Work Text:
Sometimes the panic is immediate, nothing more than the next step in a chain reaction, a culmination of responses to one stressor after another. It washes over Holden like gasoline, just begging for a match. The matches come in all different shapes and all different sizes; the sudden appearance of a three foot stack of unorganized documents on his desk, the disorderly pins and tangled threads of a yellowing Atlantan map, the condescending tone of agents that call in every morning from Quantico, a clock ticking, a camera flash, the evening news, the phone ringing off the hook past midnight, the discovery of another body.
Sometimes these things add up until they spill over, leaving Holden with clammy hands and empty lungs, searching for an out. Other times the panic sits latent underneath his skin, just waiting to claw its way through without warning and without cause. It fizzes like bubbles in a glass of Coca-Cola, slowly drifting towards the surface until it eventually pops.
Holden sits on the edge of his unmade bed in his hotel room, picking at a plate of jelly slathered toast and eggs that are too runny for his taste. The television is on and the 7 o'clock morning news is a dull drone in his ears; reports of a carjacking on the East Side, a physical altercation at a diner in the west, an armed robbery in Loring Heights. Holden is glad to hear of lesser tragedies, anything but young bodies being pulled from the river, water running off of brown skin like tears and the muck of the riverbed stuck between limp and sandy toes.
The boy they found yesterday was thirteen years old. His family described him as timid and impressionable, the kind of kid to go along with boys older than him, boys who had long since been hardened by the poverty wracked streets. Like the other victims, the kid ran errands around the neighbourhood for pocket change, carrying groceries, washing cars, fetching cigarettes from local convenience stores.
He was floating downstream in the Chattahoochee when a canoeist spotted him, his leg snagged on a tree branch. He would have done anything for a dollar, a family friend told police.
That makes twenty-two. Twenty-two children have been killed or have gone missing, and Holden knows there’ll be more if this investigation goes on any longer. They could find another this afternoon, another boy in the river or stuffed in an air vent or dumped across the highway sleeper lines or abandoned on a secluded stretch of land that never meets the horizon.
Holden feels the pressure that a ticking clock brings. He feels it from the higher-ups, the media, the community and the families, from Quantico all the way down to Georgia. Some have better intentions than others.
For Ted and the Board of Directors, the reasons are strictly bureaucratic, a means to an end that will lead to preened putting greens and many more country club dinners. Holden feels strung out just thinking of it. He’s stretched thin and bent in every direction and the things he used to hold onto for clarity—his methods, his partner, his own self-assurance—are far from reach. All he has now is a bottle of Valium in his suit jacket and a profile no one believes.
Holden throws the orange slice he’s nibbling at onto his half-eaten breakfast, his appetite fading fast and an awful sour taste coating the inside of his mouth. He slides the discarded plate onto the nightstand and it knocks over a styrofoam cup of coffee he let go cold the night before. It spills onto the shag carpet.
Holden sighs, his chest constricting against his rumpled t-shirt. His lungs feel stiff. He closes his tired eyes and they sting from staring at the television screen. He barely slept last night.
“Shit.”
He wets a towel in the bathroom, gets down on his knees, and begins blotting at the brown stain. The sun is up now and pours in through the slot between the curtains to warm the back of his neck. The room swelters as he anxiously dabs at the carpet. Perspiration gathers beneath his ears and the stain seems to grow, spreading to the rest of the floor like murky river water.
And then Holden feels it; the shortness of breath, the syncopation in his chest, the tightness at the back of his throat that makes his tongue feel swollen and several pounds too heavy. His hands still, then begin to shake, just like clockwork. He falls back on his elbows, kicks his legs out until his back is flush up against the bed frame, hoping that the press of something solid behind him will ease the panic out. It has as little effect as kids in nuclear war PSAs hiding under school desks.
His senses hone in and his surroundings fade as it takes hold of him completely. It feels like a fist is squeezing his heart, squeezing harder and harder until his arteries sprout between bloody fingers like spaghetti through holes in a colander. Saliva pools in his mouth and dribbles past the corners of his lips as he heaves.
He barely hears the first knock on the door, let alone the second. A minute or more passes—Holden can’t tell—and finally the grip around his heart gradually begins to slacken. He breaks the surface, a baptismal release of tension washing over his head to calm his nerves. His breathing slows.
The knocking continues.
“Holden,” comes a stern voice, “I know you’re in there. The ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign is still on the door.”
Not seeing much of a choice, Holden stands, gripping onto the bed sheets to pull himself up off the floor. He wobbles and his chest is still tight like the panic might return at any moment, but he straightens, padding over to the door in socked feet to where Bill is standing on the other side, still knocking with one knuckle. Holden opens it.
