Chapter Text
Amanda doesn’t go back to the warehouse right away.
She’s lucky enough that Jeff Denlon missed the artery in her neck, but it’d still be a bad move to return while cops were still turning the place inside out. She’s taking enough of a chance as it is just leaving one of the various safehouses John had as backup, the one he had told her about before they’d started their final game.
Thinking about John is an even greater wound, and one that she’s not going to recover from. Sometimes she wonders if she should have just fucking died with him. Maybe things would’ve been easier. Maybe she would’ve been just one more body in that warehouse, one more number in the kill count that had been published in the papers.
She’s still not sure why she decided to drag herself into a quiet corner with a hand pressed to her neck after all hell broke loose. Maybe it had been because John had tried again and again to make her see things his way. Maybe it was because she couldn’t let Hoffman win. Maybe it was because at the end of the day, she still had the will to live.
It takes a while for her neck to heal, and longer still to finally come back to the last place she’d actually called home. Months, really. The scar tissue is thick and red and sensitive, but it’s cold enough outside that she can wrap a scarf around her neck to hide it, and no one gives her a second glance because of it. She’s already cut all her hair off again, a messy bob that stops at her chin, and she can sneak in easily enough without drawing any attention to herself.
The door creaks shut behind her, and she stands there alone with the moon casting blue light through the slats of the windows.
It’s amazing how barren it is now. The once disastrous mish-mash of tools and half-finished traps and blueprints were all gone, all sorts of other monuments to long-lost memories. There are some tables left behind, the skeletons of drawers and file cabinets that have been emptied, but that’s really it.
Her boots click softly against the ground as she walks through the wide, vacant space. It feels like it matches the wide, vacant space in her chest, the gaping raw wound where her heart used to be. She’d called this place home for enough time that she doesn’t know where else she’s supposed to go.
She doesn’t really know when she starts crying. It’s a slow and steady slide of tears down her face, meeting at her chin and dripping onto the ground. She’s not wailing and screaming, she’s just… standing there mostly, sniffling once and a while. She can’t really do much else but really just take in the vastness of the space. It feels wrong, that what was once such a chaotic painting of their lives is so empty now.
Furious at herself, Amanda wipes at her eyes with her sleeves. There’s no use crying, not anymore. John’s dead and gone, and now it’s up to her to try and figure out where to go from here. She doesn’t really have a plan, doesn’t really have an idea of what’s even supposed to come up next. But the least she can do is try, for John’s sake.
Maybe.
She’s in the middle of crouching down to pick up a screwdriver that had rolled under a table when she hears the sharp click of one of the doors opening. Amanda whirls her head around so hard her hair smacks against her cheeks, hackles raising instantly like a rabid animal. She’s not sure who it could be—police? FBI?—but her fight or flight wars with itself instantly.
Flight wins out, just barely, and she spins to tuck herself behind an open door with the screwdriver pressed tight to her chest. She’s shaking a bit, eyes wide, but it’s not fear that’s gripping her the way she grips the impromptu weapon in her hand. Anyone who walks into this building is all but desecrating a grave, and she won’t let it slide. Depending on who it is, she’ll fuck them up so they know exactly what it is they’ve done.
She can hear the hard thumps of boots as they walk slowly across the space, and for one absolutely wild second she thinks it’s Hoffman. That makes the most sense, doesn’t it? He knows she’s alive, because her body hadn’t been one of the many recovered. Maybe he figured that she’d come back. It’s not exactly an inaccurate assumption, after all, because here she fucking is. It’d be just like him to want to tie up another loose end, after the fucking note he left her.
But it doesn’t sound like Hoffman. There’s something about it that’s both sure and yet entirely hesitant. It seems like the person doesn’t quite know where they are. She chances a peek around the edge of the door, trying to see what she can in the moon lit darkness.
