A/N: My heart skipped quite a few beats when Claire and Matt had their scenes together. These precious people. I LOVE THEM SO MUCH.
There's just that one second, before another round of chaos, when Claire wants to kiss him and forget that she's been down this road before.
Later, on the rooftop, with the taste of cold coffee lingering on her lips, she'll at least be bitter (though she still can't cut it for sensible). Why does it always have to be like this? His hands and his voice, and his wide eyes, so beautiful for all that they can't even see their own reflection. And then the danger, the hell in Hell's Kitchen that always seems to gather more blackly around him.
He brings destruction in his wake, and Claire always lets herself get caught in the crossfire.
He's a martyr, she tells herself, for the millionth time. A goddamn martyr.
But as much as she wants to shake her head at that, scold him for his self-righteous self-loathing, she gets it more than she wants to. That's probably why she's so drawn to him. Because martyrs serve—a cause, that is, and she serves people, and she knows what's it like to be willing to die for something you believe in, and to think that dying for something makes up for failing to live for something else.
Claire spends her days in an emergency room, and Matt spends his nights in a different kind of hell. But they both make sacrifices, they both miss Sunday dinner, and they both tell themselves it's worth it.
It hurts, then, when Matt confides in her that all he is and all he does seems to come to nothing. Because it isn't, it doesn't, even if he can't know that. She knows. She knows why martyrs get up again and again, bleeding and broken.
The fight doesn't ever let you go.
Claire Temple might have been a martyr too, if she had a moment to spare.