Post 5x4 Sentinel
tags: Karen's death, loss of a parent, hands, requited love they can't act upon, h/c
Street leaves Chris standing in the dim light of his kitchen, both desperate for a moment of peace. With his mom dead, Chris is the only person he has, but not being able to have all of her is killing him. His mind spins, body urging him to turn around and go back down the hallway and kiss her. Kiss her until she can't deny that they're meant to be together. Until she doesn't want to.
But Street knows her reasons against a relationship are bigger than that, as infuriating as it is, so he stands in the bathroom and knocks his knuckles on the gray marble vanity, feeling energy leak out of him like a sieve.
In the kitchen, a sigh scratches up Chris's throat. Electricity sits on her nerves, and she always hates how out-of-place she feels in their house when she's alone. Contemplating, Chris crosses her arms, tapping her fingers on her elbows in an uneven rhythm.
It would be easy, so easy, to leave. Let the door slam behind her loud enough for Street to hear, and drive to her apartment to forget about this whole mess.
But after Erika, and after years of dealing with Karen's bullshit in her periphery, Chris refuses to let this go. All she wanted when her mom died was someone to be there who got it. Who understood all the anger and resentment and confusion that she felt. Street's got even less people than she does. Chris doesn't follow him, but she gets a bottle of water from the fridge and sits on one of the barstools, waiting.
The bathroom door creaks open, Street closing his eyes and inhaling sharp, surprised, when he sees her perched and looking at the wall.
"You're still here?" He asks, jaw clenched, frozen in the hallway between the kitchen and his bedroom.
"Listen," Chris starts, "I can't sit here and talk about us, either, other than I'm sorry it's how things are right now. But what you're going through with your mom, I understand."
Chris stops when Street meets her eyes. Her lips are set in a line, and her tone is so certain, he has no choice but to lean against the wall and listen. The little he knows about her mom isn't pretty, her earlier mention of outbursts not making the image any nicer.
"It sucks." Chris continues with a shrug, viscerally aware of every point of contact she's making with the stool that's keeping her from walking to him for their own good. "It's some of the worst pain you'll ever feel, both because she's gone and because a big part of you is telling you she doesn't deserve your pain. Trust me, it's an easier burden to bear when you let other people hold some of it. That's a lesson I learned the hard way."
It's a lesson she doesn't want Street to have to learn at all.
Regret hangs off her words like honey that's gone rotten, enough to make Street understand one more piece of Chris's past. To trust why she's there now.
Chris doesn't say anything more, silence falling while Street wraps his head around his heart. Swallowing, he walks back into the kitchen but stands on the other side of the island where he was before, needing the physical barrier to keep his emotions at bay.
"You said how I'm feeling is normal," he broaches, the words forming in the cracks inside him as he speaks. "But so much of this anger I feel is towards myself. Not for donating my liver, I don't regret that, but because a part of me just wanted to not feel like I owed her anymore."
With an inhale, Chris nods to let Street know she's listening. He's said plenty enough for her to know where he's at, but he needs to continue and she gives him the space. She struggles to keep her eyes on his, grief deep enough to swim in swirling in his irises.
"She spent most of the last half of her life hammering it into me how she was in prison for me or because of me, depending on the day. It's easy from the outside to call that out as manipulation, but it's always been harder for me on this end of it to know how to feel."
"Did it?" Chris asks, voice even. "Donating, did it alleviate that feeling?"
"Honestly, Chris, I have no fucking clue. I don't know if anything ever will, even if most of it's gone now because she's gone."
He moves from leaning against the sink to bracing himself on the island, the sight of his mom across from him in the prison visitation area too much to stand still in. Chris risks sliding one of her hands across the surface to rest near his, their pinkies barely brushing.
"I'm sorry, Street."
Chris's heart clenches when Street looks at her with a sad, closed-lip smile.
"I don't blame her for not making it. She was a victim, too. But ever since I joined SWAT, all the memories that I thought were the good ones, I started to see them for what they were. Everything she did was underlined with manipulation or something in it for her. She never felt like she owed me anything, and maybe she didn't, but you were right."
Tilting her head, Chris doesn't want to make an assumption that puts them back on eggshells.
"Making me a part of what she did was wrong. And she kept doing it long after she killed my dad."
"That guy she sent you after?" Chris asks, remembering his bruised knuckles and scraped cheekbones and the way her stomach curdled when she saw him and Hondo.
Street presses his fingers into the counter as hard as he can.
"And what she did to Hondo. And once she got out, the first time. She wanted me to be where she was. Not prison, just—"
"Dependent?" Chris fills in.
"Yeah," Street says with a nod, the words acrid on his tongue. "It was like if I was able to live without her, I'd done something wrong."
Street hanging his head is too much for Chris to bear, her hand moving before she can stop it to rest on top of his. The second her skin touches his, sparks run through Chris's arm, straight to her heart.
He flips his hand so his palm is facing up, her delicate fingers resting against his, and squeezes. When Chris speaks, her voice is barely above a whisper.
"You don't owe her anything. And you're not in the wrong."
The low hum of appliances surrounds them, and she can't take her eyes off their locked hands where his thumb has absentmindedly started running over her knuckles.
"I know how much it took for you to get back on SWAT, to make everything right that she had a hand in messing up."
Bracing herself, iron fills Chris's stomach when she brings her brown eyes up to his.
"I'm proud of you for fixing things. I'm glad you did."
Traveling over her face, Street sees the slight set of a smile on Chris's lips as she talks, and how her eyelashes flutter when she blinks away her nerves a few times in a fast row. Her words are like a blanket sewn around him, a comfort he didn't know he'd been deprived of thus far.
"You've always been strong enough to live without her. You deserve to find happiness now that she's gone." Chris says, the final stitches to hold Street together as she feels her own heart ripping apart with the current of her words..
