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[fic] A Long Time Coming [PG13: Danny/Martin] 6/?
Title: A Long Time Coming
By: HF
Email: hfox @ ontheqt.org / aesc36 @ gmail.com
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.
Previous parts: Chapter One; Chapter Two; Chapter Three; Chapter Four; Chapter Five
Notes: Next part. Yes.
CHAPTER SIX
So easy. So easy and Danny knew he should be terrified at how well they still worked together, even after growing three years and worlds apart. Even with so many differences – sitting at his kitchen table in jeans and t-shirts, on a Saturday morning and no Jack growling in the background or Viv’s steadying presence or Sam’s restless pacing – he couldn’t shake the sensation of familiarity, the rightness of this.
The coffee (their second pot, and this was another difference, because the coffee at the office had been unspeakably vile, most days) grew cool while Martin wolfed down two peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and tried to fill Danny in on case details between bites.
“That closed out four months ago,” he said, gesturing to the file spread out in front of Danny’s place. “There was some question on procedure, so I had the file out for review.”
“No indictments, then?” Danny asked bleakly. This was another familiar thing: hunting and hunting, only to come up with nothing.
“Nope.” Martin swallowed and sighed. “Not even an arrest. The Secret Service conducted an interview with the family, and determined that, while Mr. Elton was a bastard, he wasn’t a threat.”
“That their professional opinion?”
“Yeah.” Martin drained his cup of coffee with impressive speed. “Personally, I think they didn’t want to deal with him. Taxpayer dollars, huh?”
Danny snorted and began reassembling the file. “Y’know, I’m starting to think that this doesn’t have anything to do with your casework... There’s something else to it. Don’t know what though.” He could feel theories coalescing, his body’s automatic response to the excitement of starting out on a new trail.
Martin was regarding him speculatively, hands folded around his empty mug. He’d steadied over the course of the morning, had even seemed calmer when he’d woken and learned that his father was going to be involved in this whether he wanted him to be or not. Danny wondered if that had anything to do with their midnight talk, or if sleep had finally taken away the worst of Martin’s exhaustion. Whatever it was, though, something was in Martin’s eyes, his expression, though he was merely sitting there, watching Danny, that said he had come to some private decision or realization and was satisfied with it.
“So what’re you thinking?”
“Okay.” Danny took a breath. “You were taken right outside the Federal Building, and no one reported you missing. No one even seems to know you’re missing, except your dad. Now I’m thinking that it can’t be one of your cases, ‘cause that would raise all sorts of alarms. Terrorists kidnapping a federal agent outside the Javits building? All over the fucking news, man.”
“So you’re saying...” Martin’s tone said that he knew – a slight darkening to it.
“Yeah. These guys, whoever they were, were professionals. No way an amateur could pull that off.” Danny tapped a pen on top of the Elton file. “And there aren’t many people in the world pissed off enough to want to take out an agent in broad daylight, either. At least, not people who want to keep a low profile.”
“Okay.” Martin nodded and wrote something down on a pad of paper. “If that’s the case, then whoever did this either doesn’t care or else knew they could get away with it.”
“I’m going for the latter... If they didn’t care if they got caught, they would’ve killed you and saved themselves the trouble of holding onto you.”
And that was a shock, hearing himself speak the words and then only hearing the words a moment later, seeing the truth of them register in Martin’s face. They would’ve killed you. His mind produced a different ending, one where he never saw Martin again, where instead of living flesh and blood there was a coffin, and regret.
He pushed that away, a blind and useless path and no point in pursuing it. Images and questions lingered, though, in the back of Danny’s awareness.
“Hey, you okay?” Martin’s voice was soft, but with an unexpected roughness in it.
“Yeah.” They would’ve killed you. Danny swallowed a bitter mouthful of coffee and grimaced. He’d forgotten that it was cold.
They sat there for a moment, and Danny felt vaguely ridiculous, freaking out like he was with Martin’s quiet, steady presence beside him, like Danny was the one who had been missing and could have been killed.
