Chapter Text
Bill kept the jacket.
God knows why he did it. Some misplaced emotion, maybe. Katie used to tell him he was overly sentimental—keeping ahold of the multitudes of cards that he got while he was in hospital, the text messages with friends he no longer speaks to, the little gifts he got from grateful witnesses he helped in court. She's right. He still has her ring—tucked inside an enveloped letter, laying carelessly on his bedside dresser—and he still has Colin's jacket.
Folded neatly inside his briefcase and smelling faintly of cologne, he'd fucking taken it back when Colin had refused it. His briefcase sat in the footwell of the passenger seat and Bill did not dare to look at it while he drove, the streetlights flashing over him as he followed them home. It was that kind of brainless sentimentality that had gotten him attached in the first place, but Bill had never known how to just move on.
"A transfer?" Jubal blinked at him. Bill pursed his lips and didn't say anything to that. Found that he couldn't, really. "What happened, Goodman? I thought you guys were working out great."
So did I, Bill thought. "Nothing. Just—realized that I was getting too… close with my work."
Jubal quirked an eyebrow at him. "You know, if Glass has been overly friendly in any way—"
"He hasn't," Bill said. That was the problem. Colin knew how to fake affection, knew how to make it seem so real that it could have fooled a blind man; it's Bill that couldn't.
They'd only been acting for one day, in front of a singular audience—and whatever they said on the mission reports, so Bill supposes a second audience of their superiors—but it had all felt natural. Almost second-nature. Bill's been engaged before. He knew what it was supposed to look like, how to act; even if it was a bit stiff (he was out of practice) it looked fine, from the outside.
It just didn't feel the same. Whatever this was, it was different. Which should have been his first warning—Kill Bill sirens going off as he floundered his way through something that should have been second nature to him.
Colin hadn't even been doing anything different from the usual; apart from the overly-sweet pet names, eugh—still as attentive as ever, still as conscious of Bill's personal bubble. That moment in the church when he dragged Bill close, under the guise of introducing him to the priest—he'd touched Bill like he was afraid of pushing him away, even as carefully orchestrated as it was. And Bill had frozen, suddenly tense in the face of the first real test of their disguise, but Colin hadn't—done anything. He'd just talked and stood shoulder to shoulder with him and hadn't pushed at that invisible boundary between them.
Seriously. Some pet names and a little touching. Colin's manhandled him away from danger and stitched him up—Bill'd foolishly thought that he could perhaps handle a little over-familiarity from the man he called his partner. You know, for the mission.
And then Colin did cross that space between them. In a way that Bill could not ignore. And Bill, for the first time in years, freaked out, freaked out so badly that it'd only registered in him on the drive home—when he'd been stonewalling Colin so hard the man looked like a kicked puppy when Bill had exiled him to his own apartment.
It was Bill's fault. Kind of. It was Colin's, too, but Bill hadn't panicked like that since he was a rookie coming fresh from being on tour overseas and being faced with the prospect of regular, civilian life. Regular being what he'd been offered. Bill had settled halfway—the promise of forever with his high school sweetheart, a high-stakes job that threw him the worst of the worst from the FBI's ledger, and a house he'd bought somewhere in between.
Bill Goodman had been excellent at the home-work balance before Colin Glass came along and ripped it all up.
"He hasn't," Bill said, gentler. Jubal's staring at him—he must have said that a bit more forcefully than he'd intended, echoing in the quietness between them. "I just thought—Colin doesn't need me specifically. He could do with any suit, not just me. Maybe it's time for a change."
Jubal glanced at the paper in front of him, the neatly-signed and filled-out form that Bill had carefully looked over before he'd come in for this meeting. It had taken him two hours and half a bottle of wine to finish. That, he's not proud of.
"No," Jubal said, eventually. Bill's heart sank.
"No?"
"You work well together. Nikki has praised your performance in particular—not a lot of people get along with Glass, from what I've heard. He's too wild, apparently."
"That's not what I've seen," Bill mumbled. Because that wasn't the full story—Colin hadn't been working with a partner before Bill showed up, and he'd spoken of Toni with a reverence that betrayed the care there, despite Colin's generally aloof attitude. "He cares about his people, he just has… an attitude."
And walls so high that they blocked out the sun.
But at least he cares, Bill thought.
