A/N: Hello, my lovely readers. Sorry for the long wait on this, but I'm taking my time because I want to do it right. (Or, at least, as right as I possibly can, being a writer who is seriously out of practice.) The awesome anon who left a review on Chapter 2 a couple of days ago wisely pointed out that this story is the first of its kind here in the Covert Affairs archive, and I really, really don't want to screw it up. (On that note, please let me know if I AM screwing it up, or, even better, if I'm not.)

So having said that, I'm sure this chapter is totally going to be a tease, and I'm working on getting the next part to you as soon as I can (while I also move into a new apartment).

Breathe.

Auggie wiped his eyes, and reminded himself once more: breathe.

Nothing could have prepared him for the colors—his body had almost forgotten how to see them—and the light of the sunrise was almost his undoing. For the first time in years, his sunglasses were doing the job they were made for, instead of simply masking his unfocused, useless eyes from the scrutiny of the judgmental public.

The colorful light dissolved into a blue morning sky as he stared, until he was pulled sharply out of his awe-struck reverie by a sudden movement of the sleeping woman lying just behind him.

Breathe.

This was it.

It had been easy to make the wish, easy to think that the one thing in the world he wanted most was to see her, but he never thought in a million lifetimes that it would happen. This was so much more complicated than he could have dreamed.

He couldn't help but think of all the times he had seen a movie adaptation of a book he had read, and had never been able to separate the actors from the characters from that moment on. Tyler Durden will forever look like Brad Pitt, whether he likes it or not, and although that had been a particularly fantastic casting choice (in his humble opinion), the point was that he had grown sort of attached to his mental image of Annie Walker.

What if he didn't like what he saw?

Impossible, he thought, but he couldn't make himself believe it. Sure, she was his best friend, his metaphorical light in the dark, and he cared very much about her, but he was human, and he didn't trust his inner caveman one bit. His joke about ladies loving a blind man came from truth, but it wasn't the whole truth. The fact was that the ladies loved Auggie even more before his accident, and he hadn't done much to fight against the stereotype of the shallow male. His accident had been a wake-up call. He had taken advantage of far too many women, and the universe told him that he had done far too much looking and not nearly enough listening. It was his ultimate karmic backlash.

He adapted, he learned to live without his sight, and, along the way, he realized what kind of a person he had been. So he took the hint, and he listened. He heard how injuries caused imbalanced movement, how stress and emotion altered a person's voice, and when nerves made a person very subtly fidget. Whenever he met a woman, he didn't see her body—he heard her life, and it changed him.

He had been whittled down to the best-ever version of himself when he lost his vision, and he hoped to the heavens above that it wasn't all about to be undone.

Breathe.

This is it.

Three, two, one.

Auggie turned, slowly, and took in the sight of her small form curled on its side, facing away from him. He already had a good idea of her figure from their time in the gym (and the surprising turn their relationship had taken just the night before), so he focused on the information that was new to him. Her hair.

Honey blonde with some light flaxen highlights, just beginning to shimmer as the dawn grew lighter. Layered, with a slight curl to it. Fine strands, but a good amount of it. He wondered if it was as soft as it looked.

No sooner had his fingers threaded in the ends of her loose hair than the object of his scrutiny began to stir, stretching her arms out in front of her, then over her head, and then back to the ground as she rolled herself over towards him, squinting against the morning sunshine.

He felt like he couldn't breathe. She wasn't at all what he had imagined.

She was so much more.