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[fic] A Long Time Coming [PG13: Danny/Martin] 1/5-ish
Title: A Long Time Coming
By: HF
Email: hfox@ontheqt.org
Rating/Warnings: PG13 for now. Minor swearing, heaping cupfuls of UST.
Disclaimers: Without a Trace belongs to CBS, Jerry Bruckheimer, and very likely many other people.
Notes: "A Long Time Coming" takes place in some nebulous future influenced by the events in "Over the Tracks." It's not a future I particularly care for (because it implies things I don't like to contemplate), so writing this is probably masochistic in some way.
The title comes from "A Change Is Gonna Come" by The Band.
CHAPTER ONE
If, three years ago, anyone had informed Danny Taylor that he would miss traipsing around the streets in the middle of a New York winter, he wouldn’t have believed it. Not under any circumstances – because you can take the boy out of Florida, but you can’t take Florida out of the boy, and if there’s one thing Danny never really got used to, it was New York winters.
But now, after an eternity (or so it seemed) of being locked in his office, wading through statutes and depositions and case decisions and a million other things, he would have gone out on the streets naked in the middle of a blizzard to find the proverbial missing needle. A grin flitted across his face, thinking about Martin’s reaction, if he’d ever done that...
The blush would come first, and maybe that was why Martin was so smart – he obviously had a rich supply of blood vessels leading to his head. Danny’d have to use that line, if he ever saw Martin again; it would definitely get a reaction.
Danny scowled and made himself re-focus. God, there was a lot of paper on his desk, and the amount seemed to grow with each passing day. He wondered if the papers were breeding, shuddered at the thought. Lawyers had paralegals and secretaries for a reason, Danny knew, but the problem with having once worked under Jack Malone was that he had a compulsive need to look over all evidence himself, even if it meant being up at one in the morning with fornicating paperwork.
For the tenth time in an hour, he glanced at the photograph perched at the edge of his desk, on the verge of being crowded off it by prolifically-breeding case files. It’d been tugging on his awareness all day, distracting him, and he didn’t know why.
Their only “team photo”, taken after the close of the last missing persons case he’d ever worked. They all looked exhausted, victorious, and that had felt good, to go out on a high note. Jack smiling for once – really smiling – and Viv just there to say goodbye but still belonging, Sam doing bunny ears behind Danny’s head (and Danny remembers Martin making some comment about Danny’s ears sticking out enough and not needing the help), and Martin...
Danny wrenched his attention back to the case on his desk. Abuse case, a ten-year-old boy who’d told his guidance counselor that his dad used his ribs for batting practice. A hearing was scheduled for the next morning, and the judge probably wouldn’t care that the attorney for the prosecution had spent half the night before obsessing about days gone by. Mark Treharne, the boy, probably wouldn’t appreciate it either.
Not quite three years. So little time, and so much.
He looked at the words on the paper in front of him, looked, but did not see.
* * *
God. Not even noon and he was fucking exhausted, like he’d finished a sixty-hour MisPers case, with the last twelve hours spent running on only adrenaline and Martin’s patented “take the lining off your stomach” coffee – tired beyond belief but as wired and hyper as a herd of twelve-year-olds.
He wished he’d gotten Martin’s secret to making that kind of coffee before he’d passed the bar exam and in a fit of exuberance left for Camelio, Barrett, and Brown. But he hadn’t, and then two years had gone by when Martin was still in New York and he could have asked, but never did.
Now Martin was gone, back to Washington D.C., to the upper echelons of the FBI – his spiritual home, really, even if he didn’t want to admit it. And Danny didn’t know why, exactly, he resented that Martin had left; it wasn’t like he’d been the first to leave. Instead, he’d been the last, and Danny had been the first (not counting Viv), and who would have thought things would wind up that way?
Shaking his head, Danny slouched up the stairs to his office building. Caught a glimpse of himself in the glass doors before he opened them and had to wince. Boy, he looked rough; the smirk he managed to summon up to convince himself he didn’t feel that terrible looked not so much amused as resigned. He wondered if the judge had granted continuance out of pity for the lawyer who obviously could not get it together.
Worse, the case seemed monumentally unimportant at the moment, compared to some unnameable something lodged in Danny’s awareness.
