Ao3 Goes Down And I Turn Into A Desperate Ex. Please Babe Just Go Back Online Please I Am Checking Every

ao3 goes down and I turn into a desperate ex. Please babe just go back online please I am checking every two minutes please I miss you. I have already annoyed the shit out of my friends. My own writing is staring at me from the corner. I venture to wattpad out of sheer desperation and find that the day I made the account is also the day of the great ao3 outage of 2023. It was used for that day only. Situational story telling. I attempt to use the operating system and must be restrained before I hurt myself or others. How did I operate this as a child. What am I supposed to do, sleep? I’m physically incapable of that. I’m clawing at the walls of my enclosure please I have a flight tomorrow and if I’m left alone with my thoughts and my sister’s spotify premium account for six whole hours everyone on that plane will be forced to adapt and overcome, or succumb to the wave of darkness that my Spanish teacher once described as “a physical wave of violence and anger that was exuding off of me and making everyone in the classroom combative”

Anyways I think im handling this super well

In a true display of athletic prowess I somersaulted down an entire flight of concrete stairs

As another request, maybe the villain and hero are fighting , and the villain notices that the hero reacts suspiciously numb to his attacks. And when he taunts him about it, the hero sisimply says something to the effect of being used to it. And the villain is suspicious by the tone so he follow the hero and find out he’s abused by family . Cue villain saving the hero, comforting him and showering him with the love he never got

The villain should have known something was wrong the first time he hit the hero, and he simply braced, pain flickering along the muscles of his jaw, before hitting back. Face blank, a mask stronger than concrete. As if pain played no part, and it was just the give and return of kinetic energy, and nothing more.

He should have known when he said something so cruel it felt like graveyard dirt upon his tongue, and the hero merely stuttered for half a second, everything within him freezing, before he continued like nothing had happened. Nothing cruel in return, nothing biting in his face. Just–complete nothing.

“You never flinch,” the villain said, and it wasn’t a sudden realization, but it was close. Again, that momentary pause, like the hero had been grabbed and stopped by some otherworldly being on a molecular level. It allowed the villain to catch the next hit the hero threw at them.

“What?”

The hero, to his credit, didn’t sound upset, and in this line of work the villain was especially good at noticing the tiny pieces of that kind of thing. He just sounded confused, maybe.

“When I hit you. You don’t flinch,” the villain clarified. The hero just stared at them.

“You only really flinch if you aren’t used to it,” the hero said finally.

“Used to it?”

“You heard me,” the hero replied, and this time, there was irritation behind his words.

The villain tossed the hero’s fist down, and the hero stumbled back.

“And you didn’t answer my question.”

“I wasn’t aware there was one.”

“Are you intentionally being annoying, or is it just natural for you?”

The hero’s breath shuddered.

“Sorry.”

“Sorry–you–I don’t want an apology,” the villain sputtered. This conversation felt above his pay grade; and he wasn't entirely sure why, either, which irked him, itching under his skin.

“So–” the hero snapped his jaw shut around the rest of the word, and it looked like he was doing everything in his power to stop himself from finishing it.

Before the villain could prod further–about the flinching, or any other confusing aspect of it–the hero blew out a breath, and said, “I’m done here.”

The villain blinked.

“You can’t just decide when a fight is over.”

“Watch me,” the hero said, but his voice didn’t have the heat that usually went along with that phrase.

“You’re a hero, isn’t this kind of your entire job? Finishing fights, not walking away from them?”

“I said, I’m done,” the hero snarled, and it was the first hint of emotion he had shown the entire day, explosive and aimed entirely at the villain. The villain was taken aback for a moment.

The hero turned and left before the villain could even think of a response. He didn’t look over his shoulder.

Of course, the villain followed him home.

The fact that he had been able to at all was something to be worried about.

He watched as the hero entered, shutting the door behind him. Heard the sound of his bag hitting the floor, his jacket being hung up. Normal, quiet little things. Shuffling through the kitchen, making a cup of tea. A quiet conversation with his mother.

