Actions

Work Header

Rating:
Archive Warning:
Category:
Fandom:
Relationship:
Characters:
Additional Tags:
Language:
English
Stats:
Published:
2017-11-18
Completed:
2017-12-29
Words:
19,105
Chapters:
10/10
Comments:
86
Kudos:
594
Bookmarks:
85
Hits:
7,903

to get back home

Chapter 3

Notes:

hey! again, i'm really thankful for the response and comments on this, they really mean a lot to me. i have a lot on at the moment, but i'm hopeful that i can get a couple of updates a week??

anyway, let me know if there are any mistakes bc i don't have a beta reader!

also i don’t have a sense of smell so i struggle to describe anything that way so sorry if anything i write about there is basic

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

In hindsight, Sonny realises he should have known that when he blew off Amanda both the night he crashed at Barba’s and the night after to catch up on sleep, there were going to be questions.

Amanda had been side-eyeing him all morning and when they finally leave to grab lunch, she sidles up beside him.

“Where were you the other night?” she asks. “Hot date?”

He almost laughs. “Baby-sitting.” It isn’t completely untrue.

“Bella?”

Sonny considers lying to avoid questions, but his mouth is already saying words by the time he thinks of that. “No, just-” he pauses, unsure of how he would define Barba, “a friend.”

“A friend?” she says. “Do you have many of those?”

He shoves her shoulder jovially. “Some.”

They enter a coffee shop, picking out a couple of sandwiches and ordering coffees, before heading to sit down.

Amanda looks exasperated. “Come on, Carisi. You know I’m fishing for gossip.”

“My lips are sealed,” he says.

His phone, sat on the table between them, conveniently chooses that moment to buzz with a text from Barba. They both look down, and Sonny quickly covers his phone with his hand.

“Barba?” Amanda asks. “Something about the case?”

“No.”

For the second time, he wishes he had lied to avoid any more questions, as the way Amanda’s face brightens as she leans in instantly lets him know any discretion he’d aimed to maintain was immediately lost.

Still, perhaps Amanda wouldn’t connect the dots.

“You were at Barba’s the other night?” She speaks in a hushed voice, looking like she’s hit the jackpot.

Or not.

He shoves his phone into his pocket.

“Baby-sitting?” she asks. “Is that some new slang I haven’t heard yet?”

He supposes he should be grateful that, while she has made the incorrect leap that he and Barba had done a little more than hang around in each other’s company those nights before, Amanda was reacting to her apparent revelation of his sexuality positively.

“No, no, I-” he doesn’t want to out Barba’s newfound parenthood, but he would also rather Amanda didn’t think they were sleeping together, especially because it isn't true. “I was genuinely baby-sitting.”

Amanda gives him a look of confusion, but still appears interested. “Barba’s got a baby?”

Sonny doesn’t reply fast enough for the questions to stop.

“What? Why?” she frowns. “Is he seeing someone? Is it his? You know, I didn’t even think Barba was-”

“It’s his cousin’s,” he interrupts before she can go any further. “Child services gave her to him to look after until they can find the guy, who I think is in Brazil or something.” Amanda watches him blankly. “I didn’t really get it either.”

“Why were you there?”

“He asked for my help.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Barba asked you for help?”

He stares. “Twice.”

“Twice? Is this the Twilight Zone?” Amanda says.

He huffs a laugh. “I think Barba would say he only asked once. The second time I offered and he didn’t say no.”

“You offered?” she questions. “And you gave up your whole night just like that?”

Truthfully, he hadn’t even thought twice. He’d wanted to go through some case files that night – nothing of particular necessity, but of probable benefit – and he had leapt at the opportunity to spend more time with Barba. While he did legitimately want to help, the offer was to some extent self-indulgent.

Sonny accepted his attraction to (what, if he was younger, he would have called crushing on) Barba semi-recently, following a sort of oh shit moment as he worked some things out because of it, going through the full five stages of grief for his heterosexuality.

While Sonny runs over this in his head, Amanda seems to have made several connections of her own, leaping several steps of the conversation and reading his mind.

“Oh my god,” she says.

“What?”

“Oh my god,” she repeats, and a sly smile spreads across her face. “You have a thing for him. God, that’s so obvious, I can’t believe I didn’t realise.”

Sonny feels his face heat up, and he takes a long sip of his coffee in some attempt to cover his reddening face.

“So are you doing this out of the good of your heart? Or as an in?”

“My intentions are nothing but wholesome,” he retorts drily, although he doesn’t really feel the confidence he tries to put behind it.

Amanda smirks like she knows something he doesn’t. He thinks she probably does.

“What did he text you?”

The text message completely slipped Sonny’s mind, and he fumbles in his pocket to take it back out.

I’m cooking tonight

It’s as much of an invitation he’s going to get, and Sonny realises it’s another coded message for help. He finds himself holding back a smile, both at the fact Rafael had obviously found himself helpless the night before, and that he was asking him again.

“You’re hopeless,” Amanda tells him. She stands and gestures for him to follow. “Come on, we should go.”

He follows her out of the shop staring at his phone.

*

Sonny heads straight to Barba’s after work, and when Barba answers the door he has his sleeves rolled up and he’s wearing a fucking apron. His hair is slightly askew, and he seems slightly flustered, but he looks damn good and the surprisingly warm gaze he is granted sets his heart fluttering in his chest.

“Are you coming in?” Barba asks.

He nods and pushes into the apartment, and he is greeted by the smell of risotto, warm and full, and he walks over to the stove where the pan is simmering. At the table, Rose sits in a high chair, looking decidedly unamused. Sonny thinks Barba probably ordered the high-chair online, rather be seen buying it in any store.