Bill barely registers him at first. He goes straight for the pocket of his stark white button down to fish for a packet of cigarettes. Holden blinks at him, trying not to feel ridiculous in his disarray; messy hair, tartan boxer shorts, the t-shirt he slept in last night and the night before. His insomnia stricken face is further marred by the stubble along his jaw, his usual bright eyed and borderline boyish disposition gone. He looks like a cub scout who’s seen better days.
Bill lights his cigarette and the smoke drifts upwards to get caught in the path of the hallway ceiling fan. He smirks around the filter. “You look like shit.”
Holden sighs sharply through his nose, expecting nothing else. The overwhelming smell of tobacco sticks in his nostrils. “Thanks.”
Bill takes another drag of his cigarette. “Ted is calling in from Washington in thirty minutes,” he says matter-of-factly. “He wants us to take it in the conference room downstairs.”
Holden bites at the inside of his cheek, leans over and grips the door jamb. “What for?”
“Beats me.” Bill shrugs, but a flash of recognition passes over his face when he notices Holden’s knuckles turning white. “Could just be another one of his pep talks.”
Holden swallows, unsure, and a pressure settles on either side of his ribcage. It gradually intensifies as a hundred different scenarios crowd his head. Maybe Bill is right, maybe they’ll get some much needed encouragement, or maybe Ted is calling to chew them out about their progress in the case, how they haven’t found any feasible suspects, how boys all over the city are still going missing, how the bodies keep piling up and Bill and Holden can’t spread themselves thin enough to cover every inch of Atlanta soiled by the killings.
Time is ticking.
Bill looks impatiently at his watch. “Get dressed,” he says. “You’ve got ten minutes.”
But all Holden can do is stare blankly, mind racing. Sweat collects on his temples and his pulse pounds in his wrists, tendons flexed.
“Holden, are you alright?” Bill asks. The skin between his eyebrows is pinched as he studies him.
It only makes things worse. Holden takes a step back from the doorway and accidentally bumps into the desk behind him. His legs give out and he slides to the ground. Reeling, he puts his head in his hands and desperately attempts to even out his breath, his lungs stinging, vomit rising in his stomach.
“Whoa,” Bill chides as he steps into the room after him, closing the door with a soft click. He stoops down on one knee and places a hand that’s meant to be comforting on Holden’s shoulder.
By instinct, Holden flinches away. The press of a hand—warm, much bigger than his own, fingers splayed out towards his neck as if to touch his jugular—pulls him back to that dimly lit hospital room, to the sterile stench of bacterial soap and medical equipment, to Ed Kemper and arms as thick as tree trunks tucked around the small of his back. Holden blinks and hot tears spill down his cheeks.
Bill removes his hand, but his eyes stay on him. “Holden, look at me.”
Holden hesitantly lifts his chin from his palms to look up at Bill with red rimmed and bleary eyes. His lip trembles, his teeth clattering together as his body shakes with each exhale. Bill stares down at him with a concern that’s unfamiliar in its intensity. Holden’s face warms with embarrassment and he fears his cheeks are pink.
“Can you breathe?”
Holden nods.
“Do you want me to call an ambulance?”
Holden shakes his head.
“Tell me what you need,” Bill says firmly, but not without gentleness.
“Pills,” Holden manages to reply, his voice strained and garbled in his throat.
“Where?”
Holden shakily points to the suit jacket hung neatly on the back of the desk chair. Bill reaches over and tugs it free. The Valium clatters around in the bottle as he searches the pockets. When he finds it, he pops the cap open and dispenses one baby blue pill into Holden’s outstretched hand. Holden chews it gratefully, the bitter tang coating his tongue and working to relax him like a Pavlovian response. The worst of the panic subsides, but the palpable feeling of dread stays with him like it always does for hours afterwards.
Bill looks relieved as Holden stills, eyes fluttering shut as the remaining tears drip onto the front of his t-shirt. He slumps all of his weight against the leg of the desk and wipes his greasy forehead with the back of his hand.
“Is it over?” Bill asks.
Holden nods. “I think so.”
Bill leans back on his hands, then shuffles over to sit with his back against the closet door across from Holden. They say nothing for a while. Holden is too afraid to speak, afraid that the words will come out strained and half-formed and he will reveal himself to be even weaker than he already is.
Then Bill says, “Do you want to talk about it?”
Holden presses his lips into a thin line. His first instinct is to undermine the severity of the situation, if only to save face. His second instinct is to roll his eyes at Bill for even suggesting they talk it out, but either option seems too cruel, so he stares at the ugly maroon carpet instead. A beat passes, and Holden expects Bill to tell him to go fuck himself, to slam the hotel room door and inform Ted that Special Agent Ford has made an idiot of himself yet again, but Bill does none of those things.
