#tosf

“C’mon,” Nadiya said. “This is the first day the doc said I could have caffeine again.”

Remy gave a long, quiet sigh. “Okay,” he said, and swung his legs back onto the roof, hopping down from the ledge. “It won’t keep you up?”

“It won’t keep you  up?” Nadiya countered.

“Nah,” Remy said. “Sometimes helps, actually.”

“Well, I’ve been sleeping a ton lately, and a cup of coffee only lasts about an hour for me, so I’m good,” Nadiya said.

A ghost of a smile flickered across Remy’s face. “How much coffee did you have when you were in grad school? Per day, rough estimate.”

“Five cups? It was pretty shitty stuff, though. Low caffeine. Sometimes instant.”

Remy followed Nadiya back into the building and down the stairs to the penthouse. Grace had flown to Las Vegas earlier that day to deal with the whole almost-an-entire-building-being-destroyed issue on Nadiya’s old campus. Jonesy had gone to bed around eleven, lab goggles still on her head. Mary Sage had curled up an hour earlier, and Irene had been asleep at nine-thirty, for some godforsaken reason (“a steady sleep schedule is important for mental and physical health, Nadiya,” she’d reprimanded when Nadiya scoffed). The apartment was quiet as Nadiya padded across the kitchen to the coffeemaker, measured out the grounds into a filter, filled the water tank. The soft sputtering of the machine started to fill the space, along with the familiar, comforting smell of freshly-brewed coffee.

“So,” Nadiya said, pulling up one of the mismatched chairs to the table. Remy forewent the chair entirely and sat on the table itself. “You’ve been avoiding me.”

Remy jolted, looking up at her from under the hood of his sweatshirt. “No, I haven’t!”

“Liar,” Nadiya said, but not unpleasantly. “I got back from the hospital a week ago and you haven’t said a word to me.”

He blanched as much as his complexion allowed him to – for Remy, this mostly meant his eyes widened so Nadiya could see the white all the way around the dark brown iris. “Oh, God, Nad, I’m so sorry, I should’ve asked how you were doing, I –”

“No, idiot, that’s not what I meant,” Nadiya said, exasperated. “I’m fine. I’m good.  But it doesn’t seem like you are.”

“How are you good? I almost killed you!” Remy said, his voice growing higher even as it stayed quiet so as not to wake anyone else. “I – I fucking impaled  you on your own arm, your heart stopped beating, you were d-dead –”

Nadiya realized quite suddenly that Remy was crying. It was like her brain had rewritten every moment around when he’d started, because she wasn’t sure when he’d gone from not crying to crying, but he certainly was now, one hoodie sleeve pressed to his face, tears flowing thick and fast down his cheeks, shoulders shaking. “You were d-dead,” he repeats, “and I killed  you, and I fucking kill everything I touch.”

“What? No, you don’t,” Nadiya said. She gave up on the chair and climbed up onto the table with him. “Remy. Remy! Hey, I’m here, I’m alive, I’m okay. We’re all okay.”

“Not my parents,” Remy whispered, and his breathing sounded painful, sobs wrenched from his throat between words. “They’re dead, a-and my brother’s gym is never going to make any money, and Xander would be better off without me in his life, and –”

Nadiya steeled herself, then wrapped her arms around Remy’s shoulders in the tightest hug she could manage.

Immediately, Remy’s arms went around her chest and clutched the back of her sweater like a lifeline. His head dropped onto her shoulder. She could barely hear the muffled words: I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

Nadiya held him there, side by side, wrapped around each other, for longer than she could remember holding anyone, including Mary Sage. She felt the shoulder of her sweater growing progressively damper. She found she didn’t care.

Eventually, the coffeemaker stopped its soft sputtering, and the helpless shaking of Remy’s shoulders died down to a tremble, his arms dropping from around her. Nadiya hopped down from the table and filled two mugs, putting sugar in hers and pressing the other into Remy’s hands. He wrapped his fingers around it and took a sip, letting out a shaky sigh. “Sorry,” he said again. His voice was still raspy with tears.

