Chapter Text
Nestled within the pile of clothing were Harold’s wallet and phone, confirming the end of the interrogation. Harold scooted his way out of the bed and dressed hastily, feeling the panic well up inside him -- even worse when he heard, faintly, the chime of the elevator. Was Reese leaving for good? There was virtually no chance of Harold catching up to him on foot, and now that Reese knew to actively avoid video cameras, the chance of finding him again by the usual surveillance techniques was also vanishing. By the time Harold got hold of his laptop, Reese could be out of his reach for good.
It unsettled Harold to head into a public space with a suit jacket over his arm and his vest not even buttoned -- but he could finish up in the elevator, and right now he had more pressing concerns than his normal sense of propriety.
What had gone wrong?
Right before leaving the room, it had seemed that Reese had finally been convinced that Harold was on the level -- that he wasn’t trying to pull one over on him, harm or control him, or set him up for some kind of scheme. The mistrust Reese had started with had fallen away, and he’d accepted the truth that Harold was a good man, one who wanted to accomplish good in the world.
It was everything that Reese seemed to want; Harold had been sure of it. So why had he just left? What else was holding him back? Was it truly a lost cause -- was there nothing at all that Harold could have said or done to convince him to give their partnership a try?
He didn’t want to believe that. Not yet. Not with lives on the line. Not after all the effort he’d put into researching the man -- with every detail proclaiming more and more clearly: This is the one. Not after lasting through an entire interrogation and somehow, against all odds, managing to convince Reese of his good intentions by nothing more than words.
There had to be a chance. He didn’t just want to believe that -- he refused to think otherwise.
He stepped out into the hallway, but there was no sign of Reese. Not knowing what else to do, Harold limped over to the elevator and pushed the button. The door opened immediately.
Harold hesitated.
There was no way to know how many people were using rooms on this floor, but he hadn’t heard other people in the hall… and it seemed odd, somehow, for the elevator to be right there. If Reese had gone down to the lobby, the elevator wouldn’t have returned to this floor. Unless… had he pushed the button, and then had second thoughts?
And if he hadn’t used the elevator… where had he gone? Harold glanced around. Had Reese broken into another room, just to get Harold off his trail for a while? Had he used the stairs?
He had a sudden, dizzying vision of Reese looking over the edge of the roof, debating whether it was finally time to end it all. Because whatever hope Harold had thought he was offering had turned out to not be enough. God, he hoped that wasn’t where Reese had gone -- but if he had…
Harold couldn’t think of a single new thing to say, anything that might persuade Reese, anything that hadn’t already been said in that room. But so long as Reese hadn’t jumped yet, Harold couldn’t give up on him, and that thought made him hurry toward the stairs, wincing at the strain on his bad hip after sitting on the bed so long.
The heavy stairwell door was hard to push open, and left Harold panting a little from the unexpected effort. He leaned against the wall for a moment, and looked despairingly at the steps he was about to climb.
Ever since the explosion, stairs had become his daily nemesis. The library remained his base of operations, for reasons that went beyond the practical, yet he couldn’t very well hire a construction crew to renovate for disability access -- not without giving up the fiction that the property didn’t exist. So each time he climbed to his workstation, silently bearing the familiar pain and stress, he let it focus his mind on the task he was to perform. That pain had come to feel like part of his penance.
Here and now, he thought, briefly, about turning back to take the elevator up the extra two floors. But in the time it would take him to get back down the hallway and wait for the elevator, he could probably have managed the task this way -- it would just hurt more. So he set his jaw and got to it, focusing only on the one step in front of him, just one at a time. It wasn’t a very tall hotel; he could do this.
His determination didn’t keep him from being out of breath after only a few steps, nor from having to stop and lean against the railing a couple of times. Soon, he abandoned his jacket, leaving it hung on the railing; he could pick it up on his way down, and right now he didn’t need the extra weight or hassle. He had to keep moving.
