Chapter Text
"I hope the fact that I was always rooting for you makes up for ever doubting you" Mandy said, looking at Courtney with a look so full of concern, guilt, worry, and, most devastatingly of all, relief, that Courtney momentarily forgot about her aching shoulder. She turns away from that look.
"It does," she mutters, unable to find the right words to convey the conflux of emotions in her chest. The memory of her words to Robert right before she kissed him in the locker room flash into her head. “I just wanted you to look at me like you look at Blazer” The memory does not alleviate the writhing knot in her gut, because it makes her realize what has her so worked up. It's the way Mandy and Robert are looking at her. Like he looks at Blazer. Like Courtney is...is a hero.
"I want you to know that you'll always have a place here." Mandy reaches over and grips Courtney's good hand with a touch that doesn't quite treat her like she's made of glass, but has a reverence that gives her goosebumps despite the heat of the burning rubble.
Courtney opens her mouth to say something witty. Something biting, acerbic, the usual. Nothing comes out. That's new. It's not that she doesn't have anything, it's that she doesn't want to say it. Because she knows the flippancy would hurt Mandy, even if just a little, and she's been hurt enough today. Courtney remembers the sound of her back as she slammed into the concrete, the way her blood had turned to ice in her veins. So after a charged moment, she lets out a hesitant "t-thank you."
Mandy squeezes her hand and nods to Robert. The two look at each other for a second, and Courtney can see the "we'll talk about it later" vibe pass between them. It doesn't take an astral pulse boosted augment to tell that the "it" in question is what shroud had said before he'd plugged the proto pulse into his head. "You're the only person in the world to have Blonde Blazer, and still want more."
Those words had nearly broken her. She tried to ignore the look on Mandy's face as she climbed up to the roof unseen. She had gone up there to kill Shroud, she'd realized. She would kill him, give Robert the pulse, and disappear. Run away from the hurt and guilt and loss in those blue eyes that had always looked at Courtney like she actually thought she, Invisibitch, could actually make something of herself.
But then, she saw Robert's expression as he'd exited his mech. The determination, the resolve, the "I'm a hero and this is what heroes do" look he always gets every time he gives one of his motivational speeches. And she imagined his face when she killed Shroud. Imagined both of their faces. Robert and Mandy, their eyes so full of pain and fear and disappointment and resignation. That "but I really thought you could be a hero" look. And suddenly she was in front of Robert, bullet screaming into her shoulder.
Courtney's mind returns to the present, as Robert wheels her past the Z-team as they chant "not a bitch!" They arrive at the back of the ambulance, and Robert looks at her again. "Well, you did it."
"And what is the "it" you're referring to, exactly?" The way his lips turn up and his eyes wrinkle at the corners is reward enough, anything to get away from that "I'm proud of you" expression he's had this whole time. And yet, when it does leave, she immediately regrets the words. As much as she loves making him laugh, the heady rush that earlier look gave her was better than nicotine after a week trying to quit.
"A lot, actually. You're not a bitch, at least according to them" he looks at the Z-team members, watching them from a distance.
She looks over at them and rolls her eyes. "Well, what do they know?"
"Very little, yea" his voice is so full of mirth. Courtney feels her face heat up a little.
"Then there was the heroic shit you did. Saving my life and all. That was cool. Does that make you a hero now?"
There it was. The question that had been bouncing around in her head for the last hour. From the moment she slid the knife back into its sheath in her boot and stood in front of Robert. She doesn't want to face it. What if it's still not enough? What if she fails the next time? What if she had to see the look on their eyes when she inevitably fucks it all up again, like she always does. She can't look him in the eye. So she looks towards the sky.
"No" she tries to say it like she doesn't care that she isn't a hero. Like it had nothing to do with her decisions. Like she didn't do it to avoid hurting the two people she had come to care about most in the entire world, far more than she'd ever thought possible.
"I think it might, though." The way he says it, so heavy with the weight of his belief in her, pulls her gaze back to his. He’s staring at her with that look again. The one she had practically begged him to give her in that locker room. It's intoxicating. She feels her lips pull up into a genuine smile. Not her typical smirk, but a full faced grin. But the memory of what happened in that locker room causes her jubilance to waiver. She hopes Robert doesn't notice.
