Chapter Text
Rio knew the day was wrong before she opened her eyes.
Technically, she’d slept. Her phone said so. The numbers added up to something that should have felt like rest. But her body disagreed. Her muscles had that heavy, underwater drag to them, like she’d been clenching all night. Her jaw ached in a way that meant she’d been grinding her teeth. The inside of her skull felt… noisy, somehow. Not thoughts yet. Just grainy.
The alarm had already gone off twice.
She turned it off properly the third time and lay there, staring at the blur of the ceiling, trying to catalog the damage.
Headache: low-grade, somewhere behind her eyes.
Throat: dry.
Back: one knot under her right shoulder blade, another lower.
Heart rate: faster than she liked, like she’d been running in her sleep.
The bedroom was quiet. That was the only point in its favor. Agatha had left stupidly early for an interview across town, moving around the room in careful, exaggerated silence. Rio had been half-awake for that, too. She remembered the faint brush of a hand over her hair and Agatha’s whisper against her forehead, too soft to make out the words, only the warmth.
She’d wanted to pull her back into bed. She hadn’t. The weight of exhaustion had pinned her down.
Now the space beside her was empty and cooling, the sheets a little tangled, one of Agatha’s pillows still carrying the faint scent of her shampoo and the perfume she always pretended she didn’t wear.
The pillow helped, a little. The knot under her shoulder blade did not.
Rio rolled onto her side and exhaled slowly, counting it out. In for four, hold for four, out for six. Grounding, regulating, all the things she knew how to do.
It helped… but not enough.
The list started forming before she could stop it.
Milk.
Veggies.
Bread.
Laundry detergent.
That specific tea Agatha liked.
Replacement batteries for the kitchen scale.
Trash bags.
Lightbulbs.
The apartment’s shared list lived on her phone now, a joint notes app monstrosity titled “House Stuff” because Agatha had refused to call it “Inventory.” Every time one of them noticed they were low on something, they added it with varying degrees of chaos. Rio’s entries were neat and precise, with brand names and quantities. Agatha’s were not.
“Trash bags, the big ones” sat right next to “those cookies from last time???” and “ps don’t let me buy another candle.”
Under all that, in bold from this morning, was:
Groceries plz, I won’t be home before seven. Love you.
The “plz” softened the request. The “love you” did more. Rio didn’t mind errands. Not in theory. The spreadsheet part of her brain liked parsing prices and comparing unit weights. The problem was everything else attached to leaving the apartment.
She could, technically, go tomorrow.
She stared up at the ceiling for another several seconds, then sighed and slid out of bed.
Better to get it over with.
Better to have the fridge full.
Better not to make Agatha come home tired and then go out again.
Her feet hit the floor. Her bones complained. She moved anyway.
The day took shape in small, abrasive increments.
First: the bathroom light was a little too bright. Not unusually so. Just… more, somehow. The bulb they’d replaced last week had a slightly different color temperature, a tiny shift that had made Agatha shrug and say, “Looks fine to me.” It did look fine. Rio’s nervous system had disagreed the second she’d looked directly at it.
This morning, the difference scraped over her eyes. She brushed her teeth with her gaze averted, focusing on the faucet handle, the tiles, the pattern of the grout. Her reflection flickered at the edges of her awareness, hair smashed on one side from sleep, pillow-crease still faint on her cheek. The static in her body hummed louder.
Second: the neighbor upstairs dropped something heavy at precisely the wrong moment. Rio had just lifted her mug from the counter, halfway to her mouth, when a thudding crash vibrated through the ceiling. Her shoulders jerked. Coffee sloshed against the rim and over her fingers. Hot.
She hissed under her breath, more from the surprise than the burn, and set the mug down carefully, flexing her hand.
“Fine,” she told the air. Because it was. It was. It was just one sound. One drop. One adrenaline spike.
The noise stopped. No follow-up. No apology shouted through the floor. Just the faint hum of someone else’s morning overhead.
Rio washed her hand in cool water and added “check if we have aloe gel” to the mental sub-list that was now clinging to the underside of the main one.
Third: her headphones battery was dead.
That one landed harder than it should have.
She was standing in the hallway, shoes on, grocery totes over her arm, about to leave when she put the headphones on and got the soft, traitorous little voice in her ear: “Battery low. Please charge.”
She checked the indicator. Twenty percent.
“Traitor,” she said, flatly.
She’d used them last night, curled up on the couch while Agatha sprawled with her head in Rio’s lap, the TV on low. They weren’t supposed to be dead yet. She’d miscalculated.
She could still wear them, of course. They’d muffle something. But the noise-canceling would flicker out randomly, and that unpredictability was worse than nothing.
She took them off, stared at them for a moment, and then left them on the credenza next to the little ceramic bowl where Agatha tossed her keys.
Her brain noted: grocery store without noise control.
Her stomach noted: a slow, descending weight.
She left anyway.
The grocery store was too full of people.
It wasn’t a rational assessment. She knew that. It was four p.m. on a weekday; the crowd was moderate at best. But the automatic doors parted and the sensory profile inside hit her like humid air.
Overhead lights: bright.
Refrigeration units: humming.
Speaker system: tinny pop song with a beat that seemed to land directly inside her skull.
Voices: overlapping, echoing, too many conversations layered into a blur.
Rio paused just past the entry, letting a man with a basket and a woman with a stroller go around her. She kept her face neutral, shoulders squared, grocery totes folded neatly in one hand.
It’s fine.
This is fine.
You’re here for forty minutes, maximum.
You know this layout.
You’ve been here dozens of times.
She could walk it in her sleep: produce, bulk dry goods, dairy, frozen, household, then out. Efficient, precise, minimum backtracking. She had the list on her phone. She had a system.
The problem wasn’t the system. The system was perfect.
