Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“The fingers on his flesh told him he was loved, that he had always been loved, and that the world was a place where above all else things that were good would find a way to burrow into you.”

     ~ Steven Galloway, The Cellist of Sarajevo

For certain professions, eighteen months is a long time.

Bus drivers, for instance. Eighteen months constitutes a lot of trips across the Arlington Memorial Bridge, numbers in potentially the tens of thousands. In eighteen months, a construction crew can build a ground breaking new skyscraper. Eighteen months is a season and a half of a hit TV show.

In FBI speak…eighteen months isn’t nearly long enough. Not long enough to have finished processing the Cibola fiasco, either individually or paperwork-wise, and not in the same time zone as long enough to dissipate the office gossip and retelling of it.

Sadusky is aware that he should know this. He should have prepared Ben better, that law enforcement has the memory of an elephant and most certainly will have been following along with his case even after it left their hands. That Spellman and Hendricks come into Sadusky’s office at least once a week to badger him about the polar bear thing—and that itself was a year ago—or show him a newspaper article about some lecture one of the Gates family gave.

Which is a moot point. Peter usually knows about their travel plans long before the press does, because sometimes Abigail calls to hash out the details of a speech, or Riley asks him to try out some new code he designed, or Patrick wants to know which tie looks best with his new sport coat.

But that’s beside the point. If the Gates family seeks out Sadusky’s advice whenever the wind blows, then it’s none of his underling agents’ business. He’ll continue to act surprised so as not to arouse suspicion.

Still, Sadusky can’t help a twinge of guilt when he meets Ben in the Bureau lobby. Mainly due to the fact that, well…

Everyone walking by Ben has stopped walking upon recognizing him and security are staring. Hands resting on their side arms.

At a professional level, Sadusky can’t say he blames them—this man kidnapped their current president, after all. At a personal level, Peter’s hackles bristled the moment he stepped foot out of the elevator.

“Good morning, Ben.” Sadusky keeps his tone buoyed and amiable. “Thanks for agreeing to come to the belly of the beast.”

Ben doesn’t shake his hand, long past any formality in this relationship, instead eyeing the hands on guns around the room. “No problem…don’t suppose I’m allowed through security this time, am I?”

Sadusky frowns. “Of course you are. I wouldn’t have personally invited you here if I wasn’t prepared.”

Ben glances to the side at him, brow quirked, seeing right through that to Sadusky’s chagrin. “Uh-huh. Is a badge going to cut it? I know for a fact I’m on three separate watch lists now.”

Sadusky opens his mouth, shocked all the way down to his toes about how Ben could possibly be aware that. Some of those lists are eyes-only levels of classified. Hell, he’s personally vetted half of the people on one of them. Then Ben mimes typing on a keyboard.

Peter huffs, handing him a visitor badge. “You’re rapscallions, the lot of you, you know that?”

“How can I forget…” Ben’s attempts to dampen a mischievous grin are almost successful. “When you keep reminding us?”

“It’s my civic duty,” Sadusky deadpans.

He lets Ben get away with the teasing, mostly because it seems to have eased some of the potent fear off his face. Real, gut rationed fear. Sadusky resists a sudden impulse to growl at the two security guards who buzz Ben in through the metal detector and mandatory radiation ordinance scanner.

Anyone who makes the Gates family scared is on his own private watch list.

They ask Ben a series of questions that are most definitely not regulation, about where he’s been in the last week and why he’s here—“Just around DC or Maryland” and “to help Agent Sadusky with something case related”—but doesn’t seem as unnerved by these as Sadusky himself feels. Some of the probing looks are borderline prejudiced.

After a tedious fifteen minutes, they reluctantly let Ben through, though Sadusky has a feeling that it’s only his presence and considerable clout that gets Ben past the doors at all. Ben clips the badge to his blazer lapel, not daring to peer back over his shoulder.

“Sorry for the hostility, Ben.”

“I’m guessing this is why you didn’t ask Riley to come too.”

“Absolutely. I wasn’t sure how he’d take it.”

Ben not-so-subtly lowers his ears away from his shoulders once they’re alone in the elevator. “It’s okay, I get it. If I met me in one of the top government agencies in the world, I’d be suspicious too.”

Sadusky shakes his head with a small chuckle. “Oh, trust me—it’s not just suspicion.”

Ben startles, puzzled by the wry look on Sadusky’s face.

“Get ready,” he says, when they stop off at the fifth floor. “You’re still something of a novelty around here. Some of us worked late nights because of you.”

True to form, the instant Ben rounds the bullpen door, all work screeches to a halt. Ben halts too, out of that human instinct when faced with an impenetrable wall. Even if—especially if—that wall is two dozen armed federal agents, all gawking at Ben as if he just popped in with a bomb strapped to his chest. Soft gasps fail in their attempts to be stifled.

Hendricks recovers first, waving a folder at Sadusky. “Oh come on. Don’t tell me you’re actually going to read him in on the case. I thought that part was a joke.”

“He’s our best shot.” Sadusky steps in front of Ben and keeps his tone firm. “Anyone who has a problem on this decision can raise it with me immediately. Any takers?”

Nobody moves. Ben taps Sadusky’s shoulder with a small laugh, though he tries to cover it up as a cough.

“Good.” Sadusky nods, both to Ben’s wordless request to calm down and relief that his team isn’t suicidal enough to try something with Gates present. “We have a serial killer to track—get back to work.”

They do, mercifully, before he even finishes. The incessant rustle of paper, typing, and ringing phone lines resumes.

They make it to Sadusky’s office without incident, open gaping notwithstanding, but not before Ben stops when he sees an agent and waves. “Agent Dawes.”

The woman blinks, paused in the act of packing up her desk into a cardboard box. She’d recently been transferred to the Chicago office. “You remember me? You remember my name?”

“Of course.” Ben smiles. “You’re the one who took care of the glasses when you inventoried my belongings.”

“The ones that Benjamin Franklin made.” Dawes grins too, shaking his hand. They both unwind. “Good to have your input, Gates.”

Sadusky mouths a ‘thank you’ at her before closing the door.

“You’d think the novelty would have worn off,” says Ben, folding his long legs into the chair in front of Sadusky’s desk. “I was here once before.”

Sadusky flicks his knee on the way by. “That was before you kidnapped the president.”

He checks on Ben’s face, the way it’s regained some colour after this trial by fire. He doesn’t look scared anymore, trading that in for something amused.  

“I thought you were going to strangle an agent. Or two.”

Sadusky doesn’t laugh, dead serious. “So did I. They had no right to treat you like that.”

“Peter.” Ben leans forward, amusement gone. “I’m fine. Besides, you must be desperate to risk it all on someone like me, with the criminal reputation I’ve gained over the years in your circle.”

Sadusky’s frown almost becomes a scowl at that insinuation, that Ben is somehow of lesser worth because of his choices. That he’s a risk to Sadusky’s career or that Sadusky wouldn’t give it up in a heartbeat if they needed him to.

“Ben, it’s an honour to have you here. Do you understand that?”

Ben doesn’t, clearly, but he offers a tiny smile in return.

“I have to ask…” Ben tears Sadusky from the dark thoughts with a curious tone. “Why did you get assigned a serial killer case? I know you’ve worked in other departments before but I thought you mainly worked with theft cases now.”

Peter unlocks the bottom left drawer of his desk and pulls out an evidence bag, containing one small slip of hotel paper. His heart thumps faster just looking at it. Something so minuscule, used to cause so much pain.

“Because of this.”

Ben accepts it with the careful, spidery fingers of someone accustomed to handling delicate documents. He holds it up to the light.

“It’s the same reason you had to come in person,” Sadusky explains. “This note from the killer is critical evidence, forbidden from leaving the building.”

“Like the Zodiac Killer, taunting police with notes.”

Peter nods. “So far he’s kidnapped and killed three victims, no discernable choosing pattern that we can see, but this is the first time he’s left a note pinned to the chest of his third victim that’s legible. The others were water damaged or torn.”

A familiar panging lurches through Sadusky’s chest, at the reminder that those victims could have been prevented if the notes were usable.

Practiced eyes read the lines of handwriting on the page once, then start again at the top. The words seem like gibberish, English letters smashed together. A crinkled line of frustration creases Ben’s brow faster than Sadusky expects, no sudden wide eyes of epiphany. There’s no eureka! moment or hastily drawn conclusions. Sadusky doesn’t let any of the disappointment show on his face, waiting out Ben’s whirling brain in silence.

“It’s a cipher,” Ben finally says. “But surely you have people for that. Riley told me some of the best code breakers in the world work here.”

“They do.” Peter studies the darting of Ben’s eyes, how he’s mentally sifting through something. Not surprising, given that he basically has a textbook for a brain. “But this is old, Ben. This is so old that when we consulted an eighty-nine year old retired code breaker, he didn’t recognize the typographical style.”

Ben’s eyes sharpen. “How old are we talking?”

“That’s why I brought you here. I don’t need a code breaker, Ben. What I need is a historian, hence my phone call yesterday.”

“Sounds like a Ricky McCormick case to me.”

Peter works hard not to startle. “How do you know about that?”

“Riley.” Ben shrugs, not quite hiding a grin. “It was a discarded chapter in his book that the editors made him take out because it was deemed ‘almost solved.’ He ranted about that for days.”

Leaning back, Sadusky’s brows go up. “Solved? Certainly not! We get calls from amateur code breakers about that case at least once a week. Never been cracked.”

Ben hums his agreement but his attention is back on the page. Sadusky doesn’t take the zone out to heart. Now that Ben understands how old the code is, he seems to be trying a different tactic—strangely, he tilts it upside down. There’s a spark in his eye too, one Peter knows like a favourite pair of shoes. He’s witnessed this particular flicker of madness before, usually before he did something stupid like jumping two stories into the Hudson or leaping into the back of a moving SUV while being shot at.

“What? What is it?”

“Could be a Vigenere Square.”

Sadusky shakes his head. “They tried that. Without a key word, it’s a useless exercise. There wasn’t enough data to make the block.”

An undulation in Ben’s fingers has Sadusky sitting back upright, watching the minutia of Ben’s excitement. Slow, gaining traction, his smile is the best thing Sadusky has seen all day. It’s a lick of white fire across the fuse line of his mouth.

“Peter, do you have a stick?”

He’s lost for a moment. “A stick? Why?”

“Just go with me on this one. I need something of a tubular shape and a pair of scissors.”

Peter hesitates in the act of retrieving a pack of Mentos on his shelf. “Why? Are you going to cut up my evidence?”

Ben hardly has any seat left at the rate he’s jittering off it. “Maybe. How about a photocopy?”

In three short minutes, Sadusky runs back in with a printer copy of the cipher. A cluster of captivated agents hover at the door in an effort to catch a peek of the man who’s apparently much better friends with their boss than they realized. Their wariness and shock are mostly gone, replaced by intrigue. Some of them are holding their breaths, on tiptoes to see what Ben is doing.

Sadusky finds Ben pacing around the chair in a loop, muttering to himself and twisting the note this way and that.

Spotting Peter, he lights up. “It’s a scytale.”

“A what?”

“An ancient scytale!” Ben’s hands wave, his words tumbled over top of each other. “Although we don’t know the correct diameter needed for sure, see how your killer wrote a teeny tiny oh-five in the top right corner of the stationary?”

Understanding begins to dawn. “Half an inch. Like my Mentos.”

“Exactly!” Ben takes the paper from Sadusky’s hand and begins to slice it into strips. “I think, based on the Saxon thorn added randomly in the middle here, it’s a clue that he’s mixing codes.”

Sadusky is fascinated by the delicate scissor work. It’s almost mesmerizing to watch. “So…he’s using this scytale in combination with another one?”

Ben points to the bottom left corner. “What do you see?”

“We catalogued this under a microscope—it’s the number forty-nine, placed there with a thumb nail sized stamper.”

“Yes! And the mirroring of certain letters on the diagonal implies that it’s meant to be flipped. Ergo, forty-nine becomes ninety-four.” Standing back, ever the enthusiastic professor, Ben raises a brow at Sadusky. “Get it?”

Sadusky can’t help but smile. An indulgent, fond smile. “No, Ben, I don’t. Enlighten me.”

“Have you ever heard of the Ptolemy Germania Map?”

“I have. But I thought they solved that.”

“They did.” This tennis-match back and forth is a little too fast for Sadusky to follow but he trusts Ben’s mind, however hard it is to catch. Ben finishes his orange peel style coiling of the paper, beginning to carefully wrap it around the roll of Mentos. “But that code centered around the number ninety-four. It referred to ninety-four towns on an antiquated map of Germany.”

He cuts off with a choked noise of surprise and the crowd at the door isn’t even pretending to not be listening anymore. En mass, they shuffle closer.

Hendricks cranes to see. “What did he find, boss?”

Sadusky comes around to see the tube from Ben’s perspective. The letters are a jumble at first, all confusing lines and angles. Then they begin to pop. “I’m not sure…wait…is that a name?”

Ben’s smile grows so wide it reveals teeth. “Right here, see? He hid the letters of his victim’s name in the mess of nonsense words, only to be seen when you split it at an angle: Henry Johnson.”

Sadusky snaps his fingers. “Spellman, get me a list of all the Henry Johnsons in the DC area.”

“On it!” She scurries off.

“Pulford, where are we on that favoured victim profile?”

“Uh…” Their office rookie consults a tablet. “There’s nothing, boss. The only thing the two men and one woman had in common is their age, over fifty. She was a law professor, one man was a retired sheriff, and our latest victim, he—”

“Ran a boarding school.” Sadusky sighs. “Yes, I know.”

“It doesn’t make sense.” Hendricks looks as frustrated as Sadusky feels. He scrubs a hand through his bristled hair. “Even their ethnicity was different, their looks. Their lifestyle. She and the cop had kids and he didn’t. One came from a rich family and two were self made. I mean, how is he picking his victims?”

Spellman returns just when the party starts to break up. “Sir?”

Peter stares at her. “That was fast.”

“That’s because there are over two thousand Henry Johnsons in this state alone. And that was just me typing it into the DMV database.”

“What?” But Peter knows she’s right, both by her grim eyes and the dense A3 print out she hands him. Sadusky had no idea how hard this was going to be. “We’ll never make it in time. Our killer could be out there scouting or enacting his plan right now while we narrow down the list.”

Ben, silent up to this point while watching the machine at work, taps the print out. “Maybe not. Do any of those men live in a house numbered ninety-four?”

The agents stiffen, expressions eager while Sadusky flips through until he’s at the third page. The scrolling line of his index finger stops.

“Just one. And what do you know—he’s over fifty.” Sadusky’s pulse hammers in his throat. “Pulford?”

“I’ll phone our guys on the ground!”

“Tell them to get a tactical team ready.”

“You got it, boss!”

Sadusky perches on the edge of his desk, a little weak kneed by the fact Ben saved a man’s life in under twenty minutes. Ben himself is oblivious to this heroic moment, still studying the ink and paper, holding it up to the light again while muttering about handwritten Germanic letters versus typed ones.

A rush of warmth floods down Peter’s spine.

“Well done, Ben. Thank you, really. It means a lot that you agreed to come today in the first place. You don’t exactly have the best memories surrounding what we do.”

“Of course.” Ben glances at him with earnest eyes. “I’m honoured that you asked for my help at all. Although…I do have one little favour to ask in return. I mean, I would have helped anyway even if you said no…”

Sadusky chuckles. “I get the picture, Ben. What is it?”

Ben’s mouth sharpens into something stormy. He’s flushed with a mixture of embarrassment and emotion, something Sadusky is not as accustomed to seeing on his face.

“That bad, huh?”

“No, just…” Ben steps to the door and back. “You can’t tell Riley.”

“Oh?”

Ben puts a hand on his hip and gestures with the other one. “I know what you’re going to say because Abigail already said it—while laughing at me. It’s probably illegal and you probably aren’t allowed to do it…but could you run a background check on a Rebecca Abbot?”

Someday. Someday Ben Gates will run out of things to say and do that shock Sadusky. Not today, but surely this can’t represent the rest of his life, fated to be kept on his toes by this academic-brained scarecrow of a man.

“Peter? Where did I lose you?”

Sadusky finally stops choking back laughter. “Ben. Did you seriously just ask me, behind your best friend’s back, to check up on a girl?”

“They started dating last month. And I still haven’t met her.” Ben’s voice strays just close enough to defensive that Sadusky can’t hold back this time. Ben talks louder to be heard over the snickers. “It’s a legitimate concern! What if she’s gold digging?”

It takes a lot of effort and appreciating the wounded puppy look on Ben’s face, but Sadusky gets his mirth under control. He puts a hand on Ben’s shoulder. “I mean this in the kindest way possible. It’s astonishing to hear, so prepare yourself.”

Ben eyes him with a warning look.

“Ben.” Sadusky inhales a big breath. “Riley is a grown man who can date whomever he wants.”

“Tell me you’re not also the least bit concerned.”

Sadusky is genuinely confused now. “Why would I be worried about Riley dating?”

“Because…” Ben struggles, a visible pinch around his eyes and down-turned lips. “Because he needs to be careful. It might go wrong.”

“Or it might go very well. That’s the whole point of dating, in case you’ve forgotten from being out of the game for so long.”

Ben opens his mouth for a comeback—Sadusky himself has no grounds to stand on in that department—and then seems to realize the absurdity of his fear. “I just don’t want to see him get hurt.”

“Neither do I, but smothering him will only lead to him shutting you out.” Sadusky takes pity on his friend. “But if I look into this Miss Abbot, will you let him live his life?”

“No promises.”

“Ben…”

“I haven’t so far and I don’t plan to start now, is all I’m saying.”

“Ben.”

“Alright, alright.” Ben holds up his hands in defeat. “I get the picture. Thank you for humouring me, Peter.”

“I’ve had lots of practice.”

Ben scoffs but takes the jab in good spirits and a quick side hug before leaving the way he came. “Let me know how the case goes, if you catch your killer.”

“Will do.” Sadusky walks him to the elevator. “Don’t get into any trouble.”

“It’s my civic duty!”

He’s gone, timing this quip with the closing of the elevator doors, before Peter can berate him for the sass. Peter shakes his head, still laughing a little. When he checks his phone, Emily has already texted him during that time, asking if he’s finished the new book. (He hasn’t—two chapters left to go.) His wallpaper hasn’t been changed since Christmas, Riley’s terrible tree topper.

Something in his chest softens.

“Life is crazy sometimes, huh?” Hendricks draws up beside his boss, staring in amazement. “It’s pretty neat that Gates doesn’t resent you, after all we did.”

Peter goes still, phone in one hand, image of Ben’s smile at the front of his mind. He can’t swallow for a moment and his ears burn. “Yes, yes it is…”

Chapter Text

“Who’s that?”

Sadusky glances down at Amelia, freshly eight years old and a compacted rocket of pure energy. She tugs on his wrist, hand in hand, when she skips up and down, mint chip ice cream melting down her left arm. Her overalls are covered in it. The skipping is a blatant attempt to peer at the phone Sadusky currently can’t stop scrolling through.

“Is that the treasure man, Papa?”

Peter smiles. “Actually, this is a picture of Riley I took when he wasn’t looking.”

Amelia leans on Sadusky’s arm, on the very tips of her shoes, and he tilts the phone so she can see better. It’s a photo of Riley from a barbecue a month or so ago, in the middle of pointing at Ben with an animated expression—right after Ben had, unwisely, asked a question about what laptop he should buy. The lecture lasted for an hour.

“That’s the computer guy who writes. You’ve got his book on your shelf.”

“Sort of. Riley is Ben’s friend and he helped find the treasure too.”

Amelia thinks about that for a whole five seconds before flipping to the next photo. “The treasure man looks at him like you look at Mom.”

Sadusky stops walking, his loafers scratching at the gravel park path. He tucks Amelia under his arm for an excuse to gather suddenly scattered thoughts, both proud of his granddaughter for understanding so quickly and shot point blank by the simple sentiment. This photo is blurry, even, Ben putting ketchup on a hamburger for Riley, but still Amelia can see it.

He clears his throat. “Yes, he does, doesn’t he? They’ve had lots of adventures together and they’re family now.”

Amelia beams, licking what ice cream remains before gobbling down the cone so she has a free hand. “Can I see some more pictures?”

Sadusky passes her the phone, always amazed by her interest in things not directly correlated to her life experience. Just that one bundt cake mold, sitting on his counter, sparked a burning desire to meet the one who gave it to her Papa. Anytime the Gates family comes up on the news with a new book launch or speaking at a political dinner, Amelia drags Sadusky into the room to ask about them.

“So how was your first day of school, Mel?” Peter steers their conversation back to the whole reason for this outing. “Third grade. You’re moving up in the world.”

You’d think he was making her lick an unripe lemon and not ice cream, at the rate her face is souring. “I don’t see why I have to go to school, Papa.”

“Oh? I thought you liked learning. You spend enough time at Mom’s work, with all the grad students and their books.”

“I do.” Amelia swings their arms and glances away from the screen. “But the other kids are weird.”

Sadusky swallows back a sharp laugh. “I see. What do they do?”

“They’re…I don’t get it. Sometimes they laugh at things that aren’t funny, like Yosef’s fart jokes, and sometimes they whisper to each other.”

Both brows go up when Sadusky looks down at her. “Let me guess, they don’t tell you what they’re whispering about? A club of sorts?”

“Yeah, exactly! When I ask what they’re whispering about, they just say…” Amelia trails off with a funny crease in her brow. Her button nose scrunches. “‘Save me.’”

Sadusky nearly jumps out of his skin. His throat tightens before he calms himself and stops walking so he can face her better. “Amelia? Why do they say that? Is everything alright at your new school?”

“No.” Amelia holds up the phone. “I mean you just got a text, Papa. It says ‘save me.’”

A smooth stone skips across the pond of Sadusky’s chest. “Who is it from, ladybug?”

“Computer man.”

Sadusky has the phone out of Amelia’s hand and speed dialing Riley in a blink. He reverses direction, trying hard to keep his pace slow for Amelia’s shorter legs to keep up while hustling back to the car. His hands shake. The phone, sticky with ice cream, congeals against sweat in his palm.

“Papa? Where are we going?”

Sadusky fights even harder to keep his voice level, to keep the telegraph pinging of his fear out of it. “We’re just going to go check on Riley for a minute, okay?”

Amelia’s fingers tighten around his clammy ones and she picks up her pace. She’s endowed with startling perception for her age. It doesn’t hurt that she’s been dying to meet him.

At first Peter doesn’t think Riley will—can’t—answer at all. Then, on the fourth ring, “Hello, Peter? Is that you?”

No sound of bullets in the background or the burble of blood clogging his throat, so that’s already a great start. “Where are you? Tell me where you are right now.”

“Hello to you too.”

“Riley,” Peter growls.

“Ugh…I’m at this terrible exhibit opening at the Smithsonian, the one we were supposed to attend last year. They’re serving ‘gourmet’ sliders that are basically tiny subway sandwiches and I’m losing my mind.”

Sadusky halts dead for a second time in one afternoon, fear leaking out of him in great oozy globs. He closes his eyes and leans on the car. “Nobody is shooting at or otherwise trying to hurt you?”

“What? No.”

Peter opens his eyes and tempers a stern expression when he sees Amelia peeking up at him. “Riley, I’m only going to say this once.”

“Shoot.”

“Don’t you ever…ever text me something like that unless you want me to use federal resources to track you down, Glock drawn, and extract you from whatever hell hole I find you in. Is that clear?”

A minute or two of silence answers, the low sea of milling voices and clink of champagne glasses a continuous echo over the line. Riley must not have pulled the phone down, because Sadusky can hear the exact moment he sighs out in realization.

“Oh. Oooohhhh.”

“Oh, indeed.”

“That’s not what I meant by the text. It’s a thing, a…code sort of thing, that Ben and I developed over the years. We text it to each other when we need a distraction from the boredom or extraction from a nosy academic.”

“And Ben?”

“Ben is busy so I messaged you. I didn’t even think how it might be interpreted by someone with your life experience. Sorry, Peter, for freaking you out.”

“Apology accepted, but we’re going to have to figure out our own code words for when you need actual help. I won’t be able to tell the difference.”

“That’s fair. I’m sorry again, Peter.”

Peter bundles Amelia in her booster seat and she points excitedly to the phone. “Can I talk to him, Papa?”

“In a few minutes.”

Amelia sits back, content with the promise and her slobbery, ice cream covered self. “Okay.”

“You’re forgiven,” Sadusky tells Riley. “But you’re not off the hook that easily.”

“Off the hook? Hold up, what are you—”

“Goodbye, Riley. See you soon.” Then he winks at Amelia and pulls into traffic. “Wanna go surprise Riley and rescue him from the boredom?”

“Yes!”

Amelia’s cheers continue the whole way, until they’re a block from the museum. It’s difficult to find parking, and signs crop up about an all-weekend lecture series on civil war memorabilia at the museum’s various halls and exhibits. Amelia proudly unclips her booster seat by herself and hops down.

“Where are we, Papa?”

Peter glances at the plethora of arrows posted around the street. He shields his eyes against noonday sun. “That’s a good question, ladybug.”

“You guys lost?” A groundskeeper looks up from raking when he sees the pair squinting at the cluttered layout of signs. “Here for the gala?”

Sadusky nods, smiling. “Yes, actually. The signs don’t indicate which building they’re holding it in.”

“They are confusing.” The man is college age, fit as a whistle. His close cropped brown hair gleams in the harsh sunshine. “Today’s event is at the American Indian Museum, back foyer.”

“Thanks!” Amelia chirps.

“What she said.”

By the time they make the long walk and find their way inside, Sadusky has mostly managed to wipe off the stickiness from Amelia’s person while explaining what all the people are doing here. Luckily, exposed to academic and formal events from a young age, Amelia just nods and hops to Sadusky’s side.

The doors are open for the public to attend, so he doesn’t even have to flash a badge.

“This is where we came to see the old documents on my birthday, Papa!” Amelia finally starts to recognize the design. “And the sarcophagus!”

“You got it. Our Christmas present from the treasure man.” Peter grins down at her bouncing copper tresses. “That was fun, wasn’t it?”

“The best,” Amelia agrees. Suited professors, curators, and rich members of the historical community eye her with that mild softness, when excited children appear, native to cultures everywhere. She catches on to the attention and spots one, waving. “Hello!”

It takes a surprisingly long time for them to make the rounds, partly due to Amelia’s boisterous presence, partly due to the pressed crowds—there has to be over three hundred people in this hall alone—and find Riley. Once Peter sees the dessert table, he puts together what he should have from the beginning. The young man has holed up there with a plate of mini tarts in hand, suit jacket and jeans a distinctly Ben Gates flavoured look for him to be wearing at a schmoozer event like this.

His eyes nearly bug when Sadusky materializes in front of him. “What are you doing here? When I texted you, it was to vent. I didn’t think you’d just…show up!”

“This event is open to the public and Amelia loves the museum.”

Some cocktail of guilt and regret flashes in Riley’s eyes. “You didn’t have to come all this way and ruin an afternoon with your family.”

“I’m not,” is all Peter says. “This is an afternoon with my family.”

Riley doesn’t seem to know what to do with that. Then his eyes comb over the dark circles under Sadusky’s. “How’s your case going?”

“As well as can be expected.” Peter hides his discomfiture. “We would be dead in the water without Ben’s help. I just hate how busy it makes me. Hence why I wanted to spend some time with Amelia and Penny this weekend.”

“I’m Amelia,” she blurts suddenly, breaking the somber moment while staring at Riley.

Riley stares back, as if Sadusky’s granddaughter is the ghost of Christmas past. “I can see that. Don’t you find being here abysmally dull?”

“Nope!” Amelia bounces a little closer to Riley. “They have a sword on the wall over there. That’s way cool.”

Riley holds out the plate and Mel pops a whole blueberry tart in her mouth, barely chewing. He nods in appreciation of her gusto and deplorable eating manners. “That is pretty cool. It’s about the only thing that’s cool about a lecture series, so I’ll take what I can get.”

Sadusky came with the intention of berating Riley some more, put the fear of God in him for the false life-and-death scare, maybe get him to actually enjoy the privilege of being personally invited to speak at these events, but something about the two of them interacting, hyper child and dubious Riley, erases any words he had prepared on his tongue. He makes a note to snap a picture later when they aren’t paying attention.

“Why do you come to these events, if you hate them so much?” Sadusky genuinely doesn’t know and has wondered about this for a while now.

Riley lights up in his first smile of the day. He holds out the plate to direct their attention halfway across the room, to a cluster of people gathered around Ben and a display case of civil war letters. His hands are flying. It’s too far away to tell for sure, but he’s making a box shape with his fingers and pointing to specific notes. Probably an impromptu lecture of his own about war correspondence.

“Because he enjoys them so much.” Riley isn’t sarcastic or pert in his tone. He’s…proud, kind of like how Penny looks at him sometimes after a successful case. “It’s fun watching Ben in his element. Half the time I don’t know what’s he talking about, but I’ll never get tired of his enthusiasm over this stuff, listening to him ramble on.”

“Me neither.” Sadusky keeps his eyes on Riley while he says it. The love written all throughout his gaze. The admiring way his smile widens when Ben manages to say something that apparently even the head curator doesn’t know.

Riley shakes himself out of the affectionate moment to fire off a quick text. “I also like coming so I can throw him off his game by doing this.”

After a second, Ben startles from his orating and digs for his phone. He frowns while reading whatever Riley sent and then types out a reply. When Riley’s phone buzzes—his ringtone is a light saber noise—he sets down his plate to whip out a pocket notebook. On one side of the page is ‘Ben’ and the other is ‘Riley,’ with a line running down the middle and a series of tallies on either side.

There are more on Ben’s side.

A lot more tallies.

Riley uses a little golf pencil to add a tally to his own measly sum. “Ha! There. One more for Riley Poole.”

Sadusky glances between them, keeping an eye on Amelia’s fascination with the rapier. “What are you two scheming up now?”

Riley’s smug grin doesn’t falter an inch. “We have a wager going for the month. Loser has to sing ‘Mambo No. 5’ at a karaoke bar downtown. With an amplifier. Even if photographers show up.”

“Dare I ask,” says Sadusky in a dry tone. “I have enough headache keeping you out of trouble and the papers as it is.”

“I am so frustrated with Ben claiming he knows more than I do.”

“He never claims that.”

“In spirit he does.” Riley raises his pencil in a not-far-off imitation of Ben’s lecturing style. “So every day for the month of September we tell each other a random fact, preferably about history like the Alan Turing one I just popped on him, and if the other person doesn’t know it, we get a point. No Googling.”

Sadusky outright huffs at him, hand on Riley’s arm. “And you agreed to this bet?”

“I came up with it, if you must know.”

“You’re a braver man than me, Riley.”

Riley’s conceit turns to offended bluster. His brows knit. “What is that supposed to mean? I’m an educated person, especially after years of listening to him monologue.”

“Of course you are, but history?”

“I think I have a pretty good shot.”

Sadusky is freed from his delirious incredulity—he still cannot quite comprehend how Riley goaded Ben into a history challenge, of all things—by Amelia bee lining for Riley’s side and taking his hand.

“Wanna go see that dead guy’s portrait over there?”

Riley blinks down at her. “We just met.”

“Yeah, but Papa tells lots of stories about you so it’s kind of like we’re already friends.”

“Does he now?” Riley gazes at Peter with something he can’t read, oddly enough. “I hope they’re good stories, that play to my epicness.”

“Only about the time you showed up with a giant bear and when you lost a game of Candy Land to the treasure man at Easter.”

Riley’s satisfied expression evaporates and shifts to a glare. “I see how it is. Peter Sadusky, taking the fun out of everything since two-thousand-four.”

“Come on!” Amelia tugs on Riley’s hand. “Let’s go!”

Before being hauled off, Riley nudges Sadusky’s shoulder. “Let the record show: I am, historically, better with kids than Ben.”

“That you are.” Sadusky laughs again. “Mel’s been wanting to meet you for a while now, which helps.”

He follows them at a slight distance, letting his ladybug drag Riley around to all the shiny, dangerous objects she can find. Machetes, maces, butterfly knives. Riley, though guarded about the whole thing, doesn’t seem to mind her energy. Probably because he rivals her on a good day. They meander through the waning crowds, with Ben and a few others filtering back into the auditorium for the next round of talks. 

“Do you know what this is?” Amelia asks.

Riley tilts his head sideways to stare at a long weapon behind the glass. “No, I do not. If you want history facts, you came to the wrong person.”

Amelia shrugs. “Papa says you like tech stuff better than old stuff anyway.”

Riley squeezes her hand with a thrilled look. “He’s right. See that security panel beside the glass box?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, I might not know what century this weapon is from—but I could hack that and all the others on this network faster than you can eat a tart.”

“Really?” Amelia’s on tiptoes again, this time to grab at Riley’s sleeve. The shine in her eyes clouds with uncertainty. “That would be wrong, though. Papa calls it irrel…egel…”

“Illegal,” Riley supplies. “He’s right, unfortunately.”

“Have you done something like that before?”

Sadusky and Riley trade a fast look, sardonic and commiserating and maybe even a little bit amused. “You want to weigh in here, ‘Papa?’”

Sadusky shakes his head. “This is all you, hacker extraordinaire.”

The nickname darkens Riley’s face for a moment. His eyes mist, glazing somewhere in the distance, before he rustles back to the present and mimics Amelia’s shrug. “Even if I had, it’s still illegal. No hacking for you.”

Amelia takes this in stride, as usual. She points to a bust of Lincoln. “Hey, Papa? Can I go look at it? We’re learning about him in our history unit.”

“Of course.” Sadusky runs a hand over her curls. “Just remember not to touch and don’t stray somewhere I can’t see you.”

