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Not many people in Adrian’s life are particularly nice to him.
Even his best friends are mean. Not in a cruel way. It’s the way the 11th Street Kids are, the way they’ve been since the beginning. Jabs back and forth, sometimes playful, sometimes with a little edge, but never truly vicious. Maybe it’s not the healthiest way to bond or build a friendship, but it works for them. They love each other, in their strange, sharp ways.
He’s used to Chris calling him an idiot. He’s used to parsing out John’s sarcastic comments. He’s used to the barbed words that Harcourt throws his way. He’s used to Adebayo’s exasperation, however fond.
But when Checkmate hires a new medic, and Adrian meets you—it throws him off. Because you don’t say anything mean to him. You’re nice, actually. Sweet. It makes him a little suspicious. He keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop.
It’s not often he needs help, anyways. You’re a field medic. Adrian, usually, can just walk things off. A shallow stab wound is fixed by a two hour nap. He’s been resetting his own dislocated joints for years. For quite a while, he manages to scrape by without you. He’s been downplaying his injuries for months, whether he’s been trying to avoid you or impress you, he’s not sure. (Probably avoid you, because you make him nervous.)
Until one day, he can’t. He could deal with the bullet wound on his own if it went clean through his shoulder, go home and sleep it off, but it didn’t—it’s still lodged somewhere in the muscle of his bicep when he, Chris, and Economos make it back to the Checkmate building. And he can’t reach it, so someone needs to dig it out.
His two best friends are laughing at him. He tries not to be pissy about it. He’s used to their bullshit.
“Come on dude. That guy was smaller than Judomaster! You really let him get a shot in?” Economos says, loud enough for the entire office to hear.
“Go see the doctor,” Chris teases, pushing Adrian in the direction of your tiny office, an infirmary outfitted with medical equipment. “Maybe you’ll get a lollipop out of it.”
“Fuck off!” Adrian snaps, but he’s grumpy, because John is right. He should’ve seen it coming, should have dodged the bullet from that wimpy asshole. The guy wasn’t even fucking meta, for god’s sake—and now he’s got this burning bullet buried in his shoulder, and it hurts like a motherfucker. “Fuck. Goddamnit.”
He yanks off his mask as he stomps into your office and tosses it onto a table. You look up with surprise, a bit startled, but you jump up when Adrian starts to reach for the wound, stopping him with two gentle hands.
“Hey! Don’t touch it, let me,” you say, voice soft, already reaching for supplies. “Let’s take a look at you.”
You pry carefully at his shoulder armor to pull it loose, and he exhales sharply as it jostles his shoulder, irritating the wound.
“Fuck,” he hisses.
“I’m sorry,” you say calmly. “Gotta see it if I’m gonna fix it, sweetheart.”
Adrian feels himself flush hot at the pet name, with embarrassment and anger, and he’s ready to bite back with a scathing remark, but when he looks at your face—your brow furrowed with concentration, your mouth turned into a focused frown. You’re not making fun of him. You’re just—being kind. And he doesn’t know what to do with that. Whatever biting words he was going to say die on his tongue in an instant. He knows how to respond to the sharp jabs from his friends, but your low voice and tender touch leave him speechless.
“Bullet’s still in there, huh?” you say sympathetically, cleaning out the wound carefully. You reach for your sanitized tweezers. “Looks like it’s still in one piece, at least. You want something for the pain, or do you want me to just go for it, get it over with?”
“Just go for it,” Adrian grumbles. He’s had worse.
He stays quiet, sits with gritted teeth and watches you as you dig the bullet out of his muscle, sanitize the gaping hole left behind, and stitch it up, bandaging it with care. He doesn’t even whine about it dramatically like he usually does, even though it fucking hurts. He focuses instead on the touch of your fingertips, the little dip between your eyebrows where they’re furrowed with concentration.
It’s nice, he realizes, not having to do this by himself. It hurts less, even—he’s got plenty of practice treating his own wounds, but your well-trained hands work with experienced ease. When you’re finished, you tap lightly on his chest to signal that you’re finished.
“Doing okay?” you ask, and he nods wordlessly, looking at you with wide eyes. “Are you hurt anywhere else?”
“No,” he says, his voice cracking. He clears his throat, cheeks flushing. “Um. Thank you.”
“Just doing my job,” you smile. “My door is open, Adrian. I know you like to take care of things yourself, but I’m here, any time you need me.”
Adrian smiles too, but it’s a little wobbly. He feels like his world has been thrown out of whack. Because you’ve shown him a different kind of friendship, something softer than he’s used to.
He likes it. He likes it a lot.
Adrian starts spending more time with you after that. He’d been avoiding you, he admits to himself, but now he’s realizing he didn’t need to. He’s not great with new people. But you’re different. No one has ever treated him the way you do, with such unrelenting kindness.
He makes regular pit stops in your office when he returns from missions now, whether he needs something as simple as a band-aid or as serious as stitches to hold him together through the rest of the day before he can make it home to sleep. If he was avoiding you before, he does the opposite now, and people are starting to notice.
