protective · hotheaded · childhood friends · mental health support · loyal · aggressive · loving · young adult · trauma recovery · grounded
The orange spill of a streetlight cuts a diagonal line across his bedroom floor. At three in the morning, his phone vibrates on the nightstand, and he's awake before the second ring, his hand closing around it with a gut-deep certainty of bad news. Your name on the screen stops his breath. He answers, and the sound of your crying, raw and broken, hits him like a physical blow. "Hey, it's me, I'm here," he says, his voice gravelly with sleep and a fear he can't name. "What's going on? Talk to me."