She scampers off around swishing skirts and spiffy pant legs to her target. The two men grin when she taps on the suit jacket of the dean at a prominent research institute and asks what Lincoln’s sculpture is made out of.

“Hey, I just realized…” Riley leans in to catch Sadusky’s eye. “I thought your daughter was a librarian at Washington State on the other side of the country. How is your granddaughter here right now?”

“Oh, well, Penelope’s contract was up and she got offered a position right here at the University of Maryland. She’s helped some of Emily’s students find material for their papers. Small world indeed.” Peter is startled at the naked hurt that flashes across Riley’s face. “She wanted to be closer to me, so the family packed up and moved here over the summer.”

“And you didn’t tell us?” Riley demands. “We could have helped them move.”

Sadusky shuffles his thoughts around, what he thought the hurt look could mean and how this is not even remotely the cause he expected. “That’s a nice offer and I’ll keep it in mind next time.”

“Nice offer,” Riley repeats in a mutter to himself, the blocky shape of his rigid shoulders so put off that it wouldn’t be surprising if steam comes out of his ears next. “You’re something else, Peter.”

Sadusky is at a complete loss, faced with this injurious anger in Riley. Who calls him to vent about mind-numbing academic events and new babies and likes to bake brownies.

“I didn’t think you’d…want to know,” Sadusky manages at length. “The nuances of my personal life, I mean.”

Riley’s jaw clenches and then slowly releases. “It’s as bad as the fact I can’t dig up your birth date. How in the world did you manage to keep that a secret? All of your documentation lists the year, but not the day.”

Sadusky knows he should probably be put off by the fact that Riley hacks into his life for fun, but the childish way he says it is endearing rather than invasive. The ways they show attachment to him are strange, by comparison, but he wouldn’t have them be anything other than who they are. No matter how bizarre.

He pushes back a little, further than he normally would—

“I’ll tell you the secret of my birthday if you tell me how you and Ben met. I know it involved those hacking skills.”

Though their eyes are on Amelia, Riley’s spark with memory. “Actually, Peter, it involved a goat.”

And with that, Riley leaves him to rejoin Amelia, especially necessary since she’s currently attempting to touch a regimental coat on display and security looks twitchy.

The words register a beat too late and Peter rushes to catch up. “Wait—did you just say a goat?”

Chapter Text

When Sadusky’s phone rings the next day, his hands are already fumbling over the counter. He’s late—late, late, late and he still can’t find his car keys. Each breath wheezes through his nose and he wishes he’d awoken in time to eat some breakfast. His mental Penny reminds him that something is better than nothing, so a banana is pocketed for later.

He accepts the call without looking at the screen. “Agent Sadusky here.”

“Peter, dear. I’m so glad I caught you.”

In spite of his flurried haste, a warm smile creeps over Peter’s face. He glances at the paperback sitting on his living room end table. “Emily. I still haven’t finished The Soloist, if that’s what you’re calling to ask about. Steve Lopez is a good author, though. I’m enjoying it.”

“Good heavens, man, sometimes I just want to chat.”

Peter rifles through a pile of mail, then opens the junk drawer. No keys. Drat. “Of course. How’s your new batch of students?”

“Incorrigible as ever. If I have to read one more paper that’s somehow mysteriously missing a thesis statement, I might just make good on my threat and retire.”

“Then who would teach the next generation about pre-colonial society structures?”

“Not Riley, that’s for sure.”

Peter barks a laugh, both at her fake irritation and fond tone. Under the couch cushions, perhaps? Nope. “You heard about their little bet too?”

“I don’t want to be there for the fallout.”

Crows feet crinkle around Sadusky’s eyes. “I think Ben will go easy on him. He’ll never make Riley embarrass himself like that, no matter how much he teases.”

Emily hums across the line, as if to reply, but then tuts. “You sound tired, Peter. Is everything okay?”

“Just flustered,” he says, because this is his current predicament. “I slept in and now I can’t find my car keys.”

He doesn’t mention that he slept in because he technically didn’t fall asleep until three am. That even with the cryptology department getting a crash course in scytales and ancient cartography from Ben, the possibility that they were wrong still haunts him.

“Take care of yourself, please.”

Peter promises as best he’s able. They chatter about the book for a while, the music scene of LA, and then say goodbyes. Sweat beads along his hairline in earnest. It is only as Peter is about to admit defeat and call a cab that he bumps against a corner of the table…

Only to feel a sharp poke along his leg. Sadusky runs a hand down his face and takes his keys out of his pocket. They hang there like a dead mouse from his fingers.

You’re losing it, Peter.

Truthfully, the case has begun to nettle at him above and beyond the normal rigmarole,  mostly due to a thicket of leads that serve only to guide his team to a bouquet of dead ends. They’re beautiful, alluring possibilities and suspects—and completely unhelpful. Once, they think they find a fingerprint on the hotel stationary…but it turns out to be a housekeeper’s.

At night, he dreams about a man writing lines and lines upon lines of strange letters, his teeth bared, face hidden in shadow. He writes like his life depends on it, until his pen catches flame and burns the world down. Sadusky yells, draws his sidearm, but the man always has an escape plan and always runs faster. So much faster.

THUD THUD THUD, his feet pound the scorched earth. Letters fall from a hailstorm of ash, pieces of paper torn by the wind and fire.

Peter’s eyes are threaded with crimson some mornings, bloodshot on days when he wakes up with a gasp or doesn’t sleep at all. Somewhere out there is a man who wants to kill again, to shoot someone through the heart and then stab them with a note pinned to the chest.

His greatest remorse, though, is not being able to spend as much time with Amelia. It’s especially painful given her struggle to integrate into this new school.

“Did you catch the bad guy, Papa?” she asks over their daily phone call, every single time.

“Not yet, ladybug. But we will. Ben even taught our code breakers something new.”

It is during one of these phone calls, in a nauseous paradox, that their dead ends crumble into a way out. Sadusky is on the phone with Amelia between bites of lunch when Hendricks flings open his office door. He puts a hand over the receiver when he sees the wild cast of the agent’s eyes.

“Did you find something?”

Hendricks shakes his head. He’s on the phone too, and he points to it with a mixture of excitement and dread, pale. “No—boss, he found us.”

Sadusky understands in an instant. His heart beats faster. “Henry Johnson?”

“The killer attacked our protective detail five minutes ago.”

Abigail opens the door much more alert than Sadusky expects for the late hour, sun long set, mug of tea in her hand. Her eyes are hooded and heavy, as if she’s getting ready for bed. “Hello, Peter.”

“Good evening, Abigail. Sorry for dropping in without calling first.”

She waves off the politeness at once. “You’re welcome any time and stay as long as you like. The boys are still up, in the living room.”

“How have you been?” he asks, while hanging up his coat. He knows Abigail went back to work last month after her maternity leave finished.

Abigail takes a sip with a thoughtful look. “Managing a ninth month old baby and restoration efforts on an old Lafayette journal simultaneously has been…a fun challenge. Definitely spices things up when I come to work with baby spit up on my blouse.”

Sadusky laughs, easily accepting the hug. “If anyone can pull it off, it’s you.”

“I’ll remember that the next time I’m changing a diaper in between phone calls about central imaging specs.”

Peter thanks her and she, in plush sleep pajama bottoms, glides back upstairs. He listens to her humming a show tune. It’s something she does when she’s truly relaxed, the smooth tones of “Memory” or “Castle on a Cloud” floating around the house to the sight of her mellow smile. There’s another sound filtering through the hall, quieter, but just as familiar as Abigail’s singing. The ping pong back and forth of two male voices—

“Belgravia.”

“No.”

“Yemen.”

“Major no.”

“Niger.”

“No.”

“Tokyo?”

“Really, Riles? You think I should take Tokyo’s conference offer?”

“Sure: most densely populated city in the world, courteous, and they’re willing to pay for all of your accommodations.”

Sadusky tracks this repartee around the corner to the living room where Ben sits on the floor against the couch, laptop on his criss-crossed legs. Riley lays on the couch in a Charlie Chaplin graphic tee and flannel pants, throwing a yellow, smiley face stress ball up in the air and somehow still catching it with his eyes closed. The ball is dimpled and matches a giant bowl of them on the side table, used in the past for physiotherapy exercises. Judging by how beaten up they are, Riley has found other, more creative and devious uses for them.

A Jeopardy re-run plays on mute but neither man is really watching.

Blue light sheens off Ben’s glasses where his eyes scan something he’s typing on the laptop. Riley pretends not to be paying attention, but at a frustrated sound from Ben, one eye pops open to check over his friend’s shoulder.

“You can’t put a comma there.”

“Where?”

Riley pushes in Ben’s space to point. “Right there. That’s why this part of your article reads so funny. It’s called a comma splice error.”

“Ah.” Ben nods. His fingers hit the backspace key a few times. “Thanks, Riley.”

Riley leans back in thinly veiled pleasure. He throws the ball again, then taps it against Ben’s hair.

Sadusky knocks on the doorframe to catch their attention. Both of their heads whip up and they smile at precisely the same moment, which does strange things to Peter’s stomach. “What’s this particular article about? I personally liked the one you co-wrote with Abigail last month on the Confederacy’s double sided politics.”

“See, Ben?” Riley greets Peter with a wave. “Some people read things right after you publish them.”

Ben doesn’t joke back, eyes pained. “I’ve learned my lesson on that front. And it’s about coded war messages, ironically.”

“Oh yeah!” Riley sits up a little. “How did that go, Peter? Did you catch the serial killer? I read about his creepy note in the paper.”

Ben’s clacking stops. He looks up from the laptop too, keen on Sadusky’s answer. Dreading it a bit, too, from his grimace.

Peter sighs, sitting on the edge of the recliner so he can stay in their eye line without them having to crane to see him. The stress of the day pounces at his back, nips at his weary heels. “We had a protective detail on Mr. Johnson, a retired prison warden, since Ben decoded the letter four days ago, and this afternoon an attempt was made to kidnap him from his home. His attacker got away into the trees. We searched for hours without a trace.”

“No one got a good look at him?” Ben asks.

“Unfortunately, he was dressed all in black, down to the balaclava over his face, so no.” Sadusky reaches out to shake Ben’s knee. “But you were right, and you deserve to know that. Henry Johnson, ninety-four Bluebird Lane, was the target, like the clue said. We don’t think the killer will try the same target twice, though we’re keeping the detail at Mr. Johnson’s house to be sure.”

“Any causalities?”

“No, Ben.” Peter squeezes his shoulder this time. “Our agents got a few scrapes, some new bruises, but they’re fine. This could have ended much worse if we hadn’t been prepared.”

Ben blows out a long breath, absorbing the information. His face looks a little bit like that day in the office, a brew of awe and relief. Riley glances between them and then, seemingly able to read his friend’s mind without even seeing his face, he bops Ben on the head again.

Ben jolts back to the present, blinking. “Thank you for coming by to tell us, Peter.”

Sadusky grins. “I didn’t just come for that. I thought Riley might like his tally system back.”

Riley gasps when Sadusky pulls the small notebook out of his pocket. “I knew I left it at the museum on Saturday! You’re a lifesaver, Peter.”

Ben’s lips twitch. He fetches his thoughts back from dismal thoughts of serial killers with effort, arranging his voice into something happier. “You know, we didn’t get our facts in for the weekend.”

“That’s right.” Riley flips to the tally page. “Hit me.”

“What were George Washington’s dentures reportedly made out of?”

“They had dentures back then?”

A failed buzzer sound grates out of Ben’s mouth. “Point for me.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t know.”

“Riley, you weren’t even aware of the fact that George Washington had dentures. How can you possibly know what material was used?”

Riley thinks for a minute. “Wood.”

Ben makes another buzzer sound. Grumbling the whole time, Riley adds a point to Ben’s column.

“I didn’t know that either,” Sadusky offers, since Riley looks more put out than he should. He’s irrationally relieved to know he’s not the only one surprised by the things Ben says. “What were they made out of?”

“Gold mostly.” Ben somehow answers this with perfect clarity, even though his eyes are back on his article. “Lead, ivory, and even real human teeth from deceased soldiers were used too.”

“Eeewwww.” Riley puts the book over his face for a moment. “That’s disgusting. Okay, my turn…who was the only American president to never marry?”

Ben’s eyes flick towards the television screen. “Riley. You can’t steal a random fact off Jeopardy. And it’s James Buchanan, fifteenth president.”

“I hate this game.”

Ben smiles, back to typing. “It was your idea. Just put another tally on my side and call it a day.”

“I don’t give up that easily.” Riley glares at the back of Ben’s head. “Alright—time to bring out the big guns. What nationality was Cleopatra?”

Ben’s fingers halt. He takes off his glasses and opens his mouth, closes it, and then opens it again. “Egyptian, obviously.”

“Ah-ha!” Riley adds a tally to his side. “Wrong again! She was Greek.”

“No way.”

“Look it up, Indiana Jones. I did a ton of research about the ancient world in hopes of finding something you didn’t know.”

Sadusky quickly searches this on his phone and feels just as shocked when the page loads. Maybe Riley has a shot after all. “He’s right. She was of Macedonian descent.”

Ben makes a ‘huh’ sound of amazement. “You learn something new everyday.”

Riley is flushed with this victory. He flips onto his side so he can tuck his face in Ben’s shoulder. “Just admit defeat now and start warming up your voice for when I win.”

“You might be right.” There’s no need to censor anything now, with Riley out of sight. Ben winks at Sadusky. “I can’t withstand your knowledge of cool facts.”

Sadusky points to his temple with a questioning, raised brow. Ben nods. Peter realizes after a beat and mimes zipping his lips. It still amazes him how they can hoodwink each other despite their coinciding ability to hold entire conversations through eye contact alone.

“Riley told me about Amelia.” Ben closes the laptop altogether and somehow the sudden re-direction of his undivided attention arrests Sadusky. “I’m happy for you, that your daughter’s family lives within driving distance now.”

“She’s been wanting to meet you too. Oh, and she’d like some help with a project on Abraham Lincoln, if you ever get a spare minute.”

Ben perks up, oddly moved. “She could just read any book on Lincoln. Why me?”

“I think she’s somewhat captivated by the infamous treasure man,” Peter admits. “Mel likes hearing the story—watered down—of how you found the treasure under the church.”

“Did you include the part where we almost got diseased by a falling skeleton?” asks Riley, muffled as he’s still snuggled up behind Ben.

Ben rolls his eyes but reaches back to play with Riley’s hair. “We were fine, Riley. The coffin’s base had just rotted, that’s all, and the bones fell out.”

“I’m just saying—there were at least two skeletons on that trip who got close to my face. That’s two too many. Completely unhygienic.”

Sadusky melts a little, the way they can henpeck and comfort each other in the exact same breath. It’s hard to believe, looking at Riley draped across the back of Ben’s shoulders and the man’s crooked glasses, that they somehow outsmarted a whole FBI division and career criminals. There’d been no end of questions from underling agents about his visit last Thursday, the way Ben had done what a whole team of code breakers couldn’t.

Ben smiles up at Sadusky again, a tight action. “Did it ever occur to you, Peter, that maybe we want to help you too? The way you’ve helped us?”

Sadusky doesn’t quite ask, ‘What are you talking about?’ But he wants to. The more he gets to know this family, the more they confuse him. He cottons on after a moment.

“Ben, it was just a move. Penny and Josh barely needed my help, let alone anyone else’s. No big deal.”

“Was my baby being born a big deal?”

A shiver laces through Peter’s stomach. Warm memories of that day still fill his dreams on kinder nights. “Of course.”

“And we told you about it. Invited you, even.”

“Right…”

Ben hardly blinks now, eyes boring into Peter. “So why would your life be any less important to us?”

Peter finds it in himself somewhere to laugh, one of those breathless laughs that he hopes will smokescreen long enough to figure out what to do with another care package of honesty from Ben dropped in his lap. “Don’t you think you’re reading into this just a bit too much?”

Ben leans back a hair, so that Riley’s weight is bracing his neck for a moment. “Probably. And you definitely had no obligation to tell us if you didn’t feel comfortable with it. It’s just the implication that you think we didn’t want to know.”

“Why ever would you?” It escapes Peter before he can snatch it back. “I’m…well…me.”

Something suspended, terrible, settles over the room in jagged fragments that pierce skin and bone. Riley has stopped breathing, head untucked so that wounded eyes can stare at Sadusky. Ben just looks tired, sad in a way that reminds Sadusky of how his mother used to look at him after he lied about his grades. The fragments slice deeper.

“If you don’t know the answer to that,” says Ben, painfully soft, “then we’ve failed you in more ways than one.”

The words haunt every step for the next three days, every stop at the coffee machine, every stapled report, every walk by the pond. They tangle up in his fingers when he fumbles to tie his Windsor knot in the morning and nit at his eyes while thumbing through old photos. The words carry power in their elephant foot press upon his diaphragm, how he catches himself chewing on them along with his lunch, clawing for breath in the vacuous space where his surety of how life works used to be. Every billboard on his morning commute is transformed into a declaration of his ignorance, his inability to understand something so vast that he can’t discern its individual moving parts—“We’ve failed you in more ways than one.”

It’s all well and good for Ben to go around preaching on the ardor of humanity every time history needs its story set straight.

It is quite another for him to turn on the microscope and catalogue every wheel and cog of Peter’s soul. There’s almost an element of injustice to it, a defensive anger that he should be so easily categorized…

Peter Sadusky: the man who can catch a renowned criminal but not his own heart.

Sadusky stares into his mug of cinnamon coffee and the words are there too, sloshing along with the bubbles. His life revolves around words now too, and they’re all confusing, from a serial killer’s deranged game to Ben’s earnest declarations. Peter doesn’t know where to put them all, leaving room for them to take over.

Perhaps he is the criminal after all, to cause such heart-rent pain in people who have zero intention of misusing him. His original hypothesis was correct—they should never have gotten so close to him in the first place. He should never have let it go on so long.

“Boss?”

Sadusky snaps back to reality at Hendricks’ voice. The agent’s eyes are dejected where he stands in Peter’s office doorway, and he’s holding a forensics report with only three paragraphs of text on it.

“Nothing?”

Hendricks slides it across the desk. “No, sir. We found no salient fingerprints or trace evidence on either the note or Johnson’s house. It’s basic hotel stationary, and though we searched everyone who stayed there in the last year, none of them raise red flags. Nor do any fit the profile of a serial killer.”

“He could have gotten this stationary anywhere, stolen it from anyone.” Sadusky shakes his head. “What we need is to understand why the killer picked these specific people. That would allow us to discern a pattern. He’s not killing for the sake of killing.”

“You think there’s a separate motivator?” Hendricks’ brow furrows.

“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” Sadusky explains. “The game of it—and the fact he didn’t kill his first three victims right away, choosing rather to take them to a secluded location—suggests emotional investment. Killing is not the point, not the reward he’s after.”

“So that’s a no on the psychopathy note Spellman wants for our profile?”

This gives Peter pause. If he’s learned anything in the last week, it’s to never jump to conclusions where a person’s intentions are concerned. “Put it down as uncertain. I still think we’re missing something.”

The clack clack clack of shoes on linoleum is the only warning they get before a hurried figure bolts through the bullpen. Spellman rushes into Sadusky’s office, sweating so much hairs are plastered to her forehead in soupy frescoes. “Sir!”

Hendricks gives her a surprised up and down. “We were just talking about your suspect profile. What did you do, run a marathon before work?”

“I chased a mail truck!”

“A mail truck.” Sadusky stands, pointing to a chair and Spellman gratefully sits. “Do you want some water?”

Spellman slashes her hands to either side, and Sadusky sees that she’s holding a crumpled wad of paper in one gloved hand. “No, sir, there’s no time. The killer left this with reception at the front desk, disguised as a mail truck driver. I spotted him on my way in to work. It’s another note!”

Hendricks straightens to attention. “I’ll see what we can pull up from cameras around the front of the building. Nice work, Spellman!”

“Get a sketch artist in here too,” Sadusky calls after him. 

Spellman shakes her head. “There’s no need, boss. I took a photo.”

Sadusky takes her phone and tries not to reveal his discouragement. It’s a blurry photo, of a Caucasian man driving a mail truck in sunglasses, full goatee, and a blue cap over a head of black hair. Probably all fake accessories.

“He’s young,” is the first helpful thing Peter notes. It’s an electric shock to the system, that this photo doesn’t match the picture Peter has in his head of their killer. “Much younger than we’d originally thought for this kind of methodical planning. There’s nothing impulsive about it, like a lot of killers under the age of thirty are famous for.”

Spellman finally catches her breath, swiping hair back with her fingers. “He spooked when I shouted for him to stop, even after flashing my badge. That was what convinced me. I called for patrol cars to pursue, but by the time they responded, we lost him.”

“Maybe not.” Sadusky trades her phone for the note and slips it into an evidence bag. It’s another cluttered block of indecipherable letters. Most likely the same one he planned to pin to Henry Johnson’s chest. “Even if he ditched the phony mail truck, a traffic camera most likely caught him switching vehicles. Something like that sticks out on footage.”

“On it.” She hops up as if she didn’t just run down the street after a serial killer.

“Don’t you want a break?” Sadusky can’t help but ask. “How far did you chase him?”

“Six blocks,” she says, like it’s nothing. He’s thankful all over again to have such dedicated people working with him. “I’ll shower later. We have to move fast or we’ll lose this lead.”

“Agreed. Let me know the second you find something.”

“Of course, sir. Are you taking this to Gates?”

Sadusky struggles to take in a full breath and even then it escapes in a rush. “I don’t think we have any other choice. Someone’s life is on the line.”

Spellman’s face smooths into the twilight zone of sympathy. She rarely misses a change in Peter’s mood, what he’s thinking, and even if she doesn’t understand the undertones of what’s going on, she recognizes the low simmer of regret and worry when she sees it. “Good luck.”

“Thanks—I’m going to need it.”

Chapter Text

Peter’s knuckles hesitate over the door.

He’d left that night, after their baffling conversation, those persistent words, on good terms. Riley had asked about Amelia, breaking the sad spell, and they talked over how she was adjusting to the move and all the lecture offers Ben keeps getting for almost thirty minutes before Peter took his leave.

Still, he wonders if Ben’s words haunt their waking thoughts to the extent they do his.

“Peter?”

It’s midnight, already an absurd hour for house calls, and Sadusky jumps before he can compose himself. He turns to see Ben standing by the garden, holding long shears. He’s not wearing any gloves or protective gear, a dangerous gamble since he’s knee deep in Abigail’s rose bush. The pink blossoms seem to glisten in the dark, lanterns of colour.

Ben looks concerned. “Are you okay? You’re pale.”

Sadusky holds up a photocopy of the letter and that stands out too. It takes a few tries to speak clearly. “He sent us another one.”

His friend drops the shears at once and joins him on the stoop. Extricating both legs from the prickly plant proves to be dicey affair, despite the thick pants he wears over his boots. Ben’s eyes narrow when he angles to read the paper better by the porch light.

“Late night gardening?” Sadusky asks.

Ben reddens, visible even in the murky lighting. “I couldn’t sleep. It’s an inheritance from my father, both the spinning-thought-induced insomnia and that working with my hands is the only thing capable of calming it down.”

“Now I know why your flower beds look so neat.”

His attempt to lighten the heavy moment is shirked. Instead, Ben inspects the tired sag of Sadusky’s features. “I thought you weren’t allowed to take evidence out of the Bureau.”

“This isn’t the original,” Peter deflects, then finally meets Ben’s eyes head on. “Extenuating circumstances call for extenuating measures.”

“You mean you’re desperate.” The words, while to the point, aren’t unkind. Ben wears a similar kind of sympathy that Spellman did this morning. “Another code?”

“I think so.”

“Come on. If he acts as fast as he did with the last one, then we don’t have much time.”

Ben leads them inside, through the hall and up the stairs to the study. There’s something urgent but subdued in the air. They both flinch under the metaphorical ticking clock, another victim out there they might not be able to save as easily as Henry Johnson.

While still honouring the traditional history and dignified mahogany theme running throughout the whole house, Ben’s study looks like it belongs to a half-crazed grad student, amorphic with loose paper pinned to the shelves and books stacked in clumsy ziggurats. Only one chair sits in front of the broad Cherrywood desk by the window, ringed with yet more books and model recreations of what look to be Incan pipes and carvings. A potted calla lily in the corner is Abigail’s touch, along with thick tomes on document preservation running the length of one dedicated shelf. There are little post-it notes everywhere too—some doodled with little flying saucers and some depicting an ongoing comic strip about a one-eyed sheep dog in his quest to catch an elusive butterfly.

“Riley,” says Ben, when he catches Sadusky trying to follow the disjointed story where it snakes around the room. “He likes to give me this running serial about Hugh. Every week I get a new piece of the comic on my desk.”

“Hugh is the dog?”

Ben’s eyes soften. “Living with Riley is never boring, that’s for sure.”

“I can’t imagine a world where it would be.”

Ben rounds his desk and starts digging for something, emptying the contents, which are apropos in their weirdness: balls of yarn, an aglet, coins of a currency Sadusky is floored that even after years in the forgery department he doesn’t recognize, a Mars bar, pack of Cuban cigars, an actual human skull, quill pens, a used clarinet reed…

“Ah, here we are.” Ben pulls out what he’s apparently been looking for, a small bronze telescope. It looks to be a hand made miniature of a sea captain’s spyglass. “My father gave this to me for my eighth birthday and I plan to give it to Ellie one day. For now, it should be the perfect width for our scytale here.”

“That’s not half an inch,” Sadusky argues.

“Check the top right corner of the note.”

Sadusky remembers the four they recorded and sighs. “Four inches.”

“Bingo.” Ben takes the note and after more digging, produces a pair of scissors. “If I gave you the code, why do you need my help this time? Can’t your code breakers do a scytale?”

“You don’t think we tried that?”

Ben pauses, eyes confused. Sadusky swallows down his anger, for the emotion isn’t directed at Ben at all, and it’s sharp on the way down. More fragments gnash at his thready heartbeat.

“Ben, it didn’t work.”

“What do you mean it didn’t work?”

Sadusky taps the photocopy. “We chopped copies of the note dozens of ways and none of it produced a name or even a coherent word. I don’t think this one’s a scytale at all.”

This must come as a blow to Ben, the way he lands shakily on the edge of his desk. He sets down the scissors in favour of holding the paper under his desk lamp and turning it slowly around. At one point he even flips it to the blank side.

“Hand writing analysis turned up nothing?”

Sadusky hears the hopeful tone. “Other than the fact it was written by the same pen, on similar hotel stationary, by the same person who is probably male, and a little loose at the top of his cursive letters, suggesting strong emotion when he wrote them…not really. Standard ink, no DNA evidence.”

Ben’s face travels through a consecutive loop of ‘idea – intense concentration – disappointment’ several times, like a fast forward version of the scientific method, before he looks up at Sadusky. His eyes glow a bright cobalt by the demure lighting. “May I see the original?”

Sadusky’s pulse misses a beat. “You know I’m not allowed to take evidence off Bureau property.”

Ben doesn’t look away, gaze steady. Hand still outstretched.

“And even if I was, that doesn’t mean—”

“Peter.”

“Oh, fine.” Sadusky reaches into the secret pocket behind the interfacing of his lapel, tears free the loose basting stitches, and pulls out a clear, sealed bag. “But if anyone asks, this never left my office.”

“Thank you. I appreciate the risk you took, secreting it here.”

Peter shakes his head, knowing he could be fired just for letting Ben see this without overhead authorization, let alone take it into a civilian’s home when at this moment there are a team of eighteen codebreakers working on the block of text. He knows they’re dealing with someone smart, in a way whose puzzles require creative thinking over logical, left brain tactics.

“I just can’t get over it,” says Sadusky. “That he walked right into reception disguised as a mail driver. Because he was just handing something across a desk, he didn’t have to go through security or have his picture taken. He kept his ball cap low to avoid being picked up by cameras—and he knew where every single one was.”

“Does it bother you?” Ben asks. “That he invaded your space, brought the fight to your territory?”

The question catches Peter off guard. It’s not the issue he anticipated Ben being concerned with, nothing to do with case procedure or profiling. Then Peter thinks back to this very house eighteen months ago and understands, especially considering he and Riley’s…experience in this area. “It bothers me that someone might die, yes. But I’m safe at the Bureau.”

Ben doesn’t reply straight away, holding the paper up to the dim lighting too. With the delicate way he handles even the bag, Sadusky knows he has no reason to be worried. It’s probably in better hands than even his colleagues.

“Pretty bold of him,” Ben comments while he scans the letter, “dropping this one off under your noses.”

“It’s pay back.” This is Sadusky and his team’s leading theory. “Because we thwarted his attempt on Mr. Johnson’s life, the killer is saying that he won’t be cowed by our presence.”

Ben retrieves a jeweler’s loupe from behind a stack of German papers and brings it to his eye. “You’re right about one thing.”

“What?” Sadusky leans in so that they’re shoulder to shoulder. “What do you see?”

“It’s not a scytale. Do you have any steganographers on staff?”

“Of course.”

Ben’s brows shoot up and takes the loupe down to stare. “Then I’m surprised they didn’t catch this—there’s a homemade invisible ink on the back, Peter.”

There he goes again, saying the last thing Sadusky would ever expect.

“Are you sure?”

Ben hands him the loupe. “There’s an almost indiscernible series of pressure marks in the top left corner, made by a stylus of some sort. They’re indented as if pressing back to front. Look.”

Sadusky doesn’t see them as clearly or as quickly as Ben, but there’s no mistaking the grooves in the paper even through the plastic bag, minuscule as they are. Despite this breakthrough, he feels just as disheartened as before.

“How does this help us? I get the emotional significance, of writing something on the reverse side as that four—representative of his fourth victim. But we have no idea how to bring that writing to light.”

Ben’s lips curve higher. So high, in fact, that the motion crinkles all the way up to his forehead. “Peter, you’re talking to someone who did their dissertation on encrypted messages and old methods of concealing handwriting. Including invisible ink. Are you comfortable with letting me take it out of the bag and try an experiment?”

“No,” Sadusky grumbles, to hide the way he is energized by something fond, at the sight of Ben’s eagerness to help. He imagines this is the same look Ben wore while using lemon juice and a hair dryer, the night Sadusky’s team found Patrick tied up in his own house. A night he’s never forgotten since. “But it’s our only shot. I’ll get the gloves.”

Ben runs out of the room, only to come back two minutes later with a spray bottle and a box of baking soda from the kitchen. It’s down by quite a lot, also Riley’s handiwork, but there’s enough powder left to sprinkle over the original. Ben makes sure he too has gloves on and a piece of saran wrap on the desk to protect the paper before tearing open the red evidence seal and laying their killer’s taunting message out on the desk, backside face up.

They both pause for a beat, with the shared understanding of what this document really signifies.

“Baking soda? That’s it?” Sadusky eyes the practiced motions with skepticism. “Isn’t it usually fruit juice or something?”

“Not this one,” says Ben. He sprays a thimbleful of mist over the paper. “The way it’s etched into the paper, along with the thicker pulp content compared to the last note, suggests a crude reactive agent based around moisture. Dry it up or expand that compound with powder…”

“And it becomes visible. I get the idea.”

Sadusky knows that this man has personally kept their nation’s most prized document safe even while being shot at, that he has all the necessary training needed to do this properly, that he’s married to the country’s leading expert on handling ancient documents—but watching Ben sift baking soda over the stationary still makes his breath catch.

Though Ben hears, judging by his little head wag, he doesn’t stop what he’s doing. “Can you grab me that flashlight on the shelf? Next to the cow in a tractor beam doodle?”

The light is awfully narrow, Sadusky thinks. He trusts Ben enough, however, to do what he asks without question. Handing it over, he realizes a second before Ben switches it on that it’s a UV light.

Ben, bent over the desk, sucks in a harsh breath of his own. His shoulders draw back in a sudden, violent motion.

“What’s wrong? Did it not work?”

Sadusky has witnessed a lot of emotions in the Gates family, especially Ben. Elation. Dread. Protectiveness. Anger, scalding anger. Love. Goofiness. Affection. Sorrow.

But for the very first time, Peter has the awful privilege of watching horror blossom over Ben’s face. Blatant, one dimensional horror. His skin loses three shades in a snap, and he drops the box of powder, he’s so haunted by whatever he sees. White spills over the rug but he doesn’t do a thing to stop it.

“Ben?” Sadusky eases him back down onto the desk with a hand under his elbow. “What is it?”

“It’s…” Ben forces his voice above the graveyard whisper. “It’s you.”

Sadusky leans away, stunned. “Me? What on earth are you…”

The UV light is still on where it rolled across the desk and it brilliantly illuminates three neon words: Agent Peter Sadusky.

All the air leaves Peter’s lungs in one huge exodus. It’s a suction of rigor and confidence in one bombastic snap, a reverse of polarity that keeps his feet firmly on the ground. He can only stare at his own name, in that same distinct cursive writing, for several minutes. Both men are completely and thoroughly struck dumb, despite the fact that they should have anticipated something like this. Sadusky levels his unblinking eyes at the paper and Ben’s are on Sadusky.

“I have to tell my superiors,” says Peter. His voice sounds far away, outside of his own body. A bad jumble of words just like everything else in his life. “Right away. They should know in case he tries something and then we have an opportunity to catch him.”

Ben swallows, features dissolving like wet newspaper. “Peter…”

“Scratch that.” Sadusky does a two-step shuffle to the bookshelf and then, disoriented, stumbles back. “My family should be notified. Not details, but this note puts them at immediate risk.”

Ben jumps to his feet. “They can stay here.”

Sadusky pauses in pressing speed dial. “Excuse me?”

“Your daughter and her family are more than welcome here, as long as they need.”

