Isabellaboo2025

You've made it. That’s the thing you carry up the path in the falling snow, heavier than the covered dish in your hands, heavier than anything – you've made your choice, finally. You've chosen Matt, chosen Dylan, chosen the family you built, and the shape of a life that lets your son grow up whole.

You’ll end things with Joel, all the way, for good, soon. And the soon of it sits in you like something you've already swallowed and can’t bring back up. You’ll give your son his father and his family and his whole world, and you’ll learn, over years, to fold the rest of yourself away where it won’t show. And all you have to do is get through Christmas dinner first, seated three feet from the man you've chosen to give up.

Dylan pounds on the door hollering Christmas greetings and it swings open into light, heat and the smell of roast and cinnamon. Maria's arms pull all of you in out of the cold, and suddenly there’s no more time to brace for anything.

Joel’s already there, standing near the hearth with a glass in his hand when the three of you come stamping in, and you feel him before you see him, that awful radar you've never asked for. You make yourself not look as you take your coat off, and across the warm room you feel him not-look at you with the same ferocious care, and the whole bright Christmas room goes instantly, silently, unbearably tight.

You agonised over what to wear today, finally eschewing your collection of worn jeans, shirts and sweaters in favour of a simple plaid dress that you found in a bag at the shop one day, blue and green, with a scooped neckline and a hem that sits mid-thigh. You chose it because it’s Christmas and, for one day, you want to feel a little more special. But you’d be lying if you said you hadn’t also chosen it for the way you know it skims your frame and flatters your chest. And then, almost as an antithesis to that, you made sure to completely straighten your hair – no curling loose ends.

You pass your coat to Maria and feel your stomach churn.

He doesn’t know and that’s the thing that makes it so much worse, that makes the stone in your chest so heavy you can hardly breathe around it. Joel doesn’t know you've chosen. The last thing you said to him, weeks ago, was that it wasn’t goodbye, and then the weeks have gone by in the terrible patient way he’s honoured your space, waiting, never pushing, still thinking that there’s a road open to him.

He's come to this dinner not knowing that somewhere in you the road is blocked, that you've chosen the other man, that he's already lost and just doesn’t know it yet. And you’re going to have to sit and smile, pass the potatoes, and let him keep his hope one more evening because you’re too much of a coward to take it from him at Christmas.

Maria notices because she notices everything. Something flickers across her face as she takes in you and Matt and Joel by the fire and the way nobody’s looking at anybody whilst Dylan bounds off to find Ellie. She covers it smoothly with warm hostess chatter and the afternoon folds over the top of the tension the way water folds over a stone.

You watch Matt shake Joel's hand – something you’ll remember as long as you live. Your husband and the man you’re going to give up, clasping hands in the Christmas light with the whole unbearable truth standing invisible between them. There’s something different in Matt tonight, something steadier, and it’s in the set of his shoulders and the firmness of his grip. A man who's been told he's won and is trying not to show it in front of the man who's lost. Joel takes the handshake, meets it and doesn’t flinch, some silent conversation passing between them that you can’t hear and don’t need to.

Except that this time you know something Joel doesn’t, and it makes watching it almost more than you can stand.

“Hey, Merry Christmas!” Tommy says, bounding over and kissing you on the cheek before divesting you of the dish.

Then he hands round the whisky with a rough joviality that’s working a little too hard, and Maria moves through it all like a woman conducting an orchestra where half the players are on fire, keeping the surface bright, keeping the kids fed with pre-dinner cookies and talking about the weather and the horses and the state of the greenhouses.

“Better with no busted locks, huh?” Dylan jokes at one point, ducking out of the way with a grin when she makes to swipe at him with a tea towel.

And through all of it you don’t look at Joel and Joel doesn’t look at you and the not looking is so total and so effortful that it becomes its own kind of shouting.

You can’t help but catch him once. You turn to answer something Ellie asks you and the turn carries your eyes across the room by accident, and there he is, already looking, because he's been fighting the same losing battle you have. For one half-second your eyes meet full-on across the firelit room before you both tear away – and in that half-second you see everything in his face, the whole three weeks of it. The love and the want and the patient hope and the sheer starved gladness of just being in a room with you at Christmas which goes through you like a blade, because you know what you’re carrying. You know the door has already shut, know that face is hoping for a thing you've already decided to deny it, and you reach for your whisky, drink too fast, blink hard and say something bright to Ellie in response.

When dinner’s finally called, it’s worse.

Maria’s made an occasion of it – candles down the table, the roast that must have taken a hell of a trade, greenery, the mismatched good plates, Ellie, Dylan and Benji at one end, happy and loud in their own ways, and the five adults ranged down the rest. The seating puts you across the table and one place down from Joel, so that the natural resting place for your eyes, every time you lift them from your plate, is his face, and the natural resting place for his, every time he lifts his, is yours. And the two of you spend the whole, long meal in an exhausting elaborate choreography of not looking, staring at your food, at the candle flames, at Dylan, at Maria, at the salt, at anything and everything but the one place on the whole earth your eyes want to go.

Matt sits beside you, close, warm and easy. Every so often his hand finds your knee under the table, or he’ll lean to murmur something in your ear, some small, ordinary, marital intimacy. You murmur back and lean into it because you've chosen it, and it should feel like relief, but instead every one of those small, warm, marital touches is a fresh small knife. You can feel Joel across the table clocking them, feel him watching Matt's hand find your knee, watching you lean into your husband's murmur, and you know what it’s doing to him, know he’s sitting there reading the body language of a woman who's made her choice and hasn't told him yet. And you can’t stop Matt's hand and you can’t tell Joel, and so you just have to sit inside it, the two men on either side of your attention, the one you've chosen touching your knee and the one you're giving up watching him do it.

"This roast is incredible,” Matt says to Maria at one point. "I don't know how you did it, I truly don't."

"Tommy traded three days' labour for that cut," Maria says dryly, "so enjoy it, it near bankrupted us.”

Everyone laughs, the surface holds, and under the table Matt's thumb moves on your knee. Across the table Joel picks up his water glass and sets it down again without drinking, and you watch his hand do it, think about that hand and have to look at the candle.

"Hey Joel," Dylan says suddenly, obliviously. “When can we go back out on patrol?

The whole table's easy attention swings, casually and warmly, toward Joel and you feel the heat start up your neck before Joel’s even opened his mouth.

“You wanna go back out there?” he asks, his voice steady. But you hear under it, because you've learned his voice.

“Of course!” Dylan grins. “Who knows who else we might find out there? Me and Ellie reckon we ought to start some sort of group – the Finders gang, or something. We could make it part of the patrol to search for lost loved ones.”

“Dylan…” Matt says softly.

“What?” Dylan’s gaze swings to his father. “We found you, didn’t we?”

“Reckon that was more by luck than anything else.”

“Still.”

You glance at Ellie and realise she’s looking at you with an expression that you’ve seen from her before in recent times and yet still can’t quite read. Then she looks at Dylan and grins in solidarity.

“Me and the D-Dog, bringing ‘em home.”

“You both did good out there,” Joel says softly. “I’ll take you out again whenever you want.”

He looks at Dylan and smiles a real smile, warm and helpless. Because whatever else is true in the whole impossible mess, Joel cares about him and has been, in every way that matters, the closest thing to a father. And that’s its own separate grief threaded through all the rest, one you haven’t even let yourself look at squarely. That choosing Matt doesn’t only take Joel from you, it takes Joel from Dylan too, quietly, over time, the way these things go.

“Yeeeeessss!” Dylan says, high-fiving Ellie.

“Maybe I could train for patrol,” Matt says suddenly and your entire body goes cold. “What do you say, Dylan? Joel could train me too and then the two of us could go out there. Maybe even the three of us if Mom feels up to it,” he adds, squeezing your knee again.

“Really?” Dylan looks from his father to you to Joel and then back again. “That would be awesome! Joel?”

Everyone swings to look at Joel again and when you brave a glance, you see that his eyes are still on Dylan.

“Sure,” he says, tightly. “We could do that. Your dad’s a fighter and we need all the good people we can get.”

Matt nods happily at Dylan as though that settles it. But he doesn’t look at Joel and Joel doesn’t look at him and you look at your plate, and think, with a kind of despair, that even the choice you've made, the clean right choice, isn’t going to be clean at all. That it’s going to have roots to tear up for years.

Maria chooses that exact moment to stand and announce the serving of the pie, the spell scatters, and you could weep with gratitude.

You get through the pie, through Tommy standing, gruff and unexpectedly moved, glass raised, to toast the ones who made it home this year – lifting the whisky toward Matt – and everyone drinks to it, including you, and means it. God help you, you do mean it. You’re glad he’s alive, and you don’t look at Joel, who’s also lifting his glass, also drinking to the return of the very man who's taken you away, and you can’t imagine what it tastes like, drinking to his own defeat at his brother's Christmas table.

You get through Dylan and Ellie spiriting Benji away to the other room to play and the loosening later phase of the evening, the adults migrating to the fire, the whisky going round again, the talk going soft and slow. You get through Matt, warm and easy and reclaimed, sitting close to you on the couch with his arm along the back of it behind your shoulders, a man settling back into a marriage he's been told is his again.

"I’ll go check on the kids,” he says at one point, before squeezing your shoulder, getting up and heading into the other room where there’s some sort of raucous game being played. Tommy, Maria and Joel are deep in conversation and you – needing air, needing a task, needing not to sit alone by the fire feeling Joel across the room a moment longer – get up, gather a stack of dessert plates and carry them through to the kitchen.

The kitchen is empty and warm, the window over the basin full of falling snow, and you set the plates down by the sink, roll up your sleeves, run the water hot and let out a long breath, alone at last. You think, standing there with your hands going into the hot water, that you've nearly made it, you've nearly gotten through the whole terrible evening and that in an hour or so, you'll be walking home through the snow with your chosen family with this behind you and you'll only have the telling of him left to dread.

Then the kitchen door swings open, and Joel comes in with a trayful of dirty glasses.

You go still with your hands in the water and don’t turn around. You both understand at once, in the silence that drops over the kitchen that the choreography has failed. The evening has thrown the two of you together, alone, with everyone else scattered. No one is coming, not for a few minutes at least, and here you are, alone with Joel with three weeks of everything between you and a decision in your chest you haven't told him and can’t bear to tell him and can't bear to keep from him either.

"Figured I should bring these though,” he says, and it’s such a transparent, thin, nothing of a sentence that it almost undoes you.

"Just…set them down there," you manage. "I'll get to them."

He sets the tray down and then he doesn’t leave. You can feel him standing there behind you, and the silence stretches and begins to fill up with everything, all of it crowding into the kitchen at once until the air is so thick you can hardly draw it into your lungs.

Tell him, you think. Tell him now and get it over with.

You've decided and you owe him the truth. You should do the brave thing, the clean thing, and tell him now while you're alone and be done with it.

You turn around, half-meaning to, your mouth already opening around the terrible words – and he’s looking at you. He’s looking at you full-on, for the first time all night, the first time for weeks, and it stops the words dead in your throat. You’ve forgotten what it actually does to you to look at Joel straight on with nothing in the way, and the whole weight of the thing you’re about to end crashes into you at once. He’s looking down at you with his whole heart naked in his face, no public mask, no gravel-steady control, just the raw held-back love and hope of a man who's starved and thinks there’s still a fight to win.

"Joel," you say, and your voice comes out wrong, thin and wrecked. "Joel, I have to…there's something I have to tell you, and I don't…God, I don't want to do it here, not at Christmas, but I can't keep…I've…"

You can’t say it. It sticks in your throat like a bone.

"There's something I have to tell you," you say again, helplessly as your eyes fill with tears.

He sees it, reads you the way you read him. He sees the shape of it in your wet eyes and your broken voice and the way you can’t finish, and something crosses his face, some flinch, some dawning, and then…you watch him decide not to let you say it. You watch him step in, closer, fast, before you can get the words out, as though the words unsaid can still be fought. As though he can win if only you don’t finish the sentence.

"No," he says, low and rough. "No, don't. Before you say it, let me…"

He takes your wet hands in both of his and holds them between you. He looks down at them and then up at you, and it costs him, you can see it cost him, this closed-off man doing the hardest thing he knows how to do, wanting out loud where it can be seen and refused.

“I know I promised you space and that I’d never push. But you told me that night that it wasn’t goodbye and yet I’ve seen…I can't stand here and let you say it's done and not fight, not once, not even one time, after these last three weeks. So let me be selfish just this once. I love you. I love you more than anythin’ in this goddamn fucked up world and I wanna be with you. I want you to choose me. Choose a life with me. I'm beggin' you, don't do the thing where you bury yourself alive and call it bein' a good mother, please. Choose me. Choose us.”

And it’s the wrong thing, the selfish thing. The thing that breaks every rule and every promise, the thing that makes a wreck of the clean, brave choice and it goes through you like lightning. Because it’s also the true thing, the thing you've been dying to hear and dying not to hear, and you've built your whole hard-won decision on the belief that it’s settled, that the door is shut, that you've come to the still, cold bottom of it and chosen. And here he is tearing the door back open with his bare hands, wanting you out loud, this man who never asks for anything, begging at Christmas, and every wall you have left simply gives way.

"Joel, you can't…you can't do this,” you breathe. “I decided, I chose. I told Matt I want to stay, that I want to fix it. I have a son and I have to give him his…you can't come in here and…"

Even as you say it your hands are gripping his back, hard, holding on instead of pulling away, and your face streams with tears.

"…it isn't fair, it isn't fair, but I finally decided. I finally got to the bottom of it and chose the right thing, the thing for Dylan, and you…you don't get to…"

You can’t finish that either, because it isn’t true.

"Tell me you don't love me," he says, low and fierce, his forehead dropping toward yours. "Tell me that and I'll let you go. Tell me you don't want me and I'll stand aside and never say another word. I'll be the man across the square you nod to. I'll take Dylan out on patrol and keep my hands to myself until I die. Say that. Say you don't love me and I'll believe you and it's done."

"I can't," you sob, wretched, because you’re done lying and that includes lying to him, cruel as the truth is. "I can't say it, you know I can't. I love you, God, I love you, that was never…that was never the question, Joel, don't you understand? I chose him anyway. I love you and I chose him anyway, because loving you isn't the only thing that's true, because there's my son and because…"

And then he kisses you.

It isn't the crash you've braced for. It’s slow and sweet and aching, his mouth coming down on yours gentle, reverent, both hands moving to cradle your face like something he’s terrified of breaking. You feel the whole three weeks of restraint in it, the whole last two years, all the tenderness he never got to show in daylight poured into one soft desperate kiss.

You move your hands up against his chest to push him away and make a sound of protest into his mouth. You even turn your face a fraction to break the contact, but he follows, gentle and patient, kissing the corner of your mouth, your cheek and your jaw.

“Please,” he murmurs, “please baby…”

Your pushing hands curl slowly into fists in his shirt and pull. Suddenly you’re lost, simply lost, three weeks of famine and a love you've decided to give up and haven't, and you kiss him back and feel him groan low and grateful against your mouth.

"Not in here," you gasp against his lips, and it isn’t no, God help you, it’s the opposite. "Anyone could…Joel, not in here…"

His hand closes around your wrist, and you don’t pull away as he moves you to the door off the far side of the kitchen, the one to the woodshed lean-to, a little dark close space under the eave of the porch roof where the split logs are stacked. You both go, fast and silent, out into the cold black-and-blue dark with the snow ticking down and the muffled warmth of the house pressed against the other side of the wall. The door swings shut behind you, cutting the lamplight to almost nothing.

And then it isn’t fast at all.

That’s the thing that will ruin you to remember. He doesn’t take you against the woodpile in a desperate rush. He backs you up against the inside of the shut door, gently, and kisses you again, slow, in the dark, both hands in your hair now, taking his time like a man who's decided that he’s going to make love to you properly.

His hands move unhurried down your body, learning you again, over your breasts, your waist, gathering your dress in his fists and drawing it up your thighs by degrees. And when he pushes your underwear aside and his fingers find you bare and slick and ready, he groans soft into your mouth, but he doesn’t rush even then. He strokes you slow and gentle, drawing it out, until you’re rocking helplessly against his hand and whimpering into his kiss, until you can’t stand it, until you’re reaching for his belt with shaking hands.

He catches your wrist gently and does it himself, unhurried, freeing himself, and then he hooks one of your thighs up over his hip, lines himself against you and pushes in slow – so slow, so deep, one long unhurried glide all the way to the root that you both have to swallow the sounds of, his forehead dropping to yours in the dark, your fingers digging into his back – and then he stills, buried deep, and just breathes with you a moment, joined, both of you shaking.

"There," he murmurs, wrecked, against your mouth. "God, there. Feel that? Tell me that ain't real."

And then he moves – slow, deep, unhurried rolls of his hips that drag him nearly all the way out and press all the way back in, so deep you feel it everywhere, pinning you gently against the door with every stroke, his hand cradling the back of your head to keep it from knocking the wood, his other arm banded under your thigh to hold you open to him. It’s slow and hot and so deep and so full of love it hurts worse than any rushed thing could have.

Because a quick desperate fuck you could call a mistake – a hunger, a weakness – but this, this slow, tender, thorough lovemaking against a door in the dark…this is a marriage, this is the thing itself, this is the whole life you’re saying no to, given to you once so you'll know exactly what you’re choosing against.

"I love you," he breathes against your mouth between kisses, on every slow deep stroke, "I love you…I love you."

You gasp it back into him, "I love you, Joel, God, I love you," and you have to swallow each other's sounds with your mouths because the house is right there.

He rolls into you slow and deep and endless, and you rise to meet every stroke, your hands mapping his back, his shoulders, his face in the dark, memorising, and it builds slow and unstoppable, a tide instead of a wave, coming up through both of you together.

He reaches between you and strokes your clit in slow circles matched to his hips. “Come with me, baby, let me feel you…”

You tip over the edge together in the dark, silent, clinging, your body clenching around him as he presses deep and shudders and spills into you, both of you shaking apart against the door with your mouths pressed together to muffle the sounds, holding on like the world is ending.

He stays inside you after, holding you up against the door, his face buried in your neck, both of you breathing hard, neither of you moving. And you understand, holding him, that your body and your heart have just told you the whole truth at once, and now you have to walk back into the house and lie about it for the rest of your life.

"I love you," he says again into your neck, quiet now. "I hear what you’re sayin’ and I understand but…don't choose him. We just made love, and you cried and said you loved me the whole way through, and I can't believe the choice is realer than that."

"It has to be," you whisper, voice breaking on every word. "This being real doesn't make the choice not real. They're both real. Don't you think I'd have chosen this in a heartbeat if it were only about what's real between you and me? But it isn’t. It’s about my son who doesn't get a vote and who loves his father and who would spend his whole childhood inside the wreckage of what we'd blow up. And his happiness is realer than this, bigger than this. It has to be, or I'm not a person I can live with being."

