#jelicia just wouldn't leave my mind!!

[sableflynn]

Felivy - Midnight Tea

Another piece from the felivy au with @whumpopology​ my love! April, thank you so so much for trusting me to write James, and thank you for your help and encouragement in finishing this 🥺

This is the Felicia timeline. She’s trying to gather all the information she remembers to help rescue Ivy, but she needs to talk it out with someone. James is there to listen. Contains vague references to past torture/captivity. Ao3 link here.

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Felicia jolted awake with a burst of panicked energy, the terror of the nightmare still pounding in her heart. Already the details were slipping away like sand through her fingers, leaving trace memories of ropes digging into her skin, Ivy’s screams, Volkan’s eyes. She loosened fingers that gripped the bedsheets and tried to steady her breathing, eyelids fluttering.

Next to her in bed, Elyse stirred. Felicia rolled over to plant a gentle kiss on her forehead, answering her mumbled question with a soft I’m fine. Untangling herself from the mass of blankets, she rose from the bed and padded from the room, wrapping a thin robe around her as she went.

The house was still in the night, soft moonlight filtering through the window and casting the kitchen in a weak glow. Her bare feet were silent on the hardwood floors as she made herself some tea, settling in to study the mass of papers she had left spread over the table. Scribbled notes, half-illegible, and newspaper clippings, and a map marked and marked again, and she was no closer to figuring out where Volkan was keeping Ivy, where he’d kept the two of them. Felicia had been home almost a week, and every minute she sat here was another minute for Volkan to decide to slit Ivy’s throat and be done with her. They needed to find her now, but all the information and memories were swirling in a jumble in Felicia’s mind, and she couldn’t focus them long enough to write down, she couldn’t do this alone—

Rubbing at her face, she left her mug at the table, and made her way through the house. She hesitated a bare moment outside the spare bedroom before raising her fist and knocking.

The door swung open and James stood there, hair still scruffy from sleep but eyes alert as they met hers. She studied him, tracing the faint freckles on his cheeks, the slight furrow of his dark brows. He had always seemed larger than life whenever Ivy described him, a hero, an inspiration. Looking at him now, Felicia saw a person, exhausted and doing his best. She thought—she hoped—he saw the same when he looked at her.

“Can I talk to you?” She forced a casual lilt to her voice despite the tension twisting through her.

If he was bothered by being woken in the middle of the night, he didn’t show it. She wondered if he was sleeping at all. “Of course,” he said, and followed her back to the table.

He sat across from her, and as she picked up her mug of tea, regret pulled at her. “I’m sorry, I didn’t make enough for you. Do you want—?”

“I’m fine.” James cast an eye over the spread of papers before turning his gaze back on her. “What did you wanna talk about?”

She pushed a blank sheet of paper and a pen across the table at him. “I just need to...talk some things out.” The clinical nature of the pen and paper, the physical barrier of the table between them, they all paradoxically relaxed Felicia. She wasn’t baring her soul to a near-stranger. She was providing important information to someone who needed it.

“It’s things we need to know. Things I learned,” she explained, haltingly, stopping herself from rambling. “I just can’t talk to Elyse about it, because—” It was too much. Too fresh, too painful, too personal. “Because I can’t.”

James nodded. “I understand.” He blew out a shaky breath, but when he spoke again, his voice was steady. “Tell me whatever you need to.”

Felicia looked down at her hands, folded on the tabletop. Whatever I need to. One thumb rubbed against the other, the sensation grounding her. Tell him floorplans and landmarks. Tell him names and locations. Don’t tell him how small Ivy looked, bleeding out from a bullet wound. Don’t tell him how the agony of the healing tore us both apart.

“I might start crying.” The words fell from her mouth before she could catch them, and her fingers fretted the edge of a stray sheet of paper, folding and unfolding. “That’s just a thing that happens. Just ignore it.”

