What A Big Nose You Have
What Big Ears You Have
It might have been that the usual suspects were keeping something of a low profile after Lynn Paver's supernaturally quick capture yesterday, but whatever the reason, Danny found little to do on foot patrol that morning. It was unseasonably warm that day, and he walked down the High Street in a sort of automatic cloud, half-aware, half-removed. Trying to think.
He told a couple of tourists off for chucking their sandwich wrappers into the gutter right in front of him, then sat down for a minute on the bench opposite the greengrocers', wiping the back of his neck.
A Vanilla Cornetto landed in his lap from behind, casually tossed and still quite frosted over on the blue paper packaging.
Nicholas was leaning against one of Joyce Cooper's flower-poles, apparently inspecting a storefront wall six feet in front of him. He seemed to be dealing with the heat quite well, considering the stab vest he had his hands tucked into, the tie, and the hat.
Danny picked it up, started to focus on picking the fiddly little disc out of the top. The idea that a Cornetto could pretty much fix anything was the closest their relationship had to a philosophy, in some ways. As a concept, as a symbol, even, it stood for quite a lot, though neither of them would have been that quick to explain why. They would now both have to see if it would hold up this time.
“Thanks.”
Nicholas sniffed where he stood, and rubbed at his nose with the back of his hand.
"Not much going on today, then?" Which nearly would have been a dickish thing to say, considering, if Nicholas weren't using the professional level of his relationship with Danny to cryptically ask if he was available.
Danny shrugged, palming the little disc. “Nah. Usual. Couple of bank jobs, crack'ead crashed a helicopter into Specsavers…”
Nicholas nearly smiled, and tried to cover it by thumbing at his lower lip.
"Alright. I'm going to try to be honest, here. I'm still quite angry with you, Danny. But really, I'm angrier at myself. Do you understand?"
Danny got up to brush the few inevitable bits of wafer off his uniform, and glanced hesitantly across at him. “Sort of…?”
Nicholas took his hat off, examining the inside. There was something to be said about Nicholas's patience improving at Sandford, that he'd realized that just because you save a whole damn town does not mean your C.I.D. will stop acting like nine-year-olds, even if they do start doing their jobs. In response, the entire leather rim of his cap was sharpied over. The Andes had looked put-out for a week.
"Two nights in a row, Danny, I fuck up and don't get home in time. In a row. That's only happened about… six, seven times in my life. Total."
Danny blinked at him, with melted ice-cream dangerously close to slipping off the side of his Cornetto. “It's… been goin' on your whole life?”
Nicholas seemed to tense, slightly. "I'm still not sure I'm entirely comfortable with this discussion, Danny. If you ask if anyone told me to stay off the moors, I'm going to get up and leave, right now. I'm not joking."
Danny huffed and squeezed his forehead as if spiked by brainfreeze, but in fact it was more plain tactile confusion. It was perfectly clear that Nicholas wasn't entirely comfortable with this discussion. Of course. Nicholas sometimes turned into a dog-wolf-thingy, and he didn't think it was reasonable that Danny should want to talk about it. Sometimes, Danny wondered if Nicholas was from the moon.
“I can't get my head round this, Nick. Yunno, right now, all I know is I'm glad? 'Least you had a proper reason for lying to me.”
Absently, he licked some ice-cream off his thumb. “Y'still could've told me, though.”
Nicholas laughed, tilting his dehatted head up towards the sky and the hanging baskets, and the sound, instead of that pleased snurf in his voice he'd had yesterday, was a bit sarcastic. "Danny, I don't even tell my girlfriends."
“I'm not your girlfriend,” Danny pointed out, a small, sharp pang unfolding under his ribs as he spoke. “'M your partner. D'ja think I wouldn't believe you? I believed you 'bout everyfin' else, didn't I?”
"Danny, you tried to discuss this in my office. In my sodding office. At work." Nicholas finally sat next to him on the bench, huffing in frustration and glaring at the people walking by in the late summer heat. "Thanks to you, I know more about the, the private lives of everyone walking down this street right now than I ever, ever really wanted to know. What am I supposed to think?"
