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“How you must have suffered getting accustomed to me,
my savage, solitary soul, my name that sends them all running.”
— Pablo Neruda
There are nights that John wakes from nightmares with his heart racing. His fingers twitch and his mind wanders around and around that old prickly pear T.S. Eliot wrote about. A lot of the nightmares are about the same person these days: his good old buddy Jack. How John hates him even now; his laughter and his beautiful face, the way he had graceful hands like those of a musician or painter. What he hates most though is the recollection of his seraphic smile when he said, Yes. Oh, yes.
John had called what he was about to do to Jack playing and he had played. He’d carved out Jack’s skeleton just as Jack had done for him and when he was done, he cut out Jack’s heart—but only after digging an X into his chest so deeply he scraped bone. For one sadistic moment, John became a monster. Jack was right—he made him that way—because Jack had given John the ugly tools to give in to a bestial side of his nature. While he lies awake in bed, he thinks that Kara would’ve welcomed a taste of darkness in John’s technique. He’d have been the Marquis de Sade to her Elizabeth Bathory and that would’ve been a lovely thing to her.
On such nights, John listens to his own heartbeat and tries to forget how Jack’s eyes were neither blue nor green, but somewhere in between—bright and polished turquoise. It’s that thought which makes him feel honest-to-God ill once in a while because he stared into those turquoise eyes and watched the light drain from them. It makes John’s stomach flip because he smiled when he saw the last shadow of life dart out of the frames that were Jack’s eyes. Pupils fixed and dilated, staring up at nothing; only John’s blood-speckled face reflected in their surface. They were so much like gemstones then. So lovely. So lifeless.
John moves closer to Harold, seeking his warmth and the reality of his presence, the knowledge that the man sleeping beside him can see the good in John even when he can’t find it himself. After dreams of Jack, Harold is the one who protects John, not the other way around. Harold will never know it and it’s better that way. If Harold knew, he would be baffled, he would ask questions: What are you talking about? How could I ever protect you, John? The answers are too complicated, so John pretends that Harold already knows to save himself the task of even trying to fathom an answer.
John finds sleep again in the sound of Harold’s sleeping breath and in the way he rests his hand on the back of John’s neck when he lays his head on his chest to listen to Harold’s heartbeat. That is how he saves and protects John when the nights are bad and the dreams take on the resemblance of conversations you wish you never had.
In a few hours it will be dawn and they will have a new number, but for right now John sleeps and does not dream again.
~*~*~*~*~*~
John still tries to stop the bleeding, he still tries to give her mouth to mouth (why, why did he do that? he will ask himself that many times down the road). When his mouth fills with her warm, copper-salt blood, he almost swallows as a reflex and only remembers to spit because that’s common sense and thankfully, it hasn’t abandoned him yet. There are darts of flesh missing on her neck, her face, the upper part of her chest. They gleam wet and painful looking, elongated and thin; alien arrowheads created by scattering buckshot. The tightest part is where it blew her wide open—bits of white-white rib and sternum, the pulpy pink remnants of a lung. Where the heart was is only a red mud hole in her chest cavity.
John thinks about how much he liked this young woman, whose name was Loreena Mendez. She was bright and talented; she had a promising future and was the only woman John’s ever met that knew sleight of hand magic tricks. They delighted her almost as much as they did the people she performed them for. He’s spent the last week and half talking to her, staying with her in one of the safe-houses and guarding her life. Now he’s lost it and in turn, she has lost everything she could’ve one day been.
People die everyday and as Harold is fond of saying: they can’t save everyone. Harold is right, too, but sometimes it smarts a hell a lot worse than it does other times. Some people deserve to die and some people don’t, but John doesn’t particularly care one way or another—he does his job and that’s basically the end of it. In this instance though, he cares. As stupid as it may seem, he’d started to think of her as a friend and that’s a rare thing for John Reese, indeed.
He hears Shaw’s booted heels clicking towards him, he hears Harold’s voice doing that rollercoaster octave thing it does when he’s beyond worried and flat-out alarmed. John, however, is not listening to any of it, not even Shaw’s, “Son of a bitch!” when she sees Loreena’s body because here’s the thing—Shaw liked her, too, even if she’d never admit it.
