Sherlock Holmes Fic: History, Repeating Itself (Chapter Eight, Holmes/Watson, R)
ARGH. Short chapter is again short, BUT I MAKE THE RULES OVER HERE. Or something. IDEK. I'm just trying to crank this out for you guys. I APOLOGIZE FOR THE FACT THAT THINGS SEEM TO BE TAKING LESS WORDS TO SAY IN THIS PART AND THE LAST ONE.
Title: History, Repeating Itself (Chapter Eight)
Rating: R
Pairing: Holmes/Watson
Warnings: Alcohol and marijuana use, general debauchery, copious use of coarse language.
Spoilers: None, except for Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three, Chapter Four, Chapter Five, Chapter Six, and Chapter Seven of this story.
Author's Notes: This is a fill for an AWESOME prompt at shkinkmeme; both the prompt and the fill thread can be found here. I will continue posting the chapters bit-by-bit there and then archiving them on my journal for the duration of this story.
Chapter Summary: John Watson solves a puzzle and breaks down.
Chapter Eight: On The Compelling Power of Disaster
Everything they had, as it turned out, wasn't much.
It took Dante nearly an hour to hack into the blocked mainframe and access the transcript of my conversation. I insisted that I could remember all of it, but Miles dismissed this, telling me I'd undoubtedly miss something important. I would have fought him on it, but the fury that had kept me moving forward had abated, and I was left a terrified, unhinged wreck. Of course, once he had the file in front of him, he swore, throwing it aside and claiming it useless rambling. I hardly heard him.
If he dies, I thought, looking over file upon file of Mihailov's alleged misdeeds, I am never going to forgive myself. If he dies I am never going to get over it, if he dies I'm going to lock myself up in a mental hospital and never ever come out, he can't die, he can't die--
Eventually, all the noise in the room faded out--Miles' furious barking and frustrated dismal of the transcript, Dante's frantic typing, Alex's clipped, elegant brainstorming. All I could do was stare at the photos in front of me, mutilated bodies and exploded buildings, and think, he can't fucking die.
Night had fallen when I felt someone put a hand on my shoulder. I looked up; Dante was standing over me, sympathy written across his features.
"You need a break," he said, "come on."
"Shouldn't you be--" I started, surprised by how raspy my voice was. He shook his head.
"Alex took over what I was doing. Come on. You smoke, right? We'll grab a cig and then get some of the pizza they ordered."
"They ordered pizza?" I asked, my voice small. He sighed.
"See? And you've got the crazy eyes, too. You need to get out, come on."
Almost blindly--he can't die, he can't die, he can't die--I followed Dante outside. He sat down on a window ledge, hoisting himself up a little to do so, and gestured for me to follow suit. I did, and offered him a cigarette; he turned it down, smiling slightly.
"Thanks, but no," he said. "I don't touch the things unless circumstance demands it."
I looked at him askance, but he just shrugged at me. He was a strange little guy, bald and round-eyed, but he seemed nice enough. I smoked my way through half of the cigarette wondering about him, and then the chorus started again--Holmes pulling away from me, Holmes looking at me like I'd slapped him, Holmes' face on those bodies--
"Hey," Dante snapped, jerking me out of it. I turned to look at him, and he sighed heavily. "Your friend. He reminds me of a guy I know, and so believe me when I say this--you're not going to get anywhere driving yourself crazy over the shit he gets himself into."
"I--" I sighed, taking a drag. "I made a really bad fucking mistake right before he left, and I just--"
"You're worried about him," Dante finished. "I get that, I do. But you've got to shut it out if you want to get anything done."
I looked at him for a long moment. He shrugged at me, as if to say "I don't make the rules," and I actually laughed a little.
"You're not really anything like I pictured an FBI agent," I said after a moment had passed. He snorted out a disgusted laugh.
"Ugh, and thank god for that. I'm not one. I'm here as a favor to Miles--he got me and some friends of mine out of a tight spot a few years ago, and it's hard for him to find people who will work with him."
"Why?" I asked, genuinely curious. Dante shrugged again.
