phoenix but u can call me pho

—woke up.

Not gasping. Not drenched in sweat like the movies wanted you to believe. Just awake, staring at the ceiling of an apartment that had never quite stopped feeling temporary, heart doing something slow and heavy in your chest. The photo album was still open on the nightstand where you'd left it last night, like an idiot, like you didn't already have the pictures memorized. Your hand found it before your brain caught up to the decision, and you closed it. Didn't look. Didn't need to. You knew exactly which page it had fallen open to.

Eight years, give or take, of being the best shot the Army had. Not a boast — a fact, logged in performance reviews and confirmed kills and the kind of reputation that got you flown places nobody talked about afterward. You'd been good at distances that made other snipers uneasy, good at the math of wind and drop and timing, good at the stillness the job demanded of a body and a mind at the same time. People who didn't know better assumed that kind of good came from not feeling much. It hadn't. It had come from feeling everything and doing the job anyway, which was a different thing entirely, and a much more expensive one.

You set it face-down in the drawer and got up to make coffee like a person who had never met either of the men in that photograph.

Scout was already awake when you padded into the kitchen, tail thumping once against the cabinets in greeting before he settled back onto his bed by the window — a German Shepherd built like he still thought he was a puppy, even at seven, even at ninety-some pounds. He watched you with the mild, patient attentiveness of a dog who'd been trained young to read a room before he ever learned to sit. You scratched behind his ear on your way to the coffee maker and didn't think, on purpose, about who'd been standing next to you the day you picked him out.

★・・・・・・★

The phone rang at 6:52 a.m., which meant it was either a telemarketer or the government.

"This is a secure line for—" the voice started, all clipped professionalism, and you already knew.

"I retired," you said, before the woman could finish. "Whatever this is, I'm not—"

"Ma'am, I understand, and I apologize for the early call. My name's Emily Prentiss, I'm the Unit Chief of the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit. We have an active LDSK case in New York City — that's a long-distance serial killer, a shooter — and your name came up as a possible consultant."

You sat down slowly at the kitchen table. Outside, a garbage truck groaned its way down the street, ordinary and loud and nothing like this conversation.

"There are other snipers," you said. "Better ones, probably, that haven't been out of the field for years."

"There are other snipers," Prentiss agreed, easy, like she'd expected the pushback and had already decided not to fight you on the small stuff. "There's exactly one of you. My team is good — genuinely, some of the best people I've worked with — and I promise you nobody's going to pry into anything you don't want to talk about. This isn't a debrief. It's a consultation. One of my agents has read every paper, every case file, every piece of literature that exists on LDSKs and long-range shooters. He could recite it back to you cover to cover if you asked him to."

"Sounds like you don't need me, then."

"He's read about it," Prentiss said, and something in her voice sharpened just slightly, the way a person's does when they're circling toward the actual point. "You've done it. There's a difference between studying a discipline and having spent years living inside it — the instinct for it, the years of experience that don't show up in a textbook. That's not something my agent can replicate no matter how many books he gets through. And your file happens to say you've consulted on cases like this before. More than once."

"My file's wrong, then. I'm retired."

"Your file doesn't say that anywhere, actually." You could hear the smile in it, faint and entirely unbothered, like she'd read that exact line before making the call and had been waiting to use it. "But I'll let you keep saying it if it makes you feel better."

Consultant only. You almost laughed. As if the moment you looked at crime scene photos you wouldn't already be building the profile in your head without meaning to — cataloguing wind allowance, positioning, the story a shot told about the person who took it. You'd been doing that your whole life. It wasn't a skill you could hand over in pieces.

But you didn't say any of that. You just said, "Where do I need to be."

"JFK, six p.m. tonight. Someone from my team will meet you at the field office."

You hung up before the woman could say anything else, before the offer could turn real enough to take back.

★・・・・・・★

You should call someone. Tell someone you were going.

You ran through the list out of habit more than hope, and it came up short the way it always did these days. Your parents would worry more than help. The few friends who'd stuck around after the Army had learned, gently but firmly, not to ask what you did before the dogs and the veterans' program, and you weren't about to break that unspoken rule over a phone call at seven in the morning. There wasn't really a list. There was one name, and everyone else was just there to make it look like there were options.

Your thumb hovered over your contacts anyway. Luke Alvez. Still saved under a dumb nickname from a dumb night that used to make you laugh until you cried.

It would be so easy. Guess who's apparently never really retired. You could already hear how he'd say it back to you — not surprised, not really, because the two of you had always known the truth underneath the paperwork: neither of you had ever actually wanted to stop. You'd both just needed a version of stopping that let you keep breathing. He'd get that instantly, the way he got everything, and that was exactly the problem. He was the one person who wouldn't need it explained, and you hadn't let yourself need that kind of understood in three years.

You didn't call.

You told yourself it didn't mean anything — that he was probably still down in some field office in another state, running down bank robbers or whatever it was Bureau guys did after the Army spat them out the other side. Last you'd heard, he was stationed at Quantico, training new recruits or whatever it was he did now. Quantico wasn't even that far from New York, not really — a shuttle flight, a few hours by car if you wanted to be dramatic about it. But it was far enough that calling him out of nowhere to say hey, funny story, I'm about to be in your backyard would've sounded exactly like what it was: an excuse. And you didn't get to have excuses. Not with him. Not after three years of choosing not to.

You packed a bag. You didn't bring the photo album.

You had your phone out to text your usual dog-sitter before you'd even zipped the bag shut — a reflex, the same one that fired every time a job took you further than a day trip — and you got as far as typing hey, are you free this week before you stopped, thumb hovering, and looked over at Scout. He was sitting by the door already, head cocked, watching the suitcase with the particular alertness of a dog who knew exactly what a packed bag meant and had opinions about being left out of it.

You deleted the text.

"Yeah, okay," you said, and he was up and wagging before you'd even finished the sentence, like he'd understood you perfectly, which — knowing him — he probably had. It wasn't a hard decision, in the end. Some jobs you did alone because you had to. This one, you didn't have to, and you weren't in the mood to pretend you were tougher than you actually were about it. If you were about to spend however many weeks in a city that used to feel like a countdown clock, you weren't doing it without the one piece of home that had a heartbeat.

You told yourself that didn't mean anything either.

★・・・・・・★

The BAU's temporary field office took up half a floor in a building that still smelled like fresh paint, the kind of space a task force gets handed when nobody expected to need it for this long — all glass partitions and hastily labeled evidence boards, extension cords taped down along baseboards, a coffee machine that had clearly been donated rather than budgeted for. Boxes of case files sat stacked against one wall, still half taped shut, and someone had already pinned up a map of the five boroughs so dense with colored string and marker that it looked less like an investigation and more like an argument nobody had won yet. It had the particular chaos of a task force that hadn't had time to get organized, the sense of a room built in a hurry around an emergency that wasn't slowing down to let anyone catch their breath. You'd flown in expecting exactly this — the fluorescent lights a shade too bright, the low hum of people who hadn't slept properly in days — and some small, traitorous part of you had missed it more than you'd admit to anyone with a badge. You'd barely made it through the security checkpoint, Scout's leash looped twice around your wrist and your duffel over one shoulder, when he went rigid.

Not scared-rigid. Focused-rigid, ears up, the specific stillness that meant he'd caught a scent he cared about.

"Scout—"

He was gone before you finished his name, leash yanked clean out of your hand, nails skidding on the tile as he shot down the hallway like he'd been fired out of something. You swore under your breath and went after him, already mortified, already composing the apology you were about to owe some very confused federal agent, and then you turned the corner and your whole chest did something complicated and fast, because Scout wasn't tackling a stranger.

Scout was up on his hind legs with his front paws braced against Luke Alvez's chest, tail going so hard his entire back half was moving with it, making a sound that was half-whine, half-joy, the sound he only ever made for exactly one person who wasn't you.

Luke went down on one knee without even seeming to think about it, both hands coming up to scratch behind Scout's ears, laughing that low surprised laugh you'd have known blindfolded, in a crowd, from a hundred yards out with a scope between you and him. "Hey — hey, buddy, whoa —"

You caught up a second later, breathless, mortified, and froze.

"I'm so sorry," you said, to the top of Luke's head, because it was easier than saying anything to his face yet. "He doesn't do this. He's never done this with anyone but — that's actually why I brought him, he's only ever—"

Luke looked up.

Everything you'd rehearsed on the flight over — every version of hi you'd practiced not needing, every careful, professional greeting you'd built like scaffolding around the actual thing you felt — evaporated on contact, useless, the way plans always were the second reality showed up wearing a different face than you'd braced for.

Three years. Three years of telling yourself it had dulled, that time did what it was supposed to do, that whatever this had been was something you'd survived rather than something you were still, quietly, unforgivably inside of. And here it was, undulled, unsurvived, sitting up in your chest like it had never once agreed to leave. He was familiar in a way that had nothing to do with memory and everything to do with instinct — the exact angle he tilted his head, the exact way his mouth did that thing before it decided whether to smile — and at the same time he was almost a stranger, a man three years further into a life you hadn't watched him build, new lines and new weight and new history you had no claim to and every reason to want. Nearly a stranger. Only nearly. That gap, that specific, aching nearly, was somehow worse than either extreme would have been.

You understood, distantly, that you were never going to get over this. Not really. Not all the way. You'd built an entire life around the shape of after him and it had never once occurred to you that the shape had a name, and the name was standing four feet away with dog hair on his slacks, looking at you like he was doing the exact same arithmetic and getting the exact same impossible number.

"Oh," you said. Just that. Just, oh.

"Hi," Luke said back, still crouched, one hand buried in Scout's fur like he needed somewhere to put it, somewhere safer than reaching for you. Not omg it's you. Not dramatic, not performed for anyone watching. Just quiet, a little stunned, like he was checking the words against the person in front of him and finding, against all odds, that they still fit. "Hi."

"Hi," you said again, because apparently that was the whole vocabulary you had left, the entirety of three years and every unsent text and every 2 a.m. flashback compressed down into one syllable said twice.

Neither of you moved for a second that stretched out longer than it had any business stretching. Scout, oblivious to the tension he'd just detonated, flopped fully into Luke's lap like the last three years hadn't happened to him either — like there was no gap at all, no nearly, just the two people he loved most in the world finally back in the same room, which, you thought, distantly, half-hysterically, was maybe the only uncomplicated read on this entire moment that either of you were going to get.

"Well," said a voice from down the hall, dry and amused and entirely unbothered by walking into whatever this was, "I did not have dog on the bingo card for today."

You looked up to find a woman in a sharp blazer leaning in the doorway of what was clearly the makeshift bullpen, arms crossed, eyebrows doing a lot of quiet, diplomatic work. "Emily Prentiss," she said, crossing over and offering a hand, which you shook while Luke was still getting to his feet, Scout's leash now firmly back in his grip instead of yours. "We spoke this morning."

"Right. Hi. Sorry — this is Scout."

"I gathered." Prentiss glanced between you and Luke with the specific patience of someone filing information away for later without commenting on it yet. "You didn't mention a dog on the phone."

"You didn't give me a lot of time to organize a sitter," you said, which was, everyone in a ten-foot radius could tell, an absolute lie — the kind that only worked if nobody bothered to call it out, and clearly nobody was going to bother, not yet. "And I'm just consulting, so — it doesn't really mean anything. It's not a whole thing. The hotel you put me in is dog-friendly, so. It's fine. It works out."

"Mm," Prentiss said, in the tone of someone who understood exactly seventy percent more than she was letting on. "It's fine. It works out." A beat, her eyes flicking to Luke, who was very carefully not reacting to any of this, both hands still on the dog like Scout was a life raft. "Alvez, why don't you get our consultant set up at a desk." Prentiss's eyes moved between the two of you again, slower this time, clocking something she clearly wasn't going to say out loud yet. "I take it you two know each other."

"We — yeah." Luke straightened up, and it took him a beat too long to find anywhere to put his hands now that Scout had abandoned his lap for yours. "We've met. It's been a while."

"A while," you echoed, which wasn't an answer so much as a confirmation that neither of you were going to be more specific than that in front of a Unit Chief you'd known for exactly nine minutes.

"Right," Prentiss said, in a tone that made it very clear she'd noticed the gap between a while and whatever the actual truth was, and had decided, for now, to let it sit there unexamined. She wasn't the type to leave a thread like that alone forever — you could tell that much already — but she also clearly knew better than to yank on it in a hallway. "Get her set up. Conference room in ten, max. We've got another body."

★・・・・・・★

Ten minutes turned into six, because neither of you knew what to do with the other four.

You both just sort of... stood there, for a second, in the wreckage of Prentiss's exit, like two people who'd rehearsed an entire reunion in their heads a hundred different ways and discovered, on arrival, that none of the scripts covered awkwardly hovering in a hallway while your dog demands attention from your ex-something. Ex-what, even. That had never gotten a name. That was sort of the whole problem.

"So," Luke said. Then didn't finish it. Just crouched back down instead, like Scout was a much safer place to put his attention than you were, and went back to scratching under his chin while the dog leaned his whole weight into it, eyes half-closed in bliss, blissfully unaware he was doing the emotional heavy lifting for both of you.

"So," you agreed, and crouched too, because apparently you also needed somewhere safer to look.

"Still can't believe he remembers me," Luke said finally, not looking up, scratching under Scout's chin while the dog leaned his whole weight into it, eyes half-closed in bliss. "It's been three years. That's insane."

"He's smarter than either of us." Your voice came out rougher than you meant it to, and you cleared your throat like that would fix it, like three years of not saying things could be cleared like that. "Better memory too, apparently."

Luke huffed something that was almost a laugh, shaking his head. "Roxy would be so jealous right now if she could see this. She still holds a grudge over a squirrel from two years ago, but sure, let's talk about my dog's memory."

Something loosened in your chest at just hearing her name, easy and unprompted, like she'd never stopped being a fixture in his life. "How's she doing?"

"Good. Getting a little gray around the muzzle, slowing down some, but she's good." He said it plain, unguarded, and there was something in the casualness of it that hit you harder than a bigger admission would have — proof that whatever this had been between the two of you, at least the dogs had made it through intact, even where the two of you clearly hadn't. "She's the best decision either of us ever made." He glanced up at that, something wry and a little pointed in it, like he knew exactly how that sentence could be read two different ways and had chosen it on purpose.

"Low bar," you said, mostly to have something to say.

"Wasn't talking about the bar," Luke said, and the look he gave you then was steadier than it had any right to be, like he'd meant exactly what he said and wasn't going to pretend otherwise just because it was inconvenient. You risked a glance up. Immediately regretted it, in the specific way that meant you'd be doing it again in about four seconds anyway. He was close enough that you could see the new lines at the corners of his eyes, the little scar above his eyebrow that definitely hadn't been there before, the new certainty in how he held himself — steadier than the man in your photo album, older in the ways that mattered and none of the ways that didn't. It was unfair, honestly, how much you wanted to reach out and just — touch his face, confirm he was real, confirm all of this was actually happening and not some elaborate stress dream your brain had cooked up on the flight over. You didn't. Obviously you didn't. You dug your nails into your own palm instead and said, "You look good, Alvez."

"You look—" He stopped. Actually stopped, mid-word, like his mouth had gotten ahead of whatever his brain had cleared for release, and you watched him visibly recalibrate, watched him swallow whatever the first version of that sentence had been. "You look like you didn't know I'd be here."

"I didn't." Your face was doing something you didn't have full control over. Probably too much. Probably way too much, for a conversation that was supposedly about a dog. "If I'd known, I—" You stopped too. Great. Now you were doing it.

"You'd have what?"

"I don't know." You did know. You absolutely knew, and the knowing was the exhausting part. "Would've needed longer to say yes, maybe."

"Would you have come if you had?" Luke asked, and it wasn't an accusation, which was somehow worse than if it had been — it was genuinely curious, a little braced, like he'd already decided he could survive either answer and just needed to know which muscles to brace before it landed.

You looked at Scout instead of at him, which was cheating, and you both knew it, and neither of you called it out, because calling it out would've meant admitting why the cheating was necessary in the first place.

"I don't know," you said again, and then, because the silence afterward felt worse than honesty, "Probably. Eventually. Like I said. It would've just taken me longer."

Luke nodded slowly, jaw doing something tight, like that answer was somehow both better and worse than the one he'd braced for — better because it wasn't no, worse because eventually had a three-year track record of meaning not yet, not yet, still not yet. Scout, entirely unaware he'd just been the emotional load-bearing wall for an entire reunion, rolled fully onto his back and demanded his stomach be rubbed, four paws in the air, tail thumping the tile, and you both dropped your hands to him at the exact same time, knuckles brushing for half a second before you both pulled back like you'd touched something hot.

Neither of you said anything about that either.

"Ten minutes," you managed eventually, standing too fast, brushing dog hair off your knees that definitely didn't need brushing, just needed somewhere for your hands to go that wasn't him. "Conference room?"

"Yeah." Luke stood too, and didn't step back the way the moment probably called for, close enough that you had to actually, consciously decide not to reach for him, which was its own small, exhausting exercise, one you had a feeling you were going to be doing on a loop for however long this case lasted. "Yeah. Come on. I'll introduce you to the team before Prentiss decides we're taking too long and comes to do it herself."

"She seems like she would."

"You have no idea," Luke said, with a look that suggested there was a whole story there he wasn't getting into right now, and for just a second, walking side by side down that hallway with Scout trotting happy and oblivious between you, tail still going, leash slack because neither of you had bothered to hold it tight, it felt almost like no time had passed at all.

Almost. And that almost was going to be the death of you, you already knew, walking into that conference room with your heart doing something it had absolutely no business doing at a professional consultation, on day one, over a man you weren't supposed to still feel like this about.

★・・・・・・★

The conference room had the particular hush of a briefing that had been given too many times already — the kind where the words come out flat because everyone's said them enough times to stop hearing themselves say them. A younger agent you hadn't met yet, all gangly limbs and rapid-fire delivery, was midway through walking the room through victimology when you and Luke slipped in, Scout settling under the table by your feet like he'd done this a hundred times before, which, you supposed, in a sense, he had.

Prentiss caught your eye and paused the briefing just long enough to wave a hand around the table. "Quick introductions since you'll be around for a while — JJ, David Rossi, Dr. Tara Lewis." A blonde woman gave you a small, warm nod; an older man with sharp eyes and the bearing of someone who'd been doing this since before you were born inclined his head; a woman with a steady, assessing gaze offered something closer to a genuine smile. "And you've clearly already met Spencer" — a small, dry look at the agent who'd been mid-ramble when you walked in — "Dr. Reid. And Alvez, obviously, you know."

"Obviously," you said, and didn't look at Luke when you said it, which took more effort than it should have.

The younger agent — Spencer, apparently, Dr. Spencer Reid — picked back up where he'd left off, and you made yourself focus on the screen instead of the fact that you were sitting across a table from Luke Alvez for the first time in three years like this was just a normal Tuesday.

"—six victims in eleven days, all shot at range, all with a single kill shot to center mass or head, no pattern in victim selection we've been able to establish yet. Different ages, different neighborhoods, different times of day. If there's a signature connecting them, it's not in who he's picking."

You made yourself look at the photos when they came up. That was always the part nobody warned you about going in — not the math, not the science of it, but the actual faces, the actual stillness of people who'd been walking down a street an hour before they weren't anymore. Something in you wanted to look away the way it always did, the old reflex, the part of you that had spent three years building a life specifically so you wouldn't have to look at this kind of thing again.

But you didn't look away, because looking away wasn't actually what made you good at your old job, and it wasn't what was going to make you good at this one either. You'd spent years telling yourself that the reason you'd been so good behind a scope was that you'd learned how to go somewhere cold and empty inside yourself and stay there until the job was done — and that was true, as far as it went, but it had never been the whole truth. The actual truth, the one you'd never said out loud to anyone except maybe Luke, on maybe one specific night neither of you talked about anymore, was that you'd never gone cold at all. You felt every single one of it — every shot, every consequence, every face on a board like this one — and you'd just learned, somewhere along the way, how to let that feeling sharpen you instead of break you. That wasn't the same as not feeling it. It was the opposite, actually. You were good at this precisely because you didn't have the luxury of looking away from what it cost.

You made yourself hold the victims' faces in your mind a second longer than was comfortable, and then you looked at the geography instead, because that, at least, you could do something useful with.

"He's disciplined enough to hit six for six," Reid said, "which in itself tells us something. Most LDSKs, especially unsubs without formal training, miss at least once over this many attempts. Range, wind, breathing — it's not intuitive. So we're looking at either military training, competitive shooting background, or extensive—"

"He's not that disciplined," you said.

The room went quiet in the specific way rooms go quiet when someone new has just contradicted the person who'd clearly been the smartest guy in every room he'd ever walked into.

"He's hitting six for six," Reid said, careful, not defensive exactly, just recalibrating in real time. "That's a hundred percent kill rate at range. That's not undisciplined."

"It's a hundred percent kill rate," you agreed. "That's not the same as a hundred percent accurate rate. Can I see the wound photos again — not the summary, the actual entry points?"

Prentiss pulled them up. You leaned forward, and something in you that had been dormant for three years — quiet, patient, waiting — sat up and paid attention.

"There," you said, pointing at the second photo. "And there. Look at the entry point relative to where you'd expect a center-mass shot to land if it were placed the way a trained shooter places it. He's hitting the kill zone every time, but he's not centered in it. He's landing high-left on three of these, low-right on the other two. That's not intentional shot placement. That's a shooter whose fundamentals are good enough to guarantee lethality but not good enough to guarantee precision. There's a difference between a kill shot and a perfect shot, and every one of these is the first, not the second."

Reid was quiet for a second, working through it, and you watched the exact moment it landed for him — a small, genuine, unbothered nod, the nod of someone who valued being right less than he valued being accurate. "That's — huh. That's a meaningful distinction. What would cause that kind of consistent-but-imprecise pattern?"