There’s a man standing there, and he’s definitely not Hoffman. He’s way too tall, and his musculature seems more defined rather than hidden underneath soft fat. Amanda’s eyes widen when she realizes that he’s in army fatigues, holding his hat at his side. She’s never seen him before, but the idea of having the fucking army descend on an empty warehouse where John used to work seems a tad excessive. She ducks back behind the door and tries to breathe.
It’s overwhelmingly quiet. Amanda just stands there, chin tilted up a bit and waiting to see what he does next. When he starts to walk again, it’s with those same stilted movements. It sounds like he’s limping a bit.
“Hello?” he says suddenly, and she jumps. His voice is soft, but firm. Even so, it shakes just a bit. “I know someone’s here.”
Amanda holds her breath.
“I know someone’s here,” he repeats, and this time he sounds angry. “I’m serious. You can’t hide from me.”
She doesn’t recognize the voice at all, but there's a thundering command in it that makes her lip curl. It makes her wish she had a gun so she could just blow him away rather than deal with whatever cocky male arrogance he’s brought into this sacred place. He sounds young, though.
When he speaks again, though, her breath wooshes out of her in a shocked, quivering exhale.
“I want to know what happened to John Kramer.”
An anger she’s rarely known lights up in her chest, a match struck that immediately races through every limb. It has her stepping out into the open before she’s actually thought it through.
“Who the fuck do you think you are?” she snarls. Just the idea that anyone could so brazenly ask about John like that, without even caring enough to already know how he died, makes her furious enough to forget all common sense. Few people in the world knew John, and even fewer only thought they did. Amanda worries which she falls under.
He stares almost mildly at her, doesn’t move from where he’s stopped as he takes her in the same way she does him.
If she were into men, she’d probably consider him handsome with his strong jawline and dirty blond hair, but there’s an anger starting to build in his expression that just makes him look ugly. She catches a red patch on his sleeve, but she can’t make out what it says. They glare at each other from across the enormous room, and the overturned chairs and tables feel like gravestones in the white moonlight filtering in through the windows.
Finally, he speaks up again.
“I’m Lieutenant Logan Nelson,” he says through his teeth. “Who are you?”
“Amanda,” she sneers, the plastic handle of the screwdriver creaking in her hand as she tightens her grip. “I don’t have any fancy titles, though. Sorry if that’s disappointing.”
To her shock, something in his face opens up. She’d expected him to step closer, to argue with her or throw his stupid rank around some more, but his eyes change instead. What had been hard and angry turns into something soft and confused, like he’s looking at her in a different light. She can see the way he lifts his head, like he isn’t sure what to say next, and he just blinks at her.
“What?” she snaps, when he doesn’t say anything.
He swallows.
“You’re Amanda?” he finally asks, and tilts his head. He’s studying her like he’s trying to make sense of her, and all that does is piss her off more.
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
He takes a breath, like he’s simply trying to pull himself together. Amanda hates when people know more about her than she does them, especially when men are involved. She can’t help but take a step closer herself when he doesn’t answer, and this time repeats herself with way more vicious anger.
“I said, what the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“I—” he starts, and then stops again. “I’m… a friend. A friend of John’s. He mentioned you once or twice before I left.”
That does make her stop in her tracks, lurching back with considerable confusion. In all the time they spent together, John had never mentioned anyone named Logan. But he had mentioned, almost offhand once or twice, that he’d known someone who was in the armed forces. It’d practically been a passing thought for both of them, more idle chatter than anything that really mattered. But somehow that information had stuck, and now apparently it’s staring her right in the face.
“He never mentioned you,” she says after a pause, still not trusting him. There’s something else curling and twisting in her stomach. It’s somewhere between pride that John spoke of her to other people, and jealousy that there was another person that John had never mentioned to her at all.
“...he wouldn’t have,” Logan finally says, like that’s good enough.
Amanda scoffs, her lip curling up.
“Oh, what the fuck,” she says, and has to start pacing to get some of the energy out before she does something stupid. He watches her without moving his head, just tracking her progress with those strangely empty eyes. He doesn’t so much as shift his position, just stands straight and tall like a good army boy.
