Alright so this one is a bit long winded, but I hope you enjoy it regardless. More side characters will be popping up next chapter. I hope everyone has a great weekend!

Wick's POV

It's one week before February when Newark sees its first proper snow fall. The state is in pure panic and milk and bread are completely sold out three days before the storm is even supposed to hit. The hospital over staffs and sends out emails promising rides from ambulances for anyone who would still come in for their shift. The night before it all starts Wick drives to Raven, waiting for her to come out patiently. Though picking her up wasn't a usual part of their routine, it was cold and dark and he didn't really see why it wasn't. So he figured why the hell not.

When she walks out she freezes after spotting his truck. Then he watches her take tentative steps toward him and swing open the door. "I don't recall asking-"

"Too bad," he cuts her off, giving her his very best shit eating grin. Sometimes he forgets the times when she used to intimidate him with her hard stares and angry words. Now he was used to those moments, always brief and with an undertone of softness just beneath. "Get in, loser."

She doesn't wait for another invitation as she gets in, slamming the door and buckling her seat belt before he pulls away. "Ready for snow-pocalypse 2k16?" he asks, referencing the actual news broadcast he had seen earlier today. He was more than a little ashamed at everyone's state of panic.

"Oh you know it," she mumbles and he sees her slouch into that familiar position she always went to in his truck before falling asleep. He stays quiet for the ride in, even turning the radio down in hopes of helping her sleep.

Five minutes before their shift he pokes her shoulder. She mumbles a 'no' and slouches further against the window. "Come on, sleepy head," he coaxes. Though, if he were honest with himself, he didn't want to wake her up any more than she wanted to be woken. "I promise not to tease you on the way home if you get up."

She groans and rubs her eyes in an attempt to wake herself up. "I meant to ask you…" she starts and then stops, biting her lip in what he assumes is contemplation.

"Yes?" he prompts.

"Never mind," she says, her energy suddenly recovering as she slips out of the truck in record time.

He follows after, turning the car off and pocketing the keys. "You can't outrun me you know," he says as he takes a few jogging steps to catch up. He grabs her shoulder, forcing her to swivel around to face him. His hand reaches out to steady her, just in case.

"Wick, it's cold," she complains which is the most half assed whine she's ever offered. As if she wasn't the least bit used to this.

He shakes his head. "I'm not letting you go until you finish your sentence." He says this as though she couldn't just shake him off if she wanted.

With a sigh and roll of her eyes she says, "Would you mind if I just…stayed at your place for the day?" She mumbles the question down at her feet, peering up at him through her eyelashes a moment later.

"Of course not," he answers like it wasn't worth a question at all. That's because it wasn't. He always wanted her there, but he knew better than to say so.

"It's just my heat has been out for a while now and my mom has the only space heater so technically I should probably go home and make sure she doesn't burn the house down but…I'm sick of being cold."

His hand falls from her shoulder immediately. Now he felt a bit like an ass for making her stand out here. "I don't need an explanation," he says, resisting the urge to throw an arm over her shoulder as they make their way into the hospital. That did explain the coldness he had felt in her trailer the other day. He'd tried to blame it on the door they had left open and the fact that he kept his own apartment plenty toasty. He was convinced there was no way that she actually lived somewhere that cold. "You're always welcome, Raven."

She doesn't answer and he wonders if it's because she can't. She nods once and offers him this sad excuse for a smile and then she disappears in the opposite direction.

Morning comes slowly. He resents the night for each slow passing second it forces on him. The shift had been surprisingly busy, more than four different calls throughout the hours which kept him occupied for the most part. The snow fall started around one in the morning and continued steadily through.

Raven looks half asleep at her desk that morning as Jasper rambles on about something so Wick steps in as soon as he walks through the locked doors to admitting. "Come on, Reyes. Save the chit chat for when there isn't an impending storm of death that we have to drive home in."

Her reaction is delayed, but she turns from Jasper to find him. The light in her eyes is completely gone, replaced with what he assumes is exhaustion. Without hesitation this time he throws an arm around her shoulder and starts leading her towards the door. "See ya, man!" he yells back to Jasper who had probably just been cut off midsentence. Oh well, he would live.

"When did you get so touchy feely?" she complains as they walk outside. Her next words die on her lips though as the wind picks up and the snowflakes swirl all around them. The moment would be a bit more magical if they weren't both about to freeze.