“No, Ben. They have a cottage upstate and they should go there.”

Ben doesn’t look happy about the decision, but he nods.

There are a dizzying ten minutes that Sadusky won’t remember later, the hurricane whirlwind of making three separate calls, one to Penelope, who takes the glossed over warning tearfully but with that no-nonsense approach she inherited from her father; they’re almost finished packing by the time she says goodbye with profuse ‘I love you’s repeated in whispered, fearful tones.

“I love you, Grandpapa.”

Sadusky tries to smile at Amelia’s interruption, her sleepy, blissfully ignorant voice over the line, and almost achieves one. “Love you too, ladybug. Have fun at the cottage.”

“We will! I’ll save you a s’more!”

Hendricks and Spellman are easier to brief, barely a sixty second call, and the last is to bosses upstairs and on the Hill, listing what Gates found and the killer’s next target. What preventative measures they should take, how the killer would have obtained personnel information about who was running the case. How he knew the scytale wouldn’t work a second time. Whether Sadusky should be penalized for taking evidence off government property.

By the time Sadusky re-enters the study and recognizes he’s sweating, Ben is already in full problem solving mode. He paces back and forth in front of his desk, one hand on his hip and the other scouring at his hair.

“Well?” he asks, stopping the agitated motions long enough to wait for Sadusky’s answer.

Peter sighs. “My family is safe for now, as the cottage isn’t listed on any government documents that the killer could get a hold of, aside from a positively ancient property deed in the family safety deposit box. The higher ups are concerned but took my recommendation on—”

“Peter.” Ben looks devastated again. His brow crumples. “I’m saying what are we going to do about you? This note means you’re his next target!”

“We?”

“It’s not safe at your house.”

“Of course it isn’t,” says Sadusky, flustered. “I’ll be staying at an out of the way motel until this case can be resolved.”

“A motel? Doesn’t the FBI have safehouses?”

Sadusky’s voice comes out with that same knife-to-the-throat softness. “Ben…I refused the offer of a protective detail. It will only put a bigger target on my back and I’m not getting some rookie, new to the job kid killed because of it. I’ve lived my life, a good life, and though I’m in no hurry to be off the ride, if it’s down to me or a young agent, I want the killer to pick me.”

Forget moving—Ben hardly breathes now. “You can’t be serious.”

Peter is silent.

Ben flounders. “Well then…you’re staying here.”

“Here?” Peter’s heart stops and then starts up again. “And put your family in more danger? Absolutely not.”

Ben marches closer. He’s resumed this whole breathing thing, but now it’s piston fast. “Peter, admit it. This is the best place for you to be. Please…please stay with us.”

“I’m touched, really, that you’d offer such a thing to me.” Sadusky places a hand on Ben’s shoulder and regrets the action immediately when Ben’s eyes widen, feeling how it shakes. “But you cannot be put into the line of fire over this target on my back. Not for a second.”

Ben shrugs off the touch with blazed, crackling eyes. “We risk our lives, every single day. What makes this any different? You walk out that door and there’s no guarantee of your safety.”

Peter’s face shutters with a deep, private grief of his own. “Ben—”

“No. No.” Ben’s volume climbs. “You cannot just walk out of there without letting us help you.”

“Watch me.”

To Sadusky’s shock, a shallow line of water steadily rises in Ben’s eyes. “I can’t watch you get hurt, Peter.”

Icy thorns impale the unfortified places of Peter’s heart, the porous walls he stopped armouring long ago. Ever since Abigail hugged him in that wretched hospital room.

“That’s my job,” he hisses. His entire body is shaking now. “Don’t you get it? I’m the one who protects you, not the other way around. I’m the one who drives by your house when I can’t sleep at night because I keep seeing your lifeless body behind my eyelids.”

Ben’s face falls but he doesn’t, can’t, look away.

A ringing starts in Peter’s ears and he yells to be heard over it. “My mind replays all of it, Ben—every gunshot, swerving car, every time one of you nearly got hit, jumping off the deck, every hostage situation, every explosion, every arrest—seeing what would have happened if even one of those went wrong!”

Peter breathes hard, voice thunderous and breaking. It is one caress away from shattering. “Every single time. I’m not letting any of those scenarios happen in reality.”

The hush that follows this is a hose full of acid, leaking from every corner of the room and sizzling across their rivaled breathing patterns. Ben gazes at him, hurt beyond words, but alive. That’s all Peter cares about.

“You’re the one who doesn’t get it.” Ben shakes too, his driven by fear instead of frustration. “Did it ever occur to you that maybe we love you back?”

More words that slay Sadusky where he stands.

He might as well have just been executed by a samurai blade for the way he gushes open in sanguine, macabre detail. The entrails of his held back vulnerability and affection for these people, the way he’s allowed his love to find a new patch of soil to root in, come spilling out. A love that should have been culled eighteen months ago.

Sadusky has every intention of yelling some more. He takes a big breath in to do just that. Yet somehow, for all of the flailing inside his chest, he can only whisper. “You shouldn’t. I should never have let it go this far, to allow you all to get so attached.”

None of Ben’s tears fall but his wet almost-sob is ten times worse. “So we’re a mistake now, huh?”

“No.” Peter pockets the letter and heads for the door. “I made the mistake and I’m sorry.”

“I’m not.”

There isn’t anything left inside of Sadusky at this point, just a hollow cavern of bone and heartbreak. Nothing left that Ben can sluice out of him. Still, Sadusky turns back, so fast and sudden he has to brace a hand on the bookshelf. He looks Ben dead in the eye and finds that his blood pressure matches the room’s spinning beat. “Are you telling me that you’d do it all over again, the credit card slip, being arrested, escaping said custody, and being shot at—just so you could meet me?”

“In a heartbeat.” Ben’s answer arrives without hesitation, without even thinking about it. “It would be worth it every time.”

Peter knows he has no choice but to leave now or he never will, a dangerous burning in his sinuses. He slams the door on his way out, more from this uncontrolled terror in his body than anger. The house is dark, the beginnings of a rainstorm tapping at the windows. Peter passes the master bedroom, Abigail fast asleep inside, untainted by the terrors in his mind. No blood. No worst case scenarios.

Sometimes leaving is the most gallant thing to be done. And Peter may be forgiving, indulgent to a fault, uncertain, but he is no coward. If he’s ever done anything right by this family, then leaving is it. He should have done it months ago, should have spared them this anguish.

But nothing is ever that easy—

When he comes down the stairs, it’s to find Riley fretting by the door, Star Wars pajamas, Chaplin T-shirt, and all. He’s trembling a little himself, a large Tupperware container nestled under his arm. Sadusky stops dead. Riley, sleep rumpled and soft as he looks right now, might as well be a firing squad for how incapable Sadusky is of brushing past him for the door.

“I, um…I heard you guys…” Riley fidgets with the hem of his shirt. “Shouting.”

Peter still can’t talk above a whisper but something about Riley’s timid, nervous posture makes it worse and soothes him all at once. He never can deny this family anything. “Sorry if we scared you.”

“It’s cool,” says Riley. “I don’t know what you were arguing about, but I figured you could use some cheering up.”

He holds out the container, also doodled with a Sharpie version of Hugh.

“Since you didn’t get any of my famous creations last time,” Riley explains, and Peter almost loses it right there in the foyer. He peeks under the lid to see twelve frosted double fudge cupcakes with planet sprinkles. “I made a batch this morning. You look like you need them.”

“I do.” Peter clasps the side of Riley’s neck. “I really do. Thank you, Riley.”

“Hey, any time.” He’s faintly jittery under Sadusky’s hand, eyes flicking up the stairs with something uneasy.

The ice in Peter’s stomach begins to thaw. “It’s all good now, Riley. We’re alright and no one’s mad, especially not at you.”

“Oh. Okay.” Riley unwinds at the reassurance, muscles releasing under Peter’s skin. It makes inhaling a full breath difficult, the guilt eating away at his lungs. “Goodnight, Peter.”

“…Goodnight, Riley.”

“See you for our games night on Thursday!”

Riley rabbits back down the first floor hall to his room with a wave and a tired smile. His voice sounds like Amelia. As if this is just any other day while Sadusky works on any other case, no big deal. It’s the final straw and Peter has to catch himself on the door frame once Riley is out of sight, the cupcakes a flaming sign he doesn’t want to read.

He exits the Gates manor as if in a dream, none of it real or piercing this new, hazy world of loss. Climbing into his car, he sits there and barely keeps from hyperventilating. He’s so hot, panicky, that it fogs the side window.

When did it happen? When did his sense of right and wrong start to circle these people? How long has he not only enjoyed their presence but needed them to keep going? Worse still…how long until the engine of his heart dies without their fuel?

Rain pounds now, a curtain of clear fog over the world.

It is one of those spellbound human moments, when there is no other option but to stare at it, this antedated deluge reigning over the world in thrashing, regal curtains. Some droplets, caught on his eyelashes, sprinkle down his mouth in spiccato flashes.

Peter loosens his tie after rolling down the window, not caring about the immediate drenching of his clothes. He panics some more while pulling out onto the road without thought or trajectory. The cupcakes sit in the passenger’s seat, at home there in a way that feels so out of reach, spewing out silent words almost unbearable to hear.

He drives for hours and hours, until the sun starts to rise.

Chapter Text

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

Sadusky’s pen scratches to a halt and he glances up. Agent Spellman stands in the doorway, just like she’s been every morning for the last three days. This is the first time she’s asked a personal question, however.

He sets down his paperwork, offering the usual litany. “I haven’t received any threatening calls or messages and I change motels every night so as not to be traced, cash only. I remember how to work surveillance and undercover.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Shoot.”

Spellman comes in and shuts the door. “I mean, sir, that you look exhausted.”

“There’s a murderer on the loose.” Sadusky shoves file folders away from himself. “Everyone is exhausted.”

“I’m still not happy you refused the security detail.” Her voice isn’t hard exactly, but firm enough to make Sadusky sit straighter.

“Get in line,” he says, also hoping this litany will ease her worry. “Bosses keep calling every night to talk me out of doing this by myself.”

“Beat me to it,” Spellman gripes.

Time for a topic change, as Sadusky doesn’t know if he can handle any more bullying-because-we-care behaviour. He hears it in his dreams, let alone his waking hours. Not that he has a case to defend against it—he can see the evidence of all this stress in himself, the crooked ties, terrible frozen food, bags under his eyes, the dread every time his phone rings.

“We think we have a positive identification, though, which feels like progress.”

Spellman nods. “My photo was grainy, but Hendricks has some possible suspects for you at our meeting this afternoon of who it might match. My money is on that young man, Cole Reeds. He’s an interim worker at a construction company.”

“Sounds about right. He fits the profile?”

“Unsupportive childhood and all.” Spellman hands him a file. It shows the man’s financial and employment history, which is shaky at best. “His father was a higher up in the military until a leg injury forced him to retire early. He’d been living with Cole before he died last year. Mrs. Reeds died when Cole was eight, leaving him alone with just his father.”

Peter has been humming in all the right places, a sign that he’s listening, but suddenly stands once he gets to a photo clipped at the back. “I’ve seen this man before.”

“What? Where?”

“At the Smithsonian gala a week ago.”

The agent blinks at him, brows high. “The Smithsonian?”

Sadusky makes a loose hand gesture at her curious tone. “Long story. He was a groundskeeper who gave Amelia and I directions…”

His heart jumps into his throat and he puts a hand to his forehead. That same young man, so kind, so friendly, is the one who murdered three people not one month ago. And he led Amelia within an arm’s breadth of him. “Reeds saw my granddaughter. He knows for sure that I have family.”

Then it hits him. Reeds didn’t just see Amelia—both Ben and Riley were at the event, and that can’t be a coincidence. The knowledge makes him dizzy, the vertigo of floating up high to see the larger mosaic of how well this was planned, long before they realized.

“Spellman, I want a protective complement on the Gates family. Now.”

“Do you really think he’ll attack them when he declared you the target?” she asks, rightfully so.

Peter’s breath snags, just imagining what would happen if Reeds has deliberately led them astray. He has a vision of Cole in the Gates home like that invasion, shooting one or all of them in cold blood while they scream. Baby Ellie growing up without parents, if she made it out alive at all.

The room trembles before Sadusky gets his panic under control. “Reeds has shown himself willing to play games. I wouldn’t put it past him to confuse us with a note while scouting a completely different target. We’re not risking their lives on blind assumption.”

Spellman’s features tighten. “I’ll notify upstairs right away.”

Peter nods but, to his confusion, the agent doesn’t scurry off right away as she is wont to. He blows out a terse breath and closes his eyes briefly. The trash compactor currently squishing at the inside of his skull fades to a low rumble when he opens them.

In that time, Spellman has moved closer. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”

“Sorry? Whatever for?”

Spellman sweeps a hand around his office. “I didn’t realize it at first…but this past year you’ve seemed…more relaxed. Happier than I’ve seen you in years. It was so gradual that I didn’t notice just how happy until this week.”

Peter swallows.

“I don’t know what happened or went wrong,” she finishes, tapping the file on his shoulder before walking to the door, “But whatever it was, I’m sorry to see that happiness go.”

Sadusky is holding himself together with home-sewn stitches and a prayer at this point, and her words are a pair of forceps, digging into the open wound. For he knows he cannot go back to the way things were, cannot disregard what they need for his own wants.

Still, he nods with complete sincerity. “So am I.”

Peter puts off the inevitable phone call for over two hours, as long as he can avoid it in good conscience. He’d rather give his life savings than say what he has to, admit the truth without buffer to a man whose heart he still can’t comprehend. Ben is praised by the papers and news outlets for his brain, for his plucky refusal to give up on what he believes in.

But Peter never stuck around for Ben’s mind. He possesses a kind of faith the world doesn’t get to witness on this scale anymore. Faith is a dirty word in today’s culture, a mocked container for the world’s private sorrows and pessimism. His heart is what brings Sadusky to his knees, then lifts him on days when the world grows dark.

The first ring doesn’t even finish before Ben picks up, as if he’s been standing over his cell since that appalling night in the study. “Peter?”

Sadusky can’t speak, suddenly. He imagines what would have happened if he’d shut the door in Riley’s face that night after the fair, if he hadn’t gone to Christmas dinner, if he’d walked away from the hospital room, had said no to every game night, every dinner. Hung up on every phone call.

There is no wondering, of course—then they’d be safe. Free of you and serial killers.

“Ben…I’m so sorry.”

“Peter, a surveillance team just showed up on the street. Abigail and Riley haven’t noticed them, which is probably the point.” Ben doesn’t sound angry, like the version of him in Peter’s mind. The one that screams and throws skulls at him. He sounds desperate, hunted, wiped. “What’s going on? Are you okay?”

“Ben, he…” Tears blur Peter’s eyes and he swivels so that he’s facing the back wall of his office instead of the door. What good are years of decorated service if his instincts fail him when it counts? “He played me.”

“Who? Who played you?”

Every protocol and subsection of the legal precedents on this niggle at Peter’s mind, how he’s not supposed to discuss the case with a civilian—he’s in enough trouble as it is for showing Ben the paper in the first place, on a kind of compassionate probation—but he takes a leap of faith of his own and throws them out the window.

“Cole Reeds,” he says in a low voice. It chokes with helplessness and regret. “The killer knows I’m close with you and Riley. Reeds saw at us at the Smithsonian lecture event.”

This is enough for Ben to chew on for several silent heartbeats.

“I sent the team. They’re for your security, okay? I’m not letting anything happen to you or your family. My people will protect you at even the slightest whiff of Cole’s presence. I’ve personally vetted them so you can trust any agents that come to your door or flash a badge.”

“And what about you?” Ben finally asks.

“What about me?”

“Who’s protecting you?”

Sadusky doesn’t want to fight again but he’s boggled by Ben’s insistence on this issue. “I’m fine, Ben. I’m staying off everyone’s radar, and he can’t get to me. It’s you my team is worried about.”

A sigh crackles across the line, and Ellie chatters in the background. “Do you remember that night you let me go?”

“What night?”

“That night on the Library of Congress balcony? I know you saw me.”

Peter blinks, trying to piece together what he’s talking about and why this would be so important to Ben right now. There’s a gritty stone in the words. “I did, yes.”

“But you didn’t tell your people to go after me right away.”

Colouring, Sadusky has to concede this with a wry look, even if Ben isn’t present to appreciate it. “Duty to one’s head and one’s heart can be dubious in distinction at times, trust me.”

“I do, that’s the point.”

The room rings. Sadusky has to take the phone away from his ear and muffle it on his shirt for a moment, kneading his brow.

Ben can read minds even across phone lines, apparently. “It’s not your fault, Peter.”

Sadusky’s hand slides down over his eyes. “Oh yes, it is. He knows about you because of me, because I led him straight to you. I should never have asked for your help in the first place; it only made Reeds bolder.”

“You don’t believe that. Then Henry Johnson would be dead.”

“Maybe I do.”

“You’re not that kind of man.”

And they’re not talking about Mr. Johnson at all, about security protocols, if they ever were.

“Neither are you.”

Ben exhales a shaky breath. “Just…come home, Peter.”

The slither of emotion that crosses through Sadusky’s hollow, broken bones isn’t weepy this time. It’s something too old and sharp for that, a rusted blade handed to him years ago that he’s steadily falling upon. Inch by agonizing inch. He feels it up between the skein of his guilt and failure where they plait together. The blade slices soft fibers until he’s unravelled.

He can’t say it, those guileless words the Gates family has been saying to him for eighteen months through every action.

“Not until this is finished.”

“Peter, please.”

Two tears fall in slow succession down Peter’s cheeks. “Goodbye, Ben.”

Thursday rolls around.

And then it never ends.

Sadusky has figured out that the secret to staying off someone’s radar is to change his schedule, keep the daily routine unpredictable. He switches motels every day, paying in cash, and only goes in to work on certain days that he doesn’t tell the agents about. Otherwise, he works from the motel room, patchwork fields of file folders scattered across the table.

He knows it’s unwise, but he can’t help doing a drive by of the Gates house every so often. Just to be sure his agents are doing their job and keeping Reeds at bay. They did great work with Henry Johnson, so logically he knows there’s no reason to be worried, but the Gates seem to have a magical override that bypasses Sadusky’s logic altogether.

On the days he does go to the Bureau, Spellman and Hendricks spirit him in through a difference entrance every time, never on a rotation or set loop. That way hopefully no one can anticipate where he will be at any given moment.

But today, working from the fifth motel in as many days, Sadusky’s mind drifts. It’s nearing sunset and he stares out the window with an increasing weight upon his shoulders, one he knows he placed there himself, brick by brick.

Normally, at this time of night on a Thursday, he’d be sitting on the Gates’ couch, huddled around the coffee table. Trying to referee a squabble about Monopoly finances—“That’s not how luxury taxes work, Ben”—or being the official ‘Googler’ for fact checking their prehistoric copy of Trivial Pursuit. The room would be dimly lit, Ellie interjecting with a ‘bah!’ here and there where she usually sits on Ben’s lap or Riley’s sound effect app interrupting Ben and Abigail’s very mature and sophisticated argument about military strategies in Risk.

At first there had been a handful of attempted phone calls. Mostly from Abigail, then a few texts from Ben. But now Peter is using a new burner, his old cell left at home, and the room is silent apart from the central heating’s low drone, in chorus with a bird twittering outside. It’s left him more isolated than he expects, not being able to call Amelia for their weekly chat or listen to another one of Patrick’s rambling discussions on democratic theory.

The leaves are just starting to turn red, and for some reason the lonely orange amongst the green makes his teeth ache.

He looks down at a photograph of the invisible ink, head propped on one set of knuckles. This evidence of how quickly Ben broke a code even the best in the country could not. He wonders, for the first time, what his wife would have thought of these strange, caring people, how he stopped expecting to die in the line of duty and would instead like to get even older. To see Ellie grow up. His chest is starting to dull, to lose colour in once vibrant places.

“What have I done, Katherine?”

“That’s a very good question.”

With five short, simple words, Sadusky’s life changes.

They are not said very loud or harshly; no inflection of anger and pain. No, Sadusky feels the background of his life fade away like downstage in Carnegie Hall, melting into the darkness of a single spotlight and this one moment he’s been waiting on for the last five days. It doesn’t matter what he told Spellman and Hendricks and his bosses—this was the only possible outcome.

Not that he’s a masochist, or that he wanted it to happen, but the sight of a familiar face to go with the words—and a gun held in his face—is almost a relief. Whatever happens next, the suspense is over.

Sadusky just gazes calmly at his intruder. His mind is still thinking of Katherine and Ellie. “Reeds. How did you get in my room? No, better question: how did you find me in the first place?”

Cole Reeds wears a plumber’s uniform this time, dark coveralls and boots, tool belt hung low on his hips. His eyes are bloodshot but again, not manic or insane. He doesn’t look anything like your stereotypical serial killer, aside from the infrequent way he blinks and the single minded drive tensing his face.

“Stroke of pure luck, Agent Sadusky. I saw you coming out of a take-out place this morning while I was on the bus. After that, it was a simple matter of following you back and waiting until you left for a few hours.” He hitches his belt. “Seems your room sprung a leak.”

Sadusky eyes the man up and down, listening to the very young voice, feeling more tired than wary. His one consolation is that Reeds looks just as fatigued as he does. They’ve caused each other equally sleepless nights. “So I see. You hid in the bathroom until I came back from a supper run? Let me get comfortable?”

“That’s the idea, Sadusky. Now come on. We’re leaving.”

“And going where? My people will find you.”

“I don’t care if they do,” says Cole, and looks like he means it. Always a sobering thing, facing someone who has nothing to lose, whether it’s in the mirror or the face of this young man. Though it’s not Sadusky’s first time alone with a cold criminal, not by a long shot, Reeds has a fatalistic air about him. He’s a cul-de-sac, a road that leads to empty ground. “I just need this to be over.”

“So do I, but there’s more than one way to do that, son.”

The word is a combustion in the room. It morphs Cole’s face into something frigid and splintering. Cole opens his mouth but he’s interrupted by Sadusky’s life changing for a second time in under five minutes—

The burner cell rings. Despite his phone’s quiet volume, its intrusion into the stand-off sounds like a shrill alarm. Sadusky reaches across the desk for his gun.

Reeds growls, cocking the hammer of his own. “Don’t.”

Sadusky eases back into his seat. Then, his attention goes solely into the phone, the utter novelty of having it go off.

A ten digit number flashes on screen with each ring. Only Spellman and a few Council bosses know how to call this phone, not the least of which because he only got it on Monday. He just spoke with them thirty minutes ago to finish debriefing for the night and complete his usual three times a day, yes-I’m-still-alive check in.

So why would someone…?

Sadusky finally remembers who the number belongs to and blanches. He’s not used to seeing the identity as a string of numbers. In his old phone…it’s a speed dial contact.

“Leave it,” says Cole, and Sadusky jumps, almost forgetting he was there amidst the increasing throb of trepidation. “We’re going for a ride. Your car.”

Peter stands but shakes his head. “If I don’t check in, they’ll know something is wrong. You’ll have a whole team of angry agents and a senate committee on your tail. If I answer it, you’ll get a head start.”

Cole’s frown mutates into a scowl, though he does consider this for a moment. The very act alone should signal hope, that Cole is a man to be reasoned with, but it just serves to increase Sadusky’s blood pressure. Killers with the ability to think ahead, not driven by impulse, always end poorly.

And all the while, that obnoxious ringing continues, a mushroom cloud in the space between them.

Just hang up, Sadusky thinks. Please, just leave it be…

“Fine.” Cole raises the gun higher, so it’s between Peter’s eyes now. His stomach sinks. “But make it quick. You act like everything’s fine and you hang up. Capiche?”

“I understand. I won’t let them know anything is amiss.”

Sadusky brings the cell to his ear and clears his throat before pressing to accept.

“Peter? You there?”

Despite it all, the life and death stakes of this moment, Peter still smiles. “Where else would I be, Riley?”

The young man huffs. “That’s my question. I know something is wrong—Ben even called off games night tonight. He’s not sleeping well. And…and you’re not here.”

“I wish I could be,” says Peter, the complete truth.

“What happened between you two?”

The moment of warmth evaporates and Peter’s face falls. “Nothing you need to worry about, okay?”

“Too little too late, Peter. I want to know whatever he’s not telling me. Whatever you’re both not telling me.”

Sadusky’s knees almost give out at the intense relief this statement brings, that Ben hasn’t told him what’s going on or that he hasn’t noticed the hidden security detail yet. That some of Riley’s innocence is preserved. They’ve faced greedy treasure hunters and thugs, sure. But a serial killer is a whole other ball game and Sadusky wants the kids as far away from it, even in hypothetical terms, as possible. It’s a rush of cool fire across his whole body.

He finally clues into the weird silence happening, weird because it’s not totally silent on Riley’s end even though it sounds like he’s alone. A scraping sound echoes again, like candy wrappers or aluminum foil.

Peter realizes what it is a split second later than he should. He straightens so fast his back pops. “Riley—”

“You haven’t been taking my calls or replying to my voice messages.” Riley sniffles some more. “Did I do something wrong?”

“Never,” Peter says, before Riley finishes. “I don’t even think you could.”

Sadusky glances at Cole when he makes a ‘wrap it up’ circular motion with his other hand.

“Riley…” He is about to ask how Riley even got this number, amazement definitely ringing in the meager space his brain has left to feel anything other than an encompassing sense of oh no. Bad bad bad. But he quickly thinks better of it. “I’ve got to go now. Working late on the case and all that.”

“Oh.” Riley audibly gathers himself together. Sadusky has never felt so torn in his life. “You’ll call again soon though, right? Fix whatever this snafu between you and Ben is about?”

The indecision about whether to lie—no, he probably will never get to call Riley ever again—or offer solace nearly splits him in half. He goes for reassuring, knowing that role deep in his bones. “It’ll all be okay, Riley, I promise.”

His heart quickens. “And make sure to feed Hugh for me. You know how hungry he gets this time of night. Sound good?”

“Hugh? Peter, what—”

“Thanks, Riley. Goodnight.”

“Peter—”

Sadusky hangs up and feels about two inches tall. A bead of sweat trickles down his temple that has absolutely nothing to do with adrenaline or the gun in his face and everything to do with the knowledge that Riley’s voice might be the last friendly one he ever hears. Knowing that Riley’s last memory of him will be him hanging up while he’s still talking and scared. Peter aches to comfort him more, like he normally would have.

“Well done.” Cole’s voice is stony, composed but intense. “Keys.”

“What, no directions this time?” Peter can’t help but snap off. He usually has a pretty good gut about people, especially when meeting them for the first time. The fact he didn’t realize this man had ill intent towards him and was never a groundskeeper at the Smithsonian makes his skin crawl.

Sadusky fishes the keys out of his pocket only to freeze at the faint, self satisfied smile that creeps over Cole’s face. “So that was one of the kooky treasure clan you hunted, huh? What was his name again…Riley? He sounds fun.”

Though Sadusky is male and has never, in fact, experienced a hot flash—he imagines it would feel something like this. A single minded curtain of red, branding fury slips over his head and across his eyes. His voice comes out with the same heat, low and dangerous. “If you touch him, I will kill you.”

Cole actually takes a step back at the bottled ferocity in this one statement. His face, however, darkens. “You’re in no position to be telling me what to do.”

“It’s not a threat, Reeds.” Peter hears a strange tinkling only to realize the car keys are shaking in his hand. “It’s a promise. If you so much as lay a hand on him, or any of them, I will break it off.”

“I’ll take that under advisement, Peter.”

The disturbing sound of his first name out of that young, bitter mouth, is the final curtain before the gun swings down.

Chapter Text

“And make sure to feed Hugh for me. You know how hungry he gets this time of night. Sound good?”

Riley, sitting at the kitchen island with his morose, consolation bowl of Lucky Charms, drops the spoon. Milk splatters all over the counter but he barely notices. His brow creases.

“Hugh? Peter, what—”

“Thanks, Riley. Goodnight.”

“Peter—”

Riley actually takes the phone away from his ear and stares at it, he’s so thrown by this closing statement. It’s just as well, since Sadusky has already hung up, but he continues to replay the peroration for a few seconds. Since the cancellation of tonight’s usual weekly games night, he’s been sitting in the dark, desolate about it, and he’d hoped that a phone call to Peter would clear up whatever nonsense he and Ben are working through right now.

But this…

Hugh…Ben must have told him…why would he have—?

Riley’s breath snags.

Jumping off the stool, he races for the stairs. To do so, he passes the nursery, where Abigail is sitting in the rocker reading a board book version of The Very Hungry Caterpillar to Ellie. It’s domestic, easy, and yet for some reason it only amps up Riley’s heartbeat as a serrated feeling begins to press down on him, Damocles’ sword in a pendulum swing over his head.

Please let me be wrong. Riley knows he’s not, but he wants nothing more than for his imagination to be acting up. Please let Peter have simply been confused.

He leaps the steps two at a time, knowing exactly where Ben will be this time of night, mainly because he’s holed himself there for the last week. Sure enough, a light still shines from under the study door despite the setting sun.

“Ben!” Riley doesn’t bother knocking. He barges in to see the same thing he always does—Ben with his head in his hands where he does research on some weird cylindrical code and baking soda. “Ben, something’s wrong.”

At Riley’s frantic tone, Ben jolts and looks up. “Riley, what—?”

“It doesn’t make sense,” Riley blurts, all in one heated rush. He belatedly realizes his hands are sweaty where they still grip his phone and tap at the desk. “Well, it’s the fact that it doesn’t make sense that was the real tip off and I don’t know why he would’ve said that and…”

A scary kind of stiffness turns Ben’s limbs rigid, then his face, and he stands so fast his chair scuffs the wall. Riley doesn’t quite understand this look or haste until Ben rounds the desk.

“Ben?”

Ben forcibly takes Riley’s arm and sits him down in the other chair. He kneels in front of Riley, still holding his arm, and through that contact not-so-subtly checks his pulse. “You’re shaking, Riles.”

The worry would be sweet if a million klaxons weren’t banshee screeching through Riley’s thoughts in a messy loop.

“Ben—”

“What happened? You okay?”

“No! Something isn’t right.” Riley waves his phone, panicked all over again. “I just called Peter’s burner phone and he told me to feed Hugh!”

This is a sock to the face for Ben too. He blinks, first at Riley’s phone with wide eyes, then at a doodle of Hugh by the lamp, his slobbering face beside a flower. It’s a visible hamster wheel spinning through Ben’s thoughts while he pieces this together. The distinct swayback droop of revulsion lowers Ben’s jaw. They meet each other’s eyes and it clicks.

“He was trying to tip us off,” says Ben, breathless. At the rapid paling of his skin, Riley wonders if he should get him a chair. “Asking for help. Reeds has him.”

“Reeds?” Riley trails after Ben when he shoots to his feet. “Who’s Reeds?”

“How did you know the number to Peter’s burner?”

Ben is halfway out the door, but at his sudden halt, Riley runs straight into his shoulder and splutters. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“You didn’t answer mine.”

Riley reddens while trying to keep up with Ben’s long stride down the hall. “It was easy, if you know how to hack traffic cameras. I saw him buying the burner in cash at a seedy place downtown. Then it was just a matter of hacking the store and finding whatever number came with the phone records. Peter is good—I still couldn’t track his car on cameras after a certain point. I knew the motel where he was staying but didn’t want to intrude physically, so I called him.”

Ben stops again, turning to stare at Riley.

Here it comes.

But Ben doesn’t berate Riley or give him some ‘only for good’ speech, not even a stern look. Instead, he clasps the back of Riley’s neck with a watery, broad smile. “You’re too smart for your own good, you know that? Awesome work.”

It’s Riley’s turn to blink, so much so that he doesn’t follow Ben right away in his lope down the stairs. “You’re going all ‘pops’ on me…things must be bad.”

Ben, mercifully, does not hear this.

There’s a hurried, chaotic moment when they try to explain the situation to Abigail. She can’t leave Ellie, but they promise to keep her updated. Ben surprises Riley by going out the back door by the solarium and using binoculars to scan the surrounding property before starting the car.

“Why are your lights off?” Riley asks, as they creep out of the back driveway, an overgrown service entrance they never use. “What’s with the secrecy?”

“I don’t want to tip off the surveillance team.”

Riley’s eyes bug. He cranes around to look out the back window, as if that will help him catch a glimpse of the clandestine sentries at the edges of their yard by the apple trees. “We have a surveillance team at our house? Since when?”

“Since last week.”

The world swirls with the shock of that statement. Riley is disgusted with himself that he never even noticed in all that time. “Did they like…tail us to the grocery store and stuff?”

“Remember that weird guy in sunglasses at the mall?”

Riley gasps. “No.”

“Oh yeah. We’ve been followed all week.” Once out on the main road, Ben picks up the pace. He breaks about a dozen traffic laws in the first jag of the trip alone. “I would ask them for help, but they’d just put us in house arrest if I told them where we’re going.”

Riley braces himself on the dashboard. “Where are we going? What are you possibly going to do, Ben?”

“What did you mean, you knew the motel where he was staying?”

Riley thwacks Ben on the arm. “Would you stop answering my questions with more questions?”

“Will you stop avoiding them?”

“Benny.”

“Riles.”

Riley pulls out his laptop from under the seat in one jerky motion, mostly as an excuse to expend his frustrated, anxious energy. A little red blip appears on screen around a black lit mapping software, from where he’d put it to sleep just this morning. “I gave Peter some cupcakes, okay?”

“You gave him…cupcakes.”

“Yes. Chocolate fudge.”

“And?” Ben’s brows go up though he, also mercifully, does not look away from the red light they just ran.

“And I may have overheard parts of your argument that night.”

Ben’s face goes from curious to pained, a full shut down. Riley almost regrets it, knowing how much that fight knifed open the part of Ben that trusts in people—namely Sadusky.