In a picturesque swirl of falling leaves, John rises from the concrete, draws his gun and goes after the bastard that pulled the trigger.
“John, please talk to me!” Harold squawks in his ear.
John grimaces at the volume, but answers. “I’m alive, Harold.”
“And Miss Mendez?”
“No,” John says.
“Oh, my.” Harold sighs, heavy and sad. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to kill them all,” John says.
Harold is silent and in the background, sirens are wailing, Shaw’s boot heels are clicking along beside him now—she’s got the same idea.
Harold’s voice is somber and tight when he comes back on the line. “I’ll check security camera feeds; see if I can point you in the right direction. I’ve already contacted the detectives.”
“Thanks, Harold,” John says. His heart feels like a lump of granite in his chest, cold and heavy but still there, unlike Loreena’s.
“And John?”
“Yeah?”
“Please be careful.” Harold’s voice is soft and strained; tight with worry and the words he will not say over the open comm line.
John hears them anyway; they’re all right there in the tone of Harold’s voice. His stony heart gives a lurching thump of a beat. “Okay.”
“We’re not aiming for kneecaps this time, got it?” Shaw says after John’s disconnected from Harold.
“I had no intention of it,” John says.
“Sometimes I love how you think.” Her smile is fierce and homicidal.
John thinks it looks good on her.
~*~*~*~*~*~
He met Loreena once and was charmed by her despite himself. She told him that his boyfriend was cute with an impish smile. Harold had surprised himself by replying, “Oh, he’s more than cute,” while he was hacking an FBI database, looking for information on the organized crime syndicate that Loreena had the misfortune of crossing. When she laughed, Harold had laughed with her and tried to figure out how she figured it out. He may be great with tech, but Harold has learned one thing that almost always holds true when it comes to matters of the heart: Women are far more perceptive than most men. It may be a stereotype, but like a cliché, it’s one for a reason.
“So, you like him a lot, huh?” she asked.
“I do, yes,” Harold said. “Quite a lot, in fact.”
“Oooh!” was Loreena’s response. “I wish I could meet a guy I liked that much.”
“A lovely young woman such as you will meet that man one day, I guarantee it,” Harold said.
He hates now that he lied to her. He meant what he said, but it ended so badly for Loreena. Harold is convinced that somewhere in the world, there is a Romeo who will forever be waiting for his Juliette (minus the overwrought double suicide, of course).
Harold stews in the library and tries not to think about Loreena Mendez. Not thinking about her only leads him to thoughts of John, however. All of the terrible potentialities of what could happen to him out there with only Shaw for back-up. She’s more than capable and so is John; together they can wreak a remarkable amount of havoc and mayhem. Still, Harold worries and worries. He paces in front of his desk, Bear keeping step with him until he goes to get his furry lamb squeaky toy (a gift from Shaw) and brings it to Harold.
Harold looks down into his expectant brown eyes and with a sigh; he takes the toy and tosses it down an aisle. He smiles the faintest bit when Bear tears off after it, tongue lolling and tail held high.
He doesn’t stop thinking, but playing with Bear eases his mind enough that he doesn’t feel like he’s fighting for every inhalation of the musty air.
“He’s coming back,” Harold says to Bear. Bear drops his toy at his feet and patiently waits for Harold to pick it up again. “He said he would. That counts, right?”
John has to come back, that’s all there is to it. The mere thought of never again waking up to morning sunlight gilding the world with brightest gold and finding John asleep with his head on his chest fills Harold with hollow dread; like it has already happened. Like there will never be another morning like this one was or the many that have come before it. He will be left with memories only, fragments and moments that add up to nothing at all because there will never be another one. Harold’s very soul feels heavy and cold at such ideas and he curses the cruelty of his imagination; the fatalistic hatefulness of it.
He tells himself that Bear’s tail thumping on the floor is proof that he agrees. Then he throws the toy and resumes waiting. Harold gives himself a stern admonishment to quit thinking. He just wants to go home—to John’s apartment where he’s staying even more now. He only stays away one or two nights a month now and soon, he doubts he will even do that; he’s forcing himself as it is.