You grip his shirt, hard with both fists.

"I chose Matt. I chose Dylan. This…" you press closer, shaking, "…this doesn't undo it. It just makes it cost more. It just proves how much it costs. We can be friends. That’s all I can give you and I’m sorry, I’m so goddamn sorry…”

You push him away from you, pull your dress back down and turn away, slipping back through the door into the kitchen. You go straight to the basin and plunge your hands back into the water that’s now gone lukewarm and press them flat against the bottom of the sink to stop them shaking. Fixing your eyes on the snow outside, you breathe, your whole body still humming with him, still aching sweet and used and full. And you think, dazed and hollow, that you’ve just said goodbye to the great love of your life against a woodpile at Christmas, and that now you only have to walk back into the living room and sit beside the man you've chosen, get through another hour and then you'll be home and this – the worst of it – will be behind you.

You should have known better. You should have felt it coming off him in the dark, in the way he held you, in the way he said choose me like a man who hasn't finished losing and, for once, is prepared to hang on until the bitter end.

Joel comes in the kitchen a minute later, but he doesn’t move past you and doesn’t go back into the living room to be with the others. Instead, he stands behind you, close enough that you can feel the heat radiating from his body.

"I can't do it," he says, his voice full of a kind of grim risen resolve. “I won't. I've spent my whole life standin' back and lettin' things happen to me, lettin' the world take what it wanted and tellin' myself that's just how it goes, that's just bein' decent, that's just survivin'. And I did that with you for three weeks whilst you picked yourself up after him comin’ home. And then tonight I had you in my arms tellin' me you love me and I'll be damned if I stand back one more time and watch the best thing that ever happened to me walk out a door because she decided sufferin' is the same thing as bein' a good mother."

You turn to look at him and see the set of his jaw.

"I ain’t acceptin' it. I'm done acceptin' things. For the first time in longer than I can remember I want somethin', and it's you, and I'm gonna fight for it."

"Joel…"

Your voice shakes, and fear comes up in you fast, because the door to the living room is thirty feet away and your husband is somewhere on the other side of it.

“Keep your voice down, please, you can't…"

"I don't care who hears," he says, not loud, but not lowered either, and it terrifies you worse than shouting would have. "That's the thing. I've been careful around you for so goddamn long. Careful is what got us here – me careful, you careful, everybody so careful nobody ever says the true thing out loud til it's too late to matter. I'm done bein' careful. I'll say it in this kitchen, and I'll say it in that room, and I'll say it in the middle of the square if that's what it takes.”

He takes a breath,

“I love you and I want you and I am not gonna stand here and watch you bury yourself alive next to a man you settled for and call it a gift to your son."

"You don't get to decide that." The fear turns to anger, the only thing big enough to stand against the pull of him. "You don't get to…Joel, this is my life, mine. And Matt's, and Dylan's. You don't get to walk in here and decide you're going to blow it all up because you've decided, all of a sudden, that you're a man who fights now. This isn't yours to fight for. It's mine to decide, and I decided, and you don't get to detonate my whole family because you can't stand losing."

"I don't care,” he says flatly. “I don't care that it's not fair, I don't care that it's not mine to decide, I don't care that it makes me the bad man in the story…I don't care. I care about one thing. I care that you're about to throw your whole life in a hole for the next forty years and tell yourself it's love when it's just fear dressed up in a sacrifice. And I am not gonna stand back and watch you ruin yourself and call my standin'-back decency. Not anymore. I'd rather be the bastard who fought than the decent man who let you drown quiet. So, no. I ain’t respectin' the decision and I ain’t leavin' it alone. I'm gonna fight."

And it’s too much – all of it, the feel of him still warm on your skin and the love roaring up in you and the terror of the room thirty feet away and the plain unbearable fact that some part of you wants him to fight, wants to be fought for, and that wanting is the most dangerous thing in the room – and you can’t stand in it another second. So, you do the only thing left. You turn to walk away, toward the door, toward the living room and your husband and your son and the choice you've made.

He moves at the same time you do, his hand closing around your arm. Not hard, but enough to stop you. You turn back, and for a second you stand there, his hand around your arm, both of you breathing too hard, the whole thing hanging in the air between you like something about to break.

"Let go of me," you say quietly, voice shaking over the words.

"Just listen…"

"Joel, let go, please!"

The kitchen door swings open and Maria comes inside, her eyes taking everything in at a glance – the two of you close, his hand on your arm, your face, his face, the charge in the air – and she crosses the kitchen fast and quiet.

"Let go of her, Joel."

He obeys immediately, his hand dropping away like the arm has gone hot, and Maria steps in close, between you almost, looking from one of you to the other.

"You need to remember where you are, both of you. Dylan and Matt are both in the other room so whatever you’re doing doesn’t happen in my kitchen at Christmas with everybody I love on the other side of that wall, you hear me? You will pull yourselves together and remember where you are."

It’s the thing you need, the cold water of it, the reminder of the room and the world and the walls, and you nod silently. Maria's eyes soften just a fraction as they go over your ruined face and then harden again as they move to Joel.

But Joel doesn’t nod. He doesn’t acquiesce and say it’s alright. Instead, he stands there with his hands loose at his sides and his jaw set.

"I know where I am, Maria,” he says. “I know exactly where I am and I'm done pretendin' I don't want what I want just 'cause of where I'm standin'."

"Joel…" you say and it comes out breaking.

You swallow and gather the last of yourself because Maria’s right, because the walls are thin, and because there’s no other way to end it.

“You need to leave me alone, okay? You need to respect my decision. It’s done, and you need to leave me alone and let me live it. Please, I’m begging you."

He looks at you a long moment, his face terrible – not angry or hard, just open, wrecked and certain all at once.

“I can’t.”

Two words. I can't. Not I won't, but rather I can't, the way you said I can't when he asked you to say you don’t love him, the same helpless bottomless can't. It goes through you like the kiss, and you understand that he means it exactly the way you meant yours, that it’s not a choice he’s making but a truth he’s reporting. That he’s as unable to leave you alone as you've been unable to say you don’t love him, and the symmetry of it is so unbearable that you can’t stand in the room one more second.

You turn to leave and this time he doesn’t grab your arm. He lets you go, and you push through the door into the living room too fast. Ellie, Dylan and Benji are back in the room, everyone looks up, and you know your face is wrong, know it before you've taken two steps, know it in the way the easy talk falters.

Matt stands up, his face moving to something alert and hard in the space of a breath, because he can see your white face and your red-rimmed eyes. Joel follows you seconds later and you watch your husband put it together fast.

"What happened?" Matt asks, his eyes going past you to Joel, and hardening as he takes a step forwards. "Did he…?”

"No…" you say quickly, moving between them. “It's nothing, please don't."

Your voice breaks and you see Matt register that you’re begging him not to talk to Joel and what that begging means – that a wife who has nothing to hide doesn’t beg her husband not to have words with a man who's upset her.

"It's not…we just…it's a hard time of year for everybody. Please, Matt, I don't want a scene, not right now, please. I just want to go home. Can we please just go home?"

He gives you a long look, and you watch him decide, for now, to let it be, to swallow it, to take you home – not because he believes it’s nothing, you can see he doesn’t, but because making it something here, now, would cost too much.

"Okay," he says, gently. “Let’s head home."

“Now?” Dylan protests, looking between you, “but…”

“Dylan doesn’t have to go, right?” Ellie pipes up quickly. “We can go back to mine and listen to some music or shit.”

“Please?” Dylan begs. “It’s still early.”

“Fine,” Matt says before you can reply. “Not too late though.”

Across the room Joel stands by the kitchen door with his jaw set and his eyes on you, not sorry, not backing down, and you can feel it coming off him like heat, the resolve, the refusal. You know this isn’t the end of it, know that walking out this door tonight isn’t walking away from it, isn’t going to leave you alone no matter how you beg, that the fight has only just started and it’s going to burn its way through all of your lives whether you will it or not.

Maria comes out of the kitchen with some wrapped pie and the surface folds back over, thin and bright and false, and you thank her and get your coat on with hands that won’t quite work. You don’t look at Joel, and he doesn’t stop looking at you, and Matt stands close and watchful and doesn’t say the thing that’s building behind his face.

“Thanks Dad,” Dylan says, giving you both an uncharacteristic quick hug. “You can have some alone time.”

You let out a short, strangled laugh, feel your face burn and make for the door.

"Best Christmas ever, right, Mom?"

You pause, turn back, and swallow hard before replying.

"Yeah, honey, best one ever."

It comes out cracked, and you see Matt hear the crack, and Joel close his eyes for a second at the sound of it.

Maria hugs you warmly, Tommy kisses your cheek then claps Matt on the shoulder, too hearty, avoiding both your eyes and Joel’s.

Joel follows you both out onto the porch and he shakes Matt's hand one more time in a very different way from the one proffered and accepted before dinner. Matt's grip is hard and searching, Joel's steady and unrepentant, and it goes on a beat too long before breaking.

"Merry Christmas," Joel says to you softly, and there’s a whole world in it, a whole refusal, a whole I can't.

"Merry Christmas, Joel," you reply, your voice holding by a thread. Then you’re moving down the path in the falling snow with your husband's hand at the small of your back, walking away into the dark.

Behind you, the light of the house spills yellow out onto the snow, and even though you don’t look back, you can feel him standing in the doorway watching you go, feel it between your shoulder blades the whole length of the path. You know, with a cold certainty, that he meant every word of what he said. That a man who's decided, after years of standing back, to want something out loud and fight for it isn’t going to change his mind because you begged him in a kitchen.

That this is a beginning, not an ending, and it’s going to come for all of you.

Matt doesn’t say anything right away. He waits until you’re around the corner, your own home in sight.

"You going to tell me what happened in there?"

You look at his profile, and feel the whole true answer rise up in your throat – we made love and he won’t accept my decision and he told me he’ll fight for me – but then you think about Dylan saying it’s been the best Christmas ever, and you swallow all of it back down.

"Nothing happened.”

It comes out steadier than you have any right to expect, and you hear yourself say it and know that the lie, smooth and quick and protective is part of what you've chosen, is the shape the choice actually takes when it comes down to it. And you understand in that moment with a cold clarity, that choosing the family means choosing to lie to keep it, over and over.

"It was just a long afternoon," you say, softer. “We got to talking about hard things and it got to me, that's all. I'm tired, Matt. I'm just tired.”

“Did you tell him?”

“Mm…that’s why it was hard.”

Matt walks a few steps in silence, and you can’t tell how much of it he believes, or wants to believe, or makes himself believe. Because a man whose been told his wife has chosen him, is a man with a powerful reason to accept nothing happened and will choose to accept it because the alternative is unbearable. You watch him accept it, watch him take the lie, fold it into his coat and decide, tonight at least, that it’s enough.

"Okay," he says, finally. "You did look done in, in there. Came out of that kitchen white as the snow."

He reaches across the space between you, takes your hand and squeezes it. You squeeze back and walk the rest of the way home hand in hand with the man you've chosen, having just lied to him.

At the front door, he stops and turns to look at you again.

"If something had happened with Joel...you'd tell me, wouldn’t you?"

It isn't quite a question and isn’t quite an accusation. It’s a man reaching out one more time in the dark to check the ground under his own feet.

You look at him, with one more chance to stop, to tell the truth, to blow it all open and let it be true – and decide not to take it.

"Of course I would," you say, making yourself meet his eyes. "There's nothing to tell, Matt. I chose you, I meant it, I told Joel and it’s done. Now let's get inside before we both freeze standing here.”

Matt looks at you for a long moment, and then something eases in him, some knot loosens, because he wants so badly to believe you and belief is a thing a hopeful man extends himself out of love.

"Yeah, okay, let’s get in.”

He holds the door open and you step inside, fighting against the thumping of your heart and the terrifying reality that you have no idea what happens now.

❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

She’s so small that the impossibility of her feels, for a long, suspended moment, like a kind of vertigo. Her fist against your chest is only slightly bigger than the pad of your thumb, the fingernails on it smaller than grains of rice. Her eyelashes – dark, thick and clumped wet at the corners – lie on her cheeks like tiny commas. Her mouth is pink, half-open and slack with sleep, and there’s a small bubble of milk at the corner of it that you wipe away with the pad of your little finger.

She has his nose. You hadn't seen it before, in the rush, but you see it now and laugh wetly. Bending your head, you press your mouth to her warm crown and breathe her in – the warm, new smell of her, the milk and the iron-trace and the strange sweet impossible smell of new skin.

"He'll be back,” you whisper into her skin. “He'll be back, sweetheart. Your buir always comes back."

She breathes, tiny and even, and her fist opens against your bare chest and rests there, palm flat, the trust of a thing that doesn’t yet know it can be afraid.

You lie still and listen as the hold ticks around you with the sound of metal cooling and there’s a faint creak somewhere aft as the wreck settles further into whatever it’s settled into. You notice the drip of something – coolant, maybe, somewhere in the bulkhead – at a slow steady rate, plink, plink, plink, like a clock. The birds outside the hole in the hull keep singing and there’s the faint distant chuckle of water somewhere past the trees.

You listen for him, for the beskar against the deck-plate but all you hear is a long silence – the kind of silence that means a man has stopped moving because he’s reached the thing he was going toward and is looking at it. You picture him in the wreck of the cockpit, the dome of the helmet tilted at the angle that means he’s assessing, the gloved hand reaching for the long-range comm panel and finding…

The personal comm in the blanket-fold by your hip clicks once causing you to jump and the baby to start fussing. You shush her gently and reach down to place your palm flat against the cylinder. He’s telling you he’s alright, that he’s thinking of you. You press once back once and feel him register it because two seconds later the cylinder clicks once more – an acknowledgment, the smallest possible yes – and goes quiet.

You breathe out, slowly and wait.

You don't know how long for because time is doing strange things tonight – the half-hour of labour that felt like a day, the long suspended second of the helmet coming off that felt like a year, the slow drift of the last little while that has been, in actual minutes, you suspect, very few. You count birdcalls, the plinks of the dripping coolant and the small breaths against your chest. The breaths of your daughter steady your own, the way his breath has steadied yours in the past through a modulator, and you laugh at the small inheritance of that.

You hear him coming back, moving differently than when he left, faster, the bad leg compensated for somehow, the bare grunt of effort each time he braces. He comes around the bend, through the canted bulkhead-door and the visor finds you immediately, the way it always does, the first sweep of the helmet always coming to wherever you are in a room. Even now. Even in a wreck. Even with the world on fire.

He drops down beside you, reaches for the helmet seal and after the soft hiss-click, his bare face is back, dark eyes on you, and the relief on his face when he sees that you’re still there, still breathing, still whole, the baby still snuffling against your chest, is so naked that you have to look away for a moment before you can look back.

"How long was I?"

"I don't know. Probably not long even though it felt like forever."

"Eight minutes. I counted."

"Of course you did," you roll your eyes.

He sets the helmet down beside him on the blanket, takes off his gloves and scrubs his hand across his face, hard, the gesture of a man who’s just been doing a great deal of difficult arithmetic and is letting himself feel it.

"Tell me what you found," you say.

"The cockpit's bad."

"How bad?"

"The whole forward section is…the canopy's gone, mesh'la, sheared clean. The pilot's chair is still bolted down but there's about three meters of nothing between it and what used to be the nose. Half the dash is in the trees. I don't know how I rode it down. I don't know what I did. It doesn't matter, the point is the long-range comm is gone. The unit's gone. It's not in the cockpit. It's somewhere, probably somewhere out there in a tree, but I don't have time to look for it before it gets dark."

"Okay."

"The short-range I already knew was dead. So, we have no comm, out or in. The personal units are short-range only. We can't reach Karga or Nevarro or anyone until I find another way."

"Okay."

"The locker’s intact. The long rifle, the carbine, the spare pistol, the kit-knives, three thermal detonators, two flares, and the med kit-supplemental are all in there and dry. The ration crate is intact. The water reclaimer is probably salvageable, but it would take me half a day, and I don't have half a day, so we’re going to drink from the stream when the canteens run out."

"Okay," you say for a third time and wonder if he’s expecting more.

"The aft hold is the only part of the ship that’s more or less the way it was. The door still seals so, as soon as you can move, we move in there. It's defensible, warm and enclosed. The hole in the hull is in the main hold, here, and I can rig a tarp over it, but I would rather have a sealed door between you and the outside.”

You nod and he nods in return before reaching, carefully, and lifting the edge of the thermal blanket. He looks underneath at the pad between your legs and nods again.

"The bleeding's slowing. That's good. The book said…"

"The book."

He laughs. "I know."

"I love that you read the book." You pause. "Tell me about outside."

"Outside is what looks like half forest, half swamp. The canopy is fifty meters up and we’re in a kind of bowl with soft undergrowth which saved us. The trees took the worst of the entry and the undergrowth took the worst of the impact. The wreck’s carved a furrow about sixty meters long through the canopy and the underbrush. Anyone flying over will see that furrow. Anyone flying over with eyes will see it from orbit. So, we’re visible from the air and there’s nothing I can do about that tonight."

"Okay.”

"The stream is, I think, about three hundred meters that way." He gestures with his chin toward what you’ve been calling the daylight side. "I haven't been to it yet. The terrain between is rocky and broken and there’s good cover. There’s a ridge on the other side, maybe about a klick from here. I couldn't see past it from where I was. If there's a settlement or a road near, it’s probably past that ridge. I’ll scout at first light tomorrow.”

"Wildlife?"

"I don't know yet. I heard birds and something larger move once at about two hundred meters out, in the brush, and then it stopped. It could have been anything, but I’ll set tripwires before nightfall. If something comes close enough to trip one, I’ll know."

"And if it's people?"

His jaw works.

"Then I’ll know that too," he says, "and I’ll deal with it."

You look at him a long moment and see that the tiredness in him is enormous. It’s starting, now, to show – the small grey under his eyes, the small tremor at the corner of his mouth, the way his hand on his knee isn’t entirely steady. He’s been on his feet, or on his knee, or hauling himself on his elbows, for the better part of an hour without rest, with a torn leg, having just delivered his first child in a wreck and you know he’s going to drop if he doesn't sit down soon.

"Din."

"Mm."

"Come here."

"Mesh'la, I have to…"

"Come here. Five minutes, I’m ordering you as your wife, the mother of your child and as your patient. As the woman who just gave birth on this deck-plate. Come here for five minutes, put your head down and breathe before you go anywhere else."

He looks at you. You watch the resistance gather and you watch it lose. He drags himself the half metre to your side, careful of the leg, eases down into the blanket-nest beside you, and lets his head fall, very slowly, onto your shoulder, on the side that’s not occupied by the baby.

He sighs a real, whole sigh. The kind a body makes when, for the first time in an hour, it’s allowed to admit that it’s tired. His arm comes across your middle, his hand finding the small of the baby's back and rests there, gently, his forehead pressing into the side of your neck.