Like when the hit on Adisa had gone down, and Martin had been shot and bleeding – and not just bleeding, he’d learned from the doctors later, but dying, and they hadn’t expected him to make it. He had bent over Martin, there on that wet and lonely street and his hands had been shaking as they’d pressed down over that terrible, terrible wound in his side, trying to keep all that blood inside Martin, where it belonged. And Martin had looked up at him and smiled, and told Danny he was okay. Like he wasn’t dying, lying on cold concrete, surrounded by the wreck of their car and metal and glass.
“Danny?” Warmth suddenly, and when had he drifted off? Danny blinked, saw Martin’s hand resting delicately atop his, as though Martin were uncertain about touching him.
And maybe he was, because Danny was the one who believed in touch, while Martin had never been demonstrative that way. But now Martin’s hand was moving over Danny’s, sliding over skin and tendon and bone, fingers insinuating themselves into the cup of Danny’s palm, warm and strong and alive.
“Hey man, you okay?”
“Yeah.” Danny made himself draw a breath and be reasonable. “Just... shit. Kind of freaked, you know?”
“Yeah.” Martin’s grip tightened, his thumb brushing against the ridge of Danny’s knuckles. “Believe me, I know.” Soft laugh at that, not meant to be humorous, and Danny had no other reply to that than to be silent.
“I...” Martin began hesitantly, “.. When we were talking last night, I didn’t tell you everything.”
“What?” Danny couldn’t help the tensing of his body, or the flicker of anger at Martin’s words. “What d’you mean?”
“When I was in front of the office on Monday afternoon, I told you I was calling someone, right?”
“Yeah...”
Martin’s hand slid away from his, fingers moving away to play nervously on the rim of his coffee mug, but his gaze never faltered, holding Danny’s own, calm and sure.
“I was going to call you.”
And, well, that was unexpected, and Danny wondered if he was going to spend the rest of his life being shocked into silence by Martin Fitzgerald.
“I wanted to see if you’d like to go for lunch, or dinner... I’d move my flight, or something.” Martin’s expression became slightly guarded, the worried line between his brows deepening at Danny’s lack of reaction. His entire body was still, except for his fingers, which tensed around his coffee mug. “I know it’s been ages, and we haven’t talked all that much, but still...” Helpless shrug now. “Don’t know what I was thinking, but it seemed like a good idea. I just... Just wanted to see you, I guess.”
Really there were no words for that, at least none that the ever-eloquent Danny Taylor could find. Barely a day ago he’d been sitting next to Martin in that hospital, and woven in somewhere between fear and shock and happiness had been the guilty, selfish anger that Martin had been in New York and hadn’t called him. Hadn’t told him anything.
But he was telling Danny now, and that was something. It wasn’t much, not like a promise or even hope, but something that Danny wasn’t accustomed to having.
“I...” He stopped, tried again. “I don’t know what to say.”
“That’s a first,” Martin said, grinning a bit, that slightly subdued, ironic expression that held so much more, if a person knew him and was looking for it.
“Shut up.”
Martin’s grin grew a bit, became mocking, not unlike Danny’s could be sometimes. “The Great Danny Taylor lost for words... I never thought I’d live to see the day.”
“Didn’t know if you were going to live to see it either, Fitz.” Honesty, because he’d been honest last night and Martin was being honest with him now, because Danny could feel the two of them stepping into some unknown territory, the place beyond the teasing and silences.
“Thanks to you, I will.” Martin’s voice was low, but suffused with feeling, something in it Danny had never heard before, and he was looking at Danny, his eyes searching, so like that night three years gone, when he’d stared up at Danny and seen whatever it was dying people see.
“Don’t think you had peanut butter sandwiches in mind when you called, huh?” Danny asked.
“I’ll take what I can get.” And the way Martin said it turned a joke into something deeper, serious, into something else entirely, something almost too big to contemplate.
“Yeah,” Danny said quietly, and it was easy, so easy now to take one of Martin’s hands in his, play a thumb gently over the bandage covering the rope burn on his wrist. “Me, too.”
