Work Text:
There is a fire raging in Liz Webber’s head.
The flames have been eating away at her since three o’clock that morning when she awoke with a scream in her throat and a terror in her heart. Every time she blinked, the final fire of Nostradamus blazed behind her eyelids, horrifically vivid against the relative darkness of her bedroom.
The fire, the screams, the blood painting the walls— It vaporized any chances of sleep the moment she was awake. The flames of blame—not fast enough to save Daniel from that monster, not good enough to save Alex from himself—thundered in her mind, hot and ceaseless and unforgiving.
She tried to smother it with work. It’s never hard to do at the morgue; far too many corpses in this world and not nearly enough people who can stomach them. She had just about managed to bury herself under the clinical loam of scalpel incisions and autopsy analysis and orderly sutures when a body landed on her table—
—with a gunshot wound in its head, up through the bottom of its chin, exploding through the top of its skull, male, 25 years old, body found alone on the edge of the woods by a civilian on her morning jog, the gun located on the ground within arm’s reach, no note left behind—
—and Liz had to escape to the bathroom when the fire came roaring up again.
Arms braced on the counter, Liz heaved for air over the sink. Her lungs were thick with smoke and starved of oxygen. Her body trembled like the charred foundations of a house fire, and her hands did not fare much better. She closed her fists around the fact that that was not Alex on her table, though when she returned to the lab, she found it hard to keep the notion in her sweat-slicked grip. What did it matter if the body in front of her was not Alex? It did not fix all that she had failed to do.
One of her coworkers asked if she was okay, and she just barely managed to strangle the “Fuck off” that jumped to her lips into an equally scathing “I’m fine.” And she got right back to work.
The fire raged for the rest of the day, rushing under her skin and boiling the blood in her veins. Determined to snuff it out, she stayed at work an hour longer than she usually does. An hour became two, became three, became more, but whatever it was that roared within her (frustration, grief, fury, spite, pain, bitterness—) it just refused to die.
She figured she ought to be tired. She figured she ought to be crying. Liz was neither, and she left work well into the evening with hands that trembled like she was still standing in the blazing, bloody core of that damn school.
So, here she stands on her front porch, using the very same hands to shake her keys out of her purse and fumble one of them into the lock.
Smothering the fire in her head had failed. Thankfully, she can always douse it.
Liz billows into her empty house like a storm, blowing past Bolinho when the little dog comes galloping over to shove his nose at her shoes. The single glowing lamp by the couch casts her shadows stalking after her as she crosses the living room. As she passes, she throws her purse and keys on the dining table with enough force to send them skidding, and she marches right into the kitchen, tossing open the cabinets.
Liz pulls down a bottle of whiskey and a glass.
She already has the bottle open by the time she gets back to the table, expertly spinning the cap off and away with just her thumb. The whiskey barely hits the bottom of the glass before she knocks it all back in one fell swoop.
It burns as it goes down, but not the same way that the screaming within her does. The whiskey is acrid, watery, and leaves a promise of silence in its wake. Good. Liz exhales the smoke of it as the drink settles in her empty gut, and then she pours herself a second glass.
She is nearly to her third, slowing down if only to breathe, when her eyes stray towards the couch in the living room, and—
It takes everything in her power to not suck the whiskey up her nose, or drop the bottle on the floor in order to reach for a gun that isn’t there.
The foreign, shadowy shape watching her from the couch is only Thiago.
“What—” Though the whiskey didn’t end up in her nose, thank God, she chokes on the little still sitting in her throat. She squeezes her eyes shut and coughs into her sleeve hard enough that she almost retches.
“Liz?” comes Thiago’s voice, hedged with both confusion and concern. “Are you alright?”
“Fuck—” Liz wheezes for air— “you.” She gulps down another breath, and her hand comes to clutch at the front of her shirt as her heart palpitates in directionless adrenaline. “Jesus Christ. What are you doing here?”
Liz cracks her eyes open at him, blinking through a watery gaze. Thiago is laid out with his socked feet kicked up on the arm of her couch and a book sitting in his lap.
He shrugs at her question, all innocence. “You said I could come over whenever I wanted. You gave me a key.”
“I said you need to text me first!”
He raises his hands. “I did, I did!”
“No you—!” Liz rips her phone out of her purse and stabs at the screen with her finger. Immediately, something in her deflates. “Oh.”
“See?”
Liz scowls. “Save it.” She swallows around the rasp in her throat. Liz briefly considers the whiskey left in her glass, and then she knocks the rest of it back, just as she had intended to do before being interrupted.
