19. Falcon
Falcon
The first thing that comes back is sound, not my sight, the voices are too fast and too far away, metal is clattering, and someone is counting something out loud in a rhythm that doesn't mean anything to me yet.
Then the pain hits me, it’s low and enormous, it’s too big to actually hurt the way pain is supposed to hurt. Then I hear Knox's voice, it’s closer than the rest, and clipped and steady like he gets when steady is the only thing standing between a man and dying on him.
"Stay with me. You hear me? Eyes on me." Knox is talking to me.
I don't remember answering. I remember the ceiling of the ambulance moving wrong, too bright, too close, and Zip's face somewhere at the edge of it, and then nothing at all for a while, there’s no before or after, just darkness.
When I come back the second time it's quieter, and the light's different, softer, and my body's a long way off from me, like it belongs to somebody I used to know. I can hear the machines. There’s a steady beep that I decide, in whatever's left of my head, is a good sign, since dead men probably don't come with sound effects.
I try to move and every part of me that isn't numb screams loud enough to answer that question. Not dead. Just wishing, for one very long second, that I had a good excuse to be.
Then I hear her.
Not her words at first, just the recognition of her voice, low, and hoarse in a way I've never heard before, not even in the worst of it. It takes effort I don't have to open my eyes, so I don't. I just listen and let her voice pull me the rest of the way up and out of wherever I've been.
"…so if you can hear me, and I think you can, because Knox said you might, I need you to know I'm furious with you.
Absolutely furious. You threw yourself in front of a bullet meant for somebody else, which is exactly the thing I told you, more than once, that I couldn't live with, and you did it anyway, and I've spent the last three hours in a waiting room deciding whether that makes you the bravest man I've ever known or the stupidest, and I still don't have an answer, and I hate that I don't."
Her hand's wrapped around mine. I hadn't noticed until she says my name and it tightens.
"Falcon."
I get my eyes open.
She's right there, close enough that I can see every hour of the last few hours on her face, her eyes are red-rimmed, exhausted, her makeup is long gone, her hair coming loose from wherever she'd pinned it.
She's never looked less put together and I don't think I've ever loved her more than I do in this exact second, which is a stupid thing to think with a hole in my side, but it's the truth and I'm too tired to dress it up as anything else.
"Hey," I manage. It comes out wrecked.
Her breath catches, and for a second I think she's going to be angry, actually angry, the way she has every right to be. Instead, her face just breaks open, and she puts her forehead down against our joined hands and I feel her shoulders shake once, hard, silent.
"You scared me," she says into my knuckles. "You scared me so badly."
"I know, I scared myself."
"Zip called me and said you’d been hit and I dropped a mug on the kitchen floor and I don't even remember doing it.
I just remember the sound, and the whole way here I kept thinking about five years, about how I already know what losing you feels like, I lived it, I know exactly what it feels like, and I thought I was about to feel it again, for real this time, permanently, and I couldn't… "
"Cara."
"I'm not finished." That shuts me up.
"Okay." I'd give her anything right now. I'd give her the moon if Knox would let me sit up long enough to reach for it.
She lifts her head. Her eyes are wet and furious and something else underneath both of those. It’s something that looks like the thing I've been waiting weeks to see and was starting to believe I'd talked myself out of ever getting back.
"I told you I was done," she says. "In that living room, with Emily's blood still on my hands, I told you I couldn't do this, and I meant it, every word of it, I want you to know I meant it."
"I know you did."
"And then tonight I sat in a waiting room and the only thing I could think about, the only thing, was that I never got to tell you I took it back.
Not all of it. Not the boundary, not the thing about needing you to choose the option that doesn't get you killed.
But the done part. I took that back weeks ago and I never said it out loud because I was scared saying it meant I was agreeing to spend the rest of my life doing exactly this, sitting in a chair like this one, waiting to find out if you're going to walk back through a door. "
My throat's doing something complicated. "And now?"
"And now I've done it anyway," she says.
"Tonight. Whether I agreed to it or not.
I sat in that chair and I did the thing I was afraid of, and I'd do it again tomorrow, and the day after that, for as long as you're stupid enough to keep throwing yourself between bullets and women who aren't you, because the alternative is not having you at all, and I tried that for five years, Falcon, and I am not doing it again by choice. "
"Cara."
"I love you," she says, like it's the simplest fact in the world, which maybe it always was and we just made it complicated because we didn't know how to survive anything simple yet.
"I know I said it before, but I love you, and I'm terrified of what that costs, and I'm done pretending the terror is a good enough reason to stand outside it. "
I want to sit up. Every instinct in me wants to close the distance and do this properly, the way it deserves, and my body vetoes that plan hard enough that I actually laugh, which hurts enough to prove I'm alive in a way the beeping machine hasn't quite managed to.
"Don't," she says immediately, hand flat on my chest, gentle but absolute. "Don't you dare move."
"Wasn't going to." I know he’s lying, I saw his body trying to move.
