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If life is a series of narrow escapes
We’re shifting our weight
In this tightrope ballet
We’re down to the wire, we’re down to the wire
Sleeping At Last, “Wires”
The problem is River. Which is probably something that people have said time and time again over the course of his life, because yes, the problem is usually River. Even in their grab-bag of problems, he takes the cake more often than not. This is both annoying, and, lately, stressful for Louisa personally. She really wishes that he would leave the damn cake to someone else once in a while, but it wasn’t like he had ever asked for her feedback on the subject.
So, that’s the problem. River.
Or, more specifically, it’s the way that every time Louisa blinks, the afterimage of River laying on the ground between those shelves, covered in debris, is burned into the backs of her eyelids. It wouldn’t have been so bad, probably, if he hadn’t had to take off immediately to deal with that folder, or if Louisa had said fuck the debrief and gone with him. If they hadn’t been separated right after making it out of the hatch, they — or, at least, Louisa would probably be fine.
But they were. Separated.
One moment Louisa was kneeling on the ground by the opening of the hatch, staring at River with adrenaline singing in her bloodstream and making the whole world seem sharp and too saturated and tinged metallic, the retort of gunfire ricocheting off the inside of her skull like it had ricocheted around in the metal tunnel they had just climbed through, and then she was looking at a blank night sky. Her whole body was shaking. Everything was weird and horrible and she couldn’t stop shaking.
Louisa had been through some shit in her life, and particularly in the last year or so, but nothing quite like that. Nothing like being hunted by people who were theoretically on her own side, pinned down by machine gun fire from both ends, trapped in a corner and meant to die there. Until Shirley had flung open the hatch and hollered down at them to get out, it had really seemed like that might be the end.
For fuck’s sake, River had thrown his gun at the dogs — with either startlingly good luck or even more startlingly good aim, and she really did not want to know which. It was that desperate. It came that close to it. They were both going to die, and Louisa knew it just as surely as she knew that she was going to have to watch. She was going to have just enough time to watch River die and then she was going to die too.
And then, just like that, they were out.
They were out and there was Shirley and they were all in one piece. Louisa looked at River and looked at him and looked at him and no matter how long she stared, there was still no blood — at least, not any more than there already had been, and a few extra smudges from the grenade. He wasn’t bleeding out. It wasn’t like with Donovan, where one moment they were all running together and then all of a sudden he was dying, and so she stared at River and tried to find the blood. The bullets. The— the fucking shrapnel that would be sticking out of his spine any moment, knowing him.
But it wasn’t there. He pulled his jacket open to grab that folder out and he still wasn’t bleeding to death beneath it. Louisa had watched closely because some part of her was sure that he had to be, because there’s no way they got that lucky. Any moment, River’s face would go grey and he would collapse and that would be that. But he didn’t. He held up the folder and shook it like he was reminding them that he had already picked up the newspaper, and then he was gone.
Louisa was left watching him walk away, out of the bright halo of lights that had been set up to illuminate the would-be site of her and River’s execution, and he was gone. She watched until she couldn’t see him anymore and then the chill of the night registered, seeping through her jacket, and she told herself that was why she was shaking so hard. It wasn’t because she couldn’t stop squinting into the shadows, looking for where River might have collapsed on his way to the car, just out of view seizing or choking on his own blood. There was no reason for her to be doing that at all.
Hitting Duffy in the head with a chunk of concrete helps, though not much. It quiets something inside of Louisa to do it, much though she isn’t particularly keen on admitting that. Whoever said that violence didn’t solve problems had clearly never bashed in the head of someone who tried to kill them.
All the way back to Slough House, Louisa’s hands kept shaking. She and Marcus left Duffy on the ground and didn’t even bother checking whether he was still alive, which is something she does not regret. Her hands tremble and her teeth hurt from how hard she grits her jaw but as far as Duffy goes, good riddance to him.
“They identified Ben Dunn and Sean Donovan,” Ho tells them when they’re sitting around, bloodied and achy and too exhausted to move. “Got it from the chatter.”
Louisa hears him, and then she hears him again. Her ears ring and she hears, They identified three of them. Ben Dunn and Sean Donovan. They found Cartwright, too.
It would have been right there on the chatter when it happened. The dogs would have reported in when it happened and again when they confirmed it — Cartwright was eliminated. Some kind of response from Duffy that would have made Louisa’s stomach flip and acid burn her throat and her mind go to the boxcutter in her desk would have followed. Even just thinking about it makes her fingers itch, and despite the fact that it hadn’t actually happened, she wishes she had swung that chunk of concrete harder. Knowing this surely that he would have done it is enough.
Most of the debriefing is going to follow in the next couple of days. Lamb makes an executive decision to that effect and sends them all home. Ordinarily it would have been Catherine ushering them off into the night while Lamb shut himself away upstairs, but Catherine isn’t even there. Lamb announces that she’s gone and quit, but that doesn’t sound right, so maybe she’d just been frustrated with his attitude after having one of the worst experiences of her life and threatened it. Louisa would call it even odds that she turned up for work in the next few days regardless.
Even after Lamb pronounces that they are released until at least the next morning, the rest of them all sit around for a while longer. Shirley and Marcus seem like they aren’t sure if they should even be there or not, and Louisa gathers after a while of listening to them mutter to each other that they’d been fired and then un-fired. Apparently the un-firing had come from Catherine, which was something Louisa hadn’t known she had the power to do, but isn’t necessarily surprised to hear that she did. If there were anyone she would personally trust to oversee who did and didn’t work at Slough House, she would certainly rather it be Catherine than Lamb.
Roddy is rambling about some inane bullshit, so he seems pretty much fine. There’s some giddy come-down from the adrenaline bouncing between Marcus and Shirley, who keep bickering about stupid shit. And then eventually they’re leaving, and Roddy’s leaving, and it’s just Louisa, and she’s left looking at River’s desk until she realizes that she was waiting for him to show up.
River is, it would seem, not going to show up. Which is something that Louisa probably could have guessed, because he probably had a lot to deal with, having custody of the most hard-won folder in the history of the fucking planet. And then there was the small matter of how he was beaten to a pulp and there are a lot of very steep stairs in this building that she can’t say she would be thrilled about dragging herself up if she were him. Still, Louisa watched his desk and thought, well, maybe. She knows better, and she watches anyway. It’s just that she… she wants to see him, she supposes.
When she had moved the debris, Louisa hadn’t known what to expect. She hadn’t known if River would still be breathing, if there would be parts of him missing, if a file singed folder or piece of shredded cardboard or shelving covering a part of his body would reveal a gaping hole as soon as she shifted it aside. It had been such a relief when his eyes had opened and there he was, blinking hazily up at her like he were waking from a mid-afternoon nap, the kind that leaves you feeling more tired than before you fell asleep. His head had been heavy in her hands and terror kept her heart in a sharp, frozen grip until he managed to hold it up on his own.
Louisa looks at his desk and can practically see him sitting there, and then she blinks and there’s his body on the ground again, his shoe sticking out into the aisle between shelves, burned into her minds eye like she was looking right at it. But he had been okay. River is okay, and just because he isn’t in front of her where she can see him doesn’t mean he isn’t still fine. He hasn’t sprung any leaks since she saw him, surely. She’s just overreacting. It’s just her mind playing tricks on her after a really shit day. River had opened his eyes and looked at her like she had begged him to, he’d done as he was told for once in his life and come back to her, and he’s probably sleeping it off now like she should be. They’re both fine. Everyone is fine.
When Louisa dreams that night, that is not what happens.
In her dreaming world, River never wakes. He won’t wake no matter how she shakes him, or Louisa goes to lift his head only for her fingers to slip through the wet mess of a partially caved-in skull, or they’re on their way to the hatch and all of a sudden it’s just her and Donovan or just her and she doesn’t know where River is at all or when she managed to leave him behind. In the version of it that Louisa’s mind conjures as she sleeps, she turns at the top of the hatch and sees him on the ground beneath the ladder because she got out and he didn’t, right at the last moment. A piece of a shelving unit breaks off and spears him through. River chokes and coughs and spits up blood and breathes with horrible wet rattles and dies and dies and dies. Over and over again, she watches River die.
Things don’t really get much better from there.
The next day, Louisa goes through a debrief with Lamb and spends a lot of time just sitting around, reeling from trying to process Catherine’s evidently very real departure and hearing phantom gunshots that leave behind bloody wounds that never really existed. She talks through what happened and remembers very little of what she said after, and Lamb sends her home before it’s barely afternoon. He dismisses her with a wave and a jab about how she wouldn’t be much use in her current state even if he did have anything to give her to do, and she leaves without a word.
It’s late by the time Louisa leaves her flat again, which she quickly learns had been a mistake. Everything is fine at first. The weather has taken a swift turn for the colder in the past few weeks, but her coat and scarf keep her well insulated, and it’s good to have a goal. Something to focus on.
