Chapter Text
The days after the match were good.
You'd settled into a rhythm that felt almost normal. You woke before Kaiser most mornings, made coffee while the apartment was still quiet, tidied while he was at training. Some days you took the bus to the library and spent hours with German textbooks, filling notebook pages with conjugations and vocabulary until your hand cramped. Other days you stayed home and read on the couch, the apartment warm and peaceful around you.
Ness called sometimes and you'd talk about nothing important, just easy conversation that made you feel like you had a friend. He told you about practice, about Kaiser being grumpy at the team, about matches coming up. You told him about the German phrases you were learning, about books you were reading. It was nice having someone to talk to besides Kaiser.
Kaiser came home late most nights and you'd eat together, or you'd have food waiting if you'd already eaten. You talked about surface things because neither of you knew how to go deeper yet. How training went, what you'd studied that day, small observations that filled the comfortable space between you. You slept in his bed most nights, sometimes on the couch when you fell asleep reading. He never commented on it either way.
It was peaceful in a way you'd never experienced before. Stable. Safe. The kind of life you'd imagined other people lived but never thought you'd have yourself.
And then one morning, you couldn't get out of bed.
It wasn't a decision or a choice. You woke at your usual time with your eyes opening to pale morning light filtering through the curtains, but your body felt impossibly heavy. Not tired exactly, just weighed down by something you couldn't name. Like something was pressing you into the mattress, holding you there.
You told yourself to get up and start the day because Kaiser would be awake soon and you should make coffee like you always did. Your body didn't respond to the command. You lay there staring at the ceiling, trying to will yourself to sit up and swing your legs over the side of the bed and stand, but nothing happened.
The heaviness wasn't physical in nature. It lived deeper than that, settled in your chest and bones and the space behind your eyes. It felt like drowning without water, like being buried without dirt. You heard Kaiser moving around the apartment, heard the coffee maker start and the bathroom door close. You should get up and say good morning and act like a person instead of lying here like a corpse, but you couldn't make yourself move.
Kaiser knocked on the bedroom door and asked if you were awake. Your throat closed up and you couldn't answer right away. The door opened and Kaiser stood there already dressed for training with his hair pulled back, looking at you for a long moment that made you want to disappear.
"You okay?" he asked.
You wanted to say yes, wanted to smile and sit up and pretend everything was fine the way you'd learned to do your whole life. "I'm just tired," you managed instead, and your voice sounded wrong even to your own ears. Flat and lifeless.
Kaiser studied your face and something shifted in his expression, but he didn't push or demand explanations. "Alright. Get some rest."
He left and you heard him grab his bag and the front door open and close. The apartment fell silent around you and you closed your eyes, trying to sleep. Sleep didn't come though. You just lay there awake but unable to move, staring at nothing while time passed in a blur.
The first day became two, then three, then more. You moved only when your body forced you to, stumbling to the bathroom when you couldn't hold it anymore, drinking water straight from the tap because getting a glass from the cabinet felt insurmountable. You couldn't remember when you'd last eaten something.
Kaiser came home every evening and opened the bedroom door to look at you, saying things you barely registered through the fog in your head. He left food on the nightstand sometimes and you'd eat it later in the dark, forcing yourself because your stomach hurt from emptiness. He didn't yell at you or demand explanations or tell you to get up and stop being lazy and pull yourself together the way other people would have. He just left you alone.
The guilt was worse than the heaviness pressing you down. You were useless now, taking up space in his bed and his home while giving nothing back. He'd brought you here and helped you escape your old life, and this was how you repaid him by rotting in his room like some pathetic broken thing that couldn't even function.
This had happened before with your mother and your husband, those terrible stretches of time where your body shut down completely and you couldn't do anything except lie there and hate yourself for existing. Your mother had screamed at you during those times, calling you lazy and worthless and a burden, throwing things at the wall near your head until eventually she stopped caring whether you ate or bathed or lived. Your husband had been worse because he'd drag you out of bed and force you to stand and move and function, and when you couldn't make your body cooperate he'd make sure you felt it. Pain at least made you move and proved you were still alive.
But now there was no pain and no yelling, just Kaiser's quiet presence and the suffocating weight of your own uselessness. You'd escaped from your old life and reached safety, so why was this happening now when you should be getting better instead of worse?
Maybe you were the problem after all. Maybe it had always been you carrying this brokenness wherever you went, infecting everything you touched. Kaiser deserved better than this, better than having your dead weight in his home.
By the fifth day you forced yourself up around three in the afternoon because the guilt was eating you alive. Your body felt disconnected from your brain as you stumbled to the bathroom and splashed water on your face, brushed your teeth while avoiding your reflection. When you finally looked in the mirror, the woman staring back looked hollow with dark circles under her eyes and ghastly skin and tangled hair.
You made it to the living room and collapsed on the couch, staring at your phone screen. Seventeen messages from Ness sat there unopened because you couldn't bring yourself to read them. The apartment was clean and organized, which meant Kaiser must have tidied it himself. The thought made your stomach twist with fresh shame.
