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“You did good today.” Leon is smiling, sweaty, shirt damp and hair mussed. Ashley is similar, slinging a towel around her neck and shaking hair that’s escaped its tie out of her face.
“Thanks. I have a good teacher.” She smiles warmly and he offers her a high five, which she claps.
“Yeah you do. Okay,” he stands up from their spot on the workout mat and reaches for his own towel, mussing it over his head. “Take tomorrow off, just make sure you stretch and drink more water. I don’t want the next session to end up with a sprain.”
The towel rests across his shoulders and he reaches for his water bottle, tossing her hers in a second fluid motion. She catches it easily, and feels proud of herself. Her arms ache but she’d kept up with him longer than before and when she glances at herself in the mirror they use for checking form she can see she’s put on muscle.
She’s looking more the special agent every day. Leon dumps the last of his water over his head and shakes off like a dog, icewater soaking into his collar and leaving dark trails on his shirt as he offers her a hand up. She takes it, and he pulls, that spark in his eyes of genuine pride warming her smile a touch brighter. She’s grateful she gets to see him like this. It’s been a year and a half since Spain, and the more of his true self she gets to know the more grateful she is they both made it out.
Oh she has nightmares. Flashes of PTSD. She can’t have someone else lock a door and certain smells make her shut down. Leon has had three panic attacks in her presence. The year anniversary saw both of them drunk, not that either were proud of it. But they lived. And she is getting stronger. And Leon is healing. And the plaga tried to erase them and Saddler paid for his hubris.
And that’s a victory all its own.
She takes a long drink from her water bottle and pulls her hair tie out, carefully stretching sore neck and shoulders the way Leon taught her.
“Listen to what your body is telling you,” he’d instructed early on. “You survive in short bursts by pushing past limits but if you train like that you’ll cripple yourself and never get anywhere. Water. Stretching. More burgers.”
He’d smiled teasingly at that and flexed, making her laugh. “You don’t build muscle with diet smoothies.” He’d softened then, sobering a little. “Just…do what you can to take care of yourself. Because you’re not always going to be able to. And when you can’t, the times you did will help.”
He doesn’t lecture her on sleep. He mentions “recovery” once or twice, but they both know sleep is important and also one of the hardest things to keep hold of.
“You picked up on vitals really fast,” he says, drawing her out of the past as he settles back on the mat and begins his own stretching. “I’m impressed.”
That day’s lesson had been blocking and protecting vulnerable points, and for that he’d given her a flash refresher on anatomy; requiring her to find his pulse, solar plexus, and several nerve points before he’d decided she passed and they could spar to wrap up.
She blushes slightly, shrugging one shoulder and pulling her hair back into its tie before joining him. “Well…I sorta cheat with you.”
He snorts lightly, reaching for his toes. “Yeah? And how do you cheat at a pulse check?”
She wishes she could match his amusement, but the question forms a lump in her throat and she crosses her legs, focusing on her arms first. “Well I had to look for yours before.”
He goes quiet and she looks up to see him watching her with a sad expression.
“And you have freckles on your pulse point,” she adds, wanting to take that guilt out of his posture. As if he has anything to feel guilty about when he nearly died because he put her before himself.
His brow scrunches. “I do?”
“Just on the left,” she says, tapping her own throat in mirror. “But yeah. They…actually helped me find it when you were in that chair. So if I need to find a pulse on you, I just use them as a marker.”
“Huh.”
He looks at himself in the mirror, turning his head to expose the soft spot just beneath his jaw, touching fingers to the freckles himself. “Well son of a bitch, guess that kinda is cheating.”
She laughs, throwing her towel at him. “That’s called being resourceful.”
He tosses the towel to rest with his in the corner. “Just means I have to find you someone else to practice on.”
She shrugs. “You could, but I don’t think it’ll be a problem. I learned well enough on you.”
She shifts to stretching out her calves, and Leon grunts, flopping onto his back and laying his arms above his head with a deep sigh. She watches him fondly, enjoying the comfortable intimacy they’ve built in eighteen months.
He hadn’t wanted to be part of her regular security detail after all, but he was still around often and when she’d expressed wanting to train in self defense and maybe a bit more her father had seen the benefit of the two of them working together. After all—nobody else could possibly understand what they’d been through.
She’d had a crush on him for the first six months. How could she not? But as he’d taught her how to punch, and block, and escape ties, how to handle a knife and how to wound an attacker, that crush had settled into a comfortable sense of safe and seen that didn’t have a conventional label.
She loved him, she’d realized after a year. But not like that. She loved him for being beautiful and strong and gentle and kind and fierce. She loved him for teaching her and supporting her and for being someone who could understand what was tearing her up inside even when she couldn’t breathe let alone find words.
He was a safe place, long after Spain. A source of strength. And she delighted in knowing she was some measure of that for him back.
Leon’s breathing eases and slows to an almost hypnotic peacefulness, and if it weren’t for the energy of awareness she can sense in his body she’d think he’d decided to nap in the whitehouse gym.
She flops down next to him and stares up at the ceiling, sighing and enjoying the endorphins for a moment.
“I don’t think I ever said how grateful I am that you didn’t give up. Or how proud I am of how you handled…everything.”
She turns her head to look at him, and he looks back.
“You were really brave that whole time, and I still don’t know how you got me into that chair but—“ he swallows, and it looks difficult. “I’m really glad you did.”
She reaches out and clasps his hand, squeezing gently. He clasps it back, and she smiles, though there are unexpected tears starting. “Me too. I’m so thankful we’re both okay.”
He looks back up at the ceiling and she watches his throat bob as he swallows again, nodding once and closing his eyes. “Yeah. We’re both okay.”
She watches his chest rise and fall with a cleansing breath and realizes she can see the gentle throb of his pulse as it lies beside his collarbone on the way to those freckles. It’s a soothing, beautiful thing to watch. Especially as she sees the space between grow longer until his heart beats barely once a second.
She smiles softly and one tear escapes, but no more than that.
“And we’ll be a little better tomorrow,” she whispers, squeezing his hand.