"Could be a lot of things. But if I had to guess without seeing it in person? Impatience. Someone who's good, and knows he's good, and isn't slowing down enough between the trigger pull to actually confirm the shot the way someone properly trained would. That's not a discipline problem. That's an ego problem."

"And the lack of a victim connection?" Rossi asked, arms crossed, the first thing he'd said since introductions.

"I don't think there is one. Not in the people, anyway." You looked back at the map on the wall, the string and pins marking each location. "I think you're looking for a connection in the wrong place. He's not picking victims. He's picking positions — buildings with the right sightlines, the right elevation, the right distance to make an easy, comfortable shot. The victims are probably just whoever happened to be the best target from wherever he'd already decided to set up. That's backwards from how most of these guys operate. Most LDSKs choose a victim and then find a position to reach them. I think this guy finds a position he likes and then just takes whatever's in front of him."

Rossi's eyebrows went up slightly, and he exchanged a look with Prentiss that you didn't fully catch the meaning of, but that felt, unmistakably, like the start of something clicking into place for the room.

Luke, across the table, hadn't said anything yet, but you could feel him watching you with an expression you recognized immediately and hated slightly, because it was the exact same look he used to get watching you work a range back before either of you had ever heard the word unsub — something warm and a little awed and entirely unsubtle about it.

"Could you tell more from the actual scene?" Prentiss asked. "Not just the photos."

"We already know roughly where he was shooting from on the last one," Rossi said. "General direction, at least. We just don't have the exact building, let alone the exact floor. There's four high-rises with a clean sightline to that intersection, and the math gets messy fast — witnesses moved the body trying to check for a pulse before anyone realized what they were dealing with, so the original position's been compromised. We've got a general trajectory. We don't have a window."

"Photos flatten everything anyway," you said. "I'd want to see the angle in person — the actual position, the actual distance, what it would've taken to get there and set up without being seen. If the body's been moved, the math from photos alone is only ever going to get you in the neighborhood. I might be able to narrow it past that." You glanced at the most recent crime scene photo still up on the screen — a wide avenue, four buildings across from it with dozens of possible windows between them. "Where was the most recent one?"

★・・・・・・★

Of the four high-rises with a sightline to the intersection, you'd ruled two out before you'd even gotten out of the car — wrong angle relative to the entry wound, one of them blocked at the right height by a rooftop water tower nobody had apparently thought to check for. That left two candidates, and by the time you stood on the sidewalk looking up at both of them, cross-referencing the wound angle against each building's face, you were fairly sure which one it was: fifty-eight stories of glass and steel, close enough to the intersection to explain the shot placement without needing an implausible level of skill to compensate for extra distance.

You stepped out of the elevator onto the fifty-fifth floor — the floor you'd settled on, before you'd even seen the building up close, based on angle math you'd done in your head on the walk over from the car — aware of Reid a step behind you, notebook out, and Luke a step behind him, hands in his pockets, watching you the way you imagine people watch weather they can't quite believe is real.

"Fifty-fifth," Reid said, checking something on his phone. "That's — how did you land on fifty-fifth specifically, out of fifty-eight floors?"

"Angle of the wound relative to the victim's height and the width of the avenue. Basic trigonometry, once you know the distance across the street and the drop, even with the body having been moved before anyone photographed the original position — you can back the angle out from the wound track itself, it doesn't actually depend on where the body ended up afterward." You said it like it was obvious, because to you, it was — the same way breathing was obvious, the same way it had been obvious for eight years of your life before it had also been the thing that ended it. "This floor, or the one below it. This one has a better sightline to where he was hitting."

The office space on fifty-five was mid-renovation, half the floor stripped down to concrete and exposed wiring, which made it, you thought, almost insultingly easy — no furniture to hide behind, no carpet to disguise anything. You walked the windows slowly, scanning, and stopped at the third one from the corner.

"Here."

"How do you know?" Luke asked, and it wasn't a challenge, it was just genuine, a little helpless, like he already knew you were right and just wanted to hear you explain it because he'd missed hearing you explain things.

You crouched by the window, running two fingers lightly along a set of faint scuff marks on the concrete a few feet back from the glass — nothing dramatic, nothing a person not looking for it would ever clock. "Bipod marks. See the spacing? That's a shooter who set up prone, not standing, which tells you he's had at least some training, because most amateurs shoot from a standing or kneeling position at range and he clearly knows better than that." You moved a foot to the left, crouched again, studying the angle of the marks against the window. "But look at the positioning relative to the glass. He's set up closer to the window than he needed to be. A trained shooter, someone who's actually been taught fieldcraft, sets up back from the opening — minimizes silhouette, reduces muzzle flash visibility, gives himself more concealment. This guy's practically got his barrel in the glass. That's someone who either doesn't know better, or—"

"Or doesn't care," Reid finished, slower now, watching you the way you imagine he usually got watched by other people.

"Or doesn't care," you agreed. "Which, combined with the imprecise shot placement — that's not fear, and it's not sloppiness exactly. That's someone who wants it to be easy. Someone who's not particularly worried about getting caught, because getting caught would almost be a bonus. He wants to be seen being good at this. He's not hiding from the risk of being noticed. He's just not thinking that far ahead, because he's got a version of invincibility going on that only shows up in people who are young, and confident, and have never once had it seriously threatened."

"Age?" Prentiss asked, arms crossed, watching all of this from a few feet back with an expression that hadn't moved much, though you were starting to understand that was mostly just her face.

"Younger than you'd think for someone this capable. Late twenties at the outside, could be younger. Older shooters — even self-taught ones — develop a wariness that shows up in setup and positioning even when the actual shot's good. This is someone who hasn't had the years yet to get scared of anything."

"You never had that," Luke said, quiet, mostly to you, while Reid was busy photographing the bipod marks and Prentiss was a few feet off on the phone with Rossi. "The overconfidence thing. You were better than guys twice your age by the time you were twenty-four and you were still double-checking everything like you didn't trust yourself."

"I trusted myself fine. I just didn't trust the wind." It came out lighter than you meant it to, and you glanced at him, and something in his face made you add, "That's not overconfidence. Overconfidence gets people killed. I wanted to be good enough that I didn't have to be lucky."

"I remember." He said it simply, no weight thrown behind it on purpose, though it landed like weight anyway. "You used to make me recheck my own math twice before you'd let me take a shot. Drove me insane at the time."

"You're welcome."

"I didn't say I was complaining." A small, crooked smile, there and gone. "I still do it, actually. Recheck. Every time. Some habits you don't get to unlearn just because the person who taught them to you isn't standing next to you anymore."

You didn't have anything to say to that, or you had too much to say to that, which amounted to the same problem, so you turned back to the window instead and let the silence do the work neither of you were equipped to do out loud, not here, not with Rossi twenty feet away and a murder to solve.

You crouched lower, studying the scuff marks again, and something about the pattern of them started to bother you the longer you looked. "There's something else. Look at how many separate marks there are here — not one clean bipod set, adjusted once and left. Three, four distinct positions, all within about a foot of each other. That's not a shooter calmly repositioning for a better angle. That's someone shifting because he's frustrated, resettling because the first position didn't feel right and neither did the second. Real patience looks like stillness. This doesn't look like stillness. This looks like someone who couldn't get comfortable and kept moving instead of just waiting it out."

"Anger," Reid said, half to himself, writing it down.

"Maybe. Or just impatience that reads like anger from the outside — genuinely not sure there's a difference for someone like this." You looked back at the victim data on your phone, the timeline Prentiss had sent over. "And look at victim selection again — for someone this disciplined, he's not waiting for a clean, ideal target. He's taking the first person who steps into a decent kill zone. That's not restraint. That's someone who wants the shot over with the second it's available, because sitting there waiting is the part he can't stand."

"That tracks with the shot placement being consistently off," Reid said. "If he's rushing the moment he's got a target instead of waiting for the ideal window—"

"Right, but it's more specific than just rushing." You crouched down further, eye level with the scuff marks, picturing it — the actual physical mechanics of it, a body you knew intimately because you'd spent years inside the same posture yourself. "Every one of these shots is off in the same general direction — high-left, or close to it, on most of them. That's not random error from rushing. That's something mechanical and repeated. Something he's doing every single time without realizing it." You thought about it for another second, chasing the shape of it. "Could be a grip issue. Could be breathing. But if I had to guess — that kind of consistent pull, paired with the impatience — that's the kind of thing that happens when someone's clenching their jaw through the shot. Grinding, ticking, whatever you want to call it. It changes your whole upper body tension without you noticing, and it pulls a shot in a specific, repeatable direction. It's a tell a lot of people never train out of, because most people never even realize they're doing it."

You crouched down all the way then, scanning along the base of the window, running your eyes over the floor the way you'd have checked your own position afterward, out of habit, out of the same restlessness you'd just described.

"Or what?" Reid asked, waiting, notebook ready.

"Or he chews gum," you said, and stopped. Half-tucked behind a folded drop cloth left by the renovation crew, small, easy to miss, exactly the kind of thing that got kicked under something and forgotten by an unsub in a hurry to leave a scene, was a single flattened wad of gum.

You crouched again and looked, without touching it.

"There's gum here," you said. "Under the cloth."

Reid was beside you in an instant, and even Prentiss had crossed the room by the time you'd finished the sentence. "Gum," Reid repeated, like the word itself was a gift.

"He chews gum while he's set up. Probably out of habit, probably out of the same restlessness that's messing with his shot placement — somebody who can't sit still long enough to be perfectly precise probably can't sit still long enough to go twenty minutes without something to do with his mouth either. If that's his, and it's got saliva on it, you've got DNA. You've got an actual name behind all of this, not just a profile."

Prentiss was already on the phone with evidence recovery before you'd finished talking, rattling off the floor number and a request for a rush on any DNA processing, and Reid was crouched next to you now, notebook forgotten, just looking at the gum and then at you like he was recalibrating an entire internal model of what you were capable of.

"That's — genuinely impressive work," Reid said, and he sounded like he meant it, no edge to it at all, the particular grace of someone secure enough in his own intelligence that watching someone else be right didn't cost him anything. "I've read every case study that exists on LDSK profiling and I would not have caught the bipod spacing. I wouldn't have thought to look for gum at all."

"You've read them," you said, not unkindly, echoing something Prentiss had said to you on the phone that morning without quite meaning to. "I used to live inside one of these setups for a living. It's a different kind of knowing."

"Clearly," Reid said, and it wasn't grudging, it was something closer to delighted, the tone of a man who loved being handed new information more than he loved being right.

Luke, over by the window, hadn't said anything in a while, and when you glanced over he was just watching you with that same unsubtle warmth from before, arms loose at his sides, like he'd forgotten there was a room full of other people in it.

"What," you said.

"Nothing." He shook his head slightly, a small, helpless smile breaking through despite himself. "I just forgot how good you are at this. Watching you do it in person instead of just — hearing about it after. It's different."

"You've literally seen me do this before, Alvez."

"Yeah," he said. "I know. Doesn't make it less impressive."

"You're being weird."

"I'm allowed to be weird. I haven't watched you work a scene in three years, forgive me for having feelings about it." He said it easy, almost joking, but there was something underneath it that wasn't a joke at all, something that made you look away first before he could see exactly how much that landed. "You know most people would've missed the gum."

"Most people weren't trained to think like the guy who left it there."

"That's not — " He stopped, recalibrated, tried again. "That's not just training. I've worked with plenty of people who came out of the same programs you did, similar backgrounds, similar skill sets. None of them do what you just did in there. That's not just muscle memory. That's you." He said it like it mattered to him that you understood the distinction, like it wasn't a compliment he was handing you so much as a correction he needed you to accept. "I don't think you ever gave yourself enough credit for that. Even back then."

"You always said that."

"I always meant it." A beat, his eyes steady on yours in a way that made the renovation-site noise and Reid's muttering by the window and the whole rest of the room fall away for a second. "Still do."

You looked away first, mostly because you didn't trust your own face not to give away exactly how much that landed, and busied yourself watching the evidence tech who'd just arrived carefully bag the gum, chain of custody forms already coming out, the whole apparatus of a real investigation clicking into motion around a piece of chewed gum you'd found because you knew, in your bones, what kind of person left it there.

It was, you thought, the first time in three years that being this good at this particular thing had felt like something other than a wound.

★・・・・・・★

Garcia's face filled half the screen in the conference room, hair a color you didn't have a name for, talking faster than you could fully track. "Okay, so, the gum — DNA came back, and we've got a partial hit. Not a full match in CODIS, which means he's never been convicted of anything that requires a sample, but there's a familial match. His name's Caleb Voss, twenty-six, and his older brother did two years for aggravated assault a few years back, which is how we've got anything at all."

"Twenty-six," Reid said, glancing at you, something almost pleased in it, like a number confirming a hypothesis always was. "You said late twenties at the outside."

"I said younger than you'd think. I didn't say I was going to be exact." But you felt it too, the small, satisfying click of a guess turning into a fact.

"No priors of his own," Garcia went on. "Not even a parking ticket, if you can believe it. Which, for a guy who's killed six people in eleven days, is either really lucky or—"

"Or exactly what we said," you finished. "Someone who's never been caught doing anything, ever, and thinks that means he's untouchable. That's not luck. That's a kid who's spent his whole life getting away with things and has started to believe it's a permanent condition."

"He works — well, worked, up until about two weeks ago — at a sporting goods store in Queens," Garcia said, pulling up an employee photo, a young guy with a soft, unremarkable face, the kind of face that would never make anyone cross the street. "Fired for what his manager's statement calls 'attitude issues.' Coworkers describe him as, quote, 'always had something to prove,' and one former manager specifically flagged that he'd get visibly frustrated over small stuff, clench his jaw, storm off the floor. No fixed address since, according to his last known lease, which lapsed a month ago."

Reid looked up from his laptop, something almost delighted crossing his face. "Jaw clenching. That's — you called that. Specifically."

"I did." It landed somewhere strange in your chest, hearing it confirmed out loud like that, a piece of a stranger's body language you'd built entirely out of scuff marks and a shot pattern turning into an actual documented fact about an actual person. Every thread you'd pulled at in that half-renovated office was turning out to be attached to something real — the impatience, the arrogance, the refusal to wait for a clean shot, all of it, apparently, just who this kid had always been, long before he'd ever picked up a rifle.

"There's more," Garcia said, scrolling. "Two separate write-ups for insubordination, both times over being told to wait — once for a delivery he thought should've come faster, once over a schedule change he didn't agree with. This is not a patient man. This is not, and I cannot stress this enough, a man who enjoys being told to hang on a second."

"That's the victim selection," you said, half to the room, half working it out loud for your own benefit. "He's not choosing targets. He's not capable of choosing targets, because choosing requires patience he's never once demonstrated in his adult life. He sees an opening and he takes it, immediately, because waiting even thirty more seconds for a better one is apparently unbearable to him. Same with the setup — the way he's practically got the barrel in the glass instead of hanging back. He's not being careless because he doesn't know better. He's being careless because slowing down long enough to do it properly isn't something he's built to do."

"So he's not tethered to anywhere obvious." Prentiss frowned at the board. "No fixed address since the lease lapsed, no priors, nothing to pull him toward a particular location. That complicates finding him fast."

"Not as much as you'd think," you said, and something in you — the same something that had gone quiet and patient in the conference room the first day — sat forward. "If he's genuinely as impatient and unrooted as the profile suggests, he's not planning three steps ahead. He's not hiding well because hiding well requires patience he doesn't have. He'll be somewhere close to a good vantage point, somewhere he doesn't have to think hard about getting to. Probably somewhere he already knows. Family, an ex, an old friend who'll let him crash without asking questions."

"The brother," Luke said, already pulling up an address on his own laptop, close enough beside you that you could feel the warmth off him without quite touching. "If Caleb's like this, he's probably still in contact with the one person in his life who's proven he'll get away with things. Shared history. Same appetite for it, if the assault charge is anything to go by."

"Exactly." You looked over at him, and something passed between you that had nothing to do with the case and everything to do with how easily the two of you had just built that thought together, half a sentence each, the way you used to build a plan back when the stakes were a training exercise instead of six bodies. Every single piece of it had held. Every guess you'd made standing in that stripped-down office, working off nothing but scuff marks and a piece of gum and eight years of knowing exactly what it felt like to be that impatient, that hungry to be seen as good at something — all of it, real. A whole person, built out of instinct, turning out to be exactly who you'd said he'd be.

It should have felt like vindication. Mostly, it just felt like proof of something you'd never really doubted about yourself, and had spent three years trying not to need proven.

★・・・・・・★

The brother's apartment was above a laundromat in Astoria, up a narrow flight of stairs that smelled like fabric softener and old carpet, and the two of you went together — not officially paired off, nobody had said the words, but somehow it had just happened that way, the same way it always used to, like your bodies remembered a formation your mouths had never needed to discuss.

Luke knocked, hard, three times, and said "FBI, open up" in a voice you hadn't heard from him before — flat, authoritative, all the easy warmth from earlier completely gone, replaced with something that made even you straighten up a little beside him.

There was a long pause, footsteps, and then the door opened four inches, caught on a chain, one eye and a slice of a wary face visible in the gap.

"Yeah?"

"Marcus Voss?" Luke held his badge up close enough to the gap that the guy couldn't pretend not to see it. "We need to ask you some questions about your brother."

"Don't know where he is." The door didn't move. "Told the other guy that already."

"We didn't ask if you knew where he is," Luke said, stepping half a foot closer, enough that his shoulder filled most of the remaining light through the gap. "We asked if we could come in and talk. There's a difference, and I'd think about which side of that difference you want to be standing on, because obstruction in an active homicide investigation is not the kind of thing that goes away on its own."

You watched Marcus's eye flick past Luke, land on you, and something in his posture shifted — not relaxed, exactly, but recalibrating, the way people do when the threat in front of them suddenly has a second option standing just behind it.

You caught Luke's gaze for half a second. Neither of you said anything. You didn't need to — three years apart hadn't touched this particular language, the one you'd built together long before either of you had ever worked a real case, the one where he went hard so you didn't have to, and you went soft so he didn't have to keep being the only voice in the room. He read it off you the same way he always had, some old shared instinct clicking back into place without either of you consciously reaching for it, and he took one small, deliberate step back, just enough to let you forward into the space he'd made.

"Marcus," you said, gentler, unhurried, nothing behind it but tired understanding. "I know this is scary. I know whatever loyalty you've got left for your brother is probably fighting pretty hard with whatever fear you've got right now, and that's an awful place to be standing. We're not here to make things worse for you. We just need five minutes."

The chain rattled. The door shut for a second — long enough that you weren't sure which way it would go — and then opened properly, and Marcus stepped back to let you both in, arms crossed over a stained t-shirt, looking at the floor more than at either of you.

The apartment was small and cluttered in the specific way of someone who'd let a sibling crash on their couch more than once and never quite gotten the space back afterward. You clocked the jacket on the hook by the door immediately — two sizes too big for the man standing in front of you — and didn't say anything about it yet.

"He hasn't been staying here," Marcus said, before either of you had asked. Too fast. The kind of answer that arrived before the question because he'd rehearsed it already, probably lying awake with it the last few nights. "I don't know where he's been."

"When did you last see him?" Luke asked, arms crossed, voice still hard but not cruel, holding the line without pushing past it now that you were inside.

"Couple weeks, maybe. I don't keep track." Marcus's eyes flicked to the jacket on the hook and away again, fast, the kind of tell a person doesn't know they're giving. "He's not — he wouldn't do what you're saying he did. He's not like that."

"I think you know he might be," you said, quiet, not unkind, and watched something crack very slightly behind Marcus's eyes — not a confession, not yet, but the specific look of a person who already knew the truth and hadn't let himself sit with it until a stranger said it out loud in his kitchen. He didn't answer that. He didn't have to. You'd gotten everything you needed from the look alone, the same way you'd gotten everything you needed from a floor covered in scuff marks two days ago — not a full statement, but enough truth leaking out around the edges of a lie to build the rest of the shape yourself.

You asked a few more questions after that — routine ones, ones you already half-knew the useless answers to — and Marcus gave you nothing solid, no address, no plan, nothing you could act on directly. But none of that mattered as much as the two things you left with: the jacket, and the look on his face when you'd said he might be, which told you plainly enough that Caleb had been here recently, and that some part of Marcus was waiting, dreading, half-hoping for the knock on the door that had just happened.

Back out on the sidewalk, the door shut behind you, you exhaled long enough that it fogged slightly in the cold.

"He's been here," you said. "Recently. That jacket's not his."

"I saw it." Luke exhaled too, hands on his hips, looking back up at the building. "We're close. Not close enough for tonight, but close."

"He'll come back. Guys like this don't have anywhere else that feels safe." You said it with more certainty than you probably had, but it felt true in your gut, the same place the rest of the profile had come from. "We put someone on the building, we wait him out."

"Already talked to Prentiss." Luke held up his phone. "Local PD's sending two patrol officers to sit on the building overnight — everyone federal's stretched too thin to spare for a stakeout that might not pan out, so it's not going to be JJ or Rossi watching the door, just two guys from the local precinct keeping an eye on the entrance and calling it in if anyone matching the description shows. Nothing else we can do here tonight."

The two of you stood there a second longer than the moment required, the L train rattling somewhere behind you, the smell of dryer sheets drifting out from the laundromat below, and for a second it felt less like the end of a lead and more like the two of you just standing somewhere quiet together, which hadn't happened, you realized, once, not really, not since you'd landed.

"Come on," Luke said finally, gentler, the hardness from the doorway completely gone now, folded away like it had never been there at all. "Nothing more we can do tonight. Let's head back."

★・・・・・・★

By the time everyone reconvened at the field office to compare notes, it was past ten, and the exhaustion in the room had that specific, silent quality that comes after a day spent running on adrenaline instead of sleep — Reid rubbing at his eyes over a folder he'd stopped actually reading twenty minutes ago, JJ and Rossi both still at their desks going back over statements one more time before calling it, Garcia's video window minimized down to almost nothing because even she'd run out of things to say.