“It’s okay,” Nadiya said, getting back onto the table with her own mug. “Um. I want to say something real, for like a second, but you have to pay close attention because I’m not saying it again, okay?” She stared down into her coffee. “You’re… you’re not just a good guy, Remy. You’re a good friend, and you can relate to other people better than any of us except for maybe Irene. You’re wicked smart, and brave as hell, even if that sometimes verges into some pretty dumbass shit. We –” She stopped and corrected herself. “I couldn’t have gotten through all this without you. I don’t blame you for anything that happened. It was all Martine. And as for the whole anyone  would be better off without you part…”

She looked up, and it was so easy to meet Remy’s eyes. It was always easy with him in a way that wasn’t easy with most people. “It fucking sucked, thinking you were dead,” she said quietly. “And that’s not me trying to blame you for getting caught. Again, that’s on Martine, and she’s going to rot in prison, good riddance. But it was like a piece of us was missing. And I can’t imagine that’s not the way your brother and his kid feel. Okay? There’s no way they’re better off without you than with you.”

“But I lost American Ninja Warrior,” Remy said, and then abruptly laughed shakily, wiping his nose with his sleeve. “I guess when I say it like that and we just stopped somebody from taking over the world it’s not as big of a deal.”

“Who cares if you messed up on TV one time?” Nadiya said. “You saved the world on TV last week. You saved my life, too. By the way. I don’t… I’m still not sure what happened with that.” Nadiya shifted, and to cover her discomfort, took a sip of her coffee. Those moments were still jumbled in her head, a chaos of pain and a floating, disconnected sensation in a sea of white and a tugging in her chest. “I don’t think that would’ve happened without you. Fuck, without you, I feel like Mary Sage wouldn’t have stuck around past around day one, so I gotta thank you for that. Thanks to you I have a girlfriend, I guess.” She nudged him with her elbow.

“Can’t believe I missed that, by the way,” Remy said. “She, uh… she told me she liked you way back when we were kidnapped in Nevada.”

“Took me a little longer to figure it out,” Nadiya admitted. “Not much longer, but a bit. I’m still waiting on the teasing.”

Remy gave another watery laugh and lifted his mug to his lips with shaky hands. “I’ll work on it.”

“Anyway. I just… I might have almost died, but you got fucking brainwashed or whatever.”

“It wasn’t a big –”

“Hey.” Nadiya cut him off. “You weren’t there. Well, you know, kind of. You didn’t see yourself. It was like  you were dead. Like… there was nothing behind your eyes. It was scary as fuck to see, so I don’t know how it must’ve felt. And you haven’t said a word about it.”

“It felt like… nothing,” he said after a long moment. “I can remember it. Which I dunno whether that’s better or worse. But it was like I didn’t have a body? Or maybe I didn’t have a mind. Like I was just a little to the left of everything, so I couldn’t use my brain to think and I couldn’t control what I was doing, and I couldn’t feel anything… and then when you – when you got hurt and fell and – it felt like something wrapped around me and yanked me back into my body. And then it all sort of hit at once, all the memories of –” He shivered. “I don’t remember what they did to me. Just Sylvane knocking me out, and then being brought to the gala and all the shit that went down there, and staying with Martine, and doing whatever she said. Her voice felt like – like a leash? It was just dragging me wherever she wanted me to go, whatever she wanted me to do, and I couldn’t help it. I could see myself hurting you, and I couldn’t stop. And then it just all hit me at once, and I was back and I thought you were dead, and – God.” He ran his hand over his face, then through his hair, knocking his hood back. “It was fucked up, Nad, I think it was pretty fucked up.”

“It sounds fucked up,” Nadiya agreed. “Drink your coffee.”

Remy drank his coffee. “It just didn’t feel okay to say anything about it when you had a literal hole in your chest.”

“Well, it’s closing up now.” Nadiya tapped lightly at the bandages on her midsection. “All good here. So it’s okay now. Yeah?”

Remy let out a long sigh that started out shaky and got deep until it sounded like it was drawing every bit of air from his chest so he could replace it all. “Yeah. Thanks, Nad.” He tipped his mug up and drained the last of his coffee. “I think I should probably get some sleep. You should, too. You’re still healing.”

“We both are,” Nadiya said as Remy climbed off the table. “Night, Remy.”