The problem was each little unpredictable element the system couldn’t account for.
She grabbed a basket, too loud when it bumped the metal stack, the sound reverberating up her arm and started in produce.
Carrots first. Two onions. A head of broccoli. Fresh coriander if it looked decent; Agatha liked it in everything. She weighed, bagged, sorted, the automatic motions grounding her. It was okay. The noise faded to a background hum when she had a task in front of her.
Halfway through choosing tomatoes, a child shrieked somewhere across the aisle.
Not a distress scream. Excited. High-pitched and sudden, followed by the quick patter of little feet and the clatter of something hitting the floor.
Rio’s fingers twitched around the tomato she was holding. The sound shot through her like a jolt of electricity. Her shoulders rose toward her ears. For a second, every muscle in her back went tight.
She set the tomato down carefully, the red blur wobbling in her peripheral vision, and exhaled through her nose. Slow, in and out, like she’d practiced.
Not dangerous, she told herself.
Not directed at you.
Not a problem to solve.
Her heartbeat didn’t get the message right away.
She added tomatoes to her basket and moved on.
In the next aisle, an employee was restocking shelves. He had a metal cart piled high with boxes and was slicing them open one by one, the rip of tape loud in the enclosed space. The cart squeaked with every shift. Every few seconds, cardboard flaps snapped, echoing in the narrow aisle like distant gunshots. Different sounds, small individually, all stacked into one overlapping cluster.
She considered skipping the aisle and coming back later. But that would mean altering the route. Doubling back. Wasting steps.
She forced herself to walk past, keeping her eyes on the labels, reading them like a mantra. Rice. Lentils. Pasta. The sharp rip of tape scored the spaces between the words.
By the time she got to dairy, her brain felt like it was buffering.
She opened the fridge door for milk and flinched at the suction sound. The cold air slapped her face. Some part of her said, absently, that the door hinge needed oiling. Another part of her said, louder, you have to get out of here.
But the list wasn’t finished yet.
Butter. Cheese. Yogurt. Two different kinds because Agatha refused to eat “the boring one” and Rio refused to buy the version with twice the sugar. They’d reached a compromise she was unreasonably proud of. Her hand hovered over the shelf a second too long while her ears caught fragments of nearby conversation—“…told him if he thinks I’m doing all the dishes—” “…no, the blue one, that one, yes—” “…then she just left, like, walked out…”
Her head gave a dull throb.
By the time she made it to household goods, her feet hurt in a way that didn’t align with how long she’d been standing. The overhead music had changed to something with more bass, each beat like a finger tapping inside her skull.
She grabbed trash bags, detergent, four-pack of lightbulbs. The shelves blurred at the edges of her vision, too many shapes, too many colors. She narrowed her focus to the rectangular box in front of her, the numbers on the side, the familiar brand. Anchor points.
At checkout, there were three people ahead of her and only two register open. The man directly in front of her kept shifting his weight, his basket bumping into her leg every few seconds. Not hard. Just enough to register. Just enough to be one more contact point she couldn’t predict.
She counted the items in his basket without meaning to. Seventeen. Too many for the “up to ten items” lane he’d clearly chosen as a shortcut.
Her fingers tapped that pattern against the handle of her basket. Seventeen. Seventeen. Seventeen.
Agatha would have said something about it. Teased him lightly or made a pointed, joking comment about math being hard. Rio did not. She stared at the floor tiles instead and tried not to imagine what the fluorescent lights would look like shattered.
When her turn came, the cashier gave the standard “Hi, how are you?” in a tone that said he neither wanted nor expected an honest answer.
“Fine, thank you,” she heard herself say. It came out even. Normal. Something in her chest ached with the effort.
She paid. She packed. She left.
The automatic doors parted again and the outside air hit her like a balm. Cooler, wider, less trapped. The street noise was still there, cars, bikes, distant sirens, but at least it had room to spread out, not bouncing between hard surfaces and straight into her ears.
She shifted the weight of the bags in her hands and started home.
Her body felt wrong.
That was the best word she had for it, not pain exactly, not illness. Just wrong. Like every nerve ending was slightly closer to the surface than usual, skin too thin by a fraction. Sounds burrowed under it faster, stayed there longer. Each step made her hyper-aware of the way her socks pulled against her heels, the seam at the toe, the give in the shoe soles.
This is fine, she told herself, and knew it was a half-truth at best.
She hadn’t eaten yet. Her stomach had moved past hunger into a vague, hollow sensation. She’d meant to have lunch before leaving, but then the light had been too bright and the neighbor had dropped something and the list had started unspooling and somewhere in there, the time had slipped.
She should go home. Put the groceries away. Sit in the bedroom with the curtains half-closed for ten minutes. Drink water. Eat something simple. Lie flat for a while, let the static burn off.
She could picture it so clearly, the darkened room, the familiar weight of the mattress, the way the noise softened if she closed the door and put her back to it.
She walked faster.
The apartment building’s stairwell smelled faintly of someone else’s cooking, something tomato-based and heavy with garlic. On a normal day, it would have made her hungry. Today, it pushed at the nausea that had been hovering just under her ribs.
She paused on the landing, taking the last few steps slower, adjusting her grip on the bags so the plastic handles didn’t dig into her fingers. The hall light on their floor flickered once as she reached it, a tiny stutter in brightness that made her blink harder than it should have.
Her key slid into the lock smoothly, she’d oiled it herself after the third time it had stuck and the familiar weight of the door gave way under her hand.
Even before it was fully open, she knew Agatha was home.
The apartment sounded different when she was there.
The base level of noise shifted: a distant melody of her humming, the cadence of her voice on the phone, the subtle chaos of her moving through space without thinking about how each motion registered. The faint clatter of a pan on the stove reached Rio’s ears along with the muffled rhythm of music, Agatha’s playlist, speaker somewhere in the kitchen, volume just a little higher than it had any right to be in a space this small.