You ordered food online because Kaiser had told you to do that when you needed it, forced yourself to eat when it arrived even though everything tasted like nothing. You forced yourself to shower and wash your hair and look like a person again instead of something half-dead. By the time Kaiser came home late that evening, you were back in bed where you belonged.
On the seventh day, something inside you finally broke open.
You'd been lying there all day the same as every day, drowning in your own thoughts while the guilt turned to anger. Anger at yourself and your body for failing you and your brain for making you like this when you should be normal by now. You heard Kaiser come home and move through the apartment, heard his footsteps coming toward the bedroom.
The door opened and Kaiser stepped inside still wearing his training clothes with his bag slung over his shoulder. He was heading for his dresser to get clean clothes and he looked at you with that neutral, calm expression. Not angry.
He wasn't angry at you and that was the entire problem.
"Why aren't you mad at me?" The words ripped out of you before you could stop them, loud and sharp with your voice cracking on the last word.
Kaiser stopped moving and turned to face you fully.
You sat up in bed with your hands clenched in the sheets so tight your knuckles went white. "Why aren't you angry? I've been lying here for a week doing absolutely nothing. I'm completely useless. I can't even get out of bed. I can't repay you for anything you've done for me and you just stand there looking at me like it doesn't matter at all."
Your voice was rising and getting louder and you couldn't stop the words from pouring out. "Why are you nice to me? Why did you bring me here in the first place? Why did you do all of this?" Your hands were shaking badly now. "You took me here because I was useful, right? Because I could help around the house and cook and be helpful. But I'm not useful anymore and you're just letting me rot in your bed and you don't even care. What's wrong with you?"
Kaiser stood there in silence, watching you with those blue eyes that gave nothing away.
"Why are you so nice to someone like me?" Your voice broke completely. "Everyone else gets angry when I'm like this. Everyone else punishes me. My mother screamed at me and threw things. My husband dragged me out of bed and hurt me until I moved. But you just leave me alone like it's fine, like I'm not wasting your space and your time and your kindness on someone who doesn't deserve any of it."
You were breathing too fast and your chest felt too tight. "Say something! Get angry at me! Tell me I'm useless! Tell me to get up! Tell me I'm a burden! Just stop being so patient with me!"
The silence after your outburst felt like it was crushing you. Kaiser's expression hadn't changed at all and he hadn't flinched or reacted to your yelling. He set his bag down slowly and crossed his arms, looking at you like he was deciding what to say.
"You think I kept you here because you're useful?" His voice came out flat and unimpressed. "That's stupid."
You stared at him while your heart pounded.
"I'm not nice," Kaiser continued in that same tone. "Don't mistake not being an asshole for kindness."
"Then why?" Your voice came out smaller now, desperate and confused. "Why do you let me stay when I can't even function like a normal person?"
Kaiser's jaw tightened and his hands flexed at his sides. For a moment he looked like he might leave the room and refuse to answer. "You were there," he said finally. "In the snow. When no one else was. That's why."
Your breath caught in your throat.
"And I do what I want," Kaiser added with his voice harder now. "If I wanted you gone, you'd be gone already. You're here because I'm letting you stay. That's all there is to it."
"But I'm not doing anything," you whispered. "I'm just taking up space and using your things and giving you nothing back in return."
"You think I care about that?"
"You should care."
"Well, I don't." Kaiser's voice was sharp and final. "You want me to hurt you because that's what you're used to? Too bad. I'm not your husband and I'm not your mother."
The words hit you like a physical blow that knocked the air from your lungs. Your hands went to your face because you couldn't look at him anymore, couldn't stand the way he was looking at you with patience when you deserved anger and punishment.
"Your body's catching up," Kaiser said more quietly now. "You were surviving for years. Now you're not. It fucks with your head."
Your shoulders started shaking.
"It gets better," he added. "Slowly. But it does."
That was the thing that broke you completely. You sobbed with loud, ugly, desperate sounds tearing from your throat. All the anger collapsed into grief and shame and overwhelming confusion and pain. You couldn't breathe through it or think through it.
Before you realized what you were doing, you reached for him. Your hands found his shirt and you pulled yourself up, pulled yourself toward him, buried your face in his chest. You couldn't let him see your face or how broken you were, but he was warm and solid and clean and here, and you needed something to hold onto before you drowned completely.
Kaiser went rigid with his arms hanging at his sides and his hands hovering uncertainly in the air. You held him tighter and sobbed into his chest, your fingers twisting in his shirt because you didn't know what else to do or how to make this stop.
Slowly and carefully, Kaiser's arm came up and wrapped around you. Not tight, just there. Just holding you in place.
His heart was racing against your cheek, rapid and unsteady despite his composed face. He wasn't as calm as he looked. Inside he was barely holding together, but he was standing upright and not pulling away and not buckling under the weight of your breakdown. That was enough. It had to be enough.
