Secret Santa 2013
Profiler: Harder to Breathe
Author: kosmickway
Rating: PG
Pairing: George/Rich
A/N: For serialbathera for the 2013 Secret Santa Fic Exchange. Enjoy and Merry Christmas!
A/N 2: Using an oldie but a goodie with “The House That Jack Built” to delve into George and Rich’s relationship.
***
“When it gets cold outside and you got nobody to love, you’ll understand what I mean when I say there’s no way we’re gonna give up. And like a little girl cries in the face of a monster that lives in her dreams, is there anyone out there cause it’s getting harder and harder to breathe?”
1AM phone calls are reserved exclusively for George. If the land-line or the cell phone goes off, if the pager vibrates, or if the tinny “you’ve got mail” for the AOL account chimes any time after midnight, it is invariably something having to do with George’s job. Because he’s completely incapable of ignoring whatever’s making the noise, he always kisses my shoulder, rolls out of bed, and heads into the living room to deal with it, closing the bedroom door so I can fall back asleep.
Tonight the pager vibrates AND the phone rings, which must mean something major has happened. I still try to ignore the noise, though, and fall back asleep … we’d had an enjoyable and VERY thorough love-making session before bed and I’m enjoying the memory of the strong muscles in his back bunching tight under my hands. I’m dozing off again, caught in a fantasy of a very steamy shower with George soaping up my chest, his hands moving lower to my belly, then lower still, when …
“Baby, wake up.”
George is shaking me awake.
I bury my head in the pillow. “Come back to bed.”
“Rich, honey, I need you to wake up.”
His voice carries a tense note, right on the edge of terror, and my eyes pop open immediately, my adrenaline starting to kick.
“What is it?” I sit up and grope for my glasses. “What’s wrong?”
“We need to get out of the apartment.”
“What?” I throw the covers back, spring out of bed, and reach for my wallet, keys, phone, jeans. “Is there a fire?”
“No.” George has pulled on his clothing all ready and is jamming more clothes into a duffle bag. “But we can’t stay here.”
“What the hell?” I pull on a black thermal and start grabbing items of my own and throwing them into the bag George tosses out of the closet at me. “Is the mob after us? Who did you piss off, George?”
“Not the mob. Jack.”
“Excuse me?”
“Jack of All Trades.”
“Wait, whoa, the serial killer you guys have been hunting? What the hell? How do you know-” I stop tossing items into the duffle to stare at George. “What is going on?”
“Keep packing while I explain. We have maybe five minutes before we need to get the hell out of here and on our way downtown.” He heads into the bathroom and begins tossing toiletry items into travel bags, which he then throws to me. “That was Bailey on the phone. Grace and Morgan were just attacked in their home.”
That statement, more than any other, makes me pack faster. Since Grace is one of George’s oldest and dearest friends and Morgan and I their significant others, we end up hanging out together more often than is strictly healthy for any of us. They’re good people. “Attacked in their home” is not a phrase you want to hear associated with people you regularly eat dinner with.
“By whom?”
“By Jack. I knew he’d breached our security over the last few days, had gotten into the computer systems at the office, but he shouldn’t have been able to access our addresses. That information is kept deep inside my files where no one else can get at it but me.”
I can’t help grinning at how earnest he is … and how naïve. “Honey, I hate to break it to you but Jack could have found their home address by hacking the IRS database. I don’t think it’s an issue with your security.” Then the REAL point of the story occurs to me and I stiffen. “Holy shit, that means …”
“Yeah. He knows where we are. So we need to move fast.” He zips up his duffle bag, grabs it, and heads for the living room where he jams a laptop into its carry-case and shoulders it. “Do you have everything you need?” He remembers something and rushes to the fridge. “Your insulin. Here.” He grabs my bottles, an unopened packet of syringes, my testing meter and strips, and dumps them all into a plastic bag. “Let’s go.”
