#gavinorgoogle

It isn't that she hates the sensation of arms around her waist, solid and warm, it's more that it reminds her of a certain lack -- something she'd never spoken of to him or anyone.

"Would you relax?" He breathes into the shell of her ear, sending something embarrassingly close to a shudder running down the length of her spine.

Relax? Now of all times? When he was pressed up against her back, burying his nose into her hair and tracing his fingertips across her sides with a tenderness that anyone else would never have pegged him to possess. (He'd always been good with his hands, his fingers, not that she'd ever attest to having first hand experience of either.)

"I am relaxed." She coaxes the words out from between her clenched jaw and tight throat, breathing deep through her nose to keep her voice steady. She feels his chest rise and fall slowly against her shoulder blades and matches up her rhythm to his.

"Pacing around doesn't exactly scream relaxed to me, Lina," he offers, and she could hear the smirk in his voice, it catches against something in her chest, sets off a fluttering ache that rests below her sternum and stays there accusingly. She'd missed his smile, even his smirk.

"I just--" She spins to face him, pulling her arms free of his grip around her middle to run them up his arms, rest them on his biceps, catch her nails on the worn off-yellow fabric of the t-shirt he'd worn to bed. 

They'd been sleeping back to back on the ratty mattress he called a bed for a week now, a gun under her pillow and a knife under his, but it wasn't enough. It was never enough, truly.

Her eyes catch his -- his one good eye, the one that isn't scarred and milky white and unseeing -- and she pauses, choking on her own paranoia and fear. Sometimes she wished he couldn't see her at all, not like he sees her now, shaking with an ineffectual desire to move or die. Move and live. Pack them both up and run before somehow they're discovered in their quiet little corner of the galaxy.

"We disabled the recovery beacons," he says, because he knows her, knows why she had insisted on doubling up the locks on the apartment, burying their armour behind a pile of old garbage in a storage locker almost halfway across the dustbowl of an old town they were staying in, why he had followed her to the raggedy edges of civilisation, as far away from any reminder of what they had left behind they could possibly get.

There's a flash of green light from his shoulder, his bad left side, it serves to highlight all his scars, old and faded to white a long time ago, ones he attributes to Maine and Tex and Wyoming, ones she attributes to the Director, ones he lets her put her hands over when the mood takes her. Delta materialises from nothing, illuminating the both of them in green, making her squint at the sudden invasive brightness.

"York is correct Agent Carolina, the chances of being discovered here are less than one point two percent currently and--"

"Dee," York says warningly, one syllable enough to remind the small A.I. of the way that Carolina freezes up over being addressed by her old moniker so casually. Her fingers curl into his shirt again, tugging  at the material until her knuckles whiten.

"My apologies, I was simply trying to help." Comes the voice of the A.I., no sarcasm, no regret, just another flat sentence. As quickly as Delta appeared he vanishes, leaving them alone in the dark again.

"I thought you were pulling him," she mutters, fixing her gaze on something over his shoulder.

"He's monitoring the perimeter. I have to keep him in." She knows there's more to it than that; an attachment to each other that neither York nor Delta have a name for. It stirs something old in her stomach. She tastes bile at the back of her throat, makes a noncommittal noise of assent.

There's a beat of silence, not awkward, they've been through enough, spoken, yelled and screamed enough, that now silence is like a blanket, old and comforting, before she presses her head to his chest, slides her arms around his broad back and pulls him closer, lets him try to comfort her like he's been trying to since he followed her out of bed.

Her toes curl against the concrete floor and she can hear the beat of his heart. It's enough to calm her down because it has to be. 

When she disentangles herself from his limbs, pulls away in a slow recoil and curls up within herself again, she can see his smile in the dark, small and a little sad but there nonetheless.

She's struck by loneliness, by the fact that this wasn't what he had planned at all when the two of them had escaped the Mother together all that time ago. There's a gap in her chest in the shape of her squad, and she knows there's a twin hole in his too. She might be enough to mend the edges, stem the bleeding, but she's not enough to fill it completely. They have each other but they're struck by the people that didn't make it out that day.

She stalks across the room, turns on a light and curls up on one of the two chairs in the apartment, he follows, takes the one across the tiny rickety table from her. In the light his smile looks a little less sad as he leans his elbows on tired and scuffed metal and looks at her conspiratorially.

"I told you Delta has been monitoring their broadcasts, right?" He doesn't need to elaborate on whose broadcasts he's referring to, even though the notion makes her lip curl. Tapping into their communication is just another way to get caught, but his smirk is too curious for her to scold him over it now. She nods slowly, staring at him. "I think we should take a little trip across town tomorrow, to the storage locker I mean."

He leans back on his chair, smirk broadening, good eye shining with old mischief. "I was going to tell you in the morning but-- well, you'll never guess who they just assigned to Recovery One..."

It's her first genuine smile in weeks.

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