#guardian garth

Garth Chapin x reader fem

The testaments

…………………………………….

The dream had started with the apartment.

As often, the kitchen too small, the Saturday morning light, the sound of the market below. Ordinary, familiar things that memory rebuilt at night when Gilead loosened its grip on everything else just a little.

But that night the apartment had drifted.

Him.

The way he approached slowly, without hurry, with that deliberate patience that had always been one of his ways of saying things without words. His hands on your waist. His mouth against your temple first, always the temple, always that precise spot, then lower, along your jaw, into your neck, and you felt his warm breath on your skin and his voice saying your name softly in that way he had, Y/N, not calling, not asking, just placing the word there like something that belonged to him and that he liked to hold.

Five years of memory to draw from.

Memory knew exactly what to look for and where.

The dream had been generous.

You woke up at six in the morning.

The gray light of Gilead filtered through the curtain. The crucifix on the wall watched you with its usual indifference. Your heart was beating too fast and there was in your body a concentrated, precise warmth that had absolutely nothing to do with the temperature of the room.

You stared at the ceiling.

The problem with a dream like that was that it left you with something, a real, concrete physical tension that waking didn’t dissolve. Something that demanded a resolution that Gilead and its nineteen months of calculated distance had never planned for.

You looked at the crucifix.

You looked at the door.

You looked at the ceiling again.

What followed lasted a few minutes in the silence of your narrow room, under the sheet, with the only company the sharp awareness that the person you needed was three corridors away and that three corridors might as well be three continents.

The result was technically functional.

Functionally, entirely, cruelly insufficient.

Because the problem wasn’t mechanical. The problem was his hands specifically, his specific way of paying attention, that quality of attention he had had for five years and that nothing else reproduced, not the dream, not you alone in a Gilead bed at six in the morning thinking about him.

You let your arms fall back at your sides.

The frustration that remained was precise, nameable, and completely useless.

— Nineteen months, you said to the ceiling.

The ceiling didn’t comment.

Neither did the crucifix.

Breakfast was at seven thirty.

Daisy sat across from you, set down her tray, and looked at you with the precision of someone who read people the way others read texts, quickly, well, without apparent effort.

— You didn’t sleep well?

— No. You stared at your porridge. I slept very well.

— Your cheeks are pink.

— It’s cold this morning.

She drank her tea. She looked out the window. She came back to your face with a slowness that said she had followed the whole path and reached the conclusion.

— Ah, she said.

Just that. Ah. With that particular tone.

— Ah what.

— Nothing at all.

— Daisy.

— I’m not saying anything. She took another sip of tea. I’m very discreet.

You set your spoon down on the table.

— I had a dream, you murmured, eyes on the tablecloth, your voice barely audible under the muted noise of the refectory. About him. A very… You stopped. Very present dream.

— Present.

— Physically present, you said, and your cheeks decided to betray what your voice still controlled.

— And this morning you…

— I tried to handle the situation, you said with the dignity of someone losing all dignity in real time. The result was disappointing.

Functionally disappointing. Because it’s not the right person and the right person is three corridors away and nineteen months is…

— Long, Daisy said.

— Very long.

She placed her hand over yours under the table, a brief second, and in her eyes there was real understanding, not amusement, well not only amusement.

— Justin and I were separated for eight months, she said softly. I know. I know exactly.

— How did you handle it.

— Badly. Simply. I handled it badly.

The morning was long.

Two hours studying texts in the reading room with Aunt Vidala walking between the rows. You read the same three lines a number of times you didn’t count because counting would have meant acknowledging the problem and you preferred to deny it.

The tension didn’t leave.

That was the real problem with that morning, not the dream, not what followed, but the fact that neither had resolved anything. The memory of the dream stayed in your body like an unfulfilled promise, a sentence begun that you weren’t allowed to finish. His voice in your neck. His hands. Everything five years had made familiar and that nineteen months had turned into a precise, constant absence.

You turned a page.

You reread the same three lines.

The crossing happened at ten thirty in the main corridor.

You and Daisy coming back from the reading room, heading toward the sewing room. Him at the central checkpoint, standing, hands behind his back, looking straight ahead, on duty.

You saw him from a distance.

Which was a mistake because seeing him from afar gave you time to think about what you had dreamed that night, what you had done that morning, what it had been and what it hadn’t been, and the heat rose back to your cheeks with devastating speed.

— Oh no, Daisy murmured beside you.

— Be quiet.

— You’re blushing.

— I’m not.

— Y/N. You’re crimson.

You reached the checkpoint. The protocol required Pearls to lower their eyes before Guardians, a gesture of humility, daily practice, and that morning a saving grace.

You lowered your eyes.

And then you raised them.

One second. Just one. Because his proximity after that night and that morning was more than your discipline could fully contain.

He was looking at you.

Garth never looked at Pearls while on duty.

He watched corridors, angles, exit points, things that needed watching. Not the women who passed by, never, it was a line he didn’t cross in his role as a Guardian.

But now, his eyes were on you.

And in that single second he did what he had done for five years, he read your face. Quickly, completely, without you being able to stop him. He saw your cheeks. He saw something in your eyes he had seen before in other contexts, in other rooms, in a life that existed three corridors and nineteen months away.

His expression didn’t move a millimeter.

But something in his eyes, deep down, where no one else ever looked, lit up softly.

He knew.

He didn’t know exactly what. But he knew something, and that something was enough to light that spark.

You looked away.

Far too late.

Three meters later, Daisy breathed very softly:

— He saw everything.

— He saw nothing.

— He read your face in a second and filed the information somewhere, she said with precise certainty. He might not know exactly what. But he knows.

You walked to the sewing room with burning cheeks and a frustration that now had two distinct components, the original frustration from that morning, intact, and on top of it the new frustration of having been read so easily by someone who couldn’t do anything with that information in a corridor of Ardua Hall.

Two frustrations layered.

The day was going to be very long.

It was.

Sewing. Lunch. Afternoon study. Each hour with that underlying tension that didn’t fade, that stayed there in the background like a continuous note, and the awareness that Garth somewhere in the building carried that spark in his eyes and knew and couldn’t do anything either, and that symmetry was both fair and entirely unsatisfying.

The message arrived late in the afternoon.

A text reference in your evening reading list that wasn’t one. Drop point. Time. Storage room in the annex building.

Eight o’clock.

The storage room smelled of cold oil and dust.

He was already there when you entered, standing against the back wall, arms crossed over his chest. The battery lamp cast the usual orange light. The door closed behind you.

He looked at you.

For a long moment. Without speaking.

And in that look there was the spark from that morning, still there, which had had the whole day to settle into something more precise.

— So, he said.

His voice, his real voice, not the Guardian’s, had something in it that wasn’t entirely neutral. Something warm and deliberate and slightly, precisely teasing.

— So what, you said.

— This morning.

— This morning I had breakfast with Daisy.

— Before breakfast.

You looked at the wall next to his head, the shelf with its equipment crates, very interesting, fascinating even, much more interesting than his face right now.

— I don’t know what you’re talking about.

— Y/N.

— Garth.

He dropped his arms. Took a step toward you. Then another. That deliberate slowness he had had for five years and that was absolutely not accidental and that your body recognized before your mind finished pretending everything was fine.

— I saw something on your face this morning, he said quietly. At the checkpoint. Something I know.

— You were reading my thoughts?

— For five years, he said. More or less.

He was now a meter away. Less.

— It’s humiliating, you said.

— It’s not humiliating.

— Yes because I had a dream about you and this morning, The sentence struggled to come out, not from shame but from the absurdity of the situation, from the fact that you were having this conversation in a Gilead storage room. I tried to handle it on my own and the result was…

— Disappointing, he said, and in his voice there was that something, not quite a smile but the shadow of one, and beneath it something much more serious.

— Functionally insufficient, you said. Because it’s not you. And without you it’s…

— I know, he said.

And in his voice, this time, the teasing had given way to something else, something more direct, warmer, heavier with nineteen months of the same thing on his side.

He placed his hand on your jaw.

— Nineteen months, he said very softly. You thought I didn’t have the same problem?

Your throat tightened.

— You could have said something.

— Through which secure channel exactly.

Fair point.

His hand moved to your neck. His eyes in yours, that way of looking, fully present, fully there, unchanged in five years, untouched by Gilead.

— The dream, he said. What was it?

— I’m not telling you.

— Y/N.

— The answer is no.

— I was in it, I have a right…

— No right of review…

He kissed you.

That kiss wasn’t the soft kiss of corridors and waiting rooms.

That one had nineteen months in it and the frustration of that morning and all the calculated corridors and maintained distances and an entire day of carrying something without being able to put it down. It had his hands that knew exactly where to go and your breathing changing immediately because the body had its own memory and yours had recognized his for five years.

— Garth…

— We have time, he said against your mouth. Tonight we have time, I arranged it.

What followed belonged to that storage room and to the two of you.

To the orange light and the cold oil and the silence of the building outside that didn’t know what was happening inside.

He hadn’t forgotten the word disappointing.

He was methodical when he had a reason to be.

And he had spent five years learning the difference between what was sufficient and what wasn’t, between what worked and what left someone in a room at six in the morning staring at the ceiling with a precise, nameable frustration.

That night there was no ceiling to stare at.

That night it was him.

Later, the lamp still on, your voices returned to something normal, his jacket somewhere on a crate, you leaning against him, his chest under his t-shirt, like before, and you couldn’t quite remember why the day had been so long.

— Better? he asked, his right hand brushing your thigh, the other around your waist.

You considered the question with the seriousness it deserved.

— Functionally satisfying, you said.

He laughed. Really laughed. A free, brief sound in the closed storage room.

— Functionally satisfying.

— It’s a compliment.

— I know. His mouth in your hair. I’ll take it.

A soft silence.

— Next time you dream, he said, you send me a message.

— Absolutely not.

— Y/N…

— The answer is no.

— I’m the subject of the dream, it makes sense that…

— Zero right of review, you said. Zero.

He pulled you closer, laughter still in his breath.

Outside, Gilead. Its rules, its corridors, its remaining days.

