Work Text:
The biting autumn draft wafts through quiet corridors, meandering its way through hanged coats and wilting ferns. It lifts and kicks the stem of a tea bag away from its mug, long gone cold and forgotten. Nestled into the furthest corner of the sofa, a loaf of black fur and purrs sleeps unperturbed. Follow the century-old steps up and onward, and you find a husband and his wife, curled up and facing opposite ends of their shared room. This speaks of their unspoken distance, even in rest. The wind has seeped through the corners of their full-length bay windows, bringing in with it the morning and the trickle of awareness.
The husband has been sleeping fitfully, as he always does, and perhaps that is the reason his spouse chooses to hoard the comforter and roll as far away from him as possible. The opportunity for comfort and reconciliation has long since aged and become a mutual understanding that it is not necessary. He wakes, in just as much solitude as if he were in this home alone, to the flickering of sunlight upon his face through blinds, torn and snapped from feline instinct. The retriever at his feet has been the only to notice Everest has opened his eyes, and is tapping a fluffy tail against his shin. The pup’s excitement is quickly cracking through her fatigue, and she gives a readying yawn before an awrr takes her up and into a cuddle against his sturdy form. The officer is instantly chuckling, lips pulled over defined canines in an easy smile. He gives his dog a few good morning pats, which earns him loving licks on his unkempt beard that he tries to scowl away from but can’t fully escape the loving assault. The pup sighs and rests her chin on his chest. Everest is then free to enjoy the peace of the silence—the calm before the storm—and fully welcome in the moment of comfort he’s been so desperately needing. He gazes out the broken blinds at the lazily rising dawn, the calm in his chest beginning to constrict into its daily concerto—for awareness is trickling back in. Every second that passes holds the weight of life within it. A life he and the rest of the police department have been searching endlessly, futilely for since she’d been reported missing in the summer.
Everest has begun to resign to the idea that they are no longer looking for the girl, but for a body. A set of bones and teeth. Closure. Because the prospect is and has always been grim. The first week was determination and chaos. Helicopters and search parties and K9s and community out pour. Since then, the helicopters have been reassigned. The search parties have stopped entirely. The only K9 left on the girl’s trail was Everest’s own, as he was the only officer left assigned to her case. As such, he had been spiraling. Thinking about and only about the dark-haired woman. He’d become so acquainted with photos of her, he’d begun to see her in his dreams. Big, doe-like eyes and a bright, bubbly smile pressing dimples into her cheeks. He dreams of walking in the forest for hours and coming upon her in the lake, where she is bathing amongst birds and lilly pads.
“There you are,” he says, and can feel the relief in his physical body as he does. “We’ve been looking for you.” His tone is gentle and beckoning.
She responds, “You have?” She sounds angelic, and he takes a step forward into her magnetic pull as she begins to cast her gaze over nude shoulder. Then he wakes up, just before he can process that she is a corpse.
He gives Cookie a final pat and kiss between the ears before hoisting himself into a sit with a groan. His entire body hurts, as usual, but especially with the reign of fog and rain outside. He’s aging, but he chooses to ignore that indefinitely, and finds himself turning off the alarm clock before its ever had the chance to bring him to. A few moments later he is relenting in the scalding shower, scrubbing some fancy mint soap his wife bought into his skin, and thinking of Maite. Not getting his hopes up that today will be the day. He steps from the steam with dark curls fallen into his face, a deep cough against the sudden change in humidity, and then leans over the sink to brush aggressively at his teeth. His own gaze finds itself and he stares into icy blue irises, moated by exhaustion. Then he wraps towel about his waist, and tip toes around to don his police uniform. Black and tactical. He checks the safety on his handgun before holstering it against his thigh; slings his bulletproof vest over his forearm as if its a jacket, while he brews himself a coffee and skips breakfast. He doesn’t say goodbye to his wife before he ventures out into the 5AM cold, but scratches at Midnight’s jaw and ruffles Cookie’s ears. “Don’t be like that,” he murmurs to her whining pout and promises that he loves her more than his K9 shepherd, Ghost. Then the door slams shut behind him, and he starts off, again, to look for the missing woman.
-------
To the tune of muffled sirens did Everest’s heart beat, hiking into his throat with the explosion of pain that handling his wounds brought. Soon enough he was bandaged, uniform cut at the thigh and completely removed from the torso, and drugged with enough fentanyl to make right the evil of the world. He was feeling relaxed and dulled by the time things had calmed between the care of the both of them; resting with his back up against the far wall that met the double doors, his injured leg propped up on the bench. Their attending medics had made do with the lack of room. One sitting in the captain’s chair behind Maite and the other standing, keeping watch on the lifepak that monitored her vitals.
