Page 145 of Falcon’s Forever

Knox is in the doorway when I look up, his arms crossed, watching both of us with an expression I can't fully read.

"Vitals are good," he says, quiet enough not to wake her. "Bullet missed everything that would've killed you outright. You lost a lot of blood and you're going to hurt like hell for a month, but you're going to be fine."

"How long was I out?"

"On and off, since last night. This is the first stretch you've actually held a conversation instead of just surfacing and going under again." He glances at Cara. "She hasn't left."

"I know."

"I told her three times there's a cot down the hall." He’s shaking his head.

"And?"

"And she told me, and I'm quoting her exactly, that I could put the cot somewhere I wouldn't enjoy very much." Knox's mouth twitches, it’s the closest thing to a smile he's got in him this early. "I like her."

"Yeah." My voice is still rough. "Me too."

He checks the monitor, adjusts something on the line running into my arm, and pauses at the door before he leaves. "Falcon."

"Yeah."

"Carrot's mother's been notified. Vulture went himself last night, while all this was happening." He says it plainly, no softening what happened, because Knox has never believed softening helps anybody heal faster. "I didn't want you hearing it secondhand and thinking nobody handled it while you were down."

Something in my chest tightens all over again, grief finding its way back in through the gap the relief left open. "How is she?"

"However a mother is, the night she learns that." He doesn't offer more than that, because there isn't more that would be true. "Vulture said tell you he'll bring you when you're strong enough to stand in front of her yourself. Not before."

"Okay."

"Get some more rest." He leaves quietly, pulling the door most of the way shut behind him.

Cara stirs at the sound, blinking up at me with sleep still heavy in her eyes, and for a second, before she's fully awake, before the last several hours catch up with her again, she just looks at me the way she used to look at me a long time ago, uncomplicated, certain, like there was never a version of us that needed five years and a bullet to find its way back to this.

"Hey," she murmurs.

"Hey."

"You're still here." She moves closer to the bed.

"Apparently that's the plan," I say, and she smiles, it’s small and exhausted and entirely real, and then she rests her head back down against the mattress beside our joined hands, close enough that I can feel her breathing even out again within a minute.

I watch the light change through the blinds and let myself believe, for the first time since the yard behind that warehouse, that whatever comes next, the trial, Carrot's mother, the long slow work of earning a patch back one unglamorous day at a time, I'm not going to be doing any of it without her standing somewhere close enough to reach.

Chapter 20

Cara

Six weeks after the warehouse, Vulture calls Church for eleven in the morning, and doesn't tell Falcon what it's about.

I know, because Falcon tells me over coffee that morning, frowning at his phone like the lack of an agenda is a personal insult. "He hasn't done that in weeks. Usually there's a reason attached."

"Maybe there's a reason attached to not telling you the reason."

"Comforting."

I don't tell him what I know. Zip called me two days ago, quiet, and almost shy about it, and asked if I wanted to be there. I said yes before he'd finished the sentence.

Falcon's healed enough now that the limp's mostly gone, though I catch him pressing a hand to his side some mornings before he remembers I'm watching. He’s had six weeks of physical therapy, six weeks of collections with Rook and perimeter walks with Harrier, six weeks of a man doing exactly what was asked of him without once complaining that it was beneath him, even on the mornings I could see it cost him something just to show up and do it anyway.