“He wouldn’t have mentioned me because I’m supposed to be a… a secret,” Logan mutters, and it sounds like even he knows how lame that is. “Like a… like a last resort. A contingency plan.”
It takes a few seconds for the meaning to lock into place in her head, and when it does she stops. It whirls around in her head, and then she whips around and stalks up to him. He goes incredibly still, eyes widening ever so slightly while his mouth thins, and Amanda can feel the tension even when she stops several feet in front of him. He’s so still he’s almost shivering, his eyelashes shuddering with the determined stress of someone refusing to blink. How he could be scared of her when he stands a foot taller is a question itself, but it gives her an ugly sense of victory.
“Who are you, really?” she demands, searching his expression. Her voice is rising in volume, and that seems to be putting him on edge. “Who the fuck are you?”
He raises his chin, just a bit.
“Someone who knows what this place used to be,” he says softly. “And someone who just wants to know what happened to John.”
It’s such a stupidly vague answer, one that makes her so angry to hear. That isn’t nearly enough for her to want to give him any real information, and if anything it makes her want to hold onto the memory of John even tighter. She wants to keep John’s last moments far away from anyone else, far away from the people who don’t deserve to know. People who weren’t there.
“And what did this place used to be, Logan?” she asks tightly.
He looks around, and again his expression changes into something almost gentle.
“John used to help people,” he says, his voice still soft. His eyes stop near the corner where John used to draw out his plans, where he used to work for hours until he was too tired to go on. “And I helped him do that. But it was a long time ago.”
Once more, Amanda tries to make sense of that information. She knew about Hoffman, obviously, and she knew about Gordon even if they barely spoke to each other. John had never mentioned that he’d recruited someone else, that he’d tried to teach another person his philosophy, his ways. There had never been a single mention of anyone like Logan, and all it does is make Amanda angrier. Just how many fucking secrets John kept she’ll never know, and she feels robbed of the moments that they could’ve shared if John had just trusted her a little bit more.
“...I don’t believe you,” she accuses, narrowing her eyes. “How do I know you aren’t lying?”
To her shock, he looks down at her in amused bewilderment.
“Why would I lie about helping him kill people?” he asks, almost smirking as he tilts his head. “That seems like a pretty stupid thing to do. I’ve spent enough time in the white rooms with all the pillows, thanks. I don’t need to add another reason for them to lock me back up again.”
The admission is so bold and so honest that it sends her reeling a little bit. She blinks a few times, but… yeah, okay. She can admit that it makes sense.
“I guess.” She scratches at her temple with the handle of the screwdriver, more out of nervous habit than an actual itch. Once again, his eyes track every movement. She can’t help but sigh, lowering the screwdriver again. “Okay. Fine. Sure.”
He gives her a slight nod, as if thanking her for the concession, and looks around again. He starts to walk around again, and she realizes that she’d been half right about his limping. It’s more like he has to walk stiffly, like there’s something wrong with his body that he’s trying to make room for, trying to figure out a way to normalize it for himself. He has a wedding ring on, and now that she’s close enough she can see that the patch on his sleeve identifies him as some kind of medic.
There’s a Purple Heart clipped to his front. Fuck.
“...he died,” she says finally, staring at the medal, and the words scratch on their way out despite her attempt to sound casual. “During a game. He— there was a circular saw, and… and his throat was—”
She can’t even say it, her voice fading out into sorrow, but he seems to understand anyway.
“...oh,” he whispers, and takes a shuddering breath. “Okay.”
Amanda had expected him to be shocked, or upset, or to even get angry. Instead he just… stands there. He’s so much taller than her that when she’s close enough, she has to tilt her head up just to look at him. He flinches and goes still when she walks up to him from behind, but even as she watches his hands clench and unclench she can tell that it’s a world of effort to calm down.
“Who?” he asks, and his voice is rough as he turns around to stare down at her. “Are they still alive?”
