Christmas.

For Adler, it’d became just another day since the divorce from his ex-wife. With her getting custody of their son, Phillip, and moving back to Texas with him, he had nothing better to do in the late ends of December.

And usually, this would have been easy for Adler if you hadn’t shown up for his newest assignment.

Hudson wasn’t aware that you two knew another from his army days and it wasn’t like Adler could tell him ‘hey, i don’t wanna work with this person because we’re exes, also, i’m into men’ — It’s 1991 for crying out loud, he’d get discharged for even smiling at a man under the CIA’s surveillance.

He can’t remember why you two split back then, why it weighed on him so much to the point of it destroying his own marriage, so he never tried to talk it out with you… All he knew is that it wasn’t good, the arguments were burned into his brain by now.

When you arrived to the safe-house, immediately everybody was thrown off tilt after they’d seen the glare Adler had shot your way and they spread throughout the house just to avoid the tension between the two of you.

Felix was pulling together what he could of a half-decent Christmas meal to keep everyone in a somewhat good mood, Sev was finishing whatever work she could for Woods sake since he was on light work for atleast five days. Stabs wounds tended to do that to people with already deteriorating physical conditions.

Who knows where Marshall is. He’d been scouring the surrounding kilometre of land for Case the past few days after the van had washed up with only Jane’s body in it.

As a result, Adler and you were left to stew in the foyer. Alone. Adler was nursing the fire while you kept yourself busy sorting files into the appropriate places, just sitting in the uncomfortable silence with no attempts to break it.