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The drive home was silent.
Both Maggie and OA were battered and bruised, OA more so than her, but every shift, every bump in the road had both of them wincing. It was a sight for sore eyes and it was a wonder that neither of them actually had sore eyes.
Did that even make sense? Maggie thought to herself as she drove, then shook her head in a silent laugh.
OA had gotten checked out at the scene by paramedics, advised to take the day unless he wanted to wake up the next morning feeling like he was run over by a truck (or, you know, an expensive SUV like Cole Dixon), but of course, ever a soldier, ever an agent, he decided to stay on. They had extra vests on hand for situations such as this, but OA didn’t put his back on until they were on route to the Wyatt, the bomb. She knew he was hurting, but didn’t feel like it was her place to say anything.
Maggie appreciated that OA knew something wasn’t right with the Wyatt, that he deferred to her to figure out where the bomb was actually placed. It spoke to their partnership, to the trust they put in each other.
All the more guilt-inducing when she thought of how the day could have gone. She knew Gwen would probably be at the bar they used to frequent in her early days at the FBI, and she knew there had to be a conversation, a really hard one at that. The same could be said about OA taking the reins on disarming another bomb.
Her life was surrounded by self-sacrificial people. She loved them dearly, and yet she had never felt more exhausted. Jubal, OA, now Gwen; she knew this was the job but there would definitely be a breaking point. For Jubal it was alcohol, OA, anxiety, and Gwen, she wasn’t quite sure what kind of sickness she had yet but Maggie knew it probably wasn’t anything good.
It made her wonder what her own breaking point was. The crutch she would use. For awhile it was her grief surrounding Jason, her desire to hide herself away while helping others in the way she wanted to be helped herself. But now?
Maggie pulled into OA’s apartment complex, and with a quiet thank you he was gingerly slipping out of her car and shutting the door, her see you in a few days, seeming to fall on deaf ears but his nod to her signaled that he heard it.
Putting in the directions to the bar in her GPS, Maggie sighed. Her night wasn’t over just yet.
-
OA saw Maggie’s double take the minute he walked into the office that day, and he almost smirked at her expression but remembered at the last second that to face the wrath of Maggie is a death most imminent.
Granted, considering he chose to come into the office less than 24 hours after being shot in the chest, well he may already have his death sentence by Maggie’s glare already written in stone.
He walked over to his desk, her eyes following his movements the whole way, “Mag-”
“Nope. Not yet. What are you even doing in the office? Isobel gave you the day, and I specifically remember dropping you off at home last night and saying ‘see you in a few days’.”
OA had the decency to blush as he sat in his office chair, leaning back and willing back a wince, “first of all, thank you for bringing me home, I know I said it yesterday but I appreciate it. Second, you know I wasn’t about to stay home.”
He hadn’t asked her to stay, like the last time she was shot and asked him, or the first time he was shot and asked her. Too much had happened, his brain still swirling with the day’s events at large, so he had quietly thanked her and left her SUV before she could even think to offer.
“Omar Zidan.”
“I promise, I won’t leave this desk all day.”
A signature Maggie eyebrow raise greeted his promise. He really should have a Maggie expression bingo card.
“Only for coffee and the bathroom.”
“Scout’s honour,” he replied and made to salute but quickly aborted the motion with a gasp of pain.
The world turned white for a second as he fought through the bruising that felt more like a punch to the lungs, and he came back online to Maggie leaning forward in her chair, elbows on her knees and hands wound tightly together.
“OA, you really shouldn’t be-”
“It’s really okay, Maggie. Bruising fades,” he interrupted with forced casualness, raising his left hand to rest on his right shoulder, gripping it tight enough to essentially hold the joint in place.
OA knew he was probably going to be sent home by lunchtime, maybe even earlier if Maggie told Isobel anything, but he would do anything to show Maggie he’s okay. He felt awful with how it all played out, with Gwen and his anger towards Maggie, so the only way he knew to make amends quietly was to show that he was okay. That they will be okay.
This sort of thing can be a really hard endeavour when you can’t even raise your arm to your mid-chest without almost passing out.
He tried, he really really tried to make it through the whole day.
He made coffee one-handed, typed slow enough so as to not jostle his upper body with quick movements, and sweated through his outer jacket until Maggie left the room so he could gingerly take it off without her seeing. He was well aware that she was onto him, taking his coffee mug back to the kitchen without so much as a comment, and handing him an ice pack from the freezer wrapped in a towel when the pain got so persistent that he couldn’t focus on his work. She knows him inside out.
Which is why when she offered to share her lunch, he readily agreed. He didn’t think he would make it to lunchtime but knew that there was a little sandwich shop down the road he could have gone to if he did get hungry. That was before getting up, putting on his jacket, and making his way to the shop sounded like the most torturous thing he could do at the moment.
So when Maggie placed down some sushi and chopsticks next to his keyboard, OA knew it was over.
