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Painting Walls Red-Krueger X Reader

WARNING/CAUTION: This story contains violence, mass shooting, blood, mentions of death, and hurt children.

The first thing Y/n noticed—absurdly, irrelevantly—was that the colors didn’t go together.

Her blood struck the peach-painted brick wall in front of her with a wet, startled sound, spattering across the uneven surface in a way that made her stomach twist more from aesthetic offense than pain. Peach. That awful, tired shade of peach that clung to public school hallways like a bad decision no one wanted to own. It was the kind of color you chose when the budget committee said good enough and the principal nodded along while approving a raise for himself in the same breath.

She had always hated that wall.

Now her blood was on it—bright, vivid red against washed-out orange-pink—and it clashed horribly. It looked wrong. As an art teacher, as someone who spent her days correcting children gently when they mashed colors together without thought, she felt a flicker of shame at the mess she was making of the space. This wasn’t even a good red against peach. It wasn’t dramatic or intentional. It was ugly. Jarring. When it dried—and it would dry quickly, she knew that much—the tones would fight each other even more aggressively.

At least the blood on the floor would look better.

Her gaze slid, unfocused, to the glossy white tiles beneath her. Red always looked better on white. It had contrast. Purpose. Even dried blood had a certain stark honesty against pale surfaces. She found herself cataloguing it automatically, the way she did when planning lessons or displays. Wet versus dry. Hue versus saturation. The brain clinging to routine because routine meant control.

Then the force hit her.

Her body jolted forward as the bullet tore through her shoulder, the impact knocking the air out of her lungs in a sharp, voiceless gasp. Heat bloomed immediately—white-hot and spreading—followed by a nauseating pressure that made her vision blur. Her hands failed her. Her knees buckled. She went down hard, chest and stomach slamming against the tile as her cheek scraped the floor.

Her second thought came with startling clarity.

Sebastian was going to be furious.

Not loud-furious. Not shouting. Worse than that. The quiet, lethal kind that meant something had gone irreversibly wrong. His wife—shot. Bleeding out on a school floor. Dying in a building painted in colors that offended her on a spiritual level. He was going to hate this place. Hate the walls. Hate the ceiling.

God, the ceiling.

That horrible orange ceiling that someone, at some point, had looked at and decided was acceptable. It hovered above her now, ugly and oppressive, its fluorescent lights buzzing faintly. She’d joked once that whoever chose that color must have been either dangerously cheap or dangerously high. Empire State Building levels of high. If the school had ever paid her for summer work—if there had ever been time—she would’ve repainted it herself. Soft neutrals. Something calming. Something that didn’t make children restless and teachers irritable.

She wasn’t going to get that chance now.

Sebastian would be mad that she’d turned her back on an armed teenager. Mad that she’d assumed—stupidly, optimistically—that she could move fast enough, that she could be careful enough. Mad that she’d gone into the hallway at all. Mad that she’d chosen to lock the bathroom doors, one by one, so the eleven students hiding inside would be safe.

He would be mad that she’d done the right thing.

And he would be furious that she hadn’t been smarter about surviving it.

Another gunshot cracked through the hallway.

Her body jerked again, pain detonating through her waist this time—deeper, uglier, the kind that made her throat tighten and her vision dim at the edges. She bit down hard, tasting blood, her fingers curling uselessly against the floor as her muscles spasmed. This one was worse. This one settled in her bones, radiating outward in slow, sickening waves.

She knew then.

She wasn’t getting help in time.

The school had been in lockdown for hours—four, if her sense of time was right. Long enough for fear to curdle into something heavy and quiet. Long enough that whatever was happening outside had escalated beyond police cars and shouted commands. There had to be negotiators by now. Tactical units. Someone making careful plans while inside, children waited in bathrooms and classrooms, counting breaths and praying.

They would prioritize the living.

They should prioritize the students.

Even if officers reached the second floor in time—even if the shooter went down immediately—paramedics wouldn’t reach her fast enough. And if they did, they’d triage. They’d choose the kid with a chest wound over the bleeding teacher on the floor. She couldn’t fault them for that. She wouldn’t want them to choose her.

Her breath hitched, shallow and uneven, each inhale burning. The floor felt cold against her cheek now. The white tiles blurred, smeared with red.

Sebastian was going to walk into this after it was over.

He was going to see the walls.

The floor.

And he was going to understand exactly why she’d done it.

She only hoped—dimly, selfishly—that someone would repaint the hallway afterward.

Because the colors really didn’t match at all.

She felt a strange, unwelcome pang of pity for the boy who had shot her.