He hurries me out the door, locks the deadbolt and the door, and we head for the elevator. It’s only as we walk that I notice he’s got his hand in his jacket pocket where, I’m quite sure, he’s holding tight to the grip of his gun.
***
I haven’t been to George’s office since he joined up with the Bureau. I used to drop in on him at APD every once in a while to take him out to lunch, but since he got this new job, lunchtime drop-bys are strictly off limits. So even though we’re in offices only a few blocks apart, I’ve only ever seen his from the car window.
We park in the underground structure and hustle inside, George’s hand still on the gun in his pocket. He has credentials which he shows to the guard in the lobby but I have to pull out both my driver’s license and my social security card before being issued a photo ID conspicuously labeled “GUEST” in huge red letters. I pocket it and follow George into the elevator.
“We’re a little paranoid,” he says by way of explanation.
“About Jack?”
“About EVERYONE.”
The elevator spits us out into a room that looks more like a movie set than an office building. People are moving at three times the speed they do in my office and everyone is dressed in “Hollywood Fed” style-dark suits, white shirts, guns on hips. I catch a glimpse of an enormous view screen on one of the walls and a bank of computer monitors. It looks like something right out of Star Trek. I can’t help it … I have to say something.
“Ah, damn, it’s Mission Impossible!”
There’s really no mistaking the pride in George’s voice as he tries to play it cool. “It’s just an office, Rich.”
“No, where I work is just an office.” I follow him along, trying not to gawk and not succeeding. “Where are we going?”
“Command Center.” I glance at him to see if he’s joking and see that he’s NOT-but he’s also smirking as he says it because he is clearly getting a kick out of being so cool.
“Command Center. Just an office. Right.” I give him a little smack on the arm and follow him down a set of stairs and into the heart of the chaos.
It’s sexy watching George in his element like this. He swings immediately into action, pulling up a set of security schematics, a set of video and audio feeds, an internal email window, and god only knows what else. His fingers fly over the keyboard and his eyes narrow in concentration as he mentally works over data that would leave most people utterly confused.
A blonde woman and a light-skinned black man join us at the table. “Hey, George,” the woman says.
“Hey, Sam. Chloe okay?” he responds, his eyes never leaving the screen.
“Yeah, she’s in the office with Angel.” She peers at me and, seeing that George is off in his own world with no intention of facilitating introductions, extends her hand. “Sam Waters.”
“Rich Warren. George’s … roommate.” I fall back on the phrase we’d long ago decided to use with the general population. I can tell by her warm smile though that she’s aware of what roommate REALLY means.
“Nathan Brubaker,” the man says, reaching across the table. “Glad to meet you. Sorry for the circumstances.” He reaches into his pocket, extracts a vibrating phone, and steps away from the table. “Excuse me.”
“Are Grace and Morgan here?” I ask the room in general.
“We’re here.” Grace’s voice is thin and tired. It matches her physical appearance. I haven’t seen her since she and George came back from training at Quantico. Right now she’s dressed more informally than I’ve ever seen her in workout clothes and tennis shoes. It’s the same for Morgan, who’s wearing breakaway pants and a sweatshirt. Grace is holding Morgan’s hand as if she doesn’t plan on letting him go any time soon. Neither looks injured, though both of their faces are sporting the weary look that speaks of a lot of tears having been shed in a short amount of time.
“Thank god.” George tunes back in at the sound of her voice and turns from the computer to draw her to him. “When Bailey told me what happened I thought my heart was going to stop.” He holds her at arm’s length, takes a long, searching look before stepping to Morgan and giving the older man a hard hug.
“Hey,” I whisper in Grace’s ear, taking her in my arms. “You all right?”
“I’m a LONG way from all right, but I’m doing better than he is,” she replies, jerking her head at her husband. “Help me keep an eye on him, okay?”
The room quiets perceptibly and everyone hurries to sit down as a man in black trousers and a white shirt with an unmistakably commanding air comes into the room.
