve stayed — he’s afraid he’ll slip again.

He’s afraid of wanting.

Of letting you hear it.

And maybe, more than anything, he’s afraid you won’t look at him the same if you do.

You wait until the next lull. After the data finishes compiling. After you both fall into quiet, careful work, pretending the air isn’t thick with everything unsaid.

Then, without looking up, you ask:

“What are you really thinking?”

The words slip out like a whisper. Not a demand. A coaxing.

You hear him stop breathing.

His fingers freeze on the console.

You look up.

He’s staring down at his hands like they belong to someone else. His brows twitch — the smallest knot of conflict pulling across his forehead.

You don’t press. You wait.

He swallows hard.

“I—” His voice is rougher than you’ve ever heard it. “I don’t think I should say.”

You nod slowly. “I know.”

There’s a pause. The kind that feels like a coin balanced on its edge — waiting to tip.

Then, finally, Reed lifts his gaze to meet yours.

It’s not a sharp glance. Not a command or a calculation. It’s vulnerable. Raw.

“Are you sure?”

You nod before your brain can stop you. “I’m sure.”

Your heart hammers against your ribs.

The silence that follows isn’t heavy. It’s charged.

And then—soft, almost reverent, like he’s saying it for himself more than for you—his thought brushes your mind.

She’s the most astonishing thing I’ve ever seen.

You don’t move.

She’s smart. Composed. And when she smiles at me like that, I want to get on my knees and put my mouth on her cunt until she forgets every name but mine.

Your breath catches.

Reed’s eyes are still on yours. Steady. Honest.

I want to see her fall apart. Hear her. Feel her thighs around my face. I want her to let go with me. Just once. Just to know what it’s like to make someone like her come.

You’re frozen.

Flushed.

His thoughts echo again, softer now, barely there:

I would be gentle. At first. I’d learn her rhythms. I’d listen.

You part your lips, but no sound comes out.

Reed doesn’t look away.

You see the tension in his jaw. The restraint. The ache he’s too careful to name aloud.

But this time, he’s not hiding.

He’s giving you the truth.

And your whole body sings with it.

The silence stretches, but it doesn’t break.

Reed watches you like he’s waiting for you to flinch. For you to run. For you to laugh it off or look away or say no.

You don’t.

Your breath is shallow. Your pulse pounds behind your ribs like a warning, like a promise. But you don’t move.

You stay.

Reed’s fingers flex slightly at his sides. A twitch. A tremor. And then—carefully, like he’s unsure the ground will hold—he takes one slow step forward.

Your heart leaps.

He pauses.

Then another step.

Still watching you.

You straighten, knees brushing the edge of the console. Your hands—useless at your sides—curl instinctively into the hem of your coat. You feel like a held breath. Like one word might shatter you.

And then he’s close enough that you can see it in his face—the nerves he’s trying to hide. The deep ache folded into his silence. The apology still lingering beneath his restraint.

But also the want.

So much want.

You reach out.

Just a little.

And that’s all it takes.

His hand lifts—slow, hesitant—and finds yours midair. The contact is gentle. Barely there. Your fingers brush his palm and his thumb curves awkwardly over your knuckles, like he doesn’t know if he’s allowed.

But you link your fingers with his.

You squeeze.

His breath shudders.

You’re close now. Not quite touching chest to chest. Not yet. But his body radiates heat like a solar flare, and your joined hands hang between you like a thread you’re both afraid to tug.

He doesn’t say anything.

He doesn’t have to.

His thoughts are quiet, but open. Not graphic. Not filthy this time.

She’s here. She’s still here.

You lift your other hand—slowly, carefully—and touch the crook of his elbow. His arm tenses for half a second, then relaxes under your touch.

His hand in yours tightens. Just a little.

You smile at him. Tentative. Like before.

And this time, Reed exhales like it breaks something loose inside him.

You lean in slowly.

No rush. No sharp breath or whispered question. Just instinct. Trust. The press of his fingers wrapped in yours.

Your lips find his.

A soft, fleeting brush.

So light you could pretend it didn’t happen.

But it does.

He stills.

For a heartbeat, maybe two.

Then something inside him snaps.

Reed surges forward—still silent, but no longer hesitant. His free hand lifts to cup your jaw, fingers spanning your cheek with a trembling kind of reverence. His mouth crashes into yours again, firmer this time, open, hungry.

You gasp, and he takes it.

Takes you.

His lips drag over yours like he’s starved. His body leans into yours, chasing heat, chasing breath, chasing something he’s kept buried under equations and silence for too damn long.

You kiss him back, matching his pace, your fingers gripping the front of his shirt just to stay grounded.

It’s not perfect. It’s messy.

Teeth clash once. Your nose bumps his. He exhales sharply against your mouth, and you laugh, surprised and dizzy.

Reed groans low in his throat like it drives him wild.

His grip shifts—hand sliding to the back of your neck, the other pressing firm at your waist, tugging you closer. There’s no more distance now. You’re chest to chest, breath to breath, his mouth working yours like it’s a formula he’s been dying to solve.

You reach blindly for something—anything—to anchor yourself.

Your fingers find the edge of his belt.

Not teasing. Not intentional.

Just need.

A way to keep your feet on the ground while the rest of you unravels.

You clutch the leather and kiss him deeper.

And Reed—God, Reed—moans softly into your mouth like he’s the one overwhelmed.

His thoughts flood through you again, all barriers down now.

So soft. So warm. She kissed me first.

I want to lift her onto the desk. Get my hands under that coat.

I want to taste her. Right now. Right fucking now.

Your knees buckle slightly, and he catches you with both arms, tugging you flush against him, the hard press of his belt against your stomach making your skin spark.

You don’t speak.

Neither does he.

But you kiss like you’re telling secrets. Like you’re breaking rules. Like every second is borrowed time. 

Reed drops to his knees.

It happens fast. One second his mouth is pressed to yours, the next he’s sinking down like gravity’s claimed him — like he’s meant to be there. At your feet. Between your legs. Worshipful and wild.

His hands slide up your thighs, warm and unhurried. He lifts your skirt like he’s unfolding a secret he’s only ever dreamed of touching. You brace one hand against the console behind you, the other tangled in his hair, fingers trembling.

He doesn’t speak.

He stares.

Like your thighs are a formula. Like the space between them holds the answer to every question he’s never let himself ask.

Then his hands slide higher, thumbs brushing the crease of your hips, and he leans in.

He kisses the inside of your knee. Then higher.

Your breath catches as his mouth moves up your thigh—soft, open-mouthed kisses dragging heat across your skin. He hums low in his throat, like he’s cataloging every inch, and you feel it all the way to your core.

“Fuck,” you whisper, your head tipping back.

Reed doesn’t stop.

He kisses just beside the place you want him most. Once. Twice. Then his hands shift—firm on your hips—and he nuzzles against your panties, dragging his nose along the damp fabric like he needs to breathe you.

And then—his thoughts, finally, finally back:

She’s soaked. God, she’s so wet. All for me.

Your legs shake.

He pulls your panties aside and exhales softly at the sight.

Perfect.

And then his mouth is on you.

You cry out—sharp and helpless—the sound echoing off the walls of the lab. He licks a slow stripe through your folds, groaning like he’s tasted something he’ll never recover from.

You grip his hair harder.

Reed doesn’t stop. Doesn’t hesitate. He licks you like he needs it, tongue dragging up to circle your clit, then back down to press flat against your entrance. His thoughts are a blur—lust, wonder, obsession—louder now, less composed.

You whimper.

She’s so sweet. Want to keep her like this. Want her coming on my tongue.

He moans against you, the vibration shooting through your whole body. His mouth moves faster, more deliberate, like he’s testing responses, building a pattern. Every flick of his tongue is data. Every gasp from you is a new variable to study.

Your knees threaten to give, and he only grips your thighs tighter, pulling you closer, mouth never leaving you.

“Reed—fuck, I—”

You shatter.

Come for me, he thinks, right as his lips wrap around your clit and suck.

Your cry rips through the air, your body spasming against his mouth. He doesn’t let up. He holds you through it—tongue coaxing, soothing, tasting every twitch and shake as you come undone.

And when it’s over, when your chest is heaving and your thighs are trembling, he looks up at you.

Mouth wet. Eyes dark.

Ravenous.

He stands, slow and steady, hands dragging up your thighs as he rises. When he’s eye level again, you see it—his mouth slick with you, his chest rising hard like he’s been holding his breath the whole time.

He doesn’t say anything at first.

Just pulls you in and wraps both arms around your waist, pressing his face into your neck. He inhales deeply.

And fucking hell, he smells like you.

“Are you alright?” he murmurs, voice low and gritty in your ear.

You let out a breathless laugh, your chest still fluttering. “You’re seriously asking me that?”

He lets out a sound — not quite a laugh, not quite a groan — and you feel it more than hear it, vibrating against your throat. His hips are right against you now, belt biting into your lower stomach. He’s hard. So fucking hard.

You push against him, mouth near his jaw. “Reed.”

He pulls back just enough to look at you. And when he does, your hands come up to frame his face.

Not tender. Hungry.

You drag your thumb across his bottom lip. His eyes flick down to your mouth like he’s about to lose it.

“What are you thinking?” you ask.

A pause.

Then his gaze darkens, and the answer bleeds out of him—wordless but clear.

I want to fuck her right here. I want to bend her over this table and hear what she sounds like when she’s cock-drunk.

Your knees go weak.

And he sees it.

You don’t say a word.

You just drop your hand from his face, trail it down between your bodies, and reach for his belt.

Reed doesn’t stop you.

Doesn’t even blink.

He watches, jaw tight, as you tug the leather loose, then work open the button and drag the zipper down. The metal teeth part with a low rasp, and he exhales sharply when your hand slips inside.

You wrap your fingers around him.

Hot. Heavy. Hard as hell.

“Jesus,” you murmur under your breath, stroking him once, slow and deliberate.

Reed’s head tips back.

His hips jerk forward slightly, chasing the friction, but he still doesn’t touch you. Just lets you have him, your hand moving over his cock like you’ve been thinking about it for weeks.

(You have.)

His thoughts are a mess—fractals of want, raw and unfiltered.

You squeeze a little tighter.

She’s touching me. She’s—fuck—she’s got her hand on my cock. I’m not going to last.

His breath catches.

“You’ve been thinking about this?” you ask, voice low, thumb swiping the head.

“Every goddamn day,” he grits out.

You jerk him faster.

He growls.

And then—too fast to brace for—he grabs your hips and spins you around.

Your palms slam against the console. You gasp, but you don’t stop him—not when you feel him crowding up behind you, not when his hands drag your skirt back up to your waist, not when he rips your panties down your thighs in one fluid motion.

One hand slides up your spine, pushing between your shoulder blades until your chest is flush to the table.

The other guides his cock to your entrance.

“Say you want this,” he breathes out, the head of him nudging against your slick folds.

You push back into him.

“Reed,” you pant, “just fuck me already.”

He groans like it’s ripped out of his throat and then he slams into you hard.

Your gasp turns into a choked moan as your body jolts forward from the force of it. One of his hands clamps tight around your hip, the other braced beside your head on the console. His cock drives into you again, again, again—deep, punishing thrusts that make your breath stutter with each slap of skin on skin.

The sounds echo off the lab walls—your gasps, his ragged breath, the obscene wet suck of your cunt taking him over and over.

“Fuck,” Reed growls, hips snapping, “you feel even better than I thought.”

Your eyes flutter shut.

His mouth is right at your ear now, breath hot and filthy.

“I’ve been thinking about this since the day you walked in,” he pants. “That face. Those sweet thighs. Wanted to bend you over this table and fuck you stupid.”

You cry out—high, breathless—when he grinds into you just right, cock dragging over every swollen nerve inside you.

“I knew you’d be wet for me,” he growls. “But this?”

His fingers slip down, find your clit, and rub fast, hard, cruel.

“You’re soaked. So fucking messy.”

You brace yourself on trembling arms, the pressure building fast—too fast. He’s everywhere, filling you, touching you, whispering things he should never say out loud.

“You gonna come for me, pretty girl?” he grits out, voice tight and close.

You whimper, legs shaking. “I—fuck, I think I—”

“You’re close,” he hisses. “I can feel it.”

His pace goes brutal. He fucks into you like he wants to break you, the slap of his hips against your ass echoing over every surface, every panel and beaker forgotten. Your cunt clamps down, fluttering, and your voice breaks into a cry as your climax rips through you.

You don’t just come. You gush.

A warm burst sprays out of you, splashing down your thighs, hitting the tile with a wet splatter. You cry out, humiliated and wrecked and still twitching, your walls milking his cock in desperate aftershocks.

Reed groans like he’s dying.

“God damn,” he breathes.

You can’t speak. Your cheek is pressed to the console, mouth open, panting, whole body slick and trembling.

He doesn’t stop. He fucks you through it, harder now, more ragged. You feel the way your slick coats his cock, dripping down onto the lab floor with every brutal thrust.

You feel ruined. Your legs give out.

There’s no warning. No graceful slide. Just the quivering collapse of overstimulated muscles, your knees hitting the tile with a soft thud, skirt bunched around your waist, panties still tangled around your thighs.

You don’t care, you don't think you could.

Not with your cunt still twitching from the last orgasm, your thighs sticky, the lab floor glistening with the evidence of just how hard he made you come.

Reed groans above you and you glance up.

He’s flushed and wrecked, shirt untucked, cock still slick with your arousal as he strokes himself, fast and frantic, hand gliding over the mess you left behind.

“Fuck,” he breathes. “You look—Jesus.”

You open your mouth, just slightly.

Not coy nor innocent, but ready.

You brace yourself on one arm and tilt your chin up, eyes locked on him. The unspoken invitation hits him like a punch.

His grip falters. He bites down a moan. You see his whole body jerk with restraint.

“Please,” you whisper, voice hoarse and aching. “I want it.”

That does it.

He grunts, cock twitching in his hand. “Fuck—fuck—”

He steps forward, the tip of him flushed and slick and angry-looking, and you hold steady even as your thighs tremble. His breath goes wild, chest heaving as he pumps himself harder, faster, your name breaking on his tongue like a prayer.

“Gonna come,” he pants. “Fuck, I’m gonna—”

Thick, hot ropes paint your cheek, your lips, your chin. One lands across your chest, the rest splashing across your flushed skin. You close your eyes as the first drops hit, lips parted as you gasp at the heat of it.

He moans—deep, guttural, undone.

You feel it drip down your neck, cooling already.

When you blink up at him again, his hand is still wrapped around his cock, his chest still rising like he’s run a mile. His eyes meet yours—dark, dazed, hungry—and the raw possessiveness isn’t there.

There's only you. 

His gaze drops to the mess he’s made of your face, and then to your mouth.

You swipe your thumb across your bottom lip, tasting him.

His breath stutters again.

“Holy shit,” he whispers.

You smile, slow and blissful. 

The chime of the doorbell makes your heart jump in your chest, the staccato rhythm picking up as you approach the front door.

After Joel had fucked you next to your pool, he gave you a kiss, left you there to sunbathe, and returned to the meticulous task of assembling your kitchen cabinets. You spent the entire time exchanging heated glances with him where you lay, still naked and reeling from being fucked so thoroughly.

