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averagejoesolomon · 4 months

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Listen—LISTEN. Don't look at me like that. It's LITERALLY Sunday night. This is a perfectly normal time for me to post a Full Circle chapter. Ignore the fact that I've already posted two other chapters this week. I am simply having the most fun of my life. Here's the kids, being real cute. If you're new here, you can read all of Full Circle on Ao3. CW: Rachel is stitching up Matt in this one. It's all fairly tame as far as cuts and blood go, but you do definitely see some of the action.

Chapter Twelve

Rachel sees the blood before Matt feels it.

He’s running on some strange cocktail of adrenaline, exhaustion, euphoria, and bliss, which means he can’t trust his usual signals. Can’t tell where his pulse is supposed to be and where it’s not. All the sensations he’d usually sort into good or bad now fall into a single shared bucket—intense—so when Rachel’s thumb brushes across the Band-aid on his temple, he can’t tell if it’s tender to the touch, or if it’s only tender because she’s the one doing the touching. “Your stitches,” she says, appraising the damage. “They came undone.”

Right. The first option, then. “Well,” he says, hands gliding thoughtlessly up and down her thighs, “at least they didn’t come alone.”

She huffs. A remark like this would normally earn him a chiding hit to the torso, but Rachel can’t seem to find a safe place to land among all his new cuts and bruises. She settles for an equivalent look instead, but it can’t fool him. He spots the amusement playing at the corner of her lips, which reminds him what a shame it is to waste such soft lips on all this not-kissing they’re doing.

Before he can make good on any efforts to rectify this situation, Rachel starts to peel the Band-aid back, which is another one of those intense sensations he can’t quite sort out in his mind. That is, until she grazes the cut itself, sending a starburst of clear pain across his forehead, his eye, his inner ear. There’s no hiding the wince that comes with it, and all of her scattered attention clicks into place with a doting tsk. “I just finished putting you back together.”

“For the record,” he says, “I really, really didn’t mind getting taken apart again.”

“I have to redo these.”

“Stay.”

“And the ones on your cheekbone.”

“Stay.”

Despite his grounding grip on her waist, she ignores his pleas and unwinds from his lap. Her warmth lingers on top of him and Matt lets his head fall to the pillows at his back, downright defeated.

If he can’t admire her up close, he at least enjoys the view of her at the edge of their bed as she searches for discarded clothes. Her exposed back sends a hot, catching little thrill through his chest, satisfying some need put there by the dress-covered version that’s been running through his thoughts for a full day. He takes in the shape of her. The way each muscle stretches, tenses, releases. The rise and fall of every last breath. He almost protests when she throws something over it, until he realizes she’s found his gray hoodie, and somehow he likes this sight even more. “God, ain’t that somethin’ to see.”

She glances up at him with a knowing smile, and he realizes this is another tactical move on her part. He’s being toyed with, and he’s enjoying every moment of it. “This old thing?” she teases, plucking his socks from the pile, too. She slides these nearly to her knees before standing to make her way across the room. “Just a little something I threw on.”

“Yeah…” he answers, dragging his eyes along her poised outline, tucked inside his slouchy silhouette. “That’s yours now. All of it—on one condition, which is that you only wear this, exclusively, for forever.”

From the other side of the bed, she scoops up his boxers and tosses them to him. “Doesn’t seem very practical.”

He catches them one-handed, then wriggles them up his legs. “Reckon I’ll have to take it all back, in that case,” he says, but he steals another glance at the way his hemline hits her thighs, just low enough to keep her covered, but just high enough to give him hope for a fresh glimpse at more. “But, nice guy that I am, I suppose I can let you borrow it for now.”

She collects a handful of supplies from the nightstand—gauze, bandages, her suture kit. “How generous of you.”

“I’m a generous sort of guy.”

“I know you are.”

