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He was in the middle of a wide open sea, surrounded by waves reflecting the sun too brightly in all directions with no sign of land, but for the first time in five long years Aidan didn't feel like he was drowning slowly, sinking an inch at a time below the surface. There was finally air to breathe, though even the shallowest attempt to inhale hurt like an absolute bitch. Rachel was here within arm's reach–literally, as he was still rather desperately clinging to the straps of her tactical vest. After finally getting to kiss her as he’d been wanting to for ages, now, he wasn't about to let go. Even if she was looking at him with a deep furrow of concern etched into her brow, at least that was an expression he recognized. Moreover, Keira was alive , somehow, and steering their boat with familiar, easy confidence away from the site of the Division’s thorough, if not yet fully complete, defeat.
There was something to be said for the miracle of getting to patch up the gaping hole in his chest that the loss of both of them had wrought all at once, even if it had cost him, well, a gaping hole in his chest.
“Now that was almost poetic. I thought you were the best-selling writer,” Aidan muttered under his breath. He managed a raspy chuckle at his own wit, biting back a groan as a new wave of pain gripped him tightly around the middle in response. The adrenaline was wearing off, and the pain it had kept partially at bay was creeping back slowly as it burned out of his system. He slumped a little deeper against the bench seat, and Rachel pulled him in more tightly to brace him upright against her shoulder, frowning. Oh, that was nice. Aidan started to shake his head, and then thought the better of it, trying to ease her fears.
“Hey…don’t be… It’s nothing. Just teasing, y’know. I’ve missed it. I’ve missed you,” he added emphatically to punctuate the dizzy ramble, all while making an attempt at a smile that, judging from her agonized expression, missed the mark entirely.
Aidan found his gaze sliding away from Rachel’s face, not out of any sense of dismay, but a frustrating inability to get his eyes to oblige him. He couldn’t get enough of looking her way and finally really seeing the woman he knew looking back, but he couldn’t quite seem to manage it at the moment. He wasn’t seeing either of them double any longer–one of each was more than enough–but focusing was a losing battle. The water was a little easier to look at, eyes stubbornly unfocusing into the distance, though he still had to squint against the brilliant glare. But then Rachel was saying something he couldn’t quite make out, and out of the corner of his eye he could barely see that the furrow in her brow was deepening as she studied his face.
“–ink we can get there within a few hours.” She stood, gently letting go of his shoulder while she untangled his hand from her vest, hissing a little when she realized that a couple of his fingers were dislocated and swollen stiff when they resisted her efforts. Rachel sounded exactly like an offended cat in that moment, and it almost made Aidan laugh again before he thought the better of it. Instead he hummed breathless agreement with whatever it was she was saying and reluctantly let his eyes fall closed while she settled his busted hand gently on the seat cushion. Everything was just a little too bright now that the sun was high in the sky. Her hands were on his face again, then, and he exhaled shakily against her palm as her shadow blocked the sun.
“Aidan, you have to stay with us,” she said sharply.
“‘S’okay, kid,” he murmured. “Just resting my eyes.” She leaned in close, the strands of her wig brushing his cheek.
“Stay put,” she said, low and carefully. “I’ll be right back.”
“I’ll be waiting…with bated breath,” he managed, voice hitching enough along the way to bely the idea that it was only a joke. Everything felt a little chillier when she moved away to join Keira at the ship’s controls, despite the too-bright sunshine. He couldn’t make out a word of their conversation over the noise of the boat, but perhaps that was for the best. He wasn’t exactly in a state to contribute to any planning. Aidan slid down a little further in the seat and contemplated just how much it would hurt to slump sideways and lay down on the seat. It would get him out of the wind, and his head was throbbing, but he was pretty certain the thin cushion wasn’t going to do a damn thing for his ribs.