"Because he's a dick? Because he thinks he's smarter than everyone? Because he punches people in the face if he feels like they deserve it?"
My hand drifted up to my already blackened eye, and I smiled, a sad, rueful thing. "He's not a bad guy," I said, sighing. Dante nodded at me.
"That's true," he said, hopping off the ledge and brushing himself off once. Then he paused, looking me over.
"John," he said, giving me a strange look.
"What?"
"I don't want to get your hopes up, but…" he paused again, clearly weighing his words out. When he spoke again his voice was measured, careful. "If your Holmes is anything like my friend, there's a message in that transcript. I know Miles didn't catch it--but you might. He might have meant you to. You should take a look."
"You think?" I asked, breathily. He held up a hand.
"Don't get your hopes--" he started, but I was already running inside.
I spent hours staring blindly at the sheets of paper, running every connection I could possibly think of. It had to mean something--none of it made sense and it had to mean something--and eventually even Miles took pity on me. He leaned over into my personal space and gently pulled the paper away from me, putting a heavy hand on my shoulder.
"John," he said, very quietly. "I know this is hard, but there's nothing there. I've already gone over it myself, and I've had Dante hack every connection I could think of--"
"Hack," I repeated suddenly, cutting him off. Miles looked at me quizzically, but it took me a second to pull my thoughts together. I could have been wrong, of course, but--
"Miles," I said, "why did you break his arm when he was 13?"
"I didn't," Miles scowled. "He likes to say I did because he's an obnoxious little shit, but I didn't do a damned thing to him. I was chasing him and he fell and broke his arm. It's an in-joke."
"Fine, fine," I said, brushing him aside. "Why were you chasing him, then?"
"He'd just learned to code," Miles said, shrugging a shoulder. "Hacked into my computer and changed my email passwords--"
"Oh my god," I breathed. I shoved back from the table and stood, looking frantically around. "Where the fuck did my laptop bag go? Where'd you put it?"
"Anything you need a computer for--" Miles started.
"No!" I said furiously. "He hacked my fucking passwords too, about a month ago. Blocked me out of all my online poker accounts--the thing about gambling--"
"You think he left a message on your computer," Miles finished, his eyes lighting up. "Oh my god--would he really have been that stu--of course, it's him. Where the fuck is that bag?"
We looked around for a minute, knocking over piles of paper and very nearly an entire pot of coffee before we remembered we'd left it in the car. Miles ran out and got it, whipping it out of its case and opening it the minute he got inside. He pulled up a black screen somehow--hey, I never claimed to be good with technology--and then started typing with a crazed fervor. Everyone in the room stopped what they were doing to watch him; I leaned over his shoulder, desperate and entirely at sea.
"Lazy code," Miles muttered, "no backdoor--Sherlock, damn it, where did you--"
He typed in a string of letters and hit enter, and suddenly the black screen gave way to a video. Holmes was in our apartment, sitting on the couch; the room was almost entirely dark, and he was wearing what he'd on in my "dream." It was all I could not to reach out and run my fingers along the screen, but I shoved my hands in my pockets and watched.
"Hey," he said, glancing around and then focusing on the camera. "So, uh, if I'm wrong about this I'm going to feel really fucking dumb about this Spy vs. Spy shit--but I really hope I'm wrong. I'd love to be wrong, actually, but I really don't think--ah, fuck. Look, if you're watching this then Moriarty or whatever the fuck his real name is has grabbed me, so I'm going to tell you everything I know and shit, and then hopefully you can come rescue me before they kill me."
He laughed a little then, a desperate, wheezing sound, and my heart clenched. "I really fucking hope I'm wrong," he muttered, and then he sighed and continued.
"So, right. I figured out how to make my thesis work today, only took me a year and a fucking half, and there's some shit I need to go get out of my lab tomorrow, some quick tests I need to run. I've been working at home to keep him from keeping tabs on me, but I know he wants me to divert into designing--I think it's some kind of mind control drug he really wants, actually, which is just great. But he'd settle for mind-altering, and anyway I think he's been waiting for me to get to a point where it's clear I could start doing functional design work. Which," and he paused here, laughing hollowly again, "is the point I've gotten to."
