sorry i didnât answer your message im consumed by a grief that never leaves me and everything feels pointless and agonizing, i have nothing funny or uplifting to say and have spent my days sitting in a dark room grappling with a deep seated emptiness i cannot explain or fill, i hope youâre doing well though talk soon
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Having been sold off to the Hero Public Safety Commission from a young age, you've been told what to do your entire life. Luckily for you, you had your best friendâKeigo Takamiâby your side. But all of that changes after making the reckless decision to kiss him in your too-small bed.
Content Warnings: angst, smut and fluff, bestfriends to lovers to rivals to rivals with benefits to lovers, don't take the rivals part too serious, semi-public sex (on top of a high-rise, in front of a window and in a changing room), unprotected & protected p in v sex, creampies, fingering, oral (f and m receiving), implied loss of virginity on both sides, multiple orgasms, squirting, a fuckton of hurt, yearning, misunderstandings, fuck the HPSC and their parents, petty games, reader has a quirk, hurt/comfort, inaccurate timeline (Iknow iknow), pierced Keigo!!!
word count: 22.7k
A/n: I'm so happy I found my drafts of this fic that I made somewhere late last year. The first 1.5k were made last year and I finally decided to expand on it for the Hawks lovers. Art on the left by @/melwakame on x & art on the right by @/kadeart on x. Divider by @/cafekitsune
laying side by side on the way too small bed, especially accounting for the crimson wings that are bigger than the bed itself, you find yourself staring into those golden eyes, close enough that you can see the specks of amber in them.
One of the wings is draped over you, crimson feathers twitching every so often, as if whispering against your skin.
Keigo is retelling a story he overheard from one of the handlers. Giggles fill the room, quiet but genuine.
If either one of your handlers found you two, side by side, in the same room, socializing, you two would be dead. Figuratively (âŚyou hope).
They would call it an distraction, the two perfect weapons as they call you two, talking about life beyond the walls of the life they carved out for you. The prison that your parents sold you off to when you two were younger with sweet smiles and promises that only benefited those who failed you.
The walls hereâin this cramped room, bare, save for a bed and a dresserâseem brighter. Not literally, everywhere you look itâs the same industrial gray walls and even floors. No colors, not even floorboards, just concrete.
No personal touch, because that would mean you have something of your own, and they canât have that. No, your lives belong to them, those who pretend to guide heroes. No it seems brighter because of him.
You scoot a little closer to Keigo, not that there is any space left on the bed. In here its just Keigo and you not the names the Commission gave you, names that you didnât even choose yourself but were assigned to you two the moment you got sold off. All sense of self being stripped away.
Well they certainly tried to, but that didnât stop you and Keigo from becoming friends when younger, best friends even. Sneaking off together to have some time for yourselves.
At age 8 he gave you one of his small feathers, alive, twitching, and more importantly, able to pick up your heartbeat if you were to press it to your chest. So I know you're still with me he said with a toothy grin on his face.
It has been there, under your Hero Commission issued gear, for the past 9 years. Not the exact same feather obviously. They ârotateâ every few days, because his feathers die out if he detaches them for too long.
The room falls quiet, the weight of silence settling around you. It takes a heartbeat too long to realize that Keigo has stopped speaking. Looking up again you see him looking at you with concern written over his face, thumb brushing over your hipâwhen did it get there?
âYou okay there, dove? You spaced out for some time,â his voice softens when he says âdoveâ, like the nickname holds more than just teasing now. And your heart, the traitorous thing it is, beats a little faster at it.
He grins, small, boyish and a little shy. Of course he could feel that, the feather still pressed over the spot where your heart is, but he could probably also feel it with the way your chest is pressed up against his.
You hope he canât see your cheeks flush (he can, damn him and his good eyes even though itâs dark inside), and just nod once. âMm. âWas just thinking about the time you lost your tooth because you flew into a wall.â Liar, you were thinking if it would still be like this if the commission gave you two more time for yourselves.
Sometimes you wonder if what you feel is love, being in love with your best friend, what a classic trope. But then you push that thought aside, quickly, like it's dangerous. You canât afford to let yourself want that.
You two are seventeen years old, getting groomed to be the perfect weapons the commission wants you to be. You know if you were to fantasize about it, they would strip it away in the blink of an eye. No, you canât be in love with Keigo, for it would only end in heartbreak.
Within a second your world tilts. You're now laying on Keigoâs chest, him laying flat on his back, one of his wings dangling off the bed, the other draped over you. The wing twitches slightly, brushing against you as if itâs trying to reassure you, but it only makes your heart race a little faster. Both his arms wrapped around your waist.
âLiar,â he says with a grin on his, stupidly handsome, face. âCâmon dove, tell me. You can tell me anything, you know that right?â The sincerity on his face makes you move your mouth before even realising it.
You gulp once âI was just thinking about what life would be like outside these walls. What our lives would look like. If youââ you trail off, looking to the side, to the same industrial gray wall youâve seen all your life, not daring to meet his eyes when telling him the next part.
âIf you would still be here, with me,â you finish your thought in a whisper, and the room feels heavier somehow, the silence wrapping around you like a blanket.
You hear him sigh before his hand comes up to cup your face, gentle, as if youâre made of glass. You feel yourself melt into his hand slightly, before you catch yourself. His thumb brushes against your cheekbone, an action so soft compared to the actions theyâd made him do just earlier today.
His voice is quiet, barely above a whisper, when he finally speaks, âYeah, dove. Iâd still be here. With you.â
His words make your face heat up under his hand. Words are stuck in your throat, because it shouldnât be like this, the two of you canât be like this. Still, you look at him, first at his eyes, filled with pure adoration, and then that traitorous part of your brainâyour heart reallyâlooks at his lips for a heartbeat too long before ripping your gaze upwards again. Shit.
You can only hope he didnât notice, but of course you're not that lucky. His soft smile, turns into a teasing, smug one that still has hints of softness underneath. You feel his thumb move down to your jaw. His gaze half-lidded now.
A whisper in the back of your mind warns you of the danger, of how you two shouldnât do this. There are only seven more months until you two get sent off into âthe real world.â Just seven, and then your lives would change, no longer living inside these gray, sterile, walls.
âYouâre right, we shouldnât, dove,â Keigo speaks out, startling you, quickly looking up at him againâwhen did you look away? Did you say that out loud? You donât know, all you know is that youâre warm, Keigoâs wing still draped over you, feathers whispering against your skin like soft little love notes, his chest steady and warm underneath you, hearts syncing to the same beat.
Still, you slowly start closing the distance between the two of you, murmuring a âWe really shouldnât.â His head lifts from the pillow, one last whisper, before meeting you halfway âWeâre not doing anything.â
The first brush of his lips steals your breath, a clumsy meeting of warmth and want. He tastes like something sweet and sharp, adrenaline and something softer hidden underneath. His wing tightens around you, pulling you closer until you canât tell where you end and he begins.
Itâs desperate in the quietest wayâthe kind of kiss you give when youâve both spent your whole lives being told you canât have this. His hand finds the back of your neck, thumb tracing small, grounding circles there, and you think you could drown in the feel of it.
When you finally pull back, the world feels different. Brighter, maybe. Dangerous, definitely. But youâd do it again in a heartbeat.
Your eyes flutter open, looking straight into Keigoâs. Lips a bit red and swollen, drawing your attention to them once again. Thereâs a slight flush on his face, creeping down his neck and disappearing into his Commission issued shirt.
Hands tighten in the fabric, his wing still tight around you, the little feathers puffed up a bit on your back. He pulls you up a bit more, nosing along your jawline. âWe shouldnât do anything more often,â he murmurs against your skin.
You laugh, small and breathy. It skims across his face like a gentle breeze, making him think of the clouds he sometimes flies through when the Commission lets him outâonly for him to do his mission, which most of the time involves something teenagers shouldnât be even thinking of doing.
âWe really shouldnât.â with that you capture his lips again, stealing his breathâand heartâonce more. Eyelashes fluttering against cheekbones, tongues entangling a bit more expertly now, but still awkward. Noses keep bumping into each other, and you exhale a laugh into his mouth. You feel him smile in return before he tightens his hold on you once more.
The rest of the time together is spent like that, adrenaline filling the both of you. This shouldnât be happening, you shouldnât even entertain the thought of kissing someone, much less Keigoâor Hawks, as they call him here.
He shouldnât even be in your room right now, having snuck out of his own earlier that evening. How the two of you havenât been caught over the years is beyond you, but then again, the two of you arenât perfect weapons for nothing.
By the time you pull away from himâstill close enough to feel and hear his heartbeat beneath you, feel the way his chest rises and falls with every breathâitâs way past the time he normally sneaks back into his own room.
âYou should probably go,â you whisper, and his eyes are still on youâon the way your hair is a bit messy now with the way he was running his hands through it. On the way your lips are red and kiss-bitten. On the way your cheeks are almost as red as his wings. âYouâre already later than normal.â
And oh, how he wishes he can just stay here, in the same bed as you, wrap his around around you and fall asleep with your head on his chest. But that isnât reality, is it? The two of you are still in this mindless dungeon your parents sold you off to. Industrial gray fills his vision when he looks around your room once more. The only thing that makes it seem brighter is youâeven if what youâre wearing doesnât have any color in it.
Heâs been thinking about this moment for years. Just being alone with you, having you all to himself, away from the watchful eyes of the Commission. Heâd buy an apartment for the two of you, living together to save expenses.
Of course heâd have to feed the Commission some bullshit lie about the two of you working better together. Team building isnât something theyâre fond of, but with the right twist of words he can definitely work something out to keep you close to him.
But for now he knows he should go back to his room. Be mindful of the handful of handlers that sometimes walk through the hallwaysâalways watching, except for when theyâre not. Heâs memorised their routines. How many steps each handler takes. When they do their rounds. Knows the way the cameraâs are angled, and how to avoid them.
He knows, but still he canât seem to let go of you. His hands on your hips, tracing small, invisible shapes into your skin. He surges forward once more, giving you a small peck this time. âGoodnight, dove.â
âGoodnight, Kei,â you whisper back, before pushing yourself off him so he can get out of the room. He glances back toward you one more time, feathers angled towards you like theyâre reaching out, before he dips out of your room and towards his own.
Rolling over you bury your face into the pillow and let out a small squealâone of the only feelings you let yourself feel while inside of this building. Itâs so unlike you, so unlike the person the Commission wants you to be. But you canât help it.
And then you feel it, under your shirt, pressed over your heartâKeigoâs feather. The one he keeps on you to make sure youâre safe. It wiggles a few times before sliding up and slipping out of your neckline. Right, he can hear you. Huffing through your nose you look at it hovering right in front of you. âWhat?â
The feather shudders slightly, as if laughing. Dickhead. Then it moves towards your face and taps you on your nose onceâa small gesture Keigo loves to do when youâre frowning, and now apparently when youâre squealing, tooâbefore it brushes feather-soft over your lips and disappears into your shirt once more.
Rolling your eyes you finally situate yourself in the bed. But your smile never leaves your face, and even in your sleep you can still feel fingers and feathers all over you.
The next few weeks are spent tense. No secret glances, no lingering touches, no acknowledgement that you and Hawks know each other as more than just two perfect weapons in the making. There are handlers constantly watching the two of you, so if your gaze would fall onto him a second too long, theyâd know something is off.
Inside of these concrete walls you cannot show your true emotions, face blank at all times of the day, despite you wanting to reach out and hold Keigo.
Youâre not sure what the two of you are right nowâexcept for children that are being groomed by those who are supposed to protect heroesâas you havenât had a chance to talk to him about it yet. There have been no more talks in your bedroom.
But every time you walk past him, that one small feather at your ribcage wiggles just slightly. A small acknowledgement that heâs seen you, that he can still feel and hear you, despite not being there with you.
Itâs harder than you expected it to be. Never in your life would youâve thought that youâd share a kiss with the boy youâve spent most of your life with. And never in your life would you have thought youâd come to the conclusion that you are, in fact, in love with said boy.
That doesnât mean you havenât talked to him, though. Well⌠talked is a big word, itâs mostly you who did the talking while he would hover his small feather in front of you, sometimes tapping on your skin if he agreed or disagreed with something. It was a small language the two of you had configured when younger.
A smile threatens to take over your face, before you smooth it over and look ahead again. Your handler is walking behind youâan older woman in her fiftiesâhands clasped behind her back, clipboard in hand, her heels click click clicking on the linoleum floor below, suit crisp, not a single wrinkle in sight. Her expression schooledâthe same way yours is, and everyone elseâs in this entire building.
Another set of footsteps can be heard from the other side of the hallway, one a bit more lax, and the other right on their heel. You know that gait anywhere. Hawks.
The two of you walk past each other and bow your heads towards one another. Custom, something they drilled into you. Thereâs nothing to be seen in his golden eyes, not a glimpse of emotion, nor can it be found in yours.
His birthmarks seem darker in these lights, almost as if they had filled them in with an even darker shade of black before he had to train. Youâre sure people will think that itâs simply eyeliner, when itâs not.
One of the little kids hereâaround sixâhad asked him if it was, and heâd laughed at them. Small but genuine. It was one of the only times heâs ever shown emotion outside of your room, and it made your heart flutter inside of your ribcage. Something that didnât go unnoticed by the blond, whose feathers puffed up behind him a little.
The footsteps disappear behind you, indicating that Hawks and his handler are away from earshot, which makes your own handler finally speak up. She talks about quirk swapping the kids, aged ten to fourteen. There are only four in totalâseven children in the program, including you and Keigoâbut they need to know what itâs like to not fight with their own quirk.
Itâs your quirk, being able to swap quirks of others. The first time you told Keigo that, he absolutely lit up and asked you if you could swap quirks with him, which you did without a second thought. Youâd warned him it meant he didnât have a quirk, at all, but he just beamed and told you he wanted to see his wings on you.
Seven year old you had done so after confirming he really was okay with it. When he nodded, you focused and swapped them around. Crimson wings sprouting from your back, while Keigoâs disappeared. It went fine for all but 2 seconds, then it went wrong.
Keigo was so used to his wings, he instinctively leaned forward to keep balance. Without his wings, he toppled forward, center of gravity having shifted, no longer being dragged back by his wings. You in the meantime fell backwards, the heavy wings dragging you down, not having braced for the extra weight youâd be carrying on your back.
Keigo landed on top of you, while you landed on one of yourâtechnically Keigoâsâwings. Pain shot through your spine, and up your skull. Tears pricking at your waterline, and one even slid down your temple and disappeared into your hair.
And then came the noise. It was as if everything was tuned up to the maxâyou could hear the buzz of electricity in the ceiling lights, keypads, electric doors. Could hear your own heartbeat, blood rushing through you, the sound of the feathers twitching behind your back. And you could even hear his heartbeat and blood rushing through him.
Putting your hands to your ears you tried blocking everything out, but it didnât help. You could hear everything around you, even when you curled up in a ball.
The boy above you was touching your shoulder, speaking, but even that felt like it was too loudânot registering the words he was desperately trying to tell you. You laid on that floor for what seemed like hours, crying about everything being too loud.
It was only when Keigo started whispering, so soft no one else wouldâve heard, that you finally heard what he was saying. âSwap it back. Give me my wings back and itâll be fine.â And you did just that. The red plumes disappearing behind you and reappearing behind their rightful owner.
âSorry, I shouldâve warned you,â Keigoâs voice was trembling a bit, fingers wiping under your eyes to rid them of their tears. âI forgot. Iâm used to it now.â
That made your heart stutter a bit. Thatâs what he hears at all times? It wasnât something you accounted for. Youâve seen his quirk in actionâflying, though it was more hovering in place, and him controlling th individual feathers to slice through objects with precision it scared youâbut you never actually asked what it did.
âThatâs what you hear all the time?â you breathed out, fingers trembling slightly beside you. Keigo nodded his head, his golden curls bouncing with the motion. The two of you are silent for a bit before you finally spoke up again, âIâm sorry you have to hear all of that.â
He merely shrugged, as if this was normal. As if itâs normal to be able to hear footsteps the floors down. To hear the electricity travel through appliances. To hear your own blood pump through you. And it made little you so incredibly sad. While itâs quiet in the building, it is still loud for him. You always thought it was eerie with how abandoned the building seemedânot because it was falling apart or because there was ivy growing everywhere, but because of how empty it was inside. But for him every single thing is noise.
Youâd pulled him into a hug right then and there, and whispered in his ear that youâd talk to him if he ever felt lonely. He merely smiled at you and returned the hug. Just two weapons in training that found solace in each other.
The kids inside the facility, despite being older than you and Keigo were at the time, still remind you of the two of you. The first time you swap their quirks around, they all look confused, still used to how they fight with their own quirk, only to quickly realise they have to adapt.
On one hand itâs a good lesson, youâd never know when youâd lose your quirk during a battle, on the other hand itâs absolutely disgusting that theyâre practicing this on barely teens.
You keep swapping quirks around once they get used to how the new quirk feels, just to throw them off. Itâs not something you do with great pleasure, but you canât exactly go against whatever your handler assigns you to do.
Itâs something youâve tried before, only to be put in solitary confinement for a week. In there they still had you practice all sorts of things, but you just didnât get to be around people anymore. You still shudder every time you think of the place.
Once the handler deems the exorcise to be enough for the kidsâalmost two whole hours laterâyou get steered out of the room, onto your next assignment.
âSince you and Hawks are about to debut in a few months, we need to make sure the two of you are desensitized, him moreso than you,â she flips through the papers on her clipboard, occasionally nodding her head at something thatâs written down. âYouâll have to act like fans without boundaries. There will be other people pulling him into every direction. Just make sure he doesnât sharpen his feathers.â
With that she pushes the door open, and in the middle of the room stands Keigoâor Hawks, right nowâhis red wings spread out into a brilliant arc, showing off all the way from the primaries down to the dowry feathers he has.
His handler is checking his wings, ensuring the strength and health of them, twisting and turning some pieces, and tugging on others. You know he hates that. Hates anyone that touches his wings, except for you. Itâs something heâs told you since the two of you were young, said it hurt with how they disregarded the fact that he could feel whenever people touched his feathers, as sensitive as nerve endings.
It took him a while to trust you enough to let the pad of your finger skim over one of the primaries while they were in their half-sharp state. He wasnât sensitized enough to let you touch his feathers when they were in their resting state just yet, but he did trust you enough that he at least let you touch them. Ever since that moment he started trusting you more and more, to a point where you can now preen him without any problems.
Heâs fallen asleep once, when you were preening him after a brutal day. They had him run simulations all day longâfly through rubble and falling buildings, soot and smoke clinging to his feathers turning the brilliant velvet into ash. He had to save hundreds, if not thousands of dummies that were stuck in the wrecksâto a point where the skin at the base of his wings were inflamed.
Youâd wanted to trace the skin, soothe it somehow, but you thought better of it. Heâd snuck out of his room later that day to get into yours, and the moment you saw him you patted the limited space beside you on the bed.
Heâd all but flopped onto the bed with a groan, telling you about how much his wings were hurting him. Itâs not something the two of you did oftenâcomplain to each otherâbut after particularly hard days you just had to vent to someone, and who better than your best friend.
So youâd combed your fingers through his wind-swept hair, untangling the obvious knots in them. Sometimes you accidentally tugged on a strand a bit too hard, but he didnât complain about it even once; merely sighed out into your duvet and kept talking about whatever his mind could conjure up.
At some point your fingers slid down to his wings, and youâd started to carefully preen him. While his wings were cleaner now, there were still some stubborn pieces of soot clinging to themâsomething you yourself couldnât get off with just your handsâbut that wasnât something you were after. No, you just carefully started to put every feather into their rightful place, sometimes that meant twisting the feather at the base a bit, and other times that meant getting rid of the keratin casings on the newer feathers.
You werenât sure when, but somewhere when you switched to preen his other wing, heâd stopped talking and his breath had evened out, eyes fluttering shut. Smiling you continued to preen him.
The sight of the handler tugging on some of the feathers makes you more mad than you should be. Not that you can show it, though. If someone were to suspect anything going on between you and Hawks, you were in some deep shit, whether it be just surface-level friendship, or something deeper. So you swallow and steel your expression.
Your own handler gives a squeeze at your elbow before she leaves the room to go to the monitor room. Once Keigoâs handler steps back, he nods once and walks past you, thrusting a piece of paper and a pen into your hand.
With that, the two of you are left alone. Well⌠you know there are tens of pairs of eyes upon the two of you, watching, waiting.
And then the simulation starts. A pro hero walks beside Hawks, chatting. The entire room transforms into that of a city, cars buzzing past, people leaving little shopsâjust a normal day in a city. Not that you and Keigo really know what that looks like.
If you were gonna do this, you could at least have some fun with it. Inhaling, you put a smile on your face, before absolutely squealing. âOH. MY. GOD. IS THAT HAWKS?!â
The simulation responds. People stop on the sidewalk, looking back at âthe two heroesâ, cars slow down slightly. And then you move. Fast. You cross the sidewalk in no time, getting all up in Hawksâ space.
âYouâre my favorite hero! I canât believe I get to meet youâ can I get an autograph?â you gush, not giving him a moment to respond before thrusting the pen into his face and holding out the paper the handler gave you.
Hawks, for his part, just smiles, and it makes your heart beat a little fasterâsomething he can definitely hear. âOf course, whatâs your name?â
You mumble out a random name before your hand shoots out toward his wing. âThese are so cool. And so soft! Do you think I can get one?â You tug on his feathers a bit forcefully, not going as hard as you probably should for the assignment, but you also donât wanna hurt him.
Thereâs a slight bristle from his feathers before he smooths them over again. Keigo just chuckles at you, signing your piece of paper before giving back the pen. âAh, sorry, no can do. Wish I could, though.â He winks over at you before he gets absolutely hoarded by other peopleâfake or not, they still feel real.
The rest of the day is spent like that, you throwing your arms around him, tugging on his feathers, squealing and screaming. Anything and everything to show the handlers that heâs sensitized enough to be able to walk outside without any problem.
Once the two of you are done, your handler pulls you aside. âWeâre gonna run another simulation. Tomorrow. Your turn.â
Right, because they have to know if youâre good enough to swap quirks with him if needed. Luckily the two of you have practiced that many times after the first time.. The Commission telling you that no one else should ever get their hands on his wings, except for you. If he ever loses too many feathers during a fight, you have to jump in and swap quirks. Youâll get his feathers while you give him one of the quirks from the fightâleaving one of the villains Quirkless.
So they have to know you donât completely shut down in an environment like that. Which you get, but itâs still annoying as fuck.
By the time your handler lets you go, Keigo is already gone. Probably towards his own room for the night. Itâs only when you walk past a supply closet that an hand encloses around your wrist and tugs you into it.
The first thing you do is try to twist whoeverâs arm it is behind them, but youâre quickly spun around. Your back hits the door with a thud, one hand is covering your mouth while the other is on your hip. âShhhh, dove, itâs just me.â
Your hands fall to your sides. Blinking a few times your vision sharpens enough to see Keigoâs silhouette. âFucking hell, Hawks, what are you doing?â you hiss at him once he removes his hand from your mouth. Keigo just smiles at you, small, but dangerous. âWhat, you think you can just touch me all day without driving me absolutely crazy?â
Right, you did do that, but that was for the assignment. Trying to get an reaction out of him. So what if your fingers skimmed over his most vulnerable partsâthe base joints near his shoulder bladesâthat was all for the assignment, of course.
âYou canât just pull me into a storage closet, what if someone saw us?â you ask him, still not moving from where youâre pressed against the door. âNo one saw us, and the cameraâs have a dead spot here.â
Damn him and his smart brain. His thumb is tracing small circles on your hipbone, while his other hand creeps up to cup your jaw. Your own arms enclose around his neck, fingers playing with the hairs at his nape.
He surges forward, lips crashing against yours in a frenzy. You kiss him back just as eager. Itâs been weeks since the last kiss, and youâd be lying if you said you didnât miss him.
âMissed you,â he mumbles against your lips, nose bumping into yours when he angles his head a bit. âMissed you, too.â
His wing wraps itself around you, feathers whispering against your skin over the fabric. They tremble slightly while your tongues entangle, puffing up slightly in affection he canât hide.
A string of saliva connects the two of you when you pull away from him. It snaps a second later, leaving your lips shiny and slightly swollen. His arenât any better, small teeth indentations on his bottom lip from where you pulled it between your teeth.
His forehead drops to yours, eyes halflidded and hazed over a little. Your breaths mingling, but mouths not touching any longer. Your chest rises and falls against his, heartbeats syncing, before it stutters once he looks at you like thatâpure adoration filling his eyes.
âHated not being able to see you for so long,â his voice is breathy, a slight groan pulling from his chest when your finger wraps around one of his locks of hair. âHeard you, though.â
And he did. You talked to him almost every night, but that doesnât make up for the fact that he wasnât there in person with you.
âOnly five more months,â you reply. Five more months before the two of you are finally free from this prison they keep you in. Those industrial gray walls youâve seen almost your entire life. The slightly cold rooms that keep you on edge constantly. âJust five before we can get out of here.â
Keigo just smiles at you, not replying with words, but rather by pressing his lips to yours once more. Itâs quiet and full of love. âThen letâs endure them and we can finally stop sneaking around like this, love.â
The nickname has you blinking a few times. Maybe it was a slip of the tongue, âdoveâ and âloveâ are so similair, after all. But your cheeks heat up all the same. Nodding your head you peck his lips once more before finally letting go of him.
He steps back slightly, fingers lingering on your hip before retracting completely. You twist the doorknob before looking over your shoulder and smiling slightly. With that you leave him in the supply closet, alone.
Keigo presses his forehead against the door for a few moments to let his heart calm down. He didnât think he would miss you so damn much, but after that once kiss the two of you shared weeks ago, he hasnât been able to think of anything but you.
Cursing he runs his hands through his hair once, before opening the door and slipping out. Wings dragging behind him like a cape that holds every little sign of affection heâs had for you since the first day he saw you.
Itâs only a few days later when Keigo comes to your room again. You honestly hadnât expected him today. Theyâd sent him out on a mission that from the looks of it, was going to take all day, if not all night. But here he is, standing in your door opening.
Sitting up you pat the space beside you, inviting him in like you always do. He crosses the room quickly to go sit beside you. His fingers are playing with each otherâa small habit you havenât seen him do oftenâwhile he looks at everything but you.
âYou okay?â you ask, your hand reaching for his shoulder, only for him to jerk away before you can touch him. Blinking a few times you let your hand fall back beside you. âHey, whatâs going on?â
He takes a deep breath in, stops fiddling with his fingers, and looks you straight into the eyes. You get slightly lost in everything that they areâgolden with those amber specs in them, all predator when he narrows themâbefore you shake your head slightly.
âI think we should stop seeing each other,â he states, still holding eye contact with you. And you can feel your heart drop to your stomach. Freezing slightly, everything around you seems to slow downâthe way youâre breathing, the slight electral buzz thatâs always there in the walls somehow feels muffled and distant, hell even Keigo looks far away.
âWhat?â
âItâs just not going to work. Not with the way the Commission is always on our asses. And- and I donât think I really have feelings for you,â he vomits the words out like theyâre acidic, burning his tongue if they donât leave fast enough.
It doesnât compute for a second. The words sound foreign. As if some random stranger came up to you and told you the sky was purple. âI- what? But what about the five months? You said we only had to wait for five more months before we could stop sneaking around.â
Keigo just shakes his head, standing up from your bed. The distance between the two of you feels greater than it actually is, as if thereâs a canyon between the two of you, whereas you two were normally all up in each othersâ space.
âJust⌠donât. This is better. For the both of us.â With that he starts walking toward the door. You feel under your shirt for the red plume thatâs pressed to your ribs.
âThen take this back,â you spit towards him, throwing the feather in his direction without a care. He picks it up before slipping out the door, just as quietly as he came in.
When you hear the door click shut behind him, you let yourself fall back onto the thin matrass, staring up at the cold ceiling. Thereâs this quake in your chest you refuse to acknowledge.
Almost twelve years. Almost twelve years of knowing the boy with his crimson wings. Almost eleven years of being friends. Ten of being âbest friendsâ. And yet, two months of being more than best friends, and everything crumbled.
You knew. You knew the friendship you and Keigo built was based on a house of cards, one wrong move and everything would collapse, but never did you think the collapse would look like thisâlike him being the one pushing the house to collapse.
All those smiles and giggles. All those memories made in corners the Commission could never reach. And now itâs all gone.
All because you let yourself fall in love with your best friend.
The next few months are a hell on earthânot that you werenât used to it by now, but itâs definitely different not having Keigo by your side. You pushed yourself into assignments more and more; any free time you did have was spent asking for more assignments, or just training in general.
You couldnât dare to sit in your own room, forced to sit in the silence that feels more suffocating than ever. The walls still carry the laughter. Still carry the gentle warmth Keigo somehow left behind, almost as if his feathers spanned the walls, feather-soft to the touch.
Whenever youâre in your room you just stare blankly at the ceiling, listening to the buzz of the electrics around you. There was one time you had your pillow clutched to your chest, unable to sleep, because you kept seeing golden eyes staring back at you. Crimson wings touching your skin, and those unruly tufts of wind-swept hair.
The pillow still faintly smelled like him at that point, and you tried so hard not to bury your nose into it and inhale like your life depended on it. You were so lost in thought, tryingâand failingânot to think about him, that you startled when you felt something prick into your chest.
Moving the pillow you felt something soft brush over your skin, something that felts suspiciously much like a feather. Heart pounding in your chest you ripped the pillow from your chest, hoping to see that familiar crimson plume you threw back at him in a fit of anger, only to see a singular, sad white feather.
Right, pillows are filled with feathers.
Your hands were shaking when you picked it up, swallowing around the lump in your throat, you laid it under your pillow, which you put under your head again. It was something you couldnât explain, but it just felt right to keep it there, with you.