Wick pretends not to notice the way she curls in further against his embrace. "Do you want to stop at your house?" he offers. It wasn't ideal in the snow but he wouldn't begrudge her if she did. "Check on your mom and get some clothes to change into and stuff?"

"The roads look bad," she muses, pulling her jacket tighter around her body. Maybe he should be upset that she essentially stole it, but really he was just happy that she had. It's not like it was serving much of a purpose otherwise. "If she burns the trailer down then that's her own problem."

He doesn't miss the bitterness in her tone. It'd be easy to argue with her but he decides against it. In all honesty, he wasn't looking forward to driving in this anyway. Once again he's grateful that he lives within relatively close distance to the hospital. "If you're sure…" She doesn't comment one way or another as they reach his truck.

Wick starts it up and lets it run, the engine complaining about the weather almost as loudly as everyone else. "If you order a few parts," Raven says, her hands reaching up and pulling the ponytail from her hair. "I could probably get this thing running even better." The way she says it is almost mischievous, a wild look in her eyes that had been so dull and lifeless minutes sooner.

But her statement makes him think of something else entirely and he asks, "Why don't you just fix your heat? That sounds like something you could easily do."

"I'm waiting on the part I need," she sighs and he wonders if that means she's ordered it and is waiting for it come in or if she's waiting to be able to buy the part at all. It bothers him that his thought process immediately jumps there.

She plays with the radio the whole way home and he has to make a conscious effort not to get distracted by her singing while he attempts to drive through the less than ideal streets. To her credit, she doesn't once lecture his driving, even when the truck slides too far forward at a red light or if he drifts over too far on a turn. She doesn't even look scared.

Once they reach the apartment Wick puts an exorbitant amount of effort not to wrap his arm around her again and help lead her inside. The sidewalks sucked and were completely covered in ice and snow. Of course, since he's spending so much time worrying about Raven tripping and falling, he's the one to go down. She laughs at him for a solid minute before so much as offering a hand to help him up. He considers pulling her down but then he takes note of the purple under her fingernails and decides flirting in the snow could wait for some other time.

Inside she strips her jacket along the back of his couch and sits down to work on getting her shoes off. "Do you know how long this is supposed to keep up?" she asks, gesturing out the window.

He wonders if she's worried about her mom and suddenly regrets not being a little more insistent on taking her to check in. "I think till like noon or something? We can stop by your place before I take you back to work tonight." She looks up at him but must decide against saying anything. Instead she just nods, a yawn falling past her lips. "Why don't you take my bed?" he offers. "I don't have to go back in tonight so I think I'm gonna stay up anyway." It's the truth for the most part. If she weren't here he'd probably sleep but since she is, he's more than happy to give it up.

She seems to hesitate but then nods, "Yeah, sure," and gets up from the couch. He knows she's tired because she doesn't bother with any arguments or smart ass comments before wandering down the hall to his room and offering a, "Night, Wick," as she shuts the door behind her.

The phone rings shortly after the sun has set. Wick had managed to pass out sometime prior, a pencil still in his hand with his head lolled back against the couch. He clears his throat in an attempt to sound more awake as he mumbles, "Hello?" into the receiver.

After he hangs up he stares blankly across the room for a moment, trying to pull himself out of the pit of exhaustion that he'd been in. Poking his head into his room he finds Raven still asleep. She laid on her stomach, the pillow half falling out of the bed, and snoring quietly.

Maybe it was selfish to wake her up, but he was bored. Besides, they had time to sleep later. "Reyes," he whispers, a finger running down her exposed arm. She shivers at the contact and pulls it away. "Raven, wake up. I have good news." His voice rests somewhere between normal volume and a whisper.

She turns, burying her face directly in the pillow, and lets out a groan. "Good news can wait," she complains. Her stomach growls then and Wick can't help the smile that crosses his face.

"Maybe good news can wait but it would seem your stomach doesn't want to." He reaches forward and pokes her side. This results in a light shriek from Raven along with her hand blindly smacking around in his direction. "Ticklish?" he asks, forgetting about boundaries and lines for once. After all, she's the one in his bed. Surely lines were blurring now more than ever.

With a forceful movement she turns to face him, fire in her eyes. "Do that again and see where it gets you." He holds up his hands in mock surrender, but he laughs all the same. She tries to keep her stare hard though it doesn't take long for her features to soften. "What exactly was so important that you had to wake me up?" Her voice still plays with irritation but he knows that she isn't mad anymore.