“Well- not that, for a start!” Danny flailed the hand that wasn't holding the Cornetto at a random passerby on the other side of the street. “You think when it comes to keeping my gob shut I dunno the difference between tellin' you about, about Shelley Carter not payin' her TV license and- and somethin' like this?”
"I didn't want to know how she was getting around paying it!" hissed Nicholas. "And, considering you think it's a big enough joke to explicitly go on about where everyone who is looking to me could hear it, I think the judgement of 'never telling anyone' was quite sound! It's my life, Danny. My career, my freedom, everything hinges around that simple fact that people do not know. Which is why I'm leaving. I've already filled out the paperwork." He breathed, the intensity in his voice winding down.
"But I don't hate you. I, er, I very much don't hate you. At all."
Danny stared at him, perplexed, desolate, mouth slightly open as he sought for the right words. He reached out a palm and pushed gently against Nicholas's shoulder, as if trying to prove that, for the moment at least, he was still there. “An' you leaving is goin' to do what? I'm less likely to go an' tell someone if I'm nowhere near you, am I? I mean… you're my, my best mate, I thought you trusted me an' a'… I trust you, Nic'las, I'd trust you with my fuckin'… life.” He paused. “An', an' I did.”
Nicholas groaned and shoved his face into his hands. "I know. I know you did. You shouldn't have jumped in front of that blunderbuss like an idiot for me, but you did."
Danny had never intended to push that particular fact in Nicholas's face, never, but he kept on at it, regardless, almost wheedling, chasing his friend's perceived faltering. “I knew I'd be all right, though, you told me I was going to be. Why's it any different the other way round?”
"Because you got better, you moron. Because you're able to stay in a hospital for more than a month without issue. Christ, Danny, why didn't you wait until Friday like I told you?"
Danny tipped his head back as if silently petitioning the heavens for a short localised shower of common sense. “Er, I was pissed off my face? I didn't think me not comin' round was life-or-death important? I din't wanna piss in your hedge? Take y'r pick.”
"I told you not to overdo it." But through his intertwined hands, Nicholas's voice sounded more petulant than coldly furious, which meant that for now he'd let the issue go, and that he was starting to let go of his anger towards Danny.
"Why the hell did you come upstairs, then? All the lights were off."
Danny sighed. There were some things that Nicholas just didn't seem to get, yet, for all that he had loosened up since arriving in Sandford, and one of them was the concept that there just wasn't any point in trying to reconstruct the logic of anything you did while properly drunk. It was like trying to scientifically analyse a BeeGees song. You might get a result in the end, but it would be understandable only to you, and everyone would be annoyed at you because it wouldn't be the same after you were done with it. What seemed like the most logical thing in the world while drunk would continue to make perfect sense up until the moment when you realised you weren't that drunk any more, along with all the other little details, like the fact that you were on the roof of your neighbour's barn wearing a neon-pink straw sombrero and not much else.
“I dunno. All your clothes were all up the stairs. I thought, maybe you were…” He hesitated. “…you were ill or somethin'.”
"Or something. 'Yes, because I know exactly on the calender when I'm going to be incapacitated. Come back Friday.'" Nicholas sighed, rubbed at his temples. "Fine! Fine! I give up! Go get an Astra."
Halfway through trying to salvage the poor, neglected, badly-melted Cornetto, Danny had to chew and swallow hastily in order to talk. “Y'wh'?
"You want to ask me questions," said Nicholas, pulling his frog-eating trout face. "And I know you're not going to drop the subject until you get an answer. It's part of what makes you a good copper. Which I'm not going to answer in my office, and I'm not going to answer on High Street, and I'm certainly not taking you to my house this evening. Get a police car and remove all the recording equipment from it, and I will."
*
They eventually parked up on a quiet lane on the edge of town, with the shady, shedding trees overhead hiding the Astra from view in the little layby, getting the speed gun out and setting it up for the look of the thing. Danny, poking buttons on the reader, was feeling horribly nervous. Nervous, like he'd been when he'd first found out when he was going to be on patrol with Nicholas, checking the roster for the exact times so he'd know when to try not to show up late, or hangovery, or with hair like an exploded guinea pig.