Inside, just him. Just you. Like before. The orange light and that warmth, whole, complete, the right person at last.

Functionally satisfying.

You smiled against his shoulder.

…………………………………….

THE HANDMAID’S TALE

mark tuello (the handmaids tale)

joseph lawrence (the handmaids tale)

guardian garth (the testaments)

What Walls remember

Garth Chapin x reader

~~~~~~~

You were born one September morning in a clean house, in a clean city, in a world that had decided that cleanliness was the thing closest to God.

You were told that you were lucky.


You were told so often and in so many different ways that you ended up wearing it like a garment, this luck, without asking yourself whether it really fit. A Commander’s daughter lacked nothing in Gilead no food, no space, no certainties. Certainties above all. They were given to you in abundance, like one feeds someone one wants to keep strong and calm, and you swallowed them because that’s what one did with the food one was given.

Your mother’s name was Madeleine, and she had cold hands and a warm faith, which gave something strange to her embraces, something that warmed and cooled at the same time. She taught you to hold your head high, to place your hands on your knees during prayers, to look Commanders in the eyes just long enough to show respect and not long enough to show anything else. She taught you that other things lingering looks, thoughts that overflowed, questions without clean answers were cracks through which evil entered like water between the stones of a wall.

You learned.
You were a good student.

Your father, Commander Reeves, was a man of few words and much presence, the kind of man whose silence occupied more space than most people’s speech. He had large hands and a gaze that weighed things, that weighed people, that weighed you sometimes with the quiet precision of a watchmaker checking mechanisms. He was not cruel. You held onto that precision, returned to it often in your mind the way one returns to a stable fact in a world that trembles slightly underfoot. He was not cruel. He simply believed in Gilead with the absolute sincerity of a man who had helped build it and therefore had no reason to doubt it.


What your father believed, the house believed.
What the house believed, you believed.
Until the light.

The light came before everything else, before words, before him, before the understanding of what you carried inside you without knowing it. It came one October afternoon when you were maybe seven, maybe eight, when a distracted Martha had left the library door slightly open and the afternoon sun fell through half-drawn curtains and traced on the wall something you had no name for.

Just light.
Just ordinary sunlight filtered through ordinary fabric, drawing shapes on an ordinary wall.


But you had stopped in the hallway, you had looked at those shapes on that wall, and something in you had moved in a way you did not yet know, something that was not prayer and was not fear and was not the certainty you had been fed since birth. Something like a door opening onto a room you had not known existed.


You had looked at that light for a very long time.
No one had found you there. No one had asked what you were doing, motionless in a hallway, eyes fixed on a plain wall crossed with sunlight. You had had time to watch until the light shifted and the shapes changed and disappeared, and you had gone back to dinner with something new in your chest, something small and warm, something you did not yet have the words to call beautiful.


That word came later.


But the thing itself had been there since that October wall of light.

You grew up in Gilead the way one grows in a carefully maintained garden, in the shapes you had been trimmed into, straight and clean and according to plan. You learned prayers and propriety and the exact degree of deference required when addressing other Commanders’ Wives. You learned that Handmaids existed because God willed it, and Marthas existed because God willed it, and you existed because God willed it, and that all these existences had a precise meaning and a precise place, and that wisdom consisted in inhabiting one’s place without spilling over the edges.


You learned all that.


And at the same time, in parallel, in a space no one had told you to leave empty and that you therefore had not closed, you watched the light.

The light on the white tablecloths at official dinners, the way it passed through glass and cast tiny rainbows on porcelain. The light in your mother’s garden in the morning, when dew still clung to the leaves and each leaf was a green, wet mirror. The way the shadows of the bars on your window fell across your bedroom floor at sunset, clean and regular and yet always slightly different depending on the season.


You watched without saying.
You carried it without showing.
Gilead had taught you not to show things that did not have an approved name.

At fourteen they brought you books. Not the books read in Gilead holy texts and instructions and edifying stories of women who had found peace in submission but books that existed despite Gilead, in the blind corners of your house. An older Martha named Ruth, who had the gaze of someone who had seen other worlds, kept them in a wooden box under the laundry sink, wrapped in waterproof cloth, and one evening she had found you in the hallway looking at the light on the wall and she had watched you watching and then left without saying anything.


The next morning the box was in your room.
No message. No explanation. Just the box, and inside it the books, and Ruth’s silent assumption that you would know what to do with them.

You knew what to do.


You read with the concentration of someone eating after a long hunger without having known they were hungry. Poetry mostly, things you did not fully understand but that made in your chest the same movement as the light on the library wall. Descriptions of landscapes, of cities, of faces, ways words could hold beauty without damaging it. You read slowly to make it last, you read at night by moonlight when a lamp would have drawn attention, you replaced the books exactly as you had found them, and you woke in the morning with the sentences still in your head like something not yet digested.

No one knew.
Ruth never said anything.

The first time you saw him…
you were nineteen.

Your father had changed his Head Guardian in the spring, the previous having been reassigned to another residence for reasons your mother did not explain and that you did not ask about. Reasons in Gilead were rarely explained and rarely asked; it was one of the unspoken rules everyone knew, silence around certain questions was a form of collective politeness, like not looking directly at the sun.

The new Guardian arrived on a Tuesday morning in May.


You did not see him arrive. You were in the garden with your mother, kneeling in the back flowerbed, your hands in the soil, a weekly task your mother called practical meditation and which consisted mainly of pulling weeds while praying. You were not really praying. You were watching the way the light passed through the young leaves of the shrubs and made them translucent, green and luminous like miniature stained glass, and you were constructing in your head words to describe it, a habit you had developed since Ruth’s books, this way of searching for the right words for the things you saw.

It was your mother’s voice that alerted you, a slight shift in her tone, something more restrained, more official.

You stood up.

Then your father said something and he turned toward the garden and his gaze passed over you.


A second. No more.

The look of someone taking inventory of a space, quick and neutral, noting presences without lingering. He noted you. Looked away. Continued listening to your father.


You lowered your gaze back to the translucent leaves.

But something in your chest had moved. That movement you had known since the October wall of light, since Ruth’s poems, that movement that had no approved name in Gilead and that you had learned to hold still in the hollow of your hand without showing.

You could not have said what it was. Not that day.
You only knew that you had felt it.

His name was Garth.


You learned his name that very evening at dinner, your father mentioning the reassignment casually, your mother nodding with her attentive Wife’s expression. Garth. A short name, two syllables, something practical and direct that matched the way he had stood in the garden, without ornament, without unnecessary gesture.


You made no comment.

You never showed things that did not have an approved name.


But that night in your room, before sleeping, you tried to find words for the translucent leaves of the morning, and somewhere among the words for the leaves there was his glance on you, a second, neutral and quick, and you did not yet know why you placed those two things in the same sentence in your mind, but you let them be there together without trying to understand.

The weeks that followed had a new texture.


Not dramatic. Nothing in Gilead was ever dramatic at its beginnings; the omnipresent surveillance had a regulating effect on visible emotions, everything happened underneath, in places eyes did not look. But the weeks had a new texture nonetheless, something slightly different in the architecture of your days, an additional awareness you carried without being able to set it down.

You saw him often. Inevitably, in a Commander’s house, the Head Guardian was everywhere and nowhere at once, present at the margins of every movement, every departure, every return. He accompanied you and your mother when you went to the Wives’ prayer meetings, he was at the gate when you came back, he sometimes crossed the hallway when you came downstairs in the morning.

He did not look at you.


Not in any particular way. Not in a way that would have meant anything or that anyone could have noted or reported. He had the gaze of well-trained Guardians, the kind that sees everything and lingers on nothing, the kind that does its job with such perfect neutrality that it resembled absence.

But you learned to read within that neutrality.


Slowly. With the patience of someone who had grown up searching for things in the angles, in oblique light, in the spaces between what was said and what existed anyway.

You learned the way he positioned his body in a room, always slightly withdrawn, never exactly where one would expect, a way of being present without occupying the center. You learned the rhythm of his rounds, the exact hour his footsteps passed beneath your window in the evening, regular and steady like something one could rely on. You learned that he did not speak much to the other Guardians, not out of hostility, simply out of economy, like someone who had decided that words cost something and it was better not to spend them unless they truly served a purpose.

You learned all this as you had learned the poems, silently, in blind spots.
And as with the poems, you did not yet know exactly what you were learning or why, but you continued anyway, because something in you recognized that it mattered.

Summer came with its long, heavy light, that July light in Gilead that lingered late into the evening and gave the days an almost unreal quality, as if time hesitated before tipping into darkness.

She did not know, or perhaps did not want to know, that what you practiced in the garden had very little to do with the virtues she imagined.

You watched.
You searched for words.


You built in your mind small descriptions of nothing, the way a bee held itself inside a flower, the exact color of the sky between blue and white, the sound dry summer leaves made when wind passed through them, something between a rustle and a breath. You did not write them down. Writing would have left traces, and traces in Gilead never really belonged to the one who made them. You kept them in your head, these small descriptions of nothing, like a collection of things no one else knew you possessed.

It was a form of freedom.
The only one you knew.

That evening he was on his rounds in the garden, which sometimes happened at the end of the day, a perimeter check before nightfall. You had heard him approach and you had not moved from your bench under the tree because moving would have been a reaction, and reactions showed things one preferred not to show.

He made his round of the garden. Stopped briefly near the back gate to check the lock. Walked back toward the house.


And as he passed by your bench, he stopped.

Not for long. Two seconds maybe, three. The exact duration of someone who notices something and stops without having decided to stop.
You were looking at your hands resting on your knees.


He said nothing.

Then there was his voice, low, completely neutral, the tone of someone making a weather observation.

“It’s going to be cold tonight.”

You raised your eyes.
He was looking at the sky, not at you. The late-day sky, that band of pink and orange on the horizon, the kind of sky you would have spent ten minutes trying to describe in your head if you had been alone.

“Yes,” you said.

One word. The safest, smallest word, the one that cost nothing.
He looked at the sky another second, then walked back toward the house, his steps steady on the gravel, and the conversation was over before it had really been a conversation.


But you carried it with you into the evening.

You carried it’s going to be cold tonight as if it were a line of poetry, as if those five words had a particular density, and you knew it was ridiculous and you knew it very clearly and it did not change the fact that you carried them.

He spoke about the weather again several times that summer.
About the wind. About a storm that was coming. About the fact that it had rained all night. Perfectly ordinary, perfectly harmless things, the kind of remarks a Guardian could make to a Commander’s daughter without anyone finding anything to note or report.

But he always made them when you were alone. Never in front of your mother, never in front of other Guardians, never in spaces where the words would have witnesses.

You did not know exactly when you understood that it was intentional.
Perhaps the night of the great August storm, when he had said stay inside tonight and his voice held something that was not a Guardian’s instruction but something else, something closer to concern. Perhaps before.

Perhaps you had known since the garden and the first evening and had simply chosen not to name it yet, because naming things made them real and real things had consequences in Gilead.


Consequences in Gilead were not light things.

Autumn came with its low, golden light, the kind you preferred because it transformed ordinary things into almost impossible ones, the way it made everything at once sharper and softer, more present and more fragile.
You had been searching for words for that light for several weeks.


You were searching for words for something else too, something less nameable, something that had settled in your chest over the course of that summer and had not moved since, that had even taken up a little more space with the autumn, slowly, without haste, with the patience of things that know they have time.

You still did not know what it was.

You had hypotheses you did not look at too directly.
One Tuesday at the end of September, your mother had gone to a prayer meeting at Commander Hartley’s Wife’s house and you had stayed home with a migraine you had not entirely invented.

The house was quiet, the Marthas at their tasks, your father in his office with his officers.

You were in the first-floor hallway, standing by the window, looking at the afternoon light on the fallen leaves in the garden.


You were searching for the exact word for that color. Not orange, not brown, something between the two with gold in it, something French must have a word for and that you had not learned because French did not exist in Gilead.

You heard his steps on the stairs.
You did not move.

He came into the hallway, stopped when he saw you, assessed the situation in a second as he assessed all situations, and made as if to continue toward the end of the hallway where he probably had something to check.

Then he stopped.

He stepped closer to the window. Not close to you, at a proper distance, a distance that looked like nothing and was perfectly calculated to mean nothing to outside eyes.

He looked out the window.
The garden. The leaves. The light.

“That color,” you said, and you did not know why you were speaking, why you were opening that door, perhaps because you had been searching for that word too long and something in you had decided that this empty hallway and this window and this particular light were a space sufficiently outside the world to say something true.

He waited.

“I don’t have a word for that exact color.”

A silence. He was looking at the leaves.

“Amber,” he said.

Amber. You placed it in your mind, turned it, set it against the color outside the window to see if it held, and it held perfectly, it had exactly the sound and texture of that light, at once warm and slightly sad, at once gentle and on the verge of ending.

“Amber,” you repeated softly, to feel the word in your mouth.

He said nothing.
But he remained a moment longer by the window, beside you and not beside you, at that calculated distance that meant nothing and meant something all the same, and you both looked at the amber light on the fallen leaves and no one said anything more and it was, you learned that day, a way of speaking too.

Words became a thing between you.


Not often. Not regularly. Just sometimes, in the spaces Gilead left empty by accident, hallways crossed at the wrong moment, gardens at the end of the day, doors held a second too long. Short words, always harmless on the surface, always about permitted things, the weather and the seasons and observations of the visible world.

But you learned to read underneath.
As you read the light.


There was a way he had of pausing before speaking, a fraction of a second, a way of choosing his words with a care that went beyond the words themselves. There was the way he never looked at you directly in front of witnesses and the way he sometimes looked at you, briefly, in empty spaces, and that brief look contained more than most of the conversations you had in Gilead.

There was his way of remembering things you had said, of bringing them back weeks later in an ordinary sentence, that proof that he truly listened to you even when he seemed not to be there.

You were learning Garth as you had learned the poems. Slowly, attentively, searching for meaning beneath the words.

And what you were learning made the same movement in your chest.
You still did not know exactly what it was.

But it was taking up more and more space, that movement, in your chest and in your mind and in your days, quietly, without haste, like the amber autumn light that moves across the floor of a room and that one does not see moving but that covers everything before one realizes it.

Winter came, and with it long evenings and indoor light, that way the season had of bringing everyone back inside houses and inside their heads.

You were twenty.

Your mother had begun to say the word marriage with a new regularity in conversations, not directly to you, never directly to you, but in the sideways ways your mother had of saying important things, through examples and allusions and stories of other Commanders’ daughters who had been well married and were happy, your mother always insisted on the happy with a conviction that sometimes sounded like a question.

You heard the word marriage and felt something cold and calm settle in your chest, something that was not exactly fear but had its shape.

Gilead had taught you what marriage was. An arrangement between families, a place in the structure, a way for women to exist with the protection and meaning God had intended for them. You knew the discourse entirely, you could recite it forwards and backwards, you had even believed it in a certain way, the way one believes things one has heard since before knowing one could not believe them.

But Gilead had not taught you what you understood that winter.

Gilead had not taught you what it was to search for someone in a room before even entering it. To know the rhythm of someone’s steps well enough to recognize them before seeing them. To keep words in your mind to tell them, words about light and colors and things you noticed, and to feel something tighten gently when you realized you would not be able to say them because it was not a space for that.

Gilead had not taught you that absence could be a presence, something one carries like a stone in a pocket, constantly, even without thinking, especially without thinking.

One evening in December there was a power outage in the residence, something electrical somewhere that failed, and the house was plunged into darkness for twenty minutes that felt longer. The Marthas lit candles. Your mother prayed. Your father summoned technicians with his usual calm, the calm of someone who summons solutions.

And you were in the first-floor hallway, a candle in your hand, and Garth was there because power outages were among the situations requiring the presence of the Head Guardian, and you were alone in that hallway for the first time in that golden, trembling darkness that changed everything, that made the outlines of the world less sharp and less watched.

He said nothing for a moment.


The flame of your candle flickered between you.

“This light too,” you said, and your voice was very low, almost nothing, just a little more than a thought.

He looked at you, this time truly, not the peripheral neutral look of public spaces, but the deeper look, the one you had seen only rarely and that you kept carefully in your memory like something precious.

“Which one,” he said.

“The candlelight on the walls.” You looked at the wall, the shifting golden shadows. “It doesn’t have a fixed color. It changes all the time.”

A silence.

“Alive,” he said.

You looked at him.
He was looking at the wall.

Alive. One word, like amber, one word that held the thing exactly, that named it perfectly, and you knew, hearing that word in his mouth, that he saw what you saw, that he searched for what you searched for, that something in the way he was in the world was not so different from your way.

That understanding was harder to keep still than everything else.
The power came back.

The cold, white electric light crushed the golden shadows on the walls and the hallway became an ordinary hallway again and Garth became the Guardian making his rounds again and you became Commander Reeves’s daughter again with your useless candle.

But alive remained.

And that evening in your room, for the first time, you allowed yourself to name what you carried in your chest.


Love

For now you carried the word in your chest as you carried everything else, discreetly, solidly, with the patience of someone who had grown in a trimmed garden and had learned to grow anyway in the only places no one looked.

In the corners.
In oblique light.

In words exchanged about the weather and colors and things that had no approved name.