Prentiss looked around the room, at all of you, and something in her expression softened, just slightly, the particular fondness of someone who'd led enough of these to know exactly when to call it.

"Okay," she said. "We stop for tonight. Get some rest — actual rest, not case-notes-in-bed rest — because tomorrow, if he comes back to that apartment, we need everyone sharp. You all earned it today. Go home. Or, well—" a small, dry look around the unfamiliar field office, at the city outside the windows that wasn't home for any of you right now— "go to your hotels. Same thing tonight."

The room broke apart slowly, gathering bags, muttering goodnights, and you found yourself standing by the elevator with Scout's leash in your hand and absolutely no idea what you were supposed to do with the rest of the night. Your hotel room was fifteen minutes away. It had a bed in it, and nothing else — no dog to walk this late, since you'd already done that, no case file worth opening again tonight, no reason at all to be anywhere but asleep.

And yet.

You knew, with the same clean, uncomfortable certainty you'd used all day to read scuff marks and wound angles, that there was exactly one person you actually wanted to spend tonight with — not doing anything, not even talking necessarily, just being in a room with him the way you used to be, before either of you had needed a case to justify it. You had his room number. He'd mentioned it earlier, off-hand, not an invitation, just information, the kind of detail you filed away without meaning to because some part of you had apparently been waiting for an excuse to use it.

The elevator doors opened. Scout looked up at you, waiting for a decision you hadn't made yet.

You didn't know what you'd even say if you knocked. You didn't know what you wanted to happen once you did, or what you were more afraid of — that nothing would, or that something would.

But you knew exactly which floor his room was on, and your feet already knew which direction the elevator needed to go.

★・・・・・・★

You knocked before you could talk yourself out of it, three soft raps that felt embarrassingly loud in the empty hallway, Scout sitting patiently at your feet like he already knew exactly where he'd been leading you the whole elevator ride up.

There was a pause, footsteps, and then the door opened, and Luke stood there in a t-shirt and sweatpants, hair damp like he'd just gotten out of the shower, and for a second neither of you said anything, because apparently that was still a thing that happened to the two of you, this specific kind of silence that filled up a doorway.

"Hey," he said finally, and then, looking down, "hey, buddy," to Scout, who'd already trotted past both your legs into the room like he lived there.

"Sorry, I know it's late. I just—" You gestured vaguely at nothing, at everything, at the general concept of the last three years. "I didn't want to be alone in my room. And you were the only person in this city I actually wanted to not be alone with."

Something in his face did something complicated and soft. "Yeah. Come in."

His room looked like every other Bureau-issued hotel room in existence — beige, forgettable, a laptop open on the desk with a case file half-minimized behind a paused episode of some cooking competition show — but he'd clearly made it his own in small ways, a jacket thrown over the desk chair, a battered paperback splayed open on the nightstand, and you filed all of it away without meaning to, the way you'd always catalogued the small details of him, back when you'd had the right to.

"You want anything? I've got—" he opened the little hotel fridge, peered in with the specific disappointment of a man who'd already checked its contents twice today. "Water. A beer I stole from the minibar and definitely shouldn't have. Some sad-looking string cheese."

"The beer's tempting, but I think we're both technically on the clock if that door opens tomorrow."

"Fair." He grabbed two waters instead, tossed you one, and folded himself onto the end of the bed, back against the headboard, leaving space beside him that felt both completely obvious and terrifyingly loaded. You sat anyway, an acceptable distance away, Scout immediately flopping across both your feet like he'd appointed himself furniture.

"So," Luke said, and there was something looser in his voice now, off the clock in a way he hadn't let himself be all day. "Tell me everything. Not case stuff. Just — everything. Three years is a lot to catch up on."

"That's a big ask for one night."

"I've got nowhere to be." A small, easy smile. "Believe me."

So you told him. Not all of it, not yet, but real things — the veterans' program you'd built from nothing in a spare office above a hardware store, the first guy you'd worked with who reminded you so much of a soldier you'd served with that you'd had to excuse yourself and cry in a bathroom for ten minutes before you could go back in and finish the intake form. The apartment you'd finally stopped calling temporary sometime last year, even though you still hadn't hung anything on the walls. Scout's various crimes — the Christmas he ate an entire ham off the counter, the time he'd herded an actual raccoon out of your yard like it had personally offended him.

Luke laughed more than you expected, and told you things back — Roxy's ongoing feud with a neighbor's cat, the ridiculous nickname the team had given him after a case in Texas he refused to elaborate on no matter how much you pushed, the apartment in DC he'd finally bought instead of rented, small, unglamorous, entirely his.

"You bought a place," you said, something warm and a little wistful in it. "That's— Luke, that's huge. You always said you didn't want to put down roots anywhere you couldn't picture staying for good."

"Yeah, well." He looked down at his hands. "Guess I finally pictured it."

You didn't ask where. You had a feeling you already knew, and you weren't ready yet to find out if you were right.

It went on like that for a long time — easy, warm, occasionally punctuated by Scout demanding attention from one or both of you, the cooking show still muted and forgotten on the TV, the case file completely abandoned behind it. It felt, for the first time since you'd landed in this city, like something other than survival. Like an actual evening. Like something you'd both quietly needed far more than either of you had let on.

It was well past midnight when the conversation slowed, settled, the easy chatter thinning out into something quieter, and Luke asked the question you'd known was coming eventually, the one you'd been circling around all night without either of you saying it out loud.

"Can I ask you something? You don't have to answer."

"You can ask."

He was quiet for a second, choosing the words carefully, the way he always used to before he said something that actually mattered. "What happened. After. You never really told me — not the whole thing. Just that you were leaving, and that you needed to, and I believed you, because I trusted you, but I never actually understood it. Not really."

You expected your chest to tighten the way it always did, the old reflex, the flinch. It didn't, not quite — or it did, but it was smaller than you braced for, softer around the edges, like something that had finally had enough time to scar over properly instead of staying raw.

"My team," you said, and the words came slower than you meant them to, but steady. "Near the end. There was an op that went wrong. And here's the part I've never actually said out loud to anyone — it wasn't just bad luck. I saw it coming. I had the shot lined up, I knew, I knew, the second I saw the setup, that they were walking into something. Every instinct I had was screaming that it was a trap. I asked for clearance to take the shot early, before anyone stepped into the kill zone, and I was told no. Hold position. Wait for confirmation. So I listened. I followed the order, because that's what you do, because eight years of training tells you the chain of command knows something you don't." Your hands had gone very still in your lap. "And I was right. I was right, and I didn't pull the trigger, and people I loved walked into exactly what I told them not to, and I lost most of them in one afternoon — people I'd been in the dirt with for years, people whose kids' names I knew, people I'd have died for without thinking twice about it. And I didn't die. And they did. I don't pull a trigger lightly, ever, I never have — but that's the one time in my life I was a hundred percent sure, and I still didn't do it, because I listened instead of trusting myself, and that's the part that never leaves. Not the op going wrong. Me listening."

Luke didn't say anything. He just listened, the way he'd always been so good at listening, like the words mattered more coming from you than they would from anyone else.

"I kept doing the job for a while after. Everyone told me that was healthy, actually — get back on the horse, don't let it win. And I tried. I really tried." You looked down at Scout instead of at Luke, found it easier that way. "But every time I got set up somewhere, every single time, I'd start running the math on it. Not the shot. The other math. The what-if math. And I kept landing on the same thing, over and over, no matter how hard I tried to think about literally anything else."

"What was the thing," Luke asked, quiet, though something in his voice told you he already suspected.

"I kept thinking about you." You said it plainly, no dramatics behind it, just the truth as it had actually lived in your head for months before you'd finally left. "Not because you were on any of those ops. You weren't. But I kept thinking — what if it had been him. What if it had been Luke on the ground and I was the one behind the glass and something went wrong that had nothing to do with skill, nothing to do with preparation, just the universe deciding today was the day. And every time I thought it, I couldn't — " Your voice caught, finally, just slightly, the first real crack all night. "I couldn't finish the thought. I still can't. I physically cannot make myself picture the rest of that sentence, even now, even years later, even knowing you're sitting right here, fine, alive, annoyingly stubborn about your dog's grudges. I just — couldn't."

"Hey." Luke's voice was low, careful, and you felt the mattress shift as he moved closer, not pulling you in exactly, just closing the distance enough that his shoulder was against yours, solid and warm and real. "Hey. Shh. Okay. I know."

"I'm not upset," you said, which was mostly true. "I just — I wanted you to actually know. Not the short version. The real one."

"I know," he said again, softer this time, and you felt him press a kiss to the top of your head, brief and unthinking, the kind of gesture that belonged to two people who'd done this exact motion a hundred times before and never once needed to discuss what it meant. "I know, I know. You don't have to explain the rest of it. I get it. I've had that thought too, you know. About you. More times than I'd probably admit if you asked me on a good day."

You let yourself lean into him properly then, the tension you hadn't realized you were still holding finally draining out of your shoulders, and for a long moment neither of you said anything else, just sat there together in the quiet, half-lit room, Scout's steady breathing at your feet, the muted cooking show still flickering uselessly on the screen.

"I'm glad you left," Luke said eventually, into the quiet. "For what it's worth. I hated not knowing where you were. I hated it more than I let myself say out loud, even to myself. But I'm glad you got out before that thought turned into something you couldn't come back from. I'd rather have three years of not knowing than the alternative."

"That's a low bar."

"You keep saying that." He huffed something that was almost a laugh, and you felt it more than heard it, his chest moving against your shoulder. "Maybe stop setting the bar so low that everything I say sounds like I'm clearing it easily."

"Maybe you should stop being so easy to clear it for."

"Rude." But he was smiling, you could hear it, and you let yourself smile too, tucked into his side, feeling lighter than you had in longer than you wanted to admit.

You didn't talk about what any of this meant. You didn't have to, not tonight — there'd be time for that later, or there wouldn't, and either way tonight wasn't the night to force it. Tonight was just this: the two of you, a dog, a paused cooking show, and three years of distance finally, quietly, closing itself back up.

"You should probably sleep," Luke said eventually, though he made no move to actually let go of you. "Big day tomorrow. Possibly a very not-fun day, if our friend Caleb decides to show back up at his brother's."

"Probably." You didn't move either. "I don't really want to walk back to my room right now, if I'm honest."

"Didn't ask you to." He shifted slightly, made room, an unspoken offer sitting there plainly between you, no pressure behind it, just an open door. "Stay. I'll take the couch — bed's too soft anyway, my back's been killing me all week, I was gonna end up on the couch regardless."

You looked at him for a second, at the couch in question, which was a perfectly ordinary hotel couch that had clearly never once caused him back pain in his life, and decided not to call it out. Some lies were just a person being careful with you, and you were tired enough, grateful enough, to let him have this one.

"Okay," you said. "Whatever helps your back, Alvez."

"Exactly." He didn't quite meet your eyes when he said it, and you let that slide too.

You looked over at Scout, sprawled diagonally across the end of the bed like he'd claimed it as his personal property the second you sat down, and you laughed, actually laughed, something easy and unguarded that you hadn't heard yourself do in longer than you wanted to think about.

"Yeah," you said. "Okay. I'll stay."

And for the first time in three years, falling asleep didn't feel like something you had to do alone to survive it.

★・・・・・・★

"Hey. Hey, wake up."

Luke's hand was on your shoulder, gentle but urgent, and you were awake instantly, the way you'd trained your body to be years ago and never quite unlearned, adrenaline arriving before your eyes had even fully opened.

"What's happening?"

"Patrol thinks they just spotted him. Someone matching Caleb's description went into the building about two minutes ago." Luke was already up, already pulling on last night's shirt, phone pressed to his ear with his other hand. "Prentiss wants everyone rolling now."

You sat up fast, mind snapping fully awake in the space of a breath, and Luke crouched back down in front of you for half a second, phone still against his ear, his free hand finding your face, thumb brushing once along your jaw like he needed to ground himself in you before the day took over completely.

"Hey," he said, quieter, just for you, the professional urgency dropping out of his voice for a beat. "You good? You don't have to be out there for this part if you don't want to be."

"I'm good." You meant it, mostly, adrenaline already sharpening everything into focus. "I'm not sitting this one out, Alvez."

"Didn't think you would." Something flickered across his face — worry, maybe, or just the old familiar reluctance of a man who'd once had to watch you walk toward danger and had never fully made peace with it. He didn't say any of that out loud, not with the clock running the way it was. He just held your gaze a second longer than the moment strictly needed, like he was trying to memorize it, and then stood, already talking into the phone again, already Agent Alvez instead of just Luke. "Copy that, we're five minutes out."

"Go," you said, already swinging your legs off the bed. "I need my rifle. It's not exactly hanging out in your closet."

That got the smallest flash of a smile out of him despite everything. "Meet you in the lobby. Two minutes."

"Two minutes," you agreed, and he was gone, door swinging shut behind him, and for one strange, suspended second you sat there in the quiet he'd left behind, heart hammering, before your body caught up with the rest of you and got moving.

You were down two flights to your own room on the floor below in under a minute, because your rifle sure as hell hadn't spent the night in Luke's. You changed fast, hands steady on the case latches despite the hour, weapon check automatic, muscle memory doing the thinking your still half-asleep brain hadn't caught up to yet. There was a strange, clean certainty to it, doing this again after three years away from it — like slipping back into a version of yourself you'd never actually stopped being underneath everything else. Okay, you thought, closing the case, rifle slung, adrenaline settling into something usable instead of something frantic. I'm ready for this.

You swung back up to Luke's room just long enough to collect Scout, who lifted his head from the end of the bed, alert, and you paused just long enough to press a hand to his fur.

"Stay, buddy. Good boy. Stay here." He settled back down, trusting, and you hated leaving him for exactly as long as it took to shut the door behind you.

★・・・・・・★

You were four minutes out when the radio crackled to life with the kind of chaos that meant something had already gone wrong.

"Shots fired, shots fired, both patrol officers down, repeat, both officers down—"

Your stomach dropped straight through the floor of the car. Luke's jaw went tight beside you, knuckles white on the wheel, and neither of you said anything, because there wasn't anything to say that would make the next several minutes go any faster.

The radio kept going, voices stacking over each other, half-panic under all the trained calm — a request for immediate backup, someone calling for a medic, someone else confirming the shooter's position was still unknown, that no one had eyes on him, that both downed officers were still in the open with no safe approach. You gripped the door handle without meaning to, watching the streets blur past too slowly, every red light an agony, every intersection a held breath.

"They shouldn't have been that close," Luke said, low, mostly to himself, the words coming out tight. "Two guys. Local PD. They weren't supposed to be doing anything but watching the entrance."

"He must have made them." You said it before you'd fully thought it through, but it felt true the second it left your mouth — the same restless, paranoid energy you'd profiled from a scuffed office floor, the same inability to sit still inside a threat, real or imagined. "Or he panicked. Thought he was cornered before he actually was, and went with the only instinct he's ever really trusted."

Luke didn't answer that, just took the next turn a little harder than he needed to, and you understood, without either of you saying it, that he was doing the same thing you were — running the entire drive on the singular, narrow hope that neither of the officers on that radio call was already past saving, and that whatever waited at the end of this drive wasn't going to ask either of you to lose someone else today.

The last minute felt longer than the four before it combined, sirens rising ahead of you, the radio still crackling with half-finished sentences, and you found yourself doing the thing you hadn't let yourself do in years — praying, wordlessly, to nothing in particular, for the ordinary mercy of everyone getting to go home tonight.

By the time you arrived, the block had already been cordoned, more units rolling in behind you, and the scene that met you was worse than the radio call had let on — both patrol officers down near the entrance, one clearly beyond help, the other being worked on by paramedics who'd gotten there faster than anyone should have been able to. Five shots, you'd learn later. Three misses, two that found their marks, and Caleb Voss was somewhere inside that building with a rifle and apparently nothing left to lose.

No one could get close. Every approach to the front of the house was covered by a sightline from an upstairs window, and the two agents who'd tried had been driven back by warning shots that weren't warnings at all, just misses that hadn't happened to land.

Prentiss found you almost immediately, her face doing none of its usual composed stillness. "I need eyes and a position," she said. "Can you set up somewhere that gives us a shot if this goes bad?"

You didn't hesitate. "Give me two minutes."

You found it fast — a stand of overgrown bushes at the edge of the yard next door, enough cover to disappear into, a clean line to the upstairs window where you'd already clocked movement. You dropped into position with the same clean, practiced stillness you hadn't used in three years, rifle steadying against your shoulder like it had never once left it, breath slowing into the old familiar rhythm.

Breathe in. Half out. Hold.

Prentiss crouched beside you, low, urgent. "Only shoot when I give the order. We're going to try to talk him down first — Alvez is going in on comms, see if we can end this without anyone else getting hurt. You are our very last option. Understood?"

"Understood."

She held your gaze a second longer, checking, and whatever she saw there must have satisfied her, because she nodded once and moved off toward the command position, already speaking into her radio, clearing Luke to make contact.

You settled deeper into the bushes, cheek against the stock, eye to the scope, and found him — Caleb, pacing behind the window, rifle in hand, movements jagged and too fast, exactly as unsteady as three years of profiling every version of this exact kind of person had taught you to expect. Impatient. Frightened now, underneath the arrogance, cornered in a way his whole life had never prepared him for.

Your own pulse had gone slow and strange in your ears, the old, familiar quiet settling over you the way it always used to right before a shot — the world narrowing down to breath and glass and a single small window of movement, everything else falling away, the shouting near the command post, the distant wail of an ambulance pulling off with one of the fallen officers, even your own fear for the man about to walk toward that house with nothing but his voice as a weapon. All of it receded to somewhere far away, filed under things you could not afford to feel right now, not until this was over.

You found the rhythm of your own breathing and matched it to the rise and fall of Caleb's shoulders through the scope, the same way you'd been trained to years ago — not just watching a target, but learning him, anticipating him, becoming so attuned to the rhythm of another person's body that you could read the half-second before he moved before he'd finished deciding to. It was an old, intimate kind of attention, the kind you'd never been able to explain to anyone who hadn't done it themselves — how close you had to let a stranger get to you, in your own head, in order to be ready to end his life cleanly if it came to that.

You thought, distantly, of Luke walking toward that house right now with nothing between himself and a loaded rifle except his voice and whatever fragile thread of reason was still holding Caleb together, and you made yourself breathe through the fear instead of around it, the way you'd learned to do a long time ago, because falling apart now would help no one, least of all him.

Steady, you told yourself. Just be steady. That's all you have to be right now.

"Caleb." Luke's voice, steady, careful, coming through your earpiece and echoing faintly across the yard from wherever he'd taken up a covered position closer to the house. "My name's Luke. Nobody else needs to get hurt today. I want to talk to you. Just talk."

Silence, then movement in the window. Caleb's voice, ragged, distant. "Get back! Get everybody back or I swear—"

"I hear you. I'm not moving any closer, okay? I'm exactly where I am. I just want to talk."

You watched through the scope, every muscle in your body locked into stillness, the crosshair resting steady on a shifting, unpredictable target, your finger resting outside the guard exactly where it belonged, waiting.

Luke kept talking — steady, patient, the same voice you remembered him using on green recruits who'd frozen up on their first live exercise, the same voice he'd once used on you, on a very bad night neither of you talked about, when you'd needed exactly this kind of calm and he'd been the only person who knew how to give it to you. He was good at this. He'd always been good at this. It was, you thought distantly, the thing you'd loved about him from the very beginning — not the good shot, not the sharp mind, but this: the specific, rare gift of making someone feel steadier just by being spoken to.

For almost a full minute, it seemed to be working. Caleb's voice lost some of its ragged edge. He said something about not meaning for it to go this far, about the officers, about how it wasn't supposed to happen like this.

And then his posture changed.

You saw it half a second before it happened — the same tell you'd read off a scuffed concrete floor days ago, the same restless inability to sit still inside his own fear, the shift in his shoulders as something in him snapped past whatever thin thread had been holding the conversation together. He swung the rifle toward Luke's position.

There was no more waiting for an order. There was no more anything except the years of training underneath every other version of yourself you'd built since, rising up in the half-second that mattered more than any half-second of your life ever had.

You didn't hear Prentiss say a word. You didn't need to. You'd already exhaled, already found the half-breath, already settled into the stillness that had always been the only place you'd ever felt completely, uncomplicatedly certain of yourself.

Caleb fired.

You fired half a heartbeat behind him, and where his shot went wide — rushed, panicked, exactly as imprecise as every other shot he'd ever taken — yours did not. It never had, not once, not in eight years, not in this single moment that mattered more than every one of them combined.

The window went still.

You were up and moving before your brain had fully caught up with what your body had just done, rifle left behind in the grass, running across the yard faster than you'd run in years, lungs burning, one single thought looping over and over: let him be okay, let him be okay, let him be okay.

"Luke!"

He came around the side of the house at almost the same moment, upright, moving under his own power, and the relief that went through you was so total it nearly took your legs out from under you.

"I'm okay," he said, catching you as you slammed into him, both of you breathing hard, his hands coming up to your face, checking you with the same urgency you were checking him with. "Hey — hey, I'm okay, I'm fine, he missed, I'm fine."

"You're sure? You're not—"

"I'm sure. I'm right here." His forehead dropped against yours, both of you still catching your breath, hearts going too fast for entirely different reasons now. "You got him. You got him before he—" His voice caught, just slightly, the first crack in all that steady calm he'd been holding for Caleb's benefit a minute ago. "You saved my life."

"I wasn't going to let anything happen to you." It came out rougher than you meant it to, three years and a lifetime of unsaid things packed into six words. "I couldn't. I told you. I couldn't even finish the thought last night, and I wasn't about to let it become real."

Luke pulled back just far enough to look at you properly, something raw and open on his face that he wasn't bothering to hide anymore, not now, not after this. "I know," he said. "I know you weren't."

