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sequinsmile-x · 3 days

Text

Prelude

-x-

Hi friends!

So, a while ago now I wrote a fic called Overture where Emily has a panic attack because she sees the benches where she met with Ian when she's out with Aaron and Jack. For a long time, I tried to think of an equivalent for Aaron and this week, inspiration struck!!

You don't have to have read Overture for this to make sense, although it is very briefly referenced.

I really hope you like this, and please let me know what you think <3

-x-

Words: 3k

Warnings: Panic attack/PTSD

Read over on Ao3, or below the cut

Emily hated moving.

She’d done it more times than she cared to count, so she was good at it, but that didn’t make her hate it any less. She had never been sentimental about physical belongings, something that had been useful when she came home from Paris to find all of her things sold, so it made moving easy.

She quickly learnt that Aaron and Jack did not have the same attitude towards possessions. Moving into their new home with them, the house she’d bought for them with her trust fund, had been a learning curve. She’d sat with Aaron in his old apartment, the place she’d called home for the 6 months she’d lived there with them, and gently made fun of him as he packed their things into boxes. She’d sat in his lap and helped him decide what to keep and what to donate, lovingly calling him a hoarder when he tried to keep books he had never read and never would, rewarding him with kisses when he put things in the donate pile.

Moving, she realised, wasn’t anywhere near as bad when you were doing it with people you love.

They’d started moving their things in just a few days ago and finally returned the keys for the apartment just that morning. Their furniture had been delivered, both from their old place, and the new things they’d bought for the house, and they were slowly unpacking. Jack was spending the night at Jessica’s, giving them some time to focus on getting as much unpacked as possible before he came back in the morning. They’d just had takeout, their first meal in their new home eaten out of the containers with plastic forks, all of their cutlery and plates still boxed up in the kitchen.

She sighs in relief as she places a heavy box on the living room floor just in front of the shelves they had installed that day, “We have so many books.”

Aaron chuckles as he walks over to her, wrapping his arms around her waist as he pulls her into him, her back against his chest as he kisses her cheek, “You say that like half of them aren’t those French and Italian novels you love.”

She hums as she tilts her head to kiss him, her hands resting over his on her waist, the cool metal of her engagement ring pressing against his skin as she links their fingers together. She smiles as she pulls back, “You’re forgetting the Spanish and Russian ones too.”

He laughs and turns her, his hands on her hips, “Of course, I seem to remember the Russian ones in particular being very heavy.”

She narrows her eyes and wraps her arms around his neck, “Hey, I’ll have you know that reading Anna Karenina, or any Tolstoy for that matter, in English is nothing short of a crime.”

Aaron smiles and leans in to kiss her, his hands slipping to her lower back as he pulls her closer, barely pulling back enough to speak, “Not all of us are polyglots, sweetheart.”

She cups his cheek, stroking her thumb back and forth over his jaw, “It’s okay, honey,” she says, a teasing edge to her voice, a hint of patronisation they both know she’s faking, “I’ll read them to you.”

He stamps another kiss to her lips and then pulls back, finally putting space between them that he knows they need if they have a chance in hell of actually getting anything unpacked this evening.

“I hung up some of the pictures.”

She smiles when she looks over, a picture of the three of them that Penelope had taken at their recent engagement party staring back at her. She’s got Jack on her hip in the photo, and Aaron standing on her other side, his arms around both of them. She’s laughing at something Jack had said, smiling at him as their eyes meet, and Aaron is looking at them both, his affection for them clear even from behind the glass it had been framed in.

“I love that picture,” she says, reaching out and squeezing his arm before she kisses his cheek, “It looks great there,” she steps back, “You know what helps with unpacking?” She says, winking at him before she turns and walks towards the kitchen, “Beer.”

He laughs as she walks away, his gaze never leaving her until she’s out of view. He loved her like this, relaxed and wearing one of his t-shirts and a pair of leggings as she walked around their house. A pair of his socks on her feet dulling the sound of her footsteps on the hardwood floors she’d loved the second they were first shown the house, the same smile on her face she’d had only minutes later when the realtor mentioned the bedroom closest to the master would be perfect for a nursery.

He looks back at the framed photo on the wall and smiles. He loved it too, loved that it wasn’t posed, that it was just a snapshot of them. A moment caught in time of what their life sounded like more often than not. Full of love and laughter and joy he would have once thought was impossible. He sighs contentedly as he looks at Jack, the way the little boy was smiling at Emily, the way his happiness at being in her arms was evident even behind glass. He loved their love for each other, loved that Jack would constantly ask when he was getting a baby brother or sister, his preference for a sister clear, and he felt like he’d kept his promise to Haley.

He’d given Jack a family. He’d made sure he was surrounded by love.

