Archive of Our Own

Ren wouldn’t say he didn’t expect it. That would be a lie, and Ren had always prided himself on at least being honest with himself, even when the truth sat heavy and sour in his chest. No, he expected it. He always did. It was only ever a matter of time.

It always happened in the end.

At first, people were warm. Bright and interested. They leaned in when he spoke, laughed too loud at his jokes, reached for him like he was something worth holding onto. But warmth, he had learned, was temporary. Interest had a shelf life. And Ren.. well, Ren spoiled quickly.

Eventually, the messages slowed. The laughter dulled. Conversations that once stretched for hours shrank into fragments, into pauses, into silence. People didn’t leave all at once. That would have been easier. Instead, they faded. Piece by piece, like a photograph left too long in the sun.

Doc wasn’t different.

Ren had hoped he would be. God, he had hoped.

At first, Doc had been everything: steady where Ren was frantic, patient where he spiralled, grounding in a way that made the world feel less like it was constantly tipping sideways. Loving him had felt easy. Natural. Safe, even.

But safety, it turned out, didn’t mean permanence.

Now, the evidence sat in Ren’s hands every day in the form of a dimly lit phone screen. Messages that used to be paragraphs: rambling, affectionate, filled with half-finished thoughts and inside jokes.. had been reduced to a handful of words.

“Busy. Talk later.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.”

Each one felt like something being scraped away. Even when they did talk, really talk, it felt… hollow. Like speaking into a room that looked full but echoed when you raised your voice. Doc responded, but there was no weight behind it. No pull. No reaching back.

Ren found himself rereading conversations, scrolling up and up and up, back into older days where Doc’s words had been warmer, fuller. Back when “I love you” wasn’t something that felt implied, but something that was said frequently and casually, without hesitation.

Now it felt like something fragile. Something unspoken because maybe saying it out loud would expose how thin it had become.

Ren understood.

That was the worst part.

He understood how exhausting he could be. How his mind ran too fast, how he overthought everything, how he clung too tightly to small changes and turned them into something catastrophic. He knew how draining that could feel, being on the receiving end of it. He knew because he lived with it every second of every day.

So of course Doc would get tired. Of course he would pull back. Of course he would start building a life that didn’t revolve so heavily around Ren’s orbit.

It made sense.

It just… hurt.

The kind of hurt that didn’t come sharp and sudden, but slow and suffocating. Like water filling lungs one inch at a time. Like being dragged under with something heavy chained to your ankle, the surface visible but unreachable.

Ren would tell himself, over and over, that understanding should make it easier but

it didn’t. It only seemed to make it feel even worse to the point he couldn't physically explain how bad it hurt in words without getting stupidly teary-eyed and emotional.

That morning had come the way it always did: quiet, grey, and far too early.

Ren woke slowly, consciousness dragging itself to the surface in uneven pieces. The first thing he noticed was the cold. The bed beside him was empty. Not just empty, cold in a way that told him Doc had been gone for hours. The sheets were smooth, the indent of his weight long since gone, like he had never been there at all. Ren’s hand drifted across the space anyway, fingers pressing into fabric that held no warmth, no trace.

His chest tightened.

He stared at the ceiling for a long moment, blinking against the dull ache behind his eyes. Sleep clung to him, heavy and unwanted, but beneath it was something worse, a bone-deep exhaustion that had nothing to do with rest.

What was the point of getting up?

The thought came uninvited, settling in his mind like it belonged there. There was nothing waiting for him. No message blinking on his phone. No soft murmur of Doc moving around the apartment. No reason to rush, or even to move at all. And yet, beneath all of that, there was still that instinct.

Find him.

Apologise.

The memory from the night before surfaced, unwelcome and sharp. Doc had wanted him. Not in the casual, passing way that had become normal over the past few months, but genuinely. He had wanted to have sex with him for the first time in months. There had been something different in the way he touched Ren’s arm, in the way his voice had softened, in the way he had lingered close.

It had felt like an opening. A chance.

And.. Ren had ruined it.

Of course he had.

He’d been tired. That was the simple explanation. Exhausted from a long day, from his own thoughts, from everything that seemed to pile up endlessly in his head. They had laid down together, Doc’s hand resting warm and solid against his side, and Ren had told himself, just for a moment, just to close his eyes for a second—

And.. he had fallen asleep.

Just like that.

He remembered waking briefly sometime in the night, disoriented, reaching out and finding empty space. He hadn’t even had the energy to get up then, to go find Doc, to fix it. He had just rolled over, guilt settling in his chest even as sleep dragged him back under.

Now, in the harsh light of morning, it felt ten times worse.

Months.

It had been months since Doc had shown that kind of interest. Months of distance, of quiet, of something unspoken building between them. And when the opportunity had finally come, when Doc had finally reached for him again, Ren had done the one thing that would confirm every fear he already had.

He wasn’t worth the effort.

A bitter laugh caught in Ren’s throat, though no sound came out.

Of course Doc wouldn’t try again after that.

Why would he?

Ren dragged a hand down his face, pressing his palms into his eyes until stars burst behind his lids. His chest felt tight, like something inside him was slowly collapsing in on itself.

“I should’ve stayed awake,” he muttered, voice rough and barely audible.

It wasn’t just about last night. It never was. That was just the latest crack in something that had already been splintering for a long time.

He sat up slowly, the movement heavy, like he was pulling himself through water. The room felt too quiet. Too still. Even the air seemed stagnant, like it hadn’t been disturbed since Doc had left.

His phone sat on the nightstand.

Ren stared at it.

For a moment, he didn’t move. Just looked. As if waiting for it to light up on its own, for a message to appear that would make everything feel less… hollow.

It didn’t. 

Of course it didn’t.

He reached for it anyway, fingers hesitant, and unlocked the screen.

Nothing.

No missed calls. No messages. Just the same blank space he’d grown used to.

Ren swallowed hard, his thumb hovering over Doc’s name in their message thread. The last message sat there, hours old.

“Heading out early. Didn’t want to wake you.”

That was it.

No “love you.” No “see you later.” Just a statement. Informative. Detached.

Ren’s chest ached. He started typing.

“Hey. I’m sorry about last night.”

He paused, staring at the words. They looked small. Insufficient. Like trying to patch a broken dam with a strip of tape.

He deleted it.

Started again.

“I didn’t mean to fall asleep. I know it’s been a while and I just—”

Deleted.

His hands trembled slightly, frustration building in his chest.

What was he even trying to say?

Sorry I’m like this?

Sorry I ruin everything?

Sorry you got stuck with me?

None of it felt right. None of it felt like it would fix anything. Because the problem wasn’t just last night.

The problem was him.

Ren exhaled slowly, shoulders slumping as he let the phone fall back onto the bed beside him. It bounced once against the mattress, then went still.

The silence pressed in around him.

He swung his legs over the side of the bed, feet hitting the floor with a soft thud. The cold seeped into him immediately, grounding in a way that was almost unpleasant.

Still, he stood.

Because what else was he supposed to do?

Lying there wouldn’t fix anything. Waiting wouldn’t fix anything. Nothing he did ever seemed to fix anything, but staying still felt worse.

The apartment was quiet as he stepped out of the bedroom. Too quiet. The kind of quiet that made every small sound feel amplified: the creak of the floor beneath his feet, the faint hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen, the distant noise of traffic filtering in through the windows.

There were signs of Doc, of course.

A mug left in the sink. A jacket draped over the back of a chair. Small, mundane reminders that he still existed in this space, that he hadn’t just… disappeared.

But none of it felt like presence. It felt like absence. Because it was absence, a bone deep agonising sense of absence and loneliness that pressed in around him like a noose.

Ren moved through the space slowly, like he was walking through something fragile, something that might shatter if he moved too quickly. He stopped in the kitchen, staring at the mug. It was such a small thing. Ordinary and insignificant. And yet it made his chest tighten all over again.

Because Doc had been here.

He had been right here, moving through this same space, living his life, existing, just… without Ren.

Ren reached out, fingers brushing the rim of the mug. It was cold.

Of course it was.

Everything was.

He let his hand fall back to his side, jaw tightening.

“I get it,” he murmured under his breath, though there was no one there to hear it. “I do.”

And he meant it.

He understood distance. He understood growing apart. He understood how easy it was to slip into separate lives even when you shared the same space, the same bed, the same name.

Understanding didn’t stop the ache.

Didn’t stop the way his chest felt hollowed out, like something vital had been carved away and nothing had filled the space it left behind. It didn’t stop the quiet, persistent thought that had been growing louder with each passing day.

That maybe this was already over.

That maybe he was the only one still trying to hold onto something that had already slipped through his fingers.

Ren leaned back against the counter, closing his eyes. For a moment, he let himself imagine something different. Doc walking back through the door. Doc looking at him the way he used to. Doc reaching for him.. not out of habit, not out of obligation, but because he wanted to.

The image felt so vivid it almost hurt.

And then it faded.

Because reality didn’t bend that way.

Reality was quiet mornings and empty beds. Short messages and long silences. Missed chances and unspoken words. Reality was standing alone in a kitchen that didn’t feel like home anymore, holding onto something that was slowly slipping away no matter how tightly he tried to grasp it.

Ren opened his eyes, staring at nothing. “I’ll fix it,” he whispered, though the words felt fragile, uncertain.

He didn’t know how.

He didn’t know if it was even possible.

But the alternative: the idea of letting it go, of confirming every fear he had ever had about himself, felt unbearable.

So he clung to it. Even as it dragged him under.

Making coffee felt like a chore.

It hadn’t always. There had been a time where the act itself carried weight, comfort, even. The quiet ritual of it. The soft click of the kettle, the low hum as it heated, the smell of coffee blooming rich and bitter in the air. It used to feel like a beginning.

Now it felt like maintenance. Like pretending.

Ren moved through the motions anyway, because not doing it felt worse somehow. Like skipping it would confirm something he wasn’t ready to say out loud, that things weren’t normal, that they hadn’t been for a long time.

