"slut era" i say as i rot and decay in my bedroom and watch the years pass me by as i miss out on core experiences other people my age are having while i think about the past
The heat was unbearably heavy, relentless, pressing down until even breathing felt like effort. The air shimmered, and sweat traced slow paths down her spine, Y/n was wearing a baby pink suit and her hair was tied up in a bun. She was walking home from college, with her friend.
“Yaar bohot garmi lag rahi hai!” Her friend, Aliza said wiping her face with her dupatta.
“Haan lag to rahi hai. Chal Aalam chacha ki shop se juice pi kar phir ghar chalte hain.” Y/n suggested and the girl nodded in agreement as they often visited that shop.
The two of them made their way to the juice shop and greeted the old man. “Salam Aalam chacha.”
“Arey beti bade dino baad aayi tum dono!” Aalam said getting the two girls. Y/n noticed a new guy behind the counter who was manhandling the juicer.
“Chacha college ki chuttiyan chal rahi thi.” Aliza replied sweetly.
“Acha acha, dono pineapple hi piyogi na?” He asked knowing their usual order. Aliza nodded but Y/n shook her head.
“Mere liye aaj mosambi.” She replied, her gaze flickering to the long haired man behind the counter.
“Theek hai baitho banwata hoon.” The old man gestured towards the tables and they walked over.
“Tu uss naye ladke ko kya dekhe ja rahi hai!” Aliza nudged Y/n, pulling her chair to sit down but Y/n stopped her.
“Udhar nahi idhar baith.” She sat facing towards the counter so she could get a perfect view of him and gestured her friend to in front of her. Aliza rolled her eyes and sat where Y/n had asked her to. Y/n kept staring at him, watching as his bicep bulged while he turned the handle of the mixer to squeeze out the fruit juice.
“Ghoorna band karegi tu use!?” Aliza whisper yelled.
“Arey dekh na kya mast item hai,” y/n replied looking at her friend, “nahi nahi tu mat hi dekh, mera hai.” She said grinning mischievously.
“Khuda ka khauf kar, Y/n. Wo juice centre me kaam karta hai.”
“Arey to me konsa Imran Khan ki beti hu jo mere liye kisi minister ka ladka ayega!?” Y/n said sarcastically. “Mere abba bhi esa hi koi layengy…par itna haseen to sirf ye hi hai.” She said checking him out.
“Tujhe uska naam bhi nahi pata.” Her friend reminded her, right then, Aalam yelled out,
“Hamza ye mosambi aur pineapple, table number 4 py dede.” Y/n smirked deviously.
“Hamza naam hai uska.” Aliza facepalmed at her antics.
“Tu pagal hai.” She muttered as Hamza arrived with their order, a bored expression on his face. He placed their glasses on the table and left.
“Tu bhi na yaar samjhti nahi hai, ek to itni zidd karke abba ko college me admission ke liye manaya, wo bhi unhone girls college me karwa diya. College me haryali ke naam py sirf pedh aur wo manhoos guard.” She explained taking a sip of her juice, “ab sabki tumhari tarah bachpan me to magni nahi hojati abba ke dost ke bete se!”
“Acha acha personal mat ho!” Aliza raised her hands in surrender. “Par usne to tujhe ghas bhi nahi daali?” She glanced back at Hamza who was focused on his work.
“To kya pehli bar me aake meri god me baith jae, sabr rakh ghas bhi dalega aur piche bhi ayega.” She smirked downing her juice in one go.
Over the next few days Y/n went to Aalam’s shop every day, without fail. Sometimes Aliza would tag along, other days she went alone. She sat there, watching him carry the heavy crates inside, admiring his built. Sometimes she’d deliberately spill juice on her table and sweetly call out to him,
“Hamza ye juice saaf kar do na please.” He’d come over, clean it and leave. She’d pout at his indifference but wouldn’t give up.
As summer was coming to an end, there were less customers at the juice shop but Y/n didn’t relent. There was just one couple sitting in shop when she arrived. Taking her seat at her usual spot, she ordered two pineapple juices. Hamza was curious about the two glasses but he didn’t comment. He kept the glasses on the table and moved to leave but she called out,
“Hamza.” He turned back at the sound of his name. “Ye tumhare liye hai.” She said sliding the other glass towards him. “Baitho na mere sath.”
He glanced around the place, realising he had time to spare he sat down on front of her. “Mat karo.” He finally spoke, if she thought he was only good looking, she was wrong because he had the sexiest voice on top of being hot.
“Kya nahi karoon?” She asked curiously.
“Yehii sab,” he replied, “tumhe lagta hai mujhe nazar nahi aata? Tum roz yahan aati ho aur mujhe kam karte dekhti ho. Mat karo ye sab accha nahi lagta.” He explained.
“Par mujhe to bohot acha lagta hai.” She said leaning on the table, both her arms crossed. “Mujhe Hamza acha lagta hai.”
Hamza’s jaw dropped at her blatant confession. He quickly stood up, “ghar jao.” And walked away leaving the juice untouched. She smirked seeing him get flustered and drank both the glasses.
Over the next few days Y/n didn’t go to college due to her mother being sick, she stayed home and looked after her. As much as she loved her mother she was disappointed she couldn’t go see Hamza at the shop after college ended.
Hamza noticed her absence and part of him believed it was his words that made her stop coming. He didn’t know why but he felt an empty ache inside him. No matter how much he pretended to dislike her presence, he secretly craved it.
A few days Y/n was dragging Aliza to the shop and her friend was having none of it. “Y/n tu samjh kyu nahi rahi hai usne tujhe reject kardiya, aur tu ab bhi wahin jana chahti hai.” Y/n had told Aliza that whole interaction with Hamza and she didn’t want her friend to embarrass herself more.
“Usne reject nahi kiya, aur agar kar bhi diya hai to maine to nahi kiya na!! Chal na pleaseeee.” Aliza gave in and the two of them arrived at the juice shop but Hamza wasn’t there.
“Chacha, Hamza nahi aya? Chutti py hai kya?” Y/n asked trying to sound nonchalant but failing.
“Beti Hamza ab yaha kaam nahi karta.” Aalam replied and Y/n froze.
“Kyun?” She asked trying to sound just curious and not that she had ulterior motives.
“Use kahin aur naukari mil gayi hai, woto waise bhi yahan sirf guzare ke liye kam karta tha.” Aalam explained and Aliza nudged Y/n to get moving.
“Yar mai itni repulsive hu ke wo kaam hi chor ke chala gaya!?” Y/n wallowed in self pity as the two sat down at the table. Aliza smacked her arm.
“Aisa mat bol.” She didn’t like listening her friend talk bad about herself. “Suna nahi chacha ne kaha wo yahan sirf guzare ke liye naukari karta tha! Acchi naukri mili aur wo chala gaya.” Aliza shrugged.
A few days passed and Y/n was heartbroken at Hamza’s sudden departure, believing she was the reason he left. She stopped being her loud bubbly self, she had internalised that her personality drove people away and made her unlikable.
She visited the shop less often now but still went sometimes. It wasn’t like she never went there before Hamza’s arrival, so why should she stop after his departure. She was sitting at her usual table when she heard a rumbling sound of a motorbike and Aalam excitedly yelling Hamza’s name. She peeked outside and her heart broke all over again. Hamza was here with a girl, she was extremely beautiful, and honestly she complemented him as she stood by his side. As she observed the girl she started comparing herself to her. She looked rich, and so put together. Maybe that’s why Hamza chose her.
She watched them sit outside and felt tears spring to her eyes but she held them back, feeling stupid for falling for someone at first sight and crying over her unrequited feelings. She blinked rapidly to stop the onslaught of waterworks and slung her bag over her shoulder and walked out of the shop. Hamza glanced at the person exiting the shop and he recognised her, he didn’t notice her tears nor did he say anything but his gaze followed her until she disappeared into an alley.
The next day Hamza arrived at the juice shop hoping to see her again, and it was just his luck he saw her sitting inside, a book opened in front of her. He made his way over to get table, pulled out a chair and sat on it.
“Tum abhi bhi yahan aati ho?” He asked, and she looked up at him.
“Aalam chacha tumhare abbu hain?” She asked, he looked at her confused as to why she was asking, but he still shook his head, answering her question with a no. “To kya ye dukaan tumhare abbu ki hai?” She asked angrily.
“Nahi.” He replied looking at her, trying to decipher where she was going with this.
“To tumhe kya matlab yahan kon ata hai kon nahi?” She replied with an attitude. “Tumhare se pehly se yaha ati hu aur tumhare baad bhi aungi.” Hamza knew she was upset with him, and that’s why she was acting this way.
“Mere jaane se pehly…” Hamza started hesitantly, “tum itne din aayi nahi, mujhe laga meri baato ki wajah se-“ he didn’t know how to continue. She on the other hand was freaking out, he noticed her absence? Her heart started melting at his concern and she turned into a puddle, forgetting how angry and upset she was in the first place.
“Nahi wo meri ammi ki tabiyat kharab thi..” she answered.
“Oh accha, ab thik hain wo?” Hamza asked and she nodded.
“Tumhe laga main tumhari wajah se nahi arhi thii aur mujhe laga tumne meri wajah se kaam chordia.” She confessed not looking at him.
“Kya?” He was taken aback, and he quickly explained, “mujhe nayi jagah kaam mil gaya hai, Rehman bhai ke pass.”
“Rehman Dakait?” She asked and he nodded, he was anxiously praying she won’t run away screaming in terror. But what she said next calmed him a little. “Mere abbu unke karkhane me kaam karte hain.” Okay so she’s a civilian but not the kind who’d run after hearing Rehman’s name.
After a few seconds of awkward silence Y/n remembered the girl from yesterday, her puddle of a heart turned stone cold again and she stood up and left, leaving Hamza confused. The second she stepped out of the shop, rain pelted down on her harshly. With summer coming to an end, it was expected, but it still felt unexpected. Hamza followed behind her and started his bike catching up to her quickly. He stopped the bike beside her and called out loudly,
“Y/n, baitho mai ghar chor deta hu!” She stopped and glared at him.
“Jao apni girlfriend ko choro jaake.” She yelled over the sound of the rain.
“Meri konsi girlfriend?” He asked incredulously.
“Kitni hain jo mujhse puch rahe ho konsi?” She said walking away but he grabbed her wrist and pulled her back.
“Hai to ek bhi nahi par jisko banana chahta hu wo bhaag rahi hai.” He smirked pulling her even closer.
“Jhoote! Kal jo aayi thi sath wo kon thii?” She jerked her wrist back, walking away.