Obviously, he does. "What's wrong?"
She takes a shaky breath. This was a day for confrontations, after all. "About what happened in that locker room-" she started
"Hey, it's okay, we don't have to talk about it-" Robert raises a hand but she grabs his wrist with her good hand.
"Please, let me say this." He nods and lowers his hand, but he doesn't pull it out of her hand. In fact, he slides it so that he's holding her hand in his, and she glances down at their hands before returning to his eyes. "I shouldn't have done that. I hadn't realized that things were happening between you and blaz-Mandy, but still, I shouldn't have just...jumped on you like that."
"Courtney, it's okay. Seriously. I mean, if you're worried about feeling guilty, then I have to take some of that. I probably should have pulled away, not leaned in"
She had looked back down at their hands as he'd started speaking, but one of the words he said caused her to look back up at him. "Probably?"
It was his turn to look away. "I...I don't know, Courtney. There's a lot about the last few months that I'm still trying to understand. My feelings towards you, and towards Mandy...they're the most enigmatic of it all right now."
"You would use words like enigmatic, you nerd." She says it with a smirk, because she knows what he needs right now is to stop wallowing in his confusion and focus on the fact that things were finally looking up for once. He smirks back.
"It was on my word of the day calendar."
She snorts. "Oh my God. You see how that isn't helping the nerd allegations, right?" They both laugh. She knows she should leave it alone, but she has to ask.
"Do you regret it?" At his look of confusion, she adds "leaning into the kiss, I mean?"
He looks at a spot over her head, and she can see that he's genuinely, actually thinking about it. Fuck, she thinks, I really do love this man.
"No," he says, eyes back on hers. His voice has the certainty of a glacier in motion, unyielding and resolute. She smiles again.
"Well, then I'm glad I did it. I can't begin to claim I understand what that means. But I can say this. You and Mandy are the two most important people in my life, and I'm just happy I get to keep you both in it."
He smiles back, a gentle one, full of care and other things she didn't dare try to label lest she get her hopes up. "You do. We're not going anywhere."
"Good," she says, and gestures with her chin towards the brunette sitting on a car hood, pulling from a beer. "Now go tell her that you want her to sit on your face, or whatever counts as flirting for you two."
"Oh my God, you're incorrigible"
"I don't see what my corrigability, or lack thereof, has anything to do with you getting your head between those thighs."
He laughs, fully and openly, and she grins at him. He leans down and kisses her forehead, and walks off as the EMTs load her into the car.
Mandy watches as Robert walks up. Her mind is a mess, but the one solid emotion in the turbulence is relief. Relief that he's alive, that Visi is alive, that she actually pulled it off and became the hero Mandy had really thought she could be, given the chance. Relief that she still gets to keep the two most important people in her life.
He reaches her and asks for a beer, which she obliges. They sit next to each other on the car and talk about what they just experienced, both of them tactfully avoiding the elephant taking up all the air between them. Robert is the one to address it first.
"Look, about what shroud said-"
Mandy raises a hand. "Hey, no worries. I get it. She's...incredible. I can hardly blame you." She forces herself to keep her voice chipper, and does an admirable job, in her reckoning. The look in roberts face disabuses her of that notion, quickly.
"You're a bad liar, Mandy."
She feels herself pout in response, and he actually has the audacity to let out a little chuckle at her expression. And damn her if that chuckle doesn't make the corner of her mouth pull up as well.
"Yea, well, I'm a hero, and all," she mutters, looking down at her beer. Robert huffs a single laugh, before face settles again.
"It was after I told the team I wasn't going to cut her. She was there the whole time, which despite everything up to that point, still caught me off guard. I followed her to the locker room and we talked and...and she told me about how she put a bomb on my suit the day I went to the steel works. About how she has an augment from Shroud and he made her do it to pay off the debt. About how she didn't deserve the good we were giving her."
Mandy felt her eyes widen. She'd heard shroud say that Visi was working with him, but this was all new. It did explain a number of things she had wondered about in the past, though.