This time, he made no attempt to hide his perusal of your body and it heated your skin more completely than the sun ever could.

By the time the sun began to dip behind the towering trees lining your property, he’d finished the cabinets and covered them with a canvas tarp to protect them overnight. You watched as he wiped his forehead with the end of this t-shirt, giving you a peak of his tummy. You licked your lips — something he quickly noticed even from across the yard.

Sauntering back over to you, he sat on the edge of the lounger and ran a hand from your hip, up your tummy and between your breasts before landing at your neck. His thumb circled your pulse point as he leaned over to kiss you.

“M’ gonna go home now, darlin’. Shower. Put something decent on. And then I’m comin’ right back. That sound good?” His voice was like gravel, deep and rough and it made your entire body tingle. It did sound good, but you wanted him to fuck you again.

All you could do was nod as he kissed you again and then helped you up. You wrapped yourself in your towel and took his hand as he guided you through the house. Your stomach fluttered as he brought those soft lips down to you again and kissed you goodbye.

It took you a long time to process everything that happened, and when you finally did, you couldn’t stop smiling. The thrill of dinner with Joel carried you on a cloud of anticipation as you showered, primped, prepped, and dressed in a baby blue sundress that reached the tops of your thighs, thin straps, and a sweetheart neckline. 

You even had time to paint your nails — a matching blue with small white polka dots. 

Now, you bite down on your lower lip to stifle your smile as you open the door to find Joel on your front porch, a bouquet of pink, orange, and white wild flowers clasped in his large hand.

The corner of his lips tick up as you take each other in, his eyes roaming you hungrily, nostrils flaring at the sight of you. He doesn’t say anything yet, and you’re equally as speechless.

He’s swapped his dirty boots for a pair of worn but carefully maintained ones, his jeans black and faded instead of the ones he normally wears that are always covered in dust, paint, and plaster. His green button down brings out the hints of gold shimmering in his eyes, the top few buttons open and providing you a glimpse of his hard chest. 

You don’t even want to go to dinner at this point, and it takes every ounce of self restraint you have to keep yourself from pouncing on him.

“You look gorgeous, darlin’” he rasps, voice quiet and low. It sends ripples of heat straight to your core. He steps forward to hand you the flowers, but something snaps between you and he’s wrapping you in a heated kiss before you even realize that you’re the one who leapt first.

He grunts as he presses you closer, one hand still holding the flowers while the other knots in your dress at your waist. He’s being respectful, not ripping your clothes to shreds or even touching your ass yet. But his tongue is right there, pushing past your lips and pulling a moan right from you.

Joel has the awareness to pull away before you do, breathing heavy, neck flushed with want.

“Gotta treat you to a nice meal before I fuck you again,” he reasons, setting the flowers onto the table by the door.

It’s sweet how he thinks you need that. Sweet that he knows you yearn for a little bit of romance. And even if there wasn’t the promise of him taking you home and fucking you senseless, you think you’d still love the idea of dinner with him. 

Getting to know him. Opening him up and taking a peek at his thoughts. His wants. His needs. Giving him the same. You haven’t dated in years, but the thrill of it is still the same with one exception. You know he’s good and he’ll treat you right. You’re sure of it.

He nods behind him at the open door, the beat to shit red pick up parked on the street, engine sizzling, “After you.”

You can’t resist. You stretch up to kiss his chin, nipping with your teeth and snickering when he growls low in his chest. You snatch your clutch from the hook by the door and saunter out to the truck. He opens the door for you and helps you up to settle on the comfortable seat.

It’s surprisingly clean for a guy who works construction and likely tracks all kinds of debris into his vehicle daily. 

“Cleaned it up real nice, just for you,” he says after climbing in and starting it.

Your skin heats, his thoughtfulness doing unspeakable things to you. 

The drive is quiet, but comfortable. If there’s one person who knows how to exist in easy silence, it’s Joel. You like that about him. He doesn’t feel the need to fill the space with inane chatter. Like Jeremy. Always eager to hear the sound of his own voice.

When Joel parks outside a small Italian bistro, your grin widens. It’s quaint and out of the way, tucked behind a copse of trees that doesn’t make it immediately visible from the busy street if you aren't looking for it. 

He helps you out of the truck and rests a hand at your lower back as he guides you inside. You can’t remember the last time you were treated with such care.

He tells the hostess his name and uses her momentary distraction to drop a kiss to your bare shoulder like it’s a habit he’s been waiting to fulfill. Your cheeks feel hot as you look up at him, his eyes twinkling in the dim candlelight of the restaurant. 

The hostess confirms the reservation and takes you to your table. It’s an intimate place, small tables dispersed throughout the room, white table cloths, a small vase containing a single white rose on each one, warm, flickering candles decorating the room.

There are a handful of other couples already seated, relaxed, enjoying their meals. But you pay them no attention as he helps you take your seat and finally settles in across from you. 

You can’t help but compare each and every one of his behaviors to Jeremy. You don’t want to, but you do. Jeremy would never pull your chair out. He’d never help you into the car. He’d never plan a romantic evening out. He’d never touch you the way Joel touches you.

He offers a tentative smile, tilting his head, “What?”

“Nothing,” you say, trying to fight the urge to beam at him. He may or may not be aware of just how thoroughly he’s romancing you.

He looks down at the menu, “How do you feel about wine?”

“Love it.”

“White?”

“Perfect.”

When your server flits by the table, he orders a bottle of Chardonnay that she quickly returns with to fill your glasses. The moment she steps away, you catch the amused glimmer in his eyes.

“So, you’re married. And I fucked you in your backyard.”

Very direct. Just as he was after he’d done it.

You almost choke on the wine, but are able to carefully arrange your features into a neutral, unbothered expression, “Yes.”

“He’s a piece of shit.”

It’s not a question or an assumption. He knows, heard Jeremy yelling at you the last time he was home, heard the derision in his voice, the malice. You nod.

“He cheated on you?”

Again, you nod, your eyes flashing with the briefest flicker of pain you’re unable to control. Even if your marriage had been failing long before you discovered Jeremy’s infidelity, it still hurts to know how deeply you’ve been betrayed.

“I’m sorry,” he offers, his voice soft and silken. He reaches across the table to thread your fingers together.

You want to climb into his lap and kiss him. His words are sincere, not placating, but genuinely apologetic about your husband’s indiscretions. About how it must make you feel. 

“Don’t make it right – what we did,” he says quietly, “What we’re doin’.”

You take another measured sip of wine while you formulate your response, nodding slowly, “No. It doesn’t. Does that mean you don’t want to do it again?”

“Didn’t say that. Just said it ain’t right.”

The candle flickers across his expression, briefly illuminating the way his eyes have dilated, his lips tightening, his jaw ticks. You stare across at him, admiring the shape of his tension and the intensity of his gaze.

“Don’t know if I can stop myself now,” he admits.

You suppress a laugh, “Why? You seemed perfectly in control before I got naked and told you to touch me.”

That gets a low growl out of him, half grumble, half chuckle, “Tommy was there. Couldn’t very well go around flirtin’ and touchin’ you with him around. Anyway, he told me to stay away from you.”

You suck in a sharp breath, “Why?”

“You’re a client. Wouldn’t be right.”

“I think I can decide what’s right for me and what’s not,” you answer stubbornly, annoyed at Tommy’s intervention. Would Joel have fucked you sooner had Tommy not meddled? Probably not.

“Mm, I know, darlin’,” he says with an appraising nod. He sips his wine and purses his lips, disgruntled.

“We could’ve ordered something else,” you acknowledge, realizing he probably isn’t a wine drinker.

“‘S no trouble. You like it,” he says simply, forcing another sip.

That makes your chest ache, your need for him growing. Drinking something he doesn’t like just because you like it? Another point for Joel.

“So, Tommy is a meddler.”

Joel huffs, “Yeah. Always has been.”

“He told me to stay away from you too. Said you’re a grumpy old bastard,” you tell him.

His smile drops into a scowl, “I don’t care if he’s a brand new daddy, I’m gonna wring his neck.”

“Stop! Your niece or nephew can’t be fatherless!”

“Nephew. Benji. He’ll be alright. Better off, if I’m honest,” he grumbles. You know he doesn’t believe it, which makes it funnier.

You snicker into your glass, hidling your smirk just as the server approaches to take your orders. Joel looks across to you as you recite your selection. He orders the same and hands the menus to her with a gentle thanks.

“Big fan of ravioli?” You ask, resting your chin on your fist. “Would’ve pegged you for a steak kind of guy.”

He shrugs, “Ain’t no harm in tryin’ somethin’ new.”

“Hm, like fucking a client?”

“That’d be new, yes.”

“Is that so?”

His ears turn red at your inquisition, but he quickly settles his features into a calm, severe look as he leans forward to look at you properly, “Swear on my life. This is the first I’ve ever laid a hand on a client. Promise.”

Pressing your lips together to hide your smile, you nod, satisfied with his answer. You’d be lying if you said you hadn’t thought about it. Were you unique? Does he do this with all his clients? He’s single, after all, according to Tommy. 

“‘M I the first tradesman you’ve fucked?” He asks suddenly, making you blanch and laugh louder than what is appropriate in a tiny little restaurant like this. He grins, clearly very pleased with himself.

“Oh my god, yes. Jesus, Joel, don’t do that,” you gasp through your laughter.

Dinner is easy after that, relaxed and smooth with the difficult topic of your ill conceived exploits out of the way. He pours each of you another glass of wine, devours his ravioli, and smirks across at you as you run your heeled foot up his leg to tease him. 

He plays with your fingers, his smile coy and shy despite having already fucked you within an inch of sanity. You finish the bottle of wine together, the alcohol warming your skin, cheeks hot with its effects, and with the way Joel makes you blush with his heated looks and dark eyes.

The candlesticks in the room shrink into nothing and soon, you and Joel are the only people left in the restaurant. When he realizes this, he signals for the check.

He’s a gentleman when he pays for your meal and helps you out of your chair. He’s a gentleman when he guides you out to the parking lot with a tender, warm hand on your lower back, then opens the truck door for you. But as you’re about to climb inside, he yanks you back, spins you around, and kisses you.

You lean up to meet him, wrapping your arms around his neck as he clutches at your dress, tangling his fingers in it like he wants to lift the skirt and fuck you right here in the parking lot. You really wish he would. Don’t really care who sees. You’ve been aching for him since he left you lying naked and trembling by your pool.

“You’re trouble,” he mutters, your back hitting the side of the truck, “Wearin’ this skimpy little dress. Lookin’ prettier than anythin’ I’ve ever seen.”

His beard scrapes against your cheek as he plunders your lips, tongue seeking yours while his hips pin you in place. You can feel the hard outline of him through his jeans and you shudder at the thought of sucking him off as he drives you home.

Despite his fervor, he doesn’t lift you up and fuck you against his truck in the parking lot of a little Italian bistro regardless of how desperately you want it.

Eventually, he tears himself away from you and offers you a heated look before finally helping you into the truck. His hand remains firmly planted on your thigh the entire drive home, his fingers steadily creeping upward each time your hips shift.

”Patience, darlin’,” he chastises, giving you a warning look as he drives toward your home.

The moment he parks in the driveway, you don’t wait for him to open your door like the gentleman he’s been all night. You hear him chuckle as he follows you up to the front door, wiggling your ass a little just for his benefit. 

As you fumble in your purse for your keys, he stands a respectable distance behind you, hands tucked in his pockets so the urge to paw at you doesn’t hinder your hunt. You find the keys, get the door unlocked, and skip inside like the excited little minx you know you are. He chuckles again.

“Someone’s eager,” he rumbles, shutting the door behind him and finally reaching for you.

Your purse gets tossed aside as your arms come up around his neck, his lips finding yours like a homing missile. He shuffles you in the direction of the stairs until your ankles hit the bottom step. Since he’s been working on your house for the better part of three months, he’s become intimately acquainted with its layout, making it easy for him to navigate while he guides you along and turns your legs to jelly.

In a stunning display of brute strength, he lifts you up, hooking your legs around his waist so he can carry you up the stairs. You break apart with a gasp and clutch his strong shoulders to stabilize yourself.

“What’s wrong?” He asks, hands under your ass, powerful legs climbing higher. 

“Nothing,” you squeak, instantly soaked at the ease with which he carries you. What girl doesn’t want to be whisked away and fucked within an inch of her life by the rugged handyman building her house? You’re a simple girl with simple needs that he’s extremely adept at handling.

His lips curve into a smile that tells you he knows exactly what he’s doing to you.

He doesn’t set you down until he crosses the threshold to your bedroom, his lips on yours again, this time tender and slow like he’s trying to savor you. It weakens your knees and your fingers curl into his shirt to hang on.

“You understand what this means, don’t you?” He asks, big, strong arms curling around your waist while he backs you toward the bed.

You look up at him with wide, curious eyes, his meaning unclear.

“If I fuck you in this bed. In your house…” he lowers his head, lips brushing your ear, breath hot on your cheek, voice dripping with power, “You’re mine.”

Your entire body shudders at the possessiveness soaking his words. You were a goner the moment he laid his hands on you.

You nod, fingers curling in his shirt, “Yours.”

He lunges then, capturing your lips, sinking his tongue between them, devouring you wholly and completely. His big arms wrap around you, pressing you closer, making you whimper into him as he guides you toward the bed. Before you can fall onto its surface, his fingers find the zipper at your back and tugs.

He slips the straps off your shoulders and lets the dress fall to your ankles, leaving you bare apart from the scrap of lace covering your pussy. Joel breaks the kiss and takes a step back to admire you.

“Darlin’, you’re the prettiest thing I’ve ever laid eyes on,” he growls, eyes dark and hungry as they take you in. With one, thick finger, he skims a path from your belly button up to your chin, stopping briefly to play with each of your nipples before continuing on. He lifts your chin gently, assessing the way your breathing changes, lips swollen from his kisses, thighs squeezing together, “Your husband fuck you in this bed yet?”

Once Joel and Tommy had completed the renovation of your upstairs, you had opted to redecorate the space with all new furniture, art, accents, everything – mattress included. You’d only slept next to your husband once since then. And he hadn’t touched you. Not a single graze of flesh, or a tender caress. 

Shaking your head, you bite your lip, “No. He hasn’t fucked me in over a year.”

Joel’s eyes flash, something dark and dangerous in them that makes your thighs clench, “That right?”

”Too busy fucking his secretary,” you admit, leaning into his touch, his thumb tracing your plump lower lip. Your tongue darts out for a taste.

He allows it, and then grips your chin between his index finger and thumb, tilting his head, “You usin’ me to get back at him?”

You can tell by the question that he doesn’t like the idea of that. That he’s just some pawn in a battle between you and Jeremy. But it couldn’t be further from the truth. You shake your head, eyes softening.

”No, no, I promise. I want you, Joel,” you whisper, fists still clenched in his shirt as you press yourself against him, “I don’t care about getting back at him. I just want him gone.”

”You send your divorce papers yet?”

“Tomorrow. First thing, my lawyer will serve them.”

”Good girl,” he says lowly, giving you a brief kiss, “You still think fuckin’ me while you’re still married is a good idea?”

You nod, “Yes, I need it, Joel,” you whine, feeling the slick between your legs, the soaked fabric of your panties rubbing against you, “I need you.”