“How’s our security, George?” he asks.
“Right now we’re air-tight. Bailey, meet my roommate, Rich.”
Talk about put on the spot. I quickly extend my hand, feeling like I ought to kiss the guy’s signet ring instead of just offer a handshake. But his smile, as fleeting as it is, is warm and his eyes are friendly.
“At last we meet. Sorry it has to be under these circumstances.”
I’m about to ask about the particular nature of the circumstances, since George really hasn’t told me much, but Bailey saves me the trouble of having to ask by quickly highlighting the events of the night before tossing out the bomb that detonates in the middle of the room: we’re stuck here until Jack of All Trades is captured or until their security is re-established, whichever comes first.
For all that Morgan has had the roughest night of all of us and would probably be glad to stay shut safely away from the homicidal lunatic who’s decided to play mind games with my boyfriend’s team, he’s also the first to vocalize precisely how upset he is by the entire situation.
“We have to be shut up, bunkered in this hole in the ground while this maniac goes around doing whatever he wants?”
So as long as we’re discussing practicalities, I add my two cents. “How long are we talking about here? I’ve got a job.”
“I can’t just not show up for work.” Morgan owns his own tax firm so he could technically not show up for a day or two and let his partner, Casey Torme, take over. But I understand why he doesn’t want to. And it goes without saying that I also can’t just not show up for work … I’m a good architect but not so good that I can’t be replaced by any of a dozen other people waiting in the wings.
“The Bureau will make the appropriate calls to all of your employers. Say the word, you get a new identity. We’ll take you anywhere in the world.”
Bailey’s second pronouncement takes the evening/night/whatever the hell time it is from weird to Twilight Zone. Suddenly we’ve gone from talking about staying under lock and key for a few days, weeks, months and into the witness protection category. George must see the look on my face because he quickly squeezes my thigh under the table.
Bailey’s seen the look, too, apparently, not just on my face and Morgan’s but on everyone’s and so he calls a halt to the meeting and sends us off to our respective offices, which are now, apparently, our homes away from home.
The Bureau staff is efficient, I’ll give them that much. They’ve moved the furniture around and set up cots in George’s office, although I know all ready that I’ll be sleeping alone tonight. Now that he’s here and “on duty,” George won’t be getting any sleep. In fact, the minute that he thinks I’ve fallen asleep (as if THAT was going to happen), he quietly leaves the office, undoubtedly to meet up with the rest of the team and discuss whatever derring-do plan of action they’re going to try next to capture Jack of All Trades.
I’m not the only one with an absent partner who also has insomnia. About ten minutes after George leaves, the door to his office opens a tiny crack and Morgan peers in.
“Hey.” I gesture him inside. “Grace left too, huh?”
He grins a little. “She wouldn’t have stepped out of the room if she thought I was still awake. Although I don’t know how she thinks I could sleep after nearly being electrocuted to death in my own home by a psychopath.”
I shrug. “For them, this is old hat. They roll with the punches … I think somewhere in there they started assuming that we can too.”
Morgan sits down on the couch and I join him. He’s a decent guy-a little bit of a stuffed shirt at times, a little too pompous at others, but really, at his heart, a nice man and a good one. He certainly didn’t deserve a turn on Jack’s roulette wheel of death and despair.
“Being a spouse to an FBI agent is a lot harder than I thought it would be,” Morgan says. “And that’s before all of this went down.”
I laugh. “There needs to be some kind of support group.”
“I guess I never …” Morgan fidgets. “I never realized she’d be gone so often, or working so late. Three out of five work nights I’m home by myself with just Foxy for company because they ran late at a scene or Grace needs a little more time to run a test. I guess it’s not the same with George, though, is it?”
“Not quite that bad. He can do most of his work from the office or from home, so he rarely needs to go with them … but when he’s home he isn’t really HOME, you know? He’s thinking about whatever’s going on here.” I look out the window at the bustle of the Command Center and shake my head. “God, look at this place! I feel like I’m dating James Bond.”