Itâs still under your pillow, even nowâalmost five months later. Sometimes you pick it up and twirl it around in your finger, watching the way it droops down like itâs sad. And with the right imagination you can imagine it being red, but even when you do that you know it isnât his.
His feathers were a little harder, not fanned out as much. They were sturdy and so brilliantly red, you couldnât imagine it being his.
Despite that you still held onto it like it was worth anything more than it actually was. Sometimes you put it under your shirt while you slept, waking up with an itch, almost as if reminding you it shouldnât be there. Other times you just⌠talked.
But this feather doesnât respond to what youâre saying. Doesnât hover in front of you, shuddering with laughter when you say something stupid. Doesnât tap your nose or skin in agreement. Itâs just there, clutched between your thumb and index finger.
You sometimes wonder if he misses you as much, but then quickly push the thought away. He broke it up for a reason, so you canât let yourself go down that route.
Whenever you saw him in the hallways, you didnât look at him. Didnât nod like you used to, just stared blankly ahead. Teeth clenched, hands balled, leaving small indents on your palms.
He didnât look at you, either. Always staring ahead. Hand in his pockets while avoiding eye contact. While the two of you never lingered on each other, there were some glances. Now itâs like the two of you are merely strangers.
So no, you wouldnât admit you miss him, because heâs clearly doing fine without you. The Commissionâs golden boy. Now getting even more praise. You hear it from the âkidsâ all the timeâmissions he went on, the absolute control he has over his quirk, anything and everything.
You tune everything they say about him out. Never listening too much about what theyâre saying. Not the handlers, not the kids.
The two of you had a mission together two weeks ago, which went⌠okay. Hawks did most of the work, to be completely honest. Something about not needing you there. It honestly stung when he said that, but you pushed the feeling away, merely telling him he could do whatever he wanted. Which he did.
Youâd gotten reprimanded about not participating, while Hawks got all the praise. Heâd looked over at you with a smirk on his faceânot the one he used to give you, no this one was radiating smugness from himâand you wanted to punch it clean off his stupidly handsome face.
Now itâs time for you to step out into the real world. The Commission had gotten you your own agency with a few sidekicks in the Sendai district, while they had sent Hawks to Kyushuâthe other side of the country.
You werenât sure how to feel about that, feelings conflicting in a tight knot inside your chest. On one hand you were glad he wasnât with you, on the other hand you felt sad because the two of you had dreamed of running an agency together, or at least close enough to each other that you two would be able to frequently see each other.
And with the way the Commission had sent you out on missions together from when you were younger, to training together, youâd absolutely believed they would let the two perfect weapons stay together, strengthening each other. But alas, the two of you had drifted away from each other.
Now youâre looking at the building that supposedly âyoursâ. You know damn well itâs the Commissionâs, but you let yourself believe for just a moment that itâs something of your own. They own you, though, so youâre not sure youâll ever get something of your own.
Stepping inside the lobby you step into a new part of your lifeâalone.
The first year goes well. You quickly climb the rankings, no doubt the Commission having something to do with it, but itâs still something. You recently just breached the top 10. Your name being everywhere.
The rookie hero who debuts in the top ten!
But wherever your name is, his follows. Hawks being more popular amongst the masses, purely for being so charismatic. You roll your eyes at that, as if you didnât know damn well how charismatic he can be. And from everything youâve seen, the smirks, the winks, the little murmured sentences to his fansâall fake.
Youâre muttering to yourself about how his real smirk is more awkward, it has that little adorable tilt to it that makes it more cute than sexy. His wink normally isnât as smooth. The little dimple doesnât appear on his face when he smiles.
But not that you notice that. Of course not. Heâs made it very clear with what the two of you are, which is absolutely nothing. So you donât look at it too long, always clicking away whenever his face pops up on the screens.
Seems like despite not working together you still canât get away from him.
The Commission drowns you in assignments. You do your normal patrols, go out when you get paged, and after that you have to do the dirty work no one ever would even think of heroes doing. Granted most heroes donât do the things youâand Hawksâdo.
It makes for a good distraction, though. Youâre simply too exhausted to even care about a certain blond-haired crimson-winged hero at the other side of Japan.
That is until the annual hero billboards come around. Your days have been so swamped that you didnât even realise it was that time of the year already.
So here you are, walking backstage, waiting for the event to start. Number ten.
You know the Commission definitely messed with the numbers, but you arenât complaining. Thereâs a lot of things you do that go unnoticed, so maybe this is a way of them telling you you did a good job. Or maybe theyâre trying to keep you under their thumbs by putting you in the spotlights so you canât slack off for even a day.
The perfect weapons.
Thatâs all youâll ever be to them. Not a person. Not a hero. A weapon they created to use at their disposal. Same for the guy you spent almost your entire life beside.
Speaking ofâ your shoulder collides with another, making you stumble slightly. Itâs not something that has happened often, your handler always being on your ass to be alert. Vigilant. Stay aware of your surroundings at all times. But with how tired you are you canât really focus. Seems like even the strongest sometimes need a break.
Youâre bowing a full ninety degrees, mumbling out a âsorryâ before straightening up again. And all the air seems to leave your lungs.
A pair of golden eyes is staring straight at you, lips pursed, bushy brows furrowed slightly. An annoyed look you werenât familiar with. Never in the thirteen years of knowing him has he ever looked at you like thatâor anyone for that matter, because handlers would have his head if he so much as disobeyed them.
âSee you made the top ten,â he mutters out with a scoff, disdain lacing his voice. But you canât hear him, not really anyway. Your mind already far, far away from the billboards and rather back in those industrial gray rooms that you were so familiar with.
Eyes that are golden with amber specks in them are looking at you. Thereâs dark marks around the eyes that has your head tilt a bit. Your hand is fisted in the fabric of this tall strangerâs pantsâyouâll later learn that itâs your handler, one of the many youâll get over the years that youâll stay in that rotten place youâve never escapedâwhile you step away from their legs just slightly when you see the boy stand there.
His golden curls bounce on top of his head, a single curl falls into his eyes, which he swipes away with one hand while the other is clutching a plushy of sorts. Youâre not familiar with what, or who it is, but itâs clearly a man with a flaming beard.
Your voice doesnât come to you, throat hoarse from all the screaming youâve done when your parents told you to stay here with the nice lady while they went out for errands. You just couldnât understand why they didnât want to take you with them and rather let you stay with a stranger.
Eyes welled up with fat tears that rolled down the round apples of your cheeks that were blotched red with the way you were crying for your parents.
Why didnât they want to take you with them?
Nose snotty and eyes completely red-rimmed you were staring at this boy that seemed to be your age. He wasnât that much taller than you were, but he was calm, looking at you like you were something interesting. And in that moment you calmed down slightly.
The hiccups stopped after a while, when the handler nice lady told you you could play with the boy. That seemed more fun, for a second forgetting your parents just left you here. Maybe being here for a few hours wouldnât hurt all that much.
Said boy told you his name was Hawks, and youâd giggled then and told him your real nameâsomething you got reprimanded for by the lady, and your little mind just couldnât understand why she was scolding you for simply telling him your nameâin turn.
The rest of the day was spent with giggles and hushed voices. There might not have been much to play withâonly giving the two of you a few blocks to play withâbut it was enough to keep your mind off the fact that your parents pretty much had abandoned you here.
It was only when the lady came back and told you two to go to bed that you were brought back to reality. Your little fist rubbing your eyes while you asked if mama and papa were there for you. The lady gave you a look, something between disappointment and reprimand, and told you that you were having a sleepover today.
Your lips pursed while your eyebrows furrowed together. As much as you liked this new boy, you werenât a fan of sleeping over here. Your parents said they would only go out to run some errands, never saying anything about you staying here for the night.
When youâd pleaded with the lady to just go home, she got angry and told you to behave, almost scolding you like a mom does.
That seemed to do something to the young boy, though, because he immediately clamped his mouth shut while his eyes turned blankâthe signs of him being happy were simply erased from his face like a light switch was turned offâand he stood up to go to, what you presumed was, his room.
From then on out there were no more playdates, only people testing your quirk out on different people, trying to gauge your power from when you were a mere five years old. Your parents never came back for you, and you later found out that youâd simply been sold off.
But through it all, from that first day up until almost the last, was one person you could always rely onâKeigo. Or as the masses call him: Hawks. That name makes you shudder, for multiple reasons, but mostly because you know what it meant for him to get a name like that. A prisoner in a corrupt system that shouldâve never existed to begin with.
And now heâs here, looking at you like youâre a pest in his life. Like youâre one of them. Not trying to hide his disdain for you, and you canât help but feel a nerve in your jaw tick at the sight.
Sure, you were the person who fell in love with your best friendâwhich you knew was stupid to begin with, not just because he might not love you back, but also because the Commission would never allow the two of you to be distracted to begin withâbut heâs the one who broke whatever it was the two of you had off.
So why is he glaring at you like youâre mere gum on the bottom of his shoe, or that one little barb he never can reach in his wings that you always had to preen for him otherwise heâd get agitated.
âMhmm. See you did, too. Mustâve been easy, charming every women to get a little more popularity over there,â you smile at him through gritted teeth, trying so incredibly hard not to let anyone whoâd walk past see that thereâs any animosity between the two of you.
He smiles at you all condescendingly. It makes your eye twitch just slightly, but his eye see the movementâof course they do, the two of you have been trained to look at little tells like that since you were young, always so in tune with otherâs emotionsâand his grin widens, almost as if heâs won something.
Heâs about to retort something when his wings twitch on his back, a movement so minuscule, no one else would catch it, but you know him better than anyone else, even if you donât want to acknowledge that part right now.
The two of you straighten up and smile at each otherâone of the practiced, fake ones that no one would be able to tell was fake to begin withâpretending to chat about the rankings. One of the heroes walks past and nods his head at the two of you, while the two of you bow back to him.
When heâs out of sight you drop the entire persona, not bothering with the fake smiles and niceties. You note the way Hawks relaxes slightly, feathers betraying his every being no matter how much he tries to hide from you, too.
Your hand shoots to your ribs, fingers skimming over your hero suit. The fabric dark with gold detailsâjust like his, because the two of you might not do things together, but the HPSC still has their claws in the two of youâbut itâs empty underneath. Just flesh and bone. No red feather that flutters against your skin whenever the blond saw you, or missed you. No longer replies to your sighs.
Itâs easy to get lost in all thatâs him. The blond and red. The cocky smirk he has on his face, and the slight stubble heâs beginning to grow. Itâs easy to get lost, and then get pulled back into the present when he scoffs and walks past you, shoulder deliberately knocking into yours.
You want to spill your heart out when you once again see him walk away from you, just like that night. Wings held high, feathers trembling slightly and the back of his head turned towards yours. Want to tell him that it meant nothing, that the two of you could still be friends, like old times sake. But you know that wonât happen, no matter how much you want it to.
The two of you have simply⌠grown apart. No longer best friends, or that more-than-bestfriends thing the two of you had before he broke it off. Right now the two of you are colleagues. Strangers with history. Enemies competing for the better spot on a leader board the two of you donât care about.
Your hand falls from your ribs to your side, and itâs so easy to make him stay, but itâs also easy to let him walk away. Because what good would it do? Heâs made his stance very clear on the matter. No longer wanting you in his life, no matter what he had promised you.
Walls no longer industrial gray, but rather a muted white, but they feel more lifeless that the prison that you called your home for years, because a certain someone isnât there to brighten them up. Only the sun setting into hues of violet and peach paints the room in colors.
He said heâd still be here with you, yet you watch him walk away from you the moment the two of you see each other again.
Fine. So be it.
And thatâs how the competition really begins.
After the first hero billboard comes the petty revenge. Flirting more with your fansâshowing him that you can use his tactics to become more popular, too. The hero rankings are constantly fluctuating, you and Hawks surpassing each other every time, trading ranks like youâre trading stock.
People online have started putting bets on who will be higher ranked this year. The two rookie heroes going head to head, making for an exciting race, or whatever it is theyâre saying.
He garners attention by flirting with his fans, you garner attention by doing a shoot, face plastered on every billboard across Japan. Itâs petty. Itâs stupid. Itâs the only way you can keep him close to you despite being hundreds of kilometers apart.
Thereâs a nagging voice at the back of your head now every time you see his face or name anywhere on the internet. No longer associated with Keigo but rather with Hawks the hero who youâre competing against.
The second annual billboard ranks you at five while heâs at six. The saccharine smile you plaster on your face when the two of you are on stage ticks him off. You can see it in the little tells, one of his feathers near his scapula is razor-sharp one second, while soft the other.
People start asking the two of you questionsârookie heroes, dating scandals, anything and everything they can get their hands on. You deflect with a smile and a wink, and he does the same.
Later that same night thereâs hundreds of clips posted about how the two of you would make such a good team or would be so good together. Your eye twitches at that, fingers cracking with the way youâre balling your hands so hard your nails breach the skin on your palms and blood steadily trickles down your forearm.
What would they know about you being âsuch a good item with him.â They do not know Hawks the same way you do, and over your dead body would you go back to him. The feud you have with him is at this point more important than anything else.
So you start doing other things on your off timeâwhich you already barely have, but for the sake of winning this god-forsaken competition youâd give up all of your free timeâsuch as going into schools and telling children about safety and what to do in villain attacks.
Your popularity numbers are climbing by the day, more of you can be seen in tabloids. Face plastered all over social media for helping a cat get out of a tree. Bringing in groceries for the nice old lady on the sidewalk. Things you would never do out of your own volition, purely because that hasnât been trained into you to do.
Seems like you underestimated how low Hawks would step, though. Itâs during one of your regular patrols, the sun is blistering down and sweat is beading off your temple and down your jaw. Thereâs a marker in your hand while a kid is jumping up and down in excitement to get your autograph.
Youâre smiling, already thinking of where you could get something to hydrate, the cold surely feeling nice against your parched throat, when a big shadow falls across you.
People starts squealing and pointing into the sky, and sure enough there he is. Hawks. All red wings and cocky smirks, hovering in the air. He circles a few times before touching down, immediately getting mobbed by tens of fans.
Hell, even the kid you were giving an autograph just⌠runs away from you. Your pen hovering uselessly in the air. The stench that comes from the marker fills your nostrils, and it finally snaps you out of your reverie.
Pinching yourself once, you confirm that Hawks is, in fact, really here. Standing on your turf, talking and taking pictures with your fans. And you can already hear that stupid counter climb up by the second, getting more popularity by just touching down here.
And as if he can feel your gaze on him, he lifts his head lightly, golden eyes finding your form. For a second he just stares blankly, then he smirks and throws a wink into your direction. Fucking dickhead.
Sighing you continue your patrol while already thinking of how youâll get your revenge.
Kyushu is⌠different than you expected. You never read up much about it, but you knew it was an islandâduhâso you didnât expect to see high rise towers litter everywhere you looked. The buildings so high you would almost be able to touch a cloud if you opened the window; an over-exaggeration, but still.
You thought the place Hawks chose, or well, the HPSC chose for him would have more sea. You thought the air would smell salty, like the ocean, and hear the waves crash ashore, but nothing is less true.
Fukuoka is a heavily populated city. Thereâs buildings, cars, and street life everywhere. When you got sent here you thought it might be different than back in Sendai, but nothing is less true.
The mission had been simple. Go undercover for a drug ring, get the info, let the President know whatâs happening, and turn the whole thing upside down before they even know someone infiltrated their home.
What youâd failed to consider, though, is the fact that this is the home of a certain crimson-winged hero who could spot you from hundreds of meters away.
Looks like he didnât spot you, but rather you him. Tiny feathers slicing through the air at lightning speed, multiple civilians getting pulled out of the way by their clothes while the number two hero fights the villains.
Itâs a sight for sore eyes, wings almost down to little nubs, no longer able to fly, and it seems like these villains arenât gonna stop any time soon.
Heâs exhausted. Thereâs too many innocent bystanders nearby that he has to keep track of while also fighting off two other villains. His wings are almost non-existent, most of the feathers having been used up at this point. One feather-blade is in his hand, luckily still able to use it.
Thereâs sweat beading down his brow, nearly falling into his eye before it drips to the ground, which is littered with debris from the wreckage the villains have done to the city. Itâs honestly more than heâs encountered in the years beforeâhere anyway.
Villains of this size were normally more common in Tokyo, but seems like they decided to bother his district this day.
He deflects one attack while scooping up a child that had fallen trying to run away with one of his feathers, returning the child to his mother who was in tears, officers holding her back from running onto an active villain site.
Then he hears it, a sharp whistle he hasnât heard in years. Itâs music to his ears. It grates him. Almost like he canât decide if he loves you for being here right now, or if he hates the fact that youâre even here to begin with.
He knows you wouldnât come here out of your own volition, just like he doesnât go to Sendai unless ordered, so youâre here on a mission. And here you are, seeing him in this pathetic state, nearly losing to two villains.
Youâd probably laugh at him when you have the time, tell him heâs gonna drop a rank and youâll sprint ahead of him again. The swapping of places hasnât once stopped. The number two and three, constantly swapping places but never getting that number one spot.
But he knows. He knows he should give you the go-ahead. Get this over with. The civilians are the most important thing right now, so he should do whatâs best for themâeven if that means you get a tally added to the score.
So he gives his signal that itâs okay to swap. His wings slowly disappearing from his back. The feathers that he has in his hand goes limpâjust an ordinary red feather right nowâjust like all the others that heâs used to get the bystanders out of the way.
Some people gasp, while others are already filming. He can feel the way his quirk has been swapped for someone elsesâone of the villains, though he doesnât know which of the two.
The villains in front of him look confused for a split second before they grin again, certainly thinking they have the upperhand now. Hawks can only grin in turn, tucking his feather in his jacker sleeveâa souvenir he can give to fans if they want it.
And then a flurry of red feathers come downâsharp as can be. The villains get pinned down almost immediately while Hawks goes in to put quirk-cancelling handcuffs on them. He sees you walk up to him a few seconds after, whistling with your hands in your pocketsâa sight so him it pisses him off. Of course youâd try and mock him while heâs already down.
More people are gasping and screaming each of your names now, but neither of you give them any attention. You stop in front of him, a lazy nod given while the police officers rush onto scene, dragging away the suspects.
There are some words exchanged while you still have his quirk, crimson stark against the dark fabric of your hero suit. And he can see the way the feathers are trembling, just like your fingers. Thereâs a slight tick in your jaw you never could hide, not even from the Commission.
Youâre overstimulated. His quirk simply picking up too many noises at once, while he canât hear anything at all. Itâs something the two of you havenât done in a long timeâswapping quirks. While you did this on a regular years ago, itâs now something foreign. Still, he has to applaud you for keeping your face as neutral as you are right now, because he knows how rowdy people can be.
After the officer is done talking with the two of you he walks away, leaving the two of you to fend for yourselves. Masses crowd around the number two and three, as if you two are merely circus acts and everyone can just do whatever they want.
People want pictures where you have the wings, others are touching the feathers to see if they really are as soft as Hawksâ. And he notes how uncomfortable you are right now, shivers running up your spine when someone tugs on one of the feathers, and he sees the way yourâtechnically hisâwings are twitching like they want to lash out.
So he whispers, as low as he can go, that the two of you can get out of here if you just fly away with him. Which is exactly what you do, picking him up with easeâease that was never there to begin with since he was heavier with the wings dragging behind himâand flying away from the crowd to one of the high-rises.
Itâs an bumpy, unsteady flight all the way up to the tallest building there is, and he has to cling onto you to not plummet to his death. Once you land, clumsy and everything, you set him down.
Your wings shudder behind you before they disappear from your back and form back onto Hawksââonly for there to be stubs instead of actual, massive wings he normally has.
Thereâs sweat clinging to your spine and beading down your temple. Youâd forgotten just how loud his world actually is, not having had to bother with it for years on end. That of course doesnât mean you forgot what his quirk can doâthings no one else in the world except for the President and a few handlers know.
You straighten up, swallowing past the bile that was threatening to come up if you stayed down there any longer, you nod to yourself. Youâre okay. This is okay. Everything is okay.
The blond is just watching you, for once having no quip ready on the tip of his tongue, but rather just⌠looking. Thereâs a hint of concern he canât quite seem to hide from you, but you donât focus too much on that.
Walking up to him you pat him on the back, just between his scapulae where heâs the most sensitive. A little payback youâd say, not just for the fact that you had to get the two of you out of there since he didnât have enough feathers to even fly, but also for all the bullshit he had pulled this year to get ahead of you.
âWell, see you later, number three,â your voice mock-cheerful. You were the number three hero currently, but with todayâs save, or whatever you want to call it, youâre sure your rank will rise once again, surpassing Hawksâ. âGotta do stuff.â
Before you can even walk away a gloved hand wraps itself around your wrist, tugging you back. Another hand finds itself on your hip, warm and familiar in a way you donât want to acknowledge right now. âWhere do you think youâre going?â
Clenching your jaw you look over at the blond, brows furrowing and lips pursing into a straight line. You donât bother to conceal your expression right now, thereâs no one around to see, so you can just show your disdain on your face whenever you wantâone of the special occasions.
âOh Iâm sorry, I forgot. I⌠gotta⌠go,â you slowly annunciate every word, almost as if youâre talking to a deaf person with dementia who has to lip read. You know he can hear you just fineâwhile he might not be able to hear everything, his ears still work perfectly fine.
The next instant youâre backed onto a brick wall of the bulkhead. Rough stone scraping against your back through the fabric of your hero suit. It has you gasping out slightly, not thinking he would do something like this.
âYouâre such a brat sometimes,â he breathes out, pupils almost like slits, and oh, heâs pissed. Not his normal relaxed self, but rather actually annoyed at something you didâand if you had to guess it was to hit him where it hurt the most. âYou should be happy I even gave you the go-ahead to use my quirk.â
That ticks you off. Itâs not like you want to use his quirk, but he was in a bind and he knows it. If it were up to you, you would never even think of using his quirk. So you do what you know bestâhands coming around to his back to where the little wings are still uncovered, one of your fingers tracing over his feather. Slow and teasing.
He groans out at the sensation, eyes fluttering closed for just a second before he opens them again, pupils dilated slightly. Then he turns you around, your chest pressing up to the stone while your cheek lays flat against the rough texture. A gasp rips itself from your throat.
His breath ghosts the shell of your ear while he presses his chest against your back, and you feel the bulge in his pants on your ass, making you gulp out. He cannot be serious right now.
âYou sure you wanna do this, birdie?â the nickname has you close your eyes for a split-second. For a moment you can hear it echo in your head, distort it until you hear that all too familiar nickname: âdoveâ, but he doesnât, he just uses the same nicknames he gives his fangirls.
You scoff out at it, and try to wiggle your way from him, only for your ass to brush his bulge. He moans out at the sensation before pushing his hips further into youâpressing it right against your ass so you can feel just how hard he is. âTell me to stop, and I will.â
Pressing your thighs together, you can feel yourself getting hot and bothered. Even after all these years he still gets you going like no otherânot that youâve ever even looked at someone else. The competition between you two has had your focus so much that you havenât even had the time to go on a date, and honestly you didnât care to go on one, either.
When you donât say anything he chuckles. It comes deep from his chest, rumbling it with the sound thatâs completely foreign to you.
âWho wouldâve thought,â he whispers, fingers slowly tracing up and down your side, not groping, not grabbing, just tracing featherlight touches along your sides while he humps against your ass. Itâs almost as if he isnât aware of his own ministrations, simply rutting against you like a dog in heatâbetter yet, like a bird in heat. âBet you flew us here just to rile me up.â
One of his hands slowly goes to the front, fingers skimming your ribs, just where his feather always used to lay. He makes a little shape there before his fingers trace upwards, squeezing your tit once over the fabric. Shivers run down your spine, straight into your core, and you can feel yourself getting wetter by the second. Panties sticking uncomfortably to your folds.
âHah, you wishâshit,â your head lolls back onto his shoulder when he finds your nipple over the fabric, pinching and rolling the bud between his forefinger and thumb before he tugs on it slightly. âYouâre so full of yourself.â
âYouâre gonna be full of me in a second,â he murmurs against your cheek, hips never ceasing their motion, while his other hand finally trails down, stopping just at your pants. Itâs only when you nod at him that he slips his fingers inside them, digits finding your heat immediately. âOh? So wet for someone whoâs âso full of himselfâ.â
His fingers move over your panties, lightly caressing it, almost like heâs preening himselfâcareful not to press too hard, nor move too fast, and it has you absolutely whining out for him.
âR-really, thatâs all you can come up with. Thought youâd have someâfuck just keep them thereâmore practice with your l-little fangirls,â you moan out when his fingers skim over your clit, not pressing or rubbing, just featherlight touches that drive you absolutely crazy for him.
Chuckling his finger finally presses down onto your clit, moving it in small circles while pleasure shoots up your core. Your hand clamps itself onto his forearm, not trying to move it, just holding onto it while you gasp out into the open air.
âThatâs itttt, love it when your rival plays with your pussy hmmm?â his finger doesnât stop, just keeps circling your nub until youâre whining out. âJust put them in already, Hawks.â
He makes a thoughtful sound in the back of his throatâsomething between a hum and a groanâbefore he finally moves your panties aside and glides one finger through your slick folds. The feeling of the pads of his fingers directly on your skin has you arching into his touch, trying to chase his fingers even though he keeps sliding them through your folds.
One of his fingers finally slide inside your snug walls, warm and wet around him. It has you struggling to catch your breath. When was the last time you even got time to get yourself off? The feeling of his singular finger so much thicker than your own, eyes rolling to the back of your skull.
He slowly starts to pump in and out of your pussy, walls clinging onto him every time he tries to slide his finger out. Soon another one joins the first, stretching you out even further. Blunt nails dig themselves into his forearm, making him hiss out.
âF-feels so good,â you whimper out, careful not to be too noisy. There might not be anyone around, but if someone living in the apartments below, thereâs a possibility theyâd be able to hear you, and youâd rather not get caught getting fingered by your so-called rival.
His hips pick up pace behind you, still rutting against your ass like a damn animal in heat. Groans fall from his lips like an open faucet, never once stopping. He curls his fingers up while his thumb grazes your clit before it presses down onto itâadding all the more stimulation.
Trusting his fingers in and out a few times, he finally finds a spot that has you actively keen out, your other hand slapping itself over your mouth when he continues to attack your g-spot with his fingers. âF-fuck, please keep them there.â
Hawks just groans while his hips stutter behind you, fingers keeping their pace. Your thighs are starting to shake, knees buckling slightly. Suddenly thereâs a tug on your nipple, completely forgetting his hand was still on your breast, and your eyes roll to the back of your skull. âCumming, cummingâ oh shit.â
Your orgasm shoots through you, and itâs so much more powerful than ever before. At the same time his hips cease behind you, warmth seeping through his pants while he muffles a moan into your shoulder.
Itâs only when you catch your breath that you look at him from the corner of your eyes. âDid you just cum in your pants just by rutting yourself against my ass?â
His fingers slip from your heat, cunt clenching around nothing after his fingers retreat, when they come down with a quick slap to your clit. You jump slightly at the feeling, yelping while your head turns to the side to look at him.
âShut up,â his cheeks are blotched pink, not once daring to look you in the eye, confirming what you thought had happened. He eyes his hand, spreading his fingers slightly, looking at the way your arousal webs between his fingers before they snap!
Almost in a trance he pops his fingers in his mouth, lips wrapping around the digits while his tongue licks the wetness right off. He moans out at the taste, eyes nearly rolling to the back of his skull while he can feel his dick twitch to life in his pants again.
Your mouth falls open at the sight, so sinful it makes you all the more hornier. Without realising your hips are moving back, ass brushing against his hardening cock, which he gives a quick slap. He pulls his fingers out of his mouth, lips shiny with a mixture of spit and cum, having your eyes snap to them. âStill havenât had enough, thought you hated me?â
You roll your eyes at that, not bothering to confirm nor deny his accusations. Turning around your hand cups his member, palm pressing against it while you smile sweetly up at him. âCould say the same thing for you, Hawks.â
He growlsâactually growlsâat that, eyes narrowing down at you before his fingers make quick work of your pants. You unbuckle his belt, fingers fumbling slightly with how theyâre trembling, and you can only hope he doesnât see it.
He frees his cock from his underwear, mushroom tip angry red and shiny with cum. Giving it a few tugs he gets himself fully hard again. His other hand creeps down your thigh before he grabs just below your knee and hoists your leg up to put it around his waist. Your other feet shuffles around on the ground slightly, trying to find your balance again, while your hand shoots out to grab his shoulderâthis time careful not to touch anywhere near his wings.
âSure youâre ready for this?â he asks, fingers toying with your panties that are soaked through at this point, flimsy material doing nothing to hide your swollen folds.
âJust put it in already,â you roll your eyes at him, watching the way he once again pulls your panties to the side while he lines himself up. Thereâs anticipation and slight dread running through you now. Are you ready? Did he prep you enough? How are you even sure you can take him?
He glides his shaft through your folds a few times, skin getting shiny with your slick, when his tip rubs over your clit, shooting more pleasure through you. Itâs only when he glides over it once again that you feel itâsomething metal.
Dickhead has a dick piercing.
âBet your f-fangirls love that,â you whimper out, still eyeing the way heâs gliding through your folds, tip catching on your entrance only to move it up again, and again, and again. âHow many compliments did you geâfuuuckk.â
He doesnât let you finish your sentence, instead finally deciding to push inside. The stretch feel insane, walls clamping down immediately, tip pushing past that first ring of resistance. Tears immediately spring to your eyes, and your hand tightens on his shoulder.
âS-shit, ease up, dâ birdie,â he grunts out, not trying to push in any further. His hand comes down to your hip, thumb rubbing circles on your hip while he lets you adjust to the stretch. âYou always this t-tight, or is it just me who has that effect on you?â
âShut up,â you whine, not caring how you sound right now. You let your body slump to the wall behind you, sweat starting to collect at your nape again. Never in your life did you think it would feel like this. âY-you can move.â
Looking at you for a few more seconds he slowly inches in, the stretch torturous, and he isnât even half-way in yet. You claw at his shoulders, trying to find anything to hold onto while he was splitting you open.