Behind you, the scene was already filling with the noise of an aftermath — agents moving in, radios crackling, Prentiss's voice cutting through it all giving calm, clear instructions — but for one more second, it was just the two of you standing in the middle of somebody's front yard, foreheads still touching, both of you shaking slightly with the kind of adrenaline that only comes after nearly losing something you'd never actually said out loud that you had.

"For what it's worth," Luke said quietly, "that was the first time in my life a shot has ever felt like the best thing that's happened to me instead of the worst."

You laughed, a little wetly, and didn't pull away. "Low bar."

"Yeah." His hand found yours, held on. "Guess I keep clearing it anyway."

You both stood there a moment longer, letting the adrenaline finish draining out of your legs, and slowly, gradually, the noise of the scene around you started filtering back in — Prentiss's voice, steady and clear, directing the response teams; the low murmur of agents confirming the house was secure; somewhere further off, the specific, awful quiet that surrounded the two fallen officers, a silence that would need its own reckoning later, one you weren't ready to look at directly yet. Luke's thumb moved absently over the back of your hand, like he needed the motion as much as you needed the contact, both of you still just breathing, just existing, in the space of having survived something.

"That's twice now," you said eventually, voice quieter, some of the adrenaline finally starting to give way to something rawer underneath it. "Twice I've had you in a scope and had to actually pull the trigger to keep you alive. I don't know how many more of those I get in me before I actually fall apart."

"You didn't fall apart the first time," Luke said, gentle, watching you with an attentiveness that made you feel entirely seen, in the uncomfortable way that only he had ever really managed. "You got quieter. Steadier. I used to think that was you not feeling it. Took me way too long to figure out it was the opposite."

"You feel everything and do the job anyway," you said, half to yourself, an old truth you'd said out loud to no one but yourself in three years, until last night. "That's not the same as not feeling it."

"No," Luke agreed. "It's not." He reached up, brushed something — dirt, maybe, or just an excuse to touch your face again — from your cheek, his hand lingering there a beat longer than the gesture strictly required. "For what it's worth, I've never once doubted that you felt every single one of them. I don't think you're capable of not feeling something. I think that's actually the whole reason you're as good as you are."

You didn't have an answer for that, or you had too many, and none of them felt like they belonged out loud in the middle of a crime scene with two dead officers and an ambulance still idling nearby. So you just leaned into his hand instead, let yourself have this small, quiet moment of being known completely by somebody, before the rest of the day came crashing back in to claim you both.

Neither of you said anything else for a while. You didn't need to. Not yet. There'd be time, later, for everything else you still hadn't said — but right now, standing there with his hand in yours and his heartbeat finally slowing back down to something normal under your palm, it felt like enough just to have this: both of you, still here, still standing, the worst of it finally, actually over.

Scout, you thought distantly, was going to be so smug about all this when you got back to tell him.

★・・・・・・★

The scene took hours to clear — statements, evidence recovery, the slow, exhausting machinery of closing out a case that had cost too much to close out cleanly. It was well past dark by the time you and Luke finally made it back to the hotel, adrenaline long since curdled into a bone-deep exhaustion neither of you had the energy to fight anymore.

Scout met you at the door like you'd been gone a year instead of half a day, and you dropped to your knees in the hallway just to bury your face in his fur for a second, letting yourself finally, finally feel the whole day catch up with you all at once.

"Hey." Luke crouched down beside you, voice low, careful, like he was checking on something fragile. "You okay?"

"I don't know." Your voice cracked, unexpectedly, and you didn't fight it. "I keep replaying it. The half-second before I fired. I keep thinking about what would've happened if I'd been a fraction of a second slower."

"You weren't." Luke's hand found your face, tilting it gently up to his. "You weren't slower. You were exactly fast enough. You have to let yourself have that, okay? You have to let yourself just — have this. Just for tonight. You don't have to run the what-ifs on this one."

"I almost lost you today."

"You didn't." His thumb brushed along your cheekbone, and something in his expression cracked open, all the careful restraint of the last three years finally giving out at once. "I've almost lost you about six different times over the last decade, in about six different ways, and I never once let myself say what I actually wanted to say every single time, because I told myself there'd be another chance to say it later. I'm not doing that again. Not after today."

"Luke—"

"I love you." It came out rough, unpolished, nothing like the careful, patient man who'd talked a killer down an hour ago — just raw and immediate and three years overdue. "I've loved you since before either of us knew what to do with it, and I let you walk away once because I didn't fight for it, and I am not making that mistake twice. I don't care that it's messy timing. I don't care that we're both running on no sleep and too much adrenaline. I needed you to know today, specifically, because today reminded me exactly how little time any of us actually get."

You didn't answer him with words. You didn't trust yourself to get them right, not after a day like this one, so you kissed him instead — messy, off-center, both of you too exhausted and too wrecked open to do it gracefully, his hand fisting in your jacket, yours gripping the front of his shirt like you needed something solid to hold onto while the whole world finally, finally settled back into place around you. It wasn't elegant. It wasn't the kind of kiss either of you would have staged if you'd planned it. It was better than that — it was real, and overdue, and entirely, finally yours.

When you finally broke apart, foreheads pressed together, both of you breathing hard for reasons that had nothing to do with the case anymore, Scout gave an enormous, unimpressed sigh from somewhere around your ankles, like he'd been waiting three years for the two of you to catch up to something he'd apparently known the whole time.

"I love you too," you said, finally, voice thick. "I have for a very long time."

Luke laughed, wet and disbelieving and happy, and kissed you again, softer this time, unhurried, like the two of you finally had all the time in the world instead of none.

You ended up on the floor of the hallway for a while, still in your jackets, still smelling like the crime scene neither of you had properly processed yet, Scout wedging himself bodily between you like he had every intention of being included in whatever this was. Neither of you moved to get up. Neither of you wanted to, not yet — it felt, strangely, like the safest place either of you had been in days, sitting on hotel carpet with your backs against the wall, hands still tangled together, both of you occasionally laughing for no reason at all except the sheer, disbelieving relief of having finally said the thing.

"Three years," you said eventually, shaking your head against his shoulder. "Three years of pretending I didn't still think about you every single day, and it took a guy with a rifle and a grudge to get us here."

"I'd have preferred a less dramatic catalyst, personally." Luke pressed a kiss to the top of your head. "But I'll take it. I'm not picky about how we got here. Just that we did."

"What happens now?" You asked it half into his shoulder, half into the quiet of the hallway, genuinely unsure of the answer for the first time all night — not afraid of it, just curious, the way you used to be curious about a case before you knew how it ended.

"Now?" Luke considered it, thumb tracing slow circles against your hand. "Now I think we go inside, and you take the world's longest shower, and I order truly inadvisable amounts of room service, and tomorrow we deal with the case wrap-up and the flight home and all of that. And after that—" He paused, something soft and certain settling into his voice. "After that, I don't know. We figure it out. Together, this time. No more three-year gaps. No more almosts."

"No more almosts," you agreed, and meant it more than you'd meant almost anything in longer than you could remember.

Scout let out another long-suffering sigh, clearly ready to be fed, and the two of you laughed again, finally hauling yourselves up off the floor, hands still linked, neither one letting go.

★・・・・・・★

Three months later, you were teaching Roxy to fetch a tennis ball she had absolutely no interest in fetching, while Scout looked on from the porch with the particular judgment only a German Shepherd who considered himself above such games could manage.

"She's not going to do it," Luke called from the grill, not even looking over. "She's never once fetched anything in her life. She's not starting today."

"She might surprise you."

"She will not."

You threw the ball anyway. Roxy watched it bounce twice across the yard, looked at you with an expression that could only be described as and why, exactly, would I do that, and settled back down in the grass with a contented huff. Scout, beside her, put his head on his paws like he was embarrassed on her behalf.

"Told you," Luke said, insufferably smug, flipping something on the grill that smelled a lot better than either of your cooking skills probably deserved.

You'd moved into his place — small, unglamorous, entirely his, and now, gradually, entirely both of yours — two months ago, once the case had wrapped and the paperwork had cleared and the two of you had run out of reasons to keep pretending the distance between your two hotel rooms had ever meant anything. It hadn't been a big conversation, in the end. It had mostly just been Scout, deciding one weekend visit that he preferred Luke's apartment to your temporary one, and neither of you having the heart, or honestly the desire, to argue with him about it.

"You know," you said, wandering over to lean against the porch railing, "there's something almost poetic about this. Two people who once trained dogs to help them survive their own heads, ending up with the same two dogs, in the same backyard, teaching one of them absolutely nothing new."

"Very poetic." Luke handed you a plate. "Very sappy. You've gotten sappy since you moved in, you know that?"

"I blame you. You're a bad influence."

"I'm an incredible influence." He kissed your temple on his way past, easy, unthinking, the kind of gesture that had stopped feeling new somewhere around week three and had instead just become the shape of your life now, the way breathing was. "Ask anyone."

★・・・・・・★

Later, dishes done, the dogs finally worn out and sprawled together in a tangle of fur on the living room floor, you found yourself digging through a box you still hadn't fully unpacked, looking for a specific photo you knew was in there somewhere.

You found it near the bottom — the two of you, years younger, dust-caked and grinning, a much smaller Scout held awkwardly between you like neither of you had quite figured out how to hold a puppy yet. Luke had a black eye in it, courtesy of an argument the two of you had never quite agreed on the details of since.

"Oh, no," Luke said, appearing over your shoulder, groaning. "Where did you find that. I thought I destroyed all copies of that."

"It's a good picture."

"I look like I lost a fight with a door."

"You lost a fight with me," you said, delighted, "over whose turn it was to hold him, and then you tripped over your own boots, and then Scout peed on your shirt out of solidarity."

"I remember it differently."

"You remember it wrong." You held the photo up, comparing it to the two dogs currently passed out together on the rug, one significantly grayer around the muzzle than the puppy in the picture, the other snoring like a much bigger animal than he actually was. "Look how far we've all come."

Luke was quiet for a second, looking at the photo, and then at you, something soft and unhurried crossing his face. "You remember what you called me, back then? Before any of this. Before I even really knew you."

"Alvarez," you said immediately, because you did remember, you'd never actually forgotten. "For like two weeks. Because I refused to learn your actual name out of pure spite, since you strolled in on your first day acting like you already belonged on my range before you'd proven a single thing to me."

"You called me Alvarez to my face for two weeks. I genuinely thought that might be my name for a while. I almost introduced myself as Alvarez to my CO."

"You deserved it. You were insufferable."

"I was sixteen months out of basic and terrified of you," Luke said, laughing now, setting the photo down gently on the table. "Everyone was terrified of you. You were the best shot on base and you knew it and you had this — this thing you'd say, every time, right before someone took a shot they were nervous about."

You knew exactly what he meant, and something warm settled in your chest at the memory of it, unprompted, unbidden after all these years. "You've got this. You always do."

"Yeah." Luke's voice went quiet, and you both just stood there a second, years of history folding neatly into the small, ordinary living room around you, the dogs asleep, the dishes done, absolutely nothing dramatic happening at all, which felt, somehow, like the whole point. "You said that to me. Right before I took my first live shot in the field. I don't think I ever told you how much I needed to hear it right then."

"You didn't have to tell me. I could see it."

"Yeah, well." He reached for your hand, laced his fingers through yours, easy, familiar, permanent in a way that no longer needed announcing. "I've got you now. Figured it was time I said it back."

"Said what back?"

"You've got this." He smiled, small and certain, the exact same smile you'd fallen for a lifetime ago in a different, harder version of both your lives. "You always do."

You didn't say anything to that. You didn't need to. You just leaned into him, into this small unremarkable evening in a small unremarkable house that had somehow, against every version of the odds either of you had ever calculated, ended up being exactly where you both belonged, and let the quiet hold you the way it always used to before either of you had needed a war, or a badge, or three years of distance to understand what it was worth.

Luke's phone buzzed on the coffee table, breaking the quiet, and he groaned even before checking it.

"Ugh, no," you said, already bracing. "Please tell me that's not a case."

"Relax, I’m not on call this week." But he was smiling as he read the screen, trying and failing not to, something clearly amusing him more than he was letting on. "It's Prentiss."

"Tell her I said hi and also that You’re off the clock and she should feel bad about texting you right now."

"She's not texting. She's calling." He answered before you could protest further, propping the phone against his ear, still smiling in that specific way that made you immediately suspicious. "Hey. Yeah — no, we're just at the house. Yeah, she's right here."

He listened for a while, nodding, expression sliding gradually from amused into something warmer, something almost proud, and by the time he pulled the phone away from his ear you were fully sitting up, alert, half convinced something was wrong purely because he was taking so long to just tell you.

"What. What did she say."

"She finished the paperwork." Luke was grinning now, unable to hold it back any longer. "She's formally requesting you join the BAU. Full special agent status as your qualified, not a case-by-case consultant — permanent, if you want it. She said to tell you specifically that our relationship being a factor was reviewed and accounted for in the paperwork, so you don't need to worry about that being a problem. Her words, not mine. She sounded very pleased with herself about writing that sentence."

You sat there for a second, stunned, the reality of it slowly settling in — an actual place, an actual team, an actual reason to keep doing the thing you'd only ever let yourself believe you were good at again over the last few months, and not just as a favor, not just for one case, but for good.

"What do you say?" Luke asked, gentler now, watching you with the specific patience of a man who already knew the answer but wanted you to get there yourself.

"Yes." It came out immediately, no hesitation at all, surprising even you with how easy it was. "Obviously yes."

Luke laughed, delighted, pulling you into him. "So let me get this straight," he said, into your hair, still grinning. "Three years of not seeing each other, not speaking, barely existing in the same state — and now we're about to live together, work together, and apparently be professionally reviewed and approved as a couple by the federal government."

"When you say it like that it does sound like a lot."

"I'm just saying, we've gone from zero to a hundred pretty fast."

"To be fair," you said, pressing a kiss just under his jaw, "there's plenty we do together these days that never made it into Prentiss's paperwork."

"There is a real chance HR would like to know about several of those things."

"HR does not need to know about several of those things."

"No," Luke agreed, laughing properly now, "they really don't."

Outside, the porch light buzzed faintly. Inside, two dogs snored in perfect, unbothered harmony, and neither of you moved for a long, long time.

★・・・・・・★

wc: 18,386

Now, the fan above Shane’s desk struggled against the heat, rattling like a man about to breathe his last. It didn’t do shit except circulate the stale air. 

Shane was leaning back in his chair, boots propped on the edge of his desk, fingers laced behind his head. He watched you rifle through that filing cabinet for the fifth time in ten minutes and you could tell you were somehow getting on his nerves.

Jesus Christ.

“You plannin’ on actually findin’ that DUI report today, sweetheart,” he drawled, “or we gonna play hide-and-seek all afternoon?”

You didn’t turn around, but he saw the way your shoulders tensed, the way your fingers fumbled just a fraction before you shoved the drawer closed—hard. The metal screeched in protest, loud enough that Rick glanced up from his own paperwork with a look towards Shane that said—Behave!

Shane scoffed and lowered his feet to the floor with a thud. He walked up to you and took the folder from your hands, then flipped through it.

And hell, he didn’t even know why he was doing this. Maybe it was the way you braced yourself when he got too close, like you expected him to bite. Maybe it was that stubborn frown you gave him when he questioned your abilities. Or maybe it was the August heat.

Whatever it was, it pissed him off.

Shane stepped back—slowly, like he was doing you a favor—and tapped the edge of the filing cabinet with two knuckles. “You know the alphabet, darlin’?”

And there it was. That glare you shot him that said—Fuck you. 

“Yeah.” He smirked, the bastard. “’Cause I can sing it for you, if that’d help.”

You yanked the right drawer open with more force than necessary. “You’re bein’ an asshole.”

“And?”

“And,” you gave him your sweetest smiles, “remember I got access to your lunch orders, Deputy.”

Oh, he liked that. Way too much.

“Oh-ho! Sweetheart’s got spine!” Shane exclaimed, with a positively shit-eating grin on his face.

Rick groaned from his desk. “Jesus, Shane. You enjoy bein’ this much of a pain in the ass?”

Shane didn’t even glance at him, too busy enjoying being a massive pain in the ass.

The phone rang before you could retaliate, the shrill sound cutting through the tension. You snatched it up and the second you answered, your voice was all sugar—professional and polite:

“King County Sheriff’s Department.”

Shane scoffed, rolling his eyes as he turned away. The contrast between sweet and spiteful was infuriating. He walked back to his desk, dropping into his chair hard enough to make it protest. 

The fan above him rattled uselessly again, and he kicked at the leg of his desk, sending a pencil rolling to the floor. Rick shot him a look. Shane opted to ignore it.

“No, Mrs. Burnett… I mean, yes, of course we can send someone. Uh-huh…” You rolled your eyes again when you heard Shane making even more noise somewhere in the background. “Stolen begonias. Certainly.”

Shane’s boot hit the desk leg again—harder this time—just as you stressed the word “begonias” with that painfully patient customer-service lilt. 

“Christ, Shane,” Rick muttered. “Forgot to take your nap today or somethin’?”

But Shane was too busy watching the way your fingers tapped an irritated rhythm against the desk. Frankly, he kind of admired your resolve. Even if he could see plain as day that calm in your voice was forced, you never broke character. 

Just as you reassured Mrs. Burnett that yes, the King County Sheriff’s Department took floral theft very seriously, Shane leaned back in his chair again and hollered to you:

“Tell her we’ll bring the K-9 unit, sweetheart! Sniff out them dangerous horticultural criminals.”

Your grip on the receiver tightened as Mrs. Burnett’s voice squawked through the line, high-pitched and alarmed. Rick buried his face in his hands.

“No, no, Mrs. Burnett, of course no dogs.” You shot Shane a glare. “No, that was just my colleague being hilarious.”

Shane gave you an exaggerated, innocent smile that fooled absolutely no one.

Rick shook his head like he could physically push Shane’s bullshit out of his skull. “You’re gonna get us a complaint filed, man. Again.”

“Aww. What’s she gonna do, Rick? Call the cops?” Shane snorted at his own joke.

Finally, you hung up the phone with more force than necessary, the plastic clattering against the receiver. Shane’s smirk widened.

“So… What’d dear ol’ Mrs. Burnett want?” he asked, feigning concern.

“Oh, I think it’s an emergency.” You nodded solemnly. “Better get that siren goin’, boys.”

“Lord help me,” Rick muttered, pushing back from his desk with a scrape of his chair. “I’ll radio Lowell to handle the begonia crisis. Least then I know it’ll actually get done without someone makin’ it worse.”

“Oh, come on, Rick. Where’s your sense of adventure? Maybe we’ll find a whole underground begonia black market.” Shane’s grin was pure trouble, the kind that made Rick want to strangle him. “Hell, might even get into a shootout with some rogue landscapers!”

Rick paused, halfway out the door. He shot you both a very strange look before finally stepping out, muttering something that sounded suspiciously like “never wanted more kids”.

You watched Rick leave, then shot Shane that glare—the one he couldn’t quite figure out. Granted, you’ve been working here only for a week. But, if he was motivated (which he rarely tended to be) Shane could actually put his detective skills to good use.

You, however, were still a mystery and some part of him thoroughly enjoyed it.

“You know,” you mused, voice sweet as poison, “I could just accidentally lose your lunch order today. Wouldn’t that be a shame?”

Shane’s smirk didn’t falter. If anything, it sharpened. “Aw, darlin’, you wouldn’t dare.”

“Oh, I don’t know…” You looked at your nails, then arched a brow. “Wouldn’t I?”

“You playin’ hardball now, sweetheart?”

You just shrugged and damn if that didn’t interest him even more.

“Tell you what—you lose my lunch, I start ‘accidentally’ misplacin’ all your paperwork.” His grin widened. “Bet you fold before I do.”

The phone rang again, cutting through the standoff. You snatched up the receiver and this time your voice sounded even more high-pitched:

“King County Sheriff’s Department! How can I help you?”

Shane chuckled, shaking his head. “Uh-huh. That’s what I thought.”

You noticed very quickly that every time someone came to file a complaint in person, Shane was somehow always… there. In the beginning, Rick tried to rein him in, but then mysteriously gave up. You had no idea what that was about exactly and frankly didn’t want to know. Their friendship was puzzling enough for you. The two of them couldn’t be any more different.

Now, Shane was pretending to pour himself the twelfth coffee of the day, while in reality he was just watching you take a witness statement. You were trying to handle yet another civilian with that sickeningly sweet voice and Shane honestly couldn’t decide if it was impressive or deeply annoying. 

An old man was droning on about his neighbor’s dog barking too loud, and you—Christ—you were nodding like it was a goddamn federal case.

“Oh, Mr. Henderson, I completely understand,” you said, helping the man fill out the forms with a sympathetic tilt of your head. “We’ll send someone right over to check on that terrible disturbance. Deputy Walsh, are you available?”

Shane scoffed under his breath. “Gotta check my schedule.”

Jesus wept, the issues these people sometimes came to report never ceased to astonish him. But what really got under his skin was how effortlessly you switched gears—one second, you were all sugar for the public, the next tearing him a new one over a misplaced stapler.

Which was currently on house arrest. In the drawer. In his desk. 

The old man finally shuffled out, and Shane sauntered over. “You ever get tired of bein’ that nice?” he asked. Then his smirk deepened when he noticed your face change as soon as you dropped the act.

“Depends,” you shot back, flipping a file shut.

“On what?”

“Oh, I dunno, Deputy Walsh,” you drawled, and the way you said his name and title sounded like an insult. He kind of liked it. “You’re a detective, ain’t you? So, go on. Detect.”

Oh, hell. 

Shane chuckled, low and amused. He liked that retort way too much.

“Uh-huh.” He leaned in just enough to invade your space. “See, way I see it, you’re playin’ two roles. An’ somehow everyone’s buyin’ it.”

