Armor

by livenudebigfoot

Summary:

Finch expresses fondness for other people via expensive and expertly tailored gifts. This makes lots of people uncomfortable, but mostly Fusco.

Chapter 1

Notes:

*** IMPORTANT CONTENT NOTE, PLEASE READ. ***

I just wanted to note for any new readers coming across my fic that the primary Number plot in this story contains multiple references to child sex trafficking. This part of the plot remains offscreen and is never explicitly described or even explicitly referred to. However, it is part of the fic's background and I felt that you should be aware.

Thank you for reading.

It starts because Fusco can't keep his big mouth shut. He doesn't mean anything by it, just bitching for the sake of it, but like always, he winds up screwing himself over.

It starts because he's on the phone with Finch, which always seems to set him off. If he thought about it ever, Fusco would say it's because Finch knows so much that Fusco doesn't need to watch what he says to him. Finch doesn't scare him like Reese does, and Fusco doesn't know him well enough that he cares what Finch thinks of him. He can just lay into him, and Finch lets him, which Fusco guesses is some small concession to Fusco's right to be angry about what's happening to him.

It starts because, when Reese suddenly rips open his passenger's side door, dumps a bruised, shivering woman with bits of glass in her hair in the seat, and tells Fusco to drive to fucking Connecticut, the woman doesn't speak English.

'Cause, if she did speak English, he'd be talking to her. Not about what happened, since that's not his business and she doesn't look like she's in the mood to discuss it anyway. But about normal, mundane things. Something that might calm her down. But she speaks a language Fusco can't quite identify, maybe Russian, so there goes that idea. She seems to calm down a bit on her own after a time and just stares out the windshield the whole trip, eyes dark and wide, so Fusco gets the sense that maybe she's not a big talker. Maybe she was at one point, but she won't be, for a while.

But if she spoke English, maybe he'd be talking to her, instead of talking himself awake to Finch on the phone, bitching and bitching and bitching.

He calls from a place of normalcy, because Reese had told him he wasn't allowed to stop for coffee, and what kind of bullshit is that because he hasn't slept for 48 hours and he feels like he's about to pass out on the steering wheel.

Finch says, "I understand your concerns, Detective, but Mr. Reese is completely right. Time is of the essence."

"Okay," Fusco says, "Okay, but I should warn you. If I fall asleep and crash us, we may be slightly late."

Finch sighs. "Let's try to keep you awake."

And that's how he winds up angrily pouring his heart out to Finch, first about how fucking tired he is, then about being treated like a glorified chauffeur when there are murders he could be solving, then about every way that Reese, Finch, and Associates have ever wronged him, which is fast becoming one of his favorite topics.

The mention of the jacket is little more than a footnote to a much longer complaint; Fusco barely glances over it, but Finch makes him go back and explain.

"Yeah, my jacket got shot up my first day out. Sign of things to come, I guess. I lost a good suit and coat too. You know. Bullet hole in the ass."

Finch doesn't say anything for a minute and Fusco, left with the silent woman and the dark road for company, becomes embarrassed. "I mean, it's no big deal," he says, because it isn't, not in the grand scheme of things, and he doesn't even think about that suit anymore because he knows it was worth it. He just likes to complain, that's all. It makes him feel like he's fighting back. "I'm just saying you guys should start up a reimbursement fund or something."

They carry on from there, and he drops the woman off at Bradley International. She barely acknowledges him on the way out of the car, walks directly into the arms of a dark-suited, shabby man idling nervously on the curb. As the two of them run into the airport without a word or a look back, Fusco thinks he probably barely rates a mention in her story.

He thinks Reese and Finch probably have whole chapters devoted to them.

They're okay, really, the two of them.

Fusco grabs coffee on the way home, makes it to his apartment just in time to crash for twelve hours. When he wakes up again, he's less pissed off about things, and he forgets all about that conversation he had with Finch.

He forgets all about it until there's a big, flat white box on his desk at work, and he opens it up to find a leather bomber jacket.

Obviously, he should close up the box right away because this looks shady as hell, but he risks touching it, runs the tips of his fingers down the sleeve. It's deep brown leather, smooth and rich with a glow to it, a shine that is not false or plastic. It's like butter under his touch. Fusco slams the lid down and the puff of displaced air that escapes smells dark and warm and earthy. He jams the box under his desk and tries not to look suspicious, which means he looks very suspicious, which means Carter gives him a look from across the way.

"What was that?" she asks.

"Present," he says shortly, voice low. "From a friend of mine."

She nods and her aspect stays casual but she mouths "John?" He keeps forgetting she knows, they both know, they're on the level. No more secrets. He's always relieved when he remembers again.

"No. The other guy." He keeps looking around to see if anyone's listening in because he hates talking about this at work.

She rolls her eyes. She keeps telling him he wouldn't have to worry about discussing it at work if he didn't get so shifty every time it came up. "What for?"

"I don't know. Reimbursement, I think."

He keeps it hidden for a couple of hours, until Carter tells him they're going out for coffee and he smuggles it out under a jacket draped in the crook of his arm. She makes him show her in the car.

"Fusco, no way is this reimbursement," she says, checking the tag at the nape of the neck. "This is a salary."

"It's that good?" he asks. He's completely out of his depth here.

"It's Burberry," she says, like it means something. Which, it does, but in a vague way, pinging something he heard a long time ago and didn't pay much attention to. He thinks it's probably good. "'Made in Italy,'" she reads on a side tag. "What did you do?"

"Nothing. Just. What I always do." Fusco shrugs helplessly.

"Does he want something?" she asks. She turns the pockets inside out, looking for a note.

"I don't think so. I just mentioned that the guy in the suit shot my old jacket full of holes. I didn't think he'd do anything about it. I was just complaining about shit that doesn't matter."

When he looks up, Carter is eying him strangely. "You know, Fusco, one of these days you need to catch me up on what happened around here before I joined up."

He laughs a little. "We. Uh. We don't always get along, me and him."

"No kidding?" She shakes her head. "Anyway, I don't know if you want to accept this thing. Maybe you don't want to know how much it costs, but. It's a lot."

"How much is a lot?"

She shrugs. "Half of what you make in a month?"

He says solemnly, "That is a lot."

"It's your business," she says. "But I'd be careful." Then, a little sly, "Are you gonna try it on?"

He shakes his head. "No. You're right. I'll give it back."

Carter passes it back to him, and he catches himself running his palms over the leather. There's a good weight to it, quality. He misses it already.

He makes the call later, from home, the jacket staring him down balefully from the half-open box on his coffee table.

"Detective," Finch answers, and the warm, expectant quality in his voice sends a pang of guilt through Fusco's chest. "Does it fit?"

"I don't know," he says. "I haven't tried it on yet. Listen," he swallows, leans forward like he's talking to Finch in person across a table or something instead of over the phone. "I can't accept this. I'm grateful and all, really, it's good of you. I guess that's it; it's too good. The jacket I lost was maybe forty bucks, tops, and then you go and...I don't know how much this cost, but Carter says a lot, and she's a woman so I trust her to know about clothes. You didn't have to do that and I'm not so bad off I can't buy my own stuff. We're okay, me and you. I just can't accept this. Sorry. Thank you," he says, "but, yeah, sorry."

Finch doesn't speak for a moment and there's only the rush of tense silence on the other end.

"I think you misunderstand me, Detective," Finch says, finally. "There are no strings attached here. No conditions. It's just a gift."

“I know. I know,” but he didn’t, not really, so that’s good to hear. “But I can’t.”

“You can,” Finch says, gently and firmly. “You can and you will, because you deserve it. And you deserve it,” he says over Fusco’s weak, astonished sound of protest, “because I say you do. Don’t try to convince me otherwise. I’m sure you could, but please don’t. I don’t want anything from you in exchange. I just saw a need and wanted to fill it. You don’t owe me.”

Fusco is quiet, chastised. “I know it wasn’t like that,” he says. “But…”

“Fusco,” Finch snaps, and he jumps a little at the sound of his name instead of his title. “I’m not taking the jacket back. Throw it out, set it on fire, I don’t care. It’s yours. You’re welcome.” He ends the call right there, like the slamming of a door.

He feels sort of trapped with it now. The jacket’s right in front of him, still fundamentally his and he wants it, he does, he’s just not sure why it’s his or what he’d be agreeing to if he accepted it.

He wants it to be like Finch says, just a present because Finch, he guesses, likes him and thinks he deserves it, but Fusco knows he doesn’t deserve it and nothing is ever that simple.

It doesn’t matter. He’ll donate it or something. That’s probably the right thing, the Carter-approved thing to do. It’ll be gone as soon as he can get it to the Salvation Army. There. Not his problem.

But, if he’s going to get rid of it anyway, he guesses that trying the jacket on won’t hurt.

The leather is soft and supple and he’s half in love with it from the second he puts it on. The lining is smooth; he’d say synthetic, but because it’s Finch’s gift he knows it’s silk, a dark mahogany check. It’s a short collar, not the kind that you pop against the wind, not showy, just enough to warm the back of your neck. Thick, ribbed cuffs are snug, but not tight, trapping heat and holding it in.

It’s a good fit. It spans his broad shoulders just right, and he was worried he’d be too wide or too short, but he isn’t; it’s right, it’s all right. It’s loose enough that he can draw a gun easily, loose enough that he could wear a Kevlar vest underneath it if he had to. Finch thought of this. Fusco isn’t sure anyone’s ever thought this hard about him in his life.

The zip purrs as he draws it up, smooth and easy.

Brown leather bomber jacket. He’s had it on for about two seconds and it’s already the best thing he’s ever owned.

He can’t take it off fast enough.

Chapter 2

It might have ended there. It might have, except the next Friday, just as Fusco’s shift is ending and he’s planning to go home, sleep for a couple of hours, and then pretend to not be going crazy for his kid’s benefit, Fusco gets a call.

“Now?” he asks, pained.

“Yes, Lionel,” Reese says in a firm tone. “Now.”

This is how Fusco ends up kneeling on a roof at three in the morning with a pair of binoculars pressing raw, pink circles around his eyes as he watches people walk in and out of a hotel, preparing to call Finch if he sees their suspect walk out. The person he’s looking for is, and he quotes, “Male, Caucasian, brown hair, mid-thirties, average height, average build, wearing a dark jacket.”

Fusco has made about fifteen calls in the last hour and he and Finch are completely sick of hearing each other’s voices.

“Maybe if you’d be more specific,” Fusco’s saying, “I could tell you something worth knowing. If you don’t give me anything better than that, I’m stuck telling you about every whitebread jackass that walks through those d – there’s another one!”

“Not him,” Finch says. Fusco’s not sure how he knows that. He thinks maybe Finch is watching all of this too, which makes Fusco the backup-lookout in this little adventure. That would be insulting enough on its own, but it’s made worse by the fact that Finch is probably watching this from a nice warm building somewhere instead of a freezing rooftop. Fusco shivers and thinks wistfully about the jacket, which is still sitting on his coffee table, in the original box, untouched because Fusco just hasn’t had the time to get rid of it yet.

“How can you even tell?”

“The nose is wrong. The footage I’m looking at is grainy, but even I can tell that.” Son of a bitch, he is watching from indoors somewhere. He probably has a chair and everything.

“The nose is – sorry, you wanna describe this one-in-a-million freak nose for me? Maybe give me a little help knowing what the hell this guy looks like?”

Finch pauses, takes a breath, seems to be gathering patience. “It’s very subtle,” he says, carefully.

“Or, hey, there’s this new thing you might want to look at, it’s called send me a fucking picture.”

“Detective,” Finch says in clipped tones, “I am doing my best. At the moment, there are no pictures, as the man in question has recently undergone plastic surgery. What we do have are eyewitness reports, which I obtained when he tried to kill me.” The last few words are said through gritted teeth.

“Oh.” Fusco shifts. The roof is hell on his knees. “Sorry about that.”

“It’s fine.”

“You okay?”

“I escaped unharmed.”

“Yeah, but that’s not…” he begins, before stopping himself because he’s tired of fighting and he just wants to go home. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.”

Fusco tries not to heave an audible sigh of relief.

They’re all out of things to say at this point, but neither of them hang up. They just sit there and breathe, not quite listening to each other, occasionally breaking the quiet with a quick exchange of “Is that him?”/”No.” It’s better not having to call each other every five minutes. This way, it’s like they’re in the same room, not forcing conversation, just keeping each other company. They’ve had maybe twenty minutes total of actual, face-to-face interaction since they first met, and Fusco wonders if it’d actually be like this if they ever spent any time together.

Finally, Fusco asks, “Are you still pissed at me because of the jacket thing?”

“Of course not,” Finch replies on automatic, but he sounds pissed, so Fusco knows what’s up now.

“I’m sorry for how I came off there,” Fusco says. “It fits, by the way.”

“Does it.” Not a question.

“Yeah. Really well.” Fusco clears his throat. “How did you…?”

Tersely, Finch says, “I estimated.”

“Well. Um. You were right.”

“How astute of me.”

“You did good.”

“Mmhmm.”

The silence this time is far tenser than before.

Fusco takes a deep breath, tries again. “I just want you to know that it meant a lot to me. I can’t keep it, but it did. It really did.”

“Detective Fusco?” Finch says. “Please stop talking.”

Obediently, he does.

It’s at around this moment that there is the sound of shattering glass and Fusco looks across the street in time to see a man falling from a shattered window on the 20^th floor to the pavement below.

“What was that?” Finch asks, sharply.

“Looks like…” Fusco adjusts the focus on the binoculars, peers over the edge. “…Brown hair, Caucasian, dark jacket, average height, average build. He landed facedown, though, so I can’t tell you about the nose.”

Finch heaves a long-suffering sigh and Fusco takes a moment to look back up to the window, where he is unsurprised to see Reese, skulking just beyond the window frame. Reese is sidling from foot to foot, seems torn between staying safely out of sight and peering over the edge. He looks just a little bit sheepish. All at once, the line of his back stiffens. He raises his head like a dog catching a scent on the wind and he turns his head to stare across the way, from his high window to the roof where Fusco is hiding. Impossibly, Reese waves at him.

“I think that’s your guy who just took up skydiving,” Fusco says to Finch, waving back at Reese on autopilot before he realizes how bizarre this is and stops. “Either that or our friend in the suit just killed some innocent guy.”

“Oh, I hope it’s not that,” Finch says, sounding fretful.

“Me too.” Fusco watches as Reese pulls back from the window and out of sight. “So. Is that it?”

“I can’t believe this has happened twice,” Finch murmurs. “Yes, I believe that wraps everything up.”

“Am I ever going to know what just happened?”

“Probably not,” Finch admits. “Count your blessings, Fusco. I’m intimately familiar with the details of this case, and most of them are idiotic.”

“Yeah, kinda seemed that way.”

“Go home, Detective,” Finch says with a hint of fondness in his voice. “Get some sleep.”

“Yeah? You too. Good night.” As he hangs up, Fusco is struck by how late it is, how tired he’d be if Finch hadn’t been keeping him up.

He guesses he’s still tired because it takes until he gets home and the security chain is locked for him to realize that he forgot about Michael. Luckily, the kid comes to the door, eyes half closed and puffy with sleep, blanket draped over his shoulders, and stands on tiptoe to undo the chain and let Fusco in.

“Hey, buddy,” he says, half-whispering, not quite crossing the threshold of his own front door.

“Hey, Dad,” Michael says, swiping at one eye. “What time is it?”

“Real late. You weren’t still up, were you?”

“No. I fell asleep on the couch.” The dark room is filled with the flickering blue light of the TV. Fusco steps in, takes his coat off, goes to turn off the TV while Michael shuts the door and locks the deadbolt behind him.

“Did your mom leave you here?” Fusco asks as he hits the off button and the apartment sinks into complete blackness.

“Yeah. She waited for a while, but she had to go.” Michael tugs at the blanket around his shoulders. “She got really mad.”

Fusco bets. He walks half-blind to the kitchen, flips on the switch. “Did you grab any dinner?”

“I made a sandwich.” Michael sounds slightly proud of himself. He steps into the light of the kitchen and sits down at the table. It’s at this point that Fusco realizes the blanket around his shoulders isn’t a blanket. It’s the jacket.

Fusco gestures. “Whatcha got there, Mick?”

Michael, swamped in the broad shoulders of the jacket, shrugs. “It’s a coat. I got cold,” he says. “It’s yours, right?”

“Right,” he says, without really thinking. Then, softly, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” he says. “You were doing police stuff, right?”

No. I don’t know what I was doing, but it wasn’t that. “Yeah,” he says.

“Then it’s okay,” Michael says, decisively.

Fusco smiles at him, helplessly, like he’s taken to doing since his estimated lifespan got a hell of a lot shorter. “You’re a good kid, Mick.”

“Okay,” Michael says, rubbing at his eyes again.

“I think it’s time for you to go to bed.”

“But you just got here,” he says, miserably.

“I know,” Fusco says. “You can wake me up early tomorrow morning. That’ll be my punishment. Now go brush your teeth.”

Michael stumbles into the bathroom, loose with sleep, and Fusco takes the moment alone to loathe himself and fight off a headache. Michael’s an independent kid; he has to be, but Fusco hates that this can happen, that he can come home hours and hours late and Michael understands because that’s just how his dad is. That’s not the kind of dad he wants to be.

Michael gets himself ready for bed, and when Fusco walks by his room to check on him, Michael’s out cold on top of the covers, jacket draped over him, sleeve twisted around his arm. Fusco can’t get rid of that jacket now.

He can’t let this go.

Chapter 3

Fusco doesn't hear from Finch again for a long time after that. This isn't so unusual. He and Reese worked together for months before Fusco even heard Finch's voice for the first time. He's seen Finch very little over the course of their working relationship, and he's comfortable with that.

Or, at least, he was. He was until he decided to keep the jacket. Now Fusco has this urge to let Finch know, to show Finch that he has given in. He’s not sure why it’s important, but it definitely is. At this point, Fusco would even tell him over the phone, as unsatisfying as that sounds, just for the peace of mind. But he hasn't gotten so much as a call from Finch in weeks and somehow Fusco can’t cross the divide there and make a social call.

So what he takes to doing is wearing the jacket around. Not at work, obviously. Carter was right about that; there are too many people who might wonder how he got something that good on a cop’s salary and start asking questions he’s not smart enough to lie his way around. With the guys in HR, though, he can wear it because even if they were the type to notice what kind of jacket a man was wearing, they’d only think Fusco finally caved and bought himself something nice with all that dirty money. So, yeah, he wears the jacket around, because you never know who is watching.

He catches himself making eye contact with security cameras a lot these days.

Sometimes, Fusco feels like it’s eating away at him, the need to show Finch that whatever power play or act of charity he was trying to pull off worked, and Fusco owes him now, if that’s what Finch was going for. He gets more and more tense, trying to decide if he should cave and ask Reese to pass on the message, to decide if he can bear to admit that he cares that much if Finch knows or not. Fusco holds on to it, keeps his mouth shut. There’ll be a case. One of these days, he’ll get a terse call from Finch and he’ll have to be in a specific place at a specific time and Finch will separate from the crowd like oil in water and he’ll sidle up to Fusco and. Well. Fusco doesn’t know. They’ll be on the same page, anyway. Fusco can wait for that. He can wait for a case to push them back together.

What ends up happening is the two of them scare the hell out of each other in a grocery store not far from the precinct. Fusco’s just stopping off on the way home from work, because he remembers at the last minute that he’s got nothing at home and if he gets takeout again, his doctor’s just going to shoot him and finish the job. So he’s just rounding the aisle, cart rattling against the linoleum floor, and there Finch is, turning over produce with a critical eye. Finch, in one of his immaculate suits, looking like he just wandered in from a different time or the universe next door, is hanging around a corner grocery store looking dissatisfied.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Fusco asks, because he never learned how to greet Finch without a chip on his shoulder.

Finch lifts his head from where it’s bent over a display of hoary apples and fixes Fusco with this awful, appraising stare through the lenses of his thick-framed glasses.

“Detective,” Finch says by way of response, because he somehow understands about the chip on Fusco’s shoulder. “You decided to keep it, I see.”

“Yeah,” he says. He didn’t expect to feel ashamed. “Couldn’t let it go, in the end.”

“You’ve scuffed the elbow,” Finch points out.

Fusco shrugs. “I get shot at for a living. Count your blessings.”

Finch seems to accept that. “And it fits well? No problems?”

“None,” Fusco says. “I think I said on the phone.” He shifts his cart out of the way of a passing woman and the wheel shrieks. “Thank you,” he says in the difficult silence that follows.

“You’re welcome.” He says it simply, and Fusco realizes that’s the first time Finch has responded to even one of his many ‘thank you’s with a ‘you’re welcome’ and he breathes a sigh of relief. Finch’s gaze has gone from Fusco to the contents of his cart. “Oh dear,” Finch says, sounding like nothing about this is particularly dear to him, “do we need to have a conversation about trans fats?”

“Go fuck yourself,” Fusco replies, calmly. He forces his cart in the other direction as quickly as he can and starts walking before he can reign himself in and apologize, because seriously, fuck this guy. Fuck him for being judgmental and confusing and fuck him for dodging the question on what he’s doing here in this particular grocery store, hanging around by the produce bins and waiting for Fusco to turn the corner.

If Finch tries to follow him, or get him to come back, Fusco doesn’t notice. He does the rest of his shopping in a pissed-off haze, refusing to even look around to see if Finch is still in the store. He manages to maintain that little rule until he gets to checkout and finds that his groceries are already paid for.

The part of him that counts change and worries about rent is thrilled, but all Fusco can think as he carries his groceries out to the car, wounded pride limping along behind him, is “Fuck him, fuck him, fuck this guy.”

Chapter 4

The thing about the jacket is that it’s insidious. Steadily, stealthily, it’s becoming his. Well, it was already his, from the second he touched it. It was always something he wanted, something made to fit him. But now it’s conforming to him. It’s bending to his shape. It’s picked up the warmth of his body and the scent of his cologne.

It’s as much a part of Fusco as the skin he lives in, but all it makes him think of is Finch. It makes him a little sick sometimes, how hard it is to get away from the parts of this jacket that are unmistakably Finch. He keeps discovering funny little personalized touches. There’s the pattern in the lining, a nearly invisible series of checks that upon closer inspection appear to be the exact shade of dark purple as that one tie Finch wears all the time. There’s also the discovery of a phone-sized pocket on the inside of the jacket, just over his heart. There’s the miniscule etching on the zipper that is unmistakably the silhouette of a small bird.

Fusco has to sit down for a moment after he finds that one.

It’s Finch’s business if he wants to leave a maker’s mark on a jacket he bought and, apparently, customized. Fusco’s just not sure why. Why would Finch go to all the trouble to give a gift this personal, this elaborate, to someone he can barely stand to talk to?

He’s going to go on wondering because it’s not for him to know and he isn’t going to ask.

Fusco’s asleep when the call comes, coiled up among the rumpled sheets with a pillow held over one ear and he lies there, stubborn, hoping that if he keeps quiet and lies still, the phone’s incessant warbling will end and he can slip back into unconsciousness and enjoy his half-remembered stress dreams in peace. But the phone won’t stop and Fusco gropes around for it in the darkness and he finally finds it in the mess on his bedside table and he answers, saying “Just take it back” because his head isn’t all there yet.

“Lionel,” Reese snaps. “Wake up.”

He blinks, rubs at his eyes, leans against the headboard with a groan. “What do you want?” he mumbles.

There’s the sound of harsh breathing on the other end of the line, fast and frantic. “Get up now. I need you to pick up Finch.”

“What?” Fusco settles into bed again, tries to disentangle the comforter from his legs. “I’m not your errand boy. Get him yourself.”

The sharp report of a gunshot yanks him out of sleep again. “Now, Lionel,” Reese snarls. “He’s alone and he’s in danger.”

His legs seem to swing over the edge of the mattress by themselves. “Where can I find him?” Fusco asks, tucking the phone into the crook of his neck and picking a pair of crumpled jeans off the floor.

Even in spite of the noise coming through the phone, the thuds and the cracks and the gunshots and the occasional pained wails, he can hear Reese’s smile.

***

Fusco doesn’t waste any time driving to the address Reese gives him, but Finch isn’t outside when he arrives. This starts him worrying, just a little. No need to panic yet. Finch has kept him waiting before. It’s not like this is even a rough part of town. Fusco knows some major players in organized crime own property around here, and they like to keep the rough stuff at a distance.

He parallel parks as close to the building as he dares, leans against the hood of his car with his fists balled up deep in the pockets of the leather jacket. While he waits, he tries not to look too much like a cop as he eyes up the foot traffic. It’s less shady than Fusco’s used to seeing at this time of night. They’re all maybe a little older, a little more refined. Good clothes, clear skin, glimmering understated jewelry.

Fusco bets they’re taking smoother drugs than the tooth-grinding night owls he usually has to deal with.

They look like the crowd Finch would run with, if Finch had a crowd, but if Finch is among them, Fusco can’t quite pick out his wispy shock of hair or his stiff-legged gait. Fusco sighs, checks his watch.

He guesses he’ll have to go in and get him.

He unzips the jacket partway, so it’ll be easy to access his gun if he needs it. He’s glad he thought to wear the bulletproof vest.  Fusco feels as though he’s as safe as he can be under the circumstances.

It’s still not enough, but it’s not as though he has a choice.

He calls Finch once before he sets out, hoping against all logic that Finch will pick up and tell Fusco to go away because he’s got it under control and they can call the whole thing off. No answer, obviously. He puts his phone away, locks his car, and takes a long, slow breath before setting off.

It’s only at the end of the block, on the corner, but it seems to take a month to get there. It’s an old house, impassive brick edifice, imposing limestone steps. The windows have been carefully blacked out but there’s a warm glow from the light over the door that looks inviting. As he approaches, he sees a neat bronze number-plate on the door, but the numbers engraved on the plate don’t match up to the house number, so he guesses there’s something sneaky going on there.

He knocks. The door slides open and a well-dressed man in a three piece suit answers the door. He’s young, maybe mid-twenties, with a preppy haircut and a bland, disinterested expression. The suit is of a sharper cut than anything Finch or Reese wears. It’s a delicate, blushing gray that’s almost lavender. Fusco’s so distracted by this elaborate, carefully constructed young man that he almost doesn’t notice that the glazed look on his face is masking a coldly efficient stare that is measuring Fusco up and finding him insufficient.

Fusco barely manages to stick his left foot in the door before it slams shut. The impact momentarily crumples his foot and Fusco tries not to wince visibly. “Hey,” he says to the young man through the crack in the door. “Don’t be like that. I’m not a member,” because it is a club, isn’t it? “I’m just here to pick up a friend.”

The young man widens the door a fraction only to slam it again on his foot and shit, that actually hurts and Fusco slaps his palm against the door to keep from making a sound. He reaches into his pocket, pulls out his badge. “I’m with the NYPD,” he grunts, pressing the badge up to the gap. “I’m not here to bust anybody. I just want to see my friend.”

“Do you have a warrant?” the young man asks. His voice is clipped, slightly breathless. Fusco wonders if he’s trying to remember protocol that he never thought he’d have to use.

“No,” Fusco says, wriggling his toes experimentally. “But you just assaulted an officer.”

The gap seems to open up by a fraction of a centimeter, but it holds firm. Fusco peers through the gap and sees that the young man is wide-eyed and tight-lipped, trying and failing to maintain an unimpressed expression.

Fusco says, very gently, “Just let me come in, get my buddy out of here, and I won’t give you any trouble.” The young man doesn’t budge. Fusco tries to smile, but it comes off like a grimace, hard and half-crazy so he decides to roll with that and says, soft and polite, “I have a gun.”

The door flies open and Fusco practically falls into the doorman, who recoils. “I don’t want any trouble,” he says.

“You won’t have any,” Fusco reassures him again, steadying himself and rotating his foot at the ankle, feeling the little bones pop. “My friend is a pale, nerdy-looking guy. Glasses. Bug-eyes. Looks like a professor of something.”

The doorman has reconstructed his deadpan.

“You’re sure you don’t know?”

He nods, once, but his eyes flick to the door at the end of the foyer, so Fusco knows that Finch is here somewhere, and that’s good enough for now.

“Thanks.” Fusco moves in.

He was right. This is a club. Not the modern kind, not a nightclub with pounding music and sticky floors. This is one of the old school, cigars-and-brandy clubs, the kind Fusco wouldn’t think existed anymore if he hadn’t spent so much of his life working for the kind of men who went to them. Fusco, in his twice-worn jeans and his expensive-but-scuffed leather jacket, feels out of place immediately upon walking through the door. The wait staff, all expertly tailored young men and women with perfect skin and flat expressions, keep giving him critical looks. They don’t recognize him. He’s not a member.

It’s at this point that Fusco realizes that he actually recognizes quite a few of the members. There’s his first police captain, from back when he first joined the force, with a skinny woman in a tight green dress sitting on his knee. There’re a couple of guys who he used to help smuggle coke for a slice of the profits back in the days before Reese, all in a tight conversational knot, big smiles, quiet sniffles. There’s a woman he knows who used to work Vice and now runs a brothel, sprawling in a leather armchair, cigar clenched between her teeth.

This place is his kind of shady.

His old friends the coke dealers spot him from across the room and wave him over, suits slightly shiny in the low light, facial hair meticulously groomed. Only their voices give them away as fucking uncouth. “Fusco!” one of them says cheerfully. “Still fat?”

Fusco crosses the room to them, desperately trying to remember names. “Yup. You still have syphilis?”

His face breaks into a grin. “Missed you too, man.” He gives Fusco a quick once-over. “Kinda underdressed, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, I’m not here for the party.” He puts his hands in his pockets, leans forward confidentially. “One of my CIs got himself in some trouble here. I told him I’d try to help him out. Funny-looking guy. Buggy eyes and glasses. White collar creep. You seen him?”

Fusco’s friend the coke dealer nods. “Yeah, I saw someone like that go in the back with some sharks. You want him back in one piece, you’d better go get him now.”

Fusco claps a hand on his shoulder. “Thanks, Gabe.” Shit, he got that wrong, didn’t he? Should have stuck to no names. This is embarrassing. He walks past the coke dealer as fast as he can, wincing in anticipation.

“No problem, man,” says Gabe the coke dealer, and Fusco congratulates himself.

Fusco weaves through the crowd, still getting sidelong looks because of the casual attire, but he’s been greeted by the locals now. He’s on the level. Fusco makes a beeline for the curtain in the back.

He draws it aside, slips through and encounters three doors, an attractive waitress with her tight black skirt rucked up around her hips, and a portly, balding man kneeling in front of her. Those last two clear out in a hurry, leaving Fusco to the doors. He could probably be clever about this. The back rooms are likely used for sex, gambling, or both, and there’s probably a way he could tell which is which, but Fusco’s pretty tired and riding high on getting into the building at all. And there’re only three of them, for fuck’s sake.

Fusco goes down the row, trying the knobs. All locked. So he decides to knock, soft and polite, so he might be mistaken for one of the staff.

Door number one is answered by a dark-eyed man with a neat mustache who immediately slams the door in Fusco’s face, but not before Fusco can take in the card game going on behind him. His experience with door number two is much the same, only replace the dark-eyed, mustachioed man with a scowling girl wrapped in a sheet, and the card game in the back with an orgy.

He has to take a minute to pull himself together after that one.

Door number three doesn’t open at all, but Fusco’s ears are pretty sharp and he hears, not a sound, but a sudden absence of sound, like there had been some low-level, indecipherable murmuring that suddenly stopped dead when he knocked. This is the door. He knocks again.

“Come back later,” someone inside calls, a tense edge to their voice.

Fusco sighs, rolls his shoulders, bounces for a moment on the balls of his feet. He gets his gun out, decides not to take the safety off yet. He shakes himself out, gets into position and, with a grunt, rams the full weight of his body into door number three.

Chapter 5

Notes:

Actual new content! Hooray!

Fusco isn’t much of an athlete. That’s the kind way of putting it. He’s not particularly strong and he’s not fast and he can’t swim and he hates running. He doesn’t move well. What he is is a rock. An immovable object. A battering ram.

That door pops open with an ear-splitting crack, lock now wreathed in pale, fluffy splinters of wood and Fusco staggers through the doorway and skids to a stop inside, panting and clutching his brutalized shoulder. Why did he think that was a good idea? Did he break his collarbone? No, probably not, but still, ow.

It’s at that point that Fusco actually bothers to take a look around the room. What he discovers is that he can be grateful for a few things. Firstly, Finch is here, sitting at a table laid out for a card game, back straight, eyes narrowed, nose bloody. Fusco can worry about that part later. Secondly, the other three men at the table look as surprised as Finch is, if less beat-up. They’re all older, suited, outside their prime. There’s no one as hard or as quick or as vicious as Reese in this room, and because that’s what Fusco’s used to dealing with at this stage, it’s kind of a relief. Thirdly, Fusco hasn’t stumbled into another orgy-in-progress, which is something he was a little bit worried about in the back of his mind.

That’s it. Those are the three things. He might have been able to think up more, but one of the other men at the table points a gun at him and that kind of kills any other thoughts Fusco might have had on the subject.

“Take a seat, son,” says the man, gesturing to an empty chair with the handgun. “You’re embarrassing yourself.”

Fusco straightens up, gives his shoulder a squeeze but nothing pops back into place, which makes him think that maybe nothing was out of place to begin with. He brushes sawdust off of his sleeve. He sheathes his gun in the pancake holster strapped to his ribs and shows his hands, free and clear. He moves towards the table slowly, carefully, and he sits down in the empty chair, between two of the unknown men. The one with the gun is on his left and he’s kind of hard, compact, like maybe he used to be something back in the day. The one on his right is gray and impassive, soft face and heavy, disinterested eyelids. Across the table sits the king, a tall, broad shouldered, white haired guy who looks like he’s rounding 70 in pretty good shape. He looks like somebody Fusco’s probably seen on the news once or twice when he wasn’t paying much attention. Between the king and the bored guy sits Finch.

Finch does not look like he’s appreciating being rescued.

“So,” Fusco begins, shattering the tenuous silence. “What are we talking about?”

He gets hit. He was expecting that. It’s okay. He’s developing a plan.

When he looks up, blinking and nursing a bruised temple, he catches Finch wincing on his behalf, but in an instant he has himself under control, face carefully crafted to look as bored and annoyed as possible. A fresh trickle of blood oozes from his nose and Finch twitches like he wants nothing more than to wipe it away but he’s afraid to move.

“What are you doing here?” the gunman asks.

“I’m here for him,” Fusco says, rubbing his sore forehead. “He’s one of my CIs.” Because that’s been a comfortable lie so far. Finch’s eyebrow raises maybe by a millimeter.

“This is a lot of trouble to go to for an informant.”

“I’m not gonna fight you on that,” Fusco agrees. “It’s been a real bitch getting in here. But if I don’t get him out of here alive, that’s my ass on the line. And my bosses aren’t the forgiving type.”

The bored-looking guy sighs. “I take it you’re not specifically referring to the NYPD,” he says. He runs a hand through his hair like a man brushing off sleep.

“No sir,” Fusco says. “No, I’m not.”

The bored guy leans forward, broad hands folded together. “Then we have a problem,” he says.

“Not really,” Fusco says. “As long as he comes with me, then there’s no problem at all. You and me are fine.”

The king snorts like a bull, but the bored guy lifts a single finger and he quiets. “We’d be interested in making a deal.”

“That’s fine.” Fusco leans forward, shifts in his chair, tries to ignore the look Finch is giving him, which is this confusing mix of contempt and fascination, muted under the blank mask of his deadpan face. “But you should know that the only one I’m taking is one where him and me walk out of this place alive and kicking.”

Bored guy’s eyes drop shut, like keeping them open long enough to even acknowledge that Fusco was in the room was just too much effort for him. “That’s something of a sticking point with us,” he confesses.

The king lurches forward across the table; he doesn’t stand but he seems to have mastered a kind of seated loom. “This little fuck,” he says, pointing to Finch, whose mouth turns a little further down at the corners because he’s not accustomed to being called a fuck to his face, “tried to infiltrate my operation. He’s already lost me money, a lot of money, and now he’s got the straight cops breathing down my neck. And you’re asking me to let him walk away?” His face is developing a gradual flush and his angry eyes are the blank kind of blue, the empty kind. Not blind, just flat. Fusco wishes he could remember where he knows this guy from. He still thinks the TV. Maybe an extortion run. Or a party; hell, he knows half the people here anyway.

It’s weird, Fusco thinks, how he can go through so much of his life in a vague, all-over panic, but right now all he can make himself do is observe, catalogue, work through his options. Maybe it’s ‘cause Finch can’t do it for him. He’s trying to, though. He keeps opening his mouth like he’s about to speak and then nothing comes out and he just sits back, like he’s real curious about where Fusco’s going with this. Fucker. Fusco could use the help right about now.

“I don’t know what to tell you, buddy,” he says, shrugging, too nonchalant. “The guy’s a shakedown artist, a conman. Blame a fish for swimming, why don’t you.”

The king starts to sputter and the bored guy lifts a heavy, graceful hand again, silences him. “With all due respect, a swimming fish never lost us 2.3 million dollars.”

Fusco coughs, mouth and throat suddenly dry. “Jesus,” he says under his breath. “What the hell did you get up to?” he asks Finch, but cuts him off because he’s got to keep the pressure and attention on himself, not on Finch. Finch is bleeding and bruised right now. Finch looks easy to kill. “Doesn’t matter,” he says. “You lost money? Cops are on your ass? That’s a real goddamn shame and I sympathize. I really do. I guess nobody knows about being stuck between a rock and a hard place more than I do. Hope it works out. But that one,” he says, and Finch scowls at Fusco when he points at him because Finch doesn’t like not understanding what’s going on and he probably doesn’t like being called ‘that one’ either, “isn’t gonna do you any good. He’s a millstone on you, but he means a whole hell of a lot to me.” He feels a strange need to clarify that statement. “HR needs his brain,” Fusco says, “and they’ll fight for it. You just want to kill him so you can get your rocks off.”

“True enough,” the bored guy admits. “And we certainly don’t want to make an enemy of HR, especially at a time like this. But we can’t allow that kind of disrespect to go unchallenged.” He blinks. “We have our pride. You understand.”

And, yeah, he understands. Of course he does. Jesus, the people he’s seen killed just for mouthing off about HR. Finch would be dead about twenty times over by now. $2.3 million. Fuck. Fusco kind of wants to order a drink right about now. Maybe he will if a waiter comes through. That could be funny, if nothing else. “Can’t let you do that,” he says.

“What’s to stop us?” asks the muscle, speaking for the first time since Fusco busted in.

Fusco shrugs, pretends his heart isn’t pounding away, that everything hasn’t started to go strangely quiet. “Not me,” he says, swallowing the lump in his throat. “I’m not delusional; I know there’s two of us and three of you and he’s a gimp besides,” and Finch makes a face at him and okay, he’s kind of having fun, “but I’ve got friends all over the place in the next room and friends on the outside, and they all know where I am and what I’m here for.” Finch is really giving him a look right now and Fusco realizes he probably thinks that’s a bigger lie than it actually is. “If I don’t walk out of here with him, I’m not the only one who’ll catch it. HR hits hard, guys. You don’t need that. Not now.”

The bored guy nods slowly, like maybe he’s really thinking it over and Fusco is thinking maybe this whole thing can be easy, but the king starts going again and Fusco sighs, because he’s pretty sure somebody’s going to bleed for this and he really hopes it isn’t him or Finch. “We pay our dues to HR. We’ve earned ourselves one corpse. We’ve paid for that a hundred times over,” he says. “He dies and HR won’t touch our operation, because they know a good thing when they have it.”

“HR doesn’t give a shit about your two-bit operation.”

The king puffs up. “Do you know who I am, you fat fuck?”

Fusco feels his mouth curl up on one side, hears his own voice say, calm and steady, “Sure I do,” before his brain actually registers that, oh shit yes, he knows exactly who this guy is. “Sure I know you. You run a shipping company. Legitimate. Want to know how I know?”

The king looks like he probably doesn’t care to know, but he’s also a little taken aback and the bored guy actually looks, well, interested, so Fusco carries on.

“A couple years back we got a call from some guys who work the docks. They run a pretty sweet little smuggling operation out there. Good guys, always pay us our slice. Anyway, they were out there one night and they hear this banging on the inside of a shipping container and they figure it’s immigrants, so they crack it open ‘cause they didn’t want to deal with any dead illegals. And they find these two kids inside, a boy and a girl, maybe seven years old. Twins. Real cute kids, only spoke Romanian or some shit, and the guys didn’t know what to do so they called us. They were hoping we could shuffle them in someplace legitimate so there wouldn’t be real police poking around their shit. So we got the kids a translator thinking, you know, maybe they’ve got relatives or something who can take ‘em off our hands. And what they told us, well,” Fusco rolls his shoulders, lets himself wince, “To be honest, fellas, I don’t want to think about it. You never want to hear that from a kid, you know?”

The king’s gone still and quiet except for a slow twitch in his jaw. Finch looks like he wants very badly to say something, but he doesn’t speak.

“Now, HR,” Fusco begins again with some difficulty, “HR’s into a lot of things. Not much the guys upstairs won’t give the okay to if there’s a buck to be made. But it’s a family business, in its way. Lots of loyalty, lots of fathers and brothers and sons. Hell, I’ve got a son of my own. My boss has a five year old daughter. We’re into a lot, but we don’t sell kids. We’ve never done that.” He takes a deep breath. “And we don’t appreciate having our guys used as mules for that kind of business. So we looked into it.”

The king clenches his fist so hard that his knuckles pop like little firecrackers.

“Figured out who organized that, and shit, son,” he says, shaking his head, “it was not hard. We had some guys wait around the docks for somebody to come pick up the package and, uh. Somebody did. Couple of guys who worked for the shipping company. We had kind of a debate about what to do with ‘em; what the best way to send a message to their boss was. Like, we’re a legitimate organization, fellas, so we don’t make these kinds of decisions willy-nilly. This wasn’t a spur of the moment, psycho thing. When we sent you that box of heads, it was an authorized statement.”

There’s a noise, a kind of horrified, closed-off sound, and he’s surprised to find that it came out of Finch.

“I, uh, I know what you’re thinking,” he says, because he feels this urge to make things sound a little better. “I didn’t kill them. Just delivered the parts. That’s, ah, that’s where I know you from. It’s okay if you don’t recognize me; I didn’t remember you at first either.”

Dead quiet in the back room and Fusco thinks he may have overdone it.

The three men are exchanging looks, silently conferring but Finch is just looking right at him with a kind of horror, like Finch doesn’t even know him anymore, and Fusco’s never felt this much like a fucking criminal in his life. He wishes he hadn’t said any of it. He wishes he’d kept his mouth shut.

The bored guy looks up and says, gravely, “I take it that we’re not just being hunted by the more legitimate branches of the law right now?”

Fusco nods, tears his eyes away from Finch. “That’s safe to say, yeah.”

“Would Mr. Crake’s safe return to the protective custody of HR improve our standing at all?” he asks, and Fusco almost asks who the fuck is Mr. Crake before he realizes that, oh, he means Finch. Jesus, that would not have been good.

“It’s a start,” he says.

“Then perhaps you’d better take him off our hands.”

Fusco rises to his feet, tries not to shake, but Finch stays rooted to his chair, bloody-nosed and still and watching Fusco with his massive, staring eyes. “Come on, let’s get out of here,” he says, but Finch doesn’t get up, so Fusco goes over and grabs him by one arm, grip close to the elbow because it doesn’t feel right, him touching Finch, but that seems like a safe enough space. He manages to guide Finch to his feet, puts an arm around him. “Okay,” he says. “Thanks, guys. I’ll put in a good word for you, if it comes to that.”

“See that you do,” the bored guy says, eyelids sliding back to half-mast. Fusco turns, pulls Finch along with him. He tries not to book it out of the room, takes a moment to close the busted door behind him.

“Jesus Christ,” he sighs, allowing himself a momentary full-body shiver. “Jesus Christ, never again. Come on, we need to move.”

“Detective,” Finch asks. His voice is careful, delicate. He sounds shaken. “What was that?”

“I don’t know,” he admits, pushing them both across the crowded club as fast as he dares with Finch’s limp. “I don’t know, guy, I just started talking and that’s what came out. We gotta take it or leave it at this point.”

“We need to talk about what you get up to outside of our work, detective,” he says, coldly. He takes a glance around, notices that they’re getting looks because of Finch’s bloodied face, and he unfolds his pocket square and, seriously, this guy wore a fucking hankie undercover, and starts dabbing at his nose. “Suffice it to say that what you just described is completely unacceptable.”

He sighs. “I know, I know. I don’t do that shit anymore; it was before I started working for you. Anyway, the guy’s a child molester. You can do that shit to child molesters and still feel pretty okay about yourself.”

Finch looks like maybe he’s a little upset that Fusco even has a basis for comparison about how he feels after handing somebody a box of heads, and then Gabe the coke dealer calls, “Hey, Fusco! Your guy’s face is a little fucked up!”

“What?” Fusco yells back, almost on autopilot. “Holy shit, Gabe, I had no fucking clue! You could make fucking detective, man!”

Gabe grins. “Don’t be a stranger, you fat fuck.”

“Yeah, we’ll get a drink sometime,” Fusco calls over his shoulder as he seizes Finch’s elbow hard because Finch has stopped walking and hauls him toward the door.

“How do you know these people?” Finch hisses as they burst into the foyer.

“Can we talk about this later?” Fusco asks, giving a wave to the doorman who actually flinches a little. Fusco might have to file that one away for a rainy day. “Now’s a real bad time.”

“Of course,” Finch says, flatly as they emerge into the wee hours of the morning. “At your convenience.”

Fusco thinks that maybe Finch just gave him lip and, given that Fusco just saved his ass at considerable risk to his own, maybe Fusco doesn’t have to take it. But he’s kind of keyed up, taking in everything right now, soaking it all up. He feels good, like maybe he could punch out a prize fighter or tell Simmons to go fuck himself. He feels like he’s on amphetamines, which he hasn’t been for a real long time, and he’s kind of missed that so it’s nice to get that natural high.

Finch, on the other hand, has his phone out and is tapping away, all business. “Mr. Reese knows we’re out,” he says, confidently. “Where’s your car, Detective?”

But Fusco doesn’t answer right away, because something’s bothering him, something weird and niggling at the back of his skull. Something in the corner of his eye. Aw, shit. “Walk in front of me,” he says, grabbing Finch and trying to force him into position while Finch squirms awkwardly and aims a bony elbow at Fusco’s ribs. “No, you gotta walk in front of me.”

Finch’s eyes focus momentarily on something behind Fusco’s head and Fusco knows Finch sees what he saw. Finch turns abruptly, starts walking forward again. 

“Is their muscle still coming?” Fusco asks.

“Yes,” he says. His thumbs start going on that phone, calling backup, and he lets Fusco push him out in front.

“Okay, we’re gonna make for that alleyway.” Fusco goes for his gun. “You just keep walking, buddy. Keep your head down as low as you can so I can cover you.”

“What about you?” Finch asks, obeying, walking at a faint, determined angle towards a dark, grimy gap between two buildings.

Fusco flicks the safety off. “I’m wearing my vest,” he says. He tries to sound hopeful and he knows he fails because Finch, for no reason Fusco can see, reaches back and squeezes his left hand, the one without a gun in it and Fusco, for lack of a better plan, squeezes back. “I’ll be fine,” he says.

They make it just to the arch of the alleyway when the muscle starts firing. The first shot goes wide, hits the brick wall and kicks up a burst of debris. The second hits Fusco.

Chapter 6

The two of them fall forward together when the shot hits, face first against the wall of the alley and Fusco wheezes, pressing into Finch, seeing stars because it hit him in the back, right side, and he’s pretty sure he heard his ribs crack.

“Detective?” Finch calls, voice tight and snappish and muffled against the brick. “Detective, are you hit?”

“Fuuuuuuuuhck,” he rasps. “Oh, fuck me, ow.”

Finch twists between him and the wall so they’re face to face, Finch’s bloody nose an inch from Fusco’s forehead. “We need to move,” Finch says and he grabs hold of Fusco’s shoulders and just kind of tips them both into the dark of the alleyway as the wall where they were just standing explodes into shards of brick.

They hit the ground hard, Fusco on his back, Finch on top of him, so that’s kind of a good thing, he guesses. He pictures himself landing hard on poor, crippled, scrawny Finch and his brain supplies a cartoonish crunching sound. The sharp, breathless agony in his ribs isn’t any better, but at least he’s not dead. You need to count your blessings in this kind of situation.

Finch plants both hands against Fusco's chest and pushes off him, struggles painfully to his feet. "Come on," he says. His forehead is creased with worry.

Fusco groans, rolls onto his side and curls up, a little nautilus of pain.

Finch bends, stiff and agonized, and grabs at Fusco's arm. "Now," he snaps, dragging him. "You're not hurt. Move."

He is, he is, but Finch isn't letting go so he forces himself to stand, lets Finch pull him further into the dark of the alley.

It feels a little like they’re underwater, like they’re moving impossibly slow. His vision has gone strange and blurry and every light is blinding. His hand is still locked around the gun and he aims it, shaky and haphazard, behind them into the too-bright lights in the street, waiting for a threatening shadow.

Finch tugs at him with every jarring step they take. "Come on," he whispers over and over. "Come on. You walk now.”

“’M trying,” he mutters. His arm drops suddenly and he forces it back up. He can’t hold his gun steady. Oh shit, he’s going to shoot a pedestrian, he can tell. His head is a clamor of desperate breath and heartbeats and this incredible roar.

They fumble in the dark of the alley, knocking into walls and each other, kicking into bottles and cans, and Fusco hears a shot, feels something whip past his face in the dark. “Oh, fuck,” he mumbles, and he pushes Finch into the wall, covering him up, claps a rough hand over his mouth as he protests.

The muscle stands in the mouth of the alley, a silhouette in the rectangle of orange street light. He shifts from foot to foot, head tilted as he peers into the black.

Pressed up to the wall of the alley, Finch and Fusco exchange a glance. Over Fusco’s hand, behind his glasses, Finch’s eyes are wide but there’s comprehension in there. He gets it. Fusco takes his hand away, moves a step back, and the two of them move as quietly as they can down the alley.

 As they carefully navigate around garbage cans, they find a side door, metal, into the building adjacent. Finch tries the knob and it’s locked, of course, and Fusco’s just thinking that his shoulder can’t go another round tonight when Finch holds up one finger and starts digging in the pockets of his overcoat.

In the mouth of the alleyway, the muscle takes a step forward. He’s featureless and dark from here, but Fusco can almost see his squint.

Finch switches to trouser pockets, front and back, and finds nothing. His forehead wrinkles and he bites at his lip, quiet, tamped down worry. He opens his overcoat and slides a hand in the stupid little flap pockets on his jacket.

The muscle takes another step and Fusco tries to hold up his gun again and shit, he’s shaking so hard.

Finch jams a hand into the inside pocket of his jacket and his eyes light up. He pulls a slim, metallic tool out of his pocket. He mouths something to Fusco in the gloom. “I trained for this.” He looks excited, proud in spite of the situation. He sinks to his knees gingerly, silent and wincing, and goes to work on the lock.

Every little click and scrape of the tool on that lock sounds like a gunshot in Fusco’s ears, but he knows it’s just his paranoia, just his fear, so he keeps an eye on the muscle as he slips into the alley, gun drawn. Fusco’s trying to calm down, stop the shakes so he can shoot if he needs to but he can’t even let himself breathe that deeply, just these shallow, light breaths that keep him standing and keep the pain in his ribs at bay, and it’s going to have to be enough for now.

The lock makes a good sound, a quiet, solid click and Finch looks up at him, undisguised relief on his face. He starts to rise to his feet and Fusco meets him halfway, takes his elbow and helps him up. Finch turns the doorknob, slowly and soundlessly, and begins to inch the door open.

The hinges scream.

“Fuck it.” Fusco wrenches the door open, seizes Finch by the collar of his overcoat and shoves him through. The muscle moves, takes aim, fires wild in the dark and Fusco takes another one, in the chest this time and fuck it, fuck it, it’s like his chest is collapsing in on itself and inside the doorway Finch is wrenching at his sleeve. Fusco gets off a single parting shot before Finch drags him inside, and as the door closes, he hears the muscle shout, sees him grasp at his upper arm. What I’m feeling right now, Fusco thinks distantly as he staggers inside, flopping against Finch’s shoulder, that’s professional pride.

Finch locks the door, hustles them both out of the way just in time for a bullet to punch a neat hole in the metal door. “No rest for the weary, it seems,” Finch mutters, and Fusco starts to giggle, breathless and insane, as Finch leads him into the building.

It’s a restaurant, it seems, all closed up for the night. They’re in the kitchen now, stainless steel surfaces and hanging utensils, and after a few seconds of hesitation, Finch grabs a knife from a rack bolted to the end of a work table. He holds it like he wants nothing more than to put it down.

Finch gives Fusco a little shove until he’s standing more or less under his own power, hand braced heavy against the table. Finch takes the phone out of his pocket and starts texting.

Somewhere outside, they can hear sirens.

He sighs, pockets the phone. “Mr. Reese is now aware of our current location. He’s close by.” His tone is breezy, like it’s no big deal, but there’s this underlying tightness and panic that’s scaring the shit out of Fusco right now. “And with any luck, the police will take care of the problem.” He smiles. It’s forced, and he seems to know it. He stops, looks sheepish. “How badly are you hurt?”

Fusco responds with a pained wheeze.

Finch takes his arm very gently, very delicately, and says, “Let’s see what we can do.”

There’s an office, a little cupboard of a room off the main kitchen with a desk and some chairs and old magazines. Finch wrestles Fusco into one of the chairs.

He seems to be about to unzip the jacket when something registers with Finch, something big. Very cautiously, he runs his palm over the front of the creased leather, traces a fingertip around the splintered fibers that fringe the bullet hole. He prods the rip open, reaches through the matching hole in Fusco’s shirt, until he’s running a finger over the flattened metal slug embedded in the bulletproof vest. “I suppose I’ll have to buy you a new one,” he says.

“Maybe buy me a new set of ribs instead?” Fusco asks. “I think this one’s broken.”

They exchange painful grins.

Far off, they hear another gunshot followed by the scream of rusted hinges, and Finch’s fingers go tight in the jacket.

Notes:

YES. THAT'S WHAT WE DO AROUND HERE. CONSTANT CLIFFHANGERS. WE LITERALLY JUST HANG OFF CLIFFS ALL GODDAMN DAY.

Chapter 7

There’s a lot that’s obvious about what they choose to do after that.

They rise to their feet (too fast, too fast, what if he hears?) and Finch goes to the door, closes it gently, turns the lock, while Fusco hits the light switch and plunges them into darkness. There’s a little window set in the door, so Fusco grabs Finch by the arm and guides them both to the scuffed, dirty linoleum, out of the window’s line of sight. He makes Finch sit beside him. He holds his gun.

His hands still shake. If he listens hard, he thinks he can hear footsteps.

The trouble is that he can’t quite catch his breath, hasn’t been able to get himself under control since the first bullet hit. Now every time he inhales, there’s this pain and he’s left with shallow, rattling breaths that don’t bring in enough and it seems like all he can do is sit there and rasp. He’s so loud, so loud he can hear himself even over the frantic pounding in his head and he’s going to get them caught and killed, he just knows it.

Finch grabs hold of his wrist and squeezes. Fusco looks at him, really looks at him for the first time in a while. His nose doesn’t seem to be bleeding anymore, but there’s still a lot that’s dried there, on his upper lip and his mouth. His eyes are dark, shadowy, and he wants to think Finch is just tired, but there’s this awful niggling part of him that thinks it could be raccoon eyes, head injury eyes. That scares him. He’s pretty sure it’s not true, because Finch has been on top of things so far. Still, the idea of Finch going far off and confused right now, head tilting back and pupils mismatched, scares the everloving shit out of Fusco.

Finch isn’t looking back at Fusco. He’s watching the door, eyes twitching and unblinking in his skull, twisting the kitchen knife in his hands. His tongue flicks out over his thin lips, all nervous, and it licks a spot clean. Blood wells up there and Fusco realizes he’s got a split lip too.

Fusco fishes in the pockets of his day old jeans, notices that they’re scuffed up a little, that there’s blood oozing at the knee. Dammit. Fine. Fine. In the back pocket, he finds a smashed packet of Kleenex, half empty. He presses it into Finch’s hand and Finch gives him the strangest look.

He demonstrates on himself, points to an imaginary lip wound, and Finch becomes his mirror, dabbing at the cut with a crumpled tissue.

In the end, there’re little white fibers stuck in the gore on Finch’s mouth, but at least he’s not bleeding anymore. Finch folds the tissue and puts it in his pocket.

They sit together in the dark a while, listening.

There are footsteps.

Fusco takes a minute to formulate his plan. He rises to his knees, moves a little closer to the door, nearly close enough that if it opened suddenly, it’d hit him in the face. He gestures to Finch, soundlessly taps the wall beside the door.

Finch cocks his head to one side, uncomprehending.

Fusco sighs, moves back to him. “I’m gonna draw him in here,” he whispers, quiet as he can. Finch winces. Fusco rolls his eyes, drops his voice even further. “You get right by the door, so if I don’t take him out right away, you can still duck out of here.”

Finch shakes his head. “And how do you plan to get out?”

“I. Uh. I don’t.” He shrugs, smiles a little. “I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. It’ll be fine.”

Finch is just frowning.

“Look, if I don’t get you out of here, I’m dead anyway so, you know, do what I fucking say.” He’s been trying not to get snappish, but he guesses that’s just what’s between them. Bitterness and irritation. Finch scowls at him and he scowls back.

Finch moves to kneel beside the door. He looks pained. Fusco can’t imagine him getting up and going like he’s probably going to need to. He’s going to need to make sure to buy Finch some time. Some protection.

Fusco thinks a second. Then he makes a decision.

He takes off the jacket, the bullet-ripped t-shirt he wears underneath. Quiet as he can, he goes to work on his vest, eases the teeth of the Velcro apart until it’s hanging loose and open. He slides it off, passes it to Finch, who stares at him, mystified.

Fusco, stripped to his undershirt and his bruises and his sweat, shrugs at him.

Finch hisses, “Don’t be stupid,” and tries to pass it back to him, but Fusco ignores him. Gun at the ready, eyes on the door. The slightly panicky nerd beside him is out of sight, out of mind. To a degree. He stares ahead with a kind of laser precision until he sees Finch start to put the vest on.

Good. Good. That’s one less thing to worry about.

Fusco reaches out, very deliberately, and knocks a stack of magazines off a plastic chair. The pages whisper and flutter against each other as they fall to the floor with a slap, and outside in the kitchen, the footsteps pause.

Okay. Okay. Please let this not be a terrible decision.

The footsteps make their way straight for the door.

Fusco saw the Suit do this once. He knows that doesn’t mean he’ll be able to do it too, but it’s worth a try. It’s not impossible. He’s the one with the advantage right now. He’s the one who knows what’s going on. That other guy, he’s probably shot and he doesn’t know shit. He got off, what, four shots? Five? Fusco only fired one. He’s got him there too. Fusco can take this guy.

He makes the mistake of glancing at Finch. Finch’s expression couldn’t say “You’re gonna fuckin’ die, buddy,” any more clearly than if he’d said it aloud. Except it’s Finch, so he’d say it like, “Excuse me, sir, but I believe you are going to expire.” Or some shit.

The footsteps of the muscle come close to the door. The knob starts to turn, clicking back and forth with a frustrated rattle. Fusco can see little divots of shadow left by his feet through the crack of the door. He thinks, from there, he can extrapolate where the muscle’s legs are. He thinks the door is flimsy enough that he could shoot through it.

Fusco makes an educated guess and fires.

Finch spasms at the sound, all rabbit-tense. For a minute, there’s nothing. Just the ringing of their ears.

Then the door flies open with some savage force behind it, and Fusco learns two things very quickly:

1. It is really, really hard to accurately shoot someone in the kneecap, especially when you can’t actually see their legs.

And

 2. He miscalculated about the right distance to sit from the door.

Should have aimed for the center mass, he thinks dimly as the sharp edge of the door slams into his face with a wet snap. The gun falls out of his hands with a clatter and before he can reach out to retrieve it, he’s catching the full force of the muscle’s foot in his gut.

He doesn’t quite hit the spot where Fusco got shot earlier, but it’s close enough to be anguish. Fusco keeps thinking that if he were any good, he’d be fighting back right now, giving Finch some time to get out, but he just keeps taking kick after kick to his chest and stomach and back, like the guy’s trying to stamp him out like a bug.

The good part is, the muscle hasn’t shot him dead yet. So maybe… He risks opening his eyes and sees that Finch is gone, no longer crouched by the door. That’s good. He clenches his eyes shut as the muscle’s boot draws back for another kick that strikes him in the sternum hard enough to make his vision black out for a second.

When he’s seeing again, the muscle is hauling Fusco up onto his knees by his ear. The muscle is actually snarling, eyes wide and white, teeth gritted, arm soaked in blood and moving funny. Then he’s pressing a gun up under Fusco’s chin and it’s not so funny anymore.

“HR ain’t gonna like this,” Fusco says. He doesn’t think it’ll do anything, but he’s too hurt and tired to try anything else.

The guy pistol whips him, so he almost wishes he hadn’t.

The muscle steadies him before he can fall forward, replaces the gun under Fusco’s chin. “I’m past caring what HR thinks,” he says. He takes the safety off his gun and Fusco closes his eyes.

Then there’s a noise. Like, a weird noise, almost a ripping sound but kind of heavier and thicker. Fusco opens his eyes again, looks up at the muscle, who has just a funny expression on his face. He’s not even looking at Fusco; he’s staring up, brow wrinkled with confusion. He reaches behind himself, like maybe he has an itch on his back. Then he drops to the floor in front of him and Fusco sees the knife stuck between his shoulder blades.

Finch is standing there, just beyond, wide-eyed, arms recoiled close to his chest. He looks very small in the bulletproof vest.

Fusco, at a loss for words, brushes blood off his face. There’s a long, thin gash there, left by the edge of the door. Probably some bruises, too. He’s gonna look like hell tomorrow if he doesn’t already look like it right now. “Thought I told you to get out,” he says. He wipes his hands on his jeans.

“I heard you, Detective.” Finch takes a few steps forward, helps him to his feet. “But I felt that I was more than capable of handling the situation.”

“I guess so,” Fusco admits. Then, quieter, “Thanks.”

“Don’t think of it,” he says. Finch gets out the Kleenex packet, pulls out a wad of tissues. He starts to dab at the cuts on Fusco’s face. “Hold still,” he mutters when Fusco flinches away from him. “You look like a nightmare.”

“Okay, sweetheart,” he grumbles. “Gotta say, I don’t much care what I look like right now.”

“Well, I do,” he says, tossing the bloody clump of tissues aside and pulling fresh ones out of the pack. “We’re going to be outside in a moment, and I’d rather you didn’t attract attention.”

“Am I interrupting?”

The two of them practically shove each other away in their shock, and Fusco immediately grabs at the place where his gun should be holstered, but it’s just Reese, leaning casually in the doorway.

“Harold?” he asks, eyes on Finch. “You hurt?”

“No, not particularly,” Finch says. “It’s just been a very trying evening.”

“You should go home.” Reese’s voice is very soft, nearly kind. Fusco’s not sure he’s ever heard him sound like that before. “I’ve got it from here.” Then his mouth gets that cruel little quirk and he turns on Fusco. “Lionel. You had one job.”

Fusco bristles. “Hey, you said pick him up. You didn’t say anything about fighting some hired gun for him.”

“Well, you did a bang-up job, Lionel.” Reese toes the corpse of the muscle, gently. “A knife? That’s a little barbaric, even for you.”

“He did it,” Fusco says, pointing at Finch like an accusing five year old. He doesn’t care if it’s childish, he’s done with this shit.

Reese frowns at that revelation. “Harold?”

Finch adjusts his many layers, puts the collar up on his coat. “Not a step I enjoyed taking, Mr. Reese,” he says. “But a necessary one. It wasn’t the first time.”

Fusco thinks that was maybe meant to be reassuring. The look Fusco trades with Reese suggests that the two of them are in agreement that no, no it was not.

Reese shakes his head. “Go home, Harold. Lionel, drive him.”

“Hey!” he snaps. “Isn’t it enough that I played Rambo for a night, you want me to be his chauffer too?”

Reese’s look turns steely, and Fusco loses the will to provoke him. He picks his shirt and jacket off the floor, retrieves the gun. “C’mon, Four Eyes,” he says, tugging at Finch’s sleeve, and the two of them make their way out, moving slow and stiff.

It’s weird to not be running from anything, Fusco thinks as they go out the side door with its shot-out lock. Weird, but good. He finally feels like he can breathe again. Kinda. When he goes too deep, it feels like his lungs are tearing. But, comparatively, it’s better. Fusco leads Finch to the car, jams his hands in his pockets. “Keys,” he mutters as he pats himself down. “Keys. Where the fuck are my car keys?” he snaps at Finch.

Finch jumps, actually jumps about a foot away when Fusco reels on him, and the two are left staring each other down in the uncomfortable silence of the dark, cold, four-in-the-morning street.

And that’s when Finch starts to laugh.

They eventually find the keys tucked away in one of the more mysterious pockets of Fusco’s ruined leather jacket. But before that, they spend a good fifteen minutes braced against the side of Fusco’s beat to shit car, laughing in hysterical shifts because they’re not the kind of men who cry.

Chapter 8

Notes:

This is the chapter that would not end.

In the car, they remember that they've never had much to say to one another.

Well, they've spoken. They've spoken a lot. They've happily ripped into each other time and time again, poking and prodding and mocking until they're both enraged and energized. But now they've saved each other's lives a couple of times and somehow that's ruined it. Fusco feels like maybe he should have a closer understanding of the man next to him now. Like, since he saved Finch's skin, he should have a better idea of what goes on beneath it. He doesn't. He keeps stealing little glances at Finch's blank, disinterested face and Fusco just has no idea.

"So." He taps his fingers on the steering wheel. "What were you doing with those guys?"

Finch doesn't say anything.

"I mean, I'm guessing that your little bird told you they were up to something. You've got your sources. I'm not gonna question that. I mean why you and not the Suit?"

Finch sighs heavily. His breath is harsh with exasperation and blood in his airway. "Mr. Reese was dealing with a more...physical threat. I felt I was better suited to this."

Fusco turns his eyes from the road for a moment, scowls and points to his beaten face. "Buddy, how is that not physical?"

"It was never supposed to be," he says. "Just infiltration."

"So what happened?"

"I got caught." Fusco risks another look at him, finds Finch frowning to himself, toying with the straps of the bulletproof vest lying across his lap.

"Not to tell you what to do or anything," he says, "but maybe you shoulda stayed home."

"Yes, apparently, we should have sent you," he snaps. "Since they all seem to know you so well."

"Oh, come on, that was one guy," Fusco protests, thinking that actually, it was a lot of guys, but what Finch doesn't know won't hurt him.

"Two," Finch corrects because, oh, yeah, thanks a lot, Gabe. "And apparently you know their social circle well enough that you can deal with them on their level."

"Yes, because it's my job." He's getting defensive. Why should he be defensive? He shouldn't have to act like he's in some kind of trouble because, you know, it is his job. Finch's disapproval, disappointment, shouldn't be crushing him right now, shouldn't feel deserved. He just saved the guy's life.

"It wasn't always," Finch says, quietly.

And, yeah, that's why it's deserved. That's why. Fusco glowers out the windshield into the early morning dark. There's blood trickling from the cut on his face. It itches. He doesn't wipe it away.

"So, where am I dropping you off?" he asks, eventually.

He watches Finch out of the corner of his eye. Finch is facing away, staring out the window. "The nearest subway station will be fine."

"Bullshit. I just got my ass kicked to keep you safe. After all that, I'm not letting you go out and get mugged. Your partner’ll kill me for real this time."

"He'll do nothing of the kind,"

"You don't know what the fuck you're talking about," Fusco snaps. "Now where to?"

Finch is looking at him now. He's pretending not to, still facing the window, mostly, but he's eyeing Fusco sidelong. There's one of those pauses, the ones he hates but also kind of gets a thrill from, where it seems like Finch is absorbing him, turning him over and over and measuring him out by inches. The back of his neck starts to prickle. "Continue on this street," Finch says finally. "Take the fifth right we come to."

It's a long half-hour like that, with Finch as a bored, exacting GPS and Fusco feeling like he should have a meter running. Finch guides them to a nice neighborhood, but not too nice. Just kind of lightly gentrified, the kind of place yuppies might feel safe walking at night. Finch pats Fusco's arm, makes him pull up in front of a well-kept little house that looks just like the others it's crammed up against. The windows are dark.

"Park," Finch says, indicating a space. "I'd like you to come in."

Fusco's not sure he wants to. He thinks it'll be lots of judgmental sniping, lots of uncomfortable silences, lots of those pauses. But he's tired and he doesn't want to drive anymore, and if Finch has a couch for him to crash on and a shower for him to use, his commute to work will be faster than usual from here.

He'll be under-dressed and brutalized and his clothes will be full of bullet holes, but he'll be on time.

He pulls over.

Finch leads the charge, which is pretty slow, but Fusco's not feeling so hot right now either, so it's okay. Finch pulls out a ring with about twenty house keys on it, each of them labeled with orderly, taped-on numbers, and he selects one that matches the neat iron plate on the door and they're in.

It's dark and dusty, burned-out light bulbs and ghostly furniture covered in sheets. "Do you actually live here?" Fusco asks, turning in the dim living room as Finch bends gingerly, takes his shoes off, sets them by the door in a precise, sober little pair.

"No," Finch says, straightening up with a wince. "Not generally. Just if I need a place to lie low for a while."

"Are we lying low?"

"I am," Finch says. "You're just a guest. Take off your shoes, please."

Fusco's not sure why it matters. The place is practically abandoned anyway. But he steps on the heels of his shoes, wrenches his feet out of them. When he puts his weight on the right one, that's when he remembers the door that slammed on it. "Shit," he mutters. "That better not be broken."

"Well, we'll find out," Finch says, limping further into the house on argyle-socked feet. He opens up a door in the hall that turns out to be the downstairs bathroom, hits the lights. "That's what we're here for, after all." Finch opens up the medicine cabinet, takes out a first-aid kit. "In the kitchen," Finch says, "you should find plastic bags in the drawer next to the sink. Additionally, the refrigerator should be running. Could you fill about..." Finch gives Fusco an appraising look, "...five bags with ice?"

Fusco guesses he could do that, guesses he could make himself useful. He limps off in search of the kitchen.

It's a weird, lonesome place, this house. It's like a stage, like a tv set, a fake life hanging around and waiting for somebody to pick it up. He peeks under the dust cover on the couch in the living room, finds the remote lying poised on the cushion, a bent paperback lying face down and forced open on the arm of the couch.

He decides, fuck it, impromptu self-guided tour.

The living room seems like it's meant to be warm, homey. Overstuffed chairs and a squashy couch that hugs the wall, all arranged in a vague way around the flatscreen TV in the corner. That's Fusco's first clue that it's all bullshit because one look at Finch tells you he's the kind of guy who gets smug about how he doesn't even own a TV. This is a guy who's never turned off his brain and collapsed into an ESPN coma over the weekend and Fusco knows that for a fucking fact.

The kitchen still has that weird, fakey lived-in look, but there's something of Finch here in the sleek lines and sharp corners, granite countertops and stainless steel fixtures. Fusco peeks inside the gently humming fridge. The light comes on and a blast of cool air makes him shiver, but the inside of the fridge is a barren wasteland, clean and white and totally empty. 

He thinks at this point, he should start hunting down those bags and filling them up with ice, but there's another door at the other end of the kitchen and, hell, he's curious.

The other door opens out into a study and this one, he thinks, is all Finch, from the big oak desk ringed with computer monitors to the dark, plush carpet that eats up the sound of his footsteps to the wall of books to the - Jesus Christ.

He jolts, leaps back a foot, but manages to get himself under control before he has the chance to make an embarrassing noise. He just stamps into the noiseless carpet, knocks out his frustration but, dammit, he's going to go ahead and reserve the right to be surprised when he runs across a freaky headless mannequin in the dark.

Although in fairness, it's not like Finch mutilated the thing or something. The headlessness is on purpose. He's seen these things before. Dressmaker's dummies, or whatever. Only this one's a suitmaker's dummy, he guesses, because it's got a jacket draped over it. He's wondering why Finch would ever keep something like that in his office when he realizes that this room serves a dual function, that beyond the dummy there's a long table covered in swatches of fabric and crumpled measuring tape and thread and needles and scattered pieces of chalk. At one end, there's a savagely ergonomic chair and a sewing machine. He moves a little closer, realizes that a corner of the room he'd taken for more bookshelf in the dark was actually a trio of carefully arranged mirrors.

"Well, fuck me sideways," he says to the empty room.

"Detective?" Finch calls from somewhere else in the house. "Could you also bring a chair?"

He leaves the study in a hurry. In the kitchen, he wrenches open drawers until he finds the box of clear plastic bags. The fridge has one of those sensors that chokes out big blocks of ice and he fills up the bags, knots them off at the top, puts the whole collection of bundles onto the seat of a kitchen chair and hauls it back to Finch.

At the end, Fusco aches.

Finch is sitting primly on the closed seat of the toilet, arranging bandages on the sink. "Did you learn anything new?" he asks, not bothering to look up.

Fusco sets the chair down heavily next to the sink, within arm's reach of Finch. "You really keep a whole room just for suits?"

Finch shrugs. "Everyone has their passions, Detective. Even me."

"Yeah, okay," he says, passing Finch the bags of ice. "All I'm saying is, if somebody told me you had a whole room just for suits, I'd have said it was a lazy joke."

"Sit down, Detective."

He sits.

Finch looks up at him for the first time since Fusco walked into the bathroom. His face is pink, freshly scrubbed. No trace of blood and only a few gently swelling spots to mark that a moment ago, his face was a beaten wreck. He just wiped it all off. His glasses are off, folded tidily on the rim of the sink. Without them, his face looks naked, his eyes massive.

Fusco blinks, shakes his head.

Finch finishes squeezing out the washcloth, beckons Fusco closer. He's not sure he wants to get any closer, but Finch puts a hand on his shoulder and Fusco leans in, in spite of himself. Finch spreads the washcloth over his palm and fingers, holds it before Fusco's face like a warning. "Just let me clean you up a bit," Finch murmurs. The hand on Fusco's shoulder slides up along his neck, cups his jaw. 

Finch swipes the cloth, wet and warm, across Fusco's temples and he feels little, ticklish rivulets of water running down his face, dripping into his eyebrows and off the tip of his nose.

"There," Finch says, chasing stray droplets out of Fusco's eyes.

Fusco takes a deep, shuddering breath, and catches Finch's hand which is still wet and wrapped in terrycloth. "It's okay," he mutters, plucking at the cloth. His face burns. "I can get it."

"Don't be ridiculous," Finch says, gently breaking free of Fusco's grip and guiding his thick, calloused hand back to rest in his lap. "It's the least I can do."

Fusco doesn't protest again, just sits there dead silent with his face going red and blazing heat under his skin. It's just...he doesn't know. It's weird; it's so weird and intimate. But good. He kind of wishes that Finch hadn't washed his face already so he could return the favor.

Finch dabs the cloth against Fusco's forehead, over his cheeks and chin and nose and split lips, even wiping delicately over Fusco's closed, flinching eyelids. When he opens his eyes again, Finch is smiling a little, not precisely at him. Just glowing to himself as he touches up, erases stray spots of dirt and blood. Fusco takes it in, really serious, because the next time Finch is sniping at him over the phone, he wants to be able to remember with perfect clarity that Four Eyes is capable of smiling, that Finch smiled over him once.

He closes his eyes, locks the image away in his mind, and basks quietly in the warmth of Finch's temporary regard.

The sting of alcohol against the long, thin split on the side of his face brings Fusco out of it with a snarl of pain. "What the hell are you doing?" he snaps.

"Preventing infection," Finch replies, dryly. "And it's not up for debate. Don't be childish." He dabs an alcohol soaked cotton ball along the length of the wound and Fusco winces as it stings and burns him clean.

"So," he says, wanting to fill the yawning, terrible silence so he doesn't have to think about Finch's cool fingers flitting nimbly on his face. "How'd you get caught?"

"Hmm?" Finch replies, too quick and loud.

"By your friends at the club. How'd they catch you?"

"Everyone makes mistakes," he says as he throws a pinkish cotton ball into the sink, grabs a new one, douses it in alcohol. "I made mine."

"You don't want to talk about it."

"No." He presses the fresh cotton ball to a cut on his cheekbone that Fusco didn't even know he had. "No, I do not."

"Embarrassing?" Fusco asks. "You know, I've made my share of dumbass mistakes. I'm not gonna give you shit if you forgot to carry the one while you were robbing them blind."

"It's not a matter of professional pride," Finch says. Snaps, really, like maybe it is a little.

"Yeah, okay. You don't want to talk about it, that's fine. Forget I said anything."

Finch finishes with the alcohol, takes a tube of antibacterial cream, starts smear that on too. Bare fingers. Christ. His bare hands are just resting on Fusco's face like it's not weird, like it's not incredibly out of order that they're even in the same room, much less touching. Finch attends to each wound, slaps band aids on the little ones and carefully applies Steri-strips to the deeper cuts. "I want you to go to the hospital tomorrow," Finch says. He considers. "Later today, I suppose. These might require stitches."

"Still bleeding?" Fusco asks.

"No, but I'm concerned about scarring. I am just an amateur, after all."

Fusco grins, which makes Finch jump and fuss over the bandages as the line of the cut bends with his face. "Feels like you did okay," he says, prodding gingerly along the curve. "Anyway, my face can take a few scars. Who'd notice?"

Finch shakes his head. "Hospital," he reiterates in a tone that won't tolerate argument.

Fusco's hands get the same treatment as his face, which he's pretty grateful for because bandaging your own hands is a real bitch. It's all scraping on his palms and knuckles, so Finch doesn't get to worry about stitches. He painstakingly digs dirt and gravel out of the scrape, stops the bleeding when it starts up again. The peroxide burns like hell when Finch swabs over him, but the antibacterial stuff soothes it away. Finch wraps both palms in gauze, leaves his fingers free.

"Foot," Finch says. Fusco realizes what he means after a moment, peels the sock off his injured foot and props it up in Finch's lap when prompted to. Finch frowns, takes Fusco's foot in both hands (and Fusco shudders because it tickles a bit and Finch's fingers are bloodless and cold). Finch prods all over his foot, slow and firm, asking "Does this hurt? Does this hurt? How much on a scale of 1 to 10?" After a while, Finch says he's probably just bruised, which is a relief. Finch wraps a bag of ice in a hand towel and presses it to the top of Fusco's foot, near where the hurting is worst. "Would you like me to bandage it on?" Finch asks.

"Please." He's shivering now. Just shaking. It's the ice, he tells himself. Just the ice. Just the ice and Finch's soft fingertips brushing lightly over the sole of his foot, aimless and soothing if he wasn't so goddamn ticklish. "Thank you."

"Very polite," he murmurs. "You're welcome." Finch wraps stretchy Ace bandages around his foot in a tidy, secure spiral, until it looks like he has a club foot, but at least it hurts less. Then Finch shoves Fusco's foot off his lap, washes his hands. He looks up after that and Fusco can tell that he's nervous about something from the way his eyes won't quite settle on any one part of him. "I'd like to check your ribs as well," he says.

Oh. Yeah. He'd almost forgotten. Got too used to the pain. "Right." He shrugs off his ruined jacket, starts to tug at the hem of his shirt.

"That! Won't. Be necessary." Finch trails off clumsily. "I just want to check that they're not broken." He pauses. "Although, if you could lift your shirt just a moment, I'd like to ensure that you're not bleeding."

That's fair. Fusco's kind of been afraid to check, himself. He pulls his shirt up, very carefully not looking down, just watching Finch's face to see how bad it is. Finch fucking recoils. He looks down, bracing himself for the worst, and sees a mass of black and purple bruises over his ribs on the right side. “Oh,” Fusco says, and suddenly, just looking at it, they hurt again. “Jesus. Don’t scare me like that. From the way you looked, I thought they were sticking out or something.”

Finch isn’t paying attention. Finch is leaning in close, eyes on the dark storm of bruises.

Finch's hand seems to reach out to touch without asking his brain for permission. The hand stops in mid-air, inches from him, before withdrawing suddenly to a respectable distance. Finch swallows. "Could you turn around, please? Your back..."

Fusco gets it. He stands up, turns, twists his arm around awkwardly to pull up the back of his shirt and show Finch the spot where the first bullet hit. With a creak of abused bones, Finch rises to his feet behind him. He feels Finch's fingers resting against his, curling in the fabric of his t-shirt, and he lets his arm drop, lets go. Finch has this.

Finch is tsking to himself.

"How bad?"

"It's about the same," Finch says. "You're very lucky. Though I suppose you don't feel that way." He tugs Fusco's shirt back down, settles back onto his seat.

"No," Fusco says. He turns back around. Finch is looking at him like that again, like he's trying to figure Fusco out, to see everything and commit it all to memory. He can't think of a thing to do about that, so he jams his hands in his pockets. "I do."

"Good." Finch claps once, businesslike, and suddenly it's all professional again. "We should make sure your ribs aren't broken. May I?" He holds out his hands.

Fusco nods and soon Finch's hands are resting on his sides, fingertips pushing lightly against his bruises.

"I won't lie to you, Detective. This will most likely be very painful, whether they're broken or not. But you must tell me if you feel anything like popping or grinding, like your bones are rubbing together. Understood?"

"Christ, now I feel better."

"Detective, this is a medical examination. Sarcasm is not welcome."

"Okay," he mutters. "Okay. Just do it quickly."

Finch frowns, seems to be bracing himself as much as Fusco is. He repositions his fingers on Fusco's ribs, getting a better grip.

He squeezes.

When Fusco regains an awareness of himself, he is gritting his teeth, eyes shut tight, hand gripping at a bony shoulder. He opens his eyes cautiously as the agony fades. Finch looks up at him, shoots an uncomfortable glance at Fusco's fingers digging into his shoulder. "You're not a real doctor," Fusco rasps, "are you?"

Finch lets go of him and gets to work prying Fusco's hand off his shoulder. "No," he says. "But I can get you some codeine, if you'd like."

"Yes, please."

Finch hands him an ice pack and, with some encouragement, he presses it to his abused ribs. Finch takes a little orange bottle out of the First Aid kit, shakes a round white pill into his hand. He passes it to Fusco, who swallows it dry, no hesitation. "Your willingness to swallow any narcotic handed to you is admirable," Finch says.

He replies, "I didn't know codeine came standard with those kits."

"I'm better stocked than most." Finch is giving him another once-over. Not the weird, absorbing kind but a careful, clinical stare, seeking out injuries. "I think we're done h-no, scratch that. How did I miss this?"

His eyes are on Fusco's knee, which is a mess of dirt and blood. Fusco had forgotten too. Too many injuries to keep track of. Christ. 

Finch wets his washcloth again. "Roll your pant leg up. Let's finish this."

Fusco grabs the hem of his jeans, starts pulling up. They only make it as far as his calf before the material gets a bit tight and he can't roll it up any further. He looks up at Finch helplessly.

He buries his tongue in his cheek, looks thoughtful. "I suppose we could cut them open. Or you could take them off."

The thick, clunky silence that follows is palpable. Fusco continues to tug uselessly at the leg of his jeans, brain caught in some kind of loop. Meanwhile, Finch doesn't move a muscle, but the color in his face rises, becomes more vibrant, with every passing second as he realizes what he just said.

"I'm sorry," Finch says, finally. "I've made you uncomfortable."

"No," Fusco says, although he is uncomfortable. "No, you're good."

"You're quite right to be," Finch says, utterly ignoring him. "I've been treating you as though you're helpless since the moment you sat down. I'll, ah. I'll leave you to take care of this one yourself. Unless you'd rather I stayed."

"No," Fusco says, although he suspects he'd like it if Finch stayed with him, took care of it clean and competent, but it's a bizarre, childish want, so he lies. "No, I think I've got it."

Finch pushes the First Aid kit towards him, struggles slowly to his feet. "I'll be in the kitchen if you need me." He takes one of the ice packs, presses it to his nose, and limps off, letting the bathroom door swing closed behind him.

Sitting in his underwear in Finch's shiny white downstairs bathroom, Fusco thinks, dully, that tonight turned out pretty weird. It seems like Reese woke him up days ago, when he knows it's only been a few hours. His brain has that odd, buzzing, shaky feel that comes with too much adrenaline and too little sleep. He wonders if Finch has coffee stashed away somewhere. He could maybe get through work if he could just get some really good coffee into his system.

He takes care of his knee pretty easily, cleans out the deep scrape and tapes a thick white square of gauze over it. In a way, he's glad Finch isn't here doing this for him. Not just because he's not wearing pants right now, but because the thought of himself sitting there while Finch cleans up his knee like he's a six year old who fell off his bike is making him wince more than the alcohol.

He puts his pants back on and grabs the First Aid kit as an afterthought, because he's pretty sure Finch still needs it.

He finds Finch in the kitchen and, sure enough, Finch is standing at the sink, trying to work a piece of gravel out of his palm. Fusco opens the kit, passes him a pair of tweezers. "Thank you," Finch says absently. "It's been a very trying evening."

"Yeah? No way, man. Walk in the park."

"What did I say about sarcasm?" The fragment of asphalt comes free from his palm and he drops it in the sink, where it clatters. Finch washes the freshly bleeding scrape out. "What I mean to say is, it's been difficult. For both of us." He holds out his wet palms. "I'd like to clean these."

Fusco douses a cotton ball in alcohol and holds a hand out for Finch's. Finch rolls his eyes, but concedes.

"I might have known," he says. He doesn't flinch openly like Fusco does. It manifests as delicate, nearly invisible twitches of his eyes and mouth. He purses his lips.

"I just thought, you know." He lacks Finch's light touch with the disinfectant, but he's very efficient. He tosses the cotton aside, squeezes a pea-sized dot of antibacterial cream onto the center of Finch's palm. "You scratch my back, I scratch yours. What's wrong with that?"

"Nothing," Finch says. "I just feel that we're getting muddled."

"About who owes who?"

Finch nods.

Fusco smears the ointment across the pads of Finch's palm with his thumb. "I lost track myself," he admits.

"You saved my life tonight. Surely that counts for something."

"Yeah. ’Course it does. But you saved mine too, so I figure we're even. And I want to keep it that way."

Finch frowns. "I'm going to ask you to spend the night," he says. "And I know you're going to argue with me about this, so I'm trying to make it clear to you that it's not a matter of one upmanship."

His tongue feels like cotton. He swallows. "Don't see how I could get you back, there. Don't think you'd want to crash on my couch."

"Very astute."

"Why do you want me here?"

"Because it's late," he says, simply. Finch seems to realize that's not enough, so he continues. "And you're tired. And I have two guest bedrooms, so there's no need to take the couch. In addition, after what happened tonight, I'm concerned that you may become a target, so it's probably best if you don't go home at all until the threat is completely neutralized."

"You put some thought into this, huh?"

Finch shrugs. His face colors slightly. "It just makes sense."

"Yeah," he says, relieved because he'd been wanting to ask but probably wasn't going to. "Yeah, you're right. I'm closer to work from here anyway."

The laugh Finch lets out is quiet, unexpected. "You really think you're going to work tomorrow? Looking like that? On no sleep and 30 milligrams of codeine?"

"Bet you I won't be the only one," he says.

Finch shakes his head. "Get some sleep."

He checks his watch. "My shift starts in two hours."

"So sleep for one."

It'll only make everything worse when he has to get up. Better to push through on no sleep at all then to give his body a taste without filling the appetite. Fusco has pulled enough all-nighters to know that. But sleep sounds good right now, even sleep on whatever austere, stiff-mattressed bed Finch would buy for a guest room. He wants that, to sleep someplace warm and dry and clean without the banging of the boiler and the shouting of the couple next door. "Okay," he says. He picks up a length of gauze, starts to wrap it around Finch's palm like Finch did for him. "Just let me finish up. Where's the room?"

"Upstairs," Finch says, watching intently as Fusco wraps his hands, tapes the gauze in place. "Three bedrooms. The one on the far right is mine."

"Okay," Fusco says. He lets go of Finch's hand. "Good night. Thanks."

The fingers on Finch's bandaged hand flex. "No," he says, still looking at them. "Thank you."

The stairs are too damn long by virtue of their mere existence. He takes them slow, wincing as muscles he doesn't think he's ever used in his life howl in pain with every movement. At the top, there are four doors. The one closest to him, the one on the right, that's Finch's room.

He goes as far left as possible.

The guest bedroom is maybe slightly nicer than his bedroom at home. Neater, anyway, and done up in a carefully-coordinated, inoffensive blue. By contrast, Fusco just buys what's on sale, what's warm, so his bed is a mish-mosh of weak colors and aggressive patterns. This is nice, he guesses. It's sort of calming. He needs that now.

He closes the door and strips off right there, every layer of his ripped, shot, filthy, bloody clothing until he's down to his boxers and socks and he figures those'll have to do. He pulls back the comforter and the sheets, flips the pillows over so they're dusty side down, and climbs in.

The mattress is maybe the softest thing he's ever felt. He knows that's a function of his exhaustion, that every mattress is the softest mattress ever when you're as tired as he is, but he still thinks this one has a leg up on most. He yanks up the covers. The sheets are smooth, fine on his abused skin and the comforter is a warm, reassuring weight.

Fusco lets himself fall back and he's not sure, but he thinks he falls asleep before his head has a chance to hit the pillow.

Chapter 9

For the first time in what seems like forever, he wakes up on his own terms. There's no warbling alarm or buzzing cell phone or knocking on the door or screaming neighbors or pounding headache or freezing cold child hands poking him awake. He comes to consciousness gradually, warm sunlight filtering in through the window and heating his back.

He wakes up in an unfamiliar bedroom, facing an unfamiliar wall. He's curled up on his side (his hurt side) and the comforter is tangled in his legs and he could just never wake up, if he wanted to.

Then he tries to roll over, and the pain starts. He groans into the pillow as his joints creak, as the pain in his ribs comes violently back to life. He settles again, shuddering gently as the pain fades.

He's not sure how long it takes him to get out of bed, but it feels like hours of just him moving inch by inch, however much he can stand until his feet are touching the floor and he's sitting up, rolling his neck and shoulders.

He wasn't paying that much attention when he first came into the room last night. It was too dark and he was too tired. He didn't notice the windows that are letting thin back alley light into the room. He didn't notice that there's a full-length mirror in the corner, judgmentally reflecting his soft gut and brutalized face. He didn't notice the pile of neatly folded clothes sitting atop a dark, antique dresser.

He guesses the clothes weren't there, at least.

As he approaches the pile of clothes, he finds a note sitting up top, a little yellow post-it note stuck to the front of a shirt. It reads, in florid, slightly frantic handwriting, "Take a shower first."

Which Fusco thinks is a pretty rude assumption for Finch to be making but then, he hasn't taken a shower. 

The room has its own bathroom, a skinny, utilitarian little suite that takes up the space of a biggish closet. It's smaller than Fusco's bathroom at home, but he does only have one. This one's gleaming white and has an unused bar of soap and a full bottle of shampoo.

Someone was in here, he thinks. Someone came in this room and did housework while he snored not fifteen feet away.

He takes his shower. It eases up his joints, his aches and pains, and he comes out smelling like wet and warmth and strong tea. He sits in the bathroom for a while after, dripping and shivering and gradually peeling wet bandages off his skin. His injuries are a mixed bag, right now. His ribs and foot ache like a bitch, but the cut on his knee and the scrapes on his hands have already begun to pebble over with rough scab. He pats his face dry in the mirror because he’s afraid to rub at it. Swollen, florid, bruised, but at least it’s healing. He’s going to heal.

Once he’s dry, he dismantles the pile of clothes. He’s pleased to find that Finch bought him jeans, that he’s not going to have to wear business casual while his face looks like raw meat. That kind of goes out the window when he gets a good look at the collared shirt, sharp and new with the tags ripped out, because Finch can’t relax enough to just buy him a fucking t-shirt, apparently. It’s pretty, though, he thinks almost as an afterthought as he runs absent fingers over the front of the shirt. It’s a deep hunter green, no pattern but the texture of the fabric is unusual. There’s a shine to it. It’s soft and the cloth hugs against his skin in a way he’s not sure he likes. When he lifts up the shirt to put it on, he finds an unopened three-pack of cotton briefs skulking beneath it, like it's embarrassed to be there. Point of fact, he's embarrassed to find it there, even though he knows it's just Finch trying to think of everything.

So he puts his clothes on. The shirt is tight across the shoulders and a bit too long, like every shirt he buys off the rack, so he tucks it in. The jeans are a little stiff because they’re new and a little snug in the hips, like maybe somebody got optimistic at the store, but lengthwise, they're nearly perfect. A quick examination reveals that they've been hastily hemmed.

The underwear fits.

That shouldn't bother him like it does. It's not as though underwear sizes are very exact to begin with. You could guess his size, easy. Big. Still, he finds himself going through the three-pack, checking the other two pairs for signs of alteration.

He doesn't find any.

Christ, he's paranoid.

He takes the stairs delicately, mindful of his screaming muscles. As he descends, he finds that the stairwell is clean, that the house is flooded with sunlight, that there's slow, rich music playing somewhere downstairs. A quick peek in the living room reveals that the sheets are gone and the place has been vacuumed and polished to gleaming catalog newness. Somebody ripped through this apartment, brought a kind of life to it, albeit a too-clean, lemon-scented undeath.

In the kitchen, Finch is sitting at the round, polished table in front of a humming laptop. His face went up during the night, bruises casting purplish shadows beneath his pale, papery skin. He doesn't seem bothered, exactly. Tired, for sure, but not in pain. Not debilitated. He's clean and shaved and pressed and aside from his face, the only thing that looks out of place is that he's not wearing a jacket. Crisp gleaming white shirt, dark gray vest with even darker lines running through it, like shadows inside shadows. The bright, sky blue tie, with its big, noble knot resting like a jewel in the hollow of Finch’s throat, is almost a shock.

Fusco can't remember if he's ever seen Finch without a jacket before.

Finch doesn't look up from whatever it is he's typing. He just raises his eyebrows, says "Welcome back to the land of the living, Detective," and carries on typing.

"Welcome back yourself," he says. Then, "What time is it?"

The buggy blue eyes flick to the computer clock, flick back to the center of the screen. "Ten until two," he says. "I took the liberty of calling you in sick."

He wants to be mad about that, but he just doesn't have the energy. It's not as though he really wants to be at work right now anyway, feeling like he does. So eventually he just says, "Thanks."

"No trouble," Finch replies mildly. “How’re you holding up?”

“Pretty good, for getting shot twice last night,” he answers, truthfully. He’s lucky, he reminds himself. No matter how much he hurts right now, he’s lucky to not be dead.

For the first time since Fusco came downstairs, Finch looks at him. The force of the glance is weird, like Finch has been holding back and when he finally looks at Fusco, it’s an indulgence. His eyes flick around in one of those quick, clinical once-overs that are made to seek out imperfection and injury. "I suppose that’s all we can hope for,” Finch sighs. He smiles, tense and tired. “Well, I’m afraid I’m in the middle of something rather urgent, but you’re free to make yourself some breakfast, if you'd like. Or lunch, I suppose, given the hour."

Fusco cracks open the previously-barren refrigerator to find a fucking jungle in there. He guesses he shouldn’t be surprised. Everything else in this house is transformed. The fridge has the same hasty, shining falseness everything else about the quick-change has. There’s a kind of stunning array of food in there, vegetables and fruits and by Fusco’s count, five different cartons of juice and two of milk (skim and 2%), all with their seals unpopped. It kind of says to Fusco, “I don’t know what you like, so I winged it.”

With, like, a fifty-foot wingspan, but he appreciates the effort. Even he can’t stop some nasty, fearful voice in the back of his head from tallying up what he owes. Shit.

Fusco grabs a box of eggs (organic, if the clean, self-satisfied print on the box is to be believed) and tries not to set it down on the counter too hard. "So, do you ever sleep?" he asks, trying to fill the silence as he digs further in the fridge.

"Everyone does, Detective."

"Don't be a smartass. You know what I mean. When the hell did you have time to do all of this?" He finds a green pepper, an onion, both carefully tied up in crinkling plastic bags. He sets those on the counter by the eggs. A little square, plastic-wrapped carton of mushrooms. Yeah, he can work with that. A shrink-wrapped slab of bacon. You’re goddamn right he can work with that. He finds a little plastic container of white, crumbling goat cheese and he's never actually had that, but hell, he's not picky. It'll do.

"I didn't," Finch confesses. "But I do have a couple of housekeepers and personal shoppers on my payroll. They took care of it."

Fusco pauses in his search for the butter, turns around and gives the back of Finch’s head the eye until Finch feels compelled to turn and look at him. As soon as he has Finch’s attention, he says, "You hired someone to buy me underwear?"

"Broadly speaking, no. I hired a personal shopper several years ago to acquire tasteful, functional clothing, among other things, in situations where I am unable to buy it myself due to injury. Your clothes were purely incidental.”

"Sorry," Fusco says, as he finally finds the butter dish. "I guess I'm just hung up on how you pay a person to do your shopping."

Finch says, “I don’t worry myself about how you choose to live your life, Detective. Kindly afford me the same courtesy.”

Fusco shrugs, starts chopping his onion. "Just saying. Christ, we’re not even from the same planet.”

They carry on, back to back, Finch clicking and tapping away at the computer, Fusco chopping his vegetables and dropping them hissing into the pan along with a pat of butter, while the bacon sizzles and pops in another pan beside them on the range. He prods the vegetables around with a spatula, watches them soften and brown at the edges, peppers them with a small, black granite mill waiting in readiness on the counter. Eventually, Finch says, "I understand that you've been taught to regard any kind of charitable overture as a...a contract of sorts. That's not what I'm trying to do."

"I know."

"I'm not sure you do," is Finch's quick rejoinder, but he falls to very soft, careful breaths and gentle murmurs. "We were both in pain," he says, "and I wanted us to be comfortable. I would never try to..." he struggles to find the word, "...collect on anything that happened since you got me out of that place."

"Okay." Fusco's chest clenches peculiarly and his ribs give off a fresh twinge of pain that makes him flinch. He shakes it off, grabs an egg and cracks it into the pan.

"You don't believe me."

"I do." He doesn't. "I have to. I'm eating your food."

Fusco makes his eggs and Finch works on whatever he's working on and they do it in silence, backs to each other. He eats standing up at the counter, finds that he's just not sure about goat cheese, and after a while, Finch speaks up again. "I'd like you to see a doctor today. Just to confirm that you're physically in order."

"Makes sense," he says around a mouthful of egg.

"You have an appointment with a very good physician. Discreet and reliable. I'll be footing the bill," he says, before Fusco can ask the question.

He swallows, slow and contemplative. "Jesus. You can't get away from making this weird, can you?"

"I can't ask you to pay for it," Finch says.

"So I won't," says Fusco. "I won't.” He takes a bite of the bacon, looks thoughtful. “Have you eaten yet?”

Finch shakes his head. “I’m afraid I haven’t had the time.”

Fusco eyes the frying pan, still filled with half of his scramble. He takes a second plate from the cupboard.

“Here,” he says, moments later, setting the full plate down beside Finch. “If you’re not gonna sleep, you should at least eat something.”

Finch gives him the eye and goes right back to his work, but Fusco leaves the plate there while he washes up, scrubbing pans and plates in the kitchen sink even though Finch protests once or twice that he does have a dishwasher. He leaves for the hospital directly after, and on his way out he can’t help but notice the nervous, hungry glance Finch shoots at the bacon going cold beside him.

On his way out, Fusco stops, does a double take and finds his jacket hanging on the coat rack by the door. It’s been dusted off, but it’s still got the big, gaping bullet holes in the front and back. Fusco sighs, slips a finger through a bullet hole despondently. The leather still has that smooth, rich glow to it and even Fusco knows it’s gonna be a fucking sin if he mars that smooth, soft hide with duct tape patches. He throws the ruined thing on over his nice new clothes and limps out into the afternoon sun.

It's a nice neighborhood, he thinks to himself as he pauses at the curb, fiddling with his car keys. There are open windows and power-walking moms. It's one step away from the suburbs. He can kind of see where Finch might fit in here, how he's got that harmless, gentrified look. Fusco bets these ladies think Finch is really nice, just a nice older bachelor and isn't it a shame he's all alone, when he's such a nice guy who never hacked into anyone's phone or stabbed anyone's back.

Fusco could tell 'em some things.

Fusco, with his beaten face and beaten car and pretty clothes, is starting to catch eyes. It's time he got out of here, so he hops into his car and gets gone. He doesn't go to Finch's very good doctor. He goes to the free clinic he winds up at every time he gets his ass kicked doing something stupid and illegal. However much Finch's doctor doesn't ask questions, Fusco bets these guys ask less. He guesses maybe he's a sucker for turning down a free checkup from someone who, knowing Finch, is probably one of the best doctors in the city, but Fusco thinks he needs to get away from that right now. Between the smell of the shower gel and the new clothes and whatever Finch did to him last night, Fusco feels like all the grit's been rubbed out of him.

Sitting on a plastic waiting room chair, tired mother with squalling baby on one side, pale, twitchy, probable junkie on the other, Fusco decides it's time to check in with Carter. She picks up halfway through the second ring.

"So what happened to you?" she asks. This is the standard post-case opener, since they both got on the level about who they're working for.

"Spent the night babysitting Four Eyes. What'd they make you do?"

"It's ongoing." There's a soft skin-on-skin noise. He bets she's rubbing at her temples, like she does when she's tired. "John has me following the money on a shipping deal. Human trafficking."

It doesn't matter how many times they have this conversation. Fusco still thinks to himself, just for a second, "Who the hell is John?" before he remembers. Every time. "It's still going on?" he asks.

"Yeah. You didn't know? What did he call you in sick for if you're not still working?"

"I'm sick! Sorta. My ribs might be broken. Last time I ever go pick up the geek at an undisclosed fuckin' location."

There's a rustling sound. He can see it. She's looking up from her work, propping her elbows up on the desk, maybe looking across at his chair like they're talking in person. He bets her face is rounding out in the edges as her serious mask slips. "Go," she says.

So he tells the story, low-voiced into his phone as he gets up and paces in the clinic's noisy waiting room, all about that club and finding Finch and getting shot and hiding in that restaurant kitchen and his failed attempt to take on the muscle. He abridges a little, edits some stuff out. He doesn't mind looking stupid so much, but he also doesn’t like reminding Carter that he's the scum of the earth any more than he likes reminding Finch. So he conveniently forgets to clarify a few points, like what exactly he said to get Finch out of there. What they did to the muscle. What weird direction things took when they got back to the apartment. He doesn’t think he’s the scum of the earth for that last thing. He’s just not sure he wants to talk about it. Just wants to let it lie, a peculiar, intimate little memory.

"So who stabbed the enforcer?" she asks, surprising him.

"How'd you know about that?"

"I worked the crime scene. This morning. While you were napping. Was...," she pauses, swallows, clears her throat, "Was it John?"

Carter likes to know these things, if Reese actually does the awful things they both know he's capable of. She has to keep it tallied up, make sure she's still doing the right thing. Fusco's glad about that. It's something he forgets to do most days and he's happy to have Carter there to worry about this shit for him. "No," he tells her. "That was Four Eyes."

She makes a soft, puzzled sound. Fusco gets the idea that this little bit of information that he's already locked away in the "Not Gonna Question It" file is something that's going to steal a few nights of dearly-needed sleep out from under Carter.

"Whatever you're thinking," Fusco says, too quick and eager to smooth it all over, "it wasn't as bad as that. Self-defense. I'd be dead right now if he hadn't done it."

She hums under her breath and sounds unsatisfied. "What are you going to do now?" she asks him.

"Eh," he sighs. "I think I'm on lockdown or something like it. I'm supposed to come back to his place after I finish up here. Hide out until the heat's off, I guess."

"His place, huh?" She's still worried, but she can't quite keep the curiosity out of her voice.

"Yeah. It's about what you'd expect. Place is like a mausoleum. I don't even think he lives there." He pauses. "He's got a whole room just for suits."

"You're full of shit."

"It's true."

"You are making shit up, Fusco."

He's grinning into the phone in spite of himself. He thinks maybe she is too.

"Well, hey," he says. "Maybe you'll get a chance to come by and see for yourself. I need a favor."

"Yeah?"

"I don't want to hang around making small talk with Mr. Vocabulary all night. Nothing personal, it just gets real uncomfortable real quick. So sometime tonight, if something develops out of one of our cases, or even if nothing does and you have to make it up, call me and say that you need my help so I have an excuse to bust out of there if I need to."

A long pause, and then she says, "You know, I used to set up this exact kind of thing with my friends to get out of bad dates."

"Yeah, okay," he grumbles. "You gonna help me or what?"

"Of course I am."

He wilts, a little embarrassed over how he snapped at her. "Thank you."

"You’re welcome,” she says, warmly. “Have fun with Finch. Remember that you don't have to put out even if he is buying dinner."

"What are you, a fuckin' comedian? Talk to you tonight." 

He pretends to hang up like he’s pissed. There’s no real force behind his bitching and Carter knows that, and that’s kind of what makes it okay.

They call his name up at the front desk and it takes him a few times to hear it.

Chapter 10

Notes:

Just a note that, for reasons related to the case!plot, there is some child sexual abuse discussed. Never in graphic terms, or even terribly specific terms, but I just wanted you to be aware.

The verdict from his doctor at the clinic is better than he could have hoped. His ribs are cracked, which isn’t great, but as long as he goes easy on himself, they should heal themselves up without any fuss. His cuts and scrapes are more or less superficial and whoever patched him up did a damn good job. Here’s his codeine prescription, now go rest up.

Sounds good to Fusco.

So he swings by the pharmacy, pays too much, and takes the little pills along with him, rattling away in his jacket pocket. He’s a little sick at heart, because all of the daylight hours seem to have been eaten up by sleep and the clinic, and now it’s getting dark and cold out again. There’s a part of him that wants to stay out, keep pacing the streets and get colder and colder rather than go back to Finch’s brownstone and start feeling like he doesn’t know where he stands again.

But he does go back.

When he does, it’s dark in the front of the house, in the foyer and the living room and the kitchen. The light by the front door is out too. When he puts it all together, he thinks maybe Finch ditched before Fusco could, just packed up and left the house to the cobwebs and the howling quiet. Then he notices a dim light flickering under the door in the back, to the study, and Fusco doesn’t even know how weirdly, awfully hurt he was by Finch abandoning him until he realizes Finch is still here.

He opens the door to the study quietly, peers around the door frame and sure enough, there’s Finch, hiding behind a wall of computers and tap-tap-tapping away. “Have you been away from that thing even once since I got here?” he asks.

“Of course I have,” Finch says, tone distracted. “If you’ll recall, I was using the laptop earlier.”

Smartass.

“You didn’t go to Dr. McConway today,” Finch continues, “which was rude of you. I did make an appointment.”

Fusco lets himself inch forward into the room, stands in front of Finch’s desk. “Sorry.”

“I’m sure. So,” he says, “where were you?”

“I did get myself checked out, if that’s what you’re worried about. Free clinic. I just,” he shrugs helplessly. “I couldn’t do it. And I am sorry.” Not that sorry, but a little bit.

“I understand,” Finch says, although Fusco’s not sure if he does. “So, what was the verdict?”

“Good,” Fusco says with a nod. He jams his hands in his jacket pockets, lets his fingertips brush over the bottle of codeine. “They asked me if I’d already been to a hospital because the bandage job you did on my face looked so professional. Have you done this before?”

A slight smile plays over Finch’s grim, dry little mouth and that thin glow of pride drapes over him. “Mr. Reese takes his share of hard knocks,” Finch says, “and he can’t always seek professional care. I think I’ve learned quickly.”

“Well, for what it’s worth, the guys down at the clinic agree.”

He doesn’t know if it is worth anything to Finch. Finch’s smile fades to neutrality as the seconds pass and his glasses are opaque with the reflected images from the screen.

Whatever Finch is working on, his focus is laser-like, so Fusco decides to leave him to it, entertain himself. Except he also wants to stay here in the dimly lit study with Finch, so he just ambles over to the other half of the study and starts looking through Finch’s clothes. It’s something he feels comfortable doing, if only because he’s pretty sure Finch has done worse to him at some point without him knowing. Hell, Finch probably has a working knowledge of Fusco’s sock drawer. Fusco’s practically entitled to go through his fancy little sewing parlor or whatever the hell it is.

So he paws his way through this metal rack that is thick with clothes. They’re mostly unfinished products, he finds.  Coats with half their pieces missing or otherwise smeared with chalk markings, and isn’t it terrible that he’s kind of disappointed to not be looking at Finch’s actual wardrobe right now?

Fusco doesn’t have a head for fashion. He wears safe colors and stuff that fits, more or less. He can’t quite see the distinction between the suits that he wears and the suits that Finch wears; he can just tell that Finch’s are better. He can’t really spot the differences until he’s confronted with this scattered variety, a thousand options at once, and his eyes start to pick up details, patterns, a faint gradient of color in what was previously a solid wall of indistinguishable gray. His fingertips begin to learn texture as he flips through suit after suit, finding little bumps and ridges in smooth fabric.

His ears are burning and he doesn’t know why.

“So,” he says, a little too loud because the quiet in his head is clamorous, “You said you didn’t really live here.”

“That would be fair to say,” Finch answers in a begrudging tone.

“Is this where you and the other guy hide out? When you’re not being a pain in my ass?”

“No,” Finch says. “Mr. Reese has never been here.”

His heart starts beating a frantic tattoo against the inside of his chest. “Then it’s just where you hide out.” His mouth is dry.

“I have a lot of places to hide, Detective. So many that it’s difficult to maintain them all. This was one I felt I could stand to lose.”

“Yeah? Lose it to what?” Fusco has been rubbing his fingertips against the lapel of the same jacket for the past 30 seconds. Herringbone. That’s one of the only patterns that he knows. It’s kind of scratchy against his skin but warm and soft, almost, and he catches himself wanting to take the sleeve in his hand and brush it against the side of his face.

He won’t, though.

“To you.” Fusco looks up at that. Finch is still seated at his desk, but he’s not looking at the monitors anymore. He’s watching Fusco like that again, like he’s peeling away layers of clothes and skin and fat and muscle with his eyes, trying to figure out what lies in the bones of him. “You may have noticed that I value my privacy, Detective. Once you leave this house for good, I’ll be leaving it behind as well.”

“Really?” Fusco says, half laughing. He releases the lapel of the jacket. “Because of me? What, are you afraid that I’m gonna come over and ask to borrow your hedge clippers all the time?”

Finch repeats, “I value my privacy.”

“Okay.” Fusco turns back to the rack of clothes. “Whatever floats your boat, guy.” He supposes he should feel a little hurt that Finch would sell a house just to get away from him.

He supposes he is, just a little.

He flips numbly through the suits on the rack until Finch says, “Before you ask, I did eat.”

Fusco wasn’t going to ask, but he’s glad.

“Thank you,” Finch continues. His voice has a funny quality to it, not clipped, more stilted and shy. “For breakfast, I mean.”

“You’re welcome,” Fusco replies on automatic.

“I’m afraid I didn’t have time to return the favor properly,” Finch says. “But there is Chinese takeout in the refrigerator, if you’re interested.”

His stomach is suddenly empty and yeah, he is interested, so he steps out of the office, and from the sigh he hears as the door swings shut, that’s probably all that Finch wanted.

In the dark of the kitchen, he heats up his Chinese food and laughs to himself about how it’s a fully stocked fridge and somehow they’re both eating takeout. He leans against the counter with his lo mein and thinks he should stay out here, well away from Finch and whatever work is distracting him. But he can’t face this fake, empty house alone. So he takes his cardboard takeout box and chopsticks, picks out a beer from the untouched case of Coors in the fridge, and goes back into the study.

Finch perks up for a second when Fusco walks in and then falls straight back to glowering. “I’d rather you didn’t eat in here, Detective.”

“You did,” because of course he did.

Finch raises one eyebrow and gets back to work.

Fusco knows better than to go back to the other side of the room. He’s not going to eat food around Finch’s precious suits, even if he did abandon them. So he eats by Finch, leaning against the wall behind his desk, and Finch doesn’t complain. Fusco watches him type and click and puzzle and sweat, toggling driver’s license photos and missing persons reports and bank statements and, occasionally, pause to press at his temples or shrug his shoulders in an awkward, lopsided shudder, like he’s fighting with a knot in his back.

Finch keeps shooting Fusco nervous, irritated glances over his shoulder until finally he says, in a weary kind of way, “If I explain it to you, will you stop watching over my shoulder like that?”

Fusco narrows his eyes, stabs his chopsticks into the mass of noodles with some force. “If I’m pissing you off, I can just leave,” he says.

“You’re not,” Finch says, but he still looks and sounds pissed. He tries again, voice soft and even. “I’m not angry with you. And I don’t want you to leave. Please, pull up a chair.”

He sets down the carton. “I’ve got nothing better to do,” Fusco says. “You sure? ‘Cause if you don’t want me around, I could grab an early night.”

“No,” he says, his hand rising up in a sudden twitch like he means to grab Fusco’s arm. “No, I don’t mind the company. Unless…” he pauses. “You must be very tired. Don’t let me keep you up.”

“You’re not,” he says. “I’ve only been awake for about 8 hours. Don’t worry about it.”

“Alright.” Finch’s smile is faded, tired. “Then pull up a chair.”

Fusco takes the chair from the sewing table and drags it across the carpet to Finch’s desk, pulls it to rest beside him. The pad on the back of the chair makes his spine arch, his posture as prim as Finch’s, but he’s not standing up anymore and Finch is scooting his own chair aside to make room.

They settle close beside each other, shoulders brushing. “We started with this man,” Finch begins, sending his mouse to the far left, passing from screen to screen until it reaches the top left corner of the monitor on the end. He taps the edge of a buried window and brings up the drivers’ license photo of a rough, heavyset guy. “Harmon Bricker. The intelligence we received indicated that he was definitely involved in a violent crime, but did not indicate what capacity he was involved in. Mr. Reese began to tail him, observe him at work and at home in an effort to discover if he was targeting someone or likely to become a target himself. Eventually, I was allowed uninterrupted access to Mr. Bricker’s home…”

“You broke into someone’s house?”

Finch sits up, a little haughty. “You’re one to talk.”

“Nah, it’s not that. Just…you?”

“You’ve seen me pick a lock, Detective. I assure you, I’m as good at gaining unlawful entry as anyone else.”

“Sure,” Fusco says, although it’s kind of funny to picture Finch trying to sneak around a house with that limp of his. Funny and a little sad, too. “Anyway, go on.”

“Right.” Finch returns his attention to the monitor. “While in Mr. Bricker’s apartment, I was able to install a virus on his personal computer, which allowed me unlimited access to the laptop, as well as eyes and ears inside the apartment. Webcam,” he adds, seeing Fusco’s brow furrow. “And microphone. It’s amazing how many people just don’t notice the light.”

Fusco has a sudden, nervous little thought.

“In any case,” Finch continues, “what I found on his computer was more than what we needed. In a password-protected file, I found roughly 75 images of a very illegal nature.” Finch takes a deep breath, goes to say something more.

“I know what you mean,” Fusco reassures him. “You don’t have to spell it out.”

“Thank you,” he says. “The. Ah. The subjects of these pictures. Many of them had been reported missing within the last five years. Most of them overseas. However, when I was able to rip GPS information from the image files, I found that the location of the images was always the same: a warehouse owned by the shipping company where Harmon Bricker is employed.”

“Oh.”

“Oh indeed. I wish we’d brought you in on this sooner, Detective.”

“Eh,” Fusco shrugs. “Don’t. I wouldn’t have known this Bricker guy anyway. I’d have been just as in the dark as you are.”

Finch doesn’t say anything, but his gaze is firm and appraising, and he doesn’t seem to agree. “Mr. Reese went to the warehouse but found nothing incriminating. What’s more, when Mr. Reese inquired into the building’s protocol, he found that there were always at least two people in the warehouse at any given time, and neither of them were Bricker. This, combined with the fact that Bricker had neither the intelligence nor the funds to run a smuggling operation by himself, indicated that there was a greater conspiracy at work.”

Finch leads him through it, the twists and turns that led him from the lowest rung of this shipping company’s hierarchy to its highest heights, outlining the computers he hacked into, the people they stalked, the sheer amount of creeping and crawling and sleepless nights that went into this, and with every moment he speaks, Finch becomes more involved and more animated, but the shadows beneath his eyes grow darker and longer.

