PFM snippets - hurt/comfort #1

# “How do you always know exactly what I need?” “I pay attention.” - Alan

You never would have guessed that Alan’s office, of all things, would become your haven. But you crawl your ass there time and time again whenever the shit hits the fan, and it doesn’t seem like that’s going to change anytime soon. 

“Welcome! How may I— Oh, it’s you. Hi.”

Alan’s new assistant pauses mid-getting up from the chair. Her sugary-sweet smile dissolves at the sight of a familiar face, and she flops back down, returning to her book.

Left to your own devices, you stagger down the hall, past the archives, and into the office proper. Alan’s not here yet - which isn’t surprising considering the early hour - but his couch is.

As you fall face-first onto the leather upholstery, you soak up the scent of Alan’s cologne and his awful gas station brew. Within seconds, you’re out cold. 

When you rouse, you feel blessedly warm. Your muddy shoes have been taken off, and a heavy coat is suffocating you in the most pleasant way possible. 

In front of you, on the coffee table, lies a plastic container with something mouth-wateringly delicious inside. You reach for it half-blindly, before your eyelids can fully peel open. 

“How do you always know exactly what I need?” you mumble around the edge of the container.

It’s barely audible, but somehow Alan gets the gist because he answers, “I pay attention.” 

His voice comes with an overlay of rapid //click click click// that you associate with his phone game. As expected, he’s looking at the screen, but he must feel your eyes on him because one of his brows quirks. 

“And it’s not hard to, seeing as you make your mood known by causing a ruckus, leaving mud prints all over the hallway, and scaring my assistant. She said you looked like a zombie.”

“She’s not a very loyal employee, then,” you grumble between gulps, “if she lets a brain-eater ambush you in your office.”

Alan snorts. “Is this about Alois?”

“Shouldn’t you know? Or did you stop paying attention?”

“To you? I shudder to think what would happen if I left you without supervision,” he quips with another crook of his brow. “Besides, I was being polite. You clearly want to talk about it.”

“I don’t,” you mumble, chewing at the empty container. A crescendo of //click click click// passes before you finally give in. “Did he call you?”

“Clara did. She said he just got home in a hissy.”

“Oh. What else is new, huh?”

A chunk of the plastic snaps off, forcing you to spit it out. Alan pauses his game to give you a long-suffering look, and when he notices you’re about to bite the other end, he leaves his seat to yank the container out of your hands. 

“It was just a stupid argument,” you call after his back, watching him dispose of the waste in the trash bin down the hall. “It was nothing, seriously,” you add, quieter, when he returns. 

“Then why are you so mopey?”

“Hmm, maybe I just missed you? And you’ve been playing snake the whole time I’m here.”

Alan stops by the desk, tilting his head to the side as he regards you. “Really now? Do you often miss me at,” he pauses, checking his wristwatch ostentatiously, “seven in the morning?”

A noncommittal grunt should be satisfactory as a response, and even if it’s not, that’s all he’ll get. “What are //you// doing here at seven in the morning, though?”

Alan sits back in his chair, raising his eyes ceilingward. “It’s my office, isn’t it?”

“But you don’t work on weekends.”

It’s his turn to grunt. “Maybe I missed you, too?”

Even his deadpan tone can’t save you from choking on your spit. It makes him break into a laugh. That asshole.

# “Sure, you can use me as a pillow.” - Reed

It takes a while for you to get used to the silence. There are no squeaky pipes to grate your ears, no arguments breaking out behind the thin, moldy wall, only the pure hiss of scalding water that cascades off your body, leaving it wet and relaxed.

You’re staying at Reed’s place for ‘no reason,’ quoting an impromptu sleepover as the cause of your visit. You can’t exactly admit that the hotel you’ve been swearing left, right, and center was ‘all safe,’ has just been raided by the ACB. 

Well, you could, but then, you’d have to fess up about the reason for said raid. That, and mention how close of a call it was, seeing as the ACB had the SPD on speed dial, and they would have made the call if their perp didn’t surrender first.

