Work Text:
The thing about saving a glade was that nobody warned you about the aftermath.
Nobody told you that the week after would feel like wading through wet concrete—that your body, having run entirely on adrenaline and fury and the particular insanity of being a nineteen-year-old college student who had briefly been a robot beaver, would eventually present you with a very large bill.
Nobody told you that the fluorescent lights of Beaverton University's lecture halls would feel like a personal grievance. That your handwriting would deteriorate across a notepad page as the hour dragged on, each letter a little smaller and messier than the last, until by the end of the fifty-minute class period it looked less like notes and more like something you would find in a cave from cavemen over millennium ago.
Seven days. It had been exactly seven days since the fire, since the flood, since everything. Seven days since Jerry had delivered a press conference about the rerouted highway project with the cheerful assurance of a man who had arrived at the right answer by a completely different route than anyone else, and called it vision.
She'd almost laughed. Almost.
Mabel hadn't laughed much this week.
She dropped her bag somewhere in the vicinity of the door, rushed to her bedroom and fell face-first onto her bed with the full-body commitment of someone who intended to merge with the mattress permanently. The mattress received her without complaint. She lay still, her cheek pressed into the pillow, and breathed.
The glade was saved.
She kept telling herself that, the way you repeat a thing until it becomes real—the glade is saved, the freeway is rerouted, the animals are home, George is back at his dam holding court with the same self-important energy that made him both insufferable and genuinely, inexplicably loveable. Everything was fine. Everything had worked out.
Mabel stared at the ceiling. The water stain she had named Gerald two semesters ago stared back. It was shaped like a lopsided dog.
She closed her eyes.
The dream started the way it always did: not with a beginning she could identify, but with the knowledge that she was already inside it, already too late.
The glade was on fire.
She felt it before she saw it—the heat pressing against her skin like a physical hand, the air thick with the smell of burning pine and something underneath, like the particular smoke of things that shouldn't burn.
She was standing at the edge of the treeline, the world ahead of her was orange and black and alive with the kind of violence that has no interest in being reasonable.
The pond had gone dark, its surface reflecting nothing but flame. The animals were gone—all of them, every creature she'd fought so hard for, George's entire kingdom—and the silence where their noise should have been was worse than any sound she could imagine.
The dam was failing.
She could see it from where she stood, log by log giving way at the waterline, coming apart slowly, each piece taken by the current, she was screaming something but her voice had no volume in this place, no purchase, and she couldn't move toward it because her legs understood something her mind was still trying to catch up to.
This was already over. This had already happened.
No. She tried to move. Her feet found the ground again through sheer will and she ran into the smoke, not toward the dam but toward—she didn't know. Something. Someone.
The heat was a wall and she pushed through it and the trees closed around her, burning at their crowns, the light turned the colour of old blood.
Her grandmother was standing in the middle of it.
Grandma Tanaka, in her jacket—the blue jacket, the one Mabel had taken from the hook by the door the morning of the fire, the one she'd beaten against the flames with both hands until her palms were raw, the one that had caught and gone up in three seconds flat, ash before she even understood it was gone-standing perfectly still in the burning glade like she had always stood in it. Patient, unhurriedly.
The way she'd stood at the edge of this exact pond when Mabel was seven years old, pointing to the spot in the water where the beaver had surfaced, saying: look, look at that, Mabel, do you see?
Grandma. Mabel tried to say it but her voice was still nowhere. Grandma, the fire—
Grandma Tanaka looked at her.
And for a moment it was so perfectly, wrenchingly her—the expression she'd worn every time Mabel had come to her with something broken, every time the world had been too much, the calm certainty that said I see you, I understand, it's going to be alright—that Mabel's whole chest cracked open with the wanting of it.
Then her grandmother turned away.
And walked into the fire.
No. Mabel ran. She ran as hard as she could run, but the distance did not close.
The smoke swallowed her grandmother whole, the glade was burning, the dam was failing and there was no one left, and she opened her mouth and finally, finally found her voice—
And woke up to the sound of her own sharp gasp, sitting half-upright in a dark bedroom, heart slamming against her ribs like it was trying to get out.
The room reassembled itself slowly. The darkness resolved into familiar shapes: the desk, the posters, the all-too-familiar water stain.
Mabel sat very still.
Her face was wet. She reached up and touched her cheek, then the other one. The tears had already happened—she hadn't felt them, hadn't been conscious of crying, and yet here was the evidence of it, cool against her skin.
She pressed her palm flat against her face and held it there until her breathing evened into something functional.