The kitchen light was too bright for how early it was, casting everything in a flat, unforgiving glare. The mug he’d grabbed was one of theirs, of course it was. Everything here was theirs. Shared space. Shared life. Shared… something.

He didn’t even remember whose mug it had originally been.

The kettle clicked as it finished, a sharp, hollow sound that echoed more than it should have in the quiet apartment. Ren picked it up, the heat seeping through the handle into his palm, grounding in a way that almost hurt.

He poured.

The stream of water hit the coffee grounds with a soft hiss, dark liquid blooming outward, swirling into something that should have been comforting. Instead, the smell turned his stomach slightly.

He didn’t even want it.

That was the stupidest part.

He knew, even as he stood there, that he probably wouldn’t drink it. It would sit on the counter or the table, slowly cooling, the surface forming that thin, oily film he hated. Eventually, hours from now, he’d dump it down the sink without taking more than a token sip.

But he made it anyway.

Because it was routine. Because it was something. Because it gave him an excuse.

Ren stared down at the mug as it filled, watching the liquid rise closer and closer to the rim. His grip tightened slightly on the kettle, his thoughts drifting, spiralling like they always did.

He could message Doc. Something small. Casual. Normal.

“Hey, we’re almost out of coffee.”

Or—

“Can you grab more milk on your way back?”

Something like that. Something harmless. Something that wouldn’t sound like what it really was: please talk to me.*

The water crept higher, nearing the edge of the mug, trembling with surface tension.

Ren didn’t notice at first.

His mind had already moved ahead, playing out the conversation like a script he’d memorised. Doc would respond eventually. Not immediately, never immediately anymore, but eventually.

“What kind?”

Short and efficient.

Ren would type back, thumbs hovering for a moment before settling on the same answer he always gave.

“Whatever non-dairy they have is fine.”

Because it was. Because it wasn’t worth being specific.

Because—

Because even when he used to be specific, it hadn’t always mattered.

The kettle tipped a fraction more. The water lapped at the edge, a trembling dome forming, threatening to spill over. Ren blinked, snapping back to the present just in time. He jerked the kettle back, heart stuttering as a drop sloshed over the side, splashing against the counter.

“Shit—”

His breath came out sharp and uneven. For a second, he just stood there, staring at the nearly overflowing mug like it had personally betrayed him.

Then, slowly, he set the kettle down.

His hands weren’t steady. They hadn’t been steady in a while, if he was being honest. Ren exhaled, long and shaky, dragging a hand down his face before reaching for the mug again. He lifted it, hesitating for just a second before tipping it toward the sink.

A dark stream poured out, splashing against the metal basin. He didn’t measure it. Didn’t think about it. Just dumped enough to make room.

An inch. Maybe a little more.

Enough.

He set the mug back down, the liquid inside sloshing faintly. The carton of dairy-free milk sat in the fridge door. He grabbed it, fingers brushing against the cheap, flimsy packaging.

Of course it was the cheap one. It always was now.

Ren unscrewed the cap, the plastic creaking faintly, and poured. The milk hit the coffee in a pale swirl, spreading out in cloudy tendrils that dissolved into the dark. It should have looked calming. Mesmerising, even.

Instead, it just made something in his chest tighten because he remembered when it hadn’t been like this. He remembered when Doc used to come home with the good brands. The ones Ren actually liked. The ones that didn’t taste watered down or leave that strange aftertaste coating his tongue.

Doc used to remember which ones those were. Used to grab them without asking. Used to show up with small things like that, unprompted, because he knew.

Because he cared.

Ren’s grip tightened slightly on the carton before he set it down a little harder than intended. 

The sound echoed.

He stared at the coffee.

It looked normal.

That was the thing. From the outside, everything looked normal. A mug of coffee on a kitchen counter. A quiet morning. A shared apartment.

Nothing about it screamed something is wrong. 

But Ren felt it.

In the way the air sat too heavy in his lungs. In the way his chest ached over something as stupid as milk.

God, it was stupid. It was so fucking stupid. It was just milk. Just brands. Prices. Convenience. It shouldn’t matter and yet it did because it wasn’t about the milk. It was about the pattern. About the slow shift from effort to… whatever this was.

From noticing to not bothering. From caring in small, quiet ways to doing the bare minimum.

And Ren noticed.

Of course he did.

He always noticed.

Even when he didn’t want to.

“I’m not upset,” he muttered under his breath, the words hollow even to his own ears. “I’m not.. I’m not.”

But the lie didn’t stick. Because something inside him twisted anyway, sharp and uncomfortable. Not anger. Not really. Something closer to hurt. To disappointment. To that quiet, gnawing feeling of being… less important than he used to be and immediately, just as quickly, came the backlash.

It’s your fault.

The thought hit hard, sudden and familiar.

Of course it is. Why wouldn’t it be?

Ren let out a humourless breath, shoulders slumping as he leaned back against the counter.

He’d done this before.

Not this exact situation, not this exact relationship, but the pattern. He knew the pattern. He got too attached. Too intense. Too much.

Too emotional.

Too unstable.

Too clingy.

Too everything.

And people, no matter how patient, no matter how understanding, they always reached a point where it became too heavy to carry. So they pulled back. Of course they did. Anyone would.

Ren squeezed his eyes shut, jaw tightening as his thoughts spiralled faster, sharper. 

He pushed.

That was the problem.

He pushed without realising it, clinging too tightly when he felt distance creeping in, overanalysing every small shift until it became something bigger, something suffocating.

And then.. Then he’d panic.

And in that panic, he’d start to pull away himself. Self-sabotage dressed up as self-preservation. Creating distance before it could be forced on him.

And by the time he realised what he was doing?

It was already too late.

It had already worked.

He had already ruined it.

A harsh, broken sound escaped him, somewhere between a laugh and a choke. “Of course,” he whispered, voice rough. “Of course it’s me.”

It always was.

Every failed friendship.

Every relationship that started bright and ended in quiet distance.

Every person who had once cared and then… didn’t.

There was only one constant in all of it.

Him.

Ren’s chest tightened painfully, like something was squeezing his ribs from the inside. It hurt. God, it hurt. Not clean, not sharp but so goddamn messy. Burning. Like something hot and jagged lodged beneath his sternum, impossible to ignore, impossible to remove.

His hands curled slightly against the counter, nails pressing into the surface. “It’s my fault,” he said, a little louder this time, like saying it out loud would make it settle. Make it stop clawing at him from the inside. “It’s always my fault.”

The words tasted bitter. But they felt true. Because what other explanation was there? Doc hadn’t changed for no reason. People didn’t just wake up one day and decide to care less. Something had pushed him there. Something had worn him down and Ren knew, deep down, exactly what that something was.

Him.

His thoughts. His moods. His need for reassurance. His inability to just let things be.

He ruined things.

That was the pattern.

That was the truth.

Ren sucked in a sharp breath, his chest stuttering as he reached for the mug again. The ceramic felt too hot against his skin, grounding him just enough to keep him from completely unravelling.

He brought it to his lips.

Hesitated.

Then took a sip.

It tasted wrong. Thin. Slightly bitter in a way that lingered unpleasantly at the back of his tongue. Of course it did. He swallowed anyway, forcing it down, his throat tightening slightly as he set the mug back down with a soft clink.

His reflection stared back at him faintly in the dark surface of the coffee, distorted and wavering.

He barely recognised it.

“Why am I like this?” he breathed. The question hung in the air, unanswered because there wasn’t an answer. Not one that fixed anything. Not one that made it stop. Ren grabbed the kettle again, almost without thinking, tipping it toward the mug to top it off—

And stopped.

The water hovered just above the rim. For a split second, he didn’t move. Didn’t breathe. Then, he lowered it slowly, setting it back down with careful precision.

His hands were shaking. Not violently and not uncontrollably but just enough to notice. Just enough to remind him. He let out a long, unsteady exhale, shoulders sagging as the tension drained out of him in uneven waves.

“God,” he muttered, voice cracking slightly. “I’m such a fuck-up.”

The words came easier than anything else. Too easy. They slipped out like something well-practiced, something ingrained.

Because they were.

Because he’d been telling himself the same thing, in different words, for years and every time something like this happened; every shift, every crack, every moment of distance, it just reinforced it.

Proof.

That he was the problem.

That he always had been.

Ren braced his hands against the counter, head dipping forward as his breathing grew uneven again. It burned. All of it. The thoughts. The guilt. The quiet, creeping certainty that he had already lost something he didn’t know how to fix. It burned like hot iron pressed against his ribs, searing and relentless.

And the worst part, the absolute worst part, was that he didn’t know how to stop it.

Didn’t know how to be different.

Didn’t know how to fix himself before he ruined this completely, the same way he had ruined everything else.

His fingers curled tighter against the edge of the counter, knuckles whitening. “Just… be normal,” he whispered, the plea soft, desperate. “Why can’t I just be normal?”

The kitchen didn’t answer. The coffee sat untouched and the silence stretched on, thick and suffocating, pressing in from all sides as Ren stood there, trapped inside his own head, with no way out.

He carried the mug to the living room like it weighed more than it should have.

Not because the ceramic was heavy, not because the coffee inside was particularly full, but because everything in his hands lately seemed to tremble with the weight of something else. Something invisible. Something that sat in his ribs and in the hollow of his throat and made even the simplest motion feel like it had to be negotiated with, bargained for and survived.

The living room waited for him in the same stale hush it always did.

The curtains were half-drawn, letting in a pale, weak strip of morning light that lay across the floorboards like something tired of existing. Dust floated through it in slow, lazy drift, little pieces of the room suspended in the air as if even they had forgotten how to land. The sofa was rumpled from the night before, one throw blanket twisted over the armrest, one cushion slightly crooked, evidence of bodies that had been there and now weren’t. Evidence of a life that had once felt full enough to trip over.