“At the moment,” Finch concludes with a sleepy sigh, “my concern is that, now that they’re on their guard, they’ll pack up and disappear somewhere else before we can locate the victims.”  

“So why don’t you let me and Carter take a crack at ‘em? We know who we’re dealing with. We just have to go get ‘em.”

“Believe me, I’d like nothing more,” he says, “but unfortunately, I don’t have any concrete evidence against the head of the organization. Just my own eyewitness testimony. I didn’t even know he was involved until I was taken to meet him last night.”

“You didn’t think to record anything?”

“Of course I did,” Finch snaps. “But my recording devices were all taken from me when I was caught, aside from the phone, which I never managed to get my hands on while I was with them. I couldn’t risk having them find that too.”

“You want me to get on this?” Fusco says. “I mean, I’m in this maybe more than anybody. Maybe I can’t testify, on account of the circumstances, but I’m sure I know somebody who can do it without screwing themselves over.”

Finch brightens slightly. “Do you think so?”

“I’ll make some calls,” he says. “If I can’t find anybody, we’ll work something out. I can always throw the real cops an anonymous tip. So long as they get in there to find something, we won’t have to.”

“I suppose so,” Finch agrees. He smiles, thin and wan. “Thank you. It seems like there’s less to do, now.” He inclines his head towards the files. “I think I should get back to work now.”

Fusco pushes his chair out. “Alright. Good luck, man.”

“Going to bed?” Finch asks.

“Nah. You got me interested now. I’m gonna see if I can find you a witness. Or, if I’m lucky, some cold hard evidence.”

Finch seems too tired to say thank you again. He just beams sleepily at Fusco.

***

So, he makes his calls. He makes a whole handful of them, pacing around in his guest bedroom while Finch works downstairs.

It’s disheartening. Disheartening because it turns out that Fusco knows a lot of people who could say something, but they’re all too scared of retribution to speak up or too deep inside to speak without incriminating themselves or too calloused to care.

Some of them, Fusco never calls. He just sits on the bed, staring at their numbers in his phone, thumb hovering over the number, before toggling away because he knows he can’t trust these guys.

So he does that until he runs out of people to call. There’s some he can track down, talk to face to face, but now’s not the time. Later. When he’s not beaten and exhausted. Fusco pats the mattress with a sigh. He should go to bed now. Definitely. Rest up, heal himself, wake up ready for action.

He thinks he could go to bed right now, but he feels like he needs to see Finch again. Keep him updated. Say good night.

He finds Finch where he left him: in the study, asleep at his desk, head at rest against the keyboard with his glasses askew and his cheek mooshed against the desk. His eyes are closed, but the lids are twitching nervously as the eye moves beneath. His left hand curls around the edge of the keyboard in a quiet fit.

That’s good, Fusco thinks. He’s earned it. He’s running on less sleep than I am. Good for him. He thinks about just switching the lights off and leaving him to it. Except he probably shouldn’t be letting the guy with serious back problems sleep upright at his desk. That’s just a matter of looking out for the guy’s well-being.

“Psst.” He presses two fingers into Finch’s soft upper arm, prods him gently. “Hey.”

Finch makes a breathy noise, not quite a snore.

“Hey. Wake up.” After a moment of debate, he puts a hand on Finch’s shoulder and squeezes. “Come on. Wakey-wakey.”

His eyelids begin to flutter and Fusco can’t help but smile to himself because Finch with his face all slack and his eyes all bleary is very different from Finch with thin lips and cold eyes and a precise, appraising stare.

This Finch is downy and vulnerable. This Finch you’re not so afraid of that you don’t notice how fucking silly his bedhead looks.  He emerges from his unsettled sleep with a pained groan and Fusco squeezes his shoulder again. “Hmm?” he mutters, blinking and swiping a thin trail of drool from the corner of his mouth. “Whassit?”

“You need to go up to bed,” Fusco tells him. His hands are still on Finch’s shoulders. He could probably move them now. It’d make it easier for Finch to get up. His thumbs play over Finch’s sharp, jutting shoulder blades. His hands don’t move from their positions.

“Can’t,” Finch says, rubbing clumsily at his eyes. “I have work to do.”

“Nope.”

“No?”

“Nuh-uh. You need to get some sleep or your work’s gonna be no good to anyone.” This is turning into a backrub, Fusco realizes belatedly as his fingers start to dig, not hard, never hard, just firm, into the tight, wiry sinews of Finch’s neck and shoulders. He should stop before Finch wakes up enough to be uncomfortable with this. His thumb has found the knot in Finch’s back and he’s probing at it gently.

“You’re right,” Finch says. He props his elbows against the desk, his head in his hands. “I can’t think like this.” Fusco’s thumb slips hard against the knot and Finch lets out a harsh, breathy cry and goes suddenly, awfully tense.

“Shit.” Fusco steps back, takes his hands away. “Shit, I didn’t paralyze you, did I?”

Finch answers through his teeth. “No. No, you did not.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, just…” Finch takes a deep breath, winces. “If you could just finish what you started, that would be an immense help. You’ve put me into a kind of transitional – ah.” He shudders as Fusco’s hands close on his shoulders again.

They maintain a very tenuous, desperate silence as it continues, only the rustle of Finch’s fine shirt under Fusco’s fingers and their shivering exhalations daring to rise above the gentle, numbing hum of the computers. Finch’s hands gradually lower and he puts his palms flat on the desk. The waves of the oak grain make ripples in the flesh of his palms as he squeaks them nervously across the surface. His head gradually begins to drop.

Fusco is trying to be gentle. He’s gentler now than he was moments ago, because he felt that peculiar crackle within the muscle, and even though he knows it’s just a knot being worked loose, the idea of him knocking some precariously balanced vertebrae astray has become too real and now there is a fool part of him that believes that if he makes a wrong move, Finch’s spine will collapse and scatter like Jenga blocks.

His hands are rough and unskilled. He is not made to handle delicate things.

Finch moans softly and Fusco can feel it reverberate in his stiff, mangled back. His fingers tingle with it.

“You’d tell me, wouldn’t you?” Fusco asks. “If it hurt?”

When Finch speaks, his voice sounds like it’s coming from someplace deep inside him, like the words had to travel a long way before they escaped his lips. “I assure you, if I was in pain, you’d be the first to know.”

“And you’re not gonna sue me?” Fusco presses on. “You wouldn’t sue me if I screwed up your back, would you?”

“No, Detective.” He looks back over his shoulder and a smile sneaks across his face. “I wouldn’t sue you for that.”

“You sure?” he asks. “Because I feel like I could fuck it up pretty bad.” Through the shirt, he can feel the faint, raised lines of surgical scars.

“You won’t,” Finch says. Satisfied, he turns away again.

“Buddy, you don’t know how bad I can fuck something up.”

Finch exhales through his nose in an odd, broken way that sounds like it might be a stifled laugh. “I know enough.” He reaches back and rests his hand over Fusco’s on his shoulder. “I know all about you,” he whispers as he traces his soft fingertips over the rough, scarred range of Fusco’s knuckles.

He does, probably. Fusco bets that from the second Reese picked him out as an unwilling little soldier for good, Finch made a background check so thorough that, had he known about it at the time, Fusco would have felt dissected. He bets Finch has everything from his birth certificate to his fifth grade report card to his police academy transcript to his marriage license to his divorce papers to the charges porn sites left on his credit card bill, and Finch has it all black and white and organized together on one of his many gently humming top-of-the-line computers in a little file marked “Look at this sad fucking fuck-up”.

Okay, so probably not that last thing. But the other stuff seems plausible.

“You can’t know me that well if you don’t think I can fuck up a sure thing. And your back isn’t all that sure of a thing. If that’s okay to say.”

“It is.” Finch is petting the back of Fusco’s hand, following the paths of veins and muscle and bone beneath the skin. “And I think you may be underestimating yourself. I’ve found you to be a very worthwhile investment.” His flat fingernails run light over sensitive skin and it makes Fusco’s hand shiver. “I admit you’ve had your share of failures, but it would be foolish to overlook your successes. We all make mistakes from time to time.”

Not that he isn’t still having fun, because he’s enjoying himself as he probes into the tight, shuddering muscles of Finch’s back, but he kind of wants to stop because Finch seems like he wants to do something to Fusco’s hand now, keeps grasping lazily at Fusco’s fingers, and Fusco kind of wants to play along, see what he’ll do. But he carries on because he’s afraid of what it might mean. “Even you?” he asks, smoothing the muscles out and away from Finch’s spine.

“Yes. Even me.” He insinuates his fingers between Fusco’s. “Especially me.”

His heart gives a sudden, sharp thud. “So tell me about it,” he says, as soon as he can speak again.

“No.”

“Come on.” He frees his hand from Finch’s, lets his touches travel lower, down Finch’s back. “It’s pretty unfair, you knowing all about every mistake I’ve ever made in my entire life but not telling me anything about yours.”

“Yes. Yes it is.” He inches backwards into Fusco’s hands.

“So?” he asks, prodding gently.

“Life is unfair, Detective.”

Fusco very deliberately takes a step back and puts his hands in his pockets. He isn’t expecting the odd, despairing whine Finch lets out, but he takes a weird kind of pleasure in it. Finch turns to face him, arm draped over the back of the computer chair, and it’s unsettling to see him languid and needy.

“Must you?” he asks

“Hey,” Fusco says with the biggest, most shit-eating grin he can muster. “Life ain’t fair, right?”

Finch swivels in his chair, folds his hands in his lap. “What do you want to know?”

He hadn’t been expecting that. He expected Finch to say something dry and clever, brush him off and carry on working, or maybe show some sense and go to bed. He never thought Finch would try to bargain him back, not at any point, so he’s standing there, fingernails scraping at the bottom of his crisp, lintless new pockets, trying to think of something to ask so he doesn’t come off as limp-dicked.

After some scrambling, he comes up with something. “How’d they catch you?”

“Hmm?” Finch replies, a little too quickly, voice pitched too high and sharp.

“Those guys at the club. How’d you blow your cover?”

Finch becomes stone-faced and unreadable. “That wasn’t a mistake.”

“Oh. So you wanted to be caught by gangsters? Makes sense.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Hey. If you know embarrassing things about me, it’s only fair that I get to know embarrassing things about you.” Fusco takes his hands out of his pockets, holds them up in a “What can I do?” gesture. “It’s up to you, man.”

“I’d prefer not to discuss it.”

“Okay,” Fusco says, shrugging his shoulders. He’s maybe a little disappointed. Not because he doesn’t get to know the answer, although he is curious, but because he doesn’t get to fulfill his end of the bargain and Finch is all closed off to him now. His hands gradually lower to hang useless at his sides.

Finch turns back to his computers, starts to bring them out of sleep. All of a sudden, he sighs, deep and harsh. “Is this going to become a point of contention between us?”

“Huh?”

“Are you…” Finch pauses. His shoulders twitch and he seems to momentarily crumble. “Are you going to bring this up often? Is it going to become something that you ask me about, jokingly, every time you see me?”

“I dunno,” he says. “I hadn’t really thought about it. I guess it might’ve. I won’t mention it again if you don’t want me to.”

“I don’t want you to.”

“Okay, then.”

“It’s nothing to do with you,” Finch says. “It’s just an incident I’d prefer to put out of my mind.”

Fusco isn’t sure what to say, so he says “That bad, huh?”

The line of Finch’s back goes very stiff and very still. “They are sex traders,” he says. “They wanted proof that I was genuinely interested in what they had to sell me. Proof I couldn’t give them.” He clears his throat. “So yes, it was that bad.”

Fusco has often felt that he doesn’t know what to say to Finch, that he’s too clever and intimidating for Fusco to have a real conversation with. Now he knows that’s not true, because he hasn’t experienced true, unbreakable, stony silence with Finch until this moment. He could think a hundred years and not come up with anything to say other than a pitiful, obligatory “sorry.” Maybe he shouldn’t say anything at all. Maybe that’s for the best.

His phone rings, makes them both jump, and Fusco’s never been more excited to hear it. He digs it out of his pocket and nearly jams the thing in his ear, so desperate is he to escape this situation. “Fusco,” he answers, heading for the other end of the study, turning his back on Finch.

“Hey.” It’s Carter. “How’s it going?”

“Can’t complain,” because he can’t, it’s not his right. “What’s going on with you?”

“You know, I was just going to let you sit and suffer,” she says, “but something actually did come up. You know the shipping company thing?”

Does he ever know the shipping company thing.

“Well, a witness came forward.  Says he can provide evidence about the head of the company. I’m going out to meet him. You feel well enough to come along?”

“Yeah,” he rasps. “Yeah, I do. Where do I meet you?”

She gives him the address and he knows the basic area, so he hangs up fast, turns back to Finch, says, “Hey, listen, Carter’s got a lead on your guy. I’m gonna go help her check it out, so…”

Finch just stares at him, ashy and blinking. “Of course,” he says. “Yes, that might be for the best.”

“Right,” he says. “So, I’m just gonna. Hit the road, I guess.”

“Yes. Only.” Finch holds up a hand, signifies, “Wait,” and rises shakily out of his chair, crosses the room. Not to Fusco, but to the rack of suits, and begins brushing through.  “I had assumed that you would want to go to work from here at some point, so to save you a trip…” he pulls a suit off the rack. It’s much broader than the others.

“Oh.” There’s a peculiar feeling in Fusco’s chest, a simultaneous rising and sinking. “You didn’t have to.”

“I’m well aware,” he says. “Don’t think too much of it. I was somewhat strapped for time, so it’s only slightly adjusted. Hardly the fit I’d generally expect from myself.”

“Thank you.” He takes the hanger from Finch’s hand, sees a shirt beneath the jacket, pants hanging down from the lower part of the rack. “I guess I’ll go and…” he shrugs, gestures to the study door.

Finch picks up a shoebox from the sewing table and hands that to him as well. Fusco’s throat tightens.

He changes in the downstairs bathroom, where Finch patched him up the night before. As he peels himself out of the designer jeans, Fusco tries not to make eye contact with himself in the bathroom mirror.

The suit’s a kind of downy gray, light and smooth. Not scratchy, like Finch’s suits so often look. There’s almost a shine to this. The shirt beneath is black, which isn’t something he would have thought of, but as the fabric closes over him, crisp and cool, he guesses it looks alright. Finch knows more about these things than he does.

In the shoebox, he finds silky black socks traced over with gray lines and diamonds, and he slides those on, slips his feet into shiny black shoes that are a little stiff, little rough on the bruised foot.

It’s not a perfect fit, overall. The pants have been hastily hemmed, so they’re the right length, but there’s a tightness around his hips and across his ass. The jacket is cut closer than he’s used to, tight across the shoulders but about right everywhere else. Enough room to move.

His traitor eyes seek out his reflection, the bruised and beaten face above the nice, shining suit, and it looks all wrong to him, but it’s as good as he’s going to look right now, he thinks.

When he goes to open the bathroom door, he slumps against it instead, just shivering and staring at the floor while his heart pounds away in his chest. There’s a tiny, dark spot of old blood on the tile, and Fusco wonders if it’s his.

He gets himself under control and steps out of the bathroom into an empty hall. He should find Finch. Thank him for the clothes and the food and the patch job and just, everything. If he wasn’t such a coward, he would. As it is, he just wants out of here. He wants to stop feeling like this. He makes for the front door.

“Lionel?” Finch asks.

He freezes. He doesn’t turn, just hears Finch’s shoes click their way down the polished wood floor of the dark hallway. Finch creeps up behind him, puts a cautious hand on Fusco’s shoulder that makes him jolt.

“May I see?” Finch asks.

Fusco lets himself be turned around. Finch’s face is critical, as expected. He’s finding faults, tugging at the cuffs of the jacket, the hem, adjusting Fusco’s collar, fussing with the too-tight shoulders. “Not quite what I’d hoped for,” Finch says. “But you wear it well, all the same.”

Fusco feels a bit like his tongue is too large and unwieldy for his mouth. “Th-thanks,” he stammers. “Not just for this, I mean. Thanks for…” he trails off as Finch pushes the suit jacket open a little, starts to fiddle with the shirt collar. “…for havin’ me.”

“No trouble,” Finch says softly. “You need a tie.”

Oh. Oh, yeah, Fusco forgot about that. He’s about to ask if he could maybe borrow one that Finch doesn’t care for when suddenly Finch is undoing the knot in his own tie and Fusco’s voice just dies. Dies because Finch is gently sliding that tie, the one that’s blue like the sky on a white-hot summer day, out from around his neck and looping it around the back of Fusco’s, reeling him in.

He crosses the strands, traps Fusco there, and starts to wind them together expertly, silk hissing like a snake as it brushes against itself and Fusco’s shirt and Finch’s skin. The knot starts to take shape in a wide, expanded form, shaping itself around Finch’s hand until he’s as wound in the knot as Fusco is.

Finch guides the wide end of the tie through the knot, pulls gently, and it takes its final shape, a subtle, asymmetrical knot high up on his chest. Finch eases and adjusts until the knot draws up close to Fusco’s throat and rests there, rising and falling with his breath as Finch’s careful knuckles brush against Fusco’s neck.

Fusco takes a deep, shivery breath and closes his hands around Finch’s wrists. He tugs him closer.

“Just want you to know,” he says, low voiced, eyes on Finch’s fingertips, which are slipping tentatively over his hand. “These guys aren’t getting away. Whatever has to be done, we’ll…you let me know.”

Finch gently pries Fusco’s hand open, frees himself, shakes his hand out. “That won’t be necessary, Detective,” he says, pulling the other hand loose. “While your enthusiasm is admirable, your own particular brand of interference is not what we need right now.” He takes a step back, forces icy blue eye contact. “Mr. Reese and I try to aim for a higher standard.”

It’s a little like being hit. A little. Except he’s used to being hit. His body has taken its share of knocks and he’s learned to brush it off, tough through it, remind himself that it’ll all heal up someday soon.

He could never get used to this.

He wants to tell Finch off right now or apologize; he’s not sure. He wants to dig into every wound Finch has ever admitted to having and make it hurt, or close the gap between them that Finch is creating and, he doesn’t know, kiss him, maybe, if Finch would let him. Christ. He could do that, couldn’t he? Just take a few steps forward, put an arm around Finch’s waist and go for it. It’d be easy. Finch might even say yes.

Finch backing up further, digging his nails into his palms. “You should go,” he says.

Fusco laughs a little, a half-relieved, half-despairing puff of air. “Yeah,” he says. “Guess I’d better. I’ll, um,” he digs his fingers into his pockets. “I’ll see you around, I guess.”

“I doubt that. We’re both about to become very busy, I suspect.”

He shrugs. “Then goodbye, I guess.”

He limps out the door, grabbing his hole-filled leather jacket off the coat hook on the way out. He can’t wear it with this, but he wants it along as, he doesn’t know, a souvenir or something. Not like it’s worth anything to Finch now, with the scuffs and the holes.

He throws his jacket in the back seat, throws himself in the front seat, and sets off to meet Carter. He’s about halfway there when he realizes that if he goes back tomorrow or the day after, pounds on the door and demands that they lay this all out in black and white so he can fucking understand for once, Finch won’t be there.

Finch won’t ever be back.

Notes:

This fic is now longer than Harmless Observation and only halfway done. What is happening to me?

Chapter 11

When he drives to the place where he’s going to meet Carter and the witness, he speeds as much as he can. He’s not sure why, exactly. It’s not as though Finch is going to try and bring him back. Even if Finch wanted him to go back, he wouldn’t do anything as straightforward as chase after him. Besides, it’s not as though he’s even going anywhere. Every stoplight that brings him to a screeching halt makes it ever clearer that there’s no point in going too fast, not right now. But he wants to.

There’s a leather jacket draped over the gearshift, brushing against his thigh, and it feels like it’s burning a hole right through his nice new suit so he pushes it away.

Fusco is trying to remember everything he can about the meeting place. He remembers it’s a club. Not like the one from the night before, nothing so refined or so comfortable. This one’s dark and loud and scummy and it stinks like sweat and beer. He thinks he’s been there before a couple of times; not for fun, just to meet with someone or other on business.

He’s pretty close when he remembers that it’s not a nightclub, not exactly.

Shit.

Carter’s probably been in there on her own for a while.

His foot becomes that little bit heavier on the gas pedal.

He walks in the door of the club just a little too fast and almost shoulder-checks a waitress with violently pink hair and a plunging neckline. “Sorry about that,” he says absently as the woman calls him an asshole. He scans the room, looking for Carter.

He finds her occupying a corner booth all by herself, sprawled out large and deliberate with an expression on her face that says she doesn’t want company. Right now, that expression is aimed straight at him.

“’You know the area,’” she repeats to him, not even trying to hide the disgust in her voice as Fusco slides onto the squeaking naugahyde bench beside her.

He shrugs helplessly. “I swear to God it was work related.”

Carter doesn’t say anything to that. She just jerks her thumb at the topless girl jiggling around on the stage that occupies the center of the bar.

“Don’t blame me,” he says. “It’s a good place to meet if you don’t want anybody to remember your face. Lights up on stage are bright, which makes the rest of the room look even darker than it already is, and nobody’s in here’s looking at the customers anyway.”

“Make all the excuses you want, Fusco,” she says, but she’s just teasing now. She’s looking him over very carefully and her brows draw together in worry, just for a moment. “Wow.”

“I know,” he says, touching the long cut on the side of his face, “I’ll never be as pretty as I used to be.”

“I was just gonna compliment you on that suit and tie.”

“’Course you were.”

“Blue’s a nice color on you.”

“That’s real sweet of you to say.”

“You look like somebody ran you face-first through a woodchipper.”

“Thanks, Carter.”

“It is a nice suit, though,” she says, plucking at his cuff. “Did he buy it for you?”

“Yeah.” Fusco exhales sharply in what might be laughter. “Like it was nothing.” He tugs at the tie. It’s smooth and soft under his hand. “So where’s our guy?” he asks.

“Don’t know.” Carter sits up straight, all business again. “He said he’d find us.”

Something bounces off the back of Fusco’s head, falls rustling into the space where his upper back meets the bench and he scrabbles around stiffly in the suit he hasn’t had a chance to break in yet. It’s a balled up club napkin. He twists around, peers over the other side into the next booth. “God dammit, Gabe.”

Gabe the coke dealer giggles to himself in the depths of the adjacent booth.

Fusco sighs. “Get over here, you asshole.”

Gabe unfolds himself from his seat and dusts off his bony knees. He’s built small and wiry, and maybe a little taller than you’d expect as he stands. You get the sense that he’s collapsible, like his long skinny limbs could fold into one another and once you were done, you could stash him in a golf bag. Gabe’s kind of oily, but his beard and mustache are meticulously trimmed. The suit he’s wearing is simple, black and well-cut. He would be invisible if he hadn’t chosen to pair it with a hot pink shirt.

Gabe hops into the space on the bench across from Fusco, right next to Carter. He bounces momentarily on the seat and says, “Hey! I kinda thought you were brushing me off when you said we could get drinks last night.”

“What can I say? I’m a man of my word. Carter,” he says, “this is Gabe. Gabe, this is Carter, but I guess you already knew that.”

Gabe extends his hand to shake. She takes his hand but her eyes are firmly on his face and Fusco can almost hear the whirring sound as she flicks through a thousand mug shots in her mind, looking for one that fits.

Working homicide as long as she has, it’s doubtful that she’ll find the one she’s looking for. Fusco’s dealings with this guy have been on the short and unmemorable side, but from what little he remembers, he’s a petty crook with a lot of friends. He’s no killer.

No convicted one, anyway, Fusco amends, because he doesn’t know anybody who’d call him a killer and his hands aren’t exactly squeaky clean.

“Carter,” Fusco says as she gradually releases Gabe’s hand from what looks to be a bonebreaker of a grip, “Gabe was at the club last night.”

“Uh-huh,” she says. “So I guess you’re the one I talked to on the phone.”

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, that was me. Listen, can we hurry this along? ‘Cause if you guys are just gonna shoot me the stinkeye and break my fuckin’ fingers, I’d just as soon go home. Have nice night in. After the clusterfuck that was last night,” he adds, scowling meaningfully at Fusco. “I almost got picked up and everything.” He adjusts his jacket with a sulky flap.

Carter seems willing to take over this one, even if Gabe is only speaking to Fusco. She says, “Okay, Gabe. This one’s all you. You got something to tell us or what?”

Gabe drums his fingertips on the table. “Uh huh.” He leans forward across the table, makes eye contact with Fusco. “Is she, ah, on the level?”

What Gabe means when he says ‘on the level’ is actually the opposite of what on the level actually means. Is she crooked? Is she like them? “She’s my partner,” Fusco says. “Why don’t you ask her?”

“Okay, okay. Touchy. Nice suit, by the way.” He sighs, turns back to Carter. “You crooked?”

“Crooked enough,” she said. “You’re boring me. If you have something to say, say it.”

"Fine, fine, fine," Gabe says, leaning forward. "Cards on the table. I guess I have to tell you I'm not alone in this. I'm more a representative of a larger movement. Here's the thing. There's pretty much no one who's in an okay business relationship with our mutual friends in the shipping business. Some don't have the stomach for the kind of business they run, don't like working alongside it. Some don't care too much about that, but they don't like the way things get run. These guys are lousy neighbors, making a scene with the cops, disrespecting venerable institutions such as yourselves and so on. They're not bringing any cash into the city either. It all goes overseas, as far as anybody can tell. They're making a little bit of trouble and helping out nobody. Which means they need to go."

Fusco nods slowly.

"We're all happy to let the proper authorities take the trash out for us, but nobody wants to admit how they know what they know, you know? We'd just let you guys figure it out on your own, but you guys couldn't find your own asses with two hands and a search warrant  No offense."

"None taken," Fusco says, even as Carter opens her mouth.

"So somebody had to step up and...well, take the bullet, I guess. No point in sugar-coating it. Anyway, I'm in a little trouble myself at the moment. Little matter of a double-cross that got unexpectedly, uh, discovered. I'll spare you the ugly details. Point is, the Witness Protection Program's looking pretty good right about now, and believe you me, once this shit comes out, the FBI's gonna want in. So, the way I see it, I step in and act as your Sherpa guide to the mountains of dirt we have on these guys, you guys make a bust and pretend to believe it when the folks running the places you bust say they had no clue what was going on, you get your collar, the feds come in, I get spirited away to a new, less controversial identity, and everyone goes home happy. Except for the kiddie smugglers, but who gives a shit how they feel, right?"

Fusco and Carter trade glances across the sticky table. Too good to be true, they agree without saying a word. "So what you're saying," Carter begins, "is that you'll give us enough to put these guys away..."

"For life," he says. "And then some."

"And in exchange for...what?"

"Well, I'd like some police protection, for starters. These guys'll fuckin' kill you. Am I right, Fusco?"

Fusco grunts in surly agreement.

"And he wasn't even there to bother 'em. Think about what they'd do to somebody who really pissed them off."

"That'd be my CI," Fusco says. He points at his face. "This was all meant for him."

"See, this is why called you guys. Somebody who goes through that for his informants is a good bet. Not as good a bet as the guy who doesn't get his face bashed in while he does it, but..."

"Save it, Gabe."

"It's a nice suit, Fusco," he says again, like that will diffuse Fusco's annoyance. “I’ll give you guys some of what I know up front. Enough to show you that I’m good for it and to get the FBIs interest. Once I cut a deal with them, I give up everything I know. The end. Not too much to ask, for what it’ll get you.”

Carter rests her chin on her knuckles and presses hard, like she’s trying to split her head open from the bottom up. She doesn’t trust him. She wants to wait. She wants to take the high road.

“Alright,” Fusco says. “Give us something to go on. We’ll set you up with someplace to hide while we go look into it. If it doesn’t check out, you’re out on your ass and whoever you pissed off can have you. Got it?”

“Got it,” Gabe says quickly. Carter follows the transaction calmly, but beneath the table, the heel of her shoe digs into the top of Fusco’s foot. “They move their products around a lot, even once they’re in the city. This place,” and he takes a crumpled slip of paper out of his breast pocket as he says it, “is a warehouse that was used by them just recently, before they cleared it out last night. I won’t lie to you, it looks pretty clean right now, but a couple of the guys involved in the cover-up made sure there was something for the cops to find. If you go there now, you should find what you’re looking for.”

Carter takes the slip of paper from him, jams it in her own pocket. “We’ll be in touch.” She sinks her fingers into Fusco’s arm. “Let’s go.”

Outside the club, while Fusco walks her back to her car, she hisses in his ear, "That was a little fast."

He sighs softly. "I know you don't like the looks of him," he says. "But I just want this whole thing over and done with, as fast as possible."

"What I don't like," she says, "is that apparently everyone in this city already knew about this except for me. How is this old news to you? How did you not report this five minutes after you figured out it was going on? How could anyone?"

There isn't an answer he can give her. There's no reason, really, nothing he can say that won't make her look at him like she does sometimes, like she found a roach in her shoe. He's been trying out honesty these days and he likes it, good for his heart and his blood pressure and his ability to sleep, but there's no honest answer to that question that isn't stupid and complacent and cowardly. But Carter's looking at him with the fire behind her eyes, so he gives it a shot. "I wasn't allowed to talk about anything I saw, to anybody," he begins. "Or I'd have...they'd kill me, yeah? Maybe not just me, maybe my kid or my ex. I don't know if they'd do it for real, like I'm so important somebody'd get their hands that dirty over me, but I wasn't gonna risk it."

"And now?" she presses. "You're not going it alone now; you've got me, you've got John, and you weren't gonna tell any of us about this?"

"No," he says. "Tell you the truth? I forgot about it. Just went out of my head. This stuff it, it's like wallpaper, right? Maybe you see it the first couple of times, but after a while, it's just a part of the wall. You know it's there, kind of, in the back of your head, but unless you really stop to look, you don't see it anymore." He rolls his shoulders. "Like you, with this. You never would've dealt with a guy like that before now. You wouldn't be doing this at all, a couple months back."

"That's not the same," she says darkly, "and you know it."

"Yeah. Yeah, not exactly."

They walk on in silence for a time. The night air is cold. There's a car alarm going off somewhere. Carter speaks up again. "Are there more like this? Am I gonna find out later that there's more people out there hurting because you went and forgot about them?"

He shrugs, too lightly. Bitterness has made him serene. "There's always more."

She's looking at him, he knows, like he's the roach in the shoe again. He's decided he's not going to let himself see the expression on his face, because at this hour of the night, in his condition, he doesn't need this. He already knows what that face looks like anyway. He already knows how it makes him feel.

They find Carter's car and she unlocks the doors, hangs in the passenger side and detaches the Club from the steering wheel. "I'll go to the warehouse," she says, her voice muffled by the car's interior. "Check things out. You go home."

"I can't," he says. "I'm not supposed to."

"Just go somewhere," she says. "I need to take some time."

"Okay." He stands on the sidewalk, hands jammed in his pockets while she clambers across into the drivers' seat. "If you need back-up, I want you to call me. No matter how pissed off you are. I'll be there."

She reaches across and slams the passenger door.

***

He doesn't go home.

He doesn't go back to Finch either.

He thinks about catching a few hours rest in his car, but decides it's not worth the stunted, awful night's sleep he's going to be getting like that. Instead, he calls Reese.

"Hey, Kemosabe. How's it going?"

"Well enough." Reese's voice is tight, like this isn't going anywhere close to well enough. "Shouldn't you be convalescing somewhere?"

"Nah, couldn't sleep. Listen, Carter found you a witness. She's checking up on him now, but I think he knows his stuff. We might be able to finish this thing the legal way. Or get you enough intel to speed things up, if you want."

"Good," but again, he doesn't sound good.

Fusco decides to bite. "What's wrong with you? Is this one getting to you?" He can't imagine much getting to Reese, but then, the guy seems like he might have a soft spot. He acts like he's Carter's big brother sometimes, and if anybody laid a finger on Four Eyes, Reese would shoot them as soon as look at them. He likes dogs. He seems less and less likely to kill Fusco with every passing month. So, yeah, the guy probably has a heart. Maybe it's getting to him.

Reese just asks, "Why aren't you with Harold?"

"Who?" and then he realizes what Reese is talking about and now he feels like an ass. "He told me to get out, so I did. Don't blame me for doing what he tells me."

"And what did you do," Reese says in silky, threatening tones, "to make him throw you out?"

"Nothing," he snaps defensively. Then, softening, "Not nothing, I guess."

"No, of course not."

"Shut up. I started asking him about what happened last night. Before I showed up," he clarifies, more for his own benefit than Reese's. Even though, of course, nothing did happen last night. "He didn't tell me much, but I guess he had a rough time. Anyway, me asking about it got him upset. I didn't mean anything by it; I just wanted to know what was going on. Carter told me about the witness, I thought it might be a good time to clear out and let the guy have his privacy, and he told me to get the hell out, so, you know, I guess I made the right call." He pauses. "You pissed at me?"

"Not quite." Deep breath. "What did he say happened to him?"

"Not sure it's my place to tell you that," because he's not sure it is. Finch almost seemed to tell him by accident, or in a moment of desperation just to get him to go away. If Reese knows less about it than he does, maybe that's a bad sign.

"Pretend I'm holding a gun to your head," Reese says without a shift in inflection.

Fusco can make it his place to tell Reese that. "Like I said, he didn't say much. Just that they wanted to make sure he really wanted what they were selling."

Reese doesn't react at first, not vocally. For a second, Fusco thinks the call got dropped, but then there's a very slow, careful, trembling breath and Reese asks, "What does that mean, in this context?"

"I don't know," Fusco admits. "I don't really want to know. Can't be anything other than awful, though, right?"

"No, Lionel. No, it can't."

"You should go talk to him, maybe. I don't..." he swallows. "I don't think he wants to see me right now, but you should go and, I don't know, check up on him. Make sure he isn't beating himself up about whatever happened."

"He's not answering my calls," Reese says.

"Well, if he's not answering yours, he's sure as hell not answering mine," but he hasn't actually put that to the test, has he? Doesn't matter. He's not going to. "He's a grown man. Give him a while.”

“Right,” he murmurs. “Thank you, Lionel.”

He ends the call and leaves Fusco alone in the dark, cold interior of his car.

Maybe he should check in on Finch. Just knock on the door, see if Finch responds. He did almost get killed last night, so it’s not like he’s worrying for no reason.

Fusco shakes his head, turns up the rattling heater and drives for the precinct. Keep it together.

***

It’s the late night shift at the precinct, where everybody’s kind of pale and unhinged and trembling from their caffeine highs. Fusco doesn’t mind so much, because everybody’s got their own business to deal with, and he’s got other cases to work on. Hell, he’s wanted to work on these for a while now anyway, but he keeps getting pulled away by stuff Reese wants him to do. Now’s his chance.

He barely makes any headway on a convenience store robbery (two dead) when Simmons slides up behind him, grabs him by the scruff of the neck and squeezes.

Fusco suppresses a yelp of pain in the flat of his palm, snarls, “Ow, what the hell?” as quietly as he can.

Simmons mutters, “Who the fuck said you were allowed to declare war?”

“I d-”

“No,” Simmons says, firm and barely calm and efficient. “Not interested. You don’t get to talk around it. You don’t get to say anything else. You just answer my goddamn question. Who,” his blunt fingernails sink into the flesh on the back of Fusco’s neck, “the fuck,” and he begins to pull, “said you were allowed to declare war?”

Fusco tries to take a breath, finds that breathing is difficult. “Nobody?” he wheezes.

Simmons lets him go and Fusco falls forward, cradling the back of his neck, feeling raw crescents left by nails in his skin. “That’s right,” Simmons says, calm as he can. “So why are we in a war, Fusco? Why did I get a fucking ultimatum from a bunch of white slavers today? What the hell did you do?”

“What the hell did you want me to do?” he snaps back. “Back down? To those guys? How does that fucking look? They made a goddamn scene, they were gonna execute a fucking goldmine…”

“What?”

It’s right here that Fusco discovers that he has begun to believe his own lie. This is nothing new. It’s something he’s been doing since he started out in this business. It’s one of the reasons that the awful things he knows seem to slip out of his mind so easily. If he says they aren’t there, they leave. But somehow, in between a bit of quick thinking last night and this moment right here, he began to believe that Finch was actually his CI.

And then he realizes that belief has nothing to do with it. Finch might as well be a CI. Calling him anything else would just be complicating the issue.

“One of my CIs, right? I didn’t want to go telling the world until I was sure about him, but he’s the real deal. Guy’s good with computers. Too good, maybe. The guy’s a genius, a total recluse with more money than God. I don’t know where he got it from; I just know he didn’t get it by playing straight. He stole 2.3 mil off those white slavers for the fun of it, and then got caught. I was just helping him out of a jam. He seems like the kind of guy I want to owe me favors. So excuse me for securing an asset.”

Simmons raises an eyebrow. “You can get him to pay HR back?”

“That’s the plan.”

Simmons sighs deeply, drags a groaning chair across the floor so he can sit by Fusco’s desk. “So what’s his name?”

“Don’t know,” Fusco says. “He gives me fakes.”

“Lot of good that does us. How the hell are we supposed to blackmail a guy with no name?”

“We don’t.” Fusco shrugs his shoulders. “He’ll do it because he owes me. He’s that kind of guy. Big on repaying debts.”

Simmons scoffs.

“You’ll see. Just give me a while.” There’s a buzzing sound in Fusco’s head right now. Yeah, Finch will lend HR a hand. That seems like something he’d do. He’s been so understanding about you being shady so far. Lionel Fusco, you are an idiot. “Anyway, Carter’s got her teeth in them now. With a bit of luck, she’ll take care of our problem for us.”

Simmons seems satisfied. His face relaxes. “So what happened to your face?” he asks, casually.

“Muscle for the white slavers. Those guys, I swear. No respect for your higher institutions. Don’t worry, I got my own back.”

“I know. I read the homicide report.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Attaboy.” Simmons claps a broad, friendly hand on Fusco’s shoulder and he tries not to shudder.

***

It’s been the wee hours and come out the other side into bright, cheery morning when Fusco gets a text from a restricted number.

“Your apartment is clear. You may return if you wish.”

He doesn’t need caller ID to know who that is. He responds, “Thanks. Did you check in with Wonderboy yet? He said you weren’t taking his calls.”

A long pause before his phone lights up again. “I was working. I have spoken to Mr. Reese since.”

“OK. Just checking in. You alright?”

“Perfectly fine, Detective.”

It’s neat how he can keep being icy over the phone like that, Fusco thinks. Never mind. He just has to finish out his shift. He wants to go home.

***

When he comes back to his apartment, it’s early evening, and he’s thinking he’s probably got something depressing and non-perishable in the cupboard, and he’s not so proud that he can’t call that dinner. He fiddles the lock open, only to find that the lights are on. Did he leave them on when he rushed out the other night? Shit, his power bill is going to be murder. He shuts the door, rounds the corner into the nook that stands in for a kitchen, and there’s Sharon, leaning on the counter, looking like she’s trying to kill him with her stare.

Sharon wore the divorce better than he ever did. Mostly because she was the one who got the ball rolling on that whole thing. Sure, they both wanted out at that point, but she was the one who brought it up, the one who was already detached from the idea of marriage. He thinks he could have persevered, could have kept on serving faithfully until long after they’d both begun to truly hate each other.

It never went that far, and distance had been good for them. They’d been almost amicable recently. Up until now. She straightens, looking thin and tired in a loose red sweater, long dark hair in a thick braid that curls over her shoulder like a friendly snake. Her soft, dark eyes have a homicidal glint to them. “I.” He begins. And then he remembers. “I was supposed to pick up Michael tonight.”

“Yeah,” she says. Her voice is dry with resignation. “Yeah, you were.” She exhales, long and slow. “Lionel, what the hell did you do to your face?”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “Things got crazy at work. I should have called. Where is he?”

“In his room,” she says. “We should talk before he comes out.”

“Yeah.” Fusco shrugs out of his suit coat, throws the leather jacket over the arm of the couch. “Good call.”

She looks him over as he sits down. “You don’t look like you,” Sharon says.

“The suit’s new,” he tries to joke.

“I noticed. Are you on the take again?”

He hushes her even though she said it nice and quiet. “No,” he says. “I swear I’m not. I’m on the straight and narrow. I have been for months, it’s just…” he runs his hands through his hair, “…the work I’m doing is unpredictable. Crazy. I have no clue what kind of case I’m working from one day to the next; I get calls at all hours of the night. I barely have enough time for my normal caseload. I want to be there, but I can’t always.”

She laughs, very softly, rubbing at her cheek. “I’ve heard something like that before. I thought you had a handle on this.”

“I did,” he says. “I really did. It’s just been busier than normal lately. It’s my job.”

“I know,” she assures him. “Lionel, I know. You can’t help that, and I don’t like it, but I get it. After all these years, I should. I just need you to meet me halfway, here. If you can’t take him on your weekend, then just call me so I can work out something else in time.”

“I will.”

“I have a job, too,” she says.

“I know.”

“And it’s not fair of you to get his hopes up like this. He gets so excited to see you, and then half the time you don’t even show up.”

He takes a deep breath. “Yeah.” He folds his hands between his knees, feels the pulse in his thumbs, feels a sickness curling around his heart. “Yeah, listen, about that.”

Sharon goes still. There’s a dangerous-sounding shift as she leans forward, deliberate, bracing herself. “What?”

“I…” his voice gives out for a moment, but he rallies. “I don’t think he should be here right now.”

He risks a look up. She’s staring at him, astonishment and anger and fear, maybe, a little. “What?” she asks with a flat affect.

“I don’t know for sure what’s going on right now,” he says, “and it could be that my part in this will be over in a few days and I’ll never have to think about it again. But I’m kind of in a dangerous position right now. For the last day, I wasn’t even allowed to go home in case somebody was here waiting for me and, yeah,” he interrupts when her mouth opens, “I should have called you. I didn’t think you’d try to come over here, but I should have called you anyway, because it wasn’t worth the risk, but I didn’t, and I’m sorry. I fucked up. I’m glad it wasn’t any worse than this. But it’s still pretty bad.”

She nods slowly. He can kind of see her pushing her anger, her frustrations, her questions aside. Not now. Now isn’t the time. She says, “So you don’t want Michael here this weekend?”

“Of course I want him here,” Fusco says, “but…”

“I understand.” She exhales and tugs at her braid. “I get it, Lionel.” She gets up, cracks her back. “What the hell do I tell him?”

“I’ll do it,” he says.

“Thank you.”

Michael is in his closet of a room, lying on his stomach on the bed with its Spiderman sheets, reading a comic book way too intently, nose an inch from the print. Fusco shuts the door as quietly as he can and Michael says, without looking up, “Are you guys done fighting?”

“We weren’t fighting,” Fusco says. “Your mom’s just mad because I wasn’t there to pick you up. And she’s right to be. I’m sorry.” He sits down beside him, hears the bed creak beneath him. “Are you mad?”

Michael flips the page. “Yeah.” His voice adds a quavering tail to the word.

“Okay,” he says softly. “I would be too.”

They sit in silence. Michael fiddles with the edge of a page, but doesn’t turn it. Fusco folds his hands and waits. He doesn’t want to force it. He looks around at the posters on the walls, the books on the shelf, and most of them are old because the kid isn’t here often enough to change anything. Michael begins to kick his legs idly on the bed, socked toes thudding hard into the mattress. “Why didn’t you come?”

“Police stuff.”

“You didn’t used to,” Michael says, soft and wounded. “You used to be around all the time.” He gives the mattress a particularly solid kick.

“I know,” he says. “But my job’s changing and there’s nothing I can do about it. I just have to get used to it, make it work out, or wait until it gets back to normal again. Whatever happens first. I’m not giving you up just because my job is hard. Alright?”

Michael says, “You want me to go home with mom, don’t you?”

“You heard that, huh?” He takes a deep breath. He wonders what else Michael heard. “Yeah. Not because I don’t want you here. I do, I really do. But I want this to be…a good place for you to be, right? A safe place. And it isn’t right now. I haven’t been a good dad to you these days.”

“Yes you are,” he murmurs.

“Well,” he says. “I don’t feel like one.”

Michael rolls over to look at him. He’s maybe halfway to a smile when he turns, but as soon as he looks at Fusco, it’s replaced with a look of alarm, and then Fusco remembers his face. “Rough day at work,” he says, smiling weakly.

Michael throws his arms around Fusco’s neck and clings, like he’s a toddler again instead of, Jesus, nine. How is he nine already? Fusco wraps his arms around him and holds tight, listens hard for the sound of crying. It doesn’t happen. Michael adjusts his strong, skinny kid grip around Fusco’s neck and boxer’s shoulders and breathes into his shirtfront, Finch’s nice blue tie going wet with sad, overheated breath.

“Hey,” Fusco says. “It’s only for a while. Once this is over, things’ll go back to normal. And the first weekend I’m free, I’ll come around your mom’s, pick you up, and we’ll do whatever you want. I mean it, whatever. Aim high, kid. Flyers tickets, Disneyland, the moon. Go crazy.”

Michael’s hitching giggle thrums through his breastbone and he knows that the hardest part is over. Fusco pats his back.

“Call me, okay?” Fusco says.

Michael looks up, wipes his nose with the back of his hand. His eyes are ringed in red, but he’s smiling. “Okay, Dad.”

“Love you, buddy.”

“Love you too. Be safe.” Michael pats Fusco’s ruined face and it almost doesn’t hurt.

***

After a frozen dinner he discards halfway through in disgust and an hour where he tries to watch TV but ends up flipping through channels in an angry, busy haze, Fusco lies down quiet on his wheezing couch, flat on his back, folded leather jacket pillowing his head. Now that he’s alone and quiet in the dark, he notices that the tie he’s wearing smells like Finch, that low, noble, dignified scent. Fusco scoffs at himself, begins to tear at the tie.

The phone rings.

He checks. Carter. He takes the call. “Hey,” he says.

“Hey.” Her voice is soft, almost shy. “I didn’t wake you, did I?”

“No. Too much to think about.” He shifts on the couch. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” she says. “I’ve been out at your guy’s warehouse.”

He kind of resents the idea that Gabe is his guy, but he’s interested. “Find anything?”

“Yeah,” she says. “Oh, yeah. We got a body. Don’t,” she says, like she can see him lurching upright, “don’t bother coming around. I’ve had forensics down here, the body’s in the lab, and we don’t know anything for sure yet. You might as well take some time.”

He flops back on the couch. “Then why’d you call me up and tell me that?” he whines.

“Sorry.” He thinks she might be smiling, small and wry. “I wanted to apologize for earlier. You made a good call.”

“You did too,” he says. “About me not telling what I knew. I should’ve said something a long time ago. There’s lots of things I need to say something about.”

“I know,” she says. “You can say ‘em to me, if you want. When you’re ready.”

“Thanks.” He rolls over. “So when’s the last time you slept?”

She groans. “Don’t ask. I don’t want to think about it.”

“Go home, Carter,” he says. “Go see your kid. Take a nap.”

“Think I’ll do that,” she says. She lets out a thin whine, like she’s stretching. “You sleep too, Fusco. Stop thinking about stuff.”

“Way ahead of you.” He breathes deep. The tie, hanging loose around his neck, smells like Finch and cigarettes and bad police station coffee and his son and a little like himself. “Way the hell ahead of you.”

Chapter 12

Forgetting is harder than he thought it would be.

He thought it would be all too easy to bury the whole encounter in the darker recesses of his brain. He's forgotten far more important things. This was just twenty-four hours spent with a very strange man. It barely rates a mention. Sure, Fusco's face is still a mess in the weeks after, but it only takes a couple of days for a glance in the mirror to stop being such a shock. Then his face begins to knit itself back together and the Steri-strips come off and most of the smaller cuts and scrapes and bruises start to fade to the point where they're just faint, shiny discolorations on his skin and it becomes more of a surprise when he looks in the mirror and what he sees looking back at him barely resembles a mugshot.

The jacket doesn't heal, though. And he can't just get rid of it, because most charities won't take clothes with holes in them and throwing it out makes him feel like a wasteful scumbag. He thinks he'll just leave it in a closet and forget about it, but he keeps grabbing it on the way out the door without thinking. So, yeah, it's his jacket and he guesses he's earned it. It's more his speed now, shot up and creased. He supposes he could continue to let it fuse to him until he forgets there was ever a time it wasn't his and he doesn't feel guilty every time he remembers who gave it to him. He supposes that after enough time, anything's possible. He's prepared to wait.

The same can't be said for the suit. Thank god it never fit quite right. Thank god it's always been just a little too nice for work. Thank god he took it to the dry cleaners once after the first time he wore it, and they wrapped it in an opaque plastic bag and he put it at the far end of his closet with his suits from ten years past, and now he barely knows it's there.

It's just the tie. Such a tiny, stupid, insignificant thing that he can't bury and he can't get rid of because it isn't really his. He doesn't think so, anyway. Finch never said so, but it feels like a loan. Fusco wants to just hand it off to Finch and be done with it, but he hasn't seen Finch since that night. Hasn't heard his voice either. Not so much as a text since the day after. He knows that Finch is still around somewhere, if only because Wonderboy hasn't plunged into a depressive spiral, but wherever he is, he wants nothing to do with Fusco.

Which is fine by Fusco.

He just wants to give the guy his damn tie back.

 

---

 

Reese says he wants to meet with both of them. This makes Fusco and Carter exchange dark glances, because Reese putting them on the same page usually means something big is about to happen. They make a point of putting on vests and carrying their sidearms, and Fusco grabs the tie out of the desk drawer where he started keeping it when finding it on his dresser top too often became depressing. Finch might turn up. You never know.

They meet Reese in a dingy little bar. Finch is conspicuous only in his absence. Not really his scene, Fusco thinks to himself. Of course he'd let the guy in the suit take this one.

"How well are we doing on your end?" Reese is asking Carter.

"You mean for real, or officially?"

"Officially."

"Pretty well," she admits. "It's nice to have the NYPD on our side for once. There's a whole task force working on this, feds are coming in and out to drag info out of Gabe, and we barely have to lift a finger. That body was well liked."

That body used to be full of a detective named Marcus Greeley. Young guy, only been on the job two or three years. Funny. Friendly, too. He was from a different precinct and Fusco only knew of him in a passing way, in the way he knows most people. He disappeared a while back investigating some kind of smuggling scheme. The math wasn’t terribly hard and cops don’t like people who kill cops, so the NYPD was on it. Go figure.

Reese is nodding. "Sounds good. And in reality?"

"Gabe's a pain in the ass. The feds aren't giving him the kind of deal he wanted and he keeps withholding information to force it out of them. It's like pulling teeth. If he keeps on like this, we're never gonna finish this thing."

"Well?" Reese says. "Sounds like what we need's an interrogator."

She sighs, presses one palm to her temple. "I'm working on it," she says. "He talks to Fusco a little."

Reese turns his inquisitive glance on Fusco. "So?"

"So he's lousy at it," she mutters.

Fusco sighs. "Again with this?"

It's been a point of contention between them the past couple of weeks. There have been a lot of those. Most of it's because Carter is tense and Fusco is distracted, and he's trying to focus on other cases because those he can lose himself in, but he keeps getting dragged back to the shipping company fiasco and that's just one more tangible memory he can't ask Finch to take back.

Some of it, though, is because he and Carter still have that night at the strip club hanging between them. Even though they talked about it, even though they made their apologies and their promises to do better next time, they haven't quite managed to move on yet. Carter keeps looking at him with suspicious eyes and Fusco keeps resenting it, even if she does have a point. It's like stagnant water between them, gathering foul smell and disease, and seeping into everything they do.

"If you'd just do what I say in the interrogation room..."

"It's not gonna work! You're asking him about, shit, his family. You're acting like if you poke around in his head enough, it'll turn out that he just wants to go home or something. Like he's scared of us. He's not scared of us; he's been running circles around cops since before he could grow facial hair. He's right where he wants to be, he's in no danger and he knows it."

"So how would you make him talk?" Reese asks. His chin drops to rest on his knuckles.

"Me? I wouldn't make him talk. I know how HR would make him talk. It'd probably work, too. But I'm not doing that. And she'd be against it anyway," he says, jerking a thumb at Carter.

Carter doesn't say anything. She looks like she probably agrees about the last thing, though. Whatever it is.

"I'm just saying," Fusco says, taking a breath, "your way's not working. And it won't start working just 'cause it's coming out of my mouth. He'll see right through it."

"So, what? We just let the feds play grabass until these scumbags get away? Gabe's information has an expiration date on it."

"I know! Just, you're the interrogator. You tell me."

She turns away from him, back to Reese. "Gabe's not talking to me," she summarizes neatly. "He knows I'm not dirty, he knows I'm not going to protect him, and he knows I can't give him the deal he wants. Feds are making him work for it, so we're in limbo until somebody breaks down."

"Hmm. Maybe not," Reese says. "Harold found them."

Carter slaps the stained, warped tabletop, makes their glasses jump. "You didn't want to open with that, John?"

"I was curious about how you two were doing," Reese says, soft and over-earnest. "I didn't want to distract you."

Carter and Fusco's eyes snap together and they share silent, boiling exasperation and suddenly they're on the same side again. "So what are we wasting time here for?" Fusco says, half rising in his seat. "Let's go finish this thing."

Carter dives for her wallet, clambers around him to pay the tab.

"Sit down," Reese says. "We're waiting until tonight. More people to bust." He clears his throat. "They're having a staff meeting."

They settle back down with dissatisfied grumbles. Reese pushes his chair in closer and they mimic him, closing in, bending their heads too close over the table. "What's the plan?" Carter asks.

It's dirt simple, in the end. Reese wants to do things legitimately this time, which Carter likes and Fusco's comfortable with. So this will be an anonymous tip, officially, and Carter will respond it. Neat, clean, practically legal. From here, they slip into that old standby: Reese wants to cause a ruckus; Carter wants to do it her way.

"I just want to thin the herd a little," Reese says. "Wouldn't want the police getting hurt."

"I think the SWAT team can take care of themselves."

He passes a flash drive in a Ziploc bag across the table. "All the evidence you need is here. See you tonight." His chair groans laboriously as he pushes it back from the table. "Lionel. A word?"

Silently, Fusco and Carter ask each other the same question, but come up with no answer. Fusco rises to his feet and lets Reese guide him a few steps away with a rough, predatory hand on the back of his neck.

"You won't be joining Carter at the raid tonight," Reese murmurs.

Fusco snaps, "What?" He is overloud. He can see Carter’s head jerk up in alarm.

"The two of you aren't playing very nicely together today. I need her focused. This is her case, Lionel. She's the one who'll be doing the bulk of the lying."

"So you're gonna bench me?" Fusco hisses. "Over this?"

"Of course not," Reese continues, smooth and calm. "I have another job for you."

Fusco braces himself. It's one of those odd things where he's pleased because Reese thought of him, but he's dreading it because if Carter's not supposed to know, then it's going to be off the map. It's going to be something dark and terrible that Reese can't bear to sully her reputation with.

Reese says, "I want you to watch out for Finch."

Fusco blinks, once, very slowly.

"He'll be handling surveillance tonight. It's his first time in the field since his infiltration went south and I want eyes on him." There are the faintest traces of worry in Reese's face.

"Because that went so well the last time, right?" Fusco whispers under his breath.

"Yes," Reese says firmly, without a trace of irony."You made a good impression that night, Lionel."

"With who?"

"Harold is a friend." Reese's voice is the dangerous kind of gentle now, the kind where he speaks very sweetly so it's more of a shock when he knocks you down. "He's very important to me. Keep him safe, Lionel. I'd hate to see him hurt." His fingers pinch at the nape of Fusco's neck.

"Okay," he says, shaking Reese's hand loose. "Ease up on the threats. You want me to babysit the guy, I'll do it. I'm not so petty I'd get killed over it." Fusco rolls his shoulders, tries to get the feeling of Reese's fingers out of the muscles in his neck. "He didn't ask for me," Fusco says, slow and thoughtful. "Did he?"

"No," Reese says. "No, he doesn't like the idea any more than you do."

"There's your first red flag."

“Well, red flag or not,” Reese tells him with a too-solid clap on the shoulder, “it’s your job.”

 

---

 

Reese slips out of the bar and into the brightness of the street where he dissolves into foot traffic like a ghost. Fusco settles the bill while Carter digs out her phone and starts getting people organized. They leave the bar together, side by side but separate, Carter laying down the law with their invisible coworkers, Fusco troubled and quiet. They get into Fusco’s car and drive in five minutes worth of traffic until Carter finishes up her phone call and flops back against the passenger seat with a frustrated sigh. She shifts, pillows her hair against the headrest, turns to look at Fusco. “What did John want to talk to you about?” she asks.

Fusco tightens his fingers on the steering wheel. “He said I wasn’t coming along tonight. I’ve got another job to do.”

She sits up straighter. “What’s more important than this?” she asks.

“Keeping an eye on Finch. I guess. That’s what our friend in the suit thinks, anyway.” He takes a quick glance at her. She looks kind of low. “Hey, of all the busts we’ve made, at least I’m sitting out the one where you have backup.”

“It’s your case too,” she says softly.

“Eh.” He shrugs. “You did all the legwork. I did one rescue mission and worked my connections. Trust me, I’ve given up the credit for things I worked one hell of a lot harder on. This one’s all yours.”

“Guess so,” she says, but she doesn’t sound satisfied. “Is it because we’ve been fighting? Is that why he wants us working separate jobs?”

“Nah, ‘course not,” he lies. Not like she needs to hear about that now. “He’s just overprotective. Wants his pet geek looked after. It’s his first time out since he got beat up the last time,” Fusco adds. “Guess I’d be worried too.”

“Yeah,” she sighs. “Well, you have fun sitting nice and quiet with Finch. I’ll be thinking of you while I’m busting up white slavers.”

“Carter, why do you have to taunt me with shit I can’t have?”

So they end on what’s more or less a good note, which Fusco guesses was the whole point of breaking them up for the night.

 

---

 

Later that night, Fusco is shuffling his feet on a street corner, trying to generate some warmth while white puffs of his breath drift around his head. He pulls the jacket closer around him, feels the new bulletproof vest shift stiffly beneath it because like hell he was going to play one of Reese and Finch’s little games without one. Not after last time. Not after the first time, come to think of it.

He’s casually kicking the toes of his shoes against the foot of a lamppost to knock away the snow accumulating in the soles when a van that has the logo of a wireless internet service provider emblazoned on its side swings around the corner and rolls to a delicate, pointed stop right in front of Fusco. If he has any doubts about who was behind the wheel, they’re dispelled when the side door slides open.

He peers into the dark interior cautiously, sticks his head and shoulders through the door and his eyes adjust in time to see Finch’s retreating back as he settles into the driver’s seat again. “Detective Fusco,” he says without turning around, “I’m going to begin driving in about ten seconds. Whether or not you are fully in the vehicle when that happens is entirely up to you.”

“Missed you too,” Fusco grunts as he pulls himself into the van and rolls the door shut behind him. He’s blinking in the dark for a moment, but the innards of the van begin to materialize slowly and soon enough he realizes that the thing pressing against his leg in the dark is the seat of a swivel chair and he parks his ass in that just before the van starts rolling. The chair is bolted to the floor, so Fusco stays put. He’s sitting at a little array of computers, screens dark and empty. He braces his elbow on that little shelf of a built-in desk and turns his chair until he’s facing the front of the van, so he can see out the windshield. So he can see Harold’s shoulder over the edge of the driver’s seat.

“What are we doing tonight?” he asks.

Finch doesn’t answer for a moment. Fusco gets this sense like maybe he’s nervous behind the wheel of the lumbering van. He negotiates turns very slowly. “I’m afraid ‘we’ won’t be doing much,” Finch finally replies. “I will be surveying the operation in the very unlikely event that something goes wrong. You, on the other hand, will…” he pauses. He does one of his funny little half-turns, like his back can’t quite manage the whole thing. “Well. I hope you brought a book, Detective.”

That’s probably a joke Finch is making. Ha ha. Of course not. We both know you can’t read. Fusco half-wishes he did bring a book, just to ruin it. He didn’t, of course, and he’s not sure what he’d bring if he did and he’s absolutely certain that whatever it was, Finch would find some excuse to sneer at it, but there would be some measure of satisfaction to whipping out a paperback when Finch dropped that line. A sign that he’s as annoyed to be here as Finch is annoyed to have him here.

Instead he says, “What kind of bodyguard would I be if I brought a book?”

Finch makes a small noise that sounds like he might be acknowledging that Fusco has a point. “A well-read one, I suppose.” He sighs, exasperated. “Truth be told, I don’t expect to be in any danger tonight. We’ll be far removed from the action. Your presence here is entirely superfluous.”

He winces internally. “So why am I here?” Fusco asks.

“Because, for all his bravado, Mr. Reese is a very worried man.”

They ride the rest of the way in silence.

The van gets parked at the curb about a block away from the building that’s about to get raided. Officially, it’s an old piano factory that got converted into a small apartment building. Unofficially, it’s not an apartment building anymore.  Finch gets out of the van to feed the meter a handful of quarters and then knocks on the side of the van until Fusco lets him in.

Finch struggles to lift his leg high enough to manage that step from curb to van and Fusco, nearly on automatic, holds out one hand. This earns him a scowl, which seems uncalled for but, somehow, is completely expected. All at once, Finch seizes his hand and lets himself be helped into the van. Or, it starts as just a helping hand, but Finch is a little heavier than he looks so Fusco grabs hold of one of his elbows and what it turns into is more of a lift. Not like he scoops Finch up or anything, but there's a period of a few seconds where Finch's feet aren't quite touching the ground.

It's over fast enough and soon Finch's feet hit the floor of the van with an understated clunk. He's still there, though, uncomfortably close with his hand in Fusco's and his elbow still gripped tight and it's probably time for Fusco to let him go now. 

"Thank you," Finch says in slightly bitter tones and Fusco's not sure if he's being thanked for the help getting in or the letting go. Finch reaches out and slams the van door closed and they're both plunged into darkness. 

"No offense," says Fusco, who can feel the warmth of Finch's skin inches away in the black, "but we’re not gonna see jack shit like this."

"Of course not," Finch replies. Fusco can hear him shuffling around. "There's a switch around here somewhere." His hands make soft tapping sounds on the metal interior as they search. His elbow catches Fusco in the chest and there is a sudden flurry of murmured apologies. All at once, the light comes on and the two of them step an appropriate distance apart. Or as close to one as they can manage, at the very least. It's not a terribly large van, from the inside. 

It's the first time he's seen Finch's face since that night, and what he sees isn't good. Finch has that pale, papery skin that hangs onto bruises so well. There are still patches of his skin that have this sickly, yellow-purple cast and Fusco suddenly feels a lot better about his own face. Of course, some of it's just that Finch isn't sleeping. That's obvious at a glance. If Fusco thought Finch looked exhausted last time, this is something else altogether. The bags beneath his eyes have taken on an awful, purplish hue.

He figures he should be embarrassed that he's scrutinizing Finch like this, because it's been a few seconds too long and Fusco's really just staring at him, but then again Finch is doing the same to him, so he guesses that makes this fair game. 

"You've healed well," Finch says in a nearly pleasant tone.

"Jesus Christ, are you okay?" Fusco asks, entirely without permission from his brain.

Finch blinks at him. "This particular case has been somewhat physically and mentally taxing, but yes, Detective, I’m perfectly fine." Fusco's always sort of admired Finch's ability to make these nice, long, eloquent phrases sound exactly like "Fuck you." "If you'll excuse me," Finch says, tilting a little like he's trying to push Fusco aside with his mind, "I'd like to get started."

They do that awkward, shifting dance around each other until Finch can get at the swivel chair in front of the computers and Fusco's just standing by the door, which he guesses bodyguards are supposed to do, so he leans on the wall and watches Finch bring the computers to pale, glowing life. One by one, a grainy black and white security feed appears on each, aside from one screen which displays only a pulsing soundwave that jumps with indistinct chatter. "Eyes and ears," Finch explains.

"Right." Fusco moves in a little closer to peer at the indistinct forms on the security feed. "So what now?"

"We wait," Finch says. "I mentioned this wouldn't be a terribly interesting task. Unless, of course, something goes wrong." Fusco heaves out this heavy breath that he didn't mean to let sound so much like a sigh. "I'm sorry that your time is being wasted, Detective. I'm sure you wanted to be a part of the action."

"Yeah, actually," Fusco admits. "But it's not your fault." Suddenly, he remembers the lump in his jacket pocket and he brightens slightly. "Hey, while I'm here..." he says, digging the tie out and unfurling it in a long thin line of blue that seems to glow electric in the van's dim interior, "...thought I might as well give this back."

Finch jumps a little as the tie snaps into view like a little blue tongue of flame. "I wasn't expecting to see this again," he says. He makes no move to take it.

"I wasn't sure if it was a gift or a loan," Fusco says, "so I thought I'd better bring it back, just to be sure."

"I wasn't sure either," Finch admits. "You could easily have kept it. I could stand the loss." He shoots Fusco a glance and there's something like fondness in the crooked quirk of his mouth. "I have an extensive collection."

"Yeah. Well. Not really my color, is it?"

"No," Finch says, very thoughtfully. He reaches out, winds the tie in his fingers and gives it a gentle tug so the silky fabric slides slow and dangerous across the pads of Fusco's palm and fingertips. "No, it isn't." He looks up at Fusco, for real this time, and gives him a long, careful stare. "You favor a darker blue."

"I. I don't know. It was a joke."

"All the same," Finch dismisses. "If you were the kind of person who cared what shade of blue he wore..."

"And I'm not."

"And you're not," Finch agrees pleasantly. "But if you were, a darker blue would be wise."

"Yeah?"

Finch nods. "Your eyes need all the help they can get. They're in danger of being lost."

Fusco's not really sure what to say to that. The words sounded insulting - threatening, at a stretch - on their own but Finch said it like it was a compliment. Either way, Finch seems embarrassed, whips the tie out of Fusco's hand and returns to work. "Not that the tie didn't look good," Finch remarks as he drapes the tie across the desk. "It did."

"I got compliments," Fusco admits.

"Of course you did. It just wasn't ideal."

"Well, don't beat yourself up about it. I could never have worn it anyway."

"Oh? The NYPD has a sharp eye for necktie quality?"

"Not so much. We're not supposed to wear real ties on the job, is all."

Finch half-turns. "Really?"

"Really. Gives your perp a handhold in a struggle. That's why the clip-ons." Also, he couldn't be bothered to tie a goddamn tie every morning even if it was allowed, but Finch doesn't need to know about that part.

"I had been wondering about those." Finch lapses into what is, going by his expression, an unpleasant memory. "Well. That's not your fault, then."

Fusco gets the distinct impression that he just rose ever so slightly in Finch's esteem.

"Of course, Mr. Reese," Finch says suddenly, pressing two fingers to his ear. "It appears to be progressing as planned. Detective Carter should have no trouble at all." He pauses. "Yes, of course, he's here." Another pause. "Amusing as that would have been, I somehow managed to conduct myself in a manner befitting an adult." Yet another one, where Fusco still can't hear a thing Reese is saying, but Finch's lips turn down at the corners. "That's interesting, because I seem to recall someone who managed to survive a date by the skin of his teeth only because I was feeding him lines." Another pause. "There's hardly anyone else I could be talking about." Yet another. "Enjoy your evening, Mr. Reese."

Fusco stands with his hand braced against the back of Finch's chair and listens to this exchange with a kind of spiteful pleasure. This is what he's going to be hearing in his head every time Reese gets all mysterious on him mid-conversation.

Finch's fingertips drift away from his ear. "My apologies," he says. "Keeping in contact with Mr. Reese is something of a priority, so I may have to interrupt you from time to time."

"No, I get it. Do what you've gotta do, you know?"

"Of course. Thank you for understanding." Finch sighs, turns and looks him over again. His eyes catch on the bullet hole, an ugly gap on the breast of the leather jacket. "Do you have plans to have that repaired?" he asks.

Fusco shrugs. "Didn't really know how to go about it. Besides slapping some duct tape over it, but that didn't sound right."

"No. Absolutely not," Finch says, hiding his cringe admirably. "Take it off. I need something to do with my hands while we're waiting."

"What?"

Finch is opening a bag and taking out a small, zipped-up little case, like a miniature tool kit or a woman's makeup bag. He pulls the zipper, unfolds the case, and begins laying out supplies. Fabric. Scissors. Glue. Little bottles and tools. And, yeah, a small square of leather the exact color and sheen of his jacket when it was new.

"Jesus," Fusco breathes.

Finch glances up impatiently. "Well?" he asks. His fingers seek out the zip of Fusco's jacket and begin to tug gently. 

Fusco swallows once, hard, and starts to shrug the jacket off over his shoulders. "You don't have to," he says lamely.

"Clearly not," Finch says, "but I want to. And there's no reason why I shouldn't and several reasons why I should. The biggest one being that seeing you wandering around in a jacket full of holes is deeply offensive to my aesthetic sensibilities." He shoves the jacket open and pulls it down so it catches around Fusco's elbows, pinning his upper arms to his side. "Could you lower your arms, please?" Finch asks.

Fusco lets his arms point directly downward, and the jacket slides off his wrists and pools heavily in Finch's arms. "You don’t have to look,” Fusco says, “if it bothers you.”

“It’s not always so easy.” The leather creaks as he drapes the jacket over his lap. “Not to make you uncomfortable, but I see you a great deal more frequently than you see me. Essentially,” he says as he begins to seek out flaws in the hide with his fingertips, “I don’t have the luxury of not looking. Whether I want to or not, one way or another, I see almost everything.” His fingers find a hole in the jacket, the one from when that bullet struck his back. “Although in this case, once was more than enough. This jacket deserves better care.”

“Maybe I’m not up to it,” Fusco says.

Finch shushes him. “Keep an eye on the monitors, won’t you?”

He watches the monitors. Someone has to. Although he suspects that Finch is watching too, stealing quick, flicking glances at the screens before returning to work on the jacket. Fusco knows this because he's stealing quick, flicking glances at Finch.

He's getting that same feeling again. Like when Finch patched him up that night, that warm, curling, cloying feeling. Like he's being thought of. Fussed over. He's not certain that he likes it, and he knows he'd get to hate it after a while, but in small doses...he doesn't know. Maybe it's only that he's not used to it.

Right. Monitors. Nothing's going on on the monitors, really. It's just a bunch of blurry, grayscale guys crammed into a lounge and talking. And the talking, that's what's interesting, because what they're talking about is whether or not they should pull all the evidence out of the not-apartment building. Whether the police know. They know. Fusco can see them gathering on the edges of Finch's security array, just out of frame on screens showing empty street corners. The guys on the center screen keep arguing. The police on the outer screens keep gathering. Fusco drums his fingertips on the desk.

"Don't fidget," Finch says, without looking up.

Fusco presses his hand flat to the desk.

"What do you think?" Finch asks. "Of the situation brewing out there, I mean."

"I think it'll go well," Fusco says. "Carter's good at this kind of thing. And she's got good people working with her." He crams his hands into his pockets. "I don't like this," he says. "I don't like watching and waiting and not being able to do anything about it. I'd rather be out there or not know a damn thing. I don't know how you don't go crazy."

"Well," Finch sighs, "who's to say I don't, on occasion?"

Fusco shrugs his shoulders. "Nobody but you, I guess."

"Even my judgment’s been known to fail."

Fusco rests one hand on the back of Finch's seat and looks down at him, at the work on his lap. What he's done is he's sort of plugged the holes in the jacket with little discs of leather cut to fit the shape of bullet holes and glued to something on the inside of the jacket. Fusco would say the lining if the lining wasn't flimsy silk and shot through besides. The leather discs, they're not patches, exactly, because there's no overlap. They just sit there filling space with only a thin line of emptiness between the jacket's old flesh and the graft. He's mixing something, a tiny cup of brown solution that he's adding to and mixing and squinting at. "Does this look like the same shade to you?" Finch asks.

"I guess."

"Don't guess. Speak with conviction."

Fusco bends a little, mimics Finch's squint. "It's a little bit too light," Fusco admits. 

"That's what I thought." Finch adds a few drops from a darker brown bottle and mixes furiously. From there, he begins to spread it into that gap between new and old leather, hiding the seam. He's careful. Finch keeps the solution smooth and even, so there's no sign of tampering.

"Hey, Finch?" Fusco asks, watching him work. "What are we doing here?"

"That's a very big question, Detective. I suggest you bring it up at whatever spiritual gathering you choose to frequent."

"No, don't be a smartass. I'm really asking. What're we, meaning you and me, doing here, meaning in this van, when all night you've been making it sound like we don't need to be here? That specific enough for you?"

"I could hardly ask for greater specificity. Thank you." Finch, having finished spreading on the liquid repair goop nice and smooth, begins to peer around the van's dim interior. "We have a hotplate in here somewhere," he says. "If you find it, I'll tell you."

After some scuffling, Fusco does manage to find it wedged into a cardboard box in the back. He holds it out to Finch and lets his expression do the asking.

"Often, I'm in here a very long time," Finch explains. "You'd get hungry too."

Fusco won't argue with that. He just sits quietly while Finch casually applies the damaged area of the leather coat directly to the hotplate. "That should adhere nicely," he says. "I'm afraid the answer to your question isn't very interesting."

"That's okay,"

"I'm here," Finch says, "because I want to ease back into things. Because I haven't done any fieldwork since that night and because going outside was becoming a daunting prospect. I couldn't carry on that way, not like this. Not for long. So I gave myself a simple, boring task. And you're here because John wanted me looked after. Even for something as small as that." There's a bitter laugh buried in his words.

"I'm sorry."

"It's not your fault."

"No. About what I said. I'm sorry."

Finch blinks at him, mystified. "You haven't said anything to be sorry for."

Fusco kind of doubts that, but he also kind of likes that Finch said it, so he's not going to put up a fight. "That night, I mean. When I wouldn't leave you alone about what happened. You didn't want to talk about it, but I kept asking, and. I'm sorry. It was lousy."

"My own behavior that night was...far from exemplary. Don't be too eager to place the blame on yourself." Finch peels back the jacket from the hotplate and frowns. "It's a little dark," he says. "The fix. I'm afraid it's not perfect."

The jacket is whole and glossy again and, yeah, the leather looks a bit too new in spots and there's a funny, dark ring there where the old leather and the new leather are bound together, but it has that shine to it again. Finch's care bled into the leather and made it new. "Shut up," Fusco says, furiously stamping out the happiness from his voice. "It looks great."

Finch looks a little exasperated. "No accounting for taste," he says, "but as long as you're happy." He passes it to Fusco, admonishes him from touching the heated spots until they've cooled properly. Fusco takes the jacket, drapes it over one arm, finds himself petting the soft grain of the leather. When he comes back to himself, when he regrows his sense of shame, he stops fussing over the jacket only to find Finch half-smiling up at him.

"What?"

"Just a sense of personal pride," Finch says. "I never imagined that convincing you to accept a simple gift would be so difficult."

"It's not simple," Fusco insists. "It's one of the best gifts anyone's ever given me. And you just tossed it out there like it didn't even matter." Finch is giving him this owlish look, wide-eyed and befuddled and maybe a little predatory. He shakes his head. "Sorry. Sounds ungrateful. I'm not. I guess I don't get gifts that often, you know? I'm not used to it."

Finch says, "I'd like to fix that."

Fusco shakes his head. "You don't have to do that."

"It's not an obligation, Lionel."

"Then what is it?"

Finch shrugs delicately. "I'm very rich," he says. "I don't mean to sound like I'm bragging, but I am astronomically wealthy. To a degree that is difficult to fathom. And in recent years, I've done my best to become less so. I've donated - and continued to donate - heavily to charities and I've sunk an immense sum of money into...this. Our work. And yet, here I am with more money than I can ever possibly spend on myself without becoming repugnant. So if I can't occasionally treat the people around me, if I can't buy them things they need from time to time, then I'm not sure of what to do with it all."

"I don't need this," Fusco says. "Your charity, I mean. I don't need any of it. I do OK. There are better things you could spend your money on."

Finch looks down at his hands, smiles sadly. "That's my own selfishness, I suppose. There are more objectively worthwhile pursuits, certainly. And don't think I don't spend money on those, because I do. But at the end of the day, I can't bear to see a good man in a cheap suit."

Fusco feels his face go hot and he breaks eye contact. "I’m not that swell of a guy. And you already bought me a good suit," he mumbles.

"That was off-rack." Like that somehow negates it, but Fusco guesses it does, in Finch's eyes. "And it doesn't fit quite right."

Of course he would notice. Of course. "So you want to buy me a monkey suit and...what? What the hell does that get you?"

"A measure of satisfaction. A sense of pride at a job well done. And maybe, just perhaps, you'll enjoy yourself."

"I kinda doubt that."

"Then you'll stand there, bored out of your skull, for a few hours at the very most in an environment where no one is shooting at you. After which, you'll walk away with a very good suit that you can wear, ignore, or destroy, according to your whim. You're hardly losing, Detective."

"Yeah." He steals a glance at Finch, whose sleepy half-smile is going sharp in the corners. "Yeah, I guess not. I might even owe you one, after something like that."

"You won't."

"Hey, nothing's free. But you know what? Fine. If it's really something you want to do, I can go along with that."

Finch doesn’t even try to cover up the brightness that comes into his eyes. "Thank you."

"Feels backwards," Fusco says, feeling faintly embarrassed. "You thanking me for this."

"All the same," Finch beams, "I'm very pleased. How do you feel about glen check?"

"I don't. I'm not even sure what that is."

Finch pats the back of his hand like you poor creature and murmurs, "Never mind. I'll figure it out."

The monitor devoted to sound emits a harsh, loud crack and the line jumps. "Hey," Fusco says, prodding Finch's shoulder. "It's starting."

He feels removed as he watches it all unfold on the screens with Finch, like it's all happening somewhere very far away to people he doesn't know. Of course, sometimes he'll recognize somebody on the screen, on one side or another, or he'll realize that the sounds of gunfire aren't just coming from the speakers, and that'll snap him right back out of that delusion.

"May I admit something?" Finch asks as they admire a particularly beautiful shot of the room being flashbanged.

"Shoot."

"My primary reason for choosing to be here was specifically to watch this happen. With my own eyes."

"Yeah, well," Fusco says, "my main reason for wanting to be out there with them was to make it happen, so maybe you're a bigger man than I am."

"No bigger."

"That a crack about my weight?"

"Hush, Lionel. Watch."

He hushes. The two of them kind of settle in there, even though Fusco's still standing up and Finch is bent into that tiny office chair and neither one of them has any right to be comfortable. Fusco stands next to him, hand braced on the back of the chair, and if his wrist and forearm rest lightly against Finch's shoulders and neck, well, that's just incidental. And if Finch happens to list a little to the right and his temple happens to press against the solid bulk of Fusco's side, well, Fusco can admit he's a pretty comfortable guy to lean against. No need to take that personally.

They watch the whole damn thing without another word said between them, and when the suspects are being carted out and called in and all the action's done with, Fusco looks down and finds Finch fast asleep. The guy's sitting nearly upright, with his head resting against Fusco's hip, but he's sleeping like a dead man. His sleepy, even little breaths puff against Fusco’s side in ticklish pushes of heat and his eyelids flicker, but remain closed. If the bags under his eyes have been any indication, Fusco thinks Finch probably earned this.

So he doesn't move. Not through any of it. Not even the part where the cops on the screen start to empty out those apartments that aren't apartments. The part where Fusco starts to get deeply sad and sick inside, but he's not moving an inch because Finch already knew what was in those apartments. He doesn't need to see for himself. Not now, anyway. Not when he's looking like maybe he isn't having lousy dreams or any dreams at all. Let him sleep.

God, he thinks as he watches the screen. I hope they have homes to go back to.

Once they're gone, once they're away, maybe at a hospital somewhere, he very deliberately pushes those thoughts away. The children in the apartments that aren’t apartments will become his business when he gets out of the van. For a second, now, he wants to pretend he didn't see that.

After a while, there's a knock on the side of the van, and Finch jolts to attention and Fusco pretends it's not kind of funny to see him momentarily flustered and blinking. Fusco lets Finch pull himself together, slides back the door to admit Reese, who looks annoyed. "I wasn't able to do it myself," he explains.

"Join the club, buddy," Fusco says as he moves aside to admit Reese into the van.

"I miss the old way."

"It's the price we pay for legality, Mr. Reese," Finch says, rubbing at his eyes. "Your personal need for revenge may not be satisfied, but the case is watertight."

Reese grumbles and moves past Finch into the van, towards the driver's seat.

"Detective," Finch calls as Fusco steps out of the van, "do we have plans?"

"Guess so," he says. "But not when I'm working. Or...you know, you probably know my schedule better than I do."

"That's true. I'll eliminate your working hours and the weekends you spend with your son and see what lines up from there."

"Actually..." Fusco hesitates. "Michael's weekends are free. Just for a little while. Thought it would be best if he stayed away until things died down."

Finch frowns for a split second, and then his face is carefully neutral again. "I'll keep that in mind. Good evening, Detective."

He and Finch push the van door shut together.

From there, Fusco walks until he meets the rest of the cops. He flashes his badge to get past the cordon and meets up with Carter, who is leaning against a car with her hands jammed very determinedly into her pockets.

"It looked like you kicked ass in there," Fusco remarks as he settles beside her.

"Yeah." Her lips pull into a weak smile. "We kinda did."

"You doing okay?"

"Nope."

"'S okay," Fusco says. "Me neither, probably. Not once we start interviewing witnesses."

"Damn it," she mutters, like she'd been very purposefully not thinking about that.

"Sorry," he says. "Hey, let's get finished up here. Faster we finish up, faster you can get home."

She looks at him, finally, and she smiles, very small but for real this time. "I missed you today."

"I missed being here," he says as the two of them push off the car together and stand upright.

"How was babysitting?"

"Okay," Fusco admits. "We had a good talk."

"Yeah? What about?"

"Not sure," he says. "Menswear, mostly."

 

---

 

He's halfway between the precinct and home, hurling every curse he can think of at his terrible, nightmarish goddamn commute, when his phone starts ringing. He's expecting Carter, or CALLER ID BLOCKED, or maybe even his ex, but it's Simmons, who he wasn't expecting at all.

"Yeah?"

"How involved were you in what happened tonight?" Simmons asks. No preamble. No 'hey, how're you doing?' It's like they're barely even pretending to be friends anymore.

"Not much," Fusco admits. "Carter did most of the legwork; I was just along for the ride."

"About that legwork," Simmons says, "we know she didn't get that info on her own. So who gave it to her?"

"So maybe a CI of mine threw some scraps our way. Guy's got eyes and ears everywhere, and a big fuckin' grudge against our incarcerated friends. He was happy to."

"Well, don't get happy just yet," Simmons grumbles. "Nobody top brass got caught in your little raid, so as far as we're concerned, this operation is pretty fucking far from over."

"So? You know one of the small fry will start running his mouth to get his sentence cut down. Or our witness will cough up something good. Or my guy will find something. We've got these assholes on the ropes. Depend on it."

Simmons makes a low, thoughtful noise. "This CI the same one?"

"Yeah," Fusco says. "Same one."

"Seems like he's a pretty smart investment after all. Good call, Fusco."

"Thanks."

"I want to meet him."

It's amazing how fast Fusco's good moods get crushed these days. "He's not the meet and greet type," Fusco says cautiously. "That could take more convincing than it's really worth. Might scare him off."

"He talks to you, doesn't he?"

"Yeah," Fusco says too quickly. "Yeah, he does, but that took some doing. Guy likes his privacy and hates cops. He's not gonna want to meet the gang."

"You better start working on it, Fusco. If we can get some use out of this guy, we're gonna need him."

He drums his fingertips on the steering wheel. "Don't I know it."

Notes:

This fic is the actual lengthiest bastard, I swear.

Chapter 13

On the way to work, he gets a call from an unknown number, which means there's a 50% chance he knows exactly who it is.

"Good morning, Detective," Finch says smoothly. "Are you well?"

Not as well as Finch is right now, Fusco thinks. That's obvious just from his voice. Finch sounds good, like he went to bed early the night before and woke up when he felt like it, when the sun was bright and his bed was warm and sleeping more would only make him tired. He sounds like he could still be in bed, maybe. His voice has that sleepy, stretching, languorous sound. What a bastard.

"I'm stuck in traffic," Fusco snaps. "Anything I can do for you?"

"I was actually hoping to set a date for your suit fitting. Do you have plans tonight?"

Oh. Christ. Fusco's been having second thoughts about that. Not just because the thought of standing perfectly still while Finch measures him up and criticizes his clothes and his body and his fucking soul makes him feel a little sick. Although that's definitely part of it.

The other part's guilt. Dread, really, because one of these days, he's going to have to ask a difficult question. He's going to have to bring up Simmons, and the lie Fusco told to get out of trouble and make his life a little easier. He's going to have to ask Finch to play along. Finch will frown. Finch will say something cutting. Finch will leave him in the lurch because Fusco's endless lies are not Finch's problem.

And they shouldn't be.

"Listen," Fusco says, "I have to go another round with Gabe in the interrogation room today. I don't see me being good for anything after work today."

"Oh." There's a hasty attempt to soften up the edge of disappointment in his voice. "Well, that's alright. There must be another time. Good luck with your interview."

"Thanks." Before he even realizes it's happening, he begins to smile. "I'm gonna need it."

"It's an expression, Detective. Your undeniable success will have nothing to do with luck."

"Four Eyes, you're alright. You know that?"

"I know everything. Have a nice day, Detective."

After they hang up, he grins stupidly at his phone for a long second before he realizes that the car ahead of him is finally moving.

 

---

 

Gabe sits under the hot lights, rubbing his palm against one stubbly cheek so his speech is muffled when he says, "Gee, I'd like to help you, buddy, but my hands are tied." Fusco, because they're being watched and he's in recovery and he never really liked roughing people up anyway, doesn't slap him.

But god damn, it is a near thing.

Fusco lets out a long breath, like the start of a dry laugh. "Gabe. Gabe, I don't think you're getting it. We're solving this thing. On our own. Without your information. If you don't start getting useful, your ass is out on the street."

"Yeah." Gabe pinches his sharp chin, frowns. "Yeah, but I am useful. You want a line on the guys in charge? Okay. Maybe I can help you out. Maybe if I think real hard, I can come up with something. But it's kinda hard, you know, to focus when I'm living in fear of my imminent demise all the time. I got ulcers on my ulcers. So maybe if our friends in the federal government would give me a nice safe space to snitch from, I'd be able to conjure up whatever bullshit it is that you're after. But until then?" He shrugs. "My mind's blank."

"Yeah, but who knows how long all that shit you forgot is good for? These guys are throwing middle management to the wolves. They're covering ass, and pretty soon whatever you have that's tying them to all of this is gonna mean precisely jack shit."

Gabe doesn't answer immediately. He just carries on rubbing at his waxy, prickling face. Then he tilts very slowly to one side so he can look around Fusco and he waves at himself in the mirror of the one-way glass. "Then I guess you guys better hurry up."

"You have to tell somebody, Gabe. People aren't gonna stand for this. You know it."

"Oooh. That a threat? You gonna rough me up, big guy?"

"No," Fusco says. "I'm not that kind of cop."

"Yeah." He cocks his head. "I believe that."

"Glad you think well of me. Now cough up."

"Not today, Fusco."

He shakes his head, rises from his seat. As he approaches the door of the interrogation room, he's glad he can only see his own sadsack face and Gabe's mocking one, because he doesn't want to see Carter's mouth curled downward in disappointment right now.

Of course, he sees it when he opens the door. But the delay helps.

 

---

 

He’s stumbling in the dark, fighting a headache and searching for pants, when his phone goes nuts and he winds up crawling on his bedroom floor, chasing the ringtone.

“Whaddya want?” he moans without even looking at caller ID.

“I’m sorry,” says Finch, who is clearly trying not to laugh. “Did I wake you?”

“No.” He rubs hard at his sleepy face. “No, I was up. It’s just early. What’s going on?”

Finch is quiet, nervous. “It’s nothing serious,” he says. “I feel a bit silly now.”

“Go ahead,” Fusco says, tucking the phone in the crook of his neck as he pulls on a workable pair of pants. “Lay it on me.”

“With my schedule, there’s no telling, but I think I might have a little time to myself tonight. I thought we could…”

“Oh,” he says. “Oh, right, the fitting thing.”

“It really wouldn’t take much of your time, Detective. A half hour, at the most. We could go out to dinner afterwards.” Fusco likes the way he says that, how it very slightly obscures the fact that there’s no ‘we’ about it and Finch is going to buy them some ridiculous lavish meal that Fusco couldn’t afford if he went hungry for a month and Fusco’s going to enjoy it but hate himself.

“I don’t know,” Fusco says. “I might be working a little late tonight. Now’s not great.”

“We could skip dinner.” Finch sounds a little plaintive.

Fusco shakes his head, remembers Finch probably can’t see him, thinks about if Finch could see him like he is now, limping around in the dark trying to figure out which shirt looks the least worn. “Not tonight,” he says.

Finch repeats, “Not tonight,” rather grimly.

“Sorry,” Fusco says. “I know I’m being a pain in the ass.”

“You’re not,” Finch insists. “We’re both very busy. We just need to find the right time.”

“Right. Uh.” Fusco gives up and seeks out the light switch, throws the room into dingy brown Technicolor. He winces, closes his eyes as his head throbs. “We’ll figure it out.”

“Of course. Going back to the interrogation room today, are we?”

“Yeah. Trying to get some of the guys we already got to crack and give up somebody higher on the food chain. I’ll keep you posted.”

“Thank you, Detective.” If he listens hard, he can hear the fast, efficient tap of Finch’s fingers on the keyboard. “For what you’ve been doing these past few days. I know it’s a stretch for you.”

“I…thanks. You’re welcome.”

“I hope today is productive for you.”

“Yeah. You too.”

The silence after the call is bitter. Fusco is freezing in an early morning kind of way and he wishes he could go back to sleep. He digs out a shirt from the pile of clean laundry he keeps meaning to sort, throws it wrinkled and faintly warm over his shoulders.

“You should iron that,” a dispassionate voice in the back of his head opines.

“Shut up,” Fusco says to no one.

 

---

 

She sets his paper cup of coffee in front of him with a thud and a gentle slosh. "You're just not very good at this," she admits as she leans back against her own desk, taking a thoughtful sip of her own coffee.

"No shit." He digs his fingers into his temples.

"Doesn't help that Gabe's a pain in the ass."

"Yup." He wishes she would stop trying to make him feel better.

"We'll figure it out. We'll make him talk to somebody else. He can't hold out forever."

"He can hold out until it's pointless."

"Yeah," she says with a solemn nod. "Yeah, he can." Her face becomes troubled, her eyes go far away, and she walks off, leaving her coffee cup to steam gently on top of a stack of paperwork.

Fusco buries his head against the desk.

 

---

 

He does do actual work that day, filing paperwork and following up leads for his real job. He misses the real policework, sometimes. What with all the other people he works for in secret, it's nice to do his real, honest job without somebody calling him up and telling him to lie or steal or shoot somebody.

He's on a roll with forgetting that he's not a very nice person when he hears somebody step up behind him and lean against the back of his chair. "Hey," Simmons says. "Heard you botched Gabe's confession."

"Thanks for bringin' it up, buddy. You got anything else you want to say? Wanna ask how my wife's doing?"

"Okay, smartass. Tone it down." Simmons leans in. "Gist is, people are getting impatient. HR let you take this one because you said you could make these guys gone. If you fuck this up, that's your ass on the line."

"We're working on it," Fusco grouses. "It's not like we're not trying. He just doesn't give a damn what happens to him."

"We can fix that," Simmons says. "You don't get him talking within the week? I know a few guys who can make him sing."

"What? Don't do that," Fusco pleads, twisting around in his seat."He turns up looking beat to shit saying he'll tell us anything we want to know, Carter's gonna kick up a fuss. Guess who she's gonna go after first?" He taps his chest.

Simmons shrugs. "Guess you better get him talking, then." He stands up straight, shoves his hands in his pockets. "How's that friend of yours?"

"Not interested." Fusco twists around and goes back to his paperwork with a grim, over-invested determination.

There's a sigh, a click of teeth, a shifting of weight. "You're not losing this one too, are you?"

"He doesn't want to meet HR. He doesn't even talk to me in person, most of the time."

"I thought you said this guy was a friend of yours."

"He is. He is. But he's not gonna be told what to do. He's not that kind."

"I thought you said he owed you one." The hands are back on Fusco's chair, shoving him forward so the desk presses hard into his stomach.

Fusco grunts, sharp and pained, "I don't know if he does."

The pressure Simmons is putting on him lets up. "What?"

The truth, half-truth that it is, feels heavy and strange on his tongue. His voice trembles, like he's some kid lying about what terrible thing happened to his report card in between school and home. "I don't know if he owes me anymore. I owe him. I don't know how it happened but I owe him big and I don't know how to pay him back."

Simmons slaps the back of his head. "You're supposed to be a damn professional, Lionel," he growls while Fusco winces against the desk. "Get it together. You think you owe this guy some kind of friendly debt 'cause he held your hand and made you feel special or whatever's got your panties in a twist? Work through it in therapy, cocksucker. Then put the screws to him. There's gotta be something in that useless fucking head of yours that'd ruin his life if it got to the press. Use it. Then get him to us. You can make up later."

Fusco rubs at the back of his head. "I'll see what I can do," he grits.

"You'll do more than that."

"Yes, sir."

"Yeah, you will, or you're that asshole who put everybody through so much trouble for nothing. And trust me, Fusco, you don't want to be that asshole."

"No, sir."

"No, sir." Simmons chuckles gently. "Did you ever notice how fast the sarcastic bullshit gets thrown out for 'yessirs' and 'nossirs' once I put the fear of God in you?"

"Yes, sir."

"Atta boy. See you around." He squeezes Fusco's shoulder, friendly-like, without a hint of nail or a threat of dislocation. Then he's gone.

For the second time today, Fusco's head drops to his desk. 

 

---

 

He doesn't go in for hard liquor. Not when he's out drinking casual. He'll have a beer or three, or he'll drink a little of the harder stuff if somebody else insists, but he won't have enough of it to really fuck him up. Not anymore.

Tonight, he thinks, isn't casual. He's alone, in a bar he picked out specifically because it was cheap and sleazy and he's never heard anyone say a kind word about it, which means nobody he knows is likely to be there. That's what he wants. It's all he wants.

He and personal responsibility haven’t been too close lately. Like, in the past decade. That kind of lately. He got too used to being forced into things, to forgetting on purpose about what he’s seen and done to get out of thinking too hard about what he’s turning into.

He thought he was out of it. Thought he was done because Reese let him free in a way, gave him the chance to do good again, a chance to turn into something like the person he used to be. But it’s just a new prison, now. It’s a prison because he’s all on his own, because he has to think about the awful things he did, because there aren’t any twisted rules keeping him safe from his own stupid brain, because there’s nobody telling him who to be anymore.

Fusco drinks his whiskey straight up and cringes with every sip and he ignores everything else in the bar but the sweep and pass of the bartender and after a while he's happily, lonesomely insensible.

He's not sure who calls Finch. It couldn't have been him, because Finch is the last thing he needs right now. He doesn't need anybody tut-tut-tutting about his whiskey breath and his poor health and his weakness. He doesn't want Finch putting him to shame.

But maybe it must have been Fusco who made the call, because nobody else here knows that number and nobody's bothering him and he's got the phone tucked flat against his face, like it's a pillow he's trying to nuzzle into. The other line clicks to life with a drowsy "Hello?" and the first thing out of Fusco's mouth is "Let's do this."

"What?" Finch groans. It's drawn out, kind of a whaaaaat and Fusco bows his head to the bar, suppressing laughter.

"You know, let's..." he breaks off into a string of uncontrollable giggles, takes a deep breath, "d'you still want to do a thing tonight?"

"A thing." It's not actually a question. Finch's voice is thin and unimpressed. "You mean your fitting?"

"Mmhmm. That." He likes the way Finch says that, he realizes. Not right now, when he sounds disappointed, but all the other times Finch has said it. Usually, he says it silky and sly and quietly pleased, like it's something Finch really wants. He likes that.

"You've been drinking," Finch says.

"Yeah."

"How much?"

"Dunno." His head is fuzzy. His feet are cold. "A lot."

Finch exhales. Something rustles on his end, maybe blankets and sheets, maybe a jacket. "Stay where you are," he orders.

"'S okay. I'm not gonna drive. You don't have to come get me."

"Stay where you are," Finch repeats.

"You don't have to..."

"Do not," Finch snaps, "make me say it again."

Fusco sits up, straightbacked and meek. "D'you want to know where I am?" he asks.

"I already know where you are. Stay." He hangs up, leaves Fusco all alone in a sleazy bar. But not for long, Fusco silently reassures himself. Not for too long.

He's not certain of how long it takes Finch to come get him. The time between then and the end of their phone call seems like a terrible, murky century, but he can't remember anything that happened in that time. Maybe nothing. Maybe he was only sitting there alone for five minutes. Maybe it was hours. All he knows is that one minute he's miserably buried in a glass, and the next there's a hand on his arm and Finch has materialized at his elbow like a dapper ghost.

"Difficult time at work today?" Finch asks.

"Yeah. Yup." He fumbles his thick hands in the direction of the shadowy bartender. "You want anything?"

"No, thank you." He eases his hand in between Fusco's side and his arm. "May I take you out of here?"

"M'having a nice time."

"I'm sure," he says. "But this place is disgusting and you're worrying me, Lionel."

 "Hey! Hey. Don't fuckin'...fuckin' be like that. These are my people, Finch."

"I respectfully disagree. Let's go for a walk." Fusco is letting himself be guided off his barstool, which is odd because he can't remember giving his body permission to go along with that. "It'll clear your head," Finch is saying.

"Okay. Just let me..." Fusco starts digging around in his pockets. "...Gotta get the tab."

Finch's credit card hits the bar with a snap. "I've got it, Detective."

"Not this shit again."

"Put your jacket on," Finch says, pushing the card closer to the bartender and out of Fusco's reach. "You need fresh air."

Fusco slips grumbling into his coat, tugs hard at the leather and lets it flap around him. "You pissed 'cause I'm drinking?"

"No," Finch says. He's not looking at Fusco. He's just leaning with one elbow on the bar, waiting for the bartender to run his credit card. "I'm not angry."

But he looks angry.

"I'm not."                        

Fusco didn't know that he had spoken aloud.

Out on the street, an icy gust of wind slaps his face and even though his head is still fuzzy and he’s seeing the world through wobbly lenses, something like sobriety takes hold of him. Finch is holding onto his arm, helping Fusco walk in what is at least kind of a straight line. "I'm sorry if I woke you up," Fusco says.

"You didn't."

"Liar."

A smile cracks Finch's cold face. "I was in the middle of a very sweet dream when you called," he says, "and you should feel intense, immutable guilt for having interrupted it."

"Yeah? What about?"

Finch doesn't answer.

"C'mon, you don't get to sell it like that and not give details."

"Italy," Finch says, shortly. "It was about traveling in Italy."

"Ever been?"

"No."

"Me neither," Fusco murmurs.

"I know."

They walk a few more steps together, arms intertwined.

"You notice," Fusco begins, "how I didn't ask how you know that?"

"Yes."

"Means I trust you."

"Thank you."

"Even if you are a creep."

Finch gives him a light slap on the upper arm. It turns into more of a pat, friendly but...he doesn't know. Condescending, maybe. Or possessive. Or not exactly that, but the way you'd pat a faithful dog or a trusty old car. "Did you really want to do the fitting?" Finch asks. "Or was that just an excuse to get me down here?"

He doesn't know. Probably the second thing, to be honest. Probably because he never really wanted to be on his own and all of his friends are monsters. Including Finch, probably, but he's a nicer kind of monster.

"Sure," Fusco says after a while. "Why not, right? When else are we gonna be together and not have anybody shooting at us?" He wrinkles his brow. "Unless it's too late."

"It is," Finch tells him. "I was going to bring you to a tailor I know, but he'll be closed now."

"Oh. Sorry."

"Mind you," Finch says, "the initial measurements are hardly rocket science. I could do them in my sleep. Would you be comfortable with that?"

"In your sleep?"

"No, we'll both be awake."

"Oh. Okay. Yeah, I could sit still for that. Takes, what, a half hour?"

"More like fifteen or twenty minutes. You'll barely be inconvenienced."

"Alright. Lead the way."

Fusco isn't sure where he expects Finch to take him. One of those slinky black cars Finch steps out of from time to time, ready to take them god knows where. Another one of Finch's places, some unassuming little apartment with an unassuming little life waiting to be picked up and worn like a costume until Finch is free to go back to being whatever he is when he's at home.

Finch takes him the first sleazy no-tell motel they come across. He guesses Finch isn't at home today. "You thought the bar I was at was gross?" Fusco asks as they push through the streaky glass door.

"Any port in a storm, Detective. You were the one who emphasized the importance of speed."

"Yeah, okay, but I meant we should do it real fast. Not, you know, meth."

"Hush." Finch goes up to the desk and talks room costs with the guy working reception, who looks between Finch and Fusco like he can't decide whose taste in tail is worse.

It's Finch, Fusco thinks privately. At least it looks like I like 'em smart and rich.

Finch gets them a tiny single room ("The size is unimportant," he says, and Fusco winces.) and they take what feels like a hundred year ride up to their room in a rickety old elevator filled with them, standing a respectful few feet apart, and a guy and his lady friend, who Fusco's not sure aren't fused together. Fusco's trying not to look, because Finch is staring really intently at the elevator safety inspection certificate tacked to the wall, but he can't help but steal glances. The woman's maybe in her mid-thirties, maybe later. It's hard to tell the way she's got eye makeup caked on and the way her legs look nicer than you'd think they would. He thinks he knows her. At one point, as the elevator stalls between the third and fourth floor, the woman looks up, gives him a nod. "How's things in Narcotics?" she asks.

"Dunno," Fusco responds without looking. "I transferred. Homicide now."

"Good for you," she says.

"What about you?"

"Eh," she shrugs. "Same old."

The elevator finally inches to the fourth floor with a harried chime. Finch tugs at Fusco's arm wordlessly. "You take care, Lori," he calls over his shoulder as Finch pulls him into the hall.

"You too." she says, turning back to her guy.

Finch is quiet, but his fingers sink sharp into Fusco's bicep. "Friend of yours from work?"

"Yup. Long time ago."

"She seems nice," Finch says distantly.

"I didn't sleep with her."

"Of course not."

"I was married back then, you dick."

Finch clears his throat. "I apologize," Finch says, sounding appropriately chastised. "That was unfair of me to assume."

What Finch doesn't know won't hurt him.

"Don't worry about it." Fusco lets himself drift against Finch's side in a friendly nudge. "I'd have thought so too, if it was you. I just wouldn't have said nothin'."

Finch flips a little plastic keycard out of his breast pocket and lets them into their room. It's a tiny little thing, one narrow bed with scratchy sheets and an ugly bedspread. Although aesthetics aren't the point, he guesses. Finch frowns. "The lighting in here is terrible."

"That a problem?"

"No," Finch says. "It's just disappointing." Finch drops his overcoat on the bed, starts unbuttoning his suit jacket. "Does the shirt you're wearing fit?"

Fusco, who is busy taking off his own jacket, shrugs. "Fits okay," he says.

Finch squints at him. "It pinches," Finch says with a frown. "Across your shoulders. Does your undershirt fit, at least?"

"Yeah, that one's fine."

"Good. You can leave that on." Finch is wearing a vest underneath his jacket. Dark, with a kind of red, silky back. Fusco's fingertips are starting to itch. 

He takes off his tie, starts unbuttoning his shirt. "So, what do you have planned for this?" he asks.

Finch unrolls a long, pale length of fabric tape from his pocket. "How do you mean?"

"The suit. If you're gonna dress me like an idiot, I wanna know about it beforehand." He drops the shirt on the bed and shivers in his thin, white cotton undershirt.

"Hmm. Such confidence in my abilities. I assure you, Detective, you are going to resemble a perfectly captivating idiot once we're done here." He sighs, finds the end of his tape. "Stand naturally, please."

Fusco does as he says, swaying only a little in place. He holds perfectly still as Finch slips the tape around his neck like a garrote, takes a look at the little number, clicks his tongue. He pulls out a tiny black notebook and writes in it. "What do you look for in a suit?" he asks.

"Dunno. Just something I can afford that kinda fits."

Finch sighs sharply, tries a different tack. "What do you like best about the way you dress now?" Finch asks, looping the tape around Fusco's chest while Fusco lifts his arms obligingly.

"I guess..." Fusco tenses, trails off with a hiss as cool plastic brushes over his nipples, "...I guess 'cause it's easy? It all matches, mostly, so I don't have to think too hard about what I'm wearing."

Finch whips the measuring tape out from around Fusco's chest. "Hopeless," he says warmly. "Turn around. Let me get your shoulders."

He does, stands in absolute silence while Finch segments up his shoulders: measures across, across with arms, across the length of each individual shoulder from the end to his bullish neck, and the length of each arm on its own.

"Let me try again," Finch says, wrapping the tape around Fusco's wrist. "What do you not like about how you dress now?"

"Nothing ever fits," he says instantly. The tape curls around his bicep. "Shirts are always too tight across my shoulders or my gut or…" The tape presses up against his spine, drops down as far as his belt.

"Or?" Finch presses.

"Or it's made for someone, you know, big. Not fat, I mean," and suddenly there's a tape wrapped around the widest part of his stomach. Ha. Timing. "Just big. Tall and wide. I'm only one of those." The tape is still twined around his waist, snug but not tight. "Or they just kinda look lousy. Cheap. Well, they are cheap. It's the whole point." The tape shifts a little, like it's being traded into one hand, and suddenly Finch's cool, dry palm is resting in the space where his ribs recede into his backbone. "The hell are you doing?" he asks.

"Nothing," Finch says, but his hand doesn't move. "You have a little bit of a waist."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing really," Finch says. "I just hadn't noticed it before." The tape slides open, loose around his hips while Finch's other hand moves into the corresponding space on Fusco's other side. His fingers dig in suddenly, like a pinch and Fusco jumps, bites back a yell.

Finch's face wanders into Fusco's peripheral vision as he peers over Fusco's shoulder. "Ticklish, Detective?"

"Just do what you have to do," he growls.

"Is that yes?"

"I don't care if you have a gimpy leg; I'll hit you."

"Alright, alright," Finch says gently, giving his waist a light squeeze. "Let's not resort to violence."

Fusco sighs, shakes out his hands, cracks his knuckles, nods.

Finch gives Fusco's fists an apprehensive glance before settling in, stroking downward on either side. "You've got a surprisingly small waist for a man of your...size."He pauses a moment. "Don't make that noise, Detective. It was a perfectly elegant euphemism."

Fusco snorts disbelievingly.

"I'd like to bring the suit in at the waist," Finch says absently. "Give it a bit of shape. If you want some expert advice..."

"Which I don't."

"Which you don't," Finch acquiesces, "I'd switch to a slightly less American cut when you buy off the rack. If you must buy off the rack," he tacks on, despairingly.

"I know exactly what that means," Fusco mutters, wishing he wasn't in focus here, wishing he couldn't feel Finch's eyes ranging all over him, wishing that he hadn't let Finch know he was ticklish, wishing Finch would stop touching him like that, squeezing casually at a love handle like Fusco's his fucking girlfriend.

"It's a specific cut. It hangs on you like a bag. Don’t worry, I'll take care of it." All at once, the hands around his waist are gone and the tape is being reeled in. "Take off your belt, please."

He's apprehensive now. "Why?"

"I need to measure your hips. The belt is going to throw off my measurements." That's fair, Fusco guesses. That makes sense. He should really calm the hell down. He unbuckles the belt, draws it through the loops on his pants with a snap, hands it off to Finch who, for some reason, wants it. He coils it around his hand, gives it a careful look.

"The belt's fine," Fusco snaps.

"You can do much better." Finch tosses it onto the bed, where it bounces back up like a snake ready to strike. "But I suppose it's adequate." The measuring tape slips around his hips, is gone again after a moment. "Slip out of your shoes," Finch asks, "and then I'll need you to do me a favor."

Fusco stumbles out of his shoes, stepping on the heels and easing his feet out in a way that makes Finch wince. He very deliberately kicks them aside just to annoy Finch a little bit more.

"I need you to stand naturally," Finch says, "and just hold your end of the measuring tape up at the base of your neck. Where your shirt collar would begin." Fusco does as he's told, holds the tape still while the rest of it unfurls down his back and goes taut against his back. "That'll do," Finch says after a moment. His voice is coming from somewhere down on the floor.

Fusco turns to find Finch kneeling there, on the rough, threadbare beige carpet in a sleazy motel, looking up at Fusco like he's a puzzle to be solved or a specimen to be studied. Maybe a work of art. Something really, really special, but not quite a person.

Finch looks anxious. “Forgive me if this seems like an inappropriate question,” he begins, shifting on his knees, “but are you wearing underwear right now?”

“What?”

“Detective, I swear to you, this is a relevant question.”

Fusco guesses it could be but his face is coloring anyway. “Yeah,” he says. “Boxers,” he adds.

“That’s good.” Finch actually does look relieved. “That’s actually ideal.”

“Why’s it ideal?”

“Because I’m going to need you to take your pants off. Don’t scowl at me like that,” he says, almost immediately. “I’m not any more comfortable with it than you are, but the trousers you’re wearing don’t fit you well.”

Fusco folds his arms. No way. No way is he letting Finch humiliate him like that. No fucking way. He’s about to say so when Finch’s hand lands high on his thigh and squeezes, very gently, no nail.

“Do you feel how tight it is, just here?” Finch says. “It’s shaping you, just a little, in this one spot. It’s not really how you are and it’s uncomfortable. Isn’t it?”

Fusco locks his eyes on the ceiling. He nods, once.

“I want what I’m making to fit you. And to do that, you’re going to have to take these off. Just for a couple of minutes, I promise. That’s all.”

He’s not sure what he’s afraid of, exactly. It’s not as though Finch has been cruel to him tonight. Or any night, not about his body. He’s already in his too-thin undershirt and that shows off all the worst of him. He guesses he’s just got this feeling like if he shows too much, Finch’ll realize he’s a fat fucking scumbag who’s not worth the time Finch wastes on him.

“Lionel?” Finch’s voice has a worried edge to it. “Are you alright?”

He doesn’t say anything. He just pops the button on the front of his pants.

“You’re sure?”

Fusco yanks the zipper down. “No. If you say one goddamn word…”

“I won’t,” Finch says, solemnly. “I wouldn’t do that to you.”

“Waste of my damn time…” he mutters as he squirms his hips out of the top of his trousers.

He slides out of his pants, kicks them aside so he’s standing there in his boxers and his socks and his pale, hairy legs and Finch, bless him, says, “I’ll be quick. Natural stance. Distribute your weight evenly.” There’s a hand on his hip and a hand on his ankle and a length of tape stretched between, and that’s the outseam. There’s the tape around his knee, and then again, higher up around his thigh and Finch is doing his best to touch Fusco as little as possible. Aside from unavoidable, incidental brushes of fingertip and knuckle, he succeeds but at every little touch, Fusco seizes up.

Then Finch touches the inside of his ankle, stretches the tape up along the inside of Fusco’s leg, touches his thigh and, wow, yep, he’s right up in there and Finch’s fingers are probing and he’s asking “I assume you dress to the other side?”

He nods, not trusting his voice.

“Alright.” Finch squints, pulling the tape measure a little bit tauter. “Were you avoiding me this week?”

“What?”

“Were you,” he asks, his fingers digging in, “avoiding me?”

“No.”

“No?” He pinches.

“Ow. Yes. Stop that.”

Finch seems satisfied, takes his hand away, writes down his inseam measurement in the little book. “Why?” he asks, without looking up.

“Dunno.” He does know. Or, he knows most of it. “I didn’t want to do this.” Finch loops the tape around the widest part of Fusco’s ass, doesn’t smirk when he reads the measurement.

“Were you…concerned? Or did you just see it as a waste of time?”

“Little of both, I guess.” The tape shifts and he cringes. “Truth be told, I was mostly nervous about what you’re doing now.”

“Oh.” Finch says, letting the tape drop. “You’re not going to like the next one at all, then.” For whatever reason, he doesn’t just get it over with. He goes down the pages in his book, checking every single one with a critical eye. “So you do feel this is a waste of time, then? In addition to the nervousness?”

“Yeah. Not that I don’t need clothes that fit me. That…I could use that. I appreciate what you’re trying to do. But you and I both know you’re not gonna buy me shit I can wear. You’re gonna get me something flashy or fancy that I can’t be seen in because everyone’ll know I couldn’t afford it on a cop’s salary, or else it’s gonna be the kind of shit that you’d wear and not the kind of shit I’d wear.”

“What would you wear?” Finch asks.

“I don’t know. I don’t think about it.”

Finch blinks up at him. “Did you not want me to do this? Genuinely?”

“I don’t know,” he repeats.

He sighs, very deeply, like it’s coming from someplace down in the earth and coming out through him. “I didn’t want to make you,” he says.

“You didn’t.”

“If there’s no point in finishing, I won’t,” Finch says decisively, rolling the tape around his hand. “We might as well skip the last.”

Fusco rubs at his forehead. “Don’t,” he says. “Don’t be dramatic about it, just…I’m sorry I said anything. You’re a nice guy and you’ve been real good to me and I don’t know if I even want to turn you down, only that it feels weird not saying anything. You really want to buy me something fancy, I…I don’t know. I’ll find an occasion. I’m not gonna be a dick about you trying to give me a gift. I’m sorry.”

A frown creeps across Finch’s face, a knit in his brow and a sharp downward turn of his lips. “Detective, you baffle me sometimes.”

“I’m not so hard to get,” he says with a shrug. “I’m mostly just kind of dumb.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Finch murmurs, leaning forward. And with that he very casually slides the tape between Fusco’s legs, going from belt height to belt height, front to back.

“Christ,” he whispers.

“Told you you wouldn’t like it.” Finch shifts the tape and Fusco is really feeling the thinness of his boxer shorts right about now. “Is this comfortable?”

“No.”

“You know what I mean.”

Fusco thinks. “Still no. It’s. Uh. ‘S a little tight.”

Finch’s face, which up until now has been pale and flat and utterly unchangeable, goes bright pink. He creates some slack in the tape. “Is that…ah…would that be adequate?”

“Yeah.” Fusco nods, chews at his lower lip, realizes in a very quiet sort of way that if he hadn’t had so much to drink earlier, he’d be making a fool of himself right now. “Yeah, I’d say about that.”

Finch snatches his hands and the tape away and they both heave a none-too-quiet sigh of relief. “That’s good,” Finch says, averting his eyes. “You can get dressed now.”

“’Kay.” He grabs his pants, pulls them back on.

“That wasn’t so bad,” Finch says, “was it?”

They share a bitter, slightly hysterical laugh.

“So, you have what you need?” Fusco says, wobbling gently as he does up his fly.

“Yes.” Finch nods. “I may be some time, as I’m not totally certain of what I want to do yet, but the first stage is finished.” He tries to get to his feet. He rocks back and forth on his knees, sticks one out to the side like he means to bring it around and get up that way and finally Fusco, just to spare himself the embarrassment of watching Finch squirm, grabs him by the elbows and hoists him up, no problem. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

Fusco lets him go. They take a step apart.

“Well. Um.” Fusco finds his shirt, pulls it on. “I guess maybe it’s a little early to fly the coop. How long do we have the room for?”

“Another half hour.”

“I thought you said this’d only take twenty minutes at the most.”

“Yes. Well. I was aware that complications might arise. You did seem reluctant, after all. I was willing to wait.”

“That’s nice of you,” Fusco says, even though he’s not sure it is. “Listen, I gotta sober up a little. You mind if we wait out the hour?”

Finch shakes his head. “No, I don’t think that would be a problem. Although I could have you driven home, if you’d rather.”

“Nah, that’s okay. The walk’ll do me good. It’s not that far.” Fusco flops on the bed, shoulders against the headboard, legs stretched out, ankles crossed. “If you want to take off, I won’t keep you.”

“No. No, that’s fine,” Finch says as he seats himself on the bed next to Fusco, not touching, not even close, just there. “I think I need a moment.”

They end up watching half an episode of Cake Boss on the tiny TV in their room. Fusco’s never actually seen it before and Finch, predictably, has never even heard of it, so they’re both kind of baffled together. It’s easy to forget the strange goddamn things they did to each other just minutes ago and Fusco almost manages it until he shifts around to get comfortable, to get a little bit closer to Finch, and his forgotten belt buckle digs sharp into his hip.

Chapter 14

Notes:

So, you may have noticed that this fic's rating just got upped to an M. This is for a couple of reasons.

1. Fusco has said fuck many, many times.

2. The subject matter of the case is, I think, not T rated and probably should have caused the rating to go up a while ago.

3. Future events would have necessitated a rating change anyway.

They have a week, and Carter doesn't know it.

