Medsi

[Jay Carpenter]

Minutes passed and Jay was about to get up and walk out. Maybe lay down on the floor and take a nap. Something. When he heard voices in the distance, he ignored them, short of his own name sounding across the waiting room.

But it was the footsteps that made him look up.

He kind of hoped Natalie was asleep when he sent the info about Medsi. But despite it being middle of the night, a swell of relief rose upon seeing her. And the coffee.

His brows lifted when she spoke to Carter right out.
“Uh, no,” he muttered when the ‘old friend’ came up. That was already a landmine and he wasn’t about to step on it. Not here.

Natalie was as tight lipped about her family as Jay had been about his. But he recognized it when Carter assumed Natalie was her older sister.

He climbed to his feet as a means of interrupting (and snatching the extra coffee). “Natalie,” he corrected on an attempt to regain her attention. He showed her his hand, and with the good one, sipped coffee. It was black and blue by now, and the knuckles all but swollen into oblivion.

[Natalie Grey]

By his expression she was surprised Carter even managed to get that close. The name came a little unbidden, like he hadn’t quite intended to admit to the struggle to place her. There was a certain faux pas to it, if Natalie were the sort of woman to care about these things, but she only laughed a little in reaction.

“A little less polite, a lot more troublesome I’m afraid.” The smirk which followed was not an expression ever to be seen on her exalted sister’s face, and she was fairly certain Isobel would have been mortified had the roles been reversed and she had been misrecognised herself. Especially by a man like Carter. “I’m not sure if she’d be pleased you’d remembered her name, or terribly disappointed to know you thought I was her.”

Natalie wouldn’t have bothered to correct him with her actual name, but Jay seemed to motor back to life then. She wasn’t sure if it was gallantry or irritation on his part that caused him to loom like that. Carter was storybook handsome after all. Boring, but handsome.

“You know there’s no point waving that about at me like a flag. It won’t earn you any sympathy.” Her tone was morbidly dry as he paraded the swollen ruin of his hand, which she couldn’t have missed even had she tried. She didn’t wince at what she saw, perhaps because it was the least of the savagery they’d witnessed between them over the past year. Little ever visibly ruffled her composure. The look up at his eyes was softer though; quieter, more private in connection. She moved onto his gravity naturally. Her free hand pulled at the sodden edges of his coat, travelled down the buttons without ever quite touching the body inside, though she could feel the heat of it. There was a ghost of a smile. “You’re soaked through too. Did you know?”

[Carter de Volthström]

Natalie’s smirk was sharp and familiar now that he had the name to go with it. Of course. Northbrook. Not Isobel. Natalie. The younger one. The one with a reputation.

He almost smiled, but it didn’t quite reach. “Then I suppose I owe your sister an apology,” he replied smoothly, straightening his cuffs again though they didn’t need it. His voice was polite, if touched with droll amusement, as if he were checking off a social box out of habit more than interest. Still, his attention lingered on her longer than it should have. She wasn’t dressed for a masquerade, but somehow still looked like she’d sauntered out of one. He wondered at the connection between a Northbrook and this American.

Jay’s sudden motion caught his attention. He stepped back slightly, registering the edge that buzzed around the man like static. The bruised hand said enough. The quiet claim of her name said the rest. Curiouser and curiouser. But Carter’s assessment was interrupted as a nurse emerged.

“Mr. Volthström?” He lifted a hand in acknowledgment. “Miss Marveet is asking for you,” she said, professional but tentative, as though unsure whether she was speaking to a man who belonged in a place like this.

“Duty calls,” he said with a faint raise of his brows. “Miss Northbrook. Dominion.”

[Jay Carpenter]

“Come on, not even a little sympathy?” Jay said, tone dry as dust. “I mean, we might have to amputate.” It was impossible to tell if he was joking or not.

He barely shifted, but the moment she moved into his space, it tugged at deep fatigue. His shoulders slackened under the weight of everything they weren’t talking about. The heat of her hand brushing along his coat, not quite touching, made him acutely aware of the cold fabric and the discomfort threaded bone-deep. Felt like his face might slide off from exhaustion. Jensen could fix it with a touch. That would’ve been easier. Wonder where he was right then.

He tracked Carter’s exit, noting the surprising dip of acknowledgement the man gave. Dominion. Jay’s mouth twisted slightly, but he let the thought fall away.

