Chapter Text
In the heartbeat of private Stan and Patricia had, she cleaned his stitches and they talked. It was something they did well most of the time, though the situation found them dancing around topics that would eventually need examination. For the time, she just wanted to bask in the fact he was there and whole and that neither of them had died - she tried not to think of the word "yet" - from this whole ordeal.
"Your friends are happy to see you," she said.
"You didn't tell them I was coming." It wasn't an accusatory statement, she knew he wouldn't frame it that way if there had been a problem. Just a statement of an observation.
Careful not to disrupt her work, Patricia shrugged. "I thought that with everything going on," she said, "a nice surprise would be good for morale." A pause, a soft laugh. "I'm not exactly sure morale is the right word."
"It's good enough for the circumstances," he said, and that was that. No comment on how it had been the last time, no opening to a path that was better left unexplored for the time being.
She almost huffed and reached out to pull on that thread, to ask for things that still felt so out of her reach. But she bit the questions down and let herself revel in the quiet of the evening that had been, at least by the standards set by the last few days, relatively uneventful. She couldn't pretend that things were as they were before, not when evidence to the contrary was staring her in the face, but she would take what she could. So instead she grinned and continued on, carefully dabbing at fresh stitch work while he watched her.
A comfortable, familiar silence had fallen over them for a few precious seconds. It was only broken when his hand shifted to brush over hers, fingers alighting against her wrist and making her pause. Her teeth dug into her lip and she looked up to see him staring intently at her. Studying her.
"Are you sure you want to do this?" he asked, and it wasn't hard for her to figure out why.
Patricia took a deep breath, forcing herself to relax and smile, something that was only half forced. "It's fine," she said. "It's not like..." she trailed off, leaving the obvious unsaid. If they had more time alone, they would talk about what had happened. But as it was, they had no idea when the others would show up. She cleared her throat, the smile turning a little more genuine, and she added, "I'm really just glad you're here. Part of me thought you were going to change your mind."
"I almost did," he admitted with a hollow laugh. "I had to switch trains in New York and there was a moment where I thought that I could just go home and not deal with this." He sighed, the kind that shook through a whole body, and she frowned. Then his lips quirked upwards, and he continued. "But I couldn't leave you here, alone. With them ."
She knew that the deflecting to tease his friends was to avoid lingering on heavier topics, the real reason he didn't want to leave her alone. But she didn't comment on it. Instead she started to clean the stitches again, allowing herself a grin and said, "I'm happy you didnt." She hadn't really considered how wrong and alien it was in the most bone deep way possible for him to be away from her, even if she had been aware of it on some level the whole time. But the gap was mended and they were side by side again, the way it was meant to be.
She lifted his wrist to her lips, pressing a kiss to the stitches she had just finished cleaning. The sharp smell of disinfectant that only just hid the smell of Hospital hit her before the taste did, enough to be known even with the slightest bit of contact. She recoiled, pressing the back of her free hand to her mouth.
"Why did I do that?" she said, a little distraught and a lot cursing herself for doing something so stupid in the immediate aftermath. Her eyes went puppy dog wide in a theatrical plea for sympathy.
And Stan, for his part, laughed. Not maliciously, but a familiar tease that bubbled in his chest and never failed to draw a smile from her. He leaned forward, pressing a quick kiss to her nose and lightly bumping his forehead to hers.
"I missed you so much," he said, mouth curling into a teasing smirk that she knew all too well.
Grasping the wonderful sense of familiar and normal with both hands, Patricia let go of his wrist to push him away, still wiping at her mouth. He laughed louder and the whole situation, the whole week they'd had, felt so much less dire. Things would come crashing back down around them sooner rather than later, she knew, but she'd take this moment.
"Stop," she said, voice an overdramatic whine. "I need to go rinse out my mouth."