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[fic] A Long Time Coming [PG13/R: Danny/Martin] 9/10
Title: A Long Time Coming
By: HF
Email: aesc36 @ gmail.com
Rating/Warnings: PG13/R. Minor swearing, heaping cupfuls ofUST RST.
Disclaimers: Without a Trace belongs to CBS, Jerry Bruckheimer, and very likely many other people.
Previous parts: 01; 02; 03; 04; 05; 06; 07; 08
Notes: Penultimate!chapter. Time to close the deal, my loves.
CHAPTER NINE
“Mr. Taylor?”
Pain swam red behind his closed eyelids, deepening and sharpening as the voice became louder. He struggled for unconsciousness, but the voice drew him, the voice and the shouts and commotion he could hear in the distance.
Reluctantly he opened his eyes, gasped as the grey winter light struck him like a mace, and the face hovering above his blurred, went liquid and alien for a nauseating moment before resolving into something human again. A woman, blond hair pulled back, EMT badge clipped to her jacket, was looking down at him and shining a light into his eyes. Reflexively, he winced and tried to turn his head away.
“Mr. Taylor, don’t move.” A hand on the side of his head kept him immobile, and a moment later the light winked out.
He took a breath, half-expecting to fight the constriction of his bulletproof vest, and was startled to find it gone. Confused, he struggled to sit up and look down at himself, but the cervical collar clasped around his neck and the paramedic stopped him. Blind panic took him for a moment, long enough to fill his head with visions of paralysis and pain and dying, and he tensed against the hands holding him, struggling away from the fear of it, reached desperately for breath again to escape.
“Sir, you’ll need to stay still.” She pushed him gently but firmly back down onto the stretcher, her gloved hands placed carefully away from his left shoulder. “You might have a concussion.”
“There’s no ‘might’ about it,” Danny rasped. The back of his head and neck throbbed, fierce and insistent, and his left shoulder ached in time to the pulse of pain radiating from just below his skull. The itch of drying blood against his scalp was a minor accent to the discomfort. “How long was I out?”
“About five minutes,” the paramedic told him, adjusting the cervical collar. “Now stay still. We need to get you loaded up – your friend’s coming with, and he’ll be a moment.”
Before he could ask what friend, a shadow moved over him, and Danny found himself staring up into the grave, pale face of Agent Black. Through the narrow gap left between Black’s body and the ambulance door, Danny could see a flurry of activity on the plaza beyond – agents and a small collection of emergency vehicles congregating around one spot, a stretcher with a blanket-covered form lying atop it. The NYPD officers and paramedics were moving with calm efficiency, no hurry-up about it, and Danny knew what that meant.
“Treharne?” He looked up at Black.
The agent shook his head and stuffed his cellphone in a pocket. “That his name? Died on the scene. They just called it.”
Danny closed his eyes, caught between relief and, all unexpectedly, sadness – not for Treharne, but for the boy he’d left behind. Going to have to tell Mark, he told himself, and he didn’t know how that would go. Tried to picture Mark’s reaction; he was a quiet boy, sandy-haired and nondescript green eyes behind cheap glasses, had gone along with everything Danny had recommended. Part of Danny imagined Mark listening to the news and nodding okay, he was fine with that, and what would happen next?
Could remember himself, an eleven-year-old mutely watching the paramedics take his parents away, and later listening to the doctors explaining that they’d died, and through the fear and pain had been a thread of guilty relief that his father was gone. No more hiding behind doors, trying not to hear Rafi being beaten, or his father swearing in blurry, drunken Spanish, his mother in some other room, not daring to interfere anymore.
And what the hell kind of a son did that make him? He’d asked himself that question over a thousand shot glasses. None of them had ever given him an answer, had only made the question go away, faded into the haze of alcohol and banished by hangovers. Finally, at the bottom of it, he’d realized there’d never be an answer.
And he could picture Mark a few years down the road, maybe trying to fight his way out of the pattern of his life but feeling it pull him in again, into poverty and drugs and hopelessness, thinking about how relieved he was that some FBI agent had shot his dad and put an end to all of it... then reaching for his drug of choice to shut up the competing voices of guilt and relief alike.