“What did you hear?”

“Just that he was in danger, had to move his family, and he didn’t…didn’t get that he’s important to us.”

They both swallow and a current ripples through the car’s atmosphere. Ben nearly runs another red light but they don’t register it, lost in a nameless agony, the thorn of memory and leaning on someone who won’t lean back. Their eyes are haunted, too bright, Peter’s subtle plea for help a clarion through their thoughts.

“We can’t let him die, Ben.” Riley’s whisper is somehow still too loud in the car.

The jigsaw pieces of Ben’s composure slide back together in visible chinks and starts, hasped by sheer desperation at this point. “Nobody’s dying tonight, Riley, because I refuse to go home without him. He saved us and this is our chance to return the favour. Now—what did you do to the cupcakes?”

“Don’t be mad.”

Ben’s face goes lax. He takes one hand off the wheel—not the wisest course of action—and squeezes Riley’s knee. “I’m not mad. It would take a lot for me to be mad at you.”

“Like running away from you for a few hours?” Riley makes sure his eyes are on the screen when he says this, waiting for the signal to lock.

Ben winces at the memory of a year ago, how Riley had bolted after being told he’s the godfather of soon-to-be baby Gates. “That’s different. That was worry-mad. It doesn’t count.”

“So I…I put a tracker on the Tupperware container.”

“You…” Ben shakes his head. “You gave Peter a tracking device without telling him?”

Riley has the grace to blush, a little. “It was a last ditch plan.”

“You’re something else.”

“The signal is having trouble narrowing down Sadusky’s location, but once we get closer, it should pinpoint exact coordinates.”

“No. Not yet.”

Betrayal stings across Riley’s chest. “What? Ben! He needs us, as in right now!”

“I understand that he’s in danger,” Ben soothes. “Which is why we’re getting help. This is a suicide mission on our own and you know it.”

Riley winds up to rant some more, preferably about the last time they attempted a suicide run all by their lonesome selves and their plan worked, thank you very much…when it suddenly occurs to Riley that Ben never answered his question.

“Ben?” Riley swallows again. “Ben, who is Reeds? What does he want?”

Before Ben can answer, the truth slams Riley with blunt force. He thinks about the secrecy, the way Sadusky is staying off everyone’s radar and how often he’s changed motels. A slither winds around Riley’s lungs, acerbic and burning on its way.

“The serial killer! Reeds is the guy who murdered all those people and left notes, the ones you helped solve!”

The grim cast of Ben’s eyes does not inspire confidence. “Yes. I’m sorry, Riley.”

Riley has no idea what the hell he’s apologizing for but he resonates with the tone, the feeling that no matter how much you do, unless those efforts prevent something wrong—it’s never enough. He’s read about it in the papers, how the killer shoots his victims and then stabs them through the heart, thereby pinning a cryptic message about his next target.

And now he has Peter. Peter, their kind hearted blind spot who makes Ellie smile and referees game night and keeps Ben’s head on straight and who defied his country—the full weight of the United States justice system—all for them.

Twice.

The shaking returns with a vengeance, especially when Riley finally looks out the window to see them heading into town. It’s past nightfall when Ben turns onto Pennsylvania Avenue, still going at illegal speeds, and Riley’s stomach bottoms out.

“Oh no.” No matter how long goes by, Riley will always carry indelible memories about this road, about the last time he sped along it in the opposite direction they’re going now. “No, no, no, no, no. Ben, come on.”

“We have no choice, Riley.”

“Yes we do!” Riley waves a frenetic hand at the laptop screen. “We could maybe, I don’t know, not go to prison and in doing so save Peter’s life!”

After spending almost a decade with Ben, Riley has learned a whole stockpile of nuances in just his facial expressions alone and vice versa. This is usually a very helpful thing, the way a flick of Riley’s brow can make Ben laugh or all they have to do is sigh a certain way for the other to know when they’ve had enough. Sometimes they can have a complete discussion in just eye rolls and hand gestures alone.

But there is one hyper-specific angling of the right side of Ben’s mouth that he only does in equally hyper-specific situations. Every time, it always precedes the exact same thing—

“Riley…”

Riley groans, hands over his face. “Don’t say it.”

“Riley,” Ben begins again, voice patient despite its shake of nerves. “Do you trust me?”

“Why do always ask me that?”

“Because it’s a trump card for when I have no logical reason for you to go along with something.”

“Right,” Riley reiterates, anxiety lending him reserves of stubbornness. “You know there’s no logical reason they will not send me to jail for hacking traffic cameras and a whole entire US Marine Corps satellite.”

Ben looks taken aback by that one. “You commandeered a satellite to track Sadusky?”

Riley shrugs. “It’s more effective than the PI trackers they sell. I time it so the coast guard doesn’t notice my string of back door code.”

“Poetic,” is all Ben says, once he recovers. “Since Peter was in the Navy.”

“He was?”

“Yep.” Ben’s voice is really crackling now, like a fuse box flying apart. All energy and hectic strain. He pulls over and grabs one of Riley’s fritzing hands, like Riley is a hard drive with water spilled on it and he’s sparking in protest. At least Ben is sweating too. “Here’s the deal: you will stay here tracking Sadusky while I go inside and try not to get shot. Okay?”

“No.” Riley clutches at his hand. As he’d known it would, the gesture freezes Ben at once. “No deal. Ben, they’ll eat you alive.”

“Maybe. But do you trust me?”

Riley’s lips thin. His heart pounds so loudly he is surprised Ben can’t hear it. “You know I do.”

“Then trust me when I say that this is our best bet.”

It’s a fact Riley hardly notices, not since the early days of watching Ben’s larger hands like a hawk and wondering when Ben would get tired of him, fed up with this stunted kid and his tireless tongue, but Ben is stronger than Riley. By enough of a margin to be noticeable. This is partly due to sheer size difference and partly thanks to years of dive training.

The strength imbalance doesn’t bother him anymore.

Tonight, Ben tugging out of Riley’s death grip like it’s nothing—it bothers him. Riley even grabs on with his other hand but Ben shirks that easily and somehow still manages to be gentle about it.

Then Ben shuts the door, leaving Riley’s shiny palms to cool at the absence of heat. His breath wheezes too loudly in the car, with the understanding that this heated conversation might be the last one he gets with Ben. Riley does exactly as he’s told for three tortuous minutes, fingers a quavering blur in an uncharacteristic fumble over the keyboard. The signal still won’t quite lock, which in itself is a clue that wherever Sadusky and Reeds are heading, it’s remote.

“Oh, screw it.”

Riley tucks the laptop away in the bag over his shoulder, trotting through the J. Edgar Hoover doors. One nice—awful—thing about this building is that security is right there when you walk in. You can’t get past the lobby without a guard’s authorization. Not even a Swedish visitor looking for a tour.

Ben hasn’t made it six feet, although this is better than Riley expected. The sight still manages to halt him dead in his tracks—

A half moon ring of agents have their guns drawn, aimed at Ben, while he pleads with them to call Sadusky’s team.

“Gates, you’re civilian. What would you know about that?” One agent asks, her eyes hard.

Ben exhales sharply, agitated, through his nose. It doesn’t sound like the first time they’ve been over this even in the few minutes since he entered. His hands are up and his eyes have that distressed glint, the one that only makes an appearance when he’s at the end of his rope. “I told you, I helped Peter Sadusky on the Reeds serial killer case.”

Bad move. All the agents glance at each other with hissed exclamations of surprise. One even cocks the hammer on his gun.

“How do you know his name? That was never released to the public—”

“He’s in danger and you’re all just standing here!” Riley can’t help his explosion, incredulous that they’re wasting precious time on this. He doesn’t care how they work this out, just that they need to do it now. “Peter needs our help!”

As it turns out, this interruption is also a bad move. Riley recognizes his mistake the second the words leave his mouth.

His voice is a bomb drop in the stressed stand off, ringing off the marble walls. The guns swivel to aim at Riley, every last Glock, so keyed up that the agents just now notice his presence. Riley has lived through some serious debacles, sure; this isn’t even the first time someone’s threatened him, far from it. But there is a special kind of terror reserved for the sight of ten agents pointing all ten of their guns at you in one unison motion so fluid it looks rehearsed.

Riley’s breath rattles in his throat and he takes a step back. If his pulse was thundering before, it’s a jack hammer now, spasming in leap frog bursts. The phantom sword nicks at his crown. He fights his adrenal gland’s insistence that he run, run right now, refusing to leave Ben’s side. If he’s in the thick of it, Riley is too.

And for all that Riley just reminisced on how well he knows Ben, his whole body is transformed in a way Riley has only gotten to witness once before in his life, the day he thought the jig was up, his life over, only to see one Benjamin Gates walk into it.

But even that…even that doesn’t hold a candle to the way Ben looks right now:

Ben reacts to both the sound of Riley’s fright and all these agents, a visceral shift of demeanor. In the flash of an eye, their classification flips from help to threat and Ben is having none of it. He usually walks with his shoulders half curled, to better look people in the eye and stoop in deep, academic thought about life and the universe or whatever Ben ruminates on when he paces the study floor over Riley’s bedroom late into the night.

All at once, the academic is gone.

Ben’s shoulders unfurl like angel wings, drawing him up to his full height that is only further accentuated by the way Riley has coiled back, on his heels instead of his toes where he normally places his weight. Ben tenses his shoulders too, granite stones of ire and gall. The surrendered posture of his hands drops to spread eagle out and slightly back, hovering but not quite touching Riley’s chest.

And from the half profile Riley can see of Ben’s incensed face…

Well, even he’s a little terrified. His heart skips a beat. Riley isn’t scared of Ben anymore but he realizes at once that the agents should be.

Ben’s voice comes out with a Lovecraftian tone quality, a snarled rockslide of ground earth and fury. “Don’t you dare.”

The agents visibly balk, not used to being threatened with that unblinking eye contact, coupled with grit teeth. Ben’s trick works, however, in that all the guns switch to rest on him instead of Riley. He’s made himself the greater threat.

“Gates—”

“He’s not a part of this,” Ben snaps. “And we’re here to give you a tip.”

A security monitor has been talking into his radio, but at this he glances towards the agents. Then back to Ben. “You had to know the risks in coming here, telling us you know where Agent Sadusky is. He’s off grid at the moment. We don’t even know where he is.”

One agent narrows his eyes at Ben. “I’ve always known you were poison, Gates.”

Riley takes another step in fear, this time closer to Ben, because quite frankly even counting all the dangers they’ve faced, this one makes the top three of things that scare him down to his core. He resists reaching out, afraid of making any sudden movements that will get them shot. This doesn’t stop him, however, and he steps close enough that Ben’s outstretched palm is now flat on his chest. It propels a flicker of humanity across Ben’s feral expression.

“Stand down! Stand down!”

This breathless shout echoes in a discordant ostinato. Following it are two pairs of feet sprinting in their direction.

A man Riley vaguely recognizes inserts himself into the huddle. There’s a woman at his side, and she might just compete with Ben for how outraged she looks by this whole scenario. They both seem tired, bags under their eyes.

“Stand down,” the man barks again. “That’s a direct order.”

The agents reluctantly holster their guns except for one. The woman, like Ben, is having absolutely none of this. She marches right up to the defiant agent and plants herself in front of Ben. “Lower it. Right now.”

“Do you know what he’s done, Spellman?” the man argues.

“Yes.” The woman’s tone is even but sharp. “And that’s exactly why he’s the best person to help us, if Peter has been compromised.”

A gnarly few seconds pass in silence. Riley isn’t sure he’s going to comply at all and that’s how it ends, shot point blank because he and Ben were stupid enough to hand themselves over on a platter while knowing things they shouldn’t.

But then the gun lowers—and everyone breathes. They sound like a punctured hot air balloon, over a dozen people exhaling together. That echoes too.

“Mr. Gates, are either of you hurt?”

Ben is still far too wound up to offer a hand shake, but he nods in thanks at the male agent. “Agent Hendricks. We’re…” He glances back at Riley, his fingers kneading gently into Riley’s chest. Riley wonders if Ben can feel the right hook of his heart, a fist against the underside of Ben’s palm. “Fine, for the most part.”

“I’m sorry our agents threatened you.” Hendricks glances past Ben to Riley and a swelling pain passes through his gaze. Something about the sight of Riley softens his frame, all over. “Both of you.”

The guarded rods in Ben’s shoulders haven’t melted, not by a long shot, and this re-honing of the room’s attention on Riley makes his eyes flash. Riley wouldn’t be surprised if Ben is the one to kill someone tonight. “We’re telling the truth, Hendricks. Sadusky tipped Riley off that something’s gone wrong.”

The woman, Spellman, jumps on this. “How?”

“It’s, uh…” Riley scratches his head. “Hard to explain.”

“It always is with you people.” Hendricks is grim. “You’d better come up.”

Ben finally turns to get a proper look at Riley and Riley’s knees, he’s ashamed to say, almost dissolve straight to the floor. He stays standing, but it’s a near thing and Ben can see it. His hand switches to Riley’s arm. They read it in each other’s eyes, how similar this was to the home invasion and how many nightmares this one six minute stand off will give them.

“You alright?”

Riley’s voice is small and strangled. “No. You?”

“Getting there. I told you to trust me.”

“Ben?”

“Yeah?”

“Did you seriously expect me to stay in the car while you went inside?”

Ben wavers.

“I rest my case.” Riley lets Ben take a smidgen more of his weight. The grip tightens. “Don’t you ever do that again.”

Ben’s shoulders ease back into their usual form, despite the fact he won’t let go of Riley. The elevator ride is interesting, mainly because Riley has never been here before; when they gave their tip about the Declaration, that was on the first floor. At all times, Ben makes sure he’s between Riley and the two agents, though they’re too engrossed discussing the case with each other to notice.

“Maybe they’re right, Tatianna,” Hendricks is saying.

Spellman sighs and knocks his elbow. “Peter called us at supper time, four hours ago. He sounded fine.”

Riley frowns. “Is that like a check in thing?”

The two agents turn to stare at him and Ben stirs. His grip is so tight that Riley’s arm goes to sleep.

“Yes,” says Spellman after a moment. “He calls three times a day to prove he’s safe. And I just spoke with him at five-thirty.”

“I have tracking software,” Riley insists. “He’s out of town. Way out of town. Why would he go there of his own volition? Why would he tell me to feed a fake dog?”

Hendricks places a hand on his hip, eyes narrowed. “Let me get this straight: you drove all this way and incited the wrath of those in the FBI community who still think you should be in prison all because Peter mentioned a dog?”

“A fake dog. Keep up.”

Spellman’s lips twitch. She turns to Hendricks. “Yeah, Paul, keep up.”

“I thought you didn’t believe all this.”

The elevator dings and they step off into a truly massive bullpen. Riley stops and marvels at it, the government machine, people who hounded them from behind these very desks. Most of the desks sit empty at the late hour, but lead agents of the serial killer case are working into the night.

Ben’s forward motion gets Riley walking again, since he’s still leashed by the arm.

“If there’s anything I’ve learned,” says Spellman, with a look at Riley that’s this close to a wink, “It’s to never underestimate a Gates.”

Riley flushes, both at the tease and the implication that he’s lumped in with the Gates family even to outsiders. Ben finally lets go of him, only to place a hand on his back. Spellman’s concession seems to relax some of his cagey behaviour.

“Gates…” Hendricks is wary but polite. He inclines his head as if correcting himself. “Ben, if you don’t mind—could you catch us up to speed while Poole does whatever he’s doing with that tracker?”

Ben and Riley trade a quick look.

Please don’t make me tell them.

Ben raises a brow.

I really don’t want to go to prison, that’s why.

Tatianna watches the interaction, eyes flicking between them. “What?”

“Uh…do I have your permission to maybe…just for a bit…hack a government satellite?” Riley is full out wincing by the time he finishes.

All the agents look up from their work, straight at Riley. Ben can’t possibly protect him from every angle so he settles on a severe glare around the room. His fingers hook in the back of Riley’s jacket, as if to pull him down to safety at a second’s notice.

Luckily, Spellman can read between the lines. “Why ask my permission when you’ve already done it?”

“Finally.” Riley plops himself down at a free desk while pulling out his laptop. He waves an arm at her. “Someone who gets it. And I ask only because I don’t want to get officially arrested.”

“We’re not arresting anybody,” says Hendricks, firm, though Riley could swear he spots a hint of amusement dancing in his lined eyes. “Though I do have to ask—which satellite?”

“I can’t remember the name. It’s the Navy’s.”

Hendricks seems rather interested in the program once it loads and Riley explains his backdoor process for using it to lock onto a tracker he designed himself.

Tatianna is busy speaking on the phone with someone at the motel, once Riley gives her the address. She paces from one side of the desk to the other, just like Ben does sometimes. Ben himself is perched on a free chair next to Riley, arms folded while they watch him work.

Riley risks a quick peek up at Hendricks when he breaks through a Navy firewall, but the agent doesn’t even bat an eyelash. An impressed noise hums in his throat.

“This is very illegal,” is his only comment. Before Riley and Ben can be alarmed by that, Hendricks actually does smile. “So I’m going to pretend I didn’t see it. You want coffee?”

Riley stares up at him. “Umm…hot chocolate?”

“Coming right up.”

Hendricks walks away in a precisely timed moment, right when Riley breaks through into satellite protocols. He enhances the range so it’s narrowed in on their part of Maryland.

Hendricks returns with a full thermos of hot chocolate. “This enough sugar for your hyper brain?”

Riley is nonplussed until he realizes in one abrupt pop that it’s a joke. Ben isn’t the only one still in fight-or-flight mode. “More than enough. Thank you.”

Spellman hangs up and snaps her fingers to get their attention. She’s pale. “Local PD found blood on the table and floor. All of his belongings are still there. Paul—Reeds took him.”

Ben and Riley suck in a rattling breath, and Ben’s hand is back on Riley’s shoulder. Riley reaches up to grasp it back—they’re both trembling.

“Gear up! I want EMTs on standby!” Hendricks shouts at the surrounding agents without missing a beat. A mushroom cloud of activity plumes to life in busy cross sections around them. “Riley, can you come with us and narrow that down as we drive?”

Riley is already throwing his laptop back in the bag. At the sound of his first name, he stops and nods at the agent. “Try and stop me. I’m taking the hot chocolate though.”

Chapter Text

There are slow motion highlights Sadusky will try to recall later: the muffled drone of an engine. The rattle of something heavy and iron against his back. The cold whistle of air passing by at a crisp speed. The twitch of his hands to protect the Gates family from a threat lurking around the periphery of his thoughts. Something sticky and unyielding around his wrists.

It’s an odd symphony for so dusky a theater. Sadusky tries to piece the notes together, the droning and the moan and a horn honking in Doppler effect stereo, after which it is long gone.

No baton or percussionist could make sense of it. The chaos. The loss. His empty arms.

They fly over a bump and his head hits something carpeted.

“ It doesn’t make much sense, when you stack it up.”

Sadusky glances over at Riley. One brow lifts while he eyes his cards and debates on the merits of making Riley pick up twelve versus having Ben, on his other side, skip a turn. “What doesn’t?”

After a moment, he settles on making Ben lose a turn. The man is too busy sorting the four new cards Riley saddled him with to care.

“All of it, the details of the case.” Riley twirls his wet spoon in the air, chowing down on yet another bowl of fudge ice cream. He changes the suit to spades. “That your killer would taunt you with notes.”

“Lots of killers throughout history have displayed bravado through leaving notes,” Peter points out.

“Yeah, but not outright telling you who they’ll kill next.”

Ben stops shuffling his massive hand of cards and catches Peter’s eye. At least Abigail and Ellie have signed off for the night, so it’s just the three of them lounging, heavy eyed with fatigue at the late hour, around the living room. This conversation would be hard enough with little ears present, even if she can’t understand it yet. Riley is draped across the couch, blanket around his shoulders, one leg up and tucked tight to the left side of his chest. Not a coincidence, and Ben notices. Ben himself sits on the floor to Riley’s right, with Sadusky in the recliner between them. It’s quickly become ‘his’ spot, usurping even Patrick’s claim on the comfy chair.

No small honour.

“It’s pride,” says Peter finally. He thinks of Ben’s fast work with the scytale a few days ago. “Hubris is the number one reason criminals get caught, every time. The stats back that up—most slips happen because of sentiment or a criminal believing they can’t be caught at all.”

“Hmm.” Riley hums non-committedly. They’re playing their cards on the coffee table, over top of the Clue board, of which Riley won all four games—Peter is convinced he’s cheating but can’t figure out how.

Ben switches the suit back to diamonds. “You’re pretty good at codes yourself, Riles. I’ll have to bring you along for the next one.”

Sadusky almost throws in his cards then, though it makes him grin in surprise. “Here’s hoping we won’t have another case like this one. I’m tired of puzzles.”

Riley shares a fast look with Ben, something old, like a picked-at scab. Ben nods, an understated motion in contrast with the quick hand he stretches across to ruffle Riley’s hair. The taught threads around both of their eyes unspool, relaxing.

“Maybe he’s got something to prove,” Ben offers, once he sits back. “Your killer needs to show the world that he’s smart.”

Sadusky accepts the pick up ten Riley lays on him and shakes his head. “I’m not sure these ciphers have to do with intelligence at all.”

“Oh?” Riley perks up. “Why?”

Peter struggles with how to answer, how to explain one of those preternatural instincts—spine prickles, Hendricks calls them—when there’s no rationale to the feeling. “They’re emotion driven. Criminals often want to…” He coughs, colour flushing into his cheeks. “Well, sometimes people need to be understood, that’s all.”

A mellow silence falls after that, a three-way dance of eyes warming the interior of the room and the space between them. In the cymbal crash of these words hitting them all at the same time, they’ve forgotten whose turn it is. None of them care, thrumming with impending sleep and the evening’s conversations. And, in Riley’s case, too much ice cream. Ben slides over and takes the bowl from his fingers when his eyes droop shut.

“For the record, I win,” he mumbles, when he feels the familiar touch of Ben’s hand against his.

A spark flares to life in Ben’s eyes. “Whatever you say, Riley.”

His palm brushes over the bullet scar and in response, Riley’s leg uncurls while he loses the battle with a light doze. Ben keeps his hand there until Riley drifts off into real sleep. Peter is feeling lulled himself, but he hates to miss a moment of watching this family. Abigail croons a soft Sam Cooke ballade from somewhere down the hall. It sounds garbled, like she’s trying to sing while brushing her teeth.

Leaning his head against the arm of the couch, Ben juts his chin at Riley. “He’s right, you know. Your killer went to a lot of trouble and risk, for no other reason than just to get your attention. Pretty crazy, when you think about it.”

Sadusky has thought about it, every waking moment since this started—and sometimes even his unconscious moments. He knows each waver and curlicue of the killer’s hand writing, his persistent words, by heart.

“Maybe not.” A hollow thump of a heartbeat echoes through Peter’s chest cavity. “Maybe it’s not crazy at all.”

There is no gradual return to consciousness, no sensations filtering in one by one.

The next time Peter opens his eyes, it’s for good.

He gasps awake from the memory of that games night in a thunderclap and it all slams into him as one single portrait—Spartan basement, relentless rain, and stiff muscles. He feels the freezing metal of a lawn chair underneath him and at his back, hands and feet tied to the arm rests. Testing the prickly rope, there isn’t a millimetre of wiggle room. His wrists have already started to bleed even from this subtle movement. He takes a moment to himself, just to huff and puff, fight back nausea, and take stock of the fact that he’s somewhere new, feeling much worse than he did before.

And alive. He didn’t expect that.

All of Cole’s past victims were snatched from their homes and then shot immediately upon arrival somewhere else, judging by the timeline of disappearance to discovery of the body. He didn’t play around with or otherwise torture his victims. One was found along a riverbank, another in a public park, the third outside a barn. Rural or nature oriented spaces were favoured for the actual killing—Hendricks made a note of that.

At least Cole’s victims had a quick death, void of physical suffering.

Not for me. Sadusky doesn’t know whether he should be relieved or terror-stricken by this deviation from pattern on Reeds’ part. Sadusky’s inner profiler wakes slowly but steadily. I’m a different subject to him. He doesn’t see me quite like the others, then, and he has unsaid business with me. I’d be his first victim to die indoors; that can’t be a coincidence.

He’s aware that he should be panicking, but there’s a detached viscosity to the passing of time and his own heart rate, a slurry that pastes the wounds of his hope closed enough for him to keep going. Anyone else would have started hollering or hyper ventilating, but Sadusky has had enough time to imagine the worst that living in one of those scenarios, even now, skirts his emotion for mordant fascination.

The persistent ooze of a head wound throbs somewhere along the crown of Peter’s head, and the room chimes with each sluggish beat of his heart. Blood trickles down his hairline. He squints into the murk, trying to find any clue as to where he might be. But aside from a box of tools and buckets in the corner, on top of a work table, there is nothing to suggest specifics. The overhead bulb is burned out and the only light he has to indicate that it’s almost dawn at all are two windows on his right, high up and providing a woodland view.

The deluge outside is almost peaceful, in any other circumstance. Rain pattering on leaves. Morning birds beginning their song—I’ve been out cold most of the night—a squirrel and its puffed tail running by.

No sound of cars, no pedestrians. Not even any airplanes. Sadusky’s investigative brain livens faster than the rest, already racing. He’s got to be somewhere out of the way, which means at least a four hour drive out of the city. If his memory is correct, he spent most of that ride in the trunk of his own car. He laments that he wasn’t more coherent and didn’t pull the glow-in-the-dark tab to open the lid, installed on most newer vehicles. That would have solved this little kidnapping problem at once.

His mind filters frantically through the property deeds in Cole or his father’s name.

The hunting cabin! Peter knows where he is and he even remembers the address, not that it helps much at the moment. The team had searched here once before, to check if it might be occupied. It wasn’t then, a dust covered and decrepit bungalow infested with rats. There’d been no evidence at the time that Cole even knew of his father’s cabin.

Spellman is going to kill me. It’s Sadusky’s first non-urgent thought and he almost laughs. It comforts him, in a bizarre way, to think of his friends and family as they are and not how confused they’ll react to his absence. The happiest, silliest parts of who they are. Though she might have to coin toss Ben for it.

Memories of them make his throat twinge so he breathes deeply through his nose and focuses on what he can do right now.

“You awake, old man?”

A staircase leads from the upstairs in front of and just to the left of Peter’s chair. He watches the white rectangle of a door opening and a now familiar silhouette tromp down the stairs. Peter’s darting eyes lock onto the residual blood, his blood, staining Cole’s coveralls. Probably from where he dragged him down here.

It’s peculiar, Sadusky takes note, that Cole is still wearing them.

Reeds catches the look when he makes it to the bottom step. “It might surprise you to learn that I actually am a registered plumber. I work a lot of odd jobs.”

“Don’t tell me you’re really a groundskeeper.”

“I got hired for that Smithsonian job fair and honest,” Cole confirms, and Sadusky takes another deep breath. “I took it to scout out your life, knowing you’d eventually make contact with the Gates family—it had to be you who got assigned the case, really, with your case history. Gates helped you solve the Johnson puzzle, I assume?”

Peter eyes Cole, not rising to the bait. The last thing he needs is Cole deciding to target Ben in punishment for thwarting his homicide attempt too.

Reeds just shrugs, and Peter is again struck by how self-controlled the young man is, not impulsive or rash. “After I put the pieces together, it was simply a matter of following them until it led me to you…and your lovely granddaughter.”

Sadusky stiffens but otherwise doesn’t react. So he had it backwards, then.

“Relax,” Cole says anyway. “I don’t even know where they are—good job, by the way. I’m not after your family at all. No, it’s you who has to pay.”

Reeds’ eyes darken, their brown almost black in the poor lighting. Sadusky’s mind files that ‘family’ away for later and studies the tormented look on Reeds’ face.

“Pay? For what, doing my job and putting a stop to your crimes?”

“Is that what you call them?” Cole’s voice is quiet, the alligator before it lunges kind of quiet, and Sadusky stops breathing altogether. “I’m a criminal now?”

“You killed them.”

Cole shakes his head. “I gave them a choice and they refused the easy way out.”

Sadusky bolsters himself with the stark fact he’s in pain, because it means he stands a chance. That’s got to count for something. This is a test, a different element that’s part of the satisfaction for Reeds other than blatant killing.

Something, some gut instinct as old as Sadusky, emboldens him. His chin lifts and he stares Cole straight in the eye. “Well? What are you waiting for? Aren’t you going to shoot me through the heart and then dagger it like the others?”

Cole’s cocky attitude dims a little. “You don’t strike me as the type of man who throws away his life so glibly, agent.”

And just like that, Sadusky finally sees the connection they couldn’t before.

It’s so obvious, right under their noses, that he almost grins, a vicious one to reflect the gruesome reality of what is happening here. It’s heartbreaking just as much as it is spine chilling. The answer was never as complicated as they thought, never the mastermind killer they’d profiled Reeds to be. This is not a game of strategy or four dimensional chess or even a bid to show off his intellect to the big bad FBI.

No, Reeds is driven by his heart just like Sadusky. It’s crippled them both and that too, in its own macabre way, is a comfort. Today ends whatever their emotions have been hurtling them towards. They’ve run out of track, fated to be at the end together and face the consequences of those hearts. Now, here, at last, they have both nothing to lose.

Peter quiets his voice too. “So that’s it, huh? Those four people—”

“Three,” Cole snaps. “Johnson was a done deal before you and Gates ruined it.”

Peter doesn’t blink. It’s a private relief that he’s the only one tied up down here and he tries to bolster himself with that fact. “Your father taught you puzzles, didn’t he? He worked as a cryptologist for the military.”

The tactic works, confirming Sadusky’s theory, when Cole whips a Beretta out of his pocket and points it at Sadusky’s chest. “Don’t mention my father.”

“Why?” Sadusky angles around the gun barrel to better meet his eyes. “Because he hit you?”

Cole snarls out a hateful sound. His chest is heaving and it breaks Sadusky’s heart a farthing more that he’s almost the exact same age as Riley, that his humanity was cut down so soon. How much better Cole’s life would have gone if he’d had a Ben in his life. The thought is a vice-like clamp of pain in Sadusky’s chest. That paste over his heart starts to crack, seeping through the edges so that he has to grip the sharp arms of the chair, keeping himself focused.

“We have no Child Services file to verify, but I know the signs when I see it,” Sadusky continues. “Your grades dipped right around the same time your father retired and visits to the school nurse increased…your father took out his frustrations on you.”

Cole fires off a warning shot at the side wall and Sadusky flinches but refrains from crying out. The casing clinks to the floor, flourished by a mortar dust cloud from the new hole in the cement.

“Now he can’t anymore,” Cole hisses. “And neither can you.”

Peter is amazed he never put it together before this very second. “I’m not your fourth victim, am I? No, Mr. Reeds—I’m your fifth.”

Reeds pants in noisy gusts and reloads the gun. It doesn’t work, clip empty, and Cole grits his teeth. Sadusky notices what he should have at first…

Military issue gun, probably his father’s.

“Your father supposedly died of a hunting accident gone wrong but that’s not quite correct, is it?” Peter’s voice softens, sad and disgusted, refusing Cole the luxury of getting out of this conversation. Of hearing his crimes laid bare in black and white before him. “You killed him to end the abuse, I think. It gave you a taste for overpowering authority figures.”

Reeds hurtles forward and so do his knuckles, whipping Sadusky’s head to the side with the force of his punch. It’s a cuff of pure fire right across Sadusky’s jaw and he spits out blood where his teeth cut his cheek. Crimson sprays over the knees of his trousers. The ringing in his ears crescendos into a descant.

“You don’t have to do this,” he whispers. More blood clots down his chin.

Cole shakes out his right hand. “Normally I give them a choice—surrender and live as my prisoner or end it. But with you I think we’ll have to skip that part.”

Peter’s eyes sharpen. “All of them: the headmaster, the sheriff, the lawyer, the prison warden…me…you wanted to prove something.”

“And now I have.” Cole leans down, so close in Peter’s face he can smell the tobacco on his breath. “Nobody gets to make me feel small. You’re the one all alone.”

The stone tablet crack of Peter’s spirit is almost audible in this moment. He half looks around for the boom, for the cold shards of his hope littered across the floor. And he understands, just a touch, that the very thing he and Riley have been trying to teach Ben—that he is not going to get them killed through his love—is the very thing Ben struggled to tell him on that forsaken night.

If Sadusky wasn’t already sitting, he would have crumpled. He feels boneless, a strange buzzing up in the recesses of his scalp.

“Yes,” he says, a word from someone else’s mouth. “We are alone. That’s our burden, isn’t it?”

“What are you talking about?” Cole’s upper lip curls, revealing teeth. “I don’t need anyone, nor am I foolish enough to get attached.”

Sadusky starts to sweat, shock finally catching up with him through the backdoor of his thoughts. “That’s what I thought too. But you’re too cowardly to do it anyway.”

In record time, Cole’s hand is buried in Sadusky’s collar, yanking at his neck. His eyes burn with the pleasure of being in control. “You’re lucky I have to reload. Face it, Sadusky—all that life, the infamous career, and you’re going to die like a dog in a basement where no one will find you. No one is coming for you.”

Finally, Peter doesn’t rouse to a comeback. His tongue falls silent. He hardly dares to exhale when Cole shoves him and stalks away, back up the stairs. The thumping of his boots on dusty wood sounds like a death knell, its pealing muted, relentless.

The instant the door closes, Sadusky is in motion. He slides the yellow X-Acto knife, the one he managed to nick off Cole’s tool belt when luring him closer, out of his palm and into the ropes. The first one saws off easily, then the second one. It’s the ankle bindings that give him some trouble.