* * *
The worst part about New York winters was the greyness, Danny decided. The sunlight of the previous two days had vanished overnight, replaced by brooding clouds brought down on winds from the north. The forecasters in the Times had issued dire predictions of snow and a wind chill that made Danny cold just listening to it, and the Monday morning rush had a new desperation to it, as men and women rushed between the warmth of the underground and their offices, heads down to watch for the ever-present slush and ice on the sidewalks.
Danny made himself leave his apartment only with great difficulty, and the knowledge that he had to keep working on his own stuff, or at least give the impression that he was. He’d missed going in on Saturday, remarkable enough for an ambitious associate, and already he could feel time pressing, hear Tarney’s demands to know what was going on. And Sunday they had hashed out more theories, and talked in spare moments of everything and nothing.
He had ordered Martin to stay put and not answer the phone or the door, or even make a sound until he got back. An early-morning conversation with Victor had revealed that Martin’s father had managed to cover for him with his team back in D.C., but while the news was good it also meant they were running out of time.
“Do you have anything for me to run out?” Victor had asked, and that had been strange – the Deputy Director asking Danny Taylor if he could do something to help.
Danny had told him about the White Tigers, and Victor said he would look into the matter as discreetly as he could.
“Wait – don’t talk to Dempsey or Silverman about the case.” That had been Martin, bursting in on the conversation. Until then he had been listening quietly to his father’s voice on speakerphone, hands folded and face unreadable.
“Any reason why not?”
“Not yet.” Martin’s tone was flat, neutral, a match for his father’s, and Danny tried to imagine what they were like as a family. Easy to picture a huge, sterile house, the stony silence of Victor’s disapproval, the faint shadow of Martin’s mother somewhere in the background. His family’s apartment had been cramped, hot, and noisy; he’d spent hours hidden behind a door listening to the lash of his father’s anger and Rafi’s stifled cries.
“Okay, then.” Tinge of doubt as to whether or not Martin was doing the right thing by not telling, but Martin didn’t react. Danny glanced at Martin curiously, but Martin’s look told him not to say anything, stern and far too Fitzgerald for Danny’s taste, with a chill in it that melted into warmth only when they’d hung up with Victor.
Wrapped up in his thoughts and intent on getting into the warmth of his office, Danny didn’t hear the series of soft but insistent ‘Mr. Taylor’’s until a gloved hand landed on his arm.
Already on edge and half-fearful for Martin, he spun reflexively, arm coming up to defend himself. His assailant gasped and staggered back, holding up his hands, stammering out an apology.
“The hell?” Danny lowered his guard and studied the other man, taking in the dilapidated coat and the thin dress shirt beneath it, the tie skewed in a parody of respectability.
“Mr. Taylor, I’m Richard Treharne.” The man looked worse than he had in court; bloodshot, shadowed eyes stared at Danny from deep sockets, shoulders hunched against the cold.
“I know.” Danny stepped back. “Look, I shouldn’t be talking to you without your lawyer.” I shouldn’t be talking to you because I want to fucking kill you.
“Yeah – yeah, I know, but Mr. Taylor I just gotta say...” Treharne licked his lips and coughed. “I love Mark, Mr. Taylor, and I know I ain’t the world’s best father and I can’t provide for him as well as I’d like to, but I swear to you I never hurt him. I wouldn’t ever hurt him.”
You should have thought of that before you took a bat to his ribs, Danny wanted to say. He forced himself to calm and studied Treharne in stony, disapproving silence. The redness in Treharne’s eyes gave them a strange sort of intensity, a desperation to be believed, but Danny had seen that before on the faces of men and women who wanted him to believe in the fictions they’d created, as though his agreement would make a reality of them.
And the hell of it was that part of Richard Treharne probably believed that he was a good father, that when he beat Mark he was doing what was best for him. Danny had met plenty of men and women like that, too. He’d lived with one for eleven years of his life, and several others in the years after that.
“Mr. Treharne,” he said, speaking slowly, forcing himself to meet Treharne’s eyes, “I can’t talk to you without your counsel present. If you want to tell me anything, you’ll have to go through your attorney.”
“Roger won’t listen to me,” Treharne muttered. His fingers twisted nervously as he backed away, gaze hovering at meeting Danny’s before darting away. “I’m sorry for bothering you, Mr. Taylor. I just – just wanted to let you know, though.”