A synthetic rustling sound broke him from his thoughts, and he peered up through carefully-narrowed eyes at Black, who was holding up Danny’s bulletproof vest and shaking it meaningfully at him.
“You were a lot luckier, Taylor.” Black pointed to the rip in the Kevlar, the indentation where the bullet had embedded itself, high on the narrowed shoulder of the vest. “The medics think the impact might have broken your collarbone, but it could have been a lot worse.”
“Thanks for pointing that out. Five years in the Bureau and I would never have guessed how a fucking bulletproof vest works.”
Black laughed, a low, rough sound like boulders falling, and took a couple steps back to allow the paramedics room to hoist Danny’s stretcher into the ambulance – definitely needed, because the man was not only tall, but wide enough for two linebackers. “I see why Fitzgerald likes you.”
That brought Danny up short and he had to stare at Black, schooling his face to a cautious blankness, knowing even that would tell the agent far too much. Black stared back at him for a moment, face as impenetrable, before he broke into a grin.
“Don’t ask, don’t tell, right?” Black bounded up into the spare seat grin still on his face. On such a big man, the expression was almost menacing, a curling of the lips away from teeth, suggestive more of menace than humor.
“Right,” Danny agreed faintly, trying not to shrink away.
The ambulance lurched into motion, sirens blaring. Danny stared at the roof, idly studying the play of light and shadow across it. Hypnotizing, he thought, and he could probably stare at this all day, Black a faint dark blur in the corner of his vision, and he really could, if he weren’t so tired, and if the paramedic didn’t keep shaking his shoulder and asking him to stay with –
* * *
When he came to again he was in the hospital, staring at the dispiriting acid green walls of the emergency room, listening to the slow series of clicks and beeps coming from the monitor by his right ear. Black was nowhere in sight, but a white-coated and efficient doctor, a phalanx of assistants arrayed behind her, stood on his left, looking down at him with something like clinical disapproval. One of the interns moved, and ah, there was Black, hovering like an overcoated specter behind the doors.
“Mr. Taylor? I’m Dr. Freeburg.” She was unnervingly tall, stretched out by the vertigo twisting around Danny’s stomach, her face livid in the clinical brightness of the overhead light. “You have a slight concussion and heavy bruising to your left shoulder.”
“Doesn’t feel ‘slight,’” he told her crossly. Someone had jammed an ice pick into the base of his skull, he was fairy certain, and if he relaxed his eyes from their determined squint or moved his head the least bit, the sadist would twist it fiercely, and he’d feel it spiraling all the way down into his stomach, transforming into nausea.
Her lips crawled into a smile. “We’ll give you something for the pain. Your X-rays came out clear, aside from the concussion, but your neck will be sore for a while, so try not to move too much, or too quickly, okay?”
“Not a problem.” He’d been hit over the head before, he knew, but he couldn’t remember it ever hurting this much.
“Try to rest for a bit,” Dr. Freeburg said, and it wasn’t like Danny had anything else to do as his gurney was surrounded, and he had to close his eyes against the relentless swirl of blue scrubs and lab coats. Had to close his eyes, and he felt the pain of motion again, and God it really, really hurt –
“Is Mr. Taylor awake?”
Victor?
“Who’re you?” Freeburg’s tone was sharp.
“Victor Fitzgerald, Deputy Director, FBI.” If the man was pulling out the full title, it must be important.
Danny struggled to open his eyes, despite the pain of it, and sure enough there was Victor, overcoat draped over one arm, keeping pace with Freeburg and the assistants. Dr. Freeburg was scowling at Victor, obviously torn between her unwelcome visitor’s rank and her patient’s well-being. Black was flanking Freeburg on her left, unwavering and ominous, and she glanced at him resentfully.
“Vict – ” Danny tried to get out, but even his own voice hurt, it was so loud. He tried to search out answers, reasons for Victor’s presence. Was Martin alive? Dead? Had they been successful? But Victor gave him nothing to work with, eyes steely and professional, posture touched with a bit of Fitzgeraldian arrogance as he stared at the doctor.
“Let me at least get him set up in a room before you start questioning him, or whatever it is you want,” Freeburg snapped. “Can you wait five minutes?”