"Precisely," Jubal pointed at him with the butt-end of his pen. The corner of his mouth quirked up. "You would be surprised how many people don't want to work with that."
The first day Bill had turned up, Colin had upended his expectations and delivered them back to him on a silver platter, freshly carved up and still-bleeding. This is my op, not your case, he'd said, callous in that patented Colin Glass way. And if you don't like it, there's the door.
And, well, like they say: the rest is history. Bill's still here.
"So what am I meant to do?"
"What any reasonable adult does, Goodman," Jubal said. He winked. "Talk. Use your words. I'm sure whatever playground fight you have, you can solve it."
Bill has the way Colin'd looked at him in the car engraved into his memory. Like finality. Like watching the end of the line loom, the station pulling up. It burned like a red-hot poker when he turned it over—the feeling sliding out of reach when he tried to name it.
"Maybe," Bill said. "Maybe."
Two months ago, Katie had left him on a warm summer afternoon, almost exactly like this one, all hazy and shimmery with heat and life. Autumn hadn't arrived yet. You could imagine it, the sky a beautiful blown-out blue and purple around the edges where the horizon stretched out its arms across the boundary of the world, and they had been outside—on a calm walk in the park, of all things—when she'd turned to him and asked whether he was happy.
What a strange question. Why wouldn't he be happy?
She'd only given him that unreadable look, the one she adopted often when she was at a loss at how to explain a very simple concept to him; the one that often made Bill feel very, very small. And then she'd left, and suddenly it was just Bill—not Bill-and-Katie, just him.
Then again, they hadn't been Bill-and-Katie for a while now. Bill's not sure when that changed, but that it did. Katie moved town, and Bill picked himself up—and the remnants of his heart, smothered inside a small paper envelope—and carried on. Living, that was.
There was always more work to be done. Colin Glass showed him that. The world had not stopped turning.
"You know," Gina said, on the seventh day of this weird not-talking-cordial-overly-polite existence (Bill calls it his personal hell. Colin, well, Colin's not here. He's gone home early for the day, why do you ask?), "If you want to talk, Bill, I'm right here."
"Talk?" he echoed, because it was two PM and he was just trying to reheat lunch, not get ambushed with weirdly earnest requests for conversation. "What's there to talk about?"
"Colin's moping like a kicked puppy," Gina said. "You know him. He just gets so… hung up, sometimes."
"You mean he cares."
"Yes," she acknowledged, rolling the pen between her fingers. "He does." Colin Glass, misanthrope extraordinaire, caring? Perish the thought. Bill took the tupperware container out of the microwave—cold at the bottom, hot around the edges and produced a pair of chopsticks, considering.
"He seems fine to me," he said, eventually. Lying through his damn teeth.
Gina raised an eyebrow at him. "Either you don't actually believe that, or you don't know him as well as I think you do."
"I like to think I do," he said, jamming his chopsticks between his rice paper rolls with a vengeance. "Maybe I don't. What does it matter?"
For the mission. For the sake of the good, important, illicit work they were doing. Bill had tried to draw away first—preserve what little remained of their friendship—but Colin had hardly seemed to care, the way that he'd dropped Bill like a piece of garbage stuck to his boot. It wasn't Colin's fault that Bill had gotten attached, because he was right: Bill hadn't been ready, as much as he'd pretended he was. He could hardly blame Colin for fucking off when he realized that Bill'd let it get to him.
That it was unprofessional was the tip of the iceberg—because Colin was perceptive, almost uncannily so. Bill'd known this from the day they'd met. From the literal second that Bill had laid eyes on him and watched as Colin walked into a room and noted all the exits, doors, windows without a second thought, Colin'd been looking also—noticing. He'd managed to psychoanalyze Bill in the literal next breath as if it was instinctual.
The look in his eyes that night when Bill had informed him of the transfer was realization, not confusion.
Gina eyed him, over his kind of dogshit paper rolls—Aunt Rory was so full of shit, this was an utterly dogshit recipe he'd followed on her advice mind you, why'd he think unseasoned tempeh was a good idea—and said, very carefully: "You know, I heard about the transfer."
Fuck's sake. "It was a bad idea—I should've known it wouldn't have gotten approved."
"Well," Gina said. "Did you want to quit?"