Instead, he turned back to Natalie, brow arching. “So… old friend?” he echoed, her earlier words flipped back at her, tone shaded with irony.

[Natalie Grey]

“I brought coffee, which is far superior to sympathy. Though I suppose I could probably be persuaded. Being as I do, in fact, quite like your hands.” She hadn’t let go of his jacket. Her gaze up at him was quiet. Often others read coldness in the paleness of her eyes, but it wasn’t their iciness which made her gaze so uncomfortable, it was how stripping they were when she was really looking. Humour aside, right now she was searching for honesty, in him and herself both. He looked exhausted to the soul. Since America it was never very deep from the surface, but tonight he seemed just about ready for his grave. Not to jump from the edge, just to float on down and finally rest.

Jay wasn’t looking to be saved. She saw that in his fragile weariness and the ghostly tumble of his shoulders, not to mention the swollen lump of his hand. Nor was he glad to see her, or maybe hadn’t even expected it, and that stung in a way she only let herself bury. She offered the shadow of a smile then, not in pity or comfort, just with the rawness of an emotion she wouldn’t name because it would break him. The thing was she’d rather bleed out than pull the hooks free, and by now she’d sort of made peace with the inevitable. That this was the man she’d follow to the ends of the earth whether he acknowledged her at his side or not. That this was the man who would break her heart. And not even because he meant to.

She hadn’t bothered to acknowledge Carter’s exit, or his rather charming insult (which might have made her smirk, in other circumstances). But she didn’t feel bad for the rudeness; it was the least of the tarnish he likely thought on her already, when he did finally dredge up the memory anyway, to the point she doubted he’d even notice a little extra incivility. If she was tired it didn’t show, but Natalie certainly felt it on the inside then. “An old friend who didn’t recall who I was, sure,” she answered. Jay’s brow was arched like he expected something else, and it felt remarkably like an accusation, but now that they had no audience the teasing slipped away from her manner. She said the rest plainly, not because it was owed, but because she was weary of her own pretence at levity. “My grandfather golfs with his father. Isobel was convinced she’d marry him one day, back when we were all kids. The guy probably has someone who irons his socks.”

It was easy thing to forget about Natalie, but her family was the dynasty which ruled a Dominance for more than two decades, and had held power in London for even longer. Edward Northbrook was one of the oldest and staunchest allies the Ascendancy had beyond Myshelov Tarasovich himself, so of course her childhood had seen her rub shoulders with the cornerstones of elite society back home. And the Volthströms were an unfortunate and unavoidable pillar of it.

“Hold still,” she added, not pausing to look for any dissonance in Jay’s impending realisation: that whatever the circumstances under which they had first met, they really did come from vastly different worlds. Instead she embraced the power, and worked slender threads into the fabric of his coat and deeper layers; drawing out the moisture, and sending in a soft hint of warmth instead. The former was a trick they’d both learned in Mexico, living from motel to car to motel while they’d chased down Amengual. She knew he knew how to do it too. She also knew that self-punishment or exhaustion or lack of care had left him sitting in a frozen puddle of his own misery for however long they’d kept him waiting. It was quite literally pooled on the pristine tiles beneath the chair he’d been slumped in.

Natalie was perfunctory with the kindness. She didn’t ask first, and she didn’t mention it after. She did briefly break her gaze from him to glance back at the triage desk though, and for a moment her jaw tightened – irritation or impatience, neither common for her to express. She prevaricated for a moment over making that promised scene, but turned back to him for a moment longer instead. The bag felt heavy on her shoulder, but it was the weight of all the things she ought to tell him which was heavier.

“I don’t need to know where you’ve been. Or with who. That’s not magnanimity on my part, by the way. And don’t give me that wounded look. It’s because I fucked up, Jay, and I really need you to be here.”

Confessions with Natalie were nearly always like that; swift, sometimes brutal, always raw. Her gaze was clear. She knew it wasn’t the best time, including the fact he was possibly still high as well as in pain, but the distance between them didn’t leave her untouched. She wasn’t afraid exactly, just alone. Jay peeked behind the veil from time to time, saw things in her she never intended him to. Every time it happened the revelation of it never failed to surprise her. But she’d never actually let him in. In return she never asked the same, left an intentional space around the demons he chose to carry closer than her. Maybe even now he would shut himself down further, but either way it told her where he stood: as an equal in the shitty mess she had landed them in, or as a responsibility she tugged along after her. Because she had no intention of letting go.