She's holding a tray like she's presenting a coronation gift—arms straight, chin lifted, expression solemn with performed ceremony—and her hair is piled up in a bun that lists slightly to the left, and her pyjamas are the ones printed with tiny cartoon sloths in various states of peaceful inaction, wrinkled from sleep and absolutely perfect. The pancakes on the tray are shaped like hearts and stars. Of course they are. There's whipped cream already on them, a small mountain of it, listing the same direction as her bun, threatening to topple and entirely unconcerned about this. The sunlight catches the edge of the tray and throws a warm rhombus across the duvet, and for a moment the whole scene is so golden and so improbably sweet that it sits in your chest like a held breath, like something you want to press between the pages of a book to keep.

"Penny," you say, and your voice comes out rougher than you meant it to.

She sets the tray on the nightstand with the focused care of someone who has definitely spilled things before—lowering it slowly, steadying it, waiting a beat to make sure it's settled—then turns to face you with a grin wide enough to be its own light source.

And then she actually looks at you.

Not the quick surface-level glance of someone checking that you're awake. She looks at you the way she always looks at you when she's paying attention, which is the way a person looks at something they know very well and are choosing to see anyway. The grin doesn't disappear—it softens, which is different, which is worse and better all at once, because it means she sees you. She always sees you, and this morning what she's seeing is the particular kind of stillness that your body wears on the days when the myasthenia has arrived early, before you've had the chance to get ahead of it.

It has its own logic, its own timetable, and it's entirely indifferent to the fact that it's Sunday. The signals between your brain and your muscles are misfiring somewhere in the gap, jamming up the line, so that what should be simple—sitting up, reaching out, holding something—instead arrives with this dull, dragging resistance, like every movement is being performed through wet concrete. Your muscles aren't painful, exactly. They're just not cooperating. The space between intention and action has grown several inches wider overnight.

You haven't reached for the fork yet.

You're not going to reach for it yet, because reaching will cost something, and you're adding up your costs this morning with the quiet precision of someone who's been doing this long enough to know exactly what the sums look like and what happens if you spend too much before noon.

Penelope sits beside you on the bed. The mattress dips under her weight, familiar and grounding, and she reaches up and brushes your hair back from your face with a hand that is warm and entirely unhurried.

"Hey, lovebug." Her voice has gone soft. "How bad is it?"

"Medium," you tell her, which is honest. Not the worst—not the crash-day kind of bad, the kind where you lie still and everything is negotiated down to almost nothing, where even speaking feels like it's drawing from a reserve that isn't there. But not fine, either. Medium is where the world is still accessible to you but costs more than the ticket price. Medium is wading through something thick and slow that nobody else can see.

"Okay," she says, and nods once, the decisive nod of someone filing a memo and moving immediately to action items. "Okay. Medium I can work with. Medium means magic hands are on duty. Medium means I'm in charge of all fork-related activities and any activity that involves lifting anything heavier than a remote control."

"Penny, you don't have to—"

"Nope." She says it gently, not a command so much as a door closing quietly in the face of the argument before it can get its foot in. "No protests. No 'I'm fine.' I know you're okay, lovebug—I can see you're okay. I also know that okay and 'doesn't need help' are two completely different postcodes."

You look at her. She looks back. Her eyes are very steady, which is not something people always clock about Penelope Garcia—they notice the colour, the warmth, the way she deploys them expressively like punctuation in a sentence—but underneath all of that there's a steadiness that has never once flinched at anything you've brought to it.

"Okay," you say.

She picks up the fork with the gravity of someone accepting a baton.

She makes a whole production of the first bite—selecting the best heart-shaped pancake with visible deliberation, tilting her head to consider it, adding an extra peak of whipped cream to the top with the care of someone applying a finishing touch to a sculpture—and then she presents it toward you with a small ceremonial flourish.

You laugh. The laugh is easy and loose and costs you almost nothing, which is its own small miracle.

"Open up," she says, in the voice she uses for feeding ducks at the park. "I slaved over these. Well—I stood over them. The stove did most of the slaving. There are some very abstract shapes in the bin downstairs that didn't make the cut."

"How abstract?"

"One of them looked like a map of a country that doesn't exist. Another one was... I'm going to say avant-garde. Spiritually, it was a star."

You're still laughing as she feeds you the first bite, and it's good—of course it's good—too sweet, more vanilla than flour, exactly the way you like them, the whipped cream dissolving cool against your tongue before the warmth of the pancake catches up.

"These are really good," you tell her, and mean it.

"I know." She cuts the next piece. "I've been perfecting this recipe for two years. I'm basically a professional at this point. You should see my Yelp reviews."

"You don't have Yelp reviews."

"Internally I do. Five stars. Zero complaints."

She feeds you bites between the two of you talking, slow and meandering the way Sunday mornings are supposed to go—she tells you about something Derek said on Friday that still has her mildly outraged on your behalf, her fork gestures growing more emphatic as the story escalates. She tells you about the film she watched without you on Thursday night, which she'd thought would be fine and turned out to be devastatingly sad, and how she'd had to text you at midnight just to say I miss you, come home soon even though you were asleep in the next room. She tells you her current theory about the coffee machine, which involves a trapped spirit and a grudge that predates the building.

"I'm just saying," she says, loading another piece of pancake, "it sounds different on Tuesdays. I've documented it."

"You've documented it."

"Voice memos. Six of them. I'm building a case."

"Against the coffee machine."

"Against whatever is inside the coffee machine." She points the fork at you, briefly, for emphasis. "There's a distinction."

The morning stretches out unhurried around you, warm and slow as the light pooling on the duvet. You're aware of your body—you're always aware of your body, it's the background music that never quite stops—but there's something about being taken care of properly, without fuss or performance, that lets you hold that awareness at a distance rather than right behind your sternum where it usually lives. The heaviness in your hands is still there. Your eyelids are doing the thing where they feel faintly reluctant to hold themselves up, that slight drag at the outer corners that's different from ordinary tiredness and that you've stopped trying to explain to people who don't already understand it. But you're here, in the golden light, and she's talking about a haunted coffee machine with absolute sincerity, and the pancakes taste like vanilla and care.

When you finish eating, she sets the tray aside and doesn't immediately reach for her phone or her laptop. She just sits with you. Pulls her legs up onto the bed and leans against the headboard and turns the TV on low—something comfortable, a show you've both seen enough times that it doesn't require attention—and asks if you want the weighted blanket or just the duvet.

"Duvet," you say. "But maybe both later."

"Both later, noted." She tucks the duvet up around you with the thoroughness of someone who has thought seriously about this, smoothing it along your sides, getting the cold spots at the edges, folding it back a little at the top so it's not sitting on your face. She makes small pleased sounds under her breath while she does it, entirely unaware of them.

"You're very good at this," you tell her.

"I've been training since the day we met," she says seriously. "You just didn't know you were being taken care of that whole time."

You think about saying something and decide just to let the warmth of it sit.

An hour passes, maybe more. The show murmurs on. Penelope gets her laptop at some point and tucks it open in her lap, working in the loose, unhurried way she only allows herself on Sundays, occasionally reading something out loud to you—a news headline, a sentence from an article she finds funny, a Wikipedia rabbit hole she's tumbled into. You answer when you want to and drift when you don't and she never seems to notice the difference, or she notices and simply doesn't mind.

Your eyelids start going heavy in the way that has nothing to do with tiredness you can push through. This is the other kind—the kind where your body has made a decision and is simply informing you of it, pulling resources inward, calling time on the morning without consulting you. The muscles holding your eyes open have been working all morning and they're done working, finished, and no amount of blinking is going to negotiate with them. You try anyway. Once, twice. The third time you don't try.

"Hey," Penelope says softly. She's already setting the laptop aside. "You going under?"

"Maybe," you admit.

"Good." She's already moving—reaching for the weighted blanket folded at the foot of the bed, layering it over the duvet, tucking it down around your legs. She gets up to turn the TV down to barely a murmur, and then she uncaps the lavender candle on the dresser. She doesn't light it right away; she finds the lighter in the drawer, takes her time, cups her hand around the flame until the wick catches. A small bright point in the amber afternoon.

You realise she's been waiting to light that candle. She'd been saving it for this part of the day.

The smell reaches you slowly, soft and herbal and warm, unfurling through the room like something that was always there and is only now making itself known. The lavender and the weighted blanket and the low murmur of the TV press together into something that feels almost architectural—a structure built specifically around you, a room inside the room, the walls made of warmth.

She settles beside you on top of the blankets, back against the headboard, laptop open again in her lap. And then, without looking down, she starts tracing patterns on your arm. Slow, light, unhurried—looping figures-of-eight and idle spirals and lines that go nowhere in particular, the way you might hum a song without realising you're doing it.

"I'll be right here when you wake up," she says.

A pause. The candle flickers.

"Always."

It's softer the second time. More to herself than to you, the word landing like something private, like she's reminding herself as much as telling you.

You close your eyes.

The lavender is the last thing you're fully conscious of. Then the warmth of her beside you, solid and real and unhurried. Then the soft, rhythmic click of her keyboard, distant and regular as rain on a window. Then the pattern on your arm, getting slower, or maybe you're just getting slower, sinking down through the layers until the room and the candle and the low voice of the television are all very far away, and the only thing that's close is the fact of her being there.

You sleep.

When you wake up, the candle has burned lower—half an inch, maybe more—and the light through the curtains has shifted. The morning gold is gone, replaced by the mellow amber of mid-afternoon, heavier and more horizontal, the kind of light that leans. Penelope is exactly where she said she'd be, sitting beside you with her phone in both hands, scrolling through something with the focused expression she gets when she's in the middle of a plan.

You watch her without moving. You do this sometimes—hoard a few seconds of her before she knows you're back, the way you might save the last bite of something good. The candlelight finds the edges of her hair and gilds them. Her socks are mismatched. There's a small frown on her face that isn't a sad frown, just the frown of someone solving a problem they've invented for themselves.

"There she is," she says, without looking up, because she always knows. Then she looks up, and the frown becomes a smile, quick and warm as a lamp switching on. "How do you feel?"

You take a moment to actually check. Your hands are still heavy but less so—the sleep has done some work, loosened something, given a little back the way it sometimes does. Your eyelids feel more cooperative. The thick resistance that had been sitting across your shoulders all morning has quieted, not gone but no longer shouting.

"Better," you say. And it's true.

"Yeah?" Her face does the thing where relief moves through it and she doesn't quite let herself show it fully, because she knows you don't like being worried about.

"Yeah. Not a hundred percent. But better."

"Better is everything," she says, firmly, as though she's saying it for the record. Then she tips her phone toward you. "Okay. So. I've been planning."

The screen shows a Pinterest board—new, by the look of it—titled Sunday Rituals Vol. 2 in her handwriting, photographed and pinned as a header. Below it: cookie recipes with circled notes in the margins of the screenshots, architectural diagrams of pillow forts that she's clearly found and saved with genuine intention, a post about stringing fairy lights inside blanket structures.

"Walk me through this," you say.

She sits up straighter, the phone held between you like a presentation deck.

"Okay. So. Phase one: cookies. I'm thinking snickerdoodles because they're forgiving and they smell incredible and I want the whole flat to smell like cinnamon. Phase two: fort construction. I've identified the optimal load-bearing cushions—the big square ones from the sofa are structural, the throw pillows are decorative load, and the duvet from the spare room is going to serve as the primary roof panel."

"You've really thought about this."

"I have a Pinterest board and a methodology. Phase three," she continues, "is fairy lights, which I ordered on impulse three weeks ago and have been looking for an excuse to deploy. They've been in the hall cupboard. Waiting."

"And phase four?"

She looks at you. "Phase four is we get inside the fort and watch something terrible and eat all the cookies."

You look at her—at the wild optimistic mess of her hair and the sloth pyjamas and the earnest, delighted focus on her face, at the way she's holding the phone toward you like evidence in a court case she's absolutely going to win—and the feeling that moves through you is warm and complicated and doesn't have a single clean name. Gratitude is in there. Love is in there, so much of it that it doesn't fit anywhere in particular and just fills the room. Something else too, something quieter: the particular relief of being known all the way down. Not understood in the abstract, not accommodated out of obligation—known. The part of you that lives inside the ongoing negotiation with your own body, inside the arithmetic of what a day costs and what it leaves behind, the part you'd spent years thinking was too tangled to explain—she knows that part. She's never needed it explained.

You reach for her. Your arm moves more easily than it did this morning.

She comes without hesitating, tilting sideways until she's leaning against you, her head finding the space just below your chin as if it's a place that was designed for exactly this purpose, which, you've decided, it was. You settle your cheek against her hair. She makes a small contented sound and tucks her phone away.

"Tell me more about the load-bearing cushions," you say.

She lights up in a way that is entirely genuine and completely disproportionate to the subject matter, which is one of about forty thousand things you love about her.

Outside, the Sunday light is doing what it does best in the late afternoon—going slow and sideways across the room, finding the dust motes and turning them briefly golden, catching the edge of the curtain and making it glow at the hem. The lavender candle is still burning, its flame steady, its small bright point reflected faintly in the window glass. Penelope is talking about blanket ratios and cookie logistics and the structural integrity of the fort she's going to build, her voice bright and warm and full of the kind of joy that isn't performing anything for anyone—it just is, constant and particular and entirely her own.

Your body is tired. It'll be tired tomorrow too, and probably the day after, and next Sunday when you take the inventory again before the light changes. That's the shape of your life—not a tragedy, not something to fix, just a fact you've learned to hold without letting it hold everything else. There will be good days and medium days and crash days, and the arithmetic will keep being what it is.

But the room smells like lavender and the candle is still burning and she's warm against your side, and there are cookies that are going to happen and a pillow fort with genuine structural research behind it and fairy lights that have been waiting in a hall cupboard for three weeks for exactly this occasion. And you think—not for the first time, never for the last—that Penelope Garcia doesn't make the hard things disappear. She's never once pretended they aren't there. What she does instead is make it so the hard things exist in the same world as heart-shaped pancakes and coffee machine conspiracy theories and a Pinterest board titled Sunday Rituals Vol. 2 and always, said soft in the morning like a promise that doesn't need to be stated because it already simply is.

"The fairy lights are solar powered," she's saying, very seriously. "Which is technically irrelevant since we're indoors. But I respect the commitment."

"Very eco-conscious fort," you say.

"Exactly. Sustainable architecture." She tilts her head up to look at you. Her eyes are warm and a little smug and full of something steadier than either. "You feel okay? Honestly?"

"Honestly," you say. "Yeah."

She holds your gaze for a moment, checking, then nods once, satisfied, the way she does when she's filed something important and can move on.

"Good." She resettles against your shoulder, comfortable and unhurried, like someone who has nowhere else to be and knows it. "Because phase one starts in twenty minutes and I need you at full cookie-adjacent capacity."

You close your eyes and rest your chin against her hair and feel the room around you—warm and amber and smelling of lavender, slow with Sunday light—and you let yourself just be inside it. No arithmetic. No inventory. Just this.

That's enough. It's more than enough.

“You’re no fun Bradley,” Coyote mumbled.

“I’ll drink to that,” Jake agreed with his friend, making a mock cheers motion towards him with a beer he — somehow —already had open.

You rolled your eyes at his words, Hangman’s childish behavior was only fueling the irritation and oncoming exasperation you were already feeling bubbling up inside you, from merely standing on the burning sand.

“I don’t even know why I keep coming to these things,” you continued complaining to Natasha, needing to lament yourself at the prospect of the hellish afternoon you were about to willingly — only God knows why — put yourself through.

Natasha only chuckled and before she was able to retort anything, Jake’s voice resonated in your ears first.

“I have my theory Lightning, wanna hear it ?”

“No.”

“I think that the temptation of seeing my hot, sweaty and shirtless body absolutely destroy Bradshaw at volleyball is just too much for you to resist.” He laid out his explanation, cocky smirk firmly in place, shirt already nowhere to be seen as he took a sip of his beer.

Natasha’s eyes slightly widened at Jake’s bold choice of words. Her eyes flicked from him to you, awaiting your answer and not missing the way your nostrils slightly flared in irritation… or was it fluster ?

You scoffed, hoping it came across as indignation, rather than a pathetic attempt to hide how rather truthful his observation had been.

“Just shut the fuck up Hangman,” you hissed, “go splash around and leave us alone, will you ?”

He stayed silent for a beat, pride radiating from his features as a victorious grin stretched his lips. No doubt that your reaction gave him the answer he was looking for, he’d been bulls eye, as always.

“You don’t have to tell me twice,” he winked at you before making his way towards Reuben and Mickey who had started a swimming race.

Bradley, who was still busy unloading his Bronco — waist deep into the trunk, suddenly got out upon hearing Jake’s words.

“Hey no— come back here Hangman !” He yelled after the blond. He turned to you then, lifting his arms in incomprehension, “what the fuck Lightning ?”

You didn’t even dignify him with a response, too busy watching Jake’s back as he walked towards the ocean. Your eyes raked over his form. From the short hair at the top of his nape, giving way to his neck, meeting the muscles of his shoulders — expanding into his whole back. His waist, which narrowed a bit from the rest of his body — his hips, on which his bathing suit was sitting lowly, the curve of his ass—

The sound of Bradley clearing his throat next to you made you jump out of your trance. When you — regretfully — tore your eyes away from Jake to glare at Bradley, he was looking at you in a deadpan expression, one eyebrow raised.

“I’m not bothering, am I ?”

You heard Natasha snicker as she was now the one waist deep with Bob into the Bronco’s trunk, and you felt heat rising to your cheeks at being so blatantly caught ogling at your so called ‘arch nemesis’.

You cleared your throat, making your voice sound as normal as possible, “No, you’re not.” You smiled tightly at him, resuming the unloading of the car. “How many stuff did you bring anyway, Bradley ? Feels like you have enough things to camp here for a week.”

He placed a hand over his heart, feigning hurt.

“I’m sorry, Lightning, I like to anticipate. You never know when you might need something.” He explained, “besides, someone’s gotta think about it. And we can’t count on you for that.” He muttered out his next words, “you’re way too busy staring at Hangman’s ass…”

“I’m sorry what was that, Bradshaw ?”

He smiled sweetly at you, “Nothing, Lightning, it was nothing.”

“Alright let’s just finish unpacking this damn car.” Natasha called out to both of you, “I wanna go in the water already.”

You four finally finished getting everything out and setting up a small space with parasols, the cooler and all of your towels. When you had finished setting the last towel down, Natasha was already halfway out of her t-shirt and shorts and already in her bathing suit, Bradley was doing the exact same thing as he ceremonially took off his t-shirt.

“You guys coming ?” Natasha asked Bob and you, as you were both sitting comfortably on your towels under one of the parasols.

“Not for now, maybe I’ll come in later.” Bob replied with a sweet smile, pushing his glasses back up his nose.

“And I’m not going in at all, now or later.” You answered, aiming to smile as sweetly as your friend.

“Oh come on, you do this every time,” Natasha complained, “just come in ! Just for a quick swim, please !” She begged, joining her hands in a pleading motion as Bradley snickered next to her.

“Ain’t no way you are getting her near the water, Nat,” he said putting on his aviators.

“He’s right, I’m sorry Phee but you know it, there’s too many weird ass creatures in there for me to ever step foot near it.”

Natasha let out a defeated sigh, “it’s alright, I’ll just have to have tons of fun without you then.”

“Yeah you do that,” you chuckled, “please try to drown Hangman on my behalf.”

She saluted you before she started jogging towards where the rest of the group was with Bradley.

“Hey don’t forget to put on sunscreen !” Bob yelled after them as he was holding a tub of said sunscreen in his hand.

“Yes mom !” Bradley yelled back, even though they made absolutely no move to come back to get some.

You enjoyed the peace that came with their departure for the waves, only hearing the distant sounds of their voices and laughs as you could only make out the outline of their bodies as they were already so far out in the water.

“Since you don’t like going in the water, have you got any other plans for today ?” Bob asked you sweetly, as he was getting out a book from his backpack.

“Actually Bobby, yes I do,” you smiled back at him as you were getting out your own book from your bag.

Bob — as the sweet, curious and engaging man he was — looked at the cover of your book with interest. The cover was pretty simple, it was actually a pretty drawn picture of a beach, and it didn’t let anything on about what was happening inside the pages.

“Ohh what is it about ?”

You smirked, opening the book where your bookmark was, eyes skimming over the page before deciding to hand it to him.

“Just read this page, it pretty much sums up what the story is about, tell me what you think.”

You carefully eyed him as he was reading through the words. Gradually, you could see his eyes widen and his cheeks taking on an adorable pink hue. When he had read through the page entirely, he gave it back to you.

“Well,” he began, chuckling but obviously flustered, “that’s certainly something.”

“I know,” you grinned at him, delighted to see him so sheepish, “what is your book about Bobby ? Are there any naked men in yours ?”

He laughed as the pink on his cheeks deepened in a slightly darker shade of red, “There are not, it’s just a regular thriller.”

“Okay, enjoy your murder mystery.”

“And enjoy your orgy.” He winked at you, settling himself properly to read.

You laughed, surprised to hear the word coming out of his mouth, as you settled down yourself comfortably for a good read.

Two hours passed during which Bob and you cozily read your respective books next to one another. By now, the other squad members were out of the water, tired out by their endless races and splashing around. They had gone back to the sand and Reuben and Mickey had ran back to where you and Bob were laid out to grab the volleyball net. Even exhausted from swimming, a single “I could still beat you all right now” from Jake was enough for everyone to regain their energy instantly.

It was Mickey, Bradley and Phoenix against Jake, Reuben and Javy.

They were not too far from where you and Bob were settled, close enough that you could clearly see the game. And close enough so that you could ogle away at the — unfortunate, truly you hated having to admit it to yourself — object of your desires.

You looked up just a tiny bit from your book, just enough to gawk at Jake without making it obvious from his perspective.

He was still wet from his hours of swimming, drops of water cascading down his naked torso, disappearing beneath his swimming trunks. The way his muscles moved as he hit the ball, his thighs flexing as he ran up to the net to spike. And God that ass—

“You found someone more interesting than the naked men in your book ?” Bob mischievously asked, still laying next to you.

Must someone always interrupt you whenever you laid eyes on the best part of Jake’s body ?

Nonetheless, you were enjoying seeing this more playful side of Bob, even if it was at your expense.

“Well Bobby, sometimes I like myself a little reality instead of fiction,” you shot back, feeling comfortable enough to keep your eyes on Jake, even after Bob’s remark.

He just laughed, shaking his head fondly, “and you dare say that you hate him,” he sighed out with a smile.

“I do hate him, just not his God given attributes.” You countered, “I know when to admit Mother Nature did a good job.”

“Yeah, you tell yourself that.”

You just playfully smacked his arm before sliding your bookmark into your book, carefully setting it down on your towel.

“I’m going to dip my feet on the shore, it’s hot as hell here.” You announced as you were getting up.

“Mmmh,” Bob hummed, “is it really the sun or Jake’s half naked body getting you hot and bothered ?”

You looked back at him in slight, delighted shock at seeing him so openly teasing and playful. Your only response was to jokingly flip him off before walking towards the water. You were totally unable to do anything more than dipping your feet in the small waves that crashed on the sand. Everything that had to do with the ocean — while it was fascinating — freaked you out.

You walked past your squad mates, who were deeply immersed into their volleyball match, and didn’t see you walk up to shore.

Instant relief washed over you as soon as the wave hit your feet. While it was true that the heat of the blazing sun was getting unbearable, Bob was partially right. Your body temperature had significantly risen as you had taken the time to ogle at Jake — and the book you were reading before laying your eyes on him definitely did not help. So you welcomed the cooling sensation that came as the wave hit your feet, walking for a bit and taking the time to enjoy this moment. You hated the beach. But today hadn’t been so bad, you were able to get ahead in your book and gawk away at Jake in a way you weren’t able to do on base. So yeah, pretty good day so far.

And right as you were about to indulge yourself in some more Jake watching—

“OW FUCK !!”

Your scream of agony echoed on the beach as scorching, white-hot pain speared into your left foot. The pain was mind numbing and nearly made you fall over. A moment of clarity shined through the burning sensation and you looked down to where your foot had began to throb, and the sight made you jump back. You saw the stingray’s barb move in the water before the flat fish left and began to swim back towards the ocean. Blood had begun mixing with water where the barb had punctured the side of your foot.

Panic was seeping its way into your veins, mingling with the pain. Breath heavy with fright and excruciating suffering, you felt yourself start to fall backwards, unable to keep upright any longer. You prepared for the added hurt of the fall—

But instead of the blazing and hard sand, you felt two strong arms around your back.

You turned to see Jake’s face close to yours, green emerald eyes injected with worry and fear.

“Y/N what the fuck happened ?! Are you alright ??”

His voice was strained and breathy, like he had sprinted all the way over here. His eyes roamed over your body quickly, assessing if you were hurt, and finally his gaze found your left foot, that had already begun to swell and bruise, and which continued leaking blood.

Jake winced, cursing lowly under his breath as he gently set your head down on his lap. He took a beat to examine your foot from where he was.

By now the squad had gathered around you two.

“Bradley, call 911, Y/N was stung by a stingray.” Jake instructed, voice calm but firm.

You only heard Bradley running back to the towels to get his phone, you could also hear the others’ quiet and worried whispers, having shut your eyes to avoid looking at any of them. Even with the agonizing pain throbbing — not only in your foot now — but in your entire body, this felt humiliating.

“Shh, it’s okay sweetheart, I know it hurts,” Jake’s soothing voice came into your ears.

It’s only then that you realized that tears were freely running down your cheeks, your breathing was ragged, heavy with pain and you were letting out small, strained whimpers that were a testimony of the hell you were going through.

“Oh fuck,” you cursed in a mix of pain and embarrassment, still refusing to look at any of your squad mates, while furiously wiping away the tears on your cheeks.

Jake shushed you soothingly, one of his hand coming up to tenderly brush your hair back from your sweaty forehead.

“It’s okay Y/N, you’re okay I promise. I know it hurts right now but 911 will be here soon.” His voice was so gentle, and for a minute it pulled your mind away from the throbbing pain in your left foot.

You finally opened your eyes and turned back to him, squinting a bit to look up at him, and Jake immediately moved a few centimeters so his head was now shielding yours from the blinding light of the sun. His eyes were staring straight into yours, worry still swimming in them, along with a tenderness you were not used to see.

“Are you okay ?” He asked, voice impossibly soft and gentle.

It made your heart skip a beat, and the realization that he was still lovingly brushing your hair back did not help. To avoid blurting out anything stupid — though if you did, you’d at least be able to blame it on the pain later — you did what you were so used to do.

“Of course I’m not okay, what does it fucking look like Seresin ?!” You hissed at him.

But despite your unjustified anger towards him, Jake just smiled down at you. Not his usual cocky smirk, or his smug grin — a genuine one.

“The fuck are you smiling for ?”

His smile only widened, “you’re still angry at me, it must not be as bad as I thought it was.”

You scoffed, outraged, but just as you were about to retort something with the same amount of venom that was probably spreading in your body right now—

Another wave of pain flared up. Intense and excruciating, you cried out and instinctively, one of your hand shot out to grip Jake’s forearm, squeezing it as hard as you could to try and focus on anything else except the agonizing pain flaring up in your entire body.

And even though your nails were anchored in his arm, probably drawing a tiny bit of blood, Jake did not waver. He stayed with you, his other hand still lightly brushing your hair.

“It’s okay, sweetheart,” he said again, voice reassuring. “That’s it, just hold onto me.”

He then turned towards the rest of the squad — who was still anxiously waiting behind him.

“Where is Bradley ? Does he have an ETA on 911 ?” He asked, not a trace of panic in his tone. Even when he wasn’t talking to you, his calm and lulling voice was soothing your system.

You could feel your blood pump in your ears and for a moment the intense pain calmed down, leaving just a permanent ache in your foot. You released your death hold on Jake’s forearm but kept your hand on his skin, the warmth of it grounding you.

“I don’t know, he’s still on the phone,” Natasha said, voice shaking a bit and trying to get a look at you from behind Jake.

“Should we do something while waiting for them ?” Mickey asked, panic in his voice at seeing you in such a state, “elevate her foot or something ?”

“Absolutely not.” Jake’s response was instant, “the venom is already spreading in her body and moving her could accelerate the process, it would do more harm than good. We just have to wait for 911 to come.”

You could feel your friends beginning to approach, in a desire to do anything that might help you while awaiting for the ambulance to arrive. But while the pain should have relieved you of your inhibitions, in this instant there was nothing worse for the tough fighter pilot that you were than your squad mates seeing you down and writhing in pain because of a stupid flat fish.

You squeezed Jake’s arm once to get his attention. He turned to you, eyes softening once again.

“Yeah, sweetheart ? You need anything ?”

The next words were hard to get out, not only because of the pain but because of how humiliating they were to pronounce out loud. Especially to someone like Jake — your rival, your arch nemesis, the one person you claimed to hate more than anything on this earth.

But right now — with your head on his lap, his hand caressing the top of your hair and him calling you sweetheart like you were the love of his life, you couldn’t find it in you to keep fighting him.

“Jake, I don’t want them to see me like that…” you whispered, voice strained by the pain that was still clinging to you.

Quick understanding flashed through his eyes, he didn’t say anything, didn’t question you, he just turned back to the squad — firm and authoritative.

“Could you please go load back the cars ? So that when the ambulance arrive we are all ready to go.”

Mickey, Reuben, Javy and Natasha all nodded diligently, happy to be of service given the situation. They all ran back to the towels and parasols, where Bradley and Bob already had started to pack up.

You squeezed Jake’s forearm again.

“Thank you— Oh fuck !”

Another wave hit you then, fuck, when was this going to stop ??

This one was especially bad, it felt like your entire body was burning alive. You cried out, reaching for Jake, trying to anchor yourself to him. Your eyes welled up with tears that were flowing endlessly down your cheeks, breath quick and heavy with panic.

“Jake, Jake Jake Jake—“ your voice was rushed, filled with fright and pain.

“I’m here, baby, right here. Try to take deep breaths for me okay ? Breathe in…” He made a show of taking an exaggerated inhale.