Halfway up the third section, just in sight of the roof access, his knee buckled; he couldn’t suppress a cry, and only his iron grip on the railing kept him from a disastrous fall. Panting through the pain, he managed to turn his body around enough to sit himself down on the edge of the landing. His knee felt tender, and hurt when he tried to stretch it out; he positioned it as well as he could, trying to keep his groans to a minimum.
Sitting there, helpless, he thought of Reese, poised at the edge, with no one there to talk him down. Harold’s broken body couldn’t get him there when he needed it. How many times had he played through this scenario in the past year? He’d watched a pre-teen jump to her death, listened to gunshots that took out whole families, dragged his half-numb leg through piles of leaves in the dead of night just in time to bear witness to Dillinger getting shot -- and felt like he’d signed their death warrants twice over, because the injuries that kept him from doing something useful were his own damn fault.
That undeniable reality was what kept him from coddling himself, even when the pressure on his hip joint felt like glass shards. He never let the pain keep him from trying. But damaging his knee further could mean the end of the limited mobility he had built up so far. Even if he were careful, paid closer attention to his footing -- the injury could be compounded by jostling the knee around. There were so many reasons to just give up and sit here; he could phone the hotel, wait for help…
Pushing aside the logic, and the overwhelming, bone-deep desire to just give in and rest there -- just for a moment -- he clutched at the railing and started to pull himself up, trying not to put any pressure on the bad knee just yet. Pain would come, but he was not afraid of pain. There was only a little ways to go, and Reese needed him.
He had almost managed to right himself when he heard footsteps hurrying up the stairs.
The usual polite demurral sprang to mind, an excuse to not need help; he never let himself be dependent on random strangers. But he couldn’t let pride or embarrassment keep him from getting to Reese. The only question was how to express the urgency in this context, keep them from focusing on his injury. My friend’s been very depressed lately, and I think he went up to the roof -- don’t worry about me--
But that would just leave him there on the stairs, and if Reese were really planning to jump, how likely was it that a stranger could persuade him otherwise? Harold had to get up there himself, had to convince the newcomer to help him up the stairs.
As he was trying to come up with the right phrasing, and struggling to leverage himself up without putting pressure on his knee, the footsteps came around the corner, and Harold looked up--
--and gaped as Reese’s lanky body sprang into view.
The shock was enough that he almost let go of the rail. Instead, carefully, he lowered himself back onto the step, wincing with every shift of his knee. When finally Harold was settled, he looked up at Reese; the release of pressure was a relief in more ways than one.
“You’re hurt,” Reese said, concern etched across his face -- one of the few strong emotions Harold had seen from him that night.
“Uh-- I--” Harold floundered, then swallowed and closed his eyes. “My knee gave out.” He winced again. “It -- it’s fine, I… I just need to sit here a moment.”
Looking skeptical, Reese knelt a couple of steps down from him. Before Harold could protest, Reese’s hands were lifting and manipulating his knee, gently examining the swollen tissue by feel. But he wasn’t looking at the knee -- his gaze was fixed on Harold’s face. And from the way he backed off at Harold’s slightest wince, Reese seemed intent on not causing him any more pain than he had to.
“Mr. Reese, I--”
“Shh. I need to listen.”
Cautiously, Reese bent the knee in a few directions, and then sighed with relief. “Not your ligaments or meniscus. Nothing’s dislocated, swelling’s light -- probably just a sprain. Ought to get it checked out, though, and in the meantime, ice and elevation. And no more stairs for a while.”
With that, he placed Harold’s foot down, gently, the knee at a good angle for now. He didn’t stop studying Harold’s face. “Why are you even on the stairs?”
“I could ask you the same thing, Mr. Reese. If you weren’t heading for the roof…”
Reese stared at him a moment longer, then folded down onto a stair himself, sideways, the exhaustion bleeding back into him again. “God, I can’t even leave you in peace without hurting you,” he said, shakily.