The villain was about to leave when he heard the slap.

He was through the door before he realized he was moving, leaving the handle to slam into the wall.

He caught the barest edge of a conversation as he rounded the corner–a curse word, then a vile sort of thing that was somehow worse than anything the villain had managed to say in his entire life–and slotted himself neatly between the hero and his mother.

The villain caught her wrist before it could touch any part of the hero. His grip was too tight to be anything but painful.

The hero’s mother gaped at them.

A bruise was beginning to bloom across the hero’s cheek.

The hero was shaking, slightly, face tense and drawn as he stared at the villain. Like the villain was the unnerving thing in this situation, and the hand his mother still had raised was the normality.

A rage, raw and unfathomable, ravenous within him, descending down so deep into the white hot of fury that it passed anything that had a name, uncurled itself along his bones.

“Touch him again,” the villain seethed, voice shaking with all that feral untamed mess within himself, “and you lose the hand.”

“Villain,” the hero said quietly, and the villain had never heard him so meek.

How long did it take for a person to learn that kind of quiet?

“Villain, leave it.”

The villain didn’t release the hero’s mother’s–no. The woman in front of him wasn’t a mother. She was something twisted, and broken, and cruel, upper lip curled with displeasure. Not that the villain was within her kitchen; but that he had stopped her from hitting her child.

The villain wanted nothing more than to vomit on her spotless white tiles.

Maybe in another life she would have been the kind of person the hero, with his kind heart, would have saved before it got to this point.

Maybe in another life the villain would have let the hero try.

But that was not this life.

And there was a bruise blooming on his hero’s cheek.

“You have no right–”

“Did I not make myself clear?” He said, and it was black and poisonous in the air.

The woman in front of him swallowed, and for the first time, fear flickered across her face.

Good.

“Villain,” the hero said, voice strangled, and the villain turned to look at him.

“She’s hurt you before,” the villain said, and it wasn’t a question. The hero looked at him wide-eyed, and he wondered how many times the hero had walked into a fight with him with pre-existing injuries. Injuries he would pretend later that the villain had given him.

The hero swallowed, hard.

“Yes,” he whispered, and that was all the villain needed. He turned back around.

“The only reason you are alive right now is because I think killing you would upset him,” he informed her, and he watched her face pale. “That, and getting blood out of shoes is a bitch. Isn’t it, hero? See, you wouldn’t know. Nobody’s ever made you bleed, I’d wager, because if they had, you would understand it isn’t the kind of thing you do to someone you love.”

He grinned, feral.

“You’re going to leave,” he continued. “Matter of fact, you’re going to vanish. And you’re going to do it so well that if he wants, he’ll never have to think of you again. The only way you’ll ever see him again will be because he wants it to happen, do you understand me? If you don’t, we’ll make you vanish my way.”

The hero made a choked noise behind him. “I don’t think you’ll like that very much,” the villain confided in a whisper.

He wasn’t sure the woman in front of him was breathing.

“Hero,” he said after a long minute. He was going to leave bruises on her wrist. She was shaking, and it soothed some of the yawning rage within him. “Pack a bag.”

The hero vanished into the halls of the house.

The villain didn’t say anything, just stared at the woman in front of him, as if he looked long enough he would be able to see the rotten core inside of her that had made her this way. Turned her into something violent. Or perhaps, the thing that had been inside her since birth, broken and seething. Inevitable.

He didn’t like to believe people could be born evil.

He would make an exception.

The hero appeared back behind him as silent as a wraith, far faster than the villain had expected, duffel bag in one hand.

He wondered how long the hero had had a bag tucked away, packed and ready to run if it got too bad.

He wondered what the hero considered ‘bad enough’ and his jaw clenched hard enough he could hear the bones creak.

“That all you need?”

The hero nodded, mutely, and the villain finally dropped the woman’s hand. She pulled back, hissing as she rubbed her arm, but she had the sense to not glare at the villain.

