Work Text:
“Marry me.”
Harry's words aren't any more heartfelt than the low whistle that preceded them – first thing that blurted out of his mouth when he saw Dale Cooper stride into the room nursing five pink boxes of donuts neatly piled in his arms. The station is not the same without Lucy and her stacking prowess, you'll understand. Just small talk.
But the thing about Dale Cooper is, he doesn't do banal and he doesn't do boring. He stares at Harry, arching one eyebrow, studying him through his eyelashes like a magician pondering a colleague's trick, and Harry gulps, because what do you do. The man's gaze is out of this world. Fixed, gentle, questioning, his focus turns the room into a space of possibilities. He locks eyes with him and raises his thin lips by the faintest hint of a lopsided smile, then getting down on one knee, he lays the boxes on the ground except for one, which he holds up and opens as if to offer Harry a ring. And he takes it, the donut. He holds it in his hands, unsure of how to handle it. Barely breathing. Because what do you do. Play along, put forth a little grin?
So Coop gets back up, looking up at him as if he were a rarity and a blessing upon the world, and he does that sometimes, doesn't he, but he also does that for everything, doesn't he, they met with a question about douglas firs for heavens' sake, it doesn't mean a goddamn thing. And Harry will never know what broke the spell, if it was his fear leaking through or Coop's own decision to shake his head and retreat into one of those bashful smiles of his, as if humoring an untold joke. When he takes Harry's hands into his and takes a bite of that donut, it's an afterthought. Isn't it?
It's off, whatever it was. It's safe now. And it was ridiculous, anyway.
They don't ever talk about it.