She should get up. Drink some water. Do any of the practical, manageable things that people do when they wake from nightmares.
She didn't move.
The thing was that her grandmother had been gone for a while now.
Mabel knew that.
She'd stood at the grave in rain and understood it, had built her entire subsequent life around the shape of it, had channeled the grief into purpose, into the campaign, into something with a direction and a target and enough momentum to keep her from having to sit still long enough for the grief to fully expand.
That had worked.
That had been a good strategy.
The strategy was not working right now.
She pressed her fists into her eyes, breathed through her mouth, and the breathing became ragged partway through.
She gave up and let herself cry properly—that is just the body releasing pressure it has been building for longer than you realised.
It was ugly, quiet and she didn't try to make it anything else.
She cried until the worst of it had passed into a manageable ache, then she lay back down and stared at the ceiling and felt the particular hollowness of someone who has cried themselves into a temporary calm.
Her eyes were swollen. Her pillow was damp. The apartment was so quiet she could hear the refrigerator's hum from the kitchen, rhythmic and indifferent.
She picked up her phone.
She didn't have a plan. She was operating on instinct—the blunt animal instinct of a person who is hurting, at some basic level, for another human being to exist near them. The screen lit up, too bright, and she squinted.
Dr. Sam's thread sat near the top. Safe. Structured. Professional. The thought of texting Dr. Sam I had a nightmare and I can't stop crying made Mabel's stomach clench. She swiped past.
Her parents. Three seconds of looking at the sparse thread. The familiar low-grade nothing. She kept scrolling.
She stopped.
DICKHEAD
Jerry Generazzo. Mayor of Beaverton. The man who had spent months trying to raze the thing she loved most in the world. Slick, self-contained and precisely calibrated to be infuriating.
It was absurd.
It was genuinely, completely absurd, and she knew it was absurd, and she also knew that if she texted him this would become a thing he had. A fact about her, stored away, a crack in the wall he'd located and would remember the location of.
Her shoulders shook once, hard, and then the shaking slowed—not stopped, but slowed, the way a storm slows after it's crested.
The tears were still coming but the pressure behind them had dropped. She was so tired. She was so completely, fundamentally tired, in the bones and behind the eyes and in every part of her that had been performing fine for who knew how long.
"Come on," he said, after a while. "Come on, let's sit down."
He moved with her rather than directing her—a small shift, his hand at her back guiding without pushing, and she let him turn her the rest of the way into the bedroom because her legs had voted again and the result was the same as before.
She sat on the edge of the bed. He sat beside her, close enough that their shoulders nearly touched, he didn't make a production of it, didn't look at her, just sat there and let her finish crying at her own pace.
She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. "I hate this," she mumbled, into her own palms. "I don't cry. I don't — I'm not someone who does this."
"You're doing it right now," he spoke, but not unkindly.
"I'm aware, Jerry—"
"It doesn't mean anything bad about you," he quickly said. She felt him look at her from the side—not the assessing look, not the reading-the-room look, but something slower and more deliberate. "It just means something happened. Something got to you. That's allowed."
Mabel put her hands down and looked at her lap. Her face was a disaster—she could feel the swollenness of it, the hot, tight aftermath of the kind of crying she'd been doing, and she was going to have to deal with it eventually and was choosing not to deal with it yet.
"I don't want to talk about it," she said flatly.
"Sure." he agreed, immediately. No pause, no negotiation.
She looked at him sideways, briefly. He wasn't looking at her, which she was grateful for. He was looking at the far wall.
"You can go," she said. "I'm—I'll be okay. You can take the couch, or go home, or—whatever. I'll be okay."
"I know you will," he soothed. Just a: I know. Simple and settled. "Lie down."
She looked at him.
"I'm not—"
"Mabel." He looked back at her finally, and the expression on his face was so straightforwardly certain that she ran out of objection before she found the words for it. "Lie down. I'll stay until you're out. Then I'll go."
She should say no. She had notes prepared, she had the argument ready—the one about not needing him here, about this being weird, about how she'd been fine alone for a year and she'd continue to be fine alone, which was simply a fact about her life and not something that required remedy.
She looked at the pillow. At him. At the pillow.
She lay down.
She did it like a formal surrender—swinging her legs up, pulling the blanket to her chin, turning to face the wall—and she waited for the smug comment, the quiet satisfaction of being the person she'd let in.
It didn't come.