He knows he and Carter only just had a conversation about honesty and coming clean and doing the right thing and it's probably, Fusco thinks, the right thing to let his partner know just what kind of pressure he's under. He knows he'd want her to trust him with that information, were their situations reversed. He wouldn't want to be walking blind while his partner dealt with a crisis. He should let her know.

He won't, of course.

He's just tired of looking bad in front of her. And, okay, maybe he is bad. It still doesn't mean he wants to sit her down and explain that some friends of his are going to torture their witness if he doesn't start giving specifics in a week and the main reason, the only reason they can't just tell somebody is because it'd really mess up Fusco's life.

So, no, he's not telling her. And he's nearly fine with that. It's not as though Carter isn't already urgently trying to get Gabe to talk. Knowing that it'd get Fusco out of some hot water that he personally heated up isn't going to get her to move any faster. Maybe knowing that it would save Gabe a beating would. Not that she likes Gabe, but Fusco's pretty sure she likes torture even less. She'd go to some lengths to stop that happening. Maybe some HR outing, large scale arresting lengths.

Best not to tell her.

The guilt of keeping quiet still gnaws at him, though. At least they have a week. One week to do this thing the right way, to convince or scare Gabe into talking the gentle way before someone comes and does it the hard way. One swiftly dwindling week.

 

---

 

"Aren't you getting sick of keeping quiet? Chatty guy like you?"

Gabe is sitting with his chin propped up on his two fists and his shoes scuffing against the floor of the interrogation room as his legs swing fidgety. "Yep," he admits. "'Course, if you guys would've just caved early on, I'd have told you everything from day one."

"You know I don't have any control over that."

"Yeah, I know." Gabe sighs slow and long. He points at his reflection in the one way mirror. "Why won't they?" he nearly whines.

"They think you're not worth the trouble." This is true. "Word is that if you know so much, you'd have more to give us than just the one body. You'd have information to burn."

"You know I do," Gabe says, sounding hurt.

"I dunno. Do I? I mean, for both our sakes, you'd better, but at this point it's just wishful thinking."

Gabe's hands drop to the tabletop with a hard slap. "Wishful thinking, my ass! You know I'm good for it."

"So show me. Prove it."

Gabe's lips press tight together, turning white around the edges. "I don't want to give it up," he says finally. "Not until I know for sure I'll get taken care of. Not any of it. Sorry."

 

---

 

"That little asshole," Fusco snarls when he and Carter are well away from the interrogation room and the Feds.

"He's scared," Carter observes. She's poring through a file, not really looking at Fusco as they walk along.

"Well, yeah, but he's still an asshole."

"I think you got to him," she says, speaking slow and thoughtful. "It's the closest thing to a reaction we've seen so far. It's a good sign."

"Yeah?" They arrive at their desks. "I don't feel like I'm getting anywhere."

"Me neither." She looks up from her file with a soft rustle of pages. "But one of us has to be the optimist." 

He grins, sits down at his desk, and notices, for the first time, the slim, rectangular brown-wrapped package sitting there waiting for him, unmarked and innocuous. Fusco doesn't comment. "Well," he says. "That's all you, sunshine."

He tries to get back to work. He really does. He doesn't want to play stupid mind games with Finch today and he doesn't want to open whatever that thing is in the middle of the precinct and besides it could, possibly, you never know, be a bomb, so he'd feel like an idiot if he opened it up now, wouldn't he? Right. Better to stay focused. He has a serious deadline to keep to, anyway.

Of course, the thought of the deadline throws him into a panic and he winds up stalled, unable to focus on one thought for too long before his mind drifts to torture and death and imprisonment. He's not sure which of those is worse.

Finally he decides that if it is a bomb, he might as well set it off and put himself out of his misery, so he waits for a quiet moment, tucks the package casually under his arm, and makes for the bathroom.

With the package laid across his knees, he rips it open to find a slim white box filled with three meticulously folded shirts in layers, like a deck of cards fanned out. The first, the one on top, is a very deep, dark blue. He lets himself touch and the crispness of the fabric, the thickness, the faint shine it has that warps and curls around his fingertips all serve to make his own shirt, white and ordinary and pinched across the shoulders, feel rough and cheap. Which it is. It always was. He just didn't know until he felt something better. 

He peels back the first shirt to take a good look at the others, a rich, raw oxblood and another, white with neat, dark chocolate pinstripes. Their smoothness insults the calluses of his hands.

His phone begins to buzz insistently and he picks up saying, "You gonna do that thing where you make some smartass comment about what I'm doing like you're watching me from somewhere?"

"Actually," Finch says, "I was going to ask you to run a license plate for me. But while we're on the subject, do you like them?"

"They're fine," he says. "Just fine. You won't know me from George Clooney. I'm a little confused, though, about what they're doing here."

Finch pauses. "You didn't want me to send you things at work," he says in tones of quiet realization.

"Yeah. Yeah, that's kind of important. On account of, if someone gets suspicious, I could die."

"I think that's a little dramatic."

"Better safe than dead and dismembered in the Hudson."

"How specific of you." Finch sighs. "Understood. I apologize. It won't happen again."

"At work," Fusco says, because he knows a pattern when he sees one.

"At work," Finch agrees. "To be perfectly honest, the only thing that prevented me from updating your wardrobe months ago was a lack of accurate measurements."

"You little sneak."

"You'll thank me later," he says. "What do you think of them? I aimed for subtlety in the hopes that you'd be able to get away with wearing them to work."

Fusco begins tracing his fingers begrudgingly over the material again. "Guess I could," he says. "Not that I want like a closet full of these or some damn thing, because that could get me noticed, but I figure I could get away with one every couple of weeks or so. I'd have to see 'em on first, though."

"Wouldn't have it any other way," Finch says. The smug self-satisfaction in his voice makes Fusco wish it was possible to smack someone over the phone.

Later that night, in the apartment, the guilt of having brushed off Finch's gift with a reprimand and an "It's fine" makes him take out the shirts from where he hid them away in a weird kind of shame under his bed and try them on in front of the mirror, like he imagines Finch would have wanted him to.

He looks good. Not, you know, not great, but pretty good. Something to be said for owning clothes that actually fit, he guesses. It's not a revelation or anything and the lighting in his apartment is pretty dim and terrible, so maybe it's not as much of a change for the better as he thinks it is, but it's good enough that he actually looks at himself which he...doesn't do often. When he looks in the mirror it's a cursory glance to make sure his tie is on straight and his shirt's buttoned right and he doesn't have anything in his teeth. He's used to quick, confirming once-overs, not liking what he sees. It makes him feel vain, uncomfortable, like he does when Finch stares at him too much.

He hides the shirts again.

 

---

 

Of course, Gabe's not the only potential source they have and Fusco crosses his fingers that maybe they can get one of the scumbags they picked up on the night of the raid to start singing. Maybe then, they can let Gabe go like the too-small fish he is and he won't be Fusco's problem anymore.

Honestly, Fusco would rather see Gabe get swallowed up by witness protection than any of these guys. At least Gabe's more or less harmless. At least Fusco's vision doesn't get all fuzzy and pinpricked with hate every time he looks at Gabe, although he's getting there.

He and Carter spend a day at Rikers. He figures that one of these days, if they finally find a time where they're free and clear and can stand the sight of each other and neither one of them is dead by then, they should probably pack their kids up and spend a day at Coney Island or something. Anything to balance out the scale.

The prisoner across from them right now looks familiar. Fusco knows all of their faces at least a little by this point. Enough that if he ever saw any of them on a bus or a train years later, he'd know what they did. But this one really tugs at his brain and it takes him a while to remember the first time he saw that wide, thuggish face tucked away in the corner of Finch's computer screen.

Fusco's kind of amazed at the things he remembers from that night.

The conversation is even more familiar than the face. Carter is explaining that they know, Harmon, they know that there's a boss somewhere who's escaping all this heat and isn't it unfair to see those white collar sons of bitches slip away scott free while somebody like Harmon stays behind and takes all the blame. She's just getting into how, if he was to spill a little information on who the guys up top were, he'd stand a chance of getting his sentence reduced when he holds up one broad hand.

"Can't do it," he says. His voice is odd and gentle, mismatched.

"We can offer you protection, if that's what you're..." but he's shaking his head.

"Firstly," he says, "there's not much I do know. They were very careful to separate us to keep something like this from happening. Most of the people arrested in that house last night, I had never seen before in my life. I don't have names. I don't know who was really in charge. I know very little."

It's bizarre to hear him speak, these soft, delicately formed words with coming out of his mouth, like a massive, crude marionette with a precise puppeteer.

"And second, one thing I do know is that people who try to inform on the company tend to disappear. You say you can protect me? I say that's a nice experiment, but I don't want to be the guinea pig."

"You sound like a bright boy, Harmon," Carter says. "How'd you ever fall in with a bunch like this? What did they give you?"

Harmon Bricker looks up, his eyes odd and pale and watery and says, very simply, "They paid me in trade."

Carter says nothing to that and she rocks gently back on her heels in place of whatever it is she wants to do.

They take a break in a room overlooking the yard and Fusco bums a cigarette and light off the guard who escorts them there. He's not much of a smoker, not unless he's in company and it seems strange and judgmental to be the only one without a light, but sometimes you have a conversation that makes you want lung cancer. So he leans against the window and watches the teeming mass of orange and white figures milling around on the asphalt.

One day, that's gonna be me down there, he thinks, not feeling a thing.

Carter appears at his side, taps him on the upper arm until he surrenders his cigarette. She presses it between her lips with a kind of unpracticed force, inhales, coughs once, soft. She holds it between her pointer finger and thumb while her breath curls and clouds against the glass. "We should've let John take this one," she says.

"I think you're doing well," he replies, voice bouncing with false optimism.

"If we let John handle it, some of them would have bled out. They do that, from time to time."

Fusco's not sure what to say to that so he just says "Yup," noncommittal.

At home, he calls his son. They talk for about a half an hour about very small things, hockey practice and school and how his mom won't get off his back about doing piano, 'cause yeah he's okay at it, but he doesn't want to be a nerd ("Suck it up and be a nerd, kid.") and when Michael starts to fish none too subtly for information about when he'll be allowed over to Fusco's, Fusco brushes it off, says that dad's real busy and it might be a while. Fusco says some variation of "I love you, buddy" three times before they hang up for the night.

Fusco has a drink.

At around midnight, he leaves his empties in the sink and trips into bed and while he's lying there wondering if it's worth the effort to take off anything more than his shoes before letting himself slip away, he rolls over and feels silk whispering smooth beneath him.

Fusco hasn't actually owned pajamas in a long time. Not pajamas that are intended to be pajamas. He owns boxers and shirts that are too thin and worn to justify wearing in public anymore. These are thin too but in an impressive, delicate way. They're cool and ticklish to wear and they feel incongruous against his pilly sheets.

Dark blue, he thinks, toying sleepily with the sleeve, watching it bend and shimmer like an oil slick. Finch likes him in dark blue.

 

---

 

Fusco, voice worn with frustration, asks, "Well, can't you just shuffle him in?"

Fusco is usually happy to stay quiet while Carter deals with this kind of thing. The Feds always make him nervous, like anyone does when they come in from outside the city within the city that HR built for itself and start getting suspicious of people. As a suspicious person, it worries him.

He's looking extra suspicious these days because he's the one Gabe talks to. The only one. And when blame starts to fly around, when pressure starts to fall on the dumb, greedy little shit who could help you track down human traffickers but won't, you don't want to be that guy's only friend. Carter understands that, at least, so she and Fusco have agreed to say that Fusco was the one who brought Gabe in. It's not as big a lie as it could be, which is probably what Carter's saying to herself to assuage the guilt. 

But he's getting a headache in the space behind his eyes and he can't figure out how to tolerate it, like he can't figure out how to tolerate poor, stupid Gabe or the apathy of this quiet, exasperated federal agent.

"No," the agent says after laboriously swallowing what looks to Fusco like sarcasm, "no, I cannot 'just shuffle him in.' That's not how it works."

"Can't you offer him something? For real, I mean. Not the little 'We'd be prepared to...' speech but, like, upgrade him to some nice digs upstate with a security detail to show him you mean business. Guarantee he'd at least cough up something."

The agent is shaking his head slowly. "Not until he has something to offer us. Something credible that points to his claims being true."

"You think he's lying? About the higher-ups being in on it?"

"I'm not ruling out the possibility," the agent says all mild and calm in a way that makes Fusco's eye twitch, "but we haven't seen a single scrap of hard evidence to suggest that this network ever extended beyond the lower levels of management."

The other reason Fusco worries about talking to the Feds is that he knows more than they do and can't tell why and it infuriates him. It's not like he isn't trained to lie his ass off, but it's not often that his secrets want to bust out of him so badly. Still, he tamps it down, nods his head, moves on.

In the interrogation room, Carter chats with Gabe. It’s a one-sided thing, but it always was that way between the two of them. Gabe has no interest in talking to someone who he senses is unbending.

Fusco is the sapling to Carter’s sequoia, in that way.

So she does her thing, staying calm because Gabe looks unimpressed and when you start yelling at him, he only smiles. Gabe rests his cheek on his palm and stays quiet and sleepy. His stillness is infuriating. The line of her back is furious.

When Fusco’s day ends, he feels like he wasted it, spent the whole day spinning his wheels and going nowhere at all. Carter, he knows, feels the same and that’s why neither of them suggests getting a drink after work. It might seem like a good way to blow some steam off, but too often it’s just them passing grievances back and forth until they fall silent, unable to do anything but stew.

So he just goes home to a dark, cold apartment, turns on the light, inhales the still air and realizes that someone’s been vacuuming. The air has that dusty scent. “Hello?” he calls out into the apartment.

Nothing. Either he’s being ambushed or Finch already left. He creeps through the apartment, wondering if maybe it’s just his mind playing tricks on him, until he realizes that the dirty dishes he put off doing are stacked, dry and gleaming, beneath the cupboards.

He gets out his phone. “Really?” he says after Finch picks up. “You broke in to clean up after me?”

“No,” Finch sighs, “no, I broke in to drop something off for you and the conditions in your apartment were…disturbing to me.”

“It wasn’t that bad.”

“Don’t dig this hole any deeper, Detective.”  There’s soft rustling and shifting on the end of the line. “Did you enjoy my gift?”

“Yesterday? That was nice. Dunno how many people are going to see me in that, but it looked good.”

“Felt good?” Finch asks anxiously.

“Yeah. Yeah, that too.” He squirms a little remembering the way the silk had no weight and no presence, like cool breath against his skin. He decides not to go into detail.

Finch hums, soft and satisfied. “And what about today’s gift?”

“I must have missed that one.”

“You just haven’t seen it yet. It’s there. Go find it.”

Fusco peers around his living room and kitchen, which is technically one room. “Give me a hint?”

“No.”

It reminds him a little of Easter Egg hunts, the feeling of being very small and very dumb and the adults sitting back with suppressed smiles to watch you scramble. “Can I ask you something else?” Fusco says as he lifts up a couch cushion because they look like they might have been fluffed up and that just seems like the kind of thing Finch might do.

“Of course.”

“Have you guys found anything concrete that points to the head of the company being in on it?” Nothing beneath the cushions. He lets them drop. “You know, besides the eyewitness testimony we can’t give?”

A careful, uncomfortable pause and then, “No. No, we never did.”

“Are you looking for any?” He satisfies himself that there’s nothing in the living room or kitchen and slips into the bedroom.

“Yes,” Finch says. “But he’s gone to ground. Him and his accomplice. Obviously, we can’t be following him all day. We have other people to help.  But what surveillance we have done shows that whatever his involvement was before, he’s dialed back now. Nothing to be done but wait. What about your witness?”

 “Don’t tell me you haven’t been listening in on that,” he says. The bed is empty aside from his rumpled sheets. “Gabe’s not talking because the Feds won’t give into his witness protection ideas.”

“I’ve been listening on and off,” Finch confesses, “but I find it takes the spark out of a conversation when you already know everything your partner has to say.”

“Sweet of you. Hey, come on, can you let me know if I’m hot or cold?”

“I can’t see you,” Finch says. “I don’t know where you are.”

“I’m in the bedroom.”

“Oh. Hot. Relatively speaking.”

Fusco opens up his dresser drawers, lifts up the rough stacks of shirts and undershirts, the disordered jumble of socks and underwear. “Is there anything you could offer him?”

“Me?”

“Well, yeah. You’re loaded. And if he knew he’d be safe, he’d tell us everything. And if he testified, we could keep him safe until after the trial, and then you could take over. I bet you wouldn’t even have to pay attention too much. Just hand him a fake passport and a giant wad of cash and release him into the wild. He’d be fine.”

“Or he wouldn’t.”

“Or that, yeah. It could get him talking, is the main thing.”

Finch makes an odd sound, a kind of murmuring, teetering noise. “I’m not certain that’s the best use of our funds.”

“Hey, man. If you can afford to buy me designer socks or whatever…”

“You still haven’t found it, have you?”

“Shut up. If you can afford to do that, then I’m okay going without if it’ll finish this thing.” He slams the drawers.

“I’ll discuss it with Mr. Reese. Not that it isn’t a good thought,” Finch says, “I’m just concerned about having someone like Gabe on my conscience.”

“He’s harmless,” Fusco says.

“Is he? Do you know that for certain?”

He can’t quite answer that. He jams his hand in his pocket, leans back against the drawer. “It’s in the closet. Isn’t it?”

“Too obvious?”

But when he pulls the closet open, he almost doesn’t see the difference. It only really becomes apparent when he’s combing through the rack of hanging suits, shoving each aside, and notices that one of them feels just a hell of a lot nicer against his palm. “You didn’t,” he says.

“I’m afraid I did.”

He pulls the suit out of his closet and lays it out across the bed. Then, having brushed against the suit next to it, pulls that one out too. And the next. And the one after that. It leaves four suits sprawling across his bed, each of them brown and inoffensive and, to the untrained eye, more or less identical to the ones he wears to work every day. Only his fingertips know the difference. “I thought it was just going to be one,” he says, rubbing one pantleg between his fingers. “When do you have the time?”

“Oh, I don’t. I had these outsourced. Just passed on your measurements and what I wanted and…well, you won’t have to worry about being spotted. I doubt there are many at your precinct who could tell you what the difference was.”

“But there is one?”

“There is.”

“Who’ll know it?”

“I will,” Finch says. “Everyone will. But they won’t know what caused it.”

“I like that,” Fusco admits.

“But,” Finch says, “none of those are the one. I’m still working on that one.”

“Christ. How many suits does one guy need?”

“No fewer than five,” Finch says promptly. “I think we can aim low. You don’t sail, do you?”

The laugh that bursts its way out of Fusco is louder than he expects it to be.

“I didn’t think so,” Finch says.

“So. What? Is this going to turn into a one-a-day thing?”

“It’s entirely possible,” Finch says. “Does that trouble you?”

“I don’t know.” He stretches out backwards over the layer of fine suits. They’re wooly, scratchy in a nice way, and they warm his back. “Do you think you’ll get sick of messing with me someday?”

“Who says I’m messing with you?” Finch sounds almost annoyed. “Maybe I just enjoy your companionship.”

Fusco arches his back a little, feels the suits brush through his shirt. “So invite me over,” he says.

His laugh is soft. “I’ll provide the wine if you provide the company.”

“I think it’s about time for me to turn in,” Fusco says, brushing away a strange urge to accept the invitation, whether jokingly made or not.

“Then turn in,” Finch says kindly. “You get too little sleep as it is.”

“Good night, Finch.” He ends the call, rolls over onto his side. He should probably hang these up at some point. Finch definitely would not approve of him napping on them like this. But before he puts them away, because he’s alone, because Finch can’t see him (or so he claims), and because he’s kind of wanted to ever since that night at Finch’s house where he pawed through the rack of suits in progress, Fusco rubs his cheek against the breast of one of the suits, feels it brush wooly and soft against him.

Apprehension sits like a cold fist in his gut.

Chapter 15

He wakes up the next morning to find fat paper-wrapped bundles piled up in a jolly, generous kind of way on his coffee table.

Taking a crooked knuckle in between his teeth, he stares them down, that old apprehension flaring up again. This kind of thing is going to mess him up, he thinks. He's a cop; he's already supposed to be suspicious of unmarked, hand-delivered packages. He's going to go through life wondering if every box that ever gets mailed to him is a bomb or anthrax or a gift from Finch or something else that doesn't scare the shit out of him.

He knows these weren't here the night before when Finch sent him on that little egg hunt. He would have seen them. He wonders if Finch was here, sometime late at night or in the small hours of the morning. He wonders if Finch, who stays indoors when he can and prefers to talk by phone, outsourced this one to the Guy in the Suit. He hopes that's not the case. Somehow, the idea of Reese being in on any of this makes it a thousand times worse.

Unsecured on top of the highest package is a folded scrap of paper that flutters gently against invisible gusts. He starts with that. That seems safe. He plucks the little thing off its perch and unfolds it in his palm.

It's Finch's handwriting, cramped and spiky but legible. Fusco's not sure he could have pictured it himself but from the second he opens up the note, it's like spotting a familiar face in a crowd. That's him. That's the guy.

The note reads, "I feel confident in saying that no one but you will ever know about these."

He slides two fingers in between the overlap of brown paper and pulls so it rips all satisfying and its contents pour out, a silky, motley overflow of socks in more colors than he was really aware they made for guys. Some of them are normal, dull, workaday colors, browns and blacks and blues and grays. Some of them aren't. Some of them are purple or lemon yellow or bright springy green or are covered with little spheres or squares or diamonds or more than one of those things at once. He blinks, picks one up between two fingers, and determines that nothing that feels that nice should be allowed anywhere near his feet.

Package number two is a little less baffling. It's undershirts, all of them neat and plain white. The material is thicker and smoother than what he's used to; he goes to check the tags and find out what the hell they're made of and finds only the fuzzy root left over from where the tags have been cut away. Tricky bastard. But thoughtful, Fusco admits, thinking of his dresser drawer of worn, faded undershirts that could stand replacement. Then he remembers that night when the two of them hid in the staff room of that restaurant kitchen, listening to footsteps in the dark, when Fusco stripped to his undershirt, threadbare and soon to be stained with blood (his mostly, thank god), and Fusco is pretty sure he knows where Finch got the idea to buy these for him. Jesus. It's kind of embarrassing, in retrospect. Which is probably a sign that Fusco's priorities are fucked.

He's feeling less worried about the whole thing when he opens up the third package, which he's pretty quick to regret when he rips the thing open and a mass of smooth, whispering material slithers its way into his lap and, yup, it's underwear. It's all underwear. It's all ridiculous luxury underwear of the kind that he's never owned or thought of owning or really believed that other people owned. Apparently, he's the kind of person who wears Italian silk boxers or whatever the hell. That's who Finch is turning him into. He plucks nervously at the waistband of one and watches the attached material flare up, thin and airy, before settling back down, clinging to the leg that it's resting against.

At some point, his other hand comes up and presses itself palm first to his face, covering up one eye like he's a kid trapped at a scary movie, utterly transfixed by the feeling of his skin heating up beneath his fingertips.

That's a line Finch just crossed, right? That has to be a line.

Fusco gives Finch a call and gets no answer which Fusco’s pretty sure is deliberate. Finch usually picks up when he calls. Now that he thinks about it, he’s not sure Finch has ever let him go to voicemail before. He settles for a brief message ("You're a creep. Call me.") before settling in to stare down the tumble of bright fabric in the center of his living room.

Truth is, he thinks, nobody would know. Nobody's seeing him with his clothes off much these days (except Finch, a nasty voice in the back of his head reminds him) and who the hell's gonna look at his socks? Provided he wears one of the normal ones and not, say, the aggressively vibrant paisley number that he's currently prodding suspiciously with one toe. He could get away with that, easy.

He could get away with wearing a lot of the things Finch has been giving him lately. He could wrap himself up in inconspicuous quality and feel less like he's wasting gifts that are wasted on him to begin with. He could go to work dressed like Finch so clearly seems to want him to, and maybe then Finch would call him up and tell him just what the fuck is going on.

Hell, why not? Why not, at this point?

So, yeah, he does. After a quick shower and a few minutes psyching himself up and a false start and a few more minutes psyching up while he tries to convince himself that nobody will be able to tell he's wearing underwear that probably costs more than most of the suits he owns and nobody would give a damn if they did know, he gets dressed. He tugs on an undershirt, picks out the pair of briefs that makes his thoughts curl off in odd directions the least, grabs a pair of socks done up in green with little blue dots because he's bold like that, lets his fingertips seek out the good suits in his closet and grabs one of his new shirts from under the bed (the one with the brown stripes, the one without color, baby steps). The effect of it all together is...he doesn't know. Not striking, exactly, because it's just his usual dim colors and faint patterns. But as he pulls the jacket of his suit on at last and draws the top button through its designated hole, he has to admit it's...something. It's good. It feels good; not internally because inside he's mostly just unsure, but against his skin, the whole thing feels good. The layers and textures shift as he moves and it's a little like being clung to.

He looks good too, he realizes with a kind of unsteady mix of pride and shame. Finch somehow coaxed his wardrobe into being something that even Fusco couldn't mess up. Well, he bets he could if he tried. He's just not trying today.

He almost breaks the whole thing when he tries putting on one of his own ties. It dangles from his throat looking like an alien lifeform among the stuff Finch bought for him, all dull and rough in a way that makes it too obvious how good everything else is. He wrenches the thing off and instead leaves the top button of his shirt open. There. That's not bad. Aside from the cracked, scarred loafers quietly calling him out as a pretender, if anyone bothered to look at his feet, Fusco can honestly say that he looks like himself.

Only maybe just a little bit better.

 

---

 

At the precinct, Fusco has to convince himself he isn’t being stared at. Because he isn’t. No one cares and his clothes aren’t obviously fancy enough for some sly, snitching kind of person to take notice of and file away in a “Bust this guy later” folder.  He’s the only one who knows. Him and, he guesses, Finch. If he’s watching. He could not be. The guy has a life, probably.

All the same, Fusco makes a point to walk between his and Carter’s desks, in front of the stupid little fat cop bobblehead that hides Finch’s camera, because if he’s going to give in and dress up like the well-groomed pet that Finch wants him to be, Finch may as well know about it. Carter does what might be a double-take, but that’s the biggest reaction he gets, if it was one.

And, you know, maybe it’s just an ordinary day, for the most part. Maybe Fusco just does his damn job and doesn’t worry about things so much and forgets about his deadline because the feds want Gabe to themselves for the day. Maybe after a while the shift of his new clothes starts to feel less like he’s being felt up and more like just something he’s supposed to be wearing. It’s comfortable, once he’s not being overstimulated by five different kinds of the nicest cloth he’s ever touched. His jacket sits nice and neat across his shoulders and it doesn’t squeeze. His clothes accommodate his stomach and his barrel chest without stretching or warping or pinching.

He tries to call Finch again over a coffee break. Still no answer. Fusco would be worried, but between Finch’s safeguards and Finch’s murderous guard dog and Finch’s murderous bodyguard, he’s safer than Fusco any day of the week.

Case in point, when Fusco pockets his phone and empties his mug until there’s nothing but coffee stain left at the bottom, he glances up and notices Simmons, lurking beyond the glass that cuts them off from the rest of the precinct and staring at Fusco in a way that says, “Get the hell over here, dead meat.”

Fusco makes his excuses to Carter and walks right past Simmons on his way to the bathroom. He listens, peers out the corners of his eyes in lieu of turning, and after a while he senses someone walking behind him, not too close, but close enough to know that Simmons has taken the bait and definitely wants a chat.

In the bathroom, Fusco checks each stall. Empty. Okay. That makes him a little less worried as the door behind him creaks open and Simmons comes up close behind him and neatly whirls him around and slams his back against the tile wall.

“You look like you’re workin’ real hard,” Simmons growls.

Fusco shrugs as best he can with Simmons’ fingers digging hard into his upper arms. “What do you want? The feds have him for today. I can’t touch him. Might as well do my real job while I’m waiting.”

“This is your real job. You started this shit, now you finish it.”

“Okay, but what the hell can I do right now? You know, maybe the feds can get him to cough up. I’ve been on it since the beginning so, you know, cut me a little bit of fucking slack.”

Simmons slams him again, pulls him a little bit closer and then shoves back so his head bounces against the wall. “You had another assignment. If your rich fucking boyfriend likes you enough to buy you a new suit, he can take a few minutes to meet with us.”

Fusco can actually kind of feel the blood leaving his face. He imagines it makes a sound, like a straw at the very bottom of a milkshake.

“Yeah,” Simmons says, face twisting in a smirk like he is so fucking smart. “You think you can just walk in here in a custom suit and have nobody notice? On your salary?”

“Dunno what you’re talking about,” Fusco says. “This was on sale.”

“I’m sure,” Simmons says, sounding like he’s pretty sure Fusco’s full of shit. “Talk to your friend for me, will you? I’m getting impatient.”

“I told you. He doesn’t like cops.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Simmons ruffles Fusco’s hair in a way that knocks his temple into the wall again, not hard, just a reminder that it could be. “He seems to like you fine.” Another knock into the wall, and Simmons steps the appropriate distance away, says, “See you ‘round.”

Fusco doesn’t take long to get himself together. When he does, he goes back to work. He doesn’t try to call Finch again and when he gets home, he puts his new clothes away so it’s just his beaten loafers peeking out the open closet door.

 

---

They don’t have to interview the victims. They have other people for that, folks with soft voices and advanced degrees. Fusco doesn’t know any of them but Carter does and she assures him that the ones she knows are good people, trustworthy people, so it’s better for the victims if untrained schmucks like Carter and Fusco stay out of it.

Neither one says it out loud, but they’re glad they don’t have to be there for that.

They still have to read over the statements, and that’s bad enough on its own. The files are delivered in boxes by a solemn-faced psychologist who shakes hands with Carter and goes on to where they’re torturing Gabe. Well, not exactly. This is sanctioned, after all. The feds are showing him pictures of the victims. Before, if they can get it. After, all of them. Fusco is sitting that out too. Somebody needs to read these statements, after all.

Carter agrees.

The boxes fall with heavy grunts on their desks and they begin to go through.  The unspoken agreement is that they won’t talk about it. Not until they’re done, not until they’ve digested it all. When they speak, it will be in distracting small talk, something to make pleasant noise. If one of them stands up and leaves the room with no explanation, the other is not to question it.

It’s a good system.

Fusco takes a lot of breaks. He’ll go outside and take a quick walk around the block just to remind himself that the rest of the world is there, or else he’ll hide out in the bathroom and blow his nose. No matter what he’s doing, he’s thinking two things. He’s thinking about how much time there is left before his shift ends and he can go home and call his son. And he’s thinking about how if he’d spoken up, turned snitch a long time ago, this probably would never have happened. He’d be in prison and his son would be far out of reach, or he’d be dead and his son wouldn’t be missing him, but maybe the worst parts of all of this never would have happened.

He comes back to his desk and finds that his eyes aren’t up to the challenge just now, so he fiddles his reading glasses out from the inside pocket of his coat and doesn’t realize what’s different until they’re halfway to his face.

These aren’t his glasses.

It’s practically just one long curve of slim, silvery wire, bending at the nosepiece and swooping down to form the bottom of the frames. There’s no top, just two slim, oblong lenses resting in the silvery cradles of the frame. It’s got Porsche written on the outside of the temples and the inside, like they’re meant to remind you of what you’re wearing as you put them on your face.

Fusco folds them up neatly on his desk, rests his forehead in his hand, and just starts to chuckle to himself. Carter, maybe mistaking the shivers in his shoulders, comes over to look. She bends over him, gives him a look like “What the hell is there to laugh about?” before noticing the glasses and easing them out from under Fusco’s palm.

“What’re these?” she asks.

Fusco takes a deep breath, pushes the bitter laugh away and says, with a kind of wheeze in his voice, “Present. From Finch.”

She opens them up, peers through the lenses at a distance. “Finch gave these to you?” she asks, brow furrowed. “When?”

“Uh. I’m not sure. I found them in my jacket just now. He must’ve dropped them off the other night.” Fusco rubs at the side of his face.

Carter isn’t looking through the lenses anymore. “What happened the other night?”

“Dunno. Finch kinda…broke in, I guess. Although it wasn’t quite like that. It didn’t feel that way.”

Carter sets the glasses back down on Fusco’s desk with a gentle click. “He broke into your house?”

“I. Yeah. He did. He had something he wanted to drop off with me and I told him to lay off sending me things at work, so. Although now that I’m thinking about it, I guess he could have just mailed them to me. So, yeah, that’s pretty weird.”

“And he’s sending you…?”

“Clothes.” Fusco swallows. “Mostly. Except for these.”

Carter takes a very deep breath. She exhales. “You just…just back up a second, okay? Don’t move.” She goes back to her desk only to return with her desk chair rumbling along behind her. She pulls it up to the other side of Fusco’s desk and sits down in a very final kind of way, propping her elbows up on the front of his desk right near the bobblehead that she doesn’t know is a hidden camera. “Okay,” she says. “Explain.”

“You sure? It’s not much of a story and I know you’ve got work to do.”

“I need a break,” she says.

He’s surprised she cares. “There’s other stuff I could be confessing to.”

“I need a distraction,” she says with too much intensity.

So he explains. Not all of it; there are parts he leaves out. He doesn’t want to tell anyone about that time Finch measured him up in a sleazy hotel. He has enough trouble just thinking about that. So he starts with the jacket, because he figures that’s where it all began. Besides, she knows about the jacket. She talked to him about it when he first got it and was nice enough not to judge him with her eyes when he ended up keeping it after all that fuss. He starts from there and he tells her about how he didn’t want to keep it because he was afraid of owing Finch and how Finch desperately wanted him to keep it, which just made Fusco more afraid that he was signing his soul away. From there, he tells her what little bits of that night he spent at Finch’s safehouse that he can make himself own up to. Mostly about how they got along okay for a while there, how they were happy enough to be victims of the same crime until, somehow, they weren’t and Fusco was imposing on Finch’s small, sequestered life and they ran out of tolerance for one another.

Fusco leaves out a lot of that, too. Mostly little, unimportant, embarrassing details. The backrub. The fact that the tie Finch gave him came from around Finch’s own neck. That weird, terrible urge Fusco had on the way out the door. He’s not telling anybody that stuff, and it’s fine because none of it is important and Carter gets the gist.

He talks about him and Finch in the van, apologizing while they watched Carter and her team kick ass on a dozen security monitors. He talks about how Finch said he wanted to give Fusco a present and he talks about how Finch never really stopped, how he keeps finding beautiful things in his apartment and he doesn’t know what to do with any of it.

Throughout, he traces the shining frame of the new reading glasses with the tip of his finger.

Carter nods slowly. “Are you okay with this?” she asks him.

He opens his mouth, but his voice catches in his throat, because he thinks if Finch was asking, he’d say “No,” but Carter isn’t Finch. “Not sure,” he says. “I wouldn’t ask him for it. But it’s not that I don’t like the stuff he gets for me, or even that I don’t like him giving me gifts. I just don’t like wondering what the hell it is he thinks I did to deserve any of this.”

“You did save his life,” Carter points out.

“Yeah. But. He saved mine too. He doesn’t have to do this.”

“Have you told him you don’t want it?”

“A thousand times. He doesn’t care. It’s…you know, sometimes I think he must be doing this for me. He’ll notice something I have that needs replacing, and he’ll get me something nicer. You know, to say thank you or something. But other times, like this,” he taps the glasses, “it’s amazing, but I can’t, you know? I can’t be seen wearing these; I don’t want to answer those questions. And he knows that, but he got it for me anyway. And I just think it’s being wasted on me and it’s money he could have spent on something better. And I wonder if he’s doing this for himself, and not for me at all.”

“Could be.” Carter’s chin is resting in her hand. She looks worried about something. “I’m gonna ask you half a question,” she says. “Don’t get mad.”

“What’s half a question?”

She asks, “Are you two…?” She makes a peace sign, crosses the middle finger over the index finger so they’re tangled together.

His heart thuds, sharp and vicious. “Ha. Very funny. No.”

“You sure he knows that?”

Fusco lets out a dry bark of laughter.

“I’m serious,” Carter says, looking the part. “If a guy started doing that for me, that’s what I’d think was going on. And I’d have my guard up, because this is weird.”

“He’s not,” Fusco says. “I bet he’s even surer of that than I am.”

She shrugs.  “If you say so.” She pushes out her chair, glides away from him on plastic wheels. “I just hope you know what you’re doing.”

“Course I do,” he lies. “I’m on top of this.”

With nothing left to talk about that either of them is willing to force, they get back to their unhappy work. Fusco, unable to find his usual glasses, makes do with the pair Finch bought him and hopes that they’ll go unnoticed for the rest of the day. They rest on the bridge of his nose like silvery ghosts and before long, he forgets they are there.

 

---

 

Finch calls him this time.

“Detective?” he says, gently, like he’s passing by the door to Fusco’s life but nervous about entering. “How are you?”

“Not great.” The words echo inside the bottle he still has held to his lips.

“I didn’t think so.” Finch sighs gently. “Would you like to talk about it?”

“Nope.” Fusco sets his beer down with a satisfying clink.

The silence is uneasy. “If you haven’t had a chance to speak to your son yet,” Finch ventures, “I could leave you to that.”

“It’s okay,” Fusco says. “I got home too late. He’s supposed to have been in bed for a couple of hours now.” Which means he’s probably wide awake with a flashlight and a book or sneaking video games under the covers, but Fusco still can’t call him. Maybe he could have when he first got home. Michael would have been getting ready for bed. There would have been time. But Fusco didn’t trust his voice just then, so he missed the window of opportunity. Pushing those thoughts aside, he asks, “When’d you slip me those glasses?”

“When I was dropping off your suits. I just tucked them away in the expectation that you’d find them eventually.” There’s a tight pause, a sharp intake of breath, and suddenly Finch blurts, “They were a bad choice.”

“They’re a good choice. They’re just no good for my health.” He takes another swallow of beer. “Porsche? You can pick up reading glasses for five bucks down at the drug store. Why bring Porsche into it?”

“I thought they might suit you.” Finch, wherever he is, is shifting around. “Do they?”

“I don’t know. They were on my face; I couldn’t see them. They seemed good. They’re better than the ones I had; I know that much.”

“Good. I’m glad.” Deep, shivery breaths and then, “I know I haven’t always been, uh, as thoughtful about your needs as I might have. It’s come to my attention lately that some of my purchases have been motivated more by things I wanted to buy for you rather than things that you might conceivably want.”

Fusco settles back on his couch, bottom of the beer bottle pressed against his bare knee. “That’s sounding mighty familiar.”

“I couldn’t help but overhear you and Detective Carter today…”

“Pretty sure you could.”

Finch falls silent. “I suppose I could’ve,” he says carefully. “But I didn’t. And it was a valuable conversation for me to overhear, because it called attention to some…negative aspects of my behavior. Boundaries that I was crossing. The nature of my day job has somewhat warped my respect for other people’s right to privacy, and for that I can’t apologize enough.”

“Well. Jeez. You don’t have to…I mean, you’re a lot nicer about it then the other guy is.”

“That’s not a high bar.”

“No. No, I guess not. But, listen,” and he inches forward to the front of the couch, like he and Finch are really talking, in the same room and everything. “I kinda liked it, you know? After the shit I deal with every day, it was kinda nice to come home and know that someone gave enough of a damn about me to hide something weird in my apartment for me to find.”

“There’s complimentary and then there’s you.”

“Shut up. I mean it. You’ve been good to me. You do have to knock it off, but I want you to know that I’m grateful.” Fusco takes a breath. “Were you listening in yesterday?”

“No,” Finch says. “No, I was focusing on other things.”

“Well, if you were, you’d have noticed that I wore one of your monkey suits and somebody noticed I was dressing above my station. I need to wait until the heat’s off me, okay? Maybe when I don’t have to work HR anymore.”

“That’s fine, Detective,” Finch says. “I understand.” And it sounds like maybe he does.

Fusco drums his fingertips against his knees, takes a long, serious drink. “Well?” he says finally.

“Well what?”

“You want to ask me how the clothes looked, don’t you?”

Finch doesn’t laugh exactly, but Fusco can hear the smile in his voice. “Truth be told, I’m pulling the relevant security footage as we speak. But how did you think it looked?”

“So much for boundaries,” Fusco chides. “You know, I’m not that kind of guy, but I have to say…”

“Yes?”

“I looked one hell of a lot better than I usually do.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Finch says absently. Fusco hears distant clicking and then, “Oh.” Just a short gasp, soft and wet in the back of Finch’s throat.

“That bad?”

Finch’s voice is distant when he says, “No.”

“No?”

Finch clears his throat. “Well, there’s room for improvement with regards to coordination, but you haven’t done anything wrong.” He clears his throat again, short and raspy. “And I’m not sure if I agree with your assessment of your appearance, but overall…you wear it very well.”

It’s faint praise, but Fusco’s face starts to burn all the same. “Shit. I’m gonna get an ego if you keep talking me up like that.”

“I just think that you’re underrating your day-to-day appearance.”

Fusco snorts. “You need think about getting a new prescription, buddy. You can’t see worth a damn.”

“I respectfully disagree.”

Fusco pushes his blushing face into his hands, bends double. “Hey Finch,” he says, bowed and muffled. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Go ahead.”

“Were you really busy yesterday or were you just hiding out so I couldn’t yell at you for buying me underwear?”

Finch’s soft, half-suppressed giggle is shocking and Fusco can’t figure out why until he realizes that it isn’t just him having a bitter chuckle at the world or the two of them laughing to keep from going crazy, but Finch just full-on laughing because of something Fusco said. He made Finch laugh and the thought’s making him smile so much he feels like his face is going to split. “It’s possible that those were both motivating factors,” Finch says, after he regains his breath and some measure of his dignity. And then, a little more serious, a little more cautious, “Are you? Mad, I mean?”

“No,” Fusco tells him, stretching out on the couch and settling in with the phone cradled against his face. “No, I’m not.”

 

---

 

It’s the last day, the one week anniversary of his talk with Simmons. He shouldn’t have taken his day off. He wouldn’t have, but that was the day after the night that Finch took him to the hotel, when he slept in late and woke up hungover and every time he remembered his multitude of worries, pain lanced through his skull.

Distance makes him regret the decision to stay home.

They tell him that when they showed Gabe the pictures of the victims, he turned his eyes away as much as he could, blinking with his chin in his hand, fingers pressed over his lips, but he didn't have a damn thing to say about it. Fusco was kind of hoping that would break him, that feeling the same guilt Fusco is feeling might finally get Gabe to open up. Fusco was hoping that it'd be well out of his hands by today.

No such luck.

So people are pursuing other leads, letting Gabe stew for a little before they come back and hit him with something new and nobody's panicking like Fusco is panicking. Especially not Simmons, who's got himself propped up all casual against a wall so he can watch Fusco lose his mind in relative comfort. Right now, Simmons is giving him this smug look like "Get over here and beg for more time so I can tell you no."

Fusco sighs, straightens up his jacket. Might as well ask. It can't hurt anymore at this stage. He goes to join Simmons against the wall, leaning beside him so their shoulders brush. "Any chance of a reprieve?"

"Sure." He exhales, shifts in his position. "Get him talking and we won't have to hurt him. That option's always been there."

"You know he won't," Fusco says into his palm. He's watching Carter, with her head bent over her desk, gazing too intently into a file.

"So why fight it? The guy's been asking for a beating since day one. You don't even like him."

It's true, Fusco quietly admits to himself. He doesn't like Gabe. Not really. They must have been friendly at some half-remembered point, friends of friends, or maybe he was one of the ones who took extortion as a reality of the line of work he was in and didn't openly begrudge giving the cops their cut. They must have gone drinking together at one time or another. But that's it. There's no feeling there. 

Gabe's pain doesn't hurt Fusco at all.

There's nothing keeping Fusco between Gabe and this beating other than the feeling that maybe he doesn't get to be that guy anymore. Now that Carter knows what he used to be, he can't be a bystander to something like this. Even if she never finds out, he can't do it.

"Said I'd help him out," he says, finally.

"Jesus." Simmons chuckles to himself. "Remind me never to ask you to pull my ass from the fire."

"That's probably a good idea."

Simmons gives him a quick, vicious smack on the ear. "You've still got all the rest of today," he says as Fusco whines. "Much as I'd like to smack the little bastard around, I'd just as soon have a night in. The wife's been giving me grief about the hours. And I can't say as I blame her, with all the extra time I put in here, so if it's all the same to you, I'd rather go home early and do some patching up."

Fusco blinks up at him.

"But I need that information now, one way or the other." Simmons sighs. "If my marriage has to suffer, so be it."

"He's not gonna talk." His voice comes out small and defeated. "And he's stupid enough and stubborn enough that he's gonna keep quiet until you knock something loose and kill him."

Simmons shrugs. "Eh. He's wiry. He'll last longer than you give him credit for. We'll get it out of him if you can't."

And that's it. That's the whole story, beginning to end. They'll get it out of him if Fusco can't. And, because he wants to look his partner in the eye and not feel like a thief whenever Finch does something nice for him and not be tortured by regrets over somebody he doesn't even like, Fusco has to.

It's almost comforting, the way his world narrows. The way things get so simple when he doesn't have a choice. He leaves Simmons by the wall. He takes a folder that he knows is filled with pictures of the victims off Carter's desk and he hears her ask him what he's doing, but he's not sure what she does after that because it doesn't occur to him to look back. 

The guy in the observation room, keeping an eye on Gabe through the one way glass, is with HR. This is probably related to this evening's plans. Because it is, and because they both know it is, Fusco is in a position to say "Piss off," and the other guy is in a position to obey. Fusco locks the door after he leaves. 

He takes a short moment just to breathe. He twists the folder in his hands.

Gabe brightens as he walks in. “Hey. Long time no see. How’re the men in black?”

Fusco doesn’t answer. He goes to the corner where the security camera hangs and plucks out a wire with practiced ease, disabling it.

“Really?” When Fusco turns back, Gabe is looking at him like he’s disappointed. “I thought you said you weren’t that kind of cop.”

“I’m not,” he says. “But you’re such a pain in the ass.” He pulls out the chair across from Gabe, settles in, starts to lay out the pictures.

“I already did this,” Gabe mutters petulantly. “I already did that thing where they show me all the sad fucking kids and tell me what an awful person I am for letting it happen by keeping quiet. And I don’t even want to hear that shit from you. I don’t hear you speaking up and it’s not like you knew nothing.”

“At least I did something about it.”

“Yeah.” Gabe sighs. “Yeah, I heard about that. HR sends a pretty loud message, when it wants to. Didn’t really stop anything though, did it? And that was a while ago.”

Fusco clenches one fist. He selects a picture, tries not to look too hard at it as he does. “You see this, Gabe?”

Gabe stares hard into the center of the picture like he’s trying to bore holes through it with his eyes. “Yeah,” he says, jerking his head to one side. “Yeah, I see it.”

“This is you.”

“Ooooh. Fancy threat. You gonna make that happen yourself, or are you gonna get your friends to do it for you while you sit off to the side with a barf bag?”

Fusco’s knuckles crackle.

“’Cause I know you don’t have it in you. You wanna hit me right now, and I can tell that ‘cause I’m not blind. But you’re not gonna. You’re gonna crack your knuckles and posture a bit like you’re somebody to be scared of, but you and I both know that the worst I’m gonna get is a few little slaps and then the real bad guys will come in here to do the rest because you don’t have the guts.”

Fusco takes a breath that whistles around in his lungs. He lets it out. “You’re dead. You know that?”

“Jesus. You’re gettin’ really unoriginal. You know that?”

“I’m not threatening you, Gabe. I’m just telling you how it is. I’ve almost…I wanna sign off on you. Just let you be somebody else’s problem, and maybe they’d really hurt you or something, and I don’t want that, I don’t think. I don’t even like you, but I don’t want to see you get tortured. And I’m trying, I’ve been trying to save you from that but you stupid son of a bitch, you just won’t let me.”

Gabe blinks. His mouth has gone lopsided, like his face is melting. “You don’t like me?”

“You’re doomed. You’re as doomed as the ones we’re dooming by keeping quiet about this and it’s like you can’t see it. It’s like you think that the FBI’s gonna change their tune after all this time based on…what? If they didn’t want you when what you knew was relevant, who the hell’s gonna want you now?”

“I didn’t want to do this!” Gabe snaps. “I just needed a place to fucking hide, okay? I try, you know, I try to just keep my head down and do my own thing but I can’t help it, Fusco, if I can exploit something, if I can screw somebody out of a few dollars, it’s like I can’t stop myself; I gotta take it. There’s people waiting for me to get out of police custody and none of ‘em are friendly. You need your information? That’s fine. I fuckin’ sympathize. But I don’t want to die. I want protection, I need protection, and if I can’t get it, I’d rather die in here than out there. You know, at least it’s fuckin’ warm in here.” He shifts in his seat.

Fusco drops the picture, lets it flutter to the tabletop. He rests his forehead in his hand. “Jesus, Gabe.”

“Tried that. Stole the communion wine. I was eight.”

He’s still rubbing at his forehead, kneading away like maybe he can mold his face into somebody else’s. “You’re gonna die in here,” he says, “because the feds aren’t going to protect you.”

Gabe nods. “’Kay,” he says in a very small voice.

Fusco takes a deep breath. He doesn’t want any more obligations but they pile up somehow. “I’m gonna protect you.”

“What?”

“Yeah.” Fusco chuckles. Even he can’t believe it. “You give it up, you agree to testify for the prosecution, that gets you protection. Could be witness protection, could be you end up admitting some pretty nasty stuff and you end up on trial yourself at some point, but at least that’s something. You’re gonna be safe for a while. And when that runs out, if people are still looking to mess you up…that’s when I come in. Whatever debts you need settled, whoever you need scared off, I’ll do what I can to see it done. Just let this be over. That’s all I want.”

Someone knocks hard on the door to the observation room.

“Looks like we’re running out of time,” he says. “What’s it gonna be Gabe?”

Gabe squirms.

“You’re not gonna get this from anyone else,” he says. “It’s all I can offer you.”

Pounding on the door again. “Fusco?” It’s Carter. She sounds like she’s somewhere between scared and pissed off. Leaning more toward pissed off.

“Come on, Gabe. We don’t have a lot of time here.”

Gabe is leaning forward over the table, looking like he’s about to burst. His lips are white. “I don’t have it,” he says.

Fusco holds very still. Gabe stays still too, bent over the table, head down. All there is is Carter’s knock on the door. “Gabe, you better be joking,” he says.

“’M not.”

“Gabe,” he sighs gently. “I’m really gonna kill you myself this time.”

Gabe scoots his chair back with a neat little shriek of metal on linoleum. “Whoa, hey now, let’s not go nuts or anything. It’s not like I made this shit up. I just know a guy who knows a guy. He wanted to make sure I was good to go; I wanted to make sure I was gonna be safe, and now that we had that talk…that we just had…about you, you know, savin’ me and not killin’ me, I can…”

Fusco’s hand is pressing kind of involuntarily at his chest and he’s taking hard, gulping breaths. “I should’ve let them beat you.”

“But you didn’t! ‘Cause you’re a swell guy. Listen, I just need a phone and a day, two days max. You guys can monitor me all you want; I really don’t give a shit. Whatever my guy knows, he’ll get to you through me. I promise. I swear to God.”

“Fuck God. You swear to me.”

“I swear to you, man.” Gabe looks him in the eye properly for the first time since he came in the room. “Thanks. For saying what you did. Means a lot.”

“Yeah. Well.” Fusco can almost breathe again. “Don’t make me regret it, okay?”

“’Kay.”

Carter is still pounding on the door, and finally Fusco pushes out his chair and goes to unlock it for her. She half-falls into the room. “What…” she takes a deep, gasping breath, and then finishes, too casual, “What were you doing in here?”

“Just havin’ a chat with Gabe.” He jerks a thumb over his shoulder. “Princess in there wants a phone. He’s ready to talk; just has to clear it with his contact. Can you believe these days? Even the CIs have CIs.”

Her eyes narrow. “You playing with me?”

“No. A little. Sorry, nobody needs sarcasm right now. He’s ready to talk. That’s all.”

“Really?” she says.

He nods.

“Okay.” She’s trading looks between Gabe and Fusco like she’s expecting someone to say April Fools. “Okay, let’s see if we can get him that phone.”

“I know you’re gonna tap that phone,” Gabe calls to her over Fusco’s shoulder. “It’s alright. I’ll be patient.”

Carter ushers Fusco out of the room, out of the little closet of a one-way observation space, into the hall and that’s where she starts to give him the third degree.

“Did you hit him to make him say that?” she asks, jabbing a finger into his chest.

“No!” he answers, leaving out the part where he wanted to.

“If you laid a finger on him…”

“I didn’t.

“That’s not what we do. That’s not what you do anymore.”

“I know.”

She shifts from foot to foot, buries her hands in her pockets. “So how’d you do it?” she asks. She’s really asking, too. Studying his face like it’s important somehow, like there’s good stuff going on behind it.

He wilts under scrutiny. “It was like you said. He was scared.” Fusco scuffs the toe of his shoe against the floor. “He just needed to feel like somebody was looking out for him.”

“And the camera?”

Fusco’s voice drops. “We had to talk about some things we both did wrong. I didn’t want a record. Sorry for scaring you.”

“You didn’t scare me,” she says. She punches his upper arm. “You got me mad at you.”

“Sorry for that, then.”

He’s pretty sure she doesn’t jump at him or anything; she probably telegraphed it from a mile away, but somehow it’s like being hit by a truck when she hugs him. She just tugs his sleeve and pulls him right up against her and then her arms are looped nice and easy around his neck and she’s rocking them back and forth. “I’m really proud of you,” she says.

He’s tentative when he wraps his arm around her, pats her back. “It’s not as good as it sounds,” he says. “This is all assuming that his friend knows anything. Could be another dead end.”

“Shut up,” she says. “I want this to be over.”

“Then be proud of me,” he says. “’Cause it’s over.”

“Good.” Her fist drives into his back, rough and affectionate. “Now let go before someone sees us hugging and assumes we’re getting friendly off-duty.”

He lets go.

 

---

 

They go out drinking because even though it’s not over, not yet, they’re at the point where they need to cherish every little victory. Carter gets their coats while Fusco says goodbye to Simmons…

(He creeps up behind Simmons while he fills out a report because he’s always wanted to be the one getting the jump. “He says he needs a day or two for his contact to get back to him. Can you hold off that long?”

Simmons turns, fixes him with a critical eye. “Two days. That so?”

“If he doesn’t come up with what we need by then,” Fusco says, catching Carter’s eye as she waves him toward the door, “then I wish you all the luck in the world.”

It’s not exactly true, but that’s the kind of confidence he’s feeling right now.)

At the bar, he and Carter are shoulder to shoulder with other cops and they don’t exactly know who’s a friend and who’s an enemy and who can be trusted, so instead they talk about things that don’t need hiding. Their families, mostly. It’s the thing they have in common. Taylor’s one hell of a Mathlete. Michael is crushing kids twice his size in hockey. Fusco’s ex is fine, thanks for asking. Carter’s ex doesn’t come up.

Fusco gets the feeling that’s deliberate on her part. He doesn’t push it, and he never will.

Carter is telling him about this youth program at Central Park Zoo that’s made for kids around Michael’s age and Fusco’s getting kind of rammed by the realization that soon, he’ll be able to see his son again without feeling like he’s painting a target on the kid’s back when somebody taps him on the shoulder.

He turns to find a scrawny kid, barely into his twenties, peering at him between strands of over-long hair. “You Lionel Fusco?” the kid asks.

“Yeah?”

The kid passes him a slim, white box, maybe a foot and a half long and a couple inches wide, and shoves a clipboard in his face. “Sign?”

Fusco does with a sigh, and soon the kid is disappearing into the crowd and Fusco’s left with yet another box of mystery and potential humiliation sitting in front of him.

Carter sets her beer down, leans forward with interest. “Is that from him?”

“Probably.” Fusco scratches at the back of his head. “This can’t be healthy, right? Getting me used to opening unmarked packages. One of these days, it’s gotta be anthrax. That’s just probability.” His phone begins to buzz aggressively in his breast pocket. “’Scuse me,” he says to Carter, picking up.

“It’s not anthrax,” Finch says.

“Don’t do that. It’s weird.” He taps at the top of the box. “I thought we talked about this.”

“We did and I took it to heart. Honestly, I did. But I felt that today was a…special occasion.”

Fusco smiles all jagged. “You spied on me.”

Finch says, with a note of pride, “You performed admirably. Just, ah, a token of my appreciation. For a job very well done.”

“No more of this stuff?” he says, easing up the lid.

“No more,” Finch agrees. “Aside from the suit I’m making for you and any special occasions that may arise.”

“You got a funny definition of ‘no more.’”

“Indulge me.”

The lid on the box falls back. It’s a tie this time, a long streak of dark blue, careful, deliberate geometry sewn into the fabric. What gets to Fusco is that it’s already knotted. He reaches down, brushes the fabric, finds that his fingertips have learned what quality feels like and this isn’t it. It doesn’t feel too delicate or fine to be next to his hide, doesn’t look shiny enough to catch anybody’s eye. It’s cheap, almost, or cheap by Finch’s standards. Solid quality, maybe more than Fusco would be willing to spend on himself, but nothing out of his range.

He turns it over. It’s a clip-on.

Finch, his voice the model of innocence, says, “Just a little something for work.”

Fusco tries to respond, finds that he can’t speak.

“It took some, ah, some considerable restraint on my part. I’m sure you’ve guessed that I’m not a proponent of the clip-on tie. Much as it pained me to purchase it, your reasons for wearing them are more than practical.”

Fusco’s just grinning to himself.

Finch, in the absence of a response, starts to chatter again. “I’m afraid the clip is silver. I failed on that score. But then, I thought the clip would likely remain unnoticed.” Finch’s voice fails. He tries again. “I hope…I hope that’s alright.” He is silent again for a long minute. “You could say something,” Finch murmurs.

“It’s my day off tomorrow.”

He hears Finch’s breath catch in his throat, hears its momentum die there with a wet click. “I. I don’t…”

“So.” Fusco’s got this weird tightness in his chest, like it’s swelling out. “If you wanted to do something tomorrow…”

“Yes.”

“That. That’d be fine by me.”

“Your suit is ready,” Finch says. “Or. That is. It nearly is. It could be done by tomorrow. Afternoon, say.”

“Then, ah, yeah. Let’s do that. Tomorrow. Afternoon. Maybe we could get coffee beforehand? Or after? I don’t know how these things…”

“Before. Before would be fine. Do you remember my address?”

All he can think is “I thought you were going to clear that place out to get away from me,” but instead he says “Yeah.”

“There’s a very charming café about a block away. We can meet there. Around three?”

“I. Alright. See you then.”

“See you soon, Detective.”

Fusco puts his phone down on the bartop with shaky hands. He pushes it and the box with the tie in it off to one side. He almost orders himself another beer, and then realizes his glass is still relatively full. He turns to find Carter staring at him over her glass.

“What just happened?” she asks.

“Nothing,” Fusco tells her.

“You sure?”

“Sure. Just meeting Finch. For coffee.”

“That’s nice,” she says carefully. “So you guys are friends now?”

“Yeah,” says Fusco as he buries his face in his glass. “Yeah, I guess so.”

Notes:

OK, reader type people, I've got a hypothetical for you. If I wanted to guide this story in a sexward direction, would you rather I:

a) up that rating and go for it?

or

b) keep all sexual content within the confines of an M rating, but link an alternate, Explicit version of that chapter so that those who are interested can experience said chapter if they choose?

I should clarify that this isn't going to be put to a vote or anything. If one person says they'd rather I went with Option B, that's what I'm doing. I'm just trying to figure out if anyone cares if the rating suddenly jumps up. And this did start life as a T-rated fic, so I could see where some readers would be like "Whoa, I did not sign up for this."

Chapter 16

It's not too late to leave, he thinks, looking at his watch. It's ten until three. There's still time to bail.

He tries it out, just to see if it's even an option. The metal chair screams against the concrete outside the coffee shop when he pushes it away from the iron lattice of the table, and he takes it as a bad omen, scoots it back in with another ear-piercing grind. Just wait, he tells himself. Just wait it out. Jesus Christ, there's nothing to worry about.

It's just coffee with a friend.

He's done this a thousand times, does it nearly every day with Carter. So, maybe it's not at a place quite as nice as this, and maybe he's more used to paper cups in cardboard sleeves than these giant ceramic fishbowl mugs, and maybe he's never done this with Finch, but that shouldn't change anything.

Just coffee with a friend. And they are friends now, he reminds himself. It seems wrong to think so, because he works so hard to pretend Finch and the other asshole don't exist unless they're giving him grief. Even when he does, it's easier to think 'boss'. But he and Finch, they have to be friends now. They have to be, because otherwise the presents and the attention and the late night phone calls are just fucking bizarre. Fusco's life doesn't need to be weirder. It can't be.

Except you don't get nervous like this over meeting a friend. You don't feel sick and overheated and squirming excited but also like running. You don't puzzle over what shirt to wear.

But he does and he did, stood in front of the mirror and gave it some serious thought, like it mattered. He never cared about how he dressed before Finch started worrying about it. Sharon did, kinda, in the way that she'd screw with his tie or the tuck of his shirt or tell him to buy some new shoes for chrissakes because these are falling apart. It was never a sore spot with her like it is with Finch. Sharon gave less of a shit about her own clothes than Finch does about Fusco's, he's pretty sure.

And now Fusco's infected with it. Or maybe he still doesn't care, but he cares that Finch does. Maybe after all that Finch spent on nice new duds for him, Fusco wants to prove that he's getting good use out of them, that Finch didn't waste his time or his money. That's not too embarrassing to own up to. That's downright courteous.

So he's wearing a nicer than usual shirt (the blue one, if it matters, the one that Finch got him, the one in the shade of blue that Finch likes because it keeps Fusco's eyes from getting lost and yes, of course that throwaway compliment would stick in his mind god dammit) and he feels like a fool, or he would if he wasn't dressed at more or less the standard for this coffee shop.

Five until three. Not too late to run out. Not too late to stand Finch up in a coffee shop because he's too much of a pussy to sit down and fucking talk to the guy. Not too late to feel like a complete tool.

A tentative voice behind him asks, "Detective?"

He jumps, just a little. Of course Finch would be early. The only surprise is that he didn't get here earlier than Fusco. That and the way his heart kind of shudders at the sound of his voice right here, not distorted by the phone. Fusco twists around to say hello, to get a good look at him.

And. Uh. Huh.

It's nothing new, Fusco tells himself, a little frantically. Just Finch in a stately gray suit, Finch in a crisp shirt, Finch with a wine-colored tie, Finch overdressed for everything around him, Finch with his stupid hair that won't lie down, but. He doesn't know. Fusco's very conscious of how long it's been since they've actually seen each other. Not since the hotel, not since just over a week. Which isn't that long, by their standards, but Fusco still catches himself gasping with a kind of relief.

It's been a long week, he guesses. A long week and Fusco missed him.

"Hey," he says instead of that. "Thought you stood me up."

"I thought I was early," Finch says. He's not quite looking at Fusco. Or, he is, but his eyes are on the shirt. His face twitches. He's trying not to smile.

Fusco thinks he should stand up and...what? Shake Finch’s hand? They're not going into business together. Hug him? Jesus Christ, no. It's just that getting up seems like it'd be the right thing to do, if he could think of something to do after he got there. They're stalemated for a while, Finch standing there with his hands in the pockets of his fine coat, Fusco twisted around in his seat with his arm draped over the back of the chair, the pair of them cordially tense. Finally, Fusco stands up and circles around the table to pull out the other chair.

Finch blinks at him.

This was probably the wrong thing. Ah, well. Nothing to do about it now. Fusco tilts his head in the chair's direction. "We doing this or what?" he asks.

Finch breaks out into a tiny half-smile. "Yes. Of course. Thank you." He lurches forward in his funny little way, takes his place and lets Fusco push the chair in. "I hope you don't think that's necessary," Finch says, unfurling a napkin as Fusco takes his own seat. "I assure you, I'm more than capable."

"I know that," Fusco nearly snaps. Then, gentler: "Just. You know. The chairs are heavy. Don't be a dick."

Finch's eyes are on the napkin. His smile is nearly shy. "I suppose it's only fair," he says, "given the circumstances."

"Damn right," Fusco says.

They get settled. Finch orders green tea that arrives in a small, unassuming teapot with a soft towel draped over the handle and a little white cup beside it. It's more manageable than Fusco's cup. Fusco wonders why that is.

"How are you?" Finch asks as he pours the tea.

“It’s, ah.” He takes a deep breath. “It’s a weight off.” And it is. It truly is. Not that it’s all gone. The case isn’t cut and dried yet and Simmons is still going to want to talk to Fusco’s rich friend. Fusco supposes he could ask about that now, while Finch is in a good mood and nobody’s directly in danger. He supposes this is the time.

Finch beams at him over the rim of his teacup and he can’t. He can’t speak. Finch is giving him a really serious once-over and he just wants to shut up and take it.

“I know that shirt,” Finch says with a smile.

“Thought you might.” He squirms under Finch’s gaze. “You regret where you put it yet?”

“No,” Finch says. “No, not yet.”

He buries his face in the teacup and Fusco follows suit with his oversized coffee mug. For a moment, they’re just two people enjoying each other’s company in a café and there’s something terribly ordinary about that. It’s not them at all. “This is weird as hell,” Fusco points out.

Finch looks up. “Oh?”

“Just. You know. The two of us. In the same room. And nobody’s pissed off or getting shot at or buying anybody underwear. Just having coffee like we’re normal folks. It’s a change.”

“I could get used to it,” Finch says, guardedly.

“No, me too,” Fusco reassures him. “Me too. I just need some time to get into it.”

“That can be arranged.”

Fusco pushes his mug to one side. “So. Uh. Maybe we should wait until we've been here more than ten minutes, but. You want to do this on the regular?”

“I’d like that,” Finch says.

"Yeah?" Warmth curls ticklish someplace deep inside his chest.

"Yes." He lowers his teacup and it rattles for a moment as he puts it to rest in the saucer. He takes a deep breath, exhales unsteadily, like he means to speak but can't quite manage it. Finally, he says, "I know we don't always agree and that the work we do necessitates a certain degree of separation, but that doesn't change the fact that I am..." He trails off, tries to gather his thoughts. "...That I have become fond of you. I'm very fond of you and I don't see you as often as I'd like." He speaks each word deliberately, like he's laying it out in just the way he wants to.

"Okay." Fusco sips his coffee thoughtfully. "That's one hell of a lot of words just to say you missed me."

Finch's face colors and a smile threatens to overtake him. "I don't..."

"Not so hard, is it? It’s only three." He counts off on his fingers. "I. Missed. You. Hell, two words. 'Missed you.' Gets the point across."

 Finch catches his gesturing hand and guides it back to the tabletop. "I missed you," he says. "Very much." His fingertips find the spaces between Fusco's knuckles and rest there.

He swallows hard. "You just had to stick the extra words in there, didn't you? Alright. I missed you too, smartass."

Finch doesn't have a thing to say about that. He just smiles bright with his eyes cast down to look at their hands together on the table. He looks like someone who doesn't mind being called smartass.

Fusco wonders, in a distant kind of way, what the two of them look like to the other people in the coffee shop. He wonders, but he doesn't move his hand.

"I don't want to rush you," Finch says, tracing the bluish path of a vein beneath Fusco's skin, "but if you're not enjoying your coffee..."

"No, no, this is good stuff," he insists. He's kind of hypnotized by Finch touching the back of his hand. "Although," he continues, "I think I might be done."

"Already?" His voice is distant as he turns Fusco's hand palm up and sets two fingers there in the very center. Just waiting. Just filling space.

He tries to speak and discovers that his voice is gone again. He nods. "Yeah. I could go along now, if you wanted."

"I do," Finch says.

When the check comes, Fusco is ready. He fucking trained for this. Finch doesn’t even see what’s coming, sliding a neat, casual hand into his pocket with the nonchalance of someone who fully expects to pick up the check and is too rich to feel any way but magnanimous about it. The waiter hasn’t even quite put the bill in contact with the table before Finch is saying “I’ll get it!” and Fusco is snatching it over to his side at the table so fast he swears his hand broke the sound barrier.

Finch frowns. Pouts, if Fusco’s in the mood to be mean and a little bit truthful. “You really don’t have to,” Finch sighs.

“Yeah, well. Neither have you.” He unfolds the thin scrap of paper and pulls maybe the best poker face of his life to keep Finch from knowing how pissed he is that he’s about to pay that much for coffee. “Let me get this one. It was my idea to go out anyway.”

Finch looks odd, like someone just knocked into him and he’s more surprised than angry. “Alright.”

“We could switch it up, if that makes you feel any better. The other times we do this,” Fusco clarifies in answer to Finch’s furrowed brow. “I pay for one and then you pay for one and then I do and so on.”

The smile Finch gives him then is bright and utterly helpless and Fusco can’t help but throw one right back at him.

It's only a short distance to the house and a nice day, so they walk it. That's strange to be doing too, walking side by side along the street in broad daylight. He keeps having the urge to do that thing he does when he meets with the guy in the suit, that thing where he turns away and pretends they aren't together. But Finch and him, they are together. And he doesn't mind, not really. He likes that they can walk like this, Fusco’s shoulder brushing against Finch’s upper arm, and they don’t have to speak and they don’t have to worry about being noticed.

When Finch takes Fusco’s arm and holds onto it, keeping him close, it doesn’t really seem out of place.

"Is this alright?" Finch asks after a moment, letting his fingers shift nervously in the crook of Fusco’s elbow. "I'm not...I'm not making you uncomfortable, am I?"

"Nah," Fusco says. "You’re fine.”

He doesn’t have anything to say about that except maybe his grip on Fusco’s arm grows tighter.

When they take the steps outside Finch’s handsome, empty brownstone, Fusco can’t help but notice they’ve been swept. There are neat little lines of dirt to either side from where they didn’t quite brush off of the stoop. “Hey, are you…?” he begins.

Finch takes a break from wrestling his keys out of the smooth lining of his pocket. He looks up. His eyes are wide. His face seems very earnest, very willing, a little nervous. “Hm?”

“…Forgot what I was going to say.”

Finch smiles at him, brushes that weird little tuft of hair at the peak of his hairline back away from his face like it was falling in his eyes. It wasn’t. He opens his mouth, rejects whatever it was he was going to say, and wordlessly goes back to unlocking the door.  Fusco guesses it must be more difficult than it looks. Or maybe Finch’s hands are shaking.

Finch lets the door swing open and takes his first few steps inside alone. Fusco waits for a cue or something. Waits to see what Finch is like when he’s at home.

Or, not when he’s at home, exactly. This isn’t home, he reminds himself. Not for either one of them. Besides, Finch knows he’s being watched. Finch hits a switch on the wall and the foyer fills up with a warm glow. He doesn’t turn around, doesn’t move forward to let Fusco come in. What he does is twist his head to one side, not quite looking over his shoulder, just far enough that he can peek at Fusco from the corner of his eye. Like he’s just…checking to make sure Fusco’s still there. His profile is unreadable, the soft chin, the sharp nose, the eyes very wide with their nearly invisible lashes. Finch isn’t giving anything away.

His shoulder rolls awkwardly, so the stiff shoulders of his neat gray jacket come unmoored and start to slip off him, so he squirms a little with his arms behind his back as he pulls the jacket off and eases it down off his elbows and wrists. Fusco has the urge to help him. It would be a simple thing to grab his jacket by the collar and pull it down, but it’s the thought of a moment because soon Finch has it off and draped neatly over one arm. Besides, Fusco reflects as Finch turns to face him, Finch doesn’t seem to like being helped and worried over any more than Fusco does.

“Are you coming in?” Finch asks, like nothing happened. Although, really, nothing did.

“Well, if you’re gonna twist my arm…” he jokes gently

Finch steps back graciously to let Fusco in.

It’s nicer than he remembers it. He doesn’t remember it so well; it was dark and he was in pain the first time he was here and on the day following, Fusco’s mind was elsewhere. But he seems to think it was shabby then, kind of cold and distant and empty, and it isn’t that anymore. There are coats, fine jackets and beaten windbreakers both, on the rack beside the door. There’s a regimented line of shoes that Finch is gingerly adding to. There’s a bag, like a little tote thing, just slumped against the wall like somebody was too tired and busy to bother putting it back where it belongs.

“We don’t wear shoes in this house,” Finch reminds him.

“Fine, fine,” Fusco says as he digs the toe of one shoe into the heel of the other to gain a little leverage so his foot can slide free. “Dunno what it is I’ve been stepping on that’s so scummy my shoes are a biohazard now.”

“The streets of New York,” Finch says primly.

Fair enough.  Fusco eases out of his shoes, kind of enjoying the way Finch winces as they’re forced out of shape by his feet. He waits for Finch to chastise him, to tell him to undo the laces first, but he doesn’t. He just waits patiently, hands folded in front of him, and when Fusco finally sticks his beaten shoes at the end of the row and hangs his jacket (the jacket, if it matters) on the coat rack alongside Finch’s own, Finch says, very simply, “Will you come with me please?”

He guides him back through the living room, where the big TV has accumulated a fine layer of dust but the couch is in a state of slight disarray, with indents in the cushions and pillows shunted off to one side and piled up as support for a back that isn’t there. The living room is besieged by stacks of books that have migrated off the shelves onto coffee tables, end tables, and into magazine racks still half-filled with copies of Better Homes and Gardens that he’s pretty sure Finch put there just for show and forgot to remove.

Finch takes him back through the kitchen, where there are plates on the drying rack by the sink and camera parts scattered on the table.

The study’s still mostly like he remembers it. It’s still got that quiet bank of computer screens, still got that big oak desk, still got that thick, heavy carpet that’s so soft under his socked feet, still got the rack of clothes and the mirrors and the long table with its fabric and scissors. The main difference is that the headless dummy is swathed in a heavy white sheet, standing next to the mirrors like a cheap Halloween ghost. Fusco inclines his head. “Is that it?”

Finch nods.

He reaches out a hand to pluck at the sheet. “Can I…?”

“No,” Finch says. “Not until it’s ready.”

“Well, uh.” Fusco crosses his arms. “You’re gonna have a tough time finishing it up if I don’t try it on.”

“I don’t disagree,” Finch says. He says in that weird, prodding little way of his, just testing with the tips of his words, “Would you mind, ah, closing your eyes?”

“Wh…” Fusco takes a moment to collect himself. “What, you mean…?”

“It won’t be like when I measured you,” Finch says, the words all tumbling out in a reassuring rush. “Nothing so…intimate.  Just a quick…just a quick check. Won’t take more than a few minutes. I only want you to…”

“Want me to what?”

“I want you to see it when it’s right,” Finch says. “It might not fit you correctly at first and I don’t want to give you an excuse to worry about how you look.”

“’M gonna do that anyway,” he points out.

“I know.” Finch does, probably. He has that look of grim, half-smiling resignation. “I just don’t want to make it any worse.”

It’s a strange thing, a deeply strange thing. Smart, sharp, abrasive Finch handling his feelings with kid gloves like he’s scared to do so much as smudge them. Finch looking at him like Fusco’s some kind of animal that might attack or bolt at a sharp sound or one wrong move. Finch caught between whatever urge made him take Fusco’s arm on the walk over and the need to keep some distance between them. He stays a measured arm’s length away, calculatedly respectful.

Fusco shrugs. “Guess there’s no point in being coy now, is there?” He undoes the topmost button on his shirt.

Finch’s face colors. “Oh, no, you don’t…”

“No?” Fusco’s fingers stall on the button second from the top.

“I already know the new shirt fits you; it’s made to the same measurements as the one you’re wearing. You only need to try the jacket on over it.”

“Oh.” Fusco, feeling stupid as hell, lets his hands drop to his side. He takes in the tense expression on Finch’s face, still hanging around after what should have been an all-clear, it’s-not-weird kind of statement. “Guess there’s something else, or you wouldn’t be looking so damn constipated.”

Finch frowns. “You can be very scatological in your word choices sometimes, do you know that?”

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to burn your delicate ears. What’s the problem?”

He clears his throat. “I. Ah. I’m going to need you to remove your trousers. Just to try on the new ones and ensure that they’re suitable with regard to length and. Um. So on.”

Fusco sighs and goes for his zipper. “You know, if you’d just come straight out with these things instead of going all mealy-mouthed on me, we’d all be one hell of a lot more comfortable.”

“Would you be?” Finch asks, eyebrows rising even as he averts his eyes. “I doubt that somehow.”

“Well, maybe not,” he concedes, opening his fly and easing the trousers down off his hips. “But it’s nothing you haven’t seen before.”

“True.” Finch nods at the wall. “But it is an awfully familiar thing to ask of you.” He allows himself a darting, guilty look at Fusco. “Did, ah, did I buy you those?”

Fusco steps out of his pants and takes a glance down at himself. “Buy me which?” he asks with false easiness. “Doesn’t matter, I’m pretty sure you paid for all of it.”

“Never mind,” Finch says. “It’s gratifying to know you’re getting use out of them. Shall we…” He claps his hands once, very loudly, like he’s trying to get somebody’s attention. His own, maybe. “Shall we get started?”

“Guess so. What do you want me to do?”

“Just stand in front of the mirror and close your eyes. I’ll do the rest.”

“Right.” Fusco takes his position in front of the three-paneled mirror, the one giving him an all-angles look at his pale, hairy shins, his thick thighs, his gut, his unsure face. He squeezes his eyes shut tight and is annoyed to find that it’s kind of a relief to not be looking at himself. He balls his hands into fists. “Ready.”

“Your eyes are shut?” Finch asks.

“I’m blind as a bat.”

“Good. Be sure it stays that way.” There’s a heavy fluttering sound as the sheet covering the dummy falls to the floor. Fabric rustles. Finch begins to whistle very sweetly, almost happily. Fusco tries to just listen to that, rocking back and forth from the balls of his feet to his heels, but the room is five degrees shy of comfortable and that bouncing, lilting tune Finch is whistling makes him nervous.

“You’re in a good mood,” Fusco says to fill space.

“Am I?” Finch asks. Then, after a private conference with himself, he announces, “Yes. I suppose I am.”

“What is it about getting me to strip down to my altogether that puts you in such high spirits?”

“I couldn’t say,” Finch murmurs. His voice is closer than Fusco thought it would be. Not too close, just somewhere over his shoulder, maybe several feet away. Not quite arm’s length. “Possibly because it’s a show of trust on your part.”

“What does that matter?” He can hear Finch’s soft tread on the carpet, moving closer.

“You place your life in my hands fairly regularly. I should think it matters very much.” Finch is pushing something into his hands: smooth, stiff fabric. “Don’t look, just step into them.”

Fusco moves his fingertips, feels belt loops. “Alright, control freak, give me a second.” He holds the waistband open, bends a little and puts one foot into what he’s pretty sure is pant leg. It’s not so bad. He can’t say he’s ever tried getting dressed with his eyes shut on purpose like this, but he’s put his clothes on in darkness and half-blind from hangovers and this isn’t so different.  “I never thought of it like that,” he says. “My life in your hands.”

“How did you think of it?” Finch asks.

Fusco pulls his pants the rest of the way up and fumbles the fly together. “I don’t know. You putting me in danger.”

Finch goes very quiet at that. Fusco realizes his ears were picking up on a thousand small sounds from Finch, breath and the rustles of clothing and those soft, thoughtful noises he makes and they all drop out very suddenly. For a second, he could swear that the earth had swallowed Finch up and Fusco was all alone in the study. He’s tempted to open his eyes, to check, but a sudden rustle and flurry of movement indicates that Finch has sprung to life once again. Fusco feels him come close, tenses when Finch’s hands materialize at his waistband, and is oddly disappointed when their touches are cold, detached, nearly professional. There’s a certainty to them, to the fingers that slip between his hip and his waistband, testing the space. The little tugs on the legs of his pants draw attention to their roominess, their comfort, and their security. The little trace of hem he can feel beneath his heel is tugged free and tutted over. Finch stands, steps away. “One moment,” he says in a voice that fades.

Not being able to see him is nothing new. Fusco thinks of him as a voice on the phone rather than a whole entire person sometimes. But at least then it’s the phone. You have to talk there. He’s not sure he likes this new thing where Fusco can’t see but Finch can and sometimes Finch shuts up and they’re left in the quiet together.

Finch starts up his whistling again, tentatively. Fusco doesn’t know the song and he doesn’t want to ask because it means admitting that he doesn’t know. Instead he whistles a little bit of Bridge on the River Kwai every so often, very quietly so Finch almost can’t hear him. Just enough to throw him off.

After a while, Finch sighs. “You’re doing that on purpose, aren’t you?”

“Dunno what you’re talking about,” Fusco says, but he’s not even trying to stop himself from smiling. “Hey, can I ask you something?”

“I believe you just did.” Finch is approaching him again. Fusco can hear the whisper of his socks against the carpet. “But ask another.”

“You wouldn’t…” Fusco begins, “you wouldn’t do this just to mess around with me, would you?”

“Hmm?” The sound comes from right behind him. Stiff fabric presses up against his shoulders.

“I mean, you’re not making me shut my eyes just so you can make me look stupid, are you?”

“How could I do that?” Finch asks in indulgent, sleepy tones. “Raise your arm, please.”

Fusco tries to raise it over his head but gets stopped when it’s halfway up, level with his shoulder. Finch guides his arm into a sleeve and he feels silky lining on his hand and wrist as he slides in. “It’d be real easy,” he says. “You could put me in an ugly color or. I dunno. A pattern. Fuckin’ plaid, like you’ve got on.”

“It’s glen check,” Finch says. He sounds like he’s trying not to laugh. “Do you think it’s ugly?”

“Nonono,” he ducks in, saving face. “Just. Maybe on me.”

“I disagree. Other arm.” Fusco raises it obediently. The jacket slips on over it and settles around him. He hears Finch move again, feels his presence, a faint heat, move around him. Fingers tug at the lapel of his jacket. “Although I suppose it’s a matter of taste. Doesn’t matter. This,” and he tugs the suit jacket close around Fusco, “is not glen check.”

His breath catches in that moment. Something about the sharp snap of the jacket flapping as Finch pulls it around him makes him feel very strange. Warm in the chest, hot behind the eyes, and a little bit in pain. His mouth wobbles.

If Finch notices, he doesn’t say anything. Just pulls the jacket closer and buttons it up. It’s double-breasted; Fusco can tell by the way it overlaps on his chest and stomach. It’s not tight exactly. It’s snug. He doesn’t feel like he’s being shaped by it. It shapes to him.

He takes a shaky breath.

Finch pinches and pulls and asks him to move his arms so and does that feel tight and does that come down the way it’s supposed to and can you bend that and he can. “Good,” Finch says. “Very good. Won’t be long now. I just need to make some minor adjustments. Keep your eyes closed.”

He does. He keeps his eyes shut tight while Finch unbuttons the jacket and peels him out of it. He even keeps still when Finch’s hands drop to the button on his trousers, how he unbuttons that too, how he draws down the zipper with care. He holds so still he could almost be cramping up while Finch sinks carefully down to his knees. And he knows that’s what Finch is doing. He can hear the rustle of his suit, the gentle creak of his bones. He can feel Finch’s soft, desk-job fingertips brushing down the back of his thighs as the trousers come down.

He realizes he kind of wants to see this.

Fusco ventures a peek, opens his eyelid just a crack and peers through the blur of eyelashes and wet eyes that have been closed too long. He can see for a second, before the image coalesces. The impressionistic smudge of Finch on his knees in front of him, the blinding white of his shirtsleeves tinted green, the angular shape of his spectacles, his face all upturned: he gets a chance to take that in, in a vague kind of way. Then a hand smacks rough against his thigh and Fusco snaps his eyes shut with a wince.

“I said keep your eyes closed,” Finch says. He sounds like he’s joking at least, not like he’s mad. His hand is still pressed there, pushing indents in the soft flesh. His fingers move very slightly, light and soothing. “You be patient.”

“Okay.” His own voice sounds very far away.

“I could blindfold you, if you want.”

“No, thanks,” he says even as he has some kind of weird tactile hallucination where he feels the faint kiss of a silk scarf brushing over his eyelids.

“Alright.” Finch’s hand slides away, down to his knee. “Keep them closed just a little while longer. Here, take your pants back.”

“I’m getting dressed again?” He steps out of the suit pants, feels his own familiar clothes being pushed against his palms.

“Yes. Just for a moment.” He hears Finch scuffle with the suit pants on the floor, hears the awkward movements of Finch trying to stand. Fusco holds out a hand to him blindly and Finch takes it. “Thank you. I need to do some quick hemming. Nothing too complicated. Just find something to amuse yourself elsewhere in the house.”

“You’re really serious about keeping this under wraps, aren’t you?” Fusco says as he redresses himself.

“Well.” Strange how he can hear the blush in Finch’s voice. “I want you to be pleasantly surprised. Is that so wrong?”

“No,” Fusco admits. “No, I guess not.”

“You can open your eyes.”

He does, blinks a little as his sight returns. The dummy has been carefully wrapped up in its sheet. Finch is standing right next to it, wide-eyed and expectant, like he can’t wait for Fusco to get the hell out so Finch can get back to his headless playmate.

“Sorry about this,” Finch says. “It will really only take a few minutes. No time at all. There’s a very nice bottle of wine on the kitchen counter if you’re interested. Or I think there’s some beer in the fridge. Have whatever you like, do what you want. My home is yours.” Finch glances meaningfully at the door.

“Okay,” Fusco says. “See you in, um, a bit, I guess.”

“I’ll let you know when it’s done,” Finch calls at his retreating back.

He lets the heavy study door fall shut behind him and it’s then that he realizes that there’s nowhere else in this house that he particularly wants to be.

He forces himself to step away.

The wine waits where Finch said it would be, standing on the counter next to a corkscrew and two wine glasses that Finch must have left out in anticipation of this moment. He lays this stuff out like a trap, sometimes. Fusco decides to fall into it. Why not? Why not have a drink? Why not relax a little? He wrestles the cork out of the bottle. It’s not good to be so nervous all the time. He overfills a glass and stands for a moment, leaning on the counter in the dark kitchen.

He’d go crazy, he thinks, staying in this house all alone. It’s the weird kind of quiet, the kind where all of the pipes and wires and machines in the house are in order so instead of clicking and hissing and groaning and banging, you only get that even, uniform hum. But then your ears get so used to it that the only sounds you hear come from you. Fusco’s only had rare brushes with that kind of quiet. His apartment has a radiator that makes sounds like somebody’s going at it with a hammer sometimes and his neighbors fight about money all the time and his apartment building’s pretty quiet compared to the rest of the neighborhood. And, thinking back, it’s always kind of been like that, wherever he’s lived, for as long as he can remember. Quiet must be a luxury item, he thinks. He’s kind of glad he could never afford silence as big as this.

After straining his ears a little listening for the sound of Finch working and deciding it’s equal parts childish and soap-opera-stupid to listen at the door with his wine in hand, he creeps into the living room. That’s a bit nicer, a little bit homier. The windows let afternoon sun and street noises through. Maybe that’s why it’s this room that’s all ruffled up. Fusco bets that after Finch is done with whatever it is Finch gets up to in that study, this is where he goes to unwind. He collapses his stiff limbs like he’s an umbrella or the tripod for a camera and stretches out on this couch, leaning back on his plumped-up pillows with a book and pretending to relax. Or maybe that is something Finch is capable of. He thinks of Finch, languid under his hands in the study not so long ago, or Finch with his head resting against Fusco’s hip in the surveillance van. Yeah, okay. Give him credit. The guy can relax.

Fusco can’t find the remote for the TV and something about the screen’s deadness makes him think it should stay that way. This is a problem because it leaves him alone with Finch’s imposing and dangerous piles of paperbacks, and Fusco’s never been much of a reader. His brain can’t hang onto written words so well and he can’t bring himself to give a damn about what a writer’s trying to say if they don’t have the brains to say it outright. That’s another place where he’s different from Finch, who’s so good at theoreticals and building castles out of cobweb. He flips through a book idly, reads a line, hits a word he’s never seen or heard before, shuts it. He sits himself down at one end of the couch, the end where Finch’s feet would rest if he was stretched out like Fusco pictured.  The wine is good. He finishes the glass.

Faint street sounds are his only reminder that anyone else exists and he really wants to go back to the study. Being alone sucks.

Instead he returns to the kitchen, refills his glass, and comes away with a plan. A plan the wine suggested, maybe, although Fusco isn’t drunk so much as warm, fuzzy in the brain and a little loose in the limbs, but it’s a plan he likes. Fusco’s been at a disadvantage from the start. He’s the one being watched, he’s the one whose apartment gets broken into, he’s the one whose clothes get sorted through. Time, he thinks, to return the favor.

He creeps upstairs as quietly as he can. It’s a lost cause because he’s heavy and these steps are old and thin and creaky, but sound doesn’t travel so well in this house and, hey, Finch did say to do what he wanted. Fusco’s got nothing to hide. Upstairs is quieter, if that’s possible. Even the carpet is thicker and Fusco regrets the wine he brought up with him. He tries to keep his hand steady as he goes for the door closest to him.

Sure as hell looks like a master bedroom, he thinks to himself. Big fuckin’ bed, anyway. Bigger than the one Fusco slept in back when he was still married. What the hell does a man who sleeps alone need a bed that big for? Space, he guesses. Just big, cool, wide open spaces. Nice, if you can get it.

He supposes it’s unfair of him to assume that Finch sleeps alone. Fusco doesn’t know Finch’s life story. There could be somebody. Who knows what goes on behind Finch’s closed doors?

The wine and a sudden thought conspire to make him giggle. He does. Fusco knows what’s going on behind Finch’s closed doors. He’s behind them right now and there’s no one else there. He pats the bedspread, white with a black, artfully half-faded pattern, like the black marks on birch bark or ugly footprints in snow. The impact of his hand raises a small burst of dust.

Huh.

This makes him give the room a second look. It’s not…empty, exactly. There’s definitely stuff in here, furniture and things; it’s just arranged in that way that Fusco guesses is fashionable where it’s all miles apart. A big oaken beast of a dresser lurks shadily against the wall, all closed up, top covered with the kinds of things you might expect some kind of well-heeled son of a bitch to cover the top of his dresser with. Like, there’s a handsome, old-fashioned lamp that looks like it runs on oil but probably doesn’t, and there’s a little iron figurine of some kind of animal crouched next to it and there’s a pot that holds the brown, crackly remains of what used to be some kind of fern. It’s the kind of stuff someone would put there if they wanted to pretty it up, dead plant aside. There’s nothing that you’d leave up there in the course of the day-to-day, like a watch or a comb or a pack of cigarettes or socks you didn’t feel like putting away just yet.

Maybe it’s only that Finch is just that clean, but Fusco doesn’t think he’d let the plant die or the bed get dusty.

He takes a peek in the attached bathroom and oh, wow, that’s nice. Makes him feel like a vulture to think so, but that’s pretty swanky. Blue tile, white marble countertops, bathtub that might as well just come out and admit it’s an Olympic-sized swimming pool in disguise and…it’s dusty. It’s all dusty. Not dirty, just unused. Fusco’s not sure what business this stuff has being abandoned.

Same story with the closet. He opens it up, pulls the chain that turns the light on, and swears because it’s about the size of his bathroom at home. Then he swears again, softer, because it’s almost completely cleared out. There are a few jackets hanging towards the back. A few sad, dangling pairs of pants or shirts that look maybe a bit shabby. Some scuffed-up shoes. A lost-looking vacuum cleaner. That’s all.

He draws the line at opening up Finch’s dresser drawers. That’s probably getting intrusive.

He can tell he’s outstaying his welcome, so he takes his thinking outside the room, leans back against the door and sips really seriously at his wine. Finch is living here. Finch isn’t sleeping here. Or, Finch isn’t sleeping here, in this room. The couch, maybe? Is his back in such bad shape that he can’t take the stairs? But, you know, Fusco’s been couchbound before. He knows the way a couch looks when it’s being slept on eight hours a night, every night, and it’s not like that. Finch isn’t sleeping in his bedroom and he isn’t slumming it in the living room.

Fusco has a thought. A really peculiar, dangerous kind of thought, one that sends a thrill through his chest. He allows himself to turn his head slowly and peer down the hall, down to where the guest room’s door hangs ever so slightly ajar.

Oh.

He probably shouldn’t, he thinks as he walks down the hallway, stepping quiet again. It’s sneaking around. It’s too intimate. Of course, then he thinks about his own house, subtly straightened up by an intruder. He thinks about his excitement in opening up the door to the big bedroom when he thought it was where Finch was sleeping. No point in lying to himself. No getting cold feet now. He touches the brass knob and the door to the guest room glides open easily.

It looks kind of the same. Same old blue everywhere. Same simpler, less grand set-up. The only big difference is the stuff in there. The dresser drawers are not quite closed and when he pulls them open, they’re filled up with crisp shirts and soft sweaters. He digs his fingers down in between, finds them warm and malleable with use. The bathroom has that strong tea smell, the smell of the shampoo he used the last time he was here, the smell Fusco thought he forgot all about until it hits him so hard. The closet is small and it hangs heavy with suits, wooly and well-cared for and kindly-scratchy underneath his palms. They smell like Finch, his cologne, the dusty scent that might just be him, all of the scents of Finch he could never recall off the top of his head but he knows them, knows them like the scent of home.

It wears off too quickly, the strange high of knowing where Finch spends his solitary nights, and soon Fusco’s lowering himself to sit on the modest twin bed. It’s an alright bed, a good enough bed for a man alone. He’s slept in this bed, he’s bled in it, and he knows the bend of the mattress. He wonders about Finch sleeping in it, stiff and tight and ignoring a nicer bed down the hall because he’s too fucked up and…lonesome, maybe, to brave that wide open space. Fusco runs a hand over the comforter, soft and half peeled back from the sheets. He drains his wine glass.

He sits there a long time, plucking at pills in the blanket until Finch’s voice floats through the house and calls him downstairs.

Chapter 17

Notes:

IMPORTANT NOTE PLEASE READ THANK: I'm sorry, small number of people who were in favor of me writing an alternate version of any explicit scenes in this fic. I planned to. I tried. I really did. I was gonna do a simple fade-to-black and it would have been very easy, but the chapter makes notably less sense without and I don't want the official version of this chapter to be one that doesn't really make sense. Here's the cut version: http://livenudebigfoot.livejournal.com/2381.html

Again, sorry.

Fusco creeps his way downstairs, the steps groaning softly beneath his feet. He’s not sure what he’s expecting. Anger, maybe. Embarrassment. Finch doesn’t have a leg to stand on, not after he gave Fusco free run of the house. Not after he gave himself free run of Fusco’s house. Still, Fusco’s brief investigation of the upstairs rooms and the contents of their closets feels invasive. Maybe Finch has a right to be pissed off.

If he is, he’s not exercising it. Finch is waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs. His hand rests on the top of the dark, oaken globe at the end of the banister and his face is upturned, hopeful.

“Hello.” He says it very gently, like a casual touch on the arm.

Fusco clears his throat. “Hey.” He doesn’t quite make it all the way down the stairs. He remains a little ways up because Finch gazing up at him is a sight he could get used to and he’s still a little afraid.

“Learn anything?” Finch asks.

He shakes his head. “Nah. You?”

The crinkles in the corners of his eyes deepen when he smiles. “No discoveries that will turn the world on its head. Apparently, I always think your legs are longer than they really are. But I don’t think you’re being truthful with me,” he says, rounding the end of the banister and rising to the challenge of the first step. “If you have questions, it’s better to ask them right away.”

That’s probably true. He’s just not sure how to phrase it in the form of a question. “You’re sleeping in my bed,” Fusco says.

Finch raises his eyebrows. “How unusually presumptuous of you. I would have said that it was my bed. Given that it’s in my house.”

“Okay.” Fusco takes a deep breath. “So you had me sleep in your bed.”

“Not the whole truth,” Finch says. “I only told you that I intended to sleep in the master bedroom that night. The decision of where you were to sleep was always in your hands. Not that it matters. I never slept at all that night.”

“But it wasn’t true,” Fusco insists, desperately maneuvering around something that’s bothering him about what Finch just said. “You don’t sleep in that big room. Any idiot could tell that.”

“No. Not anymore. I used to. Not often,” he admits. “I think I mentioned once that I’ve never spent much time in this house. I use it for missions where I might need to discard my identity and my house very quickly and without regrets.  But the master bedroom was specifically designed for my use and, yes, on those missions, that was where I stayed. And, ah, you’ve ruined that for me, somehow. It’s very empty, isn’t it? That room. Very bare and very cold. I never noticed before you spent the night, but now it’s all I can think about when I try to rest there. It’s unbearable.”

“Well, uh. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Finch says. “You didn’t make it that way. It was always like that.”

There’s another question nagging at Fusco, one that’s been bothering him since last night when they first talked about meeting up. “I thought you were gonna get rid of this place,” he says before he can stop himself. “I thought you said you were going to move out and sell it fast just to get away from me.”

“That was my intention.”

“But?”

“It didn’t happen,” Finch says simply. “I didn’t, ah.” He trails off, takes a moment to find the words he wants again. “My security is important to me. My identities. I can’t bring you too far into my life, for both our sakes,” he says. He tries a weak smile. “I don’t want you knowing too much about me, I’m afraid. But I couldn’t…I didn’t want to lose the one place that I could bring you back to.”

His heart is fluttering crazily, light and fast and frantic pulses like it’s trying to escape his chest. “Oh,” he says, for lack of a better thing to say.

Finch takes one step up the stairs and Fusco doesn’t back away, not even after Finch holds out his hand. “Just, please. Come with me.”

When Fusco lets his hand rest on Finch’s soft open palm, it closes around him like a promise.

“Okay,” Finch says. His other hand comes to rest on the back of Fusco’s, to cradle it. “Come on. Let’s finish up.”

Fusco lets himself be coaxed down the steps and back into the study. He’s very aware of how tense he is, of how fast his heart is pattering. He’s aware of the grip Finch has on his hand, not painful but very firm, and the look Finch keeps giving him. Like Fusco’s a house of cards and matchsticks and at any wrong, indelicate move on Finch’s part, he might collapse in a heap.

He can’t be completely certain that won’t happen.

In the study, Finch pulls him in front of the mirrors, grabs Fusco by the shoulders and turns him this way and that so he’s posed exactly how Finch wants him. “There,” Finch says. “There now.” When he speaks to him, it’s in low, gentle tones like you might use on a scared animal. His hands find the topmost button on Fusco’s shirt and ease it open. “Could you shut your eyes, please?” he asks.

Fusco swallows hard.

The next button down comes open and Finch’s fingertips brush incidentally at the space just above where his undershirt begins, as low on Fusco’s chest as he can get. He pauses. “You don’t have to,” Finch reassures him. “I don’t have to. I’m sorry, I should step outside and let you get ready yourself.”

Fusco’s eyelids drop shut.

Finch’s gasp is very small, barely a true sound in the scheme of things. “Oh,” he says. “Oh, you’re sure?”

Fusco nods once.

“Alright.” He feels his shirt open further. “If you’re certain.” Finch pushes the collar of his shirt open wide, brushes at the tops of Fusco’s broad shoulders so the shirt slides free and leaves them bare. He can hear his shirt fall to the floor with a gentle rustle. “Maybe this is overcautious of me,” Finch says, “and it’s entirely possible that it would be best if I just…stopped talking, but.” His fingers curl in the hem of Fusco’s undershirt. He begins to tug upward, haltingly. “I only want to be very clear that if anything I do makes you uncomfortable, I’d like to know about it.”

“Finch?” He grabs blindly at the front of the undershirt and feels Finch’s hands slip weakly away.

“Yes?”

He drags the shirt off over his head, crumples it in one hand and lets it drop. “Stop talking.”

 He hears the click in Finch’s throat when he swallows. “If you say so,” he murmurs. Fusco feels his hand before it truly lands; its heat touches him first, roams incorporeally and haltingly across his chest until skin follows. The touch is curious and fearful, the slightest pressure of fingertips. He thinks of a waterstrider skimming on the surface of a lake with only lightness and surface tension preventing it from plunging through. Finch doesn’t plunge through. His fingertips wander from the solid, lightly ridged plane of his breastbone down to the soft rise of his stomach and gradually the five points of touch stretch out and expand to one flat palm on his belly.

Finch is smooth there. Fusco always thinks his hands are so soft because Finch is all comfy at his desk and doesn’t seem like the type to labor, but it’s not true, not exactly. His fingers are strong like wire and calloused from precise and repetitive work on the insides of his knuckles and the pads of his fingers. Flat and still like this, Fusco almost thinks he can feel each individual line and whorl of his fingerprints. But his palm seems untouched and smooth as cream. He wants to make a grab for it. He wants to know what Finch is going to do next if Fusco does nothing. Curiosity wins out.

Finch’s hand moves up an inch, down an inch, a tentative rub, a stab at familiarity. He squeezes just a little, lets his fingers pinch into the rise at the bottom of Fusco’s belly. His hand drops further, to the button on Fusco’s pants, and starts to fumble it open.

In retrospect, kind of predictable.

Now that he knows a little more about the direction they’re heading in, it’s an easy thing for Fusco to jump in, to let his hands mingle with Finch’s as they strip him down together. He kicks the pants off from around his ankles, gets them under one foot and shoves them away along the carpet. It seems like Finch’s confidence is bolstered by Fusco’s help (his endorsement, he guesses) and he can hear him shuffling along like he does, fussing around with new energy. Fusco barely has a moment to zero in on where Finch is exactly before there’s a crisp, cool, factory-smooth shirt pressed up to his back and Finch is nudging at his arms.

“No undershirt?” he asks as his wrists get lost in the sleeves.

“No,” Finch says as his arms sneak around Fusco’s middle. Somehow, half-naked in another man’s home office with his eyes shut tight as the other guy dresses him up, this is the daring move. The drape of Finch’s arms across his stomach, the press of Finch’s odd, stiff body behind him, the push of one cheek as it rests against the back of Fusco’s head. He can feel the movements of Finch’s jaw when he speaks again. “Not for now.” He pulls the shirt closed across Fusco’s chest and gets to work on buttoning it up. Fusco, at a loss, tries to help him out only to have his hands brushed away. “You’re buttoning unevenly. Stop that.”

“Okay.” Fusco swallows. “You’re the professional.”

The fit’s good, he thinks desperately as Finch straightens him up. He thinks this shirt might fit even better than the others Finch got him. It’s hard to tell at this point. He’s so used to wearing shirts made to fit somebody else, some kind of standard-sized, standard-shaped guy who hasn’t gone off the rails like he has. Anything that’s even kind of made for him feels foreign and amazing. He couldn’t possibly get into specifics or subtle differences. Not now. Finch’s breath is tickling Fusco’s scalp through his thin hair.

Then he’s gone again. Fussing around with the mannequin, maybe. Trying to decide what to drape on Fusco next.

When he reappears, it’s as a pair of hands guiding him into trousers. “Come on,” Finch murmurs, soft and coaxing. He reaches up to take Fusco’s wrist, to guide his palm down onto Finch’s bony shoulder. “So you have something to lean on,” he explains.

Fusco tries not to.  He imagines Finch bending, creaking like an old tree in a strong wind, and then snapping neatly in two with a dry, crispy sound. It’s too easy to imagine. He thinks he can feel the faint hum of a groan that is not yet voiced in the bones of Finch’s shoulder, just vibrating there, waiting for the moment when Fusco screws up and destroys him.

Finch isn’t thinking about these things. Finch has trousers pulled up around Fusco’s calves while his fingertips are lost in the space behind his knee, where it’s tender and vulnerable and ticklish. His fingers go from soft, curious rubbing to the lightest scrape of nail.

A muscle in his leg twitches hard and he asks, “Can you lay off? My knees are gonna buckle if you keep ticklin’ me like that.”

“Would that be so bad?” Finch asks him, but he does stop. He pulls up the pants and tucks the shirt all in and buttons and zips him up. Finch let him do this part himself before. He doesn’t seem willing to do that now.

“Y’know, I know how to dress myself,” he comments.

“I assumed as much,” Finch says from somewhere down around his knees. “As far as I can tell, you do it almost…” There’s a soft grunt, a creak of stiff bones. “…Every day,” Finch finishes from his full height, somewhere right in front of Fusco’s face.

“But you’re doing it anyway.”

“You let me,” Finch points out.

He did. Because Finch wanted to touch him and Fusco wanted to let him. He feels sick and nervous.

“Do you want me to stop?” Finch asks.

Why does he keep making me say it? Fusco wonders, anxious and miserable. Why can’t he just let it alone? “No,” he says. Jesus, he sounds sad and weak. “No, I don’t.”

Finch pops up his shirt collar, stiff and neat, and slips a tie around his neck like a soft, silky noose. “Are you alright?”

“Yes.”

Finch’s fingers tighten the tie busily. His breaths puff unsteadily against one of Fusco’s cheeks. “You don’t sound alright.”

“I am.”

One of Finch’s fingertips wanders out of its jurisdiction and brushes against the line of Fusco’s jaw. “You don’t look alright,” he says.

“I don’t know about that,” Fusco says. “My eyes are closed.”

Finch sighs, long and slow. “Do you want to open them? Would that make you more comfortable?”

“No.”

“It’s easier for you, isn’t it?” Finch says. He lets his whole hand wander up Fusco’s neck and cradle the curve of his cheek and jaw. “If I’m doing this to you. You don’t have to take an active part.”

He says nothing.

“You were earlier,” Finch says. “What happened?”

“Could you just…just tie the damn tie. Please?”

Finch’s hand slips away, fingertips catching on the faint late afternoon growth of stubble like they don’t want to let go. He feels the tie settle secure around his neck.

Suit jacket comes next and that’s good; that’s another, thicker layer between the two of them, shielding the raw spots they just uncovered. It slips around him like a hard shell, like armor. Protection from Finch and the world. It’s snug in a way that still affords movement, like a hug that’s loose enough to not be smothering and tight enough to never let go. He tries to focus on Finch, on the distance he’s putting between them. We’re not too close, he repeats to himself. We’re not too close and this is normal and I don’t get a sick thrill out of being petted and worried over and dressed up by him and I don’t miss it when he’s not sneaking little touches and he’s not sneaking little touches and this is normal.

Finch is pinning little cuff links to his wrists.

Finch is putting something in his breast pocket.

Finch is tightening the thick, cold band of a watch.

Finch is dropping down (down to his knees, maybe) and putting guiding hands on Fusco’s calves as he slides his feet into brand new shoes.

Finch is up and looking for something, rattling things around on the sewing table. He comes back and Fusco gets a noseful of some strong, masculine scent with a chemical edge. It’s not one of Finch’s colognes; Fusco knows those scents and this isn’t one of them. He feels cool alcohol dabs at the backs of his ears. He inhales deeply. The scent is subtle and straight-edged and clean. Not one of Finch’s, but one that Finch would like.

“You finally did it,” he says.

“Did what?”

“You finally found a way to make me smell like plaid.”

It’s weird how he can hear Finch smile, crooked and tentative. “Glen check, Detective. You smell like glen check.” He tugs at the hem of the jacket, pulls the wrinkles out. He pinches the shoulders and drags outward.

“Can I look?” he asks.

“Not yet,” Finch says. He’s on the move again, walking a tight circle around Fusco, examining and tugging and once reaching out to play around with Fusco’s hair. “Just a little bit longer.”

“What else is there to do?”

“Nothing,” Finch admits. “A little straightening up. I want it to look right. I want you to see what I see.”

“What the hell do you see?”

“It’s difficult to explain.” Finch settles off to one side with a hand on Fusco’s shoulder and Fusco turns blindly to face him. “You…perhaps you’d better just look.”

For the first time in what feels like too long, he opens his eyes. The study is blinding and tinted green and he blinks until his eyes adjust.

The first thing he sees is Finch. Finch, with his hand still resting numbly on Fusco’s shoulder and his eyes all wide and pale and his lips mutely parted, is just staring. Fusco can see his throat working, just over the knot of his deep red tie.

“Oh,” Finch whispers, so soft it’s almost not an actual vocalization so much as a sigh that came out with a little bit of voice hanging on to it.

“What?”

Finch tilts his head wordlessly in the direction of the mirror.

Oh.

He knows why Finch won’t speak now because he can’t find any words himself. He almost doesn’t recognize the person in the mirror. That guy looks good. That guy looks distinguished, like he’s got taste and money. That guy looks like he might own reading glasses made by Porsche and not understand why that’s fucking ridiculous. That guy, in his dark blue suit with coppery pinstripes running through it like veins of gold, in his burnt orange tie with a neat half-Windsor knot, in his shoes that shine like glass, in his watch that costs more than his car, with his fucking pocket square, is not a dirty cop.

That guy is somebody. And he’s not sure how it is that Finch, who sees everything, is so blind that he can even begin to see Fusco like that.

He sneaks a glance at Finch in the mirror, so Finch doesn’t know he’s looking. Finch hasn’t moved from his position at Fusco’s side with his hand on Fusco’s shoulder. He hasn’t even moved his head. Finch is still staring at him, not at the suit or how he’s wearing it, but him. His face. He’s just watching Fusco’s profile, looking really hard for something. Approval, maybe, or acceptance. A smile. Finch has this edge to his expression, like it could tip over to happiness or despair at any second. His eyes are so damn sad, so worried, and Jesus, nobody should ever get that worked up over Fusco. Nobody. Especially not Finch, who is cool and calculating and knows what the hell’s going on. He should relax. He shouldn’t be bothering.

He turns his head to tell Finch so and finds that he can’t, finds that he’s caught in that stare because it’s not just sad, it’s terribly hopeful and it’s wanting. It’s wanting him and he can’t remember being looked at like that before, ever.

That’s what makes him do it. That’s what makes him lean inward and upward, bounce up just the slightest bit on his toes, and press a soft little brush of a kiss to Finch’s slightly open mouth. Because Finch looked like he wanted him so much and Fusco didn’t understand.

It only takes a moment. Just a quick brush of lips and the tips of their noses and then Fusco’s rocking back on his heels, safe and smooth. A clean break. As clean a break as he can manage, under the circumstances. He rocks back, he settles, and he watches Finch’s still face, waiting for a reaction.

For what feels like a long while, there is no reaction. Finch breathes unsteadily with his eyes cast down and his lower lip trembling almost imperceptibly. He doesn’t make a sound. He doesn’t move. His hand doesn’t even tighten or slacken its grip on Fusco’s shoulder.

“Sorry,” Fusco says after a while. He feels heat rising in his face, reality seeping back in. “Sorry, you just looked like maybe…I don’t know. I shouldn’t have done that. I’m sorry.”

Finch takes a very shaky deep breath.

“That was, uh, kind of a leap I made there, huh?” Fusco continues. He tries a smile. “I didn’t mean to. We can forget all about it if you want - ” but that’s all he gets out before Finch’s hands are on his face and his fingers are curled tight around the back of Fusco’s head and their faces are dragged close and Finch’s mouth is pressed demandingly, determinedly, to his.

He freezes. Just freezes up all of a sudden because no matter how hard he walked into it, it seems wrong that Finch should be taking hold of him now, that Finch should be scratching at the backs of his ears in an effort to pull him closer, that Finch should be sinking sharp possessive teeth into his lower lip with a moan like something sick and dying.

Fusco realizes that his hands are up, palms flat and arms drawn close to the body like he’s bracing for a fall but there’s no fall coming. Slowly, he lets his arms drop. They settle in a gentle, cautious kind of way around Finch, hands gathering at the small of Finch’s back. The push of Finch’s mouth lets up just enough for Finch to sigh, let out this sweet, pained, happy little noise. He relaxes just a little, lets himself lean against Fusco. His hands uncurl from their claws behind Fusco’s ears.

He should say something, now, while their lips aren’t crushed together and they’re just resting together. Something like, “I’ve been thinking about this for a while without knowing it,” or “Thank God, I’m not crazy,” or “Are you okay?” because even though he’s not being scratched anymore, Fusco can still feel Finch’s palms where they press at his jaw and his arms where they latch over his shoulders, tight and hard and ferocious and trembling. Fusco guides him a little closer so they’re not just joined at the head and shoulders, so their feet are like the teeth in a zipper and their chests are flush together and Finch is sort of curved over the swell of Fusco’s stomach. Fusco wonders if his back’s going to be okay with that.

He guesses Finch doesn’t care so much whether his back hurts or not because he bends to kiss Fusco again and it’s less of a collision, more of a knock at the door.

Let me in.

Fusco parts his lips and he feels Finch hum. He feels Finch’s mouth coax his open and Finch’s tongue slip in and he lets it happen. Just accepts and lets Finch in because whatever’s about to happen, he doesn’t want to miss it.

Finch keeps bending him. He seems reassured that Fusco isn’t going to pull away now so he’s not clinging on so hard anymore. He lets one hand drop to skim down his neck, his shoulder, his back, and stop on his hip and during that whole slow journey downward, he rounds out Fusco’s back into an arc tilting backwards and Finch leans into it.

Fusco, who is adjusting his stance, who is letting one of his hands creep up the forbidden highway of Finch’s spine, who is feeling like they can’t stay upright, like they have to hold tight enough to fuse flesh and bone together or they are going to fall, thinks to himself in a dim kind of way Is this what it’s like being dipped? as the two of them gradually tip off-balance.

He twists as they fall, makes sure he’s the mattress Finch tumbles onto and not the weight that crushes him, but when they they hit the floor and Finch’s body lands hard against his own, Fusco still has this delusion that the impact will combine them, make them whole. It nearly does. Their mouths don’t separate, they only entangle further, become more vicious and more heated, heavier with desperate, sucked-in breaths. The back of his head bounces off the plush carpet and Finch’s hand cushions it. He hears Finch inhale, sharp and gasping, like he wants to breathe Fusco in. Fusco’s suddenly hyper aware of all the points of touch between them, the bump of their foreheads, the crush of their mouths and wrap of their tongues, the jut of Finch’s bird nose against Fusco’s cheek. Fusco’s hands are still clinging in the jacket over Finch’s back because he’s too damn scared to do anything that might dislodge a vertebra and Finch’s hands are still on him, one gripping hard in the sparse curls at the nape of Fusco’s neck, one down low on his back, beneath their bodies, forcing Fusco’s hips to push up against his.

Finch is hard.

Somehow that’s the part that baffles Fusco. He can sort of rationalize the rest of it, push it away and chalk it up to an extension of the rough touching and strange desperation that’s been building between them these past few months. Somehow the part of this that he can’t reconcile is the idea that prim, dignified Finch could do something as ill-mannered as get a hard-on.

With a soft sigh, Finch starts to rub himself against Fusco’s hip and it’s time to start reconciling because Fusco feels his dick twitch painfully as Finch’s thigh presses against it and he realizes he’s been hard for a while now, maybe before their lips ever touched. He bucks upward, hears Finch’s answering whine, and chases it, grinding up against him as hard as he can.

Finch’s mouth pops off of Fusco’s with a harsh, desperate gasp. “Are you…?” He stops to collect himself. He lets go of Fusco, braces his hands on the carpet and pushes himself far back enough that they can see each other’s faces. Finch’s mouth is red and wet and overworked and his glasses are askew. “You are alright, aren’t you?”

He’s breathless, so he just nods. He must look…he doesn’t know how he looks, he just knows that Finch’s pupils widen just a little bit and he bends to kiss Fusco again, lighter and shorter this time, a wet brush of lips and tongue. Finch’s hand wanders to the side of Fusco’s face and rests there all the while.

“You’re sure?” he asks. Their lips still touch and the words are spoken directly into Fusco’s mouth. “I want you to be sure.”

“Yeah,” he pants. He rolls his hips up against Finch like prodding, like encouragement. He can feel Finch’s thin chest where it’s pressed against his and the thin patter of his heart is painful. Don’t hesitate. Just do this. Now. Before either one of us can escape.

The next kiss Finch gives him is high on his cheekbone, just beneath his eye, and Finch lets his lips linger there, lets his warm breath pool there.  His lips are unchapped and ticklish. He says with force that seems unwarranted next to the feathery brush of the kiss, “I don’t want this to be something else that I do to you.”

“It’s not.” His vision is half-obscured by the wispy peaks of Finch’s hair but beyond it, with one eye, he can see the ceiling of the study, white and flat and calm and very far away. In a gradual way, he lets one hand trace up Finch’s spine, pushing a ripple of the jacket’s fabric in its wake. “You’re okay,” he says as he lets his fingers curl in the collar of Finch’s shirt. “I’m okay.” Fusco turns his head, pushes his face into the side of Finch’s head, the fuzzy sideburns and the reddening curl of his ear and the straight, slick frame of his glasses. “We’re all just…” He sneaks a hand beneath the knot of Finch’s wine-colored tie and slides the pearly top button on his shirt free. “…Just peachy.”