Now, under the illumination of fluorescence, Everest could see clearly just how frail Maite had grown. No longer was she the woman, plump and healthy and happy that he’d grown accustomed to peering into the eyes of through polaroid. The woman that stared back at him was a ghost of her previous self—eroded away with months’ worth of violence he had yet to know the details of. Through the substance-forced relaxation, the officer felt the re-emergence of grief for Maite. He yearned to lean over, scoop her back up into his arms and never let her go. Some instinctual, desperate need to protect her now that he’d found her, even against those he knew wouldn’t hurt her; even against his own peers. He shared a look with the standing paramedic before he answered Maite—a silent request for privacy. Or, as much as they could get here. There was an intensity to this moment—intimate, in a way he couldn’t describe. He reached out to place a comforting hold on her shin, careful to be as gentle as he could.
“This whole time,” he finally echoed after a while. The words left him weighted with the exhaustion of all that time, finally coming to a rest, here in this ambulance. Hearing how confused she was that he had never stopped searching for her broke his heart. The fact that she’d known the search was called off left a harrowing feeling in the pit of his abdomen—some quiet knowing that the news had been shown to her and not that she’d happened to hear it. He didn’t dare prompt an elaboration.
“Your parents are okay,” he promised, despite the last memory of them flashing in his mind. Her mother had been sobbing endlessly for months. Her father had become more dead in the eyes with each passing day; each meeting where Everest delivered the same, disappointing news. He felt a hike of new relief at the realization that he would finally be able to tell them he found her. Their days of sorrow were over. He found their daughter, and the next time they would see her would not be in a casket, but alive and breathing in a hospital bed. “I never gave up on hope,” he murmured, voice baritone and gruff now. Icy blue stare fell into her doe-like chocolate gaze. His assertion was spoken in the way he held her gaze. A vow spoken within it. “I never let them give up either.” Whether they actually had, Everest wasn’t certain. He was only certain of the promises he’d made them: that she would be found and he would die before he let her case go run completely cold.
Then the officer hesitated, tipping his head back against the wall briefly to swallow against the grief that was wallowing up inside; blinking against glossing eyes at the ambulance ceiling. When he found her eyes again, his voice had become gruffer with the stifling of emotion. “I’m sorry it took me so long.” Words were stricken with sorrow—the grief of his apology dense and guilty. He swallowed again, jaw tensing, and then looked away and forward to compose himself.
Everest had so many questions for her, for what Eugene had done to her, but he knew the report would come in time. And certainly here and now was not the place and time for it. Eventually he would sit her down in private, and get as detailed of a report as she could give. It would take an emotional toll on her, he was sure, and he didn’t want to make her relive anything. Not now.
The man drew in a slow and accommodating breath, feeling pressure in his abdomen where there had been pain. “Did he feed you?” he asked after a while, perhaps a question out of place, but the longer he became acquainted with her features, the more it ate away at him that she looked positively starved.
--------
His concession didn’t require very much resistance from Maite at all; such was the result of a mental tip-toe about her frailty and a drifting from the edges of his being. As the adrenaline wore down, so too did his grip on the present, and with her apology, he murmured a reassurance back that she had nothing to apologize about, and went gradating off into the long brushstrokes of green and brown that painted the scene outside the tiny window on the door. That cascade lulled him, as did knowing Maite was safe, with him, finally, into the deepest rest he’d gotten in over a year. She met him in his dreams again, this time basking in the tangibility gifted to her by the rescue. Doe brown eyes and pinked, grateful shock, she came to him at that river that he’d so often met her before. She crawled into his arms and he could smell her hair, feel her weakened breaths on his neck.
“I’ve been looking for you,” he whispered. His voice sounded foreign to his own ears. When she spoke, she spoke in her voice, finally. Not the voice he’d conjured up and matched against her features as a likely fit. No. Her real voice, lilted and beautiful and broken, and she told him of bears that run through the forest. She told him she’d been wandering the evergreens, leaving him handprints on the bark. She told him she’d been right there all along, bathing in that river every dawn. He buckled under his grief and fell into her tangibility, gripped her close for dear life, and sobbed into her hair. Explained, pleadingly, how he’d been looking for her for so long. Held the back of her head to his chest and spoke it like a promise, trying to convince her he hadn’t stopped. She tangled her fingers through his hair and told him more stories of resting on branches and catching frogs and weaving baskets. Of being fed berries and fish by the cubs. In his dream, she draped herself down across his lap and told him it was okay, that the bears had kept her company, promised they had kept her safe, and he felt the bursting of relief explode through him just as consciousness came flooding back in. “They’re quite like you,” she mused, and suddenly she was gone, and he could feel his body again. Feel the deep, inescapable ache of injury to his gut. The man groaned out, first. Then, without thought, called out for Maite.
During his rest, he’d slumbered so deeply he hadn’t woken up when they’d gotten to the hospital, and had been immediately brought into surgery to close up his wounds. The sedation hadn’t worn off for several hours and he woke in the middle of the night, his large form rising from the mattress before his awareness had even come back to him.
He was trying to speak but the words weren’t coming out right. They fell from his lips, heavy, and he was too tired to pick them back up. The exhaustion flooded back in, and his slurring of her name silenced.