He tipped his head towards the door.

“Let’s go,” he said, as gently as he had ever heard himself.

The hero followed him out, and they didn’t say anything until the villain’s apartment door locked behind the both of them.

The villain blew out a shuddering breath.

The hero looked like he wasn’t entirely there, eyes glassy.

“Hero,” he said softly, and the hero’s gaze snapped to his face. He stopped himself from reaching for him, a helpless effort to do something, to fix it. “Can I touch you?”

He made sure it didn’t sound like a demand, because if the hero said no, the villain would die before crossing that line, no matter how much it stung. A moment later, to his relief, the hero gave a jerky nod.

He moved slowly, a gentle palm on the hero’s jaw to tip it up, inspecting the bruise with pursed lips. He brushed away the tear that slipped down the hero’s cheek with his thumb, and left it there.

“It could be worse,” the hero offered quietly.

“The fact that it exists at all is worse enough,” the villain murmured, tipping the hero’s head back down. “I’m so sorry.”

The hero blinked, brow furrowing. “For what?”

The villain shrugged one shoulder. “That it happened. That it has been happening. That I didn’t notice.”

“I’m good at hiding it,” the hero said, like it was supposed to make the villain feel better.

“You shouldn’t have had to learn how to do that at all,” the villain said, and the hero’s lip wobbled.

The hero wavered slightly, like he didn’t know what to do with himself. He carried himself like the entirety of his body was an open wound, every second spent breathing a second spent in agony.

The villain couldn’t pretend he knew what this felt like, but he could do his best to soothe it as much as possible.

“Come here,” he said softly, and the hero melted into him, shaking as he tried to cry quietly and failed. He tucked the hero against his chest, and hand coming to curl into the hero’s hair as he let out a desperate keening noise.

He rested his chin on the top of the hero’s head. “It’s going to be okay,” he whispered. “It’s not right now, but it will be, I promise. Even if it takes a while.”

The hero shuddered against him, then nodded, just once.

It wasn’t okay, but it would be.

The villain had promised.

And he never broke a promise.

could you write a snippet where hero and villain both show up at the same time to rescue civilian from supervillain please?

The hero’s pulse pounded in their ears, panicked and so loud–there was so much blood, oh god, they couldn’t tell where it was coming from–that they didn’t hear the villain behind them until they were slamming their elbow back into their ribcage. The villain caught it with one hand, running their gaze over the hero and their blood slicked hands as if assessing for injuries. When they did the same to the civilian, the villain went so still the hero wasn’t sure they were breathing.

The hero felt a little dizzy, actually, and they were trying incredibly hard not to cry, because that was their friend on the floor and they were never supposed to be involved in this–

“Hero,” the villain’s voice was stern, but not unkind. “Breathe.”

They choked on their next inhale, and the villain pressed against their chest with one hand until they breathed out again. There was something about the villain’s face, smooth and unyielding like stone, that pulled the hero into focus enough for them to suck in another breath.

“They need help,” they managed to gasp. The villain gave them a singular nod in confirmation.

“Yes. They do.”

“We need to–”

“You,” the villain interrupted, “need to calm down.”

“They’re dying.”

“And that’s not going to change if you’re too panicked to see straight. So take. A deep. Breath.”

Miraculously, the hero did. It was easier on the next breath, and the next, until their vision was clear and they could see the horror in front of them with all too much clarity.

The civilian was still breathing.

The villain released the hero’s elbow as soon as they realized the hero wasn’t about to panic again, grazing their fingers over the civilian’s tattered clothing in search of the worst wounds. They prodded something and the civilian winced, face bruised and entirely, blessedly, unconscious. “Pressure,” the villain gestured, and the hero. complied.

The hero knew better than to let up when the civilian, abruptly half-lucid from pain, tried to bat their hand away, but bile still rose in their throat.

“How are you so calm,” they said, and even they could tell their voice was slightly too close to hysterical. The villain glanced over at them, eyes dark, before ripping a makeshift tourniquet to tie around the civilian’s leg.