You just followed his instructions, breathing in deeply.

“That’s good, that’s perfect. Now breathe out…”

You copied his theatrical exhale, still holding on tightly to him. He gave you a proud smile, the one hand that wasn’t still busy brushing your hair, came up to cup your cheek — thumb tenderly caressing your skin.

“That’s good, you’re doing so good.”

You placed your right hand — the one that wasn’t holding on for dear life to his forearm — on top of his hand that was cupping your cheek, still breathing deeply with him.

Your next words would probably make you want to kill yourself when the pain stops numbing your mind, but right now there was only one thing you wanted. And it resided in the very man above you, who was looking at you and touching you with an affection that would have you shedding tears if you weren’t already doing so because of the pain.

“Please, Jake, don’t stop. Keep talking to me.” You pleaded, voice shaking with tears and a few sniffles.

Something shifted in Jake’s expression then, a reflection of how his heart broke for you right at this moment. His beautiful features took on a raw display of emotion, he inhaled sharply — forcing his voice to come out as calm and unwavering as possible.

“I will, baby, don’t worry. I’m right here with you, I’m not leaving you.” He soothed you, green eyes boring into yours and desperately trying to convey everything he felt in this moment and couldn’t possibly express with words. “Not ever.”

You let out a relieved sigh, not only at his words, but at the feeling of the spike of pain calming down, leaving — once again — only the static pain in your foot. You closed your eyes, still taking deep breaths like Jake told you and trying to slow your heart beat down. If it weren’t for this stupid stingray who had your foot feeling like it would burn and fall off your body at any moment, you would consider this moment peaceful. Jake holding you, touching your skin like you were the most precious thing in this world, voice soft and gentle like you’ve never heard before….

“The pain will continue to come and go in spikes,” Jake explained, voice low, as if to not disturb the moment, “it’s the venom spreading in your body.”

You kept your eyes closed, only nodding slightly to tell him you understood.

“You scared the hell out of me,” Jake admitted after a beat of silence, in a small, almost sad laugh.

You nuzzled closer to his hand that was cupping your cheek, “are you saying you care about me, Hangman ?” You inquired, a teasing smile pulling at your lips, your voice coming out a little strained and tired from all the pain.

“I don’t know, I might just do,” You only heard the fond smile in his voice.

Only moments after, you felt his lips press with an infinite amount of tenderness on your forehead. You sucked in a breath, opening your eyes in surprise. The kiss lasted a few seconds, and when he pulled away, the look in his eyes almost took your breath away.

“What ? You surprised ?” He probed, mimicking your teasing tone.

You felt yourself flush. Fluster temporarily replacing the pain in your body, filling you with a warmth that was making you forget about your punctured foot that was still leaking blood and painting the water crimson red.

You just snuggled further into his hand, tearing your eyes away from him to escape his prying gaze, “shut up,” you mumbled.

He just laughed, keeping his affectionate administrations to your skin.

And that’s when you heard the loud wail of the ambulance siren coming closer to the beach. Just seconds after, the whole squad was running at full speed towards you two.

“They are here !” Bradley yelled, “they are here Y/N !”

“It’s almost over, sweetheart,” Jake whispered, placing one more quick kiss to your forehead before the whole squad, along with the medics, reached you.

Jake immediately took the initiative to explain the situation, “she was stung by a stingray, approximately 10 minutes ago. The barb punctured the side of her left foot, it’s been bleeding ever since the sting. Venom has already started spreading.”

“Okay, thank you sir,” one of the medic addressed Jake before turning to you, “ma’am, my name is Martin. What’s yours ?”

“Y/N.”

“Okay Y/N. Listen we’re gonna need to put you on a stretcher to get you in the ambulance. Just know that it will probably hurt.”

You just nodded, taking a deep breath.

They hoisted you up onto the stretcher, you muffled a cry behind your hand and squeezed Jake’s hand which had slipped into yours. Once you were installed in the ambulance, the medics looked at you and then at the squad.

Martin spoke up, “one of you can climb with Y/N in the back of the ambulance. The rest can follow behind by car to get to the hospital. Who do you want coming with ?” He asked.

Lying in the stretcher that was inclined so you were sitting up a bit, your eyes immediately found Jake, who gave you a hopeful smile. You so desperately wanted to say his name, have him climb in with you and hold you like he had been doing on the beach. But sitting here, the whole squad in front of you, you felt the words get stuck in your throat. Jake seemed to see it in your eyes, the hesitation, seemed to feel that for some reason, you would not be able to express wanting him by your side. And witnessing the sadness and disappointment flash in his emerald eyes after having been so bright, made your heart fall into your stomach.

A beat passed before Natasha slightly raised her hand.

“I’ll come with—“

But Bob, of all people, was the one who interrupted her.

“Nat, I actually got a call from Cyclone there’s a meeting we have to attend, all of us.”

Phoenix, along with the rest of the squad looked confused, sharing interrogating glances.

“What ? A briefing ? Right now ?” Bradley questioned, incredulous.

Bob gave him a pointed look, “yes, Bradley, right now.” He then turned to Jake, a characteristic sweet smile on his face, “Jake, you’ll stay with Y/N, right ?”

Jake seemed surprised for a moment, his eyes flicking rapidly between Bob and you.

“I— Yeah, yeah of course,” he nodded quickly, he then turned to you, hopefulness returning to his gaze, “if you’ll have me.”

“Yes,” you answered, way too quickly — which Bob, along with the medics, quietly snickered at — “yes of course, come in.”

After the squad bid you goodbye and promised to come see you at the hospital, Bob mischievously winked at you and hurried them back to the cars.

Jake climbed into the ambulance, sitting on a seat next to your stretcher, fingers intertwining with yours instantly, like instinct. And almost as soon as his skin made contact with yours, a wave of pain hit you again, hard.

Cursing, you wiggled around on the stretcher, the burning sensation was stronger than before and was taking your whole body hostage, eyes almost rolling back from how painful it all was.

“It’s almost over, sweetheart, I promise.” Jake reassured, voice strained from seeing you hurt like that.

“Y/N,” Martin caught your attention, “the venom is progressing quickly and we need to act fast. We’re gonna give you something for the pain, it might make you a little loopy and you might fall asleep. You’ve been through a lot and the pain has definitely taken a toll on you, so totally normal if you want to crash for a moment, alright ?”

You nodded, feeling Jake squeezing your hand, you heard him take a deep breath next to you and you could feel the relief radiating off him. One of the other medics went to slap his shoulder.

“You did a good job, boyfriend.”

Jake just chuckled and you caught the faintest shade of red color his cheeks. Neither of you bothered to correct him on the term ‘boyfriend’. You all but smiled through the pain, looking at Jake with something that people might call love.

“Yeah, he really did.”

Martin turned back to you with a syringe, “okay Y/N, you need to be brave for one more minute, you might feel a slight pinch.”

And while the needle punctured your skin, similar to how the stingray’s barb had — only minutes prior to this, your eyes never wavered from Jake’s.

It only took a few moments for the painkillers to start acting, you let out a sigh of relief at feeling the pain peak progressively go away. Along with the disappearing agony, you felt your eyelids grow heavy.

“Jake…” you called out softly, already halfway into Morpheus’ arms.

“Yeah, sweetheart ? I’m right here.” He squeezed your hand again.

A smile pulled at your lips.

“I think— I think I’m gonna take a quick nap.”

“Yeah, looks like it,” he chuckled affectionately.

“Will you still be here when I wake up ?”

A beat of silence passed before he leaned forward, leaving a sweet kiss on your forehead that widened your smile.

“Yes I will, you rest, baby. You’ve been so strong today.” Another kiss. “I’ll see you when you wake up.”

And with that confirmation, your eyes finally closed, body finally at ease after all the events of the day. Before sleep took your mind away to a far away place, you registered Jake leaving one last kiss on your forehead, like he just couldn’t help himself. The warmth that filled you would have been able to alleviate any pain better than any of the medics’ painkillers. You fell asleep the heart light, knowing that when you would open your eyes, the first thing they would land on would be Jake’s green ones, full of something that could only be called love.

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Author’s note : thank you for reading "Saltwater Monster" I hope you liked it !!! Also I hope everyone spent lovely holidays !!

It had been that way ever since you were a kid. Just the sight of the tiniest speck of blood made your skin crawl. It wasn’t always easy, considering the thing you were so afraid of lived just beneath a thin layer of skin, so easily breakable that just a scrape could reveal a crimson red that would send you into an irrational and uncontrollable state of panic. But you had always managed. Turning your head away and squinting your eyes closed during medical check ups and blood drawings, always being careful of the parts of your body that could easily get scratched or scraped — especially your hands… just some little things you were extra careful about in order to live a normal life.

Not a lot of people actually understood your phobia, most thought it was stupid and downright ridiculous. And you partially agreed with them, but that was the thing with phobias, they weren’t meant to be reasoned. They were, by nature and definition, irrational. Besides, this was not something you could do anything about, so really you just let all the dumb jokes and question roll off you. You had to admit some questions were quite funny though. If you were feeling down, you’d remember that one time Mickey asked you if that meant that you were afraid of your own period blood and it would still make you laugh as hard as when you’d first heard it.

Some people were scared of clowns, others of spiders or snake, some were even deathly scared of the ocean and could not set a foot in it. Your fear was blood, and in some way you were grateful for your brain to have selected that phobia among the thousands that inhabited and plagued the human mind, at least this one kept you out of harm’s way most of the time, never would you be caught attempting something stupid just to receive validation, or prove yourself. That’s how you decided to see it.

And right now your blood was quickly flowing towards your legs, seemingly preparing to choose the ‘flight’ option over the fight. Except that there wasn’t anywhere for you to run in the cramped confine of your cockpit.

Your ears were ringing and you could feel your blood pumping in your ears, your heart jackhammering through them. The only thing your mind was able to register was the loud, incessant beeping of your jet, while an urgent, mechanical voice was urging you to pull up. You could faintly hear Maverick’s voice through the comms, screaming at you to eject but his instructions were wildly overridden by the adrenaline coursing in your veins. The mission had seemed pretty simple on paper. Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing you couldn’t do with your eyes closed. And yet.

You wouldn’t even be able to explain how and when everything started going to shit. Oh well, maybe you could. It all had started when Maverick designated you as Jake’s wingman, that alone should have warned you about how this mission would end, up in flames. Quite literally.

A louder beeping overtook the first one, this second one was higher, almost screeching, so loud in fact you thought you felt you eardrums pop for a second. A quick check to your panel control showed you that you right engine was on fire. Jesus fucking Christ could this get any worse ?!

How could a mission on your own soil could go this wrong ? You guessed the very little time of preparation for it and having to cooperate with a squad from another base you knew nothing about certainly didn’t help. And a close fly by with another pilot and their wingman had sent both Jake and you into an unrecoverable flat spin.

“Y/N !” Maverick’s voice finally came through the panic fog clouding your brain, “there’s nothing you can do, eject, now !”

Cursing, you grabbed the handle situated in between your legs and pulled as hard as you could. You had never had to eject before, and you prayed you’d never have to do it again. For a split second after you pulled the trigger, you must had pulled something like fifteen G’s, your body flew out of your cockpit while your jet continued its supersonic descent towards the ground.

You were thankful your instincts kicked into gear to somehow try and maneuver the parachute, trying to secure you a safe landing on the ground. The loud sound of your jet splitting the air had you turning your head at the last second, just in time to catch sight of your precious, multi million dollar SuperHornet crashing into some nearby trees in a roaring and deafening sound. Your heart fell down at the pitt of your stomach and an uncomfortable and dreadful shiver shook you at the realization that this could’ve been you, had you not listened to what your wise instructor was yelling in your ears.

Landing was rough. Your legs couldn’t quite maintain you upright with the speed at which you hit the ground, the force of it sending you stumbling forward, even rolling in on yourself. Flopping miserably on your back, you were just thankful you didn’t break your legs or impaled yourself on some tree. You got up on shaky legs and hastily put your parachute away in its bag while trying to contact the base.

“Maverick…? Rooster…? Phoenix…?” You tried, without receiving any answer on the other end, you tapped the side of your helmet where the microphone and speakers were, “anyone ?”

No answer.

Shit, the comms must have gone to shit when you ejected or hit the ground. Well, at least you weren’t on foreign soil so there wasn’t any immediate danger you had to worry about. Looking around you caught yourself thinking that there were worse places to land in after an emergency and possibly deadly ejection. The grass was bright green where you had tumbled, trees were standing high and proud, guarding the borders of what looked like a valley that led to some hills. That was definitely a contrast compared to the sandy and arid grounds of San Diego, and it was a surprisingly welcome one, despite the situation.

You were turning on your beacon when the roaring sound of a jet’s engine made you jerk up. Immediately looking up, you spotted Jake’s jet, spinning at uncontrollable spin towards the high trees. Your heart stopped in your chest, surely he had already ejected and had safely landed somewhere near the end of the valley ? There was no possible way a pilot like him — no matter how much you hated admitting how good he was — still thought he had a chance of coming back from a spin like that—

But your lingering fear suddenly hit you full force in the chest when Jake’s engine sputtered on and off, the undeniable sign that Jake was still inside, trying to pull up his F/A-18.

Good god was he fucking dumb sometimes !

You watched, frozen and powerless as his jet continued its supersonic descent towards the trees. It was like time had stopped for a second, a suspended moment where the only thought flashing painfully in your mind was : Jake is going to die. This is it. After all the shit he’s pulled, his fucking ego is gonna take him out because mister thinks he’s just that good that he would be able to recover from an unrecoverable spin.

But before your thoughts could spiral anymore and your heart stop completely at the prospect of losing the one man you claimed you hated body and soul, you saw something fly out of the jet, mere seconds before the metal bird crashed though the trees. You inhaled sharply, a breath that felt like breaking through the water after being under for too long. And before you could think about it any longer, your feet were already carrying you towards where Jake’s parachute was falling.

Helmet in hand, and heavy gear slowing you down, you still sprinted as fast as you could through the trees, mindful of potential holes and roots. Jake hadn’t even been no where near close the altitude he should have been at to eject safely, he’d been alarmingly low and you feared that his parachute wouldn’t slow his fall enough. Damn him and his stupid fucking ego.

Calling out his name as you got near where he should have landed, the lack of response was making your skin prickle with anxiety and dread.

“Jake ?” You called out, voice growing more desperate than you’d ever admit it.

You stopped, intensely listening for any answer back when—

“Over here !”

His voice felt far away and…strangely strained. You desperately tried to ignore how your heart clenched, no matter how much you hated him and could not stand him, Jake was still one of your squad mate, it was normal to worry about him, right ?

Swallowing the lump in your throat, you resumed your dart in the direction of his voice, and after a full minute of sprint in your entire gear, your lungs were screaming, and a side stitch was beginning to puncture your left side. But you didn’t stop, continuing to run towards him.

And finally, when you felt like your legs were actually about to give out, you spotted Jake, sitting up against a tree, facing a clearing. Rushing one last time to get to him, Jake’s face seemed to illuminate when he spotted you.

“Took you long enough,” he said when you kneeled down next to him, “thought you were about to leave me here for a second.”

You glared at him, catching your breath, “keep up the attitude and I just might do that.”

His infamous smirk slowly pulled at his lips as his eyes took you in.

“You hurt ?”

“No, you ?”

Jake shook his head and you eyed the way his helmet was weirdly placed on his lap.

“Are your comms dead as well ?”

“Yep.”

“Did you activate your beacon ?”

He let out a laugh at that, “Jesus Lightning, do you think it’s my first day in the navy or something ?”

His arrogance rubbed you the wrong way, like it always did.

“It might as well be !” You snapped a little, “I mean what the fuck was that, Seresin ? Ejecting at low altitude could have gotten you fucking killed ! But let me guess, you thought that the great Hangman would be able to undo an unrecoverable spin ?!”

Jake watched your hissed rant with raised eyebrows, and despite yourself you noticed how strangely pale he looked.

“Careful,” he cooed, seeming all too satisfied by what he chose to be worry over him and not pure infuriation over a stupid and downright unprofessional behavior, “your soft spot for me is showing, but don’t worry I won’t tell the squad, I know how you like to keep your feelings secret.”

You scoffed, shaking your head, “I still don’t know how you haven’t got suspended for all the shit you pull,” you said, choosing to entirely disregard his take on how you allegedly felt for him.

“I’m too good,” he grinned, and your heart did something weird in your chest when you noticed his smile looked weirdly strained, forced. The pitt in your stomach felt like it was getting deeper, clawing away at your insides, a discomfort that only grew stronger the longer you stared at Jake, “they can’t afford to put their best pilot on the bench.”

Letting out an exasperated sigh, which Jake keened at, annoying you apparently being his second favorite thing behind flying, you began to get up.

“Let’s move in the middle of the clearing, so search and rescue will locate us better and it’ll be easier for them to land and come get us.”

“No.”

Dusting your flight suit once you were standing on your own two feet, you frowned down at Jake.

“The fuck you mean ‘no’ ?” You could feel yourself getting irrationally irritated, a familiar recurrence whenever you spent just more than a few minutes in Jake’s presence, you took a deep breath to try and swallow back the anger bubbling up in your throat, “I’m sick of your shit, Seresin. So stop being an asshole whose sole purpose is to disagree with me for a second and do what I say.”

“Come on, don’t be so mean Lightning.” He tried to joke, but the usual glint in his eyes was missing, he took in a labored breath, “besides moving is not gonna change a thing for search and rescue, don’t worry.”

Stopping for a moment, you got a good look at him. He was acting weird. He hadn’t so much as moved an inch ever since you had found him, he was just sitting there, his stupid helmet sitting on his lap covering a good chunk of his side with one of his hand seemingly under it.

“Why is your helmet on your lap ?”

“Why not ?”

You let out an incredulous laugh at that, “seriously, what is going on ? You’re being super weird it’s kinda starting to freak me out.”

Jake seemed to freeze, if only for a second.

“I’m not acting weird, you’re the one freaking out over nothing and asking weird ass questions. Just sit down and wait for search and rescue.”

But you stayed right where you were, towering over him — which didn’t happen often — and stared down at him, crossing your arms stubbornly.

“I—“ he started, before wincing almost imperceptibly, “I got a bruise, that’s all. Hurt myself when I landed.”

“And what, you’re telling that it’s the bruise making you act like that ?” You let out disbelieving scoff, “I mean are you hearing yourself ? You sound insane ! I don’t know about a bruise but you definitely hit your head when you landed, that’s why you’re saying weird shit.”

Jake didn’t answer, he just stared right ahead, past your standing frame, a far away look in his eyes. Worry began to seep into the hollowing hole in your stomach, maybe he had actually hit his head and he had commotion ? Or worse, what if he had brain damage or internal bleeding or something ? Just the thought made you shiver in horror. If he was truly hurt, it was best not to move him. You eyed him intensely, as if you could somehow get a look inside of his head to make sure he was okay.

You watched as he readjusted himself against the tree with a groan, the movement making his helmet roll right of his lap, revealing his second hand, very obviously pressing down hard on his side.

“Mmh, applying pressure on a bruise,” You mused, squinting your eyes at him in sarcastic fashion, “is this a new technique I haven’t heard about ? Did you attend a new medical seminar I wasn’t invited to ?”

“Will you just stop talking for two minutes, please ?” He asked, voice breathy.

“I mean, shit, honestly I never pictured you as a masochist, you were always more of a sadist type in my mind.“

That finally made him look back at you and you promptly ignored the slight and short lived feeling of relief it gave you. A grin made its way back on his lips, it was strained but it successfully illuminated his face, for a moment giving it the flair it usually held.

“Glad to know this is something you have clearly thought about,” he huffed out, “if you were so curious you should have just come to me my dear Lightning, you know I’d be more than happy to prove your theories.”

Seeing him joke and tease you like that eased your discomfort, and you turned around, pretending to look at your surroundings while you were hiding the small, incontrollable smile pulling at your lips.

“I mean this place seems pretty quiet, I guess we could give a go to outdoor sex if you’re open to it.” His smug voice said behind you.

“Okay shut up now.” You chuckled despite yourself, keeping your back to him to not give him the idea you were happy to see his quick wit was back.

Your eyes took in the forest that spread out in front of you, the cool wind coming from the clearing behind offering you some relief from the sweat clinging to your uniform. It honestly looked beautiful.

Just as you were about to turn back around, your eyes landed on a random piece of wood lying on the ground and—

You froze.

Whole body becoming rigid, the hair on your nape standing up, nervous system kicking in your flight or fight reflex for the second time in an alarmingly short time span.

The piece of wood was long and wide, chips coming off it, and the end of it was covered in a deep and thick crimson liquid.

No, no, no no no—

Your breath hitched in a pathetic choked up sound, one that held every bit of the terror paralyzing your body. Your stomach churned violently.

Behind you, Jake, alarmed by the sound coming from you, anxiously followed your line of sight, and he cursed under his breath when his eyes landed on the piece of wood.

“Lightning, look at me.”

But you couldn’t move. Your gaze was still fixed on the blood dripping from the piece of wood, staining the forest ground and painting it in that fateful color. Jake’s voice barely registered in your ears, it felt like a distant echo, drowned out by your own heart beating loudly and frenetically in your ears.

“Y/N.” His voice called out again, uncharacteristically gentle, and calm despite the situation, “look at me.”

And you don’t know why, but something in you instinctively listened to him this time. Slowly turning back around, your legs were shaky and threatening to give out at any time. When you were facing him again, your heart lurched, because your eyes didn’t immediately settled on his face, instead landing on the hand that was desperately applying pressure on his side. That same hand that was now stained in blood, the thick liquid coming through the gasps between his fingers. And now that you were looking, the fabric of his flight suit underneath his hand was ripped, letting you catch a glimpse of a deep hole into Jake’s flesh, one that was profusely leaking blood.

Funnily enough, your own blood drained from your face so fast it almost made you dizzy, and a horribly frightened sob left your lips. You didn’t remember your legs giving out but suddenly you were on your knees again, next to Jake.

“Don’t look at it, look at me.” Jake said again, his voice somehow breaking through the terror fog holding your brain hostage.

Your breath was coming out ragged as your eyes finally found his, bright green irises that held nothing but an eerily calmness in them.

“It’s okay, don’t look at it, just focus on me, everything will be alright.”

“What the fuck, Jake ?!” You exploded once it seemed your vocal chords were not entirely frozen by fear anymore, “what— “ you choked up on a sob and only then did you realize the ocean of tears dripping down your cheeks, “what happened ?! Oh my god—“ you felt a sudden wave of dizziness hit you as your eyes quickly darted back over to his wound, like despite the bone chilling fear you were still attracted to it like a magnet.

“It’s nothing, I told you I got hurt when I landed.”

“You told me it was a bruise !” The end of your sentence ended in a desperate cry, your hands were shaking on your lap, chest heaving furiously with each frenetic breath you took.

“It’s barely a scratch,” he assured, and the soothing tone in his voice did not have the intended effect, only drowning you further in panic.

How the fuck was he so calm right now ?

You could feel your chest contract, and suddenly it felt impossible to take a full breath, it felt as if your lungs were somehow too small, sheer panic was settling deep inside your bones with no apparent prospect of leaving.

“Lightning, don’t freak out, it’s gonna be okay, everything is fine.”

There were so many thoughts swirling in your head. The protocol for when someone got hurt during a mission, the knowledge that Jake was bleeding out in this fucking clearing while acting like everything was fine, the black dots obstructing your vision…

“Just take a deep breath for me, yeah ?” Jake’s calm voice reached your ears, “turn around if you want, you don’t have to be near me. You can even wait in the clearing for the helicopter.”

The fact that was he straight up proposing you abandon him so you didn’t have to endure the sight of him bleeding out broke your heart and only worsened your sobs.

“Y/N, it’s okay. You’re okay, everything is fine, I promise,” he soothed again, his voice never wavering no matter how much in pain he must’ve been in.

You took a deep breath that did little to calm you down, but it at least cleared your thoughts a little.

This wasn’t right. Jake wasn’t supposed to be the one reassuring you right now, he was fucking bleeding out for God’s sake ! You were a fighter pilot, amongst the best in this entire world. You had been trained for this and you’d be damned if a little blood was blocking you from doing your job and saving your squad mate.

“Move your hand,” you said in a shaky breath, definitely not as assertive as you had intended, your eyes fixed on him.

“What—?”

You didn’t give him the time to comprehend, instead blindly removing his hand from his side and putting both of yours, and pressing down, hard. He winced, letting out a pained groan and you ignored the pinch in your heart.

For the first time ever since you found him, he seemed to be the one panicking.

“No, hey, hey hey what are you doing ?”

“I’m helping you,” you supplied, with tears still raining down your cheeks, “this is the protocol. And besides you weren’t putting enough pressure on it.”

You squeezed your eyes closed as Jake’s blood started to push back against your hands, the warm liquid trying to spill through your hands as you desperately tried to keep it there. The sensation made you shiver in pure horror and disgust.

“Hey, Y/N, I don’t want you to freak out on me, yeah ?” His hand, the one that wasn’t stained in blood, hovered over your shoulder, unsure if he should touch you in your emotional state.

Your eyes remained closed, trying to focus on anything else rather than Jake literally bleeding out beneath the palm of your hands. The wind brushing your face and the sound the trees made swaying lightly because of it, birds chirping in the distance, the grain of Jake’s strained voice…

“Why didn’t say anything ?” You asked, your voice coming out as a shaky whisper.

When his answer didn’t come fast enough, your eyes snapped open, scared that he might have lost consciousness, but Jake was just staring at you, the faintest of smile pulling at his lips.

“Is that a serious question ?” He laughed a little, wincing when his chest shook a bit from the force of it, “no offense, Lightning, truly, but I don’t know if I would have been able to handle you fainting in my state.”

‘My state.’ You didn’t like that, didn’t like that one bit. His face was paler than you’d ever seen it, his natural Texan tan nowhere to be seen. His green eyes were missing their usual brightness and the underside were horribly dark and sunken.

You were about to say something, probably tell him to shut up, when blood suddenly came rushing out of his nose.

“Shit—“ he cursed before rapidly putting a hand over his nose, frantically wiping at the blood that just kept on coming out. “Don’t look, it’s okay.”

Your heart was beating so fast and hard against your rib cage it was borderline painful. This couldn’t be good.

“Y/N, please don’t look.” Jake’s voice sounded almost pleading now as he was desperately rubbing the blood away and keeping his hand in front of his nose, making him sound nasally.

Blood.

There was just so much of it. Never in your life had you seen so much of the dreadful crimson liquid, and you honestly didn’t know if you were more likely to throw up or faint at this point.

And lingering at the back of your mind, came another whisper of your mind, one that was progressively and terrifyingly becoming louder and louder, overtaking all your senses. There was a lot of blood, yes, and Jake was the one losing it.

Jake was bleeding out, alarmingly fast, out in the middle of nowhere while the only thing you could do to help him was just keep your hands on his gaping injury and prayed that search and rescue would hurry the fuck up.

“Look away, sweetheart, please.” He said again, tilting his head back lightly, as much as he could really, in an attempt to stop the blood from leaving his nose.

But not looking was not gonna change a thing anymore. Because somewhere along the lines, the fear had shifted. Blood still very much terrified you, no doubt, but right now you were covered in it, and yet, you weren’t dead, you hadn’t fainted and the world was still spinning.

And still, something was very, very wrong.

Jake’s nose bleed seemed to have calmed down, he finally put his hand away, which was bright red, and stared at you.

“You know, you are doing much better than I thought you would,” he praised, and given the situation it absolutely shouldn’t have made your stomach flip, “look at you, could it be that the great Lightning has finally conquered her fear ?” He grinned.

You didn’t know if you should be happy he was joking again or not. Your hands had begun shaking again where they were pressing against his bloody side, you still couldn’t bear to take a look at it but you knew by the way it was still profusely leaking blood against your hands, and by how big the piece of wood looked a few centimeters away from you that his injury must have been deep, way too deep.

Very unaware of your internal breakdown, Jake just kept on talking.

“I didn’t even know it was possible to overcome a phobia as deep as yours, but hey, I guess there’s no stopping you, huh ?”

“Stop talking,” you said, trying to hold in a fresh wave of sobs, unwanted images of him lying dead in your arms kept flashing through your mind.

What the actual fuck was search and rescue doing ? It wasn’t like you were on the other half of the fucking planet, you weren’t even on the other half of the country !

Jake didn’t pay any mind to your order.

“At least crashing was good for something in the end.”

Him saying that while literally bleeding out was physically tearing your heart apart.

“Shut up.” You said through clenched teeth.

“Hey I just thought about something, if I die out here you’ll become the best pilot in the squad, perhaps I should be worried this was your plan all along—“

“Shut up ! Shut up, shut up !” You snapped, eyes wide and staring straight at him with a mix of despair and fear, “stop fucking talking about dying ! It’s not funny, and for fuck’s sake stop wasting your breath saying useless shit, just shut up !”

Tears were freely raining down your cheeks now, and you didn’t know how it was possible you still had any left to cry.

Jake was stunned for a second by your outburst, he just stared at your for a moment before his expression broke into something undeniably soft and gentle, his features morphing into something you’d use to approach a frightened animal.

“Hey, hey, I’m sorry, that was a joke.”

You didn’t think you had ever heard Jake apologize in all the time you’d known him.

“Well it’s not funny !” Your bottom lip quivered, another pathetic sob threatening to break out.

“I know, I’m an idiot,” he said, “you’re right, that wasn’t funny.” His voice was low, acting like a soothing balm on your own open wound, the one ripping your heart apart at seeing him like that.

His hand that had been awkwardly hovering off and on above your shoulder finally made contact, squeezing you lightly. And his touch completely finished to break your heart. You burst out in a very inelegant sob, you couldn’t even see through the tears clouding your vision. It was the inevitable consequence of enduring all the events of the day, the mission going to shit, the ejection, the crash, the blood, Jake…

“I don’t want you to die,” you cried out, completely exhausted and at the end of your rope, “so stop saying that.”

“I’m not gonna die, sweetheart,” his thumb rubbed gentle back and forth on your clothed shoulder, occasionally squeezing it.

