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He wonders, briefly, what it would be like to float away into space. Float away into the dark and the cold, and to not worry so much. To, for once, not have to think about much at all. To stare at something neverending.
He wonders about this, about space and stars and cold and darkness, in the gaps of his vision where fire flickers and the warmth comes and goes. He has no memory. No recollection as to why he’s laying on his back in the middle of the street, with gravel and concrete digging into his palms, and staring at the stars. The fire reaches upward, past the rooftops, away into nothing.
It is, in a sense, peaceful.
His hearing comes back full force. It goes from a high-pitched, muffled ringing to a sudden roar of voices and sirens and fires and a city suddenly awoken in the night. It terrifies him, in the way very little has terrified him in his long career. It terrifies him more than much anything else has done since he was a child and heard his father’s steps in the halls. It terrifies him more than the first time he stared down the barrel of the gun and didn’t know its true intent: to maim, to kill, or to simply scare.
(his father shoving his revolver into young Aaron’s mouth and making him taste gunmetal and gunpowder and too young an age was the first time,
by then, Aaron had already learned his father’s true intent,)
His breathing comes back second. Spastic and forced breaths into lungs full of ash and shrapnel and air far too thick, and his breathing, too suddenly, turns into short and labored ones that stutter in his chest and constrict his throat too hard. Squeezes the life out of him before he can have the chance to remember.
Something blocks his vision. Something blots out the stars and he makes a pained noise because they were his only comfort and now they’re gone, but there’s a face above him now. A woman kneels above him and looks at him with eyes wide with panic.
“Haley?” He tries to say, but his mouth moves and no sounds come out. Haley shouldn’t be here. Haley wasn’t supposed to be here.
Don’t be afraid, he wants to say. I’ll take care of it, he told Sean and hid him under his bed when he was six years old and too young for his memories to be this. This pain that Aaron can’t protect him from. He can’t protect him from the memories. He can protect him from whatever cruelties their father deems fit to give a child whose only mistake was existing.
He chokes on his tongue, and the woman is speaking rapidly to someone else. Shouting. Screaming. Her blazer (it was black,) is gone and he turns his head to look for it.
“You’ll get cold,” he chokes, and she looks down at him. Her eyes are still wide. Her voice shakes. She’s trying her best to be calm. He can see it in her face. In her forced smile. The pinched brows.
“Haley?” He asks again, because she looks wrong. She shakes her head.
“No, Aaron. Haley’s not here. Just me,” she says and Aaron frowns. Raises his head, but he doesn’t get very far before her thin hand nestles into his hair and forces it back down, gently.
“Where-?”
“She’s safe, Aaron. Her and Jack, both,” she says, one hand on his shoulder while the other still tries to pin his head to the ground in a gentle way. He doesn’t understand why she’s so gentle.
Jack.
Tears come, unbidden, to his eyes.
“Aaron? Does it hurt?”
Hurt? No. Nothing hurts. He doesn’t say it.
“Pancakes.” He says, instead. She frowns at him. Coherence is good. Keep the victim awake long enough for help to arrive.
(Coherence? Good? Victim?
When was he ever a victim of someone else besides his father? The father that has been dead for fifteen years?)
“I promised Jack pancakes before I left. I didn’t have time.” He doesn’t cry, but his voice betrays him. He wants to make pancakes with Jack in the morning. By the way, she’s looking at him, he might not make it to morning.
He drops his head to the side. The concrete is rough against his cheek.
He looks back at her.
“What happened? Kate.” Her name comes to him the moment he looks at her again. SSA Kate Joyner. New York Office.
They were working a case. They left together.
Left where? What happened next?
There’s a shrill ringing beside him, where his jacket has ridden up and bunched up underneath him. Kate digs it out, holding his phone in her blood-stained hands.
She’s staring at the small screen.
“Kate? What happened to you? Are you hurt?” His hand lifts to her ear, the blood stark against her pale skin. She holds his wrist away from her while speaking, fast, into the phone. The image of her, bleeding and composed, beside him blends with the stars.
Kate curses. She dials the number back several times, but comes up empty. Her hands land on either side of his face, forcing him awake.
“Aaron? I’m going to have to turn you, alright? I need to see where the bleeding is coming from.” The numbness has returned to his ears. He stares at her. She pushes him upward, but her momentum is wrong and she only gets him halfway, before she has to stop.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” she mumbles into his shoulder, his back to her.
“It’s okay,” he replies. He doesn’t fully know why she’s sorry.
“There-there was an explosion. An IED or something.” She whispers, and he can barely hear her, because he knows what this means.
“It’s bad, isn’t it.” It’s not a question. Kate doesn’t answer.
She tries to turn him again, and this time he lands fully on his side, his scuffed palms landing on the concrete.
“Alright, I think I’ve got it.” Her voice wavers. She’s not a field agent. Not everyone does this most days. Some people never do it at all.
She’s shouting again, to someone who’s not him.
“They’re not coming, Kate,” he says, he twists his head so he can see her again. Her eyes tell him that she knows that. She just doesn’t want to accept it.
“Someone has to.”
He has no answer to that.
~
Kate does her best to keep him conscious. She asks him about Jack’s favorite pancake toppings. His favorite toy. Aaron’s favorite memory of Jack. Haley’s favorite song.
(Jack loves too much syrup, and his favorite toy is the green power ranger Haley found at a yard sale, and Aaron’s favorite memory of Jack is the first time he called him ‘dad’ and he falters at Haley’s song and doesn’t know if he’s even said half of the things he’s thought about,)
She does her best.
Morgan lands hard beside them, his hands hovering over Aaron’s shoulders and his eyes switching between them with increased urgency. Professionalism be damned, he’d say if Aaron said anything at all about it.
In the moment, he’s more worried about his friend than he is about his boss.
“Joyner! Can we move him?” He asks Kate, and she wipes her nose on the back of her hand, because she doesn’t know.
Aaron doesn’t think he has enough left of himself to reply. Or survive being even halfway away from the ground.
He just stares up at the stars beside Morgan’s head. Morgan is the searing hate of the sun itself when he shouts at the stranger down the street.
He blacks out for what feels like a moment, and then he wakes up in the blinding light of an ambulance. There’s a stranger beside him with pretend kindness in his face, and Aaron thanks him all the same.
He can’t feel his legs.
~
Rossi’s in a chair beside him, eyes glued to his face and his chin resting on his closed fist. He looks tired. Old beyond his years.
(for the sake of his life, he’ll never call Rossi old to his face, even if he is his boss now,)
“Good to see you,” he says and Aaron feels impossibly young in the moment. Perhaps he looks like it, or slightly loopy, because Rossi has his rarest and softest smile on his face.
“Prentiss is in the waiting room. Everyone else is finishing up at the station.”
He swallows. The cannula under his nose itches. He takes the scoop of ice chips from Rossi without complaint or further words.
“I know that face. Ask away, Aaron,” Rossi says and puts the cup down. Aaron finishes chewing on the ice chips.
“Kate?”
There’s only silence.