A subtle flush crawls up her neck and into her cheeks, which sends his entire center buzzing, his spine acting as a lightning rod for the striking, sparking memories of Rachel’s hands in his hair, Rachel’s legs against his cheeks, Rachel arched toward the ceiling, Rachel calling out his name. All these flashes of her, still humming against his skin. Plus, the real-time gratification of watching the same flashes play out for her.

She chooses this moment to climb back into bed, returning to the easy straddle she left behind. “Oh, I wouldn’t do that,” Matt warns, hands falling into place along her hips. “Unless you’re looking to go again.”

She sets her supplies down on the sheets beside them, laying out each individual piece with the kind of precision he’s come to expect from her after all these years. Her eyes are big, and brown, and zealous when she leans closer to him, voice low. “Who says,” she mutters, “that I don’t want to go again?”

She ought to be careful saying things like that when she ain’t even wearing any pants to protect her when he decides to follow through. But, seeing as he’s ninety-nine percent sure this is some sort of test, he bites back a grumbling sigh and tries, “The nine stitches in my face, maybe?”

With a soft, patient smile, she closes the short distance between them to leave a kiss on his busted lips. “Good answer,” she says when she pulls back. “Especially since, right now, you only have four of them.”

That’s probably a decent measure of something—the more stitches pulled, the better the sex, maybe—but now doesn’t seem like the time to say so and anyway, they don’t need nonsense like that to know they’re good together. They’re good because Rachel is attentive and Matt’s eager to please. They’re good because they know how to read one another, listen to one another, understand one another. They’re good because they care. Matt and Rachel work in bed for all the same reasons they work everywhere else, complementing one another in ways that don’t seem practical on paper, but wind up working out in practice.

Her weight shifts smoothly, warmly across his lap as she reaches toward a glass of water on the nightstand, wetting a wad of clean gauze. With her other hand, she takes his chin in that way she does, holding him steady. Carefully, meticulously, she wipes blood from one side of his face, lipstick from the other, and whatever it is she finds on his lips that justifies another few swipes. Good, he decides. This sensation is good, starting with the warmth of her touch and leaving behind cool, dewy streaks in her wake.

For his part, Matt ain’t left with much to do except watch her work. Watch her hands move with purpose. Watch her top teeth bite into her lower lip. Watch her eyes carve into every last curve of his face. She goes on like this for a good while, discarding and dipping another three pads, tending to all the places where his pulse beats the strongest. There’s a word for when she gets like this, but the fatigue is starting to catch up with him. His eyelids grow heavy by the time he thinks of it—divine, but not in its cliché, romantic form. Divine in the biblical sense. As in, God’s divine power, or a diviner’s wisdom, or to divine an almighty truth. Beautifully capable. All-knowing awe. Divine.

He doesn’t realize he’s said the word out loud until there’s a skip in the rhythm of Rachel’s hands. The slightest pause. He wouldn’t have noticed if he weren’t so keyed into her, but as things are, he blinks slowly back into the moment and glances heavenward until he finds her face. The sight of her only confirms the thought, so he reiterates, “You really are divine.”

She must hear it the way he means it, because her hands stop altogether this time. She looks at him like she wants to kiss him and then, all at once, she seems to remember that she’s allowed to, more than allowed to, and she makes it happen. He makes a solid effort to match her enthusiasm, but the ache in his ribs holds him back. His muscles are all mixed up in equal parts fatigue and satisfaction. His body’s slowing down on him, adrenaline finally fading.

When she draws back, she swipes her thumb across his lips, clearing her workspace once more. “And you,” she says, setting aside the final pad of gauze, “are exhausted.”

“You keep kissing me like that, and I’ll be wide awake.”

“That’s a shame, because you’ll probably wish you were asleep for this next part.”

Sure enough, she unclasps her suture kit and pulls out the hooked needle, wiping it down with an alcoholic pad. It comes back with blood from the first time she stitched him up. Dread builds in his gut as she threads it, but the feeling doesn’t hold once she leans into him, stomach-to-stomach, chest-to-chest, leveraging one arm against his shoulder and holding another above his head. “Sorry,” he teases. “Am I in your way?”

