inthewildwood | Fic: rest your head close to my heart

Title: rest your head close to my heart

Fandom: The Killing
Pairing: Sarah Linden/Stephen Holder

Summary: Risk calculation: successful

Rating: T

The look on Holder’s face when they hand the baby to him for the first time is some kind of cocktail of awe, adoration, and sheer terror. Sarah’s lying back on the bed, exhausted- she’s done this before, but the fourteen years in-between had apparently taken the edges off the memory, because it seemed so much worse this time around- too tired to do anything but smile blearily at the two of them.

We did it, she thinks.

Holder’s still staring at his daughter, open-mouthed, while the baby wiggles and fusses in his arms. She’s about to hold a hand out to him when he finally shuts his mouth, swallows, and whispers “she looks just like her mama.”

Sarah’s eyes blur, and ordinarily she might pretend that it’s just allergies. But damn it, if watching her boyfriend hold their child for the first time doesn’t call for a few tears, she’s not sure what does.

She smiles and holds a hand out. “Come here.”

He makes his way carefully over to the bed, walking like he’s afraid of tripping at any moment, and settles down next to her, easing the baby into the crook of her arm so that he’s free to but an arm around her. Their daughter yawns, eyelids fluttering, apparently settling in to sleep. Sarah touches a finger to her face gently.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I think she’s kind of got your nose.”

It happens like this:

They’re sitting on Holder’s couch after dinner, watching Jeopardy and taking turns getting annoyed when the contestants get the answers wrong. (He goes for Migration Patterns; she hits it out of the park in Fables and Fairy Tales.)

“Really, Linden?” he asks. “Fairy tales?”

She shrugs. “Jack used to like it when I read to him.” Her smile fades a bit, so he hooks a foot around her ankle and jogs it. “Aw shit, Little Red Riding Hood,” he says with a leer, “the Big Bad Wolf’s gonna get you now.”

She rolls her eyes. “Stop that,” she says, kicking at his foot, and Stephen Holder did not survive being a younger sibling without an extant knowledge of how to get the upper hand in a kick fight. So of course, he immediately goes for the underhand tactic- literally, launching himself at her and tickling her ribs. She squeaks in surprise and topples over, dragging him with her so that he’s on top of her with an elbow on either side of her face. She wiggles for a few more seconds, then laughs, defeated.

He lowers his face towards her, until he can feel her breath puffing on his face. “You scared of the Big Bad Wolf, Linden?”

“You’re a pervert,” she says, though she doesn’t make any move to push him away. Instead, she shifts in place, one leg coming up to rest on his hip, her breasts rubbing against him through their sweaters.

He lowers his head even further, until his lips are brushing her ear. “I don’t hear you complaining.” He waits another moment, just to see if she changes her mind. She doesn’t. He kisses her.

It’s a risk. He knows it’s a risk, because if she pulls back or freaks out or he’s crossed an invisible line, he could lose her for good, and he really can’t imagine anything worse. But they’ve been doing this dinner/TV night thing for months now, and not saying anything seems more like cowardice than anything else. And she hasn’t said she wants his body, but she hasn’t said she doesn’t, you know? Call it a calculated risk.

She hesitates for a fraction for a second, then her hand slides into his hair and she slips her tongue between his teeth.

Rick calculation: successful.

It takes her awhile to figure it out. Of course the sex is awesome (not that she’d ever contemplated what it would feel like, back when she went home every night to a single bed) and Holder is- Holder, the way he’s always been- but when she curls against him at night, there’s a cold edge of fear that she expects but doesn’t feel. That unnerves her. Sarah Linden learned early on that feeling at least some fear is her best hope for surviving, and she’s lived by it ever since. To put herself in a situation- a situation like this- where she doesn’t have that instinct for self-preservation feels like an invitation to end up back in that white-walled ward, or worse.

But she stays. Because no self-preservation, remember?

It’s a month before she finally gets it. They’re lying in bed together, still sweaty and out of breath, and he flips over to start nuzzling against her hair, kissing along her hairline and ear when he reaches it. It was a hard day; false lead after false lead, stringing her along the fraying rope of her patience until she finally snapped and had to stand outside taking deep breaths until she felt under control again. It’s times like this she almost- almost- misses the lack of control she experienced so briefly as a child, the ability to scream and lash out and let the whole world know that she’s angry. But she can’t do that- not just because she’s an adult and adults don’t throw tantrums, but because she knows that from the first sign of displeasure or intractability, it’s only a matter of time before she’s being shown the door. So she grits her teeth and apologizes, and Holder puts a hand on her shoulder and tells her it’s no big deal.