"I know he's bugged the lab, and I know he hasn't bugged the apartment--but there's a homeless dude living up the block who wasn't here a week ago, so I think we're being watched. Miles, fuck, I bet you're tearing your fucking hair out--I've got no way to know if the bar is bugged or not, but I'm sure he's gotten into your surveillance feed. I'm pretty sure he's tapping my phone too, and homeless dude is following me and I don't know how to tell you--and I'm probably not gonna. If you're watching this now I didn't tell you, and I'm sorry, man. I should tell you, I should, but--"
He rubbed a hand over his face and then tilted his head back, blinking at the ceiling. "This is such a fucking mess," he said quietly. "I don't want you to be--I don't want you to get hurt, and you'll just pull out a gun and come down to my lab and these assholes--they want me. They need me, they don't need you, they'll just kill you--"
He stopped again. Then he pulled up the sleeve of his shirt, and I felt my breath catch when I saw a gauze bandage around his upper arm. I'd forgotten about that, let that slip to the back of my mind in the face of everything else that had been going on--but he'd been wearing it that night he climbed into my bed.
"Right," he said. "Remember that GPS chip you gave me that I wouldn't carry? I modified it, kind of, and, uh, installed it. Sorry, I know that's gross. It won't send out a signal constantly because that would be too easy to pick up on, but every 48 hours it'll send out a pulse to this computer with my location. So, you know, you can find me and stuff if you need to."
"And hey, Appleseed--" I choked on my own spit, but he only smiled sadly into the screen. "I'm really sorry to have put you through this, I'd fucking kill you if you did it to me, but it's--you know, the more time I spend hiding from them the more likely they'd be to bust into the apartment and grab you or something, and I couldn't--they can't do that. So just--when I finish this I'm gonna do something that's probably really stupid. If it is stupid, just forget everything I say in there, okay? And if it's not I mean every fucking word, John, and either way I'm sorry."
I felt my eyes stinging; I felt everyone in the room carefully not look at me. I wanted to look up, but I couldn't bear to tear my eyes from his face. He tried to smile; his mouth quirked strangely and fell flat, and he ran an agitated hand through his hair.
"Okay," he said, with one more burst of hollow laughter. "I'm--I'm gonna go. Just, uh, try to get to me quick after the pulse, okay? If they figure out that I'm doing that it's going to be really fucking unpleasant. If they even take me, heh. If this isn't just some paranoid delusion."
"I'm sorry, guys," he said, and then the video cut out and he was gone.
--
We all stared at the screen for a minute. Then Miles made a strangled kind of noise and pushed back his chair, running into the other room. For a second, I had a detached, irrational thought he was just trying to get away. Then I heard him yelling for Joseph, screaming at the top of his fucking lungs, and I shuddered back to myself.
I could barely breathe as I heard Miles explaining what had just happened, as I heard him say "helicopter," and "safehouse," and "mobilize." When he and Joseph came back into the room I looked up at them with wide eyes.
"It's a waiting game now," Joseph said, giving me a horribly kind look. "There's nothing you can do until we get the signal."
"If we get the signal," someone muttered. I was just with it enough to see Joseph shoot a murderous glare toward the direction of the voice; then I swallowed hard and stood on shaking legs.
"I need--" I started. My voice broke, and I coughed and tried again. "I need a cigarette," I managed, and I turned and walked out before anyone could stop me.
I leaned against the outside wall of the building, pulled a cigarette out with trembling fingers, and tried to light it. I couldn't get the damned thing to catch, I couldn't get the fire to make it to the right spot, couldn't align anything, so I kept trying. Every click of the lighter reminded me of a cocked gun, of a grenade pin, of Holmes' terrified face, and after the tenth one I hurled the thing away from me, furious.
My fury shattered a second later, and my legs gave out under me. I sank to the filthy ground, covered in glass shards and cigarette butts, and shook there for a long, long time.