“Suno suno,” He caught her again, Damn hin and his long arms. He pulled her back. “Kahi baith kar baat kare?” She didn’t want to but the way he was looking at her, there was something in his eyes she couldn’t say no to.
She gave in reluctantly. “Theek hai.” He took off his jacket and draped it over her shoulders. “Hum ispy jaengy?” She asked, sharply looking at the bike.
“Haan toh.”
“Giraogy to nahi?” She asked fearing an accident, the temperature is dropping and it’ll hurt like a bitch if they fell.
“Hamza ki bike se Hamza ki jaan gir jaye? Iss zindagi me mumkin nahi.” Hamza smirked confidently and she blushed at his words but schooled her expression back to sternness.
“Baate mat banao.” She hesitated to get on the bike and he got off, helping her sit securely.
He drove them off to a park nearby, the rain was still pouring relentlessly. He got off the bike and helped her down, leading her to the gazebo seeking shelter from the rain. He admired her as she shook off a few water droplets from her hair.
“Naraz ho?” He asked and she paused looking over at him.
“Humara narazgi ka koi rishta nahi hai.” She replied coolly. He inched closer and took her hand in his. He made her sit on the bench placed there and crouched in front of her.
“Hai. Mujhe Y/n achi lagti hai.” He said repeating what she’d said to him that day in the juice shop.
“Hamza-“ he shook his head stopping her
“Bolne do, maine tumhe pehli baar dekha, tab tum baby pink color ka suit pehni thi, tumhare balo me jooda bana tha aur aankho me kajal tha. Meri nazar theher gayi. Mujhe pehli nazar me ishq hogaya tha. Par tab jo main tha wo tumhare layaq nahi tha, aur ab jo main hoon wo usse bhi baddtar hai lekin me tumhe chahta hoon.” He pulled out something from the pocket of his pants and showed it to her. It was her silver bracelet she’d worn to college that day but had lost it.
“Ye to mera-“ she started and he nodded.
“Haan tumhara hai, uss din tum shop py bhul gayi thi, agar tum bhi mujhe chahti ho to mai tumhe ye wapas kar dunga, mere pass tum hogi, par agar tumhari na hai to ise mai rakh lunga, tumhari yad ke liye.” Hamza held it out towards her, to choose whatever she wills.
“Wo ladki kon thi? Kal jo saath thi?” She asked, her answer completely depending on his’.
“Minister ki beti hai. Inn ameero ke baccho ko gareebi fascinate karti hai. Farmaish kardi gareebo ki zindagi nazdeek se dekhni hai. Baap ne laga diya kaam py, after all waha sabse gareeb to mai hi hoon.” Hamza answered honestly, a hint of humour in his voice.
“Fascinate, after all? English huh?” She teased.
“Excuse you madam, I’m a college graduate. Gareeb hoon uneducated nahi.” Hamza sassed back. She chuckled looking at him.
“I’m impressed.” She smirked but then she turned serious, “lekin kya matlab minister ki beti hai to tum use apni bike py bitha kar ghumaogy.” She huffed angrily.
He tugged her closer, their faces inches apart. Her heart beating in her chest loudly. “Tum ek baar haan to bolo, minister ki beti kya minister bhi taras jaega mere piche baithne ko.”
She smiled bashfully at his promise and took the bracelet from his hand, she brushed her lips against his ear and whispered lowly, “Mujhe Hamza accha lagta hai.”
SYNOPSIS:He wore the shirt she bought him the night he stoped being Jaskirat Singh Rangi. Twelve years later, the girl who loved him is assigned to evaluate what came back.
“Good evening, Mr. Rangi,” she says professionally, sitting down across from him with a file in her hands and eleven years buried alive in her chest.He looks up.
And for one terrible second, she watches him forget which name he’s supposed to answer to.
word count: 11.2k
A/N:t his is probably one of the longest things i’ve written on here and somewhere between the angst and well more angst, i managed to sprain the pinky finger on my left hand 😭 so the second i hit post, i will be RICE-ing my hand like my life depends on it.
but genuinely, this story became very special to me while writing it.i hope you love it as much as i do. Do let me know if you wish to be added to the taglist!!
To read a happier ending click here!
His eyes were green.
That is the first thing she remembers — or rather, the first thing she lets herself remember, because with Jaskirat Singh Rangi there has always been a careful taxonomy of allowed memory and forbidden memory, the kind of interior housekeeping that psychologists are trained to do and that she, in particular, has become devastatingly good at over the course of the last eleven years.
But his eyes. She can allow herself his eyes, at least for a moment.
They were green the way certain forests in the foothills are green — not the glossy, tourist-pamphlet green of postcard Himachal Pradesh, but something older and more complicated. The green of moss on stone walls.
The green of the fields behind his house in the late monsoon, when everything smelled of wet earth and possibility and the particular kind of young-summer-evening that makes you believe, stupidly and irrevocably, that the future is something you can touch.
They were the color of a world before anything bad had happened to it.
She used to tease him about those eyes. Used to say, Jassi, you look like a film hero, you know that? Like someone who should be running through a wheat field in a song sequence. And he would duck his head — this boy who was six feet of contained restlessness, who could throw a cricket ball clean across three rooftops, and she would feel a fizzing pleasure in her chest that she was, at sixteen, not quite old enough to name correctly.
She had also forgotten how he kissed. Not the fact of it. But the weight.
She could recall the angle of light, the sound of pigeons somewhere two buildings over, the particular smell of dust and cardamom that lived in the courtyard in summer — but the weight of his hands, the specific pressure of his mouth, the way he exhaled against her jaw like he was finally putting something down: that, she had lost.
Or she had thought she had lost it. And now his hands were at the back of her neck and his thumbs were at her jaw and she was understanding, in the way that the body understands things before the mind catches up, that she had never actually forgotten. She had only stopped letting herself remember.
His mouth moved to her temple. She felt him breathe.
She is thirty-one now.
She knows exactly what to call it.This feeling.
She just does not permit herself to call it anything anymore.
The memory of his eyes dissolves the way all her good memories do — slowly, like sugar in warm water, until only the shape of the sweetness remains — and then there is a rough cut, the kind of splice that happens in badly-edited films when the editor runs out of patience or footage, and she is no longer sixteen and standing on a roof in Pathankot with the sun in her eyes and Jassi's laugh in her ears.
She is sitting in a corridor outside Ajay Sanyal's office.
Her hands are shaking.
On the other side of Ajay Sanyal's office.
The man himself,Ajay Sanyal sat in a particular way of sitting in chairs that communicated absolute ownership of every room he had ever occupied. He did not sprawl. He did not perch. He simply inhabited space the way water inhabits a vessel — completely, without apology, filling every silence to its edges.
He looked at Jaskirat Singh Rangi across the steel table and said:
"Jaskirat. I think it's time to revisit old demons."
Pathankot. Eleven years ago. A Tuesday in May, which she remembers because she had a chemistry exam on Wednesday and she had been trying, with increasing desperation, to understand thermodynamics, and the entire afternoon smelled of her mother's rajma and someone's jasmine creeper and the specific heat of a Punjab afternoon pressing itself against every window like an uninvited guest.
She heard him before she saw him.
That was always how it was with Jaskirat — you heard him first, because Jaskirat Singh Rangi moved through the world at a particular frequency, a kind of kinetic restlessness that preceded him the way sound precedes a train
. She heard his footsteps on the roof next door — their houses shared a boundary wall, and the rooftops were separated by roughly four feet of empty air, which was nothing to someone with his wingspan and general disregard for the concept of reasonable caution — and then she heard him call her name.
"Meher! Meher. Are you studying?"
She was. Demonstrably. She had three textbooks open, a highlighter in her hand, and a studied expression of academic seriousness that she was extremely proud of. She looked up at the roof next door.
Jaskirat was standing with a cricket bat slung over his shoulder like he was posing for a recruitment poster, wearing a white cotton kurta that had somehow gotten grass stains on it despite the fact that there was no grass on their roof, and his eyes were green in the afternoon light, and her heart did the thing it always did, which she had filed under thermodynamics in her head because it seemed like a reasonably accurate description: the rapid and involuntary transfer of heat.
"Yes," she said, in her most discouraging voice. "I have chemistry tomorrow."
"Chemistry will be there tomorrow," he said, with the absolute philosophical certainty of someone who had never struggled to understand chemistry in his life. "Cricket will not. Inder Uncle went to Amritsar and he has the ball. We'll use mine."
"Who is we?"
He grinned. He had a very specific grin — not wide, not performative, but private, like a parenthetical, like he was sharing it specifically and only with her, and she had catalogued this grin in the folder she kept labeled things that are fine and normal and mean nothing — and said, "Me. Priya. Ranjit from the corner house. And you, if you stop being so boring."
"I'm not boring, I'm studying."
"Same thing." He paused. "Your Maa already said yes."
This was his most devastating rhetorical tactic, and he knew it, and she hated him for it: he always went to her mother first. Her mother, who thought Jaskirat Singh Rangi was essentially an additional son, who fed him parathas with an extra pat of butter, who asked after his NDA preparation with the focused concern she usually reserved for her own children's report cards, who said, when he had left last Diwali, Mehu, that boy is going to do something great, you mark my words, in a tone of conviction so complete it sounded less like prediction and more like instruction.
Meher put down her highlighter.
She tried not to smile and was approximately thirty percent successful.
"Fine," she said. "Give me two minutes."
He was already swinging a leg over the boundary wall. "I'll jump across and wait."
"You could use the stairs —"
"The stairs take four minutes." He had already cleared the gap, landing on her rooftop with a sound like a single note of percussion, easy and inevitable. He looked down at her textbooks and raised an eyebrow. "Carnot engines?"
"Don't."
"You're doing it wrong. The efficiency formula —"
"Jaskirat Singh Rangi, if you explain thermodynamics to me right now I will throw this textbook at you."
He raised his hands in surrender, still smiling, and the afternoon light caught the green of his eyes, and she thought — very quietly, in the part of her that was not yet entirely literate about its own feelings — I could look at you forever and it would not be enough.
She didn't say that.
She went to get her cricket shoes instead.
Her family's reaction to Jaskirat's presence at dinner that evening was — as always — completely disproportionate to the occasion. Her father pulled out the good glasses. Her mother produced a bowl of halwa that had not been on the menu that morning.
Her younger brother Arjun attached himself to Jaskirat's side like a small, determined barnacle and demanded to be told everything about the NDA written examination — how many papers, bhaiya, how many marks, is it harder than board exams, will I have to do maths — until Jaskirat, with the infinite patience he had for children and almost no one else, sat down on the floor with Arjun and actually began drawing out the paper structure on the back of a grocery receipt.