“Thanks, Maggie,” OA said with a smile, the edges slightly tight as he cycled through his options on how to go about eating the one food she could have given him that needed precision and the use of your dominant hand and arm.
All she returned was a shrug and a wink, and OA would’ve sighed in defeat if he wasn’t such a stubborn man.
Using his left hand, he grabbed the chopsticks and clumsily fumbled them between his fingers. One almost dropped and he acted on instinct, his body jolting forward as he gripped both chopsticks in his left hand, his right coming up to break the potential fall of the utensils and the grippy hands of pain and injury squeezed him again, making him drop his left forearm onto his desk and tip his head forward, breathing through the agony.
The fiery tendrils snaked up his neck, down his shoulder blade and through his ribs. He only then realized how exhausting it was to try and keep up appearances of being pain-free.
“Ready for me to take you home?” Maggie’s voice was quiet behind him, and he chuckled out a weak laugh, nodding.
“Well played, partner.”
“Gotta humble you somehow,” she retorted, and, expertly plucking a piece of sushi up with the chopsticks in her own hand, she motioned for him to open his mouth, “here’s a reward for not being stubborn enough that I would’ve had to loop in Isobel.”
That got a full laugh out of him and he let her place the food in his mouth, realizing there again that he was famished since breakfast was sparse, the most he had been able to manage being a bowl of cereal around 6 in the morning when the pain woke him up and wouldn’t let him fall back asleep.
So he let her close up his computer, gather his things, as he used his fingers to eat the sushi, why didn’t I think of this before?
His shoulder chose that moment to twinge in pain as though responding for him. He continued to chew quietly.
The scene reminded him of when Maggie was shot in the vest, of the first time he was shot, and they each took care of the other. He was aware they needed to have another conversation about Gwen, on communicating and rebuilding from both her recent recovery and his present injury, but that could wait. Her demeanour told him that it could wait, too, as she offered him his coat with a gentle smile.
He slipped into it and gingerly pulled the zipper up, wincing slightly as the fabric pressed offensively against his chest, even though he was certain it was only lightly hugging his torso. Maggie grabbed his work bag with another eyebrow warning and he let her, shoulders curled slightly as standing up to his full height required an effort he couldn’t hold himself to. His body was shutting off for the day, and it was only 12:30pm.
The ride down to the parking garage and the subsequent drive home were a blur, OA feeling all of his thirty-three years weighing down on him and pressing him into the passenger seat of Maggie’s SUV. He wasn’t even sure how he hadn’t needed to go to Isobel to get the OK to go home.
“How did you even get to the office in the first place?” Maggie asked a few minutes into the drive.
“Uber,” came his quiet reply.
“And that wasn’t your first clue that maybe if you couldn’t drive, you shouldn’t be coming in?”
“Nah.”
Maggie snorted, “what about painkillers? The paramedics at the scene gave you a list of a few things you could use to help the pain, did you follow it?”
His silence was deafening.
Not for the first time that day, Maggie’s groan of “Omar Zidan,” met his ears and he would’ve laughed if the seatbelt wasn’t pressing too hard into his chest. He focused on fidgeting with it as she grumbled about self-sabotaging men and the different types of man-colds.
He didn’t blame her. Self-sabotage was a hard habit to break, even three decades into this life.
They pulled up to his apartment complex and trudged up the steps together, the shoddy elevator thankfully in service and soon he was kicking off his boots and flopping as gently as possible onto his couch.
Maggie placed the remote control in his hand, grabbed him a glass of water from the kitchen. Once he was settled, she rummaged around his kitchen counter and made a noise of triumph when she found his painkiller list.
“I’m gonna go take care of this, and if you move from this spot other than to use the bathroom, I’ll absolutely call Isobel and tell her you need a week off.”
Before he could even retort, she was gone.
Before he could even finish the glass of water, he had fallen asleep on the couch.
Pain exploded in his upper chest and he bit back a yelp, dropping back behind the dumpster with a gasp and quickly felt under his vest for any blood or brass. Thankfully, there was neither.
As he looked towards his right, he was met with darkness. He opened his mouth to speak but there was a gag shoved between his teeth, pushing hard enough to press his tongue back.
He was in that basement. Dark, muggy yet dusty, sandy, the scent of iron and gunpowder permeating the air.
The sounds of Arabic dialogue filtered into his hearing. His shoulder ached something fierce. His team had left him. No.
They had died. He had survived.
Suddenly he was being flung backwards, by a blast of some sort, with fire exploding in his ribs, his stomach, his lungs seizing.
He was looking at a silver ceiling. The world was spinning, he couldn’t breathe.
“OA. Come on. I need to see if it went through.”
Her hand, Maggie’s hand, came away slick with blood. But it wasn’t his.
It was hers.
He looks in her eyes, bloodshot and terrified as the lab fills with sarin gas.
She tries to yell.
He yells loud enough for the both of them.
“OA, you’re okay. You’re okay. It’s a dream.”
OA scrunched his eyes further shut before opening them and facing the blurry picture of Maggie. She was standing somewhere over him, a worried look painting her features.