All in all, it’s best to omit the whole thing. As long as Reed doesn’t dig any deeper, you won’t be forced to lie about it. 

The circumstances, for one, are in your favor. You caught Reed in the middle of filling Alan’s paperwork. It’s about the only time when he’s quiet and focused instead of clowning around. 

When you showed up like a stray cat at his doorstep a quarter of an hour ago, he simply ushered you inside with only minimal nagging at the state of your soaked clothes. He then steered you toward the bathroom before you could so much as say ‘hi,’ leaving you with a change of clothes and a mountain of his bath products for company.

From there on out, you’ve been stalling a bit, but sooner than later, you ran out of containers to sniff and shampoos to try. 

And so, you jump out of the shower and make yourself presentable.

“Okay, done,” you announce, stepping back into the living room. You make sure not to drip onto the floor, quickly heading towards the carpet instead.

Reed looks up briefly, but quickly ducks his head back into the documents. He grumbles something under his breath, probably about the fact that you only wore the upper part of the set he laid out for you, or about the carpet that now bears marks of your damp feet. 

Either way, he saves his nagging for later, and you take it as a sign not to disturb him. 

You take a seat on the fuzzy chair behind him, watching him scribble where he is sprawled on the ground. It reminds you of your nightly study sessions back at the Academy, and your already soppy mood goes down the drain.

The shock the raid has caused is yet to release you. Your hands are shaking in a way you can’t blame on the cold anymore. When you put them under your butt, the tremors spread over your entire frame. 

You know that Reed would have let you stay with him, no questions asked, but a bigger part of your conscience is screaming at you in refusal. He has a stable job now, and a good future ahead of him, despite the ordeal with his colleagues. He doesn’t need another stain on his life shaped like you. 

“Hey.”

“Huh?” 

You blink, realizing that Reed has been looking back at you while you were zoning out. 

“Go to bed if you want to sleep.” He grins, though from how lukewarm it is, you can surmise he already caught on to something. “You don’t have to wait up.”

His consideration makes you choke on a sob as you’re overcome with an irresistible urge to throw yourself at him. 

“You hear me?” he repeats, brow creasing in worry. “The bed?”

“Yeah. Okay.”

Your legs react before your brain can permit them, except instead of the bed, as Reed mentioned, they take you towards him. 

When he notices it, his mouth opens for a split second as if to comment on it. In the end, he simply watches you plop yourself over his spread legs, facing the carpet so that you don’t have to see his expression. 

From this close, the scent of his cinnamon gum (that he must have spat out earlier) and the same body wash you used are not enough to mask the acrid scent of anxiety that comes off him in waves. 

Making him worry is the last thing you want to accomplish, and you almost push yourself back up and head to bed, when you feel his hands on you. 

“Sure, you can use me as a pillow,” he grumbles like he isn’t wrapping his arms around you like a snake. It’s an awkward angle, but it doesn’t seem to bother him. “I’ll add it to the list of favors you owe me.”

“I think they’re all canceled out by the fact that I have to suffer through your egomania,” you joke, relieved to hear that your voice doesn’t crack.

“‘Egomania’?! Please,” he huffs, pretzeling himself even further to rest his chin on your back. “What’s wrong with bein’ a bit appreciative?”

“‘A bit,’ sure. I guess we—” 

Your traitorous stomach chooses this exact moment to remind you that your last meal was... well, not recently. Reed has to hear it even more closely because he lets out a sound, half between an exasperated laugh and a weary sigh. 

“First you’re callin’ me an egomaniac, now you’re askin’ me to feed you?”

“...Just add it to that list of yours.”

“Ah, never mind. What’s a little debt between friends?”

# “Do you feel safe enough to come with me?” - Laurent

You’re stuck and, though nobody is chasing you, the feeling of dread that’s been steadily creeping in since the examination started finally catches up with you.

The surroundings crash along with your heartbeat. One beat - the ceiling opens, letting in a thick, nearly palpable darkness. Another beat - the floor shatters, forcing you to flail around until your brain realizes that you’re not falling. You’re simply laying there, on an invisible floor.