He was at the bathroom entrance now, slamming his shoulder against the door in uneven, frantic bursts. The sound echoed down the hallway—dull, hollow thuds that vibrated through the tile beneath her cheek. It was an ugly sound, uncoordinated and desperate, like someone attacking a sculpture with no understanding of where the stress points actually were.

The door didn’t budge.

She didn’t feel bad about that.

The students inside were doing exactly what they were supposed to do. They hadn’t opened the door (not that they could anyway since she had locked it). They hadn’t screamed or begged or tried to reason with him. They were silent. Hidden. She imagined them clustered together in the cramped bathroom, shoes tucked under stalls, hands clamped over mouths, eyes wide and shining. She hoped they were confused more than terrified—confusion was softer, easier to survive later. Fear left sharper marks. She hoped the lockdown drills had stuck. She hoped muscle memory was carrying them through when conscious thought couldn’t.

She hoped—fiercely, irrationally—that someone would make sure they got help afterward. Real help. Not assemblies and pamphlets and a counselor brought in for a week before the school quietly moved on.

No. That wasn’t why she felt sorry for him.

She felt sorry because she knew what would happen if he survived this.

If the police arrested him—if he was dragged out alive, wrists cuffed, head forced down—he would never see the inside of a courtroom. Not really. He wouldn’t sit behind a table in an ill-fitting suit and listen to charges read aloud. He wouldn’t get the chance to stammer out apologies that were too late and insufficient. He wouldn’t get to hear parents speak about the children he’d taken from them, their voices shaking with grief and rage.

He wouldn’t even live long enough to take himself out in a concrete cell, alone with his thoughts.

Because Sebastian would find him.

That certainty settled in her chest with the same awful weight as the pain in her body. She knew her husband too well—better than anyone else alive, better than anyone who had ever tried to understand him. Sebastian did not leave loose ends. He did not forgive injuries that could not be undone. And this—this—was not something he would allow the world to resolve on its own.

He would break laws like matchsticks. Pull strings that didn’t officially exist. Follow trails that weren’t meant to be followed. He would hunt the boy down with the same quiet focus he brought to everything else that mattered.

And he would not make it quick.

That was why the pity curdled into something heavier, uglier. Sebastian would not grant mercy. He would not confuse efficiency with kindness. He would make it slow. Educational, in his own way. Pain drawn out, measured, each moment underlined, annotated, made to mean something. He would want the boy to understand exactly what had been taken from him. To feel it. To sit with it.

She knew, too, that Sebastian wouldn’t frame it as justice for the children.

That part of the truth stung, even as she acknowledged it.

The children would already be dead. There would be nothing he could do for them. Sebastian didn’t waste energy on what couldn’t be changed. He wouldn’t pretend otherwise. Their deaths would be facts—fixed points on a timeline that no amount of rage could alter.

But she—his wife—being dead?

That was something he could respond to. Something he could act on. Something he could carve his grief into.

So yes, she felt horrible for the boy in that sense. Because he was going to disappear into some quiet, forgotten place—an abandoned structure, a basement that didn’t echo, a stretch of land where no one listened for screams. He would be restrained with deliberate care, immobilized in a way that left him fully present for what came next. Sebastian wouldn’t rush. He never rushed things that mattered.

And yet—layered beneath that horror—there was a smaller, colder truth she couldn’t deny.

Part of her was glad the boy would die.

Glad that he wouldn’t be allowed to walk away from the destruction he’d caused. Glad that the pain he’d scattered through the building would condense, finally, into something that answered back. From Sebastian’s perspective, it would all funnel toward her—his grief narrowing until it had only one outlet.

Still, the boy would have time to sit with his thoughts. To replay the moments again and again. To be haunted by faces he barely remembered, by voices that cut through sleep. He would live with the ghosts long enough for them to matter.

A broken sound tore from her throat—half whimper, half gurgle—before she could stop it. Pain surged, white-hot, stealing her breath. She hadn’t meant to make noise. It slipped out of her anyway, dragged loose by her body’s rebellion.

She wasn’t sure how many times she’d been hit. Just that the first bullet had torn through her shoulder, had sent her blood blooming across the wall like a grotesque, uncontrolled mural. She knew—knew with sick certainty—that there was another bullet lodged somewhere in her back, fired after she’d already gone down.

That one felt different. Deeper. Meaner.

The boy hadn’t even been smart enough—or kind enough—to shoot her in the head.

The pain was everywhere now, a burning field that drowned out sensation. Her muscles spasmed involuntarily, limbs twitching as she wheezed shallow breaths. The blood pooled beneath her body felt unreal, distant. She couldn’t feel the wetness anymore, just the heat—like lying too close to a kiln, skin and nerves overwhelmed by intensity.

Her mind reached for art again, reflexively.

It felt like standing too close to a canvas that had been overworked. Too many layers. Too much pigment. No negative space left to breathe.