Then there’s some stupid, ambitious asshole who has already started putting up Christmas lights. Louisa wants to strange the bastard responsible because not only is it fucking October which means having those up is just ridiculous, but because she was walking to the shops and then she was stopped in her tracks on a street corner, transfixed by a looping repetition of red, green, red, green. It isn’t until someone ran into her and barked watch it that she snaps back into her body and realizes how hard she’s started to shake.
After that, Louisa doesn’t bother going to the shops. She goes on a walk instead, diverting her path and trying to forget about red and green lights and doing her level best not to flinch at every cyclist that passes her by. It’s not an unusual place to find herself. Louisa has been taking walks at night a lot lately, ever since… since Min. She can hear her mum’s horrified tutting every time she sets out, telling her that she’s going to run into trouble and wind up stabbed or some such.
Honestly, though? Louisa is half hoping that one of these nights, some jumped up idiot goes ahead and tries it. That’s one fight that nobody could possibly blame her for getting into. She couldn’t even be accused of picking it if they came at her first.
It doesn’t happen, though. There’s the occasional comment from some tipsy bar-goer, but she ignores them or snaps a quick fuck off and keeps going. She just has too much energy buzzing in her legs and in her lungs to do anything else.
That’s the problem tonight, too. That restless need to move, made worse by the stupid lights. So Louisa walks around and around to nowhere at all and then she walks home and dreams in red and green and wakes up after about forty-five minutes with a sweat-damp shirt and grief she doesn’t even have a real reason to feel choking her.
There’s more to come the next day, too, because of course there is.
Somehow, Louisa hasn’t gone over every detail of the damn story enough already. Lamb is still doing the debriefs, because apparently the sadism of Slough House knows no limits.
Except that Lamb is not… the worst that he could be, throughout the process, which is almost worse than the alternative. He’s not being nice — Louisa thinks that he might actually keel over of a stroke if he tried to be nice — but he’s not taking every possible opportunity to point out the places in the story where he wishes either she or River had died in the facility, which is pretty big, coming from him. And then there’s the surveillance footage.
When initially giving her story the day before, Louisa hadn’t known there was any. Of course, that probably should have been obvious. A place like that, every inch of it was going to be covered in cameras. Not that they lasted any longer than the moment the dogs shot them out one by one, but that was generally enough to get a decent narrative of what happened put together before they went black.
Not that it’s going to matter at all what’s on those tapes in the end. It won’t matter that they have footage of MI5 trying to wipe out its own people — and succeeding, in the case of poor hapless Douglas, who Louisa is sure has to be dead because she’s not heard a single word of him since the facility was breached. They’ll spin a story because of course they will and it won’t matter that they shot Sean Donovan or Ben Dunn or that they tried to shoot her and River or that they fucking blew River up with a fucking grenade.
None of that is going to matter. They only have the footage in the first place because Roddy did something that Louisa doesn’t even want to hazard a guess at to get it. It’s probably already been wiped from every other server on planet earth.
Louisa almost wishes that they didn’t have it. It’s not going to make a difference and if they didn’t have it then she wouldn’t have to sit here and watch parts of it. She wouldn’t have to see the moment before the grenade went off or, even worse, the moment just before that. The moment when River didn’t know it was about to happen and didn’t know to brace for it yet. Just like it had played out in real life, Louisa sees it coming before he does. She wants to reach into the screen and shake him. Better yet, she wants to cup her hands around the miniature version of him and shield him from what’s coming next.
There’s no sound on the video but Louisa flinches anyway when the grenade goes off and she sees River’s body ricochet off shelving units, hit with boxes and landing out of view on the floor.
“Relax, Cartwright is fine,” is all Lamb has to say when she closes her eyes tight, breathing hard through her nose. “You know he’s fine. Keep watching, he pops right up in a minute. Fucking sturdy little bastard, that one.”
“Do I?” Louisa asks, unable to stop herself, nor able to keep the accusation out of her voice. Her heart is pounding in her throat, and it’s loud enough that her voice is just a bit too loud to match. “Know he’s fine? Because he hasn’t been here since it happened. I haven’t seen him.”
“He’s at home. Medical leave, enforced.” When she looks at him in surprise, Lamb snorts. “What, you think I would pass up the chance to get him out of my house for a while? Cartwright is benched for at least the week.”
It’s not particularly reassuring, but Lamb probably hadn’t really meant it to be reassuring. He’s not a reassuring sort of person, and the lack of actively lamenting River’s survival while his unconscious body was on a computer screen in front of them is clearly as far as he’s going to go. Even that is probably a herculean effort coming from him. Somehow, Louisa can’t find it in herself to be grateful for it.
It’s a no-go on the shops that night also. Louisa considers it for a brief moment before dismissing the idea. She’d have to walk past the place with the stupid fucking Christmas lights again, and she can’t dream in green and red for the third night in a row. Instead, she goes home and eats a supper that she can’t taste at all and doesn’t remember as soon as it’s over and then she’s standing in the middle of her flat, looking uselessly around at it like she had something she was meant to do. It sure feels to Louisa like there’s something that she’s meant to be doing. Nothing comes to mind, though, and so she tidies for a while.
A load of laundry goes into the wash and then Louisa proceeds to move things around the sitting room, inanely rearranging for no particular reason. Books swap places on shelves, though not in alphabetical or subject matter order. She gets all the way to putting the laundry from the washer to the dryer and then something in Louisa snaps and she can’t stay here a moment longer, alone with the inside of her own flat.
Invigorated by sudden purpose, Louisa marches around the flat with a goal in mind. She grabs a small duffel bag and throws things into it one after the other, not paying attention to folding or organizing any of it like she usually might. Once satisfied, she zips the whole thing up with an aggravated yank and leaves the flat, barely remembering to lock the door behind her and the dryer still running in the background.
When Louisa goes on her late night walks, she doesn’t tend to follow the same path. There isn’t a usual path to follow, never a destination in mind when she leaves her building long after dark and walks and walks and walks. That’s what sets this time apart — this time, she is headed somewhere in particular.
Louisa tugs her scarf up higher, shielding her cheeks from the biting night air, hefts her bag more securely onto her shoulder, and starts off with purpose. She’s made it a point to know the city with and without a map, studying it like she would study the layout of the building that was the target of an infiltration. If she was going to be stuck here, wasting her time in Slough House and relegated to never leaving London, she figured she may as well know the city inside and out, and it’s kept her sharp. That’s how she knows which way to go, without a moment’s thought or hesitation.
It’s not a short walk, but Louisa doesn’t really care. Short or not, it passes by in a numb blur, and then she’s exactly where she meant to be, outside of a small, nondescript block of flats. For a minute she stands on the pavement by the street, looking at the window that she knows is River’s sitting room and trying to ignore the way she feels breathless and gutted by the process of finding which flat is his. Louisa counted floors and windows and then all of a sudden was sucker punched by Min’s voice in her head, how terrible he’d been at the same thing.
Even as she tells herself that she had meant to just go over for a moment, get eyes on the light on inside to see if he was home and then leave, Louisa knows that it’s a lie. She wouldn’t have the duffel slung over her shoulder if that were the case — she’d packed it for a particular reason, and she isn’t going to leave.
The funny thing is, Louisa doesn’t really like being places other than her own flat overnight. Even if her flat is a bit of a shithole, everything she needs or wants is right where she can find it exactly when she goes looking and it’s a hard sell to overcome that hurdle. Maybe it’s not the best idea to let people you’ve just picked up for a one night stand find out where you live, but Louisa is a spy and more dangerous than most strangers she’s met combined and besides, it’s not like it’s much safer to go to someone else’s place.
The point is that she knew well and good that she wasn’t going to just look and then leave, and she’d known that since before she walked out of her own front door. Which means that Louisa can’t exactly feel surprised at herself when she ends up knocking on River’s front door.
The answer doesn’t come right away. Louisa stands awkwardly in the hall for just long enough that she starts feeling silly when there’s a sort of shuffling noise that pauses while she assumes he looks through the peep hole. The pause is followed by a muffled cursing while the shuffling picks up, interrupted by a muted clatter, and the door swings open and there’s River.
“Uh,” he says with a politely bewildered smile, holding onto the handle for what looks like balance. “Hello.”
Louisa doesn’t even ask to come in. She walks right past him through the open door and stops once she’s over the threshold, turning to look at him. When he first answered she had tried not to pay attention, not to notice anything, because she wanted to be inside before she had to process it. Now, she’s inside, and she almost wishes that she hadn’t looked at all.
River closes the door with lopsided steps and leans against it, still wearing that same politely bewildered expression. He’s dressed in sweats and a hoodie and he looks like pure shit. Bruises have bloomed in technicolour across his face, painted against his temple and much more vivid than they had been day-of. Seeing it turns her stomach, and she can only imagine how bad it is where she can’t see.
It’s honestly hard to say whether he looks better or worse now than he did the last time she saw him. It’s hard to remember clearly how bad it had been, because Louisa’s mind has so thoroughly torn those last moments to bits. Had River been as bad as she thought, or was it the effect of bright unforgiving halogen that would make anyone look like death warmed over? Was she remembering things worse than they had been, coloured by an overactive imagination that kept trying to convince her after the fact that she had been the lone survivor that night?