"To bring you good tidings of great joy," he jokes and she stares at him like he has three heads. Clearly someone hadn't been forced to attend the Christmas service at church every damn year. "Delaware is in a state of emergency. Work is making Jasper stay which means you're off the hook."

"Oh," she says, her brows furrowing and her eyes bouncing back and forth in thought.

"What's wrong?" At no point had he considered that she might think of this as bad. Maybe she hadn't thought she would be stuck here with him for a whole night, maybe she wanted an out.

Raven bites at her lip before admitting," Well that's twelve hours of pay I won't see in my check." Oh, he finally realises. A shift that was cut from him might mean he couldn't eat out for every meal in a week. For her it meant something very different it seemed. "It's fine," she says with a shake of her head, pushing herself into a sitting position and letting her bare legs hang from the bed. Wick tries not to stare. He fails. "I'll just take a shift from Jasper. It'll work out."

It appears she talks to herself more than him. It's when she moves to get her brace, nearly falling off the bed in her reach, that he's pulled back to reality. He grabs it and offers it to her. She snatches it from his hand with a bit more force than necessary. When he goes to back away her hand grabs his wrist. "Could I…could you help me to the bathroom actually? A shower would be nice." She sets the brace back down on the floor and he doesn't blame her with not wanting to deal with taking that thing on and off for a shower.

Answering her would be easier if his throat hadn't run dry. So he settles for nodding as a response. She lowers her feet to the ground and stands, fully supported on her good leg. Wick wonders if she knows she's in nothing more than his boxers, which it would seem she helped herself to, and her thin shirt. He swallows heavily, still crouched in front of her. His eyes travel up her body, stalling on a few different areas. There are angry red spots all up and down her bad leg, open gashes that look bloodied and painful, but his eyes stop there for only a second before appreciating many other sights. She's staring down at him with an amused stare and the beginning of a smile.

He clears his throat and stands, trying to remind little Wick that now was not the time to make an intruding appearance. "What's easiest for you?" he asks, his eyes fixed on her lips even as he speaks.

She throws an arm around his shoulder and he follows her signals. When she takes a step on her bad leg he wraps his arm a little tighter around her waist and she pushes down heavily against him. In all actuality he's half carrying her, but he doesn't mind in the slightest. They reach the bathroom and he's impressed with how she gets around after she disentangles herself from him. She uses the counter as leverage to help her move and sits on the edge of the tub to turn on the water.

"Need any more help?" he asks, eyebrows waggling and grin forming. "I'll have you know that I am an excellent connoisseur when it comes to bathing needs."

She rolls her eyes and stands so she can shove her hands against his chest, out of the bathroom. "I've got it from here, Wick."

He stands outside the shut bathroom door, smile in place and heart a little fuller than usual. He walks away when the water starts running and tries not to think about her for the next twenty minutes.

"Wick!" he hears when he's halfway through staring into a pot of boiling pasta. It wasn't that he didn't know how to make it…just that he didn't know how to tell it was done. He knew you could throw spaghetti against the wall…did that translate to macaroni? He is more than grateful to abandon his task to answer Raven.

Though her call hadn't been the least bit distressed he moves quickly anyway. "We didn't think this through," she announces when he rounds the corner. A towel is wrapped around her body, her hair hanging in wet strings around her shoulders. He hadn't realised how long it was until now, seeing how it falls nearly halfway down her back. With a laugh he moves to help her from where she stands, leaning against the counter.

Again with a bit of teamwork and a significant amount of trust on Raven's part he helps her make her way back to the bedroom. He helps her sit on the bed, his eyes scanning down to her legs again. "Wait here," he says as he moves to leave the room.

"Good thing you said that, I was just getting ready to run a marathon!" she shouts after him. When he comes back with a tube of Neosporin and a box of bandaids in his hands she looks at him like he's grown a third head. "What the hell are you about to do?"

For the second time tonight he crouches in front of her and uncaps the Neosporin. "Pretty sure it shouldn't look like this," is all he says as he moves to dab the gel on her wounds. Her legs are still warm from the water and droplets run down them, his hands quickly getting coated in the moisture. He almost apologises for how cold it probably is, but then he remembers how unnecessary that would be. "So," he starts, keeping his eyes on what he's doing and not on her face. He had a pretty good feeling that she hated him for this right about now. "How do you get around at home?"

The toes of her good foot poke into his arm and he waves them off. She wiggles them next to his ear and he stops what he's doing to shoot her a look. The irritation is completely faked. He was too busy revelling in her kid like tendencies. "Crutches," she answers. He hears her sharp intake of breath when he swipes a line of gel just above her knee where the end of her brace usually rested.

