A Realignment of Priorities – KRSA AU x The A-Team, Face Peck x Kitt Knight [TW]

[thecrazyalaskan]

Title: A Realignment of Priorities
Author: TheCrazyAlaskan
Fandom / Setting: Classic Knight Rider (Secret Agent AU) x The A-Team (TV Series)
Characters / Pairings: Katherine "Kitt" Knight x Templeton "Face" Peck
Word Count: 1977
Rating: T+
Warnings / Notes: TW: references to rape; written for Round Ten of Hurt / Comfort Bingo: Rape / Non-Con; abracagender, humanization; mind the author notes.
Summary: Face takes Kitt up on her offer that her door is always open to him.

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When one is woken by pounding on a door at 2:30 AM, it's generally never a good sign—doubly so in Katherine Knight's line of work, to the point of downright suspicion.

That fact in mind, when she was woken by pounding on her front door at 2:30 AM, she was incredibly wary. Early morning hours, an unusually severe storm, pounding on a door to a house that was inside a gated facility, unannounced visitors with unclear intentions—given her line of work, she was damn sure that no one would blame her for bringing her sidearm to the front door.

She opened the door wide, firearm at the ready. "Who’s there?"

"Easy—!" The interloper lifted his hands in a passive gesture. "Kitt, it's me—"

There was only one person in the world allowed to address her so informally. She lowered the firearm, only slightly, looking critically at the person on her doorstep—dripping, undignified, and looking nervously, albeit unseeing, down the barrel of her weapon.

"...Face?" She lowered the sidearm completely.

His expression became almost sheepish. "I know this looks bad—"

"Get in here." She reached out and seized him by the front of his shirt and pulled him inside. When she locked the door, it was with shaking hands. "I thought you were dead!"

"Well, I'm not—does that help?" he mumbled.

"Colonel Smith tells me you've been spirited off to..." She slid the safety on and set the weapon aside. "Heaven only knows where—"

"I'm pretty sure it was Mexico," he offered, as if hoping it would assuage her worries. Something that might have been a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth, but didn’t quite reach his eyes.

"Don't try to smooth talk your way around this, Templeton Peck," she warned.

"I'm sorry," he murmured. "If there was any way I could have gotten word to you—"

"Are you alone?" she interrupted.

He nodded, running a hand through dripping wet hair. "You’re the first person I came to."

"Emotionally or geographically?" She leaned against the door, eyeing him almost critically. He was so far removed from his typical, well-groomed appearance that it was almost as if a different person were standing in her foyer. His hair had grown out to a shaggy mess, the ends brushing the bottom edge his collar; both his shirt and his trousers were wrinkled, torn in more than one place, and the dark stains spoke to something Kitt wasn’t sure she was ready to address.

"...Both?" he admitted. "It’s… kind of a long story."

She pushed off from the door and started to herd him toward the back of the house. "Well let’s get you cleaned up and dry first."

• • •

The shower was an almost soothing counterpoint to the rumble of thunder outside. Kitt lifted the artfully placed false bottoms of her dresser drawers to gather some of the spare clothes Face had left over the years, both by mistake and by design. She tucked a pair of pajamas under her arm and stood just outside the master bath, knocking lightly at the closed door. "I have dry clothes."

For a moment it was so quiet Kitt wasn’t sure he’d even heard her; at length, he could faintly hear, "…'s'open."

She twisted the knob and lightly pushed the door open. Steam floated out of the room, and the humidity of a room that was previously warm but was now cooling off washed over her. “Pajamas are by the sink,” she announced, laying the clothes on the counter.

”Thank you.”

Kitt paused, brow furrowed. It might have been easily missed or even dismissed by someone else (i.e., someone not in her line of work), but Face’s voice was noticeably strained. “Hey Face? I’m gonna peel the shower curtain back for a second.”

She paused, waiting for confirmation or for protest. Coming up against neither, she pulled the curtain back enough to poke her head in—and found herself staring at the opposite wall before glancing down to find Face sitting on the bottom of the tub, knees drawn up to his chest and the water flow hitting him in the middle of his back. “Are you okay?” she asked, her voice even.

”Oh—h-hey.” He lifted his unseeing gaze toward her, his smile obviously forced. ”Didn’t want to slip, y’know?”

”Yeah,” she said, not calling attention to the anti-slip adhesives on which Face was sitting. She knelt beside the tub, arms resting on the porcelain rim. “How are you feeling?”

”Oh—f-fine, just fine.” There was a note of worry in his voice, as if he was hiding something; coupled with how shaggy his hair looked and how gaunt his face was, how haunted he looked… Even without her Foundation training, Kitt would have been able to see just how far from fine Face was.

”Face…” She reached over and laid her hand against his cheek, her thumb brushing against his cheekbone. His five o’clock shadow was coarse under her fingers. “Please talk to me, Tem?”

The use of the nickname—something warm and friendly and familiar—seemed to soften him; he leaned his head into her touch, finally directing his unseeing gaze toward her. “I need help, Kitt,” he mumbled.