Ren stepped forward, the soles of his feet dragging a little against the floor. He placed the mug onto the coffee table with more care than was necessary, and still, because the mug was too full and his hand was not quite steady and the table was not quite level, a dark splash of coffee tipped over the rim.

It always did that.

Always the same angle. Always the same direction. A small spill, just enough to run in a thin, staining crescent over the wood before he could catch it with a sleeve or a paper towel or the edge of his hand. It sank into the grain like the table had been waiting for it. Like it knew him. Like it recognised the ritual before he did.

Ren stared at the stain.

There it was again.

That little dark mark on the table that looked insignificant unless you were the one who had to look at it every day. The kind of small, stupid thing that shouldn’t have meant anything and yet somehow became proof of the same old pattern. The same morning. The same drink he didn’t want. The same almost-spill. The same half-hearted attempt at normalcy that always ended with him staring at the evidence of his own failure on a piece of furniture.

It was never a disaster. That was almost worse.

If it had been a disaster, maybe it would have felt like something he could point to. If it had shattered, if it had spilled everywhere, if it had soaked the rug or broken the mug or left a mess he couldn’t ignore, then maybe there would have been a shape to the damage. A visible wound. A clear problem.

Instead it was always this.

A stain the size of a coin. A little slip. A bruise in the wood. A reminder.

Ren stood there looking at it and felt the thought arrive before he could stop it, heavy and immediate and familiar as breathing.

Same thing. Same day. Same loop.

Every morning pretending to be different while everything inside him repeated itself with cruel precision. Every week, every month, every year.. he couldn’t tell where one blurred into the next anymore. It was all a cycle of waking, noticing, spiralling, blaming himself, trying to hold onto the edges of something before it fell apart, and then watching it fall apart anyway.

He was so tired of the loop.

So tired of being trapped in the same goddamn moment where he always realised the same goddamn thing.

That it was him.

That it had always been him.

That Doc wasn’t pulling away because of anything mysterious or sudden or unavoidable. It was because Ren had worn him down, one tiny anxious step at a time. Because he had become too much and too often and too loud in all the wrong places. Because he had needed reassurance in a way that probably felt endless. Because loving him had turned from a feeling into a job, and jobs were something people quit.

He swallowed hard, throat clicking.

The room felt too open around him, too empty. Like the walls had pulled back slightly and left him exposed to the raw, bright pressure of his own thoughts. His heartbeat thudded at the base of his throat in an ugly, uneven rhythm. Not panic yet. Not quite. But the edge of it. That awful thin place where everything starts to tip and you can feel the drop before you fall.

He missed Doc so badly it made him feel sick.

Not just the absence of him. Not just the quiet. The shape of him. The warmth. The easy weight of his arm around Ren’s shoulders, the blunt affection of being pulled into his side, the muttered little comments in the middle of ordinary tasks. The days when Doc would come into the room and the whole space would change because he was in it. The days when Ren would look up and know, with a certainty that used to feel like safety, that he was wanted there.

He missed the kiss to his temple in passing.

He missed the hand on the small of his back.

He missed being spoken to like he mattered without having to drag the words out one by one like broken teeth.

He missed actual conversation: the kind that stretched and meandered and turned around each other, the kind that made him feel like he was not merely occupying the same space as Doc but sharing a life with him. Not just existing near him. Not just passing through his orbit like a stranger in the same room. 

Together. 

That had been the word, hadn’t it? 

Together.

Now Doc would talk and leave mid-thought.

Now Doc would answer in half-sentences, or not at all.

Now Doc would vanish into another room or another task or another silence, and Ren would sit with the ache of it growing and growing until it turned everything sour inside him.

He hated the way he waited.

Hated the way he became hyperaware of the exact moment a conversation started to dry up, the exact tilt of Doc’s tone, the exact length of a pause. Hated how his mind would seize on those tiny shifts and immediately start building a cathedral of catastrophe out of them. Hated that he could feel himself becoming smaller in the waiting. More needy. More desperate. Hated that he knew it and still couldn’t stop.

Like some pathetic mutt, he thought with sudden viciousness, and the image landed with a brutal clarity that made his stomach turn.

Not even a dog with dignity.

A mutt. A stray. Something that waits and waits because it doesn’t know any better, because it has no other place to go, because it has mistaken presence for permanence and loyalty for love. Something that sits by the door with its ribs showing through its fur, watching every sound, every shadow, every shift in the air for the return of the person who feeds it.

Waiting like that. Hoping like that.

Being ignored like that.

The thought hit so hard it almost made him nauseous.

He lowered himself onto the sofa without really deciding to, his body giving out in stages rather than all at once. The cushions swallowed him with a familiar softness that did nothing to soften anything. He sank into them and stared at the mug on the table, the small spill now darkening into the wood with a slow, spreading stain.

He was staring at nothing and everything at the same time.

A pulse throbbed in his temples. His jaw had gone tight enough to ache. There was a pressure behind his eyes, a hot, stinging build that made him feel as though if he blinked too hard he might crack open.

Doc had promised.

The memory came with the force of a hand around his wrist.

Doc had promised to help him get better. Promised to stay. Promised not to give up. Promised to notice when he spiralled. Promised that he wouldn’t vanish, wouldn’t turn cold, wouldn’t let Ren drown in his own head and call it nothing. He had promised like it meant something permanent. Like words could be anchored into the floorboards and survive the weather.

Ren had believed him.

God, he had believed him.

He believed those promises the way someone believes a hand reaching down to pull them from deep water. Completely. Desperately. With every part of himself clenched around the hope that this time, finally, someone meant it.

So what the fuck was this?

What was all of this if not the exact thing Doc had sworn he wouldn’t do?

The distance.

The absent messages.

The clipped responses.

The lack of romantic and caring actions.

The way he no longer seemed to notice the little things Ren used to think Doc couldn’t help but notice. The way he no longer came looking for him when he got quiet. The way affection had started feeling like something requested instead of offered. The way the love Ren had once felt around him like warmth had become something he now had to reach for with trembling hands.

It wasn’t fair.

None of it was fair.

The thought came up hot and raw, immediately followed by the smaller, meaner voice that always arrived right after it.

Life isn’t fair.

Neither are people.

Neither are you.

He flinched at his own mind, though no one had spoken aloud.

And that was the worst part of spiralling, how it made every thought feel like truth. Not just possible truth. Not just a thought you could examine and discard. No, when he was like this, every fear turned hard and certain. Everything he thought became evidence. Every silence became rejection. Every pause became disgust. Every missed message became proof.

He knew, rationally, that he should check himself. He knew he should ask whether he was reading too much into things. He knew he should breathe through it, should slow down, should reality check the facts against the story his mind was building.

But right now the story felt more real than the facts ever could.

Right now it felt like he was standing at the end of a hallway that kept narrowing behind him, the walls pressing in, the air growing thinner, and at the far end there was only one thing waiting for him: confirmation that he had become too much to love.

That was what it always came down to, wasn’t it?

He’d known it his whole life in one form or another. In institutions. In hospitals. In the long, fluorescent-lit corridors of being observed, managed, stabilised, spoken over, told he was having a reaction, told he was too emotional, too unstable, too loud in his suffering. Years of being handled like something delicate and dangerous at the same time. Years of people learning him only in pieces, long enough to get tired, long enough to step back.

Doc had known that history. That was what made it worse.

Doc had known what he was when they met. Had known the damage. Had known the shape of the wounds. Had known all the ugly, tender parts of him that came with the package. And still he had said he’d stay. Still he had held him and kissed him and looked at him like he was not a problem to solve but a person to love.

That had meant everything.

It still meant everything.

Maybe that was the cruelest part. That Ren could be furious and hurt and hollowed out and still, underneath all of it, there was nothing in him that had stopped loving Doc back.

He wanted him.

He needed him.

He loved him even now, even like this, even while he sat there with his chest full of splintered fear and the awful certainty that maybe Doc had grown tired of him after all. Love didn’t switch off just because it was inconvenient. It didn’t stop being love because it hurt. It just stayed there, raw and humiliating and alive, turning every absence into a wound.

Ren pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes hard enough to see sparks.

A sound came out of him, half breath, half broken laugh, ugly with strain.

“This is stupid,” he whispered to nobody.

But it wasn’t stupid. Not to him.

That was the problem. He knew, somewhere underneath the panic, that he was overreacting, that his mind was turning one stained coffee table and one quiet morning into a funeral for a relationship that might still be standing. He knew that. He knew it in the quiet, rational place that wasn’t currently being devoured by fear.

And still the feeling remained.

Still he felt abandoned.

Still he felt unwanted.

Still he felt like a dog outside a closed door, listening for footsteps that might never come, every second stretching longer and longer until hope became an ache and then an injury.

He let his head fall back against the cushions.

The ceiling above him was a blank, indifferent plane. No answers there. No signs. No divine correction of his thoughts. Just a pale expanse and the faint hum of the house settling around him.

He thought of Doc coming home later.

Or not.

He thought of the possibility of hearing the front door, of jerking upright too quickly, of trying to smooth his face into something normal, something not desperate. He thought of the possibility of Doc walking past him with that distracted look he had lately, that look that made Ren feel transparent. He thought of trying to speak and hearing his own voice come out too thin, too careful, too eager. He thought of being brushed aside again, gently or not, and how the gentleness would almost make it worse because it would mean the distance had become polite.

He hated that version of the future.

Hated it so much his throat tightened around a sound he didn’t let out.

Maybe Doc still loved him.

That thought arrived softly, almost shyly, and for a moment Ren held onto it like it was a lifeline.

Maybe this was just a bad stretch.

Maybe Doc was tired, busy, distracted or preoccupied.

Maybe the milk didn’t mean anything.

Maybe the short messages didn’t mean anything.

Maybe the silences were only silences.

Maybe.

Maybe.

Maybe.

The word repeated itself until it stopped feeling like a possibility and started sounding like a prayer.