A burst of laughter, not loud, but bright, filtered down the hallway from the main room. Agatha, alone, laughing at something on her phone or a video or the half-burnt toast she’d inevitably made as a “snack” while cooking an actual meal.
Warm noise. Friendly noise. Noise Rio usually liked. Noise she’d asked into her life.
Today, it hit the static already simmering under her skin like someone plugging an overloaded circuit into the wall.
Her shoulders climbed toward her ears again. Her jaw tightened.
Not her fault, she told herself immediately, automatic. She doesn’t know. You didn’t tell her it was a bad day. You didn’t know it was this bad until now.
The grocery bags dug into her palms.
She stepped inside, closed the door carefully behind her, no slam, never a slam and took a breath that didn’t quite fill her lungs.
The apartment smelled like onions and garlic and something browning in a pan. The music from the kitchen had lyrics, a voice layered over drums, the beat thudding gently against her ribcage in time with her pulse. The hallway magnified it, bounced it back.
Rio set the bags down with more care than necessary.
Her body, already full of static, hummed louder.
She wasn’t at the breaking point yet.
But for the first time that day, she could see it from here.
Agatha didn’t hear the door at first.
That was unusual, she was normally attuned to the sound of Rio coming home, the soft click of the lock, the nearly silent footfall that followed, the way the air in the apartment shifted because Rio carried a kind of grounded gravity with her. But tonight she was halfway inside the fridge, debating whether she should rescue the last few mushrooms from their inevitable demise or admit defeat and throw them out. She was also humming, loudly, she realized in retrospect. Loud enough that the vibration had settled into her ribs in a pleasant way. Loud enough that the music on the counter had to compete with her. Loud enough that she didn’t hear the door open or close.
The evening had been going well. Too well, maybe.
She’d come home early, earlier than Rio probably expected, because her interview across the city had wrapped ahead of schedule. Instead of sitting in traffic, she’d hopped on the tram, bought herself a little coffee on the way home, and let the quiet delight of unexpected free time settle into her bones like warmth.
A whole hour before Rio would be home.
A whole hour to herself.
A whole hour to spoil her girlfriend just a little.
She loved cooking when she wasn’t exhausted. The apartment was small, but the kitchen had become one of her favorite places, mostly because she could picture Rio leaning against the counter watching her, quietly observant, sometimes correcting her knife grip in that annoyingly competent way, sometimes silently laughing when Agatha nearly set something on fire.
She turned the heat up under the pan, swayed absently to the music, some indie rock song she’d heard twice and decided she loved and tossed in diced onions with a flourish that would’ve made Rio roll her eyes fondly. The sizzle was loud, sharp, and satisfying. Agatha grinned at the pan like it had personally encouraged her.
Tonight she wanted to make something comforting.
Warm.
Steady.
Home-ish.
Rio had looked tired this morning. Not drastically so, just the soft kind of tired that made her movements slower and her eyes distant in that way Agatha had grown to recognize.
So she’d chosen something that felt like holding someone’s face between your hands. A little spicier than Rio usually preferred, but not enough to overwhelm. Just enough to feel alive.
Agatha chopped garlic with more enthusiasm than accuracy, humming again, louder this time, then scraped it into the pan. The scent hit instantly: sharp, bright, a little sweet. She inhaled through her nose, rolling her shoulders back. Her long day fell off her like an unneeded jacket.
She checked her phone again. No new messages.
Rio still had the grocery list.
Which meant Rio was probably still out.
Agatha didn’t like sending her out after long days, but Rio never complained. Ever. Even when Agatha teased her about being married to efficiency, Rio just raised an eyebrow and said something about logical sequencing. Agatha wasn’t fully convinced Rio understood the concept of “it’s okay to not do everything yourself.” She’d been trying to teach her gently. Slowly.
A task for another day.
She tossed the vegetables, reached into the fridge for the yogurt, set it aside to temper so it wouldn’t curdle. It felt domestic in the softest way. Their fridge. Their kitchen. Their quiet little home. The first place Agatha had ever lived where she didn’t feel like she was waiting to be told she didn’t belong.
She leaned back against the counter and let herself drift a little, spoon in hand. A lyric caught her, and she sang the phrase under her breath the first time, then out loud the second time, her voice blending awkwardly with the speaker but not enough for her to stop.
Agatha wasn’t a quiet person.
She knew this.
Rio knew this.
Rio even liked it, usually.
She didn’t think to check her volume.
Why would she?
It was just a normal evening in their warm little nest.
She was mid-chorus when movement flickered in the corner of her eye.
She turned, expecting the twitch of a plant leaf near the sink she’d forgotten to water, but instead Rio stood at the end of the hallway.
Just… stood there. Bags at her feet. Shoulders drawn tight near her ears, hair slightly mussed from the wind, breaths too shallow. Her posture looked wrong, somehow, upright in a way that meant effort, not ease.
“Hey!” Agatha lit up immediately, the brightness instinctual. “You’re home early!”
She stepped forward, but something in Rio’s expression caught her mid-step.
Not anger.
Not annoyance.
Something quieter.
Something tighter.
Something vibrating under the surface.
Agatha blinked, smile softening. “Everything okay?”
Rio didn’t answer right away. She bent, slowly, to untangle the grocery bags from her fingers. Her movements were too controlled, deliberate in the way Rio only got when she was concentrating on not falling apart.
Agatha didn’t know that was what she was seeing.
To her, it just looked like Rio being serious. A little stiff, maybe. A little tired. Nothing unusual.