“Is-- is that what you thought you were doing?” Harold asked, frantically trying to put together a mental model that fit this new information. Reese had left for Harold’s good?
Hunching over, Reese rested his forearms on his knees and sighed heavily, bowing his head. His eyes were tightly closed, as if he too were in pain.
Something was wrong here, deeply wrong -- Harold wasn’t sure exactly what, but something about what he’d said or how Reese had taken it, something profoundly affecting Reese….
“If you think leaving now will bring me peace," Harold said, "then I haven’t fully conveyed to you the predicament I find myself in. That stunt with the recording -- it wasn’t just to manipulate your emotions, to make you more willing to listen to me… it’s the reality I wake up to every morning. There’s always someone who needs help, someone who will die if I don’t intervene, and I bear the burden of knowing about it ahead of time but not being able to do anything useful with that knowledge. I’ve tried involving the police, I’ve hired private agents, tried to warn the victims myself, even limped my way through apartment complexes that ought to have been condemned, and… I couldn’t save them. I couldn’t offer the police enough information or motivation; the victims rarely took me seriously. I’d get to the right apartment just in time to find a fresh corpse.
“Once I--” He took in a shuddering breath, and tried to keep his voice steady; it was hard to divorce his emotions from the memory. “I found a mother and her three young children, one of them not even walking yet. Her husband had cheated on her, and she -- she was from a culture where you don’t move on from that sort of dishonor. She’d killed them all, and killed herself afterwards. I got there only a few minutes late. Debated about calling 911, but it wouldn’t have mattered. I sat in the hall for an hour, too numb to even cry.
“So you see, Mr. Reese, there is no peace for me alone. And there will be no peace, until I can find someone capable of stepping into these situations and giving them happier endings. Maybe not even then -- it may well be that I will never know peace again. But I-- I have to do something. And you could help me.”
“Harold--” Reese said, a desperate moan, but he cut it off fast and looked away.
“But you still don’t want to work for me. Why? What’s the alternative for you? To be honest, I’m concerned about what will happen to you if you don’t accept.”
“It doesn’t matter what happens to me,” Reese said tonelessly. “I’m not the right guy. You still don’t get that.” There was that self-loathing again. Whatever conclusion Reese had come to, it was based on seeing himself as unfit.
“I am getting the impression,” Harold said slowly, trying to reason it out, “that even though you trust me enough to free me, you do not, or cannot, accept my assessment of you as the type of partner I desperately need.”
“What I said before I left -- you’re a good man. It’s hard to stay good once you start getting exposed to the shadows.”
“So you trust my character,” Harold asserted, “but not my judgment. Or at least, not so far as it concerns you.”
Reese stayed silent. Harold’s knee was throbbing, the swollen joint getting tight beneath the wool of his trousers. But icing it would have to wait.
“Mr. Reese… John,” Harold said softly, “I’ve answered many questions for you today. Would you answer some of mine? Truthfully? I don’t intend to pry into state secrets, so just… give me a straight answer.”
For a long moment, there was only the rise and fall of Reese’s shoulders; then, somewhat jerkily, he nodded.
Harold lowered his gaze. He had to make these count. But where to start?
“When I said you want to protect people, was I very wrong?”
Reese sucked in a deep breath and let it out again. “No,” he said, not looking at Harold.
“Is that what you were hoping for, when you enlisted?”
“Yes.”
“I know that your experience with the military took you to some dark places… made you do things you neither expected nor wanted to do. But setting that aside, do you feel that you were able to protect people?”
“Yes. Some people. Not enough.”
“Would you like to be in a position to help people now?”
Reese choked and dropped his head, folding in on himself a little.
Harold considered. “Do you… still feel that there are people in the world worth saving?”
“Yes,” Reese managed, but his voice was strained.
“Do you think it’s worth it -- trying to save them? Even if we can’t -- even if we fail?”
Reese hesitated, then nodded without raising his head.