Ren turned his head toward the mug again, the coffee now cooling, the spill on the table drying into a darker shape against the grain. He wanted to reach for his phone. Wanted to text something small and harmless and stupid. Wanted to ask if Doc would be home for dinner. Wanted to ask if he needed anything. Wanted to ask for the old version of him back and knew he couldn’t, because people did not get rewound by need alone.

The urge pulsed through him anyway.

He hated the urge.

He loved the urge.

It meant there was still something to reach toward.

Even if it was only a shadow.

Even if it was only the hope that Doc would answer, would come home, would see him, would notice that he was slipping and take him seriously for one more day.

One more hour.

One more conversation.

Just enough not to feel completely gone.

Ren stared at the stained table and the cooling coffee and the soft emptiness of the room around him, and the thought that rose up next was so painful in its simplicity that it made his chest cramp.

Please.

Not because he wanted to be dramatic.

Not because he wanted to manipulate.

Just because he wanted, with a desperate animal ache that had no dignity in it at all, to be wanted back.

And beneath all the spiralling, beneath the certainty and the fear and the self-hatred, that was the raw bone of it.

He wanted Doc to return home.

He wanted Doc to look at him like he still mattered.

He wanted the waiting to mean something.

He wanted to stop feeling like a mutt at the door and start feeling like a husband again.

Ren eventually found enough motivation to pick up his phone, though “motivation” felt like the wrong word for it. It was less a decision and more a surrender. A slow, reluctant crawling toward the edge of a cliff he could already feel beneath his feet. His hand hovered over the screen for a long moment before he even managed to unlock it, thumb clumsy with nerves, skin damp with the cold sheen of anxiety.

Doc’s name sat there on the screen like a promise that had been left out in the rain.

Ren stared at it.

Just stared.

His pulse had started to climb the moment he touched the phone, a frantic little thudding at the base of his throat, in his wrists, in the backs of his eyes. The living room around him felt too quiet to bear. The hum of the fridge. The faint tick of something in the walls. The soft drag of his own breathing, not enough to steady him, only enough to make him more aware of how hard he was trying to keep himself together.

He tapped the call button.

Then he waited.

The first ring came and went, bright and hollow in his ear, and with it a small tremor of hope he hated himself for having. The second ring stretched wider, longer, its tone sounding almost cruel in the silence of the room. He held the phone a little tighter, fingers pressing against the case hard enough to make the plastic creak faintly beneath his palm.

Come on.

Pick up.

Just answer.

The third ring dragged on like a wire pulled taut over exposed skin.

Ren was already leaning forward, as if that might somehow help. As if his body could will the connection into happening by force of want alone. His breath had gone shallow. His shoulders had risen toward his ears without him noticing. Every nerve in him was standing at attention, waiting, waiting, waiting like a dog at a door that might open if it just stayed still enough.

Pathetic, some ugly little part of his mind whispered.

Pathetic mutt.

Waiting for a hand. Waiting for a voice. Waiting for the thing he had started to believe might no longer come.

The fourth ring.

His stomach had already begun to twist by then, slow and nauseating, a tightening coil that made the coffee in his chest feel acidic and heavy. His fingers began to ache from how tightly he was holding the phone. The living room felt smaller with every second, the walls inching closer like they were drawn in by his own dread.

The fifth ring.

And then the sound changed.

Voicemail.

The words hit with such force that for a second they didn’t make sense. They just sat there, suspended, a cold mechanical voice offering him options he didn’t want. Leave a message. Hang up. Try again later. Nothing that sounded like a husband. Nothing warm. Nothing familiar.

Ren didn’t move.

The phone remained against his ear even after the recording started, though he was no longer listening to the instructions. They blurred into static beneath the roaring in his head. His heart dropped so suddenly it felt like a physical fall, a sickening plunge that emptied him all at once. There was a sharp, bright sting behind his eyes and then another and another, the beginnings of tears he had not agreed to.

His mouth went dry.

No. No, no, no.

Maybe his thoughts were right.

Maybe he really was nothing to Doc now.

Maybe this was what it meant when someone stopped loving you but didn’t have the courage to say it outright. Maybe this was what it looked like from the inside: unanswered calls, stretched silences, the slow quieting of interest until there was nothing left but a formal absence where affection used to be.

Maybe Doc had already left him in every way that counted.

Maybe he had simply not said the words yet.

Ren’s throat tightened around a sound that never properly formed. His vision blurred at the edges, the room tilting slightly in a way he couldn’t tell was physical or emotional. He could feel his brain trying, desperately, to latch onto any other explanation, any other more reasonable reason for the unanswered call.

Doc was at work.

Doc was busy.

Doc had meetings, responsibilities, things to do.

Doc was not sitting there rejecting him.

But logic arrived too slowly to matter.

Logic was a whisper at the edge of a building collapse.

Right now, the only truth his body understood was the one his fear had already made. He had called, and Doc hadn’t answered. He had reached, and nothing had reached back. He had spoken into the void, and the void had answered with voicemail.

That had to mean something.

It had to mean everything.

Ren lowered the phone from his ear with a jerk so sudden it almost hurt. The movement was sharp enough that the corded tension in his arm snapped like a rubber band. He stared at the blank screen for one stunned, disbelieving second before his hand recoiled and flung it away from him.

The phone hit the cushions beside him with a soft, muffled thump.

For a moment it just lay there, black screen, silent, indifferent.

Ren felt his chest cave in around the absence. Something in him cracked. Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just enough to let all the pressure seep through at once.

He bent forward, elbows braced on his knees, and his breath came out in a broken, uneven rush. “No,” he whispered, though he wasn’t even speaking to anyone. “No, no, no, no, no.”

The words came faster.

“I called. I called, and he didn’t answer. He didn’t.. he didn’t answer.”

His voice sounded wrong to him, too thin and raw, as if it belonged to someone standing a few feet away instead of inside his own body. He dragged both hands up over his face, fingers pressing hard into his eyes until he saw red and gold sparks skittering beneath his lids.

The tears came hot and sudden.

He hadn’t felt them until they were already sliding down his cheeks, one after another, tracking over his skin in wet, humiliating lines. They caught at the corners of his mouth. They pooled under his chin. He wiped at them instinctively, angrily, but his hand only smeared the wetness across his face, making his skin feel hot and slick and exposed.

“Of course,” he muttered, breath catching between syllables. “Of course. Of course he didn’t answer.”

The certainty of rejection bloomed inside him with awful speed.

Maybe it had all been in his head after all.

Maybe every small shift, every moment of distance, every short message and half-hearted reply had been leading here the entire time, and he had just been too stubborn, too desperate, too blind to see it. Maybe he had invented the warmth in the first place. Maybe he had mistaken routine for love, habit for devotion, convenience for care.

Maybe Doc had only ever been tolerating him.

The thought landed like a blade.

Ren’s stomach lurched.

He pushed himself back against the sofa, not fully sitting upright, not fully collapsing either. He could feel the shape of his own breathing turn ragged, shallow, almost convulsive. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. He tried to force it into a rhythm, tried to anchor himself in the physical mechanics of inhale and exhale like that could save him from the storm building inside his skull.

It didn’t.

His body had already decided this was the end of something.

The end of hope, maybe. The end of patience. The end of the last fragile thread he had been clutching all morning with shaking hands. His mind raced ahead of him with all the ugly precision it always used when it was cruel.

Doc saw the call and ignored it.

Doc looked at his name and felt annoyed.

Doc didn’t want to deal with this right now.

Doc was tired of him.

Doc was moving on.

Doc didn’t care enough to answer a single call.

And because Ren’s brain had a terrible habit of turning fear into fact, each thought only made the next one easier to believe.

His eyes burned. His face felt tight and damp. The room had begun to lose detail around the edges, as if the world itself was turning its face away from him. The stain on the coffee table, the couch cushions, the mug in the distance.. all of it seemed blurred and distant, rendered unimportant by the violent collapse happening right in the center of his chest.

“Of course,” he said, voice breaking immediately, the words tumbling out uneven and sharp. “Of course he didn’t. Why would he? Why the fuck would he—”

His breathing hitched.

It felt like his lungs weren’t working properly, like they couldn’t pull in enough air no matter how hard he tried. Each inhale was shallow, tight, catching halfway down his chest like something was physically blocking it.

“He doesn’t.. he doesn’t need to, he doesn’t—”

He made a sound then, low and broken, somewhere between a laugh and a choke.

“Stupid,” he said to himself, voice shaking. “So stupid.”

Maybe he really had ruined everything.

Maybe there had been a moment: one single missed cue, one too many anxious texts, one too many apologies, one too many desperate reaches for reassurance, and that had been enough to tip the whole thing over the edge. Maybe love was only ever as sturdy as the person holding it, and Ren had been holding his with hands that shook too badly to keep anything safe.

His words tangled over each other, falling apart before they could fully form. His thoughts were moving too fast, flipping from one to the next without giving him time to catch up.

Sadness hit first.

A heavy, crushing wave that made his chest ache, made his shoulders curl inward, made his whole body feel smaller.

Then anger.

Sharp and sudden, flaring hot in his chest.

“Of course you don’t answer,” he snapped, though there was no one there to hear it. “Of course you don’t. Why would you bother, why would you even care?”

He hated himself in that moment with an immediacy so sharp it almost felt clean.

Hated the need.

Hated the fear.

Hated the way he had called anyway, despite knowing, somewhere buried under the panic, that the timing might just be bad.

It twisted immediately into something uglier.

Disgust. At himself, at the way he sounded, at the way he was reacting.

“God, you’re pathetic,” he muttered, voice trembling. “You’re actually fucking pathetic. Calling him like that, like what, like he’s just gonna drop everything.”

A bitter, almost hysterical edge slipped into his tone. “Yeah, of course, Ren needs attention again, better go fix him, right?”