“I panicked once,” some memory, deep and dark and full of pain, flashed through the villain’s eyes. “I promised I wouldn’t do it again.”

The hero took the wad of cloth the villain handed to them, pressing it back down over the civilian’s stomach. It turned red under the hero’s fingers far faster than they would ever have wanted it to. Not that they would ever want it to, but if someone was bleeding they would at least want it to be slow–

“Oh,” they managed, voice strangled, and the villain took a moment to assess them once more. 

“Breathe,” the villain reminded. “They’re not dying. They’re beat up, but they’re stable. Emergency services are already on their way.”

The hero watched more blood well up around their hands. Pressed harder.

They would be digging red flakes out from under their nails for weeks.

“You’re normally calmer,” the villain remarked casually. If the hero’s brain wasn’t so stuck on the image of their friend bleeding below them, they would have recognized this for the distraction that it was.

“They didn’t choose this,” they whispered, throat raw. The civilian didn’t have powers, and they hadn’t chosen to use them for good or evil. They just lived, so kind and so normal.

“Neither does any other bystander,” the villain said.

“They’re my friend,” the hero willed the villain to understand, somehow, the enormity of this. The pain of knowing that it should have been them on the floor, that supervillain had done this because the civilian had been there and the hero had not.

A mistake of epic proportions. The biggest failure of their life. Not being there.

“So?”

“So it's my fault,” the hero’s voice broke, and they ducked their head down to hide the tears as they welled in their eyes. Distantly, they could pick up the barest trace of sirens, almost out of reach of their enhanced senses.

“Hero,” the villain said, voice gentle. “If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s mine.”

The hero shook their head–

“No, listen to me,” the villain’s voice gained an edge to it. “It’s not your fault. I pissed supervillain off this week. They know the civilian is my friend. This was deliberate to hurt me, and I need you to get it through your thick skull that there was nothing you could have done to stop this.”

The hero wasn’t sure who the villain was truly saying this to–the hero, themself, or the version of the villain that had panicked so long ago, and suffered for it.

“I could have–”

“You couldn’t.” The villain’s stare was all encompassing. The hero wanted to believe them. “Stop blaming yourself for the pain other people are causing.”

“That’s kind of my whole thing,” the hero tried for something light, airy. The both of them watched it fall flat off their tongue.

“No, it’s not. Your thing is saving people, not beating yourself up over everything you think you could have done better.”

The hero didn’t have a response to that. Just stayed staring at the villain as the ambulance skidded to a stop, the red lights flashing off the villain’s hair and eyes.

Someone reached for the hero’s hands, still pressed tightly to the wound, and they flinched away, gritting their teeth. 

The paramedic raised their gloved hands as if comforting an animal. “I’m here to help,” they said slowly. 

It felt terrible unclenching their hands, letting the paramedic take their place, sliding the civilian onto a stretcher an unending minute later.

The hero swallowed hard, knees numb against the pavement, and let the villain hook their arms under the hero’s armpits to haul the upright.

“Alright, there we go,” the villain murmured easily. The hero tracked the paramedics as they closed the doors of the ambulance. 

“I should–”

“No,” the villain interrupted. They seemed to be doing that more often than usual, the hero thought slowly. “You need to get cleaned up, and eat something.”

“I need to go to the hospital, I can’t just leave them alone,” the hero argued. They tried to jerk themself from the villain’s steadying hold, and failed.

“Trust me, they’ve got a whole team keeping them alive. They’re in good company.”

“I’m failing them.” It was an entirely irrational thought, but it stung in the hero’s chest, burning its way into their ribs as an ‘almost’ truth.

“You’re taking care of yourself so that you are able to take care of them. You can’t pour from an empty cup, and you're at empty. So, we’re going to get you some clothes that aren’t covered in blood, a sandwich, and go from there.”

The hero realized between one blink and the next that they were exhausted–bones aching and made of stone, dragging them down further with every second. By the time they reached the villain’s car, the only thing that was holding them up was the villain; the weight of panic and a too long day spent trying to save the entire city pressing down on them.