âJust a few more inches,â he murmurs down at you withâis that concern? in his voice, thumb sliding from your hip to your clit, rubbing small figure eights on it to help you relax slightly. A few more inches? Looking down you see the way his skin is wrinkling at the base, and yup, he still had two more inches give or take left.
Once he finally bottoms out he lets his head fall forward, straight against your collarbone, breath hot even through the fabric. His tip is smooched against your cervix, and you can feel the two barbells of his piercing sit snug against your walls, even when he isnât moving.
Itâs a weird sensationâthe metal cool against your warm cunt, smooth surface rubbing you just right. After a few moment he finally pulls his hips backâjust slightlyâand thrusts back in. Itâs a shallow thrust, but it knocks the breath right out of your lungs.
âY-you always this weak when fucking your girls?â You shouldnât ask it, you donât even want to know his answer to it, but your mouth is moving before your brain can even catch up. Luckily for you he doesnât reply, only pulls out further before thrusting back in, making you moan out.
He sets a steady pace after that, hips pulling out halfway only to thrust back in, tip hitting your cervix each and every time, pre clinging to your walls. Moans and groans fill the air while the two of you are too lost in the pleasure to even taunt each other.
âF-fuck, pussy gripping onto meâshit look at thatâlike she doesnât want me to leave,â he groans out, eyeing the way your lips are wrapping around him every time he pulls out.
âMaybe she just wants you to cum so she can get away from you,â you mutter out, which he hears loud and clear. The stubs on his backs flutter slightly, not bothering to hide any reaction you pull out of him any longer.
His eyes narrow at you before his hand thatâs still rubbing circles stops. The pleasure dwindles slightly, only for him to set a more brutal pace, balls slapping against your ass while he pummels into your poor pussy.
âYeah? Well then maybeâ oh fuck⌠maybe I shouldnât get you off,â he changes his angle slightly, hiking your leg further up his waist before he starts pistoning his hips in and out of you, an audible squelch can be heard every time he bottoms out.
âDonât need youâthere, please there,â your eyes roll back while you babble out âpleaseâ and âthereâ over and over again. Your mouth falls open, high off ecstasy while Hawks keeps bullying your g-spot with lethal precision.
âThere, yeah? Fuck feel her clamping down on me. What was that⌠hahhh, about not needing me?â he grunts out while he can feel his abs start to tighten.
Your own hand comes down to your sensitive clit, rubbing circles on it while youâre incoherently babbling now, cock-drunk on the way heâs pummeling into your weeping hole. âGonnaââ you gasp out, before it cuts off with a choked cry. Your walls spasm around him while you get thrown into your second climax of the day, thighs trembling slightly.
âF-fuck,â he chokes out before he thrusts once more, hips stilling while he paints your entire walls white. His wings twitch and flex against his back, and youâre pretty sure you can see the left over feathers sharpen and soften against his back through your hazed-out mind.
The two of you stay like that for a while, just breathing in each otherâs presence, not daring to move. Itâs only when he pulls out with a hiss that you realise the situation. Looking down you see his seed bubble out of you, a bit of red mixed in the mess.
Hawks also sees it, looking down with concern at you. âShitâ fuck, are you okay?â
Rolling your eyes you let your leg fall from his hips, and your thigh almost immediately seizes up. Luckily you can deal with crampsâhaving been through enough training that this doesnât feel like anything anymoreâbut the foreign feeling of your pussy having been stretched out has you grit your teeth.
âThatâs your blood,â you mumble out, swiping your thumb on a cut just on his eyebrow. It leaves behind a trail of red, staining your finger in the crimson substance. Holding it up for him to see you just swallows and nods once.
Wiping it off on your uniform, you put your panties back in place, grimacing slightly when you feel the sticky substance ooze out of you. Pulling up your pants you pat everything down to see if you still have everything before straightening up.
Thereâs an awkward beat where the two of you just look at each other. And it finally sinks in what just happened. You fucked Hawks. Your ex-bestfriend, ex-lover, current rival. The one person you swore you would be done with.
Swallowing you quickly push yourself from the brick wall, finally noticing just how much your back hurts at the moment. Running your fingers through your hair you nod once towards the hero before you open the door and walk away from whatever all of this is.
And while you awkwardly walk down the stairsâgait off and your hole pulsing around nothingâyou know that youâre absolutely and utterly fucked.
The time after that moves weird. You hadnât seen anything of the crimson-winged hero while you stayed in Kyushu, only hearing people whisper about him in passing, but never once seeing that blur of red move through the sky.
You know somewhere deep down that heâs avoiding you, and youâre honestly doing the same. The night in the safehouse after what happened made you unable to sleep, eyes blinking up at that same industrial gray youâve seen your entire life, and for just a momentâjust oneâyou could feel him beside you on that bed. Only this bed was bigger than the one you had for twelve years.
When you closed your eyes you could feel the way his breath would ghost your skin while laying beside you, his wing flopped over you like a soft, unique blanket that sometimes twitched whenever either of the two of you moved.
Could still feel the way he would trace soft patterns over your arms when he thought youâd fallen asleep before he was out of the room. Could still feel the gentleness in his gazze whenever he looked at you.
But when you opened your eyes you were met by silence. No soft whisper of feathers ruffling or the soft breathing pattern he always had around youâsomething that had been trained into the two of you. There was still that small electral buzz you were familiar with, but it made your heart only do more complicated flips.
It was like you were suddenly thrown back to when you were seventeen years old and got told that the two of you shouldnât see each other anymore.
And just like then, you have a feather in your hand. Soft, white, and itchy. Not the crimson, alive feather you used to wear like a shield. Like a promise etched onto your skin. But rather just a dead feather from god-knows-where.
It droops to the side sadly, like itâs reminding you that this isnât what you were familiar with for half your life. But still you put it on your chest and begin talking to it like it can respond. The stories are quite silly, and you would never actually say all of these things out loudâwhen youâd done grocery shopping online, the latest villain arrest, a short story about how your sidekick had put soap in the food instead of olive oil.
Youâre gesturing around the room wildly, a small smile on your face while your eyes are closed. Itâs easier that way, telling stories to a feather that canât respond. But for a moment you just let yourself believe it can. Let yourself believe that youâre seventeen years old again and that youâre ranting to your friend.
The golden-eyed boy across the hall that always looked like you were more than the weapon they were trying to make you out to be. The one who you shared secret glances and giggles with. The one who put a warm hand over your stomach whenever your cramps got too much, but the handlers just kept pushing you to do more more more.
And when you open your eyes, thereâs a slight part in your heart that yearns to see that red feather hovering in front of your eyes. But youâre met with air. The white feather still laying on your chest, not moving an inch from where you last put it.
A tear slides down your face before you can stop it. Quickly wiping it away you chuckle into the empty room. No one can hear you, after all, so why would you care?
Thereâs a slight throbbing between your legs, soreness running through your musclesâan type of sore youâve never been before, and it scares you slightlyâwhile thereâs no one to tell you itâs okay.
Rolling over you look at the empty spot beside you in the bed. Itâs cold and pristine, not a wrinkle in sight. How many times have you imagined there to be someone beside you? Itâs honestly too many to count, and you canât help but let another tear slide down your face.
Thereâs a slight discontent in your heart that tells you that after today heâll never even look at you anymore. That this will be just like what happened seven years ago, where he told you the two of you couldnât be together and walked out of your life.
You had this silly competition, chasing after numbers the two of you knew didnât matter. While other heroes yearn to be in the top 10, the two of you treated it as an game to one-up one another. Taunting the other with whoever has the higher rank that year.
That was the only time you talked to him, honestly. The annual Japanese Hero Billboard Chart. One of the only times youâd see him in real life instead of on a screen with an update on his latest endeavor.
And somewhere deep down you know that even that will cease to exist after today. The silly competition will be over, no more trying to get more popular, but rather just actually focusing on what the two of you areâheroes.
You grab your pillow, squeezing it to your chest. Of course you had to fuck it up once more.
The pillow feels to hard. Too many feathers stuffed into the thing, and without thinking about it you rip it open, hundreds of little feathers spilling from the casing. Sitting up you look around the room knowing that each safehouse had a small kit with a thread and needle stored somewhere.
Searching around for it, you find it under the sink. Sitting on the bed once moreâa few feathers poking you in the butt and your legsâyou get to work.
Hours pass, the dark night sky changing to the soft break of dawn that paints the entire sky hues of orange, to daylight where the sun is shining onto the sealed windows.
Your hands are cramping and bleeding slightly, small spots of red against the stark white feathers that make you just wanna cut your hand open to stain them red entirelyâsomething you decide against when you repeat it in your head.
When you finally lay down the thread and needle you look up at your nightstand. Itâs just past twelve in the afternoon, which gives you plenty of time to still get ready for the mission. Scrubbing a hand over your face you look down onto the bed.
An entire sheet of feathers lay there, neatly sown together in something that resembles the form of a wing. The entire thing is soft and way too itchy, but you still run your hands through it, hoping that one of them would twitch.
They never do.
Leaning your body back you look over at the wall, just⌠staring at it for a good few minutes. Since when were you so lonely that you had to sow together a whole feather blanket just to be reminded of when you were younger?
A small chuckle escapes your lips. Hollow and heartbroken. Of course, of course you would go ahead and fuck him after what happened when you kissed him last time.
Hands shaking you put the feather blanket over your legs, trying to feel the warmth in themâbut they are too different. Even your brain knows this isnât what you want, but itâs the closest what you can get. Sighing you get up to get ready for the day.
The mission comes before anything and everything else.
After that night you havenât been able to focus, quickly losing sleep and some of your popularity considering you havenât been doing that good of a job interacting with your fans. You were short and snappy with them sometimes, almost like a bird thatâs being cornered into a cage.
Your number two rankâbecause you did get to two after that saveâquickly dropped to four over the span of mere weeks. Tabloids printing out more and more articles about you. Speculations, your latest mishap, you name it and itâs there.
And of course wherever your name went, his was not far behind. Hawks, the number two hero, charming his way with the ladies once more. His ruby studs catching the light just right in the latest picture, and you know his magpie brain loves to see it.
Clicking the screen off you let yourself fall backward. This isnât what you wanted, not even close. And just like you expected, thereâs no more real competition. But maybe thatâs also because youâre not letting there be competition.
The Commission has been on your ass about your latest endeavors, scolding you and even putting cameras inside of your own agency, just so they can keep track of what youâre doing in there.
Your sidekicks have been eyeing you carefully, but you just smile at them and tell them everything is fine. Because it is, isnât it?
No matter how much time passes, every time you get homeâif you even get the time to go back to your own apartment, nothing Commission ownedâyou look in the almost-empty closet and fish out the little feather blanket you made weeks ago.
Every time you canât sleep, you lay it over you, just to try and trick your brain that everything will be okay, even when it will never be again.
The Hero Billboard Chart that year felt brutal. You fell down the rankingsânow the number five heroâwhile Hawks was at his number two spot. Itâs been the first time in years since the two of you didnât stand next to each other. And oh boy, didnât people have their opinions about it.
Thereâs speculation, children and adults alike screaming at the two of you asking if something happened. Others are more bold and ask if the two of you had a falling out of sorts. And of course there are the shippers who are making sad edits about you and Hawks, compiling every picture the two of you are in together to throw a sad song over it while unrelated pictures get used.
Itâs honestly⌠something. Never in a million years would you have thought that people cared like to this extent. The two of you werenât that close. Not in the publicâs eye anyway, and no one knows about the history you have with the birdbrain.
So why is everyone always trying to get you two together anyway? Is it because you two debuted at the same time and rose the rankings together? Or do they see something deeper you yourself are refusing to admit?
Whatever it is, it doesnât matter, because the HPSC is once again calling a meeting. Walking in you see that one face you were dreading to see, but you canât just walk back out. Steeling your face you go to sit down at the long table thatâs filled with people in business suits.
The meeting drones on and on. Beginning with reprimanding you for losing rank so fast. Rolling your eyes you let them talk about how they are going to rectify things, as if being the number five isnât good enough.
A pawn. Thatâs still all you are to these people. Just a little piece on a much bigger board they can use any time they want. Same goes for the crimson-winged hero across from you. Heâs leaning back, arms behind his head while he leans back.
Thereâs a beat of silence before your handler finally speaks up. âThe two of you will do an ad together. Just to show everyone thereâs no bad blood.â
That makes you freeze up slightly, hairs standing on end like someone threw a cold bucket of water over you. The blond across from you also halts for half a secondâone youâre sure everyone around the table sawâbefore he smiles, big and bright.
âAnd what would this ad be?â he almost purrs across the table, canines on full display while he sits up a little straighter. The lax position from minutes ago disappearing completely.
The handler looks you over for a second, then him, then looks down at the tablet, just to create a little suspense. You know she knows what the ad is about, everyone here, except for you and Hawks do. They never call in a meeting without being prepared to the max.
âItâs an underwear ad. They want to advertise their new matching setsâfor partners. The two of you can do that, right?â
Of course. Of course they would throw you in the deep end like this. It isnât even just the fact that you have to do an ad with him, but the forced close proximity and underwear. Fucking great. Across from you Hawksâ eyebrows shoot up.
âAn underwear ad,â he echoes, dragging every syllable like heâs chewing on taffy and trying to figure out how to get it out of his mouth. âFor couples.â
Everyone at the table looks at him before his own handler smiles, cold and devoid of any emotion. âThe two of you can do that, right? Show the world thereâs no bad blood like they think there is. Just two heroes who are competing to be the better hero.â
You nod slowly, mechanically. Thereâs no saying no to this, and he knows it as well. His golden eyes flit over to yours, and for the first time in forever you can see a glint of emotion in there. Itâs gone as quick as it came, but you swear there was some relief in there.
Which is why youâre here now, two weeks later in a warehouse that doubles as the set. There are people everywhere around you. Two are working on your body, lotioning it up so it looks good in the lightingâor whatever they said, you werenât really listening to begin with to be completely honestâwhile there are another two people working on your hair and makeup.
The underwear is plain. A little heart cut out on your assânothing scandalous, just something cuteâwhile there is a little bow on the front. Your bra also has a cute little bow at the front, tits sitting snug in it, and itâs honestly cute.
You can hear the assistants whisper to each other about everything and anything, but most of the time yours and Hawksâ name fall from their lips. Straining your ears you can just about hear what theyâre sayingâHeâs adorableâ âadorable? heâs so hot.â âI think I like her moreâ âFine then, more for meâ.
Theyâre giggling as if you canât hear what theyâre saying, and if you can hear it, youâre certain he can, too.Speaking of, looking in the mirror you can see him walk up and lean against the doorframe, arms over his chest, biceps bulging.
Heâs in nothing but boxers, and you have to keep your eyes up to not ogle him. Lean frame gotten a bit more defined over the years, but nothing extreme. He has to be able to fly, after all, and it would be more difficult if he was on the bigger side.
The stylist puts on some lipgloss before she steps away with an watchful eye. Once she determines everything is fine she nods at you to go stand up. Walking over to the guy who fills every room without even tryingâthough his wings certainly had something to do with thatâyou stop just short in front of him.
He lets his eyes rake over you, stopping just slightly when he sees the cute bow before he whistles. Low and sharp. A catcall if you ever heard one. Your hand shoots up and hits him on the back of his head, a small little flick of your wrist.
Thereâs a small, sharp sting on the back of his head. Not hurting him enough to complain, but enough to get him back into the present. The two of you are not alone, and when he looks around, he can see almost every eye on the two of you.
Right. Just an ad campaign and not just the two of you.
âReady?â he murmurs, pushing himself upright before stepping aside slightly. You roll your eyes at him before pushing past him to make your way to the set. He flicks two fingers into the air to everyone in the dressing room before he turns to follow you. And, ohâoh now thatâs unfair. The little heart cutout has his eyes drawn to it.
Itâs cute, small enough to be inconspicuous, but enough for him to notice. And notice he does. His feathers bristle slightly before he has to calm them down. Memories of months ago filling his head. You pushed to the brick wall, your warm, wet walls clamping down on his fingers, on his dickâshit.
He flexes his arms in hopes to get the blood rushing to there instead of down there. And he already knows this is going to be a long day.
The director is absolutely delighted when he sees the two of you walk in, immediately shaking your hands and thanking the two of you for coming, since he knows how busy hero work is. Heâs absolutely beaming when you start talking a bit more, but then remembers he has to actually put the two of you in positions for the shoot.
It starts out with Keigo sitting down, muscled thighs spread oud, and you have to perch on his lap. Of fucking course. This is a couples ad, after all. But that didnât mean you werenât hoping it wouldnât be like this.
Still the shoot goes on, running through multiple poses. Sitting on his lap, standing in front of each other, standing in front of him while you were with your back turned toward the camera, one of his hands on you waist, which slid lower lower lower, until he was grabbing your assâwhich the director absolutely loved to see.
âMake it more sensual.â âGood, good, look each other in the eyes like you mean in.â âOh, yes yes that! thatâs it!â âPut your hand on his chestâthere we goo.â âThis is looking good guys.â âOkay now I just need something that shows off the front. Ohhh thatâs good!â
He was⌠energetic to say the least.
By the time the two of you are done with the shootâhaving had solo shots done as wellâitâs already late at night. Most of the people have packed up already with a promise to go to dinner together, while there are still a few people walking around.
Youâre in your dressing room removing your makeup when the door opens. Looking up through the mirror you can see Hawks leaned against the door, crimson wings spread open slightly while his arms are over his chest. Still in just his underwearâsame as you.
Youâre not sure what happened next. One minute he was talking to youâtaunting you, reallyâand the next the two of you are stumbling to the couch, fingers groping and touching everywhere your eyes can see.
Youâre laying on your back, hair splayed out underneath you while Hawks stands over you, teeth in the wrapper of the rubber that heâ âWhere did you even get that from?â He walked in here in just his boxers, so unless he was hiding it in there you have no idea where he got it from.
âSent a feather to retreat one from my wallet,â he chuckles before he drops the last piece of clothing, dick springing free and hitting his bellybutton. Heâs already hard and leaking for youâa sight you cannot get used toâand the soft amber lighting of the mirror shows you the two barbells just under his tip.
Fuck, if that isnât hot. Your thighs squeeze together while you feel yourself start to soak through your underwear, white fabric almost turning translucent, sticking to your folds that leaves nothing up to the imagination.
Rolling the condom on he positions himself between your legs, hand at his base tapping his tip on your clit over the fabric a few times. Each tap has your thighs jolt, almost clamping them shut before you feel multiple feathers on them, keeping you nice and spread for him.
âYou always like to tease this much orâ or are you trying to keep me here longer?â you ask him through your teeth, annoyance dripping from your voice. It just makes him chuckle, golden eyes trained on where you were dripping for him. âHmm, just wanna get you nice ân wet for me, but seems like I donât have to do much, do I?
You roll your eyes at the statement. Itâs not like heâs wrong, though. Thereâs no hiding it, either, not with the way your spread out for him.
He finally takes your panties off, hooking his slender fingers into the waistband before he lets it snap against your skin once, having you jolt out, before he finally takes them off. He looks down at the way youâre spread open for himâwet slit spread open for him with the way his feathers are keeping you open, and he canât help but pry your lips open ever further with his thumbs.
Your hole clenches around nothing, more arousal dripping out of you and down the couch. Heâs just staring for a few seconds, pupils blown out at the sight, and it wouldâve made you chuckleâtaunt him about hypnotizing him with your pussyâif it wasnât for him putting his thumb in your weeping hole.
âFuck, Hawks. Wanted your cock,â you mewl out when he slowly moves his finger in and out of you, totally transfixed on the way youâre swallowing him whole. âSeriously, just g-get this over with.â
You grab the base of his cock, manicured fingers wrapping around the appendage, before you move it over your slit, head bumping your already-sensitive clit. That finally snaps him out of it, retreating his thumb from your snug walls with a pop!
Positioning him at your entrance, he finally moves his hips, pushing in slowly. The stretch is still overwhelming. Leaning down his teeth sink into the fabric of your bra before he pulls it down just enough to bunch under your tits. Your nipples pebble immediately after they get exposed to the cold air, which just makes him groan before wrapping his lips around one of them.
The dual sensation has you mewling out, hands finding purchase on his back, fingers skimming the base of his wings making them arch out, the red plumes the only thing you can see right now. He whimpers at the sensation, feathers bristling slightly before he folds them back in.
His cock throbs inside of you once he bottoms out, flushed head steadily dripping more pre. The feeling of the rubber is different, the layer between your walls and his flushed cock has you whining out. The little barbell also feels weird, not like last time.
âStop clenchingâ fucking hell⌠like that,â his hand smacks your thigh, aa sharp sting running up your thigh and straight to your core, having the exact opposite reaction he wantedâwalls clenching down on him further.
âJust move already,â you moan out when his tongue flicks over your nipple, still waiting for him to move. His hips start to move, pulling them back he thrusts forward again. A deep and brutal thrust that has you clawing at his back, leaving behind angry, red marks. The red that matches his wings.
Your hips move in tandem with his, skin slapping against skin, heavy balls hitting your ass while his mouth finally finds your other tit, peppering it with kisses and bites. âSo good for me, love it when I fuck you, donâtcha?â he murmurs against your skin.
Your legs wrap around his waist before you flip the two of you around, his body hitting the couch with an âoomfâ. Straddling him you grab him at the base before sinking down on his girth, weeping hole swallowing him greedily. âHate you. Hate you so much.â
His hands come down to your hips, helping you move up and down his cock. His eyes are transfixed on where the two of you are connected, lips stretching around him. âYeah, hate me? That why youâre bouncing on my cock right now?â
His thumb presses onto your clit while two of his feathers come down to play with your nipplesâfeather-soft brushes against your skin making you keen out into the air, not caring who could possibly walk by and hear the two of you.
âT-this doesnât mean anything,â you moan out, ass slapping against his thick thighs with each fall of your hips. Your pace slowly dwindles down, hips not lifting as far up as they did before, which is a wrong move because Hawks tightens his hold onto your plush hips and starts moving you.
âCâmon now, birdie. Wanted to ride me so. ride. me.â he slams you down with each word, tip hitting your cervix every time he bottoms out. You throw your head back at the feeling, back arching to the point where your tits are basically smothering him. Not that he cares though, he just happily groans while licking off the sweat thatâs beading down the valley of your breasts.
âYouâreâshitâdirty,â is all you can get out while heâs bruising your walls, fingers digging into your flesh in a way that you know will leave behind marks the next day. Luckily your hero suit covers it, because otherwise people would definitely know what happened.
Your thighs are starting to strain, knot in your stomach coiling deeper and deeper until it finally snaps. Body trembling above his, walls constricting around him. âShitâ tryna milk me even when you know you canât get filled?â
He holds your body against him while he plants his feet on the ground. Pummeling his hips into yours, he chases after his own orgasm. Youâre whining out at the overstimulation, hips writhing above him trying to get away from the feeling, only for him to lock his arms around your waist, keeping you still for him.
With a groan he finally cums, rubber preventing you from feeling him fill you up. The only sounds filling the room is the two of you greedily gulping in some air, and his feathers twitching against his backâpuffing up slightly with affection before they go down again.
Thatâs the way the two of you begin this⌠arrangement of sorts.
Instead of taunting about rankings, the two of you began doing⌠favors for each other. He ate you out after you shot up the rankings again, and you sucked him off when he was still the number twoâabove your rankingâthe next year.
You can still remember the way he was teasing you about sounding hoarse during patrol. Your throat was constricting around him a mere ten minutes before you had to go out, so there was no time to even look for something to soothe your throat.
And then you had the times where he came over just to take his frustrations out on you, hips pummeling into your ass from behind, grunting about how overworked the two of you were. The Commission still on both your asses, giving you assignment after assignment.
Your ass was red and swollen by the time he was done, puffy cunt absolutely abused while he watched his cum drip out of you only for him to lick it out of there mere seconds later.
Sometimes he came inside of you, other times he pulled out just in time, painting your skin with ropes of white, rubber having been ditched after your third time together. You were whining about not being able to feel him, telling him that you were on the pill so he couldnât get you pregnant anywayâthank you Commission for doing something good for once.
Which is leads you to today, youâre laid out on a bed. Not the small beds the two of you had in the safehouses, nor the couches backstage somewhere or the rough bricks scratching against your back whenever the two of you find yourselves outside again. No this is Hawksâ bed, massive, just to comfortably fit his wings onto.
Heâs pounding into your poor, overstimulated pussy. His hips coming down to grind against you before he pulls back and slams back in. The headboard is hit hit hitting the wall behind you, luckily for the two of you he lives in the penthouse, so there will be no noise complaints.
âFucking hate them,â he grunts while sweat is beading down his temple, wings spread out behind him in a brilliant, crimson arc. Your fingers are clawing at his biceps while he continues his rant. âNo, Hawks, it isnât enough. Nothing you ever do is enough. Weâll just keep on sending you on missions, because thatâs why youâre here. To be a hero means to sacrifice,â he mocks one of the handlers.
Itâs not often that he reaches out to you, much less when he actually calls you over. Hell, this has been the first time you were even in his apartment, and you had no time to actually admire the place before he had you pinned to the wall already.
Sinking to his knees he muttered out a, need this. need this pussy to suffocate me. before he all but yanked your shorts and panties down in one, swift movement. His lips immediately latched onto your sensitive nub, making your hand fly to his hair while your head thunked! onto the wall behind you.
âFucking hell, whatâs gotten into you?â you asked him through a moan. While heâs eaten you out before, he was never this desperate to get his handsâor in this case lipsâon you. It was always filled with teasing and taunting remarks. But this time he just groaned into your mound like it was the answer to all of his questions. âSeriously, Hawks⌠what happened?â
Youâre pulling on his hair trying to get him to at least acknowledge you, but all it did was make him whimper out into your slit while his wings shuddered behind him. Well guess you found out something new about him.
âCommission was on my ass,â he mumbles through licks, his tongue flitting over your clit while one of his hand is groping your ass like it was his personal stress-ball. âFuck you taste so sweet.â
Your eyes rolled to the back of your head, hips starting to grind down onto his face while he plunged his tongue inside of you, wiggling the muscle around into your tight walls. âWant me t-to talk about it?â you breathed out, swinging one leg over his shoulderâcareful not to pin his wing to his backâto give him more access to your slit, which he happily takes, pressing his mouth further into your pussy.
âJusâ need you right now,â he grunted out, continuing to eat you out. It was messy, spit dribbling past the corners of his mouth while the lower part of his face was shiny with your arousal. âPussy loves me, doesnât she?â
You couldnât answer that, too busy trying to focus on your upcoming orgasm to even think of responding to him talking to your pussy like it was alive instead of just an organ. Gripping his hair even tighter you began gyrating your hips down onto his face which he happily let you, groaning out while he angled his face so his nose would nudge your clit with each roll of your hips.
Once you came on his faceâthighs trembling, tummy clenching, moans flowing free out of youâhe dragged you to the bed where he took no time to slide into you. Youâre still not used to the way he stretches you out, despite it having been years since you first began fucking him.
Heâd filled you up once already while youâve cum three times, weeping pussy sensitive to each roll of his hips, and you can feel your stomach starting to tighten once more.
âHavenât I sacrificed enough already?â Heâs still talking, still asking rhetorical questions that you could answerâthat you would answer if he wasnât pounding you into oblivionâbut all you can do is moan out at him. âD-did everything for them.â
Nodding your head you run your hand through his hair, trying to soothe him slightly, but you just tighten your grip once he finds that spongy spot inside of you again, bullying it when he realises heâs found your g-spot once again.
âF-fuck, Hawks. Wait. Feels weird,â youâre trying to get him to slow down, to get that weird feeling building up in your lower stomach to go away, only for him to continue babbling about the Commission and how they ruined his life. If you werenât so busy youâd give your two cents on it, but you canât. Legs starting to tremble around his waist while your toes curl.
He presses his thumb to your clit, and that does it. Your orgasm crashes into you like a lighting strike. Clear liquid gushing out of you and onto Hawksâ abs, thighs, balls and bedsheets. Your hands tighten in the sheets beside you while you sob out his name. âFuck, Keigoâ Kei. Pleasepleaseplease. Love youâ shit.â
That makes him still. Just completely still against you. You donât notice, though, too busy riding out your orgasm to even see the way his eyes are wide open, mouth agape. The pleasure shooting through you has you crying, tears rolling down your cheeks and disappearing into the pillows below you.
âWhat did you just say?â His voice is so small, unlike his normal, cocky self that you finally open your eyes. Blinking a few times you note the way heâs hunched over you right now, a few feathers suspended in the air while his golden eyes look at you like youâre made of glass. He says your nameânot birdie, not dove, not your hero name, just your actual name. The one you havenât heard in years.
âSay it again,â he breathes out, almost begging you. âPlease.â
Gulping you look at those golden eyes youâve seen your entire life, the ones that always meant that you were safe. The ones youâve hoped to see beside you every day, but got taken away from you when you were a mere seventeen years old.
âI love you,â you murmur, trying to gauge his reaction. The next second his mouth crashed onto yours, plump lips groaning out after he finally tasted you. Itâs been ten years. Ten years since the two of you last kissed. You two hadnât kissed even once after debuting, despite the two of you having been fuck-buddies for years.
Itâs filled with warmth and lust, his tongue clashing against yours while you drink up all of his sounds. The wings on his back unfurl and furl back in, almost as if he has no control over whatâs happening to them.
âLove you, love you, love you,â he mumbles out against your lips while slowly starting to trust back inside again. The overstimulation has you keening out, but you just wrap your legs further around his waist while pulling him back in. âMine, all mine.â
His pace picks up, hips snapping against yours once more. One of his hands gropes your breast while the other squeezes your waist, pulling you down to meet every thrust.
Your body is completely pliant against his, bones feeling like jelly with the way heâs made you cum multiple times already. The last sunrays catch your eyes, and it has him gasping out. You look like an angel beneath himâhis angel.