Lone survivor. It’s just about the scariest thing that Louisa can imagine, and it just keeps happening. Somehow, she always ends up alone.
Bristling against the thought, teeth on edge and lungs feeling tight and small, Louisa pivots to something else she can focus on instead. She folds her arms, ignoring the way it makes her duffel bag pinch into her shoulder, and pins him with a hard look.
“Did you get hit in the head so hard you forgot how to use a telephone?”
Caught off-guard, River blinks at her through two black eyes of differing severity. He looks confused and owlish as he says, “I did my debrief already. Did I miss something?”
At first, all Louisa can do is gape at him. “You,” she manages eventually, shaking her head. “You are impossible. You can’t possibly— Sorry, are those crutches?”
It’s a non-sequitur, but in Louisa’s defence, she had just noticed them. The crutches are casually propped beside the door frame that leads into the kitchen, over at the other end of the hall, and most importantly not under River’s arms, keeping his weight off of what she now sees is an ankle wrapped up in a brace. The cuff of one leg of his sweats is caught in the velcro, giving Louisa a clear view of the injury.
Thinking back on it, Louisa does remember him limping, right from when he first returned from the park with his face all marked up and a sullen reluctance to discuss what had happened. Maybe it had happened there, or maybe it was when the grenade went off, or maybe he put his foot down wrong when they were running from the dogs. There are too many options, too many places where it could have happened, and Louisa doesn’t like the way it felt to go over all the different ways that River had been hurt. It turns her stomach and makes her breath come short so she stops trying to figure it out.
“Why aren’t you using those?” she asks instead, because being annoyed at him is easier to take than any of the rest of it is.
River shrugs one shoulder and then immediately winces like he regrets it. “Couldn’t carry my gun and the crutches at the same time,” he says like that is any kind of explanation.
Sure enough, the gun he mentioned is set on a small side table in the hall near the door he leans against. It’s a pistol that he must have put down as soon as he realized that it was Louisa on the other side of the door, and that’s what made the weird clattering noise that she’d heard.
“Do you usually answer your door with a gun?” It seems like a bit much, even in their line of work.
“Only when I think it might be the dogs come to get me that’s knocking,” he says, and there’s a resentful little edge in his voice that makes her feel a bit cold. “Figured maybe I should at least try to put up a fight.”
A knot forms in Louisa’s throat and she shakes her head. She can’t respond, not right away, and so she just stands there, at a loss. River’s eyes close and his head knocks back into the door and jolts back forward again immediately after making contact, wincing like he had when he’d shrugged. It seems to propel him into motion, and Louisa watches with the anxious suspicion that he’s moments from collapsing onto the floor as he pushes off and away from the support. She wants to dart over to help, to slot herself under his arm and take some of his weight, but something stops her. Louisa stays put and watches River make his slow, limping way from the doorway to the kitchen.
As he passes the threshold where the crutches are propped, not bothering to grab them, River looks over his shoulder. A little twitch of a smile pulls at the corner of his mouth and he calls, voice slightly raised, “You coming?”
“Yeah,” Louisa says, and starts undoing her coat. “Be there in a minute.”
And River disappears into the kitchen with that lopsided shuffling walk, leaving Louisa alone for a moment. As soon as he’s out of sight, she closes her eyes. In a moment, she’ll follow him. For that moment, though, Louisa squeezes her eyes even tighter shut, breathes hard, and tries to stop feeling like she might be about to fall to the ground at any moment.
—
River had not been expecting to see Louisa at his door that night. To be honest, he hadn’t really been expecting to see anyone, which is why he had brought the gun and not the crutches that he was supposed to be using to keep weight off his bad ankle.
A moderate sprain. That’s what the doctor who had checked him over had pronounced to be the damage. Sprained ankle, bruised ribs, bruised spleen, bruised pretty-much-everything-else. Thankfully, there was nothing needing surgery or casts, but the bad news in that was that it meant there was nothing else to do for his current physical situation other than to wait for it to get better.
It hadn’t really hurt that bad until after River got home that night. The adrenaline had faded and he had stopped moving and then he hurt so bad that he couldn’t sleep. His entire body was in pain after that, from the shooting bolts of it in his ankle to the reminder of the number of times he’d been kicked in the groin.
It hurt. It all really fucking hurt and night time was the worst. There had been no way to lay that wasn’t aggravating some of it, and every time River heard a sound it was like he was at the park or in the facility all over again — the point being someone was there to hurt him and he couldn’t even get up off bed in time to protect himself because his whole stupid bruised-up body couldn’t move. At least the painkillers the doctors sent him home with help some.
River tries not to take them, though. It makes him nervous. The pills make him fuzzy and he doesn’t like not being sharp, not being ready in case something happens. He’s already hurt, his range of motion is already fucked, he can’t afford to have his reaction time and senses dulled too. Not that those things have done much for him so far, or maybe he wouldn’t be in this kind of state in the first place, but they’re all he’s got.
So, all this to say, when Louisa shows up, River is in no small amount of pain. He’s been trying to make himself eat for the better part of an evening, because he knows that he needs to, except that his appetite has all but disappeared. River isn’t hungry, he’s just exhausted and honestly a little nauseated, but by the time he eventually gives up and takes the pills so that he can sleep he’s going to need to have something in his stomach. If he doesn’t, then he’s just going to throw the meds back up, and that had hurt so bad the last time it happened that he had ended up curled up on the floor of the bathroom crying with his bruised abdomen locked in spasms.
Which is why River had been sitting in the kitchen in the middle of the night, resentfully forcing himself to eat something, literally anything he could choke down, when the knock sounded at his door. Even if it had been the dogs there to drag him back to the park and kick the shit out of him again, it would at least break up the monotony of his pathetic excuse for a dinner. Now he’s headed right back there, but at least there’s the benefit of another person in the flat, and it’s the person he would have picked if asked who he wanted there most.
It takes Louisa a while to join him in the kitchen, but that’s of little consequence given how long it takes River to make his way back into the chair he had been sitting in when she arrived. By the time he’s eased himself down she’s coming in and he gestures at the chair opposite the table. She sets her duffel down next to the chair and he eyes it, wondering what’s inside. Louisa came prepared for something, though he’s not entirely sure what. It seems like she plans to stay a while, going by the fact that she’s now absent her coat, scarf, and shoes.
“Can I offer you a snack?” River asks, gesturing at the bowl of cereal he had been eating.
There’s no milk in the bowl. He had poured the cereal in dry and has been sitting there eating it piece by piece without a spoon for at least an hour and a half. Even so, he’s still not done with the bowl. There isn’t even what could be described as a sizable dent.
“There isn’t much else in the flat, so if you want something else then we’ll have to call for takeaway or something.”
“Why are you…” The interrogation that began in the hallway, about phones and crutches and guns, seems like it’s about to continue, but Louisa trails off partway through the question and shakes her head. “Sure. Why not.” She reaches for the bowl and takes a piece for herself, crunching it between her teeth with a deliberately loud pop that makes River cringe.
“What’d you do that for?” He can hear the whine in his own voice, exaggerated and put-upon, and she laughs. It’s just a faint huff, but River smiles back at her and he feels a little more… settled.
Louisa tips more cereal from the box into the bowl and then pulls the bowl across the table to sit between them, close enough that River can get to it without reaching too far but still obviously shared. It’s a scene better befitting a pair of sixth formers at a sleepover than two grown adults employed by MI5, but no one else is around to see it. Maybe that means it doesn’t count.
“How’re you feeling?” Louisa asks after a while. “Been to see the doctor?”
River shrugs, a faint up and down of his shoulder. He’d learned his lesson by the door and it’s a much smaller motion this time, one that hurts but not bad enough not to do it. “Yeah. Bruised some ribs, my spleen, and… everything, pretty much. Sprained ankle. None of it would be too bad on its own but it stacks so it’s… it’s not good, I guess. It’s all gonna heal, but right now it’s a little rough.”
It’s difficult to find the balance between telling the truth and not making it sound worse than it is by whining about it. River’s got some bruises and a sprained ankle but it’ll be fine. He’s basically fine now, it just… hurts, that’s all.
“They send you home with meds?”
“Yeah, but…” He doesn’t finish the sentence but he pulls a face that makes the worse of his black eyes ache and then stares at the cereal bowl in order to avoid the expression that Louisa is definitely making back at him now.
“River, please tell me you’ve been taking your meds.”
“They make me fuzzy.” And sure enough, there’s that expression. “Oh come on, Louisa,” he all but whines, echoing her name the same way she’d said his, “don’t look at me like that. Are you seriously going to tell me you always take every pain pill you should?”