Nicholas was staring off into the sheep-covered fields beyond the road. Despite being the one to put himself in the hot seat, he didn't look any better than he had on High Street, and he only looked better than he had in the station because he didn't look like was about to start screaming at his employees for letting him out of the evidence room.
The speed gun let out a cheery three-toned sound, letting them know it was in business. Danny set it in the holder and sat back in the passenger seat, watching a couple of magpies in the trees across the road make the branches bob and shake.
“Does… anyone else know?”
"My mother and her brother." Nicholas stopped, considered. "And I suppose my father would, too, wherever the hell he is."
Danny considered the implications of this. Nicholas had never mentioned his father before, in his memory. “Your uncle Derek? The cunt?”
"He paid bail and then failed to appear in court," said Nicholas, staring into the footwell. "He couldn't afford being sent to prison."
“What, he c'n do it too?” Danny glanced sharply at him, then out the window with a short, amazed laugh. “So it's like in my family everyone c'n bend their thumbs back to touch their wrists, only… bit more big-league.” He admitted this rather sheepishly. “What about your mum?”
Long pause. A car went by, slowing down significantly when it realized there was a speed trap nestled just off the side of the road. "I don't think I'm going to take questions on people I still consider my family."
Danny sighed and flopped forwards, bonking his head into the dashboard. “You don' have to take any questions at all,” he said, apparently to the satnav. “Jesus. Who d'you think I am, Nic'las, Tim bloody Messenger? I mean- d'you really not wanna talk about anything about it at all? Even, like, how we're gonna work it now so you don't have to fuck off back to London, that'd be a personal fav'rite.”
In contrast to the leaning forwards, Nicholas sank until his knees hit the glovebox. "You're my friend, Danny. My only friend, really. I just- I don't-"
“Fort you said you liked it here,” said Danny, raising his head to look at him. The defeated slump in Nicholas's shoulders made his heart sink in sympathy. “S'not like you to just give up.”
Quietly, still with that hopeless face that Danny had only seen on Nicholas before Nicholas had popped the trolley boy on the head with a peace lily, and when Nicholas had taken his keys after being ketchuped; "I like you, Danny…"
Startled, Danny looked up from his scrutiny of the hole where the cigarette lighter wasn't anymore, into Nicholas's eyes. He once again marvelled at how daft he'd been not to have fallen in at once, that first time in the cottage yesterday. It didn't matter whether they were surrounded by fur or not, those eyes. He'd know that look of Nicholas's anywhere, that fierce restraint mixed with a ready vigilance so intense it looked nearly painful. In that instant, Danny realised that he loved that look almost as much as he loved making it change.
“C'mere,” he said, gently, then reached out and enfolded his partner's shoulders in a hug that completely busted the myth that it was impossible to hug someone properly in the front of a car, over the awkward divide of the gear lever. It certainly was possible, and it appeared that Danny was a natural.
For a few seconds, Nicholas baulked at the touch, his whole body freezing up, shoulders tensing with the want to push Danny off, punch him in the face and get some personal space, even, possibly, for those few seconds- it was difficult to tell, from Nicholas's slight movements of muscle under his white shirt, under his skin- wanting to become a different pair of shoulders altogether.
But he stopped. Breathed. "Ergh." And despite direct transcription of that noise sounding more like Danny had just made him puke, in reality, the effect was quite different. And Nicholas, the real Nicholas, under all the incomprehensible layers and defences, came a little closer to the surface.
Danny, chin propped on Nicholas's shoulder as it started to relax, tried to imagine keeping a secret that gigantic for so many years. He found that he couldn't. It would change you, keeping something like that locked up in your head without the slightest possibility that you'd ever be able to let it out. He thought he could understand a little better, now, how flat-out scared Nicholas must be that someone had found out at last.
Nicholas shuddered again, letting his head fall backwards against Danny's shoulder like someone had just massaged the tense knots in his back into spaghetti- and ending up with his face in the crook of Danny's unshaven neck, his breath tickling growing hairs.
This is insane, thought Nicholas. I should be packing to get the hell out of here, back to London where you'll never see the same person twice in the same week, even in your own department. Where it's easy to keep your distance, and nobody'd barge drunkenly into your flat except to rob you. I should be getting things like passports ready, just in case. What am I doing?
