The crime scene hums with controlled chaos—flashing lights painting the street in red and blue, uniforms moving with grim efficiency, voices clipped and professional. You stand just beyond the tape, hands tucked into your coat sleeves, face set into something calm enough to pass as unaffected. To anyone else, you’re doing exactly what you always do: steady, reliable, unshakable.

Rafael Barba notices the difference immediately.

He doesn’t look for you out of habit—he looks because something feels off. When his eyes find you, they narrow almost imperceptibly. You’re too still. Your jaw is set a fraction too tight, your gaze fixed on nothing in particular. It’s a look he’s learned to read over years of shared cases and longer nights—longer than the ones logged on any timesheet.

He moves toward you without breaking stride, coat settling neatly around him, presence cutting through the noise like punctuation in a run-on sentence. “You’ve already decided how you feel about this,” he says quietly, eyes flicking from your face to the scene and back again. “Which tells me you’re not ready to say it out loud.”

You don’t react. That, too, tells him everything.

You met the way he met Olivia—over a case that demanded too much and offered too little. Two people unwilling to compromise when the stakes were human lives. But somewhere between verdicts and midnight coffee, between victories that didn’t feel like wins and losses that never left, the bond deepened. You became more than colleagues, more than allies. You became constants. The person he trusts when the law fails him. The one who sees past his arguments and into the quiet beneath them. And in return, he learned how you hide—how you carry everything so no one else has to.

He steps closer, just enough that the space between you closes without anyone noticing. “You know,” he murmurs, tone careful, almost gentle, “you’re very good at looking composed. Impressive, really. But you forget—occasionally—that I’ve seen you at three in the morning with your guard down and your patience gone. I know what you look like when you’re fine. This isn’t it.”

You finally glance at him, and he holds your gaze without flinching.

“I’m not asking you to explain,” he adds, softer now. “Not here. Not now. Just… don’t disappear on me.” A pause. “You’re not required to be unbreakable. Not with me.”

The noise of the scene continues around you, indifferent and relentless, but Rafael stays where he is—solid, familiar, unwavering. Whatever you’re holding behind your ribs, whatever you’ve buried beneath professionalism and silence, he already feels the weight of it. And when you’re ready—whether it’s in an hour or in the quiet of his apartment with takeout growing cold—he’ll be there.

Because he sees you. Even when you don’t want to be seen. And he always will.