When All Said And Done

Posted on Thu Mar 13th, 2025 @ 23:03 by Phoebe Hunter & Matteo Beneventi

Chapter: Besieged
Location: Teachers Living Quarter's
Timeline: Monday 8th February 03:00
2922 words - 5.8 OF Standard Post Measure

The meeting had been painful as she had gone over and over the details until she had given over everything she had seen and done from the moment that Cam had raised the alarm until Phoebe had woken up and raised the alarm manually. She had hated to make Matt go with Liana but she could not reveal anything about the Knights when it was not just her secret and story to tell.

Phoebe had first tried his guest room but when it was empty she had realised that her room was most likely the next place he would be and as she opened the door she had never seen a more welcome site of seeing someone waiting for her. She leaned against the door frame and just looked unsure how to face everything.

In the midst of the frantic response, Matt had found himself immediately lost. He hadn't even met all the staff members yet, let alone established enough of a rapport for many of them to intentionally seek out his assistance. Offering to take first watch outside the boys' dormitory had seemed like a decent move since it freed up others to do whatever was needed but it had also isolated him, positioned away from the action and whatever it was that Phoebe was being expected to do despite being wounded. There hadn't been much scope for complaint, he wasn't even sure she would have appreciated him trying to intervene on her behalf, and when other members of the faculty had been called upon to offer her support instead of him, the reminder that old wounds sometimes never truly healed was a sobering thought. Overlooked. As vigilant as he'd been keeping his powers in check, there was hardly anything new about being passed over as a consideration; Matt was just surprised Phoebe had allowed it.

By the time his shift had ended, he'd very nearly convinced himself to give her the space she clearly wanted. The prospect had irritated his conscience, however, and he'd compromised by only seeking her out as far as seeing if she'd returned to private quarters. Once there, the heaviness of the current situation had settled, and he'd perched on the edge of her bed to dwell on matters a while. The intrusion wasn't intended, however, and once he'd been sprung, Matt rose quickly from the bed to apologise. "I was just checking to see if you were..."

The words tapered off as his worried eyes took in her condition.

"Do you need me to go?"

It was a gentle offer, spoken without resentment and tempered by an overwhelming willingness to do what she needed of him, as long as she told him, because god knew, he wasn't making strides in figuring it out for himself.

Phoebe took an instant to close the door gently as if to say no before she moved across the small space and instantly wrapped herself around him and kissed him hard. She did not care that she was bloody, sweaty, and most likely she looked like an absolute mess but she needed to tell him everything that had been going through her head for the last six hours as she had tried to process everything that had happened below the school.

She had lost Cam, she might have had a strange relationship with him thanks to the very moment that had obviously happened but he was a friend and someone she would have died to protect but he had taken the sword for her.

“I love you… Matt… I love you. And I do not care that you might never say it back but I need you to know that, so no... I never want you to go.” She said breathlessly looking up at him.

The admission alone should have been enough to floor him. When the mixture of his innate obscurity had mingled with the increasing intention of utilising his powers to remain off the radar, Matt had all but convinced himself that life would be lonely. His earliest experiences with attempted relationships had come at a time before control was easier and it took only a few times of being stared blankly by somebody you had previously felt connected to for you to swear off even trying. He had allowed Phoebe to pursue him, (because really, all of this was the work of her tenaciousness and not something he could claim a lot of credit for), out of curiosity at first because he'd never encountered someone who remembered each encounter so vividly. There was still an element, perhaps, of appeal in that but it wouldn't have stuck had she not also proven to be worth the vague unease of feeling exposed. And here he was, in a castle full of mutants, involving himself because it turned out he didn't need very many anchors in the real world to coax him into dealing with it. A kid brother had started it all, but Phoebe...

A profession of sentiment this deep should have rocked him to his core.

And it did, in the back of his mind where Matt had shoved his own insecurity and emotional baggage. Right now, proximity triggered too many other sensations, most notably an incredible surge of protectiveness as he realised how shaken up she was. Large, warm hands cradled her face, the deepest furrow on his face not an indication of concern for the words chosen but for the look of glazed shock and grief that had darkened her eyes further. Reciprocation, even if there was a strong urge to surrender to it, actually felt like it might tip her over the edge and so he chose a path forward that avoided an immediate return of 'those three words' whilst still doing a decent job of conveying them anyway.