"And as she was telling me this, I realized that I didn't care. It didn't matter to me that she'd done all of this shit in the past. That person she was before we met, she was gone, and this person, the Courtney we'd come to know, is still someone I cared for. And I told her that. And she..."
He trailed off. Mandy, despite the way every ounce of her being was screaming at her to press, simply sat there and let him work through it.
"She told me she wanted me to look at her the way I...the way I look at you." Mandy stiffened, ever so little. She turned to look at Robert directly.
"...and what way is that?"
Robert snorts another rueful laugh. "You know, I asked her the same thing, sort of. She said I knew what she meant."
"Do you?"
Robert pulls another swig from his beer. He stared at the shattered mech shroud had been piloting not even an hour ago. He holds the liquid in his mouth, gaze seemingly a million miles away. After a protracted moment, he swallows, sighing. "Yea. I think I do."
Mandy just raises an eyebrow at him. He takes a deep breath before pushing forward. "At first I thought it was about the fact that I like you. Like, a lot." Mandy feels her face flush, and she drops her eyes down to her beer, fingers idly peeling the label.
"And then, I thought it was about the fact that I've always seen you as a hero. *My* hero, really. You told me once that you weren't done saving me, and I'll be damned if you didn't do exactly that. In way more ways than just stopping Shroud from using my grey matter as wallpaper."
She barks a bitter laugh at this. "And now?"
"Now? Now I think it's both."
Mandy nodded, and they both turned away from each other to stare out at the rubble. A few seconds of not quite awkward, not quite amicable, but quite charged silence passed between them.
"And then she kissed me." She knew it was coming. At least, something like it. Something *had* to have happened between them for Shroud to say that, for Visi to have that look of guilt, for Robert to look down at her and immediately away like he did. It still hurts.
"And I should've pulled back, ya know? I should've leaned out and told her that we couldn't do this and that I am with you. Because I want to be. I really really like you, Mandy."
He won't meet her eyes. "But I didn't. Because I..."
"Because you also really really like her" she supplies it for him. He glances away as he nods, shame and guilt written on his face. That expression pains her. She makes a decision.
"Well, I think she got what she wanted. I saw the way you looked at her. And the way she looked at you. Each certainly seemed like a healthy mix of both." She tries not to sound wistful. She really does. She tries to make it sound like a friend pointing out to another friend that their third, mutual friend is into him and that she doesn't really care. In fact, she's happy for them, because they're the two most important people in her life and knowing that they'd be happy is all she wants.
She fails. And as she does, as she hears the hutch in her voice, she realizes something. That she would be happy, at least that they were happy. But she would also be miserable, because they were the two most important people in her life, and she desperately wanted to share in that happiness.
She thinks about Invisigal. Courtney, she'd heard Robert call her. Thinks about that first day when she'd come in, looking like a kicked dog, saying she would join the Phoenix program if they didn't ask questions. The look of shock and hope in her eyes when Mandy agreed. The way she tried so hard those first few missions, like she had something to prove. The way she seemed to take every failure so personally, until she thought someone was watching her and she brushed it off. The smile she had when she wasn't at the bottom of the leaderboard for the first time in 3 months. The way she flushed and wouldn't meet her eyes when Mandy congratulated her. The way it made Mandy's chest feel tight to see her that way, walls momentarily down, vulnerable and full of hope and fear.
She thinks about Robert, about his calm and steady demeanor, his sardonic humor, the way he never, *ever* gives up on anyone. The way he looked at her when she revealed Mandy to him, like he was even more excited to be eating crappy gala spaghetti with Mandy than he was when he thought it was a date with Blonde Blazer. Of the way he looked into her eyes while they danced. Of the way he cried when she left him with a bedridden Chase, the first strangled sob escaping just as the door closed behind her. She thinks of the way she felt when he leaned in to kiss her that first day.