No big deal.

So she’s lying there, with Holder nosing at her and murmuring endearments that should be cheesy but just sound sincere when it finally hits her that she’s not scared because she’s not in danger. That Holder’s not going anywhere, even if she’s damaged goods- and yeah she’s been told not to think of herself like that, but self-deception isn’t one of her skills- that maybe they’re both damaged in their own ways, but they’re dented and scarred in ways that somehow fit together perfectly and he’s not going anywhere.

She must make a noise, because Holder draws back to look at her, concerned, and she realizes her face is wet. “Linden? You okay?”

She wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. “It’s nothing. I’m fine. I love you. It’s nothing.”

She feels him stiffen and his face goes still, but it’s a moment before she realizes what she’s said. “I-“

“Sarah,” he says, awestruck, and kisses her. She can feel him mumble “I love you too” against her lips, and she throws herself forward, into the current, away from her safe place on the sidelines.

It’s a joke, at first, like most things are with Holder. She’s making dinner- a rarity, but one she’s working on- and he’s sitting at the counter, laughing and wondering out loud if they should call an ambulance just in case her cooking gives them both food poisoning. She flicks him with water from the sink and keeps going.

“We won the genetic lottery, Sarah,” he says, leaning back in his chair. “We both got the fine-ass bodies and you got the brain and I got the cooking. I tell you, if we ever had a kid, that kid would kick ass. Like a tiny fucking superhuman.”

She rolls her eyes at him and keeps cooking.

(Neither of them get food poisoning.)

She doesn’t think anything of it, but it becomes a sort of running gag. “Our kid wouldn’t play t-ball. That game is for punks.” (“What, did the neighbourhood t-ball players beat you up as a kid?” “Only because I was outnumbered.”) It takes her awhile to realize he’s only half-joking, and then not joking at all, because he plays it off like he plays everything- safe enough to back away if he needs to. They have that in common. But it makes her think.

She did the kid thing once already, and most people would probably agree that it wasn’t exactly an unqualified success. She says as much to Holder once, and he frowns at her over the folder he’s reading. “That ain’t true, Sarah.”

“Isn’t it? I don’t see him anywhere around here.”

“Yeah, that’s my point.” He tosses the folder down on his desk for emphasis. “Neither of us went in for that white picket fence and a puppy bullshit. So what?” He leans forward, elbows on his knees, looking uncharacteristically earnest. “You sent Jack to live with his dad because it was good for him. It ain’t like you sent him to Alcatraz.”

She laughs dryly. “I’ll be sure to put that on my Mother of the Year application.”

“I’m serious,” he says, and she can tell that he means it. It’s not just about Jack, really, so much as it’s about her dragging her whole fucked-up childhood baggage around wherever she goes, hoisting it on her shoulders like some kind of fucked-up Atlas, serving time for a sin she doesn’t remember committing. “No shame in asking for help sometimes. ‘Sides, he loves it out in Chicago. You said so yourself.”

She nods, more to herself than anyone else. “If you say so,” she says, which is her way of saying “you’re right,” and they both know it.

She turns that over in her head for the next few weeks, during which Holder pulls back on the hints a bit, looking at it from different angles and trying to find flaws in the argument. Because that’s what she does. She’s a cop, and a pretty damn good one, and she’s learned that it’s best not to go into a situation where you could be ambushed or screw up a tiny person for life without looking at all the potential pitfalls. On her good days, she knows she didn’t fail her son- Jack sounds happy whenever he calls her, he looks healthy when he comes to visit or sends pictures, and however her relationship with Greg ended, she knows he adores their son. And it’s different this time- she’s not twenty-five and fighting upstream through a current she has no idea how to navigate. She’s learned some tricks of the trade, and she’s settled down in her skin- as much as she ever will- and this time, she won’t be going at it alone. It’s that last one that finally convinces her. So the next time they’re sitting on the couch, and he’s edging towards the baby thing again (“mad genetics, you know?”) she turns to him and says “okay.”

He falters. Blinks. “What?”

“I said, okay.” She scoots a bit closer to him. “Let’s do it.”

He gives her a look like someone just handed him birthday, Christmas, and Halloween all wrapped up in one box, and just about tackles her. Her head bumps against the armrest and she laughs, wondering if the whole babymaking deal is going to start right now.

Actually, it ends up starting- in earnest- a month later, because she takes a leave from work when they’re done their case, and he takes some time off as well, so they pretty much spend all their time in bed together. Or on the couch together. Or, in one memorable instance, on the kitchen counter together. They’re pretty indiscriminate.

