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He swims out of darkness to a tilting world, cold and dizzy and confused.
My name is -- my name --
I --
His lips won't work. Everything is ... wrong ...
The world slides sideways and he's drowning, drowning -- his chest constricting, air heavy on his tongue, rolling over his throat -- he chokes on it, gags, flops clumsily to the side and retches helplessly. There's nothing in his stomach to come up, just painful dry heaves wringing him out. Everything hurts. Nothing is right.
"Peter," he tries to say, but it comes out a slurred mess.
He's been poisoned. Something's gone wrong. They're -- they're investigating -- it won't come; his brain is a mad jumble of thoughtsensefeelingmemoryhurthurthurt ...
All he knows is that Peter will find him, wherever he's been taken, whatever's been done to him. Peter always finds him.
He lies shivering and clinging to that certainty for a while, until the shaking and dizziness has receded enough that he manages to flop himself to something approximating a sitting position, leaning on the wall. His stomach keeps cramping and dark spots bloom in front of his eyes. He clings to the wall until it stops trying to shake him off, opens his eyes and makes himself look around, even though turning his head makes him retch again.
He has to hold it together. For Peter. He has to help Peter find him, because this has never been a one-sided partnership.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, beats against the back of his brain.
He tries moving his legs. They respond sluggishly, like slabs of dead wood. He's wearing loose pants and nothing else. The room they locked him in is mostly dark, but not entirely, a crack of light beneath the door illuminating a closetlike space. It smells of cleaning chemicals. His elbow is pressed against a stack of boxes. There's a rubbery sheet or tarp wadded up under him, which he's mostly kicked aside in his struggles.
Holding onto the wall, he pulls himself upright by clinging to the wall, balancing precariously on his deadwood legs and wobbling, one careful step at a time, to the door. He's expecting it to be locked, but instead the knob yields under his hand, almost sending him to the floor again with the lack of resistance. Careless captors. He wishes he could remember ....
His head is splitting. He's not sure how he can escape like this. But he has to try. Peter would want him to.
Swallowing, he cracks open the door and peeks out. Tile floor, harsh florescent lights, stainless steel countertops. The smell of disinfectant is stronger. This place -- he knows what it is, knows what it's for. Gropes for the word but can't quite find it. Dead people place.
He turns shakily to look at the floor of the supply closet and the thing he was lying on. Black, rumpled plastic. His breath catches.
They tried to kill him.
It almost worked.
Peter, find me, please.
There's no one in sight, so he stumbles toward the door as fast as he can manage, hanging onto the countertops along the way. No wonder they didn't lock him in. They thought he was dead. Whoever they were --
He's almost to the door when it opens. Neal flinches away -- stupid, stupid, there's nowhere to hide and he can't get his silver tongue to cooperate, can't get his numb brain to offer up an explanation for why he's staggering around mostly naked. Instead, all he can manage to do is fall.
Hands catch him, small but strong. He finds himself looking up at a woman with brown hair drawn back in a ponytail. She's familiar, but he can't figure out why. He makes a weak effort to escape, and only ends up flopping over.
"God damn it, I told you to stay in the closet while I got the stuff," she snaps. "What's wrong with you?"
She tilts him into a sitting position, leaning against a metal cabinet, and stands up to lock the door. Then she crouches beside Neal and unzips a duffle bag. He's too dizzy and sick to see what's inside. The world is swimming around him again. She keeps moving around and it's making him sicker.
"Drink," she orders, and the rim of a glass presses against his lips.
Cold water floods over his teeth, down his throat, and his queasy stomach rebels again. She supports him while he retches with hands as brisk and impersonal as if she were moving a CPR dummy around, then pushes him firmly against the cabinet and puts the glass back to his lips. This time he obstinately keeps his mouth shut. Maybe she's one of them. Maybe she's trying to drug him again.
"If I have to hold your nose shut, I will," she says, cool and brisk. Neal gives up and takes small sips. This time it stays down. After a minute, she pushes the glass into his hand so he can hold it himself, and starts pulling things out of the duffle.
"Get dressed," she instructs him, pushing a wad of cloth into his hands. No wasted movements. She's smooth, economical, and not at all gentle as she takes his pulse. "They're gone now, so I'll take you out the back in the body bag."
"Gone," he tries to ask, and coughs.
"Yep. Whole thing went off without a hitch." She laughs. "You should've seen their faces! Hook, line, and sinker. All the tears you could hope for." She mimes rubbing her eyes.
"Tears," he says, dazed.
"Sobbing," she confirms. "Weeping on your corpse. It was great, wish you coulda seen it. You gotta clear out of town? Because if it was me, I'd stalk my own funeral. Fuckers better cry over me."
The sense of wrongness is crawling up over him, prickling his skin. He lets her dress him like a doll, and sits on the edge of a gurney while she goes to the closet to retrieve the body bag. His hands are steadier and he feels less like he's going to fall over. His stomach is still uneasy but no longer turning flip-flops.
And Peter --
"Peter," he says aloud. There's something, at the back of his brain -- he can almost grasp it --
"That's the FBI agent, right?" she says from the closet, a bit muffled. "Like I said, didn't suspect a thing. Don't know what it is you're running from, my friend, or running to, but there's nothing standing in your way now."
And then, as she spreads out the body bag on the gurney, it hits him -- first a trickle of memory, and then a flood. His breath catches. For an instant, it feels like his heart stops.
Peter isn't coming.
Because there is no they. Not this time.
There is only him.
Retrograde amnesia, he remembers learning in his research, might be a side effect of the poison he took. Now all he can do is wish it had been permanent.
"Lay down," she's saying impatiently, and he remembers her name now, it's Lydia Cooper and she's a crooked EMT; he's paying her a very large chunk of cash plus the promise of making a certain legal problem of hers go away as soon as he's free and clear (and the payoffs for that are in place already, as well).
Free.
He does as she asks, lying down and letting her zip the body bag over his face. It's close and confining and utterly dark, stinking of rubber and disinfectant. He has to breathe slowly, reminding himself that there's plenty of air; he checked and triple-checked the numbers himself.
The gurney jolts under him. He's on his way to wherever it is that he's going -- he's got a plane ticket out of JFK under an assumed name, flying to Toronto since it's a short flight and it'll confuse his trail, and from there ...
... from there, he has no idea. Never thought that far ahead.
So this is what freedom feels like.
He closes his eyes in the darkness, still shivering and ill from the poison. He tries not to think about Peter and Mozzie -- All the tears you could hope for -- and he tries not to wish, desperately, that they'd be the first people he'd see when the bag is unzipped on the hospital loading dock.
They're safe, and he's finally free, and all he wants to do is go home.