It’s torture, every second of this, and all you want to do is crawl into a hole and die. But you can’t die here. It’s not real, after all.

As soon as you calm down, the environment rebuilds itself around you. It’s garbled, upside-down, with a blackboard floating in the middle of what looks like a classroom. The desks are pushed to the side, opposite the glassless windows. 

The tar-like substance that was poured into the room pools by the door, bubbling and simmering. It’s so dark, it looks like it could swallow you whole.

The rational part of you remembers that this is only part of the training, while the rest of you is desperate to give up. It’s terrifying, because there’s nothing to fight but your mind.

Slowly, on shaky limbs, you crawl towards the corner of the room, under a desk. The four ‘walls’ around you bring you a modicum of comfort, and yet all you can do is hide your head in your hands and hope it’ll all pass soon.

Your teeth chatter from the adrenaline, so strongly your jaw starts to ache, and despite the overall silence, you only notice a new sound when the footsteps pause right in front of you. 

Someone is calling you, but you’re afraid that if you open your eyes, you’ll only see darkness. You stay like that, curled into a ball until a brush of skin - rough, calloused fingers - shocks you out of the panic attack. 

“Laurent?”

“I am here.” 

And he feels tangible from what you can tell. His hand is cold and dry against the clamminess of yours.

A sigh of relief bursts out of your lungs in a fit of giggles. You start to cough, and you can’t stop. 

“Take it easy. Breathe.” 

His free hand reaches towards your back, but you grab it, too, and hold it like a lifeline while you wheeze and sputter. The crisp material of his white shirt scrapes your cheek. 

He smells of nothing. Like everything in here. 

Without your sense of smell, you might as well be blind. You’re disoriented, and the derealization hits you like a bulldozer. 

“Y-you’re here,” you gasp, digging your fingers into Laurent’s flesh to make sure he’s still there, that he didn’t collapse like the floor did. “For real.”

“For real,” he repeats, and the stiff tone he uses around the words makes you laugh. 

Once you stop shaking, he frees one of his arms to pull out a handkerchief that he then uses to dab the moisture from your cheeks. His expression is tight, crestfallen, and that is how you realize you must have been crying. 

“Do you feel safe enough to come with me?” he whispers, and at this moment, you would have jumped into the flames if he only asked that of you in that tone. 

You nod, but the gesture is not enough for him. He asks again, and this time, you force yourself to respond. “Yeah. Always.”

Something flashes in his eyes, but it’s gone before you can determine its meaning. 

“Don’t look at the ground,” he says as he helps you up to your feet. Even if he didn’t order that, you were planning on only looking at him. 

“Where are we going?” you ask after a while. You walk, but the scenery that you glimpse in your peripheral doesn’t seem to change. 

“I am getting you out.”

“Oh. Okay. Thank you.”

Laurent tries to mimic your smile and fails. Or maybe yours looked just as miserable. 

“Here,” he says, stopping by a door. It’s blue, blending with the walls. “From here, you have to go alone.”

“No!” Once again, you latch onto his retreating hand, leaving indents shaped like the tips of your nails amongst a myriad of other scars. “Please, don’t leave me.”

Laurent sucks in a breath. He looks like you just broke his heart.

“You’ll be safe,” he promises in a voice as brittle as yours. “Just go through the door. It’ll only be a moment.” 

“Do you swear?”

“I swear.”

“Okay.” 

You let him go, swallow, then step through the threshold.

“Congratulations, you passed.”

The voice resounds just as you open your eyes. The ceiling above you is almost impossibly white. Your eyes sting. 

“What?”

“I said, congratulations. The exam is over.” 

A pair of hands helps you up. They are gloved, clinically precise. 

“Take a bag from the bundle by the door. Whichever is fine,” the same voice continues, quick but monotone. “Make sure to eat. Something sweet would be preferable.” 

What’s that, a consolation prize for all the failed—

“Wait. I passed?”

“Yes. Good job. The vertigo will pass in a moment. You can go.”

“But...” Isn’t receiving outside help considered cheating?

“Yes?”

“No. Nothing, thank you.”

Maybe it was just a trick of your mind.