Title: Niki FM
Summary: Emma finally reveals his code name, and Graham doesn't know what to say.
Notes: Sequel to Born a Different Breed. This was inspired by the review of Dreamingdreams.
When she tells him his code name, Graham smiles at her stupidly until he can think of the appropriate thing to say.
Considering that he was the one who spoke for the first few days of their relationship, nowadays he is often at a remarkable loss for words around her. He would chalk it up to being lovesick if he felt sick instead of the gently beating warmth he felt with her around.
It was how he found her. Unlike Emma, he'd known from the beginning who she was. Not the very beginning when he had his gun trained on her and practically begged her to give him a reason not to shoot. He did not know when he shot at her and she tucked and rolled her way right out of his house, leaving him with a smoldering ruin of a wall, which ended up being okay in the end. You don't have to fix a wall after you've burned your whole house to the ground.
He'd known after she was long gone and he was seated in his living room, heartbeat still pounding with adrenaline and ears still peeled for the next threat. He had his gun in hand and at the ready in case Mayor Mills sent anyone else after him. His side hurt but not in a way he paid much attention to until his physical senses went off overdrive and his mental ones came back to him.
It hurt like something he was supposed to notice.
At times, his tattoo would change color. It could freckle a golden brown at the edges and sometimes, it would look almost grey in certain lighting. He had never gotten used to it doing that, and he was often entranced by the sight.
Tonight, it was a green he could not forget.
I'm loath to shoot a woman in the back.
Yes, Graham preferred to see someone up close and to know for certain they were a threat before he shot them. His would-be assassin had looked – not frightened but somewhere in between panicky and dumbfounded. He'd seen it in her eyes, the green that was not brown or grey, but a pure green in the light of his living room. It spoke of flowering plants that he'd collected in the forest on days when he thought his house needed a softening. It spoke of the moss on trees, disturbed by the prey he knew to be close by.
Most importantly, it spoke of the green of his tattoo and the words that practically shouted at him, "You'll be coming home with me."
Or maybe she wouldn't shout them. Maybe she would speak them quietly under her breath after a shared kiss. Graham had blanched then and remembered his own words to her. More likely, she would say them after capturing him.
"You'll be coming home with me," had always warmed him as the low burning sensation of the tattoo did now. It was a promise that he would one day have a home, that someone besides the wolves of the forest would make him feel at home. At least he had imagined it so.
Graham couldn't think of what she had imagined with the words, "Stop or I'll shoot, and I promise I won't miss," branded on her skin.
His heart ached more acutely than it ever had at the thought. He hadn't given it enough consideration that he, who'd always thought himself to be so cold and heartless despite his warm demeanor and affability, would find someone willing to take him home and warm his heart enough to start it beating for another person for the first time in his life. Graham hadn't thought enough to realize that his soulmate would have to be someone so strong that she could bear those words and live to meet him and perhaps love him.
He was not good at forethought when it came to matters of the heart it seemed, but he was good at it when it came to more purely physical ones.
Graham then pressed his fingers to the tattoo on his side and felt that warmth beat back at him. After that, he became what he had always been: the hunter. This time, however, he would be hunting a prey far more precious to him than even the deer he called friends and the birds whose melodies always sang him to sleep out here in the forest.
This time, he had thought, he would be hunting his home.
The phone call for him to fly down to Georgia for a proposition did not help him find her. Following her words down south, he was already almost there when he received the call. When he felt like he needed it, he would rub against his hip and ignite his body with its warmth.
He took to driving one-handed.
And when he arrived and parked just outside the building with sunlight streaming in through the windows, he had pressed down hard enough to bruise himself. Graham had needed to be sure she was there. He found certainty when the heat pushed back with a burning that was almost painful.
He'd felt giddy while he'd waited for her in her room. When he saw her again, well, he had already been certain it was her, but he hadn't wanted it so badly until she walked out of her bathroom with her hair and body dripping water onto the floor and her look of – he still didn't quite know whether it was resigned expectation, annoyance, anger, or just smothered surprise, and he hadn't felt the need to ask.
Graham was genuinely disappointed when she didn't say a word but with their one-sided conversation, he caught on fast that he would have to wait. She wasn't ready.
Still, he couldn't help himself from trying to communicate that he was. She was too focused on his eyes to notice him press his fingers to his side. She didn't react to it, so he had left, but let his hand rest on his hip as he spoke to the Queen as she told him to address her. Her name was unimportant to him; what mattered was the woman separated from him by only mere yards, a distance that he'd felt was too far.
He'd known the Queen figured them out by the way she smiled like one of the wolves of his childhood and spoke with the softness of the feet of foxes on the floor of his forest.