Your eyes narrowed at him, like you were weighing whether to snap at him or keep on pretending. 

“Or,” you said, quieter, “maybe I just don’t waste my good manners on you, Deputy.”

That got a laugh out of him. “I think you got plenty of manners left in the tank, darlin’. Just gotta figure out what kinda currency gets ‘em.” He tapped his fingers against the mug. “So what’s the exchange rate? Chocolate?”

“I’m not five.” You rolled your eyes, but he didn’t miss the way your lips twitched. 

“Noted.” Shane grinned. “Flowers? Lemme guess—begonias?”

You actually laughed at that one and Shane did a poor job at hiding his surprise. It wasn’t one of those mocking little chuckles you kept giving him either. Goddamn, at this point you really were gonna give him whiplash.

His smirk faltered for a second. “Well, hell. Ain’t that a first…” 

He recovered quickly, but not quickly enough for you to miss it.

“Don’t let it go to your head,” you replied.

“Too late.” 

You turned back to your paperwork just to avoid giving him the satisfaction. But damn if that smug grin of his wasn’t a little attractive. Meanwhile, Rick exhaled loudly from his desk and shot Shane another look that said—Really? 

But Shane still seemed insufferably pleased with himself. Like he’d cracked some secret code. 

You finally had the time to explore the town some more over the weekend. It wasn’t exactly charming as far as small towns went, but you supposed it was nice enough. There were some picturesque historic buildings peppered here and there along the main street, and to its credit all of the businesses you have seen so far were local. Since you had nothing better to do after your long walk, the dive bar on the corner seemed like a good idea to finish your day. 

The place was exactly what you expected—dim lighting, the scent of old beer hanging in the air, and the low hum of classic rock playing just loud enough to drown out half the conversations in the room. 

You slid onto a stool at the bar, ignoring the way the vinyl stuck slightly to your legs. 

“What’ll it be?” the bartender asked.

You hesitated for a moment, then chose one of the beers on the tap with all the confidence of knowing nothing about what you’d get.

The bartender poured your beer while glancing at you curiously.

“You’re new in town.” 

It wasn’t a question.

“Just passing through,” you replied.

The answer wasn’t good enough, you could tell, so you just shot him your special customer service smile number three. You weren’t a local, this much was plain. But in a town like this your business was probably everybody’s business. You kept your answers to a minimum.

You turned to the side to watch the world go by while you drank. The beer was bitter, hoppy—not bad, but definitely an acquired taste.

“You working over at the station?” 

Your shoulders tensed a bit and the bartender must have noticed that because he extended his hand and tried his best to look less imposing. For a burly man like him that was a bit comical.

“Name’s Jimmy. An’ relax, honey, it’s a small town. News travels faster’n a fart in church. Everyone here knows Evelyn’s havin’ her surgery tomorrow, we’re all prayin’ for her.”

“Oh. Yeah, she seemed like a nice lady,” you replied, then shook his hand and introduced yourself.

“Hm.” Jimmy’s lips curved into a sly smile. “Heard you been putting up with Walsh’s bullshit.”

“Oh, I dunno if I’d call it that.” You took a gulp of your beer. “Not the worst job I’ve had.”

“Really?” Jimmy’s eyes narrowed like he clearly knew something you didn’t. “Y’know they sent another girl there ‘fore you? She quit after a day.”

“Well,” you shrugged, “that explains the hourly rate then. They must’ve been desperate.”

Jimmy barked out a laugh and then poured himself a shot of what you assumed was bourbon. “Well, then cheers, darlin’. To mildly shit jobs.”

You smiled and raised your glass to that.

After a pleasant evening of watching strangers (and them in turn watching you), you decided one pint was more than enough. The sweltering Georgia heat didn’t let up even after sundown, so you definitely felt just the right amount of tipsy. 

It was the kind of sticky-sweet Southern summer night that made even breathing feel lethargic so the way back to your hotel felt twice as long as it should have. You were halfway down the block when you spotted him—Shane, standing by his Jeep and smoking, his expression like a storm cloud.

No smirking. No running his mouth. He just stood there, one hand in his jeans pocket, the other gripping that cigarette like he was personally angry with it. There was something quieter about him and you honestly debated if you shouldn’t just walk on by and pretend you never saw him.

But then he noticed you. A muscle twitched in his cheek, but he didn’t speak. You honestly didn’t know what to do with it.

God only knew neither of you owed the other a conversation—but something about the way he was now gave you pause.

“Bad night?” you asked lightly. Yes, it was obvious, but pretending otherwise felt cruel.

Shane exhaled through his nose. “You could say that.”

His voice was rougher than usual. You waited. He didn’t elaborate.

Shane finished his cigarette and then, abruptly, he pointed toward the sidewalk ahead. “I’ll walk you.”

“Oh. No. You don’t have to.”

“Wouldn’t offer if I didn't mean it.”

It wasn’t even an offer, just a statement, and usually you’d take offence. But in this context it almost felt… protective. So you decided not to give him shit about it either.

There was no familiar humor there tonight, no “sweethearts”, just something tired underneath. You turned back towards the hotel and Shane fell into step beside you.

Shane was an overwhelming presence on a good day, but this time he seemed very different. He was tense, this much was clear, and you fought the urge to even look at him—like staring too long might set off a bomb.

It wasn’t until you passed under a brighter streetlight that you caught the faint bruising along his knuckles, and the way his shirt collar was slightly crooked, like someone yanked at it.

“Y’know,” you said, “if you punched someone, I won’t tell Rick.”

“Ain’t that sweet of you.” The sarcasm was weak at best, and there wasn’t even a trace of his usual smirk. “Naw. Just… bad company.”

“Well,” you said lightly, “if you need a witness for your inevitable assault charges, my rates are very reasonable. We could say you’ve been with me all evening, chasing away them pesky dogs from Mr. Henderson’s lawn.”

“Christ alive.” He shook his head and let out a short laugh. “Shoulda known you’d be a smartass even off the clock.”

“Oh, I’ll have you know, Deputy Walsh, I’m way worse off the clock.”

The hotel came into view. Shane slowed to a stop at the edge of the sidewalk, watching you with an expression you couldn’t quite place—somewhere between irritation and gratitude.

“Get inside,” he said finally, nodding toward the door. “Lock it.”

“Why?” You raised an eyebrow. “Are we planning on causing mayhem out here later, Deputy?”

“No.” His smirk was faint but there, just barely. “Just don’t feel like explainin’ to Rick why I let somethin’ happen to his new favorite secretary.”

“Oh?” You couldn’t resist poking at him just a little more. “Is that jealousy I hear?”

Shane scoffed. “Keep dreamin’, babygirl.”

“Ah, but you don’t wanna know what goes on in there, Deputy.” You tapped your temple with two fingers, smirking.

He tried to scoff again, but to your trained ears it sounded suspiciously more like a laugh. Good. You could almost feel him wrestling with whatever was eating at him tonight—whether to say something else or let it lie.

You shook your head, toying with your hotel key. “Just spit it out, Shane.”

That snapped him to attention, since you’ve never called him by his first name before. By the looks of it, he didn’t exactly hate it.

He rubbed the back of his neck like he was physically trying to push the words out. “You ever get the feelin’ you’re wastin’ your damn time?”

Well… It wasn’t what you expected. Not even close.

“All the time,” you admitted.

That seemed to catch him off guard. 

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” You shrugged. “But then I remember I’m getting paid to deal with you, and it all feels a little better after a quick Sephora trip.”

He laughed, rough and surprised. “Goddamn, woman. You ever not got a comeback ready?”

“Eh… With you, it’s kinda easy.”

He shook his head, but the tension in him eased just a little. “You’re a pain in my ass, woman, d’ you know that?”

“And yet,” you said, grinning, “here you are. Walking me home like a gentleman.”

“Don’t push it.”

For a moment, it was almost comfortable. Until he remembered something, you could tell by how his eyes changed—suddenly that anger was back.

“Some people ain’t worth the breath it takes to argue with ‘em.”

You arched a brow and he quickly added:

“Not you.”

“Uh-huh…”

“Goddamn it—”

“Their loss, anyway,” you said simply.

He looked at you for a very long time, like you just handed him a new piece of the puzzle that didn’t fit with any of the other pieces he already had. 

Then he jerked his chin toward the hotel door. “Go on. Before I change my mind about bein’ decent.”

You rolled your eyes, but started walking up the steps to the front door.

“Hey.”

You paused at the door, glancing back at him.

“Don’t go tellin’ anyone I was nice. Ruins my reputation.”

“Oh no!” You laughed. “We can’t have that.”

“Shut up…” He shook his head, suddenly a little softer around the edges.

You only laughed harder. “Your secret’s safe with me, Deputy.”

The following Monday morning was very different. When you came in, Shane was already there, fidgeting with the coffee machine—which wasn’t exactly unusual. But normally you’d have expected at least fifteen jabs and twenty “sweethearts” to have come your way.

Not today.

“Mornig,” you said.

He didn’t say anything, just looked at you with a frown, that line between his eyebrows even deeper than usual. Then he handed you a cup of coffee.

You blinked.

Shane had never made you coffee before. You had never even seen him be helpful to the general public in any way, shape or form. Well, maybe with the rare exception of Rick Grimes. Shane still gave him shit, just… In a slightly nicer way.

You took the mug cautiously, half-expecting it to be a trap.

“Uh… thanks?”

He just watched you, then let out a sharp sort of grunt and turned around to drop an ungodly amount of sugar in his own mug.

Rick, who had been watching this entire exchange with the kind of quiet amusement you had never seen in him before, finally spoke up. “Shane, you feelin’ alright?”

Shane shot him a glare. “Uh-huh.”

“You sure, partner?”

“I’m great.” 

Meanwhile, you took a tentative sip of your coffee. It tasted… fine. In fact, there was nothing wrong with it.

“Did you poison this?” You immediately wanted to know.

That got a reaction. Shane’s head snapped up, eyes narrowing. “The hell kinda question is that?”

“A leading one, Deputy Walsh,” you said, taking another sip just to watch him bristle. “You’ve never done anything nice for me before. Matter of fact, I’m still waitin’ to get my stapler back.”

“Ain’t nice,” he muttered. “Just coffee.”

Rick coughed into his fist—badly hiding a laugh.

“You,” Shane pointed at him, “shut it.”

“Oh, I ain’t sayin’ anything,” Rick replied, enjoying himself way too much.

“So,” you said, “what’s the catch, Deputy?”

Shane scowled. “Ain’t a catch.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Christ, woman…” Shane clenched his jaw. “Drink the damn thing, don’t drink it, I don’t even care.”

You took another very exaggerated slurp. “And yet…”

“Just figured you’d need it after last night.”

That made you pause.

Rick’s eyebrows shot up. “Last night?”

Shane shot him a look. “Ain’t like that.”

You watched the exchange between them with no small amount of amusement. It was kind of fun—now that Shane got a taste of workplace bullying.

Rick leaned back in his chair, grinning from ear to ear. “Well, I’ll be damned…”

“Don’t push it, Rick.”

“Oh, I ain’t pushin’.” Rick cleared his throat and then pointed to his own empty cup. “So…?”

Shane ignored him, focusing instead on stirring his coffee with unnecessary force. “Just drink the damn coffee, woman.”

You smirked. “Oh, I am. And it’s good.”

That seemed to throw him off. He blinked, then scowled harder. “Yeah, well. Don’t get used to it.”

You pouted. “Aw. Really?”

Rick chuckled, shaking his head. “Lord help me, I think I like whatever the hell this is.”

“Yeah, that’s enough from you.” Shane shot him a glare. “You’re fired.”

“Can’t fire me, partner. We’re the same rank.”

“Then I’m quittin’.”

You laughed into your cup. 

Shane pointed at you. “You—”

The phone rang, cutting him off. You snatched the receiver and this time didn’t even need to fake that chirping:

“King County Sheriff’s Department!”

Then your face fell. “An intruder...?”

Shane and Rick both straightened immediately, their playful banter forgotten. 

Rick stood up, his chair scraping against the floor. “Where?”

Shane was already reaching for his car keys, the most cheerful you had ever seen him.

“Alright, Mrs. Calloway, you stay where you are,” you said to the receiver. “We’ll send someone right over.”

When Mrs. Calloway hung up, you scribbled down the rest of the address, your fingers tight around the pen. “Mrs. Calloway—her neighbor’s place across the street. She says she saw someone breakin’ in through the back window. Two men, black clothes, didn’t see a gun but said they were huge an’ had somethin’ like crowbars.

Shane was already moving, now definitely in a much better mood. “Alright, let’s roll.”

Two hours later, the biggest man you've ever seen was brought to the station in handcuffs. He was snarling insults at Shane, who only seemed to grin wider the more the man thrashed. The guy was massive—at least 6’5 and built like a damn linebacker—but it still looked like he was freshly out of a couple teeth and had a proper black eye forming across his left cheekbone.

His partner, a wiry little weasel of a man, was already being processed in the other room, whimpering about how he “ain’t gonna talk ‘bout the boss-man.”

But this one? Oh, he was pissed.

“Y’ain’t shit, cop!” the giant snarled, yanking against the cuffs hard enough to make the metal creak. “I’ll snap you in half soon as I get outta these!”

Shane, the absolute bastard, just grinned wider. “Calm down, sunshine! Could be we’re both retired when that happens so I ain’t gonna hold my breath.” He clapped the guy on the shoulder—hard—like they were old buddies.

The guy lunged at him, but Shane simply stepped to the side, laughing under his breath. “Easy there, killer. Save it for your cellmate.”

Rick, who had just locked up the other guy, looked at his partner with a sigh. “Shane, quit antagonizin’ him.”

“Me?” Shane, the picture of innocence, had the audacity to ask.

You snorted into your coffee.

The guy in cuffs whipped his head toward you, eyes narrowing. “What the fuck you laughin’ at, bitch?”

Shane’s grin vanished momentarily. Before anyone could react, he stepped between you and the perp, crowding into the guy’s space like he meant it—which was sort of a feat since Shane was so much shorter.

“Say that again, big guy,” Shane said, the angriest you had ever heard him. “Don’t think I heard that right.”

The perp sneered, running his tongue over his teeth before letting out a low chuckle. “I said—”

“Shit fire!” you jumped out of your seat and promptly spilled the rest of your coffee in the general vicinity of the perp.

“The fuck?!” the man roared.

“You lost your mind?!” Shane demanded to know. 

But you stuck to your act and pointed to the faraway corner. “That was a rat! There. Right there!”

“Alright now. Show’s over.” Rick stepped between Shane and the perp, using the distraction to take the man to his cell. 

Shane watched Rick haul the guy off, then turned back to you with a look that was equal parts exasperated and impressed. “A rat?”

You shrugged, wiping your hands on your pants. “Don’t look at me like that. You were hot ‘n’ ready to knock the rest of his teeth out.”  

“Bullshit!”

“Even I know ya ain’t supposed to beat ‘em up after you already arrest ‘em.”

He scoffed, shaking his head. “You’re somethin’ else, y’ know that?”

Rick returned, looking at you with a curious expression. “Alright. I say that’s enough excitement for one day.”

Shane clapped him on the back—hard enough to make him stumble. “Come on now. Ain’t you havin’ fun?”

Rick shot him a glare. “No.”

You grinned at the exchange. “So… what’s the story with those two?”

Shane’s smirk returned full force. “Buncha idiots tryin’ to rob an old lady. Thought she had cash stashed in the walls or some shit.”

Rick sighed. “They were after her coin collection.”

“Coin collection?” You blinked. “That’s it?”

Shane laughed, low and rough. “Yep. Dumbasses thought they were gonna be rich.”

Rick sighed deeply. “And now we gotta deal with the paperwork.”

You decided to take pity on the man and reached for the forms. “Well, Deputy Walsh, since you’re feelin’ generous…”

He narrowed his eyes. “What?”

“You can help me fill these out and let your partner go home for family dinner.”

Shane groaned, dragging a hand down his face. But you could see he was smiling, if just a little. “Christ, woman, you drive a hard bargain.”

Rick wisely took a step back, retreating to the door with a smile and a quick nod towards you.

Shane snatched up a pen, clicking it aggressively. “You’re lucky I’m in a good mood, darlin’.”

You sighed. “Because you got to punch a guy?”

“Because I got to punch that guy.” He smirked, scribbling his signature with a flourish. “And he was askin’ for it.”

You rolled your eyes, but didn’t argue. Truth was, you didn’t mind this side of him—that easy confidence was kind of attractive.

Then he flipped the form back toward you and leaned in. “But… In the future, let me handle my own damn fights, sweetheart.”

You met his gaze and you both looked at each other a second or two too long for it to be casual.

“Next time I’m bringin’ an actual rat,” you decided. “Just in case the perps catch you in a bad mood or somethin’.”

Shane smirked, his dark eyes still fixed on you. “Whatever you say…”

The heat let up a little during the weekend and you decided to go on a walk through the nearby fields to watch the horses.

The air was still warm, but the oppressive humidity had eased up just enough to make being outside bearable. You’d found a quiet spot near the fence line where a few horses grazed lazily, their tails flicking at the occasional fly. The darkest of the bunch noticed you and walked up towards you, clearly expecting treats. You came prepared with a bag of carrots.

You stood there for a while, feeding the horses and trying to angle your phone just right to catch a good shot of them. Then you heard footsteps—someone was jogging down the dirt path that cut through the fields. You moved out of the way, fully expecting whoever it was to just move past you, but then he spoke:

“Didn’t take you for the outdoorsy type, darlin’.”

Shane. His shirt was damp with sweat and clinging to his broad frame. He slowed when he spotted you, wiping his forehead with the back of his arm. His breathing was heavy, but controlled, as he came to a stop. 

You shrugged. “Didn’t take you for the jogging type.”

He smirked. “Gotta stay in shape somehow. It’s a good route for a workout.”

“Because you like horses?” you asked, frowning.

He exhaled sharply, almost a laugh. “They’re alright. Uh, Rick likes them. Me, I prefer cars.”

The horse closest to you nudged your hand, urging you for more carrots.

Shane watched the interaction and you noticed his eyes were a little kinder, a little softer than usual. 

“You got a way with ‘em,” he admitted after a moment.

“I got a bag of carrots,” you corrected him. “Here.” 

Without any preamble you stuck one in Shane’s hand and nudged him towards the horses. He stared down at the carrot like it was an alien artefact.

“The hell am I supposed to do with this?”

You grinned. “Take a wild guess.”

He scoffed but didn’t argue, stepping closer to the fence. The nearest horse—a chestnut mare with a white blaze—sniffed the air, ears pricking forward. Shane hesitated, then held out the carrot like he was defusing a bomb.

The mare took it from his fingers with surprising gentleness, crunching loudly. Shane blinked, watching her.

“Now… Why am I, a city girl, teachin’ you ‘bout country living?” you teased.

He shot you a look but didn’t snap back. Instead, he reached for another carrot from your bag, this time offering it with a little more confidence. You watched, letting the horses be the judge of his character.

“She likes you,” you said after a moment.

Shane huffed, but the corner of his mouth twitched. “She’s got bad taste then.”

The mare nudged his shoulder, searching for more. Shane exhaled sharply, but there was no real irritation in it. “Greedy thing, ain’t ya?”

The sun caught the sweat still drying on his skin and somehow you couldn’t tear your eyes away.

“Careful.” You grinned. “She’ll follow you home.”

“Yeah, well. Not the first time that happened.”

“A horse followed you home?”

Shane looked at you pointedly until you caught his innuendo.

“Oh.”

He winced. “Yeah.”

“Wait, so…” You hesitated. “That night when you walked me to the hotel. Was that a bad date too?”

Shane rolled his shoulders, as if trying to physically escape embarrassment. “Yeah. But don’t get all excited. Most of ‘em ain’t worth the walk.”

The chestnut mare huffed, lipping at his empty hand, and Shane absently patted her neck.

You snorted. “Well, that’s just sad.”

“Yeah?” He arched a brow, turning to face you fully now.

“Yeah,” you said. “If you’re gonna have strays followin’ you around, Shane, least they could do is be good company.”

That surprised him. He clearly expected a jab. 

He made a low sound in his throat, half-amused. “You offerin’?”

You grinned. “Nah. I don’t follow anyone.”

That got a real laugh out of him—short and rough, but genuine. “Shoulda figured…”

“Figured what?” You walked up closer to him.

Shane looked at you, incredulous, then all of a sudden went poker-faced. “Don’t make me say it, woman.”

You stepped closer, close enough that you could smell the sweat and faint whiff of cologne clinging to him. Not the best concoction, but somehow not the worst.

“Just… out with it, Deputy,” you pressed. 

Shane exhaled through his nose, jaw clenching like he was physically grinding his molars on the words. “You ain’t like most of ‘em. You’re…”

The admission was there between you now. No way to take it back.

“Well,” you said, “I’ve definitely never met a guy like you, that’s for damn sure.”

Shane’s lips twitched, something close to a real smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “Yeah?”

You shrugged, stepping back before you did something stupid—like reach for him. “Don’t get all excited, that wasn’t a compliment.”

“Ah, I think it was actually.” He watched you retreat, that familiar smirk finally creeping back. “Good to know, sweetheart.”

You rolled your eyes.

“You gonna keep feedin’ me to the horses,” he drawled, “or are you gonna let me walk you back?”

He was watching you—like he knew exactly what you were thinking.

“You’re starin’,” he pointed out.

You rolled your eyes. “And you’re sweaty.”

“Uh-huh.” He didn’t move, just kept watching you. “So what now, darlin’? We just stand here till one of us caves?”

You scoffed. “You wish.”

“Maybe I do.”

That honesty gave you pause. You weren’t used to any of this. And especially not men who actually meant what they said.

“Alright,” he said, stretching his arms like he was shaking off the moment. “I got a shower to take. You comin’ or what?”

You blinked. “Excuse me?”

Shane chuckled. He knew exactly what he was doing. “Back to town, woman. Unless you plannin’ on sleepin’ in the field.”