He pulled his arms in around his middle protectively and shivered, trying to force his breathing to stay shallow and even. This would hurt, but then he would be laying down. And he could maybe rest. Just a little. For a moment he cracked his eyes open to make sure he’d judged the space correctly but the light was just so fucking bright that he squeezed them shut again immediately, pulling his good hand up to his face. The skin beneath his fingers was damp. Was he crying? Maybe a little, and honestly if there was ever a time and place… But no, it was sweat, mostly, pouring over his brow–though doing absolutely nothing to flatten the absurd Argylle hairstyle he’d conjured for verisimilitude or whatever–and turning the chill he’d felt a moment before into a sudden swelter. His t-shirt was abruptly sodden and plastered to his skin where it wasn’t already strapped down to staunch the bleeding. The air to breathe was suddenly entirely insufficient. Aidan gulped a ragged sigh that turned into an undignified groan as whatever dregs of adrenaline had held off the worst of the pain gave up the ghost and his chest was wrapped in a crushing vise of agony that stole the air right out of his lungs.
“Ah, shit,” he managed softly and emphatically before his bones felt like they were turned to ice water, his breath lodged in his throat, and his body slid helplessly to the deck of the boat in a heap. Aidan saw them all react in brief snapshot glimpses when he blinked his eyes open. Rachel’s eyes were wide with horror as she slid to her knees beside him. Keira looked grim and not a little haunted, her hands still steady in their work keeping the boat moving forward. But the goddamn cat only blinked at him and looked thoroughly unimpressed, as always.
When he opened his eyes again, the world was a swirling blur, and though he could hear urgent-sounding voices, they seemed strangely distant. Maybe he really was drowning and sinking fast. Without thinking, he flailed his good hand around for something to grab hold of to keep above water. Rachel’s hand closed tightly around his own and though he couldn’t make out what she was saying, Aidan stopped worrying about trying to stay afloat. Almost.
“Don’t let the cat eat my face,” he wheezed, cracking a crooked smile as he blinked up at Rachel’s stricken expression.
“‘S’gonna be fine, sunshine,” he managed in a breathy sing-song, and then Aidan blessedly passed out cold.
He woke slowly, barely half-conscious and drifting for what felt like an eternity but was probably only minutes, and immediately braced himself for the sensation of pain. It was there, to be sure–he hurt, from the roots of his hair to the tips of his fingers and most assuredly everywhere in between. But the pain came with a floaty sort of distance that made it all seem quite hypothetical rather than written directly into every inch of his skin, muscle, and bone.
Somebody had found and made good use of a stash of opiates, God bless.
Aidan cracked open his gritty eyes to half a view of a brightly lit and nondescript beige room. His face was half-buried in the mountain of crisp white pillow propping him up on his side. He hummed vaguely and started to roll backward only for a very firm hand on his shoulder and a familiar presence at his back to bring him up short.
“Don’t move. I’m not done.” Rachel’s voice was low and…well, soothing wasn’t quite the thing, however much it immediately settled and stilled him to hear it. He’d missed it all, even this part.
“Yes, ma’am. Just like the old days,” he croaked before squeezing his eyes shut again with a grunt of discomfort. It was still a little too bright, really, and there was no point in keeping his eyes open if he couldn’t see her. But even through the vaguely unnerving narcotic haze there was Rachel’s warmth at his back and the familiar sound of her exasperated sigh as her hands stilled in their work.
“Not like this. Not because of me,” Rachel replied with a studied, toneless voice. The Division hadn’t given Elly a lot of resources for managing her anxiety. Rachel had a lot more practice, but even he recognized the ragged edge of the yawning chasm just beneath the words.
“Aw, hell, I still think it was pretty cool,” he said sheepishly. Aidan wiggled the fingers of his left hand gingerly, testing to see if he had a snowball’s chance in hell of reaching behind him to touch her. (His right was resting flat above his head and beside the pillow, out of sight and feeling a mile away, but with his fingers arranged so deliberately that she must have already realigned the lot of them back into place. He didn’t want to imagine her wrath if he ruined her good work.)
“Tell that to the hole in your back,” she replied tartly.