“It’s not gonna happen right away,” she warns him, but he just laughs and tells her that he can be patient. There are anxieties she’s not going to voice- she’s not old, but she is close to thirty-six, and it’s not like she hasn’t heard the endless advertisements and doctor’s messages about how any woman who tries to get pregnant above the age of thirty is doomed to endless frustration. She finds herself obsessively checking the rhythms of her body, heart fluttering at every twinge and twitch, thinking please please please let this work.

The first week she’s late, she doesn’t dare think anything of it, but she’s tense as hell, and it shows. Holder’s smart enough not to ask, but she snaps at the slightest provocation anyway, so they spend a lot of time either apart or watching TV in silence. The second week, she’s still too skittish to go out and buy a test, but she can feel her hopes climbing in spite of herself. The third week, she breaks down and buys the test. The fourth week, she actually uses it.

Holder’s on the living room couch, reading a book. She stands in the doorway until he notices, then silently holds the test up, pointed so he can see the pink lines standing out against the white. His jaw drops, like he’d been thinking the same way she had- afraid this wasn’t really going to happen- then strides across the room and grabs her around the waist, lifting her up and kissing her. She laughs and kisses him back.

“Gotta get this in now,” he says, “before you start puking all the time.” But he’s sporting a grin wide enough to crack his face in half. She only laughs more.

He wasn’t wrong about the puking, though. Before, with Jack, she’d been hungry all the time and somehow managed to keep it all down, with just some faint nausea bothering her. Now she’s spending practically all her time with her head in the toilet, and to add insult to injury, she never seems to be hungry enough to eat in the first place. Holder, God bless him, is great about sitting next to her and holding her hair back and generally joking with her (when her retching isn’t drowning him out) and keeping her sane. He also plies her with saltines and ginger ale, apparently because that’s what his sister ate when she was pregnant and he’s worried about her losing weight.

“I really don’t know how to break this to you,” she says, lifting her head from the toilet bowl, “but losing weight isn’t really high on my list of worries at the moment.” He just shoves more saltines at her.

The morning sickness lasts for two wretched months, and then it recedes as quickly as it showed up. It’s a good thing too, she points out to Holder as she rolls over on top of him in bed, because pretty soon she’s going to start getting bigger and then it’ll be a long time before they get to have sex again.

“I can think of ways,” he says with a leer. “I’m creative.” And then he ducks under the covers and her laughs turn to gasps.

When she does start to show, it’s gradual, and not even noticeable at first- the bulky sweaters she always wears (even now, when she feels like her body temperature’s risen by twenty degrees) do a good deal to disguise it. Of course, Holder notices right away, because she wears a light cotton t-shirt to bed, and they fall asleep every night with his hand resting lightly on her middle.

She tells Jack at the four and a half month point- not quite out of the danger period, but he’s going to visit next month, and she doesn’t want him to find out by meeting her at the airport with a round stomach. He takes it pretty well, all things considered.

“I guess you can’t make me babysit her,” he says, half-ruefully, and she laughs. “Don’t push your luck. I might ask your dad to send you out for the summer and make a live-in sitter out of you.” She pauses. “How is he? Your dad I mean.”

“He’s good.” Jack sounds slightly hesitant. “Do you want me to tell him? About the baby?”

She shakes her head, then realizes he can’t see her. “I’ll tell him. Can you put him on?”

Greg, like Jack takes it well. Not that he’d have any grounds to not take it well, but despite everything that happened between the two of them, he’s been good to her son- their son- and she’s grateful. Besides, Jack having a half-sibling impacts both of them, so it’s only fair to let him know. After she’s done talking to Greg, sussing out the flight Jack’s taking to Seattle, her son gets back on the phone. “Hey, can I say hi to Holder?”

“Sure thing.” She takes the phone away from her ear and waggles it at Holder. “Call for you.” She feels lighter than she did a few minutes ago.

Holder grins and takes the phone. “Yo, little man!” His voice fades as he wanders off down the hall. Sarah hugs herself around the waist and smiles.

The baby gets a head start on waking them up when it kicks for the first time. She went to sleep early- she’s been feeling more tired than usual lately- and Holder joined her in bed around nine, conking out almost immediately afterwards, hand on her stomach as usual. She’s woken about an hour later when he elbows her in the ribs.

“Ow!” She sits up, glaring. “What the-“

He holds a finger to his lips, wide-eyed, his hair sticking up in every direction. “You didn’t feel it?"

“I was asleep until a second ago,” she retorts, but her heart’s picked up speed. She looks down. “Did it-“

“I’m not sure,” he says. His eyes are shining. “Wait.”