You huffed, falling into step beside him as he started down the dirt path.

“This don’t mean I caved,” you grumbled.

He grinned, extremely pleased with himself. “Naw, ‘course not.”

Shane kept his pace slow, matching yours without comment. 

“You know,” you said after a while, “for a guy who hates small talk, you sure do a lot of… talking.”

He snorted. “Ain’t small talk if I mean it.”

You shot him a look. “You always mean everything you say?”

“Pretty much. Saves time.”

“Guess that makes you predictable,” you mused.

Shane scoffed. “The hell it does.”

“Uh-huh.” You grinned. “I could set my watch by your bad moods.”

He stopped walking so abruptly you took two extra steps before realizing. When you turned, he was just watching you, his gaze sharp again.

“You ain’t figured me out yet, sweetheart,” he said, voice low. “But I’ll give you this—you’re tryin’.”

You held his stare, refusing to back down. “Like hell I am!”

“Yeah, you are.” He took a step closer. “But I ain’t complainin’.”

You rolled your eyes, turning back toward the path before he could see you were blushing.

As you walked back to town, you noticed now and then that people were giving you looks. Well, mostly women were, so you pretty quickly surmised it was not because of you. The novelty of your presence had gotten the chance to wear off. 

It was because of Shane and you, together. And, most probably, whatever the hell he was wearing did not help. Some women were doing their darndest to pretend not to look—but they still tracked Shane with narrowed eyes. And not just him. You. Together.

Shane, for his part, didn’t seem to notice. Or if he did, he didn’t care. He walked with that same confidence, his damp shirt still clinging in places you would honestly prefer it didn’t cling to.

“You got a fan club, Deputy,” you muttered.

Shane followed your gaze and scoffed. “Christ. Buncha busybodies.”

“Uh-huh.” You smirked. “Or maybe they’re just shocked to see you voluntarily walkin’ with someone who ain’t Rick.”

His eyes darted to you. “You’re enjoyin’ this.”

“Hm. A little.”

Shane shook his head, exasperated, but you didn’t miss how the corner of his mouth twitched upward—despite his best efforts.

The newspaper landed on your desk with a quiet thump. You glanced up just in time to see Rick retreating to his desk with a cup of coffee—all casual, like he hadn’t just done something extremely weird. 

The paper was folded open to the classifieds, several listings circled aggressively in red pen. 

Rooms for Rent. Short-Term Leases Available. Quiet Neighborhood.

You stared at it for a long moment, then glanced towards Shane’s desk. He was elbows-deep in paperwork, scowling at some report, completely oblivious to Rick’s meddling.

Rick, meanwhile, had settled back into his chair, pretending to be engrossed in his own work. But you caught the way his eyes flicked toward you, then Shane—just once. Much like his partner, the man had the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

“You plannin’ on explainin’ this, Deputy Grimes?” you asked.

Rick didn’t even look up. “Nope.”

Shane’s head snapped up at that, eyes narrowing as he caught the tail end of the exchange. “The hell’s goin’ on?”

You held up the paper, shaking it slightly. “Your best friend’s got a side hustle in real estate.”

Shane squinted at the paper, then at Rick. “Huh?”

“Just thought she might wanna know her options, is all.”

“Options.” Shane repeated flatly.

“Since the temp job’s goin’ longer than expected and Evelyn’s still recovering.” Rick shrugged. “Wouldn’t want her stayin’ in that hotel forever.”

Shane opened his mouth, but you cut in before he could:

“You know what?” You folded the paper neatly and tucked it into your bag. “I do hate that hotel.”

Which was how Shane Walsh somehow got outmaneuvered and forced to go be your (very grumpy) chaperone at an apartment viewing.

As soon as you stepped inside, Shane, much to your amusement, immediately started poking around like he was inspecting a crime scene.

He crouched to check under the sink, muttering something about water pressure, then ran a finger along the windowsill—checking for condensation, apparently.

“You moonlight as a handyman, Deputy Walsh?” you asked, insanely entertained by his prodding and poking at the shower tiles.

Shane shot you a glare over his shoulder. “Just makin’ sure you ain’t gettin’ ripped off.”

“Huh.”

“What?”

“Oh, nothin’. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were worried ‘bout me.”

“Shut up, woman.”

The landlord, an older man with a bushy mustache, watched Shane’s inspection with no less amusement. “Place is solid, Deputy. No need to worry.”

Shane grunted, unconvinced.

You exchanged a look with the landlord, who just chuckled and shook his head.

“So,” you said after a moment, “what’s the verdict, Deputy? You’re throwin’ the nice man in the slammer for real estate crimes?”

Shane turned the faucet off harder than necessary and shot you a glare. “Ain’t terrible.”

“Excellent.” You clapped your hands. “You can help me move my bags.”

“Like hell I am!”

Shane still helped you move your bags.

The whole time, he complained—loudly. About the stairs, about the broken wheel on your suitcase, and mostly about the fact that you apparently owned way too many books. But he still hauled every last thing for you and wouldn’t let you lift a finger even when you tried.

“You gonna actually unpack this shit, or just live outta cardboard like some kinda raccoon?” he grumbled, watching you stroll around the place.

You grinned, then mercifully tossed him a bottle of water. “Depends. You gonna stick around and supervise?”

He caught it one-handed. “Nah. Got better things to do than babysit.”

But he didn’t leave. Just watched you unpack the few belongings you had and mostly was just hanging out with you in silence. It wasn’t entirely uncomfortable, in fact you were a little surprised how easily you got used to Shane just… Being there. With you.

“Alright, darlin’. You need anything else, or you good?”

You paused, considering. “You hungry?”

Shane hesitated, then pointed to the little kitchenette in the corner. “Sweetheart, I ain’t seen you unpack a single kitchen utensil. Not riskin’ your cooking.”

You just laughed and took out your phone. “So. Pizza?”

“Now you’re talkin’.”

When the pizza arrived, Shane paid before you could even reach for your wallet. You shot him a look.

He shrugged, already flipping the box open. “You’re buyin’ next time.”

There was something dangerously comfortable about the way he said next time—casual, like it was already a given. You let it slide, mostly because arguing with Shane about anything was a lost cause.

You both ate in silence for a while, the only sounds the occasional rustle of cardboard and Shane’s muttered curses when he burned his mouth on the cheese. 

“You always inhale your food like that?” you asked.

He smirked. “Army habit.”

That explained... a lot, actually.

Shane wiped his hands on a napkin, then leaned back with a satisfied sigh. “Alright. Now that you’re all moved in—”

“Barely.”

“—you gonna invite me over again, or do I gotta keep invitin’ myself?”

You smiled at him and this time made sure it was a kinder sort of smile. “Shane.”

His eyes flicked to you and for a moment you saw that hesitation in him, like he was bracing for a blow.

“Thank you. For today,” you said quickly. “An’ of course you’re invited, don’t be daft.”

He rubbed the back of his neck, avoiding your gaze for a second before meeting it again. “Yeah, well. Ain’t like I got much else goin’ on anyway.”

“Wow. I’m so flattered.”

That got a smirk out of him. “You should be.”

The silence settled again, just... easy.

Finally, Shane grabbed his jacket from the back of the chair, slinging it over his shoulder. “Alright, darlin’, I’m out. You behave.”

“No promises.”

It was a particularly slow day at the station, even by this town’s standards. Rick was flipping through a case file with the kind of disinterest that suggested he’d read it three times already and retained no information.

You leaned against the edge of Shane’s desk. “So. Army stories.”

Shane didn’t even look up. “Nope.”

“Come on,” you pressed. “You can’t just be like this and not have some wild lore.”

That got his attention. “Be like what?”

You waved a hand vaguely in his direction. “You know. Like this.”

Rick, who had been pretending not to listen from his own desk, suddenly got very interested in this conversation.

Shane glared at him. “You got somethin’ to add, partner?”

Rick set his mug down, grinning. “Nah. Just thinkin’ about that time in basic when you—”

Shane’s jaw twitched. “Rick, I swear to God—”

But Rick was still grinning. “Easy, Shane. Just sayin’—you got stories.”

Shane exhaled sharply through his nose, then turned back to you. “Ain’t nothin’ interestin’. Just did my job.”

You arched a brow. “Uh-huh. So you’re tellin’ me you never did anything stupid? Never got in trouble?”

“Uh. No.” Shane spoke through gritted teeth. “That ain’t what I said.”

“Oh, he got in trouble. Plenty.”

Shane shot him another glare. “Rick.”

But Rick was already warming up to the story. “There was this one time in basic—Shane here decided he was gonna ‘improve’ the obstacle course.”

Shane groaned. “Jesus Christ, Rick.”

You were suddenly very interested. “Improve how?”

Rick’s grin widened. “By rewirin’ the damn thing after hours. Made the whole thing twice as hard. Drill sergeants were pissed—until they realized it actually worked.”

Shane muttered something under his breath and shook his head.

“So what happened?” you pressed.

Shane sighed, finally giving in. “Got my ass chewed out. Then they made me run the damn thing first to prove it could be done.”

You blinked. “And?”

He shrugged. “Did it.”

Rick chuckled. “Yeah, an’ then they promoted him to latrine duty for two months.”

“You just love tellin’ that story, don’t ya?”

Rick grinned, unbothered. “Gotta keep you humble, partner.”

You leaned in. “So, what else you got?”

Shane exhaled sharply through his nose. “Ain’t nothin’ else worth tellin’.”

“Oh, I dunno,” Rick mused. “There was that time at the base—”

“No.”

“—when you decided to arm wrestle some guy from Alabama—”

Shane groaned. “Jesus wept…” 

“—and lost spectacularly.”

You burst out laughing. “Aww.”

Shane scowled. “Guy was built like a damn refrigerator.”

Rick nodded sagely. “You still took the bet.”

Shane threw his hands up. “Alright, that’s enough outta you, man. Go get another coffee.”

You were grinning now, thoroughly enjoying this. “You’ve got a real talent for makin’ friends, Deputy Walsh.”

Shane was shooting daggers at you, but there was something almost playful underneath it. “Yeah, yeah. Laugh it up, darlin’.”

Rick was now looking far too pleased with himself. “See? Told you he had stories.”

Shane muttered something under his breath and snatched up a pen, pretending to focus on his paperwork.

In a small town like this one, hiding anything seemed downright impossible. You realized very quickly that after about three months everyone knew who you were, where you worked, where you came from, and—most importantly—that there was something going on between you and Shane.

Something neither of you managed to put a label on yet, because according to you there were no labels to be printed. The man hadn’t made a move, and well, neither have you. Still, your experience probably paled in comparison to the local American Gigolo.

You figured by this time Shane had dated half the female population in this county and one over, so you wondered why the hell the height of your supposed “fling” was eating pizza in your half-empty attic apartment or him “running into you” on his jogging route.

There was no “running into” here, you quite deliberately hung out with the horses nearly every weekend. Sometimes you’d just sit on the blanket near the paddock, just watching them play with each other and graze. 

It was a nice Saturday morning and you were lounging on the grass—until a shadow fell over you.

“We gotta stop meetin’ like this, babygirl.”

You didn’t even look up. “Mornin’, Shane.”

Shane dropped down onto the blanket beside you, stretching his legs out with a grunt. He wiped the sweat from his forehead. You handed him a bottle of water.

“Yeah, well.” He grabbed it and took a long swig before handing it back. “It’s a good place to jog.”

One of the horses—a big dark gelding—walked over, sniffing at Shane’s hair before losing interest and wandering off.

“You just gonna sit out here all day?” Shane asked.

“Maybe.”

He smirked. “Boring.”

“Then…” You waved your hand towards the dirt path. “Go on.”

“Nah.” Shane leaned back on his elbows, tilting his face up toward the sun. “Think I’ll stay.”

“Suit yourself.” You sighed and lay down beside him.

The silence settled between you, easy and familiar. After a while, he shifted and you opened one eye to find him hovering over you.

“There a problem, officer?” you muttered.

Shane chuckled, his voice rough. 

“You ever gonna tell me why you keep comin’ out here?” he asked after a minute.

You shrugged. “It’s a nice view.”

Shane snorted. “Uh-huh. Bullshit. You just like watchin’ me suffer through these damn jogs.”

You grinned. “Yeah. That’s what I said.”

Shane exhaled sharply through his nose, shaking his head once he caught your meaning.

“You ever gonna make this easy?” he muttered.

“For you?” You tilted your head. “Naw.”

That got a laugh out of him. And you quite liked the sound of it.

“You ever think about leavin’ this place?” you asked suddenly.

Shane stilled for half a second before shrugging. “Nah. Got everything I need right here.”

“Even the begonia thieves?”

“Especially the begonia thieves.” His smirk was back, sharp as ever. “Why? You plannin’ on skippin’ town?”

You looked up at the sky, squinting from the sun. “I miss Atlanta sometimes.”

Shane didn’t say anything for a long moment. Then, quietly: 

“You’d tell me if you were leavin’, right?”

You turned your head to look at him. His expression was… odd. Tense.

“Yeah,” you said softly. “I’d tell you.”

He nodded, like that settled it.

“But I’m not leaving,” you said quickly. “I mean... I don’t want to. But Evelyn can’t stay sick forever I guess. I’d have to find another job. Or maybe they’ll send me to temp somewhere else.”

Shane bristled slightly at the mention of you leaving, but he covered it with a scoff. “Hell no. You ain’t goin’ anywhere.”

You raised an eyebrow. “You gonna arrest me?”

He leaned in closer. “That what you’re into? ‘Cause I can.”

You laughed, shaking your head. “Wow. Shane Walsh, the romantic that you are…”

“Wasn’t tryin’ to be,” he grunted.

Before you could retort, he hooked two fingers in the collar of your shirt and yanked you forward. “Yeah, you ain’t leavin’,” he said, searching for something in your face. “Ain’t up for discussion.”

“That so?” You placed a tentative hand on his shoulder. “Ugh, you need a shower.”

That got him going alright. His smirk was diabolical. “Yeah? Your place’s closer.”

You rolled your eyes but didn’t pull away. “You’re insufferable.”

Shane’s grin only widened. And then he kissed you—rough and impatient, like he’d been waiting too damn long.

There was little finesse to that kiss, it was intense. He gripped your arms to pull you closer with barely contained frustration.

You pushed back just enough to catch your breath. “You—”

“Yeah, yeah.” He grinned, too busy watching your mouth. 

“Shower,” you reminded him pointedly.

“You’re presumptuous, woman.”

“Jesus Christ, you still can’t call me by my name?”

“Sweetheart?”

“Ugh…”

“Darlin’.”

Shane just laughed, but finally let you go—with obvious reluctance.

Later—much later—when your sheets were tangled beyond saving, Shane propped himself up on one elbow, watching you with his usual smirk.

But you weren’t about to let him off the hook.

“So you do know how to say my name,” you noted.

“Goddamn.” He shook his head, laughing. “That’s what you wanna say to me right now?”

“Well, I distinctly remember you sain’ it—”

“Quit it.”

“Twice.”

“Alright, that’s it.” He pushed your wrists down and stifled your giggle with a kiss. “You ain’t leavin’ this bed.”

“Oh really?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And who’s gonna sort your paperwork, Deputy Walsh?”

His grin was all teeth. “Oh, I got somethin’ else for you to sort, sweetheart.”

You kicked at him halfheartedly. “Shut up.”

-------------‧₊˚⭐✩ ₊˚🌀⊹♡--------------

"Sweet girl, look at me." Shane grumbles, grabbing your jaw and making you look at him. He's always been a bit rough with you, in and out of the bedroom. He doesn't care that you're crying, mostly because it's over something he considers stupid.

"Why'd you cut it?" You whine, salty tears rolling down your face. It's not that serious, but it's important to you. "It was so perfect!"

"Jesus, baby, I told you. I was jus' tired of maintainin' it."

"I could have washed it for you! You don't even use styling products, it was that perfect!"

"Doll." He scolds. You're quite familiar with the tone, he uses it every time you step out of line.

"It's just hair, it'll grow back."

His finger rests against your quivering lips.

"'sides, it's me getting revenge for you lettin' Lori cut your pretty hair shorter. I miss the long hair you'd put up in all those pretty styles. You looked like such a little housewife. I can't even tug it as well now."

"Don't you start with the bedroom-freak stuff now!" You turn your head away.

"Aww, why, pumpkin? You let me put you on leashes and put you in costumes but you draw the line at me cutting my hair? Pup can't handle a little teasing from her man?" He teases, hands running down your side. He stops when you push him off.

"No sex until it grows back!" You declair, standing up. He pauses.

"Ex-fucking-cuse me?"

"You heard me! No sex, no making out, no blowjobs, nothing. In fact, you're not even allowed to watch me change anymore!"

Shane watches in utter despair as you storm out, slamming the door of the bathroom behind you.

"You know what, fine! Go throw your little temper tantrum, girl! You'll come crawling back in a day!"

Okay, so, Shane might be fucked.

Based on the amount of sex you guys had pre apocalypse and at the Atlanta camp, Shane assumed you'd cave first. He remembers the good days when he'd come home to dinner on the table or you on the couch in just a shirt and underwear - both enjoyable sights. It was usually 50-50 on who would initiate.

The first few days were fine, but you were getting on his nerves. You wouldn't sleep facing him or let him hold you while you slept, you weren't always following him around like normal, and you wouldn't even kiss him. But he was a man, he could deal with it. There's other stuff to be done. Runs to do, walkers to kill, fences to fix, animals to hunt.

But then a few days turned into a week, and Shane Walsh had come to the realization that you're very, very serious and he's in dire need of a quick fuck. It's still slightly warm out, so you're wearing those jeans shorts he loves with one of your stupid sweaters - an outfit combo he would make fun of you for if you were on good terms. Are you cold or hot? Make up your fucking mind.

It's been almost a week and a half now. People are starting to notice your distance from Shane and his temper getting worse. Rick was the first one to notice, as to be expected. He'd seen many of these days when they were back in the police force - Shane wasn't a happy man when denied pleasure.

After another successful day of you ignoring him in favor of hanging out and running about with the others, Shane cornered you in the tent you two shared.

"Babydoll, I'm sorry for making you mad. I didn't know it would bother you that much. You can bitch and yell at me, just look at me, I'm right here."

He's a grown man, an officer of the law. He's killed walkers and humans and he's never hesitated. But right now, he's melting into you and pleading for forgiveness.

"Please baby, I can make you feel so good and you won't be mad at me anymore." His arms tighten around your waist and his lips brush your shoulder.

"I'll be so gentle with you, you'll forget all about the stupid curls."

You huff. The huffing that normally would drive him crazy, make him fuck you further into the sheets.

"They weren't stupid! They were gorgeous and soft and silky! They made you so handsome!"

Shane tilts his head, dragging his lips from your shoulder to your neck.

"Does my baby not think I'm handsome anymore? Is my girl not attracted to her man anymore?"

You roll your eyes.

"Shane, you know that's not true. I just wished you would have told me before you did. You've had this hair since forever. You used to love your hair!"

Your complaining makes his snicker as he grazes his teeth against the skin of your throat.

"So how about you show me how much you love me? Show me just how much you adore me, even with my stupid hair shaved off."

You give a slight nod, and at your consent he moves to unbutton your shorts.

"Don't even worry, babydoll. I'll shove that smart mouth of yours straight into the pillow, you won't even need to to look at me. That sound good, sweet girl?"

"...yeah."

It had been three weeks since the world went to shit—three weeks of surviving instead of living. Thankfully, within those three weeks, you managed to find protection in a small group you happened upon while wandering along the freeway. Being a woman all alone in this new, monstrous world, the group took you in without much thought. They were all kind enough, but one man in particular stuck out to you from the first day.

He was a little older than you usually went for—around the mid-thirties—but it made no difference to you. His name was Shane, a cop in King’s County before the outbreak, and he sure played the part: strong-willed, loud, and in charge. You two had been eyeing each other since the day you arrived, although you aren’t sure if you have been imagining it or not. There was no imagining the way his hands gripped you during shooting practice, though—firm, steady, and filled with enough tension to make your knees grow weak.

When the sun had long past set, after another exhausting day of surviving, you told the group goodnight and hopped into the backseat of the black SUV you had been camping in the past several nights. It was a little cramped, but it was better than being walker food.

Grabbing the green blanket off the floor, you threw it over yourself and lay across the seats. You closed your eyes, though you knew it would be a while until you fell asleep; it always was now.

Not ten minutes had passed of counting sheep when a tapping noise came from the window. A noise too controlled to be a walker.

Sitting up, you went to open the door, but it was opened for you. Shane stood there, his messy black hair absorbing the moonlight while his eyes reflected the pale light like they were the entrances to Heaven itself. He was gazing at you in wonder, like he wasn’t the one who had approached you.

“Yes?” you questioned, a little flustered by his unexpected appearance.

“Dale says we’re missin’ a gun,” he told you in that gritty, southern drawl, glancing back at the RV about twenty feet away. “I’m not sayin’ you took it, but I gotta look in here.”

You turned your head to the RV as well. There was no one outside, save for Dale on top of the RV and Glenn in front of it. Shrugging, you obliged and scooted to the seat on the left so he could check in the car since you didn’t feel like getting out. You knew you didn’t have the gun, so there was really no need.

Leaning into the SUV, it was very hard to miss the way his muscles moved as he rummaged around the floor. His tan shirt tucked into his similarly colored pants really worked wonders in getting you excited.

Suddenly, he was inside the car with the door shut. “This’ll be faster,” he grunted as his bicep brushed across your legs while searching the floor under your seat.

Your eyes widened, and you felt a small pulse between your legs. Your cheeks heated up in an instant, which only further flustered you. It was a simple touch. How could that have gotten you worked up?

It was as if he knew what he was doing, because his arm drifted across your knee as he sat up, lingering longer than necessary. He wasn’t acknowledging it, though; Shane just kept going through the things in the car.