Morgan laughs. “I had no idea this is what her office really looked like. I pictured something more … quiet. More low-tech. I didn’t know she’d be getting all the training and doing all the things a real federal agent does-shooting, self-defense, field-work.” His eyes roam around the office and come to rest on a framed picture on the
table close to where I’m sitting. “Look at this. I never imagined that when she joined up she’d be doing this.”
The photo is fairly recent, taken at the FBI Academy. In it, the team minus Sam Waters is clustered together, sweating, disheveled, blood-stained, but grinning from ear to ear, each holding up a gold brick. At the bottom of the frame are engraved the words “VCTF’s First Yellow Brick Road Run, Quantico, 1997.”
“I feel like there’s a part of her life that I’m missing,” Morgan says softly. “A part I’ve been shut out of. I can’t say that I like that very much. But now, after what happened … maybe I should just be grateful I don’t know more about what’s going on here.”
He doesn’t give me time to answer, just plows ahead to his next question. “Did George ask you your opinion before he signed the contract with the Bureau? Did you get a say in it?”
I nod. “We aren’t legally anything at all in the eyes of the law but if you were to ask George about it, he’d call me his husband. So, yeah, he did ask me what I thought. We had a lot of long discussions about it, actually.”
“What did you say …If you don’t mind me asking?”
“I said the joining the Bureau was ultimately his choice and that none of my reservations should hold him back. I understand his need to try to do something good with his life, something worthwhile. But I also told him that the idea of him being out in the field and in danger wasn’t going to sit easy with me. I guess it’s an uneasy sort of truce that I have with this job.” I meet his eyes. “Same with you?”
“More uneasy today than yesterday.” His hands are shaking. “I don’t know if I can do this, Rich. I don’t know if I can watch her put herself in danger to catch this maniac. Because she will, you know? She called me a few months ago when they were investigating that group that was blowing up buildings around the city. She said she needed to be the person who did the money drops for the team. Rich, I thought my heart was going to leap all the way up into my throat and out of my body, imagining my wife putting herself in the sights of some psychopath. And she’ll do it again if it means catching Jack of all Trades. And George will, too. You know that, don’t you?”
I nod reluctantly. I do know that. George has a talent for trouble and he almost relishes getting into the middle of a sticky situation. I can’t say I like the idea of him spinning some elaborate plot to trap Jack, anymore than I like the idea of Grace using herself as bait.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” Morgan whispers, and I can hear the tears in his voice. “I don’t know if I can live in this hole, waiting for word on what damn stupid thing Grace or George or any of them have done to put themselves in danger to catch this monster. I don’t want to change my identity, my face, my life, for my wife’s job.”
I reach over and clasp him firmly around the shoulders. “I don’t know if I can do it either, man. I seriously don’t know.”
It takes Morgan awhile to calm himself down, but it doesn’t bother me since I’m starting to feel as emotionally rocky as he is and need to try to get myself back to a calmer place, too. We’ve promised our spouses that we would be there for them, promised to see them through their desperate desire to rid the world of monsters. I want to be able to keep that promise and I think, deep down, Morgan wants to do the same thing. But do I wish that George was an IT guy for a tech company who sat in a cubicle all day with an earpiece over one ear, answering geeky questions about malfunctioning software? Boy, do I!
“Morgan,” I say into the darkness.
“Yeah?” His voice is still a little strained but I can tell he’s past the worst of the tears.
“Any of those three nights a week when Grace isn’t home … come over and play poker. Bring beer or wine or whatever the hell you want to drink. We can order pizza or wings or Greek food or cook. We can catch a game. Hell, bring the dog with you. You don’t HAVE to be alone. We can be our own support group while we wait for our monster hunters to come home.”
There’s a very definite smile in his voice when Morgan claps a hand on my shoulder and says, “You got a deal.”