You stroke his hair and realise it’s thicker than you would’ve guessed, damp at the roots and slightly curling at the ends. You stroke it, slow, the way you’ve stroked the back of his neck through the underweave a thousand times, and he sighs again, deeper, his hand on the baby's back goes going heavier.

"Five minutes," you whisper.

"Five minutes."

"Then you can go set your tripwires, rig your tarp and be terrifyingly competent.”

He laughs, a small, wet laugh against your neck. "Deal."

"Din."

"Mm."

"We're going to be alright, aren’t we?"

He pauses and his arm tightens, very slightly, around your middle, his hand spreading across the baby’s back.

"Yes," he says softly in a voice you’re still learning. "Yes, mesh'la, we’re going to be alright."

You don't know if you believe it. You don't know if he believes it. It doesn't, in this moment, matter. The leaf-light moves across the wrecked deck, the coolant plinks, the birds sing and your daughter breathes against your chest. The man you love – the face of the man you love, the whole face, the dark hair and the dark eyes and the small scars and the curved nose and the threads of grey – rests against your shoulder and breathes with you.

The helmet sits on the blanket beside him, and somewhere out past the ridge there may be a settlement or there may be a road or there may be nothing, and somewhere overhead there may be eyes coming or there may not, and you have, in this moment, five minutes.

You both take them.

****

The five minutes become ten and you let them. He needs them and you need them and the baby on your chest needs the quiet, warm tucked-in space of both of you breathing around her, and when he finally lifts his head from your shoulder it’s slow and reluctant, the lift of a man pulling himself back into the work by force.

"Alright," he says, softly and he goes back to the work at hand of protecting his family. He rigs the tarp with more efficiency than you’ve given him credit for, then he checks the aft hold one more time before you begin the slow progress of shifting your position.

He takes the baby from you, giving you a moment to gather your strength and allow feeling to return to your limbs before gently pushing yourself up from the blanket nest and onto your feet. The ship sways around you for a moment, and he shoots out one hand to hold you steady.

“Cyar’ika…”

“I’m fine,” you reassure him as you start shuffling along the deck, a blanket carefully placed over you, clutching the pad between your legs because you’re not wearing any underwear.

The distance isn’t far, but it takes longer than you anticipated and by the time you reach the hold and sink down into a new blanket nest, you feel exhausted. He passes the baby back to you then surveys you from above, brows drawn together.

“I should stitch you now.”

“Very romantic,” you reply wryly, then grit your teeth as he drops down to the deck and goes about the work, lifting his eyes every so often to meet yours, checking that you’re okay. “I’ve heard rumours that, after witnessing childbirth, some men find it hard to go near their partners again."

“I find that hard to believe,” he replies when he's done, kissing the top of your head.

“It’s true.”

“It’s not true of this man.”

“I know,” you reply, then watch as he fits the helmet on again and ventures outside once more to place the tripwires. By the time he comes back, the baby is fussing again, and you latch her once more to your breast to feed. “There, there little one.”

He removes the helmet and lowers himself down beside you again, one hand on the back of her neck. “She needs a name.”

“She does,” you reply, then look at her, because every name you’ve ever considered somehow doesn’t seem right now that you’ve seen her.

"Mira'ika.”

You blink and look up at him. "Mira?"

He goes still, pulling back just enough to look at your face. His eyes have gone slightly wary – the look of a man who has, once again, made a private decision and is, only now, realising he made it without consulting you.

"I…I was thinking it when I was outside. I'm sorry, I should have asked. I just…I…”

"Mira."

"It means – in the old dialect – it means…"

"It means miracle, Din. I know what it means."

"...yes."

You look down at her as she snuffles against your chest, her dark eyes – still that newborn dark, the unfocused, universal dark – open under the dark wisps. You watch her watch nothing. You watch her exist. You watch her breathe in and out, in and out, the small relentless miracle of a thing that only a few hours ago was inside you and is now a person with a name.

"Mira," you say, trying it.

She blinks, slow and accidental, the way newborns do, the way that means nothing and feels like everything.

"Yes," you say, meeting his gaze. "Mira."

His face does a small fractional break-and-mend behind the eyes, his mouth presses to your hairline and the three of you stay like that for a long time.

****

“I have a question.”

Din turns from where he’s refitting the beskar he took off the previous evening so as to be able to curl in the blanket nest with you and Mira, his body warm around yours and heavy with sleep – so heavy that you had to nudge him sharply awake when you realised you needed a change of cloth diaper for her.

“What’s the question?”

“Is she Mira Djarin or Din Mira?”

He pauses as he slides on the second glove and looks from you to his sleeping daughter and then back again.

“I mean, if she’s Din Mira, does that mean I have to call both of you Din? Because that might get a little confusing.”

“Technically, following the naming convention of my family, she would be Din Mira,” he replies, “Din being the family name.”

“Wait…” you frown. “Are you telling me that Din is your family name, not your first name?”

“Yes.”

“But…all this time I thought…I’ve been calling you Din because…”

“As you should.”

“But…”

“I’ve always been Din, cyar’ika, for as long as I can remember,” he smiles. “Calling me anything else would seem strange. But we can call her Mira.”

You shake your head, thrown once more by aspects of Mandalorian culture of which you have little to no knowledge – not even your husband’s proper name.

“When we get back to Nevarro, you have to find me a book that I can read about all this.”

“I will, but not every Mandalorian names their offspring the same. In other tribes, the names could be the other way around.”

“Mmm…” you look back down at her. “Let’s stick with Mira.”

“Yes.” He lifts the helmet. "I'm going to go up the ridge and try to see what's past it. I need to know where we are, mesh'la. I can’t plan until I know where we are."

"How long will you be gone?"

"Two hours, maybe three. I'll move fast, be back as soon as I can and I’ll be careful with the leg, I promise."

"Take the carbine."

"I'm taking the carbine."

"Take water."

"I'm taking water."

"Take…"

"Cyar'ika..." he smiles eyes warm. "I have done this before."

"Not with us in the wreck of what used to be your ship."

The smile fades and he bends, kissing your lips quick and hard, the kiss of a man who’s leaving and doesn’t want to dwell on the leaving. Then he kisses Mira’s head and puts on the helmet.

The visor finds you, the modulator catching his breath.

"One, two, hold," he says.

"One, two, hold."

He nods and then he goes.

This time, you don’t count the birdcalls or the plinks. You hold Mira against your chest and let yourself simply be. You doze in long shallow drifts, surfacing again each time she fusses, changing her diaper or shifting her against the other breast then dozing again.

The smell is back.

You don't register it at first. It’s faint, layered under leaf-smell and damp-smell and the trace of coolant, and you’ve been dozing, being a new mother, and your brain has been full of other things.

But it registers now with a familiarity that you pushed away before, but now feel coming at you, head on.

You go very still and don’t move as Mira snuffles against your chest. You make yourself stroke her back, slow and automatic, the small, unconscious soothing you’ve been doing since Din left but the smell is unmistakable now – that fetid, stagnant, slimy smell that seems to invade every part of your body, clawing at the back of your throat.

That smell you remember so vividly.

You tell yourself no, that there must be a hundred planets in the galaxy that could have the same smell, that it’s generic and that you’re tired and frightened and post-partum and your brain is reaching for the worst place it knows.

The personal comm by your hip clicks twice and your blood goes cold.

You snatch it up and press it once in response. The cylinder clicks back, twice, and you realise that he’s coming back with news that you’re probably not going to like.

You wait, lying tense in the blanket-nest, listening, and then you hear him – beskar on undergrowth, the small, careful crunch of a man who’s moving fast and trying not to – and then the dragging step at the hatch, the visor coming around the bulkhead, and he’s there.

He stops just inside, the visor finding you and he’s breathing hard through the modulator. He reaches up, takes the helmet off and you can see his face is flushed, hair damp at the temples and his eyes find yours with something behind them you can’t, at first, read.

"I have to tell you something, cyar’ika and I want you to listen and not be frightened.”

"Tell me," you say, your voice shaking slightly.

"I made the ridge and I got up high enough to see down the other side. There's a road about four klicks away. It looks like a main road, but it’s completely surrounded by swamp land.”

You can't breathe.

“I looked as far as I could without being seen, but it looks as though the road leads to a palace.” He takes a breath. “I’ve seen it before – the palace – in holo images, and the swampland. I recognised it…”

“Nal Hutta."

He stops, eyes sharpening on your tone, then moves forward to kneel, awkwardly in front of you.

"Cyar'ika..."

"It's Nal Hutta, Din, isn’t it?"

"Yes.”

You make a small sound, a small, flat sound that isn’t not a word. Mira startles and squalls, and you press her tighter against you making yourself breathe. The smell is everywhere now, and you can’t believe you didn’t name it the moment the leaf-light came through the hull, can’t believe you let yourself doze in the smell of the place you swore you would die before you ever smelled again.

"I know…I understand it's frightening. But Jabba the Hutt is dead and…”

"Din…" Your voice comes out faint, high and reedy as your body starts to shake.

“I’ll protect you, you know I will…”

“No…”

"What is it?” he asks, his tone panicked at the sight of you. “Are you cold?” He pulls the blanket tighter around you. “Tell me, cyar'ika."

You look at him, his eyes wide, searching and full of the careful banked alarm of a man who’s watching the woman he loves start to fall apart.

“I’ve been on Nal Hutta before,” you whisper, “a long time ago, when I was younger. Before…before I was sent to Shakari.”

His mouth opens as though to say something, but words don’t come and he simply shakes his head.

“I was…I was brought here from my home planet when I was a child. We were…we were all taken from our homes – kidnapped – and brought here. Jabba…he ordered that we be kept here until we were considered of age to…”

You break off and close your eyes, your face dropping to press once more against Mira’s head.

“To what?” Din asks quietly, when you don’t continue.

“To be of service,” you reply finally. “When we were considered of age to be of service. That’s when we were all transported to Shakari and…and made to work. Din…” tears blur your vision, “I know I’ve never told you, about Shakari, about what life was like there before I managed to escape and climb aboard this ship. I’ve never told you…”

You pause and his eyes hold yours, his body completely still.

"You’ve never told me."

“Because I couldn’t,” you say, fighting down a sob. “I couldn’t tell you what I had to do there, what I was forced…” you swallow hard. “And you never asked. You never asked me, that day when you found me, what I was running from. I told you I needed to be taken off-world, and you took me and you never asked…”

“I assumed that one day, you’d tell me cyar’ika.” His gloved hand comes to your face, the leather brushing away the tears. “It’s your story, your…”

“It was my hell,” you gulp, “and I escaped it, and I got away and I have a life now with you and…and with her…” you look down at Mira, the whole horror of the situation gathering in your chest and making it tight. “I can’t… I can’t stay here, Din, and I can’t be sent back to Shakari, and I can’t let her go through that. I can’t let them take her. The twins, they could take her…”

“They won’t.”

"Din…"

"They won't." His hand moves to your jaw, holding you firmly, forcing you to look at him. “Look at me cyar’ika. You will not go near the palace. She will not go near the palace. The twins will not lay eyes on either of you, and neither will anyone else who might harm you. Do you hear me?”

"But my face, Din, they…"

"Do they know your face?"

"Yes. We were all scanned when we were brought here and when we left and then regularly on Shakari so that they could keep track of us. The fact that I escaped...I…they’ll know me if they see me, I know they will.”

"Alright."

He takes a breath, looks down at Mira and his face does the small fractional thing that you can now read as the deepest and oldest love he is capable of. Then he looks back up at you, and his expression is steely again.

"Alright, so we need to get out of here as quickly as we can. We don’t engage or negotiate or do anything to draw attention to ourselves. We move tonight if you can and we get the karking hell off this swamp, okay?"

"Okay…"

"But we can’t fly the Crest, so we have to find another way.”

“There’s…there’s a freighter that comes and goes once a day. It takes off at nightfall and returns in the morning. Or at least it used to, I don’t know if…” you take a deep breath to steady yourself into the logic of escape. “It moves back and forth between Nal Hutta and Nar Shaddaa. If we can somehow reach it, stow away on board and get to Nar Shaddaa, we’ll be able to catch a commercial ship from there back towards Nevarro. But…”

“We’d have to get on the freighter undetected,” he finishes.

“Yes, and I don't know if...I don't know if they check...”

"How far is the spaceport?"

"From the palace – north, around five klicks. I don't…I don't know from here.”

He’s already thinking and you can see it, visibly, in his face – the small flicker of the eyes, the small tightening at the jaw, his glove coming off, and his hand coming up to scrub across his mouth as he runs the geometry.

"Five klicks from the palace," he says, low. "From here…call it ten klicks north of us through forest and swamp. With you and her and me with this leg. We’ll have to avoid scouts and reach the port before the freighter goes up…” he nods. “This is doable.”

"Din…"

"This is doable. We will do this, do you hear me?"

"I hear you."

"Alright. I need you to rest now whilst I inventory the locker, pack what we need and only what we need and then we’re going to move, okay?”

You nod, because there’s nothing else to do.

He breathes out and bends his forehead down to yours, staying there a long second as his mouth brushes, soft, across your lips.

"I won’t let any of them near you, I swear it on every creed I have left, mesh'la. On the Way and on the Waters and on every name I have. On my very life. No-one will see your face. No-one will see her face. The Hutts will never know you were ever here and we will be safely on our way back to Nevarro before they ever find this ship. Believe me when I say this.”

“I believe you,” you whisper in return.

He straightens, picks the helmet up and slides it back on.

"Rest," he says through the modulator. "I'll be back as soon as I can once I have everything organised.”

You hold Mira against your chest as he goes about the work of preparing for escape and press your mouth into her head.

"We’re going to get out of here, sweetheart. We’re going to get out of here. Your buir is the best there is and he’s going to get us out of here and you are never going to know the smell of this planet again. I promise you. I promise you."

Mira sleeps on, oblivious, and you close your eyes, and make yourself rest, because he told you to, and because you're going to need every scrap of strength you possess to get out of this nightmare.

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

You tell him how it started. How you first saw Joel at the gate that day, how he forced them to let you in and how kind he was afterwards. How he’d been there, at the edges – Tommy's brother, Ellie's guardian, a hard closed-off man everyone was a little wary of yet trusted with their lives. How the two of you had been thrown together by the plain circumstance of the teenagers, Dylan and Ellie falling into their odd, fierce friendship, and the two of you finding yourselves at the same doorways with the same low-grade daily worry of raising kids who've survived too much too young in a world that's still trying to kill them.

"It was that first," you say. "Just…two people with kids who've seen too much. We'd end up on a porch somewhere while they did whatever they were doing inside, and we'd talk. About them, at first, about how much you tell them, how much you let them see. He's…"

Your voice catches.

"He's been through it before. He lost a child, a long time ago, and then he found Ellie, and he understood things about it that nobody else in my life understood. About loving a kid so hard it terrifies you and what it costs to keep them alive out here."

Matt lies very still, listening, his eyes fixed on your face in the low light.

"And it just…it moved. So slow I didn't see it moving."

You make yourself keep looking at him.

“He started fixing things around the house, I mended things for him and Ellie that I treated as favours rather than as part of my work at the shop and the four of us would end up at the same table more nights than not. And somewhere in there it stopped being about the kids and it became about…him. About the fact that he was the person I wanted to tell things to, good and bad. He was the first person I thought of. And I fought it, Matt, I want you to know that. I fought it for a long time, because I still hoped that one day you might come stumbling in here, whole and alive. But then I realised that I needed to let you go, needed to stop fighting it. And by the time I stopped fighting it, it was already the shape of my whole life."

"When?” Matt asks quietly. "When did it…how long has it been?"

“Physically, only a month or so before you came back but, emotionally…”

You hold his eyes because he deserves that.

“That's the…that's the terrible part of the timing. It was new. It was so new. We finally…after all that time of being careful, of me being scared, we finally let it be the whole thing. And we decided…"

And here your voice goes, finally, all the way to pieces, and you have to push the words out through it.

"The day they found you…that night I was going to sit Dylan down and tell him about us. That Joel and I were together and that we wanted to be a family." The tears come hard now. "I was going to tell Dylan he had – not a new father, I'd never have said that, but…someone. Someone who'd chosen him, chosen us. And then Dylan came through the gate screaming that they'd found you and…”

The lamp ticks softly whilst outside the snow falls soundless and endless over the sleeping town.

Matt doesn’t say anything for a long moment. His face has done something you’ve braced for and dreaded. Not anger, but a slow, sinking grief, the look of a man watching the picture he's survived on rearrange itself into a shape that still has a place for him but not the place he's dreamed. His eyes are wet and when he finally speaks his voice is rough, careful and unbearably steady.

"He was wary of me, at the camp. He had a right to be, and I just thought it was because…” he swallows. "When we arrived here, and I was trying so hard not to collapse right in front of you, I noticed that you looked at him. But I thought it was just because you were grateful…”

“I was,” you insist, “of course I was.”

"He brought me home. He found me in that camp, and he put a gun on me and made me prove I was who I said. And then he believed me, and he put me on a horse, brought me back to Jackson and walked me through that gate to my wife and my son knowing…”

His voice cracks.

“Knowing what he was carrying me back to. That he was carrying me straight into the life he'd just…God." He presses the heel of his hand against his eyes. "That's the most decent thing I ever heard of a man doing in this fucked up world. I don’t know if I…”

And you understand, watching your husband grieve for the pain of the man who loves you, exactly what kind of person Matt is, and exactly why you married him once, and exactly why this is so impossibly, unbearably hard. Because there are no villains here, no one to be angry at, no betrayal to point to, no easy shape to any of it. There’s just three good people and a boy, and a world that took a man and then gave him back too late. Everyone doing the most decent thing they can manage in an impossible situation, and the doing of it breaking all of them a little.

"Do you love him?"

You hear how much it costs him to ask it, and you hear that he’s asking it plainly and know you owe him the true answer even though it’s like a knife to your heart.

Yes," you reply softly. "I do. I'm not going to lie to you about it because you'd know. Yes, I love him."

Matt nods slowly as the word lands in him. You watch it land, watch him absorb it the way he must have learned to absorb blows in those two years, taking it into the body, letting it move through, staying standing. His hand finds yours in the dark and holds it, and that gentleness in the middle of his own hurt is almost more than you could bear.

"Okay," he says roughly. "Okay. Thank you for telling me the truth." He breathes, unsteady. "It hurts like hell. I won't pretend it doesn't. I came home to a picture that I’ve been holding onto for two years and the picture has another man in it. That's…"

He stops and swallows.

"But I understand it. That's the thing. I'm lying here and it hurts and I can't even be angry, because what were you supposed to do – wait? You didn't know that I was alive. You had every reason to think I was dead. You grieved me, you did it right, and then you were alive and still young and you had a whole life still to live and you found somebody good…because he is good, isn't he? That's the hell of it, he's obviously a good man…" His voice breaks. "You found somebody good and you let yourself be happy. How could I ever hold that against you? What kind of man comes back from the dead and holds it against his wife that she didn't stay a widow forever?"

