Chapter Text
Leeroy came back from the kitchen with his own plate, unceremoniously less careful with the presentation of it than hers had been — a plainer omelet, toast without the avocado ceremony, because there'd only been so much good avocado in the house and she'd needed it more than he had. He pulled the chair a few inches closer to the bed and sat, balancing the plate on his knee, and started eating across from her like it was the most natural thing in the world, like he hadn't spent half the night carrying her up three flights of stairs and the other half not sleeping at all.
He noticed it almost immediately. Not because he was looking for it — he wasn't, not consciously, he was mostly just glad to be sitting somewhere that wasn't a hospital waiting room he'd never actually gotten to talk her into — but because it was the kind of thing that snagged your attention whether you meant it to or not. She wasn't eating. Not really. She was doing something that resembled eating — fork moving, food occasionally making the trip from plate to mouth — but she was picking. Turning a piece of cucumber over like it owed her an explanation. Cutting the omelet into smaller and smaller pieces without actually finishing any of them. Slow, careful, deliberate, the specific, performed slowness of somebody working hard to look like she was doing more of something than she actually was.
His brows pulled together before he'd decided to let them.
He didn't say anything about it at first. He finished his own plate — quickly, the way he did most things, without much ceremony — and set it on the side table, and then just sat there a minute, watching her work through maybe a third of what he'd put in front of her, the omelet going cold and faintly gray at the edges the way good eggs did when nobody actually got to them in time.
"Why are you watching me?"
She didn't look up when she said it. He shrugged, even though she couldn't see the shrug, some old habit of performing body language for an audience that wasn't looking.
"First, i have nothing to do. Second, you should eat more." He said it before he'd fully thought through how it was going to land, which was, he'd be the first to admit, more or less how he said everything. "What the fuck, you didn't even eat half of that and you're just picking at it."
Her eyes came up fast — wide, something flickering through them too quick for him to name before it was already gone — and then just as fast, she looked away. Back down at the plate. She picked her fork back up and kept eating, faster now, more mechanical, like she was trying to prove something to an invisible panel of judges rather than actually taste any of it.
He heard himself a half second too late, the way he always did, the words already out and already sounding worse in the replay than they had going out.
"Wait — no, wait." He put his hands up, though she still wasn't looking at him to see it. "I didn't mean to sound so bossy, Abby. If you're full, you're a grown woman, you can just say so. I just mean — for your health, you know. That's all I meant by it."
She didn't say anything. She kept eating, or kept doing the thing that looked enough like eating to pass, working down bite after bite of food that had clearly stopped being about hunger several bites ago and started being about making him stop looking at her like that — like he was cataloguing something, like there was one more thing wrong with her that he'd just found and hadn't decided yet what to do with. He didn't know that particular look was one she'd spent years learning to hate on other faces, long before last night gave anyone a fresh reason to wear it around her. He just knew, watching her force it down, that he'd said the true thing badly, the way he usually did, and that saying it again right now wouldn't fix the badly part.
He let it go. He'd learned that much, at least, in the last twelve hours — that not every silence needed filling, that sometimes the kindest thing he could do with his own worry was carry it quietly instead of handing it to her to carry too, on top of everything else she was already carrying.
He picked his phone up instead, mostly to give his hands something to do that wasn't reaching for hers.
eerqateol: rise and shine, its morning
He set the phone face-up on the nightstand beside the chair and waited, half-watching the screen out of habit. Usually by now — usually within a minute, sometimes faster than that, like she'd been sitting there with the app already open, waiting on him the same way he waited on her — abviant would have fired something back. A joke. A complaint about the hour. Something. He watched the screen stay dark a beat longer than felt normal and told himself, firmly, that she was probably just still asleep. People slept in. It wasn't a crime. It didn't have to mean anything.
He looked back at Abigail instead, because worrying about one woman not answering him fast enough felt, at the moment, like a considerably easier problem to sit with than the one currently pushing cold eggs around a plate six feet away.
"You sure you don't want to go to a doctor?" he tried again, careful, testing the ground before he put his full weight on it. "If it's about money, you know I'm not broke. I can pay."
"Lee, drop it. I'm not going to a doctor."
"What if the doctor comes to you?"
"Shut up." But there wasn't much heat in it, just tired. "Zoey used to study medicine. She usually helps me with this kind of stuff."