Aaron smiles as he turns away from the picture, his focus on the box of their belongings at his feet, and thats when it happens. A glint of a reflection catches his eye in the glass of the photo frame, his past colliding with his present as he loses the ability to breathe. Everything disappears. The smell of the takeout they’d had for dinner is replaced by the metallic stench of blood, thick and cloying as it fills the air. A sense of danger he never wanted to feel in this home chasing it, stealing what little oxygen had remained in his lungs.

He can’t feel anything, frozen in place, ice spreading through his veins, freezing him from the inside out as Emily turns the corner and walks back into the living room. He can’t focus, his vision narrowing to a pinpoint, making him miss that it’s her reflection he’d seen, not George Foyet’s. He can’t hear anything, Emily’s attempts at getting his attention muffled as his senses disappear one by one, his focus still on the framed picture, on the shifting reflections shown in their smiles, how they force him back into a past he thought he’d escaped.

He’s wrenched out of it when he feels a hand on his shoulder, pulling him back into the present as he grips the person’s wrist tightly, the bones shifting beneath their skin as he wraps his hand around it.

“Aaron,” Emily says, pulling her hand from his grip, her concern for him overriding the pain as she does so, her brief thought about the bruise she knows she’ll have fleeting as she tries to get his attention, “Aaron, sweetheart,” she repeats, her hand on his cheek as she tries to get him to look at her, her smile encouraging as his eyes snap to hers, “It’s just me. I’m right here.”

He sucks in a breath, his breathing erratic as he tries and fails to fill his lungs, “Em…”

She smiles encouragingly and nods, pressing her forehead against his, one of her hands hooked around his neck, cupping the back of it to hold him in place, “Yeah, it’s me. It’s Emily.”

She looks over at the couch, and groans in frustration when she realises how far they are away from it. She usually loved his size, loved that he was huge and heavy. It was something that brought her comfort, but now it was a problem, she couldn’t get him over to the couch, couldn’t move him, so she sinks to the floor with him. She settles him against her, his ear against her chest as she scratches against his scalp.

“I’m right here, honey,” she says, pressing her lips against his forehead, “You can hear my heartbeat, right?”

He nods against her, his grip firm around her waist as he holds on, clinging so tightly that he knows he’d be able to get under her skin if he could.

“Yes,” he chokes out, breathing her in, using the combination of the smell of her, the comforting scent of her perfume and her lingering underneath, and the beat of her heart to ground himself, “I can hear it.”

“Good,” she says, her lips against his forehead as she still scratches his scalp, knowing he found it comforting when he woke from a nightmare, “That’s good,” she blows out a slow breath, trying to regulate it, to calm down her own erratic heartbeat that had increased when she walked out to find her fiancee in the middle of a panic attack, “Just focus on that and me, okay?”

He nods, “Okay,” he closes his eyes and does that, shaking his head as he struggles to clear it, his eyes forced open again when he sees another flash of Foyet behind them, “I can’t…I can’t stop…”

She forces her eyes closed and swallows thickly, wiping away a tear from her cheek that escapes as she reopens them. She rests her cheek against the top of his head and starts to hum, quietly humming the tune of a song she doesn’t know the lyrics to, hoping that the feel of the vibration of her chest along with the soft sound will distract him.

It slowly draws him back to her, his breathing evening out against her, his grip no less tight as the tension seeps out of him, spilling onto the floor around them. They sit there in their huddled embrace in silence, time moving like syrup around them until he finally sits up enough to look at her, her fingers still tangled in his hair.

“I’m sorry,” he says, his voice thick, stuffed full of embarrassment and the fear he hadn’t entirely shifted, “I…”

She shushes him and cuts him off, shaking her head at him as she kisses his forehead, “You have nothing to apologise for, baby,” she says, shifting to kiss his cheek and then the corner of his lips, “It happens,” she assures him, her eyes kind and full of love as she pulls back, “Remember when I lost it because of a table and some chairs in a park?”

Aaron chokes on a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob and nods as it catches on his ribs. It had been almost a year since it happened, since he’d watched her freeze in the middle of the park, her eyes fixed on a table he never would have looked at twice, the place where she’d met with Ian just before he turned her life upside down. They hadn’t been back to that park since - something Jack had understood once Aaron had explained that Emily had been scared by something there. He’d never even asked to go again, the young boy painfully aware of what it was like to be scared of something other people didn’t understand.

Aaron knows it’s one of the reasons he and Emily worked. They understood each other in a way he knew no one else would be able to. Their different but similar pasts, the things they’d been through and the monsters they’d faced, bonding them in a way he knew he couldn’t live without.

“You’re right,” he says, sitting up so his head is no longer on her chest. He doesn’t pull away from her entirely, their bodies still wrapped around each other as they lean against the wall, “Thank you.”