Stupid. At least the hearing had not gone as disastrously as he’d feared... At least he now had a legitimate shot at getting the boy out of that house, in spite of his wandering thoughts. At least he hadn’t done something stupid, like spill water all over himself or tell the abusive father’s attorney exactly what he thought of both of them. (He had been very close to doing both these things.)
It was days like today that made him wish Martin were around, to remind him of the rules and regulations – and professional behavior – because Danny had a difficult time remembering them, and dammit, he hadn’t thought about Martin this much in months.
Weeks, maybe.
He sighed as he escaped into the warmth of the lower lobby, struggled with his overcoat and briefcase, wondered if Annie would mind if he slept on the couch in reception, because he wasn’t entirely certain he could make it to his office without falling flat on his face. He had a couch there, and a change of clothes, razor stashed in his drawer... Not much different from the old days, really, when none of them could spare enough time to run to their respective apartments to shower and change.
Just as he reached out to press the call button for the elevator, his cell phone rang. On edge as he was, Danny jumped a mile. He fumbled it from the clip on his belt with graceless fingers, nearly dropping it.
Paused a moment, thumb poised to flip it open, not liking the instinctual spike of anticipation that had his breath coming short and his heart pounding against his ribcage. The phone buzzed shrilly at him, but he could only stare at it with a dull, detached sort of fascination.
“Hey, Taylor, you just going to stand there?” said a voice behind him.
The nasal, irritating presumption jerked Danny from his thoughts. Ben Dawson, in his own division and one of the bigger assholes on record, was hovering at his shoulder, breath thick with garlic and impatience on Danny’s neck. His jowls – Danny wondered why the man didn’t donate some – quivered above the tight collar of his shirt, and he tugged at a tie that would have made even Martin wince in embarrassment at its hideousness.
“Christ, Taylor.” More garlic and annoyance wafted over Danny. “Get a move on, yeah?”
The phone rang twice more while Danny tried to process competing demands to answer the phone or to tell Dawson to fuck off, and then fell silent. Danny stared at it a moment, wondering why it had stopped.
“Man,” Dawson huffed and leaned across Danny to jab a fat finger into the call button. Danny tried to breathe through his mouth as they waited, and prayed that Dawson would for once have the sense to leave him alone. After a stifling, interminable time, the elevator pinged to announce its arrival and they both stepped on.
The doors closed.
“Tarney wants to see you in his office.” Dawson assaulted the button for the sixth floor. “Soon as you get up there.” Body odor and satisfaction were rolling off him in waves.
Danny made himself not react, although his stomach felt like it wanted to crawl up his throat and run away. It had the right idea; Andrew Tarney, Danny’s immediate supervisor, tolerated little in the way of sloppy casework and halfassery. Dimly, he became aware that he was still holding his cell phone, gripping it like a lifeline, and made himself return it to his belt.
The ride up to the sixth floor went far too fast. Dawson shouldered his way off first and rolled into to his office. Danny glared at the back of his head a moment, before turning in the direction of Tarney’s office, which lay behind a set of polished mahogany doors and a formidable receptionist.
“Ah, Mr. Taylor.” Margaret’s fish-grey eyes fastened on him. “Mr. Tarney is waiting for you.”
“Thanks.” Danny straightened his tie – the look on Margaret’s face told him that it was a futile effort – , knocked twice, and stepped in.
“Ah, Mr. Taylor.” Tarney’s voice held as little inflection and warmth as Margaret’s. “Please, sit down.”
Danny shuffled over to the indicated chair. The rug sank under his feet; everywhere he looked was hardwood, dark wallpaper and leather, Tarney’s Ivy League degrees and paintings by someone famous and expensive. Both the office and the man behind the desk looked like they belonged in some Hollywood high-profile firm, or a John Grisham novel, and it was easy still for Danny to feel contempt for that stereotype, but the iron sharpness of Tarney’s eyes had told him even from the first that dismissal would be a mistake.
He sat down, feeling the slide of rich leather through his clothes. Out of his element and he knew it, and dammit, so did Tarney, who was watching him levelly and without expression.
“I received a call this morning from St. Jude’s Hospital,” Tarney said, peering at Danny over steepled fingers. “It came while you were in hearings.”
“I – uh – what?” Prepared to defend himself for his recent shortcomings, Danny could manage little more than that. While he flailed around for some other response, his mind fastened frantically onto the one critical word in what Tarney had said.
“Hospital?”