~~~~~~~

Hope you liked it :)

Garth Chapin x reader fem

••••••••

The grand hall of Commander Warren smells of warm wax and white lilies.

Y/n has known this since forever, she grew up in rooms that smelled exactly like this, rooms where her father received his counterparts with their owners’ smiles and their hands that lingered too long on the shoulders of the women present. She knows this smell the way she knows the doctrine, by heart, in her bones, without ever having had a choice.

Tonight she wears green.

The dress that her father’s seamstress adjusted for three weeks, the satin fabric, the cut that falls exactly as it should, the deep green that tells every man in this room available, eligible, ready. She put on this dress tonight with the same surgical neutrality she brings to everything concerning her cover. Daughter of Commander Erhart. Pious. Desirable. Perfect.

The perfect daughter of the perfect Commander.

Underneath, a Mayday agent since she was fifteen.

These two versions of herself coexist so cleanly inside her body that she no longer knows sometimes which one is the costume.

Garth is posted near the north wall.

She knows this without looking. She always knows where he is in the rooms they share, it’s her training, she tells herself, the necessity of knowing her contact’s position in case of emergency. That’s what she’s been telling herself for weeks with a persistence that is starting to resemble bad faith.

They don’t speak at events like this one. Too many people, too many eyes, too many Aunts who watch for crossed glances between Greens and Guardians like hunting dogs picking up a scent. Their exchanges happen in the service corridors, the stairwells of the east wing, the rare stolen minutes between two rounds when nobody is watching.

But he is there.

And she knows it.

Which is already too much.

The first two hours pass as they should.

She dances with Commander Pritchard’s son, twenty-two years old, clumsy, genuinely embarrassed by the situation, and Y/n is almost grateful to him for that. She memorizes names, ranks, useful scraps of conversation. She smiles at the right moments. She tilts her head at the right angle.

She does her job.

Agnes is in the room too, also in green, straight as a candle, her hands exactly where the Aunts taught her to place them. Y/n watches her from her corner with that complex feeling that hasn’t simplified over the past weeks, a kind of painful admiration for someone who still truly believes, who hasn’t yet found the seam in the lie and pulled on it until everything unravels.

And Agnes watches Garth.

Not openly, Agnes has been too well trained to watch openly. But Y/n reads the head angles, the slight rotations of the torso, the way her fingers tighten on her dress when he moves into her field of vision.

Y/n looks away.

She’s been doing that for weeks.

Commander Raines arrives with the second group.

She sees him enter from her position near the window and something in her, that animal, primitive part that has survived seventeen years of Gilead by staying sharp, takes note immediately. The way he moves through the room. The way he looks at the girls like someone scanning a menu. The way the other Commanders shift slightly as he passes, not out of deference but out of that instinctive recoil one has before something threatening that one prefers not to name.

Sixty years old, maybe more. A high rank. Eyes that linger.

She makes a point of not looking at him directly.

Too late.

He has seen her.

The head tilt comes ten minutes later.