“But you’re b—“ a hiccup interrupted you, “you’re bleeding out !” The word alone burned on your tongue.

You heard the sound of a zipper opening, trying to blink the tears away you saw Jake open the top of his flight suit before his blood stained hand, the one that wasn’t on your shoulder, came down to take one of yours that was still pressing on his open wound.

“No, no, no Jake— you need pressure—“ you tried to say when he took your hand away, guiding it to his chest.

“It’s okay, honey,” he soothed, “just don’t look down, remember ?” he added when your eyes almost darted down to both of your bloodied hands.

Jake, while maintenant eye contact with you, his green eyes holding an almost tender glint, guided your hand up to his chest, right over his heart.

“You feel that ?” He asked, voice slightly hoarse due to the effort and the pain, but never ever losing its gentle edge.

And sure enough, underneath your palm, was the steady beat of Jake’s heart. A calm and rhythmic thump-thump that didn’t waiver and the rational part of your mind wondered how he could stay so calm under such circumstances, and it probably should have worried you a bit, but the irrational part of your brain, the one that had been running on fumes ever since you spotted the first speck of blood, seemed to finally quiet down a bit.

You let out a breath you didn’t even know you had been holding all this time.

“Yeah, that’s it, see ? I’m okay, it’ll be fine.” His hand was placed right on top of yours, his warmth seeping into your skin and radiating in your entire body.

Your fingers flexed a bit against his clothed chest, a sudden urge to feel more of him, make sure that his words were real, that he was truly gonna be fine, shook you. Jake gave you a reassuring smile and between the tears that still blurred your vision, you took the time to look at him. His blond hair was disheveled and darken by dirt, his jade green eyes held an immense tiredness to them but the tender glint in them, directed towards you, never ever left. There was some dried blood just underneath his nose, and a bit of it also on his lips, that still held that little reassuring smile. His whole face was livid, as pale as a ghost and the visual stripped him of his usual Hangman bravado. Objectively, he wasn’t looking good right now, he looked sick. But somehow, to you, he still did, looked good. There was something so vulnerable and tender about him right now, something that was slowly stitching back together the pieces of your heart Jake had himself, involuntarily, broken.

But being yourself, there was no way you’d be able to properly express the overwhelming whirlwind of emotion taking your body hostage, so instead—

“You look like shit,” you said, sniffling.

Jake let out a chuckle, the sound alone warming you from the inside out.

“Yeah, well, you don’t exactly look like you could run a marathon either, sweetheart.”

That made you laugh. You didn’t even want to think about what you must looked like right now, blotchy and red eyes from the tears, cheeks stained with the salty liquid, hair wild from the ejection… But you didn’t see any disgust or reject in his gaze. Only fondness.

Suddenly feeling bashful under his stare, you made a move to look down but before you could, Jake’s hand that was on your shoulder moved quickly, surprisingly so for someone that injured, catching your chin with two of his fingers, preventing you from looking down at the bloodied mess on which you still kept a firm pressure with your free hand. Instead, he made sure your gaze stayed right on him. This quiet gesture that so blatantly showed how much he cared about how you felt, which definitely felt ridiculous next to his predicament, just sent a sudden rush of affection run through you.

Not knowing what to do of this overwhelming urge, but nonetheless needing to express it, to get it out, to show him, your body acted on its own. Your hand still on his heart, you leaned in and gently placed your lips on his forehead, hoping the soft press would somehow convey every bit of what you were feeling. You stayed perhaps a bit too long for a conventional forehead kiss. Almost imperceptibly, you felt his heartbeat quicken under your hand, the realization making a warmth akin to the first summer rays spread out in your body. When you pulled back, there was a flash of something unreadable in Jake’s eyes.

“You’ll be okay,” you said with a tiny smile, lips wet from your tears and voice hoarse from your sobs.

And truly you said it more for yourself than him.

Jake reciprocated your smile and squeezed your hand, “you’re so brave, Y/N.” He said, full of admiration, and just a tiny bit choked up.

Before you could add anything, tell him how ridiculous it was for him to say that while he had to step up and be the rock for the both of you while he was on the verge of dying, the faint and distant sound of propellers could be heard coming from over the clearing. And just seconds later, the search and rescue helicopter came into view.

The biggest sigh of relief left your lips, you felt the tension slowly leave your body. You, not without regrets, retracted the hand that was on his chest to put it back on his wound, the added pressure made him groan.

“Sorry, sorry, I know,” you said, “it’s almost over, Jake, we’re almost out.”

He smiled at you, and you tried to ignore the ridiculousness of you trying to comfort him at the last minute, while he had spent the entire time trying to calm you down.

“Thank you, sweetheart.”

The helicopter landed in the clearing, as close to you and Jake as possible, and seconds after six people from search and rescue came rushing towards you. They carefully hosted up Jake on a stretcher and up in the helicopter, all the while your hands never left him.

“Alright, Y/N, you can stop now, he’ll be fine, we’re gonna clean and bandage him up,” Martin, the main medic, told you just as the helicopter was taking off to the air.

But you hesitated. With the stress and emotion, the time you had spent out there in the clearing had felt like an eternity, and it felt scary to let go of him now, even though you knew it was to leave him in better hands. While deep in your thoughts, you didn’t register Jake asking for a cloth, it was only when you felt his hand land on top of yours that you got out of your anxious trance.

“Everything’s fine now, remember ?” He said gently as his eyes bore into yours, “they are gonna take good care of me, you can let go.”

His hands very gently took yours off his side, cleaning them with the cloth all the while keeping eye contact with you.

“But I don’t wanna leave you,” you said in a breath.

It was a strange feeling, to feel so open and raw emotionally, a state that had been forcefully provoked by the unfortunate events of the day.

“You’re not leaving me, you’ll stay by my side, right ?”

He let out a small, fond chuckle when you nodded almost solemnly.

“Nobody’s making you leave, baby.” He said, tossing the cloth away after wiping your hands clean of his blood.

“Jake ?” Martin grabbed both your attention, “we’re gonna put you under,” he explains, showing off an oxygen mask, “we’re gonna start patching you up while on the way to the base’s hospital.”

Jake nodded before looking at you.

“You gonna kiss me goodnight ?” He asked, his characteristic smirk making a return on his face.

Wordlessly, and perhaps a bit too happy by him prompting it, you leaned in, placing your lips in a delicate kiss on his forehead, one hand coming up to cup his face. You heard him let out a little breath as you pulled away and placed another lingering kiss on his cheek.

“Sleep tight.” You smiled as a tear rolled down your face, not out of fear or sadness but simply out of feeling too much in such a short amount of time, and you quickly wiped it away.

Martin put the mask on Jake’s face.

“Alright Lieutenant, take a few deep breaths for me.”

Doing as he was told, Jake was looking at you with furrowed brows.

“Hey, don’t cry,” he lazily protested, voice already slurred from the anesthesia kicking in.

“I’m not crying,” you assured, a genuine smile stretching your face, “it’s fine, go to sleep, Hangman.”

“I prefer when you call me ‘Jake’.” He whined.

Yeah, he’d be gone any minute now.

You chuckled, “sorry, Jake.”

“That’s better,” his eyes fluttered closed and opened again, clearly fighting the anesthesia, “and when I wake up you can find out.”

“Find out what ?”

“You know…” he trailed off, his eyes closing entirely now, “if— if I’m a masochist or not…”

You burst out laughing, and even in his dazed and near coma induced state, Jake smiled at the sound.

“We’ll see about that, cowboy,” you said when your laughter died down a bit.

And just like that, he was out.

Looking at him just a second longer, feeling your heart settle down at knowing he wouldn’t feel any pain and would be taken care of, you moved away from him, letting the team of medics do their job. Martin kneeled beside Jake and began to cut his flight suit open around his wound. Removing the fabric, about to reveal just how bad the injury was, he paused and turned to you.

“You’re not afraid of blood, are you ?”

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Author’s note : I have mixed feelings about this fic, the idea had been in my head for soooo long and I fear I failed the execution of it, but oh well, I hope it was still good for you !

I’m gonna repeat myself but I do not have a phobia of blood at all so if the way I wrote reader’s reaction seems unrealistic I’m really sorry, please do let me know if it’s so unrealistic that it stops being enjoyable to read, I’ll try to change it if that’s the case

Also if you’ve read my others fics Saltwater Monster and 8-pool meltdown you might notice a pattern, that I desperately need to be comforted by Jake, and those fics are my most popular ones so I’d say we’re all in this together !💞

Finally (god sorry I’m talking a lot) a huge thank you to @berrybigpossibilities who agreed to read the first part of the fic when I was feeling really down about it and gave me their opinion, it helped a lot to finish it so thank you again !🫶

You love her. You love her entirely too much, and it's not even a problem.

She spreads everything out on the coffee table with the focused attention of a general arranging troops—lids off, chopsticks freed from their paper sleeves, the little tubs of sauce arranged by size for reasons that are entirely her own—muttering quietly about which container has the better satay and making a unilateral decision about who gets the good spring rolls. That'd be you. It's always you; she's never once let you argue about it, just slides the container to your side with the air of someone who's already closed the case.

You settle back into the corner of the couch while she works, feeling the familiar shift that comes with evenings. Mornings are usually better—muscles still relatively willing, the day ahead of you like a door propped open—but by this hour your body has put in its notice. There's a heaviness in your legs that lives below the knee and doesn't fully go away, the kind that isn't painful so much as insistent, like someone's placed a weight there and forgotten to remove it. Your hands are a little less steady than they were at noon. Your thighs ache dully when you shift. It's just Friday. It's just evening. It's just how it goes.

Penelope notices—she always notices—but she doesn't make it a thing. She just angles the coffee table a few inches closer to you without breaking her sentence, and drops an extra cushion behind your lower back like it's a completely unremarkable thing to do, and keeps talking about the satay sauce.

She's brilliant at that. The not making it a thing.

Dinner is the best kind of mess: loud and scattered and full of bad jokes, the two of you talking over each other about nothing in particular, Penelope launching into a full dramatic reading of an email she received from a colleague who appears to be allergic to full stops. She does different voices for each sentence. At some point you're laughing so hard the chopsticks become essentially theoretical as tools and you have to put them down, your chest bright and aching with it, like something's cracked open to let the light spill through.

"The audacity," she says, shaking her head solemnly.

"The absolute gall."

"He signed off with regards. Not even kind regards. Just—regards. Like he was issuing a formal statement to a nation."

"A declaration of hostility," you agree.

She points a spring roll at you. "Exactly. I'm taking it to the UN."

You're still grinning when she finishes eating—flushed and satisfied with herself in the way she gets after a good meal, her cardigan sliding off one shoulder—and she sets down her container, wipes her hands on a napkin, and gets up to fiddle with her phone with the air of someone who's had a plan this whole time and has simply been waiting to deploy it.

The opening bars of something deeply, joyfully cheesy drift out of the little Bluetooth speaker on the shelf. You recognise it immediately—some dreamy 80s ballad she's played before, all synthesiser shimmer and an achingly earnest vocalist telling someone they're everything he needs—and she turns around with her hand extended and her eyes already sparkling with that particular brand of mischief that means she's made up her mind and all that remains is you catching up.

"Dance with me," she says.

You look at her hand. You look at your legs. You feel the familiar weight in your thighs, the way your muscles sit heavy and a little unreliable this time of night, neither fully cooperative nor fully mutinous, just—present. Like they always are. A quiet footnote at the bottom of every page.

"Pen." Your voice comes out gentle, not reluctant, just honest. "I don't know. My legs are pretty done for tonight—they've been—it's been a long day for them."

"That's okay," she says, like it isn't even a hurdle.

"I might not be able to keep my balance that well right now."

"I've got you." She wiggles her fingers. "Both hands. All of my attention. The complete Penelope stabilisation service, at your disposal, absolutely free of charge."

You look at her. She's not performing patience. There's no held breath, no careful neutrality, no quietly braced expression—just that warm, steady certainty, like she's already seen the version of this night where it goes beautifully and she's simply here waiting for you to arrive in it with her.

"We'll go slow," she adds. "Just follow my lead."

You take her hand.

She draws you up carefully, slowly, one hand firm in yours and the other coming to brace lightly at your elbow while you find your footing. There's a moment where the room shifts slightly—that brief unsteadiness that comes with standing, the way your body sometimes takes a beat to decide it's on board with vertical—and she holds steady through it without commentary, just waits, her grip unhurried, an anchor and not a tether. Then her hand moves to your waist, warm and solid, and the room settles.

"There you are," she says quietly.

The music swells, unabashedly syrupy, and she begins to sway, just barely, barely enough to be called movement. Her feet shift in small increments. Yours mirror hers—careful, deliberate, one slow step and then another, your weight transferring with the cautious attention you've learned to give it. It's less dancing than it is existing together in motion, the smallest possible version of the thing, but her hands don't waver and her eyes don't leave yours.

"See?" she says. "Magnificent."

"We've barely moved six inches."

"Magnificence," she says, with great dignity, "is not measured in inches. It's a vibe. An energy. A whole entire aura."

"An aura," you repeat.

"Exactly. Ours is incredible. I can feel it radiating."

She starts to hum along a moment later—soft, slightly off-key in the most endearing way imaginable, her voice weaving underneath the melody like a second thread running through the same piece of fabric. The glitter on her cheeks catches the lamp light and scatters it. Your steps are small, slower than slow, but she's with you in every single one, not pulling forward or holding back, adjusting when you adjust, waiting when you wait, present in the specific way that feels less like patience and more like genuine preference—like she'd rather be here, at this speed, than anywhere else at any other.

"How are your legs feeling?" she asks, not anxiously, just checking in the easy way she checks in on everything—practical and warm, tucked inside an ordinary question.

"Okay. A bit shaky. I've got you though, so."

"You've absolutely got me." She tightens her hand on your waist by a fraction, just enough to feel more solid. "I'm very sturdy. People don't always think it, because of the aesthetic—" she gestures vaguely at herself, the cardigan, the glitter, the earrings shaped like tiny stars "—but I am genuinely load-bearing. It's my hidden talent."

You laugh, and the laugh moves through your chest and into hers where you're close enough you almost share it.

You stop cataloguing your legs after that. You stop tracking the familiar inventory—the tightness low in your calves, the slight tremor that comes and goes in your left knee, the way fatigue in your muscles doesn't feel like ordinary tiredness but something denser, more interior, like your body is slowly turning the volume down on itself from the inside—and you just let it be background noise. Not gone. It's never fully gone. But it's not the headline either.

The headline is her. The lamp light and the music and the ridiculous earnestness of the song and the fact that she came here tonight with Thai food and an 80s playlist just because she wanted to dance with you in your living room on a Friday, because this is what she considers a perfect evening, because you are part of what she considers a perfect evening.

"You know this song is about a man who sees a woman across a crowded room and immediately decides they're soulmates," you say.

"Iconic behaviour," says Penelope, without missing a sway.

"He's only spoken to her once."

"Love is efficient. Some people just know."

"He's also compared her eyes to the stars, her smile to the sun, and her laugh to—I think it's church bells?"

She tips her head back slightly, considering. "Honestly, church bells are underrated as romantic imagery. Very resonant. Very eternal."

"Pen."

"What?"

"You're defending a man who fell in love with someone he's never had a conversation with."

"I'm defending the feeling," she clarifies. "The feeling is real. The metaphors are a little ambitious, sure, but the feeling—" she looks at you, something shifting in her expression that isn't quite the joke anymore, something softer underneath it "—the feeling checks out."

You don't have a response to that. You just look at her and feel it, the weight of what she means, warm and certain as her hand at your waist.

"You're a natural," she announces, recovering the grin like she just picked it back up off the floor. "Fred Astaire's got nothing on you."

"Fred Astaire," you say flatly, "could actually move."

"Fred Astaire did not have my playlist, my partner, or frankly my general charisma, so I think we come out ahead overall."

"Your humility is really something."

"Thank you," she says serenely. "I've worked very hard on it."

You're smiling so wide it almost feels unfamiliar, the kind of smile that arrives without asking and just stays. It sits on your face like afternoon light on a windowsill, warm and completely at ease.

But your legs know what they know, and they begin to say it—the familiar deep tightening that starts at your ankles and climbs, the heaviness that stops being background and becomes the foreground, the quiet insistence of enough now, that's enough. Your grip on her hand shifts slightly without you meaning it to, just a small tightening, a fraction of a signal, and she feels it immediately. Her hands don't clench or rush; she doesn't make a sound or change her expression. She just begins to turn the sway by degrees, steering so gently you almost don't register it as steering at all, until the couch is simply there behind your knees like it was always going to be.

"Intermission!" she announces, delighted with herself, like it's the interval at a theatre in the West End and she's been looking forward to this part all along.

You sit, and your body does what it always does—exhales, releases, lets go of the effort it's been quietly making. The relief is real and physical, a loosening in your thighs like a fist slowly opening, the deep ache softening now that your weight isn't being negotiated with every step. Penelope is already in motion, pulling the soft grey blanket off the back of the couch and draping it over your lap, tucking the edges in at the sides with neat efficiency, then dropping down beside you close enough that your shoulders press together.

She's still swaying, even now. Of course she is.

"Intermission means snacks," you say. "I feel like intermission should mean snacks."

"I have leftover spring rolls," she offers.

"That's the same food."

"It's repurposed food. It's been elevated by context." She reaches over to the coffee table, retrieves her half-finished tub of noodles, and holds it up. "See? Now it's interval food. Completely different experience."

"Your commitment to a bit is extraordinary."

"Thank you. It's a gift, truly."

She tucks her legs underneath her and settles in, the music shifting behind her into something a little slower—all piano now, a melody that feels like the last light at the edge of dusk, unhurried and a little melancholy in the best possible way. The lamp throws everything amber. Outside, somewhere, a car passes. In here, the world has gone small and warm and exactly the right size.

Her thumb starts tracing slow circles over your knuckles, and you watch it the way you'd watch something lovely—the chipped purple nail polish on two fingers, the rings catching the light the same way her cheekbones do, the small careful motion that has no purpose except to say I'm here, I'm here, I'm here.

"You make everything feel like magic," you tell her. It comes out simple and direct, without preamble, the way the truest things do when you stop dressing them up. "I mean it. Every single bit of tonight. The food and the stupid email and the dancing—even when my body's being difficult, you make it feel like none of that's the problem. Like it's just part of the night. Like it belongs."

She goes quiet for a moment—not uncomfortably, just receiving it, the way she receives things that matter, fully and without deflecting. Her thumb stills on your hand. Then she turns her head to look at you, and her whole face does something complicated and true, something that lives underneath all the warmth and the jokes and the glitter, something that's known you a long time and chosen you on purpose and isn't ever going to make that into a speech.

She grins. The full Penelope Garcia grin, big and irrepressible, the kind that could light up a room and routinely does. She leans in and presses a kiss to your cheek, so soft and quick it barely grazes the surface—a butterfly, a parenthesis, the smallest possible punctuation mark that somehow says everything.

"That's because you're magic, darling," she says.

That's it. That's the whole thing, for her. It lives in her voice like she's believed it since the beginning and hasn't found a single reason to revise her position.

You lean into her and she wraps an arm around you, easy as anything, her head dropping to rest against yours. The blanket is warm across your legs. Her cardigan is soft against your arm and she smells like something floral and faintly like the satay sauce that she definitely got on her sleeve at some point during dinner and is absolutely pretending she didn't.

The music plays on.

She's still swaying, very faintly, just a gentle rock at the shoulder—a body that can't quite stop even when it's at rest, music living in her the way it does, always looking for somewhere to go. You can feel it through every point where you're touching, this small rhythmic pulse moving into you without effort, like a current passing through still water, like something that doesn't need to ask permission.

"Do you want me to put another one on?" she asks, after a while.

"No," you say. "This is good."

"It really is," she agrees.

You think about what it means that your idea of a perfect evening has become this: the ordinary beauty of it, the leftover containers on the table, the lamp in amber, six inches of careful movement in a living room. You think about how this morning your body felt manageable and this evening it didn't and Penelope arrived with Thai food and danced six slow inches with you and somehow that's the whole story—somehow that's enough, somehow it's more than enough, it's the actual thing. She makes the slowness feel like the point, not a workaround, not the consolation prize, but the point itself, the place where the good stuff lives.

"Best dance partner ever," she murmurs, and her voice is low and unhurried now, kept for rooms like this one. "I mean it. I've had other dance partners and none of them were you, so."

"You've had other dance partners?"

"My prom. He stepped on my foot three times and then apologised to the floor. Zero stars. Do not recommend."

"So I'm better than floor-apology guy."

"You are immeasurably better than floor-apology guy." She squeezes your hand. "It's not even a competition. You're in a completely different category." A pause. "We should make this a weekly thing."

You laugh, quiet enough not to disturb the room. "Yeah?"

"Non-negotiable," she says. "Standing appointment. Fridays, eight o'clock, your living room, my playlist. I'm thinking rotating themes—decades. 80s, 90s, early 2000s. The 2000s week will be something special."

"Terrifying, you mean."

"Special," she insists. "Lovingly curated. I'll make a whole event of it." Another pause, softer this time. "We can go as slow as you need, every single week. That's not a caveat, that's just the plan. That is the plan."

You close your eyes. The music moves around you both, soft and continuous, filling the quiet places in the room without crowding them. Her shoulder is solid under your cheek. Your legs ache the way they ache, dully and without urgency, and you let that be true without making it mean anything beyond itself—just the body, just the evening, just the ordinary texture of a life that is also, somehow, this.

You know she'll keep the promise. You know because she keeps all the small ones—every I'll be there, every we'll figure it out, every just follow my lead—and she's never once reached for a word like despite or even though when she talks about what you do together. She just says we. Easy as breathing. Like there was never any other word that fit.

The music plays on, soft and a little cheesy, earnest in the way only 80s ballads can be earnest—completely, without armour.

Her thumb starts moving again. Slow circles. Steady.

Outside, the city does what cities do. In here, the room is amber and quiet and exactly the right size for the two of you and everything you carry between you, all of it held easily, all of it at home.

Every dance.

No matter how small.

You think about the plans you've cancelled. Not just Sarah last week but the birthday dinner before that, and the gallery thing before that, the slow accumulation of occasions where you said I'm sorry, I'm not feeling great and meant something true and untranslatable, something that takes too long to explain to someone who keeps saying but you were fine on Tuesday. You think about Sarah's last message, still unanswered, cheerful and patient, the patience carrying an undercurrent now—not frustration, just a careful quality, like someone who's stopped expecting a yes and is already, gently, making different plans.

You think about your mother's voice on the phone last week, bright and bewildered, saying but you look so good like she was presenting evidence. Like your body's refusal to perform its damage where people can see it was something to factor in your favour. You'd said thank you and felt something hollow out in your chest, the way a room sounds different when the furniture's gone.

You get up eventually. You do it the way you've learned—taking the bath's edge and then the wall, not rushing, not hating yourself for the method. The blurriness recedes on its own schedule. You rinse your mouth. You don't look in the mirror—sometimes you can see the bad day on your own face before you're ready to, and you don't need that information. You drag the duvet to the couch and lie down and don't move for hours.

The afternoon light crosses the room and you watch it go—finding the picture frames, the bookshelf, Emily's jacket on the hook by the door where she left it this morning, the particular navy catching the light and then losing it. The fatigue presses you into the cushions like a gravity slightly heavier than everyone else's. You don't fight it. You've learned that fighting it is how you make tomorrow worse.

This is what invisible looks like, you think. This is what the inside of it looks like.

You fall asleep. When you wake the light is amber-going-grey and your left hand is tingling and outside a bus goes by and you close your eyes again.

That's the day.

You hear Emily's key in the lock and have I'm fine, just tired assembled before the door opens—intonation calibrated, the slight curl at the corner of your mouth that means don't worry without saying don't ask. You've become good at this. Most people take the packaging and move on. Most people are relieved to.

"Hey," Emily says. She's still in her work clothes, hair coming slightly loose, and she's carrying a paper bag from the Thai place around the corner, which means she stopped on the way home, which means she was thinking about you before she got here.

"Hey. I'm fine, just tired."

She sets the bag on the counter. Hangs up her work bag. Takes off her jacket. And then, instead of sitting beside you the way the couch arrangement implies, she drags the coffee table a few inches closer and sits on it directly—cross-legged, her knees almost touching yours through the blanket—and looks at you.

Not scanning you for symptoms. Not running the profiler assessment she sometimes can't quite switch off when she's worried. Just looking, the way she does sometimes, like you're a sentence she's reading for the second time and doesn't want to rush.

"I got the noodles you like," she says.

"Thank you."

She nods. Doesn't move.

She waits.

You hate that she waits. You hate that the silence doesn't feel like pressure—that it feels like room, like she's made room and you can fill it or not and she'll stay either way. You hate it because you know exactly what it does to you. You've known for a year and a half.

Something gives way in your chest. Not cleanly. The shapeless kind of breaking, grief without architecture.

"I cancelled on Sarah again." Your voice comes out flat, pressed thin. "She used to argue with me about it. Are you sure, can't you come for just an hour. Now she just says okay, no worries, feel better. She's stopped arguing."

"When did she stop?" Emily says. Not leading. Just—attending to the specific detail, the way she always does.

"A few months ago." You pull at a thread in the blanket. "Which means she's adjusted. Which means she's being kind about the adjusting. I can't decide which part of that is worse."

Emily lets it be true. Doesn't try to counter it.

"My mum said I looked so good last week." The hollow opens back up at the word. "Like it was a compliment. Like the fact that you can't see it on my face means it counts for less."

"It didn't feel like a compliment," Emily says. Still not a question.

"It felt like evidence I'm exaggerating." You press your thumb against the tingling in your left hand without thinking—the body's automatic attempt to remind itself what sensation is. "I know that's not what she meant. I know she doesn't know what to say. But it still—"

You stop. Start again.

"I was on the floor this morning. Legs just went, halfway through brushing my teeth. I sat there a while and thought about texting you and didn't, because—" The sentence stalls. You push it through. "Because you were in the middle of something that matters, and I was on the floor."

"You can always text me." Her voice is quiet but there's nothing soft in it—something already decided, not open to renegotiation. "Whatever I'm in the middle of."

"I know."

"I mean it."

"I know, Emily." You look at her. "But you go to work and you deal with—" you don't finish that sentence, the one about what she deals with, the photographs on the boards, the things she carries home that she doesn't always talk about either. "And then you come home to this."

"To you," she says.

"To this."

"To you." The patience in it isn't soft. It's the precision she uses when a witness has convinced themselves of something wrong and needs to be walked back from it, one careful step. "Those aren't the same thing."

"They feel like it."

She doesn't argue with that. She's learned not to argue with the feeling when you're inside it—that she can sit with it without needing it to be wrong.

"There was a version of me," you say, and your voice does something and you push through it, "who could stand long enough to cook dinner. Who didn't have to decide every morning whether she had enough to wash her hair or have a shower, not both. Who could say yes to things without running the calculation first." The grief sitting in this is enormous and embarrassing—grief for someone technically alive, still walking around inside your body, just not always where you need her. "I know how that sounds."

"Don't," Emily says. Quiet, without softening it.

"I'm grieving someone who isn't dead."

"Stop calling it pathetic."

"I didn't say—"

"You were about to." She holds your gaze. "You're grieving a life. That's not pathetic. That's just true."

You look at her. The lamp behind her is on—the one that takes months to get a new bulb into—and her face is half in shadow and she's still in her work clothes with her collar slightly off, still carrying the whole shape of the day, and she's here, on the coffee table, her knees against yours, not going anywhere.

"You shouldn't have to do this," you say. The guilt scripts are worn smooth from use—this isn't what you signed up for, I'm too heavy, you have your own things—and you deliver them not because you're trying to push her away, or not only, but because you've made yourself believe them in the small hours and now they're the first thing that surfaces. "I'm not—I'm not easy."

"Neither am I," she says, simply.

That stops you.

"Emily."

She doesn't answer. She reaches forward and pulls the blanket back and lies down behind you on the too-small couch—tucking herself around you, her chest to your back, one arm around your waist, careful and warm, her knees folding up behind yours. The two of you fitting the way things fit when they've had enough practice.

"Then we grieve her together," she says. So quietly you almost miss it under the traffic outside.

You don't miss it.

"You're not a burden I carry." Her mouth is against the back of your shoulder, words going into the fabric of your shirt. Her voice has that quality of something already decided, not performing certainty but actually in it. "You're a person I love. Those are different sentences."

You cry. The ugly kind—no emotional logic to it, no clean beginning or end, just grief that's been packed too tight for too long finally finding the crack. It comes out shapeless. You'd be embarrassed except her hand is moving in slow circles on your back, not trying to pace you toward a conclusion, not needing this to end. She doesn't say it's okay or you'll be alright—the things people say when they need you to stop. She just stays, her breath even at your neck, her arm still around you, her body a warm and certain fact while everything else remains exactly as unresolved as it was.

"I don't want you to look at me and see someone who—" you start, mid-cry, voice thick and broken.

"I see you," she says. No elaboration.

"I mean I don't want you to only see—"

"I see you."

The way she says it the second time closes the door. Not harshly. Just finally.

You cry until it becomes breathing. The weight shifts without disappearing—still present, just no longer sitting directly on your sternum. The lamp stays on. Somewhere in the building the old pipes knock and sigh. Emily's arm doesn't move.

"The Thai's going cold," you say eventually. Your voice is completely wrecked.

"There's a microwave," she says, into your shoulder.

"Emily."

"Yeah."

"Thank you."

She presses a kiss to the back of your shoulder. That's all. It's the whole answer.

You eat the noodles on the couch, both upright now, your legs across her lap without either of you deciding it. Emily eats with the focus of someone used to eating between things—quickly but unhurried, paying attention to the food and to you at the same time.

"How was the case?" you ask.

"Ongoing." She glances at you sideways. "Weird geographic distribution. Reid has a theory."

"When doesn't Reid have a theory."

"He has several, actually. They're usually right, which is—" she pauses, dry, "—deeply annoying." She turns to look at your left hand, which is resting in your lap. "How's the tingling?"