Three precious minutes later and he’s free, though he staggers once finally standing. He lands against the wall, which is just as well since it’s his ticket to freedom. He waits for the shrill sound in his ears to evaporate, for his breaths to stop sounding like an asthmatic.

The chair is just tall enough after sliding it over with tenuous care, so that his motions won’t tip off Cole. Peter climbs up and shoves open the window, pushing out the screen.

A narrow fit—but it will have to do.

He braces up on his elbows, stifling a grunt, and levers himself out sideways. Sadusky breathes a thanks when the smell of outdoor mulch hits his nose and he makes it to his feet. Words change their meaning, victim becoming human. Captive to free man. Alone to looking for rescue. The knife is stored in his pocket, just in case. Other than this tiny weapon, there is no thought or planning.

Sadusky is about to run when he spots a familiar shape around the front of the cabin. Crouched low, to avoid being spotted from the window, he shuffles towards it.

My car!

When his breath steams in the crisp air, Sadusky palms a hand over his mouth. Flames of hot, feverish pain lick at his skull, an effect even more pronounced with the morning chill. Dew and leftover rain patter off the gutters and rooftop onto his already damp clothes. Peter is just grateful Cole hadn’t thought to take his shoes or cripple his legs.

Then he’d be in a very different sort of emergency.

Creeping up to the car, Peter’s face falls—all four tires are slashed. Their rubber has melted into packed leaves around the driveway. Even if he could hotwire this car and somehow drive it away without Reeds noticing, already a miraculous probability, his sedan would never make it over the rough dirt road. This cabin is isolated to the extreme, and not for the first time he wonders if they’ll ever find his body.

A shiver runs through Sadusky that has nothing to do with pre-dawn temperatures, once the reason for the slashed tires takes shape.

Cole doesn’t plan to leave here alive. He isn’t planning on making it back to civilization either.

Whether by suicide or a police bullet, Reeds knows he won’t live through whatever happens next. Sadusky begins to shake, to feel the true weight of another impending dead end for the first time. He is neither an optimist nor pessimist, somewhere in that grey middle area of dreaming about a best case scenario while arming himself for the worst. Maybe when Katherine was alive he could allow himself the luxury of optimism, of believing that all things work together for good. Hendricks now calls his boss a ‘realist,’ but in this moment of facing his own mortality, Sadusky doesn’t think this is quite true.

He lets go of his white knuckled clutch of the knife in his pocket and understands that what he is belongs in another category altogether—

He is a sentinel. The last alone in a lighthouse to witness the worst of what’s coming and warn the innocent before it can reach them, even if it costs him his life. And he’s proud of that role, he is, but even lighthouse keepers need to rejoin what they protect.

Sadusky hasn’t set foot on dry land in a long time.

His lips shake too.

There’s a rustle inside the house, the snap of an automatic, and Sadusky doesn’t wait for a second invitation. The moment the world stops spinning, he takes off into the sable forest and doesn’t look back.

Chapter Text

Snowflakes melt on his tongue, soft and icy. They stay for longer than they should, refusing to melt until they’ve danced around the peaked scales of his mouth and lingered there with balletic poise that takes the sting out of their presence.

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“So what you’re saying is you have no plan.”

“That’s not what I—”

“You brought us this far!”

“Yes, to track Peter. Not to run in there, saloon style, and get yourself killed!”

The snowflakes smart, burning burning burning—

Riley jolts awake from the half-dream at this last, hissed yell, blinking into the sudden pitch black that wasn’t this heavy when he closed his eyes. There are no streetlamps, not so far into the potholed brush of rural Maryland, and though an ambulance trundles along half a mile behind them, Spellman explicitly asked them to keep the lights off in case they require a stealth approach. Hunters don’t dare venture this deeply into the woods, let alone cars, and tall shrubs surround them on all sides of the muddy road. Foliage blocks the first blue hints of sunrise. It is only then that Riley realizes the icy burning sensation is caused by his own teeth, clenched hard enough to smart the bones high up in his face, even in sleep.

Ben’s hand landed on his shoulder the instant he flinched awake and it stays while Riley regains his equilibrium. Rubbing his face with his sleeve, he also notices what feels different.

“Why aren’t we moving?” he asks, low, even though they’re in the SUV and there’s no one else around. “Is everything okay?”

Ben has rolled the window down so Hendricks can lean his arms on the lip of it, barely lit by the orange glow of the SUV console. Everyone’s headlights are turned off, even the inside door runners and ambulance cabin overhead. The sudden quiet and hushed voices outside the car make Riley’s hair stand on end.

The agent sighs, a gray pillar in the air. “It’s all under control.”

Riley frowns, not quite buying this when Ben tenses next to him. He listens to a distant gurgling sound, audible with the lack of wind, and wonders what it is. An animal? A natural spring?

“I don’t know how you slept through that last hour of the drive, though.” Hendricks tries on a tired, wonky smile that doesn’t quite make it to his eyes. “It felt like being on the moon.”

Riley just glances to the side. “Ben?”

“They know where the tracker leads, Riles. Where we are.” Ben sounds even more tired, somehow. He runs a hand down his eyes.

Riley checks the laptop screen but the red dot stopped moving long ago and it hasn’t changed. His heart leaps—they’re almost on top of it!

Hendricks nods. “My guys checked it out once before and it’s only now, getting close, that I recognize the coordinates: we’re behind Herald Reeds’ hunting cabin. It wasn’t passed on to his son, as far as I know. Seems he’s full of surprises.”

“Hunting cabin?” Riley’s voice comes out smaller than he likes. A hunting cabin sounds…of a suitable creepy locale factor for the horror movie scenes he can’t stop imagining Sadusky in—only this is real, and there’s no guarantee any of them are going home alive, let alone Peter. He clears his throat and tries again. “So…we made it? We found him?”

Another trade of eye contact between Ben and Hendricks. Ben’s flash. “I don’t like the plan.”

“That’s too bad,” Hendricks says, without missing a beat. He waves at Spellman who scouts up ahead with her sidearm drawn. She disappears into the trees. “Come on, Gates. Don’t make me order you.”

“I’d like to see you try.”

Hendricks snorts, almost amused if he wasn’t so frustrated. “Why did I expect anything different from a Gates?”

“I could let you talk to my wife again.”

“Oh no.” Hendricks holds up both hands. “Once on the drive here was enough. She’s furious at being left out of the manhunt, you know.”

Ben glares at him. “And I’m starting to understand the feeling.”

“Gates, Ben—”

“You’re not my boss, so you don’t have any authority to tell me what to do.”

“I’m a federal agent, and I will lock you in this vehicle if I have to.”

A benthic curl of unease twirls in matching pirouettes through Riley’s stomach at the harsh tones. He reaches for Ben’s hand, a bear claw around the stick. He’ll never get used to seeing this righteous, agitated side of him, so ready to toss himself into the fray for those he cares about. Whether it’s hanging out of the side of a moving van or sneaking into the president’s birthday, there are few places he won’t go if the stakes count.

Including towards a serial killer.

“Ben?” is all he says again.

Ben deflates, a deliberate motion intended for Riley’s benefit, he knows, and one that is executed with absolutely no grace. Using careful, jerked motions, he lets go of the stick. Even in this meager lighting, Riley can see five individual lines of sweat from his fingers.

“It’s what Peter would want.” Hendricks puts a hand on his own sidearm, when Spellman trots back into sight. “He’d put your safety first and you know it.”

The burning is in Ben’s eyes now, though he looks distraught more than angry.

Hendricks sees his advantage and runs the bases home. “We’re tactical trained, Ben. With you there, any rescue attempt might go worse. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

Before he can confirm—or more likely shoot down—Hendricks’ question, Spellman pushes into the huddle. She’s bent a little lower than she normally would be, whites of her eyes stark in the gloom, and this ready posture flips a switch in the other agents too. Those standing guard around the SUV respond to her nod, forming up for a raid. There’s the offensive screech of Velcro being pulled apart and strapped, courtesy of bullet proof vests unloaded from the cars.

“He’s gone,” is Spellman’s first report, catching them all from left field.

Hendricks slaps their car. “What do you mean? Do we have the wrong location?”

“I mean that we searched the cabin from top to bottom.” Her eyes flick briefly to Ben and Riley before speaking her next words. “Paul, there are ropes and blood in the basement…along with a bullet casing.”

A frazil wave drains down Riley’s face, a burst of dread and fear so intense that for one never ending moment he can’t feel his extremities. His grip on Ben’s hand clamps tight. “No. No! We can’t be too late. I…I put a tracker on the…” He swallows. “On the cupcakes.”

Ben reacts to the lightheaded sound of Riley’s voice, tugging gently on Riley’s hand until he’s pulled closer and Ben can feel his forehead. The action turns comforting after a moment, those same sweaty fingers carded through his hair.

Spellman’s eyes fill with an old sorrow upon watching this, alert as she is. “Nobody’s looking for a body, Mr. Poole, not yet. But neither Reeds nor Peter are in the cabin. I’d say judging by some disturbance of the leaves around the side of the basement, at least one of them left on foot.”

“He got out?” Ben leans back in their direction, looking optimistic for the first time all night. “Did Peter escape?”

“I can’t know for sure without forensics…” Spellman wags her head back and forth, looking unsure, before the combined strength of two Gates staring with raw hope causes her to cave. “But probably, yes.”

Riley closes his eyes for a moment, forcibly remembering how to breathe.

Hendricks circles his index finger over his head. “We need to start a grid search. They can’t have gotten far.”

“How about a compromise?” Ah, and this is Ben’s grasping at straws voice. The restart up of the argument laces a scowl across Hendricks’ face. “Keep us in the loop without having us underfoot.”

Though the agent opens his mouth as if to lambast Ben some more…he eventually just shakes his head. “You’re persistent, Gates, I’ll give you that. What did you have in mind?”

“A radio, or some way to stay connected to your live feed.” Ben points to his ear. The ten or so agents who rode in the government vehicles behind them are all sliding in plastic coiled ‘earwigs,’ though Riley knows it kills Ben to be benched even with this concession. “Please.”

It’s the please that does Hendricks in, that much is obvious in the way he hangs his head and gestures at Spellman back to Ben as if to say, ‘can you believe this?’ and grudgingly brings over a two-way short bandwidth radio from the lead government car. A miniscule, very stingy grin replaces the scowl on his face.

“You know.” Hendricks pauses in handing over the radio. “My world was a much simpler place before you shot your way into it.”

“Technically Ian shot his way into it,” Riley protests, because he can and he’s incapable of letting someone else have the last word. “Totally not our fault. You’re the one who didn’t believe us.”

Whatever sniping retort Hendricks has prepared shall forever remain a mystery—

The sound of two bullets rapid firing pierces the stillness. Barely twenty feet away.

And forget icy: Riley’s whole body erupts in white fire. He jumps with such force that it locks the seat belt around his chest and throat.

The mechanism thinks I’m in an accident, is his first coherent thought, even watching all the agents duck for cover and Ben’s hand push down on his back to get them away from the windows. This isn’t unusual to Riley—the seat belt has to be correct. Because he is in an accident, and he’s still tumbling around in this metaphorical car while it crashes.

Agents yabber at each other, all thought of stealth gone, bulky kits and emergency equipment under their arms, hands twitchy on their guns in a way that makes Riley queasy. Him and guns have never done well together, no matter who’s holding them.

“Riley?” Ben’s voice lacks any note, all breath. “Are you okay?”

Peter’s going to die. This is Riley’s next thought, but it isn’t coherent at all. Nor does it vacate his brain from one moment to the next but screams there in supernova waves that eat at his sense of calm, whatever shreds he has left. Peter Sadusky is about to die.

As if to taunt him, three more bullets bark into the chaos.

Riley releases his seat belt and unlatches the car door in the exact same instant, so fast that the seat belt whiplashes against his throat in an angry swipe while it zips back into the casing. It hurts to swallow now, on top of the nausea and slick palms and quiver in his knees.

“Riley!”

Ben fumbles to undo his own seat belt but Riley hardly notices. He’s already gone, bounding into the wall of a dark morning and scaling it with unsteady legs that are driven by a desperate heart.

“Riley!”

THUD THUD THUD THUD THUD.

There is something primal about the incessant running, about how it is impossible to tell what are his half mad footfalls and which drum beats are his heart. They blend together into a polyrhythmic tympani section, mad with adrenaline and octane driving each step. He’s become a hunter of old, sprinting to survive, pursued by a demented beast of blood and teeth.

The world comes down to black and grays. With the sun not fully risen, there is no way to perceive true depth or distances anyway. Adrenaline sucks away any keen reasoning, nuance replaced by alarm.

Branches slash at Sadusky’s face but still he runs. Only when a tree trunk rebounds off his shoulder does he take a moment to slow down, to assess what tactic might serve best. Leaning against a tree trunk, he rasps and puts a hand over his mouth to muffle it.

He curses the rain, the steam of his own breath in chilled autumn air and how it gives away his position, joints not so young anymore. He’s a trim man for his season of life, but even just ten minutes of nonstop sprinting is enough to make his lungs scream. The age difference between him and his abductor settles in, how a head start is his only option if it comes down to a chase.

Then a savage, enraged screech rents the air—Cole discovering the empty basement.

Sadusky bolts again.

The terrain dips and he slides on a carpet of leaves, just two steps and then he’s back. It’s enough for the world to grow dizzy again, his head wound hot even in near thirty-two degree air.

WHAP WHAP WHAP WHAP WHAP.

The heat stings down Sadusky’s back, at this counterpoint of Cole’s feet through the leaves. Peter has left the cabin and its property behind, deep into the trees now, but it doesn’t matter. Hiding isn’t an option when Cole knows the woods better than he does. No, outrunning is his only chance, however dismal.

Sadusky knows, before the first bullet hits a tree beside him, then another one, that he won’t make it. The truth of it is a certainty, impaling him further.

He can do the math too, and this puzzle he doesn’t need Ben to solve for him. Maybe if things had been different and he’d had the foresight to write his girls a letter or send a video message to the Gates family, he could die with a clear mind. Maybe if he’d made his peace, since he knew there was only one way this could ever end…

Maybe then Sadusky would make his last stand with pride. There are no odds where he makes it out alive, but he owes it to his people to try.

So he keeps running, tuning out the world. Even when the low whir of many voices starts in the distance, even as bullets keep barely missing him and Cole replaces the clip yet again, gaining ground, ever closer. Even when blood runs into Peter’s eyes.

Even when a third pair of feet join this insane tattoo.

With darkness lifting by steady increments, Sadusky can just make out the presence of someone else running through the leaves, being hollered at. It’s impossible to see detail, since they’re at least thirty feet apart, separated by trees and bullets ricocheting inches from Sadusky’s face. He wonders at first if he’s hallucinating this mysterious person until Cole shoots at them too.

A rushing sound seems just distant enough that Sadusky almost runs right off the edge of a ravine—

Straight into the water fifteen feet below.

He gasps and skids to a stop, realizing at once that this is why whatever cavalry has arrived can’t get to him. Cole’s property must border this narrow river, swollen with rain. He stares at where flooding has eroded the sides of the tributary…almost exactly thirty feet across. It explains how someone is running so parallel to his steps.

They’re trying to find a way around it.

And the sliver of faith Peter held to his chest floats away. There’s no way to swim through it, not with the raging current and dirty, foaming rapids.

Sadusky closes his eyes, trying to find some peace, some closure, before it’s over. Only then does he notice the sudden loss of footsteps and the eerie calm. And for a moment…all is still.

“Over here! I found him!”

His eyes whip open to see a figure on the other side of the river.

So does Cole. He stops beside Sadusky, spooked by the presence of another person, and raises the Beretta. It’s the most lurid, nightmarish thing Sadusky has ever seen—a gun aimed at that young, shocked face, wide blue eyes and ashen cheeks. There is no contest, no past case or crime scene that can possibly compete with its abhorrence. Peter reacts without thought, blinded by a lethal kind of frenzy and a promise he made within himself long ago. Whipping out the knife, his hand swings at Cole’s right wrist before the shot can discharge, body slanting into the line of fire.

“PETER!”

The pain comes before the crack of sound does, a meteorite of smelted flames across Sadusky’s ribs. Blood spurts onto both of them, though he cannot tell what belongs to whom. The warm crimson steams where it lands, mingled blood bubbles quenching dry, frosted earth.

He cries out in harmony with the bullet and loses his balance, lost in a tailspin from the blast’s close range. Sadusky feels himself falling but doesn’t see the water coming, staring up at the sapphire flutter of a brand new morning.

Hitting the river, however, is like slamming into cement—it jars up through Peter’s skull and into the enamel of his teeth with the quivering force of cracked bones. He’s positive he just shattered everything inside his body until his head gets sucked under and the breathless cold vacuums air from his lungs. Cold isn’t even a real term right now. This is glacial, so absent of heat that Sadusky loses feeling in almost all of his limbs by the time he claws his way back to the surface. The river is much deeper than he thought, double his height.

It sweeps him away at once, far from where he fell in. The spray of his own blood on rock is already six feet upstream and Sadusky bobs, the cruel hand of an undertow wrapped around his feet, before spotting something on the opposite shoreline.

This dishwasher swirl of water and foam, the world in a tumble, means it takes a few trips to the surface for him to recognize what it is. Who it is.

But he’d know those long legs anywhere. That face, now frantic and yelling a word he can’t hear.

A large rock rushes up to Sadusky’s face, but instead of veering around it he stretches out both arms as best he can with the jet-force current. WHAM! He hits it dead on, and his ribs screech upon being slammed against the boulder. Even with his torso buffeting the rock, he doesn’t get plastered to one side but whisked away to the other. His fingers fight to hold on, to not be dragged away by the dogged drain of water and debris.

With his head over the water for longer than two seconds, Sadusky splutters and finally gets his bearings. There, loping down the ravine slope, about to dive in—

Peter’s heart squeezes painfully and he screams. “Ben, no!”

Ben only balks for a moment, eyes haunted where they rest on the rushing water. He paces along the edge, a caged animal lost in his own memories, before looking at Sadusky. Then, suddenly, his eyes harden.

And he leaps into the river.

“Ben!”

Sadusky wants to shout and weep and swear at him for such a stunt but his fingers slip around the rock. He can’t even feel his own grip, the cold winching every shallow breath from his chest and every quadruple beat of his heart. Ben hasn’t resurfaced and Sadusky gives one last cry before completely letting go.

Weightless, the river sucks Peter back under. There’s no time to look, to see rays of sunlight pierce the boiling cauldron of a world he once knew. He sinks like an anchor.

Peter breathes out the last of his air and closes his eyes.

Adrenaline has hit the fast forward button for the last thirty minutes, accelerating this stygian dream to the point where sensations barely have time to register. Compact wavelengths of experiences he doesn’t have time to process.

But when a hand closes around Peter’s, thumb linked through his, fingers cocooned around his knuckles…everything slows.

Time suspends.

It is—quite literally—one of the greatest watershed moments of Peter Sadusky’s life:

The abrupt warmth of the skin, calloused and grooved as it is, is a beacon of light refracted straight into his soul. It should be impossible, even in normal circumstances, but with time nearly at a standstill, Peter can feel individual fingerprint whorls where the thumb touches the back of his hand. Heartbeats murmur together in the sanctuary hush where their palms meet.

Peter will remember the feel of that hand until the day he dies, how its clasp injects him with life, the umbilical cord of possibility towing him up to the surface, veins whispering underneath his fingertips. The meeting of their hands lasts only a few seconds but they are hours to Peter. Their grip fuses, one single limb of desperation and hope.

Then the hand wrenches.

Peter’s shoulder smarts instantly from the force of Ben yanking him upwards. It is almost enough to pop the joint out of alignment, but at the last second Peter finds the strength to kick, to assist, and their hyper-extended arms slacken.

Breaking into open air, fire ignites in his lungs. Ben keeps a hold of his hand but twists so the arm is wrapped around Sadusky’s chest and he can tread water backwards, their joined hands over his heart.

With his other, Sadusky finally sees that Ben is holding an orange life preserver ring tied to a rope. A team on shore holds the line, working hand-over-hand to fish them back to solid ground. They have to fight the current, but with twelve or so first responders and agents hauling on the rope, the river loses this round.

Ben shivers violently once the pair collapses on shore. He still hasn’t let go of Peter’s hand, though EMTs are doing their best to separate the interlocked palms.

His eyes bleed with pain and love. “Peter.”

Peter can’t quite say thank you just now, a ragged cough blazing through his lungs and warm blood all over his body, but he strokes Ben’s hair with his free hand. He hopes his eyes say that and more, the way Riley’s do sometimes.

Ben.

Ben nods. He sees and he nods, while Sadusky finally does weep. The tears feel blisteringly hot against his numb skin.

“Don’t you ever say goodbye to me again,” Ben says, wilder than a hornet, between coughs. He’s an untamed creature of virtue and emotion. “Don’t you ever say goodbye like that to me again.”

Peter has a feeling, with the death grip currently welded to his hand, that he won’t have to.

Chapter Text

Both men spend the next half hour hacking up what feels like the entire tributary, with Sadusky propped on one elbow and spewing all over a cop’s shoes, whoever was unfortunate enough to be standing there. It turns out to be Spellman and she rambles about how thankful they are that Peter’s alive while crouched down to give him a tight hug. How they caught Cole Reeds on vest cam trying to kill Sadusky and Riley, and cops are pursuing him into the woods now after he fled the scene, and—

Ben and Peter’s precious, silent moment from underwater has been banished by the sheer onslaught of voices and noise: sirens, shouted orders, alarmed bpm readings, the crinkle of silver insulation blankets, EMTs shining penlights in their eyes and carrying them up to the ambulances, bullhorns, even Riley’s jumpy chattering…

This detail is the one that finally gets through the shock bubble.

Peter looks up from where he has been sat on the back lip of the ambulance so they can assess him before moving. “R…Ri…Riley? Y…a’right?”

With his frigid lips and black, splotchy vision, it takes a moment to say the name. Riley doesn’t even hear the breath-thin query, too busy clucking over Ben beside him—also being assessed within an inch of his life—and rubbing his back while he coughs. Both Gates’ eyes are bloodshot, pale with lack of sleep and the sapping cold air. Riley is trembling with such force that Sadusky can barely make out his hands. He wants desperately to touch Riley, to reassure himself that Cole’s bullet didn’t, in fact, strike the young man, but his body is unresponsive to such a fine motor skill command.

Paramedics make quick work of scissoring away Ben and Peter’s clothes, though they’re permitted dignity with the massive Mylar blankets. They also shove hot pack after hot pack against their torsos and limbs, quickly drying them off so they can redress both men in thick, fleecy sweat pants and long thermal shirts. Peter feels like a race car at Daytona in the pit, stripped and redressed in record time.

“Mr. Poole.” Hendricks sounds tired but not surprised. “You’ve worked your magic and nearly given me a heart attack in the process. Now can we do our job?”

Riley sticks his tongue to the side while scrubbing a towel over Ben’s hair. “No can do, Junior Agent Man. Go catch your psychopath. We’ve got it covered.”

Hendricks is about to object, but Spellman just shakes her head and smiles. She glances at Peter. “You okay here for a minute, boss? We can take your statement at the hospital.”

Buffeted by this new, human stream, Sadusky just nods. His teeth aren’t chattering yet like Ben’s, but an electrical current of pure agony ripples through his fingers and toes. Even the tips of his ears.

“Here.” Riley holds out a thermos. “Brought some hot chocolate from the office, just how you like it.”

One of the paramedics kneels down and catches Riley by the arm before he can tip the thermos to Peter’s lips. “Ah-ah! We have to warm him up gradually to avoid hypothermic shock. Maybe later.”

“Besides, he might need surgery. No fluids.” Ben’s voice is exhausted but his eyes so relieved that Sadusky worries seriously for a moment if he might pass out from it.

A male EMT takes his blood pressure for a second time, then listens to his lungs with a stethoscope. Another one assists Riley in wrestling socks on their feet.

The paramedic assigned to Sadusky finishes packing the wound in his side. “Actually, he’s fortunate. Just a very, very deep graze. The bullet changed trajectory because of your quick thinking with the knife, and so it didn’t actually perforate anything. More like it sliced a trough through your rib tissue and muscles. I don’t see any bone peeping out, so probably no surgery.”

Ben eyes the wound. “I can’t believe you took a bullet for us.”

“I c-can’t believe you jumped into a raging current,” Sadusky fires back.

Their glares lack the usual power, trailing off when Peter has to cough for the nth time. The craggy sound burns his chest.

“Are you moving him?” Ben asks.

“We’ll move you both in a few minutes,” the woman clarifies. “But I’d rather your core temperatures be up a few more degrees before the long drive back. It’s rough terrain and not uncommon for patients to decline over the bouncy road if they’re not stable first. Your head wound is what’s giving us the biggest headache, no pun intended.”

Once she says it, Sadusky tunes into the fact that a fourth paramedic has been steadily stitching up the concussive wound along his temple. He doesn’t feel any pain thanks to a local anaesthetic, just a dull, pointed pressure. Having so many people working on him at once makes him dizzy, so he closes his eyes for a moment, just remembering how to breathe, to appreciate that his finger can now tell the difference between glacial and normal cold.

When they’re done, Riley takes a black wool toque and finagles it over Peter’s head, cautious not to touch the fresh stitches and gauze. Finally, finally Peter starts to shiver. It seems to distress Riley, who rubs the man’s hands briskly between his own.

“Are you o…kay?” he repeats his question. His hand fists in the young man’s jacket to scan for injury.

“Oh.” A rictus spasms across Riley’s cheeks like a relay race until his expression smooths. “I’m fine, Peter. You saved our lives—thank you.”

Peter winces at a sudden burst of sensation in his extremities. “How d-did you even find me in time?”

“Can’t divulge all my secrets. Let’s just say we’re good at finding lost treasure.”

The heat climbs up to Sadusky’s ears, into the pit of his stomach, and out to his ice cube fingertips. These words are persistent too, but they feel like a strong brandy after a long day, brazen on the way down and warming his heart.

Ben huffs out something in the ballpark of a laugh. It tapers off into a cough. “He means that he put a tracking device under—”

Riley flicks Ben’s face with one of the wet towels. Then he turns back to Sadusky. “You never ate any of those cupcakes in the car, did you?”

Peter blinks. “N-no. Just looking at them was hard enough.”

Riley and Ben trade an oft-repeated look. The familiarity of it, seen many times over the years, thaws Sadusky more than the heat packs. That look is solid ground in the undertow of life and Sadusky has based much of his professional and personal life around it.

“Peter.” Riley ducks in close, strangely close, to Sadusky’s space. They’re both shivering, for vastly different reasons. “I didn’t hear everything you two said that night but it was enough. Once I realized you were going off grid, I…I put a tracking bug on the underside of the Tupperware lid.”

Peter can’t help but grin, wheezing out a sound of release and humour and undiluted affection. He reaches for the back of Riley’s neck and squeezes it best he can with such clumsy digits, pleased he doesn’t have to go very far. “I w-would expect nothing less from the great Riley Poole. Of c-course you did.”

“You scared me,” Riley whispers, lips unsteady for a moment. He’s close enough now to press his forehead into Sadusky’s good shoulder. It’s the weight of the world, because they are his world. “We can’t lose you.”

And even if Sadusky were in perfect health, injury free and full of the right amount of blood, he knows he would still be in danger of passing out, struggling to breathe. These words are the simplest of all, out of the mouth of babes, and yet they shoot him straight through the lungs.

Ben doesn’t interrupt the moment, just chimes in with pat to Riley’s left shoulder. “We’d never have made it in time, or even known s-something was wrong, without you. I’m proud of you, Riles.”

Riley sniffs, pulling his head up a little. “Does this mean I get an honourary tally?”

“After that stunt you pulled? In your dreams.”

Riley’s eyes glitter under the bright dawn light. A beautiful, cloudless day after the storm.

Then he winks and rubs Peter’s ankle, even though he can’t quite feel that yet. “You’re an idiot too. But you’re our idiot, so we can’t let you go running off with half baked ideas of self-sacrifice.”

Ben glances at the paramedics. “Can we get a minute?”

“Hmm.” The team lead assesses them both, their incessant shivering, while sliding an IV into Sadusky’s shaking wrist. She tries very hard not to frown. “Fine. But we’re shipping out in a few minutes. Holler if your pain levels spike.”

The crowd steps away, back to the river and a hoard of federal and local law enforcement. Riley does too, but not before Ben snags the corner of his coat for a hug. Squatting down, Riley lets himself be engulfed in the gangly arms and reciprocates by burying his nose in Ben’s shoulder too.

“Glad you’re okay,” he says, muffled.

Ben pecks his temple in a lightning fast move. “No more running off on your own, got it?”

Riley huffs, but it’s wet sounding.

Ben’s twitching arms cinch around the bony shoulders even further. “We’re alright, Riley, the water didn’t win this round. Neither did the gun.”

The words prompt something new and festering inside of Sadusky. He waits until more sentiments are exchanged, too low to catch, and Riley is out of earshot before looking at Ben. The man’s body is warm against his right shoulder, huddled close together as they are. Tepid saline flushes through his veins and steadies the shakes. Fresh, warmed oxygen filters through the cannula in his nose.

“Thank you, Ben, really. You didn’t have to do that, but I’m…I’m glad you did.”

Ben stares out over the water for a minute. Two minutes. Three minutes. And then—as per usual—he does the last thing Sadusky ever expects:

He laughs. And laughs. And laughs, small at first and growing into an upsurge before it dies. Staccato notes of mirth and incredulity. Peter waits him out, wondering if this is a typical hysteria response for hypothermia patients. Maybe he’s still in the basement and fantasizing this entire rescue scenario, not that his mind could ever possibly predict or imagine the Gates family with any accuracy.

For all that, Ben’s eyes sag with gravity when he turns back to Sadusky. “You really don’t get it, do you?”

If Sadusky were a volcano, he knows he’d start to rumble, to froth and fury and steam with ash. He’s stuffed it down for so long that there’s no cap stone capable of holding it back, not now. Not after that otherworldly hand saving his life and pumping against his skin. He already knows he’ll dream about it for weeks.

So there’s only one option left. The only thing that will get him to free said steam instead of erupting—

“Why…” Peter loses his breath halfway through the word and the intensity of it flushes him with renewed heat. He thinks about that moment in the basement, seeing himself reflected in Ben, in Reeds, and understanding the apex of a very large iceberg. “Why, Ben?”

The question doesn’t make any sense whatsoever in the context of this broken conversation, but Ben’s gaze lands on Peter without blinking. His eyes are knowing, cracked open with a molten affection of his own that burns at the cage protecting Peter’s heart. ‘Why’ can never encapsulate all of Peter’s confusion about just when and how he became so vital to them, from the small things like bundt molds to big, baby-holding milestones.

“I told you already.” Ben leans in, just a little, so that Peter is forced to reciprocate and lean too or fall over from the increased pressure on his shoulder. “Didn’t it ever occur to you that we love you back? That your care for us is not a one way street?”

“I’m your protector, not the other way around. You didn’t…didn’t ask for me to be in your lives.” Just saying it out loud, after thinking it for so long, makes Sadusky want to lay down and never get up again. “Nor have I done anything prior to eighteen months ago that would ingratiate myself to you, would earn this kind of loyalty.”

The way Ben’s body goes lax, a gesture borne of tender frustration, is almost too sincere to witness. He looks away. “You were there when we needed you most, and somewhere between you listening to me instead of arresting me and helping clear my family name, well…”

Peter thinks of the love he has for his child and grandchild, how this isn’t quite the same kind of bond at all. He protects them too, of course, but he isn’t startled to have their love in return. Because he belongs to Penelope just as much as she belongs to him, in his heart.

But the Gates family…

Ben reads his mind again. “Guilt is a powerful taskmaster, isn’t it?”

Peter digs the heels of his hand into his eyes, hiding behind them for a few heartbeats. He can’t feel any physical pain right now other than the burning fingertips, not with all the local anaesthetic in his system, but this is far worse.

“We cared about you long before the break in, Peter.” Ben’s voice wobbles.

Though Peter doesn’t ask why again, it practically banshee shrieks from his thoughts and Ben must feel this because he shifts away a bit. Giving his friend space, granting solace to collect the smashed pieces of composure.

When Peter’s hands come down, Ben is again looking out over the water, dense forest, this small tribe of rescue and law enforcement crews, the whole world. Morning sun, lighting up the blue, shines golden off flecks of green in Ben’s eyes and his tawny hair. He looks a bit like a monument or artifact himself.

Sadusky has heard Ben talk before, an orator of history’s charm, academic mind married to childlike enthusiasm. But this time the words are different from Ben’s mouth. This time…this time he is hushed and shaking too:

“When I first met Riley, he was too skinny and his eyes were too big. Terrified of the world.”

Peter’s breath hitches. Hairs stand up on his neck, every last one, and he swivels to stare at Ben. A faint smile colours Ben’s face but he doesn’t look away from the sunrise.

“He was a grad student at MIT.” Ben shakes his head. “I offered him a job, helping me track a ship.”

“I’m guessing he turned you down,” Peter murmurs, trying not to disturb this monumental moment. He’s asked and asked but never did he think Ben would volunteer this information without prompting.

It’s not the best moment to even discuss it, void of privacy as they are, both shivering and worn, soon to be hauled off on a gurney through the forest, but somehow Sadusky knows if Ben doesn’t get this out now, he never will. He looks different when he talks about Riley. It’s the same look he adopts when showing off Ellie. Something unique to the two of them that Sadusky sees on his own face when flipping through old photos of himself holding Penelope. The heatwave of it across Ben’s body language is stunning.

Ben laughs again. “He did. But you know what? He believed I’d find it. He was the very first person to buy my story about the treasure, but he couldn’t take the job because he had to, and I say this verbatim, ‘stay under the radar.’”