She could reply that she doesn’t have anything to do but wait, and it might not kick twice in a row anyway, but he looks so excited she can’t bring herself to do it. So she sits against the headboard, her hand resting over Holder’s on her stomach, fingers entwined. Waiting.

At the first flutter, she’s not sure, still, whether or not she’s imagining things. But then there’s a definite thump against the wall of her stomach, and then another. She rubs the spot, and there’s another in response. Like the baby is saying hello.

“Wow,” says Holder. She can’t disagree.

He’s not home when she goes into labour, but he is when she goes to the hospital. The contractions start around one in the afternoon, but they’re still spaced an hour apart, so she’s not worried. She parks herself on the couch with a spoon and a carton of ice cream (because as long as she’s going to be a hugely pregnant lady, she might as well take advantage of the stereotype) and channel surfs, pausing to wince and suck in her breath when another contraction hits. When Holder gets home, around five, he happens to walk in just as a particularly hard one gets her, so he steps through the door to see her bent over, arm around her waist, wincing. He promptly loses his shit.

“Jesus, Sarah, are you okay? Do you have your bag? I’m gonna go call a cab-“

“Relax,” she says, straightening as the contraction ends. “I’ve barely been in labour for five hours, and my water hasn’t broken yet. There’s plenty of time.”

This information completely fails to make him relax, but she does at least manage to convince him that they do not need to rush to the hospital right this minute. (“Are you sure? ‘Cause this sounds like how babies end up getting born in taxis. You want our kid to come out in the backseat of a cab?”) That waits until another hour and a half has passed, and she decides that while the baby probably isn’t going to pop out any minute, she’d really appreciate an epidural. She thinks the decision might relax Holder more than it does her, but it’s a close race. She’d forgotten how much contractions hurt.

The hospital is nice enough to give her the epidural plus some stuff that lets her sleep, so she passes out in her hospital bed and wakes up a few hours later with the epidural worn off and Holder in the exact same position he was when she went to sleep. She grabs his hand and squeezes it, hard, and groans. Holder’s face is still drawn together with worry, but he manages a joke. “Yo, don’t go breaking my hand, Sarah. I got a delicate bone structure.”

“Shut up,” she hisses at him, and he complies. Instead of talking, he takes to rubbing her back, which she finds deeply soothing for a few minutes. Then the doctor comes back in and starts poking at her, and she decides she really needs something else to concentrate on. “Hey, I take it back. Go ahead and talk.”

“About what?”

“Anything you want,” she says through gritted teeth as she’s poked with a speculum. Holder immediately launches into an extended description of what he watched on last week’s Animal Planet, and she tries to breathe slowly. In spite of herself, she screams out loud when the next contraction hits, and the doctor smiles at her from between her legs. “Fully dilated. Won’t be long now.”

She’d ask him why the speculum was necessary in that case, but then another contraction rolls in and she’s too occupied in screaming and hanging on to Holder’s hand for dear life. He’s still babbling away at her about dolphin pods, which is still oddly comforting (even if there is a slightly shrill note of panic in his voice) while the doctor and nurse continue to poke at her and fuck she’d forgotten how much she hates this part. She doesn’t even like visiting the gynecologist. Then there’s another contraction that hurts way fucking more than the last few and the doctor’s telling her to push and the nurse is telling her to push and even Holder’s abandoned the dolphins in order to tell her to push, so she does the sensible thing. She pushes.

It seems to take an eternity but it’s actually only about ten seconds before the pain in her abdomen lets up and there’s an enraged screech from the foot of the bed. She flops back against the pillows, exhausted, eyes hanging half-closed. Holder’s looking from her to the doctors and back again, face infused with pride and anxiety.

“Yo, Sarah,” he says in her ear. “You did it.”

The nurse is announcing that it’s a girl and walking around to her side of the bed to show her- a tiny little wailing bundle, already crowned with a light fuzz of red hair. Sarah reaches out to touch her, and her daughter responds instantly, wrapping a tiny hand around her finger and clinging tight.

“We did, didn’t we?” she whispers. Holder kisses her forehead. The nurse takes the baby away to wash and weight her, to shrieks of protest, then wraps her up and hands her over to Holder, who settles down on the bed next to her, baby in one arm and her in the circle of the other. Sarah strokes the baby’s hair and thinks: her daughter won’t grow up like she did. She’ll grow up like this. Both parents holding her, making sure she knows she’s safe. That she’s loved.

Her eyes blur with tears again, but she doesn’t bother to keep them from falling. They run down her face and into the neck of her hospital gown. Without words, Holder lifts the arm he has around her shoulders and wipes them away with his hand. She leans into the touch and sighs, content.