Callum couldn’t get comfortable. His shoulder ached, his eye throbbed, and the cut over his lip was agonizing. Worst of all, or maybe best, Jack was gone. Callum was embarrassed to have Jack see him looking the way he was. On top of that, he hated that he didn’t help Keith, that he didn’t even know where Keith was or how hurt he was, or if he’d…

“Kitten.” Jack’s voice at the door distracted him from the horrible direction his thoughts had been falling.

Callum looked up and found Verity and Jack standing in the doorway, tentative looks on their faces.

“Daddy,” Callum answered, smiling as wide as he could without cracking the split in his lip.

“Can we come in?” Jack asked.

“Of course.” Callum straightened up in the bed, hurting himself in the process when he jerked his arm and jostled his collarbone in the sling.

Jack entered the room slowly, Verity just behind him, pulling the door halfway closed. but sliding the privacy curtain shut. Jack came around the bed to stand on Callum’s good side and waited while Verity joined them.

“What’s up?” Callum asked.

“We’re getting married,” Jack informed him.

Callum attempted to scoff and only hurt himself in the process, reluctantly easing against his pillows.

“I told you I don’t want to look like Quasimodo when I marry you,” he pouted.

Jack took his hand and kissed his fingertips.

“Just legalities, kitten. The thought of something happening to you and me not being able to…” Jack trailed off, biting his lips between his teeth.

Callum looked at him sympathetically, fully understanding the myriad of feelings Jack had been dealing with since earlier in the morning because Callum had ran through them himself in July during Jack’s hospitalization.

“Do I still get to have a proper wedding?” Callum asked. When he closed his eyes, he saw the wedding Jack had promised him. The sky, the stars, it was what he’d wanted since the first time he’d realized he loved Jack.

“I’ll give you anything you want,” Jack swore.

“Okay, then. I’ll marry you.”

“I’ll let you two save the good stuff for when everyone is healthy.” Verity cast a sidelong glance at Callum. They didn’t blink or shy away and Callum appreciated that. He appreciated everything Verity had done for him in the past twelve hours.

“Verity,” Callum interrupted. “Thank you.”

“What for?” they asked timidly.

“You know,” he answered.

“I did what any friend would do,” Verity surmised.

Jack took Callum’s hand and looked quickly to Verity with a small nod of his head.

“Do you, Jackson Martin, take Callum Jardine to be your lawfully wedded husband?”

“I do.”

Jack squeezed his hands and smiled.

“Do you, Callum Jardine, take Jackson Martin to be your lawfully wedded husband?” Verity asked him next.

“I do,” Callum rasped.

“By the power vested in me by the state of California, I pronounce you legally wed, and I swear we’ll do something much more deserving of a love like yours before the fall.”

Jack huffed out a small laugh and leaned down, pressing his lips gently against the corner of Callum’s mouth. He tasted like sleep and salt, and Callum mourned that it was all for him, so undeserving of the care and worry Jack always bestowed on him.

Verity tossed their marriage license and a pen on Callum’s lap.

“Sign it,” they said.

“Did you seriously drive home to get this?” Callum asked, signing on the line.

“I did,” Verity advised when Callum passed the pen to Jack.

“What about witnesses?” Callum questioned.

The curtain moved and Landon and Gregory stuck their heads around the corner. Landon offered a small wave, even though his face looked ready to crumble. Verity grabbed the marriage license and blew them both a kiss before ushering Landon and Gregory out of the room, closing the door this time with a loud click.

“Husband,” Jack said, crawling onto the bed and dropping a row of exploratory kisses around the bruises on Callum’s jaw.

“This is the wedding I’ve dreamed of ever since I was a little boy,” Callum bemoaned, plucking at the scratchy hospital sheets.

“Tell me about your dream wedding,” Jack situated himself next to Callum on the bed, careful to keep distance from his arm.

“I feel like the right answer is in a hospital room at seven in the morning on a Monday because as long as I’m marrying you, it’s a dream,” Callum admitted with a blush. “But I really hoped for more flowers.”

“What kind?”

“All of them.” Callum closed his eyes and rested his head next to Jack’s, taking a deep inhale before burrowing his nose into the messy brown strands.

“Duly noted, kitten.” Jack dragged his fingers lightly over the sheets, ghosting over Callum’s thighs.

They sat in silence, and excepting the pain in his face and body, it was the most comfortable silence he’d ever had, like being wrapped in contentment and perfection.

He had Jack.

His Daddy.

His Husband.

“Callum,” Jack’s voice was quiet and wobbly. “I was so scared.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Never apologize for what happened last night. Ever,” Jack demanded.

Callum nodded.

“When can I take you home?” Jack’s voice was calmer, more level.

“Around lunch probably.”

“Let’s get some rest then.” Jack kissed him and lay their tangled hands on top of the sheets.

Callum closed his eyes and did as he’d been told.

As predicted, he was discharged after lunch, Jack walked him and his pain killers to the parking garage and into the Range Rover.

“Aren’t you supposed to be at work?” Callum asked, grumbling even as he let Jack buckle him in.

“I called in,” Jack answered, closing the passenger door and jogging around to the driver’s side.

“You aren’t allowed to call in on your first day,” he reminded Jack.

“If they have a problem with it, they can fire me, kitten. Don’t worry about it.” Jack drove them home in another comfortable and less painful silence.

“I like this,” Callum said as Jack pulled into the driveway.

“Like what, kitten?”

“That I can just be with you.”