“Then… well, I guess there’s only two parts here. Do you think that I am capable of helping people, and willing to do so if I can?”
Another nod.
“Do you think that you are--”
Reese dragged his hands across his face. His breaths came deep, almost desperate, almost as though he were choking back sobs.
“Is it shame?” Harold asked. “Or, perhaps I should say, is shame the primary factor that’s holding you back right now?”
“Harold--” Reese managed, but cut himself off and stayed silent.
“I’ve very thoroughly researched your life, Mr. Reese. If there’s a crime on your list that wasn’t written down, something that I don’t know yet, I don’t see how it could possibly be worse than murder, or torture. You needn’t be afraid that I’ll turn on you after learning what you’ve really done. I know enough about you; I’m not God, so I can’t absolve you, but I also can’t condemn you, and I’ve made peace with your past. I wouldn’t have spent so much time on you if I hadn’t seen something inside of you that makes the rest of it... irrelevant.”
“Irrelevant.” Reese’s voice was shaky.
“We will be doing good, John,” Harold said, then corrected-- “Mr. Reese. I can’t shy from that just because of the mistakes of my past. You and I have both hurt people, but we have a real chance here to help people. Don’t give up on that possibility just because you’ve done wrong.”
Reese swallowed and breathed heavily for a long moment. When finally he looked at Harold, his eyes were half-lidded, dull. “You say that, but you cannot possibly grasp what I’ve done and still think I’m the kind of person you need. The fact that you just don’t get that… that’s what worries me. You’re going to run into other people who are like me, and they’re going to hurt you, because you’re too trusting.”
That one would have forced him to restrain a laugh -- except that Harold’s mind returned, again, to Dillinger, and the consequences of Harold’s inability to trust even his most important asset at the time. He wouldn’t be making the same mistake with Reese.
Studying Reese’s expression, he said, “Do I need to go through a list of the crimes I know you’re responsible for? Or would it be sufficient to point to a couple of specific examples? Torturing innocent civilians for information they didn’t have. Framing other innocents for crimes they never committed. Breaking apart families because the government needed a scapegoat.”
Reese’s face had gone blank again. If he weren’t so used to hiding his emotions… Harold imagined that he would perhaps have looked stricken.
“My naivete is a bit of a mixed bag,” Harold continued, “but you’re wrong if you think I don’t ‘get’ the kind of tasks you’ve performed over the years.”
“You’re the one still trying to get me to work with you, telling me I’m a ‘good man’--”
“You are! Yes, you’ve done horrible, horrible things, things I can barely wrap my head around. You’ve destroyed lives, destroyed families -- I don’t even know the age of your youngest victim, and I’m not sure that I want to, but it doesn’t matter. You’re not trying to justify the things you’ve done, and that means you’re aware that they’re wrong, and you’re capable of putting them behind you--”
“I’m a killer, Harold,” Reese said, his eyes hard but his voice expressionless. “That’s what I’ve spent most of my life doing. I follow orders, I go where I’m told and I shoot the people I’m told to shoot. Sometimes I toss the bodies in the water. Sometimes I melt them down with a lye bath. Sometimes I just leave them where they fell. You gonna tell me you’d be comfortable working with a man like that?”
“You keep saying that, but that can’t be all that you think of yourself,” Harold countered.
“Doesn’t matter what I think of myself. You know why I rose through the ranks. I’m capable of taking orders. They’ve ordered me to do horrible things, and I’ve done them. You really want to be holding my leash, Harold?”
Harold bowed his head, to the extent that he could, and let out a breath. “You asked me earlier, Mr. Reese, if I’d encountered very many violent people. And yes, I have -- far more than I would ever want to, most of them in the past year alone. I can’t pretend to understand their mindsets, but I know them. And while you are certainly capable of violence, you clearly aren’t the kind of person you think yourself to be.”