“Yes.” Tarney blinked. “I’m sorry.” And those steely eyes softened a bit.
“My brother?” Thoughts of Rafael dead in some kind of drug-related violence flashed through his mind. It didn’t matter that Rafi’d been clean for four years, or had a little kid he was crazy about and a shop of his own finally, he knew that was what had happened. There was no one else. Everyone else was gone.
“No.” Tarney coughed. “We don’t know who it is, but someone at the hospital identified you from a picture he apparently had on his person.”
“He?” He was leaning forward in his chair now, all weariness gone, and he felt his fingers tensing on the wood of the armrests. Couldn’t relax, though. The same awful alchemy of fear and anticipation was humming in him. A picture of him?
“That’s all I know,” Tarney replied. “I wanted them to fax over a photograph to confirm that you in fact know the man, or have some connection to him, but there are issues of patient confidentiality.” He picked up a piece of paper from his desk and extended it to Danny, who accepted it mutely. “That’s the room number, and the doctor assigned to the case.”
‘Thank you,” Danny said after a moment. He stared at the paper, one of those wispy “While You Were Out” memos, with “7121” and a doctor’s name scribbled on it. A thought occurred to him. “You said you don’t know who he is?”
“All the doctor said was that he had no identification on him, and that he was unconscious.” Tarney peered at him, blank-faced and assessing. “I suppose it’s fortunate for this man, whoever he is, that he has some acquaintance with a former missing persons specialist. However, I believe I don’t need to make it clear that if there is any hint of criminality in this situation you must treat it with the utmost discretion?”
Distance himself from it, Tarney meant, and Danny hadn’t even thought about how to handle meeting this person, much less what to do about him later on.
“Of course,” he said automatically.
“Good.” Tarney leaned back, pushing himself away from his desk. “Then you can have the rest of the day to investigate this. But I do expect you to return the Treharne case to first priority, continuance or no.”
“Of course.” Auto-pilot was a wonderful thing.
Tarney inclined his head, a summary and silent dismissal. Danny collected his briefcase and overcoat and tried not to run from Tarney’s office. On his way out he saw Dawson skulking in the door of his office, and offered the man his best smirk. It might not have been the best, but it was enough to cloud Dawson’s face with bewilderment and send him retreating to his desk – and yet, somehow, it still wasn’t satisfying.
Once he got out of the elevator on the first floor, he did run then, to the subway going uptown. And once he got off the subway at the St. Jude’s stop, he ran some more.
* * *
He didn’t stop until he reached the desk in one of the inpatient wards, and if he hadn’t been nervous or fearful before, he certainly was now. The unnameable something that had been with him for a night and a day had grown, crowding up against his lungs until he could scarcely breathe for it. His hand shook as he pulled out the memo; his voice was scarcely steadier as he explained himself to the internist at the desk, and then to the doctor in charge of the case.
“I apologize for alarming you, Mr. Taylor,” Sorensen said as he shepherded Danny down the aisle, “but you may be the only way we can identify this man, at least in the short term; one of our nurses recognized you from when you had been a patient here. Gunshot wound, I believe.”
That would be right, and that was not a memory Danny cared to relive.
“You said he had a photograph?” He looked around, distracted and anxious. The walls of the aisle were a soft mauve with green, and seaside prints punctuated them, but the air managed to smell of antiseptic and sickness both, an inescapable reminder of where he was. A drop of sweat ran down his spine, and God, when had he gotten this sloppy about controlling his emotions?
“Yes, in a shirt pocket.” Sorensen consulted his chart. “He woke up briefly earlier, around eleven-thirty. We tried to contact you – your secretary said you would be out of court by then – but I received your voice mail again.” That had been the call then. Damn Dawson. “He wasn’t oriented, though, and he’s asleep again now.”
“Could I see that photograph, please?”
“Of course.” Sorensen fished around in his lab coat pocket and came up with a folded piece of photographic paper. Danny took it carefully, and it crumpled and worn at the edges like it had been carried under someone’s coat for a long time, close to living, moving flesh.
Unfolded it.
And all five of them stared back up at him: Jack, Sam, Viv, Danny (with rabbit ears courtesy of Sam)... and Martin, Martin, who had one arm around Danny’s shoulders and was managing to look happy and sad at the same time.
“Oh, God.” Danny blinked, tried to credit what he was seeing, and could not.
“How... do you know how he got this?”