“Yeah.” Danny nodded curtly and straightened his coat, turned away before Treharne could say anything else. He tried not to look back as he strode inside, but he had to turn around once he reached the elevators, and as he scanned the front steps beyond the doors he saw that the other man had gone.
* * *
Danny managed to shake off the encounter with Treharne and get some work done before Margaret summoned him to Tarney’s office for a meeting.
“He wants to talk to you,” she said, eyebrow arched behind the thick rims of her glasses as she motioned for him to enter.
The hardwood and sophistication of Tarney’s office loomed around him as it always did, and Tarney was studying him with the clinical sort of detachment that had made him famous as a trial lawyer. Danny sat down heavily under the weight of those eyes.
“I trust your personal matter has been resolved?” Tarney asked, and the false pleasantness in his tone made Danny cringe inwardly.
“Not yet,” he said. He met Tarney’s gaze squarely, though it was an effort, and he reminded himself that if he could handle Jack Malone he could handle this. “I’m hoping that it will be soon, though.”
“For my part, I tend to become concerned when one of my associates vanishes for two days.” Tarney leaned back in his chair. “May I ask what this is about?”
Danny really wished that Tarney couldn’t.
“A friend is in trouble, and I told him I’d help him out,” he said at last. Wholly truthful, and still opaque enough.
“Nothing illegal, I hope; if so, I expect you to turn it over to the authorities immediately. I won’t have my staff compromised ethically.”
“No... he’s the victim here. We go way back – to when I was in the FBI, I mean. He didn’t have anyone else to contact.”
Tarney sighed. “I can’t tell you how to conduct your personal life, Mr. Taylor, but I can tell you... again... that I expect this not to interfere with your work here. Please do not make me call you in again.”
“I won’t, sir.” This was more than a bit untruthful, and Danny would need to talk to Victor again; there had to be some way of ironing things out with his office and seeing Martin safe at the same time. He toyed with the idea of requesting emergency personal time; Mark Treharne was the only case he had on trial, and all the rest were pending, stuck in the slow cycle of government and bureaucracy. No... that would bring up more questions from Tarney, and those questions would require lying.
“Right.” Tarney swiveled to peer intently at his computer screen, and the abrupt silence was dismissal enough. Danny slunk from his office, and paused long enough on the way back to his own to scowl at the large, smug shadow of Ben Dawson by the coffee maker.
He sat back down at his desk, surrounded by piles of actual work he needed to do, but his thoughts wouldn’t settle, and his gaze strayed far too often to the photograph perched in its corner – too much like he’d been on Friday, and he couldn’t believe it had only been two days since Martin had fallen, meteor-like, back into his life.
Weird, thinking that Martin had called him on Monday. Weird, gratifying, and he had to grin at that, even though it was stupid and way too much like being a teenager again. Weird thinking that if Martin had come to New York on Thursday they might never have seen each other, or maybe they would have but they would only have gone for coffee and friendly conversation, and this wouldn’t be happening.
Something tickled at the back of his mind in connection with that thought. Martin’s meeting had been moved up, last-minute. He’d been taken by professionals, people discreet enough to kidnap a federal agent while surrounded by literally hundreds of them, and by a security system that hadn’t relaxed since 9/11. Whoever had taken would have had to know Martin’s schedule, to know not only that he would be going to New York on Thursday but that he’d been rescheduled.
Not many people would have that kind of information. No one on the outside, certainly.
“Shit.” Awareness swept over him, blanking his mind of everything except the knowledge that he was right about this, and that Martin was still in danger, maybe greater danger than they’d realized.
Before he knew it, he had his coat in hand and was out the door, heading home.
tbc.
Post-fic musing: I was watching "Silent Partner" the other night, and was completely taken with the end, when Danny goes into Jack's office to get some forms signed and Viv asks him how things went with Martin on the San Diego trip. Danny replies with something along the lines of, "He took a little breaking in, but he's a good guy," and the entire time Jack's giving him this Look, like he knows exactly what Danny's definition of "breaking in" entails. *pleased cackle*
Gotta love the slash!radar. Once it goes on, it never goes off.