You hadn't mentioned the tingling. "You noticed."

"Of course I noticed." Not unkind. Just stating.

"It's still there. Might be a few more days."

She nods, going back to her noodles. "I'll drive tomorrow if you need it."

"I might."

"Okay."

You sit with that for a moment—the plainness of it, the absence of anything performing sacrifice in it. Just okay, and the offer already made and already standing. You lean your head back against the sofa.

"I'm going to text Sarah," you say. "Tomorrow. When I've—" You gesture vaguely at the general situation. "When I've got words again."

"That sounds right," Emily says.

She puts the empty container on the coffee table and her hand comes to rest on your ankle, easy and still. Outside, somewhere, a siren traces its long arc across the city and fades. You don't fill the quiet and neither does she. You've known her long enough to know she has no anxiety about silence—that she spent years professionally waiting for the thing underneath what people were saying, and some of that patience lives in her at home now, with you, in rooms that don't require anything from either of you.

"Come to bed," she says, eventually.

It might be better tomorrow. It might not. You've stopped building plans around the might-be.

"Yeah," you say. "Okay."

She takes the containers to the kitchen. You hear her moving—tap running, cupboard closing, the specific sound of her feet. You sit a moment longer in the warm light, just noting it: still tired, still tingling, still here.

Held, you think. Still that.

Three days later your body loosens.

Not better—not fixed, not a turning point. Just a loosening, the way a fist unclenches not because the threat's passed but because the hand's run out of tension. You wake before the alarm and your legs are yours again in some basic and provisional way, and the light through the curtains is pale and winter-thin, and the morning feels manageable in the way that mornings don't always.

You lie still and take inventory—the thing you do now, every morning, the habit that replaced the one where you just got up. Legs: present. Vision: clear. Left hand: the last two fingers still have that faint electric quality but nothing that would stop you. The fatigue sits at its usual level, the beneath-everything baseline that never fully goes but that you've learned to carry the way you carry your own weight. Worse than before. Manageable today. That's today.

Emily is already up. You can hear her in the kitchen—the coffee grinder, the machine, the slight shuffle of her feet that she'll deny if you mention it. You lie there and listen and feel something loosen that isn't physical, the specific warmth of knowing someone's sounds.

She comes back with two mugs and hands you yours without asking if you're awake. You take it with both hands, warmth coming in through your palms before you're fully upright. She's learned this—that you want the heat before the waking. She learned it without being told.

She climbs back in and sits cross-legged on top of the duvet, opens her case files in her lap, puts her glasses on. You lean against her shoulder and she doesn't say anything and you don't either. Outside something happens on the windowsill—a pigeon, probably—and then stops. A car goes by. The light shifts incrementally toward day.

"This profile is wrong," she says, to the file more than you.

"Mm?"

"The geographic analysis. They haven't accounted for the commute pattern." She turns a page. "It's not where he lives. It's where he works."

"Is it your case?"

"It is now." She doesn't look up. "I'm taking it back Monday."

Your left hand still tingles. Your coffee is warm. Emily is beside you arguing quietly with someone else's methodology, her glasses low, the small line appearing between her brows that means she's found the thing, and you feel something settle in your chest—not resolution, not relief, just the particular quiet of being in a place that holds you.

Her hand drifts to your hair. Not a decision. Just what her hand does, somewhere between one page and the next. Slow, absent, steady.

You close your eyes.

"Tingling's still there," you say. Not a complaint. Just saying it out loud to someone who won't flinch.

"I know," she says. She keeps reading.

"Could be a few more days."

"Okay."

A moment. Then: "I'll drive you Monday if you need it."

"You said that already."

"I know." She turns a page. "Saying it again."

You open your eyes and look at the side of her face—the dark eyes behind the glasses, the line at her brow, the slight tucking at the corner of her mouth that means she's found something useful in the file. She's absorbed and she's here and those aren't two different things for her the way they sometimes are for people. She doesn't perform attention. She just gives it, wherever she's giving it, and right now it's split clean and easy between the file and you, and you get your half without asking.

She glances over—the quick peripheral awareness that lives underneath everything, the thing she doesn't switch off—and finds you looking. Something passes between you that doesn't need a sentence. She turns back to the file and presses a kiss to your temple, easy and unhurried, the way you'd put a full stop at the end of something you've been working out for a long time.

You're not okay. Not in the way that word is supposed to mean. Tomorrow might be the floor again. Next week might be your mother's voice, or Sarah's careful silence, or the grief that finds you sideways at ten o'clock at night when you've been standing too long and your body starts sending up its signals and all you can feel is everything you can't do anymore. You know this. You're not pretending otherwise.

But the grief, this morning, is beside you. Not on top of you. It's here, taking up its space, and you're here too, taking up yours—legs working today, coffee warm, Emily's hand in your hair moving slow and steady as a tide, her voice when she speaks quiet and certain as something already decided a long time ago.

It's small. It's just this. But it's—

Held.

Completely and stubbornly held, the way the cold floor held you without asking anything, the way the couch held you both that night, the way this thin winter light holds without breaking—held the way things are held when someone has decided, quietly and without making a speech about it, that this is just where they're going to be.

Her fingers move through your hair. Outside the city starts its Saturday. The light keeps arriving.

Not okay. Not yet. Maybe not for a while.

Your limbs are leaden, heavy in the way that suggests something unnatural, like the blood in your veins has turned to mud. Even breathing feels like effort. Each inhale is thick, syrupy. Each exhale too shallow. Your chest rises only because it must, not because you want it to. Your body has become a battleground of stillness and subtle pain, your muscles aching with disuse. There's no injury, no fever, no wound. And yet you feel ill in every way that counts. There's a dull pulse at the base of your skull, a tightness behind your eyes, a stiffness in your neck like your spine is locking into place from the inside out. You shift only to relieve the worst of the aches, and even that feels like an ordeal—your joints grinding with protest.

The blinds are still drawn from yesterday. Or was it the day before? You can't say for certain. The room is dim, cloaked in shades of blue-grey twilight no matter the hour. Dust clings to the air, spinning lazy pirouettes through weak bands of light. You watch them for long stretches of time, letting them become something to fixate on. They're silent, like everything else in here. The kind of silence that feels loud in your chest, pressing and endless. The walls don't echo—they absorb. Everything in the room feels muffled. Even your thoughts. They come like whispers now, static-heavy and incomplete. Fragments of memories, old regrets, things you forgot to do and no longer have the will to finish. Sometimes you try to remember what the sky looked like last time you saw it. Blue? Cloudless? You're not sure. Your memories don't play back like they used to—they're warped, stretched thin, brittle like old cassette tape.

You lie curled on your side, a blanket half-draped across your legs, tangled and too warm in some places and not warm enough in others. You haven't moved in hours. Your skin is starting to feel alien, like it doesn't quite fit right over your bones. There's a stale, sourness to the air now. It should bother you. It doesn't. You can smell yourself—skin oil and something faintly metallic—but it's distant, like everything else. Your body is a container. You live somewhere beneath it, somewhere quieter. Somewhere that doesn't have to be responsible for upkeep. Somewhere that just… waits.

Your mouth is dry. You think you drank water last night. Or maybe the night before. You imagine standing up, walking to the kitchen, opening the fridge. But the thought is enough to exhaust you. It's like imagining scaling a cliff face with your hands tied. Everything is too much. The idea of moving, of changing even the smallest part of your environment, is inconceivable. The thought of showering, of turning on a tap, of lifting a glass to your lips—it all feels impossibly foreign. Like the kind of thing a different version of you used to do. A version you can't imagine returning to. You know what you should do, and the word should clings to you like smoke, staining everything. You should eat. You should clean. You should try. But those thoughts drift through you like fog—no traction, no grip.

Your phone buzzed twice. It barely even startled you. Just a dull hum against the wooden floor. The first time, you ignored it out of instinct. The second time, you knew—Emily. Somehow, you always know when it's her. Maybe your body recognises her before your mind does. But you didn't check. Couldn't. The thought of holding the phone, reading her name, deciding what to do with it... impossible. You're not ready for the weight of someone else's care, even if it's gentle. Even if it's hers. Especially if it's hers. Her name would be a mirror, and you don't want to see yourself reflected in it right now. You don't want to imagine the concern in her voice, the softness you haven't earned.

You aren't crying. Haven't for days. Maybe weeks. There's nothing dramatic in this. No storm of emotion or explosion of grief. Just quiet. The kind that dulls the edges of everything until you feel like a pencil sketch that's been smudged too many times. Not erased, exactly. Just faded. You are a shell with the echo of yourself inside it. You aren't afraid. You aren't angry. You aren't anything. There's a peace to it, almost, but not a kind you'd wish for. A flatline. A still pond with nothing left to disturb its surface. No wind, no ripples. Just the illusion of stillness over depthless dark.

And yet—

The lock clicks.

Not loud. Not hurried. Not the sound of someone invading. It's precise, almost reverent. You hear it in the stillness and know, without question, that it's her. Emily. There's no panic in you. No surprise. You must've known, somewhere deep in that molasses-thick corner of your brain, that she would come. You left her the spare key. Maybe on purpose. Maybe subconsciously. Maybe just because you were too tired to remember where you put it. Maybe you hoped she'd come. Maybe you knew you wouldn't reach for help, so you planted a seed and waited. Or maybe you stopped waiting entirely, and this is coincidence. Either way, she's here.

She doesn't call your name. Doesn't announce herself. Doesn't ask if you're okay. Emily never plays at normal when things aren't. That's one of the reasons you trust her. One of the reasons you let her see you like this. She doesn't make a performance of compassion. She doesn't treat your silence like a puzzle to solve. She just steps inside, like she's coming home to a place she's missed. She moves with familiarity, like she's done this before. Like she knows exactly how long the hallway is, how many steps it takes to reach your door.

Her footsteps are soft against the hardwood. There's a rhythm to them—measured, unfaltering. A quiet confidence that seeps into the space ahead of her, like her presence precedes her physically. The slight creak in her left boot tells you exactly which pair she's wearing. The same boots she wore that time in Boston, when you stood beside her in the rain under the flicker of motel neon. You remember that detail, even though you can't remember the last time you brushed your teeth. You can't explain how you know it's her before she speaks. You just do. She carries a kind of gravity that rearranges the molecules in the air. Being near her is like standing close to a low-burning star.

Then she's in the doorway. Then she's here.

The mattress dips, but not abruptly. Her weight settles into the edge of the bed like it's been waiting for her. Like it knows the shape of her already. You feel it, even though you haven't moved. That slight shift of gravity when she sits. The air in the room changes. Not brighter. Not louder. Just different. More real. More present. Like someone turned up the saturation just slightly on the colours around you. Like her presence redefines the perimeter of the room.

She doesn't speak right away.

Her hand reaches for your hair, and the contact is feather-light, reverent. Like she's touching a bruise. Like she's checking if you'll flinch. She brushes strands away from your forehead slowly, fingers lingering just long enough to remind you that she's there. Her thumb trails the edge of your temple. Warmth blossoms there, faint but immediate. Her hand doesn't tremble. It doesn't hesitate. It simply exists. Soft. Certain. You didn't realise how long it's been since someone touched you like this—with no expectation, no goal. Just contact.

You don't open your eyes.

"Hi," she says, voice low and even.

It's not a greeting. It's an offering. An anchor.

You want to respond. Want to tell her that you heard her. That you're glad she's here. But the words are somewhere far off, buried under layers of fog and cotton. You couldn't reach them if you tried. And still, she waits. Not for a reply. Not for proof. Just with you. With the quiet. She fits into the silence like it's her language too.

She doesn't need them. She leans down until her forehead touches yours. Her breath fans across your cheek—coffee, and that familiar hint of jasmine from the shampoo she still pretends not to steal when she stays the night. Her presence is warmth without pressure. Weight without demand. And something more. A tether. A lifeline made of skin and breath and presence. She breathes with you, slow and steady, like she's lending you her rhythm.

She stays there, silent, letting the moment stretch. Her hand doesn't move from your hair. Her thumb begins tracing slow, deliberate circles against your scalp again, like a lullaby written in skin. Each pass of her hand is a silent affirmation. You are here. I am here. That's enough. Her knees press gently against the side of the mattress. Her other hand settles beside your pillow, grounding her to the bed, to you.

"You don't have to say anything," she murmurs. Her voice is barely more than breath. "I've got you."

That breaks something. Not in a dramatic, cinematic way. No tears. No gasp. Just a crack somewhere in the frozen part of you, where the numbness lives. A tiny fracture that lets in the faintest sliver of warmth. Her words wrap around that space, soft and strong and certain. They hold you where you are, not trying to drag you out. Just staying with you in the dark.

After a moment, Emily's fingers pause in your hair. There's a brief stillness between you, a pocket of quiet where she simply breathes with you, matching the rhythm of your inhale and exhale like it's instinct. Her touch lingers in your hair, fingers brushing once more over your temple with the gentlest pressure, as if to say she's still here without using words. Then, with a quiet sigh, she reaches for the worn paperback on your nightstand. She doesn't need to ask if it's okay. She already knows. There's an intimacy in that certainty, a soft kind of trust that doesn't need to be spoken aloud.

You know the book she picks up—creased spine, corners curled from years of use, pages soft and slightly yellowed from the press of thumbs and the passage of time. It's the one you always call your favourite, even when you can't quite remember why. The one you've carried through moves, through semesters and seasons, through heartbreaks and migraines. The one you've loved even when your brain won't let you feel love for anything else. Emily's seen it tucked under your arm at airports, splayed on your chest during sleepless nights, folded open on café tables while you stared past it into nothing. She knows what it means to you. She's even read parts of it before, quietly to herself when you were asleep beside her on the couch, the television muted and forgotten in the background.

She shifts slightly to get comfortable, adjusting her posture so she can hold the book open without disturbing the delicate stillness in the room. When she begins to read, her voice doesn't rise or push. There's no dramatics, no inflection meant to draw attention. Just the steady, soothing cadence of her speaking aloud—like a tide coming in and out, unchanging. Each sentence falls into the room like soft rain on glass, quiet but present. She reads slowly, letting the words breathe, letting the space between them fill with warmth rather than expectation. The story becomes background noise—not a demand for attention, but a presence that reminds you you're not lost to silence. It wraps itself around the room like a shawl, delicate and woven through with care.

You don't follow the plot. Not entirely. The sentences drift through you like music in a language you half-remember, familiar yet slippery. Some words catch and stick. Others fade before they land. But her voice—you cling to that. The melody of it. The unbroken thread. It reaches into the edges of your mind, weaving through the fog with gentle insistence. You start to listen, not to the content, but to the rhythm. It becomes your new heartbeat. It becomes the only thing that feels real.

She pauses every now and then—not just at the end of paragraphs, but mid-sentence sometimes, like she's gauging whether the room still wants the sound of her voice. It always does. There's a steadiness in her presence that holds you where you are without pulling. Like she's anchoring you to the moment without ever demanding you stay. And when she gently closes the book, smoothing her palm over the cover like it's something alive, it doesn't feel like an ending. Just another way she's showing up for you. Another way she's telling you: I'm still here.

"You don't have to talk," she says, her voice soft but sure. "You don't have to look at me or move or even try to feel better. I'm not here to fix anything. I just want to be here, if you'll let me."

Her thumb traces along the edge of the duvet now, absentminded, her eyes watching the small motion as if grounding herself in it. "You don't need to perform, or pretend. Not with me. You're allowed to just be." She exhales slowly, like she's letting go of something she's been holding, too. "I know this isn't something that lifts because someone else says the right thing. But I'm not leaving you to carry it alone."

She looks at you then—not expectantly, not for a response, but as if memorising the shape of your stillness. Like she's cataloguing your quiet, making space for it, honouring it. Then the bed shifts again as she stands up briefly. You hear the gentle creak of the floorboard beneath her foot, the soft rustle of the duvet as she lifts it. Then, with quiet deliberation, she slides under the covers next to you. She moves slowly, easing her body close without crowding yours, adjusting the blankets to drape over both of you with practiced gentleness. She nestles into the space behind you like she's done it a thousand times before, even if she never has. Her movements are deliberate, careful, as though she's entering a sacred space.

When her arm wraps around your waist, it's not possessive or heavy. It's an offering. A reminder. She rests her palm flat against your side, grounding you both. You don't move, but you don't tense. You allow it, and that permission—unspoken, barely conscious—means something. It says, I know you're not ready, and that's okay. It says, I'm here for as long as you need.

Her chest presses lightly to your back, her knees tucked behind yours, fitting around the shape of you like a puzzle piece. There's no urgency in her touch. Just quiet presence. Just warmth. Her body radiates against yours, not heat exactly, but steadiness. The kind of warmth that says: stay. The kind that doesn't chase anything away, but waits with you in the dark. She hums softly under her breath—nothing with a melody, just a subconscious sound, like her body can't help but fill the quiet with something human. It's not meant to soothe you. It simply exists, a testament to her being here with you.

Time becomes soft around the edges. Minutes stretch and fold. You feel her breathing, the slow expansion of her ribs, the gentle release as she exhales. It doesn't take long before your own breath begins to match hers. First by accident. Then by instinct. Her rhythm becomes your rhythm. Her steadiness becomes your anchor. Her fingers splay slightly where they rest against your stomach, not pushing, not pulling—just a contact point, like she's reminding you that you are here, and she is too. She's a lighthouse in the fog, not demanding you find your way—just shining.

"You don't have to come out of this yet," she whispers, her lips near your ear but her voice barely above a hum. "There's no timer. No deadline. No one's standing on the other side of this waiting for you with a clipboard, asking why you haven't smiled today."

She shifts slightly, her hand curling more securely around your waist. "You don't owe anyone an explanation. Not even yourself. You're not failing. You're not broken. You're surviving. And I'm proud of you for that, even if you can't be."

Her voice wavers just slightly, but she steadies it. "You don't have to do anything right now. Not eat, not shower, not talk. You don't have to be okay. You don't even have to move. Just let me stay here. That's all I want."

The words are soft, but they settle deep. They don't bounce off the fog inside you—they move through it. Like sunlight diffusing through morning mist, not breaking it apart, but making it bearable. She doesn't press you to speak. She doesn't ask for your hand or your tears or even your attention. She asks only to stay. And she means it. Every syllable a promise.

She shifts her position just slightly, enough to rest her forehead against the back of your neck. Her breath is warm against your skin, each exhale slow and deliberate. She murmurs again, not for your ears exactly, but maybe for herself too. "You're not alone. Not now. Not ever. Even when it feels like no one sees you—I do."

You don't say anything. You don't shift or reply. But your body, worn and slow as it is, begins to lean the smallest fraction into her warmth. Just a tilt. Just enough to notice. And when she feels it, she presses the lightest kiss to your shoulder—barely there, reverent.

The quiet that follows is full. Not of tension or expectation, but of presence. Of knowing. Of breathing. Her fingers trace small, idle patterns on your side, not to coax a reaction but simply because she's there, and you're real, and this moment is shared. She closes her eyes behind you and lets the stillness become part of her too.

You look up, smiling brightly.  “Hi,” you squeal as you stand up to kiss him. Your lips on his ease his annoyance by a little but he still feels the aggravation boiling in him. As much as he tries, he just can’t figure out what’s upsetting him so much and the guilt he feels over his reaction doesn’t help.

“You forgot your bag,” he says, holding out the item. Your smile doesn’t drop – it fades. 

You mutter an apology and then add, “I missed you so much. You’re pretty late.”

He doesn’t want to roll his eyes but he does.

What the heck is wrong with him?

“Yeah,” he mumbles and sits down only to steal a cheese slice from your plate.

No ‘I missed you, too.’ No ‘How was your day?’

Clark just sits there, eyes half closed as he chews and the discomfort of the silence chases goosebumps up your arms. 

“Are you alright?” you ask, keeping your voice soft. Small. 

“Yes.” The single word carries more bite than you have ever heard from him before. He regrets it instantly but he doesn’t have the energy to ask for your forgiveness. Not now. 

“Are you sure?” you question timidly. You begin to reach out, wanting to rest your hand on his, maybe knead out the stress while you’re at it, but he pulls away.

“I’m just- I’m tired and I wanna take a shower. I hate to ask because I know it’s late, but can you make food? Like real food?” He eyes your plate critically and you swallow.

He feels like such a jerk and knows that his ma would give him one hell of a talk for being so gruff with you. He’d like to put himself in timeout. 

“Sure, I… yeah, any specific request?”  You’re so sweet about it even as Clark hears the uncertainty in your voice. 

“No, just… just food, okay?”

He barely waits for your nod before he bolts for the bathroom. The ache in his bones is something utterly unfamiliar, just like the anger threatening to spill over.  Clark showers quickly, hoping the cold water will soothe his tightly drawn muscles and cool his head at the same time. 

Tall as he is, he struggles to fit all of himself under the spray. He cramps himself into the small space and knocks over your shampoo and conditioner in the process. The liquids spill and a sigh of pure frustration parts his lips. 

“Jeez,” he mutters. As he cleans up the mess, he makes a mental note to buy you replacements but when? He’s been busy all week, more assignments in his planner than work hours, and all he wants is to go to sleep. 

A soft knock on the door follows and then your voice carries through the wood, “Are you okay in there?”

“Yes,” he bites and steps onto the bathmat. He’s sure there’s still soap clinging to his back. As he wraps a towel around his hips, you speak up again, “I thought I heard something fall.”

“Gosh, can you just- yeah, I dropped your dang shampoo stuff! I’m sorry, ok?”

Clark rips the door open, his chest heaving. 

You stand there, one hand still raised in the ghost of your knock. Your eyes are wide, searching his face. 

He is about to say something, maybe find a way to fix the situation, when a strange smell wafts through the apartment. 

“What the-,” Clark sprints into the kitchen to find smoke curling from the oven. It reaches out with tiny claws, slowly darkening the room. 

“Stay back,” he calls out as you follow him, your expression torn between guilt and… and fear. 

He quickly shuts off the heat and opens the oven to let the smoke escape.

“Open the window,” he instructs and you quickly walk over to do so. 

Once the smoke clears, he leans against the counter, rubbing a hand across his face. He doesn’t look at you once, just stands there and frowns. 

“I’m sorry, Clark, I- I didn’t think I turned up the heat so much. I was gonna… I’m really sorry,” you stutter. 

If he had looked at you for a second, he would have seen the way your hands shook, the way you curled into yourself, trying to take up less space.  But he doesn’t look. He just keeps his lips pressed together tightly, trying to swallow his frustrations and bite back any anger. 

“Clark-“ you begin again but he interrupts. 

Your name falls from his lips in a tone you had never heard from him before.

He doesn’t yell. Not exactly. But a man his size has a voice to match it. You know he doesn’t mean to scare you, he would never do that intentionally. But the word spill out with such irritation that you take a step back. 

It’s not a way of deescalating the situation, not a conscious decision to give him space. It’s fear that draws you away from him. 

At first, he doesn’t notice. He hears you walk out of the kitchen and his first instinct is to feel relieved. At least until he picks up on your heartbeat.  It’s fast, much too fast. The irregular rhythm, the hiccups and then the muffled sound of your hand pressed against your lips as you try to keep yourself from crying – it breaks his heart. 

All anger dissipates and is instead replaced by a mountain of guilt. 

Clark pushes away from the counter and follows you slowly.  “Sweetheart?” he calls out to you. 

You’re standing in your shared bedroom, your back to him. He sees your trembling shoulders and his stomach drops. 

He says your name once. You flinch. 

“Baby,” he whispers as he steps closer.  Cold fear runs through his veins when you don’t turn around. 

Clark doesn’t know whether he should reach out. He doesn’t want to scare you any more than he already did but he needs to see your face. 

“Baby, can you please look at me?” he requests, keeping his voice gentle. 

Slowly, you turn around, your eyes downcast. Small streaks of tears glisten on your cheeks, the low lighting catching in them. 

“I’m sorry,” you blurt pitifully, “I’m sorry for burning dinner. I’m sorry that I annoyed you. I’m sorry-“

Every other word is followed by a hiccup as your voice trembles. You sniffle, trying to pull yourself together and it pains Clark to see you like that. 

“No, darling, I’m sorry,” he mumbles. He softens his posture, tilts his head. His hands are raised slightly, as if to say, ‘I won’t hurt you’.  “Gosh, I- I’m the one who needs to apologize. I shouldn’t have raised my voice like that.”

You peer up at him slowly, your gaze still unsure. 

Clark reaches out, hoping you’ll meet him halfway. Your hand trembles as it finds his. But then you step closer, and he opens his arms in which you let yourself be enveloped. 

Your tears drench the crumbled cotton of his shirt as he strokes your back. “I’m so sorry,” he whispers again, “I’m not mad, I promise.”

He softly pulls away to face you, his heart cramping as he watches the salt stream from your eyes.

“You were so angry when you came home,” you mumble, your voice thick with tears, “And my bag- I shouldn’t have left it there, I should have hung it up, I’m sorry, I-“

He shushes you gently.  “It’s just a bag. It’s okay. You don’t need to apologize. There was no reason for me to get so upset.” His palm travels up and down your spine, soothing away the rest of your tears. 

“Are you still angry with me?” you ask quietly. 

Clark shakes his head.  “I was never angry with you in the first place. I’m just stressed. I had a long day but that’s not a reason to take it out on you.”

He cups your chin and gently raises it so you meet his eyes.  “Please, can you forgive me?” he asks. His hand tenderly strokes your cheek.

When you nod, he lets out a sigh of relief. Clark pulls you closer and presses a kiss to the crown of your head. 

“Sorry for being such a jerk,” he whispers into your hair.

“I’ve already forgiven you,” you answer but he shakes his head.  “Doesn’t matter,” he mumbles, “I’m still a jerk.”

You chuckle softly and glance up at him. “That almost qualifies as a cuss word, Clark.”

"Yes, hi. My car's stalled in—" You glance at the nearest street sign, squinting against the glare. "—the middle of Kingsway, I think. Yeah, just stalled, won't start. Yes. Yes, I'll hold."

More hold music. You shift your weight from one foot to the other, trying to find a position that doesn't immediately cost you something, and then make the mistake of leaning against the car door—the metal has been sitting in full sun and it scorches straight through the thin fabric of your shirt, and you jerk upright and swear under your breath. Which sets off a small cascade of pain that rolls up from your lower back and fans out across your shoulders like something unfurling from its centre, slow and inevitable. The kind of pain that isn't sharp or dramatic, just relentless, the way a headache is relentless—present, constant, a low hum underneath everything else, the background radiation of your body doing what your body does.

You shift your weight again.

Still on hold.

"Need a hand?"

The voice comes from behind you, familiar in a way that lands somewhere behind your sternum before you've even turned around—warm, a little dry, carrying that particular undertone of someone who finds the world genuinely amusing without quite managing to hide that they also care about it. You turn, and there she is.

Emily.

Standing on the pavement beside a dark SUV you recognise immediately, one hand tucked into the pocket of her jacket, sunglasses pushed up into her hair like an afterthought, her expression caught somewhere between concern and the kind of fond amusement that makes you feel like you're the punchline to a joke she's too kind to actually tell. She looks, as she always looks, like she belongs exactly where she is.

You're not sure whether to be embarrassed or grateful.

The hold music is still going.

"I'm—" You gesture vaguely at the car, at the phone, at the general catastrophe of your afternoon. "I've got it handled," you say, which is clearly a lie, and she clearly knows it's a lie, and the small twitch at the corner of her mouth tells you she's choosing not to comment on it, which is somehow worse.

"Sure," she says pleasantly.

"I do."

"I know you do," she says, which isn't agreement, exactly. More like acknowledgement dressed up as agreement—she's good at that, the conversational sleight of hand. She steps closer, glances at your car with the air of someone assessing a situation rather than a vehicle, and then pulls out her own phone with the smooth efficiency of someone for whom problems are just logistics that haven't been resolved yet.

"Who do you use for breakdown cover?"

You tell her. She makes a small, dismissive sound.

"I know someone better. Give me two minutes."

You open your mouth to point out that you're already on hold, but she's already dialling, already half-turned away with the phone to her ear. You watch her exchange fewer than a dozen words with someone on the other end, give your location with crisp precision—your cross street, the direction you're facing, the make and colour of the car—and hang up in the time it takes the hold music to complete one full cycle.

"Tow truck'll be here in twenty," she says, slipping her phone back into her pocket. "You can cancel whoever you've got on hold."

The efficiency of it is almost funny.

You hang up on the hold music without a second thought.

"You're lucky I was nearby," she says, and there's a smirk tucked into the words, light and warm, as she leans casually against the hood of her SUV and folds her arms. Her eyes move over you—not invasive, just careful, the habit of noticing that's so deeply built into her you don't think she's always aware she's doing it. "You okay? You look like you've been standing in the heat for a while."

"I've been standing in the heat for a while," you admit.

"That wasn't what I asked."

"It was implied."

"I'm a federal agent," she says. "I ask what I mean."

You look at her. She looks back, patient and unhurried, waiting for the actual answer in the way she always does—she has this quality of making silences feel like invitations rather than pressure, and it works on you every single time.

"I'm fine," you say.

"You say that every time."

"Because I'm always fine."

"You're always fine in the way that means you're managing," she says, and it's not unkind, just precise—the kind of precision that makes you feel seen in ways you haven't entirely given permission for. She tilts her head toward her car. "Sit down. Use the air con."

"I don't need—"

"You've been standing on hot tarmac for however long it took me to find parking," she says, "and your fibro doesn't care how much dignity you're trying to maintain."

It's said without flourish, without the particular careful tone people sometimes use around your health as though they're handling something fragile—just factual, straightforward, the way she says everything that matters. It shouldn't make you want to smile.

You want to smile.

"Are you always this bossy, or is this a special occasion?"

"This is my resting level," she says seriously. "You should see me on a good day."

You sit down.

The driver's seat is pushed back for her legs and it's surprisingly comfortable, and the cool air from the vents is so immediately relieving that you close your eyes for a moment and just breathe—in through the nose, out slow. The ache doesn't go anywhere; it doesn't work like that, it's not a headache you can clear with a cold drink. But the heat had been sitting on top of everything else like a second weight, and peeling that layer back is something. It always helps to peel a layer back.