“You’re…I-I,” he coughed, tried again, “I’m home?”
“Yes, Omar, you’re home. Do you not remember?” Maggie asked, concern slipping through her voice in the form of a shaky question.
He was beginning to get his bearings back, made to sit up with Maggie’s help and a lot of noises of pain, “yeah, I remember. I just,” he trailed off, shaking his head and placing his elbows on his knees before remembering the situation that got him in this position and dropping his right to have his forearm held up by his thigh, his left hand holding his head up, “it felt so real. I thought we were back at the lab. That I was back in the basement.”
Maggie breathed in quickly, sharply, only then realizing how far the dream had gone, the depths of which he may never fully describe to her, to himself. Just that tidbit of information would be enough.
“Want to take some painkillers and go back to sleep, or take some painkillers and eat some food?”
OA smiled shakily at her, the sweat beginning to cool on his back, “I guess I’ll go for the painkillers and food, but I desperately want to shower.”
Maggie nodded, a look on her face that showed how grateful she was to be able to do something to help him. After swallowing down two orange pills with a sip of the tepid glass of water, she ordered him to his room to shower while she made some food.
The hot water ran down his body, the smell of chicken making its way down the hall to his slightly ajar bathroom door, since the open-door policy was enforced whenever one of them was injured. He smiled to himself, sighing as the water soothed his muscles and bones.
He was blessed to have her.
-
It was a few days later when they finally cleared the air.
OA had invited Maggie over for some Thai food and the most recent episode of The Last of Us, since that video game was one of their staples while she was recovering, and they were both enthralled in the series thus far.
Food was in hand, TV ready to play the episode, but then Maggie had to go and cause an avalanche of angst.
“Why’d you tell me to follow after Rex? Leave you with the bomb?”
Silence met her question, and Maggie was never one to kick herself for making a situation awkward so she waited, took a bite of rice.
“Protocol, first,” OA replied, taking a sip of water, “but you’ve also been around bombs too much lately. It was my turn.”
The last quip made Maggie chuckle sardonically, “yeah, that’s for sure.”
A pause, and then:
“Maggie, what happened to Gwen?”
It was her turn to meet him with silence, gathering her thoughts.
“She has MS.”
“Oh, Maggie.”
“I made sure she would tell her superiors. No one knew. She barely wanted to tell me, OA, but I couldn’t get over what could’ve happened to you - I told her as much - and I’m so sorry I didn’t follow protocol. We should’ve followed, I should’ve covered you before you could get shot at and-” she cut off her own rambling with a bite of food, a sigh escaping her as she chewed.
“This job,” OA started, stared out the window, “this job dictates that we have to trust each other. Nothing you do will make me stop trusting you, Maggie, but you also have to trust me. You can’t try to save everyone around you if it’s a matter of life and death, when guns are involved. Path of least resistance, deal with the fallout later.”
Maggie closed her eyes before she spoke again, “and if the person I’m trying to help is making the decisions in life or death?”
OA stared at her, head cocked to the side and a frown on his face, “what do you mean?”
“Jubal.”
Maggie didn’t anticipate the evening turning into her revealing everything that happened with Jubal, but by the end of it OA was pacing, went to rub his forehead with his right arm but switched to the left at the last second. He was still hurting, but could actually raise his arm if he did it slowly, no sudden movements.
“Maggie, this is what I mean, you have to talk to me when this stuff happens. We’re partners, we need to know everything about each other. You got hit in the head with a brick because Jubal couldn’t take the shot and-” OA huffed, winced.
“Okay, you’re gonna have to sit down before you hurt yourself again OA, it’s okay-”
“No it’s not okay because I can’t lose you!”
The statement hung in the air, deafening and heavy. OA sunk down onto the couch.
“Maggie, what happened to you, I would’ve never forgiven myself if you died and-” he choked on a breath, shook his head, “and this job doesn’t guarantee we come home at the end of the day, any day. So we have to protect each other the best we can. I need to know you’ll have my back on plays, just like I’ll have your back. This job has to be black and white until we don’t have a gun trained on our heads, or a bomb in the back of the van.”
Maggie nodded, a sharp dip towards her forgotten bowl of food. She closed her eyes for a moment to breathe.
Maybe my self-sacrificial breaking point is that I care too much about saving too many people.
“I couldn’t save Jason, so I have this…need to save everyone around me that I love, even from themselves.”
“That makes you human, and I love you all the more for it,” OA said, shifting on the couch as he spoke.
Suddenly, a warm arm was around her shoulders and she turned, seeing her partner’s face close to her own, eyes full of warmth, kindness, and maybe a bit of sadness swimming in there. It had definitely been a long few weeks and OA was well within his right to feel it. She was certain her features mimicked his as he looked at her.
“I love you so much Maggie, you’re my best friend, my sister, and we take care of each other, yeah?”
“Yeah. Always,” Maggie replied, pressing gently into him in a sideways hug, “I love you too, OA.”