The boy glanced at her then.

She saw his eyes flick toward her—saw that he registered she was still alive, still moving, still choking on air. And then he looked away. No apology. No hesitation. No attempt to end it.

He turned back to the bathroom door and threw his shoulder into it again.

The impact reverberated through the hallway, but the door held. They always did. Thick, reinforced, built heavy enough to withstand more than people gave them credit for. She found herself thinking, distantly, about how different schools were built in different places. In the United States, they reinforced doors to slow shooters. Here, in Austria, the same doors existed because of earthquakes, because of avalanches—because the land itself was violent sometimes.

People forgot that.

The irony would have made her laugh, once.

The boy would never get through that door.

And she would never get up from this floor.

Her vision blurred, the peach wall and white tiles bleeding together into an abstract composition she would’ve failed a student for submitting. No balance. No harmony. Just chaos, splashed where it didn’t belong.

She wondered—briefly, faintly—if Sebastian would repaint the hallway after if she managed to voice that as a request to someone before dying.

Not because it mattered.

But because the colors were wrong.

And she had always believed that wrong things should be corrected, if someone was willing to put in the work.

Tears welled in Y/n’s eyes, blurring the hallway into soft, bleeding shapes, and for a moment she couldn’t tell what had summoned them. It could have been the pain—sharp, searing, everywhere at once, the kind that left no room for thought. Or maybe it was the humiliation of lying there, helpless, watching the boy fail again and again at the bathroom door, his frantic attempts almost laughable if she hadn’t been dying on the floor behind him.

She wanted to call him stupid.

The word hovered on the back of her tongue, heavy and half-formed, but she wasn’t sure she could make sound anymore. Her throat felt thick, uncooperative, like a brush left too long in dried paint.

Or maybe the tears were for the students.

For the ones already dead somewhere in the building—classrooms turned into crime scenes, desks and backpacks and unfinished assignments abandoned forever. For the ones still alive, hiding like she’d taught them to, who might bleed out just like her if help didn’t come in time. She wondered how many of them were art students. How many had complained about color theory, about shading, about how nothing ever looked right no matter how hard they tried.

She hoped—desperately—that someone would tell them it hadn’t been their fault.

Another wave of grief rolled through her, heavier than the rest, and she knew this one’s shape immediately.

Sebastian.

Leaving him behind felt wrong in a way she couldn’t articulate. Not romantic, not sentimental—structural. Like removing a load-bearing wall and expecting the house to stay standing. Sebastian would burn the world if left to his own devices. He always had that capacity in him. She had been the counterweight, the quiet hand on his wrist, the presence that redirected the worst of his impulses into something survivable.

Without her?

The thought sent another sting of tears down her temples and into her hair. He would tear through everything in reach—not because it was necessary, not even because it was just, but because it would give his rage somewhere to go. And she wouldn’t be there to stop him. To ground him. To remind him that not everything broken needed to be destroyed further.

Her body shuddered, an involuntary tremor that did nothing to warm her. Cold had settled deep inside her, creeping through muscle and bone, and she understood dimly that it wasn’t environmental. It was internal. Structural failure.

She thought of the body the way she thought of art: balance, composition, restraint. Too much red removed from a painting ruined it. Threw everything off. Took away depth and warmth and left only absence behind. Losing too much blood did the same thing. It wasn’t the blood itself that killed you—it was the oxygen that went with it. No oxygen meant no movement. No movement meant no life.

Bleeding out, she thought distantly, was dying by suffocation in slow motion.

Her eyelids fluttered.

When she opened them again, the boy was standing over her.

No—kneeling.

He dropped down beside her and grabbed her shoulder with rough impatience, rolling her onto her back. The movement ripped a sound out of her that she hadn’t known she could still make, a wet, broken noise that tore at her throat. Pain detonated through her body in blinding bursts, and she gagged as something warm flooded her mouth.

Blood.

It slid down her tongue, thick and metallic, and spilled backward into her throat instead of onto the floor. Panic flared. She couldn’t swallow properly. Couldn’t spit. Her stomach lurched violently, and then she was retching, helpless, vomiting up half-digested food and sour bile that splashed across her chest and mixed grotesquely with her blood.

It was obscene. Humiliating. Intimate in the worst way.

She coughed hard, chest burning, desperate to keep her airway clear, her body jerking in sharp, painful spasms. Each cough sent fresh agony lancing through her back and shoulder, white-hot and unforgiving.

The boy didn’t even flinch.

He paid her no attention at all, already rifling through her pockets with quick, clumsy movements, searching for something—keys, she realized numbly. The bathroom key. Something to get him inside, to finish what he’d started.