The mattress shifted as Jerry moved. Not leaving—she'd heard him stand only once and that was still clearly him sitting, the weight of him settling into the mattress, and she realized he'd shifted to sit against the headboard rather than on the edge. Close. Still close, actually closer, but the quality of it was — different from what she'd expected. Like a person settling in. Like someone who intended to stay for a while.
She kept her face to the wall. She breathed slowly.
"The glade looks good," he said, quietly. Like he was continuing a conversation that had been in progress. "I drove past it on the way here. The light was—the water looked different than usual. I don't know if it's the flood residue or the season, but it looked different. Wider somehow."
Mabel said nothing.
"The nature reserve paperwork cleared yesterday," Jerry continued casually. "I signed it myself. Nobody's touching that glade." He said it simply, without fanfare, the way he said things he'd already decided were facts. "It's done."
She stared at the wall. Her throat ached.
"My point is—" He stopped. Considered. Resumed, quieter. "You did that. Whatever tonight is, whatever is going on in your head right now that you're not going to tell me—you did that. The glade is there. The animals are there. That's yours, Mabel. You don't have to carry whatever tonight is and that at the same time. You can put one of them down."
She pressed her lips together. Her lower lip was definitely not wobbling.
"I'm just saying," he said. "That's all. I'm just saying."
She didn't answer. She couldn't answer, because her throat was doing the thing again. She felt the exhaustion moving up through her like something finally given permission to rise.
His hand found the top of her head.
She went rigid—the reflex, the old, practiced tightening. His hand didn't move. It just rested there, the warm weight of it, and she waited for herself to pull away and didn't.
Slowly, with the terrifying increments of something she had no control over, she un-tensed.
His hand began to move. Slow, even strokes through her hair, the same rhythm as his voice—unhurried, quiet, like someone who had decided there was no rush and meant it. She focused on the walls. On the shape of the ceiling. On the sound of her own breathing getting slower.
"Get some sleep," Jerry murmured. Almost too quiet to hear. "I've got you. Get some sleep."
She closed her eyes.
She was going to tell him not to say that. She was going to say that he didn't have her, that nobody had her, that she was fine alone and always had been and didn't require the implication otherwise. She had the whole response prepared, very clearly, just on the other side of—
She fell into the clutches of sleep.
The room was light. Real morning, the specific grey-gold of early-to-mid-morning coming through the curtains she never properly closed. She was warm. She registered warm first—the encompassing, physical warmth of a room that had held more than one person in it all night.
Then she registered the rest of it.
She was tangled with Jerry Generazzo.
Not tucked against him, not politely adjacent—tangled, in the way that happens when two people fall asleep in a space too small for the distance they'd agreed to maintain.
Her head was on his chest. Her arm had gone somewhere she couldn't immediately locate without moving. His arm was around her shoulders, fully, not loosely—the deep, settled hold of someone who had not moved in hours, whose body had made decisions in the night without consulting his daytime self. His chin was somewhere in her hair. She could feel him breathing, slow and even, still asleep.
She lay very still.
She should move. She should extract herself—carefully, quietly, before he woke up, while she could still pretend this configuration had been less deliberate than it was. She knew she should do that. The part of her that survived things was filing an urgent request.
She was so warm.
She hadn't been warm like this in—she didn't finish the thought. She looked at the ceiling, at the morning light spreading across the far wall. She listened to his breathing. She felt the weight of his arm across her shoulders, heavy and certain, the weight of something that had stayed.
He stayed.
The thought arrived simply, without drama, and hit her in the chest like something falling from a height.
She hadn't asked him to stay. She'd told him not to. She'd said take the couch, go home, I'll be fine, and all of those things were true and she'd meant all of them, and he'd stayed anyway, not because she'd asked but because he'd decided to, and she didn't know what to do with that.
She'd been prepared for the cost, for the invoice that would arrive—she'd been braced for it since she'd hit send on that text—and she kept waiting for it and it kept not arriving and she didn't know what to do when comfort didn't come with a bill attached.
Her eyes filled.
She didn't feel it coming. It just happened—the tears arriving with no announcement, welling up from somewhere she hadn't known was full. Not the nightmare grief. Not the specific, sharp grief for her grandmother, the jacket and the fire. Something older than that. Something that lived in the part of her that had learned very early to be warm by itself, to need nothing, to carry everything alone and be grateful for the carrying because it meant she was strong and strength was what she had in lieu of other things.
She was so tired of being strong.
Her breath caught.
Jerry woke up.