Jack put the car in park and unclipped his seatbelt, leaning over the console and kissing Callum. “Let’s get you inside.”

Jack helped him out of the car and got him settled on the couch, plugging his cell phone in and handing off the remote.

“I’m glad we bought all this stuff before,” Callum noted, flicking through the endless channels of nothing to watch.

His phone buzzed as the battery came back to life, a slew of incoming messages and missed calls.

“Fuck,” he breathed out, thumbing through the alerts.

“What’s wrong?” Jack asked, sitting beside him and placing two glasses of water on the table in front of them.

Callum changed the channel to the local news and angled his entire body in Jack’s direction so he could shoot him a disdainful stare.

“I made the news,” he groused, just as a picture of Rapture lit up the corner of the television.

The assault had made the news, thankfully leaving him and Keith nameless, but identifying the club and labeling the attack as a hate crime.

His phone buzzed again and he answered the call, “I’m fine. I’m fine.”

“Was it you?” Samantha’s voice was watery on the other end of the line, then muffled, “He answered, Mark!”

“I’m fine, guys,” he repeated.

“Was it you, Callum?” Samantha pressed.

Callum closed his eyes and sighed. “It was.”

Samantha cried and Mark’s voice filled his ear. “Are you okay? Was it you and your guy?”

“I’m fine,” he stressed. “It was me and a friend.”

“The news said they caught them. Have the cops called you about it? Do you need to, like, go give a statement or whatever?” Mark asked excitedly.

“I talked to someone when I first got to the hospital. I need to go down within the next couple days to give a formal statement,” Callum told him. Jack tensed next to him and rested his hand on Callum’s thigh, drawing a slow circle just above his knee.

That wasn’t something they’d discussed because, to be honest, Callum didn’t want to think about the fact he’d been attacked outside of his workplace. He didn’t want to admit that he didn’t feel safe alone or that the lights of the hospital had become reassuring with their sharp glare.

His hand trembled and Jack took it quickly, the warmth of his grip working to mitigate Callum’s pending anxiety, but not eliminating it. Callum didn’t want to think about that either.

“Can we come by? Can we bring you anything?” Mark asked.

Callum suddenly felt exhausted, his skin and muscles tight and wrong, and too heavy for his bones to carry. His brain, also, too active to sustain him for much longer.

“Yeah, sure, but can you sort it out with Jack?” Callum asked absently, passing the phone to Jack and pushing up from the couch with a groan.

“Hi. Hold on a sec,” Jack said into the phone before dropping it on the couch and coming after Callum who was already halfway out of the room.

“Kitten,” he said, sliding an arm around Callum’s waist.

“I’m fine,” Callum repeated the mantra. “Just tired.”

Callum flipped the lights on in the bedroom and blinked vacantly at the dandelion duvet they’d bought, when…only days ago? He sat on the bed, then reclined against the pillows and closed his eyes.

“I just want to lay down,” he told Jack, even though he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to lay down. He didn’t think he wanted to be alone, but he wasn’t sure about being around Jack either. It was like the comfort he’d just relished at the hospital and in the car had vanished once reality clicked into place.

“I’ll set something up with your friends. Rest all you want,” Jack assured him, turning the lights off.

“Don’t,” Callum stopped him. “The lights, please. Just…leave them on.”

Jack moved the switch and the lights came back on.

“Do you want to be alone, Callum?” Jack asked, a little mournfully.

“I don’t know,” he admitted, blinking away his confusion and tears. He felt scrambled, unable to understand, let alone articulate what he needed.

“I’ll go talk to your friends and come back,” Jack assured him, stepping out of the room.

Callum listened to Jack talk to Samantha and Mark. There was coordination and a few quiet laughs. The news turned off and Callum listened to the jerky sounds of Jack flipping through the channels, settling on a music station.

Classical, Callum recognized. The sound of strings and piano drifting through the house like air. Jack appeared in the doorway, sort of hovering half in and half out of the room, waiting for Callum to make a decision about where he wanted him to be.

And, fuck, he wanted to decide, but he didn’t trust himself to do it, and he didn’t understand why. How could so much have changed in the last twelve hours? He’d gone from feeling so sure and certain about everything to not even knowing which way was up.

Callum lifted his hand and patted around his swollen eye, the skin sensitive and puffy. He could open it a little now, but it was pretty useless. He felt around his face, the cut on his lip, the bruise on his cheekbone. A tear slipped off the tip of his finger and ran down his hand, then another and another.

“What do you need, kitten?” Jack asked quietly, still in the doorway.

Callum rubbed his feet together over the sheets, no longer trying to hide the tears that slid down his face.

“I don’t know. Everything feels wrong in my head.”

He closed his eyes and tried to find something to ground him in reality. A feeling that was reliable, and true, and worth something. He grew frustrated, unable to even scrunch his eyebrows together in thought without hurting himself. He cried more, harder, alone on the bed.

He fisted the sheets while he mentally tried to grasp at anything right, his memory narrowing quickly to the way his heart felt the first time Jack had kissed him, to the night Jack had taken him to the observatory then jumping frenetically from every kiss since then to the delicate way Jack had kissed around his bruises in the hospital.

Everything snapped into place. A rare moment of clarity that shattered the haze of pain and medication and confusion he’d been drowning in since the early morning. He opened his eyes, his vision blurry and murky with tears.

“I need my Daddy,” he whimpered.

Jack was on the bed, beside him, around him, on him, touching him without hurting him or maybe not really touching him at all even though Callum felt him on every part of himself. And he felt safe, then, in the light, with Jack by his side.