Robert sighs, deep and pained. "Mandy-"
"It's fine!" Mandy says too quickly. "Seriously! I mean, I can hardly get mad at you for wanting to reciprocate a kiss with someone that you like more when you're kinda seeing someone else." She means it as a joke. At least, she tries to. She even throws a little giggle at the end that absolutely fails to reach casual and falls tumbling to the edge of hysterical. The way Robert flinches makes her regret the words immediately.
"That's the thing, Mandy. That's the really fucked up, confusing, entirely foreign to me thing. I don't think I like her more than you. Not more. Just...differently?" He says it like a question, but one for him to answer, not her.
Mandy, to her surprise, feels the knot in her chest loosen, if only a fraction. "Different," she whispers. She's amazed to realize that she understands what he means. Because she likes Robert too. So, so much. Like isn't the proper word, but they're not ready for the one that comes next. Not until they get past this weird moment. All three of them.
She reaches out and grabs Robert's hand. He looks at their intertwined fingers and then back to her. She leans in and kisses him. There's a split second of hesitation from him, an eternal moment that makes her wonder if she's done the wrong thing and really screwed the whole thing up, before he melts into it. Their lips press against each other, breath intermingling in a way that energizes Mandy as it simultaneously leaves her panting slightly.
"Listen," she starts, "I don't know what it means for both of you to be in my life or how we've managed to end up in this weird tangle of emotions and connection and...whatever it is that exists between us all. All I know is that I like you. And invisig-Courtney." She smiles as she says the name, enjoying the way it feels on her lips. "I understand what you mean when you say it's different, those feelings."
Robert's eyes widened, filled with surprise, relief, and hope. "You do?"
"I do. I don't know how this sorta thing works, or if it even can, but I do know that I want it to. Because you and Courtney are the two most important people in my life. And I want to do whatever I can to keep you both in it."
Robert stares at her, expression unreadable. He snorts a laugh equal parts sardonic and amazed. "What?" she asks.
"Its just..." He seems to search for the right words to say. "Its just that I feel the same way. And I think Courtney does too, actually."
The two of them sit there, holding hands, grinning like idiots, watching the Z-team celebrate. "So" Robert says cheekily. "Does this mean the team gets Monday off?"
Courtney comes awake slowly, like she's floating weightlessly out of unconsciousness. As she does, her memory returns just as slow. She's in a hospital bed. She remembers the doctor's mildly disappointed tone as he told her that she probably wouldn't have needed to spend more than a day in the hospital if she hadn't jumped out of the ambulance and into the mass of Z-Team for the pictures. But she had, causing more damage to her arm and necessitating a multi-day stay as she required some surgery to fix the issues.
Her hearing gently picks up into the gentle beeping of the heart monitor, the distant buzz of hospital staff chatter. The clinical scent of disinfectant and floor cleaner just barely failing to mask something pleasant, with a hint of vanilla, she thinks, playing across her groggy nose. The bitter taste of morning breath in someone who's been asleep for far too long.
Her eyes slowly open, vision clearing and resolving the silhouetted form sitting next to her bed into that of Blonde Blazer, or is it Brunette Blazer?, hair in a messy bun, blue eyes full of a mixture of joy and relief and worry and care that makes Courtney equal parts giddy and terrified. She tries to sit up, but gasps as the pain in her shoulder reminds her why she's in the hospital in the first place.
"Don't move," Blazer says, partially lifting herself out of the chair and reaching towards Courtney.
"Yea, no shit" Courtney says, through a breath that's part laugh, part gasp, all pain. "Don't worry, lesson learned." A beep sounds next to her bed, and a warmth begins to spread over her body. Pain killers. God bless modern medicine. She relaxes back into the bed, that floating feeling returning.
"How long have you been here?" She asks as Blazer sits back down in her seat.
Blazer blushes slightly. "Oh not long, really. I got here around 8, I think?" Courtney looks to the clock in the room, which reads 11:13.
"You've been here for three hours?"
Blazer follows her gaze, and flushes fully. "Uhh, actually, I guess it’s been longer than I thought. It's tomorrow, or well, today, I guess, but it's morning. I mean, it's 10 AM. I got here last night."
Courtney's eyes slowly slid over from the clock to Blazer, who was looking down at her hands as she wrung them in her lap. "You've been here for, " she paused as she did the math in her head, "fifteen hours?"
