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Break My Rules

You have a rule not to date men who work with your dad - who just happens to be Quigley Smitty. After becoming friends with Lucy Chen, you meet Tim Bradford and realize that some rules hurt you more than they help you.

No Rules

As your relationship with Tim progresses, you both learn that some rules are worth not only breaking, but forgetting.

Made to Be Broken

You want to spend your first Christmas together with Tim, but your plans with your dad get in the way. You could admit you broke your own rule, or you could find a different way to invite Tim to Christmas.

Unbroken Contract

There's too much weighing on you, so you go to your dad because Tim is busy with a case. When Tim realizes you need him, he reminds you that he loves you and he's here for you.

More We Can Break

You and Tim bury your stress, hiding in a well-meaning attempt to avoid burdening one another. When everything comes crashing down, you work together to pick up the pieces and find the beauty in the brokenness.

How Many Rules

You decide it's time to tell your dad about your relationship with Tim, though you're convinced he already knows. Tim isn't so sure, but he has a request to make before you break another rule.

Broken Pieces

It's been one year since you met Tim Bradford and Lucy Chen and started breaking all your rules. While celebrating with them, you admit that the rules that were supposed to protect you kept you from living. They showed you how great life can be.

Shattered Comfort

In a single moment, because of an unwanted interaction, both you and Tim think your relationship has been shattered. While you try to determine how to talk to him, Tim buries his sadness with anger. After midnight, you knock on his door and hope he'll listen.

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“Yeah, right.” she rolls her eyes. 

Reid hides another yawn and Rossi emerges from his office with a mug that smelled unmistakingly like expensive Italian coffee. Hotch is waiting outside the conference room with an open file in hand. 

“The children are unusually energetic this morning.” Rossi looks out over the team settling in for the day just below. 

Before Hotch could answer, Strauss steps off the elevator. She pushes through the glass doors and the bullpen quieted almost immediately. She wasn’t carrying a case file, instead she had a dark blue personnel folder. Hotch noticed it first, he has dozens sitting on the corner of his desk. 

“Chief Strauss” 

“Agent Hotchner.” She offers the room a polite nod, “If everyone could meet in the conference room.” 

She leads the way and Morgan instantly looks over at Emily with wide eyes. 

“That sounds ominous.” He shakes his head. 

“Yeah, which one of us is getting fired?” Emily mumbles quietly. 

Garcia whispers dramatically, “Are we being audited?”

“No.” Reid answers without looking up, “Chief Strauss isn’t in charge of internal audits.” 

Within minutes, the team is gathered around the conference table. Strauss remains standing and Hotch takes his typical spot at the head of the table.

“So,” He keeps his voice even, “What happened?”

She sets the folder down on the table, “As of today, the BAU will be expanding.” 

Emily perks up, “We’re getting another profiler?”

“The Director approved an additional position several months ago.” Strauss reminds, cutting her stare over at Aaron. 

She opens the folder, “Seeing as your Unit Chief did not appoint any of the applicants he was provided, the Director asked me to step in. The position has now been filled.” 

“Special Agent Y/n” She pauses long enough to look around the room, “Greenaway.” 

Silence. Complete silence. 

JJ looks from Strauss to Hotch, “Greenaway?”

Morgan blinks and Garcia’s nervous smile disappears. 

“Hold on-” Derek holds up a finger. 

“No way.” 

Emily looks equally confused, “Greenaway as in….?”

Reid speaks before anyone else can. 

“Elle’s younger sister.” 

Every head turns toward him. 

“Half-sister.” Hotch corrects. 

The room looks at him, he focuses on the file sitting open on the table.

“Elle requested a weekend off to go to her graduation.” Aaron dazes, still reeling over the idea of you joining the team. It was too late now. If he had just picked someone from the stack, he would have had a say in this. 

“You remember one conversation from six years ago?” Morgan raises a brow.

“Seven.” Reid corrects. 

“She wasn’t with the bureau back then.” Aaron sets his frown into a firm line. He doesn’t like where this is going. 

“She wasn’t,” Strauss picks back up, “At the time Agent Greenaway served this unit, she had not yet entered Quantico.” 

Emily nods slowly, “So, this isn’t someone trying to ride her sister’s reputation in here?”

“Quite the opposite, she is impressive all on her own.” 

She passes out the sheet inside, all crediting your history with the bureau and your education. 

“She graduated at the top of her class.” 

Reid looks surprised. Morgan looks impressed. Aaron looks more stressed. 

“She spent three years in violent crimes where she led several interstate investigations and more recently the past two she was recruited into Behavioral Analysis Support.”

Rossi leans forward, “Behavioral analysis?”

Strauss nods, “Her supervisors describe her as exceptionally disciplined, highly analytical, and one of the strongest interviewers currently with the Bureau.” 

Emily lets out a low whistle, “Not bad.” 

“Her clearance evaluations, shooting qualifications, and psychological reviews are all exemplary.” 

Aaron raises a curious brow, “So, why leave?”

Strauss stares him down without hesitation, “She requested the transfer.” 

“To the BAU?”

“Specifically.” 

That caught Hotch’s attention. 

He sets down the sheet back on the table, “And you’re approving her transfer without consulting me?” 

“I am.” She nods. 

“I assume there is a reason.” There has to be. The Director and Strauss had been reminding him to hire someone for months, why go around him now? They hadn’t brought it up in weeks. This is clearly why. Their plan was already in motion and he fell right into it. 

“There is.” She folds her hands, “Regardless of anyone’s personal feelings, Agent Elle Greenaway’s departure from this unit remains one of the more public personnel failures associated with this team.” 

No one speaks. Garcia looks down at her hands in her lap. 

“From an administrative standpoint denying another exceptionally qualified Agent Greenaway a position she has clearly earned would create questions the Bureau has no interest in answering.” 

Rossi understands immediately, “The optics.” 

“Precisely.” 

Strauss looks back at Hotch. 

“I’ve already signed the transfer.” 

Long silence settles over the room. 

Eventually Hotch gives a single nod, “Then she’s a part of the team.”

Before anyone could say another word, there was a knock at the conference room door. Every pair of eyes turned toward it. 

“Right on time.” Strauss checks her watch and steps over to the door. She pulls the handle to let you in, letting you face your new team. 

For the first time in seven years, a Greenaway was stepping into the room. You weren’t the exact image most of the team had subconsciously expected. There were definitely things that you shared with Elle. The most obvious right now being your walk and the way you carry yourself with confidence.

Your posture is perfect, shoulders back. Your eyes sweep the room once, assessing in a quick and efficient manner. 

Strauss steps beside you, “Everyone, this is Special Agent Y/n Greenaway.” 

You offer a polite smile, “Good morning.” 

The team can tell it wasn’t exactly friendly, but it wasn’t entirely cold either. 

“Her transfer is effective immediately, her credentials speak for themselves. I expect you’ll extend the same professionalism you’ve shown every member of this team.” Strauss’s gaze lingers on Hotch briefly. 

“Thank you, ma’am.” 

She gives one final nod before leaving the room, the door clicking shut behind her. The atmosphere changed quickly, Morgan leans back in his chair with an exaggerated sigh. The rooms starts to thaw at the older woman's departure. Your shoulders drop half an inch. 

“Well, now we can actually say hello.” 

A small smile tugs at your lips, “I was wondering if that was for me or her.”

Garcia jumps up from her chair, “I’m Penelope Garcia!” 

She pulls you in for a tight hug and you pat her shoulder a few times, “I know.” 

“You do?” She pulls back. 

“My sister talked about everyone.” You nod, “She said you could find anyone and their search history.” 

Garcia grins, “She was right.” 

The rest of the room offers their own introductions accompanied with handshakes. One of them being David Rossi.

“It’s an honor.” 

He waves a dismissive hand, “No, that just means I’m old.” 

“You’re all over the original case studies.” 

“Isn’t that what I just said?” He looks to Morgan for help but the smile on his face tells you he’s still secretly proud. 

The last person who was still yet to say a word was Hotch. He hadn’t moved a muscle, just observing with a neutral expression. He rises and extends a hand toward you. 

“Welcome to the BAU.” 

You look at it for a second before accepting. His handshake was steady, but so was yours. 

“Unit Chief.” 

Not Agent Hotchner. Not Hotch. Just his title. 

“You’ve built an impressive career.” 

“So I’ve been told.”

Your tone was perfectly even, polite. But there was an edge to it. Enough to make Morgan’s eyes flicker between the two of you. Hotch noticed it too. 

“I hope you find this unit a good fit.” Hotch offers, testing the waters. 

You hold his gaze, your spine still straight as steel.

“I certainly hope the team has evolved from its past mistakes.” 

Silence. 

Emily shifts in her chair and Garcia bites her knuckle to fight a squeak of surprise. 

Hotch takes a few moments but his voice remains even, “I hope so too.” 

“What made you pursue profiling?” Rossi’s question is effective in pulling your focus off of Hotch. 

“Elle joined because of our father.” You shrug lightly, “I joined because of her.” 

You shift your stance to look back at the rest of the team. 

“I grew up with everyone talking about how great my father was, he was a police officer.” The various nods around the room remind you they’ve heard this story before, “I didn’t really know him, I was only two when he died. So what I know mostly came from stories. Elle.”

Everyone listens carefully and you shrug. 

“My dad is why I wanted to work in law enforcement, but my sister is why I’m here.” 

JJ’s expression softens, “She inspired you.” 

“Every day. She hated the phone but would call me after every big arrest. I was in college and still stuck in New York, but I followed every case she worked that made the news.” You admit, “Until she became the news.” 

Garcia’s eyes start to glisten. 

“I didn’t request to be here because I wanted her desk.” You nod toward the bullpen, “This was the job that made my sister believe she could make a difference.” 

You look back at the team. 

“I wanted to know what that felt like.” Your expression hardens and the team can only watch as you shift your focus on Hotch, “I also wanted to prove a Greenaway deserved to be here.”

The implication wasn’t subtle but you didn’t mean for it to be. Morgan winces. 

Hotch doesn’t flinch, “I never believed it didn’t.”

You tilt your head, “No?”

“No.” 

You hold his eyes for another moment, the rest of the room falling to the background as you study each other. 

“That’s not the story I grew up with.” 

Another beat passes before Hotch says something no one expected. 

“Then perhaps joining this team will provide you with another one.” 

He’s being diplomatic but you can see the tips of his ears are glowing red. Eventually you let him off the hook with a short nod. 

Morgan claps his hands together, eager to change the subject, “So, let’s find you a desk.” 

He wraps an arm around your shoulder and leads you out of the conference room. Garcia follows with the offer of showing where she hides the fun creamer. 

The team slowly follows to return to their desks. Only one person carries any real concern for the newest member of the team. Hotch lingers in the conference room for a moment, watching you fit in quickly. JJ throws her head back in a laugh at something you say while unpacking your bag. 

It was clear you’re intelligent, confident, and respected. Every bit as qualified as Strauss had promised. However. You look at him like he’s carrying a debt you intend to collect on. 

-

Weeks into being a part of the BAU, the team had learned several things about you. You absolutely hate being late. You drink your coffee black. You can spot a lie as easily as you breathe. 

More importantly. 

You couldn’t agree with Aaron Hotchner about anything. 

The first case you worked on brought the team to North Dakota. 

“You think he’s organized.” He comments. 

“I think he’s methodical.” You correct. 

“Same thing.” 

“No.” Your brows drop, “Organized offenders maintain systems. Methodical offenders maintain routines. 

“You’ve been on this team for a week.” He reminds.

“And I’ve been profiling for years.” You correct. 

Morgan coughs into his fist and Emily has to hide a smile behind her coffee. 

Hotch manages to keep his expression neutral, “That doesn’t make you right.” 

“No,” you smile sweetly, “Being right does that.” 

JJ looks down at her file, a quiet chuckle escaping. Rossi doesn’t bother commenting, he just looks back and forth between the two of you like it's a tennis match. Everyone was surprised that Hotch never shut you down. Anyone else who challenged him this aggressively would have received a very Hotch like stare and reminder of the chain of command. 

With you however, he engages every time. You gave it just as good as you got it. It had become entertaining for the team because they could see how the two of you pushed each other. You caught inconsistencies that Hotch sometimes overlooked. He saw patterns in your theories that you had never considered. 

When the two of you were on the same page, the rest of the team hardly needed to contribute. But when you disagreed the room became a verbal battlefield. 

Weeks continued, the rest of the team had found something to bond with you over. All but Hotch. The only member of the team that still received a cold shoulder from you. 

The team has spent days trying to wrap up a case in Portland that had gone on longer than anyone had hoped. 

“You’re assuming the victimology is intentional.” 

“It is.” He doesn’t even bother looking up in your direction. 

“You don’t know that.” You sigh. 

“I know the unsub chose them.” 

“That’s not the same thing.” You shake your head and he finally looks up at you. 

He leans back in his chair, his arms stretching above his head. “You’re splitting hairs.” 

“I’m profiling.” You roll your eyes. 

Derek’s eyebrows shoot up. Emily murmurs, “Here we go.” 

“What’s your theory?” Hotch finally asks you.

The team raises brows at his bold opening. Rossi wishes he had popcorn for the sparring opportunity Aaron just opened. 

“I think he’s choosing people based on opportunity.”

“Then why the consistency” 

“Because his opportunity is consistent.” Your finger jabs the file sitting on the conference table in front of you to emphasize your point. You slide a photo across the table, “The locations aren’t centered around the victims. They’re centered around him.” 

Reid leans forward and watches you tap the map. 

“Oh.” 

Hotch studies the map and you watch him. For several seconds neither of you speak. 

“You’re right.” 

You blink, not sure you heard him properly. Morgan’s eyebrows nearly disappear past his forehead.

Hotch looks back up at you, “He’s commuting.” 

You smile. Aaron is sure it’s the first time it’s ever been directed at him. 

“Was that so painful?” You ask with a slight head tilt. 

“No.”

“Could’ve fooled me.” 

Hotch’s mouth twitches, barely. You catch it and so does everyone else in the room. The case broke two hours later. Nobody had mentioned that you had been right, except for Hotch. 

“Good catch.” 

He says it quietly as the two of you walk toward the elevator. 

“Thank you.” The doors close and you can only bite your tongue for three floors, “That wasn’t so painful, was it?” 

He looks over and raises one brow. 

“Don’t push it.” 

You smile, “Wouldn’t dream of it.” 

-

The next case of importance came weeks later. Three victims in New Mexico, all women and found within a forty-mile radius. They had all been brutally beaten and found outside Santa Fe. The third was found this morning just north of the city. 

There were no obvious connections. No sexual assault, no robbery, and no communication from the offender. Just escalating violence. 

The team was already on the jet and working. 

“The injuries are the point.” You comment, taking in all of the crime scene photos that reveal the brutality behind the violence. 

Hotch looks across the table at you, “Explain.”

“He’s not killing them because he wants them dead.” 

Morgan glances over from the couch, “That’s a pretty important distinction, kid.”

“He wants the violence.” You tap the photos, “None of these injuries were immediately fatal.” 

Reid nods, “That is correct. This would be considered prolonged assault.”

“Exactly.” 

Hotch looks at the pictures again. 

“Control.” He looks back up at you to confirm. 

You nod, “Total control.” 

“Then why leave them alive?” Rossi asks from the seat next to you. 

“He doesn’t. He keeps them alive long enough to experience the fear, but eventually he loses control of the assault.”

Emily looks up, “So the homicide is incidental.” 

“The killing is the consequence, not the objective.” You lean back. 

Hotch studies you openly. 

“You’re saying he doesn’t fantasize about the murder.” 

You stare right back. 

“I’m saying he fantasizes about power.” 

He nods slowly, “That fits.” 

You look down at your notes. 

“There’s something else.” 

“Go ahead.”

“He’s getting worse.” 

“Escalation?” JJ questions. 

“The first victim was beaten. The second was more severe. The third…” You pause, “The third was unrecognizable.” 

Rossi frowns, “So he’s losing control.” 

You nod. 

Hotch immediately picks up on your train of thought, “Which means he’s going to move faster.”

Your eyes meet. Neither of you needed to explain the rest. There was going to be a fourth victim. 

-

By the time the jet touched down, you guys had a working profile. Male. Later thirties to early forties. Intelligent enough to avoid leaving obvious forensic evidence but growing increasingly more reckless. Local or at least familiar with northern New Mexico. 

The team was settled in the local police department's conference room. JJ stands at the whiteboard while everyone tries to figure out what connects the victims. How is he picking them? 

“The first victim was thirty-four, elementary school teacher. The second was twenty-nine and a vet technician. The most recent victim was thirty-eight and a real estate agent.” 

Morgan crosses his arms, “Different ages and professions.” 

“Different neighborhoods.” Emily comments, “They aren’t even from the same part of town.” 

Reid taps the map on the table, “But all three traveled through this area.” 

He circles a stretch of road between Albuquerque and Santa Fe.

“At least according to cell tower data.” 

Rossi nods, “So that’s our common denominator.” 

“Maybe.” You shrug, “All three women were found within ten miles of the highway.” 

Emily frowns, “So?”

“So he’s not hunting those neighborhoods, he's hunting along the route.” 

Hotch looks at the map. Reid’s red circle highlighting the area of concern. 

“Rest stops.” He studies it, “Gas stations, truck stops.” 

Reid nods, “Places where people stop while traveling.” 

“And places where no one notices someone watching them.” You add. 

“Or even following them.” Hotch continues before turning to the rest of the team, “We split up. Local PD has the surveillance footage from two of the locations. Morgan, take Prentiss and Reid to the first location. Rossi and JJ take the second victim.”

JJ nods and you look over at Hotch.

He looks over after feeling your gaze, “We’ll take the third location.” 

You glance down at the map, “The gas station with the missing surveillance footage?”

“Exactly.” He stands and grabs his jacket from the back of his chair. 

Morgan looks between the two of you, “You two going together?”

He wants to crack some joke, you can see it all over his face. 

“Apparently.” 

You and Hotch haven’t been alone much in the short couple of months you’ve been a part of the team now. Someone usually gets stuck being a buffer with the two of you. 

Morgan falls into step beside you as everyone walks out of the station to the SUVs. Aaron gets in the driver's seat and closes his door harshly. 

“Good luck.” Derek warns. 

“Concerened?” You smirk. “I can handle him.” 

“Trust me,” He chuckles, “That is not what I’m worried about.” 

You roll your eyes and give him a mock salute as you back toward the passenger side of the car. 

“Just be careful.” He studies you, “You don’t have anything to prove to us.” 

You swallow, “I know.”

You really didn’t.

“I know what happened with Elle.” His voice far too soft for anyone else to see, “I’m not letting it happen again.” 

You simply nod, not sure you could get anything out after that anyway. You turn back to the car behind you, getting in without a word to Hotch. He pulls out of the parking lot. The two of you have the longest drive, the farthest location from the city’s center. 

You sit with the file open in your lap, Hotch continues to drive. The silence wasn’t uncomfortable, but it was tense waiting for someone to break it. You decide to eventually after staring at the map long enough to burn it to your retinas. 

“Do you think the surveillance footage was deliberately erased?”

“Yes.” 

“Why?”

“Because it was only during the period of abduction that went missing.” His fingers tighten against the wheel. The desert stretches ahead of you, the sun still high in the sky. 

“What makes this one different? He wasn’t concerned with the two first victims.” 

“Maybe he’s connected to this location more so than the others.” He glances over at you, you can’t see his eyes due to the dark sunglasses blocking them. 

“Maybe he works there.” You send a quick text, “I’ll have Garcia check employee records.”

He doesn’t answer and you study him after putting your phone away. 

“You’re quiet.” 

“I’m driving.” He replies. 

“FBI agent who can’t talk and drive?” 

He’s still wearing the sunglasses but you can feel the glare when he looks over this time. 

“Occupational hazard.” He finally answers, looking back at the road. After a few more seconds he speaks up again, “You’re quieter too.” 

You look out the window, “Occupational hazard.” 

He almost smiles but tries to hide it when you look over. 

“Don’t.” 

“What?” He questions.

“That.” 

“What?”

“That-” You gesture with your hands, “almost smile thing.” 

His brows furrow, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” 

“You do it when you think you’re being funny.” You roll your eyes. 

“I’m rarely funny.” 

“Exactly.” You bite. 

Unexpectedly for both of you in the car, Hotch laughs. It was quiet, but it was there and it was unmistakable. A real laugh and you look at him and forget what you were going to say. 

“What?”

You look back at the road, “Nothing.” 

The gas station sat outside of city limits, but it was small and busy right off of the highway. The kind of place that had people coming and going all the time without anyone remembering a face. The manager inside met the two of you with an exhausted expression that told you that he had already answered questions to officers previously. 

At the end of the conversation, the manager leads the two of you back to the security room. Room was an exaggeration, it was a closet with monitors inside and exactly eight square feet. It was at least ten degrees warmer in there than the rest of the store. 

“Someone disabled the camera manually.” 

You look over at Hotch. 

“So our unsub isn’t just observant.” 

“No,” Hotch agrees, “he knows security systems.” 

“Or has access to someone who does.” 

The manager has to go back to work but the two of you look around the small room for any more clues. Boxes pile up everywhere making the two of you brush shoulders. His phone starts ringing, which makes you both jump. 

“Hotchner.” He answers. 

He puts the call on speaker so you can hear JJ’s voice on the other end. 

“We found something, the second victim took out a restraining order six months ago.”

“Against who?” Hotch asks.

“Against her ex boyfriend.” 

“Have him brought in.” 

“That’s the problem.” She sighs, “He disappeared three weeks ago.” 

-

It took almost a full day to find the ex boyfriend, who ended up being a dead end. Between you and Hotch, it didn’t take long in the interrogation room to see he wasn’t capable of this. Two days later, the fourth victim had turned up. 

You stand at the edge of the crime scene, staring down the yellow tape that stretches across the dirt access road. 

The victim was twenty-four. 

A truck driver found her just before dawn, badly beaten and barely alive. Responding officers got one thing from her before it was too late. She said he talked to her, that was it. He had approached her at another gas station. 

One detail caught your attention. It stuck with you all the way back to the station.

“He asked her where she was going.” you pace and the team watches you, “Did all of the victims have destinations? Were they traveling out of their normal daily routine?” 

Reid starts rifling through papers on the table, “Yes, the first was heading north from Albuquerque, the second was headed to Colorado, the third was headed to her parents, and the fourth was heading back to her college campus.”

You look at Hotch, “They weren’t chosen because of where they lived.”

“No?”

“They were chosen because they were leaving.” 

Hotch nods. 

“He’s targeting travelers.” 

“More specifically women traveling alone along this stretch.” Your finger traces the map. 

“Which means he’s watching them before he approaches.” Derek frowns. 

“From where?” Rossi asks. 

“The rest stops. He’s watching them leave from a vehicle that can blend in and follow them.”

“What about a trucker?” Reid asks, “That could be how he has the privacy to beat them so severely as well.”

That new development gives Garcia something new to work with and search for and wrap up the evening for the team. Hotch insists on everyone going back to the hotel to try and get some rest. Looking for a trucker who is familiar with the area and is capable of disappearing along a major highway at any moment isn’t easy. 

All week you and Aaron have been going everywhere together, it would seem the ride home won’t be any different. You can’t even be surprised by it anymore, you just watch the streetlights pass as he continues to drive in the direction of the hotel. 

He clears his throat softly, you automatically look over knowing he’s getting ready to say something. It takes another minute for the words to actually come out, his eyes darting to yours once before looking back at the road. 

“I’m sorry.” He quietly tosses out into the void of the car. 

“For?” Your brows tighten. 

“I never meant for Elle to end up at home alone that day.” He admits, you take a deep breath following his admission. You really didn’t think today would be the time to finally have this conversation. It’s been months, but it would seem he finally has the courage. “I think to myself every day how different things may have been if she wasn’t alone. If Anderson had stayed. If I had taken her home myself. Sent Morgan with her. All of it.”

You swallow, you can tell he means what he’s saying. He has considered the way things could have been different. She never would have killed someone later and given up her career. She could still be on this team. Maybe you wouldn’t be. 

“It’s not just because you’re here, even though that is definitely a reminder. For years I have regretted what happened to her.” 

A beat passes. The streetlights continue to flash overhead. He looks back again, finally. You can tell he’s bracing for impact. Preparing for the worst. Ready for you to rip him a new one. 

