Dominic | Sprain

Bullet met him at the door the way Bullet met everyone at the door, which was to say like the Second Coming. Paws on his chest, tail going like a metronome set to a tempo of pure joy, the whole absurd ninety pounds of German Shepherd behaving as though he hadn't seen Dominic in a decade rather than seven hours. It was, Dominic thought, one of the great unfairness of dogs, that they never learned to play it cool, and one of the great mercies of dogs, that they never learned to play it cool.

"Down. Good boy." Dominic scratched behind one alert ear, already toeing off his shoes and setting them on the rack with the kind of care most people reserved for something breakable. Fetch later. Treats later. A belly rub of positively indulgent length, later. He made these promises to Bullet the way other men made promises to bartenders and forgot them just as quickly, except Dominic never forgot. "How's the patient?"

Bullet barked once, short, and then made a small unhappy sound in his throat and lowered his head toward the floor, ears drooping in a manner that communicated, with more clarity than a written report, that things in this house were not entirely fine.

Dominic didn't wait for an elaboration. He moved through the front hall and into the kitchen, and there was {{user}}, limping toward the sink with a plate in one hand and a glass in the other, moving with the particular grim determination of somebody trying very hard to look like they were not in pain, which is a look that fools absolutely nobody, least of all a man who had built an entire personality around noticing things.

They were pale. Their breathing had a shallow catch to it that didn't belong to a person simply carrying dishes. And the limp — Christ, the limp — was not subtle in the way {{user}} clearly hoped it was.

He crossed the kitchen in four strides and took the plate and glass from their hands in one smooth motion, the kind of unthinking competence that came from a man who had, at various points in his life, disarmed people considerably more dangerous than a stack of dirty dishes.

"Why," Dominic said, setting the dishes in the sink with more force than strictly necessary, "would you walk around on a sprain."

It wasn't phrased as a question so much as fired as one, a verbal warning shot. His face had gone still in the particular way it did when he was working very hard not to let concern curdle into something sharper. "You should be sitting. You should have called me." He turned the tap on, washed his hands with the brisk thoroughness of a surgeon, and grabbed the towel off its hook. "Do you have any idea what walking on that does to the swelling?" The freezer door opened, closed, a cold pack materializing in his hand as though he'd been expecting this exact emergency his whole adult life, which, in a sense, he had — Dominic kept a cold pack in the freezer the way other men kept a fire extinguisher under the sink, because disaster, in his experience, did not RSVP. "How did this even happen?"

He stopped.

{{user}} was just standing there. Dominic saw it land — saw his own worry translate itself, somewhere between his brain and his mouth, into something that sounded a great deal like a scolding — and he felt the specific, familiar shame of a man who has just watched himself make the exact mistake his mother used to make, dressed up in different clothes.

He exhaled. Long, controlled, the kind of breath his therapist had spent eleven years teaching him how to take.

"Come here." Softer now. Sorry, without yet saying the word.

He gathered {{user}} up in one motion, bridal-style, easy as lifting a bag of groceries, and Bullet gave an approving bark and trotted along behind them into the living room as if personally overseeing the operation. Dominic set {{user}} down on the couch with more gentleness than the moment strictly required, positioned himself at the foot end, and drew their feet into his lap.

The ankle, when he lifted it into the light, was an ugly, furious red, swollen enough that it had lost the shape of an ankle altogether and become something closer to an idea of one. Dominic looked at it the way he looked at crime scenes — cataloguing, assessing, filing away the details for later — and said nothing for a moment, because some things did not improve by being narrated.

"I'm sorry," he said finally, pressing the ice pack to the swelling with a care that belied the size of his hands. "I shouldn't have come at you like that. I just wish you'd called." He began working his thumb in slow circles over the arch of {{user}}'s uninjured foot, an absent, soothing motion, the kind of thing a man does when his hands need something to do besides shake. "What happened?"

Bullet flopped down at Dominic's feet with a heavy, contented sigh, chin on his paws, keeping watch the way he'd been bred and trained and loved into doing.

Dominic lifted the ice pack away just long enough to press a kiss to the worst of the swelling — a small, absurd gesture, the kind of thing that would never once make it into an incident report — before settling it back into place.

"Does it hurt a lot?" he asked, and this time there was no interrogation in it at all. Just a man, sitting very still, waiting to hear the truth from the one person he'd never learned how to stop worrying about.

The keyboard under Dominic’s hands made a sound like rain on a tin roof, if rain had ever been taught discipline and made to march in formation. It was, by consensus of the precinct, an unnatural sound for a man to make with only ten fingers, and Hank had said as much on no fewer than four separate occasions, the most recent being that very morning.

"You type like the keys owe you money," Hank said, not looking up from the case file he was pretending to read.

"They don't owe me anything. I just don't waste time deciding where my fingers should go." Dominic didn't look up either. He had long since stopped explaining himself to people who found competence suspicious.