"Hey, I'm not leaving. Even if you wanted space, I was just going to sleep on your doorstep." Without regard for her state, Matt pressed a kiss to the bridge of Phoebe's nose and lingered there a moment before the practicalities of looking after her rearranged priorities. "We will talk about this, I promise. I don't think it's going to go as badly as you think," he added softly, not wanting to spoil a tender moment with uncertainty just because he recognised she needed grounding first. "But how about we get you cleaned up first? Something to eat."

“I would never expect you to sleep on my doorstep.” She whispered as he pressed a welcome comfort to her face. Phoebe stared at him through what felt like a completely different lens as she tried to keep her thoughts from straying to far from this moment and those words that she had needed to say to assure him of how she felt. She needed to say it in case there was no tomorrows or next weeks. “I… I do not think I could eat anything.” She admitted not sure she could stomach it but cleaning up sounded good when she had 3 people’s blood on her. Thankfully she had been in civilian clothes when the person had attacked and they were black which had disguised most of the look of it but she could felt the heaviness and itch of the leggings and dress now.

"Shower, and I'll find something you can sip."

In truth, Matt had already raided the teacher's lounge for something edible enough to pass as food. As much as the kitchen had fired up again in anticipation of making enough preprepared food to get the school through at least a couple of days of limited movement, he hadn't wanted to interrupt and didn't think he would have been welcomed had he attempted it. Getting something into Phoebe so that she could stomach whatever painkillers would get her a decent rest was a concern for later, however, as he rose carefully whilst still supporting her and allowed a hand to rest against her neck to ask, "Do you want some help?"

Help? She had wanted to scream that word from the second she had woke up alone in Secret Underground Facility. She had wanted to scream it when people had questioned her in the classroom when they had revealed that Cam was dead and Ji-an god knows where. She had wanted to scream it at Jonathan and Hallows when they had gone over and over everything she had seen, yet here when she was being asked, she silently shook her head. “I think I will be okay.” She assured quietly looking down at the items she wore. She was going to use the clothes to see if she could get GWENN to track much like she had tried with Robert but the likelihood was her mood would make it useless but she needed to try.

It was difficult not to want to intervene but Matt had asked because he figured she'd yet to have any time to herself. Grief and trauma took its toll in different ways but somewhere amidst all the tension, he felt like he was the only one taking the time to remember that she had been part of the attack. Not a witness, not privy after the fact, but enough of a participant that she was injured and, knowing Phoebe, enough of a participant to have expected herself to prevent it entirely. His large hands dropped to rub her arms gently and he nodded his understanding but still said, "I'm right out here. Call out if you need anything." The faintest flicker of a frown betrayed a twinge of his own guilt that those words hadn't rung true earlier, that he had sat watching television as she had taken her 'late night duties' without any invitation for him to join. He still had no idea how any of it had unfolded, no understanding of how Johnston had involved himself, or the child now missing. All he had was the regret of not being there himself, and the conflict of gratitude that Phoebe had been the one to walk away from it all.

"I will." She assured as she moved into the bathroom and turned on the water to hide any sounds that she made as she slowly started to shift out of her clothes and then looked at herself in the mirror. She took in her pale skin and the cuts that were visible and frowned at the memories of how they were created. She took a deep breath and slipped under the warm water and just burst into tears as she finally became undone under the water, letting it wash away the blood on her.

---

There were no guides on how to deal with this kind of situation, Matt decided. Likely, if he sat down to talk with either of the counsellors, there were plenty of suggestions but as far as he knew, none of the current research around grief and trauma factored in an ability to sense the future and the resulting expectation that it then become your responsibility to manage. It had only taken five minutes to check over what he'd managed to scrounge and set aside some packet soup and crackers. Of more importance was the sorting of medical supplies, which he'd pulled from his own kit and only really extended to some disinfectant, bandages and a bottle of ibuprofen. None of it was likely to touch the real pain and until she'd been coaxed to sleep for at least a few hours, there was very little practical assistance he could offer Phoebe beyond making sure she wasn't alone. It didn't feel like enough but it was the reason he wound up back on the edge of the bed, staring at the clock and trying to calculate how long was a reasonable time before he stepped in to help her.