Snff.
"God, you really need a shower."
Danny laughed a little into the side of Nicholas's bent head, ruffling the short blond fuzz there, and leant away a bit, giving distance if Nicholas wanted it. "Yeah, well, sorry, but I was hardly goin' to hang about an' shower, was I? With your 'get out on patrol 'fore I run your knackers through the shredder' bit."
Nicholas sat upright again, feeling incredibly odd. It was akin to your ears popping underwater, or something huge and unseen displacing your sense of surroundings. And he wasn't quite sure what it was, which made him uncomfortable. "I'm, uh, I suppose I'm sorry for, for biting your head off." He scrabbled at his door, missing the lock twice. "I should go."
Danny touched the back of his shoulder, uncertainly. To say that he didn't want Nicholas to leave just yet would be an understatement; his heart was going like the clappers and he was half-terrified in case he messed it up and Nicholas turned round and snapped at him, but he was still just about up for the one brave shot in the dark that occurred to him.
"D'y'wanna… go for a walk with me? Lock up the car an'… there's a path up there goes round in a big circle, if…"
But Nicholas didn't snap. He managed to get his door open, and tried to hastily get out while completely forgetting that he'd buckled himself in.
"N-no, I should get home."
And it was like the bit with the eyes all over again, because Nicholas looked nearly in pain, lit up but holding himself back, desperate to get away, striding off down the side of the road before he could change his mind.
Danny let him go, watched him recede in the mirror. He knew that Nicholas probably needed the space, he didn't like leaving it there but he understood on some basic level that Rome wasn't built in a day- although in this case he wasn't at all sure what 'Rome' stood for, and he was beginning to realise that Nicholas's hairy problem was only a part of it.
He sighed, looking across at the empty driver's seat, sat and listened to the faint hum of the speed gun waiting for its next victim for a little while, the inert machine as patient and unconcerned by outcome as a spider in a web. Then, after a few quiet minutes had passed, his brow straightened and the long-distance reflective look cleared.
He had an idea.
What Big Paws You Have
It might have been that the usual suspects were keeping something of a low profile after Lynn Paver's supernaturally quick capture yesterday, but whatever the reason, Danny found little to do on foot patrol that morning. It was unseasonably warm that day, and he walked down the High Street in a sort of automatic cloud, half-aware, half-removed. Trying to think.
He told a couple of tourists off for chucking their sandwich wrappers into the gutter right in front of him, then sat down for a minute on the bench opposite the greengrocers', wiping the back of his neck.
A Vanilla Cornetto landed in his lap from behind, casually tossed and still quite frosted over on the blue paper packaging.
Nicholas was leaning against one of Joyce Cooper's flower-poles, apparently inspecting a storefront wall six feet in front of him. He seemed to be dealing with the heat quite well, considering the stab vest he had his hands tucked into, the tie, and the hat.
Danny picked it up, started to focus on picking the fiddly little disc out of the top. The idea that a Cornetto could pretty much fix anything was the closest their relationship had to a philosophy, in some ways. As a concept, as a symbol, even, it stood for quite a lot, though neither of them would have been that quick to explain why. They would now both have to see if it would hold up this time.
“Thanks.”
Nicholas sniffed where he stood, and rubbed at his nose with the back of his hand.
"Not much going on today, then?" Which nearly would have been a dickish thing to say, considering, if Nicholas weren't using the professional level of his relationship with Danny to cryptically ask if he was available.
Danny shrugged, palming the little disc. “Nah. Usual. Couple of bank jobs, crack'ead crashed a helicopter into Specsavers…”
Nicholas nearly smiled, and tried to cover it by thumbing at his lower lip.
"Alright. I'm going to try to be honest, here. I'm still quite angry with you, Danny. But really, I'm angrier at myself. Do you understand?"
Danny got up to brush the few inevitable bits of wafer off his uniform, and glanced hesitantly across at him. “Sort of…?”
Nicholas took his hat off, examining the inside. There was something to be said about Nicholas's patience improving at Sandford, that he'd realized that just because you save a whole damn town does not mean your C.I.D. will stop acting like nine-year-olds, even if they do start doing their jobs. In response, the entire leather rim of his cap was sharpied over. The Andes had looked put-out for a week.
