To Be Loved
Tenebrus
(A/N: This is some sort of Monk drabble I'm doing on a complete whim. I don't know, I probably won't do anything else from this fandom – I'd appreciate reviews though. I love Monk because I am OCD too, so I really look up to him. I'm also a hopeless romantic, and Adrian's feelings for Trudy are the sweetest and most poignant of any love story I've seen or read. Naturally, what followed is a drabble I wrote for fun. Enjoy!)
The day she lost her earring – the peridot one, of the pair that he gave her – he broke down and hid, curling into a ball, pressing his head down beneath his legs while she searched. She didn't want him to look anymore because it didn't make sense and things that didn't make sense bothered him. More than germs. More than milk. More than anything. The unsolved mystery sent a cold chilling terror into his very veins.
One moment it was there, and the next, it was gone. With very little explanation.
Oh, it was so easy for him to notice the clues, find the last bit of evidence, and save the day… when he wasn't attached to the crime. The earring, however, had a great amount of emotional stock to him. He had given the pair to Trudy for their first Christmas together, and she wore them everywhere. They brought out her eyes.
She didn't care, though. She came back into the room where he was collapsing and rubbed his back – careful not to startle him and touch his skin, not just yet – and she murmured to him. The earring wouldn't bother her so much because she had him, and that was all she wanted.
A goddess with words.
And he turned his eyes to her, upwards into her shining face. He said, find them. We have to find them. And she held him close until his fears subsided. The tight panic of losing something dear, and (the very worst part) leaving it unsolved, left him moment by moment in her arms. To be loved was the cure. To be loved by her was the very best.
She held him until he was able to reason. And then all was solved. He knew where exactly to find the earring. And the itch came to him, as it always did, to run there immediately and excavate. Finish the job. Lock the pair away in the jewelry box where they ought to have been, together, in the first place. She laughed knowingly as he rose, assured, and strode into the bathroom, and followed him to fish the gem out of the U-pipe beneath the sink. Not even a moment behind him – she had figured out where it was when she rejoined him, to comfort him. He just had to figure it out for himself.
They would not have it any other way.
It was the same, again and again, whenever Adrian was too wound to find a missing anything. A shoe. A cufflink. To return the pair to the safe state, the state of harmonic symmetry. Always. Always. She held him and waited, only waited, for his fear to subside.
So the day that he lost the most final half of all – the pair that could not be reunited – he waited so hard and long for her to touch his back and calm him. Make him know who had taken the symmetry from his life. Remind him gently that there was nothing to fear.