She didn’t look up to see how he felt about that. She pushed on before he could say anything, before her thoughts could catch up with her. “I think he’s somewhere up north.” She pulled the worn map between them, and it gave her something to focus on besides her own nervous energy. “The trees...they’re different than they are here. And any time he had his friends over, they’d always be complaining about the cold.”

“He had friends over?”

She glanced up to find him looking at her, the pen clutched tight in his hand, something that might have been horrified comprehension dawning in his eyes. Her breath froze in her chest. One comment like that shouldn’t have revealed so much—but James wasn’t an idiot, and he could read between those lines to guess at why those friends had come over.

He’s quiet, Ivy had said about James one night, while they were sharing stories, but he knows his shit. I would trust him with anything.

Looking at the man before her—young, she realized, not much older than she, why had she pictured James as so much older?—Felicia searched beneath the exhaustion and growing horror to find something of the leader Ivy described. Someone she could trust.

She just saw a man. But if Ivy trusted him, maybe that could be enough for her, too.

“He had friends over,” she repeated with more force. She clutched her now-cold mug of tea like a lifeline, breathed in the chamomile to remind herself that it wasn’t a mug of coffee, she wasn’t in his lounge, they weren’t about to touch her. She had lost count of the number of hands that touched her.

She blinked, and a few tears slid down her cheeks. James tilted his gaze back towards the paper, granting her the smallest privacy, and she couldn’t remember the last time her tears had belonged to her, hadn’t been driven from her by cruel hands and words, jeered and crooned over by Volkan and his fucking friends.

“Some of them are in the city.” James flicked a glance up at her as she spoke. This is important, she told herself. Concrete information. Facts. Something they could use. Something that could bring Ivy home.

So she spoke, and James listened, and he wrote. She was hesitant, detached, drawing from memories without truly touching them, because if she had to acknowledge what had happened she would shatter. She listed anything she could remember, names and appearances and occupations, and James took them all down in messy, haphazard print. He rarely looked directly at her, and that made it easier, somehow. She didn’t have to school her expressions, worry about how her anguish affected him. She gave information, and he received.

She allowed herself to look at him, eventually. He was diligent and thorough in his notes, briefly meeting her eyes here and there to ask a gentle guiding question, never letting his gaze linger too long. She could see the tension in him—the way his jaw worked, his grip on the pen, the hard press of his writing into the paper—yet every time he spoke to her, his voice didn’t waver, and it wasn’t cold. She watched him, and she could almost hear Ivy’s choked voice as she talked about him, and then the question left her lips before she could stop herself.

“Why did you choose me?”

James looked up at her, paling, his lips pressed tight before he finally spoke. “It—it was the hardest choice we’d ever had to make.” His eyes were on hers now, dark and conflicted, and she forced herself to hold his gaze. “It wasn’t about who was better. You’re both important. It was just...it was about who made the most sense. We—”

“Actually, I don’t need to know.” Her voice shook slightly as she cut him off. Maybe she’d hoped he’d have some pithy answer ready, some straightforward explanation that put all her doubts to rest. But she couldn’t bear to listen to him justify and explain like he was still half-trying to convince himself. She wasn’t ready to know what that conversation had looked like.

All at once, exhaustion crashed over her. How long had they sat here talking? How many hours? And how could she allow herself to feel exhausted when Ivy was still there, still with him, still in danger?

“She told me you always make the right call.” They had been talking about their teams, finding what solace they could in each other. Sometimes I hate it, Ivy had said, but he’s always right. He’s never led us wrong. And yet Felicia was here, and Ivy wasn’t. “I’m not so sure.”

James’s expression stayed steady, but a flush crept up his neck and across his cheeks. “I—” He swallowed, and a muscle twitched in his jaw. “Excuse me.” He pushed back from the table, and Felicia was silent as he grabbed his coat, stepped out the door to the front stoop. The metal spoon scraped against the ceramic of the mug as she stirred her cold tea, and she stared through the papers scattered across the table, and said nothing.