END.
Author: kosmickway
Rating: PG
Pairing: George/Rich
A/N: For serialbathera for the 2013 Secret Santa Fic Exchange. Enjoy and Merry Christmas!
A/N 2: Using an oldie but a goodie with “The House That Jack Built” to delve into George and Rich’s relationship.
***
“When it gets cold outside and you got nobody to love, you’ll understand what I mean when I say there’s no way we’re gonna give up. And like a little girl cries in the face of a monster that lives in her dreams, is there anyone out there cause it’s getting harder and harder to breathe?”
1AM phone calls are reserved exclusively for George. If the land-line or the cell phone goes off, if the pager vibrates, or if the tinny “you’ve got mail” for the AOL account chimes any time after midnight, it is invariably something having to do with George’s job. Because he’s completely incapable of ignoring whatever’s making the noise, he always kisses my shoulder, rolls out of bed, and heads into the living room to deal with it, closing the bedroom door so I can fall back asleep.
Tonight the pager vibrates AND the phone rings, which must mean something major has happened. I still try to ignore the noise, though, and fall back asleep … we’d had an enjoyable and VERY thorough love-making session before bed and I’m enjoying the memory of the strong muscles in his back bunching tight under my hands. I’m dozing off again, caught in a fantasy of a very steamy shower with George soaping up my chest, his hands moving lower to my belly, then lower still, when …
“Baby, wake up.”
George is shaking me awake.
I bury my head in the pillow. “Come back to bed.”
“Rich, honey, I need you to wake up.”
His voice carries a tense note, right on the edge of terror, and my eyes pop open immediately, my adrenaline starting to kick.
“What is it?” I sit up and grope for my glasses. “What’s wrong?”
“We need to get out of the apartment.”
“What?” I throw the covers back, spring out of bed, and reach for my wallet, keys, phone, jeans. “Is there a fire?”
“No.” George has pulled on his clothing all ready and is jamming more clothes into a duffle bag. “But we can’t stay here.”
“What the hell?” I pull on a black thermal and start grabbing items of my own and throwing them into the bag George tosses out of the closet at me. “Is the mob after us? Who did you piss off, George?”
“Not the mob. Jack.”
“Excuse me?”
“Jack of All Trades.”
“Wait, whoa, the serial killer you guys have been hunting? What the hell? How do you know-” I stop tossing items into the duffle to stare at George. “What is going on?”
“Keep packing while I explain. We have maybe five minutes before we need to get the hell out of here and on our way downtown.” He heads into the bathroom and begins tossing toiletry items into travel bags, which he then throws to me. “That was Bailey on the phone. Grace and Morgan were just attacked in their home.”
That statement, more than any other, makes me pack faster. Since Grace is one of George’s oldest and dearest friends and Morgan and I their significant others, we end up hanging out together more often than is strictly healthy for any of us. They’re good people. “Attacked in their home” is not a phrase you want to hear associated with people you regularly eat dinner with.
“By whom?”
“By Jack. I knew he’d breached our security over the last few days, had gotten into the computer systems at the office, but he shouldn’t have been able to access our addresses. That information is kept deep inside my files where no one else can get at it but me.”
I can’t help grinning at how earnest he is … and how naïve. “Honey, I hate to break it to you but Jack could have found their home address by hacking the IRS database. I don’t think it’s an issue with your security.” Then the REAL point of the story occurs to me and I stiffen. “Holy shit, that means …”
“Yeah. He knows where we are. So we need to move fast.” He zips up his duffle bag, grabs it, and heads for the living room where he jams a laptop into its carry-case and shoulders it. “Do you have everything you need?” He remembers something and rushes to the fridge. “Your insulin. Here.” He grabs my bottles, an unopened packet of syringes, my testing meter and strips, and dumps them all into a plastic bag. “Let’s go.”