By: HF
Email: hfox @ ontheqt.org / aesc36 @ gmail.com
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.
Previous parts: Chapter One; Chapter Two; Chapter Three; Chapter Four; Chapter Five
Notes: Next part. Yes.
CHAPTER SIX
So easy. So easy and Danny knew he should be terrified at how well they still worked together, even after growing three years and worlds apart. Even with so many differences – sitting at his kitchen table in jeans and t-shirts, on a Saturday morning and no Jack growling in the background or Viv’s steadying presence or Sam’s restless pacing – he couldn’t shake the sensation of familiarity, the rightness of this.
The coffee (their second pot, and this was another difference, because the coffee at the office had been unspeakably vile, most days) grew cool while Martin wolfed down two peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and tried to fill Danny in on case details between bites.
“That closed out four months ago,” he said, gesturing to the file spread out in front of Danny’s place. “There was some question on procedure, so I had the file out for review.”
“No indictments, then?” Danny asked bleakly. This was another familiar thing: hunting and hunting, only to come up with nothing.
“Nope.” Martin swallowed and sighed. “Not even an arrest. The Secret Service conducted an interview with the family, and determined that, while Mr. Elton was a bastard, he wasn’t a threat.”
“That their professional opinion?”
“Yeah.” Martin drained his cup of coffee with impressive speed. “Personally, I think they didn’t want to deal with him. Taxpayer dollars, huh?”
Danny snorted and began reassembling the file. “Y’know, I’m starting to think that this doesn’t have anything to do with your casework... There’s something else to it. Don’t know what though.” He could feel theories coalescing, his body’s automatic response to the excitement of starting out on a new trail.
Martin was regarding him speculatively, hands folded around his empty mug. He’d steadied over the course of the morning, had even seemed calmer when he’d woken and learned that his father was going to be involved in this whether he wanted him to be or not. Danny wondered if that had anything to do with their midnight talk, or if sleep had finally taken away the worst of Martin’s exhaustion. Whatever it was, though, something was in Martin’s eyes, his expression, though he was merely sitting there, watching Danny, that said he had come to some private decision or realization and was satisfied with it.
“So what’re you thinking?”
“Okay.” Danny took a breath. “You were taken right outside the Federal Building, and no one reported you missing. No one even seems to know you’re missing, except your dad. Now I’m thinking that it can’t be one of your cases, ‘cause that would raise all sorts of alarms. Terrorists kidnapping a federal agent outside the Javits building? All over the fucking news, man.”
“So you’re saying...” Martin’s tone said that he knew – a slight darkening to it.
“Yeah. These guys, whoever they were, were professionals. No way an amateur could pull that off.” Danny tapped a pen on top of the Elton file. “And there aren’t many people in the world pissed off enough to want to take out an agent in broad daylight, either. At least, not people who want to keep a low profile.”
“Okay.” Martin nodded and wrote something down on a pad of paper. “If that’s the case, then whoever did this either doesn’t care or else knew they could get away with it.”
“I’m going for the latter... If they didn’t care if they got caught, they would’ve killed you and saved themselves the trouble of holding onto you.”
And that was a shock, hearing himself speak the words and then only hearing the words a moment later, seeing the truth of them register in Martin’s face. They would’ve killed you. His mind produced a different ending, one where he never saw Martin again, where instead of living flesh and blood there was a coffin, and regret.
He pushed that away, a blind and useless path and no point in pursuing it. Images and questions lingered, though, in the back of Danny’s awareness.
“Hey, you okay?” Martin’s voice was soft, but with an unexpected roughness in it.
“Yeah.” They would’ve killed you. Danny swallowed a bitter mouthful of coffee and grimaced. He’d forgotten that it was cold.
They sat there for a moment, and Danny felt vaguely ridiculous, freaking out like he was with Martin’s quiet, steady presence beside him, like Danny was the one who had been missing and could have been killed.