“We’ll never know what could have been. Neither of us can change the past.” You offer, surprising both of you. When you first started on the team you would’ve gone straight for the jugular. “I think you made mistakes, but at the end of the day so did she.”

You reminisce on when Elle had just joined the team. Her excitement was undeniable, rattling on and on about the people she was working with and the places she was traveling to. You heard about the infamous Hotchner who was too serious for his own good and terribly good at his job and leading the team. She was different after the case with the Fisher King, too eager to get back and prove herself. She wasn’t the same big sister you grew up with anymore. 

“She talked about you. She said you were a pain in the ass, but you always put the team first.” You admit, “She talked about everyone. Gideon. She would call after each case. Towards the end it was clear things had changed.” 

“She needed someone to blame.” His shoulders shrug slightly. 

“And you’re saying that person is you?”

“I was convenient.” He hesitates with his words, “It was justified.” 

“I wasn’t.” You admit, his eyes snapping over to yours, “Some would say I’ve been hostile toward you since I joined the team.” 

“Some?” He teases. 

“Morgan is afraid to leave us alone because he thinks I’ll do something to lose my job.” You roll your eyes. 

“You’re too good at this for that to happen.” He offers. 

“Good to know.” You look back at him, “I’ll keep pushing my luck then.” 

“Y/n.” He warns your name.

“Seriously.” You lean your head back against the headrest but continue looking in his direction, “Seeing you run this team first hand, I know what she meant when she first joined the team.”

“Which was?”

“You put the team first. You are the job.” 

He looks back again, his gaze opening studying you. His eyes look warmer than you’ve ever seen them. The passing streetlights give you a flash of the honey in the darkness. The rest of the drive goes faster than it should, too late for traffic. The hotel parking lot is full but he manages to get a spot before Morgan. 

“Funny,” You swing the door open and hop out, turning back to look at him, “Aaron Hotchner, you can talk and drive.” 

You slam the door behind you, walking toward the hotel. He watches every move, shaking his head with a smile. He can tell you're laughing too, he gives himself a few more seconds of that peace before heading in. 

-

The next morning, Garcia had come up with a list of twenty truckers that the team narrowed down to one. The police spotted his truck and trailer before he could get to victim number five, thanks to the work of you and the BAU. 

The team felt the shift in the weeks following Santa Fe. You had stopped being a problem that he needed to manage. Now you were something he wanted to understand. You still didn’t trust him completely, but you were starting to see why your sister had. It was getting easier day by day and case by case. 

When the team landed in Chicago, things had changed. You still didn’t particularly enjoy being reminded that Aaron Hotchner was your boss, and he still didn’t like to be challenged by their youngest profiler regularly. But, something had shifted. Your edges weren’t as sharp and the arguments had become almost… fun. Which the team was starting to notice.

“You’re assuming he’s geographically stable.” You look up from the map. 

“I’m assuming he has a preference.” Aaron sits on the opposite end of the conference table. 

“That’s not the same thing.”

He rolls his eyes, “It is if his preference is consistent.” He points at a map, “Three victims across three different neighborhoods.” 

“Four.” You correct automatically. 

“One was attempted.” 

“Still counts.” 

“Not for the geographic profile.” The edge of his lip is barely starting to curl up on one side. 

Your eyes narrow, “You’re being pedantic.”

“I’m being accurate.” 

“Those aren’t mutually exclusive.” You spin around in your chair, eager to get out of the stuffy room where the team was truly getting nowhere. 

Morgan looks between the two of you and thinks he’ll go unnoticed, “Are we solving a case or watching a married couple-”

“No.” You and Hotch cut him off simultaneously. Derek’s smile only widens and Emily covers her mouth. JJ shakes her head, pretending to read the file in front of her. Rossi just kept drinking his coffee while looking incredibly smug. 

You stop your slow spin to face the table again and point on the map, “The unsub has a comfort zone.” 

Hotch nods, “Agreed.”

You look up at him, “See?”

“That doesn’t mean you were right.” 

You smile, “I’ll take what I can get.” 

Hotch’s mouth twitches. 

“Alright, kid.” Morgan suddenly stands from the table and grabs his jacket off the back of it, “Let’s get you out of here before you combust from sitting in this room.” 

The table laughs and you shake your head. 

“Where are we going?” You stand. 

“The second victim’s apartment. The neighbor had to have seen or heard something the night of the attack.” 

You glance back at Hotch, “Try not to solve it without us.” 

He raises a brow, “I’ll do my best.” 

“Ooh, that sounds scary.” 

You follow Morgan right out the door to leave the precinct. The room is reeling at your departure and talk as if their boss wasn’t sitting right there. 

“Did you see that?” Emily leans toward JJ.

Hotch clears his throat, effectively ending the conversation. 

“We have an interview at the hospital in twenty minutes.” 

Rossi glances over at him, “Of course.” 

The case involved different people attacked in different parts of Chicago over the last four weeks. Three people died, but one managed to get away. Unfortunately she’s on a ventilator and in a coma and unable to point the team in the right direction. 

Across town, Rossi and Hotch sit in an SUV headed toward the hospital to interview a potential witness. It was clear Aaron was agitated by the comment and obvious observation earlier from the team. For the first several minutes of the car ride, neither spoke. 

“So.” Rossi starts. 

“No.” 

Rossi smiles, “I haven’t asked anything yet.” 

“I know what you’re going to ask.” 

“Do you?” He looks over at Aaron, his angry gaze is focused on the road. 

“Yes.” 

“And?”

“No.” 

Rossi chuckles, “Well you either don’t know the question or you’re a liar, Aaron.” 

He doesn’t say a word, but he does finally look over at the older man of the two for a brief second. 

“What’s going on with you and Greenaway?” 

“Nothing.” 

“Interesting.” 

Hotch looks back at him, “What?”

“It’s the answer I expected.” Rossi shrugs, looking straight ahead. 

“Because it’s true.” Aaron defends. 

Rossi nods thoughtfully, “Sure.” 

Hotch gives him another look. 

“Dave.” 

“I’m listening.” He smiles. 

“There’s nothing going on.” Aaron’s tone remains flat, but Rossi knows him too well. 

“I’ve known you for a long time, Aaron.” 

“She’s a member of the team.” Hotch reminds. 

“I know.” 

“She’s an excellent profiler.” 

“I know.” 

“She’s extremely challenging.” 

“I know.” 

“She’s still dealing with what happened to Elle.” 

Rossi nods, “And you feel responsible.” 

Hotch stays quiet for a few long seconds before answering, “Partially.” 

“Partially?” 

Hotch sighs, “I made mistakes, but there were things I didn’t know.” 

Rossi simply nods, letting him continue. 

“I don’t want her to think I don’t take what happened seriously.”

“You care what she thinks.” Rossi observes. 

“Of course I care what she thinks.” 

Rossi smiles, “There it is.” 

Hotch frowns again, “That doesn’t mean anything.” 

“It means something-”

“It means I’m responsible for the people on my team.” Aaron interrupts. 

“That’s not what I meant.”

Hotch knew that. He just didn’t want to say it, Rossi lets the silence sit for a moment. They’re getting close to the hospital now. 

“Aaron, you don’t argue with people you don’t respect. You shut them down” Rossi continues, “You don’t tease people you don’t like.” 

Another pause. 

“You certainly don’t smile at them.” Rossi chuckles because he can’t help himself. 

Hotch shakes his head, “She’s Elle’s younger sister. I’m her supervisor.” 

Rossi nods along, “And?” 

“That makes this complicated.” 

Rossi’s eyebrows rise, “Interesting choice of word.”

Hotch looks back at him, “Don’t.” 

Rossi holds up his hands in defense, “Fine. But for what it’s worth…”

Aaron waits. 

“Whatever this is, it seems healthier than what you two were doing before.” 

The buildings continue to pass in a blur. 

“I don’t know what it is.” 

“Aaron, that is probably the first honest answer you’ve given me.” 

-

It took hours for the team to all get back to the conference room later that evening. Everyone was paired off following different leads but coming back now for a bit before calling it a night. 

“The neighbor saw a dark SUV.” Derek explains. 

“Did they get a make and model?” Reid asks. 

You shake your head, “Too dark to tell, one of the streetlights is out. But she remembers the driver.” 

Hotch looks up at you, “Description?”

“Male, forties, dark hair, and a gray jacket.” 

Reid frowns, “Extremely broad.” 

You smile, “Give me a chance, boy genius. She also said he smiled and waved when she saw him outside.”

“Why does that matter?” Emily asks. 

“He was watching the neighbor.” You explain, “Which means he’s aware of witnesses.”

Hotch nods, “Which means he’s likely paying attention to the investigation.” 

Your eyes meet with that same little spark. That same familiar challenge. 

He nods again, “Good catch.” 

You smile, “Now it’s getting predictable.” 

“So are you.” His frown instantly lifts. 

“How?” You question. 

“You always have to have the last word.” 

You lean back in your seat, eager to say something. Anything. The longer you hold off the better, but it doesn’t last before you prove his point. You're surprised to hear him admit something he's observed about you so easily.

“Someone has to.” 

-

By midnight, the team was done. Not because the case had been solved, but because everyone was exhausted. The conference room at the Chicago field office had become a graveyard of coffee cups and takeout boxes. 

Hotch finally closes his file, “We’re done for the night.” 

“Thank god.” Morgan groans. 

Garcia’s voice comes in off the laptop, “I support this decision wholeheartedly.”

“You aren’t even here.” Emily looks at her.

“I’m here spiritually. Peace out my lovely crime fighters.” 

She signs out, the screen going black. 

You lean back in your chair, “I can keep going.” 

“No.” Hotch denies, “You’ve had three cups of coffee.” 

“Four.” You correct. 

Morgan laughs, “That’s worse.” 

“I am functioning perfectly fine.” You argue. 

Hotch raises a brow, “You tried to interrogate a vending machine twenty minutes ago.” 

“It wouldn’t give me my money back.” You frown. 

“You called it an accomplice.” 

You squint, “It was behaving suspiciously.” 

JJ shakes her head, “Nobody likes a sleep-deprived Greenaway.” 

Rossi grabs his coat, “She’s particularly argumentative.” 

You point at him, “I’m always argumentative.” 

Hotch looks at you, “That’s true.” 

Your eyes narrow, “See?” 

He almost smiles, “Delirious.” 

“I am not delirious!” 

“Vending machine.” Hotch blinks, “Conspiracy theory.” 

“All I know is I have two less dollars and no snacks.” You shrug. 

Morgan comes up and claps a hand on your shoulder, “Come on Greenaway, let’s get you to bed before you start profiling the elevator.” 

“Is the elevator also going to rob me?” You swat his hand away, “I can walk, thank you very much.”

The hotel was quiet, everyone disappeared into their room within minutes. You showered, changed, set your alarm, and got into bed. Your eyes were heavy enough that you didn’t even remember falling asleep. It lasted approximately three hours. 

At 3:47 a.m. you bolt upright in bed. 

You settle onto your back, looking up at the ceiling. Your mind taking you through too many loops to fall back asleep now. The neighbor. The SUV. The witness statements. Dark hair. Grey jacket. The wave. 

You had been looking at the wrong part. 

You climb out of bed, pulling on jeans and a sweatshirt. Your shoes barely make it on your feet as you grab your badge. You look at the clock one more time. 3:56 a.m. Everyone else on the team is asleep. 

You hesitate before leaving your room, walking down the hall two doors. You stop outside of Hotch’s door. Your hand hovers over the wood, debating if this is really worth waking him up in the middle of the night. 

“This is a terrible idea.” You mutter to yourself before forcing your hand to knock lightly. Nothing for a few seconds so you knock again. Seconds later you hear the lock turn, the door opens barely four inches. 

Hotch is standing there, clearly disheveled. T-shirt and sweatpants, his eyes barely open. 

“Greenaway?” He blinks, “It’s four in the morning.” 

“I know.” 

“Why are you here?” He looks around the hall behind you. 

“I figured something out.” You pause before adding a quieter “I think.”

He pinches the bridge of his nose, “Of course you did. And it can’t wait until the sun is up?”

“If I'm right, every minute matters.” 

He drops his hand, he knows how true that is more than anyone. 

“I want to go over all the witness statements from each victim again. I think we missed the unsub.” 

He stares at you, his mind processing at a fraction of what it normally does. You can finally take in how long and dark his lashes are with his slow blinks. 

“He isn’t trying to hide, he’s gloating. He can kill someone and wave goodbye and get away with it. He would get the biggest thrill by talking to us directly as a witness.”

His eyes sharpen. 

“Do you trust me?” You ask. 

“Yes.” He answers without hesitation. You’re not sure if you should blame it on the sleep deprivation or thank it.

“Okay. Get dressed.” 

The streets of Chicago were nearly empty. You sit in the passenger seat, Aaron drives with one hand on the wheel. All the lights are green, few other people out on the road yet. 

“You know, you’re a lot easier to convince when you’re half asleep.” 

He sighs, half a yawn, “Yeah…” 

You snort a laugh, “You’re not mad?”

His head is actually resting against the headrest, but he turns toward you for a second. 

“You had a breakthrough.” 

“At four in the morning.” 

His mouth twitches, “Every minute matters.” 

You openly smile and he matches it for a second. You catch it before he can turn back toward the road. 

“Was that a smile?” 

“No.” 

“Wow, you must really be tired.” 

“Yeah, and you’re using it against me.” He jokes and you actually laugh. He fails at hiding his smile. 

“Very effective.” 

For nearly two hours after arriving back at the station the two of you go over all the statements. Again and again, using your own resources to look up backgrounds since Garcia is asleep states away. 

A few officers looked surprised to see the BAU walking in at four in the morning. Hotch didn’t explain and you didn’t either. It was almost six when you finally stopped on one of the witnesses. You sit up straighter as everything starts to click. 

“Wait.” 

Hotch looks up, “What?”

“Here.” You get up and read it out loud, “Marcus Bell. Forty five and works for the city doing maintenance.”

He takes the report from your hand so he can look it over himself.

You reach for another picture, “The city maintenance crew wears grey jackets.” 

You hand Hotch the picture and he stares it over, “That’s him.” 

He’s already reaching for his phone. He makes the call and detectives are moving within minutes. Marcus Bell was at home, his vehicle parked on the street outside. A search warrant was already being prepared, and the team hadn’t even arrived yet. 

At seven thirty, the rest of the team walks into the field office with coffee in hand. They pause when they see cops everywhere, moving far too quickly for how early it still is. 

Emily walks in behind him, “What happened?”

An officer hurried past, “Marcus Bell was just arrested.” 

Morgan blinks, “Who?”

“The BAU got him.” The officer tosses over his shoulder, still in a rush. 

Derek throws up his hands, “Okay, now I’m really confused!” 

The team moves to the conference room they had been occupying. You and Hotch are sitting at the table, surrounded by files. Both of you look completely exhausted. 

You look up, “Morning.”

“Apparently we should have told the two of you not to solve the case without us.” Rossi looks between the two of you. 

“What did you do?” Derek questions.

Hotch looks up, “Found the unsub.” 

“When?” Emily shouts, “How?” 

Aaron looks over at you, “She had an idea.” 

“At four in the morning.” You add. 

Derek turns toward Hotch, “You let her wake you up at four?” 

Hotch stares back before a small shrug, “She had a theory. It paid off.” 

Outside of the conference room, officers escort Marcus Bell past in handcuffs. The case was over. The families would have answers and a dangerous man was off the streets. 

You lean back in your chair, your neck resting on the back of it. 

“You should sleep.” Hotch voices. 

You smile, “So should you.” 

“That’s an order.” 

Now you snap your head back up to look at him. A small smile on his face. 

“Bossy.” You shake your head, “Now who’s delirious?”

You laugh and Hotch tries not to, but fails. Everyone notices. 

-

Six weeks after the Chicago case, everyone was beyond pretending they didn’t notice things. You found yourself sitting near him on the plane more and more. He somehow always knew when you needed another file, before you could even ask. 

Morgan nearly choked at the table during a briefing when Hotch slid you his muffin when your stomach rumbled loud enough for the whole room to hear. Neither of you acknowledged what he had just done. 

The banter was still constant. 

You were still at your apartment when you got the call. It was 6:14 a.m. Hotch barely got out a handful of words before he was hanging up and calling the next team member. 

It only takes you less than twenty minutes from that call to make it into the bullpen. Somehow Hotch and JJ are already here. The rest of the team doesn’t take long to show up, Hotch marches out of his office. 

“Everybody to the conference room.” 

Morgan looks up between everyone, “What’s going on?” 

He doesn’t get an answer until the team is sitting around the table. 

“Bomb threat?”

Hotch nods, “DC Metro received an anonymous call at 5:47 this morning.” 

“What was the threat?” You look up at him. 

“One bomb.” He pauses, “At first.” 

JJ frowns, “At first?” 

“The caller said there would be multiple devices.” 

Morgan sits forward, “How many?” 

“Three confirmed.” Aaron swallows, the room stays silent. 

Rossi eventually looks over at Hotch, “What are the targets?”

“That’s what we’re trying to figure out.” 

Garcia pulls up the audio file of the call. 

“It’s automated.” She types rapidly, “The initial call was directed to the bomb squad for metro, that’s the department he was trying to reach.” 

‘You built your city on graves.’ the voice robotically speaks, ‘At noon, four, and twelve they will need to expand. This city will mourn.’ 

The dial clicks off, not leaving you guys with much. 

“He gave us a schedule?” Reid questions with the raise of his brows. 

“No,” you shake your head, “He’s giving us a countdown.” 

Hotch nods, “He’s controlling the response.” 

“He’s not trying to hide the bombs.” You continue. 

Hotch follows instantly. 

“He’s announcing them.” His face growing more serious, “Because he wants the city looking for them.” 

Rossi leans forward, “Which means?”

“He wants us distracted.” You look back at Hotch again, eyes meeting.

The same thought at the same time. 

“There’s a fourth target.” 

-

Within two hours, the BAU had a task force assembled. Bomb technicians were ready all over the city as highly populated areas were being thoroughly inspected. The first device was found beneath a parked car right outside a government office building. 

It was capable of causing significant casualties and there’s only reason to believe he’ll get bigger and bigger with it. The city was shutting down streets and evacuating buildings. Somewhere, the unsub was watching it all. 

Hotch walks back into the room after getting on a call, “What’s our timeline?” 

“First device is secure.” JJ answers. 

“Second target is still unknown, but we bought ourselves some time if he’s still following his own timeline.” You continue. 

He nods, “We need to assume the second device is still in place.” 

Reid looks up from the map, “We need to consider what other government buildings he’s targeting.” 

Your gut pulls at you. Screaming to speak up, even though you don’t have the evidence to back it. Screw it. 

“Actually, I think that’s too obvious now.” 

The team all looks at you, giving you their attention and the opportunity to continue. You walk over to the map of DC on the wall. 

“He wants us to think politically motivated.” 

“But?” Rossi questions. 

“He chose the first location because of what it represents.” 

Hotch watches you, tilting his head, “Not what it does.” 

You nod, “Exactly. What if his second target is about quantity? Where would he have the most potential casualties? The biggest fallout?”

It was closer than anyone had wanted, but at 3:38 p.m., the second bomb was found. You had started to sweat thinking you maybe led the team down the wrong path, but it paid off when it was found inside a Metro station. 

The evacuation was chaotic, forcing thousands of people out onto the streets. The bomb squad moved in and disarmed it within minutes. 

This officially confirmed for the team that these targets weren’t random at all. The first was a federal building. The second was public infrastructure. 

“What connects them?” Morgan asks out loud to the room, not to anyone in particular. 

Reid points to the locations again, “Both were built during major periods of urban expansion.” 

“So?” Rossi frowns. 

“Both were built after major government reconstruction projects.” Garcia notes, eyes glued to the screen in front of her, “Post-war redevelopment that became federal expansion.”

“So he’s not really targeting buildings or people.” You sit up straighter. 

“He’s targeting history.” Hotch crosses his arms over his chest and leans back against the table. 

“Maybe.” You turn back toward him, “We know he’s getting angrier with each one of his failures.” 

“You think he’ll escalate?” Emily asks. 

“I think he’ll do anything to make sure his surprise finale goes off without a hitch.” 

-

The third device was in a parking garage for a government housing complex. 

The team should be celebrating. You guys knew better than that. 

The fourth target was the one that actually mattered to him. The team has spent the entire day pissing him off, if he didn’t have a fourth he does now. 

“We’ve already evacuated three highly crowded areas, what would be bigger and more dense?” You think outloud, “Reid, any concerts or big games tonight?” 

He shakes his head as the words are still leaving your mouth, “The Nationals had a game but it’s already been postponed.”

JJ gestures with her hands as she speaks, “Where is everyone on a Friday night?”

Hotch’s eyes widen, “The National Mall.” 

The room goes silent, he reaches for his phone. 

“Get every available unit to the National Mall.” 

The team is already in motion, you pair off with Hotch. Sirens were starting to fill the streets. The clock was still counting down, but this time you didn’t know when it would stop. Somewhere up ahead, there was a bomb big enough to change the city forever. 

Maybe for the first time since joining the BAU, you weren’t thinking about Elle. Or Aaron. The only thing on your mind was all of the people you needed to save. In the driver's seat next to you Aaron can’t help but think the exact same. 

It was too crowded. 

Tourists. Families. Joggers. Couples. Photographers. 

Thousands of people unaware that somewhere there was a clock ticking. 

You look around the crowded area, scanning faces and trying to spot red flags. Hotch does the same, looking in the other direction. There’s a table set up with cliche touristy magnets and T-shirts. No one is standing with the items. Never in your life have you seen a street vendor abandon their stuff so carelessly. 

“Hotch?” You ask, nodding in its direction. 

It doesn’t take long for him to catch onto what you’re thinking. The two of you move closer, a large tub sits under the table. You look up at Hotch and he nods so you carefully take off the lid. The bomb is hidden inside, time flashing down and two many wires to count. 

He drops beside you, “It’s too big to move.” 

You look up at the crowd, there’s too many people and with the size of this no one within blocks would stand a chance. 

“Less than two minutes.” You tie your hair back and Aaron reaches for his phone to call Morgan. 

“Hotch?” He answers instantly. 

He hesitates for a second, “We found the device.”

“Where are you?” Derek pants, “How much time?”

“Street vendor stand by the Lincoln Memorial.” 

“A minute and twenty-six seconds.” You answer Morgan’s other question. 

He sighs again, “I’m not close enough.” 

He’s running, you can tell by the sound coming through on the phone. 

You look up at Hotch, his eyes already studying you. 

“Talk us through it.” You decide. 

Morgan’s rough inhale tells you he doesn’t love this idea either. 

“Don’t touch anything yet.” 

“Too late.” 

“Of course you did, Greenaway.” 

“Focus.” Aaron reminds. 

This device was more sophisticated than the previous bombs. Multiple circuits and backup power. Morgan gave careful instructions step by step. Between that and Aaron’s reassuring nod, your hands stopped shaking. 

“There should be a blue wire.” 

“There’s three.” 

“Great.” 

Hotch stares at the timer, watching the precious seconds pass by. 

“One should go underneath to the main housing.” 

You follow the wire all the way under, “I see it.” 

“That’s your primary trigger.” 

“What about the secondary?” Hotch asks. 

“If she disconnects the wrong one, it accelerates.” 

You huff, “That’s reassuring.” 

“You’re doing great.” Aaron’s voice comes out softer than you’ve ever heard. 

You cut the cord, the timer continues to drop. 

“Forty seconds.” Hotch announces. 

“Next step, Morgan.” You demand, sweat building at your temples. 

“Now the second circuit. There should be another panel of wires.” 

Tourists all over laugh and continue taking pictures. Completely oblivious. 

“There.” Hotch points his hand coming over yours to guide it toward the panel, “Red and yellow, Morgan.” 

It takes a few seconds for him to answer.

“Yellow.” 

00:19 flashes in your face. 

Derek says it with enough confidence you cut this one without hesitation. Nothing. You both stare at the timer. 

“Why isn’t it stopping?” 

Morgan’s voice goes quiet, “Hotch, there’s a manual trigger. That’s the last step.” 

Your blood goes cold. 

“Where?”

“Underneath.”

He reaches under the bomb and with some reaching and the flip of a switch a few seconds later the timer finally stops. 

00:06 flashes. 

“Got it.” Hotch pants.

“You’re clear.” Derek cheers, Hotch hangs up the phone and puts it back in his pocket.