The room fell silent except for your sobs. Kaiser didn't say anything or try to comfort you with words. He just stood there and let you hold him with one arm around your shoulders, keeping you upright when you couldn't do it yourself.
You felt shame burning through your entire body. Shame for your trauma and your weakness and for being the kind of woman no one wanted. A traumatized woman was worthless and everyone knew that. No man wanted someone this broken and damaged and troubled.
But Kaiser didn't move away or push you off or tell you that you were too much to handle. Everyone else lived in a world separate from yours, a world where people were whole and functional and normal. A world where trauma was fiction.
Everyone except Kaiser. He'd always been here in the cold and the darkness, in the places where no one else looked.
And somehow, impossibly, he still was.
Your sobs gradually quieted and your breathing evened out. You didn't let go, just pressed your face against his chest and tried to remember how to exist. Kaiser's hand moved slightly, adjusting his grip on your shoulder. His heartbeat was still fast beneath your ear.
You stood there in the dim bedroom, holding each other in the growing darkness.
Somehow you ended up on the bed.
Your legs were tangled with his, bodies close together in the dim light. Your head rested on his outstretched arm, face still pressed against his chest because you couldn't look at him yet. He was warm and solid against you, his body much larger than yours. Tall and muscular in a way that made you feel small but not threatened, not scared. His blonde hair had come loose from whatever he'd had it tied back in earlier, the strands falling across his face and down his back. The tips were still dyed that familiar blue, catching what little light filtered through the window.
His other hand played with your hair, fingers threading through the strands gently, absently. The hand belonged to his left arm, the one with the blue rose tattooed from shoulder down to his hand.
You were quiet now, just laying there exhausted and wanting to sleep. One of your hands toyed with the drawstrings of his pants, fingers pulling at them without purpose. The other lay between you on the bed, fingertips touching his chest but not moving. You could feel his heartbeat under your palm, still faster than normal.
You felt wrung out and hollow, too tired to think or speak or do anything but exist in this moment. But his presence was grounding in a way nothing else had been all week. The weight of him next to you, the warmth radiating from his body, the steady rhythm of his breathing.
Kaiser stared at you.
He felt emotionally exhausted in a way he hadn't in years. The kind of exhaustion that came from holding himself together when everything inside screamed to break. Before you, he would've exploded. Would've left the apartment or found somewhere private to choke himself until his vision blurred and the rage finally settled. Would've let the violence turn inward the way it always did when he was triggered like this.
But he'd taught himself not to. Because of you. Because exploding meant leaving you alone or scaring you and he couldn't do that anymore.
Now he was dealing with the aftermath of that control, the exhaustion of keeping everything locked down when his body wanted to destroy something. His fingers moved through your hair because it gave him something to focus on that wasn't the tightness in his throat or the urge to wrap his hands around his own neck.
You were smaller than him, small enough that your head fit perfectly on his bicep and you could avoid looking at him even while this close. It should have bothered him but it didn't. It felt comforting somehow, having you here like this. Warm and solid and real against him.
He'd told himself for weeks now that he helped you because of the past. Because you'd been there in the snow when no one else was, when he was cold and bleeding and alone. Because you'd given him warmth when he didn't know what warmth felt like. Because he owed you for that kindness even if you didn't remember it the same way he did.
But that was a lie.
Kaiser knew it was a lie even as he kept telling himself that story. The truth was simpler and more complicated all at once. He liked you. Not in the casual way he liked Ness or tolerated his teammates. Not in the superficial way he'd liked the girls he'd dated before, the ones who were attracted to his status and his face and never saw past the surface.
He was attached to you in a way that made his chest feel too tight and his heart beat too fast. You made him feel warmth that had nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with the way you existed in his space. The way you smiled at him when he came home. The way you said his name. The way you made food and brought it to him like it mattered that he ate. The way you'd broken down in front of him and still reached for him instead of pushing him away.
You made his trauma feel less heavy somehow. Like the weight he'd been carrying alone for years was lighter when you were nearby. Like he didn't have to be the Emperor every second of every day. Like he could just be Michael and that was enough.
He liked you.
The realization should have scared him more than it did.
Kaiser's fingers paused in your hair. His thumb traced the shell of your ear, then down to your jaw. You still weren't looking at him, face pressed against his chest, breathing finally even and slow.
His heart was beating too fast again but for different reasons now.
The hand that had been playing with your hair moved to the back of your head, fingers tangling in the strands there. He held you gently but firmly, tilting your head up so you had to look at him.
Your eyes met his and something in his chest cracked wide open.
Kaiser closed the gap between you. His arm pulled you flush against him, eliminating any space that remained between your bodies. His lips pressed against yours, firm and certain and claiming.
You made a small sound against his mouth but you didn't pull away. Your hand that had been toying with his drawstrings curled into his shirt instead, holding on.
Kaiser kissed you like he was drowning and you were air. Like he'd been wanting to do this for longer than he wanted to admit. Like you were the only thing that mattered in the entire world.
And maybe, in this moment, you were.