Like when the hit on Adisa had gone down, and Martin had been shot and bleeding – and not just bleeding, he’d learned from the doctors later, but dying, and they hadn’t expected him to make it. He had bent over Martin, there on that wet and lonely street and his hands had been shaking as they’d pressed down over that terrible, terrible wound in his side, trying to keep all that blood inside Martin, where it belonged. And Martin had looked up at him and smiled, and told Danny he was okay. Like he wasn’t dying, lying on cold concrete, surrounded by the wreck of their car and metal and glass.
“Danny?” Warmth suddenly, and when had he drifted off? Danny blinked, saw Martin’s hand resting delicately atop his, as though Martin were uncertain about touching him.
And maybe he was, because Danny was the one who believed in touch, while Martin had never been demonstrative that way. But now Martin’s hand was moving over Danny’s, sliding over skin and tendon and bone, fingers insinuating themselves into the cup of Danny’s palm, warm and strong and alive.
“Hey man, you okay?”
“Yeah.” Danny made himself draw a breath and be reasonable. “Just... shit. Kind of freaked, you know?”
“Yeah.” Martin’s grip tightened, his thumb brushing against the ridge of Danny’s knuckles. “Believe me, I know.” Soft laugh at that, not meant to be humorous, and Danny had no other reply to that than to be silent.
“I...” Martin began hesitantly, “.. When we were talking last night, I didn’t tell you everything.”
“What?” Danny couldn’t help the tensing of his body, or the flicker of anger at Martin’s words. “What d’you mean?”
“When I was in front of the office on Monday afternoon, I told you I was calling someone, right?”
“Yeah...”
Martin’s hand slid away from his, fingers moving away to play nervously on the rim of his coffee mug, but his gaze never faltered, holding Danny’s own, calm and sure.
“I was going to call you.”
And, well, that was unexpected, and Danny wondered if he was going to spend the rest of his life being shocked into silence by Martin Fitzgerald.
“I wanted to see if you’d like to go for lunch, or dinner... I’d move my flight, or something.” Martin’s expression became slightly guarded, the worried line between his brows deepening at Danny’s lack of reaction. His entire body was still, except for his fingers, which tensed around his coffee mug. “I know it’s been ages, and we haven’t talked all that much, but still...” Helpless shrug now. “Don’t know what I was thinking, but it seemed like a good idea. I just... Just wanted to see you, I guess.”
Really there were no words for that, at least none that the ever-eloquent Danny Taylor could find. Barely a day ago he’d been sitting next to Martin in that hospital, and woven in somewhere between fear and shock and happiness had been the guilty, selfish anger that Martin had been in New York and hadn’t called him. Hadn’t told him anything.
But he was telling Danny now, and that was something. It wasn’t much, not like a promise or even hope, but something that Danny wasn’t accustomed to having.
“I...” He stopped, tried again. “I don’t know what to say.”
“That’s a first,” Martin said, grinning a bit, that slightly subdued, ironic expression that held so much more, if a person knew him and was looking for it.
“Shut up.”
Martin’s grin grew a bit, became mocking, not unlike Danny’s could be sometimes. “The Great Danny Taylor lost for words... I never thought I’d live to see the day.”
“Didn’t know if you were going to live to see it either, Fitz.” Honesty, because he’d been honest last night and Martin was being honest with him now, because Danny could feel the two of them stepping into some unknown territory, the place beyond the teasing and silences.
“Thanks to you, I will.” Martin’s voice was low, but suffused with feeling, something in it Danny had never heard before, and he was looking at Danny, his eyes searching, so like that night three years gone, when he’d stared up at Danny and seen whatever it was dying people see.
“Don’t think you had peanut butter sandwiches in mind when you called, huh?” Danny asked.
“I’ll take what I can get.” And the way Martin said it turned a joke into something deeper, serious, into something else entirely, something almost too big to contemplate.
“Yeah,” Danny said quietly, and it was easy, so easy now to take one of Martin’s hands in his, play a thumb gently over the bandage covering the rope burn on his wrist. “Me, too.”
The worst part about New York winters was the greyness, Danny decided. The sunlight of the previous two days had vanished overnight, replaced by brooding clouds brought down on winds from the north. The forecasters in the Times had issued dire predictions of snow and a wind chill that made Danny cold just listening to it, and the Monday morning rush had a new desperation to it, as men and women rushed between the warmth of the underground and their offices, heads down to watch for the ever-present slush and ice on the sidewalks.