“I’m sorry,” Sorensen said. “We tried to ask him, but he wasn’t lucid enough.”
“Drugs?” Sift through possibilities. Who could have gotten that picture? Maybe it was his brother and Tarney was lying. Maybe someone from Way Back.
“Why don’t you see if you can’t identify him first?”
And that was a ‘yes’ if Danny ever heard one, though when he looked up Sorensen’s face was clinical and unreadable. Another flash of Rafi, lying half-dead and high out of his mind, in a hospital bed. And the two of them in that godforsaken garage, and didn’t Rafi ever fucking learn?
Discretion, whispered Tarney in reply.
“Look, I don’t know what I can do beyond identifying him for you, if I can even do that,” Danny said flatly. Rafi, or some psycho or grudge-holding criminal whom he’d put behind bars. He thought briefly of Spaulding and shivered.
“If you can at least identify him, we can then bring in the family or any next of kin, and they can take it from there,” Sorensen said placidly. His balding head shone fluorescent under the hospital lights. “If you can’t, well, I apologize again; we’ll run fingerprints against missing persons reports, if we need to.” And wasn’t that a kick, being involved in a potential missing persons case when he couldn’t do a damned thing?
“Ah, here we are,” Sorensen murmured. He stopped, and gestured to the open door that led into a small private room. More mauve and green and seaside prints, same awful, plague-and-detergent scent, narrow bed festooned with rubber tubing and plastic.
“We put him in here after he woke up the first time,” Sorensen was saying as they entered. “He was alarmed when he woke, and we didn’t want a repeat the next time...”
And he was saying something else that was probably important, but Danny didn’t care because he recognized the body lying so fearfully motionless on that bed, surrounded by beeping alien machinery. He knew that face – would know it anywhere, even after nearly two years of separation – the disordered brush of fox-brown hair, shorter now than the last time they’d seen each other. Three long strides took him to the bedside; he heard his briefcase and coat hitting the floor, heard Sorensen saying something behind him, and didn’t care about that, either.
“Oh, my God,” he whispered. Reached out to touch the bandaged hand, so pale against hospital blankets, against the bruises on his wrist. Slow, steady pulse under the skin, and he was alive, though so very still.
“Martin.”
tbc.
[revised 05/18/2005]
By: HF
Email: hfox@ontheqt.org
Rating/Warnings: PG13 for now. Minor swearing, heaping cupfuls of UST.
Disclaimers: Without a Trace belongs to CBS, Jerry Bruckheimer, and very likely many other people.
Notes: "A Long Time Coming" takes place in some nebulous future influenced by the events in "Over the Tracks." It's not a future I particularly care for (because it implies things I don't like to contemplate), so writing this is probably masochistic in some way.
The title comes from "A Change Is Gonna Come" by The Band.
CHAPTER ONE
If, three years ago, anyone had informed Danny Taylor that he would miss traipsing around the streets in the middle of a New York winter, he wouldn’t have believed it. Not under any circumstances – because you can take the boy out of Florida, but you can’t take Florida out of the boy, and if there’s one thing Danny never really got used to, it was New York winters.
But now, after an eternity (or so it seemed) of being locked in his office, wading through statutes and depositions and case decisions and a million other things, he would have gone out on the streets naked in the middle of a blizzard to find the proverbial missing needle. A grin flitted across his face, thinking about Martin’s reaction, if he’d ever done that...
The blush would come first, and maybe that was why Martin was so smart – he obviously had a rich supply of blood vessels leading to his head. Danny’d have to use that line, if he ever saw Martin again; it would definitely get a reaction.
Danny scowled and made himself re-focus. God, there was a lot of paper on his desk, and the amount seemed to grow with each passing day. He wondered if the papers were breeding, shuddered at the thought. Lawyers had paralegals and secretaries for a reason, Danny knew, but the problem with having once worked under Jack Malone was that he had a compulsive need to look over all evidence himself, even if it meant being up at one in the morning with fornicating paperwork.
For the tenth time in an hour, he glanced at the photograph perched at the edge of his desk, on the verge of being crowded off it by prolifically-breeding case files. It’d been tugging on his awareness all day, distracting him, and he didn’t know why.