Hotch sits back on his heels and you do the same. For a second neither of you move, you start to laugh. He looks over, a smile growing. He pulls your side in against him in a hug. You’ve never touched him like this. You’ll probably have to blame this on adrenaline. 

“That was fun.” You laugh. 

“Don’t ever say that again.” 

You smile and pull back so you can look at him, he’s still closer than he’s ever been. His eyes fall down to your lips for a split second. Your heart starts beating faster than it had been when the bomb was still active. 

“Aaron Hotchner, you were scared-”

A gunshot cracks through the air. Hotch looks up immediately, your body drops to the ground. He’s quick to the draw, reaching for the gun at his waist. The man doesn’t get off another shot, Aaron’s impeccable aim settling the score. 

Blood was rapidly blooming across your shoulder and spreading across your chest. Hotch is on his knees at your side yelling for an ambulance, your eyes flutter and you see him in flashes. His voice echoes your name but it sounds distant. His hand is held against the wound. 

“Stay with me.” 

You manage to focus your eyes on his for another second. You hold it as long as possible, but the weight on your eyelids starts to win. 

Daniel Erickson was a thirty-nine year old former city engineer. He had no criminal record or any psychiatric history. No obvious extremist affiliation. He had been present for the bomb, waiting for it to explode. He intended to die with it. Some would say he did. 

The profile was wrong, everyone had assumed he wanted to witness the destruction. In the end he wanted to be part of it. 

The team approaches as the paramedics get you on a gurney. You’re out of it at this point, the team watches them rush you away. Hotch remains hot on their heels, his shirt stained in your blood. He doesn’t even look up at them as he passes, his focused locked on you. They watch all the way until Hotch disappears into the ambulance after you. 

Morgan looks over to the body bag being zipped up, “How did we miss that?”

Rossi simply shakes his head, forcing his hands into his pockets. 

“We didn’t have enough information.”

Derek looks to where your ambulance has now disappeared. 

“She could die.” 

“I know,” Rossi reaches out to pat his shoulder carefully, “I know. 

-

The hospital waiting room had never felt so small and it had been nearly four hours. Four hours since you had been rushed through the doors and disappeared deeper where Aaron wasn’t allowed to follow anymore. The team joined him not long after he finally sat down. 

The bullet had entered high in your chest, just below the shoulder. 

The surgeon had already been out to update the team, “If the bullet had been two inches to the right, she wouldn’t have had a chance.” 

Two inches. 

That short distance replayed in Aaron’s mind a thousand times. 

Two inches. 

Dried blood was still on Aaron’s shirt. He hadn’t noticed, but everyone else had. Nobody said anything. The team had gone unusually quiet. They had grown used to you filling most conversations, and of course getting the last word in. 

Now, no one had anything to say. Even Penelope. 

Rossi sits across from Hotch, two untouched coffees sitting between them. Morgan stands near the window, somehow unable to sit even still. Reid was trying to read, but found himself stuck on the same page. Emily was outside, pretending not to have a stress cigarette. JJ was pacing, her phone never leaving her hand. 

None of them were good at waiting. Especially for one of their own. Especially for you. You had become one of their own without question. 

Morgan was protective of you from the beginning. JJ took you under her wing. You and Emily had developed a beautiful friendship and witty banter that never ceased. Reid was fascinated by your ability to argue against his statistics with remarkable persuasion. Rossi had started lumping you in with his daughter as just another one of his girls. 

And Aaron. 

He hadn’t allowed himself to say what you had become to him. Not even privately to himself. He knew he cared. He knew part of him was obsessed. He’d known for weeks. 

Morgan breaks the silence, “How long has it been?” 

JJ checks the clock, “Almost four hours.”

“That’s a long surgery.” His jaw tightens. 

“She’ll be okay.” Garcia tries to reassure, but it’s not even a fraction of her typical positivity. 

“You don’t know that.” Reid says, without looking up from his book. Still on the same page. 

“No.” Garcia swallows, focusing on her knitting needles with tears in her eyes, “But I’m going to keep on saying it.”

It took another hour for the surgeon to appear. Everyone stood at once, the doctor looked exhausted but they could all see the good news on her face. 

“She’s stable.” 

The entire room sighed in relief. 

“Oh, thank god!” Garcia cries. 

The doctor continues, “The bullet fractured her clavicle. We repaired the damage and removed the bullet. She’s going to be in a sling for several weeks, possibly longer depending on how the fracture heals.” 

Hotch nods, closing his eyes briefly. 

“She also lost a significant amount of blood.” 

His eyes open. 

“But she’s stable. She was extremely lucky.” The doctor nods, “She’ll be unconscious for a while, the anesthesia is still wearing off.” 

“Can we see her?” JJ asks. 

She nods, “One at a time.” 

The team looks to one person. 

“Hotch.” Morgan states. 

He looks at him, almost embarrassed by how badly he needed it. How easily they all saw that. 

“You need to see her.” 

He hesitates, Rossi gives him an encouraging nod. 

“Thank you.”

Your room is dim, you look too small beneath the hospital blankets in bed. Your arm secured in a sling, and wires all over you. Monitors. An IV. He stops just inside the door. For a moment, he couldn’t move. 

You don’t look like the person he’s come to know well over the last few months. The woman who argued over everything. The woman who woke him up at four in the morning. The woman who stole coffee and lied about it. The one who gave him his first real smile in the car. 

But it is you. 

The thought hit him so hard he almost stopped breathing. 

Eventually he can move again, he pulls the chair closer to your bed. He sits slowly, his hand hovering over yours before taking it. 

“I-” He clears his throat, his voice sounded strange, “I don’t know if you can hear me.” 

He looks at your face. 

“But you scared the hell out of me.” He swallows, “I was terrified.” 

The monitor continues its steady beeps, he looks back at your hands. 

“I don’t know what we’re doing.” A humorless smile touches his face, “I’m not even sure what this is.” 

He shakes his head, his voice growing softer. 

“But something changed. Somewhere along the way.”

He looks back at you. 

“I look for you, when I walk into any room.” He pauses, “I started wondering what you thought before making decisions.” 

His thumb brushes the back of your hand. 

“I enjoy arguing with you.” 

He smiles faintly. 

“That’s probably the most concerning part of all of this.” 

He sighs again and reaches out his free hand to brush hair off your forehead. 

“I care about you more than I should.” He admits, “But I-”

The door opens and he stops himself, looking over and freezing. 

Elle Greenaway stands in the doorway. 

Her eyes immediately go to you, concerned for her younger sister. Then they jump to Hotch. Then to the joined hands. Her expression hardens within seconds. 

“Aaron.” 

He stands, “Elle.” 

If Hotch had been paying attention earlier he would’ve heard JJ say she got ahold of Elle and she was getting on the first flight. Even if he had been listening, he still would’ve been just as surprised to see her standing in the doorway after all these years. 

He needs to thank JJ. That technically should have been his job, but he doubts Elle would’ve taken his call. 

She walks into the room, not saying anything else yet. She stands on the other side of your bed. Looking at you again, concern all over her face. Then she looks back at him. She gives him an unimpressed look and it sinks his gut. 

“I begged her not to join this team.” 

Aaron’s jaw tightens, “I know.” 

“I told her this would happen.” 

He looks down at you for a second, letting Elle continue. 

“She made her own decision.” Aaron says finally. 

“I know,” her eyes sharpen, “Is that supposed to make me feel better?” 

“No.” 

“Because it doesn’t.”

Hotch nods. 

Elle looks back down at you, “It’s only a matter of time with this team.” 

Hotch looks back at her. 

“What?”

“Before someone ends up in a hospital.” Her voice cracks slightly. Her expression shifts again, trying to hide how scared she is. There you lay, in a hospital bed unmoving. 

Tears gather in Elle’s eyes, she takes it all in. Aaron steps away, grabbing the other chair and moving it to the other side of the bed so she can sit. He grabs a box of tissues from the table on the far side of the room and sets them down within reach without saying a word. 

She waits until he sits back down in his original chair before speaking again. 

“What are you doing here?” 

His eyes fall back to you for a second, “I care about her.” 

Elle goes still. 

“I care about her more than I should.” 

“How long?” 

He blinks, “What?”

“How long have the two of you been together?”

“We haven’t-”

“Don’t lie.” She interrupts. 

“No.” He shakes his head, “It was just starting. Something. I think.” 

He feels more pathetic about it the longer she stares at him. 

“You love her.” 

He freezes. 

“I didn’t say that.” 

“You didn’t have to.” 

Elle’s expression grew complicated. A mix of anger and protective instinct, but some of the hostility faded. She looks back at you, then back at him. 

“Does she know?”

“No.” His voice is barely audible. 

She nods slowly, “You need to tell her.” 

“She’s going to kill me.” 

Elle smiles. He’d forgotten what it looked like. He can now recognize how similar it is to yours. 

“Hopefully.” She bites, the smile that remains tells him it’s at least teasing now. 

For the first time all night, Aaron smiled. 

-

It takes a few more hours for you to wake up. Your eyes are still closed, but you can hear people arguing. It isn’t loud, but it’s definitely two people disagreeing. You can’t quite get your eyes open yet, but you’re desperately trying to figure out where you are. 

Everything hurts. Your shoulder feels like a truck drove through it. Your mouth is dry and your head feels heavy. 

“She’s been chasing this team to prove a point.” Elle mutters “I think she sees what I did as a failure. She’s trying to fix what I broke.” 

Aaron’s brows furrow, knowing that is far from the truth. He knows you admire Elle, you’d never see what happened as her failure. 

“Do you ever think she’s doing this for you?” He questions carefully. 

Your eyes slowly open, the ceiling is white and there's a machine beeping beside you. Elle is sitting on one side and Aaron is sitting on the other. 

Both turn immediately to look at you. You blink a couple times. 

Your voice comes out hoarse, “This can’t be real.” 

Both of them freeze. 

“Hell is significantly more creative than I anticipated.” You mutter, your throat dry making it hard for your words to come out evenly. 

Elle’s mouth falls open, “You’re awake.” 

You look at her, “Potentially. This isn’t very convincing.” 

Elle smiles and Aaron’s mouth twitches. 

“You two in the same room?”

“Yeah, whatever.” Elle shakes her head. “You’re in the hospital.” 

Aaron finally gains the courage to say something, “How’re you feeling?” 

“Like I got shot.” 

“You did.” 

“Thank you, Dr. Hotchner.” 

Elle smiles, “Well it’s nice to confirm no neurological damage, still sarcastic as ever.” 

“How much do you remember?” He asks. 

Your face falls a little, “The bomb. You. That’s it.” 

His face tightens. He looks awful, like he had aged ten years overnight. 

“You were shot by the bomber. He was there waiting for it to go off.” 

“We didn’t have it in our profile that he would kill himself.” 

He shakes his head. 

“Your clavicle was fractured.” Elle twists a piece of hair away from your face. 

A soft knock at the door has them both turning, you can’t move much yet but the team comes into view. One by one filtering in, starting with Morgan. 

“There she is.” He grins. 

You smile, “Hi, Morgan.” 

He crosses the room and carefully hugs you from your good side. 

“Don’t do that again.” 

You wince, “Just for you, Derek.” 

He pulls back and immediately looks like he could cry. 

“Seriouisly.” 

You squeeze his hand, “I’m okay.” 

“You scared the hell out of us.” 

Emily, JJ, Reid, and Garcia go next. Everyone is gentle, Garcia ends up needing to be pulled away by Derek after her tears start getting on you. 

“You should know better,” Rossi leans down to hug you, pressing a kiss to the top of your head, “It’s cruel to scare an old man like that.” 

You smile, “Sorry, Rossi.” 

“Be careful, bella.” 

The room was full of people who all cared so much about you. They had spent hours waiting in hard plastic chairs after the longest day, but they stay as long as the doctors let them. They ask about the pain. They tell you about Daniel and what ended up happening. Hotch remains quiet when it gets to the retelling of everything that happened after the bomb was diffused. 

He stands toward the back of the room, backing off when everyone else came in. You catch his gaze every once and awhile, each time something passes between the two of you. 

“How are we feeling?” The doctor asks loudly, entering and weaving through the small crowd you’ve gathered. 

“Everyone keeps asking me that.” You sigh. 

“That’s because you’re alive.” 

You nod. 

“Which also means, you still need rest.” She starts waving everyone to the door, “Everyone can come back a little bit later. One at a time again.” 

There were groans, everyone shifting up off of chairs and the stiff couch. The doctor smiled, “You guys will have plenty of time to come back and visit.” 

Derek steps forward and reaches out for a fist bump on your good side, “Call if you need anything.” 

You nod. Everyone begins filing out with various goodbyes. Elle and Hotch were the last ones, he reaches for his jacket, ready to leave you alone with your sister for a while. 

“Actually,” Elle reaches out a hand to stop him, “I’m going to run to Y/n’s apartment to get you some clothes for when they let you out of here.” Aaron looks at her and she smirks at him. She digs out your spare key, “I’ll be back in a bit.”

“Bring back food,” You call after her, “Hospital food is nasty!”

She waves a hand in your direction and walks out without confirming. Like a true sister, you know she’ll bring something anyway. 

“Staying?” You ask, watching him hesitate in returning to the seat he had occupied most of the night. 

He sits down, moving it a little closer. 

“Staying.” He confirms. 

“Should I be concerned with how well you and Elle are getting along?”

He huffs a laugh out his nose, “Probably.” 

You smile, wincing slightly when you try to turn your head. He moves even closer, reaching out cautiously. 

“Don’t move too much.” 

“You’re still worried.” You observe. 

“I think I’m going to be worried about you for a long time.” He admits. 

“Did you stay?” You ask. 

“All night.” 

“Why?”

Because you’re on his team. Because he’s responsible for you.Because that’s just who he is. “Because I couldn’t leave.” 

You go quiet and he takes your hand. Very carefully. His thumb sweeps across your knuckles. 

“I thought I watched you die.” He flinches, clearly replaying it in his mind, “I realized I care about you more than I should. I love you. And I am nowhere near ready to know what my life looks like without you in it.” 

He continues before you can respond. 

“I don’t know when it happened. I don’t know when you stopped being the person who challenged every decision I make and became…” 

He exhales. 

“Someone I can’t imagine losing.” 

You stare at him, he squeezes your hand. A small smile appears on your face. 

“That’s inconvenient.” 

His mouth twitches. 

“Very.” 

Your grin widens, “You really love me?”

He nods earnestly, “Yes.” 

“That’s unfortunate.” 

“Why?”

“Because I'm still going to argue with you constantly.” 

This finally breaks a real smile onto his face. Your cheeks hurt from how long they’ve been pulling. 

“I know.” He nods. 

“And you’re still my boss.” 

“I am.” 

“Are you sure you’re ready to argue at work and at home?”

“Looking forward to it.”

Your smile softens, “I love you too.” 

Aaron’s breath caught. You squeeze his hand this time, he pulls it up to his lips so he can press a kiss to the back of it. 

“This feels too good to be true.” he sighs in relief, getting up and pressing a kiss to your temple, then to your hairline, and then the top of your head. 

“What?” You grin, “Scared because the last time we had a moment I was shot?” 

He huffs a surprised laugh before looking in pain, “Please, no more jokes about you being shot.” 

“No promises.” You smirk, “That’s the only fun part of being shot.” 

He shakes his head, “You’re going to keep me on my toes.” 

“All ten of ‘em.”

an// omg you guys, I am so sorry to all my other work because THIS has been consuming my brain. Holy fuck this was wild lol. I am sorry in advance if Elle isn’t super accurate, I wanted to go back and rewatch her episodes prior to this but this just poured out lol. Also lmk if the italics piss anyone off, i like them but i know not everyone does in a fic. 

Nights spent pacing the garden of Smurf’s house, bare feet on the cold ground, counting his steps to keep his mind occupied. It never did. He tried to outrun the memories of his actions, to drown his pain at the bottom of the pool. But on those nights, his torment wore the faces of his ghosts.

First there was Julia, then Cath, quickly followed by Baz. And Smurf. Always Smurf. A cycle of misery that makes his ribcage feel as though it might collapse under the violent pounding of his heart.

Some days, seated at a table with his family, Andrew had felt he could scream until his throat gave out, and no one would have heard. He imagined falling into the pool, slipping under the surface, water closing over his head and staying there, lungs burning just long enough for the noise to finally fucking stop, no one coming to pull him out because nobody would have noticed he disappeared.

There were moments when the thought settled heavy in his bones: he would not survive another day in his family, he didn’t want to. He kept straining toward a bond that no longer reached his end…if it ever did.

Over the years, Andrew had grown accustomed to his role. Weird Pope, Creepy Pope, the family’s guard dog: asking for nothing, obeying to the beatings, the killings and never, never, mentioning the ghosts hunting the corner of his eyes each night.

He remembered Smurf’s voice, years ago. “Pop him a few pills and he’ll follow your commands, baby.” She said it to Baz like it was nothing, like he was nothing. This was before prison, before Andrew felt deep in his bones that the other half of his soul left this merciless Earth without him.

Sometimes he let himself think about Julia, since no one else did. He hoped that at least one of them had finally found peace.

Then, you happened.

And Andrew can’t make sense of it, no matter how much he turns it over in his head, how a girl like you ends up being friends with Craig and therefore, near the Cody brothers: you are sweet, kind, nothing but soft edges, and innocent. Almost like the world has spared you the knowledge of what men like him are capable of.

Whenever you are in the house, his gaze follows you from room to room. He tells himself that it’s vigilance and habit that pushes him to act like that. Except he doesn’t need to memorize the way you tuck your hair behind your ear, or how he can recognize the distinct sound of your footsteps in a heartbeat.

He learns and catalogues each of your reactions: the faint frown of your nose at the smell of a particular brand of coffee (gone from the house and replaced before sunset), the soft curl of your lips whenever you are kindly refusing his offer to make you a sandwich.

(He wouldn’t be bothered if you took a bite of his.)

To see you is a special kind of hell and an indescribable heaven, like pressing on a bruise just to make sure it still hurts.

Lately, you shift the air of the house by simply existing in it. Your laugh, in the rooms where Smurf had once lived, seems to almost cleanse the walls of her memory.  And Andrew knows. He knows that’s why Craig is friends with you. Because each day, the sun seems to finally be able to reach the house, even his own room.

It frightens him.

His body instinctively adjusts around your presence, his mind reassessing new rules (the glasses on the bottom shelf so you can have access to them, checking how many drinks you have at Deran’s bar). He memorizes your schedule, notes which books you are bringing with you in your bag, times how long it takes you to get home, parks far enough that you can’t notice his truck but close enough that he can reach you if something goes wrong.

All his life, Andrew had survived by wanting nothing. By hollowing himself out until the obedience Smurf wanted from him fitted neatly inside his ribs, because wanting had always been a liability, a weakness someone could press a knife into.

But now…now that life seems finally good and breathable, that he has the skatepark and his siblings and an almost regular life (if one exists for men like him) without Smurf’s claws on his throat, Andrew finds himself cornered by a simple, terrifying truth: he wants you.

He swallows it. Buries it deep inside, trying to drown it with numbness and even more repetitive actions when you are near: chopping, tidying the house, scrubbing counters that are already clean, fixing hinges that doesn’t squeak… Anything to keep his hands busy so they don’t reach for you.

No, Andrew Cody has never been able to sleep properly.

──────────

You remember telling yourself that the house felt wrong before you ever understood why.

Craig had asked you to come meet his brothers and from his tone alone, you knew it was a big deal. That something was at stake.

You showed up at four sharp, even if he hadn’t given you a specific time (something you would soon realize was typical of Craig), a paper bag pressed to your chest, palms already sweaty. You stood outside for a full minute before knocking, taking a few deep breaths, and stepping over the threshold with a smile as he wrapped you in a hug with his tall frame before dragging you straight into the kitchen.

That’s when you saw him.

Broad shoulders, dark curls on a face held tight, back straight and hands braced on his thighs, his posture so still you almost thought he was a mannequin.

“My brother Pope,” Craig said. “Don’t mind him, he almost doesn’t bite.”

His gaze was already on you, unblinking, steady in a quiet unnerving way, like he was committing every detail to memory, a look so intense it coaxed words out of you before you could stop them.

“H-Hi,” you stuttered, giving your name as you tried to stay composed. You extended your hand toward him, and he stared at it for a moment. The pause stretched long enough for doubt to creep up your spine (maybe he didn’t shake hands? maybe you had already broken some invisible rule?).

You swallowed, blood rising to your cheeks, drawing your hand back to clutch the paper bag as you tried not to stammer on your words. “I brought pastries. I didn’t know what you all would like so…I kind of…guessed,” you hated how small your voice sounded.

He stayed silent, brows faintly furrowed, as if he was processing what you had just said. Then he nodded. “Thank you.”

His tone was quiet, almost a hum, pulled from the depth of his chest, the sound settling low in your stomach, warm and heavy, and your first thought (unwelcome and strange) was how that vibration would feel beneath your palm.

Craig sighed with desperation at the conversation with a quiet “Stop being weird, bro!” while his other younger brother, unbothered, simply ignored the awkwardness, nodded as an introduction and handed beers around.

It was a welcome distraction, the cold liquid sliding down your throat, and buying you time to think on what to say next, but the youngest, Deran, beat you to it, asking you about your job and how good a surfer you were.

“You fuckin’ with me? You live in Oceanside and can’t stand on a board?” he laughed and couldn’t stop the slight condescending tone from his voice. “No worry, me or mister El Craigo here will introduce you to it. You’ll only swallow, like…a gallon of water before you get it.”

“Oh, um…I don’t think…”  you tried to say, though it was mostly ignored.

Pope hadn’t looked away once, hand gripping tightly enough on the beer that you could see his knuckles whitening. There was something careful about the way he held himself: still, contained.

Your eyes met his again and you smiled tentatively.

“Um…Pope,” you started, uncertain, the name tasting strange on your tongue. “Can I ask you…”

“Andrew.” He interrupted, the tone firm enough to stop you mid-breath.

You suddenly became aware of your heartbeat, your chest lifting as it rattled against your ribs. Your gaze dropped at the intensity. Had you done something wrong? You suddenly felt foolish for the pastries, for the outstretched hand, for trying so hard, and an absurd urge to apologize rose in your throat, even if you didn’t know what for.

When you looked up, he was already halfway out of the kitchen.

You never finished your question.

Later that night, when you slipped into your bed, the sheets cold but familiar in their welcoming loneliness, you turned from one side to the other, eyes pinched shut without any release to exhaustion, realizing that you couldn’t remember what you had meant to ask.

Only that you wanted to hear his voice, just one more time.

──────────

The house is too loud. It always is when there are people over.

It reminds him of being a kid, hiding with Julia, hands intertwined, avoiding the drunk and high grown-ups. Whispering that everything would be alright. That no one would find them. Not even Smu-

(Bad thought. One. Two. Three. Four. He counts the dents on the kitchen counter.)

The volume of the music is pushed too high for his comfort, a constant buzz under the conversations in the house and near the pool while Andrew stands in the kitchen, hands deep in soapy water, scrubbing a glass that is already clean.

He finished the dishes ten minutes ago, but he is still washing, still drying, rearranging things that don’t need rearranging because it gives him somewhere to put his hands, to put his eyes. Because the alternative is the living room. And you.

(You, in that white dress. He has the stupid thought that you look like an angel and immediately hates himself for it. One. Two. Three. Four. He counts the droplets dripping from his fingertips.)

He tells himself that he is staying in the kitchen because it lets him see everything in the house, because parties mean unlocked doors, strangers who could wander into rooms they shouldn’t be in. And there are the habits he can’t shake off: watching the exits, the unfamiliar faces, counting heads (Deran, Craig, you), noting who is drinking too much, who is getting loud, who might break something.

He dries the same plate twice in a row before setting it down on the kitchen counter and looking up without meaning to.

You are by the couch, perched on the armrest while Craig, bare chest and shameless about it, tells you the story about the time he smuggled a burrito full of drugs across the Mexico border, story he knew you heard a dozen times these past three months. But still, you are laughing, head tipped back, hair falling down your spine (he wonders what they would feel like underneath his fingertips), one hand wrapped around a bottle you haven’t drunk from in a while, like it has more to do with keeping your hands busy while you are listening.

Andrew noticed it the first week he met you.

But the moment your lips wrap around the drink, he looks away and goes back to washing clean and dried plates, hands in the ice water, soap stinging the small cut on his knuckle.

