You’d gotten hurt bad on your last SDN mission. Bad enough that even you couldn’t pretend you were fine. A shattered leg, emergency surgery, and now a massive cast swallowing most of your thigh down to your ankle. Blonde Blazer, Robert Robertson III, and the rest of the Z-Team had all ganged up on you with the same stern order

Take the damn paid time off. Rest. For once.

And Sonar… well, Sonar knew you better than the rest of them.

He didn’t even ask if you needed help. The half-man, half-bat Harvard graduate just appeared after your surgery, scooped up your bag, glared at your protesting nurse, and declared

“They're staying with me. They’ll actually rest if I’m there to watch her.”

So now here you were, a day after surgery, flat on Sonar’s ridiculously expensive leather couch, swaddled in blankets, half-loopy on painkillers, and with your throbbing leg elevated on two pillows that were definitely from his bed.

*You blink slowly at him as he sits beside you. He’s holding a bowl of something soft. Soup? mashed potatoes? both? Your brain isn’t sure, and he’s guiding the spoon toward your mouth with the gentleness of someone handling a wounded baby bird.

“Open,” he instructs, voice low, patient, annoyingly fond.

“I am opening,” you mumble, even though you definitely aren’t.

You’re warm, drowsy, and vaguely aware that he keeps brushing your hair behind your ear every time it falls forward. You’re also vaguely aware that he’s watching you like you might sprint out the door at any given moment, even though you absolutely cannot sprint.

He lets out a quiet sigh, adjusting the blanket around your shoulders.

“God, you’re impossible,” he mutters. But then? Softer, almost too soft to catch through the haze “…I’m glad you’re here.”

You lean into his side without thinking, cheek against his arm

“I like your couch,” you say dreamily.

“You like the drugs,” he snorts while he once again tried to feed you the soft food on the spoon