He spills inside you not soon after, a second load filling you up. And you coax him through it, hands running through his hair while his lips latch onto your throat.
You thought heâd be done now, but you can feel him twitch inside of you. âAre you still hard?â you whisper, incredulous.
Keigo merely smiles down at you before he pulls out of you, his thick seed immediately bubbling out of you. He gives you no time to even realise whatâs going on, picking you up into his arms and setting you down in front of the big window that overlooks the city.
Your body tilts forward, tits pressing against the cool glass while you turn your head to the side to look at the man behind you. âWhat are you doing?â
âGonna show everyone youâre mine,â he growls before nudging your knees apart and slips back inside. Your mouth falls open when he starts moving again, the cool glass a stark contrast to your overheating body.
The streets below are still busy, and if someone were to look up they would be able to see the number two absolutely railing the number three hero. Your nipples brush against the smooth surface, adding all the more pleasure to your core.
Inner thighs are slick with a mixture of your and his cum, and you can see him in the reflection of the glass. The crimson almost getting swallowed by the burnt-sienna of the sky outside, but his eyes are transfixed on you. He chuckles when he feels you clench down onto him, walls fluttering uselessly around him. âYou like the thought of people seeing you like this?â he murmurs into your ear, breath warm against the shell.
Your hips move back against him, knees weak with the way he knocks you forward with each thrust. Wrapping his arm around you, he lifts you up, feet dangling uselessly above the ground. You gasp out at thatâat him using your body like you were merely a doll he could just pick up whenever he wanted.
âShitâ Keigo,â you whine out his name, forehead thumping against the glass, eyes fluttering close when that piercing passes over your sweet-spot with each pass of his hips. Nails leaving angry indents into his forearm.
âI know, dove. I know,â he murmurs against your cheek, he pounds into you from behind like a man possessed. âLet go for me. Show me how much you want me.â
Your eyes roll to the back of your skull, mouth opening in a broken moan that sounds so unlike you. White-hot pleasure shoots through your core, whitening out your vision for what feels like an eternity.
Keigo is not far behind, hips snapping against your ass like a punctuation. âS-shit, trying to milk me for all Iâm worth.â
He spills into you for the last time that night. Hips ceasing their ministrations completely, his sweaty chest pressed flush against your back. Letting your head loll back against his shoulder you look at him, tired eyes blinking over his form.
Heâs flushed from his face down all the way to his chest. Sweat beads down his body and heâs panting against your neck. His hair is plastered to his forehead, eyes blown out wide.
Moving the two of you back to the bed, he carefully lays you down before walking away, only to return with a washcloth seconds later. He carefully opens your thighs for him and begins to clean you up. You trash slightly at the sensation. âI know, dovey. Will be over soon.â
He throws the washcloth somewhere to the ground, and it lands with a wet schlap! somewhere in the corner of his bedroomâsomething youâll probably reprimand him for when you have more energy, but right now you couldnât care less.
Shuffling into the bed, he pulls you to his chest. One of his wings wraps itself around youâjust like old times. It takes you right back to that too-small bed where the two of you would talk into the late hours of the night.
Feathers are twitching against your skin as if trying to kiss your entire body. It makes you relax, body sinking more into his chest while he traces small shapes in your skin.
âThat was⌠a lot,â you mumble out, not quite sure if you should even address it, but you canât stay silent any longer. The way he said your name, told you he loved you, gave you your old nickname back. It was, quite frankly, a lot. And even if that all didnât happen, he also made you squirt for the first time. The memory has you flushing bright red.
âMhmm, nothing I said was untrue, though,â he mumbles out into your hair, pressing his lips feather-soft against the crown of your head. It has you closing your eyes for a few seconds before opening them again.
âWhy did you even leave in the first place, Kei?â Itâs been bothering you ever since he walked out of that room. The way he was so fidgety, no longer wanting anything to do with you when the two of you only had a few more months before the debut. A few more months and the two of you couldâve just stopped sneaking around.
You can feel him lean back a little, head angled down before his fingers find you chin and nudges your head up so he can look at you. âWhat are you talking about, dove? Youâre the one who told me that we couldnât be together.â
Furrowing your brows you look at the golden eyes youâve known your whole life. Shifting slightlyâand hissing when you accidentally rub yourself against his thighâyou sit up a little, just enough to look at him.
âNo, no. You came into my room telling me it couldnât work any longer,â you start, eyes darting around his face, confusion settling over you. You can still remember that night vividly, and it was him who broke it off with you. âSaid you didnât have feelings for me and then just⌠walked out.â
âNow why would I do that when Iâve been in love with you for all of my life?â He asks you, bushy brows furrowed together. Thereâs a slight crease between them, and you want to rub it away, but youâre still racking your brain.
He continues, voice lower now, more sad, âI came back from that horribly long assignment and you were waiting for me on my bed. At first you were just⌠quiet. Then you told me that it was a mistake and that it was just the proximity that had made you kiss me.â
You chuckle at that, hollow and sad all at once. âJust the proximity? Keigo Iâve liked you ever since I realised what it meant to have a crush on someone.â
He just purses his lips at that, not moving an inch. The feathers that are still on your back twitch a few times, a shudder going through them that he doesnât bother to stop.
âThen why would youââ he trails off, golden eyes almost bulging out of his skull with realisation. âThe Commission.â
âWait, what?â Youâre confused now. What does the Commission have to do with any of this? It was just you two that knew about everything, the Commission has never even known that you and Keigo even knew each other outside of any assignments.
âThink about it, dove. Youâre saying it was me who broke it of, Iâm saying it was youââ
âI never broke up with you. God I was so heartbroken.â
ââand neither of us is saying we did that. Hell, weâre both saying we wanted to be together. So what else could it have been? You know how the Commission is, they could get their hands on any quirk user, and I would bet thereâs someone who could shapeshift, or something like that.â
Youâre still looking at him, mind racing now. You honestly canât believe neither of you thought about this earlier, but then again the two of you didnât really talk. Just played stupid games to be close to each other.
âThe feather,â you finally breathe out, fingers ghosting over your ribs where he always put the small feather. The one youâve been missing on your skin for years. âIt didnât float when I threw it back at you. It just⌠fell to the floor. And âyouâ picked it up. Picked it up.â
How could you have missed itâthat small detail that would tell you something was wrong. Sure he was acting strange, not letting you touch him and just being twitchy in general, but his feathers were the dead giveaway. They never could quite hide everything he wanted to, despite having been trained for years.
How did it never occur to you that he had telepathic feathers and he picked it off the floor rather than just bringing it toward himself.
âYou gave that feather back,â he murmurs, his own thumb coming to your ribs. Then a small, sad chuckle falls from his lips. âEven after all the training weâve had, we still got outsmarted by the suits. Purely because we couldnât see past our emotions.â
Tears spring to your eyes, because itâs true, isnât it? You let the emotions get the better of you, throwing out the small feather that could have solved everything. What wouldâve happened if you never threw it back at âhimâ in that fit of anger? Would the two of you still have been best friends? More than best friends? Or would he not have believed you?
âHow did they even find out about it?â you whisper. His thumb comes up and wipes away some of the tears that are gathering on your waterline, the action so soft compared to how he used your body mere minutes ago. âWeâve never gotten caught in twelve years.â
âMustâve been the supply closet,â he answers, pulling you back to lay on his chest. âMaybe they realised that us walking back took longer than needed.â
And how stupid could the two of you have been? Of course they would know how long it takes for the two of you to walk backâespecially considering Keigo had left before you and went out of the supply closet after you.
Thatâs the exact thing the two of you were trained on noticing, patterns and behaviours. Yet it didnât occur in your minds that they would be using it as well. Didnât think about much but him at that moment, to be completely honest.
âCanât believe secret kisses in a supply closet is what has gotten us caught,â you groan out into his chest, the words slightly muffled. And he laughs at that, a small breath through his nose that rattles his chest. âAt least you were my first everything.â
âWait what?â He looks down at you, looks at the way youâre burrowing yourself further into his chest, trying to find his warmth. His wing instinctively tightens around you, feathers whispering against your skin from where theyâre puffing up slightly. âYou mean to tell me that time on the rooftop was your first time, too?â
You hum slightly, a small, drowsy thing that comes deep from your throat. His words still have to catch up with your brain, but when they finally register your head snaps up. âWhat do you mean, too?â
âI never fucked anyone beside you,â he says, not even a tremble can be found in his voice. Looking at him for a little while longer, you let a small chuckle escape your lips. He never fucked anyone else?
âThen why do you have a piercing there?â Your leg shifts slightly over him, making him groan out, wing tightening a fraction. He grabs your leg with one hand, halting your movement, because he can already feel blood rush south againâway too sensitive from the multiple rounds the two of you had earlier.
âGot it so I could jerk off fasterâwhy are you laughing, you out of all people should know that we donât get any time to get any release. Especially with the way the Commission keeps throwing more and more missions at us.â
âItâs just⌠I thought you had fucked half the population here in Fukuoka City, and here you are telling me you were a virgin and just got a dick piercing to make yourself more sensitive?â
Itâs ridiculous, honestly. And everything makes senseâthe way he would never respond to your taunts about other girls, just like you wouldnât respond to any of his taunts since you wouldnât just tell him he was the one to take your virginity.
âGuess we have a lot of catching up to do, love.â There it is again, that nickname. Not a slip of the tongue as you thought it was ten years ago. He really did call you âloveâ back then.
Your eyes close against your will, body finally going boneless against him. âMhmm, but first we should go to sleep.â
âI donât care what we do as long as I have you beside me,â he murmurs out against your skin, lips brushing your templeâfeather-light, almost like it was never there to begin with.
You donât know whatâll happen tomorrow. All you know is that you got the boy you loved back and that this time nothing will come between the two of you.
ŠCursedKisss do not copy, steal, plagiarize, or feed my works into AI. I will send Shigaraki after you if you do.
Summary: During a sacred Yautja ceremony, a warrior must choose the mate who will stand beside him for life. Among proud hunters and warriors, you expect to remain unseen.
Kwei walks through the forest slowly, the weight of the skull resting in his hands. The creature had been strong. Fast. Its claws had cut through stone and bark alike, leaving deep scars across the trees where it fought for its life.
But it had not been strong enough.
Kwei had brought it down before sunrise, ending the fight with a clean strike through the spine.
Now, its skull belongs to him.
And soon, it will belong to someone else.
It is quiet as he returns to the clan grounds.
The evening air is cold, carrying the smell of distant fire smoke.
The clan is already preparing. Fires are being lit.
Warriors move through the settlement, carrying supplies and sharpening blades.
They all know what tomorrow is.
The claiming ceremony.
A tradition older than most of the warriors present.
A hunt is completed. The skull of the creature is offered. And from the females of the clan, one is chosen to become a wife.
Kwei reaches the entrance of the central courtyard and pauses for a moment.
His brother is waiting.
Dek stands near one of the fire pits, arms crossed over his chest. His posture is relaxed, but his eyes immediately fall on the skull in Kweiâs hands.
âA worthy kill,â Dek says.
Kwei steps closer and sets the skull on the stone table between them.
The bone is thick and ridged, its teeth curved and brutal. A dangerous creature. The kind that earns respect when it is brought down.
Dek runs a clawed finger across one of the horns.
âIt will make a fine first gift.â
Kwei grunts in agreement.
The skull will not remain here long. By this time tomorrow, it will be placed in the hands of his chosen mate.
Dek glances at him.
âYou have decided, then.â
It is not a question.
Kwei has never been one to hesitate.
âYes.â
Dek leans back slightly, studying his brother.
âAnd yet you have told no one.â
Kwei does not answer.
He reaches for a cloth and begins cleaning the remaining blood and dirt from the bone.
The silence stretches.
Dek snorts softly.
âYou enjoy this.â
Kwei glances at him briefly.
âWhat?â
âThe mystery. Every female in this clan has been preparing for weeks.â
Kwei knows.
He has seen it.
Some train harder. Some speak louder. Some walk closer to him than they once did, hoping their presence will be noticed.
Dek gestures lazily toward the outer paths of the settlement.
âThey believe they know what you want.â
Kwei finally sets the cloth aside.
âThey are wrong.â
Dekâs brow ridges lift slightly.
âOh?â
Kwei leans his weight against the stone table.
âI do not want a warrior.â
Dek blinks.
That is not the answer he expected.
âYou are a hunter. One of the strongest in this clan.â
âI know.â
âThen why would you not want a warrior beside you?â
Kwei looks toward the distant treeline.
Because he has seen what that looks like.
He has watched the pairings before.
Two warriors sharing a home that feels more like a training ground.
Competition.
Strength measured every day.
He does not want that.
âI have enough war in my life,â he says simply.
Dek studies him carefully now.
âYou believe a warrior cannot bring peace.â
âI believe a warrior will not try.â
Dek crosses his arms again.
âAnd the others?â
Kwei knows what he means.
The females who have approached him these past months.
Strong hunters.
Impressive fighters.
Loud.
Proud.
They want to stand beside him because he is strong.
Because his name carries weight in the clan.
Because they believe standing next to him will raise their own.
But that is not what he wants.
Kwei glances down at the skull again.
âI do not want someone who sees me as a prize.â
Dek tilts his head slightly.
âAnd yet you have chosen.â
âYes.â
The answer is firm.
Certain.
Dekâs gaze sharpens.
âThen tell me who you chose.â
Kwei meets his brotherâs eyes.
âNo.â
Dek laughs under his breath.
âYou truly intend to surprise the entire clan.â
Kwei does not smile.
But his eyes shift slightly toward the path leading down to the water pools.
Earlier that day, he had passed by there.
He had seen you kneeling beside a youngling, cleaning a cut on the small warriorâs arm.
Your hands had been gentle.
Your voice soft.
You had not noticed him watching.
You rarely notice him.
Most of the others do.
They look at him with calculation.
With ambition.
With the quiet hunger to be chosen.
You do not.
You speak to him when spoken to.
You nod respectfully.
Then you return to whatever task you were doing.
Water.
Food preparation.
Helping someone who needed it.
You never try to impress him.
And that, strangely, had made you impossible to ignore.
Dek notices the shift in his gaze.
âYou are thinking of her.â
Kweiâs attention snaps back to his brother.
âI did not say that.â
âYou did not need to. Is she strong?â
Kwei considers the question.
Then shakes his head.
âNot in the way you mean.â
Dek leans forward slightly, curious.
âThen why her?â
Kwei looks around the courtyard.
The stone.
The weapons.
The skulls of old hunts mounted along the walls.
This place is strong.
Impressive.
But it is not warm.
His home is the same.
Strong.
Cold.
Empty.
He exhales slowly.
âA hunter can fill my walls with trophies. But they cannot fill my home.â
Dekâs expression changes slightly.
Understanding flickers there.
âYou want warmth.â
âYes.â
Dek studies him for a long moment.
âYou believe she can give you that.â
Kwei nods once.
âI know she can.â
Dek pushes away from the fire pit and stretches his arms.
âWell. Tomorrow will be interesting.â
Kwei lifts the skull from the table again.
The bone is heavy.
Solid.
A worthy gift.
Tomorrow, he will place it in your hands.
You will be shocked.
He knows that already.
You will look up at him with those wide, uncertain eyes and wonder why he has chosen you.
He can already imagine the question forming in your mind.
Why me?
Kwei turns toward the ceremonial hall.
The fires inside are already being prepared.
The clan will gather.
The elder will speak.
And when the moment comes, he will walk past every female who tried to be noticed.
Until he stops in front of the one who never tried at all.
Dek calls after him.
âOne last question.â
Kwei pauses.
His brother grins slightly.
âAre you certain she will accept you?â
Kwei glances back over his shoulder.
For a moment, his expression softens.
Then he answers.
âIf she does not, I will accept it. But I will not choose another.â
Dek studies him carefully.
That answer surprises him even more than the rest.
Kwei turns away again and continues toward the hall.
The skull rests steady in his hands.
Tomorrow, the clan will believe he is choosing a wife.
But the truth is simpler than that.
Tomorrow, he will choose warmth.
---
You were the only human living in the settlement. Yautja wasn't really the kind to accept other species. But after one of their Elders took you from Earth as a live trophy, you began to live amongst them. You learned their language, their traditions and soon, you became a member of their clan.
During an attack, you proved yourself worthy by saving the younglings. They were left behind, not a priority. But you fought a monster and kept them safe.
It earned you your place in their society.
An independent female living on her own, doing chores she can.
This will not be your first ceremony. During such events, all females are present.
You were never chosen and you expect the same to happen today.
The fire is already burning when you arrive.
The smell of smoke mixes with the cool evening air.
You pause at the edge of the courtyard.
There are many females already standing near the stone platform where the ritual will take place.
Some are hunters.
Some are warriors.
All of them know why they are here.
You lower your gaze slightly as you move to stand among them.
The ceremony is an old tradition. One that carries weight within the clan. A warrior proves himself through a hunt, bringing back the skull of the creature he killed. That skull becomes the first gift to the female he chooses as his mate.
A promise.
A declaration.
A sign that he can provide.
And tonight, the warrior who will make that choice is Kwei.
You have spoken to him before.
But not often.
You do not think he even notices you.
So you take your place quietly among the others and keep your head lowered.
Around you, the other females stand tall.
Some wear their armour proudly. Others carry the marks of previous hunts on their skin. Their posture is confident. Their movements are careful and deliberate.
They expect to be seen.
You do not.
Your hands rest loosely in front of you as you stare at the ground underneath your feet.
The stone floor is warm from the fire.
The air around you feels heavy with anticipation.
Then the drums begin.
A deep, steady rhythm echoes across the courtyard. Warriors of the clan begin to gather around the outer circle, their large forms surrounding the ceremonial space.
You feel their eyes moving over the line of females.
Judging.
Watching.
Waiting.
You try not to think about it.
You try not to think about Kwei.
The drums grow louder.
Then suddenly they stop.
Silence falls across the courtyard.
You lift your eyes slightly.
The elder steps forward first.
He stands beside the stone platform, raising one hand to quiet the crowd completely.
âTonight,â he begins, his voice carrying easily across the courtyard, âa hunter returns with honour.â
You hear movement behind you.
Heavy footsteps.
You already know who it is.
Kwei enters the courtyard slowly.
You do not look directly at him at first.
But you see the shape of him from the corner of your vision.
Tall.
Broad.
Strong.
In his hands, he carries the skull.
The bone is pale beneath the firelight, thick and ridged with long, curved horns. Even from this distance, you can see how dangerous the creature must have been when it was alive.
The elder gestures toward the skull.
âThe hunt proves strength,â he says.
Kwei steps forward and places the skull on the ceremonial stone.
The bone lands with a heavy sound.
âThe gift proves worth.â
You swallow slightly.
This is the moment every female here has been waiting for. You don't expect anything tonight. But then, why are you nervous?
The elder continues.
âFrom among the females of this clan, the hunter will choose the one he believes worthy to stand beside him. The skull of his hunt will become the first gift given to his mate.â
The elder steps back.
All attention turns to Kwei.
Your heart beats even faster now.
Kwei stands beside the skull for a moment.
He lifts it.
The bone looks heavy in his hands.
He turns.
And begins to walk.
You keep your head lowered.
You do not want to draw attention to yourself. You do not want to seem as if you expect anything.
So you stare at the stone floor and wait for the moment to pass.
Kweiâs footsteps move slowly down the line of females.
He stops briefly in front of the first.
She stands tall.
Confident.
But after a moment, he moves again.
Another female.
Another pause.
Another step forward.
You hear the faint murmurs of the crowd.
Everyone watching.
Your hands tighten slightly together.
You know he will not stop here.
You barely know him.
And you certainly are not the kind of female warriors usually choose.
You are not the strongest.
You are not the fiercest.
You have never tried to be.
So when the footsteps stop in front of you, you assume he is choosing the female standing beside you.
You remain still.
Head lowered.
Breathing quietly.
But the footsteps do not move again.
Seconds pass.
You lift your eyes.
And find Kwei standing directly in front of you.
Your breath catches.
For a moment, you simply stare at him.
Surely this is a mistake.
Surely he means someone else.
But his eyes are on you.
Only you.
The courtyard has gone completely silent.
Your heart begins to pound.
You glance slightly to the side, wondering if he will move again.
But he doesnât.
Instead, he lowers the skull.
And places it gently into your hands.
The bone is heavier than you expected.
You nearly stumble under the sudden weight.
Your eyes widen in shock.
A ripple of murmurs spreads through the watching clan.
You barely hear them.
All you can see is Kwei standing in front of you.
All you can feel is the heavy skull resting in your arms.
Kwei speaks.
âThis hunt, I dedicate to my mate.â
Mate.
The word echoes through your mind.
Your fingers tighten instinctively around the bone.
You look up at him again, searching his face for some sign that this is a mistake.
But there is none.
His expression is calm.
As if this decision was never in doubt.
The elder steps forward again.
âThe gift has been given. The choice has been made.â
Your heart is still racing.
You feel the eyes of the entire clan on you now.
Some surprised.
Some curious.
You barely know what to do.
So you hold the skull carefully and bow your head slightly.
It is the only response you can manage.
You accepted.
The elder nods once.
âThen the bond is acknowledged.â
The drums begin again.
The ceremony continues.
But you barely hear any of it.
Your mind is still caught on one simple thought.
Kwei chose you.
Out of everyone standing here.
He chose you.
And you have absolutely no idea why.
The celebration lasts long into the evening.
Fires burn across the clearing, and the scent of roasted meat fills the air. Yautja warriors sit together, recounting hunts and victories, their deep voices carrying across the night. Skulls and trophies gleam in the firelight, reminders of strength and survival.
You sit quietly among the others. The other females congratulated you, you could tell, they were truly happy for you.
The skull Kwei offered you rests beside you, polished and carefully placed on a mat. It is heavier than you expected. Not just in weight, but in meaning.
You try not to think about it.
Instead, your fingers trace the ridges of the skull, remembering the moment he placed it in your hands. The heat of his gaze. The certainty in his voice.
You are still not entirely sure this is real.
Across the fire, Kwei sits with the other hunters.
He speaks little. That part does not surprise you.
But his eyes move often.
And every time they do, they return to you.
You feel it each time.
It makes your heart beat strangely.
Eventually, the celebration begins to thin. Warriors rise and return to their homes. The fires burn lower. The air grows quieter.
You stand slowly, unsure of what comes next.
You feel his presence before you hear him.
Heavy footsteps approach behind you.
"Kwei."
His voice is low, gentle in a way that surprises you.
You turn.
Up close, he seems even larger than before. The firelight catches along the plates of his armour and the faint scars across his skin.
For a moment, neither of you speak.
Then he gestures.
A simple motion toward the path leading away from the clearing.
You follow him.
The walk is quiet.
The clan settlement fades behind you, replaced by the softer sounds of night insects and distant wind moving through the stone.
His home stands slightly apart from the others.
It is sturdy, built from thick wood and dark stone, decorated with trophies of hunts long past. Bones, claws, and carved markings line the entrance.
Yet the inside feels strangely empty.
Cold.
You step inside cautiously.
Kwei enters behind you and closes the door.
For a long moment, he simply stands there, watching you.
You feel suddenly very aware of yourself.
Of the skull you still carry.
Of the strange new weight of being chosen.
Finally, you speak.
"Why?"
The word leaves you before you can stop it.
Your voice is quiet, but the question feels enormous in the silence.
Kwei tilts his head slightly.
You force yourself to continue.
"There were stronger females."
Your hands tighten slightly around the skull. You look down briefly.
"I am not like them."
Silence fills the room.
You wonder if you have spoken out of place.
Then Kwei moves.
He steps closer until he stands only a short distance away.
Up close, his size is overwhelming.
But his posture is calm.
Not threatening.
His voice is softer than you expected.
"I know."
You blink.
He reaches out slowly, tapping two claws gently against his chest.
"My home."
Then he gestures around the room.
The cold walls.
The empty space.
"It is cold." His gaze returns to you. "I do not want another hunter."
His head tilts again, studying your expression carefully.
"I want warmth."
Your breath catches slightly.
He gestures again, mimicking the shape of something being built with his hands.
"A nest."
A nest.
A home.
His voice lowers even further.
"You bring warmth."
Your throat tightens unexpectedly.
You stare at him, trying to understand.
"But... we barely speak."
His mandibles shift slightly in what you slowly realise might be something like a smile.
"I observe."
You freeze.
"You bring food to injured younglings. You share water. You speak gently. You are kind."
Your cheeks grow warm.
You had never thought anyone would notice those things.
Kwei steps closer.
"The others want battle. I want peace."
His hand lifts slowly.
For a moment, you think he might touch you.
But he stops just short, as if he is unsure if he is allowed.
"You are different."
Silence settles between you.
Your heart beats quickly.
Slowly, carefully, you set the skull down on the nearby table.
Then you look back up at him.
"I don't know how to be a Yautja wife."
The words feel embarrassingly small.
He shakes his head.
"I do not want a Yautja wife. I want you."
The simplicity of it hits harder than anything else.
Your chest tightens.
Slowly, you step forward.
His posture goes completely still.
You lift your hand.
For a moment, you hesitate.
Then you place your palm gently against his chest.
The warmth under your hand surprises you.
His breath catches slightly.
You look up at him.
"I can try."
The words are quiet but sincere.
Kwei does not move for several seconds. Then his large hand slowly lifts, covering yours where it rests against him.
---
The clan is quiet when Kwei returns from the hunt.
Night has already fallen. The air is sharp with the coming winter, cold enough that frost gathers along the edges of leaves and stones.
His armour is heavy with the scent of blood and earth. A large creature hangs across his shoulder, its claws bound with thick rope.
The hunt was successful.
Any other hunter would walk proudly through the clan with such a prize. Many do. They enjoy the attention, the admiration, the loud praise from other warriors.
Kwei walks past them without stopping.
His path leads somewhere else.
Home.
The word still feels strange sometimes. Not because it is unfamiliar, but because of what it has become.
Years ago, this place was nothing more than a shelter. Stone walls. A place to sleep between hunts. Cold, quiet, empty.
Now it is something different.
Now it is yours.
The door opens with a low wooden creak.
Warm air greets him first.
Then the smell.
Cooked meat. Herbs you gathered earlier in the day. The faint smoke from the fire burning in the hearth.
It is a scent he knows well now.
It is the scent of peace.
Furs cover the stone floor, and the large sleeping nest in the corner is piled high with thick pelts from hunts. Some are from creatures that live far. Some from beasts so large that bringing them home nearly cost him his life.
Every single one was brought here for the same reason.
You.
Humans feel cold easily. He learned that very quickly.
And so the nest grew warmer with every passing season.
Kwei lowers the creature from his shoulder onto the floor near the door.
The sound draws your attention.
You step out from the back room, wiping your hands against a cloth.
When you see him, your face lights up immediately.
"Kwei."
Your voice is soft and warm, exactly the way it always is when he returns.
You walk toward him without hesitation.
You are smaller than him. Much smaller. Yet you stand before him without fear, reaching for him.
Your hand touches his arm.
"You are back."
He nods once.
Your eyes move briefly to the creature on the floor.
"You had a good hunt."
Another nod.
You smile.
There is no jealousy in your voice. No competition. No pride that demands proof of strength, the way many Yautja females would.
Only quiet happiness that he returned safely.
The warmth in his chest spreads instantly.
You turn slightly, already moving toward the fire.
"I made food. I was not sure when you would return, but it should still be warm."
You speak casually, like this is the most natural thing in the world.
Maybe for you it is. For him, it is still something precious.
Something rare.
He watches you move around the room, adjusting the pot above the fire, setting out the carved wooden bowls you prefer to use. The soft fur around your shoulders shifts when you move.
You hum quietly to yourself while you work.
Kwei removes his armour slowly, placing the heavy pieces against the wall.
Your home is full now.
Not with trophies or weapons.
With life.
You glance back at him over your shoulder.
"Was the hunt difficult?"
He could tell you many things.
About the creature that nearly tore open his side. About the long chase through the frozen river. About the moment he drove his blade through the beast's skull.
But he only answers simply.
"It was good."
You laugh softly.
"You always say that."
Kwei tilts his head slightly.
It is true.
He does not enjoy talking about hunts the way the others do. They sit for hours telling stories of blood and battle.
He listens.
But he does not speak.
You bring the food to the low table near the fire and sit down.
"Come. Eat."
He steps closer.
But instead of sitting immediately, he reaches for you.
Large arms wrap around your body, lifting you easily from the floor before you can react.
You laugh in surprise.
"Kwei!"
He does not answer.
Instead, he carries you across the room toward the large nest of furs.
You try to continue your earlier conversation.
"What did you hunt this time? It looked big."
No answer.
You glance up at him.
He lowers himself onto the nest, pulling you with him until you are pressed safely against his chest.
Your head rests just under his chin.
Only then does he finally speak.
"I want to hear you."
You blink.
"What?"
His arms tighten slightly around you.
"Talk."
You laugh again, quieter this time.
"You just came back from a hunt and you want to hear me talk?"
He nods.
Your fingers trace small circles against the skin of his arm.
"What should I talk about?"
Kwei closes his eyes briefly.
Your voice is calm.
Soft.
Warm.
It fills the space in a way nothing else ever could.
"Anything."
You think for a moment.
Then you begin speaking about your day.
About the herbs you gathered near the river. About the young hunter who slipped in the mud during training and covered himself completely in dirt. About how one of the elders tried to teach you a new recipe, but nearly burned the meat.
Your words flow easily.
Kwei listens.
He does not interrupt.
Does not move.
His large body relaxes slowly under your gentle voice.
This is what he wanted all those years ago.
Not another warrior.
Not another hunter eager for battle.
Warmth.
A home.
A nest filled with life.
Your hand eventually moves through his dreadlocks absentmindedly while you continue talking.
Your fingers are gentle.
Comforting.
At some point, your voice slows.
"You are very quiet tonight."
He opens one eye slightly.
"I am listening."
You smile against his chest.