Her own breath catches. The sheer rage that quivers through him is startling, and not because it surprises her. No, it’s because she understands it so intrinsically that it’s all but a part of her existence now.
“No.” She’s gone a bit quieter. “No, he’s dead.”
“...good,” he says through his teeth, and she can feel the anger coming off him in waves. It’s visceral, almost painful just to take in, and it’s because she understands. Fuck, she understands. Hoffman wouldn’t have given off this kind of wretched fury knowing that John had been murdered. She doesn’t know how he reacted to it, because she hasn’t seen him since. But this?
This is mourning.
Amanda’s not sure what this thing is between them right now. It’s a delicate, fragile little moment, something she hasn’t shared with anyone in a long time. He looks at her, and she looks back, and instead of there being an opaque film between herself and another person, she thinks there might be something more transparent instead. It’s terrifying, and she doesn’t know what to do with it.
They’re both simultaneously at a crossroads, but they’re meeting at the fork with one path in front of them instead, having started far away at the opposite sides. Amanda can’t help but wonder where his path had started, can’t help but wonder if he’s thinking the exact same thing.
“Does he have a gravestone yet?” Logan finally asks, his voice rough.
The question is so shocking, so personal, that Amanda reels.
“I—” She shakes her head. “Yeah, uh, his wife paid for it. Jill.”
He laughs a bit, though there’s nothing about it that’s even remotely amused. His eyes are too bright, and he looks away, rubs at his face with one hand. For the first time, she can see a long burn that travels up his wrist and down into the sleeve of his fatigues. She’s seen enough chemical burns to know that’s what it is, but she can’t figure out how he could’ve gotten it.
“Um… Where is it?” he asks thickly, once he seems to have pulled himself together. He takes his hand away. “I’d like to visit him.”
Amanda really, truly fucking looks at him, and she tries to make sense of what she sees. He’s so closed off that she wonders if she’ll ever see anything at all.
Finally, she shakes her head.
“It’s not really a good idea to visit him right now,” she says, and she can’t help the bitterness in her tone. She had already tried. “There are a lot of… a lot of journalists and shit, fuckin’ vultures that want to catch whoever comes near the grave. The police are there all the time, too. It’s a fuckin’ spectacle.”
He’s silent again, taking in that information, and then he gently picks at the front of his jacket.
“Do you think I could get away with it?” he says, and it almost sounds like he’s joking. “You know everyone loves a fucked up man in a uniform.”
There’s a pause, and then for the first time in what truly feels like forever, she busts out laughing.
“What?” she manages, bending over a bit while she giggles. There are tears in her eyes again, and they aren’t from her laughter. She has to brace herself on her knees. “Man, if anything that would make it worse.”
“Yeah,” he says, and hiccups out a laugh. “Yeah, okay. Fair.”
Once more, they settle into silence. There’s something different in the air, something that feels like it doesn’t know what it wants to turn into. It’s a bit like stained glass. Two pieces of something broken, something with different colors that’s been fused by the cooling metal that had bound them together. Stained glass can be something beautiful, Amanda knows, but sometimes it just breaks apart when it isn’t made right. Sometimes the person making it has no idea what they’re doing.
“I’m glad he had you,” Logan finally says. His gaze shifts over to her. “I owe him my life. I wish I could’ve been there with him.”
She meets his gaze. It’s a powerful admission, one that she agrees with. She had yelled at John, begged him to fix her, begged him to do something. She had shot Lynn Denlon because she didn’t know what else to do in order to get herself out of the situation she’d found herself in, and she’d been shot in return for it. She’s always owed John her life, and she’d repaid him by letting him die.
Had she been there with him? Had she given him the comfort and company that he deserved in his final moments? Logan’s giving her this gratitude despite not knowing what had happened, and she doesn’t know if she deserves it. More to the point, he’s claiming that John had saved his life. He’d done the same for her. There are few people who truly believe that John had done something for them.
