Catching Her Breath
Garth Chapin x reader fem
••••••••
The grand hall of Commander Warren smells of warm wax and white lilies.
Y/n has known this since forever, she grew up in rooms that smelled exactly like this, rooms where her father received his counterparts with their owners’ smiles and their hands that lingered too long on the shoulders of the women present. She knows this smell the way she knows the doctrine, by heart, in her bones, without ever having had a choice.
Tonight she wears green.
The dress that her father’s seamstress adjusted for three weeks, the satin fabric, the cut that falls exactly as it should, the deep green that tells every man in this room available, eligible, ready. She put on this dress tonight with the same surgical neutrality she brings to everything concerning her cover. Daughter of Commander Erhart. Pious. Desirable. Perfect.
The perfect daughter of the perfect Commander.
Underneath, a Mayday agent since she was fifteen.
These two versions of herself coexist so cleanly inside her body that she no longer knows sometimes which one is the costume.
Garth is posted near the north wall.
She knows this without looking. She always knows where he is in the rooms they share, it’s her training, she tells herself, the necessity of knowing her contact’s position in case of emergency. That’s what she’s been telling herself for weeks with a persistence that is starting to resemble bad faith.
They don’t speak at events like this one. Too many people, too many eyes, too many Aunts who watch for crossed glances between Greens and Guardians like hunting dogs picking up a scent. Their exchanges happen in the service corridors, the stairwells of the east wing, the rare stolen minutes between two rounds when nobody is watching.
But he is there.
And she knows it.
Which is already too much.
The first two hours pass as they should.
She dances with Commander Pritchard’s son, twenty-two years old, clumsy, genuinely embarrassed by the situation, and Y/n is almost grateful to him for that. She memorizes names, ranks, useful scraps of conversation. She smiles at the right moments. She tilts her head at the right angle.
She does her job.
Agnes is in the room too, also in green, straight as a candle, her hands exactly where the Aunts taught her to place them. Y/n watches her from her corner with that complex feeling that hasn’t simplified over the past weeks, a kind of painful admiration for someone who still truly believes, who hasn’t yet found the seam in the lie and pulled on it until everything unravels.
And Agnes watches Garth.
Not openly, Agnes has been too well trained to watch openly. But Y/n reads the head angles, the slight rotations of the torso, the way her fingers tighten on her dress when he moves into her field of vision.
Y/n looks away.
She’s been doing that for weeks.
Commander Raines arrives with the second group.
She sees him enter from her position near the window and something in her, that animal, primitive part that has survived seventeen years of Gilead by staying sharp, takes note immediately. The way he moves through the room. The way he looks at the girls like someone scanning a menu. The way the other Commanders shift slightly as he passes, not out of deference but out of that instinctive recoil one has before something threatening that one prefers not to name.
Sixty years old, maybe more. A high rank. Eyes that linger.
She makes a point of not looking at him directly.
Too late.
He has seen her.
The head tilt comes ten minutes later.
You’ll dance with me. Not a question. Never a question with men like him. A designation, a verbal possession that does not wait for an answer because it has already decided the answer on her behalf.
Y/n sets down her glass.
She smiles.
She dances.
The first measures are bearable.
Raines holds the correct distance, barely, the exact limit of what is permitted, which means he knows the rules and has decided to push right up against them. Y/n maintains her posture, her smile, her eyes at the correct height. She counts the measures. She takes inventory of the room in her periphery, the exits, the Aunts on duty, the other Guardians.
Garth.
Garth who is still at the north wall and whose shoulders she can see, without looking at him directly, contract by an imperceptible degree.
He saw Raines choose her.
The second measure. The third.
Raines speaks, the usual ball formalities, your father Commander Erhart, what a remarkable family, you look like him. She responds with the right formulas. Her smile doesn’t move.
Then his hand moves.
It’s barely anything at first.
A pressure slightly lower on her waist, not quite a gesture yet, just a shift, one centimeter. Enough to be accidental. Enough to be deliberate. Y/n doesn’t react. She holds her smile and chooses her words and calculates whether she can reposition her own hand to correct the anchor without it showing.
His hand moves again.
Two centimeters. Downward. Downward and inward along her back, where he has absolutely no right to be, where none of the ball’s protocols authorize anything at all.
Y/n freezes for a fraction of a second, just one, imperceptible, then resumes the movement of the dance.