The face she makes when he says that tells River that he definitely has her on that one. So they aren’t exactly a pair of perfect examples of healthy, responsible medical behaviour. They must cut quite the picture right about now. River knows that he looks like shit, that’s for sure. Louisa, though, while not looking like she went ten rounds with a professional fighter, doesn’t look too great herself. Her eyes are heavily shadowed and she looks like she hasn’t been sleeping. The same impression is reflected in her posture, and there’s been a look in her eyes since he answered the door that River doesn’t quite know what to do with.
“How are you feeling?” he asks, though he’s well aware that it’s a question that may or may not be welcomed. It hadn’t gone over too well the last time he pried into Louisa’s emotional state. Then again, it hadn’t gone as bad as it might have, either, and he thinks he at least helped a little. It’s not like he can just sit there and ignore the fact that she’s clearly got something heavy on her mind.
“Why are you asking me that?” There’s a helplessness to the question. It sounds not unlike the way Louisa had sounded in the car, asking him why he’d had to bring up Min’s death, though far less upset. It’s rhetorical just like that question had been, but River can’t help answering it anyway.
“Because you turned up at my flat in the middle of the night and you look like you haven’t slept since we split up at the facility which was like three days ago.”
Louisa’s lips twist and her brow furrows and she picks out another piece of cereal. She eats it slowly and then takes another, repeating the process. It seems like she isn’t going to respond to what he’s said, either tell him how she’s feeling or acknowledge why he’d asked, and that would be fair. She doesn’t actually owe River anything. Not the answer to his question or anything else.
Besides, it was already just about answer enough that Louisa is here at all. There’s something soft and warm in River’s chest, throbbing like the bruises do except that it doesn’t hurt. It’s a feeling put there by the thought that Louisa had been upset and she had decided to come to him. It honestly made River want to smile, let that warm fondness bloom on his face too, except that it wouldn’t exactly be a great idea to smile like a loon right now, given they’re in the middle of a bit of a serious conversation.
Well. Not much of a conversation, is it, since Louisa isn’t—
“You’re right. I’m not sleeping.”
—answering him.
Marshalling his voice into something calm and hopefully nonchalant, River says, “Yeah, I could… I could tell.” He knows it’s a bad idea to say as soon as it’s part of the way out of his mouth, and he’s cringing by the time that he’s done. Focusing too hard on how he said it appeared to have prevented him from thinking at all about what he said.
There’s no real reaction from Louisa, though. She doesn’t throw cereal at him or pull a face or tell him to piss off for essentially telling her that she looked tired. All she does is stare at the table with a stiff set to her shoulders. If she didn’t speak another word the whole night, River would not be surprised. It doesn’t seem like she wants to talk.
When Louisa does speak, it’s with the slow reluctance of someone who, as he had guessed, did not want to be doing so, at the same time that she couldn’t help it. “The facility was…” She keeps her eyes fixed on the tabletop, and her body shifts with a short, pressurized sigh. “It was tough. I can’t quite… shake it, I guess.”
Which, well, fair enough. River hums, and then says, “Yeah. Probably be weird if you could, right? It was a lot. The facility was a lot.” Redundant sort of thing to say, but River is a talker. He always has been. “Getting chased through it by dogs trying to kill us. Getting shot at. What happened to Dunn and Donovan, especially. Can’t blame you for having some trouble sleeping after that.”
The response that he gets is not one that he would have predicted. Louisa’s heavy stillness disappears in a moment and she looks at him with a sharp twist of her head, her chin snapping up and her eyes flashing. River is taken aback. She seems angry, suddenly and acutely, and he can’t figure out why. He hadn’t thought that he had said anything wrong, but then again, that particular thought is one that he has had in the past and been woefully wrong about.
“What?” he asks, unable to help himself.
“You…” Louisa doesn’t finish. She shakes her head and looks out the window, her jaw in a tense set. Angry has given way back to upset, the way she had looked when admitting that she couldn’t sleep and wasn’t quite able to shake off the events of a few days ago, though River no longer thinks that he knows why.
It’s an unsettling thought, that. There are some very obvious reasons for Louisa to be upset, and River had thought he was commiserating with her on that, validating her feelings and giving space for them, given what he knew about how big a deal it was for her to share them with him in the first place.
Evidently not.
After she has watched the raindrops streak down the pane of the window closest to the table for some a while, Louisa says, a little stiff and a little muted and not shifting to look at him, “I thought you were dead.”
“Beg pardon?” River had heard the words. He knew what Louisa had said. Still, he says it immediately, unable to help his grandparents’ vocabulary from slipping out in his incomprehension. People used to think it was adorable — little boy who talked like an old timer — and it still pops out sometimes when he’s caught off-guard and speaks on instinct. Which is certainly the case now. He had heard Louisa’s words but he couldn’t quite process what they meant. Why she was saying them.
“I looked over after the grenade went off and you were just… on the ground. Still.” Her voice is distant and flat. It’s a debrief voice. Except that it’s fraying at the edges, coming apart into something shakier and more unstable. “I didn’t know you were alive until Donovan said something. I told the gunmen that they’d just killed an MI5 officer. It just came out of my mouth, I didn’t even… I thought I had seen you die.”
“Oh.” It’s a pathetic nothing kind of response, but River can’t come up with anything else. His mouth is dry and his face feels kind of hot, which makes his bruises throb a bit. Louisa looks at the window and takes a shuddery breath and then it’s all spilling out of here while River sits there, shocked, and listens to it. It bowls him over. Not only what she’s saying, but the fact that she’s saying it, talking a little fast and a little loud and a little hollow, like she’s not quite all the way there.
“A grenade went off and you were down,” she tells him like he hadn’t been there — and it feels like he hadn’t. Like Louisa is talking about an event that River hadn’t experienced, is hearing about now for the first time. “You went down and you weren’t popping right back up or whining about how loud it was or anything. I couldn’t bring myself to look at you. I just knew you weren’t getting up and you weren’t saying anything and a grenade had gone off and then Donovan said he thought you were still alive. And I could just…” Louisa stops, her mouth open and silent for a moment, like her voice had just spontaneously left her. Then, just as suddenly as it left, it’s back again. “All I could see was your hand on your chest, and I couldn’t tell if it was moving or not. I thought, you know, maybe, but I also thought maybe I was just shaking. Or it was wishful thinking. Or something.”
River doesn’t really know what to do with that. Louisa’s voice is holding steady, just that fraying bit at the edge that never quite takes over, and it sounds like it’s taking quite a bit of effort to keep it that way. She still isn’t looking at him. She’s watching the streaks of water down the window and there’s a faint tremor that runs through her pursed lips.
“Fuck,” River says after a bit, because he’s realized that he should probably say something. “I— I’m sorry, Louisa, that’s… I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t even check your pulse, you know?” The tremor is in her voice, too. It’s less steady, now, like her grip on her composed distance is coming looser. “I should have. I knew I was supposed to, but I didn’t. I don’t think I wanted to find out that…” She stops again and her breathing is audible, laboured.
The thing is, River doesn’t really remember what happened in the facility. Or, well, he does, there was quite a lot that happened in the facility and he remembers a good bit of it, but this part is mostly a blur. Even the moment of the grenade going off itself is hazy and dream-like, probably a side-effect of having been knocked unconscious. River remembers Ben being shot and everything getting suddenly even more intense, which was somehow still possible, and then it’s like all of a sudden he was very far underwater.
That was preferable to the next thing he remembers, which is the pain. He woke up to it. It hadn’t started out too bad, like a distant light that got bigger as it got closer, and then eventually it was very big and very close indeed and he felt like he had been laid out on a counter and someone had gone over pretty much his entire body with a meat tenderizer.
He remembers Louisa too, though. Not much, at least not right when he woke up, but that was the second and third things he registered: her voice and her hands. She had been saying something the exact nature of which had been drowned out by the ringing in his ears that had suddenly had River thinking of being a teenager with his grandfather scolding him for having his music turned up too loud. You’ll end up with hearing loss, Granddad had said, and River had rolled his eyes but turned the volume down anyway, even though he had been half convinced that was just one of those things old people said without even really believing it themselves. Except that now his ears are ringing and he’s got the nagging sense that he owes his grandfather an apology.
(Not that this is an unusual thought for him. River owes his grandfather apologies for a great multitude of things, beginning with having been dropped on his doorstep and continuing to accumulate items for the list to this day.)
It was the touch that brought him away from thoughts of Granddad and hearing loss and doing chores around the house with some indie rock album he had thought was very cool at the time blasting from his CD player. Louisa’s hands came like her voice did — distant at first, and then taking over his awareness, holding his head, lifting it off the floor. It hurt, making the throbbing sense that his brain was too big for his skull get worse, but her hands were warm and nice even if she were shaking him a bit. Or maybe everything was shaking. That was possible too. But Louisa’s hands were there. They were gentle. Nothing in River’s world had been gentle, not for days.
“Sorry,” he murmurs, lost in thought.
That doesn’t seem to help.
“I wasn’t trying to— That’s not the point.” Louisa sounds frustrated, which just makes the urge to apologize rise again in River’s throat. He swallows it down. “The point is just that I— I thought you were dead, that’s all. I really thought you were dead, and you weren’t, but sometimes it’s a bit hard to—” She waves a hand near her head, mouth twisted in an irritated sort of expression. “See, this, this is why I don’t fucking talk about this shit.”
