A/N: so the final chapter is here, it's been a tough process both to write and also to read for some of you, sorry about that... Hope this last chapter leave you all with a bit of a silver lining feeling.

Please do let me know what you thought of the whole story and this chapter, I love your feedback! I'm sure I'll be back soon enough with something a little lighter.

Thanks again for all your amazing support!

The sound of the front door slamming and reverberating up the stairwell stirs him. He rolls over crumpled sheets, stretches his tired limbs and finds her before he manages to crack his eyes open. She's right in her spot, red hair in a mess, face buried in the pillow beside him.

"Morning, beautiful," he mumbles, kissing her forehead and pulling her close.

She groans, exhausted from her late shift, exhausted from their late-night shift.

"Do I have to get up now?" She muffles her words into his chest.

He laughs at that, because she is normally the morning person out of the two of them, but if his slight soreness is anything to go by, she must be feeling ten times worse.

"I'll make breakfast," he offers, relieved to finally have the house to themselves.

She tumbles out of bed in nothing but a tank top, careless of her still messy hair, her slightly smudged eyeliner, the faint lines that trace her pale skin. He watches her as she searches the room for something slightly more decent to wear, hoping she doesn't find anything anytime soon.

Three months ago she was less cavalier about exposing her legs to him like this, it's a sign of trust that she barely thinks twice about it now. The angry, red scars on her thighs are gone, faint silver lines in their place, reminding him daily of how far she went and how far she has come since. She smiles and it's the genuine, wide, sparkling kind, the kind that he never expects from her but always hopes for. He came to dread her wide smiles back then, when they would never quite reach her eyes, when her eyes were big pools of darkness, hiding her pain. He still worries he's going to see that smile every time the corners of her mouth turns upwards, but this smile is confident, this smile is honest, this smile is not hiding anything.

We all get addicted to something that will take away our pain. For her it was many things, but for him it was her. Every time she used him to replace one of her addictions she only added to his, drawing him in deeper with each needy kiss. She let him replace some of her harmful behaviour, let him distract her from scribbling angrily into that terrible black book, from drinking herself into oblivion, but he couldn't stop her from carrying around that old, battered make up bag containing her metal blades. He was never afraid of her darkness, just afraid that he couldn't drag her out of it. It took him a while to come to terms with the fact that he couldn't control it, he couldn't cure it. It felt like another failure, another weight to his burden, that he was powerless in the face of her addictions and her actions. The insidious part of her disease was that she alone could cure it, and he had to stand back and let her. Slowly she came back to him, came back to herself, she started breathing, she started living. There's no collection of empty glass bottles by the door in her room, no black notebook wedged open by the heavy indentation of ink, making the pages fan out and prop up the leather covers. He never dared check what she wrote in that book, the manic, angry letters giving him as much information as he could contain gracefully, but he's glad it's gone, glad the little red notebook is back, in which she writes deliberately and carefully, with blue ink. She goes to church every now and again, and now that he knows where she goes he can see how much it means to her and how her back is just that little bit straighter when she comes back. She still carries her make up bag around with her, but the sound of metal clinking against metal has been replaced by the sound of plastic clicking against plastic, the sound of lip gloss canisters meeting mascara tubes. She keeps her red hair, has no choice but to keep her red tattoo, but she carries it with a swan-like grace, like the marks on her skin remind her who she was but isn't any longer.

She no longer cuts, and he no longer dreams. He is not haunted by the same 4.15 AM bloody wake up call, he doesn't jolt away from the mattress covered in sweat and guilt and grief. He doesn't exactly remember when he stopped having his nightmares, but maybe that's exactly what he needed, someone who could make him forget the heaviness in his heart without even trying.

"Waffles?" He smirks as they amble down to the kitchen, as the only thing April could find to cover herself with are a pair of very tiny shorts. It really is time for them to get their own place, but she wants what she wants, hardwood floors and a washer dryer, and he doesn't want Alex to third wheel waffle breakfasts.

"Waffles," she confirms, flashing him another steady smile. They circle around each other with ease, like the best friends they have become, like two pieces of a finely tuned clockwork. Just because he offered to make breakfast doesn't mean she wants her hands to be idle, so he cooks, she cleans. She buzzes around him in a comfortable silence, once again rendering her own chore wheel obsolete.

