Warnings: blood, allusions to death, use of weapons, violence, slight choking, tension, tension, tension, kissing, suggestive at times, swearing, angst, pjo characters make an appearance (yayy).
a/n: *clears throat* So you know how I said I'd have more time to write... well... I lied. So, thank you for being patient enough for this chapter. This one means a little something extra, because at its core, the fic stems entirely from his chapter. Finally being able to post it feels kind of insane, so I hope you will love as much as I do (or not). All I have to say is, I'm sorry, I promise it's for the best. (mwaahhh <33)
Calm morning and calmer thoughts.
That’s what went through your mind as you walked along the beach, a mere hours before your team would talk strategy for the afternoon’s capture the flag. The gods knew how intense those talks could be because it was never just a game with the Greeks. And what better way to spend your Friday afternoons than avoiding getting mauled by eager campers, or patching up the wounded in the infirmary all evening.
You were in your orange camp tshirt, olive cargo pants, and hiking boots - yes, hiking boots on the beach. The sun was beaming through the clouds, the blue sky stretching beyond what the eye could see. To your left, the waves washed along the shore in a soothing melody as the forest extended itself out to your left. Your fingers instinctively trace figures along your pants, already trying to capture the scene in a drawing, mapping out the landscape, trying to imitate the curve of the water and the strength of the trunks.
A bird call catches your attention, the sound echoing through the trees, falling in harmony with the rustle of the leaves. Nature’s perfect symphony. The primal source of inspiration of artists throughout the millennials. A space of comfort, no matter how you are feeling.
You often wonder how Nature does it - how it maintains such a serene composure after seeing so much destruction. You wonder where it stores those memories, if it tries to forget or if the songs were a way of mourning the dead, of moving on from the ugliness - or simply showing you that everything will be okay.
You let your eyes wander ahead, trying to find what you came searching for.
Rather, who you came searching for.
You didn’t usually spend your mornings trying to seek him, but it had been a couple days since you couldn’t shake your conversations with him. His words playing on repeat in your mind, distracting you from every task, making you revisit memories you had wished buried for good.
In a sense, you weren’t resisting the thoughts that came to you - you welcomed them. Because although you were never going to openly admit it, he was right. You hadn’t properly made your peace with it - you had been burying it, distracting yourself from your feelings, hoping they would magically disappear.
Those were the wounds your gift couldn’t heal. No matter how hard you tried.
With those thoughts came reflections, and questions. Questions you wanted answered. To your relief, the answer - or at least you hoped so - was sitting on the edge of the far end of the dock, his arms holding his weight as he looked out into the horizon.
The boards creek as you walk up to him, your arrival being anything but discreet, making him turn his head around. Without a word, he shifts to the side, making room for you to sit. You take careful steps towards him, until you bend your knees and use your arms to steady your way down - his eyes following you as you do so.
You sit on the edge together, your weight pressed into your hands by your side, your legs swinging on the edge. A long moment of silence passes between you, both of you drinking in the view of the water sparkling beneath the sun, the clouds clearing up in waves. Your breathing was calm, even, matching his; your body familiar with his presence: the faint cologne he wore because too much would attract monsters or the frequency of deep inhales and exhales.
“You know, I’ve thought about what you said.”, your voice cuts the silence.
James nudges his head to the side, raising an eyebrow, one eye closing as it gets hit by light. “About ..?” he asks, perplexed.
You return the look, meeting him halfway. “About showing less vulnerability”
He looks down. “Ah- aye.” he lifts his head back up, letting his gaze drift along the horizon - unwilling to face the genuine conviction in your eyes.
Something he knew would make him do whatever you said.
“Yeah. So, I don’t see how you find it to be a weakness.” you argue.
He opens his mouth to say something but the response dies on his tongue.
“And-” you continue, “ I've also thought about this other thing you've said... That it was survival advice, right?”
“Mhm”, he hums in approval.
You fix your gaze on the side of his face, unwilling to let go. “What did you survive that made you think this way?”
His posture stiffens for a split second before he exhales loudly, releasing something he had unknowingly held prisoner. Something twists in the deepest part of his chest, toying with his heart.
Every time, without fail, you seem to unravel him. You stand in front of the walls he had built for years and find a way to utilize the smallest cracks.
And the worst part? You didn’t even do it on purpose
But the scariest part? He didn’t want to resist.
You both stay waiting, frozen in time. He shifts his focus from the horizon to your eyes, in a slow movement of his head.
And for once, there wasn't any mischief or playfulness hidden behind them. No smart remarks begging to be released.
It was… soft. Understanding. Almost… kind.
His shoulders were slightly angled towards you, his back relaxed. A wild curl settled itself on his forehead - the sun painting his hair a lighter shade of brown. His freckles stood out against his pale skin, his nose turning a light shade of red, protesting the amount of light it absorbed.
You found yourself holding your breath. Unsure if you’ll take another one.
The way he looked at you… it felt foreign, uncharted territory. A place you wished to explore. Territory you wanted him to guide you through.
He huffs out a breath.
“Don’t know where to start.” he looks back at you “Haven’t we all survived too much?”
The question weighs between you. Ready to be answered. But also ready to be forever pending.
You look down at your feet dangling off the edge of the dock, your fingers drumming on the wood, occasionally bumping his.
Haven’t we all survived too much?
“It’s part of the deal I guess.”, you attempt.
He shifts his weight from arm to arm, his expression hardening.“A deal I never wanted to be a part of.” he replies, his accent growing thicker, leaving bare the bitterness of his words.
You let his confession sit. How it reflected who you were. How a demigod is expected to defy death and be grateful. How you become acquainted with fear. How you avoid indulging in sweets moments to protect yourself when they turn sour.
The reminder of the essence of your existence placed a weight on your chest, crept up your throat, begged to be let out.
“Splendid pre-game strategy sunshine. What a way to play with my feelings” his voice cuts the silence as he grins infectiously, and you can’t help returning it - the weight seemingly vanishing without a trace.
Gods damn his perfect smile.
You let out a soft laugh. “I was being serious, you know.”
“Ah - shame.” he rests his hand on yours. “Though, trust me when I say you’d be great at emotional manipulation.” he gently taps his fingers against your own, emphasizing his point.
You glance at where your hands connect, taking in its weight, and you make no effort in making it stop.
You lean in, the air thick between you. “I’ll take your word for it.” your words barely a whisper.
He hums, low and deep, letting his jaw drop slightly as his eyes flicker to your lips, his breathing shallow. Uncertain.
Your eyes betray you when they glance at his parted lips. Your mind drifting to the possibility of leaning in even closer.
Though before either of your bodies could make something happen, he presses mouth into a line, looking into your eyes almost apologetically. The air between you shifts quickly, throwing you off guard.
He brings his knee to him, helping him stand up.
The once warm air becomes cooler as it hits your now exposed hand.
You barely had the time to register what had happened when your eyes followed his movements as he started walking backwards, a slight bounce in his steps.
“See ya in a couple hours”, he winks as he calls back - the simple gesture doing nothing to help your rapidly beating heart.
Once he had turned his back to you, you watched as he disappeared in the distance, a warm feeling spreading across your body.
Your hand traces where he had touched moments ago, the reminder of the feeling making you grin - your mind having erased the last couple of seconds.
Maybe there was more to Moriarty than what met the eye.
Maybe he wasn’t so bad after all.
…
Malcom Pace, one of the Athena demigods, slams the camp’s map against the center table in the Athena cabin. As the main strategists for the games, no one argued that the Apollo and Hermes cabin would join them there.
“Let’s try something different this time.” He lifts his head in your direction. “Let’s have you as the only guard on the flag.”
Your breath catches in your throat.
What.
“No.” protests Annabeth Chase, the youngest, yet one of the most respected strategists. “That wouldn’t work. We need at least two people so that we get maximum coverage. We’d be setting her and our team up for failure.”
“Wait wait listen listen-”, Malcolm raises his hands defensively.
“Do I have a say in-”, you try cutting in.
“Please hear me out.” Malcolm insists with a heavy tone. Every head turns towards him, the room deathly silent, eager to hear the bold plan.
“They’re expecting y/n and Kayla to be on the flag. So when we have Kayla around our ranks, she becomes an element of surprise - since they don’t expect her, they don’t plan to protect themselves from her.”
“That’s true.” Chimes in Kayla Knowles, your fellow half-sister from the Apollo cabin . “I’ve noticed that they change their armor’s weak points when they know I’m on the offensive line. They are less vigilant when I’m not.”
Annabeth frowns and crosses her arms. “How can you be so sure?”
Kayla’s eyes light up. “It took some time to figure out, but after every game when we would debrief, the archers would talk about not being able to hit specific parts of armor. And every time I’m on, those spots magically disappear.”
“So your strategy is an assumption?” Annabeth challenges.
“It’s based on careful observation and deduction. You work the same way, A.”
She hums, her face relaxing. “Touché.”
Malcolm’s hands clap together, the loud sudden sound making you jump. “Perfect! So we’ll be doing that.” He turns towards you. “That cool?”
You chuckle nervously. “Well, I would’ve loved a heads up beforehand but hey - doesn’t seem like I have much of a choice.”
He grins. “She agrees - wonderful. Ok let’s talk about offense.” he turns his head to the side. “Annabeth-”
“Right. So, I think every squad of campers should have two archers with them. We need the deadly combination of close combat and long distance protection.When both work hand in hand, we’ll be a fully operating, moving battle station.”
She traces her finger across the map, past the river and taps at the red team’s flag.
“You see how the flag is placed on a high surface?”
A couple hums and nods.
She looks up, scanning the room. “What does that mean?”
“Easy. They have the advantage. It’s a perfect spot for any spear shooters or lookouts, even if it’s ten yards away from the flag.” you respond in a single breath.
She nods in approval.
“Yes. Now, I have my cap, so when I’m invisible, I can sneak around them, but I’ll need a distraction.”, she continues.
“Wait a second-,” interjects Malcom, “- this was our strategy last time. They’ll definitely be expecting you.”
“And that’s why you have me,” points out Kayla, “The defense is definitely not armed the same as the offense. Which means-” she taps her quiver already strapped to her back, “-they’ll have some sweet weak spots I can play with.”
You flash her a knowing smirk which she playfully returns. There was nothing the poor red team’s defense would love more than having one of the deadliest archers of camp play target practice with their armor.
You tap on your side of the forest where your flag would be standing. “That leaves our defense which is going to be more important than ever… Because let’s not forget that I’m alone.”
Annabeth nods, her arms crossing in front, her eyes fixated on the map, barely blinking.
Malcolm looks between you, mouth slightly agape, trying to protest the suggestion that the attack plan wouldn’t be sufficient.
“Malcom, think for a moment,” Annabeth places a hand on the table, her gaze serious and unwavering as she challenges her half-brother. “How can you be sure they put the armor Kayla can pierce? If your offense fails, we’re completely exposed.”
“And you’re forgetting how good Moriarty and Clarrisse are at either singlehandedly piercing the offense or sneaking up behind our defense.” you argue in her favor.
Someone clears their throat in the background.
Heads turn as Luke Castellan, son of Hermes and head counsellor of the Hermes cabin, who was silent for most of the talk, pushes himself off of the wall he was leaning against. He takes calculated strides as he makes his way towards the table, a stern and focused expression painted across his features.
People moved aside to let him pass, the air tense with anticipation. Annabeth steps aside as well, the twelve year old demigod eager to hear what he has to say.
“If we start nit picking at every detail of their strengths, we’ll never find a solution” he starts, his low voice echoing through the cabin. “What's definite is that playing safe is risky. We have to make a change - something - it’ll throw them off.” he offers.
Annabeth squints. “We’re not playing safe, we’re playing strategically.”
Luke raises an eyebrow, pressing his weight on his arms as he leans onto the table. “Think of Malcom’s idea as a bold strategy.”
She scoffs. “It’s reckless.”
“It’s fun.”
Annabeth huffs. “There’s no way it’ll work.”
Luke grins, his eyes lighting up. “I say it’s worth a shot.”
…
They were taking too long. They never took this long.
You fidget with your bow as you walk along the perimeter of your flag, the golden carvings on your weapon catching and absorbing what was left from the sun through the intense foliage of the forest.
It was quiet. Never has the forest been quiet. The air felt heavy, as though it was waiting for something to happen, every tree a spectator for whatever show they had the privilege, or the misery, to observe.
You take slow steps on the ground, careful not to make too much noise. You wanted to keep a minimum of stealth, because although an attacker would certainly expect you, you still hoped to have an edge over them.
You pass a nervous hand on your face, every breath unable to properly escape your throat. You were never this anxious - it was just a game.
“Exactly, it’s just a game, it’s going to be fine”, you quietly mutter to yourself. Hoping that putting your words into the open would will your body into calming itself.
You look around, focusing on holding your breath at each inhale and exhale, reviewing shooting techniques in your head, taping your outer thigh were you hid your dagger in its hilt.
The knot in your throat slowly undoes itself, bringing your senses back to their baseline.
“See,” you whisper, talking to yourself. “Nothing a little of planning and breathing can’t-”
A twig snaps.
Your head whips around towards the sound, your hands having armed and readied your bow in a split second. A slight tension in the string where you held the arrow kept you ready without tiring your arms. Your heels steady in the ground, your body still in its place. Your ears perk up, trying to pick up anything else.
Leaves rustle to the other side.
You carefully shift your stance. Your weapon following your movements.
Another rustle, even closer; the sound came from the bushes ahead.
You stand your ground, the distance sufficient to shoot if anyone were to surge and surprise you.
Your hands tighten in the string, the tension rising in case he -
A bunny rabbit jumps out.
You blink.
Oh.
You exhale loudly in relief, a breath you had been unconsciously keeping in. You softly chuckle as you lower your bow. The rabbit catches the movement and rapidly hurries away, your eyes following until he is no longer visible.
Again, nothing to worry about.
But something felt off.
You couldn’t shake the weight pulling at your gut, or how the back of your neck prickled whenever you took a step forward. You tighten your grip on your bow.
Snap.
You whip your body around and the glint of celestial bronze catched your eye.
With a gasp, you step aside, narrowly missing the hit of a sword. The sudden movement makes you stumble sideways, your legs nearly tangling and tripping you. Your heart skips a beat when you dodge the second strike, your eyes unable to focus on your attacker.
At the third strike, you lift your arms to block it, your bow taking the brunt of it without breaking, its wood enchanted by your father as a gift to absorb force when hit, but flexible when time to shoot.
Your heels dig into the ground as the hit makes you stumble backward. You swing your bow to the side, pushing off the blade away from you as you shift your body away. You catch a glimpse of familiar curls as the person stumbles to the side where you redirected the strike.
Your head frantically darts to the side, making sure there isn't anyone else you should worry about, before focusing ahead.
You arm your bow with an arrow, the point aiming in the middle of his chest.
He smirks, tilting his head forward mockingly. “Sunshine.” he says, greeting you.
You huff. “Not my name, Moriarty.”
He lifts an eyebrow, amused. “Thought you’d be used to it by now.”
“Drop the sword.”, you order.
His smile drops, his gaze settling on the arrow you still pointed at him.
His eyes flicker back towards you. “You don’t have the guts”, he challenges bitterly.
He steps closer, and you respond by keeping the distance.
Your jaw tightens. “Try me”, you grit between your teeth.
You take a step back and shoot an arrow in his direction, he sidesteps and avoids it, nearly getting scratched at the thigh, before lunging at you.
You dodge and quickly unstrap your dagger, readying it at your side.
But he was fast.
Whatever you did, you were dodging, ducking, stepping back - barely getting a hit in.
