[fic] let the day surround you

[daisysusan]

Title: let the day surround you
Fandom: Gallagher Girls
Genre: Romance
Paring: Rachel Morgan/Joe Solomon
Rating: R
Word Count: 4,403
Summary: Falling for Joe is probably the only thing that could have made Rachel's life more complicated.
Notes: Spoilers for Out of Sight, Out of Time. Also, this is for kohlrimmedeye and hanelissar, even though Han can't read this yet. Title from Wild Child, by Enya.


Lots of people keep journals, diaries, daybooks where they record the details of their lives; Rachel’s read more than her fair share for research and missions and simply out of curiosity about the writers’ lives.

Most spies make a point of not doing it-a journal is too much like an operations report, and it’s nice to let a few days go by without recording every breath because someone else’s life might depend on it later. Rachel’s never been able to bring herself to do it, though she’s regretted that more than once, first when her memories of Matthew started to fade just the slightest bit and she wanted to cling to them even more closely, and then when she had to confront the possibility that everything she’d believed about one of her dearest friends-that everything she’d clung to after Matthew died-was a lie.

Matthew had always recorded his life, almost obsessive in his need to mark down the events before the end of the day. He’d never talked about it and she, in turn, had never questioned it, choosing to leave him a few meager secrets.

It wasn’t until Joe showed up at the Gallagher Academy that she realized where he’d picked it up-Joe’s notebooks were older, more tattered than Matthew’s had ever been. He’d been doing it for a very long time, had probably filled dozens of the books with the story of his life in neat script.

Of course, she didn’t understand why he did it-why either of them did it-until it was nearly too late. Joe was comatose, dead in all official records; Matthew had been dead for years.

Even with everything she’s learned recently, from Joe and Matthew’s reports, from Zach, from Cammie, Rachel can’t bring herself to put pen to paper. Not while she’s sitting next to Joe, who escaped with his life from a search for his record by only sheer luck. The words that spies put on paper can change their lives and it feels that, more often than not, the trivial details they choose to add or omit can change the world.

Joe still isn’t moving, his face unnaturally pale and motionless, and Rachel wants him to wake up, move, tell her she has better things to be doing with her life; she’s wanted other things more, of course-for Matt to come home, for Abby to be safe, for Cammie to be healthy and happy and loved-but this is up there.

She’s always felt like she needs to justify hiring Joe, even though he’s a fantastic teacher-probably the best CoveOps instructor the school’s ever had-because he was her husband’s best friend and, who is she kidding, because he’s flirted with her outrageously since the first time they met. She flirted back at first to watch Matthew’s blood pressure rise, but he’d been gone for a long time when Joe showed up to teach.

It had been a long time since someone flirted with her.

Still, she had hired him because he was a brilliant operative and a damn good teacher, and because she trusted him more than just about anyone in the world; she knew the things the older kids whispered because knowing is her job, but they weren’t true and she could take comfort in that.

Abby came in and sat by the bed for hours nearly every day after she showed up to teach; Rachel was mostly grateful, because couldn’t be there nearly as often as she wanted to, not with students and faculty and boatloads of work to do. Over the summer, she’d had very little to do except sit and hold Joe’s hand and pray to a god she’d never before had any use for that Cammie wasn’t dead or captured or a thousand horrible possibilities she didn’t dare consider about.

She and Abby end up sitting in the room for hours-it’s probably more time than they’ve spent together since they were children, terrorizing their parents and the faculty of the Gallagher Academy alike. And, for the first time in more years than Rachel particularly wants to count, they start talking. Really talking-sisters talking-not spy talking.

And then one evening, when Rachel is pitched forward, her head resting on the mattress and half asleep, Abby speaks so softly that she can barely discern the words.

But Rachel has years and years of practice making out the things people say quietly, when they haven’t decided yet whether they really want you to hear, and she catches Abby’s words perfectly.

“It’s okay if you’re in love with him.”

She’s honestly taken aback, jerking upright and staring at Abby. “I-what?”

“I don’t know if you are or not, but god, Rachel. You don’t spend the night holding someone’s hand in the hospital if you don’t care. And it seemed like something you might need to hear.”

Her little sister is infuriating and reckless and stubborn and entirely too perceptive for her own good. Not that it matters if Joe doesn’t wake up.