(Good. Something sharp. Something real. Better than counting for now.)

“I bought you a new pair of gloves.”

Your voice is closer than he expected and his head snaps towards you before he can stop it. You are standing at the edge of the counter, smiling, so close that he can smell your shampoo despite the soap and the lingering smell of weed (it’s so clean, so soft, he wants to drown himself in it).

 “Why?” He asks, his nostrils flaring at his own bluntness.

You shrug, small. “I know Craig threw your pair away yesterday. And, um… I know you like wearing them when you clean.”

“Why?” his voice repeats, breaking at the word.

Of course, you ignore his question, and he can’t help but spiral (why did you do that? do you realize how much the gesture is affecting him? no one ever cared about his gloves. One. Two. Three. Four. He counts the freckles on your nose.).

“I got the good ones,” you add, beaming. “So the soap doesn’t mess up your hands.”

While your eyes drop to his hands, his are still enraptured on your face, studying every single feature (you really do look like an angel. and you act like one too. maybe you are his salvation. stop, he needs to fucking stop but he no longer knows what to count.).

Andrew swallows what feels like an anchor in his throat because you look like you worry about him (you have done that for a while now, which still baffles him). Nobody worries about him: they worry about what he might do, not whether he is hurt.

“’m fine.” He mutters, not convincingly enough, judging by the look on your face.

You are still looking at his bruised hands and your fingers twitch on the counter like you had the sudden urge to reach for him, like you might take his hand to look at it.

(He has the overwhelming need to know what you would do with his hands in yours. Hold them? Kiss them better? One. Two. Three- would you let his hands run along your hair? He knows what it’s like to touch you when you need help, but he feels that this would be very different.)

“They are under the sink,” you say above the music and Andrew can’t do anything else but stare, not trusting his own voice.

You linger for a moment at the counter and Andrew wants to ask you to stay (in the kitchen, in his life, doesn’t matter), but Craig shouts your name from the living room and suddenly he has some homicidal thoughts. You glance over your shoulder, then back at Andrew, and you look…reluctant.

“I’ll…”

“Yeah.”

You don’t move. Neither does he.

“Thanks.” He finally says, his gaze still tracking every shift of your expressions, trying to burn your smile in his retina, hoping one blink would not be enough to erase it.

“Of course, Andrew.”

Andrew. For you, he is Andrew and that’s all that matters because you are the only one calling him by this name and you make it sound like it belongs to you ever since you first said it by the pool.

With one last little smile, you walk away and his eyes follow you until he knows you have reached Craig but even then, he doesn’t look away, afraid you might disappear, just like every good thing always did.

And Andrew learned, a long time ago, that if you wanted something to stay alive and safe, you watched it. Guarded it. Didn’t blink.

Andrew didn’t blink.

──────────

You stepped outside because the house had started to feel too small, suffocating all at once, Craig and Deran’s voices stacking over each other in the open kitchen, arguing about a job - a part of the Cody brothers’ lives you knew existed but mostly chose not to look at too closely.

You told yourself you only needed a second of quiet, just enough space to breathe properly again after a long day at work full of aggravating customers, meager tips and a coffee spilt by a coworker on your bare legs.

The noise softened once the door closed, letting you draw in a deep breath you hadn’t realized you’d been holding.

“Fucking hell.” You muttered, exhausted by the shouting.

You hadn’t noticed him at first, too busy staring at the pool and ignoring your inner voice telling you to jump straight in the pool fully clothed, a thought that you were soon pulled out of when you heard a sound that didn’t belong to the wind or the trees.

That’s when you saw him, seated at the edge of a lounge chair, head bowed, a skateboard turned upside down across his thighs, one hand spinning a wheel while the other oiled it with slow, precise movements.

“Not a fan of the shouting matches?” you asked, trying not to startle him.

He glanced up, shook his head before going back to the board. “No.”

“So…not keen on loud noises either?”

“No.”

For a moment, you simply watched him, struck by how different he looked when he was doing something he seemed to…enjoy. Less folded into himself, the usual tightness of his posture easing (was it because of the board? the sound of the pool? the absence of his brothers? whatever it is, the view looked precious enough for you to want to capture it).

You lowered yourself onto the warm concrete next to him, your back resting against the lounge chair, knees pulled to your chest, neither of you speaking for a while.

That’s when you noticed his hands: knuckles swollen and red, the skin split near the thumb, a faint line of blood reopening every time the skin stretched.

“They look like they hurt. Y-Your hands, I mean.”

He shrugged without looking at you. “They’re fine.”

Your eyes drifted from them to his profile: from his hazel eyes fully focused on the board to the tight set of his mouth and you caught yourself distracted by his lips for a second too long before forcing your eyes back to the floor, warmth creeping up your neck (don’t think about that, don’t think about that).

“Andrew?”

The wheel immediately stopped spinning. Not gradually, just…stopped.

The entire yard suddenly became too quiet as his face snapped towards you, something unreadable flickering across his face and vanishing just as quickly, and you felt the realization settle in slowly that you had finally said his name after almost a month of avoiding it.

“Do you think I could learn how to skateboard? I…” the words got stuck between your throat and your lips while you searched for the courage to finish your sentence without tripping over yourself. “I mean…I wanted to know if you could help me. Learn it, I mean. If you wanted to. You don’t have to, I just…” (fuck. why? why were you so weird?)

Your fingers picked at the hem of your skirt and pulled on a thread to busy your hands, and from the corner of your vision you caught his brief smile, and the warmth that spread was so shamefully immediate that you bit your tongue until you tasted metal just to keep from blurting out something along the lines of ‘i really, really, fucking love your smile, please do it again so my day goes from moderately shitty to embarrassingly close to perfection.’

“Give me your phone.” he said, and you didn’t hesitate, fishing it out from your pocket, and placing it in his palm.

“There’s no password on your phone.”

“Yeah…I know.”

“It’s dangerous.” His thumb hovered over the screen, nose flaring. “Anyone could get into it. Your photos. Your messages. Your address. Everything is in there.”

You barely heard the end of it, too focused on the pull in your chest as his words kept coming, just for you.

“I haven’t thought about that.” You murmured, feeling foolish while he muttered to himself something that definitely sounded like ‘I did.’

He tapped his number in before going through the settings while you were still struck by his intensity and that he was doing this for you without being asked.

“Six digits. Not birthdates and not something simple like six zeros.” He handed your phone back, his fingers lingering for a second too long before pulling away. “Put one.”

This time you knew it was an order and you didn’t hesitate a second as you followed it, typing something in, suddenly hyperaware of how close he was standing, your shoulder almost brushing his calf, your pulse loud in your ears and a slow, humiliating heat pooling low in your stomach that you refused to think about at the moment.

“Good.” He said after you saved the password. “Text me your work hours.”

“So, it’s a yes? Really?”

He grunted and whether the dusting of crimson over his freckles was real or something you imagined, you couldn’t tell, you were too busy feeling as light as a leaf.

“Yes. And…”

His words were cut off by the screen door banging open, leaning back abruptly just as Craig made his way toward you both with a grin that meant whatever the fight with Deran had been about, he had won.

“Deran agrees for Friday night. And you,” he tapped your forehead. “didn’t hear shit.”

“I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

“That’s my girl. Now get your ass in the pool.”

Craig was already running to the pool before you could respond, clothes coming off mid-step.

“I can’t believe this man has a kid. Has you brother always been a shameless nudist?”

 “Unfortunately…yes.”

You snorted before murmuring. “Thanks, by the way. For the password thing. And for agreeing to teach me. I promise I’ll only be like…average terrible.”

“You’ll be fine,” he shrugged. Then, quieter, “I’ll make sure.”

His gaze dipped briefly to your mouth when he said it, before snapping back up, and something in your stomach turned warm and gooey, a reckless part of you hoping he might add something else. Or step closer again. But he didn’t, just nodded once, before muttering. “Go.”

“Okay, I’ll leave you to your board, Andrew.”

You made it halfway to the pool before you glanced back. He was still watching, not even pretending not to, looking like a leopard ready to jump. Like if you slipped, he would already be moving.

And lying awake that night, window cracked open and the ocean humming somewhere in the dark, you muffled his name into your pillow, trying to quiet yourself, imagining his hands instead of yours. Andrew, Andrew, Andrew.

──────────

Andrew is used to ending his nights alone because wanting people to stay never goes well for him.

So, when the party finally ends at four in the morning, he does what he knows best: throwing the bottles into the trash, making sure no one is passed out in the backyard or asleep in one of the bedrooms and…cleaning.

First the diving board, even if Craig is still making out on one of the lounge chairs with a girl whose name Andrew can’t remember and doesn’t try to (he knows best). Next, the counter, twice in a row for good measure. Then the sink, while Deran claps a hand on his shoulder with a “Don’t stay up too late, okay?” before heading out.

(One. Two. Three. Four. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. He counts the second you spend in the bathroom.)

He stands in the kitchen for a moment before realizing it might look strange and make you uncomfortable. That’s the last thing he wants.

He rushes back to his room (he wouldn’t exactly call it ‘sprinting’. sprinting would mean he is trying to avoid you. which he is not. not at all.).

He doesn’t bother turning on the light when he decides to lie on top of the covers, fully dressed, staring at the ceiling because he knows that sleep won’t come. It never does.

(One. Two. Three. Four. He counts the cracks.)

Every time he closes his eyes, something crawls up from beneath his ribs and he is once again plagued by his ghost: Julia’s voice, Cath’s smile, Baz’s forgiveness. Smurf’s words cutting straight through him.

He thinks about the pool and how easy it would be to let the water close over his head. How all the voices would finally be silent forever, his own included.

(Bad thoughts. One. Two. Three. Four. He recites the number of cameras in the bank for the incoming job.)

He forces himself to think of something else.

Of you, earlier, laughing at Craig’s story (and the immediate, unwelcome ache in his chest as he wonders if there’s something between the two of you, if this will end the way things always seem to, if you’ll be another Cath: close to him before preferring his brother).

Then he thinks about the way he made you laugh on your first skateboard lesson, all because he wanted to make you feel safe and seen, how the simple feel of your waist had nearly made him press his forehead to your shoulder and beg for you to stay and keep looking at him like that.

He thinks about that night when you called him for help, and how he didn’t hesitate for even a second when reaching for his keys, truck already running before you even finished explaining because the simple thought of you alone somewhere in the dark, waiting and frightened, had felt like acid running through his veins, the kind of fear that made him beg to the sky “Not here, not her, not again. I won’t fail her”.  

He presses his palms against his eyes until he sees bursts of purple light.

(Breathe. One. Tw-)

A faint knock against the door makes him freeze.

Nobody knocks in this house, his brothers just…barge in.

He is already on his feet before he realizes it, his hand finding the handle before he opens to find you there.

Barefoot, hair loose and messy, the mascara smudged at the corners of your eyes and the dress wrinkled. Earlier, Andrew thought you looked like an ethereal angel, something untouchable and holy.

But now…now you just look human, real and warm, which is worse because real things like you can stay as well as leave.

“Hey.” You murmur, leaning against the doorframe.

He grips the handle tightly to steady himself.

“Something wrong?”

“I was supposed to sleep on the couch,” you begin, talking with your hands the way you always do when you try to explain a situation, “but signor El Craigo has decided that it’s now his new make out spot with Sam and I really don’t need that image burned into my brain. And of course, I thought about taking his room in retaliation, but I don’t trust his conception of hygiene,”

That makes him huff.

“So…” you add, rubbing your arm, almost shy which doesn’t make sense in his mind because you haven’t been shy with him in a long time with the skatepark lessons or with the ‘hallway accident’ you both had together, “Can I stay here tonight?”

You don’t say ‘with you’ nor ‘in your bed’, but Andrew understands and he is pretty sure his brain short circuits for a second or two.

You didn’t text Deran or try to Uber home. You just came to him. Because you trusted him.

“Yes.” He replies too fast, stepping back from the door.

“You sure?”

He nods to avoid confessing that he would give you the bed. The room. The house. The air in his lungs.

You slip past him into the room, sitting on the edge of the bed before looking back at him and asking gently, “You’re not sleeping, right?”.

“No. Not…not really.”

“Yeah, figured.”

You lie down beneath the covers first, curling onto the side of the bed closest to the wall, leaving him space.

“Don’t think about staying on top of the covers, Andrew.”

The warning in your tone almost makes him laugh so he complies, lying down beside you, fully clothed and aware of every inch separating the two of you.

He stares at the ceiling again.

(One. Two. Three. Four. He counts your breathing.)

The mattress shifts while you slowly roll onto your back before turning fully toward him, your shoulder brushing his arm.

“Sorry,” you mumble sleepily. “’m cold.”

“It’s fine.” He says it like the ghost of your breathing over his collarbone didn’t just set every of his nerves on fire, like he was not terrified to shift even an inch.

After a few minutes, you drift closer in your sleep, chasing warmth without thinking, your knee pressing against his thigh, your hand sliding across the sheets until your fingers come to rest on the fabric of his shirt, right over his heartbeat and for a moment he genuinely forgets how to breathe.

Your palm is so warm, and he is painfully aware that you can probably feel how hard his heart is pounding.

Nobody has ever touched him like this, like he is something safe and out of everything that has happened to him: the underground fights, the prison, the jobs…none of that ever made him feel this defenseless.

His eyes suddenly burn because he wants to turn so much to see your peaceful face, tuck a strand of hair behind your ear, pull you closer to know just once in his life what it’s like to hold something good without destroying it, to press his face into your hair and breathe until the ghosts quiet down, but he doesn’t.

He stays exactly as he is, lying in the dark, eyes wide open, staring at nothing.

(One. Two. Three. Four. He counts your breaths again. Then the seconds between them. He thinks about the fact that you’re here and the miracle of it.)

Sleep doesn’t come, but for the first time in years, the night doesn’t feel empty. Because you’re here. Warm. Alive. Trusting him.

So, Andrew stays awake until morning, guarding the only good thing that ever chose him.

──────────

You were so, so late.

You had told Andrew on the phone that you would be at his skatepark at 5:15 sharp after work, and it was now 5:42 and you were sprinting the half mile that separated the coffee shop from there, bag smacking against your hip, your lungs burning, already sweaty before you even reached the entrance, trying to slow your breathing with a few useless deep inhales, hands braced on your knees, pretending that you were not seconds away from passing out.

(First lesson and you were already late and a disaster. Great. Very impressive.)

You straightened, wiped your forehead, and stepped inside, scanning the park before finding Andrew, board tucked under one arm, sleeves riding up his biceps, curls messy from the wind and sweat and you were now positively sure that you had some drool at the corner of your mouth (the universe had decided to sabotage you and that was fucking unfair.)

You watched the tiny smile he had as a girl showed him her board, proud and beaming at him like he had personally hung the sun in the sky (no, you didn’t need to think about him being good with kids. you didn’t need to picture him with kids, him gentle, him…stop. shut up.).

The second his head lifted and locked eyes with you, you were pretty much done for. It was ridiculous, really, how one look from him could short-circuit every coherent thought in your brain, how your feet just…moved, carrying you toward him instinctively, dropping your bag by the fence without breaking your stride as he met you halfway.

His gaze dragged over you once: your face, your hair, your chest.

“You ran here?”

“Yes. And I’m sweating…a lot. Please don’t judge me.”

He took a few seconds, a storm passing through his eyes before he added.

“You’re late.”

“I know,” you rushed, your hands quickly moving and your words tumbling over each other like they always did when you got flustered around him. “but a guy ordered for his whole ‘cheaper by the dozen’ family like three minutes before we closed. I’m probably sure he sensed my despair and fed on it.”

A small huff escaped him. “You didn’t have to run.”

You shrugged, eyes to the ground. “Didn’t want you to think I bailed on you.”

You felt it, his head tilting down just enough to catch your gaze again, stubborn about it.

“I wouldn’t. Now you ready?”

“Born ready.” You lied through your teeth.

“You look terrified.”

“I can do both, you know,” you shot back quickly. “I am large, I contain multitudes.”

There was the tiniest twitch at the corner of his mouth. “Okay, Whitman.”

“Y-You know Whitman?”

A pause.

“I mean…not that I don’t believe you or think you can’t read poetry or anything…that’s actually super hot, so good job!” you gave him a thumbs-up, aware you had just lost every ounce of dignity you had ever possessed. “It’s just that last week Craig asked me if ‘Pride and Peace’ was a good book to impress a girl, so…my bar was very low.”

Andrew stared at you for a moment. “Pride and Peace.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s not…”

“I know, I know. But don’t worry, I did a good deed for society and told him not to mention any book ever. You and Deran are safe from now on. You’re welcome.”

And there it was again: that quiet amusement on his lips, the roll of his eyes like he couldn’t help himself, making you feel the stupid and dangerous need to continue to jest (keep talking, say anything, make him do it again).

He shook his head once. “C’mon Whitman. Let’s see what you got.”

You trailed after him without thinking and the first few attempts were…humiliating to say the least: your balance was nonexistent, your feet refused to cooperate, your arms stood uselessly at your sides, and you had absolutely no idea where you were supposed to look while Andrew hovered nearby like he was ready to intervene at any moment.

“I look stupid!” you complained.

“You’re fine.”

“I’m not fine! This is deeply humiliating. I can barely stay upright and there are twelve-year-olds doing tricks behind me! Tricks, Andrew!”

“You’re doing good.”

“I almost died.”

“You didn’t.”

“Socially, I assure you I did.”

Your heart did a stupid little skip when a tiny, amused sound escaped him.

(You could bottle that sound and live off it. You were now pretty sure you would commit crimes for it.)

“Makes sense you’re friends with Craig,” he muttered. “Dramatic.”

You gasped, unable to contain your grin. “Excuse you mister Cody, but I am layered! I am complex!”

He looked unimpressed and repeated “Dramatic.”

You opened your mouth to argue before your foot slipped, the board shooting forward, and for one horrible second you thought that worse than falling off in front of children was falling off in front of the guy you had a crush on.

But you never got to know the feeling before his hands were suddenly there, at your waist, catching you fast and steadying you while you became acutely aware of every nerve under his palms, of his thumbs grazing your hipbones, of his breath brushing your cheek as heat pooled between your legs.

He moved behind your back, still holding your waist before murmuring “Don’t lean and bend your knees.”

(You were starting to suspect he was fucking with you on purpose.)

But still, he adjusted you gently, palms rotating your hips and guiding your stance before kneeling to help place your legs on the board and you couldn’t stop yourself from blurting:

“I haven’t shaved my legs. Sorry.”

“Me neither.” He huffed, his breath warm on your calf and the faintest hint of amusement threading through his voice.

(Was that…a joke? Was he joking? Since when was he doing that? You liked that. You wanted that.)

Andrew pushed himself back on his feet, stepping away just enough for you to feel the sudden absence of his body, leaving you oddly cold, like you had stepped out of the sunlight.

“Try again.”

You nodded, realizing that his joke had somehow shaken the worst of your nerves away, before pushing off, your knees bent like he had shown you, your weight centered and the board rolled.

“Oh my God, I’m doing it! Andrew, I’m really doing it!” you exclaimed happily.

“You are.”

You risked a glance over your shoulder, and he was watching you with his usual careful intensity, hands half-raised and prepared to catch you, like protecting you was the only thing on his list right now.

So (naturally), you did the dumbest thing possible and tested him. Just a little bit. Just to know.

You leaned and let your weight tip forward just enough to know if…

His hands immediately caught you, his hands on your ribs, scanning up and down if you had been hurt, “You okay?”

You swallowed, realizing that you had never doubted a second he would be there. And that settled something warm and terrifying in your chest.

It was not a silly crush, not your friend’s brother that you thought was hot and interesting, no. It was falling. Headfirst, no parachute.

And judging by the way his hands hadn’t moved from your waist yet, you weren’t entirely sure he wasn’t falling a little too.

──────────

You are screaming and he is too late.

He is always too late.

Your voice breaks into something small and terrified, the kind of sound that doesn’t even feel human anymore, and he is running but his legs don’t cooperate, move in slow-motion, the floor stretching longer and longer beneath him and the house smells like chlorine, metal and something sour he recognizes too fast.

You’re in the pool, face down and the water is red. And you are so, so still. He tries to move, to drag you out, but he can’t.

You turn toward him, eyes open and your mouth spilling blood.

“You were supposed to be there, Andrew. Why weren’t you there?”

He jerks awake, his whole body snapping upright while air refuses to enter his lungs, a pain in his ribcage so intense he thinks it might split him open from the inside out.

He doesn’t understand why at first: why his pillow feels cold and damp to the touch, why his throat burns, until he drags a shaky hand across his face and touches something wet, the realization feeling nauseating.

He has been crying in his sleep for God knows how long.

He presses his palms hard into his eyes like maybe the pain will help him, like maybe if he suffers enough the images will disappear. That you won’t be floating face down in the pool, covered in blood, your blood, your voice joining all the others, the same disappointed tone he’s memorized over the years with his ghosts.

(One. Two. Three. Four. He tries to count but it doesn’t work.)

The house is quiet for once, too quiet, and Andrew has this awful, crawling sensation lodged under his sternum, something cold and irrational that he can’t help but spiral into.

(What if…No.)

He is already moving, because lying back down would mean closing his eyes again and he can’t, he fucking can’t risk seeing you like that again, can’t hear the sound of your voice pleading and begging for him to save you when you are already gone, can’t add you to the long list of ghosts that wait for him every night.

Halfway down the hall, he gets as quiet as he can manage, moving through the house like he is on a job, because it feels the same: this sick, urgent need to verify something, to be sure that you are here, that you are safe.

The living room is glowing faintly blue before he even steps in, the light spilling on the floor and he hears it: a narrator speaking about sharks and the distant sound of recorded waves.

You always pick sea life documentaries when you stay over.

He doesn’t know when you figured out he liked them.

He stops at the threshold and sees you: curled on the couch, hidden beneath a blanket and alive.

(Your chest rises. Then falls. Rises. Falls. You’re not floating. You’re not gone.)

His lungs finally unlock and he breathes sharply, the sound loud enough that you look up immediately, like you sensed him there, like you are now tuned to him in a way he doesn’t understand, and your expression softens the second you see his face.

“Hey,” you say, voice thick with sleep. “Everything okay?”

He nods automatically but knows that he can’t bullshit you.

“You don’t look okay.”

“I’m fine,” he manages, but the words come out wrecked and dragged through his throat.

Your eyes examine him slowly and it clicks behind them. “Nightmare?”

(Oh, he hates this word. Hates how small it makes him feel. Hates how childish it sounds. Hates how accurate it is.)

His jaw locks so hard it aches and he can’t force out anything more than a stiff, miserable nod, his nails digging crescent moons in his palms as he braces himself for questions, for having to justify why he is standing there at three in the morning, shaking over a bad dream. But you don’t push.

You just scrub a hand over your tired face before moving your legs and lifting the blanket, creating space beside you.

“Come here.” You mumble, looking at him, patient.

He crosses the room slowly, the couch dipping under his weight as he lowers himself beside you, hyperaware of every inch of distance, of your arm brushing his, of the warmth bleeding through the thin fabric of your shirt, of how close your knee is to his thigh and how easy it would be to accidentally touch.

Your hand bumps his and even if he should pull away, he doesn’t. The contact is small, just skin against skin but for Andrew, it’s the closest to heaven he’s ever been.

Your fingers linger, uncertain, like you’re giving him time to decide, like he is allowed to decide. His thumb moves before he can stop it, brushing lightly over your knuckles, slowly, reverently, like he needs to make sure you are solid and not a trick of his mind. You feel warmer than him.

(Alive warm. Not water cold. Not bloody and floating. Not like in the pool.)

The memory hits so hard it hurts.

He jerks his hand back abruptly, his breathing going wrong again, shame creeping hot and fast because for a moment he wanted something and asked for it, letting the walls go down.

But you don’t comment, don’t tease and don’t pull away in response to his neediness and instead, you shift closer and you help settling the blanket over both of you, your arm following, tugging him in gently, like there has never been a version of this world where he wasn’t permitted to be here.

He stiffens when your hand finds the back of his neck and he wants to reassure you that it’s not because he wants it to stop but because he wants it too much, and he doesn’t deserve it. But your fingers brush his scalp, and suddenly he is nothing but starving for it, leaning toward it instinctively.

You guide him down gently, so gently and he can’t win this fight tonight, his ear pressing against your chest.