Danny made himself leave his apartment only with great difficulty, and the knowledge that he had to keep working on his own stuff, or at least give the impression that he was. He’d missed going in on Saturday, remarkable enough for an ambitious associate, and already he could feel time pressing, hear Tarney’s demands to know what was going on. And Sunday they had hashed out more theories, and talked in spare moments of everything and nothing.
He had ordered Martin to stay put and not answer the phone or the door, or even make a sound until he got back. An early-morning conversation with Victor had revealed that Martin’s father had managed to cover for him with his team back in D.C., but while the news was good it also meant they were running out of time.
“Do you have anything for me to run out?” Victor had asked, and that had been strange – the Deputy Director asking Danny Taylor if he could do something to help.
Danny had told him about the White Tigers, and Victor said he would look into the matter as discreetly as he could.
“Wait – don’t talk to Dempsey or Silverman about the case.” That had been Martin, bursting in on the conversation. Until then he had been listening quietly to his father’s voice on speakerphone, hands folded and face unreadable.
“Any reason why not?”
“Not yet.” Martin’s tone was flat, neutral, a match for his father’s, and Danny tried to imagine what they were like as a family. Easy to picture a huge, sterile house, the stony silence of Victor’s disapproval, the faint shadow of Martin’s mother somewhere in the background. His family’s apartment had been cramped, hot, and noisy; he’d spent hours hidden behind a door listening to the lash of his father’s anger and Rafi’s stifled cries.
“Okay, then.” Tinge of doubt as to whether or not Martin was doing the right thing by not telling, but Martin didn’t react. Danny glanced at Martin curiously, but Martin’s look told him not to say anything, stern and far too Fitzgerald for Danny’s taste, with a chill in it that melted into warmth only when they’d hung up with Victor.
Wrapped up in his thoughts and intent on getting into the warmth of his office, Danny didn’t hear the series of soft but insistent ‘Mr. Taylor’’s until a gloved hand landed on his arm.
Already on edge and half-fearful for Martin, he spun reflexively, arm coming up to defend himself. His assailant gasped and staggered back, holding up his hands, stammering out an apology.
“The hell?” Danny lowered his guard and studied the other man, taking in the dilapidated coat and the thin dress shirt beneath it, the tie skewed in a parody of respectability.
“Mr. Taylor, I’m Richard Treharne.” The man looked worse than he had in court; bloodshot, shadowed eyes stared at Danny from deep sockets, shoulders hunched against the cold.
“I know.” Danny stepped back. “Look, I shouldn’t be talking to you without your lawyer.” I shouldn’t be talking to you because I want to fucking kill you.
“Yeah – yeah, I know, but Mr. Taylor I just gotta say...” Treharne licked his lips and coughed. “I love Mark, Mr. Taylor, and I know I ain’t the world’s best father and I can’t provide for him as well as I’d like to, but I swear to you I never hurt him. I wouldn’t ever hurt him.”
You should have thought of that before you took a bat to his ribs, Danny wanted to say. He forced himself to calm and studied Treharne in stony, disapproving silence. The redness in Treharne’s eyes gave them a strange sort of intensity, a desperation to be believed, but Danny had seen that before on the faces of men and women who wanted him to believe in the fictions they’d created, as though his agreement would make a reality of them.
And the hell of it was that part of Richard Treharne probably believed that he was a good father, that when he beat Mark he was doing what was best for him. Danny had met plenty of men and women like that, too. He’d lived with one for eleven years of his life, and several others in the years after that.
“Mr. Treharne,” he said, speaking slowly, forcing himself to meet Treharne’s eyes, “I can’t talk to you without your counsel present. If you want to tell me anything, you’ll have to go through your attorney.”
“Roger won’t listen to me,” Treharne muttered. His fingers twisted nervously as he backed away, gaze hovering at meeting Danny’s before darting away. “I’m sorry for bothering you, Mr. Taylor. I just – just wanted to let you know, though.”