Victor didn’t look like he wanted to wait five seconds, but he nodded stiffly and moved out of Freeburg’s way. The doctor favored him with a surly nod of thanks and muttered an order to get moving. Victor fell into step behind them, muttering impatiently all the way to Danny’s room.
“I want to keep him under observation for a couple hours, to make sure he isn’t too badly concussed,” Freeburg was saying to Victor, voice hazy and distant by the time it traveled through the layers of Danny’s exhaustion. “If he remains stable, I’ll release him then.”
“Good, good,” Victor replied distractedly.
Danny wanted to ask about Martin, fought against the tide of weariness pulling him under, but when he struggled for words and the coherence to say them he found nothing. The last thing he saw before vision greyed out and faded to black was Dr. Freeburg’s satisfied look, and Victor’s Fitzgeraldian mask cracking under the strain of frustration.
* * *
He woke up some time later to warmth and disorientation, eyes sticky and reluctant to open. Something warm and firm was wrapped around his right hand, and he knew, even before he blinked away the fog and fuzziness from his vision that Martin was there.
Finally got his eyes open, and yeah, there he was, looking at Danny with blue eyes soft and open, not hiding either concern or relief, both hands clasped around Danny’s own, body silver-lined in the light coming through the window. Still in Danny’s shirt, the sleeves rolled up now and the top two buttons undone.
Like that, if he could have only one memory of Martin at all Danny wanted him to be just like that, open and not concealing anything, grip firm around Danny’s hand, smile unhesitating and honest, deepening the fine lines around his eyes.
“Hey,” Martin said, and even the single word was warm.
“Come here often?” he asked, wincing at the way the words scratched at his throat.
Martin offered him his typical, dry half-smile. “Too often. What’s a nice boy like you doing in a place like this?”
“Good question.” He coughed around the words.
“Can I get you anything? Water? Ice?”
“A new head would be great.” Danny winced. “And a new shoulder. Bruised the hell out of it, I think.”
“Wish I could help with that.” Martin poured a cup of water from the pitcher by his elbow and handed it to Danny. “Here. You sound terrible.”
Crazy, thinking that this was how all of this got started – a hospital bed and a cup of water, one pair of hands shaking, another reaching out to steady them. Danny glanced up at Martin, saw the laughter bright and real in his eyes, playing at the edges of his mouth, and knew he was thinking the same thing. He watched silently as Danny drank another cup, and in that scant minute, his good humor faded, eyes going serious and somber again.
“It’s done, Danny.” Martin was looking at him, and for a confused moment Danny wanted to ask what was done, until he remembered.
“Silverman?”
“Yeah.” No satisfaction anywhere in Martin now, he saw, only a tired sort of resignation. “I walked in... and well, it was like he’d seen a ghost. My dad arrested him right there in the conference room, with everyone watching.”
“Did he confess?”
Martin nodded. “We were right, Danny. Silverman confirmed everything; he’d had Dempsey make the call. Pete didn’t know anything, and no one else on his team did, either. And he’d set it up, had Benson and another guy waiting for me in the plaza.”
No triumph in this at all, and that was a familiar feeling – they’d solved the case, and the guilty would face justice, but the wrongness of what had happened overwhelmed whatever good there was. Danny’s thoughts flickered momentarily to Mark Treharne, and he wondered if the boy knew that his father was dead. Another story with no good ending.
“I’m sorry, Martin.”
“I am, too. And I’m sorry about Treharne. Matt told me.”
“Don’t be sorry.” That came out more forcefully than he intended, but Martin only nodded, and Danny gratefully took one of Martin’s hands in his own, was relieved when Martin accepted the gesture. “Your dad came by earlier.”
“I know. He wanted to make sure the doctors involved are staying quiet about this for now. He shouted at the attending for a while... I got to hear about that before they let me in here.” Martin paused.
“What else?”
“I, uh... I have to go to DC for a bit, to get things squared away in the office down there,” Martin said, nervousness flickering through the words, betrayed in the smallest hesitation between breath and speech. “But I’ll be back – Silverman’s trial’s probably going to take place up here, and we still need to gather evidence... And I know you’ll be busy, but d’you think...” He trailed off uncertainly.
“I’m not going anywhere, Fitz” Danny told him. “Come back anytime.” So much more in those words than he could say.