You were breathing hard, desperately trying to step back and give yourself space to shoot, but he always seemed to fill it.
You decided to attempt a shot, although he was too close, but you were eager to have at least something work.
You miss.
Before you could retreat or retaliate, he was already in your space, moving faster than what the eye could see. He grabs the arm holding the bow and uses it against you as he flips around and pushes it onto your neck.
Your other arm flies out to push back against your own weapon, wincing at the unexpected pressure.
He’s pressed to your back, pulling his arm towards you as leverage, the movement only increasing the struggle of your arms against your own bow that inched in the direction of your neck. You grunt, feeling muscles tire, begging to let go.
“Come on, you can give up now. No shame.” he teases, the mocking ring of his tone making your skin crawl.
“You would love that wouldn’t you”, you bite out, breathing loud and heavily.
He hums and forces the bow deeper and your arms jerk in response, every fiber trembling uncontrollably, its borders starting to press down on your neck. Your breathing turns ragged and uneven, your body unsure where it should put its energy.
With power you didn’t believe still resided in you, you dropped to your knee and rolled forward, the impact of your body against his loosening his grip and giving you the window you needed to evade his grasp.
You roll to the side, grabbing your weapon from his hands, small rocks scratching your skin, leaving a greater sting to your aching muscles.
You stumble as you stand, your arms swinging heavily by your side, desperately trying to hold onto your bow. Beads of sweat tickled down your neck, your mind scrambling to find an exit.
Where the hell was my backup-
Oh.
Right.
He chuckles, lazily twirling his sword in his hand while you catch your breath. “Ready to give up now?”
You glare at him. “You first.”
You both stay where you were. Feet planted solidly in the ground, ready for the next round, the air shifting in anticipation.
His smile slowly fades, replaced by something you couldn’t quite corner.
And he drops his sword.
Your breath catches in your throat.
What.
The celestial bronze falls with a loud clang, the sound echoing through the trees, and James raises his hands - in surrender.
His face pulled in a serious expression, his gaze fixed on you in a way that made your skin tingle in response.
You blink, your eyes darting hesitantly from the weapon laying on the floor, to the completely defenseless man in front of you.
What kind of game was he playing?
You should shoot, tie him, something. Nothing was preventing you from it. This was your chance.
But you don’t.
He lets his hands drop and slowly steps closer.
Your pulse falters.
What was he doing?
Before your rational mind took control, your feet moved on their own, pulling themselves towards him. Like a pair of magnets.
What was I doing?
His pace quickens. Your heart hammers in your chest.
Your drop your bow and quiver, unbothered by the sound the arrows make as they hit the floor. All you cared about was how your steps mimicked his.
How you were getting closer by the second.
Both of your steps sync as they border on a jog and your hands find a renewed purpose - they grab his face and your lips crash into each other.
His fingers mirror your own, sprawled across your cheek, holding behind your ears. His lips ardently move against yours, eager to kiss every inch, leaving nothing untouched - unexplored.
And all you could feel was relief.
Like a coil was undone inside your chest.
How everything fell into place the second his lips touched yours. How you molded perfectly together.
So much to be said - but you settled on it being shown.
You sigh into his mouth and he swallows the sound. Your arms instinctively try to bring him closer, grabbing his shoulders, his neck, his face - trying to find his heart, trying to figure out if this was real.
You stumble backwards and James places a hand on your lower back, steadying you as he presses you to the nearest tree.
You didn’t care about the game anymore. If you lost, you would make some type of excuse. Nothing mattered more than having James in your arms.
And that was terrifying. How much you craved him. How easily your body gladly gave itself to him. How much energy you had spent trying to rid yourself of your desires, all for the work to come undone in seconds. How eager you were to remember everything he was giving you: the curve of his shoulders, the heat of his mouth, the softness of his lips, the fragrance of his hair.
James slowly detaches from your lips, letting himself look into your eyes for a moment. Both of your chest heaving against each other, your noses holding a little bit of contact. You take in the sight of his deep brown eye, how when you looked closely, you found a hint of dark red.
He breathes in, taking in your smile, how your eyes softened when they met his. How you nudged your head up, glancing once again at his slightly swollen lips, hungry for more.
And gods was he a weak man.
He could only oblige. His lips crash once more against yours, and you could feel his smile - the sensation sending shivers down your spine, making you feel more alive than ever.
He slips from your mouth, leaving trails of warm kisses along your jaw, up to your earlobe, and down your neck - like a man starved. You let your head fall back against the trunk of the tree, allowing him to explore and leave a trace of himself wherever he wanted, letting yourself feel. Your fingers find the back of his neck, grabbing his hair at the base - desperately needing something to hold onto as your knees molten. The only thing keeping you standing being the press of his body against yours.
He lets out a groan that traveled through your skin and made your eyes flutter shut, shaking something deep inside your core. He kept muttering something against your skin, too low for you to hear, but the sound vibrated and traveled every inch of your body, the overwhelming intensity of it all making you wish you had given into your desires earlier - somewhere more private, where you had hours only to yourselves…
“I am so sorry,” he mumbles between kisses, his voice clear enough to decipher, breaking the air that settled around you, "I promise it’s for the best”.
You hum, sweet breaths escaping your lips, hanging in the air. “What are you talking about,” you whisper, your brain complete mush from the way he worked his mouth on your neck, “There’s nothing to forgive –”
A sharp pain to your side cuts you off.
And suddenly, you could feel everything that was muffled out. The distant yell of campers, your pulse roaring in your ear, the shift of the dirt beneath your feet, the heat of James’ neck where your hand rested and the tickle of his mouth against your skin once soft turned rough.
His rhythm slowed down, his lips leaving one last kiss as his head hesitantly backed up from your neck, pausing midway. Your noses bump as he takes one last look into your eyes.
There was nothing to read.
They were empty.
Avoidant.
Dead.
That wasn’t James.
His face pulled in a stern expression – lips pursed together, his hand on your waist, once warm – was freezing. He turns his head away, and you try following his gaze but the pain throbbed even more, reminding you of its unavoidable presence.
Something shifts in your gut as the throb hits in an all too familiar way.
You recognized it.
No.
Impossible.
It couldn’t be.
You slowly glance down.
The hilt of James Moriarty’s dagger was sticking out of your waist.
Crimson red blood rapidly stains your shirt.
No.
No.
No.
Adrenaline starts coursing through your veins. Your heart beating in an entirely different manner than it did a minute ago.
“Shit.” you mutter. “Shit shti shit shit shit.”
Your legs give out as you slump down the tree in one motion - your muscles unable to hold you upright. The sudden motion made the knife twist and you grunt loudly in response, tears filling your eyes, clouding your vision. You furiously blink them away, your mind scrambling to calm itself amidst the searing hot pain.
With every second, more blood was spilled. You attempt to apply pressure on the wound, but your cold and trembling fingers would not oblige.
You desperately try looking around, for someone - anyone - that could help you.
James had disappeared.
He was nowhere to be found.
Coward.
A breath too deep made the knife move again - you let out a yell between your teeth, heavy and ragged breaths escaping your mouth.
A black curtain starts creeping up your vision, blocking the periphery.
No no no no no.
You felt more and more nauseous.
You try once more to bring your fingers around the wound. A desperate final attempt in using your gift to try saving your life.
You muster every ounce of will to drive your fingers around, trying to find the vessel that had been cut.
In vain.
The pain made you see stars, your focus completely shattered. Your hands slump to the side, as you slowly lost sensation in your extremities. Everything felt cold.
Your breathing got more shallow.
Your eyelids droop.
Fight it. Fight it.
Your sheer will failed as you started drifting away, everything starting to feel numb.
A lingering pain followed as you fell into the abyss.
Though you couldn’t tell if it came from the gaping wound in your side, or your heart shattering in a million pieces.
Taglist: @whosscruffylooking;@wolfiemarley; @beck123122; @13ariaa; (let me know if you want to be added to the taglist!)
Jack Abbot x Fem!Reader
word count: 5k
warnings: depiction of emotional and psychological coercive control in a relationship, the aftermath of physical abuse (non-graphic), emotional affair, infidelity (justified…in my opinion 🤭)
"Then he should have punched me."
Jack's voice is flat and final, like he's already considered every version of this argument and dismissed them all.
"What?" You look up at him, "Jack, if he hurt you… I don't know what I would do with myself."
"Then please...." He holds your gaze. "Look at it from my perspective. He did hurt you. He hurt you because I was selfish and took something that wasn't mine to take."
His hands are still reaching toward you, still hovering, still giving you the choice. Right now you hate him for the option.
"You didn't take anything I didn't freely give you, Jack," you whisper.
That stops him completely.
Then, carefully, each word placed like he's making an incision: "What happened between us wasn't right. But it does not give him the right to do this to you."
"I know." You've been practicing it, the plain acceptance of it. "He's never… well not like this. Never physically."
Something works in his jaw. "Maybe not physically. But I have watched him take you apart piece by piece for years. Watched you shrink in rooms you used to fill." Rougher now, rougher than you've heard him. "And I have hated myself for every second I didn't stand in his way."
He clicks his teeth together, hand balling into a fist, and begins to pace the length of the curtain and back, holding himself in with visible effort. He is not a man who paces. That is the thing that tells you how close to the surface this is, that the careful structure of his restraint is, for once, not quite holding.
3 Months Earlier
It's been two days since the rooftop, two days during which Tyler has been blessedly, entirely absent. First, golf with the hospital president, a guest lecture at one of the most prestigious medical schools in Pennsylvania, a schedule so full he's barely been home long enough to notice you haven't been sleeping.
You sit in your car in the hospital parking structure and stare at the entrance and don't move.
Your hand hovers over the ignition. There’s no choice but to go in. You have a shift. That is a fact that exists independently of everything else that has happened in the last forty-eight hours, and you are a doctor, and you are going in.
Jack is going to be there.
You have been thinking about what you're going to say since approximately two hours after you left the rooftop, lying on your side of the bed in the dark while Tyler slept, turning words over in your head with the exhaustion of someone trying to construct an apology for something they are not entirely sure they're sorry about.
I shouldn't have done that. True, but insufficient.
That can never happen again. Also true, but it feels like a lie in your mouth.
I put you in an impossible position and I'm sorry. This one. You keep coming back to this one.
He is your attending, technically your superior. You kissed him on a rooftop and he kissed you back and now you have to walk into a trauma bay and work a twelve-hour shift beside him as if none of it happened, and the only version of that future that functions requires one of you to say something first.
You are going to be the one to say it. That is why you have been sitting in this car for eleven minutes.
By the time you badge through the doors the speech has dissolved completely, which is maybe for the best, because it was never going to survive contact with his actual face.
The floor is already moving — the controlled urgency you have come to understand as the building's heartbeat. You scan the bay automatically, clocking who's where and what's running, and you find him immediately, the way you always find him, like some part of you has been calibrated to his frequency without you noticing.
He's at the board, back to you, marking something off. His shoulders are set , already three problems ahead of wherever everyone else is.
He hasn't seen you yet, which means you have approximately four seconds before he turns around.
I'm sorry I put you in that position.
I'm sorry it happened.
Fuck I can't keep doing this.
He turns and his eyes find yours across the floor. Jack goes still for a fraction of a second and then his expression settles into something that is not quite neutral but is doing a convincing impression of it.
He crosses the floor toward you, pace unhurried. Everything about him is unhurried. You have always suspected he practices it.
"You're early," he says.
"I wanted to—" You stop. The speech is gone. Damn it. "I—uh...I wanted to talk to you. Before the shift."
He looks at you for a moment. Reading you, the way he always does, the way you have spent two years pretending not to notice. Then he tips his head toward the small break room at the end of the hall. "Walk with me."
The break room is empty. He holds the door open for you, then closes it behind him. Suddenly, there is very little space between the two of you, and both your mind and your heart are acutely aware of this fact.
"I'm sorry," you start.
The door swings back open.
"Abbot I need you to come look at—" Robby stops. His eyes move from Jack to you and back to Jack with the speed of a man whose read of a room is, unfortunately, very good. "Oh. Fuck. Am I interrupting something."
"Actually—" Jack starts.
"No, not at all," you say, at the exact same moment.
Jack turns back to look at you.
"I can wait." You mean to sound easy about it, unbothered, two colleagues having a routine pre-shift conversation that was definitely not about anything. "It can wait."
Jack looks back to Robby. "Give us two minutes."
"Sure, yeah, absolutely, take your—" Robby gestures widely at nothing and backs through the door and pulls it mostly shut, leaving a gap of approximately four inches that tells you he is definitely still standing right outside it.
You both look at the gap.
"He's still standing there," you assume.
"He's definitely still standing there," Jack confirms.
You press your fingers to your mouth. The laugh that escapes is small and helpless and entirely against your will, and Jack watches it happen with an expression you can't quite read — something that looks, for just a second, like relief. Like the version of you that laughs carelessly at things is something he has been waiting to see again for two days.
You look away first.
"For fuck's sake," Jack gets out under his breath, and walks out the door with the resignation of a man who has accepted his fate. "Give me five minutes."
You hear Robby's voice in the hall, bright and immediate: "Okay so there's a forty-two year old in bay four who's insisting it's not gas even though it is absolutely—" and then the door swings shut and you are alone in the break room.
You stand there with your cold coffee and your unfinished apology and the ghost of a laugh still in your chest.
Through the small window in the door you can see them — Robby talking, hands moving, Jack listening with his arms crossed and his eyes tracking across the floor. He doesn't look back at the break room...not even once.
You tell yourself that's the correct outcome. The apology will keep. You are beginning to understand that everything between you and Jack Abbot keeps — accumulates, layers, waits — and that neither of you is very good at finishing the sentences that matter most.
Jack approaches you twelve minutes later, not five, because Robby's consults never take five minutes. You are at the counter pretending to chart when you hear him.
"Sorry," Jack apologizes.
"How's the forty-two year old?"
"Gas."
"Shocking."
He stops at the counter beside you, close enough that your arms are nearly touching, and picks up a chart he probably doesn't need. You both look at your respective screens.
"I wanted to say—" you start.
"Alright you two, I am ready to hand these people off because I have a date tonight with my couch and four episodes of something I am not going to tell either of you about." Heather Collins materializes at your elbow with the energy of someone who has been on her feet for twelve hours and has fully made peace with it.
"Of course," you comply behind a smile that physically pisses you off to produce.
You do not look at Jack. You feel him convincing himself not to look at you.
The shift handoff moves the way it always moves: bed by bed, bay by bay, Dana your favorite day shift charge nurse leading the procession with the efficiency of someone conducting a very unglamorous orchestra. You fall into the walk naturally, slotting into the loose cluster of doctors moving through the floor.
Somehow, you end up beside Jack.
Not by design, because there is never a design. It simply happens the way things between you two simply happen…without announcement, without permission, the way water finds the same path every time.
Bay three: sixty-year-old asthmatic, stable, no overnight concerns. Heather hands him off to you. The group shuffles forward. In the shuffle, the back of Jack's hand grazes yours — brief, accidental, or close enough to accidental that neither of you has to decide what it was — and you feel it in your wrist, your elbow, all the way up to your shoulder.
Bay five: Dana is explaining a medication adjustment and you are nodding and Jack shifts his weight and his shoulder presses against yours for a moment, warm and solid, the same shoulder that was warm and solid against yours on a rooftop two nights ago, and you think about that with twenty percent too much of your brain while the other eighty percent continues to function as a doctor.
You are getting very good at this particular kind of multitasking.