They were dumped into the passenger seat without fanfare, and if they weren’t so tired, they would have protested about the blood, or question how the villain had gotten their car here.

The villain slammed the door, settling themself into the driver’s seat a moment later. They dug through the center console, too dark for the hero to make out what they were grabbing, before they scrubbed the hero’s hands with a baby wipe. 

They had the engine started before the hero had a chance to look down at their own–now clean–hands.

“It’s not your fault,” the villain said again. Their tone left no room for argument.

“You keep saying that,” they watched as the city lights flickered through the car windows. “Why?”

The villain’s jaw clenched in the periphery of their vision. When they answered, it was so soft and quiet the hero almost didn’t catch it.

“Because nobody said it to me.”

The hero let their head slump against the window, half-asleep as they watched the roads vanish behind them.

“Hey,” they said quietly. They didn’t have to look up to know the villain’s attention was solely on them.

Sleep pulled on them until their voice was little more than an exhaled breath. 

“It wasn’t your fault.”

The villain sucked in a shuddering breath.

“It isn’t your fault.”

Before sleep managed to swallow them whole, the hero swore they caught a single tear streaking down the villain’s cheek.

“I don’t need you.”

It sounded less grounded than the villain had wanted it to. It sounded like something someone had told them to say, and they were just repeating it with half hearted determination. They said it again, “I don’t need you.”

“No,” the hero agreed. They were grinning. “You don’t.”

The villain floundered. They, in all honesty, wanted a fight. To prove something, they supposed. That they really didn’t need the hero. That they weren’t in the wrong, here. “What?”

“I said,” the hero said slowly, and the beginnings of a grin curled at the edges of their mouth. “You don’t need me.”

“I don’t need you,” the villain repeated, and the hero nodded encouragingly. It just made the villain want to hit them.

The hero lounged against the doorframe, halfway in and halfway out of their apartment. And truly, that was the worst bit of it all—the hero wasn’t showing up outside the villain’s house, or driving by the villain’s work to see if they truly looked happier without them. But the villain was.

They wanted to scream, and kick, and throw plates onto the ground.

‘Leave me alone.’

But they couldn’t say that, because the hero had. They had cut contact and blocked numbers and ignored the villain’s car as it went by. Still, the villain felt haunted. As if they would never be clean of the hero, parts of their soul forever dirtied by it all.

The hero’s smile, and the way their voice sounded when they knew the villain would cave to their wishes.

They just wanted the hero to—

“Leave me alone.” It slipped out against their better judgement. From the way the hero’s grin widened, they knew it had been the worst thing they could have said.

“Darling, I have,” the hero said, their tone saccharine. Pitying. “You’re the one outside of my apartment.”

It felt like being burned alive, the frustration of it. The way it rose in their chest but had nowhere to go, leaving them shaking with nothing and everything trapped under their tongue.

“That’s not what I meant and you know that—“

“What, you miss me that bad? I thought you—“

“Shut up,” the villain snapped. The hero raised an eyebrow.

“It’s eating you alive, isn’t it?” They sounded pleased.

“It’s not,” the villain protested.

“I told you, you don’t need me.”

“I know,” the villain grit out.

“But you want me.”

Something in the villain’s brain stalled.

“Excuse me?”

“You don’t need me. You never have,” the hero said it like it was a fact. “You want me, though. Even as the sound of my name burns you, and the memory of me rots in your mouth, you’re going to want me.”

“You’re wrong.”

“Am I?” The hero’s voice dropped to a whisper. “You can go out to every bar in this city, kiss a hundred people who look like me and get just drunk enough to forget you’re not mine anymore—but you’re never going to stop missing me.”

The hero knew, of course they did, how hard the villain had tried to forget it entirely. The disaster they had become trying to be clean again.

“No matter how many shots you take to block out the memory of me, you’ll always be mine.”