“I think it’s pretty obvious I don’t have the gun by now,” you said after another minute of him searching.

He let out a small breath of laughter, scratched his head, and then side-eyed the RV. “I don’t know. Could be hidin’ it on your person.”

“What, are you gonna pat me down or something, Mr. Officer?” you joked, rolling your eyes playfully.

The corners of his mouth turned up, almost mischievously. “Got no other choice.”

You narrowed your eyes, trying to read his tone. Was he joking? Was he serious? You didn’t know, but having his hands on you right now was far from the worst situation you could be in. “Should I step out or…?”

“Nah, it’s fine. Here’ll work,” he responded, motioning for you to lift your arms.

You did as he gestured, and he began to pat you down with his palms. Shane started with your shoulders, moving to your arms slowly. When he got to your chest area, he softened his touch, but the way his callous hands glided over your nipple made you realize the pulsing between your legs came back.

Moving down your chest and to your stomach, his hands stopped just shy of your V-line. You gazed into his eyes and saw a trace of appreciation in his eyes, maybe even hunger.

Biting your lip, your eyes dropped to his mouth, which was slightly hung open, as if he was marveling at the sight in front of him that was you.

“I gotta be honest, Y/N, there ain’t a gun missin’,” he admitted breathily with his hands now gripping onto your hips lightly, like he was asking for further permission.

You looked at him, confused. “So—What? Why lie?”

“So I could do this.” Shane grabbed the back of your head and pulled it forward, your lips connecting magnetically.

Shocked at first, you quickly closed your eyes and allowed yourself to melt into his kiss. His hand on your hip squeezed tighter, the other one tangling in your hair. He didn’t kiss lightly; he kissed you like he was starved, like a man who desperately needed this. And that only furthered your attraction—he needed you.

Your hands wrapped around his broad shoulders, fingernails gripped onto him with intensity. Shane abruptly wrapped his arms around your back and moved you from your sitting position to lying on your back. The blanket you were wrapped in was discarded carelessly on the floorboards; he was acting as your blanket now, on top of you, looking into your eyes with a smirk.

“This alright, pretty girl?” He drawled, tongue moving around his mouth hungrily.

You nodded vigorously, and he tugged the bottom of your shirt up. You allowed him to lift it over your head, revealing a lace bra you’d had on for days in a row. But that didn’t matter to him, clearly, as you felt his cock begin to harden in his pants against your thigh. With one hand behind your head for support, he grabbed one of your boobs and played with it before pushing it up to reveal your nipples.

Shane wasted no time in moving his mouth to one of them, flicking his tongue around while fondling your other nipple. Soft moans spilled out of your mouth, and the pulsing was non-stop, turning into wetness in your underwear.

When he took his mouth off you, he hurriedly pulled his shirt off, undoing his belt, too. He stripped until he was left in only his black boxers and silver dog tag necklace before doing the same to you, leaving you fully nude. You two would be exposed if anyone might walk by, but it was only Glenn and Dale at this hour, anyway, so caution was thrown to the wind.

“Fuck,” was all Shane said, taking in your beauty under him before he smashed his lips onto yours again. His hands roamed your entire body from your neck to your stomach, ass, and knees—his hands were absolutely everywhere.

Then, his hand dipped into the line between your cunt and thigh, teasing you by rubbing up and down beside your clit. Arching your back against the seats, you whined out a small, “Please.”

“Was that a ‘please’ I heard, darlin’?”

Giving him unsubtle fuck-me eyes with your mouth parted open, he took the hint and began to rub slow circles on your clit.

“Damn. You’re dripping already,” he groaned while pushing himself off of you, sitting up to peek out of the window. When he saw no one, he stayed sitting up, licking his lips as he pushed two fingers into you.

You gasped, gripping onto the side of the seats while his fingers curled deep inside of you, prompting a deep moan from you.

“Feel good, pretty girl?” Smirking again, he started to speed his pace up when he saw how good it was making you feel.

Arching your back, not bothering to hold your moans in, you got lost in his touch. When his thumb started working your clit, his breathing started to come in uneven hitches; he was turned on by how well he was pleasing you.

But it wasn’t enough; he grabbed your hand and placed it on his length, making you stroke him a few times before letting your hand go so you could do it yourself. His cock was long, thick, with precum seeping out of the tip.

Slowly increasing your pace of strokes, his breaths became more ragged, and he leaned down to kiss you once more. Shane guided your hand away from his dick and pinned both of your wrists against the car door behind you. Stroking himself with your wetness coating his fingers, he then lined it up to your entrance. He slapped it a couple of times against your cunt.

Without wasting another second, he pushed his entire cock inside of you in one smooth stroke, stretching you out around him. You threw your head back. “Shit,” you moaned.

Shane pumped into you slowly at first, making sure you could take him. Once he knew you could, his speed increased rapidly, inducing groans from you as well as him.

“You like that, pretty girl? How does it feel?” he asked seductively.

“Yes, fuck,” you managed to speak as he pounded in and out of you, hitting your G-spot with each stroke. Your back was not touching the seat at all, and needy noises poured out of your mouth, unwittingly.

Unexpectedly, he pulled out and flipped you around with ease, landing you on your hands and knees. He took a handful of your hair and yanked you back until your back was against his chest, feeling his drenched cock on the inside of your thigh.

You grabbed it and slipped it inside of you, moaning, not being able to wait.

“We can’t wake the whole camp up. Are you gonna be a good girl and be quiet for me?” he whispered into your ear, his breath hot against your neck.

“I am,” you assured him, your hands finding his hair.

At that, he pushed your head down to the backseat and slapped your ass. He inserted himself again, slipping into your cunt with ease, and instantly hitting your G-spot.

“Oh my god,” you couldn’t help but cry out.

Shane shoved your head down harder, your mouth now against the seats. “I thought you were gonna be a good girl for me.”

With your voice muffled against the seat, you tried to apologize, but it was no use. He started slamming into you with fervor, grunting at every stroke. You tried to put a hand behind you to get him to ease up a little, but he took that hand and pressed it into your back, immobilizing it.

He continued to pound in and out of you as fast as he pleased, your moaning muffled mostly by the seats of the car. You felt your climax approaching quickly as he showed no signs of slowing any time soon. Your walls tightened around his cock, causing his strokes to become sloppy.

And then, you felt your climax build to the highest peak, and released onto him, practically convulsing as you did so.

“Fuck—that’s right,” he grunted, ramming into you a few more times before pulling out and spilling his seed onto your ass, the warm liquid dripping down your smooth skin.

Shane released his grip on your head and arm, breathing heavily. You sat up beside him, breathing like him, and grabbed the blanket on the floor to cover yourself out of instinct.

He turned to look at you, gripping the side of your face. “You’re beautiful. And that was damn good.”

“They probably couldn’t hear us…Right?” You wearily peeped the RV out of the rearview mirror.

The gun had still been smoking when it’d clattered at your feet. 

Regret felt like a wet blanket on your shoulders, suffocating in its weight. You couldn’t stand it.

Couldn’t stand.

Asphalt dug into your knees, crumpling at the man's side. Your hands had been shaking as you grabbed his wrist, searching for a pulse, praying for it in the way a sinner prays for absolution.

You found none. 

No pulse. No absolution. 

Still, you tried. Locked your fingers over his chest—pressing and pressing, trying and trying. Until thick ribs cracked and caved, until your palms were drenched in warmth and death and–

Rain. 

It was raining. 

Little drops, softly pattering all throughout the alleyway. You watched, dazed, as they slid down the lit-up screen in your hands. 

You didn’t remember pulling out your phone, but you remembered making the call. 

Calls. 

In the Bible, the number seven is considered sacred. Symbolic of divine oaths and promises, of perfection in the purest, most angelic sense. 

Seven times you called the Devil. 

Seven times he didn’t answer. 

You tilted your head back. The rain fell faster, cool drops steady rolling down your cheeks. The sky was a yawning, starless expanse. In the past, you’d always said that’s why you hated the city. The lack of stars—veiled by pollution and human selfishness, replaced by a twinkling skyline made of artificial hope. 

But tonight was different. Tonight, you were glad for their absence. 

At least the stars hadn’t seen what you’d done. 

Blood smeared across the phone screen as you dialed your eighth call. A different tone than before; a number not saved but remembered. 

A number you’d promised Matt you’d never call again. 

{In case you ever need it—} 

[—I don’t trust him.] 

What is trust? 

Once, it felt like the comfort of sunlight pouring through stained glass windows. Sitting amidst the oaken pews with a man at your side—a soft man dressed in a sharp suit, his glasses tinted red and his heart pure gold. 

Now, trust felt like the relief of a call that rang only once. Of cold fear melting into the gruff warmth of another’s voice, heavy with concern as they answered: “You alright?” 

You almost laughed. 

No. Of course not—because why would you call Frank Castle if you were anything other than desperate? 

“Are you busy?” you asked, awkward and hesitant. 

In hindsight, the question felt stupid. There was a body lying in front of you, and certainly no amount of busyness took precedence over that. But then, Matt must’ve been busy. Playing dutiful layer or God’s lone soldier. That’s why he hadn’t answered. 

Unless… 

[Elektra’s just a friend—] 

{—That what we are?} 

On the other end of the line, Frank urged, “C’mon now, doll, you gotta answer me, alright?” Had he asked something? You hadn’t noticed. “Where’re you at?” 

“An alley.” 

A rough, humorless chuckle. “Little more specific, sweetheart.” 

Five blocks from Matt’s apartment, you thought. 

“Off West 51st,” you said. 

“Don’t move.” There was the sound of a door slamming, of boots pounding down a flight of stairs. “I’m on my way.” 

Panic thrashed in your veins, anticipating the sharp click of a call gone dead. “Wait!” A cry, a plea—but for what? You had no clue what to say next. 

You hadn’t told him about the man, or the gun, or the sin. 

And Frank hadn’t asked. You knew this was because the Why? for your call hadn’t mattered to him. 

Only that you had. 

{You call, I come—} 

[—Frank Castle is a murderer.] 

Your eyes squeezed shut. You went to rub them, then remembered the blood dripping from your hands. 

So am I, you thought. So am I. 

Frank said your name. Once, twice. 

Quietly, you asked, “Will you stay on the phone?” 

The sound of another door pushing open, a great whoosh! of air as the city unfolded around him: sirens screaming, traffic blaring. With your eyes closed, you could almost see—shoving from his apartment building, marching down darkened sidewalks with a determined clench in his jaw. 

It wasn’t a man coming to save you, nor a vigilante. 

It was a soldier. 

After drawing in a breath, Frank uttered, “‘Course.” 

Time dragged. 

Hell’s Kitchen droned around you. Occasionally, Frank would ask: You good? to which you replied: How far are you? At some point, you drifted further from the man’s body. Ended up sitting on the ground, your back pressed to a brick wall. 

Your emotions were still fuzzy, as dull as the blunt edge of a knife. But your nerves… those were razor sharp. 

You watched both ends of the alleyway. Vigilant, afraid. Your muscles tensed whenever a car door shut too loud, whenever a stranger passed beneath the distant, buzzing streetlights. 

What if someone noticed? 

Gunshots weren’t such a strange thing in the Kitchen. The Devil couldn’t be everywhere at once, and the cops were either too busy or too lazy to investigate every bang! in the night. 

But if someone noticed you like this—curled on the ground, a dead man at your feet and violent red on your skin… 

He started it, you reminded yourself. Self-defense is absolvable. 

[To a judge? Or to God?—] 

God doesn’t matter. 

[—Why didn’t you call 9-1-1?] 

Why didn’t you answer? 

Your grip tightened around the phone. “How far now?” 

“Check your nine.” In the second it took for you to envision a clock, Frank had already amended, “Left, sweetheart.” There was the barest hint of a smile in his voice. “Look left.” 

You did. 

Frank was little more than a formless figure approaching. He was dressed in all black, his hood up against the rain. You couldn’t see his face, but you didn’t need to. His presence was enough to ease the frantic beat of your pulse. 

When he was close enough to hear, you hung up the phone. Wiped your nose on your sleeve and sniffed, “Took you long enough.” 

Cool and calculating—two descriptors that fit Frank best as he scanned the scene. He took note of the discarded gun, the puddle of watered down blood, the man with three bullets in his chest. 

You were the last thing he noted, and the only one to put a crack in his stern exterior. 

“Smart enough to practice law,” Frank lightly joked, “but not to read a goddamn clock, huh?” 

A laugh sputtered past your lips, melding into a broken sob. 

“Paralegals don’t practice,” you argued, ignoring the tears wetting your cheeks. “And I can read a clock just fine, asshole.” 

There was a softness to his face, one brow raising. “Yeah?” 

“Yeah.” So long as it’s in front of you, and you’re telling time and not direction. 

Frank hummed, his knees popping as he crouched down beside you. “Well I ain’t got a watch,” he said, “so I guess I’ll have to take your word for it.” 

Another weak laugh faded into quiet. 

Then, more hesitant than you’d ever heard him before, Frank asked, “You wanna tell me what happened?” 

Something about the way he said it struck you as odd. Like it was a choice—that you didn’t have to explain. If you wanted, the secrets of tonight could remain just that: Secrets, known only by you and a man who had no voice to share them. 

[Do you remember Psalm 80:9?—] 

Even secret sins are exposed in His light. 

{—How do you deal with it? All Red’s Catholic bullshit?} 

By believing in it. 

Frank took your silence for an answer. Shifted as if he might reach out, offer comfort. Instead, his fingers curled into loose fists. 

“How ‘bout you go wait around the corner,” he offered, “and let me take care of all this?” 

You weren’t sure what Frank’s version of ‘taking care of this’ entailed, but you knew you were comfortable with never finding out. 

Frank followed suit as you pushed off the ground. His movements were precise and easy, while yours were graceless and weighted. Standing, the world seemed to shift beneath your feet. Your mind was still hazy, your bones tired. 

Existence had become an arduous task. 

“When you’re… done,” you managed, your arms curled tight around your waist, “what then?” 

You didn’t want to go home—or to Matt’s. 

You didn’t want to feel alone. 

As if he understood this, Frank simply answered, “I’ll take you back to my place. Get you cleaned up, let you rest awhile.” His head tilted slightly. “You like pizza?” 

The world was ending. 

And yet here stood Frank—no Bible quotes or Hail Mary’s, no judgement for the sin you’d committed or the mess he had to clean. He offered only calm, only patience—and pizza of all things. 

[What do you see in him?—] 

{—Let me take care of all this.} 

You nodded. 

Frank’s apartment was bleak. 

One room total—unless you counted the cramped shoebox of a bathroom, which you did not. The front door opened into a shoddy kitchenette, connected to a living room that clearly doubled as his bedroom. 

He owned minimal furnishings. There was a lumpy couch, a small table with one chair, an old doormat that read Stay Awhile! except the Awhile had been all but completely rubbed off. You assumed that’s why it was inside instead of out—because even indirectly, Frank Castle wasn’t the type to ask anyone to Stay. 

Behind you, Frank grunted as he kicked his boots off onto the mat. You wondered if you should do the same, but didn’t. 

It felt strange to be in Frank’s apartment. Not because it made you uncomfortable, but because it didn’t. You felt fine. Still shaken, still a little sick—but safe. 

Would Matt be able to tell? Would he smell the gunpowder and Old Spice clinging to your skin and know that you’d been with Frank? 

That’s how you knew when he’d been with Elektra. You didn’t need super senses to smell her perfume—a heady mix of cloves and something citrus, lingering on his shirts as plain as if it were lipstick on the collar. 

Unthinking, you said, “You should get a bird.” 

Frank chuckled. “Yeah? And why’s that?” 

You weren’t sure. It was just the first thing that had come to mind, a means of evicting Elektra from your thoughts. 

“It could liven the place up,” you suggested. Though, after taking another glance around, you realized that might be asking too much of one little bird. 

He’d need a flock. 

Frank slipped past you, warmth crawling up your spine at the slight brush of his hand against your back. You told yourself it was unintentional—no more intimate than someone scooting past you in a crowded bar or a grocery store aisle. 

Still, the warmth lingered. 

“Don’t think I’m much of a bird guy,” Frank admitted from the kitchenette. Then, nodding towards the couch, he added, “Sit.” 

You drifted that way and sank into the cushions. The springs were practically nonexistent, and the brown leather peeled like a bad sunburn—impossible not to pick at. 

“What kind of guy are you, then?” you asked, more interested in a distraction than his answer. 

Frank dug around in the cabinets, grabbed a plastic mixing bowl, and went to the sink. “I like dogs,” he told you, loud enough to be heard over the running water filling the bowl. 

You pretended not to hear him anyway. 

After starting at Nelson & Murdock, you’d planned to get a dog. It seemed like the right time. You had your own place, your own income—and you knew Foggy would love having something cute and furry around the office. But then you got closer to Matt, and the dream died before it ever began. 

Dogs were too much for Matt. Too many smells, too many sounds, too many textures. Back then, you’d thought it was a reasonable sacrifice. No dog in exchange for an incredible boyfriend. 

You knew better now. 

You should’ve picked the dog. 

Dragging the lone chair from the table, Frank settled in front of you with the bowl of steaming water and a thin cloth. His eyes went straight to your hand. You assumed it was because of the dried blood until he said, “You’re fucking up my couch.” 

You stopped picking, dusting the flakes of leather onto the floor. “It was already fucked,” you defended. 

“So you gotta make it worse?” 

You fixed him with a blank stare. “Nothing could make this couch worse.” Short of setting it on fire, that is. 

“That how we’re gonna play this?” Frank looked like he was holding in a laugh. “I let you in, offer you food—and you pay me back by talkin’ shit about my couch?” 

“It’s not just the couch,” you stated plainly. “It’s the whole apartment.” 

It reminded you of prison—a place that you, Foggy, and Matt had worked hard to keep Frank out of. Even if the trial hadn’t gone as expected, you hated the idea that all that fight had been for this: A peeling couch, a faded doormat, a lonely little chair. 

Frank deserved better than that. 

[Have you forgotten?—] 

[Castle was charged with 37 counts of murder] 

[—Why are you so attached to this case?] 

With the bowl balanced on top of his legs, Frank dipped the cloth in and wrung it out as he joked, “Guess I need that bird.” 

Your lips twitched. Not quite a smile, but close. 

“Guess so.” 

Frank held out an open palm. Without thinking, you laid your hand against his. 

The water was too hot. Not quite burning, but still uncomfortable as he pressed the cloth to your wrist. But you didn’t flinch, utterly motionless as he wiped in slow, circular motions. 

His touch was far lighter than you’d imagined. 

Not that you ever had imagined it. 

As the cloth moved down to your fingers, Frank’s focus grew more intent. He was meticulous in cleaning every line of your knuckles, the dried blood caked under your nails. 

Only when the water in the bowl had turned the color of rust, the cloth stained and your skin spotless, did Frank trade one of your hands for the other. 

Only then did you confess. 

“He had a knife.” 

Half a second—that’s how long Frank’s movements faltered before he kept on cleaning. You were thankful he didn’t try to look you in the eye. That he didn’t have to for you to know he was listening. 

“Foggy has a deposition in the morning,” you continued shakily. “He always forgets to print his motion, so I stopped by the office to do it for him and… I don’t know. On the way back home, I could just feel it, you know? That someone was there. That they were following me.” 

An understanding nod as Frank moved the cloth to your index finger. 

“I know it’s stupid,” you told him. “But I thought if I cut through the alley, got closer to Matt’s, then–” 

He’d hear it, if the worst happened. The Devil would come. Your boyfriend—if you could even still call him that—would save you. 

But that had been a stupid, childish thought. 

“I figured I could lose him,” you said instead. “That I could turn the corner and just run in circles until he gave up. But he was fast. I wasn’t even halfway down the alley when he ran up behind me, when grabbed my shoulder and–” 

Your breath caught. Frank’s touch moved slower, gentler—a feat you wouldn’t have thought possible. His eyes caught yours in a concerned glance. Only then did you remember how to breathe. 

“It was just a knife, Frank. A knife—and I pulled out a gun!” A short, hollow laugh. “I should have let him rob me,” you rationalized. “At least a wallet can be replaced. But him, his life–” 

Frank cut you off. “How do you know?” 

Your brows furrowed in answer. 

His hand went still against yours, holding the cloth wrapped around your ring finger. “That that’s all he wanted,” Frank gruffly clarified. “To rob you.” 

“I don’t, but–” 

“You remember what I told you? When I taught you how to shoot?” 

{You or them?—}

Frustrated, you insisted, “It’s not that easy, Frank. It’s not my choice!” 

[—It’s up to God, who lives and who dies.] 

Frank shook his head. “That’s the Catholic in you,” he argued. 

“I’m not Catholic,” you snapped, low but harsh. Frank looked confused, and you fought to keep the shame from your voice as you muttered, “Not anymore.” 

Religion, you learned, was a funny sort of thing. Even when you stop believing, it never truly goes away. God becomes a ghost under your skin, a divine haunting that borders on insanity. You will always think in terms of Sinners and Saints. You will always know that no amount of repentance will ever mold your soul into something more like the latter. 

Frank wasn’t the type to pry any further. 

Instead, he adjusted your hand. Carefully dragged the cloth along the curve of your fingernail. The water had cooled, now too cold where it was once too hot. 

“It doesn’t matter what he was going to do,” you decided. “It only matters that I killed him.” 

This time, it was Frank’s breath that hitched. 

“No you didn’t,” he said, and you had never heard someone tell a lie so matter-of-fact. 

“I did–” 

He looked up. A muscle feathered in his jaw, and when he spoke, it was with the steely resolve of a Marine.  

“No. I did.” 

You blinked at him. 

“I gave you that gun,” he continued. “Gave you that goddamn advice, too. That no matter what, you always gotta pick you. And see, I don’t regret that shit either because all that? It kept you alive. Kept you breathing. And if some no-good prick’s gotta so you get to live? Fine. Good.” 

