A/N: Thank you for all the reviews and alerts – it's like instant gratification to come home after three hours and find my mailbox full of notifications! I'm glad everyone thinks I've captured Finn well – that's pretty much all I'm good at these days (you wouldn't believe the conversations he has with me in my head sometimes – he's gotten very good at convincing me to continue driving to work in the mornings instead of turning around and going back home). I've had this story on my mind for a few days and it was originally only planned as a one-shot – not quite sure how it ended up getting a bit longer.

Hope this will keep you satisfied, even if it's more angsty than fluffy. I promise the next one will be delightfully fluffy again

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"How much longer do they expect us to wait?"

He'd never known how impatient she could really get. They'd only been waiting half an hour – by his standards, that wasn't a long time to wait for anything in a hospital, especially not after you'd already been looked at and poked at and everything. But then perhaps she'd not had as many opportunities to get to see the inside of one as he'd had; he'd been here at least five or six times in his life so far, for various reasons. Broken bones, mostly. Stitches from when he'd had the bike accident when he was still in kindergarden. And once to have his appendi-something removed. The last one didn't really count, it hadn't been a short visit; but all the other times he could remember sitting there for hours and hours before anyone had ever looked at him.

She'd been pacing the little space next to his him for what seemed an eternity. The look on her face wasn't nearly as annoyed as her voice made it seem, and he knew there was something else behind it.

He held out his hand and stopped her as she walked by him, grabbing her by the elbow.

"Come here," he said, and pulled her closer until she stood right in front of him between his legs. Their heads were level now that he was sitting on the examination bed; but instead of meeting his eyes she looked down. "Rach, come on," he said, unable to keep his amusement out of his voice. "what ever this is, it's not your fault. So stop beating yourself up about it."

As her head came up, the eyes that met his confirmed his suspicions, misery and guilt written in them so thickly that they seemed to overflow with it. No sooner had she looked at him – his heart plummeting, aching, wanting nothing more than to take everything sad from her – than she threw herself at him, wrapping her arms around him with a sob as she buried her face against the crook of his neck.

He felt shaken. It was at the same time terrifying and amazing that she would react like this. Unsure of what else to do or say, he enveloped her in his arms and laid his head against hers, just glad to feel her closeness and hoping it would have the same soothing effect on her as it had on him. After one week of staying at arm's length, being able to hold her felt great.

But instead of calming down, her sobs just grew harder, until her entire body was shaking in his embrace. It bewildered him – was she still crying about his foot? Or was it something else? He reached up one hand and patted the back of her head.

"Rach?" he whispered nervously, and realised that her crying was slowly making him freaked out. But she gave no sign of having heard him, even.

Before he could do anything else – not that he knew what – a noise alerted him to someone else's presence. He'd been so wrapped up in Rachel's distress that he hadn't even noticed the door opening. Dr. Noaman was standing in the doorframe, looking at them with an amused expression, his hand still on his throat after having cleared it so noisily. "Should I come back later?"

Rachel let go of him so quickly and completely that all he could do was blink in confusion as she stepped back, her head cast down, her face hiding behind a curtain of hair. She simply stood there at his side, a few feet away, her arms folded in front of her chest as if she was trying to hold on to herself. He stared at her in utter bewilderment. It hadn't been more than a couple of minutes since she'd been all annoyed impatience, and now she was this… crying mess? Why?

It was a puzzle, and one he couldn't solve right now, with the doctor standing in the same room as them. So he switched his attention to him.

"Uh… no, sorry about that," he said, feeling embarrassed.

For another moment the doctor looked from him to Rachel and back again, still with that same amused smile, then he advanced further into the room and took a seat behind his desk. The smile slowly vanished as the doctor looked into the papers lying in front of him, and it made way to a more sombre expression. "Then let's get this over with, shall we? You've got what is called Achilles tendonitis, which is a condition of irritation of the large tendon in the back of the ankle that often leads to a more severe inflammation and rupture of the tendon. There is evidence of a slight inflammation in yours."