Not impatiently. Not in the abbreviated way of someone performing the performance of being gracious. Actually, genuinely — he turned toward Arjun and talked through it the way he talked through anything that mattered: slowly, in the register of someone who has thought about this for a long time and wants the other person to understand it exactly right.
Meher watched this from the kitchen doorway, a glass of water in her hand, and felt something complicated and tender move through her chest.
"He's a good boy," her mother said, appearing beside her with supernatural silence, the way mothers do.
"Mm," said Meher, attempting neutrality.
"Smart. Hardworking." Her mother's voice was the auditory equivalent of a nudge. "And very handsome, nahin?"
"Maa."
"I'm just observing. I'm allowed to observe." Her mother took the water glass from her hand and went back to the kitchen, and as she left she said, over her shoulder, with devastating casualness: "The Rangi family is coming for Baisakhi, you know. His mother told me. She is so proud of him."
Meher watched Jaskirat patiently explaining something to Arjun — watched the way he tilted his head, the way his voice dropped into a register of genuine seriousness that he rarely used with adults, the way Arjun looked at him with the uncomplicated hero-worship of a child who does not yet know enough about the world to be cynical about its heroes — and thought:
The only way to become Mrs. Jaskirat Singh Rangi is by studying hard enough and becoming extraordinary enough for him.
The thought arrived with the quiet certainty of something she had known for a long time without having the vocabulary to express it. She filed it away — in the folder labeled thermodynamics, in the cabinet marked future, in the room of her interior life that she kept very carefully locked — and went back to the kitchen to help her mother with the dishes.
She was not in Pathankot anymore. Hadn't been in a long time.Her hands were still shaking.
She pressed them flat against her thighs — pressure interrupting the tremor response, a trick she had taught to field operatives who needed to hold a weapon steady after a cortisol spike — and counted her breath.
In for four.
Hold for four.
Out for four.
The box breath. She had prescribed this to nineteen different agents over the last three years and was now, in a corridor in New Delhi outside an intelligence officer's office, using it on herself, which was either evidence of its clinical validity or a profound irony, and she was not currently in a position to determine which.
She was a psychologist.
She had a PhD from JNU. A post-doctoral fellowship from NIMHANS. Eleven years of experience working psychological evaluation for RAW, specifically with the rehabilitation of field operatives — the careful, technical work of helping people who had been through things that did not have adequate language put themselves back together in ways that allowed for continued functional life.
She had sat across the table from men who had watched their entire units die. She had spent eight months doing rehabilitation work with an agent who had been held in a facility she was not permitted to name in any document. She had, on four separate occasions, talked people back from the edges of things that she still thought about sometimes when she could not sleep.
She was a professional.
She pressed her hands harder against her thighs.
The file she had been given was face-down on Sanyal's desk, where she had put it. She had read as far as the column marked field alias — had read the name Hamza Ali Mazari next to the name Jaskirat Singh Rangi — and then she had put the file down and walked into the corridor, and that was where she was now: four minutes and forty-three seconds later, sitting in a plastic chair, trying to remember how to breathe.
Because Harleen was dead.
She had known about Harleen for years — not from the file, but from her own memory, from the early 2000s when the news had reached their mohalla in fragments and her mother had gone quiet for a week and Meher had understood without being told directly that something catastrophic had happened to the family next door in her absence.
By then she was already at JNU. By then she had already begun, carefully and deliberately, the process of filing Jaskirat Singh Rangi's green eyes in the folder labeled past and closing the drawer.
She had not known he had been recruited.
She had not known — could not have known, it was classified, it was deeply and entirely classified — what had happened to him in the years between his sentencing and now.
What had been done to him.
What he had been made into.
She pressed her hands flat against her thighs.
Sanyal's aide opened the door and said her name.
She stood up.
She smoothed her kurta.
She assembled herself, item by item, the way you pack a bag: the professional face, the clinical frame, the eleven years of careful training arranged like ballast against the pull of everything else.
By the time she walked through the door, she was Dr. Meher Kaur, psychological evaluation specialist, RAW rehabilitation division.
She was completely composed.
She was also lying.
[ She knows about Yalina. She knows about Zayan — who is Yalina's son, not the name of anyone Jaskirat killed, though in a conversation about guilt they sometimes blur into the same category of person: the one whose life was altered by the shape of his cover.
She knows about Aalam, who agreed to be shot rather than tortured, and about Pinda — Gurbaaz Singh, his best friend since childhood, the drug peddler who helped him get the weapons the first time — who died by his hands the second time, in a Karachi house, because recognition is a liability that cannot be managed any other way. She knows all of this now.
She did not always.
The file filled in the years she was not present for. The file is a terrible document.]
{Interrogation Room B - 1st Session}
He knew his name.
He checked this the way he had learned to check things: not by assuming, but by actually going to look, the same way you verify a lock you have just turned, pressing the door to be sure.
His name was Jaskirat Singh Rangi. He was born in Pathankot. His mother's name was Prabhneet Kaur. His father had been a soldier, had been hanged by the men of MLA Sukhwinder Singh over a plot of land and a debt that had turned into a death sentence delivered with complete impunity by men who owned the local machinery of justice and therefore had no particular fear of it.
He knew this.
He also heard, overlaid on Sanyal's voice like a signal on the wrong frequency, Yalina calling him Hamza.
Hamza.
Not Jaskirat. She had never said Jaskirat. She had never met Jaskirat. Yalina Jamali — Jameel Jamali's daughter, who had been, when he arrived in Lyari, nineteen years old and conducting her life with the absolute conviction of someone who believed the world was legible — had known only Hamza.
Had loved only Hamza.
Had screamed at only Hamza, when she found the diary, when the chemical revealed the names and the list and the whole architecture of what he actually was: You ruined my life. You did this. What are you?
And he had said: I am targeting terrorists. I am not targeting the people of Pakistan. I am not targeting you.
And she had said: And Zayan? What are you targeting my son for?
Zayan. Who was three years old. Who called him abbu. Who had, in the house in Karachi, a specific way of falling asleep in Jaskirat's arms — going heavy all at once, the dead weight of complete trust — that
Jaskirat thought about now, in Interrogation Room B, with the fluorescent lights humming and Sanyal asking him to walk through the timeline of the final month, and could not think about without a specific pressure appearing in the middle of his chest that was not quite pain but was in the same family.
He had left Zayan in Pakistan.
He had left Zayan in Lyari with Yalina, who had chosen not to betray him — who had, when Omar Haider pointed a gun at their son's head and demanded she confirm his identity, eventually done so, because there are things you cannot ask a mother to endure, and Jaskirat would not, would not blame her for that — and who was now in Pakistan in a life that existed in the shape of the lie he had created, married to a man who was not real, mother to a son whose father had a different name.
"Jaskirat." Sanyal's voice, precise and flat. "The events of the final month."
He opened his mouth to speak.
What came out was:
Pinda.
Pinda at the party — Gurbaaz Singh, who he had not seen in years, who had arrived in the context of a drug delivery from Indian dealers, who had looked at him across a room in Karachi and gone very still in the way of a person whose brain is doing something rapid and difficult. Who had said, later, drunk and hallucinating and frightened: Jassi? Jassi, is it you?
He had tried to calm him.
He had tried everything.
Pinda had attacked, and the fight had been brief and desperate and terrible in the specific way of things that happen so fast you cannot process them while they are happening, and then Pinda was on the floor and Aalam was in the doorway asking him to leave, telling him: I'll take the blame. Go.
And he had left.
And then Aalam was dead too, because Jaskirat had gone back in and shot him — not to punish him, not for betrayal, not for anything other than the single most terrible kindness he has ever performed: sparing him from what Major Iqbal would have done to extract information, which was something that Jaskirat knew with clinical precision because he had been on the receiving end of Major Iqbal's methods and there are things worse than a clean death, and Aalam had known this too, which is why his eyes, in the moment, had said yes. Had said I know. I understand. Do it.
Aalam, who had been his handler. Who had owned the juice shop in Lyari. Who had said, the first time they met in the back room with the maps and the codes and the entire fiction of Hamza Ali Mazari spread out across a table between them: You are not the first man to do this. You will not be the last. The country does not forget its own, even when it must pretend to.
He had believed that.
He is trying to still believe it.
"Jaskirat." Sanyal again.
"The final month," Jaskirat said. "Yes. Let me —"
And every question that followed arrived in voices he was not expecting.
Bansal asked about the ammunition. He heard Major Iqbal's voice layered underneath, the specific register of a man describing violence with the pleasure of an academic.
Sanyal asked about the extraction. He heard Yalina — call me when you're safe, at least call me, Hamza, just tell me you're alive — and the last call, from the hospital corridor, her number on his screen, and him pressing it and saying: I'm alive. Two words. That was all he had been able to give her at the end.
Bansal asked about Rehman Dakait. He heard Pinda's voice. The old voice — the Pathankot voice, twenty years old, sitting outside the chowk with his legs stretched out and his arms behind his head saying Jassi, yaar, you take everything too seriously. And the newer voice. The Karachi voice. Jassi? Is it you? It's you. What are you doing here, what are you —
The questions continued.
He answered them.
He kept his voice level and he answered them in the operational vocabulary that had been installed in him over years of training, and the fluorescent lights hummed, and somewhere very far underneath the level surface of Hamza Ali Mazari's answers, Jaskirat Singh Rangi was making a sound that had no outlet.
Eventually Sanyal said: "Take a break."
Jaskirat sat alone in the room and heard his dead.
Pinda, who he had killed.
Aalam, who he had killed.
Harleen, who was dead before he got there.
His father, whose voice he could no longer clearly reconstruct. This frightened him more than all the other losses. He went looking for it sometimes in the silence of early mornings — his father's specific voice, the cadence of it, the register of a soldier who was also a father, serious in all things including warmth — and found only approximations, only the shape of it, not the sound.
And under all of them, not dead but not reachable:
His mother. Prabhneet Kaur. In Pathankot.
Jasleen. Who was alive. Who had Pinda's children, or so the welfare report said — Pinda had asked him, before the court, to take care of her, and Pinda had done it, and then Pinda had died in Karachi by Hamza's hands, which was a sentence he was not yet capable of holding all at once without something in him fragmenting.
He pressed his hands flat on the table.
He asked himself: Who are you?
The room did not answer.
What came, eventually, into the silence was not a name.
It was a word.
Balidaan.