Weight lifting off his shoulders at Chris's reassurance, Street stands up straighter, laughing softly against the tears that flood his eye sockets.
"Thank you, Chris."
Hands linked, Street walks around the island where Chris stands to meet him after his first step. His arms find their way around her form easily, relaxing into the stability of her that he wished and begged for every night.
"You're gonna be okay," Chris tells him, rubbing her hand up and down his back and trying to clear away any residual shame or doubt that sits deep in his bones, still able to feel where it lives in her from her mother's passing.
"What if I'm not?" He whispers, ragged in her ear. Swallowing thick, Chris pulls him tighter to her.
"You've got a family, Street. SWAT. Me. We'll make sure of it. Give yourself time."
More tears rain down hot on her neck and soak into the collar of her cardigan. Sobs that start in Street's core and tear through his soul before finally escaping shake his frame, and Chris presses herself impossibly closer to ease them.
"It's going to be hard," Chris says, unable and unwilling to lie when she's become so intimately acquainted with the grieving process. "But none of us are going anywhere."
She repeats herself, her hands becoming numb to the fabric of his shirt and whole body tingling the more minutes that pass.
Every time Street thinks it's over, something else races to the forefront of his mind. A memory of his mom, something she said, everything that happened, for better or for worse, that he has no choice but to make peace with now.
How Karen will be cemented in his memory with no more hope for her changing into someone she never could've been.
"I'm sorry," Street hears Chris say, the thing so many people have said to him in the past day, but it feels so different coming from her.
It sounds like she's apologizing for more than just his mother passing.
But, standing in her arms in the middle of his kitchen, all the blame and anger that he had for her earlier fades into nothing more than the echoes of a childish tantrum. Another sob escapes, harder, and he feels her hand cradle the back of his head. She doesn't move until his crying starts to quiet, her fingers untangling from the short hairs at the nape of his neck to slide over his shoulder blades.
"It's okay," he whispers once he has control over his voice, hoping she hears him above the pounding of his heart and racing of his pulse.
Street holds her as tight as he can for one more second, giving himself the chance to remember what it feels like when their bodies are interlocked as the last of his tears make themselves known.
A shiver runs through both of them when they pull back, air flowing freely again in the space between them.
"I'm sorry," Street says, a calm recognition in his voice that makes Chris believe he will be okay, if not now, as he coughs to clear his throat. "Your sweater."
Shaking her head, Chris bounces once on her heels. She feels her cheeks lift and her lips quirk into a gentle smile when she looks at him.
"Don't worry about it. How're you feeling?"
"Cards up?" He asks, waiting for her quick nod that's become a way they communicate without words in the middle of shootouts and team conversations.
"Like shit. But," Street continues, running a hand from her elbow, over the bones of her wrist, and finally settling itself in hers, "not alone."
His hand is warm in hers. All Chris can think is that it's meant to be there. She doesn't want to break from him first.
"Good," she says softly, eyes flicking to their shoes and then back to him. "Just, believe me. Give yourself time, okay?"
"Yeah," Street says, immediately followed by a wide yawn.
Stepping another inch closer, Chris raises her chin so she can see every detail in Street's eyes, trace the curve of his nose and the bow of his lips until she sees them every time she blinks.
"You should get some rest." She whispers, hand spasming as she wars between what she wants and what she knows they need to maintain.
Street reads Chris like a magazine, the conflict in her eyes as loud as their arguments can get, and steels himself to let go of her hand first and take a small step back.
"You should, too. Thank you, Chris, for staying. I appreciate it."
Fingers ghosting over her now-empty palm and fighting the urge to touch his face, Chris tells Street she means everything she said.
"I'm here, the whole team is. Call me if you need me later tonight."
Sucking in a breath, Street wants to tell her that he needs her later tonight and right now and every second since they first exchanged words with one another.
"I will, Chris." He swears. With a quick, final jerk of her head, Chris steps away, grabbing her keys from the living room table.
"Wait!" Street calls as soon as Chris's hand wraps around the doorknob, his stomach twisting. Turning, her eyes automatically start to scan over his body, looking for anything wrong, and she bites her bottom lip.
"Sorry, I—Tomorrow, I have to go get her things from the halfway house. It's not a lot, but will you come with me?" His tone is shaky, like he expects a no, and he looks so young when he asks, like his features are set in a time when Chris doesn't know him, but she wishes she did. Rage flies through her at how much Karen's put him through. She grasps the doorknob tighter in a convoluted effort to keep her body where it is.
"Your wheels or mine?" She asks, as light as she can, reflecting on when he asked her the same question. He was the one pillar that remained standing in her life when everything else crumbled, she'll be the same for him.
"Yours." He says. Looking at her from across the space, it sinks in that Chris is giving him every part of her that she can, even if it's not all of her.
"I'll be there." She promises.
Every promise that Karen ever made and broke comes to Street's mind like the white light of a bomb exploding. He blinks against the assault, expecting the carnage to follow. But Chris is still there when he opens his eyes like a light at the end of a tunnel he thought he'd never make it through.
"See you tomorrow. Call me if you want to." She reminds him, and then closes the door quietly behind her and steps into the cool night air.
"Get it together," Chris tells herself sharply, back against the wooden door.
"See you tomorrow." Street says, watching her go, and knowing sure in his heart that she'll always come back.
hello! thank you so so so much for reading, and i hope you enjoyed! i think this is one of my favorites thus far, and it's such a momentous episode in general for both of them as people, together, and just for the show. i don't know if it's right to call this one long-awaited, but it feels long awaited for me to write while i was rewatching lol. comments/kudos/suggestions/etc always always appreciated and cherished. feel free to say hi on tumblr streakyglasses! stay liquid! xo, A