You couldn’t speak. Couldn’t do anything but stare at him. 

“But if someone’s gotta bear the weight of that guy’s miserable life,” Frank told you, “then let it be me, alright?” His gaze fell, lingering on your lips a moment too long before he uttered, “‘Cause I ain’t gonna let it be you.” 

[You care about him—]

[—Don’t you?] 

Do you care about her? 

[Elektra’s just a friend—] 

… 

[—Can you say the same about Frank?] 

You studied the man before you. 

Frank Castle. The Punisher. 

The one you shouldn’t call, shouldn’t trust. A murderer and a felon, a crack in your already crumbling relationship. Someone you tried to stay away from, tried to forget. 

A number not saved, but remembered. 

No, you thought, and wondered if Matt already knew. I can’t. 

Swallowing, you looked down at your joined hands. The blood was almost all gone now, washed away by someone far more damned than you. 

“Okay,” you said. There was no need to say anything else, no need to keep bearing the crushing weight of your newly acquired sin—not when God was a ghost and the Devil had abandoned you, not when a Soldier was so willing to bear it for you. 

“You know,” you said, deftly changing the subject, “my brain’s a little hazy, but I’m pretty sure you promised me pizza.” 

Frank fought the subtle curve of his lips. “Did I?” 

You nodded, and he chuckled. 

“Fine–” he refocused, back to cleaning off the last of the blood–“but you’re placin’ the order.” 

You mocked him, Fine!, while sliding your phone from your pocket. The screen lit up with two missed calls and one text. 

Matthew: Sorry, got caught up with something. Everything OK? 

Your thumb hovered over the message. 

In the Bible, the number eight is symbolic of many things. Resurrection is one of them; something dead brought back into eternal life. Once, you would’ve seen Matt’s text—a string of eight words—and wondered if that meant something. If maybe there was something left of your love to be resurrected. 

Now, you stole a glance at Frank—your eighth call—and thought of new beginnings. Of choosing your own path. 

You cleared Matt’s message. 

Tapped on the Safari icon and asked, “Do you want somewhere specific?” 

“Ever been to Lombardi’s?” suggested Frank. 

You shook your head. “Is it good?” 

Frank cut you a look. “‘Course it’s good. But knowin’ you, you’ll probably shit talk it the same way you did my couch.” 

A smile tugged at your lips. “Keep it up,” you teased, already typing the restaurant into the search, “and your only company’s gonna be the couch and the bird.” 

He chuckled. “I ain’t gettin’ a bird.” 

You'd just pressed the phone to your ear, already listening to it ring when you built up the nerve to ask, "What about a dog?"

Frank set the cloth in the bowl. Gave your hand a gentle squeeze. 

“Maybe a dog.”

a/n - this has been sitting in my drafts literally since january. i can't decide if i like it or hate it, but i've gotten into too much of a habit of writing, overthinking, and then never posting---so, here it is! thank you to anyone who takes the time to read it <3

The smell of salt and seafood filled your nostrils as you watched your daughter run around the beach. You watched her play in the sand and build a castle with Benito, your boyfriend of about a year now. He asked you out after a concert you went to with your friend, then during the first date he found out about your daughter. You expected him to just leave, but he stayed and was active in her life.

"Careful, princesita!" He called out as your daughter stalked closer to the water. Of course her bad self inched closer and closer to the navy cold water giggling. Benito chased after her, she was fast for someone 3ft, he swooped her up and she turned to face him giggling.

He sighed, "Dios, cariño. ¿Por qué no escuchas?", he questioned out of breath from chasing your little girl around the beach. He walked up the sand much farther from the water, he continued to play with your daughter as you watched them.

He continued to dig in the sand and play with her. You watched him occasionally tickle her and fix her little sand covered bun. You watched her dig around in the sand, and find a cute seashell. You smile as she shows Benito her treasure and he whispered something causing the little girl to walk up to you with the shell in her hand.

"Mama!" She exclaimed as she showed you the shell, you push down your glasses and smile at the shell.

"Wow! Is that a seashell, baby?" You questioned and she nodded then handed it to you. You let out a theatrical gasp.

"Oh! It's gorgeous my love. Thank you!" You adorn the little girl in kisses, as Benito stalked up and grabbed the little girls sides causing her to burst out in a fit of giggles. The little girl peers up at Benito with big begging eyes, Benito let out a sigh knowing he was already defeated. He swore up and down that you gave the girl her signature big brown eyes.

"May we please get ice cweam." Your daughter begged, he was done for the second she lisped out her request. He sighed, "En español.", he asked acting like that was any use. Your daughter pouted, but nothing came in between her and her ice cream.

"M-me...puedos-"

"Puedes." Benito corrected, causing her to pout.

Your daughter turned to you her bottom lip completely out. You sigh and sit up. You almost mirror her begging look, I mean it was more potent from you. You were the source of her attitude.

"Benni. Get my baby her ice cream." You requested, but with enough authority in your voice it wasn't even close to a question. More of an instruction. He sighed

"Mami, she needs to learn span-"

"Now." You said raising your eyebrows. Now you really weren't asking. He sighed and picked the little sand covered girl up and took her up the boardwalk to a little ice cream shack.

"You're scared of mommy!" The girl sang.

"Not even close!" He protested.

It’s silent for a second, the only thing that fills your ears is the car’s roar when he hurrily pulls under a shady tree on the side of the road.

“My name’s Logan,” he huffs playfully as he puts the car in park.

“Logan,” you feel yourself mimicking with a smile on your face.

He looks up at you with a sly smile, his sunglasses are now sitting on the dashboard, which gives you more of him to study.

Your eyes take in his sharp nose, soft eyes, and grown out facial hair before they drop to the three undone buttons on his collared shirt. The hair on his chest makes your fingers itch to undo the last few buttons and tug off his brown leather jacket. You’d be doing him a favor too.

The summer heat is criminal.

As if he read your mind, Logan tugs off his leather jacket, throwing it over his shoulder to the back seat. You expect him to stop, but his thick fingers work to undo the rest of his buttons as he pulls off his shirt. His shirt falls on top of his leather jacket, leaving him in his low rise jeans held by a thick brown belt and white undershirt.

“So I’m just supposed to believe that you,” you point at Logan, then yourself. “And me end up together?”

“Is it that hard to believe?” He asks raising his eyebrows.

The man is sex on legs. If anything you should be applauding your future-self for fucking and tying the man down.

“Kind of, yeah,” you lie.

“Liar.”

Before you could reply Logan readjusts himself in the driver’s seat. The sight of him widening his legs and throwing his arm over your shoulder has your mind thinking maybe the man isn’t crazy. Words are stuck in your throat when his lips dips to meet the sticky skin on your collarbone.

“Had you wrapped around my finger,” his breath is hot against the junction of your neck as he whispers against your skin.

His flirtatious tone makes you squirm on the leather seats and you find it’s getting harder to ignore the building heat between your thighs. The leather from the bench styles seats sticks to your skin. Your brightly patterned dress does little to separate you from the leather, instead it clings to you body where sweat forms on your skin.

“Prove it.”

Maybe Logan isn’t talking out of his ass or trying to use some lame pick up line. He could be telling the truth.

It’s only fair you give him a chance.

Connecting your lips, the kiss is messy which has you opening your legs and welcoming the left hand that’s gripping your thigh. The arm over your shoulder pushes you closer to him and your hands find his face. Pulling away, you cup his cheeks in your hands as you angle his head to the left. This time when you lips meet, you’re stifling a moan. The hand between your thigh expertly finds your clit over your cotton panties. He pays no mind at the sweat between your thighs, instead he rubs small circles that has you rolling your hips against his hand, begging for more.

“Just like that,” you praise.

His hand doesn’t even flinch.

“I know, Darlin.”

He knows what you like.

“Cause you’re from the future?” You can barely spit out your words and whine when Logan pulls your panties to the side. Your brain only comprehends the way his fingers glide through your folds. He nods as he gathers your slick and uses it to rub your clit again.

“I know your body. Had years of practice.”

His words have you whimpering and hiding your face in his neck. The hands that were holding his face fall and greedily grab at his biceps. The muscles are firm in your hands and call for your teeth. Everything about the man makes your mouth water. The carnivorous ache in your teeth makes you feel silly, but you settle for moaning his name instead.

His fingers rub your clit and occasionally tease at your entrance where you’re dripping; however, despite your whines, Logan doesn’t give in. Squirming against his hand, unsure if you’re running to or from him, Logan keeps you in place causing your panties to scratch at your skin. Focusing on his fingers, you try your best to ignore the uncomfortable friction scratching your right inner thigh. Your eyes fall shut and suddenly your nose is hyperaware of the man’s scent. The smell of cheap cigars tickles your nose, but it’s the smell of his sweat that makes your head spin.

His scent makes you widen your legs. The shift allows for more friction on your sensitive skin, but you still choose to ignore it. Distracting yourself with his scent, you bury your nose in his neck and inhale; the way you breathe him in is animalistic. The loud sniff makes Logan laugh, making his fingers pick up their pace. You shift once one, this time a painful whine escapes your lips.

“W-What’s wrong?”

It isn’t his scared question that brings you back to reality, but the halt to his fingers. Your mouth falls shut and you open your eyes to see a very concerned Logan staring down at you.

Worried eyes jump all over your face and body, looking for your pain making your heart skip a beat. His free hand caresses the side of your face and tilts it to face him. He’s so concerned that your blood starts to feel hot.

Did his stare have to be this instense?

Shaking your head you reassure, “It’s nothing.”

Your attempt to comfort him is cut off by his lips. Expecting his teeth to clash with yours, your heads spins once more. Instead his kiss is soft and has you melting into the leather seat beneath you. Wet tongues taste each other, his tongue is romantic while yours is curious.

To him, your taste is comforting. His kiss is making up for lost time. Soft lips are desperate to commit every inch of your mouth to memory.

To you, his taste is addicting. You crave his entire being, his smell, touch, words, and lips. He reels you in with claws.

“Tell me, Darlin,” he begs as his lips travel down to your neck.

Shyly, your hands slip beneath the skirt of your dress and hook your underwear on your fingers and pull them off. Awkwardly you lift your hips to pull off the scratchy, grey material, but Logan is quick to take over.

“I was chafing,” you whisper, clearly embarrassed.

His body visibly relaxes before he shakes his head at the material in a disapproving manner. Meanwhile, his hand between your thighs searches for the irritated skin. Your sharp inhale tells him he’s found it before he gently kneads at your skin, a silent apology.

Careful not to irritate your skin more, Logan goes back to tug off your panties hugging at your thighs. His voice is taunting as he coos, “Don’t worry, I’ll take them off your hands.”

You nod at his words and expect him to toss your panties in the back seat the same way he did his shirt and jacket, but your jaw drops when he brings the cotton up to his nose. The sound of him breathing in the grey cotton fills the car and suddenly your bottom lip stings from the force of your teeth. You watch as his eyes roll back and you swear you see pink reach out and taste the wet cotton.

Pride builds in the bottom of your stomach as your body moves before you can stop it. You climb on his lap, thighs trapping the both of his, similar to the way your arms trap his neck. The steering wheel digs into the small of your back, but the bulge on Logan’s jeans brushing against your pussy does a great job in distracting you. Playfully, Logan jerks his hips upward, bouncing you on his lap, but you watch as his carefully stuffs the grey cotton into his back pocket.

“My future boyfriend is such a pervert,” you giggle.

“You like it,” he smirks as his hand finds its way between your thighs.

A gasp escapes your lips when two fingers shove themselves inside you, no longer playing the teasing game. Your pussy clenches, struggling to accommodate the thickness of his fingers. Logan wastes no time and ignores your pleads for a an extra second. His fingers, wet with your arousal, curl and hit the spongy spot inside you that has you cursing his name against his neck.

Your hips ride his hand, eager for more despite your whines. His fingers curl expertly and have you hiding your face in his neck. Sweat builds at your hairline, your spine, and the back of your neck, but you don’t care. The growing pleasure between your thighs captures your full attention and you pathetically cry Logan’s name, but he shushes you with his lips.

He whispers soft praises against your lips, letting you know it’s okay. The steering wheel digs into your back and the leather seats stick to your shines, holding you in place. With no where to escape, a loud gasp of Logan’s name is his only warning before your pussy gushes on his fingers and onto his jeans. Your heart races as the pressure in your lower tummy releases. Squeezing Logan’s fingers so tight it has him cursing as he watches your eyes roll back. He groans as a familiar, sweet scent, one only he can smell, fills his nostrils.

“Smell like my favorite candy.”

Your ears barely register Logan’s praises on how sweet you smell or the way he tucks the skirt of your dress so he can see the wet mess between your thighs and his jeans. Slipping his fingers out of your pussy, it’s not long after wet fingers find their way to your parted lips and push past your teeth.

“Come on. Taste it.”

His fingers press on your lips, egging you to lick them clean. His dark eyes meet yours and watch as your tongue peeks out and drools over his glistening fingers. Your subtle sweet taste lingers on your tongue and the way he’s looking at you is making you want to swallow down his fingers. Rather than feeding you his fingers, he smears your remaining juices on your lips. Your slick coats your lips like a cheap lip gloss, tricking your mind to rub your lips together.

“My turn,” Logan groans before his lips kiss yours.

The kiss is filthy.

His tongue licks your lips clean, almost like a dog. It should gross you out, the way he’s licking you, as if he’s eating you from the source, but it doesn’t. He groans at your familiar taste as your blind, impatient hands reach to tug off the thick, brown belt trapping his cock.

“Taste so good,” Logan moans, his hands reaching down to help you when a frustrated whine falls past your lips.

The metal clinks and the sound of his zipper makes your ears perk up. Taking over, your fingers hook on his belt loops and tug off his jeans. Your eyes widen when they are immediately rewarded with the sight of dark, wiry hairs leading up to his thick and veiny cock instead of underwear.

“Fuck me,” the curse escapes you before you can even think. It’s quiet so Logan lets you think he didn’t catch it. His thighs flex, a silent beg for your touch and you’re quick to comply. Without wasting time, your hand wraps around his thick cock.

“You’re big,” you whisper. Not as a praise or compliment, but a fact.

Bigger than you expected.

“You can take it,” he nods like he’s talking from experience.

His cock is heavy in your hand and mind races with dirty thoughts. Before you can reply, his hand traps the hand wrapped around his cock. He squeezes your hand as he guides your hand up and down his cock. His thumb pushes yours to circle the tip of his cock. Despite him being the one that guided your hand, despite him expecting the pleasure, his hips shudder beneath you and your name falls past his lips. You watch, memorizing the way his eyes flutter shut.

This time you fist his cock without his help, slapping his hand away.

The head of his cock glisten with precome that makes your mouth water. Your face feels hot when your eyes watch Logan curse under his breath and leak onto your hand. Adjusting yourself on his lap, you decide to use both your hands. Your left hand grabs the base of his cock, while your right hand jerks the rest of his cock.

“You’re so leaky,” you giggle and then some more when his cock spits out onto your hand.

He scoffs at you, but moans your name when your thumb swipes over the tip of his cock. His come piles on your thumb and he groans when it presses against his lips. You smirk when you repeat his words, “Come on. Taste it.”

Shamelessly, Logan’s lips wrap around over your thumb. His tongue licks your thumb clean so when you pop your thumb out of his mouth, it glistens with his spit. His eyes lock with yours and the overwhelming feeling of needing to be full takes over.

Logan sees it in your eyes. There’s a cloudy and dazed look in your eyes when you grab the base of his cock and line him up to your entrance. His rough hands hold your hips as you sit on his cock, gasping at every inch. Logan’s stare where the both of you meet has you drooling on his cock. Despite your slick, he watches as you struggle to take his cock.

“Know you can do, Darlin, you used to do it all the time,” he praises.

Your hands reach out to his shoulders. You pout as you take another inch, “That’s future me though.”

Logan lets out a hearty laugh. His laugh makes your heart flutter. The flutter travels down to your pussy and suddenly the laugh is cut short when your walls squeeze around him. His nails dig into the meat of your hips as he tugs at your skin, encouraging you to ease the burn in your thighs and just sit on his lap.

Aching with need, you furrow your brows as you sink further on his cock. Crying out his name when he slides deeper into your cunt. The head of his cock brushing past the spongy spot inside you.

Drunken with pleasure, Logan’s fingers grip your hips and moans, “Knew I had to find you.”

The pressure in your lower stomach builds as your skin’s temperature begins to rise. Your walls squeeze around his cock, adjusting to the stretch. His cock wet with your slick makes it easier for you to take the last inch of his cock.

“I’m so full,” you whine, cloudy eyes stare up at Logan’s soft stare.

Taking a moment to adjust, your lips find his as your fingers bury themselves in his hair. Tugging at the dark roots and smiling against the beads of sweats that pile on the back of his neck.

The hands that were on your hips rise to the small of your back, pushing your body closer. Forcing you leaning onto his body, your clit rests on the wet, wiry hairs on his pelvis. The hairs tickling your clit every time he nudges your body closer.

His left hand cups the side of your face and groans into your mouth when you carefully lift your hips. Pulling away, a line of spit connect the both of you for a second before it falls onto your chin. With a shaky breath, you work your hips down and sit on his cock with a soft bounce.

“That’s it, Darlin,” he praises, his eyes falling to the plunging neckline of your dress.

His lips kiss down your neck, teeth tugging at the neckline of your dress. Your hands slip from his hair when he yanks your dress to expose your breasts. You gasp as his lips wrap around your nipple, while he rolls the other between his fingers.

“Fuck.”

Logan’s mouth is desperate as he mouths at your nipple, occasionally, groaning into your skin when you grind your hips against his. Holding his head to your chest you focus on bouncing yourself on his cock, setting an even pace while chasing your high.

Your slick drips down his length and he can feel it dripping down his balls. A creamy ring decorates the base of his cock that only gets creamier with each bounce.

“Missed you so much,” Logan groans out on your chest, his mouth pulling away, only to give the same treatment to your other nipple.

Your pussy spasms over his cock trying to commit every vein to memory. The ache in your hips and the pain building from the steering wheel digging into your back is ignored as you mumble Logan’s name like a mantra.

“I’m close.” You cry out, as a weak warning.

You smile when you feel him nod against your chest, his silent way of letting you know that he knows. The roll of your hips get messy and the way your leaking on his cock gives him more than enough to figure you’re close to coming on his cock. You just need that extra push and he’s more than willing to give you that.

“Come on, Darlin,” he hums, slipping a hand between the both of you. The toothy smile he gives you when his fingers find your puffy clit has you whining his name. His eyes drop to your chest again, watching as your tits bounce with every attempt of chasing your orgasm. His fingers are soaked with your sweet slick as he rubs even circles on your clit. Your jaw drops as your body tenses.

“That’s it, darlin. Let go.”

Your walls squeeze his cock as he fights the urge to come inside you. He smiles at your bunched up dress that does little to cover you. Your entire body glistens with sweat and the sweet smell of your pussy fills Logan’s nose. He’s memorized as he watches your head fall back, exposing your neck and feels your walls clench uncontrollably around his cock.

“Ah! Lo-”

Gasping for air, you try to warn him, you really do, but it’s too late. Trying to run away from his fingers and cock, your lift your hips, unintentionally causing his cock to hit that spongy spot inside you before it slaps against his stomach. The lingering feeling of his cock spreading you open has you squirting on his cock with a cry.

“Logan!”

Overstimulated, Logan’s fingers pet your clit softly, smiling when your tired body jerks on his lap. His abs underneath his tank top flex when he sees a wet mess between your thighs, no doubt adding to the puddle on the leather seats. Chasing his orgasm, Logan’s hand reaches down to fist his soaked cock.

“F-fuck,” he stutters as the lewd sounds of Logan fisting his cock fill your ears. His hips flex as moans slip out of his mouth.

Slowly, you become more aware of your surroundings and help Logan finish. Eager to both see and hear how Logan comes, your hand replaces his. Shaky fingers wrap around his cock as your work a tight grip up and down his cock.

“Gonna come for me?”

Your sweet tone makes him throw his head back. A smile creeping on his face when you give him a playful and loud kiss on his cheek.

“Come on, I’m your future girlfriend,” you tease as your flick your wrist and swipe your thumb over the tip of his leaky cock. “You know you want to.”

The giggly banter, the banter he missed so much, has him choking out your name and spilling onto your hand. Spurts of his come land on your dress, on his shirt, and onto your hand. You watch as Logan’s chest rises and falls with every deep breath. His flushed skin glistens with sweat, similar to yours.

The silence is comfortable for a couple minutes as the both of your fix on your clothes onto your sticky skin. Huffing out loud as the heat suddenly begins to hit you, you shift on Logan’s lap. Looking up at him only to find his eyes already looking at you. Suddenly shy, you lower your gaze and look out the car window.

“You’re the first person I looked for.”

His confession is quiet and has you pulling your attention from the swaying trees to the soft eyes staring at you.

“Why?” You ask just as soft. “Why didn’t you wait to meet me how you’re suppose to?”

A part of you wants to bring up the way his fingertips dug into your skin, holding you down as if he was scared you were going to disappear. Maybe bring up the way his kiss press onto your skin just a tad too harsh, desperate with love. You most definitely want to bring up the salty tears that slipped down his cheeks when his cried out your name as he came.

“Just wanted more time with you,” he admits, avoiding eye contact for the first time since he first convinced you to get in his car.

“What do you mean?” You ask with a nervous laugh.

In attempt to comfort you, or maybe it’s for his own comfort, Logan’s rough hands find yours, intertwining your fingers together. His throat feels like its closing, but he still manages to spit out his selfish words.

“I needed more time with you.”

No pressure tags: @eupheme @mrsimpurity @joelsgoldrush @djarins-riduur @superhoeva @d1stalker @moonlight-prose @ozarkthedog @sunsburns @inkedells i love yall !!! Each and every single one of you are so talented and have individually inspired me to write for Logan! So thank you :)