Emily leans in through the open passenger window, arms folded on the frame, close enough that you can smell her perfume over the hot city air.

"Better?"

"Don't gloat."

"I'm not gloating," she says. "I'm observing."

"That's gloating with extra steps."

She laughs—genuinely, the kind of laugh that crinkles the corners of her eyes and makes her look younger and less careful—and the sound of it does something to the tight, frustrated knot in your chest, loosening a thread without fully unravelling it. You find yourself almost smiling again, despite yourself, despite the dead car and the traffic and the slow geological ache working its way through your joints.

"Okay," she says, when she's done laughing. "So. What happened?"

"It just died."

"Just died."

"I was at the lights, the engine stuttered, and then nothing."

She nods slowly, the way she nods when she's filing information. "Any warning sounds before?"

"No."

"Funny smells? Dashboard lights?"

"Emily." You give her a look. "It's a car, not a suspect."

"Everything," she says, entirely seriously, "can be interrogated given the right circumstances." She turns to regard your car through the windscreen with an expression of theatrical gravity, head tilted, considering. "I could have a word with it. See if it'll talk."

"Please don't."

"I've broken harder cases."

"It's a 2019 hatchback."

"Everyone has a breaking point," she says sagely, and then glances at you sideways. "Tell you what—if it turns out to be the alternator, I'll let it off with a warning. But if it's something it could've told you about sooner, I'm pressing charges."

You actually laugh at that—properly, out loud, the kind of laugh that surprises you with how full it is. It cuts through the afternoon heat like something clean and sharp, and Emily looks quietly pleased with herself in the way she always does when she manages to get you there—not smug, exactly, more like someone who was genuinely trying and is glad it worked.

"I think it's beyond interrogation," you tell her.

"Nothing's beyond interrogation," she says firmly. Then, after a beat: "I'm also an excellent character witness, if it needs one."

"For my car."

"For your car."

"You're very strange," you tell her warmly.

"You keep spending time with me anyway," she points out.

You don't have a good response to that, mostly because it's true and you both know exactly why it's true, and acknowledging it out loud feels like stepping off a ledge you haven't quite decided to step off yet. The weeks of coffee that ran long, of texts that turned into long back-and-forth threads about nothing in particular, of the way she looks at you sometimes like she's working up to something—all of it sits between you, comfortable and charged, a live wire neither of you has touched.

Not yet.

You wait. The traffic crawls past in both directions, indifferent to all of it. The sun starts to lose a fraction of its ferocity, the light shifting from white toward amber, and somehow the twenty minutes pass less miserably than twenty minutes stranded in rush hour traffic have any right to. She talks, and you talk, and she has a way of making conversation feel effortless without making it feel like nothing—she asks questions that are genuinely curious rather than polite, she listens like she means it, she offers her own things in that particular ratio where you always come away feeling like you've learned something real about her, like she let you in through a door that isn't always open.

She tells you about something that went sideways at work that week, a miscommunication involving a very upset local detective and a case file that went to the wrong address, and she tells it with enough dry self-deprecation that you're laughing again before she gets to the end of it.

"That's not—" You press the back of your hand to your mouth. "That's genuinely awful."

"It was genuinely awful," she agrees. "Reid thought I was angry at him for four days. He kept leaving apology notes on my desk."

"That's adorable."

"It was," she says, and she's smiling at the memory, something soft in it. "He wrote one in three different languages. I kept them."

"Of course you did."

"I'm sentimental," she says, glancing at you. "Don't tell anyone."

"Your secret's safe with me."

"I know," she says simply, and the simplicity of it lands differently than you expect, heavier and warmer, settling somewhere low in your chest.

By the time the tow truck appears at the far end of the lane, you've almost forgotten to be annoyed about any of it.

Almost.

"Right," Emily says, pushing off from the window and straightening up, rolling her shoulders back. She squints at the truck, then at you. "I'll drive you home after."

"I'll get an Uber," you say.

She turns and looks at you with an expression that is not quite exasperation and not quite amusement and is somehow both.

"You won't."

"Emily—"

"I'm not letting you take an Uber," she says, and there's a tone underneath it—firm and warm in equal measure, like the way certain old buildings feel in winter, solid stone with heat radiating from somewhere within. It's not a command, not quite, but it doesn't leave much room either. Something protective sitting just below the surface, something that doesn't announce itself but makes itself felt. "Besides," she adds, and the warmth shifts back into something a little more playful, "it'll take forty minutes in this traffic. You'd be miserable."

"I'm already miserable."

"You're currently at a managed level of miserable," she says. "I'm preserving the status quo."

You look at her for a moment. She looks back, eyebrows slightly raised, waiting.

"Fine," you say.

"Good choice."

"I'm going to start charging you a consulting fee," you tell her, "for how often you make my decisions for me."

"You'd never follow through," she says cheerfully. "You like it."

You open your mouth and then close it again, because the genuinely irritating thing is that she's not wrong, and she knows she's not wrong, and pointing that out would only make it worse. She's already smiling, the particular satisfied smile of someone who has made an excellent point and is gracious enough not to labour it. Barely.

The tow truck driver is efficient and cheerful and gets everything sorted with a minimum of fuss, and within fifteen minutes your car is secured and you're back in the passenger seat of Emily's SUV, the city moving past the windows in slow amber light as she navigates out of the mess of Kingsway with the ease of someone who's driven in considerably more hostile conditions than this.

"Where am I taking you?"

You give her your address.

"Good neighbourhood," she says.

"You've never been to my neighbourhood."

"I've driven past it."

"That's not the same thing."

"Close enough for an opinion."

"That is such an agent thing to say," you tell her. "You can't just do a drive-by and claim familiarity."

"I noticed the good coffee shop on the corner," she says. "That tells me everything I need to know."

"What does it tell you?"

She glances at you, a quick sideways look that carries a smile. "That you have decent taste."

"Just decent?"

"I'm withholding judgement on the rest until I have more data," she says, and there's something in the way she says it—light and deliberate, like a door left slightly ajar—that makes warmth move through you, slow and certain.

The conversation settles back into its easy rhythm. She tells you more about her week, you tell her about yours, and the city moves past in its amber-and-shadow evening state, all long light and softened edges. At one point there's a gap in the conversation—not uncomfortable, just a natural breath, the kind that only happens between people who don't need to fill every silence—and in it, she glances at you out of the corner of her eye.

"You know," she says, her voice easy, "you could've just called me."

The words land softly, without fanfare.

"I had it handled."

"You were on hold for roadside assistance in forty-degree heat," she says, "with your fibro flaring, on a day you'd already told me this morning was hard." She says it the way she says everything that matters—matter-of-fact, not wielding it like a correction, just naming the thing you'd both been circling. "You could've called me. I'd have come running."

There's a beat of silence.

The traffic light ahead turns amber, then red.

You look at her profile—the line of her jaw, the way her hands rest easy and certain on the wheel. She's not looking at you now, but something in the set of her shoulders is very still in the way that means she means what she said and she's letting it sit there without dressing it up or walking it back.

"This morning was a text," you say. "Not an invitation to rescue me."

"Maybe I'm always looking for an excuse," she says, and it's light, there's a smile somewhere in it, but it doesn't fully cancel out what's underneath. She glances at you briefly. "You're not a burden. I need you to know that."

You don't know what to do with that, exactly. You're not sure if she means it the way it sounds or if she means it the way you want it to sound, and the difference matters and also might not matter at all—because either way she's here, she came, she handled the tow truck and the hold music and the twenty minutes in rush hour traffic like it was simply what you do for someone. Like it was obvious.

"I didn't want to be a bother," you say.

"You're not a bother."

Simple. Clean. No hesitation.

"Emily—"

"You're really not," she says, quieter now, and the traffic light turns green, and she drives, and you sit with it.

Your street appears sooner than you're quite ready for, the familiar rows of terraced houses and the old oak at the corner catching the last of the evening light, its leaves lit from beneath in pale gold. She pulls up outside your door with the quiet competence she does everything, the engine idling, and for a moment neither of you moves.

Her fingers drum a slow, absent rhythm on the steering wheel.

The oak tree shifts slightly in a breath of wind you can't feel from inside the car. The amber light is doing something to everything—softening hard edges, laying itself across the dashboard and the backs of her hands like something offered rather than imposed. You feel the ache in your body the way you always feel it, a constant companion with no concept of timing, no understanding of moments it should respect—but it's sitting further back than it was an hour ago, less at the front of everything, and that's something.

"Thank you," you say. "Genuinely. You saved me from a significantly worse afternoon."

"That's my job," she says, and the smirk is there, small and fond.

"You're not my FBI agent."

"No," she agrees, and something shifts in her voice, settling into something quieter that doesn't have a smirk in it at all. "I'm not."

She looks at you then—properly, the way she doesn't always let herself. Her eyes are very dark in the evening light and there's something in them that you've seen before, in pieces, in half-glimpsed moments she tends to redirect before they can become fully legible. It's legible now. Close enough to read.

"Next time," she says, "just call me first."

Her voice is softer now than it's been all afternoon, the professional crispness gone entirely, and what's underneath is something quieter and truer and unguarded in the way she rarely lets herself be—the way she only is, you've noticed, in the small hours of long evenings and the still centres of difficult days.

"I don't mind being your first option."

The words settle around you like the evening light itself, like the low warmth of the idling engine, like the particular feeling of being known by someone who paid close enough attention to learn you. You want to say something—you're aware of several possible responses, some of them sensible, some of them not at all—but what comes out is just her name, soft and a little wondering.

"Emily."

She smiles. Not the smirk, not the warm professional thing she uses to fill rooms—something smaller than that, and much more real, and entirely just for you.

"Go inside," she says. "Take your meds, drink something cold, lie down."

"Are you prescribing for me now?"

"I'm observing," she says. "Completely different thing."

"The line between those two seems very blurry from where I'm sitting."

"Good thing you're about to go inside and lie down, then," she says, and there's a warmth tucked into the practicality of it, something that makes it feel less like being managed and more like being looked after, which are different things, and she seems to understand that distinction intuitively.

You unbuckle your seatbelt. Reach for the door handle. Pause.

"I'll call you next time," you tell her.

"Yeah?"

"First option," you say, and something in her expression shifts—just slightly, just enough, the way light shifts when something moves in front of it.

"Good," she says.

You get out. The evening air is still warm but gentler now, the worst of the heat exhaled out of the day, and you stand for a moment on the pavement and watch her pull away—smooth and unhurried, indicator flashing amber at the junction before she turns and disappears around the corner.

The oak tree moves again in the breeze, its pale-gold leaves catching and releasing the light.

You stay there a moment longer than you need to, the evening settling around you like something you're not quite ready to go inside and leave behind. There's an ache in your body that hasn't gone anywhere—it doesn't do that, it doesn't care how the day ended—but alongside it, underneath it, threaded through the familiar weight of it, is something else entirely. Something that sits in the chest rather than the joints, warm and not entirely comfortable, the way new things sometimes feel before you've found the right shape for them.

She said she'd come running. She said you're not a bother.

She said first option, like it meant something specific.

You think about the weeks of it—the coffee, the texts, the way she says your name like it's something she chose rather than something she was given. The particular quality of her attention when she turns it on you. The smirk that softens into something else when she thinks you're not watching closely enough to catch it. You've been watching closely. You suspect she knows that.

You turn toward your front door, your keys already in your hand, the evening light at your back.

You'll call her next time.

He appears in the kitchen doorway with a dish towel over one shoulder, and he looks at you, and then he just—stops. The expression he gets is very still and very careful, like a man looking at something he doesn't want to disturb.

"Hey," he says. Just that.

"Hey," you say back. "I think dinner is going to be a takeaway situation."

Something moves across his face—not alarm, not quite. Something more considered.

"Okay," he says. And then: "Thai or Indian?"

That—the way he just pivots, takes the new information and adjusts without making a whole thing of it—makes something in your chest loosen. Relief, moving through you like a breath you've been holding too long.

"Thai," you say. "Please."

He nods, puts the dish towel on the counter, and goes quiet in that particular way of his—the silence of a man actively running calculations you're not privy to. He goes very still when he's working something out, like all his energy gets redirected inward. You can almost see it: clocking your colour, the way you've sunk into the cushions, the fact that you're not apologising. Reading you the way he'd read evidence. You don't particularly mind. You're too tired to mind.

He disappears into the kitchen for a moment—you hear him covering the pan, tidying—and comes back with a glass of water. Sets it on the side table without a word. Without an I thought you might need this. Without any of the fuss.

Just the water. Just there.

He sits on the arm of the chair opposite. Not too close. He's reading the room correctly enough to know this isn't a comfort-by-proximity moment. Not yet.

But then: "Have you tried a hot bath? I've heard that can help with muscle—"

"It doesn't, for me," you say. "Hot water makes the fatigue worse. I just end up stuck in the bath."

"Right." A pause. "There's ibuprofen in the cabinet above the sink, if you haven't—"

"I've already taken what I can today."

A beat. "What about—I read that light stretching can sometimes help with—"

"Aaron." Your voice is gentle, because you're not angry—there's something almost sweet about the way he's working through the list—but you're tired in all the ways a body can be tired at once and the kindest thing is to be honest. Tired like sediment. Like something settled to the bottom of a very deep lake. "This isn't something to fix."

He looks at you. Really looks—the way he does when he's listening, not just waiting.

"There isn't a thing you can do that will make it stop," you say. "It happens, and then it passes, or it doesn't pass as quickly as either of us would like. There's no right answer you're going to find if you just think about it hard enough."

You watch him take that in.

The silence that follows would worry you with someone else—would feel like withdrawal or a prelude to the wrong thing being said. With Aaron, you're starting to understand, silence is just how he moves through things he doesn't yet have language for. He doesn't fill space with noise. He goes still, like a held breath, like water finding its level.

He uncrosses his arms. Moves to the other end of the couch—not crowding you, just adjusting his position. Close enough to be present. Far enough that you've got room to breathe.

"Then what helps?" he asks, and the question is so genuinely meant, placed so carefully in the space between you, that something small and defended in your chest unclenches without your permission.

You have to think about it. The honest answer, not the easy one.

"Sometimes nothing," you say. "Sometimes it just has to run its course. But sometimes—" You pause. "Sometimes just not being alone with it. That's something."

He nods once. And he stays where he is.

He picks up his phone and orders Thai—asks you to confirm your usual before he places it, which is the kind of thing that sounds small and isn't—then puts it down and is just there. Warm and solid and not making you talk about it any more than you already have. The lamp in the corner gives out that amber light that makes his apartment feel like something you could live inside. You drink the water in small sips. Everything still hurts, quietly, the way it will all evening. You exist in the borrowed warmth of the evening, and it's enough.

When the food comes he brings it to the coffee table without suggesting you move to the dining table. He puts on a nature documentary—something wordless and visually soothing, which you suspect is deliberate—and doesn't make it a thing. Just an evening. Just the two of you.

Over the next week, he does research.

You know this the way you know most things about Aaron—not because he tells you, but because you start noticing the evidence. A specific ergonomic pillow appears on what's becoming your side of his bed, dense and unyielding in a way that communicates I consulted a website. You press your hand into it and wince and then feel immediately guilty for wincing because the intent was so clearly good. He texts you an article on a Tuesday morning—thought this might be useful—a link about anti-inflammatory diets, and you can picture him at his desk reading it with the same careful attention he'd give a case file. The thermostat has been adjusted two degrees cooler than you'd like, and when you mention you're chilly he says something about a study on optimal temperature for pain management.

He looks so earnest about it. Not proud of himself, not waiting for thanks—just genuinely, entirely earnest, like this is a problem with a correct answer and he's determined to find it. It makes your chest ache with a fondness you weren't braced for.

The pillow is first.

"It's too firm," you tell him, holding it up. "My neck needs to sink in a bit or everything tightens up."

"Noted," he says, and takes it back without a trace of wounded pride. "What do you use at home?"

You describe it. He listens like you're giving him information he'll be tested on later.

The diet article takes more care. You sit next to him and say, "I know you meant well with this," and he raises an eyebrow slightly—which you've learned is the Aaron version of go on.

"I've tried most of the anti-inflammatory approaches. Gluten-free, dairy-free, nightshades, all of it. For some people they really help. I'm not one of those people. The research is genuinely mixed and a lot of it is based on tiny samples."

"The study in the article had a sample of forty-two," he says.

"Yeah."

A pause. "That's—not great."

"No. It's really not."

He exhales through his nose—which you've come to understand is his version of well, that's frustrating. "Alright," he says. "I'll stop sending you articles."

"You can still send me articles," you say, because you find you mean it. "Just run them by me first. I can usually tell before you've read the whole thing whether it's worth your time."

Something in his expression shifts—softens, in that way he has where it doesn't quite reach a smile but exists in the neighbourhood of one. "That's a more efficient system," he says.

"I have years of experience filtering health content."

"I imagine you do."

The thermostat comes up that same afternoon, when he finds you in a cardigan over your jumper and frowns.

"The cold makes it worse," you say. "My joints especially. I know the internet said cooler temperatures help but whoever wrote that doesn't live in my body."

He goes and adjusts it without another word, and when he comes back he sits down next to you and says, very mildly, "I may have over-indexed on the research phase."

"A little bit," you say.

"I'll recalibrate."

"You don't have to stop," you say, and you mean this too, with a warmth you weren't entirely expecting. "The fact that you're trying to understand it—even when you get the specifics wrong. It means something."

He looks at you for a moment. Then he reaches over and tucks a strand of hair behind your ear, easy and unhurried, the casual affection of someone who's decided they're allowed to touch you.

"I'll try to get fewer specifics wrong," he says.

"That's all anyone can ask."

He takes each correction the same way—not hurt, not defensive, just integrating and adjusting. You realise, watching him do it, that he's building a picture of you. Not the condition. Not the general category of person who has days like yours. Your specific version of it—the particular way your particular body works and fails and recovers.

It feels like being paid attention to in a language you'd stopped expecting anyone to learn.

The morning you wake up in his bed and know—before you've opened your eyes, before you've so much as shifted your weight—that it's a bad one. These mornings carry their own particular dread, arriving before you've even opened your eyes—something in the quality of the dark, something in the weight of your own body against the mattress, and you already know. Everything's wrong in the specific way it goes wrong: heavier than it should be, stiff in the joints, the tiredness sitting on your chest like something has moved in overnight and made itself comfortable and has no intention of leaving just because you need to get up.

Aaron's already up. Aaron is always already up.

You hear him in the kitchen, the low sounds of coffee being made, and you lie there doing the thing you always do first thing—taking stock. How bad. How bad is it today. You've been doing this long enough that it's automatic, this quiet internal audit: what can be pushed through, what can be modified, what just has to be sat with. This morning the audit comes back bad across the board. Everything that usually aches is aching more. The tiredness is the thick kind, the wading-through-water kind, where even the idea of standing up and crossing the room is something you have to think about first.

You try to push yourself to sitting. The room lists slightly. You put your feet on the floor and sit on the edge of the bed, gathering yourself, and you're still in that process—still negotiating with gravity—when Aaron appears in the doorway.

Work shirt open at the collar, sleeves half-rolled. He looks at you. Takes in the posture, the stillness, the pace of it.

"You don't have to get up," he says.

Not are you okay or what's wrong or can I get you anything. Just—permission. A quiet certain statement of it, like he's already thought it through and landed somewhere simple. Like he's figured out that what the bad mornings cost most isn't getting up—it's having to act like getting up is fine, the constant low-level work of making sure nobody around you is worried, and he's choosing to let you off that particular hook.

Something in your throat goes tight.

"I was going to—" you start.

"You don't have to," he says again. Same tone. No pressure in it.

You look at him for a moment, this man in his doorway, and you feel the tight thing in your throat become something more complicated. You nod, and you lie back down, and you don't apologise for it.

He brings you coffee in bed—the way you like it, because he learned that early—and sits beside you on top of the covers with his own mug and his case files, reading. Not asking you to narrate your pain on a scale of one to ten. Not estimating your trajectory. Not looking at you with that specific expression, the helpless concerned one that makes you feel like a problem someone's been handed without adequate preparation. Once he makes a quiet noise of derision at something in the file, and you ask what, and he tells you—something dry and brief about whoever wrote the report—and you laugh a little even though laughing takes more out of you than usual, and he glances over at you with something fond in it.

The morning passes. He doesn't make it mean anything except what it is.

The flare hits about three weeks in.

It starts on a Friday evening, building quietly the way they sometimes do—a warning that accumulates rather than announces itself. By Saturday morning you're already in a different category of bad, the kind that has its own specific texture: everything hurts more than it usually hurts, sharper, with edges, and the tiredness is the complete kind—not tired, not exhausted, but some place past all the words you have for it, where the idea of walking to the kitchen involves a genuine moment of weighing up whether you have what it'll cost.

By Sunday afternoon you're on his couch with your shoes off and the blanket he brought without being asked, going on two full days now. You haven't showered. You've cried twice, briefly, from pure exhaustion rather than sadness. You're running on dregs. Aaron's been in and out—tea, soup you mostly didn't eat, working at the dining table close enough to be present but not hovering—and you've been grateful for the calibration of it even as the part of you that keeps a running tally of what you're costing people has been quietly compiling reasons to leave.

"I should go home," you say. Your voice comes out flatter than intended, scraped thin.

Aaron looks up from the table. Looks at you properly.

"You've been here since Friday," he says.

"I know. That's too long."

"It's not."

"Aaron." You push yourself up a little, which takes more out of you than you'll admit. "I'm not—I'm not good right now. I'm not the version of me that's nice to be around. You don't have to—"

"You shouldn't drive," he says. Quiet. Certain.

You open your mouth.

"You're exhausted and you're in pain and you've been lying down for most of the day," he says. Not unkindly. Just factual, the way he is when he's made a decision. "You shouldn't drive."

You know he's right. You hate knowing he's right. You sit back down.

He closes the case file. Comes over and settles in the chair nearby—doesn't try to sit close, doesn't reach for you—and says, "What do you need right now?"

"I don't know," you say, which is honest.

"Do you want me to sit with you or give you some space?"

"I don't—" You stop. Everything feels wrong today, including being touched—like your skin has decided it's had enough of the world and any contact is just one more thing landing on something already overwhelmed. "Not touching right now," you say. "But don't go far."

"Okay," he says, and stays in the chair, and doesn't make a face about it. That small absence of a face is its own kind of relief.

Over those two days he learns things in real time. He learns that do you want me closer? asked from the doorway is better than an arm around your shoulders that arrives without warning on a day when everything already feels like too much. He learns that sometimes you want the weight of him next to you—something real to anchor you to the present—and sometimes the same weight is too much and you need a closed door. He learns to ask, every time, without making the asking feel like a production.

You snap at him once, that same afternoon. Something small—he moves a cushion and it's the wrong moment, and you hear the sharpness in your own voice before you can stop it.

"Sorry," you say immediately.

"Don't worry about it," he says, and steps back, gives you the space, and doesn't bring it up again.

Later, when the worst of it has settled from a roar to its usual background noise and you've managed half a shower and you're feeling something closer to human, you find him in the kitchen making tea.

"I'm sorry about earlier," you say. "That wasn't fair."

He turns around and looks at you—that careful look.

"You were in pain," he says. "You don't need to apologise for being in pain."

"I was rude."

"You were having a hard day." He sets the mug down in front of you. "There's a difference."

You look at him. He's so steady about it. You'd been waiting, somewhere under the surface, for the moment where you'd see it in his face—that this was beyond what he'd signed up for. You've seen that moment before, with other people, and you've learned to brace for it.

It doesn't come.

"Are you sure you—" you start.

"Yes," he says, before you've finished. Dry, definitive, with the faintest edge of amusement. "I'm sure."

"You don't know what I was going to ask."

"You were going to ask if I was sure about something related to whether I wanted to be here," he says. "And yes. I am."

You laugh a little. It comes out more watery than you'd like.

"Alright," you say.

"Alright," he agrees, and sits across from you while you drink the tea, and tells you something mildly unflattering about a colleague—not anything identifying, just something dry and observational—and you laugh again, and you think: this person is choosing this.

By the end of the month, he's not perfect at it. You don't need him to be—perfection would feel like a script, and what you need is real. His love language is competence, which means his learning curve is visible and genuine and occasionally involves him standing in a doorway with his jaw slightly set, clocking that you're struggling and working very hard against the instinct to immediately propose a solution. He slips. Suggests things. Ibuprofen when you've already had it, movement when movement is the last thing. Sometimes the concern comes out as efficiency—Aaron Hotchner trying to think his way around something that doesn't work like that—and you gently redirect him, and he nods and files it away.

But less often. Noticeably less.

He keeps your tea at his apartment now—the specific one, the loose-leaf one in the round tin, the one you'd mentioned once in passing, the one he'd watched you reach for without comment three times before it simply appeared in his cabinet as though it had always lived there. Not because a website said to. Because he watched.

It's there one evening when you arrive and you stop for a moment, just looking at it.

"When did you get this?" you ask.

"A week or so ago," he says, from the other room, not looking up. Like it's obvious. Like of course he noticed.

He knows what a bad day looks like on you before you've said a word. He reads it in the way you carry yourself through his door—the set of your shoulders, whether you meet his eyes straight away or take a moment with your back to him before you turn around. He's learned the difference between the tired that's ordinary and the tired that has weight to it. He's stopped asking what do you need every single time because sometimes he already knows—he's already moving toward the kettle, or shifting the blanket to the end of the couch—and asking would make it a production when it doesn't need to be one.

And when he doesn't know, he asks. Simply. Without loading the question.

There's an evening, about five weeks in, when you're lying with your head in his lap while he reads and the lamp is on—the good one, the amber one—and the tea is the right temperature on the side table and the whole room feels like something you could trust. Your body is doing its usual thing, the background hum of complaint that you've lived with long enough that most days it's just wallpaper—there, but not dominating. You're not having a good day, not exactly, but you're not having a bad one either. Somewhere in the middle, in the ordinary unglamorous territory of living in a body that requires constant negotiation, and for once the negotiation isn't costing you more than you have.

You realise, without any ceremony, that you haven't felt like a burden tonight.

Haven't felt like a condition being accommodated or an inconvenience someone has decided to tolerate with grace. You've felt like a person who is tired, being kept company by someone who wants to be here. The difference is enormous. It's the difference between being held at arm's length and being held.

You think about the ergonomic pillow. The thermostat. The diet article with its sample of forty-two. All of it so completely wrong and so completely sincere. How the research was never really about fixing you—it was about paying attention, because paying attention is the only language Aaron has ever been fully fluent in, the only way he knows to say you specifically, the actual grain and weight of you, not just the general idea.

You think about you don't have to get up, and how those five words landed like something settling into place.

You think about the tea tin, in his cabinet like it's always been there.

Aaron turns a page. His free hand rests at the crown of your head—not stroking, just there, the weight of his palm a steady quiet presence.

"Still okay?" he asks, low, without looking up.

"Yeah," you say. "You?"

"Mm." He turns another page. "Good."

You're falling for him, you realise. You've been falling for him probably since before the ergonomic pillow, maybe since the night with the Thai food and the nature documentary and the water he brought without being asked. But it lands now, fully, in this ordinary nothing-evening.

Not because he figured it all out. Because he's still figuring it out and he doesn't flinch from the figuring. Because he looks at the true shape of your life—the difficult unglamorous non-negotiable reality of it—and he doesn't look away. Doesn't make you feel like a problem he's reluctantly agreed to take on.

He's learning you. Not a condition. Not a list of accommodations. You.

"Aaron," you say.

"Mm?"

You think about trying to explain it—what it means that the tea is there, what it meant when he stood in the doorway and said you didn't have to get up, what it means right now, his hand at your head and the lamp and the silence. You think about trying to find words for the specific quality of being chosen. Not in spite of. Not contingently. Just chosen.

You don't have them yet.

"Nothing," you say. "Just checking you were there."

A brief pause. Then, without looking up from his page: "I'm not going anywhere."

And the thing is—you believe him.

Outside, the city hums and flickers, indifferent to this room, this lamp, this small private fact. Aaron turns another page. His palm rests at your crown like something that's decided where it belongs. The tea goes slowly cool.

Just someone staying in the same room with the true shape of your life. Learning its particular weight. Not flinching.

Every bad morning. Every flare. Every evening where dinner doesn't happen and the couch has to be enough.

You did everything right. You always do. You know your checklist like muscle memory: the early application of the weighted vest, its grounding pressure like a hug you can bear—one that doesn't require reciprocation, doesn't shift unexpectedly, doesn't ask anything of you. Noise-cancelling headphones snug over your ears, cutting the world down to a low, manageable thrum. You skipped breakfast music, kept the blinds low, lit candles instead of turning on the overhead lights. You ate lunch on the porch in the shade, in your softest hoodie, listening to the birds instead of the traffic, trying to replace overwhelm with stillness. You avoided screens, skipped phone calls, turned off every notification. A silent dinner followed—forks set gently, bites slow, nothing crunchy or metallic or hot enough to burn. Even your clothes were pre-vetted: soft, worn, safe. Still, it hasn't been enough. Not today. Not with the way the world clawed at you from the minute you woke up.

Your skin feels too thin. Your teeth ache from the tension in your jaw. Even blinking feels too loud inside your skull. Your bones hum like tuning forks, vibrating with something you can't name but can't escape. You try deep breathing. Try pressure points. Try grounding techniques one after the other like rituals. You recite facts, count colours, focus on sensations you can name, but none of it sticks. Your brain, a shaken snow globe. Your thoughts, drifting flakes refusing to settle. Still the wildfire rages beneath your skin.

Now the day has dissolved into the heavy hush of evening, and you are curled up in the corner of your bed like something shrinking, something folding in on itself to survive. Limbs drawn tight to your chest, spine curled, your body trying to disappear into the mattress. Your fingers twitch where they rest against the blanket, twisting and untwisting the edge like you're trying to unravel the static from your skin. The blanket is a lifeline and a threat all at once—too warm, too close, not close enough. Your chest rises and falls in careful rhythm, every breath measured like you're counting down the seconds until this feeling passes. Eyes shut, jaw locked, breath slow and deliberate—but inside, it's chaos. Your nervous system buzzes like a downed powerline, every cell sparking. It feels like ants crawling under your skin, like your bones are too loud for your body to contain them, like your muscles are screaming without making a sound.