“You need to get fucked?” He nips at your chin, then moves down to your neck, making your legs weaken, “You need your pussy filled to the brim?”

Speechless, you nod frantically, hands flattening on his chest as he takes your waist and turns you to putty with his lips on your throat. “Please…”

”Alright, darlin’, lie back for me,” he grumbles, peeling himself away from you and helping you lie on the bed. When you position yourself in the center, he clicks his tongue and takes you by the thighs to pull your hips to the edge of the bed. Joel drops to his knees, and your stomach does a flip. “Need to taste this sweet little pussy before I fuck you.”

You’re not complaining.

His thumbs hook at the hem of your panties and he drags them down your legs slowly, your entire body lit with anticipation and a fresh wave of desire.

With his wide hands, he spreads your thighs gently, peppering kisses along your skin and inching his way methodically up to your center. The scruff of his beard tickles your skin, hips lifting in search of any sort of contact. It seems Joel isn’t in the mood for teasing today, because after parting your folds with his thumbs, he drags a slow, deliberate stripe up the center of your pussy.

He groans into you, your body overcome with sensation as he does it again. And again, and again, and again.

“Taste so fuckin’ sweet, baby,” he says, moving his hands to your hips to pull you further toward the edge of the mattress. 

He drinks you in like a man possessed, his tongue strumming your clit effortlessly and drawing out the most pathetic noises from the back of your throat. You writhe and arch, his movements slow and precise as he licks you. Your toes curl, fingers digging into his mess of curls. Fuck, he’s good.

He uses his tongue on you like he can’t get enough of the taste of you. Like he’s been desperate to make you cum on his tongue all evening. And maybe he has been. Maybe it’s all he’s thought about, because you know damn well it’s all you’ve thought about.

Before you can even register anything else, two, thick fingers press into you and you have to slap your hand over your mouth to keep from crying out.

Joel lifts his head and scowls, “What are you doing?”

You blink, hips moving to the slow, steady stroke of his fingers, “I — I —“

“Nuh uh, I wanna hear those pretty little sounds you make. You understand?” He asks, voice hard and stern like you’ve made a grave mistake.

You nod, whimpering a little when he crooks his fingers just right.

“Words, baby. Use your words,” he rasps, “Do you understand?”

“Yes, yes, I understand,” you insist, letting loose a sound that would make a porn star blush when he starts pumping his fingers steadily. His tongue is back on you, and in the next instant, you’re careening toward your orgasm.

Your skin is hot and your blood electric in your veins as you cum, a strangled moan puncturing the quiet of your bedroom. Joel grunts into your pussy and licks and laps at your release until you’re sure you can’t take it anymore. You’re still trembling when he pulls his fingers from you and moves up your body to give you a kiss.

Tasting yourself on his lips, you let out a faint sigh, pulling at the buttons on his shirt and pushing it off. His tongue is heaven on your pussy, but infinitely more devious when it slips between your lips. It’s dirty and slow, like he’s building you up just to shatter you again and again. Your entire body still tingles with the aftermath of your climax.

Your hips lift against him, clit scraping against denim. His cock is hard in the confines of his jeans, and all you want is for him to be inside you. 

With searching hands, you map out the contours of his muscles, built slowly over time by his craft. His tummy is soft, but underneath, you feel his muscles clench as your fingers continue their perusal. 

As much as you enjoy kissing him, you need him to fill you up, so you begin the delicate task of undoing his jeans and shoving them down his hips. They’re barely down past his ass when you arch up again, and dig your nails into his lower back to get him closer. His cock is thick and heavy against your pussy, making you both groan.

“So fuckin’ needy,” he growls, pushing his hips against you and creating a friction so overwhelming you swear it’ll make you cum if he does it again.

All you can do is nod, because you are. You need him so bad, you think you’ll die if you don’t get him inside you soon.

He grinds against you again, the underside of his cock stimulating your overworked clit. You squeal, arching into him, both somehow seeking more and less at the same time. Joel takes your hip in his large hand, thumb pressing into you to still your movements.

“Ask nicely, darlin’.”

It takes a few seconds for your brain to catch up with his words. You sound needy when you say it. Desperate and fucked out. “Please, fuck me, Joel. Please, I need it so bad.”

The sentence hasn’t even fully left your lips before he pushes into you with a low growl. Once he’s seated with the coarse hairs at his base nestled against you, he flexes his hips, pushing just a bit deeper until there’s nowhere else to go. You’re so full of him, aching as he settles against you, his girth splitting you wide open. 

Your nails rake down his back, but he doesn’t seem to mind.

“This pussy’s so fuckin’ tight, honey,” he hisses into your ear, withdrawing an inch and pushing back in. “Fuck.”

Under your hands, his muscles tremble with either the effort of holding himself over you, or with the restraint of not fucking into you like you want him to. Either way, you’re flattered and tilt your hips to take him deeper. 

“Don’t fuckin’ do that,” he warns, pushing his hips against you and making you gasp at the intrusion. Your walls flutter around him, practically screaming at him to move, pussy leaking with your arousal, “Ain’t bein’ polite.”

“S-sorry,” you whimper, nails digging into his lower back, “I need –”

“What do you need?”

“Need you to move, Joel, please fuck me,” you beg, sounding so pathetic to your own ears, you almost cringe. But the slow smile and jut of his hips makes you forget in an instant. 

“Yeah? Need me to wreck this pretty little pussy?” He hums, the low vibrato of his voice sending you into another simpering fit as you try to move your hips against him. “Careful.”

He gives you a hard kiss before sitting up to tower over you, knees braced on the edge of the bed as his hands roam your body. The steady shift of his cock inside you has slowly eased the ache, but you need more. He feels so big, your cunt practically drools around him.

“You’ve got such good manners, baby,” he huffs, arms hooking under your thighs to lift you higher, pushing his cock deeper. Your hands fly out to cling to the comforter, eyes hazy as he withdraws and pushes in again, so fucking slowly it’s driving you crazy. It’s the same position he took you on the lounger by the pool, the same heavy stare, the same dark look and powerful body looming over you.

When speech evades you, he simply smiles and adjusts you again before he begins a steady, rhythmic pace that’s both hard and easy all at once. His hips smack into you, before he slowly withdraws, then fucking into you again like he’s trying to make you cum on force alone. And it’s working.

Each push of his hips elicits a little gasp from you and a spark of arousal pulsing through you. Sweat gleams on his forehead with the effort of his control, so you’re not surprised when he abandons his subdued pace in favor of quicker, deeper thrusts. 

“Takin’ my cock so good,” he grunts, pulling you up higher, “You gonna cum on it like a good girl?”

You nod frantically, already on your way to your own undoing. When his thumb circles your clit and his cock hits you just right, your vision goes dark and your back arches. Your moans are obscene and loud, and you’re certain your neighbors can hear the way you scream for him. But you don’t care. The pleasure coursing through you crests while he fucks you through your orgasm, his groans faint and labored.

The moment you come down, he pulls out, making you suck in a sharp breath at the loss. He flips you onto your stomach while he lies prone on top of you and pants into your ear, “This sweet little pussy is gonna be the death of me, baby.”

In one, brutal thrust, he’s back inside you, making your back arch against him. He takes the opportunity to wrap a large hand around your neck, holding you up as he takes his own pleasure and gives you everything in return. Even after two orgasms, the size of him burns through you, fire coiling tight in your belly with each plunge.

Your walls clench around him and he growls into your ear, his breath hard. His lips find your throat and he grunts with each push, “Tryn’ to make me cum before I’m ready to be done with you, darlin’?”

You shake your head, voice broken and barely there, like he’s fucked the will right out of you, “No… no, I swear.”

His fingers squeeze around your neck, not enough to cut off your air supply, but the pressure is there, and it’s exquisite. His pace is relentless, his cock so deep, filling you so completely, all you can do is writhe and cry under him. A large hand lands on your ass as he growls into your ear, “Tell me who this pussy belongs to.”

You don’t even hesitate, not for a second, “You, it’s yours. It belongs to you.”

“What belongs to me?”

“My p-pussy,” you cry out, another crack of his palm against your ass. “Joel…”

“I gotcha, baby,” he breathes into your ear, his beard scraping your cheek, lips and teeth adding sensation to your skin as his cock stretches you out. His restraint snaps then, and he begins pounding into you with a force that makes your eyes roll back into your head and your entire body lock up. “That’s it, honey. I know you’re about to cum. Give it to me.”

It’s remarkable how quickly he’s become attuned to your body and its signals. He adjusts his hips, pushing deeper, harder, faster than what he should be capable of. His breath ragged in your ear, muscles tight against your back, cock dragging in and out of you. When he releases your neck, you slump to the bed, only for him to plant his hand next to you, while the other sneaks underneath you to rub your clit in time with his thrusts.

It undoes you so quickly, you scream into the sheets, hips pushing against him as you cum. Your climax washes over you so completely, you think you lose consciousness for several seconds. You’re nothing but sensation and bliss.

His deep growl reaches your ears, breaths coming in short bursts as he fucks you through it, “Fuck, feels so good. Pussy is grippin’ me nice and tight baby. I’m gonna cum.”

“Cum inside me,” you plead, words muffled by the bedding. You can feel him trembling above you, holding himself back, and then a rush of warmth as he fills you, cumming with a bone shattering groan that makes your entire body tingle. You love the way he sounds, love that you can do this to him. Wreck him just as thoroughly as he wrecks you.

His thrusts slow, then ease to a stop, and he bends over you to kiss along your shoulder and down your back until he’s withdrawing from you completely. A quiet whimper leaves you, devastated at the loss. 

After wiping up the mess you two had made, Joel settles in bed next to you, drawing you against his chest and giving you a tender kiss. It’s slow and thoughtful and lingering. There’s no intent behind it other than to claim and cherish.

“I can’t stay,” he says when he pulls away, “Gotta be up early for a job tomorrow.”

You sigh and nestle deeper, chasing his lips, “I don’t want you to go.”

“Mm, I don’t either. But my client is extremely demanding. Gotta get to the site on time to make her happy,” he mutters, tongue swiping against you. Your heart flutters, cheeks warming as he pulls away with a smile, “I’ll be back in the morning.”

“Stay a little while longer?”

He answers by pulling the sheets around the both of you, his arms cradling you against him despite the sweat you’ve both worked up. Joel kisses you again, his hand sliding up your back to rest at the base of your neck.

He’s warm and solid against you, his breathing heavy and deep, but you know he’s not asleep yet.

“Joel?”

“Mm?”

“Are you gonna tell Tommy?” You ask, not out of fear or hesitancy, but simple curiosity. If he tells his brother, what will that convey about the two of you? 

He lifts his head to peek down at you and arches an eyebrow, “Do you want me to?”

You shrug, truly unsure. You’re still married. He’s still technically working for you, and you’re not sure what this means for either of you. 

“Don’t see that it’s any of his business. But I meant what I said earlier. I don’t do shit half way, darlin’. This ain’t some game to me,” he tells you, resting on his elbow to look down at you. You look up at him with wide, glimmering eyes, “You either want this, or you don’t. But you better tell me soon so I –”

“I like you too,” you blurt, cutting him off so he doesn’t spiral. You’re growing accustomed to his directness. He doesn’t want to play mind games like some men. Doesn’t want to string you along. It’s refreshing. “I – I don’t want to tell Tommy, though. Not until you’re done… working for me.”

A sly smile creeps onto his face, “You don’t want him to know I’m fuckin’ the boss?”

“No!” Your skin heats and you bring the sheet up to hide your embarrassment, “It’ll look like I’m taking advantage of you.”

“Darlin’, if anyone’s takin’ advantage, it’s me,” he chuckles, pulling the sheet down and pressing a kiss to your forehead. “Saw you walkin’ around in those skimpy little outfits and couldn’t help myself.”

“I didn’t exactly give you a choice, Joel. I basically stripped naked and threw myself at you.”

“Still,” he shrugs, “Could’ve said no.”

You look up at him with a slight smile, his eyes warm and gentle, softened in the dull light of the bedroom lamp, “Glad you didn’t.”

He smiles back. “Me too.”

The next morning, you wake to an email from your lawyer telling you that the papers have been delivered to Jeremy. He was confused and pissed off, but it’s done. The weight of it shifts something in you, the relief burning at your eyes. 

Joel left sometime during the night, but you wish you could reach for him, celebrate with him, kiss him. Because of him, your life has changed drastically in the past twenty-four hours. You want to thank him.

You get the chance to do just that over the course of the next few days, kissing him when he arrives to work on your house for the day, sitting in his lap while he eats lunch, begging him to fuck you before he leaves for the evening. It’s pure bliss, and for the first time in years, you feel something dangerously close to happiness. Something Jeremy hasn’t given you in so long, you forgot what it felt like.

You should’ve known, then, that it would all come crashing down.

"Set her down here."

"She…the baby…"

"Set her down here."

He sets you down on the long wooden bench against the wall – the one for waiting husbands – and Vesha is already on one knee in front of you, her hands going to your wrists, your throat, your forehead, the long unhurried thoroughness of her sweep almost more steadying than anything else that’s happened in the last hour.

"Your pulse is fast and your skin’s clammy. Pupils…yes, fine. You’re in shock, just mild, but nevertheless. It’s quite normal. Did you fall, my dear?"

"No."

"Were you struck anywhere?"

"No."

"Did anything hit your belly? Anything at all. A door, an elbow, a bolt that grazed...?"

"No, nothing."

She nods briskly. “Now the belly."

She moves you, carefully, onto the cot in the back room. Din puts himself in the corner with his back to the wall and his hands at his sides, deliberately useless, the way a man makes himself when he knows that if he lets himself help, he won’t be able to stop helping. But the visor doesn’t leave you for a second.

Vesha spreads the gel on your stomach again and passes the wand over you

You hear the small, wet, rapid drum before Vesha has even gotten the wand properly placed, the same frantic pulse from this morning. You close your eyes, and Din makes a small sound through the modulator that is, almost, the same sound he made on his knees on the bloody floorboards of the tavern.

"There she is," Vesha murmurs. "Right where we left her. Same rate, same rhythm. No change. Nothing has happened in there, my dear. Whatever happened to you out there did not happen to her. She is entirely unbothered. Do you hear me? Entirely."

"Yes."

"Good." She wipes the gel away and helps you sit up. She looks at you, and then she looks, sharply, at the visor in the corner. "Mandalorian."

Din starts slightly. "Yes."

"This is the second time today she’s been in this room. I would like it to be the last for a while, do you understand me?"

"Yes."

"Take her home, whatever home you decide that is. Make her tea, make her eat something with iron in it and put her to bed. Do not let her replay what happened until tomorrow at the earliest.”

"I understand.”

"Good. Out now, both of you. Go."

You smile your thanks as Din gathers you once more into his arms and proceeds to carry you all the way to the ship. You tell him, twice, that you can walk but he doesn't answer.

He carries you through the lanes – past the small dark knot of Karga's settlement-guard still working the tavern frontage, past Karga himself, who only takes one look at the visor and the way it’s angled and steps back without a word to let you pass – up the slope of the pad, up the ramp and into the cool dim of the cargo bay. Only then, with the ramp hissing shut behind him and the inner door sealing and the recyclers humming, does he set you down.