“You’re insane,” the villain finally managed. The hero simply tipped their head to the side in acknowledgement. “That’s not-what’s wrong with you—“

“You’re the one who misses me.”

It stung, deep in the villain’s stomach. It took them too long to remember how to breathe—too long after that to think of what to say.

“If I’m lucky, I won’t ever have to see you again,” their voice quivered, slightly. “But knowing us, the next time we meet it will be in hell.”

The hero laughed and closed the door in their face.

The villain blocked them. Avoided the side of town the worked in. Moved three cities over.

It didn’t matter.

The villain could still feel the hero under their skin.

Later, whenever someone would ask, “Have you ever been haunted?”

The villain would think back to the hero.

And say, “Yes.”

A sapphic detective who gets too close to the truth of a case and gets confronted by her girlfriend for being too obsessed?

“You need to stop.”

The detective didn’t jerk up at the sound of her voice—just quietly stirred, rustling papers as she shifted upright to meet her eyes.

“I didn’t hear you come in,” the detective said slowly, eyes scanning over her. She watched her gaze catch on the water dripping from the ends of her hair, the mascara smudging itself down her cheeks.

“It’s date night,” she said, and even to her own ears her voice sounded tired. Dead. Rotting roses and dirty dishes in the sink.

The detective blinked once, then shifted through her papers until she found a scribbled in calendar. It was stuck on the wrong month.

“I forgot,” the detective murmured. It wasn’t an apology, and neither of them were pretending that it was. She could tell, even now, with her girlfriend pathetic and dripping water onto the hardwood floor in front of her, that the detective wanted nothing more than to go back to her evidence.

“Yeah,” she croaked. “Funny how it’s never the case you forget.”

The detective jerked, slightly, like she hadn’t expected the barbs in her girlfriend’s voice.

In the hallway, there was a drooping bouquet of flowers she hadn’t been able to bear bringing into the apartment.

“You know how important this is,” the detective implored, and it made her want to break things. Burn the papers, shatter the fancy glasses in the cabinet, spill wine across the carpets.

What about me, she wanted to scream. Am I not important to you anymore?

Instead, she said again, “You need to stop.”

“Stop?”

“The case. You need to stop.”

“I can’t just stop,” the detective laughed slightly, as if she thought it would convey how inconceivable the idea of stopping was.

“Yes, you can. Give it to someone else. There’s a whole precinct just waiting for you to put this file into their hands.”

At the thought of it, the thought of giving up this case, the hunt, the chase, pain flashed across the detective’s face.

“You don’t understand.”

“I do,” she replied. She had to shift her gaze to the dead plant on the corner of her partner’s desk, dirt dry and leaves brittle. “How could I not?”

“So then how could you ask me to do that? To give it all up? Why now?”

She had so many answers to that. So many moments that cut into her hands like a mosaic of memories. The bed empty beside her through the entire night. Cancelled reservations, one seat alone at the dinner table, laughs that died in her ribs. Friends, well meaning, who asked where the detective was, and the painful smiles she forced through the explanations. Work, and work, and work. Crime scene photos on the coffee table. The loneliness that seemed to care about her more than her girlfriend did.

There were so many times when she almost said something. Almost said enough. But she hadn’t, and now they were here, as she dripped a puddle onto the floor, and the detective looked at her like she had never seen her before.

When she tried to say that, any of that, it caught in her throat.

The detective took her silence for an inability to answer. A lack of evidence. Like she was throwing this tantrum for no reason, a little kid in the toy aisle of the store.

The detective sighed, rubbing a hand over her forehead. The other was already fanning through the papers once more. Her voice turned into something that begged to be understood.

“I’m so close—“

“To losing me.” She swallowed, painfully. “You’re losing me.”

“That’s not fair.”

“This isn’t fair,” her voice broke as she gestured between the two of them. “What you’re doing to me isn’t fair.”

“I’m not doing anything—“

“Exactly.” It was louder than she meant it to be. They both flinched.

