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Robin’s hands shake as she rips Strike`s shirt open. The wound in his chest is deep and making slurping noises with each inhale and exhale. It almost makes Robin’s stomach turn, but she swallows the bile and her fear and uses her bare hands to cover and seal the wound.
“Bloody f-... that hurts,” Strike gasps, his voice a stuttering wheeze now.
“I’m sorry,” she tells him, grimacing at his pain.
Where is the bloody ambulance?!
She can tell that his lung’s been punctured. After all, this isn’t the first time they’ve ended up like this - Strike in a blood-soaked shirt, struggling for air, and Robin trying to keep him from suffocating. They really should stop ending up like this: one of these days they will run out of luck and Strike truly out of breath, or Robin won’t be there to shout at him to “stay awake, they’re almost here!”
But they seem to have a knack for this: after a plethora of boring surveillance cases, of footwork and endless interviews, whenever detective work seems to grind towards a standstill or at least a never-ending groundhog day routine, drama has a way of rattling them loose - with a life-threatening grin on its face.
It’s frightening. It’s thrilling. Today, it is more than she signed up for, and a fresh adrenaline rush is flooding her, making her hands tremble as she keeps pressure on Cormoran’s wound.
He groans wretchedly.
“I’m so sorry,” she repeats, her eyes still dry, although she knows the tears will come, later, when Strike is safe and recovering in a hospital bed, when the adrenaline has ebbed and left her with a bottom-deep let-down.
Is it worth it?
Robin looks at her partner. At her best friend. At the man she tries so hard not to love but cannot help it. Nothing makes her feel more alive than solving cases with him. Nothing makes her more confident. Nothing is better than those late nights at the office, his not-so-secret admiring looks on her, their whiskey glasses clinking, that feeling of congruence and contentedness when closing a file together for good.
Strike looks back at her now, eyes gleaming with pain, his chest heaving, but beside the shock and the fear she sees trust and bravery and a lifeline he holds onto: something that doesn’t tear between them even on the most terrible days. And she sees pride.
“You did… good, Robin,” he manages, gulping for air.
And she did. They solved this case together, but Robin had figured it out this time, saved a young woman and - she chooses to believe so while she hears the wail of an ambulance approach - her partner’s life.
It’s worth it.
“You can tell me again later,” she reprimands him, gently. “In hospital. When you complain about me not smuggling burgers into your room.”
Strike weakly lifts his eyebrows.
“I’m not…getting.. burgers?” he rasps.
“Not until you promise not to get stabbed anymore,” Robin replies, buoyed by the sound of firm footsteps entering the house. The ambulance crew has arrived.
“Too bad,” Strike wheezes, the blood on his teeth belying his bravado. “Since it’s… so much fun.”
Robin doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry when a paramedic kneels down beside her and gently pushes her out of the way.