Her vision swam, but her gaze snagged on the knife strapped to his thigh. Dark handle. Clean. Useless to her. She didn’t have the strength to reach for it, let alone pull it free and use it.

But then she saw the gun.

He’d set it down on the floor beside her, careless, thoughtless—an amateur mistake so glaring Sebastian would’ve smacked her for it if she’d ever done something so stupid. It lay there within her reach, solid and real, and something primal ignited inside her chest.

Adrenaline surged, sharp and sudden.

She snatched the gun with shaking fingers and lifted it, arm trembling violently as she pointed it up at him.

The boy froze.

His eyes went wide, terror flashing across his face as he realized what he’d done, what was about to happen. Y/n focused on the trigger, on the simple mechanics of it, the four pounds of pressure it would take. Four pounds. Less than a bag of flour. Less than some textbooks.

She couldn’t do it.

Her finger refused to move, muscles screaming in protest, her arm sagging as weakness overwhelmed the brief spike of strength. The world tilted. Her vision narrowed.

The boy reacted instantly.

He slammed his fist into her wrist, knocking the gun from her grip. It clattered across the tile, the sound sharp enough to send a spike of pain through her skull. Light burned her eyes. Noise felt physical now, like something striking her from the inside.

She wondered—detached, almost curious—if artists who painted death ever considered how unbearable the senses became at the end. How everything hurt. How slow it was.

A new sound crashed through the hallway.

Glass shattered somewhere nearby, the noise ringing out like a thousand bells breaking at once—beautiful in a terrible, crystalline way. Then came the bang, deeper and louder than the others, a concussion that left her ears screaming.

The boy’s head snapped up.

Another bang.

Then another.

She watched as he collapsed, his body dropping with none of the awkward resistance hers had shown. Blood burst from his face, splattering across the floor and walls in violent arcs, a grotesque parody of abstract art. Red on white. Red on peach. Sudden. Final.

He hit the floor and didn’t move.

Y/n stared at him, chest hitching, vision fading at the edges.

Sebastian was going to be furious now.

Furious that his wife was dead.

Furious that he hadn’t been the one to kill her killer.

The thought struck her as absurdly funny, and a weak, broken breath escaped her—something almost like a laugh. She figured it was the hypoxia. The lack of oxygen and nutrients reaching her brain. Nothing about this should be funny.

And yet.

The hallway blurred into color and shadow, edges dissolving, composition finally breaking apart. The painting was finished now, whether she liked it or not.

She wondered, dimly, if Sebastian would hate the colors as much as she did.

Something moved into her field of vision.

At first, her brain registered it as nothing more than a shadow—dark and shapeless, eclipsing the fluorescent glare above her. Then weight pressed down on her shoulders, firm and sudden, and a sound tore out of her throat before she could stop it. It wasn’t quite a scream. More a broken, raw cry that dragged air into her lungs and ripped it back out again in a violent cough.

It hurt so much worse with pressure.

Weight made everything sharper, brighter, unbearable. Her body reacted on instinct alone, legs jerking weakly as panic surged through the haze. For a split second, a horrible thought clawed its way forward—that this was another kind of monster, someone who wanted to feel her pain under their hands before ending it. Someone curious. Cruel.

She kicked, heel scraping uselessly against tile.

Her vision refused to focus. All she could see was green—fabric, mesh, something draped and irregular. A sniper’s hood, she would have known that on any other day. Now it just looked like a net pulled over a nightmare. She was too far gone, too dizzy, to realize how close she was, close enough that she could have seen a face through the mesh if she’d been capable of looking properly.

She didn’t see the eyes.

Didn’t see the shock flaring there, wide and immediate, when the soldier realized who was bleeding out on the hallway floor. Didn’t see the way his hands tightened reflexively, adjusting their grip to keep her steady, to keep her alive.

What she did feel was pressure—deliberate, practiced—hands bracing her shoulders, shifting just enough to avoid grinding bone against bone. Pain screamed through her again, hot and blinding, and she sobbed around it, chest hitching.

Then—something clicked.

Slowly, through the fog, she understood that the hands weren’t hurting her on purpose.

They weren’t fumbling. They weren’t panicked.

They were trying to stop the bleeding.

Another figure dropped into her vision, this one faster, heavier. Knees hit the floor beside her with a dull thud, and she barely had time to register the movement before hands gripped her under the arms and lifted her upright. The motion ripped another wet, broken sound from her throat as agony detonated through her back.

She gasped, sucking in air too fast, too shallow, vision smearing at the edges as fingers pressed against the wounds in her back—searching, counting, sealing. The pain crescendoed into something almost abstract, a solid wall she couldn’t see past. Her muscles spasmed violently, body shaking as if it were trying to tear itself free of the sensation.

She couldn’t feel anything else.