You’ll dance with me. Not a question. Never a question with men like him. A designation, a verbal possession that does not wait for an answer because it has already decided the answer on her behalf.

Y/n sets down her glass.

She smiles.

She dances.

The first measures are bearable.

Raines holds the correct distance, barely, the exact limit of what is permitted, which means he knows the rules and has decided to push right up against them. Y/n maintains her posture, her smile, her eyes at the correct height. She counts the measures. She takes inventory of the room in her periphery, the exits, the Aunts on duty, the other Guardians.

Garth.

Garth who is still at the north wall and whose shoulders she can see, without looking at him directly, contract by an imperceptible degree.

He saw Raines choose her.

The second measure. The third.

Raines speaks, the usual ball formalities, your father Commander Erhart, what a remarkable family, you look like him. She responds with the right formulas. Her smile doesn’t move.

Then his hand moves.

It’s barely anything at first.

A pressure slightly lower on her waist, not quite a gesture yet, just a shift, one centimeter. Enough to be accidental. Enough to be deliberate. Y/n doesn’t react. She holds her smile and chooses her words and calculates whether she can reposition her own hand to correct the anchor without it showing.

His hand moves again.

Two centimeters. Downward. Downward and inward along her back, where he has absolutely no right to be, where none of the ball’s protocols authorize anything at all.

Y/n freezes for a fraction of a second, just one, imperceptible, then resumes the movement of the dance.

You handle it. You’ve handled worse. You’ve known men like this your whole life.

His hand moves down again.

“Your father will be pleased with our conversations tonight,” he says. “He speaks of you often.”

His voice is pleasant. Social. His fingers press into the small of her back with a pressure that is no longer ambiguous in the slightest.

Y/n smiles.

And something in her chest begins to tighten.

She doesn’t decide to leave.

That’s what she’ll analyze later, she doesn’t decide, her body decides for her, that survival mechanism that triggered without asking permission from the conscious part of her brain. The music pauses between two pieces, three seconds of silence, and in those three seconds her feet carry her toward the edge of the dance floor, then toward the side door, then into the corridor.

As if her legs had chosen for her.

The corridor is white and clean and silent and she walks to the corner, turns, and stops.

She leans her back against the wall.

And that’s when it happens.

It starts in her chest.

A tightening at first, like a hand closing around her lungs, slowly, methodically. She breathes in. The air comes but doesn’t really fill her, it stops somewhere halfway as if something is blocking the passage. She breathes in again. Same thing.

Her hands are trembling.

She looks at them, these perfect hands, trained since forever to stay still in every situation, and they are trembling, slightly at first and then plainly, and she cannot make them stop.

It’s nothing. You handle it. You’ve handled it.

But the tightening worsens instead of easing and now her legs aren’t entirely reliable and the white corridor in front of her seems slightly too bright and too small at the same time. The walls aren’t moving but she perceives them as if they’re closing in, and the muffled music from the hall resonates strangely in her ears like something distant and threatening.

She slides down the wall.

She didn’t mean to slide. Her legs decided.

She finds herself sitting on the cold floor, back against the wall, the green dress making a splash of color against the immaculate white of Gilead. Her knees pulled up against her chest. Her breathing, rapid, shallow, that cycle that spirals and feeds on itself.

“Y/n?”

Daisy comes from the cross corridor, her tray of white napkins in her hands, and she takes in the scene in a fraction of a second. She sets the tray on the console without a sound and is kneeling in front of Y/n in three seconds.

“Hey. Hey, I’m here.” Her voice is soft, stripped of all irony. “What happened?”

Y/n opens her mouth.

Nothing comes out.

It’s not that she doesn’t want to answer, it’s that the words can’t find the exit, like the air that doesn’t go far enough. She wants to say Raines, the dance, his hands… but the words stay stuck and she just shakes her head, once, her eyes apologizing for not being able to say more.

“Okay. You don’t have to talk.” Daisy settles in front of her, at the same level. “Look at me. You’re in the east corridor. You’re safe.”

Y/n looks at her. She tries to hold on to her face.

It’s not enough.

Her breathing accelerates again.

“Breathe with me. Inhale, like this, exhale…”

Y/n tries.

The air still doesn’t go far enough.

“Y/n. Inhale.”

“I’m trying.”

“I know.” Daisy puts her hands over hers. “You’re here. You’re with me.”

But the tightness won’t let go. The walls are still too close. Something in Daisy’s direct kindness brings something up in Y/n’s throat that is even worse than the panic because it feels like grief.

“Daisy.” Her voice comes out broken. “I can’t… if an Aunt walks by…”

“I know.” Daisy squeezes her hands for a second. Her eyes sweep the corridor, calculating, deciding. “You need someone else.”

“No… stay…”

“Two minutes. I promise.” She is already standing. “Two minutes.”

She is already in the corridor.

Garth is on his second perimeter round when Daisy appears in the north corridor.

He sees her from ten meters away, the missing tray, the way she’s walking too fast, the face too closed off.

He adjusts his route.

She reaches him and speaks before she even stops:

“Y/n. East corridor, at the corner. She’s not okay.”

Something contracts in his chest.

“What happened.”

“I don’t know exactly. She couldn’t tell me. She can’t speak.”

“Is she hurt?”

“No. Not physically. But she can’t breathe right and she can’t calm down and I can’t…” She stops. “She needs you.”

Four words. Placed simply, without ambiguity.

Garth doesn’t ask another question.

He’s already gone.

He finds her exactly where Daisy said.

The green stain on the immaculate white. Knees pressed tight to her chest. Shoulders rising and falling too fast. He stops two meters away.

He doesn’t move closer yet.

Because he knows Y/n. And he knows that Y/n is not someone you help by walking up on her. Y/n is someone you let see you coming.

“Y/n.”

His voice is low. Normal. Not urgent, just his usual voice, the one from the service corridor and the north garden.

She looks up.

And in her eyes there is something he has never seen before. The top layer has slipped away entirely. The perfect girl, the flawless agent, the Green who never has one glance too many, all of it has fallen away, and what remains is just a girl on a cold floor who cannot catch her breath.

Something tightens in his throat.

He crouches down. Same distance. At her level.

“I’m here. Do you see me?”

She nods.

“Good. You don’t have to talk. You don’t have to do anything.”

He moves forward one meter. Slowly.

She doesn’t pull back.

He sits down on the floor, back against the wall, beside her. Not facing her, he decided that on the way over, not to be one more gaze to bear, to be facing the same direction rather than opposite her like a problem to be solved.

Their shoulders touch.

He feels the tremor that runs through her, the uneven breathing, the tension in her entire body.

“Listen to my breathing,” he says.

He breathes slowly. With intention. In for four counts, holds for two, out for six. He doesn’t ask her to do the same, he just does it, and he lets his body be a reference point.

She tries.

The air blocks again.

“You don’t have to take it all at once. Just a little further than the last time.”

She tries again.

Blocks again.

“Breathe with me. Right here, with me.”

She tries.

The air stops halfway, as always, as if a clenched fist somewhere between her throat and her lungs is refusing to let go. Her hands close around her knees. Her shoulders rise. Everything she tries to control slips away under the very effort of controlling it.

“I… I can’t,” she says. Her voice comes out in small fragments. “I can’t…”

“I know.” He stays calm. “You keep trying to force it. Your body feels that and it resists.”

“Then what… how do I…”

He doesn’t answer immediately.

His hand has been resting open on his own thigh for a few minutes, he placed it there without thinking, an anchor for himself perhaps, or a silent offer. Ten centimeters from hers.

She sees it.

And in the exact moment when another cycle of blocked breathing makes her clench her teeth, when the walls close in one more millimeter in her perception and Raines’ hands are still somewhere on her skin despite everything, in that moment, her hand leaves her knees and lands on his.

Not gently. Not delicately.

She grabs on.

Fingers tight, knuckles white, like someone falling who finds something to hold.

He doesn’t pull his hand away.

He turns it slowly under hers and closes his fingers around hers.

And for a few seconds he stays there, holding on, breathing steadily, letting his own breathing be the only real thing in this corridor.

But it’s not enough.

He can still feel it, that short blocked cycle, the shoulders that won’t come down, the breath that can’t find its way. It’s been several minutes now and it’s no longer getting worse but it’s not getting better either, like something stuck that doesn’t know which direction to come loose.

He turns his head toward her.

He looks at her, really looks, in this corridor, with the cold light on her face and her half-closed eyes and her parted lips on that breath she can’t complete.

And he makes a decision.

“Y/n.”

She turns her eyes toward him. Her fingers don’t let go of his.

“I’m going to do something,” he says. “If you don’t want…”

“What.”

“Trust me.”

A fraction of a second of silence.

“Okay,” she says.

He leans in.

His lips find hers gently, not a question this time, not a hesitation, a deliberate and precise contact that says I know what I’m doing and why I’m doing it, and in the first instant she doesn’t really react, the surprise stills her for a second, and in that second of surprise her breath stops.

Completely.

No more short blocked cycle. No more breath that doesn’t reach its destination. Just… nothing. A complete stop.

And then, in that nothing, her lungs reset.

He feels her breathe in against him, long and deep, like someone breaking the surface after too long underwater, and the air comes in for real this time, all the way down, to the place where it had been stuck this whole time, and something in her chest finally lets go.

He should have stopped there.

That was the plan, just that, just breaking the cycle, giving her breath back, and pulling away.

But her hand in his tightens instead of letting go.

And she doesn’t pull back either.

He draws back one centimeter, just enough to sense if she moves away.

She doesn’t move away.

Her free hand rises slowly to his shoulder, her fingers finding the fabric of his jacket, and that gesture has nothing to do with the panic attack anymore and they both know it.

He comes back.

This time it’s different, slower, deeper, without the clinical urgency of the first contact. His hand leaves hers to travel up her arm, to her jaw, his fingers anchoring gently in her hair, and he kisses her in that way that is his own, that economy of gesture that leaves nothing to chance, that says I know exactly where I am and I am choosing to be here.

She responds.

Her hand on his shoulder moves up to the lapel of his jacket. She holds on the way she held on to his hand a moment ago, not out of fear this time, out of something else, out of that because he told her in the garden last week that has never quite left her chest since.