“Yeah,” River breathes, a little high and anxious. He wants so much to do something to help the way that Louisa is feeling but he doesn’t know how. “I’m no good at this, I’m afraid. Sorry.”
“I’d noticed that,” she responds dryly.
And they laugh a little, both of them, at the sheer ridiculousness of the situation they’re in, and for a moment things seem normal. Normal collapses when it goes from a bit silly to painful in a split second, because that little snort of a laugh pulled at just the wrong muscle, sending his hand to his side to cradle his jarred ribs. It sets off a chain reaction of one muscle connected to the other connected to the other and River is left gritting his teeth and trying not to gasp, sparks going off in his field of vision.
“Jesus, River.”
The voice comes from beside him and River flinches, not having noticed Louisa approach. The flinch makes everything hurt worse and a whine escapes through his teeth, which makes Louisa swear under her breath again. Her hands come to his shoulder and his back, steadying him, and he remembers that, too — the way her hands had been in almost those exact places when he was trying to get up from the ground, after the grenade.
“Sorry,” Louisa murmurs, as soon as River stops feeling like he’s breathing with red-hot iron bands around his lungs and can blink his eyes clear of stars and the tears that had started to gather. It’s hard to tell what she’s apologizing for, and he’s just about to ask when she continues, “I didn’t mean to startle you, just now. I hope I didn’t… didn’t hurt you.”
“No, it’s… I’m sorry, that was stupid.” And it was. Stupid and embarrassing, a reflex that he couldn’t control and regrets immensely all the same. “Just… You know. Long couple of days.” Long couple of days where the sudden appearance of a person beside River meant he was about to get hit very hard, and he didn’t know that he could withstand another blow in his current state. “Guess I’m having a bit of trouble shaking it too.”
It feels like a weird thing to admit, like he’s confessing to some kind of failure. River is MI5. Flinching at the sudden appearance of someone next to him because he got smacked about a bit at the park not too long ago is some kind of pathetic, surely, something he should have had trained out of him by now. Still, Louisa said all those things. He can give her that in return. It’s only the truth.
“Right.” There’s something happening on her face that he can’t decipher, but it clears quickly when she squares her shoulders and stands up straight. “On that note, that looked brutal. Take your fucking pain medication.”
Hard to argue with that one given what’s just happened. “Yeah, yeah,” River mutters. “I guess you’re right”
Much as he doesn’t like it, Louisa is right. He needs to take them, because he’s exhausted and he wants to go to bed soon but his whole body just locked up at a small laugh that came too much from his belly and he’s just— fuck, River is tired of hurting. Besides, Louisa is here. He might get fuzzy when he takes the meds, might lose reaction time and be unable to pick up on things quick enough to be safe, but with her here how necessary could those things really be?
“Where are they?” Louisa asks, already casting about the room for them. She looks better than she has since she got here, and River gets that. He does better too when he has a task, something he can do that matters. That can help.
“On the counter, there’s two bottles. One of each.” It’s not like they’re so far away that it would be an enormous hardship for him to get up and get them himself, but Louisa seems eager for an objective, and he’ll let her have this one. She fishes a pill from each bottle and gets a glass out of the cupboard as well, filling it for him at the sink.
“Thanks,” River murmurs, watching her.
Louisa brings it all over to him and hands him first the glass and then the pills, watching him closely as he knocks them back one after the other. River almost bristles at it — at being minded like he can’t be trusted to swallow medication without supervision. He doesn’t. Everything she had said about the facility, about the grenade, hangs over his head and puts out any spark of irritation that may have ignited in the circumstances. Putting himself in Louisa’s shoes, River knows that he would be nothing short of insufferable if he’d been on the other end of this, and she deserves to be allowed to fuss if that’s what she needs. Of the two of them, his is the position he would choose to be in every time. There are some types pain that he finds easier to bear than others.
Once River has successfully managed not to choke on his meds, Louisa returns to her seat across from him and there’s nothing left but to wait. It’s not going to be instant, obviously, but as soon as he takes the meds, River starts to notice the pain more than before. He gets impatient quick while waiting for the effects to kick in, feeling minutes drag out on and on as he continues to exist inside a body that aches and throbs and reminds him constantly of what an idiot he had been not to take them earlier.
With a soft, exasperated groan, River lifts his forearms onto the table and lets his head sink into them. The movement ignites further pain, and it drags the groan out farther, pitching into something like a whine at the end. It hurt to put his arms on the table and it hurt to lean down over them, because as he had learned when he laughed, every muscle in the human body and especially every single one of them that River had bruised or strained this week is connected to every other muscle in the human body. Once he’s got his head down, though, it’s better. At least he doesn’t have to expend the effort of holding himself up.
There’s a scraping sound as the chair across the table shuffles over. When it settles, River doesn’t lift his head but he knows that Louisa is next to him now. He hears an inhale like she’s going to talk, and then it catches and stops and no words follow. It happens a second time, shortly after the first, and another shuffle of the chair comes along with it. The third time that he hears the start-stop inhale, it doesn’t end there.
“I’m gonna touch your head now,” Louisa says, with the very specific and constructed determination of someone who doesn’t feel remotely as confident in their words as they have decided they need to sound.
River knows that she can’t see his blush but he can feel it, warming his face and his neck. He knows that he would’ve flinched something awful if she hadn’t let him know she was going to touch him first, and the only thing more embarrassing than that is the fact that she had known it too and so had thought to alert him before she did it. There’s quite a lot to unpack there, and none of it makes River feel inclined to ever pull his face up out of his arms. All thoughts of it, however, all unpacking, it flies out of his mind as soon as she makes contact. Louisa’s palm settles at the top of his neck, warm and steady. It sits there, still, while they both adjust to it, and then her fingers start scratching slowly, almost hesitantly through his hair.
It feels so nice that River almost falls out of his chair. The rest of his entire body is protesting the very fact that he is continuing to make it exist, but his scalp tingles with the light pressure and the gentle scratching. Her arm lays across the back of his shoulder, and he doesn’t even care that it’s putting pressure on some of the bruises hiding under his shirt. That’s nothing compared to the faint heat seeping through the fabric. River sighs quietly, more of a soft exhale than anything else, and tries to focus on that.
There’s a lump on the side of his head. It’s a tender place where River’s skull had bounced off a metal shelf not all that long after it had been slammed into a locker by Duffy. Louisa’s thumb brushes the edge and River’s breath catches, but she doesn’t push any harder than that. She lightly maps the edges of the injury and settles her hand away from it, as deliberate and attentive to detail as ever.
The touch and the rhythm of the movement across his scalp keeps River’s focus until things start to go hazy, just like he knew they would. His body starts to feel distant, dulled, and that’s how he knows that the meds are working. Relief pulls a sigh out of him, his face pressing deeper into his forearms and tension bleeding away from his back and shoulders.
When Louisa’s hand pulls away, River comes very close to making some sort of terrible, needy little sound at the loss of the contact. He still has enough wherewithal to choke it down, though, swallow the noise instead of letting it out where it could have completely ruined whatever was left of what Louisa thought of him. It’s just been a long time since anyone touched him like that, is all, and it was nice. Really nice. It was enough to have it while it lasted, but if he’d been given the choice, he would have asked it to keep going forever.
It’s raining outside. It’s been raining on and off since River got home, which is not particularly unusual for England, but it’s been annoying while he’s been stuck here doing not much more than existing in a body that was currently punishing him for that audacity. The sound of the rain was a reminder that he was without anything to do, anything useful or active, and it made him feel like he was trapped inside some kind of terrarium with a spiteful giant tapping on the glass just to make him agitated. Now, though, with his head still tingling and warm where Louisa had been touching him, it’s nice. It’s soothing, almost hypnotic.
Time drifts and frays and River continues to breathe, steady and slow. His stomach hurts a little, not quite settled enough to completely tolerate the harsh chemical impact of the medication thanks to a bowl-ish of dry cereal, but he stays still and it mostly fades with time. Sleep is creeping up his spine, trickling out through his limbs and making them heavy. With the half an ear that is all he can give to pay attention, River can hear small sounds start up that indicate Louisa is playing a game on her phone.
Placing the noise makes his mouth twitch against the sleeves of his hoodie, a fond smile lost in the fabric. Louisa goes through phone games quick. When River asked her about it, she said it was because as soon as she knew she was good at them, they got boring. He had stared at her and then said that’s mental and she’d made a face at him and asked what the point was if it weren’t a challenge. This game is a new one. River doesn’t know the sounds specifically, but he knows what they are anyway, why they’re happening, and it makes a nice mix with the rain.
Eventually, River feels well enough to pull his face away from where it’s surely collected lines imprinted into his skin from the folds of fabric under it. He props his chin on his arms and watches Louisa play her game. Though he can’t see the screen, he can see the little frown she’s got wrinkling her forehead, concentrating on whatever it is that she’s doing, and that’s just as good to track her progress.