You’re crying openly now, and so, silently, is he, the two of you holding hands over the wreckage of it.

"So, here's what I need to know," he says finally, his voice steadying, "and it's the last hard question, and then I'll stop. What do you want? Not what's right. Not what's fair to me or to him or to Dylan. Just…if you could have anything, what do you want?"

And there it is. The question Gail keeps circling. The question you've been running from for weeks. And lying there in the dark with your husband's hand in yours, you make yourself actually look at it, straight on, no flinching.

What you want, if you can have anything, is probably Joel. That’s the plain, honest truth of it and you've known it since the day Matt came home. Your heart had chosen, cleanly, a month before the world ever gave Matt back. If a genie had appeared and offered you the life you were about to build the day of the patrol, you'd have taken it without a breath.

But that isn’t the world you live in. And the question of what you want, you understood now, isn't actually the only question, no matter how much Gail presses you toward it, no matter how much Joel told you to follow your heart. Because you aren’t a single woman with a single heart to please.

You’re a mother.

"I want a lot of things," you say slowly. "And some of them can't all be true at once. So, I have to…I have to tell you the thing I've landed on, the thing I keep landing on no matter how many times I turn it over."

You wipe your face.

"The most important thing to me – more important than what I want, more important than my own heart – is Dylan. That's not a noble thing I'm saying to make this easier, it’s just true. He's the truest thing in my life and he always has been, since the day he was born. And Dylan’s got his father back. He said we're a family again with his whole heart shining out of him, and he's happier than he's been since the world ended, and I will not…"

Your voice hardens as it finds its ground.

"I will not be the one who takes that away from him. I won't tear up my son's family just when it got put back together. I can't. I wouldn't be able to live in my own skin. Whatever I want, I can't want it more than I want him whole."

Matt looks at you, barely breathing.

"So, I want to try," you say, and you make yourself mean it, make the words solid. "I want to try to rebuild what we had, you and me. Slow, like we said. I don't know if we can – two years is two years. We’ve both changed and I won't lie and say my heart's just going to obey me because it doesn't work like that. But love isn't only a feeling, is it? It's a thing you do. It's a choice you make and keep making. I chose you once. I built a life with you, I made a child with you, and you came back to us. Dylan needs his family, and…I want to choose it again. I want to try to build it back. Not because it's the right thing, though it is. Because it's the thing I can live with. Because it's the thing that lets my son keep the family he prayed for."

You squeeze his hand hard.

"That's what I want, Matt. When I actually look at all of it, all of us, and not just my own selfish heart. I want to try to be your family again. If you still want that, knowing what you know now."

Matt’s quiet a long time, and you let him have the silence, because you've just laid a great deal on a man who’s still healing from two years of horror, and he deserves to take his time with it.

"When I was out there," he says finally, "in the worst of it, the thing I held onto wasn't…it wasn't the two of us, exactly. Some nights it was, but mostly it was the family. A table with the three of us at it. Ordinary…nothing special. Just – home. That's the picture. Not you and me specifically, being…" he gestures vaguely at the bed, at the intimacy of an hour ago, "…that. That was part of it, sure, I'm a man and I missed my wife. But the thing that actually kept me breathing was bigger than that. It was the family. It was a safe home for you and Dylan."

His eyes find yours.

"And I've got that. Right now, tonight, I've got exactly that. Dylan, the table, the home, you safe... That's the thing I survived for and I've got it." He draws a breath. "So, if what you're telling me is, the family stays, we try to build it back, we give Dylan his whole home, and maybe over time the rest of it comes back too, or maybe it doesn't and we're just…two people who love the same kid and share a life and are kind to each other, then Christ, that's still so much more than I ever thought I'd get. That's still everything I prayed for. Most of it, anyway."

"Most of it," you echo softly, and you both know what part isn't in there, and neither of you say it.

"Yeah." He gives you a small, sad, real smile. "Most of it. I'd be a greedy fool to turn down most-of-everything because it wasn't all-of-everything. Nobody out here gets all of everything."

He lifts your joined hands and presses his lips to your knuckles.

"So yeah, I want to try. Of course I want to try. I want the family. I want to earn my way back into it, slow, real, no pretending. I want to be Dylan's father at that table for the rest of my life. And I want to be your…whatever we can honestly be to each other, however long it takes to find out what that is. I'll take it. I'll take all of it and be grateful."

You hold each other in the lamplight then, and it’s not the holding of an hour ago. It’s something quieter and more grown, the holding of two people who've just told each other the truth and decided, out of that truth, to build something anyway. And it’s sad – there’s a grief running all through it, for you and for him both – but it’s at least clean and honest. It’s the two of you choosing the family with your eyes open, and that’s worth more.

"There's one more thing," you say, into his shoulder, "and I need to be honest about it too, because if we're doing this, we're doing it with everything on the table."

You pull back to look at him.

"I have to…I have to figure out what things are with Joel now. Because he lives round the corner and this is a small town and I can't just…he's been keeping his distance, being careful, being decent, but I owe him…I owe him a conversation. He deserves to hear it from me, plainly, what I've decided. That I'm choosing the family. That we're going to try. He'd never push, he'd never make it hard for me, he's spent these past weeks standing back so quietly that half the time I…" You stop. "But I can't just let it hang. It's not fair to any of us.”

Matt nods slowly. "What do you want it to be between you and him going forward?"

You think about it – about Joel in his lit doorway, watching you leave. You think about the porches and the coffees and the time spent together. You think about the fact that Ellie and Dylan's friendship isn't going anywhere, that the four of you are braided together whether anyone likes it or not, that this town is too small to disappear a person in. And you think about the thing that will hurt least, over the long run, for all of you.

"Friends," you say finally. "I think…I think we have to just be friends again. Go back to what we were before it became more. He's Ellie's dad and Ellie's Dylan's best friend. That's not going away and it shouldn't because it's good for both of them. And he's Tommy's brother and Tommy's married to Maria and she’s my friend and the whole town's woven together. There's no version where Joel just vanishes out of our lives, and I wouldn't want that anyway. It'd break Dylan's heart to lose Ellie, it would…"

Your voice thickens.

"It would break mine to lose Joel entirely. I don't think I could stand him being nothing to me. So, we go back. We put what happened between us in a box and we close it and we're just people who live in the same town and are kind to each other."

You laugh, and it comes out wet and broken.

"God, listen to me. You said that exact thing. Two people who love the same kid and are kind to each other. Turns out that's what I'm going to have to be with him now too. Kind, and careful, and closed."

"That's going to be hard on both of you,” Matt says gently, “Being that close and just being polite. That's going to be hard for a long time."

"I know."

"Especially on him."

His eyes hold yours, and there’s something almost tender in the way he says it, this strange grace of a man who's come to understand his rival too well to hate him.

"He doesn't get the family. You and me, we've got Dylan and a whole life to fill up the space. He goes home to Ellie and that's it. And Ellie's half grown and half out the door already, off with Dylan and their other friends most nights. He brought me home and he goes back to an empty house, and he watches you build the thing he wanted whilst being polite. That's…"

He shakes his head slowly.

"I don't envy any part of what that man's carrying. I hope to God he's got something - finds someone. I hope he doesn't just…sit in it alone."

And that undoes you completely. That your husband, in the middle of his own hurt, can grieve for Joel's loneliness. You turn your face into Matt's shoulder and weep, for all of it, for the three of you, for the impossible tangle of good people and bad timing and a world that gave back what it took only after you'd already learned to live without it.

Matt holds you while you cry. He strokes your hair, slow, the way he used to, and he doesn’t say anything, because there isn’t anything to say. After a while the worst of it passes and you lie quiet against him, hollowed out and strangely lighter, the way you're lighter after you've finally set down a thing you've been carrying too long.

"I'll talk to him," you say eventually, into the dark. "After Christmas, I’ll talk to him. Maria’s going to invite us for dinner on Friday, I know she will and I know that’ll be hard, but I don’t want to…I can’t …not before that. He deserves to hear the truth from me, all of it, but not before Christmas Day."

You swallow.

"He'll say yes to just being friends. He'll be gracious about it, because he's always gracious and he'll probably make it easier on me than I have any right to. And it'll cost him everything and he won't let me see it cost him a thing. That's who he is."

Your voice breaks one last time.

"That's the man I'm giving up so that our son can keep his family. And I think it might be the right thing, and I think it might be the hardest thing I've ever done, and I think both of those are true at the same time, the way everything's been true at the same time since you came home."

"Both things are true," Matt agrees softly, and there’s a strange comfort in that, in not being alone in the impossible arithmetic of it anymore.

You lie together as the lamp burns down and the snow comes soundless over the square with its great tree, over the shop, over the streets you've walked in the dark, over a house around the corner where a man’s lying awake with a loss he'll never once complain of, and over your own house, where a family is being chosen, deliberately, out of love and grief and the plain, hard needs of a sixteen year old boy. And where two people are finally, quietly, beginning the long work of building something honest back out of the ruins.

It isn’t the life you'd choose, if choosing was free. But choosing is never free. Joel taught you that, without ever meaning to – that you take what the world lets you keep, and you brace for the rest, and you love the people in front of you as best you can with whatever heart you have left. So, you’ll take this. The family. The trying. And you’ll carry the other thing in its closed box, quietly, for the rest of your life, the way Joel will carry his. Two people being kind, being careful, being closed, having given each other up so that an innocent boy can keep the one impossible good thing the world has ever handed him back.

In the morning there will be the ordinary, blessed noise of a family. In the morning you’ll begin. But tonight you lie in the dark with your husband and grieve, cleanly, honestly, for the road not taken, and let yourself feel all of it, the whole torn tangled truth of a heart that has loved twice and can only, in the end, keep one of them whole – and you choose, again, with your eyes open, the one that lets your son keep his father.

And you try not to think about what you know is going to be the singularly most awkward Christmas Day that you’ve ever experienced - even in a post-apocalyptic world.

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You tell him how it started. How you first saw Joel at the gate that day, how he forced them to let you in and how kind he was afterwards. How he’d been there, at the edges – Tommy's brother, Ellie's guardian, a hard closed-off man everyone was a little wary of yet trusted with their lives. How the two of you had been thrown together by the plain circumstance of the teenagers, Dylan and Ellie falling into their odd, fierce friendship, and the two of you finding yourselves at the same doorways with the same low-grade daily worry of raising kids who've survived too much too young in a world that's still trying to kill them.

"It was that first," you say. "Just…two people with kids who've seen too much. We'd end up on a porch somewhere while they did whatever they were doing inside, and we'd talk. About them, at first, about how much you tell them, how much you let them see. He's…"

Your voice catches.

"He's been through it before. He lost a child, a long time ago, and then he found Ellie, and he understood things about it that nobody else in my life understood. About loving a kid so hard it terrifies you and what it costs to keep them alive out here."

Matt lies very still, listening, his eyes fixed on your face in the low light.

"And it just…it moved. So slow I didn't see it moving."

You make yourself keep looking at him.

“He started fixing things around the house, I mended things for him and Ellie that I treated as favours rather than as part of my work at the shop and the four of us would end up at the same table more nights than not. And somewhere in there it stopped being about the kids and it became about…him. About the fact that he was the person I wanted to tell things to, good and bad. He was the first person I thought of. And I fought it, Matt, I want you to know that. I fought it for a long time, because I still hoped that one day you might come stumbling in here, whole and alive. But then I realised that I needed to let you go, needed to stop fighting it. And by the time I stopped fighting it, it was already the shape of my whole life."

"When?” Matt asks quietly. "When did it…how long has it been?"

“Physically, only a month or so before you came back but, emotionally…”

You hold his eyes because he deserves that.

“That's the…that's the terrible part of the timing. It was new. It was so new. We finally…after all that time of being careful, of me being scared, we finally let it be the whole thing. And we decided…"

And here your voice goes, finally, all the way to pieces, and you have to push the words out through it.

"The day they found you…that night I was going to sit Dylan down and tell him about us. That Joel and I were together and that we wanted to be a family." The tears come hard now. "I was going to tell Dylan he had – not a new father, I'd never have said that, but…someone. Someone who'd chosen him, chosen us. And then Dylan came through the gate screaming that they'd found you and…”

The lamp ticks softly whilst outside the snow falls soundless and endless over the sleeping town.

Matt doesn’t say anything for a long moment. His face has done something you’ve braced for and dreaded. Not anger, but a slow, sinking grief, the look of a man watching the picture he's survived on rearrange itself into a shape that still has a place for him but not the place he's dreamed. His eyes are wet and when he finally speaks his voice is rough, careful and unbearably steady.

"He was wary of me, at the camp. He had a right to be, and I just thought it was because…” he swallows. "When we arrived here, and I was trying so hard not to collapse right in front of you, I noticed that you looked at him. But I thought it was just because you were grateful…”

“I was,” you insist, “of course I was.”

"He brought me home. He found me in that camp, and he put a gun on me and made me prove I was who I said. And then he believed me, and he put me on a horse, brought me back to Jackson and walked me through that gate to my wife and my son knowing…”

His voice cracks.

“Knowing what he was carrying me back to. That he was carrying me straight into the life he'd just…God." He presses the heel of his hand against his eyes. "That's the most decent thing I ever heard of a man doing in this fucked up world. I don’t know if I…”

And you understand, watching your husband grieve for the pain of the man who loves you, exactly what kind of person Matt is, and exactly why you married him once, and exactly why this is so impossibly, unbearably hard. Because there are no villains here, no one to be angry at, no betrayal to point to, no easy shape to any of it. There’s just three good people and a boy, and a world that took a man and then gave him back too late. Everyone doing the most decent thing they can manage in an impossible situation, and the doing of it breaking all of them a little.

"Do you love him?"

You hear how much it costs him to ask it, and you hear that he’s asking it plainly and know you owe him the true answer even though it’s like a knife to your heart.

Yes," you reply softly. "I do. I'm not going to lie to you about it because you'd know. Yes, I love him."

Matt nods slowly as the word lands in him. You watch it land, watch him absorb it the way he must have learned to absorb blows in those two years, taking it into the body, letting it move through, staying standing. His hand finds yours in the dark and holds it, and that gentleness in the middle of his own hurt is almost more than you could bear.

"Okay," he says roughly. "Okay. Thank you for telling me the truth." He breathes, unsteady. "It hurts like hell. I won't pretend it doesn't. I came home to a picture that I’ve been holding onto for two years and the picture has another man in it. That's…"

He stops and swallows.

"But I understand it. That's the thing. I'm lying here and it hurts and I can't even be angry, because what were you supposed to do – wait? You didn't know that I was alive. You had every reason to think I was dead. You grieved me, you did it right, and then you were alive and still young and you had a whole life still to live and you found somebody good…because he is good, isn't he? That's the hell of it, he's obviously a good man…" His voice breaks. "You found somebody good and you let yourself be happy. How could I ever hold that against you? What kind of man comes back from the dead and holds it against his wife that she didn't stay a widow forever?"

You’re crying openly now, and so, silently, is he, the two of you holding hands over the wreckage of it.

"So, here's what I need to know," he says finally, his voice steadying, "and it's the last hard question, and then I'll stop. What do you want? Not what's right. Not what's fair to me or to him or to Dylan. Just…if you could have anything, what do you want?"

And there it is. The question Gail keeps circling. The question you've been running from for weeks. And lying there in the dark with your husband's hand in yours, you make yourself actually look at it, straight on, no flinching.

What you want, if you can have anything, is probably Joel. That’s the plain, honest truth of it and you've known it since the day Matt came home. Your heart had chosen, cleanly, a month before the world ever gave Matt back. If a genie had appeared and offered you the life you were about to build the day of the patrol, you'd have taken it without a breath.

But that isn’t the world you live in. And the question of what you want, you understood now, isn't actually the only question, no matter how much Gail presses you toward it, no matter how much Joel told you to follow your heart. Because you aren’t a single woman with a single heart to please.

You’re a mother.

"I want a lot of things," you say slowly. "And some of them can't all be true at once. So, I have to…I have to tell you the thing I've landed on, the thing I keep landing on no matter how many times I turn it over."

You wipe your face.

"The most important thing to me – more important than what I want, more important than my own heart – is Dylan. That's not a noble thing I'm saying to make this easier, it’s just true. He's the truest thing in my life and he always has been, since the day he was born. And Dylan’s got his father back. He said we're a family again with his whole heart shining out of him, and he's happier than he's been since the world ended, and I will not…"

Your voice hardens as it finds its ground.

"I will not be the one who takes that away from him. I won't tear up my son's family just when it got put back together. I can't. I wouldn't be able to live in my own skin. Whatever I want, I can't want it more than I want him whole."

Matt looks at you, barely breathing.

"So, I want to try," you say, and you make yourself mean it, make the words solid. "I want to try to rebuild what we had, you and me. Slow, like we said. I don't know if we can – two years is two years. We’ve both changed and I won't lie and say my heart's just going to obey me because it doesn't work like that. But love isn't only a feeling, is it? It's a thing you do. It's a choice you make and keep making. I chose you once. I built a life with you, I made a child with you, and you came back to us. Dylan needs his family, and…I want to choose it again. I want to try to build it back. Not because it's the right thing, though it is. Because it's the thing I can live with. Because it's the thing that lets my son keep the family he prayed for."

You squeeze his hand hard.

"That's what I want, Matt. When I actually look at all of it, all of us, and not just my own selfish heart. I want to try to be your family again. If you still want that, knowing what you know now."

Matt’s quiet a long time, and you let him have the silence, because you've just laid a great deal on a man who’s still healing from two years of horror, and he deserves to take his time with it.

"When I was out there," he says finally, "in the worst of it, the thing I held onto wasn't…it wasn't the two of us, exactly. Some nights it was, but mostly it was the family. A table with the three of us at it. Ordinary…nothing special. Just – home. That's the picture. Not you and me specifically, being…" he gestures vaguely at the bed, at the intimacy of an hour ago, "…that. That was part of it, sure, I'm a man and I missed my wife. But the thing that actually kept me breathing was bigger than that. It was the family. It was a safe home for you and Dylan."

His eyes find yours.

"And I've got that. Right now, tonight, I've got exactly that. Dylan, the table, the home, you safe... That's the thing I survived for and I've got it." He draws a breath. "So, if what you're telling me is, the family stays, we try to build it back, we give Dylan his whole home, and maybe over time the rest of it comes back too, or maybe it doesn't and we're just…two people who love the same kid and share a life and are kind to each other, then Christ, that's still so much more than I ever thought I'd get. That's still everything I prayed for. Most of it, anyway."

"Most of it," you echo softly, and you both know what part isn't in there, and neither of you say it.

"Yeah." He gives you a small, sad, real smile. "Most of it. I'd be a greedy fool to turn down most-of-everything because it wasn't all-of-everything. Nobody out here gets all of everything."