“Something about a goat?”

Ben turns to Sadusky in surprise. “Yeah, actually. How did you know?”

“I thought he was messing with me.” Peter works hard not to gape. “He was telling the truth about that?”

“Sure was. It goes down as one of the strangest days of my life, and that’s saying something…”

Seven Years Earlier

Ben is not so old as everyone would like to pretend, especially with all the jokes about how he’s a piece of history himself at this point, but walking through halls swarming with twenty-something year olds makes him feel keenly how long it’s been since he was in university. He sidesteps a couple making out by the cafeteria and hurries to a door at the end of the stairwell. His bogus visitor’s pass will only work for so long. It’s not the first time he’s made a fake ID and he’s sure it won’t be the last.

This whole scheme is a million mile longshot, but hey. His entire life’s mission is built on longshots. Ben figures adding one more to the stack can’t hurt.

That being said, he knows it’s only a matter of time before someone wonders why he’s in a restricted area. Even research students have swipe cards that only last a few days before the codes change.

The door opens into a quieter wing, all wires and gleaming floors and the drone of large machines doing byzantine calculations. Ben mentally checks the directory while passing student labs. One room houses a smorgasbord of robotic equipment and what looks like an LED dog, barking at grad students. Another is rife with stacked hard drives. Its neighbouring rooms have tables with biomechanical arms on them and old medical equipment.

But the fifth one, tucked away at the end of the hall, is completely dark.

Well, not completely. The dim lighting, however, is just as much of a dead giveaway as the cluttered workstation. A tag on the door reads cyber security, confirming that he’s in the right place.

Ben taps on the open door. “Uh…hello? Anybody home?”

There doesn’t appear to be, the room’s only chair empty, computer screen set to a complicated line of black and green code he can’t even hope to begin to read. While there are no windows in the tight space, it still manages to be full of life: A Space Jam figurine is topped with little take out bags folded into origami hat shapes. Small doodles cover the only whiteboard, something about a T-rex trying not to break a frisbee in his mouth. The floor is also littered with what looks to be trace amounts of alfalfa hay, though Ben can’t make heads or tails of what such a thing would be used for.

Ben notices he’s smiling, probably at the sheer warmth and muddled humanity of the room’s interior. It’s a stark contrast to the other emotionless, sanitary lab spaces. He hopes its occupant doesn’t lose this childishness when he or she finishes school.

The sound of urgent feet running down the hall in his direction catches Ben’s attention. He cranes around the door frame. The footsteps precede a short, dishevelled figure holding a large cardboard box who jogs into view. He’s faintly sweating, coat coming off on one shoulder, brunette hair sticking up in a dizzying array. He keeps checking back over his shoulder and muttering epithets at a ‘cocky Enzo.’

“Excuse me.” Ben waves his hand to focus the kid’s eyes. No luck. “Do you know where I could find a Riley Poole? The school website says he studies here. Or maybe Riley is a she—there wasn’t a photo attached.”

“No time,” the student pants. He juggles the box without even glancing at Ben. “I have maybe ten minutes of freedom before the administration gets here.”

Ben squints at him. “Need a hand?”

As he reaches for the box, the student finally takes one good look at him and jumps back a step. “No!”

Ben pauses at the alarm in his tone, at wary eyes flicking over his hands and feet. He holds his forearms up in a surrendered pose. “O-kay…”

The kid is still doing his jittery dance by the door and Ben realizes, abruptly, that he’s waiting for Ben to move farther away—more than an arm’s length—before stepping through it. His eyes are huge and the mismatched, oversized clothes hang off him at unnatural angles. Ben can see the outline of his ribs where the T-shirt slips down below his clavicle. Like sickly xylophone rungs, insidious and shaded. He looks…he looks almost like he’s scared of how tall Ben looms by the doorway. As if Ben might eat him. It’s something he’s never experienced before, that fear on a younger, smaller person.

Throat tightening, Ben carefully steps out of range. The kid blows out a messy breath, all relief. He hustles for the desk.

“This Poole guy,” Ben tries again while following him inside. The kid watches him do so with sharp eyes but doesn’t comment. “I hear he’s good with firewalls and such.”

“Yeah?” The student rifles through a tundra of paper on the desk, mixed in with the copious baked goods. It’s a tough endeavour with the box resting on his forearms. “So? Why are you hanging around here?”

“So…I have a job for him or her. I need help getting access to some sonar research archives. Word is there’s no one better at this stuff.”

The kid sits down, box across his lap. When he can’t find what he’s looking for he mutters what sounds like a Klingon curse under his breath, typing madly into the computer. “Now’s not a great time. It’s all Enzo’s fault.”

“Job pays well.”

The kid’s eyes dart to Ben’s threadbare clothes. “Uh-huh. Nice try.”

“Will you at least pass along the message to your lab partner? I need to find a ship no one believes exists.”

And instantly, all frantic motion stops. The kid’s typing fingers freeze, top lip slipping out from between his teeth. “Like…a ghost ship?”

Ben holds his breath while deliberating. This is the part where he usually loses people. “Not exactly. You ever hear of the Templar Treasure?”

The kid shakes his head. Ben gives him a sketched out explanation of it, skipping the bloody history and getting laughed out of academia part. He starts to talk with his hands, waving them around, but stops when he notices the kid losing what little colour remains in his cheeks—Ben is also careful to keep out of arm’s reach, closer to the door. The longer he explains, however, the more the kid relaxes, his eyes shiny with intrigue at the prospect of it.

“Makes sense.” The student bobs his head. “Legends are always built on a grain of truth, however far fetched. And that’s a pretty cool one, epic really. I hope you find it.”

There’s a ringing in Ben’s ears and his slack jaw refuses to move. Nobody, not even his own family, has ever taken the seriousness of this story so well. He always ends up with egg on his face, no matter how nice or accommodating people are in the beginning.

The kid leans forward, eyes worried. “Mr. Treasure Dude, sir? You look like you’re about to pass out.”

“Ben.”

“What?”

“My name is Ben.”

“Okay, Benny, park yourself.”

Ben does, on the farthest edge of the desk he can manage, but both men continue to faintly stare at each other, awed for separate reasons.

“Look, I gotta roll,” the kid shifts his box and for a second Ben swears it moves. “But good luck. I can’t wait to read all about the treasure in the papers. I’m sad he can’t help you search for it, but Riley has to…uh…stay under the radar at the moment.”

Ben shakes his head. “I just need his help finding the ship, Charlotte. Poole doesn’t have to help with the rest of it.”

“Oh.” The student sits back down. “Is that all?”

“Um, yes.” Ben tries to get a read on the odd ripple around the kid’s lips. “I know it’s a lot to ask, hacking data readings—”

“Pfft. No, it’s not.” Before he can type anything, the box most certainly does move. “Be quiet, Enzo.”

“Baahh.”

Ben openly gawks this time. “Was that—”

“Baaahhhh.”

“You’re being rude,” the kid berates whatever is in the box. “We have a guest.”

“BAAHHHH!”

“Oh for the love of…” The student sets his box on the floor and removes an honest-to-God goat from inside. Tiny horns and all. Its white furred body is petite, but little hooves beat the air while licking at the student’s face. He seems content now that he’s free. “You’re the worst. I don’t know how Sherry puts up with smuggling you in her dorm room—you happen to be the reason I got on the dean’s radar in the first place, if you care to know.”

Ben points. “That is a goat. In a million dollar lab.”

“You’re quick, Ben.”

Glossing over the deadpan sass, Ben can’t help but laugh while the student wrangles it under the desk. “Why do you have a kid goat?”

“In exchange for my lab partner Sherry keeping her mouth shut about something she caught me doing, I take care of her pet goat for the weekend, obviously.”

“Obviously.”

It’s a quick comment, lost from Ben’s mouth before he can even think about it. His mind not so kindly remind him that this is the reason people find him irritating and maybe he should, you know…not do that. He can practically hear his mother’s voice lecturing him.

But the student whips his head up from where he’s leaned over Enzo on the floor. Something tells Ben that he’s not used to people keeping up with the snark or reciprocating. That he’s not used to much friendly conversation at all.

He opens his mouth to ask Ben something else but just then a chorus of shouts erupts down the hall.

The kid flinches about two feet in the air, banging his head on the underside of the desk. He winces. “That would be my cue to skedaddle.”

Ben stands and looks through a window set in the door. He gasps. There are actual—very angry—cops storming down the grad lab hallway, talking into radios on their shoulders. “When you said administration, I thought you meant the dean or something!”

“Oh, I’m sure he’s coming for me too,” the student rambles, stuffing papers in his pocket and erasing a string of code on screen. He seems scared, even more scared than he was of Ben, despite the dry words coming out of his mouth. “It’s been fun, Benny.”

“Use the goat.”

The words fall from Ben’s lips faster than he can censor them. It seems to be a trend today.

The kid startles and Ben automatically takes another step back. “What? How?”

“As a distraction.” Ben has no idea why he’s helping this poor, broke grad student but something about the hungry shadows of his hollow boned limbs and intelligent, fearful eyes won’t let Ben stay passive. “They’ll be forced to catch Enzo and we can both get away.”

The student looks confused before he spots the ‘visitor pass’ clipped to Ben’s jacket. His face clears. “Ah. I see we’re both wanted fugitives here.”

“Great minds think alike.”

“You made a fake ID just to offer someone a job? That’s a first.”

Ben shrugs. “Some people are worth the risk.”

This, of all things, seems to endear the kid more than anything said so far. The touched, pleased smile melts years off his face, making him seem like the youth he is and more grown up, all at once. It’s of such world’s-away contrast to his fear, Ben’s not sure he’d recognize him otherwise.

The kid holds out his hand. “For what it’s worth and if I make it out of this without going to jail, I’ll consider the job.”

Ben barely has time to shake it. “Wait, you’re—”

But Riley is already in motion, opening the door to shove Enzo out. The shouts turn distressed at the emerging animal. “Sorry, buddy. Run like the wind!”

Enzo does so in a skip of pure delight at his newfound liberty, clippity clopping down the linoleum and head butting straight into the first cop’s legs. He falls to one knee, swearing. The hallway erupts into a circus, a race against the clock to catch the elusive goat before he can chew at super computer wires or poop on the floor.

Riley takes off in the other direction, towards the emergency exit stairwell. Alarms blare and students come flooding out of classrooms and labs, the clog of people assisting both men in their great escape. Ben takes off after him, easily slipping away from the fuming cops.

But when he too pushes open the door…Riley is nowhere to be seen.

Chapter Text

It takes Ben far too long to figure out what’s just happened.

He paces in a little park near the MIT campus, going over the hectic, bizarre encounter a few times while trying to make sense of it. Fire trucks have only just now started to depart, confirming the alarm as a false emergency. Coming here was a risk not just for himself—but for exposing this Riley Poole, supposedly a straight A grad student, and his…extracurricular activities. Hacking is prohibited among students, especially those hoping to advance in the cyber security world.

Had his fake badge gotten Riley arrested? Would Riley forgive him once he put those pieces together too?

Ben stops stalling the inevitable phone call and punches in the local PD’s number. Sure enough, they caught Riley in that goat chase, no matter how much of a fight he put up. After the run around with a few clerks and officers, Ben finally figures out where Riley is being held.

It’s a mad dash drive to the station, the sky dark with the late hour and an approaching storm. Ben barely remembers to park before running inside, his heart thumping soundly in the hollow of his neck. The first drops have already started, and he’s leopard spotted with rain by the time he makes the short jaunt from his car to the lobby.

And there is Riley himself, handcuffed to a chair right there in the chilly waiting room. Head hanging, sewing leg bobbing, and skin pasty. He hasn’t noticed Ben yet, lost in the world of his spinning thoughts.

Ben deflates, his shoulders sagging, before it even occurs to him how fast his heart is racing. He’s heard the stories, about police brutality and withholding food, and he doesn’t know much about Riley, but he knows enough that this would not be his first experience with such treatment. He knows he’d do anything to keep him from living through it again.

Ben catches himself on the desk, appreciating that there are few cops around with the late hour and slippery weather. “I’m here for Riley Poole. What is he being charged with?”

Riley’s sewing leg halts abruptly when he startles and looks up, insipid in a way that makes him seem even smaller. As if Ben is an alien popping in for tea. His mouth works like a fish, akin to their first meeting but not scared so much as utterly stunned this time. To be honest, Ben is stunned too. Then he spots a milky bruise on Riley’s angled chin and reddens with anger, heat crawling up his neck. Riley looks stunned by this too, so Ben gets his reaction under control and offers a wan grin, hoping to show that he’s not here to nail his case in the coffin but instead help him out of it. Though Riley doesn’t reply in kind, he studies Ben with guarded eyes now—Ben is determined to prove his silent disappointment wrong.

The officer on duty narrows her eyes over a coffee cup. “We have no official evidence with which to charge him, see, but the hack on our database goes back to his school-issue laptop every time. I even asked a friend at the DOJ to trace the IP and it’s his.”

Ben swivels to meet Riley’s eyes head on. He knows there are a host of questions any other sane person would ask—not that a sane person would have come here and stuck out their neck for a stranger in the first place—all about police procedure and bail and what it would take to prove Riley’s innocence, how any student could have borrowed that laptop.

But Ben sees another shadow in Riley’s eyes, a dark undertone, and recognizes it at once.

“What did the hacker access?”

“I beg your pardon?” The woman’s cup freezes halfway to her lips.

“What did the hacker do to your systems?” Ben asks again, patient.

The officer stands. “We had security camera footage of a woman breaking into a pawn shop while drunk. That footage got wiped.” She leans around Ben to scowl at Riley. “From his computer.”

Riley shrinks in his seat, shoulders hunched up near his ears.

“But you have no proof that Mr. Poole did it?”

“…No. We don’t. That’s why he’s being detained but not officially charged. The IP trace was also wiped before we could submit it as evidence.”

She’s still glaring at Riley, so Ben clears his throat to get her attention back on him.

“Someone has to sign for his release,” the officer says, holding a clipboard. “A relative or secondary consent. So that if we need to bring him in again, we have someone to call who’d be willing to be responsible for him. Or in case he gets arrested officially and we post bail.”

Some ideas are well thought out, meticulously planned weeks before initiation. And others, like this one, well…

Others form in one atomic twist of the heart.

“I’m his father,” Ben blurts. Out of the corner of his eye, he watches Riley sit ramrod straight. “I’m here to sign for his release.”

The woman blinks, also caught off guard. “You’re his…”

“Father,” Ben says again, and the word has a funny taste in his mouth. He’s just barely old enough for that to even be true but he’s always looked older for his age, assisted in this facade by the professional looking blazer and his height.

The woman glances at a driver’s license Ben slides across the counter. She types it into the database and frowns. “Gates? Not Poole?”

“His mother and I separated before he was born so he took her maiden name. We’ve just reconnected recently.” The fake story comes easier than Ben expects. He turns to Riley again before signing the form. “You okay with this, son?”

It’s a pitiful attempt to ask for permission, a moot point since Ben has already started the con, but Riley seems moved anyway.

He nods and sits forward on the edge of the chair, as far as the cuff’s leash room will allow, though still with that deer-in-a-headlights look that says he’s trying to figure out how this day went so pear shaped. “Yes…Dad.”

Though Ben has only known Riley for a grand total of maybe fifteen minutes, he can hear something in the hesitant tone. Ben almost smiles, suddenly aware that in any other circumstance and if they weren’t lying to save their hides, Riley would tack on a joke at the end of that phrase. The word, three letters and a universe of meaning, flutter around in Ben’s stomach for a while.

The officer is still suspicious, but she accepts Ben’s signature and photocopies the report for him to take home—very long photocopies. He begins to recognize that he might have to commit to this act.

“I don’t know why you had to handcuff him,” Ben blusters, only half faking his frustration. He hasn’t missed the red lines around Riley’s wrists. It implies a struggle, and that heralds with it a whole new brand of fury. “Bringing someone in as a suspect is not the same thing as pressing charges.”

The woman sighs, like she’s given this spiel to angry parents hundreds of times. “It’s procedure, Mr. Gates, especially as he tried to run today. Another man snuck onto campus as well using a fake ID but they never caught him. Can you believe that?”

“Yeah, Dad. Isn’t it crazy?”

Ben throws Riley his best disappointed Patrick Gates face. “Don’t push your luck, son.”

Riley nods again to thank the officer while she removes his handcuffs. “Did you…did you ever find out who was in that footage, the one that got wiped?”

Ben has no idea what Riley is talking about, why he’s pushing the issue when they’re getting off scot free right now, but the kid looks serious. So Ben takes it seriously too.

“Weirdest thing. Right before we could run facial recognition on her and press charges, the footage vanished.” The officer eyes Riley. “Guess we’ll never know.”

“Yeah, I guess we won’t,” says Riley, sotto voce. Then, louder, “Am I free to go?”

Another cop, just coming in from the break room, gives a cry of protest at these words. He’s limping faintly and Ben recognizes him as the one Enzo bull rammed. “Marg, why is this brat out of cuffs? Chief wasn’t done interrogating him.”

He reaches around as if to grab Riley by the elbow but Ben is bigger and faster. He steps in front of Riley with a thunderous look. The officer tries again, to stretch beyond Ben’s shoulder—and something inside of his chest snaps. Ben slaps the offending arm away, quickly, but with a decisive edge that makes the man’s eyes widen. Ben can feel Riley trembling slightly under all the layers and his stomach flutters for a host of other, dangerous reasons.

“We have no evidence to hold him on and you know it, Hodgens,” Marg scolds her colleague. “Maybe he did it and maybe he didn’t. Leave it up to the detectives to figure out. There’s no case without proof anyway.”

The officer studies Ben for a beat longer than he’s comfortable with, particularly in light of Riley’s uneasy breathing at his back. The sooner they get out, the better. The cop’s hand is still outstretched, frozen, and Ben glowers at it.

“Don’t touch my son. You’re lucky I’m not pressing charges of my own.”

Ben hears Riley’s shoes take a shuffling step away and feels an immediate pang of regret for the harsh, if quiet, inflection he chose to use.

“Alright, sir.” The male cop points. “But do you have a card or number so we can reach you in case there are questions?”

“There won’t be,” says Marg. “And he already wrote down his number.”

Ben taps Riley’s hand and leads the way out the door, knowing he can’t initiate contact with him any more than that. He’s lucky enough that Riley hasn’t protested this charade or busted his chops about the fake ID.

Riley, however, surprises him—the minute Ben touches the skin of his wrist, he grips Ben’s arm in return, tighter than Ben expects. Belying his rail-thin frame, the digits feel like rebar, contoured to the shape of Ben’s forearm and rattling with fear. It raises his internal red flag, a choir of klaxons that Ben can’t address here, so he hurries their steps and squeezes the nimble fingers in his other hand. With Riley’s hand sandwiched between Ben’s, it stops quivering.

“Here we go.” Ben half lets go to fish for his keys. “Can I give you a ride back to—?”

They make it out into the damp night, where instead of relaxing or responding, Riley immediately collapses against Ben’s car and slides to the ground.

“Whoa, okay!” Ben braces his arm to create a controlled fall. “Not a great day, I read you loud and clear. We can sit for a while.”

Ben falters for a hot second, wondering if he should get the kid an umbrella or something and then deciding, hell. What’s one more oddity in a day overstuffed with them?

Riley stares at Ben afresh when he plops down beside him, both of them smushed together against the back hubcap and getting rained on. He finally wrangles the shallow breaths under control enough to lean his head back. The feel of fat, cold drops on his cheeks appears to calm him further.

“Did they hit you anywhere else?” Ben asks.

Riley brushes his chin as if he forgot about it. Something haunted flares in his eyes, making them vacant for a beat. “This is just from me being slammed against the car when they caught me. I’m fine.”

Ben doesn’t call him out on the obvious lie, just adjusts the collar of Riley’s worn jacket so it hems in his neck. It’s also a way to also check for any blood or uneven pupil dilation without Riley noticing.

Ben has no idea what he’s just walked into, but the night is quiet and this ratty kid only comes up to his shoulder and it’s freezing and for the first time in years he feels seen, understood. They’re still holding each other’s arms, but Ben doesn’t want to let go and neither does Riley. It’s awkward, with the angle, so Ben switches it so that they’re holding hands instead, fingers linked. In this manor, safely ensconced, Riley’s hand is now soft, cold, and spindly, as if Ben is holding a skeleton key.

Riley swallows a few times like he’s working desperately not to throw up. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“I know.”

“I can’t tell if you did it because you’re a creep who’s going to shank me now, luring me in with this fake treasure quest, or because…”

Ben’s eyes scan the scruffy youth. “I did it because I wanted to—I would have even if you told me not to. Helping you was a privilege and an honour.”

Riley sniffs. “Dude, who are you? King Arthur?”

“Only if that makes you Merlin.”

It surprises a laugh out of Riley, the first one Ben’s ever heard from him, and he adores the sound instantly. He makes a pact to get Riley to do it as often as possible. “Nobody ever sasses me back. It’s like…an unwritten code. Nobody else can keep up.”

“That’s a shame,” says Ben. “I would have liked keeping you on your toes. You’ll have to teach Sherry.”

Riley sobers. “Ben, I don’t think I have a lab partner anymore.”

“Because of the goat?”

Riley laughs again, but this one is short and bitter. “No, the dean came by the station earlier and informed me that I am expelled for using ‘institute resources with criminal intent.’ Even though they can’t prove it, I’ve…hacked things before. Usually got off with a warning. Sherry didn’t squeal though, so that’s something.”

He closes his eyes for a minute, looking ill, and Ben clenches their hands, wondering how they ended up here, wondering what the kid is thinking. He wavers before asking the most pressing question. “Riley…did you actually do what they accused you of? Deleted all information and footage of the woman who broke into a pawn shop?”

Another sniff. Riley wipes his nose with his sleeve. Ben doesn’t bother getting him a tissue, since they’re both soaked and dripping anyway.

“Yeah,” says Riley, low. “I did. She’s my birth mom and she…she would never be able to handle prison.”

You’d think seeing a goat in a box and pretending to be some kicked-puppy-looking student’s father would be enough spellbinding shocks for one day, but this one takes the cake. It’s an undercurrent kind of shock, one that makes Ben tear up instead of gasp, the kind he knows he has no right to comment on.

“I see,” is all he says, even though he doesn’t.

“I keep an eye on police databases, in case she ever gets caught like last night.” Riley lurches for a moment, almost as if he is about to lean on Ben’s shoulder, before he catches himself and stiffens. The few inches of space are back. “Guess she ran out of bourbon money. Guess that means we’re both homeless now, like mother like son.”

Then Riley falls quiet, and Ben hates it. Hates the silence and Riley’s mistrust and the abject unfairness of this whole situation.

Ben’s stomach ripples with a brand new instinct he doesn’t have a name for…or perhaps one he doesn’t want to name for fear it will stick around. He lets go of Riley’s hand and the kid’s face falls, devastated, before he covers it up with stoic indifference.

“Just a second,” Ben says softly. He crouches, shucks his olive green coat, and loops it around Riley. The flutters approve of this action, Ben notes. Riley burrows into the coat’s warmth, and for some reason the sight of his arms disappearing into the too-long, too-wide sleeves, a child playing dress up, punches all the air straight out of Ben’s chest.

He settles back and retakes Riley’s hand once it fishes its way through the fabric. His thin, reddened arms sit like straws in a cup. Ben makes a note to get him some antibiotic cream from the car’s first aid kit.

“Why…” Riley glances up at Ben. He’s clearly still nervous about being the object of someone’s unflagging attention, but his curiosity has started to override it. “Why did you do that? You had no guarantee going in that I could help you find the Charlotte.”

Ben flounders for words. How to explain something that he is only just starting to understand himself?

Riley starts to shake again, his voice razor sharp. “Why do you care about some random hobo that you just met?”

Ben frowns at Riley’s choice of words to describe himself, and the revealing nature of self worth inherent in it. Or lack thereof.

“I told you already, Riley.” Ben swipes some of the water out of Riley’s eyes and is pleased he doesn’t pull away this time. “Some people are worth the risk. I saw that look in your eye back there—because I see it in the mirror sometimes. The feeling nobody would care a lick if you died. I’m learning it’s not true, that my value has nothing to do with what I accomplish in life, a little at a time. Maybe it’s your turn to learn that.”

Riley’s eyes are tearing up too, though he glances away to hide it. “Not that I couldn’t erase it with a few keystrokes, but do you regret that you’re in the system now, Father dearest?”

It’s a sardonic joke said with pinpoint accuracy at the same time that it’s not a joke at all. Ben hears the real question hidden in there, an echo of the way Riley still won’t relax against Ben’s side.

“Do you regret helping your mother, even though it got you expelled?”

Riley’s eyes burn. “I’d do it again without question.”

“Exactly. Because I would repeat what just happened in there a hundred times.”

“You don’t even know me.”

Ben shifts so that he’s half standing and extends his other hand. “I’m hoping to change that, if you still want the job.”

Riley examines that hand in dissecting detail for a long minute. Water sloughs off spikes of hair that somehow refuse to stick to his forehead, defying physics, and his blue eyes are piercing under the flickering streetlamp, haloed underneath by dark, bruised circles of insomnia. In all, he looks like someone who has reached the end of a long and fraying tether. 

Ben doesn’t move, hardly dares to even take a breath. Riley’s eyes search for something in his face, with the jaded scrutiny of someone used to being manipulated or lied to. So Ben holds himself perfectly still, knowing that whatever happens next has to be one hundred percent Riley’s choice and he can’t make it for him.

Then he takes Ben’s hand and rides the strong pull to his feet. Riley’s hold feels like lightning bolts, like a bird’s fast heartbeat and velvet, somehow in such a seamless tactile symphony that his pulse sings against Ben’s own. That skeleton key twists, unlocking something in Ben’s heart.

The simple grip winds him a bit, honestly.

Ben steals the opportunity to wrap his arm around the bony shoulders while rooting for his keys. He even ruffles the thick hair, slow so Riley can see it coming, something he’s never done to someone in his life. He’ll have to get used to these strange flutters, as they don’t appear to be leaving anytime soon.

Riley looks away from his entrancing view of the sky to read Ben’s face. Whatever he sees makes him smile. “Ben?”

“Merlin?”

Riley’s nose wrinkles. “I’m not good with new people. Or allergens. Or bugs. Or stupidity. You’ll get tired of having me around, especially on a globe hopping search. They always do in the end.”

Ben opens the passenger’s side door and plunks Riley into the seat, which squelches with the addition of a sopping former grad student. Then he comes around and gets behind the wheel, though he doesn’t take off right away after turning the ignition.

“A month, tops.” Riley is insistent. “You’re going to hate me by then.”

“I really don’t think I will,” Ben argues. “Do you see me having a lot of friends either? We’ll be irritating misfits together.”

“I think this is the longest civil conversation I’ve had with someone who’s not my family,” Riley confesses, looking shocked about it. 

Ben runs over the last few months—years—in his mind. “You know, me too. The academic community hates me, thinks I’m a tinfoil hat. Most people just don’t…”

“…Get it,” Riley finishes, and that’s a heartfelt movie moment if Ben’s ever seen one. Riley must think the same thing because he rolls his eyes at himself. “Hey, can we stop for food? I haven’t eaten since breakfast.”

Again, Ben runs an eye over the emaciated cheekbones. “First thing on the agenda, actually. Tacos?”

“Great minds think alike.”

The parroting of his own words sucker punches Ben again. He pulls out onto the freeway, listening to Riley hum along with the radio, a newer pop song Ben’s never heard of, and tapping his feet like a line dancer. He doesn’t seem phased one ounce by suitcases in the back or a toothbrush in the cup holder or the copious file folders clipped together in a spastic array of data mining.

“Hold up.” Riley’s eyes widen. “We have to bust Enzo out of the pound! The city confiscated him and Sherry will murder me in my sleep if that thing gets put down.”

Ben’s stomach glows with warmth. This kid has a big heart, despite the barbed spikes he’s built up around it. “What’s one more caper for the day? But if you ask me ‘are we there yet’ at any point, I’m kicking you out of this car.”

Riley curls up into a little ball with his heels on the seat, like a content cat. He smirks. “No promises, pops.”

And with that—he steals Ben’s comforter from the back, wraps himself up in it like a burrito, and promptly dozes off.

There’s no real logic or justification for the feeling, but Ben knows in this instant, without doubt, that he just found a clue to the treasure. A massive piece of the puzzle he wasn’t even looking for. That this wound up kid is somehow tied to him in a way he can’t—or won’t ever want to—unknot.

“…And I don’t think Riley has truly left my side since.”

The story melts back to present day in a trance, sensations familiar but not quite the same. Wet, but less frigid. Sitting on hard earth, but bundled tightly. Facing a choice, but knowing his mind was made up long ago. Ben’s words dry up and Sadusky resurfaces from the vividly painted memory only to see that sometime during it, Ben has taken his hand too.

Peter feels it now for real, warmer and not trembling so much.

Ben’s crying a bit, and so is Peter, but their eyes are steady. They breathe together and simply watch the chaos wind down, Riley passing out those chocolate cupcakes to weary forensic crews where they finish a sweep through the cabin a few miles up the road. The immense weight of his presence, of all of them, washes over Peter in one huge tidal wave. How differently their lives could have gone without that day. How they probably never would have met otherwise.

Then Riley swats at some black flies and Peter grins.

“I see the parallels here.”

Ben’s blanket crinkles when he shifts. “Then you know why we care. Peter, you hunted us because you were doing your job. We don’t hold that against you.”

“It comes over me sometimes.” Sadusky blinks fast, not that it does any good. The tidal wave bleeds through cracks in his armour. “If the only reason you care is because you feel you have to.”

Ben doesn’t jump on that right away, much as his lips pull down and his eyes flicker at the words. Instead, he sighs and adjusts one of the hot packs. Leans a little more into Sadusky’s shoulder.

“Do you remember the first time we met?”

Peter’s eyes cloud. “I already told you I see the parallels. Riley was handcuffed to a chair and you were handcuffed to a table. You saved him then just like you saved me now.”

“But do you remember the first time we met?” Ben jostles his knee, urgent. “The first time we actually spoke?”

Obeying the request, Peter runs through this memory. “I was playing with the multi-lens glasses. You were telling me about what you’d found so far. Then Ian called your cellphone.”

“No, you met me in front of the Chinese restaurant.”

Sadusky’s mouth drops open. He’d completely forgotten about that moment, right before Hendricks himself cuffed Ben. 

Ben sits back, triumphant, like that should clear everything right up.

“Ben, I’m proud to be your friend. But this last year, you’ve started treating me like family, and that’s something to be approached with much more care and caution.”

“You are family.” Ben’s shivering starts up afresh. “You listened that day. You didn’t shove me off or stick me in a jail cell. You took me seriously. I know you have a history with the Masons but that’s not why you did it.”

Peter’s lips work and he can’t speak.

Ben drives his point home. “I told you that story about Riley not just because it parallels today—but because it parallels the day we met. You looked at me in front of the restaurant the same way I looked at Riley…didn’t you?”

And this. This Peter knows like he knows the sky is blue and the water is cold.

“You were a man lost in a sea of his own making,” Peter whispers. There’s a kettle drum pounding at the back of his throat, so low and deep and resonating that he can barely breathe. “And that look in your eyes was one I saw every day: you desperately wanted to protect those you love. To prove that some things are worth having faith in.”

Ben’s eyes shine. “You claimed us long before we ever claimed you. What’s been so hard for you is accepting it—you’ve been ruled by guilt, Peter.”

At last, Sadusky nods. He sheds about a hundred pounds just doing so, a burden of shame he’s been shouldering for years. “I was grieving. I had just lost Katherine four years prior to that day and when I heard your voice, on the deck…for the first time I heard someone sound the same way I felt. Suddenly I wasn’t alone. There was hope. Except you had a way to get your family back, and I knew that came before any duty to my government.”

“Your loyalty shifted that day. You chose us.”

A tear rolls off the end of Sadusky’s nose. “Best decision of my life.”

“Does it really seem so crazy that we might have chosen you back? That you might be allowed to care about us?”

He glances at Ben, and still feels the same crest of affection, to this day. That need to make sure everything turns out okay for him, all of them. “Sometimes. I’m coming around.”

“To be fair, we’re always a little crazy.”

Peter huffs. “Glad you’re finally recognizing that.”

“Wait a minute…” Ben exhales in a rush, an incredulous scoff while he twists to stare at Sadusky. The words catch up with Ben in visible balks and starts. “Peter, did you—did you let me get away that day on the deck?”

Peter smiles, just a small and wry one that he fights to keep from growing. “Don’t tell Hendricks, but I knew you’d find a way to escape no matter what we did, so I suggested the bait idea. I delayed the order to move in when you ran. Although you did nearly give me a coronary, leaping off the Intrepid like that.”

“Wow.” Ben slumps back. “You learn something new every day.”

“No, you don’t. I know for a fact you let Riley have those few tallies by pretending to be ignorant of his historical facts.”

An impish grin slicks across Ben’s face. “He needs the win sometimes, though I really didn’t know the one about Turing’s childhood. I won’t tell Agent Hendricks if you won’t tell Riley.”

“Deal.”

The sun is pulsing now and so is Peter, lost in the birth of a world he didn’t think mattered so much anymore. That he didn’t matter so much anymore. Ben found a treasure back then but so did he, a truth that has dogged at his every footstep for the past five years. His love won’t get them killed—it will, instead, shield them with everything he has.

“I really do love you, all of you,” Peter breathes. And saying it feels like release, like he hasn’t been able to truly take in a full lungful of air for eighteen months until right this second. “God help me, but I do.”