It was Miles who finally came out after me, just as dawn was beginning to break. "John," he said, and his voice was as thick as my thoughts were, heavy with the weight of it, with the finality of that message. I looked up at him and could see the fear in his eyes, and that--for whatever reason--was the last straw.
"He's," I tried, but the word got twisted into a tangled sob. I choked on it, trying to reign in back, but I couldn't; the noise of it burst out from me, shameful and raw. I pulled my knees to my chest and covered my face with my hands and tried to control myself, hoping Miles would leave me to my own embarrassing display.
He sat down next to me instead, put a broad hand on my back. "I know," he said, and the fuck if I didn't let it go. I wept wrenchingly into my palms, hating myself for it and unable to stop. I couldn't breathe--I couldn't breathe--he'd come into my room and he'd told me he loved me as best he knew how and then he'd given himself up for me and I'd let him, I'd let him think that I hated him and he'd still done it--
"We're going to find him," Miles said. He didn't sound sure but he did sound fierce, feral even, like he'd kill anyone who got in his way. It was a comfort of sorts. "We're going to find him and he's going to be fine, and then this is never going to fucking happen again. Never."
I nodded into my hands; the tears had stopped but my breathing was still hitching, in that horrible, unstoppable way it does when you've only stopped crying because you have to. I wiped my face as best I could and then he was pressing a Kleenex into my hand, patting me on the shoulder.
"It's not your fault," he said softly. There were birds chirping vaguely in the distance and even that made me think of Holmes, Holmes scared and unsure on the top of that hill, asking me if I was really his best friend. "It's mine, I shouldn't have--"
"Don't," I said. "He'd fucking hate that. I'm sorry I punched you."
Miles gave me a sad half smile. "I'm sorry I punched you too," he said. "That's a hell of a black eye you've got there."
"Yeah, probably not making it better by bawling like a pussy girl," I joked. The levity in my attempt fell more than a little flat but he snorted out something like a laugh anyway.
"Irene'd kill you if she heard you talk like that," he said. Then he sighed. "And frankly, man, if I that wasn't a room full of men who have to follow my orders--" he coughed, blinking up at the sky.
"Yeah," I said softly. "Yeah, I figured as much."
We smiled at each other--sad, strange things in the early morning light. Then he stood and offered me his hand. I took it, and he hauled me up, and we went inside, ready to weather the most miserable fucking wait of our lives.
Title: History, Repeating Itself (Chapter Eight)
Rating: R
Pairing: Holmes/Watson
Warnings: Alcohol and marijuana use, general debauchery, copious use of coarse language.
Spoilers: None, except for Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three, Chapter Four, Chapter Five, Chapter Six, and Chapter Seven of this story.
Author's Notes: This is a fill for an AWESOME prompt at shkinkmeme; both the prompt and the fill thread can be found here. I will continue posting the chapters bit-by-bit there and then archiving them on my journal for the duration of this story.
Chapter Summary: John Watson solves a puzzle and breaks down.
Chapter Eight: On The Compelling Power of Disaster
Everything they had, as it turned out, wasn't much.
It took Dante nearly an hour to hack into the blocked mainframe and access the transcript of my conversation. I insisted that I could remember all of it, but Miles dismissed this, telling me I'd undoubtedly miss something important. I would have fought him on it, but the fury that had kept me moving forward had abated, and I was left a terrified, unhinged wreck. Of course, once he had the file in front of him, he swore, throwing it aside and claiming it useless rambling. I hardly heard him.
If he dies, I thought, looking over file upon file of Mihailov's alleged misdeeds, I am never going to forgive myself. If he dies I am never going to get over it, if he dies I'm going to lock myself up in a mental hospital and never ever come out, he can't die, he can't die--
Eventually, all the noise in the room faded out--Miles' furious barking and frustrated dismal of the transcript, Dante's frantic typing, Alex's clipped, elegant brainstorming. All I could do was stare at the photos in front of me, mutilated bodies and exploded buildings, and think, he can't fucking die.
Night had fallen when I felt someone put a hand on my shoulder. I looked up; Dante was standing over me, sympathy written across his features.
"You need a break," he said, "come on."
"Shouldn't you be--" I started, surprised by how raspy my voice was. He shook his head.