He lifts your joined hands and presses his lips to your knuckles.

"So yeah, I want to try. Of course I want to try. I want the family. I want to earn my way back into it, slow, real, no pretending. I want to be Dylan's father at that table for the rest of my life. And I want to be your…whatever we can honestly be to each other, however long it takes to find out what that is. I'll take it. I'll take all of it and be grateful."

You hold each other in the lamplight then, and it’s not the holding of an hour ago. It’s something quieter and more grown, the holding of two people who've just told each other the truth and decided, out of that truth, to build something anyway. And it’s sad – there’s a grief running all through it, for you and for him both – but it’s at least clean and honest. It’s the two of you choosing the family with your eyes open, and that’s worth more.

"There's one more thing," you say, into his shoulder, "and I need to be honest about it too, because if we're doing this, we're doing it with everything on the table."

You pull back to look at him.

"I have to…I have to figure out what things are with Joel now. Because he lives round the corner and this is a small town and I can't just…he's been keeping his distance, being careful, being decent, but I owe him…I owe him a conversation. He deserves to hear it from me, plainly, what I've decided. That I'm choosing the family. That we're going to try. He'd never push, he'd never make it hard for me, he's spent these past weeks standing back so quietly that half the time I…" You stop. "But I can't just let it hang. It's not fair to any of us.”

Matt nods slowly. "What do you want it to be between you and him going forward?"

You think about it – about Joel in his lit doorway, watching you leave. You think about the porches and the coffees and the time spent together. You think about the fact that Ellie and Dylan's friendship isn't going anywhere, that the four of you are braided together whether anyone likes it or not, that this town is too small to disappear a person in. And you think about the thing that will hurt least, over the long run, for all of you.

"Friends," you say finally. "I think…I think we have to just be friends again. Go back to what we were before it became more. He's Ellie's dad and Ellie's Dylan's best friend. That's not going away and it shouldn't because it's good for both of them. And he's Tommy's brother and Tommy's married to Maria and she’s my friend and the whole town's woven together. There's no version where Joel just vanishes out of our lives, and I wouldn't want that anyway. It'd break Dylan's heart to lose Ellie, it would…"

Your voice thickens.

"It would break mine to lose Joel entirely. I don't think I could stand him being nothing to me. So, we go back. We put what happened between us in a box and we close it and we're just people who live in the same town and are kind to each other."

You laugh, and it comes out wet and broken.

"God, listen to me. You said that exact thing. Two people who love the same kid and are kind to each other. Turns out that's what I'm going to have to be with him now too. Kind, and careful, and closed."

"That's going to be hard on both of you,” Matt says gently, “Being that close and just being polite. That's going to be hard for a long time."

"I know."

"Especially on him."

His eyes hold yours, and there’s something almost tender in the way he says it, this strange grace of a man who's come to understand his rival too well to hate him.

"He doesn't get the family. You and me, we've got Dylan and a whole life to fill up the space. He goes home to Ellie and that's it. And Ellie's half grown and half out the door already, off with Dylan and their other friends most nights. He brought me home and he goes back to an empty house, and he watches you build the thing he wanted whilst being polite. That's…"

He shakes his head slowly.

"I don't envy any part of what that man's carrying. I hope to God he's got something - finds someone. I hope he doesn't just…sit in it alone."

And that undoes you completely. That your husband, in the middle of his own hurt, can grieve for Joel's loneliness. You turn your face into Matt's shoulder and weep, for all of it, for the three of you, for the impossible tangle of good people and bad timing and a world that gave back what it took only after you'd already learned to live without it.

Matt holds you while you cry. He strokes your hair, slow, the way he used to, and he doesn’t say anything, because there isn’t anything to say. After a while the worst of it passes and you lie quiet against him, hollowed out and strangely lighter, the way you're lighter after you've finally set down a thing you've been carrying too long.

"I'll talk to him," you say eventually, into the dark. "After Christmas, I’ll talk to him. Maria’s going to invite us for dinner on Friday, I know she will and I know that’ll be hard, but I don’t want to…I can’t …not before that. He deserves to hear the truth from me, all of it, but not before Christmas Day."

You swallow.

"He'll say yes to just being friends. He'll be gracious about it, because he's always gracious and he'll probably make it easier on me than I have any right to. And it'll cost him everything and he won't let me see it cost him a thing. That's who he is."

Your voice breaks one last time.

"That's the man I'm giving up so that our son can keep his family. And I think it might be the right thing, and I think it might be the hardest thing I've ever done, and I think both of those are true at the same time, the way everything's been true at the same time since you came home."

"Both things are true," Matt agrees softly, and there’s a strange comfort in that, in not being alone in the impossible arithmetic of it anymore.

You lie together as the lamp burns down and the snow comes soundless over the square with its great tree, over the shop, over the streets you've walked in the dark, over a house around the corner where a man’s lying awake with a loss he'll never once complain of, and over your own house, where a family is being chosen, deliberately, out of love and grief and the plain, hard needs of a sixteen year old boy. And where two people are finally, quietly, beginning the long work of building something honest back out of the ruins.

It isn’t the life you'd choose, if choosing was free. But choosing is never free. Joel taught you that, without ever meaning to – that you take what the world lets you keep, and you brace for the rest, and you love the people in front of you as best you can with whatever heart you have left. So, you’ll take this. The family. The trying. And you’ll carry the other thing in its closed box, quietly, for the rest of your life, the way Joel will carry his. Two people being kind, being careful, being closed, having given each other up so that an innocent boy can keep the one impossible good thing the world has ever handed him back.

In the morning there will be the ordinary, blessed noise of a family. In the morning you’ll begin. But tonight you lie in the dark with your husband and grieve, cleanly, honestly, for the road not taken, and let yourself feel all of it, the whole torn tangled truth of a heart that has loved twice and can only, in the end, keep one of them whole – and you choose, again, with your eyes open, the one that lets your son keep his father.

And you try not to think about what you know is going to be the singularly most awkward Christmas Day that you’ve ever experienced - even in a post-apocalyptic world.

❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

“Javi?” you called softly, knocking on the door. You didn’t exactly wait for an answer, though. You knew you weren’t going to get one.

Javi was so deep in his own head, drowning in guilt, that he didn’t want to let anyone near him. For one thing, you’d known him long enough to recognize when he got like this.

And for another, you’d run into Messina in the hallway just as she was leaving his room. She’d only shaken her head and said something about there being no point trying. Almost like she meant there was no point trying to comfort him. Or talk him out of blaming himself.

You knew she hadn’t meant anything bad by it. From what you could tell, she genuinely liked Javi. As her subordinate, of course.

Still, it pissed you off. It felt like everyone had already given up, like none of it really mattered because Peña would get over it eventually. But you didn’t think that way. Not when it came to him. So you walked in without waiting to be invited.

“Fuck, what now? I already said I don’t wanna talk about it,” Javi snapped. That told you he hadn’t even heard your voice when you knocked. He clearly thought Messina had come back. Then he finally looked toward the door.

You saw his body go a little tense when he realized it was you. He hadn’t expected to see you. Not now, not like this. Not even tonight. You hadn’t made any plans to meet. “What are you doing here?” was all he asked.

He was sitting in the chair behind his desk. In front of him sat a half-empty bottle of whiskey, or whatever the hell it was, and a glass that had already been mostly drained.

You found yourself hoping the bottle hadn’t been full when he opened it. He didn’t look drunk, but the last thing he needed right now, while he was blaming himself for everything, was to get completely wasted on top of it.

“I heard what happened.” You slowly walked farther into the room, heading toward the desk. Files were scattered across it, his gun resting on top of them. A small lamp gave off a weak yellow glow. You stopped in front of him.

You didn’t know whether you should touch him. God, you wanted to. But you knew him.

He was too far inside his own head right now, buried under everything he thought he’d done wrong.

If you reached for him or tried to hug him, you’d only make him pull away. He’d shut down before you got anything out of him.

So instead, you slowly sat on the arm of the chair across from him, moving his denim jacket out of the way with one hand.

Javi watched you through narrowed eyes. Suspicious.

And honestly, you couldn’t blame him. Not after what had happened tonight. “I... I know you probably don’t wanna hear that it wasn’t your fault. Messina probably already told you that before I got here, but–”

“You’re right. I don’t,” he cut in, his voice low. He propped his head up with one hand. The other rested between his thighs, his legs slightly spread as he sat there.

Fuck, he looked vulnerable.

Before you could say anything else, Javi spoke again. “What are you doing here?” he asked for the second time.

Honestly, you didn’t know what to say. You wanted to tell him you’d come because you needed to see him. Or that you knew he’d blame himself for Carrillo’s death and that you’d known you would find him exactly like this.

But none of it felt like it would mean anything. Because the man sitting in front of you clearly wanted nothing more than to be left alone with the silence of this shitty room and the alcohol already running through his veins.

“I didn’t want you to be alone,” you finally said. And it wasn’t a lie. That was exactly why you were there. “Not now. Not after what happened.”

“What the hell do you know about what happened?” Javi said bitterly. He lifted the glass to his mouth and swallowed whatever was left in it.

“I talked to Murphy.”

Javi let out a quiet laugh, but there was nothing amused about it. It was just a short, bitter breath as he reached for the bottle and poured more whiskey into his glass. This time, he didn’t even bother setting it down properly. He left it sitting crooked between the scattered files and stared into his drink like there might be something at the bottom of it that nobody else had managed to tell him. “So now you know everything,” he said. “Murphy told you how the whole thing went to shit, then explained how obviously nobody’s to blame.”

“He told me what happened.”

“No.” Javi slowly shook his head. “He told you how it ended.” He lifted the glass toward his mouth, but didn’t drink. He just held it between his fingers, his thumb running along the rim.

You watched his hand and noticed the slight tremor. It wasn’t obvious. Barely there, really. But with Javi, even that meant more than someone else breaking down right in front of you.

“The tip came to me,” he said after a moment. His voice was still calm. Too calm. “Straight to me. Nobody brought it in. Nobody made me believe it. I questioned that fucking girl. I decided what she was saying made sense.”

“Because you had no reason to think it was a trap.”

His eyes finally lifted to yours. They looked tired, red, and completely empty. “No reason?” he repeated. “After everything Escobar’s done? All the fake tips, dead informants, people he’s bought off?” His jaw tightened. “I had a thousand reasons not to trust it.”

“And how many tips have you checked that turned out to be real? You can’t know ahead of time every single time.”

“That’s my job.” He said it so simply that the words hit you somewhere under the ribs. “My job is knowing who I can trust. My job is knowing when someone’s trying to put us exactly where they want us.” He set the glass down harder than he meant to, and whiskey spilled over the edge onto one of the files. Javi didn’t even notice. “Instead, I picked up the phone, listened to where Escobar was supposed to be, and passed the information straight to Carrillo.”

“Javi...”

“I saw the look on his face when I went to him with that.” His eyes dropped again. “I told him I believed it.” The words didn’t come easily. He had to force them out, one at a time, and with each one, more tension settled into his face. “And he trusted me,” he added quietly. “He didn’t even ask me more than once if I was sure.” His voice dropped even lower. “He just believed me.”

“Because you’d never knowingly given him bad information.”

“Yeah, I’m sure that helps him a lot now.” He closed his eyes and pressed a hand to his forehead. For a few seconds, the only sound in the room was his heavy breathing.

You wanted to get up, go to him, and wrap your arms around him so tightly he couldn’t keep going. So he couldn’t say another one of those things he was using to tear himself apart. But you knew if you touched him now, he’d push you away. Maybe harder than he meant to.

“You know how many times I’ve replayed that conversation in my head since it happened?” he asked suddenly.

You didn’t answer.

He wasn’t expecting you to. “Over and over. Every word. Every fucking second.” He dragged a hand over his face, then let it fall between his thighs. “I keep trying to find something I should’ve heard. Something in her voice. Something in the tip. One fucking thing that should’ve stopped me.”

“Why? Because you need to prove you could’ve prevented it?”

His jaw tightened immediately. You saw something shift in him. The pain he’d been holding down started turning into anger. “Don’t tell me what I need.”

“Then tell me what you want from me. What do you need right now?”

“I want you to leave.” He didn’t raise his voice. He said it flatly, without looking at you, like if he sounded calm enough, you might actually get up and leave him there.

“No.”

That made him look at you. “No?” he repeated slowly.

“I’m not trying to make you talk. You don’t have to explain anything to me. But I’m not leaving you alone while you’re clearly trying to drown yourself in that bottle and convince yourself you killed Carrillo.”

The second you said Carrillo’s name, Javi went completely still. For a moment, he didn’t even breathe. Then he planted both hands on his thighs and shot up from the chair. “I don’t have to convince myself of anything.” The chair scraped across the floor when he knocked into it. He took a few steps toward the wall, but the room was too small for him to get away from you or from his own head. He stopped with his back to you, both hands on his hips, his head lowered. “The tip came from me,” he said, louder now. “And I passed it on to Carrillo and sent him there.”

“You passed along information. You didn’t tell Escobar to be waiting for him.”

“You think that fucking matters?” He spun around so fast his shirt shifted around his body. “You think Carrillo’s any less dead because I wasn’t the one who pulled the trigger?”

“Escobar killed him.”

“I put him on that street!” His voice slammed into the walls. He wasn’t only yelling at you anymore. He was yelling at Messina. At Murphy. At Escobar. At Carrillo. At himself. At every fucking thing he couldn’t change. “I told him where to go! I told him the tip was good! Then I sat there like a fucking idiot listening to the radio, waiting for him to call and tell me we had Escobar, while he was driving straight into a trap I sent him into!”

“You didn’t know!”

“I should’ve known!”

“How?” you shot back. “Tell me how, Javi. How the fuck were you supposed to know this one tip was a trap?”

“I don’t know!” he shouted. “But I fucking should have!” His voice cracked on the last word.

Just barely, but you heard it. Underneath all that anger, the thing he’d been trying so hard to hide finally broke through. Pure, raw helplessness.

Javi turned his back on you and ran both hands through his hair. He took a few sharp breaths, but they didn’t help. His shoulders kept rising and falling like he’d just run for miles, even though he’d barely moved across the room. “You know what the best part is?” he said after a moment. His voice was quieter now, but the anger was still there. It had just turned back in on him. “This isn’t the first time.”

He slowly turned to face you.

“He’s not the first person I told everything was gonna be okay. He’s not the first person I sent somewhere they never came back from.” A bitter smile pulled at his mouth, but his eyes stayed completely empty. “People around me die. Informants. Agents. Cops. Anyone who trusts me long enough to do what I tell them.”

“That’s not true.”

“It is.”

“No. It’s just what you need to believe right now, because hating yourself is easier than admitting you can’t control everything.”

His expression hardened. “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

“I know you’re trying to scare me.”

“Then be fucking scared!” he snapped. “For once, listen to what I’m telling you. Anyone who gets close to me ends up fucked. Carrillo trusted me, and now he’s dead. Helena trusted me too, a long time ago, and look what they fucking did to her. How many more people is it gonna take before you realize this isn’t some goddamn coincidence?”

“So that’s why you’re trying to throw me out? Because you’ve decided you’re protecting me?”

“Yes!” The answer came out immediately. No hesitation. Only after he said it did he seem to realize what he’d admitted.

For a moment, neither of you spoke.

Javi looked away and clenched his fists. He suddenly looked so exhausted you were almost surprised he was still standing. All the energy he’d had a second ago seemed to disappear with that one word. “Go home,” he said, much quieter now. “Just go.”

“No.”

“Jesus fucking christ, why can’t you listen to me for once?”

“Because I don’t want to.”

“This isn’t about what you want.”

“And it’s not only about what you want either.”

Javi shook his head, but this time he didn’t argue. He slowly went back to the desk and grabbed the back of the chair. For a moment, he just stood there, hunched over with both hands gripping it like he needed to make sure his legs were still going to hold him up.

Then he sat down heavily. Not like before. This time, he practically collapsed into the chair. He rested his elbows on his thighs, let his hands hang between his knees, and dropped his head so low you couldn’t see his face.

He looked smaller somehow. Not physically. Just more broken. Like that short burst of anger had taken everything he had left and left nothing behind. “I can’t do this anymore,” he breathed. The words were so quiet you almost didn’t hear them.

You didn’t know whether he meant tonight. Colombia. Escobar. All the dead bodies. Or everything.

“I can’t keep sending people out there and waiting to find out if they’re coming back,” he continued. “I can’t keep listening to people tell me it wasn’t my fault when I was right in the middle of it every fucking time.”

“Javi...”

“I gave him the tip.” His voice was rough, more broken than you’d ever heard it. “If I hadn’t, he’d still be alive.”

“Maybe he would be. Tonight,” you said quietly. “Maybe it would’ve happened next week. Or next month. Maybe he would’ve survived all of it. I don’t know. You don’t know. Nobody does.”

His jaw tightened, but he kept staring at the floor.

“But I do know who killed him,” you continued. “And it wasn’t you.”

“Stop.”

“No.”

“I said stop.”

“And I’m telling you I’m not gonna stop just because you yell at me.”

Javi slowly shook his head. He looked like he didn’t have the energy to tell you to leave again. Like all he could do was sit there, stare at the floor, and wait for you to finally give up on your own. “You don’t know what I’m like,” he muttered. There was no anger in his voice anymore. He wasn’t blaming you either. He just sounded defeated. “You don’t know all the shit I’ve done. The people I’ve used. The people I let walk because it worked for me at the time. How many people I promised we’d protect, only to end up doing fuck all when it mattered.” He swallowed and rubbed his palms together like he was trying to wash off something only he could see. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“But I am.”

“Then maybe you’re not as smart as I thought you were.”

This time, it didn’t hurt. Not because it wasn’t cruel, but because you knew exactly what he was trying to do.

He wanted to piss you off. He wanted you to take it personally, get up, and walk out because he didn’t have it in him to make you leave any other way.

And that was exactly why you finally stood up from the arm of the chair.

Javi noticed. His shoulders dropped slightly, like for one second, he really thought he’d done it. That he’d finally pushed you far enough to leave.

But you didn’t head for the door. You walked straight toward him. When you stopped in front of his chair, he still didn’t look up.

He just clasped his hands between his knees and kept his head down, his eyes fixed somewhere near your feet. “Go,” he said one last time. But there was nothing left in his voice that could make you listen.

You reached down and took his chin between your fingers.

Javi flinched slightly at the first touch, but he didn’t pull away. His jaw only tightened, like he was waiting for another argument he’d have to defend himself against.

You held him a little firmer and slowly lifted his head until he had no choice but to look at you. “Then look at me when you tell me I’d be better off without you.” You still had your fingers under his chin, and you could feel how tense his jaw was.

Like even now, he was fighting the urge to look away, shut down, and disappear back inside his own head before you saw anything else.

But this time, you didn’t let him. “Say it,” you continued quietly. “Look me in the eye and tell me you want me to leave because you don’t want me here. Not because you’ve convinced yourself you need to save me from you.”