And maybe he finally sees what she gets out of it, this thing with him. She had asked him to make her feel something other than pain, to reach out for her when she was lost. She showed him her dark soul and all the demons that haunted her, and he accepted her challenge. He saw her fragile heart, her hesitation to trust, to feel, to hope, he saw her tortured soul and all he did was accept and wait. He makes her feel, not because of anything, but in spite of everything.

The Seattle afternoon is drizzly and grey, the tiny drops of water making it hard to keep his eyes fully open as they climb out of his car. The miserable weather matches their grim mood as they slowly make their way up the slight hill of the cemetery. It's been nine months since they lost their friends and had the carpet pulled from underneath them, shaking up their existence. It's been too hard to come here until now, too difficult to set aside the time to fully focus on the lingering grief he still carries around with him every day. The saying "time heals all wounds" doesn't apply, his wounds are very much still there, covered in scar tissue, buried deep in his consciousness. The pain is not so acute anymore, so maybe time doesn't heal but simply lessens. The pain hasn't got better, it's just different, each day his grief puts on a new face. April pulls him along towards the top, physically encouraging him in the same way as she has been psychologically encouraging him up to this point. She finds strength in her religion, he finds it in her. If it hadn't been for her determined strides and the firmness of her hand in his he probably wouldn't have made it halfway up this hill.

Finally they reach the two graves, next to each other but not together, just as Charles and Reed were in life. Both the headstones are new and made of black polished stone, each of their names etched in to inform posterity of their short existence and their familiar accomplishments. Son, daughter, brother, sister, friend, grandchild, beloved, deeply missed. His stone is square, straight lines and brutish, hers is artfully curved, feminine, softer. Both seem uncharacteristic and out of place, but to be fair any headstone with Charles' name on it would seem out of place. Any headstone with such a short time bracket on it is a stark reminder that life can end suddenly, unexpectedly and unfairly. There are fresh flowers on his grave, one of those with lots of small flowers that go from sky blue to a faint purple, he forgets the name. There is also a sad looking teddy bear hugging a heart, sodden from the constant Seattle weather, and he can almost feel Charles rolling his eyes at the unmanliness of the gesture. Reed's grave is less populated, presumably due to her parents living further away, but April immediately clears away a dead bunch of roses and plants a white version of the same flower that is planted on Charles' grave. When she is done they sit down on a bench a couple of rows back, ignoring the steady whip of rain on their faces. Her hand finds his and he was never a fan of handholding until their hands kept finding one another, but the way theirs meet is never about possessiveness, but about maintaining contact, about their wordless agreement that neither wants the other to go.

The thing about PTSD as opposed to general anxiety is that you're not constantly worrying about worst case scenarios and all the bad things that might one day happen to you. The worst has already happened, your deepest fears became a reality and you spend your days processing what happened and reliving the trauma again and again. He was trapped in an OR, operating with another resident on his attending, gun pointed at his head, fully loaded, finger on the trigger. He can still feel the cold grip on his stomach, the metallic taste in his mouth as his teeth dug into the walls of his mouth, the sweat beading on his brow, he can still feel everything he felt that day every time something triggers the memories in him. He can still feel his wordless shock when he learned of Reed's fate, his bottomless grief when he went to ID Charles' body, his heart breaking for April when she told him of her ordeal between inconsolable sobs. He squeezes the small hand in his a little harder as they sit in silent reflection of their individual and their mutual losses. She keeps her head held high, but the rain can't cover up the fat tears that roll down her cheeks.

"I'm terrified of forgetting her," she says after a while, voice unsteady but her eyes firmly fixed on the headstone to their right. "I'm scared I'll forget her voice, the colour of her eyes, her smile."

His throat closes up, tears burning the back of his eyes and he has to swallow hard and look away for a moment.

"It doesn't matter what colour her eyes were or how her voice sounded," he finally manages. "She was your best friend, she was ripped away from you in the most horrifying way possible. You have enough scars to remind you of her forever."