"You were entirely going to."
"A little." I catch her hand before she can pull it back, and thread our fingers together instead. "I love you too. I never stopped, not for one day, and I know that's not new information, but I want it said out loud in a room that isn't full of grief for once."
Something in her face gives way completely. "Say it again."
"I love you."
"Again."
"I love you, Cara. However many times you need it, for as long as you need it, in every room we're ever in, grieving or not."
She laughs, wet and unsteady, and presses her mouth to our joined hands instead of mine, she’s being careful of the lines running into my arm
"You're not allowed to do that again," she says.
"I make a lot of promises I probably can't keep."
"I know. Promise me anyway."
"I'll try not to get shot again," I say, and she huffs something that's half a laugh, half a sob, and I mean it as much as a man can mean anything from a hospital bed with painkillers dragging at the edges of him.
"I can't promise the danger stops. I can promise I'm not choosing it for its own sake anymore. "
"I know you do." Her thumb moves once over my knuckles. "I watched you learn it. That's the only reason I'm still here instead of walking away for good."
Somewhere under the relief and the drugs and the ache radiating out from my side, Carrot's face surfaces, the way it does now during the quietest moments, uninvited. He was nineteen years old; he’s gone because I taught him showing up mattered more than staying alive.
I don't say his name out loud. I don't have to.
Cara sees something shift in my face and doesn't ask, she just tightens her hand around mine, steady, present, and willing to sit in whatever this is without needing me to explain it right now.
"You're allowed to grieve him and still be glad you're alive," she says quietly, like she's been waiting for the moment to say it. "You can have both things at the same time. I promise you it's allowed."
I close my eyes, not because I'm fading again, but because I need a second where nobody, not even her, can see exactly what that does to me.
"Sleep," she says, gentler now. "I'm not going anywhere."
"You should go home. Sleep in an actual bed."
"Falcon." It’s flat, and final, it’s how she talked to be the night she told me to lock the door. "I am not leaving this chair."
I don't have the strength to argue with her, and even if I did, I don't think I'd want to win.
I let my eyes close, her hand still wrapped around mine, and for the first time since the yard since Carrot's bike got wheeled out of sight, since the patch went into Vulture's desk drawer, something in my chest loosens instead of tightening.
I don't know how long I'm out. It’s long enough that when I surface again the light through the blinds has changed, gone soft and gray with early morning instead of the flat hospital white from before.
Cara hasn't moved, or hasn't moved far, her chair is pulled up close enough that her head's resting against the edge of the mattress, still holding my hand even asleep, her knuckles are pale from how long she's been gripping it.
Knox is in the doorway when I look up, his arms crossed, watching both of us with an expression I can't fully read.
"Vitals are good," he says, quiet enough not to wake her. "Bullet missed everything that would've killed you outright. You lost a lot of blood and you're going to hurt like hell for a month, but you're going to be fine."
"How long was I out?"
"On and off, since last night. This is the first stretch you've actually held a conversation instead of just surfacing and going under again." He glances at Cara. "She hasn't left."
"I know."
"I told her three times there's a cot down the hall." He’s shaking his head.
"And?"
"And she told me, and I'm quoting her exactly, that I could put the cot somewhere I wouldn't enjoy very much." Knox's mouth twitches, it’s the closest thing to a smile he's got in him this early. "I like her."
"Yeah." My voice is still rough. "Me too."
He checks the monitor, adjusts something on the line running into my arm, and pauses at the door before he leaves. "Falcon."
"Yeah."
"Carrot's mother's been notified. Vulture went himself last night, while all this was happening.
" He says it plainly, no softening what happened, because Knox has never believed softening helps anybody heal faster.
"I didn't want you hearing it secondhand and thinking nobody handled it while you were down. "
Something in my chest tightens all over again, grief finding its way back in through the gap the relief left open. "How is she?"
"However a mother is, the night she learns that." He doesn't offer more than that, because there isn't more that would be true. "Vulture said tell you he'll bring you when you're strong enough to stand in front of her yourself. Not before."
"Okay."
"Get some more rest." He leaves quietly, pulling the door most of the way shut behind him.
Cara stirs at the sound, blinking up at me with sleep still heavy in her eyes, and for a second, before she's fully awake, before the last several hours catch up with her again, she just looks at me the way she used to look at me a long time ago, uncomplicated, certain, like there was never a version of us that needed five years and a bullet to find its way back to this.
"Hey," she murmurs.
"Hey."
"You're still here." She moves closer to the bed.
"Apparently that's the plan," I say, and she smiles, it’s small and exhausted and entirely real, and then she rests her head back down against the mattress beside our joined hands, close enough that I can feel her breathing even out again within a minute.
I watch the light change through the blinds and let myself believe, for the first time since the yard behind that warehouse, that whatever comes next, the trial, Carrot's mother, the long slow work of earning a patch back one unglamorous day at a time, I'm not going to be doing any of it without her standing somewhere close enough to reach.