Phoebe eventually came out after nearly 40 minutes looking clean and slightly less stressed but the cuts and bruises were now evident across her shoulders and arms as she was only wrapped in a large grey towel. “It looks worse than it feels.” She straight up lied feeling the need to want to protect him. He did not know her role in this school but she was starting to think she would not be able to keep it from him much longer when she came back beaten and people died.

A life of obscurity tended to enhance a person's ability to read between the lines. Lack of interaction lead to lack of clarification, after all, and so Matt had developed a reasonably astute capacity to understand the implication of things without knowing specifics. There had always been something about Phoebe, part of the allure perhaps, and in the brief time he'd seen her in a professional capacity, he would have said there was very little about her that screamed 'history teacher'. Her injuries were nasty enough to require proper dressing, and might even warrant stitches when he could finally convince her to seek treatment, and yet she had still been the one to walk away from it all. He didn't know if Johnston was dead, wasn't sure why those delivering the news had been so certain when there wasn't a body to verify, but he didn't think the guy would be a push-over in a fight and Matt sure as hell knew Phoebe well enough to disbelieve she would have cowered in a corner when the stakes were so high. Like all the tiny pieces of her he'd been collecting along the way, this was just another facet, another angle for the light to catch.

He didn't press her about it though.

Instead, he gently insisted that she sit on the bed while he took to patching her up. The shower had cleaned the open wounds, at least, and now he did his best to seal them away from the risk of infection, quietly, breaking silence only occasionally to murmur an apology when his ministrations prodded a particularly sore spot.

“This is not how I thought you would see me pretty much naked for the first time” The woman finally admitted as she shifted the towel a little to get a cut on her back from where she had been slammed into the wall. It was the first sentence she had murmured since she had gotten out the shower and she was not sure how it sounded but it was in her head and it was going to come out.

"That makes two of us."

The little wink Matt offered as a slight deviation to his otherwise steady focus-on-task conveyed a playfulness he didn't exactly feel but recognised the need for nonetheless. Phoebe wasn't one to wallow, just as inclined to rediscover her temper if her emotions pushed her to a point where she felt like they were preventing her from moving forward. She would need that anger eventually, he'd come to understand, even if it wasn't quite time yet. In the interim, he accepted her attempt at humour for what it was and gently set about dressing the exposed wound.

“But thank you.” She whispered looking over her shoulder at him and offered a sad smile as she leaned back against him for a moment. “I do not deserve you but I want to keep you all the same.” She sighed leaning over to grab a hair brush and start tackling her hair.

"We will talk." It was a quiet promise, gently offered as the best reassurance Matt could provide. A placeholder, an acknowledgement that there was a conversation to finish and he wasn't trying to brush her off. Leaning forward, he planted a kiss into her hair. "About anything and everything you want, but right now, you need to sleep. I can stay, if you want. The couch will fit me if you need space."

“I am not making you sleep on the couch but you are right, I need to sleep. My brain hurts from today.” She whispered as she savoured the reassurance for a moment before she rose on unsteady feet. Her brain was going to turn today into nightmares and she wanted someone there when she woke up. She slowly moved to where her closet was and pulled out a t shirt to wear to bed with some baggy shorts.

If he was honest, Matt had no real intention of sleeping anyway. Whilst the loss of her colleague was a palpable blow, it was difficult to view the night's events as anything more than a direct threat to Phoebe's safety. If that made him bias, then there wasn't a lot of argument to be had but it gave Matt a clear priority at least. Leo was asleep, somehow the world had come crashing down without many of the students being disturbed at all, and having convinced himself that the dormitories were secure enough for now, he turned his attention to the next most important thing this castle held. Pulling off his boots and jeans, Matt sank into the bed and drew back the covers on Phoebe's side.

Phoebe smiled and quietly walked into the bathroom quickly tugging on the t-shirt and shorts before coming back. She settled on the bed lying on her side facing away but she scooted back until she was lying against him. "It won't always be like this." She promised.

"It never is," Matt agreed, pulling the covers over both of them. "But we'll deal with that when the time comes."