Thiago makes a worrisome sound. “Maybe I should just call next time. Long day, my dear?”
Liz pulls the glass from her lips. “Yes,” she hisses on an exhale, and she thumps the glass down on the table like punctuation.
Liz braces her hand, fingers splayed on the wood grain, and she savors the soft, woozy thrum of alcohol hitting her bloodstream. She knows from experience that the whiskey doesn’t so much as douse the fire as it does numb the burns, but the effect is basically the same; she feels like she can breathe for the first time since 3 o’clock that morning.
Fuck, she needed that. With less haste this time, Liz lifts the bottle and pours herself a third. She pointedly ignores the look that tight Thiago is fixing her with, or that wrinkle in his lip that means he’s trying very hard not to outright frown.
“Have you had dinner yet?” Thiago asks, clearly trying to be casual about it. Liz doesn’t grace that with a response. They both know the answer. “I made pasta and red sauce, if you’re interested. It’s on the stove.”
Liz cranes her neck to peer into the kitchen. Sure enough, there is a covered pot on the stove, which she completely overlooked while on her quest for a drink. Thiago is no Michelin star chef, but his repertoire of recipes is certainly more expansive than Liz’s own, and it’s become customary for him to provide some sort of homemade ‘piece-offering’ whenever he invites himself over like this.
Liz thinks she might be hungry. Her appetite isn’t exactly biting at the moment, though. Besides, she wants to let the drink do its work—not that Thiago would like that answer. She lifts her glass indicatively. “After this one,” she says, just to appease him.
Thiago closes his book and swings his legs over the side of the couch. “Let me fix you a bowl.”
Liz thinks that if it were anyone else, she would growl at the obvious attempts to babysit her drinking. As it stands, it’s only Thiago. Thiago, whose bedside she sat a five-day vigil over following his chest surgery. Thiago, who insisted on keeping her company when she went to visit her mother’s grave. Thiago, who she exchanged house keys with in case anything, anything else went wrong. Thiago, who has since used her open door to invite himself over whenever his lungs are itching for a cigarette—a numbing burn of his own, and a nasty habit he can’t afford to entertain anymore.
So Liz lets him fuss. Only because he gets it; only because the look in his eye whenever she reaches for the bottle is less judgmental than it is a soul-deep understanding. Her nerves still bristle at being known so well by someone else, foreign like a needle under her skin, but it is better than being callously scrutinized.
The whiskey is keeping her from giving too much of a damn, anyway, providing her some perspective. Oh, let him fuss. Making her eat something is hardly the worst thing he has forced her to do. She takes another sip and lets it wash away the blistering memory of her hands soaked in Thiago’s blood, scrabbling for his pulse.
“Here.” A bowl is placed down on the table, at Liz’s hip. “I really recommend you try it. I think this may be my best pot of sauce yet.”
Liz rolls her eyes. Really hard selling it. He’s not even trying to be subtle. “Thanks,” she says blandly.
“My pleasure,” Thiago answers with a shameless grin.
He returns to his sprawl on the couch. He picks up his book as Liz works her way through her third drink of the evening. Slowly but surely, the fire in her head becomes a distant thing, like the tick of the clock or the rustle of a turned page. Her shoulders loosen from their wire-tight pull around her frame, and she lets her singed weight sag back against the table.
It’s somewhere during drink number three that Liz is enticed enough by the smell of the food that she puts the glass aside in favor of fumbling for the fork. Upon the first bite, she tips her head back with a groan.
“Told you,” Thiago chirps from the couch.
“What’d you do to this?” Liz asks around a mouthful.
Thiago shrugs. “I brought more of my own spices from home this time around and took my time with it. I wanted to get it right. It seems like I succeeded.”
Either Liz just hasn’t eaten in eight hours, or Thiago might be on to something. She shovels a couple more forkfuls in her mouth and wonders if he’ll leave her with the leftovers like he usually does. God knows she doesn’t keep much in her fridge.
Thiago hums, eyebrow raised. “Not even going to sit down to eat?”
Funny how he’ll judge her for the lack of table manners but not for cussing him out or for downing two drinks in twenty seconds. Thiago can be weird like that. “Mmf,” Liz answers intelligently and takes another bite.
Really, she hadn’t planned to eat at all tonight. Prior to walking in that door, the plan was to knock back whiskey until the wildfire burning her mind was beaten back into coals, then flop on the couch and smother herself in brainless reality TV. Instead, she’s got a bowl of pasta in her hands and a Thiago on her couch.
