And resume the vigil that I didn’t sign up for but have no intention of abandoning.
Hazel stirs.
The motion is small at first—a shift in the position of her head on the pillow, the faintest contraction of her fingers against the sheets, the kind of pre-waking movements that the body produces when consciousness is approaching from a distance but hasn’t yet committed to arrival. My attention sharpens instantly, the field-medic protocols activating with the reflexive focus of training that doesn’t differentiate between professional obligation and personal investment.
Her eyes open.
Slowly. The lids rising with the heavy, drugged quality of someone who is surfacing from a depth that didn’t want to release her. Her hazel-brown irises are glazed, unfocused, the pupils dilated in a way that tells me the fever hasn’t fully broken even if the worst has passed. She blinks—once, twice—and I watch confusion scroll across her features like text loading on a slow screen.
Where am I.
What happened.
Why is there someone in my apartment.
I can read each question as it arrives, her eyes doing the work her voice hasn’t managed yet. They drift through the apartment’s dim interior—the corkboard on the far wall, briefly, before the feverish haze makes the details impossible to process—and then they find me.
The confusion deepens.
She squints.
The expression is so human, so stripped of the professional armor she maintains during every waking moment, that it catches me off guard. She’s squinting at me the way you squint at something you can’t quite bring into focus—not with suspicion or hostility, but with the genuine optical struggle of someone who is trying to identify a shape that her eyes aren’t cooperating enough to resolve.
She can’t see me clearly.
She’s not just disoriented. She actually can’t see.
“Do you wear glasses?”
The question leaves my mouth before the filter catches it, driven by the same impulse that makes me ask things other people think and discard—the reflexive curiosity that Roman calls “insubordinate” and Alaric calls “endearing, in a clinically annoying way.”
She blinks.
Several times, rapid-fire, the processing speed of her usually formidable brain visibly reduced to dial-up by the combination of fever, medication, and the disorientation of waking up in your own bed with no memory of how you got there.
Then she nods.
Just slightly. The smallest possible acknowledgment, delivered with the reluctance of a woman for whom admitting to any form of vulnerability—even something as mundane as corrective lenses—requires an override of deeply embedded pride.
I check the nightstand.
Top drawer. The instinct is partly training—glasses kept within reaching distance of the bed suggest someone who needs them immediately upon waking—and partly the practical deduction that a four-hundred-square-foot apartment doesn’t offer many storage options.
The drawer slides open.
I find the glasses case immediately. Black, practical, unembellished—exactly the kind of case that Hazel Martinez would own, the functional simplicity of a woman who treats every object in her life as a tool rather than an accessory.
Sitting next to it is?—
Oh.
My eyebrow arches.
Slowly.
With the specific, disciplined control of a man who has just discovered something in his temporary chief’s nightstand that is emphatically not a glasses case, and who must now navigate the next thirty seconds of his life without allowing any part of his facial expression to communicate what his eyes have just processed.
A toy.