"Alex took over what I was doing. Come on. You smoke, right? We'll grab a cig and then get some of the pizza they ordered."
"They ordered pizza?" I asked, my voice small. He sighed.
"See? And you've got the crazy eyes, too. You need to get out, come on."
Almost blindly--he can't die, he can't die, he can't die--I followed Dante outside. He sat down on a window ledge, hoisting himself up a little to do so, and gestured for me to follow suit. I did, and offered him a cigarette; he turned it down, smiling slightly.
"Thanks, but no," he said. "I don't touch the things unless circumstance demands it."
I looked at him askance, but he just shrugged at me. He was a strange little guy, bald and round-eyed, but he seemed nice enough. I smoked my way through half of the cigarette wondering about him, and then the chorus started again--Holmes pulling away from me, Holmes looking at me like I'd slapped him, Holmes' face on those bodies--
"Hey," Dante snapped, jerking me out of it. I turned to look at him, and he sighed heavily. "Your friend. He reminds me of a guy I know, and so believe me when I say this--you're not going to get anywhere driving yourself crazy over the shit he gets himself into."
"I--" I sighed, taking a drag. "I made a really bad fucking mistake right before he left, and I just--"
"You're worried about him," Dante finished. "I get that, I do. But you've got to shut it out if you want to get anything done."
I looked at him for a long moment. He shrugged at me, as if to say "I don't make the rules," and I actually laughed a little.
"You're not really anything like I pictured an FBI agent," I said after a moment had passed. He snorted out a disgusted laugh.
"Ugh, and thank god for that. I'm not one. I'm here as a favor to Miles--he got me and some friends of mine out of a tight spot a few years ago, and it's hard for him to find people who will work with him."
"Why?" I asked, genuinely curious. Dante shrugged again.
"Because he's a dick? Because he thinks he's smarter than everyone? Because he punches people in the face if he feels like they deserve it?"
My hand drifted up to my already blackened eye, and I smiled, a sad, rueful thing. "He's not a bad guy," I said, sighing. Dante nodded at me.
"That's true," he said, hopping off the ledge and brushing himself off once. Then he paused, looking me over.
"John," he said, giving me a strange look.
"What?"
"I don't want to get your hopes up, but…" he paused again, clearly weighing his words out. When he spoke again his voice was measured, careful. "If your Holmes is anything like my friend, there's a message in that transcript. I know Miles didn't catch it--but you might. He might have meant you to. You should take a look."
"You think?" I asked, breathily. He held up a hand.
"Don't get your hopes--" he started, but I was already running inside.
I spent hours staring blindly at the sheets of paper, running every connection I could possibly think of. It had to mean something--none of it made sense and it had to mean something--and eventually even Miles took pity on me. He leaned over into my personal space and gently pulled the paper away from me, putting a heavy hand on my shoulder.
"John," he said, very quietly. "I know this is hard, but there's nothing there. I've already gone over it myself, and I've had Dante hack every connection I could think of--"
"Hack," I repeated suddenly, cutting him off. Miles looked at me quizzically, but it took me a second to pull my thoughts together. I could have been wrong, of course, but--
"Miles," I said, "why did you break his arm when he was 13?"
"I didn't," Miles scowled. "He likes to say I did because he's an obnoxious little shit, but I didn't do a damned thing to him. I was chasing him and he fell and broke his arm. It's an in-joke."
"Fine, fine," I said, brushing him aside. "Why were you chasing him, then?"
"He'd just learned to code," Miles said, shrugging a shoulder. "Hacked into my computer and changed my email passwords--"
"Oh my god," I breathed. I shoved back from the table and stood, looking frantically around. "Where the fuck did my laptop bag go? Where'd you put it?"
"Anything you need a computer for--" Miles started.
"No!" I said furiously. "He hacked my fucking passwords too, about a month ago. Blocked me out of all my online poker accounts--the thing about gambling--"
"You think he left a message on your computer," Miles finished, his eyes lighting up. "Oh my god--would he really have been that stu--of course, it's him. Where the fuck is that bag?"