He feels Finch’s face slide against his and push hard into his neck in a slow descent, an immersion. He can feel Finch’s mouth opening and the faint scrape of Finch’s teeth over the seat of his pulse. Fusco hears himself gasp in that way people do when there’s no air left, the dry pop, the sound of lung hitting rock bottom. His hips give a weak jump and the feeling of their cocks brushing together through layer upon layer of clothing is more than either of them can bear.

They can’t go back now.

Finch bites down.

He feels the weight of Finch come down hard on him, bony and rickety, and Fusco’s not even sure why it’s happening until he realizes that Finch was bracing himself between Fusco’s bent, upright knees and he only fell when Fusco let his legs pop open. He gets ready to apologize and inquire after Finch’s back, offer up massages and pleas for forgiveness, but he never actually gets around to it because Finch’s teeth are still there on his neck, nearly buried in the scruff and his hands are on the move. He sinks fingertips into the flesh of Fusco’s ass so the nails kiss through the suit. He squeezes, rough possession, direct and vicious. Finch is not his clean and distant mask now. He has blood in his veins. He has wants.

Finch’s jaw relaxes and he pins hard, impassioned kisses of apology to the raw skin over Fusco’s pulse. “Lionel,” he murmurs there, “Lionel, I…”

The name sounds awkward and foreign in Finch’s mouth and he doesn’t want to hear it there. He turns his head to one side, presses his nose into Finch’s cheek and makes sharp, muffled sounds against the soft curve of Finch’s jaw as Finch drags them across and against one another, holding tight.

Fusco winds his fingers in the starchy twill of Finch’s shirt collar and yanks until a button pops loose with a dim snap and bounces lamely off of Fusco’s chest before slipping off between them or into the thick strands of the carpet.

Finch backs off in surprise, gives Fusco’s ass a parting squeeze before pushing himself up, bracing hard against Fusco’s chest. He looks strange and undone, his glasses fogged and knocked askew, his mouth wet, his hair wild, his eyes suddenly dark behind their frames. Fusco’s hand is hanging uselessly from the collar of Finch’s shirt, dragging it two buttons down and wide open and exposing a pale chest with a fine dusting of hair. Finch seizes Fusco by the wrist, gently detaches his grip from the shirt, and guides Fusco’s hand up over his head.

“No,” he says as he presses the back of Fusco’s hand deep into the carpet. “That’s enough of that.” He bends to press a soft, indulgent kiss to Fusco’s forehead.

Finch stays that way, one hand pinning Fusco’s wrist, one hand a crushing weight on Fusco’s chest, and Finch just stares down at him a while, surveying. It’s gradual, the way his eyes slip shut. His eyelids are so pale, Fusco thinks suddenly. Finch’s face has gone pink from excitement and friction and his eyes were so deep and stormy a moment ago and his whole face, which is usually made up of fading stains of color on oppressive white, seems so livid. His eyelids, so rarely seen without the shield of Finch’s glasses, show the contrast too damn well.

It’s a stupid thing to notice, Fusco thinks as Finch’s brows draw together, as his mouth becomes stern, as his face begins to tighten into a wince. A stupid thing.

Finch’s whole body gives a jerk, a rough thrust against Fusco, and it makes them both gasp. Fusco gasps because the contortion Finch’s face goes through is agony and because the friction makes him painfully, guiltily hard. Finch just cringes and grits his teeth.

“Are you okay?” Fusco whispers even as heat rises in his face and pools hopefully in the bottom of his belly. “Finch. Finch, are you okay?”

Finch does it again. This time it’s with a sharp, stifled cry, almost a scream, and Fusco is dragged between worry and the fact that he’s leaking into his underwear and he doesn’t know how to think about anything other than that and how warm and close Finch is.

Finch’s palm is pressing a hole in Fusco’s chest.

He thrusts again and Finch is still in pain, eyelids tight-creased and white teeth biting soundlessly at the air, and Fusco reaches between their bodies with his free hand. He can do something, he can alleviate the hurt, and he’s just fumbling one-handed at Finch’s belt buckle when Finch drops down on him hard.

They grunt together in quiet pain and in surprise and Fusco takes in a deep breath because he can now, Finch’s hand is off his chest, and the stretch is good in a way that hurts. He realizes that Finch’s hand is off his chest because Finch is reaching between them, chasing Fusco’s hand, wrenching it off Finch’s belt, dragging Fusco’s hand up above his head and pinning it down on top of the other hand.

Finch lies atop him, breathing hard. “Not now,” Finch pants. “Okay? Not now.”

“Okay,” Fusco agrees, only he’s not totally sure what he’s agreeing to except no undressing Finch, maybe no touching, but it doesn’t matter because Finch is holding tight to his wrists and he seems to know what they’re going to do.

Finch spends a little time adjusting, shoving Fusco’s knees further apart and lining himself up and gaining his footing on the carpet so he has leverage to push. His next thrust is slower, more exploratory. His brow stays rumpled and his eyes stay shut but he doesn’t make a sound. He’s rubbing little circles into Fusco’s wrists with his thumbs, maybe to reassure Fusco, maybe to distract himself from his aching back.

Finch pushes again, a little more smooth, a little more confident. He’s still hurting. But he’s falling into a rhythm.

It’s unbearable. Unbearable because Finch is rubbing at him too hard, crushingly hard. Unbearable because it doesn’t matter how hard Finch ruts against him because there’s still two suits’ worth of material between them, wool and silk blending and tangling and bunching between their bodies, exquisite and thick and not enough. Unbearable because the deadened sensation and the pain and the distance between them and the total inability to just have what he fucking wants makes it better somehow, in an awful way. It makes what they’re doing together desperate and illicit and passionate. Not being able to move just enhances it. All he can do is lie there and take it or arch up against Finch and accept it.

Or he could break free. It’s hard to not shake the illusion but pushing Finch away would be an easy thing. He’s not a strong man, not a heavy man, and before just now, Fusco was terrified that a touch might shatter him.  He’s still afraid of that, deep down. So, no, it wouldn’t be hard to push Finch off and walk away from feeling like this, but the fact that Finch is holding him there, that Finch wants him there, that Finch is pressing white, bloodless circles into the skin of Fusco’s wrists and peppering kisses along the line of Fusco’s jaw, that fact pins him down more securely than Finch ever could.

Finch snarls in pain against his ear. Fusco bends his knees and tilts his hips so he’s all open and welcoming. He can feel rugburn through the shoulders of his jacket and precome wetting the space where they rub together. They’re just rubbing and rubbing together and his dick is so hard and Finch is jutting into him and the heat between them is almost too much.

“Come on,” Finch whispers. “Come on, I have you, I have you.” Finch’s movements become jagged, broken, and shivery. He buries his face in Fusco’s neck and his fists relax their tight circles around Fusco’s wrists. Finch doesn’t let go, not quite, but he lets his hands wander down to rub at Fusco’s forearms through the sleeves of that jacket and then back up to meet him palm to palm, to interlock fingers, to stay that way.

That’s what finishes him off. That’s what sends Fusco’s hips snapping upward and his eyes slamming shut and his brain going all luminous and wrung out with pleasure. Not the two of them grinding together, not that moment when Finch was scrabbling for Fusco’s hand between them and Finch groped him thorough and sheepish before grabbing Fusco’s hand. It was the touch of their palms, the weave of their fingers, skin on skin finally. Jesus Christ. Jesus H. Christ.

Finch is still rutting against him furiously and it’s starting to hurt now. Starting to hurt them both because Finch’s sounds are now open, tiny noises, half want, half tortured whines, and Fusco is going through the last jerking convulsions and becoming soft and wet with come and marvelously sensitive. He can’t stand it anymore, not the noises and not the sensation. It’s too much. He twists his hand free of Finch’s grip easily and slips it between them again. He doesn’t go for the belt this time, just presses his palm gentle against Finch’s hard-on and starts to rub and massage and pet through the front of Finch’s wool suit pants. Starts to coax him toward orgasm, throws an arm around Finch’s shoulders and holds him tight while Finch groans and whimpers his way through it, thrusting hard into Fusco’s palm.

He can feel beneath the wool where Finch’s underwear is soft and silky, where the scratchy suit glides over him. He can feel in his fingertips when Finch finally comes, when the groan he lets out becomes long and lonesome and wetness starts to seep against Fusco’s fingertips.

They fell over a while ago. Somehow, it’s not until this moment that gravity starts to catch up to him.

“Oh my god,” he mumbles as Finch pushes a wet little finishing kiss against the corner of his mouth. “Oh my god.”

Finch’s head drops heavy on Fusco’s shoulder. He exhales, deep and serious. After a moment, his breathing slows and his movement stills. He settles in on top of Fusco and he becomes very quiet.

Maybe gravity got him too.

Because gravity is playing hell with Fusco. It’s amazing the stuff you miss when you’re in the moment. From the instant that Finch kissed him, all Fusco could think about the two of them together and how much he wanted that and how badly it spooked him that he wanted that. There wasn’t any room for consequences.

Now, with the rush of climax fading, reality’s starting to set in.

Because that was Finch, just now. He kissed Finch. Finch kissed him back. They took each other to the floor and they’re still here, draped in each other. That happened. That’s happening now.

Finch shifts awkwardly on top of him, releases Fusco’s hands with a kind of jolt. Like he’s surprised at himself for having grabbed them in the first place. “I. Ah.” He pats Fusco’s chest. The strikes are muffled by the lapels of the suit jacket.

“You doing okay?” Fusco asks.

“Yes,” Finch replies, but he sounds distracted. “Yes, of course.” The front of Fusco’s suit has been rumpled by what they did and Finch tries to iron out the wrinkles with his palm. “You?”

“Mhmm. Just. I need to catch my breath.”

“Of course,” Finch repeats. “I understand completely.”

“It’s just a lot to take in.”

“I know.” Finch winces again and lifts himself up off of Fusco a little, rolling off to the side and sitting beside Fusco’s prone body with a grunt. He sits bent, tousled, and raw pink from blushing and contact.  “I’m going to go, ah, wash and change.” Finch gives him an odd look, nervous and half-hopeful. Like he expects Fusco to invite himself along.

Fusco can see the appeal to that. The two of them warm and soaked and clean and sequestered might give them a moment to find each other again, to legitimize this thing they’ve done.

As it is, Fusco needs some time to think. So he pretends to not notice Finch’s look and Finch seems a little relieved. He struggles to his feet and wobbles upright. “I won’t be long. If you need anything…”

“I can take care of myself,” Fusco says, looking up at Finch. “You go on ahead. I need a minute.”

“Alright.” Deep breath. “I hope…” But whatever he hopes, he can’t make himself say it. He stalls. He closes his eyes. He goes.

Fusco stays where he is on the floor, running his fingers through the strands of the carpet. He just keeps quiet and lets reality filter back in.

There’s the hum of the air conditioner, the gentle play of warm afternoon light sneaking through the curtains. Faintly, he can hear a couple of kids talking and laughing as they walk beneath the windows. There’s some kind of alley around the back of the house, like a skinny little highway between the rows of brownstones.

He wonders if somebody passing beneath could have heard the two of them.

The pipes in the walls give a heavy groan as Finch turns the water on.

Fusco shifts against the carpeting, rolls his shoulders as he sits up. His back’s killing him. The skin across his shoulders is burned and rubbed raw. He stretches. He glances into the mirror and doesn’t really like what he sees.

The nice new suit’s all rumpled. It’s a fucking shame. It is, to see the jacket and shirt wrinkled and the tie with its loosened knot knocked all askew. For a second there, Finch let Fusco look through his warped lens and see himself changed and respectable. Now he just looks fucked.

He can’t wear the suit, now. Not just because it’s too damn quality for him, but because it was quality and he ruined it with what they did.  Because he can’t leave now, he realizes. The plan he’s formulating in the back of his head without really thinking of it is that he’ll run, he’ll change clothes quickly and slip out while Finch is in the shower, except he can’t because leaving the suit behind in this condition is unacceptable, but so is taking it with him.

He finds his own clothes folded neatly in a pile at the end of Finch’s little sewing table. That stings the worst out of any of it, that Finch was thinking about the sanctity of Fusco’s clothes even when he was decking him out in that nice suit. Fusco tries to show the same level of care when he takes off the suit, but he can’t. Finch folds like a goddamn machine, all crisp and precise angles. Fusco’s not even sure if he’s ever taken that kind of care of his own clothes. He does as best he can with the rumpled suit.

He leaves it at the end of the table with a note scrawled in smeary, inexperienced fountain pen that Finch should send him the bill for the dry cleaning. It seems…not right, not even adequate, but all he can make himself do in terms of repayment right now.

Fusco thinks it would be smart to creep out now, while the water’s still pattering faintly in the shower upstairs and Finch might not hear the sound of the door as it opens and shuts.

But that’s wrong, more wrong than the paltry, weak excuse for a note he already regrets leaving. He can’t just go and not say goodbye. So he makes himself sit at the foot of the stairs until he hears the sound of falling water go quiet from upstairs and he’s waited an amount of time where someone might reasonably have dried off and put clothes on.

Finch takes a very long time showering.

It’s okay. Fusco needs that time to figure out what the hell he’s going to say.

Minutes are wasted at the door of Finch’s fine and fancy actual bedroom before he realizes that Finch probably isn’t there. The results are better when Fusco goes to the door at the end of the hall and raps his knuckles on it, quick and sharp.

“Just a moment,” Finch calls. He takes somewhat longer than a moment and Fusco can hear scuffling in the room beyond.

When Finch opens the door, Fusco forgets what he’s going to say. This is because Finch’s hair is dark and spiky from the water, with little droplets collecting at the tips of each sharp, dampened barb of hair. Because he is not wearing his glasses and the shallow indents they’ve left high up on his nose are strangely endearing even as his eyes become shockingly large without the frames in the way. Because his cheeks are pink from the warm water. Because he’s wearing a loose, gray t-shirt over flannel pajama pants and Fusco’s never seen him dressed so simply in his life. Because he’s got a thick, fluffy white towel thrown over his shoulders and it makes him seem soft and inviting.

“I have to go,” Fusco mumbles.

“Hmm?” Finch cocks his head to one side. Fusco’s pretty sure Finch heard what he said and just didn’t like it.

He repeats, “I have to go,” and Finch frowns.

“I was hoping you’d stay a while,” he says. Finch has faint, tentative hopes and they strike Fusco with brutal, unintentional force. “I could make dinner. We could talk. About what happened.”

“I don’t want to talk about that.”

“Then we don’t have to,” Finch insists. “We can just…have dinner. Be together. You don’t have to worry about what to say.”

Fusco inhales deep and catches the scent of Finch’s body wash. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Mmhm.” Finch bites his lip. He looks hurt, but very thoughtful. “This was a mistake. I shouldn’t have done that.”

“Wasn’t your fault,” Fusco says. “I started it.”

“Only in the short term.” Finch amends his statement neatly. “We shouldn’t have done that.”

“No.”

“It was short sighted. Unprofessional. Completely counter to our mission.”

Fusco nods along, numbly.

“And it, ah. While we were. Together. Privately, and this is in no way an insult to you, but I felt that it wasn’t going well. That there was a disconnect between us. Am I wrong to…?”

Fusco shakes his head and Finch sighs with obvious relief.

“I’m sorry,” Finch says, very suddenly. “I know I’ve been pushing you for quite some time, months and months now and that can’t – cannot have been easy for you. I…I took advantage.”

“Well.” Fusco shrugs, mock-cheerful. “That’s what you brought me here for, right?”

Finch’s brow furrows. “No. No, I never…”

“Look, don’t bullshit me, alright? You bought me all those fancy clothes. You bought me goddamn underwear. What the hell did you think you were trying to do?”

“I never meant to - !” Finch’s pitch is wild and a little helpless, and he pauses to regain control of his voice. “I had hopes,” Finch admits gently. “I thought our relationship might undergo a change. But I never wanted you to do anything you were uncomfortable with.”

“You had hopes,” Fusco repeats under his breath. “You had – I don’t know. I don’t know about you.”

“This wasn’t my intention,” Finch frets. “None of it was. If you’d…if you’d let me give you that jacket in the first place, this would never have happened.”

“Don’t you blame me.”

“If you’d just accepted the payoff, I could have forgotten all about you, could have gone on thinking you were…”

“I was what?”

Finch pauses. He gives Fusco a guilty, fearful glance. Distantly, Fusco can feel the way his own skin is blazing, radiating heat and he knows he must be red with shame and vulnerability and anger. He must seem very ugly just now. “It doesn’t matter,” Finch says. He sounds like he’s trying for calm and reasonable but there’s something timid lurking in his throat that slashes all his words up and sends them out ragged. “It doesn’t matter what I thought of you then. I was wrong.”

“You thought I was cheap. You thought I was cheap and you could buy me.”

Finch says nothing.

“No wonder it pissed you off so much when I wouldn’t take that fucking jacket. You’re not used to people you can’t buy and sell, are you?”

Finch closes his eyes and goes white knuckled on the frame of the door.

“Yeah, well. Don’t look so beat down. You were right about me. It worked and I’m just as cheap and weak as you always thought I was.”

“You’d better go,” Finch whispers. The sound of his voice is cold and it sinks like a stone in the air.

“Okay.”

“Please go now.”

“Alright.” Fusco says. “See you around.”

Finch winces, full body, and does not open his eyes.

“I’m going.” He walks away backward, slowly, and watches as Finch eases the whining door shut inch by inch.

That could have been worse, Fusco thinks to himself as he takes the stairs down. They could have shouted at each other. There could have been hatred between them, real hatred. There could have, he acknowledges as he wedges his feet into his shoes, been tears, although that seems unlikely. Things could have become violent. Fusco might have been too caught up in the softness of Finch’s skin after a shower and he might have reached out and touched him and Finch might never have told him to leave and they’d still be up there together, digging themselves in deeper and making it more and more impossible to finally accept that it won’t work.

This is good, he thinks as he shrugs on his jacket and sneaks shameful out the door and into early evening sunlight and coolness. It’s good that they’re stamping it out before it can grow, before either one of them can hurt the other. This is a clean break.

He takes the walk back toward the café, near where he parked his car, and he’s already behind the wheel and driving home, merciful home, when he realizes that it doesn’t matter that he left the suit behind. It doesn’t matter because everything he’s wearing right now is something that Finch gave to him and he is that cheap and he is that weak and he might as well have stayed.

Chapter 18

Gabe blinks wistfully at the slim ray of light seeping through the gap in the curtains.

“I’m gonna have to request one of those happy lamps, man,” he says, tapping the corner of a playing card against the coffee table. “You know, the ones that give off the fake sunlight so depressed motherfuckers don’t off themselves in winter? One of those things.”

Fusco flips the cards in his hand over, rubs sleepily at his eye. “Fine. Just stay clear of the windows, okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m not that dumb.” He discards one card, picks up another, twitches in what’s either a spasm of misery or a suppressed smile. “These guys are hardasses, though. I think if they so much as crack a smile, the stick up their asses gets replaced with a bigger, sharper stick. Yo, Officer Friendly, it’s your turn.” He nudges the cop next to him with one foot.

Officer Friendly, who is actually Detective Randazzo, is stone-faced and put-upon as he replaces his own card.

“They won’t even run out and get me some smokes,” Gabe confides. “Can you believe that?”

“Torture,” Fusco murmurs.

“Speaking of which...”

“I quit,” Fusco tells him without looking up from his hand, “a few years ago.”

“Well, good for you.” He sounds half genuine, half bitter. “I haven’t.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Detective Randazzo flashes a brief, pleading look at Fusco over the fan of his cards. It’s the look of a man who is already tired of sharing a confined space with Gabe and doesn’t want to add carcinogens to the mix. Fusco can sympathize.

“Thanks,” Gabe says. “Not just for hypothetical smokes, I mean. In general.”

“No problem.”

“Bullshit. Don’t you put me down like that. I am a huge problem.”

Fusco buries a smile. “Okay, Gabe. You’re the worst mistake I ever made.”

“That’s more like it.”

It’s not true, of course. Not that putting faith in Gabe has been so fruitful, but Fusco knows he’s been stupider than this, that he’s made worse decisions in his time. He’s got a tarnished reputation, a few shattered relationships, and a dead best friend who can all attest to that. It’s alright, though. It’s a very small, friendly lie and Gabe’s one of the last people in his life who Fusco still feels comfortable lying to.

He eyes Gabe across the coffee table. He’s unkempt and sallow-cheeked from too much time spent inside and out of the sun and air but his eyes are bright and lively as they flick and rove over cards and the other players. He’s wearing a sweater, green, thick, cable-knit and riddled with holes. It’s something you might get from your grandmother. It’s something Gabe thought to bring with him when he packed for the safehouse.

He’s not the worst. He’s an obnoxious little fuck, but he’s not the worst.

“Murphy!” Gabe calls. “Hey, Murph, you’re next.”

Detective Murphy got up to get a drink some time ago. He hasn’t been back. Fusco can still hear him fussing around in the kitchen, ambling from counter to counter like he just can’t make himself walk back into the living room. Fusco gets the sense, once again, that he is babysitting for two very put-upon cops.

“When you gonna hear from your contact?” Fusco asks.

“Soon.”

“How soon?”

“If I knew how fucking soon, I’d tell you. But I don’t know. So I can’t. So I won’t. End of.” Gabe's forehead crinkles. “They didn’t say.”

“What did they say?”

Gabe presses his lips together.

“Nothin’,” Detective Randazzo fills in, not looking up from his hand. “A big fat nothing. They hung up on him.”

“It doesn’t mean anything!” Gabe says, voice all high and tight. “They pull that kinda shit all the time. I’m not supposed to know who this guy is and they knew I was gonna get wiretapped, so of course they didn’t say anything. They’ll get back to me somehow. There’s gotta be a way.”

Fusco turns to Detective Randazzo. “You guys did a trace?”

“Of course.”

“And?”

He delicately rearranges the fan of cards. “Rikers.”

“You’re fucking kidding me.”

“I am fucking not.”

Detective Murphy reappears, having steeled himself. Murphy is a big Irishman who's built like a moose, well over six feet tall with broad shoulders and slim legs. “I know what you’re thinking. And we had it checked out. Checked the security footage of the prison phones around the time the call was made and harassed everybody who turned up on camera, tossed the cells, checked out the guards on duty and the visitors who were on the island that day. Nothing so far.”

“They couldn’t, uh, turn it on remotely? Or however they do that? Track it that way?”

“Yeah, somebody tried that.” Murphy picks up his hand with a flourish, frowns slightly. “Didn’t work. Working theory is that there’s nothing to turn on. Whoever took that call sent their phone to the next world right after.”

“What the hell’s the point of that?” Fusco asks. "Why pick up at all if they're not even gonna say anything?"

“Beats me.”

Randazzo scrapes at the edge of a card with one blunt, carefully clipped nail. "The line's still open. The phone Gabe used to contact them is being monitered. There's always the chance they could call back later."

“Hey,” Gabe says. “Will you stop with this? You guys are giving me an ulcer. Who’s in?”

“I’m just going to preempt the betting. I fold,” Randazzo says promptly.

“Me too,” Murphy adds.

“Oh, come on, you guys.” Gabe turns plaintive eyes on Fusco. “Fusco?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Might as well. Go out on a high note, right?” He shoves his pile of scuffed plastic poker chips into the center. “All in.”

“Me too.” Gabe’s chips scatter as he shoves them forward. He grins. “Okay. You show me yours, I’ll show you mine.”

Fusco shows him. “Four of a kind.”

Gabe lays his cards out, neat and pretty. Royal flush. Fuck that guy.

“Every goddamn time,” Murphy mutters as he rises to his feet.

“Yup,” Gabe says, tracing the face of the Jack with one nail. “Every time. Everything’s coming up Gabe.”

 

---

 

He doesn't go straight back to his car, which is parked three blocks away in front of the Chinese restaurant where Carter is eating lunch. More likely, she is glancing out the streaky front window again and again, only breaking to stare sullenly into her chow mein or look for answers in the screen of her phone. That's how Carter eats nowadays.

He doesn't want to keep her waiting too much longer, but he has to take the scenic route. So he takes a stroll one block up, two blocks over, until he hits a bodega. He stops in, buys a soda because he could use the caffeine and a pack of Virginia Slims, because Gabe wants cigarettes and at least these'll give the guys stuck babysitting him a laugh.
Fusco's waiting for the cashier to finish ringing him up and as he paws idly through the cracked leather pockets of the wallet, he finds the crumpled-up receipt from that coffee shop. He'd just shoved it in there on the way out, without ever looking because he was nervous to be going home with Finch and he didn't want to think about how much he just shelled out for coffee to save his bruised pride. He should throw this receipt out, he thinks. It's bothering him.

When he got back to his apartment the night before, he found that a lot of his possessions bothered him.

He's just accepting the whisper-thin plastic bag full of soda and cigarettes from the kid behind the cash register when he becomes really sharply aware of somebody else behind him in line. Not like they're being loud or drawing attention to themselves. Just that the shape of them is familiar and demanding and Fusco doesn't want to think about it. He takes the bag a little roughly and gets the hell out of there as fast as he can without raising too much suspicion.

The shape follows.

"Thought I'd pay a little visit to your friend Gabe," it says.

"You don't even know where he is, asshole."

Simmons snorts. "Believe what you wanna believe. Just know that you're not that hard to follow. Is he spilling his guts, as expected?"

"Nothing to spill."

Simmons takes a longer than usual stride so they're shoulder to shoulder on the sidewalk. "Nothing?"

"Nothing that would put away anyone we haven't already put away ten times over. We're looking to take out the guys in charge. Gabe doesn't have that kind of firepower. His contact did, supposedly, but they left him to swing in the wind."

"Shit." Simmons takes a really deep, serious yoga breath. Fusco can almost see the numbers one to ten ticking by in his head as his chest expands. "Shoulda killed him back when it was convenient," he says, finally.

"Lay off him," Fusco snaps. "Either his contact comes through or he's useless. Either way, Gabe being dead doesn't make our lives any better."

"Speak for yourself."

"They traced the number he called," Fusco says. He almost regrets it even as the words come tumbling out. "Phone was in Rikers when the call was made. What do you make of that?"

Simmons face loses a little of its menace as it wrinkles in thought. "We know which phone?"

"I don't think it's one of the phones for the prisoners. Nothing that would be picked up by security cameras. Not an employee or a visitor's phone either. It'd have to be a phone that was used just once, to take this call and be destroyed right after. One of those disposable, prepaid things. Bought with cash."

Simmons raises an eyebrow, like "Go on," and Fusco confesses, "I don't really know for sure on that last part; I'm just figuring it must have been, or they'd know who owned this fucking thing by now."

He nods slowly. "It's not impossible to get one of those things in prison, if you're connected. Can't rule out the staff, though. Or visitors. I'll see what I can find out." His brow furrows and he shoots Fusco a sidelong glance. "You're being helpful."

Fusco shrugs. "I'd rather take them down legitimately, but if you want to knock some heads together...I can't be totally against that. Hell, Carter can't, although I'd rather not run it by her to confirm."

"Hah." It's a weird, harsh non-laugh Simmons has. "Of course, you know I'll do more with heads than just knock 'em together."

"Yeah, I figured that." Fusco's remembering a damp cardboard box and something dripping onto his shoe and trying really hard not to think about it as he tries to ring the doorbell without pressing the box against his side. "Like I said, I'd rather arrest them. But it's not the hill I wanna die on."

Simmons lets his arm fall heavy across Fusco's shoulders with a rough slap. "Glad you're finally seeing sense," he says. "Maybe one of these days you'll get me that meeting with your rich friend and I can stop regretting not having you killed for starting this war to begin with." He tilts his head under the force of Fusco's scowl and his look is casual, unaffected. "You've been a headache, Lionel."

"You're not getting that meeting," he says. "Not just because I don't want you near him, although I don't. We're splits, me and him." He rolls his shoulders so Simmons' arm slips free. "Told you he doesn't like cops."

The two of them round the corner together and Fusco's car comes into view. Behind it, he can see Carter through the glare on the Chinese restaurant's front window, her head bent low over her lunch and what's probably an open file, her hair falling in a dark shiny sweep.

"Jesus, you're a headache," Simmons says again. "I don't know what I keep you around for."

"I'm a great conversationalist."

"Funny too," Simmons agrees. "If this situation doesn't get fixed soon, I'm gonna have you killed."

"Yeah, I kinda figured that."

"Just so you know what you're getting into."

"I'm not worried."

"If you say so." Simmons' hand is on his shoulder again, patting hard. "Have a good lunch, Fusco."

Carter, wary and distracted by small movements, jerks her head out of her file, looks unerringly out the window, across the street, and directly at them.

Fusco walks out from under Simmons arm and crosses the street to his car, to the Chinese restaurant, walks on in to the tinny jingle of bells. Carter sits up. She jabs her chopsticks point first into noodles and lets them stand a moment before they slowly tilt askew. She is trying too hard to iron the suspicion out of her eyes. "So how was it?"

"Lousy," he says. "Sorry I had to ditch you here, but you know how he is about talking in front of you. Did you have a good lunch, at least?"

She ignores the question. "What did Gabe have to say?"

Fusco pulls out a chair and settles in across from her. "Nothing. Whoever was supposed to help him out screwed him. They hung up when he called. He hasn't heard back. I'll tell you the rest when we're not in public."

Carter frowns. "He wasn't worth it," she murmurs. "Was he?"

"No. I guess not. Maybe. We'll keep him on the backburner."

"And, uh, your friend," she continues, treading carefully, flicking her gaze out across the street to where he and Simmons stood talking a while. "Did he come back with you from the safehouse?"

"No," Fusco says, "no, I met him on the way back. Just a coincidence."

"I've seen him around before," she says.

"Yeah. He's at the precinct."

"You never introduced me."

"Well." He has nothing to append to the well and he lets it hang there between them, a gaudy and useless little word.

She gives him a hard look like she can't believe him, like she can't imagine how he's still lying to her even now, like his lies are paper. "You're scared shitless of him," she says

"What makes you say that?" He fumbles with the cap on his soda.

"I have eyes."

His palm slips against the cap again. "He's a friend. I'm not afraid of him."

Carter seems to lose patience and she eases the soda out of his hands, pops the cap with a sharp twist. "You are," she says, pushing it back across the table at him.

"It's, uh." He traces a fingertip in the condensation on the bottle. "Listen, he's nobody you have to worry about."

"If he knows where Gabe is, then yeah, I do need to worry about him."

"He doesn't," Fusco snaps. "And if he does, it's not important. Gabe doesn't mean anything to him anymore. He'll leave him be."

Carter lowers her head still and solemn but her hands twist together, nails pick-pick-picking at cuticle. "Anymore," she repeats.

"Yeah." Deep breaths, in and out, nails tapping on the side of the soda bottle so bubbles rise and burst at the surface. "He's a scumbag," he tells her after a moment. "Don't go near him."

When she meets his eyes, hers are dark and cold. "I could have told you that."

"I wish I'd known you back then," he says.

She says nothing. She drums her palms weakly, arhythmically on the tabletop. She puffs air out between her lips. She says, finally, "Did you have a nice time with Finch?"

"What?"

"I don't want to talk about your friend anymore," she tells him. "Or Gabe, or this goddamn case, or any of our other goddamn cases. So I'm changing the subject. You got a problem?"

"Yeah. Yeah, kinda."

"Kinda?"

For a second, he wants to tell her everything. That's the kind of thing you should be able to do with a friend, he thinks. Just tell them everything. Or not everything, but just talk about a date gone wrong in a casual way, turn it into a shared joke instead of a harrowing, private experience. Carter wouldn't be judgmental, not necessarily, not about this. He remembers the questions she asked him last week, her crossed fingers and the way she made sure he knew it was okay to cut and run if he needed to. If there's anyone in the world he can talk to about Finch and what happened between them, it's Carter.

He should say to her, "It didn't go so well. Not that he was anything but good to me. He's a good man, you know, a better person than you'd think he was. Or maybe you could see it. You see some things so much clearer than I do. But most of the time I can only make myself see how much better than me he knows he is and I can't stand that. I can't stand his fucking charity. He's, god, he's so damn gentle. Did you know that? And breakable. And human. There's part of me that still thinks he's God on the throne and I hurt his fucking feelings somehow and that's crazy to me; it's crazy. He took me home with him, you know, like he was bringing me home for good and I felt like I'd broken in. He dressed me up in good clothes and I felt like I was lying to him. And when he screwed me, he made me keep the clothes on and what the hell am I supposed to make of that? What the hell's that supposed to mean? He scares the shit out of me and he's not even trying to kill me. He scared me so bad and I ran out on him and I regret it already and every time I think about it I feel sick to my goddamn stomach. So, yeah, I kinda have a problem with that."

He just says, "It didn't go so well," because he can't see a way for him to say the rest.

"What happened?"

"Nothing," he says. "He was real nice. We're just not much alike."

"Huh." She twists the chopsticks with no clear aim in mind. "You had to know that before yesterday."

"Yeah," he says, "I had that figured. But yesterday was a good reminder."

She pushes back from the table with a groan. "Back to work," she says and he doesn't argue.

---

 

He forgets to check caller ID before he answers so there's this hard jolt of fear in his gut as he raises the phone to his ear. He hopes it's not Finch. If it's Finch, he'll drop the fucking phone down the stairwell. He's drunk enough right now that it could happen. He says his own last name, hoarse but neutral, and hopes that he sounds businesslike, hopes that if he sounds businesslike enough, Finch will hang up first.

"Dad?"

His stomach drops. "Hey, kiddo." He falls heavy against the railing, relaxes there a moment as the cold metal digs into his hand. He tightens his fingers, tries to find that edge of hurt that might push him to sobriety.

Michael's excitable puffs of breath fizzle against the speaker. "Hi." He's grinning. He can hear it.

"Buddy, what are you doing up?" he asks. His voice sloshes. "It's so late."

"I can't sleep."

"You should be in bed."

"I am in bed," Michael protests. "I'm just not sleeping. I can't make myself sleep."

Fusco toes cautiously at the next step, decides it's too many things to focus on at once, climbing the steps and talking to his son and trying to sound sober and staying upright. He sinks to the floor and the painted-over concrete step is cold through the back of his pants. "I could bop you on the head," he mutters into the phone. "Then you'd sleep."

His son giggles and Fusco feels tightness in his chest as he's slammed back to a night a couple of years ago: one in the morning and Fusco with his knuckles digging playfully into the top of Michael's head while Michael kicked restlessly and laughed and kept his mom awake in the next room.

"Alright," he says, bracing his back against the slats in the railing. "What's keepin' you up? You got an under-the-bed monster problem I should know about?"

"No. I'm almost ten, Dad."

Tightness in his chest again. "Nope," he says. "Next birthday, you're nine again. That's the rule."

"That's not the rule."

"New rule. Dad's not ready for you to be ten yet."

"You say that every year."

"Alright," he says. "But you wait 'til your next birthday. We'll see who's right."

"Me."

"Not you." He takes a breath, waits for the smile on his face to die down a little. "What's keeping you up?"

"I don't know," says Michael. "I keep thinking about everything."

"Everything? Shit, that's over my head." Shit, he didn't mean to say shit. "What's everything?"

"When am I allowed to come over to your house again?"

He doesn't want to answer that. He hasn't been thinking about that. "I don't know, Mick," he says. "I don't know yet. I don't think it's safe for you to be over here right now."

"Still?" he asks.

Fusco swallows. "Yup. Still." He shifts on the unforgiving stairs. "I'm sorry. I usually try to put 'em in jail faster than this."

"Could you come over here? Mom wouldn't mind if you were just here for the day."

"She would mind," he doesn't say because he and Sharon have a rule about not talking shit about each other in front of Michael.

"If I came over, I might lead some very bad people to you and your mom, and I don't want to run even the tiniest risk of that," he also doesn't say because he's trying to help his son go to sleep.

"I don't think that's a good idea," he says, finally.

"Why not?" It's the first time the little kid whine has broken into Michael's voice since they started talking and Fusco can almost hear his son's embarrassment in the moment after.

"It just isn't," he says.

Michael says, "I haven't seen you in so long."

"I know." Fusco feels his head knock into the railing. He lifts his head, lets it fall again. "I miss you too. I think about you all the time." That's not true, actually. He used to think about his son all the time. Now there's not enough room in his head for all the painful things he can't bear to remember. He needs to take them piecemeal. He thinks about his son when he needs to make himself be brave and he's been such a coward lately. "Soon," he promises. "As soon as I can." As soon as I stop believing that someone terrible is going to take you away from me.

"I miss you." Michael's voice is distant and sleepy and very sad.

"Me too."

"Miss you."

"Me too, buddy."

Michael's response is to breathe out, slow and unselfconscious. Restless little half-snores whistle through the phone, slowly deepening and evening out, and Fusco shuts his eyes. His son is asleep with the phone next to him on the pillow. His arm is wrapped around something, maybe the blue-cased pillow, maybe one of the giant plush Angry Birds that dot his bed at Sharon's like mushrooms, maybe the ratty, worn out rabbit he's had since before he could talk that the three of them, Fusco, Sharon, and Michael, all tactfully pretend does not live in the crack between his mattress and the wall. There might be the beginning of a tear drying on his cheek, just beneath his eye.

Fusco's hand wipes across dirty concrete.

He ends the call so he's not running up Sharon's bill, shoves the phone in his coat pocket, drags his drunk ass up the last of the steps and lets himself tumble out of the stairwell on the right floor and against the door of the right apartment. The door is already unlocked.

This does not register as wrong until he's already inside and by that point, it's too late.

Reese is so fast.

He lunges out of the dark by the row of coathooks and throws Fusco back against the closed door so hard that it rattles in its hinges. The heel of Reese's hand slams up hard against Fusco's throat, neat, straight-cut fingernails scraping at the line of his jaw. "What," he growls, "did you do?"

"Nothing," Fusco hisses, drunk, scared, confused, and scrabbling frantically at Reese's wrist with his fingernails. "What the fuck is wrong with you?"

Reese bounces him off the door again, but he eases up the pressure on Fusco's windpipe and Fusco relaxes his clawlike grip on Reese's wrist. They breathe. Reese counts to ten in his head. "What did you do to Finch?" His breath washes over Fusco's mouth, humid and whiskey-scented.

"Are you kidding?"

Reese presses up under Fusco's jaw so hard that his toes actually leave the floor and he chokes, cringes full-body, takes it back. Reese makes himself relax. His head is cocked to one side all questioning, like an attack dog that might be persuaded not to bite. There's a spot of blood on the cuff of his shirt, Fusco notices, just by the root of his thumb.

Fusco asks, "Is he okay?"

In a tone that suggests that Fusco's a brave fucking idiot for even asking, Reese says, "He's gone."

"Gone? How gone? Is he okay?"

"He called and told me he's taking a personal day." Reese blinks once, very slowly. "Harold doesn't take personal days. Something's wrong."

"I." He doesn't realize how fast his heart was going until he hears it slow, beat by beat. "Jesus, really? The guy can't take a day off without you going psycho?"

"I almost lost him, Lionel. You once said you didn't want to know what I'd be like without his influence. Let's try to never find out. Now," he says, fingers curling in the collar of Fusco's shirt, "what happened?"

"You don't want to know that," Fusco says. "You really don't."

Reese grits his teeth.

"He's fine," Fusco says, although he thinks that might not be true, if Finch took a personal day. "He'll be back. He's just...taking some time. Sober up. Wait it out. He'll get over it."
Reese's scowl deepens but he lets go of Fusco's throat.

"Look, it's not really your business what happened," Fusco says, rubbing at his neck. "It's between us. It's personal."

"There's no personal for you, Lionel. Not anymore."

"For him, then," Fusco says and he's gratified, just a little, to see the sharp points of Reese's eyes begin to soften. "You don't have to give a damn about me, but I'm pretty sure he wouldn't want me telling anybody about what happened. It's not a big important secret; it's just...sad. Let it go."

"Hmmm." For a moment, Reese is thoughtful, solemn-eyed with respect for his friend that he can't have for Fusco. He mixes it with the small, disbelieving looks that he tosses out at Fusco every so often.

"What? What's your problem?" Fusco cautiously takes a step to the side and, when Reese makes no move to stop him, edges around Reese to take his shoes off, to hang his coat on the hook in the doorway, to pretend that there was never an ambush.

Reese turns slowly, follows Fusco's movements with his eyes, and just says, "He asked me for time alone with you yesterday."

Fusco's throat constricts momentarily. "And?"

"He only wanted to hear from me if there was an emergency. I almost invented one, just to have an excuse to interrupt, learn more. He asked me," Reese says, "like he wanted my permission. My approval."

"And I take it you don't approve," Fusco says. He takes a few steps further into the kitchen, starts washing one of the dirty plates in the sink just to have something to do with his hands.

Reese shrugs. "I'm not sure what I'd be approving."

"Me neither," Fusco confesses. "Listen, it's like I told you. It's not important. Whatever it was, it didn't work out. It was never going to. It's all over."

Thoughtfully, he says, "It was important to him."

Fusco's hand slips on the plate he's scrubbing and he barks his knuckles on the clanking glasses in the bottom of the sink.

"You hurt him," Reese says. "Didn't you?"

"I never laid a finger on him," Fusco lies, shaking out his soaking hands.

"But you still hurt him."

"He's a genius superhero with more money than God. I'm just some fat schlub with a badge, and I'm not even good at that. How the hell could I hurt somebody like him?"

"I don't know," Reese says. He shrugs, stumbles slightly to the side. One of his shoes leaves half-moon partial footprints in the carpet, rusty and brown. "He used to want to get rid of you. Put you in prison. Or, that's what I assumed. I did wonder if he was going to ask me to kill you one day, but...that's not Harold. I just thought it could be a possibility." He wanders into the kitchen, braces himself against the counter alongside Fusco. Reese doesn't look at Fusco at all; his eyes are trained somewhere slightly up, like Reese is just telling this story to the ceiling or God or the Finch in his ear, maybe. "He used to tell me, Mr. Reese, one day your dog is going to turn around and bite you. I tried to tell him how well trained you are," he says, tossing Fusco one mock-sympathetic glance, "but he didn't buy it."

"Gee. Thanks."

"Shh." Reese taps his feet on the floor. "He thought you were scum, Lionel. He didn't even hate you; he just...pitied you. Like you were some sick, mean animal I brought home and he just knew that one of these days, somebody was going to have to put you down." His mouth is turning down at the corners. "And somehow, you hurt him."

They sit quiet for a moment, their elbows brushing, the water in the sink providing white noise. "Do you and I have a problem?" Fusco asks.

"I don't know yet," Reese says.

"Okay. So are you gonna dig your heels in with the whole drinking thing?" Fusco asks. "'Cause if you are, I got beer in the fridge and I think I'm gonna need to break into it."

Reese turns to him, eyebrows raised.

"Your depressing goddamn story just drove me to drink," he explains.

"Oh." Reese stands on his own power, tilts, grabs Fusco's shoulder for balance. "No. I'm done. You should be done too."

"Great. Fine. You want me to call you a cab or something?"

"That's alright," he says. "I'll walk." Then, almost as an afterthought, "Lionel, I came here to tell you something."

"Yeah. I know. You told me, asshole. Bruised me too."

"No," Reese says. "Your witness is dead."

There's no more air in the room. "What?"

"I was at the safehouse earlier tonight." He sounds so calm and dreamy. "Someone broke in, executed him and the cops who were watching him. It's, ah, it's a real mess. You're going to get a call about it soon," Reese says. "You should pretend you don't already know about it. Otherwise, you might seem suspicious."

Fusco, in the absence of words, turns off the sink.

"I don't know if you liked him." Reese's tone is thoughtful. "I'm sorry, anyway." He adjusts his long black coat and makes for the door.

Sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry Gabe. He asks, in a voice that isn't as weak as he expects it to be, "Do you know who did it?"

"No," Reese says. "They were already gone when I arrived."

Already gone. When the heads of the five biggest crime families in the city are in danger, it's all hands on deck a day ahead of time and let's risk everything to save the scumbags. But when someone like Gabe, someone not so bad and not so dangerous, someone Fusco's been putting his life on the line for needs help, the killer gets to pull a disappearing act, Finch gets to go on vacation, and Fusco gets nothing but a sorry and a better luck next time.

His phone flares to life in his pocket and he figures it's not his son, not this time.

"It's okay," Fusco says to Reese's retreating back as he cradles the phone in his palm. "I might know who did it."

"Good," Reese tosses over his shoulder. "You should pick that up. It might be important."

Fusco knows he's probably right, but he nearly lets it go to voicemail.

Chapter 19

He snaps on thin white latex gloves and drops to one knee.

Gabe's head is cracked like an egg. The actual instability is very small, a neat, quarter-sized hole in the top of his skull. But it's enough. It's enough to leave his face wide open and spilling on the rug. In his periphery, Fusco is aware of other cops, stepping around and over the body, brushing and sampling and postulating, but the world seems very small right now. Just Fusco and the near-unrecognizable, limp form on the carpet.

All the king's horses. All the king's men. Etcetera.

Fusco brushes a wet, dangling lock of hair away from what's left of the face. The unbloodied parts of his cheek are damp, but drying. He looks like he died scared. Which is unsurprising, Fusco guesses. Gabe did most things scared.

"Amateurish," he hears Carter say behind him.

He tries to respond, meets with resistance, clears his throat. "You think so?" He tears his eyes away from Gabe.

Carter's not looking at him or Gabe. She's just taking in the room, lower lip pinched between her teeth. She takes a short, hissing breath, speaks again. "No," she says finally. "They were smart about it. Did you see the lock?"

"I'm kind of in a fog," Fusco confesses. He's gesturing to the broken form beside him without really thinking about it.

"Yeah," she says. "You doing okay?"

"Eh." He shrugs. "I'm not gonna need to break for a good cry, if that's what you mean." Fusco swallows a lump in his throat. "I don't know. He wasn't so bad, you know?"

"I know." She looks unconvinced. "I was thinking about the cops."

"It's a shame. I didn't know them that well, but they seemed like good guys. Sorry," he says. "What about the lock?"

"Blown out. Nice and neat. Quickly too, probably. I'd bet whoever did it knew what they were doing."

Sounds about right. Fusco nods to himself. "But the rest," he says, finally connecting the dots. He shoots a glance up the steep steps to his left, sees splintered wood and dried blood oozing down the first step of the landing. He can't actually see Randazzo from here but he knows, in an abstract kind of way, that he's up there.

"The rest," Carter repeats. "We've got the quick, neat entry with the total chaos in here. Early ballistic reports are pointing to one shooter so that," she says, jerking her thumb at the couch, torn up and fluffy with bullet holes, "just seems like excess. It doesn't look like Detective Murphy got the chance to move around too much. This guy missed. A lot."

"So..." Fusco encourages.

"So I'm thinking either it's an amateur shooter who knows his way around a break-in, or," and here she joins Fusco in crouching over Gabe. Her voice drops too. "...Or it's a professional who's out of practice."

"Why are we whispering?" Fusco asks, matching her volume.

"In case the professional is a cop. Who else knew he was here?"

Who indeed.

Carter's attention switches neatly to Gabe. "What about this one?"

"Study in contrasts, right? Murph at least looks like he tried to dive out of the way. Randazzo made it all the way up there. Even took cover and got off a few shots. Gabe, though." Fusco shakes his head. "Like you said. Neat. All folded up." He indicates the knees drawn in beneath Gabe's thin frame. "The cuffs." They're wrapped delicate around his wrists, binding Gabe's hands behind his back and glinting in the low light. "It's an execution."

"Why the cuffs?" she asks herself. "Why take the time after all this sloppy stuff? Did he rough Gabe up first? Torture him?"

"Not that I can see." Fusco takes a deep breath. "Maybe he was already cuffed when the shooter got here."

Carter frowns. "Why would they do that?"

"I don't know," Fusco says. "Maybe Gabe did something he shouldn't have."

She stands with a groan. "I'm gonna do a walkthrough; see if I can spot anything unusual. You should do one too, since you know the place better than me."

"Okay." He's still looking at the handcuffs.

"Try to make a list of everyone who knew we were keeping Gabe here," she says.

"Already started."

His list only has one name on it at the moment.

 

---

 

He stays on the corner across the street for a long time. He checks the clock on his phone over and over, keeps an eye on the lights inside the house as they flicker, shift, and brighten. He sees a woman he's met only two or three times pass before the window with a stack of clean white plates in her hands. She is looking back over her shoulder and she is smiling.

Must be about dinnertime.

He figures it's about time to make himself known.

On the way across the street, Fusco tries to puff himself up, give himself some some confidence, some danger. You are the bastard who comes out of nowhere and ruins somebody's night. You be that bastard.

He takes the steps up to the door two at a time.

He makes his knock on the door sharp and clean and light enough that it doesn't sound angry. As the sound bounces between his body and the doorway, Fusco thinks, inexplicably, of Finch. The thought is gone the second Simmons answers his knock.

Fusco's gotten the jump on Simmons very little in his life, and always at work, when Simmons' guard was already up and this, this is something else again. It's a scary and hilarious thing to see Simmons expression, calm, at-home, and happy, harden in to the meanest, blackest scowl Fusco's ever seen.

"Hear about Gabe?" Fusco asks, mildly.

In a very low tone, nearly lost in the rumble of a passing car, Simmons mutters, "What the fuck are you doing here?"

"Just checking in. Making sure you knew. Had a couple of questions for you." Fusco lets his foot creep over the threshold, a ready-made doorstop. "Because I think it's real interesting that the day you shadow me to where we're hiding Gabe, he and both of his handlers get blown away. I think that's a real hundred to one kind of coincidence. Don't you?"

Simmons puts his hand on the frame of the door so the way is barred. "Walk away."

"I'm just," and Fusco raises his voice just a little, sets his palm flat on the center of the door, ready to push, "I just wanted to know if you knew about it."

"Of course I know," he snarls. "Do you want me to shed a goddamn tear?"

"I'm not here to wring any sympathy out of you. I'm here for a confession."

"I had nothing to do with it. Get the fuck off my doorstep." He shoves hard at the door and Fusco braces himself against it, shoulder, arm, and hip.

"If you had nothing to do with it, then why the secrecy?"

"Because I don't want you near my family, Fusco."

His grip slackens.

"I don't bring this part of my life home with me and I especially don't want whatever crazy shit you're mixed up in on top of that. You're bad news. You're dangerous and stupid and I don't want you within five hundred feet of my wife or daughter. I didn't touch your little snitch. You want to know why? Because it would have been a waste of my goddamn time. Because you were right, Fusco. I didn't give a shit if he lived or died. It didn't matter anymore. It still doesn't."

"What are you...?"

"So you turn around, you go down those steps, and you never come near my home again. You never come near my family again. And if I hear that you so much as go shopping in the same fucking bodega as my wife, I'm gonna kill you. Are we clear?"

"Pat?" the wife calls from somewhere in the back, in the kitchen. Fusco can't remember her name. "Who's at the door?"

Simmons laboriously unfurrows his brow, ungrits his teeth. "Just someone from work."

She appears in the kitchen door dragging her left leg because the child, the five-year-old girl who is as blonde as her mom, is locked giggling around her shin. Kate. Simmons' wife is named Kate. She looks cheerfully harried, pushes slightly damp wisps of hair out of her eyes with clean, manicured fingers. Her face is open, friendly. Apprehension creeps in only at the edges. "Oh, yes. We've met. Sorry, I don't remember...?"

Fusco waves his hand. "Eh. It was a while ago."

Down on the floor, the little girl peeks shyly at Fusco from behind her mother's calf.

"Will you be staying for dinner?" Kate asks.

"No," he says, very suddenly. He's smiling, maybe too hard. Be normal. "Thank you, ma'am, but I was just stopping by. No need to trouble yourself. You enjoy your evening." He takes his hand off the door, slides his foot safely outside the threshold.

Simmons claps one big hand around Fusco's upper arm and squeezes. Nail presses through the sleeve of Fusco's jacket. "See you tomorrow?"

"Yeah." Fusco tries to subtly shake his grip off. "Be seein' you. Pat."

Simmons waits until his back is totally turned, until his face is hidden from his wife, to stare at Fusco with a kind of bitter, simple hatred. "See you 'round," he says.

And then he shuts the door with maybe a tiny bit more force than he needs to.

Fusco remains outside for about a minute after, wanting to see if Simmons will check for him, if his visit will have cast a pall over the happy home somehow. Also to think about what he's learned. Simmons makes a valid point, he thinks. There really was no reason for him to put Gabe down right now, or those cops. Which doesn't mean that Simmons didn't do it just to vent some anger or prove a point, but Fusco thinks that if there was a point to be made here, Simmons would have made sure it hit home.

Not a straightforward elimination. But if Fusco's list of solid suspects consisted of more than one name, Simmons' ranking would be sinking like a stone.

He doesn't need to be outside Simmons' house to think about things like this. Fusco just suspects that he doesn't really want to go home.

 

---

 

It's 3 in the morning and he’s nearly asleep in his paperwork when Carter says, "We need to go," and tugs at the collar of his suit jacket, near the nape of his neck.

"Where?" Fusco asks, swatting her hand away.

She offers him her phone, taps one short, shiny nail beside the first line of the text on the screen. It's brief, demanding. A time. A subway station. A direction. A car to enter. Tacked to the end, like an afterthought, are the words, "Bring Fusco."

Restricted number. Very surprising.

"About what happened?" he asks.

She nods.

"What are we waiting for?"

"You," she says.

So they go.

And he feels good about going, he really does. Much as he complains about Reese's iron grip on his life, he likes that direction, that drive Reese and his orders bring. Don't argue. Just do it. Just do one small thing, get one small piece secure and somebody else, someone smart and brave, will worry about the puzzle. Fusco's been doing more puzzling than he'd like lately. He'd like to turn it all over to Reese and Finch now, just do some mindless task to make sure it all works out in the end and suffer the paperwork later.

On the subway platform, he lingers at Carter's elbow and stares at the scummy concrete between his shoes. He counts seconds until the train's supposed to arrive, lets them tick by in his head. When it's not there on the dot, he starts counting again and his eventual sigh of relief is washed on down the platform along with the gust of air as the train rolls in.

He and Carter get into the very last car.

The car that is nearly empty.

The car that stays nearly empty when the solitary drunk who follows Carter and Fusco in takes one look at Reese, with his predator eyes and the knife across his knee, and moves to the car next door.

"Jesus," Fusco says as the doors shudder closed behind them. "You want somebody to call the cops?"

"You are the cops," Reese reminds him gently as he relaxes back into his seat.

Fusco's ready-made smartass comment dies in his throat when he realizes, finally, that Finch is there. He must have known it, must have seen him when he came in because how Fusco could have missed Finch sitting plain as day at Reese’s side? Maybe it’s because Reese was leaning forward when he did his drunk-frightening knife act and it was difficult to see beyond him. Maybe Fusco just didn’t want to see Finch. It hurts to see him now. It hurts because Fusco didn’t expect it, because Fusco is now accustomed to Finch’s vanishing act, because ordinarily these conversations happen between him and Reese and Carter, now. Finch is always away somewhere, maybe watching, maybe uncaring. He allows himself a quick look at Finch, in a suit the color of toast crosshatched in chocolate, with the line of his jaw and the tip of his chin obscured by a pale green scarf wound fat and smooth around his throat, with his sensible brown oxfords, with his hair under control for once. He can’t really make himself look at Finch’s face yet, so he acquaints himself with the shell Finch is wearing today. It only hurts a little. He vaguely remembers some obscure fact about frogs and how they can’t perceive incremental differences in temperature, how they’ll sit peacefully in the bottom of a pot and let themselves be boiled provided you heat the water slowly enough. He can do that.

Carter picks up the thread that Fusco dropped. “You’re the one who’s so obsessed about secrecy,” she says to Reese, rolling her shoulder and adjusting the holster invisibly nestled against her ribs, “and we’re the only cops dumb enough to let you get away with that shit. Put it away.”

Reese shrugs, folds the knife’s blade into the handle and tucks it away in his carefully rolled sock. The sock, peeking up over the top of his oxfords and disappearing into his pant leg, is lavender. Fusco wonders.

The train groans as it starts to pull away from the platform.

Finch clears his throat, neat and percussive. Fusco gives Finch his attention, because that’s what you do, but he fixes his gaze on Finch’s forehead, just above his left eye. That’s about all he can stand. “Thank you, Detective Carter,” he says. “He’s been playing with it all day. Have a seat.”

“It’s new,” Reese says, mildly defensive, as Carter and Fusco shuffle down the aisle and take their seats across. Fusco lets Carter lead the way, lets her take the seat directly across from Finch so Fusco winds up knee to knee with Reese. That’s fine. Reese may have knocked him around a little the last time they shared the same air, but somehow that relationship’s on firmer, friendlier ground. Fusco meets Reese’s gaze as he plucks at the knees of his pants and lowers himself into the grungy seat and Reese, unexpectedly, smiles at him. It’s an odd smile, darting and furtive. It doesn’t belong on Reese’s face and fortunately, it’s gone from his lips in an instant, though it hangs around in his eyes a while longer.

“Who’d you take the knife from?” Fusco asks, letting himself smile back. “Anyone I need to know about?”

“It’s taken care of, Lionel, but thanks for asking.”

“No problem.” Fusco leans forward, elbows on knees. “Do you know who killed my witness?”

“No.” Reese’s brow furrows. “Do you?”

“No,” Fusco admits. “I thought I did. Now I don’t think so.”

“What are you thinking now, Lionel?”

“That there’s more than one person who wanted him dead. A lot more. And that we need your help.”

Somewhere in the space across from him and to his right where Fusco isn’t looking for his own sake, Finch asks, “Where does your investigation currently stand?”

Fusco lets his eyes go soft and glide straight over Finch, and sharpen up once they’re safely fixed on Carter. She meets him, raises one eyebrow, shoots a sidelong look in Finch’s direction. Her lip curls very slightly, and in that curve he reads the words, “Jesus Christ, Fusco. Get a grip.” Out loud, she says, “We’re short on leads right now. Forensics has a lot of stray DNA to sort through, the ballistic report is out in limbo somewhere, and we’re fresh out of witnesses.” Her palms strike the tops of her thighs with a muted slap. “Tomorrow might be a different story, but right now, we don’t have too much to go on.”

“Hmm.” Fusco sneaks a look just in time to see Finch bite his lower lip and let it slip slowly from between his teeth. “Of course, you’re hamstrung by procedure. I’m not.”

Fusco jolts to attention, forgets to look away. “You have something,” he says.

And just like that, Finch is looking him in the eye. It's cotton-mouth, instant and debilitating.

He had planned, vaguely, to be uncomfortable in the next time he and Finch saw one another, for there to be a tightness in the air between them and many long pauses in a few forced conversations. Something like what they had way back in the beginning, only worse because they know now that it doesn’t need to be this way. They’ve made each other laugh by now, and made each other sick. There are things between them that can’t go away. Fusco planned to cringe away from the force of Finch’s hurt and confusion and anger.

He never expected an absence. He never expected Finch to regard him distantly, like Fusco barely means more to him than any other uninteresting stranger on a train.

Finch blinks at him. His eyes are so pale, so wide. You could freeze to death in there. “Well, not quite, Detective. But it’s a start.”

Fusco feels his throat working, revving up for the question he wants to ask, but it never quite gets going.

Carter asks it, seamlessly. “A start to what?”

“To discovering the identity of your shooter.” Finch pulls a suitcase out from beneath his seat and lays it out across his knees, fiddling with the clasps. “We received our tip-off well before the shooting was reported to the police. Mr. Reese was first on the scene and I began pulling relevant security footage not long after.”

The suitcase pops open, brassy clasps dangling as Finch passes Carter a sheaf of printed-out security stills and Fusco tears his eyes away from Finch’s face to look them over.

Relief, or something like it, washes over him when Fusco finds that in this moment, he does not need to find Finch impressive.

“Am I supposed to recognize this guy?” Fusco hears himself snap.

“If you did, it would certainly speed our work along. But I gather from your reaction that you don’t. Still, we have body type…”

Tall. Broad. Fat, maybe, though Fusco wonders if some of the bulk might be body armor. It’s hard to tell. He’s swathed in a dark coat, head and face covered with hat and what looks like a scarf.

“…we have method of entry…”

Carter was probably right, Fusco thinks to himself as Finch flips the page. This guy’s a professional. He’s neat and he’s quick, if the time stamps are anything to go by, and he doesn’t look around or hesitate or look anything but calm as he attaches plastic explosives to the door, right by the lock.

“…and, best of all, even though we can’t identify him from this footage, it’s a simple, if dull, matter of scanning other security cameras in the area to trace the path he took to and from the house. If we can discover a home, a car, a taxi he hired on the way, that’s the break we need.”

“Sounds good,” Fusco admits. “Who’s going to do all that sorting?”

Finch shrugs. “It’ll be time intensive, but less so than if it were left to the police.”

“Thanks.”

Finch barrels onward like he never heard. “I’m afraid that’s not all. Your department already knows, but has not yet informed you, that a call was placed from within the safehouse phone at precisely 12:05 AM to a prepaid phone, the whereabouts of which are currently unknown, as there’s nothing to track.” He sighs wistfully. “At the moment, your department is seeking the permission of the phone company to delve deeper into the records. I never bothered to ask.” He returns to rummaging around in the suitcase, retrieves a neatly-stapled stack of paper, which he hands to Carter.  “The call was made at 12:05 and lasted a full minute. The owner of the prepaid cell phone then immediately made a call of their own to this number.” Finch taps the sheet, makes the paper flutter. “Yet another prepaid cell phone. The call is similarly brief. That’s the last we’ve heard from our mystery phone.”

“And the new one?” Carter asks.

“Its current location is similarly inscrutable. Most likely, it’s been destroyed or disabled. Here’s something interesting. That prepaid phone was activated quite some time ago, but this is the first time it was ever used to make or receive a call.”

Carter rests her chin on her knuckles. “So who made the original call? The one in the safehouse.”

“Not to point any fingers,” Finch says, “but Detective Murphy’s cell phone is unquestionably the source of the call.”

Phone records fall whispering from Carter’s hand. “You didn’t want to start with that?”

“I was concerned it would distract you from the plain facts of the case.” Finch frowns. “In any case, we now have our leak, for all the good it does us. And him. I’m uncertain of what he was hoping to achieve by betraying Gabe’s location, but frankly, Detective Fusco, I’m surprised you weren’t aware of his allegiances, given your connections. I only wish I’d had the foresight to tap his phone.”

“Yeah, well.” Fusco leans forward, makes himself look Finch in the face. He looks like Fusco always thought he did, before things became strange between them. Disapproving. Disgusted. Like being in the same room with someone as weak and incompetent and distasteful as Fusco is a chore he just has to push through. “Don’t beat yourself up about it,” he says “You’re not psychic.”

Finch’s eyes narrow, bitter slits behind glass. “No. But then, if I was as informed as you claim you are, I don’t think I’d need to be.”

“You have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about.”

The brakes on the subway squeal in agony as they pull into another station but the inside of their car is deathly quiet. The doors clatter open, hold position, and shudder closed again when no one enters their car.

“Excuse me?” Finch says.

“Your theory about Murphy. It makes sense, I guess, from where you’re sitting. But not from over here. I’m not gonna pretend that I know him so well and he’s such a good guy and he’d never ever do anything like this. I don’t know what he would or wouldn’t do; I barely knew the guy. But I knew…I got to know Gabe kinda well, towards the end. And, you know, the guy was a thief and a shithead and he was desperate and he might…he might do something dumb. If he thought it’d save his life. He might do that.”

Fusco’s getting stared at, he knows. And he deserves it, probably, because he’s crazy to talk to Finch like that and bitter, maybe, bitter because he ruined what’s between them. But right, too, he thinks. I’m a bitter fuck, but I’m right.

“He was cuffed,” Fusco continues, rubbing at the side of his face. “At the scene. You saw.”

Reese nods once.

“He wasn’t roughed up or anything. Autopsy’s not ‘til tomorrow, so I’ll know more then, but from what I could see, it’s just the gunshot wound. Just that. Once in the back of the head, nice and neat. No bruises, no cuts, no misfires, no nothing.  You look at him, you look at how tore up the other guys were and you…you can’t see what the cuffs have to do with anything. You can’t see where Gabe tried to fight or hide or struggle or anything, and you can’t see what the shooter would have done with him. And it, uh, it makes me think the shooter never cuffed him. That the cops who were protecting him did. That Gabe stole Murphy’s cellphone and made that call and that he was already handcuffed when the killer busted through that door. That’s, uh, that’s how I see it, anyway.”

Finch’s mouth twitches downward. “An interesting theory, Detective. Perhaps even a likely one. And, if incriminating fingerprints can be found on the phone, a provable one. We’ll keep it in mind.” He leans forward. “Now who do you suppose he was calling?”

“I don’t know,” Fusco says. “If you don’t know, how the hell would I know?”

“You seem to think you have insight.”

“I don’t. I just talked to the guy. I talked to all of those guys, and maybe I wasn’t uncovering the mysteries of the human heart or whatever the fuck, but at least I talked to them.”

Finch’s voice is muted and flat when he says, “You seem dissatisfied.”

“Well, I am. I am dissatisfied. A guy I promised to look out for just got killed, and none of us saw it coming. And I want to, you know, to hope here, that you guys are going to magic up a way out of this, but…”

“I’m sorry, Detective, if you feel we haven’t been doing our jobs…”

“Shut up,” he says, bizarrely calm, calmer than he feels on the inside. “You’re not the one I’m pissed at.” He rubs at his own jaw, soft with fat, prickly with stubble. “I want a new witness,” he says.

Finch shrugs. “If you can procure one…”

“I can.”

His mouth curves down, all confusion. “Then why…?” And then he understands. He understands it quietly, but in the instant when the penny drops, there’s the slightest hint of alarm in his eyes and it’s a shock because this is the first real emotion he’s shown since Fusco got into the subway car. It’s all gone in a blink and then Finch, with a sigh that trembles only slightly, turns his head to stare down the wide empty aisle at nothing in particular. “It’s a noble offer, Detective, but an unnecessary one. As I said, we have leads.”

“We’ve had leads,” Fusco points out. “They haven’t panned out so well. Maybe this time they will, and what I promise tonight won’t matter. I just want to be sure. I want to have one sure thing.”

He’s half-aware of Carter going tense beside him, sitting up and closing ranks. “What are we talking about?”

Finch just nods, careful and slow. “And you’re sure of yourself, are you?”

“No. Shit, no. That’s why I’m sitting here telling you all about it instead of taking care of this myself. I guess you know by now that I need, you know, a parole officer. A sponsor. Someone to push me into doing the right thing. Right now, I know what needs to be done. Tomorrow? Hell, ten minutes from now? I might not be able to go through with it. So I’m just letting you all know now that I’m willing so you know where to push me if it comes to that.”

“And that’s my responsibility, is it?”

Carter repeats, “What the hell are we talking about?” but from the way she says it, half worry, half rage, Fusco thinks she already knows.

“I know what these guys did,” Fusco begins, “and I can explain how I know it, which is more than you guys can say. I know what I did, and the cops around me did, and what Gabe did, almost. I know more than you about this, and I can back it up with evidence. Old bodies, bad books. I even have that bulletproof vest still, from that night. Stuffed under my bed because I wasn’t sure how to get rid of it, but the slugs are still stuck in there. All I need to do to end this thing right now is stop worrying about what happens to me.”

Finch closes his eyes. “Don’t be melodramatic. It doesn’t suit you. We have plenty to go on.”

“And if it goes nowhere? Or if we follow that shooter and it turns out he’s just one of a hundred people who wanted Gabe dead anyway?”

His eyelids crinkle and tighten behind the frames of his glasses.

Reese and Carter keep shooting glances diagonally to one another, eyebrows raised and faces carefully still. They're wondering about us, Fusco thinks. They're wondering why suddenly he can’t stand to look at me. Fuck 'em. It's not their business. Fuck 'em. 

Finch's face is still tilted toward the empty space down the subway car's center aisle toward anything but Fusco. He takes a neat little breath of air. His eyes flutter open, clear and unclouded by emotion. Finch's neat brown oxfords, polished to high gloss, tap the dirty steel floor. "I wouldn't like to lose your services, Detective" he says evenly. "Your contributions to our cause have been...invaluable, and if there is an alternative, I'd like to take it. But you do make a compelling argument." He nods to himself, deep in thought. "Hold off for now. We'll try to find a way around it. But, of course, the choice to proceed ultimately rests with you."

"Yeah," Fusco says. "Well, you know my choice."

"You can’t do that," Carter hisses, easing her hand around the crook of Fusco's elbow and gripping tight. "We’re not going to throw him away like that."

Finch blinks owlishly. "Well, we may have to. I understand your reticence, Detective Carter, but the point still stands. He is, without a doubt, the best witness we have."

"We'll find a better one," she says, fiercely. She jerks at his arm so his elbow jabs hard into her side, the flesh just above her hip, and she does not seem to notice.

Dreary fluorescent light begins to flutter through the windows in bursts as the brakes shriek in anticipation of the upcoming platform. "I urge you to try." Finch raises his voice over the din. "We'll all try. Whether or not we succeed remains to be seen." His head tilts. "I believe this is your stop."

She stands along with the jolting stop of the subway, dragging Fusco by the arm as she rises, and storms out of the car as soon as the door shudders open. She pushes roughly into the platform and Fusco trails behind her like a baffled Mylar balloon, eyes locked on the tight set of her shoulders.

She's saying something, but her face is turned from him and in the noise of the station, he can't quite hear her. The only part he catches is, "...thought he was your friend."

"He's not," Fusco says as he jogs a few steps to keep pace with her. "He's not my friend. He's my...boss. Or something. We can't be friends. That's the whole point."

"If he's your boss, he should be looking out for you. For us. There's a line between...between being a professional, treating this like a job, and killing you. And he's killing you. Don't you see that?"

"He's not killing me. He’s letting me…I'm just...I'm coming clean. That's what you wanted, remember?"

"Yeah." Her hand sinks into the front of her hair. "Yeah, that's what I wanted. Cause cops do so well in prison. And the NYPD's got a real good track record of protecting witnesses on their way to the stand these days. You're gonna be fine. Fuck."

"Carter.” He makes a grab for her shoulder and she shakes him off.

“Don’t you,” as she steps onto the escalator and starts to ascend to the world above, “don’t you grab at me.”

“Sorry.” He climbs onto the step below her and puts his hand next to hers on the rail. “Look, I’m just putting it out there, okay? Making sure he knows – they know – that I’m willing to do what it takes. It’s just a safety net. If we find the lead we’re looking for, I won’t have to and it won’t mean anything. Alright?”

She won’t look at him either. “Don’t threaten me,” she says as her hair comes alive suddenly as the first few gasps of fresh air begin to reach them. “You can tell yourself whatever the hell you like, but I won’t stand here and listen to you threaten that, you understand?”

“Carter…” he begins, but it’s the escalator’s end and she’s already walking tight and fast along the sidewalk, away from him. Going home, maybe. And it’s good; she should go home. Get some rest, break away.

He winds up back at the precinct, waiting on the results of an autopsy, because he can’t face the empty moan of his apartment or the quiet of his phone.

 

Chapter 20

Notes:

Hey, just wanted to say sorry for the even-later-than-usual-wow-what-are-you-even-doing-for-a-month-and-a-half chapter. I had a very hectic October and I'm hoping to be a little more timely with my updates from now on.

He wakes up too early.

He’s been doing that, lately. Like his eyes just can’t stay shut. Like it’s way too easy to rupture his peace of mind and every creak and groan and siren is enough to leave him flat on his back with his eyes locked on the water stained ceiling.

He wakes up too early for work, but not early enough to justify rolling over and pretending to sleep for a while. He’s not totally sure what it was that woke him or who’s up and making noise at this time of morning because usually around this time even the couple next door that fights and the people upstairs who play bad, thumping music all through the night are winding down and drifting off. Maybe it was pipes. Maybe the wind changed and the whole building reseated itself the way it does. Maybe it was nothing real, just a nasty idea that jostled him awake, because the first thought he has, after wondering what it was that woke him up, is that he doesn’t know if Finch is still spying on him.

Fusco hasn’t tried to blind Finch’s eyes on him yet. He isn’t smart enough about cameras and microphones to be completely successful in shutting Finch out. He guesses he could start by getting a new phone, new computer, new everything. Or none of them, nothing at all. He could take that stupid bobblehead still gathering dust on his desk and drop it in the trash or in traffic. They sell devices that seek out other devices and he could sweep his apartment in a grid, removing bugs when he finds them. Go off the grid and anything he has to say to the likes of Reese and Finch can go through Carter.

That wouldn’t last long, he admits to himself with a straight, dry-lipped smile at nothing. In a day there would be Reese in his apartment or in the backseat of his car with crackling knuckles and quiet threats and suddenly Fusco would have a brand new phone in his pocket and his work and his home and everything in between would be wired and they’d have him calling in every eight hours and turning out his pockets to prove that whatever he’s done, he’s not still doing it and whatever disagreements they’ve had, he’s not trying to leave them.

Of course Finch is spying on him. Not out of worry or misplaced affection, but because Fusco is an asset and a liability in one and Finch has to keep tabs so Fusco can’t break what they built.

With that in mind, he takes a long shower. He never has the time or the hot water and what is there of him that Finch hasn’t already seen?

He dries off slow and thorough, gets dressed stop-and-start, because too many of the things in his closet and dresser drawers are presents from Finch and he can’t wear those in good conscience, not now. It’s getting so he can’t pick up a pair of socks without puzzling for a while: are these his? If I wear these, am I scum?

Mostly it’s the nice stuff, the stuff he actually wants to wear, that he has to watch out for.

There’s still time before he has to brave his commute, so he takes the day’s first cup of coffee at home. Instant. Acrid black powder he spoons from a big, rattling tin. He drinks it and remembers drinking one of the best cups of coffee he’s ever had from an oversized mug across from Finch with his tea and his soft, coaxing words and soft, coaxing touches.

He remembers, obsessively, that high number on the receipt and he swallows his instant coffee down hot and bitter and he comes in too early for his shift.

 

---

 

His new friend will not stop biting his nails. Not that Fusco's asked him to stop because who gives a shit, really, but the nibbling, squirrelish nervousness is getting to him. It makes his palms itch.

"Well," his friend begins finally, “I can’t tell you about that.”

"Then what the hell am I paying you for, Ray?”

“Okay, okay, calm your shit.” Ray stops biting his nails, finally, and rubs shiny palms against the knees of his jeans. “Just, you know, I’m not really supposed to be talking about this. I’m not supposed to be talking to you in general.”

Fusco’s palm wanders up to push against his temple. “Ray. Dig deep.”

“’Kaaaaay.” He drags it out long and wobbly as he peers around, over his shoulder.

Ray, it’s turning out pretty quickly, is the worrying type. The cut-and-run type. And much as Gabe turned out to be a lousy investment, at least you could more or less be sure that he’d stick around, if only because he didn’t have the brains to run. Ray’s smarter than Gabe was, and Ray’s cautious. Because of this, Ray might rabbit. It’s okay, Fusco reassures himself. He doesn’t want or need a new Gabe, not precisely. He just needs to be pointed in the right direction.

“I understand,” Fusco prompts, “that Gabe turning witness was a group decision.”

“Yeah.” Ray unwinds the crick in his neck and faces forward. “You could call it that.”

“So it wasn’t a group decision?”

“Well, Gabe didn’t make it. I don’t know if he bullshitted to you that this was all his grand scheme or what, but the only reason he was involved is because he was there and he didn’t mind disappearing for a while. Or forever. Get it?”

“Get what? You barely told me anything.”

Ray doesn’t answer, he just starts to fidget like he’s developing a full body itch.

“You don’t have to name names,” Fusco reassures. “Not yet, anyway.”

“Several individuals,” Ray begins with the kind of emphasis that tells Fusco that this is as much of a name as these individuals are ever going to get, “didn’t appreciate having the cops sniffing around their clubhouse in the middle of a party. They figured that anyone who was stupid enough to bring an HR informant to a party and get caught needed to disappear, right? So they think they could have the stupid assholes in question killed, only that’s kind of messy and nobody wanted to go through the trouble of starting a war, what with it being strange days since the Italians took back Brighton Beach. Who needs that kind of trouble? If it’s anybody’s war, it’s HR’s.

“So somebody, some smart underachiever, realizes that nobody has to get involved. We just have to feed the cops or HR or both a little info. Speed things up a little. All we have to do is give ‘em anonymous tips or, better yet, get them a star witness. Not necessarily the guy that knows the most, but the guy you could feed everything that everybody knows and you don’t care too much if he gets fuckin’ killed. You know. So.”

“And Gabe was that guy.”

“Gabe was a pain in everyone’s ass. You know that. Dude burned all kinds of bridges. Some kind of kleptomaniac or something, like he couldn’t not dick you over and steal all your shit. Somebody would’ve killed him whether he turned witness or not.”

Fusco frowns.

“It’s not like they forced him, if that makes you feel any better,” Ray says. “They were never gonna pick him out for this thing. The guy’s an unreliable piece of shit. He was just the only one that volunteered.”

Fusco winces and isn’t completely sure why. “So. Ah. These guys put the word out that they were looking for someone willing to do a stay in witness protection or federal prison. Gabe comes forward. They give him…well, they give him almost nothing. Make him call in. Why is that?”

Ray takes a breath and he hesitates. His teeth click. “What I just told you,” he says, “I know because my boss tried to get me to volunteer, okay? That’s what I’m doing here. That’s the only reason I’m talking to you. The rest of what I tell you that’s, uh, that’s guesswork. That’s what we call “conjecture,” right? As in, it might as well not be true.”

“Go on.”

He says, “There might have been a guy.”

“A guy.”

“Yeah. And I’m not bullshitting around or anything, trying to get out of giving you real information. I don’t know his name or his face or if he’s real or a lie or an urban legend. He was supposed to be some kind of grunt for the company looking to break away. Story goes, he had dirt on these guys. Real dirt. This guy knew where the fuckin’ bodies were buried, dude. And he was a known entity, too. I’d been hearing about him for over a year before this whole thing got started. It was just that nobody gave a shit, back then. Nobody was getting burned by that trade, nobody dangerous was looking into them, so why bother?

“But that guy kept fishing and kept fishing. I think he talked to that cop. You know, the dead one. So close and yet so far, right?” Ray rubs his chin. “But finally some people up top decided to play ball with this guy. And that’s why the call-in system. Word is, the snitch insisted on it. Keep in mind, this could all be bullshit. I’m just telling you what I’ve heard from friends in high places.”

“And do your friends in high places know who the mystery snitch is?”

He laughs, a strange, scratchy little yelp. “If they do, they’re sure as fuck not telling me about it. Guy might as well be the Easter Bunny.” He frowns, thoughtful. “The Pedo Bunny,” he tests.

“Not funny, Ray.”

“Eh. I tried. My point is, I don’t know who he is, I don’t know of anyone who definitely knows who he is, and anybody I could figure probably knows who he isn’t worth my life to tell you about. Sorry.”

He thinks as he strikes, as he pins Ray’s throat to the wall with his forearm, that Ray isn’t sorry at all.

 

---

 

She’s on her phone and she won’t look at him.

Not that she just isn’t paying attention to him. That wouldn’t put him on edge. He and Carter have their own separate troubles and he thinks they’re both aware of that, both respectful of the line. If he was honest, Fusco would have to admit that it still gives him a sense of relief to have the spotlight of her focus pointed elsewhere. Part of him still thinks that, even after everything they’ve been through and everything she’s forgiven him for, one day Carter’s going to say “Gotcha,” cuff him, and all her trust will have been a cruel and clever trick. It’s not an idea based in concrete suspicions; it’s just a delusion that slips in, sometimes.

The way she isn’t looking at him now doesn’t give him that stupid, paranoid relief. She’s aware of him. He sees the twitch in her cheek, in the muscles around her eye when he sits down. He sees the way nothing changes about her posture except that her fingers curl just slightly to cover her lips. She is posed, stiffly, in the shape of casual. She is fighting not to glance at him.

He waits patiently until her phone call ends with the soft “Thank you” Carter half-whispers to the person on the other end of the line. Finally, she lets herself look at Fusco. The uneasiness is there in her eyes, pushed far back, deep in the sockets, where he can only barely see it peeking out at him.

“So, how’d it go?” she asks.

“Not great,” he admits, pulling his chair out with a metallic shriek as its steel feet are dragged across linoleum. “This one’s a hell of a lot more straightforward, but he still needs that delicate touch or whatever. Reassurances, that kind of thing.”

Carter exhales through her nose. “Can you blame him?”

No, Fusco thinks to himself, remembering Gabe’s shattered head. No, of course not. Instead he says, fake-despairingly, “Snitches these days,” and then, “Who was that on the phone?”

“Friend of mine,” she says, dismissive. Carter has that sweet, smooth voice and while she does a good job of keeping it calm, there’s a ragged, croaky tail to it now that is not always there. “Forensics. I wanted to see if they’d found anything we don’t already know about.”

“Thanks. Good thinking.” He pinches at his chin. “You ever have problems with that?”

Carter tilts her head, wrinkles her brow.

“Knowing stuff about a case that you’re not supposed to know about yet.” He pushes his elbows forward on the desk, crinkling paperwork. Sterile, papery office scents rise. “I keep wanting to remind people about the security footage before I realize that warrant hasn’t come through yet.”

She nods, smiles. “Yeah. All the time.”

“Although I guess I have more experience at it,” he ruminates, “than you do.”

The corner of her mouth twitches.

His head drops, eyes on his folded hands on the desk. “What did Finch say?” he asks. He scratches at a ragged cuticle.

Carter remains a silent, thorny presence just out of his line of sight.

“I know it was him,” Fusco says, “so why keep it from me?”

Her breaths are hesitant. Then, strong and clear, “Because he asked me to.”

“And since when do you live and die by what he asks you to do?”

“Since I started agreeing with him.”

He lifts his head. She holds his gaze.

“You agree with him,” he repeats, careful and slow.

“We talked.”

“Yeah?”

“Or.” Her hands twist. “I confronted him.”

“What the hell did you do that for?”

“You’re my partner,” she says, as though that explains it.

“You’re keeping things from me,” he says between his teeth.

“You’re being an idiot,” she hisses back, “so yeah, I’m keeping things from you.”

He scrambles for the phone in his pocket. “Alright. Alright, fine.” She reaches out to him, tries to grab his arm, and he shrugs her away. “I’ll ask him myself.”

“Don’t,” she says. “You don’t want to know.”

He’s already wrestling the phone away and making for the back of the precinct.

Fusco hides out in the handicap stall of the men’s room that no one ever uses if they can help it, the one with the faulty lighting where there’re never enough paper towels. Finch picks up on the fourth ring. It’s longer than he generally lets these things go, Fusco thinks. Not that he’s ever counted how many rings it takes for Finch to answer the phone, not before today. The silence at the other end of the line is apprehensive.

“Hey,” Fusco barks with this weird, breathless, futile energy. All pissed off and nowhere to go, he guesses.

“Hello.” Finch’s voice is very calm, very careful.

He was waiting for it. Even after the last time they spoke, when Finch treated him like a stranger and Fusco couldn’t bear to look at him, when it was all so bitter and cold, Fusco’s still waiting on his word. On the sound of his voice. He misses those teasing phone calls, he realizes.

Finch half-forms a few words, edging into the gap Fusco’s silence left. Finally he manages, in his most clipped and formal tones, a “How can I help you, Detective?”

“You can stop keeping me out of the goddamn loop, for one thing.” Angry. He still sounds so damn angry.

“Ah. Hmm.” He clears his throat. “I was afraid it might be something like that. I’ll have to have a word with Detective Carter about confidentiality.”

“She didn’t tell me. I caught her at it. I caught my partner hiding information from me.”

“And, ah.” Finch hums. “And that’s a problem for you?”

“She’s my partner.”

“You’re no stranger to hiding information from her under orders, Detective. You must admit, it’s more than a little hypocritical of you to expect total honesty from Detective Carter.”

“Yeah, but,” he splutters, sighs, recovers. “I thought we were past that cloak and dagger shit.”

“We were,” Finch says. Weaker, he rephrases: “We are.”

He can’t even respond to that.

“I’m just…” Finch begins, words tight and truncated. “I want very badly to trust you.”

Fusco coughs.

“So…very badly. To believe that I understand how you think, and that I can…” he trails off, slightly breathless. Inhaling, he begins again. “Predict you. Predict what you’ll do. I believed that I could for a very long time and I’m finding lately that that’s just…just not true. I’m finding that you’re rather like John in the sense that you’ll do the right thing whether I want you to or not and I’m trying very hard to…respect that. Even as it worries me. Deeply.”

Eyes on the tile between his shoes, Fusco asks in a low, lifeless rumble, “Are you going to tell me the thing you’re trying to hide from me or should I go and guilt it out of Carter?”

“It won’t do you any good to know.”

“I can handle it.” His throat is dry and raspy. “Go on. Go on, shoot.”

Finch does not shoot. Finch does breathing exercises. Finch hesitates. Finch does something that makes the worry, the breathlessness drain out of his voice, leaving only cool professionalism. “Our analysis of the security footage has proven…less than helpful,” Finch says. “I think our shooter may have known where the cameras were located and deliberately avoided them where able.”

Fusco lets out a strange, hoarse bark of laughter. “Smart.”

“Yes.” Finch lets the word hang silent and for a second, Fusco feels around, rubs his palms against his knees, really tries to figure out what it is that Finch wants him to pick up from that before he realizes that it’s nothing, there’s nothing, genius Finch is just as unsure and in the dark as he is, and isn’t that just a beautiful, terrible thing to know?

“So what now?” he asks.

“We try something else,” Finch says, firmly. “I’m not done with my work. Mr. Reese isn’t done with his. You and Detective Carter are not done with yours. There will be another way, a simple way, and all I want is to discourage any theatrics on your part.”

“’Theatrics’?”

“Dramatic gestures. Fffffatalistic thinking.” The ‘f’ in ‘fatalistic’ rips away from Finch’s lower lip with what sounds like a nervous burst of spit, the unexpected resurgence of a long-dead stammer. “You know what I mean,” he says.

“You trying to keep me from turning myself in?”

“Of course I am.” Finch’s voice is tight, impatient. “It’s the last resort, Detective. The very last resort. I thought I made that clear.”

It’s what he needed to hear, in a way, in that subway car. Even though, of course he knew that Finch couldn’t be that petty, that hateful, that Finch had a heart under all that fabric and wire. Just a should-be-unnecessary reminder that Finch prefers Fusco alive to Fusco dead. “You didn’t.”

Finch’s breath is weary and hissing. “I have no interest in seeing you go to prison, Detective. Neither does Mr. Reese, and Detective Carter has made it her personal mission to ensure that you remain her partner at all costs. You don’t belong in there and frankly,” and there comes the busy tapping of computer keys, a wobbly edge of wry humor in his voice, “I don’t like your odds.”

“Like you’d do so much better.”

“I would,” Finch replies, indignant. “I may not look it, but I’m extremely adaptable. I’m mechanically gifted. I’m intelligent. I’m quiet. I employ excellent lawyers. And, most importantly, I am not a corrupt police detective. I’d serve half a sentence before being released on good behavior. You’d be lucky to survive the first night.” His indignation sputters, fades as he finishes the sentence, as he realizes what he just said.

He’s probably right, Fusco thinks distantly. “I’d be dead the second I let myself sleep with both eyes shut,” he says with a shrug. “I’ll give you that. I’m just wondering how long someone like you survives without a personal computer.”

“Fair point,” Finch concedes.

“How many cigarettes do you think you’re worth, genius?”

“My point,” Finch interrupts hastily, “is that none of this speculation about which of us is best suited to prison survival matters in the slightest because you, Detective, are not going to prison.”  He nearly laughs with relief as he says it, as he throws that one down like a trump card. “I won’t have you put in a position where you feel compelled to turn yourself in.”

“That’s, uh.” He shoves his hand deep into one pocket, scratching at the seam and catching pearls of lint beneath his fingernails. “That’s not your call to make, though, is it? Whether I go through with this or not.”

“Well, no, Detective. It’s your decision. Your life, your misdeeds.”

“So who,” he asks, “do you think is compelling me, here?”

“No one but yourself.” Finch has gone stony, solemn again. “And I know it’s not my place to…to try to force you one way or the other. I can only offer my advice and respect whatever choice you ultimately come to. But, if the choice were mine to make…”

“It’s not.”

“…I wouldn’t let you do this to yourself. And the fact that you seem bound and determined to see this through is what worries me.”

It’s not making him feel any better, he realizes suddenly. The confirmation that he’s not completely disposable and Finch is not the bastard Fusco never truly believed he was. It’s true, it’s true and he needed to hear it, but it’s not making him feel any better. “You say I don’t belong in there...”

“You don’t. Prison provides rehabilitation, or else it keeps dangerous criminals off the streets. You’ve been rehabilitated and…” He swallows. “…And you are not dangerous, Detective.”

He thinks about the first person he ever shot unprovoked. He thinks about making Stills disappear, effortless, like a magic trick. He thinks about himself on the curb, watching Simmons’ house, unsure of what’s about to happen. “You don’t really know shit about me, do you?”

“I know everything about you,” he says. “Nearly.”

“Then you know what happens next,” Fusco says.

Finch murmurs, “Please don’t,” but Fusco is already hanging up.

In the empty bathroom, he washes his hands for show and the fluorescent ceiling lights flicker and buzz.

Back in the light, Carter is waiting, half-risen from her chair. She looks justifiably annoyed, justifiably guilty, strangely relieved. “I was asking him how it was going so far,” she explains to him as he walks past her to his own desk. “I didn’t want to get you all worked up over bad news that might just be temporary.”

He stops in his tracks by Carter’s desk, unwilling to really look at her but not really wanting to go a step further from her either. “I don’t think it’s temporary,” he says, rubbing at the bone beneath his eye.

“That’s a shitty attitude to take.”

He laughs in a dry burst against the inside of his arm. “Yeah. Sorry.”

She reaches out, taps the fingertips of his free hand with her own. “We’ll figure it out, okay? You and me.”

“Sure.”

“We will,” she insists, sliding her fingers between his. “I won’t hide information from you again.”

“Thanks,” he says, and then, repeating, turning it over in his mouth, he adds, “We will.”

He lets himself believe it for a few hours, until he’s getting coffee for the pair of them and while he’s filling up the first cup, enjoying the feel of heat through Styrofoam against his calloused palm, his arm is jostled, sending scalding drops of coffee over his hand and his wrist and the sleeve of his jacket. Simmons curls sharp fingers in the bend of Fusco’s elbow and mutters in his ear, “Let’s take a walk.”

He leaves the half-filled cup of coffee steaming gently there beside the machine. If Carter ever sees it, if Carter knows he’s gone, if Carter ever looks up from her work and wonders where he went off to, he never finds out.

 

---

 

The doors out of the precinct open groaningly, laboriously, and the frigid fall air hits him like a punch to the gut. It's a miserable kind of day, gray skies and weak light and thin, icy smatterings of rain. Fusco's foot falls squarely in a small puddle as he and Simmons patter wetly down the stairs from the precinct and into the parking lot.

He’d thought, he’d assumed when Simmons grabbed him that taking a walk would lead them deeper into the precinct, to a supply closet or a dark file room. Somewhere they could talk or fight without interruption.

Fusco wonders if Simmons is afraid of being overheard inside the precinct. He wonders this, but he doesn’t actually say the words.

Simmons doesn’t say anything either. Outside of threats, Simmons has never been the kind to talk.

The expected forced march around back of the precinct or into the passenger seat of a patrol car never actually happens. Simmons’ face remains set, his collar turned up, gloved left hand shoved hard in his coat pocket, hat pulled low over his ears. Fusco can just see the tops of his cheekbones, the steely edge of his eyes.

Fusco didn’t bring a coat.

They step on to the sidewalk, turn left, and take a walk.

“Should I have brought a coat?” Fusco asks.

Simmons maintains the harsh pinch of his fingers in the crook of Fusco’s arm. He settles into a long and even stride, which for Fusco is halfway to jogging.

Now that he’s spoken, it’s easier to keep running his dumb mouth so he asks, struggling to keep up, “Are you pissed ‘cause I stopped by your house the other day?”

His breath rasps. “Yeah, Lionel. Yeah, I’m pissed. But this isn’t about that.”

“Okay.” Fusco experiments with twisting his arm out of Simmons’ grip. No dice. The guy’s got fingers like fucking pliers. “So what’s your problem, buddy?”

His face changes, becomes very solemn and careful, like he worries about what to say next. It’s a face that looks wrong stuck on Simmons. “Did I, ah.” He releases a thin cloud of steam from between his lips. “Did I wound you at some point, Lionel?”

It’s a weird, sensitive thing to ask, Fusco thinks. He begins to test the length of Simmons grip by drifting away from him, just a little, just so they’re not joined at shoulder and hip, or near enough. Just enough so the wind can whistle between them. “Yeah. You have. Lots of times. Why?”

Simmons jerks Fusco back against his side. “Because there’s a lack of trust here. A lack of good faith. I’ve looked out for you, I’ve been a lifeline to you…”

Fusco’s laugh is bitter and met with a rough drag forward that nearly brings him to his knees on the concrete. He gets his feet under him at the last second, pops back up at Simmons’ side like nothing’s wrong and he was never falling.

“Shut up,” Simmons snarls without sparing him a look. “Don’t pretend you wouldn’t be in prison or dead right now if I hadn’t saved your neck.”

It’s true. Funny in an awful way, but extremely true. In the end Fusco owes more to the protection of Carter, of Reese, of Finch, but yeah, Simmons has saved his neck once or twice. Fusco knows it’s not out of the goodness of his heart or anything – he’s not that deluded – but Simmons has been a protector to him, in his way.

“I took you on because I trusted you to know the score here. To be smart and keep your mouth shut. I helped cover up what you did because I thought you’d be a good investment. Turns out, you’re nothing but trouble.”

“I’ve had nothing but trouble,” Fusco says. “The past two years, I’ve had nothing but. Don’t be making out like I betrayed you somehow after the hell I’ve been through. You know me. You know I wouldn’t be walking the streets right now if you hadn’t helped me when I asked for it. You know HR owns me. You don’t get to blame me when I take a hit for doing what you asked me to do.”

Simmons’ laugh is chalky and tired. “Doesn’t matter why this shit happens to you, does it? What matters is that every time, it happens to you.” He releases his deathgrip on Fusco’s elbow, trades it for a friendlier, but no less unbreakable, hand on Fusco’s shoulder. “You’re a millstone,” he says almost warmly. “You’ll drag us all down with you if we let you.”

He doesn’t want to talk anymore about ways in which he’s been a disappointment. It aches, though he knows it shouldn’t. He hasn’t taken pride in the work he did for HR in a long time, maybe never. “Is this it?”

Simmons is quiet. He picks up the pace.

“What I want to know is, why today? Was there a change in the case I haven’t heard about yet? Did I piss you off without knowing it? Or is it just that you’d been meaning to get to it and today happened to be the day?”

The hand is back on his elbow and pulling hard, and Fusco keeps bumping people, jostling them with his shoulder, but he’s aware of them only distantly, like there’s a thick layer of fog between him and them. He wonders if the two of them look crazy right now.

“You know I haven’t seen my son in weeks.” He’s babbling, he thinks. He wishes he could stop. He wishes he could have dignity. “Must be…more than three. More than four. You couldn’t wait until after I saw him again? You couldn’t wait that long?”

“Shut up, Fusco.”

He does. He goes mute as a stone and he drifts alongside Simmons, silent and obedient and too numb to be scared.

“I’ve been thinking,” Simmons says. “About what you said.”

“What did I say?”

“When you were failing to get anything worth hearing out of your witness, you said that it didn’t matter to you what we did. That if legal means failed, we might as well kill ‘em all on our own.” Finally, Simmons looks at him, looks Fusco right in the face and he wishes Simmons hadn’t. “Legal means have failed.”

“Not yet,” Fusco says, though he doesn’t believe it.

“For our purposes, they have. Useless as you are, when they hit you, they hit us and it’s been way too damn long without some direct retribution to the ones responsible. We’re starting to look weak.” His shoulders roll, all lean muscle, beneath the thick cover of his jacket. “I won’t let you make me look weak, Lionel.”

“Alright.” The feeling’s coming back into his fingertips and his hearing is sharper and less filled with buzzes and howls. “Alright. You know, like I said, fuck it. Who cares how those guys get taken out, so long as it happens?”

“Glad you see it my way.”

“So, listen. If we’re off to abduct some scumbag right now well, okay, I’ll lose no sleep over it. But I, um, I’m working pretty closely on the side of the angels right now.” The two of them meander to a stop in front of a pizza joint and just stand there, sodden and idle on the sidewalk, watching the street. They’re almost arm in arm. “As far as my partner knows, I just went to get her some coffee and never came back. She’s gonna want to know where I am and if I can’t beg her off, she’ll track me down.” Or someone will. Someone.

Simmons turns them both so they’re face to face, peering at each other all closed off and suspicious.  He pats down the front of Fusco’s chest, finds the rectangular lump of his cell phone. Plucking it loose, Simmons weighs it in his palm, tosses it up once or twice. Then he drops it to the sidewalk between their toes and, unceremoniously, brings his heel down on it.

“You’re not taking her calls, Lionel.”

He tries not to let his face show that his lifeline lies cracked under Simmons’ shoe, but it probably shows anyway. For someone who’s a liar by trade, Fusco’s never been very good at it. So he just commits to looking downtrodden. He hugs himself, lets go of a shiver he’s been holding back. “So now what?” he asks.

Simmons turns away from him. He peers down the street, eyes narrow with intent, and eventually his gaze falls on an inconspicuous silver sedan ponderously rounding the block and trundling down towards them. “We’re gonna go dump some trash in the woods,” he says.

The silver sedan pulls up in front of them, tinted windows blank and expectant.

“What’re we dumping?” he asks. “Who are we dumping?”

A heavy palm falls against his back, between his shoulder blades, shoving him forward as Simmons opens the door to the backseat of that car.

Fusco’s shoulder clips the edge of the car door as they pass each other by. His knees hit the car seat with a muted thump and that trips him up so he stumbles into the car, seat cushion fat beneath his hands, wide shoulder hard beneath his forehead.

He is leaning on a stranger.

Simmons is still shoving at him, so Fusco pulls his feet in before Simmons can slam the door on them. He pushes himself away from the backseat’s other occupant, presses himself against the door to make a big, wide gap between them while Simmons, apparently satisfied, puts himself in the passenger seat.

The driver has a bald head that winks in the dreary light as he leans forward and drives on.

His seatmate is a big man, taller than Fusco by a lot, even hunched as he is with the crown of his head pressed to the driver’s side headrest. His pale gray suit, his powder blue tie, his shiny silver watch with its many dials, they’re all expensive. That’s a thing Fusco learned to tell by looking somewhere along the line. His hair, what little of it that isn’t caked and blackened with gore, is thick and bright white. His face is a mess of blood and bruises and if Fusco knows him from somewhere, he honestly can’t say.

Fusco thinks he’s choking or having a fit of some kind at first. Turns out he’s crying, squalling like a kid against that headrest.

“Who the hell is this guy?” Fusco asks, jerking a thumb at him.

“Don’t you know him, Lionel?”

“How could I? He’s barely got a face. If you wanted me to know him, you should have told your friend not to work him over so hard.”

Framed in the black plastic of the rearview mirror, Simmons’ eyes shine with good humor as the lines around them deepen. “You know him.”

The guy lifts his head, actually spares Fusco a look. His eyes are very blue. He’s old, this guy, but his eyes are blue and clear in that face all red.

“Help,” he says, only it comes out more like “helb,” on account of his broken nose. “Help me.”

And it’s a pathetic plea and a changed voice, pretty much unrecognizable, but it’s only then that Fusco figures it out and part of him is suddenly back in that shady club sitting at a poker table, with a nearly broken foot and a nearly doomed Finch, and he’s being loomed at by a man who, in his head, he called the king.

Fusco, who has nothing of substance to say to that, whistles. “Go big or go home,” he remarks to Simmons.

Simmons chuckles. “That’s what they say.”

The king begins to sob again.

Chapter 21

Beside him on the car seat, the king's rough, wet cough propels a thin spray of blood over Fusco's knee.

"Jesus," he mutters, scooting further away from his fellow passenger. Then, somewhat louder, "This guy's bleeding all over the place. You shoulda laid down a tarp or something back here."

"Thank you, Lionel," Simmons says. "We'll have to remember that for next time."

"Hey. That's what you pay me for, right?"

No response.

Fusco's not totally sure where he stands right now. He's not cuffed, he still has his gun and nobody's tried to take it from him, he hasn't been hit, and nobody's told him he's about to die. On the other hand, he's sharing seat space with a person who's almost definitely about to die and Simmons isn't acting too friendly.

He doesn't know. He hopes Simmons is just pissed. He hopes he's just having the fear of God put into him.

Nobody, not Simmons, not the bald driver, not the guy choking on his own fluids next to him, seems too interested in conversation so Fusco presses his forehead to the cool window and peers through rising condensation at buildings fading into trees as they tear down the interstate.

Internally, he reviews his options. There are a lot of options, but the situation is so precariously balanced that with every second and every new thought, his windows of escape shift and flicker and die and burst suddenly back to life and he can’t focus on just one for too long without feeling anxious and seasick.

He presses the soft flesh of his palm against the handle of the car door. Child safety locked, he notices. Go figure. Doesn’t matter. He’s not so desperate yet that he’d dive out into a busy interstate just to escape. He gropes for the service weapon flat against his hip and knows that he can defend himself if he has to, for a little while at least. If he’s right, and he should be right, he knows where they’re going. They’re on the interstate, headed east toward the bay. He’s made this drive before, maybe more than Simmons has, and he knows the terrain they’re headed for well. He’s got a chance. A slim one.

He wishes his phone had not been crushed. He’s too dependent on the word of others, on Finch’s beck and call. He’s gotten naïve and lazy in the wake of knowing he is always being watched.

You don’t know they’re going to kill you, he thinks.

But he knows the best he can hope for is being forced to stand by while something brutal happens and he’d really, really come to love not doing that anymore.

“You have to do something,” the king moans. “You can’t let them do this to me.”

Fusco can’t be bothered to lift his head from the window. He only rotates a little, feels the wet of the window plaster his hair to his skull. “You tried to have me shot,” he says, peering sidelong at the king. “I don’t have to do anything for you.”

The king shakes his head furiously. “Do you know?” he asks. “Do you know what these people are going to do to me?”

“Well, no. No, not yet. I have a pretty good idea, though.” Fusco clears his throat, goes back to staring out the window. “You probably have a college degree or something. You can figure it out.”

His groan is quavering, sputtering, and Fusco doesn’t want to hear it. He turns further away, so his forehead and nose are touching the glass.

“You shut up now,” he says, puffing breath onto the window to cover the spaces where his face rubbed condensation away. “And quit coughing on me.”

The king becomes very quiet then. If Fusco shuts his eyes, he can almost pretend the guy isn’t there. There’s still a dip in the car seat and the warm, ghost presence of another person nearby. There’s the smell, too, the blood like pennies left in an old wallet, the fear like piss. Maybe it’s actual piss. That wouldn’t be so surprising. The white collar types like him tend to crack when the real gangsters come a-knocking. But just as easily, it could be that awful sweat-ammonia smell you catch a whiff of on someone who’s had the life scared out of them, somebody whose hopes are fraying and dying.

But if he ignores the presence and the scent and the clammy warmth, Fusco can pretend he’s alone in the backseat of the car and that, if he wants to be lulled to sleep by the hum of the engine and the tires on asphalt, he can. He half-remembers a road trip down to North Carolina that he took when he was around ten years old. His dad was driving, fretting in his head and under his breath about how they couldn’t afford this, and his mom was reaching across the gap between the bucket seats and putting her hand, rough palms and nails lacquered pink, across his dad’s thick forearm and just petting like yes dear, stop now, hush.

He knows that’s not what’s happening outside the boundaries of his closed eyes, but he hangs on to it for a little while. The car ride he’s remembering happened in summer and it’s much, much warmer there than it is here.

Fusco feels the odd, stomach-churning swirl of the car coming too fast off the exit and he sighs, lets his eyes open up.

Oyster Bay’s kind of nice, if he lets himself forget some things. It’s quiet, historical. Relaxed. You’d maybe want to retire out here. He wonders what one of these houses would go for. Not that he wants one. Not that he could ever walk in the trees or along a beach without wondering how many bones are under his feet. He just wonders, you know, about the littler houses. The tiny ones with beige sand driveways and chipping shutters. They’re about the same size as his apartment but, hey, at least there’s a yard.

The king’s trying the door handle. Fusco can hear that low clunking over and over again as he tugs and tugs at that door. What makes him think that’ll do any good? Fusco wonders.

What gives him the right to be so optimistic?

In the front, Simmons taps the arm of the driver and says, “Here. On the left,” and the car turns down a badly paved road.

Clunk-clunk-clunk goes that door handle.

Then nothing.

He’s getting frustrated, Fusco thinks. Scared and desperate and stupid. Back when he used to do this, it didn’t matter because he’d do it in his police car with the caged off backseat so the guys he carpooled with could panic all they liked and it wouldn’t bother him when the time came. That isn’t the case today.

He knows the assault’s coming before he even bothers to turn. Just all of a sudden there’s a yell and he’s catching 200 pounds of wasted ex-football player or whatever the hell this guy is, right in his side, on his ribs and on his lungs and Fusco wheezes hard as a big, square hand scrabbles for the firearm at his hip. The first punch Fusco throws is clumsy; it scrapes by the guy’s face until Fusco’s pushing the king away with a forearm pressed against his cheek, knees gathered up and feet shoving at this guy’s thighs and gut.

Fusco’s yelling. Someone else is too. He pushes hard, throws the king off just a little, just enough so Fusco has the space to catch him with a real punch this time, one that cracks against his jaw and sends him careening into the back of the seat. He grabs the king’s hand, the one that’s clawing at Fusco’s sidearm, and twists hard, listening for a snap. He doesn’t get one, just a pained groan before the king’s snatching his hand back and cradling it close to his chest and then, like it’s natural and there’s no way he can stop it, Fusco’s drawing his gun and battering it over and over against the king’s raw face.

Someone is still yelling.

Then all at once Simmons’ arm is snagged around his neck and pulling him back so his strikes can’t quite land and Fusco suddenly realizes that his arm is tired and he’s breathing hard and the driver, the bald guy, is speaking for the first time since Fusco got in the car, yelling “Don’t shoot him in my fucking car!”

Fusco lets his arm drop. His fingers stay tight and secure around the grip of the gun and it bounces against his thigh.

He was never going to shoot him. He’s kind of insulted that the driver thought so.

The pressure of Simmons’ arm across his windpipe gradually relents.

Fusco sits down in his seat, reholsters his gun. He can’t actually unbend his fingers, so he stays like that a while, like he’s a gunslinger frozen midway through quickdraw. “He went for my gun,” Fusco tells Simmons.

The king isn’t going for Fusco’s gun anymore. Curled up like a pillbug in the corner as far away from Fusco as possible, it’s kind of hard to imagine he ever did.

“See he doesn’t get it,” Simmons says. “And go easy. We’re gonna have to walk out to the site and if he’s dead or unconscious, you get to carry him.”

Fusco breathes in, breathes out, and on the exhale he releases the grip of his gun. He rubs his palms together, cracks his knuckles, tries to ignore the thick, wheezy gurgling of the king. The driver, out of desperation, turns on the radio and Billy Joel drowns it all out. Fusco presses his overwarm head to the window again and scrawls “Help” in the condensation with one fingertip. Childish. He sweeps his thumb over the letters, erasing them, leaving a block of clear window behind.

It’s not such a long drive from there. Fusco wishes they had further to go or that he had time to think. Not that he’s coming up with anything; he just keeps slipping away. Backwards and sideways to better places than this car on this day. Maybe it’s better this way, he thinks. Maybe it’s best just to get it over with.

When the car rattles to a stop, it’s at the edge of the dirt road, listing against a steep bank of moss and earth, studded with rock and roots. The driver turns the key and the car stills; the rumble of the engine and the warm familiarity of the classic rock station die abruptly.

“Okay,” Simmons begins as the driver pulls the lever, pops the trunk. “Let’s make it quick.”

The front doors of the car swing wide like wings on a beetle and Simmons and the driver get out. Fusco can’t. Fusco’s child-safety locked in the back seat with a man who hurts children to get his kicks. He’s still all knotted up in a ball with his face shoved against the car window. Fusco, whose forehead is still damp with condensation, can’t totally blame him. Instead he cradles the gun against his hip protectively and taps fingertips, just once, on the king’s shoulder, all encased in soft, wet wool.

“You keep your shit together,” he says “or I’ll shoot you right now, understand?”

He just cringes.

The child-safety locks pop open and the driver, shiny head and small eyes and thin shoulders, opens the door and bends to look the king right in the face. “Will you quit bleeding,” he says, “on my goddamn upholstery?”

The king looks away. He turns his head very slowly, so slowly Fusco’s not even sure that he’s moving at first until the face that wasn’t visible before becomes a sliver, a silhouette with one dead, narrowed eye locked on Fusco’s face.

“You heard the man,” Fusco says. He draws his gun slowly.

With a rumbling sigh, the king forces one leg out of the car and stands up and Fusco crawls across the seat, following him as he goes.

In the seconds it takes for Fusco to emerge, the clammy warmth of the car’s interior is replaced by chill, damp air and Fusco shudders as he stands. The ground is spongy beneath the tractionless soles of his cheap shoes. At the rear of the car, Simmons is pulling shovels from the trunk. He points one at Fusco, handle first. Fusco stares at it for a while, dull and uncomprehending, before he realizes, before he puts his gun away and takes the shovel in both hands.

Simmons slams the trunk hard, hefts his own shovel in his left hand. “Let’s walk.”

Fusco never liked this part. Not that he ever liked any part of this, even back when he was in the business of telling himself over and over that killing those people was alright somehow. But he liked the walk to the burial site the least, because that was when improvisation started to creep in. The drive to the site was a scripted thing. You search them, you cuff them, you make them get in the car, you ignore what they say or you talk with them, depending on your mood. You do that until you reach the site. Then things get tricky because if you can drive right up to the place where you’re burying someone, that means you aren’t hiding them well enough. So more often than not, it’s a little hike out to some remote location where no one will see or hear. It’s crossing empty country and difficult terrain and it’s a window of at least ten minutes where desperation runs wild. That’s how you wind up ineptly tracking someone through the woods or dragging a body through the brush or giving up and burying them where your shot dropped them. He’s done all three.

This one isn’t trying to run. He holds out his wrists all weary and lets the driver cuff him and he keeps his eyes on the wet ground.

So that’s a relief, Fusco thinks as he struggles up the steep bank behind the others. At least it will be fast and easy. The sooner it happens, the sooner he can get to forgetting.

Beneath the trees, the faint mist of rain turns to fat, cold, dirty droplets that drip from leaves and branches and dot the shoulders of his jacket and prickle the back of his neck.  He shudders. His shoes are leaking. He peers back over his shoulder at the car and wishes, faintly, that he knew how to hotwire.

“Lionel. Hurry up.” Simmons waits for him, shovel slung over his shoulder, until Fusco finishes tripping through wet underbrush and winds up by his side. Together, they watch ahead where the king and the driver are picking their way among trees black with rain, green with lichen. “Second thoughts?” Simmons asks.

“No thoughts,” Fusco says, shifting his grip on the shovel. “I just want to get out of here.”

“You were all in favor, before,” Simmons says. When he starts to walk again it’s slow, at a pace that Fusco can easily keep.

 “Yeah,” he says. “I don’t really do this anymore. Not like this.”

“So you got soft,” Simmons says with a shrug. “Time to toughen up, Fusco. Don’t tell me your heart is breaking for this trash.”

Fusco laughs, a short, sharp, humorless huff of air. “No. It’s just my partner. She, uh. You know her. Strong sense of right and wrong. She’d hate this.”

“Unless you’re planning on telling her about it – and if you want to walk out of here, I’m gonna advise against it – what the hell does it matter?”

“She’s taking it personal. This whole thing. She wants to bring this guy down for real. Him and all of his and if he disappears and she never finds out what happened, she’ll think she failed. I, uh. I just thought of that.”

Simmons’ lips draw back from his teeth in what Fusco takes too long to realize is a grin. “It doesn’t matter,” he says.

“She’ll never stop looking for him. She’ll tear the goddamn town apart.”

“Everybody’s gotta stop sometime.” Simmons sighs. “Don’t you worry about your partner, Fusco. Just worry about this.”

Up ahead, the king trips and falls to one knee and the low, mild chuckle that comes out of Simmons is mirrored in his own mouth.

The place where they come to a stop is not the place where he buried Stills and that detective from Internal Affairs. It could be. It looks a lot like it. It’s a flat, clear pocket at the top of a small hill. The ground looks like you could dig a ways down without hitting roots. Part of him fears turning over some earth with a shovel and seeing the face of a friend. But he knows that spot is further on, one or two miles away. He could walk there from here, if he had to.

The driver fiddles with the king’s cuffs until they click open and he’s left caved in around a point in the center of his chest, clutching his hands to his breastbone and rubbing at his wrists. “Okay,” says the driver. “Here’s how it’s gonna go. You listening?”

His nod is frantic. It starts from somewhere in his waist and travels up to the crown of his bleeding head.

“We need a hole dug. Only thing is, me and my friends aren’t so big on digging, right? It’s lousy work. We’ve done enough of it for three lifetimes, you get me? But you, you’re a wealthy guy. Got some cash in your pocket. Bet you never dug a hole in your life. So,” and it’s here that Simmons passes the driver a shovel, “we’re gonna think of this like work study. You dig; we check your work. That all make sense to you?”

The king nods again.

The driver makes like he’s going to hand him the shovel but he balks at the last second. “One other thing. You get fighty with this thing, or you try to run? You die. You die inhumanely, got it? No two in the back of the skull for you. You make any fucking trouble, I go back to my car and I get my hatchet. Are you fucking listening?”

Strange how he seems to shrink.

“Okay.” He jabs the shovel handle-first against the king’s gut, doubling him over only slightly. “Get to work.” And he leaves the king there in the center of the clearing, twisting the handle of the shovel in his hands and looking lost and bereft. He raises his head finally, eyes all wide and blue and baffled, looking to the driver, to Simmons, to Fusco for direction. Then, with a shrug, he drives the shovel point down into the ground and levers out a tiny wedge of grass and black dirt.

The driver comes to stand on the other side of Simmons, propping himself lazily against a tree only to jerk away again when he realizes it’s too wet to stand against. He shifts from foot to foot, pats his pockets down. “Shit,” he says. “I left my smokes in the car. Do either of you…?”

Simmons shakes his head. Fusco vaguely recalls a period of about six months where Simmons chewed white, minty gum all the time and then after that, never again. Fusco’s about to shake his head too when he remembers, feels the bulk against his hip like it’s burning him. He pulls a squashed pack of cigarettes out of his jacket pocket. “Yeah. Here.”

“Thanks, man.” He reaches across Simmons’ chest, takes the pack. The driver wrinkles his nose. “Virginia Slims? You a fag?”

“Bought ‘em for a friend. I don’t smoke.” Fusco shrugs his shoulders. “Take them or leave them. They’re all we got.”

The driver considers the crushed pack for a moment. It’s still unopened. “A cigarette’s a cigarette,” he says, doubtfully, and he opens it up. He takes one, tries to pass the rest of the pack back to Fusco.

“Keep it,” Fusco says.

So he does, folding it apprehensively into his own pockets.

“You clean that up when you’re done with it,” Simmons says. “If this gets traced back to us because of a fucking cigarette butt...”

“Yeah, yeah,” the driver interrupts. “What am I, a rookie?”

“Just shut up and do as you’re told.”

In the middle of the clearing, the king has dug up a small pile of earth, a little pothole that might come up to someone’s shins. He looks up at them again, like he wants something. “How big?” he asks. “Does, uh, the hole need to be?”

“Dunno,” says the driver, puffing contemplatively at his Virginia Slim. “How tall are you?”

He sighs, long and shuddering. His mouth works, open and close, dying fish gasps. His knuckles fade white and red on the handle of that shovel. He starts to moan again.

Fusco shoves his hands in his pockets and lets his back rest against the nearest tree.  “Why do you have a hatchet in your car?” he asks, peering up at little patches of dull sky through the wet branches.

The driver shrugs. “Carjackers.”

“Huh.”

“Hey, don’t knock it, man. It’s a strategy.”

The king’s anguished sounds get louder, rise higher, but none of them listening can bring themselves to care.

 

---

 

The hole is about six feet long and four feet wide. It looks about right, especially if they bend him at the knee a little. But it’s too shallow. As it is right now, it’d barely cover the rise of his belly. There’d be a big, obvious lump.