(Your heartbeat. Steady. There. One. Two. Three. Four. It’s there. You’re alive.)

The documentary keeps whispering about tides and sharks, but he barely hears it now because all he can focus on is the rhythm under his cheek and the way your fingers keep caressing his curls in slow strokes like you were calming a frightened wild animal.

He wants to move. To slide his arm around your waist. To press his face into your shirt and breathe you. To hold you tight enough so nothing could ever take you away.

But he stays still, terrified of ruining it and breaking something with the weight of his want.

Your fingers drift lower to cradle the back of his head while your other arm tightens around him and pull him fully into you, closing the remaining space between your two bodies. His relief is immediate and overwhelming, pulling a whimper out of him, emptying him of his thoughts.

His chest caves inward on a shaky exhale, his hand finally moving hesitantly until it rests lightly on your waist, barely touching and giving you room to pull away if you want to, but you don’t. You tuck him closer, your chin brushing his hair.

 “I’ve got you. You’re okay, Andrew, I promise. I’m here.”

The words land deep and it takes him a moment to realize he is sobbing in your arms, the tears soaking your shirt while he presses his forehead closer to your chest, just to confirm that the heartbeat under him is real.

(One. Two. Three. Four. He counts your heart now.)

“Shh…It’s going to be okay, Andrew.”

The storm in his head – the ghosts, the pool, your voice – slowly quiets for the first time all night, dissolving under the simple, undeniable fact that you are here and breathing under his cheek, speaking to him, comforting him.

And somewhere, between one beat and the next, his body finally gives up the fight, his sobs stop, exhaustion dragging him under gently this time, no drowning, no screaming, just the steady rhythm of you and your quiet voice drifting above him.

“I’m not leaving Andrew.”

He knows that for tonight at least, no nightmare will come at him.

You promised.

──────────

“Fuck, Fuck, Fuck.”

Craig was the worst and you were absolutely going to kill him. Not even metaphorically, but in the sense where you would pick up the nearest heavy object and aim for his head the next time you saw him, if only you were able to find him right now instead of wandering through a house you didn’t know that smelled aggressively of weed and alcohol.

Deran and Andrew would forgive you, you were sure of it, if you murdered their brother under these circumstances. Hell, they might even help you bury the body. Because you could have had a regular evening at home, watching for the hundredth time Shawshank Redemption but no, you had to be alone in a stranger’s kitchen, trying not to panic.

The party had shifted, you felt it about twenty minutes ago.

It had stopped being loud fun and started being loud wrong when little bags started to be passed around, people disappearing in rooms and coming back with pupils blown wide and white powder on their nostrils.

You had looked for Craig. Texted him. Called. Nothing.

You had found someone who vaguely resembled one of the friends he introduced you to earlier, and when you asked if they had seen him, they laughed and replied something about “upstairs with Renn so it might take a while, Sweetheart,” and you stood there for a second, scared. Really scared.

Because you didn’t know anyone there, not really. And you were now surrounded by idiots who were snorting cocaine.

(Okay. Calm down. Breathe. Don’t cry. It doesn’t help your situation at all.)

A guy you didn’t recognize slid a drink toward you with a grin that lingered too long, and the fact that your very first thought was ‘I wonder if he put something in that’ made your decision for you: you were leaving. Immediately. Whatever Craig was doing upstairs with Renn was officially no longer your problem.

The night air hit your face, making you regret for the lack of jacket.

You stood on a sidewalk for a moment, trying to calculate the distance back to your apartment. You were too far, with no car and a phone at nine percent.

“Craig is dead. He is fucking dead. I will kill him myself,” you muttered under your breath as you started walking anyway, heels dangling in your hand, bare feet against the cold concrete, just to put some distance between you and the house.

But the further you got, the louder your heartbeat became, pounding in your ears, the fear crawling up your spine.

Still, you kept walking, arms wrapped tightly around yourself, repeating ‘You’ll be fine,’ over and over to your brain.

(You were not fine. You were alone. In the middle of the night. Walking barefoot down a street you didn’t know. Why were you like this? Why didn’t you just stay? Why didn’t you drag Craig out by his stupid hair to drive you back home?)

You didn’t want to try to call Craig again and waste your last percentage of battery on someone who would not answer.

And before you could talk yourself out of it, before you could rationalize or be embarrassed…your thumb was already pressing Andrew’s name.

(If you called him, he would come. He wouldn’t hesitate. You knew it.)

The phone only rang once before he picked up.

“Yes?”

That was all it took for you: the sound of his steady and low voice to make something inside your chest collapse, the fragile composure you had been clinging to dissolving instantly as you let out a shaky exhale, thanking all the Gods above for Andrew Cody’s existence.

“Andrew,” you said, your voice betraying you immediately with a crack right through the middle of his name. “I-I’m sorry. It’s late, I know. I just…”

“What happened.”

You swallowed, trying to force the tears to back down. “I’m at this party and…and Craig left. I mean…he is upstairs with Renn doing I don’t know what and he won’t answer me. I left the house because it got weird there and I’m trying to walk home but I think that was a stupid idea and I just…”

(You hated how your voice wobbled. How small it sounded. You should have bought pepper spray.)

“I’m so scared.”

In the background, you could hear keys jangling, a door closing and his truck starting.

“Where are you?”

No ‘why’, no ‘what were you thinking’. Just that.

You gave him the street name and the closest intersection you could see, wiping your face with the back of your hand and trying to steady your breathing so you didn’t sound like you were seconds away from a breakdown.

“I’ll be there in five.”

You let out a weak, disbelieving laugh. “It’s at least ten.”

“Five.”

The line went dead before you could argue, the call cutting off abruptly as your screen went black. Dead battery.

You stared at your reflection for half a second on the dark screen, heart hammering while you counted the seconds in your head, hoping that somehow it would summon him faster.

It took less than three hundred for you to see headlights cut around the corner of the street faster than the required speed limit, relief crashing into you. He didn’t even fully stop before the driver’s door was already swinging open, crossing the distance to you in three long strides, eyes sweeping over you from head to toe then past you to the houses.

“You okay?”

You nodded too quickly and he stared at you, jaw locked so hard you could see the muscles twitching. He looked furious.

“Get in,” he said, opening the passenger door, one hand braced on the roof as he helped you climb up into the seat, taking your shoes to put them in the back seat.

You stayed silent, not wanting to know to whom his anger was directed at. It was only once you were down the street that he finally spoke again, eyes flicking between the road and you.

“Did anyone hurt you?”

You blinked at him. “No.”

“Touch you?”

“No.”

“Follow you?”

You shook your head, watching his knuckles tightening around the steering wheel.

“Say anything to you?”

“Just…offered me stuff,” you admitted quietly, wrapping your arms around yourself again. “But I said no. I would never do that. You know I would not.”

You weren’t sure why you felt the need to add that, why you wanted him to understand that you hadn’t been reckless. That hanging out with Craig didn’t mean being like him. That you wouldn’t caught yourself in drugs. You knew better.

The streetlight caught the side of his face and for a split second you saw something raw there before it slipped behind his mask of control. The silence continued to stretch, heavy.

“Are you angry at me?”

The truck slowed to a stop at a red light, allowing him to turn his head toward you fully, eyes dark and intense in a way that made your whole body pulse in response, not from fear but from the weight of being seen.

“I’m not angry at you,” he said, holding your gaze. “I’m angry you were there alone. Angry that my stupid brother left you. Angry that I wasn’t there sooner. But not at you.”

The light shifted to green, but he didn’t move right away. His eyes remained locked on yours, unblinking, making sure you understood the distinction.

“You call me,” he added quietly. “The second you have a problem, you always call me. Okay?”

You nodded, fingers twisting in the fabric of your dress. “I didn’t want to bother you.”

“You don’t.”

And there was something in the way he said it, like he was wounded at the idea you thought you might ever be an inconvenience to him, that made you blush.

The truck finally rolled forward, but the air between you felt different, heavier in a way that you’ll only be to shake off with a cold shower.

You watched the way his shoulders remained tense all the way to your home and understood then that he had come because he had been frightened, that the thought of you alone in the dark had unsettled something in him, and that he had needed to fix it.

And the scariest part was that something warm and traitorous inside your chest responded to that.

You liked that he had been scared.

You liked that he came in less than three hundred seconds.

That he didn’t even hesitate when you admitted you were frightened, he simply moved.

And you liked the way he refused to let you walk barefoot to your apartment, carrying you, as if the idea of your skin touching the cold pavement was something he would not allow.

He didn’t put you down immediately. No, he held you all the way from his truck to your doorway, one arm firm beneath your legs and the other steady at your back, your shoes dangling loosely from his fingers, your body tucked close enough to feel his breathing through his shirt, making you aware of how easily you fit there.

When he finally set you down at your threshold, his hands lingered at your waist a second longer than necessary.

“You’ll be good?” he asked quietly, handing you your shoes, your fingers brushing his in the exchange.

You nodded, incapable of trusting your own voice, because if you opened your mouth, you were fairly certain that something reckless would fall out, something dangerously close to ‘stay’ and you were overwhelmed enough by the urge to step over, to reach for him and press your forehead against his chest just to see if his heart was still beating as fast as yours.

He was still staring at you, something unspoken passing like electricity.

“Good night,” he whispered, the softness of it almost undoing you.

“Good night, Andrew.”

You closed your door slowly, pressing your back against it, listening to his boots on the pavement, realizing that he hadn’t moved until he heard the lock click.

Only then did he walk back to his truck.

You would maybe not murder Craig after all.

──────────

Andrew spends the entire day watching for the moment you are going to change your mind and run from him.

And you don’t act differently when you wake up: you drink coffee while humming along to the songs on the radio, trying to coax a laugh out of him, but he keeps waiting for it anyway: the flicker in your eyes that says you’ve seen too much of him now, that holding him while he sobbed was enough to scare you off for good.

He replays the night while you are in the shower. How he cried in your arms. How your fingers combed through his curls. How you held him pressed against your chest. How he let himself need you.

He wonders if he should apologize, or explain, or at least even just…acknowledge that you saw him at his weakest and that he was thankful it was you.

Instead, he washes the dishes twice in a row to calm his brain, avoiding looking directly at your body when you step back into the kitchen in your coffee shop uniform, hair damp.

(One. Two. Three. Four. He counts the dents on his mug.)

You ask him if he is still taking you to the skatepark after your shift, and he wants to say no. The word sits right there on his tongue, ready to spill, because the park means proximity and proximity means touch and desire which always ends with something being taken away from him.

But you smile at him in such an open and easy way, and if it was something you really wanted to do, far be it from him to deny you after last night when you held him like he was something that could be saved, that was worth saving.

So, he nods and the way your whole face lights up makes him think, not for the first time, that he would probably give you anything you asked for.

That is the part of himself that scares him.

And now that he is finally at the skatepark with you on this late afternoon, he knows that he should be tracking your stance and foot placement the way he always does, but today he notices different things about you instead: how you are not pulling away from him, not avoiding him, how you stand close when you talk, lean into his space without hesitation.

And somehow that unsettles him more than distance would have. Because, if you are not afraid of him, if you are not stepping back after seeing what he is like during his worst nights, then what does that mean?

You sway on the board.

He sees it, but his brain is still half-caught in the memory of your heartbeat under his ear, still waiting for the recoil that doesn’t come and by the time his body reacts, you’re already too far from his reach.

You hit the concrete hands first, palms slamming down on instinct before your knees follow, the skin scraping on the ground with a sound that makes his stomach drop. The impact steals the air from your lungs and for a fraction of a second you manage to hold yourself up before your face strikes the ground with a sickening thud.

Andrew is already moving before you even understand what happened, the board rolling behind you while he drops to his knees so fast, he doesn’t register the sting tearing through his own skin, doesn’t feel the way his jeans split at the knee or how his knuckles scratch raw when he catches himself, because none of it matters to him. He is scanning, assessing and cataloguing the damage, forcing his mind to clear before he dares to touch you.

Your palms and knees are damaged through the torn denim, but it’s the blood beginning to run from your eyebrow that makes him feel abruptly cold. It gathers at the edge of your lashes and runs along the curve of your nose, bright red against your skin, and for a second, the world tilts.

(Blood. So much blood. He knows blood. Knows how to stop it. How to clean it. How to stitch it close. Pope is good with blood.)

The thought lands with cold precision, and even if he hates the name, even if it sounds wrong in his own head, he can’t afford to hate the part of himself that steps forward first right now - efficient Pope, steady Pope, the one who does not panic.

“I’ve got you,” he says, and his voice is low, measured, trying to reassure you the way you reassured him last night while he broke apart against your chest, even though his heart is hammering through his ribs.

Your eyes flutter, dazed, before you try to sit up, but he is already there, placing one hand at the back of your neck and the other on your shoulder to help you.

“It’s okay sweetheart, I’ve got you. You’re gonna be okay,” he murmurs, and there is something almost pleading behind his words that has less to do with your eyebrow and more to do with the memory of the pool and your voice accusing him of being too late.

He swipes his thumb gently beneath the cut to assess its depth, his other hand moving to brace your jaw so you don’t move, and when fresh blood coats the pad of his finger, he feels the familiar switch inside him flips into place.

(His breathing slows. His hands stop shaking. This he understands. This he can control.)

“It’s not deep,” he says after his inspection, even though he knows you’ll need stitches. “You still with me?”

Your hand lifts and finds his wrist, fingers curling around it, and the contact sends something through him that is not adrenaline and not fear but softer that frightens him more because it makes him aware of how much he needs you to be okay.

“I’m fine,” you whisper, though your voice is small.

He shakes his head once, tearing a strip from the hem of his shirt. “Let’s get you home so I can clean this properly, okay? Keep pressure there,” he instructs, guiding your hand back to your eyebrow and pressing it into place.

You nod, and that’s enough for him.

He slides one arm behind your back, his broad palm spanning the length of your shoulder blades, the other slipping beneath your knees to lift you, ignoring the sting of his knees and the sticky blood drying across his knuckles because none of it is important compared to the steady rhythm of your breath brushing his collarbone.

He carries you toward the truck, opening the door and lowering you carefully into the passenger seat, one hand coming up to your jaw, his thumb resting lightly on your cheekbone to make sure your eyes focus on him.

“Stay with me,” he says softly.

Your lips twitch despite the pain. “Bossy.”

He goes to buckle your seatbelt, adjusting the strap and closing the door gently before circling the truck, wiping his bloody hand against his jeans.

While driving back to your apartment, his eyes keep darting to you every few seconds.

“Talk to me,” he says after a moment.

“About what?”

“Anything.”

You take a moment before starting to talk about your day at the coffee shop, just mindless little moments. He doesn’t interrupt, he listens and nods at the right moments. You are grounding him on purpose, he realizes, dragging his thoughts back to something ordinary, something alive.

(You are not in the pool. You are breathing. You are not telling him he failed you. He counts your breaths.)

Inside your place, he works methodically, like he always does when someone comes back from a job hurt and bleeding – controlled, shutting everything else out. He lays out all your medical supplies on your desk with a precise spacing: first gauze then antiseptic, needle, sewing thread…The order is important. Order means control.

 You sit on the edge of your bed, looking at him and continuing the pressure of the piece of his shirt against your eyebrow.

“Alright,” he says quietly, stepping between your knees so he can reach your face properly. “Hold still.”

He cleans your palms first, his concentration absolute because his entire world has narrowed down to the square inch of skin beneath his fingers.

“I should have caught you.”

“It’s not your fault, Andrew. Don’t punish yourself for it, okay? I’m fine, I promise I’m fine.”

He doesn’t answer. Doesn’t trust himself to.

Instead, he goes silent and returns to the work in front of him, bandaging thoroughly your hands before taking off your pants and doing the same with your knees, making sure everything stays in place.

Finally, he allows himself to look fully at your face again, examining the cut on your eyebrow and tilting your chin upward with two fingers, feeling your breath ghosting on his lips in the small space between you.

“You’re going to need stitches,” he murmurs.

You study him for a second. “You’re very serious about this.”

“Yes.”

“I’m not dying, Andrew.”

“I know.”

“You look at me like I am.”

His jaw tightens and for a moment, he almost says it. Almost tells you that in his head, he’s already seen that version of you, floating and gone, but he swallows it back.

“Hold still,” he says instead.

He cleans the wound carefully by dabbing away the dried blood, and when you flinch, his free hand comes up automatically to steady the side of your head, thumb resting near your temple, not commenting on the way you lean into that touch.

The first puncture makes you inhale sharply.

“Breathe,” he says low, “Just breathe slow for me.”

You obey, focusing on him rather than the pull of the thread, your eyes locking on his face. He works carefully, tying each stitch with precision, trying not to falter at your gaze and even less at the reckless, intrusive thought about pressing his mouth to your brow to undo the wound.

When he finishes, he doesn’t move right away. He studies the line of the sutures, checks for tension, checks for bleeding or anything he might have missed before studying you.

“You’re okay,” he says, trying to convince himself.

You give him a small, tired smile. “I told you. I’m tougher than I look,” you say before your gaze drops, narrowing as you notice what he has been deliberately ignoring. “Andrew.”

“What?”

“You’re bleeding.”

He shrugs, dismissive, trying to pull his hand back so you can’t look too closely. “It’s nothing.”

“No, it’s not nothing,” you murmur, reaching for him before he can retreat, your fingers tracing carefully over his knuckles, making him go still. “You can’t patch me up and ignore yourself.”

He swallows, and before he can argue, you’re already reaching for the antiseptic with your bandaged hand, fumbling slightly. He catches the bottle before you drop it, his other hand covering your instinctively.

“You shouldn’t…”

“None of that,” you interrupt, and there is a flicker of stubbornness there that makes his mouth twitch despite himself.

You tug his hand toward you, and this time he lets you clean the scrape on his hands. He doesn’t look at the wound. He looks at you.

At the crease between your brows as you concentrate. At the way your lips press together. At the way you treat his injuries as if they matter. No one ever does.

Your fingers tie the bandage clumsily but securely, and when you finish, you don’t let go right away. Your thumb lingers, stroking slowly over the back of his hand. He is not sure how to breathe. The room feels so much smaller now. Quieter?

You lift your eyes up to him and whisper. “Can you stay? Just for a bit. So…we can check on each other.”

He could tell you it’s starting to get late and he was supposed to meet Deran and Craig for their next job. He could tell you he’ll call you tonight to see how you feel.

But there is nothing in him that wants to leave this room.

“Yeah,” he says quietly. “I can stay.”

He helps you shift properly onto the bed, careful of your knees. When you lie back against the pillows, you reach for him, fingers curling into the front of his shirt.

It takes him a second of hesitation before lying down beside you, stiff at first, but you roll toward him, your bandaged hands pressing against his chest as you settle close, your head finding the space beneath his chin.

He exhales through his nose before lifting his arms and resting them around you.

After a few minutes of silence, when he thinks you might already be drifting, you murmur. “I like it when you called me sweetheart.”

He presses his mouth lightly into your hair.

“Go to sleep now.”

You nod, your body going slack after a few minutes while he stays wide awake, his hands moving slowly along your spine.

“You scared me,” he whispers into the quiet, once he is sure you’re gone.

His fingers move to brush lightly just above the stitches of your brow.

“I can’t lose you,” he breathes, pressing his forehead gently against yours.

(He counts your breathing. One. Two. Three. Four. Not because he is afraid. But because he simply likes knowing the rhythm.)

When sleep finally comes at him, he knows there won’t be any nightmare.

Because you’re there.

──────────

You did not mean to end up alone with Deran.

In fact, if you were being completely honest with yourself, you had carefully avoided being alone with him since you met, not because he had been hostile to you, but because he seemed to have this unnerving habit of seeing through people and you were not a fan of subjecting yourself to that.

Craig had dragged you to the bar “just for a bit,” (which in Craig language meant ‘indefinitely’) before promptly disappearing with a girl, leaving you at the counter, nursing a soda because you had work in the morning.

Deran was wiping down the bar in front of you.

“El Craigo has already left?” he asked without looking up.

“’Flee’ would be a better word to describe what happened.”

“And so now you’re just…” he gestured vaguely toward you with the cloth, “…miserably contemplating on drowning yourself in your drink?”

“It’s a soda.”

“You know what? That’s so much sadder.”

You exhaled, dragging a hand over your face before saying, “Can I ask you something without you telling Craig?”

That caught his attention immediately, making him glance up.

“Depends how embarrassing it is.”

“It’s not embarrassing,” you protested automatically, then faltered. “Fine. It’s…a little embarrassing.”

“A little?”

“A lot,” you admitted.

He huffed once, almost amused, tossing the cloth over his shoulder. “Fine. What?”

You took a breath, suddenly aware of how absurd this was and how you were feeling like you were sixteen instead of twenty-nine. “It’s…” you cleared your throat. “It’s about Andrew.”

(Fuck. This was so deeply humiliating. But Craig was not an option. He would weaponize the information and never let you live it down.)

Deran blinked once before leaning his forearms on the counter, a smirk spreading on his lips. “Oh, I see.”

You groaned immediately. “Oh, please, can you not react like that? You’re making this worse.”

“I haven’t reacted! I’m just…not quite surprised about this discussion. Come on.” he waved a hand. “What’s your question?”

“It’s just…” you stopped. “I don’t know how to tell if he…”

(Oh my God. You had faced worst things than this. You could finish a sentence.)

Deran tilted his face slightly, with a shit-eating grin that you absolutely hated. “If he…what?”

“If he likes me,” you blurted out in one breath.

The silence fell for exactly two seconds before he let out a short, incredulous laugh.

“You’re fucking with me. Right?”

Your face burned instantly. “Okay, great. Never mind, I’m just gonna dig my gra-”

“Easy tiger. Don’t get your panties in a twist. He’s obsessed with you.”

You stopped, your stomach flipping violently.

“That’s not true.”

“It is deeply true,” Deran replied flatly. “He reorganized the shelves in the kitchen.”

You blinked. “Well…I thought he just liked order.”

“Oh yeah, he does. Trust me, he fucking does. But…not that much.”

You opened your mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

“Surely that doesn’t mean…”

“He drove across town at three in the morning to get you out of a party,” Deran continued, counting off on his fingers now. “He cancels family meetings to go to the skatepark with you. He did his ‘scary stare’ to me the last time I drank in your mug.”

Heat crept up your cheeks as you stammered, throat dry. “B-But he doesn’t…He doesn’t say anything.”

Deran snorted. “Yeah, that’s Andrew.”

“It’s just...sometimes I don’t even know what he’s thinking.”

“Neither do we,” he deadpanned. “Welcome to the family.”

You exhaled, frustration spilling over. “So, what am I supposed to do now?”

Deran considered you for a moment. “Just…let him try to go at his own pace here. He is not good at the whole…relationship thing.” he said, his voice stripped of its usual sarcasm before adding. “And for the record, the way you look at him? Not subtle. Like, at all.”

You nearly choked on your own spit. “I am subtle!”

“I mean, yes,” he conceded dryly. “You are subtle…for Andrew and Craig. So don’t be proud about it. That’s the lowest level of subtility possible.”

“I hate you, Deran.”

“Yeah?” he replied with an amused smile. “Well, get in line.”

There was a pause before he said quietly. “You’re good for him. Just…don’t screw it up. You’re in the tribe now. Which means I have to tell you this…”

You straightened slightly.

“…if you’re not sure about this, about yourself, you go now. Not in a few months. Not after he lets himself think this might be real. You don’t get to backpedal if it gets complicated. He wouldn’t recover from it.”

You shook your head immediately. “I swear, I won’t hurt him. He’s…he’s-”

You stopped, because the word felt too large to say aloud. But Deran looked at you intensely enough for you to finish.

“He’s important. To me. I don’t want to fix him, because I don’t think he’s broken. I like him the way he is. I...I think I wouldn’t recover from losing him too.”

Deran held your gaze for a long moment. “Alright.”

You tilted your head. “Alright?”

“Alright,” he repeated. “You pass.”

“Was-Was it an interview? Are you serious?”

“Yep. And congrats, you got the job.”

You rolled your eyes, but your chest felt lighter than it had in quite some time while Deran smiled, a real full grin, almost boyish, making it easier to see the younger brother under his usual cryptic attitude.

“I forgot what it was like,” he said after a beat.

“What?” you asked.

“Having a sister you can annoy.”

“That’s…extremely sweet of you.”