Harold has been entertaining the idea of asking John how he would feel about putting the apartment up for sale or converting it to another safe-house. He thinks about asking John to come live with him, help fill up the emptiness of his big house with his quiet, reassuring presence. He wonders what John would say. Harold has imagined that conversation with a variety of different outcomes—from the absolutely ludicrous: John hitting him with a pewter candlestick that does not, in reality, exist in his apartment—Harold thanks his imagination for that. There are scenarios that are far more realistic: John very calmly telling him Yes or No. The last one makes Harold feel like he should pass it to John in a note; ask him to circle one or the other.
Things with John are much easier; they’re okay now, he and John. It’s so nice that it hasn’t for one second stopped scaring the ever-loving shit out of Harold. He thinks that’s probably the biggest reason he hasn’t popped the second biggest question to John and asked him to move in with him. He’s afraid that if he does then it’ll all go to hell without so much as the courtesy of a hand basket.
Harold sighs and throws the toy again, resuming the waiting game whilst chastising himself for wanting to cross his fingers in the hopes that will add weight to the guarantee of John coming back in one piece. He tells himself not to contact John, he could interrupt him or Shaw at a critical moment, but the silence is driving him up the wall. The not knowing feels like it’s killing him.
Harold doesn’t cross his fingers after all, but he is beside himself by the time John and Shaw make it back to the library. It’s after three in the morning and he lost contact with both of them hours ago; Fusco and Carter have had no luck in locating them either. All they’ve found is the destruction left in their wake.
They both look like hell; so bad that Harold can’t decide which one looks worse. John is grim, eyes red-rimmed with exhaustion, clothes ripped and filthy. Shaw looks smug, if a bit tired herself. She is also holding a fuzzy little black kitten and scratching it under its chin. Harold dares not ask how she acquired said kitten, though he can guess. If Shaw has a soft spot, it’s definitely animals.
“What happened?” Harold asks as he goes to examine John. He’s long since dropped any pretense in front of their immediate circle of friends. It would be a waste of time and ultimately, he would look idiotic for it. Everyone knows now and to pretend otherwise is a waste of time.
“We killed all of them,” Shaw says. “Except this pretty baby.” She pats the kitten’s head. “I couldn’t leave her alone and orphaned, now could I? Could I?”
Harold is sure she’s not talking to him anymore, what with the way she’s smiling down at the kitten. It’s gruesome the way it pulls at the splits in her lips and makes them ooze blood. Yet, it’s heartening to see Shaw, so chilly and withdrawn, being kind—affectionate—with the kitten, much as she is with Bear.
John’s left eye is black and swollen to a slit, but he watches Harold patiently with his good eye. There’s a cut across the bridge of his nose and another on his right cheek bone with a bruise blooming bright purple-red around it. His hands are stained with dried blood, some of it undoubtedly belonging to the people they dispatched, but not all. The knuckles are scraped raw and painful looking, a few of them turning black-blue beneath the faint wash of red.
Shaw glances over at them and says, “You gonna tell him or am I?”
“Tell me what?” Harold backs up to give John a suspicious look. “What is it I am not seeing?”
“He got shot,” Shaw says. “And stabbed. Twice.”
John hisses a breath in through his teeth and says, “Damnit, Shaw.”
“What? You weren’t gonna tell him,” she says. “Which is fucking stupid, so you know. He sees you naked all the time.”
Harold purses his lips and clears his throat a bit more loudly than necessary to derail her from the topic. He’s not quite sure what Shaw thinks he and John get up to, but he has the impression she imagines Olympic-level gymnastic-style sex at least twice a day. Which is beyond absurd; she should know better, but Shaw’s mind is a strange and rather frightening place.
“My God,” Harold says. “Where?”
John makes a sound a lot like a growl in the back of his throat. “The bullet grazed the back of my right shoulder. The knives got my upper arm and right below my right collarbone.”
“Knives?!”
“It was two different guys, that’s all,” John says. “Calm down, Harold.”
“Don’t tell me to calm down, John!” Harold is surprised to hear how loud his voice is.