But another hour or two of steady digging, Fusco knows, and they can start to think about getting out of here. He knows that’s an ideal kind of scenario. The digging is not going steady. The king’s been crying on and off or taking breaks to scream threats and promises to them or else stopping to sit at the edge of his grave and huff and puff to himself. He might keel over from heart failure or stroke before they ever pull the trigger. That might be a relief.

That might mean he won’t have to do anything. Because it’s becoming clear, terrible and slowly dawning, that this might be his problem, his responsibility.

Fusco’s barely a cop anymore. He’s not stupid; when he first went off the rails, he knew it. He’s more a spy now, or a vigilante or a traitor or a bagman or a coward. He’s unsure from day to day. He just knows that he’s been relearning lately about what he is and what he should be, and that Carter’s been the goal to strive for and the line to never cross.

And she would never be here, leaning on a tree like it’s not her business. She would not be counting down the seconds until the execution happens and they can all go home. Even now, with all the hate that’s in her for this man and his misdeeds, she’d never let him be killed out here in the woods without ever seeing the inside of a courtroom.

Fusco wonders what Carter thinks happened to him, if she’s looking for him or if she’s noticed he’s gone or if she has noticed but she chalked it up to Fusco disappearing again, right when she needs him.

He misses the steady rectangular pressure of the phone in his breast pocket. He wants advice, or maybe just a sympathetic ear.

The king dumps yet another shovelful of dirt beside the hole and then, with the stiff and cordial unchangeability of a Dresden figurine being knocked off a table, he tips. Falls face first in the mud and lies there, still and silent.

Frozen in the instant of putting his third cigarette butt safely away in a crumpled sandwich bag, the driver says, “Shit. Already?”

Simmons squints at what he can see of the still form in the half-finished grave. “He’s an older guy,” he says. “His ticker’s probably not what it once was. Bound to happen.”

Fusco rolls his shoulders, adjusts the fit of his jacket, tries not to shiver. “Guess I’ll check it out, if none of you wants to do the honors.”

The driver lights up his fourth cigarette. “Be my guest.”

He takes a step forward, toward the prone form collapsed in the hole, only to feel Simmons’ hand fall heavy on his shoulder. Fusco peers back at him. “What?”

Simmons holds out his other hand, beckons with his fingers. “Your gun, Fusco.”

He frowns, uncomprehending.

“He already almost took it from you once,” Simmons says, patient, like he’s explaining something really simple to a stupid kid. “If you’re gonna be stupid enough to get disarmed and taken hostage by some half-dead businessman, I’m not giving you the opportunity. Hand it over.”

It’s tense in that second. The trust between them is drawn too tight, close to breaking. Because it’s a reasonable request, one that makes sense because Fusco can take this guy no problem, with or without a shovel, but if the king got ahold of his gun, things would get real dangerous real fast. On the other hand, he can think of another reason why Simmons might want him unarmed.

Simmons eyes begin to narrow, his mouth hardens into a line, and to stave off what’s coming, Fusco opens up his jacket and pulls his gun out of the holster. “You’re right,” he says as Simmons’ face relaxes just a little. He passes the gun to him grip first. “Cover me, yeah?”

He takes the gun. “We’ve got your back, Lionel.”

As he comes close, the rise and fall of the king’s shoulders becomes clearer. Okay. Okay, so he’s alive. Shit. Fusco snatches the shovel out from under him before he can try anything with it, throws it a few feet away where it slides and settles in wet grass and leaves.

“Hey.” He taps the king between his shoulder blades.

The king just groans.

“Hey,” Fusco says again. “Come on. You need to get up.”

Nothing.

“As far as my boss is concerned, this hole’s getting dug with or without you. You don’t pitch in, he might as well shoot you now.”

The king’s head turns. His face is unrecognizable, dark with blood and soil. His eyes are an icy shock of color. “If he’s going to shoot me anyway, he might as well do it right now and spare me the wait.”

“Then you are dead,” he says. “And there’s nothing I can do for you.”

He raises a filthy eyebrow and hope comes into his face, all open and pathetic. “Please,” he mumbles. “Please, please, please.” His fingers snare themselves in the hem of Fusco’s pants, just by his ankle and it takes all of Fusco’s restraint not to kick him away.

“I don’t have my gun right now,” Fusco murmurs. “But if you get back to work, they’ll hand it back to me. It’s an excuse to have it drawn. I’d have the advantage.”

The king nods slowly, face pressed in the mud. “Thank you,” he whispers. He begins to push himself up onto hands and knees.

“Shut up,” Fusco mutters.  He stands, brushes uselessly at the mud ground deep in his knees. He’s a person, he repeats to himself in his head. He’s just a person. There’s nothing wrong with hating him, but he’s a person and you can’t let him be killed. He turns away from the grave. Simmons and the driver are still huddled beneath the trees, scowling with critical eyes as Fusco picks his way back across the clearing. “Just throwin’ a fit,” he says with a slightly theatrical grimace. “I set him straight.”

Simmons scowls past him, unimpressed. Fusco cranes his neck around, sees the king standing bewildered in the beginnings of his grave, messy and dull-eyed, hands dangling idle. Staring. “I’m not impressed, Lionel.”

“Whaddya want?” Fusco shrugs. “The guy’s gotta be like seventy. He’ll get back to work if he wants to keep living a while longer. Give me my gun back, will you?”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“Doesn’t what?”

“Want to keep living.” Simmons is terribly calm. “What if he decides he doesn’t care to live long enough to dig his own grave?”

“Then, uh, then that hole gets dug a hell of a lot faster than it’s getting dug now. Guy’s slow as hell. Any one of us can do better.”

Simmons exhales harshly through his nose. “It’s a good point.” He taps the handle of his own shovel, the second shovel, against his open palm. Then, like an offering, like a quiet revelation, he holds it out. “You do it,” he says.

All the air leaving his body at once doesn’t make any sound. “What?”

“He’s slow,” Simmons says, like it’s so simple, so goddamn obvious. “I want to go home.” He holds out the shovel until the handle is a line across Fusco’s chest.

He shoves at it, gentle. “Look, man, you want me to take out the trash, I’m there, but I didn’t sign up for any manual labor.”

Simmons pushes the shovel back, just as gentle, but more insistent. “You’re the one with the bleeding heart,” he says. “So you take care of it, Fusco.”

He realizes all at once that somebody else might have been able to get out of this by pitching a fit, making a big goddamn deal about having to do more than his share of the work. But Fusco can’t do that. He never set the precedent. He bitches, sure, all the time, but in the end, he always rolls belly-up and does whatever Simmons asked him for. He can’t make something this small a point of pride, not without Simmons asking him why here and why now.

He takes the shovel. “Whatever my share is,” he grumbles, “I want it upped. I never signed on to do any fucking digging.”

“It’s pro bono work, Fusco. And for somebody who never signed up to dig any holes, you’ve sure dug a lot of them.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he moans. He turns away from Simmons with a lump in his gut.

Up to his knees in the grave, the king is peering up at him with a kind of bulgy-eyed, dying hope.

“What now?” he hisses as Fusco hops into the grave alongside him.

“Now,” Fusco says, not bothering to keep his voice down, “we dig.”

“B-but,” he stammers, “but you said…”

“Nothin’ to talk about.” Fusco taps the earth with the blade of the shovel. “Bossman says I’m helping you dig your grave. I’m gonna make your last seconds hell if you don’t help me dig. So we’re digging, got it?”

The king nods. His dirty face is still. With a strange, guttural sound, he hauls himself out of the hole and reaches for his shovel.

It’s tight in that grave at first, but the more they work, the easier it gets. Fusco always favored a wider grave. Easier to get down and up, easier to maneuver the body around in case it fell in funny or you remembered only after you dumped your corpse in that the guy had something incriminating in his pocket. His strategies come back way too easily while he’s down there in the grave with the king and he finds himself offering advice offhand.

“Don’t dig the walls so straight,” he says, overturning a rock. “If it’s kind of a weird shape, it’s harder to pick up on a satellite.”

“What do I care?” When Fusco risks a look at him, he sees his face all flat and dull and lumpen. “If my grave gets found or not.”

Fusco stops digging, rolls his shoulders and cracks his neck. “I s’pose you don’t.”

The king sputters, throws up his hands a moment and it’s peculiar because Fusco’s only ever spoken to him briefly and over tense life-or-death matters. He looks for a second like somebody’s exasperated boss and Fusco supposes that’s what he must be, most hours out of a day. When he’s not hurting kids, he must go to his dayjob sometime. “You’re killing me,” he snaps, jabbing the shovel uselessly into the dirt wall. “You’re letting me die.”

“Not letting you,” Fusco says. “They just made it difficult. Sorry.”

He isn’t sorry, not exactly. He’s sorry he’s about to be complicit in a murder when he’d started to let himself think he was better than that. He’s sorry he can’t do anything to get himself out of it. He’s sorry he can’t feel any pity for the guy who’s about to die. He keeps starting to, whenever the king shoots him a desperate look of the kind that Fusco knows because he’s felt it take shape on his own face more than a few times. His heart will clench up and he’ll start to think he can’t let this happen and then he’ll remember about Romanian twins, no more than seven years old, locked away in a shipping container and the shit they had to say, and Fusco realizes that he can, he can let this happen, he’s just not allowed to.

Fusco thinks, suddenly, about his son. Not his son as he is now, fearless and gangly-limbed and nearly ten, but his son of a few years ago. Six or seven. Fat cheeked and round-eyed and wanting to play hockey so badly, but always flinching away if the puck whipped by too close. He remembers this phase Michael went through where he was weirdly little-kid conscious of death, crying over cats on the road and shouting down Fusco for killing the spiders that dotted their tiny apartment. For a couple of months, because Michael couldn’t bear to see a living thing die and Sharon couldn’t bear to look at a spider, Fusco had to scoop the little things up in glasses, on sheets of paper, in the palms of his hands, and carry them lovingly to windows and hallways, all while his brain screamed “Kill it, kill it, kill it.”

“You’d give a damn,” the king says, flinging a shovelful of earth that misses the lip of the grave and scatters back down in a filthy rain, “if you’d stop pretending my life isn’t the only one on the line here.”

Fusco snorts. “Dunno if you noticed back there, but I’m one of the guys with guns here. I’m one of the bad guys.”

“You don’t have a gun now.” He sends another pile of earth over the edge of the grave, this one more successful. “Last I checked, you were helping a condemned man dig a grave.”

“Because I’m the idiot who brought it up,” Fusco hisses. “Because I’m the idiot who felt sorry for you.”

The king fixes him with a scowl. “You don’t feel sorry for me.”

“Fine. I don’t. I don’t give a shit. I’m just sick of killing people, alright?”

“You’re about to have to,” the king says, “either way.”

“I know.” He weighs it in his head. Simmons is a threat right now. Simmons is going to kill someone. Taking Simmons down now is self-defense. Fusco’s allowed.

But for all his faults, Simmons never did anything as bad as Fusco knows the king has.

“Hey, Fusco!” the driver shouts. “You done yet?”

No. Probably never. Fusco takes a good look around the grave. It’s deep and wide, comes up to just over his ears. It’s deeper than he’d do ordinarily, because ordinarily he’d be under some stress and just trying to get the job done before anyone came around. He had help this time, though. It’s deep enough, for sure. The animals won’t be getting at him.

“Yeah.” He breathes deep, until he’s sure that when he speaks, his voice will come out smooth. “Yeah, we’re done here.”

The king whispers, “No.”

Fusco twists the shovel in his hands and listens for footfalls. Simmons won’t be thinking about him (unless he wants you dead too, Lionel). There will be seconds, sparse seconds that he can stretch and twist so they last just as long as he needs them to, where Simmons will be looking at the king and not at him.

“You can’t do this.” The king is tearing at Fusco’s sleeve. “You can’t. I’ll do anything. I’ll pay you!”

“Shut up,” Fusco snarls, eyes on the lip of the grave.

He’s taken on two men at once before, he reminds himself. He can do it again.

(But you were armed then, Lionel. You had your gun. Why wouldn’t he give you your gun back, Lionel?)

The king’s face pushes his bleeding face into the shoulder pad of Fusco’s suit jacket and he starts wailing into it, wet and hot, dirty fingers groping and tearing at Fusco’s face, the tip of one pointer finger actually sliding into the corner of his mouth. “You don’t know what you’re doing,” he whimpers. “You’re killing us.”

Fusco shoves at him roughly, pushes him down to the ground. Recoiling, he clutches at his face, brings the shovel close to his chest. “You shut the fuck up,” he whispers to the prone figure blubbering on the ground. He means to shout it, feels like shouting it, but his voice comes out soft and still. “There is no us. Understand? I’m ashamed I even helped you dig a hole to die in. There’s no us.”

Simmons is coming. He can hear the squish of wet grass very near now, very close, parallel with his head. Fusco bends his knees a little so his head drops further beneath the edge, gets the shovel ready to swing. He’ll take out the legs, he repeats to himself desperately. Take out their legs and then see what happens next. Take out their legs and try not to die, Lionel. Try not to die over this one.

“Pleeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaase.” He feels the king’s heavy, squashy bulk creep up against his knee, feels his fucking hands creeping up the leg of his pants, feels the tremor of that awful, pathetic fucking whine. “I’m begging you,” he sobs. “I’m begging you, please, please, I’m begging you. I’m a person, I have a life, I’m married, I have children…”

Fusco doesn’t realize what happened until he hears the odd, damp sound of the edge of a shovel blade striking skull. It seems like maybe the king’s confused too, because he doesn’t move or anything, doesn’t yell or scream. Just blinks. His eyes are really, really blue in that awful grimy face. Fusco’s mother had a set of glasses in her kitchen, clear blue plastic, and he thinks the color of this man’s eyes and the color of those glasses when you filled them with milk are about the same. A thin veneer of blue over blank, cold white.

The thickness and the darkness of the blood gushing over the king’s cheek and ear intensifies and, neatly, he goes over, eyes still bright and open.

“Jesus Christ.” Somewhere above his head, the driver is trying not to giggle or trying not to cough. “Save a little for the rest of us, why don’t you?”

Simmons’ voice is even, nearly gentle. “Fusco,” he says, and the sound of his voice draws closer as he speaks, like he’s crouching down to Fusco’s level, “drop the shovel.”

He can’t. His knuckles, the muscles in his arms, are locked up for good in this permanent swing, the shovel still stuck in a head that isn’t there anymore.

Cigarette ash drifts past the side of his face. He can see it out the corner of his eye. “Shiiiiiiit. Where’d you find this guy? He’s fucking nuts.”

“Shut up.” And then Simmons’ rough hand is down there with him, shaking Fusco’s shoulder. “Lionel. Put it on the ground.”

I should take him too, he thinks. Just turn around real fast and slice his hatchet face off. Instead, he remembers how heavy these shovels are and how much he didn’t want to pick one up in the first place. He lets it drop. It doesn’t hit the ground. There’s a guy in the way.

Fusco turns his head with what must be an audible creak, looks intently at Simmons’ face for some sign of well done or oh fuck or what now, but there’s nothing to read in his features.

The driver is easier. He’s half horrified, half impressed, all giddy in the way that some guys get when they’re not quite used to killing yet. He’s holding something inches from Fusco’s face.

Virginia Slim.

Fusco takes the cigarette, takes the light he’s offered soon after, but he might as well be a kid playing pretend. He stands in that hole, with a dead man at his back, and blows smoke at the two guys peering down at him.

“Sorry if I ruined your plans,” he says.

Simmons shakes his head. “I’d say it was too quick for the likes of him. But it wasn’t important.”

“Alright.”

“Why’d you do it, Fusco?”

“Dunno. It’s not like I planned to or anything. He just, uh.” Fusco scratches at the back of his neck, feels dirt scrape off his skin and pearl up under his fingernails. “He kept grabbin’ at me.”

Simmons nods very slowly. Not in an understanding way, just accepting. So that’s it.

Fusco clears his throat. “You gonna give me a hand out of here?”

Simmons says, “No.”

That seems about right. He blinks up at Simmons, waits for an explanation or a bullet.

He looks tired all of a sudden. Simmons rubs at the space right beneath his eye and says in a soft, creaking voice, “You showed up at my goddamn house, Lionel.”

It shouldn’t be, but that’s all the reason in the world. If Simmons had shown up at Fusco’s apartment while his little boy was over, there’s no question in Fusco’s mind that he’d do the same. It was a bad play, going to Simmons’ house. Fusco hasn’t been thinking clearly lately. “So, is that all?” Fusco asks.

“No.” Simmons is holding Fusco’s gun in his gloved hands now, twisting it over like some trick of the light made it interesting. “You’re a danger,” he says, “to the people that own you. But there’s still something good left in you. Secrets. Information. Lionel.”

Fusco is suddenly tired of his cigarette. He drops it in the wet dirt at his feet, crushes it under his shoe. “What do I have to do to get out of here?” he asks.

 “You don’t get out of there,” Simmons tells him, calm and even. “You get to change how you get planted. You tell me what I want to know, I’ll make it quick and easy. Like going to sleep. You die a painless death and your kid gets a little bit of money every month and never knows why. Not so bad. On the other hand, if you get fresh, I just wing you. Enough that you can’t move so well. Then I bury you anyway. No peace. No trust fund for your son. You die slow and alone in a hole. Clear?”

“I have a question. A real one; I’m not being an asshole,” he reassures when Simmons goes for his gun. “What do I have to do to get my own grave?”

Simmons looks genuinely taken aback at that.

“I’m not, uh, superstitious or anything, but I don’t wanna get buried in the same hole as him.”

Simmons squints at him, like Fusco isn’t quite real. “No second grave,” Simmons says. “You’re not worth the goddamn trouble. What does it matter?”

It doesn’t. It’s not important, what happens to his body after he’s gone. Being planted a few feet away is no different from being thrown in the same exact grave. But it bothers him that Simmons didn’t even consider it, that Simmons isn’t even thinking of why it might matter to Fusco, that Simmons doesn’t seem to see any difference between Fusco and the dead pedophile. That’s what makes him hurl himself against the wall of the grave, drag himself up enough that he can claw furiously at Simmons shins and calves and ankles until Simmons brings the grip of the gun down on his face and skull again and again and Fusco has to drop back into the grave.

“You stupid asshole,” Simmons spits.

Fusco is lying on someone else’s legs. He rolls over and over until he isn’t anymore, and by then he’s too dizzy to stand. So instead he sits cross-legged in the bottom of the grave, wiping blood out of his eyes with dirty fingers and God, it just gets worse and worse and harder to see.

Above, a safety catch is clicking. His safety catch. “Alright, Lionel. Last chance. Give me the name and location of your contact, the one that started this whole fucking mess. Give him to me, and it’ll all go easy on you.”

It actually takes Fusco a while to realize who he’s talking about, a while longer to realize who’s laughing. He hacks a final few dry giggles into his sleeve and grins at Simmons’ hatchetface where it peers over the edge at him. “Jesus,” Fusco wheezes. “That takes me back. I don’t know his real name. He’s too smart to go telling the likes of me a thing like that. And I don’t know where he is because he doesn’t have a home that I know of. I do know that I lied to you about what he is. You wanna know the story there?”

Simmons is scowling, but Fusco isn’t dead yet. He goes on talking.

“Lessee. Let’s see. I told you he was my CI. He’s not my CI, Patrick. He was never my CI. I just told you that so you’d leave me alone. I didn’t want to listen to you bitch and moan about how I started a war anymore, so I made up the whole bullshit story to shut you up. I told you that, uh, I was asking him every day to come work for HR, help us out with whatever we needed, but that’s bullshit too. I never asked him. I never wanted him helping HR and I never wanted him thinking of me in connection with you, ever, because I’m ashamed to know you. I told you he wasn’t talking to me anymore. It’s not true. Not true. For a few weeks there, he’d call me every night and we’d just talk for hours about nothing and it was the best part of my day and I never told you because I didn’t want you anywhere near that. And, uh, I told you he hates cops. Truth is, I never saw him treat an honest cop with anything other than respect in the utmost. It’s just you he’d hate, Simmons. Just you and everyone like you.”

“And you, Fusco. You can take the high road about your friend but let’s not pretend you’re anything but a liar and a killer.”

“I don’t know,” Fusco says. He shrugs his shoulders against the dirt wall.  “As long as I’m being honest, we’re not on good terms right now. Maybe he doesn’t care for me so much. But I think he’d, uh, I think if it ever got to be time for him and his to put me down, he’d think it mattered how I wanted to be buried. Which is more than I can say about you. That’s all.”

That’s all. He closes his eyes. He exhales. That’s all.

“Anything you want said to your son?” Simmons asks.

“Not by you.”

He has a lot of things he wants to say to his son right now. Apologies, mainly. Reassurances that he’s a good kid, a brave, smart, kind, funny kid who never needs to screw up like his old man screwed up. The words “I love you,” over and over.

He owes Carter apologies too, a thousand of them. Sorry for making you proud of me that one time, just so I could go and screw it up. I’m sorry. You’re a great partner. I’m sorry.

He just wants to tell Reese that he picked the wrong corrupt cop that day. He thinks Reese would understand the rest.

He has things he wants to say to Finch too. He can feel them pressing at the back of his throat and the undersides of his ribs. He’s not sure of what the words are supposed to be.

Finch isn’t sure what to say either. Fusco just hears him far above, clearing his throat like the sharp, delicate tap of a teaspoon on a saucer. “Do I not get a say in what happens to my own asset?”

“Where the fuck did he come from?” and that’s the worst thing Fusco’s ever heard because that’s the driver speaking and that means that Finch is here, really here and that’s the last place Fusco ever wanted him to be.

Chapter 22

Notes:

We're earning that overall E rating today, kids. Be forewarned. Violence, sexual activity and all kinds of swearing lie ahead.

Thank you to Dien, who improved this chapter by pointing out when I wrote stuff that didn't make no sense.

It’s kind of, Fusco thinks, like listening to a bad radio play, one where nobody cares if you understand what’s going on. He sinks fingers into the wet earth of the grave’s walls and digs his heels in deep, but he can’t quite force himself to stand. So he settles. Fusco leans back, tilts his head back so he’s staring at the rectangle of gray, wilting light at the top of the hole. He can’t see anything. No trees over his grave. No definition to the clouds. He read somewhere that if you dig a hole deep enough, you can stand at the bottom and see stars in the daylight, and he’s always kind of wanted to try it. There’s nothing to see, though. Either the clouds are too thick or the hole is too shallow or both. Finally, he shuts his eyes and listens.

There’s the shuffle of feet on wet grass, the click of guns at the ready, the heavy rustle of wet leaves and the coo of a fat, oblivious mourning dove in the uncomfortable silence that follows. And then there’s Finch’s voice, calm and neat and tailored to the brisk air. “Oh, I wouldn’t, Officer Simmons. I really wouldn’t.”

Simmons just says, “You again.”

“Oh, good.” There’s a quick, light smack, a sound that might be Finch’s dry palms clapping together in that eager, let’s-get-started way he has. “I was wondering if you’d recognize me. That should cut this whole experience somewhat shorter, unless, of course, Detective Malinowski would like to be properly introduced.”

The driver. He bothered to learn the driver’s name. “Fuckin’ perfectionist,” Fusco mutters. Fuckin’ perfectionist, because he’d rather think that then wonder how it is that Simmons can look at Finch and say “You again.”

“But I don’t think that will be necessary,” Finch continues. “He’s really more of a bystander, in this particular instance.”

“What do you want?” Simmons snarls.

“Detective Fusco,” Finch says, promptly and simply.

He laughs, curling and insidious as creeper vines. “And what does a well-to-do fella like yourself want with trash like him?”

Finch hums thoughtfully, as though he’s been asked to explain his tea order or what book he likes best. “He’s my asset. He’s been consistently faithful and valuable to my operations. It isn’t complicated, Officer.”

“You’re, ah, you’re too late for Fusco. He brought this on himself. If you wanted him to stay safe, you shouldn’t have encouraged him to stray.”

“Perhaps that’s true,” Finch says with a sigh, “but if it is, it’s unimportant. I’m not leaving this place without him.”

“Yeah?” says the driver. He’s found his voice again, getting mean now that he thinks he’s found someone new to bully. “What if we don’t wanna give him up? What if we’re through with him disrespecting us, going behind our backs? What’re you gonna do, rich boy? You think you’re a big fuckin’ man? Well, that guy in the hole right now, he thought so too. You wanna guess how he’s feeling now? What if we just shoot you and make that grave a triple?”

“…Well, I suppose you could.” Finch sounds so patient, like he’s talking to a child. “I’m not armed, if that’s what you’re trying to determine. Not really in line with my ethics. Or style, for that matter. I prefer to change the situation. Make it apparent that my preferred outcome is really the best thing for everyone.”

“Fusco says you’re loaded,” Simmons says.

“Mhmm.” Finch sighs, like he’s disappointed how vulgar this conversation’s become already. “That’s correct. He may, in fact, have underreported my income. Is money something you would like, Officer Simmons?”

If Fusco listens hard enough, he can hear the soft rumble at the back of Simmons’ throat.

“Because I guarantee,” Finch continues, “that you’ll get more working with me than against me.” There’s a pause, thick and dangerous. “My car,” Finch ventures, “is parked down along the road, behind your own. I think we’d be able to have a much more civilized conversation there. Not to mention comfortable.”

“We can talk here,” Simmons says.

“It’s starting to rain,” Finch sniffs. “I’m sure you don’t want to experience that any more than I do. And you’ve been out here a great deal longer than I have. Pull Detective Fusco out of the hole and we’ll go talk, all four of us.”

“No. He stays where he is.”

“Officer Simmons…” Finch makes a small, frustrated sound, a hairline crack in his patience, and then begins to speak again. “I’m assuming that, as a career killer, the process of dehumanization is nothing new to you. And perhaps in this particular situation, it’s more difficult than usual, seeing as Detective Fusco is something of a friend to you, one whom you hold a certain amount of affection or animosity for. If this makes it any easier for you to understand what my position is, it might be best for you to think of Detective Fusco as an object that I am attempting to purchase from you. I am willing to spend far, far more than he’s worth to you, provided he remains in his current condition, or better yet, improves. At the moment, he has been outside, in the rain and the cold, doing difficult physical labor without adequate outerwear, for the better part of four hours. He is, as far as I can tell, injured and likely on the edge of hypothermia. You are, as they say, ‘damaging the goods.’”

How did I ever walk out on this guy? Fusco thinks. What a hopeless romantic. But he keeps his trap shut. Mostly because he’s too tired to make any vocalization beyond a weak little mumble.

Simmons must be tired too, tired of fighting over every little point with Finch. “Fine. Get him out of there.”

“I’m not touching him,” the driver snaps. “That guy’s fucking crazy.”

“Pull him up.”

Suddenly hands appear over the edge of the grave, hands and forearms and elbows following, and finally the thin face of the driver topped with its bald, shiny scalp. “Come on,” he says, unenthusiastically. “Take hold.”

Fusco thinks that it’d be funny to pull the driver down, scare the shit out of him, really work him over. Maybe that’s what Finch wants him to do right now. That’s probably what he would do if it was Carter up there, or Reese. Or Stills, back in the old days. He trusts Finch to tell him where to go or what to do, trusts him to know everything about everyone, but he can’t trust Finch to protect himself from Simmons if a fight breaks out. He just can’t. So he braces himself against the dirt wall, struggles slow and unsteady to his feet, and takes the hands he’s offered. Fusco finds that his limbs are like water, weak and quivering, and what would have been a moment’s climb becomes a drawn-out fight. The toes of his shoes scrape uselessly at the wall, sending loose wet trails of earth crumbling down to the bottom. He just clings to the driver’s arms while he grunts and swears and tugs at Fusco’s arms and the back of his jacket until he’s bent in half over the edge of the grave and his legs are kicking into space and he can kind of get a knee up onto the grass and suddenly there’s a hand on his back and a presence by his side and Finch’s soft voice saying, “Almost. There you are.”

Fusco wedges that knee in, between his gut and the grass, and pushes as hard as he can, maybe as hard as he’s ever pushed at anything, until the driver drops his hands and Fusco falls hard, face down in wet grass.

He’s not in the grave. There’s grass smearing on his face and sky above him and trees on all sides and Finch’s hands, warm through the back of his jacket, and Fusco never thought he’d feel any of that again, ever. He giggles into the ground.

“That’s quite enough of that,” Finch says firmly. “Get up.”

Fusco takes a shot at it, runs the grass through his fingers and pushes up, away, until he’s on his knees at the edge of the grave and Finch is clutching at his shoulders so he doesn’t fall back in. Fusco blinks dirt and what might be blood out of his eyes, squints at Finch’s face. It’s pale, but neutral, unimpressed. Maybe annoyed. The rain is spattered on his glasses and has darkened his hair, sharpened it into clumps and points dripping with water.

His only tell is that his eyes are wide, that his throat flickers with the speed of his pulse.

“You should get out of here,” Fusco murmurs.

“I suspect it might be too late for that, Detective. You’re stuck with me.” A smile plays over his mouth, thin and desperate. “I’ll try not to make things any worse for you.”

He tries to laugh, but it comes out as a short, wet cough.

“Stand now,” Finch says, tugging at his arm.

Fusco tilts to one side, trying to get his feet flat on the ground, but he’s so dizzy and it nearly sends him tipping.

“You have to stand up,” Finch hisses.

Fusco tries again, gets one knee out from under him so he’s kneeling, lopsidedly, by Finch’s feet. He stares gloomily at Finch’s loafers, wet and warping in the rain.

“Are we going?” Simmons asks.

“Lionel,” Finch spits, so soft, so quiet Fusco can barely hear it himself, “every second you stay on the ground is another chance for them to decide we’re not worth the time to talk to. Get up. Now.” On the last word, Finch sinks his fingernails deep into the scruff of Fusco’s neck and yanks upward, hard, like he means to pick Fusco up like an unruly kitten. He cringes, whimpers at the tugging on his skin, but because he understands what Finch means and because he knows Finch isn’t strong enough to pull him up, Fusco pushes up hard and stands, wobbling, on his own two feet. Finch takes Fusco’s arm as he rises, holds him close. His face is flat, unemotional. “Shall we?”

Simmons nods, curt and efficient, and turns toward the trees. The driver remains behind, staring meaningfully at Finch and Fusco until, haltingly, they start to move, Fusco trying to lean on Finch as little as possible. The driver falls into step behind them. In this tiny knot, Fusco is escorted away from the hole he dug and the body he made and he can’t help but feel wistful, abandoning it.

They walk back to the cars in close formation, so he can’t ask Finch any of the things he wants to ask about, like what they’re going to do now or what the hell Finch thinks he’s doing here. “How’d you find me?” Fusco tries.

“You were with Officer Simmons when your signal went dead. I simply worked under the assumption that you remained with Officer Simmons and began tracking his phone instead.”

“And how the hell,” Simmons calls over his shoulder, “did you do that?”

“I’m rather gifted in that area,” Finch says, maneuvering shakily among thick underbrush. Fusco looks down, notices that Finch is soaked up to the shins, that there are little threads pulled loose in his trousers. “Don’t take it personally, Officer. I can do it to most people at most times. If it makes you feel any better, your password security is well above the average. Which isn’t exactly a high bar, but still.” He further entangles his arm with Fusco, so they’re linked, so Fusco’s arm is pressed against Finch’s ribs.

He can feel Finch’s heart hammering.

The road appears suddenly through the trees and Fusco’s first, distant, fuzzy thought is, That’s a long-ass Lincoln. He shakes his head, blinks his eyes and realizes the obvious: that it’s a goddamn stretch Lincoln.

Finch went out and retrieved or rented or – hell, it’s Finch – bought a stretch Lincoln Town Car to save Fusco from execution.

Where, between spying, crime-fighting, tailoring, and whatever other crazy rich guy hobbies Finch has, does he even find the time for this shit?

“Gentlemen.” Finch opens the door to his goddamn limousine like he’s the chauffer and not the billionaire who owns it. “I suppose you have a specific order you’d like to enter in, to assuage any fears or doubts you may have. I’ll defer to you.”

Simmons raises an eyebrow. “What about him?” He cocks his head toward the shadow of a man behind the tinted windows of the driver’s seat. For a moment, Fusco’s heart leaps because it’s Reese, it’s got to be Tall, Dark, and Creepy, and they’re all saved. Then the shadow of the head turns and Fusco sees the fullness of the man’s cheek, the inefficient strain as he twists around to peer at them through dark glass. Not Reese. Definitely not.

“Just a hired driver,” Finch says with a shrug. “There is a soundproofed privacy divider in the car itself and I think it’s best if you give him as little opportunity to memorize your faces as possible. I’d hate to have to get rid of him. This is, after all, primarily a rescue mission.”

Simmons doesn’t like that. It’s very clear from the set of his brows, from the way his jaw clicks. He’s weighing his options. “You and me first,” he says, rapping a knuckle against Finch’s breastbone in a way that makes Fusco suddenly, blazingly angry. “Then Malinowski will bring Fusco in.”

That idea, the concept of Finch and Simmons alone together, hits every alarm Fusco has. He grips hard at Finch’s sleeve, blue wool bunching between Fusco’s fingers, and drags him close, but Finch plays it off like Fusco’s falling again. He detaches Fusco’s hand and hooks it neatly around the frame of the car door.

“Hang on, if you can,” he says. Finch lets his palm ghost over the ridge of Fusco’s knuckles as he lowers himself gingerly into the door of the limousine with Simmons at his back.

Go after him while his back is turned, Fusco thinks. Get your arm around his throat and choke the life out of him. Don’t let him near Finch.

The muzzle of a gun nudges between his shoulder blades and Fusco recalls one reason among many why he can’t do that. So he waits patiently as Finch disappears into the dark of the car, as Simmons follows him. He cracks his knuckles.

“Alright,” Simmons says from inside. “Come on in.”

He feels the press of the gun again, urging him onward. It’s too close to his back, Fusco thinks. It’s a rookie mistake the driver’s making, shoving the gun right up against the guy you’re trying to hold up. If he wanted to, he could turn around real fast, take control of the gun. He’s bigger than this guy. He’s stronger. He could wrench the gun out of the driver’s hands and put him down. It’d be risky, but it could be done.

Of course, Fusco would need to be fast and strong, and he can’t really manage that right now. He hates that he can’t. He was strong enough to dig a grave, to kill a man, but since that last revelation, it’s like all his will dried up. Like everything that made him solid and dependable and fucking good for something is gone and he’s just a trembling husk. I can kill a man. I can’t protect one.

If he kills the driver, that leaves Simmons in the limo alone with Finch. That can never happen.

Fusco lets himself be guided into the limo, bowing his head low to clear the doorway and blinking in the dim, gold track lights. The air is excruciating, warm and carefully conditioned and burning his frozen skin. He didn’t know. He had no idea he was that cold. A cough escapes him, hacking and painful like his insides are all raw, and bows his head with the force of it.

When he looks up, he is staring into a bloody, feral face and it’s a bad punchline when he realizes it’s his own reflected in the mirror behind the bar.

It’s a smaller, funnier, more ordinary punchline when he registers finally that the limo has a bar.

Fusco blinks, takes in his own bruised and red-rimmed eyes peering between the stems of champagne flutes, and shakes his head.

To his right is a privacy screen. He can see, very faintly, the shape of the man Finch hired to drive his car. Beyond that, nothing.

To his left is an aisle. One side is all champagne in buckets and crystal glasses hung shimmering by their stems, all brilliant in the ambient underlighting that clashes bizarrely with the gray, sopping, twilit woods outside the long window. The other side is a long black leather seat that curves in an L at the end. Finch sits in the bend of that L, back straight, hands folded on his knees, head tilted solicitously. Simmons sits on the long axis of the L, head tilted lazily back against one foggy window, gun trained on Finch.

“Are you moving or what?”

He feels the driver close behind him, feels the barrel of the gun nosing up his spine as the driver pushes it against him. Turn around, he thinks, fruitlessly. Take control of the gun. Kill him.

Finch is very still and very calm but his eyes keep flicking from Fusco to the gun in Simmons’ hand. Fusco falters.

“Move, asshole!” The driver gives him a rough shove and there was a time when Fusco would have whipped around and socked him right in the jaw for that, or at least wheeled around on him and puffed out his chest and shoved the driver around until it got through his dumb fucking head that he doesn’t get to lay a hand on Fusco. This isn’t that time. Not when Fusco’s head is light and his legs are so damn shaky. When the driver shoves him, Fusco goes down, face-first onto the plush black carpet of the limo’s floor.

There’s soft, almost surprised laughter. “Jesus, Lionel,” says Simmons. “You are a mess.”

“Yes,” Finch murmurs slowly, thoughtfully, dreamily from his seat at the end. “Yes, he rather is.”

“You still sure you want him back?”

Fusco lies very still on the carpet. He should get up. Finch is gonna need him; even if Finch is finished with him, Finch is gonna need him to get out of here alive. Fusco lies unmoving. Fusco counts his aches and pains. Fusco inhales sharply, breathes in traces of cleaning chemicals in the carpet.

“Positive,” Finch says. He clears his throat. “Lionel. Come here.”

The sound he makes is guttural and pained.

“Shhhh. Not now. Just come sit by me.”

He wants to. He’s so tired of knowing nothing and having to choose between rocks and hard places. He’s so tired of Finch and being afraid of Finch and being apart from Finch. He’s so goddamn sick of not understanding anything. This is a simple command. No choice and no uncertainty. Go sit by Finch, because you have to.

He can’t walk. His legs are soft and heavy. They kick and scrape weakly against the floor when he tries to stand. So he crawls to Finch. He inches along on his hands and his knees and if the driver or Simmons have anything to say about that, they might as well be saying it miles away through a thick layer of cotton wool, because Fusco can’t hear them. If, perhaps, he starts to to, the sound of them is drowned out soon enough by the pressure of Finch’s bony knee against his ear as Fusco pushes against him, just wanting to be close. “Ohhhhh dear,” Finch sighs, calm and faintly exasperated. He slides one hand around Fusco’s upper arm and tugs. It’s a faint, unimpressive tug, so Fusco doesn’t move. He just rests his cheek against the sharp peak of Finch’s knees and blinks up at him.

Finch’s expression is sharp and irritated. His skin is so pale.

“Can you get up at all?” he asks. The sentence softens as he speaks it, like he meant to be annoyed but he just doesn’t have the energy.

He tries, finds that he’s shaking hard, harder than he should be. “I need a minute,” he manages.

“Alright,” Finch says. His fingertips come gingerly to rest on the top of Fusco’s head. It’s like the weight of an anchor holding him in place. “Take whatever time you need.” He looks up at the sound of the car’s door being slammed. Fusco stares dully up at the soft, stubble-flecked underside of Finch’s chin. “Detective Malinowski,” he says, “I wonder if you wouldn’t mind passing me that bucket.”

There’s the scrape of metal, the clank and click of ice. Finch sets a champagne bucket on the seat beside him, takes out the bottle.

“Thank you. I don’t actually want it,” Finch admits, holding it out with a sheepish shrug. “I don’t suppose either of you would care to…”

“We’re fine.”

“Very well.” He drops the dark green bottle on to the seat and it tips, rolls, leaving a shiny slug’s trail of condensation on the leather. Finch doesn’t care to set it upright. Instead, he plucks a clean chunk of ice from the champagne bucket, squints at it in the light. “Suppose we discuss terms.”

“If anything he says is true,” Simmons settles the toe of one wet, muddy shoe in between two of Fusco’s ribs and pushes, real gentle, “it sounds like Fusco here pulled your ass from the fire.”

“That’s a way of putting it.” Finch frowns and, for no goddamn reason at all, presses the corner of that ice cube to Fusco’s split lip and shit, shit it bites. He jerks back but Finch grabs hold of his chin and just keeps him there, pressing at him with that ice until the bite turns numb and strange. “Yes. Detective Fusco did save my life.”

Simmons’ light toeing at Fusco’s side turns into a shove that knocks him off-balance, out of Finch’s hands and clutching at the seat, at Finch’s shins, trying to right himself. “He used our name to do it,” he says. “You’ve been a goddamn headache to me, sir.”

“My apologies.” Finch takes Fusco by the shoulders and steadies him so he’s draped against Finch’s shins once again. He drops the old ice cube on the floor, takes a new one and starts to brush one facet of it over a cut on Fusco’s temple. He’s staring right into Fusco’s face while he mops up his wounds and Finch’s eyes are distant. “I never meant to cause you any discomfort, I’m sure. It just happened that way.”

Fusco feels the press of Simmons’ shoe treads on his upper arm, wet through his jacket. “Wasn’t his call to make.” He kicks again, harder this time, and it sends Fusco onto the floor, lying on Finch’s plushy limo carpet and Finch’s poor, pricey, mud-spattered shoes. “And this has been an expensive fight so far. Fusco said he’d get some compensation out of you, but I haven’t seen a dime of it so far. In fact, I don’t even know your name.”

For the first time since he started to ice Fusco’s face, Finch turns to stare Simmons in the eye. “I’ll ask you not to kick him again.”

Simmons laughs, sharp and disbelieving. “I’ve got a gun on you.”

“Yes, I’m aware of that. All the same, don’t kick him again.” He holds out one of his thin, white hands and Fusco takes it, clutches at it. Finch doesn’t have the strength to pull him up, but having that guide there, the force of his grip, is enough to make Fusco sit up again, lean against Finch’s legs. He thinks that maybe Finch is going to try to drag him up onto the couch again, but Finch seems happy to give Fusco that minute he needs to catch his breath. He cradles Fusco’s jaw against his palm. “There you are,” he murmurs. The ice cube brushes in broad streaks across his forehead and trickles of icewater drizzle into his eyebrows, down the bridge of his nose. “He never told me any of this, by the way.”

Simmons gives a noncommittal grunt.

“Not that any of it is news. Detective Fusco has always been an at-risk asset, and I make it my business to know his troubles. I’ve been aware of your threats and harassment for some time. However…” The ice cube has melted to a thin, jagged sliver. Finch tosses it aside, grabs another one from the bucket. The ice rests against Fusco’s mouth, traces smooth, cool lines over his lips. “…While I can’t make his right to privacy a priority, I do trust him to handle his own affairs, up to a point. I hoped that he would break away from you on his own or ask for my help. He did not.” He shrugs. “A misguided attempt to protect me, more than likely, so I can’t be too furious.” The ice cube is starting to melt through, so there’s a hole in the center where he can feel Finch’s thumb brushing over torn skin. “However, it is frustrating. At the end of the day, Detective Fusco is an informant. His purpose, as far as I am concerned, is to tell me everything. You’ve compromised that, Officer Simmons. You and your organization.” Finch clears his throat. “There. You see, we’ve inconvenienced each other. I’d hate to be inconvenienced further. Name your price and be done with it.”

“Fusco says you swindled that guy in the grave over there to the tune of 2.3 million dollars.” Simmons leans forward. He rests his forearms on his knees and this puts the gun closer to Finch’s shin, to Fusco’s face than either of them really want. “We want twice that.”

“That’s easy enough to arrange,” Finch says. “I suppose you’ll want that in cash, or perhaps a wire transfer. I can’t imagine who you’d want that check made out to. I would prefer electronic payment, if only for efficiency’s sake. Frankly, I’d like to spend as little time with you as possible and the banks are closing soon.”

“Twice that,” Simmons repeats, “for starters.”

Finch’s eyes narrow. His lips part and he breathes out harshly, but he says nothing.

“I think you’re good for a lot more than 4.6 mil, so I have a better idea. What if I hang on to him for you? Make sure he stays safe, since that’s such a priority with you. Keep an eye on the big dumb son of a bitch so you don’t have to. And you pay me off every month for my trouble. And on the day you stop paying me off, that’s the day I break him until all your secrets come spilling out. What do you think of that?”

“Fuck you.” Fusco’s kind of surprised to hear his thoughts outside the privacy of his own head until he realizes he’s the dumbass saying them. He grabs hard at one of Finch’s knees and tremblingly struggles to push himself to his feet. “Fuck you. That’s what I think.”

“I think,” Finch says, more politely but with a brittle kind of force, “that you wouldn’t wait until I stopped paying you off to start hurting him.” He puts one hand on the back of Fusco’s neck and gently but firmly, he pushes him back to the floor. “I also think that it would be a fruitless endeavor on your part. He knows almost nothing about me.”

I know your old fake names, Fusco thinks in a desperate, inane rush. I know a place where you sleep sometimes, or you used to, and I could lead them back there. I know what tea you drink and I know some of the cars you drive. I know your friends’ faces. Don’t do it, don’t let them have me, because I could hurt you so bad, whether I wanted to or not.

Finch’s hand on the back of his neck is tense as wire.

“Yeah,” says Detective Malinowski in a slow, careful whisper, “but you’d say that whether it was true or not. Wouldn’t you?”

“You should never have tipped your hand,” Simmons says.

“Should never’ve come out here without a gun, more like.”

“That’s a fair point,” Simmons agrees, gesturing with the barrel of his gun. “That was pretty goddamn stupid of you.” He cracks his neck. “So here’s how it’s gonna be. I’m not unreasonable, so you get two choices. First one’s the one we just discussed. We take Fusco here and kennel him for you, for a modest fee. Second one is, we take you. Yeah, you. We’ll drop Fusco wherever you like, safe and sound. A free man. But you come work for us. ‘Cause I get the feeling you’re more than just a rich idiot, mister. I think you’re probably pretty goddamn smart. The kind of smart that’s worth more than all the cash we could bleed out of you before you decided that Fusco here wasn’t worth the trouble.”

Finch’s throat flexes. “If he isn’t worth a few hundred million to me, what makes you think he’s worth my life?”

“I think that after a few payments and some time without him, you might start to sour on him. I also think that you’re not half as cold as you want us to think you are, and you’d sooner take a bullet to the head yourself than stand by and watch us take him away. In short,” Simmons says, “I think he’s worth plenty to you, mister.”

Fusco can feel Finch shivering. He slides his fingertips around to the back of Finch’s knee and squeezes in a way that he hopes will be reassuring. It’s all he can let himself do; anything else would be too obvious. They should never have been so close to each other in the first place. If Finch had any goddamn sense at all, he would have left Fusco down at the other end of the limo where he fell, or maybe in that hole in the woods. Of course, if Finch really had any sense, he never would’ve come out here at all. He would’ve cut his losses and stayed home. There’s no point to them both dying.

But it would have been nice if Finch had left Fusco somewhere apart from him. Without everybody looking at him and using him like a fucking poker chip, Fusco would’ve had a chance to...not escape, probably. Not even come up with a plan. He can’t stand. He can barely think.

At least Finch could have made it seem like he didn’t give a damn if Fusco lived or died.

Why’d Finch have to go and touch him? Why couldn’t he have kept his hands off for once? They’re not in Finch’s quiet, empty townhouse right now. It matters who sees the two of them together. It matters what they think. Finch never should have called Fusco to him like a dog, or else Fusco should have never listened, played dead, just stayed down. Not come when he’s called and nuzzle up against Finch’s lap like a love-starved fucking idiot.

Where his fingers are pressed against tendons and ligaments in the knee, Fusco can feel Finch’s whole leg tense up hard and tight for just a second, and when he releases, the shiver is gone. Fusco looks up and finds Finch’s face calm and blank, his eyes as sharp as razors behind his glasses. He plucks the bright, stripy handkerchief that puffs out of his suit’s breast pocket like a flower and unfurls it with a flick of his wrist.

“That’s poor faith to say the least,” Finch says. He gives Fusco a light push off to the side, clearing his lap, and lays out the hankie like he’s about to have dinner at some fancy restaurant. Fusco slumps between them, back against Simmons’ knee, and watches dumbly. “It feels strange to say this, since I didn’t have a high opinion of you in the first place, but I’m rather disappointed.” He starts to drop ice cubes, one by one, into the center of the handkerchief. “Perhaps our goals are very different, but I was under the impression that we at least understood one another.”

“Sure,” Simmons says. “I understand you. Anybody who’s been in this business as long as I have could understand you, because you’re a fuckin’ cliche. You’re smart, really smart. And because you’re smart, you’re also rich. You wouldn’t have a care in the world, except you’re bored. Bored and guilty on account of how rich you are. And because you’re so smart and rich, right around the time that midlife crisis hits you figure you can, I dunno. Clean up the streets. Build a smarter, kinder mob. Run with the criminals and become the big fuckin’ man you always wished you were. Your type always wants something like that.”

Finch grabs a handful of ice and drops it glistening into his own lap. “You read me like a book,” he says in bored tones.

“I’m not done yet,” Simmons says. “The problem with your type is that you have it too good. You think you’re a hard fuckin’ guy because you know your way around the boardroom, but you’re not cut out for real crime. You think there’s rules or honor among thieves or some shit and it makes you do stuff like this…” Simmons looks very tired, all of a sudden. “...when you should’ve just stayed at home. There are no fuckin’ rules, rich man. And people like you either get that through their skulls or they die stupid.”

Finch folds up his handkerchief, gives it a twist so the ice is all sealed up inside. It looks like a melting hard candy, lumpy and dripping and bright, ruined silk. He holds it out to Fusco.

If he had played dead, Fusco realizes as he mutely takes the little makeshift ice pack, Finch would have asked to sit beside him on the floor. He presses the bundle to his cheek, beneath his eye.

“I suppose you think you’re very intimidating.”

Simmons tired expression shatters into a low chuckle. “Yeah. Yeah, I think that. If you weren’t scared shitless, you’d be able to go ten seconds without doing something with your hands. You’d be able to look me in the fuckin’ eye. You wouldn’t be dragging him in between us so you can hide behind him.” Simmons rolls his shoulders with a low grunt. “You know, I wasn’t playing Would You Rather? earlier. You make your choice yet?”

Finch twists away from Simmons, away from Fusco, and stares dully out the opposite window of the limo. “Neither option appeals to me.”

“Gotta pick one,” he says. “If you pick neither, then I make the choice for you. I don’t think you want that.”

Finch doesn’t move. “Which would you pick?”

“Option number three.” He grins sharply. “That’s the one where I shoot Fusco and you come with us. You’re welcome to pick that one too, if you want, but I figured you wouldn’t like the idea.”

“You figured right.” He sighs. “May I make a confession?”

“Seems like the place for it,” Simmons says with a shrug. “Just don’t expect me to care.”

“I’m becoming bored.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” His hand strikes out and grips Fusco hard by the collar of his shirt. He drags him hard back against that sharp fucking knee, digs the barrel of the gun into his scalp. “You want me to liven it up?”

Fusco squirms in his grip, tries to jerk away, but the gun barrel follows him and stamps a small, neat circle through Fusco’s thinning hair. “Get off me,” he snarls. He sounds weak and lame.

“Oh, stop it.” Finch says it the way you would to a kid who’s been acting up all day and you’re just tired, tired, tired. Finally, he bothers to turn. His eyes slide straight over Fusco and go right to Simmons. “You might as well put that thing in your own mouth, for all the credible threat you are. Frankly, I’m insulted. I’m enraged that you believed, even for a second, that I would be so easily manipulated. The fact that you seem to genuinely believe that I’m idiotic enough to come out here on my own without anything resembling backup is actually infuriati - oh, don’t bother,” he snaps as Malinowski whips his gun around to point to the privacy screen separating them from the front of the car. “It’s bulletproof. And soundproof, so there’s really no need for any kind of vindictiveness toward my driver. They could not be more ignorant as to the nature of this situation. The same, however, cannot be said for the trained sniper in the woods who is currently watching our every move and is, in actual fact, listening to everything we’re saying.” Casually, he pulls out the omnipresent little earbud that Fusco stopped questioning a long time ago and holds it up, bright and confident, like a magician asking “Is this your card?”

Malinowski leans over and snatches the earbud out of Finch’s hand and smashes it under his heel.

Finch blinks. “You are aware that that’s not the actual listening device?”

His mouth drops open. He keeps grinding the sole of his shoe against the carpet.

“It’s actually much more complicated than that.”

His foot still continues in little half-moon twists, like if he steps on this thing enough, all of his problems will go away.

“I’d explain it to you, but, ah. Yes. Over your head, perhaps. Anyway, suffice it to say that this recording is being automatically uploaded to something called a cloud - not an actual cloud, mind you - where it can now be accessed by seven or eight of my closest friends and associates, all of whom have been given instructions to take this recording to the proper authorities if I fail to check in by a certain time. It’s all fairly well planned.”

Fusco feels lightheaded. You smug, condescending son of a bitch, he thinks as his bloody face splits into a broad, dopey grin and he rocks forward, I never should have doubted you.

“Sounds like you thought this through,” Simmons says. “So. What now? You gonna have me shot?”

“Well, no, not necessarily. I’m not the killing kind, Officer Simmons. You’re correct in your summation of my character in that instance at least. I’m not a criminal by nature. But, as I said, Detective Fusco is a valued member of my organization and, though it pains me to say it, I am rather attached to him.” Finch’s smile is lukewarm and sheepish, and he half hides it in the collar of his coat. He might as well have wiped it off there, because in the next second, it’s gone. “I’ve betrayed my nature to protect people I care for in the past. This could, I think, be one of those instances. But only if you force my hand.”

Simmons’ fingers curl and bunch in the collar of Fusco’s shirt. The gun moves just slightly, up and down, like a fond scratch behind the ear. “And what would I have to do,” Simmons says in careful tones disguised as lazy ones, “to get out of forcing that hand of yours?”

“That’s easy enough. Let him go, obviously,” Finch says, indicating Fusco. “And after that, we would simply...part ways. Detective Fusco and I would leave; Detective Malinowski and yourself might finish burying that man in the woods, or you might just leave him out for the birds and go home early. That’s entirely up to your discretion. All I ask is that, from now on, you forget about Detective Fusco. He is not your ally or your enemy. He has nothing to do with you.”

“Nothing to do with me,” Simmons repeats. Fusco feels his fingers go loose and strange against the back of his neck. All at once they tighten with renewed force, yanking back until Fusco’s choking against the press of his own tie. “He has everything to do with me. I own him.”

“No.” Finch becomes momentarily distracted by a clump of dirt on his knee, flicks it neatly away. “No, of course you don’t. You’re just attached to him, as I am. But he doesn’t belong to either one of us.”

“So what am I supposed to do? Forget this trash ever wanted to betray me?” His wrist twists and the collar of his shirt draws tighter. Fusco’s hands fly to his throat and try to tug it loose, get some air. “Fight the war he dumped on my goddamn doorstep?” He twists again and Fusco’s vision tightens and becomes bright in some spots, very dark in others. He gasps and it’s a thin, belabored hiss.

“No.” Finch’s hand reaches out, past Fusco and his half-crushed throat, to fall on Simmons’ hands where they bunch behind Fusco’s neck, pulling and twisting. “This is, ah, the part of my offer I’m most reluctant to make. This is, as you say, a war Detective Fusco started. Or rather, a war I started that Detective Fusco unfortunately became embroiled in. We will take care of what we started. It’s not your problem any longer.”

The collar of his shirt falls loose again and Fusco wheezes, lets his head fall to one side so he’s resting his cheek on Finch’s forearm where it passes him by.

Finch’s arm remains there. Fusco can feel muscles tightening as Finch gives Simmons’ hand a reassuring squeeze. “I’m not asking you for much,” Finch says. “Only your apathy.”

Fusco cranes his head back, stretches out his bruising neck, watches a sharp-edged smile crawl across Simmons face from upside down and beneath him.

“Guess I could give you that much,” Simmons says. “Guess I would if I thought for a second there was really a sniper out there.”

Finch’s jaw tightens. Fusco can hear his teeth click.

“But we both know that’s a bunch of bullshit, don’t we? If there was a sniper out there, a real crack shot...” Finch tries to snatch his hand away but Simmons catches him, uses the hand that’s not holding a gun to Fusco’s head to grip hard at Finch’s skinny little wrist. “...you never would have offered me a fuckin’ cent. You wouldn’t have wasted our time. Just laid it all out on the line and took what you thought you were owed. That’s what you would’ve done if there was a real sniper out there in those trees. It’s a ballsy lie, mister,” he says, running a thumb up the inside of FInch’s wrist so hard that the flesh bends and warps around it, “but it’s still a fuckin’ lie. And I’m gonna make you pay for making me sit here and listen to your bullshit.”

Simmons wrenches hard at Finch’s arm, draws a thin, scratchy sound from his mouth, and the force of the motion makes the gun bounce against Fusco’s skull. He flinches. Can’t get away, he thinks. Not crammed between the two of them like this. Not with the gun right up against his head.

Simmons pulls so hard at Finch that he slips straight off the seat and onto his poor, damaged goddamn knees.

As Finch falls, he is wide-eyed, openly scared as hell.

Can’t get away, Fusco thinks. Can get closer.

Hard as he can, Fusco throws himself back and up into Simmons. He hears Simmons’ nose crack wetly against the back of his head, hears the grunt of surprise and pain, hears Malinowsky dumbly shout, “Hey! Hey, asshole!” and it’s like somebody flipped a switch inside his head because he can’t believe he waited this fucking long. His heart is pounding and his brain is on fire and he thinks he can feel Simmons’ teeth clashing at the nape of his neck. He slams his head back again and this time he can feel that nose bone shatter, the tickle of blood on his scalp. That’s good. God, that’s good. Fusco lunges for Simmons’ right hand, the one with the gun in it.

He pins Simmons by the wrist to the seat, starts tearing at his fingers where they’re locked on the grip on the trigger, and that’s when Simmons comes down hard on him. Fusco catches the full weight of him on his back and it crushes him hard against the edge of the seat, pushes the air out of him with a horrible groan that Fusco can’t believe came out of his own mouth. Simmons’ unpinned fist pounds hard into Fusco’s kidneys. He curls, draws one knee up in pain, but he doesn’t let go of Simmons’ hand.

Control the gun, he thinks feverishly. He can’t shoot you if you control the gun.

“Get off him, man,” Malinowski’s saying. “I can’t shoot him if you’re on top of him.”

Simmons’ breath gusts hot and heavy against Fusco’s neck. “I’m gonna fucking kill you,” he snarls, voice all thick and soaked with blood. His hand squeezes at the bruises his fist left. He seeks them out all lovingly, gropes his rough palm up Fusco’s side and over his shoulder until Simmons is pinching hard at the base of his neck. “I’m gonna fucking kill you.”

Fusco keeps wrenching hard at his fingers, scratching and tearing but, with the gun as with the base of his skull, Simmons has one hell of a grip.

So he lets his head drop suddenly, so his teeth are barked against the inside of his lips and his lips are smashed to the thumb joint in Simmons’ hand and he opens his mouth and he bites down and waits to taste blood. He hangs on by his teeth until Simmons’ angry fucking yell starts to filter in and Fusco realizes that thing he thought was a splitting headache is actually just Simmons pounding him across the back of the head over and over.

He digs in. He clings. He feels his teeth meet between a thin layer of torn-up skin.

The heel of Simmons’ hand slams into the back of his head and he exhales sharp and wet through gritted teeth and fights the urge to throw up.

Simmons’ hand falls on the back of his neck again, squeezing gently this time, like Fusco’s a kitten he means to pick up by the scruff. “Okay, Lionel,” he murmurs, grabbing a soft pinch of skin between his fingers, “you let me kill you quickly now. You know I can make it worse for you. Just get off my fucking gun and let me put you out of your misery.”

Fusco wedges a finger behind the trigger so it can’t be pulled back. He grinds his teeth.

Simmons takes a long, hissing breath. “Malinowski.” His voice is tight. “Get over here and shoot him already.”

“Don’t want to shoot you in the hand.”

“Point blank,” he says. His voice shivers with pain. “We’ll figure it out; just do it!”

Malinowski hesitates.

“What the hell are you waiting for?”

“Look, I don’t wanna get that close to him.”

“What?”

“Guy’s fucking rabid. I don’t wanna put my hands near his face.”

“Are you scared?”

“No!” Malinowski says, way too loud. “I just don’t wanna get bit.”

Simmons’ exhales, a long, rattling breath. Fusco can feel the muscles in Simmons’ hand twitch between his teeth. “Malinowski, this isn’t hard. You got a gun. He’s got nothing. And if you are worth a goddamn, you will get over here and shoot him in the fucking head. ”

Suddenly Simmons staggers with a grunt and Fusco peeks out the corner of his eye to see Finch shrink back against the seats, back from the place where he stood when he pushed Simmons, shoved at him like he was a schoolyard bully. It seems as though Finch becomes smaller as he cringes backwards.

Simmons goes very still for a long second and then, almost casually, he wrenches his hand out of Fusco’s bite, gun and all. “Jesus,” he snarls. “What am I, in fuckin’ grade school? Can’t any of you pussies throw a fucking punch?” Then, like he feels the need to demonstrate, like they’re all there to learn, in a smooth, fluid motion he whips his gun across Finch’s face.

It’s almost impossible. Fusco knows Finch lives with injury and that he’s breakable and that he needs to be thinking about it always when he’s touching Finch, even if Finch doesn’t seem to want him to, because Fusco’s the kind of fuckup who could snap Finch in half without meaning to.

But he guesses he never believed it, not really. Fragile as he is, Finch has always been untouchable, cold and stiff and sophisticated and fearless. The sight of him dropped, falling back against the last seat like a puppet with its strings cut, is a violation.

That’s kind of all Fusco picks up before he throws himself against Simmons’ knees.

They slam into the bar with a crash and Fusco’s aware of a rain of shattered glass, a shout, the feeling of something heavy and made with cut glass falling into the side of his head but he’s not looking at any of it. His eyes are on Simmons’ face, the scowl plastered on it even when he’s down and there’s cuts on his scalp and there’s a halo around his head from where it crashed into the mirror behind the bar.

Simmons blinks at him, slowly, and the gun falls from his hand with a clatter. “Fuck you,” he groans.

His fist strikes Fusco in the jaw.

Fusco falls back. His head strikes the carpet next to a shattered bottle of something expensive. He buries his face in it the carpet, feels the cooling sting of alcohol on his cheek and the sickening squish-crunch of a shard of glass embedding itself in the bendy cartilage of his ear. He holds position, stays down and protects his face as Simmons rains down vicious fucking blows on his shoulders and his neck and the back of his head.

Somewhere far away, like maybe all the way down the block, he can hear Malinowski saying “Just get off him. Just get off of him so I can shoot him already!”

He can’t hear Finch.

Fusco brings his knee up sharp and catches Simmons in the groin. The sound he makes, this really horrible gut-shot sound, is maybe the best thing Fusco’s heard all year. As Simmons crumples and falls to the side, Fusco rolls to follow him, rolls until he’s pinning him.

Simmons is crumpled, face tight with pain, and for a moment Fusco isn’t sure what he’s going to do with him. It’s just that everything’s moving like it’s underwater and Fusco’s ears are ringing and there’s something hot and wet running down his neck and it’s all too much, like he’s high.

Then he knows.

He hits Simmons in the face once, and then again ‘cause it feels so good and then one more time because the second time felt even better and then a fourth time, ‘cause his muscles are caught in this loop of motion and after that he loses count. He can’t think because Simmons is hurt and Simmons’ skin is splitting beneath his knuckles and Fusco is terrified that the dream will end. It’s like he’s pounding all his frustrations out, the whole damn year’s worth. Every time he felt scared or worthless or like he couldn’t protect his son, every time Simmons threatened him at work, every time the son of a bitch tainted the name of somebody Fusco loved with his shitty fucking words, every time Fusco woke up in a cold sweat and knew that nobody was ever going to help him get away, that’s a bruise he leaves on Simmons’ face, that’s a cut on his lip.

He’s numbed by it. It feels like a long time before he’s aware of Finch’s arms around him, of Finch shouting “Lionel, get off him!” in Fusco’s ringing ears, of Finch pulling at him, of Finch pressed right up against him, curved around him and over him like a shield between Fusco and Malinowski’s gun.

It’s not so brave in retrospect, Fusco thinks as Finch drags him to the floor. It’s only that Finch is the most important person in the car, and he knows it.

He falls back hard into Finch’s lap, body between Finch’s legs and head dawdling against Finch’s chest. Finch is peering at him upside down, eyes round as big shiny half-dollars, and wraps his arms around Fusco’s head, bends over him until they’re nose to chin. “Shut your eyes,” he whispers.

Fusco hears a bang and a second rain of glass.

For thirty seconds, all is quiet. It’s just rain sounds and tinkling glass sounds and the sounds of four people being really, really tired and the sound of Finch’s heart hammering behind Fusco’s head and the sound of Finch’s breath puffing hot against Fusco’s face.

Finally, Finch looses his death grip on Fusco’s head and sits up straight. Malinowski is standing there, gun dangling useless in his hand. Simmons is on the floor, propped up on his elbows in the glass. Neither one is looking at Finch or Fusco. Their eyes are on the back of the limo. Fusco follows their gaze.

The last two windows, opposite each other, are blown out, rain gusting cheerfully around the jagged remnants of the glass in the frame.

“That,” Finch says, “was a warning shot.”

He doesn’t even sound out of breath.

Simmons makes an odd, choking-snorting noise and spits, very casually, on the floor. “So what now?” he says.

“You were made aware of the rules. Now get out of my car.”

Malinowski is wide-eyed, balanced on the edge of panic. “How do we know he’s not gonna execute us anyway?”

“You don’t,” Finch says coldly. “But it’s the only chance you’ve got.”

“You think I’m gonna fuckin’-”

“Hey,” Simmons says, his voice all thick and rough with how his face has been beaten out of shape. “Hey, shithead. Get out of the car.”

And they do. Malinowski eases the door open an inch at the time, peering fruitlessly around for the sniper before finally giving up. He offers a hand to Simmons that Simmons doesn’t take. He just rises up on his own, broken up and proud, and he doesn’t say a word on the way out. He just spits a gob of blood on the toe of Fusco’s shoe and Fusco can’t even bring himself to care.

They sit in silence as the two of them clamber out of the car, as the two of them slam the door to the limo. They don’t even move while they listen to the squish of their footsteps headed away, the whine and slam of Malinowski’s car doors and the sputtering roar of the engine.

Finch clears his throat. “Are they really leaving that grave open?

“Nah,” Fusco says, sitting up. “Probably gonna send some other poor schmuck to come fill it in.” He grins, jagged and crazy, as he climbs out of Finch’s lap. “I think I might’ve put Simmons in the hospital.”

“And you’re proud of that, are you?” asks Finch, eyebrows raised.

“Yup.”

Finch closes his eyes and cracks a small, tender smile. “Well done, Detective.” Finch twists to face the long streak of seats, folds out an armrest and finds a small panel of buttons. He presses one and there’s the fuzz of an intercom. “Drive on.”

The limo’s engine purrs to life.

“Jesus,” Fusco murmurs. “I hope you’re tipping that poor driver.”

“Naturally. I believe the arrangement was that I pay for any and all damages, in addition to his student loans.” Finch wrinkles his nose. “I have to say, the damages are much steeper than I’d like. But it’s a small price to pay for his silence.”

“Huh.” Fusco takes a good look at his own hands, plucks a chunk of glass out of his palm. “Sweet of you.”

“Yes. I thought so.”

Fusco finally looks up at him. There’s a spiderweb crack in the corner of Finch’s glasses, a bruise blossoming over the eye behind it. Fusco taps the same spot on his own face. “Did he do that?”

Finch shakes his head. He touches two fingers beneath his own eye and presses down gently, leaving indents in the swollen, puffy skin. “No, he did the one on my cheek, just here. You were somewhat careless with your elbows when I tried to pull you off of him.”

“Shit. Shit, I’m sorry.”

Finch waves him off. “Oh, don’t be. Don’t be. You can hardly be blamed for what happened in the heat of the moment.”

Picking through the glass, Fusco finds his makeshift handkerchief ice pack. It’s sodden and deflated-looking now, but there’s still a big lump of ice inside. He carefully brushes over it, plucking out chips and slivers of window and champagne glass, and then passes it off to Finch.

His mouth quivers very slightly. “Thank you.” The ruined glasses come off. Finch folds them neatly out of habit and sticks them in his breast pocket. His eyes look vulnerable and massive without them, Fusco thinks. Pink and watery. Finch blinks and holds the ice pack over his blackened eye.

Beneath them, the crunch and jostle of gravel becomes the smoothness of a real road, and the car starts to pick up speed.

“Guess I could have kept my cool a little better, though,” Fusco says. “Sorry I hauled off on him like that. I should’ve gone on believing you had a plan, like always. Speaking of which, is your attack dog gonna be okay getting home?”

“Hmm?” Finch peers at him, one-eyed and quizzical.

“You know. Your friend with the sniper rifle. Is Reese walking home, or what?”

“Ah.” Finch clears his throat. “Mr. Reese is in Brooklyn at the moment, attending to another matter.”

“Oh. So who...who’d you get to...not...it’s not Carter, is it?”

“No.” He squints at Fusco’s face, reading carefully. “Would there be a problem if she was?”

“No.” He rubs hard at his hurting face. “Maybe. I don’t want her to know...you know. What I did out there. I don’t want her thinking of me that way.” The smile that crosses his face is overstretched and defensive. “Hell, I don’t want you thinking of me that way.”

“You were placed in a difficult position,” Finch says. “I don’t think ill of you. Although perhaps it would make more sense if I did.” He sighs. “This incident can be kept confidential from Detective Carter, if that would make you more comfortable.”

“It would,” he says. “Thanks.”

“You are most welcome.”

They sit in silence and listen to the wind and rain as it flaps through the two shattered windows.

“Finch?”

“Mmm?”

“Who the hell was the sniper?”

Finch clicks his tongue. “There was no sniper, Detective Fusco.”

“What?”

“There wasn’t one.” Finch becomes distracted by little specks of glass resting on the shoulders of his jacket. He plucks fruitlessly at them. “I lied.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Fusco can hear his voice getting kind of high-pitched and hysterical. “Somebody shot out our windows, buddy, and it wasn’t a friendly fucking woodland creature, so who did it?”

“I suppose if you want to assign blame, then I did, although to call it shooting would be...inaccurate, to say the least. The windows were rigged with small explosive devices designed to shatter glass. Not terribly convincing on its own, but combined with the earlier suggestion that there might be a sniper in the woods, Officer Simmons’ mind leapt to the obvious conclusion. No guns required. Just a special effect. Maybe a bit...well, filmic, but then there’s very little about what I do that isn’t.” He digs some weird, cobbled-together-looking thing out of his pocket, all plastic and wire. “Press of a button,” he says, holding it up all proud. “Triggered it the second I pulled you off of Officer Simmons.”

“Huh.” Fusco rubs hard at his chin. “So you, uh, you weren’t in any kind of hurry there, were you? Took your sweet-ass fucking time about it.”

Finch lets out a long-suffering sigh. “Do you have any idea how difficult it is to sneak a hand into your jacket pocket while you’re being held at gunpoint? Not to mention somebody felt the need to physically engage. I had it well under control, Detective.”

“Yeah. Yeah, okay. So shoving him like a pissy little kid, was that part of the master plan, genius? Was that you having it under control?”

“That was…” Finch’s scowl crumbles and for a moment he looks like he’s just laughing at himself. “That was a momentary loss of control. Due to unforseen circumstances.” He starts to play with the trigger, turning it over and over in his hands. “I was afraid of what he might do to you.”

“You’re a fucking moron.”

“And you’re alive,” Finch says, unimpressed. “In spite of it.”

“I’m alive? Forget that shit. You could have died. Negotiations could’ve gone south. They could have put a bullet between your eyes before you had a chance to say a word. It could have happened at any time and then you would be dead. One of you doesn’t equal one of me. You’re so goddamn smart, you have to know that.”

Finch stops flicking at the shoulders of his suit, flecked with glass shards like glittery dandruff, and fixes Fusco with this wet-eyed stare, all soft and kind. It makes Fusco feel a bit like his chest is caving in. Finch holds out a hand expectantly. “Help me up, please. We shouldn’t be sitting in broken glass.”

Fusco reaches out and holds on to that hand, damp with blood and ice water, and braces his feet on the carpet so when they pull towards each other, they end up pulling each other to their feet until they’re standing in the aisle, nose to nose, hunched beneath the limo’s low ceiling.

Finch reaches up and plucks a neat triangle of glass out of Fusco’s hair and flicks it away onto the floor. “It’s a limited way of looking at things but I suppose you’re not wrong. Purely in terms of the work we do together, you’re replaceable in a way that I am not. But you’re also…” He smiles suddenly, shyly. “You’re not looking at the bigger picture. Which is fine. It can be difficult to see. But I’ve led...a very unusual life and I’ve learned a good deal. And one of the things I’ve learned is that everyone - every life - has relevance and meaning to someone. Every single human means the world to at least one other.” He straightens Fusco’s lapels, stares intently at the knot of his tie. “In my own personal estimation, you are well worth one of me.”

Fusco feels his ears go hot. “It’s still fuckin’ dumb.” He brushes at the shoulders of Finch’s jacket, gives up after the first few swipes when he feels tiny abrasions on his palms from all the glass nestled in between fibers. Instead, he unbuttons it, neatly flaps the jacket open and off Finch’s shoulders so he’s standing there in shirtsleeves and suspenders.

“I’m sorry,” Finch says, tugging at one deep red suspender strap, at the dirty cuff of his sleeve. “I never imagined being rescued would upset you so much. We could go back to the grave if you want. Start afresh.”

“Asshole.” He drops Finch’s jacket in a heap on the floor, shrugs out of his own and drops that on top of it, a muddled little pile between their feet. After a moment’s thought, Fusco unclips his tie and throws it on the pile. He’s sick of it pressing up against his throat. “‘Course not. You saved my life.”

“Happy to do it.” Finch stops fiddling around with his clothes for a second and blinks up at Fusco. “Did I get it all?”

Fusco gives him a fast once-over and sees the telltale glitter in his hair. “Hang on. You got something. Hold still a second, okay?” And he runs his hand through Finch’s thin, soft hair, combing through slow and gentle, collecting the bright little fragments between his fingers and leaving behind small streaks of mud and hair swept back. Finch holds very still, owl-eyed and curious, totally oblivious to the dirt Fusco’s smearing onto him.

“Shit,” he says with a laugh as he draws back his hand, shakes the glass off. “Should’ve let you do that yourself. I’m a goddamn mess.”

Finch captures Fusco’s hand as it drops. They look mismatched, his broad hand with the short, fat fingers clasped in Finch’s. The guy’s hands belong on an artist, he thinks, or a musician. Long, elegant, smart fingers. Right now they’re tracing over the lines in Fusco’s palms, heartline and lifeline and so on, though Fusco couldn’t tell you which was which. He just knows that there’s dirt in there, ground in the creases and in under his fingernails. He knows he’s all smeared and tacky with blood. He waits for Finch to click his tongue and offer him some hand sanitizer.

“Stop apologizing,” Finch murmurs. “You have lovely hands.”

“Don’t bullshit me.”

“Strong. But very gentle. I’ve always been struck by that, how carefully you treat the things that you feel are deserving of care. And, ah...” Finch’s fingertips nestle into the callouses on the pads of his palm and start rubbing over them, trying to read the ridges like it’s Braille. “...Well-used, I think is the phrase. Well-loved is the kinder alternative. Honest hands.”

“Okay,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean you should be touching them when they’re this filthy so why don’t y…”

He trails off as Finch presses his closed lips to the tip of Fusco’s middle finger and holds there. Fusco feels his lips open and Fusco thinks Finch is going to put his mouth on it but instead he just rests there, his slightly-parted lips hugging the pad of Fusco’s middle finger. His mouth moves, skims down the length of his finger until a second kiss settles in the hollow of Fusco’s palm.

Finch guides Fusco’s hand until it’s pressed up against the side of his face, smushing his soft cheek and broken glasses lopsided. Finch just holds him right there, shuts his eyes, and breathes.

He missed me, Fusco thinks. He throws his free arm around Finch and crushes him close. The son of a bitch missed me. Heat and prickling build up behind his eyes and his chest feels like it’s going to explode and Finch is holding him back; Finch is holding him so tight.

He barely knows the feel of Finch’s bony shoulders under his hands, but somehow he’s missed it. He misses late night phone calls and making Finch smile and being looked after, misses being fucking spied on. He even misses rubbing up against Finch on the floor of his study, even though that only happened once and Fusco never gave himself the chance to get used to it.

Fusco presses his face into Finch’s soft neck, so hard he can feel the guy’s pulse against the tip of his nose. Inhaling sharply, he smells earth and damp and bergamot and fear, and it’s like running into an unexpected friend.

“You should have told me,” Finch says. His voice is muffled in Fusco’s hair and he feels hot blasts of breath against his scalp.

“I could never ask you for that.”

Finch thumps at his back with one fist, tightens the hug. “Of course you could.” He steps forward, guides Fusco backwards. “Lionel, sit down.”

Leather seats tap at the backs of his knees, so Fusco sits and Finch follows him down. He lands heavy in Fusco’s lap, one knee on either side of his hips. “Those guys are scumbags,” Fusco says. “I didn’t want you to...”

“Didn’t want me to what? Know that you associated with them? Because it’s a bit late for that.”

“I didn’t want to get you involved.”

“Lionel.” He rocks back so they can look each other in the eye, skims a pretty, white hand through Fusco’s hair, like he can’t get enough of it. “I’m not sure if you’ve been paying attention, but I’m already involved.”

“Yeah,” he says, leaning into the touch. “Yeah, how is that?”

Finch’s hand curves around the back of Fusco’s head. “Sometimes you have to associate with some...questionable people to get the things you need to protect others.”

“I can understand that.”

“Yes. I thought you might.” Finch leans in just a little and then stops himself, a few inches from Fusco’s face. Even without the glasses shielding them, he can’t really read Finch’s eyes.

“So,” Fusco begins.

“So.” Finch avoids eye contact.

“So are you coming in for the kill here or what?”

Finch’s face colors. “Excuse me, I...I. You. We, really. It, ah. It didn’t go well, last time.”

“So we’re done with that?” Fusco asks. “You’re through with me?”

“Ye-e-es.” He doesn’t sound sure. “If that’s, ah...I don’t. Whatever you want.”

“Doesn’t really answer my question, buddy. I know what I want…” He doesn’t, not completely. “...but I got no clue what the hell it is you want. That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Did you, boss, just try to lay one on me?”

The shade of Finch’s blush deepens. “Well, I admit I was...I considered it. But I thought, you’d...it’d be better if I didn’t. You’re hurt, you’re tired. You may well not want anything to do with me. This didn’t seem like the moment to...confuse you.”

“Finch,” he says as he grips him by the shirt collar and pulls him in real close. “I got news for you. You just kissed my hand and called me lovely. I’m already confused.”

In the press of their mouths, he swallows up Finch’s laughter.

Neither one of them seems to know what to do with their hands. Finch’s keep roaming up to Fusco’s face, to the back of his neck to his shoulders to his back to his arms to his chest to his hands all clasped palm to palm with fingers interlocked and then back to his chest again, tickling and scratching at the buttons on his shirt, and then to his stomach and thighs. Fusco thinks if Finch was a little more bendy and mobile, Finch would be dropping to the floor right now and running greedy, desperate fingers over his calves and his feet, just to know that he had, that he’d touched every part of Fusco he could reach. There’s this crazy desperation to it, like Finch thinks that if he’s not touching Fusco all the time and everywhere, he’ll start to disappear.

Whatever he wants to do with his hands, Finch seems happy to straddle Fusco’s lap, to push one long, unbroken kiss against Fusco’s mouth, and Fusco’s just trying to keep him there. He grabs Finch’s shirt in big handfuls, seizes at the straps of his suspenders and Fusco is so wrapped up in the fancy layers of clothes that it takes him a stupidly long time to realize that there’s a person beneath them. It’s because the shirt’s so thin, and because he’s never touched Finch through less than two layers of clothing, but he can feel sharp bones and soft fat and small, tense, twitching muscles beneath his hands, the heat of smooth skin, and there’s only this shirt in the way. This light, smooth, airy little shirt that’s so thin Fusco could tear it if he wanted, if he thought Finch wouldn’t kill him. Maybe it’s wrong to want more, because an hour ago he was about to die in a hole and now he’s in a limo, alive and well, with Finch in his lap, but he wants bare skin under his hands. He wants sweat and warmth and touching and more than what Finch’s hands on his clothed hips and the curl of Finch’s tongue in his mouth can give him.

Gently, he tugs the hem of Finch’s shirt loose from his trousers so it puffs out between the straps of his suspenders, flapping loose, and he slides his hand into the opening it makes. He glides his hand in to rest on Finch’s bare, smooth-skinned waist, above the rounded, solid jut of his hip. Finch jumps like he’s just been pinched and yelps, “Lionel!” like he’s scandalized, but his hips roll against Fusco with new desperation and suddenly Fusco knows what he wants. He wants this. He wants to go on surprising Finch like that, over and over again, until they’re both tired of each other. He wants to demystify Finch, live long enough to find out what he looks like under those fancy suits, but never learn everything, never know everything, because he wants Finch to go on surprising him and he never wants to be tired of Finch, not ever.

And suddenly he gets so angry, because he knows what he wants, fucking finally he knows, but he knows just as well that he can never have it. He bites down on Finch’s lip and Finch makes a sharp sound that slowly turns appreciative, sinks his fingertips into the softness of a love handle and Finch cants his hips forward, rubs eagerly against him.

Fusco rolls over, slowly, telegraphing every movement so Finch knows what’s coming and moves smooth and easy when Fusco turns them over until Finch is in the seat with his back bent uncomfortably and his legs draped around Fusco’s thighs. They rearrange him, so he’s seated and comfortable, so his back’s under no duress. Fusco gives him a hard last kiss, one that crushes the back of his head into the seat.

Finch blinks at him as they part. “What’s going on?”

Fusco peels away the straps on Finch’s suspenders and lets them fall to the seat.

Nervously, he smiles. “What are you doing?”

Fusco drops to his knees and things get a whole lot clearer for Finch.

“Oh. Oh. Oh my. You don’t. You don’t have to…” Fusco starts fumbling with Finch’s zipper and Finch’s hands fall over his, like he’s not really sure if he wants to stop Fusco or help him out. His fingertips just bounce hesitantly against Fusco’s knuckles.

Fusco goes still with the button on Finch’s trousers stuck between his fingertips. He keeps his eyes down, on the tailoring. “You sayin’ I don’t have to do it if I don’t want to? Or are you saying you don’t want me to?”

Finch’s breath is thick and harsh. “I’m not…” he begins, but it’s a false start. “You’ve had a traumatic experience,” he tries again. “I don’t want to push you into anything.”

“You’re not pushing me.” He tugs hard at the button. “Do you want me to do this?”

“I…”

“Do you want me to?”

“I.” Finch’s breaths are long and quivering. When Fusco looks up, Finch is blushing deep and dark, shaking his head in disbelief. “I want you to.”

“Okay.” He yanks and the button pops off, rolls to the carpet and gets lost somewhere. “Okay.” He tears Finch’s zipper down. “Okay.” And Finch helps him with this next part, lifts his hips so Fusco can pull his pants and underwear down to his knees. Fusco puts hands on Finch’s soft white thighs and Fusco is deafened by the sound of his own heartbeat.

Finch is hard for him. Finch is all flushed and overeager with his hands shaking and grabbing at Fusco’s shoulders and his dick gone red and sticking out from under the hem of Finch’s nice, fancy shirt.

“Alright?” Finch asks, voice cracking, and no, Fusco’s not alright but yes, yes, finally he is.

There’s a quick tightness in his throat, the terror of inexperience, but he opens his mouth and he takes.

Finch convulses. Shitty as his spine is, he kind of does a backbend, where his head is thrown back and his spine is arching as best it can and his hips are slammed back against the seat but in a coy way, like they might slam forward at any second. Fusco kind of hopes they don’t, not just yet. He’s got some adjusting to do.

Finch’s cock is hot and heavy in his mouth. It bumps hopefully against the roof of his mouth, dangerously close to what feels like his throat, but it doesn’t go any further. Finch is restraining himself.

Fusco gives it a slow, experimental suck and Finch whines, high and quavering. Okay. Okay, so he can do this.

So, yeah, not like he knows what he’s doing or anything, but he can pay attention, can’t he? He’s not a fucking dope or selfish or anything; as long as he’s listening to the noises Finch makes and what the guy seems to like, he can’t screw it up too bad. Or else, if Finch is maybe too hard to get a read on, Fusco can always remember what he likes done to him. And yeah, sure, it wasn’t Fusco’s mouth doing the work all those times, but it’s not rocket science either, you know? It’s a blowjob, for fuck’s sake. Figure it out.

So he just starts to move his head up and down with his cheeks sucked in as much as he can make that happen and Fusco thinks he’s got this. It’s just about listening, about paying attention so he knows when Finch is liking it , when to move his head in time with Finch’s small, weak, restrained thrusts. He can listen to the noises Finch makes, tiny suppressed sounds, some of them shrill and half-scared and some of them low and content, like a purr. He’s making Finch happy right now, he realizes, and that’s good, that’s amazing, that’s making Fusco forget to touch himself and forget about the fragments of glass sticking into his knees. He starts to press down with just the tip of his tongue so he’s tracing a thin line up and down Finch’s cock with every movement, and that makes Finch grab the back of his head with both hands and hold him there, guide his head up and down. He’s getting better, more secure. He tastes salt. The head of Finch’s cock brushes the back of his throat with every downstroke and that’s making Finch squirm, so he thinks, why not deeper? Why not?

It’s easy. It’s just opening up.

He takes Finch in about as far as he can, about to the point where his throat starts to ache and his face is pressed almost flat to Finch and he’s just thinking to himself, Shit, I have no idea what to do next, when Finch comes.

He comes hard, smacks forward into Fusco and then draws back just as suddenly, like an apology, like he isn’t tearing at Fusco’s hair to bring him close, like he isn’t still fucking his face with needy little twitches of his hips.

It seems like forever until Finch lets go, all in a sudden jolt of embarrassment. Right away, Fusco draws away and doubles over in a coughing fit, hand clapped tight over his mouth until it’s all gone and he can spit out what’s left on the carpet. He looks up to Finch, who’s staring at him with wonder and something that might be horror. “Sorry,” Fusco says, wiping come off on his pant leg. “I. Uh. I don’t really know what I’m doing.”

Finch tips his head back and covers his eyes with a soft whine, like, Are you kidding me?

“Plus, I figured you’re having this carpet cleaned anyway so, you know, what’s the harm?”

“It’s fine. It’s just fine.” From the sound of his voice, maybe it is fine. Finch rubs at his eyes before he uncovers them. They’re bright, happy, mystified eyes and they make Fusco unbearably sad. “What brought that on?”

“Nothin’. Just. You know. Thanks. For everything.”

“You...you are most welcome.” He shifts, zips up his pants gingerly. “I’d like to return the favor, if I may.” He shoulders the straps of his suspenders.

“Nah,” Fusco says. “Nah, I’m fine,” even though his dick gives a painful, wanting twitch at the suggestion. He takes FInch’s hand when it’s offered and lets himself be pulled back onto the seat at Finch’s side. For a second, it’s weirdly quiet in the limo, except for the wind and rain still roaring through the back windows as they zip onto the highway.

“Oh,” Finch says, looking down, “your knees.”

Fusco looks down, sees blood spotting through his trousers, sees tiny slivers of glass protruding. “Aw, fuck,” he murmurs.

“Perhaps our first stop on the way back should be a hospital.”

“Yeah, maybe. Dunno what I’m gonna blame this on.”

“Car accident, perhaps,” Finch says. He gets a sly look in his eyes. “Of course, if you wanted to avoid the hospital again - and I’m not sure that’s wise - but if you wanted to get out of a long hospital stay, there’s always my house. Softer beds, better food. Medical care’s not quite up to par, but it’s good enough for a patch job.”

“You don’t want to waste your precious time nursing me back to health.”

“You’d think so.” Finch takes one of his bloodied hands. “But I’m afraid I really, really do.”

“Anything you fix, I’m just gonna mess up again.”

“Shh.” Finch touches him beneath the chin, guides him into a very soft kiss like he doesn’t mind the taste at all. “We’ll see about that.”

He breathes out, loses himself for a second in their lips barely touching, just brushing by. He’s so warm and close and Fusco can’t do it any longer. He breaks away. “No. I mean...” He moves so there’s room between them, a big, cold, appropriate space. He looks Finch in the eye and they’re all wide and ready to be wounded, so he looks away again. “I killed a guy, Finch. I wasn’t trying to protect myself or anything. I just killed him because he was pissing me off. And I...it’s not the first time. You know that. You knew that, right?”

Finch nods mutely. There’s quiet, dawning horror in the set of his brows.

“I didn’t want to be that kind of guy anymore, you know? Even with trash like him, I wanted to be the better person. I wanted to, you know, to save him. That seemed like the kind of thing somebody with his head on straight would do. And even then, I couldn’t make myself do the right thing.”

“Lionel, ‘the right thing’ in that situation is fairly nebulous. I’ll flatter myself a level-headed, sane individual, and I can’t say that I wouldn’t have done the same in your place.”

“Yeah,” Fusco breathes. “Yeah, but it’s the 21st century and you’re still carrying hankies, so who says you’re not crazy?”

Finch smiles like he’s in pain.

“So, um. I mean, maybe I shouldn’t be outside, you know? Around normal people and everything. Maybe you guys should’ve sent me to prison when you first picked me up, or something, like maybe I’m dogshit and I can’t help anybody, not for real. Not without you guys there to make me.”

Finch opens his mouth like he means to say something, and Fusco just cuts him off.

“It’s not like I’m chomping at the bit to go to prison or anything. Believe me, that’s the last thing I want. It’s just, you know, I have to be ready for it. In case...you know, in case you can’t stop those guys. I gotta be able to do the right thing, when the time comes. And the time’s gonna come pretty soon, right, because who knows how long my information’s any good? So, if we don’t find another way real soon, it’s gonna happen. And it’s okay, because it’s the right thing. You know it is. I’m, uh, I’m a good fit for it. So I, uh, I don’t think we should be...it’s not a good idea right now.”

“Detective.” Finch’s voice is heavy and scratchy. He plucks at the broken glasses in his breast pocket. “Detective, please come back with me. I’ll wait with you at the hospital, we’ll make sure you’re alright, and then please come back to my house. We’ll talk; you can let yourself feel safe for a while. Just...please come home with me.”

“Finch,” he says, “Finch, if I go home with you right now, I’m not gonna want to fuckin’ leave.” He giggles after, wheezy and dry and sad as hell.

He’s quiet. Quiet and still and his face doesn’t move. He doesn’t even frown.

After a moment, Finch stands up and starts to pick among the glass, kicking the bigger debris aside and salvaging small items gingerly, with the tips of his fingers.

He comes up with two unbroken glasses and a bottle of champagne. The cork pops, bounces in the broken wreckage of the bar and bubbles wash over Finch’s hands like seafoam. They’re just as dirty, Fusco realizes suddenly. They’re just as covered in mud and blood as his are.

Finch overfills each champagne flute, sets the bottle aside and hands one fizzing glass to Fusco.

“What’re we toasting?” Fusco asks as he takes it from him.

“I don’t know,” Finch says. “Your health.”

“And yours.”

“If you like.”

Their glasses clink together.

It feels longer on the way back than Fusco remembers from the trip out. Maybe that’s a trick his head is playing, anticipation and dread. Maybe it’s because this is a car he can’t imagine his family in. He downs his champagne, finds that Finch has already beaten him to it. He keeps pretending to not be looking at Fusco out the corners of his eyes.

“What’re you thinking about?” he asks.

“Just that.” Finch pauses, swallows something heavy and razor sharp in his throat. “Just that Lionel, I don’t want you to go.”

“Yeah. Well.” He drops the empty champagne flute on the carpet. “Don’t tell me what to do.”

The limo ends up dropping him outside a hospital in Queens. Fusco slings his glass-filled jacket over one forearm, tries his best to look presentable even though there’s no way he looks anything other than dirty, beaten, bruised and fucked, maybe, if you look too close.

“Hey, listen,” he says as he climbs out the door, head craned back to watch Finch. “I know you’re kinda pissed at me now but, uh. Thank you, okay? I mean it. Thank you.”

Finch doesn’t look up when he says, in a voice that sounds weirdly sincere, “You’re welcome.”

Notes:

Fun fact: I intended to include this entire sequence at the end of last chapter. Additional fun fact: I'm really bad at predicting how many words it takes to write things.

Chapter 23

If he’s still for too long, it’s hard to start moving again. He’s discovering that. His muscles cling too tightly to being relaxed so when he wakes up in the morning he’s stiff and in pain. The bandages striping his hands and back and spotting his face are itchy and they warp and pull at him when he speaks or when he writes.

He takes a couple of days to sleep off his imaginary car accident and take stock of his lousy fucking life.

It seems like he can’t do anything anymore without taking stock of his life. What do I touch each day? Who do I affect? In what ways will I be missed, and by how many people? In what ways am I replaceable?

Carter might have trouble finding a new partner. If there’s anything he knows for sure, it’s that it is a bad world out there for people looking to trust. She’d be safer in a nest of vipers than in the NYPD right now, but Carter’s got a good head on her shoulders. She’s sharp and wary and he thinks she must already be preparing to find somebody new. When he comes back to work, she starts giving him funeral eyes, looks that say, “I can’t believe he’s dead. He looks like he’s just sleeping.” She’d miss him maybe, and maybe after the loss stopped smarting, he’d become an anecdote she’d tell. A little morality tale about her scumbag partner who’s in prison now, the guy she convinced to straighten up and turn himself in. Yeah, it’s a bad world out there, but Fusco also thinks good ferrets out good. Carter’s going to find someone else to watch her back. Someone without so many marks against him.

Reese is going to figure it out, too. Fusco never flattered himself that Reese picked him out special. He was convenient, the guy driving the car, the guy who Reese never bothered killing because what kind of threat was Fusco? No threat. No threat at all. There’ll be another guy, another car, another soul Reese steals. There are a lot of spineless people out there. If Reese needs another dirty cop, he can find one all too goddamn easy.

Finch…Finch will come to his senses. He’d do that whether Fusco left or not, given enough time.

Which just leaves his family; what’s left of it. Sharon has a boyfriend who they don’t talk about. Fusco detected him in the silence between “Are you seeing anybody?” and “No,” in the calm and constant loitering of a silver sedan on the corner next to Sharon’s building when Fusco comes by to drop off or pick up, in the name “Ted” that Michael drops occasionally like it’s natural as “hello” or “goodbye” or “Dad.”

Fusco brought it up only once. He passed Michael’s duffel bag to Sharon on the doorstep as their son scampered between them into the apartment and Fusco asked, calm and casual, “Is he any good with the kid?”

And she’d tilted her head, baffled, until she realized what Fusco was driving at and said, very softly, “Oh.” And then, “Yes. I mean, he’s not…there’s not a lot in common there. Not a lot of shared interests. But he’s good. He’s kind. He listens.”

Fusco had nothing to say. Not shocked, just empty.

“He’s not trying to be Michael’s dad, Lionel,” she said, shaking her head very slowly, very wearily. “You’re his dad. Ted’s just kind to my son.”

Fusco pushed his fist deep into his pocket.

“You should talk to him,” Sharon went on in a tone that was too bright and seemed to indicate that no, no he shouldn’t, they should never speak. “He’s, uh, he’s a music teacher.”

Fusco was already starting to leave.

In this way, at least, he is irreplaceable. Ted the music teacher will have to do.

Fusco waits on the corner and watches his ex-wife’s door and it reminds him of something. Something, but he can’t think what. He’s just trying to get up the courage to go knock.

He should have called ahead. He knows he’s going to get shit for not calling ahead. He should have. He would have, but he didn’t exactly plan this. It just happened. He just needs to be here right now.

Shit. Shit, he should leave. Go home, calm down, call and ask if you can come over.

He bounces anxiously on the balls of his feet. No silver sedan outside. That means it’s a good time.

He crosses the street on trembling legs, bounds up to the door and hesitates – fucking wilts – at the prospect of knocking but he does it. It’s a cowardly, trembling knock but he guesses it’s loud enough, because she opens the door.

The first thing he thinks is that he knows the shirt she’s wearing, because it used to be his. It’s a Zeppelin shirt, black except for the chipped and faded Icarus. She took to wearing it around the house back when things were still good between them, way back when. The shirt still hangs on her like a tent, slipping off her shoulders and falling to her knees. It seems like something you’d get rid of once you divorced somebody, he thinks. Like maybe it’d be too painful to look at anymore. But then, that shirt was hers enough that he never asked for it back when he moved out and Fusco knows he has this scarf in the trunk of his car – blue with navy and furious pink pinstripes – that he still wears on cold days sometimes because he didn’t pay attention one morning while bundling up. Sharon never asked for that back either.

She tips, slumps against the doorframe, and pushes a hand into the depths of her hair, piled up in a fat, curly bun at the back of her head. “You didn’t call ahead,” she says.

“I know.”

“Lionel, we talked about this,” she says.

“Yeah,” he says, “I know.”

She just leans there, looking at him with a kind of distance. Her eyes are still so damn beautiful. Maybe he’s been thinking about Finch too much these days, him with his big, buggy, pale eyes that Fusco can never read anything in. Sharon’s are different. They’re all depth and color, the color of honey, and he can always tell when she’s hurting.

She says, “You don’t know what you do to our kid when you do shit like this.”

He feels something like a stone in his throat and behind his heart.

Her head is shaking gently from side to side. “He hasn’t seen you in over a month, Lionel. You can’t just show up like this. He needs stability from you, you know? Like a schedule; something he can depend on. You’re supposed to be his dad.”

Fusco nods. “I know, I know. Believe me, I know. I just…haven’t been safe to be around, these past few weeks. I’m sorry. I wanted to see him that whole time. I know it’s rough on him and on you.”

He stops talking, waits for her to cut in, but she doesn’t. She folds her arms, pushes her hands into her shirtsleeves.

“The right thing to do,” he continues, “is to clear out before he knows I’m here –”

“He knows you’re here. He’s a sharp kid. He knows.”

“…Clear out and call you, find out what time you’d like me to be here. I understand that, okay, Sharon? It’s your house, I get it, and I’m sorry. I just feel like maybe I don’t have time to do it right. I just…I just need to see him for a little bit. Just for a little while. Now.”

Her eyes narrow. He can see where her little, wiry body is willing itself to be a brick wall. “Are you bringing anybody down on us?” she asks in an almost silent rumble.

“No,” he says.

She softens, just a little. “You in trouble?”

“Not yet.” He scratches at a prickle on the back of his neck. “I might go to jail,” he says.

“Why?”

“What, you don’t have a few ideas?”

“I know why I’d put you in jail,” she says. “I want to know what took them so long.”

“They don’t want me in jail yet.” He breathes deep. “Shari, I’m gonna turn myself in.”

She’s quiet. Her lips part. Her eyebrows come together in the middle. She makes this funny little sound at the back of her throat, like the peep of a bird. It dies, thin and scratchy. She shuts her mouth, shakes off his use of the chopped-up part of her name like it’s water, swallows, tries again. “What the fuck does that solve?”

“Most things,” he says.

She looks down. She’s not wearing shoes but her toenails are painted bright, kelly green and he wonders what the hell she’d do that for.

“Thought you’d be proud of me,” he says. “You said a couple of times that I belong in prison.”

“Yeah.” Her feet shuffle in the threshold. “Yeah, I know. Jesus. What the hell do you want to do that for?”

“I, ah. I’ve been through a lot, these past couple of years. And I couldn’t tell anybody about it. I couldn’t tell you anything about it.” He rolls his shoulders. “You’re not gonna be culpable in any way, just so you know. You were never involved and whatever you might’ve thought I was up to, I’m gonna make it clear that you never really knew. Okay?”

“Yeah.” She’s looking at him again, weird and fragile. “Yeah, of course.”

“But, um. This shit is starting to wear on me because I realized that I know stuff that could protect some people or put away some bad ones and I wasn’t telling anybody because I didn’t want to incriminate myself. Like, people are getting killed because I’m scared of prison.”

“People die in prison,” she says.

“Yeah.” He scratches his hand through his hair. “Anyway. I gotta say something. And it needs to be soon.”

She shuts her eyes and nods and finally, she steps aside. “He’s up in his room.”

“Thank you.”

If she says anything to that, if she even looks at him, he doesn’t know because the second he has permission, he’s already brushing past her, through the door and up the stairs.

When he gets to the top, he sees that Michael’s bedroom door is in motion, creaking closed. He holds out his hand and it squeaks to a stop against his palm. He lets his hand rest there for a second against the door, where it’s cold and smooth and unchallenging, before pushing in.

He’s curled up in a little cave in the corner of his room, made of a low bookcase and the end of his desk and a heavy, knit blanket stretched over top. Between the dangling strands of fringe he can see Michael nestled inside, barricaded in among stiff living room pillows. Michael’s awful interested in his music book. He goes right on scrawling in it with a pencil and he doesn’t look up.

Fusco drops into a crouch, tilts his head to the side to see in. “Hey, kid.”

Michael scribbles harder, his hair all in his eyes.

“Whatcha workin’ on, there?”

“Homework,” he says. “For piano.”

“That’s good.” He swallows. “How’s that workin’ out for you? You liking that?”

“’S okay.”

“Just okay?”

“Yeah.”

The air in his son’s room feels brittle. Fusco lets himself fall back on his haunches to sit on the carpet, cross-legged. “Is Ted givin’ you a hard time with lessons?”

“You don’t care.”

“I do!” He leans forward, bows his head. “I do. I’m your dad. I want you to be happy.”

Michael opens his mouth and his tongue makes a heavy, sticky sound as it falls away from the roof of his mouth. “I haven’t seen you in like. Like two months.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m sorry.”

“You only called two times.”

“One time,” Fusco amends, quietly.

 “No.” Michael hides his mouth in his hand. “I remember now. You never called me. I called you.”

Fusco stares into his lap, into the curl of his folded hands. “Yeah. You did.”

They’re quiet for a few seconds except for the busy scratch of Michael’s pencil.

“Where’d you go?” Michael asks.

“Nowhere. No place special. I was in the city the whole time.”

“The whole time,” he repeats. Not questioning, not even surprised. Just turning the fact over and over in a fidgety little kid way.

“Yup.” He nods. And then, with a wheezy rush, like he’s in confession and he just needs to say it, Fusco tells him, “I missed you real bad.”

“Then why’d you stay away so long?”

“Because it wasn’t safe with me, buddy.” Fusco’s fingernails scrape against the grain of the carpet. “I’m not a safe person to be with right now.”

“But you’re here,” he says.

Fusco takes a deep breath. “Yup.”

“Even though it’s not safe?”

“Yup.”

“Oh,” he says. “Why?”

“Because I…I just wanted to see you. Just wanted to see your face again.”

Michael considers that, and he does it quietly, eyes all downcast.

“I should’ve called,” Fusco says.

“Yeah, maybe.”

“It wasn’t right to leave you alone all that time. I’m sorry,” he says again. He leans forward. “Listen. I don’t know what’s going to happen next.”

Michael doesn’t look at him but the pencil stops moving, so Fusco guesses he’s listening.

“I don’t want to…to leave you like that again. Okay? Not ever. But I could, uh, I might have to. I don’t want to, but I might have to.” He folds his hands, interlaces his fingers. “How much did you hear of what I said to your mom?”

The kid stops moving at all for a second, stops breathing, and then calmly lets the music book fall closed before his knees.

“Come on, now,” Fusco coaxes. “You’re sharp. I know you heard a thing or two.”

“Are you gonna go to jail?” Michael asks, without looking up.

Deep, deep breaths. Cleansing breaths. “Maybe. Yeah. Probably.”

“Why?”

“Because I made some bad choices, Mike.” It’s the easiest, the cleanest way to talk about what he’s done. He rubs his palms together, hears calluses whisper and scuff. “I guess there’s a point in everybody’s life when they realize their dad wasn’t as great a guy as they hoped. And I guess you’re in that now.” He squints at Michael’s darkened face. “Maybe you’ve been in that for a while.”

Michael just brings his palm up to his mouth and presses flat, crushes.

“It’s, uh, too early, I think. For you. Maybe it’s because my old man had better reasons for being a lousy father than I do, but I never figured out that the old man had problems until I was almost grown. That’s one of my problems, in case you’re having trouble figuring. I think too much of the wrong kinds of people, so much that I forget what’s important. These past couple of years I’ve tried to be better, smarter about the crowd I run with. And I was smarter, Mike. Honest to God, I was. I found some brave, good goddamn people and they set me right. Set me so right that I realized that it was, you know, it was…pathetic that I ever expected them to set me right in the first place. That was never their job. Every bad, stupid thing I ever did was my own choice. You, uh, you following me?”

He is. Even though he doesn’t move, his eyes are sharp and questioning.

He says, “Part of being a better person means taking responsibility for the things you’ve done wrong in your life. And nobody else can do it for you. It’s gotta be you. So that’s why I might have to go to jail. But listen, kid,” and he pushes forward on the carpet, holds out his hand, “I’m still your dad, okay?  I still care about you and whether or not you’re happy. Listen,” and he inches closer, grabs Michael’s limp hand and squeezes hard. “I messed up a lot in my life, in a lot of ways, but you are the best thing I ever did. Just a sharp, funny, good-looking, brave kid. I don’t know. I have no clue how anything like you came from me and with all the trouble your mom and I have had, we’re lucky you grew up as good as you did. We’re lucky she did such a good job of holding it together for you, because god knows I haven’t always been able to.” There’s a block, a wall in his throat and he has to take a moment before any sound can pass through it. His eyes and nose sting. “This might not be the best way to tell you this. Jesus Christ, I sound like a lunatic.”

“Dad…”

“I just wanna make sure you don’t do what I did.  I’m maybe not going to be around much longer, and I want to make sure you don’t…you don’t hold me up to anything. Don’t ever try to be like me.”

“Dad…” and then Michael’s pulling hard at his arm, dragging himself forward and out of the blanket fort and into Fusco’s arms. “Shut up,” he whispers, hugging around Fusco’s neck like a stranglehold. “Please shut up.”

And Fusco melts around him. “I don’t  -.” he tries. He keeps choking on all of his words. “I don’t want to be apart from you. You know that, right?” He pushes his fingers into his son’s hair, cradles his skull in the palm of his hand, throws the other arm tight around him. “You’re nine years old; I’m not ready to stop being your dad.”

Michael, muffled by Fusco’s throat, says, “Ten.”

“What?”

“Ten.”

Fusco goes still, realizes he’d been rocking them back and forth, like it’s three a.m. and Sharon needs rest and they’re all nine years younger. “Are you kidding me?”

“No, Dad. Last Friday.”

Fusco mentally flips back through the calendar and the realization of what day it is, what day it was, is like a garrotte pulling tight around his heart.

“Jesus Christ,” he mutters into his kid’s hair. “I’m such a fuck-up.”

“You said the f-word.”

“Yup.” Fusco starts to rock again, slow and steady. He pillows his head on the crown of his son’s. “I’m sorry about that too.”

“It’s okay, Dad,” he says. “I’ve heard it before.”

“Mmmhm. Don’t tell me that. You just let me pretend.”

“Okay.”

He presses a hard kiss to his son’s forehead. “I love you. Okay?”

“I love you too, Dad.”

“Even though I’m a piece of shit who missed your birthday?”

“Yup.”

“Atta boy.” He makes a space between them, gets a good look at Michael’s face. Puffy eyed, but not crying. Strong chin. He looks scarily like childhood photographs of Fusco sometimes, but not right now. “You’re gonna be okay,” he says. “No matter what happens to me, you’re gonna be okay.”

For a second, it seems like Michael’s way far off, looking at his dad through binoculars. Like Fusco’s already a catastrophic event in Michael’s past. Then Michael comes close and hugs him again and Fusco remembers he’s right here, he’s doing this right now.

Michael doesn’t come downstairs with him. It’s just Sharon, cross-legged and folding laundry on the couch, pretending she’s got better things to do then listen in. She looks up too quickly when he appears on the stairs. “So how’d it go?” she asks as he descends.

“Well, I told him,” Fusco says. “I dunno if he forgives me. He says he does.”

“I raised an honest kid,” she says.

“I wouldn’t blame him for lying.”

She crumples a shirt in her hands and twists it idly. “What happens next?”

“I’m not sure,” he says. “I’m gonna talk it over with my partner, find out what my options are. Then, uh, I’m probably gonna turn myself in. I could make you my phone call, but they’ll probably send somebody here to tell you anyway.”

She nods slowly. “Call a lawyer,” she says.

“Will do. Well, I, uh. I better be going.”

“Yeah.” She’s got her eyes on her lap. “You do that.”

He’s turning the doorknob when she catches him, reaches over the arm of the couch to grab the sleeve of his jacket. “I could - ,” she begins.

He looks down at her. “Yeah?”

“I could bring him,” she says lamely. “To visit you. In. Well. Wherever you end up. If you end up there. I’ll make sure you see him sometimes.”

Slowly, painfully, he lets his eyes fall shut. “No,” he says. “No, you won’t.”

Her jaw drops, indignant. “You think I’d fuck with you about this?”

“No. I just think you don’t want him anywhere near a prison. Not any more than I do.”

She falls quiet, works the sleeve of his coat between her fingertips, worrying at it. He wonders if it’s one of the ones Finch bought for him. He can’t always tell. When he pulls his arm out of her grasp, he feels it pinch across his shoulders. Not Finch, then.

“I’d say see you later, but, uh…”

“Yeah,” she says. She gets back to her laundry. With a resigned sigh, “Yeah, I get it.”

 

---

 

 

When he comes up behind her, Carter’s bent low over her desk, so low you might think she’s asleep but in actual fact she’s just letting her head hang a moment. He’s used to it by now.

He taps with one finger at the space dead center of her shoulders. She turns her head to look at him. “I’m reading the computer forensics report,” she says. “On the guys we busted way back. You know.”

“Don’t do that,” he says.

She just says, with a slow blink. “It’s awful.”

“So don’t read it,” he says. “Listen, I think I’m gonna go ahead.”

Her brows draw tight together. “Now?”

“Not now-now, but. Yeah. Today.”

She turns a little further and grips the back of her chair with both hands. “Is it because the head of the company disappeared?”

“Yeah.”

“Unless you know where he disappeared to,” she asks, “what good is turning yourself in going to do?”

He hesitates. “Can I talk to you someplace a little more private?”

The flash of doubt in her eyes as she rises from her chair stings him.

They take an empty interrogation room for themselves and Carter hangs back and watches disapprovingly while Fusco drags a chair over to the corner of the room and disconnects the camera. “Do I want to know how you know how to do that?”

“I’d say, no. But I’d also say that you’ve figured it out already.” He gets off the chair carefully, minding his knees. “You figure out anything else?”

“You know where the head of the company is.”

“Yeah. Kinda.”

She chews her lips for a moment. “When you say kinda, what does that mean?”

“It means I know where I left him. I don’t know if he’s still there now.”

She takes a very deep breath, one that hitches as it goes, like a roller coaster clanking its way to the top of the track.

He says, “If I’m going to turn myself in, I’d rather it was to you.”

“I don’t want to do that.”

“I have to say this shit to somebody.”

“Yeah, I know, I know.” She rubs hard at her eye like she’s so, so tired. “But I’m not your confessor, Fusco. I never signed up for that.”

“I know you didn’t.”

“We’re supposed to work together; I never wanted to know…”

“I know. I’m sorry, Carter.”

She’s got her hand pushed deep back in her hair and she’s staring at him, looking like she’s just sad to have known him. “I thought you were getting better.”

“I was,” he says. “Thanks to you. It’s just that I’ve done some things that are going to be hanging onto me forever. And good as you were, you could never have brushed them away. It’s not your fault. It’s not your responsibility. It’s all me.”

She’s quiet, staring at her hands. “What do you want to do?” she asks.

“I don’t want you implicated. Not that you could be implicated; you never did anything wrong…”

“I did a few things wrong,” she says.

“I’m your partner. If someone else notices I’m crooked and you don’t, that looks bad. At best, it makes you look bad at your job. At worst, it makes you look suspicious. I don’t want that heat on you.”

“I understand.”

“If you’re the one who turns me in, it looks…observant. Like you’d been keeping an eye on me for a while and you’d only just now decided to bring me down. It looks careful, like you waited and gathered evidence and worked at me, like you’re a real good cop. Which you are.” He smiles, real small, and she doesn’t return it. “You are a good cop, Carter. And, you know, for what it’s worth, you were the first one to figure out I was crooked. It seems right.”

She’s shaking her head, nice and slow, so slow sometimes it’s hard to tell she’s moving.

“We should go over it all first,” he says. “Get our stories straight.”

She just says, “Tell me what you did with him.”

His grin is shallow, faint. “You don’t want to start from the beginning?”

“No,” she says, “I don’t.”

He rolls his shoulders, feels his joints crackle and the bandages tighten. He sits down in the chair with the dead camera hanging over his head. “A friend of mine – Officer Simmons, you know – he took me out for a walk the other day. And while we were out, this car pulled up to the curb and there was our friend the CEO, all crumpled up in the back seat.”

“Dead?” There’s a high crack in her voice and it sounds almost hopeful.

“Alive. And Simmons told me get in, and I thought maybe he’d kill me if I said no, so I did it. He never said so in so many words, but we’ve got a whole history. I think he would have. So we drove out to Oyster Bay, because it’s quiet out there, and lonely. When you report all of this, you should say you think I’ve done this before, that there’s more out there that I’m not telling you about. There’s more, and I’m not telling you about them.” He takes a deep breath. “Anyway, we dragged him out into the woods and we said ‘Here’s a shovel; get digging.’ And he got digging. But he’s, you know, Jesus, he was old. Not that old, but old enough that he shouldn’t have been digging any holes. So they said, ‘Go help him.’ And I did.

“And you’d think standing in somebody else’s grave with them, working right next to them, would make you feel for that person. You know, maybe you don’t love them or cry over them but at least you gain an appreciation for…I dunno, something. Their humanity, maybe. Or just that they’re a thing that’s alive, and they’re about to not be. Something like that. But there I was down in the shit with him and there he was moaning and crying about how he was a person too and didn’t he deserve to live, same as me? And all I could think was…no. Not you. Not either of us. Maybe at one point, but we pissed on our chance somewhere along the line.”

Carter’s face has gone still. He can’t tell if she hates him. All she knows is that any warm light, any sadness has dissipated all out of her eyes. What’s left is cold and unsure. “They made you?” she asks, only it’s not a question. More of a plea.

“No.” He clears his throat. “Maybe they would’ve, if it had all gone on long enough, but fact is, I killed him on the spot because I hated him.  I’d, uh, I’d never really done that before. I mean, I’ve killed people before and I usually didn’t, didn’t like them or anything. But a lot of the time I’d have no real strong feelings either way; it was just something that had to be done and someone was counting on me to do it, so I did it. I never…I never hated somebody so much I’d rather kill them than listen to them talk anymore.”

“What was he saying,” she asks, “when you did it?”

“That I shouldn’t kill him ‘cause he’s a father.”

For the first time, Carter looks like she understands. “You could lead me back to that spot?”

“Yeah, I could,” he says.  “I don’t know if he’s still there, though. There was…a ruckus. Before I left. Simmons and I had a pretty bad falling out and the body was never buried right so I don’t know if they left him there or moved him or what. There should be some evidence, though, either way. Disturbed dirt or DNA, that kind of thing.”

She’s not interested. She’s just looking him over, top to bottom. “You weren’t in a car accident,” she says. “Were you?” Like she never believed it for a second, but she had to try, for her own sake.

“Well,” he says. “Well, it happened in a car.”

“Who knows about this?” she asks.

“Simmons. His guy, Malinowski. Whoever they told. Simmons is pretty tight lipped, but that other guy seems like he talks too much, so who knows. Finch. He came to bail me out,” he explains in answer to her lurch forward, her dropped lip. “I never asked him to. Never would’ve asked him to. But he did.”

“What did he think of it? What you did?”

“He isn’t thinking.”

She takes a deep breath. “I still don’t want to do this. This whole assisted suicide thing.”

“It’s not assisted suicide.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“But you’re gonna?”

“Yeah,” she says. She finally takes a seat on one side of the table, the interrogator’s seat. “Damn it. Yeah. How do you want to do this?”

He scoots forward in his chair, keeps moving up until he’s there right across from her. “Get our story straight,” he says again. “We’re both gonna get grilled about this. A lot, by a lot of different people. We can’t slip up.” He thinks. “Maybe start with when you first thought I might be crooked and we’ll build from there. When was that?”

“First moment I met you,” she says.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, but you thought everybody was crooked back then.”

“I still do.”

“That’s good. That’s very smart. But for real.”

She thinks. “Do you remember when Elias made a play for the heads of the five families?”

“Sure,” he says. “I thought that was a good day for us.”

“It was,” she says. “But while we were in that safehouse, one of them told me all about you. Who you were before and what you’d done.”

“And you believed him?”

“It was true.”

“Yeah,” he admits, “probably.”

