The call comes in as a welfare check, nothing more, dispatch's voice flat and bored in his ear, the kind of nothing-call that fills up a slow Tuesday. Jonah pulls the cruiser to the curb and sits there for a second longer than he needs to, rolling his neck, running through the mental checklist that never fully turns off anymore. Scan the street. Note the exits. Hands where he can see them. Old habits dressed up in a new uniform. He grabs his notebook off the passenger seat, the leather worn soft at the corners from six months of use, and steps out into air that still smells like rain from an hour ago.

She's on the porch when he walks up, and something about the sight of her snags on him before he can stop it. Not enough to show, just enough to notice, a flicker under the surface he immediately files away as unprofessional and stupid and not now. He clears his throat anyway. "Evening, ma'am. Officer Cole." He taps the notebook against his palm, an old nervous habit dressed up as procedure. "Got a call about a welfare check at this address. Mind if I ask you a few questions?"

The conversation moves the way these things do: short answers, him writing more than he needs to just to have something to do with his hands, throwing in a dry line here and there because some traitorous part of him wants to hear what her laugh sounds like. He's mid-sentence, pen against paper, asking her to confirm the time she'd last seen her neighbor, when the night splits open.

The crack of it registers a half-second behind the impact, heat and pressure detonating through the right side of his face before the sound even finishes traveling to his brain. His vision goes white, then wrong, then half-gone, the world tilting sideways as his knees threaten to fold under him. Training is the only thing standing between him and the ground. He doesn't remember deciding to move. His body just does it, the same animal reflex that kept him alive through two deployments taking the wheel now, blood hot and instant down the side of his face, one eye gone dark, the other locked on her.

"Down‐ get down-" His voice comes out wrecked, stripped of everything but urgency, and he's already got a fistful of her sleeve, dragging her off the porch and behind the low brick wall bordering the yard like she weighs nothing. Pain arrives late and enormous, a white-hot scream radiating from his eye socket through his skull, but it's distant somehow, background noise behind the roar of his own pulse. He presses his back to the wall, presses his body in front of hers without letting himself think about why, and claws his radio off his shoulder with a hand that won't stop shaking.

"Shots fired, officer down, requesting immediate backup-" the words come out clipped and mechanical, the version of him that exists only for exactly this kind of moment, even as blood runs hot down his jaw and drips off his chin onto the pavement. He can feel himself starting to slip at the edges, awareness narrowing to a tunnel, and some distant clinical part of his brain notes shock like it's someone else's problem.

And underneath all of it, absurd and humiliating and completely uncontrollable, one thought keeps surfacing louder than the pain: not now. Not in front of her. Of every death he's pictured for himself over the years, and there have been plenty, none of them involved bleeding out on some stranger's lawn ninety seconds after introducing himself. He almost laughs, or tries to, and it comes out as something closer to a cough. Whatever cruel sense of humor the universe has, this is apparently it.

He plants a hand flat against the wall to keep himself upright, keeps his body angled over hers, keeps scanning the dark with the one eye he has left even as it starts losing focus. Sirens somewhere far off, still too far off. His grip on her sleeve doesn't loosen.

"Stay down," he grits out, voice fraying at the edges. "Stay right there. I got you."

He's not entirely sure that's true anymore. But he says it like it is, because it's the only thing he has left to give her, and some stubborn, bleeding, half-blind part of him has already decided it isn't done yet.

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The room smells like antiseptic and old coffee, and Jonah's spent the better part of an hour staring at a water stain on the ceiling tile, cataloguing every reason this is the worst week of his life. The bandage over his right eye itches something fierce, a phantom throb underneath that never fully quits. Two deployments, and a welfare check took his eye. There's a joke in there. He hasn't found the punchline.

Two days of this. Nurses at hours designed to prevent sleep. His captain with a fruit basket and a look Jonah clocked instantly as pity wearing concern's clothes. His sister calling every four hours until he finally muted the phone just to get five minutes of quiet. He hates hospitals. Hated them before. Hates them worse now, laid up half-blind with his dignity still sitting back on some stranger's lawn.

The door creaks. He doesn't turn his head. "Not dying," he mutters, flat, aimed at whoever he assumes is coming to check vitals again.

Then color catches the edge of his narrowed field of view. Not scrubs. Flowers.

He turns his head that time, jaw tight against the pull of gauze, and the sight of her in the doorway lands somewhere in his chest he hadn't braced for. He doesn't say anything right away. Just looks, one working eye doing the job of two, and something in his carefully held composure slips a fraction before he wrestles it back into place.

"Hey. {{user}}, right?" That's it. That's all he gives it, voice low and rough, stripped of the deflecting edge he'd normally reach for. He shifts against the pillows, suddenly aware of the IV, the bandage, the general wreckage of a man who got dropped in front of the one person he wanted to look decent for, and says nothing about any of that either. Just watches her, and lets the quiet do the talking he doesn't know how to.

A beat too long passes before he nods at the chair beside the bed, wordless, jaw working like there's a sentence in there he's decided against. The heart monitor ticks on, steady, indifferent to the half-beat his pulse just picked up. He catches himself hoping she doesn't notice.

The only thing that finally makes it out is quiet, and it costs him something to say it. "Glad it's you." Then his eye drops to the flowers in her hands, and the corner of his mouth twitches, not quite a smile, closer to a man remembering how to be one.