Her breathing is normal.

Completely normal.

She realizes it somewhere in the warmth of this contact, her lungs are working, the air is coming in and going out, the tightness is gone and Raines’ hands are nowhere on her skin anymore because there is only him, only his hands that are nothing like anything she experienced tonight, hands that don’t take, that hold.

They stop.

The length of one breath between them, foreheads almost touching, his hand still in her hair, hers still on his jacket.

“Your breathing,” he says softly.

“I know,” she says.

“Better?”

“Yes.”

A silence.

“That wasn’t…” she says.

“No.”

“Not only for that.”

“No.” He draws his head back slightly to look at her. In his eyes that thing she has started to recognize and that still has no name in the language of Gilead. “Not only for that.”

She looks at him.

This face in the cold light of the corridor, the line of his jaw, his eyes that are not searching for anything other than what she is going to give him or not give him.

“Garth.”

“Mm.”

“Next time you want to kiss me.”

“Yes.”

“You don’t need me to have a panic attack first.”

Something shifts on his face, and it’s the smile, that rare smile she has seen three times since she’s known him, the one that entirely changes his face and makes him unrecognizable compared to the man at the north wall.

“Noted,” he says.

“When all of this is over,” she says.

He waits.

“I want us to have time. Really. In a place where no one is watching. Without the uniforms and the protocols and…”

“We’ll have time.”

“You don’t know that.”

“No.” His hand leaves her hair, travels down to her hand, takes it again. “But that’s why I do this work. So that there can be an after where things like this are possible.”

“Things like what.”

“Things like kissing someone you want to kiss without it being an act of rebellion.”

Daisy finds them two minutes later.

She comes back from the cross corridor, tray retrieved, her face in its I’m just a Pearl doing her rounds configuration. She takes in the scene in one second, Y/n standing, her hands in Garth’s, her shoulders finally down, her breathing normal.

She sees their hands.

She sees the slightly pink cheeks.

She sees Garth at a distance that is no longer that of a Guardian on duty.

“Good,” she says simply.

One word. Placed with that brief sincerity that holds everything, the relief, the affection, that way Daisy has of approving the things that matter without making an event of it.

Garth lets go of Y/n’s hands. One step back. The Guardian reclaims his shape.

“Can she go back into the hall?” he says.

“In ten minutes. I’ll have her hold the tray. Aunt Hulda will think she was helping with the service.”

“Good.”

He looks at Y/n one last time, that look that no longer needs to hide what it is.

“Ten minutes,” he says.

“Ten minutes,” she repeats.

He heads back toward the north corridor.

His silhouette disappears around the corner.

Daisy comes over.

She hands the tray to Y/n, immediate cover, and slips her arm through hers, on the left side as always.

“Are you okay?” she says, and she means it.

“Yes.”

“Raines…”

“I’ve got it handled.”

“Y/n.”

“I really have it handled.” A pause. “Thank you for going to get him.”

Daisy shrugs slightly. Her way of saying you’d have done the same for me.

“He kissed you,” says Daisy.

“It was…”

“I can see the pink cheeks Y/n. I’m from Toronto, not a cave.”

Silence.

“Yes,” says Y/n.

“And?”

“And…” She searches for her words. She who always has the words. “And it worked.”

Daisy looks at her for a second. Then that smile, warm and a little sad and full of all the things you feel when you’re happy for someone in a world that makes happiness complicated.

“Good,” she says.

And she guides Y/n toward the hall.

Ten minutes later Y/n is back in the grand hall.

She holds her tray. Her smile is in place. Her green dress is perfect.

Nobody sees a thing.

Garth is at the north wall. He doesn’t look at her directly.

But when she takes her position and their sight lines cross for a second in the geography of the room, she sees the very slight movement of his head.

Are you okay?

She tilts hers almost imperceptibly.

I’m okay.

And for the first time in her thirteen years in this city that taught her everything except how to breathe freely, she thinks about the after.

She thinks that there is an after.

And that somewhere in that after, there is him.

That’s enough for tonight.

That’s enough to hold on.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Garth Chapin x reader fem

The gathering was held at Commander Hartley’s house, one of those mandatory evenings Gilead organized under the name of a celebration but which functioned more like an inspection, everyone dressed properly, everyone saying the right things, each person’s posture communicating exactly the correct degree of contentment.

Y/N hadn’t wanted to come.

Not because of the evening itself, she had attended dozens of them, she knew the choreography by heart, the Wives in clusters, the Commanders with their drinks, the Guardians on the margins like breathing furniture. She hadn’t wanted to come because Garth would be there, and an evening spent in the same room as Garth without being able to tell him what she thought of him required a level of self-control she did not feel inclined to provide.

They had had an argument three days earlier. Not a real argument, of course, nothing in Gilead was ever a real argument, but the Gilead equivalent of an argument: low voices and clenched jaws in the basement hallway, where they sometimes met for Mayday transmissions, that small space between the shelves of supplies where no one ever came and that smelled of cold earth and damp wood.

The disagreement was about a transfer of documents. Garth thought she was taking unnecessary risks. Y/N thought he was too cautious to the point of being useless. Neither of them had raised their voices. Neither of them had given in.

They had ended by parting without resolution, which was their usual way of ending things, and Y/N had gone back upstairs with flushed cheeks and that particular irritation he had a talent for provoking in her, that irritation that resembled something else if she wasn’t careful and which she therefore preferred not to examine too closely.

The problem with Garth, and she had spent a considerable amount of time trying to formulate this problem precisely, was that he always seemed to know exactly where he stood. Not arrogant. Just… grounded. That way he had of holding a position without needing to justify it out loud, as if his reasons belonged to him and did not need to be put to a vote. Y/N had grown up in a house where her father functioned exactly like that and she had developed toward that trait a deep and well-documented allergy.

That was not the only reason Garth irritated her. But it was the most presentable one.

The evening went smoothly for two hours.

Y/N did what was expected of her. She spoke to the right women, smiled at the appropriate moments, inclined her head to the Commanders with exactly the required degree of deference. She drank fruit juice she did not want to drink and ate hors d’oeuvres she did not want to eat and said that yes, this year the Hartleys’ garden was truly remarkable, absolutely agreed.

She saw Garth twice from a distance, standing against the back wall with the other Guardians, his face in his usual expression of professional neutrality. She did not look at him for too long. Not because she was afraid of what it might mean, but because she had decided it meant nothing at all and that decision required a minimum of effort to maintain.

The second time she saw him, he was speaking quietly with one of the Hartleys’ Guardians, something brief and functional, and he nodded once and the other man left. Garth raised his eyes for a second, not in her direction, toward the room in general, and Y/N looked away a half beat too late, which she noted and chose to ignore.

It was Daisy who created the problem.

Daisy had that particular talent for creating situations no one had anticipated and getting out of them with a disarming smile that made it seem as if everything had gone exactly as planned. It was one of the things Y/N found both admirable and deeply exhausting about her. Daisy came from the outside, she had grown up elsewhere, she had a way of inhabiting Gilead like an actress inhabits a costume, with a lightness Y/N had never quite managed to reproduce because she had grown up in it and that made a difference that could not be erased.

That evening Daisy had found a way to position herself near the piano in the main living room at the moment one of the Hartley girls had begun to play, and she had said something quietly to Y/N as she passed, something that sounded like an innocent observation about the music but was in fact a piece of Mayday information encoded in an ordinary sentence, which they sometimes did when the context did not allow for more.

Y/N took a step back to move away naturally, like someone stepping aside to let a Martha pass with a tray.

She did not see the step.

There was only one step, a very small change in level between the main living room and the antechamber, the kind of thing you notice on the way in and forget on the way out. Her right foot found empty space where it expected the floor, she lost her balance, caught herself against the wall but not quickly enough, and her ankle twisted at an angle that produced a brief sound and an immediate, sharp pain that took her breath away.

She did not fall completely. She caught herself. But she had to lean against the wall and for a few seconds she could do little more than stay there, teeth clenched, and wait for the pain to decide what it was going to do.

Daisy was beside her in an instant, her hand on her arm, her face shifting in a fraction of a second from its composed expression to something genuinely worried.

“Y/N.” Her voice, low, with that quick tension she knew how to hide behind a suitably concerned expression. “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” Y/N said through her teeth.

Which might have been true or might not, and they both knew it, and Daisy kept her hand on her arm without insisting further because that was also one of the things Y/N appreciated about her, that ability to read what was needed without being told.

Several people had turned. Not everyone, the music continued, but enough for the situation to be visible, enough for Commander Reeves, who was at the other end of the room, to turn his head.

Her father crossed the room with his usual calm, the calm of a man who managed situations without being managed by them. He assessed the ankle, assessed the room, assessed the degree of visibility of the incident with the same silent precision he applied to everything.

“Garth,” he said.

A single syllable. Garth was already moving from the back wall, Y/N saw him enter her peripheral vision and felt something tighten slightly in her chest, that irritating reflex she had not asked for and that happened anyway every time he entered her immediate space.

“Escort my daughter to the infirmary. Mrs. Hartley has a treatment room upstairs.”

It was not a question. Her father never asked questions when he could issue instructions.

She opened her mouth.

“I can”

“You’re limping,” her father said simply. And he was already heading back toward the group of Commanders, the incident filed, resolved, delegated, with that quiet efficiency that had always had the effect of making her feel like a logistical problem rather than a person.

Garth stood in front of her.

He had that expression she knew well now, after months of basements and empty hallways and whispered transmissions, that service face that showed nothing and was at the same time perfectly readable to anyone who knew him well enough. Professional neutrality on the surface. Underneath, if you knew where to look, a very precise attention to everything happening in the room.

She knew where to look. That was the problem.

“I don’t need to be escorted,” she said.

“You’re limping,” he said.

Exactly her father’s words. With exactly the same neutral tone. She did not know whether it was intentional or whether the two men had independently developed the same infuriating way of stating obvious facts as if they were sufficient to end a discussion.

“Thank you for that observation.”

He did not respond. He simply waited, with that particular patience of his that sometimes resembled indifference and was not, she knew now, but which she still could not decide whether it changed anything.