"Your recruiter, by the way, her name is Emma."
"Emma," he echoed. He liked the way her name formed in his throat and the way it sounded. Emma.
Settled in the car on their way back to Maine, he couldn't stop making a fool of himself as he'd tried to fill the silence between them with all his hope and happiness at finally being by her side. It was then that he'd made her jump with his own apology and had to assure himself and her that he had a heart. He'd tapped the hand that he'd left free to warm his tatted hip to heart and told her that it was beating, that it was real.
What he'd left out was that he hadn't known that until he met her.
He couldn't tell her how just being near her made his newly beating heart jump in his chest, so he spoke of everything else that popped into his head. He hadn't spoken this much in all his life, not even when he tried dating in the romantically foolish hope that he'd find her by stepping into a bar, meeting her eyes across the room, having her fix him with a flirty smile and say with certainty, "You'll be coming home with me."
Graham definitely couldn't tell her how he nearly fell to his knees when he pressed his hand to her shoulder to wake her gently and she murmured in a songlike lilt still stuck in dreams, "You'll be coming home with me."
Even if he hadn't nearly had a breakdown at a gas station in North Carolina over the sleepy murmurs of his assassin soulmate, he had already known from Emma's silence that she was not one to leave herself to the fickleness of fate. She would not want her life decided by some words said when she couldn't even control herself. Her silence was her armor. If he'd broken it down then, without her having a say in it, she would never forgive him.
So, instead he nudged her awake and sent her on her way into the store, but not without first pressing his fingers to his tattoo, a quiet acknowledgement of all he felt bubbling up inside him.
Though he had been sorely tempted to tell her when their hands met while reaching for his bear claw. It would have been magical, Graham had thought only for a moment, but that was his fantasy, not hers and he wouldn't force it on her.
Emma had been through enough.
He had forced himself silent for a while after that until the thought of codenames popped into his mind. Wanting to know even though he hadn't expected a response, he'd asked her what she would call him.
Like he thought, she hadn't responded but that was just as well because both his hands were on the wheel when he felt the twinge of warmth not created by him spread its way across his hip and the words she'd spoken only hours before.
Graham's smile had been uncontrollable for hours afterwards.
What happened in the hotel room was a moment he would think of for probably the rest of his life. The way Emma had felt in his arms as he pulled her off the edge of the bed and into his arms. How she looked at him with something he knew to be the same need reflected in his own. He would never forget the way her lips first felt against his.
They still feel that way when she kisses him now; her lips feel like coming back to life. Her lips feel like coming home.
When she'd run away from him afterwards, Graham knew she still wasn't ready, and as much as he wanted to say something, even more than when she spoke, he wanted her to be ready. He wanted her to be as accepting of them as he was. He'd clung to that as he drove and tried to keep his words to a minimum to make it easier for him to do so because it was made so much harder by the way her hand rested right on the bottom of his tattoo.
He couldn't stop looking at her as he set his house aflame and watched everything he ever knew burn to ash. It was only ever a house. She was much more than the ruins of an old cabin and Ikea furniture.
He hadn't missed the way she looked at him as if she were considering the same thing.
They didn't speak when they arrived at the Mayor's house. For the same reasons, he knew now, for Emma didn't want to say goodbye and neither did Graham. "What awful first words that would've been," she'd giggled into his neck while he held her to his chest, the beating of his heart echoing in his ears. He was sure she could hear it too.
She was right, those would've been awful first words, worse than the ones she thought she'd said when he'd lost so much blood that his consciousness had gone with it. Begging for his life would've been an uncomfortable parallel to his threat running across her thigh.
It was no worse than her thinking that everything she'd felt for him and everything they had shared had meant nothing. To this day, he is so grateful to the hope she allowed to bring her back to his side as he lay, unable to follow, in that hospital bed.
He is so grateful to the easy way she accepted his explanation – but even more grateful to Shang for that playlist of only pop punk bands that Emma listened to so often she sang the songs in her sleep.
More than even that, he is grateful that it was those words imprinted on his skin and not, "I'm outside of your window with my radio." He has no idea what he would've thought if he'd seen that detail itself on his skin. It sounded like something Hook would do more than Emma. Say Anything was not one of her favorite movies. To her, grand gestures of love did not mean playing songs at her window, but being by her side. He knew this because she had told him so in both words and the way she would hold his hand while they planned missions or just watched TV or walked along the garden path of the Queen's favorite headquarters.
He supposes it's appropriate then that he doesn't say anything more than, "It has a nice ring to it. Sounds like the stuff of fairytales," and kisses her until she is as giddy with laughter as he feels everyday by her side.