She turns his head to the side. “Hold still.”

Rachel’s no stranger to backroom first-aid and she’s even stitched up Matt on more than one occasion. But the fact of the matter is that she used all the good, taught skin on the first round of stitches and she’s forced to improvise on the second. It takes longer than it should, even with her expertise, and everything is more sensitive than it ought to be. This sensation is bad, bad, bad a dozen times over, poking and tugging straight down to his nerves, and it’s balanced only by the comforting feel of Rachel’s weight pressing him into the mattress.

She must not need such a severe vantage point for the last two stitches, because she sits upright and turns his head to face her once more. His cheek is meatier than his temple and gives the thread more to hold onto. It should make her job easier, but she’s still got that same focused look she started with. That's odd. Exhausted or not, Matt can spot when one of his people ain’t right.

So he goes off a hunch. “What are you thinking about?”

She pulls the first knot tight. “Infection,” she says, not missing a beat. “Paperwork. Getting tickets back home.”

These are all fine answers for the circumstances, but not for the person. Infection can be managed back home. Paperwork, too. And even with his extended detour, Rachel knows how to exchange any plane ticket without paying a dime in transfer fees. For someone like her, these are small logistical details that she could hash out in her sleep. They’re not worthy of the harsh lines carved into her brow or the tight purse of her lips. “You wanna take that horse down the road?” he offers. “Because I certainly ain’t buying it.”

Her eyes flit up at him, but return to his cheek just as quickly. With two small loops around her needle, she settles back into the automatic, familiar movement of her hands. “Stop talking,” she says. “It’s scrunching up your face.”

The needle is high enough on his cheek that his words don’t matter, and they both know it. “I gotcha,” he says. “So you’ve got no problem letting me run my mouth over every last inch of you, but you draw the line at any real intimacy—is that it?”

The second suture puncture hurts worse than the first. Matt’s not sure that’s an accident.

“That wouldn’t happen,” she tells him, “if you would just hold still.”

With the threat of her needle still looming, he bites his tongue, giving her time to loop the second knot, pull it tight, and cut the thread short. Though not explicitly written out in any agency handbooks, it goes against conventional wisdom to piss off the person stitching him up, which brings him back to watching all her detailed divinity. It really is something, the way her thoughts play out on her face, if only a fella knows what to look for.

She examines her work before setting the needle aside and reaching for another Band-aid patch. Just like before, she peels the wings apart one at a time and presses it to his tender temple. Slowly, gently, Matt reaches toward the same spot on her, mirroring her touch. She pulls away as though it hurts, just the same as his, but he persists. “You can’t solve everything up here,” he reminds her. “And you definitely can’t do it alone.”

This softens her, just slightly at first, then more and more until she’s leaning heavy against his hold. Before long, she takes his hand in hers, guides it to her lips to kiss his palm. “I’m not very good at this next part,” she admits.

Her breath slips into every last line on his hand. “And what part is that?”

Her chill soothes his bloodied knuckles. “The part when I ask you what we’re doing.”

Rachel is a genius. A master strategist. A planner, down to her core. She’s trying to open up this moment, reach inside of it, and understand how it works. Matt’s of the opinion that these situations don’t lend themselves to logic and reason, but he’s willing to let her try. “You mean to tell me,” he starts, “this wasn’t in your fifty-point-plan for the Moscow mission?”

“It was a hundred-and-thirteen-point plan,” she corrects. “If you’re going to tease, at least get the numbers right.”

“My apologies.”

She says, “I’m serious, Matthew,” and he can see her usual severity taking over. Her playfulness, lust, serenity—the further they get from needy kisses and clothes thrown across the room, the more it all fades. “I’m not sure we should be together. Not like this.”

He lets out a low whistle, which provides the levity he’s looking for, but at the cost of a sharp twinge in his cut lip. “Wow, you are efficient, aren’t you?” he says. “It usually takes girls at least a few months to break up with me.”