“Yeah,” she says finally. “I owe him my life, too.”
His smile is actually sweet when he finally gives her one. He looks like he could be a kind man, if it weren’t for that emptiness in his eyes.
“So.” Logan takes a deep breath that lifts his shoulders, and turns his eyes up towards the ceiling. “Where exactly do we go from here, Amanda?”
Another insane question that she doesn’t have an answer for. She gestures towards his hand.
“Aren’t you married?” she asks, only a little bit confused. “You could go home to her.”
Logan lifts his left hand, stares down as he spreads his fingers and looks at his ring. He’s still smiling, and there’s something even softer there. He tilts his head as he turns his hand over, squeezes it shut.
“We met in the same unit,” he says, sounding far away. “She’s still finishing up her tour.”
Amanda blinks.
“Oh,” she says awkwardly. “I guess… I guess that’s why you’re here, isn’t it? The warehouse.”
“Yeah.”
There’s again a pause. Amanda doesn’t know of anyone she’s ever truly related to. There’s no one who had taken John’s philosophy as seriously as she had, before she’d started to realize that it was wrong. Before she’d realized how far people could fall, and have no way to climb back up again.
“Do you believe people can change?” she asks abruptly. “Do you think John was right?”
His lips part, but instead of answering he simply continues to look at his fist. There’s something clearly running through his head, like he doesn’t know how to answer that, and that actually puts Amanda a bit at ease. If he’d just answered blindly, she might not trust what he’d say. Instead, he seems to really think about it.
“I don’t know,” he finally admits quietly. “Maybe. Some people can. But there are some people who aren’t ever going to change, who deserve to be tested. And some people deserve to fail.”
The scoff that leaves her isn’t derisive.
“Yeah,” she says, and jerks her head towards the door. “C’mon. You got a place to stay?”
He’s the one who blinks at her this time.
“Uh,” he says a bit dumbly. “Sort of. I’m staying at a halfway house for—”
He stops suddenly, like he’d been about to say something he hadn’t meant to, and his face starts to turn a little red. He looks almost embarrassed, and looks away like he can’t exactly meet her eyes again. She remembers what he’d said, about how he’d spent time in what sounds like some kind of mental health facility. He and his wife must’ve sold their house or apartment whatever when they both went back out to wherever they’d been sent for the year.
“Alright,” she says, and finally slips the screwdriver into her pocket. “I got a place for you.”
-
It takes some time to get there. Logan has a rental that he says was supplied to him by the Armed Forces. It sounds like way more than they usually seem to give the people they all but dump on the side of the road when they’re done with them.
“I was honorably discharged,” he finally admits. “So I think they actually feel a little bad. For now, anyway.”
She kicks her legs up on the dashboard and crosses her arms, watching the turnpike zoom by as they make their way back to the safehouse. She’d taken a taxi the first time around, and the driver hadn’t bothered to actually look at her face. It’d been as much of a risk as going to the warehouse itself, so she’s kind of glad that Logan has a car.
“Why?” she asks, and gestures blindly towards his chest where she remembers the Purple Heart is pinned. “Is it because of that?”
He clears his throat a bit awkwardly.
“Yeah.” He doesn’t say anything more than that, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure that he’s not going to talk about it. She thinks about the chemical burn on his wrist.
“Well, you can stay for a while,” she says, and turns to look at him. “But your wife probably won’t like it when she comes back.”
His fingers drum nervously against the wheel.
“Yeah,” he finally admits. “I want to get a job and a proper place for us to stay before she gets back. I write her letters twice a week, but she never knew about John. I wanted it to stay that way. She just knows that I was in a game, because I couldn’t really hide it from her.”
Amanda’s about to ask what he means, but he must be one step ahead of her already because he gestures towards her mouth without taking his eyes away from the road.
“Those are from the reverse bear trap, aren’t they?”