Their only “team photo”, taken after the close of the last missing persons case he’d ever worked. They all looked exhausted, victorious, and that had felt good, to go out on a high note. Jack smiling for once – really smiling – and Viv just there to say goodbye but still belonging, Sam doing bunny ears behind Danny’s head (and Danny remembers Martin making some comment about Danny’s ears sticking out enough and not needing the help), and Martin...
Danny wrenched his attention back to the case on his desk. Abuse case, a ten-year-old boy who’d told his guidance counselor that his dad used his ribs for batting practice. A hearing was scheduled for the next morning, and the judge probably wouldn’t care that the attorney for the prosecution had spent half the night before obsessing about days gone by. Mark Treharne, the boy, probably wouldn’t appreciate it either.
Not quite three years. So little time, and so much.
He looked at the words on the paper in front of him, looked, but did not see.
God. Not even noon and he was fucking exhausted, like he’d finished a sixty-hour MisPers case, with the last twelve hours spent running on only adrenaline and Martin’s patented “take the lining off your stomach” coffee – tired beyond belief but as wired and hyper as a herd of twelve-year-olds.
He wished he’d gotten Martin’s secret to making that kind of coffee before he’d passed the bar exam and in a fit of exuberance left for Camelio, Barrett, and Brown. But he hadn’t, and then two years had gone by when Martin was still in New York and he could have asked, but never did.
Now Martin was gone, back to Washington D.C., to the upper echelons of the FBI – his spiritual home, really, even if he didn’t want to admit it. And Danny didn’t know why, exactly, he resented that Martin had left; it wasn’t like he’d been the first to leave. Instead, he’d been the last, and Danny had been the first (not counting Viv), and who would have thought things would wind up that way?
Shaking his head, Danny slouched up the stairs to his office building. Caught a glimpse of himself in the glass doors before he opened them and had to wince. Boy, he looked rough; the smirk he managed to summon up to convince himself he didn’t feel that terrible looked not so much amused as resigned. He wondered if the judge had granted continuance out of pity for the lawyer who obviously could not get it together.
Worse, the case seemed monumentally unimportant at the moment, compared to some unnameable something lodged in Danny’s awareness.
Stupid. At least the hearing had not gone as disastrously as he’d feared... At least he now had a legitimate shot at getting the boy out of that house, in spite of his wandering thoughts. At least he hadn’t done something stupid, like spill water all over himself or tell the abusive father’s attorney exactly what he thought of both of them. (He had been very close to doing both these things.)
It was days like today that made him wish Martin were around, to remind him of the rules and regulations – and professional behavior – because Danny had a difficult time remembering them, and dammit, he hadn’t thought about Martin this much in months.
Weeks, maybe.
He sighed as he escaped into the warmth of the lower lobby, struggled with his overcoat and briefcase, wondered if Annie would mind if he slept on the couch in reception, because he wasn’t entirely certain he could make it to his office without falling flat on his face. He had a couch there, and a change of clothes, razor stashed in his drawer... Not much different from the old days, really, when none of them could spare enough time to run to their respective apartments to shower and change.
Just as he reached out to press the call button for the elevator, his cell phone rang. On edge as he was, Danny jumped a mile. He fumbled it from the clip on his belt with graceless fingers, nearly dropping it.
Paused a moment, thumb poised to flip it open, not liking the instinctual spike of anticipation that had his breath coming short and his heart pounding against his ribcage. The phone buzzed shrilly at him, but he could only stare at it with a dull, detached sort of fascination.
“Hey, Taylor, you just going to stand there?” said a voice behind him.
The nasal, irritating presumption jerked Danny from his thoughts. Ben Dawson, in his own division and one of the bigger assholes on record, was hovering at his shoulder, breath thick with garlic and impatience on Danny’s neck. His jowls – Danny wondered why the man didn’t donate some – quivered above the tight collar of his shirt, and he tugged at a tie that would have made even Martin wince in embarrassment at its hideousness.
“Christ, Taylor.” More garlic and annoyance wafted over Danny. “Get a move on, yeah?”
The phone rang twice more while Danny tried to process competing demands to answer the phone or to tell Dawson to fuck off, and then fell silent. Danny stared at it a moment, wondering why it had stopped.
“Man,” Dawson huffed and leaned across Danny to jab a fat finger into the call button. Danny tried to breathe through his mouth as they waited, and prayed that Dawson would for once have the sense to leave him alone. After a stifling, interminable time, the elevator pinged to announce its arrival and they both stepped on.
The doors closed.