“What if I am?” Reese’s tone had gone as blank as his expression. “I follow orders, Harold. If I join you, if I start taking orders from you… someday you’re going to order me to shoot someone, and I’m going to do it. You don’t want that on your conscience.”
And Harold suddenly caught the subtext: In Reese’s eyes, the fact that he had killed people made him so tainted that he was trying to push Harold away here. As if the taint could spread.
“You really think I chose you in spite of your skills,” Harold said slowly, keeping his eyes steady on Reese’s face. “Mr. Reese, this job isn’t a tame one. There is almost always a murder involved. Not accidents, not spur-of-the-moment rage, but deliberate, premeditated acts of violence. If I sent someone in there who wasn’t prepared to kill, I’d be sending them to their death. That’s not any better than just sitting by while innocent people die.”
For the first time, Reese looked a little out of his element, as though of all the answers Harold could have given him, this was the one he didn’t anticipate. His mouth came open, but the words didn’t come right away. Then, finally, his voice not as steady as it had been, he quietly verified, “You expect me to kill for you.”
“I expect that you will kill, when necessary, yes. Because sometimes that’s better than the alternative. It has to be a judgment call on your part; I can’t make it. In fact, I have to extend to you the trust that you can and will make good decisions about when and if to kill. If you can handle the encounter without harming anyone -- without undue risk to either yourself or the people we’ll be trying to save -- then please do. But…” He sighed, and looked away. “I don’t like firearms, but I do recognize their necessity. And where an amateur might do worse harm than he meant to, you’ve got the skills to use precisely the amount of force you intend to use.”
Head tilted to the side, Reese was staring at him, as if regarding a rare and precious sight. After a moment, he seemed to breathe easier -- a weight lifted off his shoulders.
“I don’t know that this will ease your mind,” Harold added, “but we’ve more in common than you think. The world thinks we’re both dead, for starters. And… while I’ve never deliberately taken a life, I’m responsible for the deaths of more people than I care to think about -- although I do think about them, often. If you count up the people who have died because of my stupidity, and add them to the people who’ve been targeted for death because of my brilliance… well, even one death would weigh on my conscience, and the number is quite a bit higher than that. And it never stops growing.”
Reese studied him, taking that in. “So, what, this do-gooder routine you’ve got going, that’s to make up for the deaths you caused?”
“Nothing can make up for the deaths I’ve caused. People aren’t interchangeable; that’s not what this is about. But that’s the point: Each individual matters, and we have the opportunity to help some of them, using information no one else in the world has access to. Mr. Reese, you’re used to working with information the general public isn’t privy to, and with this… I need someone with discretion. Someone who can use this information without allowing it to spread, and who has the skill to ghost into situations without leaving too much evidence behind. Without those qualities, this operation would be over before we’d barely started.”
For a moment, Reese looked somber. Then, softly nodding, he said, “I can do that.”
A sudden hope sprang up inside Harold. Was it possible? “Does that mean… are you willing to work with me, then?”
A smile slowly stretched across Reese’s face -- not a large one, not even a particularly pleasant one, but the first Harold had seen from him in person. It pushed the haunted look out of his eyes almost completely.
“Ten minutes ago,” Reese said, “I was sitting on the stairs down there, coming to terms with the fact that I’d just been offered everything I've ever wanted, and I couldn’t take it, because I was too tainted to qualify. And I thought that was it for me. I’d found the point where I was more than just exhausted, where I honestly wanted to give up on life… because the meaning I wanted in my life was something I could never have -- not even if it were handed to me directly by an angel.”
“... dear God. My offer almost killed you.”
“Yeah.” Reese ran a hand over his mouth. “You’re right, you know. When you said I was trying to drink myself to death. Because there’s nothing else left for me. There’s nothing in my life that I care about, or want, not anymore. And here you offer me a chance to make my life into something worthwhile again, to do good, and… if this comes crashing down, that’ll be the end of me. You know that.”