You handle it. You’ve handled worse. You’ve known men like this your whole life.
His hand moves down again.
“Your father will be pleased with our conversations tonight,” he says. “He speaks of you often.”
His voice is pleasant. Social. His fingers press into the small of her back with a pressure that is no longer ambiguous in the slightest.
Y/n smiles.
And something in her chest begins to tighten.
She doesn’t decide to leave.
That’s what she’ll analyze later, she doesn’t decide, her body decides for her, that survival mechanism that triggered without asking permission from the conscious part of her brain. The music pauses between two pieces, three seconds of silence, and in those three seconds her feet carry her toward the edge of the dance floor, then toward the side door, then into the corridor.
As if her legs had chosen for her.
The corridor is white and clean and silent and she walks to the corner, turns, and stops.
She leans her back against the wall.
And that’s when it happens.
It starts in her chest.
A tightening at first, like a hand closing around her lungs, slowly, methodically. She breathes in. The air comes but doesn’t really fill her, it stops somewhere halfway as if something is blocking the passage. She breathes in again. Same thing.
Her hands are trembling.
She looks at them, these perfect hands, trained since forever to stay still in every situation, and they are trembling, slightly at first and then plainly, and she cannot make them stop.
It’s nothing. You handle it. You’ve handled it.
But the tightening worsens instead of easing and now her legs aren’t entirely reliable and the white corridor in front of her seems slightly too bright and too small at the same time. The walls aren’t moving but she perceives them as if they’re closing in, and the muffled music from the hall resonates strangely in her ears like something distant and threatening.
She slides down the wall.
She didn’t mean to slide. Her legs decided.
She finds herself sitting on the cold floor, back against the wall, the green dress making a splash of color against the immaculate white of Gilead. Her knees pulled up against her chest. Her breathing, rapid, shallow, that cycle that spirals and feeds on itself.
“Y/n?”
Daisy comes from the cross corridor, her tray of white napkins in her hands, and she takes in the scene in a fraction of a second. She sets the tray on the console without a sound and is kneeling in front of Y/n in three seconds.
“Hey. Hey, I’m here.” Her voice is soft, stripped of all irony. “What happened?”
Y/n opens her mouth.
Nothing comes out.
It’s not that she doesn’t want to answer, it’s that the words can’t find the exit, like the air that doesn’t go far enough. She wants to say Raines, the dance, his hands… but the words stay stuck and she just shakes her head, once, her eyes apologizing for not being able to say more.
“Okay. You don’t have to talk.” Daisy settles in front of her, at the same level. “Look at me. You’re in the east corridor. You’re safe.”
Y/n looks at her. She tries to hold on to her face.
It’s not enough.
Her breathing accelerates again.
“Breathe with me. Inhale, like this, exhale…”
Y/n tries.
The air still doesn’t go far enough.
“Y/n. Inhale.”
“I’m trying.”
“I know.” Daisy puts her hands over hers. “You’re here. You’re with me.”
But the tightness won’t let go. The walls are still too close. Something in Daisy’s direct kindness brings something up in Y/n’s throat that is even worse than the panic because it feels like grief.
“Daisy.” Her voice comes out broken. “I can’t… if an Aunt walks by…”
“I know.” Daisy squeezes her hands for a second. Her eyes sweep the corridor, calculating, deciding. “You need someone else.”
“No… stay…”
“Two minutes. I promise.” She is already standing. “Two minutes.”
She is already in the corridor.
Garth is on his second perimeter round when Daisy appears in the north corridor.
He sees her from ten meters away, the missing tray, the way she’s walking too fast, the face too closed off.
He adjusts his route.
She reaches him and speaks before she even stops:
“Y/n. East corridor, at the corner. She’s not okay.”
Something contracts in his chest.
“What happened.”
“I don’t know exactly. She couldn’t tell me. She can’t speak.”
“Is she hurt?”
“No. Not physically. But she can’t breathe right and she can’t calm down and I can’t…” She stops. “She needs you.”
Four words. Placed simply, without ambiguity.
Garth doesn’t ask another question.
He’s already gone.
He finds her exactly where Daisy said.
The green stain on the immaculate white. Knees pressed tight to her chest. Shoulders rising and falling too fast. He stops two meters away.
He doesn’t move closer yet.
Because he knows Y/n. And he knows that Y/n is not someone you help by walking up on her. Y/n is someone you let see you coming.