Cammie is home, a relief so big Rachel thinks she could fly with that weight off her shoulders, and Abby is safe (or as safe and she’s ever been) teaching, and Joe isn’t dead, and Matthew is still gone but that worry has been around for so long she no longer feels it.

“I honestly don’t know,” she says, and Abby looks at her with entirely too much sympathy. Rachel laughs a little. “I haven’t had a lot of time to think about it.”

Abby smirks and Rachel admits, silently and with no intention of ever revealing this to her, that Abby’s right and that saying she doesn’t know is a cop-out answer. The real one is that she does know and just isn’t comfortable with it. But if Abby’s not going to call her on it, then Rachel’s going to take comfort in her lie for a few minutes.

Joe wakes up and Rachel's world shifts on its axis and, insanely, the two things aren't related.

When it comes down to it, she wimps out on telling him, somewhat cruelly letting Abby tell yet another person who loved him that Matthew is dead-for sure, found a body, not coming back ever. Rachel feels a little silly, being so heartbroken about him all over again, but she's learned time and time again that hope is one of the most unquenchable forces in the world-and as long as there wasn't a body, she could hope.

She's also vaguely embarrassed about how long it takes her to muster the courage to go see Joe after Abby tells him. Considering that she slept in his room as often as not and held his hand when he woke up and, hell, stood next to him at Matthew's so funeral so many years ago, it's absurd that she can't grieve in front of him.

Finally, she makes the familiar trek through the passageway into his room; he’s alone, as she knew he would-it’s the middle of the day and everyone else who might linger by his sickbed is otherwise occupied.

Joe smiles at her, a little wan, and the first thing he says is "You're not wearing your ring."

Rachel shrugs. “I’ve been a widow for five years.”

"I was always completely sure he wasn't coming back," Joe says, unprompted and without quite meeting her eyes. "It feels different now."

There's no answer to that-Rachel had never really believed Matt was coming back, but despite her best efforts, hope always crept in around the edges of that certainty. Joe is watching her again, his eyes neatly trained on hers. He's probably already noted, memorized, and interpreted everything else about her appearance-like taking off her wedding ring-but facial expressions tell you something new every second.

"It didn't feel real until I took the ring off," she says. "I still felt married."

She settles into the chair next to his bed, its familiarity vaguely comforting. Joe is awake and Matt is dead and Cammie is in danger, gone, probably captured by the Circle, home but unable to remember what happened.

Her daughter was captured and tortured in the same place that her husband was killed.

When Rachel told Cammie that some things were best left forgotten, she was telling the truth-she didn’t want Cammie to have to confront the memories of torture-but, well, the biggest lies people tell are always to themselves. It doesn't get easy, hearing about the horrible things her friends and coworkers have been subjected to, but it's different when it's her daughter.

"How are you holding up?" Joe asks her after a few minutes.

"I should be asking you that," she says, but it's kind of futile because he's going to see through her deflection and they both know it.

"Maybe, but I got there first. So talk."

She isn't sure where to start-everything has been crazy and disorienting-and ends up just sitting in silence until he speaks again.

"Cammie's going to be okay, Rachel."

From anyone else's mouth, the words would have seemed trite, but Joe says them like it's his professional opinion as her instructor, not that of someone who loves her so much that the idea of her not being okay is unbearable. "It's tough, but she can handle this. Both of you can."

Rachel nods, swallowing the words she's almost tempted to speak-not without you.

It’s probably not true; after all, she got through Matt’s disappearance more or less by herself, was an operative, raised a daughter. There’s not much she can’t handle and, well, if the universe decides to take Joe Solomon away from her, decides he should never wake up, she’ll get through that too.

Joe is still weaker than Rachel's ever seen him, but he's stronger than he was a few months ago. Cammie is still shaken, but she's not losing time and her grip on reality.

The Circle thinks they're both dead, has no use for either of them, and the relief is almost crushing.

On the other hand, she is facing some logistical issues as an administrator. Joe can't exactly keep living in the hidden room now that he's not in a coma, but he can't go back to teaching, either. They could always get a plastic surgeon recommendation from Mr. Smith and a new identity for Joe, but that doesn't sit well with her-he won't want to give up his life, his relationships, not to mention how she doesn't particularly want to part with him either.

