anxiety - request
author’s heads up: this one shot does deal with anxiety-induced appetite loss and forgetting to eat due to stress/overwhelm. it isn't an eating disorder fic and it doesn't involve body image issues, just the physical body reaction when your nervous system is on overtime.
REQUEST: another chase fluff fic where it's more like comfort and the reader struggles with her mental health? asking bc of what i personally am going through rn but maybe its like she has anxiety over everything that happens in the show drama wise? & those feelings start to affect her eating (not an ed tho).
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The lab hummed around you. Bright, fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. Sounds of the holotable quietly rippled. A fan cycled through its rhythm somewhere in a corner. You sat at the workbench with a granola bar in your hand, wrapper peeled back an hour ago, untouched.
Chase stood at the holotable across the room, fingers trailing through mission data. His brow furrowed at something on the display. Probably a probability or data anomaly. Probably another close call you’d have to hear about at dinner.
You stared at the granola bar. Oats. Honey. A thin film of chocolate on the bottom. Your stomach clenched just looking at it.
Another mission tomorrow. Another extraction, another impossible rescue, another scenario where the people you cared about walked into danger and you stayed behind, holding your breath until their communicators crackled back to life.
You set the bar down.
"Hey." Chase's voice came from the other end of the bench. You looked up, he'd crossed the room without you noticing. "You've been staring at that thing for a while."
"Just distracted," you said, trying to sound casual. Your voice came out thin around the edges.
He tilted his head, his eyes squinting with that analytical look he always got when something didn't add up. He reached for your wrist with a gentle grip. "Your heart rate is elevated. One hundred and twelve beats per minute. You've been sitting still for the last twenty minutes."
Chase could always read a room with precision and notice the details regular humans hoped he'd look past. Even without consciously focusing his bionic vision, he picked up on every subtle shift in your posture.
"Are you feeling okay?" He pulled the stool across from you, sat down, and folded his arms on the workbench.
"I'm fine."
"You haven't eaten since breakfast."
"I had a snack at noon."
"A granola bar. Which you opened and then didn't consume." He gestured at the wrapper, still around the bar. "That counts as having a snack the way breathing counts as cardio."
You wanted to make a joke, but your throat tightened. The humor drained out of the moment, replaced by the weight pressing in your chest.
He noticed.
"Something on your mind?" he asked softly, not like the confident bionic genius the world saw, but like the boy who stayed up late with you in this lab, splitting sugar-free energy drinks and fixing things. Sugar-free because it is Chase afterall.
You let out a shaky breath.
"Tomorrow's mission," you started. Then stopped.
He waited.
"Every time you guys leave, I just stand here. Watching the monitors. Running diagnostics on equipment I can't fully control. And I keep thinking—" Your voice cracked. You pressed your palms against your legs, steadying yourself. "What if this is the one where something goes wrong? What if Adam gets pinned under a collapsing building? What if Bree doesn't make it out fast enough? What if you—"
You couldn't finish the sentence.
The lab suddenly felt very small. The screens glowed too bright. The processing hum of the servers vibrated through the floor, through your bones and in your ears like some constant heartbeat of danger. You felt a pit grow in your stomach.
“Hey, hey,” Chase reached out. His hand landed on top of yours, warm and still. "Breathe with me," he turned your hand over so your palm rested flat against his chest. "Match my rhythm. Slow it down."
You took a shaky inhale, focusing entirely on the steady, calm rise and fall of his chest beneath your fingers.
"Can I ask you something?" he added after a moment.
You blinked at him.
"How’ve you been sleeping lately?"
Your mouth opened. Nothing came out.
"That's what I thought." His thumb traced a slow arc across your knuckles. "And the last time you ate a real meal?"
"Yesterday," you managed.
"Dinner?"
You couldn't even remember. You remembered the kitchen chaos—Adam grabbing food off plates mid-sentence, Bree arguing about something, Mr. Davenport yelling about equipment damage. You remembered pushing your food around the plate and giving up.
"The answer's that long pause," he said quietly.
You wanted to pull your hand away. Deflect. Change the subject. Instead, your eyes burned and you could feel tears try to escape. You were supposed to be the steady one. The problem-solver. The person who kept her head down and did her job.
Except the steady one had been worried for weeks now, and your sleep and eating schedule were completely off because of it.
Chase let go of your hand, and for a moment you felt the absence like cold air. Then he stood up, walked to the holotable, and did something you'd never seen him do: he shut the whole system down.
Every screen. Every projection. Every blinking indicator light.
The lab went quiet.
"If you're going to talk, you're going to do it in a calm environment," he said, turning back around. "Not surrounded by battle schematics and all the other distractions. I do have to keep security on, though. Sorry about Eddy.” You looked over at the familiar emoticon on the screen and sighed.
"There's a mission tomorrow—" you started.
"There's a mission tomorrow that Adam and Bree can handle without me for the most part." He walked over and turned off the temperature readouts and the lights illuminating the diagnostic arrays behind you, dimming the room until the harsh glare was completely gone. "And my job is to keep you safe, too."
"Your job is to save the world. Plus, you’re their leader."
"My job," he said, settling back onto the stool across from you, "is to take care of the people I love."