He hurries me out the door, locks the deadbolt and the door, and we head for the elevator. It’s only as we walk that I notice he’s got his hand in his jacket pocket where, I’m quite sure, he’s holding tight to the grip of his gun.
***
I haven’t been to George’s office since he joined up with the Bureau. I used to drop in on him at APD every once in a while to take him out to lunch, but since he got this new job, lunchtime drop-bys are strictly off limits. So even though we’re in offices only a few blocks apart, I’ve only ever seen his from the car window.
We park in the underground structure and hustle inside, George’s hand still on the gun in his pocket. He has credentials which he shows to the guard in the lobby but I have to pull out both my driver’s license and my social security card before being issued a photo ID conspicuously labeled “GUEST” in huge red letters. I pocket it and follow George into the elevator.
“We’re a little paranoid,” he says by way of explanation.
“About Jack?”
“About EVERYONE.”
The elevator spits us out into a room that looks more like a movie set than an office building. People are moving at three times the speed they do in my office and everyone is dressed in “Hollywood Fed” style-dark suits, white shirts, guns on hips. I catch a glimpse of an enormous view screen on one of the walls and a bank of computer monitors. It looks like something right out of Star Trek. I can’t help it … I have to say something.
“Ah, damn, it’s Mission Impossible!”
There’s really no mistaking the pride in George’s voice as he tries to play it cool. “It’s just an office, Rich.”
“No, where I work is just an office.” I follow him along, trying not to gawk and not succeeding. “Where are we going?”
“Command Center.” I glance at him to see if he’s joking and see that he’s NOT-but he’s also smirking as he says it because he is clearly getting a kick out of being so cool.
“Command Center. Just an office. Right.” I give him a little smack on the arm and follow him down a set of stairs and into the heart of the chaos.
It’s sexy watching George in his element like this. He swings immediately into action, pulling up a set of security schematics, a set of video and audio feeds, an internal email window, and god only knows what else. His fingers fly over the keyboard and his eyes narrow in concentration as he mentally works over data that would leave most people utterly confused.
A blonde woman and a light-skinned black man join us at the table. “Hey, George,” the woman says.
“Hey, Sam. Chloe okay?” he responds, his eyes never leaving the screen.
“Yeah, she’s in the office with Angel.” She peers at me and, seeing that George is off in his own world with no intention of facilitating introductions, extends her hand. “Sam Waters.”
“Rich Warren. George’s … roommate.” I fall back on the phrase we’d long ago decided to use with the general population. I can tell by her warm smile though that she’s aware of what roommate REALLY means.
“Nathan Brubaker,” the man says, reaching across the table. “Glad to meet you. Sorry for the circumstances.” He reaches into his pocket, extracts a vibrating phone, and steps away from the table. “Excuse me.”
“Are Grace and Morgan here?” I ask the room in general.
“We’re here.” Grace’s voice is thin and tired. It matches her physical appearance. I haven’t seen her since she and George came back from training at Quantico. Right now she’s dressed more informally than I’ve ever seen her in workout clothes and tennis shoes. It’s the same for Morgan, who’s wearing breakaway pants and a sweatshirt. Grace is holding Morgan’s hand as if she doesn’t plan on letting him go any time soon. Neither looks injured, though both of their faces are sporting the weary look that speaks of a lot of tears having been shed in a short amount of time.
“Thank god.” George tunes back in at the sound of her voice and turns from the computer to draw her to him. “When Bailey told me what happened I thought my heart was going to stop.” He holds her at arm’s length, takes a long, searching look before stepping to Morgan and giving the older man a hard hug.
“Hey,” I whisper in Grace’s ear, taking her in my arms. “You all right?”
“I’m a LONG way from all right, but I’m doing better than he is,” she replies, jerking her head at her husband. “Help me keep an eye on him, okay?”
The room quiets perceptibly and everyone hurries to sit down as a man in black trousers and a white shirt with an unmistakably commanding air comes into the room.