She glanced at the stove, then the bags. “You didn’t have to get all this today,” she said lightly, trying to take one of the totes from Rio’s hand. “I could’ve gone tomorrow, or—”
Rio pulled the bag just slightly out of reach.
Not a snap.
Not rude.
But unmistakably sharp in a way that made Agatha pause.
She straightened. “Okay… you good?”
Rio exhaled through her nose, slow and shaky, and Agatha felt the first faint itch of concern at the back of her mind. She lowered the music by a couple of notches, but not much, not enough, because she didn’t know yet that it was the wrong kind of noise tonight.
“I’m making dinner,” she offered, cheerful again. “Your favorite kind. Well, my version of your favorite, because I still can’t chop onions the way you do, but—”
Her sentence trailed off as Rio stepped past her wordlessly, setting the bags on the counter with meticulous precision, aligning their handles so they didn’t twist.
Agatha’s smile faltered.
Something was off.
Something was wrong.
But she didn’t know what.
Not yet.
She turned the stove to low and moved toward her, gently, carefully. She reached to touch Rio’s arm, just a brush, a grounding connection, but Rio flinched, just barely, shoulders jerking before she disguised it as reaching for something in the bag.
Agatha froze.
Not hurt.
Not offended.
Just… stunned.
Because Rio never pulled away from her.
Never.
“Hey.” Agatha kept her voice soft, warm. “Hun? Look at me for a second.”
Rio didn’t.
Her hands were moving too fast now, unpacking items like she was racing a clock only she could hear. Bread. Veggies. Detergent. Lightbulbs. Each motion precise, clipped, robotic.
Agatha watched her closely, chest tightening.
Rio wasn’t angry.
She wasn’t annoyed.
She wasn’t even distant.
She was overwhelmed.
Agatha could feel it, like the drop in air pressure before a storm.
But she didn’t know the cause.
Didn’t know the context.
Didn’t know that the grocery store had carved her girlfriend raw from the inside.
Agatha reached again, slower this time, wanting only to help. “Sweetheart, talk to me. What’s—”
Rio flinched again.
And then—
The pot on the stove hissed sharply as a bit of liquid spat onto the burner.
The noise was tiny.
Insignificant.
Barely noticeable.
Agatha didn’t register it as anything but a cooking sound.
But Rio did.
Her whole body jerked as if slapped.
Her breath caught.
And when Agatha finally saw her face clearly, she realized Rio wasn’t simply tense.
She was vibrating.
Skin flushed high on her cheeks.
Jaw clenched tight enough to ache.
Eyes wide and too bright.
Chest rising too fast.
The edges of panic sharpening in real time.
Static.
Agatha recognized it without knowing the word Rio used for it.
She swallowed. “Hey. Let’s turn the music down? Is it too loud?”
She moved toward the speaker.
And that—that tiny, well-meant action, was the wrong move.
Rio’s voice cut across the kitchen.
“Stop.”
Not a shout.
Not quite.
But sharp.
Sudden.
Rigid enough to slice through the air.
Agatha’s hand froze mid-reach, hovering over the speaker.
Her heart dropped.
Slowly.
Heavily.
Because Rio didn’t speak like that.
Ever.
Not to her.
Agatha turned slowly, very slowly, to face her. “...Okay,” she said softly. “I’ll stop. But you need to tell me—”
Rio’s hands were pressed flat to the counter now, knuckles white. Her head bowed. She looked like she was actively holding herself together with muscle tension alone.
Agatha’s throat tightened.
Something is wrong.
Something is very, very wrong.
She took a step toward her, gentle, careful, hands open.
“Rio,” she murmured. “Honey, talk to—”
And then Rio’s voice came again.
Not yelling.
But cutting.
Broken-edge sharp.
“Can you just not—”
She stopped herself.
But too late.
The words hung in the air like shattered glass.
Not what she meant.
Not what she intended.
Not who she was.
Agatha felt the hit like a physical impact.
Her spine straightened.
Her breath stuttered.
Her heart scrambled into a defensive rhythm.
A beat of silence passed.
Heavy.
Cold.
Waiting.
Agatha blinked once. Slowly.
Her voice when it came was softer, but not fragile, controlled.
“Okay,” she said. “That’s how we’re talking now?” Rio didn’t answer.
Agatha waited for the apology that didn’t come.
Waited for the explanation that didn’t come.
Waited for anything.
Instead, Rio kept her stare fixed on the counter, breathing in tiny, clipped bursts like someone cornered.
Agatha’s chest tightened with frustration, concern, hurt, everything tangled.
She lowered her voice further, trying tenderness one more time.
“What’s going on, sweetheart? Tell me—”
The spatula slipped from the counter and clattered against the floor.
A stupid sound.
Small.
Nothing.
But Rio’s body reacted like a gunshot.
She recoiled.
Shoulders convulsed.
Breath shuddered out.
And then, before Agatha could process it Rio lifted both hands and clapped them over her ears.
Not gently.
Not thoughtfully.
Involuntarily.
Instinctively.
Full-body.
Agatha froze.
Everything in her went silent.
The music kept playing.
The pot kept simmering.
The apartment stayed warm.
But Agatha felt the temperature drop like someone had opened a window in winter.
Rio stood in the middle of their kitchen, hands pressed hard to her ears, eyes squeezed shut, body trembling.
And Agatha finally understood the shape of the storm.
Rio knew she’d lost the thread the moment her hands touched her ears.
She didn’t decide to do it, there was no conscious moment, no internal command, no thought between stimulus and response. One clang, one tiny scrape of metal on tile, and her body reacted before she could shape a single coherent word.
Pressure.
Sound.
Impact.
It felt like someone had reached into her skull and twisted a dial labeled TOO MUCH until it broke.