[The first time Jaskirat killed twelve men, it was to protect his family. His father was already gone. Harleen was already gone. Jasleen was the one he could still save, and so he went with Pinda to Atif Ahmed in Uttar Pradesh, and he got the weapons, and he went to Sukhwinder's house and he killed twelve men and he brought his sister out of that house and he has never, not for a single hour since, been sorry.
The second time is harder to count. The operations in Lyari. The necessary deaths. Pinda. Aalam. The twelve names he has ticked off a list in a diary written in invisible ink that only appeared under a certain chemical Yalina found, because Yalina was curious and thorough and looking for something to explain the man she'd married, and found instead the whole architecture of her husband's lie.
Both times destroyed him.
The question that Interrogation Room B cannot answer — the question that no debrief protocol in RAW's considerable institutional library was designed to ask — is whether the thing destroyed was the same thing both times.
Whether the first killing made the second possible.
Whether Jaskirat was always capable of this, and Hamza was just the name they gave to the capability. Or whether Hamza was constructed in the ruins of Jaskirat and the construction was thorough in ruins of bygones.
He does not know.
He is sitting in a room trying to find out.]
Three weeks before he left, Meher is nineteen. It is December, the December of 2000, cold in the way Pathankot does cold — serious and dry, the sky in the evening going first amber and then the specific deep blue of a place that has no ambient light to compete with the stars.
She had been saving since October.
Meher's pocket money was not generous, her expenditures were not minimal (reference books, bus fare, the occasional chhole bhature with Simran, a tube of kajal she had decided she needed and then hidden from her mother), and the shirt she had seen in the market on the street near the vegetable stalls had cost approximately twice what she had in hand in October. So she had saved.
The result: enough. Exactly enough.
He was leaving to become what he had always been going to become — an officer, a soldier, his father's son, a person who served — and the fact that this leaving involved a permanent renegotiation of the geography of her life, which had always contained him as a fixed coordinate, was something she was handling with extraordinary maturity by not looking directly at it.
She found him on his roof, not hers. She had climbed the stairs to her own roof and called across the four-foot gap and he had looked up from his study materials with the expression of someone being rescued from voluntary suffering and jumped across in one easy movement, the way he always did, the way that had always looked to her like a small casual miracle, like someone who had decided gravity was a suggestion.
He landed next to her with a single thud of percussion.
She held the shirt out before she could rethink it.
Green and black. Wide stripes, not subtle, not trying to be. Good cotton, softer than it looked, the kind of material that would get better with washing and time. She had spent seventeen minutes in the shop deliberating.
She said, "Mere paas kuch paise hain. This is what I bought for you."
He took it.
He turned it over in his hands.
He looked at it and then at her and then at the shirt again, and she watched something move across his face that she didn't have a precise name for — something that was complicated and young and serious and, underneath all of that, grateful in a way that had nowhere to go.
"Meher —"
"You can just say thank you, Jassi, you don't need to make it a whole —"
"Thank you," he said. Quietly. Meaning it.
"It'll be too big." She said it matter-of-factly, though her heart was doing the thermodynamics thing with a force she was choosing to ignore. "You haven't quite —" She gestured vaguely at his general situation, which was: six feet and lean and still in the process of becoming the physical fact of himself.
He looked at the shirt. "I'll grow into it."
"That's the idea." And then, because she was nineteen and there is a specific brand of honesty available only to nineteen and soon to expire: she laughed, the soft helpless kind, and said: "Grow your muscles into it. I want to be a strong army officer's wife."
The words left her mouth and landed in the cold December air between them, and for approximately one second she heard them from the outside — heard their full implication, their entirely undisguised content — and felt the heat arrive in her face.
But Jaskirat wasn't laughing.
He was looking at her.
With the full quality of his attention, which was the thing about him that had always undone her most completely: when Jaskirat looked at you, he looked at you with all of himself, nothing elsewhere, nothing managed or withheld.
And his eyes in the December light were very green, and his expression was something she had never seen on his face before — not the private grin, not the restless energy, but something older and younger simultaneously, something that said: I know. Something that said: yes. Something that said: I am afraid of everything this means and I am also entirely certain of it.
He said: "Okay."
Just that.
Okay.
She stood in the cold air in December and felt the word settle somewhere in her chest like a stone settling in water — finding its depth, sitting down, becoming permanent — and thought:
This is enough. This is exactly what I needed. This is enough.
She went inside before she started crying.
She sat on her bed and pressed her hands to her face and thought about green eyes and the word okay and the weight of a future that was, in that moment, as real to her as the cold.
[Jaskirat never got to be an officer. He left for training in 2000 and while he was gone, Sukhwinder Singh's men came to the house over a land dispute and a debt, and his father was hanged, and Harleen was murdered, and Jasleen was taken, and when he came back the future that had been agreed upon in December on a rooftop with a green-and-black shirt between them had been replaced entirely by something else.
Green and black, broad stripes. The same shirt. It no longer too big for him.
It was logged after the events at Sukhwinder's house as Item 47 in the evidence list.
Nobody noted that it had been bought with four months of saved pocket money by a girl on a rooftop who believed in a future she was going to be extraordinary enough to deserve.
It is the last thing he wears as Jaskirat before he becomes Hamza.
I think he knew that things would never be the same after the decision he was about make. I think he put it on deliberately.
I think it was the only goodbye he knew how to give her.
But did she deserve it? No. Absolutely not.]
They were in different rooms.
This is true in the precise literal sense: Meher was in the anteroom outside Sanyal's office, which had a plastic chair and a water cooler that produced a sound like a perpetually startled animal, and Jaskirat was in Interrogation Room B, which had a steel table and fluorescent lights and the institutional cold of rooms designed by people who understand that discomfort is a tool.
But they were also in different rooms in every other sense.
In her head, he was Jassi.
He had always been Jassi — since before she had the vocabulary for what she felt about him, since before she understood that Jassi from next door was a category that was going to resist filing no matter how many labelled folders she constructed. Jassi who jumped rooftops. Jassi with the private grin. Jassi who said okay in December and meant everything she needed him to mean.
In his own mind — and she had read enough of the file, and possessed sufficient clinical training, to construct an accurate model of what was happening in his mind — he was Hamza. Had been Hamza for long enough that Jaskirat was now a place he was returning to rather than a place he simply was.
The way you return to a language you learned before another one colonised your mouth: with effort, with gaps, with the occasional word from the other tongue slipping in unbidden.
She thought about this. She was a psychologist; she thought about identity architecturally, in terms of load-bearing structures and pressure points and the question of what happens to a building when you remove its central column and replace it with a different one. Three years is not an abstract period of time. Three years is long enough to form new neural pathways, to establish new reflex patterns, to make a new name feel more immediately present than the old one.
Identity, she had written in her doctoral thesis, is not a thing you possess but a performance you sustain — and what happens when you sustain a different performance, in a different language, with different people, for long enough that the original performance becomes the thing requiring effort?
She was the person whose job it was to know.
She thought: I feel proud of him.
The thought arrived without warning, the way honest thoughts do — without announcement, without permission, simply present.
I feel proud of him.
He saved our country. He was given a choice that was not really a choice and he said yes and he went in and twelve years later he came out the other side having done what he was sent to do, having avenged the attacks, having taken apart the network piece by piece, having left behind — having left behind —
She felt proud of him.
She began to cry.Now was not the time.
{Sanyal's office. Three weeks ago.}
Three monitors. One showing internal feeds, one rotating through international news including Pakistani channels, one displaying a map. Meher had been called in on a separate matter — a field operative with moral injury, which is the specific psychic damage that comes not from fear but from conflict with your own values, which presents differently from PTSD and requires a different clinical approach — and she had her notes and her professional face and no particular reason to expect the afternoon to go differently than any other afternoon.
Then the second monitor changed.
The text read: Sher-e-Baloch.
Below it: a face.
She had known the name. She had known it in the clinical, technical way she knew all operationally relevant context — as a threat designation, a figure in the intelligence landscape, not as a person. She had not known the face.
But she had known this face.
Not like this — not with the beard, not with the hair, not with the years of Karachi written into the set of his jaw — but underneath all of that. She had known the specific way his eyes sat in his face, the specific ratio of his cheekbones. She had known the architecture of this face since she was twelve years old.
She had mapped it compulsively and involuntarily for eleven years of consciously trying not to think about it and had apparently remembered every coordinate.
The ground came out from under her.
Not suddenly. Not with sound. Silently, the way the best catastrophes manage it — not the spectacular collapse but the quiet withdrawal of the surface you had been standing on, leaving you upright and apparently fine and utterly airborne.
Sanyal was watching her.
He said, carefully: "Dr. Kaur. We will be receiving a field operative in the next seventy-two hours for full debriefing and psychological evaluation —"
"Yes," she said. Her voice was level. "I understand."
"The operative has been in deep cover for approximately twelve years in total, with an extended active period of —"
"Three years in continuous deep cover. Yes. I'll need the full file."
"Of course." A pause. "Meher."
She looked at him.
Sanyal's face was the face of a man who has spent forty years making his face unreadable, but in the area around his eyes there was something that might, in a person less practiced, have been called concern. "Are you the right person for this evaluation?"
She held his gaze for exactly long enough.
"Yes," she said. "I'm the only person in this building who can do it correctly."
She believed this.
She was also not entirely certain she wasn't lying.
She went out to the corridor and she sat down and she read the file and she put the section about Harleen down and did not read it again.
She read the section about Pinda twice, slowly, with her hand pressed flat against the page, and when she put the file face-down on the desk and walked out of the office she was already building the clinical framework, already constructing the approach, and she told herself that this was professionalism and not the act of putting something very large in a box so that she could carry it.
{Interrogation Room B — second session}
"Tell me about Pinda," Bansal said.
He had a particular method of asking questions that sounded like the answer was already written on his notepad and the question was a courtesy, a formality.
Jaskirat had been debriefed before — smaller operations, early period, when the methods were being established — and had learned to recognise this method and respond to it with the operational vocabulary, precise and documented, that neutralised its effect.
"Gurbaaz Singh," Jaskirat said. "Known as Pinda. He was —" He stopped. "He was from Pathankot. He was my friend."
Was. Past tense. He had used the past tense without having to decide to. That was something.
"He appeared in Lyari as part of a drug delivery chain from Indian dealers," Jaskirat said. "He made contact through the supply chain. He recognised me at a party."
"And the outcome?"
Jaskirat looked at the table.
The outcome. As if Pinda were a variable that had resolved itself. As if Pinda — who had sat outside the Pathankot chowk with his legs stretched out and his arms behind his head; who had driven through the city in the early morning with blood on his shirt and a weapon in the boot and asked no questions, had just driven; who had said, before the court, Jassi, I'll look after Jasleen, I promise, I'll look after her — as if Pinda were a column in a spreadsheet that had finally been completed.