“How’s our security, George?” he asks.
“Right now we’re air-tight. Bailey, meet my roommate, Rich.”
Talk about put on the spot. I quickly extend my hand, feeling like I ought to kiss the guy’s signet ring instead of just offer a handshake. But his smile, as fleeting as it is, is warm and his eyes are friendly.
“At last we meet. Sorry it has to be under these circumstances.”
I’m about to ask about the particular nature of the circumstances, since George really hasn’t told me much, but Bailey saves me the trouble of having to ask by quickly highlighting the events of the night before tossing out the bomb that detonates in the middle of the room: we’re stuck here until Jack of All Trades is captured or until their security is re-established, whichever comes first.
For all that Morgan has had the roughest night of all of us and would probably be glad to stay shut safely away from the homicidal lunatic who’s decided to play mind games with my boyfriend’s team, he’s also the first to vocalize precisely how upset he is by the entire situation.
“We have to be shut up, bunkered in this hole in the ground while this maniac goes around doing whatever he wants?”
So as long as we’re discussing practicalities, I add my two cents. “How long are we talking about here? I’ve got a job.”
“I can’t just not show up for work.” Morgan owns his own tax firm so he could technically not show up for a day or two and let his partner, Casey Torme, take over. But I understand why he doesn’t want to. And it goes without saying that I also can’t just not show up for work … I’m a good architect but not so good that I can’t be replaced by any of a dozen other people waiting in the wings.
“The Bureau will make the appropriate calls to all of your employers. Say the word, you get a new identity. We’ll take you anywhere in the world.”
Bailey’s second pronouncement takes the evening/night/whatever the hell time it is from weird to Twilight Zone. Suddenly we’ve gone from talking about staying under lock and key for a few days, weeks, months and into the witness protection category. George must see the look on my face because he quickly squeezes my thigh under the table.
Bailey’s seen the look, too, apparently, not just on my face and Morgan’s but on everyone’s and so he calls a halt to the meeting and sends us off to our respective offices, which are now, apparently, our homes away from home.
The Bureau staff is efficient, I’ll give them that much. They’ve moved the furniture around and set up cots in George’s office, although I know all ready that I’ll be sleeping alone tonight. Now that he’s here and “on duty,” George won’t be getting any sleep. In fact, the minute that he thinks I’ve fallen asleep (as if THAT was going to happen), he quietly leaves the office, undoubtedly to meet up with the rest of the team and discuss whatever derring-do plan of action they’re going to try next to capture Jack of All Trades.
I’m not the only one with an absent partner who also has insomnia. About ten minutes after George leaves, the door to his office opens a tiny crack and Morgan peers in.
“Hey.” I gesture him inside. “Grace left too, huh?”
He grins a little. “She wouldn’t have stepped out of the room if she thought I was still awake. Although I don’t know how she thinks I could sleep after nearly being electrocuted to death in my own home by a psychopath.”
I shrug. “For them, this is old hat. They roll with the punches … I think somewhere in there they started assuming that we can too.”
Morgan sits down on the couch and I join him. He’s a decent guy-a little bit of a stuffed shirt at times, a little too pompous at others, but really, at his heart, a nice man and a good one. He certainly didn’t deserve a turn on Jack’s roulette wheel of death and despair.
“Being a spouse to an FBI agent is a lot harder than I thought it would be,” Morgan says. “And that’s before all of this went down.”
I laugh. “There needs to be some kind of support group.”
“I guess I never …” Morgan fidgets. “I never realized she’d be gone so often, or working so late. Three out of five work nights I’m home by myself with just Foxy for company because they ran late at a scene or Grace needs a little more time to run a test. I guess it’s not the same with George, though, is it?”
“Not quite that bad. He can do most of his work from the office or from home, so he rarely needs to go with them … but when he’s home he isn’t really HOME, you know? He’s thinking about whatever’s going on here.” I look out the window at the bustle of the Command Center and shake my head. “God, look at this place! I feel like I’m dating James Bond.”