“Y/n.”
His voice is low. Normal. Not urgent, just his usual voice, the one from the service corridor and the north garden.
She looks up.
And in her eyes there is something he has never seen before. The top layer has slipped away entirely. The perfect girl, the flawless agent, the Green who never has one glance too many, all of it has fallen away, and what remains is just a girl on a cold floor who cannot catch her breath.
Something tightens in his throat.
He crouches down. Same distance. At her level.
“I’m here. Do you see me?”
She nods.
“Good. You don’t have to talk. You don’t have to do anything.”
He moves forward one meter. Slowly.
She doesn’t pull back.
He sits down on the floor, back against the wall, beside her. Not facing her, he decided that on the way over, not to be one more gaze to bear, to be facing the same direction rather than opposite her like a problem to be solved.
Their shoulders touch.
He feels the tremor that runs through her, the uneven breathing, the tension in her entire body.
“Listen to my breathing,” he says.
He breathes slowly. With intention. In for four counts, holds for two, out for six. He doesn’t ask her to do the same, he just does it, and he lets his body be a reference point.
She tries.
The air blocks again.
“You don’t have to take it all at once. Just a little further than the last time.”
She tries again.
Blocks again.
“Breathe with me. Right here, with me.”
She tries.
The air stops halfway, as always, as if a clenched fist somewhere between her throat and her lungs is refusing to let go. Her hands close around her knees. Her shoulders rise. Everything she tries to control slips away under the very effort of controlling it.
“I… I can’t,” she says. Her voice comes out in small fragments. “I can’t…”
“I know.” He stays calm. “You keep trying to force it. Your body feels that and it resists.”
“Then what… how do I…”
He doesn’t answer immediately.
His hand has been resting open on his own thigh for a few minutes, he placed it there without thinking, an anchor for himself perhaps, or a silent offer. Ten centimeters from hers.
She sees it.
And in the exact moment when another cycle of blocked breathing makes her clench her teeth, when the walls close in one more millimeter in her perception and Raines’ hands are still somewhere on her skin despite everything, in that moment, her hand leaves her knees and lands on his.
Not gently. Not delicately.
She grabs on.
Fingers tight, knuckles white, like someone falling who finds something to hold.
He doesn’t pull his hand away.
He turns it slowly under hers and closes his fingers around hers.
And for a few seconds he stays there, holding on, breathing steadily, letting his own breathing be the only real thing in this corridor.
But it’s not enough.
He can still feel it, that short blocked cycle, the shoulders that won’t come down, the breath that can’t find its way. It’s been several minutes now and it’s no longer getting worse but it’s not getting better either, like something stuck that doesn’t know which direction to come loose.
He turns his head toward her.
He looks at her, really looks, in this corridor, with the cold light on her face and her half-closed eyes and her parted lips on that breath she can’t complete.
And he makes a decision.
“Y/n.”
She turns her eyes toward him. Her fingers don’t let go of his.
“I’m going to do something,” he says. “If you don’t want…”
“What.”
“Trust me.”
A fraction of a second of silence.
“Okay,” she says.
He leans in.
His lips find hers gently, not a question this time, not a hesitation, a deliberate and precise contact that says I know what I’m doing and why I’m doing it, and in the first instant she doesn’t really react, the surprise stills her for a second, and in that second of surprise her breath stops.
Completely.
No more short blocked cycle. No more breath that doesn’t reach its destination. Just… nothing. A complete stop.
And then, in that nothing, her lungs reset.
He feels her breathe in against him, long and deep, like someone breaking the surface after too long underwater, and the air comes in for real this time, all the way down, to the place where it had been stuck this whole time, and something in her chest finally lets go.
He should have stopped there.
That was the plan, just that, just breaking the cycle, giving her breath back, and pulling away.
But her hand in his tightens instead of letting go.
And she doesn’t pull back either.
He draws back one centimeter, just enough to sense if she moves away.
She doesn’t move away.
Her free hand rises slowly to his shoulder, her fingers finding the fabric of his jacket, and that gesture has nothing to do with the panic attack anymore and they both know it.
He comes back.
This time it’s different, slower, deeper, without the clinical urgency of the first contact. His hand leaves hers to travel up her arm, to her jaw, his fingers anchoring gently in her hair, and he kisses her in that way that is his own, that economy of gesture that leaves nothing to chance, that says I know exactly where I am and I am choosing to be here.