The words landed in your chest. You stared at him.
He looked different in the dimmer light. Softer. The angles of his face still held that impossible symmetry, the kind that made scientists question whether he was really a human experiment, but his eyes were gentle. No data processing. No threat assessment. Just Chase.
"The what-ifs," he said. "I want to hear them. All of them."
"I don't want to burden you."
"Burden me."
You glanced at the nearest dark screen and started to spiral. "What if someone discovers your bionics? What if there's another Marcus? What if the government gets involved and you all get taken away? What if—"
"Okay." He held up a hand, not to silence you, but to slow you down. "Let's break this into pieces."
You exhaled slowly.
"Our outside discovery risk is currently at 3.2%," he said. "That’s calculated across threat vectors, data leaks, and surveillance exposure. It’s down from 14% last month. The lab's cloaking systems are running at optimal efficiency, and Davenport’s intel network hasn't flagged any credible interest in Davenport Industries."
"Okay, but what if there’s someone else out there who knows how to program bionics? What if another Marcus and Krane thing happens?"
"Davenport and Douglas are the only two people who know how our programming works. Now that Krane is gone, there’s no way something like that could ever happen again. Marcus is gone too. Krane's operation was dismantled. The emergency protocols we built in response mean that even a worst-case scenario with double agents would take months to fully execute, and by then we'd have identified the threat."
He spoke with calm certainty. The same voice he used when explaining complex physics, when walking you through his engineering breakthroughs. It was soothing and familiar, like a song you'd heard a hundred times.
“Now what about the government? What if they take you away or try to deploy you or use you as weapons at some point or run experiments—”
"The government," he continued, "isn’t going to take anyone away. Because that scenario only happens if they discover us, which brings us back to the 3.2%."
"Three point two percent isn't zero."
"No." He leaned forward. "It isn't. But you can't live your life bracing for a 3.2% possibility. That's like wearing a helmet inside your house just in case the ceiling falls. The odds are with you… unless you live with Adam."
Your chest ached, but differently now. Less like fear and more like something cracking open.
"Do you want to know what I've been working on?" he asked, tilting his head toward the dark holotable. "Not mission stuff. Personal project."
You nodded.
"A miniature gravitational field stabilizer," he said, and his face lit up—that boyish enthusiasm that appeared when he talked about theoretical physics. "For portable technology uses. The challenge is managing the energy output without destabilizing the local spacetime curvature. Every time I think I've solved it, the math shifts. But yesterday I realized—"
You let out a breath you hadn't realized you were holding. The tension uncoiled from your shoulders, your muscles loosening slowly. Your head felt heavy. Without thinking, you leaned sideways and rested it against his shoulder.
He didn't stop talking. He just shifted slightly to make space for you, his hand coming up to rest on your back, fingers tracing gentle patterns. His voice hummed through his chest, vibrating against your cheek as he kept explaining the physics with growing passion.
"At a certain point, the field should maintain stability independently. Think about it like a gyroscope—once it achieves sufficient angular momentum, it won't tip over. I just haven't found the right material for the superconducting core yet. Bree says I'm overcomplicating it. Adam says I should just use duct tape."
You smiled a little.
"I told Adam that duct tape is not a component material for spacetime manipulation," Chase said, sounding affronted. "Then, he said that's exactly what someone who's never tried duct tape would say."
Your eyes closed. The weight in your chest had eased to a dull ache. You could feel his heartbeat, steady and even. The hum of his voice continued, and you let it fill your mind, drowning out the constant loop of worry and fear.
"We also discussed the possibility of using graphene. But temperature variance creates conductivity issues in certain energy ranges, so I'd need a composite structure, which introduces flexibility problems…"
He trailed off.
"Still awake?" he asked.
"Mmhm." Your voice came out lazy.
"How's the granola bar situation?"
You opened your eyes, glanced at the discarded bar on the workbench. Your stomach didn't clench this time. It just felt empty.
"Maybe I'll try again," you said.
Chase shifted, glancing at the elevator. "The kitchen has leftover soup from yesterday. I don't know what's in it, because Adam made it, but it smelled nontoxic."
"That's a glowing endorsement." You looked up at him slyly.
"I can also make you toast and some warm tea. I might’ve gotten an A- in Home Ec, but toast and tea are well within my capabilities."
You laughed again. The sound surprised you. It felt like something you hadn't done in weeks.
"Toast sounds good," you said.
Chase stood and held out his hand. You took it, letting him pull you up from the stool. His fingers stayed wrapped around yours.
"One more thing," he said.
You looked up at him.
"You don't have to carry this," he said quietly. "The weight of our world. The missions, the secrets, the danger. I need to go into missions knowing I'm coming back to you, not to a version of you that's been slowly worrying herself to exhaustion about what could happen to us."
Your lips pursed.
"Can you be here with me? Not anticipating every disaster?"
"I can try," you responded.
"That's all I'm asking." He squeezed your hand. "Now come on. Toast awaits."
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anotha fluff chapter! yay! i lowk might redo this at some point or do another thing like this about mental health because it’s something i’ve struggled with too.
also!! if you’re still reading, i love requests so please reach out!