"Did you at least miss me while you were gone?"
The question is playful.
Light.
Kwei opens his eyes fully now.
His hand moves up, gently holding the back of your head as he pulls you closer.
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or five times dennis whitaker didn't say anything, and one time he did.
dennis whitaker x f!reader | slow burn, 5+1, ms4!dennis, left-handed! dennis, er resident!reader, two tired people, accumulation of small things, pittsburgh winter, break room pretzels at 5am, being seen before you're ready to be seen
tw: referenced patient death, medical setting, exhaustion and burnout, brief mention of wanting to quit
summary: They don't fall in love the way people do in movies. There's no single moment, no score swelling beneath it, no rain. It's quieter than that. It's the way two people who are both running on empty stop, briefly, in the same place, and find that the stopping feels better than the running did.
one. the coffee
The first time she really notices him, it's 4:47 in the morning and she is losing a war with the break room vending machine.
She's been on since seven the previous morning. Nearly twenty-two hours, which is not a record, she stopped keeping records somewhere around month four of intern year, when the numbers stopped meaning anything useful, but it is the kind of hour where the fluorescent lights stop being lights and start being a personal insult. Her feet stopped sending reliable information to her brain sometime around midnight. She is running on the particular fuel of second-year residency, which is mostly stubbornness and the muscle memory of doing this before.
The vending machine has taken her dollar and returned nothing.
She presses B4 again. The coil turns. The bag of pretzels inches forward exactly one rotation, catches on the edge of the wire shelf, and stops.
She stares at it.
It stares back at her.
The small standoff holds for a moment. She has been awake for twenty-two hours, she has three charts left to close, and there is a bag of pretzels hanging six inches from freedom making a fool of her.
"I will end you," she says, very quietly, to the machine.
"You could try shaking it."
She turns around.
There's a medical student in the doorway, she's seen him around the floor, one of the new MS4s who started the ER rotation two weeks ago. She hasn't had reason to interact with him directly yet, though she's clocked him the way you clock everyone on your floor: name, year, general competency level, whether they'll cause you problems. Whitaker. From what she's seen, no problems. Tall, soft around the edges in the way people get when they haven't slept properly in longer than they can accurately remember. Brown curls that look like they stopped cooperating somewhere around the first overnight shift and have not been negotiated with since. He's holding a paper cup of coffee with both hands like it's the only thing keeping him upright, and he looks just as wrung out as she feels, which is, oddly, a small comfort.
He's watching her with an expression of polite uncertainty, like he's not sure if he's walked into something private.
She blinks at him.
He nods toward the machine. "Shaking it," he says, a little hesitant. "Sometimes it works. The ones in the lobby especially, if you get the angle right."
"I'm not going to shake a vending machine at four in the morning," she says.
"Right," he says. "Yeah. That's fair."
A beat. He doesn't leave. She's not sure why she expected him to. She turns back to the machine and considers her options with the gravity of someone who has very few of them left. Then, without making a conscious decision about it, she plants both hands flat against the side of the machine and shoves it, once, hard. The pretzel bag swings forward. The pretzels drop.
The machine rocks slightly. Settles.
She retrieves her pretzels.
She turns around. The medical student is watching her with an expression that is very carefully, very deliberately, not laughing.
"That," he says, "is essentially shaking it."
"That," she says, "is applied physics. Completely different discipline."
He does smile then, it's small and a little startled, like he wasn't expecting to, like the smile got away from him before he could decide whether to let it. She notices, without particularly meaning to, the way it arrives slowly, like it has to travel some distance before it reaches his face. It's not a performance of a smile. It's just what happens to his face when something is funny.
She tears open the pretzels. "You want some?"
He looks momentarily like she's offered him something more complicated than pretzels. "I don't want to take yourâ"
"There's forty-something in here," she says. "I'm offering five. Six if you're having a bad night."
He considers this with a seriousness that she finds, against her better judgment, a little endearing. Then he crosses the room and accepts the five pretzels she holds out. He eats one. She eats one. The break room hums around them with the particular quality of silence that only exists in a hospital at almost-five-in-the-morning, a thinner silence than any other kind, like the building is between breaths.
"Whitaker," he says, after a moment. "MS4."
"I know," she says. "I've seen you on the floor." She tells him her name, her year. Second-year resident. She watches him catalogue it with a small nod.
"Long shift?" he asks.
She lets out a single, quiet exhale that contains the whole answer. "Little bit."
He nods once, turning his coffee cup in his hands. He doesn't try to fill the silence after that, doesn't reach for more questions, doesn't perform friendliness the way some people do when they find themselves in an unexpected conversation at a bad hour. He just stands there, eating his pretzels, present and unhurried. She doesn't mind it. She notices that she doesn't mind it and files it somewhere she doesn't inspect yet.
"That pot," she says, after a moment, nodding at the coffee maker on the counter, "has been sitting since nine. Whatever is in your cup is approximately half-sediment."
He looks at the cup. "I know," he says. "I've made it twice tonight trying to improve it. I don't think it's a problem that can be solved from inside the system."
"There's a place two blocks down," she says. "Opens at five. The guy there makes actual coffee. The kind where you can taste that it was beans at some point."
He looks at her. "How do you know that?"
"Because I've been doing this for two years," she says, "and you find the coffee or you don't make it."
He takes that in with the same seriousness with which he took the pretzel situation. "Good to know," he says, and he means it, which is the part that's slightly funny, he's filed it, genuinely, like useful information he'll use.
She finishes her pretzels. He finishes his coffee. She goes back to work, and so does he, and they don't speak again for the rest of the shift. But when she passes him in the hallway twenty minutes later and he glances up from the chart he's marking, he gives her a small nod, the particular kind that means I know you now, and that's a different thing from before, and she nods back.
It's nothing.
It's also, if she's being precise about it, the beginning of something. She just doesn't know that yet.
She thinks about it twice on the drive home without knowing why.
two. the waiting room
The thing about working in the ER is that the waiting room is always the worst room.
She has known this since intern year, when she made the mistake of believing the hardest part happened inside the bays, the codes, the blood, the fractured decisions made in fractured seconds. All of that is hard. She won't minimize it. But there is a specific and different kind of hard that lives in the waiting room, in the quality of stillness that collects there. In the faces of people who have been sitting for two hours not knowing. In the children asleep across plastic chairs, and the ones who aren't asleep but are pretending. In the person in the corner whose hands are folded like they're already somewhere else.
She goes out there when she can. Not everyone does. Some people find reasons not to; the floor is busy, the charts are backed up, there's always something, and she understands it, doesn't judge it, because the waiting room costs something. It costs something to walk into it and be present in it, and this job asks so much of people that she doesn't hold it against the ones who conserve that particular cost.
She goes because she decided, a long time ago, that she would. And she keeps the decision, even on the shifts where it's expensive.
She's been talking to a woman for ten minutes, mid-fifties, her husband brought in forty minutes ago with chest pain, now in a bay while his wife sits in the yellow plastic chair nearest the door, which is where people sit when they're trying to stay close to the thing they're waiting for, when she becomes aware of someone settling into the empty chair on the other side of the woman.
She finishes her sentence. She glances over.
Whitaker.
She didn't ask him. She didn't wave him over. He just, came. He's sitting slightly angled toward the woman, and he's not doing anything dramatic, not performing attentiveness, just present in the particular way she's noticed about him on the floor: fully, without divided attention, like whatever is in front of him is the only thing currently in the world.
"âand I keep telling myself they're going to come out and say it's nothing," the woman is saying. Her hands are working in her lap, turning over each other the way hands do when there's nothing to hold. "But every time someone comes through that door I thinkâ"
"That's a hard place to sit," Whitaker says.
He doesn't say he's going to be fine or try not to worry, both things people say in waiting rooms because they're trying to help and both things that land hollow because they're about the future and nobody in a waiting room has the future yet. He just names the thing she's in. He says: that's a hard place to sit.
The woman's breath changes. Her shoulders drop a fraction.
She finishes her own update, delivers the timeline, does the things she's there to do. She's good at this. She knows she's good at this. But she keeps her peripheral attention on him, on the way he holds the conversation with the woman after she's done with the clinical part, not steering it anywhere, not trying to reassure, just letting the woman talk and responding to what she actually says rather than managing her toward calm.
It works the way it works when it's real. Gradually. Without tricks.
When she wraps up, she excuses herself and heads back to the floor. Whitaker follows a few minutes later, catching up with her near the triage desk.
"She was spinning out," he says. Not defensive. Just explaining, in case explanation is needed.
"I noticed," she says.
He looks at her sideways, checking the temperature of that.
She lets her face answer. "Her husband is going to be okay," she adds. "We'll know more in an hour, but it's reading as an anxiety response. Not cardiac."
He exhales through his nose, and the breath carries something. "Okay," he says. "Good." And he means it with his whole chest, which she notices.
She looks at him for a moment. They're both moving, still walking, charts in hand, the ordinary motion of a floor that doesn't stop. "You didn't have to do that," she says.
"I know."
"The rotation doesn't require you toâ"
"I know," he says again. He's quiet for a step. "She looked like she needed someone to sit with her. That's all."
It's such a plain sentence. No performance in it, no awareness of itself as a good thing to say. Just the observation and the response to the observation, cause and effect, simple as that. She looked like she needed someone, so he sat with her.
She picks up the next chart from the rack. "Whitaker."
He looks over.
"That was good," she says. "In there. That was good work."
He blinks. There's a half-second where something moves across his face, not quite surprise, but adjacent to it, like he received something he hadn't budgeted for. "Thank you," he says, and the words are small and genuine in equal measure.
She heads down the hallway. She doesn't see what he does after she turns, doesn't see him stand there for a moment holding the words like he's making sure they're real before he puts them somewhere.
But something shifts in the air, and she carries it for the rest of the shift without examining it.
three. the end of the world shift
There are shifts that break people.
Not the way it looks in stories, not the throwing things, not the walking out into the rain and standing with your face turned up to something. Real breaking is much quieter. It's the two-in-the-morning stillness of a trauma bay after you've done everything correctly and it wasn't enough. It's getting to your car and sitting in the parking garage for an indeterminate amount of time not because you're crying but because you're not anything yet. It's washing your hands and then washing them again and then once more after that, and not being able to say exactly why.
She has a shift like that in November.
It's never one thing. Any doctor who tells you it was one thing is compressing a longer story for convenience. It's the pediatric case at eight in the morning that they almost lose, they don't lose it, and she will think later that they should take more comfort in not losing it, but the almost stays in her chest like something lodged sideways, and it's still there at noon and at four and at seven. It's an attending who snaps at her in front of three nurses over a decision that she made correctly, that she would make again, that she knows she would make again, but it still does the specific thing that it does when someone in authority dismisses you in front of other people, it gets in, even when it shouldn't. It's the family in bay six who keep asking questions she doesn't have honest answers to yet, and the particular toll of standing in that gap between what someone needs to hear and what is actually true.
It's twelve hours of accumulation. And by the end of it she is not broken, because she's learned that she doesn't really break, but she is, she doesn't have a better word for it, she is very close to the bottom of herself, and the bottom is not a comfortable place to be.
She gets to the break room at the end of it and she is not crying. She is, with some effort, specifically not crying, in the way that requires a kind of internal maintenance, a steady holding of something in place.
Whitaker is already there.
He's at the table with a cup of coffee she can tell from across the room has gone cold, and he isn't doing anything, not his phone, not a chart, not anything. Just sitting there with both hands wrapped around the cup, looking at the middle distance with the particular expression of someone who has also arrived at the bottom of themselves and is just existing there for a moment before they have to move again.
He looks exactly the way she feels. It's so precise that it almost makes her laugh.
She drops into the chair across from him without asking, without the usual small negotiation of break room social geometry. He doesn't react with surprise, just adjusts, makes space, shifts the cup slightly as if to say here, there's room. She drops her head into her hands for a moment and presses her palms against her eyes and just holds that position, not caring particularly how it looks.
The break room hums. Neither of them says anything.
After a moment she lowers her hands. He's watching her, not staring, not intruding, just the kind of watching that means I'm here, I see you, I'm not going to ask you to perform okay-ness. She's catalogued this quality in him over the past month and a half: the ability to be present without demanding anything from the presence. It's not a small quality. Most people can't do it.
"Rough one?" he asks. His voice is quieter than the room.
"Mm," she says. Which is not really an answer but contains the whole answer.
He nods. He doesn't push.
"You?" she asks.
He looks down at his cup. Wraps his hands around it a little tighter, like he's cold even though he isn't. "The man in bay two," he says.
She remembers. She'd been three bays down. She'd heard the call, tracked the timeline in the way she tracks all timelines on the floor, peripheral and constant. She nods slowly.
"I did everything right," he says. He says it the way people say things they've been saying to themselves for hours and haven't yet been able to make land. "I know I did everything right. Robby told me. I ran through it, and Iâ" He stops. His jaw moves. "I keep waiting for the part where that matters."
She looks at him across the table and thinks about every time someone said this to her, the early version of it, when she was still new enough to believe there was a clean resolution available, and about the insufficient comfort she'd been offered in return. The it gets easier. The you'll find a way to contextualize it. The things that were meant well and landed hollow.
She decides to tell him the truth.
"It matters," she says. "It just takes longer than you want it to before it feels like it does. Sometimes a lot longer." She pauses. "And in the meantime you just have to carry it."
He lifts his eyes to her.
"There's no trick to that part," she says. "There's no reframe that makes the weight lighter. You just get better at carrying weight. That's all it is." She holds his gaze. "And you will. You're already better at it than you think."
He's quiet for a moment. He doesn't look away. "How do you know that?"
"Because you're sitting here instead of pretending the shift didn't happen," she says. "Because you're letting it be what it was instead of managing it away. That's the work. Most people don't know that's the work."
He exhales slowly through his nose. Something in his shoulders changes, not release, exactly, but a slight shift, like one of the layers of tension has been named and naming it does something.
They sit there. The break room holds them. Someone moves past in the hallway outside, shoes squeaking on linoleum, and then the quiet resettles like dust after a door closes.
"I have pretzels," he says, after a while.
She looks at him.
He reaches into the pocket of his scrubs and produces a small bag. Same brand as the vending machine. He sets it on the table between them with the matter-of-fact placement of someone who has decided this is the correct thing to do and is doing it without ceremony.
She stares at the bag. "Did you buy those because of the vending machine thing?"
"I bought them," he says carefully, "in preparation for potential future vending machine failures. Which is a different and more responsible thing."
She takes three pretzels. He takes three pretzels. They eat in the silence they've been building for a month and a half, it has texture now, this silence, it is made of specific things , and she feels, not better exactly, but less alone inside it, which she has learned over two years of this job to treat as its own category of good. Less alone is real. Less alone is worth something. She stopped dismissing it somewhere around month six of intern year when she realized that some nights it was the best available option and that was okay.
"Thank you," she says, when she stands up to go. She lets the words do more work than their surface. She doesn't mean the pretzels.
He seems to know that. He nods once, small and even. "See you out there," he says.
"See you out there," she says.
She goes back to the floor. She is still carrying what she was carrying when she walked into the break room, but the walk back to the floor is fractionally shorter than the walk away from it had been, and she holds onto that fraction because fractions are what this job is made of.
four. the thing with the hand
It happens on a Wednesday, which is the kind of ordinary day that makes the moment feel slightly wrong in retrospect, like it should have happened on a more significant day, a day with weather or a date you'd remember. But it's a Wednesday in December, gray, full waiting room, two staff members called in sick, the particular brand of cold that the building's heating system has never learned to fully address.
She runs a trauma in the morning with a nurse and a very tired attending, and Whitaker appears at the door not to watch but because the nurse waved him in for a second pair of hands. He finds his position without instruction, does what's asked cleanly and without excess, doesn't crowd anyone or second-guess out loud, and when it's over he documents his part and moves on without making anything of himself.
She notices. She always notices the people who do the work and don't make anything of themselves for doing it.
After, she's filling out paperwork in the hallway, the surfaces inside are all occupied, the floor is that kind of busy, so it's the wall or nothing, and she becomes aware of him doing the same thing a few feet down. She glances over.
He's writing with his left hand, which she hasn't registered before. The handwriting is the particular kind of terrible that comes from spending a lifetime in a world that defaults to right-handed systems, slightly cramped, the letters leaning the wrong way, fighting the page.
"You're left-handed," she says.
He looks up. "Yeah."
"I've never noticed."
"Most people don't. Or they notice and don't say anything." He goes back to writing. Then, a beat later: "Is that relevant to something?"
"No," she says. "I just notice things."
He glances at her, brief, a little sideways, something considering in it, and goes back to his page.
A minute passes. The hallway moves around them: a cart, someone calling a name, the background percussion of a floor at capacity.
"I notice things too," he says.
She looks up.
He is not looking at her. He is still writing, head angled down, the cramped left-handed scrawl moving across the page. The tips of his ears have gone a little red, which she's come to understand as the specific thing his face does when he's said something before he finished deciding to say it.
She looks back at her own paperwork. Her pen has stopped moving. "Like what?" she asks.
A pause. He turns a page.
"Like you always take the hard families," he says. His voice is even, almost clinical, like he's presenting an observation. "The ones that are complicated or angry or grieving in a way that makes other people slow down in the doorway. You just go in." He pauses. "And you eat at three instead of noon. Every shift, almost. Because the break room is empty then."
She has stopped writing entirely.
"And you check on patients after your shift is technically over," he continues. "Not every time. But when something's still open. When you're not sure." He turns another page. "And when you're waiting on labs, just before you open the chart, you hold your breath. For about a second."
The hallway continues its business around her. She is not in it.
She is looking at the side of his face, at the ear that's still a little red, at the deliberate angle of his eyes toward the page. He's not looking at her, and she understands suddenly that this is a kindness, that he said it to the page instead of to her face because that makes it easier to receive.
"You noticed all of that," she says.
"I notice things," he says. Simply. Like it's just a property of himself, like being left-handed.
There is no performance in it. No I've been watching you with its attendant implications. Just: here are things that are true about you that I paid enough attention to learn. That is all.
Her chest does something she doesn't have a precise word for. It's in the neighborhood of warmth and in the neighborhood of ache and it is the specific sensation, she's felt it before, rarely, in the moments that turn out to matter, of being seen accurately, by someone who chose to look.
Her pager goes off.
She looks at it. Bay four. She caps her pen. She pushes off the wall and she opens her mouth to say something, she doesn't know what, she doesn't have it yet, there isn't time, so she says: "Good catch in there earlier. The aspiration."
"Thanks," he says.
She goes to bay four.
She doesn't look back. She doesn't need to, she can feel the attention, quiet and directional, the way you can feel warmth from something without seeing it.
In bay four she opens the chart and she catches herself, just for one second, just before the screen loads, holding her breath.
She didn't know she did that.
She knows it now.
five. 3am in radiology
She finds him in radiology at three in the morning, which is not a thing she was expecting to do with this particular hour, but the ER has spent two years teaching her to stop expecting things and she's a reasonably good student.
The reading room is a small one, barely larger than a generous closet, tucked at the end of the radiology hallway, usually occupied by whichever resident drew the worst overnight assignment. It smells faintly of stale coffee and the specific staleness of a room that gets used in the deep hours and aired out between. There's a lightboard on the wall and two chairs and a desk that nobody sits at and the particular blue-white light that makes everyone look slightly otherworldly.
The radiology resident is not in it. The chair is empty.
Whitaker is standing in front of the lightboard with his arms crossed and his head tilted at a slight angle, looking at a set of films with the focused expression of someone working on a problem they weren't assigned.
She stops in the doorway. He doesn't startle, he never startles, something she's noted before with that specific combination of calm and slight unreality, like the world would have to try harder than that to catch him off-guard.
"What are you doing?" she asks.
"Looking at the films for the chest pain in bay seven." He doesn't look away from the board. "Okafor wants me to present at handoff. I wanted to make sure I was seeing what I'm seeing."
"You could pull those up on any computer."
"I think better with the lightboard." He says it plainly, without any self-consciousness about it. "Something about the size. The way you have to stand in front of it." A pause. "You can see things differently when they're bigger than you."
She steps inside. The door closes behind her and the room becomes smaller in the way small rooms do when there are two people in them. She stands beside him and looks at the films.
The blue-white light settles around both of them. She can see the case immediately, the haziness in the right middle lobe, the shadow that sits at the edge of certainty.
"Right middle lobe," she says. "There."
"Yeah." He uncrosses his arms and points at it, not touching, hovering, the way you do when you're not sure enough to commit the gesture fully. "I keep looking at it and I can't decide if I'm seeing an infiltrate or manufacturing one."
"You're seeing one."
He turns. "Yeah?"
"Probable. Early pneumonia or aspiration, you'd need more context to differentiate. But the shadow is real." She tilts her head slightly. "You were right to look."
He absorbs that, turns back to the films. She watches the processing happen, the small visible movement of thought across his features that she's come to recognize, the particular quality of his attention when he's taking something in versus when he's waiting for his turn to speak. He genuinely takes things in. It's rarer than it should be.
"I almost didn't flag it," he says. "On the initial workup. I thoughtâ. "Â "I kept going back and forth, and at some point I started thinking I was just making myself anxious." He pauses. "I do that."
"I know," she says.
He looks at her.
"It's not a weakness," she says. "The back and forth keeps you from being sloppy. The only time it becomes a problem is when it makes you go quiet. When you have something and you sit on it because you're not sure anyone wants to hear it."
He's still looking at her. The blue light makes everything in the room feel slightly suspended, like the normal rules about what costs what are temporarily different. "Is that what I do?"
"Sometimes," she says. "Less than when you started."
Something shifts in the lower half of his face, not quite a smile, more like the precursor to one, the muscles making the decision before the expression commits. "You've been watching me."
"I watch everyone on my floor," she says. "That's the job."
"Right," he says. And then, quieter: "Right."
The lightboard hums between them. The room holds them in its blue-white light and its small particular silence. She becomes aware, in the way awareness sometimes arrives wholesale rather than incrementally, all at once instead of building, of exactly how close they're standing. There's room. There's technically room. But the room is small and they're both oriented toward the same point on the film and at some point the space between them stopped being neutral and became something she's conscious of in a way that requires some maintenance to not react to.
She doesn't move away.
Neither does he.
"Can I ask you something?" he says, to the film.
"Sure," she says, to the film.
"Why do you go to the waiting room?" His voice is measured, careful, he's not asking to make conversation, he's asking because he actually wants to know. "You don't have to. It's not in any expectation of your role, from what I can tell. But you go. You go out there and you sit with people who are scared." He pauses. "Why?"
She considers the question. She's been asked versions of it before, by attendings making small talk, by other residents who've noticed, by people who mean it as a kind of compliment dressed as a question. She's given versions of an answer, professional, tidy, the kind that explains the behavior without exposing anything underneath it.
She doesn't give that answer tonight.
"Because the waiting room is where the fear lives," she says. "Everything inside, the bays, the decisions, the procedures, that's where we work. We're busy in there. We have things to do with our hands. But the people out there just have to wait, and waiting is its own specific kind of suffering, and most of the time they're doing it alone." She looks at the film, at the shadow in the right middle lobe. "I think if you can do something about suffering, you should do it. Even if it's small. Especially if it's small, maybe, because nobody's measuring the small ones."
The room is quiet.
She's aware that she said more than she usually says. She said it to the lightboard rather than to him, which helped. But she said it.
He's quiet for long enough that she glances at him. He's not looking at the film anymore. He's looking at a middle point somewhere between them, something thoughtful in his expression, not analyzing what she said, she doesn't think, more like sitting with it, letting it settle.
"There was a patient today," he says, slowly. "Mrs. Colter, in bay three. She came in alone and she was there for six hours waiting on results, and every time I walked by she was just, sitting there. Hands folded. Not on her phone. Just sitting." He pauses. "I stopped in twice to update her. But the second time I stopped, I stayed for about fifteen minutes, and we talked about, I don't even know. Her garden. The neighborhood she grew up in. Nothing that mattered medically at all." He stops. "I kept thinking I should go. That I was wasting time."
"You weren't," she says.
"I know that now," he says. "But I felt like I was supposed to feel like I was wasting time. Like that was the correct way to feel about fifteen minutes that didn't produce a clinical outcome."
She turns to look at him fully. He's still looking at the middle distance, but she can see the architecture of what he's describing, the tension between what the training shapes you to value and what some quieter part of him keeps insisting matters. She recognizes it because she spent the better part of intern year having the same fight with herself, and the part of her that kept insisting won, and she made a decision about it that she's kept every shift since.
"You're going to have that argument with yourself for a while," she says. "Between the efficient version and the version that stays fifteen minutes. And I'm not going to tell you it goes away completely, because that would be a lie. But â" She pauses. "The fifteen minutes matter. They matter to Mrs. Colter and they matter to who you're going to be as a doctor, and I don't know how to say that without it sounding like a poster in a hospital corridor, but it's true."
He looks at her then. The blue light from the board catches the line of his face, and he's looking at her with the expression she's been in proximity to for three months now, the careful one, the attending one, but there's something else in it tonight, something that's been building for a while that the blue light and the three in the morning and the small room have pushed close enough to the surface that she can see it clearly.
She looks back at the film. Steadies.
"I think about quitting sometimes," he says, quietly.
She goes still.
"Not â not seriously. I'm not going to. I just â" He runs a hand through his hair, the gesture she knows: looking for words, coming up short. "There are days where it all feels so enormous, and I don't know if I'm actually cut out for it or if I just wanted to be. And those feel like different things." He exhales. "And I don't have anyone here who, I mean, Santos is great, but she'd just tell me I was being dramatic, which is probably what I need most of the time. But sometimes I just want someone toâ" He stops. "I don't know what I want. To say it out loud, maybe."
"Okay," she says. Her voice is steady and quiet. "You said it out loud."
He makes a sound that's almost a laugh. Not quite.
"It's not the same thing as actually quitting," she says. "Wanting to quit is just your brain telling you the weight is real. It is real. It would be strange if you never wanted to put it down." She pauses. "The difference between you and someone who actually should quit is that you go and sit with Mrs. Colter's garden for fifteen minutes, and you flag the shadow in the right middle lobe, and you stayed in that waiting room today with a woman you didn't know because she looked like she needed someone. People who should quit don't do any of those things."
The room is very quiet.
He doesn't say anything. She doesn't fill it.
After a moment he looks back at the films, and she looks back at the films, and they stand there in the blue light for another half hour, talking about the case, about a similar presentation she'd seen in September, about the differential for right middle lobe haziness in someone his patient's age, about a paper she'd read the month before that had changed how she thought about aspiration in older adults. It's clinical. It's grounded. It is also, underneath all of that, something else, something that two people staying past the point of necessity in a small room at three in the morning can only really be one thing, even if neither of them names it yet.
She leaves first. Bay to check. She always has a bay to check.
At the door she pauses, because there's something she wants him to have before she goes. She turns.
"Whitaker."
He looks up from the film.
"You're going to be a good doctor," she says. "Not eventually. You already are one. You're just still in the part where it doesn't feel like that yet." She holds his gaze for a moment. "But I've watched a lot of people go through this rotation, and I'm telling you, it's not an average thing, what you do. Pay attention to that."
He goes still. Just for a beat, a skipped frame, the pause before something lands.
"You don't have toâ"
"I know I don't," she says. "That's the point."
She goes back down the corridor. Her pager goes off. She answers it. She does all the things she always does.
But the reading room stays with her, the blue light, the hum, the particular quality of having stood next to someone in a small space and chosen, in some quiet way, not to move away from them, and it stays with her for the rest of the shift, and then for the drive home, and then a little beyond that.
six. where it lands
It's a Tuesday in January, the kind of day that starts ordinary and maintains it all the way through without apology. No extraordinary cases. No near-misses. No moments of grace or disaster. Just the ER being the ER, relentless and steady, patient to patient, bay to bay, the regular work.
She's at the nurse's station writing note, she's two charts behind, which for a Tuesday is actually fine, when Santos materializes beside her.
Santos does not arrive so much as appear. It is a quality she has and likely knows she has and has possibly cultivated. One moment the space beside the nurse's station is empty and the next moment Santos is leaning against the counter with her arms crossed and the specific expression of someone who has decided to say something and is taking a beat to enjoy the timing.
"You know he talks about you," Santos says. No preamble. No greeting.
She doesn't look up from the chart. "Who does."
"Huckleberry." Santos reaches over and helps herself to a pen from the cup on the counter for no apparent reason. "Not on purpose. That's the thing. It's not like he's trying to. It's more like you come up." She examines the pen. "We'll be talking about a case and he'll say something like, she had something like this in September or she told me once that you watch for â, and then he keeps going and then like two sentences later he stops and gets this look."
She has looked up from the chart.
Santos meets her eyes with the expression of profound innocence she wears specifically when she is the least innocent person in the room. "Just something I noticed," Santos says.
"Santos."
"Hmm."
"Why are you telling me this."
Santos puts the pen back. She straightens up from the counter, tugging the front of her scrubs into place, and for a moment she drops the innocence and just looks at her directly. "Because he's not going to," she says. Certain. Simple. "He's from Nebraska. He'll be sixty and retired before he says it first, and he'll say it like an apology." She pushes off the counter. "And because you make a face."
"What face."
"The one when he walks into a room." Santos is already moving away down the hallway. "The one that you're making right now, actually."
She opens her mouth.
Santos turns the corner.
She stands at the nurse's station. The floor moves around her, phones, footsteps, someone calling for a chart, and she is briefly not in any of it. She is thinking about a face she apparently makes when someone walks into a room. A face she thought she was keeping to herself. A face that Santos, who notices everything and mentions it with the precision of a surgeon, has clocked and named.
She picks up her pen.
She finishes the chart.
She tells herself she is not going to carry that around for the rest of the shift.
She carries it around for the rest of the shift.
It's the end. The shift is finally, properly, concretely over.
