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The city is healing but Jim can’t be sure he can say the same about himself.
Sometimes, in the depth of night when everything is as still as it will ever be (Gotham is one of those places that never truly sleeps, after all), Jim would swear blindly he can feel the virus thrumming through his veins. It’s not true, the cure worked, but the nightmares are too real and the memories too vivid for Jim to be spared from the raw fear of self-doubt.
In these moments he will reach for Harvey, trying not to wake him but needing that contact more than anything, and Harvey will always stir and return Jim’s touch, murmuring jumbled words of reassurance in the dark.
“I think I’m drowning,” Jim tells him on one such night, miserable and too exhausted to care about how pitiful he sounds to his own ears.
It’s been weeks and Jim can still feel the monster inside trying to claw free. He can feel exactly how it was to clutch that syringe in his hand as the air in his tomb became thinner and thinner and he can feel the exact moment he weakened and let himself become what he was always fighting off long before the Tetch virus ever existed.
“Not today, partner,” Harvey replies sleepily, rustling the sheets as he edges closer. “Not while I have anything to say about it.”
Jim inhales a shuddering breath as Harvey takes his hand and holds on tight. Harvey has been more patient than Jim deserves as they work together trying to clean up Gotham well enough until the next mess turns up and undoes their already thankless efforts. For the countless time Jim can’t understand Harvey’s compliance with Jim’s bullshit. As acting captain of the GCPD, with what’s happened, Harvey has enough to deal with and Jim can see the strain of it all in the other man’s face every night before they go to bed and switch off the lights. Jim, though, can still feel the unmitigated terror of being buried alive threatening to swallow him whole again and again, caught in a loop of that one moment worse than death as he injected the contents of Lee’s vial into too welcoming skin.
“Jim, look at me,” Harvey orders from his side, pulling him back from the brink like so many times before. “The virus is gone. The cure worked. You know that.”
He does, far beneath the surface of the swirl of disorientation, and he grips Harvey’s hand like the lifeline it’s become and kisses him in an effort to push back the irritation that’s started to creep into Harvey’s voice the last few evenings, not wanting to hear the increasing insistence behind the words when Harvey again mutters things about PTSD and psychiatrists because Jim’s getting worse and not better. Besides, it’s not like Harvey wouldn’t scoff and refuse those things if the roles were reversed, like most of the guys at the precinct. It was one of the few ways in which Jim actually fit in and he sighs as he pulls apart from Harvey, breaking the kiss.
“I’ll be fine,” he tries to insist, horrified at how unconvincing he sounds to even himself. “Just got to finish the clean-up, get the city back to normal.”
Harvey snorts at that.
“Whatever the hell that is.”
Jim could laugh, wants to, except he thinks if he starts he might never stop so he chokes it away by moving for the glass of water on his nightstand and swallowing the remaining contents down in one. He pretends Harvey isn’t watching as his hand trembles when he places the glass back down, light pollution from the city and the full moon beaming in through the window and shattering the cover of darkness.
From this position, sitting up with blankets twisted around his ankles, Jim can see Harvey well enough to make out the exhaustion Jim feels looking back at him like a mirror image, except all the more ugly and unforgiving thanks to the bruising still marring Harvey’s face. Bruising put there by the monster Jim willingly unleashed. Harvey may have urged him to inject but the choice was ultimately his own and Jim reaches out, touches the fading scars and cuts as gently as he can.
“I still can’t believe I - ”
Harvey grabs his hand again, stops him in his tracks.
“It wasn’t you, and I’ve taken much worse knocks than that in my lifetime. You’ve got to let it go. It’s done, it’s over. Same as the goddamn virus.”
The conviction behind Harvey’s words, the squeeze he gives Jim’s hand…Jim closes his eyes against the onslaught of loyalty, the honesty behind it more than anything he’d known before and something he knows he doesn’t deserve, let alone has earned.
No verbal reply seems nearly enough so Jim kisses Harvey again, pouring everything he’s got into it, and when they release some of the weight crushing Jim’s lungs at last begins to ease.
For now.