Morgan laughs. “I had no idea this is what her office really looked like. I pictured something more … quiet. More low-tech. I didn’t know she’d be getting all the training and doing all the things a real federal agent does-shooting, self-defense, field-work.” His eyes roam around the office and come to rest on a framed picture on the
table close to where I’m sitting. “Look at this. I never imagined that when she joined up she’d be doing this.”
The photo is fairly recent, taken at the FBI Academy. In it, the team minus Sam Waters is clustered together, sweating, disheveled, blood-stained, but grinning from ear to ear, each holding up a gold brick. At the bottom of the frame are engraved the words “VCTF’s First Yellow Brick Road Run, Quantico, 1997.”
“I feel like there’s a part of her life that I’m missing,” Morgan says softly. “A part I’ve been shut out of. I can’t say that I like that very much. But now, after what happened … maybe I should just be grateful I don’t know more about what’s going on here.”
He doesn’t give me time to answer, just plows ahead to his next question. “Did George ask you your opinion before he signed the contract with the Bureau? Did you get a say in it?”
I nod. “We aren’t legally anything at all in the eyes of the law but if you were to ask George about it, he’d call me his husband. So, yeah, he did ask me what I thought. We had a lot of long discussions about it, actually.”
“What did you say …If you don’t mind me asking?”
“I said the joining the Bureau was ultimately his choice and that none of my reservations should hold him back. I understand his need to try to do something good with his life, something worthwhile. But I also told him that the idea of him being out in the field and in danger wasn’t going to sit easy with me. I guess it’s an uneasy sort of truce that I have with this job.” I meet his eyes. “Same with you?”
“More uneasy today than yesterday.” His hands are shaking. “I don’t know if I can do this, Rich. I don’t know if I can watch her put herself in danger to catch this maniac. Because she will, you know? She called me a few months ago when they were investigating that group that was blowing up buildings around the city. She said she needed to be the person who did the money drops for the team. Rich, I thought my heart was going to leap all the way up into my throat and out of my body, imagining my wife putting herself in the sights of some psychopath. And she’ll do it again if it means catching Jack of all Trades. And George will, too. You know that, don’t you?”
I nod reluctantly. I do know that. George has a talent for trouble and he almost relishes getting into the middle of a sticky situation. I can’t say I like the idea of him spinning some elaborate plot to trap Jack, anymore than I like the idea of Grace using herself as bait.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” Morgan whispers, and I can hear the tears in his voice. “I don’t know if I can live in this hole, waiting for word on what damn stupid thing Grace or George or any of them have done to put themselves in danger to catch this monster. I don’t want to change my identity, my face, my life, for my wife’s job.”
I reach over and clasp him firmly around the shoulders. “I don’t know if I can do it either, man. I seriously don’t know.”
It takes Morgan awhile to calm himself down, but it doesn’t bother me since I’m starting to feel as emotionally rocky as he is and need to try to get myself back to a calmer place, too. We’ve promised our spouses that we would be there for them, promised to see them through their desperate desire to rid the world of monsters. I want to be able to keep that promise and I think, deep down, Morgan wants to do the same thing. But do I wish that George was an IT guy for a tech company who sat in a cubicle all day with an earpiece over one ear, answering geeky questions about malfunctioning software? Boy, do I!
“Morgan,” I say into the darkness.
“Yeah?” His voice is still a little strained but I can tell he’s past the worst of the tears.
“Any of those three nights a week when Grace isn’t home … come over and play poker. Bring beer or wine or whatever the hell you want to drink. We can order pizza or wings or Greek food or cook. We can catch a game. Hell, bring the dog with you. You don’t HAVE to be alone. We can be our own support group while we wait for our monster hunters to come home.”
There’s a very definite smile in his voice when Morgan claps a hand on my shoulder and says, “You got a deal.”
END.