His hand froze, chopsticks laid forgotten on the plastic lid. Bill thought about it for a second. "No," he admitted.
It was good work. It was probably one of the most important things Bill has ever done in his entire life. Law had not brought him the satisfaction he wanted—helping people, stopping horrible events in motion—which FBI had, somewhat, given him. But it was all law at the end of the day. Missions were rulebooks that he had to follow, steps of protocol that he treaded like hopscotch steps he knew by heart.
Colin threw that out the window. The CIA did not behave by the same rules; which, obviously, they were a bunch of spies, why would they heed FBI rules—but Colin'd made it clear to him. This was a dangerous game they were playing, using Bill to exist and work on US soil—a loophole a better lawyer than Bill would have closed a long time ago—but it'd worked so far. They had saved lives. Stopped countless tragedies.
Colin had even begun to start humoring Bill on certain things. Like FBI assets, respecting Bill's touchiness about his space, even letting him approach certain ops the way Bill would have done it several lifetimes ago—when he didn't know how Colin operated. The antithesis of what Colin would have done.
My op, not your case. It rang in his ears.
"I didn't think so," Gina spoke, gentle. "I mean I'm not a therapist—but if you want to talk about it, my door's always open, William."
"Only my mom calls me that," Bill said, petulant.
"And so does Colin, apparently," she smiled, dropping the pen and passing him the salt when he reached for it. He poured a liberal amount on and frowned at that—when had Colin…?
"Don't recall giving him that kind of clearance."
"Nope, but he has his ways. Is your middle name really Randall?"
"…yes."
"Damn." Gina stood up. Her neck cracked as she rolled it—Bill could empathize, long hours bent over a desk and less-than-ergonomic chairs when he was back at the FBI. The cushy paychecks did not seem to extend themselves to good furniture, which the CIA had even less of. "Hey, Bill. I also saw your report on the Banning case."
"Of course you did."
"Yeah. Have you seen Colin's?"
Bill frowned down at his tupperware. "I—no?" When they wrote mission reports, they typically gave each other's a quick glance over to make sure it lined up. Colin had emailed him his copy—it sat ominously in Bill's inbox, under Colin's work email that he really rarely ever used. Colin liked paper, like Bill—safety concerns and all that. If it was that important Colin would have just handed it to him in person.
Bill hadn't touched the PDF. He'd written his own report and dutifully turned it in on Monday. He still doesn't know why he's so afraid of it, a little icon threatening to bite him. Was it an indictment against Bill's performance? Was it a cold, laundry list of events that'd gone down, as professional as Bill's own? He doesn't know because he can't make himself read it.
"Of course you haven't," Gina sighed. "You should take a look. Or, better yet—" the corners of her mouth turned up in a Cheshire cat grin, "—you should look at his first draft."
She straightened, and walked out of the room before Bill had a chance to let that sink in. Huh, he thought, staring at his sad tempeh-cauliflower abominations. First draft?
The email from Gina hit his inbox not an hour later. C first draft, noted the subject line. There were no other text. Just an attachment.
Bill hovered his mouse over the PDF, and then ultimately decided against it.
He was a coward like that.
The jacket is taunting him.
He kept it draped carefully around the back of his at-home office chair. It wasn't like he had anywhere else to put it. He'd contemplated trying to hand it back to its owner—Colin wasn't avoiding him, but he wasn't around either. Professionalism indeed—but then again, they'd moved past that a long time ago.
He wondered, briefly, if Colin'd acted the same way when Toni left him. If he'd sat and waited, waiting for someone to walk through the door even though they never would. It was a moot point: Colin had not actually died. Bill was still here. Neither of them had gotten fired, and they were still doing good work despite Colin's sudden flakiness.
And yet.
Banning got arrested on a Friday afternoon, cold and chilly and definitely too fucking overcast of a day to be doing work. Half the office'd left already, barring their little crew—because they were all workaholics like that, apparently. You know how it is, Gina'd said to him, on their way down to the interrogation cells. Work never stops.
Bill doesn't know. He used to be a strict believer in the nine-to-five work-life balance.
CIA had thrown that out the window, too.