Under better circumstances, Kitt would have made a mental note to praise him for his willingness to admit that he needed help at all—but the circumstances weren’t “better.” They weren’t even “that great.” “Do you want to call someone?” she offered. “Maybe Colonel—“

"No!" The word was little more than a strangled cry, and it almost made Kitt flinch back from him. When was he afraid to talk to his team, his friends? "God, please don’t call Hannibal—Hannibal or Murdock or BA—"

"Easy, easy," she soothed. "I won't call them."

It took a moment for the words to penetrate Face's panic, and when they finally did, he seemed genuinely stunned. "You… you won’t?"

She shook her head, brushing her thumb over his cheek again. "If you don't want me to, then I won't."

His expression softened, but was tinged with… did Kitt dare think of it as grief? "Thank you…"

"Is there anything I can do?" she asked.

Face shrugged slightly before admitting, "…I could do with a haircut?"

• • •

Kitt pulled a dining room chair into the bathroom while Face dressed. As she prepared the clippers, he sat down, dressed only in pajama bottoms and toweling his hair dry. A few times, Kitt stole a glance at him in the bathroom mirror. A network of wounds of all types and stages of healing littered his body, wordless testimony to heaven only knew what he'd been through. "Ready whenever you are, Tem," she announced, picking up a comb and a pair of scissors once she saw that he was settled in.

"I've been needing this for a while," he said by way of confirmation.

"It looks like it," she murmured softly, coming to stand behind him. "Your usual cut?" He hmm-ed in confirmation, and she got to work.

Before long, there was a growing semicircle of fair hair around the legs of the chair. Kitt let Face lead the conversation—which was to say, they didn't speak at all.

When he did finally speak, it was so soft, Kitt could barely hear him over the clippers. "If I told you what I'd been through, you wouldn't believe me."

"What makes you say that, Tem?" she asked, brow furrowing. Face had never given her reason to not trust him (their first meeting aside); why the sudden change?

"...Just a feeling," he admitted.

"Do you want to tell me what you've been through?" she prompted, hoping to convey that he could choose to say nothing if he wanted.

He paused, apparently considering the words very, very carefully. "… So much, Kitt," he finally mumbled.

There was a lot of gray area in so simple a sentence—was there so much to tell, or was that how much he wanted to tell her? "Care to elaborate?"

He lifted his hands, searching for words. "It all started so… normal," he began. "Then everything went wrong and I was… taken and… I was a bargaining chip, a tool. I was… a toy to them."

It was the longest he'd spoken all night, and she hesitated to interrupt him; all the same—"A toy?"

"I was the thing they took their frustrations out on." He pitched his voice down, as if trying to convey even a snapshot of what his life had been like. "'Ohh had a bad day? Go beat the snot out of the blind guy, that'll make you feel better.'" He tipped his head back, as if pleading with some higher power. "I tried to fight back, Kitt! I tried, I—" He stopped, choking on the words, his voice cracking. "Do you know what they did? When you tried to fight back?"

Were he sighted, he would have been looking at Kitt in the mirror. When he spoke, the pain had drained from his voice, as had the color from his face. "Have you ever had someone pin you to a cheap mattress and have their way with you, Kitt?"

The admission was like ice water down Kitt's back, and her hand flew to her mouth. After a moment, she turned off the clippers and set them on the bathroom counter, a tremble running through her fingers as she laid her hands on Face's shoulders.

He lifted a hand, trembling just as much, to lay it on Kitt's. Now that the words were out, he went on, haltingly, as if he couldn't leave the tale unfinished, no matter how much it hurt. "It didn't happen at first. It… I—I don't know, it just… one day punching me wasn't enough, I guess."

He paused, swallowing hard. "It came out of nowhere—one of them just tossed me on the mattress and held me there and I didn't know what was going on until I felt him going for… for my fly.

"After that it was—" He lifted a hand to wave it as if underlining his thoughts— "totally unpredictable. When it happened and what they…" He choked for moment. "What those fuckers—"

Face's hand flew to his mouth and he doubled over, retching. For several minutes, he was lost to the world, overwhelmed by whatever memories he'd triggered in himself. Kitt, for her part, was powerless to do anything to help.

At length, he lowered his hands, hugging himself tightly and breathing heavily. "I'm… 'm okay…" he mumbled at length, more to himself than to Kitt.

Kitt crouched beside him, rubbing small, comforting circles on his back (and trying to ignore the roughness of the scars, how he'd lost enough weight that she could feel the faintest impression of his spine under her fingers). Her thoughts wandered, without permission, to the accident that had cost Face his sight. He had been vulnerable and frightened then, too, but somehow… God, this was worse. "I'm sorry, Templeton."

He lifted his head, brow furrowed in obvious confusion—to say nothing of the seriousness that came with Kitt calling him by his full name. "What are you sorry for?"

"If I had known what you were going through, I would have—"

"Used your Foundation pull to rescue me?" Face lifted a shaking hand to brush the backs of his fingers against Kitt's cheek, seemingly trying to push through his trauma to soothe her, too. "Decker would have loved that, I bet."

As much as Kitt wanted to say she would have been able to rescue him, she knew he had a point. With all the government contracts to which the Foundation was a party, discretion when it came to Face and his team had to be her highest priority.

Well… her second highest priority. Now her foremost concern was helping Face get through this with as much grace and dignity as they were able.