Not the cold tile anymore.

Not the blood.

Not even fear.

Just pain.

Her thoughts scattered, slipping through her grasp like wet paint she couldn’t control. Somewhere, someone was talking—short, clipped words, the language of people who knew exactly what they were doing. Hands moved with purpose, pressure increasing, shifting, locking into place.

Her vision tunneled.

Black crept in from the corners, thick and heavy, swallowing the hallway inch by inch. As consciousness began to slip, one last thought surfaced with bitter clarity—Sebastian, being treated like this, on some other battlefield, hands just as rough, just as necessary. She’d always wondered how he endured it with such silence and that it must not be all that horrid.

Now she knew.

It was hell.

And then the dark closed over her completely, merciful and absolute, as the world fell away.

************************************************************************

When Y/n woke, the first thing she noticed was that she was no longer surrounded by peach.

That alone felt like mercy.

Her eyes fluttered open to a space that was undeniably better than a school hallway—quieter, cleaner, more intentional—but that didn’t mean she liked it. The floor beneath the bed was a deep brown-red, polished to a dull sheen, and the lower half of the wall directly across from her was painted the same shade. It reminded her uncomfortably of dried clay or oxidized paint left too long in the tray. Not pleasant. Not inviting. Just… there.

Ugly, she decided faintly.

Still, it was better than the peach-painted brick wall she’d last seen. Better than white tile soaked dark with her own blood. She’d take bad design over that any day.

Her gaze drifted left, sluggish and unfocused, and landed on a window that stretched from floor to ceiling. The frame was wood—real wood, not laminate—stained to match the brown tones of the room. Outside, a hill rose gently upward, covered in dense trees that blurred together in shades of green. The glass was clean enough that it almost didn’t exist, and for a moment she felt like she was looking at a painting hung too close to the bed.

It took effort to think.

Her mind felt wrapped in fog, like she was trying to navigate a forest at dawn with a flashlight that only flickered on when it felt like it. Thoughts came slowly, bumping into one another, slipping out of reach just as she tried to grab them. She stared at the trees, letting their familiar shapes coax her brain into working.

A hospital.

She was in a hospital.

Her throat burned.

Dry. Scratchy. Raw, like she’d been breathing dust for hours or screaming herself hoarse. She swallowed reflexively and immediately regretted it, a sharp discomfort dragging down her neck. She frowned slightly, confused. She hadn’t been shot there.

Oh.

Right.

She’d been shot.

The memory surfaced not as images but as sensations—heat, pressure, the floor too close to her face, the wrongness of red against peach. Her chest tightened, but the panic didn’t come. Maybe she was too tired. Maybe whatever they’d given her had wrapped her emotions in cotton.

Someone must have reached her in time. Police. Medics. They would’ve slowed the bleeding, packed her up, stabilized her enough to move her here. That meant she was alive. Which meant—after a few slow, deliberate breaths—that she was likely in UKH Salzburg. The view outside matched. Tree-covered hills. Trauma center. She’d read about it often enough to recognize the geography now that she thought about it.

Severe trauma cases.

She supposed she qualified.

Her eyes wandered again, cataloguing the room the way she always did, even before her students noticed. Artist’s instinct. The space was… sparse. Empty in a way that felt deliberate rather than neglected. White walls above the brown-red band. Clean lines. Functional furniture. A chair tucked neatly against the wall, a small table beside it, shelves with minimal clutter.

Color was scarce.

Brown. White. The occasional intrusion of medical blue or yellow. Red from warning labels. Black cords. Grey metal. None of it aesthetic—purely utilitarian. It was the kind of room that made no attempt to soothe through beauty, only through order.

She found herself oddly and shamefully grateful for that.

Her mouth was painfully dry now, the sensation impossible to ignore. She licked her lips and winced. Why was her throat this bad? Had bleeding out dehydrated her that much? Or was it the oxygen? The tube? She didn’t remember a tube, but that didn’t mean there hadn’t been one.

Her mind jumped, annoyingly, to paint again.

Uncovered paint dried out. Became unusable. Ruined the budget. She hated when students forgot to seal their lids properly—hated how fast good material could become waste when neglected. She wondered vaguely if the human body followed the same rules. Leave it open too long and it dried out. Lost its usefulness.

Her eyes dropped to the equipment beside the bed.

A heart monitor hummed softly, its steady rhythm reassuring in a way she didn’t consciously register until later. An IV line snaked into her arm, secured with tape that tugged unpleasantly at her skin. It itched—an irritating, insistent sensation that begged to be scratched. She resisted, knowing better. The IV was doing its job. Messing with it would only make things worse.

