Prompt: Baccano! - Firo/Ennis - comfort - "Would you be my solid ground?"
He took her places she'd never even bothered to dream about.
He took her hand and said, gently, "I want to show you the world" and Ennis followed, entranced, in love, completely without words. She would have followed him to the ends of the universe.
Luckily, he didn't ask her to come quite that far.
Instead they left what passed for home and ranged over first the country and then the world. Cities that hung with the scents and sounds of a thousand lives, mountains with air almost too clear and fresh to breathe, valleys and sunbaked deserts. He took her to the top of the highest buildings in the world just so he could show her each sunset like it was something new; he kissed her there, every time, like a tentative boy, full of tender longing, like just the touch of her skin was bliss, new every time.
Sometimes they crossed places she'd gone with Szilard, tracking over old trails that crawled revulsion and the memories of a waking nightmare down her spine.
He would have left with her if she'd asked him. Instead, since she insisted on staying, he took her over the old places, through the old haunts, following the monster's footsteps--and he recreated the places for her.
He kissed her on top of a building where she'd once consumed Szilard's latest experiments, holding her so close it was like he wanted to breathe her in and slide into her skin, until she couldn't think of anything but the smell of his skin and the curve of his hipbones in her palms. He backed her against a wall in an alley where she'd fought and killed a man, tucking a poppy over her ear. A cat twined around their ankles; they both crouched to pet it, scratching it behind its ears, too well fed and friendly to be an alleycat.
He took her to low gravel beach in the vicinity of a dock she'd once boarded a ship from with Szilard and taught her to skip stones, laughing in disbelief as she learned to be quicker and sharper than he, snapping them over the steel-gray water. He kissed her there, slow and sweet and serious, until they scattered as a wave slapped them with brine and chill. Incredibly she found she was laughing, and the mischievous quirk of his mouth was a temptation she couldn't ignore.
They fought together in an underground club and with him at her side, metal flashing in his hands, the snap of bone and the gurgling cry of pain didn't, for the first time, bring skin-crawling memories to bear.
Ennis knew herself too well to call him her only solid grip, her only island in the churning seas of a world she'd walked in pain. He was her lifeline, instead, there in the delighted flash of his smile, in the brightness of his eyes and the way he laughed and turned solemn in an eyeblink. The way he fought, the way it drew fingers of desire up her spine when he turned to her after every battle, his first thought her safety--the way he touched her skin, the way he taught her to see the light in the world.