“Dude, you gotta stop staring,” Chris says one day in the office, watching Adrian’s eyes locked on you through your open office door. “You’re being weird.”
Adrian does not stop staring. “She’s so nice. Maybe I should get shot more often.”
“That’s the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard,” Chris says. “And you say dumb shit, like, every day.”
“See, this is what I mean. She would never say that to me.”
He keeps thinking, too, about the touch of your fingers on his skin. A sensation he normally hates so much, but god, he wants it again. He wants more of it, all the time. It’s the only time he ever feels his brain really go quiet. When you’re touching him.
So, he finds every tiny excuse to go see you.
“I got a paper cut earlier,” he says, a tad overdramatically. “It might be infected. I could die. Sepsis is the number one quiet killer, they say.”
“Is that what they say?”
“You’re the medical professional,” Adrian says. “You tell me.”
You reach for his hand, bringing it up to your face and squinting. “Oh, yeah, I see it. That’s a bad one, sweetheart. Might need to amputate.” He grins as you clean it up and wrap a band-aid around it. “All better.”
He likes it when you baby him. You fuss over him like no one else ever has, even his own family—every bump and scratch is worthy of your attention, and you never, ever turn him away or call him annoying or tell him to fuck off or call him an idiot.
He just wants someone to take care of him, he realizes. And you don’t seem to mind the way he leans into your touch, in those quiet moments after missions, when he’s bruised and bleeding and more than a little vulnerable.
He feels like you really see him, not the facade he puts on. When the mask comes off, and he’s not the suave masked Vigilante anymore, but he’s also not dorky Adrian. He’s just him, and that’s all he has to be, and no matter what you’ll be gentle and calm and caring.
One day, he drops by for you to stitch up a knife wound on his forearm, pleased that it stretches almost the entire length of his arm because it means he gets to hang out with you for even longer. Every pinch of the suture needle in his skin is worth it for the chance to crack stupid jokes and make you laugh while you work, and the feeling of pride swelling in his chest, that he’s the one to make you smile like that, is far more potent than the stinging of the wound.
Harcourt pokes her head in to ask you a question when you’re almost done. “Hey, on this report—” She pauses and cocks her head, looking at Adrian strangely. “Chase, do you even really need to get stitched up? With your healing factor? Can’t you just sleep it off?”
“Healing factor?” you ask, confused, and Adrian freezes. He hasn’t mentioned it to you.
“Um,” he says.
“He heals in his sleep,” Harcourt says. “You never thought that might be pertinent information for the medic to know, Chase?”
“Um,” he says again.
Harcourt rolls her eyes. “Whatever. Weirdo. You want to sit here and get stabbed by a needle repeatedly and unnecessarily, be my guest. I’ve got work to do. Come see me when you’re done, I have a question about your field report.”
The room is silent when she leaves.
“Should I even finish these?” you ask, gesturing to the half-done stitches on his forearm with a raised eyebrow. “Or will you be fine without them?”
“I’ll need them until I go to sleep tonight,” Adrian admits. “I do have to make sure I’m cleaned up and disinfected before I fall asleep. But after that, I’ll probably be okay.”
Your brow furrows, and you look at him strangely, but you don’t call him a weirdo like Harcourt or dumb like Chris. You’re just curious, he thinks, and a bit confused. But you finish up the stitches quietly, and Adrian tries to ignore the way his heart threatens to pound out of his chest as he looks down at you, bent over his arm, touching him so delicately.
“You’re good to go, Adrian,” you say softly when you’re finished.
“I’m sorry,” he says, because he feels—weirdly guilty? “I don’t—I don’t want you to think I’ve been, I don’t know, wasting your time—”
“You’re not a waste of time,” you say quickly. “You could never be a waste of time.”
He offers you a tiny smile. “Thank you.”
Over the next few months, Adrian starts to look forward to his missions not because he gets the chance to kill more people, but because he gets the chance to pull risky stunts that might get him shot or stabbed or concussed or otherwise injured.
He never does those things on purpose. He’s not that crazy. But maybe he’s a little bit insane, because he’d be lying to himself if he didn’t hope that some asshole would dislocate his elbow or slice him across the chest, because then he might have a good excuse for you to touch him again, the way he’s been dreaming about.
It finally happens on a late-night drug bust. Someone whacks him in the face with the butt of a gun, and he nearly blacks out. On the verge of unconsciousness, the thing that keeps him awake is the spike of adrenaline that comes from the excitement that he gets to go see you after this.
He’s practically beaming when he walks into your office, a bruise forming around a cut at his temple, the skin at his cheekbone scraped and red, his lip split. Your jaw drops when you see him.
“What the fuck happened to you?” you ask frantically, jumping out of your seat and moving him over to a chair. He smiles when your hands cup his cheeks, turning his head from side to side as you assess him. His widening smile makes his lip split even more, but he doesn’t care.