Her palms slammed against her ears. Hard. Too hard. Enough to make her elbows lock, her shoulders seize, her pulse punch against her throat. Her breaths came in short, sharp bursts she couldn’t slow down. Her whole body vibrated like she’d stepped into a powerline.
She wasn’t shutting Agatha out.
She wasn’t angry at her.
She wasn’t trying to make a point.
She was trying not to fall apart on the kitchen floor.
But she couldn’t say any of that.
Not with her mind split open like this.
The first thing she became aware of—really, fully aware of—was the look on Agatha’s face.
Shock.
Hurt.
Fear.
And something that carved Rio open with surgical precision:
Understanding.
Too late, but real.
Rio wanted to explain.
No, she needed to explain.
Needed to tell Agatha she hadn’t meant to snap, hadn’t meant to push her away, hadn’t meant any of it. Needed to say she wasn’t angry, wasn’t frustrated, wasn’t doing this because of her.
She wanted to say:
It’s not you.
It’s not anything you did.
I’m overwhelmed and I can’t think and everything is loud and I don’t want you to touch me because it might break me open, not because I don’t want you.
But her mouth wouldn’t form the words.
Her throat was too tight.
Her brain felt like it was misfiring.
Agatha took a step closer.
Just one.
Just a gentle, soft, careful step.
And Rio snapped.
Not because Agatha did anything wrong.
But because her nervous system interpreted the movement as a threat, too fast, too close, too unpredictable.
Her hands dropped from her ears before she even registered it. Her voice fired out of her, unfiltered, a thin wire pulled too tight.
“Don’t—”
Agatha froze.
Her eyes widened just slightly.
Her shoulders lifted a fraction.
Rio’s breath hitched.
She hadn’t meant it like that.
She hadn’t meant it at her.
But the words kept tumbling because she couldn’t stop them.
“Just stop, please, just stop—”
Her voice broke on the last word.
Not loud.
Not yelling.
But sharp enough to slice through every soft thing in the room.
The worst part was the echo inside her head:
You’re being too much.
You’re pushing her.
You’re hurting her.
You didn’t mean to, but you’re doing it anyway.
Rio squeezed her eyes shut, meaning to breathe, to reset, to salvage the moment, but the static behind her eyes roared, drowning out everything else.
She tried again, forcing out something that might resemble language.
“I can’t—”
Her throat constricted.
“I just, everything is too, too—”
She shook her head hard, as if she could dislodge the noise physically.
Agatha said her name gently.
“Rio—”
That did it.
It should have grounded her.
Should have steadied her.
Should have soothed something inside her.
Instead it felt like another demand she wasn’t capable of meeting. Another thread to hold when her hands were already full.
“Can you just—”
Her voice cracked.
Her breath hitched.
Her whole body shook.
Then the sentence finished itself in a jagged, unforgivable piece.
“Can you shut up for a minute?”
The moment the words left her mouth, Rio felt her stomach drop so violently she almost gagged.
Agatha went still.
Utterly still.
Like the temperature in the room dropped by five degrees.
Oh no.
Oh, no, no, no.
She’d never spoken to Agatha like that.
Not once.
Not in anger, not in stress, not even on her worst days.
Rio stepped back and her shoulder hit the cabinet behind her. The noise of the impact, tiny, muted, absolutely insignificant, still hit her like a slap.
Her breath stuttered.
Her hands curled into fists at her sides, not in anger but in desperate containment. She was trying so hard not to fall apart. Not to make this even worse. Not to let the overwhelm become complete destruction.
She tried to backtrack.
Tried to speak.
Failed.
“I didn’t. I wasn’t. I didn’t mean—”
But her mouth wouldn’t form anything useful.
Agatha was staring at her now, eyes wide but not shocked.
No.
Worse.
Hurt.
Rio tried to breathe, but the static in her head spiked again, the pan hissed, the music thudded, a cabinet creaked and Rio snapped a second time, voice sharp enough to cut skin, “Why do you always have to—”
Her voice broke.
She swallowed hard, trying to redirect, to stop herself, to change the trajectory of a sentence that had already betrayed them both.
“—be so loud all the time?”
Silence.
Silence with weight.
Silence with shape.
Silence that felt like a blade settling into place between them.
Agatha didn’t move right away.
Rio felt every heartbeat like a punch from the inside.
She didn’t mean it like that.
She didn’t.
She didn’t mean it as a criticism or a judgment.
She meant I am overwhelmed and I can’t regulate and I don’t know how to ask for quiet without sounding like a monster.
She meant I love your loudness, I really do, just not right now, not with my brain like this, not when every sound feels like it’s stripping the insulation off my nerves.
But that wasn’t what she said.
And it sure as hell wasn’t what Agatha heard.
Agatha inhaled slowly, staring at her like she’d just watched something precious slip from her fingers.
Rio watched her girlfriend’s chest rise and fall once—twice—like she was holding something fragile inside her ribcage that was threatening to crack open.
Then Agatha spoke.
Her voice was too calm.
Too even.
Too controlled.
“Okay,” she said quietly. “If that’s how you want to talk to me, then say it.”
Rio’s stomach dropped.
“I didn’t—” her voice failed, came back thin, shaking. “Agatha, I didn’t mean—”
Agatha held up a hand.
Not harshly.
Not dismissively.
Just enough to stop her mid-sentence.
“No,” she said. “I got it.”
Her tone wasn’t angry.
Wasn’t cold.
It was worse.
It was hurt, contained and compressed until it was sharp enough to cut her own tongue on.
Rio felt something collapse in her chest.
Not a crack.
A break.
She took a step forward anyway, because she needed to fix it, needed to take the words back, needed to explain, but Agatha stepped back in tandem, the movement precise, instinctive.
And everything inside Rio shattered.
Her breath stuttered.
Her throat closed.
Her vision blurred at the edges, not from tears but from the shock of connection severing right in front of her.