He rests you on the lower step of the cockpit ladder, carefully, his hands lingering at your hips even after your feet are on the deck. He doesn’t let go for a long moment, standing in front of you with the visor on your face, his hands on your hips and the smallest tremor still running through them. The small careful tilt of his helmet says he is, only now, beginning to register that you’re alive and inside his ship and that no further immediate thing is going to take you away from him.

He bends and presses the cool beskar of the brow to your forehead.

"I need to tell you something."

"Okay."

He moves back and stands a few feet away, leaning his weight against the small fold-down table with both hands on the metal of it, the visor angled down at them, and stays silent for a long moment.

You wait because you can feel the shape of what’s coming and you don’t, just yet, want to help him say it.

"I can't do this," he says, finally. "Cyar'ika, I can't…I can't do this. I can't…I can't have you out there and me on the pad. I can't have you out there and me an hour behind. I…I came up that lane today and I…I heard the second shot, and I started running and the whole way I was…I was thinking…I’m not going to get there. I’m not going to get there. I’m not going to get there. The whole way. For…for two minutes. For two whole minutes I ran up that lane thinking I was going to find you and our baby on the cobbles."

"Din…"

"I almost didn't get there."

"You did get there."

"Barely."

"You got there, Din…"

"By seconds, cyar'ika. By…by the third one bending the bar up with a magnetic lift. By him not knowing his back was to the door. By you being a better shot than I have any right to expect. By all of those things, cyar'ika, and one of them goes the other way and you’re dead. You and her, both, on the floor of a tavern. Because you walked around a corner. Because you walked around a corner, cyar'ika."

You don't speak because the thing behind his voice isn’t anger or blame and you don’t have the strength to mistake it for either.

"I can't," he says quieter. "I can't keep you safe and keep flying. Not the way I've been flying. Not the way we've been flying. I’ve been telling myself since Tatooine that I could, that I could find a way. That the ship is enough and the bunk is enough and the blaster in your waistband is enough. That you’re…that you’re tough enough and quick enough and that I’m close enough and that we can…that we can go on like we have been, just…just with the baby. With the baby in a sling in the cargo bay. I’ve been telling myself that, cyar'ika, and now…now I can’t tell myself that. Now I…now I can’t."

He stops and breathes once, slow, through the modulator.

"Karga offered me a cabin a long time ago before…before you. He offered me a map and a deed and a…” he breaks off. “I said no at the time, but he said it would always be mine if I wanted it. When you were sleeping, before Tatooine, I commed him about the…the baby and he said that it could be ours. He said he’d happily give it to us.”

You laugh, but it comes out wrong – sharp, raw, a little broken.

"All of you," you say. "All of you have been…all of you have been planning this, Din. Peli, Karga, Vesha, you. All of you have been moving me into a cabin in your heads without telling me. I am the last person in this…in this conspiracy of midwives and magistrates and Mandalorians who has been told what is happening to her life."

"Cyar'ika…"

"Don't cyar'ika me,” you snort, folding your arms across your chest. “Not right now. Tell me the rest, because I know there must be more. All this time you’ve been spending thinking and tapping…there must be more."

He’s quiet a long moment.

"You take the cabin," he says, finally. "You take the cabin and I take the ship. I take the jobs, the careful ones. The ones I know I can come back from. I come to the cabin between jobs. I…I’m there as much as I can be and you and the baby are safe. Karga has guards that will keep watch from a distance. You’re there, and I’m on the ship, and I’ll come back as often as I can, and you’re safe, cyar'ika, you and her, you’re safe."

You don't speak – can’t, because the cold thing under your sternum from this morning has come back and has, in the last thirty seconds, grown teeth.

"How long between jobs?" You ask quietly.

"Cyar'ika…"

"How long, Din?"

"A…a week, sometimes two. Sometimes more. Karga said he could keep me to short runs, mostly. Inner systems. He said he could…he could route me through Nevarro often. He said…"

"Sometimes more."

"Sometimes more, yes."

"How much more?"

"I don't know. It depends on the work.”

"A month?"

"Maybe."

"Two months?"

"Cyar'ika…"

"Two months, Din?"

"Sometimes, maybe. I…I would try not to. I would… "

"You would try not to."

"I would try…"

"No."

It comes out of you flat.

"Cyar'ika..."

"No, Din. No. I’m…I’m not doing that. I’m not going to be a woman in a cabin waiting for her Mandalorian to come back from a run. I’m not going to be a woman who puts her baby to bed at night not knowing if you’re alive. I’m not going to be a woman whose only news of her husband comes through Karga's comms relay. I am not - no."

He raises his hands. "Please…"

"You think I would survive that, Din? Two months at a time? In a cabin with a baby on my own? Not knowing? You think I would…you think I would do that? I would lose my mind, Din! I would lose my mind in a week. In a month I’d be…I’d be a woman who can’t let her baby out of her sight because the baby is the only thing in the cabin and the cabin is the only thing in the world and her husband is…is somewhere in hyperspace getting shot at without her and she doesn’t even know it yet!”

You try to take a breath and find yourself wanting.

“No, Din. No. That’s not…that’s not the deal. That wasn’t the deal when you found me on the Crest and that isn’t the deal now and you don’t…you don’t get to make it the deal because you got scared in a lane today."

"Cyar'ika…"

"I got scared too, Din."

It cracks out of you.

"I got scared too. I was on the floor of a tavern with a blaster in my hands and a dead woman next to me and a man lifting the bar off the door from the outside and I was scared too. I was terrified. I thought…I thought our baby was going to die on those floorboards. I thought I was going to die on those floorboards. I thought I was never going to…never going to be able to tell you I love you and I…I got scared too, Din. And I’m still scared, but I’m not going to be scared into a cabin. Not without you in it. Not…not at the price of you. Do you hear me, I am not."

He’s very still, the visor on you. His hands lower into careful fists and the shoulders under the beskar are doing the small terrible thing they were doing on the floor of the tavern.

"Cyar'ika…I'm trying..."

“My life on Shakari…” you go on, your voice cracking, your eyes hot. “I know I don’t talk about it but if you knew…if you knew what that was like for me, then you would know that I can’t.”

You swallow hard.

“You asked me to marry you and we said the vows and we are married now and you don’t get to just…we are partners in every sense of the word and I don’t want…I don’t want to be somewhere that you’re not – for weeks and months on end. If that’s what you’re offering me, then let’s take the vows back and go our separate ways. Because I would rather be alone forever than only have you for some of the time and spend the rest of it not knowing.”

He flinches slightly. “We can’t…we can’t take them back, cyar’ika. We’ve said the vows…we’re one now. I belong to you and you belong to me.”

“Then you don’t get to leave me,” you say quietly but fiercely. “You don’t get to leave me – leave us – behind. Not for weeks and months at a time.”

For a moment, neither of you speak and the only sound is the familiar hum of the ship around you.

"I’m not saying no to the cabin. I’m saying no to the shape of it you brought me. I’m saying no to you on the ship and me in the cabin. I’m not separating from you, Din. Not for a job. That’s not…that’s not what we are. That’s not what we’ve built. I want to live with you, wherever that is. Ship. Cabin. Both. Neither. With. Do you understand me? With."

"I understand,” he says softly.

"So, you don’t get to take the jobs without me. You don’t get to take a single one. Not a careful one, not an easy one, not an in-system one. Not one, Din, unless we have sat down – properly – and decided it together. And if I say no…if I say I can’t have you out there for that one, Din, that one is too long, that one I can’t do, then you don’t take it. You turn it down and you tell Karga to give it to somebody else. You stay. You hear me? You stay."

"Okay."

"Say it back to me."

"I…I stay. I don't take a job without you saying yes.”

You let out a shaky breath and look around you, at the ship that you’ve made into a home. You look at the starkness of it and think about everything Vesha said. The Crest is your home because Din is there. Din is your home and you realise, that as much as you love this gunship, it’s not about metal or bricks or mortar.

"We should take the cabin,” you say finally. “We should take it and move our things into it. We build a crib and we hang our weapons by the door. We have a kitchen and a window and a fire. We have all of that, and we have you, Din.”

"Yes."

"And when you go on a job – when we go on a job – when we’ve decided together that it’s one we can take – you take me with you the way you have always taken me since we met. The cabin is the base, the place we go from. The ship is where we go to. Together. Until the baby comes. Until she comes and we…we make a new arrangement, with her in it, together.”

He nods. “Alright cya’rika.”

You let out a long, slow breath and rub your hands over your face. “Where is this cabin anyway?”

“A short speeder ride away.”

You look at him curiously. “You’ve been there?”

“I went to look – once – before you,” he replies calmly.

"Alright, tomorrow we go and look at it together, the two of us, and then we can decide if it’s right. If it’s ours. And if it isn't – if we walk into it and the kitchen is wrong and the window is wrong and the rooms feel wrong – then we tell Karga thank you and we look at another one, and another one, until we find the right one.”

"Yes.”

He moves around the table, crosses towards you and kneels on the deck plates in front of you the way he knelt in the tavern in front of you, only this time there’s no blood on the floor and no body at your hip and no third man at the door. This time there’s only the soft hum of the ship, you on the bench and him on his knees. His hands come up and close, carefully, over your thighs and the visor tips up to your face.

"I’m going to be bad at this," he says, softly. "I’m going to forget and chew on things alone again. I’m going to come to you with a…with a decided thing in my hand and you’re going to have to push it back at me and make me undo it. I want you to know that, so that when I do it, you know I’m not doing it on purpose. And…and I'm asking you to be patient with me, cyar'ika. Will you be patient with me?"

You set your hands over his and suddenly realise that you’re both still shaking.

"Yes, of course I will, Din. Because you’ll have to be patient with me too when I get angry the way I got angry this morning. When I…when I yell in lanes and run out of midwives' offices. When I… when I’m bad at this too. Because I will be."

"I’ll be patient with you.”

"Okay."

He bows his head, the visor comes against your knee and he stays like that, hands wrapped around the backs of your calves, helmet pressed to the top of your thigh, for a long quiet moment. You let go of one of his hands, lay your palm on the top of the helmet, where the smooth beskar curves down over the back of his skull, and stroke once, slow, down to the cowl at the base.

Heat suddenly pools in your belly, hot and demanding.

"I need you, Din," you breathe softly.

The helmet raises again towards you, and, for a moment, you think he either doesn’t understand or that he’s going to refuse you again. You feel it in the stillness that suddenly goes through his body.

"What do you need? What can I give you?"

"You," you reply simply. "You can give me you - here and now."

He gets up slowly, hands sliding off the backs of your calves and bracing on the bench on either side of you, the long beskar-clad height of him uncoiling in front of you in the dim light. You stand with him and fist your hand in his cape.

“I’m still on the floor of that tavern, and if you put me down on that bunk right now and tell me to rest, I’m going to lie there for hours thinking about a man lifting the bar off the door from outside and....I don’t want to rest and I don’t want to sleep. I want you, Din, right now. Hard.”

The visor tips, slow, the modulator hissing, soft, against the air between you. One hand comes up and finds the side of your face, careful with the small unconscious gentleness he can’t help, and you reach up, close your bare hand around the gloved wrist and pull it, hard, down.

"Not careful, Din."

"Cyar'ika…"

"Not careful. I don’t want careful right now. This is our wedding night and I want you to put me against that bulkhead and fuck me until that’s the only thing I can think about – being your wife.”

The visor stays on you. The modulator hisses out, ragged, the small bare sound through the grille that is, almost, the closest thing to him swearing in his own native tongue you ever get in daylight.

"Are you…? "

"Yes."

"Are you sure?"

"I have never been surer of anything in my life, Din. Fuck me now, please.”

He moves fast, the way he moves when something has finally, somewhere behind the beskar, given – his hands closing at your hips, turning and walking you backwards until your back hits the cool of the galley bulkhead with the small bright sound of skin against metal.

The visor is right there at your forehead, the modulator, ragged, against the bridge of your nose. His hands brace on either side of your head, the cool of the cuirass pressing against the bare of your stomach where your shirt has ridden up.

"Like this?"

"Yes, Din."

"How hard?"

"Hard, Din,” you breathe. “Hard."

"Okay,” he says softly and he pulls both gloves from his hands, one after the other, dropping them to the deck plates between you. They lie there between his boots while he stays braced over you.

His bare hands come up, his palms finding your throat, the left one sliding slowly up under your jaw, his thumb finding the small hammer of your pulse there. He tips your head back against the bulkhead with it, and his other hand comes down off the metal, finds the loose neckline of your shirt and pulls, yanking the fabric off your shoulder, and it slips down to your elbows in one motion.

"Cyar'ika…"

"Don't ask, Din."

"I’m not asking."

"Then do it."

The ragged sound that comes through the modulator is almost a laugh, almost a snarl. His hand at your throat tightens, carefully but hard, causing desire to climb quickly inside you. His other hand goes down, fast, into the loose waistband of your trousers and his fingers find you already wet, the sound now coming through the modulator against the bare of your collarbone almost a groan.

"Fuck cyar'ika…"

"Don't talk, Din," you gasp, the crudity sending an extra shot of heat to where his fingers still probe.

"You’re… "

"Please, don’t talk!”

His fingers move hard, not the slow, careful, patient thing he’s done a hundred times in the dark, but rather the hard, fast unhurried thing he does only when you’ve asked, only when you’ve begged, and you feel your orgasm climbing fast against the heel of his palm, his other hand at your throat keeping your head back against the bulkhead, the visor pressed to the side of your jaw, the modulator ragged at your ear.

"Din…"

"There."

"Din, I…Din…"

"There, cyar'ika. There, come for me."

You come on his bare hand with your back arched off the bulkhead and your hands fisted in his cape, and a bright, bitten sound torn out of you against the cool of the beskar at the cheek-line. The hand at your throat doesn’t let go and his fingers don’t slow, and the shaking down of it is not, this time, slow. It’s short and hard and bright and he doesn’t give you time to come down before he takes his hand out of your trousers and pulls them down off your hips, where they fall to the deck plates around your ankles.

"Step out."

You do as requested and he kicks them aside with one boot in a careful, efficient motion before his hands go under your thighs and lift you carefully off the deck plates, pinning you to the bulkhead. Your legs come up around the dense warm beskar of his hips, and he finds himself through the opening in the flight suit, lines up and slides into you in one long, hard press.

You cry out, loudly, the sound tearing out of you against the visor. You know the recyclers in the galley will muffle it, but it doesn’t matter, and you don’t care and you make the same noise, again and again and again

"Move, Din. Hard. The way I… oh fuck, Din…"

He moves the way you demand, sliding back and then thrusting forward into your hot wetness, the visor pressed hard to the side of your jaw, the ragged unmodulated-shaped sound through the grille at your ear with every breath.

The bulkhead hits the bare of your shoulders with every press meaning that you’ll have bruises tomorrow but, right now, you want them – you welcome them as proof that you're alive, that you're okay and that you've been fucked well by your husband.

"Harder, Din."

"Cyar'ika…"

"Harder. Ask me who I belong to."

"I don’t…"

"Ask me, Din!"

“Who do you belong to?”

“You,” you pant, “only you, always you…harder.”