“I do,” Harold admitted, accepting his role as Reese’s lifeline. If there was nothing else he could do for the man, he would at least keep him afloat until he was no longer in danger of drowning.
“So yes, I’ll work with you. And if you’re really everything you appear to be, Harold, then… I’ll pledge my life to your service. As thoroughly as any knight… or bondslave.”
“I don’t want to own you, Mr. Reese.”
“I’m not going to find a better master. And really, serving is what I’m good at.”
“Well… if you must think of it that way, I can adjust. For now. I hope, in time, the metaphor won’t be necessary.”
“Well, if that’s settled, what say we go save Ms. Hansen?” Reese said, getting to his feet. He held out a hand toward Harold.
A smile quirked Harold’s lips for a moment before he accepted the hand and cautiously got up, balancing on his good leg. Reese moved into position at his side; Harold took his arm, and they went down the stairs together, slowly. Each time he had to put weight on his bad knee, Harold winced, and his breath caught, but Reese’s firm support made it possible to keep going without being in danger of another collapse.
“You know,” Reese said suddenly, “when you brought up Jessica, I honestly wanted to kill you.”
Harold blinked. “Thank you for restraining yourself.”
“Barely. I could have done a lot worse. Not even sure why I held back.”
“I still believe what I said: You’re not inherently a killer. You want to protect people.”
Reese stayed silent until they got to the landing. After testing the door to see that it wasn’t locked, he left Harold holding onto the railing and trotted down to grab his suit jacket.
“This is really nice work,” he said as he helped Harold put it on. “I noticed earlier.”
“Earlier as in when you met me, or when you stole all my clothes?”
Reese chuckled. “I knew it was custom-tailored when I met you, but I got to admire the fabric while I was folding it up.”
“The term is bespoke,” Harold said primly, as Reese opened the door for him. “And I don’t mean to belittle your current wardrobe, Mr. Reese, but if you’ll indulge a bored rich guy for a little while, I think it’s high time we set you up with a good tailor.”
As the door closed behind them, Reese held out his arm again. “You don’t want to own me, but you want to choose my clothing for me?”
“For utility as much as appearance. A properly fitted suit won’t restrict your movement in the field, and will get you into more locations than a t-shirt and jeans can. And it shouldn’t be hard to add a few hidden pockets for whatever small tools you need.”
“So, definitely not an attempt to get me out of my clothes as payback, then.”
Harold turned his upper body enough to glare at him.
“Just checking,” Reese said, and pushed the button for the elevator.
“Mr. Reese, I have been through some truly harrowing experiences in my life, and have spent the last year in chronic pain that I will likely never be free of. And yet you managed to concoct a scenario that left me… well, I can’t say that I have ever been as discomfited as I was in that bed today.”
“That was the intention.”
“I’m aware.”
“In the same situation, with the same info, I’d do it again. But for what it’s worth, now that I have a better idea of the kind of person you are… I’m sorry you had to go through that.”
Harold let out an irritated huff.
“Still think you’re gonna pick up bad habits from me,” Reese continued.
“Oh?”
“Maybe not shooting people. But stick around me long enough, pretty soon you’ll be learning to pick locks, plant evidence… next thing you know, you’ll be lying to doctors, making deals with mob bosses, jaywalking…”
“I already lie to doctors, Mr. Reese. And… jaywalking? This is New York.”
“No objection to framing people or palling around with mobsters, then?”
Harold shot him a look. Just then, the elevator doors opened, and Harold limped inside, leaning on Reese’s arm only long enough to get within range of the handrails.
As the doors closed and the elevator began to descend, Harold leaned his head back against the wall and let out a shuddering breath. “You know that part about avoiding stairs for a while?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m afraid our base of operations is less than ideal.”
“Harold, every detail of this setup is less than ideal. But it seems to me we’re still gonna make it work.”
“I appreciate the vote of confidence. Now let’s go help Ms. Hansen… and once that’s done, we can see about your suit.”
Reese grinned. “I’m all yours.”