Blazer gave a small shrug. "I guess so, yea. I fell asleep at some point, so it hasn’t felt that long. I...I wanted to be here when you woke up."
The way she says it makes Courtney feel tingles all over her body, and she feels her face flush.
"What about Robert?" She asks it before she realizes she's going to. She doesn't know whether she means "why isn't he here?" or "why aren't you with him?" but she does know that she immediately regrets the words when she sees the way Blazer's winces.
"I mean," Courtney rushes to fill the silence, "I'm really glad you're here, seriously. I just thought that you'd be with him. You know, doing shit at SDN. Being heroes and all that." She finishes lamely, feeling her cheeks heat up.
Blazer gives a rueful smile. "He is, actually. He's heading up the Torrance branch right now. Myself however." She gestures at herself. "Not really much I can do in this state."
"Oh please" Courtney scoffs. “You're, like, the corporate badass. I bet you could email someone to death or something.”
Blazer flushes a bit. Courtney's eyes widen. “Wait, did you actua-”
“No!” Blazer says, waving her hands. “I didn't kill someone with an email. I just…I may have convinced some of our neighboring branches to assist in an…expedited fashion while clearing away some red tape.”
“Oh my God, you emailed so hard that it scared people into action.” She actually means for the wonder in her voice to be there. Blazer snorts, which turns into a set of giggles that threaten to run away from her before she can reign it in.
“Yea, I guess I kind of did.” Their eyes meet, and the silence that fills the space between this time is a lot more comfortable. Blazer is giving her that look again, the same one she gave her when they were wheeling her on the stretcher. When she held Courtney's hand and told her she would always have a place here.
“Listen, about-”
“Look, I just-”
They both pause, before breaking into a short burst of laughter.
“You first” Blazer prompts her, beating her to saying the same. Courtney falters. She realizes she was about to talk about the kiss she and Robert shared, and now that she's had a chance to think about it, she finds she’s lost the courage. So, she resorts to the old tricks.
“I take it you’re here to finalize my termination paperwork? Need my signature on the dotted line or whatever? It's gonna be pretty sloppy if I gotta do it with the non-dominant hand.” She catches the unintended joke halfway through saying it and ends the sentence with a smirk.
Blazer responds with a flat stare that can’t quite fully hide the way her lips quiver as she fights her own little smile. “No, actually. As a matter of fact, not only are you not fired, but we’ve actually decided to end your suspension early. You’ll even get back pay for it.”
Courtney stares at her. “I…wait, what? How does that even…What?” Mandy huffs a laugh at her expression in a way that makes Courtney feel warm in a not entirely unpleasant way.
“There’s a provision in the Phoenix Program contract that allows a supervisor to prematurely end an employee’s suspension if they demonstrate, quote ‘overtly heroic actions in the line of civic duty and/or the greater good.’ It was Brainbook’s idea, I think. It requires both the dispatcher and the branch manager to approve and a pretty extensive amount of paperwork, but like I said, not much else for me to do.”
Courntey barely heard the last part, her mind turning over the words overtly heroic actions. “And…you guys did that? For me?” She intended to say it with the usual flippance, like she doesn’t believe what she did was that heroic. Instead, it comes out like she can’t believe that her dispatcher and branch manager, Robert and Blonde Blazer respectively, felt that it was.
Blazer, still looking at her in a way that makes her skin feel tingly, just nods. “We did. It was the first thing Robert did when we set up the temporary office, actually. The dispatcher has to be the one to start the process. He insisted on going in early to get it done before the shift started.”
Courtney feels numb, like she’s seeing and hearing all of this from far away. She can feel her pulse in her neck, her ears are hot, and her fingers twitch as they unconsciously search for a cigarette. She doesn’t even realize she’s holding her breath until Blazer’s eyes widen as she leans in. “Visi?” She reaches a hand out and it lands on Courtney’s good arm. “Hey, it's okay. What’s wrong?” She’s rubbing small circles with her thumb on Courtney's invisible arm, the touch, to Courntey’s immense surprise, oddly grounding her. She exhales slowly, feeling the tingle of her body returning to being visible.