Time warps even farther as passes and River’s eyes start staying closed longer when he blinks. If he isn’t careful then he’s going to fall asleep at the table — it happened on the couch the last time he took the meds, which had been a mistake. He hadn’t had to get up and go to bed, sure, but he’d been in a world of hurt when he woke up, and that had not been worth it.
By the time Louisa puts her phone down, River still hasn’t moved. Her frown deepens, growing more real, and she looks at the wall over the stove where the clock sits.
“I should go,” she says, and it’s immediately clear even to River and his medication-induced tiredness that she doesn’t remotely mean it. Or maybe she does mean it, at least insofar as she thinks she should go, but what she doesn’t mean is any actual intention to act on that thought. Louisa’s bag stays on the floor and she doesn’t make a move to get it, or her shoes or coat, or even to so much as stand from the table.
“Don’t have to,” River offers, when it’s well and obvious that Louisa isn’t going anywhere.
“Okay,” she agrees, so quick and easy that it’s like she was just waiting for the chance to dismiss the very thought of doing so.
The next part is River’s idea, and it’s something that he never would have said if it wasn’t late and he weren’t tired and slightly loopy from pain medication. “I need to go to bed,” he says, finally admitting to himself that if he doesn’t get up in the next few minutes then he’s genuinely going to fall asleep at this table. “You can still stay, though. Sleep here if you want, bed’s big enough.” It’s an offer made without really thinking it through, and a slight pause follows wherein River starts to regret having said it. It was a fucking weird thing to say, an odd offer with any number of potential interpretations.
Except that it can’t have been that weird. Either that or Louisa just doesn’t care, because she nods and says, “Yeah, alright. Where’s your toilet? If we’re turning in, I need to change.”
River tells her and she picks up her duffel and takes off in the direction he told her. Her reluctant raising of the suggestion of leaving, her immediate agreement to the suggestion of spending the night, the duffel bag that apparently contained sleep clothes amongst whatever else. It all blends together in River’s head and creates an image of why Louisa had come in the first place, what her plans had been right from the start. Whether she could admit it or not, she had come here with the intention not to leave.
Changing is a good idea. While Louisa is gone in the toilet to get into sleeping clothes, River ought to do the same. It’s going to be a battle with his mass of bruises, and he would rather have those covered again by the time she gets back. Louisa seems like she’s already worried about him quite enough, she doesn’t need to see anything more that might freak her out. River has seen the way his body looks in the mirror and it makes for an alarming visual.
It’s a slow and stiff journey from the kitchen into his bedroom. River forgoes the crutches again, leaning on the wall and trying to keep his weight off his sprained ankle, which he knows is contrary to the instructions he’d been given by the doctor. It just feels silly to be using crutches inside his own home for such a short distance, like an overly dramatic fuss over something that didn’t warrant it. He could get down his own hall without needing equipment.
The thought of balancing on one leg, the other lifted, in order to step into different bottoms is immediately unappealing. River considers how much that would ask of his inner thigh muscles, which had been stained a deep purple with contusions the last time he checked, and shudders. He’s already in sweats. Those are fine to sleep in, he doesn’t need to change. The hoodie will be too warm by far, though, so that does need to be swapped out for one of the soft shirts he keeps for nightclothes. His hoodie comes off easily enough, aided by the zipper down the front, but getting the t-shirt he selected on afterwards proves to be more of a struggle. So much so in fact that River is still wrestling with it when Louisa gets there.
Through a tangle of fabric that obscures his vision and keeps his arms trapped up by his face, River hears soft, un-shoed footsteps approach down the hall and enter the room. He groans into it because of course someone else had to see this shit. That’s River Cartwright — can’t even get a t-shirt on by himself without the endeavour ending in disaster. It’s just that getting his arms up over his head is a little tricky in his current condition and it hurts and his range of motion isn’t fantastic and he’d been trying to go too fast because he had wanted to be done before she arrived. Everything came together in a perfect storm that’s left him a hostage to his own clothing, embarrassed and helpless.
“Here, let me,” Louisa says, and to her merciful credit there’s only a bit of a laugh in her voice. She comes over to where he’s sat down on the side of the bed and starts pulling at the tangle of fabric caught around his head and arms.
At first he tries to make himself useful, twisting in what he hopes is an assistive direction, tugging at what he can reach of the shirt too. Louisa has to tell him to stop trying to help, a request that he complies with after only a moment’s stubborn resistance. Once River goes still, Louisa makes short work of getting the fabric straightened out, unwinding the bits that got caught and setting it to rights. She pulls the shirt down over his back and smooths it out, a flat palm sweeping down his spine, far past what’s necessary.
And, far from protesting, River lets her. Something about the brisk fussing gives him a warm feeling in his chest, soft and humming, like when she had messed with his hair at the table.
“There, all sorted,” Louisa pronounces, giving the hem of his shirt a final tug.
It’s the first that River has really been able to get a good look at her. Louisa is dressed much the same as he is, in a t-shirt that looks old and soft, a hole worn in near the collar, and a pair of shorts. She looks tired.
This is a bit of a ridiculous observation to make, and River knows that. He’s sure that he looks absolutely shattered right now, and he’d already noticed how tired she looked earlier. Except that it’s even worse now, even more obvious, and something about it has struck River a little dumb.
Clothing is a sort of armour, isn’t it? It keeps a person shielded against the elements and against the judgements of others. It could send a message, could help one blend in or stand out. It was a way to choose how the world saw you, the most control a person ever really had over that. Seeing Louisa in her nightclothes, barefoot and perched on the side of his bed, makes her seem vulnerable. Being there in front of her in his own is much the same feeling in reverse. Shy isn’t something that River has been accused of being particularly often in his life, but he feels a bit shy in this particular moment. They’re both fully clothed, but he feels exposed, and like he’s seeing her the same way.
Tiredness rushes up, surging in River’s chest, and he sighs. He needs to lay down before he collapses and loses the ability for that to be a decision. With an inelegant slump that only hurts fractionally as much as it would have without having taken the painkillers when he did, River flops over onto his side, head landing squarely on a pillow. Behind him, Louisa’s sigh echoes his and he shifts, rolling onto his back to watch her curiously. He knows that it’s going to hurt too much to stay there after a while, his back having taken much of the brunt of the damage when Duffy decided to throw him around a locker room, but for now it’s alright.
Louisa has set her duffel on the end of the bed and she’s rifling through it, clearly looking for something. A small pile of items accumulates next to her hip, and River settles his head back against the pillow, watching her through half-lidded eyes. She rips open a small packet and uses a towelette inside to wipe her face, then tucks it back into the now-empty packaging. The next thing she does is take some kind of small bottle and spray her palm with a sweet-smelling product. Louisa rubs her hands together and then starts to work them through her hair, smoothing the oil or cream or whatever it was all the way to the ends. She does this a few times over, making sure that she gets it all, and then she starts sectioning it off and twisting the pieces. Her fingers spin around and around in deft, practiced twirls, and then she pins the end down, repeating the process several times.
Watching her perform these rituals, the clearly well-worn muscle memory of Louisa’s bedtime routine, makes River’s heart give a fond kick. It feels like he had felt earlier, realizing that she had come to him, told him what was upsetting her because she wanted to talk and he was the one she wanted to talk to, except that there aren’t all the bad feelings that came with what she said. There’s just the two of them and a quiet moment where Louisa has decided to let him see her without her guard up, getting ready to sleep in his bed.
Finally, Louisa shakes out a cap made of dark blue, shiny fabric, tugging it on over her hair and smoothing out the headband holding it in place. It’s probably meant to protect her hair while she sleeps, which River concludes after a short moment of being puzzled at the point of such an item. She tucks a few things back in her duffel and zips it up, turning to set it on the floor. The light of the lamp on the bedside table glints off the dark blue bonnet as Louisa shifts fully onto the mattress, flipping the blankets over herself and stretching out beside River.
The two of them settle quickly, despite the unfamiliar situation. Louisa clicks the light off from her side and the room is dark and quiet. Sleep should come quickly — they’re both exhausted and the meds in River’s system are making themselves known. Still, he can’t quite let himself drift just yet. Not when he’s got the sneaking sense that something is not quite right. River’s whole body feels heavy and his mind is clouded and tired and all he wants is to let go of consciousness. But— But Louisa is keeping her distance.
It’s not an enormous bed, and while it’s not tiny either, they’re two grown adults and they shouldn’t be able to both lay in it without making any kind of incidental contact. And yet, it hasn’t happened. River hasn’t exactly been minding his limbs particularly carefully, even as he rolled from his back onto his side, facing away from Louisa. Even though he can’t see her, he can sense the stiffness radiating from her body, and it makes him cringe.
After a while, River gives a short sigh and says, “Look, okay, I shouldn’t have assumed that you’d be comfortable with this, I’m sorry. I can go and sleep on the couch, or—”
Louisa snorts, cutting him off. “You are about sixty percent bruise by surface area, River, you are not sleeping on the couch. Don’t be fucking stupid.”