Ben squeezes their hands. “No more running, Peter. No more going it alone or waiting to die, thinking that’s all you deserve.”

A fond note rumbles from Sadusky’s chest. Something paternal, a flutter of his own, prompts him to pat Ben’s knee. “No more running.”

“You promise?”

“I promise to try.”

Ben closes his eyes and the last of his tension ebbs away. His shivers have slowed down too, the apples of his cheeks regaining some colour. “That’s good, because you’re stuck with us.”

“…Looking forward to it.”

Chapter Text

It’s a beautiful kind of resolution to those long hours spent in the trunk of his own car, vague sensations Peter won’t remember much later—being loaded into the ambulance, Abigail flittering around at the hospital, barking out instructions while nurses try to lead her away, CT scans, blood work…

“Are you taking him in for tests now?”

“Yes, Dr. Chase, but could you please—”

“I want to go with him.”

“Which one?”

Even with Ellie strapped to Abigail’s chest in a papoose, it’s still possibly the fiercest she’s ever looked. She stands before the ICU nurse’s desk with an immutable expression, though her eyes are bloodshot as if she didn’t sleep either. “Both. I don’t want them separated even for tests.”

“Mfwah!” Ellie chimes in.

Abigail nods, triumphant, like her child made a relevant point. “Your examination rooms are next to each other, correct? If you take them in at the same time, I can check on both during their procedures.”

“Fine.” The nurse sighs while they wheel Peter and Ben’s gurneys down the hall—Peter to have his ribcage X-rayed and Ben to check his lungs for fluid build up—probably because she recognizes the futility of arguing with a determined Gates. “Right this way, Doctor.”

The hospital keeps Sadusky and Ben overnight and into the next day for observation. Peter feels no pain, on these meds, and Ben falls into some state halfway between sleep and unconsciousness as soon as the tests finish. Doctors even insist on checking Riley’s vitals, after he looked a little zoned out there for a while—and admitted he hasn’t eaten since the half finished bowl of Lucky Charms. They give him some Gatorade, muffins, and a cot to sleep in. It just barely fits while wedged in the corner next to Ben, though no one has the heart to argue his non-regulation presence.

Sadusky didn’t lose enough blood to need a transfusion after all, nor did he lose any toes or extremities to the mild hypothermia. They’re squished into a private room together, Ben with an igloo of blankets and Sadusky with two or three IV lines. Both wear bulky oxygen masks that reduce their coughing; it takes a few hours, but Peter can now inhale a full breath without hacking.

He worries about dreams, that first night, but all three men are too exhausted for their minds to process anything. Even when the sun rises, they keep the room lights mercifully dim for Peter’s concussion, curtains drawn.

It finally hits Ben sometime around ten o’clock the next morning after breakfast, however, in real time. Sadusky watches his face fall as his hand fishes out from under the covers until Sadusky leans over and clasps it. He’s been waiting on this ever since they trawled he and Ben out of the water.

“I’m alright, Ben.”

Ben doesn’t say anything but he’s shaking hard enough to jostle IV lines, their tap tap against the bedrail an eerie counterpoint. The plastic around his nose and mouth fogs. “He took you away…he hurt you.”

“We’re safe, Ben. It’s okay.”

“You almost died. All three of us almost died.”

Sadusky understands that his words aren’t penetrating the shattered shock bubble currently in jagged pieces around Ben’s psyche, so he settles for stroking the man’s hand. Wiping away a falling tear off Ben’s cheek with his thumb.

“I’m not going anywhere, remember?”

Riley must hear the words, even half sleep, for he stretches out and his ankle touches Ben’s elbow. Ben snaps out to hold onto that too and suddenly they’re linked, an unbreakable chain with a name Sadusky hasn’t dared allowed himself to own yet. Four letters and a truth he’s just coming to terms with.

“When can we go home?” Riley mumbles for him.

Sadusky is glad the young man’s eyes are closed, for his own begin to fill up.

“Soon,” says Abigail, upon breezing into the room looking prim and more coherent than all of them put together, despite the fact she spent the night sleeping on the nurse’s couch with Ellie in her carrier. She kisses each of their foreheads, one by one. “I just need to fill out some paperwork.”

Riley reaches out for a handful of Ben’s Johnny gown. He nuzzles deeper into his pillow, smiling at the feel of Abigail’s lips on his brow. “M’kay, mean declaration lady.”

Abigail tweaks his ear. “I’m going to forgive that—but only if you survive Ben’s upcoming lecture about not running after a serial killer by yourself.”

“Oh boy.”

Peter answers Riley’s question by squeezing Ben’s hand.

I think I already am.

Peter must doze off again because the next time the world blurs into focus, Ben and Riley are absent and his IV leads have been removed. The rustle of usual hospital hours echoes louder out in the hall. There’s also a sweet smell, like caramel, and sure enough—a half eaten Caramilk bar perches on the side visitor’s table. A takeout napkin has been folded into a little hat, sitting on Sadusky’s former IV pole.

Blinking, he spots Abigail at the door next, unpacking fresh clothes for them to change into. She’s in a cream coloured coat now and has her hair up in a French twist, freshly showered. “Sorry to wake you, Peter, I just wanted to let you know that we’re delayed in leaving by a few hours.”

“More tests?”

“On Ben’s lungs,” she says, soft, sinking onto the thin mattress beside his hip. “He hasn’t told me all the nitty gritty details, but doctors suspect he was hyperventilating a little when he jumped into the water and it’s irritating the pleura on his lungs.”

“He’s okay though?” Peter’s mind won’t even entertain the idea that his life was saved at the cost of lasting damage to Ben.

Abigail just hums. She seems to be assessing his face, the nuances of his eyes. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”

Her joke takes a moment or two to sink in, heavy limbed and warm as he is right now. “Hey, I wasn’t the one in the hospital bed last time.”

“No, you weren’t.” Abigail’s voice is still hushed, a smidgen too low to be in the normal realm of common courtesy for an ICU ward. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be there. I wanted to come along, so badly, but Ellie needed me and it sounds like your agents were irritated enough with Ben and Riley.”

It’s Peter’s first official smile of the day—and it feels good. There are so many things he almost never got to do again. “Hendricks told me something about a chewing-out phone call?”

Abigail flushes and leans in, mirroring his amusement. “Well, he wouldn’t give me any details about your location or abductor. Something about me being a ‘civilian’ and ‘it’s classified.’ I’ve had enough stonewalling to last a lifetime.”

Then she cuts off, somewhat abruptly, as if she’s just being socked.

Slender, graceful fingers shimmy up his hand, like woven ribbon plaited into beautiful shapes. Unlike Ben or Riley, ready to tear up at a moment’s notice from all this, Abigail’s gaze neither burns nor dissolves. Instead, she nods. Lids narrowed, just a touch, lips quirked up on one side, eyes steady and full of understanding.

“It seems you’re always saving my boys.”

Peter huffs, because she must really have her facts crossed. “Ben rescued me, Abigail. I got out, but with the wound and current, I’d have never made it.”

Abigail shifts a thumb under his palm and leans in even closer, wrapping him in a one-armed hug. “Physically, he did…but they would never have overcome those memories without you, Peter.”

And Sadusky is suddenly very glad his face is pressed into Abigail’s shoulder, that she cannot see the shake in his lips.

A timid knock interrupts the hug and Abigail leans back. She squints at the woman in the doorway.

“Hey, boss. You’ve got a minute?”

“Of course, Tia.” Sadusky waves Spellman inside. “Is the clean up finally finished?”

“Forensics is sending over some of the evidence now, at least what we rush ordered. Profilers just finished a full work up too.”

Spellman herself, in an out of character move, seems slightly unsure and self conscious under Abigail’s scrutiny, with just a dash of sheepishness. She delivers this report while stealing askance looks at Gates.

Abigail’s eyes widen after a moment. “I remember you.”

Both Peter and Spellman go stiff, waiting for the blow up, the inevitable accusations—Sadusky is fully aware it was Spellman’s branch of the team that shot at Abigail and Riley in the SUV during the Library of Congress fiasco. But like her husband, Abigail is also in the habit of doing the last thing he would ever expect.

She lights up, standing to shake Spellman’s hand. “You were so kind at the President’s briefing in the hangar. You gave us blankets!”

Spellman’s shoulders slacken into something less standoffish. “It’s good to see you doing well, Dr. Chase. Congratulations on becoming a mother.”

“Thank you.” Then Abigail glances back at Peter, of all things. He’s not sure how he fits into this discussion. “You should be resting, not working.”

“I am, and I will.” Though Abigail let go of Sadusky’s hand to face Spellman, she’s still close enough for him to gingerly reach out and pat her wrist. “It’s just a quick update. Right, Tia?”

Spellman holds a hand over her heart in the Boy Scout pose. “Not even ten minutes, boss.”

“Promise you’ll call if you need anything.”

“I promise, Abigail.”

She gives him yet another hug before leaving and she’s not even out the door before Spellman takes the visitor chair with a wry look. She sits back, hands folded over her waist. Having just been shot twenty-four hours ago, Sadusky feels a strong sense of bemusement at being the object of not one but two women’s scrutiny in under twenty minutes.

“What?”

Spellman lets out a breath that’s almost a laugh. “Nothing, just…I’ve never been so relieved in my life.”

“That your infamous boss didn’t die by a serial killer’s hand because he was too stupid to accept a protection detail?”

Hearing the quipped apology, Spellman shifts forward, elbows on her knees. “No. Well, yes. But now you finally have people looking out for you. Now I know why you’ve been more…” She clears her throat, not searching for a word but rather weighing one in her mind. “…Alive, this past year.”

It sobers Sadusky instantly, though he doesn’t deny it. They sit in silence, listening to visitors trundle past, flowers in their arms, nurses running to and fro, the blip of endless machines, weeping, gentle laughter, Ellie chatting with Abigail out in the hallway, ‘ba-ba’ style, Riley fighting with the vending machine for another Caramilk bar…

“They’re good for you,” Spellman whispers. Her voice is quiet not out of respect or so Abigail won’t over hear. No, she whispers for the same reason that Peter has to swallow before he can speak, the same reverent awe that has been dogging his every heartbeat from the moment Ben grasped his hand under the water. “They woke up a part of you I’ve never seen before. Love makes us do crazy things sometimes.”

Sadusky runs a hand down his face, the room lurching with emotion and the morphine’s groggy effects. “Speaking of crazy…Reeds?”

Spellman sighs. “I think you slashed his wrist at a vital artery, Peter. The amount of blood in that one spot alone was a death sentence. We found his mother’s stash of books in Cole’s room—you’ll never guess what she did for a living.”

Peter frowns. “I thought she was a homemaker.”

“Not quite. Before Cole was born, she worked as a history professor. In Emily Gates’ own department, actually.”

Spellman shows Peter a photo of the books and he sags. “An ancient history professor, which explains how he knew about the Germania map and scytales.”

“His parents were a perfect storm of information to use in taunting us.”

“No,” says Sadusky, a touch harsher than he means to. “Cole left those clues to be seen, Tia. I don’t think he’d known love or the patience of an authority figure in decades. There’s no excuse for what he did, but we’d do well to understand that mindset in the future.”

Spellman doesn’t ask about her boss’s vehemence on this subject or use of his first name, simply nodding. “I’ll correct the profile. We can’t find Reeds’ body, but we’ve got a BOLO posted with all major law enforcement. He won’t last the weekend, Peter, not even with medical intervention.”

“So…he could still be out there. Targeting us.”

“Way ahead of you, boss.” Spellman grins. “That’s part of why I’m here, actually, to be on a low profile kind of protection detail for you and the Gates family. They’re like trying to herd chipmunks, as usual.”

Peter relaxes at the thought they’re protected by the best. He doesn’t regret what he did to Cole, not if it saved Riley’s life, not if he could put a stop to an out of control evil.

“Reeds would have gotten what he wanted if it wasn’t for Riley and Ben.” The thought hasn’t stopped gonging through Peter’s thoughts, not for a second. He still can’t quite believe it, as if someone is telling him a fairy tale that turned out to be real.

There’s a funny puff of air between Spellman’s lips that lifts the bangs off her forehead. Her brows rise in remembrance. “They nearly died to get us the information too. Either the bravest or most insane thing I’ve ever seen.”

The words short circuit Sadusky’s already deadlocked brain, striking a wet match behind his throat in spritzing stutters. It’s a clumsy, panic-driven thing. Sparks, all smoke and no substance, scald along his trachea. He sits up in one sharp motion, so fast that it causes black splotches in his vision.

“Whoa, hey!” Spellman jumps to her feet and hurries to plant both hands on his shoulders. “Boss, take it easy! If you pop a stitch, Abigail will stab me with her pointy shoes.”

“What happened?”

“Peter—”

“I need to know.” Sadusky pants, forced to do so around hot prickles of pain in the two ribs most affected by the bullet’s path. “I knew Hendricks seemed nervous when I asked about it.”

“You shouldn’t exert yourself. I’ll get a nurse—”

“Tia, please.”

She stops, eyes closed. Her hands release the wrinkled wads of Sadusky’s gown to massage her temples.

“Headache?” he asks. None of them have truly slept and guilt niggles at him for pushing her.

“Gates…Ben, drove to our J. Edgar office with the information on tracking your whereabouts,” she says, ignoring his question.

“Okay.” Sadusky runs over why this would be a problem. Then a cold bucket of water splashes over his crown. “Riley was with him. Riley, he—”

Spellman clenches her teeth. That, more than anything, tells Sadusky how close a call it truly was—she’s not easily provoked to anger, and he’s only seen her incensed at this level a scant few times. “One of our agents pointed a gun at them, Peter, both of them. And not just out of habit or precaution like the others. If Paul and I hadn’t gotten there in time…well, let’s just say we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation at all, or if we did it would be in the morgue.”

That image burns through Peter’s palms for a moment, up his arms, down his spine, into his stomach. The thought of any of the Gates family dead on a slab.

“Who do I have to fire?” Sadusky growls. He makes a mental note to find that footage and scour every second of it. “Tell me whose life I have to make hell for a while.”

She sighs. “You know a lot of agents don’t trust the Gates family.”

“How dare they.” Sadusky doesn’t care. He is far past the realm of reason, trembling like a flag in a wind tunnel. “How dare someone make them scared, fear for their lives.”

“If it’s any consolation—I think this episode convinced the rest of our staff now and forever that they’re on our side. Saving renowned legend Peter Sadusky will stick with people for a long time.”

A heart monitor clip has long since been taken off Peter’s finger but he doesn’t need it to feel his pulse flying away against his collar. “Who, Tia? Which agent nearly took the shot?”

Her lips thin. “Does it matter?”

Yes. Always, it will always matter.

“I wasn’t there.” Peter’s lips are at it again, betraying even his anger. This is the heavy weight compressing each breath in his chest. “I wasn’t there. Not to protect them, not to save them from yet more trauma.”

Tia reads his face, her own grim. “Peter, Gates and Poole are safe. They’re alive and irritating and bursting with more eccentric energy than ever.”

As if to demonstrate this last point, she slips a flower out of her coat pocket. It’s wrapped in cellophane, to protect the delicate lavender blossom. “Poole told me to give this to you, after he finished scouring the gift shop while I shadowed him. He said you’d know what it means.”

Peter unwraps the tulip with delicate, careful fingers, just like Riley always does. He doesn’t quite manage it, depth perception skewed by the meds and throbbing skull, but touching the carnose petals feels like slotting in the last piece of a giant jigsaw puzzle to step back and see the whole picture. Only Sadusky never had the box for a guide and it is only now, right this second, that he glimpses the entire portrait of his own place in their lives.

He’s already a goner, so when Tia tacks on, “Oh, and Riley told me to tell you that you’ve officially been added to the album,” Peter finally breaks down. He waters the flower with catharsis and pain and so much love that he knows he’ll have to build new rooms in his heart to hold it all.

Somehow, once the hospital discharges them around supper time, the Gates manage some impressive legerdemain and load Sadusky into their car along with Ben. A pharmacy’s worth of painkillers already sits beside Abigail in the passenger’s seat, on Riley's lap. She immediately fusses over Peter where he’s been deposited in the back seat next to Ellie, reading a print out about mild concussions and how often they should wake him to check for complications.

“You don’t have to…”

“Peter, dear.” Abigail’s eyes skim the dry, procedural writing before she pulls onto the road. “I mean this in the nicest possible way, but shut up. You’re not even medically allowed to be alone right now.”

Sadusky glances at Riley’s lined eyes in the rear view.

“Don’t worry about it,” says Riley when he catches the concerned look, craning back to pat Ben’s knee and then Sadusky’s. “We had to find you.”

Peter very much does worry about it and has no qualms about saying so.

“Worry wort,” Riley grumbles.

Sadusky palms at his head. “I’m just glad you ‘fed’ Hugh for me. And thank you for my flower.”

Eyes closed, Riley smiles. The tulip in question is now sitting in Abigail’s top coat button hole. It glows in the waning sunshine.

After that, Peter is in a pleasant fog until they shepherd him inside their house, onto the recliner. The spot is strategically chosen, he realizes, both so that he can sit up, easier to breathe than being in a bed, and to keep a better eye on him.

Riley shoves Ben towards the couch, where he stretches out and is asleep again almost the second he’s horizontal. There’s a rattle in his lungs, one that Riley grimaces at before draping a blanket over him, then Peter. Ben is also still shaking.

“In an ironic twist,” Riley comments, while tucking the blanket around Peter’s shoulders. “I think he’s the one at risk for pneumonia; the hospital even sent over an oxygen tank, just in case. Are you in any pain?”

Sadusky shakes his head. “I’m fine, Riley. The morphine they gave me hasn’t worn off yet.”

“It will, trust me.” Riley’s hand hovers over the tussock of bandages on Sadusky’s side. “Now I finally have a buddy to commiserate with in the getting-shot club. Yours is even on the left side too.”

Sadusky’s heart paddles over that statement like an oar in a tar pit, especially at the way Riley’s pale while he talks about it.

Still, Peter keeps his voice light. “I wasn’t actually perforated by a bullet, like you were.”

“Same thing.” Then Riley adds an electric, heated blanket to Peter’s growing pile and cranks the dial. “Want me to call your family?”

Peter almost asks why before he remembers he never informed Penny. “I don’t want them to see me like this. I’ve scared them enough over the years…this isn’t exactly my first time getting shot.”

Riley’s lips thin. “They’ll want to know you’re okay.”

So Peter takes Riley’s advice for once and has an emotional conversation with Penny and her husband Josh that’s mostly just them crying over the line and working out the details of when he’ll be back home. He doesn’t recall falling asleep, though the glossy brush of Abigail’s hair on his face, when she leans over him to take the phone and hang up, follows Peter into the black curtain of dreamless sleep.

“Oh, Penny!” Abigail says, phone to her ear. “This is Abigail Chase. It’s so nice to finally chat with you! No, they’re fine, just dehydrated and chilled…mild concussion…deep wound…doctors said he was lucky, all things considered…yes, that part of the story was true—Ben jumped into the river to save him after he took a bullet for Riley…”

Over the next few hours, Peter phases in and out. There’s always someone present to watch over the two men, to create enough homey noise to preserve the calm of their sleep. Sometimes it’s Patrick, who appears in the living room to pet his son’s hair and sit with Riley on the floor for a while. Sometimes it’s Abigail humming while sorting through a forest of academic articles.

“Hey, Grandmother Willow?”

This time he’s being woken against his will, though he still smiles. “Yes, Riley?”

Riley is perched on the arm of the recliner. “Um, I’m supposed to ask you some questions, to make sure your head wound isn’t swelling.”

“Sounds good.” Peter’s eyes slip shut and Riley pokes his shoulder. “Sorry. I’m here. Time is it?”

“A little after nine pm. You and Ben have been sleeping for four hours. Do you know what month it is?”

“September.”

“Your full name?”

“Peter Aleksander Sadusky.”

“Cool. I had an uncle named Aleksy.” Riley squirms, wobbling the recliner. “Okay—what’s your favourite movie?”

Peter pops open one eye. “I don’t think these are standard concussion questions.”

“Aht! No questioning the official house nurse.”

Peter wakes further, worried that Riley might be doing too much by himself. Ben is still down for the count, though he’s finally stopped looking like a pastel corpse under all those blankets, and the house is quiet for once. But it doesn’t seem like Riley’s slept at all. “I’m pretty sure that’s Abigail.”

“No sassing your nurse either.”

“Alright, Riley, you got me. My favourite film is Clue.”

“Really?” Riley sounds surprised. “You strike me as more of a Godfather or Casablanca guy, something classy.”

“I like that the movie is a real mystery to solve but still ridiculous. Plus, you can never go wrong with Tim Curry.”

Riley makes an interested noise. “No argument there. When’s your birthday?”

“Very sneaky. You know I’m not divulging that.”

“Worth a shot.”

The recliner wobbles again but this time Peter realizes it’s from Riley swaying in place. “Go lay down, Merlin. I’m perfectly toasty and pain free.”

Riley gasps, scandalized. “Ben told you that story? Like, about Enzo and everything? Little sneak…”

“It was for a good cause,” Peter soothes, hand clumsy in brushing over Riley’s arm. Once in place, Riley’s taught frame eases, as if the warmth of Peter’s hand is a muscle relaxant. “And congratulations on your new girlfriend.”

Riley is halfway to standing, but at this he pauses. “Girlfriend? Peter, I’m not dating anyone right now.”

“Oh.” The morphine is loosening his tongue, Peter belatedly recognizes. Ben probably won’t appreciate the betrayal of confidence once this is all over. “Sorry. Thought I’d heard something about a Rebecca.”

“Ha. Did Ben tell you that?”

“Maybe.”

The world grows dizzy for a moment and Peter has to close his eyes. There comes the burbling chatter of Ellie crawling her way into the living room again. The shuffle of Riley’s feet while he moves to intercept causes her to twitter.

“You’re supposed to be in bed, you little toadstool,” Riley scolds. “Did Mum let you fall asleep on the play mat again?”

Peter knows, even without seeing, that Riley has scooped her up, maybe pretended to steal her nose like he does sometimes.

Sure enough, Ellie giggles. “Ri-Ri!”

Before Peter can register any kind of surprise, a warm weight is nested against his chest. He tussles his eyes open to see Riley settle the infant on top of the heated blanket, Ellie’s lids also heavy with sleep. Peter instinctively lifts a hand to secure her in place. She’s grown a lot, but she’s still the perfect size to snuggle.

“It’s Ben’s fault,” Riley explains, as if Peter’s wide eyes are a question. “Ellie likes to sleep on someone’s lap because he always lets her doze off there. It’s the only way she knows how to sometimes.”

“She…she said your name.”

Riley grins, teeth and all. “Don’t tell Ben or Abigail, but she said my name ages ago—she’s been belting out ‘Ri-Ri’ for weeks now, usually when they’re not in the room. They’re still waiting for ‘Dad’ or ‘Mama.’ I felt bad being her first real word.”

The meaning of all this sinks in a minute later, once Ellie’s eyes have closed for good and her elfin fingers bunch up in Sadusky’s sleeve.

He throws Riley a weighted look. “Not even the great Ben Gates knows everything, huh?”

Riley’s eyes are exhausted but tender on the cozy scene. “Which is why, if he’d bothered to look into it for two seconds, he’d know that Becca is my new accountant, not my girlfriend.”

“Your accountant.” Peter chuckles and Ellie smiles in her sleep. “It’s a good thing I didn’t do that background check he asked for right away.”

Riley plops down onto the floor where Ben sat barely a week earlier. “If you had, you’d know that Becca Foreman is a happily married fifty-two year old with three children. I’m not, uh…I’m not ready for a serious relationship like that right now.”

They are quiet for a moment, Peter digesting the implications of all the ways this family protects each other and Riley staring out the window to a dark night. How he seems scared of going to sleep. Ellie drools, which Peter cleans off with his index finger. At some point, Ben has shifted, one hand poking out of the blankets and searching for Riley’s hair in his sleep. Absent, Riley reaches back and touches the slack fingers. Ben settles.

It is, perhaps, one of the most peaceful moments of Peter’s life.

Things are not perfect, and they have a long road ahead of them, but he understands what it is to be content. It is an old friend, gone away for many years after Katherine died and rushing back in now like a waltzing partner inviting him to dance once more.

He doesn’t take that for granted even for a second. The atmosphere feels akin to mouthfuls of cream, melting and bubbling on his tongue in warm scoops. Ellie’s palm-sized back rises and falls under Peter’s hand. It fights off his headache at once, the smarting ache of inflamed flesh that runs the length of his stitched ribs and protests each of his own deep breaths.

He knows he’ll need another dose of painkillers soon, but he doesn’t move. This is more healing anyway.

“Riley?”

The young man rouses at the soft whisper, blinking owlishly.

“Thank you.” Peter channels that peace and gratitude into his voice. “Thank you for tracking me down and getting there in time.”

Despite his bloodshot fatigue and restless anxiety, Riley’s eyes are completely in the present, solemn. “I’d do it again in a heartbeat, Peter. It was a privilege and an honour.”

Chapter Text

In the end, Sadusky doesn’t really go home at all.

Or maybe he does, and that’s something his brain is still figuring out how to put a stamp on. This is mostly due to the obvious fact that he can’t stand or lift any kind of weight for very long and this makes it easier to just…just stay at the Gates house. His doctors made it crystal clear that he’s not allowed to live on his own while taking these painkillers, let alone drive or operate a stove. The one time he’d tried to use a microwave, he forgot to take the tinfoil off and his soup narrowly missed an explosion of epic proportions, thanks to Abigail’s quick intervention.

(He’s banned from the microwave until further notice.)

Peter learns an enormous amount about the Gates family over those first few days: Ben has a nice singing voice, if you can catch him doing so for Eleanor. Riley likes to cut the crusts off his sandwiches or he refuses to eat them. Abigail prefers doing yoga to Aretha Franklin records. Riley occasionally has trouble sleeping and so he draws little chapbooks for Ellie and Ben, or Ben will sit up with him while working on a paper. Ellie is trying furiously to learn to wink, since Riley does it to her so much. Success pending.

Sometimes Penny visits and brings over stew for them all, hugging her father for long minutes of self-reassurance. She offers to let Peter stay with them, but their house is still somewhat a mess from the move and they both agree he’s better where he is for now. Penny and Abigail have started doing yoga together and it’s a strange, buzzing thing in Sadusky’s throat, watching them all interact. Other times she sits at the table with a cup of tea and patiently listens while Abigail explains her frustrations over the latest drama at work or the fact that the president has their phone number now, apparently, and has taken to calling her if they ever need help authenticating a document.

But his favourite sight by far is the Gates family first thing in the morning.

Thanks to the painkillers, Sadusky is normally still asleep when they’re up and at ‘em for the day, but a week in and he wanders into the kitchen right when they do, just in time to witness their fluid choreography—

Riley, true to form, is a mess in the mornings, all bleary-eyed with bedhead that looks more like a hat than hair. Peter suspects that the only reason he’s up at all is the influence of Ben and Abigail, living with morning people. Riley slumps at the island, grabbing a muffin. Abigail is the most awake out of all of them, already dressed and texting on her phone while pouring pancake batter into the frying pan. Ben is halfway there, wearing jeans and a rumpled sleep sweater.

In his semi-conscious state, Riley has dug out a sharp meat knife to butter his muffin. Ben fluidly plucks it from his fingers in his quest for the coffee machine. Riley grumbles until Ben passes by again and replaces it with a butter knife. Abigail holds out a mug for Ben to pour his coffee into, still without looking away from her phone. He kisses her cheek.

Rolling his eyes, Riley rescues Abigail’s burning pancakes in his self-proclaimed take over of cooking duties. She leaves to get the baby’s highchair ready and Riley stretches out an arm without looking, flipping pancakes with the spatula in the other. Ben places a plate in his proffered hand, for Riley to dish out breakfast for them all.

Sadusky, now sitting on a stool at the island, huffs around a smile. He shakes his head. The dance is all done without a single word, barely glancing at each other, so fine tuned that they have its timing down to the second.

“You’re something else,” he says.

All three of them pause what they’re doing, staring at Peter. He laughs.

About two weeks into this peaceful stay, Sadusky wakes in the middle of the night from rolling too far over on his ribs and a subsequent flash of acidic pain. He lays there, breathing through it, with the knowledge that he’s going to have to get up and take some medication. Some days he can settle right back to sleep, but tonight is not one of them.

The quiet of this house still amazes him, the property far from civilization and surrounding highways. This effect is especially prominent in the guest bedroom, where his window looks out onto the ancestral apple orchard and beyond that, a dark forest. He finally wrangles his eyes open—

Only to see a post-it note stuck to the lamp.

Peter blinks at it, and then a pool of heat percolates into his stomach. If he squints, he can just make out bold, Sharpie lines by moonlight: the doodle depicts Hugh with that ever elusive butterfly finally perched on his nose, eye bugged, tongue out in a delighted smile. Four small brackets frame the tip of Hugh’s tail to indicate a fierce wag.

The dog is happy and, Peter realizes, so is he.

Soft pad, pad, pad steps brush past his door in the hallway, solving the mystery of how he went to bed three hours ago, his room drawing free, and woke up with this little gift. He’s learned each of their step patterns too—that Ben has a clopping, deliberate sort of gate, which announces his presence almost instantly. Abigail’s feet are usually in heels so she has a dainty but extremely even walk; you could almost use it as a metronome once she picks a particular speed. There’s a swirl in it too sometimes, as if she used to be a dancer.

Riley, by contrast, is a ghost. If his feet are in socks and he’s not talking or otherwise making noise, forget it. You’ll never hear him coming. The only reason Sadusky catches him now is because he’s probably wearing those giant Chewbacca feet slippers with the gel grip bubbles on the bottom.

By the time Peter makes it to standing, Riley is long gone. Still, he throws on his bathrobe and leans on the wall while hobbling his way towards the kitchen. He passes Ellie’s nursery, smiling at her sleepy form, sprawled out on her back. They graciously gave him one of the spare main floor rooms, since stairs are out of the question for now. So it’s just the three of them occupying the first floor.

Sure enough, Peter finds Riley in the kitchen. Riley’s feet are swaddled in massive amounts of fake fur, propped up on the base of the island stool. He’s eating Reese Puffs. Not in a bowl with milk, mind you. But downing handfuls of the dry cereal between swigs of apple juice. Demur, artisanal bulbs keep the kitchen lit with a cozy feel.

Sadusky grabs a mug off the drying board. “Most people eat cheese or peanut butter as a midnight snack.”

“There’s peanut butter in these,” Riley argues around bulging chipmunk cheeks.

Peter quirks a brow. He fills his mug with whatever is left in the kettle on the stove, some kind of fruity herbal tea Ben likes. “I’m not sure anything in that is real. But don’t let me steal your fun.”

Riley swallows and it reveals a grin not unlike Hugh’s. “Tech specialists gotta eat.”

And Riley is always eating. Peter learned this long before he came to live with them, how much Riley can put away and still be hungry. Amelia certainly found a kindred spirit.  

“Are you okay? Need your meds?”

Peter glances up to see Riley half out of his seat, eyes concerned. He doesn’t miss a thing, including lines of pain around Peter’s forehead. That warmth returns in an unexpected rush.

He touches Riley’s shoulder while climbing onto the spare island stool. “I think so, yes. Thanks.”

Riley digs an orange bottle out of the cupboard and pops out two tablets. Sadusky washes them down with the tea—cranberry lemon—and they work deceptively fast. The quick-dissolve ones, then. Riley really doesn’t miss anything.

He also doesn’t say anything, keenly watching Sadusky until he relaxes into his seat a little.

“You shouldn’t take those on an empty stomach, though,” says Riley. “Want some Puffs?”

Peter almost makes a joke about children’s cereal…but then the smell hits his nose and he peers inside the box. “Actually, sure. Why not?”

There’s a funny snap off of laughter while Riley pours some into a bowl for him, topped with chocolate milk. “I can’t believe I’m serving Reese cereal to an injured FBI agent at one-thirty in the morning.”

“I can’t believe I’m eating what is basically just pure sugar.”

Riley smirks and presents it to him with jazz hands. “Voila. Enjoy, Grandmother Willow.”

So they crunch away in easy, companionable silence for a while. And what do you know—it doesn’t taste half bad. Chocolate and powdered peanut roll around in competition with the sharp cranberry and acidic lemon flavours. It hits the spot in Sadusky’s roiling stomach, the hot, cramping abdominal muscles. At least the perpetual ache in his skull has diminished these last few days.

With the hand not shovelling dry cereal into his mouth, Riley flips through the album Peter gave him. It’s half full of photos now, not just of Ellie. Ben and Abigail’s faces constitute a good portion of the sleeves, along with a few of Emily and Patrick. Some of Peter’s snapshots have been added too. Candid moments seem to be Riley’s favourite: Patrick asleep with Ellie on his knee. Abigail scratching through Ben’s article with a red pen while he gawks over her shoulder. Sadusky himself just reading a book.

They’re simple and real, raw in a way that’s a vice around Peter’s chest. He thinks of the night Riley came to his doorstep, holding a giant polar bear and spilling hot chocolate everywhere. What a herald of the days to come it turned out to be.

Peter is observant too, however. The shaky twitch of Riley’s fingers and pale skin coalesce into a full picture.

“Trouble sleeping?”

Riley’s flipping stops. He looks up, but not at Sadusky.

“I get nightmares too,” says Peter in a silky murmur, “Or sometimes memories play on a loop inside my head.”

Shrugging, Riley pulls his sweater cuffs down over his hands. He conjures up a smile from somewhere, and that’s twitchy too. “I’m fine. Just…can’t shut my mind off, you know?”

“Yes. Yes, I certainly do.”