“And that’s my cue to bail out,” Shaw says. “This shit is above my pay grade. Buenos noches, boys.”
When she’s gone, Harold huffs out a breath and looks away from John. He can feel himself glaring and doesn’t much care for the way his heart thuds in his chest, almost painful. There’s a knot in his throat that he doesn’t like one little bit and John’s calm, one-eyed gaze is infuriating.
“How many times is it going to take, do you think?” Harold asks.
“How many times is what going to take?” John asks.
“For you to realize that the world needs a hero, not a martyr.” Harold snaps it out as he whirls back on him.
The bitter taste of fear in his mouth tastes like old batteries. He knew it would come to this one day if things continued on between them and here it is. Harold isn’t thinking about tonight so much as he is thinking about Jack, the psycho that nearly did kill John. He’s thinking about John tied to a chair with a knife jutting from his thigh; the scars that frame the symmetry of his very bones.
John’s eye narrows at that and the swollen one closes completely. It looks like he’s doing a poor job of winking at Harold. “What was I supposed to do, let them get away with it?”
“No, but you should not have gone off on such an errand with only Shaw for back-up either!” Harold is fuming, terrified and angry because of it. “If you died out there, do you ever imagine what—” Harold cuts himself off with a click of teeth. He evens out his expression, carefully masking what he’s truly feeling and smoothes down his lapels as he looks away from John. “It’s late and I’m sure you’re exhausted, I certainly know I am. I think we both need some rest; things will look much better tomorrow.”
“Harold.” John rests a bloodstained hand on his shoulder and Harold pats it absently before moving away to collect his things.
“Can you get Bear’s leash, please?” Harold asks.
John frowns at the sudden shift in Harold’s mood and behavior. He sees the way his hands are trembling when he picks up a book and puts it in his briefcase. He hates it when Harold does this. But John, forever tongue-tied, doesn’t know what to say to fix it. So, all he says is, “Sure, I’ll get it.”
“Thank you, Mr. Reese,” Harold says.
John stiffens at that, but then makes himself breathe through it. Harold’s pushing him away; this is how he does it—with rigid formality and impeccable manners. Nothing says FUCK YOU quite the way this does. Harold’s upset and John knows that, too; it’s why he wasn’t going to tell him about what happened.
Leave it to Shaw to go and open her big mouth though because—well, John doesn’t know. Maybe it’s the Samantha Shaw way of saying, You need to be more open in your relationship. That’s pretty rich coming from her since she broke things off with Robert Giovanni because he suggested they hang out with her friends for a change. She said he was getting clingy and that she didn’t need that shit in her life, thanks, but hell no.
John shakes his head when he thinks that sometimes it seems like Shaw is more invested in his and Harold’s relationship than even John is. Which is saying a lot because he’s determined to hold onto Harold now that he’s well and truly got him. It took so much out of them both in the beginning and nearly didn’t happen at all, but it’s right here now and that means the world to John. It’s why he hates the stiff way Harold is holding himself, the way he keeps swallowing. The way his hands dangle loosely at his sides when he turns to gaze out the window at nothing.
John calls Bear over, clips on his leash and rises to wait for Harold to finish shutting down the computers.
~*~*~*~*~*~
Once they’re inside, John doesn’t say a word. He showers and then re-bandages his wounds. John pulls on a plain white t-shirt when he’s done and doesn’t think anything about the bruises on his forearms or the way they make Jack’s raised scars stand out in bright, pale pink relief. Scars like those don’t bruise the same way undamaged skin does. It’s ghastly 3D, but John isn’t bothered. It’s only when he notices Harold staring at them that he even notices.
John refuses to cover them up because this, what he does, cannot be hidden away like a secret. The knife wounds and the bullet graze, sure, but the black eye, the scraped cheek and the bruises on his arms cannot be. Neither can Jack’s scars. Of all of his scars, they are the only ones John actually hates and wishes he could get rid of, but they’re never going away. He knows it, Harold knows it; everyone knows it. Only Carter and Shaw have actually asked to see them though. It belatedly occurs to John that he knows some really morbid women. He’s incredibly fond of them.