Your discarded headphones lie on the floor nearby, abandoned like a lifeline that turned into a noose. Today even the soft hum of silence was too much. The pressure on your ears turned wrong. Claustrophobic. Suffocating. Every second wearing them had become another needle to endure. The sensation twisted and turned until it was louder than the sounds they were meant to protect you from. So you sit here now, unarmoured. Raw. Bare. Even the air feels wrong—too still, too heavy, like it's pressing against your skin. Every texture amplified. Every sound, even imagined, echoing.

The bedroom door opens with a click you'd normally brace against, but you're too far gone to flinch. Still, he pauses. Like always. Derek never approaches without asking. He stands just inside the doorway, his frame silhouetted in the soft glow of the hallway light, reading the room with the kind of attention that makes you feel seen without being watched. He doesn't speak right away. He waits. Waits for the air to settle, for your breathing to even slightly change. He doesn't fill the space with questions or concern, doesn't crowd you with his worry.

"You okay if I come closer?"

His voice is low. Gentle. Careful. It falls into the room like mist instead of thunder. Each word is spaced just enough to breathe. He always speaks like that when you're like this. Like his voice could be another texture—and he wants to make sure it's the soft kind. You don't open your eyes, but you nod once, just enough to be seen. Even that small motion is a cost. But he's worth it.

There's a beat of quiet, just long enough to give you space to change your mind. Then, measured steps—no stomp, no rustle. He moves with precision, the kind that's learned not out of obligation, but love. The kind that listens. The kind that adapts. He doesn't sit on the bed. Doesn't reach for you. Instead, he lowers himself to the floor beside it, back to the wall, legs crossed like he's settling in for the long haul. You don't have to look at him to know the way his body shifts—solid, steady, present. He's here. Entirely here. Not hovering. Not fussing. Just... here.

Then he starts to read.

His voice is your favourite kind of quiet. Not whispering, not patronising, not performing. Just... there. Present. Warm. Low and even, like a lullaby that never needs to rhyme. The words are familiar—the cadence of a book you've read enough times to know where he's up to without needing to open your eyes. He chose it on purpose. He always does. One of the dog-eared paperbacks from your shared shelf, worn thin from years of comfort. He doesn't start at the beginning. He knows better than to jar you with newness tonight. He picks a chapter deep in the middle, one that doesn't need context to soothe. He reads like he's offering something—like each sentence is a gift carefully unwrapped just for you.

But still, you listen. Not because you need to follow the story. Because his voice is a rope, and you are clinging to it, one syllable at a time. It's the rhythm of it, the steady pulse, the unfurling of something that doesn't ask anything of you. It's the way he gives it freely. No pressure. No expectation. Just presence. The cadence of it becomes a backdrop to your breath, a pulse to sync your heartbeat to.

You feel the fire begin to retreat. Not extinguished. Not gone. But less. Like his words are water, cool and steady, trickling over the frayed edges of your nerves. Like the air shifts slightly with every sentence, drawing the temperature down, quieting the alarm bells still ringing behind your ribs. You feel your toes unclench. Your shoulder lowers a fraction. A quiet exhale leaks out of you, unplanned but honest. It doesn't fix it. Nothing does. But it helps. God, it helps.

After a few pages, his voice dips lower, softer. He's near the part you love. The part that always makes you feel safe, even when your brain is trying to convince you that the walls are too close and the lights are too loud and everything is too much. He knows that. Of course he does. He's read this aloud enough times to have memorised your favourite line, knows how you breathe differently when he says it. And he lingers there, just slightly. Just enough. His breath slows with yours. You can feel it—subtle, rhythmic.

When he turns the page, the sound is slow and intentional, the slide of paper against paper barely audible over the murmur of his voice. He doesn't look at you. Doesn't expect you to look at him. Doesn't ask how you're doing or tell you you're okay. He just reads, and in doing so, tells you everything.

You're not alone. You're not wrong. You're not too much.

You're here. And so is he.

The book continues in his hands, voice dipping and rising in all the right places, a current you can float on without needing to swim. Your breath evens out. Your jaw unlocks. One hand releases its grip on the blanket and shifts slightly, resting closer to where he is. Not touching. Not yet. But close. Close enough that if you needed, he would understand. His presence is a harbour you can dock in. You don't need to reach out, but if you did, he would be there in a heartbeat. If your hand brushed his, he'd simply rest his there—solid, steady, asking nothing.

You stay like that, suspended in the calm he brings, until the words themselves start to blur at the edges of your mind. The ache hasn't vanished, but it's dulled. Your thoughts haven't stopped, but they've softened. The static is quieter now, beneath the weight of his voice and the safety he's built, line by line, page by page. There's a lull in the air. A gentling.

Eventually, you reach out.

Your hand moves with the hesitance of a question asked in a language without words, slow and unsure, like your body is still waiting for permission even after it's been granted. Your fingers brush his forearm, then pause, trembling. The contact is featherlight, barely a whisper, but he notices. Of course he does. Derek always notices.

He doesn't flinch or startle or look up with alarm. He simply adjusts, gently turning his wrist so your fingers meet his palm, and then—only then—does he close his hand around yours. No squeeze. No pressure. Just the steady weight of presence, warm and real. His thumb rests against the back of your hand like punctuation, anchoring you without demanding anything. He's quiet, still, like he understands the sanctity of the moment—that your reaching out is not casual, but an offering. A sign of trust. A fragile truth wrapped in skin, vulnerable and sacred.

You could do this without him. You have. You've survived darker nights and louder days. You've breathed through spirals alone, curled tight in rooms where no one saw you. You've fought tooth and nail for equilibrium, for peace, for the fragile stillness that sometimes feels just out of reach. You've made lists, found anchors, counted breaths in the dark until your lungs remembered how to work. You've clung to mantras like lifelines, repeated the names of things you could touch to keep from floating away. You are capable. You are strong. Your resilience has been forged in silence, in discomfort, in pushing through. In endurance. In exhaustion. In sheer, raw survival.

But letting him be your soft place—letting him be the still point in the chaos—makes the process feel less like a war. Less isolating. Like you don't have to carry the weight of your nervous system by yourself. Like maybe you don't have to shrink to survive. With Derek, there's space to just be. No urgency. No noise. No demands to snap out of it or explain why. Just room enough to exist, however you are in the moment. And that kind of space is rare. Priceless. Healing in ways no words could ever quite articulate. It's not about being saved. It's about being seen, fully and without condition. It's about being allowed to unravel without fear.

He shifts beside the bed slowly, carefully, the book closing with a soft thud on the floor, and only then does he move. His hands are unhurried. His steps deliberate. He crawls up beside you without ceremony, laying down on top of the blanket instead of under it, giving you space without retreat. His head on the pillow next to yours. Close, but not overwhelming. He doesn't try to pull you in. Doesn't drape an arm over you or murmur anything reassuring. He just lies there, grounded, letting you feel his presence at your own pace. The air between you hums with quiet understanding. The way he meets your silence with his own feels like a language of its own.

For a while, there's nothing but breath.

The rise and fall of his chest. The subtle weight of his hand in yours. The distant hum of night beyond the walls—crickets, maybe, or the wind brushing against the windowpane. A car passes somewhere far off. Pipes creak in the walls. The house breathes with you. The world hasn't gone silent. But it's quiet enough now. Bearable. A kind of hush settles over everything, thick and safe, like the moment before snowfall touches the ground.

Your breathing starts to synchronise with his. Not intentional. Just... natural. Your body noticing the rhythm beside you and beginning to match it, like a tide pulled toward something calm. Each inhale feels a little less jagged. Each exhale a little less tight. The thrum in your head quiets by degrees. Your heartbeat, once erratic, slowly begins to follow a steadier beat—his. A rhythm that is not yours alone to carry anymore.

"You don't need to talk," he murmurs eventually, voice low and steady, vibrating more in the air between you than in your ears. "You don't need to do anything."

His words aren't reassurance—they're permission. A gentle reminder that you're allowed to exist without performance, without explanation. That stillness is not failure. That rest is not weakness. That surviving—quietly, slowly—is enough. That you don't need to earn your right to peace.

You turn your head just slightly. He's already looking at you. Not watching—just being there. His eyes soft, not pitying. There's no expectation in them, only patience. Only warmth. You don't reply. Not aloud. You don't have to. He nods like he understands anyway, and something in your chest loosens further. The breath you take next is deeper, steadier. Not perfect, but freer.

The moment holds. Lingers. It stretches into something timeless, where minutes stop mattering and your internal clock forgets how to tick. The tension in your jaw releases another inch. Your muscles no longer clench by default. It's not peace, exactly. But it's the beginning of something kinder. A softness begins to wrap around your thoughts like cotton wool. Not smothering, just buffering you from the sharpness of the day.

Something inside you uncoils, slowly. Like a tight thread loosening, tension unwinding from the centre out. The pressure behind your eyes doesn't vanish, but it recedes—like the tide pulling back from the shore. Your breath isn't perfect, but it's easier. Your limbs aren't light, but they're no longer burning. The static is still there, but it's not screaming. Just murmuring now, low and manageable. Like background noise you can finally tune out. Like radio static drifting into white noise that somehow makes space for silence.

Derek doesn't speak again. He doesn't need to. He just lies beside you, breathing, being. His presence says everything: I see you. I'm not going anywhere. You don't have to explain. You don't have to mask. You are not a burden. You are not broken. You are loved, here and now, exactly as you are. Even in the quiet. Especially in the quiet. Especially when you feel like you've got nothing left.

Your fingers twitch against his. He responds by gently brushing his thumb in slow, lazy arcs across your knuckles—no pattern, no rhythm. Just there. It doesn't demand your attention. It just exists alongside you. Something to feel if you want to. Something that won't vanish if you don't. The simplicity of it is grounding in a way nothing else could be. It's the kind of touch that holds no weight, and somehow, that's what makes it enough to keep you anchored.

And for once, the world feels quiet.

Not silent. Not empty. Just... calm.

The apartment door shuts harder than usual.

Not slammed.

Frank doesn’t slam doors.

But enough force behind it that you look up immediately from the couch.

“You okay?” you call out. Silence answers first. Then heavy boots across the floor. Frank rounds the corner a second later still wearing his jacket, shoulders tight beneath worn black fabric, jaw clenched hard enough to twitch. There’s fresh rain caught in his hair. A bruise darkening along one cheekbone. Your stomach drops a little.

“Frank?” His eyes land on you. And something in his expression shifts instantly. Not fixed. Not gone. Just… softer. Enough that your chest tightens.

“Hey,” he says quietly. You sit up fully now, blanket falling into your lap.

“What happened?”

“Nothin’.” You stare at him. Frank stares back for exactly three seconds before exhaling through his nose.

“Long night.”

“That bruise says otherwise.” His hand comes up automatically toward his face like he forgot it was there.

“Looks worse than it is.”

“Frank.”

“I’m okay.” He says it gentler this time. Tired instead of defensive. You study him another second before patting the spot beside you on the couch.

“C’mere." Frank hesitates. Which tells you immediately something’s wrong. Usually the second you ask for him, he comes. Now he just stands there looking exhausted. Wet from the rain. Big enough to fill the whole room with tension without even trying.

“Baby.”

“I know.” His voice is rough. “Lemme just…” He gestures vaguely toward himself. Blood. Bruises. The mood hanging off him like smoke.“You don’t gotta deal with me like this right now." Your face softens instantly.

“Oh, sweetheart.” That look crosses his face again. That awful wrecked little flicker he gets whenever you’re kind to him at the exact moment he thinks he deserves it least. You stand slowly and walk toward him. Frank watches every step.

“You think I care about a bruise?” you murmur.

“It ain’t the bruise.”

“Then what is it?” His jaw shifts once.

“You ever have one’a those nights where you feel like maybe there’s somethin’ wrong with you?” The honesty of it punches straight through you. You stop directly in front of him now.

“Frank.” His eyes stay fixed somewhere over your shoulder instead of your face.

“I’m serious.”

“I know you are.”

“You shouldn’t have t’pull me back together every time I come home like this.” Your throat tightens painfully. So that’s what this is. Not anger. Shame. You lift your hands carefully to his jacket collar.

“Look at me.” Frank does. Slowly.

God.

There’s so much exhaustion in his face it hurts to see.

“You wanna know what I see?” you ask softly. His mouth twitches bitterly.

“Probably a mess.”

“I see my favorite person.” That lands visibly. His eyes close briefly like the words physically hurt him.

“Jesus Christ,” he mutters under his breath.

“What?”

“Nothin’.” His hands settle automatically at your waist now. Big. Warm. Familiar. “You just…” He shakes his head once. “Don’t know what you do t’me sometimes.” You smile faintly.

“Probably because you never tell me.” Frank huffs quietly at that. Then his thumbs move against your hips absentmindedly. Back and forth. Back and forth. Grounding himself through touch.

“You eat?” you ask.

“Mm.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“Ate enough.”

“Frank.” He finally looks properly guilty.

“…Had coffee.”

“Coffee isn’t food.”

“Depends how desperate you are.” You roll your eyes softly and start tugging his jacket off his shoulders. Frank lets you. Always lets you.

“You’re impossible.”

“Yeah,” he murmurs, watching your face instead of your hands now. “Still here though.” That pulls your attention up immediately. There it is again. That insecurity buried under all the muscle and violence and sharp edges. Still here though. Like he’s waiting for the day you won’t be. Your expression softens without meaning to.

“C’mere,” you whisper. Frank goes instantly. Like he was holding himself back before and finally ran out of strength to do it. One second there’s space between you. The next his arms are around your waist and your back hits the wall softly behind you as he folds himself into you with a low rough exhale.

Not rough. Never rough with you. Just close. Desperate for it. His forehead drops to your shoulder. You feel the tension bleeding out of him slowly beneath your hands.

“Better?” you murmur into his hair.

“Little.” You smile faintly and run your fingers through the damp strands at the nape of his neck. Frank makes this quiet sound deep in his chest. Not quite a groan. Not quite relief. Something warmer.

“You smell good,” he mutters after a minute. You laugh softly.

“That’s your opening line?”

“M’tired.”

“Clearly.” His hands flex once at your waist. Then still. Then flex again. Your breath catches slightly. Frank notices immediately. Of course he does. His head lifts just enough to look at you. The mood changes all at once. Subtle. Dangerous. Not from aggression.

From attention.

The kind only Frank knows how to give — complete and heavy and impossible to ignore.

“You okay?” he asks quietly. The concern in his voice almost makes it worse somehow. You nod once.

“Yeah.” His eyes flick briefly to your mouth. Then back up.

“You sure?”

“Frank.”

“Mm?”

“You’re staring.”

“Can’t help it.” Heat crawls slowly up your throat. Frank notices that too. His mouth twitches faintly at one corner.

“There she is,” he murmurs softly. Your fingers tighten slightly against his shoulders.

“You come home all bruised and exhausted and somehow I’m the flustered one.”

“Not my fault you like me.” You snort softly.

“Your ego is unbelievable.”

“Earned it.”

“Oh my God.” Frank finally smiles then. Small. Crooked. Real. And suddenly the whole room feels warmer for it. Before you can protest, he has you lifted and he's flopping down on the couch with you straddling his lap. In a single smooth motion he pulls you down flush against him, your knees bracketing his hips, his big battered hands slow and deliberate as they peel the blanket the rest of the way off your lap. He’s still rain-damp, the heat of him radiating through your shirt. You know what he wants. You’ve gotten better at reading the way his hands settle—sometimes gentle, sometimes not. Tonight they’re careful. Not because he wants to be, but because he’s making himself be.

“Comfortable?” he asks it deadpan, like you haven’t been in his lap a thousand times before. His voice thrums against your thigh, the steady warmth of his body working the last of the chill out of you. You lean in close, your chest pressed to his still-necked t-shirt, and tangle your fingers in his damp hair.

“Better,” you whisper, and the hunger in his face is gone, replaced by something softer. Wanting, but not desperate. Not yet. He slides his hands up under your shirt, the calluses on his fingertips catching along your ribcage. Always so gentle when you’re like this, like he’s still trying to talk you out of belonging to him all the way. You’ve never let anyone else touch you when you’re hurting. Frank figured that out fast. And he never asked questions about it. Not even once.

“Tell me what you want,” he says, but it’s not a command. It’s that low hush of his when you’re both off-balance, when it matters that you get it right. He drags his mouth along your jaw, delicately, and you angle your head back for more, hungry for it. He grinds his hips up into you just enough that the bruised part of him brushes your thigh. He grunts, barely, keeping his eyes open. Watching your face instead of his own pleasure. You’re already warm everywhere. He’s never made you ask for anything, so you don’t start now. Just shift in his lap and let your hips roll forward, finding that careful friction, your panties damp and hot between you already, the thin cotton of his sweats doing nothing to dull the heat of him. His hands have found their way inside the waistband of your pants, palms bracing the small of your back, steadying you in place.

“Frank,” you breathe, and he’s got a mouthful of your collarbone, his breath shuddering out as he catches your scent. It’s suddenly so intense you have to cover your own mouth, biting down on your knuckles to keep from making noise. He pries your hand away, brings your fingers to his mouth, sucks at them soft, then hard. You want him all at once. Want him until you’re shaking with it. His hand slips beneath your underwear, slow, careful. You’re so wet already it’s embarrassing, but Frank’s never made you feel ashamed of it. It’s almost like he likes it. Like every desperate sticky slick part of you is proof you want him as much as he wants you. He slides one thick finger in and you whimper. He’s so big that you feel it everywhere, a deep insistent pressure that’s almost too much. It’s almost funny. You know he knows it.

“Easy,” he whispers, and you almost laugh at how well he reads you. You let him curl his finger inside you, let him coax your legs open wider across his lap. It hurts a little, but the ache is good. It’s supposed to be good, the way he does it—careful, incremental, always waiting for your breath to catch before he gives you more.

“Frank,” you mumble. He just nods into your neck, like yeah, he knows, that’s how it is for him too. Somewhere between the steady stretch of his palms and the slow, hot pressure gathering in your center, everything else falls away. You can almost forget about the rest of the world. The crummy apartment. The busted boiler. Even the bruise along his jaw. It all dissolves into the rhythm of his hand working you open and the neat, even slide of his wrist against your skin. You can hear him breathing against your shoulder, steady, measured, like he’s counting out every pulse of sensation you give him. A minute passes. Maybe more. You press your face into the slope of his throat and let the smell of rain and sweat and blood ground you right there in the present.

“Holy fuck,” you gasp, almost more air than sound. He pulls back to look at you, eyes half-lidded.

“You want more?” he murmurs, not a tease, just a question. You nod, but then he does it—he adds another finger, thick and slow, and you feel the burn start up sharp and hot across your hips. You suck in a breath, grip at his forearm.

“I want- I need you inside me.” He keeps his palm splayed low on your back, like a promise to anchor you through. His breath stutters when you say it, and for a beat he just…looks at you, lashes low over his cheekbones, the blue shock-clear of his eyes almost guiltless with how badly he wants you. Wants to fix something in himself using this.

“C’mere,” he says rough, nudging your hips up and forward. Lifts you just enough that he can wriggle his sweatpants down, bare to you and already impossibly hard, that first heavy brush of him against your thigh making your stomach bottom out. His skin is so warm it feels dangerous. You’re vibrating with nerves and want and something that tastes like anticipation, metallic in the back of your tongue. He’s so unfair. That’s the narrative you settle on, even as you reach down, embarrassingly eager, and wrap your hand around him. The weight—absurd. Sometimes you wonder how a person gets made that way. How whatever god or biology was in charge decided Frank Castle needed to be built like a goddamn tank everywhere. He’s leaking already, thick and wet; you run your thumb over the head, and in response he shivers, jaw going tight. His forehead drops to the hollow of your throat. He mutters something that sounds like “Fuckin’ hell, baby, you’re killin’ me.” You breathe out, try to steady yourself, let him angle you how he wants. His hand’s gentle but firm; he lines you up, rubs himself slow through your slick, getting you used to the idea, maybe, or just getting himself off on the wet suck of your body. It’s involuntary, the way you whimper—Frank hushes you soft into your neck, teeth scraping where your pulse jumps. Then he’s pushing in. Slow.

Too slow, you think, but then you realize he’s only a quarter in and it’s already—God, how is anyone supposed to take all of it? You dig your nails into his shoulders, bite his collar out of self-preservation. The stretch feels raw and greedy and delicious at first; you squirm, desperate for more, and Frank grips your hip with an iron clamp to hold you steady.

“Easy, baby. Slow, like this. You gotta let me in, okay?” His words are slurred, reverent. He keeps his face buried in your shoulder like he can’t look at you, or maybe he’s just that close to unraveling. You try to breathe through it. Try to unclench, force your body open around him. Another inch, and you gasp—pain-bright, almost electric—and he stops, instantly, just holding you there. His thumb paints slow circles into your skin.

“You got it,” Frank whispers. “You always do.” He rocks you a little, just a hitch back and then in again, and you can feel yourself melting, a little at a time, until he’s halfway in and you can barely remember your own name. There’s so much of him. It’s not fair, you want to laugh, except the tension’s too thick in your throat for sound. He fills you up in a way that makes you gasp for air. You’re shaking by the time you take half of him and you know it, and Frank knows it, so he keeps whispering to you, soft and low and steady, like if he keeps talking you through it you’ll remember why you want it so bad.

“Doing so good,” he says, like it hurts to get the words out. “You take it so fuckin’ good, sweet girl. S’a lot, I know.” His mouth finds your ear, brushing the shell with every word. “Y’okay?” The praise makes it easier, somehow. You nod, a wild little jerk of your chin, and work yourself lower onto him, your body protesting in that way you crave. By the time he’s all the way inside you, you can’t do much more than breathe hard against his neck and let the bright white edge of the ache melt into raw heat. He holds you there, unmoving, just this enormous presence inside you, chest rising and falling. You could almost cry, from the intensity. You want the ache until it becomes something else. He keeps murmuring, stroking your sides, kissing your hair, saying things you barely process but know you’ll carry with you for days. Sometimes you think Frank needs this even more than you do—needs to see you take every inch of him, needs to know you’ll let him in all the way. He starts slow and steady. Always does, even if half the time he’s gritting his own teeth about it. Lets you get there together, lets you rock yourself down inch by inch, all the while his hands keep you steady and his voice keeps you anchored, soft filthy praise dripping into your ear until you feel—ridiculously—like you can do anything.

Then you’re there. All the way, you think. Except it almost doesn’t feel like it could possibly be all the way—there’s just too much, the end of him pressed snug up against your insides, propped open around the root, the stretch of it pulsing and hot. You breathe. You shake. You clutch at the thick line of his neck and you can’t help but whine, just a little.

“Too much?” he asks, and you know the tremor in his arms is him holding himself back, not wanting to push, not wanting to lose you. You shake your head.

“No, I—just—” He twitches his hips up, barely moving, and your vision goes white and spotty for a second.

“Holy fuck, Frank.” He laughs rough, squeezing at your waist.

“You like that?” You’re not sure you can answer out loud, but you nod, jaw gone slack. Your nails dig in and he keeps moving, tiny little thrusts, each one dragging a shivery shock up your spine. He’s watching you again. Always watching. Watching for pain, for pleasure, for the moment you tip from one to the other. It’s almost too much, that kind of attention. Makes you want to hide and bask in it all at once. The slow body-crawl of heat builds, wrapping itself low in your belly. You find a rhythm in his lap, rutting down onto him, greedy for the friction. Frank lets you take the pace, lets you fuck yourself down on him even though you know it’s probably killing him to keep still. You know he wants to flip you over, to drive into you so hard you see through time, but he never does. Always gives you control. Always makes it about you. He hums in your ear, sweet and dark.

“God, you’re perfect. Beatiful little thing, takin’ me so deep. Look at you.” He palms your ass, squeezes, bounces you gently on top of him. “So fuckin’ full, huh?” You whimper.

“Can’t—can’t—” He rocks up to meet you, catches your mouth on his, swallows the noise you make.

“You can. Always do. Makes me so proud, babe.” It should be embarrassing, how easily he can undo you with just words and a handful of slow, deep thrusts. But it isn’t. It’s grounding, real. The rest of the world fades around the two of you—the busted lights, the ticking wall clock, even the ache in your own hips. There’s only Frank, heat and power and patience, his hands guiding you around him like a prayer. You’re close. Closer than you should be. A coil of heat in your belly, tight and ready to snap. You chase it, grind down harder, until a sharp pinch of pain ricochets through your body. You body stutters, and you gasp in pain, your movements slowing. The pain spikes again—sharper, brighter—and suddenly you can’t breathe through it. Frank begins to move faster, lost in you, his mouth open against your neck, heartbeat stuttering in your own chest in time with the insistent rut of his hips. You brace yourself, try to ride over the sensation, swallow down the tears pricking hard at the corners of your eyes, but then the burn turns cold and wrong. Your thighs start to tremble, not with want but with the pure animal shock of a body pushed too far. You dig your nails into his shoulders, hard. It’s supposed to mean please, supposed to mean more, but right now it just means stop—your whole body screaming at you to pull back, to close up, to end it.

"W-Wait, Frank, stop-"But Frank’s so deep in his own wanting, he barely notices.

“Frank, just—slower—” you try, but your own voice scraps out small, swallowed by the ragged panting between you. He doesn’t hear it. He’s moving you up and down in his lap, huge hands bracketing your hips, eyes half-lidded, sweaty lashes against the bruised swell of his cheek. He keeps talking to you, low and thick, saying things you can’t process through the static in your head.

"Wait, Frank, stop, please-" Your vision’s gone a little blurry. He feels like too much, not just physically, but all of it—the weight, the heat, the way he needs you to be okay so badly he doesn’t see when you’re not. The pain flares, deep, and suddenly you’re crying. Not a pretty, slow leak, but a reckless overflow, hot and stinging at your chin. You try to push off of him, to get purchase against his chest, but your arms have all the strength of wet laundry. You try to speak, but it comes out a crushed, keening little sob.

“Frank, stop! Stop-” It hits him all at once. He freezes, muscles going rock-still under your palms. His hands leave your hips so fast you nearly slide off him; he fumbles you upright, like he thinks you’re about to faint.

“Hey—hey, it’s okay, hey.” His voice goes from dark velvet to pure panic, the kind of sound that would be terrifying if it weren’t Frank, if it weren’t so desperate. He tries to pull out but you grip at his wrist, too disoriented to untangle yourself from him. He’s breathing hard—like he’s been gut-punched—and now he’s holding you suspended in his lap, his hands trembling, his face a mess of confusion and guilt and horror.

“Shit. Oh, baby, what—? Did I—? Fuck.” You shake your head—don’t know what you’re denying, just need him to not move, not right now. He pulls you in close, rocks you like he used to rock his daughter, you bet, gentling you with shushing sounds and muttered apologies that taste sour against your ear. He wraps you up, big arms closing around you, framing you in meat and heat and nothing else. The second he realizes you’re crying, Frank goes white. Not pale. White. Like all the blood in his body evacuated at once.

“Oh my God.” The words fall out of him shredded raw. He’s trying to pull back without hurting you, hands shaking so badly he can barely coordinate them. “Fuck—fuck, baby, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—” You can’t stop crying. And that’s the part that terrifies him. Not because you’re loud. You’re not. You’re trying so hard to keep it quiet that it hurts worse somehow. Little broken sobs caught in your throat while you curl instinctively inward, arms wrapping around yourself the second he finally manages to pull out and get you settled properly against his chest.

“Hey, hey, hey.” Frank’s voice is frantic now. “Look at me, sweetheart. C’mon. Look at me.” You can’t. Your face is buried against his shoulder, shaking too hard. Humiliation crawls hot and sick through your stomach.

Of course this happened. Of course.

You knew better than to ruin it.

Frank’s still talking, panicked apologies tumbling over each other while one hand cups the back of your head and the other rubs helpless circles between your shoulder blades.

“Did I hurt you?” he asks shakily. “Baby, talk t’me. Please.” You nod before you can stop yourself. Frank goes dead still. Not angry. Not annoyed. Destroyed.

“Oh, Christ.” His forehead drops against your hair. “I hurt you.”

“I’m sorry,” you choke out immediately. Frank freezes. Actually freezes.

“…What?” The word comes out dangerously soft. Your chest caves in harder instantly.

“I tried, I just— I thought I could—”

“Stop.” Frank pulls back enough to look at you, hands gentle but firm around your face. “Why’re you apologizin’?” Because that’s what you do. Because every other person before him taught you that needing a second was inconvenient.

That discomfort was normal. That stopping midway was selfish. Too sensitive. Too dramatic. Too much. You can’t even look him in the eye now.

“I didn’t mean to ruin it,” you whisper. Frank stares at you. And slowly—slowly—something awful settles across his face. Not anger at you. Understanding.

The horrible kind.

“Baby…” His voice cracks around the word. You shake your head, sobbing.

"God, i'm so sorry, Frank !" You whine, hiding your face in your hands. You climb off of him sniffling as you pull your clothes back on, not daring to look at him.

“Hey.” Frank catches your wrist before you can get far. Not hard. Never hard. Just enough to stop you from bolting completely. “Hey, no. Don’t do that.”

You can’t breathe.

The humiliation is swallowing you whole now, hot and familiar and awful. You know this part. Know it down to the bone. The shift afterward. The disappointment. The frustration hidden behind reassurance. The inevitable distance that comes after you become difficult.

Too emotional. Too sensitive. Too much work.

“It’s okay,” you say automatically, voice wrecked. “I’m okay, I’ll just—” You tug weakly at your shirt with shaking hands. “I just need a minute.” Frank stares at you like you’ve started speaking another language.

“A minute?” he repeats faintly.

“So you’re not—” Your throat closes hard around the words. “So you’re not stuck dealing with this.” Something on Frank’s face breaks. Not anger. Not irritation. Heartbreak.