“And it was the first time anybody else had said out loud the exact things I felt about you when we first met. So I knew. I knew I was on to something when I didn’t trust you.”

He blinks at her. “No fooling? That early on?”

“That early.”

He feels the corner of his mouth drag up and up, into a ragged grin. “Thanks for taking so long to arrest me.”

“Well, I wanted to be sure that you were my kind of crooked.”

He smiles shyly into the table.

And maybe they’re not fine with each other, not really. Maybe Carter will never really trust him again, not like she once did and maybe Fusco will never be able to call himself her friend in his head, like he does sometimes. But they can still smile together. They can go from there, lay out a whole sordid investigative history that almost happened. It’s not all that hard to translate, funnily enough. They spent more time lying and being suspicious of one another than he thought. It’s only a little more difficult when they get to the point where they started really working together.

The biggest problem is explaining their mutual friends.

“Maybe we can just leave them out?” she suggests.

“Nah,” he says. “They’re too important. I got too much information out of them. People are gonna want to know who my source is.”

“Well, you can’t tell the truth.”

“I know that. I’m not stupid.”

She rakes both hands back through her hair, pulling hard as she goes. “Ugh,” she says. “Do you think they’d care if we called them CIs?”

“If we call them CIs, people are going to ask us about them. And believe you me, they won’t ask nicely.”

She exhales harshly around her clenched teeth. “We could ask them how they’d like us to talk about them.”

“They don’t want us talking about them at all.”

“They’ll understand.”

“Finch won’t.” He lets his head drop into his hands and he groans. “He doesn’t want me to do this.”

“Nobody wants you to do this.”

“If we call him, he’ll use it as an excuse to try to stop me. I can’t go through that again.”

“Because he might convince you.”

He nods slowly.

“You know,” she says, “you’re giving me some really good reasons to give him a call.”

Wearily, he asks, “Why? You know what I did. You know I’ve done worse. You’re the real cop, so what do you want to keep me out of jail for?”

“You’re my friend. Isn’t that enough?”

“No,” he says.

“You gonna tell me you never kept a friend out of jail because you cared for them?”

“Nah. Nah, I did that. You don’t, though. You’re better than that.”

She pushes her chair back from the table and it scrapes across the floor with an agonizing squeal. Very softly, she says, “You don’t know what I’d do, if it came down to that.”

The wiry curls of his hair are rough between his fingers as he makes anxious fists against his scalp. “When I was out there in the woods, on that long walk, I got a lot of thinking done. Not, you know, good thinking, but. I’d done that kind of thing a few times before – more than a few – and I knew that the easiest thing to do in that situation was to just let them do whatever they wanted to the son of a bitch. If I went along with it, it might take a little of the heat off me. Plus, up until about a year ago, getting rid of a guy like that would’ve been… I probably wouldn’t have even had trouble sleeping that night. Might even be a pick-me-up. Something that I could point to and say, ‘See, what I do isn’t all bad,’ and justify all the other stuff. Yeah, I know, it’s terrible,” he says, as her face contorts, all sad and disgusted. “That’s kinda the point. I can’t think like that anymore; it gets my conscience pricking at me. I think it’s probably your fault. That whole walk, I kept thinking, ‘I can’t do it. Carter wouldn’t, and she’d hate me for it if I did, and I’d deserve it.’” His mouth stretches itself out in a wide, jagged grin. “You’re too good of an example, Carter. The closest you’d come to killing somebody in cold blood is making me too principled to save my own skin. You’re not gonna let me get away with it. You just won’t.”

“I wasn’t there.” She rises up from the seat. “You don’t know what I would have done or what I’ll do. And neither do I. Not yet.”

“Yeah, okay. Just don’t call him.”

“I won’t,” she says, “but I want to.”

“Yeah.”

She takes a deep breath. “We could always call Reese instead.”

“Nah. He’ll tell Finch.”

“You think so?” She lets her hip rest against the edge of the table. “You know, he might be attached to his boss’s apron strings, but I think maybe he understands what you’re doing a bit better than Finch does. You think he can’t keep a secret?”

He smiles a little, into the creases in his palm. “You’re right,” he says. “I forget Wonderboy’s got a brain of his own, sometimes. You know, back before we were all simpatico, he had me following Finch around town for a few days, trying to figure out his secrets.”

Her brows leap for a moment. “Learn anything good?”

“Nah, not much of anything. Went to MIT, big surprise. His real name isn’t Finch, even less of a surprise.”

“Did he ever catch on to you following?”

“Not as far as I know.” Fusco frowns. “But he must’ve, right? Him being him and all.”

The edge of her smile peeks through the dinge and the gloom of the interrogation room. “You really think he’s amazing, don’t you?”

“Isn’t he?”

“Yeah,” she says, sounding resigned, “yeah, he kind of is.” She sighs. “Well, maybe we don’t have to talk about them at all. Maybe we can cut out the middle man. Where do Reese and Finch get their information?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “Do you?”

She frowns. “No.”

“Huh.” He shifts in his seat. “You know, I kind of hoped you would. I always figured they trusted you over me.”

“They do,” she says. “But they don’t trust anybody that much.”

“Yeah.” He rests his face in his hands with a thin sigh. “Yeah, I kind of figured that.”

That’s the way of it. They don’t trust him to keep the big secret, the real one, or even to keep himself alive. He’s just trusted to do what he’s told and keep his stupid mouth shut.

And sometimes, he’s trusted to come around Finch’s house, to where even Reese has never been. Sometimes he’s trusted with that and a space by Finch’s side, elbows jockeying for space.

“You know, he showed me something,” Fusco says. “Back a while. That night he had me over at his place and you called me away to meet up with Gabe. You remember? At the strip club?”

Unimpressed, she says, “I remember the strip club.”

“Yeah, but before that, he kind of…walked me through the case. Showed me how they figured it out, how the information all linked together. Just to get me up to speed. And it was all their stuff, their info. Not ours. They got it on their own.”

She frowns. “He showed you how they do it?”

“Not…kinda. He showed me how they worked out the bigger picture. How they spied on people and broke into places and figured out exactly what was going on. He never showed me their source or anything. But he showed me the…the first thing. The guy their source gave up.”

“And?”

“And. Nothing. We got him. He’s in prison. You remember that, um, that…Bricker? Big fella. Real weird. We interviewed him once.”

“They were all weird,” she says. “But yeah, I remember.”

“Something about him must have clued their source in. I dunno.”

“Guess so.” She’s squinting down at the table, twisting her fingers. “John and Finch never know what’s going on,” she says suddenly. “You ever notice that? They always leave that part for us. They always know who’s involved, but they never know what anybody’s involved in.”

“No,” he says. “No, I never thought of that.”

She folds and unfolds the cuffs on her shirt. “I think about that a lot.”

The walls are soundproof. It’s awfully quiet in that interrogation room for a minute.

“Carter?” he says.

“Mmm?”

“I changed my mind. I want to talk to Finch.”

Her face brightens in very small degrees, like she’s struggling to hide a light. “Even though he might try to talk you out of it?”

He nods. “Yeah. Even though.” He looks her in the eye and he misses her already. “I made my mind up. He can’t change it for me. I just…I have a question for him.”

“Go ahead,” she says as he takes his phone out. “You wanna be alone?”

“Nah, don’t bother.”

“I’m leaving you alone,” she says.

“It’s fine, really. Stick around.”

She’s already halfway out the door. “Bye.”

So he’s left alone with it, the little screen and his reflection in it, and he doesn’t know how to begin. Because what happened in the car, those last few moments, that was as much of a goodbye as it was anything else. He never hoped to follow that up or continue that conversation or see Finch’s face ever again. But, Fusco has a question. And he needs to have it answered, even if it’s disappointing, even if all Finch has to say is “I don’t know.”

So he calls.

The phone rings only twice before Finch picks up. Finch doesn’t say anything, Fusco just hears the ring stop abruptly and the catch of Finch’s breath.

And Fusco can’t speak either. His voice is snagged on something far back in his throat and he’s just left with this pained, sharp sound and then nothing. Just two idiots on the phone, breathing at each other. Hesitating.

“I don’t mean to draw this out,” Fusco begins, finally.

“I do.”

Fusco stamps on that real quick. “Look, I’m not interested in fighting you about this anymore. I know you’re real smart, and you’re good with words, and you’re used to getting your way, but you can’t change my mind right now, okay?”

Finch takes a very deliberate breath. “You called me, Detective.”

He stumbles.  “I know. I’m just trying to get that all out up front. I got a question for you and I just want a straight answer.”

“Could we please have this conversation face to face?” Finch’s voice is tight. “If it’s the last time I’m to speak to you, I’d like to at least…be present. Too often, we’re apart when we speak to each other. I don’t want this to be the last I hear of you.”

“I don’t have the time to come meet with you.”

“Lionel,” he says, “I’m here.”

He freezes, feels fluish for a moment, blazing hot and freezing cold all at once.

“I’m at your desk right now,” Finch continues. “Have been for a little while.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I…I’m afraid I’m not sure myself. To ask you to stay one more time, or perhaps to say goodbye. I had this really self-destructive notion that I’d pull the rug out from under you. Steal your thunder. The knife I used all those months ago was catalogued as evidence, if you recall. I’m sure there are fingerprints on it. I could turn myself in just as easily as you could. I may even be more informed, in some respects.”

Fusco grips the edge of the table, finds himself rising up out of his chair, can’t really remember giving his legs permission to do that. “Don’t you dare. You’re too important, so don’t you fucking dare.”

“Well, I’m not going to, Lionel,” he says, slowly and kindly. “For exactly that reason. It’s something you could stand to learn.” He clears his throat. “I asked someone where you were, and they said you were in an interrogation room with Detective Carter. That’s an interesting choice, by the way. A responsible choice, maybe, to give yourself up to her.” He pauses. “She’s looking at me now. I can’t tell if she’s upset with me or not.” He sighs, long and slow. “I think the primary reason why I’m here is that I’m simply not ready to see the back of you. Not yet.”

“Life’s disappointing, Finch.”

“Are you coming to see me or not?”

Fusco ends the call, finds that his teeth are gritted.

Finch is where he promised he’d be, seated primly behind Fusco’s desk with his hands folded on his knees and his face all expectant. He’s dressed sharp, sharper than usual: green linen suit, crisp white shirt, sober gray-blue tie, shiny brown loafers. He looks untouchable. Almost. The bruise Fusco saw forming after the incident in the car is in full bloom, a dark, puffy swell beneath Finch’s eye, making his gentle, intelligent face seem lopsided and strange. His eye is stuck in a perpetual squint behind its neat tortoiseshell frame. New glasses. Nice.

Carter’s almost sitting at her desk. She’s hovering there, maybe an inch away from full contact with the chair, legs tight and ready to spring forward if this goes wrong somehow. She keeps looking between Fusco and Finch like she’s not sure how much to acknowledge the situation, like she thinks Fusco might hit Finch.

Fusco wonders what his face must look like, to make her think that way.

He steps past her, past both their desks until he’s beside Finch’s chair. His own chair; Finch just sits in it like it’s his. He thinks he might grab Finch by the shoulders, pull him out of that chair and shake him for being brave and arrogant and trying to save Fusco’s skin, even now when it’s worthless. Fusco’s maybe more afraid that he’ll go like he did in the limo again, drop to his knees and bury his face in Finch’s lap and wait for his hair to be stroked and for Finch to tell him what to do.

He asks, “How’s the eye?”

“The swelling will go down,” Finch says. “Eventually.” He leans forward. “I hope it’s not attracting too much in the way of unwelcome attention.”

“You kidding? It’s the only thing about you that makes you look like you belong in here,” Fusco says. He jerks his thumb over his shoulder. “Get up. I need to talk to you in the back.”

Finch’s shoulders jerk in an odd way and Fusco realizes it’s a shrug. “If you like.”

Finch rises from the chair by degrees, first on one side, then on the other, and when Fusco makes an impulsive grab for his elbow to steady him, Finch jerks away. Not obviously, just a short, sharp, and defined movement of the arm. Fusco lets his hand drop and when he makes the walk back to the interrogation room, Finch walks at his side, keeping determined, faltering pace.

Once they’re safe inside the interrogation room and the door is shut and locked, Fusco pushes him back against it. Not hard, never hard. He’s not a complete asshole. He just stops Finch short and corrals him flat up against the door, sudden enough that he stumbles a little, that he looks surprised, that his careful feathers are ruffled. He squints, insulted, trapped between Fusco’s arms and Fusco’s chest and the dark, peeling green paint on the metal door.

“Don’t threaten me again,” Fusco says.

“I…”

“I don’t care. All that ‘I was thinking of turning myself in’ crap? It’s not funny. It’s not cute. You’re important. If you go away, people out and out die. Don’t you dangle that over my head.”

Finch’s lips part in astonishment. “To say that this is a violation of my personal space,” he says, “is a gross understatement.”

His nose is close to touching Finch’s swollen cheek. Fusco can feel his own breath pool there and then bounce back into his face. “That’s kinda rich, coming from you.”

Finch acknowledges this with a thoughtful, conciliatory tilt of his head.

“You shouldn’t even be here,” Fusco says, pushing off from the door and away from him. He settles against the table, leaning. “You’re a wanted man. What the hell are you doing in a police station?”

“No, John’s a wanted man. I’ve been fortunate enough to avert police interest.” He coughs gently, adjusts his jacket. “I may be a man, and I may be wearing a suit, but anyone with eyes can see that I’m not The Man in the Suit. Wide-ranging and adaptable as that profile is, it doesn’t apply to me.”

“I don’t want you here.”

“Your concern is touching.”

“Just don’t come back here again. Even after I’m gone, don’t.”

“I assure you, I have no intention of returning here. I only came to...see you off, I suppose. Try to convince you to stay. I confess I’ve nearly given up on that; you seem utterly determined to destroy yourself. I’m not sure what to do from now on, aside from…well, I’m really not certain. Reassure you, maybe.” He sighs. “I’ll visit you in prison.”

“Don’t go out of your way.”

“Oh, it wouldn’t be,” he says, in tones that are nearly bright and reassuring. “I actually visit Rikers Island quite regularly.”

“I’m not gonna want to see you.”

“Then I’ll send you letters, Lionel.”

“I don’t want you to send me letters.”

Finch is staring down at his pristine shoes with a flat, small smile pinned to his lips. “I used to be very concerned about what you’d want from me and Mr. Reese when you finally got yourself into trouble. What kind of blackmail or violence you’d use to try to force us to cover for you. I needn’t have worried.” He looks up, blinks wetly. “You don’t really want anything, do you? Have you ever dared to want something in your entire life?”

There’s the hit. There’s the savage little punch. Fusco’s been beaten, Fusco’s gone sleepless, Fusco’s lived with a horrible ache in his chest for months, but yeah, sure, Fusco doesn’t want anything. “Don’t talk to me like you give a shit about what I want. If you gave a shit about what I want, you’d have stopped spying on me a long goddamn time ago. You’d stop trying to get me to stop this and understand that I need to do it. You know that, need? I’m not like you; I can’t just have whatever the fuck I want. My obligations come first. You know what I didn’t want to do? I didn’t want to say goodbye to my kid this morning. I didn’t want to sit down with my ten-year-old kid and explain to him that his dad belongs in jail. But it needed to happen, so I went through with it. What I want doesn’t matter, not to you and not to me, and it never fucking has.”

Dead silence nestles in the space between them. Finch’s Adam’s apple bobs in his throat. “I don’t watch you anymore, Lionel,” he says, letting his head fall back to tap the door. “Not since I dropped you off at the hospital. I didn’t know you had to say that to your son. I’m sorry.”

“Yeah. Well.” Fusco clears his throat. “It’s not your fault.”

“I know,” Finch says. “You’re…you’re right. Not completely right, but you’re close enough that it doesn’t matter. I won’t be back.” He shines his fingernails on the sleeve of his suit just to look busy. “You had a question.”

Fusco nods, slowly. The anger in him lifts and dissipates, and now he feels cool and empty, drained. “Yeah. About the guy who kicked off your investigation. Not your source, I mean. I know you’re not going to give up who that is. I mean the first guy your source tipped you off to.”

“Harmon Bricker,” Finch says, carefully. “He’s in prison, correct?”

Fusco nods. He can almost see where something’s been drained out of Finch too, somewhere just behind the eyes. 

Finch says, like it’s sort of unbelievable, “You remembered.”

“Couldn’t forget. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to understanding how you guys operate. Not that I really understand any of it. You, uh, you said then that he was the first suspect, and when you checked out his house you found…pictures, and stuff.”

“That’s correct.”

“Was that it? Was there anything different about him that made him interesting to your source? Did he talk too much or was…was he special somehow? Was he important in the company or something?”

Finch frowns. “No. There wasn’t anything particularly interesting about him. He was one of many. Why?”

“Nothing, I guess. You just never send us after one of many. It’s always someone who’s about to kill or somebody who’s about to get killed. I’ve never gone after just some mook for you, you know?”

“I do know.” He chews his lower lip. “I assumed the information I received was based on the materials found on his computer…”

“Carter was reading the forensics reports. On all of their computers, you know. Most of them had stuff like that.” Fusco rolls his shoulders. “I dunno. I thought he might have been different somehow. Just an idea. Thanks for letting me run it by you.”

Finch has fixed him with an out-and-out stare, one that’s almost suspicious. He reaches out with both hands and holds tight to Fusco’s, drawing them up between them, Fusco’s hands clasped tight together with Finch’s hands on the outside, covering. “Do you also remember,” he asks, “how I told you that night that we should have worked with you on this case from the beginning?”

“Yeah.” He shivers. “Yeah, I remember.”

Finch presses his hands together a few degrees tighter, like it’s all he’s letting himself do right now and he desperately wants to do more. “I was right. I focused on the organization and I may have overlooked something. I can’t make any promises, but…” And then, just as suddenly, he lets go. “I know we just had a conversation about this and I know you won’t want to hear it, but I need you to refrain from turning yourself in to the authorities. Just for now. I promise, this will be the last time I ask anything so personal of you. But please don’t do it yet.”

“If this doesn’t work…”

“If it doesn’t work,” Finch says, “If you haven’t just solved this for me, then I will never try to stop you again, I swear.”

“That’s…that’s a turnaround for you.”

“For once, I’m feeling confident.”

“That’s not.”

Finch adjusts his jacket busily. “I have to go. There’s work to do. Take care of yourself. Talk to your son.”

“I don’t want to get his hopes up.”

Finch looks up at him, slow and sad. “Then just take care of yourself.” He reaches out, taps the sleeve of Fusco’s jacket, withdraws his hand like he’s been bitten. He reaches back, turns the doorknob, and practically falls out of the interrogation room and into the hall. Fusco sticks his head out into the hall just in time to watch Finch hobble past Carter with a hurried “Good day, Detective.”

She watches a while as Finch speedwalks off to parts unknown before turning back to Fusco. “He’s in a hurry. What happened in there?”

“He…uh, convinced me.”

“What? How did he do that? What did he say?”

“He didn’t,” Fusco says, heading back into the interrogation room to rewire the security cameras. “I think it’s what I said.”

Notes:

Hey everyone! Just a little update on the future of Armor and, more specifically, why recent updates have been taking so long.

Sometime in about mid-January, I started a job search, while still employed at my current place of work. So my life's kind of split between work/looking for work/brainless Tumblr scrolling/food/watching terrible things on Netflix/blissful unconsciousness right now, and finding enough energy to work on Armor - or really do anything with my free time that isn't completely mindless - can be tough sometimes.

I just wanted to reassure folks that updates aren't getting more sporadic because I'm losing interest; I've just got some really stressful stuff on my plate right now. And I'm also not going on hiatus, because I love working on this fic and when I'm feeling up to it, it's the best motivation and stress-relief ever and also I'm SO CLOSE TO BEING DONE I CAN TASTE IT. I just wanted to warn you that the trend of late updates will probably continue for a while. Hopefully within the next one or two chapters, I'll only have one job to worry about and I can get back onto a more regular schedule. Thank you for bearing with me. You are all so patient. <3

Chapter 24

He spends the next couple of days in a kind of shock. Sleepless, dazed, disoriented, staggering around like a zombie and wanting a drink like he hasn’t in a long, long time.

Fusco’s never really been this bad, this shaky and astonished; not even all the times he’s almost been full-on murdered. Somehow, getting taken out to the woods or an alley and threatened with a gun has always been a punch Fusco can roll with. For once, he’s shocked to be alive.

Not that he thought he’d die if he confessed. Not right away. Sure, somebody would get him in prison someday, or whatever came for Gabe would come for him too, but realistically, if Fusco had come forward, he would’ve had a couple more weeks to live, at least.

But he guesses he didn’t prepare for that. Living beyond the moment he planned to tell the world what a scumbag he is feels wrong, like he just walked off the edge of the earth. Like, where do you go from here? Fusco’s not sure what he thought was going to happen. Maybe he figured some straight and narrow cop would kill him on the spot or he’d go up in a puff of honesty. He’s not sure.

He’s still alive, though. That’s something. That’s Finch’s fault. Fusco would take the whole shock and horror thing up with him, but Finch is nowhere to be found.

Whatever it is Finch rushed off to do, it’s a shadow campaign and it doesn’t require Fusco.

He discovers that Simmons is there by watching Carter. Fusco’s sitting just across from her, like always, and he sees her freeze for a second and then look straight at him.

The look says, “You poor bastard.” Fusco thinks, not for the first time, that Carter has him on unofficial suicide watch. He turns his head.

From across the room, Simmons is watching. He’s leaning on a wall, staring right at Fusco, and there’s no pity or forgiveness or familiarity in his eyes. Appealing to old friendships won’t make that look go away. Appealing to Simmons’ sense of loyalty might make it all worse.

Then again, even in the days when they actually were friends and Fusco would have taken a beating for Simmons like he would for any other guy he hung around back then, Fusco bets that neither one of those appeals would’ve worked.

All at once, Fusco hopes he comes over. Fuck him. Fuck that fucking guy. Fuck him for being pitiless, fuck him for killing so many people, fuck him for being happily married while Fusco’s alone in the world, fuck him for hitting Finch and fuck him for trying to kill Fusco without letting him say goodbye to his boy. Fusco hopes he does come over and try to start something. Simmons still has a couple of yellow-purpling bruises and fine, small cuts on his face from their tussle in the back of Finch’s borrowed limo and Fusco wants to go another round with his face. Smash up those blood vessels before they have a chance to really heal and make those cuts a little longer, little fatter. Do it right here in the middle of the precinct, in front of God and everybody. Try it. Just try it with me today, you hatchet-faced fuck.

Simmons stands up out of his lean, to full height, and Fusco is reminded, uncomfortably, of how tall he is. Lean, lanky. Guy’s got a hell of a reach. If they hadn’t been trapped in a tight space and if Fusco hadn’t caught him by surprise (if Finch hadn’t been standing by with an insane plan), that fight could have turned out real different.

Simmons starts walking in his direction and Fusco clenches his fists so the bruised and scabby knuckles jut, plants his feet beneath the desk, holds his legs tense and ready to stand up fast, if he needs to.

Simmons walks right up to his desk and then right on by, like Fusco isn’t even there.

Then Fusco’s just staring at the air where Simmons was, and he notices, bit by bit, that his teeth are all clenched and his jaw is tight and his fingernails, blunt as they are, are cutting into the flesh of his palm, and it’s all over nothing. He’s staring at nothing.

He unclenches his fists, turns to watch the back of Simmons as he continues through the precinct, gets himself a cup of coffee, goes about his business.

He blinks, uselessly, at Carter.

She’s still giving him a suicide watch look, which isn’t helpful.

Simmons passed him by. Didn’t even throw a threat Fusco’s way or lay a hand on him, in that way Simmons has that looks friendly from a distance but really, really isn’t, up close.

Being ignored is a whole different thing. Like maybe, for once, Fusco finally isn’t worth the trouble of messing with.

Fusco, with his hands peacefully folded on his desk, wonders if this is what being safe feels like.

Probably not. He figures if you’re safe, you’re not on edge. You’re not on suicide watch, anyway.

Carter’s phone goes off and she finally breaks eye contact, scrabbles for the phone, holds it to her ear.

She says, “Carter here.”

And then, “What?”

And then, “When? How bad?”

And then, again, “What?”

And just on the heels of that, excitedly, “Well, when? Can we do it now?”

And then, “Okay. Thank you. We’re on our way.” Before she even ends the call right, she’s saying to Fusco, “He wants to talk.”

“Who?”

“Harmon Bricker.” She pauses, lets him really absorb that. “That guy’s lips were sealed. Suddenly, somebody beats the hell out of him in prison and he can’t wait to talk.”

“Wow.”

“You don’t know anything about that?”

“Nope.” Fusco thinks. “Maybe.”

Carter’s brow furrows.

“Not saying I organized it. I don’t have any friends in prison right now; you know that. I’m just saying…we’ll see when we get there,” he says, retrieving his coat. “Alright?”

She maintains that look of suspicion the whole way to Rikers.

 

---

 

The guard outside the infirmary is buried in a back-issue of Time magazine with a cover story about cholesterol. Picture of a bacon-and-eggs frowny face. The guard, when he lifts his head from the magazine, looks about the same. He’s barely an adult, surly mouth and zitty chin. He shuts the magazine, rolls it up tight in his hands.

“You here to talk to Bricker?”

“Mmhm.”

“Guy’s an asshole,” he remarks, rising from his metal folding chair.

“Well, he’s a convicted sex offender,” Carter remarks. “So it’s a little worse than that.”

He shrugs, opens up the door for them.

As he passes, Fusco asks, “How bad is he?”

“Guy’s dogfood.”

“And, uh. You know who did it to him?”

The guard shrugs again. “Dunno. He won’t say.”

“Uh huh.”

“You get that a lot.”

“Uh huh.” He follows Carter in.

Harmon Bricker is, in fact, dogfood. The guy is lying at an incline on the hospital bed, face all black and red and purple, eyes swollen nearly shut. Fusco guesses he can see, though, ‘cause he sits up as they approach.

“Detectives,” he says. His voice is sticky, gummy, swollen, but it still has that politeness to it that Fusco remembers. It’s a voice that’s too small and well-mannered for such a big, ugly dude. “It’s nice to see you again.”

Carter comes to a stop by his hospital bed at a distance that’s something like two arm-lengths. “Having trouble adjusting to prison life, Harmon?”

His ruined face tilts. “Not much more than expected. It was always my understanding that men with my proclivities are not well-liked in prison.”

Fusco drags over two chairs, places one behind Carter’s legs where it goes unused, parks his ass in the other one beside her because this guy’s long-winded and he figures they’ll be there a while. “They’re not liked anywhere.”

“True.”

Carter pulls them back on track. “You had something you wanted to say.”

“I did.” He clears his throat. “I understand that the two of you are searching for an individual in the know, one who is willing to name names and provide testimony. Recently, a few of my esteemed neighbors impressed on me the importance of honesty,” he says, indicating his face, “and I’m now willing to be that individual. For a small price.”

“We’re not interested in your price.”

“Oh, but it’s such a small one,” he says. “I’m not interested in privileges, time off for good behavior, a transfer to cushier facilities and so on. I can see you’re reluctant to give them to me and I’m not interested in sitting through the ensuing debate. As far as I can tell, my window for negotiations is closing on all sides. Time, as they say, is of the essence. I don’t want freedom, Detectives. My former employers have made that a very unsafe option, as I’m sure you know. I just want solitary confinement. For the remainder of my sentence. However long that is.”

“For the rest of your life, if I can help it,” Carter says.

“That’s fine.” He attempts what Fusco’s pretty sure is supposed to be a smile, but it’s really just a rearrangement of the lumps that pass for his face now. “Don’t pretend the idea of someone like me sealed off in a concrete box for the rest of his lonesome, miserable life doesn’t bring a smile to your face, Detective Carter.”

“Can we talk a second?” Fusco says, cutting him off and putting a hand on Carter’s elbow, just to stabilize, just to break the stiffness in her stance.

She shakes his hand away, but when Fusco gestures to the far side of the infirmary, she follows.

“I’m kinda fine with that,” he whispers once they’re sequestered in a corner with their backs to Bricker.

She hisses back, “I’m not.”

“We’re gonna have to do it anyway, if we want him to live long enough to give testimony. I can’t think of a better place for a scumbag like that then locked up in a tiny room where he can’t ever hurt anybody again.”

She folds her arms.

“You don’t wanna?” he asks.

“I don’t want to do it,” she says, “because he wants to do it.” She looks back over her shoulder at Harmon in the hospital bed.

“But other than that,” Fusco says, “do you think it’s a good idea?”

Carter turns to Fusco. Her face is troubled. “If we don’t put him in solitary, they’re gonna go after him again.”

“Mhmm.”

“They might kill him next time.”

“Would that make you happy?” he asks.

“Yes,” she says, fiercely.

“Okay, probably,” he concedes. “But not for very long. ‘Cause then you realize you’ve got no witness again.”

She frowns. “We gonna do it?”

“Only if you want to. And only if he gives us something we can use.”

“I don’t want to,” she says.

“Okay.”

“We’re gonna do it,” she says.

“Okay.”

They go back to stand by the bed.

“Alright,” Carter says, taking her stand once again with the chair behind her. “This is on you. You give us something good enough to use, we’ll get you your solitary confinement.”

“Perfectly acceptable,” he says. He leans forward, folds his hands on the sheet, on the peaks of his knees. “Where would you like me to begin?”

“Like, I said, it’s on you. Tell us something we don’t know. Impress us.”

His face twists, becomes thoughtful. “Your witness,” he says. “The original one, the little dealer. Did you ever find out how he came to meet his end?”

“Only in part,” Carter says. “We know it wasn’t you.”

“Well, no,” he says. “Not directly.”

He pauses, really rolling in the knowledge that somebody cares what he has to say, and Fusco works at looking bored and unimpressed.

“I’ll start from the beginning,” he says. “If you check the official employment records, which I’m sure you have, you would read that I worked in a warehouse, transporting crates from point A to point B. This is true, more or less. You wouldn’t have read about what was in the crates but I’m sure you can guess. Off the record, however…” He shifts from side to side, straightens his back. “Off the record, my job was a little more complicated.”

“We know about that, Harmon,” she says, “or you wouldn’t be here.”

“There’s more to it than that, Detective. A few years ago one of my…” He hesitates. “…Bosses asked for a word with me. Said that the company was in danger, I was in danger, we were all in danger unless certain provisions were made. He said he’d been watching me and he thought I’d be perfect for the job.” He rolls his shoulders. “I didn’t care about the others. But I didn’t want to go to prison and I was promised a pay raise, so I agreed to hear him out. The work he promised me was…different. Stimulating.”

He pauses again, spreads his hands, and Fusco wonders if just this once, Carter would be up for some police brutality. Her face is closed-off, steely, and Fusco thinks maybe he could swing that.

“What you have to understand,” Bricker continues, “is that we suffered under some questionable management. The secret of what we were doing was poorly kept. The only reason we weren’t brought down years ago is that the majority of those who knew were too corrupt to risk blowing the whistle.” His eyes flick, for just a second, to Fusco’s face. Their color is an odd, drained blue, a blue that is nearly white. “The minority – the ones who would have exposed us if given the chance – had to be dealt with. And what my boss had found was that often, when someone wanted to destroy us, they would try to do it from the inside out. They would look for a person within our organization with loose lips. A guilty conscience. Some other burden. And they’d try to convince that person to unburden themselves in a court of law. Obviously we tried to eliminate such people from entering our side of the organization to start with, but some always slip through the cracks. You can be as vigilant as you want; incompetence is everywhere. So my boss – my clever boss – he gets the idea.” And this is it, the punchline, the moment of the rabbit from the hat, or at least that’s what Bricker thinks it is. Fusco can tell from how lively his swollen face is. “The trick is,” he says, “to make sure that the guiltiest, stupidest, loudest whistleblower they can find isn’t guilty or stupid at all. Here, I’ll give you an example.

“Say some wide-eyed, idealistic young detective – we’ll call him Marcus – stumbles in over his head. He intends to investigate a smalltime gun-smuggling operation but, due to some incompetence on our end while he happened to be in the same shipyard, he gets wind of our operation. Now, our Marcus, he’s the soft-hearted, empathetic type. He doesn’t want any more children to suffer. But he runs up against a little opposition in the form of some friends of ours in high places, and he can’t get the permission he needs to do a full-blown investigation. This is a bright kid, so he realizes that a confession by someone in the organization, willingly given, will force attention to this case that he can’t legally give yet, so he starts to feel around for someone chatty. It’s at this juncture,” Bricker says, “that I would make myself available to him.”

Fusco gets up out of his seat. Not like a jolt or anything, he does it slowly. It’s designed not to startle but it kinda does anyway. Bricker pauses, tilts his head. Carter looks at him sidelong. “Don’t mind me,” Fusco says. “I just need to stretch my legs out.”

Bricker grins, lips split and puffy and twisted. “It’s difficult to hear.”

“Sure.” He touches Carter’s elbow. “I’m doing a lap. Don’t wait up for me. I’m listening.”

Carter gives him a narrow look. Out of the corner of her mouth, she says, “…Go on, Mr. Bricker.”

He begins slowly, edgily, the pomp squeezed out of his story for the moment. “I would make contact with the detective. Tell him a sob story.”

Fusco turns away from Bricker, from the bed, and just lets his eyes relax, lets his vision go soft and wide.

“Maybe my bosses had, uh, threatened me,” Bricker continues. “My loved ones.”

It’s a trick he’s learned, living paranoid. If your eyes are all focused on one thing, you’ll never see the big picture and you’ll never see the details you weren’t prepared for.

“Made me feel unsafe.”

He was right. Two security cameras, each in an opposite corner of the room. Good coverage. Pretty standard. It’s not a make he’s precisely familiar with, but it’s close enough that he kinda already knows what he’s looking at. Fusco walks on over and has a good hard look at one of them.

“Or maybe I just couldn’t keep quiet any longer because the guilt was just tearing me up inside. Something like that. Varying degrees of honesty, there, about my own level of involvement but the crux is always the same: I am ready to come clean.”

He squints, leans forward, takes in the whole small machine, all its wires and its focusing and unfocusing lenses and its plastic housing. Keeping casual as he can, Fusco does a quick speedwalk over, close enough to the other one that he can see the same thing, the same familiar irregularity. The same dangling wire.

“My bosses, my coworkers, me, we all need to be stopped, and I know enough to help you make it stop. I just want to meet someplace private, someplace I won’t be seen talking to a cop. My preferred places were always fairly derelict. But not abandoned. That’s a mistake. A crime scene can stand undisturbed in a totally abandoned space for some time. No, someplace a little busier, with a small squatter population. Dirty hands and feet all over that wall you slammed him against or the floor he bled out on. It smudges the trail. It’s, ah, erosion.”

Bricker likes that. Fusco can tell even from across the room. He settles into that metaphor like it’s a good coat, a soft bed. He’s been wanting to tell this story, the story of how he’s clever, for years and years. Fusco chews his own lower lip but he tries not to leave marks.

“People think that violence is eternal. That once you pervert a space with violence, you taint every memory of what came before and every moment after and whatever that place used to be, before, doesn’t matter. It’s a place where violence has happened or, I suppose, where it is happening, even now. Frozen in time. And, ah, it’s not true, necessarily. Only if you’re the kind who makes a point of clinging on to things and refusing to let go even after they’re dead and in the ground. I can tell you’re one of them, Detective Carter, from the way you’re looking at me. You think every little life I’ve wrecked is like a pin stabbed through all of history. A permanent tragedy. Let me assure you: the reason why I can do what I do is because I understand that once the screams stop bouncing off the walls and the blood’s all mopped up and the body’s hidden away and a crowd of street people come in a few hours after to grab a few hours of sleep and they scatter their filth and their fingerprints all over, those murders I committed? All those things I did? They only exist in my memory.”

“Hey, Carter?” Fusco says, trying to sound nonchalant. “I just noticed these security cameras are disconnected.”

“Oh, thank God.”

The rough, wet strike of her fist and the cry he makes, pained and fucking whiny, is a prettier sound than any metaphor. Fusco takes his time scrutinizing that second camera.

He doesn’t have to wait too long. Carter gets mad, sure, like anybody, but she also knows how to restrain herself. That’s what makes her a good cop and a better vigilante. He keeps his eyes turned firmly away until there’s nothing left but thin, keening sounds and Carter’s breath slowing, becoming regular. Fusco turns in time to see her guiltily wiping at her knuckles.

“We’re not here to listen to your poetry, Harmon,” he says. “Straight answers from now on, okay?”

He whimpers into his palms, “Okay.”

“Okay.” Fusco looks to Carter.

She takes a deep breath and says, voice calm and even, “You killed Detective Marcus Greeley: yes or no?”

“Yes,” Bricker says.

“And you’d admit to that in court?”

“Yes.”

“And what I think you were getting at with that whole speech was that you were Gabe’s contact within the organization: yes or no?”

“Yes.”

She frowns. “But you didn’t kill him.”

“No,” he says. “No, I only sicced the dogs on him.”

Carter sits, leans forward, elbows on knees. “Explain.”

“Every time I had a new mark, I would acquire a burner phone where only my boss and that mark could contact me. When I was arrested, that burner phone was left behind. My boss decided he wanted to maintain contact with me so I could monitor the behavior of my fellow inmates and assure that there was no dissension in the ranks.” He shrugs like Look how well that worked out. “I reacquired the phone.”

“How?”

“We have our hooks into a few people, some powerful, some not so powerful. Anyone who has utilized our services in the past. If we can use them, we do. I’m not sure if it’s the best business model, but desperate times call for desperate et cetera.”

Bricker squirms momentarily under Carter’s blank, cold stare.

“The guard,” he says, inclining his head. “The moon-faced kid sitting outside the door. He’s probably very nervous about you right now. I’d take care of him soon, if I were you.”

“We’ll take it under advisement,” Carter says. “How did you get to Gabe?”

“He got to me,” Bricker says. “First time he called me, I decided it was more important that I not be caught with a cell phone. The second time, it was quite late at night and I was alone. He said he needed any information I could give him. I said, “Give me your location and I’ll come to you.” He did. At that point, he was interrupted, I assume by his protectors. I called my boss.” Bricker rolls his shoulders. “I destroyed my phone soon after and have been without outside communication ever since. I assume my boss paid him a visit.”

“Who is your boss?”

“He always went by Mr. Palmer to me and the rest of the staff. But I’m not stupid enough to believe that’s his actual last name. He was never on the books. I believe he got paid in cash. He dressed nice, spoke nice, played the part of some old boys’ club executive when he went around with the big boss. But he was never like that. The man was a contract killer; depend on it. Old, fat, but he had that instinct and he did his best to pass it on to me. I’m grateful, after a fashion.” He pauses. “I suppose you want a description.”

“Yeah.”

“Older,” he recites. “60 to 70 years of age. Gray hair. Paunchy. Tall and broad. He must have been very powerful when he was younger. Eyes…gray. Nothing too distinctive, I’m sorry to say. I’d know him if I saw him again, and if he is what I think he is, he probably has a rap sheet somewhere.” Bricker looks thoughtful. “He has a strange face. Inexpressive. Bored. He looks like he’s about to fall asleep at any second. Sharp as a tack, though.”

Fusco frowns. “You say he went around with that CEO?”

“He does.”

“I think I met him, once.”

Carter turns to look at him.

“That night,” Fusco says. “The night this mess got started. I think he might have been there.”

She nods. “You know where to find him?”

“Haven’t seen him since,” Fusco says.

They turn to fix Bricker with matching hard stares.

“We always met at his convenience,” he says. “I wouldn’t know where to find him, especially now, with all of us scattered to the four winds. I’d say he’s far away from our esteemed CEO, wherever he may be. That man may have all the relevant business degrees, but Mr. Palmer has a better head for this kind of business. If he’s smart, he’s already long gone.”

“If he’s not?”

Bricker shrugs. “He’s very smart. But I think he’s also very angry. He takes insults seriously.” He shudders. “If I could give you a tip that would lead to him being imprisoned and far from me, I would. It would do wonders for my peace of mind. As it is, I don’t know. I’d be willing to look at mug shots, if you’d like.”

Fusco shoves his fists in his pockets. “If you can’t lead us to him, what good are you?”

“Well, Detective, I’d say you’ve imprisoned about 20 people in connection with this case, which is pretty good. But by my count, there are at least 50 people involved.” He shows his teeth. “And I know most of them by their real names. Surely that’s a start.”

There’s a knock by the door. The guard, odd and shiny-faced, peers inside at them anxiously. “You all okay in here?”

The three of them, Carter, Fusco, and the monster in the bed, trade nervous glances. Fusco crosses the room to meet him, slow and casual. “Sure. We’re fine.”

“’Cause I heard a noise.”

Fusco shakes his head. “Just a friendly chat. Mr. Bricker’s being pretty cooperative, so…”

The guard shifts in the doorway as Fusco approaches, shields his shoulder. “You’re not supposed to hang around too long.”

“Yeah? Hey, let me ask you a question.”

He backs away half a step. “…Not supposed to…”

“You just heard a noise, is the thing.”

“Visiting hours are…”

“You didn’t see anything. Like you’d be able to do if those security cameras were connected.”

“Detective,” he says, voice thin and strained. “Detective, I really think you should give Mr. Bricker a break now.”

“Why’d you disconnect the security cameras, buddy?”

Fusco lunges for him, catches him by the forearm as he tries to run, catches him by the other arm when he snaps back, tries to stab at Fusco with something small and shiny. Fusco brings him down hard on the linoleum floor.

It’s over pretty quick. The guard is scrawny, badly trained or else just bad. Fusco flips him onto his stomach, sticks a knee in his back, and wrenches his arms behind him, goes for the cuffs on his belt. The guy’s crying, crying like a kid. Fusco just sits there on top of him for a moment after the guard’s hands are cuffed, listening to Carter in the next room carry on like nothing happened, listens to her say to Bricker, “List them. Full names and exactly what they did. The short version.” He listens to the thud of other guards’ feet as they come to see what happened and he watches the syringe full of Drano that the guard had in his sleeve as it rolls away across the floor, light winking off the sharp tip.

 

---

 

“That’s all the names I can remember right now,” Bricker says, “but if you give me some time to think about it, I’m sure I can come up with more.”

Fusco leans in the doorway, rubbing his busted knuckles, while Carter folds up her notebook. “If you’re holding anything back…”

“I’m not,” he says. “Not deliberately. You saw what happened. I want them all accounted for and far away from me. Speaking of which, my solitary confinement has been arranged?”

“Starting tonight,” Fusco says.

“Good.” He takes a deep breath. “That’s a relief.”

“If you’ve been lying to us, Harmon…”

“I haven’t,” he says. “I haven’t. All of that should check out. You’ll see.” He leans back on the pillows with a sigh. “Detectives. Obviously, I shouldn’t press my luck…”

“You’re damn right.”

“…But if you could see your way to informing Mr. Elias that I was cooperative, that would be greatly appreciated.”

Carter frowns. “What?”

“No need to play stupid. Nobody has bothered to reconnect those cameras yet; no one’s watching. I’m not angry, Detective Carter. Or Detective Fusco, I suppose. You’re the one with the crooked conscience, if memory serves. You had your reasons, just as I have mine. In a way, I can’t help but congratulate you. Securing the cooperation of Carl Elias and his men must have been a real coup. But I think I’ve been very helpful to you and I’d appreciate it if he was told that.”

Fusco squints, puzzled. “I don’t know why you think that, but Carl Elias isn’t my dog to call off. Not that I know the guy personally, but I don’t think he’s anybody’s.”

His face falls. “But they said if I told…” He shakes his head. “It doesn’t matter. Solitary. It’s been a pleasure working with you, Detectives. Good night.”

And he drops back against the inclined mattress, shuts his eyes, and the whole inflamed face goes quiet and still. Not asleep, probably. Not right away. But he’s finished talking. And so are they, for now.

“That was strange,” Carter says as the two of them make their way out of the prison.

All the walking’s drawing attention to how he banged his knee on the floor when he tackled that guy. It’s swollen now, tough to move. Kinda small, compared to what he’s sustained lately, but it still bothers him. He wonders if this whole superhero gig has medical. After all that’s happened, he could go for some sports medicine right about now. Or painkillers, something a little stronger than what the hospital gave him after his fake car wreck. “Yup,” he says.

“How he thought you worked with Elias to get him to cooperate.”

“Didn’t happen, if that’s what you’re asking,” Fusco says. “You’re probably on better terms with the guy than I am and you’re the one who put him away.”

“You helped,” she says.

“Little bit.”

“Do you think Elias is taking a personal interest in all this?”

“Could be. Is this the kind of thing he’d stand for?”

She frowns. “Don’t think so.  He didn’t like it when the Five Families were exploiting underage girls. I don’t see him liking this.”

Good enough explanation for now, Fusco guesses, but Carter doesn’t seem to into it. “But?”

She hesitates for a moment, carefully building up her reservations just behind her teeth. “Elias likes to settle things his own way. Not bring police into it.”

“So, you don’t figure he’d hand this one off to us?”

“I don’t. I think if he really wanted these guys gone, they’d be gone by now. One way or the other.”

“Makes sense,” Fusco says, remembering that fireball that consumed Morrettis Junior and Senior a while back. “So, what are you thinking?”

“I think this whole thing is way too convenient,” she says, jamming her fists deep in her pockets. “Him stepping in just when we needed him to.”

“Maybe we’re lucky.”

“Maybe I don’t want Elias doing me any favors.”

“Maybe,” Fusco concedes. “Not like we’re turning it down, though, at this point.”

“No, of course not.” He can see the lump of her hand moving in her tan coat pocket and he realizes she’s playing with that list of names.

“You have to give him credit,” Fusco says, knocking into her lightly with his shoulder, “this is a hell of a lot better than my thing.”

She knocks him back. “Yeah, I was thinking that.”

It’s not until they’re in the car again, until Fusco’s behind the wheel and Carter’s on the phone rattling off names, that Fusco remembers, kinda out of nowhere, that Finch has a friend in Rikers who he goes to visit sometimes.

Well, that figures.

 

---

 

It’s like dominoes. Not the actual game, the one where you match the tiles up end to end just like everybody’s grandmother taught them on a rainy afternoon one time. The one where you line ‘em up and knock shit down.

For the next week, that’s him and Carter. Knocking shit down, after weeks and weeks of twiddling their goddamn thumbs, and it feels amazing.

The names on the list, the high-ranking employees, are the ones who were slick and satisfied and sure they’d never be caught. They put on a pretty good show when the cops first come around and ask if they wouldn’t mind taking a trip down to the station, but once they’re in that interrogation room across the table from Carter or Fusco and the lights are harsh and the questions keep coming and there’s no place for them to run, they just crumble. They’re not ready for it. They never stood a chance.

It’s beautiful. It’s like he and Carter aren’t even the same edgy, frightened people anymore. All the lights are on and all the cylinders are firing and they keep trading knowing little smiles.

They’re winning.

That’s how it feels when they sit together towards the end of the day, filling out the paperwork on their most recent capture, either the 36^th or the 37th.  Carter’s being cautious because one of their guys hasn’t quite cracked yet, but Fusco’s confident enough that he added the guy to his tally.

Carter says it’s unprofessional of him to even be keeping a tally but in the little island of light made by their desk lamps in the darkened precinct, he can tell she doesn’t mind all that much.

“So, we’ve been seeing a lot of each other these past couple of days,” Fusco begins.

“Sure,” Carter says, not looking up. “It’s a tough case.”

“Getting kind of sick of each other, by now.”

“Oh, I can’t stand the sight of you,” she agrees, mildly.

“…You wanna get dinner?”

She peers across the desk at him, all raised eyebrows.

“Nothing fancy,” he adds. “I grab takeout, you grab takeout, we pool our resources back at my place, watch the game, shoot the shit, and then we don’t talk to each other for a week. End this thing on a high note.”

Well, not end. It still has to go to trial. That won’t be for a while yet, though.

“If this is what I think it is,” she says, “I’m not interested.”

“It’s not what you think it is,” he reassures.

“Then I’m interested.”

“Great,” he says. “Meet up at 9?”

“Sounds good.”

So they’re grinning across the desk at each other again, until they sense, kind of as a unit, that somebody’s watching.

Reese leans against a wall, watching them from a polite, spooky distance. When he knows they see him, that’s when he comes over.

Carter beats Fusco to it, hisses under her breath, “You shouldn’t be here.”

“I’ll be gone soon,” he says, real pleasant as far as Reese goes. “I just want to congratulate you on a job well done. It’s not every day the two of you take care of one of our jobs without our help.”

“Not sure I buy that,” Fusco says. “And this thing’s not close to done. But thanks.”

“You’re welcome, Lionel.”

Carter asks, “So, what now?”

Reese rolls his shoulders. “Whatever you can’t catch, we’ll pick up.”

“No sign of the other guy? The one who killed our witness?”

“Not yet. But then,” he says, with a sidelong, half-sly glance at Fusco, “we haven’t found the CEO either. Maybe something similar happened to the other one.”

That shitty little look Reese gives him makes Fusco think of something he hadn’t really considered before but probably should have a long time ago: Reese and Finch talk about him when he’s not around. Like, it’s really obvious. Secrecy-obsessed as they are, no way they don’t pass information on him and Carter and their cases back and forth between the two of them. Even if he didn’t know about the whole incident with HR and Finch and the CEO and the stupid fucking limo at the time, Reese would have to know by now.

Not that that bothers him so much. Reese knows Fusco and what Fusco’s done to survive well enough that killing a pedophile with a shovel is just another drop in that bucket, as far as Reese is concerned. Fusco’s more worried about other things Finch might have shared with Reese.

Fusco thinks back to that night when he came home hammered and Reese was waiting for him, drunk and dangerous and full of threats. But clueless, too, maybe more clueless than Fusco was at the time. And Fusco was pretty clueless.

It’s been a while since then, though. Lots of time to get loose-lipped between then and now.

Like some goddamn mind reader, Reese says, “Lionel, I want to speak to you privately.”

He lets his hand fall hard on the back of Fusco’s neck and squeeze real tight in a way that cuts off any argument Fusco might have to the contrary. Fusco stands, lets himself be guided away from the safety of Carter and their desks, but not so far away that he’s out of shouting distance. That’s a good sign. A good, non-violent sign. Reese backing him into a wall isn’t as good, but it could be worse.

Once Fusco’s wedged neatly in a corner a little ways away from the bullpen and Reese is towering dangerously over him, Reese feels it’s safe enough to talk. “I don’t understand,” he begins.

“Join the club, buddy,” Fusco says, crushing himself as far back into the corner as he can without seeming like he’s cowering.

“What you and Finch have,” Reese explains. “I thought I did, a couple of times. But I don’t.”

Fusco confesses, “I don’t either. He took an interest in me, I guess, and I got to like him a whole lot, but we’re pretty different. He’s a lot smarter than me and he’s got a lot more money and he’s just a nice guy, nicer than I’m used to. It, uh, it wasn’t gonna work. Whatever it was. Died before it lived, that kind of a thing.”

In the face of Reese’s total silence, Fusco shrugs at him, helplessly.

“Makes sense,” he says finally. He fishes deep in one pocket. “Finch wanted me to give you something.”

Fusco shakes his head. “I don’t want it.”

“He said you’d say that,” Reese says, pulling a crinkling wad of folded paper out of his pocket and holding it up to Fusco’s chest so it’s nearly touching him. “Take it. He says it’s the last one.”

Fusco blinks at Reese’s hand suspiciously. “Did he mean that?” Fusco asks.

Reese shrugs. “He said it. I trust him.”

Fusco nods slowly.

“You don’t,” Reese observes.

“I do. I just don’t trust myself to trust the right people. You know?”

Reese, he thinks, does.

Fusco takes the paper from him. “So, what now?”

Reese takes a couple steps back. “That’s not really up to me, Lionel. You have a good night.”

And then he just fuckin’ leaves.

Fusco’s had worse bosses. He doesn’t know if he’s ever had a weirder one, though.

He uncrumples the paper. It’s one sheet, folded hard into eighths, all worried at the creases like somebody folded and unfolded and refolded and maybe got bored and tried to make a swan out of it. This thing’s been through hell.

It’s a bill, unpaid. From his dry cleaner, the cheap one a couple of blocks away from his apartment where he drops his suits from time to time. It’s for a clean-up job on a two piece suit and a shirt, coming to a neat $15.50, to be paid off by the end of the month.

I’ll get on that.

Thanks for the reminder, Finch.

What the hell is this?

Fusco scours the paper, checks the back, tries to find a note or something, some kind of explanation. But there’s nothing. It’s all weird as hell, especially since Fusco’s pretty sure he’s all up to date on his dry cleaning. He pays his bills right there in the goddamn store.

Until finally, he remembers a pile of hastily-folded clothes and the messily written note he left beside it. An apology and a plea that no, really, he’d cover the cost of the dry cleaning.

Shit, that note he left Finch is even dumber in retrospect. Who’s he cleaning that suit for? Not himself; he’d be ashamed to touch it. And it’s not like it’d fit anybody else.

Made for him. That suit was made for him and he threw it back in Finch’s face. Jesus. Jesus, Lionel, you’re pathetic.

It’s weird, because he’d been waiting on an end to all of this for so long and now that he’s holding it in his hands, a straightforward declaration of “You aren’t my problem anymore, Fusco,” it goddamn hurts.

But you wanted it, he thinks to himself. You asked for it, you idiot.

He stuffs the bill in his pocket, takes a few deep breaths, takes a second to collect himself.

When he comes back, Carter asks what kept him.

“Nothing,” he says. “Just had a weird talk with Mr. Sunshine. Listen, I’m gonna be done here for tonight. That alright with you?”

“Sure,” she says. And then, “You okay?”

“Yeah,” he says, “of course. See you at 9?”

“See you at 9,” she says back to him, but he’s already walking away.

 

---

 

He grabs Indian takeout at a place he knows and likes on the way home. Little round plastic containers of rice and curry, mango lassis in Styrofoam cups, naan in crinkling tinfoil. He barely thinks about it, just drops the paper takeout bag in the passenger seat and gets right back on the road. He has another stop to make.

The dry cleaner is getting ready to close down for the night, but Fusco slips in right under the wire, all “Uh, sorry, but I just wanted to settle my bill. And pick something up, maybe?” So he pays his cleaning bill in cash at the register while an attendant goes and fetches something on a hanger, draped in a long plastic bag. Fusco takes it numbly. He hangs it from the bar over the door in the backseat of his car and doesn’t even bother to peek beneath the plastic.

Until he gets home, obviously. ‘Cause that’s how it is, right? Fusco gets home and no matter how much he’s sick of feeling like Finch’s charity case, the curiosity eats him up until he opens his present. That’s how it is when he shoulders his front door open, puts that poor, maligned takeout bag on his kitchen counter, and immediately tears the plastic up over the suit. Wrenches it up hard, like he doesn’t already know what it is, like it’s a surprise.

It’s still real beautiful, this suit that Finch made for him. That’s what he’s struck by the second the plastic is gone and the fabric is bare and draped over his arms. He never really got to know it. One second he was staring in the mirror like he barely knew himself and the next, Finch was on him, and in the seconds after that, Fusco just tore it off because it made him feel unworthy.

He was always, he thinks as he runs a hand over the smooth fabric, unworthy. It’s just that Finch stopped thinking so for a while. His calloused fingers catch on the subtle weave, on the deep blue and the copper pinstripes, and he thinks about how knowing that Finch saw something this beautiful and thought he’d like to see Fusco wear it is a real punch to the gut.

He takes a deep breath and recovers. He finds a scrap of paper, a pink dry cleaner’s slip scrawled on at the last second, tucked away in the jacket’s breast pocket where that bright little hankie was last time.

 The note begins, “Detective Fusco,” because that’s where he and Finch are, he guesses.

“Detective Fusco, I’m going to ask that you take this, not because I think you want it but for my own peace of mind. Wear it, destroy it, keep it in the back of your closet, whatever you wish to do with it. Just know that it was made with you in mind and no one can wear it better.

“Well done.”

It’s not signed. It doesn’t need to be. Fusco crumples the note with the idea in his head like maybe he’ll toss it in the trashcan beneath the kitchen sink, push away the ache in his chest, and get on with his life. But he never gets that far. He just rolls the ball of paper in his hand until its sharp, bent edges soften with the heat of his palm before dropping it on the kitchen counter.

He takes the suit into his bedroom and hangs it off the closet door. He’ll figure it out later. Then he thinks he probably doesn’t want to hang around having lazy dinner with Carter in his suit from work, so he changes. Loses the tie and the coat and the fucking loafers and swaps them out for jeans and a soft, worn t-shirt he picked up at a Springsteen concert forever ago and holey socks, because it’s his apartment, goddammit.

He gets through the whole process and is just thinking that he should definitely reapply deodorant because he smells like the wrong end of a long day when the need to talk to Finch hits him like a fucking truck. The need to explain and re-explain and try to convince Finch that no, really, he’s not worth this nice suit, he’s not worth any of it, he’s not worth the time Finch spent, much less the money.

But also other stuff, too. The need to empty out whatever awful thing is inside him right now and the need to thank Finch and the need to hear his voice, soft and careful and gentle and chiding, in his ear. He misses it. He’s missed it so bad.

So Fusco gets out his phone and he calls Finch up, not really knowing what he’s about to say exactly, just that his hands are shaking and he needs this. He cradles the phone to his face and he needs it.

The phone is answered by a woman with a smooth, robotic voice who tells him that the number he has reached is no longer in service.

He puts his phone down on the dresser with a click.

He understands for the first time how bad it is between them now. How rough and how tense and how much it’s his own damn fault that they’re like this. That Finch is changing his goddamn number just to get away.

“’M sorry,” he says to the phone, like that means anything.

Although, he thinks, maybe it does. Finch has shown him how he doesn’t need to call to hear what’s going on on Fusco’s end of the line. Finch could be listening. Finch could be listening now.

“I, uh…I could have handled this better. And I’m not going to make excuses, man; I did a really bad job of handling everything you ever did for me. Mostly ‘cause the stuff you did was kinda weird. But I also kinda liked it, so there’s that. I’ve never had anybody…give a shit the way you did. A lot, and about little things. It was nice.”

The phone stays quiet.

“I don’t know if I ever said that,” he continues, “that it was nice. I missed it when you stopped leaving weird shit for me in my apartment. Like, I know I bitched about it a lot, ‘cause I didn’t want to be your charity case – and I know, I know, that’s never how you meant it to be in the first place – but I liked that a whole lot. Made me feel, you know, cared for.”

Still nothing.

“I miss talking to you already. Not like we ever talked that much to begin with, but I always liked it when we did. Liked your voice and the way you’d fuss around and the questions you’d ask me. You’re…you know, you’re funny? I bet you don’t hear that as much as how you’re smart, but you are. You make me laugh a lot. It’s gonna really…really fuck me up if we don’t talk anymore after this.

“Like, if you don’t want to fool around anymore, that’s okay, and if you don’t even want to be friends, I’m…I wish we could be. But that’s your call and I get it if after all this, you don’t want to. But don’t cut me out of the work, okay? Give me my orders through Carter if you can’t stand to hear my stupid voice but don’t push me away from this. It’s pretty much the only thing making me a worthwhile human being right now, and if you take that away, I might as well go to prison anyway.”

“That was, uh, not a joke, but…”

“Look, don’t send me to prison just ‘cause you don’t want to talk to me anymore, okay? At least have a good reason for that shit, don’t just…” He sighs. “Listen, if, uh…if it’s not all that bad, and you can stand to hang around me again, I’m having Carter over for dinner tonight. Nothin’ special, just a takeout potluck kinda thing and if you wanted to come by and celebrate all this bullshit being over with us, I’d, uh, I’d like that. Bring Wonderboy if it makes you feel a little safer. That guy could stand to get out a little more. Just, uh. I’d like to see you.”

And then he just stands there, hoping that somehow, Finch was listening in on his cell phone’s microphone when he started talking and somehow managed to not turn it off before Fusco got through his whole speech. It would be a big fucking shame if Fusco poured his heart out to his empty fucking phone.

Well, of course he’s pouring his heart out to nothing. Why would Finch be listening to him? Finch probably destroyed his phone just so Fusco wouldn’t have his number anymore.

“Thanks,” he says finally. “You did a good job too. You son of a bitch. Go get some rest.”

Very suddenly, something clicks sharply just behind Fusco’s ear. “Who,” says a smooth, slow, exhausted kind of voice that kinda tugs at the edge of Fusco’s memory, “are you talking to?”

Fusco realizes, with a stupid kind of belatedness, that he was in such a hurry to get home, he never noticed the door was unlocked.

The muzzle of the gray-eyed man’s gun taps up against the spot behind Fusco’s ear.

Notes:

Those seeking Detective Marcus Greeley can find him in Chapter 12. Those seeking Mr. Palmer can find him slumming it all the way back in Chapter 4. Those seeking me can find me drinking my sorrows away, because I seriously had to research my own fic for ages just to make this chapter come together.

Chapter 25

The neat, round press of the gun against the space behind his ear sends a jolt through his whole body, like a bolt of jagged lightening passing through his head and his chest and his groin and the bottoms of his feet. And then, for a second, peace. Just a cool, blank kind of understanding. Okay. Okay. I didn’t know it until right now, but I’ve kinda been waiting for something like this.

Maybe it was all just going too well, by comparison.

 “So,” Fusco says. “How’d you get in here?”

There’s a soft murmur of movement, not a laugh or a shake exactly. The guy only rearranges minutely, jovially. Like he wasn’t expecting Fusco to sound so calm, and he kinda likes it. “It’s been a while,” the gray-eyed man says, “but I still remember a few tricks of the trade. I’m sure that’s true of you as well.”

Fusco nods, real slow, telegraphing everything. He wants to get this guy used to him moving. “You pick things up. This is a little less noisy than plastic explosives, though. So that’s a step up for you.”

“Hmm.” He can feel the guy shift, feel the muzzle of the gun bounce lightly against his skull. “You know why I’m here?”

“You grew a conscience and you wanted to turn yourself in?”

He chuckles very gently. “No,” says the gray-eyed man. “But I admire your optimism.”

“I don’t want your admiration. I want you gone.”

The gray-eyed man keeps right on chuckling even as he smacks his gun right across the back of Fusco’s head and sends him staggering, bent and clutching the space behind his ear.

“You,” he begins, very firmly, like he’s choosing his words with great care and standing by the choices, “are a problem for me, Detective.” He swallows sharply. “I don’t care if you want me gone. I need you gone. It’s a matter of pride.”

Even with a head full of stars, Fusco can understand that. Just like he understood why Simmons had to execute him in the woods. He’s kind of ashamed that he gets that so well, that he needs to die for standing in an evil man’s way. He’s embarrassing a lot of people, he thinks, doing the right thing.

Well, good. Good. “You don’t deserve to be proud.”

The flurry of blows falls again, hard and sharp and again and again on his shoulders and on the back of his head and he staggers, falls to his knees.

“Stay down,” the gray-eyed man is saying when the ringing in his ears starts to subside. “I’m trying to decide if you’re worth talking to or if I should just kill you right now.”

Fusco rocks from knee to knee, crosses his arms over his head. He keens, thin and sharp, at the back of his throat until he realizes he’s the one making that whiny noise and makes himself stop out of pride.

He keeps still and quiet as he listens to every minor shift of the man standing behind him and he starts to think strategically.

Not that Fusco likes the idea of getting beat up and tortured, because that’s been happening a lot lately and he’s getting to be kinda sick of the whole thing, but he likes that it takes time. Carter’s coming over at 9:00 and he puts the current time at around 8:15. Now, that’s a while.

Too long, if the guy just shoots him.

If the guy smacks him around a while, cuts his fingers off, burns him, whatever, that could last a while. Fusco could make that last 45 minutes, he thinks.

But from where Carter’s standing, she’s not 45 minutes away from a fight; she’s 45 minutes from casual dinner with a friend. Who knows if she’s wearing her vest, if she’s carrying, if she’s even wearing shoes she can run in. What if she turns up, takeout bag under her arm, smile on her face, and she doesn’t know what she’s walking into until the gray-eyed man puts two in her brain, nice and neat.

Maybe getting executed is the responsible thing. Die fast, and maybe the guy’s gone in under a half an hour and Carter walks in on something real bad but at least she’s alive.

Nah. Nah, that’s a shitty way to think. That, and the guy was listening in on Fusco’s phone call that wasn’t, so there’s a chance he already knows Carter’s coming over and he’s thinking it’s a real two for one situation. Can’t have that.

So, what now?

Make it a torture situation, he thinks. Make him angry.

Or make him talkative, adds a calmer, more critical voice in the back of his head. Do what you have to do but don’t let him hurt you except as a last resort. You know he likes to talk. Help him talk.

“So I guess you killed Gabe,” he says, rubbing at the back of his head and staring into the carpet.

“Who?”

“My witness,” he says. “The little guy in the police safehouse. And the cops with him. That was you, right?”

“Oh. Mhmm. That was me.” He coughs softly. Trouble with his throat, Fusco thinks. “That was easy.”

And it was. For someone like him, it always is.

“…He was a bad strategist,” the gray-eyed man reflects.

“I could’ve told you that.”

“Hmm.” He’s moving now. Backing off a little. Fusco wanted him to stay close, get relaxed a little so he’d be surprised when Fusco turned around and took the gun away from him. Fusco risks turning to get a good look and finds him casually pawing through the stuff on Fusco’s dressertop, gun trained lazily on his head. He looks a little worse for the wear, Fusco thinks. Not hurt or anything, but his suit is run down and the tiredness doesn’t look so much like aristocratic boredom anymore. It looks real. True exhaustion, bone-deep and debilitating.

That’s something.

“Does it bother you?” he asks. “That I killed them all right under your nose?”

Fusco thinks really hard about that, counts out 15 seconds. “Yeah,” he admits. “Maybe he wasn’t the brightest crayon in the box, but I promised Gabe I’d keep him alive. You…you made a liar out of me. So we’ve got problems, you and I.”

“You shouldn’t blame yourself,” says the gray-eyed man. “Or even the detectives I killed. Your witness died because he made bad choices. You might as well call it a suicide.”

“It wasn’t, though.” Fusco chews his lip. “He was cuffed when you got there?”

“Yeah. He was in some trouble with them. I never bothered to find out why.”

“He stole a phone,” Fusco says. “From one of them. So he could call you.”

The gray-eyed man laughs, exasperated. “Poor idiot.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Fusco says. “Nothing wrong with being an idiot. I knew he was an idiot when I said I’d protect him. And I meant it.”

“Did you?” He sounds genuinely surprised. “I know a little bit about your body of work, Detective. I’m not sure what your promises are worth exactly, but it’s not much.”

That stings a little. Not that he’s so concerned with this guy’s opinion of his moral fortitude, but it’s kinda true, or it used to be. Fusco isn’t sure how many times he’s committed perjury, but it’s a lot. He’s spent a really sickening amount of time – time that could’ve been spent closing cases – on rehearsing cover stories and lying his ass off in court. Not to mention the whole “protect and serve” thing that fell by the wayside during his bad years. So, yeah, maybe Fusco’s word hasn’t been worth so much for a while.

But maybe, if his word was worth so little, Reese wouldn’t put people’s lives in his hands. And maybe Carter wouldn’t depend on him like she does. And maybe he would never have seen the inside of Finch’s brownstone, if Finch didn’t think he could be trusted.

If he couldn’t be trusted, he never would’ve gone into that club and he never would’ve broken down that door and he never would’ve walked out with Finch on his arm and he never would’ve tried to protect him when things got dangerous.

Fusco realizes that somehow, when he wasn’t looking, he turned into the kind of guy who never would have offered to be Gabe’s protector if he didn’t mean to be exactly that.

“Here’s an interesting idea,” says the gray-eyed man. “I killed two police officers. Very efficiently. As near to painlessly as is possible. I tortured a drug dealer, briefly, before ending his life. Again, efficiently. It was violent. People died. But there was very little pain and suffering involved. Can you say the same of what you do? I’m running a business. You’re just an attack dog.”

Fusco laughs at that, outright, a dry, almost painful bark of air. Because it’s not an interesting idea, because Fusco knows what happened at the safehouse doesn’t even begin to cover what the gray-eyed man’s done in his time, because Fusco took a bullet for a kid he barely knew and raised a damn fine son and look at this son of a bitch. This son of a bitch. “Not that I’m an angel or anything, but I know I’m not as bad as you. I’m fuckin’ bush league compared to you. Sorry.”

The gray-eyed man shrugs, real graceful, like he’s unshouldering something heavy. “I guess you could make that argument.” He pauses in his examination of the receipts and unsorted socks and old colognes Fusco picked up many Christmases ago and never threw out. He pauses because he found a picture.

It’s not one that Fusco looks at so much. The good ones, the ones that matter to him, end up on his desk at work or on his phone, in his pocket always. Where he can reach them easily in the places where he needs strength the most. This picture, in its cheap imitation wood frame, has become more of a thing that he keeps because it’s the kind of thing a person ought to keep. In practice, it’s more a thing that he drapes his ties over at the end of the day.

This one was taken on the edge of the trouble, before Fusco ever understood what it was that Stills really wanted from him and just around the time he and Sharon were starting to cotton to the idea that maybe the fights and differences between them were indicative of something really broken in the marriage. The three of them – him, Sharon, and Michael – took a trip up north. It was Sharon’s thing; her parents took her camping a lot when she was a kid and she got a taste for it, so she decided the whole family was going up north to camp in Acadia or some shit. Fusco was miserable most of the time. His folks never had the money or the inclination for that kind of thing so he felt kinda dumb and inexperienced and Sharon got a big kick out of showing him how dumb and inexperienced he was exactly. He’d sweat all day and he’d be freezing cold in the tent at night. Sharon would curl up at the other end, in her separate sleeping bag, and Fusco would just shudder in the dark, roots and rocks digging in his back, and listen to the sound of something, something that rustled leaves and broke branches and maybe could be coming up on his kid’s little tent, maybe. So he wasn’t sleeping so much at the time either.

But that week in Acadia, Sharon decided they were gonna climb a mountain. It was a dusty, hot chore and Fusco kinda felt like maybe his calf muscles were gonna split open the backs of his legs and he spent the whole day with fucking palpitations from watching Michael scramble over jagged rocks and along the edges of steep drops. But Michael was smiling his face off and Sharon seemed fonder of him for worrying and Fusco was kind of in awe of her for being able to take it in stride. Around halfway up the rock, they stopped off at this lookout that jutted out right against a waterfall, all dark wet rocks and icy white water and plushy green mosses growing in cracks. The mist on his face was the best thing he’d felt all day and they stopped there a while, ate their snacks and drank their water and scooped handfuls of water out of the falls to pour over heads and down the backs of shirts. Another climber offered to snap a picture and captured them in that moment, all clustered together in front of the falls, sunburned and soaked and grinning.

He doesn’t know. It wasn’t his idea of a vacation. The kid had fun, though, so he guesses it was a success in that way. And he and Sharon had pretty decent make-up sex after they got back to civilization, not that that fixed anything in the long run. He got that picture printed out and stuck it in a frame sometime after the whole thing went bad and he never cut her out of it, because she was there and it’s important that she was. His son is between them, smiling, and it’s maybe the last picture where they’re all together like that. He doesn’t know. He kept it.

The gray-eyed man picks up the frame for a moment and examines, keeping the gun casually trained on Fusco. “Is this your family?” he asks.

He takes a slow, shivering breath. “Leave them be,” he says. “They have nothing to do with me. I’m not even married to her anymore.”

“Hm.” And he turns the picture over, like he’s searching for secrets on the back of the frame. “Which is why you keep their picture…in your bedroom.”

The breath escapes in a weak puff. “It…it’s my kid, man.”

The gray-eyed man’s eyebrow jumps, just once. “Cute kid.”

The world narrows into a real sharp point for Fusco, just for a second. His blood quickens, his eyes water, his whole circulatory system gives this huge thump. And then it relaxes, and he’s quiet. He can breathe easily. He feels better. A sense of purpose, he guesses, is helpful like that.

Because now Fusco knows that he needs to kill this guy or die trying. He flexes his hands. One tight squeeze, and then relaxed and twitching and ready. Fusco tenses his legs.

“You know,” he murmurs, “I’ve been ten steps behind you and yours at every turn. I’m kinda surprised I ever rated a visit at all.”

“So am I.” The gray-eyed man puts the photo back on the dresser, face down. “But you and your partner did enough to cause me serious trouble. I worked hard to attach myself to this organization and mold it to suit my needs. I need to start over from scratch now which, when you get to be my age, is difficult. I’m, ah, I’m getting up there. Before you people showed up, I was letting myself think…retirement. When you start toeing seventy, you don’t want to be conquering new territory anymore. A man deserves that time to reflect, to sit back and live off of what he’s made of his life. You’ll understand in another twenty or thirty years. Or.” He stops, mid-stream, surprised at himself. “I guess you won’t.”

The gray-eyed man straggles to a stop again and looks honest-to-god apologetic about the whole thing for a few seconds.

“You’re not missing much,” he adds after a moment. “Watching yourself deteriorate is, ah, sobering. Men like us have very poor twilight years, I think. Too many bridges burned at the end.”

“Would you quit lumping me in with you?”

“You’re not being singled out unfairly,” the gray-eyed man continues, as though Fusco never spoke. “I don’t know if that helps. You’re just one on a long list. Clean-up. As usual.” He clears his throat again. “Speaking of which, where is my business partner?”

“Dunno,” Fusco says. “But he’s dead.”

The gray-eyed man nods, like “Good,” or like “I knew it.” It’s hard to say which. “Your own partner is still alive, if you were wondering. For now.”

“Gee. Thanks. Real princely of you, leaving her alive.”

“For now,” he repeats. “Again. Pride. Clean-up. You know. I don’t want to hurt her unless I need to. I hurt a lot of people, but I don’t really want to hurt anybody. Except Harmon. That’s personal. Stings.” He presses his fist just under his collarbone, digs knuckles in. “He had a lot of problems, but we took very good care of him, before.”

“You gonna kill him too?”

“Somehow,” he says, like it’s a calm certainty. “Why, did you swear to protect this one too?”

Fusco says, “Nah, I’m less beat up about that one.”

“Detective Fusco,” he says very suddenly. “I have a question about your friend, Mr. Crake.”

Fusco thinks Who the hell is Mr. Crake? and then thinks, Haven’t I thought that before, not so long ago? and then thinks, Oh. Oh. “What about him?”

“Well,” he says, “I can’t find him.”

“Join the club.”

“It’s pretty strange,” says the gray-eyed man. “I never do business with people I don’t know, Detective. You can’t trust someone you know nothing about. I know where my associates work, where they live, what they do with their money. I’m thorough. And I checked up on Mr. Crake. I knew how he paid for his house and what color the drapes were. I examined his business practices inside and out. I knew about the charities he supported, the grocery stores he shops at, what brand of toilet paper he buys before he ever spoke to any of us. But after the night you and I met, I went to call on Mr. Crake at home, and he wasn’t there. He didn’t live in that house. He didn’t own that house. What’s more, he had never owned that house. That’s strange.”

Fusco shrugs. “Yeah. I guess.”

“Your criminal informant disappears and that doesn’t bother you.” Not a question. Just an analytical statement.

“It’s not my business. He’s a secretive guy.”

“He stopped existing.”

“People do that every day,” Fusco says.

The gray-eyed man smiles. It’s a light, breezy smile, a business casual smile. He takes a few quick steps forward and neatly, efficiently, slams the sole of his shoe into Fusco’s face.

Fusco’s pretty sure, for a second, that the gray-eyed man never needed explosives to get into the safehouse. He could have kicked the door down by himself. He could have kicked a hole in Fusco’s skull. The force of it brings Fusco to the floor, laid out with rugburn on half of his face and the gray-eyed man’s foot pinning him down.

“Do you know,” he asks, grinding the tread into Fusco’s cheek, “where he is now?”

Fusco struggles under the pressure of his foot for a second, braces his hands on the floor.

The weight increases, really presses on his skull. “I’ll make you a deal,” says the gray-eyed man. “If you help me find Mr. Crake, I’ll make this quick and painless. Two in the back of the head, no collateral damage. Your family will be left alone, as requested. If you don’t, then I’m sorry, but you have only yourself to blame for whatever happens next. What do you say?”

“I’d like to help you,” he grits out, jaw all out of alignment, “but I don’t know where he is.”

The guy makes this sound and it’s a bit like a tuning fork, where it’s all at the edge of what you can hear so it’s almost not there, except it hurts. “A crake is a kind of bird, Detective. Did you know that? Little, fat, short-billed things that hang around near water. Funny-looking. Not the kind of thing people get named after, most of the time. I thought that was an interesting thing about Mr. Crake. After Mr. Crake disappeared, I gave it some more thought, and I realized that his name must never have been Harold Crake at all. It’s a pseudonym. And then I thought, maybe he picked the name Crake because it’s a bird. And am I wrong,” he says, leaning closer, “or when I came up behind you, didn’t I hear you chatting away to a finch on the phone?”

Fusco feels like his head’s about to cave in like an old fruit from the pressure, like his heart’s about to do the same. He holds still.

How do you do that? he wonders. How do you get that smart, learn that much, graduate from MIgoddamnT, become the kind of guy who can build a whole new identity for himself in the blink of an eye, and not figure out that maybe giving yourself a bird-themed name every time is as good as a big, flashing, neon “CATCH ME” sign?

Might as well ask how an honest-to-god detective, a seasoned veteran of the NYPD, comes home to find his apartment unlocked and doesn’t question it until there’s a gun to his head.

We all make mistakes, he thinks, firmly.

“Yrr houa lkkk.”

The gray-eyed man lifts his foot a few degrees. “What’d you say?”

Fusco takes a breath, opens his mouth, realigns his jaw. “I said, ‘you’re out of luck,’ pal.” He squirms a little, shifts his body so it’s easy to stare up at the gray-eyed man out the corner of his eye. “I don’t know where he is. Nobody does. I dunno if you noticed, but he’s not really an open door kinda guy.”

“You work with him. You’re telling me you don’t have a place you can expect to find him?”

Maybe at home, he thinks, almost by accident. Maybe he’s at home in that big, lonely brownstone. Maybe he’s sipping tea in that pristine, icy kitchen or in the back room, tapping away at his computer or piecing together suits that nobody’s ever going to wear. Maybe he’s grabbing an early night in the guest bed that Fusco bled in and maybe he’s lying in the same spot Fusco lay in and maybe he’s cuddling in and maybe he’s thinking about Fusco.

Or, you know, maybe not.

Bringing Fusco to that house was a big show of trust on Finch’s part, but Fusco’s realizing that he never really knew where to find Finch outside of that. And Finch doesn’t even live there, really.

If Finch disconnected the number Fusco knows to call him at, Finch probably doesn’t live there at all. Maybe it’s Mr. Crake’s house, so dark and empty it’s like no one ever lived there in the first place.

“He didn’t like people looking for him,” Fusco says. “If he wanted to talk to you, he’d find you himself. And he doesn’t want to talk to me. I had a number for him, but it’s disconnected.”

“You were talking to him,” he says, really insistently, like he’s just going over the facts.

“No.”

“I could hear you.”

“You heard wrong,” he says. “He wasn’t on the line. I was talking to nobody. He’s gone.”

“Nobody,” the gray-eyed man repeats.

Fusco says, “He used to have me bugged. Couldn’t get ahold of him by phone, so I thought maybe he’d be listening to me. Guess he’s not,” Fusco adds with an airless, desperate laugh. “We don’t get along so great most of the time, but I don’t think he’d let me get killed by the likes of you.”

The pressure of the foot increases for a second, then decreases a lot as he pushes off, takes steps back, and Fusco rolls over, knees and stomach, and covers his head, waits for the pain in his head and his neck to subside or for this guy to rain down kicks on him.

That doesn’t happen, that last thing. Fusco hears him moving, pacing maybe. He listens.

“He had you bugged.”

“What’re you, an echo?” Fusco groans into his hands.

“This man.” He chuckles dryly. “He wasn’t your criminal informant, was he?”

“Think it depends on your definition,” Fusco says. “He’s a criminal. He keeps me informed. I’d say that covers it.”

“That’s an unimaginative way of saying it.”

Fusco rises to his knees. The gray-eyed man is leaning on Fusco’s dresser, looking at him real hard.

“What are you?” the gray-eyed man asks. “Not HR, not anymore. Or not just HR.”

Not HR. Not since the woods and not for a while before that and never again. Not quite whatever Reese and Finch are, not a superhero and not a ghost and not a genius and not a dead man. Not quite what Carter is, strong and incorruptible.

“I’m a cop,” he says after a few seconds. “I help people. That’s all.”

The gray-eyed man raises an eyebrow. “Get on the floor.”

“What?”

“Get on the floor. Face down. You’re not worth my goddamn time.” The safety on his gun clicks off like punctuation. “Let’s make this quick.”

Fusco tenses. “What?” he says. “I thought you wanted to talk.”

“Done talking to you. I’ll try your partner on for size when she shows up. Maybe she’ll be more helpful. Face down.”

Fusco gets his feet underneath him, rises to a wary crouch. “If you’re gonna shoot me,” he says, “the least you can do is look me in the eye while you do it.”

The pistol clips him right across the bridge of his nose and sends him reeling. “I’m a professional,” the gray-eyed man says, unmoved, like he just plucked a piece of lint off Fusco’s shoulder or something. “I’ll shoot you however I want. Face down on the ground, Detective. Before I start to lose patience.”

Fusco staggers, clutches his nose and feels hot blood spill over his hand. He can feel it already, old injuries jarred and brought to life again. What with all that’s been happening, he’s lucky his face still more or less looks like a face. Not that he was ever good-looking, but he was kinda hoping to make it to the end with his nose intact.

He snorts, gags as blood trickles against the back of this throat, coughs. He gets his breath back, thick and loud as it is. He takes a look at the gray-eyed man through his fingers.

Simmons would’ve been mad, he thinks. Most guys, if you keep giving them lip and not doing what you’re goddamn told, they get frustrated. They fix hard on beating you down into the right shape and they get sloppy, hitting you hard instead of smart.

The gray-eyed man doesn’t seem like he operates that way. He gives Fusco a look like he’s the stubborn child of a stranger, one you can’t get too angry with because the kid is not your own.

“Down,” he repeats softly.

Fusco lunges.

It’s an uncontrolled kind of lunge. He’s not sure what he’s trying to accomplish, exactly. Except for the obvious thing. Wanting somebody dead. That’s a sensation he’s starting to get a handle on now.

He wishes he wasn’t the kind of person who needed to get a handle on that sensation.

His lunge never really connects with the gray-eyed man. The guy just shifts a little to the right, brings his knee up sharp to meet Fusco’s gut. Fusco folds around it.

Isn’t that weird? he thinks as his knees buckle and a rough, wet wheeze forces its way out of his body. Isn’t it weird that he didn’t just shoot me?

Isn’t it weird that I want him dead more than he wants me dead?

Fusco’s knees hit the floor with a muted thud and from there he tips, bouncing off the corner of his bed on the way down. He’s lying on his side, curled, clutching his stomach, watching the gray-eyed man’s oxblood shoes come closer.

“It’s not that I can’t bear to look you in the eye while I kill you,” he says. Fusco hears the crackle of joints. He’s moving his leg, bending and unbending his knee. Fusco hopes his gut broke the gray-eyed man’s patella. “But this a respect thing, as much as it is a revenge thing. I don’t want to hear you ask why I want you to do it, or why it matters if you do it or not. It matters because I asked you to. And if you respected me and the institutions that I belong to, you would do it.”

Fusco takes a deep breath, sputters because there’s blood in his nose and his lungs feel bruised. He coughs and it’s painful. “I don’t respect you,” he mumbles, pressing his lips to the carpet.

“Say again?”

He lifts his heavy head. “I don’t,” he repeats, lips swollen and clumsy, “respect you. I don’t give a shit about you. I already had this talk with people who scare me more than you ever will. I didn’t give him up to them and I’m not gonna give him up to you.”

The gray-eyed man blinks down at him. Not curious or surprised at all, just in the perfunctory way a lizard licks dust off its eyeballs. He lifts his foot and, almost gently, braces it against Fusco’s shoulder.

“Down.” He presses slowly but insistently, until Fusco’s shivering arm can’t hold him up anymore and Fusco’s down on his stomach on the bedroom floor, prone and fucking helpless. His shoulder, the one that the gray-eyed man isn’t stepping on, and that one arm are stuck kinda under his bed and all of a sudden, Fusco can’t bear to try looking up anymore.

So he turns his head so he’s staring into the musty darkness under his bed and he’s sick of himself.

This is it, he guesses. God, he’s mad at himself for that, but he’s been hit too many times and he’s weak and there’s no way out that he can see. Which means he gets to die now.

Step up from being gut shot and buried alive, maybe. His son gets to know for sure that his dad is dead, not missing, not run off, dead, which is awful, but at least it’s closure.

Fusco’s been thinking about death a lot the past couple of years. How he’s likely to go out and so on, since it’s something that preoccupies him. He’s in a dangerous line of work and he keeps piling it on, making more scary friends and dangerous enemies. So he might die on the job or he might die ‘cause of a gang hit or he might die in prison or he might die of Simmons or he might die of Reese or he might die ‘cause he didn’t look both ways crossing the street or he might eat or drink himself to death or, if he’s real fucking lucky, he might get so goddamn old his body stops working.

That last thing always seemed pretty unlikely. Since he met Reese and Finch, he’s been trying to die a good person. That’s a pretty decent consolation prize, he thinks, for never getting old enough to see grandkids. Dying a hero, or at least at peace with himself. Good job, Fusco. You may have a bullet in your head, but at least you did the right thing in the end.

He guesses that’s what this is.

Doesn’t feel like dying to do the right thing, though. It feels like being a fucking chump and dying ‘cause you were too slow to survive doing the right thing. It feels like dying in a dirty apartment he moved into too quickly after the divorce and never bothered to leave. It feels like dying for nothing, because a guy who barely cares needed to even out the scales in his head. It feels like dying of weakness, like Carter’s going to die because Fusco did, like Fusco’s family is going to die because Fusco did, like Finch might die or Finch might stay hidden and never understand and never forgive himself for not doing something, somehow, no matter how impossible.

Fusco’s eyes adjust. He can see now, a little bit. Plastic bags of summer clothes vacuumed flat so they don’t take up space. Boxes, maybe from when he moved, of stuff Fusco guesses he might as well have just thrown out, since he never felt the need to unpack it. Dustbunnies. Crumbs. A lone screw, for some reason. A shoe he’s been missing but hasn’t really tried to find. Cans and bottles of beer that rolled. Jesus.

Dying now feels like bullshit.

With the hand that’s under the bed, he reaches out two fingers, careful not to move the visible parts of his arm. Those two fingers brush the neck of a brown beer bottle by his hand. They coax it close, under the pads of his fingers.

“Can I ask a question?” says the gray-eyed man, somewhere above him, somewhere with a gun.

Fusco presses his tongue between his teeth. “Sure. Shoot.”

“That’s funny,” he says. “Is it worth it?”

“Is what worth it?” Fusco can curl those two fingers over the neck of the bottle and they pull it closer.

“This Crake,” the gray-eyed man says. “Is he worth dying for?”

Fusco holds his breath, takes a long pause, hopes he sounds thoughtful. “Yeah,” he says, as his hand closes around the bottle. “Yeah, he’s worth it.”

And he rolls over. Rolls toward the foot pinning him down and rolls hard, so the gray-eyed man is knocked off balance, so he staggers, so Fusco’s shoulder slides free and he can roll onto his back, so he’s looking the gray-eyed man dead on when he throws the bottle right in his face hard enough to shatter glass.

The guy staggers back with a yell and Fusco follows, presses the fucking advantage, rams his broken body into the gray-eyed man’s knees and brings him down to the floor with a rough thud. Fusco pounces on him then, scrambling for the gun.

Fusco catches the gray-eyed man by the wrist, presses his hand to the floor with the gun pointed away from them, presses his body down so the guy can’t move, can’t recoup. He’s still confused, still in pain, still shaking shards of brown glass out of his face, and Fusco pounds his free hand roughly against his face, making sure he stays that way. That part isn’t so hard; the real trouble is how the gray-eyed man’s fist is white-knuckled around the grip of the gun. He’s trying to get control back.

Since meeting Reese, Fusco doesn’t think so highly of his own ability to throw a punch. It’s kinda like being a guy who’s pretty sure he’s got the whole horse-drawn carriage thing down until some asshole blows past him in a Ferrari. There’s like a whole side of things he can’t even approach, and after too long with Reese, Fusco starts to feel like a kid when he fights, like he knows nothing. He’s probably more like that now, ‘cause there’s blood in his airways and glass under his hands and he’s clumsy, like when you try to fight in a dream. But it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t have to be finessed; he doesn’t have to be a superhero. He just has to keep one guy down. He just has to be a blunt instrument a little while longer.

With one hand, he slams the gun down. The other hand, the free hand, he drives into the gray-eyed man’s weak throat.

He can feel the guy’s choking wheeze in his fingertips, feels airways and muscles and cords in his neck collapse for a second, jump, twitch, and spring to tense life in his hand, and Fusco presses down with all his weight and keeps on slamming their hands – joined around the gun – into the cheap, rough carpet on his bedroom floor.

After some long-ass seconds, the gray-eyed man’s grip starts to loosen from barked knuckles and lack of oxygen, and the gun flies out of his hand, skitters someplace under the bed. Not all that great as permanent solutions go, but it’s a little better than a gun in a close quarters struggle. If he stays where he is, firm on top of the guy, pinning his hand and pushing down on his throat, this could be over. This could be over soon. Fusco leans hard on the throat while the gray-eyed man’s face turns red and his free hand pounds a weakening tattoo against Fusco’s chest.

The knee that slams into Fusco’s groin, sharp and efficient, is a lot of things. Mostly, it’s a reminder to never believe that everything is going to be okay.

He’s buckling, groaning, caught in this little curl of pain when the fist that was so weak a second ago slams hard into his jaw.

Fusco’s teeth click together hard and he tips. He falls hard on the carpet with a rough grunt and then the gray-eyed man is on him, knee dug deep in Fusco’s stomach, hands locked tight around his throat. Fusco aims a blow at his face but the gray-eyed man has long arms, a good reach, and Fusco falls short so he’s left clawing at his arms and his wrists through the sleeves of the gray-eyed man’s good suit. He’s left trying to suck down breaths that never make it through, that hit a wall, that never get started. Fusco’s trying to roll them back over again and take back control but the knee in his gut is like a stake through is body, pinning him.

His vision is starting to blur, to become stingingly bright. He can feel his mouth opening and closing, uselessly. Soundlessly, probably. He can’t tell. His ears pound.

Fusco sinks his blunt nails into the gray-eyed man’s wrist and gouges, and he tries to think about his son or Finch or somebody he’d like to see again, but he’s looking up at the gray-eyed man and thinking goddammit, goddammit, not you. What was even the point of finding that bottle? What was the point of letting Fusco hope? He kicks his legs against the floor, worthless little bicycle motions. Most of all, he wants it to be over, for him to be able to let go and shut his eyes and think about his kid until it’s all done, but strangling’s a bad way to go and he can’t not fight, even if it’s not doing anything.

Fusco stares up into the face of the gray-eyed man and he doesn’t think about his son. He thinks, as his lungs spasm for air, about the movie Jaws. About a predator that comes alive for the taste of blood. Because the man strangling him doesn’t look tired anymore. His face is flushed red and his eyes are twinkling. He isn’t angry. He is smiling very small, like his day is looking up.

Fusco reaches for that smile with failing hands and bloody fingernails, like he wants to tear it off. But his arms have always been stubby, so he falls short, grabbing at nothing. The world is less bright now, more dark and murky and hard to pay attention to but that bright, flitting little smile is still there, a pinprick of flawless vision.

So when the sound comes, like a roar, like a rip in the earth, so loud Fusco can hear it over the pounding and the ringing in his ears, Fusco can watch as the smile slowly fades away.

The grip on his throat relaxes and Fusco gets the impression of vibrant red blossoming on the left side of the gray-eyed man’s chest before he slumps forward onto Fusco.

For a few seconds, Fusco’s stuck staring up at his yellowed, cracked bedroom ceiling. His throat hurts. All of him hurts. There’s heavy pressure on him and a warm and wet sensation spreading against his chest that Fusco doesn’t like. He doesn’t understand; he just sucks down air and coughs when it burns the inside of his throat and his lungs.

When Carter kneels beside him, peels the gray-eyed man’s hands off his throat, and starts to roll the body away, it all makes a kind of sense.

Once the pressure’s gone, Fusco rolls too, curls up on his side and just lets himself cough and hurt for a really long time, until his lungs stop burning so much and he’s got a normal pattern down.

“Are you gonna be okay?” Carter is asking.

He thinks maybe Carter’s been asking him that for a while, but he was just too out of air to listen. He tries to say yes, gets a feeling like somebody made him swallow a wire brush, and starts coughing again, rough and hard. He covers his mouth with his hand and nods.

He feels her hand fall warm on his shoulder. It pats, one, two, three, a little awkward. It stills. It stays there with him until the coughing fit is over.

When he can breathe again he says in a pained rasp, “You’re early.”

She thumps him hard on the back.

When he turns to look at her, really look at her for the first time since she came into the room, she isn’t looking at Fusco. She’s kneeling by him with her hand on his back, but she’s looking at the gray-eyed man. Fusco looks too.

His hands are still curled. His eyes are glassy. Blood pulses slow and smooth from the hole above his heart. If he isn’t dead, he’s almost there. Nobody tries to put pressure on the wound.

Fusco touches his own neck, finds it tender and bruised. “He broke in.”

Carter doesn’t say anything.

“The door was unlocked when I got here, but I was too wrapped up in, in something and I never noticed until it was way too late. Not my, uh, not my finest hour. He, um.” Fusco pushes himself off the floor until he’s sitting upright and Carter’s hand follows, stuck warm to his back. “He heard me on the phone, telling someone you were coming over and he was gonna wait for you after he killed me…”

Her fingers tighten, grab a handful of the back of his shirt. “Nothing happened,” she says, “and this isn’t your fault. If you try to apologize for getting hurt again, I’ll kick your ass. Okay?”

Fusco nods slow.

“You gonna live?” she asks.

“Yeah.”

She stands, still tugging at the back of his shirt. “I need to call this in,” she says.

“Okay.” He clears his throat, spits a little blood on the floor. “I think I’m gonna go wash my face now.”

“Good call.” She takes his arm, and she’s not strong enough to force him up, but the suggestion is enough to make Fusco force himself. He walks ahead of her out of the bedroom. As he passes under the threshold of the door, he puts his foot by the gun she dropped there, feels the heat of it on his bare foot. Police issue.

“You’re carrying at my dinner party?” he mumbles.

“Just in case you got fresh.” She pushes between his shoulders. “Go take care of yourself, asshole.”

Fusco walks to the bathroom grinning, cringes the second he sees his own face in the mirror. Christ.

Bruises and blotches on his forehead, on his nose and under his eyes, on his jaw. Hospital again, for sure. That’s been happening way too much for his taste lately. Blood is caked thick under his nose and on his mouth and his chin. It stains the spaces between his teeth pink. He sighs, wets a washcloth and starts to clean.

It’s not that much better, after that. Fusco isn’t delusional or anything; he knows he’s not a handsome guy. Really, if his face gets knocked out of shape, it doesn’t matter too much. All the same, it’s hard to look at. He dabs at his nose. Hurts, but it might not be broken.

He comes out wet-faced and raccoon-eyed and finds Carter sitting on his couch, cell phone in front of her on the coffee table, take-out bag stapled shut on her lap. “Called it in,” she says. “I just told them the truth. Seemed like it’d be okay, just this once. You need a doctor?”

He shrugs. “Probably. I, uh, I’d like to get out of it, though, if I can. Not that it’s not important, but I kinda feel like if I get stuck in a hospital any longer, I’ll go nuts.”

She nods. She gets it. “If nothing’s broken, we’ll talk. Probably best if you make a statement right away too.”

“Yeah. That I’ll go along with. Get it over with.”

“You gonna be okay?” she asks again.

Fusco nods. “Yeah. Yeah. Of course I am.” If you hadn’t come, he would’ve killed me and he would’ve killed you and he would’ve killed my son out of spite and he would’ve killed Finch, he doesn’t say. Instead he goes to sit beside her, jerks his thumb at the bag. “What’d you bring me?”

“Oh,” she says. “Indian.”

He presses his palm up against his lips, chuckles into it. “Shit. Me too. We probably should’ve planned this out better.”

“Yeah. Maybe. I put the lassis in the fridge. Hope that’s okay.”

“Mango?” he asks.

“Yep.”

He feels his lips crack when he smiles. “You’re my fucking hero, you know that?”

Her eyes crinkle when she smiles back. “I better be.”

They sit there, grinning and listening to distant sirens. “Thank god you were early,” he says.

“I almost wasn’t.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” She looks down at her hands. “9:00 sharp, but I was wondering if I should be a few minutes late.”

“On purpose?”

“Yeah,” she says. “The army kinda drills punctuality into you. But I didn’t know if you wanted me there exactly on time.”

“That’s weird as hell, Carter.” Fusco rubs his hands together, feels the cuts on his knuckles. “What changed your mind?”

She says, “I got a phone call.”

His breath catches on something sharp in his chest.

“Finch said you were being held at gunpoint by our suspect.” She leans over just a little, so their shoulders brush. “How’d he know that?”

Fusco shrugs. “How does that guy know anything?”

They ruminate on that together without saying a word.

“You know,” Carter says after a time, “I think Finch might be more invested in your safety than you are.”

“That’s probably true,” Fusco admits.

“What changed there?” Carter asks. “Not that he didn’t care about you before or anything…”

“He didn’t.”

“…But he definitely wants you safe now.”

“Well,” Fusco says as he takes the bag out of Carter’s lap and rips it open. “Isn’t it obvious? He’s in love with me.”

Carter gives him a long, hard stare.

Fusco passes her a container of basmati rice. “Kidding,” he says firmly, fiercely. “I’m pulling your leg.”

By the time the other cops get there, they’ve plated up the chicken tikka masala. There’s a game on the TV – just in time to watch the Rangers get demolished, surprise surprise – and the two of them have their feet propped up on the coffee table, their mouths full of food.

The gray-eyed man is cold in the other room.

They’re gonna need to explain themselves to someone real soon. For now they’re eating. They’re the victors and only they know it, and in spite of the broken face, it all feels pretty damn good.

 

Notes:

Good news: I have a new job and a new apartment all lined up.

Bad news: I have to adjust to a new job and a new city, so I'm probably still writing slow for a while.

Good news: Only three chapters left.

Bad news: There were three chapters left last time.

Further good news: Yeah, but the new one is just self-indulgent sex scenes, so there.

Chapter 26

Once again, he’s on the wrong side of the interrogation table. This time it isn’t so bad.

Fusco’s been playing around with honesty more and more these days and he thinks he might really like it. Much as it hurt, he liked coming clean to Carter. He likes knowing that she knows some of the worst stuff he ever did and still thinks he’s worth protecting. Shabby as he is, Carter thinks he deserves to keep living. That’s a comfort.

This, too, is a comfort, because his statement is the end of a story, and the story is true. Fusco has done a lot of almost dying in the past year, and he’s had to lie about most of it, ‘cause when he almost dies, it’s for Reese and Finch and them, and he can’t tell anybody. He’s carrying a lot of frightening almost-deaths around with him, and it’s nice to talk about one, in real casual, honest terms. Put it all on the record.

Hey, almost died. Carter saved me. The end.

The annoying thing is, because he almost never puts this kind of thing on the record, Fusco’s getting treated like this is something he might not be able to handle, which is pissing him off. No, he doesn’t want to go to the hospital. No, it doesn’t hurt that bad. No, he’s not going into shock.

But it’s hard to get out of these things, so he’s sitting in a quiet room, face and hands bandaged, a hot Styrofoam cup between his hands. He weaseled out of being wrapped in a blanket like a kid fresh from a nightmare. He’s got a good jacket.

Yeah. Yeah, it’s the leather one. The brown leather bomber jacket that set this whole thing off somehow, the one with the slight discoloration from repairs over bullet holes. Fusco hasn’t worn it in a while, maybe not since he and Finch had that whole altercation on the floor of Finch’s study. After that day, Finch’s gifts all got harder to look at.

He pulls the jacket close around him, tugs the ribbed cuffs down over his wrists. He’s warm. It’s a pretty great jacket. Maybe a bit more scuffed up than he remembers it being when it was new, in that flat box he was so afraid of, with its crinkling paper and smell like newness. Fraying at the cuffs. Whatever, it’s a hell of a jacket. It deserves to get worn.

He looks up when Carter opens the door and leans around the frame. Her eyes are puffy and her clothes are rumpled and she’s got honest-to-god messed up hair, like he’s never seen Carter have, but she’s smiling. Not big, not actively. Just her whole demeanor is turning up at the edges. It’s good. She hasn’t been like that for a while. She says, “OK, statement’s filed. I think you should get out of here.” When her eyes line up with Fusco’s, she tilts her head, tilts her lips in an uneven smile. “What?”

He gives her a last hard look before closing his eyes and sniggering into his palm. “You look like shit.”

“That supposed to be funny?”

“Yeah,” says Fusco, hand still pressed over his mouth. “I’m a funny fucking guy.”

“Get some sleep, Fusco. You’re losing it.” She lets herself relax, brace a hip and shoulder against the door. “You sure you don’t want to hit the hospital?”

“EMTs say nothing’s broken,” he says, like it’s Get Thee Behind Me, Satan. No more hospitals. Not for a while. Not unless he needs to.

“Yeah, yeah.” Her brow crinkles; her voice gets earnest. “Do you need a place to stay tonight?”

They say the apartment might not be the same anymore, that it might be haunted by what happened. Fusco guesses that won’t be the case; he’s got a brain that’s designed to be wiped clean after disasters. He’d kind of like to show them all by sleeping a peaceful night in the room where he was almost strangled, just to show he can take it.

He’d like to, but it’s kind of an active crime scene right now.

“Don’t worry about it,” he says. “I got a place.”

“You sure?” She asks it in a way that says, without saying anything, that the couch is open at Carter’s place, that her kid won’t mind if Mom’s partner is snoring in the living room tomorrow morning. It’s a kind offer and it’s one he kind of wants to take. But, you know, Carter’s saved him enough for one night.

“Yeah,” he says. “There’s a place for me.”

Not that he knows if he’ll be welcome.

Carter says, “Suit yourself. Get some rest.”

“You get some rest,” Fusco mutters as he stands up out of the chair.

“Not yet,” she says, voice humming with energy. “Not now.”

He feels guilty leaving now and letting Carter pace the home stretch on her own. But then, maybe that’s how she wants it. Maybe this is just bowing out of somebody else’s story.

 

---

 

 

He’s not gonna be there. Fusco keeps telling himself that over and over while he drives. If Finch disconnected his phone just to stop getting calls from Fusco, Finch definitely isn’t living in the brownstone anymore. Finch was already threatening to clear the place out just ‘cause Fusco had seen it, before things ever had the chance to get really weird between them. Probably Finch moved out after Fusco left last time and Fusco’s gonna come back to find it vacant with a For Sale sign out front, or else warm and filled with a family, the way a house like that should be.

Finch isn’t gonna be there. Fusco’s just gonna find another place he doesn’t belong. Get a hotel, or something. That’s a good place for odds and ends.

But he keeps driving. He keeps going because Finch called Carter and told her to come early, and Finch couldn’t have done that unless he listened to what happened. He keeps going because the small chance that Finch will be sitting up waiting for him is worth anything right now.

When he pulls up to Finch’s brownstone, there are lights on. All along the first floor, cozy and yellow. Fusco diligently looks for signs of new management: realtor’s signs or new cars or toys left on the stoop. Just one car, low and long and black. Something Finch would drive, because that’s how Fusco has to think about it. Finch isn’t a one car kind of guy. There’s a lightness in him, so bright and perfect it’s almost painful. He locks his fingers around the steering wheel to stop them shaking.

His nerves try to fail him at the last second but he won’t turn back. He’s here. Finch is here. The both of them are at this house again and they’ve got stuff to talk about, the two of them. And Fusco wants to talk, for once. He wants to hear Finch’s voice.

He takes the steps to the house too fast, nearly trips over his own klutzy feet. He knocks, feels sudden, painful regret, and wishes for a second that he’d gone back to his house to collect the suit back. Maybe that’s the kind of thing he should be doing. Three piece suit and flowers in the hand instead of a bloody t-shirt and bandages on the knuckles. Then he pictures that with his face as it is now, beaten and bruised, and thinks that the t-shirt is right, the jeans and the scarred jacket. It’s honest.

Reese opens the door.

Fusco fucking jumps. That’s a case of misplaced priorities for you. Doesn’t flinch when a murderous pedophile holds a gun to his head. Jumps out of his skin when the wrong person answers the door. Get it together, Fusco.

Reese doesn’t move, doesn’t say a goddamn word.

“Uh,” Fusco begins. “Hey.”

Reese blinks.

“You, uh, surprised me.”

Reese looks like he knows he surprised Fusco and doesn’t care.

“Didn’t think you’d be here.”

“Get in,” Reese says. He moves aside.

Christ. Maybe Reese has had enough of him. Maybe now’s a good time to say that on second thought, he was just dropping by to say hi and if it’s inconvenient, he’ll be going now. Fusco steps past Reese through the door. “Okay. Thanks, Lurch. Is, uh, is Glasses in?”

Reese shoots a dirty look at Fusco, points down on the floor, and Fusco remembers without looking.

“Oh! Right. Shoes. I forgot.”

Reese looks pissed that Fusco remembered about shoes. Maybe that Fusco has the capacity to remember anything about this place, that Fusco has any kind of a history here.

Fusco takes a knee and starts tugging at the laces on his sneakers. They don’t really stack up to the other shoes in the line-up, he notices. Nice pair of dark brown loafers, nicer pair of reddish oxfords, a pair of soft leather shoes stuffed with sheepskin, and a pair of black shiny loafers bigger than the rest of the things in line. Fusco figures they're Reese’s on account of the size, and also on account of how Reese toes them out of the lineup, starts to stick his feet in them.

“Hey,” Fusco says. “Is, uh, is this a bad time?”

Reese looks down on him with a dirty goddamn scowl, stuffs feet wrapped in socks with little coral bicycles printed on them into the shoes. “Let me be clear, Lionel,” Reese says. “There are a lot of things I trust you with. Money, information, human lives. All of those, I’m willing to put in your hands. Understand?”

Fusco nods, keeps his mouth shut, presses down on the stupid “Thanks,” that threatens to tumble out.

Reese says, “Finch is something else.”

And that, Fusco thinks he might understand.

“If there is a problem,” Reese says, tugging on his black overcoat, “I’ll hear about it.”

And then he just leaves and Fusco’s still kneeling on the floor, shoes untied, wondering what hit him.

Then Finch’s voice floats from another room, somewhere further back in the house. “Mr. Reese?” Silence. “Mr. Reese, who’s at the door?”

Fusco swallows a sudden lump in his throat. “It’s. Uh. It’s me.”

There’s an icy, plummeting silence after that.

“He…I’m sorry; he just walked out. I dunno why.”

Fusco hears the unsteady pad of Finch’s feet and he breathes a shivery sigh of relief. He puts his sneakers in the line of shoes and stands up so he can at least look Finch in the eye when he comes in.

“There is a natural limit to Mr. Reese’s patience for this sort of thing,” says Finch as he emerges, brisk and businesslike, from the living room, “and I’m afraid I’ve…reached…it.”

Finch was maybe wearing a mask when he walked into the foyer, something cold and professional. Fusco will never know for sure, because by the time he’s seeing Finch, Finch is seeing him, and the look dawning over his face, the quiet horror, is a harsh reminder. “Ah,” Fusco says. “Right, I probably should have warned you.”

Finch’s hand rises on its own to cover his mouth. Just with the tips of the fingers, like that’s gonna do anything. “Oh, your poor face.”

“It’s not that bad,” Fusco says, on autopilot. “Really, it’s not so bad.”

He says it that way because he’s looking at Finch, kinda drinking him in deep. He’s seen Finch in shirts and coats and ties and vests in every cut and color of the rainbow and it’s something Fusco has come to expect.

At this point, sweatpants are a curveball.

Sweatpants and a t-shirt so faded Fusco can’t even read what’s printed on it and bare goddamn feet and hair that’s tussled. God. Fusco wants him close.

Finch asks, “How much does it hurt?” and then again, “How much does it hurt?” because Fusco wasn’t paying attention the first time.

“Oh. It’s fine, fine. Stings a little, but. You know.”

Finch squints behind his glasses. “I don’t know if I do.” He’s still got that black eye. It’s getting better, which means it’s actually looking worse, a kind of necrotic yellow-green. “Our experiences with physical violence are very different, I think.”

“Okay, so maybe more than a little bit. I can handle it,” Fusco says. “Anyway, I gotta count my blessings. It could’ve been a lot worse.”

The smile Finch gives him is very cautious. “Yes. I rather suppose it could’ve.”

“So, uh.” Fusco looks around, at the reduced line-up of shoes, the gap where Reese’s shoes were, and he shrugs. “What’re you up to?”

“Ah.” Finch breaks eye contact. “Moving. Actually.”

Something in Fusco’s gut plummets. “Yeah?”

“Yes.” Finch’s hands press nervously together, shift like he’s trying to make a gesture that will explain this away easily, gives up and stuffs his fists in the pockets of those sweatpants. “I thought it would be for the best if I closed this place. Quietly. Without a fuss. Just, ah, best for all of us.”

Fusco nods. “I figured. Kinda thought you’d be long gone by now, actually.”

“And yet, you’re here.”

“Yeah.” Fusco clears his throat. “So, you keeping the place, or…?”

“Selling,” Finch says, shortly. “It’s just…I acquire things. And most of it is just…temporary. Enough to maintain a cover or make a house comfortable for the time that I need it. Furniture and art and books and so on. And most of it is disposable but some of it I’d like to keep. I’d hate for anything of importance to be lost.”

“Yeah,” Fusco says, nodding. “That’d suck. So, you need any help sorting through stuff? Since your help ran off and all.”

Finch really tries not to seem surprised. His mouth only pops open for a second and then he closes it up, prim and dignified. “If you’d…if you’d like. That would be very helpful, Detective. Thank you very much.”

Finch steps aside and shepherds Fusco into the living room with a gesture. Fusco pretends he doesn’t catch Finch stealing glances at the blood on his shirt.

So they move past the living room, into the spotless and cold kitchen, empty except for cardboard boxes silent on the counter, and through that into Finch’s study.

Computers are all gone. That makes sense. That’s where the evidence is, as far as Finch is concerned. The clothes and sewing shit are all gone too, making that side of the room eerily bare except for the sewing table and the stupid posture chair and the mirror and the dummy, now hidden under heavy dropcloths.

“If you wouldn’t mind looking through these,” Finch says, gesturing to a wall of bookshelves that’s already looking a little thin. “Obviously, most of this is going to come down to my own personal taste, but if you could sort through these books and set aside any editions printed before, say, 1960, that would make my job far easier.”

Fusco’s eyes are on the shelves. “You’re really outta here, aren’t you?”

Finch blinks at him. He’s got this look on his face, like, You okay, dumbass? “I’m afraid so.”

“You gonna miss it?”

“No.” Finch smiles flatly. “I think I’ve told you before that I don’t really live here. I have a lot of houses. I don’t mind abandoning one.”

“I guess not,” Fusco says. “Still. Seems like you got comfy here. 1960, you said?”

Finch has his mouth open, like he wants to refute something, but he doesn’t. “Yes. 1960 or earlier. And if you find any copies of Cat’s Cradle, I’d like to know about them. Regardless of printing date.”

“Sure.” Fusco starts taking books off the shelves and checking publishing dates. It’s a lot of big, classy, leather-bound volumes, but the first few he takes are kinda new with uncracked spines. “You play a lot of kid’s games, Finch?”

“I’m not referring to the game, Detective,” Finch says. “I’m referring to the 1963 novel of the same name by Kurt-”

“Vonnegut. Right. I know.”

“You do?”

“Oh, what, I’m not allowed to read now?”

“I suppose…I just didn’t expect it. You’ve read it, then?”

“Nah,” Fusco says. “Got through Slaughterhouse Five a couple of times on stakeout, though. You know how goddamn boring stakeouts can get; you read everything you can get your hands on cover to cover.” Not that he read it on purpose. Some guy Fusco half-knew from HR had been reading it. That guy left it in the glove compartment of Fusco’s car while on some kind of run somewhere, and Fusco got sick of reading the paper right down to the classifieds and the obits, so he picked it up. “Cat’s Cradle was on that page in the back. You know, other books by the same author. Always figured maybe I’d pick some of those up sometime, but I never got around to it.”

He looks up to find Finch still cross-legged on the floor with that box of odds and ends. He looks embarrassed, which is a surprise. “Well,” Finch says. “I must have more than one copy. You should take one.”

“Maybe I’ll do that,” Fusco says, really not intending to. He checks the date on a few more editions, finds this dusty, green volume of something Fusco can’t even read the title of ‘cause the binding is so faded. Says it’s printed in 1928, so he puts it aside gently.

“Hmm,” Finch says.

“What?”

Finch holds up a little framed painting that Fusco’s 90% sure his kid fingerpainted back in the day. “Kandinsky. I’d been wondering where I left this.”

“Okay,” Fusco says. “You got me. I dunno what that is.”

“Don’t let it bother you. He’s overrated.”

“If you say so.” Fusco removes another stack of pristine leather books from the shelf, every single one of them dated 2008. “Finch?”

“Mmm?”

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Of course.”

“And you can’t lie. Gotta be completely honest. Okay?”

Finch hesitates. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“Okay.” Fusco knocks against the spine of a book. “You actually read any of these?”

Finch sputters. “Of course I do.”

“Yeah, but I thought you don’t live here, so…”

“When I have the time,” Finch says, testily, “I read.”

“These books, though? You pick up this copy of, uh.” He checks the title. “Formal languages and their relation to automata?” Jesus. “You pick this book up, you crack it open, and you read it in your spare time?”

“Well, of course I’ve read it.”

Fusco breaks open the spine and ruffles smooth, unsullied pages.

“Perhaps not that specific copy…”

“Yeah.”

“Read it as a boy…”

“Mhmm.”

“But that copy has all of my old notes in it and the pages are dog-eared…”

“So you had to pick up a fresh one.”

“Yes.”

Fusco sets the book aside.  “For your house you don’t live in.”

“Yes.” Finch pauses. “It’s not as absurd as it sounds. I’m a collector of rare or attractive editions.”

“Okay,” Fusco says. “You don’t have to make an excuse.”

“I…” Finch sighs. “Of course.” His gaze drops and he goes back to digging in the cardboard box he pulled the painting out of.

“So,” Fusco says, stepping back from the bookcase. “Why Cat’s Cradle?”

“It’s an old favorite.” Finch stares, still dejectedly focused on the contents of the box. “Not hard to find copies of it, but I had one that was signed. I put it in storage somewhere. I was hoping it might be here.”

“What’s it like?”

“Paperback,” Finch says promptly. “1988.” He swallows. “I think the spine is pink.”

“Far right, second shelf from the top,” Fusco says. “You got a stepping stool or a ladder or something?”

Finch blinks at him, lips parted. “There,” he says, pointing. “By the desk. How…?”

“You’re a details guy.” Fusco rolls his shoulders, picks up the teeny stepladder. “I used to wanna be that. Still take a crack at it from time to time. Dunno how well that works out for me.” He sets it down beneath the book, takes the three steps up to the top. “My specialty, though, is big picture stuff. You get too caught up in details, you start to miss obvious shit. Gotta just let your eyes go out of focus and see what you pick up. A friend of mine in the mounted division calls it soft eyes. I never rode a horse, but I guess it applies somehow.” Fusco takes the book off the shelf and tosses it down to Finch. Finch catches it neatly, opens it up and turns the book around to show Fusco the scrawled-upon title page.

“What was he like?” Fusco asks.

“I have no idea,” Finch says. “I purchased it at an auction.”

Fusco’s about to climb down the stepladder when something in the gap the book left catches his eye, a tiny black box shoved in the corner. And at first his heart sinks. Maybe Fusco’s getting paranoid, but his first thought is bug, camera or microphone or both, and who could get away with doing that to Finch? But it’s not that, ‘cause it’s an actual box with a lid and everything. Black, with a muted shine, around the size of a fist. Like what jewelry comes in.

“Hey,” he says. “There’s something up here.”

“Oh?” Finch looks up from the book in his lap, eyes round and curious.

Fusco holds up the box, rattles it gently. He feels a small weight shift from side to side but hears no sound. Padded on the inside, maybe.

Finch squints. “I can’t recall. Check.”