He gives it to you harder, hips driving against yours, the sound of flesh meeting flesh mixing with the hum of the recyclers around you as you come for the second time within three minutes, the galley lights flickering under the relentless thudding of the bulkhead.

“Din…oh fuck…!”

“Mine,” he grunts.

Your hands grip his cape tighter, legs locking around his hips, your forehead pressing hard to the brow of the helmet. He doesn’t stop or slow, the sound through the modulator at your ear almost a sob now, and his hands tighten under your thighs.

"Cyar'ika, I’m…I need to…"

"Come, Din, come in me. In me, now. I’m already carrying your baby – please!"

He unleashes himself with the visor pressed hard to your jaw. his hands tight under your thighs and the cool of the cuirass pressing against your stomach as he holds you against the bulkhead through the long shuddering down of it. His hips stutter then he drives into you again, the warmth of him flooding you and you cry out again, the sound stretching into a keening you can't control and which finally dies in the air between you.

For a long time neither of you moves.

The recyclers hum and the galley lights flicker once, then steady as he continues to hold you in his arms.

“Are you alright?” he pants after a long moment.

"I’m perfect, Din."

"You…are you…?"

"I’m perfect, Din. Shut up."

"Your back… "

"My back is fine. Yes, there might be some bruising tomorrow, but I don’t care. I don’t care, Din. Just…set me down carefully.”

He sets you down with the slow, careful, unspoken reverence he uses for the few things he’s afraid to break, his hands at your hips taking the weight you can’t, immediately, take, because your knees don’t quite work. He knows it, and he stays braced against the bulkhead with you for a long moment with his visor at your forehead and his ragged breath at your ear, until you can stand.

“That was good,” you breathe, and the helmet moves back so that he can look at you. “So good.”

“Will you…I mean, every time…?”

You smile wickedly at him as you reach out and lay one hand on the side of the helmet. “Perhaps. I've read that hormones can be funny things. Will that be a problem?”

You sense his gaze dip momentarily downwards to your stomach and then back up again, one hand moving to slide, warm, across your bare skin.

“I don’t want to hurt you – either of you.”

You feel a tightness in your throat. “You could never hurt us, Din. I know that to be true more than I know anything else. And our baby is strong – I can feel that about her already.”

He nods imperceptibly, then presses the visor once more against your forehead. “We will raise warriors.”

“Yes,” you nod, sliding your arms around him and pulling him close. “We certainly will.”

➰➰➰➰➰➰➰➰🚀➰➰➰➰➰➰➰➰

Taglist: @thelittlebats @sassythejedi @millercontracting @porganas @lovely-kitsune-exe @themilkhasjustexpired @dream-alittlebiggerdarling @seikamuzu

"Dylan! Dylan, no…!"

Joel's own horse leaps after, every instinct he owns screaming at the fact that it’s open ground and an unknown man. A camp full of raiders' spoils and maybe a raider's welcome waiting inside those tents.

And Dylan, galloping into it like a lamb into a slaughter chute, without a thing in the world Joel can do but go after him.

"Ellie, stay high and give cover!” He barks over his shoulder.

He hears her rack her bolt, and then he has no more attention to spare because Dylan’s reached the bottom of the slope and half-fallen, half-thrown himself off the horse before it stops, stumbling, catching himself, then running the last few yards on foot.

The man by the fire hasn't moved. He stands rooted, hands loose at his sides, and his face has come apart in a way Joel’s seen on very few faces in his life – the specific ruin of a man looking at something he's long ago made himself stop hoping for. His mouth works, his knees seem to go, and he catches himself on the fallen log seconds before Dylan hits him.

The boy slams into his father's chest with a force that staggers them both. The man's arms come up and wrap around him and the two of them fold down toward the ground together. The sound that comes out of the man then isn’t a word, but rather a great cracked animal sob, torn up from somewhere two years deep.

He fists one hand in the back of Dylan's coat and cups the other around the back of his head, holding him the way a person holds a thing they’ve already grieved, already buried and now dug back up living.

"Dylan," he says, over and over, wrecked, the name coming out shapeless with weeping. "Dylan… Dylan. Oh my God…my God, look at you. Look how big…look at you…"

Dylan’s crying too, great heaving graceless sobs, his face buried in his father's neck, his hands scrabbling at the man's shoulders like he needs to physically confirm the solidity of him, like the whole thing might dissolve if he stops clutching.

"I thought…Mom said you…we thought you were dead, we thought you were dead, Dad! We waited for you to come, and you didn't…"

"I know, buddy. I know…"

Joel comes down off his horse slow and stands a dozen feet off with his rifle in his hands, just watching whilst every cold, hard-won instinct in his body sings the same wrong note.

He wants this to be true.

That’s the thing he'll have to remember later, that he wants it to be true so badly he'll had to fight himself for every inch of caution. A boy gets his father back and the world hands you a whole entire life back after taking it. That’s the kind of story Joel’s learned, over a very long time, not to believe.

His eyes do what they always do as the reunion carries on around him. They read the camp, take in the three tents and the spoils laid out carelessly on the log – jackets, boots, a child's stuffed toy gone grey with grime and a rifle he clocks, marking the distance to.

He reads the man, not chained or showing the marks of someone kept two years against his will. He looks clean enough, fed enough and free enough to walk out of a tent and stretch in the afternoon sun with his hands on his hips like he owns the ground.

And three men lie dead two miles back in a bowl. Three men who'd set an ambush on a trail that leads home to Jackson. Three men from this camp - this man's camp.

"Dylan," Joel says, his voice level and low, "step away from him."

Dylan’s head comes up, his face a smeared ruin of joy and tears and he looks at Joel like he’s spoken in a language he's never heard.

"What? Joel…Joel, it's my dad. It's my dad, he's…he's alive, he's…"

"I heard you, but I want you to step away from him, right now."

The man's arms tighten around his son, and over Dylan’s shoulder his red-rimmed eyes find Joel's. Something in them shifts – some read happening in the other direction now, a man taking Joel's measure the way Joel’s taking his.

"Who are you?" He asks, keeping hold of Dylan.

"Step. Away." Joel raises the rifle. "I ain’t gonna say it again, Dylan. I want you to come and stand behind me, now."

"No!"

Dylan wrenches around, putting himself half between Joel and his father, his tear-wet face moving from joy to fury in the space of a breath.

"What the fuck is wrong with you? This is my dad! We just…he's been…" He can’t even find the words for the size of it. "Put the gun down! Put it down!"

"Son…" the man starts.

"Don't call him that."

It comes out of Joel harder than he means it, or exactly as hard as he means it, because he isn’t sure anymore.

"Not yet. Not til I know what you are."

He takes a step, keeping the angle, keeping Ellie's line to the tents clear behind him.

"Dylan, listen to me. You know me and you trust me. You’ve trusted me all day out here and I’ve kept you alive, haven’t I? So, I need you to trust me thirty more seconds. There is a man standin' in a raider camp. Two miles back there's three dead men who set an ambush on the road home. They came from here, from this camp. His camp."

Joel's eyes never leave the man's face.

"So, before anybody hugs anybody else, that man is gonna talk to me. And you’re gonna stand back and let him. ‘Cause if he's who you think he is, thirty seconds won't cost him a thing. And if he ain't…"

Joel watches the argument go through Dylan, watches the fury bank down against the plain awful sense of it, and hates himself a little for making the kid choose, on this day of all days, between the man who's kept him alive since dawn and the ghost of his father.

"Dylan." The man says gently now, placing his hand on the boy’s shoulder. "It's okay. Hey, look at me. It's okay. He's right."

Dylan blinks as he turns back to face him. "What?"

"He's right to be careful."

The man’s eyes flick to Joel, and there’s something in them now that Joel doesn’t want to see and sees anyway – a steadiness, a decency, the look of a man who understands exactly the shape of the world his boy has just come galloping down a hill through.

"You don't know me from a hole in the ground, friend. I'd have the gun up too. Whoever you are…you've been keeping my son alive out here today. So…"

He lifts his hands slowly off Dylan's shoulders, palms open, and steps back, putting daylight between himself and the boy of his own accord.

"Ask me whatever you want. I'm not going anywhere. God knows I'm not going anywhere."

Joel keeps the rifle where it is.

"Name."

“Matthew…Matt." He takes a breath. "I’m Dylan's father. His mother…" and here something crosses his face, a flinch of hope so raw Joel feels it land in his own chest like a blow, "…, my wife. We were together, on the road. Is she…?"

He says your name and it’s all Joel can do to keep breathing.

"We're askin' the questions."

Joel's voice doesn’t change, but he hears it, hears the naked want and files it away with everything else, hating that he has to.

"Two years. Start at the beginnin’."

Matt's jaw works as his eyes go somewhere far off, and when he speaks it comes out in the flat careful cadence of a man who's told the story to himself in the dark a great many times to keep from losing the shape of it.

"We were coming up through the pass, following the old highway, trying to get to a place we'd heard about – a settlement with…with walls and people. It was called Jackson." His eyes flick up. "Is that where you're from? That where he's…?" He stops and wipes his mouth with the back of a shaking hand. "There were three of us. My wife, Dylan and me. We'd been on the road from Kansas City for…God, months. And we hit a crew of raiders in the pass, more than we could fight, way more. They had the high ground, and they had numbers and they were between us and where we needed to be." He swallows. "So, I told them to run. I told my wife to take Dylan, run over the ridge, and I'd hold the mouth of the pass as long as I could to let them get clear.”

Dylan goes very still.

“You said you'd be right behind us. You said…" His voice breaks clean in half. "You said you'd catch up."

Matt's face crumples. "I know what I said."

"You said you'd catch up." Now it comes out of the boy as an accusation, two years of grief turning to acid. "We waited. We watched the gate every day and you didn't come, you never came, and I thought you were…" He can’t finish because he’s crying again, but different now, uglier, the specific weeping of an old wound torn open.

"I meant to catch up." Matt's voice drops to almost nothing. "I swear to you, on everything, I meant to. I fired off what I had, and I fell back into the rocks, and thought I'd lose them in the dark and circle around."

He shuts his eyes.

"They didn't kill me. That's the thing you learn about a crew like that – killing you is a waste. A man who can work, a man who can carry, a man they can put out front when they hit the next place so it's him takes the first bullet and not one of theirs – that's worth more than a corpse."

He opens his eyes and they’re wet and flat and old.

"They took me and kept me all this time, buddy. Two years I've been carried around this whole stretch of country doing their hauling and their digging and getting put at the front of every ugly thing they walked into and praying every single day that your mother got you somewhere safe." His voice cracks. "And she did, didn’t she? She got you to Jackson?"

"Yeah," Dylan breathes, eyes lighting up again. "Yeah, Dad, we made it, we've been there, we've been safe. You should see it, it’s…"

"Dylan…" Joel's voice sounds a warning, but the boy’s too far gone in it to hear.

“It has people and animals and stores…Mom has a store…and there’s a Christmas tree and…”

“Dylan!”

He turns to look at Joel again, brows drawn in annoyance, but he also stops talking.

Joel keeps the rifle up and makes his face do nothing. But inside, he’s turning it over, hard and fast, the way he turns over every story a stranger’s ever told him with his life and the lives of the people he loves riding on whether he believes it.

And the ugly truth of it is…it holds. It’s exactly the kind of thing that happens out here. He's seen it and even freed a couple such men himself over the years and put a couple such crews in the ground. And the freed men had all had that same look this one has, the used-hard look, the fed-just enough kept-alive look, the look of a tool somebody hasn't finished using.

"Those three men," he says. "In the bowl a couple of miles back. Your crew?"

Matt goes still. "You ran into them?"

"I put 'em down. They were settin' an ambush on the trail." Joel watches him for the tell, for the flicker, for the thing a liar can't help. "Somebody comes down that trail from Jackson, they were gonna die in that bowl. You wanna tell me about that?”

Matt laughs – not a happy sound, a broken raw thing, and he drags both shaking hands down his face

"You put down Taylor? And the other two?" He breathes out slow. "God, then it's…then they're…"

Something loosens in his whole body, some tension he's been carrying so long it’s become his shape, and for a second Joel thinks he might actually go to his knees.

"You don't understand what you did. Taylor ran what was left of the crew. There were more of us before – more of them, and more like me – but it's been getting smaller. Sickness, the weather, a fight up north went wrong… it's been down to the four of them and me for a couple of months now."

He looks up, eyes streaming, and his voice comes out thin and wondering.

"You killed three of them, but there’s one more – Harper. He rode out at dawn to scout the trail, and he'll be back by dark. It'll just be him, and I…" He stops and looks at his own shaking hands. "I could've killed him. Just him, and me. I've been waiting two years for the number to get small enough that I could. And you did most of it for me.”

Joel doesn’t lower the gun, because it’s too clean, fits too well. Because a lifetime has taught him that the stories which slot together neatest are the ones you have to squeeze hardest, and because the wanting in the man's face when he mentioned you has set something off in Joel's chest that he doesn’t want to look at directly and can’t stop feeling.

"Joel!"

Ellie's voice comes from up the rise. When he turns to look, he sees she’s come down partway, rifle still ready, still doing her job, still watching the tree line like he told her without telling her. But she’s looking at the scene below her now, and Joel knows that look too.

“I've cleared the tents from up here and there’s nobody else. It's just him."

“You need proof?” Matt pushes the frayed cuffs of his jacket up his arms and Joel sees the marks ringing his wrists – old and new, the deep worn grooves of a man who's spent a long time in rope and wire, healed over and rubbed raw again a hundred times. The kind of marks you don’t fake, the ones it takes years to earn.

Something in his chest goes very quiet.

Still, he doesn’t lower the gun, but the reason for keeping it up has changed, somewhere in the last thirty seconds, from I don't believe you to I do, and God help me, I do.

"You didn't try to run," he says, quieter now. "Two years. There had to have been a chance."

"There were chances." Matt's voice sounds exhausted, hollowed out. "There were a few. And every time I ran the math on it, it came out the same. I run, and I fail – and you don't fail once with a crew like that and get to try again. They break something so you can't. Or they just stop feeding you. I saw both."

He rubs at one scarred wrist without seeming to know he’s doing it.

"And there was the other thing, the thing that kept me from even trying, most days." He looks up, his eyes finding Dylan and staying there. "If I ran and died in a ditch somewhere, then whatever you remember stays true. You get to keep that. But if I ran and died, that's it, that's the end, and you never know I even tried to come back."

He draws a shaking breath.

"So, I stayed alive instead for every ugly day of it. I stayed alive and did their hauling and let them put me at the front and kept breathing, because as long as I was breathing there was a road – a stupid, one-in-a-thousand road – where the number got small enough, or they got careless enough, and I walked out of it, and I found the two of you. And I told myself if I ever got to Jackson, if I ever stood at those walls, I'd…"

His voice goes to pieces and he presses the back of his hand hard against his mouth, until he can compose himself.

"I didn't ever really believe it. You tell yourself a thing for two years to keep your heart beating and you never once believe it. And then this morning I hear gunfire up the ridge, and I think, that's it, that's the day they finally walk into something too big, and I don't even feel scared, I just feel…tired. And then…"

He looks up the slope, at the horses, at Ellie, at Joel, and last of all at his son, standing there wrecked and shining.