"Two nights in a row, Danny, I fuck up and don't get home in time. In a row. That's only happened about… six, seven times in my life. Total."
Danny blinked at him, with melted ice-cream dangerously close to slipping off the side of his Cornetto. “It's… been goin' on your whole life?”
Nicholas seemed to tense, slightly. "I'm still not sure I'm entirely comfortable with this discussion, Danny. If you ask if anyone told me to stay off the moors, I'm going to get up and leave, right now. I'm not joking."
Danny huffed and squeezed his forehead as if spiked by brainfreeze, but in fact it was more plain tactile confusion. It was perfectly clear that Nicholas wasn't entirely comfortable with this discussion. Of course. Nicholas sometimes turned into a dog-wolf-thingy, and he didn't think it was reasonable that Danny should want to talk about it. Sometimes, Danny wondered if Nicholas was from the moon.
“I can't get my head round this, Nick. Yunno, right now, all I know is I'm glad? 'Least you had a proper reason for lying to me.”
Absently, he licked some ice-cream off his thumb. “Y'still could've told me, though.”
Nicholas laughed, tilting his dehatted head up towards the sky and the hanging baskets, and the sound, instead of that pleased snurf in his voice he'd had yesterday, was a bit sarcastic. "Danny, I don't even tell my girlfriends."
“I'm not your girlfriend,” Danny pointed out, a small, sharp pang unfolding under his ribs as he spoke. “'M your partner. D'ja think I wouldn't believe you? I believed you 'bout everyfin' else, didn't I?”
"Danny, you tried to discuss this in my office. In my sodding office. At work." Nicholas finally sat next to him on the bench, huffing in frustration and glaring at the people walking by in the late summer heat. "Thanks to you, I know more about the, the private lives of everyone walking down this street right now than I ever, ever really wanted to know. What am I supposed to think?"
“Well- not that, for a start!” Danny flailed the hand that wasn't holding the Cornetto at a random passerby on the other side of the street. “You think when it comes to keeping my gob shut I dunno the difference between tellin' you about, about Shelley Carter not payin' her TV license and- and somethin' like this?”
"I didn't want to know how she was getting around paying it!" hissed Nicholas. "And, considering you think it's a big enough joke to explicitly go on about where everyone who is looking to me could hear it, I think the judgement of 'never telling anyone' was quite sound! It's my life, Danny. My career, my freedom, everything hinges around that simple fact that people do not know. Which is why I'm leaving. I've already filled out the paperwork." He breathed, the intensity in his voice winding down.
"But I don't hate you. I, er, I very much don't hate you. At all."
Danny stared at him, perplexed, desolate, mouth slightly open as he sought for the right words. He reached out a palm and pushed gently against Nicholas's shoulder, as if trying to prove that, for the moment at least, he was still there. “An' you leaving is goin' to do what? I'm less likely to go an' tell someone if I'm nowhere near you, am I? I mean… you're my, my best mate, I thought you trusted me an' a'… I trust you, Nic'las, I'd trust you with my fuckin'… life.” He paused. “An', an' I did.”
Nicholas groaned and shoved his face into his hands. "I know. I know you did. You shouldn't have jumped in front of that blunderbuss like an idiot for me, but you did."
Danny had never intended to push that particular fact in Nicholas's face, never, but he kept on at it, regardless, almost wheedling, chasing his friend's perceived faltering. “I knew I'd be all right, though, you told me I was going to be. Why's it any different the other way round?”
"Because you got better, you moron. Because you're able to stay in a hospital for more than a month without issue. Christ, Danny, why didn't you wait until Friday like I told you?"
Danny tipped his head back as if silently petitioning the heavens for a short localised shower of common sense. “Er, I was pissed off my face? I didn't think me not comin' round was life-or-death important? I din't wanna piss in your hedge? Take y'r pick.”
"I told you not to overdo it." But through his intertwined hands, Nicholas's voice sounded more petulant than coldly furious, which meant that for now he'd let the issue go, and that he was starting to let go of his anger towards Danny.