“Agatha, please—”
But the explanation wouldn’t come.
Not now.
Not while she was trembling.
Not while her thoughts were tangled and chaotic and untranslatable.
Not while every sensory input felt like sandpaper on her nerves.
She stood there, shaking, chest tight, breath hitching like someone was tugging on invisible strings in her ribs.
Agatha looked at her.
Really looked.
And Rio knew, knew she could see the overwhelm, the panic, the shape of the meltdown sitting just under her skin.
But Rio had already crossed a line.
Agatha’s voice came again, quiet as a match going out.
“I’m done being spoken to like that.”
Each syllable deliberate.
Measured.
Final.
Rio’s pulse hammered against the inside of her skull.
Her mouth opened, nothing came out.
Her hands trembled violently, fingers twitching toward her hair, her arms, anything to calm herself but afraid to stim because she looked out of control already.
She forced out the only word she could shape.
“Wait—”
Her voice cracked completely.
Agatha exhaled once, steady, controlled, heartbreakingly calm.
“No,” she said. “You wait.”
And Rio felt the ground shift under her feet.
Not physically.
Emotionally.
Foundationally.
She’d snapped.
And now the fallout was coming.
Agatha didn’t move for a moment.
Couldn’t.
Her body felt like someone had poured cold water down her spine, slow and deliberate. Every muscle locked in place, like her nerves hadn’t gotten the memo that the danger wasn’t physical, it just felt like it.
Rio’s voice, bright, warm, gentle Rio had cracked across the kitchen like a whip.
“Can you just not—”
“Can you shut up for a minute?”
“Why do you always have to be so loud?”
Agatha kept replaying the words because she couldn’t quite believe she’d heard them right.
Rio never spoke to her like that.
Not even when frustrated.
Not even when overwhelmed.
Not even when exhausted.
And that tone, that sharp, cutting tone, it didn’t belong to the woman she knew.
But it had come out of Rio’s mouth.
Directed at her.
Laced with an edge that felt… deliberate.
Even though Agatha knew, rationally, it wasn’t.
That was the problem with tone, it didn’t care about intention.
It landed where it landed.
And it had landed straight in her chest.
Agatha swallowed, slow and steady, grounding herself the way she’d been learning, one breath, one thought, one piece of reality. But the reality wasn’t soft. It didn’t cushion her. It scraped.
Rio looked wrecked.
Not angry.
Not triumphant.
Not self-righteous.
Wrecked.
Like someone had cut a wire inside her and she didn’t know how to stop sparking.
Her hands were shaking.
Her chest was rising too fast.
Her face was tight with panic.
Her eyes were wide, glassy, more animal fear than anything human.
The sight hit Agatha somewhere deep and ancient, somewhere protective.
But the words Rio had thrown hit deeper.
She wanted to help.
She wanted to reach out.
She wanted to be the grounding point Rio needed.
But she also wanted—needed—to protect herself.
Because that tone hadn’t just startled her.
It had hurt.
She stepped back without meaning to.
A tiny motion.
Barely a shift in weight.
But Rio reacted like she’d been stabbed.
And that made something twist horribly inside Agatha, love, anger, fear, instinct, apology all knotted into something she couldn’t separate yet.
Her own voice felt foreign in her throat when she said, quietly:
“Okay. If that’s how you want to talk to me, then say it.”
It wasn’t a threat.
It wasn’t a challenge.
It was a boundary.
A line drawn because her heart needed a shield.
Rio froze, eyes wide.
Her lips parted, but the words got caught somewhere in her chest, tiny, fragile, broken.
“Agatha, I didn’t mean—”
“No. I got it.”
Her voice was soft, almost too soft.
But the edge was there.
She knew it.
She couldn’t sand it down.
Because that one sentence—Why do you always have to be so loud?—cut deeper than Rio could probably imagine.
Agatha wasn’t stupid. She knew she was loud.
She knew she filled rooms.
She knew she spilled over sometimes.
Her mother had reminded her often enough as a teenager.
Her ex-girlfriends, too.
Too loud.
Too much.
Talks too fast, too big, too intense.
Too everything.
She had come to terms with it only because Rio had never treated it like something that needed fixing.
Until tonight.
And now the old wound split open in one clean, surgical line.
She tried to breathe past it.
Tried to find the calm Rio needed from her.
Tried to set aside the rising flares of hurt.
But Rio hadn’t just flinched away from her, she had snapped at her, twice.
Raised her voice.
Thrown a criticism that felt so personal it made the inside of Agatha’s ribs ache.
She didn’t want to punish Rio.
God, she didn’t.
But she couldn’t soothe someone who had just cut her open.
Not right now.
Not while her own heartbeat was skipping.
She stepped back another inch when Rio stepped forward, instinctive, protective, reactionary.
Rio looked gutted.
Agatha hated that look.
Hated that she’d caused it.
But she wasn’t the only one who’d caused pain tonight.
“Agatha, please—” Rio’s voice cracked.
Normally that sound would make Agatha melt.
Move forward.
Wrap her arms around her.
Kiss her hairline.
Say something soft.
Tonight it felt like salt in an open wound.
She forced herself to breathe through the ache and said, low:
“I’m done being spoken to like that.”
Agatha watched her pulse hammer visibly at the base of her throat, watched her mouth open and close like she was drowning on dry land. Her hands shook so violently it hurt to look at them—fingers twitching upward then stopping mid-motion, like she wanted to grab her hair or press her palms to her arms, anything to soothe herself, but didn’t dare.
Because she knew how it must look.
Because she thought looking overwhelmed made her dangerous.
Because she thought Agatha would see her meltdown as something monstrous.
The realization cut Agatha deeper than any of the words had.
Rio wasn’t just scared.