Rachel pushes the door to her office open-it's Sunday evening, she needs to find some food that she might not butcher too much for dinner with Cammie. It's only years of training and decades of practice that keep her from actually jumping when she sees Joe at her desk chair.

"Hi, Rachel," he says calmly-and then he winks at her.

Rachel's stomach flips like she's sixteen and a boy is flirting with her for the first time. Joe grins, because he knows her too well, but what she notices isn’t his smile or the familiar way the corners of his eyes crinkle up, it’s his pale and waxy skin, and the fact that he’s sitting in her chair instead of leaned against the file cabinets or perched on the corner of her desk. It means he’s too weak to stand-predictable and understandable, given the coma, but also jarringly unlike the Joe Solomon who exists in her memories.

“Are you even supposed to be out here?” she asks, because “if you die in my office, it’ll be difficult to keep claiming that you’re dead” doesn’t seem like the best thing to say.

He laughs. “I’m supposed to walk around as much as I can to built up muscle strength.”

The conversation is comforting but banal enough, and Rachel manages to unstuck herself from the floor. Leaning around him to get to things on her desk is easy, half teasing and half their familiar ability to navigate around each other. But then-

She's kissing Joe Solomon. Or maybe he's kissing her.

The details of how it started are a little fuzzy; she's distracted by the warm press of his lips against hers and the way he's tracing the outline of her left hand with his right, his fingers running across the slight indent where her wedding ring sat for so many years.

She reaches for him with her other hand, half-convinced this is a dream-maybe Cammie's not the only one whose mind has been compromised. He's warm to the touch even through his shirt and she has a sudden, nearly overwhelming, urge to slide her fingers under it and let them rest against the skin of his hip.

His other hand, in the meantime, is running gently up her arm until it’s resting against the back of her head and pulling her closer. She leans in, running her tongue across his lower lip and carefully gauging his reaction-the hand against her head tenses, his fingers digging into her hair a bit, and his mouth opens slightly.

She hears herself sigh a little when he pulls at lip with his teeth, and-then he's pulling back just the smallest bit to kiss the corner of her mouth and along the line of her jaw. Everything is hazy except the point of contact between his lips and her skin, which is white-hot and searing. Rachel's hand moved while she was focused on more important things like kissing; when she runs her nails up the back of his neck, he bites softly at the edge of her jaw and-

-she remembers that her daughter is coming for dinner.

Tilting her head away from Joe's lips somewhat reluctantly-he tries to follow for a moment and she's sorely tempted to let him-Rachel reminds him, "It's Sunday night. Cammie is coming for dinner."

"I can leave," Joe says, though the way he leans forward and kisses her again belies his words. It's chaste but-lingering.

Rachel thinks of Cammie and how long it took her conviction that Joe was on their side to waver, how she lost her father and nearly the closest replacement she'd ever get, how shaken the last year has left her.

"You can stay," she says. "I don't think Cammie will mind."

Dinner that evening reminds her horribly of meals at home before Matt disap-before Matt died. For all the complex emotions that resurface, she can’t say it’s a bad thing; it’s nice, comforting, familiar, easy.

The first time Matt and Abby met officially was when she introduced them (the first time they ever met was on a mission). After their dinner, Matt had turned to her and asked whether the scary silent conversations she and Abby shared were a sisters thing or a spies thing. Rachel was forced to admit that it was both-they'd always been good at communicating nonverbally but it wasn't until they were in training that they'd created an actual code.

In much the same way, Abby's slightly terrifying ability to see straight through Rachel at all times predated but had been augmented by her training as an operative.

The look she's getting right now isn't a particularly familiar one and, frankly, she can't make heads or tails of it. A little pitying, a little sympathetic, a little frustrated, a little sad, a little nostalgic-there are too many parts to this one.

When it becomes clear that the look alone isn't going to get her point access, Abby spells it out. "I think I know what happened."

Rachel has done this-on the job and off-enough times to know that silence is often the best defense.

"You have dibs, you know," Abby continues. "At least between the two of us."

"I don't think which of us saw him first really ought to be the deciding factor in this particular situation, Abby," Rachel says.