Amanda’s heart starts to beat wildly in her chest, something between fear and anger. She gapes at him, and has half a mind to demand he stops the car. But the panic fades almost as quickly as it had come, because she pieces together what it is he’s trying to imply, what he’s trying to say without saying it at all.
The scars.
“...yeah,” she mutters. “Why?”
Logan smiles grimly.
“Mine are just as hard to hide when you get married to someone. What exit?”
They pull off the turnpike after she points out the exit lane they need to take, and then it’s mostly the pockmarked roads of Jersey City in the middle of the night. Logan seems unperturbed by some of the people that watch their car pass, and Amanda can’t help but be curious about that. They’re in one of the less savory parts of the city— John had found it easier to get them some apartments or houses that would be a bit harder to track down. It makes staying sober a little harder, but she’s doing well in that respect at least.
As for her other vice… well, she’s not going to address that if she doesn’t have to.
When they finally get to the house that John had left to Amanda, Logan pulls into the driveway and just sighs as he leans back and closes his eyes. He seems fucking exhausted, though Amanda can’t blame him. It’s something like three in the morning. He does open them up again and look around though, and Amanda watches him. There’s another scar on the side of his neck, and it looks precise.
The two of them sit there after they’ve undone their seatbelts, neither moving to get out of the car.
“I did drugs,” she says finally, looking down into her lap. The track marks are hidden by her jacket, but those too are hard to hide, just as he’d said. “I was wasting my life. John saved me.”
Logan looks sideways at her, and laughs a bit weakly when she makes eye contact with him again. He still has the crown of his head leaning against the headrest, and up close she can see how his eyes are less blue and more of a seafoam color, like the ocean in the middle of the night. Or maybe the Hudson.
“I, uh. I made a big mistake,” he says softly, the guilt thickening his voice. “While I was a resident at Angel of Mercy. I mixed up a patient’s X-Rays and it delayed their diagnosis until it was too late for treatment. I guess we were all in there because we’d killed someone by accident.”
Her eyebrows raise.
“Sorry. Hold on.” She leans forward, processing what he’d said but zeroing in on something specific. “Are you a fucking doctor, Logan?”
He’s the one who looks down at his lap this time.
“I didn’t finish my residency,” he mumbles. “I was hoping to get in contact with the Head of Pathology and maybe finish it. But, um… yeah?”
“And you don’t have anywhere to stay?” Amanda’s incredulous. “You fuckin’ mooch?”
“I’m not a mooch,” he protests immediately, but if he was going to say anything else he stops at the grin spreading on her face. “Oh.”
“Yeah,” she says, and pokes his side. He stiffens again, just like he had at the warehouse, but he doesn’t do much more than that. “I’m teasing you, loser. Do you have money?”
“I have a pension from my military service and an insane amount of medical debt, does that count?”
“Not really.”
“Then no,” he confirms. “Not a lot, anyway. I have some in savings, and so does my wife. But until she gets back from Iraq in March, I’m kind of shit out of luck.”
It’s September now, so he’s at least got time to do that. Amanda muses on the thought as she tries to figure out a timeline. She’s taking a huge risk right now, bringing a man she barely knows back to their safehouse without really confirming that he’s who he says he is. After all, John hadn’t told her or anyone else about Logan as far as she knows, but there’s something to be said about trust.
She just needs him to prove himself.
“You can stay here. But I showed you mine,” she says quietly. “Show me yours or it’s no deal.”
Rather than ask what she means, he takes a breath.
“Yeah. That’s fair,” he says and starts to unbutton his jacket.
His fingers work deftly, but they still shake. If he was a doctor like he says he is, they wouldn’t shake like that. Whatever happened to him must’ve been bad, because Amanda’s had tremors like that for as long as she can remember. She watches as he shrugs it off, and there are more scars running up his arms and into the tan sleeves of his undershirt. They’re so precise, so clearly intentional, that they couldn’t possibly be from an IED or a gun, and those bring up questions that’ll need answering eventually.
