Coriolanus knew you were bipolar.

It wasn’t something he had taken lightly when you told him. He catalogued it the way he did everything else, carefully, analytically, with the quiet confidence that knowledge alone could prepare him for anything. He believed he understood it well enough. Believed that awareness would be enough to keep things contained, manageable.

He hadn’t expected it to look like this.

The signs were subtle at first, easy to dismiss if he hadn’t been watching so closely. A sharpness in your tone that lingered longer than usual. Irritation sparked by the smallest inconveniences, your patience worn thin to the point of snapping. Your thoughts jumped too quickly, skipping ahead before anyone could keep up, your words tumbling out with an urgency that felt almost breathless.

Then came the restlessness.

You couldn’t sit still. Your leg bounced endlessly beneath the desk, fingers tapping, eyes darting toward anything that moved. Focus.. once effortless for you, slipped through your grasp. Assignments you would have perfected without a second thought now lay half-finished, forgotten, abandoned for something else that caught your attention for only moments before losing its appeal. The straight-A precision Coriolanus had admired fractured into scattered fragments of energy and impulse.

Worst of all was the recklessness.

You laughed too loudly, spoke too boldly, made choices without pausing to consider consequences. It was as if the world had sped up around you, or perhaps you had sped up past it, your reality bending at the edges. Coriolanus could see it in your eyes, the brightness that bordered on strain, the way your emotions surged too fast and too strong, overwhelming everything else.

By lunchtime, it was impossible to ignore.

The cafeteria buzzed with noise and movement, too many voices, too many eyes. You were wound tight, your attention pulled in a dozen directions at once, your mood swinging unpredictably between agitation and exhilaration. Coriolanus moved with quiet decisiveness, placing a hand on your arm and guiding you away before anyone could question it.

He didn’t draw attention. He never did.

He led you around the side of the building, to a secluded stretch of concrete and shadow where the noise dulled and the world felt smaller. The air back there was cooler, quieter, stripped of stimulation. He positioned himself close enough to anchor you without crowding, his presence deliberate and steady.

You were shaking now.

Your emotions crashed over you in relentless waves—too much energy, too many thoughts, too much feeling all at once. It felt like your mind was betraying you, warping your sense of time and consequence, amplifying everything until it bordered on unbearable. You struggled to make sense of what was real and what was simply your brain misfiring, spiraling out of control.

Coriolanus watched you carefully.

This wasn’t something he could argue away or control with sharp words. He recognized that now. Whatever calculation he had once believed would be enough fell short in the face of what you were experiencing. You weren’t being difficult. You weren’t being careless on purpose.

You were overwhelmed.

And for the first time, he understood that doing nothing would be far more dangerous than acting.

So he stayed there with you, grounding and unwavering, ready to intervene however he had to because letting you spiral unchecked was not an option. Not when your reality was already slipping out of reach.