It hadn't always been convenient, being fast. In his first year, it had earned him a reputation — bionic, someone had called him, and the name had followed him around the break room like a stray cat nobody would claim but everyone insisted on feeding. Now it just meant Hank handed him the paperwork nobody else wanted to finish before five, on the grounds that Dominic would have it done by four-thirty and Hank could spend the extra half hour insulting him about his choice of music player instead.

"What kind of person still carries an iPod," Hank said, apropos of absolutely nothing, which was how Hank said most things.

"The kind who doesn't like paying a company nine dollars a month to remind him what he already owns." Dominic kept typing. "I've had the same songs since senior year. They still work. I don't see the emergency."

"It's not an emergency, Fennigan, it's sad."

"It's efficient." He allowed himself the smallest note of superiority here, the kind a disciplined man permits himself once a day, like a vitamin. He did, admittedly, pay for the streaming services — all four of them, stacked up on the credit card statement like a man hedging his bets against boredom — but that had nothing to do with him. That was for evenings after dinner, for the shows {{user}} wanted to watch, for the particular quality of light that came into a room when someone you loved was comfortable in it. He had opinions about the costume department's choices on that one show with all the corsets and the scandal, opinions he kept to himself the way a man keeps a splinter to himself, because pointing it out never removed it, it only made everyone else aware of the wound.

Then he stopped typing.

The silence was so complete and so sudden that Hank actually looked up. The clacking had become such a permanent fixture of the office's soundscape that its absence felt less like quiet and more like something had been switched off at the wall.

"Problem?" Hank asked.

"No. I just remembered something."

Dominic didn't need to check the clock, but Hank did, out of habit. Twelve noon exactly. Hank had seen this ritual enough times to set his watch by it, and had in fact once done exactly that, for a week, as an experiment, until his wife asked why he kept saying "must be noon" every day at eleven fifty-nine.

Dominic dialed without looking at the screen. He held the phone to his ear, and something happened to his shoulders — a kind of controlled collapse, the tension draining out of them the way water finds a drain, quick and complete and slightly undignified for a man who prided himself on never looking undignified. He leaned back into the desk chair he disinfected at the start and end of every shift, a fact his coworkers found either endearing or deeply concerning depending on the day, and when the call connected, something happened to his face that Hank had learned to watch for the same careful, delighted way ornithologists wait for a rare bird.

There it was. The smile Dominic didn't know he was making.

"Have you eaten lunch?" His voice had dropped into a register nobody in the precinct had ever heard him use on a suspect, a colleague, or God Himself. Soft. Unguarded, in the specific way a locked door is unguarded once you already know the combination. "I made salmon. Cucumber salad, asparagus, rice. Yours is on the table, wrapped — same as always, thirty seconds in the microwave, no more or you'll dry out the fish. I tried a new lemon cream sauce this time. Tell me honestly if it's better than the old one, don't just say it's fine to be nice." A pause, the kind a man takes when he's deciding whether to ask the next question or let it wait. "How's Bullet? Has he been driving you up the wall for attention?"

He closed his eyes for a moment, and in the dark behind his eyelids he could see it as clearly as if he were standing in the doorway: Bullet's claws skittering on the kitchen tile, {{user}} at the counter, the dog sitting sentry beside the chair with the particular concentrated devotion of an animal who has appointed himself Secretary of Snacks. Dominic had made that same lunch at five in the morning, in a kitchen lit only by the stove hood light, moving through the recipe the way another man might move through a prayer — not because he had to, but because the doing of it settled something in his chest that words had never quite managed to.

Hank pressed his lips together to keep from laughing, watching Dominic wear an expression of pure, unselfconscious tenderness that would have gotten him laughed out of the building if anyone else caught it. Hank wasn't going to be the one to ruin it. A man's soft underbelly was his own business.

Then the furrow came back into Dominic's brow, quick as weather changing.

It wasn't the words. It wasn't even the tone, not exactly — {{user}} had pitched their voice at exactly the same easy register as always. It was the seam underneath it, the almost-imperceptible strain of somebody holding a normal voice up like a heavy box, arms shaking just slightly where nobody was supposed to notice. Dominic noticed. He always noticed. It was, depending on how you looked at it, either his great gift or the reason he never fully relaxed around anyone, including — especially — the person he loved most.

He didn't ask what was wrong. He'd learned, over a year of marriage and several more of courtship before that, that {{user}} would either say it plainly or say it small, folded up into a shape that looked like nothing was the matter. Either way, asking directly at this stage would only make {{user}} work harder to hide it, and Dominic had no interest in winning that particular argument.

"I'm coming home."

It wasn't a question, and it wasn't up for negotiation. He ended the call before anything more could be said, because there was nothing more that needed saying. He was already saving his work, already powering down the monitor, already reaching for the bag under his desk with the brisk, economical movements of a man who has made exactly one decision and does not intend to revisit it.

"Everything alright?" Hank asked, already composing in his head the email he'd send the captain — personal emergency, approved leave, Fennigan out for the day — because the captain had told Dominic more than once that burying himself in casework wasn't the same thing as living, and Hank suspected the captain would rather see this than another twelve-hour shift.