The words tasted wrong even as he said them. And then, for a flicker of a moment: Smugness. Ugly, defensive and hollow.

See? See, you were right. You knew this was happening. You knew he was pulling away. You knew it wasn’t in your head.

It didn’t last.

It never did.

Because it immediately collapsed under the weight of everything else. Disappointment. Heavy and crushing.

Not just in Doc.

In himself.

“You ruined it,” he whispered, the words barely there, choked out through tightening lungs. “You ruined it like everything else. you always do this, you always—”

His voice broke completely.

The tears spilled over running down his cheeks in uneven streaks, hot and relentless, dripping off his jaw, soaking into the fabric of his shirt. He didn’t wipe them away. He didn’t even try.

His hands curled into fists against his thighs.

“Just.. breathe,” he gasped, trying to force his chest to expand, trying to follow the rhythm he knew he was supposed to.

That he might be at work.

That he might be busy.

That there might be a hundred ordinary reasons for voicemail.

But ordinary reasons were too small to fit inside the shape of his terror.

Terror made everything biblical.

Terror made a missed call feel like abandonment.

Terror made silence feel intentional.

His shoulders began to shake. Not elegantly. Not controlled. Just small, ugly tremors that started in his back and spread down his arms, through his stomach, into his thighs. He wrapped one arm around his middle as if he might physically hold himself together, but the movement only made him more aware of the weight in his chest, the soreness behind his sternum, the tight little knot lodged there like a stone.

His tears kept coming.

He didn’t feel dramatic. He felt wrecked.

The tears ran down his face while his expression kept failing to settle on anything recognisable. His mouth pulled downward and then twitched flat. His brow furrowed and then smoothed. Sadness, anger, disgust, humiliation, disappointment. Each one flashed across him so quickly it felt like watching different storms pass over the same ruined field.

He felt angry at Doc.

Then ashamed for feeling angry.

Then disgusted with himself for being angry at all.

Then bitterly smug for a second, some defensive piece of him whispering I knew it, I knew this would happen.

Then immediately devastated by the very thought of thinking that way.

The emotions came too fast to hold.

Too fast to name.

Too fast to survive.

And then, almost mercifully, they began to burn out.

“Just.. breathe,” he gasped, trying to force his chest to expand, trying to follow the rhythm he knew he was supposed to.

But the words didn’t stick. They slid right off, unable to take hold against the avalanche already in motion. Because it didn’t feel like he was just busy. It felt like every worst thought he’d had was suddenly real, suddenly proven, suddenly undeniable.

And it hurt.

God, it hurt.

“Why…” his voice cracked, barely a whisper now. “Why am I like this?”

The question dissolved into another broken breath. His face twisted, expression flickering rapidly between too many things at once. Each emotion surged forward only to be replaced by another before it could fully land, leaving him disoriented, overwhelmed, unable to hold onto any one feeling long enough to process it.

It was too much.

All of it.

And then, just as suddenly as it had started:

It stopped.

Not gradually.

Not gently.

It just… cut.

Like a switch flipped.

The intensity drained out of him all at once, leaving behind something hollow and eerily still.

The edges of everything went soft. His muscles stopped clenching quite so hard. The tears still fell, but the force behind them loosened, as if his body had spent itself and now had nothing left to give.

Numbness arrived like a door closing.

It wasn’t peace. It was absence.

His mind pulled away from the pain the way a hand jerks back from a hot stove. One moment he was flooded with hurt and the next there was space, cold and blank, opening up around it. The tears continued, but they no longer seemed connected to him in any meaningful way. They rolled down his cheeks in quiet streams while he stared ahead at nothing, his eyes glassy and unfocused, his breathing thinning into something automatic.

The room across from him became just shapes.

A chair.

A wall.

The pale rectangle of light on the floor.

No meaning attached. No sharpness. No weight.

Just... existence.

His thoughts, which had been thrashing a moment ago, began to drift apart too, losing their hooks. The conclusion remained, but it no longer came with the same voltage. He had ruined it. Doc didn’t care. He was nothing. He was too much. He was too unstable. He was a burden. He was all the things he had always feared.

The words floated through him with the deadness of old bruises.

His face felt wet and strangely far away, like it belonged to someone else. His limbs were heavy, not with exhaustion exactly, but with the strange leaden stillness that sometimes came after too much panic, too much feeling, too much of everything. He sat there with his hands loose in his lap, fingers slightly curled, looking past the room rather than at it.

A quiet dissociation spread through him like frost.

It was easier this way.

That thought arrived with chilling simplicity.

Easier to be empty than afraid.

Easier to watch the tears fall without being fully inside the grief.

Easier to let the world slide away from him by degrees than to keep standing in the center of it while it caved in.

He could feel the last of the emotional storm still moving in the background somewhere, faint and distant, but it no longer had its claws in him. Not fully. He was floating just above himself now, not free, just disconnected.

His breathing slowed.

Not because he was okay.

Because he wasn’t present enough to keep fighting.

The phone lay forgotten in the cushions beside him. Somewhere in the room the coffee had gone cold. Somewhere in the apartment, the silence remained exactly what it had been before he called, only now it felt larger, emptier and more final.

Ren stared into the middle distance with tears drying on his skin in thin, sticky tracks. He didn’t blink for a long time. Didn’t move. Didn’t reach for the phone. Didn’t try again.

His brain had gone quiet in the way a storm quiets after it has already destroyed the roof and in that wrecked, hollow stillness, all he could do was sit there and let the emptiness hold him.

Ren didn’t know how long he stayed there.

Time had lost its edges somewhere between the voicemail and the numbness that followed it. Minutes might have passed. Hours might have passed. The apartment didn’t help him mark it. The light through the curtains had shifted, maybe, but he couldn’t have said how. The room remained the same shape in the same kind of silence, as if the world had narrowed to a single fixed point and decided to leave him behind in it.

He was aware of his body in pieces, not as a whole.

The weight of his head tipped slightly forward. The ache in his neck where he’d held himself too stiffly for too long. The wet stickiness on his cheeks from tears that had dried and been replaced and dried again. The shallow drag of air through his chest, not quite enough to feel like breathing, just enough to keep the body functioning while whatever part of him was supposed to be present had drifted somewhere out beyond the room.

The sofa underneath him had gone from soft to barely noticeable.

The phone in the cushions had become a dead object, no longer a lifeline but just another shape in the fabric.

Ren stared at nothing.

Not metaphorically. Not poetically. Nothing. His eyes were open but they did not seem to be seeing the room so much as passing through it. The coffee table blurred into a smudge. The stain from the spill had dried in a dark crescent, ugly and final, and it seemed to exist on the same plane as everything else in the apartment: unchanged, indifferent, waiting.

Then the phone vibrated.

The sudden hum against the couch cushions cut through the numbness like a blade. Ren flinched so hard his shoulder jerked upward, and for one disorienting second his body seemed to remember itself before his mind did. The vibration came again, insistent and sharp, rattling faintly beneath the upholstery.

His gaze drifted downward.

Phone.

The screen was lit.

A call.

Ren blinked once, slowly, as if waking through deep water. His hand moved with terrible sluggishness, as though each finger had to be argued into motion. He reached down and fumbled, almost missing the device entirely because his hand didn’t seem to belong to him yet. The phone buzzed again against his palm, its tiny insistence shaking something loose in his chest.

Another call.

His thumb hovered over the screen.

He could barely think. The world still had that strange, cotton-thick quality, like he was several rooms away from himself and only now starting to hear his own name called from the far end of a tunnel. The display was too bright. The letters too crisp. The name on the screen took a second to resolve.

Doc.

His heart gave a strange, violent leap that hurt all the way through his sternum.

Ren’s breath caught.

His body was still moving like it had been unplugged and only recently jammed back into the wall. He stared at the name, stunned, as another vibration trembled through the phone and into his hand. There was no elegant recovery from this. No instant return to coherence. Just the slow, clumsy sensation of his mind trying to reconnect itself in the wrong order.

Hours had passed.

That realisation came not as a memory, but as an impact.

There were over a hundred missed calls. More messages than he could count without the number becoming meaningless. Ren didn’t even fully understand what he was seeing at first. He scrolled with numb fingers, the list of notifications stretching far beyond what his brain could immediately process. 

Missed call. Missed call. Message. Missed call. Message. Message. Call. Call. Call.

The number of them was obscene.

Impossible.

His chest tightened in a way that was almost painful enough to be useful, almost enough to force him back into his body. Almost.

He stared at the screen, disbelieving, his mind refusing to translate the evidence into feeling. Because if Doc had called that much, if he had messaged that many times, then the shape of the story Ren had been telling himself had cracked wide open. Not disappeared. Not fixed. Cracked. Enough for light to get in, enough for shame to begin seeping through.

Doc had called.

Doc had called and called and called.

Ren had been so deep in his own collapse that he hadn’t even seen it.

The shame hit first, hot and immediate. Then confusion. Then a kind of disoriented fear that shoved at the numbness and made it wobble.

What time was it?

Where had he been?

What had Doc been saying?

Why hadn’t he seen it?

His thumb fumbled over the screen again, nearly dropping the phone before he caught it. A call was still coming through. The vibration thrummed against his fingers, relentless and alive. His gaze locked on the green accept button as if it were something holy and dangerous at the same time.

Then he pressed it.

For one brief moment, there was only the connection sound: faint static, a click, the breath between two people finding each other through a wire. Ren lifted the phone to his ear and waited.

And then Doc’s voice came through.

Low. Tight. Too fast at first.

The sound of it hit Ren with such force that his whole body went strangely still.

German accent thick with strain, the words carrying that familiar clipped edge he got when he was scared but trying not to show it. There was a harshness underneath the control, as though he’d been holding himself together by will alone and was only just now beginning to unravel.

Ren heard the voice.

Didn’t understand it.

