paper planes

She was asleep. 

Gen was pretty sure she was asleep, because her breathing had slowed and evened out, but that wasn't hard to fake. He should know. However, it was hard to fake that kind of stillness for more than half an hour, and she hadn't moved for closer to an hour now. 

Again: he would know. Sleep wasn't something that came easily to him nowadays, and more often than not Irene would stay awake if he tossed too much. So he pretended, sometimes, and only once she had slipped away into her own dreams did he give up the pretence.

In the near-dark, with only a sliver of moonlight falling across her cheek and part of her bare shoulder, she was beautiful. But then again, she was beautiful all the time: whether it was curled up on the sofa in an overlarge sweater or dressed so sharply she could kill (and had killed, too). 

What she was doing here in bed a broken shell of a man, Gen had no idea. 

Carefully, so carefully, he drew his fingers through the cool strands of her hair where it lay fanned out against her pillow. He sidled closer, so gently that the sheets barely rustled, and then he was inching an arm slowly, slowly, over her waist.

So far, she had never complained about his octopus-like tendencies, though she had woken him more than once trying to slide out from under his arm. So long as she didn't, though, Gen was determined to keep doing it, because it made jolting out of a bad dream better when there was someone (not just anyone, Irene) curled up against his chest. 

He held his breath as he put the full weight of his arm against her side, and quickly shut them again when she roused with a sleepy murmur. She didn't move away, instead sliding a hand down his own and tugging him a little closer, to which he was all too happy to oblige.

"What is that?"

"...Breakfast?"

It was a good thing that Irene couldn't smell anything, Gen thought sheepishly, as he looked from Irene's highly dubious face to the slightly charred pieces of toast on the tray. The blackened edges of the crust were damning enough. 

"That doesn't look like food anymore, Gen," she said, before dissolving into a fit of hacking coughs that chased away his sheepishness in exchange for a frown. 

"Well, you ran out of bread. These were the best-looking." Crossing the room, he settled the tray onto her knees. "Careful of the soup."

At Irene's grimace, he huffed and added. "It's canned. I just microwaved it."

Perhaps he should have been more offended by how relieved she looked.

As she picked up the spoon with marked reluctance (no appetite, she'd said earlier, so Gen was sure it wasn't completely the fault of his cooking), he slid into bed next to her. She radiated just a little too much warmth when he pressed close to her side, but Gen tucked the covers higher around her waist anyway. 

Once she was finished, he set the tray on the floor and curled his arm around her shoulders, drawing her down so she could lie comfortably against him. That she came without hesitation, her body heavy but pliant, read as bone-deep fatigue. That sound, a small sigh, as she pressed an ear over his heart. 

And Gen's chest filled with a strange, flushed protectiveness, a pride that she would let him see her in such weakness.

Then, "Did you burn all of my bread?"

Uh oh. "... Not all of it." She'd eaten some, after all. 

Gen was alright with action sequences, usually. The fighting, that had been a part of his life long before he’d gotten into the intelligence field, both in the military and from a life on the streets. No, in this movie the hero got himself caught.

In this movie, there was an interrogation scene. 

Irene had gone to get a drink when it started. By the time she returned to the sitting room, the TV screen was dark. The remote was lying sad and broken on the opposite side of the room, and Gen couldn’t stop fucking shaking.

"Hey," she said, crouching in front of him. "Look at me, Gen. Look at me. It’s alright." Her voice was calm, her face tightly controlled, but he could see in the tightness of her lips, in the blank mask she only wore when she was stressed. She wasn’t touching him.

He could see her guilt, he could see her blaming herself. And he hated that she did. 

"You’re safe," she says, and oh, he knew. He knew, and yet here he was, shaking so hard he could barely breathe. 

Reaching for her, then, had a twofold purpose. Here, with his nose pressed into her shoulder and his arms tight around her waist… Here, he could find comfort (so ironic, wasn’t it, that he felt safest in the arms of the woman who had made him this way). 

And in the clutch of his fingers in the back of her shirt, in the trembling kiss he pressed to her neck, perhaps he was trying to tell her something, too. 

I’m not afraid of you.