“Yeah.” Danny nodded curtly and straightened his coat, turned away before Treharne could say anything else. He tried not to look back as he strode inside, but he had to turn around once he reached the elevators, and as he scanned the front steps beyond the doors he saw that the other man had gone.
Danny managed to shake off the encounter with Treharne and get some work done before Margaret summoned him to Tarney’s office for a meeting.
“He wants to talk to you,” she said, eyebrow arched behind the thick rims of her glasses as she motioned for him to enter.
The hardwood and sophistication of Tarney’s office loomed around him as it always did, and Tarney was studying him with the clinical sort of detachment that had made him famous as a trial lawyer. Danny sat down heavily under the weight of those eyes.
“I trust your personal matter has been resolved?” Tarney asked, and the false pleasantness in his tone made Danny cringe inwardly.
“Not yet,” he said. He met Tarney’s gaze squarely, though it was an effort, and he reminded himself that if he could handle Jack Malone he could handle this. “I’m hoping that it will be soon, though.”
“For my part, I tend to become concerned when one of my associates vanishes for two days.” Tarney leaned back in his chair. “May I ask what this is about?”
Danny really wished that Tarney couldn’t.
“A friend is in trouble, and I told him I’d help him out,” he said at last. Wholly truthful, and still opaque enough.
“Nothing illegal, I hope; if so, I expect you to turn it over to the authorities immediately. I won’t have my staff compromised ethically.”
“No... he’s the victim here. We go way back – to when I was in the FBI, I mean. He didn’t have anyone else to contact.”
Tarney sighed. “I can’t tell you how to conduct your personal life, Mr. Taylor, but I can tell you... again... that I expect this not to interfere with your work here. Please do not make me call you in again.”
“I won’t, sir.” This was more than a bit untruthful, and Danny would need to talk to Victor again; there had to be some way of ironing things out with his office and seeing Martin safe at the same time. He toyed with the idea of requesting emergency personal time; Mark Treharne was the only case he had on trial, and all the rest were pending, stuck in the slow cycle of government and bureaucracy. No... that would bring up more questions from Tarney, and those questions would require lying.
“Right.” Tarney swiveled to peer intently at his computer screen, and the abrupt silence was dismissal enough. Danny slunk from his office, and paused long enough on the way back to his own to scowl at the large, smug shadow of Ben Dawson by the coffee maker.
He sat back down at his desk, surrounded by piles of actual work he needed to do, but his thoughts wouldn’t settle, and his gaze strayed far too often to the photograph perched in its corner – too much like he’d been on Friday, and he couldn’t believe it had only been two days since Martin had fallen, meteor-like, back into his life.
Weird, thinking that Martin had called him on Monday. Weird, gratifying, and he had to grin at that, even though it was stupid and way too much like being a teenager again. Weird thinking that if Martin had come to New York on Thursday they might never have seen each other, or maybe they would have but they would only have gone for coffee and friendly conversation, and this wouldn’t be happening.
Something tickled at the back of his mind in connection with that thought. Martin’s meeting had been moved up, last-minute. He’d been taken by professionals, people discreet enough to kidnap a federal agent while surrounded by literally hundreds of them, and by a security system that hadn’t relaxed since 9/11. Whoever had taken would have had to know Martin’s schedule, to know not only that he would be going to New York on Thursday but that he’d been rescheduled.
Not many people would have that kind of information. No one on the outside, certainly.
“Shit.” Awareness swept over him, blanking his mind of everything except the knowledge that he was right about this, and that Martin was still in danger, maybe greater danger than they’d realized.
Before he knew it, he had his coat in hand and was out the door, heading home.
tbc.
Post-fic musing: I was watching "Silent Partner" the other night, and was completely taken with the end, when Danny goes into Jack's office to get some forms signed and Viv asks him how things went with Martin on the San Diego trip. Danny replies with something along the lines of, "He took a little breaking in, but he's a good guy," and the entire time Jack's giving him this Look, like he knows exactly what Danny's definition of "breaking in" entails. *pleased cackle*
Gotta love the slash!radar. Once it goes on, it never goes off.