They sit together in silent contemplation, measuring the potency of memories that will fade but never go away completely. The pain from an old wound can sometimes linger in the mind far beyond the physical hurt, he sees it all the time at work. A spasm in a muscle that has had to work around a damaged nerve for far to long is not dissimilar to a twinge in your heart as you long for a place or a time you want to return to. They will never get Charles and Reed back, those lives are lost forever. Their own lives are also lost forever, their lives as they knew them. They are forever changed, they will never be quite as they were before that day. Their lives, their existence, their fates sealed by the devastations of a lone gunman.

The impossible questions he's been asking himself doesn't get any easier to answer with time. He still can't say why two parts of their foursome bore the brunt of the crazed attack, why Charles and Reed are in the ground before them and not Jackson and April. He can't explain why events stacked up as they did so that his best friend bled out whilst surrounded by medical equipment and top class surgeons, why he could have a gun pointed at him but not have a bullet in him, why he escaped unscathed. He doesn't know how the worst time of this life has put him directly in the path of what may prove to be the best thing that has ever happened to him. The answer to impossible questions is to never ask them in the first place. The answer to undeserved and self-imposed guilt is to forgive yourself for the things you cannot help. The answer to crippling hurt, pain and darkness is to embrace the privilege of being alive, to be able to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to chase after a future. The answer is to put one foot in front of the other and see where the journey will take you, to not look back until you can finally turn around and say with relief that you made it.

He puts one foot in front of the other and one arm around her shoulder as they make their way back down the hill and towards the shelter of his car. Despite everything he's glad she persuaded him to spend a rare day off together doing this. She said it would be cathartic and she was right, he does feel lighter, almost light-headed. She said he would feel better and she was right, she sees right through his attempts at suppressing his feelings, she makes it ok for him to feel. She said it would give him some perspective and she was right, he's lost his best friend but also found another, one that is seemingly always right, one that knows him better than he knows himself. This is what he puts one foot in front of the other for, this friendship or this more-than-friendship, this thing that propels him forward, that stops him from looking back. This journey with her feels like it's just beginning, this is what's got him feeling, not because of anything, but in spite of everything.

First she made him feel, but now she is making him fall, even though he's never fallen before, even though he has no idea how to fall. He never believed in soul mates or love at first sight. He never believed there was just one perfect person out there for him, or that one glance could make him give his heart away, that would be such a stupid system. But now he is beginning to suspect that he has loved her this whole time, that he has loved her smile since the first time he saw it, that the second he saw her eyes he loved them, that from the first time they met he has belonged to her completely. Now he is starting to believe that he is lucky enough to have met that one person who is exactly right for him, not because she is perfect or because he is, but because their combined flaws are arranged in such a way that the pieces fit together perfectly. She is his person and he is hers, and it's becoming imperative to tell her.

As he turns his car out of the cemetery, he suddenly can't wait anymore. After weeks of trying to find the right words or the right moment, he decides that he should tell her whilst battling rush hour traffic, when he can't look at her, when her eyes are still red from crying. He still hasn't found the right words so he eases into it.

"I dreamt of you last night," he starts, which is not what he wanted to say, but it's what came out.

"Yeah?" He can see her turning towards him through the corner of his eye, he can hear a slight smile in her voice.

"I don't remember any of it." This is not going well, the words are flowing from his mouth, but they don't seem to be the right ones. "But I know you were there."

She doesn't respond, but to be fair there isn't much to respond to.

"The thing is...," he continues, arranging his voice in more serious tones to make her understand that he is making a point here. "The thing is, I always want you there. I want you, I want us."

She still doesn't respond, and now he's really beginning to regret the decision to do this whilst driving, he is literally too afraid to look at her right now, not just because in doing so he might accidentally kill them both.

"I want you any way I can get you," he presses on, because he has to, there is no other option. "Not because you are gorgeous, or brilliant, or kind or adorable, though lord knows you're every one of those things. I want you because there is no one else like you and I don't ever want to go a day without seeing you."

She inhales sharply, almost like a reverse sob, letting him know that she is hanging on to every word.

"I want the whole damn thing, April." He steals a quick glance at her, noticing her big, wet eyes, her slightly open mouth, her expression of complete surprise.

"April, I-i...," he falters, cursing the gods of irony that this is the moment where his verbal diarrhea is finally over.

"I know," she interrupts, before he has a chance to push out the final two words.

Her hand finds his on top of the gear stick, making yet another wordless agreement. Truth is you don't always have to tell someone you love them. You just have to give them no reason to doubt it.