“Holden, say something,” Bill offers instead. Holden, perplexed by his response, is quiet still. Bill sighs and his throat sounds tight, like the air is scraping its way up his windpipe. “Come on, Holden. I suffer enough silences at home.”
Their eyes meet and Holden sees the same resigned expression Bill wore the day Holden parked across from his house, when he watched Brian refuse to say goodbye, head hung and glaring at his sneakers.
“Are you going to tell anyone?” is the only thing that Holden comes up with.
“What?” Bill asks incredulously. He returns to the smoke perched between his fingers. The end is close to going out. He attempts to salvage it, the tip glowing orange as he inhales. “No, of course not. Why would I do that?”
Holden is almost disappointed at his response. Even at his most fragile, he hates that Bill is handling him like damaged goods. “You don’t have to protect me, alright?”
Bill scoffs. “I think I do. Look at yourself.” He motions towards Holden, up and down. “If Ted and the other higher-ups catch wind that the FBI Boy Wonder is crumbling under the pressure of this case, the faith in our little research project will be snuffed out just like that.” He puts the dying cigarette out on the carpet.
“Is that all that matters?” Holden snaps. “Not Angel Lenair, not Patrick Rogers, not Timothy Hill or the twenty other kids whose names we've had to replace with numbers because there are just too many to keep straight? What really matters is this bureaucratic bullshit?”
“You would know,” Bill bites back. “You saw this as an opportunity just like everyone else.”
“And what if we fail to catch the guy? What then?”
“Then we go home.”
Holden sighs sharply through his nose, tongue in his cheek. “Home,” he repeats with a shake of his head. “Why are you even still here, Bill? Do you really give a shit or are you just here to babysit me? Because I can handle myself. Call Ted. Ask for some time off.”
“You really think I have it any easier back home?” Bill sucks at his teeth, hurt deepening the lines on his face. “I have a kid who refuses to talk to me, let alone look at me, and my wife wants to trade in the last bit of normalcy we have to move across town because somehow she thinks it’ll make all our problems go away.”
Bill sounds more defeated than he did yesterday by the river, confrontational even less so. His shoulders are deflated and his head is bowed. He fiddles with his extinguished cigarette to avoid eye contact, peppery ash dusting his fingertips. The guilt lays on Holden heavy and he already regrets letting Bill comfort him. It feels nothing short of selfish, irresponsible, the antithesis of being able to take care of himself. He should have shut the door in his face before he could lay himself bare because now Bill is doing the same. All it does is leave Holden unsure of his place, like everything has tipped off balance again like it had during the OPR inquiry.
“You have your issues, I have mine,” Bill continues, meeting his eyes, “but don’t ever fucking presume I don’t care. I care about this case and I care about you, alright? You scared the shit out of me just now.”
The guilt intensifies. “Bill, your family needs you,” Holden says, a hard lump forming in his throat as he remembers what Bill told him yesterday. “I—this case, I mean—can wait. I can handle it.”
“Holden, you keep saying that and it’s bullshit and you know it. You’re not doing anyone any favours by pretending to be okay.”
“I am okay,” Holden insists. “I promise.”
Bill shoots him a look that in any other situation would be comical. “What the fuck was that then?” he refutes. His face softens along with his tone of voice when he speaks again. “How often has this been happening?”
Frustrated, Holden stands and walks over to the window in an attempt to avoid the question, but Bill just follows suit. Bill sits on the edge of his bed and reaches around in his jacket for another cigarette.
Holden parts the curtains and looks outside. The sun is out in full force to heat the sidewalks until the tar starts bubbling. A group of boys with suntanned skin dressed in denim shorts and sweat speckled tank tops dribble a basketball between one another as they cut through the parking lot. Holden can hear them laughing. Above them, the sky, brushed with wispy cotton clouds, is the colour of Valium. Phosphenes swim across Holden’s pupils like blackened, wriggling tadpoles and he prays the drugs are finally working. The last thing he wants to worry about is whether or not those kids will get back home.
“Answer the damn question, Holden.”
“Every couple days,” Holden says a little too quickly in response, just to get it over with. “Sometimes once a day, sometimes twice. The attack you just saw was my second this morning. I had another just before you came in.”
The cigarette hangs limply in Bill’s mouth. He clasps his hands together, looks down at his dress shoes. “Jesus, Holden. Why didn’t you say anything?”
Holden shrugs. “Since when does my condition matter to you?” He lets the curtains fall back into place. “You look anxious,” Holden quotes from the day before. “Take a fucking Valium.”
“Holden, I had a lot going on and you pissed me off, that’s all,” Bill says in defense, hands upturned on his knees. “You’re pretty good at doing that, y’know.”