You move into the corridor between bays. There's a cart blocking the hallway and the space compresses. Jack steps behind you to let a nurse pass. For three seconds, he is close enough that you can feel the presence of him at your back without him touching you at all. Then his hand finds the lightest possible contact at your hip — navigating, the most ordinary gesture in a busy hospital — and it is gone before you could have pointed to it.
You keep walking. Your face is doing something you wish it wouldn't, BUT you are controlling it.
Bay seven. Bay eight. The handoff winds down, and the cluster disperses. You realize that you are running out of corridor, running out of reasons to be standing this close to him.
Heather signs off with a wave and disappears. Then it is just the two of you at the end of the hall...the shift stretching out ahead and the thing you still haven't said sitting exactly where you left it.
He turns to you.
"You were going to say something."
"This is ridiculous," you groan, and you mean it… the frustration of the last twenty minutes finally finding somewhere to rest.
"What is?"
"I—" Two nurses pass between you, clipboards out, mid-conversation, entirely indifferent to the fact that you are trying to have the most careful conversation of your professional life in a hospital corridor. You wait. They pass. "I had a whole thing I was going to say to you. Before the shift. I rehearsed it." You exhale. "And I cant get two consecutive sentences out without the universe intervening."
"So say it now."
"I'm trying." You look at him. "I'm sorry. For the rooftop. For putting you in that position."
He is quiet for a moment. The floor moves around you — a monitor somewhere, footsteps, the very normal noise of the place — and he stands in it like none of it touches him until he decides it does.
"Are you sorry it happened," he asks, "or are you sorry about what comes after it."
You look at him. He looks back, still and steady, waiting for the honest answer as if he has all the time in the world and will not accept a substitute.
"I'm not sure how to answer that," you admit.
You look down the hall. A resident is moving toward you with a tablet and the focused expression of someone who needs an attending, and you watch Jack clock it too, watch him make the same calculation — thirty seconds, maybe forty, before this gets interrupted again.
"Let's finish this shift." He looks back at you. "We take care of the patients. And we figure out the rest later. When there's time to do it properly."
"And if there isn't time?"
"There will be." Said with a certainty that is either reassurance or stubbornness…and with Jack it is sometimes hard to tell the difference, but you have never been sure it matters.
The resident arrives. "Dr. Abbot, I have a question about the patient in bay six—"
"One second." He doesn't look away from you. "Are you okay?"
The question is so simple and so direct and so entirely not what you were prepared for that you almost say fine, the reflexive, load-bearing fine that gets you through most days.
You don't.
"I don't know," you tell him honestly. "Are you?"
He holds your gaze for a moment. "No," he gets out, plainly, because the truth you have come to learn, is the only language he cares to speak. "Not particularly."
Then he turns to the resident. "Show me."
He walks away, and you stand there in the corridor for a moment with the ghost of the conversation still warm around you.
I'm not sorry it happened.
I am very sorry about what comes after.
It happens at 2 a.m.. Typical.
The trauma comes in fast — forty-minute ETA that turns into twenty, the radio crackling ahead of the ambulance, and by the time the bay is prepped you have just enough information to know it's bad.
You're already moving when the doors open, Jack two steps ahead of you, the team falling into formation around the gurney, bodies that know the choreography before their brains catch up.
"Get me a pressure," Jack orders, hands already moving. "What's his last BP?"
"Eighty over fifty and dropping," the paramedic rattles off, "lost consciousness twice in the rig—"
You are mid-assessment when Lena appears at your elbow. "Cardiothoracic is sending someone down."
Something cold and specific moves through you. "Who."
She looks at you with an expression that tells you she already knows and is sorry about it. "Tyler...Dr. Bane."
You breathe. "Okay."
"He's already on his way down."
"Okay," you say again, because it is the only word currently available to you.
The bay doors open.
Tyler walks in.
He is in his scrubs, hair slightly ruffled from being called down at 2 a.m., and he is already looking at the monitors before he's fully through the door which is, you have always known, one of the genuinely good things about him. He is a talented doctor. That has never been the problem.
"What's the situation," he says, to the room. Then his eyes find you. "Hey."
"Hey," you reply.
Jack gives him the rundown without looking up from the patient — vitals, suspected bleed location, imaging on its way — voice even and clinical and giving nothing away, and you wonder, not for the first time, how he does it. How he stands in the same room as Tyler and sounds like that.
"I'll need to see the scan before I can tell you what we're dealing with," Tyler informs him.
"Imaging's two minutes out." You say it before you've decided to. "There's a possible hemothorax based on breath sounds. Left side."
Tyler looks at you.
"Good catch," he nods in your direction.
A compliment. Delivered in the tone he uses when he wants other people to hear him complimenting you. Playing the part of the generous partner, the supportive superior. You know the difference between that and the real thing because you have been cataloguing the difference for over a year.
"Thanks," you turn back to the patient.
The next twenty minutes are all work… clean, focused, the kind of medicine that requires all of you and leaves no room for anything else. You move around each other in the bay, you and Jack and Tyler and the rest of the team, and it is fine. It is professional. It is exactly what it should be.
And then the imaging comes back and Tyler steps up beside you to look at it, close enough that his arm presses against yours, and it is nothing like the way you feel Jack's arm against yours. The comparison moves through you before you can stop it, unwanted, clarifying and awful.
"There." Tyler's finger lands near yours on the screen. "You see that?"
"Yes," you respond.
"Smart." Quieter now, the compliment smaller and more private, meant for you and not the room. The version of him that shows up when he wants something back. "You were right."
Across the bay, Jack is writing something on a chart, completely focused on what he is doing.
You watch his pen move across the page and you think about standing on a rooftop two nights ago, about what you are carrying into this room. You think about the fact that Tyler's arm is still against yours, and you have not moved away from it because moving would mean something, would be a tell, would be a moment that neither of you is ready to have in a trauma bay at 2 a.m. with six people watching.
So you stand there. You look at the scan. You breathe.
"I want to take him up," Tyler says finally.
"Agreed," Jack nods.
"I'll call the OR." Tyler steps back from the bed.
The bay reorganizes around the transfer prep, controlled and quick, everyone knowing their role. You are doing yours, hands busy, mind working, and Jack moves to your side of the bed to check something. For a moment you are standing close together with the patient between you and Tyler on the phone six feet away.
"You're doing fine," Jack says, to the chart, to no one, to you.
You don't look at him. "I know."
"I know you know."
The transfer team arrives and the room finally empties. Tyler ends his call and catches your eye on his way out and then he's gone, through the doors, following the gurney up.
The bay goes quiet.
You strip your gloves, drop them and stand there for a moment in the specific silence of a room that just held something urgent and now holds nothing.
Jack is doing the same thing three feet away.
"Good work," he repeats himself.
"You already said that."
"Worth saying twice."
You look at him then. He looks back. There is nothing on his face that anyone could point to, and there is everything on his face that you have learned to read. All you can think is that you are so tired, and it is 2 a.m., and you have eight hours left on this shift…you can’t be doing this.
"I need some air," you whisper.
"Take ten minutes. I've got the floor."
"Hey." Close behind you, low enough that it's only for you, and you turn away from your locker to find Jack standing near enough that it takes a second to calibrate.
"Jack, what the fu—"
"Can I walk you out?"
You look past his shoulder. The locker room is empty, but the locker room is never empty for long. "I don't think that's—"
"I'm walking you out." A small lift of his hand, open-palmed. "Nothing more."
You take a breath. "Okay."
He tips his head toward the door.
The parking deck at 7 a.m. is its own specific world — grey concrete and the hum of the ventilation system. Most of the night shift is already gone. Your footsteps sound too loud, his hand is tight around his bag strap, and yours find the hem of your jacket and stay there.
You've made it past two rows of cars when he says it.
"I'm not sorry."
You nearly stop walking.
"You're not."
"No." He shakes his head once, looking straight ahead. "I'm not."
"Oh." The word comes out smaller than you intended. You look down at the concrete. "Why aren't you… why aren’t you sorry?"
He's quiet for a moment. It’s not because he’s searching for the answer, you know the difference. He’s deciding how much of the real answer to give you.
"I thought I would be," he admits. "I've been waiting for it. Since the moment you left that rooftop I kept thinking — tomorrow. I'll feel it tomorrow." He shrugs. "I don't."
You stop walking.
He takes two more steps and then stops too, turning to face you, and the sunrise breaking the horizon behind him is doing something genuinely unfair to the angles of his face. You shake your head, you have been awake for fourteen hours, and you have no idea what to do with any of this.
"Jack—"
"I'm not saying it was right." His eyes find yours and hold them, direct, the same way that used to feel like solid ground and now feels like something more complicated that you don't have a name for yet. "I know what it was. I know what it cost." Something works through his jaw. "I've thought about every part of it."
The parking deck drones on around you. Somewhere on the level below, a car starts, reverses, disappears.
"I have too," you admit. "Every part of it." You glance back at the building behind you, the habit of checking, always checking. "And I've thought about what you asked me. Earlier."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
He waits. He is so good at waiting.
"I'm sorry that I…don't feel more sorry about it happening," you finally get out. The confession lands in the cool air between you and stays there.
He stares at you. And then, slowly, almost imperceptibly, his shoulders drop. Just the fraction that tells you he has been holding something since the rooftop and has just been given permission to put it down.
"I'm not proud of it," you push on. "I never thought I'd be the kind of woman who—" You stop. Start again, because the sentence deserves to be finished honestly. "I never thought I'd kiss someone while I was with someone else. But no." Your eyes find his and hold. "I'm not sorry it happened."
The silence that follows is not uncomfortable. That is almost the most alarming thing about it.
Jack looks at you for a long moment. In the thin early light his face is very still, you have spent two years learning to read the things he doesn't say, and what you read right now makes your chest do something inconvenient and unwelcome.
"Okay," he gets out.
"Okay." A little helplessly. "That's all you have to say?"
"What would you like me to say?"
"I don't know." You push a hand through your hair. "Something that makes this easier."
"I don't have anything like that." Not unkind. Just straight on, no padding. "What I have is — I meant what I said on the rooftop. All of it. And I'm not going to pretend I didn't."
"This is a mess," you tell him.
"It is." He doesn't flinch from it. "It's a mess."
A car rolls past and you both watch it go, taillights disappearing around the curve of the deck.
"Which car."
You look back at him. "Hmm?"
He tips his chin toward the rows ahead. "I'm walking you to it."
You have stopped being surprised by the things Jack Abbot decides without asking permission. You point and he falls into step beside you.
Your car is at the far end of the row. You are already dreading arriving at it. You arrive at it anyway, the universe being what it is, and you turn to face him. Then, you reach into your jacket pocket for your keys and your jacket slips off one shoulder in the process, tank top strap bare in the cold, and you don't bother fixing it because your keys are being uncooperative and you are still exhausted and —
His fingers find the strap where it's been exposed. Just the backs of them, like on the rooftop, like he can only ever allow himself the suggestion of contact rather than the thing itself. He goes still for a fraction of a second. One breath. The kind of pause that rearranges the air around it.
Then he draws the jacket back up. Settles it onto your shoulder, careful and certain, like he put something back together and is making sure it holds.
His hand stays, palm curved over your shoulder through the fabric, and neither of you moves. God, you are so aware of the weight of his hand that you are aware of almost nothing else.
"You should go home," he gets out with the voice of a man saying the right thing at significant personal cost.
"Yeah," you breathe.
Neither of you moves.
His thumb shifts and you feel it in your collarbone, your sternum, the backs of your knees. The thought of the rooftop comes back to haunt you. His arm around you, his sigh against your mouth, the city blurred behind you both, and you think: we are in a parking deck at 7 a.m. and I have a boyfriend…Jack is my attending; there is nowhere safe to put this.
You think: I don't care. I don't care. I don't care.
You look up at him.
He's already there. Eyes on yours, jaw tight, and there's something in his face that is past the point of pretending — not reckless. No. There is nothing about Jack that is reckless. Rather, he looks like he's made a choice and stopped arguing with himself about it.
His hand moves from your shoulder to the side of your jaw. The heel of his palm against your cheek, tilting your face up a fraction, and he holds you there for one long moment like he's giving you every opportunity to step back —
You don't step back.
"Jack Abbot!" Lena's voice cuts across the parking deck like a horn. "Why the hell did I have to finish two of your charts? You absolute asshole."
His hand drops. You thump the back of your head against your car window.
"Fucking hell," he exhales through his nose.
"What are you two still doing here?" Her footsteps echo toward you, keys swinging.
"Low tire." The excuse arrives fully formed, delivered with the flat tone of someone running on no sleep and pure survival instinct. "I asked Jack to take a look."
Jack's mouth does something at the sound of it, the corner lifting just enough that you notice and immediately look away.
Lena stops. Eyes moving between the two of you with the sharpness of a woman who has been a nurse for fifteen years and has seen every variety of human behavior a hospital can produce.
"Yeah," she decides, "that is genuinely not my problem." She points at Jack. "Charts. Tonight. Don't make me hunt you down." She points at you. "Get the tire fixed."
"On it," you tell her.
"I'm serious, both of you look terrible. Go home." She gets into her car, slams the door with the conviction of someone who has earned the right to slam doors, and reverses out with complete indifference to whether either of you has anything else to say.
Her taillights disappear around the curve.
The parking deck settles back into its hum. You and Jack stand on either side of the invisible line that just snapped back into place between you, and neither of you says anything.
Then, low, looking at the middle distance: "Low tire? Really?"
"It worked, didn't it."
"It did."
You look down at your keys. The moment that existed thirty seconds ago has dissolved completely, which is probably the correct outcome, but simultaneously the most frustrating thing that has happened in a morning full of frustrating things. "I should go for real now."
"Yeah." He takes a step back. Then another. "Go home. Sleep."
"You too."
He nods. He's already moving — three steps away, four — and then he stops without turning around, and you wait, because you know that pause, you have learned every version of it.
"For what it's worth," he starts, then stops. Shakes his head once like he's arguing with himself and losing. "Never mind."
"Jack."
"Go home," he gets out instead, and keeps walking.
You watch him until he rounds the corner and disappears, and then you stand there alone in the brims morning with the ghost of his hand still warm on your jaw, and you think about never mind — about what lives inside those two words, what he picked up and dropped just as quickly — you could probably guess. Yeah, you could probably guess exactly.
You get in the car and drive home with both hands on the wheel, not thinking about the way he said I don't… quietly, without apology. You most definitely do not think about his thumb through the fabric of your jacket or the rays of sunrise doing something unholy to the angles of his face.
hiiiiiiii!!!! i KNOW i went mia…i’m so sorry. honestly, the post-concert depression has been so real.
but genuinely, it was the best concert i’ve ever been to. i kept turning to my friend and saying my 16yo self would NEVER believe i was in the same room as joe keery. like…WHAT!? 😭
here’s a lil blurry photo collage i managed to get of my baby thoooooooooo 🥹 look how handsome joe is!!!
Just seeing how you write the stranger things boys and James
You put so much care into the characters and how you write and my my, you write absolute masterpieces
hiiii!!!! first of all PLEASE forgive me for taking approximately 84 years to answer this. i promise i wasn’t ignoring you, i’m just notoriously bad at keeping up with my inbox.
but genuinely…thank you so much 🥹🤍 i don’t think there’s a compliment that means more to me than someone noticing how much care i put into these characters. i love them all an unreasonable amount, and i spend way too much time trying to get them to feel like them, so im glad that it’s paying off.
and “masterpieces”??? you’re being way too nice to me…thank you for reading my little stories and for taking the time to send this.
i’m yearning for chapter six of your James fic. you write phenomenally and your words captivated me all night.
hiiii! thank you so much 💗 i’m so happy you’re enjoying it! i am working on the next chapter, but i’ve hit a bit of a creative wall lately and i think i’m just a little burnt out. i’m hoping the inspiration kicks back in soon because i really want to get it out for you all.
i’m going to the tame impala/djo show this weekend and i fear i’ve never been in the same general vicinity as someone i’ve written a fic about before.
because yes, that’s joe keery.
but that’s ALSO steve harrington…who, as far as i’m concerned, is currently living in the attic apartment above the WSQK with the love of his life (me + everyone who’s read my fic). we’re literally building a life together in my little au universe. this feels incredibly awkward for everyone involved.