So he's here, watching as a rather bedraggled Banning is brought through the door of one of their rooms, Gina at his side and ready to take notes. It's Colin who's been sent to pick Banning's brain this time—last time, Bill took point because Lauren had argued for his right to do so. Colin had sort-of volunteered for this one, something that'd raised eyebrows in the bullpen—certainly raised Bill's eyebrows when Colin'd said, very neutrally, that I'd do it.
And Nikki had seemed—what, confident? Bill's got confidence in Colin as a competent agent and investigator and interrogator. But maybe, he thought, as Colin stepped through the door, maybe there's a reason why he never does it.
Colin walked the doorway as impeccably put together as he was, always—five o clock shadow, another bomber jacket, clad in midnight colors so dark that he stood out against the dank walls. Neil looked up as he approached the table.
"You," he realized.
"Me," Colin confirmed. With his back to the one-way glass like that, Bill can't see the expression on his face, but the forced-casual Colin injected into his demeanor is almost indistinguishable from the real thing. He pulled out a chair, sitting in it backwards, draping his arms around the back of the chair.
Neil bit his lip. Looked towards the door. "You're not… really getting married, are you?"
Colin smacked the table. "I'm asking the questions here."
Neil slumped. Suddenly, he looked a lot older than his age—twenty something, and yet he looked like he'd aged overnight. Unshaved, scruffy as he'd appeared when Bill'd been the one sitting in his chair, unwashed and apathetic about everything.
His lazy disposition he'd carried himself with had fallen away like water. Now, Neil looked old—and disappointed. Like a kicked puppy, or a kid who's just been told his parents were divorcing. Not like a criminal at all.
"Odd," Gina muttered, under her breath. Bill privately agreed.
"Maybe he really has no idea," he said, watching as Colin sat impassive while Neil started talking—without prompting or even a question asked. Stranger was the way he apparently appeared unconcerned, even though he was reasonably being held for conspiracy and terrorism.
"I can't believe it," Neil said, oblivious to the conversation happening behind the glass. "I just thought—your fiancé seemed so nice! And he didn't say much but you don't fake that kinda look, man, it had me fooled."
Colin's shoulders shifted. "Pretend fiancé," he said. "Irrelevant. Neil, what were you doing with napalm of all things?"
Neil looked—distraught. "I swear I didn't know about it," he cried, slumping over his handcuffed hands. "His brother—the big guy—said it was good for fireworks so I did a little testing and—"
"The big guy?"
"The bald guy," Neil said. "Y'know, looks like Vin Diesel and John DeSantis had a mutant freak baby?"
Oh.
Colin reached into his coat and withdrew a sheet of paper. On it, Bill could see the sketch he'd outlined to the artist, and a marking of the tattoo he'd drawn himself—intricate knotwork scribed on the back of the man's head. "This man?"
"Yeah! That's him," Neil pointed. "I promise I had no idea, man. I didn't even want to hurt that lady."
"But did you want to hurt someone else?"
"No! I swear," Neil's cuffs jingled as he gestured. "Robaire said his brother in law was getting married the next day, and these were supposed to help—I planned that guy's wedding! Why would I want to—"
"Maybe because," Colin said, drawing to his full height. "That was the Senator, Neil."
"The Senator?"
"Don't pretend you didn't know."
"No, really, I had no idea," Neil said, blinking. Interesting. Next to him, Gina was scribbling something down faster than Bill could follow. "I'd never even met the guy—his aide came to me and told me all the details. I just set it up—I remember thinking it was super unromantic, man, who the hell doesn't even want to plan their own wedding?"
"That's why," he continued, "I thought it was super romantic that your guy had all the details down pat. Like he remembered everything about what you like, what you don't like, what flowers y'all wanted—said they reminded him of your eyes—like, love is real, man." He drooped. "I mean. I guess it was fake. Your guy's a good actor."
Bill didn't dare breathe. In front of him, Colin is so, so still, even with his back turned to Bill—and next to him, Gina's eyes are boring holes into his skull. Silence swelled.
"He's a great actor," Colin said, at last. "He's good at it. Better than me."
His voice was careful, as flat as it could come. Gina said something under her breath but Bill didn't hear it, too focused on the way Colin still hadn't moved. His hand clenched in his jacket pocket. Gina's pen stopped scribbling—as if frozen, too.
"I just can't believe it," Neil said. "I mean. It looked so real, you know?"