"He died," Jaskirat said. "During a confrontation in my house. He was under the influence and —" He stopped. "He would have exposed me. The exposure would have —"
He stopped.
What he did not say: He was my oldest friend. He knew me before. He was the only person in Karachi who knew who I actually was and I put my hands on him and now he is dead and I cannot complete this sentence because Aalam took the blame and I shot Aalam to spare him torture and there is no version of this that resolves cleanly, there is no version of this in which I am not the person who killed both of the people who knew I existed.
He said: "It was operationally necessary."
Bansal wrote something down.
Sanyal watched him.
Every question that followed had a second voice behind it. Bansal asked about the Balochistan operation and he heard Yalina: At least you were targeting terrorists, not ordinary people, right? Tell me you were targeting terrorists.
And he had said yes, and that was true, and he had also left her with their son in a city that now knew her husband's real name, and both of those things were equally true, and the truth did not resolve the latter.
Bansal asked about the final confrontation with Major Iqbal. He heard Iqbal himself — the specific quality of Iqbal's voice during interrogation, the particular technique of a man who had been trained by people who had refined cruelty into a methodology — and his body responded before his mind could intervene, a physical flinch that he converted into the motion of shifting his weight in the chair.
Bansal asked about returning to India.
He heard his mother.
Not a specific sentence. Not a specific memory. Just the quality of her voice — Prabhneet Kaur, who had sat in the front row at his sentencing and held her dupatta to her mouth and made no sound — a quality he could reconstruct precisely and which he had spent twelve years not reconstructing, because reconstructing it made the distance unbridgeable and the distance needed to be unbridgeable for the work to be possible.
"I went to Pathankot," he said.
The room went very still.
"Before I came here," he said. "I went —" He stopped. "I needed to see if they were —"
Sanyal said: "I know. It was noted."
It was noted. He had been watched. Of course he had been watched. He had stood outside the gate of the house where he had grown up, in the street he had walked every day of the first twenty-one years of his life, and watched his mother close the gate from the inside — watched her do it without looking up, without seeing him, because he was dead to her, had been dead to her for years.
He had watched Jasleen in the courtyard with her children, going about the ordinary business of an ordinary afternoon, and he had stood in the street and cried with the particular total silence of someone who has had enough years of practice to make no sound while they do it.
He had stood there for twenty minutes.
Then he had turned and walked away.
Balidan Parmo Dharma, he had said to himself, in the street, like a man trying to remember the rules of something. Sacrifice is the highest duty.
He was not sure it had helped.
He said: "I didn't go inside."
"I know," Sanyal said. Again. Still with the same careful neutrality.
[About Pinda.
Gurbaaz Singh Pinda drove a car through Pathankot at three in the morning with blood on his shirt and weapons in the boot, for his best friend, without asking questions.
He promised to look after a woman he didn't know well enough, for his best friend's sake, and he kept that promise for twelve years, long enough to become someone she didn't have to look after anymore.
He went to Pakistan as part of a drug supply chain and walked into a party in Lyari and recognised a face he hadn't seen in twelve years and the recognition cost him everything.
He is listed in the file as "collateral outcome - cover maintenance." He gets three lines.
This is what the file does to people. It makes them three lines. It removes everything except the function and the result and it calls what is left a record.
Pinda deserves more than three lines. He was a person who loved badly and inconveniently and with his whole body, the way people from Pathankot do. He was a person who showed up.
He also actively was betraying his own motherland in the name business.
Three lines.
I am angry about the three lines.I am angry for Jasleen.]
[And so we come to Yalina Jamali.
Who is not in the file very much. Who is the wife, the cover, the asset maintained, the person who discovered the truth and kept silent for the sake of her son and eventually broke when Omar put a gun to Zayan's head because there are things that are not abstractly possible to maintain under specific concrete threat.
Who called a number and said: my husband is alive. Make sure he stays that way.
Because even after the diary, even after the confrontation, even after the full extent of the lie was visible, she made that call. She told her father, who told Sanyal, who blackmailed a general into releasing him. She saved his life after he had spent twelve years constructing the life that erased his.
I don't know if this is love. I don't know if love is what I would call it. I think it might be something more complicated than love, something that happens when you build a life with a person for long enough that the person and the life become inseparable, so that even when you know the truth about the person you cannot quite dissolve your investment in the life.
She is still in Karachi.
She has their son.
The file says: no further action required regarding Yalina Jamali. The cover is sufficiently dissolved. She is not considered a threat.
She is not considered a threat.]
{Interrogation Room B — Ecaluation Phase}
She had composed herself.
She had stood in the corridor for exactly six minutes — she knew because she counted, habit, the internal timekeeping she had developed sometime in her second year working with RAW, the clinical metacognition of a person who monitors their own state as a professional practice and had used those six minutes to: verify that she was not going to cry, review the clinical framework for identity reintegration following extended deep-cover immersion, remind herself of the ethical obligations of her role, and arrive at the following decision, clearly and without equivocation:
she was both the right person for this evaluation and a person with a personal history she was obligated to manage, and these two things were not in conflict, because the reason she was the right person was not personal but clinical — she had more contextual knowledge of Jaskirat Singh Rangi's pre-cover identity than anyone else in the building, and that context was therapeutically essential, and she was going to use it correctly.
She had fixed her hair.
She had drunk water.
She had stood outside Interrogation Room B for twenty-three seconds, which was fifteen longer than she needed and eight shorter than she felt like, and then she had opened the door.
He was at the table.
He was looking at the middle distance.
She had a single moment, in the doorway, to see him before he saw her. And she used it — not unprofessionally, not indulgently, but simply: she looked. She looked at the fact of him. Twelve years older. The beard. The hair. The particular way he was sitting, very still, with his hands flat on the table, with the practiced interior composure of someone who has learned to manage the surface independent of whatever is happening underneath.
She looked at his eyes.
Brown.
Not the green of the fields in monsoon. Not the green that had been the first thing she reached for whenever she allowed herself to reach. Brown — the colour of tired earth, of a world that has been through its seasons. Brown in the way that things go brown when the green has been worked out of them by long continuous effort.
She looked at his eyes.
She filed what she saw.
Then she walked in and sat down across from him.
She said: "Good evening, Mr. Rangi."
Her voice was completely level.
He looked up.
And she watched it happen — the moment of recognition. Not slow, not uncertain; he knew her immediately, with the completeness of someone who has been keeping a face somewhere very safe for a very long time and retrieves it without effort. She watched the recognition move through him and then she watched what came after it: the choice. The deliberate, visible, conscious choice to become Hamza-still. To arrange the surface. To put on the face that had kept him alive in Karachi.
He looked at her with Hamza's eyes.
He said: "Good evening."
She put her folder on the table.
"I'm Dr. Meher Kaur," she said. "Psychological evaluation specialist, rehabilitation division. I've been assigned to your post-operative assessment. The purpose —"
"I know what a psychological evaluation is," he said. Hamza-precise. Not rude. Simply economical.
"Of course," she said. "Then let's begin."
She was very good at her job.
She asked about sleep — he reported fragmented sleep, night terrors consistent with PTSD presentation, specific recurring content (she noted: voices, faces, the particular sensory memory of specific events, a clinical finding of significant intrusive symptomatology).
She asked about appetite (disrupted, low; he ate because he knew he was supposed to). She asked about somatic symptoms (headaches, yes; elevated startle response, yes; physical tension primarily in the jaw and shoulders — he moved his jaw slightly when she said this, the involuntary acknowledgement of something accurate).
She asked about his relationship to time: did the past feel like the past, did the present feel present, did he experience temporal displacement, moments where he was not certain which time he was in?
He paused at this question.
He said: "Sometimes the voices overlap."
"Which voices?"
"The dead." A pause. "And the living. And sometimes they're in each other's voices." Another pause. "Yalina asking questions in Pinda's voice. Pinda saying things that were Aalam's." He stopped. "I know they are different people."
"Knowing doesn't always interrupt the overlap," she said. "That's not a failure of yours."
He looked at her.
"It's a feature of how memory and grief interact in the context of extended dissociation," she said. "Your mind was sustaining two identities for three years. The architecture was necessarily — unstable. Permeable in places."
He said: "That's a very clinical way to describe it."
"It is," she agreed. "Would you prefer a different one?"
He almost smiled. Almost. The corner of his mouth moved.
She wrote something in her folder.
She turned a page.
She asked: "What is the difference between Jaskirat and Hamza?"
The question dropped into the room like a stone into deep water — going in cleanly, disturbing the surface in a widening circle, continuing to fall long after the visible impact was done.
She watched him.
He looked at his hands. He looked at them for a long time, as if they were containing something, as if the question had the effect of making the hands suddenly visible in a new way.
He said: "No one has asked me that before."
"I'm asking now."
He was quiet for a long time. A full minute. She waited. She was excellent at waiting.
He said:
"Jaskirat is violent."
He said it flat and factual, a clinical observation about a third party. "Unpredictable. Emotional. He makes decisions because he loves people. He loved his father. He loved Harleen. He loved Jasleen enough to —" He stopped. Reorganised. "He acts from feeling. He does not assess first and then act. He acts first and the consequences arrive after and he carries them, but he cannot — he cannot go backward. He cannot make himself not act." A pause. "That is a liability in the field."
She wrote nothing. She wanted him to hear only silence, not the scratch of documentation.
"Hamza is controlled," he said. "Predictable. He assesses before he acts. He knows the operational value of every relationship before he allows the relationship to function. He does not love people first — he cannot afford to. He makes the decisions that Jaskirat couldn't make without falling apart." Another pause. The word that came next arrived with a particular weight: "Hamza is necessary."
The word necessary was, she thought, the saddest word in her entire clinical career. Not because of what it meant but because of how he said it — not with pride, not with bitterness, with something more precise than either: the grief of a person who has understood that being necessary is the thing they have been reduced to.
"And which one is in this room right now?"
He looked up.
For the first time since she had entered the room, he looked at her directly. Not through her. Not past her. At her — with the full quality of attention that was, she now understood, not something either Jaskirat or Hamza owned exclusively but something that had always been simply his.
His eyes were brown.
She looked back.
He said: "I don't know."
[About the shirt. I am telling you this once again because it is important.
It was green and black, wide stripes. She bought it in December of 2000 for approximately five hundred and fifty rupees that she had saved over four months by declining cinema trips and exercising extraordinary self-control near bookshops.
He was wearing it the morning of the attack on Sukhwinder's house. He had put it on deliberately. She knows this now because she has thought about it for eleven years and there is no other explanation for why a person going to do what he was going to do would put on a shirt that was too big for him, a shirt that had been bought for a future that no longer existed.
