@ryderxaeron
setting: thane house / 2012.
Stupid. Why is every man in her life so fucking stupid sometimes? Why are they all such goddamn hot heads, so eager to pull their guns and so dedicated to the brotherhood of the club that they’re willing to jump in front of fucking bullets for each other? In this case, she’s left feeling torn ---- Ryder is someone that she has grown to genuinely care about, someone she feels a maternal pull over ever since his scrawny ass had wandered into a club family dinner with a chip on his shoulder and obvious mommy issues (and daddy issues to match, but those are hardly her area of expertise). There’s a strange pull she feels to him, and the desire to take care of him and help him through the shit show that is life in Olympus is one that she couldn’t deny even if she wanted to. So seeing her husband drag him into their house with a couple of bullets in him, face pale and his blood dripping all over her hardwood floors isn’t something she’s comfortable seeing, even if she knows that this is part of the life. But Rowan has always been good at compartmentalizing when it comes to things like this, and she works quickly to keep him from bleeding out on her table, her husband filling her in on what had happened.
Which is where she ends up torn. Because while she wants to immediately jump into the defensive and tell Ryder how stupid he is for jumping in front of a bullet, the fact that he had done it at all had kept said bullet from landing in it’s target of Andy --- so she can’t help but be grateful, too. It’s confusing, to say the least, but she pushes it to the background while she finishes up what she’s doing. After all is said and done, they move Ryder’s unconscious body to the guestroom and Rowan sets up camp on the slightly uncomfortable arm chair in the corner of the room. She drags it a little closer to the bed and makes a mental note to put it in the dumpster behind the club house tomorrow and get something else as she shifts in an attempt to get comfortable. Ryder is, for all intents and purposes, fine. He’s out of the woods and Rowan knows that though he’ll certainly be uncomfortable and in a considerable deal of pain for the next little bit, he’ll be okay. Still, she stays in the guest room with him for a few hours while he sleeps off the blood loss and shock and allows his body to begin the healing process, even if just to ease her peace of mind because God knows that if she didn’t, she’d just be peaking her head in every five minutes anyway to check on him.
She leans forward in the chair when Ryder begins to wake up, her body still as if any movement is going to shatter the moment and he’ll slip right through her fingers again, a fear that she hadn’t realized even existed until she’d been digging a bullet out of his shoulder hours previously. “Hey kid,” her voice is soft when he opens his eyes, the smallest of smiles tugging up on her lips. “Don’t ever fucking do that again.”