Martin offered him a smile, shy and tentative, and Danny found himself dwelling on that barely-there expression, the careful curve of Martin’s lips, like he wasn’t even sure he should be showing Danny this much, and found himself unexpectedly caught by memory.
He’d spent a summer caddying at a country club in the Hamptons when he was eighteen, listening to the wives of rich Southerners gossip over their nine-irons and sweating glasses of gin and tonic. Back then he’d been coltish and still growing into his ears, but good-looking, and the women had eyed him with decidedly adulterous interest. They’d been overcome with his accent (“Is that French, sweetie?”) and the fact that he was from South Florida (“Oh, Spanish, it’s Spanish, Louanne.”), and one of them, a pudgy lady stuffed into plaid Bermuda shorts, her grey hair curling up and over her sun visor like a thundercloud, had called him “a real sweet boy.”
It had taken all of his self-control not to snicker at that. Instead, he’d smiled charmingly at her and thanked her in Spanish (“Oh, that’s just so sweet! Hattie, isn’t that just so sweet?”) and years later, when he’d had a chance to observe Martin in action, to see (and feel) for himself the force of Martin’s personality, his dedication, he’d decided that Martin would definitely have qualified as “a real sweet boy” in Mrs. Flaherty’s book.
But the problem with sweet was that it was perilous, like sweet alcohol and under Martin’s weird, misguided chivalry lay something dangerous and potent, a hundred-proof intensity, and Danny had seen that last night, after wondering for years what it would have felt like to have that focus on him, and now that he had seen it, felt it, as Martin had looked at him with those huge, dark eyes, he couldn’t live without it.
And that was a huge thought, too big for his aching head to hold, too big for what the next few weeks promised.
“Listen, now that you’re awake, the doc says you can be released, but you need someone to watch you.” Martin rolled his eyes and sighed. “Can’t leave you alone for five minutes, Taylor, honestly.”
“I’ve heard that before,” Danny said. Felt a grin of his own, big and helpless and probably goofy, forming. “Can’t remember where, though.”
“So’ve I.” Martin stood up, letting Danny’s hand go. “C’mon... Let’s get you home.”
Home.
“Sounds good,” Danny said.
-to be concluded-
By: HF
Email: aesc36 @ gmail.com
Rating/Warnings: PG13/R. Minor swearing, heaping cupfuls of
Disclaimers: Without a Trace belongs to CBS, Jerry Bruckheimer, and very likely many other people.
Previous parts: 01; 02; 03; 04; 05; 06; 07; 08
Notes: Penultimate!chapter. Time to close the deal, my loves.
CHAPTER NINE
“Mr. Taylor?”
Pain swam red behind his closed eyelids, deepening and sharpening as the voice became louder. He struggled for unconsciousness, but the voice drew him, the voice and the shouts and commotion he could hear in the distance.
Reluctantly he opened his eyes, gasped as the grey winter light struck him like a mace, and the face hovering above his blurred, went liquid and alien for a nauseating moment before resolving into something human again. A woman, blond hair pulled back, EMT badge clipped to her jacket, was looking down at him and shining a light into his eyes. Reflexively, he winced and tried to turn his head away.
“Mr. Taylor, don’t move.” A hand on the side of his head kept him immobile, and a moment later the light winked out.
He took a breath, half-expecting to fight the constriction of his bulletproof vest, and was startled to find it gone. Confused, he struggled to sit up and look down at himself, but the cervical collar clasped around his neck and the paramedic stopped him. Blind panic took him for a moment, long enough to fill his head with visions of paralysis and pain and dying, and he tensed against the hands holding him, struggling away from the fear of it, reached desperately for breath again to escape.
“Sir, you’ll need to stay still.” She pushed him gently but firmly back down onto the stretcher, her gloved hands placed carefully away from his left shoulder. “You might have a concussion.”
“There’s no ‘might’ about it,” Danny rasped. The back of his head and neck throbbed, fierce and insistent, and his left shoulder ached in time to the pulse of pain radiating from just below his skull. The itch of drying blood against his scalp was a minor accent to the discomfort. “How long was I out?”
“About five minutes,” the paramedic told him, adjusting the cervical collar. “Now stay still. We need to get you loaded up – your friend’s coming with, and he’ll be a moment.”
