Not mine. Just a little drabble, for your consideration. R&R if it so pleases you.
She's hurt him, she knows, with Faber and Raph and a million treacherous little things that were never meant to wound him, were never meant to involve him at all.
He's tangled up with her in ways that she doesn't know how to avoid, or fix. They're in too deep before she thinks to stop it. It's a shitty situation no matter which way you spin it. They always are.
It's just that she's toxic, understand, and he's really the only thing she's ever thought to shield, to save. It makes no difference in the end, of course, but she has to try. Doesn't know how not to. He's an innocent, in all the ways she isn't, and she honestly doesn't know how to keep him from the wrongness that builds up in her sometimes. She doesn't know how to keep him.
Despite her best efforts, they fall into each other one day like it's absolutely nothing at all. Inevitable, he tells her, somewhere between the car and his bed. He's wrong, she thinks, and doesn't say, it's just that she was never strong enough to walk away. It's just one of those things, she supposes, like so many others that she can't seem to control. He's too good, and she's too weak and this will break them, will break him finally, irrevocably the way these things always do. Inevitable.
After, in the dull light, he whispers I'll never leave you against her skin. A prayer and a promise. A concession. Because he knows, in that Marshall way of knowing her, that I love you would be the final piece of her undoing. They are frightfully close, regardless. I'll never leave you. It changes things.
She knows it's a lie, even as he breathes it. But he doesn't know, not yet, and that changes things too. She says nothing, and holds on tight.
It's painful and slow, but they're finding their way through this.
He brushes his fingers against hers a moment too long in the office the next day. Dangerous, but he doesn't mean it that way. He means it only as a reminder to her that he remembers her still against the harsh light of day.
It's the little things, she guesses, that keep them sane.