“I thiiiiiink that would be an anatomical impossibility, y’know,” Aidan muttered, trying gamely to work saliva back into his dry mouth. “It was through and through clean, though, right?” He knew it had been; he’d felt it quite intimately, and she’d said as much on the tanker. He could only imagine the look of frustration on her face, boring entirely new holes into his back.
“Yes,” Rachel admitted grudgingly.
“Let’s not look the gift horse in the eye, then, alright?” he drawled, allowing a smug smile to pull at the corner of his mouth that felt slightly less swollen as her huffed breath stirred the hairs on the back of his neck.
“It’s the horse’s mouth, and that doesn’t even make any sense,” she snapped.
“You didn’t short me on the good drugs, kid, this’s what’ve got,” he said, slurring his words a little before huffing an impatient breath into the pillow.
“Where’s Keira?” he mumbled after a moment.
“Hopefully by now at Alfie’s chateau,” Rachel sighed. “She managed to get her hands on plenty that will help make the case against the Division air-tight before we abandoned ship, she thinks. The Master File was apparently not the full tally of the Division’s atrocities.” He grunted in agreement.
“It’s been…some time,” he offered mildly, the understatement of the century. “They’d only gotten worse, honestly.”
Rachel’s hands still moved carefully over his back, laying out a precise pattern of medical tape to hold packed gauze in place, and he knew better than to try to move while she worked. But at that, they stilled, warm and familiar on his shoulder. She was quiet for a long moment, but as she drew breath to speak again he reached blindly behind him with his good hand and lucked into grabbing her knee. He knew damn well what she was about to ask, but he wasn’t about to hand her the whip to flagellate herself over it.
“You know she’ll show you. And Alfie. Every bit of it, what they got up to over the past five years, if you need to know. I’ll even make you another damn slide show if you want. But you don’t need to do it now.”
“You’re right. It’s just…so much is gone. But not really,” she admitted. “I do actually remember those years, of course, and now I can vaguely recall news stories, and things that happened in the world that I only paid attention to as far as they inspired plot for my books. But I can guess what they really meant. How much I would have been in the thick of them, in slightly different circumstances.”
“But you weren’t. You’ve been putting out really good books because they were actually real. We did that. You did that. You don’t need to write any more fiction about what you didn’t do, you know,” he said firmly.
“I’m almost done,” was her only reply, as her hand started moving again. Aidan let his hand drop from her leg after another small squeeze. Her gentle touch very nearly lulled him back into unconsciousness before the bed shifted ever so slightly beneath him as her movements stilled and then her hands fell away.
Under different circumstances the quiet and entirely uncontrolled noise of protest he’d made in that moment might have been slightly embarrassing. In all their years of partnership, they’d never been able to keep their hands off each other. At first it had been all practical obligation, but then the challenge had become making it still look like it was nothing more. It was the perk and the curse of the job; there was always a legitimate reason to be in contact, between close quarters, undercover work, and combat’s hazards. He felt her hesitate, and then Rachel’s face appeared above him like the sun peeking over the horizon as she leaned over his shoulder with a furrowed brow. She’d removed the brass-blonde wig at some point, but the braids it had been sewn to remained, frizzy individual hairs escaping from their confines all over to create a ruddy halo all around her face. Her makeup was smudged like a mask around her eyes, and thin lines of oil still streaked her chin and cheeks. Aidan smiled wistfully; she was gorgeous.
“Now that is a sight for sore eyes,” he said, slowly rolling over onto his back to drink her in. Under the sudden scrutiny Rachel slid away a little, across the bed, to give him room, before he caught her hand in his own, arresting her retreat. Her answering smile was thin and watery, and she scrubbed at her eyes roughly with the back of her other hand. Though her hands were clean–he could see that they were scrubbed and antiseptic, short nails still perfectly polished a brilliant red–the strong line of her forearm was flaky with blood that was probably at least mostly his.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered miserably, and he could only chuckle, wincing as the stifled laughter shifted extremely unappreciative fractured ribs. This whole ‘feeling unalloyed joy but excruciating bone on bone grinding every time you express it’ thing was deeply unfair, if you asked him.