“Dealin’ with this?” he echoes hoarsely. You still can’t look at him. Because if you do and he looks annoyed even for one second, you think it might kill you.

“I know it’s frustrating,” you whisper quickly. “I know I ruined the mood, I just thought if I could push through it a little longer—”

“Push through?” Frank sounds physically sick now. Your hands shake harder trying to pull your clothes back into place. You can feel yourself spiraling, words falling out too fast now because silence was always worse before. Silence usually meant somebody getting angry.

“I really did want to, Frank, I swear, I wasn’t trying to—”

“Baby.” Sharp now. Not mean. Desperate. “Stop apologizin’." You flinch anyway. And that— That does something catastrophic to him. Frank’s entire body stills as he watches you recoil from just a change in his tone. His breathing turns uneven immediately.

Your face crumples instantly.

“Oh, baby.” Frank gathers you against him again immediately, palm spanning the back of your head. “C’mere. C’mere, sweetheart.”

“I don’t know why I’m like this,” you whisper miserably into his chest.

“Who made you think this was somethin’ you had t’push through?” Your throat closes completely. That’s answer enough. Frank exhales once. Shaky. Like he’s trying very hard not to explode.

“Hey.” He waits until your eyes finally flick toward his. His own are glassy now. Furious and heartbroken all at once. “Listen t’me real careful.” His thumb brushes under your eye, catching tears before they fall. “You never— ever— gotta endure me.” That word breaks something open in you.

Endure.

Because that’s exactly what it felt like before. Something to survive until it was over. Frank sees it happen on your face and looks genuinely sick.

Silence.

Then quietly:

“One of my exes used to sigh whenever I asked him to stop.” The words feel rusted coming out. “Like I was ruining something.” Frank’s entire body goes rigid beneath you. You keep staring at his shirt instead of his face. “And if I cried he’d tell me I was making him feel guilty on purpose.” Frank exhales once. Slow. Controlled. Dangerously controlled.

“Another one used to just…” You swallow hard. “Keep going until he was done.” The room goes completely still. Frank doesn’t move. Doesn’t breathe. For one terrifying second you think maybe you finally said too much. Then his arms tighten around you with startling force. Not painful. Protective.

Violent in its tenderness.

“Oh, sweetheart.” His voice sounds wrecked beyond repair now. “Jesus Christ.” You finally look at him then. There are tears in his eyes. Actual tears.

Not pity. Not disgust. Just devastation on your behalf.

“That wasn’t okay,” he says roughly. “None’a that was okay.”

You blink hard. You feel awful.

“You were already upset,” you whisper brokenly. “I just wanted t’make you feel better and now I’m—” You shake your head unable to speak. Your whole body is shaking, and you can barely breathe. You shake your head. You sniffle, wiping at your cheeks. "I'm okay. I-I'm okay, we can-" You reach for your shorts, ready o tug them down again, "We can keep going, i'm okay. "

Frank looks at your hand reaching for your shorts like it physically hurts him.

“Hey.” His voice breaks immediately. He catches your wrists gently before you can tug them down any further. “No. No, sweetheart.” Panic flashes across your face instantly.

“I can, really, I’m okay now, I just freaked out for a second—”

“You are cryin’ so hard you can barely breathe.” Not harsh. Not accusing. Just devastated. “Baby, look at yourself right now.” That humiliation spikes all over again. You yank your hands back automatically.

“Great.” Your voice shakes violently. “Now I’m making a huge deal out of nothing.” Frank’s entire expression twists.

“Nothing?” he repeats softly, like he can’t believe what he’s hearing. You can’t stop now that the spiral’s started.

“I should’ve just kept going,” you whisper miserably. “I almost had it under control.” Frank goes dead still. Then very carefully, like he’s handling something shattered, he reaches for your face again.

“No.” Firm this time. Certain. “You listen t’me right now.” Fresh tears spill immediately. “You bein’ in pain is not somethin’ t’‘get under control.’” Your chest caves inward harder.

“But you wanted—”

“You think I wanted you hurtin’?” His voice cracks around the words. “Sweetheart, I would rather never touch you again than have you force yourself through somethin’ because you’re scared’a disappointing me.” That knocks the air clean out of you. Frank sees it happen. And suddenly he’s pulling you fully back into his lap again despite your weak protests, wrapping the blanket around both of you until you’re cocooned against his chest.

“Nope,” he mutters when you try to squirm away again. “Not lettin’ you run from me right now.”

“I’m embarrassing myself.”

“No, baby.” His hand smooths through your hair carefully. “You’re havin’ a trauma response.”The words hit weirdly. Too clinical. Too real. You laugh shakily through tears.

“That sounds dramatic.” Frank actually leans back enough to stare at you incredulously.

“You just told me multiple men treated you like your pain was inconvenient.” His jaw flexes hard. “That ain’t dramatic. That’s fucked.” You flinch faintly at the sharpness in his voice—not directed at you, but still sharp. Frank notices instantly.

“Hey.” Immediate regret floods his face. “Shit. Baby, not at you.” His hands cradle your jaw carefully. “Never at you.” Your breathing turns uneven again.

“I keep waiting for you to get tired of this,” you admit quietly. Frank looks poleaxed.

“Of what?” You gesture helplessly between the two of you.

“This.” Your voice gets smaller and smaller. “Me needing too much reassurance. Ruining things. Crying all the time—”

“Oh, sweetheart.” Frank pulls you closer so fast your forehead bumps lightly against his collarbone. “Who told you you ruin things?”You laugh once. Broken.

“Nobody had to say it outright.”

“Yeah,” he says darkly. “They did.” Silence. Then quietly:

“One guy stopped touching me for like… a week after I asked him to stop once.” The confession spills out before you can stop it. “Wouldn’t yell or anything. Just acted cold until I apologized.” Frank’s arms tighten hard around you. Another memory surfaces ugly and unwanted. “Another used to finish and then get annoyed if I cried after because it ‘killed the vibe.’” Frank shuts his eyes. You can literally feel anger radiating off him now—not explosive, but terrifyingly deep. Ancient. Protective.

“You know what kills the vibe for me?” he says finally, voice rough as gravel. You shake your head weakly.

“You thinkin’ you gotta offer your body back t’me while you’re still cryin’.” That one makes your face crumple completely. Because you hadn’t even realized that’s what you were doing. Frank brushes both thumbs under your eyes gently. “Baby, sex with me is never gonna be somethin’ you survive.” His forehead presses against yours again. “It’s supposed t’feel safe.” You stare at him through blurry vision. Frank groans, running his hands down his face. "For fucks sake." He rasps. "Can't believe I fuckin' hurt you." You shake your head immediately.

“No, Frank—”

“Yes.” His voice cracks hard over the word. “Yeah, I did.” He looks genuinely shaken now. Like this has cracked something open inside him he doesn’t know how to fix. His hands keep moving over you compulsively—your hair, your shoulders, your back—like he needs constant confirmation that you’re still here and not afraid of him.

“This’s never happened before,” he whispers more to himself than you. “Never with you.” And somehow that makes you cry harder. Because he sounds devastated by it. Not inconvenienced. Not irritated. Devastated. Frank notices instantly and curses softly under his breath.

“Shit, no, sweetheart, I ain’t upset with you.” He cups your face quickly. “That’s not what I meant.”

“I know.” You sniff hard. “I know.” But he still looks haunted. His eyes keep darting over your face like he’s searching for damage he missed. You sniff miserably.

“You’re not disappointed?” Frank actually lets out a disbelieving breath of laughter.

“Sweetheart, I got a beautiful girl sittin’ in my lap trustin’ me enough t’tell me this stuff.” He shakes his head gently. “Why the hell would I be disappointed?” Your face crumples all over again. Because he means it. Completely. Frank watches another wave of tears spill down your cheeks and immediately shifts, pulling the blanket tighter around your shoulders like he can shield you from the whole world if he wraps you up enough.

“Hey,” he murmurs softly. “Hey, c’mon. Look at me a second.” You do. Barely. His expression nearly breaks your heart. There’s still guilt all over him, heavy and ugly, but underneath it is something even stronger—care. The kind that settles deep into his bones. The kind that makes him hold you like something precious instead of fragile. “You know what I’m disappointed about?” he asks quietly. You shake your head. “That somebody taught you love was somethin’ you had t’earn by ignoring your own pain.” Your breath catches hard. Frank brushes your hair back carefully, fingertips feather-light against your scalp.

“That’s it,” he says. “That’s the only thing breakin’ my heart right now.”You stare at him for a long moment before whispering:

“You’re really not mad?” Frank looks almost offended by the question.

“Baby.” He cups your face in both hands. “You could stop me a hundred times in one night and I still wouldn’t be mad at you.” Your lip wobbles again.

“I don’t know why this feels so scary.”

“Because people made it scary.” Immediate. Certain. “That ain’t your fault.” You look down at your hands curled against his chest.

“I thought if I was easy enough nobody would leave.” Silence. Then Frank makes this awful quiet sound like the words physically hurt him.

“Oh, sweetheart.” His arms tighten around you again, and suddenly you’re tucked completely against him, your head under his chin while he rocks you slowly without even realizing he’s doing it. “You do not gotta make yourself small t’keep somebody,” he murmurs into your hair. “Especially not me.” Your eyes burn.

“But what if one day it’s too much?” Frank pulls back just enough to look at you directly.

“You cryin’ in my arms is not too much.” His thumb strokes under your eye again. “You needin’ reassurance is not too much.” A kiss to your forehead. “You gettin’ scared because people hurt you before is not too much.” Another kiss. Slower this time. “You are not too much.” You break completely after that. Not loudly. Just this soft, devastated collapse against him while years of tension seem to leak out of your body all at once. Frank holds you through every second of it. No impatience. No discomfort. Just one big hand rubbing slowly up and down your back while the other cradles the back of your head. Eventually your breathing starts evening out little by little. Frank notices immediately. You sniff weakly against his shirt.

“I’m gross.”

“You are literally the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

“I’ve been crying for like twenty minutes.”

“And?” He shrugs one shoulder. “Still true.” A tiny laugh escapes you before you can stop it. Frank’s entire face softens at the sound.

“There y’are,” he murmurs again, like hearing you laugh is the greatest relief he’s ever experienced. You finally relax enough to melt properly into his lap, exhausted now. Frank adjusts the blanket around you automatically, tucking it beneath your legs with absurd care. “You hurt anywhere?” he asks quietly after a minute. You hesitate.

“A little sore.” His face immediately twists with guilt again. “Hey.” You catch his wrist before he can spiral. “Not in a bad way.” Frank still looks miserable. He leans into your palm instinctively. Eyes closing for half a second.

“You know what would’ve happened with anybody else?” you ask quietly. His jaw tightens.

“I don’t wanna think about anybody else touchin’ you right now.” Despite everything, your mouth twitches faintly. He shakes his head. "Alright, alright." He asks, already lifting you to settle you on the couch, getting to his feet and walking off to the kitchen. You blink after him, still wrapped up in the blanket while he disappears into the kitchen like he’s on a mission.Drawers open.Cabinets. The freezer. You hear him muttering under his breath the entire time.

“Jesus Christ… where th’fuck…” Another drawer slams shut. Then: “Found it.”You can’t help it. You smile weakly into the blanket. A minute later Frank reappears carrying an ice pack wrapped carefully in a dish towel and a glass of water balanced awkwardly in his massive hand like he’s transporting explosives. His eyes are on you immediately. Soft.Still worried sick.

“Okay,” he says quietly, kneeling in front of the couch. “Talk t’me. Where does it hurt, baby ?”You pull the blanket tighter around yourself automatically.

“It’s not bad.”

“Didn’t ask if it was bad.” He settles one hand carefully over your knee. “Asked where it hurts.” The concern in his voice almost embarrasses you all over again. You glance away. “Just… there.” You gesture vaguely downward, face heating. Frank’s expression immediately gentles further somehow. Not teasing. Not awkward. Just careful.

“Okay.” He nods once like you told him something important. “Cramps or soreness?” You stare at him.

“What?”

“I’m askin’ questions,” he says patiently. “Humor me.”

“…Mostly soreness.”

“Sharp pain?” You shake your head.

“Okay.” Another nod. “That’s good.” He reaches up slowly. “Can I touch you?” The question alone nearly makes you cry again. You nod quickly. Frank’s palm settles against the outside of your thigh over the blanket first, grounding more than anything else.

“Any bruising?” he asks softly.

“No. Just sore."His entire face tightens with guilt again. “Hey.” You immediately reach for him. “Frank.”

“I know.” He catches your hand and kisses your knuckles automatically. “I know. M’just checkin’.” He shifts onto the couch beside you then and gently pulls your legs over his lap before you can protest.

“Frank—”

“Nope.” He adjusts the blanket around you again. “Doctor’s orders.”

“You are not a doctor.”

“I watched, like, six hours of The Pitt with you.”

“That is not medical training.”

“Disagree.” You snort softly despite yourself. Frank looks absurdly relieved to hear it.

“There she is,” he murmurs. Then he carefully presses the wrapped ice pack into your hands. “Hold that where y’need it, sweetheart.” You blink at him.

“You got me an ice pack?”

“Baby, I was about three minutes away from drivin’ you to urgent care.”

“You are catastrophically dramatic.”

“You cried during sex.” He looks genuinely baffled you aren’t understanding his perspective here. “That’s, like, top three worst moments’a my life.” Your mouth falls open.

“Frank.”

“I’m serious.”

“You’ve been shot.”

“Yeah, well.” He shrugs one shoulder. “This felt worse.” You stare at him for a second. Then another. And suddenly you’re laughing again. Not the shaky crying kind this time. Real laughter bubbling up out of nowhere while Frank watches you like he’s afraid to breathe too hard and scare it away.

“Oh my God,” you wheeze, hiding your face behind the blanket. “You’re insane.”

“There she is,” he says immediately, pointing at you like he just proved a theory. “That’s my girl.”

“You compared me crying to getting shot.”

“Accurate comparison.”

“It absolutely is not.” Frank crosses his arms stubbornly.

“I got shot in the shoulder once. Walked it off.”

“You absolutely did not walk it off.”

“Emotionally, I did.”You snort so hard you nearly lose hold of the ice pack. Frank’s eyes light up at the sound. There’s still worry in him. You can feel it humming beneath everything else. But now there’s relief mixed in too. Relief that you’re laughing. Talking. Still curled up against him instead of pulling away. He reaches over and tugs the blanket back up around your shoulders when it slips.

“You cold?”

“No.”

“You shivered.”

“I laughed.”

“Mm.” Skeptical. “Suspicious.”

“You are literally built like a furnace.”

“Good.” He shifts closer immediately anyway, dragging you sideways until your head ends up back against his chest. “C’mere.” You go willingly this time. Frank settles deeper into the couch with a quiet grunt, one hand rubbing absentmindedly up and down your arm while the other stays planted protectively on your thigh over the blanket. After a minute you murmur:

“You know you don’t have to look at me like I’m gonna explode, right?” His hand stills briefly.

“I do not look at you like that.” You tilt your head up. Frank is, in fact, looking at you exactly like that.

“…Baby,” he says defensively. “You cried.”

“I’m aware.”

“In my lap.”

“Yes, Frank.”

“During sex.” You groan and bury your face back into his chest immediately.

“Okay, now I’m dead.”

“Nope.” He tightens his arm around you. “Not allowed.”

“I’m serious, this is mortifying.” Frank’s voice softens instantly.

“Sweetheart.” He waits until you peek up at him again. “You know what I remember most right now?”

“What?”

“You trusted me enough to say stop.” Your expression flickers. Frank brushes his knuckles gently across your cheek.

“That matters t’me.” You swallow hard.

“I almost didn’t.” That one hits him. You see it immediately. His jaw tightens and his eyes close briefly before he leans down and presses a slow kiss to your forehead.

“But you did,” he murmurs. “An’ I’m real glad you did.” Silence settles for a moment after that. Warm. Soft. Safe. Then:

“…You really would’ve taken me to urgent care?” Frank looks offended.

“Baby, I was mentally suiting up to fistfight a gynecologist.” You choke on air laughing.

“A what?”

“Don’t know.” He shrugs. “Sounded productive.”

“You can’t fistfight doctors.”

“Says who?”

“Society?”

“Society’s weak.”

taglist!

You breathe. Count.

You know this feeling the way you know the layout of your own kitchen in the dark—by memory, by repetition, by the particular shape of having navigated it so many times that your body does it without you. The flutter is familiar. The tightness is familiar. Even the lightheadedness, that particular brand of the world deciding to tilt without asking you first, is familiar. Your heart has never quite agreed with the rest of you about how it's supposed to work. The valves do what they do—leak a little, strain a little, make themselves known at inconvenient hours—and you've learned, over years, to tell the difference between the kind of morning that rights itself by noon and the kind that needs more than patience.

This one, you think, needs more than patience.

You know this. You've known it since long before Aaron. Long before any of this.

It doesn't make it easier to lie here and catalogue it.

Aaron stirs. His hand tightens on your hip—reflex first, consciousness second—and you feel the exact moment he surfaces from sleep, the shift in his breathing, the slight tension moving through his arm.

"Morning," he murmurs, and his lips press to the curve of your shoulder, warm and unhurried, the kind of kiss that isn't asking anything, just—there. Just his way of saying he's here, he's awake, this is where he wants to be.

Then he looks at you.

His soft "good morning" dies on his lips.

He's learned to read you in the specific and granular way that takes time, and patience, and the willingness to be wrong a few times first. He'd been wrong early on—had said are you okay? in that careful, measured voice, calibrating his concern against what he thought you needed, and you'd smiled and said I'm fine and he'd known, even then, that those were two different conversations. He doesn't do that anymore. Now his eyes move over your face the way they move over evidence: careful, unhurried, gathering information before he commits to a conclusion.

"How bad?"

The fact that he doesn't say what's wrong—that he already knows to ask how bad—makes your throat tighten in a way that has nothing to do with your heart and everything to do with him.

"Manageable," you say, which is true, and not the same as fine, and you both know it.

He holds your gaze for a moment. Just a moment, long enough for you to see the thing that moves through his expression—not panic, not pity, something quieter and harder to name than either—and then he reaches up and tucks a piece of hair behind your ear, his thumb resting briefly against your jaw. It's such a small gesture. It lands like a whole sentence.

"Okay," he says. "Okay."

He doesn't say it twice because he needs convincing. He says it twice the way you say it to yourself sometimes in the mirror—like the word is an anchor, like repetition makes it real.

He's already reaching for his phone.

Not emergency services—that distinction matters, and he's never gotten it wrong, not once, which tells you everything about how carefully he listened when you explained it to him—but your cardiologist's line, saved under Dr. Reyes - cardiac (non-emergency). He'd added that parenthetical himself, early on. So I know, he'd said. When it's that line, I know. The phone screen throws cold blue light across his face in the dim room, and you watch his jaw set with the particular tension of a man doing the only useful thing available to him and being grimly, privately frustrated that there isn't more.

"I'm going to get your morning meds while it rings," he says, already sliding out of the bed with the unhurried efficiency of someone who has thought through the sequence in advance. "Don't sit up too fast."

"I know not to sit up too fast," you say, which comes out more fond than pointed.

"I know you know," he says, glancing back at you over his shoulder, and there's the ghost of something warmer than a smile at the corner of his mouth. "Humour me."

You hear him in the kitchen—the soft percussion of cabinet doors, the tap running, the faint clink of pill bottles. You've told him where everything is so many times that he moves through it without thinking now, without having to ask, and there's something both quietly lovely and quietly painful about that. About how much of this he's absorbed. About how much there is to absorb.

You know the drill.

You've known it for years. The event monitor, the echo, the waiting room with its particular smell of recycled air and recycled patience. The specific exhaustion of a body that requires more management than most, the weight of a condition that doesn't announce itself with drama but with interruption—with a heart that skips on a Tuesday morning, with the fatigue that follows a bad episode like a shadow dragging at your heels, with the quiet, ongoing renegotiation of what your day is going to look like. You've made a kind of peace with it. Mostly. The peace isn't clean; it has seams you can feel when you press on them.

Aaron comes back with a glass of water and your morning medications in his palm, arranged in the order he's learned you take them, and he sits on the edge of the bed beside you and waits while you push yourself upright slowly, carefully, letting the blood pressure settle before you commit to being vertical.

"Still dizzy?" he asks.

"A bit," you say. "It's okay."

He watches you take the first tablet. Then he puts his free hand on your back, warm and flat between your shoulder blades—not rubbing, not doing anything in particular, just there—and you feel something in you unknot a fraction. He does that sometimes. Holds his hand there like he's taking your temperature in a language that doesn't have a name.

"Dr. Reyes is in at eight," he says. "I left a message."

"She's going to say the same thing she always says."

"Probably." He takes the empty glass back from you. "But I'll feel better hearing her say it."

You look at him. He's still in his pyjamas, his hair not yet tamed for the day, and he looks—softer, somehow, like this. Less like Unit Chief Aaron Hotchner and more like just Aaron, the man who hums under his breath while he makes breakfast without seeming to notice he's doing it, who leaves little notes in Jack's lunchbox that are so earnest they make your chest hurt, who will deliver an absolutely withering one-liner with a completely straight face and then look away before he lets himself smile. The man who kisses you hello like you've been gone a week even if you've only been in the other room. The man who looked at all of this—all of you, every complicated, high-maintenance, uncertain inch of you—and decided, without apparent hesitation, that this was exactly where he wanted to be.

"You don't have to come," you say. You say it every time, not because you mean it, but because you think he should always know it's an option.

He gives you the look. The one that's replaced whatever he used to say when you offered him an exit, because he realised, eventually, that answering it seriously was giving it more weight than it deserved.

"Get dressed," he says, and presses a kiss to your temple. "I'll warm the car up."

The drive is quiet in the way that means something—not the quiet of nothing to say but the quiet of too much, of words that would ring hollow no matter how carefully chosen. The city is still mostly asleep, or doing that early-morning version of itself, all pale light and near-empty streets, and Aaron drives with one hand on the wheel and one resting over yours on the centre console. He doesn't ask how you're feeling every five minutes. He'd tried that, once, and you'd gently told him that being asked repeatedly made the space between each question feel like waiting for a verdict, which was worse. He'd nodded, slow and serious, and he'd never done it again.

What he does instead is talk, low and matter-of-fact, filling the silence with logistics the way he fills gaps at crime scenes—purposefully, so nothing goes unaccounted for.

"I grabbed your medication list from the drawer. It's in my inside pocket."

"Thank you."

"Your sister knows. I kept it brief."

"She's going to ring me seventeen times."

"She already has. I told her we'd call when we knew something." He glances across at you, brief. "She said, and I quote, if he doesn't text me updates I'll drive down there."

You exhale, something between a laugh and a sigh. "She would."

"I know," he says, with a tone that suggests he's fully prepared to facilitate exactly that if it comes to it. He squeezes your hand once, quick and warm, then settles back.

Each small practicality lands like a stone placed carefully in the gap left by everything he can't fix—the insurance card, the medication list, the text to your sister. It's not plugging anything. It's acknowledging the shape of it. Somehow that's more comforting than any promise that everything will be fine, because promises about outcomes are hollow things, fragile as spun glass, and he's too careful with you to offer you something he can't guarantee.

You look at his profile against the pale morning. The strong set of his jaw, the slight furrow between his brows that never fully smooths, the way his thumb traces a slow arc across your knuckles without him seeming to notice he's doing it. You feel the love for him as a physical thing, warm and a little unwieldy, sitting in your chest alongside everything else that's happening in there.

At the hospital, there's a particular exhaustion in being somewhere familiar for reasons you wish weren't familiar. It's not the exhaustion of navigating something new—it's heavier than that, more specific. The weariness of a path you've worn into the ground through repetition, each visit adding another layer to the groove. The same corridor, the same intake forms you could fill in with your eyes closed, the same knowledge that you're here not because something went catastrophically wrong but because your body is doing what it's always done, which is require more attention than most.

The nurse at the desk—Maricel, who's been here as long as you have, more or less—looks up and gives you a small nod that contains an entire conversation.

"Same as before?" she asks.

"More or less," you say.

"We'll get you in." She glances at Aaron, who is already holding your coat and has already found the chairs nearest the door without being told. "He can come back with you once you're settled."

"I know," you say. "Thank you."

It goes the way it always goes. The event monitor first—the leads cold against your skin, the familiar catch of adhesive, the particular indignity of sitting still while technology makes its assessment. Aaron sits in the plastic chair beside the bed, close enough that his knee presses against yours, steady and constant. He's brought a small notepad, and he writes something on it while you wait, and when you raise an eyebrow at him he shows you: a list of questions for Dr. Reyes, neat and numbered. Nothing catastrophising. Practical. Specific.

"You made a list," you say.

"I had time in the waiting room." He caps the pen. "Is that alright?"

"It's very you," you say, which isn't a complaint, and he seems to know that.

He reaches over and tucks your hand into both of his, and his thumb makes slow circles on the back of it while the machines hum their flat, uninvested language around you. He doesn't look at his phone. Doesn't check his watch. He asks you, after a while, if you're warm enough, and when you say mostly he drapes your coat across your lap without comment. He tells you about a restaurant Jack mentioned wanting to try, something new in the neighbourhood, and you talk about that for a while—whether Jack's developed sophisticated taste or just seen an advert—and it's ordinary, and strange, and exactly right, this small island of ordinary in the middle of all of this.

You appreciate it more than you'll ever fully articulate.

When Dr. Reyes comes in, her expression is the particular neutral of someone who is not alarmed, and you feel your body calibrate to it automatically, the way you've calibrated over years of learning to read the register of medical faces before they speak.

"Good morning," she says, and she looks at Aaron. "You must be the partner."

"Aaron Hotchner," he says, and stands to shake her hand with a gravity that makes you want to smile, because he brings the same quality of serious attention to this that he brings to everything and it is, in its way, the most Aaron thing in the world.

"I have questions," he says.

"I saw the list," she says, which means Maricel told her, and she pulls up a chair. "Let's go through them."

He does. He asks about the specific presentation this morning, whether the pattern has shifted from previous episodes, what the event monitor data is showing so far, what the echo will tell them that it hasn't told them before. She answers him without condescension, and you watch him listen in the way he listens when he's building a complete picture, absorbing everything, storing it. At one point his hand finds yours again on the bed—just rests there, not quite holding, just touching—without him breaking eye contact with Dr. Reyes.

You think: he's doing this for himself as much as for me. Not in a selfish way. In the way that someone who loves you needs to understand the landscape of what you're living with, needs the map, because the alternative—the blankness of not knowing—is worse for him than any difficult information could be.

The verdict, when it comes, is the verdict you've been holding your breath for.

The episode doesn't require intervention.

This time, she says, and the words land the way they always do—relief and the quiet weight of but there will be a next time arriving in the same breath, neither cancelling the other out. You've learned to hold both. The relief is real, immediate, like the first full breath after being underwater too long. The weight is also real. It doesn't leave when she does. You've stopped expecting it to.

You've made peace with that.

Mostly.

Aaron is still learning to.

You see it in him as Dr. Reyes goes through discharge. He's writing down everything she says, and his handwriting is neater than it needs to be, the way handwriting gets when you're focusing harder than the task strictly requires. He asks one more question—about activity levels for the rest of the day—and she tells him light is fine, no strenuous anything, listen to your body. She looks at you when she says the last part, not him. You appreciate that too.

When she leaves, Aaron sits for a moment without speaking, forearms braced on his knees, head slightly bowed. You reach out and put your hand on his back, between his shoulder blades, the way he does for you.

He exhales.

"Okay," he says.

"Yeah," you say. "Okay."

He looks up at you, and there's something in his face that he's stopped trying to manage in front of you—not fear exactly, but the long shadow of it, the place where fear has been living and has left a mark. He lifts your hand from his back and holds it in both of his, his thumb pressed to your pulse point at your wrist, and he stays like that for a moment. Not saying anything. Just—feeling it. Feeling you.

"Hotchner," you say softly.

"I know," he says. "I know."

He brings your hand up and presses his lips to your knuckles, slow and deliberate, his eyes closing briefly, and it's the most unbuttoned you've ever seen him in a fluorescent-lit hospital room, which is saying something.

The drive home is different from the drive there. Still quiet, but the texture of it has changed—softer now, more settled, the quiet of two people who've come through something and are still here. He drives with his hand over yours again, but looser now, the grip of comfort rather than the grip of effort. At a red light he reaches over without looking and adjusts your scarf where it's slipped, tugs it back around your throat with a careful, practiced efficiency, and you watch him do it like it's the most natural thing in the world. Like it's not something that would have required a whole conversation to explain to someone else.

"I'm going to make soup," he says, as if this has been the plan all along.

"You make terrible soup," you say.

"I make competent soup. There's a difference." He considers. "Jack says it's good."

"Jack is eleven and will eat anything if it's in a bowl."

He almost smiles. It reaches his eyes, the real one, the rare one, and you feel it like sunlight through glass—indirect, but warm. "I'll order from the place on Clement Street," he says. "Is that acceptable."

"That's acceptable," you say.

"Good." He squeezes your hand. Doesn't let go.

That night, he holds you closer than usual.

You've already eaten—he'd ordered enough for approximately four people and pretended not to notice when you only managed half of yours, had simply put the rest in the fridge and said whenever you want it without making it into anything—and you're in bed earlier than normal, earlier than either of you would typically admit to, the day having taken more from you than it appears to on the surface. It always does. That's the other part of this no one talks about: the aftermath isn't just physical. It's the low-grade depletion of managing your own fear all day, of performing okay-ness for people at the edges of your life, of carrying the weight of a body that asks more of you than you sometimes have to give.

You don't have to perform with Aaron. That's not nothing. That's, actually, most of it.

He's lying propped against the pillows with a book he's barely reading, his reading glasses low on his nose, and you settle against his side and feel his arm come around you immediately, no hesitation, like a reflex he's stopped questioning. He puts the book down. He doesn't make a thing of it. His lips brush your temple, warm and unhurried, and his hand begins to move in slow, absent patterns on your arm—not a conscious gesture, just the thing his hands do when he wants to touch you and doesn't need a reason.

