Work Text:
You hadn’t meant to cry in the stairwell. You had only ducked in for a moment. Five minutes at most, honestly, likely just enough time to clear your head before finishing the last chunk of overtime you had no choice but to do. Maybe that’s why you hadn’t planned to sit down. You hadn’t planned for your breath to catch the second the door clicked shut behind you. But now, with the hallway sealed off and the sound of the office reduced to a low, muffled hum, the silence felt too sharp, too immediate. It was like a lid had been screwed on too tightly around your chest.
Your legs folded in on themselves, back curled up against the cold concrete wall. The stairwell wasn’t even that secluded—just a forgotten side route between two departments, a place mostly used by smokers or people on their way to rooftop drone launches. But in that moment, it might as well have been a sealed-off vault, a place somewhere safe, somewhere you could unravel in peace.
Your forehead pressed against your knees, and the weight of everything started to settle. Not in one great rush, but gradually, insistently, like snowfall beginning to bury something fragile. There were no sobs, and no dramatic collapse one would expect from an overworked young woman. No, it was just that annoying aching pressure in your ribs, the kind that made your entire body feel too full of things you couldn’t name.
The air smelled like old cement and ozone. Your uniform jacket was still creased from sitting too long in the same position at your desk, and the taste of burnt vending machine coffee clung to the back of your tongue like it had taken root there.
The mission hadn’t gone badly. It had been straightforward, clean, exactly what it needed to be. And yet somehow, the aftermath of it—the endless crawl of post-mission cleanup—had left you feeling more wrung out than the mission itself. There had been no dramatic injury, no near-death escape, no failure, just an avalanche of admin work that you somehow found overwhelming. Was it because it was a busy season? Maybe, but when working as a Hunter, every month felt like a busy season, given that the wanderer attacks in certain areas kept increasing.
There were so many reports to file, video footage to scrub and annotate, tracker data to log... And even biological samples to label and send to Research. You had been staring at your monitor so long that your eyes felt grainy. Every system demanded your attention in its own specific way, each one acting like it was the most important, like the others didn’t exist. You filled out the same information multiple times in slightly different formats until you weren’t sure if the repetition was making you efficient or slowly breaking you apart; even your tiny blob of an AI companion, who hovered around your desk, was of little help.
The worst part wasn’t even the workload. It was the atmosphere. The conversations that dropped off when you entered a room. The careful way people avoided sitting too close at lunch. Or maybe it was the glances. The near-constant sense of being observed, not maliciously, but measured, like your worth was being weighed. It didn’t feel like camaraderie, no, it felt more like being appraised.
You were proud to be a Hunter, and you were good at it, too. But lately, it had felt like your edges were starting to fray. The missions were easier than the in-between stuff, or maybe it was mostly because you didn’t mind fighting.
Still, it was the noise afterward that wore you down, paired with the pressure, the drama, the tension between departments, and the way no one seemed to say what they really meant anymore. Everyone kept smiling just a little too tightly, acting like they weren’t exhausted themselves either.
You had planned to stay late today to finish up your part of the report. Maybe get a head start on the next one. You’d even brought your own lunch to avoid getting dragged into small talk. But then, someone had laughed too sharply in the break room, a whisper tucked between sentences that made you freeze. You weren’t even sure they were talking about you, but for some reason, it felt pointed regardless.
That uncertainty hurt worse than knowing for sure.
So here you were, hiding in the stairwell like a kicked dog, trying not to cry over something you couldn’t name. Trying not to admit that you were just tired, tired of holding it together, tired of pretending it wasn’t getting to you.
You thought of your boyfriend, who was currently on a business trip. You hadn’t told Sylus anything, not really, in fact, you decided to keep your casual demeanor by spamming him with memes and stickers on the messaging app as well as sending random pictures throughout the day to make sure he wouldn’t worry about you. Because if you kept up your normal act, he wouldn’t notice, right?
You had sent him a song earlier, something slow, instrumental, and aching in places you didn’t have words for, knowing he’d likely love listening to it as it was his style of music. So, on your end, it wasn’t a cry for help; it wasn’t even a message. It was just… something. Something that felt a little like leaving the door unlocked in case he came by.
Your phone buzzed once, then again.
You didn’t look, or perhaps you felt like you couldn’t. Your hands were still curled in your sleeves, fingers clenched tightly against your palms like they could keep the pressure inside you from spilling out.
A third buzz, then dead silence for a moment. You figured he probably listened to the song and answered it with a few messages in a row. You sighed, deciding you would look at it later, once you are done brooding and feel less exhausted, maybe on your way home in a few hours.
Then, just when you thought that would be the end of it, your screen lit up with an incoming call. That familiar chime he set up on your phone one time when you were showering on a random evening at the beginning of your relationship. It was a soft, deliberate tune, the kind he always used in relation to you. A signature sound that had become a tether over time.