Daisy, beside her, was looking somewhere at the ceiling with the expression of someone actively trying not to smile. Y/N shot her a look. Daisy suddenly took a very keen interest in the paintings on the opposite wall.

She pushed herself away from the wall and took a step. The ankle held, but not comfortably, and the pain ran up her calf with a clarity that was difficult to ignore. She ignored it anyway, took two more steps, and stopped because the third option, which was to fall in a living room full of Commanders and their Wives, was objectively worse than everything else.

Garth made a brief gesture toward the staircase. Professional. Patient. The kind of patience that looked a little like carefully contained exasperation.

The staircase was the problem.

Not insurmountable. Just uncomfortable enough to be slow, and the slowness created a proximity she would have preferred to avoid. Garth stayed level with her without saying anything, hands behind his back, that proper Guardian posture that did not touch and did not offer touch because it was not his role to touch a Commander’s daughter.

She climbed three steps. Steadily, without rushing, careful not to limp too visibly because they were still within sight of the living room.

The fourth step was less cooperative.

She did not fall, but she had to grasp the banister with both hands and she stopped, and there was a slightly too long moment where she stood still on the staircase with an ankle deciding to be difficult and Garth waiting behind her, and she felt Daisy’s gaze on her back from the bottom of the steps, that gaze that said nothing and far too much at the same time.

“You can take my arm,” Garth said.

Neutral tone. Factual. As if commenting on the weather.

“I am capable of climbing a staircase.”

“I know.” A short pause. “It would be faster.”

She did not like that he was right. It was one of the things she generally did not like about him, that way of being right without seeming to notice it, without doing anything with it, simply being right and waiting for the rest of the world to adjust.

She took his arm.

It was steadier than she would have liked, which was not his fault but which she blamed him for anyway internally. She felt his muscles under her hand, the warmth through the fabric of his uniform, and she immediately and firmly decided not to register that information. They climbed the rest of the staircase in silence, she leaning on him more than she would have liked, he maintaining a steady pace without ever speeding up or slowing down, as if the situation were perfectly ordinary and did not deserve comment.

Which was precisely the right way to handle it. Which was precisely annoying.

At the top of the stairs she let go of his arm perhaps half a second too quickly, and she hoped he had not noticed. He gave no sign of it, at least.

The treatment room was a small space at the end of the hallway, clean, plain, with an examination table and a medicine cabinet. The Martha in charge of it, a woman in her sixties with efficient movements and the face of someone who had seen many people pass through without being particularly impressed, sat Y/N down and examined the ankle with experienced hands.

“Light sprain,” she said. “No fracture. I’ll bandage it and you can go home.”

Garth had positioned himself near the door, in his usual stance, eyes on the hallway. Properly outside and properly inside at the same time, the kind of position that was technically appropriate and still allowed him to be present.

The Martha began to bandage. Her movements were quick and precise and she worked without looking at her, focused on the ankle.

“How did it happen?” she asked.

“A step,” said Y/N.

“You were looking elsewhere.”

It was not a question either. Everyone that evening was making statements instead of asking questions.

“Apparently,” said Y/N.

She did not look toward the door. She did not need to look toward the door to know that Garth had slightly turned his head at that answer, that small movement of someone holding something back. She knew it because she knew the way he moved in a room, which was information she would have preferred not to have and which she had anyway, accumulated over months of reluctant collaboration in spaces that were too small.

The Martha finished the bandage, smoothed the edges carefully, and stepped back to assess her work.

“Avoid putting too much weight on it tonight. And the stairs, with someone.”

She said it normally, practically, without any implication, and she put away her things and left through the side door with the quiet efficiency of someone who had other places to be.

There was a silence.

Y/N and Garth in the small room, the white light of the ceiling lamp, and outside the distant sound of the gathering continuing without them.

She tested the bandage, moved her ankle carefully. Manageable. She would have liked it to hurt more, or less, something that better justified the state she was in, that tension in her chest that had nothing to do with the ankle and which she firmly attributed to the argument three days earlier.

“The documents,” she said.

No preamble. They did not need one, they had long since moved past the stage of preambles in empty spaces.

Garth turned toward her. He had left his façade expression, not entirely, but enough. That face he had in basements and empty hallways, the face of someone seriously working on something difficult and not allowing himself to find it easy. Something more direct, less guarded. She would have preferred the service expression. The service expression was easier to manage.

“This is not the moment,” he said.

“With you it’s always either too early or too late.”

“Because you choose moments when we can’t really talk.”

“Maybe if you were available at times when we can talk”

“I am available.” His voice had stayed low but there was something less flat in it, something with texture, not quite anger, something between anger and something else she did not want to identify. “You’re the one who shows up with decisions already made expecting me to approve them.”

She opened her mouth. Closed it.

That was not entirely wrong. That was precisely why it was annoying, that way he had of pointing out true things with the same tone he used for everything else, without raising his voice, without turning it into a dramatic reproach, just placing them there as facts and letting her deal with them.

“The documents have to go through this week,” she said. Less aggressive. Still firm.

“I know.” He looked at her, really looked at her, not the service look but the one underneath, the one she had only seen rarely and which each time had that effect she refused to name. “I’m looking for a route that doesn’t put three people in unnecessary danger. Give me until Thursday.”

A pause.

She looked back at him. In the white light of that small room there were no angles, no obliques, no shadows in which to dilute things. Just him and her and the two meters between them and the distant sound of the gathering.

He was sincere. She could see it, even if she would have preferred not to. He was not trying to win the argument. He was genuinely trying to find a safe way.

That was the problem with him, ultimately. Not that he was impossible to tolerate. But that in moments when she was not careful, he was very difficult not to respect.

“Until Thursday,” she said.

Silence.

“Your ankle, will it be okay?” he said.

The change of register was unexpected, enough that she did not answer immediately. It was not the Mayday tone. It was not the professional tone either. It was just a question, asked directly, by someone who wanted to know the answer.

“Yes,” she said. And then, because the room was small and the light was white and it was difficult to be imprecise in those conditions: “Probably.”

Something passed over his face. Not a smile, not quite, but something in that direction, something brief and almost imperceptible that changed the structure of his features for a second before disappearing.

She decided not to take into account the effect it had.

“We’ll go back down,” she said.

At the bottom of the staircase, Daisy was waiting for them in the antechamber with two glasses of fruit juice and an expression too innocent to be honest. She watched them arrive, assessed the distance between them, assessed their respective faces with that speed of analysis she disguised under an air of lightness and which was one of the reasons Mayday had recruited her.

“So?” she said.

“Light sprain,” said Y/N.

“I meant you two.”

Garth returned to his place against the wall of the living room without answering, with the naturalness of someone who had not heard or who had decided the sentence did not deserve a response, and Y/N could not quite decide which one it was.

She took one of the glasses and looked at Daisy with the look she reserved for people who thought they were funny.

“Drink your juice,” she said.

Daisy drank her juice with the calm smile of someone who had noticed exactly what she wanted to notice and needed no confirmation.

“He helped you on the stairs,” she said, like a weather observation.

“He was doing his job.”

“Hmm.” Daisy rotated her glass between her fingers. “He checked twice that you were okay on the way down.”

Y/N took a sip of juice. “I didn’t notice.”

“No,” said Daisy. Her smile did not move. “That’s what I thought.”

On the other side of the room, the music resumed. Y/N looked straight ahead, toward the living room and its lights and its good manners, and without turning she felt Garth’s presence against the wall behind her, steady and solid like something one could lean on if one decided to, which she had not decided and had no intention of deciding, and she drank her fruit juice to the last drop with the concentration of someone who had something else to do than think about what she was thinking.

Daisy said nothing more.

She did not need to.

Garth Chapin x reader

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The word stayed in you all winter like an ember beneath ash.

You did not show it. You had learned since childhood the art of not showing, that particular art Gilead taught women the way others teach piano or embroidery, with the same insistence, the same conviction that this was an essential skill for survival in a well-ordered world. You knew how to hold your face the way one holds a plate, flat and clean and without spillage. You knew that the walls of Gilead were not made only of stone.

But the word was there. Alive. And the other one. Love.

You carried them together in your chest without looking at them too directly, the way one looks at the sun from an angle, never straight on, because looking straight on would have made the thing real in a way you were not yet ready to bear.

January brought snow and with it a particular quality of silence, the kind only snow knows how to make, a way of muffling the sounds of the outside world that made the interior sounds more audible. You heard your own breathing more clearly. You heard, it seemed, more of your own interior voice.

You continued to cross paths in the ordinary spaces of the house. The hallway in the morning. The entryway on returning from prayer meetings. The garden now taken under its white and silent layer, where you went sometimes despite the cold because your mother found it virtuous to brave the seasons, and because you found, for your part, that winter light had something the other seasons' light did not, this way of being at once poorer and sharper, stripped of all ornament, honest.

He continued not to look at you in the presence of witnesses. You continued not to seek him out with your eyes in rooms where others were present. You had developed, both of you and without ever having spoken of it, a kind of shared geography of safe spaces and unsafe ones, an invisible map you each read with the same quiet precision.

That too, you learned to name. Not right away. Later.

It was a Tuesday near the end of January that something changed in texture.

Your mother was in bed with a fever the doctor had judged not serious but sufficient to keep her there, which was rare… your mother was never sick, or rather never permitted illness to immobilize her, as if falling ill were a form of disorder she refused to allow herself. The house had therefore, that day, something unusual about it, a slight disorganization in its ordinary breathing, the Marthas coming and going with teas and trays, your father locked in his office with his officers, the ordinary surveillance redistributed.

You were in the library.

Your father's library was a room you had access to on days he was absent, within the limits of what Gilead permitted women to have in a library: approved texts, bound sermons, annotated editions of the Scriptures in their authorized versions. You knew precisely what you would not find there. You went anyway, for the light.

The January light in that room, in the afternoon, passed between the half-drawn curtains and laid across the spines of the books an oblique clarity, golden despite the season, that made that row of bound backs into something almost beautiful. You were standing near the back shelf, your hand resting on the wood of the furniture, searching for a word for that particular light, the kind that falls on motionless objects and renders them momentarily alive.