Before he could ask what friend, a shadow moved over him, and Danny found himself staring up into the grave, pale face of Agent Black. Through the narrow gap left between Black’s body and the ambulance door, Danny could see a flurry of activity on the plaza beyond – agents and a small collection of emergency vehicles congregating around one spot, a stretcher with a blanket-covered form lying atop it. The NYPD officers and paramedics were moving with calm efficiency, no hurry-up about it, and Danny knew what that meant.
“Treharne?” He looked up at Black.
The agent shook his head and stuffed his cellphone in a pocket. “That his name? Died on the scene. They just called it.”
Danny closed his eyes, caught between relief and, all unexpectedly, sadness – not for Treharne, but for the boy he’d left behind. Going to have to tell Mark, he told himself, and he didn’t know how that would go. Tried to picture Mark’s reaction; he was a quiet boy, sandy-haired and nondescript green eyes behind cheap glasses, had gone along with everything Danny had recommended. Part of Danny imagined Mark listening to the news and nodding okay, he was fine with that, and what would happen next?
Could remember himself, an eleven-year-old mutely watching the paramedics take his parents away, and later listening to the doctors explaining that they’d died, and through the fear and pain had been a thread of guilty relief that his father was gone. No more hiding behind doors, trying not to hear Rafi being beaten, or his father swearing in blurry, drunken Spanish, his mother in some other room, not daring to interfere anymore.
And what the hell kind of a son did that make him? He’d asked himself that question over a thousand shot glasses. None of them had ever given him an answer, had only made the question go away, faded into the haze of alcohol and banished by hangovers. Finally, at the bottom of it, he’d realized there’d never be an answer.
And he could picture Mark a few years down the road, maybe trying to fight his way out of the pattern of his life but feeling it pull him in again, into poverty and drugs and hopelessness, thinking about how relieved he was that some FBI agent had shot his dad and put an end to all of it... then reaching for his drug of choice to shut up the competing voices of guilt and relief alike.
A synthetic rustling sound broke him from his thoughts, and he peered up through carefully-narrowed eyes at Black, who was holding up Danny’s bulletproof vest and shaking it meaningfully at him.
“You were a lot luckier, Taylor.” Black pointed to the rip in the Kevlar, the indentation where the bullet had embedded itself, high on the narrowed shoulder of the vest. “The medics think the impact might have broken your collarbone, but it could have been a lot worse.”
“Thanks for pointing that out. Five years in the Bureau and I would never have guessed how a fucking bulletproof vest works.”
Black laughed, a low, rough sound like boulders falling, and took a couple steps back to allow the paramedics room to hoist Danny’s stretcher into the ambulance – definitely needed, because the man was not only tall, but wide enough for two linebackers. “I see why Fitzgerald likes you.”
That brought Danny up short and he had to stare at Black, schooling his face to a cautious blankness, knowing even that would tell the agent far too much. Black stared back at him for a moment, face as impenetrable, before he broke into a grin.
“Don’t ask, don’t tell, right?” Black bounded up into the spare seat grin still on his face. On such a big man, the expression was almost menacing, a curling of the lips away from teeth, suggestive more of menace than humor.
“Right,” Danny agreed faintly, trying not to shrink away.
The ambulance lurched into motion, sirens blaring. Danny stared at the roof, idly studying the play of light and shadow across it. Hypnotizing, he thought, and he could probably stare at this all day, Black a faint dark blur in the corner of his vision, and he really could, if he weren’t so tired, and if the paramedic didn’t keep shaking his shoulder and asking him to stay with –
When he came to again he was in the hospital, staring at the dispiriting acid green walls of the emergency room, listening to the slow series of clicks and beeps coming from the monitor by his right ear. Black was nowhere in sight, but a white-coated and efficient doctor, a phalanx of assistants arrayed behind her, stood on his left, looking down at him with something like clinical disapproval. One of the interns moved, and ah, there was Black, hovering like an overcoated specter behind the doors.
“Mr. Taylor? I’m Dr. Freeburg.” She was unnervingly tall, stretched out by the vertigo twisting around Danny’s stomach, her face livid in the clinical brightness of the overhead light. “You have a slight concussion and heavy bruising to your left shoulder.”
