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The tricky thing about being soulmates with a reckless FBI agent who has no sense of self-preservation and a penchant for landing in hot water, you see, is that it tends to come with some collateral damage.
When it begins, that night, Aaron doesn’t even realise it at first. When it begins, Aaron doesn’t even know where Hannah is. And he has no idea what’s about to happen.
He’s in a meeting when his throat begins to close up. It’s just a tickle at first, so he goes on talking. It creeps steadily down and down, leaking into his lungs; now there’s cotton wool lining his rib cage and stopping them from expanding quite enough.
He stops, takes a real breather. He wonders who Hannah’s running from this time, or towards, wonders if she could take a moment any time soon to catch her breath, please, thank you very much. He isn’t too worried. Hannah’s always running somewhere, isn’t she?
(Hannah isn’t going to be running anywhere. Aaron has no idea.)
“You must feel cursed, huh?” Hannah said to him, grinning bloody with her feet on his desk as Aaron glared at her. They were both nursing split lips, though hers was the only one dribbling down her chin, because she couldn’t investigate and keep her fists to herself at the same time, apparently.
Aaron never had too many doubts about his luck. He limped his way through childhood, knocked this way and that by some mysterious spirit on the other side of anywhere who always seemed to find a new body part to bruise, new trees to fall out of. His parents had shared look after worried look as he stumbled out of bed, eleven years old, with an ache in his jaw that could have only come from a thrown punch.
He had never called it a curse. They were gifts, in a weird sort of way; a glimpse into the other half of his world that he hadn’t met yet. Pain is a sort of language, after all. He:d given her sunburn and scraped knees in return, burnt feet from walking on the tin roof in the summer, insect bites that never stopped itching, and, on one memorable occasion, appendicitis.
There are other things that hurt more. “I don’t do soulmates,” she told him one night. It was a week before she met Damien Rennett, the one where he finally tried to kiss her for the first time. That sharp, dark grin never died, but was overtaken by something else, just for a second. Sharing sensations is one thing; Aaron would have taken sharing minds, because he could never figure out what’s going on in hers. “I tend to make a mess of things—“ she gestured at herself; there was a bruise on her left cheekbone, and Aaron knew from the radiating pain that it was only half healed—“No point keeping you around to hate me for it.”
Aaron never hated her, not once, but she didn’t know that. He never got a chance to tell her.
It’s getting worse.
Aaron can’t breathe.
Well, it’s not exactly that. He knows he’s breathing, can feel the air flowing in and out of his lungs just fine, but there’s no relief in the motion; there’s a crushing pressure in his chest like a balloon is expanding in there and pushing all the oxygen out. Whatever Hannah’s doing, it’s worse than running a marathon.
His hands are on his throat, trying futilely to massage it into working condition again, and the others have noticed that something’s wrong. Kendra grabs his arm as his knees buckle—there’s a bruising pain jumping down his body now, shoulder to back to knee to arm to head—and Mars is speaking to him in slow, measured tones, something about breathing, hospitals, allergic reactions?
Aaron tries shaking his head, but the concussion-crack Hannah sustained makes his vision spin round and round and round. Speaking isn’t much better. “N-not—not me,” he gasps out. “Not me.”
His vision is blurring, but Aaron can still see the way the President’s face goes slack and pale.
They’re pushing him towards a chair—Emily’s hand on the small of his back, Seth firmly gripping his shoulders. None of them are strangers to this. Aaron is cursing and tripping and grasping at an uninjured limb on a fairly regular basis. He’d passed out and then woken up on his office floor with Emily propping his head up with pillows that one night he found out that Hannah had gone ahead and gotten herself hit by a truck. When Hannah was stabbed in the leg over in London, Seth had been the one catching him under the arms as he collapsed, and Lyor had pestered him with questions about Hannah’s sordid affair with Damien to distract him from the ache until the second-hand morphine kicked in.