Something shifted in his eyes. A quick flash of pain that he tried to bury almost immediately. “You don’t know what you want,” he said at last.

“I know exactly what I want.”

“No.” He shook his head, even though your hand made it harder. “You see me like this and think you can fix me.”

“I’m not trying to fix you.”

“Then what the fuck do you want?” The question came out sharper than he probably meant it to, but underneath the anger, all you could hear was exhaustion. Almost desperation. Like he was honestly asking you to explain why you were still standing there when he couldn’t think of a single good reason for you to stay.

You slowly ran your thumb along his jaw. “I want you to stop acting like I don’t get a say in my own life.”

Javi frowned. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“This.” You held his chin for another second before letting go. “The way you keep deciding what’s best for me. Deciding I’d be better off leaving. That I should be scared of you. That pushing me away somehow means you’re protecting me.” Your hand moved to his cheek. His skin was warm beneath your palm, rough with stubble. “You can’t keep pretending you’re giving me a choice when you’re doing everything you can to make me choose what you want.”

“I want you to be safe.” This time, he said it quietly. No yelling. No bitterness. And somehow, that made it hit even harder.

“I know.”

“No, you don’t.” His eyes dropped, but your hand stayed against his face. “You don’t know what it’s like waiting for the phone to ring and finding out another person you care about is dead.”

“And you don’t know what it’s like being stuck on the outside, wondering if you’re ever gonna let me in.”

His eyes lifted to yours again.

“I can’t promise nothing will ever happen to me,” you continued. “Just like you can’t promise you’ll always come back. But you don’t get to push me away every time you’re scared you might lose something.”

“I already lost someone.” His voice cracked so quietly you might not have noticed if you hadn’t been standing so close.

“I know,” you breathed.

Javi closed his eyes. For a second, he leaned into your palm. Barely. Like he didn’t even realize he was doing it until it was too late to stop himself. There was something so painfully vulnerable about it that your chest hurt. “Don’t tell me it’s gonna be okay,” he muttered. “Because it’s not.”

“Then I won’t.”

“And don’t tell me it’ll stop hurting.”

“I won’t tell you that either.”

He slowly opened his eyes. “Then what the fuck can you tell me?”

You leaned closer until there was almost no space left between your faces. “That I’m here.”

Javi didn’t move.

“That you don’t have to be alone tonight. You don’t have to explain anything or defend yourself. You don’t have to be a good agent. You don’t have to know what happens next. You don’t have to pretend you’re the guy who can handle all of this.” You slid your fingers into the hair at the back of his neck and gently held on. “You can just be here. With me.”

His breath brushed your lips. You could smell the whiskey, but his eyes were focused now. Present. Not as empty as they’d been before. “You shouldn’t want me right now,” he said.

“Stop telling me what I should want.” You brought your other hand to his face, holding him with both hands now.

“I’m fucked up.”

“I know.”

“I could hurt you.”

“Then don’t.”

The simple answer shut him up. For a moment, he just looked at you. Guilt, want, self-hatred, and something that almost looked like fear all crossed his face. Not fear of you. Fear that if he touched you, he might stop thinking about Carrillo for a few minutes. That he might let himself want something other than punishment.

You leaned closer and lightly pressed your lips to his forehead. It wasn’t a kiss asking for anything. Just a brief, warm touch. “I’m not asking you to forget him,” you whispered. “I just don’t want you destroying yourself tonight because of him.”

Javi’s hands finally moved. They closed around yours, still holding his face. He didn’t pull them away. He just held on, like he needed to make sure you were really there. “What exactly do you want from me?” he asked again, his voice lower this time. Then he slowly let go of your hands.

“Right now?”

He nodded.

You lowered your hands from his face, letting them slide down his neck and onto his chest. You could feel his heart pounding beneath his shirt. “I want you to let me stay.”

Javi swallowed. His large hands moved to your hips, gripping the fabric of your clothes. He still didn’t pull you closer, but he wasn’t trying to stop you either.

“And if you don’t want this,” you added, keeping your eyes on his, “then tell me. Don’t tell me what’s better for me. Don’t tell me I should leave. Just tell me you don’t want me right now.”

His jaw tightened again. He didn’t answer for a long time. Then his grip on your hips got tighter. “I can’t tell you that.” The words hung between you, heavy and hot.

You slowly stepped between his spread knees. Javi tilted his head back to keep looking at you as you placed both hands on his shoulders. You gave him one more second. One last chance to pull away, push you back, or say no.

He didn’t do any of those things. Instead, his hands tightened around your waist.

You leaned down and kissed him. Not hard. Not desperate. Careful at first, almost like a question, until you felt his lips finally move against yours.

Something in him gave in. Not the pain. Not the guilt. Just that endless fight against letting anyone touch him.

When you pulled back a couple of inches, his eyes stayed closed. “Look at me,” you whispered.

He did.

You slowly slid one hand down from his shoulder. Javi watched every move, but he didn’t stop you. His breathing only got faster when your fingers reached his belt buckle. “I can still stop,” you said quietly.

Javi looked at you for a long moment, then placed one hand on the back of your neck. “Don’t.”

You didn’t wait any longer. You brought your other hand down and used both hands to undo his belt, then the button of his gray pants. Before reaching for the zipper, you looked up at him again. “I could still stop...” One last chance for him to end this. To tell you to leave.

Instead of answering, Javi slowly pressed the growing bulge beneath his pants into your palm. He lifted his hips just a little, like he was trying to tell you without words that he needed you. He really fucking did.

You didn't hesitate anymore. Your fingers slowly dragged his zipper down, painfully slow. Then you hooked your fingers into the waistband of both his pants and his boxers. “Hm.”

Javi got the message. He lifted his hips again just enough for you to pull them down beneath his ass.

You tugged both his pants and boxers down to his knees. That was all you needed.

He wasn't fully hard yet. Just half hard. The alcohol and everything that had happened that night were still getting to him.

But you knew exactly how to fix that. You spat into your palm.

Javi's breath caught the second he saw it.

Then you wrapped your wet hand around his cock. At first, you didn't even stroke him. You just slowly spread the slickness over him, running your hand from base to tip, making sure every inch of him was covered.

His stomach rose with a slow, heavy breath. His breathing got rougher. His hands found your hips again like he needed something to hold on to.

That's when you finally squeezed him. Firm. Hard enough to push every bit of the night's bullshit out of his head. You wanted him here. Right now. Feeling nothing except your hand moving around him.

You felt him getting harder in your palm. A little more. Then even more.

“There you go,” you whispered, brushing your thumb over the head of his cock, already slick with precum. Now he was exactly where you needed him.

Javi's hand suddenly came up to your neck, pulling you into a kiss. His tongue was in your mouth almost instantly, impatient, desperate, like it was the only thing he wanted right then.

You sighed into the kiss, heat pooling low in your stomach. You could already feel yourself getting wet. Still, you kept your focus on him.

While your tongue moved against his, your hand finally started stroking him for real. Long, steady strokes. Your hand slid over him once. Twice. Three times. Four.

Javi let out the quietest little moan against your mouth. You'd barely have heard it if you hadn't been this close. “I need you...” he whispered. Like he didn't even mean to say it out loud. Like part of him was still trying to fight it. But he was already too far gone.

You let go of his cock, now fully hard and ready for you. “Okay,” you whispered, barely loud enough to hear. For once, you were glad you’d worn nothing but a short skirt  in the Bogotá heat. You didn’t have to waste time taking off your pants. You just pushed your skirt up over your hips and spread your legs enough to climb onto his lap.

Javi watched you with dark eyes. One hand wrapped around the base of his cock, like he was making sure he stayed hard.

You slowly lowered yourself toward him. You could feel the heat coming off his body, and just before the head of his cock reached your folds, Javi seemed to know exactly what you needed.

With his free hand, he slipped your panties to the side. He ran a finger between your folds, making you gasp as a sharp wave of need rushed through your body.

You didn’t wait another second. You lowered yourself onto the head of his cock. Painfully slowly, you took him inside you, feeling every fucking inch as his thick cock stretched and filled you.

You both moaned as you slowly sank down around him.

Javi’s hands shot to your ass. His fingers dug into your skin as he pulled you down harder, like he couldn’t wait another second. Like he needed to be buried inside you now.

So you gave him what he wanted. You lowered yourself the rest of the way until your pussy had taken every inch of him. You grabbed his shoulders and looked at him.

Neither of you looked away as you rolled your hips and started moving.

Javi’s eyes narrowed, but they never left you. Like he needed something to focus on. Like holding your ass wasn’t enough. He needed all of his attention on you. His whole body. Even then, he let you set the pace.

You rolled your hips in slow circles, lifting yourself every now and then before sinking back down onto him again. Letting him feel your walls tighten around him. Feel your body pulling him back in. Every time you came back down, the room filled with the quiet, wet sound of your bodies coming together.

He felt huge inside you. Hot and deep enough to make your thighs shake every time you took him all the way. Javi breathed hard beneath you, every breath rough and uneven.

You could feel every muscle in his shoulders tighten beneath your hands. His chest rose faster, and when you rolled your hips again, a low, rough sound caught in his throat. “Fuck...” he muttered. It almost sounded like a warning. Or maybe he was begging you not to stop.

His hands weren’t just resting on your ass. Even though he was letting you control the pace, his fingers dug into your skin hard enough to hurt in the best way.

Every time you lowered yourself onto him, his hips lifted without him even thinking about it, pushing himself just a little deeper inside you.

You could feel his pulse racing beneath your hands where they still rested on his shoulders. You picked up the pace, rolling your hips a little faster before leaning in until your breasts were pressed against his chest.

Javi tipped his head back. For a second, his eyes fell shut. The way your pussy tightened and pulsed around his cock was getting too fucking intense. Between the alcohol still in his system and everything you were doing to him, whatever control he had left was starting to slip away.

Javi lifted his head again, looking for your face. His eyes were completely dark now, unfocused but fixed on your lips. One hand left your ass and slid to the back of your neck, pulling you closer. “Don’t stop,” he breathed against your mouth, his hot breath still smelling like whiskey. “Fuck... don’t let go of me.” His body started moving beneath you without thinking, his hips lifting to meet yours every time you came back down.

The change in rhythm sent a sharp wave of pleasure through your lower stomach, and your muscles tightened around him as you found the angle that brought both of you closer.

Exactly where you wanted to be.

Where he needed to be.

You sped up, settling into a hard, steady rhythm. Right then, there was nothing except your warmth and your skin. And somehow, that reached the part of him that hurt the most.

His hand slipped from the back of your neck, both hands moved to your hips, gripping you so hard you’d probably have bruises tomorrow, but you barely noticed. All you could feel was him thrusting up into you, his hips lifting every time you came back down. It was desperate. His body trying to drown out everything going on inside his head.

“Javi...” you breathed as that familiar, sharp pressure started building low in your stomach.

His eyes closed the second he heard his name. He pressed his forehead against your shoulder, buried his face in your neck, and took a deep, shaky breath.

You could feel the heat of it against your skin, mixed with sweat.

“I can’t...” he growled into your neck, his voice rough and completely wrecked. “Fuck... I can’t do this anymore.”

You didn’t know if he meant he was about to come, or the whole fucking day, Carrillo, the blood he thought he had on his hands, or the way everything around him was falling apart.

It didn’t matter. Right then, it was all the same thing.

You grabbed a fistful of the thick hair at the back of his head, pulled him even closer, and moved your hips as fast as you could. The friction was almost too much. Your walls clenched hard around his cock, sending waves of heat through your entire body.

A raw, broken sound tore out of Javi, somewhere between a growl and a sob.

Then it hit you. Your orgasm tore through your body all at once. You moaned loudly, your back arching as your body tightened around him in hard, uncontrollable pulses.

Javi felt every one of them. That tight, pulsing grip pushed him right over the edge. He sucked in a sharp breath, then came inside you with a loud, broken moan that sounded like pure relief tangled up with every bit of pain he’d been holding inside. His whole body went rigid in the chair. His hips jerked up into you, and his head fell back.

You felt every hot pulse of his release inside you. You felt him shaking from head to toe.

It went on for several long seconds, like everything was being ripped out of him all at once. Not just his cum. The anger. The helplessness. Carrillo.

And when it finally faded, Javi sagged beneath you. His grip finally loosened, and he let his head fall forward, burying his face in the crook of your neck.

He stayed there, folded into you in the chair, breathing fast and hard while the room slowly went quiet around you.

His body was no longer rigid, but you could still feel the tension sitting heavy in his shoulders. His arms stayed wrapped around your waist, though he wasn’t holding you tightly anymore. It felt more like he was hanging on, like he was afraid that the second he let go, all the shit in his head would come rushing back. 

You lifted one hand from his shoulder and ran your fingers through the hair at the back of his neck.

After a while, Javi took a deep, shaky breath. He pulled his face away from your skin and lifted his head to look at you. His eyes were half closed, his jaw still tight.

“There’s one thing you need to know,” you said quietly but firmly, your voice cutting through the heavy silence.

Javi lowered his chin a little. “No, please...” he muttered, his voice rough.

“No. Listen to me, Javi.” You took his face in your hand and made him look at you.

His dark eyes were unfocused and exhausted when they met yours.

“None of this fucked-up night was your fault,” you said slowly, making sure he heard every word. “Carrillo chose to go there. Escobar killed him. Not you. And if you’re gonna sit here blaming yourself because of some fucking tip that turned out to be a trap, when there was no fucking way anyone could’ve known, then you’re an even bigger idiot than I thought.”

Javi just stared at you for a few seconds.

You saw the old reflex kick in. The need to argue, snap at you, tell you to fuck off, or shut you out again.

His jaw tightened, his lips pressing into a thin line. But he didn’t have the energy for another fight. Whatever anger he’d had left was gone. Instead, he let out a long breath through his nose, closed his eyes, and slowly shook his head. “You’re fucking unbearable,” he muttered. His voice was low, with no sarcasm or anger behind it. He just sounded completely exhausted.

“I know,” you said softly.

Javi’s hands tightened around your hips.

He hadn’t fixed anything. He didn’t agree with you, tell you that you were right, or promise things would get better. Javi Peña didn’t work like that.

But he didn’t push you away either. He let you stay there on his lap, and he let your words sit between you. Right then, that was the most he could give you.

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Dark hair flattened with sweat, a beard close-cropped, a nose with a slight curve in it, eyes – eyes – dark, wet, wide and fixed on you with an intensity that’s almost more than the body can hold.

Then the wave takes you, the face goes blurred and you arch up off the blanket-nest with a scream.

"Cyar'ika…"

It’s his voice – his real voice. Not through the modulator, not warped or filtered or flattened. The voice you’ve heard a hundred times muffled through beskar and never once direct now lands in your chest like a hand and you sob – sob into the scream.

He’s there, with both hands and a bare face and the helmet set down on the deck beside him forgotten, and his mouth is right at your ear.

"I'm here. I’m here… push. Push, mesh'la, push with it, push into it, that's it, that's it…"

You push, but it’s not a decision. It’s what the body does when there’s no other option. You bear down with everything you are and the noise that comes out of you is nothing you’ve ever made before – a long, low opening sound from somewhere underneath your ribs. And he’s there at the other end of you with his hands on the insides of your thighs and the unfiltered voice in your ear and you push and push, and the wave releases you, allowing you to fall back, gasping against the slope of the bulkhead as he wipes your face with his palm.

“Good, that’s good…”

"Din…"

"I'm here."

"I can't."

"You can."

"I can't, I…"

"You can, mesh'la, you are. She's right there, I can see her, I can see her, I can see her hair…"

"Her…her hair?"

"It’s dark like mine. I can see it, cyar'ika. Look at me."

You look at his face, at the wet eyes and wet cheeks and realise he’s crying. You haven’t understood, somehow, that his face could cry – you know his shoulders cry, you know his hands cry, but the face is new and the face is crying.

"One more, maybe two, you hear me? She’s right here. You’re going to push her out and I’m going to catch her and you’re going to hold her. You. First. You hear me?"

"I hear you…"

"Good girl, good girl. Here it comes, breathe – there – push."

You push and the world becomes only the push, only the long, deep terrible work of it, only the burn between your legs and the pressure that’s gone past pressure into something the body has no word for. His hands are there, and his face is there, and somewhere in the middle of it you hear him sob, a real sob, the unfiltered, helpless, wet sound of a man crying.

"She's coming, she's coming, mesh'la, she's coming…”

And you push, and you push, and you push, and…then there’s a slip – a great, hot, terrible, relieving slip, and the pressure breaks, the wave breaks, and you fall back gasping against the slope, the world silent for one suspended, endless second.

Then a thin, furious squall fills the wrecked hold of the Crest – tiny, outraged and alive.

You don't know if you’re laughing or sobbing and think it might somehow be both. He’s sobbing too, you can hear him, his hands full of something small and slick and dark-haired and moving and he laughs through the sobbing.

"Cyar'ika…cyar'ika…. cyar’ika."

"Give her to me…"

"Wait…wait, let me…the cord, I have to…wait, mesh'la."

You wait and watch as he works fast, hands shaking, the kit-clamps coming up off the blanket and applied to the cord with brisk efficiency, and then the small folding blade from his belt cuts clean between, and she’s separate, a small, furious, dark-haired thing with her mouth open and her eyes screwed shut and her tiny fists already up by her cheeks.

He lays her on your chest, naked, slick and warm, then pulls the thermal blanket up over both of you, tucking it in around her shoulders and the back of her head and you realise he’s laughing and crying.

"There…there she is. There she is. Hi, ad'ika. Hi… shh, shh, shh…"

She’s wet and warm, impossibly small and impossibly heavy, heavier than a thing that small has any right to be. Her cheeks move against the bare skin above your heart and her mouth opens, her cry going from outraged squall to confused snuffling. You wrap both arms around her and press your face into the wet, dark hair on her tiny crown and sob, openly, helplessly, into the smell of her.

"Din…"

"I know."

"Din, she's…"

"I know. I know, mesh'la, I know."

He bends and presses his mouth against your forehead, warm and wet from his own tears, and he kisses you there, long and hard and shaking before kissing the top of her head and murmuring something in Mando'a that you don't have the language for, but don't need to.

Then he straightens and the work-voice comes back.

"Cyar'ika, I have to keep going. There's…the placenta. There's bleeding. I have to…I have to see you. Hold her against you, skin against skin, that's what the book said. It'll help the both of you. I'm going to work, alright?"

You nod wordlessly.

"Talk to her while I work."

You talk, even though you don’t really know what you say. You say hello, you say I've got you, you say we did it, we did it, baby, we did it, you say nonsense and you press your lips to her hair and breathe her in. Somewhere down at the other end of you Din works fast and careful, his hands gentle and methodical with his face set in the close focus you have, until tonight, only ever read through a visor.