"Why the hell did you come upstairs, then? All the lights were off."
Danny sighed. There were some things that Nicholas just didn't seem to get, yet, for all that he had loosened up since arriving in Sandford, and one of them was the concept that there just wasn't any point in trying to reconstruct the logic of anything you did while properly drunk. It was like trying to scientifically analyse a BeeGees song. You might get a result in the end, but it would be understandable only to you, and everyone would be annoyed at you because it wouldn't be the same after you were done with it. What seemed like the most logical thing in the world while drunk would continue to make perfect sense up until the moment when you realised you weren't that drunk any more, along with all the other little details, like the fact that you were on the roof of your neighbour's barn wearing a neon-pink straw sombrero and not much else.
“I dunno. All your clothes were all up the stairs. I thought, maybe you were…” He hesitated. “…you were ill or somethin'.”
"Or something. 'Yes, because I know exactly on the calender when I'm going to be incapacitated. Come back Friday.'" Nicholas sighed, rubbed at his temples. "Fine! Fine! I give up! Go get an Astra."
Halfway through trying to salvage the poor, neglected, badly-melted Cornetto, Danny had to chew and swallow hastily in order to talk. “Y'wh'?
"You want to ask me questions," said Nicholas, pulling his frog-eating trout face. "And I know you're not going to drop the subject until you get an answer. It's part of what makes you a good copper. Which I'm not going to answer in my office, and I'm not going to answer on High Street, and I'm certainly not taking you to my house this evening. Get a police car and remove all the recording equipment from it, and I will."
*
They eventually parked up on a quiet lane on the edge of town, with the shady, shedding trees overhead hiding the Astra from view in the little layby, getting the speed gun out and setting it up for the look of the thing. Danny, poking buttons on the reader, was feeling horribly nervous. Nervous, like he'd been when he'd first found out when he was going to be on patrol with Nicholas, checking the roster for the exact times so he'd know when to try not to show up late, or hangovery, or with hair like an exploded guinea pig.
Nicholas was staring off into the sheep-covered fields beyond the road. Despite being the one to put himself in the hot seat, he didn't look any better than he had on High Street, and he only looked better than he had in the station because he didn't look like was about to start screaming at his employees for letting him out of the evidence room.
The speed gun let out a cheery three-toned sound, letting them know it was in business. Danny set it in the holder and sat back in the passenger seat, watching a couple of magpies in the trees across the road make the branches bob and shake.
“Does… anyone else know?”
"My mother and her brother." Nicholas stopped, considered. "And I suppose my father would, too, wherever the hell he is."
Danny considered the implications of this. Nicholas had never mentioned his father before, in his memory. “Your uncle Derek? The cunt?”
"He paid bail and then failed to appear in court," said Nicholas, staring into the footwell. "He couldn't afford being sent to prison."
“What, he c'n do it too?” Danny glanced sharply at him, then out the window with a short, amazed laugh. “So it's like in my family everyone c'n bend their thumbs back to touch their wrists, only… bit more big-league.” He admitted this rather sheepishly. “What about your mum?”
Long pause. A car went by, slowing down significantly when it realized there was a speed trap nestled just off the side of the road. "I don't think I'm going to take questions on people I still consider my family."
Danny sighed and flopped forwards, bonking his head into the dashboard. “You don' have to take any questions at all,” he said, apparently to the satnav. “Jesus. Who d'you think I am, Nic'las, Tim bloody Messenger? I mean- d'you really not wanna talk about anything about it at all? Even, like, how we're gonna work it now so you don't have to fuck off back to London, that'd be a personal fav'rite.”
In contrast to the leaning forwards, Nicholas sank until his knees hit the glovebox. "You're my friend, Danny. My only friend, really. I just- I don't-"
“Fort you said you liked it here,” said Danny, raising his head to look at him. The defeated slump in Nicholas's shoulders made his heart sink in sympathy. “S'not like you to just give up.”