A beat passed. "That's why it's called acting, Neil," Colin said. Softer this time. Without his expression, Bill could almost believe it sounded like longing. "But that's not why we're here. Why'd Robaire want to off his brother in law?"
"I don't know," Neil half-wailed. "I just followed instructions—they paid my rent for seven months and I didn't want to ask questions—I didn't even know it would hurt anybody!"
"You're sure?"
"Yes," he gestured at the paper. "I don't even know his full name. He just came up to me one day and offered, like, crazy amounts of money for me to do this."
"And you took it," Colin took the paper back, carefully tucking it in his pocket. "Well. If your alibi checks out, you'll probably only receive a few months for this—with a public defender, of course. Unless—of course, you'd like to help me catch this guy."
"Catch him?"
And Bill couldn't see it, but he knew—somehow—gut instinct and all, that Colin smiled. "Yeah. Opportunity of a lifetime. Think about it, really, while you're sitting in timeout."
"How does he do that," Gina muttered. Her pen's tucked behind her ear and she's folding up her notepad. Bill felt—not quite off-kilter, per se, but definitely unmoored. "You'd think he'd get tired of shoving his fingers in every single pie he gets his hands on."
"I think that's Colin for you," is all he said. "Good at recruitment, and all that."
She squinted at him. "How'd you feel about the acting bit?"
Uh. "Nothing," he lied. "I must have really made an impression."
"That's what working with Colin will do to you," she acknowledged, nodding at him as he held the door open for her. "He said something about coaching?"
"It was just a couple pointers," Bill said. He slowed.
Colin stood in the hallway, haloed by the overhead lights, dingy and fluorescent as they come—cutting impossible shadows on his face. With his sharp nose, his shadowed eyes, he looked like the epitome of Bill's every emo teenage dream ever—like something from the Get Scared poster he'd had on his childhood wall. He suppressed a shiver.
Colin looked up as they approached. "Hey," he said, nodding and pushing himself to his feet where he'd been leaning against the wall. "You got all that?"
"Yup," Gina muttered. "I'm going to look up Robaire very, very soon. But that was good, Colin. You didn't even have to break out the pliers today."
"Pliers?" Bill echoed.
"Sometimes forceps," Colin said. "Anything big doesn't really work. Tongs and pokers are medieval and we're trying to be humane, you understand."
Bill laughed.
Colin… Colin did not. Neither did Gina. "Wait, you don't actually—"
"Moving on," Gina interrupted. "Let's go, I got shit to do, and Colin—" she pointed at him, "—Debrief with Nikki, she's asking. Bill, you can go home, you've been helpful enough for the day."
Which was a dismissal if he's ever heard one. He didn't think about it too hard—nor Colin's eyes scorching holes in the back of his neck—as he u-turned, numbly, as if in a dream, and climbed up the steps back to the bullpen. Back into the light and not down here where the walls started feeling like they were closing in on him—he had no idea how Colin prowled these dark hallways without blinking.
"Brian Robaire is in custody," Nikki said to him, just a scant day after Bill'd walked away from the investigation room a little shaken—out of character for him, because he didn't get shaken. "Colin will be interrogating him. Do you have any questions you'd like to add?"
Colin's overly callous, casual way he'd said forceps flashed across his mind. "No." He hesitated.
Nikki raised an eyebrow at him. "You have questions."
"Is that—common?" Like, with how Colin—" he blurted. "I mean, he was gentle in there."
She blinked at him. "Are you referring to the way he behaves in interrogation?"
"Yes," Bill said. "I mean, he didn't lay a hand on Banning."
She put her paper down, and just stared at him for a minute. "Colin doesn't do physical interrogations," was all she said, after a moment. "His method usually just involves words. Although, from what I gather… Banning didn't really need it, right?"
"No."
"Good," she clicked her tongue. She caught the look on his face, and sighed. "Anything Gina or Colin say is metaphorical. They're used to it. No one does physical interrogations here—Colin doesn't need it."
Colin doesn't need it. Bill turned that over and over in his mind until it was worn smooth like a stone in his hands. "So he hasn't—"
"No," Nikki said, patient. "But he's, ah, what's the word… hazing you?"
Bill gaped at her. "He isn't."
"Well," she said, pointing at him with the end of her pen. "I imagine he probably wants to put some distance between you. I did happen to read his—and your— report, you know."