You feel the second, smaller delivery come and feel him catch it. He grunts, soft and satisfied, then continues working between your thighs, inspecting carefully before pressing a clean pad of bandage.

"There’s some tearing, but it’s small. I can…I can patch it. You're not bleeding bad, cyar'ika. You're going to be alright."

"I know."

You’re crying again and he’s crying whilst your baby is snuffling against your chest, her tiny mouth working, her tiny fist curling and uncurling. The leaf-light moves through the hole in the hull in long, slow, dappled bands across the wrecked deck and, somewhere outside, birds are still singing.

He works methodically, cleaning you with warm water from the kit canteen and a sterile pad. He applies the sealant in a thin, clean line where the tearing is then retrieves a second thermal blanket and lays it over your legs. He checks the bleeding again, then again, then a third time, his face hard with concentration, his eyes flicking up to yours every fifteen seconds to make sure you’re still here. He gets a small pillow under your hips then lifts the canteen up to your mouth, tips it for you and you drink, two long swallows, the water the best thing you think you’ve ever tasted.

Then he half-collapses, the bad leg finally giving, and drags himself up the slope of the bulkhead until he’s sitting beside you, his shoulder against yours, his arm around you and the baby both, his face turned in toward her head.

For a long moment you both just breathe. The thin squall has quieted as she’s found, against your chest, the warm, steady rhythm of your heart, and has decided, for the moment, that it’s enough. Her tiny eyes have opened – unfocused but open – and she’s here, and you and Din are still here, and the Crest is broken open around you and full of moving leaf-light and all three of you, against all reasonable odds, are alive.

"Try her,” he says softly. “See if she'll latch. It'll help… it helps with the bleeding. The book said..."

"You and that book."

"I read it twice."

"Of course you did."

You shift her carefully, both of you fumbling, and after a minute of small, frantic snuffling and one tiny, outraged squeak she finds your breast. Her tiny mouth opens and closes, then you feel a small, startling tug, sharp, strange and unmistakable, then a long, slow, steady drawing that you feel in your chest and somewhere lower, deep, a contracting pull that you realise, distantly, is the help he was talking about, the thing that closes you back down.

You both laugh and he bows his head against your temple.

"There," he murmurs. "There…my good girls. This is the Way."

You stay there a long time. She feeds, stops then feeds again whilst the leaf-light shifts outside and the birds sing on. Somewhere far away there’s a sound that might be water. Din's arm is around your shoulders, his hand cupped under the baby's back, supporting her, his cheek resting against the side of your head, his breath coming slow and warm against your hair.

She finishes, her tiny mouth slackening, her eyes closing. The fist against your chest opens, fingers splayed, and rests there, palm flat, the way a small animal rests when it’s decided it’s safe.

The hold is very quiet. All you can hear are the breaths of three people – you, Din and the impossible miracle of a thing that was inside you an hour ago now breathing the air of a planet you don’t know the name of.

You turn your head slowly, against his shoulder, and look at him, properly, for the first time.

He’s not what you expected, but he isn’t not what you expected either. He’s just…him. The face fits the voice and the hands and the careful set of the shoulders the way a key fits a lock you’ve been carrying in your pocket without quite knowing.

His dark hair is longer than you would have guessed, falling across his forehead in a damp curl that, even now, you find searingly attractive. His beard is close, dark and shot through, at the chin, with the first few threads of grey you’ve not known were there and his mouth is wider than the modulator makes it sound.

There’s a small constellation of faint scars along the line of his jaw, and his eyes are darker than you thought they would be. And they are, right now, looking at you, full of something that’s been building behind a visor and that has now, all at once, nowhere to hide.

He looks tired – so tired. He looks like a man who’s flown his ship through atmosphere with a hole in her hull and brought her down on a planet he can’t name and delivered his first child on a wrecked deck with a torn-open leg and is, finally, allowing his body to register the cost.

He looks like a man who is, despite all of that, in this moment, the happiest he’s ever been in his life.

"Hi," he says, softly.

"Hi."

"You're looking at me."

“Yes.”

"Well?"

You can't speak so you shake your head, smiling, wet, lift the hand that isn't supporting the baby, and set it against his cheek. You stroke your thumb across his jaw and his eyes close, slowly, his mouth turning into your palm. He kisses the centre of it, and you feel the brush of his lashes against the base of your thumb and almost stop breathing.

"You’re so handsome,” you whisper and he chuckles self-deprecatingly.

“You thought I’d resemble an Ugnaught?”

“Mm…I was thinking more like an Ewok.”

You both laugh again and then you look at him a long time. He sits there with his cheek in your palm and his eyes closed and the leaf-light moving over the planes of his face letting you look – letting you memorise. The line of the brow. The hollow at the temple where a vein moves. The small fine grain of the skin at the corner of the eye where it’s crinkled for years inside a helmet without anyone to see. The shape of the mouth.

You want to kiss his mouth. You want to kiss it more than you’ve wanted to do almost anything, and you’re too tired, and the baby is on your chest, and you settle, instead, for stroking your thumb across his bottom lip and watching him open his eyes for you.

He looks at you with something that, in the moment, you don’t have the vocabulary to name. Later – much later – you’ll think it was grief, or something that had a piece of grief in it. In the moment you only see the dark, wet eyes and the small, soft, warm smile and the tiny tremor at the corner of his mouth, and you think it’s exhaustion, and overwhelm, and the simple, impossible weight of having just become a father in a wrecked ship on a planet he doesn’t know.

You think it’s love.

It is love. You’ll never doubt that it’s love. But it’s…

It’s…

The thought comes slowly, the way a cold thing comes into warm water. You don't, at first, recognise it as a thought, rather more like a shadow at the edge of vision. A small wrongness. A something that doesn’t quite fit in the warm, dim hold full of leaf-light and birdsong and a sleeping baby on your chest.

You stroke his cheek again and feel the beard and the warm skin.

I am the only person alive who has touched this face.

I am the only person alive who has seen this face.

I am the only person alive…

This is the Way.

The cold reaches your chest, and you go very still.

He sees it. His face – the face that you can read now, the face that has been a visor for more than a year and is, suddenly, an open thing under your palm – goes through three small fractional shifts in quick succession.

First, the small dimming of the smile. Second, the small focusing of the brows. Third, the slow careful drop of the eyes from yours to the baby on your chest, and then back to yours, and then – somewhere underneath the dark, wet eyes – the smallest possible hardening, the closing of a door you didn’t, until now, know he had behind his face.

You stop stroking his cheek, but your hand stays there.

"Din," you whisper.

He doesn't answer.

"Din…the Creed."

His eyes close, slowly, mouth tightening. He turns his face just enough to press a kiss to the heel of your palm – soft, careful, the kind of kiss a man gives a thing he’s about to lose – and when he opens his eyes again they’re looking at you with all of the love and all of the grief and all of the impossible terrible weight of the thing he’s done, and the thing he now has to do, and the thing that has, in the last hour, been quietly waiting for the moment of calm in which to arrive.

"Cyar'ika…”

"Din, the Creed says…if anyone sees…"

"I know what it says."

"Din…"

"I know what it says, mesh'la, I know."

You stare at him and he stares back. The baby sighs in her sleep with a tiny, snuffling outbreath. Her dark hair, now drying in the warm thermal-blanketed air, is beginning to lift in soft fine wisps off the crown of her head.

She’s seen him too.

She’s seen him too.

You feel your whole body go cold and you drop your hand from his cheek. It falls into your lap, useless, and your other arm tightens, instinctively, helplessly, around the warm sleeping weight of your daughter.

Her. Her too.

"Din." Your voice goes thin. "Din, she…she…"

He doesn't speak.

"Din, she's seen you too."

His eyes close again and he bows his head. His forehead comes down, slowly, gently, against your temple, and his hand rises and cups the back of the baby's head where it rests against your chest, and he holds her there, gently.

"I know," he says softly.

"No," you whisper.

He lifts his head from your temple, his eyes finding yours.

"Cyar'ika…”

"No."

"Mesh'la, listen…"

"No. No, Din, no, no, no…!"

You start to shake, the baby shifting, fretful, disturbed by the sudden tension in the body she’s sleeping on, and you tighten your arm around her which only makes you shake harder. You can’t stop the small sounds coming out of you, the small, high, broken sounds that aren’t quite words.

"Don't…don't touch her. Don't touch her, Din, don't…!"

His face goes white and his hand comes off the back of the baby's head as though her skin has burned him, lifts, and hangs in the air a foot from her, whilst he stares at you, mouth open.

"Don't take her," you whisper. "Don't take her from me, please. Please, I'll go. I'll go right now. I'll go and I'll never come back and I'll never tell anyone, I won't tell anyone what you look like, I won't tell anyone, I'll take her away…I'll take her away somewhere and I'll raise her and I'll never speak your name again. I'll change my name. You can tell Karga I died in the crash, that we both died, you can…you can…Din, please, don't hurt her, don't hurt me in front of her, don't…please…!"

"Cyar'ika..."

His voice cracks on the word and suddenly he moves, his bad leg dragging, both bare hands coming up to cup your face, his eyes right in front of yours.

"No…no….no, mesh'la, no, no, no, listen to me, listen to me. Look at me, look at me, look at me."

"Din…"

"Look at me!"

His face is right there, inches from yours, his hand warm on your cheeks. He’s shaking now too and his eyes are streaming, freely, the tears running down into his beard.

"Never. Never, never, mesh'la, never. Do you hear me? You have to hear me. You have to hear me, cyar'ika, you have to…look at me…never. I would die. I would die, do you understand? I would die before I lifted a hand to either of you… cyar'ika, look at me. Never, not in any creed, not in any code, not in any galaxy. Never. Never."

"But the Creed…"

"Fuck the Creed!"

It comes out of him like a thing torn loose, like a thing that’s been sitting on his chest and has, finally, found a way out. His thumbs sweep, hard, across your wet cheeks. His forehead comes down against yours and presses there, hard.

“Fuck the Creed. Fuck the Creed, mesh'la, fuck it before I do anything to either of you, fuck it before I do anything to anyone in this hold. Do you hear me? The Creed doesn’t say to kill you. The Creed has never said to kill you. The Creed says… the Creed says I’m not to be seen, and I’ve been seen, and that is a thing that has happened to me, not a thing that I am to do to you, do you understand the difference, cyar'ika? Tell me you understand the difference."

You can't speak. All you can do is shake your head under the press of his forehead, as his hands tighten on your face, his breath hot and uneven against your mouth.

"There’s a way."

"What…?"

"There’s a way, mesh'la. There’s always been a way. Listen to me…are you listening?"

"I'm…I'm listening, Din…"

"On Mandalore."

He stops and swallows. The baby wakes again, snuffling, troubled, and his hand leaves your cheek and comes down to cup the back of her head, steadying her against you, his thumb stroking once, soft, against the wisp of her hair.

"On Mandalore, there are waters under the ground in the mines. They’re called the Living Waters, cyar'ika. They’re older than the Creed, older than anything. There’s a…a rite. There’s always been a rite. If a Mandalorian…if a Mandalorian has been apostate, if a Mandalorian has broken the Creed, if a Mandalorian has shown his face… there’s a way back. There’s always been a way back. He bathes in the Living Waters, he says the words, he emerges, and he’s reconciled. Do you understand? The Way is not a…it’s not a trap. It’s a path. And every path has a way back onto it, even mine. Even mine, mesh'la, even after tonight."

You sob helplessly, the baby fretting against your chest.

"You can…. you can go back?"

"I can go back."

"You can…"

"I can go back. I can be reconciled. I can put the helmet on again with a clean creed, mesh'la. I can do it if I want to. And until I can, until I get the chance, I’ll simply not be seen by anyone else. The helmet goes on the second any other living thing comes within a klick of this wreck. The helmet goes on for Karga and for Vesha and for every soul on Nevarro and every soul in this galaxy. The only two beings who have seen my face will be the two beings in this hold. And when the time comes, if I want to, I’ll go to Mandalore, go down into the mines and walk into those waters with all of it on me and I’ll come back out with a clean creed, and the helmet will go back on, and that will be the end of it – if I want to.”

He takes a breath.

There’s no killing. There’s never been any killing. Where did you…where did you get that, mesh'la, where…?"

"I just…I thought… you never told me about the Waters, you never…"

"I should have. I should have told you. I just…cyar'ika, I’m sorry. I would never hurt you – never hurt her – please tell me you believe that.”

He pulls back just enough to look you in the face. His eyes are red and streaming, the lashes spiked with wet and his hand is still on the back of the baby's head and his other is back on your face, his thumb sweeping, hard, across your cheekbone, as he searches you, the way a man searches a sky for one star.

"Do you believe me?"

"Din…"

"Cyar'ika, look at me. Do you believe me?"

You look at him, at the wet dark eyes and the threads of grey at the chin and the long, terrible love in all of it. You look at his hand cradling the back of your baby's head, at the way he has not, since the panic took you, stopped touching her – the way he is, even now, still holding her against you, still steadying her, still gentle, the hand of a man who has never in his life raised it to a child and could no more do it tonight than he could stop the suns.

"I believe you," you whisper.

His face breaks open. The fragile careful composure he’s been holding through the crash and the labour and the delivery and the cord-cutting and the bandaging and the explanation – the fragile careful composure of a man being needed – finally cracks, and he drops his forehead back to yours and sobs, openly, helplessly, the great shuddering wet sobs of a man who’s been afraid that the woman he loves believes he’s going to murder her.

"Mesh'la…"

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Din. I'm sorry, I…I wasn't thinking, I was…I was just so tired, and she's so small, and you…you just…"

"I know, I know, I know...."

"And I love you. I love you, I love your face, I love your face, Din, please don't…"

"I'm not going anywhere, mesh'la, I'm right here, I'm right here, I'm…karking hell, cyar'ika…"

He laughs, wet and broken into your forehead and you laugh into his and the baby on your chest, finally, lets out one small, fretful squall and his hand moves, instinctively, down her back in a slow soothing stroke, and she settles, the way a thing settles when it’s decided the hand that is on it is a safe hand.

"Hush, ad'ika, hush. Your buir and buir are having a moment."

You laugh, hard and wet and he laughs back. He kisses your forehead then pulls back and wipes his face roughly with the back of his bare wrist, and the small fractional shift happens behind his eyes that you’ve learned to read in his shoulders.

"Alright," he says, his voice gathering itself back to its proper task. "Alright, listen, mesh'la. We have to think. Are you with me?"

"I'm with you."

"Good girl, stay with me. I have to think out loud. Sometimes it helps. You tell me if I miss anything."

"I'll tell you."

He shifts, dragging himself back up into the half-sitting position against the slope of the bulkhead, his bad leg out long in front of him, his arm coming back around you and the baby. His other hand stays on her, his thumb moving in the slow soothing stroke that has, somehow, become automatic, the absent unconscious gesture of a man who’s had a daughter for thirty minutes and has already learned the rhythm of the thing.

"First, where we are."

"You don't know."

"I don't know. I…when the first hit took the navicomp the screens went. I was flying her down on visual through atmospheric scatter and I was looking for anything green. I picked the biggest patch of green I could see and aimed for it. The biggest patch of green is…it's some forest or swamp somewhere in the system. We were three jumps from Nevarro. So, we’re somewhere within… somewhere within probably four parsecs of Nevarro. That's a lot of space, a lot of planets."

"Inhabited?"

"I don't know yet. We came down in trees. Trees mean atmosphere, atmosphere means probably habitable, habitable means probably settled somewhere, but not necessarily near us. We could be a thousand klicks from the nearest settlement, or we could be ten and then there’s that smell…”

You pause and inhale, tasting something for the first time that you haven’t noticed before – something that tastes vaguely familiar and yet you push it down because it just can’t be what you think it is.

"Second…” he carries on. “The Crest. It’s…I haven't been forward yet, so I don't know what's left up there. The cockpit took at least one hit before atmosphere, maybe two. The nav is gone, I know that. The long-range comm may or may not be intact. I need to look. There’s a chance – a small chance – that the long-range is up and I can punch a beacon to Karga. There’s also a chance the long-range may be on the ground in a tree somewhere a klick from here. I have to look."

"What about the attacker?"

He goes still.

"What about them?"

"Din, whoever shot us down must have seen us go down. They know where the wreck is. They…they could be coming."

His jaw works, the small ripple under the beard at the hinge of it, the small clench that you have, until tonight, only ever read through the helmet's slight forward tilt.

"Maybe," he says. "Maybe, yes…probably. I’ve been trying not to think about it but yes, probably. They hit us hard and that wasn't a random pirate sweep, mesh'la. That was a hunt. Which means someone is going to want to confirm the put-down."

"How long?"

"I don’t know. It depends on whether they have atmospheric craft or only the fighter. It depends on whether they tracked us through the burn and whether there's anyone on this planet for the ground search. It could be hours or days. It could be never, if we're remote enough and they decide the crash itself killed us. But I’m not going to plan for never, cyar'ika. I'm going to plan for hours. So, priorities."

He counts on his fingers.

"One – comm. I get forward, assess the cockpit and try the long-range. If it works, I punch a beacon to Karga. If it doesn’t, I rip the unit, bring it back here and see what I can do with the kit. Two – threat. I assess the wreck from outside and see what's around us. Trees, swamp, terrain, sightlines, water source – you heard the water too?"

"I heard it. I think it's a stream."

"Good, a stream means we have drinking water. A stream also means cover and a way to move if we need to move. Three – defence. If we have hours, I set the wreck for defence. There are still weapons in the locker, I haven't checked yet, but the locker was aft and the aft is intact. Four – you and her. I’m not moving you for at least a day, mesh'la. You just gave birth on a deck-plate. You’re bleeding and exhausted and neither of you are getting up. The two of you will stay in this nest and I’ll bring the universe to you, do you understand?"

"Din, your leg…"

"It’ll hold."

“But…”

"It’ll hold, cyar'ika. I've sealed it and it’s not bleeding. I won't run a marathon on it, but it’ll hold. I have to be able to move and I will, but you will not – promise me.”

"I promise."

"Good."

He breathes and looks down at both you. Then he bends and presses his mouth to the baby’s head and straightens again.

"I'm going to go forward now."

"Alright."

He reaches for the helmet where it still sits on the deck beside him. The dim red light of the auxiliary glows against the dome. He lifts it, looks at it for one suspended second, and then he looks back at you.

"This is not…this is not me leaving you, mesh'la. This is not me hiding from you. The helmet’s going on because I’m going forward and the cockpit’s open to the sky and there could be eyes already. The helmet goes on for them, not for you. The second I come back through the hatch, and it’s just us, it comes off."

“I understand, but Din…”

He waits.

“Will you kiss me, just once, before you put it back on?”

His face softens imperceptibly and, without any hesitation, he leans back down and presses his mouth to yours. It’s familiar in the way it was that one night you had in the hold – the night you believe you created your daughter – and you press back, a small, satisfied sound leaving your throat.