“Tarney wants to see you in his office.” Dawson assaulted the button for the sixth floor. “Soon as you get up there.” Body odor and satisfaction were rolling off him in waves.
Danny made himself not react, although his stomach felt like it wanted to crawl up his throat and run away. It had the right idea; Andrew Tarney, Danny’s immediate supervisor, tolerated little in the way of sloppy casework and halfassery. Dimly, he became aware that he was still holding his cell phone, gripping it like a lifeline, and made himself return it to his belt.
The ride up to the sixth floor went far too fast. Dawson shouldered his way off first and rolled into to his office. Danny glared at the back of his head a moment, before turning in the direction of Tarney’s office, which lay behind a set of polished mahogany doors and a formidable receptionist.
“Ah, Mr. Taylor.” Margaret’s fish-grey eyes fastened on him. “Mr. Tarney is waiting for you.”
“Thanks.” Danny straightened his tie – the look on Margaret’s face told him that it was a futile effort – , knocked twice, and stepped in.
“Ah, Mr. Taylor.” Tarney’s voice held as little inflection and warmth as Margaret’s. “Please, sit down.”
Danny shuffled over to the indicated chair. The rug sank under his feet; everywhere he looked was hardwood, dark wallpaper and leather, Tarney’s Ivy League degrees and paintings by someone famous and expensive. Both the office and the man behind the desk looked like they belonged in some Hollywood high-profile firm, or a John Grisham novel, and it was easy still for Danny to feel contempt for that stereotype, but the iron sharpness of Tarney’s eyes had told him even from the first that dismissal would be a mistake.
He sat down, feeling the slide of rich leather through his clothes. Out of his element and he knew it, and dammit, so did Tarney, who was watching him levelly and without expression.
“I received a call this morning from St. Jude’s Hospital,” Tarney said, peering at Danny over steepled fingers. “It came while you were in hearings.”
“I – uh – what?” Prepared to defend himself for his recent shortcomings, Danny could manage little more than that. While he flailed around for some other response, his mind fastened frantically onto the one critical word in what Tarney had said.
“Hospital?”
“Yes.” Tarney blinked. “I’m sorry.” And those steely eyes softened a bit.
“My brother?” Thoughts of Rafael dead in some kind of drug-related violence flashed through his mind. It didn’t matter that Rafi’d been clean for four years, or had a little kid he was crazy about and a shop of his own finally, he knew that was what had happened. There was no one else. Everyone else was gone.
“No.” Tarney coughed. “We don’t know who it is, but someone at the hospital identified you from a picture he apparently had on his person.”
“He?” He was leaning forward in his chair now, all weariness gone, and he felt his fingers tensing on the wood of the armrests. Couldn’t relax, though. The same awful alchemy of fear and anticipation was humming in him. A picture of him?
“That’s all I know,” Tarney replied. “I wanted them to fax over a photograph to confirm that you in fact know the man, or have some connection to him, but there are issues of patient confidentiality.” He picked up a piece of paper from his desk and extended it to Danny, who accepted it mutely. “That’s the room number, and the doctor assigned to the case.”
‘Thank you,” Danny said after a moment. He stared at the paper, one of those wispy “While You Were Out” memos, with “7121” and a doctor’s name scribbled on it. A thought occurred to him. “You said you don’t know who he is?”
“All the doctor said was that he had no identification on him, and that he was unconscious.” Tarney peered at him, blank-faced and assessing. “I suppose it’s fortunate for this man, whoever he is, that he has some acquaintance with a former missing persons specialist. However, I believe I don’t need to make it clear that if there is any hint of criminality in this situation you must treat it with the utmost discretion?”
Distance himself from it, Tarney meant, and Danny hadn’t even thought about how to handle meeting this person, much less what to do about him later on.
“Of course,” he said automatically.
“Good.” Tarney leaned back, pushing himself away from his desk. “Then you can have the rest of the day to investigate this. But I do expect you to return the Treharne case to first priority, continuance or no.”
“Of course.” Auto-pilot was a wonderful thing.
Tarney inclined his head, a summary and silent dismissal. Danny collected his briefcase and overcoat and tried not to run from Tarney’s office. On his way out he saw Dawson skulking in the door of his office, and offered the man his best smirk. It might not have been the best, but it was enough to cloud Dawson’s face with bewilderment and send him retreating to his desk – and yet, somehow, it still wasn’t satisfying.