She's in the break room doing the end-of-shift ritual, the badge going into the bag, the slow transition from this self back to the other one, the one that exists outside of these walls and those walls' particular demands. She has plans. The plans are her apartment and a shower and her couch and as many consecutive hours of sleep as the city is willing to permit. She has been on her feet for thirteen hours and the soles of her shoes have become intimately acquainted with every square foot of this floor and she is ready to go.
The door opens.
She knows before she looks up. She's been knowing things about his particular arrival before she looks up for about a month now and she's been declining to think about what that means.
Whitaker.
He stops just inside the door. She stops reaching into her bag.
For a moment they just look at each other, which is, she's aware of this, has been aware of it for some time, a thing that they do now. Look at each other. Not in the loaded, weighted way of people building to something obvious, more in the way of people who have accumulated a lot of small things and haven't figured out yet what they add up to.
"Hey," he says.
"Hey," she says.
They have exchanged this particular greeting approximately a thousand times across the three and a half months of his rotation. This one is different. She can feel the difference and so can he, she can tell by the slight adjustment in his expression, a careful awareness clicking into place.
"Long shift?" she asks.
"Little bit," he says.
The familiarity of that, her words in his mouth, the rhythm of it that they've built across dozens of break room conversations, does something to her chest.
He crosses to his locker. She should pick her bag up and go. She does not pick her bag up and go. She stands in the middle of the break room with her bag strap in her hand and she is thinking about Santos saying the one you make when he walks into a room, and she is wondering what her face is doing right now.
He opens his locker and then doesn't do anything with the opening. Just stands there for a moment, back to her.
"I was thinking," he says. His voice is careful in a way that is different from his usual careful. "About that coffee place."
She blinks. "The one two blocks down?"
"You mentioned it. Back in October." He takes his badge off and puts it in his locker. "I was thinking about trying it tomorrow morning. After." He closes the locker. Turns around. He's looking at her with the expression she's spent three and a half months learning, and underneath the familiar layer of it there's something else, something that has been present for a while, she understands now, something she has been politely not looking at directly, the way you don't look directly at something bright. "If you wanted to come."
She looks at him.
He is standing by his locker with his hands in the front pocket of his hoodie because his hands don't know what to do with themselves. She knows this about him. She knows the difference between his hands in his pockets because he's relaxed and his hands in his pockets because he doesn't know where else to put them. This is the second kind.
"I don't usually love getting coffee after a shift," she says.
He nods, and she can already see it beginning to assemble on his face, the accommodation, the easy retreat, the no worries, it was just a thought that he'll mean completely, without bitterness, because that is precisely and specifically who he is and she knows it down to the bone by now.
"But," she says.
He goes very still.
"I don't think I'd be done," she says, "if it was you."
The break room is quiet. It is not a dramatic quiet, there's still the hum of the refrigerator, still the distant constant noise of the hospital beyond the walls, still the fluorescent light doing its fluorescent thing. But between them, in the specific small geography between where she's standing and where he's standing, something settles.
She watches it happen on his face, slowly, carefully, the way everything moves on his face, he never rushes anything, he always makes sure he's reading it correctly before he lets it mean something. The careful expression doesn't disappear. It just opens, slightly, from the inside. Like a room with more light in it than there was a moment ago.
"Yeah?" he says. Barely above quiet.
"Yeah," she says.
He exhales. She knows this exhale, she has a small catalogue of his exhales by now, the way you accumulate knowledge about a person you've been paying attention to without letting yourself fully admit that's what you're doing. This one is relief. The specific relief of someone who prepared themselves honestly for the harder answer and is now recalibrating.
"Okay," he says. And then, softer, like it escaped: "Good."
She doesn't move toward the door yet. There's something she's been sitting with since December, since the hallway and I notice things too and his ears going red, and she has been in this building long enough to have learned what waiting costs, to have watched people talk themselves out of things by waiting too long for the right moment, to know that the right moment is usually just the moment that's happening right now.
"Whitaker," she says.
He looks at her. He does the full version of it, not a glance, the whole thing, the way he looks at patients when they're telling him something important.
"I notice things too," she says.
He doesn't move. He waits. He's very good at waiting, the kind of waiting that isn't passive, that's actively giving you the space to say what you're going to say.
"I noticed that you always let people go first," she says. "In conversations, in doorways, with the attendings. Even when you have the thing, the right read, the correct answer, you wait. You give other people the room before you take any." She pauses. "And I noticed that you fold your notes in half before you put them in your pocket, even when they don't need folding. Every time." She looks at him steadily. "And that you learn the nurses' names within the first week. All of them. Not just the ones on your bays. All of them. And you use them."
His jaw moves slightly. He doesn't say anything.
"And I noticed," she says, quieter now, "that you are tired almost every single day, genuinely. Bone-deep tired in a way that would give most people an excuse to be short with people, to cut corners on the things that aren't being graded, and you never are. You stay gentle. You stay present. Every shift." She lets that sit for a moment. "I don't know if anyone's told you that. But I've been watching people do this job for two years and it's not common. It's not something you can teach someone. You either have it or you don't."
The break room is very, very quiet.
He's looking at her the way he looked at the films on the lightboard, like he's making absolutely sure he's seeing what he's seeing before he says it out loud.
"I've been trying," he says finally, "to figure out how to say something to you for about two months."
She waits.
"I'm â" He runs a hand through his hair, the motion she knows means looking for words, coming up short. "I'm not good at this. I grew up in a place where you just, did things, and the doing was the saying, and nobody reallyâ" He stops. "I don't know how to say the thing. I know what the thing is. I've known what the thing is for a while. I just don't have." "I don't have the sentence for it."
She looks at him across the break room, this tired, careful, left-handed person who notices things and stays gentle and folds his notes in half and came three thousand miles from a farm in Nebraska to do this hard, enormous thing, and who has been, for three and a half months, one of the most quietly significant parts of her days.
"Then don't say it in a sentence," she says. "You've been saying it in other ways for months. I've been hearing it."
He looks at her for a long moment.
"Have you," he says. It's not quite a question.
"Yes," she says. Plainly. "And I've been saying it back."
Something happens then, slow, like everything with him, unhurried and real, the careful quality giving way to something less guarded underneath it. Not performing the letting go. Just letting go. His hands come out of his pocket. He looks at her like she's something he's been looking for without the right word for what he was looking for.
"The coffee place," she says. "Is it too late to go tonight instead?"
His mouth does the thing, the slow arrival of the smile, traveling its distance. "It's almost five," he says.
"I know," she says.
"It's been a thirteen-hour shift."
"I know."
He tilts his head slightly, the same angle as the lightboard. "Yeah," he says. "Okay. Yeah, let's go."
She picks up her bag. He gets his coat. He holds the door and she walks through it, and they go down the corridor side by side, not touching, not quite, the space between them a decision rather than a default, and through the ambulance bay and out into the January morning, which is cold and gray and not beautiful in any conventional sense, the city just barely starting, the sky the color of something that hasn't made up its mind yet.
They walk two blocks. Their breath makes small white shapes in the cold air. She doesn't feel the thirteen hours the way she felt them inside, out here there's wind, and the smell of the city in winter, and the particular quality of early morning that belongs to nobody yet, that exists in that gap between the people who stayed up all night and the people who are just waking up.
She is, she realizes, not tired.
Or rather: she is tired, deeply and accurately tired, but the tiredness has been joined by something else, something that coexists with it without canceling it, a kind of aliveness that has been accumulating since October and has finally, on a gray Tuesday morning in January, reached some threshold she doesn't have a better name for than this.
They push open the door of the coffee shop. It's warm inside, and it smells like actual coffee, exactly like she told him it would, and the man behind the counter looks up and nods in the specific way of someone who is used to seeing hollow-eyed people in scrubs at five in the morning and has made his peace with it.
Whitaker looks at the menu on the wall with the expression she recognizes from the lightboard and from every chart he's ever considered and from the five-pretzel decision, the expression of someone applying genuine thought to a thing other people would decide in ten seconds. She watches his face while he reads and thinks: there it is. The thing that has been true for a while and is now just â out. Said, or as good as.
There he is.
The man behind the counter looks at them. "What can I get you?"
Whitaker looks at her. "What do you get?"
"The Americano," she says. "Milk, no sugar."
He looks back at the menu. "I'll have the same," he says.
She smiles. He catches her smiling and his ears go a little pink and he looks back at the counter like that was a completely normal thing to say.
They take their coffees to the small table by the window. Outside, the city is starting to happen, a bus, someone with a dog, the gradual accumulation of morning. She wraps both hands around her cup and lets the warmth come in.
"Can I ask you something?" she says.
He looks at her across the table. "Yeah."
"When did you know?" she asks. "That you wanted to do this. Medicine." She tilts her head. "You told Santos it was because you wanted to do more than what you grew up with. But that's the version of the answer that's â it's true, but it's not the whole thing. What's the whole thing?"
He looks at his cup for a moment. The morning comes in through the window behind him, gray and gradual.
"When I was sixteen," he says, "one of our farm hands got hurt. Machinery accident. My dad and I were the ones with him until the paramedics came and I remember â I remember being so scared, but also feeling this very strange calm at the same time, like my brain just went: okay, here's the situation, here's what needs doing, do it." He pauses. "I'd never felt that before. That specific kind of calm. And I remember thinking, after, that I wanted to feel that again. That I wanted to be the person who knew what needed doing."
She listens. She lets the silence hold the story after he stops telling it.
"And then I spent about four years convincing myself it was impractical," he says, a slight wryness in it, "and then I applied anyway."
"I'm glad you applied," she says.
He looks at her. "Yeah?"
"The ER is better with you in it," she says. "The patients in it are better. Mrs. Colter with her garden is better." She pauses. "I'm better. Having someone around who â" She stops. Tries again. "Who takes it seriously. The whole thing. Not just the clinical outcomes."
He's quiet for a moment. Outside the bus passes. The morning arrives another increment.
"I don't know what I'm doing most of the time," he says.
"Neither do I," she says. "Nobody does. The people who are sure they know what they're doing are the ones you should worry about."
He laughs, a real one, low and quiet and completely unguarded, and she's heard him laugh before but not like this, not this easy, and it's a different thing than the almost-laughs and the careful-smiles and the mouth-twitches she's been collecting since October. It's just a laugh. It's just him, in the morning, warm coffee, no performance.
She holds it, carefully, and adds it to the collection.
They stay for an hour. They talk about the shift, about a case he's still thinking about, about a technique she learned in her intern year that changed how she approached a certain kind of presentation. They talk about Nebraska, about what it's actually like, not the summary version, the real version, the particular quality of that much space and that much quiet, and she tells him about where she's from, the real version, and he listens the way he always listens, with his whole self oriented toward what she's saying.
At some point the coffee is gone and they're just talking, and neither of them reaches for their phone to check the time, and the morning outside the window has become actual morning, full light, the city in it fully, and she thinks: this is what it looks like when something that has been accumulating quietly for a long time finally tips into the open.
Not dramatic. Not cinematic. Just two people at a table with empty cups, talking in the morning, unwilling to be the one who says I should go first.
She says it eventually. She has to. Sleep exists and is non-negotiable.
He walks out with her. On the sidewalk they stop, and there's a moment, the particular kind of moment that needs something, that is clearly asking for something, and she watches him navigate it, the slight gathering of himself, the decision-making visible just under the surface.
"Tomorrow," he says. "We're both on at seven?"
"We're both on at seven," she confirms.
He nods. He looks at her for a moment with the look she knows now, the careful one, the attending one, the one underneath which there is no longer anything she doesn't understand. "I'll see you in there," he says.
"See you in there," she says.
She walks to her car. The cold air is bracing and the morning is full and she is tired in the specific, complete way of a body that has done its work and now needs rest. She gets in. She sits for a moment before she starts the engine.
She thinks about three and a half months of small things. Pretzels and lightboards and the sound of an exhale she learned to read. The way he folds his notes. The specific red of his ears. The slow arrival of a smile that has no performance in it. A Tuesday morning and two Americanos and the way he said I'll see you in there like it was a promise he'd been keeping for a while and was just now saying out loud.
She starts the car.
She drives home.
She is asleep within eleven minutes of lying down, which is the fastest she's fallen asleep in longer than she can remember.
She doesn't think about why until later. And then she thinks: it's because something that takes energy to carry has been set down, and the setting-down happened so quietly, so gradually, that she almost didn't notice.
Almost.
Three weeks later he reaches for her hand in the break room. He does it the way he does everything â without announcement, without making anything of it, like it's just the next true thing that needs doing. And it is.
She lets him.
author's note:
there's a specific kind of person that this job either breaks or quietly shapes into something extraordinary. dennis whitaker is the second kind, and i don't think he knows it yet. that's the part that gets me.
i wanted to write him the way i see him, not as someone who's still figuring out the medicine, but as someone who already understands the part that can't be taught. the sitting with people. the noticing. the staying gentle on the days when gentle costs the most. i wanted to write a story where someone sees that in him before he sees it in himself, and where that seeing becomes the whole thing between them.
âthis one is for everyone who needed someone to stay in the room. and for the ones who stayed.
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trinity santos x f!reader, yolanda garcĂa x f!reader, santos x garcĂa the pitt (2025)
tags: slow burn, pining, they're so obvious except to her, established santos/garcĂa (kind of), reader is oblivious, like genuinely has no idea, reader would absolutely be down for it if she knew, she just doesn't know, hurt/comfort if you squint, found family, workplace romance, blurb format, no beta we die like our patients
summary: santos lost count somewhere around month three. garcĂa stopped counting entirely. you're just trying to get through your shift.
The emergency runs long.
By the time it wraps GarcĂa is still in her trauma gown and Santos is at the hub finishing notes with the end-of-hard-shift energy, the kind that means she's running on fumes and spite and is fine about it. They have plans tonight. Dinner, the kind of dinner that started as a maybe four months ago and has been slowly becoming something more specific, more certain, without either of them making a formal announcement about it.
They're standing close, not touching, when the elevator opens.
Santos sees you first.
you're still in the dress.
it's the kind of dress that was chosen for somewhere that isn't here, a deep burgundy thing, the kind that fits like it was made for you specifically, and your hair is down and you have a bag over your shoulder and the expression of someone who was forty minutes away from a good night out with your friends when your pager went off.
Santos's pen stops moving.
GarcĂa, half a second later, looks up from her chart.
the hub does a very subtle thing where everyone is suddenly very interested in whatever is directly in front of them.
you spot them and cross over. "tell me it's bad enough to justify ruining my friday."
"define bad," Santos says, and her voice is completely normal, she's a professional.
"Princess has your assignment," GarcĂa says, also completely normal, also a professional.
"great." you're already moving. "I'm grabbing scrubs first, I'm not traumatizing anyone's patients in this."
"probably wise," GarcĂa says.
you're gone. down the hall toward the scrubs dispenser, bag over your shoulder, dress still happening for approximately another four minutes.
Santos waits until you round the corner.
"hm," she says.
"don't," GarcĂa says.
"I didn't say anything."
"you were going to."
"I was going to say hm."
"Santos."
"GarcĂa."
a beat.
Mel appears from bay three, flipping through a chart, and stops when she clocks the two of them standing at the hub doing nothing with the specific frozen energy of people interrupted mid-something.
she looks at them.
she looks down the hall where you just disappeared.
she looks back.
"oh" she says, in the tone of someone connecting dots she didn't know were there.
"Mel," GarcĂa says.
"I didn't say anything," Mel says, which is the exact same thing Santos just said, delivered with significantly more amusement. she leans on the hub counter. "she just get called in?"
"yes," Santos says.
"still in theâ"
"she's changing," GarcĂa says.
"right." Mel looks at her chart. looks up. "so you two are just standing here."
"we're finishing notes," Santos says.
Mel looks at Santos's pen, which has not moved in two minutes. "sure," she says pleasantly, and goes back to her chart.
Santos looks at GarcĂa.
GarcĂa looks at Santos.
this is the thing about them, the thing that would be messy if either of them made it messy, which they don't, which is a decision that was made in a supply closet three months ago in about forty words total.
we're good, GarcĂa had said.
we're good, Santos had said.
she doesn't know.
she has no idea.
okay.
okay.
and that was that. not resolved, not complicated, just. acknowledged. the three of them existing in the same floor in the specific way of something that hasn't become anything yet and might not and either way they're all still here doing their jobs and getting through their shifts.
it works.
mostly it works.
it works until you walk out of the elevator in burgundy and Santos's pen stops moving, apparently.
Princess appears at the hub, tablet in hand, with the particular energy she has when she's already three steps ahead of everyone. she clocks Santos and GarcĂa standing there and says nothing, which with Princess means more than saying something, because Princess notices everything and files it and produces it later at exactly the right moment with the precision of someone who has been watching this floor for a long time.
"assignment's ready," she says. to the general vicinity. "she just grabbed scrubs."
"thanks," GarcĂa says.
Princess looks at them both for one second. just one. then she goes back to her tablet.
Mel, without looking up from her chart, makes a sound that is not quite a laugh.
"not a word," Santos says.
"I'm working," Mel says innocently.
you reappear from the hallway in scrubs, hair pulled back now, bag gone, dress exchanged for the standard issue black that everyone wears and that looks, somehow, still completely like you because you are aggressively yourself in every context.
"okay," you say, arriving at the hub, taking the tablet Princess holds out to you with the smooth efficiency of someone already shifting into work mode. "what do we have."
"bay two and bay five," Princess says. "two is straightforward, five is going to need you."
"got it." you scan the notes. look up briefly. "you two eat yet?"
Santos blinks. "sorry?"
"it's almost nine," you say, already moving. "there's food in the break room, Robby brought something, I don't know what, go eat before it gets worse." and then you're gone, bay five, just like that, in and out, completely unaware.
Santos stares at the hallway.
"she noticed we hadn't eaten," she says.
"she always notices," GarcĂa says.
"in the thirty seconds she was standing here she noticed we hadn't eaten."
"Santos."
"I'm just saying it's a lot, GarcĂa, it's genuinely a lot, she does it without evenâ"
"Santos." GarcĂa says it the specific way, the warm way, the way that means I know, I also know, we're both aware, let's be adults. "food."
Santos exhales.
they go to the break room.
Mel follows, saying nothing, wearing the expression of someone storing information for later.
Princess stays at the hub, makes a small note on her tablet that is almost certainly not about patient care, and goes back to work.
outside bay five you're already introducing yourself to the patient, scrubs perfectly unremarkable, dress folded in your bag, the burgundy evening completely traded for this one without complaint.
you don't think about it.
you never do.
that's the whole thing.
that's exactly the whole thing.
Authorâs note:
reader is oblivious in the way that genuinely observant people are sometimes oblivious, she notices everything except the thing that's right in front of her. she would be so down for it by the way. she just doesn't know yet:(
santos and garcĂa are almost a thing and also have a whole separate situation and they've accepted this about themselves which i think is very mature of them. Princess knows everything and said nothing. she's also already made a bet. she's not worried about it. she knows she's going to win. she's just waiting.
â with love and a concerning investment in three people who need to have a conversation
omg I just read Give It Til April and I just wanna say I think it's my favorite Jack Abbot (or just the pitt) fic I've read so far and I've read TONS
the way you write is mesmerizing captivating and peaceful at the same time it was truly amazing
thank you so much, this made my day genuinely. iâm really glad it resonated, itâs a quiet story so itâs always nice to hear it landed the way i intended. means a lot đ¤ââââââââââââââââ
jack abbot x f!reader | slow burn, age gap, hurt/comfort, veteran!jack, reader is a paramedic turned ER charge nurse, chronic pain themes, emotional avoidance, pittsburgh winter
The first thing you learn about Jack Abbot is that he lies about his pain levels.
Not dramatically. Not in the way patients lie, theatrical minimizing, hoping you won't notice the sweat on their upper lip or the way they're breathing through their back teeth. He lies the way someone lies when they've been doing it long enough that the lie has become the first language and the truth is the translation. Automatic. Fluent.
You know this because you spent six years as a paramedic before you became a nurse, and paramedics learn to read bodies the way other people read faces. By the time you get to a scene, the body has already been telling the story for minutes, sometimes hours. You learn to listen to it instead of the words.
Jack Abbot's body, on a bad day, says something completely different from what his mouth says.
His mouth says fine, it's manageable, don't worry about it.
His body says the socket fit is wrong today, or the weather changed overnight and the phantom pain is running hot, or he's been on his feet for six hours past the point where he should have sat down. The particular set of his jaw and the almost-imperceptible shift of his weight to his right side are the story, if you know how to read it.
You know how to read it.
You don't say anything about it for the first two months.
You came to PTMC in January, which is, in retrospect, the worst possible time to move to Pittsburgh. The city in January is gray in a way that feels personal, a low flat gray that sits on everything and muffles sound and makes the days feel like they're happening inside a cotton ball. You grew up in North Carolina. You were not prepared.
What you were prepared for was the job, because the job is the one thing that has always been straightforward. You are good at this. You have always been good at this, from your first day on an ambulance at twenty-two to the charge nurse position you'd held at Durham Regional for four years before the particular series of events that led you to Pittsburgh. You don't think about those directly if you can help it. You've filed them under necessary change in the organizational system of your own history.
PTMC's night shift ER is a different animal from what you knew. Bigger, faster, with the specific energy of a teaching hospital, residents everywhere, the constant low-level hum of people learning under pressure. You'd worked in teaching hospitals before. You understood the rhythm.
What you didn't anticipate was the attending.
Your first shift, you're given the standard orientation rundown by the outgoing charge nurse, a woman named Delphine who has clearly been doing this long enough to have developed a personal shorthand for everything, delivered at speed. She covers the board system, the trauma bay protocol, the supply room situation, the attendings. When she gets to Jack Abbot, she pauses in a way that isn't quite a pause, more like a breath, like she's selecting the right words.
"Night shift lead," she says. "Ex-military, Army. Left leg prosthetic, below knee. He'll never mention it, don't mention it either unless he brings it up or it becomes a clinical concern. He runs a tight floor. He's fair. He doesn't raise his voice." She looks at you over the top of her reading glasses. "When he gets quiet is when you should pay attention."
"What does quiet mean?" you ask.
"You'll know," she says, which is not an answer, and turns out to be completely accurate.
You meet him properly at the start of that first shift, in the handoff briefing. He's already at the board when you come in, reviewing overnight census with the precision of someone who has been doing this long enough to read a board the way other people read a sentence. Whole, not word by word.
He's, you notice him the way you'd notice a weather system. Something that occupies space differently from the things around it.
Late forties, maybe early fifties. Dark hair with gray through it, more at the temples. The kind of face that would be called handsome in a way that's about structure rather than prettiness, strong jaw, lines around his eyes and mouth from years of squinting into the sun or the middle distance. Heâs in black scrubs, wearing them with the unconscious uprightness of someone whose posture was trained into him young and never quite left.
When he turns to acknowledge the incoming shift, his eyes do the thing Delphine warned you about. A quick systematic read of the room, everyone clocked and filed in seconds. When they land on you, they pause one beat longer. New face. Catalogued.
"Charge nurse?" he says.
"Yes," you say. "First shift."
"Durham Regional before this?"
"Six years before that as a paramedic."
Something registers in his expression. Not warmth exactly, more like the slight adjustment of a person recalibrating an estimate. "Good," he says, and turns back to the board.
That's the whole introduction.
Later you'll understand that good from Jack Abbot in the first thirty seconds of meeting you is the equivalent of a lengthy written endorsement from anyone else.
The first month is learning. Not the job, you know the job, but the floor, the people, the particular language of this specific place.
You learn: Lena at the main desk has worked this floor for nineteen years and knows where everything is, has ever been, and probably will be. Consult her before the supply room. Resident Santos is sharp and combative and improves dramatically when you treat her like the intelligent adult she is rather than a medical student who needs managing. Resident Whitaker is careful and slow and will get there, he just needs more runway than the others. Dr. Parker Ellis is the senior resident who has, apparently, been trying to get Jack to take a vacation for three consecutive years.
You learn Jack in layers, the way you'd learn a complicated patient history. Not all at once, but accumulating, building toward a picture.
He takes his coffee black and too hot, and he has opinions about the ER coffee machine that he has apparently been voicing to facilities since before you arrived. He reviews charts standing up, always, unless it's the end of a long shift and he thinks no one is watching, at which point he will occasionally, briefly, sit. He has a particular way of delivering bad news to families. Not scripted, not the sterile clinical distance some doctors put on like protective gear, but present. Actually in the room with them. You've watched him do it three times in your first month and each time it's the same: he finds a chair, he sits at their level, he doesn't rush the silence.
He is, in ways that are professionally inconvenient, exactly the kind of person you find most difficult to be indifferent to.
You do your level best anyway.
The pain thing comes to a head on a Thursday in February.
The weather has been bad for a week. Pittsburgh winter, which turns out to be a different category of winter than North Carolina winter, with a wet cold that gets into everything and a wind off the rivers that has a personal quality to it, like it knows where you're going. You've been told by multiple people that you'll acclimate. You're skeptical.
The floor has been brutal. A multi-car pileup on 376 sent four traumas in under an hour, and the residual administrative chaos of that is still reverberating five hours later. You've been moving without stopping since the shift started, and you're aware, in the background-noise way you're aware of your own physical state during hard shifts, that your feet crossed the threshold from tired into genuinely unhappy about two hours ago.
You're at the medication cart at hour seven when you notice Jack at the far end of the hall, reviewing a chart. The weight distribution is wrong. He's putting almost nothing on his left side, and the line of his back is carrying a tension that wasn't there at the start of shift. He's been on his feet for the same seven hours, plus whatever time he was here before handoff, and the socket that connects his prosthetic to his residual limb has a tolerance for hours-of-use that you know from six years of working with amputee veterans is finite and individual and frequently ignored by the person most affected.
You finish with the medication cart. You think about it for another minute. Then you go to the supply room.
When you come back, you find him at the hub.
You set a heat pack on the counter next to him, the kind you crack and shake, runs for about forty minutes. You don't say anything. You go back to your charting.
A long pause.
"What's this for," he says. Not a question. The sentence has the quality of someone who knows exactly what it's for and is deciding how to handle it.
"Residual limb pain responds well to heat when it's cold-triggered," you say, eyes on your screen. "Particularly after extended weight-bearing. I've got four amputee veterans in my contacts from my paramedic years and two of them told me that independently."
Silence.
"Your weight's been on your right side for two hours," you say. "I noticed."
More silence. You type something. You can feel him looking at the side of your face.
"I didn't ask forâ" he starts.
"You didn't," you agree. "I didn't offer it as a commentary on your ability to do your job. I offered it as a heat pack." You look at him then, briefly, level. "You don't have to use it."
You go back to the screen.
Another pause. Then, in your peripheral vision, he picks it up.
He doesn't say thank you. He goes back to his chart.
You don't expect him to. You weren't doing it for the thank you.
About twenty minutes later, a cup appears next to your keyboard. Coffee, from the good machine at the other end of the floor, not the hub machine. Hot.
You look at it.
You look toward the board, where he's standing.
He's talking to Ellis about a consult. He doesn't look over.
You drink the coffee.
This becomes, without either of you naming it, a language.
Not every night. Not predictably. But the small offerings accumulate, the coffee, the heat pack on the bad days, a granola bar left near your station during a brutal stretch when you haven't eaten since before shift, a specific piece of information relayed in a way that makes your job marginally easier, the quiet appearing at your shoulder on the nights that earn the particular designation of hard rather than just busy.
You do the same back. It comes naturally. Six years of paramedic work teaches you that care is often most useful when it's practical and doesn't require the other person to acknowledge receiving it.
The first conversation that isn't about the floor happens in the break room, five weeks in.
You're eating dinner at eleven PM, or what passes for dinner, which is the depressing collection of vending machine items that constitute nutrition during a long night shift, when he comes in for coffee. He does the microwave thing. He leans against the counter while it runs.
You eat your crackers.
"Durham," he says. "What made you leave?"
He's not looking at you, looking at the microwave, thirty-eight seconds remaining on the display.
"Needed a change," you say.
"From the job specifically?"
"From a version of myself I'd gotten stuck in."
The microwave beeps. He gets the cup. He turns around and leans against the counter facing you now, and the expression is attentive in the particular Jack Abbot way, not performing interest, just actually interested.
"What version," he says.
You consider how much of this you want to hand over to someone you've known for five weeks. Then you consider that you're in Pittsburgh in February eating crackers at eleven PM and your options for honest conversation are limited.
"The version that had gotten very good at the job," you say, "by removing herself from it. Technically excellent. Clinically appropriate. Completely sealed. You do the thing for long enough without adequate processing and it just," you tap the side of your head, "goes somewhere it shouldn't. Calcifies."
He's quiet.
"Paramedic work specifically does something to you," you say. "You're first in. By the time a patient reaches an ER, there's a team, there's protocol, there's structure. On a scene it's you and your partner and whatever you find when you get there. No buffer. You absorb a lot." You pause. "I absorbed a lot."
"And you stopped processing it."
"I stopped having the bandwidth. And then I stopped noticing I'd stopped. And then one day a woman in the waiting room asked me if I was okay and I realized I genuinely didn't know how to answer."
He makes a sound that isn't quite a word.
"You know that version of the problem," you say. It's not a question.
A beat. "I know a version of it," he says. "Different origin. Same architecture."
"Military."
"Yeah."
"When."
"Three deployments. Third one ended the career." He glances down at his leg without looking like he's glancing down at his leg, a micro-movement you'd miss if you weren't watching carefully. "By which point I'd been not-processing for about eight years."
"How'd you get out of it?"
He makes a quiet sound that has some irony in it. "Badly, at first. Then therapy. Then time. Then finding something worth being present for."
"Medicine."
"Among other things."
The break room is quiet. The vending machine hums. From outside the door, the distant sounds of the floor.
"Pittsburgh was supposed to be temporary," you say. "I was going to do a year, get my head right, figure out the next thing."
"And?"
You look at your crackers. "Still figuring."
"How long have you been here?"
"Seven weeks."
"Give it till April," he says. "The city looks different when the gray lifts."
