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He told her "You belong in Sleepy Hollow." not 24 hours after they first met and even then, with the desperation in his eyes refracting back onto the insatiable curiosity in hers, the "You belong in Sleepy Hollow, with me." was quite clearly implied.
He asks her about things like her childhood and who invented Redbull and why she'll hum along to top 50's radio stations in the morning but won't be caught dead listening to them in the afternoon. She asks him about things like whether or not he was ever forced to attend a ball during his "regal childhood", just how many caramel frappuccinos he's had today and what was it like on late nights during the war, where soldiers would look at up the stars, unknowing of whether they'd live long enough to see them the next night.
Neither of them mention Jenny, once she goes back to the hospital.
Neither of them mention how illogically interested they are in one another's partners- the wives trapped in purgatories and the ex's who keep giving them long looks when they're together.
Sometimes she still battles with the doubt that maybe he's insane, maybe the whole damn town is insane, maybe there's something in the water because last week she met an entire settlement of ghosts and just before that she saw what looked like albino bats trapped in fiery saran wrap and seriously. Witnesses? The apocalypse?
Some nights all she can do is pour a finger of whiskey and fall into the worn wooden chairs of the cabin's table, strewn about with case files and Starbuck's receipts and leather-bound books. She leans her elbow into the table top, one hand splayed across the ever-aching warmth of her forehead and the other tracing the smooth edge of the glass, eyes half-focused and her spine arched forward, arched inward, yearning for somewhere to hide but never really knowing where to go.
She drinks her whiskey, kicking back the fiery amber with a raspy gasp, and she looks over some files as her eyes unfocus and her head grows warmer, pulse beats harder against the confines of her skull, and she wonders how all of this was so easily orchestrated without her ever having known. She thinks about her da- about the sheriff. And about her sister. And sometimes, if she's had enough whiskey- her parents. Those nights she always ends up staring at the Bible, the copy he'd come clutching, and she stares at the ancient illustrations and downright glares at the word "witness" until it morphs into nothing so much as a blurred black line.
She hates that word.
She hates all the death that word has so casually caused and the men whose lives have been so easily ruined. She stays late into the night, lips curling at the thought of what's coming, of what's already here, of just how much has been hiding under her nose for a long, long time without her ever having been the wiser. Sometimes, once she's damned everything she can think of to hell and back, little words like "accent" and "eidetic" and "that coat" slip out as well, and she kind of hates them too.
He once told her that she had saved the town through her Faith and she'd blinked once, twice, and smiled slowly, in seeming acquiescence. Because he may know everything but he still doesn't know the truth: she has no Faith. Not in the divine plan, nor the demons or spirits or ghosts or horsemen. She sees nothing but the same monsters that she's spent years chasing down with her badge and her gun- only now they've grown that much more varied in their appearance.
Her only faith is in him, in the angle of his jaw and the tilt of his head and the wide, enthralling glance of his eyes when he's emphasizing a point and does not turn from her, cannot turn from her. Her faith lies in the way that he leans ever-so-slightly against her when they walk side by side, in the way he laughs, breathless and unrefined, when they're exhausted and half-dead and have just prevented the apocalypse, again. He is her faith, and maybe he knows after all, because when she told him "You belong here, in Sleepy Hollow." his eyes grew lunar-wide and he swallowed ever-so-slightly. Because the promise in her eyes is shining back into the astonishment within his and the "You belong here, in Sleepy Hollow, with me." is so clearly implied she feels as though she may as well have shouted it from the roof tops.
But it's okay, really. Because they both understand one another. And when they lock their eyes and quirk their lips, it feels less like a statement and more like a promise when they echo each other and say
"We've got work to do."