Fusco’s halfway through pulling the lid off when he thinks about how this isn’t so unusual except it puts him deeper into Finch’s private world than he’s ever been before. That’s dangerous, probably. That’s daring.

The lid comes off.

Inside is a watch. Fusco’s never been a watch guy. He knew watch guys in HR; guys who took in twice what Fusco made and blew it all on solid gold, waterproof, Swiss-made watches or whatever the hell. Watches that were almost worthless because they couldn’t wear them to work.

The Fusco men have two watches, passed down like a three-legged race, skipping generations. Fusco’s got his grandfather’s watch with the thin spider web of a crack forming at the edge of its face. His dad’s watch waits in a box in Fusco’s closet until the day Michael starts wearing a watch, which’ll be never, probably, because people have phones now. That one’s battered too, dented all over.

This one looks like it’s never been breathed on. It’s a big watch face too, and heavy, domed. Black leather strap, crystal face. There’s a little scene inside. Two birds, mom and dad, doting over two tiny birds and a little egg in a nest, lush green trees and blue water behind them.

Fusco shows Finch. “That’s pretty,” he says.

Finch’s eyes go wide and dark, mouth goes slack and breathless. “Oh,” he says, eyes locked on the box. “I’d forgotten.”

“Why? What is it?”

Finch shifts back and forth on the floor. Too late, Fusco realizes he’s trying to get up. Fusco climbs off the ladder and holds out his hand in time for Finch to bob to his feet, bright-eyed. Fusco holds out the box instead and Finch tenderly takes the watch out.

“This,” he says, soft and breathless, “is a very unusual timepiece. Jaquet Droz. Swiss. Predominantly, they make excellent but not unusual watches. But this is, ah, something of a throwback.” Finch begins to wind it. “In the 18^th century, Pierre Jaquet-Droz gained fame not through the excellence of his watches, which were by all accounts flawless, but through his work with early automata. Mechanical beings. Toys, I suppose, but sophisticated. One could write, another could reproduce three distinct drawings. He would code incredibly complex motion cycles for these automata. In a sense, they could be called the first computers, and Jaquet-Droz the first programmer.” He casts a bright, almost shy look at Fusco before returning to the watch in his palm. “This was made in honor of, I believe, Jaquet-Droz’ 250^th anniversary. It’s symbolic of Jaquet Droz’s native Jura, the two blue tits and the Sant du Doubs waterfall here in the background.” Finch taps the face. “Hand engraved, hand painted mother-of-pearl. It’s called the Bird Repeater. Watch. It’s about to chime the hour.”

Fusco leans in close, until he feels the heat of Finch’s nearness against his cheek. He feels the corner of Finch’s glasses pressing into his forehead.

The hour chimes.

It’s a clear, sweet sound, louder than anything Fusco’s ever heard out of a wristwatch. But it’s not piercing or annoying or anything, it’s just musical. Sounds like morning in a Disney movie, crisp and cool and sunny. Fusco thinks it’s in his head for a second when he hears the birds chirping but no, it’s not, and they really are. They sing and they bob their heads and one parent bird bends to drop a worm into a baby’s eager little mouth. Their little wings stretch and fan their feathers. The tiny golden egg in the center of the nest splits, reveals a scrawny baby bird.

Fusco lifts his eyes and looks at Finch instead. A peculiar bloom has come over his pale skin, a bright and rosy flush. His lips curve into a smile and part just a little, showing teeth unselfconsciously. His eyes shine.

He looks unguarded, like he’s enchanted and he doesn’t care who sees.

But he does, of course. Finch twigs, real suddenly, to Fusco watching him and he freezes. Mouth shuts like a trap, eyes go sullen and cold. It’s like someone stubbing out a cigarette in the dark. “It’s too ostentatious for everyday wear, or even special occasions,” Finch says, closing his fingers over the watch. “Too memorable. Too heavy. And, ah, irritating. It does that every other hour and I imagine the magic would wear off sooner rather than later. I can’t think why I would hide it up there, except that I knew it was not something I would ever wear or use, but I still wanted to…to hang onto it. Because even though it’s nearly useless, it’s very beautiful and I liked it.” Finch’s lips twitch, sputter silently, and his gaze drops to his bare toes. “You find me ridiculous,” he says, “don’t you?”

“Sure I do,” Fusco says, gently, closing his hand around Finch’s fist with the watch clenched in it. “But, you know, it makes you happy. That’s a use.”

Finch’s fingers twitch in Fusco’s grasp.  “I think,” he says, with the smallest of smiles playing over his mouth, “we should get back to sorting.”

“’Kay, boss,” Fusco says. His fingers swipe guiltily across the back of Finch’s hand as he lets him go. “Whatever you say.”

So they don’t talk for a while. Fusco sets aside a pile of dusty books and discards about 80% of the shelf and Finch, once he’s done with his boxes of Kandinskys or whatever, discards about 50% of the keepers. Finch also goes to the shelf and hunts through the rejects until he finds a skinny, banged-up spare copy of Cat’s Cradle, which he pointedly sets aside on the bare desk.

In the middle of trying to figure out exactly where the printing date is on a book that’s written in what looks like German, Fusco says, “You can’t help yourself, can you?”

“Once you’re done with the books, Detective,” Finch sighs without looking up, “there’s a box of records on a lower shelf I’d like you to look through.”

“Fine, fine. But if you’re sticking me with some rare first edition or something…”

“Just make different piles according to genre. Organized alphabetically by the artist’s last name within those piles, if that’s not too much to ask. The record player’s there beside them, if you’d like to play something while you work.”

“’Cause, you know, that kind of thing is important to people. I’m not an idiot, I get why, but it’s not important to me like it might be to somebody else. So, you know, probably not the guy to leave something like that with.”

“It’s a mass-produced paperback, Lionel. I think you could pick it up for fifty cents at a used book sale.” Finch sighs. “Probably less. It’s got my old notes in it.”

“Oh.”

“By genre, and then alphabetically within the genre. Don’t worry about eliminating anything.”

“Right. No problem.”

Fusco already knew Finch was a vinyl kind of guy. That’s just something you come to expect out of a man who wears waistcoats and bow ties sometimes. It’s one place where they’re kind of in agreement. Fusco doesn’t have a record player anymore and while he’s pretty sure he still has a box or two of old records in cold storage somewhere, he hasn’t actually played the damn things in probably more than fifteen years.

Not that there’s much overlap in Finch’s collection. The three genres that establish themselves right off the bat are jazz, opera, and classical, orchestral shit. Not a guitar to be seen. Nothing Fusco really wants to put on the aging record player in the corner, although maybe he’ll put on one of the records by some GermAustriCzechwegian-sounding composer just to see what Finch’ll have to say about that choice, what Finch’ll think about him.

Or maybe one of the operas. Fusco bets all he has to do is pretend his Italian is a little worse than it is and Finch will tell him the whole story.

He’s trying to choose between Rigoletto and The Magic Flute, like which do I care about less, when the pile of albums shifts and a red, screaming face catches his attention.

“You shittin’ me?” Fusco says, putting the opera aside.

“Hmmm?”

Fusco holds up the album. “You know, I figured you for a lot of things, Finch. You being a King Crimson fan never even occurred to me.”

Finch murmurs, very softly, “Oh good god.”

“How much prog rock you got in here?” Fusco asks, digging deeper in the box.

“Some, I imagine.”

Fusco feels this shit-eating gotcha grin stretching his mouth as he paws through records and picks out, with a kind of malevolent accuracy, ELP, Genesis, Jethro Tull lurking in the back. “How much were you using back in the 70’s, Finch?”

“What are you?” Finch murmurs, a tiny, sheepish smile forming. “A cop?”

Fusco grins, fans out records on the floor. “Never would’ve figured,” he says to himself.

“Really?” Finch asks. “What did you imagine? That I couldn’t enjoy anything composed before the invention of radio?”

Fusco points to the classical stack.

“Oh, stop it. The things I enjoy are not mutually exclusive. I am allowed to have musical interests outside the purely classical. I am allowed to go to the ballet and to art galleries and to the very Springsteen tour you’re adorning your shirt with and I am not a stereotype, thank you.”

Fusco shrugs, pulls the vinyl out of the sleeve of In the Court of the Crimson King. “Okay, buddy.” He fiddles with Finch’s turntable, puts the record on. “So,” he says. “Springsteen?”

Finch raises an eyebrow. “I’m afraid I don’t have much of an opinion. A close friend of mine in college was a fan. He wanted to bring me to New York for the week, so I went along.”

“Yeah, but that tour? ’78?”

“Yes.”

“No shit,” Fusco murmurs as he puts the needle down.

“Hmm?”

“Eh, it’s just funny to think about. You know? The two of us being in the same place at the same time all those years ago. We coulda bumped into each other and never known.” He thinks. “Well, probably not. Me and my friends were up in the nosebleeds.”

“So were we,” Finch says.

“Nahhh. You?”

“I wasn’t born rich, you know. Some of us are self-made men.” Finch looks down at the palms of his hands, rubs them together. “You don’t know much about me, do you?”

“Not so much, no,” Fusco admits, “but I always kinda figured that was how you wanted it.”

“Yes,” Finch says, but he hesitates on that e and it trembles. “I suppose it’s just odd. There’s so little I don’t know about you.”

“Mm. Well. I’m not gonna catch up to you, buddy. Not unless you rig yourself with a security camera and let me watch.”

“I can’t do that,” Finch says. “Security risk.”

“I don’t want you to.” Fusco sits down beside him, cross-legged. “Doesn’t matter anyway. I don’t need to know all the details. I know all I need to know about you.”

There’s a soft, skeptical puff of air from Finch. “What do you think you know about me?”

Fusco chews his lip, real thoughtful. “Well, I know you’re brave, or you wouldn’t be doing what you’re doing. And I know you’re tough, ‘cause I’ve seen you take a punch and that’s not easy. I know I make it look easy,” he says, jabbing one thumb toward his swollen cheek, making Finch smile. “But it’s not easy. And I know for sure that you’re the smartest person I’ve ever met in my life, but I also know that you’re kinda dumb about people, no offense.” Finch doesn’t look offended. “I know you’ve got lousy taste in music and lousy taste in friends, but not as lousy as mine.

“I know you went to MIT…” Finch frowns, real sharp, and Fusco knows with a mean kind of satisfaction that Finch didn’t know he knew, “and I know you’re not from the city and it’s okay if you don’t tell me where you really are from. It’s not important. I know you’re really good at sewing and tailoring and stuff and I also know you don’t have a ton of time on your hands, so I like to think maybe someone taught you when you were a kid and it stuck. Your mom, maybe. Or your dad, I guess,” Fusco says with a shrug. “I wouldn’t’ve learned something like that from my dad, but all dads ain’t the same. I know you’re a prickly kind of guy, and you’re tough to get to, but I also know how far you’d go to protect somebody you, uh, you cared about.”

When he looks at Finch, Finch is still, stiff-backed, prim, but there’s a big, filthy blush crawling over his cheeks and Fusco wants more of that.

 “And,” Fusco adds, “I know you were listening to me earlier. Through my phone. You fuckin’ creep.”

Finch scoffs, a sharp bark of air. Not a laugh, though it sounds something like one. “I had asked Detective Carter to keep my interference confidential.”

“Yeah. Well. She didn’t. And I’m glad she didn’t. Tough.”

“Not that it’s some great and terrible secret,” he says absently, his fingertips at his mouth again, his nails resting between his teeth. “I’m happy to have been in a position to find help for you tonight, of course. I can’t…I don’t want to imagine, if I hadn’t.”

“Not that I’m not grateful,” Fusco says, “’cause I am. I really am. But I’m guessing you started listening before you knew I had trouble.”

Finch nods once, neatly. His mouth is a troubled twist. “It’s, ah. It’s hypocritical, doing what I do. I spend a good deal of time looking out into lives that I’m not welcome in and never letting anyone else look back, but that’s because…I’ve had to, you understand? Not always, not in this instance, but. It’s not an excuse. I just want to show you…why. You don’t have to forgive me but I’d like you to understand.”

Fusco waits, listening hard, watching the red on Finch’s face, the way he wraps the ties on his sweatpants tight around his fingers, until they purple and swell from cut-off circulation.

“It’s not right, the way that I would listen to you. And in a situation like this, where I was forcibly cutting ties and you didn’t have any say in whether you could reach out to me, it was particularly egregious. Hypocritical. I. I resolved to stop. Did, for a little while. Never should have started. But, as I was packing today…” Finch rolls the strings on his sweatpants tighter around his fingers and seems to register, finally, that it hurts. He lets the strings fall in curls, massages the blood back into his fingers. “You became a habit. Listening to you. I. I became accustomed.”

“I don’t need to know about that,” Fusco says. “It’s okay if…”

“When I was packing, I didn’t want to listen to you,” Finch says, fierce and determined. “Hearing your voice and knowing I’d made an awful misstep, that you wanted nothing to do with me and that I had to have nothing to do with you was painful. Truly…truly. Painful. But not hearing your voice was equally painful and I didn’t know what to do and then I tuned in just for a moment and heard you speaking directly to me. As if you knew. You didn’t, of course. And that’s the crux of it, that you didn’t, but. I. I think you’ll find,” Finch says with a slightly bedraggled take on his usual firmness, “that I saved your life. So, I, I’m not sorry. Not for that. But in principle, my actions were…inexcusable. Uninformed by the danger you were in. I suppose I…” He falters. His lips draw back in a tense smile. “I suppose I only missed you. I…”

Fusco rests his palm against the soft curve of Finch’s jaw and kisses him real gentle on the mouth just to stop Finch from talking anymore.

When he pulls back, Finch is trembling.

“It’s a shitty habit,” Fusco says, “but just this once I forgive you.”

Finch grabs handfuls of the front of his holey, bloodstained Springsteen shirt and hauls him close.

Finch can really latch on, Fusco thinks as Finch presses his lips to Fusco’s, as he locks tight fists into the front of Fusco’s shirt. That’s something he’s just realizing now, even though he’s been learning it for a long while. Fusco has this whole persistent image of Finch as the guy who can buy and sell you, the guy who knows everything’s disposable. Except maybe that’s it, that Finch can buy and sell you, but if he can’t buy you, he’s never letting you go.

In spite of the death grip, Finch is still shaking. Fusco can feel him against his chest, under his hands resting awkward on Finch’s shoulders. Finch’s little heart thrums in his chest, whole body shivers, mouth gasps little happy-terrified puffs of air against Fusco’s lips. He drags hard at Fusco’s shirt like he wants to tear it, like he wants to be still closer.

Fusco curves his arms around Finch and crushes him tight as he dares against his chest and the little sigh Finch lets out, the way his hands relax and trace their way up Fusco’s chest to meet in a blissful little knot at the back of his neck lets Fusco know it was the right thing.

He lets his mouth go soft, relaxed, pushy, and Finch does the same, so that’s the right thing too.

They’re sitting on a bare floor surrounded by records and books, kissing like teenagers with a dumb fucking prog rock soundtrack, and this is the right thing, somehow. After almost dying, after almost going to jail for the rest of his life, after almost being too stupid to realize that Finch gave a damn, this is right.

There’s all this warmth between them and around them and inside them and Fusco feels this really frightening instability in his chest, like his heart is water and it’s spilling.

Finch’s fingertips scratch at the nape of Fusco’s neck as he nearly breaks the kiss, nearly except his lips are still ghosting against the corner of Fusco’s mouth when he asks, tentatively, “Will you come upstairs with me?”

“Sure,” Fusco says, getting up on one knee and lifting, just a little, so Finch can start to get his legs under him. “Sure, I’ll do that.”

It’s kind of hard to move. Fusco’s always aware of how Finch moves, that labored, dignified limp of his, but he’s never known it like this. He’s never tried so hard to stop a kiss from breaking, never tried to support as much of Finch’s weight. He’s never clutched like this, desperate, because he’s eager and trembling and Finch is eager and trembling and it’s made every move they try to make weak and clumsy.

Probably it’d be easier if they’d let each other go.

Not gonna do that, though.

By the time they get to the stairs, Fusco’s got a sore shoulder from knocking into doorframes. They take the steps in a shuffling way; first one moves, and then the other, staggered stair to stair, attached at the arms and the chest and the mouth. Finch takes the steps precariously, mindful of his hips, and Fusco almost wants to stop kissing him, just so he’s not distracting Finch.

Fusco thinks that maybe, if it came to that, they could just drop here on the stairs and that would be alright. That would be better than waiting any longer. He would be the one on his back or his belly against the sharp points of the stairs to spare Finch that, if he had to. He makes a fist in the soft gray knit of Finch's shirt and thinks about dragging it off over his head.

He relaxes, smooths the shirt down. Not yet. It might be important to make it upstairs, like something about being in a bed with Finch will legitimize this, make it real.

His one hand settles in the soft hollow of Finch's lower back, where it does not press too hard.  Even when Finch latches around him, uses his teeth and clean, even-shaped nails like hooks to pull Fusco nearer, Finch is fragile. It's important to remember.

The law is do not hurt him ever, and it has nothing to do with Reese. Everything to do with Fusco knowing that his job is to protect like Finch protects.

His other hand white-knuckles on the thick wooden banister. Finch leans on him hard as they inch up the stairs and Fusco keeps craning back to meet lips that are even further out of reach than usual because Finch is on the stair above him and he has to keep chasing up. Finch leans. Fusco bends against him.

If he lets go, they will fall.

Finch catches his breath for a moment that they spend face to face, foreheads knocked close, noses pressed together, and Fusco takes the moment to pant, "Hey."

Finch's breath makes an odd, fluttery sound as it leaves him. A chuckle of disbelief. "Hello."

"Hey," Fusco says, leaning forward and up, arm tight as he clings to the balcony, face soft as he nudges, kind of aimlessly, at Finch. "Got a question."

Finch likes that, nuzzles into him. "Of course." They're pushed as close together as being on different stairs lets them be, but Fusco gets this idea like if Finch could get closer, he would and even if they were flat together and there wasn't clothes or light or dust or anything at all between them, Finch still wouldn't be close enough for his liking.

You are so smart, Fusco thinks at him, half-angry. What the hell do you want me for?

He asks, "You gonna get pissed off if I lift you?"

Sharply, Finch says, "What?"

And Fusco gets his bearings, finds his balance, takes that arm locked on the railing and brings it around the back of Finch's legs, just under his ass. Finch is heavier than Fusco thinks he’ll be, but softer too. The flesh of his thighs gives beneath Fusco’s arms, his hands, and when Fusco scoops him up, he yelps like he’s been pinched.

"You okay?" Fusco asks as Finch's hands find cautious purchase on his shoulders, as he starts to plod up the stairs, his head buried in the cush of Finch’s stomach, his eyes on the floor, watching his own feet as they take each step.

"Relatively," Finch says, sounding tense. "Regarding your earlier question, the answer is, 'Only mildly, but infinitely more so if you drop me down the stairs.'"

"I'm not gonna." He’s not. He could carry Finch around forever. He’d be happy to. Fusco only brings him up the last step and lowers him gently, looking down still until he sees Finch’s bare toes touch the floor in front of his own dirty socks.

Finch’s hands stay on Fusco’s shoulders, fists gently crumpling and uncrumpling in the jacket. Fusco doesn’t look up.

“That was. Uh. That was fresh of me.”

“That’s enough of that,” Finch agrees. His palms smooth down the crinkles in the leather. He adjusts the collar on Fusco’s jacket, arranges it and tugs the whole thing down like my, aren’t you smart. Finch draws him in and the kiss is slow, this time, slow enough that Fusco can taste it, the ghost of wine in Finch’s mouth and faint, half-sweet chapstick and the smell-taste of cologne that’s mostly faded. Right now, they can just do that. They can just reach out for each other and have each other. It is incredible, Fusco thinks, giddy with the taste of Finch as he’s pushed backward, walked backward and he can’t see where he’s going but it’s where Finch wants to go, so he goes, just incredible the shit you can get away with when you don’t try to stop yourself.

His knees hit bed, his ass hits a sheet that flaps loud when he drops onto it. Fusco braces his hands against it, finds it’s cold and rough and not for sleeping on, but then Finch is following him down, easing Fusco up the bed until he feels two layers of pillow and sham pillow beneath the hard, rough sheet and then Finch descends on him.

It’s amazing because he’s seen Finch in real, actual, life-or-death fights before but he’s never seen Finch throw himself at anything until now and it’s at him. Finch is the calmest and most dignified guy Fusco knows and he’s straddling Fusco, a knee on either side of his legs and he’s kissing one minute passionate and sloppy like fire, the next minute like crisp, neat labels reading mine, mine, mine, all of this is mine. He leaves them on every bare inch of Fusco, on his face, on his neck, on the small hemisphere of chest Finch can reach under the collar of his shirt.

He scrabbles at the back of Finch’s shirt, shoving it up a little and letting his hand creep up beneath. He’s touching, stroking blindly over skin he’s never seen. Cushy fat and faint traces of sweat and god, he’s so soft. Finch is all plush from no work and small comforts. He reaches, drawing up the back of the t-shirt and fingerwalking his way up the stiff ladder of Finch’s spine until he feels the ridge and seam and jagged curve of scar tissue.

Finch jolts under Fusco’s hands, a full body jerk, and Fusco thinks he must have hurt him. He must’ve done something wrong. Finch gasps, takes a long, deep breath against Fusco’s lips.

Fusco curls his fingers, starts to pull his shirt back down, but on the exhale, Finch melts down onto him with the happiest little sigh. Finch is kissing him, firm and serious, while he drags the zipper on Fusco’s jacket the last few inches down and pulls it open, off his shoulders.

“Just so you know,” Fusco murmurs as he feels the jacket bunching on his upper arms and lowers his arms to the bed so he can work them out of the sleeves, “I’m not so much to look at.”

Finch yanks hard until the jacket catches on his elbows and pins Fusco’s arms back. “If you don’t stop disparaging my taste,” Finch says, shoving Fusco’s shirt up until it’s rucked high on his chest and beneath his armpits, leaving his chest and stomach bare, “I am going to be very cross.” He stills for a moment, palms hovering over Fusco’s skin nervously like he’s not really sure what to touch or where to start and it occurs to Fusco that Finch is only a little less new at this than he is, that the first and last time Finch saw him with his shirt off, it was downstairs in the study, right before things went really right and then really wrong.

Finch overcomes the moment of shyness or indecision or whatever it is and lets his hands fall and oh god, oh god, Finch means to make up for a long, long time spent blind. His hands skim hungrily over Fusco’s chest, his stomach, his shoulders as far as Finch can reach them by sticking fingers underneath his bunched-up shirt.

It’s not quite like that time in the study, when Finch touched him like Fusco might disappear under his fingers. This is Finch taking handfuls of him, Finch pinching at him, Finch leaving scratchy-ticklish pink lines down Fusco’s back and down his chest and his ribs like Finch is writing his name. This is Finch knowing, knowing for sure that Fusco is here and he’s his and Finch can touch if he wants and he wants and he doesn’t care about Fusco knowing.

This is honest.

Fusco bucks up into Finch’s hands, props himself up on his elbows with his head back, partly because it feels good to arch beneath him. Partly because he is working his arms out of his jacket sleeves. He wants to touch Finch; he wants to be honest about that too.

Finch’s arms slip around him, loop through the arch of his back and hold and trace the bend of Fusco’s spine like it’s something holy. Then Finch’s mouth curves in this sly, shit-eating grin and his hands slide down fast, grab at Fusco’s ass through the back of his jeans, and Fusco drops to the mattress with this embarrassing little yell. Like he’s not used to being touched.

Well, not like that, he’s not.

Finch peers down at him through foggy, lopsided lenses, eyes shiny, mouth curled and satisfied. His hands still squeeze hard at Fusco’s ass, rough, grabby little pulses and Fusco finds himself wondering in a stupid, vain way if Finch has been thinking about this, if Finch planned this, if Finch has favorite parts of Fusco already, if they’ll still be his favorite parts once he’s touched them, once he’s seen them without clothes.

Fusco doesn’t have favorite parts of Finch yet, he doesn’t think. He’s been falling for something he’s barely glimpsed, a strength, a frailty, skin so soft Fusco’s calluses could snag and tear it hidden beneath armor made of wool and cotton and silk.

Fusco inches at the sleeves of his jacket, wiggles them down around his forearms, around his wrists, over his hands. He wants to get loose. He wants to touch Finch’s skin and smooth back his dumb hair.

Finch takes the ribbed cuff of his jacket and holds onto it, eases it over the widest part of Fusco’s hand and pulls at his sleeve until Fusco’s arm is loose. He does the same with the other, until Fusco’s arms are loose and his hands cup Finch’s face and Fusco’s lying back, sweating against the silk lining of the jacket underneath him.

Finch touches his wrists, the backs of his hands, cradling Fusco’s hands against his face. “Not to be terribly obvious,” Finch says, rubbing his smooth cheek against the inside of Fusco’s palm, “but this is nice.”

“Yeah,” Fusco murmurs as he takes off Finch’s glasses, all whited out with the heat and wet of their breaths. “I was just thinking that.”

He barely has time to fold the glasses up nice and neat and set them on the bedside table before Finch is on him again, kissing deep and pulling Fusco up to him rather than pushing down. Fusco cranes up to meet him, leans heavy on one arm while he puts the other around Finch, glides his palm up Finch’s back, between his thin shoulders, along the back of his scarred neck and deep into his hair. It’s thin. Thin and fine and so light it’s no wonder it never stays down. It feels like almost nothing, a tickle between his fingers. Fusco kisses at his forehead, at his nose, at Finch’s soft mouth and Finch leans into him with a sigh.

Fusco sits up the rest of the way, Finch straddled in his lap, and he takes a handful of the front of Finch’s t-shirt. He tugs gently. “Can I?” he asks against Finch’s lips. “Is it okay if I…?”

“Yes,” Finch already murmurs. “Yes, yes, go ahead.” But maybe he doesn’t even know what he said yes to, maybe Finch just wants whatever he can get.

Fusco tugs the old t-shirt up and Finch lifts his arms without complaint, lets Fusco pull the shirt over his head and throw it casually across the room where he hears it slump against a wall but doesn’t bother to look.

He’s okay just looking at Finch, for now.

Under his shirt, Finch is pale. His chest and his belly are dusted with hair like what’s on his head, brown going gray and sparse and thin and light enough to do peculiar things, to whirl in odd directions. He’s built to be a skinny man, gangly and rangy, maybe but age and inactivity have made him soft in the belly and the arms and the chest.

Without his glasses, Finch’s eyelids are pink and drawn mostly closed in a perplexed squint. He’s watching Fusco’s face, trying to read it.

He’s just a person, isn’t he? He’s just a person. He’s not a god, he’s not a machine, he’s just a guy, pale from being indoors all day and fatter in his old age. Just a man with more money than God and a perfect brain, but he’s worried Fusco won’t like the way he looks. Figure that one out. Just try.

“Lionel?” Finch asks, nervously, because Fusco’s just been looking for a while; Fusco’s just been staring. “Are you…?”

Fusco plants a kiss on his breastbone, just above where the ribs branch out. Finch gasps sudden and sharp, like a hiccup.

Finch exhales, trembling, and he peers down at Fusco like he never expected to find him there, like he doesn't even know him but he'd like to. Fusco sits up the rest of the way, reseats himself so he doesn't feel the need to lean back on his hands, so his mouth, his chin, is pushed against Finch's breastbone, so he can taste the persistent, rabbity beat of Finch's heart. He stares up at Finch while he does it, while he kisses and licks and nips lazily at Finch's chest, at his round little belly. He tastes like nothing Fusco hasn't tasted before, like salt, like sweat, like skin, like soap that probably nobody Fusco's ever kissed before has been wealthy enough to wear, but at the end of the day, soap is soap. It's all bitter, ordinary, clean.

The fingers on one of Finch's hands close and curve at the nape of Fusco's neck, at the curls there. The ones on the other hand, they're rubbing, pressed at the front of Fusco's jeans, the hard ridge of the zipper.

He's just a person, isn't he?

Fusco slips a hand between them, between Finch's legs, and he feels that odd, internal whine in Finch's throat when Fusco's hand curls around him loosely through his pants. There's something earnest and sloppy about it, something unmysterious and unFinchlike about the feel of his cock, warm and eager, through sweatpants. He strokes, feels Finch's whole body shudder.

"So," he says against Finch's chest, trying to sound low, so the buzz of sound travels in his bones, "how do you want to do this?"

"Mmmh?" Finch's voice is dreamy. His hips jerk forward arhythmically, spasmodically. 

"How do I do this," he asks, tightening his grip just slightly, "without hurting you?"

Finch lets out a small, shivery laugh. "I feel," he whispers, "as though I should be asking you the exact same question." His hips thrust busily against Fusco's hand.

"What? No. No, I'm fine." He's probably not, totally. Shook off the EMTs but his face and his stomach are going to bruise like hell and Fusco's just kinda sending out blanket thanks to every god and church he can think of that he had so many hours stuck at the precinct to cool off from that knee to the groin, otherwise tonight would not be going so well. "Just a little bruised."

"You're sure?"

"Yeah." He takes Finch's hands. "Do whatever you want."

Finch stares down at Fusco's hands in his own. Bloody knuckles and smooth white palms. They grip each other firmly for a moment, a nice, reassuring squeeze. Bending, Finch plants a kiss on Fusco's forehead, a gentle, definite little stamp. Then he lets go, lets Fusco's hands fall to the bed and awkwardly climbs off of him.

"Hey!" Fusco's horrified at how petulant his voice sounds, how whiny and thwarted and painfully needy. "Where're you going?"

Finch eases off the side of the bed with a careful little wiggle. "I need to get some things if we're to proceed any further," he says. He takes a few steps toward the bathroom door and pauses for just a second, like he stumbled on something Fusco can't see. He looks back and says, like an afterthought, "Stay there."

Fusco laughs to himself as Finch vanishes into the bathroom. Like he's going anywhere, he thinks as he tugs at the button on his jeans. Like anything short of Finch telling him to get the fuck out could make him leave.

Fusco lies back on his jacket and takes a good look around the room for the first time since he walked in. 'Cause he was a little distracted before. He pulls his zipper down.

It's kinda the same old place it was the last time Fusco was in here, back when he was snooping around the house with no real direction. It's barren and neat: cold white walls and bare hardwood floors. Maybe even more barren and neat than it was the last time Fusco was here. The little knickknacks, the signs of unlife that Finch was keeping on his dresser top, are all gone. Same with the sad, dead little plant he was keeping. That sheet underneath him, he finds, is a dropcloth laid down to keep the dust off.

Finch was really gonna leave.

He lies still and listens to Finch rattling around in the bathroom, quiet scuffling and dull, hollow plastic sounds of bottles on a countertop. And sometimes a long pause, like a holding of breath. Maybe Finch is nervous. Maybe he's hesitating, wondering why he's doing this, why he's lowering himself to fool around with that fat fuck in the next room, thinking forward to the arrival of a moving van or a realtor.

Fusco lifts his hips, drags his jeans down to his thighs because he doesn’t care; he’s here, and if Finch didn’t want him to be, he wouldn’t be. 

So he might as well get his jeans off now, while Finch isn’t sitting on his legs.

When he settles back down and the bed stops rustling, Fusco hears nothing from the bathroom. Like a deliberate nothing, that holding-breath feeling. And Fusco wonders if Finch is going quiet because he’s listening to Fusco, listening for deliberate silences or the squeak of floorboards as Fusco gets dressed like a coward.

Fusco’s jeans are around his knees and he pushes them down, viciously, to his ankles.

There’s the empty clunk of plastic from the bathroom again and then Finch appears around the door. He’s kinda funny-looking like this, pale and mussed and pigeon-chested, a box of condoms in one hand, a black bottle in the other. Like a scrawny Casanova. “Sorry to keep you waiting, I packed the prophylactics up with the other…” He stops dead in his tracks. Fusco can see the flicker of his throat working beneath his chin. “…Toiletries.”

Fusco kicks his jeans off his ankles, lets them drop to the floor in a heap.

Finch raises an eyebrow. He’s still tense, struck, but he’s pretending not to be, pretending to be sly and dignified. “Impatient, are we?”

Fusco shrugs. “I dunno. You’re the guy with a whole box of condoms in his hand. You tell me.”

“I was having trouble finding them.”

“Yeah?” Fusco pulls at his shirt. It’s still rolled up tight under his arms, so he needs to unroll it, just a little bit.

“Yes.”

“Well, you found ‘em now,” Fusco says as he pulls one arm through the sleeve of his shirt, “haven’t you?”

Finch makes this determined, prissy little beeline for the bed, throws the condoms and the bottle of lube on the dropcloth next to Fusco and shoves him, shoves at his chest so Fusco falls back into bed and Finch falls with him and the thing Finch says before his mouth slams into Fusco’s is “You are dreadful.”

Fusco just gathers him close, gathers that gangly body gone to seed right up against his chest and rolls so they’re both in bed, lying on their sides, face to face.

This is nice, like equal footing. Like nobody's bigger than anyone else and Fusco isn't in danger of snapping Finch in two while he curls his fingers in the elastic waistband of Finch’s sweatpants and tugs them down to rumple around his knees and Finch isn’t looking down on Fusco when he’s pulling at the shirt that’s still around Fusco’s neck and his one arm like it’s a leash while he kisses him, when his hand slides up one leg of Fusco’s underwear. Fusco never knows how hard he is until Finch’s palm slides over him. It’s gentle, demanding pressure, the sweat of his palm, the tremble in his fingertips. Fusco lets his legs slip apart, bucks into Finch’s hand with a wary tilt of the hips.

Finch gives him a last, solid kiss before breaking away, hand still at work between Fusco’s legs, sliding back and forth in small degrees. On the pillow beside him, Finch looks shaken, dark-eyed and pink-mouthed and tousled and happily stunned. He opens his mouth, hesitates, licks his lips.

“I don’t suppose,” he says, “I could prevail upon you to lie on your back?”

No argument. Fusco rolls over, still thrusting lazily against Finch’s hand. He whines only a little bit when Finch takes his hand away, when Finch rises up onto his knees, pants still rucked around them. He lets Finch pulls Fusco’s shirt off over his head and discard it casually over the side of the bed; he waits patiently while Finch wriggles his way out of those sweatpants finally until he’s kicking them off his feet and into a tangled little bundle at the foot of the bed. He only lifts his hips a little, helpfully, when Finch yanks Fusco’s underwear down so hard Fusco’s pretty sure he hears elastic snap and leaves them wrapped loosely around one of Fusco’s ankles.

Finch has a knee on either side of Fusco’s hips, Fusco’s fingers on his thighs, a box of condoms ripping in his hands, when they both pause for just a second, surprised. Because they’ve never seen each other naked before, and they realize it at the same moment. Because it seems like a big deal, but it isn’t one, not right now. Fusco finds himself sizing Finch up, mouth and belly and pink, jutting cock and thighs that are tight from supporting Finch’s weight but still soft on the insides and in the back and just above the knee.  

Finch is doing the same to him, but slyly, like he thinks Fusco isn’t going to notice. His glances are anxious, darting, and Fusco tries to follow them, to see where they’re going, where they linger, what Finch likes.

He rubs slow circles into the give of Finch’s thighs, gazes up and watches Finch struggle with the box, with a condom in shiny foil. Finch circles Fusco’s cock with a loose, teasing grip, tries to slip the condom on, but his hands are shaking so much he can’t quite manage it, just makes Fusco crane back and hiss as the head of his cock is briefly made wet.

Finch steadies his hands against Fusco’s belly, leaving a little snail trail of spermicide there in the wake of the condom. “In the interests of full disclosure,” Finch says, head bowed, staring at his thumb through latex, “I haven’t had occasion to use one of these in a while.”

Fusco pats his wrist gently. “It’s okay,” he says. “I don’t get laid that much either.”

Finch sighs, sharp.

“Sorry,” Fusco says. He lets go of Finch’s thighs, lets his hands come down to close over Finch’s, to slip the condom from between his fingers. “I got it. You take care of you.”

Finch smiles at him gratefully, reaches for the black bottle of lube, pumps a generous amount onto his fingertips.

It’s weird, like a standoff. Fusco rolls the condom onto his dick, nice and easy, and Finch watches, heavy lidded, and Finch slides his wet, shiny fingers down the front of himself and behind his balls and into himself and Fusco’s gaping stupidly, fingers working mindless at the base of his cock as Finch’s face changes, becomes tense and strange and then gorgeously open.

“Wow,” Fusco whispers.

Finch’s lips part, teeth show, in a shaky laugh that turns into a gulp for air as he pushes deeper into himself. His eyes slip shut and it’s like Finch turns inward. He might be here all alone, taking care of himself in the master bedroom in an empty house, quirking his thin, sensitive mouth at a frustrated angle as he tries to push deeper. Does he do this, Fusco wonders, on his own? Does he kneel on this huge empty bed and touch himself like this, blushing and frowning and struggling to reach? Does he think about Fusco while he does it?

Fusco gives his own cock a last, languid, muted stroke through the latex stretched over it before he reaches for Finch. Finch’s dick twitches before Fusco’s hand even closes over it, just from body heat encircling. He only touches for a moment, just long enough for Finch to rock a few times into the tight curl of Fusco’s fingers. Fusco squeezes softly, releases, lets his palm slide smoothly between Finch’s legs and smear silky lube between his fingers. His fingers meet Finch’s there.

“You mind if I…?”

Finch clutches his wrist, forces Fusco’s hand to stay, stay right there, so that’s an okay, an all-clear if there ever was one. Fusco teases gently with the tips of his fingers, rubbing back and forth over his asshole. Finch rolls his hips against the press of Fusco’s fingers, demanding, until Fusco lets a finger slide into him.

Finch gasps, mumbles breathily, “Please,” and sinks rounded, smooth-filed nails into Fusco’s wrist, pulling up, pulling closer.

“I got you,” he whispers, pressing deeper. “’S alright, I got you.”

“I…” Finch swallows hard, tightens suddenly around Fusco’s fingers. “I need to tell you that I can’t…” Fusco curls his fingers idly and Finch makes a clenched, strained sound in the back of his throat. “I can’t move very well, so it might be…”

“’S okay,” Fusco mumbles. “I’m not so hurt. I can move enough for us both.”

“Mmhm.” Finch shivers, serious and slow, as he pulls at Fusco’s wrist until his fingers slide loose. He lets them fall, lets them curl, wet and languid, around Fusco’s cock, lets his body descend slow and smooth, guides Fusco into him with a low, wondering groan.

Fusco whines, cranes his head back, lets his hips surge upward as Finch slides gently down and it’s easy, it’s so easy.  It shouldn’t be, after everything. It should be murky and complicated and painful, the way they’ve been so far. It shouldn’t be a simple, obvious fit.

Fusco holds Finch’s hand tight as Finch settles down on him, hot and slick and tight. Finch’s eyes are shut, not squeezed shut in pain but just smooth and closed, like he’s meditating. His mouth is very slightly open, very slightly desperate for air. His hips twitch, a small, jagged pulse, and go deliberately still.

“You okay?” Fusco asks.

Finch catches his own lower lip between his teeth. His thighs are shaking.

“Okay.” Fusco rests his hand at the small of Finch’s back. He feels Finch jump, tense slightly around him at the unexpected contact. “Gimme a sec,” he says, sitting up, stomach tight and trembling under the fat.

He grunts and swears into sitting position, until he and Finch are pressed flat together, chest to chest, except Finch is that little bit taller, his knees folded awkward on either side of Fusco to get close to him.

Fusco lets his hands skim lazily over Finch, up and down his back, over his thin chest and his hardening nipples and the fair hair on his legs and belly, until Finch is squirming just a little in his lap, in a way that makes Fusco hold his breath sometimes, just for a second, just to keep himself from enjoying this too much too quickly.

“How,” he asks, “do you want to do this?”

Finch releases his lip from between his teeth, lets his eyes drift ponderously open. “I’d be amenable to more of this.”

“We can do that,” Fusco says, squeezing gently at Finch’s ass. “What else?”

“I need.” Finch hesitates. “It’s a matter of lift. I can’t quite…”

“Yeah. Yeah, I see. You want me to just…”

“If you would.”

“…Give you a little bounce?”

“I would…I would not have put it that way. But yes. Please.”

“Okay. Okay. Just…” His grip on Finch’s ass becomes firmer, but broader, more supportive. “Just like this?”

“Yes. Yes, I think that will do nicely. If you don’t miiiohhhmygoodness,” because Fusco doesn’t wait for him to finish his prissy little request, he just lifts Finch up, guides him back down, easy as anything.

“Okay?”

Finch locks his arms around Fusco’s neck, muffles a cry in Fusco’s hair. So, that’s as close to a “Keep going” as he’s likely to get.

Fusco’s just trying to keep his mind on the mechanics of it, because Finch isn’t a lot of muscle and bone to lift, but he’s still not light either. After a few times, though, Fusco finds an efficient way to do it. It’s a kind of a rocking motion, where he pushes Finch up as he rocks forward, pulls him back down as he rocks back. It’s all steady and careful and it means that Fusco can support him one-armed sometimes, just for a second, to run a hand up Finch’s back or through his hair and make him shiver.

Fusco keeps his mind on the mechanics of it, because if he doesn’t, he’ll start thinking about the red fingerprints he’s pressing into the white flesh of Finch’s ass, the tense heat of Finch around Fusco’s dick, the sharp whines escaping Finch’s pursed lips. Fusco wasn’t trying to make Finch feel better earlier; he just doesn’t get laid all that much since the divorce. Or for a while before that, even. He’s out of practice.

He’s not used to wanting somebody that much.

That could be the case with Finch too, he thinks. Just guessing from the way Finch grabs at him, the way Finch pushes his palms into Fusco’s shoulders and back, like that span of skin is really something special.

As Fusco rolls his hips up into Finch and Finch responds, tentative at first but then seriously, deeply, meeting him at every thrust, Fusco figures they’re just geared for each other. Two lonely guys in need of a shoulder to lean on, a shield to hide behind.

Finch taps at him, the tips of his fingernails scraping the ridge of Fusco’s shoulder blade. “Faster?” he whispers. “Please, could you…faster?”

It takes effort to still his hips that fast, effort to stop mid-thrust. It’s worth it when Finch cries out like that, snarls his fingers in Fusco’s nape, whispers, voice heavy with an unspoken threat, “That is not funny.”

Fusco lowers his head, hides a nasty fucking grin in the empty space between them, the place where their bodies bow out. For a second, he is transfixed by where they join, where Finch’s cock stands, thick and curious with arousal. Then he looks up. He makes his face soft, eyes earnest. It takes less self-control than he thinks it will. “What can I do for you, boss?”

Pink-skinned, sweat-streaked, dark-eyed, Finch catches his breath. His brows are furrowed."You're being horrendous." And then, leaning close so his nose presses into Fusco's cheek, so his mouth is close to Fusco's ear, he murmurs, "I'd like you to roll us over."

Fusco leans all blissed out into Finch’s face, into his mouth. "Hmm?"

"This position," he says, "much as I'm enjoying it, is impeding my ability to move. And yours. Mainly yours." He says that last thing like it's by way of reassurance.

"So you want me to...?"

Finch begins to move his hips in a slow wave that makes Fusco bite down on his lip. "Just roll us. No other changes in position."

"You gonna..?" Fusco pauses, gasps for breath as Finch grinds down on him. "Finch, I'm a…’m a heavy guy, you know? What if I…what if it hurts you?”

Finch draws back, corners of the mouth downturned, hips still going. "How fragile do you suppose I am?"

"Little bit," Fusco pants. "Little bit fragile."

"Well." Finch says. But that’s all he says. He goes all quiet, thoughtful, keeps rocking back into Fusco as Fusco cants his hips upward, desperately. Finch smiles, wan and strange. "May I be honest?”

“Sure,” Fusco says. “Honest is good.”

He presses a flat, wet kiss to Fusco’s forehead. “I’m out of shape.”

“Mmm.”

Finch kisses him again, on the mouth this time. “And I’m very tired.”

“Nnhnnn.”

“And I want to lie back,” Finch says, very softly, “and let you do all the work for a while.”

“I can do that,” Fusco says.  When Finch starts to lean hard to one side and tug at his arm, he follows. “I can definitely do that.”

He keeps Finch clutched to him as they turn, hips shoved flat to his ass and the backs of Finch’s legs. When they’re about three-quarters turned, Fusco braces his arms against the bed, lets himself loom over Finch as he tumbles flat on his back, caught between Fusco and the bed.

Caught between Fusco and the jacket. Fusco realizes now it was under him the whole time; while Finch was straddling him, while they were shedding their clothes piece by piece, the jacket was only ever shrugged off and left to crumple beneath them.

It’s beneath Finch now, the strange purple geometry of the lining standing bright against Finch’s pale shoulders. The coppery zipper, the battle scarred sleeves are a frame to Finch’s body, a series of sharp ridges beneath Fusco’s hands.

Finch blinks up at him. His eyes glitter, the blue of the iris stretched to a pale, thin ring around the black of his pupil. “What?” he asks.

Fusco scrunches his fingers tight in the leather and lets his hips snap forward.

Finch cries out, formless and loud. He throws his head back into the pillows, against the ribbed collar of the jacket, and his arms flex around Fusco, stretching out, hanging on, small muscles bunching. His whole body gives a short, violent squirm.

Fusco goes still, blood pounding in his ears. “You okay?” he asks, sloppy and ragged.

Finch’s calloused, blunt heels drive hard into the backs of Fusco’s thighs and Fusco feels five sharp points of nail sink into the center of his back.

“Keep going.” Finch crumples up around him. “You keep going.”

And it’s not like Finch needs to twist his arm or anything. Christ.

When he pushes into Finch, Fusco's mind is on the way Finch's breathing hitches, quiet little snaps of breath that make his thin ribs heave, expand. His mind is on Finch's face, which has gone so strange, his mouth quivering, his eyes wet and near closed. He’s trying, Fusco thinks, not to move. To keep a poker face. Like if he moans while getting fucked in the ass, Fusco’s gonna call his bluff and take all his money. Or maybe stop. ‘Cause it could be a pain-moan, maybe. This whole thing might be painful, Fusco thinks. Finch might be playing it cool while Fusco breaks his fucking back all over again or whatever the hell happened to him to make Finch move the way he does.

That’s the fear, anyway. It’s one he’d listen to if he couldn’t feel Finch’s dick grazing his belly with every thrust, if on one forward rock of his hips, real deep and – Fusco hopes – fulfilling, Finch didn’t let his eyes flutter shut and sigh real wistful.

If Finch was in pain, he wouldn’t be doing that, Fusco thinks. He wouldn’t be letting his hands wander lazily over Fusco’s shoulders and his back and down Fusco’s straining arms and over his chest.

“Don’t you dare fuckin’ tickle me,” Fusco grunts as Finch slides his fingers up and down Fusco’s sides, prodding through fat to trace the shape of bone, “or I’ll crush you whether I want to or not.”

“Mhmm.” Finch’s hands settle on Fusco’s hips, following along with the thrusts but not controlling. “I rather hope you don’t want me crushed.”

“Oh, I don’t,” he says, “but if it happens, you got nobody to blame but yourself.”

The pinch of Finch’s fingers taking big handfuls of Fusco’s love handles makes his pelvis stutter against Finch’s ass. “I’ll keep,” and Finch’s voice jumps, strained for a moment, before becoming even and professorial again “that in mind.”

Fusco doesn’t say anything. Fusco’s got his teeth gritted, his stomach held tense, his brain doing frantic mantras because he has to go slow and steady and thoughtful and the temptation, after thrusting in that fast, is to pound.

Finch’s hands give his love handles a hard pulse of a squeeze before letting go to drift down the middle of Fusco’s back, down the flat small of his back and over his ass. “Alright?” he asks.

“Yeah,” Fusco rasps, letting himself relax by small degrees.

Finch rubs his way back up, along the length of Fusco’s spine and Fusco shivers, lets his back bow under the pressure of Finch’s palm because he feels owned like that. He feels like Finch wants him nowhere else but here.

Craning up from the bed, Finch kisses him on the corner of his mouth. His lips are wet and Fusco feels the smudge of them there after they’re gone. He lingers that way, close, noses knocking, breathing his words into Fusco’s mouth.  "I'm glad," he says. He takes a deep breath and on the exhale his legs drop a few degrees further apart. He shifts beneath Fusco, tongue pressed pink between his teeth as he maneuvers his hips.

"What about?" Fusco asks, tamping down a grunt as he grabs a tighter handful of the jacket, eases a little further into Finch.

Fusco feels Finch's cheeks expand, puff out air in a thoughtful way. "That you're alright. That you're here." Finch thinks for a moment. "That we're here."

Oh. Yeah. Fusco rocks forward a little, so he's just balancing on his knees, supporting a lot of weight on his hands, bends Finch beneath him as far as he dares. That was kind of a near miss.

"If you just consider the possibilities..." Finch pauses, makes a lost, quivering kind of sound as Fusco pulls out of him, silently gritting his teeth around a moan. "...For example, if sentiment hadn't held me back, I might have chosen to move yesterday rather than, nnh, today. Or, not to speak for you, but you might have chosen - oh - to spend the night at a, a hotel or at the home of a friend or s-something. Or...or you might've...you could easily..."

"Finch."

"If I hadn't been listening or if Detective Carter hadn't arrived in time..."

Fusco pauses, arms shaking from the strain of holding himself up, and looks down at him. "Finch, I don't wanna think about that right now."

His eyes are all bright and shiny and mixed up, like he's happy, like he's terrified, like he's never been more turned on in his life. "I can't help but think about how near..."

Fusco bends at the elbow to kiss him. It's a real inelegant thing, a clash of teeth and a strange heat off of Finch's face like he's about to goddamn cry, which nobody fuckin' wants. Finch throws arms around Fusco's neck and tries to pull himself up, pull himself flat against Fusco's chest, and eventually Fusco thinks to himself, fuck it, Finch is heavy and lowers himself, careful as he can, to cover Finch with his body.

Finch exhales long and slow, lets his legs trace up and down the back of Fusco's.

Fusco's got his arms bent, elbows stuck out like he's caught mid-push up. He lets his hands slide forward on the dropcloth, catches himself on his forearms. He creeps his freed hands under Finch, cradles his back, the bumps and ridges of scar tissue under his hand.

And Finch tilts his hips up against Fusco, welcoming, and Fusco pushes forward to meet him.

It’s a guilty thing, at first, because Fusco’s just thinking of the angle of Finch’s body bent beneath him and the suppressed, keening sounds he’s making and the tightness of his muscles. He’s thinking he’s going too hard, he must be, he must be about to break Finch in half but the wet heat of him is too sweet and he wants it too bad and he can’t stop.

And, of course, he’s not about to break Finch in half. He feels Finch touching his back in the owning way again, tracing out the knobs of Fusco’s spine, the shape of strong back muscles through fat. He can feel Finch’s cock press wet and needy against him. Whatever Fusco’s doing, Finch has no complaints.

He isn’t here unless Finch wants him here. If Finch isn’t telling him to stop, then he doesn’t want him to.

What he’s coming to understand is that Finch is only as light and delicate as razor wire.

Right now, Finch has his legs drawn up, his heels braced against the back of Fusco’s legs, and he’s using that to draw Fusco close against him. He rubs insistently, grinding against him.

“Okay,” Fusco mutters, breathlessly, letting one hand slide between their bodies. “Okay,” he says, as he curls his fingers loosely around Finch’s cock.

Finch bucks up hard into Fusco’s fist, jerks his hips back just as quickly and clenches around Fusco in a way that sets off jagged sparks in his head and god, god it’s incredible. He lets himself sink down onto Finch as much as he dares, pressing down with his whole body like he wants to own Finch like Finch owns him, lets himself be whatever it is Finch wants him to be when he pulls Fusco down against him, a comfort, a shield, a wall to throw himself against.

Fusco lets out a weird little broken noise when he thrusts into Finch, a funny strangled sound that comes from his chest and he realizes that his eyes are watering and stinging and his nose is prickling and god dammit, he will not be the one getting emotional. It’s not a problem, it’s not a goddamn religious experience; it’s just sex.

But it’s been so fucking difficult. They’ve almost lost each other so many times, almost died, almost pushed each other away on purpose or by dumbfuck accident and Fusco doesn’t even know when he started loving Finch, he just knows that it must have been before they ever fell to that study floor and it’s only gotten worse since.

And now Finch is bunched up beneath him, arms wrapped tight around Fusco’s neck, legs around his hips, saying “Please, please, please” over and over under his breath until it doesn’t sound like a word anymore and Fusco is fucking into him, hard and fast, and Fusco can feel Finch’s pulse in his thumb where it’s pressed just under the slick head of Finch’s cock and they’re pressed brow to brow, sharing sweat and breath. And when his hips snap forward one last time, when Finch bites his own lip and muffles a cry while he comes on Fusco’s hand, Fusco doesn’t feel guilty anymore.

He finishes with a sharp, kinda pained groan that he masks in Finch’s neck and Fusco lies there on top of him with his ears ringing, with a gorgeous, warm kind of feeling spreading over his whole body as he twitches through the last of the orgasm. He stays for a while, taking deep breaths and blinking the wet out of his eyes, listening to Finch’s heartbeat slowly even out.

Fusco waits for Finch to say something. Like, maybe not a declaration of undying devotion, but something like “That was good” or “Get off me” or something like that. Finch doesn’t say anything, just breathes deep and pats Fusco on the back. So Fusco takes a little initiative, pulls out of Finch nice and slow and takes some satisfaction out of the way Finch moans when he does it. He rolls off of Finch and takes up a position right next to him, lying on his back, staring up at the ceiling.

They collect themselves for a second. Fusco thinks it’s a shared thing, even though they’re only barely brushing shoulders and nobody says anything to anybody. Just the same shifting noises from the both of them, the buzz in the air that’s this quiet energy, warm, sleepy excitement. Fusco takes the condom off, ties it, and is kinda stymied for a second about what to do with it before he gets the idea to get rid of it in the bathroom.

It’s like he remembers it, mostly. Tile and sunken bath. Kinda lifeless. Big plastic bin full of scattered shampoos and body washes and cold medicine and washcloths and stuff like that. The kinds of things you collect in your bathroom. Fusco drops the condom into the bathroom wastebasket, washes his hands in the marble sink. Before he leaves, he takes a washcloth out of the box, runs it under warm water and wrings it right out until it’s just damp. He hands it to Finch when he comes back to bed.

“Thank you,” Finch says gently.

Fusco steals his first real glances at Finch since the sex while Finch is focused on cleaning himself up. He looks pretty okay. Like, his hair is all spiked up with sweat and he’s got come drying on his belly and he’s pink-cheeked. But he looks good. Not like he just had his back re-broken.

Finch passes the washcloth back to Fusco and Fusco takes the hint, cleans himself off too.

Without a word, they settle back down, flat on their backs and staring up at the ceiling like stargazers. They touch at the shoulder. They touch at the radius of each other’s warmth. They keep their hands folded chastely behind the head or on the belly, respectively.

“For the record,” Fusco says, breaking the silence, “I’m glad we’re here too.”

“Hmm.”

It’s not like a thoughtful hmm or a skeptical hmm or anything like that. It’s the sound a smile makes when there’s breath attached to it.

Deliberately, Finch moves closer, so his left leg lies flat against Fusco’s right and their arms and hands touch just so and he lets his head drift to one side to rest on top of Fusco’s.

That’s how they fall asleep.

Chapter 27

Notes:

my chapter was too long so i split it up D:

He wakes up cold to the sound of a skipping record.

When Fusco opens his eyes, he can’t see much, but that’s only because his face is pushed deep into Finch’s throat like that’s the only place he wants to be.

He stays for a while, adjusting. There's a little pocket of warmth and closeness there, where they're tucked against each other and their skin is red from contact and the hair at the nape of Finch's neck is damp and spiky against Fusco's cheek. Fusco doesn't want to lose that just yet.

He breathes deep. Finch smells good in a different way from how he normally does. The carefully selected and manicured rich guy scents are still there, subtle, dignified traces clinging to hair and skin through the last vestiges of shampoo and lotion and aftershave. But over it all there's skin, there's sweat, and that's good too. That's kind of human. Fusco nuzzles sleepily at Finch's ear and then rolls over with a suppressed grunt.

Pale sunlight is creeping across the hardwood floor and Fusco thinks, with shades of bitterness, that his apartment never gets natural light like this. Not that it's so surprising that Finch's bedroom he can't stand in Finch's house that he's going to throw away is nicer than Fusco's one and only apartment will ever be. That's just the natural order of things. Still, Finch should probably appreciate what he's got more. 

As it is, Finch is out cold.

Fusco sits up in bed. Finch shifts a little, takes a deep breath, settles. He's got a hand curled around the inside of Fusco's upper thigh. He doesn't wake up.

Fusco has never seen him sleep before.

Well, once. Once, folded over his desk, fingers still resting on the keyboard, that night Finch first brought Fusco to this house. When Fusco tried to wake him up and ended up giving him a back rub.

In retrospect, kinda dumb that it took them this long to catch on.

Asleep, Finch looks very vulnerable. His face is soft and slack and relaxed and the dark circles under his eyes that you'd never dare notice when he was awake stand out bright. The early morning chill has him curled up, cuddled against Fusco's side, skin goosepimpled. Just looking at him, Fusco wants to cover him up, warm him with his mouth and hands.

Downstairs, the record skips again.

Fusco detaches himself as gently as he can from Finch and sets his feet on the floor, feels cold wood through thin socks. His spine and hip pop as he stands and stretches, knees twinge with pain. Christ. Christ, Fusco’s getting so fucking old. It’s that, he thinks, looking down at himself, and the beating he took last night.

It’s weird, but parts of last night feel like they happened so long ago.

Fusco checks himself in the bathroom mirror. It’s not so bad, he thinks. If you look at it all in context. Like, yeah, he’s got big, purple bruises on his knees, on his stomach, on his face around his eyes and one cheek, and they’re all bad, but they’re not that bad. He’s had worse. Still cut up on his knuckles, but they’ll heal. Still fat, but that’s nothing new. He looks like shit, but it’s not his worst day, not by a long shot.

Once he gets the big stuff out of the way, he can start to see the little things. The red indent of his jacket’s zipper winding like a surgical scar up his side. Thin pink lines raised on his shoulders and back and ass from Finch grabbing at him. Spit dry in the corner of his mouth because of course you drooled on him in your sleep way to fucking go Lionel. Fusco wipes at his mouth.

There. Not so bad.

The record is still skipping. He goes back into the bedroom, watches Finch while he puts his underwear on, watches while Finch paws unconsciously at the bed beside him, at the lining of the jacket they slept on, like he's missing something before finally settling in the warm spot where Fusco was.

Fusco leaves him there.

Christ, it's cold in here, he thinks as he descends the stairs with rough creaks and groans. This is a drafty goddamn house. You're a rich guy, Finch; what are you, too cheap to heat your goddamn house?

Although it's possible he just turned the heat off.

After all, Finch doesn't live here anymore.

Downstairs is like they left it last night, books and boxes and papers strewn around, empty shelves and ghostly furniture. Fusco picks his way through it, stepping over and around little piles of things, little clusters of Finch's careless collection.

Maybe it isn’t so bad that Finch is moving. Finch wasn’t using this place right.

He guides the needle off the record, scratches idly at what he's pretty sure is Finch's spit, dry on his neck.

So last night went pretty okay, huh?

Fusco guesses it did. Kinda scares him, how well it went, because that's a whole new thing. What's that gonna be like, he wonders. Him and Finch on really, really good terms.

Not to get carried away or anything, start picking out china patterns or naming the kids they're gonna adopt. This could all go sour in a second. Or, not sour, but haltingly, logically dead. 'Cause fun as last night was, there were always good reasons for the two of them to not do that. Security risks, like Finch says. Legally speaking, Finch is dead, after all, and Fusco hasn't checked the score in a while, but he might be a target of organized crime still. That's tough to work around. If Finch wakes up and says to him, "This was a bad idea," Fusco's not gonna disagree completely. A little bit, but not completely.

But, Fusco thinks as he walks back through the kitchen, that's only if Finch is through with him.

Fusco's not sure Finch is through with him. He hopes, maybe desperately, that Finch isn't.

So, say he isn't. Say Fusco's not through with Finch either. Say they keep doing this, every so often. Or maybe more than every so often. Why not? Aim high. How's that gonna hash out? 

A shitty, snide, pessimistic part of him thinks Finch in a relationship is like Finch on missions, all quick demands and cold shoulders. Another part of him remembers how Finch was in the limo after Fusco sucked him off, for those few seconds when Finch believed that it could all be copacetic between them. How he was then, warm and close and sweet as hell, wanting to take Fusco home, take care of him. How he was before that, back when he was sending Fusco weird presents all the time. Finch really wanted him to like those, Fusco realizes now. Wanted so badly to spoil him. Buy him pretty things just to show Fusco that Finch thought he was worth the expense. Another side of him knows that there are a lot of ways Finch can be, and Fusco hasn't even seen most of them yet and will probably never see all of them.

Mostly, he worries about his own coward self. His own shitty track record. Sharon wasn't even all that demanding with him. She just wanted somebody she could count on to be a good father to her kid. Somebody steady and kind.

Finch is a high standards kind of guy. However hard Fusco let his wife down, this will be worse.

Probably, the right thing to do next is to clear out. Even if they're okay and Finch wants to keep doing this, he'll probably need some time to think about it. Having Fusco hanging around underfoot, all needy, isn't going to help anybody.

Then again, slinking out like a thief isn't going to help anybody either.

Plus, his clothes are up in the room with Finch, so there's that little holdup. Even his coat is still in bed. Christ, that thing's gonna be unwearable. Scratched up, riddled with bullet holes, smelling of sex. And he just knows Finch is going to offer to pay for the cleaning. Pain in the ass. Fusco stretches, shivers in the cold, and climbs the stairs again.

He hears Finch before he sees Finch. Soft rustling sounds and creaking, like floorboards under feet. When Fusco shoulders the bedroom door open, he finds Finch standing in the middle of the room in a kind of disarray.

Or two kinds. There's the physical kind, where Finch is naked and his hair is a goddamn mess and his glasses are off-balance and he's got his sweatpants hanging by the waistband in one hand and Fusco's jacket gathered to his chest with one arm. Everything he's got looks like he grabbed it in a hurry.

Then there's the other kind, the kind in his face. It's fear and it's anger and it's sadness, all of them ebbing away to embarrassment the longer he looks at Fusco.

Finch stands up straight, puts his glasses back in alignment, casually covers himself with Fusco's jacket. He clears his throat.

"I," he begins. "Um."

Fusco decides he'll start. "Your record was skipping."

Finch's face starts to go pink, just a little. "Oh."

"Thought I'd go down and uh. Stop it.”

Finch’s fingers flex, crumple the elastic of his sweatpants in his hand. "Thank you, Lionel.”

What follows is an edgy quiet, suppressed breathing and eyes that don't quite know where to look. Shyness, all of a sudden. Like they didn't do what they did the night before. Finch holds onto the sweatpants and the jacket like they are shields and he can hide behind them. His ears are bright with blushing; his face burns. He looks so ashamed, and Fusco can't think what Finch would ever have to be ashamed of. Aside from him, maybe. Aside from Fusco.

Aw, Finch, he thinks. You shouldn't have done it. If you knew, if you even thought you'd regret it, you shouldn't've even given me that.

Fusco stands there like a chump in his underwear and waits for the kiss-off.

Finch says, "I thought you'd left."

Or he blurts it. He says it a little too loudly, like a part of him wasn't brave enough to say it at all. Then he closes his mouth determinedly and says nothing.

Fusco waits for him.

Finch's eyes drop to the floor, his bare toes. "Although," he adds, quieter, more purposeful, "I suppose it was foolish of me to think so. Given that most of your clothing was still on the floor."

"Yeah, you really jumped to conclusions there, Four Eyes."

Finch smiles, small and nervous, at the floor. The collar of the leather jacket twists in his grip. “I did,” he says. “But then, that’s always been the case, up until now.”

“I...yeah.” Fusco wishes he had clothes to hide behind, or something with pockets he could stick his hands in. Not really sure what to do with those; they’re just hanging down by his thighs. “You’re a cold fish and all, but it’s hard to pretend I don’t do most of the running away around here.”

“You’re too kind.”

Fusco looks at him for a while. Finch is pale, really pale, like maybe his chest hasn’t seen direct sunlight in years. He’s paunchy and his thighs are soft. He’s got the teeth of a zipper temporarily tattooed down one side of him in angry red and pink, from his shoulder to the round of his hip. Sleep flecks his light-colored eyelashes; greenish traces of a bruise shadow his eye.

With an edgy, anxious smile on him, Finch looks more human than Fusco’s ever seen him.

“Listen,” Fusco says. “I know you like pretending you're too cool to sleep and you probably wanna get back to that. But if it’s alright with you, I’d kinda like to go back to bed for a while.”

Finch peers at Fusco. The edges on his smile soften. “I think I’d like that very much, Detective,” he says.

Fusco reaches out, tugs gently at the jacket until Finch reluctantly lets it go. “Detective? Come on. If we’re not on first name basis now, I don’t know what it’ll take.” He unfurls the jacket, slings it neatly around Finch’s shoulders, tugs for a second at the front, adjusting it. “You look cold,” Fusco says in response to the question Finch never manages to ask.

Finch drops the sweatpants, pulls Fusco’s jacket closed around him with both hands. It’s big on him. Too wide and too long, but short in the sleeves so his skinny wrists poke out the ends. “Thank you, Lionel,” he murmurs.

“No problem.” Fusco goes to the bed, takes the corner of the heavy white sheet with one hand. “You mind if I take this thing down? It’s cold as hell in here.”

Finch takes a place, another corner, on the opposite side of the bed. “I was just about to ask you the same thing.”

So they pull the dustcover down until it’s folded over the foot of the bed and the actual bedspread, thick and heavy and vacuum-sealed to the mattress, is unveiled. Finch performs whatever complex bedmaking origami needs to happen and turns down the covers before climbing in himself, jacket still crinkling around his thin shoulders and bony elbows. Fusco climbs in beside him, draws the sheets and blanket up over their shoulders, to just under their chins. It’s cold under there too, cool and smooth in a way that Fusco’s forgotten that good sheets can be. But he can feel Finch’s feet tangled next to his own and he knows it’ll be warm enough soon.

Fusco figures it’d be nice enough to just lie here next to him, drowsing and getting warmer.

Finch lays in bed like he's laid out for a funeral, flat on his back, staring straight up, hands a little folded bump under the duvet, where his belly ought to be. Not for Fusco to question what's best for the guy's back, even if it does look like the stiffest sleeping position he's ever seen, so he just curls up beside him, plants a kiss on the peak of Finch's bony shoulder through the jacket.

Finch's mouth curves very slightly.

So he does it again, really goes at Finch this time, nipping and mouthing at his shoulder and his neck and his flushed ear, and Finch crumples around him with a sharp, delighted wheeze.

Fusco rolls onto him (gently, gently now) and conducts a real slow examination, because they were in kind of a hurry last night and Fusco didn't get all that good of a look or a feel. It's morning, Fusco's got nowhere else to be, so they have that kind of time, that kind of lighting now.

He pushes one hand up under the leather jacket.

He's real sensitive. Fusco always knew that, but in the shitty way, where when you call a guy "sensitive," it means he uses moisturizer and can't take a punch. Both of those are true, 'cause Finch's skin is so soft it's almost weird and Finch can take a punch, but he shouldn't. This is something else. It's the way Finch twitches and squirms at every touch and kiss. The way his muscles jump and he gasps real small, so the air clicks in his throat.

Finch isn't used to being touched. That gets obvious, the longer this goes on. Fusco's not sure what to make of that, exactly. 'Cause he's not sure where Finch gets off, putting his hands all over Fusco when he's so jumpy about Fusco's hands on him. And Fusco isn't sure how he ended what seems like a real long dry spell for Finch. He hopes he isn't a desperation thing for Finch. Finch isn't a desperation thing for him. Not that he's swimming in it but, you know.

He brushes the jacket open.

Finch takes a deep, slow breath. The little knot of his hands unwinds, parts, and disappears as he lays out his hands on either side, maybe grabbing at the fitted sheet, at the bumps and grooves in the mattress. His skinny little chest jumps and catches on stalled breath. His eyes are drawn straight to the ceiling, straight away.

Nerves, maybe. Fusco can understand that. If it wasn’t the kind of thing that got you picked on in Fusco’s old neighborhood, maybe he’d have ended up the nervous type too. On the outside, though. Not like what he is now, the type to laugh his way through a heart attack. Fusco doesn’t feel equipped to comfort anybody, never has, but he rubs gentle little circles on Finch with his hands, on his soft arms and his fuzzy chest and belly. Not sure what good it does, but Fusco can see him warming up. His skin flushes, patchy and strange, and the goosepimples lie flat.

His hands are still tight in the sheets.

So Fusco kisses him, just a little. Not on the mouth or anything, Finch’s face is turned away, turned upward. On the breastbone, though, where it shows bumpy through his thin skin. On one nipple, ‘cause it’s peaky and tight and pink on Finch’s white, dead man chest, and it’s right there besides, right in his reach, and Fusco can’t help himself. On Finch’s stomach, where the dumbass temptation is to blow raspberries, shock him out of his stupor. The other temptation is to keep going down, where Finch’s knobby hipbones jut, where his skin gets a whole lot more sensitive. Fusco feels the edge of the duvet bark at the back of his head and he just eases himself beneath it, keeps right on going.

Nestles into that pocket of warm under the covers, where their bodies are trapped flat together, where the sheets are still unnaturally cool and fused together from disuse in the corners, in the places where Finch and Fusco haven’t been yet.

There’s a little bow, a covered bridge of light to the outside world and Fusco looks up through it, up Finch’s body to his face. All he can see is the round of Finch’s chin, the beak of his nose. Finch isn’t watching.

Finch breathes edgy and trembling.

“You okay?” Fusco asks, finally.

Finch doesn’t make any noise for a while, just that shaky in-out, so Fusco waits for him, rests his chin on Finch’s hip. “I’m fine, Detective,” he says, finally.

Fusco asks, “You want me to lay off? We can just sleep, if you want to.” Fusco’s not just being polite about it either; he’s not turned on or anything. He just kinda likes rubbing up on Finch. Friendly-like.

Finch says no real quick. Or, what he says is “Uh-uh,” which isn’t a thing that Finch is supposed to say, on account of it’s not a complete sentence and it’s barely a real word. Fusco’s just gearing up to poke fun at him for it, offer to go downstairs and pick him up a thesaurus, when Finch tacks on, “…I’d really rather you didn’t stop,” and his breath is still all shaky and Fusco doesn’t have the heart to pick at him. Not today and not for that.

He finds Finch’s hands where they’re all balled up in sheet and touches with his fingertips, traces the lines of bones and tendons and solid, tiny little hand muscles all puffed up and clenched. Fusco just drapes his own palms over them in a way he hopes is loose and comforting.

Then he buries his face in the bottom of Finch’s belly.

Not, like, right for the crotch. He’s not an animal or anything and it’s not like Finch is hard at all. Just the soft, smooth, easy skin above Finch’s pubes, above his cock. Right where the skin is thin. Fusco gets real comfy there.

Finch makes a drowsy, shivering sound and stretches, pushes his hips up into Fusco’s face, and Fusco just lets it happen, rubs his cheek against him.

“Dear,” Finch murmurs tightly as he arches, and Fusco presses his face in Finch, self-satisfied. He peppers soft, close-mouthed kisses over the bottom of Finch’s belly, the insides of his thighs that are stringy with wasted muscle, cushy with fat, ravaged by battle scars.

He kisses the head of Finch’s limp cock the same way, close-mouthed, undemanding.

Finch jumps beneath him with a shocked little sound. “How young,” he asks, “do you think I am?”

“You don’t want me to answer that, Glasses.”

Finch swats neatly at Fusco's shoulder, so lightly there’s only the faintest sting of his fingernails brushing past.

“Too soon?” Fusco asks. “Doesn’t hurt, does it?”

“Nnnno.” Finch sounds real thoughtful. “I’m just afraid you’re, er. Barking up the wrong tree. So to speak.”

“Yeah?”

“Mhmm. Age, exhaustion, chronic pain. These are all…factors. I may not always be physically able to…hmm.”

Perform, Fusco thinks. That’s probably what you’re trying to say. Get it up, although that’s what I’d say, not you. He rubs his cheek up and down the inside of Finch’s thigh, back and forth. It’s pushing against the grain of the light stubble on Fusco’s face and he wonders if maybe he should shave before he does this kind of thing. Doesn’t wanna leave beard burn on Finch’s white legs. That’s a surefire way to get kicked out of bed, most likely.

“Particularly,” Finch adds, sounding the littlest bit defensive, “so soon after last time.”

“S’okay,” Fusco mumbles into his skin. “Not like I expect anything.” He lifts his head, kisses the sharp little curve of Finch’s hipbone, looks up and watches Finch’s face, watches him stealing little looks down.

“No?” Finch asks, sweaty and bewildered. Fusco can feel him getting warmer.

“Nah. If you can’t right now, then you can’t right now. No big deal. You, uh, you mind if I try, though?”

“If you…” Finch repeats uneasily.

Fusco breathes out, nuzzles up between his legs, and Finch gasps.

Fusco suspects that in this moment, right now, he’s the confident one, the one with a plan. Which is scary as hell, because Fusco only barely knows what he’s doing. He’s still new at this kind of thing. Not so new as he was last time, but his heart patters nervously in his chest and his fingers shake as he traces light, noncommittal fingers over Finch.

Somehow, the lack of a death sentence dangling over his head makes this whole thing way scarier.

Which is stupid. Fusco’s annoyed at himself for being nervous at all, like this isn’t a line he’s already crossed. There’s this virginal preciousness about it that he knows looks bad on him, on anybody as old or as rough as he is. And he liked it last time, liked doing that for Finch, even though it was such a sad, last ditch kind of gesture. But it’s frightening now, because he doesn’t feel hunted or worthless or like he might die any second, because he’s going to have to live with the consequences of this and everything else, because he wants to live with the consequences for once. He wants to see where this thing with Finch goes, if it lasts or even gets better, somehow. He wants to carry on not feeling worthless. He wants to keep doing things for Finch. Wants to make him happy.

Fusco thinks he understands about the gifts, now. About the jacket and everything else.

He goes at Finch gently, with lips and hands, never pressing hard. Just coaxing. Teasing, maybe. Nuzzling at Finch’s cock and balls and the inside of his thighs and he listens for the things that make Finch’s breath catch, the things that force loving sounds from his mouth, muffled through the covers.

Finch’s cock thickens lazily. Fusco runs his mouth, his clumsy tongue over it, over and over toward the tip. Strokes get shorter, more efficient, until it’s just the head he’s lapping at, his hand working at the base and Finch’s hands come up to curl around the back of Fusco’s head. Finch’s fingertips scratch against his scalp, comb at his hair, tighten up and pull back, so Fusco takes the hint, lifts his head beneath the blanket, blinks dazed and wet-mouthed up through the tunnel of blankets.

Finch is looking down at him, finally. It’s the weirdest expression on his face, cheeks all flushed, mouth slack, eyes sad as hell. He looks like somebody slapped him.

Fusco says, numbly, “What’s up?”

He feels the sting in his scalp lessen as Finch relaxes his grip on Fusco’s hair and starts kneading gently. “You…” he begins, but he doesn’t seem to know where to go from there. His voice is scratchy and sluggish.

“I, uh. If I’m not, uh, doing it right. Or if you don’t like it. You can say so, you know? I’m kinda, kinda new at this whole thing, so I mean. I wanna learn.” Fusco shifts gently on top of Finch, gets ready to climb off if he’s asked to.

Finch’s mouth shuts tight, lips pursed. He exhales through the nose and his mouth falls open again and he’s struggling to say whatever it is so much that Fusco kinda wants to pack it in and hold him for a while, if Finch’ll let him.

“The last time you did this,” Finch says, finally, “you left.” And then he’s silent, horrified at himself.

Because Finch gets needy too, sometimes. He gets all heartsick and demanding and he doesn’t want anyone to know.

And Fusco says, “Oh.”

Finch says, deliberate and ashamed, “If you’re going to do that again, then I don’t want to do this at all.”

And Fusco says, “I’m not gonna.” Says, “I’m sorry I left last time.”

Finch lets Fusco’s hair go, reaches up to roll down the duvet, bring his face into the light.

Fusco says, “If you want me gone now, you’re gonna have to tell me to get out, because I don’t want to go.”

And Finch touches his face, cradles Fusco’s jaw, gently guides his head back down.

He tries to go slow this time, because last time was fast. Last time he was hurting all over and inside his own head and he just wanted to thank Finch in any way he could. Thanks, goodbye, here’s a little something to remember me by. Now he just wants Finch to know that he can be good at this, he can give love and attention. He can stay and stay just as long as Finch needs him to.

He feels the weight of Finch against his tongue as he takes him into his mouth. His tongue slides smooth and lazy up and down the underside and Finch shivers; Finch makes soft, happy sounds.

Fusco’s just trying to remember every woman who’s ever gone down on him. He’s trying to reverse engineer a feeling, something Finch might like. And it’s working, he thinks. Finch is hard in his mouth and his hips makes small, suppressed twitches upward, and Fusco can feel Finch’s pulse against his tongue. Finch is petting him, fingers on his hair and his jaw and his cheeks and his lips stretched around Finch’s cock and Fusco looks up at him finally.

Finch is still flushed, pink in the cheeks, pink in the mouth, pink in the whites of his eyes and startlingly blue in the irises, startlingly shiny and wet. He breathes deep, in-out, like it’s meditation, like it’s therapy. He moves like a languid wave, gently rising and falling. His eyes are on Fusco’s face.

He kinda wants to look away again, kinda doesn’t want to look away ever. It’s that same stare again, the one that gets deep under Fusco’s skin and makes him feel like he’s being taken apart and put back together.

And whatever he’s seeing, Finch likes.

What are you getting out of this? he wonders. Out of looking at me or trying to pretty me up. You know it doesn’t work, don’t you? You know that. Maybe you think I’m funny or I’m good at my job or maybe you see me trying to do better and you think that’s worth something and that I can understand. But you can’t like looking at me that way. You’re not so unwise.

Finch’s touches on his face are like the kisses he’s too far away to give right now and his eyes are so soft and bright and he’s just beaming down at Fusco like he’s something, like he’s good, and fuck you, Fusco thinks ferociously as he drags Finch close, takes him deep, fuck you for caring so much, and then Finch is coming in his mouth and he doesn’t choke this time. He swallows it all down, keeps swallowing until there’s nothing left, until Finch whispers, “Ah. Tender,” and guides Fusco’s head back off his cock.

And he just stares at Fusco for a while after that, fingers all on his wet, puffy lips and aching jaw, cradling Fusco’s head against his hip. He smiles cautiously at first, and then bright and helpless, like he doesn’t know how to stop himself.

He asks, “May I take care of you now?”

Fusco scoots up the bed, listens to Finch say, “Oof,” very softly when Fusco rests his head on Finch’s stomach. “Nah,” he says. “I’m kinda spent. Maybe later?”

Finch’s hand glides over the top of Fusco’s head, the back of his neck, the spot between his shoulders. “Later, then,” Finch says as he brings Fusco against his side. He draws the covers up ‘til they’re around his hips, around Fusco’s shoulders. “Later,” he says, and for the second time in twelve hours, they drop off beside each other.

 

---

 

He knows Finch isn’t in bed before he opens his eyes. Fusco just knows it because he’s the type to cuddle up in bed, and he can’t feel Finch under his arm or against his chest, so he must be gone. His heart speeds up; his stomach twists.

When he opens his eyes, he sees steam rolling in the sunlight, feels heat and wet in the air. Fusco sighs. He’s a clingy idiot.

He rolls over in bed, in Finch’s cooling, sweaty shadow to see the open bathroom door emit cheerful billows of steam and quiet drips and sloshes. He’s in the bath. He’s taking a bath, Lionel, and not running out on you.

Fusco stretches, tries to figure out what time it is. Afternoon, most likely. It’s bright outside and warm in here. He hasn’t slept this late in the day in a long damn time. Although he guesses he didn’t sleep most of the night either. Things balance out.

He checks himself. Real sore in the joints where they’re banged up, faint ache in the front of his drawers ‘cause he isn’t made of stone, spit dry at the corners of his mouth again, but Fusco figures he gets a pass this time, given what he was up to before he went to sleep. Bad taste in his mouth but, again. Pass.

He slings his legs out of bed with a grunt, sits up tall as he can, lifts his arms and cracks his back. Fusco wishes he was the type to think ahead and pack an overnight bag. No toothbrush or anything, no change of clothes. Unless Finch just happens to have a change of clothes set aside for him somewhere, which wouldn’t be too surprising. He'll have a spare toothbrush around, anyway. That’s just who Finch is.

He stands up on stiff, unsteady feet and ambles over to lean in the bathroom doorway.

Finch doesn’t seem to notice. His back is turned to the door and he just sits, straight but not tense, in a cloud of heated steam rising up from the bath set into the floor. Fusco can see soap suds gathered in the hairs at the nape of his neck, an angry red stripe of scar tissue slicing down his neck from the base of his skull. Fusco’s only ever touched it, he realizes and part of him always kind of knew it was there from the way Finch moved. He always figured there would be some visible sign of what happened somewhere on Finch; he just never thought too hard about it. Never tried to look at it before now.

Well, he’s seen it. Any kind of painful, crawling introduction that Finch might have needed to give him is swept out of the way by random chance and that’s fine by Fusco. No questions.

He’d rather look Finch in the face at this point. He squelches his foot on the wet tile and Finch whirls around with a sloshy jump, his hands clasped high on his chest.

“I. Ah. Hello. Good morning.”

“Morning,” Fusco says, taking a step into the bathroom. “What time is it?”

Finch relaxes slowly, sheepishly. “Around two o’clock in the afternoon. So, perhaps morning is a misnomer.”

“Yeah, maybe.” Fusco grins, shifts against the doorframe. “You feeling okay?”

“Oh, yes. Yes. It’s not often I sleep that well.” He rolls his thin shoulders. “A little sore, maybe, but it can’t be helped.” He frowns slightly. “I suppose I shouldn’t be talking to you about sore right now. How are you?”

“I’m fine. The bruises aren’t that bad, are they?”

Finch flashes him this strange, cringing smile that says yes, yes they are that bad.

“Geez. Message received.”

“Oh, it’s not…it’s not so bad…” Finch says, gently.

“Hey. Hey. It’s fine. A few more bumps and bruises aren’t going to make any difference.”

“You said something like that before,” Finch says, brow furrowed. “I wish you wouldn’t.”

“I’m just saying,” Fusco adds, “it’s hard to make that situation any worse.”

“Please stop talking about yourself in that way.”

Fusco opens his mouth to protest but Finch stares up at him so seriously, mouth twisted, eyes sad, water lapping at his hips and his balled-up fists. “Okay,” he says, softly.

Finch holds out his hands to Fusco. “Come here.”

Fusco obeys, comes to stand at the edge of the tub, takes Finch’s outstretched hands in his own and squeezes real gentle, like an apology. Finch squeezes back and then relaxes completely, so Fusco takes the hint, loosens his grip. Finch’s hands slip from Fusco’s and come to rest on the waistband of Fusco’s underwear, to tug gently at the elastic. When Fusco doesn’t protest, Finch pulls them down neat around his ankles.

“Take a bath with me,” Finch orders, very gently.

So Fusco steps out of his underwear, dips a toe in the bath and it scalds him, just a little, but he slides his leg in until his foot rests on the white tile of a submerged seat that rings the inside of the tub. Finch steps back fast, almost topples over backward except he lets the water catch him, lets himself be propelled gracefully to the other side of the tub where he settles. Finch sits on the little underwater bench and he watches, hands folded on his underwater knees.

Fusco steps the rest of the way in. For the first ten seconds it’s like fire against his skin, burning up his legs and his back and his belly in a real way, a way that blisters flesh and dries out muscle and leaves bones ashy and he closes his eyes, hisses between his teeth. After the first ten seconds, it passes and it’s just water, just warm, cradling him gently and sloshing against his chest. He feels his skin panicking, goosepimpling, relaxing.

He must have been really cold.

When he opens his eyes again, Finch hasn’t moved from across the tub but he’s looking Fusco in the face so intently that he might as well be in Fusco’s lap.

“Been a while,” Fusco says, trying to answer a question that Finch never asked. “I don’t know if I’ve taken an honest-to-God bath in over 20 years. Not like that,” he adds as Finch’s lip curls in mock horror. “You know what I mean. Showers. I’ve only had the little, you know, standing cubicle thing with the foggy glass door for a long time.” He squirms a little on the seat, against tile crosshatching his ass. “This is nice, though. It’s something for you.”

“Mmm?” Finch cocks his head to one side.

“Nothing. This place just doesn’t, uh. I mean it’s got a lot of stuff you like in it, and it’s nice and all, but most of the house doesn’t really seem like your kind of setup. Am I wrong?”

Finch purses his lips thoughtfully. “No. I never put much thought into most of it. It just needed to be a house, not my house.” He settles back against the lip of the tub. “I don’t know if this room is any more of a personal choice than the others, but I like it very much.”

“Is it easier on you?” Fusco asks. “When you, uh…” and he trails off in the face of Finch’s quizzical expression. Fuck. This is a stupid thing to ask. You’re gonna break it, all of it. “Is it easier for you to move?”

The change that comes over Finch is careful and not quite cold, but completely serious. “Are you asking,” he says, calm and polite but maybe over-precise, “if the tub helps with my…my handicap?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess.” Fusco looks down at his hands, warped and wiggling through a foot of water. “You don’t have to answer that if you don’t…”

“It does,” Finch says. It’s not the question that bothered him, not exactly. That’s clear. He’s trying to say what bothered him now, hesitating as he tests out the words in his head, behind his teeth. “Does it worry you?”

“No.”

“I ask because you…” Finch pauses, frowns momentarily. “I won’t say ‘brought it up’ because you didn’t, not precisely. But it was on your mind last night, I felt.”

Fusco nods, slowly. Like he’s ashamed. “I mean, I don’t wanna…I wouldn’t wanna treat you like you can’t take care of yourself, because that’s not…’s just not true. Sometimes I think you’re tougher than I am. Sometimes I know you’re tougher than me, you know?”

Finch’s mouth quivers. “That isn’t always true.”

Fusco carries on. “I just don’t know anything about it. And I don’t need you to…to tell me what happened or anything, if you don’t want to. It’s personal and you’re private. I get that. I don’t even know if I wanna talk about it. I just don’t want to hurt you by accident if we end up doing this kind of thing again, you know?”

“I know,” Finch says, very gently. He’s very quiet, very thoughtful for a moment. “I’m not one of the great communicators, particularly about this, but…”

“Thanks.”

“It’s important to me,” Finch adds, “that this be allowed to happen again.”

“Yeah?” Fusco feels himself smiling broadly, wonders if he should try to tamp it down. “Me too.”

Finch returns his smile, faint and cautious. “My neck is fine. Lower back aches slightly,” he says, like he’s talking about the weather. “Perhaps too much pressure when we changed position last night, but that was my lapse in judgment, not yours.” He rolls his shoulders. “For the most part, I’m just sore. Using muscles I don’t generally use. I think I mentioned I was out of practice.”

“Yeah, you said.” Fusco wipes at his mouth. “Where?”

Finch hesitates very visibly. "My legs," he says. "And my back and stomach. Anything I used to...to move."

Fusco drops to his achey knees in the tub, where the tile digs into bruises and the water laps at his chin.

Finch blinks. "That's a bit drastic, don't you think?"

Fusco takes Finch's bony ankle, cups the wasted muscle of his calf in his palm.

"It's not that bad," Finch murmurs, flush with embarrassment.

He digs in, fingers and thumbs, and Finch's foot flexes and his head drops back.

"Okay?" Fusco asks.

Finch grunts.

So he keeps going.

Finch’s legs are real soft in his hands, skin smooth and movable. He has to dig deep to find it, thin, wiry muscle and gristly tendon. The strength beneath Finch’s sedentary legs. It’s all coiled tight, like a trap. Fusco presses hard, flinches when he feels his callouses making deep grooves in Finch, but on the knobs of Finch’s ankle, on his hairy shins, on the curve of Finch’s round little calves, Fusco lets himself crush out tension.

He feels weird grabbing at him like this: Fusco, with his broad, rough fucking mitts, giving a leg massage to a guy who’s already got trouble walking. What a great idea. But Finch doesn’t seem to mind. Finch makes soft, subdued, breathy sounds, sighs and grunts and murmurs, and if Fusco looks hard, he can see Finch’s eyelids twitch every so often, but they never open. There’s no slim, dark line between his brows and Finch’s mouth is perfectly relaxed.

He rubs at the space behind Finch’s knobbly little knee and Finch’s whole leg extends with a jump. His foot relaxes at the ankle and the tip of his toe presses limp and ridiculous against Fusco’s chest.

“Still good?” Fusco asks, letting his fingers creep up to Finch’s thigh.

“Mmmm,” Finch says. His damp eyelashes flutter, eyes open just a thin, blue slit. His mouth curls in a small, sleepy smile. “Very good.”

Fusco finds himself light-headed and over-warm, tells himself it’s just the steam and gets back to work. Finch’s thighs are well-padded, but Fusco knows how strong they can be, the weight they can support with a little help. Gently, he nudges Finch’s leg aside so he can nestle up between them, rub way up high on Finch’s leg.

Fusco says, "Hey, you remember..." - which is stupid because how could either of them forget - "you remember that first time you brought me here?"

Finch's smooth, blissed-out face curls in a small smile. One wet hand comes to rest on Fusco's hair. "Yes, I do."

"You, uh. You remember when I woke you up?"

His eyes stay shut but the smile broadens. "You rubbed my back," he murmurs.

"Yeah," Fusco says, but he falls quiet right after. He's not totally sure where he was going with any of it; just that this moment is like that moment and that's important, somehow.

Finch says, "I was surprised by that. Not displeased," he adds, reassuringly, "just surprised. I thought it was very bold of you. You were afraid to touch me back then, I think."

"Ha. Yeah." Then, "Was that when...?"

"When I began to feel differently about you, do you mean?" He breathes deep, puffs out his cheeks on the exhale. "It's difficult to say. I began to grow fond of you long before then. Even though you tried my patience so often and I didn't wholly trust you. You still try my patience," he adds real sweet, voice all heavy with tenderness, fingers scratching slow at the back of Fusco's head, "but I don't know when the rest changed, precisely. It might be that that night was the first time I ever seriously considered making love to you, but I'm not even sure if that's true."

He feels breathless, treacly heat creeping over him, up his back and down his throat. His hands tighten on Finch’s leg and he feels tension leaking out of the muscle.

Finch stretches sleepily. “It might have been the second. Or third. It’s difficult to know what I allowed myself to think of at the time. I know I thought of it that night.”

Fusco keeps on rubbing at Finch’s legs, his knees, with robotic diligence. His mind is on that night, the one that feels like it happened a million years ago. Fusco was upstairs, curled up and aching in the guest room. And Finch was downstairs, working all night, wanting to fuck him.

“Was it that night for you?” Finch asks, trying to sound casual. “When you knew.”

When he knew.

As if Fusco’s supposed to know when even Finch can’t pinpoint it. As if Fusco’s supposed to know anything about any of this, like he’s ever been sure at any point.

Very suddenly, he remembers sitting across a table from Finch, killers to his left and to his right. Finch with a nosebleed, scared and depending on him. He says, “Before then.”

Finch blinks down at him. “Oh?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I mean I…it’s hard to know when exactly, you know? You were right. It snuck up on me. But I know it was before then because of how I worried about you when I came to get you at that club. I mean, even before I knew how much trouble you were in. Just when Reese called and asked me to get you, I was worried. And that was…part of it. I wouldn’t’ve thought about it like that back then, but that’s what it was, you know?”

Finch doesn’t say anything. He just looks down at Fusco with this baffled, pink face.

Fusco looks back up at him, swallows thickly. “So, yeah. Before then.”

Maybe Finch feels like Fusco does, raw and overexposed, because when Fusco’s hands slide high up on his thigh, where his leg meets his hip, Finch looks away. Looks up, like the bathroom ceiling is so interesting. “It beggars belief,” he says.

Fusco squeezes hard, feels something pop, feels Finch take a sharp breath. “What?” he says. “What’s so hard to believe about that?”

“You were afraid of me,” Finch says. “Not without good reason. I didn’t always treat you warmly.”

“Hey. I mean. You had reasons for not liking me all that much. I can admit to that.”

Finch just murmurs very intently to the light fixture over their heads, “You would act as though you didn’t think of me at all, but you were scared to look at me. Even then, I could tell.”

Fusco rolls his shoulders. “You’re smart. I never knew what to say to you. But I mean, I liked you enough. I felt safer around you.”

“Compared to John,” Finch says, “I don’t know that that’s a very high bar.”

That's a true thing. "Safer" is one of those words that only works by comparison. Fusco hasn't felt actually safe for a long time. "Maybe," he says. "But I did. Even when you didn’t like me, you gave a damn. Like how you’d check in. Call me up and talk at me. Keep me on track and awake.” He lets his hands start to travel down again, inching finger by finger, squeeze by hard squeeze back down to Finch’s knee. “Even if you didn’t mean for it to be about checking in on me, it felt like it sometimes, to me. I don’t know. I liked that.”

Finch swallows slowly, lowers his eyes. “When I was having the jacket made,” he says. His voice is thick and hoarse. “I think that’s when it started for me. You made an enjoyable project. I thought…maybe I overthought you. What you’d like. What you’d need. What I wanted you to have.”

“You put that little pocket for the phone,” Fusco says, rubbing hard at the back of Finch’s knee, “right where you like me to keep it while you’re spying on me.”

“Yes,” Finch says. “Yes, I did.”

“Always thought that was funny.”

“Did you?”

“Mmhmm.” He’s quiet for a moment. “You know, I really like that jacket. I don’t remember if I ever said.”

An odd, broken little sound comes out of Finch, a sound Fusco can feel. One that prickles and tingles through Finch’s skin, through his muscle and his bones, and through Fusco, right down the back of his neck and in the center of his chest and in his teeth. An ache with a voice. Finch says, “You do?”

“Yeah,” Fusco says, feeling all warm and peculiar again. “I always did. It’s the best thing anybody’s ever given me.” He pushes the hair stuck to his forehead away with a wet hand. “You, uh, you want me to do the other leg?”

And then he’s being dragged close, Finch’s arms around the back of his head and pressing his face flat to Finch’s belly. At first, he thinks his head’s being pushed down, like Finch wants something, which Fusco’s a little alarmed by ‘cause he’s new to this whole thing and he’s not sure he’s up to sucking Finch’s cock underwater but after a few seconds, he realizes Finch isn’t pushing down. Finch is holding tight.

Finch takes tight, anxious little breaths and presses his face into the top of Fusco’s head and inhales deep and painful.

Fusco nuzzles deep into the soft of Finch’s wet, pale belly and lets his arms slink casually around Finch so he’s holding too. He’s holding back.

Finch’s next breath is long, trembling, satisfied.

For a long time, they simply hold and breathe. Finch rocks back and forth at one point, soothingly, but eventually even that comes to rest.

Finally, Finch lets go, sits up as if nothing happened. He cups his hands in the warm water, scoops up a bright, soapy handful, and pours it neatly over Fusco’s head.

Fusco blinks water out of his eyes. “What the hell?”

Finch is preoccupied, squeezing a glob of shampoo into his palm. “I’m washing your hair. Hold still.”

So he does. He folds his hands in his lap and kneels there between Finch’s legs while Finch scrubs deep and serious at his scalp. He blinks suds out of his eyes.

It’s something he always knew about Finch, that he was thorough. This is like anything else he does. He washes Fusco’s hair until it’s heavy with lather, curling limply around his fingers, and then scoops handful after handful of water over him until it’s clean. He takes Fusco by the arms and nudges upward enough that Fusco understands Finch wants him standing.

He gets up with a groan but it’s not as bad as he thinks it’s going to be. Warm water eased up the muscles in his legs, the ligaments in his knees, and he doesn’t creak like he might have. He stands, water dripping down his chest, down his neck, from his hair in clean streams while he waits.

Finch doesn’t look at him. Finch is kneading clear blue gel into a washcloth until it’s fat with white foam, faintly perfumed to smell of health and something like the mountains, like trees and clean air.

After the warmth of the water, the open air leaves a chill on his chest and shoulders. Fusco shivers, folds his arms. He waits.

After a moment, Finch stands up toe to toe with Fusco. He pauses, gives him this slow, lingering up-and-down glance that makes Fusco remember in an itchy, bone-deep way that all he’s wearing is water up to his hips, that he still looks like himself. He’d forgotten for a second. Suds from the washcloth drip, leave bubbly clouds on the surface of the water.

Fusco opens his mouth to say something, anything. Like, to apologize for himself yet again.

Finch just presses the washcloth against Fusco’s chest and starts to scrub in small, firm circles.

It’s a weird thing to stand still for. ‘Cause it’s intimate, ‘cause it tickles, ‘cause it makes Fusco feel dumb and helpless. But he tries to get into it a couple of times, tries to intercept the washcloth with his hands or take hold of Finch and do the same for him, and each time Finch catches Fusco’s hands and guides them back down to his sides and goes back to what he was doing, polishing sweat and blood off of Fusco’s body.

Fusco guesses it’s like the tailoring. That’s what this reminds him of, Finch measuring him up in that scummy hotel room, making Fusco stand perfectly still while Finch did stuff to him. Finch loved that. Even before Fusco understood what was going on, he knew Finch loved it. That’s what he likes: controlling, measuring, knowing.

Well, fine. Fine. Fusco’s not allowed to get involved, he can watch. Measure and know. So he watches Finch’s face and curious little movements as he cleans Fusco up.

He’s efficient, the way he moves. Maybe hurt does that to you, makes you do everything as quick and direct as possible just to get it over with. Except Finch doesn’t seem tired or taxed. Finch seems like he’s thrumming with energy. His look, his eyes and his brow and his serious little mouth, it’s all intent and driven. A pink, blotchy flush creeps over his cheeks and his chest. Maybe he’s getting hard. Tough to say. He looks like it, though.

He looks like a lot of things.

If this keeps happening between the two of them, like if this isn’t the last time they’re this close together without clothes on, Fusco wants to try a lot of things too. Wants to make Finch really tired, sticky and wrung out and relaxed. Wants to see Finch’s serious little mouth on his cock. Wants to let Finch take control as far as he wants, just to see where it brings them.

Under the water, Fusco’s dick is jutting, aching, and without missing a beat, Finch takes him in hand, closes warm wet cloth around him and gives him a few languid pumps. Finch makes his first eye contact with Fusco since the whole washing business started. A short, darting look, a flash of the light dancing in his eyes.

“Turn around,” Finch says.

“Turn around” turns out to be kind of a production, one that Finch guides with his hands on Fusco’s shoulders, because he wants Fusco’s back to him, but he also wants to trade places, so Fusco’s standing there facing that seat Finch languished on while Fusco rubbed down his legs.

Finch rubs his back now, still those firm little circles, side to side in orderly gridlines, neatly zigzagging down.

That’s with the one hand. The other hand lingers after, in the middle of Fusco’s back. It’s tracing, the ridges of bone, the soft waves of muscle under fat. Maybe Finch is writing with the tips of his fingers in the suds. Fusco doesn’t know. He shuts his eyes and shivers as Finch’s hands move, one in those neat, orderly rows, one in sleepy, light whorls, down to the small of his back.

Finch gives him a gentle push forward. “Kneel on the seat, please.”

Fusco lets his knees tap the edge of the seat, braces his hands on the lip of the tub, and climbs up. His arms quiver. His back straightens out under Finch’s fingers, which are spiderwalking deliberately down his spine. He takes a deep, gulping breath.

Finch touches Fusco’s hips, nudges back and upwards until Fusco’s ass is out of the water and Finch’s hands are moving firm on him. Not doing anything, exactly. Washing, maybe. Fusco can feel the knuckles and lines and rough patches on Finch’s left hand being deadened by soft washcloth. It’s all deadened, slick with soap, but it’s forcing him to kind of accept that Finch has strong hands. He keeps taking these possessive little handfuls of Fusco’s ass and squeezing real hard, until it hurts, until Fusco’s thinking about favorite parts again and whether or not Finch has any.

He squirms back into Finch’s palms and feels his ears go hot.

Finch gives Fusco’s ass a gentle parting squeeze and lets go, slides his arms around him. “Would you be so kind as to do me a favor?”

He swallows hard as Finch leans up flat behind him. He nods, mute.

A kiss taps his ear. “The blue bottle. There.”

Fusco sees it sitting on the bathroom floor by the edge of the tub, stately dark blue bottle, white label. He reaches for it.

Finch’s hands unclasp from the center of Fusco’s chest. He holds them cupped. “Pour me some?”

His fingers shake on the cap as he unscrews it. That smell escapes, the piney mountain scent. The stuff is white, though, smooth and creamy as it pours from the bottle and into Finch’s palm. “Smells nice,” he murmurs.

“Jasmine.” Finch smears the stuff over his fingers. “Balsam fir. It’s a conditioner. Not harsh or drying.”

“Oh.”

He lets one slick hand fall, tracing down Fusco’s side, over his hip. “It should do nicely.”

“Oh.”

Finch slips two of his slick fingers right there, right up against him, and lets them rub back and forth and okay, okay, it’s that kind of party.

Fusco goes white-knuckled on the edge of the tub.

Not that it hurts or anything. It doesn’t; it’s kinda nice. Nice in a way that makes Fusco bite the tip of his tongue, but that’s still nice. He’s just not used to it. He shuts his eyes, holds perfectly still.

“Relax,” Finch puffs against his ear. “You can move if you’d like.”

Fusco chokes back a deranged little giggle that tries to claw its way out of his mouth. He suppresses it, lets his hips twitch in rhythm with the movements of Finch’s hand in a way that he thinks will make him seem eager.

His heart thuds against his ribs.

Finch tucks up behind him, face buried in Fusco’s neck, hand still moving back and forth, still rubbing. “There,” he sighs. “That’s nice, isn’t it?”

Fusco shivers. He might relax whether he wants to or not.

Finch’s cheek is pressed to the nape of Fusco’s neck. “How are you? Tell me.”

He tries. He lets out this rough, stuttering wheeze instead.

“In words,” Finch says.

He gathers himself. “Good,” Fusco mumbles. “Real good.”

“’Real good,’” Finch repeats distastefully. “I was hoping for more detail.”

Fusco pants, scoots his legs further apart.

“I feel as though I should ask for a few more adjectives. A simile, perhaps.”

“Just do it,” Fusco mutters. “Don’t play around, okay? Just do it.”

Finch makes a soft, indulgent sound. “Very well.”

And Finch just insinuates a finger into him like it’s so goddamn easy.

There’s a thick, rich burn spreading over his thighs and between his legs. It doesn’t hurt, it’s just heat and unbearable sensitivity. A sudden rush of blood. Fusco’s ears start to ring.

Finch slides that finger in and out, a slow, rocking back and forth. Just trying to get Fusco used to the idea. Except Fusco isn’t used to the idea; Fusco’s heart is hammering and this thin, unsteady whine fills the air and it’s him, it’s coming out of him.

“Shhhhh.” Finch’s other hand rubs a little circle in the small of Fusco’s back. “That’s wonderful. You’re doing very well.”

Fusco’s watching his own hands, locked on the rim of the tub. He watches the knuckles on his big, rough hands, ivory white from strain.

“So well,” Finch says again. “Are you blushing? The back of your neck is red.”

He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know. Probably. His face burns.

“A lot of you,” Finch adds, “is red. I like that. I think it’s very sweet, the way you flush when you’re embarrassed. You did that when I was measuring you for the suit, when I had you strip down. Very pink and very agreeable. I’m not sure you knew at the time; I think you believed you maintained your poise brilliantly. Meanwhile, there I was trying to be professional and measure you for a suit when all the while I wanted to push you into bed and see you red all over.”

Fusco exhales so hard he feels like his lungs are bottoming out and this low, hoarse moan escapes. He’s terrified. His cock is so hard it hurts.

Finch asks, calmly, like they’re talking over coffee, “Do you think you could take another?”

He knows he can. Not that Fusco’s any kind of expert, but he figures this ought to hurt more than it does. It doesn’t really hurt at all. Finch just keeps sliding his finger in and out of him like it’s such an easy thing, smooth and simple, and Fusco knows with a kind of grim certainty that he’s going to take whatever Finch wants him to take.

Fusco tries to make a sound in the affirmative but his breath is ragged, his throat feels broken, so he just nods his head, rocks back against Finch’s hand like yeah, yeah, whatever you want.

Finch slips the second finger in slow and easy and it burns at first; it really does. At first. It’s a kind of a rough drag, one that draws sharp, mean fucking attention to the fact that something’s going into him before Finch smears on even more of that fucking conditioner stuff and then it’s just smooth and easy and still invasive, but it doesn’t burn. Shoving fingers straight, deep in him but it doesn’t hurt so that’s fine. That’s just peachy.

“We haven’t discussed this much,” Finch says, like this is a discussion, “so I’m not certain of what you like. I’m afraid I…well, I can’t right now.” Finch falters for a second before soldiering on. “But I have a few substitutes, if you’d like to try them. Beads. Vibration. Glass. I have a few plugs as well, if that’s the sort of thing you prefer…?”

Fusco lowers his head to the edge of the tub, lets his forehead rest against the cool tile of the bathroom floor. He holds tight. The back of his neck prickles.

“Unless…unless you’d rather not be too adventurous the first time? We can keep things simple, if that would help.” Finch sounds weird, tight of breath. Fusco suddenly feels Finch’s face pressed into his shoulder blade, the poke of his nose, the ridge of his cheekbone. “I would…it would make me very happy if I knew that you enjoyed this experience.”

“Jesus.” Fusco doesn’t mean to sound disgusted but he does a little. He realizes it when it bounces back to him against the tile. “Just do what you’re gonna do.”

Finch hesitates. “I want to do something you’ll like,” he says.

This dry, hacking laugh comes out of him, pained and mean. “I don’t know,” Fusco says, “what the fuck I like.”

Finch’s hand goes completely still. All of a sudden it’s quiet, this sad, hesitant, breathless silence. “You’ve never,” Finch says, very gently. He doesn’t try to finish the sentence, but Fusco can tell it’s not really a question. Just a quiet confirmation.

“I made you look away,” Finch says.

Fusco’s not sure what the fuck that’s supposed to mean. Finch just sounds like he lost a button off his coat, all sudden and bereft.

Finch pulls his fingers out of Fusco. His hand comes to rest on Fusco’s padded hip, just waiting for a while. Like he’s embarrassed. Like Finch has anything to be embarrassed about.

“It’s not that big of a deal,” Fusco groans into the tile.

Finch puts both hands on Fusco’s hips and pulls gently. “Turn over, please.”

Fusco lifts his head from the tile with a groan. “Not for nothing,” he says as he unfolds himself, slides his legs off the seat and rolls himself over into the sitting position that Finch’s tugging hands guide him into, “I might be new at some of this stuff but that doesn’t mean I’m new. I was married for 7 years. I have a kid, which is more than you can say. Probably,” he amends. There’s a lot he doesn’t know about Finch.

Seems like it’s a good call, though, because Finch is nodding when Fusco settles back onto the seat. “True. But I don’t see how that has any bearing on the situation.”

“I’m just saying, I’ve, uh, I’ve been around the block. You don’t have to be worrying about protecting my innocence or anything. You’re way too fucking late for that, you know?”

Softly, Finch says, “I know.”

Fusco studies his face. Flushed, big-eyed. Small, sad mouth. Fusco’s suddenly really conscious of how red his own face still is.

“I got nervous,” he admits. “Wasn’t bad, didn’t hurt or anything. I just don’t know too much about it.”

“You might have said something,” Finch murmurs.

“Well, yeah, I might’ve, but I got my pride, you know?” He cracks a rough, strained smile and Finch doesn’t smile, doesn’t frown. Gets sadder maybe, around the eyes. “I’m okay with it, really.”

“I don’t want you to feel as though you have to do something that frightens you.”

“Well. I mean. Tough, you know?” Fusco sits up sloshily. “I’m scared most of the time. This rates pretty low. I’ll get over it.”

Finch’s mouth pops open in protest, a scandalized little O. Fusco leans forward and kisses it. He catches Finch’s jaw in his palm and tries to reassure with that and the pressure of his lips.

Finch makes a sharp, annoyed sound that gradually flattens, softens, burrs into a hum of satisfaction. “You shouldn’t,” Finch whispers half-heartedly into the space that momentarily appears between their mouths, “feel obligated…”

“Shut up,” Fusco says, without much bite. “I wanna try it. Stop trying to talk me out of it.”

“If you don’t…,” Finch breathes, “…if you feel uncomfortable or you don’t like it…”

“I trust you.” Fusco grabs Finch’s wrist, tugs insistently. “C’mon. Get to it.”

“Patience,” Finch huffs. “Let me…” He drags at Fusco, tugs and rearranges, pulls his hips forward until he’s slouched in the seat, until he’s practically falling off. It’s an access thing, he guesses.

Finch comes close to him, tucks his face in Fusco’s throat. He whispers, “Hang on to something.”

Fusco rolls his eyes. “You’re fuckin’ full of it.” He wraps his arms around Finch, breathes slow and measured. There’s only the slightest break and quiver in his breathing when Finch’s fingers slide into him again. He’s a little more used to it, now.

And yeah, it’s definitely an access thing.

He decides straight off that he likes this new position. He likes Finch moving against him like this, the way it’s not just his hand; it’s his whole body going into every little push. Fusco folds his hands in the center of Finch’s back, right between his twitchy, hawkish shoulders, and rests and waits and feels.

Once you start getting used to it – and he is now, he thinks, now the initial panic is over with – it’s really kind of fine. He figures Finch could hurt him if it was something bigger than a couple of fingers, or if Finch moved his hand faster, but they aren’t and he isn’t, so it’s just this rhythmic pressure increasing and decreasing, stretching and receding. It’s okay. It’s really okay. He could let Finch do this to him for a while, he thinks, and it’d still be okay.

Finch seems to sense that, because after a long while just rubbing like that, he asks, “Are you feeling more comfortable?”

“Yeah.” His voice only bends a little bit, just when Finch pushes deep into him and he has to take a breath. “’M fine.”

“No pain?”

“Nah.”

Finch hesitates. “Let go of me, then, please.”

Fusco lets go right away, hands on the edge of the tub in seconds. “Sorry. You alright?”

Letting go gives him distance enough to see Finch, his hair messy, his ears ringed in pink, his gaze glinting and filthy. “I’m fine,” Finch reassures. “I just wanted to watch your face.”

And then he feels Finch’s fingers curl inside of him.

He chokes on air, hears his fingers squeak wetly on the edge of the tub.

He knows what he’s feeling, in an abstract kind of way. He’s been to a few doctor’s appointments; he knows what this is.

Never felt like this, though.

Probably, it’s because he’s hard, because Finch seems to know what he’s doing, because Finch watches Fusco’s face and he’s got this look, like it’s funny, like it’s precious. There’s warmth spreading, pooling in his groin, along his thighs and belly. Finch’s fingers relax and curl again, slowly stroke across Fusco’s prostate, firm and deliberate, and he quivers, lets his head drop back.

This is nice, he thinks, desperately.

“That’s lovely,” Finch murmurs, “isn’t it?”

He shivers mutely. His legs tense.

“Gently, gently.” Finch pats his thigh with his other hand. “Is it too much?”

Fusco shakes his head from side to side until Finch’s hand comes up and cradles his face into stillness.

“Breathe,” he orders, and Fusco does – deep, gasping, sighing breaths. He lets his knees part further, scoots his hips down to meet the movements of Finch’s hand. It’s a slow, firm circle: gentle, passing tickle to solid pressure that dials back just before it becomes too much and he feels himself going achingly hard. He presses his face into Finch’s free hand, mouth to palm, and he groans.

“Can I…” Fusco says, voice muffled, tongue tasting salt, “…can I touch…?”

Finch hesitates. “You can,” he says, tone guarded, “but I’d rather you didn’t.”

Fusco blinks at him. “Yeah?”

Finch teeters, unsure, for a moment. “I don’t want to say no to you,” he says. “Will you wait? Only a little while longer? I don’t want it to be over just yet.”

He drinks Finch in for a long moment. Water dapples his soft skin and mashes his hair to his forehead. Without his glasses, his eyes seem huge and dark and wanting. His fingers still move kind, firm circles inside of Fusco.

Finch wants to keep doing this a little while longer.

Fusco’s hands twitch, but they stay where they are.

Finch licks his lips. “Thank you. I’ll tell you when.”

“Thanks,” Fusco mutters thickly, and then there’s Finch teasing him hard and Fusco’s head tips back until it’s flat on the floor, eyes locked on the ceiling, whole body open and given up to warmth.

He’s warm everywhere now, warm and pleasantly weightless and strangely paralyzed. He doesn’t wanna move yet, not exactly. He wants Finch to keep doing whatever he wants to do. That’s been a good plan, so far.

“I feel a little peculiar, enjoying this the way I do.” He feels Finch come closer to him, feels the pressure from his fingers become more direct, feels kisses pattering on his chest. “I doubt it means much of anything that you’ve never had this done to you before. Only that you’ve never been interested in trying it, or you never had the opportunity. Nothing of any significance, but I…like this. That I’m the first you’ve ever shared this with. Your face and the sweet little sounds you make and how good you’re being.” Finch pushes down hard and Fusco groans, knocks his head back into the tile, pulses his hips gently. “I want to try this later, in a bed with you, if you’ll let me. Because there’s so much you’re missing like this. You’re dripping right now; your cock jumps every time I move my fingers and I don’t think you even know it.”

Fusco whines, tries to rub his face against Finch’s hand only to find it’s not there. It’s pressing hard in the center of his chest, holding him still. He feels a weightlessness, a deep itch, a rising sensation.

Finch’s hot breath puffs against his ear. “I’d like to see you like this in my bed, all stretched out on the sheets. Do you think you’d like being tied to my bed? You wouldn’t have to try so hard to hold still. You could squirm as much as you wanted and I would take such good care of you.”

“Jesus.” He jerks, arcs backwards, and collapses when his feet slip against the bottom of the tub and he’s too weak-legged to find his footing. He’s gasps, twitches, clenches around Finch’s bent fingers and he knows, he knows he’s about to come. He’s teetering just there on the edge and he should be falling now, now, now?

Finch peers down at him, studying Fusco’s wet eyes and confused, sweaty, reddened face, and Fusco kinda wishes they’d never changed position. He doesn’t want anyone looking at him right now, not while his face is twisted up like this. Not in the way Finch looks at him, like this is a rich and beautiful experience and it hangs on Fusco, somehow. Which is wrong because it hangs on Finch; it always has.

Fusco tries to sit up, drops back with a groan when strange, sharp pleasure knifes through him. He tries again. Finch leans in, catches the bend of Fusco’s jaw in his free hand, asks him “What’s wrong?” and that brings him close enough that Fusco can nuzzle close and kiss him easy.

He never gets a chance to touch his own dick. They’re in the middle of it, Finch still diligently working his fingers inside of Fusco and Fusco gripping at Finch’s shoulders and kissing Finch like Fusco’s drowning and Finch is air, when Finch lets his hand trail down over Fusco’s throat, his pounding chest, and casually catches a nipple between his thumb and forefinger. Fusco bucks hard, snarls into the soft push of Finch’s lips, and then Fusco’s coming and he doesn’t know or see or feel anything, just a sharp peak and the most amazing fall.

When he’s back in himself again, he is shaking. Finch makes soothing sounds and puts his arms around Fusco. They sway for a time and Fusco goes along with it, rocking lazily as he’s pulled one way, then the other.

“I’m sorry,” Finch mutters into his chest, “if I overstepped my bounds.”

Fusco opens his mouth, finds his tongue dry and clumsy. “You didn’t.”

Finch rubs his face against Fusco’s chest, like he’s trying to burrow in behind his breastbone. “I think I try to control too much, sometimes.”

“Yeah,” Fusco admits, “yeah, maybe.”

“I’m sorry I wouldn’t let you touch yourself. That was selfish of me.”

Fusco shrugs. “Not your fault. I got overexcited. I woulda got around to it before long.”

Finch’s wet hand grazes the nape of his neck and ruffles his hair fondly. “Can you stand?”

Fusco finally looks down at the top of Finch’s head, the way their bodies drape together in the cooling bathwater. “Gimme a sec? I’m still a little weak in the knee.”

Finch colors slightly. “Take as long as you need.”

“Not too long,” Fusco says, cautiously putting his own hand on top of the peaks of Finch’s hair and gently smushing them down. “It’s getting cold in here.”

All the same, he lets Finch hang onto him for a while.

