Elevator
Tamsy x f!reader | No use of y/n | "Dove" = reader-insert nickname | Reader has vague appearance
Tamsy is injured and you are tasked with assisting him to the bath house. On the way there, chaos ensues.
No major spoilers or warnings. A little scene from a fic I'm working on. Will reference scenes from other chapters I have not published yet.
...
The hallway stretched long and quiet in the early evening light, the yellow walls gone amber at this hour, a single bulb flickering twice at the far end before settling.
Dove kept her arm steady under Tamsy's and focused on the elevator.
He wasn't dead weight â he was too controlled for that, moving with a deliberate economy that told her he was conserving rather than struggling. But the hospital gown had been traded for his leisure clothes, white underneath the open robe, and the effort of dressing had cost him something. She felt it in the occasional lean â the way his shoulder would press into hers for half a step, weight redistributing without comment, before he found his footing again and straightened.
She tried not to think about his hair.
It was down. Fully down, blond and navy loose around his shoulders, the tassels stripped of their white strips, the whole arrangement disordered in a way she'd never seen it. It made him look â different. Softer at the edges. The scar sat differently without the tassels framing his face, and the labret caught what light there was, and the navy brows were relaxed, and he looked, privately and annoyingly, like someone she wanted to keep looking at.
Stop, she told herself. He almost died today. That's just a chemically sympathetic response and it will pass.
She looked at the elevator instead.
She'd assumed this part would be uncomfortable for him. The reliance. The proximity. The visible evidence of limitation in someone who had never, in her observation, allowed himself to appear limited. She'd braced for the composed deflection of it, the practiced ease deployed to cover exposed ground.
But she glanced at him now, and he seemed â fine. Entirely fine, in fact. His expression was mild, his pace unhurried, his chin slightly elevated. Not performing comfort. Actually comfortable.
That mattered, she thought. More than it should.
"I could just use my Vital Instrument, you know," she said, before she'd decided to say it.
He glanced down at her.
"Float you the rest of the way." She kept her tone practical. "It would be faster than walking, and less strain onâ"
"That's quite alright."
"Are you sure? It's not tooâ"
"You know," he said, pleasantly, "for someone offering to float meâ" and his voice curved around the word like amusement itself, "âyou seem rather comfortable just holding on to me like this."
She blinked.
He held her gaze with the specific quality of a man who had identified something and found it charming.
"That is notâ" She stopped. Closed her mouth. Opened it. "I was being practical."
"Mm." He turned back to face the hallway ahead. The corner of his mouth had moved. "Certainly."
"I was."
"I believe you completely."
She looked at the elevator door, which was not getting closer fast enough.
The smile in his voice sat in her chest without asking permission, and she told herself that was just the warmth of the corridor, the flickering light, the end of a very long day.
The elevator was old.
The accordion gate folded back with a groan of metal and a sound like a very emphatic sigh. The car was small â wood paneling on three sides, a worn brass railing, the half-dial floor indicator above the door frozen perpetually between two and three. Dove pressed the ground-level button and felt the car shudder once, then begin its slow, certain descent.
The gate closed.
A smaller, quieter space than the hallway. She was aware of it immediately â the close walls, the creak of the old cables, the lack of anywhere useful to look that wasn't him.
She looked at the floor indicator.
Tamsy leaned against the railing at the back of the car with his arms loosely crossed, watching her with the uncomplicated attention of someone who had nowhere else to be and found the current view sufficient.
Then, from the hallway behind the gate â voices.
Dove recognized Gris's deep, easy baritone before the words resolved. He was talking to someone, two or three others by the sound of it, their footsteps unhurried, moving in the direction of the elevator.
Beside her, she felt Tamsy's posture shift â something subtle, barely perceptible. Not tension. More like a man who had just performed a rapid internal calculation.
Well. This is just great, thought Tamsy.
Gris would see them. Gris would see that Tamsy was still moving around post-medbay, which meant Gris would offer to help, which meant Gris would insist, and then there would be kind hands and genuine concern and questions and the specific well-meaning invasion that came from a man who found helping people genuinely fulfilling, and then there would be more people between him and the current arrangement of the evening, which involved Dove's arm and Dove's pace and Dove's quietly cherished expressions and absolutely no one else.
He was not going to let Gris Rubion ruin this.
The footsteps drew closer.
Tamsy stumbled.
It happened fast. His foot went sideways, his weight shifted, and she had exactly no time to brace before he came with it â sideways, forward, one hand catching the wall beside her head with a crack of palm on wood paneling, the other finding the railing. He caught himself. Both of them hit the wall of the car, her back against the paneling, his arm above her head, his body angled over hers and not quite touching, close enough that she could feel the warmth of him through the thin white of his underlayer.
His hair fell.
Blond and navy, swinging forward in a curtain around them, catching the dim overhead light. She was looking up at him. His face hovered close â the scar, the button nose, the labret gleaming, the pale oak eyes, which were not, she noted with some irritation, reflecting any surprise whatsoever.