The implication bloomed, like an untoward stray flower in the cracks of Bill's mind. Colin's trying to scare him? "Gina's been saying that he's been—moping," he said, haltingly. "And I thought maybe—he needed that space. I thought I needed that space."
Silence. Nikki put down her pen. "I'm just your supervisor," she spoke, after a moment. "But I know Colin. He squirrels himself away if he feels like he needs to—like if he's cornered."
"That's what I gathered, yes." The most avoidant man in Bill's life and he looks at himself in the mirror every morning.
She leveled a look at him. "He's trying to give you space, Bill. This isn't helping you or your work—you're consistently distracted, and Colin's broodier when he doesn't get to see you every day."
That's… true. Bill hasn't quite felt like he's found his equilibrium—still feels unmoored, the way he's been since Colin kissed him. For work, he repeated to himself, for the umpteenth time, tacking it on like an afterthought. It still didn't stick.
"That's what Jubal said," Bill muttered.
"We correspond, yes."
Gossiping, Bill's mind filled in. He felt a little like a schoolboy being called into the principal's office and being chastised for something he didn't know he'd done wrong. "So what would you have me do?"
"Talk," Nikki said, simply. She closed the open folder on her desk—covering Robaire's mugshot with clean manila paper. "Just talk to him, Bill—and for God's sake, put him out of his misery."
In the end, he dwelled on that for exactly two days, two nights.
The jacket still hung like a reminder over the back of his chair. He did not look at it as he got ready for bed, still shower-damp, and checked his work phone: no new messages.
Typical. He laid in bed and thought about it. Talking, that was. The look on Colin's face wasn't just realization—it was devastation. There's not a lot that can get through to Colin Glass. There's not anything at all about Bill that he's afraid of. Was it the transfer? Was Colin afraid of getting attached to Bill like he'd been to Toni?
(Unbeknownst to Colin, Bill was attached, almost hopelessly so, but up until then he hadn't realized what it would look like when Colin also inevitably realized that fact.)
He scrolled through their messages. Little in-jokes, little updates on cases, some meeting points. Once, a photo of Bill's morning tea, which Colin'd responded with a photo of his black venti espresso monstrosity.
Under it, Bill had written That looks awful.
Colin'd replied, maturely, Yours is worse.
Bill wondered. He wondered. The idea of a life without this—what had he been thinking when he'd applied for that transfer?
The answer came simple: he hadn't.
He'd gotten home and laid in bed and tried not to think about what kissing Colin Glass felt like, because it was a dangerous thought he did not want to have about the man he saw and worked with every day. The line of emotional separation Bill kept with his work had been obliterated that day—but how much of it had existed in the first place?
Colin knew where he lived. Colin regularly sent him texts during the day and knew about the scar on his right shoulder and gave him back his clothes when Bill had stayed over and he knew about Bill's failed relationship. He knew about Bill's propensity for tea and what he liked in his sandwiches and his horrible driving habits.
He'd given Bill his favorite jacket.
Bill tried to picture it. Waking up tomorrow, driving to the FBI offices, freshly reassigned—no partner, no one to be responsible to, no texts in his phone. No snarky jokes in the car and no unspoken lunches and no remarks about Bill's attire, his good-boy demeanor he comported himself with.
He… he couldn't. The line had evaporated sometime in the past several months and Bill hadn't even realized. He'd been so blind that when he tried to imagine a life without Colin he realized he couldn't.
The funny thing is, Bill thought, staring at his ceiling in wide-eyed epiphany, is that when he conjured a picture of Katie in his head and tried the exact same exercise—down to every single detail he knew about her from ten years of a happy, loving relationship; is that it didn't at all feel different. Except Bill could see himself moving on. Could see himself falling for someone else after Katie'd left him.
He had.
Oh.
Bill had never been the brightest guy in his class. That belonged to Sam O' Hara, top of their year and valedictorian, who'd had very very nice arms and a good smile and stood tall and straight when he graduated with honors.
Bill had noticed and refused to look too hard, because he was eighteen years old and in love with his very beautiful girlfriend that loved him just as much. Because fear got the better of him. Because he didn't want to upend his life by trying to entertain something fleeting—something that wasn't going to happen anyway, and it was a dangerous thought.
Sam went to New Jersey to be a doctor. Bill went to law school. Nothing happened.