She thinks he put it on because he was going to do something he couldn't come back from and he wanted to go in as himself. As Jaskirat. In the shirt that had been bought for the officer he was going to be.
She has spent eleven years trying to separate two images: the boy who received the shirt on a December rooftop and the man who wore it into a house where twelve men died. She has been trying to put them in different rooms in her head. She has been trying to make them stop being the same person.
They are the same person.
He is sitting across the table from her.
He is the same person and his eyes are brown and she is looking at him and trying to separate the boy from the man and finding that she cannot, that eleven years of trying has not helped, that the green and the brown are in the same face and always were.]
The evaluation continued.
She asked the correct questions in the correct sequence with the correct clinical framing, and he answered them in his Hamza-register — precise, controlled, economical — except that the register was, as the session continued, becoming fractionally less absolute. She could track it.
A word here that was not operational vocabulary. A pause there that was not the calculated pause of someone managing disclosure but the unguarded pause of someone actually thinking. The Hamza-stillness, intact and immaculate at the beginning of the session, developing microscopic imprecision at the edges.
She was watching him come back to himself the way you watch ice become water — slowly, without drama, the change happening at the edges first.
She asked about his support system.
He said: "My mother." A pause. "My sister, if —" He stopped. Started again. "Jasleen. I don't know if — I have been gone for twelve years. I was dead. I am still, to them —"
"They don't know you're alive," she said.
"No."
"Your mother," Meher said. "Prabhneet Kaur. She is in Pathankot. She is well — physically well. She kept your room exactly as it was."
He looked at her.
"It's in the welfare file," she said. "A welfare officer visited the family under cover, six months into the operation. Your room: textbooks on the shelf, study materials, the cricket bat." A pause. "She kept it."
He pressed his hand flat against the table.
He said: "The cricket bat."
"Yes."
His jaw was very tight.
She waited.
He said: "Jasleen's children —"
"Two boys. The elder one looks like Pinda." She said this without looking up from her notes, because she had calculated, correctly, that the way to say unbearable things is to say them while doing something else, so that they can land without requiring an immediate response. "The younger one looks like her."
He was quiet for a very long time.
She let him be quiet.
Then he said: "She deserves to know." His voice was different. Lower. "About Pinda. That it wasn't — that I didn't —" He stopped. "She thinks he disappeared. She doesn't know he died. She definitely doesn't know —"
"I know," Meher said.
He looked up.
"There are ways to do it within protocol," she said. "I have clearance. I can find a way to tell her the truth — not the operational details, but what he did. What he agreed to. What he —" She stopped. "She should know he chose it. In the sense that he could have chosen otherwise and didn't."
He stared at her.
"I can't promise the exact shape of how I'll do it," she said. "But I can promise it will be done. You have my word."
He looked at her for a long time.
He said: "Thank you."
She nodded.
She looked at her notes.
She wrote something.
She said: "I'm also going to recommend that your mother be told you're alive. Not the details — not the operational context — but that you're alive. She is entitled to that." She paused. "You are entitled to that."
He said nothing.
She said: "The country asked a great deal of you. It is not asking you to let your mother believe you are dead when you aren't."
He said, very quietly: "It's asking me to let Yalina —"
"I know," she said.
The room was very quiet.
She said: "I know. And I don't have a clinical resolution for that. The file has no protocol for that. I'm sorry."
She was.
She was sorry in the direct, unmediated way of a person sitting across a table from the consequences of something very large and very terrible, and the sorryness was not professional, was not clinical, was simply the response of one person to another person's permanent loss.
He looked at his hands.
She looked at her notes.
It was not sudden.
She had expected it might be sudden — had read about precipitous breakdowns, the dam-giving-way model, the structural-failure model, one more question being the one more that the load-bearing elements cannot hold. She had seen it happen that way before.
His was geological.
Slow. Incremental. The kind of change that happens at depths you cannot directly observe and announces itself only when the landscape has already shifted, when you look up and find you are somewhere different without having seen yourself move.
She tracked it across the sessions.
Session two: he used the word Jassi in reference to himself in the third person, caught himself, did not correct it.
Session three: he described his father's voice and then stopped and said, with a flatness that contained enormous things: "I can't remember exactly what it sounded like anymore."
Session four: he talked about Harleen without the operational vocabulary. Without calling it collateral or antecedent or backstory. He called her Harleen and he stopped mid-sentence and did not continue and she let the silence be exactly as long as it needed to be.
Session five: he talked about the night at Sukhwinder's house. Not the operational version. The real one. He talked about what the house had sounded like when he arrived. He talked about finding Jasleen.
He talked about not being able to separate, in the months afterward in prison, the satisfaction of having done it from the horror of having done it — that both were present simultaneously, that they did not cancel each other out, that he had been trying for twelve years to reconcile this and had not managed.
She said: "You don't have to reconcile it. Some things are irreconcilable. The clinical goal isn't resolution. It's coexistence."
He looked at her.
He said: "That sounds like something that should be easier than it is."
"Most true things do," she said.
Session six was when it happened.
She had been running the identity reintegration protocol — a structured series of questions designed to help the operative consciously inhabit both identities rather than cycling between them, to understand them as a continuous self rather than opposed fictions — and she had asked him to describe a specific memory from before 2000. Concrete. Sensory. Unambiguously Jaskirat's.
He was quiet.
Then he said: "There was a girl next door."
She breathed.
She did not move.
"She used to sit on the roof and study," he said. "She was very serious about studying. She had folders. She organised her notes with a colour system." A pause. A pause that contained something — a sound that was almost a sound, not quite. "Her mother made halwa every time I came over. Too sweet. Always too sweet. But she made it like it was a special occasion."
She watched his hands on the table. They were very still.
"She used to call me Jassi," he said.
And Meher, who had been Dr. Kaur for six sessions, who had maintained the professional frame with the precision of someone who knows exactly how much depends on it, who had done this job correctly for six sessions and had every intention of continuing to do it correctly —
She said: "I know."
Two words.
Not Dr. Kaur's voice. Her voice. The voice that was from Pathankot, the voice that had called across a four-foot gap between rooftops, the voice that had said grow your muscles into it on a December afternoon and then been horrified and then been unable to be sorry.
He went very still.
Then he looked at her.
She said: "You explained thermodynamics to me the week before my class twelve boards and I still got a better mark than you would have." She said it quietly. "
You put the flour on the wrong shelf in our kitchen once and my mother pretended for three days that she hadn't noticed. Arjun cried for a week when you left for training." She paused. "Your father read from the Guru Granth Sahib on Sunday mornings. You always thought he was asleep when he did it. He wasn't."
He looked at her.
She said: "The shirt. I saw it on the news, when they were reporting on the house in Pathankot. The house where —" She stopped. "I saw it. I knew the shirt. I didn't understand it then, what you were —" She stopped again. "I understand it now."
He looked at his hands.
He said: "I put it on because —"
"I know," she said. "I know why you put it on."
A silence.
She said: "Your sister is going to be told the truth about Pinda. I promise you that. And your mother will know you're alive." She paused. "You will have that."
He pressed his hands flat against the table.
He said: "Meher."
Her name. Her actual name, in the actual voice — not Hamza's level register, not the careful operational control, but the voice she had last heard on a rooftop in Pathankot saying okay, which was the word she had filed in the cabinet marked future in the room she kept carefully locked, which was the room she was now standing in.
He said her name and then he said nothing.
He was very still and very quiet for a long time.
And then — not suddenly, not with sound, not the dam-breaking model — he broke.
He bent his head and the breaking happened in the small and almost invisible way that grief happens when it has been held for long enough that it no longer remembers how to be large: his hands came up and covered his face and he breathed, just breathed, and the breathing was not crying but was the thing that lives in the same room as crying, the thing that is grief happening in a body that has used up its water.
She was around the table in four steps.
Clinical training said: maintain physical distance. Assess before contact. The professional frame. The evaluation context.
She sat in the chair beside him and put her hand on his back.
She felt him breathe.
She felt the whole enormous weight of him — Jaskirat, Hamza, the boy from next door, the man the country made, all of them at once — in the rise and fall of the breathing.
She said nothing.
He said nothing.
They sat in the room, and the fluorescent lights hummed, and the breathing continued, and she kept her hand on his back the way you keep a hand on something that is trying to find its way back to solid ground: steadily, without agenda, just present.
This was not clinical.
This was just what you do.
When it had run its course — when he had straightened up, when he had pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, when the breathing had found its ordinary rhythm — she returned to her chair.
She straightened her kurta.
She picked up her pen.
She was a professional.
She said,"I'm recommending extended rehabilitation. Three months at minimum, with a specialist in identity integration. There's also a group program for operatives with prolonged deep-cover experience —"
"Meher."
She looked up.
He was looking at her.
He was looking at her with both of them present — not only Hamza, not only Jaskirat, but whoever was in the process of being assembled from the pieces: tired and present and looking at her in the specific way she had filed under thermodynamics at fifteen and never entirely correctly refiled since.
"Ask me," he said.
She looked at him.
"Whatever you want to ask," he said. "You are allowed to ask."
She held his gaze.
She simply shrugged"I'm not asking anything. I'm your evaluating psychologist and I'm going to refer you to the appropriate specialists and I'm going to ensure that your family knows you're alive." A pause. "That's what I'm here to do."
After all that he had been through she could not present to him the cruelty of obligation. He was not obligated to tell her. As much as it hurt she knew that.
He looked at her for a long time.
He said: "Okay."
Just that.
Okay.She stood up.
She closed her folder.
She said, "Good night, Mr. Rangi."
She thinks about his eyes.
This is the habit she has not broken. She has broken many: looking toward his house when she returns to Pathankot for Diwali; calculating the years; keeping the green-and-black colour combination in its own category, weighted with meaning it no longer needs to carry. She has dismantled all of these with the careful deliberate effort she applies to everything she decides is necessary.
She has not broken the habit of thinking about his eyes.
She has not broken it because she is not certain she wants to. Because the eyes are the last honest thing. Because in the years between the rooftop and the interrogation room she has had many opportunities to stop remembering and has not taken them, and this is not a failing — it is a fact, and she is too rigorously trained to mistake the two.
His eyes were green.
They are brown now.
This is the thing she is sitting with — not resolving, not healing, sitting with, the way you sit with things that are irreconcilable, which is a thing she told him in a room with fluorescent lights and which she is now applying to herself.