Well, worse still has failed to stop her once she’s set her mind to something. Liz shoves a couple more bites in her mouth, washes it down with the last of her third drink (and a hearty swig from the bottle itself, fuck the pretense of a glass), and saunters her way into the living room.
And then she tumbles onto the couch, onto Thiago, with all the grace of a fallen rafter.
Thiago barely moves his book in time. Liz’s weight audibly punches a breath out of Thiago’s lungs as she comes down. “Ow,” he wheezes when Liz lands on his ribs—
—and Liz’s brain finally catches up. She hisses— “Shit, sorry—” and knees her way around him, shuffling clumsily so she can lay on the narrow space beside him instead. This was a stupid idea. She’s going to put him back in the hospital. “Sorry. Fuck. Sorry.”
Thiago’s wheeze trails off into a laugh. “No no, all good, all good,” he says breezily. “No need to scramble, my dear, just stay off my left side, yeah?”
Off his left? Which left? Liz shuffles awkwardly, and Thiago, having mercy on her, hooks an arm around her back and tugs her somewhere safe.
This happens to be tucked against his side, head pillowed on his shoulder, legs knocking together and arms pinned by each other. They’ll get pins and needles this way, Liz muses.
Thiago shifts around, grunting as he tries to get more comfortable. He settles. He hums. “We’ve never done this before,” he notes mildly.
Liz thinks she ought to be embarrassed. Somewhere between dragging his breathing corpse out of Nostradamus and knocking back drink number three, she must have stopped caring so much. “You were on my couch,” she complains. “I wanted to lay on my couch.”
“I could have just…”
Thiago tapers off. Seems to think for a moment. He breathes in, lets it out slowly, and Liz feels his shoulders sink back into the cushions.
“You know what?” he murmurs. “Never mind. This is fine.”
Liz hums in agreement. This is fine. Well, almost. She flops an arm over his chest, wiggling her fingers at the coffee table. “Could you pass me the remote?”
Thiago’s arm comes to settle around her back as Liz flicks through the programs she has recorded. As planned, she picks out a reality TV rerun. After turning the volume down low, the remote is tossed back on the coffee table with a careless clatter.
“What’re we watching?” Thiago asks.
Aside from the tense drive home, Liz hasn’t so much as sat down since her lunch break. She can feel pressure she didn’t realize was even there releasing from her joints. Liz smooshes her face into his shoulder. “Something stupid.”
“Mm. I like the sound of that.”
The house is quiet. Everything is still. Even Bolinho has given up his sniffing around the dining table to come settle in front of the TV, curling up on the carpet. Through half-lidded eyes, Liz watches ridiculous, normal people blabber on about their ridiculous, normal problems in their ridiculous, normal lives.
No secret missions or loaded guns. No tortured teenage girls or monsters made from their defiled corpses. No ancient books of curses or names cried out too late. No brains painting the gouged-out walls or blood soaking through the knees of her jeans.
No death. No fire.
Just her, Thiago, and the woes of every-day nonsense prattling on behind a glowing screen.
Liz slides herself down a few inches. Thiago mumbles a confused sound, but he doesn’t object, nor does he make any sounds of pain.
Liz settles her ear against Thiago’s chest.
She can hear him breathing this way. The beat of his heart; the steady rhythm her fingers so desperately searched for beneath his blood-smeared chin on that twisted night. She remembers the stench of the girls’ smoking corpse flooding her nose and mouth as she begged the God she no longer believed in for Thiago’s pulse to still be there. The dying fire lapped at the threads of her soul for that small eternity between one beat and the next. For a moment, she truly believed herself to be damned to survive this blazing hell all on her own.
And then: pa-thump… pa-thump… pa-thump…
It envelops her now, steady and strong and blessedly ceaseless. Thiago was practically a stranger to her then, but emerging from the rotten core of Nostradamus, he became—someone. A friend? A confidant? A partner?
…No. A balm to the endless burn.
Settled lower now, Thiago’s arm has been shifted from her back up towards her shoulder blades. His hand eases into her hair, tracing mindless circles at the base of her neck. Liz closes her eyes. Exhausted tears collect on her lashes. The fire that licks at the walls of Liz’s mind and catches on the ends of Thiago’s cigarettes slowly begins to lose its fervor until, at last, it sizzles out. Nothing but gentle darkness is left in its wake.