Aaron Hotchner x fem!reader
Previous | The Purest Things Masterlist | Taglist Form
word count: 3.3k
Warnings: grief/loss, references to character death, lots of fluff, and… TALK OF MARRIAGE AND KIDS AHHHH 🥹
a/n: a little timeline shuffle! this starts shortly after they officially become they, then we jump back to the present. also… everyone say hello to jessica brooks!!! love my girl aunt jess DOWN.
August 2012
Bookend: “Family isn’t defined only by last names or by blood; it’s defined by commitment and by love.” — Dave Wilis
You've checked the oven three times in the last twenty minutes. The table is set. The wine is open and breathing. The house smells like the rosemary chicken that Jack declared last month to be his favorite thing you've ever made, a declaration you've been quietly holding onto ever since, and everything is exactly as ready as it is going to get.
Which means there is nothing left to do but stand at the kitchen window and stare at your own reflection and feel the particular dread of a woman who has run out of tasks to hide behind.
You take a breath. Let it out slowly.
To say you are nervous is an understatement so severe it borders on dishonest.
Tonight is the night you meet Jessica Brooks officially.
You met her once before, briefly, at the funeral. You remember the press of her hand, the automatic murmur of your condolences, the way she looked at you with red-rimmed eyes and said thank you in the voice of someone who had been saying it all day to people whose names she would never remember. It didn't feel right then. It feels worse now, because now there is no ambiguity about who you are and what you are to the people she loves most.
"I know that look."
Aaron's voice comes from the doorway. You glance over your shoulder and find him leaning against the frame, arms crossed, wearing that quiet attentive expression he gets when he's already read the room and is waiting for you to tell him what you need.
"Talk to me," he says.
You lean back against the counter and fold your arms, mirroring him without meaning to. "I just don't want to offend her."
He pushes off the doorframe and crosses to you, his hands finding your waist. "You won't. You couldn't if you tried."
"By default," you press on, "my presence might be offensive."
"Because we're together?"
"Because I'm dating her sister's husband, Aaron." It comes out with more feeling than you intended, the full weight of it surfacing before you can manage it back down. "That is not a small thing. That is a very specific kind of complicated."
He doesn't rush to fix it. His hands stay firm at your waist and he lets the words land before he speaks.
"Jessica has been there through everything Haley and I went through," he acknowledges. "The hard years. The divorce. She knew where Haley and I stood at the end — not the version that looks simple from the outside, but all of it. She knows how much I loved Haley. How much I'll always respect her as Jack's mother." His eyes hold yours. "And she knows this isn't an attempt to replace her. I've talked to her about us…in depth."
"Talking about something and seeing it are two very different things."
"That's true," he allows, and doesn't argue past it. "But I think Haley herself prepared Jessica for this, in some ways."
You go still. "What do you mean?"
His thumb makes one slow pass along your side. "Jessica knew about you before Haley died. Not everything, and not all at once. But Haley noticed you long before anything was ever said or done about it, and she told her sister." He watches your face. "They talked about everything."
Something complicated moves through you. "That somehow makes it feel worse. Like confirmation of something. Like we had an affair."
"We were divorced."
"I know that."
"And nothing happened."
"I know," you repeat, and you do, yet it still sits in you like a stone you can't put down. "It still feels wrong. Knowing Haley talked about me and Jessica has probably had some idea of me in her head this whole time, and now she's going to walk in and see if it matches, and I have no idea what Haley said—"
"Hey." His hands tighten at your waist. "Listen to me."
You stop.
"I can't change how you feel about this." His forehead tips toward yours, stopping just short of touching. "But I'm asking you to trust me. I'll be with you the whole time. I'm not going to disappear into another room and leave you to navigate this alone." A beat. "I promise you it'll be alright."
You let out a breath that has been sitting in your chest since four o'clock. "I do trust you. That's not the part I'm struggling with."
"I know." He presses a kiss to your forehead. "So let's let that be enough for tonight."
You groan into his chest and his arms come around you properly, and you stand there in the warm kitchen with the smell of rosemary and the sound of Jack somewhere upstairs in your room narrating what sounds like an elaborate and very high-stakes battle sequence.
"Show her above everything else how loved her nephew is," Aaron breathes into your hair. "That's all tonight has to be."
Something in you settles. Not all the way, but enough.
"He is loved," you recite.
"He knows it. And she'll see it." His arms tighten once. "You make him feel it every single day. That matters. That's what she's going to walk in and see."
You lift your head. He's looking at you with that expression he has when he means something all the way down, the one that bypasses your defenses because it doesn't feel like reassurance — it just feels like fact.
You open your mouth to answer.
The doorbell rings.
The sound of it goes through you like a current. Your hands close around the fabric of his shirt. Aaron feels it — of course he does — and his hand finds the small of your back, warm and steady.
"Together," he assures you.
You look at him once more.
Then you go to the door.
Jessica stands on the other side, a bottle of wine held between both hands like an offering or a shield — you cannot tell which. She's dressed simply, dark jeans and a cream blouse, and she has the look of someone who spent the drive over doing the same thing you spent the last hour doing. Talking herself into this.
For one suspended second, the two of you just look at each other.
"Hi." Her smile is genuine and careful in equal measure, the smile of a woman who has decided to try and is reserving the right to reassess.
"Hi." You step back from the door. "Please come in. I'm so glad you're here."
It comes out more earnest than you planned. Aaron is at your shoulder, close enough to be a presence without crowding the doorway, and Jessica's eyes move to him briefly — something passing between them, some shorthand built from years of family that you are not part of and never will be — and then she steps inside.
She barely makes it three feet.
"Aunt Jess!"
Jack hits her like a small, joyful freight train, arms going around her middle, face buried somewhere in the vicinity of her ribs, and whatever careful composure she walked in with dissolves on the spot. Her arms close around him and she drops her face into his hair and for a moment she just holds him, the wine bottle dangling from one hand, her eyes closing briefly.
"Hey, you," she says into the top of his head, and her voice has changed entirely. Softer. More real.
Something loosens in your chest.
Aaron takes the wine from her as she straightens, his hand landing briefly on her shoulder in that understated way he has, and she lets him, and there is an entire history in that small exchange that you witness from two feet away and understand you are only seeing the surface of.
"Thank you for coming," he nods.
"Of course." She means it — you think she does — and then her eyes find you again. More open than they were at the door, the caution still present but sitting differently, like something that might shift with enough time and the right circumstances.
"Something smells incredible."
"Rosemary chicken," Jack announces, pulling away from her with the authority of someone presenting evidence. He throws a look over his shoulder at you, chin lifted with proprietary pride. "It's my favorite. I told her to make it."
Jessica looks down at him. "I thought you liked her spaghetti."
"This is my new favorite," he declares, entirely unbothered by the contradiction.
"You told her about the spaghetti?" You put a hand on his shoulder, something warm catching in your throat.
"Oh, he hasn't stopped talking about it since the first time you made it." Jessica's eyes lift to yours, and there's something in them now — recognition, maybe, or the beginning of it. "All those years ago."
The words settle over you quietly.
All those years ago. She has been listening. She has known, in the small accumulated way that family knows things, that you have been present in this boy's life long before tonight made it official. The realization moves through you before you can prepare for it.
"I'm honored, Jack," you manage.
"Yeah, yeah," he shrugs, already turning, already reaching for Jessica's hand and tugging her toward the kitchen like a man with places to be.
Jessica lets herself be pulled, shooting one last look back at you over her shoulder — something in it still figuring itself out — and then she's gone around the corner and the hallway is quiet.
Aaron's arm comes around your shoulders. He presses a kiss to your temple, unhurried, right there in the open hallway where anyone could see.
"Strong start," he commends you.
You let out a breath that comes out closer to a laugh. "I genuinely cannot breathe."
"I'll find you something stronger than wine."
"Please," you beg. "Immediately."
His arm tightens once before he lets go, and you follow the sound of Jack's voice into the kitchen, and the evening continues, and you breathe.
August 2013
Jessica comes down the stairs with a wide grin, one hand trailing the banister, already looking back over her shoulder at the hallway behind her like she's still taking it in.
"I am so impressed." She reaches the bottom and turns to you fully. "Jack's room alone — but the whole place, really. It's changed so much since I first visited." A small pause, something genuine moving through her expression. "It feels like it represents all three of you now."
You hand her a glass of wine. "It's been a busy three months. But it's been worth every second of it."
"I noticed the little touches of Haley," she nods toward the far wall — the photo there, the one of Aaron and Haley young and laughing with baby Jack between them, framed simply, given its place without ceremony.
You glance at it. "She's as much a part of this home as they are."
Jessica is quiet for a moment, turning the stem of her glass between her fingers. Then, with a shift in her expression that is warmer and slightly more dangerous: "So. In all honesty." Her mouth curves. "How has it been? Officially living with the Hotchner boys?"
You laugh before you can stop it, the kind that comes from somewhere genuine and tired and fond all at once. "I mean… it already felt like we lived together. We were always at each other's places." You shake your head, settling back against the counter. "I'm just glad I had somewhere safe for them to land. A home Jack can grow up in. A place where Aaron and I can—"
You stop.
The words were right there, fully formed, ready to come out, and you have never once said them out loud before.
Jessica notices. She looks at you over the rim of her glass with an expression that is entirely too knowing and entirely too pleased, and she does not press it, and somehow that is worse.
You clear your throat. "I'm just glad they're here."
"Mm," she says, in a tone that contains an entire conversation she has chosen not to have.
You narrow your eyes at her. She smiles into her wine.
"I'm so happy with how far the three of you have come," her hand coms up to your arm, the levity in her face giving way to something more honest underneath it. "Genuinely."
"Really?"
"Really." Her fingers squeeze once. "And I'm grateful you're part of our family now. I mean that."
Something in your chest flickers. You blink, once, and look away before it can become something you have to explain. "Me too." Your eyes find the photo on their own. "I just wish—"
"I know." Her voice is quiet. "We all do."
She lifts her glass toward you. You touch yours to it, the soft clink of it hanging in the warm room.
"To Haley," she says. "And to family."
"To Haley," you echo. "And to family."
You both drink, and the house settles around you, and for a moment neither of you needs to say anything else at all.
Jack has been upstairs for the better part of an hour. The dinner table is cleared, the candles have burned down to soft stubs, and the three of you have migrated to the living room — you and Aaron on the couch, Jessica folded into the armchair across from you with her legs tucked beneath her, all of you pleasantly loosened by the particular combination of good wine and Aaron's whiskey, which Jessica declared unfairly good and then had two glasses of.
The conversation has gone the way good late-night conversation goes when people stop performing for each other. Easier. Slower. Real.
"Now," Jessica begins, setting her glass on the coffee table with the deliberate care of someone who has been waiting for exactly the right moment. "I promised myself I wouldn't do this."
"That's never a good start," Aaron teases.
"And yet." She points at you. "I heard the slip earlier. I have been sitting on it for three hours and I cannot hold it in any longer." She tucks her feet further beneath her, leaning forward with barely contained delight. "What's next for you two?"
You feel the warmth climb your face before you can stop it.
"You've been together a while now. You've moved in together. Jack is perfectly, contentedly, obnoxiously happy with this little life you've all built." She gestures broadly at the room, the house, the life in it. "So. What's next?"
You glance sideways at Aaron.
He's already looking at you, that smile starting at the corners of his mouth — the quiet, slightly undone one he gets when the conversation turns to the future, like he still can't quite believe he gets to have one that looks like this.
"Earlier," you begin, turning back to Jessica, "I may have accidentally started to say something about how this house is somewhere I can see myself. See us." You pause. "Really building something in."
"Brilliantly done," Jessica agrees, "but not before I heard enough." She grins at you, warm and conspiratorial. "And as Aaron's sister-in-law and whatever the appropriate title is for what I am to you—" she waves her glass vaguely in your direction, "—I would really love to see that for you both. You're already fantastic with Jack. I'd love to see what a kid made from the two of you would look like."
You choke, slightly, on your wine.
"We're jumping straight from moving in together to having children?"
"I think," Aaron starts, with the careful tone of a man testing the weight of his next words, "marriage would come first."
You turn to look at him.
"Marriage," you repeat. "You've thought about — marrying me?"
"Of course I have." He says it simply, like it has never once been a question, his arm pulling you closer against his side. "How could I not?"
"Awww!" Jessica clasps both hands over her mouth.
You are still looking at Aaron. Something in his face shifts, just slightly. "You've thought about it too. Haven't you?"
"Yes," you say immediately, and then you get up on your knees on the couch and turn to face him properly, one hand on his chest, slightly tilted from the whiskey and not remotely caring. "Aaron. Yes. Of course I have. I think about it an embarrassing amount." You shake your head, the words coming before you can organize them into anything more composed. "I have never once been able to picture the rest of my life without you in it. Not for a single second."
The look that crosses his face when you say it is almost too much to look at directly. He tucks a strand of hair behind your ear, like he's using the gesture to anchor himself. You smile, a little helpless, a little dizzy, and settle back into the couch beside him.
"Ahem." Jessica clears her throat. "Circling back, though. I still think Jack would make a fantastic older brother."
"How does that sound?" Aaron asks, turning toward you, his voice dropping into that register it reserves only for when it's close to just the two of you. "Becoming a mom."
"She already is," Jessica blurts out.
You turn to look at her.
She meets your eyes without flinching, the smile she's been wearing all evening set aside entirely. Just steady, and honest, and sure. "You are raising Jack. You have given him a home that feels safe. You've given him arms he runs to. He looks at you the way children look at the people they belong to, whether he's found the word for it yet or not." She shakes her head, once. "Not giving birth to him doesn't make you any less his mother."
You look down at your lap.
There is a smile pulling at your mouth and a sting behind your eyes and you are not entirely sure which one is going to win. You have never once let yourself think of it that way.
"I agree," Aaron presses his lips to your temple, staying there a moment longer than necessary. "And you are a remarkable one."
"Please," you manage, your voice smaller than you'd like, "do not make me cry. I have done enough crying in my lifetime and I will not be undone by good whiskey and a Tuesday."
Jessica raises her glass. "No promises."
Aaron's hand finds your knee, and he waits until you look at him. "You didn't actually answer the question."
You take a breath. Let it settle.
"I want that," you tell him. "I want to have kids with you. Grow what we already have, give Jack a sibling or two, see what a person made from both of us looks like." A small smile finds its way out. "I want the whole thing, Aaron. I think I've wanted it for longer than I've known how to say."
He looks at you for a long moment.
Then he pulls you in by the side of your face and kisses you once, gentle and unhurried, entirely unbothered by the audience.
"Awww," Jessica coos, this time without any attempt at restraint whatsoever.
You pull back laughing.
"You're the worst," you laugh.
"You love me," she says.
Then she reaches forward and tops up all three glasses without a word, and raises hers, and looks between the two of you with an expression that is equal parts joy and the particular ache of someone holding love and loss in the same hand.