It struck her as strange that the IV itched while the places she’d been shot only ached dully, deep and heavy, like bruises layered beneath tight fabric. When she shifted even slightly, the wounds pulled uncomfortably, skin stretched over stitches she couldn’t see but could feel. Her limbs felt weighted, as though gravity had increased while she slept.

She didn’t like that.

Moving made her dizzy too—a brief but sharp spin that forced her to stop and breathe through it. She stayed where she was, half-upright, unsure if she was even allowed to reposition herself yet. Her body felt fragile in a way she wasn’t used to.

Water.

She needed water.

How long had it been since she’d last had anything to drink? Hours, at least. She didn’t feel rested enough for it to have been days. Her eyes tracked the room again, slowly this time, careful not to provoke another wave of dizziness.

There—a digital clock mounted high on the wall.

Red numbers glowed softly against the white, slightly blurry no matter how hard she focused. She blinked, once, twice. The blur didn’t clear. The clock read 07:30.

Seven thirty.

Morning.

Confusion flickered through her. It had been afternoon when she’d been shot. That meant she’d been out longer than she thought. Overnight, at least. The idea made her chest feel tight again—not fear, exactly, just disorientation.

Hospital rooms had call buttons.

Didn’t they?

If she could find one, she could ask for water. Ask why her throat felt like this. Ask how long she’d been unconscious. The thought of pressing something, of making someone come help her, felt both necessary and daunting.

A sudden chill swept up her arm, sharp and unexpected, and vanished just as quickly. She shuddered, the movement sending a stronger ache rippling through her shoulder and abdomen. A small whimper escaped her before she could stop it.

Her gaze snagged on something red hanging beside the bed.

A cord.

It dangled within arm’s reach, attached to a small red box on the wall. The call cord. Relief flickered weakly through her chest.

She lifted her hand.

The effort shocked her.

Pain flared immediately, a throbbing protest that traveled up her arm and into her shoulder. Her fingers felt clumsy, uncooperative, like they belonged to someone else. She tried to curl them and failed, breath hitching as she fought through the resistance.

Slowly. Carefully.

She managed to close her fingers around the cord, panting softly at the exertion. It startled her how breathless she felt from such a small movement. Her chest rose and fell unevenly, and she paused, gathering herself.

Pulling the cord took almost everything she had.

The motion reminded her, bizarrely, of trying to pull the trigger on the gun back in the hallway—how impossible it had felt, how weak her hand had been. She tugged the cord once, hard enough to make the box click faintly, then let go immediately, exhausted.

Her head fell back against the pillow with a quiet, pained sound.

She closed her eyes, breathing shallowly, waiting for someone to come.

And hoping—very quietly—that the water would come soon.

The wait for someone to come didn’t stretch nearly as long as she’d braced herself for.

The door opened quietly, the hinge barely making a sound, and a man in dark blue scrubs stepped into the room with practiced ease. The movement drew her attention immediately, her eyes drifting past him before she could stop herself. For just a second, she caught a glimpse of the hallway beyond—bright, sterile, and too busy for the early hour. A woman stood there with a man and a little boy, all three angled toward a doctor. The child had one finger buried unapologetically in his nose, knuckle-deep and entirely unbothered by the adults around him.

Y/n felt a laugh try to claw its way up her chest.

The absurdity of it—the normalcy—hit her harder than she expected. She attempted to breathe it out as a quiet chuckle, but nothing came except a dry, rasping exhale that scraped unpleasantly against her throat. The sound startled her more than it amused her. The door closed gently behind the nurse before she could look again.

He moved closer, eyes flicking over the monitors beside her bed with quick efficiency. Numbers, lines, and soft beeps reflected faintly in his gaze before he finally looked down at her properly.

“Glad to see you awake, Mrs. Krueger,” he said, voice calm and warm despite the faint shadows beneath his eyes. He smiled—not the forced kind, but the careful one people learned when they worked around pain every day.

“Hhhnn…” she tried, unsure what sound she was even aiming for. Her tongue felt like it had been replaced with something heavier, swollen and uncooperative. She swallowed and tried again. “Hi.” The word came out rough, but recognizable.

“That’s good,” he said approvingly, checking the IV line in her arm. She shuddered reflexively at the sight, the movement sending a ripple of ache through her shoulder and abdomen that made her jaw tighten. “How are you feeling?”

She considered that for half a second before settling on the most urgent truth. “I—I need… water.” Her voice was barely more than a rasp, each syllable taking effort.

“Of course,” he said immediately. “I’ll get you some.” His hands moved smoothly as he continued his assessment. “Any sharp pains?”

She shook her head instead of answering out loud. The motion was a mistake. The room tilted unpleasantly, and she whimpered softly as dizziness washed over her in a slow, nauseating wave. “Dizzy,” she murmured.