Quietly, still with that hopeless face that Danny had only seen on Nicholas before Nicholas had popped the trolley boy on the head with a peace lily, and when Nicholas had taken his keys after being ketchuped; "I like you, Danny…"
Startled, Danny looked up from his scrutiny of the hole where the cigarette lighter wasn't anymore, into Nicholas's eyes. He once again marvelled at how daft he'd been not to have fallen in at once, that first time in the cottage yesterday. It didn't matter whether they were surrounded by fur or not, those eyes. He'd know that look of Nicholas's anywhere, that fierce restraint mixed with a ready vigilance so intense it looked nearly painful. In that instant, Danny realised that he loved that look almost as much as he loved making it change.
“C'mere,” he said, gently, then reached out and enfolded his partner's shoulders in a hug that completely busted the myth that it was impossible to hug someone properly in the front of a car, over the awkward divide of the gear lever. It certainly was possible, and it appeared that Danny was a natural.
For a few seconds, Nicholas baulked at the touch, his whole body freezing up, shoulders tensing with the want to push Danny off, punch him in the face and get some personal space, even, possibly, for those few seconds- it was difficult to tell, from Nicholas's slight movements of muscle under his white shirt, under his skin- wanting to become a different pair of shoulders altogether.
But he stopped. Breathed. "Ergh." And despite direct transcription of that noise sounding more like Danny had just made him puke, in reality, the effect was quite different. And Nicholas, the real Nicholas, under all the incomprehensible layers and defences, came a little closer to the surface.
Danny, chin propped on Nicholas's shoulder as it started to relax, tried to imagine keeping a secret that gigantic for so many years. He found that he couldn't. It would change you, keeping something like that locked up in your head without the slightest possibility that you'd ever be able to let it out. He thought he could understand a little better, now, how flat-out scared Nicholas must be that someone had found out at last.
Nicholas shuddered again, letting his head fall backwards against Danny's shoulder like someone had just massaged the tense knots in his back into spaghetti- and ending up with his face in the crook of Danny's unshaven neck, his breath tickling growing hairs.
This is insane, thought Nicholas. I should be packing to get the hell out of here, back to London where you'll never see the same person twice in the same week, even in your own department. Where it's easy to keep your distance, and nobody'd barge drunkenly into your flat except to rob you. I should be getting things like passports ready, just in case. What am I doing?
Snff.
"God, you really need a shower."
Danny laughed a little into the side of Nicholas's bent head, ruffling the short blond fuzz there, and leant away a bit, giving distance if Nicholas wanted it. "Yeah, well, sorry, but I was hardly goin' to hang about an' shower, was I? With your 'get out on patrol 'fore I run your knackers through the shredder' bit."
Nicholas sat upright again, feeling incredibly odd. It was akin to your ears popping underwater, or something huge and unseen displacing your sense of surroundings. And he wasn't quite sure what it was, which made him uncomfortable. "I'm, uh, I suppose I'm sorry for, for biting your head off." He scrabbled at his door, missing the lock twice. "I should go."
Danny touched the back of his shoulder, uncertainly. To say that he didn't want Nicholas to leave just yet would be an understatement; his heart was going like the clappers and he was half-terrified in case he messed it up and Nicholas turned round and snapped at him, but he was still just about up for the one brave shot in the dark that occurred to him.
"D'y'wanna… go for a walk with me? Lock up the car an'… there's a path up there goes round in a big circle, if…"
But Nicholas didn't snap. He managed to get his door open, and tried to hastily get out while completely forgetting that he'd buckled himself in.
"N-no, I should get home."
And it was like the bit with the eyes all over again, because Nicholas looked nearly in pain, lit up but holding himself back, desperate to get away, striding off down the side of the road before he could change his mind.
Danny let him go, watched him recede in the mirror. He knew that Nicholas probably needed the space, he didn't like leaving it there but he understood on some basic level that Rome wasn't built in a day- although in this case he wasn't at all sure what 'Rome' stood for, and he was beginning to realise that Nicholas's hairy problem was only a part of it.
He sighed, looking across at the empty driver's seat, sat and listened to the faint hum of the speed gun waiting for its next victim for a little while, the inert machine as patient and unconcerned by outcome as a spider in a web. Then, after a few quiet minutes had passed, his brow straightened and the long-distance reflective look cleared.
He had an idea.
What Big Paws You Have