“Nothing!” the haste in which she says it undercutting the intent of the words. “Nothing, I just…I’m surprised to hear about that. I would’ve thought that my…” My working with shroud would’ve made me irredeemable, she finishes in her head. She had thought that, at the time. She thought that right up until the point where she felt the bullet enter her shoulder.
“We, that is, Robert and I, took a look at the…unusual circumstances surrounding your particular case and decided your actions in the field outweighed any…problematic happenings in the past.”
“Problematic happenings? How very…”
“Corperate”
“I was gonna say corny, but yea, corporate works.”
Blazer snorts, and Courtney smiles as she realizes she's glad that it made her laugh, and not feel insulted. 5 months ago, when she’d joined the phoenix program, Blazer would have given her that disappointed mom look that always made Courtney feel chagrinned as much as it made her giddy to have the attention of someone like Blonde Blazer. Now, she just felt the giddiness. It was so much better this way.
An amicable silence settled between them. Unfortunately for the silence, Courntey couldn’t stand it for very long. “That’s…not what you came here to talk about, is it?”
“No, it isn't,” Blazer says with a shake of her head. She doesn’t continue, leaving the words hanging in the air. It's an offer, Courtney realizes. She knows what she wants to talk about. The words Shroud said to Robert on the roof. It couldn’t be more obvious, the elephant practically trumpeting to announce its presence in the room.
She can’t take it. The threat of what that conversation will require of her, what it could mean for her, for Robert, for Blazer, she can’t handle it, not right now. Not while Blazer is looking at her with that “it’s okay, take your time” look. Not while she’s still gently rubbing circles onto her skin with her thumb. She finds herself staring at that thumb, at how it leaves goosebumps on her arm. Blazer’s eyes leave her face to follow her gaze, and she seems to realize for the first time that she’s touching Courtney. Her hand pulls away, which makes Courtney immediately regret staring, and clears her throat. The offer is rescinded.
“Did the doctor say how long you’d have to stay?”
He had, actually. One more day and, provided the stitches hadn't reopened or anything, she’d be good to go home. Home. She hadn’t thought about that. Her roommate was Red Ring. She had no idea if she was still there, or what she would think about what Courtney had done, or if she would even care, but she certainly didn't want to find out.
“Visi?”
She realizes she’s gotten lost in her own mind. “Uh, no, he didn’t,” she lies. She can tell Blazer doesn’t believe it, but she doesn’t press.
“Right,” she says with a little sigh that forces Courtney to fight off a wince. “Well, when you do get out, just let me know. I’ve already filed the paperwork to make sure you have a ride home. I don’t want you to have to walk all that way.”
“Oh, you don’t have to do that.”
“I know. But I wanted to. So I did.”
Courtney feels herself grow warm again. She stares down at her arm again. “Thanks, Blazer”
Blazer hums a response. “Oh, you don’t have to call me Blazer, by the way. It…feels weird to hear it when I’m like this.” She gestures to herself dismissively, like she’s embarrassed of the fact that she’s, what, a little shorter?
“When you’re a hot brunette instead of a hot blonde?” Courtney blames the morphine for her loose tongue, but is happy for it when Blazer blushes and glances away, clearing her throat. She turns back and extends her hand.
“I’m Mandy.”
Courtney takes the hand, a bit uncomfortable with the formality. “C-courtney.” Her hand tingles at the contact, and her chest tingles at the smile Mandy gives in response.
“Its nice to really meet you, Courtney.”
“Uh, yea. You too, Bla-Mandy.”
A buzz from Mandy's pocket draws their attention. She pulls her phone out and reads the notification, smiling faintly. “It’s Robert,” she says, “he’s asking how you’re doing. Or, well, asking again, that is.”
“Again?” Courtney feels her ears getting warm and immediately chides herself. He’s just concerned cause you’re hurt. Mandy nods.
“He’s asked about you pretty much every hour since I got here, yea.”
The warmth spreads to her face. She makes a small “oh” noise that she had no real control over. Mandy looks up from the text she’s typing out in response.