"Then my boy comes down a hill."

The clearing goes quiet, no sound but the fire ticking and the clothes on the line turning slowly in the wind.

Joel finally lowers the rifle. He does it slow and doesn’t put it away because decades don’t wash off in one afternoon. If Matt is to be believed, Harper is still out there, and Joel won’t be truly easy until they’re all back behind Jackson's walls again with the gate shut.

But he brings the muzzle down, lets the barrel rest across his forearm, and watches Dylan see him do it, watches the last of the fury drain out of his face and leave something younger and more fragile behind.

"Go on, then," Joel says.

Dylan goes to his father, Matt catching him, and this time Joel doesn’t stop it. This time he makes himself stand and witness it – the boy folding into the man's chest, the man's arms closing around his son, the two of them holding on like the ground might tilt. Matt’s crying openly now with no shame in it, his face pressed into his son's hair, and he’s saying things too quiet to hear, the small broken litany of a man given back the one thing he's made himself stop wanting.

"Is she really okay?" Matt asks suddenly, lifting his head and looking at Joel, the hope in his face steadying into something worse, something warm and certain and alive. "You keep saying we, and you're from Jackson, and you're…" his eyes move over Joel, the read finishing itself, "…you're the one they sent to keep him safe. So, she's there? She's behind those walls?"

"Mom's gonna lose her fucking mind," Dylan says half-laughing through the tears, the joy in his voice like a knife. "She's gonna…Dad, she's gonna be so happy. She never…she cried about you for like a year! She's gonna…we have to get you home, we have to, right now, we have to bring you back and she's gonna…"

"Yeah?" Matt breathes.

He fixes his eyes shut, and two more tears run down into his beard, his whole face lit up with a thing Joel recognises because he's been carrying the same thing in his own chest.

"She's happy? She's…she's got a good life? A home? People?" He laughs, wet and disbelieving. "She always deserved that. God, she deserved that so much. I used to lie there and just…I'd try to picture it. Her, safe somewhere, with a roof, not looking over her shoulder. That's the picture I kept. That's the one that kept me alive." He holds his son tighter. "And she kept you. She got you there and she kept you and she…she kept me alive too, and she never even knew it. All this time."

His voice drops, thick and private, meant for you though you’re miles away behind a wall he's dreamed of for two years.

"I never stopped. Two years and I never once stopped."

And Joel stands there in the ticking quiet of the raider camp with the rifle across his forearm and feels his heart begin, very slowly, to break.

Because he knows, deep down, neither did you.

And because it’s all true. Even though he wants it to be true, he also wants it to be a lie so he can put it down and go home. But it isn’t a lie. It’s the truest thing he's stumbled into in years – a good man, a decent man, a man who stayed behind to buy his family the minutes they needed and been made to pay for it two years running and never once let go of the picture of you safe. A man who's done nothing wrong except survive. A man Dylan loves with the whole uncomplicated force of a child, a love that has never once wavered in two years of believing him dead and has come roaring back the instant it has somewhere to go.

A father. Dylan’s real father. The man you told Joel about, the man whose empty place he’s slid quietly into over the last two years, inch by inch, thinking that the place could finally be his.

He thinks about tonight, about the good version he held to himself earlier, and he understands, standing here, with the perfect awful clarity of a man who’s lost enough to recognise the beginning of a loss, that the life he's been about to reach for has a father walking back into it.

That the story you told has just gotten up off the ground. That you’re going to be so happy because Dylan’s right – you’re going to lose your mind. You’re going to weep and laugh and hold this man like the ground’s tilting, because you loved him first and buried him and grieved him, and now here he is, alive, come back from the dead the way nobody ever does.

And Joel’s the one who’s going to have to bring him home to you.

He'll do it, too because there’s no version of this where he doesn’t do it. He isn’t a man who leaves a good man in a raider camp, isn’t a man who could ever look Dylan in the eye again if he tried, isn’t a man who could look you in the eye either, could stand in front of you with this knowledge in him and say nothing, could steal from you the thing you've cried over just because it’s the thing he wants for himself.

He isn’t that man. You've made him not want to be that man. And so, he’s going to put this stranger up on a horse, walk him through Jackson's gate and watch your face when you see who it is, and it’s going to cost him everything, and he’s going to do it anyway, because that’s what loving you turns out to mean.

And fuck does he love you.

"Joel."

He starts and turns to look at Ellie, at the expression on her face that tells him she's done the math too. She looks from the weeping man to Joel's still face and puts it together, all of it, in about four seconds, and looks at him with an expression he can’t stand, because it’s pity. Ellie doesn’t do pity, and the fact that she’s doing it now tells him exactly how plainly the break is showing on his face.

"We can't stay," he says, like a man giving orders on a patrol. "There's a fourth man due back and we’re gonna be long gone before then."

He looks at Matt, makes himself hold the man's grateful streaming eyes, and hates the size of his own decency.

"Can you ride?"

Matt lets out a breath that’s half a sob and half a laugh. "For Jackson? For her?"

He wraps his arm around Dylan’s shoulders and pulls him in, looking up at Joel like he’s personally reached down and pulled him out of the grave.

“You point me at that gate and I'll crawl."

"Won't come to crawlin'."

Joel turns away toward the horses, toward the long ride home, so that none of them can see his face.

"You can ride with Dylan. Ellie, grab whatever's worth grabbing off that log, we don't leave it for Harper."

The he walks to his horse, puts his hand on the warm leather of the saddle, and stands there a moment with his back to all of them – the man come back from the dead, and the boy made whole, and the girl who's guessed it all. And he thinks about the miles of snow-covered country between here and the walls behind which you are, right now, waiting, planning the words to say to Dylan tonight, not knowing that the whole shape of everything has already changed down here in a clearing you've never see.

“What’s your name?” Matt suddenly asks from behind.

“Joel,” he answers stiffly. “Joel Miller.”

Then he breathes in and breathes out, before tightening the cinch, swinging up into the saddle and turning the horse towards home.

❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

"Set her down here."

"She…the baby…"

"Set her down here."

He sets you down on the long wooden bench against the wall – the one for waiting husbands – and Vesha is already on one knee in front of you, her hands going to your wrists, your throat, your forehead, the long unhurried thoroughness of her sweep almost more steadying than anything else that’s happened in the last hour.

"Your pulse is fast and your skin’s clammy. Pupils…yes, fine. You’re in shock, just mild, but nevertheless. It’s quite normal. Did you fall, my dear?"

"No."

"Were you struck anywhere?"

"No."

"Did anything hit your belly? Anything at all. A door, an elbow, a bolt that grazed...?"

"No, nothing."

She nods briskly. “Now the belly."

She moves you, carefully, onto the cot in the back room. Din puts himself in the corner with his back to the wall and his hands at his sides, deliberately useless, the way a man makes himself when he knows that if he lets himself help, he won’t be able to stop helping. But the visor doesn’t leave you for a second.

Vesha spreads the gel on your stomach again and passes the wand over you

You hear the small, wet, rapid drum before Vesha has even gotten the wand properly placed, the same frantic pulse from this morning. You close your eyes, and Din makes a small sound through the modulator that is, almost, the same sound he made on his knees on the bloody floorboards of the tavern.

"There she is," Vesha murmurs. "Right where we left her. Same rate, same rhythm. No change. Nothing has happened in there, my dear. Whatever happened to you out there did not happen to her. She is entirely unbothered. Do you hear me? Entirely."

"Yes."

"Good." She wipes the gel away and helps you sit up. She looks at you, and then she looks, sharply, at the visor in the corner. "Mandalorian."

Din starts slightly. "Yes."

"This is the second time today she’s been in this room. I would like it to be the last for a while, do you understand me?"

"Yes."

"Take her home, whatever home you decide that is. Make her tea, make her eat something with iron in it and put her to bed. Do not let her replay what happened until tomorrow at the earliest.”

"I understand.”

"Good. Out now, both of you. Go."

You smile your thanks as Din gathers you once more into his arms and proceeds to carry you all the way to the ship. You tell him, twice, that you can walk but he doesn't answer.

He carries you through the lanes – past the small dark knot of Karga's settlement-guard still working the tavern frontage, past Karga himself, who only takes one look at the visor and the way it’s angled and steps back without a word to let you pass – up the slope of the pad, up the ramp and into the cool dim of the cargo bay. Only then, with the ramp hissing shut behind him and the inner door sealing and the recyclers humming, does he set you down.

He rests you on the lower step of the cockpit ladder, carefully, his hands lingering at your hips even after your feet are on the deck. He doesn’t let go for a long moment, standing in front of you with the visor on your face, his hands on your hips and the smallest tremor still running through them. The small careful tilt of his helmet says he is, only now, beginning to register that you’re alive and inside his ship and that no further immediate thing is going to take you away from him.

He bends and presses the cool beskar of the brow to your forehead.

"I need to tell you something."

"Okay."

He moves back and stands a few feet away, leaning his weight against the small fold-down table with both hands on the metal of it, the visor angled down at them, and stays silent for a long moment.

You wait because you can feel the shape of what’s coming and you don’t, just yet, want to help him say it.

"I can't do this," he says, finally. "Cyar'ika, I can't…I can't do this. I can't…I can't have you out there and me on the pad. I can't have you out there and me an hour behind. I…I came up that lane today and I…I heard the second shot, and I started running and the whole way I was…I was thinking…I’m not going to get there. I’m not going to get there. I’m not going to get there. The whole way. For…for two minutes. For two whole minutes I ran up that lane thinking I was going to find you and our baby on the cobbles."

"Din…"

"I almost didn't get there."

"You did get there."

"Barely."

"You got there, Din…"

"By seconds, cyar'ika. By…by the third one bending the bar up with a magnetic lift. By him not knowing his back was to the door. By you being a better shot than I have any right to expect. By all of those things, cyar'ika, and one of them goes the other way and you’re dead. You and her, both, on the floor of a tavern. Because you walked around a corner. Because you walked around a corner, cyar'ika."

You don't speak because the thing behind his voice isn’t anger or blame and you don’t have the strength to mistake it for either.

"I can't," he says quieter. "I can't keep you safe and keep flying. Not the way I've been flying. Not the way we've been flying. I’ve been telling myself since Tatooine that I could, that I could find a way. That the ship is enough and the bunk is enough and the blaster in your waistband is enough. That you’re…that you’re tough enough and quick enough and that I’m close enough and that we can…that we can go on like we have been, just…just with the baby. With the baby in a sling in the cargo bay. I’ve been telling myself that, cyar'ika, and now…now I can’t tell myself that. Now I…now I can’t."

He stops and breathes once, slow, through the modulator.

"Karga offered me a cabin a long time ago before…before you. He offered me a map and a deed and a…” he breaks off. “I said no at the time, but he said it would always be mine if I wanted it. When you were sleeping, before Tatooine, I commed him about the…the baby and he said that it could be ours. He said he’d happily give it to us.”

You laugh, but it comes out wrong – sharp, raw, a little broken.

"All of you," you say. "All of you have been…all of you have been planning this, Din. Peli, Karga, Vesha, you. All of you have been moving me into a cabin in your heads without telling me. I am the last person in this…in this conspiracy of midwives and magistrates and Mandalorians who has been told what is happening to her life."

"Cyar'ika…"

"Don't cyar'ika me,” you snort, folding your arms across your chest. “Not right now. Tell me the rest, because I know there must be more. All this time you’ve been spending thinking and tapping…there must be more."

He’s quiet a long moment.

"You take the cabin," he says, finally. "You take the cabin and I take the ship. I take the jobs, the careful ones. The ones I know I can come back from. I come to the cabin between jobs. I…I’m there as much as I can be and you and the baby are safe. Karga has guards that will keep watch from a distance. You’re there, and I’m on the ship, and I’ll come back as often as I can, and you’re safe, cyar'ika, you and her, you’re safe."

You don't speak – can’t, because the cold thing under your sternum from this morning has come back and has, in the last thirty seconds, grown teeth.

"How long between jobs?" You ask quietly.

"Cyar'ika…"

"How long, Din?"

"A…a week, sometimes two. Sometimes more. Karga said he could keep me to short runs, mostly. Inner systems. He said he could…he could route me through Nevarro often. He said…"

"Sometimes more."

"Sometimes more, yes."

"How much more?"

"I don't know. It depends on the work.”

"A month?"

"Maybe."

"Two months?"

"Cyar'ika…"

"Two months, Din?"

"Sometimes, maybe. I…I would try not to. I would… "

"You would try not to."

"I would try…"

"No."

It comes out of you flat.

"Cyar'ika..."

"No, Din. No. I’m…I’m not doing that. I’m not going to be a woman in a cabin waiting for her Mandalorian to come back from a run. I’m not going to be a woman who puts her baby to bed at night not knowing if you’re alive. I’m not going to be a woman whose only news of her husband comes through Karga's comms relay. I am not - no."

He raises his hands. "Please…"

"You think I would survive that, Din? Two months at a time? In a cabin with a baby on my own? Not knowing? You think I would…you think I would do that? I would lose my mind, Din! I would lose my mind in a week. In a month I’d be…I’d be a woman who can’t let her baby out of her sight because the baby is the only thing in the cabin and the cabin is the only thing in the world and her husband is…is somewhere in hyperspace getting shot at without her and she doesn’t even know it yet!”

You try to take a breath and find yourself wanting.

“No, Din. No. That’s not…that’s not the deal. That wasn’t the deal when you found me on the Crest and that isn’t the deal now and you don’t…you don’t get to make it the deal because you got scared in a lane today."

"Cyar'ika…"

"I got scared too, Din."

It cracks out of you.

"I got scared too. I was on the floor of a tavern with a blaster in my hands and a dead woman next to me and a man lifting the bar off the door from the outside and I was scared too. I was terrified. I thought…I thought our baby was going to die on those floorboards. I thought I was going to die on those floorboards. I thought I was never going to…never going to be able to tell you I love you and I…I got scared too, Din. And I’m still scared, but I’m not going to be scared into a cabin. Not without you in it. Not…not at the price of you. Do you hear me, I am not."

He’s very still, the visor on you. His hands lower into careful fists and the shoulders under the beskar are doing the small terrible thing they were doing on the floor of the tavern.

"Cyar'ika…I'm trying..."

“My life on Shakari…” you go on, your voice cracking, your eyes hot. “I know I don’t talk about it but if you knew…if you knew what that was like for me, then you would know that I can’t.”

You swallow hard.

“You asked me to marry you and we said the vows and we are married now and you don’t get to just…we are partners in every sense of the word and I don’t want…I don’t want to be somewhere that you’re not – for weeks and months on end. If that’s what you’re offering me, then let’s take the vows back and go our separate ways. Because I would rather be alone forever than only have you for some of the time and spend the rest of it not knowing.”

He flinches slightly. “We can’t…we can’t take them back, cyar’ika. We’ve said the vows…we’re one now. I belong to you and you belong to me.”

“Then you don’t get to leave me,” you say quietly but fiercely. “You don’t get to leave me – leave us – behind. Not for weeks and months at a time.”

For a moment, neither of you speak and the only sound is the familiar hum of the ship around you.