"Aha!" her ever-obnoxious little sister exclaims. "Finally, she confesses!"

There's a brief pause, and then Abby-who is apparently still twelve-starts singing. "Joe and Rachel sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G-"

Rachel bursts out laughing. "Something like that, sure. But without the tree."

"Are you sure? If anyone could pull off an arboreal make out session, it would be Joe."

"How would you know? Have you and he spent a lot of time necking in trees?" Rachel asks, still giggling-if only because she's pretty sure the answer is no.

"Not as such," Abby replies, grinning so broadly her eyes are scrunched tiny. " I've only ever kissed him once, though it was pretty impressive, as kisses go."

It's extraordinarily difficult not to be jealous of Abby at the best of times-her easy smiles, her ability to always appear untroubled, her unbelievable comfort in her own skin. Rachel always loved the part of field work that meant being someone else, slipping away from the responsible, loving, brilliant older sister she's been for as long as she can remember. Abby has always seemed to play the part of Abigail Cameron with incredible ease.

The memory of the entire school buzzing with talk of how Cool Agent Abigail Cameron kissed Hot Teacher Joe Solomon in the middle of the school stings a little in a way that makes Rachel hate herself.

She's better than this-jealousy is petty and not worth her time. If Abby wants to kiss Joe like that every day for the rest of their lives and he has no objection, that's their prerogative. Having known him longer or being Matt's widow or any other so-called claim she might have is utterly meaningless.

"I mostly kissed him to see what he would do," Abby says, still laughing a little. "And he didn't really do much of anything, except now he makes fun of me."

"Are you seeing someone?" Rachel asks, relishing the look on Abby's face at the non sequitur. "Because you know, it's my right as your older sister to meet this person and then try my hardest to scare the living daylights out if him."

"Oh believe me, he's already traumatized."

"So it's what I thought, then. I didn't know it was so serious!"

Abby snorts a little. "It's not like we're together or anything. We just have each other's a backs and sometimes there's sex."

"Trust and sex? I hate to tell you, sis, but that sounds a lot like marriage." This causes Abby to scowl and aim a kick at her; Rachel dodges it easily because she's been on the receiving end of that maneuver for longer than Abby can remember using it.

"At least I'm getting sex out of it! I will accept no digs from the reigning champion of trust but no sex until I hear a good explanation for why you haven't banged Joe on every surface in this school."

Rachel opens the top drawer of her desk, pulls out the wedding ring she's not wearing-still strange-and sets it down between them. Abby's face twists in a way that Rachel can't quite read, and then she says, "You knew he wasn't coming back and so did Joe."

Nodding, Rachel adds, "He told me that he knew death was the only way to keep Matt away from me and Cammie."

Abby smiles, a little thin. "Cammie told me he said that to her as well."

"God, you know, it's a lot harder to watch your daughter do crazy things than it is to do them yourself." Even before Abby reminds her, she's thinking of crazy ops disguised as summer vacations and deep cover missions at the age of nineteen. It seemed plenty old when she was doing it, but the thought of Cammie being less than a year away from life as a fully qualified field operative is terrifying.

"Tell me about it," Abby says.

“I’d really rather not, since I spend so much time thinking about it anyway.”

“We can always go back to talking about how you want to mack on Joe,” her brat of a little sister.

“Don’t you have a job or something?” Rachel asks, smirking. “I’m pretty sure that I’m your employer, now that I think about it.”

“Yep, you were enough of a sucker to hire me.” Abby grins, standing up and backing out of the room. “Make sure to tell me when you finally do more than stick your tongue down Joe’s throat!”

She has a suite, of course, near the other faculty rooms-a bit nicer, the perks of being headmistress, but otherwise essentially the same. A bedroom, a bathroom, a kitchenette so small as to be essentially useless, a cozy living room, nothing fancy. She sees less of it than she really ought to admit, between work and occasional missions, not to mention the months she spent basically living in a secret room watching Joe sleep and, frankly, has never been all that fond of it. There's a reason Sunday dinners are in her office, after all.

And Rachel Morgan has been a widow the entire time she's worked at the Gallagher Academy, so the most scandalous thing that's ever happened in her suite is having a known member of the Circle who is also legally dead over for tea, if by tea you mean mixed drinks poured strong.