We looked around for a minute, knocking over piles of paper and very nearly an entire pot of coffee before we remembered we'd left it in the car. Miles ran out and got it, whipping it out of its case and opening it the minute he got inside. He pulled up a black screen somehow--hey, I never claimed to be good with technology--and then started typing with a crazed fervor. Everyone in the room stopped what they were doing to watch him; I leaned over his shoulder, desperate and entirely at sea.
"Lazy code," Miles muttered, "no backdoor--Sherlock, damn it, where did you--"
He typed in a string of letters and hit enter, and suddenly the black screen gave way to a video. Holmes was in our apartment, sitting on the couch; the room was almost entirely dark, and he was wearing what he'd on in my "dream." It was all I could not to reach out and run my fingers along the screen, but I shoved my hands in my pockets and watched.
"Hey," he said, glancing around and then focusing on the camera. "So, uh, if I'm wrong about this I'm going to feel really fucking dumb about this Spy vs. Spy shit--but I really hope I'm wrong. I'd love to be wrong, actually, but I really don't think--ah, fuck. Look, if you're watching this then Moriarty or whatever the fuck his real name is has grabbed me, so I'm going to tell you everything I know and shit, and then hopefully you can come rescue me before they kill me."
He laughed a little then, a desperate, wheezing sound, and my heart clenched. "I really fucking hope I'm wrong," he muttered, and then he sighed and continued.
"So, right. I figured out how to make my thesis work today, only took me a year and a fucking half, and there's some shit I need to go get out of my lab tomorrow, some quick tests I need to run. I've been working at home to keep him from keeping tabs on me, but I know he wants me to divert into designing--I think it's some kind of mind control drug he really wants, actually, which is just great. But he'd settle for mind-altering, and anyway I think he's been waiting for me to get to a point where it's clear I could start doing functional design work. Which," and he paused here, laughing hollowly again, "is the point I've gotten to."
"I know he's bugged the lab, and I know he hasn't bugged the apartment--but there's a homeless dude living up the block who wasn't here a week ago, so I think we're being watched. Miles, fuck, I bet you're tearing your fucking hair out--I've got no way to know if the bar is bugged or not, but I'm sure he's gotten into your surveillance feed. I'm pretty sure he's tapping my phone too, and homeless dude is following me and I don't know how to tell you--and I'm probably not gonna. If you're watching this now I didn't tell you, and I'm sorry, man. I should tell you, I should, but--"
He rubbed a hand over his face and then tilted his head back, blinking at the ceiling. "This is such a fucking mess," he said quietly. "I don't want you to be--I don't want you to get hurt, and you'll just pull out a gun and come down to my lab and these assholes--they want me. They need me, they don't need you, they'll just kill you--"
He stopped again. Then he pulled up the sleeve of his shirt, and I felt my breath catch when I saw a gauze bandage around his upper arm. I'd forgotten about that, let that slip to the back of my mind in the face of everything else that had been going on--but he'd been wearing it that night he climbed into my bed.
"Right," he said. "Remember that GPS chip you gave me that I wouldn't carry? I modified it, kind of, and, uh, installed it. Sorry, I know that's gross. It won't send out a signal constantly because that would be too easy to pick up on, but every 48 hours it'll send out a pulse to this computer with my location. So, you know, you can find me and stuff if you need to."
"And hey, Appleseed--" I choked on my own spit, but he only smiled sadly into the screen. "I'm really sorry to have put you through this, I'd fucking kill you if you did it to me, but it's--you know, the more time I spend hiding from them the more likely they'd be to bust into the apartment and grab you or something, and I couldn't--they can't do that. So just--when I finish this I'm gonna do something that's probably really stupid. If it is stupid, just forget everything I say in there, okay? And if it's not I mean every fucking word, John, and either way I'm sorry."
I felt my eyes stinging; I felt everyone in the room carefully not look at me. I wanted to look up, but I couldn't bear to tear my eyes from his face. He tried to smile; his mouth quirked strangely and fell flat, and he ran an agitated hand through his hair.