He cuts his eyes to the side and finds Harold pretending to read the book he brought home from the library. John sighs and gets up to grab a beer.
“What do you want me to say?” John asks after a good twenty minutes of more silence have passed. “Will it make you feel better if I say I’m sorry?”
“Are you?” Harold asks.
John shakes his head. “No.”
“Then I don’t want you to say any such thing,” Harold says. “We’re past the point of lying to one another.”
John looks at him for that. “Lying by omission is still lying.”
“No, it isn’t.” Harold’s voice is tight.
“Then what is it, withholding the truth?” John asks.
Harold cracks a faint smile at that. “Perhaps so, yes.”
They fall silent again after that. The hum of the refrigerator motor and Bear’s snores seem loud-loud in the quiet.
Then John says, “I’m not sorry for going after those guys. But… I am sorry if I scared you.”
“You scare me almost everyday,” Harold says. “Every time you go out there, I have no idea what’s going to happen. But I’ve been shown more often than I care to think about what can happen. And I… I don’t know what to do.”
“I don’t know either,” John says. “You could maybe start with having a little more faith in me though.”
“I have immense faith in you, John,” Harold says. “But you are only one man. A man whom I happen to think is not expendable.” He fidgets and looks away, worried that he’s said too much, yet again.
“Are you sweet-talking me?” John asks. He teases to ease Harold’s tension, to calm his nerves. This kind of openness is still very shaky territory for them, but John’s had a bit more experience here. Nor has he ever completely closed himself off like Harold. His heart gives a nice kind of flutter at the words though. To Harold, he means something and that means everything to John.
“Hush,” Harold says with an irritable flap of his hand.
John grins. When he takes Harold’s hand this time, he doesn’t pull away and that’s a good thing.
“Next thing I know, you’re going to be quoting poetry at me,” John says.
Harold raises his eyebrow and looks right at John. “Am I now?”
“I never know with you,” John says with a shrug.
“Well, if it’s poetry you want then perhaps I can accommodate you.”
It’s John’s turn to look over at Harold. “You actually have poems memorized?”
“Only a couple of complete ones, but I know bits and pieces of many,” Harold says. “Now, listen.”
“Okay,” John says. He’s curious to hear whatever it is Harold is about to spout at him. He really hopes it isn’t Shakespeare though.
Harold clears his throat and then says, “I do not love you as if you were salt-rose or topaz or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off. I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul.”
When Harold leans back and looks at him again, gaze frank and eyes bright behind the lenses of his glasses, John lets out a heavy breath.
“Did you just—”
“Yes, John, I did,” Harold says.
John smiles then. Maybe it’s not the bare simplicity of those three words standing alone, but Harold’s offerings have always been extravagant. For Harold, saying I love you with excess verbosity is probably the only way he knows. John is not the world’s biggest fan of poetry and he doesn’t know the poem Harold quoted, but it’s prettier than anything he can remember.
While he has no fancy words to offer Harold in return, John does know the tried-and-true ones. “I love you, too, Harold.”
Harold smiles and when John leans in to kiss him, he’s not surprised to find Harold shaking. It can’t have been easy for him to admit such a thing, but he did it because Harold has more steel in him than even he realizes.
After they have turned off the lights and are at last in bed where they meant to be over an hour ago, Harold says, “John, please don’t get yourself killed out there.”
John can’t lie to him and they both know it’s a possibility, but he can say, “I’ll try my best.”
“Then I suppose that will have to do,” Harold says. “Your best is rather remarkable, after all.”
“I like to think so,” John says.
Harold laughs softly. “Goodnight, John.”
“Goodnight, Harold,” John says.
John rolls over and rests his head on Harold’s chest. His hand on the back of his neck is familiar and comforting. Harold lightly strokes the back of John’s hair, the touch like a lullaby and John closes his eyes.
Harold lies awake a bit longer, mulling things over. By the time he, too, is drifting off to sleep, he’s made up his mind. Tomorrow, he is going to ask John about coming to live with him. He thinks it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that one day, he may very well ask John to marry him. Harold smiles and thinks: Now wouldn’t that be something?
Indeed, it would be, but it would be something good. Harold is absolutely certain of that much.
The End