The silence lulls again, a coin swirling down a funnel with only one place to go and mesmerizing in its inevitability. They’re riding the loop. One minute, one heartbeat at a time, heading to where they belong.

“I’m sorry I almost got you shot,” Peter whispers. He’s been meaning to say it, unsure of how Riley would take it. “You had to relive that memory all over again.”

Riley starts, eyes wide. “That wasn’t your fault.”

“Oh yes, it was.” Sadusky grits his teeth.

“Peter—I’m the one who ran into the line of fire, on purpose. I did it to distract Cole’s attempts to kill you, because that’s the part of this my brain is hiccupping over.”

Blinking, Sadusky sets down his spoon. It clatters into the bowl, a soggy mess of chocolate and crumbling things. The house is quiet enough to hear the fridge humming, a grandfather clock ticking away in the living room, a nightingale singing out the bay window. He mulls again over Ben pretending to be Riley’s father, just to get him out safely, the inaugural cornerstone of a family built on the concept of sacrifice to save each other.

“Sometimes I dream…dream about falling.” Riley says it out of the blue, very quiet. “It’s stupid, but every once in a while my brain flashes to that moment when Shaw died.”

It takes a solid two minutes for Peter both to remember the details of the body forensics found at the bottom of that subterranean shaft under the church and to realize this isn’t out of the blue at all. To connect this memory to Riley’s life as it functions now means decoding why his subconscious would insist on this being important. Then Riley rolls a piece of dry cereal along the counter and Peter understands.

“Good things feel hard to keep a hold of at times, don’t they?”

Riley nods, still not looking at Sadusky.

The rest of that statement, the truth, lingers in the air—and this good thing has lasted far longer than anything else in Riley’s life. Meaning it’s uncharted territory. Meaning there are no guarantees, not for any of them.

Peter’s voice sinks down into a whisper. “You’re allowed to be happy, Riley. No one’s going to take it away.”

“Someone took you away.”

Sadusky’s pulse misses exactly three beats and somewhere in the liminal pause, his pride dies a gory death. He has to thumb at his eyes. “But that was because I wouldn’t accept help and those days…well, those days are gone.”

Riley twiddles the spoon around in his fingers. Across the back of his knuckles, serpentine through the underside of his fingers, like he’s weaving on an invisible loom and his spoon is the shuttle. The action leaves splotchy chocolate milk dashes along his skin in Dalmatian patterns.

“That goes both ways, you know,” Riley points out. “You’re allowed to be happy.”

The pool of warmth steams with love, thawing leftover icy patches. Peter rests a hand overtop of Riley’s free one. “Thank you for the drawing of Hugh. He finally got what he wanted, huh?”

Riley glances up and when at last he makes eye contact, it hits Peter at the exact same moment. They both let out a shaky sort of sound, almost a laugh.

Riley’s gaze does a circuit around the kitchen, Ellie’s Duplo block toys on the floor, the endless myriad of historical books scattered on tables and chairs, Patrick’s umbrella still leaning on the foyer wall, yet more books from Emily for them all to read, academic articles pinned down by gutted hard drives and tiny robot parts…

“Yeah.” Riley releases his shoulders, wonder shining in his eyes. “Yeah, I guess he did.”

Peter Sadusky has lived through a lot in his sixty-four years. Throughout his colourful, steadfast career he has chased thieves to dark places, looked a gun down its barrel many times, seen the scorching light of pain turn to hard flint in a hurting criminal’s eye, watched them lie—Ben included—while across the table from his interrogation, survived car wrecks and near hit-and-runs, to name just a few highlights…

But for some reason none of that prepares him for moments like this. None of it stops the breath from being snatched out of his lungs.

He’s sitting at the coffee table with Riley and Abigail, setting up a game of Cranium while nibbling on one of Riley’s confetti squares. This is the first night the ritual has been restored, mostly because the last two Thursdays he’s been here, both he and Ben were too exhausted or medicated to have enough brain power for games, though they did watch Jeopardy while Riley complained about ‘jank historical facts.’ Ben had simply smiled the whole time and added another tally to his side of the score.

“At least there’s drawing in this game,” says Riley, shaking Peter from his thoughts. “That means I stand a chance against these brainiacs.”

It is then, suddenly, that the doorbell rings.

Sadusky halts his straightening of the game board, marvelling at it. This shouldn’t be a novelty, but it is. He’s inside their space for the very first time, not standing out on the stoop while waiting to be let in. And the privilege of it all hits him afresh, that they’ve let him live in their house and eat their food and saved his life, in more ways than one.

Since Ben is the only one standing, drying dishes, he sets the cloth down and hops to the door. He swings it open only for fifty pounds of eight year old girl to hurtle through.

“Papa, Papa!”

Sadusky makes it to his feet just in time to catch Amelia when she flings herself into his arms. Gingerly, he tests his own strength and finds there’s no pain when he picks her up, setting the little girl on his hip. His left arm isn’t strong enough to manage on its own, but with his right under her legs, it works.

She’s at the age where dressing herself is of supreme importance and so she’s wearing an orange tie-dyed shirt and green denim pants, complete with a fuzzy ladybug headband that tickles his cheek.

“You were gone for forever,” Amelia laments, once she’s had her reunion kisses.

“I’m so very sorry,” says Peter. He plants another kiss on her nose. “I promise I won’t do it again.”

Ben passes by with a rueful snort. “You’d better not.”

Penny eyes her father with something knowing where she follows at a more sedate pace. They haven’t let Amelia see him until now, both because Peter wasn’t too coherent, on these heavy-duty meds, and he didn’t want her traumatized by the sight of bandages and leaking, cherry red stitches. Not to mention that he wouldn’t have been able to hold her on his lap, let alone pick her up like he can now, three weeks later. They’d had to settle for more phone calls.

They decided that when Mel is older she can know what really happened. For now, she firmly believes her Papa had a bad fall by the river while out on a case and Ben helped him up. It’s not that far from the truth, really.

Abigail hugs Penelope. “Can you stay for our games night?”

“Oh I would, but I have a symposium that I’m helping moderate until nine.” Penny winks at Amelia. “Are you good here until then, ladybug?”

“Sure, Mom.”

Riley too comes in and looks between Penelope, with her auburn tresses and chocolate eyes that match Peter’s, and Amelia’s copper ringlets. His forehead cinches.

Peter catches the confused look, laughing. “Amelia didn’t inherit too much of my Polish ancestry.”

Penny gives Amelia a goodbye kiss on her forehead. “The red hair and green eyes are my husband Josh’s UK ancestry, methinks.”

Amelia misses this moment, though she does zero in on Ben once she clues in to the world outside of her beloved grandpapa. “You’re the treasure man!”

Ben has come a long way since the early days of befuddlement with children, his heart softer than it was when Sadusky first met him. He smiles at Amelia while holding out the confetti squares. “And you’re Amelia. It’s nice to finally meet you.”

“Papa says it’s not treasure you found—it’s artefacts.”

Ben leans back. “Well, he’s correct. Nicely done.”

Amelia positively beams. Ben has apparently passed some esoteric test because Mel nods and takes one of the squares. She gobbles it in three messy bites, forcing the adults to hide their snickers as Penelope takes her leave and they drift back to the living room.

When Sadusky sets Mel down on her feet—dinosaur socks and all, of course—she immediately takes Ben’s hand. He looks surprised but doesn’t comment or pull away. Sadusky suspects she’s still enamored after the story they told her about Ben diving into the water to save Papa Peter.

Ben just studies her for a moment, then swings their arms. It’s a tentative motion and he looks ready to stop if she reacts badly. Amelia, however, doesn’t hesitate for a second, deepening the motion so their arms are a pendulum.

“You’re named after one of the coolest women in history, you know,” Ben informs her.

Amelia’s eyes widen and she stops dead. “I am?”

Riley moans. “Here we go.”

“Amelia Earhart,” Ben explains. His eyes spark, warming to his subject. “She was one of the most famous pilots who ever lived.”

“Pilot, like flying a plane?”

“You got it.”

“Then I want to be a pilot.”

Sadusky smiles. “Have you finally given up your dream of being a T-rex trainer?”

Riley stops too, when the full mental picture of that hits him. His lips curve up. “Did I just hear that right—a T-rex trainer?”

“Don’t tell her. She hasn’t caught on to the concept of extinction yet.”

They end up seated on the floor around the coffee table, in the usual fashion for games night. Amelia licks at her chocolatey fingers while climbing into Riley’s lap. He tugs her into the hollow of his crossed legs.

“Make yourself at home, why don’t you.” Betraying Riley’s words is the gentle hand that strokes back her wild hair and offers another square. “Comfy enough, Dr. Grant?”

Amelia is oblivious to the sarcasm and movie reference, nodding so hard Riley has to hold her around the waist or she’ll fall off. They divide into teams, Riley, Amelia, and Sadusky versus Ben and Abigail. The board is ready to go but then suddenly they all just…stop.

Peter glances around at their faces in alarm, settling on Amelia. Her eyes dance and she has one hand over her mouth. 

“What’s going on, ladybug?”

Riley pulls out two wrapped packages from under the couch skirt. “She spilled the beans, Peter. That day at the exhibit.”

“Happy Birthday, Papa!” Amelia blurts.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.” But Sadusky knows he’s not fooling any of them when a touched, bright little smile crosses his face. “You told Riley?”

“Yeah!” Amelia nods again. “We always celebrate on the first of October!”

Abigail reaches behind the recliner and out comes a whopper of a chocolate cake. Four layers of pure fudge. She peels off the plastic wrap to reveal a posy of candles and thunks it on the game board.

Peter is still too astonished to think straight. “When did you have time to do this? I’ve been here all day!”

“Riley baked it while you were at your doctor’s appointment on Tuesday,” says Ben, whipping out a matchbox where it was hidden under the Cranium cover. Unbelievable.

“We still know how to pull off a good heist, you know.” Riley admires his handiwork proudly. There’s even a ‘Best Wishes, Wise Tree’ piped on in blue icing. The neat calligraphy is a dead give away that it’s probably Abigail’s contribution, though how Riley convinced her to write that is a mystery. “Your birthdate isn’t legally recorded because you don’t know your own birthday. That’s the secret, isn’t it?”

Peter reaches down and tweaks Amelia’s nose. “Very sneaky, ladybug.”

“I may have bribed her with blueberry tarts,” Riley admits.

Peter watches Ben light the candles, Abigail digging out paper plates and forks from behind the cushions. He fights a building pressure behind his eyes. They went to such lengths…

“I was given up for adoption as a toddler when my parents immigrated.” Peter has only ever told Penny this, who must have told Amelia. “My birth certificate, which was left with me at the group home, only says the year. I don’t know what day I was born. So…we always celebrate the day I got adopted, October first.”

He expects their faces to fall or that pitying exchange of eye contact people sometimes do. But Ben simply winks and holds out the cake. “Now that the cat’s out of the bag, you’re never escaping birthday celebrations ever again.”

“Oh great.”

Riley just snickers. “Make a wish, Secret Agent Man.”

Four attentive faces gaze back at Peter when his eyes make the rounds, from Amelia covered in chocolate, to Abigail holding up her phone to capture a photo of the moment, to Riley having some sort of silent conversation with Ben about the gifts they got him—

These people love him back, with the same kind of marrow-deep intensity he has for them all. He won’t ever have to doubt that love again. It’s a second kind of adoption, no matter what name he tried to call it by.

“I don’t need to,” Peter says, hoarse with emotion. “I already got it.”

The adults tear up right along with him. They have knit his soul back together again, filled up the gaping cavern left by the loss of family, and shown him that sometimes a duty to one’s heart is more important than any vocational responsibility. His compass is pulled by their magnetism, and he doesn’t ever want to navigate life without it.

“Come on, Papa!” Amelia taps his arm. “Blow out your candles!”

Peter does so to the sweet backing track of them all laughing. In the end, he does make a wish:

Please…please give them even a fraction of what they’ve given me.

Chapter Text

Amelia’s freckled brow furrows. “And then Lincoln died at Ford’s Theatre?”

“You got it.” Ben sits next to Amelia at the dining room table. He watches her make another note for her Bristol board project, pointing to the textbook open in front of them. They’re a funny pair, Ben’s long legs stretched out underneath the table, Amelia’s swinging from the chair where they don’t reach the floor. The room smells strongly of Patrick’s gingerbread, which the two academics nibble on together. “When a prominent figure is murdered it’s called assassination. He was watching a play at the time and an actor, Booth, assassinated him.”

“As-sas-sin-at-ed. Did I spell that right?”

“Here.” Ben prints out the new word in big, blocky letters so she can see it clearly. “You’re doing great and I bet your teacher will love the theatre diorama idea.”

“How did Lincoln die?”

“He was, uh…”

Ben opens his mouth, then closes it with a sudden, waxy glint to his skin. Something surrounding the telling of it spooks him, and he looks up to catch Peter’s eye where he hovers in the doorway. His ribs ache and Ben grimaces, like he feels the phantom pain in his own body. Though Peter has been weaned off the meds, a month isn’t as long or effective as the doctors told him it would be, body slow to heal. The joys of getting older.

Since Ben can’t seem to get it out, Peter answers with a small smile. “He was shot from behind, ladybug.”

“You mean he did all this stuff and…and someone didn’t like it?” Amelia is outraged. Her fingers rap the book, cheeks flaming red. “Why did people hate him so much?”

This childish question is enough to wake Ben from unwelcome memories. It’s adorable, quite frankly, watching him explain history concepts to a third grader with both mutual respect and patience for her delayed grasp on certain things.

“That’s a bit of a long story,” says Ben.

“Even longer than his life? It takes up ten pages of our textbook.”

Ben stifles a laugh. “Oh yeah. Way longer than ten pages. Suffice it to say some people thought Lincoln was too progressive and shouldn’t support the ideals he did. It was just after the American civil war, which didn’t help things.”

Amelia sits back, ladybug headband swaying, to digest this. Peter doesn’t really care if this after-supper study time gets her a good grade or not. Peter’s admiration is not so much for Ben’s knowledge as it is for this one peaceful, exquisite moment of domesticity and Amelia being treated with the same kindness that they extend to Peter. For the first time, he gets to watch it from the outside—and it makes his knees weak.

Amelia is about to ask another question when there’s a loud screech from down the hall. Both Ben and Sadusky jump, but for Ben the sound also launches him to his feet. They share a moment of alarmed eye contact.

Mel doesn’t notice the exchange or the suddenly tense atmosphere and lights up. As an only child, she’s fascinated by the ten month old. “That’s baby Ellie, right? Is she hungry?”

But Ben is already off down the hall, so Sadusky places an arm around Amelia’s shoulder after she climbs down from the chair. “We’re going to let Ben handle this one, okay?”

“Okay,” says Amelia, and her agreement makes him buzz with love for her, her easy going nature and excitement over this new life. Her brow crinkles again. “What does the baby need?”

Hesitating, Sadusky weighs how to answer in his mind. He can’t very well tell her that this cry is a brand new one, specific to when one of them scares Ellie…when Riley scares Ellie.

You’d think, like the doctors and (work mandated) therapist certainly did, that between Sadusky getting kidnapped, held at gunpoint, shot, and then falling into a river, or with Ben trying to track down his friend and then almost not getting there in time, diving into rushing water with its already traumatic memory associations—that the two men would take the cake in the nightmare department. That they would be the ones to struggle and lose sleep and get triggered by the little things.

But to everyone’s surprise, except perhaps Ben’s, it is Riley who has the most nightmares of them all. Prepared as they were for Ben’s terror with water, Riley’s over being shot came out of left field and with greater intensity than expected.

“She’s upset and just needs someone to rock her for a while,” Peter finally answers.

Amelia’s braid sways to either side when she bobs. “Oh! Can I hold her, Papa? I’ve never held a baby before.”

Sadusky makes sure to halt Amelia before she can look inside the nursery, a gentle hand on her chest. “Wait here, ladybug, and I’ll see what I can do.”

She does with a nod, though it takes effort and she’s on tiptoes in anticipation. Glancing back to throw Amelia a smile and make sure she stays there, Sadusky turns the corner.

The room is dark when he enters, and yet somehow fear still charges the air in chain lightning blitzes. He doesn’t get much farther than the changing table in an effort to give Riley, sitting in the rocking chair, and Ben, crouched in front of him, some space. Both of them are taut, rigid, though Ben lets his fingers hang loose in a visible effort to look nonthreatening. This isn’t the first time Riley’s dozed off and woken in confusion about the fact that he’s safe, but it is the first time Ben hasn’t jumped in right away.

Ellie continues her wailed chorus, face red where she rests against Riley’s chest. Her eyes are open and up on Riley, confirming their suspicions.

“Sorry,” Riley says, voice blank. His limbs jitter, trembling from head to toe. He blinks, as if surprised by his body’s own reaction, detached from it. “I must have fallen asleep and jolted awake.”

There’s something diaphanous about his expression, shocked and bloodless, ready to be punctured at a moment’s notice by an offhand word. Ben doesn’t respond with words at all, however, reaching out—measured, eyes locked on Riley’s face—to pull Ellie away and pass her back to Peter. Riley lets her go without resisting, like the last time this happened.

Ben and Peter breathe a unison sigh of relief.

Though Ellie calms in her father’s arms, it’s the distance from Riley and his shaking frame that seems to help the most. It causes a flip in Sadusky’s chest when her warm body meets his hands. He tilts his chin to avoid a flailed arm, noting the girl’s hot, upset cheeks.

He doesn’t step out of the room right away, not the least of which because he’s unsure how Riley will react if she’s out of sight. Ellie rubs at her eyes, still sleepy from being frightened out of her nap, so he guides her onto his shoulder. The soft blue wool of his sweater acts as a sensory lullaby for her to nuzzle. She burbles into Sadusky’s shoulder while he rubs her elfin curls. In the sudden hush and de-escalation of noise, Riley’s skin regains a little colour.

The gesture of faith from Ben, who hasn’t even glanced back to check on his daughter, winds Sadusky afresh. In his worry for all of them, he holds Ellie tighter.

“Sorry.” Riley blurts it again, his fingers a spastic blur on the arm of the chair. “Shouldn’t have let myself get so relaxed…”

“Riley.” Ben’s eyes pinch.

“It won’t happen again.”

“Riles, hey. Look at me.”

Riley does so, but only after his gaze has skittered around the room once, then arrived back at home plate. Ben doesn’t touch him right away and for once this feels wise, despite how tactile they are with each other.

“I’m good,” Riley whispers. “I’m fine now, honest.”

Ben shuffles closer, elbows propped on his knees. He’s made himself smaller than usual by squatting, a little below Riley’s eye level so Riley has the upper vantage. It puts him in control, uncrowded and therefore reminded of where he actually is, that Ben is not someone who will take advantage of or abuse the power of his size.

“We talked about lying,” Ben murmurs.

Sadusky finally notices what Ben did right off the bat—that Riley is guarding his left arm against his stomach. It’s glued there, plastered to his ribs in a way that looks almost painful when coupled with the trembling. The fingers shudder into hooked claws whenever a particularly bad shake assaults his frame.

“I’m not lying.” Riley lifts his chin, a defiant and insecure expression that cuts straight to Sadusky’s heart. “I know where I am.”

With a tentativeness not often seen, if ever, in their relationship, Ben lifts a hand in Riley’s direction. He holds it up, so Riley can see it. It hovers in the air for a moment, Riley’s eyes wide and white and dilated, then lands, barely there, upon his bad arm, just near the wrist. Riley’s whole body twitches.

“I’m sorry,” he says for a third time. This round it sounds like shards of porcelain, edges harsh and crumbling.

Ben rubs one slow circle on the atrophied forearm. “I’m not mad at you, Riley. Not at all. Do you understand that?”

Riley’s lips cinch. He looks down at Ben’s hand with unblinking attention.

“I woke Ellie up, scared her.” Riley’s voice is so small Sadusky has to work to breathe.

With his other hand, Ben clasps the side of Riley’s neck, where it meets his shoulder. His thumb ripples when Riley swallows against it. Ben strokes hairs at the base of Riley’s head, short and wispy, darkened with sweat.

Ben doesn’t even bother addressing this misplaced guilt. He just asks in a low, tender voice, “Was it the same nightmare? The one where Cole shot you through Peter?”

A wince lances across Riley’s face and he tries to shrug, only to abort the motion when it pulls at his arm. Phantom pain in the bullet-scarred shoulder is not a new thing for Riley, but this fear is. In many ways he hasn’t struggled with the home invasion shooting, at least not in any visible attribution that Sadusky is aware of, a relief to know that he’s made it through without lasting damage.

And in other ways…well, they’re beginning to wonder if this isn’t a bad sign after all. Perhaps Cole Reeds was the crack in an eighteen month old veneer of trauma, Riley’s mind finally dealing with how close he came to dying.

Ben just continues rubbing at the arm until it uncoils a bit. He takes a deep breath, lets it out through his nose, and after a moment Riley mimics the pattern. “Can I touch it, Riles?”

This is also a first. A huge first—Ben has never, not even once, bothered to ask for permission when it comes to examining Riley’s shoulder. He’ll take his time, let Riley see his hand coming, draw back if his friend looks uncomfortable. But he doesn’t ask verbally, until right now.

It’s Riley’s turn to soften, leaning forward so they’re in each other’s space. “Sure, Ben. I’m fine, really. It was just a bad dream. In fact, they’re getting more infrequent.”

Again, Ben doesn’t bother refuting this. He takes his palm off Riley’s forearm to set it over the scar, dead center. It doesn’t massage, doesn’t knead into the knotted wad of tissue. Ben simply rests it there and maintains eye contact. He’s unbearably patient, when the need arises, and it’s a burden of gravity even while it causes a hot steam of devotion in Peter’s chest.

Riley stops shaking. It’s a gradual, messy thing, but eventually his limbs cease their violent trembling and he manages to take in a breath that extends beyond his chest so it lifts his stomach instead. The dark outline of his eyes morphs from black to blue as his pupils shrink back to a normal size.

Then Ben holds out his left hand.

Riley’s breath catches. Despite claiming he is ‘fine’ only moments ago, the pall on his face betrays him.

It’s a different hand than was extended that night in a precinct parking lot, but Sadusky understands suddenly that he’s getting a glimpse back in time, witnessing the same trussed moment they lived through almost eight years ago. Different hurts, different fears—same offer of trust. People laud Ben for his belief, even when the odds and history itself are stacked against him…

But in seeing Riley stretch out his caged fingers to meet Ben’s, peeling his arm away from his side, Sadusky thinks they’ve never met Riley Poole. His window of faith may be small, but he’s given it all to Ben, every last iota of what trust he has left in his heart, a widow’s two mites the entire fortune of his heart.

The two men link hands and Riley grins, a silent thanks.

“We made it home,” Ben whispers. His own blue eyes are bright.

Riley glances over at Sadusky, who sniffs and nods back. “Home, Riley. We’re home.”

The words spark in golden firework bursts on Sadusky’s tongue. Just saying them sets off a rocket in his heart, fizzing up high above the stratosphere of what he thought he deserved. For one lightheaded, dizzy second, he gets a glimpse of the true perspective of this new world of love he’s settled in. How vast and uncharted it is, freely offered with no strings attached.

“Ajubah,” says Ellie. It breaks the moment and they all let out a shaky laugh.

And for the first time in nearly a decade—Peter’s feet at long last hit dry land. The world stabilizes and so too does his soul. He steps down from his lighthouse, knowing he’s not the only one to man it anymore and never will be with this family again.

Little things start to pack more of a punch, inch by inch.

Sadusky catches himself getting emotional on sunny days or when he watches a mother robin feed her babies. It’s ridiculous, at a certain level, but there’s the simultaneous junction of gratitude attached to it that makes the joint of his hope easier to flex. He’s forced to stand there and just witness these quiet moments, drink it in like a parched man in the desert. Coffee with Penny on campus does the same thing, especially when Emily passes by and hands Sadusky a copy of the latest book she’s reading, or playdates where Abigail makes play dough castles with Mel and Ellie.

Moments like this take the cake, though—watching Ben and Riley walk up to the auditorium’s glass doors entrance. They’re nicely dressed, collared shirts and all. Their profiles cause him to swallow something thick in his throat. He himself wears the watch Ben gave him for his birthday and carries the little chapbook Riley drew him in his pocket.

It’s a gracious miracle that they agreed to come here in the first place. When he asked Ben, he wasn’t sure what they’d say. Peter watched part of the footage—though he managed to not kill the agent in question, settling for a blistering confrontation behind closed doors—and he knows how hard they still find it being surrounded by law enforcement like this. This is the nest of the beast, and yet Ben and Riley accepted the invitation at once, with the proviso that Sadusky be there the whole time.

As if they could drag me away.

The moist-eyed moment breaks when Peter sees Riley and his bizarre accoutrement close up. The hacker flings open the door in a sulk while Ben takes a shameless amount of pictures.

“Don’t ask!” Riley barks out, hands up, before Sadusky can do just that.

Still, it doesn’t stop him from staring. He pokes at the midnight blue velvet hat nestled on Riley’s head, silver stars, puffy brim, and all. It pushes his ears out, a hair too big for him. The tall hat is similar to Mickey Mouse’s, one of those kitschy Merlin replicas famous the world over thanks to the pop culture influence of Fantasia.

“These are going in the album,” says Ben, once he’s apparently had his fun.

Sadusky tries to find a bright spot, something that will take the sting out of this public humiliation. “It almost makes you the same height as Ben.”

Riley’s eyes narrow, arms folded. “Watch it.”

“Well?” Ben prods Riley’s shoulder with his own. “Aren’t you going to tell him?”

“Was that really part of the deal? Talk about cruel and unusual punishment.”

“He’s going to find out either way.”

Riley sighs, adjusting a laptop bag on his shoulder. He pulls out the leather notebook and hands it to Sadusky.

Peter grins when he flips to their dog-eared page. A forest of tallies clutter Ben’s side, with only ten on Riley’s. “Ben won the bet.”

“Of flipping course he did.”

Ben pats Riley on the back. “At least I didn’t make you do karaoke downtown.”

“Oh. Trust me.” Riley kicks Ben’s shoe. “This is much worse.”

Sadusky clues in after a moment of eye contact arguing between Ben and Riley. It really lands when a few agents-to-be pass by on their way inside the auditorium and stare at the two men, but mostly Riley’s hat, and he colours.

Peter chokes out a startled noise. “Wait a minute—Riley, are you wearing that for the cryptography lecture? I thought you’d take it off once you went inside.”

A rosy hue of gratification lights up Ben’s features. “Nope. He lost the bet, so I said he had to give his half of the talk while wearing this stylin’ hat.”

“I repeat: cruel and unusual punishment,” Riley snipes back.

“Hey, we’ll explain the bet to the students first, so they can appreciate this masterpiece in all its glory.”

The throwback joke and their playful, bantering looks at each other herald a return of the gentleness in Sadusky’s gaze. He doesn’t know how he ever managed without them.

Before he can get too lost in the absurdity and joy of it all, another duo enter the foyer.

“Hendricks.” Sadusky is genuinely taken aback. “Spellman. What are you doing here?”

Spellman smirks at the hat but has also learned by now that it’s better not to ask, where Ben and Riley’s odd dynamic is concerned. “I’ve been saying for years that Quantico should teach more about the history of code breaking and decryption. I hope you don’t mind that we skipped work, boss, we just didn’t want to miss this guest lecture. You’re the talk of the town, Gates.”

Hendricks, however, hasn’t learned yet. He nods at Riley. “It’s a good look for you.”

“Not you too.” Riley rolls his eyes. “I’ll never live this down.”

Spellman can’t help but laugh. “No, you probably won’t. Federal agents have long memories.”

During this, Hendricks has been eyeing Ben with something calculating. Fragile in its thick cracks. He seems to debate with himself, coming to some long mulled over conclusion. Sadusky has a feeling about what it is but keeps silent, knowing this is something he has to do by himself.

Ben spies the look after a moment. Though his face doesn’t change, a faint stiffness appears in his hands and the line of his back.

It prompts Hendricks into action, to dispel it by sticking out his hand. The motion is abrupt but deliberate and Ben only loses a moment in surprise before he reciprocates.

“Thank you for all you’ve done, and I’m sorry for how we…I treated you that day in the office.”

Coming from a sharp witted, satirical man like Hendricks, this is a huge moment. He’s had to overcome a lot of self sufficiency to be the stellar agent he is now.

Ben must sense something of that as well, for he lets out his breath and the tension flees with it. “I understand, Agent Hendricks, and I’m just glad Reeds didn’t get what he wanted.”

“Paul.” Hendricks smiles. “Call me Paul.”

Ben blinks, floored. “Paul.”

“Speaking of Reeds,” says Spellman. “We finally found him, boss.”

Sadusky catches the wording at once. “Found him?”

“He…” She glances at Hendricks, who nods in encouragement for her to continue. “His body was found just outside a veterinary clinic in Virginia, where he’d been seeking illegal treatment. Without a blood transfusion, he died of blood loss within forty eight hours.”

“Bosses upstairs agreed his death was justified, self defense on your part,” says Hendricks. “They want to promote you.”

Peter snorts, waving a hand. “Pah! I don’t need another promotion. What I need is a vacation.”

Spellman smiles. “And that’s exactly what we told them.”

“Wow.” Riley looks up at Ben. There’s a lilt around his eyes and the pocket of his lips that speaks of inundated relief. “A month later and it’s over.”

The five of them stand there, statue still, once the realization sinks in. Not just the closing of this serial killer case, but how full circle it’s all come. Sadusky would never have guessed, five years ago, that he’d be standing with a man they arrested for treason and theft—and see him as family. They’ve mounted the steps of expectation to brave clearer air.

“It’s almost time.” Riley waves a USB drive. “I’d better go set up. You coming?”

Ben shakes his head. “In a minute.”

Sadusky feels a stirring of protectiveness, the thought of him facing all those people alone, and points to his two agents. “Keep an eye on him.”

Spellman salutes. “Always, boss.”

The loud murmur of two hundred or so students and faculty wafts out to them in the foyer when the door opens. The agents filter inside after Riley, laughing when they hear questions about his getup already.

Ben must be on the same wavelength, not ready to go in yet either. Not able to digest what all this means, that this nightmare is well and truly ended. Sudden quiet descends, upon the door hissing shut, and for one freeze framed minute the two men stand in silence. Absorbing the presence of each other. Of how it could have all gone very differently.

Sadusky wouldn’t even be here without this family. His body would have washed downstream somewhere, a statistic for his agents and a dark stain upon Amelia and Penelope’s memory of him for the rest of their lives.

Speaking of family…

“You know.” Sadusky breathes through a scalding lump in his throat and can’t help eyeing Ben with that same fire. “All this free time has given me a chance to look up old precinct records.”

By contrast, Ben’s eyes are on the slice of lecture hall visible through the door’s rectangular window—the shuffling crowd, that ridiculous Merlin hat, a rubber duck screen saver on Riley’s laptop, projected overhead while he queues up their presentation. The proximity is more than close enough to see swan feather wrinkles at the corner of Ben’s eyes.

“And?” Ben keeps his voice low. “Where is she? I assume not in jail, otherwise Riley would have busted her out by now.”

Sadusky’s heart gives a strange tug, a steel cable licking at exposed nerves. “Marianne Poole was homeless or sometimes found squatting in an abandoned crack house. But she’s alive and well, though I’m sure Riley already knows that.”

Ben glances askance at him. “Was?”

“I may have pulled a few strings and gotten her checked into a halfway house. A job counsellor will be visiting the center soon to help her with a resume.” Peter ignores the knowing smile from his friend. “Reading the file on her and her children…I definitely spent a few hours alone with a mug of scotch.”

Ben sobers. He can hear what that means. “Thank you, Peter, for doing what I’ve wanted to for years.”

In truth, Peter had wept. Tears mingled with alcohol in his glass for the boy who grew up too fast amid the washing machine of America’s foster care system. His file had a happy ending, but only by a hair. He thinks again of Cole Reeds, a man without love and how that blackened his heart to any human empathy.

Riley wouldn’t be here without this family either.

“Is this what the random hug for Riley was about yesterday?” Ben asks.

Sadusky doesn’t move for a minute. Then he nods. “Yes. If you’d like details…”

Ben’s eyes harden. “No. I don’t want to know until Riley bestows the honour of telling me about his childhood himself. He deserves that much.”

There will never be a time this doesn’t amaze Peter. Their monolithic compassion continues to be used in such nuanced and supple ways, unspoken often times in the same way their conversations are.

“How does it feel to still be listed as Riley’s father on official police records?” Sadusky can’t believe Riley or Ben didn’t set the record straight years ago.

There’s a little puff of air and then Ben finally turns to him. “How does it feel to have secretly let one of the country’s worst thieves get away on purpose?”

There’s no point in censoring the warm, buttery feeling. It softens Peter’s face and he winks. “Or one of the best, if you think about it.”

“We got caught.”

“You found the biggest treasure in world history.”

Ben shrugs. “Eh. Some days you get lucky.”

Peter outright scoffs now, because it had nothing to do with luck at all. They found the Templar and Cibola treasure through blood, sweat, and loss. Then he hears the hidden meaning behind Ben’s words, though he hasn’t veiled anything and rarely does, and fights back a sudden sting behind his eyes.

He thinks about how his heart shifted that day, when Ben sat across from him at the table. Refusing to let Riley or Abigail take the blame for any of it. Just the sight of Ben’s flinty eyes, desperate but willing to face off against Sadusky at any cost, was enough to flip a switch inside his heart.

Apparently the same thing happened to Ben.

“Yes…” Peter watches Ben watch Riley and knows that somehow, despite what the textbooks will say one day and all the biographies yet to be written about him, they’ll never capture this moment, the depth of love and how Ben would give every pennyweight of that treasure away just to keep the real prize safe. “Yes, we really do.”