“Okay, you sleep on the couch then, if you insist,” he fires back. Then he sighs again and gets back to the point. His hand fists in the pillowcase next to his cheek and he’s glad that the lights are off because at least she wouldn’t be able to see the embarrassed blush warming the back of his neck. “I just don’t want you to feel uncomfortable with… I don’t know. Sorry. This was a weird suggestion, sorry.”
A pause follows, not unlike the pause before Louisa had initially accepted the offer to stay the night. It’s driving River mad to not be able to see her and get a read on what that pause is about, but he can’t imagine that scrutinizing her is going to make this a lot better, even if he could. He’ll just have to wait.
“It’s not that. That’s not…” Louis sounds quiet and a little muffled by her own pillow. Frustrated, maybe. Another pause stretches out between the point when she started speaking and when she continues, explaining the problem that River had apparently been unable to pinpoint. “I just don’t want to— to hurt you.”
“Oh,” River murmurs, staring into the dark in front of him. He doesn’t really know how to feel about that. There’s exasperation, because Louisa seems to think he’s some kind of delicate china cup or something, probably the type that already has a crack in it and so any disturbance might break it into pieces. But that’s not all that’s there. There’s something warm and soft too, like the way it had felt when Louisa had been fussing with his shirt, or when she had touched his head in the kitchen.
And it also makes River want more of that feeling. The warm soft one. He can feel the distance between them, just a couple of rigidly-maintained inches that may as well be an acre of distant land, and he wants to close it. Honestly, if he weren’t worried about how it might come off and also aware of how it would wake his quieted injuries to move that much, he would roll over against her himself. He twitches a little with the want to do it, to be close to her. Closer than they already are, at any rate. He misses her hand on his head, her fingers scratching at his scalp.
“I’m on meds,” River says, instead of any of the other things he’d been thinking. “And anyway it’s not— it’s not that bad.”
There’s a sudden sharp noise and a thump of what is probably Louisa’s hand hitting the mattress, given the way the whole thing jolts slightly. River winces. He’d imagine it’s probably only the aforementioned sixty percent bruise by surface area status that saved him from being thwacked on the shoulder or the side, which is fair.
I thought I’d seen you die.
“Sorry. Sorry, that wasn’t… Sorry.” Even though no one can see it, River pulls a face. “I just mean, like… Nothing’s broken. I’m not being held together by stitches. I didn’t need surgery. It hurts but it’s not, like— You’re not gonna hurt me, that’s all I’m trying to say.” You could touch me if you wanted, he doesn’t say, because it sounds insane and needy and likely to come out all wrong. It wouldn’t hurt me. You don’t have to keep yourself so far away, unless that’s what you want.
Louisa doesn’t answer verbally but she does hum. It’s just a short sound, without any particular decipherable tone to it and no indication what it’s supposed to mean.
After that, even though he can’t quite explain how he knows it, River feels her start to relax. There’s a tension in the air, especially between them, and in his own body too, that starts to ease and fade. He sighs, settling his face more securely against the pillow. Behind him, the mattress creaks very faintly and then lightly, cautiously, the top of Louisa’s shoulder brushes against his back. River had known it was coming and the painkillers have blurred the sharp edges of his injuries enough that he doesn’t flinch at all. He leans back, just slightly, just enough to steady the point of contact, make it something more solid. More real. And then he goes still. They both go still.
It’s like Louisa is waiting to see if River is wrong — if she is going to break him just by being close to him. So he lays patiently while her arm slowly presses more and more into him, until he can feel the line of it down his back. Then she goes still again. Waiting.
“See?” he says after a bit, quiet in the dark, still room. “Still not hurting me.” It’s a little petulant, a bit bratty, and he knows it. There’s a quiet huff of laughter, and he smiles into the pillowcase.
Things are alright after that. Better than alright.
Louisa shifts, turning slowly, careful not to jostle him as she closes the remainder of the gap between them. She shuffles around until she ends up laying behind River, curled over his back, arm laid over his waist, cheek against his spine between his shoulder blades. He doesn’t know for sure but he thinks he might know why she’s settled like that. From there, Louisa could listen to his heart and feel him breathe. She would know, without a shadow of a doubt, that he was alive.
For his part, the feeling of someone else in his bed is not exactly one that River is used to. It hasn’t happened in quite a while. He had rather lost track, actually, and now there’s someone there, which is a nicer feeling than he possibly would’ve predicted when he initially made the offer. At the time, he’d been tired and a little dizzy and he’d wanted to go to bed but he hadn’t wanted to kick Louisa out of the flat, so it was a quick jump to saying she could stay if she wanted. And now that she’s there and they’re both relaxing and it’s warm and something close to perfect, River thinks this might just be the best idea he’s ever had.
It’s… safe. It, this — River’s bed, Louisa here with him, her arm around him and their legs brushing — is a lot of things, but that’s the one that sticks out more than anything else. It’s safe and whatever the opposite of ‘lonely’ is. And maybe it’s the influence of the painkillers or maybe it’s Louisa there with him, the rain on the window and the steady rise and fall of her breathing at his back, but River doesn’t think he’s ever fallen asleep faster.
—
When River wakes up, he isn’t sure at first what woke him. He blinks into the thick dark and tries to orient himself, swim through a still half-asleep fog to register his surroundings and what’s happening in them.
There’s a faint shaking that River can’t quite figure out the source of and a strange sound, things that filter in bit by bit through the fading haze of pain medication.There’s someone else in his bed. This would be a weird thing to recognize upon waking, except that then the details come together and River remembers that it’s Louisa. This realization comes along with why she is in his bed, which all culminates in the realization that she’s crying. It’s stifled and quiet and he can’t see her, but Louisa is definitely crying.
“Uh,” River says, thick and raspy with sleep. The rest of the question evades him and he shifts like he’s going to roll over and look at her, because he needs to figure out how bad this is. How serious things have gotten.
“Don’t,” Louisa chokes. Her grip on River’s waist goes tighter, almost a restraint, and he closes his mouth, giving up on asking whatever that question might have turned out to be. It’s clear that she doesn’t want him to ask and she doesn’t want him to move.
It feels weird and wrong. River is laying in bed with Louisa behind him out of sight and he’s just letting her cry and not doing anything about it. That is not the sort of thing that he thinks friends are supposed to do when someone is clearly very upset. But Louisa had told him not to… do anything at all, it seemed, and so maybe that’s exactly what he should do? Maybe more information is what he needs first.
More information is this: Louisa is shaking. She’s pressed up behind River and he can feel it clearly, the way she’s trembling. There’s a warm, damp patch where her face is jammed between his shoulder blades and it makes him feel a little extra bruised to feel that and register what it means. River wants to say that he’s sorry, but Louisa hadn’t wanted him to say that earlier. Plus, she doesn’t seem to want him to talk at all, so that was probably a bad idea no matter what. It still feels wrong.
It goes on like that for a while. Louisa cries and River lays still and lets her. He hopes that if he’s just quiet and still, then that might be what she needs. It might help her calm and move past whatever it is she’s feeling that has left her laying behind him and crying into his back. Louisa’s forearm lays over River’s waist and she’s got a fistful of his shirt in her hand, gripping onto it tightly like she wants to be holding onto him just as tight but is afraid she would hurt him if she did. If he didn’t know how it would go over, River would tell her that he doesn’t care. That maybe it would hurt, maybe it would make his bruises ache a bit, but River wouldn’t mind — he would take the hug any day, especially if it was what Louisa needed.
Despite what River hoped, it doesn’t stop. His heart gives a painful, lurching squeeze when Louisa lets out a sound that’s something close to a whimper and flexes her hold on his shirt. He squeezes his eyes tight shut and grits his teeth and forces himself not to turn over. Instead, unable to help doing something and hoping that a smaller action might be taken better, River cautiously risks shifting a hand over to rest on Louisa’s wrist.
It’s a risk because Louisa had said don’t and it was hard to tell exactly what she meant by that, and if she wants to tell him to fuck off or if she gets up and leaves entirely, that would be fair. But it’s a risk that pays off, because Louisa doesn’t react badly at all. If anything, she just leans harder against River, which feels nice, just like he thought it would, even though it does hurt a bit. It’s not much, it’s just a faint ache of his battered body being reminded that it exists, and that’s nothing. Not compared to how Louisa pushes closer to him, her breathing growing slower and steadier, her wrist warm under his palm.
I didn’t even check your pulse, you know?
Louisa’s voice revolves around the inside of River’s mind and he mulls over what she’d said, the detail in the whole horrible story that was suddenly all he could think about. And he thinks, okay, well, in for a penny, in for a pound, and he shifts his palm over her wrist, curling his fingers. River keeps his hold gentle but he gives a tug, just a light pull that Louisa allows without effort. He never would have managed it if she didn’t, but she lets him pull her hand slowly up to the front of his chest. Stopping there, River uncurls his fingers and flattens his hand over the top of Louisa’s, pressing her palm to the front of his sleep shirt over where his heart beats steadily underneath.