“Vis-Courtney. It’s very important to me that you know that I meant it when I said you will always have a place with SDN. With us.” The “us” is charged in a way that Courtney can’t parse immediately and won’t bring herself to try. “I know- well, I can guess that you feel all sorts of ways about what happened with Shroud and all, but that’s all in the past. What matters is that you’ve made the effort to be better and it shows. We-” Mandy hesitates. “We care about you. Robert cares about you. I care about you.”
Courtney feels her shoulders come up with each line, her left one complaining as they do. She hates that she feels this way when Mandy is trying so hard to be kind, but she's just not used to people talking to her like this. Treating her like she's worth anything. She fights the bitter laugh that threatens to bubble up at the irony of her getting so uncomfortable with the very thing she told Robert she always wanted. For people to see her as someone capable of good. Someone worth caring about.
Her eyes are burning. Oh, fuck. She’s about to cry. How pathetic. I’m gonna cry because my boss is being nice to me? She tries to mutter something snarky, but her voice won’t work right and her jaw is shaking and her vision is blurry and her mind can’t even summon anything coherent, let alone speak it.
She feels Mandy’s hand on hers, and she finds herself holding on, this single lifeline keeping her from breaking down in front of her boss, in front of Blonde Fucking Blazer. She realizes that she’s biting her lip so hard that she's tasting blood. They sit there for a moment, as Courtney pulls herself back from the edge of tears. Mandy gently squeezes her hand and pulls away, leaving Courtney’s hand feeling cold and empty.
“I should be getting back, I have a meeting in an hour and I can’t keep putting them off.”
“Wait, you’ve been dodging meetings to be here?”
Mandy looks a bit like a kid caught with their hand in the cookie jar, a look Courtney’s never seen, and finds endlessly endearing on her face. “Uh, yea. It didn't seem right to take them while sitting in your room and I wanted to be here when you woke up.” She scratches the back of her head, cheeks coloring. “But I do have to talk to finance about…Well, never mind that. Just…let me know when you get out. Please?”
Courtney can’t bring herself to meet her eyes. “Yea, sure. Can you, uh, not tell the team I'm up yet? I don’t think i’m ready to deal with…all that yet”
Mandy lets out a little laugh. “Yea, they can be a lot, huh? It’ll be our secret until you’re ready.”
“Thank you.”
She can see Mandy hesitate a moment, her hand poised for something, before she turns and walks out of the room, the door closing softly behind her. A moment of silence passes, and she gives up the fight against her emotions, her body shuddering as she softly cries into her good hand.
Robert sighs as the bell rings to indicate the end of the shift. It went well, all things considered. Z-team had actually done a terrific job, but most of the tasks are still cleanup and rescue, not exactly the most exciting things, and the chatter was chock full of barbs. Nervous energy burning off, he knew. Everyone was anxious to hear an update on Courtney’s condition. No one more so than him. Well, except maybe Mandy, who’d delegated herself to sitting vigil at Courtney’s bedside since he’d left the spot.
He opened his texts with Mandy. A dozen iterations of “Any update?” from him and “Nope :/” from her stared at him as he sent yet another inquiry.
“Yo, Robert, you hear anything about Visi?” Golem’s deep voice sounds in his headset. The chatter dies as everyone waits to hear his response.
“Not yet, sorry guys. I promise that you will know as soon as I do.” He watches as the little dots appear on Mandy’s end, then disappear. His pulse quickens. He tries not to get his hopes up as he says his good-byes and logs out of his temporary work station. It could mean anything. She could be in a meeting, or her hand slipped, or- His thoughts are interrupted as a text from Mandy arrives
Robert snorts at that.
Mandy types for a while, the dots appearing and disappearing in succession. Eventually the text comes.
Robert slides his phone into his pocket, exits the SDN’s temporary Torrance office, and returns to his tiny apartment, his slightly too large chihuahua, and his new bed, read: couch, courtesy of Mandy. Sleep finds him quickly, the exhaustion of the day taking hold.
That is, until it is interrupted by his phone buzzing several hours into the night. He opens it to see a single text from Mandy.