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They don’t quite settle right away in the first few months alone, because the word settle implies everything goes smoothly, like standing one moment and then sitting the next. It implies this kind of fluid motion, settling in somewhere they belong, and making a home there, but reality isn’t that easy.
Wash rents a house with money he’d discovered mostly on accident. An account in the name of his parents, untouched and forgotten, and while it doesn’t contain all of the military wages he’d earned, it’s with a small, local bank from where his parents had lived, and it contains a good fraction of it, and his parents’ wages. It hasn’t been touched in years, simply sitting and earning interest, untouched by the military or Freelancer because he’d had his military wages transferred to his mother for their family, not to a specific account. His finding it is entirely by accident, but it’s welcome, nonetheless. CT’s there every step of the way— for better or for worse, sometimes, and they do all the strange, boring, domestic things he never thought himself capable of, really.
Once he has the keys and makes a copy for her, the two of them stand in the living room, Wash just staring blankly at the walls while CT starts exploring, poking around this room and that, frowning at the garage— they don’t even own a car, but they’ll need to eventually, she supposes. They argue over who takes the master bedroom, until Wash, tired of arguing, simply agrees to take it, since she’s right, he’s paying the rent, and she’s still looking for a job.
They walk to the store, next, and Wash, entirely at a loss, uses a datapad and finds a list of everything commonly stored in a kitchen, and fills a cart up half by accident, realizing that it’s going to be a bitch to carry it all home. CT give him a look for his trouble, and after one attempt of trying to carry all of it between the two of them and him nearly smacking CT in the face with the mop handle, he calls a cab, grudgingly.
It takes three different conversations to determine where the spice cabinet goes— just the fact that there even has to be one is mind-boggling, but he refuses to think too hard on it, and instead, designates the one closest to the stove as it, and starts organizing, everything meticulously arranged until CT shoves things here and there, wherever they fit. Wash’s mouth opens and then swiftly closes as she rounds on him, hands on her hips, just daring him to say something. “It fits,” he manages, and swiftly finds something else to put away as she moves like a force of nature through the kitchen, arranging things haphazardly, leaving him to trail behind her subtly and arrange things a little more neatly, so they don’t fall out and hit them next time the cabinet opens. CT either doesn’t notice, doesn’t care, or doesn’t try to start a fight over it. Wash doesn’t question which it is.
They don’t settle, at least not right away.
Wash sleeps on the couch, most nights. It’s closest to the doors, both the patio and the front door, and he sleeps with a firearm within reach every night, until the night CT shakes him awake from a nightmare and he bolts awake, pressing the gun to her forehead. For a moment, he doesn’t see her, shorts and one of his tshirts, he just sees the Director, looming and pressing long fingers into his head, picking him apart piece by piece until he’s – until he’s –
“Wash.” CT’s voice grounds him, shoves the gun away, and after a moment of clearly being unsure what to do with her hands, just jerks him closer by the tshirt until her face is pressed into his shoulder, and she’s holding him hard enough to bruise, shaking. The shirt will be all stretched out, he thinks, and can’t bring himself to care right then, breathing slow and even by sheer force of will. The gun is out of sight, out of mind, but it leaves his hands just resting in his lap, palms itching when he realizes they’re empty, and he doesn’t know what to do with them. Swallowing, he steadies himself, CT helping even when she doesn’t realize it, and touches both of his hands to her shoulders, light, as she squeezes him even tighter, fingers and nails biting into his skin. He doesn’t ask her to stop, though, he just sucks in a slow breath and stares at the spartan walls of their apartment, and for a long, blessedly long amount of time, they just sit there, and he doesn’t think. When they wind up curled in his bed, CT doesn’t hesitate to curl both arms around his chest and let his cheek rest on her shoulder, because they’ve been together months, months, now, and this is something she can do for him, after what he’d done for her.
He’s not sure how much sleep he gets that night, but he wakes up to the sound of his alarm, with Connie sprawled over his chest, hogging all of the blankets, her hair in his mouth, somehow taking up more space on the bed than he ever has. He squints at the ceiling a moment, and breathes out in one slow sigh, beginning the slow, careful process of extracting himself, and then tucking the sheets in around her feet where she’s kicked them off. Wash still has a hair in his mouth when he gets to the bathroom, flicking the shower on high with max heat, and makes a face in the mirror, trying to get it out of his mouth.
More nights get spent like that than he likes to think about, really. CT doesn’t move into his room, but she winds up there more nights than not, and things don’t— well, they don’t settle, but they’re close. They find jobs, CT with security and Wash with law enforcement, settling in a little awkwardly, but well enough. He uses a different first and last name, here, pays too much, probably, to get his identify edited on this little backwater planet, and in the end, it all works out.
He makes friends— slowly, somehow, though he’s not quite sure how it happened, and they invite him to a barbecue— him and his girlfriend, which no matter how many times he corrects, they still call her it, no doubt just to mess with him. He warns CT beforehand, but she doesn’t take him seriously until his boss’ wife takes her aside and folds her into this mass of perfume and perfectly done hair and skirts and shoes and nails, and Wash wants to go and save her, but the sour look CT gives him keeps him from doing it. She can handle her own, and he knows it.
Wash doesn’t settle anymore than she does, but he learns. He adapts. He picks up cooking after one sour comment of, “I should be able to. We both know I know how to follow orders.” It’s a subject they leave alone, though, and CT opts for helping him by reading the list of ingredients, and measuring them out, giving him shit when he takes a knife to adjust the amount of flour to just right, and eyeball the teaspoon of oil until it’s perfect.
Gradually, the nights he spends cleaning his gun, keeping his tools in working order, cleaning his armor, get moved to other things. Hobbies he picks up for lack of anything else to do and for a need to do something with his hands. He comes in the first night, covered in sawdust and apologetic when he realizes he forgot dinner, but CT only rolls her eyes, brushing him off with her nose wrinkled. “I ordered pizza.”
On CT’s birthday, he finishes the final bit of the drawers he’s made. It’s reinforced with metal, but with shiny, deep mahogany wood that has a false back to it, something to hold her armor in secret, because Just In Case is always on the tip of their tongues. He makes one for himself, too, and their armor gets hid in plain sight in the front room, behind books and shelves that move easily if needed. Wash cleans and arranges it in what’s probably record time, the motions easy, pretty much habit by now, and CT notices. She comes up to his elbow, frowning at the easy way he arranges things, like it’s reflex rather than something he has to do. “You could have been in Recovery, with how thorough you are,” she says, and he’s not sure if it’s comment or insult, really, glancing down at her.
She didn’t know. They haven’t talked much about before. He’s been just as stubborn as she was, after everything, and they both agreed to leave well enough alone until later.
Until they settle.
“Wouldn’t have been very good at it,” Wash murmurs finally, and closes the fake back to the cabinet to his armor, placing the few books he has on the shelf. “This worked out better.”
They’ll talk about it another time, when it’s easier. Until then, Wash sits on the couch with her, their backs on opposite armrests, feet facing each other, and takes one of her feet after an absent comment this morning about how she’d spent all day walking in the new boots she’d had to get, breaking them in. “It’ll take a while to settle into them,” Wash offers, the movie starting in the background as he works the tension out of her foot with firm strokes of his thumb, and he and CT settle a little more comfortably into the couch.