It’s only an educated guess as to what might have upset her so much, what Louisa may have been dreaming about that made her cry hard enough that it woke River up too, but the guess pays off. Louisa’s hand lays between River’s chest and his own palm, only moving when it shifts a little to better seek the heartbeat that proves so undeniably that he’s alive.
I didn’t even check your pulse, you know?
It had clearly rattled her, stuck in her mind — that piece of information she had needed so badly but was too afraid to check and find out. So River gave it to her.
After that, Louisa calms and stops crying entirely, save for the occasional hitch in her breath. Even when it stops, though, her hand stays where it is and River’s stays over the top of it. Her thumb starts up a repetitive movement, stroking back and forth in idle motions, slow and gentle. It feels nice. It’s actually one of the nicest things River has felt in a long time, maybe ever, and his favourite thing about it is how thoughtless it seems. It’s like an instinct, like Louisa’s thumb is rubbing against the fabric of his shirt, over where his heart is beating under her palm, because it just feels right to her to do. It sure feels right to River, like the moment he’d kissed her head leaving Min’s memorial, only he’s on the other end of it this time.
“We’re okay,” River whispers into the dark, barely audible. “I’m— We’re okay.” He doesn’t know if Louisa can hear him at all, but he feels her take a long, shaky breath in and then let it escape, warming his collar.
Sleep comes for River again soon after that. He thinks it does for Louisa too, though he isn’t awake to tell.
—
When River wakes in the morning, the sky is light through the curtains and Louisa has retreated more into her own space. She’s curled in on herself, her arm pulled away from where it had lain over his waist, but her forehead and her hand are still touching his back, like she hadn’t wanted to get too far away, even in sleep.
It’s with great reluctance and no small amount of childish urge to pout that River drags himself out of bed to deal with the urgencies of waking up in the morning. He shuffles off to the toilet and for a glass of water, wincing every time he puts weight on his sprained ankle, and then immediately turns around and goes back to his bedroom. On a regular day he might feel silly for doing so, talking himself out of the impulse because he isn’t sixteen and going back to bed once the sun has already risen feels like the sort of thing he ought to have grown out of by now. But this isn’t a regular day. River feels sluggish and sleepy, his body is aching because the painkillers have worn off again, and he got just a bit blown up only a few days ago.
At least River observes that he feels better this morning than he has when he woke up since everything went down, though. The effect of actually having been able to get some rest, not waking more than a muzzy half-blink when an unknown noise happened outside, has evidently done wonders for him. The damage to his body is still there, but he’s starting to think that rest, real rest, is some kind of wonder drug.
Lingering in the bedroom doorway, thinking about how much better he genuinely does feel, River contemplates not going back to bed. Maybe he ought to just face the day, since he’s finally feeling semi-prepared for it. Then again, it’s not like there’s really anything for him to face except for another couple of days of mandated medical leave staring River down and Louisa is still, somehow, asleep. He can see her from the door.
Even though he’s gotten up and walked around a bit, shifting the mattress and making a bit of unavoidable noise, Louisa hasn’t stirred. It’s a good reminder that she hasn’t been sleeping either. Leaning against the door jamb, keeping his bad foot slightly elevated, River looks at her. She’s curled on her side and he can just see her expression from the threshold, smooth and calm. The satin fabric of her hair cover glimmers a little in the early light seeping through the curtains. Louisa has the corner of the blanket twisted up around her leg and the sleeve of her sleep shirt’s gotten flipped up and River shakes his head, fondness bubbling in his chest.
Having made the decision that facing the day can wait, River quietly limps back to bed and settles down again, easing himself to the bed gently in the hopes of not disturbing Louisa. He lays down and scoots across the mattress with as much caution as he can without refraining from moving at all until her forearm, up close by her face, comes into contact with his back again. Louisa moves just fractionally, her arm resting more solidly against him, and River smiles.
After that, River dozes periodically but never quite loses consciousness. It’s perfect. When Louisa finally wakes and gets out of bed, he hears and feels it but lets his eyes stay shut. River stays put and listens to her walk around the flat without feeling overly motivated to get up himself. There’s a sort of novel delight in listening to someone else moving about in his home. Someone he knows, at least, River is quick to mentally correct. Thinking in the abstract about how it’s nice to hear someone else walking through his kitchen could easily end with the universe providing him with a home invasion.
When Louisa gets back to the bedroom, she’s got coffee. Just the one, which makes River pull a face at her, and in response she quirks an eyebrow and holds out her other hand. There are pills in it, and River only considers arguing with her about it for a few moments. His ankle has started to really fucking hurt, as has his side, and he selfishly hopes that if she’s handing him the pills after knowing part of the reason he didn’t like taking them was a sense that he couldn’t protect himself, it might mean she intends to stay a while longer. At least Louisa lets him have a sip of her coffee when he takes them.
After that, River lets his head drop back onto his pillow and groans at the unfairness of the world. Louisa snickers at him from where she’s settled sitting up against the headboard. She’s got her phone out and she’s playing some game again, which prompts him to crack an eye open and peer at the screen, curious as to what it is. It’s something with a bunch of puzzles, and it fascinates him to watch her progress through them. She’s good at it — good enough that River is sure she’s going to abandon the game soon.
It’s probably the effect of the painkillers loosening his tongue that has River saying what he does. He should know better, but he can’t help it anyway, which in all fairness could be the painkillers or it could just be what he has been repeatedly informed is his incurable inability to never leave well enough alone.
“So. Seemed like you had a rough night…” River starts, intending to ask about the dream. Whatever it was, it had upset Louisa badly enough that she had cried in front of him. Or behind him, as it were, but he had been there and he had known it was happening, which means that it must have been bad.
“Nope,” Louisa says sharply, not even lifting her eyes from the game. Her voice is swift and clipped, a response she doesn’t even think about. “We are not talking about that.”
Which, alright, fair enough. River goes quiet and expects the conversation — for as much as it had even been any kind of conversation — to die there. Shockingly enough, it doesn’t. Only about a minute or so passes before Louisa speaks, much more subdued and tentative though she still doesn’t lift her eyes from her mobile.
“Wasn’t a rough night,” she says. “Not compared to… It wasn’t bad.”
For lack of being able to think of any way to respond, River ducks his head down and leans. He bumps into her, the top of his head knocking against her arm. Louisa laughs, just a soft snort of air, and her elbow bumps him back, a faint tap with no real weight behind it.
It’s the strangest thing, how none of this feels strange at all. It seems so normal, even though it shouldn’t, even though this probably wasn’t the sort of situation friends typically found themselves in. Then again River’s experience with friends is both limited and not exactly typical, so what does he know? It’s good, at least, and maybe that’s what counts.
“I’m glad,” he murmurs. Glad that Louisa’s night hadn’t been too bad, comparatively speaking. Glad that she’s still here. Glad she had been there in the first place. Glad in general, maybe. And then, because the painkillers are still making him brave, River says, “If you ever want to come over again, you know, key’s on top of the doorframe. You can just… come in. Whenever you want.”
Louisa does take her eyes from her mobile now. She looks up without moving her head, just a flick of her gaze over to him, and there’s an odd expression on her face. River finds himself suddenly deeply concerned that he may have overstepped with the offer — that maybe this was, in Louisa’s mind, very firmly a one-time thing that she didn’t so much as want to acknowledge, and by indicating that he might like it to happen again River has wildly misread the situation and ruined it.
“Why the fuck do you keep your spare key on top of the doorframe? Are you insane?” She sounds positively scandalized.
River laughs. His hand comes to his side to stabilize his ribs and he tries to laugh slowly, which is a weird sort of thing to attempt, but it works and it keeps the pain from getting too bad. Louisa just rolls her eyes and looks back to her game. She hadn’t said anything else about the suggestion, and River lets himself think it: that maybe she might like being here as much as he likes having her here. That maybe it makes her feel a little less alone too.
“You have nothing in your fridge, by the way,” Louisa comments. She’s finished the level she’d been working on and there’s an advert playing on the screen. The little videos that the game manufacturer plays between levels drive her mad but she never buys the games. Always goes through them too quickly to bother.
“Yeah, guilty.” River refrains from pointing out that she should have predicted that one, given their late-night dry cereal snack.
“I’m going to call for takeaway,” she announces, tucking the phone into the pocket of the hoodie she must have put on when she originally got up. It looks an awful lot like the one that River had been wearing the night before, but he can’t see the top of his dresser to check if it’s still there or not. “I saw some menus on the fridge, are those your usual spots?”
“Yeah,” he confirms, and watches Louisa leave. She isn’t wearing the bonnet anymore but her hair is still twisted in sections, pinned down out of the way, and the hoodie is too big for her.
River watches her until she’s out of sight and then he lays back and stares at the ceiling. He’s smiling like an idiot, but that’s okay. Nobody can see him just now regardless.
Outside, it’s started to rain again.