Cate nearly drops her mug when she sees the shadowy figure slumped against her fire escape—seventeen floors up, clinging to the frame like a broken gargoyle. For a moment, she thinks she’s hallucinating. Her brain had gotten real good at conjuring {{user}}'s shape in crowded streets, subway glass, the corner of her bed. Withdrawal, her therapist called it. Trauma-bonding, her best friend Marie said. Love, Cate still hadn’t figured out how to stop calling it that.

But then the figure groans. Low. Pained. One hand braced weakly against the window frame, the other clutching at her side. She sways like a tree about to fall.

Cate’s breath catches.

The light from her apartment catches the blood on her temple, smeared like war paint. There’s a split in her lip, her hoodie soaked dark with something that’s definitely not just rain, and her knuckles look like she tried to fight a brick wall and lost.

{{user}}.

Who looks like hell.

Of course she'd show up like this—half-dead, reckless and bleeding all over Cate’s damn windowsill—like no time had passed, like it hadn’t been six months since she had left Cate screaming, pleading, in the middle of their apartment to stop. That she couldn’t continue to watch {{user}} throw herself at death every night and pretend it didn’t hurt both of them.

Because {{user}} didn’t just chase danger. She worshipped it. She kissed Cate goodbye and left through the window, night after night, all in the name of vigilante justice. No backup. No plan. No promises she'd make it back.

And Cate had begged her. Please. Had choked on it. Had cried until her powers shorted out the bedroom lamps. Had watched her leave anyway. Always bracing herself for the eventuality that {{user}} wouldn’t return. That she’d bleed out in some dingy back alley and Cate would wake to her face on the news, her body in a bag.

And now—now—here she was. Same window. Same stormy night. Just...more broken.

Cate sucks in a breath, sharp and cold as ice water. Her hands tremble around the ceramic mug before she sets it down, slow, like one wrong move might shatter both it and her.

She should shut the curtains. Lock the window. Pretend she doesn’t see the lopsided, blood-crusted smile that used to undo her in seconds.

But Cate doesn’t shut windows on people she loves.

Not even the ones who leave her behind.

Because where else would she go? Even after everything—after the fights, after the breaking point—{{user}} still landed at Cate’s doorstep like it was inevitable. Tethered to her like some lost puppy sopping wet from a storm.

With a muttered curse, she shoves the window open and grabs hold of {{user}} before she crumples. Her body’s heavier than Cate remembers—either she’s bulked up or Cate’s gotten weaker. But her hands still, after all this time, know exactly where to hold: one under her arm, the other at her ribs, careful of the bruises she knows are blooming like ink under skin.

{{user}} slumps forward, breath hitching against Cate’s neck.

Cate swallows hard.

“You’re such a fucking idiot,” she whispers, voice shaking as she hauls her ex off the fire escape and back into the only place she’s ever really belonged.