"To the future," she toasts.
Aaron's hand tightens on your knee.
"To the future," you cheers, and mean it all the way down.
Jack Abbot x Fem!Reader
word count: 4k
warnings: depiction of emotional and psychological coercive control in a relationship, the aftermath of physical abuse (non-graphic), emotional affair, infidelity (justified…in my opinion 🤭)
a/n: this story is going to explore some heavier themes than i usually write, so i completely understand if it isn’t for everyone. in a lot of ways, this is my way of taking back a little bit of power from some past experiences, while also telling a story about how the right people can slowly restore someone’s faith in humanity after it’s been broken.
…and, of course, because i love me some jack abbot. WHEW.
Jack walks in for the night shift and checks the docket. Everyone scheduled is present and accounted for except —
He looks up. Lena is already watching him. She sets her hand flat over the tablet, drawing his attention to her.
"She's here."
His eyes move across the floor. A sweep, automatic. Nothing flags.
"What do you mean."
"She's here." A subtle tilt of her head toward the far end — bay marked empty, curtain drawn, lights off behind it. Something cold settles in him. His grip on the tablet adjusts without his permission.
"She doesn't want anyone knowing," Lena adds quietly.
He shifts his weight. "What—"
"She'll want to tell you herself." Her hand finds his arm for a moment and then releases it. She holds his gaze long enough that he understands the rest of it without her having to say it: it's bad.
He doesn't look for him. He doesn't need to. The man who's supposed to show up when something goes wrong — the one who goes home to you every night and apparently cannot manage even that one thing — his absence is already a fact, already filed. Of course he isn't here. That stopped surprising Jack a long time ago.
He sets the tablet down on the counter. Walks toward the bay at the far end of the floor at the pace of a man with no particular destination. Nothing worth noting. Nothing that would draw attention.
The curtain gives under his hand.
The light from the corridor falls across you in a thin strip. His eyes take a moment to adjust, and then they don't need any more time at all.
The bruise runs along your cheekbone. Not fresh...no. A day old at least, maybe two, already settling into that yellow-green at the edges that means the body is doing what it's supposed to, healing whether or not the person inside it is ready to. You're sitting slightly angled on the edge of the bed, one arm held close to your ribs in the prideful way people hold themselves when breathing has become a calculation. He reads all of it in under four seconds.
Then you look up.
And then you look away.
That is the thing that finishes him. Not the bruise. Not the careful architecture of how you're holding yourself together. The looking away...because you have never looked away from him. Never once in all the years he has known you. Not when he was telling you something you didn't want to hear, or when you were exhausted and half-wrong and arguing with him anyway, not even in the moments that should have made it impossible to hold his gaze. You always looked straight at him. And now you don't, and the absence of that one ordinary thing lands in his chest like a finding he does not want to have made.
He lets the curtain fall closed behind him. Pulls the chair from the corner. Sits close enough that you could reach him if you wanted to, not so close that you'd have to, and waits.
"I didn't—" Your voice breaks on the second word. You cover your face with your hands. "Shit."
He starts to move and then stops himself. Whether you want to be touched right now is a question he cannot answer for you, and getting it wrong in either direction would cost something neither of you could afford. The restraint itself costs him something he doesn't want to name.
"I feel so stupid." Into your palms. "I feel so fucking stupid."
"Don't." He looks down at his own hands. He doesn't trust his face right now. "Please don't do that."
A long breath. You lower your hands but don't look at him. "It wasn't—" You stop. Try again. "God. What a cliché. What a complete, embarrassing—" Another stop. "It wasn't his fault."
He waits.
"It was mine."
"You gave yourself those bruises?"
It isn't a question. He says it without inflection and waits for you to hear yourself try to contradict it.
You shake your head, eyes closed. "You know why it was my fault."
"I don't."
"Because of what I did." Smaller now. The smallest he has ever heard your voice. "What we did, Jack."
3 Months Earlier
The wind off the river is cold enough to bite, and you've been up here long enough that you've stopped noticing.
Pittsburgh spreads out below you in lights, all of it blurring at the edges the way things do when you've been crying long enough to be embarrassed about it. You're gripping the railing with both hands. Not because you might do anything — just because it's something solid, and solid is what you need right now.
"Fuck." You look down at the city below. "What a shitty night."
"I agree," a voice calls out from behind you and you jump, turning fast enough that your hand slips on the rail.
There stands Jack Abbot. Your attending for the past two years, the man who has pulled you back from the edge of your own worst moments more times than either of you has ever acknowledged out loud. He looks at you the way he always does — like he's already finished reading you and is deciding what to do with the information.
"You found me." You let go of the railing with one hand and swipe at your face, the gesture too quick to be subtle and both of you know it.
"You're in my hiding spot."
"That's why I came." You turn back to the city. "Felt close. Comforting. In a twisted way."
A pause. Then the sound of him crossing the roof, stopping a few feet to your left. He leans his forearms on the railing and looks out at the same skyline.
"Nothing bonds people like mutual—" he glances at the long drop below, "—ideations."
Something between a laugh and a sob escapes you before you can catch it. It surprises you. You hadn't known there was anything left in you tonight that could still make that sound.
"We did good tonight," you say, once you've got yourself back.
"You did great tonight." He doesn't look at you when he says it. That's how you know he means it. Jack's compliments always land sideways, never straight on, the way the most honest things usually do.
You glance at him. His face is closer than you expected, the city light catching the lines around his eyes, the grey at his temple. You look away before he can catch you looking.
The wind moves through your hair and you think about the girl — eleven years old, the pink shade of her sneakers, the way her mother's hands looked when you had to stop working. You think about standing in the hallway after and pulling out your phone because that's what you do when something guts you, you call someone who is supposed to care. The call going to voicemail. The text that came back twenty minutes later: busy, what is it. You typing nothing, never mind,because you had learned somewhere along the way that the answer to what is it should never actually be the thing.
"I thought after two years the death would get easier to carry," you lament.
"It doesn't get easier." A shrugs. "But you get stronger. There's a difference."
"Doesn't feel like it tonight."
He shifts slightly, his arm brushing yours, and neither of you moves away from it. A jacket sleeve against a jacket sleeve. You are both pretending it is nothing and doing a reasonable job of it.
"You did everything you could for that kid."
"That seems up for debate."
A stillness comes over him, sudden and total.
"Is that his take, or yours?"
You don't answer fast enough.
"Because there is a significant difference," he continues, voice even, "between you genuinely second-guessing your work and you repeating something back to me that someone else said."
You look out at the lights. "He had a point."
"He had an opinion." He stops, then continues against his better judgement. "And I've found that his opinions are, more often than not, bullshit."
"Jack—"
"Sorry." He doesn't sound sorry. His jaw is set like he's been holding this in far longer than tonight. "But this is not the first time he's pulled this shit, and I am so fucking tired of having to convince you that you are a fantastic doctor — because a man who assists one elective surgery a week in cardiothoracic questioned your work on an active trauma case. At what point do we stop calling that a difference of opinion?"
"Jack—"
"I'm not finished."
You close your mouth.
"You walked into that bay tonight and made twelve decisions in forty seconds and every single one of them was correct." He takes a breath and points back toward the stairwell, toward the ER eight floors below. "I watch you every shift. I know what good looks like and I know what you look like and those two things are the same thing, and I need you to hear that."
You don't know what to do with what he just said. You turn it over carefully, as if it's precious and breakable, and you hear yourself sigh: "He's not wrong that I could've considered the—"
"Stop." Barely a word. More like a direction. "Please. Don't."
"I'm just saying—"
"I know what you're doing." He looks at you then, straight on, the full weight of it landing somewhere you have never entirely learned to hold. "You're making it all smaller so it fits somewhere you can live with it. You've been doing that for a long time."
The truth of it settles somewhere beneath your sternum and stays there.
You look back at the skyline. He doesn't look away from you and you feel that too…his gaze steady at the side of your face, patient in the way he is with things he has decided matter.
"I don't know how to be angry at him," you admit, very quietly. "I don't know how to do that and still go home."
You might not know how to be angry at Tyler — at the man who has spent a year making you smaller in increments too subtle to name, who comes home every night and makes that feel like something you should be grateful for, who questioned your medicine in front of people who respect you and then kissed you on the cheek like he'd done you a favor. You might not know how to hold any of that without it falling apart in your hands.
But you know this.
You want to stay here. In this specific cold. In this specific quiet. Next to Jack. You want it the way kids want things they've already been told they can't have — with the grief already built in, like the wanting and the losing are the same feeling and always were.
You don't let yourself look at him. You watch the lights and you breathe and you tell yourself it's the bad day, the dead girl, the exhaustion that comes from holding yourself together for eight hours with nowhere good to put it down.
You are almost convinced.
"Then stop."
You turn. "What?"
"Stop going home to him." Jack turns so his back is against the railing now, facing the rooftop door instead of the city, shoulder to shoulder with you. Not looking at the skyline anymore. Looking solely at you. "If you don't know how to be angry at him and still go home, then stop. Going. Home."
You look at him. You mean to say something practical — something about leases or history or the sheer exhaustion of dismantling a three-year relationship — but you look at him and he is looking straight back and whatever you were about to say dissolves before it reaches your mouth.
His gaze drops. Just briefly. A fraction of a second, barely a movement at all... and then comes back up.
"Jack." You hum his name far too carefully. You can hear it yourself.
"I know." He looks away first, jaw set, a muscle working in his throat. He doesn't apologize or walk it back. He won't give you the out of pretending he didn't just look at you like that. "I know all the reasons. You don't have to list them."
"Then why are you—"
"Because someone should say it. Because you have spent well over a year letting that man convince you that you are lessthan what you are, and I have watched it, and I am not going to stand here and tell you it's fine." He shakes his head. "It's not fine."
"You don't know everything about it."
"I know enough."
"You know what I've told you."
"I know what you haven't told me too." Quiet, certain. "I've been paying attention for a lot longer than you think."
That moves through you slowly. The knowledge that he has been watching closely enough to see the things you've been careful not to say. That you have been seen — in this way, at this depth — for longer than you realized.
It should feel like too much. It doesn't. That is the part that frightens you.
"I can't just—" you start.
He eases closer by barely an inch, the kind of movement you could both agree was nothing if you needed to. His voice drops, rougher than it was a few minutes ago. "I just want you to know that you have somewhere to go. When it gets to a point where you need somewhere to go."
When. Not if. When.
The wind moves between you. The city holds its shape below, indifferent to both of you, to the charged and impossible distance between your bodies.
You understand what he is not saying. You've been pretending not to understand it for a long time…months, maybe. The knowledge that has been waiting just below the surface of everything for a night cold enough and honest enough to finally bring it up. He is not talking about a couch. He is talking about something neither of you has named and both of you have been building slowly, out of late nights and long silences and the way he always seems to know when you need someone to hold the line for you.
"Jack, you don't—"
"I know what I'm saying."
"Do you."
"Yes."
You are close enough to see the catch in his breathing, his eyes moving over your face like he's memorizing something he isn't sure he'll get to keep. The cold has reddened the tips of his ears. His shoulder is warm against yours. A warmth you became aware of a long time ago and have been carefully not thinking about ever since.
Then his hand moves. The backs of his fingers, barely, against the back of yours on the railing. Not a hold. Not even quite a touch. The suggestion of one. The question of one.
You don't pull away.
He stays exactly where he is, close and still and god, so warm, and lets you decide — lets you have the choice, which is so entirely like him that it cracks something open in your chest that you are not prepared for. Jack has always done this. Given you the room. Let you come to things yourself. Never pushed. And you have spent two years calling it professionalism, the ordinary warmth of someone good at his job.
You have been lying to yourself for two years.
"Oh god help me," you gasp, and you shake your head once like you're still arguing with yourself, like there's still a version of this where you make the sensible choice —
And then you surge forward and kiss him.
And god help him, he kisses you back.
It isn't tentative. That is the thing that ruins you completely, the thing you will turn over in your hands for months afterward in the dark. You half-expected careful…expected him to hold something in reserve, to kiss you the way a man kisses someone he knows he shouldn't, apologetically, with an exit already built in. But he doesn't.
His mouth is warm and sure against yours and he kisses you like he has thought about this, like the thinking has been going on longer than either of you would be comfortable admitting, and the certainty of it — the sheer unguarded certainty — makes your knees go weak beneath you.
There you stand… you on one side of the railing, him on the other, the city yawning open behind you and the rooftop solid behind him. Yin and yang. Two people facing opposite directions who somehow found the same point. It should be awkward, the geometry of it, the railing between you like a reminder of everything else that stands between you. It isn't. It is the least awkward thing that has happened to you in longer than you can remember.
You lose your balance — at the cold, at him, at the dizzying vertigo of finally doing the thing you have been not-doing for months — and his arm moves on instinct, that big certain arm, curling around the front of you, pulling you back and against him in the same motion, anchoring you to the roof, to him.
Instinctively you grip his bicep. Your fingers find the muscle there and hold on, and he registers it…you can feel the slight tension move through him when you tighten your grip. He pulls you fractionally closer in a way you will think about later, all alone, when thinking about it is all that's left.
He sighs against your mouth and you inhale it like he's breathing air into you that you haven't been able to find on your own in years. Like your lungs have been working at half capacity and you didn't know it until right now, until this, until him.
His breath is uneven and knowing that…knowing you did that to him, to this composed, careful man…does something to you that you have no language for.
Then —
"Babe! Someone mentioned you might be up here."
The voice hits you like cold water from a height up above.
You break away so fast the railing bites into your hip and you don't care, your hand coming up to your lips before you catch yourself and drop it, heart slamming. Jack's arm is still half-around you. In fact, there's no world in which he could have unwrapped it fast enough and he does the only thing available to him, which is to make it look like nothing at all.
"Whoa, careful there." His voice comes out even. The voice of a man catching a colleague who nearly lost her footing, nothing more, and you could kiss him again just for that — for the instantaneous, instinctive cover of it — except that is exactly the problem you are currently trying to survive. "Watch your step."
The door swings wider.
Tyler steps through it.
He is, as always, immediately the most put-together person in any room or in this case, any rooftop. Jacket still crisp from a day that broke you down to the cellular level. Not a single hair out of place. His eyes move in one clean sweep: you first, then Jack, then back to you, running the math with the focused efficiency of a man who does not enjoy variables he didn't introduce himself.
"Hey." His smile arrives. Pleasant. Practiced. The one that has never quite reached his eyes in a way you stopped mentioning a long time ago. "Didn't know you'd have company up here."
"Oh my god, hi—" The performance costs you the last of what you had. Your face does what it needs to do: warm, a little sheepish, surprised in the right amounts.
"What are you doing up here." Not quite a question. You have become, over three years, fluent in what lives beneath the pleasant register of Tyler's voice.
"Decompressing." You gesture vaguely at the city, at everything that is not Jack or the specific place you were standing ten seconds ago. "You know how I get after a bad outcome."
"With your attending."
"She was already here when I came up," Jack says. Unhurried. Carrying exactly the right amount of mild inconvenience, like he'd been hoping for five minutes alone and found the roof occupied. You have no idea how he's doing it. "I startled her and shit, she nearly lost her footing on the wrong side of the railing." He looks at you, and the look is perfect, just the right measure of attending-to-resident, nothing underneath it that anyone could name. "You should come back to this side."
He offers his hand.
You take it and duck under the railing. His grip is strong, but brief and entirely professional, released the moment you're clear, and you feel the loss of it in the half-second before he lets go. Then his hands find his pockets and he looks at Tyler the way he looks at people he has already fully assessed and found unsatisfied with his explanation.