“That’s pretty common when you wake up,” the nurse reassured her, watching the monitor as her heart rate ticked along slower than average but steady. “It’s actually a good sign—it means the fluid in your inner ear is doing what it should.”

She didn’t know enough about anatomy to argue with that, so she accepted it.

“I’ll grab you some water and bring the doctor by,” he said, already turning back toward the door.

When it opened again, the family in the hallway was gone.

In their place stood someone in military gear.

Y/n’s foggy mind snagged on the details automatically—uniform, posture, the unmistakable outline of a sniper’s hood. He stood close to a doctor, head inclined slightly as if listening rather than speaking. She couldn’t hear what they were saying, but the doctor’s expression was serious, attentive. The soldier didn’t move much. He didn’t need to.

The door closed again, cutting off the view.

Silence settled back over the room, broken only by the muted rhythm of the heart monitor and the faint hum of hospital life beyond the walls. Her hearing felt… off. Not muffled exactly, but dulled, like listening through water that hadn’t quite swallowed the sound. She could tell what noises were—voices, footsteps, distant carts—but everything arrived softened, edges blurred just like her vision.

Time stretched.

Longer than she would have liked, but not long enough to justify irritation. Hospitals were like that—triage, priority, limited hands. She knew the drill. It wasn’t so different from school, really. Too many needs, not enough resources. You learned to wait your turn, learned that patience was often mistaken for neglect.

She thought, oddly, of bake sales.

Of coaxing parents into donating cupcakes and brownies so the art department could afford decent brushes. Of smiling through budget meetings where creativity was treated like a luxury instead of a necessity. The parallels amused her faintly.

When the door finally opened again, it wasn’t just the nurse who returned.

He came in with the doctor she’d glimpsed earlier—and the soldier.

The nurse moved first, adjusting the bed slightly and bringing a cup with a straw to her lips. The first sip of water was blissful, cool and grounding, easing the fire in her throat enough that she almost sighed. She drank slowly, careful not to cough, while the doctor watched her with professional focus.

The soldier remained a step back.

She studied him from the corner of her eye, curiosity threading through the haze. He stood with his hands relaxed at his sides, posture straight but not rigid. The sniper hood was still up, shadowing his face but not enough that she could make out details clearly. It struck her as odd—why was he here? Had he been part of the response? Was he meant to ask her questions later?

Or—

Her mind, unhelpfully, drifted.

Did he know she was married? If he was about to say something charming or inappropriate, she’d have to shut it down gently. She could already hear Sebastian’s voice in her head—flat, unimpressed, teasing in that way that hid steel beneath it. He’d blame it on the drugs. Or the trauma. Or both.

She swallowed another mouthful of water and resisted the urge to smile.

The doctor stepped forward at last, introducing himself and beginning to explain her condition in measured terms—multiple gunshot wounds, surgery successful, no immediate complications. Y/n listened as best she could, nodding faintly when appropriate, letting the information wash over her in manageable pieces.

Through it all, she was acutely aware of the soldier’s presence.

Not threatening. Not intrusive.

Just… there.

And somewhere deep beneath the fog and the ache and the lingering fear, a quiet certainty settled into her chest.

Sebastian knew where she was.

And nothing—absolutely nothing—would have kept him away.

“You’re awake.”

The voice cut through the fog like a blade through cloth.

Y/n’s eyes widened, breath hitching as recognition hit her faster than thought ever could. Even dulled by medication, even warped by the strange way high and low pitches slid past each other in her ears, she knew that voice immediately. It anchored her. Pulled her back into herself.

The man stepped closer, boots soft against the hospital floor. One gloved hand reached for hers, enveloping her pale, weak fingers. The contrast was stark—his glove rough and worn, her skin fragile and too thin, veins faintly visible beneath it. His grip was careful, deliberate, as though he were afraid of breaking something already cracked.

“S-Seba—nnn.”

The effort nearly stole her breath. The name was too long, too complicated for a mouth that didn’t want to cooperate anymore. It came out broken, half-swallowed.

“Take your time speaking,” the doctor said calmly from where he stood, watching closely. “And don’t speak much. Use short words.”

Y/n barely registered him. Her focus never left her husband.

Sebastian lifted his other hand and pulled the sniper veil back from his face. The mesh slid away, revealing him fully now. His brown eyes were steady at first glance—controlled, unreadable—but she knew better. She always had. She saw the tension there, the barely restrained relief, the violence of emotion compressed into stillness because there were other people in the room.

Her chest trembled.

She tried not to cry. She knew it would hurt. She knew the pain would spike and bloom if she did. But the medication dulled her control just enough, loosened the careful hold she normally had on herself, and tears welled anyway. They slipped free, hot and uninvited, streaking down her cheeks.