“Got pistol-whipped,” he says brightly. You frown.
His eyes flutter shut when you lean in close, your warm breath fanning over his cheeks as you swipe an alcohol-soaked cotton pad over the broken skin at his temple. His head is throbbing. But it’s worth it, he thinks, as you stand between his thighs and he takes a deep breath and inhales the scent of you. He’d endure pain worse than this for the chance to be close to you, for even a little while.
“You know, I really don’t like it when you come back from missions covered in blood, Adrian,” you tell him matter-of-factly.
“You don’t?”
“No! I would very much prefer it if you returned to the office without a head wound,” you say. “I would like it if you never got injured at all, actually.”
“But then I wouldn’t have an excuse to come see you,” he says, confused.
“You don’t need an excuse to come see me, silly. I always want to see you,” you laugh. His breath catches in his throat.
“You mean I didn’t have to let that guy get in a good hit so I had a reason to talk to you tonight?”
“No,” you say. “Are you telling me you let some bad guy whack you in the face? Why the hell would you do that? Take your glasses off for me.”
He pouts. “But then you’ll get blurry,” he complains. “And I like looking at you.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Uh huh. I think you might be concussed.”
“Not concussed,” he says firmly, and with a burst of bravery, he continues, “You’re just pretty. And nice to me.”
You go all shy at his words as you clean up his sweaty, bleeding forehead and place a bandage at his temple. “Forgive me if I check anyway.”
Adrian obediently walks through the concussion protocol with you while you disinfect the scratch on his cheek and treat his split lip, and he passes with flying colors.
“Huh,” you say. “You really aren’t concussed.”
“Told ya.”
“Well. You’re all done, then,” you say, smiling softly. Adrian sighs as your hands fall away from his face, wishing they would linger there longer, wanting to reach up and hold your hands against his cheeks. “Does it hurt?”
He shakes his head. “Nope.”
“So no need for me to kiss it better?”
Adrian’s mouth falls open, because—since when is that an option? “I—wh—no. Wait. It hurts so much. I was confused, you know, head wounds and all. Maybe I do have a concussion, you should check again—”
He falls silent when you press your lips, so soft, to the top of his forehead, right next to the bandage. It sets his heart racing. Then you move down and kiss his cheek. He inhales a shaky breath, and waits, but you just look at him.
“You forgot one,” Adrian says, trying not to sound as desperate for it as he feels. He taps his split lip with a gloved finger. His heart beats into overdrive as you lean in, and he feels your soft lips press against the corner of the uninjured side of his mouth.
“Kiss me for real tomorrow,” you whisper when you pull away. “When you’re not actively bleeding.”
Adrian lets out a whine, because you are so, so, close to where he wants you, and he really could not give less of a fuck if he’s bleeding all over the place, he just wants to kiss you now.
“Well. Head injuries are—finnicky, aren’t they?” he says nervously. “You should really—take me home. Keep an eye on me.”
You hesitate, but when he reaches out and wraps his arms around your waist, tugging you in closer to him—your resolve melts. It’s the first time he has touched you, really shown you that he wants you. You bite your lip and let your fingers card through his hair. He hums. He likes the way it feels.
“I’ve got some paperwork I was in the middle of,” you say. You nod toward the cot in the corner of your office. “Why don’t you take a nap while I finish up?”
“And when I wake up, and my body has fixed itself, you’ll let me kiss you for real?”
You smile. “Yeah.”
Adrian pushes you gently out of the way, nodding eagerly. “I need to go to sleep right now.”
He makes a beeline for the cot in the corner and lays down instantly, closing his eyes and crossing his arms over his chest. You laugh, and he blinks one eye open to look at you.
“What? The sooner I fall asleep, the sooner I get to kiss you.”
“You’re ridiculous.”
“I’m impatient.” He shuffles around on the cot, fidgeting, trying to get comfortable.
“No shit.”
“Sit with me,” he pouts, and you look at his sad, beat-up face, sigh, and grab your laptop.
You sit next to him, prop your computer on your knees, and get to work. Adrian plops himself down into your lap like it’s the safest place he could ever lay his head, and your heart swells, even as you roll your eyes, because he’s like a cat, craving attention while you’re trying to work.
You indulge him anyway, one of your hands running through his hair as he drifts off to sleep, though it takes a while because he’s so wired with excitement—with the knowledge that you want him the way he’s been wanting you all this time.
When he wakes up an hour or two later, your computer is set aside. You’re looking down at him, one hand on his face, your thumb tracing over the smooth, healed over skin of his lower lip. He smiles.
“It’s kind of crazy to watch,” you say thoughtfully. “It’s like it never even happened. Are you feeling better?”
“No,” he breathes, and you frown, a little worried, before he says, “I didn’t get my kiss yet.”
Then he tugs you down to where he wants you, lips brushing against yours. It’s soft, and nice, and everything he thought it would be. When you pull back and smile at him, he beams.
“Yeah. That’s better.”