“Don’t ruin it,” he warned, pointing the towel at you. “I will absolutely deny this conversation ever happened if you mention it to my brothers.”

You laughed despite yourself, shaking your head.

Then, he leaned forward and whispered to you. “And if you hurt him, I’m stealing your car and slashing your tires.”

“O-Okay.”

He had a little smile before straightening up. “Welcome into the family.”

──────────

He has not told you.

No one has told you about the job.

Craig said it wasn’t necessary, that you would make a big deal out of it. Deran said it was cleaner that way, the less people know, the less risk and Andrew didn’t argue, telling himself it was better if you didn’t know the details, better if you didn’t have to sit there, waiting for them to come back and spiraling about what could be happening to them.

He told himself that ignorance would keep you safe.

The screen door slams and your voice, sharper than he has ever heard it is rising against Craig, who’s following you in the backyard like a kicked puppy.

Andrew doesn’t turn immediately from his spot, staring at the water of the pool. He closes his eyes, preparing himself for the loud noises.

(One. Two. Three. Four. He counts the tiles of the pool.)

“You asked me to babysit Nick,” you’re saying, your voice shaking like you are about to start crying, “and you made it sound like it was for a date or something stupid! You didn’t say it was because you were going to fucking rob a jewelry store!”

“Jesus, lower your voice.”

“Lower my voice? How about you shut your mouth you liar!”

It isn’t only outrage in your voice, Andrew feels it. It’s fear. A raw, unfiltered fear for them. For him. And he doesn’t know what to do with that because no one has ever been afraid of losing him. When he went to prison years ago, his family moved on, sold his place and went on with their lives. For them, it was an inconvenience, for him, it was three years in Folsom.

Andrew turns then.

You’re standing a few feet from Craig, hands still bandaged, the thin line of stitches above your eyebrow visible, pointing a finger at Craig angrily while he tries to stay calm, running a hand through his hair.

“It’s not a big deal.”

“You’re breaking into a jewelry store, Craig. That’s not exactly Disneyland.”

“We’ve done jobs for years,” he snaps. “We’re good at it.”

Andrew watches the way your shoulders rise and fall too fast with your breath, the way your fingers flex like you’re resisting the urge to grab something and throw it at Craig.

“You know what happens if you get caught, right? You know what that would do to Nick?”

Craig’s jaw tightens. “We don’t get caught.”

You let out a bitter sound that is half a laugh, half a sob.

“Repeat this in the eyes of your brother, I fucking dare you. That’s not how life works, and you know it. You can get caught.”

Andrew feels the words hit him in the chest and rip something out of him. He doesn’t know when you learn about it. Doesn’t know who told you or the extent of your knowledge about those three years of fights and isolation.

If you know – truly know - why aren’t you running away? Why are you still here?

(He doesn’t understand. He can’t understand. It’s too much. It’s too little. One. Two. Three. Four. He counts the cracks on the floor.)

“We’re not idiots, just trust us, okay?” Craig argues, rolling his eyes.

“You left me alone at a party in a house full of people doing coke,” you fire back, your finger jabbing hard against his chest. “You are the exact definition of an idiot, Craig.”

Craig winces. “We don’t have to do this right now, okay? I already told you I was sorry about it. Pope, back me up.”

Both of you turn toward him at once, the weight of the fight landing on his shoulders. He doesn’t move immediately. Doesn’t speak either. Andrew has never been good at splitting himself in two, at giving his opinion. He was raised to follow orders.

Craig gestures toward you. “She’s acting like we’re amateurs.”

You slap his arm, wincing, forgetting for a moment about your bandage. “Fuck.”

Andrew walks up to you, checking your hand while you keep repeating him. “I’m okay, Andrew. I promise.”

He lifts his eyes to yours, angling his head to catch them, and when your gaze finally locks with his, he holds it, stubborn and unblinking. Your eyes shine brighter tonight than they usually do, so he doesn’t give himself permission to look away.

(You’re about to cry. It’s his fault. It must be his fault. He should have been better. But the voices are too loud. He doesn’t like when it’s too loud. One. Two. Three. Four. He remembers your breaths when you sleep.)

“I just…I thought you all trusted me,” you say, your voice breaking halfway through, fighting back tears of frustration.

Craig’s shoulders drop while Andrew’s thumb strokes over the back of your hand, grounding himself.

“We do,” Craig says, less combative now. “That’s why I asked you to watch Nick.”

“That’s not making me feel like you trust me. It’s making me feel like I’m a convenience.”

The word hangs there, making Andrew feel like he failed something. He has never wanted you to feel like this. He wanted you to be protected.

His gaze doesn’t waver as he keeps your hand in his, stroking over the bandage.

Craig looks between the two of you, seeing the hand, the closeness and mutters, “Jesus, bro, this is the worst time,” under his breath.

“Okay,” he exhales finally, turning fully toward you. “I fucked up. Massively. About the party. About not telling you. About…probably a million other things. I didn’t mean for you to feel unsafe.”

You don’t look convinced.

“Trust me,” Craig adds quickly, throwing Andrew a sideways glance, “I got my ass kicked enough by Pope to regret this party for the rest of my life.”

Your lips twitch a little, trying to keep it contain.

“Now, if you could hand me back my brother, I would be very grateful because we have a job to do, and you have a kid to entertain,” Craig says, rolling his eyes and retreating inside the house.

Andrew doesn’t let go of your hand, refusing to blink and terrified of losing a moment of you. He has the irrational feeling that if he does, something will waver on your face, the moment when you realize what this life looks like and he won’t be able to see his failure in time.

 “We’ve planned it,” he murmurs finally.

You hold his gaze. “And if something goes wrong?”

He doesn’t answer right away because he knows the answer to this, and he is certain you don’t want to hear it.

(If something goes wrong, he goes down first. He makes sure Deran and Craig are safe. He doesn’t come home because he won’t ever go back to prison. He prefers to die trying to escape than go back in a cell. One. Two. Three. Four. He counts your eyelashes.)

You are still waiting, searching his face.

“Then I handle it,” he says quietly.

You shake your head, your jaw working as if you’re trying to physically hold yourself together. “Promise me to come back safe.”

His hand lifts before he can stop himself to settle against the side of your face, his thumb resting just beneath your eye, making you go very still, waiting for what he will do next.

His thumb caresses your cheekbone once, just enough to fill his mind with the memory of your skin.

“I won’t let anything happen to me,” he whispers, and he doesn’t know if it’s meant as a vow or a lie he’s trying to force into becoming true. “I promise,” and before he allows himself to overthink it, he presses a careful kiss to your forehead, his lips brushing just above the line of stitches.

He can hear you catch your breath and it makes him pull back, his lips tingling at the contact. He knows it now: if he stays longer, if he lets himself feel the warmth of you, he might not leave at all.

He memorizes the sight of you like this: looking like losing him would break you and it does something unfamiliar to his chest. No one has ever been scared at the thought of him disappearing. No one has ever demanded that he come back.

He turns quickly, putting distance between the two of you before he changes his mind, the promise he made echoing in his head.

He hears it when Deran cuts the alarms. Promise me to come back safe. When he cuts through the back entrance. Promise me. And when Craig tries to improvise. Promise. He is not one to do reckless things but tonight, he is particularly unyielding each time the job almost goes sideways.

He knows you are in the house with Nick, probably pacing the kitchen and waiting to see the outcome of his word. So, when he finally reaches the main display room, he is quick to reach for the highest value pieces that will be cut down and reshaped. No traces or evidence will be left, they have done this long enough to know how to make everything disappear completely.

Andrew’s hand hovers for half a second over a particular velvet cushion before picking up the thin gold chain, a small heart-shaped pendant set in the center. It’s delicate and quiet, reminding him how it feels to bask in your light. He turns it between his fingers once, twice, imagining it resting just below the hollow of your throat, his thumb brushing over it absentmindedly while you are both sitting on the couch and watching a documentary.

He slips it securely into the inner pocket of his jacket, pressing it flat against his chest for a brief second before stepping back into motion and leaving with his brothers without any alarms or police sirens cutting through the night.

And when they get at the warehouse to stash the duffel bags, Andrew doesn’t stay like he usually would to make sure about getting his fair cut of the job. He nods once, quiet, ignoring their snickers and comments about him being ‘down bad’ all the way to his truck.

The house is dim when he enters, a soft glow coming from Craig’s bedroom and before he sees you, he hears your voice. It’s so soft.

“And baby whale swam all the way across the ocean to find mama whale,” you murmur.

He quietly walks up to the threshold to see you sitting on the bed with Nick lying, his eyes dropping with sleep, his thumb in his mouth and clutching to his monkey plushie. You slowly close the illustrated book before pressing a kiss onto the his hair and something expands in Andrew’s.

(You would be good at this. At building something steady. He can picture you pregnant, swelling with a child. His curls and your smile on a being that would never know the kind of hurt he had to go through.)

You stand up from the bed and see him, the relief crossing your face so achingly tender it nearly knocks the breath from his lungs.

“Andrew.”

He nods once, trying to convey his feelings, “I came back.”

You smile, closing the bedroom door behind you and stepping close to him, scanning for injuries the way he did for you at the skatepark. He lifts his hands, showing you his palms.

“I’m fine. I promised you I would.”

Your shoulders drop in a way that tells him you’ve been holding yourself rigid for hours, managing a barely audible, “Thank God.”

His lips tilt upward before reaching into his jacket’s pocket, “Turn around,” before adding a quiet, “Please.”

“Bossy,” you reply, amused, before turning your back to him.

He closes the one last step between you, pulling out the necklace from his pocket, careful not to let his hands shake as he lifts your hair to expose the back on your neck. He fastens the chain, the clasp clicking softly into place and for a second he doesn’t step away, the pad of his thumb grazing at the nape of your neck.

“Andrew,” you whisper, turning back toward him, your fingers lifting to trace it. “It’s…It’s beautiful. Thank you.”

He keeps staring at the pendant who rests exactly where he imagined it would be, then at your mouth before quickly going back to your eyes. You are close enough that he can feel your breath on his face, the world narrowing to the space between you.

He wants to close the distance, to press his mouth to yours.

Instead, he rests his forehead gently against yours, grounding himself with your scent, refusing to close his eyes.

“You should sleep,” he murmurs.

You smile softly and suddenly, Andrew wonders how he can extract a memory and preserve it forever in resin.

Because this moment feels like the dawn of his existence.

──────────

When Andrew was seven years old, the house was already too loud.

Somewhere down the hall a door slammed hard enough to be heard from the bedroom he shared with Julia, who was sitting on the floor with a deck of cards spread between them while he lined them into exact rows instead of playing War.

He liked the rows and the symmetry of it. It calmed him each time the edges were precisely following the pattern of the carpet. With this, he didn’t need to count.

In the backyard, someone shouted about money, making the twins flinch in fear. Julia reached for his hand, and they sat like that for a long time: her fingers curled tightly around his, his eyes fixed on the the cards. (Hearts. Diamonds. Clubs. Spades. Everything will be all right.)

Smurf emerged in the doorway with her bright smile, eight months pregnant with their little brother, tilting her head, “My baby is a strange one,” she whispers to his new stepfather, “But useful.”

Andrew heard it. He didn’t know what strange meant exactly, but he knew it was something you said when you didn’t want to say wrong.

At school, boys kept snatching his skateboard, tossing it across the asphalt because he rode the same loop over and over during recess, memorizing how many pushes it took to reach the fence.

(Fourteen. Fourteen every time. An even number. He liked them. That’s why he always counted till four.)

The first time a boy shoved him and called him a freak, Andrew didn’t respond. Just took back the board and kept doing his loops. The second time, when the board got kicked away and Julia was not there to held his hand, Andrew swung without warning. He couldn’t remember deciding to, just the sound of the impact and how the noise inside him went blissfully silent.

After that, teachers called him difficult, the kids stopped approaching him and Smurf congratulated him with a kiss on his mouth.

At night, when Julia was asleep beside him, Andrew kept staring at the ceiling, wondering something he couldn’t say out loud to his mother or his sister: would anyone ever see that he was trying? Trying to keep himself together so he didn’t explode? Trying to be good? Trying to stop the noises in his head?

-

When you were seven years old, the house smelled like warm cookies.

You were sitting on the couch, your small arms cradling your cousin, afraid to drop her. You didn’t know how to act with a baby. Your parents had sat you down a few months ago at the kitchen table and told you that you were their little miracle, that Santa sometimes forgot things and that maybe it would always just be the three of you – which sounded a little sad until your father had squeezed your hand and told you that three was already perfect.

But it was alright, because now, you had your cousin’s fingers clutching onto your hair, “She’s holding me!” you squealed, delighted and in awe because here, in this house, you were allowed to be amazed and to grow at your own pace.

The day you scraped your knee on the sidewalk, trying to teach yourself how to roller skate, you cried for less than a minute before your mother knelt in front of you, cleaning the wound and kissing the sting away. “You’re gonna be okay,” she said, and you believed her.

At school, you had a best friend who whispered to you how babies were made, and that made you giggle all day, the teacher shaking his head and calling you incorrigible, even though you had no idea what that meant and decided it must be something wonderful if it made you laugh that hard.

And the day you asked what you could be when you grew up, no one laughed. “You can be anything my little monkey,” your father had told you, and you thought about it for the whole day. Because anything was a lot for your brain: a teacher, a vet, a marine biologist. You always circled back to the same answer: something to help people.

And at night, as you looked at your glow-in-the-dark stars on your ceiling, you wondered about other things: would someone look at you the way your father looked at your mother when she was singing in the kitchen, with that love that said I am home?

──────────

Deran’s bar is louder than usual tonight, crowded by sports fans watching a game between Los Angeles and Atlanta. Craig has tried to tell him why it was so important to win at least five times since their arrival, but Andrew’s attention remains elsewhere entirely, watching you from across the room the way he has been watching you for four months now: trying to read something in your posture or in the tilt of your head that could give him an answer.

Because the truth is…he doesn’t know what you are after last night and if what happened in the hallway, or every night you’ve spent wrapped together, mean the same thing to you that they mean to him. He wants to ask, to spill the question out before it eats him alive: what are we?

Andrew hates not knowing. On a job, he knows every camera, every blind spot, every possible way things can go wrong but with you, there’s no map. And he hates that he can’t predict your next move.

You are standing at the bar, ordering a drink, your back half-turned to him and wearing a dress that shouldn’t be allowed to exist in public. It makes his pants grow tighter and has him readjusting on the stool, trying to pretend he isn’t affected while his brother sits three feet away and would never let him live it down if he knew.

And he knows he shouldn’t be staring, but you keep touching absentmindedly the necklace, your fingers tracing the pendant as it moves with your breathing, and before he can stop himself, he’s counting it.

(One. Two. Three. Four.)

You had said thank you last night in a way that felt like you meant something more, had let him secure the necklace around your neck and had met his eyes when you called it beautiful as if you were promising you would always wear it.

Always.

(Oh, how he doesn’t trust that word. Doesn’t trust anything that implies staying. He knows better. He should know better.)

And yet, there you are, wearing it for everyone to see, which does nothing to steady his accelerated pulse, and leaning across the counter to collect your cocktail from Deran. The movement doesn’t reveal much more of your skin, but it still sets ablaze Andrew’s brain, his lips going dry as he tries to resist the urge to walk up to you and beg for you to tell him that he isn’t the only one picturing rings, and a cradle in a quiet house and your head on his chest until he is old and grey.

“You’re not being subtle, you know that?” Craig says, cutting through the haze of his thoughts.

“Don’t start.”

Craig raises his hands innocently. “Jesus, relax.” He immediately reaches for the bowl of peanuts on the table, and Andrew feels his jaw tighten at the thought of how many unwashed hands have touched that bowl already. “Seriously, what’s wrong with you tonight?”

What’s wrong is that he just stole diamonds worth more than all of the jobs he did last year and it doesn’t compete to the way you look with the chain resting against your collarbone.

What’s wrong is that he would give back every dollar from last night if it meant waking up beside you for the next fifty years.

What’s wrong is that he is one second away from walking across that bar and lowering himself at your feet for your hands to baptize him clean, as if loving you were the only absolution worth asking for because whatever heaven exists for a man like him begins and ends with you.

And what’s wrong right now is that a man slides into the empty space beside you, leaning too close and touching your arm to get your attention. You turn toward him politely, your lips curving into the small smile you once called your ‘customer smile’.  You had explained it to his brothers and him: that you always kept the worst-case scenario in the back of your mind and that a smile felt safer than a hard no since it could mean the difference between walking away or not.

(Andrew doesn’t know the names or the faces of those who made you feel like that but he wants to find them. He wants to press them on the ground and feel their pulse panic under his thumbs. He wants them to understand what fear tastes like when it turns metallic into the mouth. He wants the air stolen from their lungs the way it must have been stolen from yours when you felt scared. He no longer wants to count. He wants to hurt. To see this man’s blood on the bar.)

Andrew starts walking towards you before he even formulates the thought, shoulders squared, already calculating how much force it would require to grab the stranger by the collar and steer him outside of the bar.

His vision narrows as he sees the stranger laughing, his hand lifting to linger near your elbow as if he was testing whether he can push for more and that makes Andrew’s vision blur at the edges. He is three steps away. Two.

Your eyes find his instantly, and something shifts in your expression. Your hand leaves the cocktail and you smile at him. It’s not the customer smile. No, it’s the real one that unravels him each time.

“Hey, honey,” you say brightly as your arm wraps around his neck and you press a kiss to his cheek, your hand traveling down his side before sliding into the back pocket of his pants, settling against him.

Andrew is almost sure he died at some point on the way there because he is pressed against you and now, he is no longer Andrew or Pope. For a brief moment, he gets to just be honey, and the word makes him happier than any name ever has.

The stranger glances between you. “Oh. I didn’t realize…”

“My boyfriend,” you cut him off with a smile, looking up at Andrew’s face.

His eyes were already on yours, searching for the smallest flicker of fear. Because if the man has dared put some in them, Andrew would dig an unmarked grave without blinking. When he finds none, his hand comes to your waist, his thumb strolling along your hip as he dips his head and presses his mouth above the faint line of stitches on your forehead.

“Hey, sweetheart,” he murmurs, low enough that the word belongs only to you.

He feels your breath hitch against his skin before turning to the man and saying lightly. “No worries, he always gets a little intense about men crowding me,” you tilt your head, thoughtful. “Not sure if it’s the boxing or the prison time. But don’t mind him…he almost doesn’t bite.”

The stranger’s smile falters just enough to satisfy something dark in Andrew’s chest. “Oh, um…yeah. Sorry man, I didn’t know she was taken.”

Andrew doesn’t raise his voice or move, he just stands there with your hand in his pocket, letting the silence stretch until it feels suffocating. “She is.”

“Right. I’ll go back to…the match.”

Andrew doesn’t blink and keeps track of the man’s back until he is laughing again at his friends’ table like nothing happened and only then does he let his focus shift back to you. You, who’s still close and warm, holding onto him like you have no intention of letting go.

His hand remains at your waist as he turns toward you, the movement bringing your faces close enough that your noses almost brush and your breaths mix between you. He lowers his head slightly, almost enough to kiss you.

“You okay?” he murmurs while his thumb keeps its slow movement on your hip.

You nod, your mouth curving up in that smile he loves. The real one. The one that you have at the skatepark each time you manage to stay upright a little longer than the day before: proud, bright and stubbornly pleased of yourself. And he can’t help but think about those lips and the way they said ‘honey’.

(He wants to hear it again. Wants to hear it softly. Wants to hear it moaned in the dark and against his mouth. He wants to kiss them every day for the rest of his life. To learn them. To know how they would part as he pounds into you. Stop. He has to stop.)

He blinks twice, grounding himself in the feel of your waist.

“Andrew. I’m good, I promise,” you murmur, sliding your hand out of his pocket and lace your fingers with his instead, interlocking them. “Let’s get out of here, please. It’s too loud.”

He doesn’t say it out loud, but relief settles at your suggestion. The bar feels too loud, too crowded and the idea of how many unwashed hands like Craig’s have been over the counters keeps coming back at him. So, when you tug gently at his hand and turn toward the door, he follows without hesitation, grateful that you were the one saying it.

The door swings shut behind you and the noise from the bar dulls instantly, reduced to a muted thud. The air is cooler than inside, smelling like the salt of the ocean mixed with your shampoo and he doesn’t understand how he gets to still have your hand in his and your thumb moving across his knuckles.

It’s only when you stop beside the truck and turn toward him that his eyes drop to the thin gold chain resting around your neck. His free hand lifts carefully to brush the chain first, following it down until the pad of his thumb rests over the pendant itself, flattening it against your skin.

“Still got it on,” he murmurs, tracing the outline of the pendant.

(He imagines doing this, years from now. In the kitchen. In bed. In the shower. Adjusting it before you leave the house. Brushing it aside before he kisses the curve of your throat. Seeing it against your skin when you are carrying his child.)

“Looks better on you than it did in the store,” he adds.

Your fingers slide slowly between his, guiding his hand so it settles flat over your heartbeat. He can feel it beating loud and fast under his palm, matching his own.

You tilt your face enough to find his eyes back. “Thank you for what happened in there, Andrew. You were good.”

His eyes slip shut for half a second because he doesn’t trust himself to survive the way you are looking at him, smiling at him with such warmth he shivers of pleasure.

(Good. You think he is good. If that’s what you want, he can be good. He can kneel. He can find how to rebuild himself from the bones if it means you keep calling him good.)

“You shouldn’t say things like that,” he says under his breath.

“Why?”

“Because I’d do anything if you asked.”

Your fingers start to caress the back of his hand. “Anything?”

He nods, his gaze unwaveringly focused on your eyes. “If you told me to walk away from the jobs, I would.”

Your hand pauses against his.

“Andrew…” you murmur, but there’s no panic in it, no immediate rejection. “You know why I wanted to reject him, right?”

He doesn’t answer, too scared of startling the moment with another word.

“You know why I’d reject any other guy in that bar and why I wanted him to know?”

“Know what?”

“That I’m not available.”

“You’re not?” he asks, as his mind races.

“I don’t know,” you say softly. “Are you?”

The question hangs there, in the small space between your bodies, his mind fumbling with a thousand overlapping questions.

(Are you with him? Calling him yours? Defining what this was? Finally answering the question that has been rattling his brain for weeks?)

“Are you available Andrew?” you repeat gently, your hand lifting up to cup his face.

He exhales slowly, trying not to whimper at the contact, shaking his head.

You lean closer, your nose brushing his and your voice dropping lower. “No?”

“No.”

Your thumb traces patterns along his cheekbone and it takes him a few moments to realize that you were mapping his freckles. “How long?” you whisper.

He feels too weak to reply, overwhelmed by the tenderness of your touch. If his heart had not been already yours, he would lay it at your feet right there, so long as you promise to treat him with this gentleness and care for the rest of his life.

“Before the party? When I called you to help me?” he nods. “Before our night on the couch?” another nod. “Before our first skateboard le-?”

 “When we met. And you brought pastries,” he replies, on the verge of a sob, shameful to confess that he keeps thinking about you on top of him, under him, any way you want it as long as he could disappear into your light and be drown whole by your grace to wipe out every horror he has ever seen or done for the sake of others.

“Andrew. Honey. Please, look at me.”

He keeps his gaze darted to the ground, like looking anywhere but you might prevent him from saying anything more revealing about the depth of his feelings, before his eyes close on their own instinctively, only realizing a heartbeat later that it’s because your lips found his.

And for the first time in Andrew’s life, that deep pit of misery in his heart goes completely silent, frozen for a flash before kissing you back.

Your lips are warm and a little reckless, tasting like mint and something entirely yours that he knows he will crave for the rest of his life. Your fingers thread into his curls, pulling a groan he can’t control out of him. He moves closer without thinking, his hand sliding along your waist until your back meets the metal of the truck door.

The second he registers the force of it, he pulls back just enough to search your face, to scan for any sign that he has gone too far, but the pause barely lasts a breath before your fingers tighten in his hair, guiding him back down as your body arched into his, slipping his tongue past your parted lips.

You are an oasis and he is nothing but a thirsty man wandering in the dark who gets to finally know what it’s like to drink every drop of it. You taste dizzy and intoxicating and he knows that he has been feeding on scraps of affection all his life and now…now he understands what it means to be full.

He is about to tell you how much sweeter you taste than in his fantasies before you bite down on his lower lip, drawing another sound of his throat.