"God, Joe, have you ever made a martini before?" she asks, laughing a little as she sips at a drink so strong it's going to make the room spin.

"As a matter of fact I have," he answers with an obnoxiously charming grin. "Maybe I'm just trying to get you drunk."

"You've never in your life needed to get a woman drunk." Strictly speaking, she doesn't know if that's true, but there are strong indicators that it is: Abby's flirtation, the crushes of just about every girl past the seventh grade, the fact that she's even having this conversation, not to mention the fact that he looks, well, like himself.

"There was this one time in Malaysia," he begins, and Rachel cuts him off with a laugh.

"Not where I was going with that."

Joe finishes pouring his own drink and sits down next to her. "Oh really? Well, maybe I think I need to be a little drunk for this."

That's-worryingly plausible. She's not sure what's happening but they have drinks and Matthew has been dead for five years and Joe flirts a lot but not like this and he's sitting closer than he really needs to be, strictly speaking, and-they've been dancing around this for a long time.

Well, there's no time like the present, especially when you don't know if the opportunity will present itself again. Rachel downs half her drink quickly, suppressing the ingrained flinch at what her Culture and Assimilation teacher would have said, and sets the glass down on the disconcertingly clean coffee table.

Then she turns a bit so she's facing Joe, and kisses him. Hard. With intent.

The first thing she feels is him smiling against her mouth, and she can't help but smile back. There's a faint clink that means he's set his glass down as well, and then one of his hands is buried in her hair, pulling her closer so that he can tease at her lips with his tongue, so that she's dangerously close to being in his lap. Rachel runs a hand down the side of his neck, fingertips lingering under his ear and tracing his collarbone.

It's a good collarbone, defined but not so much so that he looks emaciated and she, with a sudden burst of wanting she hasn't felt in a long time, is really intrigued by the possibility of licking it. Considering that Joe's hand is curled possessively against her lower back, where he's bunched her shirt up, tracing slow patterns against her skin, she has a hunch that licking would not go over badly.

The most difficult part is prying her lips away from his to press a string of kisses to his jaw and neck while he pushes her shirt up more, running the same hand across the plane of her stomach. A strangely detached part of her registers that he’s noticeably stronger as he pulls her closer-the memory of his terrifying weakness right after he woke up is still fresh-but it’s difficult to focus on whether or not the arm behind her back is trembling when Joe is nuzzling at the skin behind her ear and she has one of her hands underneath his shirt.

He pulls away from her neck-tragedy-and presses a lingering but close-mouthed kiss to her lips, then speaks. “I probably shouldn’t tell you how long I’ve been thinking about doing that.”

Rachel’s smile is a little tight, because Matthew but that was then and this is now, and there’s no point clinging to the memory of someone who’s been gone for so long when kissing Joe makes her stomach twist and seeing his face makes her happy. For as long as she can remember, her life has been a little short on people she could trust-her parents, Abby, her non-biological sisters, Matthew, a few rare friends, Cammie, and now Joe. It’s too rare not to take full advantage of.

That’s the thought that causes her to lean towards him again, whispering “Who knows, maybe you should have brought it up a few years ago. Might have worked out in your favor.”

She’s not sure who exactly kisses whom this time; their mouths were too close together to tell. It’s different, though, in some way that can’t actually be described with words but that might be related to joy-or love.

Love is a scary word to be bringing into the equation-there are some jobs that don’t mix particularly well with romantic entanglements, and being a spy is one of those-but it’s difficult not to think about it when she and Joe stumble through the suite some time later, unwilling to stop kissing. They tumble onto the bed, next to each other, Joe toying with the button on her jeans and her hand down the back of his.

Soon enough, he’s managed to get them off-it’s a little unfair that he actually is as suave as he looks-and she’s unable to look away from his eyes as he sinks into her. The eye contact breaks only when he leans to kiss her, half tender and half filthy.

It’s frighteningly intimate, except she remembers, curled into Joe’s shoulder and drowsing afterward, that they’ve known each other for so long, and they’ve been building towards this since before that ridiculous dance so many years ago.

(Besides, it would be nice to have sex again; seriously, it’s a bit horrifying that Joe is actually as good in bed as he looks like he would be.)