The words came through like sludge, like they were sinking through mud before they reached him. His brain was moving too slowly to catch them on the way. All he could really hear at first was the texture of it: the rough warmth of Doc’s voice, the urgency, the concern, the sharp inhale at the end of one sentence before he rushed into the next.

Ren stared blindly at the wall.

He made a small sound in the back of his throat, not quite a response, just evidence that he was there.

Doc kept talking.

The words began to separate one by one from the static.

“Ren?” His name, pulled out careful and low. “Ren, are you there?”

Another phrase, blurred.

“Where are you?”

Then, clearer, threaded with fear:

“Did you take anything?”

Ren blinked slowly.

The apartment around him tilted in an uneven little wave that made his stomach lurch. He could hear Doc breathing now, harsher than usual, as if he had been moving, maybe pacing, maybe running. There was background noise on the other end, a faint and distorted whoosh of motion. A door? Outside? The sound of traffic? It all came through mixed and meaningless.

Doc again, sharper this time:

“Ren, answer me. Please.”

Ren tried to form a thought. It felt like reaching into cold water and closing his hand around nothing.

The question floated in, too late and too far away.

Okay?

Where was he?

What happened?

Taken anything?

Hurt himself?

Done anything he would regret?

The pieces landed one by one, slow and heavy, until at last they began to stitch together into something he could understand. The realisation was humiliating in its fullness. Doc had not called because he was annoyed. He had called because he was terrified.

That should have been obvious.

It wasn’t, not when Ren was like this. Not when the spiral had consumed him so completely that every absence became rejection, every silence a verdict. He had vanished into himself so far that he’d missed the sound of someone trying desperately to get him back.

His lips parted.

His throat worked.

When he finally spoke, his voice came out rough and small, as if it had been scraped raw by the last several hours.

“Home,” he mumbled.

There was a pause.

Ren could hear the change in Doc instantly, the way his breath snagged, the way his tone sharpened with immediate focus.

“Home?” Doc repeated, slower now, more deliberately. “You’re at home?”

Ren made a faint sound, something between a grunt and a hum, and nodded before remembering that Doc couldn't see him.

“Yeah,” he said, though the word blurred at the edges. “Home.”

He swallowed. His tongue felt thick. His mouth tasted like salt and old coffee and the residue of tears.

“I missed you,” he said, and then, because the numbness had not fully returned and because the truth was a raw thing in his chest that could no longer be held back, he added in a voice so broken it barely sounded like his own, “I love you.”

The silence on the other end lasted only a second.

Maybe less.

But it felt long enough to terrify him.

And then Doc changed.

Not in a dramatic way. Not in some sudden outburst. The shift was subtler than that, and somehow worse for how immediate it was. The fear in his voice sharpened into recognition. The clipped urgency became focus. The rough edge of panic softened into something careful and controlled, the voice of someone who had learned how to keep another person tethered when they were drifting out of reach.

“Okay,” Doc said, slow and low. “Okay, liebling, listen to me. I need you to stay with me.”

Ren’s fingers tightened around the phone.

Doc kept going, his voice now deliberate, each word placed carefully, as though he knew he had to build a bridge out of tone alone.

“I’m coming home now. I will be there soon. You stay on the phone with me, ja? Don’t hang up.”

Ren stared at the wall across from him, vision blurring at the edges.

The sound of being told what to do should have irritated him, maybe, under different circumstances. It should have felt controlling. But right now it felt like a rope thrown to someone already under the waterline.

Stay on the phone.

Okay.

Don’t hang up.

Okay.

Doc’s voice dropped even softer.

“Can you tell me where you are right now?”

Ren tried to answer. He really did. He opened his mouth and found that the words had to travel through layers of fog before they could form. His brain was still struggling to catch up, still half-stranded in the numb empty place where it had gone to survive.

“Sofa,” he murmured after a beat. “Living room.”

“Good,” Doc said at once. Too fast, then carefully slower. “Good. You’re on the sofa. That‘s good.”

Good.

The word landed strangely. Like it had been handed to him from somewhere outside the spiral.

Ren’s eyes burned again, but this time the tears felt different. Not the frantic, shattered tears from before. These felt quieter. Confused. Embarrassed. Relieved in a way that hurt.

His breathing remained uneven, but Doc seemed to notice every shift in it immediately.

“Ren,” he said, and there it was again, that careful, weighted use of his name. “Look at me by listening, yes? I need you to tell me if you took anything. Anything at all.”

Ren frowned faintly, trying to understand.

“No,” he said, and his voice sounded distant even to himself. “No.”

“Did you hurt yourself?”

The answer came just as quickly, almost reflexive.

“No.”

A pause.

Doc didn’t sound convinced. He sounded watchful.

“Are you sure?”

Ren closed his eyes.

The room was still there, but only technically. His body sat in it, but the rest of him kept slipping at the edges, threatened by the easy drift back into dissociation. He could feel the temptation to disappear into blankness again, to let the sound of Doc’s voice become background noise instead of anchor.

“No,” he repeated, a little firmer this time. “No.”

He could hear Doc breathe out slowly.

“Good.. Good. Stay with me. Tell me something you can see.”

The question was gentle and stupidly practical and somehow it made Ren’s throat tighten.

The coffee table.

The stain.

The dead mug.

The cushion bunched under his knee.

He looked around the room with effort, like lifting his eyes was a physical task.

“Table,” he said.

“Good. What else?”

“Phone.”

“Good. Something blue? Something red?”

Ren blinked, staring at the edges of a blanket thrown over the armrest. “Blanket,” he mumbled. “Blue.”

“Ja,” Doc said softly. “Good. That’s very good.”

There was a scrape of sound on the other end, muffled and urgent, as if Doc was moving while he spoke. Maybe locking his door. Maybe stepping into a car. Maybe already on his way. The thought was like a pulse of heat through Ren’s chest.

He was coming home.

The phrase repeated inside him like a distant bell.

Coming home.

“Doc?” he said suddenly, the word cracking in his throat.

“Yes, Schatz?”

Ren swallowed.

He didn’t know what he was asking for exactly. Reassurance, maybe. Proof. Permission to be held together by another person for a little while longer.

“I was… I thought…” His voice fell apart. “I thought you didn’t want me.”

The line went very, very quiet.

Then Doc’s voice came back, steady but painful in its sincerity.

“Ren,” he said, each syllable precise. “No. No, listen to me. I called because I was worried. I called because I thought you weren’t safe. I called because I love you.”

Ren’s breath caught hard enough to sting.

Doc didn’t stop.

“I’m not angry at you,” he said. “I’m not leaving you. I’m coming home.”

Ren let his forehead drop into the heel of his free hand, fingers pressing against his skin hard enough to anchor him there.

The words should have been enough to fix everything. They weren’t. Nothing was fixed. The hurt still sat in him, bruised and heavy and raw. The shame still lived there too, coiled tight around the memory of the voicemail, the silence, the hours lost to dissociation.

But Doc’s voice was real.

His concern was real.

The calls were real.

That mattered. It mattered enough to make the edge of the spiral soften, just slightly, like a hand unclenching around his throat.

Ren made a small sound, something halfway between a sob and a breath.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

Doc answered immediately.

“Don’t apologise right now. Stay with me.”

Ren nodded even though he couldn’t be seen. “Okay,” His voice was tiny. Ruined. But it was there.

Doc’s tone softened another degree, becoming almost unbearably gentle.

“Good. Now tell me one more thing you can hear.”

Ren listened. The hum of the refrigerator from the kitchen. The faint noise of traffic outside. His own breathing, ragged and wet and underneath all of it, faintly through the phone, the sound of Doc moving somewhere on the other end of the world, coming back toward him by sheer force of love and fear.

“I hear you,” Ren whispered.

The silence that followed this time wasn’t empty.

Doc inhaled sharply.Then, in a voice gone rough with feeling, he said, 

“Yes. You do.”

Ren couldn’t have said how long the call lasted.

Time didn’t behave normally anymore. It didn’t move in minutes or hours; it stretched and collapsed, looping in on itself the same way his thoughts had earlier. The only constant was Doc’s voice; steady and grounding, pulling him back inch by inch from wherever his mind had drifted. Ren stayed where he was on the sofa, phone pressed to his ear, eyes unfocused, body heavy and distant, responding when he could, or just making small sounds to prove he was still there.

Doc kept him talking.

Or breathing.

Or listening.

Whatever Ren could manage.

And then—

The sound of the front door.

It cut through everything.

A sharp, real noise. The click of the lock. The shift of the handle. The creak of the door opening inward. It was such a normal sound, one Ren had heard a thousand times, but now it landed like something foreign and abrupt, like reality forcing itself back into place.

Ren’s head tilted slightly, slow and delayed, like his body had to catch up to the meaning.

Doc’s voice was still in his ear.

“Ren? I'm here. I'm coming in, okay?”

The words overlapped, phone and real life colliding, and for a second it made no sense at all.

Then Doc stepped into the room.

Still in his work clothes, jacket half-unzipped, hair slightly disheveled like he’d run his hands through it too many times. His expression was tight, eyes scanning the room immediately, landing on Ren with a sharp, searching intensity that held too many emotions at once: fear, relief, urgency and then something softer buried underneath.

Ren looked at him.

Or rather.. looked through him.

That was the strangest part.

Doc was there, physically present, real in a way that should have snapped everything back into place. But Ren’s mind lagged behind, still caught somewhere between the dissociation and the slow process of returning. His gaze didn’t quite lock onto Doc’s face. It drifted past him, unfocused, like he was trying to see something just behind him instead.

Doc crossed the room quickly, but not abruptly.

Controlled. Careful.

He moved like someone approaching something fragile.

“Hey,” he said softly, voice no longer filtered through the phone, now warm and immediate and close enough to feel. “Hey, I’ve got you.”

He crouched in front of Ren, lowering himself until they were level, until he could reach him without looming. One hand came out slowly, giving Ren just enough time to react, though Ren didn’t, not really and then his fingers wrapped around Ren’s hand.