She was ashamed.
Her breath caught, thin and breaking at the edges. Then she managed, barely, “Wait—”
Her voice cracked open on the word like it hurt to push it out.
And for a fraction of a second, Agatha felt her resolve wobble.
Just a fraction.
Just enough for instinct to reach toward Rio, to want to gather her close, to whisper I’m here, I know, I know, I know—
But then she remembered the snap.
The tone.
The way Rio’s words had landed in her chest like thrown stones.
Shut up.
Always so loud.
And even though she understood the overwhelm, even though she could see it plain as day, it didn’t erase the bruise blooming under her ribs.
Her exhale came slow.
Measured.
Steady.
The kind of breath you take when your heart is shaking but your spine needs to hold firm.
She met Rio’s fractured gaze, felt the pull of sympathy and stepped around it with effort that bordered on painful.
“No,” Agatha said softly.
Firmly.
Evenly.
With a calm she had to construct piece by piece in her throat.
“You wait.”
And the moment the words left her, she saw the devastation ripple through Rio’s face like lightning cracking a surface.
But Agatha stood her ground.
Because loving someone didn’t mean letting them hurt you.
Because understanding the reason didn’t erase the impact.
Because boundaries mattered even here, especially here.
And because if she softened now, Rio would never understand how deep the cut had gone.
“Agatha—”
“Don’t,” she whispered.
Not cruel.
Not angry.
Just… tired.
Hurt.
Holding herself together by the thinnest thread.
Her pulse too fast.
Her breath too shallow.
She turned off the stove without looking at Rio.
The hiss quieted.
But it wasn’t enough.
She reached for her phone.
Her keys.
Her coat.
All in silence.
Rio watched her like someone watching their house collapse, helpless, horrified, frozen.
“Where are you going?”
Rio’s voice was a whisper wrapped in panic.
Agatha paused at the entryway.
Just paused.
She didn’t turn around yet.
Didn’t trust her face to hold steady.
Her throat worked around a dozen possible answers—
To breathe.
To calm down.
To not say something worse.
To not make this spiral further.
To not fall apart in front of you.
But none of those were what came out.
Instead she exhaled, slow and painful, and said:
“Somewhere you don’t get to speak to me like I’m a problem.”
The silence after that sentence felt heavier than the argument.
Rio recoiled.
Physically.
Like the words had hit her sternum.
Agatha closed her eyes briefly, steadying herself, then opened the door.
The hallway felt colder.
Wider.
Breathable.
She stepped out.
Closed the door, softly, always softly.
And left.
The moment the door clicked shut behind her, her legs felt wobbly, not weak, just… unsteady, like she’d stepped off a boat after too long.
Her eyes burned.
God, she hated that.
Not crying—she didn’t mind crying—it was why she was crying.
Because Rio had hurt her.
Because she felt like a glass someone had knocked over on accident.
Because she loved Rio so much it made her stupid.
Because she couldn’t fix something she didn’t understand.
She walked down the hallway on autopilot, keys cutting into her palm, breath tight in her throat, vision blurring around the edges but not enough to break yet. She hit the stairwell, not the elevator, she needed to move, needed the physicality of descending stairs to keep her body from shaking apart.
Outside, the air was cold enough to bite.
That helped.
Cold anchored her.
Cold made everything clearer.
Her feet carried her automatically toward the tram stop at the corner. She didn’t even check the schedule, she knew the evening routes by heart. A tram rumbled two blocks away, its faint metallic shriek drifting through the city breeze.
Agatha sniffed once, sharply.
Not crying.
Not yet.
She swallowed hard and pulled out her phone, thumb hovering over her recent contacts.
There:
Jen
Her friend long before Rio ever entered her life.
Someone who always answered, no matter the hour.
Agatha hit call.
It rang once.
Twice.
Three times.
Then:
“Agatha?” Jen’s voice, warm and alert. “You okay?”
Agatha exhaled shakily, breath breaking in the middle. “No.”
Jen didn’t make her repeat it. Didn’t ask questions prematurely. Didn’t push.
“Where are you?”
“By the number 3 tram.”
“Get on. Come here. I’ll make tea.”
Agatha’s jaw trembled. “Okay.”
Agatha hung up before her voice could crack further. A tram clattered around the corner in a wash of light, brakes hissing as it pulled to a stop. She climbed aboard, sitting heavily near a window, hands trembling in her lap.
The city moved past her in a blur of streetlamps and darkening sky.
And upstairs in a quiet, too-bright kitchen several neighborhoods away, Rio Vidal stood rooted to the floor, staring at the door Agatha had walked through.
Her breathing finally collapsed into a sob she tried and failed to swallow.
She hadn’t meant to hurt her.
But she had.
And now Agatha was gone.
The door clicked.
A soft, ordinary sound.
A sound Rio had heard hundreds of times, Agatha leaving for work, stepping out for groceries, grabbing a parcel downstairs, running to catch a tram she was almost definitely late for.
But this time the click landed differently.
This time it landed inside her.
A clean, sharp, echoing thing.
For a second—one long, stretched-out second—Rio didn’t move.
She stood there exactly where Agatha had left her:
hands half-lifted, breath half-taken, body frozen in some awful shape that didn’t feel like hers. Her eyes were wide and fixed on the door as if she could will it to open again.
It didn’t.
The silence that followed wasn’t silence.
It was punishment.
The music was still playing.
The pan still hissed faintly on the stove.
The apartment was still warm.
But everything that felt like home had evaporated.
Rio didn’t breathe at first, not properly. She took these shallow, broken half-sips of air that didn’t reach her lungs. Her throat clenched. Her chest squeezed tight.
Her brain was still buffering.
Not thinking.
Not processing.
Just replaying the last thirty seconds on a loop so violent it made her dizzy.