Tyler's eyes moves between you. Slower this time.
"You okay?" Soft. Solicitous. The version of him that shows up in front of witnesses.
"Fine." You brush your jacket down. "Cold. I should have come in earlier."
"Yeah." Something passes across Tyler's face that isn't quite an expression…a small calculation, something filed away for later when there's no audience. You know that look. You know what it means for home, for the temperature the apartment will be when you walk in. "Probably should have."
Jack glances between you. One second, maybe less. You feel it anyway. Precise, even now, even with Tyler standing six feet away.
"Good work tonight," Jack says to you. Plainly. The way he's said it a hundred times at the end of brutal shifts. It is the most ordinary thing and yet it feels like a hand steadying something that keeps threatening to tip within you.
You nod. You don't trust your voice for anything beyond that.
He heads for the door. Stops with his hand on it, not looking back. "Get some sleep."
Then he's gone. The door falls shut and the rooftop is just a rooftop again, cold and normal, and Tyler is watching you with that quality of attention that has never once felt like the same thing as being seen.
"Ready?" he asks.
"Yeah," you say.
You follow him to the door. You don't look back at the railing, at the city, at the place where you were standing when everything was different.
You already know exactly what it looked like from the outside. Two colleagues on a rooftop. Nothing more.
You know what it felt like from the inside too.
You carry both of those things down the stairwell and into the rest of the night, and you do not let yourself think about which one is true.
Him saying he’d do anything for her. And she wants a distraction from grief. He holds her close and just cares.
MY HEART CANNOT TAKE IT ANYMORE I NEED MORE.
(I don’t remember who it’s from. I think whosscruffylooking… idk)
If you're talking about Chapter V - my favorite - from A Study in Enmity, written by my dearest tumblr bestie @whosscruffylooking, you best BELIEVE I know what you're talking about and how you're feeling.
I could go on and on about how beautifully written that chapter was, how much it captured the essence of a troubled and abusive relationship when meshed with grief, and the exquisite development of the relationship between the reader and James - which is so incredibly in character.
If you haven't read it, yall trust me it's a genuine work of art. It's my absolute favorite. I've read so many fics, but none have put me in the trance that her writing put me in. It's addictive and delicious - if you wanna escape reality, that's your writer.
She also has a bunch of other fics that are to die for, sooo go read and support her, she writes beautifully :))
i’ve always believed fandom is at its best when people lift each other up, share the stories they love, and get excited together. getting to be on the receiving end of that kind of kindness is something i don’t think i’ll ever get used to.
i started posting these stories because i had all of these little worlds living in my head, and somehow they’ve found their way to people who love them just as much as i do.
thank you for making this such a kind, supportive little corner of the internet. i feel incredibly lucky to be here, to contribute to it, and to call SO many of you my friends. i appreciate every comment, reblog, recommendation, and conversation more than i could ever put into words. thank you for making this feel like home 💗
James Moriarty x Fem!Reader
Taglist Form | Previous | Next | word count: 3.2k
warnings: loss of a parent, grief, complicated parental relationships, implied child neglect, resentment, unhealthy coping mechanisms
a/n: i love our deeply unwell and emotionally stunted babies, who only know how to cope through their overwhelming lust for one another.
You stand at the door in your nightgown, the letter in your hands, reading the same line over and over.
Your father, Bucephalus Hodge, was killed this afternoon. My condolences. — Edie.
That is all.
No elaboration. No comfort. Just the fact of it, delivered in her clean, unhurried hand, as though it were a matter of administrative tidiness. As though she had simply seen to something that needed seeing to, and now it was done.
You are not certain how long you have been standing here.
The night air moves against your bare arms. The field beyond the open door stretches dark and still, and you look out into it the way you might look into water — not seeing it, only aware of its depth.
"What is it?"
Sherlock appears at your shoulder, voice tinged with the careful quiet of someone who already suspects the answer is not a small one.
You do not turn. You do not speak. You only loosen your fingers, and he understands, taking the letter from your hand with a gentleness that would have undone you if you had been paying attention.
You are not paying attention.
Somewhere behind you, footsteps descend the stairs — not in any rush at first, then quickening as they read the room. James. You know his tread by now without needing to look, know the particular rhythm of it the way you know things you have never meant to learn.
Your ears are ringing.
Your vision has blurred at the edges, the doorframe and the dark field beyond it bleeding together into something that does not quite resolve.
"What on earth—" James's voice arrives mid-sentence, still roughened by sleep, and then stops.
The rustle of paper as Sherlock passes him the letter.
Silence.
Then the kind of silence that has weight to it. The kind that presses.
You go on looking at the field.
Edie.
Of all the people who might have written. Of all the hands this news might have arrived in. It had to be hers — composed and correct and faintly, impossibly, kind, as though she had every right to be the one to tell you. As though she had simply been there, at the end, in the place that was never yours, and had done what needed doing because someone had to and it had always fallen to her.
She had his ear in life.
She kept his counsel.
She sat at his shoulder while you sat across a dining hall and learned, slowly and without ever intending to, to stop waiting for him to look your way.
And now, it seems, she was there at the last of him too.
Something shifts in your chest. Not grief, exactly. Not yet. Something deeper and less clean than grief — the ache of mourning a man you never fully had. Of losing something that was already, in every way that counted, lost.
You had always told yourself there would be time.
Not for forgiveness. Not for anything so neat as that. Only time — the vague, unexamined possibility of it, sitting somewhere ahead of you like a door left ajar, one you had always meant to approach and never quite did. One you had grown so accustomed to deferring that you had stopped noticing it was there at all.
It is not there anymore.
And the cruelest part — the part already pressing against the inside of your ribs with a persistence you cannot ignore much longer — is that she knew.
Edie knew where he was. How he was. What his last hours looked like.
You did not.
You had not even known to ask.
She had been given every piece of him you were never offered, and now she has given you this — the last piece, the final accounting — in four words and a signature, and you cannot even be angry at the manner of it because she is not wrong to have been the one to send it. That is what makes it impossible to bear. She was simply there, in all the ways you were not, and there is no one to blame for it — least of all her — and that absence is its own particular kind of torment.
Behind you, James says your name.
Not a question. Not a prompt. Just your name, placed quietly into the dark, as though to remind you that you are still here. Still standing. Still in possession of it.
You do not turn around.
If you turn around, you will have to be somewhere. You will have to be in a room, in a body, in a moment that is actually happening. As long as you go on looking at the field you can remain just slightly outside of it…a step removed from the full weight of what is in that letter, from the fact that the door is gone and you never opened it, and you never will.
You hear Sherlock's quiet footsteps retreat. The hushed click of a door further down the hall. And then there is only the night air and the distant dark and the sound of James moving closer, until you feel the warmth of him at your back.
His hand finds your shoulder first. A palm. A steady, wordless press of it, the kind that asks for nothing and offers what it can.
Then he exhales — as though he is breathing on your behalf — and his arms come around you properly, both of them, folding you in with a care so entirely unlike everything sharp in him that it nearly breaks you where you stand. His mouth finds your shoulder, and he tucks his head against your neck. It is not graceful, not performed, nothing like the James Moriarty who deploys charm the way other men deploy weaponry. This is something else entirely. Something that has no use for cleverness.
He simply holds you.
And something in you, some taut and exhausted part of you that has been braced since the moment you read that letter, since long before that, since the first time you learned that fathers did not always look the way they were meant to, releases.
You close your eyes.
You take the first full breath you have managed since Edie's handwriting swam into focus, and it shudders a little on the way in, and you let it. You can feel the slow, steady rhythm of his breathing against your back. In and out. Patient. Present. The most uncomplicated thing in the world.
Then, so quietly you might almost have imagined it:
"I'm sorry."
The words arrive muffled against your shoulder, pressed there rather than spoken, as though he could not quite bring himself to release them into open air.
You say nothing.
He does not rush you.
"I'm so dreadfully sorry."
This time it is not the death he is apologising for. You both know that. It is the rest of it — the dining hall, the years of careful distance, the letter, the clean unhurried handwriting of a woman who was permitted to be present in all the ways you were not. He is sorry for the shape your life with your father took. For the door that has closed on any possibility of a different ending. For every version of that ending you will never now be able to choose.
That is what he is sorry for.
Your throat tightens.
"Tell me what you need."
No wit, no angle, no careful management of how the words land. Just the question, pressed against your shoulder with the same quiet firmness as the rest of him, and the unmistakable willingness to mean it entirely.
"Whatever it is," he adds, softer still. "I will do it."
You open your mouth. Close it again.
What do you need.
You need the door to still exist. You need the years back, or at least some portion of them — enough to have stood in that hallway at Oxford and chosen differently. Said something different. Been braver, or angrier, or simply more present than you ever allowed yourself to be. You need it not to be Edie's handwriting on that letter. You need to stop hearing her voice in your head, that maddeningly composed voice delivering the news as though it were a footnote, as though your father's death were a task she had simply had the efficiency to complete.
You need to stop thinking.
"Make me stop thinking," you beg.
His lips press again to your shoulder, then travel slowly to the curve of your neck. You tilt your head to one side without quite deciding to, and he takes the invitation — his mouth finding the top of your spine, the soft place behind your ear, warm and entirely without expectation. Your fingers find his where they rest at your waist and curl between them, holding on.
A long moment passes.
Then his lips return to your shoulder, and he speaks against your skin, low and careful, as though the words are something he has been turning over for some time and has only now decided to say aloud.
"Come to bed with me." A pause, brief and honest. "Let me hold you."
An offer, plain and open, from a man who has spent the better part of your acquaintance deploying words like instruments, and has chosen, tonight, to simply mean them.
You turn in his arms then.
You look at him — at the tiredness in his face, the careful way he is watching you, the complete and uncharacteristic absence of anything guarded in his expression — and you feel something loosen in your chest that you had not known was still held tight.
"Alright," you say quietly.
It is the smallest word. It carries everything.
He takes your hand and leads you away from the open door and the dark field and the letter lying on the floor. Away from Edie's handwriting and the years you did not get and the grief that will still be there in the morning, patient as it always is.
But morning is not now.
Now there is only the warmth of his hand around yours, and the quiet of the house, and the particular mercy of not having to be alone inside this.
You let him lead you.
For once in your life, simply looked after.
Simply enough.
The first thing you are aware of is light.
Not the thin, reluctant grey of early morning, but proper light… the kind that indicates the day has been going on without you for some time and has simply been waiting for you to catch up. It falls in long pale strips across the bedclothes, across the unfamiliar ceiling, across the empty space beside you where the sheets are cool to the touch.
You lie still for a moment, taking stock.
The grief is still there. Of course it is. It has simply settled overnight, the way deep water settles after something has been thrown into it — calmer at the surface now, but no less present beneath. You are aware of it the way you are aware of the weight of the blankets, or the cold of the room against your face: constantly, without drama.
You push yourself upright.
The room is quiet. The door is closed. On the small table beside the bed, someone has left a glass of water and, beside it, a single folded note.
You reach for it.
Don't go anywhere. — J.
You set it down and reach for the water instead, and you are still drinking when the door opens and James appears in the frame, coat off, shirtsleeves rolled to the forearm, looking entirely too composed for a man who held you while you fell apart less than twelve hours ago.
"You're awake," he observes as though this is the only thing that needed to go right today, and it has.
"Where did you go?"
"Downstairs." He steps into the room and closes the door behind him with quiet care, the way you might close a door in a house where something fragile is resting. "Sherlock and his mother are out for a walk. I have had the run of the kitchen, which I used with varying success." A pause. "There is also a bath."
You look at him.
"I drew it," he adds, with the slight defensive air of a man who is unused to performing domestic kindnesses and would prefer not to make too much of it. "It will get cold if you leave it long."
"You drew me a bath."
He gives you a look. "I said...it will get cold."
The bathroom is small and warm, filled with steam that has left a haze at the edges of everything and turned the mirror to pale fog. The bath is full, and someone…James…has found, from some corner of Appleton Manor's many pantries, a jar of something that smells faintly of lavender and has turned the water a pale, milky white.
You stand in the doorway and look at it for a moment.
Then at him.
"I suppose I'll leave you to it," he assumes, and there is something almost uncertain in it, something that does not quite know what comes next — which is, you think, the most human you have ever seen him.
"Stay." The word is out before you have decided to say it. "Please." A breath. "I dread the thought of being alone right now."
He looks almost startled. Not by the asking, but by what it costs you to ask it. He knows what it costs you. He nods once, says nothing, and turns his back while you undress and lower yourself into the water.
"Alright," you say quietly.
He turns.
He looks at you for a moment — just a moment, no more — and in that moment you see him make a particular effort to be a gentleman, which is not an effort James Moriarty is accustomed to making. The water keeps what it keeps. But there is enough. Enough to make his jaw tighten slightly. Enough to make him look away first, which he does, clearing his throat and dragging the small wooden stool from the corner with rather more focus than the task requires.
He sits.
You reach for the soap.
His hand finds yours before you get there.
"Let me."
Somewhere between a question and a command…the register he occupies when he means something and has no interest in embellishing it.
You let go of the soap.
You lean back.
He begins at your neck, the soap moving in slow, unhurried passes, and you feel the warmth of his hand through it — present and deliberate, every movement considered. You tilt your head to one side. Then the other. He follows without being asked. His touch is careful in a way that has nothing careful about it, the kind of care that takes a sacrifice to maintain.
He moves to your arms, one at a time, from shoulder to wrist and back again, and goosebumps rise in the wake of his hands despite the heat of the water. You do not remark on this. Neither does he.
Then his hands move to your collarbone.
Your breathing quickens.
He notices. Of course he notices. He notices everything, catalogues everything, and he does not stop. His hands move lower, slow and certain, over the rise of your chest, and the breath you take is not entirely steady and neither of you pretends it is. The steam presses close around you both. The water laps gently at the sides of the tub.
He stands from the stool then, and kneels beside the bath instead, bringing himself level with you, and the change in proximity does something immediate to the quality of the air between you. His hands move beneath the surface, up and then down the length of your legs, and you watch his face as he works — the focus in it, the restraint in it, the way his eyes move over you with each gradual pass of his hands as though you are something he is learning by heart and intends to remember.
He sets the soap aside.
He cups the warm water in both hands and begins to rinse you, patient and thorough, and you watch the water run in rivulets over your collarbone and think: you have never been looked at quite like this. Not with this quality of attention. Not as though being permitted to care for you is something he considers a privilege.
His thumb traces your collarbone.
Slowly. As though it is the only thing in the world worth doing.
Then it travels up the line of your throat, and his hand curves around the back of your neck, warm and certain, and he tilts your face up toward his.
He kisses you.
It is not the kiss of a man taking something. It is the kiss of a man offering everything he has and waiting to see if it will be received. Tender at first, almost unbearably so and then deeper, when your wet hands find his hair and pull him closer, deeper and full of all the things neither of you has said aloud yet and both of you have known for some time.
He sighs against your mouth.
When he draws back it is only a fraction, only enough to speak, his lips still grazing yours with every word.
"You are allowed whatever you need today." A pause, purposeful and gracious. "Comfort. Company. Space." Another pause. "Distraction."
The last word lands with perfect, devastating precision. The acknowledgment straightforward, that he knows what exists between you and is not pretending otherwise. That whatever you need from him today he will give without condition or account.
Your fingers curl into the front of his shirt.
He does not need to be told twice.
He reaches for the hem and pulls the shirt over his head in one motion, dropping it somewhere behind him without looking. Then he is stepping out of his trousers, and the water rises as he folds himself into the bath, his legs bracketing yours, his hands finding your waist beneath the surface and drawing you forward until you are settled in his lap with a sureness that feels less like an invitation and more like a homecoming.
