jdelacruz:
They reach out, put their hand on his, and his instinct, sheer muscle memory, is to pull away. He doesn’t, but the muscles of his forearm jump, all the same, tense for a long moment until he wills them to relax again. He looks at their hand, at the way the ink of their tattoo moves across the skin; he can’t look away from it, or anywhere else, as he listens to Lucky talk, voice dropping into something quiet and serious.
He doesn’t think he could look at them if he tried, now. He didn’t realize he was looking for a specific answer until he didn’t get it—doesn’t even think he wanted the answer he was looking for, not really, except in some desperate attempt to find something else, someone else, to cling to. That he’d woken up miserable and reached out to Lucky out of, what, some sort of pathetic, misplaced hope that there was something to salvage a decade after Lucky had stopped caring about him, a decade after he forfeited the right to their care.
He realizes, belatedly, that he’d wanted them to say No, Julián, you have me. But of course that was absurd. Of course he didn’t.
He can practically hear Rafael’s voice in his head, more scathing and pointed and right than it ever really was out loud. The real Rafael would have made some snide comment, sure, but it was only the version of Rafael that lived at the back of his mind and never left that knew enough about him to say they just feel sorry for you, Julián. They pity you. They’re doing this for Vesper. They’re doing it to clear their own conscience.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he answers. But he can’t imagine it. It’s been so long, since he was alone, since he was reminded so sharply of how lonely he is, without Vesper. He used to think it was better to be alone than to be with his family, but the truth is he isn’t so sure anymore. Maybe he’s like a stray dog, too, the hunger pangs of loneliness bad enough that any scrap of attention is enough, touch-starved enough that even a kick feels like a mercy.
They watch him closely, hoping to find some further guidance in just what he wanted from them. The moment their hand touches his, they can feel a small seize in the muscles, and they almost pull back, worried they’d overstepped and had misinterpreted the situation again.
But that doesn’t quite feel like that’s the case... they think to themself, feeling the muscles relax under their hand, and notice the lost look that soon seems to plague Julián’s features. He’s stuck in his head, they think, thoughts seemingly miles away from the counter they were currently sitting at. They’re not quite sure how to pull him back, even as someone who spent half their time wrapped up in their own spiraling thoughts.
They try to take a figurative step back though, to get a better read on it all. Brushing their thumb over the top of his hand, their brow knits in thought. The scale seemed to be a bit off-balance between them now, what with everything they saw the night before, and what he’d confessed to them since they sat down. They now knew a lot more about shit he probably didn’t want them to, the gritty and ugly details of his life over the last decade laid out now fully for them to examine.
They needed to even the deck more, they decide, no matter how much the thought of doing so caused their chest to tighten and burn as stomach acid began to creep up their esophagus.
“I wasn’t- I wasn’t mad at you...” they begin, taking a deep breath as they do, “when you didn’t recognize me. I mean fuck... I hoped you never would, even though the name would have eventually clued you in.” They’re not sure if airing out at least their own part to play in what happened in the last couple years would help or not, but they feel like if they were going to try to offer themself up as someone that could help him, they at least had to explain why they waited until now to do so.
“I tried to stay in New York after it happened,” they say, before gesturing towards their face and then the rest of their body, “but it’s hard to try to move forward from something, when every time someone looks at you it’s all they see. So I moved out here, you know, where no one knew fuck all about what happened, and didn’t look at me like I was some broken thing, because it’s different when this face is the only one you know.”
They pause for a second to take a drink of their coffee, wishing it was something stronger as their knee viciously bobs under the counter. They’re the one not making eye contact now, not really wanting to see what he was thinking until they were through.
“When I first saw you in the bullpen after I got hired, I was so fuckin’ scared you’d recognize me some how, I was afraid it’d be New York all over again- but worse because it was you.... But then you looked past me- well sort of,” they chuckle weakly, only imagining what Julián‘s first impression of them was without realizing who they were. “And I was so relieved- but then....”
But then they made a mistake, they think to themself. They couldn’t remember just where they were specifically when it happened, but they remember walking into the headquarters in full morph, and passing him. The encounter couldn’t have lasted but a few seconds, but they can still remember the look of recognition in Julián’s features, followed by what they interpreted as shock and horror, after he realized the scarred up new auror and the old cadet/eventual officer he used to fuck around with were one in the same person.
“I thought it would be easier for the two of us, if I made myself more scarce when you were around. Hell, I even sent in a request to Lin to not put us on any cases together, and told her about our history as a reason why.” And damn, wasn’t that the most fun conversation they ever had with their chief.... It got the job done though, and they have to hand it to Lin for actually following through with the request for the last few years. “I figured after how things ended before, you wouldn’t necessarily take any offense to it, but prefer it anyway.”
They look to him then finally, because if they don’t they feel like they’ll bolt out of there if they wait any longer to do so. They’re not sure just what they expect or hope in the form of an answer, but they feel like he had to know, if anything just so they could find some way to move past this shit that keeps tangling their feet up as they try to move on from it.