"Ah."

That didn't actually sound so bad. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Rachel wipe her eyes, then look up. To his surprise the look on her face was oddly grim, which he found only more puzzling.

"How does one incur Achilles tendonitis?" she asked, her voice unnaturally strong after all the crying she'd done just moments ago. There was a weird tone to it that he couldn't quite place.

The doctor seemed to find the sudden change in her equally surprising and looked at her for a moment before turning his attention back to Finn. "You said you had been running at the onset of the pain. Do you do this on a daily basis?"

"Yeah, sort of." Coach Tanaka had always made them run laps for practise, so it could be called daily. And he'd really been running daily for the last week. "I mean, at school I did it regularly, and for the last week we went running every day."

Dr. Noaman nodded his head, looking down at the papers again, then looked back up at him and steepled his fingers together over the file. "See, Finn, this kind of injury is fairly common with athletes. It usually can occur if you change your training schedule by increasing the difficulty or distance. Sometimes it can even be caused by a simple change in footwear."

"We ran uphill a lot," Rachel said, very matter-of-factly. He eyed her again, and reached out to take her hand. Her fingers slipped between his but there was not the slightest bit of reaction when he squeezed hers, hoping to get her to do the same back.

The doctor looked from her to Finn again, and nodded once more. "If you are not used to running uphill, then doing that would be a very probable cause to your injury."

Something about her line of conversation had bothered him all along but as he listened to the doctor's last reply it finally struck him: she was really blaming herself for all this! And Dr. Noaman had just played right into her hands with his reply.

Shit.

"Rach, you-" he began, grabbing her hand with his other hand, too, but she slipped her fingers out of his grasp entirely.

"How is this curable?" she interrupted him, her voice deceptively detached.

For the first time during the entire conversation the doctor addressed her directly instead of Finn. "He's going to have to abstain from any further running or any exercise that will put a strain on his foot. The tendon is inflamed, and he will have to take some medication for this."

As if he was only now realising that he wasn't actually talking to his patient, Dr Noaman turned back to Finn with a serious face. "While I know any walking is going to hurt in the beginning, you will have to keep that foot mobile to a certain point. You will have to walk on it; but if you ice it and take your anti-inflammatory medication you should be fine. But no more than just light exercise until the inflammation has gone back, and you're going to have to be careful afterwards."

As he listened to the doctor's advice, a terrible realisation finally hit Finn. The one thing he'd pushed aside all this time, hadn't even thought of until now because he'd been too engrossed with Rachel – the one thing that she probably hadn't forgotten, and had just added to whatever else she was blaming herself for: his job. The summer job he was supposed to start in two days - the job that was going to need him on a bike, cycling all over town to deliver messages and stuff. Was he going to be able to do that?

Consternation written clearly on his face, Finn asked, "how about cycling? I'm to start a job in two days as a bike messenger…?"

The doctor shook his head. "Not at the speed and the hours that kind of job brings with it, Finn. As I said, you have to take it slowly."

He swallowed hard. Didn't want to believe it. What was he going to do?

"Thank you, Dr. Noaman," he heard Rachel say next to him, and felt more than saw her move forward. She took his hand, pulled him off the bed he was sitting on. He barely registered any of it.

His worry about Rachel, all the other distractions – they'd just faded into the background suddenly. How could he have forgotten about the job? It'd been Burt who'd arranged it all for him, got him the interview with one of his garage clients, seen him off to the actual thing with all kinds of helpful advice – and who'd cheered with him when he got the call that he'd got the job. He'd been so stoked about it. His first proper job, earning money – not just a couple of bucks an hour like he had at Sheets'n'Things. And now? He couldn't do it.

Finn shook the doctor's proffered hand automatically, said "Thank you" when given the prescription and "Goodbye" when leaving, but it was Rachel who got him out of that office, walking down that hallway, into the elevator, across the lobby, across the car park, to his car. He didn't even feel the pain in his foot, even though it was there, an insistent burning sensation by now. It wasn't until she'd seen to him getting into the passenger seat of his car and she'd climbed in behind the steering wheel that he snapped out of the daze.