Once he got out of the elevator on the first floor, he did run then, to the subway going uptown. And once he got off the subway at the St. Jude’s stop, he ran some more.
He didn’t stop until he reached the desk in one of the inpatient wards, and if he hadn’t been nervous or fearful before, he certainly was now. The unnameable something that had been with him for a night and a day had grown, crowding up against his lungs until he could scarcely breathe for it. His hand shook as he pulled out the memo; his voice was scarcely steadier as he explained himself to the internist at the desk, and then to the doctor in charge of the case.
“I apologize for alarming you, Mr. Taylor,” Sorensen said as he shepherded Danny down the aisle, “but you may be the only way we can identify this man, at least in the short term; one of our nurses recognized you from when you had been a patient here. Gunshot wound, I believe.”
That would be right, and that was not a memory Danny cared to relive.
“You said he had a photograph?” He looked around, distracted and anxious. The walls of the aisle were a soft mauve with green, and seaside prints punctuated them, but the air managed to smell of antiseptic and sickness both, an inescapable reminder of where he was. A drop of sweat ran down his spine, and God, when had he gotten this sloppy about controlling his emotions?
“Yes, in a shirt pocket.” Sorensen consulted his chart. “He woke up briefly earlier, around eleven-thirty. We tried to contact you – your secretary said you would be out of court by then – but I received your voice mail again.” That had been the call then. Damn Dawson. “He wasn’t oriented, though, and he’s asleep again now.”
“Could I see that photograph, please?”
“Of course.” Sorensen fished around in his lab coat pocket and came up with a folded piece of photographic paper. Danny took it carefully, and it crumpled and worn at the edges like it had been carried under someone’s coat for a long time, close to living, moving flesh.
Unfolded it.
And all five of them stared back up at him: Jack, Sam, Viv, Danny (with rabbit ears courtesy of Sam)... and Martin, Martin, who had one arm around Danny’s shoulders and was managing to look happy and sad at the same time.
“Oh, God.” Danny blinked, tried to credit what he was seeing, and could not.
“How... do you know how he got this?”
“I’m sorry,” Sorensen said. “We tried to ask him, but he wasn’t lucid enough.”
“Drugs?” Sift through possibilities. Who could have gotten that picture? Maybe it was his brother and Tarney was lying. Maybe someone from Way Back.
“Why don’t you see if you can’t identify him first?”
And that was a ‘yes’ if Danny ever heard one, though when he looked up Sorensen’s face was clinical and unreadable. Another flash of Rafi, lying half-dead and high out of his mind, in a hospital bed. And the two of them in that godforsaken garage, and didn’t Rafi ever fucking learn?
Discretion, whispered Tarney in reply.
“Look, I don’t know what I can do beyond identifying him for you, if I can even do that,” Danny said flatly. Rafi, or some psycho or grudge-holding criminal whom he’d put behind bars. He thought briefly of Spaulding and shivered.
“If you can at least identify him, we can then bring in the family or any next of kin, and they can take it from there,” Sorensen said placidly. His balding head shone fluorescent under the hospital lights. “If you can’t, well, I apologize again; we’ll run fingerprints against missing persons reports, if we need to.” And wasn’t that a kick, being involved in a potential missing persons case when he couldn’t do a damned thing?
“Ah, here we are,” Sorensen murmured. He stopped, and gestured to the open door that led into a small private room. More mauve and green and seaside prints, same awful, plague-and-detergent scent, narrow bed festooned with rubber tubing and plastic.
“We put him in here after he woke up the first time,” Sorensen was saying as they entered. “He was alarmed when he woke, and we didn’t want a repeat the next time...”
And he was saying something else that was probably important, but Danny didn’t care because he recognized the body lying so fearfully motionless on that bed, surrounded by beeping alien machinery. He knew that face – would know it anywhere, even after nearly two years of separation – the disordered brush of fox-brown hair, shorter now than the last time they’d seen each other. Three long strides took him to the bedside; he heard his briefcase and coat hitting the floor, heard Sorensen saying something behind him, and didn’t care about that, either.
“Oh, my God,” he whispered. Reached out to touch the bandaged hand, so pale against hospital blankets, against the bruises on his wrist. Slow, steady pulse under the skin, and he was alive, though so very still.
“Martin.”
tbc.
[revised 05/18/2005]