Sebastian’s thumb moved immediately, rubbing slow circles over the back of her hand. His other hand rose to her face, pushing loose strands of hair away from her eyes, wiping tears before they could fall further.

“Easy,” he murmured.

“Breathe deeply,” the doctor instructed, stepping closer to her other side. “Calm yourself. You can’t cry hard right now—you’ve got internal damage, and we don’t want to aggravate it.”

The warning only made it worse.

Her breathing hitched, tears coming faster, and before the doctor could intervene again, Sebastian moved. He released her hand and cupped her face with both of his, palms warm even through the gloves. He leaned down until his forehead rested against hers, grounding her with the solid pressure of him.

“Calm down, baby,” he whispered.

The word baby—soft, private—cut through the noise like nothing else could. She saw it then, clearly: the relief in his eyes, fierce and undeniable, tangled with command. Not control over her—never that—but over the moment, over the chaos.

Slowly, painfully, she followed his lead. Inhale. Exhale. Short breaths at first, then deeper ones, until the sobbing dulled into quiet tremors. It took time, but eventually, she managed to stop.

Only then did the doctor step in.

“Alright,” he said gently. “I need to check a few things.”

Sebastian shifted back without protest, though he stayed close enough that she could still feel his presence. The doctor’s hands moved over her abdomen, careful but firm, pressing through layers of bandages and bruised skin. The area was wrapped thickly, swollen and dark beneath the gauze, and the touch made her shiver violently.

A small whimper slipped out before she could stop it.

Her hand reached instinctively for Sebastian again.

He took it immediately, holding on gently but with enough firmness to remind her she wasn’t alone. Together, he and the nurse carefully adjusted her position, lifting her a little higher. The movement sent sharp pain lancing through her shoulder and side, and she cried out softly, a broken sound that tore at her own ears.

“I know,” Sebastian murmured, low and close. “I know.”

The doctor examined the entry and exit wounds at her shoulder, his brow furrowing slightly as he worked. After a moment, he exhaled and nodded.

“That’s enough,” he said. “Let’s not push her.”

They eased her back down into a half-lying, half-sitting position. She sagged against the pillows, exhausted, every inch of her body aching.

“I need to document a few things and check on something,” the doctor said. “We’ll be back. If you need anything, pull the call bell.”

The nurse followed him out, the door closing softly behind them.

Silence fell.

The instant the latch clicked shut, Sebastian changed.

He leaned over the bed, bracing his hands on the metal rails, his posture no longer controlled for an audience. His eyes were wider now, raw with worry, his breath uneven.

“Fuck,” he said quietly. “I thought—you were going to die.”

He swallowed hard, jaw tightening.

“You were going to die if Yegor and I didn’t get to you in time.”

“I—”

He pressed a finger gently to her lips.

“No.”

The word was soft but absolute.

“That fucking brat,” Sebastian continued, voice low and venomous. “He’s lucky Yegor shot him before I could.” His forehead rested against hers again. “I would have skinned that little bitch alive.”

“I know,” Y/n murmured weakly, lips brushing his finger.

“Shh,” he said immediately. “Don’t speak.”

He leaned back slightly, then lifted her hair carefully, bringing it to his face. He inhaled slowly, deeply—the familiar scent grounding him. Something he always did after long separations, after close calls.

“I’ll ask Syd to come fix your hair,” he said quietly.

Her eyes drifted to her hair, awareness dawning sluggishly. It was long, tangled, stiff in places with dried blood. Someone must have brushed it, but no one had washed it. It would tangle worse the longer she lay there.

“A—”

“I said don’t speak,” Sebastian repeated, his voice gentler now, memory flickering behind his eyes.

The memory came back with brutal clarity.

He and Yegor on their knees beside her. Five bullet holes. Blood everywhere. His hands pressing hard, harder than he ever wanted to, stuffing wounds he couldn’t truly fix. He remembered ripping his hood off, desperate, hoping that if she saw his face, she’d fight harder to stay conscious.

She had tried to say his name.

Air hissed out of her body as she spoke. Then coughing. Gagging. Dark blood spilling from her mouth in a way that made his vision narrow.

He remembered throwing his full weight over her abdomen, cold and precise, because panic wouldn’t save her. Training would. He remembered the moment she went limp, consciousness slipping away.

They stopped trying to fix her then.

Yegor had lifted her, cradled her carefully, and they’d carried her out past screaming sirens and chaos, past police and Chimera operatives dragging people to safety.

They’d been lucky.

Chimera had been training outside the city.

He had been angry.

Angry enough to move faster than fear.

Angry enough to keep her alive.

Sebastian bent down and pressed a careful kiss to her forehead.

“You’re alive,” he murmured, more to himself than to her.