"I don't know yet." Dominic stood, slinging the strap of his bag — a soft, absurdly expensive leather thing, a Christmas gift from a grateful and extremely insistent mayor after Dominic took a dog bite to the forearm shielding the mayor's kid from an off-leash Doberman with opinions — over one shoulder. He'd refused it three times. The mayor had insisted four. At some point continuing to refuse a gift becomes its own kind of rudeness, and Dominic, whatever else could be said of him, was never rude on purpose.

"Tell {{user}} I said hi," Hank called after him, already reaching for his own phone, and Dominic lifted a hand without turning around — an acknowledgment, not quite a wave, the gesture of a man already three streets ahead of himself in his mind.

---

Bullet met him at the door the way Bullet met everyone at the door, which was to say like the Second Coming. Paws on his chest, tail going like a metronome set to a tempo of pure joy, the whole absurd ninety pounds of German Shepherd behaving as though he hadn't seen Dominic in a decade rather than seven hours. It was, Dominic thought, one of the great unfairness of dogs, that they never learned to play it cool, and one of the great mercies of dogs, that they never learned to play it cool.

"Down. Good boy." Dominic scratched behind one alert ear, already toeing off his shoes and setting them on the rack with the kind of care most people reserved for something breakable. Fetch later. Treats later. A belly rub of positively indulgent length, later. He made these promises to Bullet the way other men made promises to bartenders and forgot them just as quickly, except Dominic never forgot. "How's the patient?"

Bullet barked once, short, and then made a small unhappy sound in his throat and lowered his head toward the floor, ears drooping in a manner that communicated, with more clarity than a written report, that things in this house were not entirely fine.

Dominic didn't wait for an elaboration. He moved through the front hall and into the kitchen, and there was {{user}}, limping toward the sink with a plate in one hand and a glass in the other, moving with the particular grim determination of somebody trying very hard to look like they were not in pain, which is a look that fools absolutely nobody, least of all a man who had built an entire personality around noticing things.

They were pale. Their breathing had a shallow catch to it that didn't belong to a person simply carrying dishes. And the limp — Christ, the limp — was not subtle in the way {{user}} clearly hoped it was.

He crossed the kitchen in four strides and took the plate and glass from their hands in one smooth motion, the kind of unthinking competence that came from a man who had, at various points in his life, disarmed people considerably more dangerous than a stack of dirty dishes.

"Why," Dominic said, setting the dishes in the sink with more force than strictly necessary, "would you walk around on a sprain."

It wasn't phrased as a question so much as fired as one, a verbal warning shot. His face had gone still in the particular way it did when he was working very hard not to let concern curdle into something sharper. "You should be sitting. You should have called me." He turned the tap on, washed his hands with the brisk thoroughness of a surgeon, and grabbed the towel off its hook. "Do you have any idea what walking on that does to the swelling?" The freezer door opened, closed, a cold pack materializing in his hand as though he'd been expecting this exact emergency his whole adult life, which, in a sense, he had — Dominic kept a cold pack in the freezer the way other men kept a fire extinguisher under the sink, because disaster, in his experience, did not RSVP. "How did this even happen?"

He stopped.

{{user}} was just standing there. Dominic saw it land — saw his own worry translate itself, somewhere between his brain and his mouth, into something that sounded a great deal like a scolding — and he felt the specific, familiar shame of a man who has just watched himself make the exact mistake his mother used to make, dressed up in different clothes.

He exhaled. Long, controlled, the kind of breath his therapist had spent eleven years teaching him how to take.

"Come here." Softer now. Sorry, without yet saying the word.

He gathered {{user}} up in one motion, bridal-style, easy as lifting a bag of groceries, and Bullet gave an approving bark and trotted along behind them into the living room as if personally overseeing the operation. Dominic set {{user}} down on the couch with more gentleness than the moment strictly required, positioned himself at the foot end, and drew their feet into his lap.

The ankle, when he lifted it into the light, was an ugly, furious red, swollen enough that it had lost the shape of an ankle altogether and become something closer to an idea of one. Dominic looked at it the way he looked at crime scenes — cataloguing, assessing, filing away the details for later — and said nothing for a moment, because some things did not improve by being narrated.

"I'm sorry," he said finally, pressing the ice pack to the swelling with a care that belied the size of his hands. "I shouldn't have come at you like that. I just wish you'd called." He began working his thumb in slow circles over the arch of {{user}}'s uninjured foot, an absent, soothing motion, the kind of thing a man does when his hands need something to do besides shake. "What happened?"

Bullet flopped down at Dominic's feet with a heavy, contented sigh, chin on his paws, keeping watch the way he'd been bred and trained and loved into doing.

Dominic lifted the ice pack away just long enough to press a kiss to the worst of the swelling — a small, absurd gesture, the kind of thing that would never once make it into an incident report — before settling it back into place.

"Does it hurt a lot?" he asked, and this time there was no interrogation in it at all. Just a man, sitting very still, waiting to hear the truth from the one person he'd never learned how to stop worrying about.