"Can you feel that?" he asks, his voice more than a little surprised. Hope tinges it in a way he hadn't expected. Raven nods. Wick spends more time than needed covering that particular spot. "Maybe you should leave your brace off for tonight. Lest you ruin all my hard work."

For whatever reason, that's the moment she closes off again. She pulls her brace from the floor and tightens her hold on the towel that covered her. "Let me get dressed," she says, her voice harder than he had remembered it being in days.

"Yeah," he nods, standing and taking a step back from her. It was easy to tell when something was too far. It was harder to know which thing specifically would set her off. "I'll make food." If things weren't quite so tense he's sure she'd make a joke about the empty promise he'd just offered and how she would look forward to the take out. Instead she's silent as he leaves the room and shuts the door behind him.

It sometimes felt almost like a game. This tug and war between just enough and too far. The hardest part was that he had no trouble at all crossing the middle and living in the happy bliss of Too Far Land forevermore. She didn't seem quite so gung ho at the idea.

Giving up on the idea of pasta, Wick works on scraping the burnt pieces of macaroni from the bottom of the pot while a pizza begins to cook in the oven. At some point she must have come out and made it to the living room because out of nowhere he hears a demanding, "Why didn't you tell me about this?"

With tenuous steps he walks out of the kitchen, pot and spoon still in hand. She looks to him with an eyebrow raised and then just shakes her head. He walks around to peer over her shoulder at what she's holding and she moves the paper away from the water dripping off the pot. "That? I drew it up while you were sleeping." It was another half assed plan, one he was sure she'd probably comment about eating and shitting back out later so it could resemble its true form once and for all.

"This…Wick, this could work."

"Wait really?" He leans in further, trying to see just where his brilliance had occurred.

With a sigh she pulls it away again from him. "It'd be good if you didn't ruin the only half decent thing you've managed to make," she mutters and that's what lets him knows for once and for all that things were back to normal with them again. "What the fuck did you even do?"

She cranes her neck to peer into the pot and he pulls it away before she gets a chance to see. "Just some mild burning, it could happen to anyone."

"Uh-huh." For whatever reason he gets the idea that she doesn't buy his statement.

"Shut up, pizza is in the oven." Her laughs follow him through to the kitchen. A part of him tries to fight off the thought that it was something he could get used to. (That part fails.)

He passes out in between games of Uno. She'd unearthed the pack of cards and had forced him through about ten different rounds while the two of them sipped on hot chocolate. At some point she gets up for something or other and he uses his arms as a pillow to lie on the table.

"C'mon," he hears after what feels like mere seconds. "You're going to have a killer kink in your neck if you sleep like that all night." She gives him a shove and he thinks about reminding her how much nicer he was when he woke her up. He also thinks about all the different kind of kinks he could think of that were better than just necks but some part of his filter must still be functioning because he resists.

She tugs on his hand and, just like with everything else involving Raven Reyes, he gives in. There's giggling as he halfway drapes his body over hers as she leads him to his room and then she practically shoves him off onto the bed. "Such a baby," she whispers.

He grabs for her wrist before she walks around, awake enough to know she'd probably hate him for this but too tired to care. "Don't you want to sleep too?" he asks. They'd shared a bed in the past after all.

"I slept all day, Wick," she reminds him though she doesn't shake his grasp off.

He's definitely awake enough to know better than to say, "But it's so much nicer to sleep next to me," but somehow that doesn't stop him. "Come on, Reyes, you know you want to."

If he was more awake he would definitely be analysing her reactions right now. Unfortunately he's too tired to make proper use of this time to figure out how she felt about this. For sure he thinks she's left as he rolls into the pillows, his hands finding the hem of his shirt to pull it off.

"Whoa there," she says, reaching over to stop him. "Don't push it." That does get him to open his eyes and watch her slide into bed next to him and unhook her brace. If he wasn't so tired he might try and utilize this situation a little more to his advantage, but instead he just settles down and closes his eyes. He can feel her presence hovering beside him and his breath is caught in his throat as she grabs his hand beneath the blankets, just like Christmas night all over again. "Night, Wick," she whispers and he's awake enough to notice how her voice isn't tired and to appreciate the fact that she was there with him anyway.

"Night, Raven," he answers, happiness spilling over at just the ability to speak those words. He doesn't dwell on it, just lets the happiness pull him under.