Because that was when she started crying again. Startled out of his reverie by the noise of her sobbing, he looked at her. She didn't even bother to hide it this time; she threw herself against him, her arms around his neck, buried her face against his chest and cried until her entire body shook with the sobs. Once again, all he felt able to do was to hold her and wait until this would subside, until she'd calm down enough to speak – but this time he also needed some time. Time to digest this whole thing, to figure out what to say. Figure out how to get her to stop feeling she was to blame.

So they just sat there. After a while he pulled her arm down from around her neck and simply held her hand in his, stroking the back of her hand with his thumb. The sobbing turned to sniffling.

"Rach?" He leaned down and kissed the top of her head. "Please don't blame yourself. None of this is your fault, I told you before."

She pulled away from him but didn't let go of his hand. When she met his eyes hers were red-rimmed and puffy and all he could think of was how much he truly loved her.

"It's not that. I – please hear me out – " she began, and stopped him from trying to object by freeing her hand and putting her index finger against his lips. She dropped her hand after a second and let it rest right on top of his heart as she continued. "Finn, I am sorry. Not just about this whole mess – yes I am to blame, at least a little, you can't deny that, if I hadn't been so adamant about taking things slowly you would not have been so insistent on accompanying me on my runs just to spend more time with me. And I deliberately chose harder routes than usual, too, because I got it into my head that I had to punish you somehow."

He slipped his free hand over hers, clutching it to his heart as if he could somehow make her stop talking with that. He didn't actually want to revisit the conversation they had that day a week ago. Just thinking about it made him a little sick to his stomach. But the plea in her eyes kept him from trying to stop her.

"Being in that doctor's office – suddenly all I could see was us in that other doctor's office."

He stared at her, feeling the blood rush to his head. He'd been so bold that day, so desperate to make her feel something other than scared.

"I remembered the look in your eyes when I told you that I still had feelings for Jesse, that he still cared about me."

He remembered that, too. Vividly. And even now, after everything was said and done, it still hurt a little bit.

"I remember feeling scared. But I convinced myself then that I was scared of losing him – when all along the only thing I truly was scared of was admitting how much I- how much you meant to me."

He blinked. Hard.

"It was hurt pride that pushed me into his arms, and when he was gone I realised that. But last week…." She broke off, cast her eyes down with such sadness that he felt like his heart was going to burst out of his chest.

A single tear rolled down her cheek and he stared at it, following it with his eyes, mesmerized. He found he wasn't capable of saying anything, or even trying to think.

But then she looked up, looked right into his eyes, and there was a glimmer of something in hers that made him shiver, inside and out. Butterflies in his stomach didn't even come close.

"Just now, there, in the doctor's office I realised I almost made the same mistake again last week. You had as much reason to be upset as I was – we both lied to each other. But I just saw my own hurt and disappointment, and never really considered yours. Again."

Before he knew what was happening, she was suddenly on his lap, her lithe body straddling his knees. Her hands now both on his chest, she looked into his eyes and there was something new in her eyes that made his heart leap in his chest. He was sure she had felt it, too, for the next moment a smile blossomed on her face: that smile, the special smile, the one she only had for him.

"I love you, Finn."

And just like that, nothing else mattered anymore. Not his injured foot, not the job he'd lose because of it, nor any of the heartache he'd gone through for the past months. It was only her, and him, and what was between them.

"I love you, Rachel," he said, his voice raw with emotion as he leaned forward to kiss her.

But she pulled back. "You're sort of my Achilles heel, you know?"

He looked at her, taken aback. "Uhm… what?"

The smile she gave him was glorious in all its cuteness. "My weak spot. I'll explain later."

She was still smiling when their lips touched.

. . . . . . .

A/N: No, this isn't the end, there's still one more to come so bear with me.