This is meant as another joke, but she takes it in earnest. “That’s exactly what I’m saying,” she says. “Am I breaking up with you? How serious is this? Are we even…break-up-able?”

And if he can’t draw her back onto his level of ease, he’s going to have to meet her in the solemnity. “Rachel, listen—no teasing, just really, honestly, listen to me. If we’re gonna do this, then we’re gonna have to do it, because there ain’t a chance in Hell that I am ever, ever gonna be just a little bit in love with you, for just a short amount of time.” He laces his hands behind her tailbone and gives her a reassuring squeeze, hoping it all comes across as truthfully as he intends. “And if that’s too much, all at once, then I dunno—”

“It’s not too much,” she cuts in, and she spares an urgent touch on his stomach just to prove it. His insides flutter at her fingertips. “But I think this is all going to get too complicated.”

“Too complicated for Rachel Cameron?” he challenges.

“No, don’t do that. This is really complicated, Matt, and I’m not a miracle worker.” All of her reasoning builds behind her lips, and he just has to let her go. Say it all aloud. Be heard by someone who isn’t the voice in her head. “Half the time, I don’t know where you’ve traveled or why you were there. And even if I can trust you, I don’t know if I can trust your network”—he opens his mouth to protest, but she beats him to the punch—“and I’m not just talking about Joe. Joe’s the one I know about. Who else are you working with that I don’t know about? How can I trust that you won’t put yourself at risk for them, too?”

Catherine comes to mind, reminding Matt that he doesn’t even know everyone he’s working with, but Rachel’s right. This ain’t the Boy Scouts. After years of chasing the Circle, he’s learned that finding one bad guy usually requires help from a lot of other bad guys, and he wonders if he’ll ever reach a point when his alliances are more Circle members than not. What’s that going to do to him, running with a crowd like that? And what would it do to Rachel if they got together? He doesn’t have a plan for when something unexpected in one life starts to bleed into another.

“And let’s not forget,” she says, “that less than twenty-four hours ago, you broke away from your crew to sell US identities in Moscow. You can’t expect me not to report that. I can't look the other way, and even if I could, there were witnesses—and you got injured. I had to extend our op, because I couldn’t put you on a plane with confidence. This is going to get back to Langley and when it does, it’ll be paperwork, and court hearings, and investigations. It’ll be jail time, Matthew, and you’ll be lucky to ever work in this business again.”

There’s no judgment in her tone. Just inevitable fact. A truth she can’t shake, with the information she has at hand. “And where does that put me?” she goes on. “Even if I do decide to trust that you had good and moral reasons to trade those passports—a decision I’m not sold on, by the way—what is it going to look like when we get back to the States? Like I’m associating with a double-agent? Literally sleeping with the enemy?” There’s a spark of those same, frustrated tears she always seems to get around him, but this time they’re accompanied by her touch, absentminded fingers tracing old scars in his torso. “It really isn’t fair, because I want you and I want to try, try to make this work. But I will not give up my career, my life, myself just because you took too big a risk and got caught.”

He waits her out for a few extra seconds, leaving space for any addendums or postscripts she might want to tack onto the end. But then her eyes flash to him, signaling that it’s his turn now, and it’s second nature to follow her lead. “Well,” he says. “if that’s all…”

She drops her face into her hands and groans—and not one of those delighted, indulging groans he’s gonna be thinking about for years to come. Just the opposite. This is a rare show of embarrassment from a woman who just laid her entire heart bare. “I told you I was bad at this part.”

“Hey, hey, hey, none of that now.” Without hesitation, he reaches for her hands. Pulls them away from her face. Wraps them in his palms and locks them into the spot where her lap meets his. “This is exactly the kind of thing you’re great at—though, clearly, you’re not known for your optimism.”

“What are you—?”

“Rachel,” he says, stopping her before she can get going again. “You won’t catch any grief from me, trying to figure out how our lives fit together. You’re the smartest person I know, and the fact that you’re even entertaining the idea is—no kidding—all the proof I need to know it’s worth a shot. I like that you’re thinking about this. And I might even be able to help.”