Firm.

Warm.

Real.

He squeezed gently.

Ren’s fingers twitched in response, delayed, like the signal had to travel through layers before it reached him.

“There you are,” Doc murmured, more to himself than anything.

He carefully took the phone from Ren’s other hand, easing it out of his grip without resistance. The call ended somewhere in the process, the faint click barely noticeable as Doc set the device aside on the couch.

Ren’s hand remained in his.

Doc squeezed again.

Slow pulses.

In.

Out.

Grounding.

“I’m here now,” Doc said quietly.

The words were simple, but they carried weight. Not rushed. Not panicked. Just… present.

Ren blinked.

Once.

Twice.

His breathing hitched, still uneven, still catching on itself like it didn’t quite remember how to work properly. His chest rose too fast, then too shallow, then stuttered.

Doc noticed immediately.

“Easy,” he said, softer now. “Slow down. Breathe with me, ja?”

Another squeeze of his hand.

“In.”

He demonstrated it, visibly, his own chest rising slowly, deliberately.

“Out.”

Ren tried.

God, he tried.

But his body didn’t listen properly at first. His breaths came in broken pieces, too quick, too tight. His chest burned faintly with the effort, like he was forcing air into lungs that had forgotten how to expand.

Doc didn’t rush him.

Didn’t get frustrated.

He just stayed there, kneeling in front of him, steady as something unmovable.

“Again,” Doc said gently. “In.”

Another squeeze.

“Out.”

Ren followed as best he could.

It wasn’t perfect.

It wasn’t even close.

But it was something.

Doc’s thumb brushed lightly over the back of his hand, a small, repetitive motion, grounding in its simplicity. He kept talking, low and calm, filling the silence so Ren didn’t fall back into it.

“I’ve got you,” he murmured. “You’re okay. You’re safe. Just breathe with me.”

Ren’s vision flickered slightly, like a camera trying to focus. Doc’s face wavered in and out of clarity. The details were slow to return; the sharp line of his jaw, the faint crease between his brows, the way his eyes stayed locked on Ren’s like he refused to let him drift again.

“I love you,” Doc added, quieter this time.

The words landed.

Not fully.

Not all at once.

But enough.

Ren’s lips parted slightly. His throat worked, like he wanted to respond but couldn’t quite find the words yet. His grip on Doc’s hand tightened just a fraction.

Another breath.

In.

Out.

The room started to feel more solid around him.

Not completely real yet, but closer.

And then—

A sudden, sharp twist in his stomach.

It hit without warning.

A violent, nauseating lurch that made his entire body tense instinctively. Ren’s expression shifted, his face tightening as something unpleasant surged up from deep in his gut.

Doc saw it immediately. “What is it?” he asked, voice sharpening just slightly with concern.

Ren swallowed hard, the motion jerky and uneven. “I—” His voice came out hoarse. “I think I’m—”

He didn’t finish.

There wasn’t time.

His body reacted before his brain could catch up.

Ren jolted forward abruptly, his free hand barely catching himself against the edge of the couch as his stomach clenched hard enough to force the air from his lungs. The nausea surged upward, fast and unstoppable.

He barely managed to turn.

And then he was throwing up.

It came up harsh and sudden, splattering against the wooden floor with a sickening, unmistakable sound. His body convulsed with it, muscles tightening as he retched again, breath hitching violently between each wave.

The taste burned.

Bitter and acidic.

His eyes watered instantly, tears spilling over without his permission as his body tried to expel everything at once. His throat ached with it, raw and strained.

He gagged, another sharp retch pulling through him, leaving him shaking and breathless.

“Hey, hey.. it’s okay,” Doc said immediately.

No hesitation. No disgust. No frustration. Just steady reassurance.

“I’ve got you. Let it out. Don’t fight it.”

Doc’s hand moved to his back, firm and supportive, rubbing slow circles between his shoulder blades as Ren’s body continued to shudder with the aftermath. The contact was grounding, anchoring him through the discomfort.

“I’ll clean it,” Doc added quickly, voice still calm, still soft. “Don’t worry about it. Just breathe.”

Ren coughed weakly, his body still trembling from the force of it. His chest burned, throat raw, eyes stinging from the tears that continued to spill over. He wiped at his mouth with the back of his hand, though it did little to stop the lingering taste.

Another small retch followed, weaker this time.

Then nothing.

Just shaky, uneven breaths.

Doc didn’t move away, he didn’t recoil. He stayed exactly where he was, one hand still on Ren’s back, the other loosely holding his, like letting go wasn’t even an option. “That’s it,” He murmured. “It’s okay. You’re okay.”

Ren’s head hung forward slightly, his body sagging as the tension drained out of him in uneven waves. The nausea faded as quickly as it had come, leaving behind a strange, hollow relief.

His breathing slowed.

Still shaky.

Still unsteady.

But slower.

And underneath all of it; 

He felt… lighter.

Not fixed.

Not healed.

But lighter.

Like something had been forced out of him that he hadn’t even realised he was holding onto. The pressure in his chest, the tight, suffocating coil of emotion, it had loosened, just slightly, enough to let him breathe without it feeling like a struggle.

Tears still clung to his lashes, slipping down his cheeks in quiet tracks he didn’t bother to wipe away this time.

Doc shifted slightly, just enough to look at him properly. “Hey,” he said softly.

Ren blinked, his gaze finally focusing, really focusing, for the first time since Doc had walked in.

Their eyes met. And this time, Ren saw him. 

Fully.

The worry in his expression. The tension in his shoulders. The softness in his eyes that hadn’t left, even through all of it.

“You with me?” Doc asked gently.

Ren swallowed, nodding weakly. “Yeah,” he managed, voice still rough.

Doc’s shoulders loosened just a fraction, relief flickering across his face. “Good,” he said quietly. He brushed his thumb lightly across Ren’s knuckles again, that same grounding motion as before. “I told you,” he murmured. “I’ve got you.”

Ren let out a slow, shaky exhale. And for the first time since everything had started spiralling, it didn’t feel like he was drowning. It felt like he had finally broken the surface, just enough to gasp for air. He leaned forward slightly, not fully conscious of the movement, just drawn by something instinctive. Doc didn’t hesitate; he shifted closer, one arm coming around Ren’s shoulders to steady him, to hold him without pressure.

“I’m sorry,” Ren whispered, the words fragile and automatic.

Doc shook his head immediately. “No,” he said softly. “Not right now. No apologies.”

Ren’s fingers curled weakly into the fabric of Doc’s shirt, holding on like it was the only solid thing in the room.

“I love you,” he added, voice quieter.

Doc didn’t miss a beat.

“I know,” he said. Then, softer, “I love you too.”

Doc didn’t leave him alone to deal with the mess.

Not once.

Not when Ren’s breathing was still rough and uneven, not when his hands were still trembling with the last shuddering remnants of panic and nausea, not even when the immediate danger had passed and the worst of the episode had begun to ebb into that brittle, exhausted quiet that always came after. He stayed exactly where he was for a long moment, one hand on Ren’s back, the other still loosely holding his hand, speaking to him in that low, steady voice as if the entire world could be narrowed down to this one room, this one couch, this one body trying to come back to itself.

Ren could feel the residue of the episode clinging to him in unpleasant layers.

His throat burned. His eyes were puffy and raw. There was a sour taste in the back of his mouth that no amount of swallowing could quite get rid of, and every time he drew in a breath too deep, his stomach gave a small warning twist like it was remembering what had just happened and threatening to do it again if he was careless. He stayed slumped forward for a while, head bowed, fingers twisted in the hem of his shirt, trying to collect himself enough to exist in the room without immediately falling apart again.

Doc waited.

He always seemed to know when to wait.

Only when Ren had managed a few shaky but deliberate breaths without gagging or crying or drifting too far away again did Doc begin to move. Even then, he didn't do it quickly. He rose with careful slowness, one hand briefly brushing through Ren’s hair in a gesture that was more reassuring than necessary, then he turned toward the floor.

Ren watched him through a blur of exhausted, exhausted awareness as Doc crouched down and took in the mess. There was no disgust on his face. No sharp inhale. No visible recoil. Just concern, tiredness, and the faintest tightening around his mouth that made it look less like revulsion and more like he was simply clocking the practical reality of the situation and filing it away to handle.

He grabbed a towel from somewhere nearby. Then another. Then a small cleaning spray from the cabinet under the sink.

“I’m going to clean this up,” he said quietly, voice still carrying that careful gentleness. “You just stay there for a moment, okay?”

Ren made a small, helpless sound that might have been agreement. Or gratitude. Or both. He wasn’t sure. He only knew that the words reached him like they had to travel a very long distance to do so.

Doc crouched by the floor and started cleaning with patient precision.

The room settled into a new kind of quiet then, one filled not with abandonment but with the soft sounds of care: the rustle of the towel, the faint hiss of the spray, the gentle scrape of cloth against wood. It shouldn’t have been comforting, but somehow it was. The domesticity of it. The ordinariness. The fact that Doc was here, physically here, doing something practical while still paying attention to Ren as if Ren’s existence and comfort were not optional things, not afterthoughts, not burdens to be endured.

“Can you tell me how you’re feeling now?” Doc asked, not looking up yet, wiping the floor in steady strokes.

Ren’s mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.

He hated this part of episodes, hated the way every answer felt so much larger than the question and yet somehow impossible to say properly. His mind felt full of wet cotton and static and old shame. He could still feel remnants of panic vibrating under his skin, but the sharp edge had dulled. What remained was the aftershock: nausea, fatigue, embarrassment, a tired, hollow tenderness where the worst of the spiralling had been ripped out.

“I don’t…” He swallowed, voice hoarse. “I don’t know.”

“That’s okay,” Doc said immediately.

The certainty in his tone almost undid him.

Doc continued cleaning, tossing the used towel aside and grabbing another. “Any dizziness? Still feel like you might throw up again?”