Not gradually—fully, immediately, his whole body shifting from still to present in the space of two seconds. She felt his arm tighten around her, reflexive and immediate, pulling her in before he'd even opened his eyes. He looked down at her. Took in her face—the wet cheeks, the shaking shoulders—and his expression didn't cycle through confusion or hesitation or the various stages of a person figuring out what to do. It went straight to certain.
"Hey." he soothed. Not a question. A landing. I'm here, I see you, I've got you.
And then he moved.
He sat up and gathered her in with both arms, not gently or tentatively but firmly and without ceremony, the way you'd pick up something that was falling, and she was against his chest before she'd decided anything about it.
He pulled her in close—her face pressed into the front of his pajama shirt, his arms crossed around her back—and he held her there with the sure, uncomplicated grip of someone who is not going to let go until the situation improves.
She didn't fight it.
This was the part she couldn't account for later, the part that was harder to explain than all the rest of it: she didn't fight it.
Mabel was delirious with sleep and grief and the residue of the nightmare, and she was warm, and the arms around her were the arms that had stayed all night, and she pressed her face into his shirt and cried in earnest and let him hold her without putting any distance in it.
"There we go," he soothed, into her hair. Low and steady. "There we go. Let it out."
She shook her head, or tried to.
"Yes." he said simply. Not arguing with her. "Yes. It's alright. I've got you." His hand came up to the back of her head, pressing her in gently, and began to move. Long, slow strokes, the same as the night before. "I've got you, Mabel. You're okay."
A sob came out of her that she hadn't been braced for—sharp and sudden and entirely outside her control—and she pressed her face harder into his shirt and felt her hands come up between them, grab fistfuls of the fabric, making pathetic whines that Mabel would regret later. (And made Jerry’s overprotective heart clench.)
"I know. I know it's a lot. You don't have to hold it all right now." Jerry’s voice was unusually gentle, and it just made Mabel sob more.
"I don't—" She couldn't get the sentence out. Her face was wet against his shirt and she couldn't get a full breath.
"You don't have to say anything," he reassured. "You don't have to tell me anything. Just breathe." His hand moved to her back, rubbing, the other stayed at her head, and she could feel the solidness of him—the fact of him, the whole improbable, inexplicable fact of Jerry Generazzo sitting in her bed in the morning holding her together while she fell apart, which was the most absurd sentence she'd ever assembled and was also just what was happening. "Breathe. I'm here. I'm not going anywhere."
She exhaled. It came out ragged.
"There you go." he murmured.
"I don't—" She tried again. "I don't do this."
"I know," he said. Something in his voice, very quiet. "I know you don't."
"I'm not—I'm fine, I'm usually—"
"Mabel." His arms tightened slightly. "It’s okay to not be. You've been hurt for a long time and working very hard to make sure nobody noticed, and that's a lot to sustain."
She shook her head against his chest. She could hear the heartbeat under her ear, steady and even.
She said nothing. Her shoulders were still shaking but the intensity had crested and was beginning to ebb.He kept his arms around her and kept his hand moving in her hair and said nothing else, just let the silence be what it was—warm.
His hand moved through her hair, slow and even. Her breathing steadied. The tears slowed. She was aware of the morning around them—the birds outside going about their unreasonable business, the light spreading across the walls.
She didn't let go of his shirt.
She told herself she would let go in a minute. In another minute. When the last of it had passed, she was fully herself again and could extract herself with some semblance of dignity intact.
His hand continued its slow path through her hair.
"You should've gone home," she choked, into his chest. The words had no real force in them.
“Yeah.”
"I told you to go home."
"You did," he agreed.
"Multiple times."
"Several.” he said.
She breathed in. Breathed out. Felt the last of the shaking go, finally, leaving behind only the scraped-clean, morning-after calm of someone who has cried everything out and has arrived at the other side of it. She was still pressed against his chest. His arms were still around her. She was going to move in a minute.
"Don't say anything about this," she threatened.
"I wasn't going to."
"Not to Conner, not to Dr. Sam, not to— anyone."
"Mabel." His voice was very quiet and very dry. "Do you honestly think I'm going to tell people about this."
She thought about it. "No." she admitted.
"No." he agreed.
She breathed. The morning continued around them, ordinary and gold, the city of Beaverton waking up outside without any knowledge of anything that had happened in this apartment during the dark hours.
"Jerry," she tried.
"Mm."
She didn't have a sentence to follow it up with. She'd said his name and then arrived at the end of what she could say, standing at the edge of a thing she didn't have words for.
She pressed her face into his chest and closed her eyes.