"I’m not saying no to the cabin. I’m saying no to the shape of it you brought me. I’m saying no to you on the ship and me in the cabin. I’m not separating from you, Din. Not for a job. That’s not…that’s not what we are. That’s not what we’ve built. I want to live with you, wherever that is. Ship. Cabin. Both. Neither. With. Do you understand me? With."

"I understand,” he says softly.

"So, you don’t get to take the jobs without me. You don’t get to take a single one. Not a careful one, not an easy one, not an in-system one. Not one, Din, unless we have sat down – properly – and decided it together. And if I say no…if I say I can’t have you out there for that one, Din, that one is too long, that one I can’t do, then you don’t take it. You turn it down and you tell Karga to give it to somebody else. You stay. You hear me? You stay."

"Okay."

"Say it back to me."

"I…I stay. I don't take a job without you saying yes.”

You let out a shaky breath and look around you, at the ship that you’ve made into a home. You look at the starkness of it and think about everything Vesha said. The Crest is your home because Din is there. Din is your home and you realise, that as much as you love this gunship, it’s not about metal or bricks or mortar.

"We should take the cabin,” you say finally. “We should take it and move our things into it. We build a crib and we hang our weapons by the door. We have a kitchen and a window and a fire. We have all of that, and we have you, Din.”

"Yes."

"And when you go on a job – when we go on a job – when we’ve decided together that it’s one we can take – you take me with you the way you have always taken me since we met. The cabin is the base, the place we go from. The ship is where we go to. Together. Until the baby comes. Until she comes and we…we make a new arrangement, with her in it, together.”

He nods. “Alright cya’rika.”

You let out a long, slow breath and rub your hands over your face. “Where is this cabin anyway?”

“A short speeder ride away.”

You look at him curiously. “You’ve been there?”

“I went to look – once – before you,” he replies calmly.

"Alright, tomorrow we go and look at it together, the two of us, and then we can decide if it’s right. If it’s ours. And if it isn't – if we walk into it and the kitchen is wrong and the window is wrong and the rooms feel wrong – then we tell Karga thank you and we look at another one, and another one, until we find the right one.”

"Yes.”

He moves around the table, crosses towards you and kneels on the deck plates in front of you the way he knelt in the tavern in front of you, only this time there’s no blood on the floor and no body at your hip and no third man at the door. This time there’s only the soft hum of the ship, you on the bench and him on his knees. His hands come up and close, carefully, over your thighs and the visor tips up to your face.

"I’m going to be bad at this," he says, softly. "I’m going to forget and chew on things alone again. I’m going to come to you with a…with a decided thing in my hand and you’re going to have to push it back at me and make me undo it. I want you to know that, so that when I do it, you know I’m not doing it on purpose. And…and I'm asking you to be patient with me, cyar'ika. Will you be patient with me?"

You set your hands over his and suddenly realise that you’re both still shaking.

"Yes, of course I will, Din. Because you’ll have to be patient with me too when I get angry the way I got angry this morning. When I…when I yell in lanes and run out of midwives' offices. When I… when I’m bad at this too. Because I will be."

"I’ll be patient with you.”

"Okay."

He bows his head, the visor comes against your knee and he stays like that, hands wrapped around the backs of your calves, helmet pressed to the top of your thigh, for a long quiet moment. You let go of one of his hands, lay your palm on the top of the helmet, where the smooth beskar curves down over the back of his skull, and stroke once, slow, down to the cowl at the base.

Heat suddenly pools in your belly, hot and demanding.

"I need you, Din," you breathe softly.

The helmet raises again towards you, and, for a moment, you think he either doesn’t understand or that he’s going to refuse you again. You feel it in the stillness that suddenly goes through his body.

"What do you need? What can I give you?"

"You," you reply simply. "You can give me you - here and now."

He gets up slowly, hands sliding off the backs of your calves and bracing on the bench on either side of you, the long beskar-clad height of him uncoiling in front of you in the dim light. You stand with him and fist your hand in his cape.

“I’m still on the floor of that tavern, and if you put me down on that bunk right now and tell me to rest, I’m going to lie there for hours thinking about a man lifting the bar off the door from outside and....I don’t want to rest and I don’t want to sleep. I want you, Din, right now. Hard.”

The visor tips, slow, the modulator hissing, soft, against the air between you. One hand comes up and finds the side of your face, careful with the small unconscious gentleness he can’t help, and you reach up, close your bare hand around the gloved wrist and pull it, hard, down.

"Not careful, Din."

"Cyar'ika…"

"Not careful. I don’t want careful right now. This is our wedding night and I want you to put me against that bulkhead and fuck me until that’s the only thing I can think about – being your wife.”

The visor stays on you. The modulator hisses out, ragged, the small bare sound through the grille that is, almost, the closest thing to him swearing in his own native tongue you ever get in daylight.

"Are you…? "

"Yes."

"Are you sure?"

"I have never been surer of anything in my life, Din. Fuck me now, please.”

He moves fast, the way he moves when something has finally, somewhere behind the beskar, given – his hands closing at your hips, turning and walking you backwards until your back hits the cool of the galley bulkhead with the small bright sound of skin against metal.

The visor is right there at your forehead, the modulator, ragged, against the bridge of your nose. His hands brace on either side of your head, the cool of the cuirass pressing against the bare of your stomach where your shirt has ridden up.

"Like this?"

"Yes, Din."

"How hard?"

"Hard, Din,” you breathe. “Hard."

"Okay,” he says softly and he pulls both gloves from his hands, one after the other, dropping them to the deck plates between you. They lie there between his boots while he stays braced over you.

His bare hands come up, his palms finding your throat, the left one sliding slowly up under your jaw, his thumb finding the small hammer of your pulse there. He tips your head back against the bulkhead with it, and his other hand comes down off the metal, finds the loose neckline of your shirt and pulls, yanking the fabric off your shoulder, and it slips down to your elbows in one motion.

"Cyar'ika…"

"Don't ask, Din."

"I’m not asking."

"Then do it."

The ragged sound that comes through the modulator is almost a laugh, almost a snarl. His hand at your throat tightens, carefully but hard, causing desire to climb quickly inside you. His other hand goes down, fast, into the loose waistband of your trousers and his fingers find you already wet, the sound now coming through the modulator against the bare of your collarbone almost a groan.

"Fuck cyar'ika…"

"Don't talk, Din," you gasp, the crudity sending an extra shot of heat to where his fingers still probe.

"You’re… "

"Please, don’t talk!”

His fingers move hard, not the slow, careful, patient thing he’s done a hundred times in the dark, but rather the hard, fast unhurried thing he does only when you’ve asked, only when you’ve begged, and you feel your orgasm climbing fast against the heel of his palm, his other hand at your throat keeping your head back against the bulkhead, the visor pressed to the side of your jaw, the modulator ragged at your ear.

"Din…"

"There."

"Din, I…Din…"

"There, cyar'ika. There, come for me."

You come on his bare hand with your back arched off the bulkhead and your hands fisted in his cape, and a bright, bitten sound torn out of you against the cool of the beskar at the cheek-line. The hand at your throat doesn’t let go and his fingers don’t slow, and the shaking down of it is not, this time, slow. It’s short and hard and bright and he doesn’t give you time to come down before he takes his hand out of your trousers and pulls them down off your hips, where they fall to the deck plates around your ankles.

"Step out."

You do as requested and he kicks them aside with one boot in a careful, efficient motion before his hands go under your thighs and lift you carefully off the deck plates, pinning you to the bulkhead. Your legs come up around the dense warm beskar of his hips, and he finds himself through the opening in the flight suit, lines up and slides into you in one long, hard press.

You cry out, loudly, the sound tearing out of you against the visor. You know the recyclers in the galley will muffle it, but it doesn’t matter, and you don’t care and you make the same noise, again and again and again

"Move, Din. Hard. The way I… oh fuck, Din…"

He moves the way you demand, sliding back and then thrusting forward into your hot wetness, the visor pressed hard to the side of your jaw, the ragged unmodulated-shaped sound through the grille at your ear with every breath.

The bulkhead hits the bare of your shoulders with every press meaning that you’ll have bruises tomorrow but, right now, you want them – you welcome them as proof that you're alive, that you're okay and that you've been fucked well by your husband.

"Harder, Din."

"Cyar'ika…"

"Harder. Ask me who I belong to."

"I don’t…"

"Ask me, Din!"

“Who do you belong to?”

“You,” you pant, “only you, always you…harder.”

He gives it to you harder, hips driving against yours, the sound of flesh meeting flesh mixing with the hum of the recyclers around you as you come for the second time within three minutes, the galley lights flickering under the relentless thudding of the bulkhead.

“Din…oh fuck…!”

“Mine,” he grunts.

Your hands grip his cape tighter, legs locking around his hips, your forehead pressing hard to the brow of the helmet. He doesn’t stop or slow, the sound through the modulator at your ear almost a sob now, and his hands tighten under your thighs.

"Cyar'ika, I’m…I need to…"

"Come, Din, come in me. In me, now. I’m already carrying your baby – please!"

He unleashes himself with the visor pressed hard to your jaw. his hands tight under your thighs and the cool of the cuirass pressing against your stomach as he holds you against the bulkhead through the long shuddering down of it. His hips stutter then he drives into you again, the warmth of him flooding you and you cry out again, the sound stretching into a keening you can't control and which finally dies in the air between you.

For a long time neither of you moves.

The recyclers hum and the galley lights flicker once, then steady as he continues to hold you in his arms.

“Are you alright?” he pants after a long moment.

"I’m perfect, Din."

"You…are you…?"

"I’m perfect, Din. Shut up."

"Your back… "

"My back is fine. Yes, there might be some bruising tomorrow, but I don’t care. I don’t care, Din. Just…set me down carefully.”

He sets you down with the slow, careful, unspoken reverence he uses for the few things he’s afraid to break, his hands at your hips taking the weight you can’t, immediately, take, because your knees don’t quite work. He knows it, and he stays braced against the bulkhead with you for a long moment with his visor at your forehead and his ragged breath at your ear, until you can stand.

“That was good,” you breathe, and the helmet moves back so that he can look at you. “So good.”

“Will you…I mean, every time…?”

You smile wickedly at him as you reach out and lay one hand on the side of the helmet. “Perhaps. I've read that hormones can be funny things. Will that be a problem?”

You sense his gaze dip momentarily downwards to your stomach and then back up again, one hand moving to slide, warm, across your bare skin.

“I don’t want to hurt you – either of you.”

You feel a tightness in your throat. “You could never hurt us, Din. I know that to be true more than I know anything else. And our baby is strong – I can feel that about her already.”

He nods imperceptibly, then presses the visor once more against your forehead. “We will raise warriors.”

“Yes,” you nod, sliding your arms around him and pulling him close. “We certainly will.”

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Taglist: @thelittlebats @sassythejedi @millercontracting @porganas @lovely-kitsune-exe @themilkhasjustexpired @dream-alittlebiggerdarling @seikamuzu

On the other side, there’s everything else, including your son and his daughter.

They’re two kids, green as spring grass, and both grinning like it’s the best day of their lives which, for them right now, Joel supposes it is. The magnitude of the responsibility doesn’t sit easy, despite everything he’s said, despite how confident he is in his own abilities. It might be the best day of their lives – it’s one of the most important of his.

Dylan sits on his horse too stiff, reins gripped like they might try to escape him and Joel can tell, that for all his bravado, he’s scared witless at being back on this side of the gate. Ellie sits on hers with a cocky sort of ease that fools nobody. Her knuckles are white, the same as Dylan’s, just wrapped up in more attitude.

"Loosen up, both of you," Joel says, not unkindly. "Horse can feel it when you're wound tight. Makes 'em jumpy."

"I'm not wound tight," they say, near enough in unison that they both turn and glare at each other for the theft.

“You're both wound tighter than a two-dollar watch." Joel eases his own mount ahead. "First rule – you listen. Not to each other – to me, and to the woods. You talk when there's nothin' worth listenin’ to and you shut up the second there is. Understood?"

"Understood," says Dylan.

"Yes sir, boss, absolutely, whatever you say," Ellie replies, and Joel feels the long day stretching out ahead of him already. He forgets at times how frustrating their journey to Jackson together was.

“Shit,” Tommy says suddenly as his horse stumbles.

“What?” Joel asks, riding forward.

“Reckon she’s thrown a shoe.” Tommy sighs. “I’d best head back. You all good to take ‘em?”

“Sure,” Joel says.

“Okay,” Tommy nods. “Good luck.”

Joel watches his brother pick his way back to the gate, then turns back to Dylan and Ellie.

“Plans change sometimes. Let’s go.”

He lets them ride, keeping a half-length in front, spine easy, eyes never quite settling anywhere for long – the tree line, the ridge, the deer path that cuts down toward the creek, back to the ridge. He's spent so long learning to see the world in threats that peace has never fully overwritten the habit and probably never will.

Truthfully, he doesn’t want it to. That paranoia is why he’s still breathing to take two kids out into the fresh snow.

Behind him the two of them have already started in on each other, bickering the way only genuine friends can, mean, easy and with no real teeth in it. He doesn’t often like to admit it, but he loves the sound of it in a way that he never thought he would.

“Dude, I bet I can kill more infected than you.”

“No way.”

“I’ll bet you anything in the world, D-Dog.”

“Fine – name it.”

“I’ll think about it. And I bet you puke your guts out if we come across any dead bodies.”

“I bet you shit your pants.”

Joel lets his mouth twitch where they can’t see it and his thoughts wander inevitably to you. Your eyes, your smile, your body…if he thought that actually starting something real with you would help quieten the way his mind can shamelessly fixate on you, he was wrong.

He can still see you, feel you, yesterday, under him in your bed, the sweat glistening on your skin, the pleasure breaking over your face, the way you groaned when he filled you…

He knows he doesn’t have much to offer you, nobody in Jackson does, but once this patrol is done, once Dylan knows the truth, he knows what he wants to do. He’s been given another chance at family, another chance to build something meaningful and long lasting and he’ll be damned if he intends to waste it.

Because he knows he'd walk into fire before he lets anything touch either one of these kids. And that’s the most important thing he could offer you as your husband.

It’s also the trouble he’s carrying today.

"You're doing it again," Ellie calls up to him.

"Doin’ what?"

"The thinking face. It's very intense. You look like you're solving a murder."

"I'm scannin’ the terrain."

"He's scanning the terrain," Dylan says sagely.

"He's doing the murder face."

They cackle and Joel scans the terrain just to prove a point.

"How much further to the loop?" Dylan asks after a while, and there’s something under the question, a boy trying to sound casual about a thing that scares him.

"Couple miles to the first waypoint," Joel replies. "We check the marker. We check the shed, make sure the cache is stocked, make sure nobody's been at the tripwires, then we ride the ridge, come down through the aspens and we’re home before dark. Nice and borin’. That's what we want. You want your first patrol borin’, you hear me? A borin’ patrol is a good patrol. Don't either of you go wishin' for excitement."

"I would never," says Ellie, in a tone that suggests she wishes for it constantly.

"I mean it. Out here excitement means somethin' has gone wrong."

She sobers a little at that, but only a little. Joel watches her out of the corner of his eye – the girl carries herself like nothing can touch her, and he can’t help but worry sometimes. She’s tougher than Dylan by a mile, but toughness can get you killed out here just as fast as fear. Faster, sometimes. The ones who think they’re ready are the ones who walk into the thing that eats them.