He pulls back and kisses the tip of your nose. “There can be more of that later.”

He puts the helmet back on and you watch his face disappear behind the dark T of the visor and feel something complicated in your chest. A small, unexpected grief at losing him again, and the deeper recognition that he’s not lost. He’s the same man, the helmet is the same helmet, and now you know what’s in it.

Now you know the dark hair and the dark eyes and the threads of grey at the chin. Now when the helmet looks at you, you’ll see them. The helmet is no longer a wall. The helmet is a window with the curtains drawn, and you’re on the inside of the curtain with him.

You watch as he pulls on the remainder of his armour, the gloves the last piece to be fitted. Then he reaches out and cups your cheek, the leather warm, the visor tipping down to you.

"If you hear anything – anything that isn't me – you stay flat and keep her quiet. There's a blaster in the kit-pouch on the right side. You put your hand on it, and you wait. You don’t call out and you don’t move. Even if you hear me. Especially if you hear me. You wait until you see me, understand?”

"Yes."

"Tell me where the blaster is."

"Kit-pouch on the right side."

"Good girl."

He pulls the personal comm he carries for short range from his belt, the one paired to the unit in the helmet, and tucks it gently into the blanket-fold by your hip.

"That's on and open. If you need me, you press it once and I’ll hear you. Don't speak unless you have to. Press it once if you're alright and just want me. Press it twice if something’s wrong. Press and hold if you can’t speak and I come running, okay?"

“You can’t run.”

“Cyar’ika…”

"One, two, hold."

"Good."

He bends and the beskar presses, briefly, against your forehead. Then the visor tips down to your baby and he presses it to the top of her head too.

"Hold the line, ad'ika, I'll be back."

Then he’s moving, the bad leg dragging, the cuirass scraping faintly against twisted deck-plate. He goes forward through the canted bulkhead-door into the dim, red corridor and disappears around the bend toward the cockpit.

The hold goes quiet around you, and you’re alone with your daughter for the first time, your life split open in so many ways.

➰➰➰➰➰➰➰➰🚀➰➰➰➰➰➰➰➰

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

Ellie doesn’t count, not really, and as he sits at the bar sipping on his second glass of honey-coloured liquid, he immediately feels guilty for having had the thought in the first place. She’s not nothing, of course she isn’t. But she’s sixteen and, one day, she won’t need him anymore, even if she thinks she doesn’t need him now.

She’s the closest thing he’ll ever have to a daughter again, and he’s grateful for that small fact every day, even if he isn't good at showing it.

And you were the closest thing he was ever going to have to a partner again – a wife, maybe.

He’s not stupid. For all the fairytale and fantasy and loved up feelings he’s been experiencing over the last month, he knows his limitations. Knows he’s not the same man he was before the outbreak. Knows he’s not capable…

He takes another mouthful – almost half the glass – and sits back in his chair, chiding himself in that way he sometimes does when, deep down, he knows he’s being unfair to himself. Because he is capable and if he’d been given the chance – if whatever ethereal being that exists had listened to his prayers – he would have been everything for you.

Three weeks. Three weeks since Matt came home, three weeks since you came to his door, three weeks since he buried himself deep inside you against his kitchen wall and tried to believe you when you said it wasn’t goodbye. He thinks about it all the time – thinks about you all the time. The look on your face, the taste of your mouth, the feel of you…the desperate, painful knowledge that it was all just too little too late.

“Figured I might find you here.” He jumps as Tommy slides in the seat at the table beside him. “At least I did after I checked all the obvious places.”

“I wanted a drink,” Joel replies simply.

“So I see.”

“Somethin’ wrong down at the wall? Somebody need somethin’?”

“No, nobody needs anythin’,” Tommy says. “I just wanted to see my brother – that allowed?”

“Sure,” Joel shrugs. “Now you can say you’ve seen me, and I’m fine.”

“Yeah, you look it.” Tommy’s voice is dry. “Real picture of fine.”

Joel drains the last of his glass and gestures to Seth for another. “Say what you came here to say, Tommy.”

Tommy looks at him for a long moment. “Okay, I’ll say it then. Month, six weeks ago, you were the happiest I’ve seen you in…in forever. And I know exactly what – or rather who – was makin’ you happy. And then, three weeks ago, that someone’s dead husband shows up and now everyone’s actin’ like it’s the greatest miracle since I don’t know when, he’s moved into her house so they can play happy families and you’re sittin’ here doing this. So, I wanted to ask my brother how he’s doin’ since he sure as hell ain’t gonna volunteer it.”

“I told you,” Joel says, nodding as Seth brings over another glass. “I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine, Joel.”

“I’m fine,” he repeats, harder now. “It’s done. She’s made her choice and it was the right choice. She’s got a husband she loves come back from the dead and a son that needs his family and she’s chosen that, and she’s right to.”

He takes a drink.

“Matt’s a good man, a better man that me probably, and Dylan needs his parents under one roof and that’s…that’s the right thing. So, there’s nothin’ to talk about. She chose right and I’m respectin’ that and I’m havin’ a drink. That’s the whole of it.”

“And you’re just…okay with that?”

“Doesn’t matter if I’m okay with it or not. It ain’t about me. It’s about what’s best for Dylan and that family and I’m not gonna be the thing that breaks a family up. Matt’s gone through hell these last two years, hopin’ he might someday find his way back to his wife and child and who am I to stand in the way of that?”

He rubs a hand over his face.

“I’m happy for ‘em.”

“Bullshit.”

Joel glances at his brother. “Watch it.”

“Bullshit, Joel.” Tommy leans in closer. “You’re not happy for ‘em – look at yourself. You’re sittin’ in a bar at ten in the morning drinking whiskey when I’d normally find you at the gate or at the stables or doin’ somethin’ productive, and you’re tellin’ me that you’re happy for the woman you love goin’ home to another man? That ain’t peace or acceptance. That’s a man who’s given up and callin’ it grace to make it hurt less.”

He shakes his head.

“I know you and I know what this is. This is the same damn thing you did after…”

“Don’t.” Joel glares at him. “Don’t you bring that up. That has nothin’ to do with this.”

“It’s got everythin’ to do with this. It’s the exact same thing. Somethin’ hurts too much to look at, so you decide the manly, noble thing is to eat it, swallow it whole, tell everybody that you’re fine and then find somethin’ to bury yourself in. That ain’t strength Joel, that’s weakness.”

Joel sets his glass down and half-turns in his chair to face his brother, something dangerous, raw and cornered in his expression.

“You wanna know what it is? It’s the only thing I get to do, that’s what it is. You think I got choices here, Tommy? You think there’s some other play I’m too stubborn to make? There isn’t, okay? She’s married, her husband’s alive and her son needs his family whole. There’s no version of this where I get her that doesn’t mean tearin’ that apart – none. So, the only thing I get to decide is whether I do this ugly or whether I do it clean. Whether I make it hard for her or easy for her. And I’ve decided to make it easy. That’s the one scrap of it that’s mine. So yeah, I’m in here havin’ a drink and then, once I’ve done that, I’ll get back out to the stables or the wall or wherever the fuck you need me and call it fine. Because the alternative is, I go over there and make it harder for her and I’d rather cut my own hand off, so don’t…”

His voice cracks.

“Don’t sit here and tell me it’s givin’ up. It’s the only thing I got left that I can do for her. Let me have it.”

Tommy sits quietly for a moment, watching his brother’s fingers move back and forth on the glass in front of him.

“Does she know that you’re givin’ up this easy?” He finally asks, quietly. “Or did she decide it and you just…rolled over and let her because you’d already decided you don’t deserve to fight for it?”

Joel’s eyes move to his again.

“She said…she said it wasn’t goodbye.”

“What wasn’t goodbye?”

“She came over that night – the night I brought him home – and…” he swallows. “Doesn’t matter what happened, but she said it wasn’t goodbye. I told her to follow her heart, and she said it wasn’t goodbye and that was weeks ago and…”

“And now she’s got Matt moved into her house and…”

Joel nods silently.

“So, you’ve just decided that’s it – case closed?”

Tommy shakes his head.

“You are the most stubborn man I ever met about everythin’ except the one thing that matters. You’ll fight the whole world tooth and nail for scraps, cross the country through hell, kill anybody who comes near the people you love, but the second it’s about whether you get to have somethin’ good, somethin’ for you, you fold, every time. You decide you don’t deserve it before anybody’s even said no. And then you dress it up as sacrifice, as protectin’ folk, as being noble. And everybody buys it ‘cause it looks like strength. But I know better, Joel, I’ve always known better. It’s not strength – it’s the oldest fear you’ve got. That you’re not a man who gets to keep good things. So, you throw ‘em away first, so you don’t have to watch ‘em get taken.”

Joel’s fingers leave the glass and curl into fists.

“Stop.”

“You need to fight.” Tommy leans in close. “That woman loves you, anybody with eyes can see it, even if you’ve both tried your hardest to hide it. And you love her more than I’ve seen you love anythin’ since…”

He catches himself.

“…in a long time. And you’re gonna to let it go, let her walk back into a life she grieved her way out of, into bed with a man she thought was dead because you decided in your own head that you don’t get to have her? Without even fightin’ for it? Without even findin’ out if she’d choose you if you actually gave her the chance to, instead of makin’ it easy for her to walk away? That ain’t love, that’s cowardice.”

And that’s the word – cowardice – the one that lands. Joel moves fast, leaping to his feet, chair tumbling over behind him and his fist bunches in the front of Tommy’s shirt, pulling him out of his own chair and pushing him back against the far wall.

“You call me a coward again…” he snarls, “one more time…!”

“Or what?” Tommy doesn’t flinch. “You’ll hit me? Go on then, hit me. That’d be easier than what I’m actually askin’ you to do, wouldn’t it? Easier to swing at your brother than to walk around the corner, knock on a door and tell a woman the truth. Go on then. I’d rather you hit me than watch you keep dyin’ inside and callin’ it peace!”

He grabs Joel’s hand, the one twisted in his shirt and grips it tightly.

“You’re my brother and I’ve watched you lose damn near everythin’ a man can lose and keep walkin’. I am not gonna stand here and watch you throw away the one good thing that’s come along in twenty years because you’re too scared and too broke inside to believe you’re allowed to keep it. So hit me, or let go of me, but either way you’re gonna hear it.”

He stares into his brother’s eyes.

“Fight for her! For once in your goddamn life fight for the thing that’s good instead of just the things that hurt!”

They stand there, the two of them, chest to chest, Joel's fist still twisted in his brother's shirt, both breathing hard whilst Seth turns away and starts cleaning some glasses. And for a long, terrible second it hangs there, before it goes out of Joel all at once. The fight, the rage, the wall…it collapses. His fist unclenches from Tommy's shirt, and he lets go, steps back and turns away, his shoulders coming down, head bowing.

“You don’t understand,” he says, his voice ragged. “It ain’t that I don’t wanna fight for her. God, Tommy, you think I don’t wanna…I want it so bad I can’t breathe half the time. I lie awake and I…”

He stops, breath shaking.

“It’s that I’ve thought it through, all the way through, every night, every angle, and there’s no way to fight for her that doesn’t mean askin’ her to blow up her family. To hurt Dylan, to break Matt’s heart. I brought him home, Tommy. I brought him home to ‘em and now I’m supposed to – what – turn around and take his wife? What kind of man does that? What kind of…?”

His voice breaks fully.

“And if she chooses me, even if I walk over there and she says yes, then I’ve cost Dylan his family and Matt everythin’ and I’ll have to live for the rest of my life knowin’ I broke those people to get what I wanted, And she’d had to live with it too. And I know she’d resent me for it eventually, or hate herself, and it would…it would rot. A thing like that rots. So, it ain’t that I won’t fight. It’s that I’ve fought it out in my head a hundred times and I lose every version. There’s no way to win that doesn’t cause pain and so the only decent thing…”

“You keep saying decent like it’s the highest thing there is,” Tommy says, quieter now. “Like the whole point of a life is to be the most decent man in the graveyard.”

He puts his hand on Joel’s shoulder.

“You wanna know what I think? I think you don’t get to decide that for everyone. I think you’ve sat in your own head and played God with three other people’s lives, decided what’s best for ‘em, and done all of that decidin’ alone so you never have to actually ask any of 'em what they want. Because askin’ is the scary part and means it might come out different than the story you’ve told yourself.”

He sighs.

“Maybe Dylan would rather have a mother who’s actually happy rather than his parents pretendin’. Maybe Matt already knows or suspects somethin’ and you’re too busy being noble to see it. Maybe she wouldn’t resent you at all. Maybe you’re wrong about all of it and you’ll never know cause you decided to fold before the cards were even dealt.”

Joel stands there a long time under his brother's hand, his breath ragged and slowing, and something works in him, some terrible, slow shifting of a thing that’s been set like concrete.

“I brought him home,” he says, weaker now, like even he can hear it starting to give. “After that, I can’t…”

“You brought a man home, but that doesn’t put a lien on his wife’s heart. Joel, bringin’ Matt home didn’t make her love him again. You can’t be responsible for bringin’ a man across the country, hand him back to his family and also be responsible for makin’ his wife’s heart do somethin’ it can’t. Her heart is where her heart is. Her lovin’ you instead of him ain’t a crime you committed against him by savin’ his life. It’s just the truth of where things stood before he came back through that gate.”

Tommy moves round to face his brother.

“You really think that Matt wants his wife spending the next forty years dead inside next to him pretendin’ out of gratitude and duty when there’s a whole other life she could be livin’ honest?”

Joel turns away again, but slower this time, and he walks a few steps back to the table and leans on it, head down.

“I don’t know how,” he says finally. “Even if you’re right I don’t…Tommy I don’t know how to go do it. I don’t know how to walk over there and want somethin’ out loud, for me and ask for it. I’ve spent so long not doin’ that because it’s safer to want in the dark where, if you don’t get it, nobody sees that you didn’t. Even before he came back, it took…”

He swallows hard.

“I don’t know how to say, now, that I want her, I want a life, I want to be happy and let everybody see me want it and maybe watch me not get it. I don’t…I’m fifty-five years old and I don’t know how to do the one thing you’re askin’ which is just…hope out loud. I don’t know how.”

And that’s the true bottom of it. Not that he thinks he shouldn’t fight for you, but because, somewhere long ago, he lost the ability to believe he’s allowed to want good things where the world can see, that hope has become a thing too dangerous to hold in the open, that he'd rather quietly relinquish everything than stand exposed in the terrible vulnerability of openly, visibly, wanting to be happy.

Tommy moves to stand beside him.

"You know how you learn?" He says quietly. "You just do it scared. That's the whole secret. There's no version where you're not scared. You don't get to wait till the fear's gone, 'cause it's never gonna be gone, not for a thing that matters this much. You just…you walk over there with your heart in your throat and your knees shakin' and you say the true thing anyway, while you're still scared, 'cause that's what it costs. That's what it costs to be alive instead of just careful.”

He sighs again.

“And maybe it goes bad. Maybe she says no, or Matt takes a swing at you, or the whole thing's a wreck. That's the risk, the real one, not the noble story you tell where you protect everybody by disappearin'. The real risk is you want it out loud and you don't get it and everybody sees. And you survive that, Joel. Men survive that every day. You've survived a hundred things worse than that. You just haven't let yourself risk this particular thing 'cause it's the one that'll hurt the most, and somewhere back there you decided the way to never hurt like that again was to never want like that again where it counts."

He puts his hand back on his brother's shoulder.

"But you already want her. You already do. That train left the station a while ago. So, you're gonna hurt either way now, that's already decided – you're either gonna hurt havin' tried and lost, or you're gonna hurt for the next forty years knowin' you never tried at all, watchin' her across the square. Those are the only two roads left. Pick the one where you at least find out."

Joel’s quiet a long time.

"Not now," he says at last. "I hear you. I do. I'm not…I'm not sayin' you're wrong, Tommy. You might be right about all of it, but not now. It'd be…the timin' of it'd be cruel, no matter how true it was. There's a right way to do a thing and a wrong time to do the right way, and right now everybody's raw, everybody's reelin', and if I go stormin' over there now to declare myself, I'm not fightin' for her, I'm just addin' my mess to a pile that's already too high. She needs to heal, Dylan needs to settle and Matt needs – hell, everybody needs a minute to find their feet before anybody goes blowin' anythin’ up."

He straightens finally, and turns to face his brother, eyes red.

"But I hear you. I'm ain’t gonna just disappear and call it noble. I'm gonna…when it's time, when things have settled and it won't just be cruel, I'm gonna find a way to be honest. Out loud, where it can be seen. I'm gonna give her a real choice, made with all the cards on the table, instead of decidin' it for her by vanishin'. That much I can promise you, just not today. Alright? Is that enough for you?"

Tommy exhales and nods, “I guess so. Only…”

“Only what?”

“Well…” he scratches the back of his neck. “Maria’s gonna invite ‘em over for Christmas dinner on Friday - the three of 'em. I don’t know if they’re gonna say yes or not, but you're gonna be there so are you gonna be able to sit at a table with her and Matt, watchin', and not say anythin’?”

Joel rubs his hand over his face – because sitting at a table with you and your no-so-dead husband isn't exactly what he had in his head when he pictured Christmas Day this year.

“And don’t say you ain’t comin’,” Tommy interjects, “’cause that would just be obvious.”

“Why is Maria doin’ this?”

“I guess she just wants to make sure everyone feels included.”

"Jesus…”

"I know. I tried to tell her but you know what she's like. If she don't invite 'em it looks suss and..."

He trails off, places both hands on Joel's shoulders and looks him dead in the eye.

“For what it's worth, I think she'll choose you. I've seen how she looks at you. When the time comes and you finally get brave enough to ask, I think she’ll choose you. I think when you finally stand in the light and want her out loud, I think she's gonna want you right back, and I think it's gonna be alright. Not easy, but alright. Real, and honest, and alright. So don't spend the wait convincin' yourself she'll say no. Spend it healin' up and gettin' brave. That's my last piece of unsolicited brotherly wisdom, and then I'll shut up forever, I swear."

"You won't," Joel says ruefully.

"No, I won't. Tommy agrees cheerfully. “You done here? Cause there’s a shit load of – pardon my French – shit needin’ shovelled down at the stables. We got two folks called in sick and…”

“I’ll be there. Just…give me half an hour and I’ll be there.”

“Great, half an hour then.” Tommy claps him on the shoulder. “I’ll see you.”

“Yeah, you will.”

Alone once again, Joel stares down at the half-finished glass on the table in front of him and thinks about it all – about you and Dylan and Matt. About telling you how he feels and asking you to choose. About a life lived either with you or without you. A life where he gets what he wants or one where he has to spend the next thirty years watching someone else have it instead.

Lifting the glass, he turns to put it on the bar, then remembers Tommy’s warning about Christmas Day.

“Fuck,” he mutters to himself, then drains the last of the contents before heading for the door.

❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️