The Science of Amity
There's that split, gut-wrenching second where you wish he was Moriarty.
Duplicity is no new discovery, betrayal no new terrain upon which you haven't tested your footing and found to be most grievous. You know bad things and bad people and bad people, you can handle. You can watch, you can dissect, you can store away for later safekeeping. It hurt, and it hurt quite a bit - more than you'd expected, a low sort of twisting in your stomach where your fingers seized and your mind reached one of those beautiful, dangerous, awful places where it had stuttered to a complete halt.
Your shoulders were ratcheted, your eyes were riveted, your skin was a little too tight and your jacket following suit. It ached. It was uncomfortable. It was nothing compared to what followed. The oil-slick feeling of the acid rising in your throat, when he'd opened that utterly ridiculous jacket and started showing off gadgets and munitions - the one scenario that hadn't crossed your mind, closely followed by the one other.
John. John was going to die, and it was all because of you.
Fear was nothing new for you. You'd been in death-defying situations, life-threatening cases, fights and battles. You'd been afraid for yourself before. Being afraid for someone else was an entirely new experience, jarring and dazzlingly overwhelming. It wasn't often you allowed yourself to slip into the realm of panic. It wasn't often emotions overcame pure and irrefutable logic.
You don't like new things. You don't like that which you don't know how to handle. Death, that had occurred to you, and death was a price to pay in a field such as yours, in a career as dangerous as yours. Death, you had considered and you were quite comfortable with as an inevitability. A scenario worse than death had never quite occurred to you before staring at this man, your colleague, your friend, strapped to enough explosives to level this entire sports centre.
Your palms are sweating. Your mouth is dry.
You have to win this.