You tilt your head, your arms wrapping fully around his neck as his drop to your hips, steady and sure, to raise you higher against the door, a gasp spilling out of you that he swallows eagerly and your dress hiking up as your legs wrap around him, denying any space between your bodies.

He feels you pull away for air by an inch or two, making him whine at the loss of contact, but he quickly recovers as he sees the flushed smile on your kiss-swollen lips. “Show off.”

“Yeah?” he asks while one of his arms tightens under you, anchoring your body to the door while the other frees itself to trail up your body and adding a smug, “Yeah,” skimming your inner thigh and marveling at how many sounds he can coax out of you, wondering how much more he’d pull if he could trace his thumb along your heat. But instead, he cups again your cheek, tracing slowly the bow of your lips.

“Dimples,” you murmur.

“What?”

“Dimples, Andrew,” you repeat, delighted, like you’ve just discovered something rare. “I didn’t know you had them.”

(Oh. Of course. You can see them because he is smiling. For real. A real one. Not the tight, guarded version. Not the twitchy one. A full unguarded smile. When was the last time he did that?)

“I do,” he says, trying and failing to smooth it away. “So do you.”

Your eyebrows lift. “I do not.”

“You do,” he insists quietly, shifting his hold slightly to keep his arm secure around you, his thumb pressing gently at the corner of your mouth. “Right there…”

Inside the bar, the crowd erupts in a wave of shouting, making you glance at the door before erupting in laughter, eyes wide.

“Oh, fuck,” you whisper, incapable of stopping your giggles. “I forgot.”

Andrew exhales through his nose, trying to calm the blood pumping hard all the way down his length. He knows that you’ve been feeling him against you the whole time, your hips still rubbing together, and for once in his life, he doesn’t want to excuse himself or feel ashamed of his desires, of how much he wants. He has spent too many nights thinking about how you’d taste, how you’d moan. Too many cold showers to try get rid of his hard-on whenever he was picturing you.

“Maybe…” you murmur against his mouth, pecking soft kisses along his jaw. “Maybe we should relocate.”

He looks at you, at the way your lips are still swollen and glistening from kissing, at your panting and the tremors of your legs.

He nods, lowering you carefully back onto your feet, his hands still trailing along your sides to still have some ways of being connected to you before reaching for the door handle of the passenger seat and helping you in.

He feels, walking around to the driver’s side, that he is still smiling. Dimples and all.

──────────

“Maybe…” you sigh, struggling to keep your composure and pressing kisses along the freckles dusting his jaw. “Maybe we should relocate.”

The intensity of his eyes on you, trailing along your body and taking in your rampant arousal, feels like he is on the verge of taking you against the door. You are pretty sure that if he’d ask you for permission, you’d grant it promptly. You want him. You want to know how long it would take for his unwavering hazel eyes to become pleading wet just by your lips telling how good he is to you.

But he just nods, jaw tight before lowering you carefully back onto your feet, making you bite down a protest at the loss of contact, like even the air feels like too much distance, until you feel his fingertips dragging over your waist.

He opens the door for you and not so long ago, you would have described his current behavior as controlled and cold, but now that you know him…you recognize a man who’s trying to contain himself, like a wild animal finally freed.

(Devour. You want him to devour you. To ruin you. Four months of trying – miserably – to have a date with him and it took only a gross man and a ‘honey’ to get him to kiss you like that and tell you he would quit everything?  Fuck. Focus.)

He starts the engine, snapping you out of your thoughts, before pulling out of the parking lot, still smiling. You stare at his profile: the line of his jaw that has now faint traces of your lipstick, the way his tongue briefly drags across his lower lips like he can still taste you and his hand on the gear shift that slowly drifts to your thigh.

Your breath stutters the moment his palm settles just above your knee, the pads of his fingers tracing patterns over it while he keeps his eyes on the road. That definitely doesn’t help your craving for more.

(How much can be a fine for having sex in a car anyway? Andrew has money. Plenty from what you understand so…that would just be a drop in a bucket, right?)

You slide your fingers over his, intertwining them on your lap and stilling his slow, absent movements. He glances at you immediately, probably to understand why you stopped him. But the look you give him is enough to answer his question.

His eyes trail your face a fraction too long before looking back to the road, purposefully, the streetlights passing by a little faster.

“We’ll be there in five,” he declares without looking at you.

“Andrew, it’s at least ten minutes away,” you say, with a barely contained smile.

“Five.”

“I’m timing you, you know,” you smirked, pointing at the car clock.

The truck moves through an intersection just as the light turns yellow - once, then again at the next block – while Andrew doesn’t do so much as blink.

“See?” he says, the hint of a smug smile on his face when the car finally parks home.

You check the dashboard clock. Four minutes.

You shake your head, laughing as you both unbuckle your seatbelts. “Show off.”

Of course, you should know better now, he is not a man to stop there. So, when he opens the door for you before you even reach for the handle, and offers his hand, you should see it coming.

He helps you down carefully and for half a breath you think that maybe this time he’s not going to do it. No, you definitely should know better cause the moment your feet hit the ground, his arm slides behind your knees, sweeping you off while the other moves behind your back.

A breathless gasp escapes your mouth. “Andrew!”

(God you are so fucking gone for him. Is this what it would feel like? Crossing a threshold with him as a young bride? Completely besotted in a white dress? No. Not would. Will.)

He shuts the door with his hip, adjusting you against his chest as your arms loop around his neck automatically, your body relishing his touch as the thought slips out before you can stop it: “I feel like your bride right now.”

His steps slow on his way to the door, just enough for you to notice and wonder if you should just tell him to brush off your stupid words. That you are just drunk (you barely had the time to drink a sip of your cocktail earlier) and tired (you just spent two nights in a row sleeping like a baby in his arms).

The garage light flickers as he reaches the front door. “You are.”

He carries you inside like he’s done it in a million other lifetimes while you are still gaping, mouth wide open at his words. You shake your head a bit wobbly before moving your hand from the nape of his neck to the place on his cheek where you know a dimple is hiding.

“Careful,” you murmur, smiling softly. “Keep talking like that and I might start looking for a dress rea-”

Your words are being cut off by his mouth, kissing you like he is trying to drown in the sensation, tilting his head to fit you better, to take more of you, and you can’t stop the moan passing your lips. It feels like stepping into the fire and realizing you don’t ever want to be pulled out.

Your feet carefully find back the ground as his hands slide along your backbone, fingers spreading between your shoulder blades. His lips part yours with the same confidence he has when he catches you at the skatepark. You feel him everywhere and you still want more.

(Is it ever going to stop? This feeling? This whole tremor that dances under your skin every time he touches you? Every time he kisses you like he means forever?)

He pulls away just enough, heavy breath mingling with yours, hazel eyes half-lidded in pleasure and his nose brushing yours softly with your foreheads pressed together, “We can just kiss. If that’s what you want. I don’t need more. Just you,” he murmured in a broken voice.

The words settle deep in your chest, heavy and large as if they have roots. It makes you want to answer him with your mouth, to kiss him until his doubts leave his bones entirely. You bring your fingers to the bow of his lips and he kisses them gently, one after the other, the softness of it making you tremble.

“Andrew,” you say quietly, smiling despite your racing pulse. “Take me to bed.”

He regards you for a long moment, his eyes moving slowly over your face as though he is searching for hesitation and when he finds none, a smile begins at the corner of his mouth, enough to carve that rare, gorgeous dimple into his cheek. “Bossy,” he smirks before lifting you back by the waist so your legs can wrap up around his waist, walking around the house guided only by his memory since his lips are too busy coaxing moans out of you.

You are almost blacking out from the lack of oxygen when the kiss suddenly breaks. In the soft lighting of his bedroom, you distinguish most of his expression: lustful and bewildered that this is finally happening.

“I want to taste you. Please,” he breaths and you nod, not trusting yourself to reply.

The look that passes through his hazel eyes is hazy, fingers finding the hem of your dress and carefully pulling it up.

“Don’t want to mess it,” he says, folding it neatly on his chair. “You look pretty in that.”

You sit on the edge of the bed, trying not to feel too self-conscious about being only in your underwear, braless as he kneels down to the floor, still fully clothed and face a few inches lower than yours, prying your legs apart.

“Andrew,”

He doesn’t respond, pressing his lips to the inner corner of your thigh and moving further up between your legs.

“You don’t have to Andrew.”

He only lifts his gaze up to yours, unwavering as he continues his kisses, “You don’t want it?”

“I…I’m not saying that. I just…I don’t want you to feel obligated to it. I know it’s not…what men like the most,” you gasp, your hand finding his curls and twisting them around your fingers, making him grunt.

“It’s what I want to do the most, right now,” he says with a sinful gaze. “Can I?”

“Yes. Okay. Sure,” you choke, closing your eyes and lying down as he continues his torturous path, his hands slowly tugging the last piece between him and your pussy.

You don’t think you have ever been this wet with a man. Or a woman. Or anyone at all. Normally, you feel a bit uncomfortable with men going down on you cause they never seem to know what they are doing or are too impatient of having ‘real sex’ to let you finish. But here with Andrew, you are nothing but pleasure, his lips fiddling with you like you are an instrument that he is tuning to his own harmony.

You gasp as his tongue finally probes your folds stopping just underneath your clit, earning from him a low whimper.

“You taste delicious,” he goes, coming up for air by an inch. “Just like how I dreamt,” he adds, making you feel close to delirious.

He lowers his face again, tongue working its way up your pussy again, finally reaching for your clit and rolling over it, making you shudder and writhe on the bed, incapable of keeping your moans down and your hands running through his scalp.

“Andrew, please. Just like that. It’s perfect,” you praise him, feeling how it makes him pick up the pace.

Your last straw is the sight of his face between your legs, eyes burning with nothing but want, his hands used to stealing and hurting now holding onto your legs to keep them open and making you come with a hoarse cry. If there’s a heaven on Earth, you know now that it must only exist in this man. In his hands, his chest, his mouth, his eyes. He is nothing but your sanctuary, your promised land and your altar.

When your orgasm subsides, you feel Andrew crawling over you and pressing his lips against you, making you taste yourself on his mouth as you slip your tongue in it. The small noise of pleasure from the back of his throat is the most delicious sound you’ve ever heard.

“You,” you breathe against him, your lips brushing his, pupils probably wide. “I want you. Like right now. So please…take off those clothes. I love them. Really. But take them off.”

His lips twitches again to the side, “Anything.” as he starts to undress, folding them before going above you, his hard cock pressing against your heat.

His eyes keep searching your face, looking for an ounce of backtrack in your eyes before slowly entering you. That’s when you realize how grateful you are for the previous climax because in any other situation, you would have probably wince at his thickness. Thankfully, he seems to catch on with it - probably due to his gaze not leaving your face and refusing to blink – and takes his time to be fully inside you.

For a couple of minutes, the two of you don’t move, give you the time to marvel at how good he feels inside of you. You know now that you’ll have other days and nights to ask him to stay like this for hours, just to be one.

Andrew presses his forehead against yours, lips brushing yours as he whispers. “I love you.”

The word hums through your body. Love. Love. Love. Andrew loves someone and it’s you. From your scalp to your toes, you can feel it resonating through you. Love. Love. Love.

“I love you, Andrew. My Andrew,” you murmur happily, moving a drenched curl from his forehead. “So good to me.”

His face ends up in your neck, trying to cover his reaction to your words. “You really think I’m good?”

“Of course you are. Look at me, honey,” you say, holding onto his chin to bring back his face close to yours as your legs wrap around his waist. “You are good. You are kind. You keep making me feel safe. And…I’m so lucky to have you,” you add, rolling your hips and making him shiver.

You drink in the sight of him: his sweaty hair sticking to his head, curls messy from where your fingers had run through, the freckles dusting his chest and the traces of old wounds that you’ll ask about one day. But the most important of all is the way he is looking at you – as if he loves you. Because he does. He said it. I love you. I love you. I love you.

You keep whispering sweet nothings into his ear, just to see the flush spreading on his cheeks, his ears, his chest and encouraging his thrusts to go harder, deeper. Soon enough, you are quivering around him, your nails digging in his skin as you bite on his lower lip in retaliation for making you wait so long for this moment.

He lets out a desperate moan. “I won’t…last long. ‘m sorry. You feel so…”

“It’s okay,” you encourage him. “I want you to come.”

He slams his cock one more time and goes. “Wh-Where?”

“In me,” you beg, and you know you have hit the right nerve from the way his whole body trembles.

“Really?” he breathes.

“Please.”

The sight of his body, eyes fighting to not shut tight from the pleasure, mouth pursuing yours, mixed with how good he is making you feel, is too much. Your back arches as you reach your second climax tonight, quickly followed by Andrew, clinging to you as his warm load fills you up. Both of you are gasping for one another, time almost freezing as your eyes are sharing the same thought. I love you. I love you. I love you.

After a couple of minutes, Andrew slips out of you and lays most of his body against your side, putting his head above your breasts, on your heartbeat, intertwining your hands together.

“Tomorrow,” he says.

You brush a kiss on top of his head. “What?”

“Tomorrow, we’re picking out your dress.”

blackout | ⚡︎ ❀

⤷ a power outage strands you and reid in the basement records room. his flashlight is useless, your lighter keeps flickering out, and you’re pretty sure you said too much — but somehow, he never makes you regret it.

bullseye | ❀

⤷ you didn’t plan on staying late at the bar, hustling reid at darts, or flirting with him after trivia. you definitely didn’t plan on the coffee waiting on your desk the next morning, either.

gambit | ❀

⤷ spencer pulls out a travel chess set on the jet and offers to teach you. it’s a harmless way to kill time… until you realize how much you like the way he looks at you across the chessboard. // ficlet written for my 2k celebration event!

hot topic | ❀⚡︎ᢉ𐭩

⤷ after an injury in the field, you patch spencer up with a skull-print bandage. he gets a little jealous, you get a little deflective, and a quiet moment passes at 30,000 feet where you both admit more than you mean to.

fever dream | ꩜ ❀

⤷ you don’t get sick. you don’t let coworkers into your apartment. and you definitely don’t have vivid, full-body sex dreams about spencer reid. except today, apparently, you do all three. 18+ MDNI

night watch | ❀ ⚡︎

⤷ ever since he showed up at your apartment (and ever since that fever dream you’re pretending didn’t happen), you’ve avoided being alone with reid. unfortunately, hotch has another plan: assigning the two of you to an overnight stakeout.

liquid courage | ❀

⤷ you never call anyone when you’re drunk — except tonight, you do. margaritas, glitter, and one reckless drunk dial later, you’re in spencer reid’s car at 1am, wearing his coat and trying not to notice how good he smells.

head rush | ❀ ⚡︎

⤷ dayton, ohio. one asshole cop, one concussion, six hours of stay-awake poker, and a kiss that makes you see stars — right up until you slam on the brakes.

lies | ⚡︎

⤷ after ohio, you rebuild your armor and pretend the kiss didn’t happen. two weeks of awkward distance, a charged moment at the gun range, and a stairwell conversation later, you tell spencer the cruelest lie you can think of. it should end there — but then he finds the only evidence that can prove you wrong.

truths | ⚡︎ ❀ ᢉ𐭩

⤷ spencer shows up at your door with irrefutable proof you’ve been lying — to him and to yourself — but that doesn’t stop you from trying to deny it anyway. what follows is a late-night reckoning: small truths, careful boundaries, and the soft kind of honesty you usually run from.

adagio | ❀

⤷ at work, you and spencer try out adagio tempo until a hotel room debrief tests just how slow you can go.

heart eyes | ❀

⤷ spencer tries to focus on the case, but watching you translate grief into gentleness ruins his concentration until morgan snaps him out of it. // ficlet written for my 1k celebration event!

limited exposure | ⚡︎ ❀

⤷ at rossi’s book release party, the team’s playful teasing pushes you and reid’s “not-a-relationship” into a quiet fight, a real apology, and a red-velvet photo booth that develops more than just pictures.

october nights | ❀

⤷ you can’t hide the fact you love autumn from anyone — especially spencer. he gives you all the best parts of the season in a single day: leaves in the park, halloween decorations, classic horror films, and a night that spooks you in a way you hadn’t planned for.

just socks | ⚡︎ ❀

⤷ you buy spencer funny socks because they reminded you of him. which is totally normal. and casual. and definitely not girlfriend behavior. // ficlet written for my 2k celebration event!

scorpio season | ❀

⤷ you’ve never been a fan of birthdays, but celebrating spencer (and reluctantly allowing him to celebrate you too) might just change your mind.

out of the doghouse | ❀

⤷ your neighbor’s shy, sweet dog doesn’t trust men, and she definitely doesn’t trust spencer when he shows up to your place like he belongs there while you’re dogsitting for the weekend. // ficlet written for my 2k celebration event!

raincheck | ❀ ᢉ𐭩

⤷ you finally say yes when spencer asks to take you on a real date, but work interrupts the night before the entrees arrive.

shelter from the storm | ⚡︎ ᢉ𐭩 ꩜

⤷ in the cold aftermath of a fight left unresolved, you & spencer get stranded as a storm rolls in. with the roads underwater and only one vacant room at the motel, you’re left with nowhere else to run but straight into him. 18+, MDNI. sfw/under 18 version

call it what you want | ⚡︎ ❀

⤷ things between you and spencer are perfect, right up until a flirty grad student and a mandatory ethics training force you to decide what, exactly, to call the thing you’ve been pretending doesn’t need a name.

wear & tear | ꩜

⤷ after a brutal week on a case and an evening at o’keefe’s spent hiding your relationship from the team, you and spencer finally get each other alone — and your fishnets do not survive the night. 18+, MDNI.

can’t keep my hands to myself | ❀ ꩜

⤷ spencer can’t keep his hands off of you during a rare day-off movie marathon, so you call him out and turn it into a no-touching bet with paperwork on the line. 18+, MDNI. // ficlet written for my 2k celebration event!

operation mystery girl | ᢉ𐭩 ❀

⤷ when the team realizes spencer has a secret girlfriend, garcia launches a glitter-covered investigation that’s equal parts profiling and meddling. the only problem? their “mystery girl” profile is so wrong it hurts — and then the case cracks wide open, whether you’re ready or not.

something borrowed | ❀

⤷ a very simple, very sweet, very boyfriend-coded gesture from spencer in the BAU bullpen becomes the team’s newest obsession. // ficlet written for my 2k celebration event!

the comet | ❀

⤷ you wake up in spencer’s bed to feather-light fingers tracing your freckles like they’re constellations. // ficlet written for my 2k celebration event!

tethered | ᢉ𐭩

⤷ spencer has spent so long being the one who steadies you, up until an unsub he sees too much of himself in knocks him off-balance. he asks for space but ends up at your door anyway, and you become the tether you didn’t know he needed.

liminal | ⚡︎ ᢉ𐭩

⤷ you’re caught between breaths, between doors marked STAFF ONLY, between the life you had and the one you might not wake up to. spencer waits on the other side, choking on words he should’ve said sooner while a ghost from your past sits beside him in the waiting room.

house rules | ᢉ𐭩 ⚡︎ ❀

⤷ getting shot was dramatic, but recovering is worse. especially now that spencer reid has a key to your apartment and a color-coded plan for your survival.

like real people do | ꩜

⤷ a follow-up doctor’s appointment leaves you with medical clearance, a filthy dream, and a rapidly deteriorating ability to act normal around your boyfriend spencer reid.

nothing serious | ❀

⤷ you agree to girls’ night to celebrate your first week back at work and end up a little too drunk, a little too honest, and very much forced to confront how serious your relationship with spencer has gotten.

you’re all i have to lose | ⚡︎

⤷ after spencer is exposed to anthrax, the hardest part isn’t being afraid. it’s knowing you love him for the same reasons you’re furious with him.

& more, coming soon!

what are greenaway!reader’s vibes .ᐣ.ᐟ

extras

⟢ greenaway!reader pinterest finds

⟢ headcanons 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

⟢ text messages 📱💬 | text messages pt 2

⟢ greenaway!reader fanart by gummy-cat-writes

⟢ apartment moodboard

⟢ hotch & emily’s relationship w/ reader

⟢ spencer said he “notices things” about reader. what does he notice?

⟢ why is greenaway!reader so avoidant/afraid of relationships?

⟢ greenaway!reader’s complex relationship with her sister Elle

⟢ how would greenaway!reader react to spencer going to prison? / part 2

⟢ things spencer has said to greenaway!reader that made reader not want to run

⟢ what did spencer & greenaway!reader each do with their photo booth strips from limited exposure?

⟢ greenaway!reader timeline

⟢ greenaway!reader marathon event

⟢ greenaway!reader’s MySpace page

⟢ greenaway!reader series playlist

⟢ a peek inside greenaway!reader’s camera roll

Lesson 1: Never Call Your Ex When You’re in Trouble

Lesson 2: Don’t Underestimate an Ex With a Plan

Lesson 3: Don’t Poke a Queen in Heels

Lesson 4: Don’t Show Up at Your Ex’s House Unannounced

Lesson 5: You Can’t Hurt Your Ex Without Bleeding Too

Lesson 6: Never Share a Room With Your Ex

story timeline (contains spoilers if you haven’t read up to Lesson 6)

Lesson 7: Denial Is Not a Strategy, Darling

Lesson 8: Never Enter a Battle You Can’t Win

Lesson 9: Ears Lie. Hearts Don't

Lesson 10: Pain is Shared, Not Borne Alone

Lesson 11: Love Answers Only to Itself

Lesson 12: Careful. Life Doesn’t Spare What You Love

Lesson 13: Love Doesn't Belong on the Balance Sheet

Queen moodboard

Lesson 14: Nothing Worth Having Is Simple

Lesson 15: Never Mistake Restraint for Weakness

Lesson 16: Never Gamble What You Can’t Survive Losing

Lesson 17: Expect the Unexpected… Twice

Lesson 18: Love is never Logical

Lesson 19: What Belongs to You Will Find Its Way Back new

Lesson 20: the last chapter coming soon

Epilogue. coming soon

Next lesson loading… Stay Tuned babes...💋

small lessons (drabbles, bonus scenes)

I'm Yours. (from Lesson 12)

After Hours. (from Lesson 14)

You spend another night in the hospital, and the next morning, 31 hours after the birth, you’re about to be released from the hospital.

As you slowly pack the last of your things up, Jack gets Birdie settled in her car seat. She squirms and whimpers, but he whispers soft reassurances as he buckles her in.

“I know the car seat’s not as warm as Mommy and Daddy are, Birdie girl. I know, but you’ll be okay,” he coos. “The car ride’s only gonna be about ten minutes. Ten minutes, then Mommy’ll hold you again. You might even get the boob.”

From your spot on the foot of the bed, you let out a soft snort.

“All ready?” Jack asks once he’s got Birdie settled.

You nod and stand to step closer to peek in the car seat.

“Aw, she looks even smaller in there,” you mutter as you reach out to adjust her onesie.

“Tiny but mighty,” Jack says, placing a comforting, possessive hand on your hip.

You look from Birdie to him and find him pulling the ‘#1 Dad’ cap on.

“Wow,” you laugh softly.

Jack furrows his brow. “Hey, Jerry got it for me, so I’m gonna wear it with pride.”

Yesterday afternoon, your mom and stepdad, Jerry, came to the hospital with lunch to check in on you and meet the baby. Jerry handed the baseball cap to Jack with about as much pride as you can imagine.

“Okay, babe.” You smile and reach out to adjust the cap. “You actually do look hot in it.” 

Jack grins, and you kiss his cheek, then a nurse comes in with a wheelchair.

“Ready to go home?” she asks, smiling cheerfully.

Jack dropped all the bags off in the car when he pulled it around, so the only thing left for him to grab is the car seat where Birdie is now sleeping soundly. 

On the way out, he walks ahead of you in jeans that hug his ass a little too well and a t-shirt that is fighting with his broad shoulders and his grays peeking out of the cap’s strap.

His forearm is flexed as he carries the car seat, and you’re positive this moment in time is going to live in your mind forever.

When you make it to the car, you peer over Jack’s shoulder as he secures the car seat. It’s not that you don’t trust him to do it properly; it’s just that you’d like to watch over your baby.

He steps back, accidentally bumping into you, then turns around and puts his hands on your hips.

“Hi,” he chirps, happy to see you there. “Wanna ride in the back with her?”

You cover his hands with yours and lean in to peck his lips. “Hi. And, yes, I do.”