“Doesn’t feel ‘slight,’” he told her crossly. Someone had jammed an ice pick into the base of his skull, he was fairy certain, and if he relaxed his eyes from their determined squint or moved his head the least bit, the sadist would twist it fiercely, and he’d feel it spiraling all the way down into his stomach, transforming into nausea.
Her lips crawled into a smile. “We’ll give you something for the pain. Your X-rays came out clear, aside from the concussion, but your neck will be sore for a while, so try not to move too much, or too quickly, okay?”
“Not a problem.” He’d been hit over the head before, he knew, but he couldn’t remember it ever hurting this much.
“Try to rest for a bit,” Dr. Freeburg said, and it wasn’t like Danny had anything else to do as his gurney was surrounded, and he had to close his eyes against the relentless swirl of blue scrubs and lab coats. Had to close his eyes, and he felt the pain of motion again, and God it really, really hurt –
“Is Mr. Taylor awake?”
Victor?
“Who’re you?” Freeburg’s tone was sharp.
“Victor Fitzgerald, Deputy Director, FBI.” If the man was pulling out the full title, it must be important.
Danny struggled to open his eyes, despite the pain of it, and sure enough there was Victor, overcoat draped over one arm, keeping pace with Freeburg and the assistants. Dr. Freeburg was scowling at Victor, obviously torn between her unwelcome visitor’s rank and her patient’s well-being. Black was flanking Freeburg on her left, unwavering and ominous, and she glanced at him resentfully.
“Vict – ” Danny tried to get out, but even his own voice hurt, it was so loud. He tried to search out answers, reasons for Victor’s presence. Was Martin alive? Dead? Had they been successful? But Victor gave him nothing to work with, eyes steely and professional, posture touched with a bit of Fitzgeraldian arrogance as he stared at the doctor.
“Let me at least get him set up in a room before you start questioning him, or whatever it is you want,” Freeburg snapped. “Can you wait five minutes?”
Victor didn’t look like he wanted to wait five seconds, but he nodded stiffly and moved out of Freeburg’s way. The doctor favored him with a surly nod of thanks and muttered an order to get moving. Victor fell into step behind them, muttering impatiently all the way to Danny’s room.
“I want to keep him under observation for a couple hours, to make sure he isn’t too badly concussed,” Freeburg was saying to Victor, voice hazy and distant by the time it traveled through the layers of Danny’s exhaustion. “If he remains stable, I’ll release him then.”
“Good, good,” Victor replied distractedly.
Danny wanted to ask about Martin, fought against the tide of weariness pulling him under, but when he struggled for words and the coherence to say them he found nothing. The last thing he saw before vision greyed out and faded to black was Dr. Freeburg’s satisfied look, and Victor’s Fitzgeraldian mask cracking under the strain of frustration.
He woke up some time later to warmth and disorientation, eyes sticky and reluctant to open. Something warm and firm was wrapped around his right hand, and he knew, even before he blinked away the fog and fuzziness from his vision that Martin was there.
Finally got his eyes open, and yeah, there he was, looking at Danny with blue eyes soft and open, not hiding either concern or relief, both hands clasped around Danny’s own, body silver-lined in the light coming through the window. Still in Danny’s shirt, the sleeves rolled up now and the top two buttons undone.
Like that, if he could have only one memory of Martin at all Danny wanted him to be just like that, open and not concealing anything, grip firm around Danny’s hand, smile unhesitating and honest, deepening the fine lines around his eyes.
“Hey,” Martin said, and even the single word was warm.
“Come here often?” he asked, wincing at the way the words scratched at his throat.
Martin offered him his typical, dry half-smile. “Too often. What’s a nice boy like you doing in a place like this?”
“Good question.” He coughed around the words.
“Can I get you anything? Water? Ice?”
“A new head would be great.” Danny winced. “And a new shoulder. Bruised the hell out of it, I think.”
“Wish I could help with that.” Martin poured a cup of water from the pitcher by his elbow and handed it to Danny. “Here. You sound terrible.”