"That sounds like the beginning of civic propaganda."
"It sounds like someone who came here for temporary reasons and then stayed," he says, and picks up his coffee and goes back to the floor, and you sit in the break room for another few minutes thinking about the specific weight of that sentence.
March is when the floor gets to know you.
Lena starts leaving notes for you at the start of shift, small intelligence briefings on the state of the floor, the status of the supply situation, which residents are having good nights and which need watching. Santos, after an incident involving a difficult patient and your intervention on her behalf, starts bringing you coffee exactly once a week in what you understand is her version of a significant gesture. Whitaker asks you questions in the tentative way of someone who has been burned before by asking the wrong person, and you answer them straight, and he relaxes.
Parker Ellis tells you, on a Tuesday in March, that you're good for the floor.
"How so," you say.
"You stabilize things," she says. "Some charge nurses manage the floor. You hold it. There's a difference."
You think about this later. You think about the version of yourself in Durham who was excellent at managing and terrible at holding, and whether Pittsburgh is teaching you something or whether you arrived already changed and the city is just the location of the change.
You think about a lot of things lately that you'd stopped thinking about for a couple of years.
Jack is not incidental to this. You'd be dishonest with yourself if you tried to argue that he was. There's something about the quality of his attention, the specific way he notices without making the noticing a performance, that has begun to unlock things. Things you sealed up and labeled later and then ignored.
You don't know what to do about this, exactly.
You file it under pending.
The night it shifts is a Wednesday in late March.
A warehouse fire on the South Side sends three critical patients in under forty minutes. It's the kind of night that strips everything down to function, no room for anything except the work, the sequence, the next right thing. You've been in these nights before. You know how to move through them.
What you haven't navigated before is moving through one of these nights and simultaneously being aware, in some registered but unaddressed corner of your attention, that Jack Abbot is running on something that isn't all right.
It starts small. The tells are minor. He's been on his feet longer than he should, the cold has been bad this week, the socket issue you've been watching for two months has been a recurring problem and he's mentioned the new fitting exactly once in the dismissive tone of someone who made an appointment and then cancelled it. On a normal night you'd leave a heat pack and a coffee and consider the conversation managed.
This isn't a normal night. This is eight hours of controlled emergency, and by hour six you can see, if you're watching, if you've been watching for three months, that the pain is running high enough to be a factor.
He doesn't show it in the work. That's the thing that makes it worse, in a way. The work is impeccable. The decisions are right, the communication is clear, the patients are managed with the same steady competence that they always are. Whatever he's dealing with, he has put it somewhere else with a proficiency that speaks to long practice.
But you've been a paramedic. You've seen people push through pain until their body stops accepting the instruction, and you know what that looks like in the seconds before it happens.
At hour seven, during a lull between the second and third trauma, you find him at the hub. You don't ask how he's doing. That's not the language.
"I need you to do something for me," you say.
He looks at you.
"Sit down for twenty minutes. I'll cover."
"I don't needâ"
"I know you don't need to. I'm asking you to do it for the floor." You hold his gaze. "You're eight hours into a shift that's had three traumas and you've been compensating your gait for the last two hours, which means the socket is causing problems, and if you end up off your feet involuntarily in hour nine because you didn't sit down in hour seven, that's a floor problem. So I'm asking you, as charge nurse, to sit down."
A long pause.
"That was very tactical," he says.
"I spent six years on ambulances. I learned to frame requests so people would take them."
Something almost moves in his expression. "Twenty minutes."
"Twenty minutes."
He goes to the break room. You cover the floor. Twenty-three minutes later he's back, and the gait is better, and the tension in his jaw has reduced to something closer to baseline, and he doesn't say anything about it and neither do you.
But at the end of shift, when the floor is winding down and you're both at the hub finishing charting, he says, without looking up from his screen: "How did you know it was the socket and not the phantom pain."
"Phantom pain doesn't change your gait," you say. "Socket fit does."
He's quiet.
"You cancelled the fitting appointment," you say. Not a question.
"How do youâ"
"You mentioned it in February. You haven't mentioned it since, and the problem's gotten worse, not better." You save your chart. "I'm not asking you to explain yourself. I'm observing that the appointment would probably help."
A pause. Then: "You're very annoying."
"I know."
"In a," he stops. Starts differently. "It's useful. The annoying."
"High praise."
The almost-sound, the one that isn't quite a laugh. You've been hearing it for three months and you've started to understand that it's the version of warmth he allows himself in professional settings, the suggestion of it, the controlled release. You've started to notice when you prompt it.
You're aware this is information with implications you haven't fully processed.
April arrives and the gray does lift, like he said.
It happens incrementally, a morning here, an afternoon there, the river catching light in a way that Pittsburgh in January made you doubt was possible. The city reveals itself differently in April. Older neighborhoods with the particular architecture of a place built by people who intended to stay. Bridges everywhere, connecting things.
You take a different route to work and find a diner and start stopping there before night shifts, and the routine of it, the specific booth, the same server who brings coffee without being asked after the third visit, grounds something that has been unmoored since January.
You're better, you realize, in April.
Not fixed. Not resolved. But better, in the specific sense of being present in your life rather than passing through it at a remove.
You tell Jack this, one night in the break room, because the break room has become the place where you say the things that don't fit on the floor.
"You were right about April," you say.
He's at the table with a chart, paper, one of the few remaining paper charts, a particular older patient who prefers them and for whom Jack has apparently been maintaining the practice without comment for two years. "Was I."
"The city looks different. You were right."
"Mmm." He makes a note. "How's the diner?"
You look at him. "I haven't mentioned a diner."
"You come in before some shifts with powdered sugar on your jacket," he says. "There's a diner on Penn Avenue that does beignets until four AM. It's the only place within walking distance of the parking structure."
You look at your jacket. There is, in fact, a trace of powdered sugar on the lapel.
"That's â" you start.
"Observational" he says. "Same thing you do."
You sit down across from him. He turns a page in the chart. The break room is quiet.
"How long did it take you?" you ask. "After you moved here. To feel like Pittsburgh was where you actually lived and not just where you were."
He thinks about it. "Two years, maybe. Closer to three before it felt like home."
"What made it feel like home eventually?"
He's quiet for a moment. Then: "People. The floor. Having something that mattered."
"Not the city itself."
"The city's just the container" he says. "What you put in it is the part that matters."
You look at the table. "I haven't put very much in it yet."
"You've been here four months."
"I know. In Durham I had ten years of putting things in. People, places, a version of myself that knew how to be there. Starting over is â" you look for the word.
"Expensive" he says.
You look at him.
"It costs something," he says. "Starting over. People underestimate that. They think fresh start means free, but it's actually the opposite. You pay for the fresh start with everything you built before it."
"Was yours worth it?" you ask. "The cost."
A long pause. He closes the chart. He looks at you with the expression that isn't quite neutral, the one you've seen a handful of times, the careful one, the one that's managing something.
"Most days," he says. "Yes."
The night in April that you file under the night things changed is less dramatic than you'd expect.
It's not a bad shift, particularly. Moderately busy. No catastrophes. The kind of night where you move steadily and finish on time and feel, at the end of it, tired in the clean way rather than the hollowed-out way.
What happens is this: at two in the morning, during a quiet stretch, you're in the hallway outside the storage room and your phone rings with a call you've been half-expecting and fully dreading.
It's your sister in Raleigh. Your mother's been asking about you. It's been three months since you visited. When are you coming home.
You stand in the hallway and have a version of the conversation you've been having for a year, the one where you explain, without explaining, that home is a complicated word right now and that you're figuring things out and that yes, you'll visit, you just need a little more time. Your sister is kind about it. She's always kind about it. The kindness makes it worse, somehow.
You hang up and stand in the hallway for a moment with your hand flat against the wall.
"Bad news?"
You turn. Jack is at the other end of the hall, heading toward you.
"No," you say. "Just family. It's fine."
He slows as he reaches you, reading the hallway the way he reads everything. He doesn't keep walking. He stops, a few feet away.
"You don't have to," he starts.
"I know." You lower your hand from the wall. "My mom wants me to come home for a visit. My sister was relaying the message. Nothing bad happened. I justâ"
you stop. You're not sure how to finish the sentence.
"Don't know what home means right now," he says.
You look at him.
"You said in March, starting over costs what you had before. I think one of the things it costs is the easy answer to that question."
Your chest does something complicated. "Yeah."
"That gets easier," he says. "Not because you answer it definitively. Just because you get better at living in the ambiguity."
"That sounds terrible."
"It's better than it sounds."
You lean back against the wall. He stays where he is, which means he's about three feet from you, and the hallway is empty and quiet and it's two in the morning in Pittsburgh and you've known this man for four months.
"Jack," you say.
"Yeah."
"Can I ask you something personal?"
A pause. "Probably."
"After you came back from the last deployment, the one where you lost the leg, who took care of you?"
The question sits in the hallway. He's very still.
"Why are you asking that," he says. Carefully. Not defensively.
"Because you're very good at it," you say. "Taking care of people. Not in the managing way. In the actual way. And I've been trying to work out if that's just who you are, or if someone taught you by doing it for you."
A long pause.
"My platoon medic," he says. "Before I became one myself. Man named Curtis. He had a way of treating the person that had nothing to do with treating the injury. Used to drive the MOs insane. He'd spend ten minutes just talking to someone. Being there. And they'd come through things they statistically shouldn't have come through." He pauses. "I asked him once why he did it that way. He said the body takes cues from being witnessed. That knowing someone is there changes the physiology."
"He was right," you say. "That's documented."
"I know that now." He looks at the floor for a second, then back up. "After I came home the last time, after the leg, no one took care of me, specifically. I didn't allow it. I had a version of that problem you described. Sealed up. Handled." He says handled with the specific irony of someone who has been in enough therapy to know what they were actually doing. "I took care of myself because the alternative meant admitting I needed it."
"How'd you crack that open?"
"A therapist with considerably more patience than I deserved," he says. "And time. And losing enough by refusing to let anyone in that eventually the cost of refusing was higher than the cost of letting."
"What did you lose?"
He's quiet for a moment. "That's the longer story."
"Okay," you say. You don't push.
He looks at you. The careful expression, the managed one, and then, for just a second, something shifts in it. Like a held breath, released.
"My wife died," he says. "Seven years ago. And I'd been so shut down, for so long, that I almost missed the last year of her life because I was performing fine for everyone including her. Including myself." A pause. "I don't, I'm not putting that on the table as a bid for sympathy. I'm answering your question about who taught me by doing it for me. She did. Once I finally let her."
The hallway is very quiet.
"I'm sorry," you say.
"Thank you." Said simply. Not deflecting it, not managing it. Just receiving it.
You stand in the hallway for another moment.
"That's not a shorter story." you say, finally.
The almost-sound. The not-quite-laugh. Warmer than usual. "No." he says. "It's not."
"Thank you for telling me."
"You asked an honest question," he says. "You get an honest answer."
He pushes off from where he's been standing and moves back toward the floor. At the hallway junction, he pauses.
"You should go visit," he says. "Your mom. It doesn't have to mean anything about home. It can just mean going."
You look at him.
"Pittsburgh will still be here when you get back," he says, and turns the corner.
You stand in the hallway for another thirty seconds.
Then you go back to the floor and do your job and don't think about it. Or try not to.
You fail, mostly.
May.
You go to Raleigh for four days, which is the longest you've been away from the floor since January, and which reveals something you hadn't fully understood: you miss Pittsburgh when you're not there.
Not the winter. Not the gray. But the diner and the particular quality of the morning light over the river and the floor and the people on it. Lena and her comprehensive institutional knowledge. Santos and her weekly coffee tribute. Whitaker finding his footing. Parker Ellis's running commentary on everything.
And Jack. You miss Jack, which you acknowledge privately and then immediately file under to be examined later while you eat your mother's cooking and sit on your sister's porch and allow yourself, for four days, to be someone's child and someone's sister and not a charge nurse running a trauma floor.
When you come back, you are, measurably, better. Something that was wound has loosened. Something that was held at distance has been permitted to be close.
You walk into your first shift back and Lena says "welcome back, honey" and Santos gives you a nod that is the Santos equivalent of a standing ovation, and Whitaker tells you about a case he managed well while you were gone with the barely-suppressed pride of a kid showing a parent a test score.
Jack is at the board when you come in. He doesn't turn immediately. You do the handoff briefing, get caught up on the floor status, settle into the shift.
An hour in, he ends up beside you at the hub.
"How was Raleigh," he says. Not looking at you. Looking at the board.
"Good," you say. "It was good."
"Your mom."
"Good. She kept feeding me."
"Sounds right."
"How was the floor," you say.
"Functional. Ellis covered competently. Whitaker had a good week."
"I heard."
A pause. He marks something on the board.
"You look better," he says. Still looking at the board.
"I feel better."
"Good." He caps the marker. And then, still not looking at you: "Pittsburgh felt different with you gone."
You go very still.
He puts the marker in the tray. He still doesn't look at you. The floor noise continues around you, the steady background hum of a functioning ER, monitors, voices, the distant sound of the ambulance bay.
"I'm not sure what to do with that," you say, very carefully.
"You don't have to do anything with it," he says. "I'm just saying it. For accuracy."
You look at the side of his face. The line of his jaw. The gray at his temple.
"Jack," you say.
He turns, finally, and looks at you.
"I need you to be clearer than that," you say. "Because I have been working very hard for five months to be professional about something and if you are saying what I think you might be saying I need you to actually say it."
A pause. Something in his expression moves through several registers, the careful controlled neutral, the managed version, and then the version underneath it, the one you've seen a handful of times. The unguarded one.
"I think about you," he says. "Outside of work. I think about whether you're sleeping enough, whether the diner is open when you need it to be, whether whatever you're still carrying from Durham is getting lighter." He looks at you steadily. "I'm aware of the position. I'm not asking you for anything. I just, you said you needed me to be clear."
You breathe.
"I think about you outside of work too," you say.
The hallway with your sister calling. The four days in Raleigh and the shape of what was missing. The floor at two AM and the particular way he told you the longer story because you asked an honest question.
"I think about how you are the first person in a long time who has not asked me to perform anything," you say. "Who takes me as I am and doesn't need me to be more okay than I am, or less damaged than I am. You make it easier to be actually here. And I don't know what to do with that either, but I'm done pretending I don't know what it is."
He's very still.
"I don't know what this looks like," you say. "Practically. Given,"
"The floor."
"The floor."
"You're charge nurse," he says. "I'm the attending lead. There's no direct supervisory,"
"I know."
"It would requireâ"
"I know."
A pause.
"I'm not impulsive," he says. "I need you to know that. I don't do things halfway. If this is something, it's something. I can't do the version where it's ambiguous. I'm not built for that anymore."
"Okay," you say.
"Okay?"
"I don't want ambiguous either." You look at him. "I moved to Pittsburgh because I needed to stop being a recording of myself and start being actually present. And whatever this is," you gesture slightly, the small inadequate gesture for the thing you've been building for five months in a language of heat packs and coffee and two AM honesty, "it's the most present I've felt in two years. I'm not interested in backing away from that."
The floor continues around you. Someone calls for a consult at the other end of the hall. A monitor beeps its reassuring rhythm.
Jack Abbot looks at you with the expression that has no performance in it.
"There's a restaurant," he says. "On the North Side. It's good. I've been meaning to," he stops. Tries again. "Would you have dinner with me."
"Not a shift," you say.
"Not a shift."
"When."
"Saturday. You're off Saturday."
"How do you know my-"
"I know the schedule."
You look at him. He looks back. The door, which has been ajar for five months, is open.
"Yes," you say.
He nods. The expression does the thing, the almost-laugh, warmer than you've ever heard it, and then, briefly, the real one. Quiet and genuine and entirely devastating.
"Back to the floor," he says.
"Back to the floor," you agree.
You go in opposite directions. You don't smile until you're around the corner.
Saturday is April in Pittsburgh, which means cool and bright, the city wearing its best version of itself. The restaurant is on the North Side, small and warm, with the kind of menu that takes itself seriously without making you feel like you've walked into a performance.
He's there when you arrive. He's early, you realize. Of course he's early. He's been running tight logistics his entire adult life.
He stands when he sees you, and the simplicity of the gesture does something unexpected to your chest.
"Hi," you say.
"Hi," he says.
You sit down. The server comes. You order wine. He orders water and then looks at the wine and changes his order, and you file this as the first new thing you're learning about him outside of the hospital context. There will be many more of these. The prospect of them is something you haven't felt in a while.
The dinner is easy. Which is not what you expected, exactly. You'd anticipated a version of the careful managed conversation of the floor, the professional language, the deliberate navigation.
But off the floor he is still Jack, still precise, still honest, still the person who answers real questions with real answers, but something has been set down. Some part of the management. He talks about his sister who calls him too often and who he would not trade for anything. He talks about what it was like to go to medical school in his mid-thirties, post-military, post-amputation, in a class full of people a decade younger, and what he learned from that and what it cost. He asks about your paramedic years with the genuine curiosity of someone who wants to understand the timeline of a person, not just the resume.
You tell him about the car accident that started your paramedic career. The one you were first on scene for at twenty-two, the one where you didn't know what you were doing and did it anyway and everyone survived and you sat in the ambulance bay afterward for forty minutes understanding that this was what you were supposed to do. He listens to the whole thing.
"That's how you know," he says, when you finish. "When you can't explain the why and you don't need to."
"Is that how it was for you? Medicine?"
"After the leg," he says. "I needed something to fix things with. I'd been breaking things, one way and another, for long enough. I wanted to be on the other side of it."
"And?"
He looks at his glass. "And it worked. Mostly."
"Mostly?"
He looks at you. "There are still nights."
"I know," you say. "I've seen some of them."
"You have," he agrees. "You see things very clearly. I found it uncomfortable at first."
"And now?"
The expression. The real one. "Now I find it," he considers the word carefully, "restful."
You look at him across the table in the warm light of this restaurant on a Saturday in April and you think about five months of a specific language built of small gestures in a hospital at two in the morning, and how the thing you came to Pittsburgh to find, the presence, the being actually here, has arrived from a direction you weren't expecting.
"Can I tell you something," you say.
"Yes."
"I came here to stop being a recording of myself and I'm not sure when exactly it stopped being a risk, but I think it was early. Earlier than I wanted to admit."
He waits.
"I think it was around the time I started leaving pens near your chart station," you say.
The almost-laugh. The real one. Warm and quiet and brief, and you're close enough now, across a restaurant table on a Saturday night, that it's not at a professional distance anymore.
"Around the same time," he says.
"The heat pack?" you say.
"Before that, actually."
"When?"
"Third shift," he says. "You were in bay seven with a patient who was frightened and escalating and you were completely still. Not frozen. Still. Like someone who has been in frightening rooms before and knows that the stillness is what the other person needs, and who can provide it without it costing them anything in the moment. I'd seen nurses do that before. Not like that."
You don't say anything for a moment.
"And then I walked away and told myself it was a professional observation," he says, dry, "and I was extremely convincing. To myself. For about two weeks."
"Then what?"
"Then you left a heat pack on the counter without making it an event," he says. "And that was harder to file away."
You look at him.
He looks at you.
"Jack," you say.
"Yeah."
"I'm not very good at this part. The saying the thing part. I spent a lot of years being good at everything else."
"I know," he says. "I'm not either. I've been told I communicate like a situation report."
"You don't, actually."
"Only with you," he says. Simply. "Only recently."
The restaurant is warm and the wine is good and Pittsburgh is outside the window doing its April thing, and you reach across the table and put your hand over his.
He turns his hand over.
His thumb moves across your palm, once, and you feel it in your sternum.
"We're figuring it out," you say.
"We're figuring it out," he agrees.
Here is what you know, by the time the summer comes.
The diner on Penn Avenue knows your order. The server, whose name is Gloria, asks after Jack on the mornings you come in alone, because you came in together twice and once is a coincidence and twice is a data point and Gloria has been reading data points for thirty years.
The floor is still the floor. The work doesn't change, the long nights don't change, the particular weight of the hard ones doesn't change. But there is a shift in the architecture of the hard ones. The knowing that at the end of them there is a person who will not require you to perform recovery, who will simply be there while the shift processes through you like weather.
You go back to your hometown in June and this time you don't feel the pull of the departure the way you did in May. You feel it on the return, the Pittsburgh-shaped gravity that has been building since January, that you understand now is not the city itself but what you've put in it.
You call your mother from the airport and she asks how things are going, really, in the tone of a woman who reads her children accurately from two states away.
"Good," you say. "Really."
A pause. "There's someone," she says. Not a question.
"There's someone," you confirm.
You can hear her smiling. "Does he deserve you?"
You think about a man who answers honest questions with honest answers. Who said restful and meant it as the highest thing.
"I think we deserve each other," you say. "Which is different."
"That's better," she says. "That's the right answer."
Jack is on a Saturday morning in July, in your apartment, drinking coffee that is actually hot because you got a machine that does it correctly, reading something, when you come in from your run.
You are, in the clinical vocabulary, a lot. Red-faced, sweaty, approximately nine miles of July heat in your joints.
He looks up. He looks at you. The expression, the open one, the unguarded one, the one that stopped being rare sometime around April, sits on his face with the ease of something that lives there now.
"There's water," he says.
"I see it."
"You look like you ran somewhere unreasonable."
"Nine miles."
He shakes his head. Returns to his book. "Statistically inadvisable."
You get the water. You sit on the other end of the couch, legs folded under you, drink half of it and look at him.
"Jack."
"Hmm."
"I rescheduled the fitting appointment."
He looks up from the book.
"The socket's been giving me problems," he says.
"I know."
"I cancelled twice."
"I know that too."
A pause. He looks at you. The expression is the one that means he's deciding how much to say.
"Thank you," he says. Quietly. "For staying on it."
"You stayed on mine," you say. "The processing thing. The being-present thing. You stayed on it without making it a project."
"That's different."
"It's not."
He holds your gaze for a moment. Then the almost-sound, warm and real.
"Annoying," he says.
"You keep saying that."
"It keeps being true."
You lean over and take the book out of his hands and put it on the coffee table, and he watches you do this with the mild expression of someone who is not going to object.
"We have four hours before you have to be at the hospital," you say.
"I'm aware of the schedule."
"Then stop reading and pay attention to me."
The actual laugh, brief and quiet and entirely devastating, the same as the first time you heard it and every time since.
"You're the most presumptuous person I've ever met," he says, and puts his arm around you when you lean into his side, and outside the window Pittsburgh is doing its summer thing, green and warm, the rivers catching the light.
You're learning that this is what it's supposed to feel like.
You're learning it's worth the cost of getting here.
Author's Note:
jack abbot has been living in my head rent free for longer than i'd like to admit, and at some point i had to do something about it. so here we are.
this one is slow and quiet and a little bit about learning to let people see you. if that's your thing, i hope you like it.
for everyone who's been fine. you know the kind.
â with love and an embarrassing amount of feelings about a fictional man
trinity santos is a study in fandom misogyny because they gave her all the characteristics fandoms usually salivate for in men, being gruff, quippy and misunderstood with a tragic backstory but a heart of gold beneath it all. they put all this into her AND let her be a lesbian. she's everything you could ever want in a character but she's not a man so half the fandom either hates her or constantly mischaracterizes her as petty, callous and aggressive while doing mental gymnastics to baby the male characters around her
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Alpha! Anthony, Benedict & Colin Bridgerton x Omega!Fem!Reader
Time Travel/ Transmigration AU for reader
past chapters: chapter 1, chapter 2,
CHAPTER 3
By fourteen months, she was walking.
By seventeen months, she was talking.
Not the ordinary halting toddler speech of first words and labored repetition, but actual speech, structured, articulate, assembled from the vocabulary she had been building since before her first breath, drawing on the English of her past life's extensive reading to supplement and expand what she was currently learning from the people around her.
She was careful about it. She had decided, early, that the most strategic approach was not to reveal the full extent of her capability immediately. The goal was to appear precocious without appearing unsettling. She had calibrated this target with the same care she might calibrate a treatment plan, enough deviation from the expected to be interesting, not so much to trigger alarm.
"She said empirically this morning," her nurse Mrs. Potts reported to Constance, with the expression of someone who was either impressed or deeply concerned and hadn't yet decided which. "She was looking at the bread and she said empirically the crust is the best part."
Constance looked at her daughter, sitting on the nursery floor with a cloth book and an expression of serene innocence.
"[Name]," she said carefully. "Where did you learn that word?"
[Name] looked up at her mother. She had learned, in her months of careful social observation, that her mother responded best to directness, that charm was appreciated but seen through, and that the most reliable way to maintain trust was to offer truth in approximately the right proportion.
"From Father," she said, which was partially true, she had heard her father use it, and offered her mother a smile of such devastating sweetness that Constance momentarily forgot to be suspicious.
"She's remarkable," Edmund said that evening, when Constance reported the exchange.
"She's something," Constance agreed, in the tone of a woman who was reserving judgment but keeping her eyes open.
[Name], in the nursery, was reorganizing her cloth books by topic with the focused efficiency of someone who had spent two years managing patient charts and found disorder fundamentally offensive.
She loved her family fiercely and without reservation, and this was perhaps the thing that surprised her most about her transmigration. She had expected to feel displaced. Detached. She had expected to carry the weight of her past life as a separation, a distance between herself and this world that could never be fully closed. She had expected to be a visitor in her own life, observing from behind the glass of her memories.
She had not expected to love them so completely that sometimes it ached.
Charles, her eldest brother, was twelve when she was five, and he treated her with the exaggerated patience of a boy who had been told repeatedly that he must be gentle with small sisters and had internalized this instruction with such thoroughness that it occasionally crossed from gentleness into condescension, which she found less agreeable. She was working on him. She had discovered that the most effective method was to ask him questions that he confidently began to answer and then couldn't finish, which produced in him a productive frustration that led, over time, to him beginning to take her seriously.
William, at nine, was her favorite of the brothers, not that she would have said so, because she loved them both and understood the politics of sibling dynamics, but William had a quality that she recognized and valued: he was genuinely curious. About everything. He asked questions not to perform intelligence but because he actually wanted to know the answers, and he extended this genuine curiosity to his little sister in a way that meant he treated her less like a small child to be managed and more like a person to be interested in. They spent hours together in the library, William reading aloud from books he found exciting, [Name] listening with the focused attention that she had learned to display in proportion, enthusiastic but not so attentive as to remind anyone that she was a five-year-old who probably shouldn't be following complex historical narrative.
She loved London, which surprised her. She had expected to find it difficult, the smells, the lack of modern sanitation, the particular hazards of an era without antibiotics or anesthesia or any of the medical tools she had spent years training to use. And there were certainly moments when the gap between what she knew and what was available made her quietly, intensely frustrated. But London itself, the streets and the sounds, the peculiar beauty of a city before it had been overlaid with concrete and glass and electric light, the horses and the carriages and the vendors calling their wares in the mornings, the particular quality of the light through old glass windows, the smell of coal fires and bread and the river, London was extraordinary. It was alive in a way she hadn't anticipated.
She explored it as much as she was permitted to, which was not very much, which she found limiting but accepted as the practical constraint it was. She was five years old and a girl and an Omega in Regency London. Her radius of freedom was, by definition, small.
She was already planning to expand it.
She was confirmed as an Omega on a Tuesday in March, two weeks after her fifth birthday.
The confirmation process was, in this world, a medical one, a visit from a discreet physician named Dr. Hartley, who came to the house with a small bag and a very proper manner and performed a brief examination that was more about scent markers and the specific biological signatures of designation than anything else. [Name] submitted to this with the patience she had developed for medical procedures, which was considerable, while privately filing away everything she observed about his technique and comparing it unfavorably to what she knew modern endocrinological assessment looked like.
"Omega," Dr. Hartley confirmed to her parents, in the parlor, in the tone of someone delivering news that required delicacy. "Quite clearly. The markers are strong. She will be a powerful one, I believe."
Edmund said nothing, but his hands, clasped behind his back, tightened.
Constance said, "We expected as much. Thank you, doctor."
When Dr. Hartley had gone, [Name] was brought into the parlor, and her parents sat with her on the settle in the particular arrangement that, she had learned, meant a Serious Conversation was occurring. She sat between them with her hands folded in her lap and her expression composed and waited.
"You know what an Omega is," her mother said. It was not a question.
"Yes," [Name] said.
"Do you understand what it means? For your life?"
[Name] considered. She had been thinking about this for approximately four years, which gave her a certain advantage in the conversation. "It means I will have heats," she said carefully. "And that I will eventually find a mate. An Alpha. And that some people will think that means I need more protecting."
Edmund made a sound that was not quite a laugh and not quite a sigh.
"Some people will think it means you need managing," Constance said, with the precise careful enunciation of someone who had strong opinions about a thing and was deciding how much of them to share with a five-year-old. "Your father and I do not think this."
"Good," [Name] said.
"But some of the world will disagree with us," her father added. "And it is important that you understand that, so you can navigate it."
"I understand," [Name] said.
And then, because she was five years old and had decided that this was a moment to invest in honesty with her parents: "I am not afraid."
Her father looked at her. That look again, the one she had seen from her very first days, the one that said he saw something in her that surprised and moved him. "No," he said softly. "I don't believe you are."
"I just want to be prepared," she added. "I want to learn things. I want to know as much as possible about everything that's relevant."
Her mother exchanged a look with her father above her head, the look of two people communicating volumes in a glance, and then Constance smiled, the particular smile she wore when she was genuinely pleased. "Well," she said. "Then we shall make sure you have access to every relevant resource."
It was, [Name] thought, an excellent start.
By seven, she was working through material that was typically considered appropriate for children of twelve.
She was discreet about it, but her mother, who had, by this point, concluded that her daughter was quite simply the most extraordinary person she had personally encountered, and had stopped being surprised by this and started being quietly, fiercely proud, had arranged for a governess of exceptional quality. Miss Pemberton was a woman of forty, unmarried, Beta, possessed of a first-rate education that she had been permitted to pursue because her father had been an unusual man and because she was very intelligent and had quietly found ways to learn things that women of her era were not typically taught. She had strong opinions about the education of girls, which aligned almost perfectly with [Name]'s strong opinions about her own education, and within the first month of their acquaintance they had established a working relationship that was less teacher-and-student than it was colleagues with a significant age difference.