You saw his name on the screen, no more messages. It felt like a gentle request, and you wondered if he suspected anything or just wanted to speak to you because he missed you.
You stared at it for a long moment, jaw tight, heart pounding. You didn’t want to cry in front of him. You didn’t want to explain what couldn’t be explained. But when it came to him, when it was Sylus, resistance always felt like the lonelier option.
So you answered.
The line connected with a muted click, followed by a silence that felt less like absence and more like recognition. It was the kind of silence that did not demand filling, one that carried its own meaning, like the soft weight of a familiar coat settling over your shoulders after a long day. The silver-haired man didn’t speak immediately. His stillness wasn’t laced with indifference or casual delay; it was measured, intentional, like he understood on an elemental level that the space between breaths mattered as much as breath itself.
And perhaps that’s why your throat closed up, and you didn’t speak, well, more so, you couldn’t, not with your chest still drawn tight from tension and your eyes still stinging from the effort of containment. Emotion sat behind your ribcage like pressure behind reinforced glass, visible, undeniable, yet still restrained. And yet, Sylus didn’t move to shatter it. He didn’t fill the quiet with coaxing questions or self-deprecating jokes to loosen your tongue. He simply waited, letting the moment stretch and settle with the patience of someone who understood that holding space was an act of care.
"I figured you might not talk," he murmured eventually, his voice rich and low, softened by the faint abrasion that came from either sleep deprivation or a deliberate refusal to rest. His cadence, slow and deliberate, offered no urgency. "That’s alright. I’ll speak until you’re ready to interrupt."
You exhaled, the breath leaving your lungs in a shallow stream, less a sigh, more the release of something that had been clenched too long.
"I’m in my hotel room," he continued, and his tone shifted, angled slightly toward levity, though never frivolous. “The window’s open, and there’s wind coming in off the coast; sharp, briny. You’d hate it. There’s a violinist playing nearby, and I think they’re trying to romance a raccoon. It’s the most tragic courtship I’ve heard all week.”
Your lips moved before your brain caught up, a near-smile tugging faintly at one corner of your mouth. The sound of his voice was doing what the stairwell could not, easing the clench of thought, replacing the noise with something steady and familiar.
“I started that book you pushed on me, the one with the sad android and the nonlinear timeline.” He hesitated, not for effect but for honesty. “You were right. It’s bleak and beautiful. I like it. It’s exhausting me in all the right ways.”
You made a small sound, barely more than breath; agreement, acknowledgement, or maybe just proof of presence. It didn’t matter what it was, he received it as it was given and kept going.
“I have nothing pressing to attend to tonight,” he said, and the intimacy of that statement, its quiet prioritization, pressed against something soft in your chest. “So if you want to listen to me narrate bad observations or fall asleep to my voice, I’ll stay. If you just want the quiet to have company, I’ll do that too, anything for you, sweetie, you know that already.”
You adjusted your grip on the phone, fingers curling tighter like the contact could somehow anchor you to the warmth bleeding from his voice. The stairwell was still cold, still dim, but it no longer felt as hollow. The fluorescent lights still flickered overhead, but their hum seemed further away now. His voice had wrapped around you like a thread, like a tether, not yanking, not dragging, just offering a line to hold onto until your footing returned.
He didn’t ask you what was wrong; he never did, not until you were ready to tell him yourself. But across the distance, despite time zones and oceans and everything unnamed between you, your boyfriend always knew, and knowing, he stayed.
You swallowed hard. He didn’t prompt you or coax or press, but the silence after his last sentence lingered lightly, like it was inviting a reply rather than demanding one, so you let yourself breathe into it—one beat, then another.
“…You’re ridiculous, by the way,” you muttered, voice scratchy but fond, your first real reply to the stream of nonsense he’d offered earlier. “Romancing a raccoon? Are you jealous it’s getting more attention than you? Sounds like you might want a raccoon of your own, Sy.”
"Maybe it's just my way of saying I miss you, sweetie. Ever thought of that?" You could hear the smile in his voice, and that alone made you feel more at ease as you sighed, the corners of your lips lifting slightly at his words, almost a smile. He never failed to soften the edges of your worst days, always managing to say the right thing without trying too hard to be right.
“I… miss you too, and you know... I got through everything today,” you said finally, your voice low, quieter than you intended, the words coming out in that tired tone you couldn’t quite mask. “Filed the reports, logged the samples, even triple-checked the timestamps, because I’d hate for anything to get flagged for revision again as Jenna’s been in a bad mood for like a week now.”
It wasn’t really an answer to anything he’d asked, because he hadn’t asked, but you knew he’d hear the truth layered inside the minutiae.
Sylus didn’t interrupt you while you talked; you could hear the faint rustle of his clothing through the speaker and pictured him adjusting where he sat, maybe leaning back against some unfamiliar hotel headboard with the same calm ease he always carried around you.