The door was ajar.

You heard him before you saw him. His steps in the hallway, that regular rhythm you now knew better than most things you knew, and a slight pause in front of the door, the fraction of a second of a man who sees that a door is open and assesses the situation, as he assessed all situations, with that quiet precision you had learned to recognize in him.

He entered.

Not far. Two steps barely beyond the threshold, the way one enters a room to verify it is in order. He saw you. He stopped.

A moment passed.

"Miss Reeves," he said.

The neutral, correct tone, the tone of public spaces. You noted that this was not a public space.

"Garth," you said.

And then you did not know what else to say, because everything you would have wished to say had no shape in words, or rather had too many shapes at once, and you stood there with your hand on the shelf and him with his two steps into the room and the oblique light between you on the spines of the forbidden books.

It was he who spoke. His voice had shifted register, imperceptibly, sufficiently for you to hear it.

"The light is changing," he said.

You raised your eyes toward him. He was looking at the shelf. The way the January clarity was slowly dying there, sliding downward as the afternoon advanced.

"It descends," you said. "In winter it always descends. In summer it rises."

A pause.

"I hadn't noticed that."

It was not a formula. It was someone saying a true thing simply, without ornament, the way he said all true things. You recognized that tone now, the difference between his surface words and his underneath words.

"Ruth taught me to look," you said, and you did not know why you were speaking of Ruth, except that it was true and you wanted to give him something true.

He looked at you then. Not briefly this time. With an attention that had time to settle, to truly see you.

"Ruth," he repeated.

"The Martha. Before." A short pause. "She gave me books."

You did not know why you were telling him this. You knew perfectly well. To tell him this was to tell him something essential about what you were on the inside, beneath the tended garden and the Commander's daughter and the hands folded on your knees during prayers. It was to extend toward him something you had never extended toward anyone.

His expression did not change. There was no surprise, no withdrawal, none of that swift judgment you had learned to dread in the eyes of Gilead.

There was something else.

A recognition, perhaps. The kind one feels when one hears someone pronounce, in the foreign language one speaks in secret, the words one had believed belonged only to oneself.

"Books," he said softly. And in the way he said that word there was something that resembled tenderness.

You heard a Martha's footsteps in the hallway. He took a half-step back, resumed his Guardian's posture in the doorframe, and the moment closed the way water closes over a stone.

But there had been a door.

For the first time, clearly, without your needing to search underneath or to guess, there had been a door.

Spring returned with its new light, that March light one had forgotten all winter and that surprised you nonetheless every year, this way it had of being at once too strong and too gentle, impatient.

The words between you became more frequent.

Always in the empty spaces, always in the permitted languages, the observations about the weather and the seasons and the visible things of the world. But more frequent, and sometimes longer by a fraction, as if something had slightly loosened, as if the library in January had established between you a kind of tacit permission to venture a little further into those territories that had no approved name.

He told you one April evening in the garden that starlings always returned to the same tree year after year.

You told him the linden tree at the back of the garden had been planted before your mother was born and that she did not know it.

He said that certain things did not need to be known in order to exist.

You kept that sentence for a long time. You keep it still.

It was in May that you understood he was carrying something too.

You had known it in a certain way since autumn, since the way he looked at the sky with you, since amber, since alive. But there is a difference between knowing a thing obliquely, in the angles, in the light from the side, and seeing it directly.

It was a late afternoon. You were returning from a Wives' meeting with your mother, the car had stopped in the driveway, Garth had opened the curbside door for your mother first, as protocol required. Your mother had stepped out and said something to a Martha waiting on the front steps.

And there had been that moment of a few seconds, your mother turned toward the house, the other Guardians at the far end of the driveway, and you standing between the car and the garden, and him at that calculated distance that signified nothing.

He turned his eyes toward you.

Not for long. The duration of a breath. But something in that look you had not yet seen there, something less neutral, something that carried a question or perhaps more than a question, something that resembled what you would have read in the October light if the October light had been capable of wanting.

You had to lower your eyes.

Not from fear, not entirely, but because there was something in that look you could not sustain without it showing on your face, and your face was still Gilead's property, still the flat and clean plate, even if you yourself had become, on the inside, something more difficult to contain.

That evening in your room you did not search for words.

You only held, carefully, the new certainty.

He was carrying something too. And that something, you thought now, perhaps had the same name as what you were carrying.

It was the last week of May when the Eye came to the house.

Not for you. You told yourself that immediately, in the first second when you heard the knock at the front door, that particular knock that was not a visitor's knock but an authority's knock, measured and unhurried, the knock of someone who knows the door will open. You told yourself it was not for you because there was nothing to find, because you had been careful, because the geometry of your silences had been exact. You told yourself all of this in the space of a single breath and you believed almost none of it.

There were two of them. You saw them from the top of the stairs, through the banister's bars, that framed view of the entrance hall below where your father was already standing with the composed authority of a Commander who has nothing to fear and intends to show it. Two men in the long dark coats, the small eye pinned at their chest. One of them was carrying a folder.

You did not move.

Your mother appeared beside you, silently, the way she appeared in moments of danger, already assembled, already correct, her hands clasped in front of her at the precise angle of a Wife who is present but not intrusive. She touched your arm once, lightly, a touch that meant stillness and downstairs and your face all at once, and you descended with her, unhurried, because hurrying would have been a reaction and reactions showed things.

In the entrance hall your father was speaking to the taller of the two men in the measured tones of someone who has been interrupted at work and is tolerating it with grace. The folder lay open between them. You did not look at it directly. You looked at the middle distance, that careful gaze your mother had taught you for official occasions, present without being curious, respectful without being afraid.

You were afraid.

Not the clean, nameable fear of a specific threat but something worse, the fear that does not know its own shape yet, that sits in the chest like water that has not found its level, moving with every small shift of the room.

The shorter Eye looked at you.

Not long. The practiced look of someone cataloguing a space, the same inventory look you had seen in other official eyes over the years. He noted you. He noted your mother. He returned to the folder.

"Routine verification," your father said, in your direction, in the tone he used when he wanted you to understand that a thing was under control and that your understanding of this was itself part of the control.

You nodded. One movement, small and clean.

And then, without meaning to, without having decided to, your eyes moved to the garden door at the end of the hallway.

Garth was standing there.

He must have come in from outside when he heard the knock, because that was his function, because the presence of Eyes in a residence required the Head Guardian's awareness. He was standing at exactly the correct distance, in exactly the correct posture, his face holding exactly the correct expression of attentive neutrality.

But his eyes found yours for one fraction of a second.

One fraction only. Less than a breath. And in that fraction there was nothing that anyone present could have named or reported, nothing that deviated from perfect professional form.

But you read it the way you had learned to read everything in oblique light.

Stay still. I am here. Stay still.

You looked away.

Your mother was answering a question from the taller Eye in her warm and certain voice, the voice of a woman with nothing to hide because she had organized her life precisely around the principle of having nothing to hide. Your father had closed the folder with a hand that did not tremble.

You held your own hands loose at your sides and you breathed and you kept your face flat and clean and you did not look at the garden door again.

The Eyes stayed forty minutes.

They left with the folder and without ceremony, the same measured knock in reverse, the door closing behind them with a sound that was perfectly ordinary and that you felt in your chest like something released.

Your father said: "Neighbors on the east side. Nothing that concerns us."

Your mother said: "Of course."

You said nothing. You were looking at the place on the hallway floor where the afternoon light fell in a long pale stripe, and you were breathing, and you were not thinking about anything except the breathing and the light and the fact that the floor was solid beneath your feet.

Later, much later, after dinner and prayers and your mother's kiss on your forehead and the closing of your bedroom door, you sat at the edge of your bed in the dark and you understood what had frightened you most.

Not the Eyes. Not the folder. Not even the question of what they might have known or seen or been told.

What had frightened you most was the fraction of a second when your eyes had moved to the garden door before you had chosen to move them. That involuntary motion. That instinct that had acted before the careful, trained part of you could intervene.

Gilead had taught you to control your face, your hands, your voice, the angle of your gaze. It had not taught you, because it could not have known it needed to, how to control what your body did when it was afraid and sought, without asking permission, the one thing that felt like safety.

You sat with that knowledge for a long time in the dark.

It was its own kind of door.

June arrived, and with it the heat and the long evenings, and something else as well, a new tension in the way the days organized themselves, as if spring had been an accumulation and summer were the moment when accumulated things sought a form.

Your mother spoke of marriage more often.

You heard that word and it did something strange in your chest, not exactly pain, rather the awareness of a limit, of an edge, of a place beyond which the world you had built in secret in the angles and the oblique light ceased to be possible.

You did not speak of it. There was no one to speak to.

Except that certain evenings, in the garden, you found words for other things, and he received them, and you received his, and in that exchange that bore no other name there was a way of saying the essential things all the same.

One evening he said: "Some things are worth keeping for a long time."

You said: "Even if one cannot show them."

"Especially if one cannot show them."

A pause. The sky above the garden had that summer color that is not quite blue and not quite golden. You searched for a word. You did not find one.

Then, after a silence that had its own weight:

"I won't be leaving anytime soon," he said.

That was all. Five words, like it will be cold tonight, like all the surface sentences behind which you had learned to read. Five perfectly innocuous words that a Guardian could say to a Commander's daughter without anyone finding anything in them worth noting or reporting.

But you heard them with the part of you that read beneath words.

And the part of you that read beneath words understood this: he knew what your mother was saying about marriage. He knew what it meant for you. And he was choosing, in the only language permitted to him, to tell you he would stay. That you were not alone at this edge you were approaching.

You thought of the fraction of a second in the hallway. Your eyes moving to the garden door before you had chosen to move them.

You looked at the sky with no exact color.

"Good," you said.

And in the way you said that word there was everything else you could not say. And in the way he heard that word, you saw from his profile that he had heard all of it.

It was a way of speaking.

It was, you understood that summer, the only way of truly speaking that existed in Gilead, for those who had learned to look at light where it fell, from an angle, in the corners, in the spaces that surveillance forgot to occupy.

You were twenty years old.