"Hey," you say, quietly, against his shoulder.

"Hey," he says.

"Thank you. For today."

He's quiet for a moment. His hand stills on your arm, then starts moving again. "You don't have to thank me for that."

"I know I don't. I'm doing it anyway."

He turns his head and presses a proper kiss to your hairline, lingering, his face half-buried in your hair. You feel him breathe. Feel him settle.

"I looked up the valve stuff again," he says, eventually, careful and quiet. "Last night. Before we fell asleep. I know you've explained it. I just wanted to—" he pauses, "—I wanted to understand what it's doing in there. Why it does what it does."

Your throat does something complicated. "And?"

"And I think your heart is working harder than it should have to," he says. "Which makes two of us."

You laugh, soft and unexpected, and you feel him smile against your hair. You tuck yourself closer, your head against his chest, and you can hear it—his heart, steady and reliable, a metronome you've fallen asleep to enough times now that it's as familiar as your own. The contrast is not lost on you. You've thought about it, in quieter moments. The strange intimacy of having a body that makes itself known while his just—works, quietly, without complaint. There are bad days when that particular disparity sits heavily. Tonight it doesn't. Tonight it just feels like two different things existing alongside each other in the same dark room.

"You can ask me things," you say. "If you want to understand it. You can just ask."

"I know," he says. "Sometimes I don't want to make you explain yourself when you're already—" he considers, and you feel the pause, the care he takes with it, "—when you've already spent the day dealing with it."

"Sometimes that's the right call," you admit. "But not always."

"Tell me when."

"I will."

His arm tightens around you slightly, a quiet emphasis, and you close your eyes and listen to the slow, even sound of him breathing and the muffled ambient noise of the city outside, indifferent and continuous, going about its business in the dark. In here the room is warm, and the lamp on his nightstand throws a low amber light, and your heart—still imperfect, still yours, still navigating the particular complexity of connective tissue that never quite behaved the way the textbooks said it should—your heart beats on.

It doesn't beat the way other hearts do.

It never has.

It beats a little too fast sometimes and a little wrong and occasionally it skips steps entirely, like a record jumping its groove, like a sentence that starts one way and ends another. It has, over the years, accumulated its own file at the cardiology practice, its own notes, its own history. You've sat in rooms like today's room so many times that you know what the machines sound like when they're recording and what the faces look like when the news is good. You know the relief and the this time in the same breath. You've built a life inside the space between manageable and fine and learned that it's a perfectly liveable space, if smaller than you might have chosen.

You think about what Aaron said. Working harder than it should have to. You think about that without resentment, tonight—just as a fact, a characteristic, like the way you've learned not to stand up too fast, or the way you know by now that a run of bad nights will catch up to your chest before it catches up to anything else, or the way you have to plan around things that other people don't think about. Just your body, doing what it does. Just yours.

Aaron's hand has stilled on your arm. His breathing is getting heavier. He always falls asleep before he means to, especially on days like this, when he's been running on careful attention for hours, on the particular energy expenditure of being present rather than useful, which is harder for him than the useful.

You watch his chest rise and fall.

You think about the notepad full of questions, and the medication in the right order, and the way he adjusted your scarf at the traffic light without thinking about it. You think about tell me when and I wanted to understand and the press of his lips against your knuckles in a fluorescent-lit hospital room, eyes closed, utterly unbuttoned, holding your wrist like it contained something necessary.

You don't know what you did to get here. You're not sure the question is the right one.

You just know that when your heart does its sideways thing on a Tuesday morning, and the world narrows down to holding still and counting beats, there is a hand on your hip before you've even said a word—and that the man attached to it has already memorised the medication order, already saved the number under non-emergency, already learned the difference between your kinds of stillness.

Outside, the city hums on, indifferent and full of itself.

In here, Aaron's arm tightens around you in his sleep—a reflex, unconscious, the thing his body does without permission—and you feel it like a second heartbeat, steadier than your own.

You close your eyes.

Your heart does its imperfect, familiar thing.

“Have I done something? Please don’t leave, I’d worry myself to death if you left me now.” His voice is familiar and warm, slow, forever mellifluous. You’ll never get sick of the way he talks—it’s one of the reasons you fell in love with him, how he could make anything at all sound like a love note. “What’s making you feel unsure? Tell me what’s going on in there.”

You know that Aaron’s gentle, but he’s gone so sweet so suddenly it has emotion brewing in you that you haven’t earned. You swallow a silly lump and try to smile. “It’s nothing,” you say. 

Aaron slowly cards his hand behind your neck and encourages you into the curve of his neck, his second hand at the small of your back in a perfect fit. Warm and big, stretching over one of your most delicate parts. 

“I don’t know what to think about it, honey. I don’t ever want you to feel like you’d rather be at home than with me. If you need space, you can have it. Of course you can have it, but I’m getting the feeling that that’s not what this is about. Do you trust that you can talk to me?”

You want to cuss, but your throat burns, and all you can force out is a reprimanding, “Aaron.” 

“‘Cos I can fix anything.”

“I know that.”

“Yeah? So let me fix it for you, sweetheart.”

It is perhaps your greatest shame to be near tears in his arms as you plead with him to pretend you never said it. “I was just– I just wondered how you’d react, is all, there’s nothing wrong.” And Aaron doesn’t believe you, still soft as silk, so you tell him about the video you saw and he hums. You’re worried he’ll be rougher with you, then, because it’s not like you’ve earned his sympathy, but he rubs your back slowly and hums pensively, the smell of his skin under your nose. 

“Something still doesn’t feel right, does it?” he asks in a murmur, unaware of the molten heat in your throat and stomach simultaneously. You couldn’t explain it to him if he did notice it. “Did you– was it a surprise, that I wanted you to stay and work things out with me? I’m sorry if I didn’t make that clear, that I’d fix anything for you.”

It’s just—it borders being too much, too kind. It’s the ache of biting into something sweet with a bad tooth, how he’s gone this tender, how he hasn’t once pushed you off of his chest. It hits you how willing he is to spend endless minutes reassuring you over nothing, a scenario that you created, and how easily he reads your smallest emotions. 

You’re downed by a video prank, and it’s all your fault. 

Luckily, Aaron doesn’t seem to mind at all. He tips your head back with your ear against his shoulder, looking up at him from his chest all wide-eyed and in love as he leans down for a slow kiss. “Do you want to go home?” he asks quietly. 

You shake your head, worried your voice will wobble and betray you if you speak, so Aaron leans down again to press another kiss to your mouth, this time very purposefully misaligned, so as to kiss right under your nose. 

“What can I do to make you feel better?” he asks, like you haven’t just deregulated yourself by accident. 

“I’m okay. Sorry.”

“Don’t say sorry.” He gives your back a good rub, like he’s waving his hand into your spine. “How’s that? Is that helping?”

“Little more,” you tell him. You don’t mention going home again. 

You've been here before—stood at this particular junction between stubbornness and common sense more times than you can count, and every single time, you've taken the same exit. There's a perverse logic to it that even you can recognise: if you can just get the water, take the meds, sit down under your own power, then this doesn't have to be a crash. It can just be a bad hour. A bad morning. Something manageable. Something you handled.

So you keep moving.

The kitchen is ten feet away. Maybe twelve. You're measuring it in steps that cost more than they should, the counter gleaming and solid at the far end of it like a finishing line, like a promise, like the one fixed point in a room that's starting to feel slightly unmapped. You're almost there. You're—

You're barely through the doorway when you hear him move.

Derek doesn't say anything immediately. That's the thing about him—he never rushes to fill silence with noise. You feel his attention before you hear his voice, that particular quality of focus he carries, the way it lands on you like a hand on your shoulder before his hands are anywhere near you. It's the same awareness he brings to everything that matters to him, this steady, unblinking notice, and right now it's entirely on you. The chair scrapes back across the tile. His footsteps are quick and certain, three strides that close the distance between you before you've managed another half-step toward the counter, and then he's there—right there, solid as a wall but warmer, filling up the space between you and the rest of your bad plan.

"Oh no, you don't."

His voice is low and level, the kind of tone that doesn't rise because it doesn't need to, the kind of tone that has never once needed volume to carry weight. His hands find your shoulders—warm, large, the grip of them firm without being harsh, like being caught by something with roots that go all the way down.

"What do you think you're doing, huh?"

The question isn't rhetorical. He's actually looking at you, actually waiting, his dark eyes moving over your face with the same systematic attention he'd give a scene—cataloguing the pallor and the shadows and the particular set of your mouth that you know, from experience, gives everything away.

You open your mouth. The protest rises on instinct, the same worn-smooth reflex that's been your first response to concern for longer than you've known him, ground down to something almost reflexive by years of practice.

"I'm fine."

Even as the words leave you, you know how they sound. Thin. Unconvincing. The verbal equivalent of a building facade held up by scaffolding that's already starting to buckle in the middle, the kind of structure that looks like it's standing until you look at it too long.

Derek raises one eyebrow. Just the one. It communicates an entire paragraph.

"You're fine."

He repeats it back to you not as a question but as an object he's examining, turning it over in his hands, and the flatness of it makes the word sound exactly as hollow as it is.

"No, you're not."

He doesn't say it harshly—there's no frustration in it, no impatience, nothing punishing in the weight of it. Just certainty. The blunt and settled certainty of a man who has watched you long enough and closely enough to know the difference between fine and the performance of fine, between genuinely okay and too stubborn to admit otherwise. His hands shift from your shoulders to steer you—firmly, without apology, back the way you came.

"And don't try to argue with me. I'm not letting you push yourself into a full-on crash."

"Derek—"

"Nope."

Just the one word. Not unkind. Not cold. But absolute in a way that settles somewhere in your chest and sits there, and you feel the fight in you waver like a flame in a draught.

You consider pushing back anyway. The stubbornness in you is its own creature, has always been—a thing that lives behind your ribs like an ember that doesn't know how to go out, and right now it's flaring, throwing heat, making arguments in your head about self-sufficiency and not wanting to be a bother and it's just water, it's just twelve feet. But your body chooses that exact moment to make its position abundantly clear, your next step coming out uneven in a way you can't disguise, your hand shooting out toward the wall before you can stop it.

Derek's already there. His arm comes under yours, solid and steady, and he takes your weight like it costs him nothing, like it's the most natural thing in the world, like he was already expecting it and positioned himself accordingly—which, knowing him, he probably was.

That's when you stop arguing.

He doesn't comment on it. Doesn't say see or I told you or make any particular face about it. He just keeps moving, arm under yours, his pace adjusted to yours without a single word about the adjustment, steering you back down the hallway with the same unhurried efficiency he brings to every practical problem. You feel the heat of him against your side, the dependable solidity of him, and something in you that's been pulled taut since you woke up this morning and felt the particular quality of wrongness in your limbs starts—almost imperceptibly—to ease.

The bedroom is dim when he gets you there, curtains drawn against the afternoon, the familiar smell of the room gathering around you like something you didn't know you needed until it was already pressing in on all sides. He guides you to the edge of the bed with the practised ease of someone who has done this before—not with helplessness in his touch, not with the overly careful handling of something fragile, but with competence. The kind that comes from love wearing practical shoes and showing up to the difficult parts without being asked.

"Sit," he says.

You sit. The mattress takes your weight and you feel something in your spine unlock, some tension you've been carrying in the architecture of your posture all morning.

"Lie back."

Not a question. Not even really a request. Just the quiet, unhurried expectation of someone who already knows you're going to do it, like the direction is merely a courtesy—acknowledging that you're still a person who gets to move under your own power, even if he's the one deciding where. You lean back against the pillow, cool cotton against the back of your head, and you feel something unknot in the centre of your chest that you hadn't fully registered you'd been holding together with spite and sheer bloody-mindedness all morning.

The ceiling is familiar. The room is quiet. Derek moves around the bed with focused efficiency, adjusting the pillow behind your head, then checking the one beside you, his brow furrowed slightly in the concentrated expression he makes when he's doing something worth doing correctly.

"You're not moving from this spot until I say so."

"Derek, I really don't need—"

"I know what you think you need." He says it easily, without heat, like a man who is entirely at peace with having the last word on this subject. "And I know what you actually need. And right now those aren't the same thing."

He pulls the blanket up over you, tucks it at the edges with more gentleness than the declaration probably warrants—this careful attention to the small details, the way he's always done the big things and the small things with equal seriousness, like neither is beneath his notice. Then he straightens, and he looks at you. Just looks, for a moment, with that open and uncomplicated gaze that has never once contained a single gram of pity. There's something in it that makes your throat feel tight in a way that has nothing to do with fatigue.

"I'll get your water and your meds," he says. "And then you're going to rest." He tilts his head slightly. "Got it?"

He waits. He's very good at waiting—has this quality of absolute stillness when he wants an answer, like the question will just sit there in the air between you indefinitely, patient and immovable, until you decide to meet it.

You look at him. You look at the ceiling. You let out a long breath.

"Got it," you say.

The corner of his mouth does something warm.

"Good girl."

The words are light, said easily, in the same register as that's it or there you go—but they do something to you anyway, something immediate and settling, the verbal equivalent of a hand pressed flat and sure between your shoulder blades. You feel the tension in your jaw release. Something in your shoulders. Your body recognising, at the level below language, that it's been given permission to stop performing. He holds your gaze for a beat longer than necessary—making sure it landed, making sure you felt it—and then he's gone, footsteps quiet down the hall.

He's back before the silence has time to develop edges. Water first—cold glass pressed carefully into your hand, his fingers wrapping briefly around yours to make sure you've got it before he lets go. Then your medication, and he knows which ones without asking, knows the order, knows the one that makes you drowsy goes last and not first, has learnt every detail of the routine with the quiet, specific diligence he applies to everything he's decided matters. You take them one at a time. He watches—not hovering, not taut with anxiety, just present the way a lighthouse is present, not performing vigilance, just making sure you can see where the rocks are.

When you hand the glass back, his hand moves to your hair. Slow and deliberate, fingers carding through from your temple backward, unhurried as if he's got all the time there is and intends to use it. The tenderness of it lands somewhere behind your sternum and sits there, warm and heavy as afternoon light coming through glass.

"Good girl," he says again, quieter this time—lower, and with a weight the first time didn't have. Not praise, exactly, or not only that. Something with more gravity to it, something that finds the worn-out places in you and settles into them like ballast.

You exhale. A real one. The kind you haven't managed since you woke up.

"You didn't have to—"

"Yes, I did." Simple as that. No argument available.

He sits down beside you then, the mattress dipping with his weight, and he settles his hand on your thigh—large and warm and completely, deliberately still. Not moving. Not doing anything with it except being there, an anchor against the particular kind of drift that bad days bring, the feeling of being slightly untethered from yourself.

"How long have you actually been this bad?" he asks. Not quite a question—more like a man who already knows the answer and is giving you the chance to be honest about it.

You consider softening it. You don't.

"Since this morning. I thought it'd level out."

"And instead you spent the whole day waiting for it to level out." He says it without heat. Just the plain shape of the thing, laid out between you.

"I was going to rest after I got the water. And I almost made it into the kitchen."

He makes a sound—warm, unimpressed, fond underneath in a way that makes the combination somehow worse and better at once. "Baby, you made it to the kitchen doorway."

"That's basically the kitchen."

"That is really not the kitchen." His thumb moves, just once, a slow arc against your thigh before going still again. "You know what happens, right? What happens when you push through it all day."

"I know."

"Tell me."

You blink. It's not a challenging kind of tell me—it doesn't have any edge in it—but it's not negotiable either.

"It costs me more later," you say, the way you'd recite something learnt by heart.

"It costs you more later," he confirms, like you've said something correct and he wants you to hear it confirmed in his voice, not just your own head. "Every time."

"I just hate—" you start, and stop, because the sentence has too many endings and none of them feel like things you want to hold in your mouth right now.

"I know," Derek says. Before you have to find one.

And that's the thing—he does. That's the part that still occasionally catches you off guard, the depth of his comprehension, the way he doesn't ask you to explain yourself on the days when explanation is one more thing your body can't spare the energy for. He just knows. He made it his business to know, some point early on when he decided you were someone worth knowing thoroughly, and he's never once made you feel like the knowing was a burden.

Your eyes sting faintly, staring at the ceiling.

"Hey." His hand on your thigh shifts, just slightly, pressing with more intent, and you look at him. "You don't have to do everything on your own. You know that, right?"

"In theory."

"Not in theory. In practice." His voice is quiet now, the authority still woven through it but softer at the edges—the way good leather softens over time, not losing its structure but becoming more suited to the shape of what it's holding. "I'm here. That's not an accident. That's not just—circumstance. I'm here, which means I'm here for this. For all of it."

You look at him for a long moment.

"That's why I'm here," he says. "So let me take care of you. Alright?"

And there it is—let me, not I suppose I should, not the language of obligation in care's clothing. An offer and a direction at once, and the combination of those two things, the softness and the certainty threaded through each other like that, is the specific thing about Derek that has undone you since the beginning. You look at him—this man who learned the particular shape of your worst days and moved toward them rather than away, who holds the edge of your limits with both hands and doesn't look away—and you feel the last of the morning's armour come loose.

"Okay," you say. Quietly. Meaning it.

His hand, still resting on your thigh, turns slightly—palm flat against you, warm and certain as a seal. Grounding you here, in this bed, in this room, in the specific and concrete fact of being looked after.

"Okay," he echoes. "Close your eyes."

Outside, the afternoon light shifts and drifts behind the curtains, the world carrying on at its own ordinary pace while yours slows to something your body can actually hold. The fatigue settles into you differently now—not as something you're bracing against, not as an enemy you're managing with sheer force of will, but as a simple truth you're allowed to acknowledge without it meaning anything has gone wrong. Your body asking, plainly, for what it needs. And someone here to make sure it gets it.

Derek doesn't move. His hand stays warm and steady on your leg, like a hearthstone, like something that's been warm so long it's forgotten how to be anything else, and the room fills with a quiet that has texture and weight to it. The particular quality of shared silence between two people who don't need to perform ease because they've arrived at the actual thing. You have been at your worst in this room before. You've been frightened and exhausted and furious at your own body, and he's been here for every version of it, and none of it has changed the way he looks at you.

That's not nothing. That's, in fact, everything.

The heaviness behind your eyes is growing now, the specific weight of a body that's been given permission to be exactly what it is—tired, and asking, and allowed. It moves through you the way water moves downhill, inevitable and unhurried, finding every low place and filling it. Your limbs loosening from the long effort of holding themselves at attention all morning. The pillow is soft. The blanket holds your warmth back to you. The room is dim and quiet.

Derek's hand is still there.

But that's all it is now: a plan. A thought. A distant flicker swallowed by the reality of your body giving up the second you close your front door.

It starts in your knees. A strange, sudden tremble. You try to step forward, but your legs give a warning jolt and threaten to fold beneath you like paper straws. Your breath hitches. You toe off your shoes with stiff, clumsy movements, each foot dragging like it weighs a hundred pounds. Wobbling, you catch yourself on the wall, palm scraping against the cool paint as you brace. That simple motion makes your shoulders scream. A thousand needles bloom behind your ribs and bloom again down your spine. You curse softly, voice barely audible over the rustling of your clothes, the faint hum of your fridge somewhere down the hall, the dragging, disjointed rhythm of your own breathing. Inhale. Exhale. Try not to cry.

The hallway stretches before you like a tunnel, floor tilting sideways. You grab for the wall again. Your vision dips. Each step is harder than the last, a slow, sludgy shuffle. Your muscles are abandoning you, one by one. You lean against the bathroom doorframe before fumbling for the light switch with fingers that don't quite obey, missing it once, twice, before the room floods with sterile brightness. The bulbs are too harsh, too white. It turns everything into edges and shadows and makes your headache throb even harder, pulsing behind your eyes like a warning bell.

By the time you make it to the bathroom, your legs are shuddering beneath you, trembling as if they've run a marathon rather than sat at a desk for eight hours. Each step feels like dragging yourself through molasses, thick and slow and clinging. Your arms ache, too, as though you've been lifting weights instead of typing emails. Fatigue sinks into you like wet sand, heavy and suffocating, pulling you under. Your fingers buzz with that strange, pins-and-needles haze you've grown too familiar with. It creeps from your elbows to your wrists to the space between your knuckles. And just as you lower yourself onto the closed toilet lid—slow, slow, don't fall—you feel it.

Heat. Damp. A sudden, sick flush of understanding.

No.

Your period. Early.

You freeze for a second, brain catching up with what your body already knows. Then your face falls into your hands, elbows pressing into your thighs. Your breath stutters out in shallow bursts, catching hard in your throat. Of course. Of course it comes today. Not when you're prepared, when your bag's got supplies and your mind's alert. No, it sneaks in now, kicks you while you're already down. The wet discomfort makes you shudder with something halfway between disgust and defeat. You think back—when was your last one? Didn't your app say four more days? There was no warning. No cramps. No tension. Just this. This awful, unexpected, humiliating betrayal.

You shift your weight forward again, trying to peel yourself upright. It feels like moving through syrup, every motion thick and resistant. Your trembling fingers fumble with the waistband of your trousers, the elastic suddenly stiff and unyielding, like your body's resisting even this small mercy. You finally manage to get them down. Underwear too. You try not to look.

But you can't not see it. It's everywhere. Thick, clotted red. On your thighs. The insides of your legs. Your hands now, too. You groan, quiet and hoarse. Even the air seems heavier now, warm and close, like it's pressing down on you. You don't have the strength to stand, to climb into the shower like you planned. Your legs are limp things now, aching and trembling, and the idea of standing feels laughable. Instead, you reach blindly for a wad of toilet paper, hand shaking so badly you barely tear it from the roll.

You press it between your legs. It tears.

Thin, useless. It shreds against your skin, disintegrates in the blood, leaves specks of white fluff clinging to you like confetti from some cruel celebration. You stare at your hand. At the smudges of red in your palm. You grab more paper, try again. Dabbing. Wiping. Your fingers are slick and useless. Shaky. Ungraceful. Your hand cramps halfway through the motion. You grit your teeth and keep going.

You feel like a child. That's what it is. Not a woman. Not a grown adult with bills and deadlines and a man who calls you sweetheart like it means something. Just… this. This wreck of a person. This hot, trembling, bloodied mess, with legs half-numb and stained knickers bunched around your ankles. The tile is cold under your feet, and you only now realise you never even took your socks off. One is damp. You don't know if it's sweat or blood or the water pooling from the edge of the shower curtain. You don't check. You can't.

There's a trail of red from the seat to your knee. You notice it too late. It blooms on your skin like a warning sign. Your thighs stick uncomfortably where they press together, the blood already starting to dry at the edges. You breathe through your nose. You reach again. The toilet paper shreds again. Your stomach turns.

Your eyes blur. Not with tears, not yet, but with that strange heat behind them that makes your vision swim. Your breath comes in shallow gasps. You lean back against the wall, let your head thud gently against the cool tile. The contrast to your flushed skin is stark, jarring. It keeps you conscious. Anchored. You close your eyes for a moment and try to feel something else. Anything else.

Even as your hands start to cramp again and your legs slide a little wider apart in defeat, you try not to cry.

But your throat's tight, and your chest's heavier than it should be. Your eyes sting, even as you blink hard, jaw clenched. There's a familiar heat in your sinuses, that pre-cry ache that makes you feel eight years old and helpless. Your breath stutters. You inhale too fast and choke on it. You lean forward again, arms over your knees, curling in on yourself like that will somehow shrink this whole moment into something smaller. More manageable. Less humiliating.

There's blood under your nails now. You notice it as you look down, hands limp in your lap, streaked with red and tissue fibres and sweat. You press your thumbs into your palms until the sting distracts you. It doesn't work for long.

Your vision catches on the edge of the bath mat. A speck of lint. A crack in the tile grout. Anything to focus on that isn't your own body. You stare until your eyes burn, and even then, you don't look away.

You just wanted a shower. That's all. Just a bit of steam and soap and ten minutes to feel human again. To stop feeling like a stranger in your own body. To reclaim something. Anything.

But you sit there instead. Bleeding. Shaking. And utterly spent.

You don't even hear the door click open. Not the keys, not the footsteps. Not at first.

You only become aware of Derek when the air changes—some subtle shift in the quiet, like your body recognises his presence before your brain can name it. A breath you didn't realise you were holding releases. And then, from the doorway:

"Sweetheart?"

You flinch.

His voice is soft, almost hesitant, but your heart still leaps in panic. You're not ready to be seen. You can't imagine how you look right now—flushed, shaking, knickers tangled around your ankles, toilet paper clinging to your fingers, legs and thighs streaked with drying blood. Your head jerks up, and your mouth opens, but nothing comes out. Just air and shame. Your chest tightens like it's being squeezed from the inside.

His brows pull together when he steps into view. His eyes move fast, sharp and assessing—like he's piecing together a scene in a fraction of a second. He sees the blood. He sees your hands. He sees you, too still and too pale and too small in a bathroom that suddenly feels like a spotlight. But he doesn't startle. Doesn't grimace or pause or look away. He exhales slowly through his nose, steadying himself not because he's unsettled—but because he wants to be exactly what you need in this moment. Not afraid. Not alarmed. Just solid.

"Shh, it's okay." His voice drops low, firm and tender all at once. "I've got you."

He crouches down beside you with barely a pause, grabbing a clean washcloth from under the sink. He runs it under the tap, wrings it out quickly. His movements are precise, practiced. Not clinical—gentle. Like he's done this before, maybe not this exactly, but enough to know how to move without hesitation. Without fear. Like none of this fazes him. Like it's the most natural thing in the world to find you like this and simply… help. His knee hits the tile with a soft thud. You flinch again, but he doesn't seem to notice.

You shake your head as he leans closer. "Derek—no, no, I'm—please don't. It's gross. I can do it."

"You can't, sweetheart." His tone is calm, not a single note of judgment in it. "And that's okay. Let me take care of this."

"I'm a mess," you whisper. "It's too much. I'm too much."

"No, you're not." His fingers brush your thigh as he begins to clean you up, wiping gently with the warm cloth. "You're human. That's all. This isn't too much for me."

The cloth glides over your skin, the warmth a jarring contrast to the cold creeping in your limbs. He starts at your knees and works with slow, unhurried care. There's no tension in his body, no rush. Just patience. Just tenderness. He moves like time doesn't exist. Like the only thing that matters is getting you clean and safe and settled. And every time the cloth touches you, another layer of mortification peels back, replaced by something quieter. Something almost like comfort. Almost like grace.

You flinch again as he wipes over the most tender parts, but not because it hurts. Because he's seeing all of it—your pain, your mess, the parts of you no one's supposed to touch without gloves and clinical detachment. You can't bear it.

"Derek, please, I can do it, just give me a second—"

"Stop." His voice is firmer now, but still warm. "You don't have to prove anything to me. I'm here because I love you. Not because I expect you to perform being okay."

Your lip trembles. You don't want to cry. But his hands are so steady, so kind. His eyes stay on your face, not your body, not the blood, not the damage. Just you. Just the part of you that's trying to hold it all together and failing. You look away as a tear rolls down your cheek.

He catches it with the back of his hand. Then, gently, he leans in and kisses your temple. "You're allowed to need help. Especially from me."

The washcloth is stained now, but he doesn't seem to care. He works gently, wiping everything away until there's nothing left but warm, clean skin and the sound of your breathing. Then he reaches behind you to grab your softest pair of period panties from the drawer—he knows where they are, of course he does—and guides your legs through them one at a time. His touch is featherlight but grounded. Reverent, almost.

You try to help, lifting your hips, but your strength fails halfway through and you slump back with a frustrated noise. Derek doesn't comment. He just keeps going. He gently adjusts the waistband, smoothing it over your hips like it's the most natural thing in the world. Like it's a privilege to care for you this way.

"I can stand," you murmur.

"You can try. But I've got you if you can't."

You push yourself upright slowly, and he helps you, steadying you with a hand on your back. It takes a lot—more than you want to admit—but you get there. Enough to slip into the loose cotton sleep shirt he pulls from the shelf. It smells like fabric softener and home. You nearly cry just from the softness of it brushing over your skin.

He doesn't rush you. He waits, giving you time to breathe, to settle into your skin again. You feel like you should apologise—for the mess, for the silence, for the fact that this is your life now—but every time the words gather in your mouth, you see the soft, steady look in his eyes, and they crumble before they can escape. You don't need to say anything. He already knows.

When it's done, when you're finally dressed and swaying gently with exhaustion, he lifts you without ceremony. Not like a damsel. Like a partner. Like someone worth carrying.

He carries you to the bed like he's done it before. As if it's a privilege. He tucks you into bed with the kind of care people reserve for fragile things. Adjusts the pillows. Pulls the blanket to your chin. Smooths the hair from your face. Makes sure your water bottle is within reach, sets your heating pad on low, plugs your phone in with practiced ease. He glances around to double-check that everything you might need is close by. A snack. The remote. Your meds. The heating pad cord tucked so it doesn't pull.

Then he leans against the headboard beside you, nudging your hip with his.

"You know," he says, cocking his head as if considering something deeply, "you're still the prettiest girl in the world. Even covered in blood. Kinda unfair, really."

A broken sound bursts from your chest. Half sob, half laugh.

"Derek."

He grins and leans in close. "I mean it. Absolute goddess. No competition."

You laugh again, watery but real. He makes a show of wrinkling his nose and peering down at your shirt.

"You know what this is?" he asks.

"What?"

"Hardcore. This is commitment. This is ride-or-die."

You snort and bury your face in his chest. "You're ridiculous."

He wraps an arm around your shoulder, rubbing gentle circles into your back. "Yeah. But I'm yours."

You sit there for a while like that, pressed close in the quiet. He doesn't fill the silence with platitudes. Doesn't push you to talk or move or be anything other than what you are in this exact moment. He just holds you. Like your breath is his rhythm. Like your comfort is his only priority. The steady beat of his heart against your cheek anchors you better than any medication.

He hums softly. A song you recognise but can't name. And maybe it doesn't matter. Because the warmth of his chest, the familiar scent of his hoodie, the sure weight of his arm—it all tells you the same thing.

You're safe.

Because with Derek, even the messiest parts of you are never too much.