Groggily, Stef woke up and sat up one morning, blinking and feeling blurry. ”What time is it?” She asked… as it turned out, nobody, because she got no reply. She reached a hand out beside her absently for Lena, thinking her wife was probably just still asleep, but felt only empty bed.

She fell back on the bed with a woof, her head landing on the pillow. ”What day is it, anyway?” She asked, again, as it turned out, to nobody. ”Alright, brain, you can start working now, okay?” She asked her brain.

She turned her head to the side, saw the offending empty bed, and felt her brain slowly starting to function in an awake way. Why was she so tired still? Oh, right. She’d been out on a call that had gone long last night. A domestic disturbance… Really, why did people have to try to come up with less offensive sounding euphemisms for everything, she wondered?

A shooting at a school was a ’tragedy’, not murdered children. The death of a loved one was a ’loss’. And a man beating his wife and children half to death and making a run for it? That was a ’domestic disturbance’. She sighed and closed her eyes, trying to force herself into a better mood.

Some minutes later, she felt she might have managed it reasonably well. It was a Saturday morning, she realized. A day off. She belatedly looked at the clock and saw it was almost nine thirty. Lena must have just wanted to let her sleep in. She sat up and yawned, stretching her hands above her head and arching her back.

She pulled back the covers and got out of bed next.

Morning necessities and a luxuriously long shower later, she was headed downstairs and feeling more genuinely optimistic about things.

She heard the all-too-predictable sounds of a video game being played. She poked her head in and saw it was Callie and Jude. Callie was smiling and joking with her brother as they tried to… apparently sneak up on a tank. She shook her head a little and had one of those ’I’m old now, apparently’ moments. She despised those moments… but then, she supposed, most people would despise those moments. It was probably why so many old people got the reputation for being cranky. That and the lower back pain. Thankfully she didn’t have that quite yet… or, at least, she didn’t today. It had happened a few times. Not that she would admit to it if given the option not to.