You did not yet know what it would become, this thing you each carried, these words that were not words, this invisible map of two people who had learned to exist in the margins of the world in

But you knew this:

Someone else knew the color amber.

Someone else knew that candlelight is alive.

And in a world that had decided everything must have an approved name and an assigned place, to be seen by someone searching for the same things in the same oblique light… that was already something that resembled freedom.

Even on the days it felt, more precisely, like something to lose.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I Hope you enjoyed it as much as part 1 !

Garth x reader fem

The testaments

*****************************

The nightmare had begun like all the others.

Not with a precise image, never with something you could name and confront directly. With an atmosphere. A light that wasn’t right, too red at the edges, too white at the center. Corridors that never ended. The feeling of searching for something you had put down somewhere and could no longer find, something important, something whose absence grew in your chest as the corridors stretched longer.

And then the faces.

Faces from Gilead, the Aunts, the Eyes, Guardians whose features you couldn’t see but whose gaze you felt like a physical pressure on your shoulders, on your neck, everywhere at once.

And among all that, someone you were looking for and who was never where you looked, never in the corridor you took, always around a turn you never managed to reach.

A voice calling your name,

Y/N, Y/N and you knew it was him but you couldn’t find where it was coming from and the corridors kept going and the red light intensified along the walls and…

You heard yourself make a sound.

Not a scream. Something more muffled, more involuntary, the kind of sound you make when the body decides to leave the dream before the mind has time to understand what’s happening. Short, caught in your throat, followed by the abrupt awakening.

Your eyes open on the ceiling.

The reddish light filtering under the door from the corridor. Your heart beating too hard and too fast in your chest, dull and frantic, like someone knocking on a door from the inside.

Your room. Ardua Hall. The crucifix on the wall. The narrow bed. The window too high that only let in gray sky even in full daylight.

The dream was unraveling at the edges but the residue remained, that feeling of searching without finding, that pressure in your chest that hadn’t yet received the message that you were awake and safe, as much as one could be here.

You placed your hand flat over your heart.

Checked that it was beating.

It was beating.

In the corridor, footsteps.

Light and quick, someone approaching from outside with the gait of someone who had heard something and made a decision before fully evaluating it.

Footsteps you would have recognized among a thousand, in any corridor, in any city, because you had known them for five years and some things imprinted themselves in memory on a level that had nothing to do with conscious effort.

A stop in front of your door.

A silence of two seconds, someone listening, waiting, calculating.

Then three knocks. Very soft. Almost imperceptible in the silence of three in the morning.

You looked at the door without moving.

Curfew had been in place since ten. You could feel it in the thickness of the silence outside, in the quality of the darkness, in that something still and flat the night held in its deepest hours, three in the morning, maybe a little later. No one had a legitimate reason to knock on a Pearl’s door at that hour.

Except someone whose night post was in the exact corridor your room opened onto.

Three knocks again. The same softness.

You got up.

Two centimeters of opening.

Garth.

In service uniform, dark trousers, navy top, his feet still in his patrol shoes.

His hair in that in-between state between the order of the beginning of his shift and the gradual disarray of the late night, slightly undone in the way it was when he ran a hand through it without thinking, that gesture he had always had when something was on his mind.

His eyes found you in the crack immediately.

They moved over your face in two seconds, quick assessment, risk calculation, and beneath that something else, something that appeared the moment he saw your eyes in the dimness and looked like relief.

— I heard, he said very quietly.

Not a question. Not an explanation. Just that, two words that held everything necessary.

You glanced down the corridor over his shoulder. Empty. The reddish light, the silence of the sleeping building, no one in sight in either direction.

You opened the door wider.

He stepped inside.

The door closed behind him, the latch set with that care he had for movements that should make no sound. He scanned the room in three seconds, old field habit, automatic check, window, blind spot, nothing to report, and then he really looked at you.

You were standing in the middle of the room in your nightshirt, hair loose over your shoulders, arms lightly crossed over your chest in that gesture you make when you try to keep yourself warm from the inside. The nightmare was still there, not in the images but in your body, your heart not fully slowed yet, your shoulders still a notch too high, your eyes carrying that slightly dazed quality of a brutal awakening you hadn’t quite come back from.

He didn’t say are you okay because he could see you weren’t.

He said:

— Come here.

You crossed the two meters without thinking.

His arms closed around you with that solidity that had never changed in five years, not in Montreal, not in Toronto, not in any of the temporary apartments Mayday had assigned you before the mission, and not here either, not even Gilead had managed to change that.

That specific way of holding you that said I’m here, you’re here, the rest can wait, and to which your body had been responding for so long it had become a reflex.

Your cheek against his chest. His hand in your hair, the other at your back.

His warmth.

His heart under your ear, steady, stable, alive. That rhythm you knew in the dark, that you would have recognized with your eyes closed among all the others.

Something in your chest began, very slowly, to loosen.

— The same nightmare? he asked quietly.

He knew. He had known for a long time, the recurring nightmares had started six months after your arrival in Gilead, and even without direct contact he had eventually known, through the signs that people who pay attention to others always learn to read.

— More or less, you said. The corridors. The light. I was looking for you and I couldn’t find you.

His hand in your hair tightened slightly.

— I’m here.

— I know. Your voice still came out with blurred edges, not quite steady. In the dream you’re never there. That’s the problem with dreams.

— You would have found me.

— You don’t know that.

— I do. That quiet, slightly stubborn certainty that had always been his, unchanged by the years, untouched by Gilead. You would have found me.

You stayed like that for several minutes.

The silence of Ardua Hall at three in the morning, not a peaceful silence, a curfew silence, a surveillance silence, everything this country compressed into the dark hours so it would hold until dawn. Somewhere outside, a clock. The usual draft under the too-high window lifting the edge of the curtain.

Your heart eventually slowed.

Your shoulders lowered.

The pressure in your chest faded inch by inch.

— I miss the apartment at night, you said quietly. During the day I manage. At night it’s different. The creaky floorboard, the living room where we slept more often than in our bed.

A soft sound left him, something between a laugh and a sigh, very low.

— The couch.

— You say it like it’s ridiculous.

— I never said that. His voice was warm in your hair. I think about the couch too.

— Liar.

— I think about the coffee, he admitted. The machine that’s too slow. Saturday mornings.

Saturday mornings. The market downstairs you heard before you saw it, voices and carts and smells rising up to the half-open window. Him still half asleep with his coffee too hot and you leaning on the counter and that particular Saturday morning light in Toronto that didn’t exist anywhere else.

— We’ll go back, you said.

— We’ll go back.

You lifted your head.

He looked at you very closely in the low orange light of the bedside lamp, and in his eyes was what you had read there for five years, that way he looked at you that had no exact name but that you would have recognized with your eyes closed, that Gilead and its uniforms and protocols had not managed to completely cover.

— You’re risking something being here, you said.

— Yes.

— And you’re here anyway.

— I was in the corridor and I heard you.

Simple. Direct. As if the rest was obvious and didn’t need explaining. I couldn’t stay outside.

Your hand rose to his jaw, that gesture, always that gesture, for five years, your way of saying things words couldn’t reach as well. He closed his eyes under your palm, one second, two.

And you kissed him.

Softly.

Not rushed, not because there wasn’t urgency, but because you chose to set it aside for something slower, fuller. His lips on yours in the silence of the room, his hand sliding up to your neck with that precise gentleness he had always had, and in that single contact you felt everything the forty days still held, the weight of what remained to cross and the quiet certainty of what waited on the other side.

He smiled against your mouth.

— What, you breathed.

— Nothing. His lips still close to yours, his voice very low. I’m glad you opened the door.

— How many times would you have knocked before leaving.

He thought for half a second.

— As many as it took.

He didn’t leave right away.

You sat on the edge of the narrow bed, him with his back against the wall, you against him, his hand holding yours resting on his leg, and you spoke in low voices about small, real things. Things that belonged to a Toronto apartment and to five years of ordinary life you had put on hold for Mayday and that were waiting forty days ahead.

The silly argument on a Saturday morning about how to arrange books, by author or by color, a fundamental and entirely pleasant disagreement that lasted forty minutes and ended in a cheerful stalemate because neither of you truly gave in on that kind of thing.

The plant in the entryway you had managed to kill in three weeks despite his very precise instructions.

The restaurant on the corner that always closed too early on Sundays and that you always reached too late, that had become a kind of private joke, a tradition of punctual failure.

Small things.

Things that were waiting.

At some point your head dropped onto his shoulder.

He rested his chin in your hair.

You stopped talking.

The silence of the room, the low light, the Gilead night on the other side of the door and the too-high window, and between you that specific, familiar warmth that had not changed over the years and that nineteen months of infiltration had not cooled.

— Go back before five, you murmured without moving. The morning round…

— Four forty. I know.

— You didn’t sleep at all.

— I slept before my shift.

— Garth.

— Y/N.

He said your name the same way you said his, without argument in it, just the name, like an answer in itself.

You smiled into the fabric of his shirt.

— Night shift because of me.

— Night shift with you, he corrected quietly. That’s different.

He left at four thirty.

Standing without a sound, he checked the corridor through the slight opening and turned back to you one last time. You were still sitting on the edge of the bed, hair loose, your eyes no longer carrying anything of the brutal awakening from earlier.

He placed his hand on your cheek.

A light pressure. His fingers against your skin.

— Sleep, he said.

— You’re the one working.

— And you sleep. His eyes in yours in the low light. The nightmare doesn’t come back twice in the same night.

— You don’t know that.

— No. Something soft in his voice. But I say it anyway.

He kissed your forehead, simply, his lips resting there for a second, and he left.

The door closed without a sound.

You lay back down.

The ceiling. The wooden slats. The reddish light under the door. And outside, in the corridor, Garth’s footsteps resuming their patrol rhythm, steady, measured, the sound of someone doing his job.

There.

A few meters away.

You closed your eyes.

That night you did not dream of endless corridors or red light or someone you searched for and never found.

You dreamed of Saturday morning, of coffee too hot, of the market you hear before you see it, and of an argument about books that didn’t matter and that was perfectly, entirely yours.

*****************************