She responds.
Her hand on his shoulder moves up to the lapel of his jacket. She holds on the way she held on to his hand a moment ago, not out of fear this time, out of something else, out of that because he told her in the garden last week that has never quite left her chest since.
Her breathing is normal.
Completely normal.
She realizes it somewhere in the warmth of this contact, her lungs are working, the air is coming in and going out, the tightness is gone and Raines’ hands are nowhere on her skin anymore because there is only him, only his hands that are nothing like anything she experienced tonight, hands that don’t take, that hold.
They stop.
The length of one breath between them, foreheads almost touching, his hand still in her hair, hers still on his jacket.
“Your breathing,” he says softly.
“I know,” she says.
“Better?”
“Yes.”
A silence.
“That wasn’t…” she says.
“No.”
“Not only for that.”
“No.” He draws his head back slightly to look at her. In his eyes that thing she has started to recognize and that still has no name in the language of Gilead. “Not only for that.”
She looks at him.
This face in the cold light of the corridor, the line of his jaw, his eyes that are not searching for anything other than what she is going to give him or not give him.
“Garth.”
“Mm.”
“Next time you want to kiss me.”
“Yes.”
“You don’t need me to have a panic attack first.”
Something shifts on his face, and it’s the smile, that rare smile she has seen three times since she’s known him, the one that entirely changes his face and makes him unrecognizable compared to the man at the north wall.
“Noted,” he says.
“When all of this is over,” she says.
He waits.
“I want us to have time. Really. In a place where no one is watching. Without the uniforms and the protocols and…”
“We’ll have time.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No.” His hand leaves her hair, travels down to her hand, takes it again. “But that’s why I do this work. So that there can be an after where things like this are possible.”
“Things like what.”
“Things like kissing someone you want to kiss without it being an act of rebellion.”
Daisy finds them two minutes later.
She comes back from the cross corridor, tray retrieved, her face in its I’m just a Pearl doing her rounds configuration. She takes in the scene in one second, Y/n standing, her hands in Garth’s, her shoulders finally down, her breathing normal.
She sees their hands.
She sees the slightly pink cheeks.
She sees Garth at a distance that is no longer that of a Guardian on duty.
“Good,” she says simply.
One word. Placed with that brief sincerity that holds everything, the relief, the affection, that way Daisy has of approving the things that matter without making an event of it.
Garth lets go of Y/n’s hands. One step back. The Guardian reclaims his shape.
“Can she go back into the hall?” he says.
“In ten minutes. I’ll have her hold the tray. Aunt Hulda will think she was helping with the service.”
“Good.”
He looks at Y/n one last time, that look that no longer needs to hide what it is.
“Ten minutes,” he says.
“Ten minutes,” she repeats.
He heads back toward the north corridor.
His silhouette disappears around the corner.
Daisy comes over.
She hands the tray to Y/n, immediate cover, and slips her arm through hers, on the left side as always.
“Are you okay?” she says, and she means it.
“Yes.”
“Raines…”
“I’ve got it handled.”
“Y/n.”
“I really have it handled.” A pause. “Thank you for going to get him.”
Daisy shrugs slightly. Her way of saying you’d have done the same for me.
“He kissed you,” says Daisy.
“It was…”
“I can see the pink cheeks Y/n. I’m from Toronto, not a cave.”
Silence.
“Yes,” says Y/n.
“And?”
“And…” She searches for her words. She who always has the words. “And it worked.”
Daisy looks at her for a second. Then that smile, warm and a little sad and full of all the things you feel when you’re happy for someone in a world that makes happiness complicated.
“Good,” she says.
And she guides Y/n toward the hall.
Ten minutes later Y/n is back in the grand hall.
She holds her tray. Her smile is in place. Her green dress is perfect.
Nobody sees a thing.
Garth is at the north wall. He doesn’t look at her directly.
But when she takes her position and their sight lines cross for a second in the geography of the room, she sees the very slight movement of his head.
Are you okay?
She tilts hers almost imperceptibly.
I’m okay.
And for the first time in her thirteen years in this city that taught her everything except how to breathe freely, she thinks about the after.
She thinks that there is an after.
And that somewhere in that after, there is him.
That’s enough for tonight.
That’s enough to hold on.
••••••••