Ren let out a shaky breath and pressed the heel of one hand against his eye. “No. I think… no.”

“Good.” A pause. “What brought this on?”

The question was asked softly. Not like an interrogation. Not like blame. Just an attempt to make sense of the shape of the collapse, to understand it well enough to help him keep it from swallowing him whole next time.

Ren stared at the floor.

The memory surfaced in ugly pieces: the call, the voicemail, the hours of silence he had mistook for rejection, the way his mind had turned that silence into a verdict and then into a sentence. The shame returned in a small hot flare, but this time it didn’t have quite as much power. Not with Doc here. Not with the room cleaned up a little. Not with the air no longer feeling quite so thin.

“I thought…” Ren began, then stopped.

Doc’s hand paused briefly in its work. “You thought what?”

Ren laughed once, weakly. “Thought you hated me.”

The words fell into the room between them like something ugly and breakable.

Doc didn't stop moving. Didn’t answer too quickly. He simply waited, letting the silence sit long enough that Ren did not feel rushed into dressing the wound with prettier words.

Finally, Doc said, “Okay.”

Not agreement. Not dismissal. Just a small acknowledgement that Ren had said something real.

Ren’s fingers curled tighter in his lap.

Doc rinsed another cloth and kept going. “Did you take your meds today?”

The question made Ren flinch, just slightly.

There it was. The practical part of it. The part that lived in the body, in chemistry, in the cruel stubborn fact that his mind could turn feral when he ran out of the things meant to keep it from splintering. He looked away, jaw working.

“I ran out,” he muttered.

Doc’s shoulders sank a fraction.

It wasn’t disappointment. Ren knew that almost immediately, even before the other man spoke. It was the exhale of someone who understood too well how many times this had happened before. The late refill. The delay. The doctor’s office dragging their feet. The small bureaucratic cruelty of being left without what he needed because the system was infuriatingly, predictably slow. A week without them, sometimes more. A week in which his brain grew louder, meaner, more chaotic, more likely to slip into the sort of episode that swallowed afternoons and turned voices into accusations.

Doc rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. “I know,” he said softly. “I know they’re always late with the refill.”

Ren said nothing.

He could hear the quiet frustration under Doc’s voice, but it wasn’t aimed at him. Never at him. That was almost worse sometimes. Doc understood the pattern too well, and that understanding carried its own kind of helplessness.

“How long ago did you run out?” he asked.

Ren stared at the coffee table. At the stain. At the mug still sitting there, cold now and forgotten. “Couple days.”

Doc murmured something under his breath in German that Ren didn’t fully catch, though the tone made the meaning clear enough: a soft, annoyed concern directed at the doctor, the system, the whole rigged nonsense of it all.

He folded the cloth into itself and got another.

Then, more gently, “How are you feeling right now? Not what you think you should feel. What do you actually feel.”

Ren swallowed.

The answer was a mess.

He felt empty and raw and exhausted and embarrassed and too aware of his own skin. He felt like his body had been wrung out. He felt guilty for frightening Doc. He felt a lingering, stupid relief that he had not been abandoned, that Doc had come home, that the voice in his head had been wrong in the one way that mattered most. He felt fragile enough to crumble if touched too hard, and somehow still too tense to relax fully.

He couldn’t organise that into language.

“I can’t describe it,” he admitted quietly.

“That’s fine,” Doc said at once. “You don’t have to describe it perfectly.”

Ren let out another breath, longer this time, and closed his eyes. The words should have been simple, but they sat inside him with surprising force. *You don’t have to describe it perfectly.* As if imperfection was allowed. As if he wasn’t failing some invisible test by being unable to turn his internal wreckage into coherent speech.

His chest tightened.

The episode had left him painfully open, and the worst part was that openness made everything easier to say and harder to bear all at once.

Words began to spill out before he could properly stop them.

Jumbled at first. Broken. Too fast.

“I thought you were tired of me,” he said, voice cracking on the last word. “I thought you— I thought maybe you’d finally had enough. You didn’t answer and I just… I kept thinking it meant something. I kept thinking you were done and you were leaving and that you’d—” His breath shuddered. “That you’d broken your promise.”

The room went still in the soft, careful way it only did when someone was listening with their whole body.

Doc didn’t interrupt.

Didn’t immediately rush in to defend himself or correct him or insist that Ren was wrong. He just kept cleaning the last of the mess on the floor, movements slowing a little, while his face remained turned toward Ren with quiet attention.

It was exactly what Ren needed, though he would’ve hated to admit it out loud.

Not comfort. Not yet. Not the kind that asked him to immediately believe something kinder than what his brain had chosen. Just presence. Just being allowed to speak the ugly thought all the way to its end without being corrected before it could finish bleeding.

Ren’s voice wavered.

“You said you’d be there,” he muttered, looking down at his own hands now because it was easier than looking at Doc’s face. “You said you’d notice when I was spiralling. You said you wouldn’t give up on me and I—” He swallowed hard. “I know it’s stupid, I know you were at work, I know you didn’t do anything wrong, I just… it felt real. It felt like you were gone.”

His throat ached.

“I felt like I was back there again,” he whispered, and that was the truest thing of all. Back in the institutions. Back in the waiting. Back in the fluorescent-lit terror of being too much and not enough at once. “Waiting for people to get bored of me.”

His mouth twisted bitterly.

“I know I’m hard to deal with.”

No reply yet. Only the quiet swish of the rag against the floor as Doc finished the last of the cleanup and stood, carrying the soiled cloth toward the kitchen.

Ren kept talking because once the dam opened there was no polite way to close it again.

“I know I’m not easy. I know I get like this and I make everything worse and then I start thinking even worse things and it just—” He exhaled shakily. “It’s like I can feel myself doing it while it’s happening and I still can’t stop it. And then I thought you were mad at me because I called and called and you didn’t answer and I just kept thinking maybe you saw it was me and didn’t want to talk.”

Doc set the cloth in the sink, rinsed his hands, and turned back toward him with unhurried calm.

He still didn’t interrupt.

Still didn’t defend himself.

Still didn’t say, “No, that’s not true,” as if such a sentence could brush away the shape of the fear. He knew better than that. He knew Ren didn’t want to be argued with while he was still vulnerable. Arguments were for later, if they were needed at all. Right now what Ren needed was the permission to empty the poison out without being forced to pretend it had not existed.

Doc came back into the living room slowly, and when he sat beside Ren on the sofa, he did it carefully, making sure to leave enough space for Ren to decide whether to lean in or not. That mattered too. It always mattered.

Ren was exhausted enough to lean.

Not all at once. Just inching. Tentatively. Like an animal that expected to be startled away.

Doc welcomed the movement without comment, one arm slipping around his shoulders and drawing him in with warmth that felt almost unbearable in its gentleness. Ren let out a tiny, broken sound and folded into him, cheek pressing against the front of Doc’s shirt.

The fabric smelled faintly of work, of outside air, of the day still clinging to him. Under that was the familiar scent of him, clean and human and real, and the combination nearly made Ren cry again for an entirely different reason.

Doc kissed his temple.

Softly.

Exactly where Ren always liked it.

The kiss wasn’t dramatic. Not desperate. Just tender enough to say “I am here” without needing a speech.

Ren shuddered at the contact in a way that surprised him.

Doc’s hand came up to stroke slowly between his shoulder blades, then settled there, warm and steady. “You didn’t ruin anything just because you had an episode,” he said quietly, the words chosen with precision now that Ren had done the hard part of speaking first. “You aren’t broken because your brain is doing what it does when you run out of your medication.”

Ren closed his eyes, throat tightening around something dangerously close to a sob.

Doc continued, voice low and even. “I’m not angry with you. I was scared because I couldn’t reach you. That’s different.”

Ren nodded faintly against his chest, though it did not entirely sink in yet.

Doc kissed his temple again, slower this time.

“And when I say I love you,” he murmured, “I don’t mean only when you're calm. I don’t mean only when everything is easy. I mean now too.”

Something in Ren’s chest cracked, not in a bad way. Not exactly. More like a locked place giving way under pressure it had been unable to hold forever.

His eyes stung.

He hated crying after an episode. Hated how exposed it made him feel. Hated that some part of him still worried tears were proof of weakness rather than evidence of relief. But he could feel the tears gathering anyway, hot and stubborn, because his body was still shaking loose the last of the fear.

“I thought you were done,” he admitted, voice muffled against Doc’s shirt.

Doc’s arm tightened around him with just enough pressure to be felt and not to trap. “I know.”

Ren swallowed.

Doc brushed his thumb once over the side of his arm. “And I’m here.. I’m still here.”

The words did what words alone could not usually do in moments like this: they settled.

Not permanently. Not magically. But enough for the panic to ease another notch. Enough for the constant high alarm in his nervous system to begin, slowly, grudgingly, to lower itself from the ceiling. His breathing, still uneven, became less jagged. The tight knot in his stomach loosened a fraction. The room stopped tilting.

He stayed folded into Doc’s side, listening to the steady beat of his voice, the occasional soft murmur of reassurance, the quiet kiss to his temple now and then like punctuation.

Doc didn’t crowd him.

Didn’t overdo it.

Just held him in the exact way he needed: patient and warm.

After a while, Ren’s body finally began to feel like his own again.

Not entirely. Not fully. But enough.

Enough to register the weight of Doc’s arm around him. Enough to feel the sofa beneath them both. Enough to notice that the floor had been cleaned and the room no longer smelled like panic and sickness alone. Enough to understand, with a dawning, aching clarity, that this… this moment, this sofa, this quiet after the storm; was what love looked like when it stayed.

Not perfect.

Not effortless.

But staying.

Ren exhaled slowly, the sound shaky but genuine, and let his forehead rest against Doc’s shoulder.

Doc kissed his temple one more time.

“I’ve got you,” he said again, as if repetition itself could sew the world back together. And this time, for the first time in hours, Ren believed him enough to breathe.