Emily smiles softly and cups his cheek, stroking her thumb back and forth over his skin, sticky with tears and sweat, “You don’t have to thank me either,” she says kissing him, “It’s what you do for the people you love,” she smiles as she pulls back, “Do you know what triggered it?”

He swallows thickly, and nods, “Yeah, it was…” he clears his throat and nods up to the picture above them, “I saw something reflected in the photo frame, it was you I think, but…”

“You thought it was Foyet,” she finishes for him, her heart aching when he nods to confirm. He’d told her a long time ago, long before they were anything more than friends. It was back when he was still recovering from what Foyet had done to him, his wounds still healing as she brought him home from the hospital and helped him into his apartment. She knows he won’t want to talk about it anymore, not tonight anyway, so she reaches for his hand and links their fingers together, “I think we should leave the rest until tomorrow,” she says, nodding towards the boxes, “There’s a large, claw foot bath in our new ensuite that we haven’t tried out yet.”

Aaron smiles gratefully and squeezes her hand, hoping she knows how much he loves her, how much she made his life better.

“That sounds perfect, sweetheart.”

___

When he wakes up the next morning, he has a headache.

He groans as he gets out of bed, his fingers pressed into his temples as he leaves the bedroom, pausing when he hears movement downstairs, the familiar sound of Emily humming to herself as she walks around. It was rare for her to be up before him. He usually had to gently coax her out of bed, the promise of breakfast, coffee and no short amount of morning kisses usually enough to do the trick. She’d likely let him sleep in because of the night before, the concern that had lingered in her eyes, in the way she touched him, after his panic attack likely to stick around for a few days.

He pauses when he gets downstairs, his eyebrows furrowing as he watches her take the pictures down from the wall he’d hung them on the night before, “What are you doing, Em?”

She turns to look at him, “I figured out if we moved these to that other wall,” she says, nodding her head behind her, “You won’t see any reflections coming around corners because of the angle,” she says, smiling as she leans the large framed photo from their engagement party against the wall, before she stands up straight, her smile soft as she turns to look at him, “We can just hang a canvas here instead, maybe save the space for a photo from the wedding.”

He wants to focus on the unrelenting kindness she was showing him, the way she’d come up with a solution for a problem they hadn’t known existed even 24 hours ago, but he can’t. Instead, all he can do is stare at her wrist, exposed by her long-sleeved shirt riding up slightly, revealing her usually perfect skin marred by a bruise.

He feels nauseous, his stomach rolling as he realises what’s happened, flashes of the otherwise patchy first moments of his panic attack coming back to him as he swallows thickly, “Did I…”

She frowns and she looks down at her wrist, cursing under her breath as she pulls her sleeve back down over her hand. She looks back up at him and sighs, taking a step towards him. She knows exactly what he’s thinking when he steps backwards, putting more space between them, and it makes her ache.

“Honey…”

“I did that. I hurt you,” he says, his throat tight as he shakes his head at himself, “I-”

“No,” she says firmly, cutting him off as she gets close to him, reaching out and wrapping her hand around his, stopping him from stepping back again. She looks fiercely at him, tightening her hold on him as she forces him to maintain eye contact with her, “You did nothing wrong.”

“Your wrist is bruised, Emily,” he says, “I did that.”

“You were having a panic attack, honey” she says, cupping his cheek, forcing him to look at her when he tries to look away, “You were in the middle of a panic attack,” she repeats, “You did not do it on purpose. You were scared,” she swallows thickly as tears press at the back of her eyes, the memory of seeing him like he was the night before not an easy one, “Fuck, Aaron, you’ve done worse during sex.”

He chokes on a laugh at the unexpected joke, and it knocks all the fight out of him, all of his worry disappearing in a second as he presses his forehead against hers, “You’re something else, do you know that?”

She nods, her forehead knocking briefly against his, “I know,” she says, stamping her lips against his, “That’s why you love me.”

He wraps his arms around her, pulling her into a fierce hug as he rests his cheek against the top of her head, “One of the many reasons.”

She smiles to herself, her cheek pressed against his chest, and then she pulls back to look at him, “Why don’t we have breakfast?” She asks, running her fingers through his hair, “Jack will be home in a few hours and we’ve still got a lot to do.”

He nods in agreement and kisses her forehead, “Only one issue with that, sweetheart.”

She frowns and tilts her head, “What?”

He can’t help but smile at her. He knew the guilt in his stomach would simmer for days, that it would come to a boil each time he saw the bruise on her wrist, but he knew she was right and that, for now at least, he would himself to forget it and enjoy his first full day in his new home with the woman he loves.

“We haven’t unpacked anything in the kitchen.”

-x-

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