The water settles around you both.
He pushes the wet hair from your face with both hands, tucking it back behind your ears the way he has done before in darker moments, and then he simply looks at you.
There is nothing guarded in his face right now. Nothing held at the careful distance he usually maintains between himself and the world. Only him. Only James, in a bath full of lavender-clouded water in a house that belongs to neither of you, looking at you as though you are the most significant thing he has encountered in a life that has, by any measure, not been short of significant things.
"I've got you," he says. The same three words as last night. Quieter now. And this time, somehow, more certain.
You rest your forehead against his.
Outside, the morning continues without you. The grief will be there when you are ready for it — it always is. The world will want things from you soon enough.
But not yet.
Not now.
Now there is only this: the warmth of the water, the warmth of him, and the hard-won peace of being, for once, entirely held.
warnings: no use of y/n, mentions of sibling death, dying by suicide, maiming, losing limbs (traumatic injury), violence, use of weapons, references to a panic attack, tension.
a/n: This is probably my favorite chapter so far (and longest!!) haha. I was writing it between exams and honestly thank you so much for being patient with me. Now that the academic war is over (wohoooo), the updates should come quicker (at least I hope so). Quite a lot of warnings for this one, so read carefully! Enjoy and let me know what yall think :))
Synopsis: This takes place in Camp Half Blood and is centered around f!reader, daughter of Apollo, a masterful archer and the best medic of Camp. She's just trying to live her life, but that always seems to include a certain James Moriarty, son of Ares, who always seems to appear in her life, causing chaos and conflicting feelings...
It was a sunny afternoon, your kind of weather. You were picking up some arrows left behind by campers - a hazard on the grass, really.
In the shade of the trees, small rays of light bore down onto your skin; enough to feel its warmth without it burning you. Your boots scraped the dry dirt, pebbles rolling away, as it opened to the training field where you made your way down to the weapons shed.
You hummed a tune as James taught a dozen campers behind you, the occasional loud thud making your head snap around, an instinct your years as a medic has burned into you.
Though nothing today seriously needed your attention. A couple groans, a lot of bruises, but an overall severe injury-less day.
“A rare occurrence when he was teaching,” you think.
It was customary to have at least one person from the infirmary at every physical training. And funnily enough, you were always the one supervising whenever Moriarty was on. Whether it was Clarisse La Rue or James Moriarty, you always had your hands full.
Although you loved the rush of adrenaline when someone needed your help, or the high you felt after saving someone, calmer days were always welcomed.
The doors to the shed creek open as you placed an equal amount of arrows in each quiver. The musky smell of the badly ventilated storage room filling your nose.
Without fail, every time you went inside, you were hit with bittersweet nostalgia.
Sweet, because the smell reminded you of the time you spent with your sister, as a child.
You would spend hours outside, constantly hiding in the small cupboard in your backyard when you played hide and seek - thinking that after enough times, she’d look somewhere else, that you’d finally win.
How youthfully naive you were.
She would pretend to look for you in the most obvious places - and you were unable to repress your giggles when you saw parts of her figure approach through the small cracks of the wood.
That same memory was bitter, because it reminded you of how much you missed her. It reminded you when you lost her and everything went south.
You circle the base of your fingers, a nervous habit you developed over the years.
The more you thought about that day, the more the shed smelled sour, stinging your senses.
You would give anything to see her again.
Anything.
You close the doors to the shed, humming to distract you from your memories.
As you were about to finish, you felt your back tingle, a creeping feeling that happened when you felt watched.
You slowly turn around, your boots scraping the earth, as you see a dozen heads turned in your direction.
Expectant.
Waiting.
Your head flickered from one person to another, trying to piece together why they looked at you so intently.
“Well?”, asks one of the campers, his voice cutting through the silence you realized had fallen on the field.
You look at him, perplexed. The camper wore his orange camp shirt; its torn sleeves and his camo shorts telling you he was from the Ares cabin.
“Well what?”, you counter.
“Well would you be so kind as to be my demonstration partner,” explained a well too familiar voice.
Your eyes fell to the middle of the field, where the campers had parted, leaving him in the center.
His wide smile, the extra tooth peaking through - he wasn't even trying to conceal the true intention behind his words.
It was his time to show you he had a couple tricks up his sleeve.
You nod slowly, smacking your lips.
“I’m an archer, James. Not a close combat fighter.” you answer, with as much calmness you could muster at being put on the spot.
“That’s why I chose you darling. Because we both know you need help in that department.” he looks you up and down for a second and you couldn’t feel more exposed.
A couple of gasps. Oohs. Giggles.
The response he wanted.
You weren’t going to give him the satisfaction of a reaction.
You close your eyes and take a moment to ignore the jab at your skills, and take slow and calculated steps across the terrain; passing through the students like they had opened a gate that led to Moriarty.
You felt like you were walking up to the human impersonation of your inevitable embarrassment. Your heart was beating hard, but nothing unusual. The typical anticipation when you were heading into the unknown.
The unpredictable.
He wore his black cargo pants and orange camp shirt. You could tell he’d been training outside for a while by the way the chest was dirtied and the hem of his shirt was tucked on the side, exposing the smallest bit of skin.
You avert your eyes, not wanting to spend more time analysing the way his sleeves hung on his broad shoulders, or how the muscles of his forearm twitched when he wiggled his fingers.
You stop walking a few feet away from him. Not too close, but not too far. A good distance.
“A distance that’s going to close anyway”, you anticipated.
“Grand.” he claps his hands together. “So when you go for an attack-”, he reaches for your arm, in the attempt to demonstrate the start of the sequence.
You don’t give him time to complete the motion before you grab his forearm, pull it towards you, and grab a higher point in his arm for stability. You turn around to get some momentum as you drop to one knee and throw him above your shoulder.
The sheer force of the impact made his back hit the floor with a loud smack. His breath knocks out of his lungs with a sharp exhale.
You stand up with the shadow of a smirk on your lips before turning to the crowd that was stifling laughs of disbelief at their teacher being bested by the girl who only came to observe.
The archer who beat the swordsman.
Moriarty looks up at you while still on the floor, eyes wide, a little breathless, before he lets out a forced laugh, his abdomen contracting at every moment. He wasn't thrilled to be lying on the floor, but he was pleasantly surprised.
Bewildered, even.
And frankly, quite impressed.
Though that was something he would never tell you.
You thought you imagined it, trying to read the expression on his face. You weren’t sure if you had signed your death warrant, or he was calculating his next move.
He notices you looking down at him, and as if to mask his thoughts, the skin around his eyes crinkle, his mouth pulling into a smile. He sits up with a groan - the sound warming you unwantedly - and brings his hands together in a slow clap.
You had a gut feeling something was about to happen, but you let yourself smirk, taking an unserious bow.
“Thank you, thank you-”
Before you could finish, he swung one leg in your direction. You jump to dodge, but having anticipated that, he swings his other leg and it sweeps your ankles.
They lose their grip on the floor and you fall the same way he did. Your back hitting the floor with a loud thud. Your head nearly escaped being smacked the same way.
Oh how the tables have turned.
Before you could protest what he had done, he had swiftly rolled on top of you, pinning your arms with one hand as the other nested a dagger - your dagger - below your chin.
His body weighs at your hips.
Your legs squirm in a final attempt, but he got you completely immobilized.
With a satisfied smirk at his victory, he leans in.
Your eyes stared deep into his eyes. Trying to predict what he will do next. A mix of fear and anxiety meeting his complete calm and confidence.
A contrast that couldn’t feel more striking.
How in mere seconds, he was able to shift the tide of your fight.
How in a real fight, he would’ve struck.
How in anything other than practice, you would be dead.
As he kept on getting closer, the faint smell of sweat mixed with his musky cologne swirled in your nose.
You could feel the press of his body digging into your flesh as he neared your face. The dagger inches away from cutting your neck.
Even with the situation, there was something oddly attractive in the way he looked at you. Like he was feeding off of the power he held over you. Like he’d been waiting to get the upper hand - for months.
The longer he looked at you, the more your face heated up. The more you sensed the stares from the campers burning into your skin - though nothing was more overwhelming than having James Moriarty look into your eyes like you were his prey, his next meal - ready for him to devour.
His gaze shifts for a split second to your lips before tilting his head and moving closer to your ear.
Your breath catches. The heat of his breath mixing with your face’s.
Your pulse hammering in your ear - so much so that you could swear he felt it.
Your skin trembling at every heartbeat.
“Checkmate.” he whispers, his voice penetrating every fiber of your being.
To everyone watching, he had brought himself down and back up in a couple seconds - in one swift motion.
But it felt infinitely slower than that.
Every detail of your interaction burned holes into your mind. Everything replaying like a song on a continuous loop - without the possibility to halt it.
You could almost swear he did it on purpose.
This couldn’t keep happening.
He looks down at you one last time before briefly raising his eyebrows in the cockiest way possible. He moves the dagger away from your neck, sharply plants it into the grass right besides your head, and gets off of you.
You flinch at the motion.
The celestial bronze catching the light and reflecting it into your eye. The sting of sudden light made you wince and shut your eyes by reflex, pulling you from your bubble of thoughts.
You hoist yourself onto your elbow, catching your breath, taking a deep breath in and out - trying to rid your body of the lingering pressure his hips made on yours.
Your heart calms down in your chest.
A throbbing headache comes and goes as you pick up the hilt of your dagger and stand.
You groan as your aching back straightens. You could move it around; Nothing was broken.
Thank the gods.
He bows to the class. A wave of embarrassment washed through you - it was the same motion you did moments ago.
A simple celebration before the script was flipped.
Literally.
He lets out a cheeky laugh and turns towards you, basking in the glory of besting you at the game in which he had allowed you to believe you were queen.
‘You’re so predictable’, he muses.
“And you played dirty. That wasn’t fair.”, you remark.
He leans forwards from the hips, his hands in his pockets. “Aye but you seem to forget all is not fair when it comes to war”
You scoff and roll your eyes. “This isn’t war”
“But that’s what we’re preparing them for,” he replies.
You raise an eyebrow. “That’s what you’re doing maybe”
He lets out a soft chuckle. “Tell me, sunshine,” he takes a step closer, “what’s the point of learning how to shoot a bow and arrow?”
“In order to defend yourself- ”, you reply instinctively, not giving it a second thought.
You pause.
He grins.
Gotcha.
Your ears heat up at the embarrassment and realization that you’ve proved Moriarty’s point correct. The embarrassment of being wrong in front of a crowd.
“Fine.” you swallow your pride. “Self-defense it is.”
“So, my point stands,” he turns to the rest of the class, sweeping his index to address them, “you must learn how to fight. Even if that means to fight dirty.”
He flashes you a quick look.
“You think the monsters are going to wait and listen when you ask for a clean fight?”, he says mockingly.
Snickers travel around, the sound dancing in your ears.
“You think the monsters care about the rules?”, he asks, a certain roughness coating the edges of his voice.
It no longer felt like he was teaching. It felt like you had made a fatal mistake and he was using you as an example to learn from.
Like some humiliation ritual you hadn’t signed up for.
The campers nod, completely entrapped by his speech. The wave of approval made him sound similar to an emperor addressing his subjects.
He turns back to you. A new intensity sculpted into his features, as though he was feeding off of the approval - like he was ready to deliver the final blow to nail the coffin of your one sided debate.
“Do you think the monsters cared about fair play when they ripped your fingers off for fun?”
Wait.
What.
Panic coursed through your veins.
How did he know that?
Your chest started to tighten all over again.
A wave of whispers echoes around you. No one was expecting that.
Your heart began to hammer.
You never told him that.
Your throat constricted.
You never told anyone that.
Your body was failing to conceal the veracity of his words as your fingers instinctively picked at your skin, circling at their base.
You could feel the stares.
The skin at the nape of your neck prickled - you wanted to crawl out of your skin.
How did he find out?
After what felt like standing underneath the spotlight for hours, James carried on his speech, now talking about utilizing the element of surprise.
Though none of that mattered anymore.
You’re still there, standing like an idiot in the middle of the field.
Everything was muffled.
Shapes were blurred.
Your body snapped into survival mode, making your legs move before your mind could think about which direction you should take.
The only thing plaguing your thoughts was how James Moriarty found out a secret only three people shared.
Especially since two of those people were buried in the ground.
…
“Where’s James?”, you demand as you storm into the arena, stopping at the door to the weapons room.
The red haired girl at the entrance squints. You had no armour, no weapons, no reason to be here.
She looks at you like you spoke Latin, her face twisting into a scowl.
“Who?”, she asks, as though your question was physically demanding and running her day.
“Gods there aren’t that many -,” you mutter rolling your eyes to the side. “James Moriarty”, you punctuate, “Where is he?”
She scoffs, annoyed. “Why do you want to know that?”
“None of your damn -”
As if on command, James pops up behind her, like a curious cat being summoned for food. The sight of you fuming making him grin.
‘Oh Mare, don't be so rude.” He swings an arm around her shoulder. “You know how the singers get lost all the time. Like little fawns trying to find their mother”
Mare, as it seems her name was, snickers. You make a mental note to never ask her anything again.
“You.” You grab his arm. “With me. Now.”
“Whatever you say sun-”
You don’t give him enough time to finish his sentence and pull him down the hall you came from. James looks back with a smug glare before letting himself get dragged away, making no effort to resist.
Your steps echo on the stone floor that lined the path circling the inside of the arena. His steps quickly sync with your own, his eyes locking on the part of his arm that you were holding.
The way your fingers curled around his forearm which made him hyperaware of the way his body was responding to the touch.
How the tips of his ears heated. How his heart quickened. How his mind was eager to find out where you were taking him. What the whole situation looked like.
How he didn’t mind - what it looked like.
Before he could formulate some smart remark, you pushed open a door and threw him inside. His eyes barely adjusted to the dark room.
The door shutting loudly behind you.
He could only feel your hands push him again, his back hitting a wall.
“Who told you?”, you demand. Your voice is sharp, unwilling to back down. You were getting answers no matter what.
“Told me what?” He was going to enjoy testing your limits.
You pull your dagger. The same one he placed beneath your neck a couple hours ago - and you press it beneath his.
His vision slowly adjusted to the darkness; enough to notice he got dragged into a storage closet and enough to notice that you were really not messing around.
That amused him even more. He raises his arms sarcastically, even though he could disarm you in the blink of an eye - but where would be the fun of that?
“Aw - How adorable that you think you’re scaring me when you’re angry”, he muses.
“James this is not a fucking joke”, you snap back.
“I can see that.”
“Answer. My question.” you grit through your teeth.
He hums. “Well, if I’m being plain - you’re the most obvious person I have ever met.”
“That wasn’t plain-”
“You constantly fidget with your fingers when you’re nervous.” he blurts out, shutting you up. “ Which-” he sucks in a breath. “- frankly is the most basic form of unconsciously showing nervousness.”
You sigh. “Get to the point.”.
“And, you circle their base. Constantly. You have a pattern. It’s not hard to miss. It’s like you’re afraid they’ll fall off again.”
You lower your weapon. That last sentence hits you deeper than it should.
You feel tears creeping up on you, your skin responding by sending goosebumps although the room was warm.
Shit.
He continues. “It’s also not hard to notice the evident scars around the base of your fingers. Anyone with a pair of eyes could see the contrast in skin tone.”
He dips his head towards you. You could feel his breath on your skin - thanking the darkness that was all your senses could make out.