“It’s not the work,” you continued, fingers flexing again inside your sleeves. “I mean, okay, it is... there’s just so much. Everything feels like too much lately, and I don’t know when it got like this.”
Another breath left you, this one hollower than the last.
“I think I’m starting to dread the in-between parts more than the missions, and isn’t that… like stupid?”
“No,” he said, simply and gently, shaking his head on the other side of the call.
You let out something between a laugh and a sigh. “I hate how quiet it gets, and not the good kind of quiet where it feels comfortable to just focus and do your own job, but the kind where everyone’s smiling and you just know they’re not, the kind where you sit in a room and it’s so obvious you’re not wanted there, even if no one says it... especially because no one says it.”
Your voice caught on the last word, and you hated that, hated how raw it came out even though you tried to keep it even.
“I know I’m good at what I do,” you added quickly, your tone shifting into something defensive, almost automatic. “But lately it feels like I’m constantly being evaluated, like I’m always on display. And I try not to let it get to me, I really do, but some days it’s just...”
You trailed off, the words still formed in your mouth but refusing to come out, your throat holding them back like they might betray something if spoken aloud.
"Maybe I am just tired, I think," you said at last, voice softening to a near whisper.
“You're not wrong for feeling that way,” Sylus replied after a pause, his voice steady and sure. “It’s hard to stay focused when you’re carrying all of that alone.” He didn’t push for more, never did, but even in his restraint, you could feel how fully he understood, the weight of his presence wrapping around you like a warm blanket.
“I trust your instincts,” he said, his tone gentler now, softer than before. “And if your instincts are telling you something’s off, then you don’t have to keep proving anything to anyone. Not to them, and not to me.”
You didn’t respond, not with words, but something loosened in your shoulders, like maybe you weren’t being irrational, or dramatic, or too sensitive—those quiet little thoughts that always found a way to sink their teeth into your peace whenever you tried to let go.
The ruby-eyed man exhaled on his end, slow and quiet, but you felt it like a pulse beneath your skin. “You’ve been trying to do everything right, even when the environment around you isn’t making it easy. That’s not failure, if anything, that’s resilience, kitten.”
Another pause followed, but it wasn’t empty. His next words came softer, lower.
“If I were there, I’d pull you away from that place for a while, let you breathe for real. Maybe we’d sit somewhere quiet, not the hollow kind, but actual quiet. With one of my vinyls playing in the background and a glass of red wine. You’d finally have space to just exist without performing, without the judging eyes on you. Let’s do that when I come back, alright? I want you to be happy and relaxed. You sound more tired than I, and I am the one pulling the all-nighters.” His voice never failed to have a hint of teasing to it, even if Sylus was genuine in his intention.
Your throat tightened again, not from panic or stress this time, but from something quieter, something that felt like relief or maybe even longing. A few tears escaped your eyes as you quickly wiped them with the sleeve of your jacket.
“I am just so tired, Sy, I just want you home, I will go insane if I have to stay working more overtime this week.”
“Sweetie, shhh, relax a little for me, hm? You know you can tell me anything, right? Acting based on your emotions isn't necessarily a bad thing, so cry, if you need to.” His voice dropped to an even softer tone, knowing you were likely holding back tears as he tried to comfort you. “You’re allowed to rest,” Sylus said eventually as he heard you sniffling in the background. “You’re allowed to not be perfect, and you’re allowed to be upset. You don’t need anyone’s permission... but I’ll still give it, if it helps.”
You let out a breathy laugh, tired but real. “Thanks, I think I needed to hear that more than I realized.”
He hummed in response, a low sound that buzzed faintly in your ear like a soft current. “You don’t need to prove your strength by breaking apart in private; that’s not what resilience means. Sometimes it’s just choosing to rest instead of run.”
You didn’t say anything right away, but your silence wasn’t heavy this time—it felt understood more than anything.
“I know I can’t be there physically right now,” he added, “but I’m still here, every step, every word. I’ll stay with you for as long as you need, so just don’t close off on me, alright?”
You nodded slowly, even though he couldn’t see it. “That helps, really.”
There was a pause, then he spoke again. “Go home after this, yeah? No more overtime tonight. I’ll keep you company on the way, and we can pretend you’re walking somewhere better.”
You sniffled again, quieter now. “I think I’d like that.”
“I’ll order your favorite junk food to be delivered to your apartment, while we are at it, that sound good?”
“Yes. You know I love you, right?”
“I love you, too, sweetie.” He didn’t need to think twice about answering you back. “Call me once you are out of the office, I will wait for you.” The call ended on that note, just for now.
You sighed deeply, and somehow, even with the concrete wall still pressing at your back and the fluorescent light still buzzing overhead, the world felt just a little easier to carry, just a little warmer, because when it came to him, when it was Sylus, you never had to hold it all alone.