Her gaze dropped. Nose. Lips. The silver of the labret. Back up.
"What are youâ"
His finger touched her lips.
Light. One finger, just the tip of it, pressed gently against her mouth. His eyes moved to the gate.
"Shh," he said. "Wait."
Not a command. Barely even a request. Conspiratorial, almost â quiet and unhurried, the voice of someone who had a plan and was very comfortable with it.
Outside, the footsteps arrived.
Gris's voice, mid-sentence: "âtold Enjin the south corridor's faster if you're coming from theâ"
A pause.
A very specific pause.
Dove, with her back against the wood paneling and Tamsy's arm above her head and his hair falling in a curtain around both of them, heard the exact moment Gris saw them through the accordion gate.
Silence.
The silence of a large and fundamentally decent man processing information he had not anticipated.
Then the careful, deliberate sound of a throat being cleared.
"Let's uh," Gris said, with admirable composure, "take the stairs."
A second of shuffling. The sound of someone redirecting several people, gently, with the quiet efficiency of a shepherd who had encountered an unexpected situation in a field and was choosing not to examine it further.
Footsteps retreating. Then nothing.
The elevator creaked around them.
Dove planted both palms flat on Tamsy's shoulders and pushed.
He went, obligingly, to arm's length. His hair swung back. He found the railing again and settled against it with the ease of a man who had just concluded a perfectly reasonable interaction and was ready for the next one.
She turned her face to the side.
Her ears were on fire. She could feel it from the jaw up â the specific, comprehensive heat of someone who had been caught in a tableau they had not constructed and could not adequately explain. She could feel her own heartbeat in the side of her throat.
"They are going to think," she said, to the wall, "something happened. Theyâll get the wrong idea!"
"Will they."
"What was that?"
"I tripped."
She turned back to look at him. Fully, directly, with the expression she reserved for things that did not hold up to scrutiny.
He met her eyes with a blandness that was technically a facial expression but barely.
"That was not a trip."
"I've been injured," he said. "My balance isâ"
"Why?" She kept her voice flat. "Seriously. Why."
He looked at her for a moment.
Then the blandness dropped â not into guilt, nothing so satisfying as that. Into something more honest. He exhaled once through his nose, almost a sigh, and the arm that had been braced on the railing uncrossed, and he looked at her the way he'd looked at her in the medbay â not performing anything.
"I didn't want anyone else handling me right now," he said. Simple. Flat as reading from a list.
She stared at him.
"Why not?"
It was the wrong question to ask. She knew it was the wrong question the moment it came out of her, because asking why not meant she'd accepted the premise, which meant she'd let the excuse stand, which was apparently not something she was capable of doing right now.
He thought for a second.
Not performing the pause. Actually thinking â she could see it in the slight drop of his gaze, the moment where something assembled itself and then got dressed in appropriate language. Then he looked back up.
And grinned.
Not the polished smile. Not the pleasant warmth. This one was darker at the edges, more deliberate, something possessive underneath the playfulness that she felt in the base of her sternum like a struck chord.
He leaned in.
Not fast â slow enough that she tracked every inch of it and did nothing to stop it, which was a separate problem she'd examine later.
"I only want to spend a little more time with you." Close to her ear, quiet, conspiratorial and utterly sincere. His voice had dropped just slightly. "Must I have to share?"
She looked at him.
The elevator creaked around them.
The pattern assembled in her head all at once â clean and complete and entirely unwelcome. The town outing, offered so casually, already knowing the cafĂ©'s name. The spacing of his appearances in the laundry room, in the corridor, at her table. Now this. The common thread was not convenience. It was not coincidence. The common thread was her, and time, and the quiet engineering of both.
He had wanted the small table at the café that fit exactly two people. He had wanted her to bring him to the bath house. He had wanted, apparently, this specific elevator instead of those stairs.
He had wanted all of it.
Her heart hit her ribs harder than fear alone would have managed.
This is a problem, she thought. This is a significant problem and you need to not be in this feeling right now.
She straightened.
"Right," she said.
Her voice came out flat. Good. Flat was good. Flat was practical and self-preserving and implied no particular internal state.
She locked it in the same drawer as annoyingly beautiful and the warmth of his sleeve and her ear he'd touched during the café, and she pressed her hands together and announced:
"I'm not carrying you anymore."
His expression shifted immediately â the grin dissolving into something pained and exaggerated and deeply, theatrically unconvincing.
"I'll just use my Vital Instrument," she said. "You can float the rest of the way."
"Aww." His brows drew together. He pressed a hand to his chest. "Please?"
"You just admitted you faked a fall."
"I admitted no such thing. I said I wanted to spend time withâ"
"Azimuth," she said. "You're getting floated."
He exhaled. Long-suffering. The expression of a man who had played his hand and found the return unsatisfactory.
She was already pulling the compass from beneath her capelet.
"And I'm scrubbing your back anyway!"