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It’s just been a bad week, and there’s no fix or cure and you’re tired of trying to find one. So you’re curled up, knees to chest, on the floor of the bathroom; back against the wall, hands pressed to your face, breathing into your palms. You aren’t crying, you’re just breathing. Your head hurts and your chest feels a little hollow from the stress and the frustration and the hurt. You feel like nothing is happening and there’s nothing you can do.
He slips in quietly and just sits down on the floor next to you. He doesn’t say anything, but he touches your leg lightly with one finger. It’s a question. Do you want me here or do you want to be alone? You curl into him in answer, taking your hands away from your face and climbing into his lap, clutching at his shirt and his neck. He wraps all the way around you, arms and legs and whole body, and kisses your forehead, your hair. His fingers brush comforting circles and patterns into your back, your shoulder, your neck into your hair.
He whispers, I love you.
It doesn’t fix anything.
But it helps.
When you miss Combeferre so much you can hardly breathe and you can’t call him because you don’t want him to worry about you, Courfeyrac isn’t even there. He’s out with Bahorel and Bossuet, and you think about calling him but you don’t want to ruin his fun so you just stand in the kitchen in the dark and try not to take up any space.
And there’s no way he could know you’re feeling like this because when he left two hours ago, you were fine. And still, somehow, he calls you.
You answer and he can already tell something’s off. He asks you if you’re okay and you pretend you are, but you’re not very convincing. He asks you if you want him to come over, but you say no because you don’t want to ruin his night out, that would just make you feel worse. So he tells you he loves you and makes kissy noises over the phone and you actually do laugh a little at that before you tell him you love him too and hang up.
And then you go to bed because there’s nothing left for you to do but feel sad so you might as well sleep.
It must be a few hours later when you’re woken up by someone climbing into bed with you. You’d roll over to see him, but before you can, he’s slipping his arms around your waist and holding you from behind, aligning the lines of his body with yours and pressing a kiss into your shoulder before he settles in to sleep.
Before he drifts off, you hear him whisper, “He’ll be back soon. We’ll call him tomorrow.”
And then his breath is hot on the back of your neck and you feel like you can breathe, too.
When he gets pneumonia so bad you have to take him to the hospital, you manage not to panic until he’s asleep in his hospital bed, hooked up to the antibiotics. That’s when you call Combeferre and let yourself cry for a minute while Combeferre talks you soothingly about how he’ll probably be out in a few days and you did the right thing and he’s going to be fine and you’ve been very brave (you cry harder at that).
After you hang up, you climb into his hospital bed with him. You’re not even technically supposed to be here, but you’d given the nurse who’d come to tell you to leave one of your scariest looks and he’d left pretty quickly. Courfeyrac shifts a little when he feels you in bed with him, even though he doesn’t wake up. It’s like he’s automatically making space for you. You press your lips to his cheek and then tuck your face into his shoulder when he coughs.
It’s the nightmare that wakes you up again at 7am. A little before 4am, you dreamed he was drowning and his screaming woke you up into a world where he was in your arms and sleeping and not drowning and not screaming. But it took you more than a half an hour to get back to sleep.
At 5:10am, it was his breathing. You thought he’d stopped and you’d woken with a start. It took eight minutes of just listening to his heart beat before you could calm down enough to breathe normally yourself, and then it was another fourty five before you could even try to sleep again.
But the nightmare comes back and he’s drowning and you can’t get to him. You’re scrambling for him and water is filling up his lungs and his screams are muffled and you can’t get to him, and then he’s not screaming or struggling anymore and you just can’t fucking breathe and you wake up. His hand is in yours, like he took it to hold in his sleep, and he’s alive and breathing and fine.
Still, you cry.
Your phone buzzes from the little table beside the bed and you reach for it. It’s Enjolras. You sent him a bunch texts last night, but you figure his phone must have been off. He has a habit of turning it off when he sleeps — one too many drunk texts. So he must be awake now, because in response to the deluge you sent him last night, he’s sent you one text. But it’s a text that makes you topple over yourself and bury your face in your hands because, as terrified and exhausted as you still are, you don’t have to be alone.
I’m on my way