A/N So I know I have an unfinished story on here and I'll get to it, I promise! But I just HAD to write something after the last episode. This season is making my emotions go haywire!
"Welcome home, Walker." Auggie kept his emotions firmly in check as Annie put her hand on his shoulder. He patted her arm and grasped it lightly before walking out of the room. Annie was different. Harder. Her experiences over the past few months had changed her, and for the first time, she was hard for him to read. She had always had walls around her heart, but this was something else. The light that usually emanated into the atmosphere around her had disappeared. Annie had not broken down or given the Russians any information they didn't already know, but part of her had died in that prison. Every time he thought about what they might have done to her while she was locked up, his blood boiled, hands forming fists by his sides. The thought of her never returning home haunted him.
He remembered back to when he first returned from Iraq, disoriented and uncertain. The flashbacks of the accident that would hit him without warning. The emotions swirling around his body that he did not know how to handle. Depression, frustration, anger. He had shut down, not knowing if there was anyone he could trust enough to open up to, and not wanting to be seen as weak. Keeping everyone at an arms distance behind a façade of sarcastic wit had become second nature to him. Until Annie Walker arrived. She had somehow convinced him to open up, and now he was lost without her.
It scared him that Annie's defenses might become permanent, that she would continue to lock everyone out. She was shutting him out of her life, and it hurt more than he could have imagined. He needed her too much to lose her like this, relied on her friendship to get him through long days at work. Well, her, and the bottle of Patron he kept in his top drawer. Currently that bottle was empty from weeks of insomnia and living at Langley trying to find a way to get Annie out of Russia. Her body had returned home, but it remained to be seen if the Annie Walker he knew and loved would ever truly return. Not that he would love her any less if she remained this shell of her former self, but he cared too much to allow her to stay this broken.
He had hoped that she would open up over drinks tonight, but it was understandable that she was not yet ready to talk to someone who truly knew her. When he first returned from Iraq the people he had been closest to were the ones he avoided the longest, knowing that one look from them would cause his carefully crafted walls to shatter. He had needed to pull himself together first, to regain some semblance of control over his environment. It had been about a year before he had opened up to anyone, and he could only hope that it would not take Annie as long.
He would wait, regardless of how long it took. Eventually he knew he would have to push her to open up, that it was not something that would happen on its own. She would be angry, defensive. She would insist she did not need to talk, and that she was fine. She would probably direct all her pent-up emotions at him, pushing him away harder than she pushed away anyone else. Insisting he was just making her feel worse. Eventually though, she would call him when she finally let herself experience the full range of her emotions. He knew after two years of close friendship that in spite of her love affairs with other men from rival agencies, he was the one who she always called when she fell apart. He wanted to be more to her than simply her handler and friend. He had wanted more for a while. But it was not what she needed at the moment. It was not their time.
The added complication of her obvious crush on Eyal did not change the fact that Walker was not in any state to build a healthy relationship. Jealousy ripped through him like a bad burrito every time he thought about it, making his stomach clench and face grimace tightly, but it did not change the facts. Annie was in pieces, and it was not the right time for him to tell her how he felt. He knew that she was likely to turn to Eyal as she avoided dealing with her emotions, seeing him as her knight in shining armor who would make everything okay. But it was a pipe dream, a fantasy.
Auggie knew better than anyone else what she was going through. She would never be okay again, would never return to being the person she was before Lena shot her and killed the man she loved in front of her eyes. She would never be able to forget the horrors of interrogation in a Russian dungeon. She would never again be able to fully trust anyone the way she used to. And she would have to rebuild her identity from the ground up. Her life had been changed forever and eventually she would realize that Eyal could not make it all go away.
For now though, Annie was making it clear that she needed some space to process, burying herself in work and refusing to take a break. She needed a chance to piece herself back together, and knowing Annie, she would not accept any help in the process.
When she needed him though, he would be there. No matter how long it took.