She actually, physically grimaces at the suggestion, trying with all her might not to point out that her plans are calculated, efficient feats of spycraft, while his plans landed him in a river just this morning. “Help?”

His laugh falls out of him without effort, bless her heart. “While I’m absolutely flattered by that show of confidence,” he says, “I’m not looking to run the show, here. Just provide a little more intel. It’s like you said—you don’t need everything, but you deserve something.”

Visible relief crosses her features, and her uncertain shoulders settle. “Okay,” she says. Then, with a touch more caution, “And you’re allowed to pass along this intel?”

“Oh, no, definitely not,” he says. “But truthfully, I’m not sure what happens if you commit this incident to paper. Nothing good, that’s for sure. So I’m going to tell you something, and then we’re both going to meet with the Director of Operations about it later.”

“Director of…?” She tries the title out on her tongue, testing the weight of it. “You’re talking about Alexander Smith? Director of Operations for the CIA? That Director of Operations?”

“The one and only.”

“Matthew.” She’s sighing his name again, but not in the fun way. Instead, she’s all wrapped up in a tired disbelief, leaning slowly into his shoulder as though she might understand better, if she can just get a little closer. “What have you gotten yourself into?”

He takes all of her weight, happily, and slips a hand under his borrowed hoodie to leave soothing circles along her back. It’s easy, drawing his fingertips up and down the muscles he’s already committed to memory.

He says, “It’s not too late to stay in the dark.”

The words are just above a whisper, right in her ear. For a split second, he prays she takes him up on the offer. Begs her, silently, to choose ignorance while she still can. And to Rachel’s credit, she doesn’t take the decision lightly. The two of them sit like this for a long time, his hand looping along her back, her breaths expanding against his chest, both of them knowing that this is the moment that changes everything.

But Rachel has been chasing this information for ages, and he can’t expect her to turn it down after all this time. “No.” She unwraps herself from his hold, trading a seat in his lap for a spot on his good side, right in the crook of his arm. “Tell me.”

He’s never really registered how small she truly is. Rachel always stands so much taller than her actual height, taking up more space in a room than her body calls for. But beside his farm-raised frame, she’s downright petite. The words small but mighty come to mind, as he works up the courage to tell her, “Joe and I—we’re going after something. And it ain’t a usual threat, so we’re not going about it in the usual ways.”

Back home, her gracious listening would be seen as polite, but Matt knows better. He sees her answering silence for what it truly is—an interrogation technique, and an effort to make him say more. It works. “We’ve got a long leash,” he explains. “You don’t know where I’m traveling because, most of the time, no one knows where I’m traveling. Not the record keepers. Not my case officer. Sometimes, not even me. We go, we do what needs to be done, and we report back when we need to. But nothing makes it to paper. There are no travel logs, or expense reports, or ticket stubs on file for any of these ops.”

He can see her mind working, right before his very eyes. “No paper trail,” she says, in the manner of a woman who’s tried like Hell to find one, but always came up short. “Why?”

A hard lump of hesitation clogs up his throat, a stopper for something he can’t take back once it’s said aloud. Rachel’s smart enough to crack this whole thing with the smallest scraps. She already has once, back when they were Townsend’s age and sharing an armrest at Wrigley Field. A mole, she had realized, without him even saying so. Once he says it, she'll draw her own conclusions, and she'll be right. She will, officially, know too much.

And once she does, there’s a chance this information gets her killed, someday down the road. A chance it gets her hurt, court-martialed, jailed if any of this ever gets out. A chance—absurd and slim, but well within the realm of possibility—that she’s the mole he’s spent years looking for, and this has all been a long game.

But he’s spent this entire evening, this entire mission, their entire relationship telling her to trust him. He’d be a fool and a hypocrite to doubt her after all that. Rachel was born into espionage and, according to Henry, trained in the craft from her earliest years. Intel is her livelihood, the same way it's Matt’s, and he has to trust that she knows what to do with it. That she knows how to keep it, and them, safe once she has it.