That landed somewhere he hadn't expected it to. Zoey. 4B. The friend who'd stood in a stairwell a week ago choosing her words off a very short list — she's dealing with some stuff — and he understood now, with a small, uncomfortable lurch, that Zoey had probably known more than she'd let on that day. Not gossip-known. Not rumor-known. Actually known, the way you know something because you've been the one holding gauze to it before.
"Want me to call her, or something?"
"Leeroy. Not now."
"Okay." He held both hands up again, this time somewhere she could actually see. "Okay. Not pushing."
He gathered her plate along with his own — she'd stopped eating somewhere in the last exchange, fork resting against the rim, more than half the food still there going cold — and stood, careful with his knees not to jostle the mattress, and carried both plates toward the kitchen. He left his phone behind on the nightstand without thinking about it, the way you leave behind anything you've stopped consciously tracking, already three-quarters focused on hot water and dish soap and the small, manageable satisfaction of a clean plate at the end of a morning that hadn't offered him many other things he could actually finish.
⸻
Abigail waited until she heard the tap running before she reached for her own phone where it sat charging on the side table — the one small, private motion she'd been rationing since she woke up, the one part of the morning that was still, technically, hers alone.
eerqateol: rise and shine, its morning
She smiled before she could stop herself. Small. Involuntary. The specific muscle memory of a smile that had nothing to do with how her ribs felt, or how long it had taken her to walk from the bed to the kitchen doorway and back, or any of the rest of it. Whatever else last night had taken from her, apparently, it hadn't taken this. She typed back, thumb slower than usual, everything about her slower than usual this morning, one word.
abviant: morning
She hit send.
And in the same half second — the exact same half second, no delay she could later talk herself into believing she'd imagined — a small, bright buzz sounded from the nightstand across the room, and the screen of the phone lying face-up on it lit white against the morning light.
Leeroy's phone.
Abigail went very still.
It wasn't proof of anything. She told herself that immediately, automatically, the way you talk yourself down off any ledge your own brain has just handed you before you've had a chance to check whether it was a real one. Phones buzzed constantly. People got notifications all day, every day, for a hundred reasons that had nothing to do with anything — a game, an app, spam, some group chat asking again about a missing cat. It didn't have to mean what the sudden, cold drop in her stomach was already insisting it meant.
But she was still looking at it. She hadn't looked away yet, and some old, careful, hyper-vigilant part of her — the part that noticed things, that had spent a lifetime clocking exits and reading rooms and cataloguing small inconsistencies before they had the chance to become large ones — was already doing the math anyway, whether she gave it permission to or not. The timing. The exact, unbearable precision of the timing. Not a few seconds later. Not close enough to explain away as coincidence stretched generously thin. Exactly, precisely, the same half second she'd hit send.
She looked down at her own screen. abviant: morning. Sent. Delivered. No read receipt yet.
She looked back at his phone. The screen was already dimming, whatever notification it had carried already swallowed back into darkness, utterly unremarkable to anyone who hadn't been watching it happen in real time, six feet away, with her whole body gone rigid around the watching.
Coincidence, she told herself. Right?
She sat there a long moment, her own phone still warm in her hand, listening to the water running in the kitchen, to Leeroy humming something tuneless and cheerful under his breath like the whole world hadn't just, possibly, quietly rearranged itself while his back was turned. She ran through every alternative she could think of, fast, methodical, the same way she'd once catalogued a stranger's username for clues — a shared group chat notification, some building-wide alert, a delayed message from an unrelated thread finally coming through. None of it held. None of it explained the exact half second, the precision of it, the fact that of every possible instant in a twenty-four-hour day, his phone had chosen that one.
The water shut off in the kitchen. She heard him set something down — a plate, a rag — and start toward the hallway, still humming, entirely unaware that anything about the last ninety seconds had been remarkable at all.
She put her own phone face-down on the blanket a half second before he came back through the doorway, and arranged her face into something that looked, she hoped, like a woman thinking about nothing more complicated than breakfast.
"You good?" he asked, dropping back into the chair like nothing in the room had changed.
"Yeah," she said. Her voice came out almost steady. Almost. "Fine."
She wasn't sure, watching him settle back in without a single trace of suspicion on his face, whether that was the most comforting thing she'd learned all morning, or the most frightening.