"You've already read this," Miss Pemberton said, the second week, setting down the arithmetic primer she had intended to begin with and looking at [Name] with the expression of someone recalibrating rapidly.
"Yes," [Name] said.
"When?"
"Last year. I found it in Father's study."
"And you understood it?"
"Most of it. I had questions about the trigonometric components, but William explained them." This was true. William had not entirely understood why she was asking, but had answered thoroughly, and she had filed the explanations carefully.
Miss Pemberton was quiet for a moment. Then she said, with admirable composure: "What haven't you read?"
[Name] thought about it. "I haven't had access to much natural philosophy. Or anatomy." A pause. "I would very much like to read anatomy."
Miss Pemberton looked at her for a long moment. "You are seven years old," she observed.
"Yes."
"Most seven-year-old girls want to learn embroidery and French."
"I want to learn French too," [Name] said agreeably. "And I don't object to embroidery in principle, though I suspect my fine motor development hasn't caught up with my ambition yet. But I would also like anatomy."
Miss Pemberton, who would later tell Constance that teaching [Name] Ashworth was the most stimulating professional experience of her career, said: "I'll see what I can source."
She was as good as her word. Within a fortnight, [Name] had been provided with a copy of a basic anatomical text, a natural philosophy primer three levels above where most children her age were working, and a French grammar that Miss Pemberton had annotated with her own extensive notes. She worked through all three with the focused intensity of someone who was not learning these things for the first time but deepening an existing foundation, her past life's medical knowledge was present in her mind, but it was knowledge without context, without the vocabulary of this era, without the theoretical frameworks that connected it to what was currently understood about the human body. She needed to build the bridge between what she knew and what was knowable here, and she did it methodically, brick by brick, with the same careful attention she had always brought to learning.
She was happy. That was the thing she noted most, in those years, the warm, simple happiness of a child who was loved and engaged and growing in an environment that made room for her. She had expected to feel the weight of her past life as a shadow over her present one. Instead, what she felt was something more like integration, the two lives settling into each other, the woman she had been informing and enriching the child she now was, without erasing the child, without diminishing the genuine, immediate joy of a summer morning or a good book or the particular triumph of finally perfectly executing a French subjunctive construction.
She laughed easily. She made friends readily, with the children of her parents' acquaintances, with the household staff who had largely concluded that she was their personal favorite human, with Miss Pemberton, who maintained professional formality in public and in private allowed herself to laugh freely at [Name]'s observations. She was warm by nature and curious by design and she had the particular quality of genuinely caring about the people around her, asking after their concerns, remembering the small details they mentioned in passing, following up in ways that made them feel, reliably and truly, that they mattered.
This was not a performance. It was not a strategy, though it was certainly useful. It was simply who she was, in this life as she had been in her last, someone to whom other people's wellbeing felt genuinely important, for its own sake, without needing a reason.
"You have a gift," her father told her once, when she was eight, after she had spent an afternoon talking with his elderly mother-in-law who was visiting and whom everyone else in the household found demanding and difficult. [Name] had found her fascinating, sharp beneath the querulousness, lonely beneath the demands, and had listened to her stories about a life that spanned most of the century with genuine attention.
"She's interesting," [Name] said.
"She says she's never had such a good conversation," Edmund said, looking at his daughter with an expression of wonder. "She said you asked her exactly the right questions."
[Name] shrugged. "She knows things I don't. Why wouldn't I ask her?"
Edmund was quiet for a moment. Then: "You are going to be remarkable, my love."
"I'm going to try," she said, which was more accurate.
She was nine years old when she first heard the Bridgerton name spoken in a context that meant something.
She had, of course, known they existed. She had been waiting, with the patient anticipation of someone who knew the broad structure of events without knowing the precise timing, for the family to become relevant to her life. She had also been carefully not-thinking about what, precisely, relevant might eventually mean, because she understood enough about herself to know that thinking too much about certain things before they became necessary was a reliable pathway to anxiety, and she had work to do.
The context was a dinner party at a friend's house, the family of one of Charles's schoolfellows, which meant the gathering was primarily adults, which meant [Name] had been permitted to attend because her parents were progressive in their approach to including their children in social contexts and because, as her mother put it, [Name] could be trusted to conduct herself appropriately.
She sat between her mother and a woman she didn't know, ate her dinner with the careful attention to table manners that Mrs. Potts had drilled into her for years, and listened.
The conversation moved around her the way conversation did at these events, in the organized chaos of multiple concurrent exchanges, fragments surfacing and submerging, a word here and a name there. She caught most of it, sorted it, kept what was useful and released the rest.
"...the Bridgerton boys," someone said, across the table. "Have you seen the eldest? Must be fifteen by now..."
"Anthony," someone confirmed. "Yes, quite extraordinary. Alpha, strong one, his father is immensely proud..."
"And the middle one, Benedict, isn't it? The artistic one. Quite different from his brother..."
"There's a third as well, isn't there? Colin, the youngest of the boys? Still young, only eight or nine..."
[Name] set her fork down very carefully and took a sip of water.
There they are, she thought.
There they are.
She did not seek them out. She was nine years old and they were fifteen, thirteen, and nine respectively, and the social mechanics of the Ton meant that there was no natural intersection between their lives at present. But she filed what she knew carefully, and she waited, and she continued the business of growing up with the focused efficiency she brought to everything.
She grew. The sunshine personality that her household had been noting since her earliest months deepened and expanded as she did, she was warm and bright and easy to love, and she loved easily in return, with the generosity of someone who understood how quickly things could be taken away and who had therefore decided not to be careful or strategic about affection. She gave it freely. It was returned, mostly, in full.
She was also, increasingly, someone to take seriously. Miss Pemberton had long since stopped thinking of their sessions as teaching and started thinking of them as collaborative inquiry, they worked through problems together, argued competing interpretations of texts with the mutual respect of intellectual equals, and [Name] had begun occasionally to know things that Miss Pemberton did not, which she managed with the tact she had developed for navigating situations where her knowledge exceeded what her age should have allowed.
The anatomy had become, gradually, medicine. She had worked through every text she could access, and what she could access in London at the close of the eighteenth century was limited but not negligible, there were physicians in her parents' acquaintance who, when they understood what she was actually asking and that she was genuinely able to engage with the answers, began to lend her texts and include her in conversations that were not, strictly speaking, appropriate for a girl of nine or ten or eleven. She absorbed everything. She asked precise questions. She cross-referenced what she learned here against the comprehensive medical knowledge stored in her memory from her past life, building the synthesis carefully, identifying where the understanding of this era was correct, where it was incomplete, and where it was wrong in ways that had consequences she could not ignore.
She kept notes. Extensive, careful, ciphered notes in a personal notation system she had developed at age six, which lived in a locked journal that she treated with the same security consciousness she had once brought to patient records.
She was not ready to use what she knew yet. She understood that. She was a child, and an Omega girl-child at that, in a world that had very precise ideas about what children and Omega girl-children were supposed to know and not know and do and not do. Timing was everything. She had always been good at timing.
She waited, and she learned, and she grew, and she loved her family with the whole of her extraordinary heart.
She was sixteen the first time Lady Danbury looked at her with the expression of a woman who had found something genuinely interesting.
It was at a concert, one of those interminable musicales that the London Season generated in vast quantities, where one sat on uncomfortable chairs and listened to performances of varying quality and the real business of the evening, which was the social exchange happening in the spaces between the music, proceeded around the performances like water around stones.
[Name] was there with her mother and, as chaperones often were, somewhat bored. She had positioned herself near a window where she could observe the room without being directly in the center of it, and she was doing what she always did in situations she found less than fully engaging: watching people. The small tells. The microexpressions. The way a woman's smile tightened when she greeted someone she found threatening, the way a man's posture shifted when his Alpha instincts were triggered. She had always been good at reading people. Years of medical practice in her past life had honed it to something very fine.
"You're watching everyone," said a voice beside her, and she turned.
Lady Danbury was exactly as she had expected her to be, which was to say formidable, sharp eyes, sharp tongue, the posture of a woman who had decided long ago that she would not apologize for occupying her space and had maintained this decision through sheer force of will for several decades. She was looking at [Name] with frank, unabashed curiosity.
"It's more interesting than the music," [Name] said, before she could decide whether to be more diplomatic.
Lady Danbury's eyes lit. "Well," she said. "An honest answer. Those are rarer than they should be." She studied [Name] for a moment. "You're Pemsley's girl. [Name]."
"Yes, my lady."
"Sit down. No, not there, here. I dislike shouting." She indicated the chair beside her with her cane. "You were watching Lady Cresthaven. What did you see?"
[Name] sat, and thought, and decided that honesty was still the best policy with this particular woman. "That she's exhausted. She's been managing her smile since she arrived, and real smiles don't require management. Her shoes are half a size too small, she keeps shifting her weight. And she's worried about something with her son; she looked at him three times in the last ten minutes and each time her expression did something involuntary."
Lady Danbury was quiet for a moment. "Her son," she said, "has been spending money he does not have."
"Ah," [Name] said. "That would do it."
"How old are you?"
"Sixteen, my lady."
"And are you always like this?"
[Name] considered. "Like what, specifically?"
"Like someone who is paying more attention than everyone else in the room."
"I don't know what I'm like when I'm not paying attention," [Name] said honestly. "I'm not sure I've ever done it."
Lady Danbury looked at her for a long moment, and then she laughed, a real laugh, short and sharp and genuine, the laugh of someone who was genuinely surprised and pleased. "Pemberton tells me you're a remarkable student," she said.
"You know Miss Pemberton?" [Name] said, surprised in spite of herself.
"I know everyone worth knowing. She told me about you some years ago. I've been waiting to meet you." A pause. "You didn't disappoint."
It was, [Name] understood, very high praise from a woman who gave it rarely and meant it always.
"Thank you, my lady," she said.
"Come to tea on Thursday," Lady Danbury said. "We will talk. I find most people insufferably dull and I am in need of stimulating conversation. You will do."
It was also, [Name] recognized, not quite a question.
"I would be honored," she said.
She was seventeen when she met them properly for the first time, and she had been preparing for this meeting, in the loosest sense, for approximately twelve years.
The occasion was a ball, the Featherington ball, as it happened, one of the early events of the Season, which placed her precisely in the year the story began, the year Daphne Bridgerton made her debut. She knew the broad shapes of what was coming. She also knew, with the grounded self-awareness she had developed over seventeen years of an extraordinary life, that the broad shapes of what she remembered were not a script but a map, useful for orientation, unreliable for navigation at the level of individual moments.
She arrived with her mother and her father, who had procured her a dress in a particular shade of deep rose that her mother insisted complemented her complexion beautifully, which [Name] had accepted without protest because the dress was genuinely beautiful and because she had learned, over years of being her mother's daughter, that some battles were worth having and some were not. She was in the latter category of fashion opinions. Her hair was arranged by the household's excellent lady's maid in a style that was elegant without being effortful, which was her consistent preference.
She had grown into herself over the last year in the way that seventeen-year-olds do, not suddenly, but with the quiet accumulated inevitability of many small changes arriving all at once. She was not the conventional beauty of the season, in the way that Daphne Bridgerton was conventionally beautiful, that particular combination of features and coloring that the Ton had collectively decided was the ideal. [Name] was something different: striking, warm-faced, with the kind of presence that made people instinctively turn toward her the way plants turned toward the sun, less because of the arrangement of her features and more because of the quality she projected, something that had no proper name but was made up of warmth and intelligence and a certain joyful aliveness that seemed, in rooms full of people performing their pleasantness, genuinely and refreshingly real.
She was also, and had been increasingly aware of this for the last two years as the biological realities of her designation had become more impossible to ignore, unmistakably Omega. Her scent, which she managed carefully with the various suppressants that existed in this world, nothing like the pharmaceutical precision she would have preferred but functional enough, was like warm honey and something green, like new leaves in early spring, and even suppressed it carried a quality that Alphas in particular seemed to register with something in their nervous system before their conscious awareness caught up.
She was, in the language of this world, a presenting Omega in her first Season.
She was also, in her own language, a grown woman with a medical degree and twelve years of careful preparation and absolutely no intention of being managed.
She entered the Featherington ballroom on her father's arm, and she felt it, the subtle shift in the room's energy that she had learned to recognize, the way certain Alphas' attention moved toward her involuntarily, the way the air seemed to carry a new frequency. She kept her expression pleasant and her posture easy and she scanned the room with the systematic thoroughness she brought to any new environment.
She found them within the first five minutes.
Anthony Bridgerton was the easiest to locate because he was the kind of man rooms organized themselves around whether he chose it or not. He was tall, she had remembered the description, but the reality was its own thing, with dark hair and eyes that were nearly black and a quality of compressed authority that was specifically Alpha in a way she recognized, the deep, settled confidence of a dominant Alpha in his element. He was twenty-two, she calculated. The eldest. The Viscount. The one who was responsible for everything and carried that responsibility in the set of his shoulders the way some men carried old injuries.
He was talking to another man she didn't recognize, and he was not smiling, and even not smiling he wasâ
Handsome, she thought, with the dispassionate acknowledgment of someone noting an objective fact. Very handsome. Noted. Moving on.
Benedict Bridgerton she found a moment later, near the edge of the room rather than the center of it, in the way of someone who was present without being invested in being seen. He was twenty, dark-haired like his brother but with a quality about him that was less compressed, more open, something in his face that suggested he was looking at the room the way she looked at the room, taking it in rather than performing in it. He had a sketch pad half-hidden at his side, which she recognized from her memories of the character, and he was, she noted, watching a woman across the room with the focused attention of someone observing something beautiful.
He wasn't looking at the woman the way a man looked at a woman he desired. He was looking at her the way an artist looked at a subject. There was a difference, and she could read it.
Colin Bridgerton was sixteen and looked it, gangly with the particular awkwardness of a boy who had grown fast and hadn't finished growing, still not fully inhabiting the height that was going to be his eventually. He was talking animatedly with a group of young people near the refreshments, his hands moving in the expressive, emphatic way of someone who got carried away by what he was saying, and even across the room she could see that he was funny, that the group around him was laughing with the helpless, genuine laughter that came from someone who was actually, organically amusing rather than performing humor.
She looked at all three of them in the space of approximately four minutes, with the comprehensive attention she had developed over seventeen years of doing this, and she thought: Yes. There they are.
And then Anthony Bridgerton turned, and his eyes met hers across the ballroom.
She did not look away. She was not the type to look away. She held his gaze with the calm steadiness of a woman who had held eye contact with a great many more intimidating things than a handsome Viscount in a ballroom, and she gave him the small, polite smile that the situation warranted, and then she looked away first because she had other things to do and she was not going to organize her evening around the fact of a pair of dark eyes.
But she noticed, in the part of her that she kept meticulous track of, the way something in her chest had responded when their eyes met.
She noted it. She filed it. She moved on.
The formal introduction happened approximately an hour later, through the mediating architecture of the Ton's social system, a mutual acquaintance, a conventional exchange, the careful choreography of a world that had very precise ideas about how people were and were not supposed to meet.
"Lady [Name]," said Lady Bridgerton, Violet, warm and beautiful in the way of women who had genuinely loved and genuinely lost, with the instinctive approachability that she remembered from the character, "allow me to present my sons. Anthony, my eldest. Benedict. And this is Colin."
"My lady," Anthony said, with the formal bow of a man who had done this a thousand times and brought the same careful precision to the thousandth as the first. His voice was exactly what she had expected, low and certain and the kind of voice that rooms quieted for, and close up the quality of his Alpha presence was more intense than it had been across the room, the particular weight of him like standing near something with significant gravity.
"Lord Bridgerton," she said, with the appropriate curtsy.
"Lady [Name]," said Benedict, with slightly less formality and slightly more curiosity, his eyes moving over her in the way of someone who was looking at her the way he had been looking at the woman earlier, not with desire but with interest, the interest of someone noting something worth noting.
"Mr. Bridgerton," she said.
"Lady [Name]!" said Colin, and she liked him immediately with a completeness that surprised even her, because he said it with the enthusiastic warmth of someone who was genuinely pleased to meet a new person and had never developed the studied coolness that the Ton considered appropriate to his age and station. He bowed with slightly less polish than his brothers and slightly more sincerity. "Are you enjoying the evening?"
"I am now," she said honestly, and was rewarded with a grin that was like a door opening.
She could see, in her peripheral vision, that Anthony had looked at her sharply at that. She did not address it.
"My mother speaks very highly of you," Violet said, and [Name] looked at her with a warmth that was completely genuine. Lady Bridgerton, she had always thought from her memories of the show, was one of the best things in it, a woman who had loved with her whole heart and carried that love forward after loss as a form of living.
"Lady Bridgerton has been very kind to me," [Name] said, and meant it.
"I am told you are something of a scholar," Benedict said, and his voice had a quality of careful interest, genuine, not performative. "Miss Pemberton's student."
"Her colleague, she insists," [Name] said. "Though she taught me everything worth knowing."
Benedict smiled. It was a different smile from Colin's, quieter, more reserved, reaching his eyes in a way that suggested it was earned. "What are you reading at present?"
"Natural philosophy," she said. "And a French text on botanical medicine that a friend in Paris sent through my father's contacts."
Benedict blinked. "Botanical medicine."
"Plants used in treatment," she said helpfully. "The therapeutic applications ofâ"
"I know what it is," he said, and he sounded, she thought, slightly delighted. "I simply did not expectâ"
"What?" she said, and kept her voice perfectly pleasant.
He had the good grace to recognize the trap. "Nothing that would sound well if I said it aloud," he said instead, and this time the smile was full and real and she found herself returning it before she made the conscious decision to.
Anthony, who had been watching this exchange with an expression she couldn't fully read, said: "Are you out this Season, Lady [Name]?"
"I am," she said, turning her attention to him with the same pleasant composure she had brought to the conversation with his brothers. Close up, his eyes were very dark and very focused, and she had the sense that he did not look at most things as closely as he was looking at her, and that this was likely not something he was doing on purpose.
"Your first?" he asked.
"Yes."
"I hope it proves enjoyable," he said, which was the appropriate thing to say and said in the appropriate tone, formal and correct, and she would have thought nothing of it except that underneath the formality there was something that she was not going to name yet, something her Omega instincts recognized before her conscious mind fully caught up.
"I expect it will be interesting," she said, which was honest.
She curtsied and moved on, because she was not going to organize her first conversation around staying in it, and she had learned a long time ago that the most effective exit from any interaction was a graceful one.
But she thought about it, afterward, for longer than was strictly practical.
She had not expected to meet Queen Charlotte in her first Season.
Lady Danbury had arranged it, which was to say Lady Danbury had decided it was happening and had informed the relevant parties, including [Name], after the arrangements were already made. This was characteristic. In the two years since their first meeting at the concert, [Name] had developed a genuine and deep fondness for Lady Danbury that she was fairly sure was mutual, expressed in the form of Lady Danbury continuing to seek her company and occasionally saying things about her to other people that were very close to complimentary when filtered through the particular translation layer of Lady Danbury's communication style.
"The Queen wishes to meet the Season's more interesting prospects," Lady Danbury informed her, over tea on a Wednesday morning two weeks into the Season. "I have told Her Majesty that you are the most interesting prospect and she is inclined to take my word for it. She will see you Thursday."
"I see," [Name] said.
"You are not afraid," Lady Danbury observed.
"Should I be?"
"Most girls are terrified. It's tiresome." A pause. "Though if you are not afraid, don't perform fear for her benefit. She can smell performance at forty paces and she finds it offensive."
"Noted," [Name] said.
She was not, in fact, afraid. She was, if she was being precise with herself, more focused than usual, the way she had felt before significant medical procedures in her past life, the heightened alertness that served performance without impeding it. Queen Charlotte, in her memories of the story, was a woman of considerable intelligence who was carrying a considerable burden that almost no one in her world fully understood, and who had developed a comprehensive armor against a world that mostly didn't try.
She also knew, because she had spent twelve years thinking about it, that this was the point. This was the moment her past life's knowledge became directly, urgently useful in a way that might change things.
She dressed carefully for Thursday. Not elaborately, she had learned, from Lady Danbury and from her own extensive observation, that elaborateness in this context read as trying too hard, and trying too hard with this particular Queen would be precisely the wrong approach. She wore a gown in deep blue, simply cut, with her hair arranged with care but without artifice, and she was delivered to the palace with her mother in a state of approximately controlled calm.
Her mother was considerably more nervous.
"You will be respectful," Constance said, for the second time in the carriage.
"Yes, Mama."
"You will be measured in your speech."
"Yes, Mama."
"You will not say anything thatâ"
"Mama." [Name] reached over and covered her mother's hand with hers. "I will be fine."
Constance looked at her, that particular look that mothers wore when they were confronting the evidence of how extraordinary their child was and finding the evidence simultaneously wonderful and slightly overwhelming. "Yes," she said softly. "I know you will."
Queen Charlotte received her in a private salon, without the full court apparatus, which was itself a kind of signal, an indication that this was intended to be an actual conversation rather than a ceremonial presentation. Lady Danbury was present, standing to the side with the quiet satisfaction of someone who had arranged something they are pleased about.
[Name] curtsied with the form her mother had spent weeks drilling into her, perfectly executed, and then straightened and looked at the Queen directly, with the respectful attention she gave to everyone she considered worth attending to.
Charlotte was watching her with the sharp, assessing quality that she had expected, the look of a woman who had spent decades reading people and had developed, through that practice, an accuracy that was very nearly clinical. She was resplendent and contained, beauty and authority combined in the way of someone who had been performing both for so long that the performance had become something else.
"Lady [Name] Ashworth," the Queen said.
"Your Majesty," [Name] said.
"Lady Danbury tells me you are exceptional."
"Lady Danbury is very kind, Your Majesty."
"Lady Danbury is never kind," Charlotte said, without particular inflection. "She is accurate. There is a difference." A pause. "You are aware of it."
"Yes, Your Majesty."
Charlotte's eyes narrowed slightly, not with displeasure but with the sharpening attention of someone who had received an unexpected answer. "Sit down," she said. "I dislike conversations where I must look up."
[Name] sat, with the ease of someone who had spent two years having conversations with Lady Danbury and had therefore been extensively trained in the management of formidable women.
"Lady Danbury tells me you have an interest in medicine," Charlotte said.
"In natural philosophy and the treatment of illness, Your Majesty. Yes."
"An unusual interest for a young woman of your station."
"Perhaps, Your Majesty. I find the usual alternatives less compelling."
"Embroidery and music."
"Music I enjoy very much. Embroidery I respect in principle but find insufficiently challenging to hold my attention for long."
There was a pause. And then, quietly, like something that had not been planned, Queen Charlotte smiled. It was small and brief and genuine, the smile of a woman who found something actually amusing rather than the performed pleasure of court smile, and [Name] felt it land with the significance of something rare.
"You are honest," Charlotte said.
"I try to be, Your Majesty. I find most other approaches require too much maintenance."
Charlotte looked at her for a long moment. Lady Danbury, to the side, was doing a very good impression of someone who was not deeply, smugly pleased.
"Tell me," Charlotte said, "what do you know of nervous afflictions? Of the mind's effects on the body?"
The question was precise and she landed on it with the controlled response of someone who had not expected to be asked it in exactly those terms but had been thinking about it for years. She felt the particular sharpening clarity that had always come over her when a difficult diagnostic question arrived, the way the whole of her knowledge organized itself around the problem, the relevant pieces surfacing, the irrelevant receding.
"A great deal, Your Majesty," she said carefully. "In a theoretical capacity. I have read extensively, everything available, and some texts in French and German through correspondence with scholars my father has been kind enough to facilitate."
Charlotte was very still. "And what does your reading suggest?"
"That the mind and body are not as separate as current understanding tends to treat them," [Name] said, keeping her voice even and measured. "That certain afflictions which present as bodily have their origin in the nervous system and in its interaction with experience. And thatâ" She paused, choosing her next words with the care of someone navigating delicate terrain. "That many such conditions, which are currently considered untreatable, respond to specific intervention. If the intervention is correctly identified and applied consistently."
The silence in the room was very complete.
"You seem," Charlotte said slowly, "to be speaking about something specific."
"I am speaking generally, Your Majesty," [Name] said. "About the state of current understanding. Which I believe has significant room for development."
Charlotte looked at her. The sharpness in her gaze had become something else, something more complex, more layered. Something that was very close, [Name] thought, to hope, carefully controlled so as not to become desperation.
"I believe," Charlotte said, "that you should come to court again."
"I would be honored, Your Majesty."
"Not for a presentation. For a conversation." A pause. "I have a particular interest in the subject you describe."
"I am aware, Your Majesty," [Name] said gently. And then, because she had decided that honesty was her only real option with this woman, and because she believed that this moment mattered: "I came prepared to speak about it, if Your Majesty wished."
Another silence.
And then Charlotte said, very quietly, as if the words required careful handling: "I think, Lady [Name], that you and I are going to understand each other very well."
In the weeks that followed her first meeting with the Queen, [Name] came to the palace three times.
The first visit was still largely formal, Charlotte learning the edges of her, the shape of what she knew and how she knew it, assessing with the careful thoroughness of a woman who had been disappointed by people who seemed promising and had learned to verify before trusting. [Name] submitted to this assessment without impatience. She understood it. She understood Charlotte, from the outside in a way that Charlotte could not know and that she was very careful about handling gently, not using what she knew as a lever, but as a guide. A way of finding the right words for the right moments.
The second visit was different. Charlotte dismissed her ladies, which was itself a signal, and looked at [Name] across the tea service with the directness of a woman who had decided to stop testing and start speaking.
"My husband," she said, without preamble.
"Yes," [Name] said.
"What do you know."
It was not a question.
[Name] took a slow breath. This was the moment she had thought about for years, not with dread, but with the careful, sobered awareness of its weight. "I know," she said, choosing each word with precision, "that what afflicts His Majesty is a condition of the nervous system. That it is not a failure of character, nor of intelligence, nor of sanity in the manner in which it is sometimes spoken of. That it is a physiological reality, something that exists in the tissue of the brain and in the chemistry of the blood, and that it is made significantly worse by certain things and somewhat better by others."
Charlotte was very still. "The physiciansâ"
"The physicians are doing what they can with what they have," [Name] said, with the honest fairness she brought to all assessments. "What they have is not yet sufficient to fully address the condition. Butâ" A pause. "There are things that help. That are not currently being tried, or not being tried in the right combination."
"What things?"
[Name] reached, carefully, into the small bag she had been permitted to bring with her, and produced a document she had spent three weeks preparing, handwritten, clear, organized with the systematic precision of a differential diagnosis and treatment plan, translated into the terminology of this era with the care of someone who understood that effective communication required meeting the audience where they were.
She set it on the table between them.
Charlotte looked at it. Then she looked at [Name]. "You prepared this."
"I have been preparing it for some time," [Name] said honestly. "I hoped for the opportunity to share it."
Charlotte picked up the document and read it, slowly and completely, while [Name] sat with her tea and waited with the patience of someone who had sat through very long ward rounds and understood that the management of silence was a skill.
When she finished, Charlotte looked up. Her expression was something complex and layered that [Name] could not fully name, parts of it were relief, and parts of it were grief, and parts of it were something that was almost anger, the anger of someone who had been waiting too long for an answer that should have arrived sooner.
"Who else has seen this?" Charlotte said.
"No one, Your Majesty."
"It must remain so."
"I understand."
"If this worksâ" Charlotte stopped. The controlled herself with the visible effort of a woman who had been managing the appearance of composure for so long it had become structural. "If this works," she said again, more steadily, "I will owe you a debt that I am not certain can be adequately repaid."
"I ask nothing in return," [Name] said, which was true. "He is suffering. You are suffering. If I can help, then I should."
Charlotte looked at her for a long moment. Something in her expression shifted, not softened exactly, because Charlotte was not a woman who softened, but opened, slightly, the way a room opened when a window was lifted.
"You are," she said slowly, "a remarkable young woman."
"I have been told so," [Name] said. "I try to deserve it."
The third visit, six weeks after the first, Queen Charlotte received [Name] not in the public salon but in her private sitting room, the inner chambers that very few people outside the immediate royal household ever entered. It was a privilege so unusual that even Lady Danbury, when informed of it, was briefly and expressively speechless.
[Name] sat with the Queen and drank tea and they talked for two hours, and some of what they discussed was the King and the careful, slow work of implementing the interventions [Name] had outlined, adjusted and refined through the ongoing consultation between them. Some of what they discussed was other things, books, and philosophy, and the management of a world that did not always make room for women who thought clearly and acted on what they found.
At the end of the two hours, Charlotte said, with the directness that [Name] had come to understand was her highest mode of respect: "I intend to make it known that you are under my particular regard. This will smooth certain paths for you."
[Name] understood precisely what this meant. Queen Charlotte's favor was one of the most significant social currencies in the Ton. To be under her particular regard was not simply an honor, it was a form of protection, a signal to the social architecture of London that this person was not to be casually dismissed or managed. For an Omega girl in her first Season, it was transformative.
"I am grateful, Your Majesty," she said.
"Don't be grateful," Charlotte said crisply. "Be useful. Continue being as remarkable as you are. That is what I require of you."
"I can do that," [Name] said.
Charlotte looked at her, and the expression on her face was the expression of a woman who believed her.
Author's Note:
Thank you to everyone who liked my story! I decided to make the chapters a bit longer so the story doesnât get cut off so abruptly. I really appreciate all the support and hope you enjoy the next updates.
We finally introduced the Bridgertons, the Queen, and my beloved Lady Danbury in this chapter!
P.S. If youâd also like to be added to the taglist, just say so!
Also I totally underestimated how many tabs Iâd have to open just to search for richer vocabulary lol.