But in retrospect, the clues were there. The fact that Bill Goodman had to have the idea dawn on him at the asscrack of dawn was more inconvenient than relevatory—sure, he probably wasn't as straight as he'd imagined himself to be, but life was really fucking weird like that and wouldn't slow down for him. He pulled his car into park and wondered, briefly, if he could maybe have delayed his second sexuality crisis—ever—for after his first cup of coffee. Or tea. Tea didn't feel strong enough.
It wasn't a crisis. That was wrong. It was like realizing a fact about yourself that you might've known all along—like your eyes were actually green instead of blue, or whatever, because Bill finally looked in a damn mirror and had the epiphany hit while he was busy considering if he should really quit and find new meaning in becoming … he doesn't know, a sheep herder?
The fact that it was Colin who'd caused it was so fucking idiotically right to him that Bill went through about five stages of grief before realizing, at six am in the morning and staring at a poorly-written copy of his partner's first draft report, that it made perfect sense.
Of course it was him, he thought, getting out of the car. Who else?
The dark-colored bundle in the back seat of his car sat there, like incriminating evidence. He reached over and shrugged it on before putting his trenchcoat on—protection against the chill— before he locked the doors and started up the steps to the CIA hidden office.
When he stepped through the doors, Colin was there. It was shockingly early at seven-twenty am and Colin Glass was there.
In two weeks, Bill has not seen him in office before nine am. "You're here."
Colin looked up. Under his eyes were dark shadows, and the whites around his pupils were bloodshot. Around him lay the multiple carcasses of disposable coffee cups, some crumpled and some tossed aside, and there was even an energy drink in there. Bill recognized it as one of Zeeb's. "I always am," Colin said, slumping in his chair.
"Did you go home at all last night?"
"What do you think," Colin said, dryly. "I'm busy sorting the paperwork for Robaire. And catching up on my backlog." He motioned to the piles of paper stacked up next to him. "What are you doing here so early?"
"Just felt like it."
"Liar." Colin tilted his head at him. "You, mate, also look like shit."
"Okay, couldn't sleep either," Bill gave in. He put his briefcase on his desk, sighing. "Fine. Caught me. Happy?"
"As a clam," Colin said. "We sent Robaire to your guys, by the way. He talked."
"He did?"
"Yeah. Some sort of two-bit assassin that tried to outsource his dirty work. The Senator was very grateful—his aide assured me of that—and his security's been upped. So. All's well that ends well, eh?"
Somehow, Colin's forced lightheartedness just rubbed him the wrong way. Made Bill feel cold, despite the fact that he was wearing three-odd layers and inside a temperature-controlled office. Like someone walked over your grave, his dad used to say. He steeled himself, drew up a chair for him to sit in.
"I'm glad."
Colin's mouth quirked up into a sardonic smile. "Yeah?"
"Yeah," Bill confirmed. "Colin, we—we should talk."
Colin froze—just once, a fraction of a milisecond—before he relaxed. If Bill didn't know what he was looking at, he would have said he'd been seeing things. "Talk, huh."
"You've been avoiding me." Ah, blunt like a hammer. Bill cringed as soon as it fell out of his mouth—all petulant, like a girlfriend asking why her boyfriend ghosted her.
"Technically," Colin spoke, "You avoided me first."
"It was a mistake," Bill said. Colin raised an eyebrow. "I didn't do it because I hated you, or anything like that."
"Who said anything about hate?"
"You did."
Colin looked thunderstruck. Bill shook his head. "In your first mission report. The one that Nikki made you redo."
"You read it," was all Colin said. "And now, what, you're going to laugh at me? Tell me you are transferring?"
"No." Bill hesitated. Here he was, a grown-ass man, and he's fumbling. "Did you really do the fake dating scheme because you thought it was—the 'only way'?"
Jackpot. Red, brilliant red, crawled up Colin's ears and flushed his cheeks, like filling a canteen with water, a slow-moving thing that Bill couldn't keep his eyes off. "Why, does it matter?"
A few days ago Bill had said the exact same thing to Gina. Oh, how the tables turn. "You gave me your jacket."
"You don't have to keep it," Colin said, aggrieved. "If you really don't want it then—"
Bill shook his head, and then shrugged off his trenchcoat.