“I’m done being spoken to like that.”
“Somewhere you don’t get to speak to me like I’m a problem.”
Rio’s stomach flipped.
Her jaw trembled.
She pressed both hands flat to her thighs, grounding herself even as her pulse spiked.
She hadn’t meant—
God, she hadn’t meant any of it.
Not the words.
Not the tone.
Not the sharpness.
Not the pain she’d seen ripple across Agatha’s face.
Her breath stuttered.
She needed to move.
Needed to do something.
Anything.
Instead she took one stiff step backward and her hip knocked into the corner of the counter.
The sound was tiny.
Barely there.
Rio flinched like it was gunfire.
Her mind was unraveling in fast, unstoppable threads.
The first wave came as clarity.
The second wave came as horror.
The third wave came as grief.
She swallowed hard and felt the pressure climb up her throat like a sob trying to be born.
The groceries were still on the counter.
The yogurt was sweating.
The vegetables were half put away.
The kitchen was in mid-motion, but Agatha had left in the middle of it.
Because of her.
Rio braced a hand against the counter but her palm kept slipping.
Her fingers trembled too badly to hold still.
She tried speaking aloud sometimes hearing her own voice helped her process the shape of her emotions.
But when she opened her mouth, the sound that came out was small, broken.
“No.”
Not a protest.
Not denial.
Just devastation in a single syllable.
Her knees gave out.
Not dramatically, just softened until the floor rose to meet her. She caught herself with her hands, palms hitting tile with a thud that echoed too loud in her ears.
She folded slowly onto her knees, forehead almost touching the cabinet door, breath coming in these sharp, irregular bursts.
A meltdown without the noise.
A collapse without the screaming.
Her body shaking, her mind fracturing, her senses spiking, every part of her begging for a quiet she no longer deserved.
She clamped a hand over her mouth, as if that would stop the sound she wasn’t even making.
Her shoulders convulsed once.
Then again.
Finally, her forehead touched the cabinet door and stayed there.
She whispered, barely audible:
“I hurt her.”
Her chest seized.
“I hurt her.”
Her hands tangled in her hair, not pulling, just anchoring.
“I hurt her, I hurt her, I hurt her.”
The words were a litany.
A punishment.
A truth.
And her entire nervous system recoiled from it.
Rio wasn’t used to being the one who crossed the line.
She was the calm one.
The steady one.
The logical one.
The one who never snapped, never raised her voice, never let overload spill outward.
She managed herself ruthlessly.
Always had.
It was how she functioned.
How she survived.
How she made sure she never became too much, too sharp, too frightening, too mean.
And she had failed.
Spectacularly.
Unforgivably.
Her breath hitched, uneven and wet.
She pressed the heel of her hand to her sternum, trying to ease the ache blooming there, but the pressure only made it worse.
She couldn’t chase Agatha.
Not like this.
Not half-collapsed on the kitchen floor.
Not trembling so badly she couldn’t stand.
Even if she could get up, she didn’t know where Agatha had gone.
Didn’t know which tram.
Didn’t know which direction.
Didn’t know if arriving now, breathless, shaking, frantic, would make things worse.
She couldn’t fix it yet.
And the knowledge hollowed her out.
Her voice cracked through the quiet:
“What did I do?”
The question wasn’t rhetorical.
It was literal.
She couldn’t sort the sequence of events.
Everything was a blur of color and noise and panic.
But she knew the conclusion.
Agatha left because of her words.
Her tone.
Her volume.
Her loss of control.
She pressed her forehead harder against the cabinet, grounding herself against the cool wood.
Her breath trembled.
She needed the steps.
A sequence.
A structure.
Something to stop her mind from spinning.
Step one: calm your body.
But her body felt like a live wire.
Step two: breathe steadily.
Her breath refused obedience.
Step three: self-assess.
She tried. Failed. Tried again.
Her fingers curled against the tile.
Her breath shuddered.
Her vision blurred.
“I messed up,” she whispered.
Finally.
The truth in plain language.
Her shoulders shook—once, twice—as the weight of it landed fully.
She whispered it again, quieter.
“I messed up.”
Then a third time, barely audible.
“And she left.”
The apartment wasn’t quiet anymore.
It was empty.
The difference cut her open.
Rio lifted her head slowly, like her neck barely belonged to her, and looked around their home, the home they’d built together, the one that usually felt warm, anchoring, steady.
Tonight it felt unbalanced.
Tilted.
The pan on the stove hissed faintly.
The music still played a song she couldn’t process.
The hallway light flickered.
Every detail stabbed her senses.
She forced herself upright.
Slowly.
Shakily.
Hands braced on the counter until the tremors eased enough.
The cold reality settled then, heavy and unavoidable:
She couldn’t undo this.
She couldn’t rewind.
She couldn’t pretend she hadn’t snapped.
She couldn’t pretend Agatha hadn’t heard every razor edge of her voice.
But she could do one thing.
She could make sure that when Agatha came home—if she came home—the apartment was safe, calm, regulated, and ready for an apology large enough to fill the space between them.
Not a quick “I’m sorry.”
Not a hurried explanation.
But real accountability.
The kind that came from the bones.
Rio turned off the music.
Turned off the lights one by one until the apartment was dim, soft, quiet.
Safe.
She leaned back against the counter in the dark, hands trembling, breath uneven.
The kitchen clock ticked once, sharply.
Rio flinched.
Then she whispered into the stillness:
“I don’t know how to get her back.”
Her voice cracked.
Her lungs twisted.
Her eyes burned.
“But I will.”
She said it again, stronger.
“I will.”
The apartment stayed silent.
Heavy.
Waiting.
And Rio,alone, overwhelmed, and wrecked by her own actions, let her head drop back against the cabinet and finally, silently, cried.