They’ve been lucky so far, and Jackson’s safer than most, but all it takes is one wrong step – and Joel knows he won’t survive losing another daughter.

They ride on, the land opening and closing again, the trail winding between stands of pine, the mountains standing blue-shouldered and patient. Joel narrates as they go – the necessary things.

This is where the trail forks, you always take the left, the right one washes out. This is where we found a bear den two winters back, still give it wide berth. This ridge is bad for sound, echoes carry, so you keep your voice down through here.

Both kids absorb it, Dylan with the grave concentration of someone desperate to be good at something, Ellie with a sharper hunger, filing it all away like she means to survive on it – which, Joel supposes, she does.

At the first waypoint they dismount, and he shows them how to read the marker – the little painted stone, the notch cut fresh into the post to show the last patrol has come through. The way you leave your own notch, so the next crew knows you'd been.

Dylan's hands shake a little the first time he sets the knife to the wood, the notch coming out crooked. Ellie's comes out clean and deep, and she gives Dylan a smug look.

“Fuck you,” Dylan harrumphs.

“Language,” Joel says automatically.

The shed’s clean, the cache untouched – jerky, water, ammunition, bandages sealed in a tin against the damp. Joel counts it and logs it in the little book. The two of them stand in the doorway, and for once they’re quiet, looking out at the woods with a kind of dawning understanding of how big and empty and old the world past the walls really is once you’ve become soft having spent time cocooned in safety.

He thinks about you again, about how you’d probably know the right thing to say at this moment to put everyone at ease. Then, like clockwork, he finds his mind wandering into murky territory again and imagines the two of you out here on your own, enjoying a stolen moment in the shed, your legs around his waist, your face buried in his neck as you groan his name, his cock pulsing inside you…

"You're going somewhere again," Ellie says, making him start.

"I'm right here."

"Uh huh." She lets it drop, which is its own kind of gift, and they mount up and ride on.

The trouble comes on the ridge.

Joel feels it before he sees it – that prickle at the back of the neck that decades in the dark has wired into him permanently. He holds up a fist, and to their credit both kids stop, Dylan a half-beat late but stopping, Ellie instantly, going still and quiet all at once.

"What?" Dylan breathes.

Joel doesn’t answer right away. The wind has shifted, and it carries something that doesn’t belong – not the natural creak and rustle of the woods but a wrongness, a scrape of movement with a body behind it. Below them, where the ridge drops away into a bowl of scrub and deadfall, something moves.

Two somethings.

Men.

Not infected – infected don’t move like that, careful and low, don’t crouch behind a fallen log and watch a stretch of trail with the patience of predators. These are people which is, Joel has learned the hardest way a man can learn a thing, almost always worse.

"Down," he says, barely a sound. "Off the horses – slow. Ellie, you tie ‘em to that pine, quietly. Dylan, you help her."

They dismount into the cover of the pines, and the horses stand quiet, well-trained, ears swivelling. Joel gets low and eases forward to the lip of the ridge. After a moment Ellie’s beside him and behind her Dylan, white-faced, crawling up on his belly the way Joel’s shown them.

"I told you to tie the horses."

"Dylan tied the horses," Ellie whispers. "I wanted to see."

"You do what I tell you out here or you don't come out here. That's it. That's the whole deal."

Something in his voice works where his words might not have. She nods, and some of the swagger goes out of her. Then she goes quiet, does as she’s told, and watches.

"Two," Joel murmurs. "Maybe more." He scans the bowl and finds the third – a man sitting back against a rock, shotgun across his knees. "Three. That's an ambush setup. They're waitin’ on somebody comin’ down that trail."

"Us?" Dylan's voice cracks on the word.

"Maybe. Maybe just anybody. Doesn't matter." Joel's voice drops flat, cold and level as still water. "We got the high ground, and they don't know we're here. That's the whole game. They don't know we're here."

"What do we do?" Ellie asks, and there’s no swagger in it now, just a thin, taut thread of a question, a girl finally understanding what boring has been protecting her from. “Do we take them out?”

"You two do nothin'."

Joel looks at them both, and for just a second the cold thing behind his eyes cracks and something else shows through – something that’s purely about you, about the boy you've made and the girl he knows you’ll claim and both of them handed to him this morning under a promise.

"You stay right here, flat and quiet. You do not stand up. You do not make a sound. No matter what happens down there. You understand me? Both of you say it."

“What do you mean – no matter what happens down there?” Dylan whispers.

“Say it.”

"I stay down," he murmurs.

Ellie hesitates. He can see the argument forming behind her eyes, the I can help, the I've got a gun too, the but we’ve dealt with this kind of thing before. Joel holds her look, lets her see how much he means it, and whatever she finds in his face kills the argument in her throat.

"I stay down," she repeats.

"Good."

He puts a hand on the back of Dylan's neck, brief and hard, and then – after a beat, because he’s never sure how she'll take it – on the back of Ellie's. To his relief, she doesn’t pull away.

"You keep each other down. That's your job. That's the only job."

Then he’s gone, sliding along the ridge to get his angle, and the two kids are alone in the pine needles with their hearts hammering and the whole terrible weight of the world tilted suddenly real beneath them.

Joel doesn’t want to do this. That’s a thing people who haven’t done it never understand – that a man can be good at a thing, can do it clean, fast and without a wasted motion, and still not want it. But wanting has nothing to do with the two kids at his back. Down in that bowl are three armed men lying in wait to hurt whoever comes down the trail, and Jackson sends people down that trail. The calculus is old and settled and requires no debate.

He moves low behind a boulder, settles the rifle into his shoulder and breathes. He thinks, absurd and unwelcome in the moment before – I want to come home to you tonight. I want to feel you in my arms. I want to make love to you because you’re mine. I want to marry you.

Then one of the men below shifts, says something, starts to rise – starts to turn his head toward the ridge as though some animal part of him has felt eyes – and there’s no more time for wanting anything.

The ridge comes apart in noise.

Joel puts the first round through the man who's risen before the fool has fully found his feet. He works the bolt – brass spinning away bright in the sun – and swings to the second behind the log, putting him down as he scrambles up. The third comes fast, faster than Joel likes, shotgun swinging, roars off a blast at nothing, buckshot shredding pine ten feet from where the kids lie flat and shaking.

Dylan makes a small sound, and Ellie clamps a hand over her own mouth. Joel racks the bolt and puts the third man down with the shotgun half-raised. He sits back against his rock almost gently, like a tired thing, and doesn’t get up.

Then it’s quiet. Ringing, enormous quiet, the woods holding their breath.

Joel waits, counts to thirty and watches. Nothing moves down there but the wind stirring a dead man's jacket. He rises slow, rifle still up, and picks his way down, checking each body the way you have to, thorough and unsentimental, finding them done.

They're Raiders, by the look of them – the mismatched gear, the hard hollow faces, the trophies some of them wear that Joel doesn’t let his eyes rest on too long. Men who would have done to a Jackson patrol exactly what he's just done to them, only slower, and worse.

"Clear," he calls up. "Come on down. Watch your footin’."

They come down together, Dylan first this time, then Ellie, and when they see the bodies up close they both stop. Dylan goes a shade of green, whilst Ellie stills, her face doing something complicated – not shock, exactly, or not only shock. Rather, recognition. Like this is a thing she's seen before and hoped, coming to Jackson, that she'd left behind.

Joel knows who, what and where she’s thinking about.

"Hey." He gets in front of them, putting his body between them and the worst of it. "Look at me, both of you. Not at them, at me."

Dylan's eyes come up, wet and wide. Ellie's take a second longer, and when they do, they’re dry, which somehow worries Joel more.

"You did good," he says. "You did everything I asked. You stayed down and kept quiet. That's exactly right. That's the whole job today and you did it."

"They're dead," Dylan says. "You…you just…"

"Yeah."

There’s no point in softening it. If there’s one thing Joel knows it’s that you don’t lie to them about it, don’t dress it up, because they'll know, and the lie will rot something in them worse than the truth ever could.

"They're dead. And if we hadn't come along, some folks from home would've ridden down that trail tomorrow, or the next day, and it'd be them lyin' here instead. Maybe you'd have known 'em. Maybe your mom would've."

Dylan's eyes steady a fraction at the mention of you.

"That's the job," Joel says. "It's an ugly job and I won't pretend to you it's not. But it's the reason the walls hold. It's the reason your mom sleeps safe at night, the reason we all do. Both of you understand? This whole thing has never been about who’s biggest and strongest.”

Dylan nods, slow, and something hard settles into place behind his eyes – the loss of the child and the solidifying of the man he’s tried to become over these last few months. Joel knows what he’s seen and, for a second, can’t help but wonder if you weren’t right all along about not wanting your precious boy out on patrol.

Sixteen is too young for any of this shit.

But it’s Ellie he’s watching. She’s looking at the bodies past his shoulder with that dry, complicated look, and when she speaks her voice is flat in a way he doesn’t like at all. Kind of like it was right after…

"I've seen dead people before," she says. "You know that. You don't have to do the…" she gestures vaguely at him, at his whole posture of shielding. "The speech. I'm fine."

"You're not fine. Nobody's fine after this. Bein' fine after this is the thing you should be scared of."

She looks at him then, really looks, and for a second the tough thing cracks and he sees the kid underneath – young, and rattled, despite all she’s lived through, and so tired of being tough that the exhaustion of it lives in her bones. Then she pulls it closed again.

"Breathe," Joel says, gentler. "I know what we’ve been through, but it doesn't get easier. Anybody tells you it gets easier is lyin' to sell you somethin'. But you get where you can hold it. You get where it doesn't knock you sideways. That's all any of us manage and that’s enough."

Dylan nods and lets out a breath that’s half a laugh, wet and rattling. "This is…a lot. This is a lot for a first day."

"It is," Joel agrees. "First days are usually borin’. I told you I wanted borin’. This ain't what I wanted for either of you."

Ellie steps up next to Dylan – the two of them shoulder to shoulder – and she bumps his arm with hers, an awkward clumsy thing, the closest she knows how to come to comfort.

"Look at it this way D-Dog, you didn't throw up.”

“Shut up. I never said I was going to throw up.”

“Still, I figured you probably would. Your mom'll be proud."

Joel feels something in his own chest unknot at that. They’re going to be all right. They’ll be rattled, and they'll carry it, and there'll be a night or two each of them wakes with the sound of it in their ears – but they’re going to be all right. And they have each other for it now, and that’s more than a lot of people get. More than Joel had, once.

They don’t linger. Joel goes through the bodies fast and clean, taking a decent knife, a half-box of shotgun shells, and a folded map that might mean something to Maria, leaving the rest. Then they mount up and put the bowl behind them, riding a little faster now, Joel taking a wide loop to make sure the three have been alone, that there isn’t a fourth somewhere watching, marking them.

But there’s nothing. Just the three, the ugly work of it done.

The kids are quiet a while and he lets the quiet do its work, lets the rhythm of the horses and the ordinary shape of the world stitch the morning back into something a body can carry. After a mile it’s Ellie who starts up again – low, easy, some dumb story about tripping over a sheep – and Joel understands exactly what she’s doing, sees her drawing herself and Dylan both back out of the dark a step at a time, and he loves her for it in the wordless way he's come to love her for most things.

And he thinks of you again, riding easy, the sun climbing toward noon, illuminating the snow-covered ground. He thinks about how he'll tell you – all of it, straight – and how you’ll hold Dylan tight and let him feel whatever he wants to feel.

He also thinks about the words you might use to tell Dylan that you’re in love. About how you might spin it so that he knows you’ve never forgotten, and never will forget, his father, but that souls move on.

About how you’ll deal with the reaction.

He lets himself hold the good version a minute. The version where Dylan grins, says he’s pleased and then turns up at his door to shake his hand and rib Ellie about how they’re going to be kind of related. How the two of them will roll their eyes and make sick noises in the backs of their throats every time Joel touches you.

He doesn’t think about the alternative.

"Joel."

Ellie's voice, sharp, breaks into his thoughts again. Not scared-sharp, rather alert-sharp.

He comes out of the daydream fast. "What?"

She's reined up. Ahead of them the trail dips through a thin screen of aspens, and past the pale trunks, in a clearing that hasn't been there on any map Joel keeps in his head, something sits that shouldn't.

A camp.

Not a settlement – nothing built, nothing meant to last. Rather, a rough scatter of tents, three or four of them, canvas and tarp lashed to poles and pulled taut against the weather. There’s a firepit ringed with river stone, the flames burned down to a lazy thread of smoke, and packs slumped against a fallen log. A line’s been strung between two trees with clothes hung out to dry and the whole thing has the temporary, hard-used look of men who move often and stay nowhere long.

This is where the three in the bowl have come from. This is their camp, sitting near empty while its owners lie cooling in the deadfall a couple miles back.

Joel's hand goes to his rifle without his deciding it should. "Off the trail, now. Into the trees."

They melt back into the aspens, and Joel walks his horse forward at a crawl, reading the clearing the way he reads everything – counting, weighing, looking for the thing that will kill them.

Three tents.

Three dead men.

That math works, mostly, and mostly isn’t good enough. He watches for movement, for a fourth, a fifth, for the twitch of canvas that means somebody’s home.

"Do we…?" Dylan starts.

"Quiet."

"Joel, are there more of them?" Ellie whispers, and there’s steel under it now, the girl already reaching for her rifle, thinking like the thing she'd been before Jackson. Joel hates to see it and is, in the same breath, grateful for it.

"Maybe. Camp this size, three bodies…could be the whole crew's accounted for or could be there's another out huntin', gonna come strollin' back any minute." He keeps his voice flat and low. "We don't go down there. We mark it, we go home, we bring back a proper party to clear it. This ain’t a thing three of us do on a first patrol, you hear me? Let’s go."

But Dylan isn’t listening.

There’s movement at the far edge of the camp – the flap of the largest tent is pushed back, and a figure ducks out into the grey afternoon light. It’s a man and he straightens, stretches, and stands a moment at the edge of the fire with his hands on his hips, looking out at the tree line. He’s lean, could almost be described as skeletal, clothes hanging loosely on his frame, sun-dark, older than the men in the bowl had been, with a beard grown in ragged and threaded with grey.

Dylan walks his horse a few steps forward without seeming to know he's done it, out past the last of the aspens, to where the clearing opens below them. And he goes completely still, every drop of colour draining from his face. His mouth opens, the reins hanging slack and forgotten in his hands.

"Dylan..." Joel edges up beside him, eyes snapping between the kid and the camp, hand still on his rifle. "Dylan! Get back in the trees. What are you…?"

But Dylan isn’t hearing him. He’s staring down the length of the clearing at the man by the fire, staring the way a person stares at something the world has already taught them can't be there, at a shape pulled straight up out of the deepest grief he owns.

And the man by the fire turns his head, and looks up the rise toward the tree line, toward the three riders half-broken from the cover of the aspens…and goes as still as Dylan.

Dylan makes a sound that isn’t a word at all, not at first, just a torn thing out of the bottom of his chest. Then it shapes itself, cracked straight down the middle, a child's voice come back into the throat of a boy who’s started becoming a man.

"Dad?"

And that one word stops Joel's heart cold in his chest.

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