The green was real. The boy on the rooftop was real. The okay in December was real and it meant what she needed it to mean and she is not going to retroactively un-mean it just because everything that followed happened. The green existed. It was that colour. She was not wrong.
And the brown is also real. The brown is the colour of twelve years of Lyari and Pinda and Aalam and Yalina and Zayan and every name on the invisible-ink list. The brown is the colour of what the country asked for and received.
The brown is the colour of a man who put on a shirt she bought him with her pocket money on the morning of the worst thing he ever did, because he wanted to do it as himself, one last time, before becoming someone else.
She is not going to tell herself the green is still there underneath. She is not going to offer herself that comfort. The green is gone. That person is gone. The man in that room is not the boy from the rooftop and she is not the girl with the colour-coded study folders.
She is thirty-one years old.
She is a psychologist who works for RAW.
She has done her job correctly.
She has referred him to the appropriate specialists.
She has ensured that his mother will know he is alive.
She has ensured that Jasleen will know the truth about Pinda.
She has done everything that was hers to do.
She sits in her car in the underground car park of the RAW field operations complex and she thinks about the December evening when she opened her eyes after the kiss and saw green — the exact specific unrepeatable green of that evening and his eyes in it — and she thinks:
I loved him.
Past tense. That love is now utterly and fully complete.
idgaf. endgame steve rogers ruined ten years of development and was an assassination of the character. it took a progressive character and sent him to the 50s (the epitome of traditional values) and had him settle down with a woman who recruited nazis into an organization made in his “honor”. he left his best friend alone in the future and didn’t save him from being tortured in the past. it was an evil ending and I can’t believe we’re having it shoved in our faces again (doomsday)
#genuinely: this is what further research into the famous 'marshmallow test' showed#it wasn't that kids who were able to delay gratification were more likely to be successful later on#due to intrinsic qualities#it was that kids who had a stable upbringing were more likely to be successful#and ALSO: those kids had trust that their caregivers would keep promises#which is WHY they were willing to give up one marshmallow now for the promise of two marshmallows later#kids who did NOT have trustworthy caregivers#or who were in a fundamentally unstable situation#DID NOT have that trust so they wanted their one marshmallow NOW#same deal here i think#it's not that Gen Z is bratty#it's that they have no trust in the system and no faith that promises will be fulfilled#and frankly i do not blame them -@cicerfics
*This was a totally random and spontaneous idea. Not edited. Light language (so we can get *the joke*), pining, light angst, hurt/comfort, and fluff. This work is for all ages! WC ~2k
Sam Wilson introduces you. Both your parents were veterans and active at the VA, so you practically grew up there.
At first, you’re reserved, a little formal, but very nice. Oddly enough, Steve just likes that you don’t hound him with questions about his military service and how it was different based on the decade, etc. You are just…around to listen.
He finds himself filling any (comfortable) silence between you with stories. Stupid things. Things that don’t have to do with the VA or his past or even his present, which is entirely work as Captain America.
Steve gets to a point where he is itching to live off of Avengers Campus, but he doesn’t want to live alone.
One day he finds you hunched over a laptop and grumbling, “why is everything so fucking expensive?”
A sentiment which, of course, he frowns at.
“Sorry,” you shrug, a look of sincere apology on your distraught face. “I didn’t realize it, but apparently, I’m poor with my measly three-thousand-dollar-a-month budget for an apartment. Now I have to find a roommate, and—“ you start wagging a finger at him sarcastically “—I don’t know if you’ve noticed there’re some real weirdos out there. It’ll take me longer to find a safe, stable roomie than it takes to—“
“I can move in with you.”
Steve almost gasps at how fast the words fly out of his mouth.
“Well, not ‘move in’ to your current place. I mean. I can—I would be willing to live with you. Sorry! That sounds bad. You’re not bad. I meant…you know, anytime you want to chime in and stop me would be helpful.”
You remain silent and smirking.
“Right. Okay. So…think about it? Or not, that’s fine.”
“Let’s talk figures, Rogers. The square-footage just doubled, and I need to rework the budget.”
Moving in is shockingly uneventful. You’re easy to get along with, when not suddenly up on your high horse about something, and Steve is easy to get along with under the same circumstances. You push his militant rigidity to the brink on purpose, but never too far.
Things sit out in the wrong place, but it’s never dirty. Stuff doesn’t always get returned promptly, but if he asks, you’re on it.
There are two bathrooms, thank mercy.
He has random and odd hours. You work nine to five, mostly. It’s the perfect level of independence without loneliness for Steve.
Sam and Natasha stop by regularly or ask you both out for drinks or to fun, new places.
One time, when Nat is ribbing Steve to go talk to a cute girl ordering at the bar, he panics and takes your hand in his on the tabletop.
“How can I do that when my date is right here?” he grits playfully through his pearly white teeth. “Leave it alone.”
Each word is punctuated by a shift forward and a slight tilt of his head.
Natasha is unamused and instantly grabs your other hand (which was holding your drink) to pull you toward the dance floor.
It’s awkward for multiple reasons. You’d pay a whole month’s rent to know what Sam and Steve talked about after you left.
Sam takes a different approach, luring—or attempting to lure—Steve into setting up just one dating profile online.
“You don’t have to put photos,” Sam assures, “and you can stick with your first name only. I swear to you, man, this’ll be good for you. Get you out there more. Help me out here, Tagalong!”
He turns to you for support. To be fair, you did quite literally tag along with your parents for years to the VA, and it stuck. Why it sticks as a grown-ass adult? You’ll never know. You just don’t mind Sam Wilson saying it because he means well and never uses it in public.
“Uh, nooooo.”
Sam’s face falls. “What?”
You look at Steve and grimace, clicking your tongue. “He’s not ready for that,” you conclude.
Steve jumps out of the chair, arms wide with victory.
“THAT’S WHAT I’VE BEEN SAYING!”
“I know you told her to say that,” Sam shouts back.
“Did not,” Steve barks.
“He did not.” You lean against your bedroom doorframe. “I just think it’s obvious.”
That makes Steve deflate a little. “Wait, but…I’m not that bad.”
“Oh gosh,” you fake with a huge smile, “look at the time! Gotta be off to bed…”
The men keep fighting albeit muffled from your side of the wall. The only part you can make out before giving them privacy is Sam, whining, “but you actually like bubble baths and walks on the beach, dude. You’re gonna be money on there.”
“Hey, why do you not, ya know, date?”
You look up from your breakfast, stunned because that came out of nowhere. You’ve lived together over six months now, and Steve hasn’t asked for one iota of personal—well, romantically personal—information.
Twiddling your fork around, you think.
“I always imagine what my parents would think of him, any guy I’ve ever considered being with longterm, and…I was just never proud to say ‘here, here’s the one,’ I guess.”
Your parents have been gone for years. You value their opinion anyway.
“Mhm,” Steve hums, “the one?”
You take a bite of food, straightening your back, tossing a dismissive hand in the air. “Yeah, if you believe in that sort of thing.”
He’s quiet for a while.
“So you’re waiting for the right partner?” Steve finally mutters, and he watches your noncommittal gesturing intently.
That was a ‘yes.’
Natasha knows. Sam knows. Steve suspects but won’t admit to anything. You are kind and unreadable.
You’ve always been kind, so there’s no discernible difference to signal you have feelings for him in return. He can’t bring himself to be anything less than a gentleman at home and makes absolutely no moves to find out.
He stays out in the living room a lot more, all hours, hoping you’ll mention staying in for a movie, praying you’ll be tired enough to fall asleep on his lap on the couch.
He’s in way too deep.
What Steve suspects is that it would be too awkward to start anything while living together, but he doesn’t want to leave you in the lurch for rent or a roommate. He also desperately doesn’t want to move out. The status quo is comfortable.
He loves being comfortable with you.
The stress of not telling you, while needing to make some sort of arrangements should telling you blow up in his face, starts to wear on him.
Steve is a pro at compartmentalizing his life, so it’s when he’s stuck at the apartment without any missions, a handful of meetings, and a team that all have lives for two long months that he cracks…in the least attractive way.
He’s messed up his sleep schedule with worry and playing innocent, and out of the not-so-blue, a horrible, vivid nightmare hits him. Steve isn’t even on the mattress anymore by the time he figures out there wasn’t carpet like this in Germany and the desk chair he grips is not a motorcycle.
“Rogers,” he hears. “Rogers, can you look at me?”
The dark room is somehow hollow and stifling all at once. His head turns slower than his brain tells it to.
Steve blinks.
“Do you know where you are?”
“Hey, sweets,” he husks from a dry throat. “What…”
“Can you tell me where this is?” You step closer and pry one of his hands off the mesh to cradle in yours. “Where are we, Rogers?”
“Home.” He swallows. “Our home.”
Your smile doesn’t reach your eyes, but you nod like he’s done well.
“Okay, Steve, I’m going to get you some water. If you want—“ your fingers smooth over the back of his hand, nudging the other to release the chair “—you can sit on the bed.”
You don’t leave. You don’t even get up from the floor.
He doesn’t notice he’s clutching your hands, shaking slightly until long seconds go by.
“Yeah. Okay.” Steve lets go, otherwise unmoving, contemplating how he ever thought the semi-rough industrial carpet felt the same as mud.
You carefully hand him the water and rub his back, using your nails to trace invisible patterns. He can’t remember what he was so scared of a minute ago. He only knows he’s sweating that empty kind of confused.
“What’s that supposed to do?” he asks absently.
You shrug. “Eh. Back scratches just feel good.”
Steve’s mind remains blank as he sips his water.
: We need to renew the lease soon. Like this week.
Steve has stalled as long as humanly possible; he is officially not being a gentleman now. He is a coward.
: Talk about it when I get home?
: Could you at least tell me if this is a hard NO on staying here or just some concerns/questions?
: I don’t get why you’re being like this.
Steve gets it, but he hates it.
: I’ll be back tonight. Should I pick up food?
: ffs
: Fine. Whatever you want.
Steve also hates when you’re mad at him…which has been happening more and more.
He’s been distant, he refuses to let Sam or Nat come around for fear they’ll play match-maker and ruin the whole thing, and he is about to ruin the whole thing anyway.
Because he is not smooth. Because he is not prepared. Because he’s built up this perfect and amazing, sweep-you-off-your-feet moment.
And he bungles it.
“Out with it,” you command, haughtily yanking your portion of food from the countertop beside him, heading for the dinette.
“I want to be with you,” he blurts.
“Thank god,” you sigh, settling in your spot. “So we’ll go down to the office and sign in the morning. I don’t want there to be an issue if you’re off to wherever for who-the-hell-knows how long on the date the thing expires.”
“No, I…” but Steve’s voice is too quiet.
