Nothing Important
A tiny little episode addition to '4-D'.
He can feel her shaking. He doesn't understand it. All she did was walk into the kitchen. Now here she is, less than a minute later, with her body pressed against his and her arms around his shoulders, trembling. It's not a sensation he would ever have associated with her. She's not a damn wallflower. It takes a hell of a lot to shake Monica Reyes. There are men in the building where they work that dismiss her as flighty, a lightweight, but John Doggett knows better. He's seen her stay calm and functioning in the face of things that would make every one of those men weep for their mothers.
But when he followed her into the kitchen to tell her to forget about the damn plates, she stared at him with tears in her eyes and a look on her face that suggested the world was about to end. Or that perhaps it already had.
What had she seen, in that head of hers? Had it been a – whatdyacallit? – a vision? She's tried to tell him about them before and he's never listened that closely. He knows she takes all that stuff seriously, but he can't, and he knows that she knows that. It's just not in his nature. John Doggett deals with what he can see and do, with what he can touch and feel, with what he can defend against. It's why he's still holding her against him now, despite the fact that this isn't usually how they respond to each other.
"Monica, what's wrong?"
She makes a sound against his neck, a sob bursting out through a smile. "I'm good. Good," she gets out, but she doesn't let him go. Instead, she hugs him tighter.
They stand like that for what feels like a long time and Doggett is still no nearer to understanding what could have brought his partner to this in the thirty seconds she was out of his sight. He glances at the counter and sees the phone, standing out of its cradle on the worktop.
"Who called? What did they say? What's happened? Monica – talk to me."
She pulls away, looking up at him with a bright blurred smile and the tracks of her tears on her cheeks. She shakes her head. "Nothing. I can't – it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter anyway, John. Sorry."
She steps away, turning to look for those plates she's so far failed to conjure from the depths of her moving boxes.
"Don't be sorry – just tell me what the hell happened."
She takes a deep breath, still with her back to him, wiping her cheeks on the backs of her hands. She's steeling herself, he can tell. She's shaking off whatever this was. Monica turns, holding out a plate. "We should finish those hotdogs before they go cold."
He watches her without moving for another fraction of a second. Her eyes are still too bright. She doesn't look away, but instead moves her gaze over his face, as if trying to fix some sort of memory of him in her mind. This careful scrutiny makes him flush.
"Polish sausage," he corrects her, for lack of anything better to say, and she laughs, a bright sound in her bright new kitchen. Doggett grins at it, at her smile, at her face, "and I told you, don't bother with the plates."
The tension is ebbing away. He lets it go with a pang of something unexpectedly like regret and then it begins to occur to him that what he's regretting could be the loss of the feel of her pressed against him, and then before that thought has even had chance to properly lodge in his brain he turns his back on her, closing it out, because obviously it had never even been there in the first place. Doggett heads back out into the living area as she follows.
"So what you're saying is that you just came over here to drop crumbs on my clean, only-just-occupied floor," she observes. "What you're saying, Agent Doggett, is that you want me to have to clean up on my very first afternoon in my new home."
The playful edge to her voice is a relief. It holds no undercurrent. Here they are, work colleagues, friends. He's called in to see her new place, brought her an inconsequential gift, something that no one could possibly read anything into other than the fact that he misses New York street food and has struggled to find its equal in this city.
Nothing important happened today.
"Start as you mean to go on, Agent Reyes," Doggett says, matching her tone and raising an eyebrow as he stuffs the last of the sausage into his mouth. "That's what my old ma always used to tell me, anyways."
She smiles again, shaking her head slightly so that the light from the windows in her high gabled roof dances off her dark hair. It strikes him that he likes seeing her like this. Off duty, in a space that already suits her, Reyes is in a white T and blue jeans, the simplicity of which appeals to Doggett's own aesthetic.
Time to go, he tells himself. "Well, I'll – leave you to it," he says. "Sure you want to get on with sorting this place out."
Monica nods, her smile lessening a little as some of the tension following that inexplicable whatever-the-hell-it-was in the kitchen returns to shadow her eyes. "See you Monday."
"Monday," he agrees, with another smile.
He turns to the door, and then she says-
"John!"
-and before he registers that she's moving, Monica is behind him. He turns and as he does she takes his left hand, lifting it so that his palm is a warm and heavy weight, flat against hers. She covers his fingers with her other hand, her head bowed. He's frozen in place, unable to move but knowing he needs to, somehow, knowing he has to do something but at a loss as to what, because the obvious thing would be to put his arms around her and for some reason that he's not going to contemplate – not now, not ever if he can stop himself – that suddenly seems like a dangerous thing to do.
When John Doggett does move, it is to stroke his forefinger against the inner curve of her thumb. It is a movement so infinitesimal that it is barely there, but it elicits from her a painful shudder that he's sure he feels run right through him from stem to stern and back again.
Monica looks up at him and damn it all if her eyes aren't full of tears again. It makes him wonder what else she has cried about when there's no one there to see it.
She lets him go, stepping back.
"Monica-"
She shakes her head, smiling. "Got to unpack, John. Thank you."
He's mystified. "For what?"
Monica shrugs. "For coming. For the hot dogs. For being-" she stops herself, bites her lip. "Here."
Time to go, his mind is telling him. Time to go, time to go, time to go.
"Polish sausage," he says.
He leaves to the sound of her soft laughter. It follows him down the hall and out into the light of a Saturday afternoon in which nothing important has happened at all.
[END]