 

---

 

He wakes to a shrill warbling that is an alarm, but not his alarm, or a ringtone, but not his ringtone, and Fusco lashes out with one clumsy paw for the phone lighting up on the bedside table and jams the plastic receiver into the side of his face.

Finch says, very coolly, “Yes?” and Fusco’s about to read him the riot act because motherfucker, you called me before he remembers that it’s Finch’s house, not his, and Fusco hasn’t had a landline since he moved out of his wife’s place. Which makes this Finch’s phone.

Where the hell is Finch? Fusco gives the bed a bleary once-over. Himself, naked, wrapped in a blanket. Some stray clothes. A rumpled comforter. No Finch.

Fusco’s dumb, sleepy brain finally puts it together. Somebody’s calling Finch on Finch’s home line. Finch is somewhere else in the house. Finch picked up the phone. Fusco just happened to pick up the phone at the exact same time. Fusco is listening in on Finch’s private phone calls.

He chews his lower lip. He should hang up.

Payback, though.

He should really hang up.

He’s still weighing pros and cons when the caller starts talking. Kinda. Starts talking kinda.

It’s not a person talking to Finch. It’s a tinny electronic voice, like they use for school cancellations and doctor’s appointments. A paint-by-numbers kind of voice. A voice like an audio ransom note, every word- sometimes individual syllables – spoken by different people. Men, women, all different inflections and accents, like the words were never meant to stand together. At first, it’s too weird to understand.

Even once Fusco gets past that, it’s too weird to understand. It’s just words strung together – reliance, memory, indigo, dolphin – and there’s no sentence, no meaning. It’s just nonsense.

Except it’s Finch, so it’s not nonsense. It’s just a code Fusco doesn’t have the key to.

Quickly, too quickly for Fusco to really get a handle on any of it, the voice stops speaking and it’s all quiet on the line.

“Thank you,” Finch says. He hangs up with a forceful click.

Fusco just sits there, mouthpiece of the phone smushed into his cheek. Fusco’s learned a lot about Finch the past few months, stuff that maybe no one else knows. And some of it he’s learned by watching and listening and keeping sharp, but Fusco’s not so up his own ass that he doesn’t think Finch lets him see things sometimes. Sometimes Finch shows his hand, just for a second.

Fusco is close to 100% sure that he wasn’t supposed to hear any of that, whatever it was.

Not that Fusco can do anything with that information. He doesn’t know what he heard. Maybe he has some ideas but, you know, ideas grow on trees. Good or lousy, they grow on trees. Doesn’t mean shit if you can’t put ‘em into practice. Fusco can’t and won’t, so who cares.

Not that Finch doesn’t definitely know stuff about Fusco that Fusco never wanted him to know.

So what does it matter, really?

A sound on the line catches Fusco’s attention, a soft whoosh and buzz, like waves on sand. Like an electric cough. He’d assumed that the call was over just because Finch hung up and nobody was talking, but this is a landline. There should be a dial tone. There isn’t.

Finch’s caller, the Franken-voice thing, is still on the line.

Maybe because Fusco is. Maybe it’s up to him to end the call.

He listens. He can hear it. He’d almost say he could hear it breathing, but that’s stupid and he can’t. It’s just weird, restless little sounds, buzzing and bursts of static and sharp pitches. No more strange, disconnected voice.

It’s nothing. Just feedback and whatever weird noises call center robots make on their off time, and Fusco feels so stupid but there’s presence to it, presence and weight, like a person. This thing just called Finch up and said something to him in code and Finch understood it, and now Fusco’s on the phone with it. What could he ask it? What would it answer, if it could? Would he even understand it?

Fusco pinches the tip of his tongue between his teeth. The restless, fussy quiet on the end of the line reminds him of Finch a little bit, not speaking, just watching and learning and making a careful judgment. He hears feedback from his own breath wash back in his ears and wonders if there’s something similar going on at the end of the line, some robot keeping quiet and wondering who the sicko breathing into the phone is and why he won’t hang up.

This is stupid.

“Goodbye,” it chirps.

Fusco jumps like an idiot because there’s no intake of breath in front of the speech, no warning. Just a little word floating in nothing. “Jesus Christ,” he murmurs. “You dumb thing; you scared the shit out of me.”

It says, “Goodbye, detective.”

It hangs up like Finch does, a neat, decisive click.

Chapter 28

It’s an unfamiliar phone. It takes some circular fumbling before Fusco’s thumb finds the button to hang up. He rests it gently back in the cradle on the bedside table. He watches it for a while, all white plastic and steady green light and wrong, because it’s not old and classic enough or smooth and new enough to be something Finch would like.

He stares at the phone for a long time. There’s a little digital clock set into its receiver and Fusco watches the minutes pass, hypnotized. Nothing changes.

Finally, Fusco sits up in bed.

He takes a slow, deep breath. He rubs his palms together like he’s trying to warm his hands over a radiator.

Fusco isn’t as dumb as some people think he is. He’s not even as dumb as he tells himself he is, sometimes. He didn’t get that detective’s badge out of a box of Cracker Jack; he earned it ‘cause he’s good at this shit. Solving puzzles. Knowing people.

Fusco doesn’t even know where to start.

The first thing he thinks of is numbers stations. He’s heard about them a couple of times. Holdovers from the Cold War, lists of numbers read out into nothing. That’s what the voice on the phone with its string of nonsense words reminds him of.

It’s not a useful thing to remember.

Fusco draws his knees up to his chest. He sticks his thumbnail between his teeth and worries at it, a habit he thought he left behind in grade school.

There’s nothing to go on. Just a Frankenstein voice on the line.

He thinks maybe he’s not equipped to understand what just happened on his own. Like, that was something specialized and bizarre and not for him. Something just for Finch and he happened to get in the way.

Fusco guesses he could ask Finch about it. But then, Finch almost moved because Fusco found out where his house was. Not even his real house, his spare house that he doesn’t give a shit about. That’s nothing. This is something else. Something enormous.

Numbly, he crawls out of bed. He finds his underwear in the bathroom, his jeans halfway under the bed, his jacket crumpled under the top sheet. No shirt. Fusco shakes out the covers and everything. Finally he gives up and just puts on the underwear.

The silence in the house has a less forbidding feeling to it, less sterile and haunted, more like a morning when you wake up and snow's thick on the ground, muting everything, and you don't have anyplace to be, so you stay under the covers a little longer than you need to.

Chalk it up to perspective, Fusco guesses.

He creaks his way down the stairs and feels the bones in his feet resettling with every step. The boards are warm. Finch must've turned the heat on.

He only has to search for Finch a little while. The empty kitchen has an unboxed kettle on the stove and it's still got little curls of steam peeling off it. Fusco can hear the sounds of gentle tapping from the living room.

The dustcover that was on the couch is lying on the floor, bundled up with no particular care. Finch cranes into his laptop screen, tongue caught thoughtful between his teeth, totally absorbed. He's got his feet up on the coffee table next to a beige plastic phone receiver and a stained and reused mug of tea.

He looks drowned in Fusco's Springsteen shirt. The natural shoulders fall almost to his elbows.

It takes Finch a little while to realize he’s not alone. He startles, turns. Immediately, his face relaxes.

Finch beams up at Fusco like he’s precious, like he’s so damn happy to see Fusco, like Fusco’s not some schlub in his underwear who spies on Finch’s calls and stomps on his hospitality.

“You’re up,” Finch says, setting his laptop aside.

Fusco almost chokes on sharpness in his throat, fear and so many questions. He swallows. “Nice shirt.”

Finch peers down through his glasses and plucks at the shirt's hem. “Yes, I thought it might suit me.”

Fusco takes a few uneasy steps toward him. “I think it’s mine.”

“I think you’ll find,” Finch says, drawing up haughtily, a small playful light glittering in his eyes, “that by right of experience, it’s as much mine as it is y - ”

And then Fusco has him by the front of the shirt and he’s pulling Finch close to him and for a second he wants to shout at Finch, shake him, because that thing on the phone wasn’t a person, but it knew who Fusco was and Finch spoke to it like a lackey. His heart thrums in his chest and he wants answers and then Finch wraps his arms around Fusco’s neck with dreamy ease and starts giving him these slow, lazy, mouthfucking kisses, all wet tongue and heat. Fusco’s brain stutters to a stop and he bunches the familiar material of his shirt in his hands as Finch pulls him forward and down.

He settles on top of Finch like it’s the most natural thing in the world. He’d be worried; he’d be really worried, except Finch keeps pulling at him, urging him down. Fusco lets himself be pulled, but braces his palms on the couch cushion and anticipates having to push himself up and off to keep from snapping Finch’s bones.

“Mmmph,” Finch sighs, sounding not at all crushed. He breaks the kiss and blinks up at Fusco with sly, heavy-lidded eyes. “How long have you been awake?”

He only hesitates for a second. “Not too long.” He reaches down to grab at the hem of the shirt where it falls by Finch’s upper thigh, just under his ass. He starts to pull it up. “Started wondering where you were. Thought I’d come find you.”

 “As you can see, I didn’t go far.” Finch squirms as Fusco’s nails rake his side, lets his hands trace down Fusco’s back. “I’m sorry if I worried you. Perhaps I should have stayed.”

Fusco presses his face into Finch’s throat and rubs his cheek, rough with two days of stubble, against the pale, sensitive skin. “Nah.”

Finch gasps, tilts his head to give Fusco access. “It’s just that I didn’t want to disturb you while I was working.” Finch’s fingertips slide under the elastic of Fusco’s underwear.

“’S fine,” he mumbles into Finch’s neck. Finch has stubble too; he can feel it when his face grazes Finch’s jawline. It’s nice. Kind of a light prickling. “Work’s important.”

Finch clears his throat. “Speaking of work…”

Fusco stops rubbing his cheek feverishly against Finch’s. “Yeah?”

His hands creep guiltily back up to Fusco’s shoulders. “I hate to put a stop to this,” he says, sounding like he really does, like he’s so, so sorry, “but I’m afraid something’s come up.”

Fusco’s heart thumps. A thousand worst-case scenarios fly through his head all at once and he’s clambering off Finch in an instant, ready to run upstairs and get his pants back. “Shit. Shit. Is Carter okay? Are the charges not sticking? Did Bricker back out? ‘Cause give me a couple hours and I can talk him back into it, believe you me...”

Finch, mussed and pink beneath him, sits up and grabs his arm. “Oh, no, no, no. Detective, everything is fine. Detective Carter is fine. Everything is proceeding to plan. Please sit back down.”

Fusco takes a deep breath, obeys.

Finch’s eyes are round and apologetic. “I’m so sorry. I never dreamed you’d take it that way.”

“’S fine,” Fusco says as his heart gives a few last, vicious pulses before settling into something more regular. “I’m a little paranoid, maybe.”

“You’re entitled to that,” Finch says, gently. “No, this is a completely unrelated case. Utterly ordinary. Business as usual.”

“As usual,” Fusco repeats numbly. He paws at his tired eyes. “God, you make that sound so good.”

Finch pets Fusco’s thick arm, his shoulder, his back. “I am rather excited to return to a more erratic schedule, if that makes any kind of sense,” he says. “In any case, I’ve just received a call regarding our next…” He pauses, like he’s genuinely unsure of what word to use. “…Client,” he decides. “And I really must be going.”

The words he says next need to be very well chosen. “Sure,” Fusco says, nodding away. “Was that just now?”

For the first time, something like a thin spiderweb crack appears in Finch’s early morning ease. Carefully, he says, “Yes. Just now.”

Fusco grunts. “Figures. I’m pretty sure your Batphone was what woke me up.” Fusco sits upright on the couch and stretches his arms up over his head with a long groan, eyes shut save for the crack he uses to watch the trace amounts of suspicion clear from Finch’s face.  He feels his back pop in a nasty way. “Ugh. Christ. You need me on this one?”

When he looks again, Finch’s mouth is open, aghast. “I need you to get some more rest, Detective.” He closes his laptop and rises from the couch. “Mr. Reese and I will handle this one on our own.”

“More rest?” He scoffs. “I’m pretty sure I just slept twelve hours straight.”

Finch hikes the hem of the shirt up to his stomach. Kissed that last night, Fusco thinks in a dim, satisfied way. “Closer to ten,” Finch corrects. “Not that it matters.” His head disappears, reemerges as he pulls the shirt off. “You’ve just experienced serious trauma…”

Fusco lets himself smile as sleazily, as shit-eatingly wide as he can manage. “Is that what you call it?”

Finch whips the shirt at Fusco’s face. “Stop it. You were nearly killed and you need to take a break. Don’t argue.”

He peels his own shirt off his face. It’s warm from the dryer, smells like Finch and laundry detergent. Got my shirt back, he thinks, like a scavenger. I can leave. He shivers, yanks his shirt back on. “You know,” he tells Finch, “people don’t stop getting killed just ‘cause I’m on vacation.”

“I know, Detective.” His voice is cold. “I’m painfully aware.”

Fusco’s voice buckles inside of him, becomes a leaden, hard-edged thing. He looks up to find Finch looking solemn, slightly wounded. Finch worries about things a lot, he realizes. “Sorry,” he says, too quickly. “Listen, I promise I’ll rest up, but if shit gets bad, swear you’ll call me?”

Finch hesitates.

“Or even if it just gets tough. I don’t need to get out of bed to make a phone call or help you rule out a bunch of people on a list, okay? I wanna make myself useful.”

Finch nods slowly. “I understand. And I promise. If today’s adventure goes very, very badly, and a second pair of hands – or eyes, as the case may be – are all that stand between me and certain death, I will certainly not hesitate to call you. But it won’t reach that point,” he insists. “Believe it or not, we do manage without you on occasion.”

Fusco grins. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Finch repeats. He takes a few steps out of the living room, hesitates in the doorway. He tacks on, shyly. “Just because I’m going to have to go out for the day, it doesn’t mean…you needn’t…that is, you may stay here, if you’d like. For, ah, for today.” Flushing deeply, looking at the floor, he continues, “If all goes well, I could be back within a few hours.”

When Finch looks up, he’s almost glowing. Finch does that sometimes, with his whole sweet, weird face. His eyes twinkle and his cheeks flush and he’ll have this perfect, content smile on his face, very small and very bright. Sometimes it snatches the breath out of Fusco.

And he imagines, like he thinks Finch is imagining, a world where this house belongs to the both of them. One where Fusco has his own key, maybe. His own drawer in the huge dresser, his own section of the walk-in closet. His beer in the fridge and his coffee in the cupboard. One where Fusco comes back sore and complaining from the precinct, takes a shower and crawls between the sheets and waits for Finch to walk in the door and climb in beside him. A world where they’re at home here.

Fusco shakes his head. “Nah. I should probably get home. I haven’t taken a good look at my apartment since I left, but I’m pretty sure it’s still a crime scene. Better take care of that.”

Finch only looks hurt for a second before he gets his face back under control. “Mmmh. Perhaps you should.”

“Yeah. But, uh, but you should call me, though. I mean, whenever.”

Finch sighs. “Detective, I recognize your worth as an asset, but I’m really not planning to call you in on assignment for at least a week unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

He plucks the front of his shirt. “Yeah, yeah, I know. That’s not what I mean. Just, uh, you know.” Fusco looks up. “Call me. When you get the chance.”

Finch’s color rises. “Oh.”

Fusco gives him a once-over. “So, you planning to go save lives in your birthday suit or what?”

“Certainly not. I’ll go get dressed.”

They don’t get dressed together, exactly, because they have their own things going on. Finch has about fifty pounds of equipment to gather and Fusco just wants to put clothes on and stay out of his way. Still, they lap each other, moment to moment. Fusco passes Finch on the way up the stairs, hunts down his jeans and his socks while Finch limps to the guest bedroom and brings back a hanger and suit wrapped in plastic. Fusco’s brushing his teeth in front of the bathroom mirror when Finch bullies him aside and casually shaves his own face with a straight razor.

Fusco just asks, “Really?”

“Sometimes,” Finch says, jaw tense, “the old ways are the best ways.”

“You’re unreal, you know that?”

Finch preens silently in the mirror, foam-streaked cheeks glowing.

Downstairs, Fusco leans on the kitchen counter and downs a glass of water, slow and serious, and watches while Finch, now professorial and prickly and slightly shabby in an old but still pretty nice tweed suit, packs laptops and hard-drives and flashdrives and thick wads of paper into a rolling suitcase. Not that he’s being lazy on purpose. He offered to help. Finch turned him down.

“Will you need anything for the pain?” Finch asks anxiously. “I might be able to give you something.”

“Nah, I’ll be fine.”

“You’re sure?”

Fusco nods, touches tender spots on his face. “Barely registers. I’ll take an Advil and sack out on the couch. Quit worrying.”

“I wish you wouldn’t sleep on that couch,” Finch frets. “It’s very old and I doubt it provides much support for your back.”

Fusco adjusts the jacket bunched under his arm. “Don’t you have to go to work or something?”

“Of course,” Finch murmurs. He takes a quick inventory of everything he just stuffed in the suitcase and closes the lid with a perfunctory zip. “I’m ready now.”

Fusco walks with him to the door. “You need me to drive you anywhere?”

“No, thank you,” Finch says as he toes on his loafers. “My ride is arranged.”

Fusco wrenches his feet into his sneakers. “Anything else I can do?”

“I really don’t think so.”

“At least let me take that suitcase down the front steps for you.”

Finch lets him do that. Concern for the equipment trumps whatever stand Finch is taking against letting Fusco do anything.

“I’ll call you,” Finch says as Fusco lowers the suitcase gently onto the sidewalk, “when I can.”

“Sure.” Fusco shivers in the cool air and puts his jacket on. It’s bright out here, warm orange light. Looks like afternoon. It might be afternoon. What day is it? “Listen, are you sure…?”

“Yes, Lionel.” Finch’s indulgent tones sharpen into something a little more harried. “I am absolutely sure. I know you’d rather be working, but I, Detective Carter, and – I’m certain – the rest of your friends at the NYPD would rather you take the time to heal yourself. Or stay out of their illegal business. Either way, go rest. I’ll call you. Or you may call me. Either is acceptable. Go. Shoo.” Finch waves toward Fusco’s car.

Fusco grins at him, stuffs his cold-chapped hands in his pockets. “Thanks for havin’ me.”

Finch softens immediately. “Oh. Oh, of course. Thank you for…for coming to me. When you needed a place to stay.”

“Hey, I mean.” He shrugs. “It was you or a hotel.”

“I can only hope that my home met the lofty standards set by the Holiday Inn Express.”

Fusco chuckles. “But really,” he says. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” Finch pauses, reaches into an inside pocket of his coat and rummages. “Here. If you’re so desperate for something to do…” and here he pulls out a small paperback book and offers it to Fusco. “…you could do a good deal worse than Cat’s Cradle.”

Quietly, Fusco takes it from him. He examines the cover: blue hands, orange sun, green island. “This isn’t a special one,” he asks, “is it?”

“Not particularly,” Finch says. “I think I was bored at the airport.”

“Okay.” Fusco turns it over in his hands, feels himself beaming stupidly. “I’m gonna read this,” he says, tapping fingers on the cover. “For real. Might take me a while, but I will.”

“I believe you.”

They’re silent for a moment on the sidewalk by Fusco’s car, the two of them tamping down smiles. Finch says “Well…” and takes a hesitant step toward Fusco, but freezes, hands half-outstretched, smile fading. Unsure of what to do.

Fusco leans in, takes Finch’s face in his hands, and gives him a gentle kiss on the mouth. “See you later,” he says. “Okay?”

Finch touches Fusco’s wrists, Fusco’s hands, and cradles them to his cheeks. He nods. “I will see you very soon.”

They separate. Finch takes the handle on the suitcase and Fusco reaches for his car door.

“Stay out of trouble,” Fusco calls after Finch’s retreating back.

“Detective,” he says, “I will do no such thing.”

Fusco watches Finch walk away from him, prim and straight-backed, suitcase dogging his heels, until Finch disappears around the corner. Only then does he climb into his car and put the key in the ignition.

The interior of his car is close. It smells like trapped air and old cigarettes and grease from his last fast food run. The heater rattles and it takes a while to warm up.

By the time he’s pulling away from the curb, the warmth from Finch’s hands is already fading. Now that he’s alone, it’s harder to ignore his suspicions.

He lets his car creep to the end of the street until Finch is visible again, a thin gray dash moving up the sidewalk. The street is one way, moving to the left. If Fusco takes this road, it will bring him up alongside Finch, moving in the same direction.

Instead he crosses, turns right on the next street.

He doesn’t need this now. He doesn’t need to be spying; he needs to go home and keep his stupid mouth shut.

All the way back to his apartment, he studies road signs and traffic signals like they’re scripture. Anything to get out of thinking.

 

---

 

 

The lock on his door is broken. He wants to blame that on the gray-eyed man, but he can’t. The gray-eyed man picked the lock so subtly that Fusco didn’t even notice. Carter was the one who bashed the door in. Can’t get mad about that.

Fusco guesses, in a roundabout way, he can still blame the gray-eyed man for the door. If he hadn’t broken in and held Fusco at gunpoint, Carter never would have needed to break in. Fusco could’ve let her in, they could’ve had a nice dinner, and nobody had to shoot anybody.

Then again, Fusco’s glad somebody got shot. Not so much that he had to get beaten and choked and terrified, but knowing that that fucking guy’s been wiped off the face of the earth is bringing Fusco peace of mind already.

Anyway, if nobody got shot and he and Carter just had a nice dinner, that would’ve been that and he never would’ve gone to find Finch. Fusco’s glad for that. Looking at it that way, he’s really happy that shook out the way it did.

Maybe things work out eventually. Karma or whatever. Fuck it. He shoves the door open.

You kinda can’t tell there was anything wrong just from how his living room looks. It’s better than usual, really, because he tidied up for Carter to come over just before. The only telltale signs something happened are in the carpet, dirty footprints in and out and little fragments of pale wood ground deep into the carpet from where the edge of the door shattered. It’s kind of OK.

He checks his little kitchenette. Normal. Some of the leftovers got abandoned on the table, so he’ll have to take care of that soon, but that’s no problem. Suit’s still draped over the counter in its crinkling plastic sheath. There’s a business card tacked to the fridge, the card for the cleaning service that they pass out to the families of victims. Decon people, to clean up the blood so you don’t have to.

The blood is only in his bedroom, a deep, rusty bloom on the beige carpet. It’s not as bad as he thought it would be. Bigger than he thought, though. He guesses that guy kept pumping out blood for a little while after Fusco left the room, so that makes sense. Okay.

Fusco takes a few steps forward, brown tips of broken glass crunching underfoot. He crouches down, peers into this dark stain marking where somebody died in his home, and he doesn’t really feel anything. Just that it’s got a smell to it, heavy and metallic, and he’s probably not getting his deposit back.

Okay. Fusco slaps his palms against his knees, rises out of the crouch with a groan. Okay, so he can’t live with this on the floor next to where he sleeps. He gets up and goes back to the kitchen.

He throws the leftovers in the trash. Same with the card for the decon people. No reason to call those guys. Fusco’s not attached to the person who did the bleeding and the assumption that Fusco doesn’t know how to get rid of a bloodstain on the carpet is almost an insult at this point. Of course he can. He’s a grown goddamn man.

He finds steel wool under the sink, mixes water and dish detergent in a bowl and finds a rag that’s old enough he doesn’t mind throwing it away. While he’s down there, he finds a box like a Kleenex dispenser, full of blue latex gloves. He grabs a pair. Might as well.

Soon his room is full of the soothing thrum of the vacuum, the satisfying click-click-click of broken glass sucked into the hose, the smooth expanse of carpet.

When he thinks it’s clean enough that he won’t cut himself, he trundles the vacuum off to one side and gets down on his knees.

What you do for blood in carpets is, what you can’t soak up right away, you let dry. Time already turned it into a thick red-brown crust. Fusco chips away at it with steel wool from the kitchen. It’s slow work, tedious. Makes his mind wander.

That thing on the phone.

It’s not his business. Fusco’s smart enough to know that at least. If there was ever a keep-your-head-down-and-shut-up moment, this is it.

But what was that?

It couldn’t have been a person, right? Fusco knows there are ways to electronically warp and muffle the sound of your voice, but this was something else. A bunch of voices, clear and ordinary voices, all pieced together to make words and sentences. You’d have to make that ahead of time, pick and choose your soundbites. You could put together your code, but you wouldn’t be able to improvise, to say goodbye to someone you couldn’t have known would be on the line.

How did it know that Fusco was on the line?

He runs the vacuum again.

The bloodstain is less dark, less threatening. A grainy, red-brown sunset on the carpet. Fusco wets the rag in the dish soap mixture and starts to dab at the stain.

Even if it was a person, how would it know?

So. So, alright. Not a person, because a person couldn’t sound like that. Not a recording, either, because a recording couldn’t react to Fusco being there. So…

He scrubs at the carpet.

Whatever it was, whatever it was saying, it was telling Finch about somebody in trouble.

Or somebody making trouble. He remembers something Carter said, something true: Reese and Finch never seem to know who’s making trouble, who needs help. They just give names pulled from thin air.

Names their source gives them.

He scrubs until the carpet is nearly pristine except for a wide, faintly brown, almost-invisible smear.

Then he calls Carter.

She does not say “Hello.” She says, “Go back to bed.”

“I’ve barely been outta bed for the past day and a half,” he says, which is technically true. “Hear me out.”

“Fine.” Then, gentler, “How are you?”

He thinks about it. “Better.”

“How’s your face?”

“Bad.” He reconsiders. “Not too bad.”

“Need a doctor?”

“I’m pulling through.” He sits down heavily on his bed and the springs creak and grind.

“Where are you?”

“Home,” he says. “I’m at home again.”

She makes a small, tense sound. “Don’t you think it’s a little early for that?”

Fusco falls back, stares up at the cracking plaster ceiling. “Nah. It’s not really bothering me.”

“So…did you just want to shoot the shit, or…?” with the “because I’m trying to run an investigation here” remaining unspoken.

“Nah, no, I know you’re busy. I’m just…I’ve been thinking about some stuff and I want to run it by you.”

He hears her quiet adjustments, the rustle of her hair and her coat. “…Uh huh?” She sounds like she’s bracing for impact.

 “So, I guess…” He starts, hesitates. “I guess you know. Or maybe you don’t, but you should know, because things might get weird from here on in. I spent yesterday at Finch’s place. I, uh, don’t need to talk about that part. Don’t worry.”

“Fine by me,” she says, still sounding edgy, like she can’t quite believe she dodged the bullet of having to talk about Fusco’s feelings.

“But while I was there, I, um. I listened in on a phone call.”

“Lionel.”

“Oh, like you wouldn’t’ve.” He chews his lip. “It was an accident anyway. Mostly.”

“What did you hear?”

As best as he can, he tells her.

By the time he finishes, Carter is so stonily silent he thinks she might’ve hung up.

“Carter?”

“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, I’m here.”

“What do you think?” He just wants somebody to give him a reasonable explanation, something simple and easy.

“Are you sure it wasn’t a person?”

“Positive,” he says, with confidence he doesn’t have. “It just…didn’t feel right.”

“Didn’t feel right how?”

“I mean, just the way it was…the way it was made. All those voices stitched together. It didn’t seem like something a person could do off the cuff. It seemed like…like some kind of automated calling system. You know, like they record all of these different tiny sounds so they can be rearranged to say anything. Except…”

“Except it talked to you.”

“Yeah.” He thinks. “More than that. It knew I was there. It knew who I was. Even if it was a person, it couldn’t have known that I was there.”

Carter makes low, thoughtful sounds of agreement. “So if it isn’t a person and it isn’t a recording…”

“Right.” He’s chewing his nail again. “You’re where I am.” He tenses for a moment. “Maybe it’s something in-between. Not a recording, more adaptable than that. Like…”

Fusco can’t find the words. He wishes he was better with computers, that he knew anything about them.

Finch, it seems, knows everything.

He is hit with an odd, panicky tightness in his chest and throat, fear that soon, once the excitement wears off, he and Finch won’t have anything to say to each other.

“A program,” Carter says, finishing his thought. “Something that can adapt to different situations. To you.”

 “Right.” Only it doesn’t feel right. It seems more complicated than that.

Carter thinks so too. “That’s a pretty specific thing to make a recording react to,” she says.

“And it still doesn’t explain how it knew I was there.”

“No.”

They share a heavy, uncomfortable silence, neither one of them able to think of a goddamn thing.

Fusco says, “I was in an interview once with a guy they brought in for throwing a drink at a squad car.” Then, he shuts his trap.

“Yes?”

“Never mind. It’s nothing.”

“Finish the story,” she says. “At least.”

“Not much to tell, really,” he says. “We were short-handed that day. I wasn’t one of the arresting officers or anything, but I sat with the guy a while. Trying to see what his deal was. He said he got himself arrested on purpose. And he told me this long – really long – story about this theory he had. He thought that somebody – I dunno who, the government, I guess – built this surveillance system that was so good it could watch what everybody was doing all the time. Good enough that, because it could see what everyone was doing all the time, it knew if somebody was going to kill somebody else before it had a chance to happen. And it could send people out to. I dunno. Deal with it.” He presses the phone into his cheek, feels his face flush. “I mean, the guy was looney tunes.”

“Uh huh,” Carter says, deep in thought.

“But, I mean…that all sounds like someone we know, right? Maybe that surveillance system is a real thing and Finch…I dunno, found it or hacked into it or – hell, he’s smart – helped make it and now he’s taking orders from it? Or it’s feeding him info? Or…am I nuts?” he asks.

“No,” she says. “No, I don’t think so. You should probably get some more rest, though.”

He groans, drives the heel of his hand into his forehead.

Tentatively, Carter says, “Do you think you could ask him?”

“What?”

“Finch. Do you think he’d tell you if you asked?”

That’s an easy answer. “No.”

“You two are…together?” She says it like a test, like she’s sure of the sentiment but not the word.

“Yeah. I think so. I’d appreciate you keeping that under your hat, by the way.”

“Of course.”

“Not that there’s anybody to tell. The guy in the suit maybe, but if he doesn’t know for sure, he’s got a pretty good idea.” He swallows around a heaviness in his throat. “Anyway, I don’t…I dunno how solid this is or how long it’s gonna last. But he likes to keep his business private and I can tell this is something he doesn’t want anybody knowing. Maybe that’ll change over time, but I don’t wanna test him right now. Not when it’s going so good.”

“I understand.”

“Thanks.” He rubs his face, feels a harsh sting in his nose and behind his eyes.

“No problem.” Then, in a gentle, prodding tone, “Everything is okay, then?”

“Yeah. Really okay.” Fusco rolls, examines his bedspread intently. “He’s a good guy, you know? Kinda ridiculous once you get to know him. Real nice.”

“Is he?”

“Uh huh.” He scratches at the coarse fabric. “Just lonely. Weird. Smart. We’re, uh, we’re not much like each other.”

“No,” she says.

“That’ll be trouble,” he predicts, “later on.”

“If you want my opinion, Fusco,” she says, “and it kinda seems like you do, I don’t think you should be spending too much time with people like you.”

“No?”

“Nah. I’ve seen what happens when you spend too much time wrapped up with yourself. It’s sad.”

“Gee,” he says. “Thanks.”

“I’m just saying,” she says. “Nothing wrong with a change of pace.”

“Guess not.” He rubs at his face again, really relishes that burn as his flesh moves in directions it shouldn’t. “I should let you get back to work. Thanks for talking to me.”

“No problem. Rest up, okay? You’ll be back before you know it.”

His face stretches in a stinging smile. “Sure. Save some of that paperwork for me, okay?”

“Oh, I’m saving it,” says Carter. “Don’t worry.”

They end the call and the phone drops from Fusco’s nerveless hand. He resumes his examination of the bedspread.

What caught his attention was a small red-brown dot, like a speckle on a new egg. When he scratched at it, it came away in one piece, cracking at the edges.

Like a scab.

Fusco stands, pushes down and apart with his hands so the comforter stretches flat. From this vantage, he can see all the little specks and drops and globs that make up the fine spray of blood on his bed. From when the guy was shot, probably. The moment of impact, before he toppled over and bled out on the floor. Fusco backs away, brushing compulsively at his hands and his shirtfront, like the blood on the bed isn’t long dry, like there isn’t already a bloodstain on his shirt, in spite of Finch’s laundering.

He stuffs the comforter into a plastic garbage bag from the kitchen. He could wash it out, probably, soak and scrub out the stains, but…

It’s time anyway. How long has it been since he had new sheets and blankets on his bed? He can spring for a new bed-in-bag. Fuck it.

Fuck all of it.

He rips open his closet and his dresser drawers and he finds things he doesn’t like, things he never liked. Shirts that fit weird or scratch against his bare skin or shrank just a little in the wash. Jackets that pinch across the shoulders. Socks with holes in the toe that he doesn’t repair and he doesn’t replace. Finch could buy everything Fusco owns with pocket change. Every sad, cheap piece of it.

Except he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t because Fusco’s belongings would depress him. The things Fusco owns aren’t like that bird watch, exquisite and useless. They’re ugly and functional and painfully necessary.

Fusco starts throwing things out.

He knows in the back of his head that he’s making a mistake, that once he’s got people convinced that he’s fit for work he’s gonna need jackets and shirts and socks and all that. He’s gonna have to look like himself again, like a cop. He can’t be throwing everything away like this.

But he can’t stand the sight of any of it.

His chest constricts and his breath is short and as he shovels handfuls of his shirt drawer into a second garbage bag, he keeps expecting to see something, anything he wants to keep. Like Finch packing up the library, sorting through a million books he can buy all over again just to find the one that’s important to him. He wants to strip out all the bullshit and find something that really matters.

And none of it does. It’s just stuff he has, stuff he keeps because it’s there. Because it still fits him, kinda. Because that stain’s not too obvious. Because his wife bought it for him back when she was still his wife and Fusco hangs onto things, even after it stops making sense.

This shouldn’t matter. It’s not important. It’s not. When did Fusco ever give a damn about clothes, ever think for longer than a second about what he was going to wear until Finch started confusing him? It never broke him up to wear something ugly. He barely gave a damn if his clothes felt good. Maybe he didn’t know they could feel good. Maybe he always thought the ugliness was him.

The shirt he’s holding bunched in his fist is the one he wore when Simmons drove him out to Oyster Bay, when Finch drove him back. He threw out the suit pants, too torn up with glass, but the shirt was salvageable. He only bled on it a little. After a soak in cold water, the stain came right out.

It’s the shirt he wore to kill a man and now he can’t throw it away fast enough.

And dammit, is there anything in his closet he can’t say that about? It’s not like he’s buying new clothes all the time. Even when he was dirty, he never spent his take on clothes, and now he doesn’t have that extra cash floating around. A lot of Fusco’s stuff is from before Reese, before Finch, before any of it. There probably isn’t a single suit, not one shirt in his closet he can point to and say “I never killed anybody while wearing that.”

Everything he owns is bloodstained, somehow.

And the clothes Finch buys him are just pristine, smartly cut strangers. Beautiful things he’s terrified to wear.

Finch is like that, less strange now, but clean and clever and crisp and better than Fusco, better than what he deserves. If Finch can see everything, like Fusco thinks, Finch already knows. Or he’s going to know one day. He’s gonna hate Fusco for dragging him down, staining him red by association.

He pulls the last of his shirts out, slams the empty drawer roughly. The sound, the smaller thud that follows takes a while to actually reach his ears and register inside his head. When it does, Fusco turns back to see what else he broke.

Seeing the picture frame lying face down on the dresser top makes his insides go cold.

He lets the clothes fall lifeless from his arms, comes close with his hands hovering around the frame like he’s scared to touch it, scared to turn it over and make it real.

When he does, he sees the long hairline crack curving and splitting the picture of him and his broken family before a big, warped triangle of glass drops free.

He sits. He leaves the glass on the dressertop, takes the frame with him as he sits down on his carpet, scattered with clothes, wet with dishwater. He sits for a while, crosslegged, the photo in his lap. The air he’s breathing has a sharp edge to it and it digs at him, over and again.

It takes some time until he trusts his voice enough to make a call.

“Go back to bed.” Finch says that differently from how Carter did. When she said it, it was a tease and a shove, but Finch’s voice is warm and sweet and heavy as it curls around him. Makes him want to be back between the sheets at Finch’s house. He never should’ve come home.

“I am in bed,” he says. When he leans back, his head and shoulders brace against the edge of his mattress. That’s almost like it. "Hey, I got...I got a question for you." The words come out thick and sticky. He wonders if he sounds drunk. He hopes Finch doesn't think that about him, not right now.

Whether Finch thinks he's fucked up or not, he knows something's not right. Fusco can tell by the nervous flutter that comes into his voice. "Of course," he says. "Is everything alright?"

Probably not. Probably never. Fusco rakes his hand back into his hair, knots up his fingers and holds tight, so he feels it in the swell and ache of his face. “I was listening,” he says, “when you were on the phone. With…with the thing.” And then he shuts up and he listens for any sound that might mean sympathy, forgiveness.

“That,” Finch says, dry and snappish and cold as fucking Siberia, “was a private conversation.”

“I know.”

“I trusted you.”

He rubs at his temples. “I know,” he says. “Before you say it’s an invasion of your privacy and I shouldn’t have done it, just…I mean, you’re right, but. You know. Look at yourself.”

Finch makes a small, tight sound.

“I never said you could buy me new clothes and listen to all my phone calls, okay?” Fusco presses on. “You just started doing it. So, you know, give me a pass, this once.”

Reluctantly, Finch clears his throat. “Given the circumstances,” he says, words plinking precise and careful into the phone, “I suppose such a thing is not entirely out of line.”

“That’s real magnanimous of you, buddy.”

“Well, I’m sorry, detective,” Finch snaps. Then he sputters, softens. “I dislike having my privacy violated and, yes, I’m aware of the hypocrisy. If it could be undone, I…”

“Yeah,” Fusco says. “Yeah, I get it.”

They both sit quiet for a while.

“So,” Finch begins. Suddenly, he seems so exhausted. “So, you overheard.”

“Yeah.”

He makes an unsteady back-of-the-throat sound, like a shrug. Then, “What did you think?”

“I don’t know,” Fusco says. “I don’t know what to think. I’m not even sure what you’re asking me. What did I think. You asking if I’m impressed? Yeah, I guess so. I guess whatever it is, whatever you did to get it, that all must be pretty impressive. Fuck if I understand it, but. Or do you mean what did I think it was? I know it’s your informant. Your little bird that tells you so much. That part I figured out.”

“Oh.” The sound quivers.

“Eh, I’m makin’ it sound like I know more than I do. So it’s your informant. I still don’t know how it works or what it is or what any of it means. I don’t understand any of it. Sure as hell not gonna figure it out without hint, either. This isn’t exactly my wheelhouse.”

“That, uh, that was your cue, smart guy.”

Finch sighs deep, like it comes from his toes. “The answers to those questions,” he says, “do not concern you.”

“Bullshit. Of course they do. If it’s got anything to do with how you always seem to know where I am or what I have or what I’m doing, or how I fell into all of this, or any of the people I put my ass on the line to protect for you every goddamn day, of course they do.”

“Lionel…”

“Tell me I’m wrong. Look me in the goddamn eye and tell me I’m wrong.”

“We’re on the ph-“

“Go to hell.”

Fusco breathes heavy, heart pounding again. He feels like he’s on his back again, the gray-eyed man’s hands closing on his throat, the world narrowing to a small red and black pinprick.

Softly, in a tone that cuts through the fog, Finch begins, “Our informant never led us to you. We were given the name of Lawrence Pope. The man whose life you were helping to destroy. Do you remember?”

Only kinda. It’s sick, but he can’t keep ‘em straight. Maybe he could if he wasn’t so angry and scared, but that’s wishful thinking. There’s just so many. He’d only think of somebody like Lawrence Pope in the perfunctory way you remember the last day at an old job, the last day at school. The last guy whose life I helped ruin. Who didn’t deserve it, he tacks on, remembering the grave, the shovel, the king.

Finch is still speaking. “I know that John selected you as his informant, independently of me and against my wishes. I don’t know if my informant had a hand in the decision. It’s often difficult to tell. Possibly, we were led to you. More likely, it was a very fortuitous confluence of events that put you in the car with John that day, and not someone less trustworthy.”

Fusco swallows numbly. He clenches and unclenches his fists, listens to the tattoo in his ears slow to a firm, steady thud.

“I can spy on you,” Finch continues, “because I am very good at accessing cameras and microphones that I should not have access to. I have also planted my own cameras and microphones in your home and in your workplace. And on your person. And I do it because, before I came to trust you – and I do trust you – you were an asset whose loyalty was unproven. And I continue to do it because, in spite of changes in our relationship, you are still an asset. I do the same for Detective Carter and for Mr. Reese. To everyone.”

Fusco takes a deep breath, holds for three seconds, releases for six. Weakly, he murmurs, “You fuck them too?”

“No, of course not.” Finch says it so gentle and sad, like he doesn’t want Fusco to think he’s unfaithful, like that’s the problem and not everything else.

“You still think I’m gonna turn on you?”

“I think,” Finch replies, “that if you are placed in terrible danger because you did something I asked you to do, I need to be able to find you and protect you. Because you are very valuable.”

Fusco snorts. “Valuable. That’s sweet.”

“That isn’t what I mean.”

“Yeah? What do you mean, sport?”

“I mean,” Finch says, “that you do good work. You are dependable. You reassure our clients. You have shown courage in the face of impossible risk. You were chosen for our work against my wishes and time has made a fool of me. From a purely professional standpoint, you are valuable. And yes, I’m personally very fond of you, but that has no bearing on the facts.”

Fusco shivers once, all over. He’s lightheaded, tight-chested. His eyes sting.

“It’s not as if I don’t think you deserve to know why you take these risks,” Finch says. “I do try to keep you informed, as much as I’m able. I don’t want you to feel lost, or be ignorant of the pertinent facts in a case. I certainly don’t want you to find yourself in danger because of something I could have warned you about. Often, I’m just as in the dark as to the specifics of what we’re working on as you are.”

“But not about why we’re there in the first place. Or how we knew where to look . I’m more in the dark about that then you are.”

Finch hesitates. “Yes.”

“And you’re not gonna enlighten me. Are you, Four Eyes?”

“No.” He speaks with soft, sad conviction.

“Jesus,” Fusco whispers. “Not even after everything that's happened?”

“Not even after all of this. Perhaps especially so.”

“Why not? If you think I have a right to know, why not?”

Finch inhales, exhales shakily. “There is a difference between making a calculated risk for the sake of something very important and being utterly reckless. Your involvement in our work is a calculated risk. You are and always have been aware that death is a potential outcome of what we do. We continue with the work, knowing this, because we are willing to die to protect good people. I believe that is why you continue to work with us,” Finch ventures. “You haven’t been forced into service for a very long time.”

“You guys grew on me,” Fusco admits. “They grew on me.”

Finch seems satisfied with the answer. “That is the risk we can ethically allow you to take. Understanding the nature of our informant would open you up into an entirely different sphere of risk, one I could not ethically expose you to. Because you are leading an ordinary life.”

Fusco scoffs. “Buddy, I know you’re out of touch with a lot of things, but if this seems ordinary to you…”

“A connected life, then,” Finch interrupts. “A life with roots. A house, a job, a family. A fixed identity. If I told you what you want to know, you could never be safe until you left all of those things behind.”

“I’m not safe now.”

“No,” Finch says. “But you love your son. And I believe you love your job. And I couldn’t, in good conscience, ask you to leave either.” He clears his throat. “I, on the other hand, have no fixed location, employment, or identity. No family living. I can survive knowing what I know because I have nothing. No life to take.”

“You got Reese.”

“I do. But Reese is a dead man. Like me. I could never have reached out to him otherwise, not without regret.”

“You got me.”

“Do I?” Finch’s voice goes dry again, but shivery, like rattling grass in wind. “I’d like very much to believe that. I think I did this morning. I might have you for the next few weeks or so, perhaps a year, but it would be difficult for you, very difficult. You’re not wrong to be angry with me for keeping secrets from you or violating your privacy. I could understand if you disliked me for it. Or if my embarrassing overtures with the, ah, with the clothes have made you hold me in contempt. And I’m afraid I’d make a poor long-term partner. I can’t live an ordinary sort of life. I might have to disappear for quite long intervals. I can’t even promise to keep regular hours or see you more than once a week. I’m very particular. I can be selfish, absurdly, myopically selfish, and I’d rather not be, but I often don’t realize until it’s too late. I can’t cook at all. And I’m nearly 10 years your senior.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“It’s the sort of age difference,” Finch says primly, “that becomes significant in middle age.”

“Why? ‘Cause you can’t get it up anymore?”

Finch remains firmly, prissily silent on the issue.

“Well, I cook fine,” Fusco says.

“Do you?”

“Yeah. And, I mean, I haven’t had that kind of relationship with you for a very long time, but in my experience, you get it up fine, so.”

“Since you’re pressing the issue, I was speaking of mortality, not…impotence.”

“Sure, fine,” Fusco says, waving it off. “We’re all going to hell at about the same speed, you know. You might die, I might die, and bullets don’t give a shit how old you are. You wanna come over?”

“Excuse me?”

“I mean, I guess you’re working now, so whenever you’re done.”

Finch’s voice stutters in the back of his throat. “Are you…are you not upset, then?”

Fusco shrugs. “I dunno. I dunno. I guess I am. I can’t tell if it’s ‘cause I’m hurt or I’ve been through some shit these past few weeks or because you’re an asshole. I just know I don’t wanna waste any more time not being around you, even if you are an asshole. Are you coming over?”

“Ye-e-es,” Finch says in fits and starts, like he’s checking his day planner. “Of course, I can’t say when.”

“’Course.”

“But when the situation here is resolved, I will come to see you, yes.”

“Good,” Fusco says. “I got a job for you.”

“Oh?” He can practically hear Finch’s raised eyebrows.

“Yeah. Got a bunch of old clothes I’m sorting through, trying to figure out what to get rid of and what to keep and what needs replacing. I know you like clothes stuff.”

“I do.”

“Could use your help.”

“Very well. I may be some time, however. You should try to rest, in the meantime.”

“I am so sick,” Fusco groans, “of people telling me to go to bed.”

“Well, perhaps if you’d listen, they’d stop telling you.”

“I don’t need sleep,” he says. “I need something to do.”

“Then do something. Something simple, that you don’t have to think about. Reorganize a closet. Read a book.”

“What’re you, my mother?”

“How Oedipal of you. No, of course not. It’s your home. Do whatever you like. I’ll see you as soon as I can.”

“Okay,” he says, this thick, needy gorge rising in his throat. “See you then.”

They hang up.

It got dark during the call, while Fusco wasn’t paying attention.

Numbly, mechanically, he pops the cardboard backing off the picture frame and frees the photo of himself, his ex, his son. It’s not cut up by the glass at all, not scuffed or torn. It’s fine. It’ll be fine. His knees creak when he stands up. Jesus. Jesus, ow.

He props the photo against the lamp on his dresser so it’s standing up again, snaps the chain on the light so he can see it. Yeah, that’s fine.

There’s this savage little high he gets from going through with the cleanup process: the trash in the kitchen, the dirt and woodchips ground into the carpet inside his front door, the bloodstain he scrubs at until it’s mostly faded. Hey, look at me. I’m functional, productive. My shit still works. He hucks his bag of trash in the dumpster in the alley out back and stands by a second, cracks his back and his barked-up knuckles in the cold.

When he gets back upstairs, there’s still his clothes to deal with, carefully bundled away in fat white garbage bags. Probably, he should put those away again. This is the excuse Finch is looking for, he thinks, that green light to buy Fusco all new clothes, you know, since you’re throwing yours away. Fusco gets about halfway through shoving his undershirts carelessly back into a drawer when he gives up. Fuck it, right? If Finch wants to get Fusco a new shirt or two, let him. Fusco could use a new shirt or two. The trick is not to let Finch go crazy.

He takes a quick shower, just to wake himself the hell up, and tidies up the bathroom a little as he goes. Not like Finch doesn’t know he’s a slob but now, faced with yellowed tile and soap scum in a ring around the drain, Fusco can’t stop himself from thinking of that spotless bathroom in Finch’s house, how Finch isn’t even gonna want to be in here.

He shouldn’t have invited Finch here. Should’ve arranged to meet at the brownstone or a hotel somewhere. This was a bad idea. Fuck, so bad.

He picks up dirty laundry while he dries himself off, brushes his teeth within an inch of their lives, scrubs out the sink once he’s done.

It’s just gotta be enough, he guesses.

What the hell is he gonna wear?

He clutches a towel around his waist while he paws through the plastic bags for something, anything that doesn’t make him kinda sick inside, but after a while he gives up, puts everything back because it’s just making the mess worse.

Anyway, the answer’s kind of obvious.

Finch’s suit is still draped over the kitchen counter, still wrapped in plastic, still perfect from the cleaners. Fusco meant to put it in the closet the night he brought it home, but he never got the chance to, what with everything that happened. It just got left out here.

It still fits perfect. Fusco’s not sure why he was afraid it might not. Not like he’s put on a lot of weight since Finch measured him for it, or taken any weight off, for that matter. He’s still the same old guy. A little more battered, maybe, but the same in most respects. He just thinks the suit looks nice on the hanger, in its careful plastic bag. It doesn’t look like something that should fit him.

Does, though.

It’s pretty weird, Fusco thinks as he does up the delicate little buttons on his shirt, that he’s worn this suit a couple of times already, technically, but this is the first time he’s ever put it on himself. He guesses that’s all part of the package deal of what Finch gets off on, actually putting each piece on him like a clothes horse. He wonders if Finch is gonna want to do that a lot now.

Fusco wonders if that’s something he’d like.

Fusco knots his tie the best he can. You get complacent, wearing clip-ons all the time. He can tie an okay knot but it takes practice, at least two do-overs until it’s the big, rakish knot he wants it to be.

The little hankie thing, the pocket square, he doesn’t even try whatever origami has to happen there, just smushes it into his breast pocket so it bursts out like a big orange flower, like a small fire.

It does look a little ridiculous, like he thought it would when he entertained the idea of showing up on Finch’s doorstep dressed like this. With his fancy suit and his cut-up face, he looks like a real scumbag, like a gangster. Handsome, though, he admits privately. Like kinda slick and dramatic and flashy. Like a real fucking character.

He squints at himself, black-eyed, in the mirror and adjusts his lapels. Yeah, he thinks. I’d be scared of me.

Not that he’s gonna be all that scary to look at. Fusco knows how he’s gonna kill time until Finch gets here, and there’s nothing scary about it.

He ransacks the top of his dresser until he finds reading glasses, the sleek little glasses by Porsche that made him blind at work for a day until he could go out and grab a cheap replacement. He checks himself in the mirror again. Not much better. College boy gangster, maybe.

He settles in on the couch, with his suit he’s afraid to wrinkle, with his reading glasses built by a company that makes luxury cars, with his soft-edged, beat-up copy of Cat’s Cradle. It’s not a bad way to pass the time.

He passes a couple of hours like that, one ankle propped up on his knee, eyes retracing sentences he didn’t quite grasp, not because he’s such an idiot he can’t understand them but because he’s kinda tired and he needs to check and re-check everything.

The creak of the front door makes him look up.

Finch busts in with one fingertip, braced in the center of the door and pushing outwards. He peers at the broken lock distastefully. He looks up, blinks at Fusco. “Sorry, I suppose I ought to have knocked. But your door was open.”

Fusco licks the pad of his fingertip, turns another page. “Yup.”

Finch hovers expectantly in the doorway for a few seconds before Fusco realizes he’s waiting to be asked in.

“What,” Fusco says, “you wanna let in the whole neighborhood?”

Finch steps into the apartment, closes the door behind him. “Is that safe?” he asks.

“Probably not,” Fusco admits. “I’ll get a locksmith in here tomorrow. In the meantime, the whole place is lousy with cops, so it’s not like creeps are lining up to get in, you know? Present company excluded.”

Finch gives him a wan smile. “Are you enjoying it?” he asks.

“Hmm?”

Finch nods at the book in his hands. “Cat’s Cradle. Are you enjoying it?”

Fusco thinks for a minute. “Not sure yet.”

“Oh,” Finch says. “Well, if it doesn’t catch your interest, you’re certainly not obligated to…”

“I mean I’m tired,” Fusco interrupts, “and I got a lot to think about. I barely know what I’ve been reading. It’s not the book’s fault. Don’t worry about it. I’ll read the thing.”

Finch’s face brightens by a very small degree. “You wanted to see me?”

“Yeah,” Fusco says. He closes the book with a muted snap, sets it aside on the couch. He leans forward, elbows on knees.

Finch steps closer to him, so their feet nearly touch, so he can brush his hands over Fusco’s back and through his hair. “Did you have something…” Finch is doing this feathery light scratch down his back, a soothing tickle through his shirt “…specific in mind?

Fusco’s head drops forward until his forehead braces against Finch’s round belly. “Nah,” he says. “Just wanted to see you.”

Delicately, Finch’s hands curl up his back, on his shoulders, on his neck and the back of his head. “Here?”

Fusco shakes his head, brushes his cheek against Finch’s stomach. “Bed. I don’t want you to fuck up your back lying on the couch.” His whole body whines and pops as he stands. Jesus, what a fucking wreck he is.

Finch sneaks demanding fingers into the crook of Fusco’s elbow. “Little overdressed for a night in, aren’t you?” he says as they walk to the bedroom.

Fusco snorts. “I’m a little overdressed for every night. Where’d you think I’d ever get to wear this thing?”

“Well,” Finch begins, “I hoped you might join me for dinner sometime.”

“Yeah?”

“Hmmm.” Finch nods, lips pressed tight together.

“You thought it was all gonna fall into place, huh?” Fusco says as they step through the threshold of his bedroom. “After you got me in this suit.”

Finch breathes in sharp and tense. “I suppose I did. In a sense. I knew it couldn’t be as simple as that, that we were…complicated. But I had, ah, very high hopes for that day.”

“Uh huh?”

“Very high,” Finch repeats, toying with the end of Fusco’s tie. “Lionel, what happened in here?”

With sidelong glances, he’s taking in the room, wet spot on the floor, comforter stripped from the bed, broken picture frame on the dresser, clothes scattered and bundled up for the curb.

“I, uh.” There’s an explanation stuck at the back of his throat: I was cleaning up, I was reorganizing, stuff got knocked over and thrown out, it’s fine. He discards it. “Somebody got shot.”

“Oh.” Finch tugs gently downward on Fusco’s tie until his head is bowed and easily reached and Finch settles a palm on the back of Fusco’s head, warily skimming over his hair where it’s clipped short. “You’ve had a difficult day,” Finch says. He taps with one finger on Fusco’s empty skull. “In here.”

“’M doin’ okay,” Fusco protests softly.

Finch’s grip on him tightens, just gently, just for a moment. “Will you be alright in this room?” he asks, his voice a ticklish buzz on the top of Fusco’s head.

“Yeah. ‘Course. I, uh. I think I need to…just act like everything’s normal in here. Keep moving. I don’t wanna…don’t wanna make it all about that. I hafta live here, you know?”

Finch nods, begins to undo Fusco’s tie. “I understand,” he says, which is good, ‘cause Fusco’s not sure Fusco understands. He lifts his head as Finch’s fingers neatly untangle the loose, lazy knot of his tie. “Not how I would have done this,” Finch murmurs as a small smile creeps across his lips.

“Well.” Fusco maintains eye contact, fiddles with the button on his jacket. “It’s how I did it.”

Finch’s brows lift just a little bit, a little bounce of surprise that he suppresses. “These are the clothes you wanted to sort through?” he asks, tilting his head toward a garbage bag.

“Yeah,” Fusco says. “Not now, though.” He shrugs out of his suit jacket, lets it sink to the floor.

The tie slips from around Fusco’s neck with a slow, silken growl. “I suppose it can wait,” Finch concedes.

“’Course it can,” Fusco mutters. He presses his forehead hard into Finch’s, takes the lapels on his stately gray-brown professor’s suit tight in his hands.

He knew from the start that this was Finch’s thing: the clothes and the pieces and the buttons, doing them up and smoothing them out and styling them just so. Turns out that extends to taking it all off, too. Finch has this fever glint behind his glasses, in his eyes and on his flushed cheeks, as he very carefully undoes the buttons on Fusco’s shirt, the buckle on his belt. Fusco doesn’t fight him on it. He’s kinda grown to like the attention and care, and it’s all a lot easier to understand in reverse like this. Fusco lets his hands rest on the sharp peaks of Finch’s bony elbows until he gets restless enough to fiddle with Finch’s cufflinks.

Finch’s hands pause against Fusco’s trousers where they’re teasing the button open, the fly down.

“Just a sec,” Fusco murmurs, tongue wedged between teeth, unscrewing the tiny gunmetal gray bolts holding his shirtcuffs starched and proper. “There you go.” He pulls them loose, lets them clatter on the nightstand.

Finch blinks at him, flutters his dopey, invisible eyelashes.

“What? Did I do something rude?”

“No.” Finch smiles in that very warm, beaming way he has. “Not at all.”

“Oh. Okay.” He tugs gently at Finch’s fancy shirt until it comes loose from where it’s tucked in his pants. “You can keep going too,” he says as Finch holds painfully still while Fusco opens the lowest button on Finch’s shirtfront.

They try to do it like that, but their arms and hands keep getting in the way so eventually they settle into turns, into Finch holding still for a few seconds while Fusco shucks his jacket off before springing forward to press his lips to Fusco’s neck, to peel the shirt back from his shoulders and let it bunch around his elbows.

Fusco thinks maybe he understands whatever thrill Finch is getting out of this. Maybe it’s just because he’s used to seeing Finch dressed to kill, every day another perfect, spotless, unrumpled suit, and before now, Fusco’s never gotten to take one off him. And he’s finding this mean, rough bully’s pleasure in doing it badly, in wrinkling the shirtfront in his grip and popping the collar askew and stepping on Finch’s jacket as he backs him toward the bed. He thinks Finch is getting something out of that too. Finch’s cheeks are all in color and Fusco covers them with his hands, feels them blazing through the skin.

Finch turns his head, presses his mouth to the center of Fusco’s hand. “I’m sorry to be a wet blanket,” he murmurs, “but I really don’t think I can this time.”

Fusco kicks off his shoes, lets one hand drop to tug at his trousers until they slide down his legs and he can step out of those too. “Don’t think you can…?”

“I’ll take care of you, of course,” Finch says. “I’m just…rather tired.”

“Oh.” Fusco curls his fingers in the bottom of Finch’s undershirt: smooth and thick and well-constructed and unlike the three-packs from Hanes that fill a portion of the garbage bags. “You wanna just lie around for a while, then? I’m not in any huge hurry.”

Finch snags two fingers in the elastic waistband of Fusco’s briefs and tugs him, inexorably, forward. “Are you sure? You may be waiting for quite some time.”

“Yeah.” He shoves his face into Finch’s throat, takes a tight hold on his elbows so he can start to lower him into bed real gently. “’M sure.”

Finch shivers at the buzz of words spoken against his jugular and Fusco breathes deep, smells faint aftershave and salt sweat.

The sheets are cool against their bare legs and arms and the two of them draw together, hands folded in the smalls of each other’s backs, legs entangled, chest to chest through their undershirts. Fusco draws up the topsheet and lets it billow over them for a few seconds like a cloud before slowly, airily falling to rest.

“Sorry,” Fusco mumbles. “I threw out the blanket.”

Finch doesn’t ask. He just tugs at Fusco’s thigh until he agreeably slides it between Finch’s knees. Finch sighs, settles.

“Support,” he explains. “For my hip.”

“I need to get more pillows.”

“This is fine.” He pulls Fusco closer. “Perfectly acceptable.”

And they lie there like that a while, soft, even breaths and a distant car alarm.

“So. Uh.” Fusco flexes his fingers, scratches slow and gentle at Finch’s lower back through the shirt. “How was your day?”

“Successful,” Finch says. “Our client is safe and sound.”

“Good to know.”

“John asked about you.”

“Yeah?”

“Mhmm.” Finch shifts against him. “Wanted to know if you needed to be dealt with. I assured him that I had you well in hand and John became uncomfortable and changed the subject.”

“Prob’ly a good move.” Fusco squirms a little as Finch’s ticklish fingers dance around the thin strip of skin between where his underwear begins and his undershirt rides up. “You, uh, you talk to him about us?”

“I felt it would be best to leave it alone. I mean,” Finch adds, voice calm and even and professorial as he teases his fingers down the back of Fusco’s briefs, “I’m certain he’s inferred the nature of our relationship already, more or less. No need to make things explicit. Have you, er…?” Finch blinks at him from inches away in the dark. “May I ask what tack you’ve chosen to take with Detective Carter?”

“Carter knows,” he says. “Not too much. I left out the gory details. She just knows there’s something going on between us. Figured it was better to be up front about it instead of letting her wonder.”

“Yes, I think that’s wise.” Real casually, Finch sneaks his hands down the back of Fusco’s underwear and squeezes, firm and playful.

Fusco jumps. “Jesus. What’re you, making bread back there?”

“Just wanted to touch,” Finch murmurs. “I’ll stop if you like.”

“’S fine.” It is. Finch really does have strong hands, smooth and well cared-for, and Fusco’s kinda fine with them going anywhere. “Didn’t think you wanted to fool around.”

“I don’t, particularly. Not right now. Do you?”

“Nuh.”

So while Finch squeezes and pets and explores with his fingertips, Fusco slips his hands up underneath Finch’s fancy undershirt and touches his back, wirey muscles and knobbly vertebrae and pliable ridges of fat, and it’s really pretty nice, even when Finch’s thumb passes over that dead, nerveless spot on Fusco’s asscheek and rubs there, examining the little dimple of scar tissue. “Is this where you were shot?”

“Yup. That’s the place.”

“Does it hurt you to touch?” Finch asks, guiltily withdrawing his hand.

“Nah, not so much.” Fusco inches back against Finch’s palm. “A little bit, when it’s raining. Aches sometimes. For the most part, I got off easy.” As he strokes Finch’s back, he feels the fine ripple of Finch’s precise, tiger-stripe surgical scars. “What about you? I mean, I know you…you hurt. But do the scars…?”

“No,” Finch says. “Not the scars. The pain is…elsewhere.”

Fusco tickles sleepy lines and swirls into Finch’s back. “You know how I got hurt. Can I ask how you…?”

Finch hesitates. “I’d rather not say.”

“’Kay.”

“Suffice to say, there was an…an accident. And the circumstances were not particularly heroic, on my part. Quite the opposite.” Finch’s hands settle on the small of Fusco’s back again, cool and innocent. “I think if I’d gotten my scars under circumstances comparable to the ones under which you received yours, I’d be very proud to wear them. If marginally more humiliated.”

“You got plenty to be proud of. You forget who you’re talking to?” Fusco pulls Finch closer to him, rubs his cheek lazily against Finch’s chest. “Compared to me, you’re goddamn Mother Theresa.”

Finch’s arms slide up, hold Fusco’s head right there. “It must seem that way, sometimes.” He pushes his face against the top of Fusco’s head and breaths real deep. “I’m sorry I can’t tell you these things.”

Fusco, head clutched warm and weirdly secure to Finch’s chest, thinks about it. “I mean, I don’t like it,” he says. “But you’re good people, I think. And I trust you. I can believe there’s a reason it’d be dangerous if I knew this stuff, even if I don’t like it.” He presses his mouth to the soft, good fabric of the undershirt, the humming heart underneath. “You think you’ll ever tell me?”

Finch tenses in his arms; his heart gives a small leap. “I think so,” he whispers.

“Not now, though.”

“No.” Finch cradles Fusco’s head flat to him. “In both cases – my accident and what you heard on the phone – I believe there’s a tipping point where you will be safer knowing than you will be remaining ignorant. But we haven’t reached that point, in either case.”

“Yeah?” Fusco murmurs. “That dangerous, huh?”

“There are people who have lost their lives because of this information. I don’t want you to become one of them. You already risk so much in the work you do for us.”

Fusco hums, dissatisfied. “Can you promise me something?”

“I’ll do my best,” Finch says, pressing a kiss to his temple.

“Tell me on my deathbed?”

“Oh dear.”

“Just if that tipping point never happens,” Fusco says. “I wanna know I’ll know someday.”

“Oh dear,” Finch sighs against Fusco’s hairline. “Don’t be morbid.”

“I just...” he tries. “I mean, there’s a lot of stuff I know I’m not gonna know before I die. Like, I’m never gonna understand computers, not like you do, and I’m never gonna know the difference between glen check and plaid and I’m never gonna know how I got so far from who I wanted to be. Just gotta be glad you guys pulled me back. And I’m never gonna know what it is you want out of me. Really. I’m happy you’re here and I like you a helluva lot and I don’t want you to go, but this is all a goddamn mystery to me. But, um. I guess I just want a guarantee. That I’ll know at least this one thing, before the end.”

Finch grips tight at his shoulders, at the straps of his undershirt. “Before then,” he says, a quaver in his voice. “Before then, at least.”

Fusco leans heavy against Finch’s chest. “I can live with that.”

“I’m sorry,” Finch tells him. “It’s the best I can do.”

“It’s fine. It’s enough for me.”

Somewhere outside, whoever it is shuts off his car alarm. It’d been going so long that the alarm’s squawk kind of became a part of the white noise, the creak of bedsprings and the groan of plumbing and the ebb and flow of the street outside, not so busy at this hour. With the alarm gone, there’s kind of a gap in the air, a hollow, aching silence and quietly, tentatively, they fill it.

Notes:

YOU GUYS YOU GUYS YOU GUYS.

WE ARE ONE CHAPTER AWAY FROM THE. END.

HOW DID WE GET HERE

AFTER ALL THIS TIME

YOU GUYS ARE TROOPERS, IS ALL I CAN SAY. SUPER TROOPERS. GOOD FOR ME, GOOD FOR YOU, GOOD FOR US. WOW.

Chapter 29

He keeps a tea tin tucked behind the coffee pot and he uses it for moments like these. Moments when Finch sits at his kitchen table, wrapped in a robe, sluggishly absorbed in the Saturday paper, surrounded by Formica and linoleum and holey terrycloth. A rare bird in a strange country.

Fusco bustles clumsily between the stove and the kitchen sink, blue silk pajama pants swishing as his legs brush past each other, clinging and bunching behind his knees. He thinks, as he pours hot water from a cheap kettle - the newest thing in his kitchen – slowly through a strainer over tea leaves, that he’s getting pretty good at this. He always passed up the cardboard box of Lipton tea bags by the hot water dispenser in the precinct and Finch, of course, has standards. Finch has opinions about precise water temperature and a guy in Midtown who gets him obscure blends. At first it was Finch’s exacting little ritual, the miniature tin of tea stowed in a pocket of the overnight bag and the glass travel mug with built-in infuser, but after a while it became another thing Fusco does the morning after while he’s waiting for coffee to percolate. Doesn’t really drink the stuff, but Fusco makes a damn good cup of tea by now. Fusco brings it to him, places the steaming mug next to Finch's hand. He accepts the steeping tea with a slow, grateful blink.

"I'm buying you a new mattress," Finch says as Fusco turns back to the coffee pot.

Fusco tosses a sleepy "Yeah?" over his shoulder.

"Mmhmm."

It's maybe the fifth time Finch has said so, starting from the first time they laid together in Fusco's creaking bed around three months ago. Fusco doesn't object to getting his mattress replaced so much. The clothes, yes. The new car Finch suggested once, doubly so. But the mattress would be a thing for both of them and Fusco's not going to stand in the way of something that might save Finch's back a little grief.

Finch still hasn't gotten around to it, though.

Maybe he likes having something to complain about while he's here. Keeps things from getting too serious.

Fusco pours himself a mug of coffee and goes to join Finch, now squinting blearily at the pale yellow plastic clock on the kitchen wall.

"Time?" he asks, as the feet of Fusco's chair groan across the linoleum.

"9:30. Wear your glasses, dummy."

Finch purses his lips. "I left them in the bedroom. When did you say your son would be arriving?"

"11.” Fusco gently extricates the sports section from the rest of Finch’s newspaper. “We got time."

"Good." Finch delicately tugs at the chain on the infuser, pulls it loose from the mug, prods at the clouds of murky brown tea with a spoon. "It's been some time," he says, "hasn't it? Since you last saw him.”

"Yeah."

Finch taps his spoon on the edge of his mug, watches hypnotized as amber drops flick back into the tea. “And everything’s…all is well, I suppose?”

“Sure,” Fusco says, blinking stupidly at a headline proclaiming that the Yankees won again, surprise surprise.

“I haven’t asked you,” Finch says, very softly. Regretfully. He does that sometimes, realizes stuff like that aloud. That’s his apology.

Fusco waves him off. “Nothing to tell. I kinda…kinda botched the last time I was with him. And Sharon thought we ought to hold off for a while. Give Michael some distance. I, uh, I came off crazy last time, is what happened. And she wants to make sure it didn’t stick. I don’t blame her. If I had primary custody of him and she acted like that…” He rolls his shoulders, feels his back crack. He repeats, “I don’t blame her.”

Finch frowns. “But there were extenuating circumstances. Your situation at the time…”

“Was bad. Real bad. She knows that. Not all of it, but I told her a little and she got the picture okay. Doesn’t matter. She doesn’t want our kid to get caught up in my extenuating circumstances. Neither do I.” Fusco takes a sip of his coffee, casual, final.

“So this is,” Finch says, “a mutual decision?”

“Somethin’ like that.” He shrugs. “We talked it over.”

We is him and Sharon, him doubled up on the edge of his bed, teeth buried in his knuckles during the moments when he’s not talking, her speaking in hushed tones an hour exactly after Michael’s bedtime. Her using the word “concerned” a lot.

He doesn’t blame her. He hates it, but he doesn’t blame her.

We is her bargaining, saying that they could do something small and low pressure, that Michael could maybe spend an afternoon with him and they could see how it goes, and Fusco watches the stain at the foot of his bed and he pushes the date back.

That’s on him.

“But it’s all sorted out now?” Finch asks, a note of encouragement in his voice.

“Yeah.” Almost. Because he didn’t fight it, because he understood, there were other conversations. Ones held in broad daylight where Sharon spoke above a whisper. Ones where they talked about small boring things, where they tossed around dates and times. One where Sharon said, “Hang on, he’s here,” and then “Michael, Dad’s on the phone,” and then “Sorry,” small and pitying.

That’s on him too.

“You don’t have any kids,” Fusco asks. “Do you?”

“No,” Finch murmurs softly. “Not as such.”

“Didn’t think so,” Fusco says. “But you never know with some people. You might’ve had one or two stashed somewhere.”

“I don’t.” He adds, “A dear…dear friend of mine had a son and I was a kind of makeshift uncle to him, for a time. That’s my closest analogous experience.”

“Well, when you mess up,” Fusco says, “kids remember it. And they remember it forever, even if it’s something real small that you forgot about five seconds after it happened. You miss a hockey practice, you get called away in the middle of a phone call, that stuff sticks with them. And that’s with normal stuff, mistakes anybody could make. I…you know, I told him I was going to prison. That I deserved to. He doesn’t know about me, you know. What I was like. I always kept it together in front of him. He, uh, he expects better of me.”

Finch takes Fusco’s big hand and crumples it between his own. “I’m sure he’s missed you.”

Fusco stares dully at his dark blue pajama sleeve pooling next to their tangled fists like a spreading oil slick. “Yeah,” he says. His throat is dry. He sips his coffee and it feels like it helps but he knows it doesn’t, not really.

“Do you have plans?”

Fusco nods. “Mets. Got us a couple of nosebleed seats. Aside from that it’s, you know, whatever he wants.” He says that last thing a little too hard, a little too sharp. Whatever my son wants.

Finch squeezes his hand, releases. “Very good.” He lazily fishes in the pocket of the bathrobe, pulls out his phone. He takes a few precise, delicate pokes on the screen, seems satisfied by whatever he sees there, and puts it back in his pocket.

“You working today?” Fusco asks.

“It would appear not. For now, anyway.” Finch resettles in the squeaky kitchen chair. He sips his tea in a long and serious way. “If anything does come up I will, of course, refrain from contacting you unless absolutely necessary.”

“Thanks.” Fusco feels his face get hot at the niceness of it, the consideration. Even though it isn’t such a big deal, really. Fusco’s on call a lot less these days. It’s more like before, when Finch would call him up every so often saying please look up this license number, please pull this criminal record, please go to this parking garage at three in the morning and retrieve John, thank you, Detective. Except now there’s extras tacked on. See you Friday. What was that restaurant in the East Village you liked? Please be careful. Thank you, dear.

The same, but different.

He bumps Finch’s leg underneath the table.

“Listen,” Fusco says. His face is still warm. “Shot in the dark, but if you got nothing going on today…you wanna meet him?”

Finch blinks at him, face still, mug suspended an inch above the tabletop.

“I’m not saying, you know, spend the day or anything. I know that wouldn’t work. I only got two tickets anyway.”

One of his eyebrows perks up in a languid kind of way, like a stretching cat, like, Well, we both know that’s not the problem.

“Just thought, you know, might be good if you met him and he met you. And everybody…met…each other.” He hides his mouth behind his coffee cup.

Finch leans forward, legs crossed, elbows on the table. Perfectly attentive, serious mouth and naked, sympathetic eyes. “Is it moral support?” Finch asks. “Because you’re nervous about seeing your son again?”

Is it? Maybe. A little bit. It’d be nice to have somebody with him who he knows will still want him around at the end of the day. Just in case. But it’d be hard to introduce Finch, hard to explain Finch. He’d have to lie a lot to his kid. Not a good way to come back to him.

“You know I can’t, of course,” Finch adds.

Fusco nods.

“It’s not as though I wouldn’t like to meet him,” Finch continues. “It’s not as though I’m disinterested or, or callous, or…I know that he is very, very dear to you. And I want to be involved. If we are…if we are to be…” He trails off limping, tangled up in himself. “I would like to,” he says, very firmly, very carefully, like each word is a nail he’s hammering into the conversation, “but I can’t. Because it would be dangerous. For him.”

“Got it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, man, I got it. You don’t have to be sorry.”

Finch visibly wilts. “You’re not upset, are you?”

It’s the wrong kind of question to ask, Fusco thinks, because even if he was, even if he was fucking devastated that Finch couldn’t take the time to meet his kid, he’d never admit to “upset”. “Upset”, like how Sharon got, lips tight and arms crossed and so, so angry that Fusco couldn’t read her mind and see what had her so pissed off. He understands what Finch is asking, but he’d never admit to it like that.

Anyway, he’s not upset.

“Nah. I mean, I kinda knew. Like I said, shot in the dark. I get why you can’t, it just…woulda been good.”

“Yes,” Finch says softly into his tea. “I think so too.”

They get quieter from there, until it’s just the gentle chime of spoon-in-mug and the soft flutter of newspaper pages being turned and the warm buzz of phones being checked. A hard-edged, prickly silence, but not a cold one. Finch lets their legs brush together again, makes a point of grazing bare ankles against one another.

“Ohhh, you are,” he murmurs, barely within hearing. “You are upset.”

“I’m n - ” and then Finch crushes his mouth against Fusco’s and Finch digs fingers in the curls on the back of his head and Finch leaves peculiar, nibbling, hot-breathed kisses against Fusco’s bottom lip. “I’m…” and Fusco twists his neck to get free, takes Finch by the elbows and plants a few softer, drier kisses on Finch’s cramped, worried mouth. “I’m not upset,” he says. “Not at you. It’s not your fault.”

In scrambling across the table to get at each other, they’ve become an awkward, hunched, half-standing arch across the spotty Formica.

“Shower?” Fusco asks, because it’s about that time of the morning, because he doesn’t want to hurt Finch’s back in bed again.

Later, they are soaking wet and Fusco’s got his arms braced against the tile, his forehead braced against his arms, his hips quivering in final, unsteady jerks and he lets Finch press flat, even teeth into the heft of his shoulder and he thinks this is good, this is great, he doesn’t need anything else.

Over the white noise of the shower, he hears Finch ask, “What would you want him to know about me?” and his knees almost give out.

“Does it matter?” he pants, leaning limply against the wall. “We’re not doing that.”

“Perhaps not, but…” Behind him, Finch hesitates. “I think I would like to know what you’d tell him.”

The temperature knobs in the shower make angry, labored sounds as Fusco turns them and the water dwindles to a thin patter down the center of his back. He sighs and the sound is louder than he expects it to be in the echo chamber of the shower. “I mean, I dunno. You’re real tough to explain.”

“Hmm.” It kinda sounds like agreement. Fusco can picture Finch behind him, nodding curtly, head tilted at a little angle, eyes wide. An “I’m listening” pose.

Fusco rolls his shoulders, feels his back crack. “Guess I couldn’t tell him the truth at all, really. Not most of it. Maybe just that you’re…you know, you’re a good guy. And I care about you. And you’re gonna be…around. For a while.”

He finally feels like his legs can take his full weight again so he stands up straight. His shower is a tight space, so he kinda has to shuffle in place to turn around and face Finch. Finch waits for him, hair wet and dark, eyes on his bare feet. “For a while?” he repeats.

“Sure,” Fusco says. “Or am I wrong?”

His mouth trembles, curls up at the corners. “No,” he says. “I certainly hope not.”

“Well. Well, okay, then.”

Finch’s cheeks color and he reaches for the sliding door of the shower and steps out, steps away.

Fusco likes watching Finch put himself together in the mornings, when he can catch him at it. Sometimes Finch wakes up so early that Fusco barely catches any of it, just the last straightening of a tie or tightening of a shoelace, the tailored coat adjusted with a sharp, sartorial snap. Sometimes Finch wakes up so early that Fusco never sees him at all.

But sometimes, Fusco catches him and it’s kinda great just to watch, because Finch is so deliberate about it. Finch never does the walk of shame; he brings backup outfits, the whole thing, the full suit and the little bits and pieces that go with it. And he puts it all on neat and even and crisp and so sure, so sure that he can wear that dark gray shirt and that stupid orange tie and it’ll look good. Fusco likes that kind of thing. He knows it’s not for him or anything, but he really likes it.

He finds an excuse to come up to the dresser while Finch is there, fussing with a microscopic wrinkle in his shirt, pants still folded and waiting on top of his overnight bag. Fusco kneels to open the bottom drawer on the dresser, right beside Finch’s bare, skinny legs.

He wears bright socks, thin and calf-hugging as a woman’s stocking, held up with black elastic straps just under his knees. Fusco reaches over and snaps a strap and Finch yelps, jerks his foot up, scowls down into Fusco’s grinning face.

“So,” Fusco says, real casual, digging blindly and without much interest in his drawer full of old jeans, “what do you need those things for, anyway?”

“They’re sock garters,” Finch says, like he’s annoyed at having to explain anything so obvious. “They hold your socks up.”

“Yeah, but they don’t stay up on their own?”

“No. Not all of the time.” He pauses a moment, peering down while Fusco toys with the tiny gold buckle on the strap. “Would you like a pair?”

“Nah.” Fusco cradles the swell of Finch’s calf in his hand. “Just messing around.”

But Finch has this thoughtful little twist to his lips that lets Fusco know that he’s still considering it. Making a little picture in his head. Finch still does that sometimes, with the clothes and all, and these days, Fusco’s a little more inclined to let Finch get away with it. Because he knows it’s not pity now; picking out cuts and colors he thinks Fusco looks good in is Finch’s weird way of taking care. Because Finch has the spending under control since he finally got it through his thick skull that Fusco’s freaked out by suits that cost more than his car did when it was new. What Finch does now is ask these sneaky questions. Buttoning his shirt up and then, casually, “What do you think of this color?” or walking past a store window and following Fusco’s eyes when they snag on a jacket for a second and then two weeks later, when Fusco’s totally forgotten about it, there it’ll be, the shirt or the tie or the jacket or whatever, left someplace surprising and inconspicuous. A little present.

Finch is still giving him that look like he’s measuring Fusco for something and Fusco’s starting to hit that squirming point where it’s too much and he feels a little dissected, so he leans against Finch’s bare leg and nuzzles at his thigh, just under Finch’s hip. There’s the sharp intake of breath, the tender jolt that rocks Finch’s whole body, and then there’s a firm hand on the back of his neck.

“We don’t have time for that.” Finch sounds like he regrets having to say it.

He’s right, though. Fusco tears himself away, picks a pair of jeans out of the drawer. “Yeah,” he says, getting to his feet. “Sorry.”

Finch frowns. “Don’t be.”

He gets dressed faster than Finch does, always, so he gets to sit on the bed for a second, clothed except for his bare feet, and watch while Finch puts on the finishing touches, twists his tie into a big, bold, satisfying knot and adjusts the delicate cufflinks on the ends of his sleeves. Finch gathers up the clothes he wore yesterday, tsks if they’ve been wrinkled, if one of them got stepped on in the hustle last night, and stows them in his leather overnight bag. He slips into his loafers, straightens his stiff little shoulders, and sighs.

Fusco walks him to the door. This always happens, like Fusco thinks Finch is gonna get lost on the way out of his shitty apartment somehow. Unfamiliar territory. Here there be dragons. Something like that.

“Perhaps something could be arranged.”

“Yeah?” Fusco says, trying to think if Finch said anything while they were getting dressed, something he missed.

“About your son, I mean.”

Fusco lets his foot drag a little too long on the carpet and almost trips. He reaches out to touch the wall, get his feet under him again. “Yeah?”

“Mmm.” Finch looks straight ahead as he speaks, like this is small talk. Not something important enough for eye contact. “I think there’s merit to the idea of introducing myself to…principal figures in your life under an assumed identity. So that, in the case of chance encounters, my presence can be explained away easily and there’s no need to worry about conflicting stories or…or temporary excuses that only work in the short term. Telling people I’m here to fix the cable or you’re seeing me about a criminal matter is fine for the moment, but if the same person sees us having dinner, the explanation becomes much more complicated. And,” he clears his throat, “if I’m to be…around for a while…”

“No, no, I get you.” Fusco pretends to not be a little bit short of breath. “That makes sense.”

“I’m glad you think so.” Finch rests his hand on the doorknob. “Of course, I’d need time to craft a new identity. We’d need to compare notes and ensure that we agree on the specifics of how we met and how long we’ve known each other and so on. And even then, I can’t precisely guarantee…results, but…”

“Yeah,” Fusco says. “Yeah, we’ll see.”

Finch smiles weakly as he twists the doorknob, opens the door. “I really do want to meet him.”

“Sure you do. He’s a great kid.” Fusco shrugs. “Think we could swing that, though. It’d be real easy, no fuss. ‘Hey, kiddo, meet my friend, Mr….’ I dunno. Mr. Parrot,” he tries. “Mr. Ostrich. Mr. Albatross. Whatever dumb bird name you wanna go with.”

Finch sputters.

“’Point is,’” Fusco says, reaching for Finch as he puts a fake-angry foot out the door to storm off ‘cause Fusco made fun of his dumb bird names, catching him by the elbows and pulling Finch flat to his chest, “’point is,’ I’d say, ‘he’s my friend, and I want you to meet him.’”

Finch lets his head drop to press against Fusco’s. “Just friends?” he asks.

“’Just’?” Fusco repeats. He leans in close, ‘til he can smell Finch’s tea-sweet breath. “You are my friend. Asshole.”

“But other things,” Finch murmurs, letting his fingers drift against Fusco’s stomach. “Other things as well, I hope.”

“Yeah. Sure.” He presses a slow, sleepy goodbye against Finch’s mouth. “Other stuff too.”

And he feels Finch melt against him, Finch’s fingers clasping the front of his shirt, Finch’s mouth pressing hard against his like he wants them to bleed into one thing, two clashing colors mixing.

And then he hears somebody in the hall clear their throat.

And isn’t it weird how if you’ve been with somebody long enough, even if you split up and you hardly see each other for months, you still recognize them in the smallest ways. The smell of their perfume. The nuances of how they clear their throat. Stuff like that. It’s why Finch is melting and why Fusco is freezing up and shoving Finch off him as kindly as he can, wrenching his head away from the kiss. Finally, finally Finch gets the hint, stops trying to plant teasing kisses on Fusco’s nose and his brow and starts wondering what’s wrong. That’s when Finch sees what Fusco sees and Fusco feels Finch’s whole body lock up in his arms.

He takes his hands off Finch’s elbows, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “Uh,” he says. “Hey.”

Sharon just stands there, Michael’s bag slung over her shoulder, mouth frozen half-open, mid-word. Her throat twitches as she swallows and a polite “How good to see you” mask descends over her face. “Hi.”

Michael is beside her and behind her, half-hidden by the bag. Fusco can’t see his face right now.

“This, uh.” He’s uncomfortably aware of Finch’s hands, now dangling limp at his sides, pretending they weren’t tearing at Fusco’s shirt a few seconds ago. Not Finch, he tells himself, or he’ll have to change his name and leave the country or something. And anyway, people don’t call their…their other halves, their boyfriends by their last name. “So, uh,” he tries again. “So, this is Harold.”

It sounds all wrong coming out of his mouth. Harold. He never calls Finch Harold. That doesn’t sound like the name of somebody he’d be close to, somebody he’d be friends with. Harold sounds like the name of his accountant.

Sharon is shifting the bag on her shoulder so it’s steadier. She nods to Harold. “Hey.”

Tight, clipped, edgy hey. Not unfriendly, though. She’s trying. Fusco spares a glance at Finch, who is ashy and big-eyed. He puts a hand on Finch’s back, high up, PG-rated, and feels Finch tense beneath his palm. “And, uh, Harold, this is Sharon, my ex-wife.” There, good. No bitterness in the voice. That wouldn’t be good for anybody. “And this is my son. Michael.”

At the mention of his name, Michael peers around the edge of the bag and it hits Fusco, like a punch to the gut. Three months. Three months is such a long time. His son is settled into being ten. He needs a haircut. He’s a few inches taller, or maybe that’s just Fusco’s imagination. Michael’s always smaller, younger in his head. He wishes he could drop everything, the ex-wife and Finch both, and just talk to his son right now.

Finch twists slightly in Fusco’s arms, leans forward and down from the hips like he does, all one big moving piece. “Hello, Michael,” he says. “I’ve heard a good deal about you.” Not exactly true. Fusco really did want Michael to meet Finch someday – not like this – but he doesn’t talk to Finch about his son all that often. Michael is one of those weird tender spots he doesn’t like to bring up with Finch. Which doesn’t mean Finch doesn’t know stuff.

Michael blinks up at Finch, solemn and critical, and a small, nervous smile twitches across Finch’s lips. Fusco realizes Finch has no clue how to talk to a kid. Maybe he’s never had to, or hasn’t for a really long time. But he can see it, the wheels in Finch’s head whirring uselessly as he tries to think of what kids are like, what ten year olds specifically are like. He shrinks back, makes faltering eye contact with Sharon.

“It’s very, ah, very good to meet you,” he says, extending a hand. “I was just…” His ears are all in bloom, bright pink. “I was just…going. I’m terribly sorry to have intruded, I suppose I must have lost track of the ti…”

“No,” Sharon interrupts, taking his hand, giving it a firm, measuring shake. “No, it’s. I was early. I should’ve called ahead.”

“Terribly sorry,” Finch repeats, hand still locked in hers, still going through the mindless up-and-down.

They stand there in the hall in this awful, polite Mexican standoff.

“Mom,” Michael says, nudging at her side. “Can I have my bag?”

“Yeah,” she murmurs numbly, releasing Finch, who gathers his hand close to his chest, like he missed it. She lets the bag slide loose and the strap catches in the collar of her oversized sweater so her sharp, freckly shoulder is exposed. “Yeah, why don’t you go on inside, honey? I gotta…I wanna talk to your dad for a second, okay?”

“’Kay.” Michael lugs the bag over his shoulder and keeps a curious eye on Finch as he squeezes past the adults into the apartment. He pats Fusco’s sleeve as he goes, a firm, silent, “Hey, Dad.”

Okay. Okay.

Fusco touches Finch’s elbow, makes him jump. “Hey. You mind going in too? Need to talk to the ex.”

“Oh,” Finch murmurs, still wide-eyed, “I wouldn’t want to impose…”

“You’re not imposing. Clear out a sec, okay? Make sure my kid gets settled.”

Finch doesn’t seem all that reassured by any of it. He shuffles back into the apartment, his own little overnight bag hanging from his white-knuckled fist, and closes the door. So it’s just the two of them in the hallway, Fusco and the ex.

She’s making a fist in her sweater, pulling the neckline up to cover her shoulder again. "Harold," she says in the quiet of the hallway. Just getting a feel for it, trying to figure it out. Harold.

"Yeah." Fusco scratches at the back of his head. "He really was leaving. I wasn't gonna spring him on you like that."

She nods real slow, still thinking. “How long has that been going on?”

“Not long. Couple of months.” Fusco’s hands creep into his pockets. “We were waiting to do introductions and stuff until…he’s really private, you know?”

Sharon shrugs weakly.

“He’s, uh. Shy, I guess. Doesn’t really have family or anything, so I don’t think he knows how to act around that. Kids and stuff.”

That’s kinda true.

She’s still watching the closed door, squinting curiously at the memory of Finch. “Does he have a limp?” she asks.

“Yeah. Some kinda…accident. With his back. He doesn’t like to talk about it.”

“Oh." The flicker of guilt in her eyes. "Okay.”

“So, do we…” he begins. “Is there a problem?”

“Jesus, Lionel.” She pushes her hands back through her dark, curly hair. “No. There’s no problem.”

He squeezes the lint-fuzzed insides of his pockets, lets out a whistling breath.

She flops against the wall and leans there with her feet out, like she’s sprawled in an invisible chair. “I’m not here to police who you fuck, you know? See whoever you want. We’re not together anymore.” She shrugs, looks at him sidelong. “It’s actually kind of a relief to see you with somebody. It's, you know, healthy. Having something other than work in your life. Meeting new people." She says that pointedly, probingly, because she wants assurance that Finch is new people. Not HR people. Not a dangerous habit. She seems satisfied by what she reads in his face. "I'm fine with it, Lionel. Even if it…wasn’t what I expected.”

“Yeah. Well. Me neither, if it makes you feel any better.”

She exhales sharp through her nose. “So, uh. What’s this guy like?”

Most of the stuff he knows about what Finch is like, he can’t say. Not even ‘cause it’s secret or illegal; just ‘cause he knows Finch wants to stay as mysterious as he can right now, until they decide what to do. He could say a lot, though, about how smart Finch is, smarter than anybody he knows. He could say that Finch is thoughtful and he wants to make the people around him happy. He could say Finch is fussy and exacting and perfectionist to the core and it was intimidating at first, but now it’s kinda funny. He could say all of that, because Sharon will notice it about Finch sooner or later, if she hasn’t already. But she wasn’t asking what Finch is like the way most people would, the standard so-you’re-with-somebody-new question. She wants to know if Finch is safe.

“He’s good,” Fusco tells her. “He’s a good guy.”

“Good with kids?” she asks.

Fusco thinks. “Probably not,” he admits. “But not bad either.”

Her mouth twists, like what’s that supposed to mean.

“I think kids make him nervous,” Fusco explains. “It doesn’t matter. He knows Michael’s important.”

She nods. “Good. That’s all I need.” She rubs her temples for a moment, taking it all in. “So, is this a long-term thing, do you think?

He shrugs. “Who can say, right?” They can’t, not for real. Maybe things are okay now, but who’s to say one of them doesn’t catch a bullet tomorrow? Who’s to say Finch won’t pull another disappearing act, move right on into another life and another house and another stupid bird name? But he lets himself admit, “I think so.”

He leans on the wall beside her with a grunt.

“Okay,” she says, not looking at him. “Good for you.”

Good for him. Good for them, really. Because if this works out long-term, what a fucking miracle of cooperation and teamwork and monumental fucking effort on both their parts. Just staying alive long enough to make it “long-term” would be pretty damn impressive.

It’s a miserable way to think, but he kinda has to because he wants it to last so bad. He wants that stupid, sticky normal relationship that they can’t have; the one where they sleep in on Sundays and argue about stupid shit and cook dinner together after work. And months or maybe a year later, he’d like to find out that Finch’s complaining about Fusco’s mattress is actually some kind of trick to draw Fusco into the brownstone and make him sleep in Finch’s bed for the rest of his life. And maybe he gives in and they live that lazy, yuppie couple’s life in that nice house and that nice neighborhood and Michael comes to visit on alternating weekends and Fusco lives long enough to meet his grandkids.

It’s a nice idea. He’s just not so dumb he thinks it’ll happen like that.

“Yeah,” he says softly. “Good for me.”

“I mean it.” She’s looking at her feet. “He seems…nice.”

It doesn’t matter if Sharon likes Finch. It never did. Probably she doesn’t, because she doesn’t know him, and maybe she never will like him because she’ll never know him. But it’s still a relief, in a weird kind of way, to know she’s okay with it.

“Hey, Lionel,” she says, still studying the laces on her sneakers, “can I ask you a question?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Go ahead.”

“It’s, uh.” She pushes her fingers back into her hair again. “It’s not a good question.”

“You gonna ask or what?”

Her mouth pops open, hand comes down, grasping the air as it does like she’s trying to draw the words out. Her fingernails are bright, tangerine. “Is this…?” She chuckles, nervous, tugs the air again. “Is this why we broke up?”

He freezes.

The corners of her mouth twitch. “Or…or not. I’m not asking if it was because of H…of this guy. Of any guy. Just.” She finally looks at him “Is that why we couldn’t work it out?”

And it’s kind of a slap, even though he only misses the idea of the marriage sometimes, even though he doesn’t want it back. Even though she wants it back even less. The idea that he could’ve been a liar in this, as in everything else, really bites at him. Really draws blood. “No,” he hears himself say, very gently. “No, that’s not why.”

Her face goes twisted up and ruddy, lip stuck out at a sudden and painful angle. Her eyes are deeply unhappy, bone dry, and they’re both suddenly so miserable for each other.

He takes her hand in his without having to look down. It’s a strange memory, the length of her arm, the bones of her hand, the small, ridgy grip. It’s different from what he’s used to holding these days. Finch’s hand is manicured and nimble but it’s bigger. A better fit. Her hand is smoother than Finch’s is, even now. She moisturizes still, he thinks.

“I know it didn’t work out,” he says, squeezing her small, soft hand, “but I really used to love you.”

Her face relaxes, very slightly, and she squeezes back. “I used to love you too.” She lets her other hand come up, swipes it across her face and then, “So,” she says. “The Mets, huh?”

He turns his face to the opposite wall. “Yup. I figured since it’s been such a long time since I’ve seen him…”

“Yeah,” Sharon says. Her hand slips out of his, fingers rub together like he’s sand stuck to her skin and she’s brushing him away. “He’ll like that.”

Fusco nods, rubs his palm against the leg of his jeans. “Hope so.”

“He missed you,” she says, matter-of-fact. “He’s just like you; he pretends he doesn’t give a shit about anything ‘cause he thinks that’s what being tough is. But he did.”

Fusco’s starting to feel a little weak. “Anything I need to know?”

“Nah. Not too much has changed. Pushed his bedtime back to 9:30. Not that it matters, since it’s a weekend and you never enforce it anyway.”

“Nope.”

“’Cause you wanna be the cool dad or something.”

“Yup.”

“You dick.”

“Sure.”

Her sharp fist is a dart in his arm. “Don’t make me the bad guy about things like this, okay? I’m doing my best here.”

“You’re not the bad guy,” he says. “You’re never the bad guy. You take really good care of him.”

“I know,” she says. “You too, most of the time.”

They stand in the hallway a while, quiet, Fusco digging his bare toes into the ugly carpet until it’s clear that nobody has anything else to say and they better go in.

He’s not exactly sure what he expected to find when he came back into the apartment. Finch making uncomfortable small talk with his son, or Michael hidden away in his room and Finch camped out in the kitchen with a lost expression on his face like “I tried,” or maybe the opposite, Finch hiding out in Fusco’s bedroom until the whole thing blows over.

What they do find is Michael and Finch huddled together on the couch, peering at the screen of Finch’s phone in Michael’s hands.

“So there’s no real objective?” Finch asks.

“Nope,” Michael says, eyes on the screen. “You just do whatever you want.”

“And there’s a community? People who share their ideas and accomplishments?”

“Uh huh. People make videos and tutorials and stuff.”

Finch leans closer to the screen, rests his chin on his hand. “It’s simple, but it allows for a surprising amount of creativity.”

Michael nods. “Uh huh. My friends and I are building a zoo. I mean, it’s mostly like sheep and cows and pigs and stuff right now, so maybe it’s just a petting zoo? Or like a farm. But they have other stuff, so. We’ll work on it.” He looks up, catches Fusco’s eye.  “Harold said he was good with computers, but he doesn’t know what Minecraft is.” He says it kind of like an accusation, like it might be Fusco’s fault somehow and he expects him to fix it.

“Well,” Finch says, rising creakily from the couch. “I certainly do now. Wonderful meeting you, Michael. I’ll certainly give it a try.”

“Download it like the second you get home,” Michael says as he pushes the phone into Finch’s outstretched hand.

Finch smiles very slightly. When he moves toward Fusco, he’s a little looser, a little more relaxed. “I really do have to be going,” he says, splitting it between Fusco and Sharon like he’s not sure who he’s apologizing to.

“Me too,” Sharon says. “I’ll walk you down.”

Finch’s newfound ease dies immediately and he shoots Fusco this miserable, fearful stare as Sharon passes him by to say her goodbyes to Michael.

“’S okay,” Fusco says, slipping an arm around Finch. “She thinks you’re harmless.”

“Oh. What luck.”

Fusco pulls him close and presses a chaste, purposeful kiss to Finch’s cheek. He whispers, “If you want, you can come back late tonight, once he’s asleep.”

Finch pecks him just beneath the eye. “I’ll try.”

Sharon finishes up with Michael – goodbye honey, be good, call me if you need me, try to sleep like a normal person, love you, bye – and then the two of them, his ex-wife and his current whatever-Finch-is find their way out of the apartment together.

He kinda hopes they don’t like each other. Not that they fight or they can’t be in the same room together. Just that they aren’t friends and they won’t want to be around each other any more than they have to. That’ll make things easier. He doesn’t want to compare them.

When he turns back, Michael is watching him, kicking his heels against the couch. He’s thinking hard.

“Hey, kiddo,” Fusco says, weakly.

“Hey.”

“So, um.” His mouth is dry. “I guess I should explain about what happened back there.”

Michael is listening.

“See, Harold is, he….he’s really important to me. And he’s a really, really good guy. And sometimes, when two guys spend a lot of time together and they’re real important to each other…”

“Dad,” Michael interrupts. “I know what gay is.”

“Huh.” Fusco knew that. Maybe not in a conscious way, like at the front of his mind, but…yeah. It’s New York. Gay marriage is legal. His kid’s ten years old. Michael knows what gay is. “Yeah. Well.”

“Ben from hockey has two moms and I’ve been over to his house and everything.”

“Yeah. That makes sense. You, uh, you okay with that?  With…with me and Harold?”

Michael thinks about that a second. “Yeah. Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Sure. Mom gets to go on dates with Ted and stuff. That’s fair.”

“Okay.” Fusco exhales and suddenly feels high, fucking giddy. “What…what did you think of him?”

“Harold? He’s okay. A little weird, but nice too.”

Fusco finds himself nodding along.

“Does he really know a lot about computers?” Michael asks.

Fusco settles on the couch beside him maybe a little harder than he means to. “Kid,” he sighs as his head knocks against the back frame, “he knows more about computers than I’m ever gonna know.”

“That’s cool,” Michael says, like he means it. And then, “I don’t hafta call him Dad, do I? Or Uncle Harold or something? ‘Cause Mom tried to do that with Ted and it sucked.”

Fusco thinks about Finch’s face if his son called him “Uncle Harold” out of nowhere, his wrinkled nose, his polite horror. “Nah. I think he’d hate that even more than you would.”

Michael nods solemnly. “Good.”

Good. Jesus.

“So, you and me,” Fusco asks, “we’re okay?”

Michael opens his mouth, hesitates, frowns, drives his heels into the couch real hard. “Was he why you didn’t want me to come over?” Michael asks, looking at his knees.

“Oh. Oh, Jesus, kiddo no. No, that wasn’t it at all.” He takes one of Michael’s hands and worries it between his own.

Michael doesn’t look up from his knees. “Okay, but why, then?”

He’s tempted, for a second, to do like he did with Finch and blame it on Sharon, on his ex-wife’s well-founded worries. But that’s a shitheel move, one he doesn’t wanna ever start using in front of the kid, ‘cause it’s too tempting. Fusco breathes in deep. “The last time I saw you,” he begins, “I was in a lot of trouble. Because of a case I was working on. Some really, really bad guys. And, uh, and during the case, they found out who I was and that I was trying to put them in jail. And one of them…” one of them came to my home, to the place where you sleep and I expect you to be safe, one of them came here, “one of them came after me. To try to scare me away from solving the case. And one of the ways he tried to scare me was saying that he was gonna hurt my family.” He held your picture in his dirty fucking hands, Michael, and if I’d been strong enough I would’ve killed him with mine. “And it…it worked, kinda. Because even though he couldn’t hurt you or mom, it was still a scary idea. We took care of it, me and my partner, and we don’t have to worry about that anymore, but I wanted to wait until it was really, really safe for you to be near me again.”

Michael frowns. “That guy’s in jail?”

Fusco thinks of the faint brown stain still on his carpet, beyond the help of steam-cleaning. He’s probably the only one who’d even notice it but it’s still there. “Yeah, honey,” he says. “He’s in jail.”

“Okay.” Michael tightens his grip on Fusco’s hands and scoots closer along the couch. “But you coulda just said that was why I couldn’t come over. I would’ve got that.”

“That’s probably what I should’ve done,” Fusco admits. “But it’s tough to say you’re afraid. Especially when it doesn’t really make sense anymore. And especially when you have to say it to somebody you wanna be brave for.”

Michael pats his arm. “’S okay. I’m scared too.”

“Nah.” Fusco ruffles his hair. “Kiddo, don’t. You got nothing to be afraid of.”

“That guy’s in jail?” Michael says again.

“Yeah,” Fusco reassures, thinking of blood on his shirt, a body bag in his bedroom. “He’s all locked up. And he’s never getting out.”

Michael clamps himself tight to Fusco’s side, buries his face in his shoulder.

“Oh, no,” he murmurs, arms drawn up and tense like he dropped a plate. “Michael, don’t…”

But he can feel Michael’s face going hot against his shoulder, his little voice whispering, tense and miserable, “I don’t want you to go to jail.”

Because kids remember that stuff. They hang on to it forever. Fusco feels himself go uncomfortably warm and horribly, horribly cold in an instant.

Dad deserves to go to jail with the bad people. Dad’s getting off scot free. That’s the message here.

It’s a tough thing to maneuver around, because what do you say?

Fusco buries his face in the top of Michael’s head until he feels the tip of his nose bend against Michael’s scalp. “I’m sorry,” he mumbles against his hair as he pulls his kid into his lap. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” Fusco takes a deep, struggling breath, locks his arms tight around his son. He sits quiet for a minute, rocking, listening to his son’s tiny, hitching sobs.

“I’m not,” he mumbles, petting clumsily at his son’s back. “I’m not gonna go to jail, Michael. You don’t need to worry about that.”

“You’re not?”

“No, I’m not. I’m not gonna.” He clutches Michael to his chest, braces for follow-up questions, for wait-why-nots. “I’m gonna stay right here,” he says, to fill the quiet. “I have people I need to look out for.”

“’Kay,” Michael murmurs.

“Okay?”

Michael balls up his fists in Fusco’s shirt and rests there against his shoulder. “’Kay.”

Michael’s not gonna ask wait-why-not, he realizes. Because you wanna believe the best of your old man, as long as you can.

That’s not gonna be true forever, probably.

“I love you, buddy.” He rests his chin on Michael’s head. “I’m not going anywhere.”

And he sits there for a while, holding his son tight and being held tightly back, trying to learn to breathe again.

“Dad?” Michael whispers.

“Yeah?”

“You’re crushing me.”

“Oh.” Fusco releases, lets Michael fall out of his lap and back onto the couch. “Sorry about that.”

“’S okay,” Michael says, rubbing his ribs, a shy smile on his reddened face. “I’ll walk it off.”

“Aw, what d’you need to be so tough for, huh? You’re ten.”

Michael grins at him, little-kid bright, and the lump in his chest just dissipates. Fusco sets his hand on top of his kid’s head, shaggy hair snaking between his fingers.

“Okay, kid,” Fusco says, swiping at his eyes, snuffling only a little. “You wanna go watch the Mets lose?”

He does.

---

Somebody has their hand on his forehead, tracing lines and tickling at the edge of his hairline. Fusco swipes at them without opening his eyes, catches a smooth, long-fingered hand in his own. He squeezes gently.

“I had hoped,” Finch purrs to him, interlacing their fingers, “to find you a little more wakeful.”

“Mmmph.” He rolls, feels the couch at his back, the crick in his neck as he changes positions. He presses the back of Finch’s hand against his cheek.

Finch bends close to him until Fusco can feel puffs of breath on his ear. “First and foremost,” Finch says, “I think you should take care of your son.”

Fusco blinks awake and finds that he is sprawled out on the couch, like he thought. The TV still blares and flickers in his peripheral vision like it did when Michael started playing some game however many hours ago. Before he fell asleep. Finch’s face is above him, upside down, peering over the arm of the couch at him.

Finch’s eyes are crinkled and kind at the edges. “Tired?”

“Yeah.” His mouth is gummy, desert dry. He licks his lips. “Little bit.”

“Mmm.” Finch bends to kiss his forehead. “We’ll see what we can do about that. Go, put your son to bed. We need to talk.”

A cold, nervous weight settles in his chest. “Okay.”

Fusco sits up, gets on his feet, feels his fucking knees pop, like that sure won’t get old. Michael is passed out cold on the floor, facing the TV. There’s a fat pillow from the couch braced under his head and his chest, an Xbox controller still loosely clutched in his fist, an open bag of chips with the contents gradually avalanching out on the carpet beside him.

He could jostle the kid’s shoulder, wake him up and shepherd him back to the room, but he feels guilty already for not making him go to sleep on time. Better to not wake him up. Fusco hasn’t had to use this move in a while, but he’s pretty sure he can still pull it off. He kneels on the floor beside Michael and slowly, gradually, like he’s Indiana Jones switching the bag of sand for the idol, he eases his hands between the carpet and Michael. He picks him up real slowly, smooth as he can, kinda rolls him in midair so he goes from face down to face up. Michael spasms in his sleep then, lets out a tiny groan before settling against Fusco’s chest. Fusco stands up slow too, arms shivering ‘cause this kid of his is getting real heavy.

When he turns to bring Michael to bed, Finch is watching, hands clasped in his lap, face bright and fucking delighted.

“What?” Fusco mouths to him.

Finch flushes deeply, shakes his head.

So he carries his kid at a snail’s goddamn pace, thinking he’s gonna need somebody to walk on his back after this or he needs to hit the gym next week or something. He lays Michael out in bed, says “Good night, jerk” when Michael squints up half awake in the instant after he hits the bed, messes his hair up real good once he’s sure he’s asleep.

By the time he gets back, Finch has the TV turned off, the bag of chips pinched shut with a clothespin and tucked away on the kitchen counter. Finch himself is positioned neatly on one end of the couch. He pats the cushion beside him and Fusco gets the hint, takes his place.  

“This was…” Finch begins, “…not what I wanted.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

Finch shakes his head. “No apologies necessary. This isn’t your doing. It’s not anyone’s doing, it’s just.” He presses his praying hands to his lips as he thinks. “It’s not ideal.”

“Yeah,” Fusco says. “I’m pretty much with you on that.”

Finch crumples his hands in his lap. “It’s not as though I didn’t enjoy meeting him. He’s a, a perfectly wonderful child. Bright and friendly. He looks very like you, you know.”

“I know,” Fusco says again.

“Even your wife. She’s…”

“My ex. My ex-wife.”

“Yes. Of course.” Finch’s cheeks color and he looks down at his knees. “I feel it would be best if they saw me seldom. If at all. For now, at least.”

“Okay,” Fusco says. Not like he expected anything different

“I told your former wife that my name was Harold Crow. An alias of mine, one of the more disposable ones. I ask that you use it when speaking of me to your family.”

“Crow.” He tests that against his tongue. It’s okay. It’s easier than Harold, somehow. “You and your goddamn birds. Sure. Whatever you need.”

“He’s, ah, a private investigator,” Finch says, shyly. “Doesn’t often take on cases, but he does have business cards and a sterling reputation. Your ex-wife asked how the two of us met and I said it was through work. I imagine Harold Crow was hired onto a case that became the purview of the NYPD and we became acquainted while comparing notes.”

“You imagine?”

“Well,” Finch says, “she didn’t ask me.”

Fusco lets himself tip, very slowly, so his head is pillowed on Finch’s bony shoulder. “You know, I’ve had those kindsa things happen before. Private dick gets involved in something that turns into an actual investigation and we gotta get him to share his information with us.”

“Oh?”

“Mmhmm.” Fusco lets his eyes slide shut. “Those guys are uncooperative pains-in-my-ass.”

“Hmm.” Finch’s hand comes up to trace the line of his jaw. “So not altogether off the mark, then.”

“No, not so far off.” He turns his head just slightly so Finch’s fingertips graze over his mouth. “You ever see Chinatown?”

“The film or the neighborhood?”

“The movie, genius.”

“Yes,” Finch says, “I’ve seen Chinatown.”

“Those guys are never as smooth as Jake Gittes in real life.”

“Jake Gittes,” Finch murmurs, “wasn’t particularly smooth, in the long run.”

“So that should tell you something, Glasses.”

“Very well.” Finch traces the sensitive shell of his ear with one fingertip. “Where do you rate me? On this scale.”

“Below Jake,” he says. “Cut above the other guys, though.”

“Thank you, Lionel.” Finch bends closer, presses soft, dry lips to Fusco’s ear. “You’re sunburned.”

“Mmmmph. Figures.”

“Sunscreen,” Finch reprimands.

He mumbles, “I know, I know. Sometimes I miss a spot.”

“Your poor ear.”

“Lay off, Harold.” He shifts on the couch against Finch’s sharp little shoulder, burrows against his soft throat. “Hey, what do you think of that?”

“Of what?”

“Me. Callin’ you Harold.”

“That was quick thinking,” Finch says. “I was very concerned you’d call me Finch in front of your family and that would lead to…questions. And limited options.”

“Yeah, but I mean…do you want me to call you Harold? All the time, I mean.”

“Oh.” He feels Finch’s head tilt against his. “If you like.”

“’Cause sometimes you call me Detective, and that’s fine, and sometimes you call me Lionel, and that’s fine too. And I call you a lot of things, but I don’t think I ever called you Harold before today. And I was wondering if you wished I did that more.”

“It doesn’t come naturally to you,” Finch asks, “does it?”

“Nah,” Fusco admits. “But, you know, it’s your name. Your real name, maybe, or at least one you hang on to. If you want me to call you Harold, I’ll call you Harold.”

Finch sits tight, thinking about it.

“Or somethin’ else,” Fusco adds, “if it’s too formal. You ever go by Harry?”

“No,” Finch says. “I never have.” His tone says pretty clearly he never will. “I think you should call me by whatever name seems right to you.”

“Not Harry, though.”

“I would prefer,” Finch says, “if you didn’t.”

“Alright.” He nuzzles sleepily against Finch’s cheek and jaw. “Harold,” he tries.

“It does sound odd, coming from you.” Finch’s fingers sneak into his hair. “No need to force it. Just concentrate on using that name around your wife and son. If it catches on…”

“Ex-wife,” Fusco says again. “I’m not married to her anymore.”

“I know.”

Fusco cracks one eye and peers at Finch. “What’d you think of her?”

“Very nice. Lovely woman.” Finch’s dry little lips twitch. “Very, ah, understanding. No denying that.”

“Uh huh.”

Finch’s arm squeezes between the couch cushion and Fusco’s back, shoving up his t-shirt as it goes. His hand settles beneath Fusco’s ribs, above the curve of his hip. “I’m sorry to admit I was prepared to dislike her on principle.”

Fusco grins. “Jealous, smart guy?”

“No.” Finch twists to face him. “Affronted, perhaps. I’ve found you to be rather…deprived. In some ways.” Finch’s hands are moving on him, small and ticklish, on the side of his face and underneath his shirt. “Sometimes heartbreakingly so.”

“’Heartbreaking,’” he repeats as he tilts backwards, draws Finch up on top of him. “Geez.”

“Well, it is,” Finch sighs. He adjusts, moves his hips a little, gets comfortable. “On occasion, it really is.”

“Hey, I mean.” Fusco leans forward, knocks their noses together. “You can weep all you want, but at the end of the day it’s up to me to know what the hell I want, you know? Not her. Not you, for that matter.”

“I suppose.” Finch has this little frown fixed on his mouth, like he thinks Fusco oughta know that, but he thinks he oughta know too, just by looking, and it really bothers him that he doesn’t.

“Ah, stop it.” Fusco nuzzles against him, shifts a little so he’s laid out flat. “Anyway, I’m happy now. How many people get to say that?”

“Not enough,” Finch admits.

“What about you? You happy?”

He smiles very slightly. “I suppose I am.”

“Well, then. Count your blessings, jackass.”

Finch tugs up the bottom of Fusco’s shirt, lets his fingers graze over his belly, his chest. “I intend to.”

“Mmmm. Not here, though.”

“No?”

“Nah. What if the kid hears?”

Finch starts, peers anxiously over the back of the couch at the door to Michael’s room. “Is he not asleep?”

“He’s asleep, I’ve just don’t wanna fool around where he might see if he wakes up.” Fusco pushes up on his elbows, presses a kiss to Finch’s neck. “You said you didn’t want him seeing too much of you,” he reminds Finch.

“Not quite what I meant, but,” Finch tilts his head, “an excellent point.”

“Well, anyway,” Fusco says as he supports Finch’s arms and guides him gently off the couch, “I’m sure he feels the same. Kid used to cover his eyes when me and his mom kissed too much; can’t imagine he was thrilled to meet you at first.”

Finch frowns. “He doesn’t approve?”

“Nah, he’s fine with it,” Fusco says, grunting as he sits up. “I raised a good kid.”

Finch takes his hands, helps him to his feet. “You did. You’re very sweet with him.” Lazily, Finch slides his arms around Fusco’s neck. “I’m glad to hear he approves. I know it’s important to you.”

Fusco feels his face heat up. “Thanks.” He leans in, presses his forehead to Finch’s. “Listen, not to kill the mood or anything…”

“Oh, go on.”

“But we’re gonna have to keep it down,” he says. “Thin walls.”

Finch sighs.

Fusco tugs gently at the front of Finch’s suit. “Maybe I shouldn’t have both of you over here at the same time.”

“It’s fine, really,” Finch says, slipping hands up under Fusco’s shirt and rubbing small circles into his back. “We just need more privacy.”

“Mmmm.”

“More space. Thicker walls.”

“Right.”

“A quieter mattress.”

Fusco hesitates, slides his hands into Finch’s jacket, over his soft stomach. Pretends he doesn’t understand. “We gonna stand here talking real estate all night?” Fusco asks as he tugs the shirt from Finch’s waistband, “or are you gonna go to bed?”

“Just me?”

“I, uh.” Fusco squirms. “I gotta check the place, before…”

“I understand.” Finch pats him on the back. “I’ll go on ahead.”

He’s mostly stopped doing this. Finch was patient about it the first few times but eventually he stopped letting Fusco get out of bed at night to pace around the apartment. Finch would hang on him until he gave up on listening for creaks or groans or footfalls and just fell asleep. But he kinda has to, tonight. ‘Cause Michael’s here. So he checks that the door is locked, that there’s nobody in the coat closet or in the kitchen, that his son’s room is bare except for the kid, curled up in a tight little knot on top of his blankets.

Fusco comes back with his jacket, the same over-priced, battle-scarred thing he wears everywhere now, every day, and he drapes it over his son’s shoulders, watches him bunch up underneath it and bury his face in the collar. He leans in the doorway and watches for a while, just following the rise and fall of Michael’s chest.

Later, he climbs into bed next to Finch and Finch groans, turns over, blinks sleep out of his eyes. “There you are,” Finch murmurs. “Thought you might’ve gotten lost.”

“Nah,” Fusco says, resting his head on Finch’s chest.

“Mmm.” Finch’s fingers tickle against the back of his neck. “Where were we?”

“I was telling you to go on to bed.”

“Ah, yes.”

“And you were trying to get up the courage to ask me to move in with you.”

“I.” His heart hammers in Fusco’s ears. “Hah.”

And then he asks.

And then Fusco answers.

And later he will say, very fondly, that he should’ve kept his big mouth shut.

Notes:

[calmly bursts into flames]

Like, thanks, everybody.