But none of those scars are the ones he points out. Instead he starts breathing a bit harder, like he’s almost… afraid. Then he’s moving again, reaching behind himself to grab at the collar of his shirt before he pulls it up towards his head, presenting his back as much as he can while they’re still seated in the car.
Amanda stares. There are seven in all, and they’re so angry and red that they stand out against his skin even in the dark of the car. Each one has to be at least five or six inches long, and two of them cross over each other near their edges in the small of his back. They’re horrific, the kind of wounds that struck deep. It reminds her of the gunshot in her neck, how she’d almost bled out. Whatever this was, it must’ve hurt. Whatever it was, it had taught Logan his lesson.
“Yeah,” she says finally, her voice quiet. "Okay. I believe you.”
Logan smiles sadly and pulls his shirt back down. He doesn’t put his jacket back on.
“He saved me in more ways than one,” he mutters, and that’s really the end of that.
The car beeps a few times when they open the doors, and Logan has to reach in and pull the keys out of the ignition like it’d been a second thought. As soon as he has his bag slung over one shoulder—also camouflage, like the army’s just fucking dedicated to that aesthetic—she leads him down the driveway into a side door, rather than risk the front. She has to punch in the code for the security system the second they get inside, and Logan watches her curiously as she goes through the motions of checking all five locks before she’s finally satisfied.
“I have a lot of cops on my ass,” she explains as she finally turns the lights on in the kitchen. He looks around, squinting a little against the brightness. “So we kind of have to make sure no one gets in without us knowing.”
Though he’d been looking around and taking in the room, he jerks his head sharply in her direction.
“We?” he asks, and there’s something low and defensive in his tone. He’s tightened up again, like he’s ready to fight someone at a moment’s notice, and Amanda shrugs.
“I don’t live here by myself, you know,” she says, like it’s obvious, and as far as she’s concerned it is. Before Logan can ask, though, she walks over and sticks her head up the stairwell. There’s a light on underneath the door across from hers, and that’s all she needs.
“Hey!” she bellows. “Get the fuck down here, we got company!”
There’s a swift curse and a bang, like something was dropped all of a sudden, but it doesn’t come from upstairs. She turns to look and finds that Logan’s pressed himself against the door, bag dropped without decorum at his side. He looks like he’s a second away from flipping out, and she has to hold out her hand before he probably throws himself out the window or something.
“Whoa,” she says, like she’s trying to calm a wild animal. “Whoa, hey, relax. What the fuck?”
Little by little, he defrosts. His face is far too pale.
“Sorry,” he breathes. “I don’t— I don’t like yelling.”
Oh. Shit. That makes sense. She opens her mouth to… well, she doesn’t know. Apologize, maybe, or call him out for being a pussy. She’s interrupted instead by the sound of someone gingerly hauling themselves down the last of the stairs, and she turns to grin as they round the corner.
“What the fuck do you mean, company?” her roommate gripes, leaning against the kitchen threshold with a bit of a scowl. Then he locks eyes with Logan and his nose wrinkles up as he takes in Logan’s uniform.
“Oh, dude,” he says sourly, and looks over at Amanda with an eyebrow up. “You actually brought a fucking trench monkey here? Is he gonna murder us in our sleep or some shit?”
Amanda rolls her eyes, but before she can interject, Logan pipes up again.
“Nah,” he says, and his voice doesn’t shake as much. He points towards the ceiling, where the muffled sounds of music can still be heard above them. “Not unless your taste in punk is actually that bad. Then we’re gonna have a problem.”
It’s quiet, save for the sound of an ambulance in the distance and the hum of the refrigerator. The three of them stand there.
But finally, Adam grins.
“Well, fuck you too,” he says cheerfully, reaching out to high five Logan with his left arm rather than his right, and Amanda watches them do a weird, obscenely manly first meeting dance as they slap their hands together. “You look like you listen to yacht rock.”
She sighs, running a hand through her chopped hair.
Men. Maybe this was a mistake after all.