“Everything is off-books because it has to be,” he says. “I’m not hiding anything from Langley, but Langley has plenty of reasons to hide what I’m doing.”

She studies him at the microscopic level, running his story through that infallible mind of hers and trying to find holes. Matt’s telling the God’s-honest truth, but he’ll admit—if all of this were a lie, it’d be damn hard to disprove. It’s going to take more than a little trust on her part. Maybe even a little faith.

She doesn’t dismiss him outright, which is a promising start. Instead, she prods him for just a little bit more. “But you have friends,” she clarifies. “High up the ranks.”

“You didn’t think I was keeping this up all on my own, did you?” he says. “I’m good, Rachel, but I’m not that good. If I didn’t have someone helping me, some analyst would have pegged me as a risk a long time ago.”

“The Director?”

“Smith’s the one who put us on the case.”

“Which means,” she concludes, “no jail-time?”

“And no double-agent status,” he confirms. “We’ll meet, we’ll explain what happened, and he’ll take care of it. He always does. He’ll want to hear about this op anyway—it’ll save everyone the work of redacting half of your mission notes later on.”

The Director’s involvement seems to ease some of her uncertainty, providing a concrete possibility that she can fact-check when she gets home. Still. There’s something to the way her look lingers, like she’s not quite satisfied with the answers she’s got. Gently, he says, “That’s really all I can tell you.”

“That’s more than you can tell me,” she reminds him, and it’s the truth. His heart’s still racing from the admission, and he’s certain she can hear it. “And I want that to be enough…”

He can hear it, right on the tail end of her words. “But...?”

She bites her lip. “I’m sorry.”

“Ain’t nothing to be sorry about.”

“I want to trust you.”

“I know you do.”

“But I’m just so”—she tries to find the word, and picks one that sits right at her uncensored center—“scared that I’m wrong. Everything in my training is telling me to keep my guard up. I’m on edge, all the time, and I just can’t seem to shake it.”

Once again, he decides to meet her where she’s at, rather than fight her into understanding. “Let’s talk training, then. In this business, you’ve got to find your allies, right?” he tries. “People who know all of your intel who, when the chips fall, you still trust to land on your side. Well, I reckon love is pretty similar. You give someone all this inside information, and maybe you even arm them with a grenade or two, and then you have to trust that they won’t throw them in your direction. That they’re going to work with you, instead of against you.”

When it’s laid out in her language, something in her lights up. Finally, he’s got a logic she can follow. But it doesn’t last long. Rachel’s been at this work for a while, which means she’s got the insight to know, “Sometimes alliances go bad.”

Matt shrugs, which settles her deeper at his side. “Sometimes love does, too,” he agrees. “But we trust it anyway, at least while we can. Then we figure out what to do when we can’t anymore.”

Her hand slides across his stomach, until her entire arm is wrapped around his torso and she’s looking up at him like she never has before. Like she sees a way forward, when everything until now has been stuck on the secrets kept between them.“You weren’t part of my plan, Matthew.”

This sort of thing never is, and maybe that’s what Matt likes most about it. “Then let’s keep talking about how I fit into what you’ve already got,” he proposes. “Tonight, tomorrow, a week from now. However long it takes.”

“It might take a long time,” she warns.

“I don’t mind the wait,” he says. “Talking to you is the part I like most, anyway.”

So they do. They talk, they laugh, they kiss, they debate, and then they talk some more. They talk about serious things and they talk about silly things. They talk about things neither one of them will remember in the morning, then they talk about things they’ll think about for the rest of their lives. They talk until the day catches up with both of them, Matt fading first, then Rachel. They fall asleep as they are, all tangled up together, and then Matt keeps talking to her in his dreams. For the first time in the last two years, he's feeling good, good, good all over.

#Full Circle #Dont look at me Im obsessed

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