“What’s cooking?” Sonny asks.

“Risotto,” Barba tells him.

Sonny doesn’t want to get his hopes up that Barba was cooking Italian specifically because of him, but he can’t shake the thought once it crosses his mind.

Over the last couple of years, he’s got increasingly better at working out how Barba really feels. He used to think the man had an impenetrable mask, instilled by both his career and his upbringing. Sonny knew now this was incorrect. The mask Barba wears is limited, false. He can’t always tell, but he finds him a lot easier to read now. Sonny could tell when Barba was stressed, angry, tired, sad, pleased, just by the small slips of his mask – behind his eyes, around his lips, small quirks and nods he’d never noticed before.

It was how he knew Barba was stressed during a particularly gruelling case. It was how he knew he was scared when he was receiving death threats, no matter how nonchalant he had tried to appear, how he knew that Barba had all but flinched when Sonny had blown up at him over what happened with Stein.

So it could be forgiven that Sonny keeps a small glimmer of hope that Barba’s choices for dinner are specifically tailored to him.

He realises he’s been staring into the pan when Barba practically shoves him out of the way.

“Something wrong with it, Carisi?” he asks as he takes to stirring it some more.

“Oh, no- I was just,” he pauses, “thinking.”

“Well, don’t strain yourself.”

Barba takes a sip of the glass of wine he’s left on the counter, and Sonny notices an empty one sat next to it, the bottle of wine itself a few inches away. He stares pointedly at it.

Barba practically glares at him. “Use your initiative, Carisi, I didn’t get the other glass out for Rosie.”

“Rosie?” Sonny questions teasingly as he moves past Barba to pour himself some wine.

The other man winces minutely, as he usually does when he’s been caught in the act of doing anything a normal human would do.

Sonny feels somewhat pleased that Barba’s given the child the closest thing to a nickname he can manage. He would be lying if he said he hadn’t been worried that Barba’s less-than-sunny and unemotional demeanor would lead to a detached sort of guardianship, something a six-month-old doesn’t need.

He pours some wine and clinks his glass with Barba’s – sat once again on the worktop – as he passes behind him to go to the table, sitting by already set cutlery next to Rose.

“Hey,” he greets, “how are you doing? He been treating you okay?” He’s raised the pitch of his voice a little and is talking softer than usual, but he remembers his mother telling him with one of his numerous cousins not to baby-talk.

Rose babbles in response.

“Really?” Sonny replies. “Wow.”

He can practically hear Barba roll his eyes behind him.

Sonny picks up the bear sat in the chair with her, which he proudly acknowledges as his own gift. She babbles more, reaching out when he pulls it away.

“You like this?”

She offers him more nonsenses and when he doesn’t give it back, she stares at him with what could only be described as exasperation.

“You’ve picked that look up quickly,” Sonny comments and hands the bear back.

“I’m glad you’ve finally found someone more your speed to have a conversation with,” Barba comments as he places one dish in front of him and one on the opposite side of the table before sitting down.

Barba is, as Sonny probably could have predicted, a great cook. They have that in common at least, he thinks.  The rice is cooked perfectly, and the slight bite of the chorizo complements the creaminess of what Sonny assumes is an obscene amount of cheese. It rivals some of his own family’s best, but he doesn’t plan to tell Barba that. He’s cocky enough already.

“You’ve succeeded in getting me over here,” he says. “Do you want to tell me why now? It’s not a thank you. You don’t do those.”

“Yesterday was,” Barba swills his wine in his glass as he looks for the right word, “a mess.”

Yesterday. Sonny had left in the morning, having slept in his clothes on top of the sheets in Barba’s guest bedroom, after Barba assured him he’d be fine, just needed someone to show him the ropes. He hadn’t seen or heard from him the rest of the day.

“Did you find a sitter okay?” Sonny asks.

“No,” Barba replies. “I tried asking Liv but she said she didn’t want me to steal her few good ones.”

“What did you do?”

“I wasn’t in court and I didn’t have much to do in the office that day,” he justifies before even answering. “I took her with me.”

It takes all Sonny’s willpower not to laugh when the image of an emphatically grumpy Barba wearing a baby carrier. Sonny imagines he isn’t doing a particularly good job of hiding his amusement.

“Don’t,” Barba warns. “I was there for a couple of hours, then I came back to my apartment and did the rest of my work here.”

“I mean, at least she’s pretty well-behaved,” Sonny makes the mistake of commenting. He’s right, and he knows it, having spent more than enough time around babies to know that Rose is pretty far from being a problem child.

Barba however, does not know this, and the way he stares is withering. Again, Sonny finds it funny. “Well-behaved?” he asks. “I haven’t had more than 8 hours sleep in total in the past two days.”

“That’s normal, Counselor.”

“Normal? Christ.” He drains his glass.

Sonny leans back in his chair. “Are you going to tell me why I’m here?”

“Look, the other night, you were…invaluable,” Barba says slowly. “You’re allowed to say no,” he starts, before he takes a deep breath, like the very idea of admitting defeat and asking for help is difficult.

He doesn’t say anything, and while Sonny is certainly enjoying watching him work his way around asking, he decides to pull Barba out of this agony of his own creation.

“Yes,” he answers the unasked question.

“I haven’t even asked the question yet, Carisi,” he says, but he looks relieved. “Thank you.”

The thanks take Sonny by surprise, especially because Barba sounds so relieved and grateful, and he doesn’t regret the unspoken offer to give up most of his free time at all.

Notes:

i cook a banging chorizo and kale risotto so if u want to know how to make that hmu ✌️