“I’ll have it solved in a week, I promise.” She wasn’t sure who the detective was promising to.

“No.”

The detective blinked.

“No?”

“You heard me the first time.”

“I heard you, but I’m not sure what you’re saying ‘no’ to.”

If she had the energy to be slightly meaner, she would have told her to figure it out. Told her that she was a detective, this should be easy for her.

“I’m not giving you a week.” She took a deep breath. “And you’re not going to solve it.”

The detective’s looked at her like she didn’t recognize the person on the other side of the desk.

Finally, she understood what it felt like to face her girlfriend from the other side of an interrogation table.

Her girlfriend’s face was cold, and closed off. Her jaw was grinding into itself. She was staring at her like she couldn’t decide whether or not to consider her a suspect. As if the only reason she could fathom her girlfriend saying something like that was if she was actively sabotaging her.

She was cold, and her coat was wet, and this place no longer felt like home.

“You won’t solve this case.”

She was pretty sure there wasn’t anything crueler she could have said.

“You don’t know anything.” It was dripping with venom, and fear, and frustration. The fear the detective really wouldn’t solve it. The frustration that it still wasn’t solved.

“Do you really think you’re that special?” By now, it was too far gone for her to stop. There was no pretty way out of this. “You aren’t. This isn’t a TV show. You aren’t the main character who swoops in where no one else has before. It’s been decades of the same bullshit—taunting and evidence trails, and nobody has solved it. Don’t you think if it was solvable, it would have been by now?”

“There’s new evidence, and I’m not them—“

“What part of ‘you aren’t special’ don’t you understand,” she hissed, and the detective shifted away from her. “You aren’t the miracle detective who solves this. They’re going to keep on killing, and driving the people who try and find them crazy, and you’re letting them do it to you.”

“I’m not letting them do anything.”

“But you are,” she countered. “You have been for months. They’re messing with you. They’re everything to you, and you’re a game to them, and I’m nothing on the sidelines.”

“Babe, that’s not true,” The detective tried, voice softening. As if she had just realized something between them was wrong. That her girlfriend was hurting—had been, for a while.

She swallowed the tears rising in her throat.

“Do I need to become a crime scene for you to finally care about me again?” She slammed her hand down on the papers. Pretended the wince on the detectives face was concern for her, and not the papers she crumpled. “Will you look at me, love me again, if I’m a bloody photograph in this folder?”

“I do love you.”

“When someone loves someone else, they don’t leave them alone in the rain, waiting to be picked up. They don’t cancel to go dig through old archives on their loved one’s birthday. They don’t leave them in the middle of the night and let the blankets beside them get cold. People who love someone don’t live their life without a concern for the person they’re putting below everything else.”

“You’re making this really hard.”

“Good,” she snapped. “Because you’ve been making it hard to love you for months, and I’m glad you finally know how it feels.”

The detective paused, at that. Swallowed, eyes flitting around the room as if she would find the perfect thing to say in the remnants of the life they had built together.

“I love you,” The detective managed. Somehow, it was the worst thing she could have said.

“Good. Prove it.” She thought maybe dying would have hurt less than this.

“Prove it?”

“Prove it. Me, or the case.”

The detective froze.

“You don’t mean that,” she said, and it sounded like a plea. Don’t make me choose.

“Look at me and try and tell me I’m joking.” When the detective said nothing, she pushed further. “Go on. Do it. Choose.”

“I can’t do that—“ the detective choked. “This isn’t fair, you know that. I’m so close.”

Somehow, she had expected it to hurt less.

“Don’t make me choose,” the detective, her girlfriend, the love of her life finally said, voice breaking.

She had thought it would feel like dying.

It felt like nothing.

“You just did,” she said. The tears refused to be held, this time. The pain ran rampant through every word.

She knew her girlfriend could hear it.

“I love you,” the detective whispered. A final, desperate prayer for her to stay. But she was no god, and her girlfriend was no believer. And it would never be enough.

She let the door slam on the way out.

The detective never did solve that case.