"Okay," he said, with one more burst of hollow laughter. "I'm--I'm gonna go. Just, uh, try to get to me quick after the pulse, okay? If they figure out that I'm doing that it's going to be really fucking unpleasant. If they even take me, heh. If this isn't just some paranoid delusion."
"I'm sorry, guys," he said, and then the video cut out and he was gone.
--
We all stared at the screen for a minute. Then Miles made a strangled kind of noise and pushed back his chair, running into the other room. For a second, I had a detached, irrational thought he was just trying to get away. Then I heard him yelling for Joseph, screaming at the top of his fucking lungs, and I shuddered back to myself.
I could barely breathe as I heard Miles explaining what had just happened, as I heard him say "helicopter," and "safehouse," and "mobilize." When he and Joseph came back into the room I looked up at them with wide eyes.
"It's a waiting game now," Joseph said, giving me a horribly kind look. "There's nothing you can do until we get the signal."
"If we get the signal," someone muttered. I was just with it enough to see Joseph shoot a murderous glare toward the direction of the voice; then I swallowed hard and stood on shaking legs.
"I need--" I started. My voice broke, and I coughed and tried again. "I need a cigarette," I managed, and I turned and walked out before anyone could stop me.
I leaned against the outside wall of the building, pulled a cigarette out with trembling fingers, and tried to light it. I couldn't get the damned thing to catch, I couldn't get the fire to make it to the right spot, couldn't align anything, so I kept trying. Every click of the lighter reminded me of a cocked gun, of a grenade pin, of Holmes' terrified face, and after the tenth one I hurled the thing away from me, furious.
My fury shattered a second later, and my legs gave out under me. I sank to the filthy ground, covered in glass shards and cigarette butts, and shook there for a long, long time.
It was Miles who finally came out after me, just as dawn was beginning to break. "John," he said, and his voice was as thick as my thoughts were, heavy with the weight of it, with the finality of that message. I looked up at him and could see the fear in his eyes, and that--for whatever reason--was the last straw.
"He's," I tried, but the word got twisted into a tangled sob. I choked on it, trying to reign in back, but I couldn't; the noise of it burst out from me, shameful and raw. I pulled my knees to my chest and covered my face with my hands and tried to control myself, hoping Miles would leave me to my own embarrassing display.
He sat down next to me instead, put a broad hand on my back. "I know," he said, and the fuck if I didn't let it go. I wept wrenchingly into my palms, hating myself for it and unable to stop. I couldn't breathe--I couldn't breathe--he'd come into my room and he'd told me he loved me as best he knew how and then he'd given himself up for me and I'd let him, I'd let him think that I hated him and he'd still done it--
"We're going to find him," Miles said. He didn't sound sure but he did sound fierce, feral even, like he'd kill anyone who got in his way. It was a comfort of sorts. "We're going to find him and he's going to be fine, and then this is never going to fucking happen again. Never."
I nodded into my hands; the tears had stopped but my breathing was still hitching, in that horrible, unstoppable way it does when you've only stopped crying because you have to. I wiped my face as best I could and then he was pressing a Kleenex into my hand, patting me on the shoulder.
"It's not your fault," he said softly. There were birds chirping vaguely in the distance and even that made me think of Holmes, Holmes scared and unsure on the top of that hill, asking me if I was really his best friend. "It's mine, I shouldn't have--"
"Don't," I said. "He'd fucking hate that. I'm sorry I punched you."
Miles gave me a sad half smile. "I'm sorry I punched you too," he said. "That's a hell of a black eye you've got there."
"Yeah, probably not making it better by bawling like a pussy girl," I joked. The levity in my attempt fell more than a little flat but he snorted out something like a laugh anyway.
"Irene'd kill you if she heard you talk like that," he said. Then he sighed. "And frankly, man, if I that wasn't a room full of men who have to follow my orders--" he coughed, blinking up at the sky.
"Yeah," I said softly. "Yeah, I figured as much."
We smiled at each other--sad, strange things in the early morning light. Then he stood and offered me his hand. I took it, and he hauled me up, and we went inside, ready to weather the most miserable fucking wait of our lives.