“But that makes me wonder-” his tone drops, his accent getting even thicker, “Are your fingers, even yours?”
Your heart skips a beat. The uncanny curiosity behind his voice sends shivers down your spine, as you stand there in silence.
Letting his words sink it.
Letting your eyes fully adjust to the darkness and take in the shadow of his figure in front of you. The way he crossed his arms, waiting for an answer.
And your lack of response being the answer he seeked.
…
It was the end of the play. You had been on stage for a little over two hours. You played your lines, manipulated props, landed jokes that made the audience laugh. You were having the time of your life.
It was the final scene, you were facing the audience.
For the first time that night, your line of sight falls onto a man you hadn’t seen before in the audience.
A man that looked all too familiar.
James.
He was watching you with such curiosity - a look of genuine curiosity. Like he was trying to understand the character. He wasn’t staring at you, he was observing the girl you played.
The girl holding her father’s knife in one hand.
The girl delivering her final words.
You hold his gaze, as though you were speaking to him, and him only.
You take a deep breath; a breath calculated with the timing of your next line.
“And as I fall into the depths of my despair, as I fall into the trenches that I have dug,” your eyes soften, “Make it known that I have loved and I wish to have been loved in return.”
“ Let it be known-,” your voice cracks, “ that there was nothing crueler than to have given so much and be torn apart by the same ones whom I have loved.”
You fall to your knees, your hands toying with the handle of the knife prop. You look up to the audience again, your eyes finding James again through the crowd.
Tears threatened to fall. Your hair was a mess.
“I have given my soul to you, my lover.”
His breath catches.
You take another breath - turning your head frantically from side to side. Your character, desperate to find someone to address.
Though there was no one.
She was alone on the stage.
Alone with her thoughts.
And no one to save her.
Your free hand grips your chest. “ I have given my heart to you, my mother. I have clawed and sacrificed my flesh for you, my friend.”
Your face falls, as though a realization dawned on you. You throw the knife to the side and clumsily stand up.
“I am but bones now being chewed at by your dog, oh Universe!” you cry. Your voice raw and angry, echoing in the deafening silence of a focused audience.
You let out a soft chuckle. A chuckle of defeat.
“Oh how the Fates have laughed - its echo in my ears, filling my mind with a constant buzz”, you spat.
A breath.
“Yet, I do not loathe it,” you deliver calmly, “I welcome it.” A pause.
“For it has made my choices clear.” you finish in solemn resolve.
Another breath. Deeper this time.
“And how cruel that I have been beaten down and still wish that you know: I do not blame you. I do not blame any of you. I still love you. For it seems that this was my destiny; and you have all helped me fulfill it.”
A final pause.
“So before I bid you all eternal goodbye and goodnight-”
Tears threatened to fall from your glossy eyes, a pained smile stretched across your face - like it took every ounce of energy to produce it
“I say, thank you.”
You stab yourself in a quick and swift motion - the action drawing gasps from the crowd. The fake blood pouch sewn in your dress oozing onto the fabric
As you stagger backwards, you show momentary panic before your face falls peacefully.
Your knees hit the ground as your arms stretch out to your sides, dropping the knife, welcoming the sweetness of death to free your character from her mortal torment, her eyes closing in a solemn final moment.
She crumbles to the floor and the curtains fall.
…
You picked up your trusty olive satchel to head back to your cabin. The sun was setting, golden hour at its peak. Everything was infinitely more beautiful. It was like the trees were shaking off the last rays of light before the shadows submerge them.
Your steps were more lively than usual. The performance would usually always take a toll on you since they were so emotionally demanding; Though this evening, you felt light and full of energy - like you could go out there and do it a dozen more times.
As you approached the exit, you noticed James waiting in the distance.
You could recognize those dark curls from a mile away. He was pressed against the wall, holding a knee up, looking opposite you, somewhere deep in thought.
“Didn’t take you for a theater guy” you teased, once you were close enough.
His head snaps in your direction. His face was blank, unreadable.
He pushes himself off the wall with his foot. “That sounded personal what you said up there”, he states.
“It’s just a play, James.”, you confess.
He chuckles. “Oh you know very well that was more than just a play.”, he corrected. “ You’re always the first to defend that art isn't just meant to be seen - so I suggest you don’t fathom lying to me.”, a hint of warning coating his tone.
Your face lightens up in delight. “I’m surprised you paid so much attention to the things I care about”
“You make annoyingly convincing points.”, he concedes.
“Oh - are you saying I’ve convinced you?”
He raises an eyebrow, a ghost of a smile painted on his lips. “Maybe.”
“Hm.” you hum jovially - a swell of pride blooming in your chest.
He had never admitted - or closely admitted - you were right about anything.
You could get used to this.
“But -”, he reprised more seriously, “I still stand by what I said before- you know before you just left without saying a word.”
You freeze. Knowing exactly what he referred to.
You had silently hoped not to revisit the conversation.
A conversation you tried burying a few days ago.
“You should get yourself under better control. You’re too easy to take advantage of if your weaknesses are exposed to the public”, he advises.
You scoff. “Is that supposed to be your heartwarming advice after so graciously complementing me?”
“It’s survival advice”, he returns, not denying that he complimented you. “I suggest you take it. For if you have really clawed at the flesh of your skin for your friend, you must see the importance of thicker skin.”
You glance at him, surprised that he had quoted you - word for word.
You didn’t know how to process that he was truly paying attention to you , that he was being oddly kind to you.
You open your mouth to respond - but he doesn’t give you the chance, flashing you a quick smile before walking away - leaving you wondering what else he knew.
What else he wasn’t telling you.
And what he was going to do with that information.
Taglist: @whosscruffylooking;@wolfiemarley (let me know if you want to be added to the taglist!)
Jud Duplenticy x Wick'sNiece!Reader
Sanctuary Masterlist | Taglist Form | Previous | The end. |
word count: 2k
warnings: none, for once. just the emotional damage that comes with saying goodbye to one of my favorite stories i’ve ever written.
a/n: thank you, thank you, thank you for coming along on this journey with me. i love these two and their little world so much, and i’m so grateful that so many of you chose to love them too.
here is your ending 🥂🤍 and maybe, if you’d like, share in the comments what you think Jud and reader’s life looks like after that year. i’d love for you to make the story your own and imagine all the little moments they get after we leave them.
i love you guys dowwwwnnn 😭🫶
"Wait!"
Jud's voice tears across the rain as he pedals harder than he probably has in years, the bike rattling beneath him like it too understands the urgency. He nearly loses control rounding the bend to your house, tires skidding over wet gravel, but then he sees you.
The trunk of your car is open. Bags already inside. Your front door standing wide like the house itself is helping you leave him.
And it is raining, of course it is — as if the sky has decided this deserves more drama.
Your letter is still clenched in his hand, soaked through, the ink beginning to run at the edges. He brakes too hard, the bike fishtailing before it jerks to a stop.
"Please." He half-falls off it trying to get to you faster. "Just hold on. Please. I'm begging you."
You turn at the sound of him, startled, rain sliding down your face and catching in your lashes. "Jud, what—"
"Don't do this."
He says it before he's even fully reached you.
He leaves the bike where it falls and closes the distance between you with no caution left in him, no priestly composure, no effort to seem measured or calm. He is soaked through, breathless, hair dripping, the letter crushed in his fist like it personally offended him.
"I told you not to—"
"Not to come after you," he cuts in, still catching his breath. "Did you really think I'd accept this?"
He lifts the letter between you.
The pages are damp and wrinkled, your words half-blurring into the rain, but he is looking at you. Not at them.
"You don't get to write something like this and disappear before I answer it."
Your face shifts, hurt and hope colliding so fast it almost looks like fear. "Jud…"
"No." He shakes his head, rain flying from the ends of his hair. "No, I'm not letting this happen again. We've done this — walked away, decided for each other, chosen the noble exit — and I am done."
He's shaking. Not from cold. Not entirely.
He opens the letter with both hands, careful despite the rain trying to dissolve it, and glances down at the page.
"'How can I stand there while you trade away your calling piece by piece just to keep me nearby.'" His voice roughens on your own words. Then he looks up. "You don't get to decide that for me."
Your throat tightens.
"I am so tired," he says, quieter now, "of everyone in this town deciding what my life ought to cost me."
That takes the air right out of you.
He drops the letter to his side and steps close enough that the rain no longer feels like it's falling between you.
"Langstrom offered me a year. A leave. Time to think — to figure this out without any commitments to the church bearing down on me, without fully breaking my vows. Time to follow my gut for once in my life."
You blink. "You can do that?"
"I can do that." Something in his face breaks open slowly, like a man who has finally stopped bracing for the next blow. "I want to do that."
"I can't, Jud." You wrap your arms around yourself against the cold. "I can't spend another year doing this. Waiting for what my gut tells me will inevitably come."
"And what does your gut tell you?"
The question is so quiet it nearly gets swallowed by the rain.
You open your mouth. Close it.
"That you'll realize this was grief and pain and proximity and a very strange couple of months, and you'll—"
"Stop it," he shakes his head.
"It's all in the letter. I won't repeat it. You mean too much to me to—"
"Please." He steps toward you.
"I just need to go." You shift toward the car.
"Damn it. I love you!"
The words land without warning, without preamble, without any of the careful architecture he usually builds around hard things.
Just that.
The rain keeps falling. Somewhere down the road, a branch snaps in the wind.
You stare at him.
His jaw is set, eyes firmly set on yours, and he looks terrified — the way a man looks when he has finally said the true thing and has no idea what comes next.
"I love you," he repeats, slower this time, like he wants you to hear every syllable. "Not because of what happened or by accident. I loved you before I had the courage to name it, and I will still love you at the end of that year, and I am not interested in pretending otherwise so you can leave quietly and call it mercy."
Your chin trembles. You press your lips together hard.
"You said I was your saving grace." He shakes his head, wet and wrecked and incandescently earnest in a way that breaks something open in your chest. "You have been mine since the day you walked up to the churchyard with your bike, in that beautiful yellow dress, and made me feel seen for the first time since moving here…maybe ever." His voice drops. "I have not spent one second since then not thinking about you. Not wanting you. Not needing you in a way I couldn't pray away no matter how hard I tried."
You look at him. At the soaked hair and the ruined letter and the bike lying on its side in the gravel. At the expression on his face that has nothing of the priest left in it and everything of the man.
"Jud." Your voice comes out smaller than you intend. "I am so afraid of wanting this."
"I know." He takes one more step, careful enough to give you room to decide. "So am I. But I am so tired of living in fear."
You close the distance he left you.
His arms come around you before you're fully there, pulling you against him like the last month has been one long held breath he can finally let go. One hand cradles the back of your head. His cheek presses to your temple.
You cry into his shoulder.
"Please," he whispers into your hair, and it comes out like a prayer — a little desperate and entirely without shame. "Please put me out of my misery and tell me you feel the same. I think you do. I pray you do. But I am willing to beg. I'm already out here drenched, I biked through a storm, I would have run if I had to. Just—" His arms tighten around you. "Please love me back."
You pull back just enough to look at him, hands coming up to hold his face the way he always holds yours — like something precious, like something you're not willing to drop. Rain runs between your fingers.
His eyes close for one brief, undone second, like the words have gone somewhere deep and he needs a moment before he can look at you again.
When he opens them, they're wet in a way that isn't just the weather.
"Jud." Your thumbs brush his cheeks. "I love you so much that I have been in complete agony trying to protect you from it. I wrote that letter because I love you. Because I couldn't watch you spend one more day choosing guilt over yourself and think I didn't notice. Because the cruelest thing I could imagine was becoming one more person in your life who cost you something."
"You are not a cost," he assured you, and the certainty in it is devastating. "You have added more value to my life than you could ever know."
You make a sound that is not quite a laugh and not quite a sob.
He kisses you in the rain, which is exactly as ridiculous and inevitable as everything else between you has been — both of your hands still cradling each others faces, the trunk of your car still open behind you with bags that are no longer going anywhere.
When he pulls back, he's smiling. The full version. Unguarded, unashamed, a little undone.
"I'm going to need you to unpack those bags," he says.
You laugh — properly this time, wet and exhausted and lighter than you've felt in years. "I know."
He kisses you again, and you run your fingers through his wet hair and he sighs into you like a man setting something down he's been carrying too long.
"How," he murmurs against your lips, "was I ever supposed to recover after knowing what it felt like to kiss you?"
You smile against his mouth. "That was all part of my evil plan."
"It worked." He pulls back just enough to look at you, eyes bright, the smile still there. Then he takes your hand from his face and holds it in both of his, turning it over slowly — like he's reading something written in your palm, like he's making sure this is real before he lets himself believe it.
You watch him do it.
And then, because he has earned every word of it, you give him the only thing left to give.
"One year," you say.
He looks up at you.
"And then whatever comes after."
His whole face changes — the last of the fear going out of it, replaced by something quieter and more permanent. He brings your hand to his mouth and presses his lips to your knuckles, eyes closed, like a man at the end of a very long road who has finally, finally stopped walking.
"Yeah," he breathes, the smile breaking wide and helpless across his face. "I have a feeling it's going to be a lot longer than a year."
The rain softens around you.
Not to nothing — just to the kind that doesn't demand anything. The kind you can stand in without bracing.
Behind you, the trunk of your car stays open. The house door is still ajar, letting the warm light spill out across the wet gravel like it's been waiting for you both to come back inside.
You look at the man in front of you — soaked through, laughing quietly, still holding your hand like he has no plans to stop — and you think about yellow dresses and storms and letters written out of love and bicycles and prayers that got answered sideways, in the last way you ever expected, by exactly the right person at exactly the wrong time.
You think: I would do all of it again.
Every storm. Every wound. Every impossible, necessary, ruinous, beautiful step of it.
have you ever thought about writing for starwars? i noticed your username and there’s a severe lack of starwars writers on tumblr…
also, i love your writing so so much, especially sanctuary i adored the way you handled jud and his story!! 💌
this ask made me smile because i’ve been a star wars fan since i was a little girl. my username def is a star wars reference, so i fear you caught me 😂
i’ll be honest, i’ve lost a little bit of my love for the franchise over the years with some of the choices disney has made, but the love is definitely still there.
and fun fact: i actually have some VERY old mando, poe, and obi-wan fics tucked away from years ago 👀 maybe i need to revisit them and see if they’re worth posting after all? if that’s something people would actually want to see, i could definitely be persuaded….
and thank you so much for your kind words about sanctuary! jud and his story mean so much to me, so hearing that makes my heart very happy
i’ve actually gotten a few asks like this lately, which makes me so happy because i absolutely loved writing eddie in open arms.
i definitely think it’s an idea i’d love to explore eventually! i think once open arms is finished, i need a little time to grieve that story and say goodbye to those characters after living with them for so long 😭 and then maybe i’ll finally let myself dive into an eddie story.
so the answer is definitely not no…just an “eventually”
Would you ever write a fic for Eddie Munson like you wrote him in the Steve one?
I think it’d be pretty sweet.
Just imagine him with the gang from the beginning.
And maybe let him live. Survive with some injuries as y/n stays with him. Also (maybe less) injured. No death due to bats, just trauma. Let someone else be the blame for poor Chrissy.
awww this is such a sweet idea!!! i’m honestly still undecided, but i’d definitely say an eddie fic is in the cards eventually. i loved writing him in open arms, and the idea of giving that boy a little more happiness (and maybe letting him survive 😭) is very tempting.
there are a few other characters i’ve been dying to write for first, but i wouldn’t rule eddie out at all. if and when i do, i promise i’ll make sure he gets all the love he deserves 🫶