“Don’t be. I would take this a hundred times over rather than spend another year, hell, another month or, no. No. Not even a single day watching you be somebody else,” he said emphatically. “No contest.”
“That’s some bullshit,” she said, eyes narrowed. “Total B.S.” The ghost of Elly’s indignant cadences was there in her voice again, and his breath caught while she shook her head grimly.
“I shot you, Aidan–”
“You were backed into a corner by then, there was no other way–”
“–and then I beat you to a pulp–”
“–are we calling this beaten to a pulp? I’m not sure about “pulp”, c’mon now–”
“–and if Keira hadn’t been there to stop me you’d be dead!” Rachel finished, crescendoing to a full-throated yell over his mild protests.
“Better my head get crushed for once and all than my heart again, kid,” Aidan replied softly, and Rachel’s face crumpled with a muffled sob. Ah, hell.
“Look, I know, I know , and I’m ready to give you every chance to make it up to me, alright? Can we start with you laying down here, with me? You’re tired. I’m still tired. I think I could sleep for a week at this point.” Rachel fought back tears gamely and shook her head, clearing her throat with a wet, hiccupping sort of cough. She picked up a spool of thick wrap bandage and set her jaw firmly, staring him down.
“The wound needs wrapping. And your ribs,” she said firmly. Aidan groaned softly but dipped his chin in a reluctant nod.
“Have I told you lately how much I love you when you're right?” he wheezed as he levered himself up abruptly off the bed.
“Slowly, slowly!” she warned him. “It's been a little while, actually,” she added with a shaky laugh.
“I love you,” he said emphatically. “Keep these opportunities coming and I'll oblige you as much as you want,” Aidan continued with a valiant attempt at a pointedly lifted eyebrow. He swung his legs off the bed to sit and damn if he didn't nearly follow all the way through and pitch himself face first to the floor.
“Wait, wait, shit,” Rachel hissed as she scrambled across the bed. She ended up standing beside the bed bent in a crouch to brace him, arm wrapped across his shoulders above the mass of padding covering the gunshot wound. She sighed directly into his ear and gently dropped her forehead against the top of his head, immediately followed by a small recoil and a little huff of surprise.
“Ugh, what even is this stuff in your hair? It’s still actually standing straight up– Never mind, I guess. But you were just saying about me being right...”
Aidan simply peered up at her with wide, innocent eyes and slung an arm over her shoulder, pushing himself abruptly to his feet as she hastily straightened with a bitten-off curse to take some of his weight. Without heels or combat boots on her feet he had all of an inch on her, but he found himself shrinking under her exasperated glare. But she bore him up patiently instead of pushing him back down on the bed while he winced and found some semblance of balance.
“Sorry, sorry, but that wasn’t going to happen slow,” he said tightly by way of apology.
“You could sit for this,” Rachel pointed out. “You should probably sit for this,” she added, unspooling the bandage with a grim expression.
“After this we’re gonna sleep for a week, remember? I can stand for five minutes. Besides, I haven’t yet gotten the chance to do this properly,” Aidan complained, cupping her face in both of his hands, and thumbing away a smudge of gunpowder.
“I literally just put those fingers back, be careful,” she grumbled, but there was very little heat in it, and he grinned, leaning in for a kiss, by necessity telegraphing it with agonizing slowness.
She met him halfway, kissing him back with every iota of the same enthusiasm, and it was perfect. Shot, beaten, filthy, and in desperate need of a shower and a solid 48 hours of sleep, just like the old days. The kiss lingered a moment, and then longer, and–
“Fuck! That hurts,” he yelped and broke away from her mouth despairingly with a whine as she tightened a loop of bandage around his chest with a sheepish smile.
“I love you,” she said gently, and started wrapping him up in earnest as he sighed.
“Yeah, I know.”