“There’s only a tiny window where they’re open before I have to head to work, so let me physically sign first, right? Then I gotta go.”
“Sure,” he slurs.
“Steve?” You turn to see him staring down at his food. He’s still across the room. “Are you okay?”
“I said I—I meant that—“ he huffs out his breath and taps his fist on the counter “—I meant that I’m an idiot,” he finishes softly.
Approaching with that beautiful, open-hearted kindness that haunts his days and soothes his night, you cross to him, scratching his back just the way he’s grown to crave.
“Think you might be hangry,” you chuckle.
He cannot do this. Steve is hanging on by a thread until the graze of your hand slides down his forearm to take his plate, and he spins.
He’s thought about kissing you so many times, he mapped out the angles he’d have to hold himself at, how far he needs to lean to get to you, the care to take wrangling in his strength and sheer excitement.
Steve Rogers is good at planning, at least, this part.
Gentle pecks of his plush lips to yours leave gaps in contact that let you whimper, and he fears you stopping him. He presses, wrapping his arms around you and molding your bodies together. The linoleum of the kitchen floor makes sticky sounds beneath your shuffling feet, squeaking once you hit the adjacent wall.
The force of that knocks your frozen arms into his chest, and painfully, Steve relents to step away, but not far. He bites his bottom lip and tastes the balm from yours, his head tilted in shame but fiery eyes watching you from beneath long lashes.
Steve Rogers Masterlist | Steve Rogers Bingo | Main Masterlist
Pairing: Steve Rogers x Reader
Word Count: 1861
Summary: All you wanted after a long day at work is to ride your motorcycle until your tension and stress disappeared. The last thing you ever expected was to find Steve checking out your bike or anything that follows.
Warnings: mutual pining/attraction; meddling friends (mainly Nat, but Tony to smaller extent); fluff; lots of fluff; gentlemanly Steve (absolute warning)
I do not give permission to have my works copied, translated, reposted, or fed into an AI machine.
****
Dr. Banner couldn't get back fast enough.
Exhaustion and tension threatened to cave you in as you stepped onto the elevator.
Who knew a shift with Tony Stark could feel like an eternity?
Oh, how you missed the quieter, can-hear-yourself-think time spent with your actual boss. There hadn't been one thought that Mr. Stark had kept to himself. If he wasn't talking through one problem he wanted to work on, he was blasting his music at an ungodly level. Your head thumped to the beat until it throbbed and screamed for the quiet you preferred.
Dr. Banner played music, sure, but it was always at a level that you could tune out when it suited you. He also never really spoke unless he needed your opinion on one matter or another. The two of you could spend almost the entire day in silence, working on your respective duties. It was something you wouldn't ever take for granted again while praying you wouldn't have Mr. Stark for company again the next day.
All you wanted in that moment was to hop on your bike and ride.
Where? It didn't matter. Just wind yourself through the streets and out to the more country-ish roads until you found the peace you desperately needed. Sure, maybe you'd stop for a bite to eat somewhere, but you had no plans to stop until the hour grew late.
Maybe you'd even make a weekend of it. It's why you kept a spare set of clothes in your saddlebags. All it would take is a quick search for a little place to spend the night.
Your grand plan ground to a halt the moment you stepped into the parking garage.
Some oversized dude had apparently taken a liking to your bike and was now sitting on it.
The absolute audacity. The nerve.
"Excuse me," you shouted as you marched toward the guy on your bike. "What exactly do you think you're doing? Didn't your mama ever teach you not to touch other's stuff? Get off my bike before I—"
The words died abruptly in your throat.
The great hulk of a man who'd been on your bike had turned toward you at the start of your tirade. But, you'd been so caught up in shouting it took a moment to compute who he was. When your brain finally caught up to your mouth, it was too late.
Staring back at you were the bluest eyes you've ever encountered. The same eyes you'd dreamed about a time or two. How could you not? After all, they belonged to none other than Captain America, Steve Rogers himself.
To his credit, he appeared at a loss, quickly and easily moving off your bike and taking a few steps away. His hand came up to rub at the back of his neck as pink suffused his cheeks. "I didn't realize it was yours. Tony's been talking up his newest bike, and I was led to believe this was it. My sincerest apologies."
Your earlier ire died swiftly.
His sincerity and horrified expression was more than enough to easily forgive him. It was a relatively minor transgression compared to if he'd been a complete stranger who'd wandered into the gated garage.
If anyone should incur your wrath, it should be Mr. Stark, not Captain Rogers. No, Steve Rogers had only ever been kind and even sweet whenever the two of you interacted. It wasn't often he'd come into Dr. Banner's labs. When he did though, he was always courteous and maybe a little quieter than you thought he would be as you worked. He wouldn't linger, either.
You had no idea that he often wished he had more excuses to come into Dr. Banner's labs. Nor were you aware that he's liked you from the first time he'd seen you, but he'd never found an opening that made sense. He'd give almost anything to have a chance to learn more about you.
"It's, uh, okay," you finally stammered when you realized you hadn't responded to him. No, you'd been a bit busy losing yourself to your thoughts while also staring at him. Not drooling or anything, mind you, but in a way that Steve couldn't quite read if he'd deeply offended you or not. "I wasn't aware that Mr. Stark was a bike man. He doesn't seem the type."
That earned you a huff of what could only be laughter.
Steve's eyes crinkled at the corners as his smile blossomed.
"Yeah," he said after a moment, "he's more a collector than rider nowadays. Prefers his suit, you know."
You smiled at him. "Oh, I know he does. I don't think he stopped talking about it all day as he worked in Dr. Banner's labs. You don't, by any chance, know when Dr. Banner's coming back from his mission, do you?"
"Not a fan of Tony in the lab?"
Your face must've shifted more than you imagined it did. One moment, Steve's grinning at you, and the next, he's shaking his head and chuckling under his breath.
"You won't tell him, will you? I don't want to bruise his ego or anything. I mean, he could use an ego deflation now and then, but he's an okay boss. I just prefer Dr. Banner. That's all."
Steve's hands came up as if to ward off any more of your words. His smile gentled once more into the one that filled your dreams at night as he said, "Your secret's safe with me. Bruce should be back by next Friday, I think. I'm not exactly sure since his mission doesn't have a strict turnaround or deadline compared to others."
"Ah, okay," you said, hoping he didn't catch a hint of your disappointment. You'd really been hoping Dr. Banner would be back by Monday morning. That way, there would be no more Tony Stark in the lab. "Thank you for letting me know though. I guess I'll, uh, see you around, Captain Rogers."
When you would've stepped towards your bike, ready to get one with your plans, Steve stepped in front of you, blocking you from it.
"Call me Steve, please," he said softly, his voice holding a hint of something you couldn't quite put your finger on. When you glanced up to meet his gaze, you found his eyes watching you with something you so wanted to be interest and maybe a little bit of hope. As if to confirm, he asked, "You going straight home? I know a diner nearby. Good food, great atmosphere. It's a good place to wind down after a stressful day."
That certainly had your attention.
All previous plans flew out of your head as you stared at Steve and saw that same expression deepen with his gaze. Even his posture shifted in a way that made you think of a puppy, hoping it would be the one chosen this time.
Now, that was the most surprising part of all.
It was well known around the Tower that Steve was ogled and drooled over every time he walks by. He could have his pick of any hundred-plus women that work within its glass-lined walls. That included you though you adamantly denied you were as bad as some.
"Are you asking me out?" you couldn't help asking. After all, you had to be sure for fear you'd make a fool of yourself.
He nodded so emphatically. "Bad idea?"
"Oh, no," you shook your head, a smile sliding back in place, "diner food sounds really good right now."
"Yeah?"
You nodded your head rather vigorously.
Steve beamed down at you before his cheeks went pink. "Okay, great, um, just let me grab my jacket and keys. Then, we'll go. Wait for me? Five minutes, tops?"
He almost made it a full stop, but you managed to stop him. Your smile widened into a full-blown grin. You even shook your head while gesturing to himself.
"You're wearing your jacket," you said softly, then pointed at the keys peeking out of his pocket, "and I believe those are your keys right there. Unless you somehow managed to lift mine, copy them, and return them without my noticing."
His cheeks darkened into a rosier color.
You couldn't help thinking how unfair the color suited him better than it ever would you.
"Sorry, guess I'm just excited you said yes," he murmured, his hue growing even darker and spreading.
Your heart, the traitor, started pounding in your chest at the sweetness of his words. It'd been a bit since anyone had shown this level of interest in you, and you found it a little daunting but also so sweet. You couldn't help but feel the butterflies kick up when his gaze met yours with an earnestness that literally stole your breath for a moment.
Before your courage could fail you, you rose on tiptoes and pressed a chaste kiss to his cheek. Pulling back, you said, "Well, my bike is calling me to ride. Wanna grab yours and show me your diner? Maybe after, we can go on the drive I had planned for myself. I mean, if you don't have anything else to do and want to spend more time together."
"I'd really like that, but I don't want to impose on your alone time."
Oh, this man could just about kill you with his gentlemanly behavior.
"Wouldn't have offered if you'd be imposing." You allowed yourself a squeeze of his arm before stepping back and picking up your helmet. "Now, I'm starving, so let's get going. Definitely want to get out of here before Mr. Stark tries to find me and drag me back to the lab."
Steve grinned. "I'd keep you safe."
"Hm, that's good to know."
The two of you quickly donned what gear you typically wore. You with your full-body protection gear and Steve with only a helmet that you made him put on. Despite hearing his protests about the serum, you weren't having it, not when you'd gained what you hoped to be the first of many dates with him.
Your bikes roared to life within minutes, then spun out of the garage and onto the city's streets.
*****
Meanwhile…
"You didn't have to throw me under the bus like you did, Romanov," Tony groused while watching the screens in front of them. "Can't believe I didn't see your meddling sooner."
Nat smirked, her eyes never leaving the screens. "You never do, genius. Besides, my plan worked just as it was meant to. Those two were never going to make a move if we didn't help them along."
"Yeah, I guess," Tony continued to grumble, "but next time, don't make it where I almost cost Banner his assistant. He'd never forgive me, and we don't need a Hulk situation in the city."
"You know I can't promise that."
'Tony sighed, his gaze going a final time to the screens. He watched as you and Steve made your way out of the garage. A smile flitted over his features.
"It's nice to see him happy, yeah?"
Nat nodded. Her smirk transformed into an honest smile as she said, "Yeah, it is."
x reader she's like Barbie. she can be anything. she can be everything. she can do whatever I'm not dare to do in rl and she can choose her man. *sigh* Life've never been better.
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