It’s mundane, a little embarrassing if he’s being honest, but at least he knows the routine by now: he just has to wait it out. Clearly Hannah’s taken a beating—there was one memorable occasion in what must have been her early FBI days where someone had apparently tried to strangle her, and this doesn’t feel too different. He’s worried, sure, but only in a perfunctory sort of way. Hannah has been in far worse shape than this before, many times over, and she’s always managed to crawl her way back home.
Aaron’s just about getting a grip on breathing when it feels like his throat is full of concrete, is about to ask for a glass of water, when his body, his skin, every entire inch of himself, starts to scream.
Aaron screams with it. He screams, and he screams, and he screams. His skin is being painted with hot oil. His skin is being peeled off the bone. His skin doesn’t exist anymore; nothing exists except this pain. It explodes in white against the back of his eyelids, not in waves but in one solid mass that came at once and won’t stop coming. Aaron didn’t think this was the sort of pain that could exist.
He’s fallen off the chair, he’s vaguely aware, because he’s writhing against flat carpet. The rough texture rakes at his already searing skin, just like the hands all over him—trying to hold him still or soothe him Aaron isn’t sure, but either way it isn’t helping. Nothing is a relief: even the tears coursing their way unwillingly down his cheeks feel like they’re burning him.
Voices from above ping off his consciousness. It’s okay! What’s happening? Where does it hurt?
“Everywhere,” Aaron sobs. “Everywhere, everywhere…”
It’s only in the shocking stillness of the moment when the pain abruptly dies away completely, leaving behind such a terrible, gaping nothing that Aaron almost wishes the agony would return, that he slips away into black.
Aaron had been learning pain as long as he’d been walking. He could tell you with complete certainty whether he’d rather be shot or stabbed—neither, thank you very much Hannah, but he’d take a bullet if he had to—and he didn’t use the phrase “like being hit by a car” lightly, because seriously, that fucking hurts. It’s how he kept himself calm when Hannah was off being Hannah: he could tell the micro-filament difference between ‘danger’ and ‘a normal day’s work.’
For the last year, he’d been getting weird, stinging pains in his fingers. They’d bothered him until he realised they were paper cuts and typing callouses, and then he’d laughed himself silly.
In Cuba, he’d sat as Hannah had tried to escape, sat vigil for the burn of a bullet but felt only aching breaths. That’s how it felt like he lived sometimes: breath by breath. He would go to sleep at night to the sound of his own chest’s rise and fall, feeling its evenness, its calm.
Aaron wakes to nothing at all, and that’s what makes him want to close his eyes and never open them again.
He’s on a couch, by the looks of it. He’s not sure how he got up there—Mike must have carried him, but he can’t bring himself to care about how that must have looked.
Noise above him. Voices, whispered and rough with worry.
“...take him to a hospital?”
“No, this is….”
“....never heard Aaron scream like that.” That’s Seth, voice close. Aaron registers a dark mass of a figure crouched by the cushion where his head lolls. “I’ve never heard anyone scream like that. What do you think—“
He cuts himself off, and there’s a shuffling around. He thinks they’ve noticed his eyes are open. Aaron can’t tell. He’s not looking at them. He’s staring at the wall because it’s the first thing he’d seen when he’d opened his eyes and he doesn’t think he could move his head even if he wanted to.
“Aaron.” Emily this time. She kneels down to join Seth, hand on the side of his head, thumb brushing his temple. He can barely feel it. “Hey, hey. Does it still...are you still in pain?”
Aaron tenses all the muscles in his body, one long coil and release. It’s a weak effort, he barely twitches, and still he feels nothing. No aches, no pains, just his own breathing.
“No,” he croaks.
“Okay,” Seth says, relieved, hesitant. It’s hard to keep hold of their voices, but it sounds like he’s put on something encouraging. It’s wavering fast. “Okay, well, maybe that’s a good sign. Maybe Hannah’s gotten herself out of...whatever she’d gotten caught up in.”
