35. Naveed #2
Asking her is the hardest single thing my body has done in years.
Standing in strobing red light with a building coming down behind her: for me, control has never once been the opposite of love.
It has been the shape love takes. Every person I have ever loved, I loved by deciding for them, by covering them, by ruling on what they were allowed to survive — and here, on wet asphalt, I am about to hand the decision to the one I love more than all of them.
In the middle of a live fire, every cell I own insists it’s the precise moment a man takes control.
To ask her what she needs is admitting that my grammar of love is a fortress I built and mistook for a shelter.
It is a kind of death of the only self I have ever fully trusted.
I open my mouth, but the words stay trapped behind my teeth.
My face hardens around the shape of the next order I don't say. My hands remain at my sides instead of reaching for her elbow. The part of me built for extraction routes and threat radii goes quiet, waiting, she reads what the line actually says.
She doesn't flinch at the question, there's no look of surprise, not really, just a flicker, quick and gone, like she catalogued the shift in me, filing it somewhere she'll pull out later.
Smoke rolls thick behind her, backlighting her hair orange at the edges, and for one unbearable second she looks like something already lost to me, already a photograph I'll carry face-down in a drawer.
Then her chin lifts.
"No, the Fire Department cleared the building. Everyone is accounted for."
Just information, given straight.
I nod once and the organ in my chest that has been clenched since the moment I saw the flames finally starts to loosen.
Then her hand fists in my jacket.
"The drive." Her voice is a wreck, all smoke and grit. "From Amir, I had it in my jacket pocket, I had it over my face to help with the smoke inhalation. No, I can't lose it." She turns to me with plea in her eyes.
"Do you remember the last place you had it?"
"I had just gone past the evidence room, when the firefighter carried me out, now it's gone, it fell between the archive room and the stairwell. It's the only copy left and it's still in there."
The old man in me wants to say no. Wants to tell her any chance of saving it now is gone, the place is soaked with water. Wants to tell her the building has eight minutes and no piece of evidence is worth her lungs.
The new one asks, "Which stairwell."
Her eyes fly to mine, and I watch her absorb my answer, the fact that I asked instead of refused, and then she's already moving.
"North wall. Secure with a fire door."
"Naveed." Nathan, in my ear, flat. "The east stairwell's still holding. Ninety seconds of holding, maybe."
"Copy." I catch Kat's wrist to guide her through the chaos, she lets me set the pace, I let her set the direction. Two skills braided into one motion, her knowledge and my body, and we go in together through a door I'd have carried her out of a month ago.
On the way past the trucks I grab two towels from a paramedic's kit, soak them, and hand her one. We press them over our mouths and step inside.
The heat hits like a wall. Black rolling across the ceiling, dropping lower with every step.
I pull her down with me, putting myself between her and the worst of it before my mind catches up. Her hand stays fisted in my jacket. I feel every tug of it against my back like a heartbeat.
"Low," I tell her, and she's already dropping, already moving under the smoke the way I taught her without actually teaching her, watching me and matching me.
The stairwell winds up to the next floor. We step out to see the bullpen glowing orange at the far end. North wall. She points, coughing so hard her whole body folds.
"The firefighter grabbed me right about here. I dropped the jacket when he lifted me."
I follow. She moves back along the wall where she was carried out, and there, covered in dust and grime, is her jacket.
She picks it up and immediately unzips a secret compartment and there it is, still sitting in its cradle where the leak never found it.
She grabs it up in her fist before I finish reaching, places it against her chest, both arms wrapped around it like a pulse she won't let stop.
Then the ceiling gives.
I hear it before I see it, that specific crack, and I turn us, put my back to it, take her down under me as a section of drop-tile comes apart in a rain of fire and hot metal.
Something bites into my shoulder. I don't stop.
I get us up and move, and when the floor tilts near the stairwell door I take the fall, drop through the last three steps with her weight against my chest and the drive crushed between us, my shoulder eating the concrete so hers doesn't.
We come out into wet air and red light and hands reaching for both of us at once.
She's alive. Coughing, filthy, furious, alive. The drive still against her chest.
We did that. Not me. We.
I take it from her and slip it into my pocket.
"For safekeeping," I whisper into her hair.
My hands learned to hold on to what matters in the worst place there was. They have not forgotten.
The paramedics place an oxygen mask over her face and she accepts without argument. She sits on the back bumper of the ambulance and her whole body starts to shake.
She pulls the mask down.
"You asked." Her voice is wrecked, barely there. Tears cut clean tracks through the soot on her face. "You didn't grab me. You didn't tell me to run. You asked which stairwell."
Something in me caves at the sight of her breaking apart, because she is not crying about the fire. She is crying because for the first time in her life someone in a position to override her chose not to. Because I handed her the wheel when every instinct I own was howling to take it.
Her tears open something in me that the flames could not. A hairline fracture that penetrates the place I keep locked behind discipline, the doors I have kept tightly sealed my whole adult life, and they crack it open the rest of the way.
I crouch in front of her so we're level. My shoulder screams where the metal bit through, blood tacky under my jacket, but I don't care. I've never cared less about my own body in my life.
"Katarina."
Her eyes lift to mine. Red-rimmed. Furious. Alive.
"I spent sixteen years believing the only way to keep someone breathing was to stand in front of them." My voice rough, half smoke, half everything I have never once said out loud. "I put my body between people and the world and called it love. It wasn't. It was duty wearing a uniform."
She stops moving, locks her eyes on mine, oxygen hissing forgotten in her lap.
"I am done standing in front of you." Each word is a price I pay willingly for the first time in my life. "If you still want me, I'll stand beside you."
“I love you.” I have never said those words to another living person, and they pour out of me smoke-torn, in a voice I don’t recognize as mine.
“I’ve kept it locked behind this organ in my chest for so long with all the rest of it.
I have loved you since a database put your uncle’s name in front of me.
I drove to your door to pay a debt and found the one thing I was never going to be able to set back down.
I ‘m done pretending you don’t matter Katarina.
You’re mine and I’m not letting you walk away without knowing it. ”
The relief and the terror hit at the same moment, and for one breath I don't know which one will take me apart first.
Kat's hand finds my jacket again.
"I want you," she says. "You idiot. I've wanted you since you fell asleep against my door."
I press my forehead to hers, both of us filthy, bleeding and breathing borrowed air, I allow myself to feel all of it.
She is not standing in my shadow.
She never was.
And I am not standing in front of her anymore.
I am standing beside her.