Jack takes a step back and keeps his hands hovering near you as you settle into the backseat.

“Comfortable?” he asks as your brow furrows.

Your face relaxes, and you nod. He reaches over and lovingly squeezes your knee before he shuts the door.

The entire drive home, Jack maintains exactly the speed limit on every road. He gets passed at every chance, but he’s got precious cargo in the back, so who really cares if he’s driving like his 97-year-old grandma?

When you get home, he helps you out of the car, then pulls Birdie from her car seat and hands her to you before guiding you up the porch. He unlocks the front door and holds it open for you.

“This is your house, Birdie,” you coo down at the baby in your arms. “This is where you’re gonna live with Mommy and Daddy until we find a different house.”

“Should we give her the tour?” Jack suggests.

You nod at him, then look back at Birdie. By the time you complete the brief tour of the house, she starts to fuss.

“Okay, last room, Birdie girl,” you mutter to the baby as she starts rooting for milk. “It’s your room. Your daddy and Uncle Robby–-who you’ll meet when he gets back from sabbatical–painted the room for you.” You go to sit in the glider chair and start pulling your shirt up and undoing the nursing bra. “And Mommy sat right here while Daddy built the crib.”

Jack crouches down and smooths a hand over Birdie’s soft hair.

“Need anything?” he asks as you get the baby latched.

“Not really,” you say softly, smiling contentedly.

He nods and straightens up. “I’ll bring the stuff inside from the car.”

Then it’s just you and the baby in the nursery, the only sound being her soft suckling.

“We’ve got all kinds of stuff to do,” you say, speaking softly, but not exactly baby-talking. “Gotta make your baby wellness appointment, get you on the insurance, give you a bath. All real exciting, huh, baby girl?”

For a few minutes, you just rock in the glider and watch Birdie’s jaw move.

Jack comes back in and crouches in front of the glider again.

“You gonna want lunch soon?” he asks, slipping his finger in Birdie’s grasp.

“Yeah. I think there’s sandwich fixings and chips. Will you put extra turkey on mine?” you ask, reaching a hand out to caress his shoulder.

Jack nods and leans down to kiss Birdie’s head, then pecks your lips before he heads to the kitchen.

“Your daddy’s love language is physical touch. That’s how he shows us he loves us,” you say, one hand gently stroking Birdie’s hair. “He also loves words of affirmation. I think those two are tied. He also loves doing acts of service. Your daddy’s very talkative and passionate.”

You sigh and stay quiet for a few minutes, eyes just fixed on all her squirming and swallowing and blinking and clenching and unclenching of her fists. Eventually, she unlatches, and you reposition her to nurse from your other breast.

“You know, you’re a very good-looking baby, Birdie. You look like Mommy, except for your chin. I guess sperm donor 18645 gave you that. It’s not bad. And, hey, maybe it gets him all the ladies.” You slip a finger into Birdie’s grasp. “You’re an Abbot, no matter whose DNA mixed with mine to make you. It’s no one’s business, anyway, but just so you know, Daddy and I are going to do everything we can to make sure you don’t feel insecure about that. We don’t ever want you to feel like you don’t belong.”

//

The rest of the day is spent on the couch with just the three of you. You and Jack take turns holding the baby, shirts and Birdie’s onesie long forgotten in the interest of skin-to-skin bonding. She’s relatively quiet outside of the cries that tell you she’s hungry or needs a diaper change. 

When it feels like bedtime, Jack feeds her a bottle with the milk you pumped earlier while you take a shower.

You come out half an hour later–because Jack was adamant that you take all the time you need in there–wearing only a nursing bra and your postpartum diaper. You feel your most unattractive, yet Jack looks at you with awe when you emerge from the shower. 

This body carried his baby and labored for hours to birth her. So, maybe you feel funny about the current state of your stomach, but Jack feels lucky to get to witness it.

“You look so pretty and happy,” he says softly as he burps Birdie, the bottle completely finished on the nightstand.

You smile and lean down to kiss Birdie’s head.

“You’re a good-looking dad, baby,” you say as you sit down next to Jack on the bed.

Jack wraps an arm around your shoulders, the two of you staring down at Birdie in the crook of his elbow, her tiny mouth slightly agape as she sleeps.

“She took the bottle well,” he says softly. “A whole ounce and a half, like a champ.”

“Mm. You like giving her the bottle?”

“Yeah, I did. Good father-daughter bonding.” He turns his head toward you. 

“You’re tired,” you mutter softly, gently cupping his jaw. 

“So are you.”

You huff a soft laugh through your nose. “Go shower. I got her.”

Carefully, Jack transfers Birdie into your arms, then heads to the bathroom. When the door shuts, you pad over to your side of the bed where the bedside bassinet that Jack put together today is all set up.

“Okay, Birdie girl,” you sigh, gently lowering her inside. “This bassinet only has three full walls, so you can still see me if you turn your head to the right. I’ll be right here, and when you wake up hungry, I’ll put you right on the boob. If it’s a diaper situation, you’ll have to go to Daddy, though. He’s a good man, won’t let me do the stinky stuff.”

Birdie settles immediately, not disturbed by the transfer at all. You press a kiss to her chubby cheek, then get in bed and pull the covers over your body. 

A few minutes later, Jack emerges from the bathroom, and before crawling into bed, he stops by your side of the bed to kiss Birdie good night and whisper that he loves her. When he’s in bed beside you, he kisses you and whispers the same thing.

He holds onto you a little tighter tonight than he usually does. You don’t say anything. He presses another kiss to your cheek before he finally settles.

//

The next day, Birdie has her well-baby checkup in the early afternoon. 

Thanks to one of the copious matching sets you bought for postpartum, you feel put together enough to leave the house confidently. You hand Jack the ‘#1 Dad’ hat on the way out the door.

Jack’s a little quieter today. You can’t tell if he’s just tired or if something else is weighing on him. He has therapy today, though. 4:00, you’re pretty sure. Maybe at 5:00. It doesn’t really matter since it’s virtual. 

He pushes the stroller, walking a little slower than he would if a freshly postpartum woman wasn’t walking next to him, through the pediatrician’s office. He only talks when you get situated in the waiting room chair, asking if you’re comfortable. Still, in his quietness, he keeps one hand on the handle of the stroller and the other on your knee, ever protective of his girls.

Birdie’s name is called, and Jack follows behind you and the nurse with the stroller. Once you’re all inside the room, the nurse instructs you to strip Birdie down to be weighed.

She fusses as Jack undoes her onesie but settles when he wraps a blanket around her and cradles her in his arms while the nurse sets up.

“Alright, Dad,” the nurse sighs. “You can set her down.”

Birdie continues to fuss when the warmth is taken away again, but she gets through it.

The nurse declares that Birdie’s weight is in a good place, then measures her head and says those measurements are normal too. After all that, the nurse tells you the doctor will be in for the head-to-toe exam, then slips out.

Jack gathers Birdie in his arms, careful to make sure her whole body is covered by the blanket.

“Babe, are you okay?” you ask softly, leaning against the exam table, your head against his shoulder. “You’re pretty quiet today.”

He turns his head toward you. He shrugs and leans his head down to kiss your temple.

“Just tired. Guess all the adrenaline is finally gone,” he says softly.

You kiss his shoulder. “Hopefully therapy helps today.”

Then the doctor knocks at the door. She’s nice and performs the exam very well, in Jack’s opinion. 

Soft spots of the skull are good, no signs of hip dysplasia, collarbones didn’t break during delivery, femoral pulse is strong, no irregularities anywhere.

“Possibly the most perfect baby ever,” the doctor jokes.

You ask a few questions that you came up with on the drive over. The doctor explains your concerns away, and when you look at Jack, he seems to be in agreement with the pediatrician that everything is normal.  

“Alright,” the doctor says as Jack puts Birdie’s onesie back on. “That’s it for Birdie for today. Cute nickname, by the way. Remember to also take care of yourselves. You guys are a team, so lean on each other and help each other out.”

“Yeah, we haven’t crashed and burned yet,” you joke. “Thank you so much, doctor.”

The doctor smiles and shuts the door behind her.

“Wanna get lunch on the way home?” you suggest as Jack goes to open the door.

“Yeah, sounds good,” he says, following you out while you push the stroller.

//

When you get home, the three of you take a nap after you nurse Birdie. Jack sets an alarm so he doesn’t miss therapy.

By the time the alarm does go off, you’re still sleeping. As Jack puts his prosthesis back on, Birdie starts fussing. He glances at his phone and decides she probably needs a bottle after he checks her diaper.

He scoops Birdie up and sniffs her bottom. Nothing, but he checks more carefully while her bottle warms up. A peek tells him she’s all dry. Just hungry.

“You wanna sit in on therapy with me, Birdie?” he mutters to the baby as he grabs her bottle. “Yeah? Gonna do your best to be quiet?”

Birdie just stares up at Jack with her big, bright eyes, waiting for a bottle or a breast.

Once he’s signed into the virtual waiting room, sitting in your home office, he brings the bottle to Birdie’s mouth. For something so tiny, she sure is a greedy eater.

His therapist, Leo, joins the call, surprised to see Birdie in Jack’s arms. 

“I see we have a guest,” he remarks, smiling.

“This is Birdie. Her mom’s sleeping, and she needed a bottle. Figured she doesn’t understand anything besides milk, so she could sit in today, if that’s okay,” Jack explains.

Leo smiles, eyes clearly fixed on the tiny baby rather than Jack as he talks. “Yeah, of course, as long as you’re fine with it. Wow, the baby’s finally here. How’re you feeling?”

Jack shrugs. “She was born on the sixth, early in the morning. We got home yesterday, took her to the doctor earlier. I feel… I feel good.” He looks down at Birdie, checking in to make sure she’s still taking the bottle okay. “She’s amazing, looks just like her mom except for the chin. I guess that’s from the sperm donor.”

There’s a pause, so Leo takes advantage.

“How do you feel about that? Your daughter having biological ties to another man?” Leo asks, blunt as always.

Jack swallows roughly. “I knew what I was getting myself into when I got involved with my wife. I always knew that Birdie wouldn’t look like me. I actually was kind of expecting her to look exactly like the sperm donor, but she’s really more of her mom’s twin, so I guess that makes me feel better.”

“Would it be possible for you to feel insecure about it if your daughter didn’t look like her mother?”

Jack doesn’t like that question; Leo can tell. Maybe that’s what makes it an important one to ask.

“Guess it could be possible,” Jack says softly, eyes fixed on the door rather than Leo on the screen or Birdie in his arms. “I wouldn’t… She’s my kid, blood or not, so I… I don’t know. I don’t want to sound like an asshole.”

Leo shakes his head. “It’s perfectly natural to want your children to look like you. With Birdie, that’s impossible, but you were there when she was born, Jack. You were friends with her mother in the early stages of pregnancy, and along the way became her romantic partner. Birdie doesn’t know that you didn’t contribute to her DNA, and she doesn’t care. You’re the man holding her right now. Nobody else is. She’ll give you gifts on Father’s Day, and her first word will probably be ‘Dada’, and even though that’s more of a phonics and developmental thing, she’ll be looking at you when she says it.”

Jack sighs and scrubs a hand over his face, holding Birdie and the bottle with one hand for a moment.

“I caught her,” Jack says softly. “When she started crowning, I moved down between my wife’s legs, and I was there to catch my daughter when she was born.”

Leo smiles softly. “You’ve delivered babies before. I assume this one was different.”

“Yeah.” Jack nods and looks down at Birdie, still suckling. “This one… I took this one home. I signed her birth certificate. She’s got my last name. I had to hold back tears when I got my hands on her head. She’s mine.” He swallows roughly again. “I never thought I’d have this.”

“Right.” Leo sighs. “Have you expressed your past feelings about children to your wife?”

Jack sighs now and lets out a sniffle. “No, I didn’t really see the point, honestly. I don’t want her to get the wrong idea and start thinking I’m not happy with how things have turned out.”

Leo nods. “It’s not uncommon to go from being neutral on an idea to being 100% on board. You fell in love with your wife, and the baby came with her.”

“It’s not just that,” Jack says. “Helene didn’t want kids. I thought it was better for me to maybe regret not having kids than her regretting having a child. Now that Birdie’s here, I can’t imagine there ever being a reality where I’m not her dad.”

His phone buzzes just then, the distinctive ringtone he set for your texts filling the room. He glances at the phone and reads the message: I know you’re in therapy, but if you want, I can pop in real quick and grab Birdie.

“It’s my wife,” he says as he sends a message back: That’d be nice. Thx

“Is she okay?”

“Yeah, she’s coming in to grab the baby.”

Then there’s a knock at the door, and Jack tells you to come in.

Eyes a little puffy from sleep, hair slightly mussed, still in the matching pink sweatshirt and shorts set, and the world’s softest and prettiest smile on your face. 

His beautiful wife, mother of his perfect daughter.

Still on the bottle, Jack carefully transfers Birdie into your arms and whispers a soft thank you to you on your way out of the office.

Once the door shuts, Leo smiles. “It’s obvious your wife loves you, Jack. I’m sure she’d understand your feelings. Besides, now that Birdie’s here, how do you feel about her presence, your role in her life?”

Jack nods and swallows the lump in his throat. 

“I’m happy,” he says, his voice warbly. “I don’t… I feel like I can’t believe that there was a universe where I was going to miss out on this, on being a dad. But, y’know, I wouldn’t have this if I hadn’t lost Helene, so I feel kind of… I don’t know, maybe guilty? That I’m having this life that I wouldn’t be having otherwise and…really loving it.”

The adrenaline is finally wearing off, and Jack can finally stop and let his mind get consumed with the question of how he got so lucky with you and also how to rationalize his love for both Helene and you.

He always thought everything bad that happened to him–losing his leg, his and Helene’s infertility, Helene dying–was all punishment for every bad thing he did in his life, the things he did with the American flag on his shoulder that helped a younger Jack believe it was for the greater good.

That didn’t work for long.

“That’s a valid feeling,” Leo says. “It’s true that you wouldn’t have the life you do now if Helene was still here. Let me ask you this, Jack. Are you happy with where you are today?”

Jack sighs but doesn’t hesitate to nod his head.

“I am. I’m happy with my wife and with Birdie. I just… I look at Birdie…” He trails off, eyes squinting. He clears his throat, gaze fixed on a doodle you made on a sticky note next to the computer mouse. “I look at my daughter and wonder what I did that makes me worthy of her. It’s the same thing when I look at my wife, but Birdie… She’s two days old. She’s never done anything wrong in her entire life, and she’s so pure and loved, and I… I wonder if I deserve to be in their lives.”

Leo takes a moment to come up with a response. “Jack, from what you’ve told me, you’ve married a very intelligent and thoughtful woman. She gave up on men and was going to have Birdie on her own. Then she got to know you, and you’ve become her partner in all of this. If you’re feeling doubtful about your worthiness in your family, try thinking about your wife’s decision to involve you, how much you trust her.”

“Yeah,” Jack chokes. He clears his throat. “She’s great. Amazing woman, man, so fucking strong.” He can steer the conversation. “She didn’t get an epidural for about twelve hours. She managed to stay clear-headed the whole time. Like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”

Leo doesn’t miss the avoidance, but one thing is for sure: Jack will talk about it when he’s ready, when he doesn’t feel so raw.

//

When Jack steps out of your office, he doesn’t join you and Birdie on the couch. You’re not upset; he just spent the better part of an hour talking about who knows what. He’s entitled to some alone time. You’re fine to sit on the couch with Birdie at your breast, the remote, water bottle, and a snack nearby.

It’s when nearly an hour goes by that you send him a text asking if he’s okay.

Five minutes go by, and he doesn’t respond, so you pad into the bedroom with Birdie in your arms.

He’s on the bed, back to the door, prosthesis near his nightstand.

You round the bed to put Birdie in her bassinet on your side of the bed, then crawl in next to him, leaving him some space. For someone who didn’t answer your text, he doesn’t seem to want the space as he pulls you toward him. You let him pull your left leg up and rest it on his hip as you bring a hand to his cheek.

“I love you, Jack,” you whisper as he pulls your head toward him so your foreheads touch. “I’m sorry if you’re feeling overwhelmed today, baby.”

He pecks your lips and sighs. 

“Baby, are you okay?” you ask softly, brow furrowed in concern, thumb rubbing back and forth across his cheek.

He nods softly and kisses your lips again.

“I’ve just got a lot on my mind, is all,” he mumbles against your lips. “Let’s just stay here for a while until Birdie needs something. Yeah?”

He’s probably got his entire life story leading up to this point on his mind right now. If he wants to process things on his own before he talks to you about it, that’s okay. You won’t argue against letting him hold you in his arms.

“Yeah,” you whisper back. “We’ll just chill for the rest of the day. Um, tomorrow, though, I wanted to take Birdie on a walk. I think it’d be good for all of us.”

“Sounds perfect, sweetheart,” he whispers softly before pressing another kiss to your lips.

//

As the next few days go by, Jack seems to relax a bit more, which makes you feel calmer, too. The two of you take Birdie on walks in the neighborhood with her fan attached to her stroller.

After the walks is when you shower since the girdle you wear during them creates a lot of sweat.

Today is day seven of being home, day eight since you’ve given birth. Jack has put Birdie down for a nap, so he watches you in the bathroom as you carefully remove the girdle.

“It’s not giving you trouble, is it?” he asks softly. “You feel okay when you wear it?”

You smile as you meet his eyes in the mirror. “I feel fine. It’s doing its job, making things a little easier.”

He nods along, his eyes flitting from your eyes to your still swollen middle.

“Okay, good.” He steps closer to you, his hip brushing your side. “Y’know you’re beautiful?”

You smile brighter, and you caress his cheek. “I do. Thanks for not letting me forget.”

He smiles softly, his gaze softening along with it. Pure would be a good word to describe the way he’s looking at you right now.

“I love you,” you say, rubbing your thumb back and forth across his cheekbone.

He kisses the juncture of your neck and shoulder. “I love you, too.”

He pulls back and you look him in his eyes. So full of love and adoration and peace. You wrap your arms around him, chest to chest, belly to belly.

“So much better without Birdie in the way,” you mutter, your voice muffled with your cheek against his chest.

Jack chuckles softly and kisses the top of your head before letting his arms fall.

When you get out of the shower, you find Jack on the bed with Birdie on his bare chest, a soft pink blanket over her back.

Skin-to-skin has become an addiction.

You walk to your dresser in just the postpartum diaper to put on a nursing bra before you join them on the bed. Jack holds an arm out to get you as close as possible. You sneak your left arm under his neck and cover his left bicep with your hand, your right hand going to Birdie’s fist. Jack’s right hand skates up and down your back, eyes fixed on Birdie like her lip occasionally twitching is the most bewitching thing he’s ever seen.

//

Jack has told you about his nightmares. He told you they didn’t happen very often anymore. You’re pretty sure the last one he told you about happened when you were 37 weeks pregnant, but he didn’t wake you up with his screams or his fingernails digging into your skin.

It’s almost 2:00 in the morning when you hear the sounds of Jack screaming. With the lack of sleep due to having a one-week-old baby in the house, you think it’s Birdie at first. Then you feel his nails dig into your thigh, and you know it’s him.

“Ow, fuck, Jack!” you whimper, whipping your head around in his direction to find his skin drenched in sweat, his left hand gripping your thigh like it’s personally offended him.

You vaguely remember a Google search telling you not to touch him or be too loud.

So you sit there in bed and start speaking in a calming voice.

“Jack, it’s okay,” you murmur. “Please wake up.”

Birdie starts crying in the bassinet to your left.

Your head turns back and forth between your daughter and your husband.

Birdie’s upset that she’s been woken up. Jack is fighting off metaphorical demons and taking it out on your thigh. Birdie’s going to have to cry it out for a second.

You lean your head down, your fists clenching as you fight the urge to caress Jack’s cheek.

“Baby, please wake up. You’re having a nightmare,” you say softly. “Jack, it’s okay. You’re safe.”

His eyes shoot open faster than you’ve ever seen. His grip on your thigh momentarily tightens, and you fight back your whimper while he shoots up in bed.

“Jack, it’s me. You’re safe. You’re in bed with me in our house,” you whisper, keeping your distance as you sit up.

As he comes to, all he can hear is his breathing and Birdie crying.

“I woke them up,” he mutters to himself. 

“Jack, it’s okay,” you say, but he barely hears it.

He finally looks at you, fear in his eyes. You’ve never seen him scared.

The hand he has on your thigh suddenly pulls back in toward himself as if he’s been burned.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, his eyes glazing over.

You shake your head. “It’s okay. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

His eyes focus on the bassinet behind you.

“She’s crying,” he whispers, sounding as if the notion is bringing him physical pain. “Please, you gotta pick her up.”

You furrow your brow, unsure if you should keep your focus on Jack or rock Birdie back to sleep, but his intense gaze decides for you.

Birdie’s cries die down when you finally pick her up, your legs hanging off the bed, your back to Jack as you stare at the broken blood vessels on your thigh.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, finally getting his breathing under control. “Sweetheart, I’m so sorry. I haven’t… I haven’t had one like that in years. I’m so sorry I woke you up.”

You carefully lower Birdie back in the bassinet and turn back around.

“Jack, it’s not your fault. Everyone’s okay,” you whisper. “Do you want to go to the kitchen and have some water?”

He swallows roughly and eventually nods.

You slip out of bed and grab his crutch for him. He takes it and follows you to the kitchen. When you hand him the cup, his eyes fall to your thigh, the dotting on your thigh telling him something hurt you.

“Was that me?” he asks softly, guilt already seeping into his voice.

You chew on the inside of your cheek as you debate lying.

You land on staying silent as you wrap your arms around him. He melts into you, which is relieving. It could’ve gone either way, given his current state.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” he sobs into your neck. 

“I know,” you whisper.

“You just had our baby,” he whimpers.

“It’s okay, Jack. It’ll heal in a day or two.”

“But I hurt you,” he reiterates. “You’re fragile, and I hurt you.”

“You didn’t mean to, baby. It doesn’t even hurt, I promise. I’m okay.”

You press a soft kiss to his cheek and scratch your fingernails up and down his bare back.

“I love you,” you whisper as you pull back slightly. “I’m okay. We’re all safe. Birdie’s asleep in our room, and you and I are having some water. I love you, Jack. I’m right here, and I’m not going anywhere.”

He nods, taking in your words, eyes fluttering shut as he tries to take some deep breaths.

“I love you, too, sweetheart,” he breathes.

“We can sit out here in the living room and talk if you need,” you offer. “Or we can go back to bed. Whatever you need.”

Whatever he needs.

Fuck, you just had a baby. He’s supposed to be telling you that. He’s also amazed you feel safe enough to go back to bed with him after he just about detached your skin from your quads.

Slowly, he leans in to kiss you. You reciprocate immediately, your hands flexing against his back.

“I love you,” he whispers against your lips.

Flashbacks of the nightmare play in his head. Helene sits in the middle of the bathroom floor as blood pools beneath her. You clutch a lifeless Birdie as you bleed out. It makes his stomach churn.

“I love you, too, baby.”

Jack takes in a shuddering breath and pulls back to kiss your cheek now, your temple, your forehead, then pulls you closer with one arm while he balances on his crutch with the other.

Eventually, you go back to bed. Jack’s conflicted between wanting to keep a safe distance from you and wanting to hold you in his arms to lull himself to sleep like he usually does.

You decide for him, wrapping your arms around him in a way that makes his heart ache.

He feels a little better as you rest your head on his pillow, your nose brushing against his neck, your fingers gently stroking the top of his hair, your other arm secure around his middle.

His heart breaks a little when he feels your tears rub against his skin. Your hormones are still a little all over the place, and your brain is finally able to catch up to what just happened. Jack is your strong and tough husband, and seeing him crumble like he just did hasn’t made you believe that any less; it’s just made you sad over the fact that he’s feeling anything other than content. 

You shift a little closer and kiss the underside of his jaw and gently tighten your arm around his waist.

Jack begins gently scratching his fingernails up and down your back, and eventually, your stroking his hair and his scratching your back lulls both of you to sleep.

When you get things moving for the day around 10:00 AM, the sadness in both your and Jack’s eyes lessens just a bit as Birdie lies between her parents in their bed.

He grabs her tiny fist and kisses it while she looks at you like you’ve hung the moon. And after how you supported him last night, Jack would have to agree with his daughter.

*reminder that you get side eyed hard if you're on one of these taglists and don't reblog

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