Aaron shifts his eyes now, searching out the President. The man meets his gaze, and he’s gaunt. Aaron has seen that look on him before.
Aaron closes his eyes again. “No.”
“This is going to end bloody, one way or another,” Hannah said, her hand on his chest as his head tilted toward hers. Her resignation hung heavy over both their heads; she was about to leave, and Aaron knew a last chance when he saw one.
She was warning him, and he didn’t care, because he still remembered being eight years old and feeling his first real pain, up and down the left side of his body like he’d taken a tumble out of a tree—he remembered lying in the grass, that quiet, small-town boy, and dreaming about how his soulmate was going to be an adventure.
The next eight days, Aaron wakes up every morning; he showers (cold water only), he puts on his suit (doesn’t knot his tie too tight, though), and he comes to work. He is calm. He is composed. He doesn’t look anyone in the eye for too long, and he barely talks, but nobody has the heart to question it. That is how long it takes for them to provide an autopsy report. It’s on Aaron’s desk the moment it becomes available. It doesn’t take too long, though, for it to end up on the floor with him.
... traces of toxin found...nerve agent…paralysis ….
He’d tumbled down like a Jenga tower, and his legs are tucked uncomfortably beneath him. His office door is still open, exposing him to the world, but Aaron can’t find it within himself to get up and close it.
... third degree burns across 85% of body….result of close proximity gas explosion….
He’d managed to reach the wastepaper basket on his way down, so at least there isn’t vomit all across the floor. Good thing Hannah isn’t around to feel it—she’d have teased him for having a weak stomach.
…. evidence of smoke inhalation in the lungs, indicating that… .
Aaron doesn’t need an autopsy report to tell him that Hannah was still alive when the flames had reached her.
There’s a hand on his shoulder. It’s only that which makes him register that his door is now closed, that someone’s in the room with him. It’s only when he hears the voice that he realises it’s the President.
“Breathe, son.”
Aaron breathes, and it feels like nothing at all. The President glances over the pages of the autopsy, just long enough to understand what they are, and then he sits down next to Aaron, leaning back against the desk. It would be a shock if Aaron could feel anything other than numbness.
The others all have a particular way of looking at him now: a cloying, band aid smile, gentle because they’re afraid anything else will break him, that holds all the promises of “everything’s gonna be okay.” The President doesn’t look at him like that.
“I need—“ Aaron says. He can just barely hear the sound of his own voice. “I need this—I need it to stop.” His head lolls to look at the President. “When does it stop?”
The President’s hand on the back of his neck is the only thing in the world that feels real. “I’ll let you know,” he says.
They were tangled up together on the bed in Hannah’s apartment, because hers was nicer, and Aaron was too damn happy to argue about it. It was three weeks since Hannah got back from England, and three hours since Hannah said “fuck it” and kissed him. It was the last time Aaron will ever see her alive, but neither of them knew that. They both didn’t know so many things.
“You know this is my good leg as well, right?” Aaron grumbled as he massaged his thigh, unscarred and still aching.
Hannah rolled her eyes. “Fine. I promise that next time I’ll politely ask the Russian assassin to stab me in the other leg.” She’d already apologised for it—right after she marched into his office and kissed him senseless. Hannah knew last chances when she saw them too, and she’d always been the best at making terrible choices. She could give herself one night, and god, Aaron would take it.
“I’d rather if you said there wouldn’t be a next time.” Hannah laughed—had he met her?—but Aaron wasn’t going to let her shake him off this time. “I’m serious,” he said. “I want you to be more careful.” He couldn’t reel her in with bare sincerity though, he knew that much. “For the sake of my career, at least. Really doesn’t look good, me falling over screaming in front of the President of the United States.”
Hannah’s answering smile was wide and bright and everything he’d known he’d been promised his whole life. Her fingertips resting on his chest had landed directly over his heart.
“For you, pretty boy, I might just try.”