Crazy, thinking that this was how all of this got started – a hospital bed and a cup of water, one pair of hands shaking, another reaching out to steady them. Danny glanced up at Martin, saw the laughter bright and real in his eyes, playing at the edges of his mouth, and knew he was thinking the same thing. He watched silently as Danny drank another cup, and in that scant minute, his good humor faded, eyes going serious and somber again.
“It’s done, Danny.” Martin was looking at him, and for a confused moment Danny wanted to ask what was done, until he remembered.
“Silverman?”
“Yeah.” No satisfaction anywhere in Martin now, he saw, only a tired sort of resignation. “I walked in... and well, it was like he’d seen a ghost. My dad arrested him right there in the conference room, with everyone watching.”
“Did he confess?”
Martin nodded. “We were right, Danny. Silverman confirmed everything; he’d had Dempsey make the call. Pete didn’t know anything, and no one else on his team did, either. And he’d set it up, had Benson and another guy waiting for me in the plaza.”
No triumph in this at all, and that was a familiar feeling – they’d solved the case, and the guilty would face justice, but the wrongness of what had happened overwhelmed whatever good there was. Danny’s thoughts flickered momentarily to Mark Treharne, and he wondered if the boy knew that his father was dead. Another story with no good ending.
“I’m sorry, Martin.”
“I am, too. And I’m sorry about Treharne. Matt told me.”
“Don’t be sorry.” That came out more forcefully than he intended, but Martin only nodded, and Danny gratefully took one of Martin’s hands in his own, was relieved when Martin accepted the gesture. “Your dad came by earlier.”
“I know. He wanted to make sure the doctors involved are staying quiet about this for now. He shouted at the attending for a while... I got to hear about that before they let me in here.” Martin paused.
“What else?”
“I, uh... I have to go to DC for a bit, to get things squared away in the office down there,” Martin said, nervousness flickering through the words, betrayed in the smallest hesitation between breath and speech. “But I’ll be back – Silverman’s trial’s probably going to take place up here, and we still need to gather evidence... And I know you’ll be busy, but d’you think...” He trailed off uncertainly.
“I’m not going anywhere, Fitz” Danny told him. “Come back anytime.” So much more in those words than he could say.
Martin offered him a smile, shy and tentative, and Danny found himself dwelling on that barely-there expression, the careful curve of Martin’s lips, like he wasn’t even sure he should be showing Danny this much, and found himself unexpectedly caught by memory.
He’d spent a summer caddying at a country club in the Hamptons when he was eighteen, listening to the wives of rich Southerners gossip over their nine-irons and sweating glasses of gin and tonic. Back then he’d been coltish and still growing into his ears, but good-looking, and the women had eyed him with decidedly adulterous interest. They’d been overcome with his accent (“Is that French, sweetie?”) and the fact that he was from South Florida (“Oh, Spanish, it’s Spanish, Louanne.”), and one of them, a pudgy lady stuffed into plaid Bermuda shorts, her grey hair curling up and over her sun visor like a thundercloud, had called him “a real sweet boy.”
It had taken all of his self-control not to snicker at that. Instead, he’d smiled charmingly at her and thanked her in Spanish (“Oh, that’s just so sweet! Hattie, isn’t that just so sweet?”) and years later, when he’d had a chance to observe Martin in action, to see (and feel) for himself the force of Martin’s personality, his dedication, he’d decided that Martin would definitely have qualified as “a real sweet boy” in Mrs. Flaherty’s book.
But the problem with sweet was that it was perilous, like sweet alcohol and under Martin’s weird, misguided chivalry lay something dangerous and potent, a hundred-proof intensity, and Danny had seen that last night, after wondering for years what it would have felt like to have that focus on him, and now that he had seen it, felt it, as Martin had looked at him with those huge, dark eyes, he couldn’t live without it.
And that was a huge thought, too big for his aching head to hold, too big for what the next few weeks promised.
“Listen, now that you’re awake, the doc says you can be released, but you need someone to watch you.” Martin rolled his eyes and sighed. “Can’t leave you alone for five minutes, Taylor, honestly.”
“I’ve heard that before,” Danny said. Felt a grin of his own, big and helpless and probably goofy, forming. “Can’t remember where, though.”
“So’ve I.” Martin stood up, letting Danny’s hand go. “C’mon... Let’s get you home.”
Home.
“Sounds good,” Danny said.
-to be concluded-