Colin made some sort of garbled noise, kind of like choking. "What—"
"I like the jacket," Bill said, very slowly.
It's true. It was warm, and smelled a little bit like Colin's cologne, and that terrible fake lemon detergent he probably used to wash the lining—it should have been intolerable. It was too big on Bill, but it was comforting somehow, like a security blanket. Colin didn't often talk about his feelings (if ever) but Bill has no idea how he fucking overlooked this, the desperate look on Colin's face as he'd asked Bill to keep it.
You pull it off better than I do.
In Colin's words, that was as good as admitting. Colin—surrounded by so many empty coffee cups and a few energy drink cans—gaped at Bill, and it struck him: how much he wanted this, how much he'd already had it and not even realized until Colin had managed to tip the scales in his favor. How much it'd hurt when that invisible string between them pulled taut.
He was a sleep-deprived-mess and was callous, always, always, with Bill because he knew he never had to play pretend. He was mean and a little ruffled and tired and he was real, the way he'd always been before this whole fiasco. Something soft bayed in his chest like a dog, pushing blood out to all the corners of his body with renewed strength.
"I like the jacket," Bill repeated. He summoned all his courage. "I like you, Colin."
Thank god for the office being empty except the two of them. And Haines, at the door, but the man couldn't hear the way that Bill's heart pounded, the audible breath Colin exhaled when he pinned Bill with his gaze. "As in," he rasped, "Like-like?"
"We're not in high school," said Bill. "I'm telling you that I'm in love with you."
It was so easy to say. It fell out of his mouth without preamble, like a stream reconnecting to the ocean after a long journey, rain falling somewhere in the sea. Time did not stop or slow. Time carried on, like it always had, pushing and pulling the puzzle piece into place—the way that Bill had always known where it would go, because he'd always known. After all, he'd had practice; when they'd been pretending it'd been just as easy.
(In retrospect, that should have been his first clue.)
"And you just— realized this?" The grip Colin had on the edge of his desk was turning white. Bill eyed it, and then reached across the desk to offer his own bare hand. Colin didn't take it. "What, you just, waltz in and tell me that, like I know Gina and Nikki haven't been telling you all about my—my—"
He looked like a cornered animal. The dawnlight came through the windows and hit his eyes, and Bill remembered that Colin'd always had a heart too big for that body. Walls so high they blocked out the sun and it still couldn't keep him from caring. That was his Achilles heel.
"Yeah," Bill settled on. "I'm sure. They didn't do anything—gave me a nudge in the right direction, but the rest was all you." You made me realize, he thought.
"Bill," Colin said. It was like begging. It was like desperation. "You're not—you have to be serious about this."
He's never been so sure in his life. "I am serious," he said, putting the emphasis where it belonged. "I know this. You just gave me the kick I needed to realize it for myself."
"I didn't even know you liked men."
"Me neither, until recently." Colin's stalling. He's stalling. Because he's afraid, Bill's mind supplied for him. "But I just—needed to tell you. You know. That I'm sorry. For how… post-mission turned out."
"Well," Colin managed. "You certainly did avoid me first."
"Yeah. And I'm sorry."
Silence, and then Colin unclasped his death-grip on the corner of his desk, and took Bill's hand between his.
His hand was cold—terrible British circulation, Bill knows—between his, and it was pallid and pale when it lay in Bill's palm. But it was Colin's hand he was holding. It was real, and it made his heart jump into his throat.
"I'm sorry too," Colin said, quietly. "I couldn't say it."
Bill breathed—in, out. The erratic, heart-burn inducing pulse he had slowed and staggered, tripping over itself, restoring equilibrium in the punch-drunk washing machine of Bill's brain. "I know now," was all he said. "We can take things slow. I know… it was sudden."
"Yeah," Colin squeezed Bill's hand. A small smile stole over his face—like the rays of sun after a storm. "I'd like that."
Bill smiled, and leaned in.
"Thank god," was all Gina said, when Bill waltzed up to them in a casual tee and jeans and Colin's jacket, a hickey visible underneath his jawline. He looked, frankly, like something out of Colin's wildest dreams. "I thought I was going to die watching that."
Colin patted her on the shoulder in consolation. Shame? Who's that, he has no idea who that is. "Sorry. Here, let me get you another drink."
She laughed. "So long as you're paying."