“No one lets me forget,” Holden deadpans.
The corners of Bill’s mouth upturn slightly, but his face quickly straightens again. “Do you know why it keeps happening?”
“No, I don’t.” Holden shakes his head. He turns away from the window and sits down on the bed beside Bill. He stares at the coffee stain drying on the floor. “I’m fine in interviews. I’m fine in interrogations. I’m fine when I’m excelling at the things I excel at, but other times I just feel lost.”
Holden thinks about his conversation with Shepard and the panic that followed when he realized his resignation was his fault, that he had missed all the signs that pointed straight to him and consequently made a fool of himself in front of all those very important people. With this case, that same feeling of certainty finds him over and over and over again, at every wrong turn and at every dead end. It leaves him with a ball of guilt held tight in his chest, tangled and unruly like a tumbleweed, with no way to take responsibility for it even if he wanted to.
“Do you feel like you no longer have any control over things? Over the research? Over the case?” Bill asks, and it sounds like a question taken straight off a clipboard. All he needs is a tape recorder, a microphone, and some cuffs.
Holden snorts. “Please don’t look at me like that,” he tells Bill with eyebrows raised. “I’m not a psychopath. I don’t need to control every aspect of my life at all times.”
“Maybe not,” Bill says, “but you always need to be the expert, don’t you?”
Holden groans. “Can we stop playing therapist?”
Bill smirks, looking more than satisfied with himself. It annoys Holden to no end.
“I think this case might finally be getting to me,” Holden says to steer the conversation away from whatever psychosocial crap Bill was getting at. “We have no suspects and no solid leads and it feels like the entire state of Georgia—and Virginia—is breathing down my neck.”
“They’re breathing down everyone’s necks,” Bill says. “We’ll be going home soon. Time’s almost up.”
“That doesn’t help. It certainly doesn’t make me feel any better.”
“I know.”
“I can’t even tell their faces apart anymore.”
“Whose faces?”
“The victims. There’s too many to keep track of.”
“You can’t think about it, Holden,” Bill says flippantly, but it’s probably meant to be reassuring. “You just can’t.”
“Oh, and you don’t?” Holden snaps.
Bill goes quiet at that. He shifts and the mattress springs creak. His cigarette burns down to the nub. Holden watches him intently, like a twitch of his mouth might reveal something.
“Of course I think about it,” Bill says with a half-hearted shrug. “I think about what I would do if it were my kid, if it were Brian.” He takes a puff from his cigarette and blows smoke as if to hide his face from view. “It could have been him.”
Holden frowns. “What do you mean?”
“Those boys Brian was playing with. What if it had been him, not that toddler. It could’ve been him.” Bill exhales, smoke clouding his face like a shroud. “Did I tell you they tied the poor kid to a cross?”
Holden feels his stomach drop, a thousand horrifying images coming to mind. “Jesus fucking Christ,” he swears under his breath, then, “Shit, sorry, poor choice of words.”
Bill laughs through his nose, the kind of laugh people save for the most difficult situations, if only to break up the silence. “It was Brian’s idea. He heard about it in church, thought it might help the boy I guess,” Bill says. “I don’t know. He won’t talk to anyone about it. Not even me.”
“Bill, I’m sorry,” Holden says. “If there’s anything I can do—”
“You can do your job,” Bill states. “Catch this fucker so we can both go home and forget all about this.”
Holden smiles sadly. “Right.”
The air between them feels unbearably heavy. Holden waits for the weariness and the tobacco smoke to clear before silently reaching over and taking Bill’s hand. He fully expects Bill to pull away the moment their fingers lock together, but Bill stays beside him, not even flinching as Holden holds him there, gives his hand a gentle squeeze. Bill’s palms are warm and calloused and any panic that remained, jittering like tiny atoms under the surface of Holden’s skin, seems to disappear.
“That Valium must be working, huh?” Bill asks with an eyebrow raised.
Holden chuckles. “Oh yeah.”
Bill returns his laughter. He looks down at their hands for a painfully tender second, then he stands, letting their fingers fall apart. Bill looks at his watch.
“What should I tell Ted?”
“Shit.” Holden shoots up off the bed. “I can still do the call,” he insists. “Just give me a minute to get dressed.”
Bill shakes his head. “The last thing anyone needs is a fifteen minute Ted pep talk. You should get some rest.” He claps Holden on the shoulder and this time Holden leans into the touch instead of pulling away. “Time to stop pretending.”
Holden follows Bill to the door. He pauses, trying to mull things over in the time it takes for Bill to turn the knob. "Well, then tell Ted the truth.”
“The truth?” Bills asks.
“Yeah, the truth,” Holden reaffirms. “Why should you keep covering for me?”
Bill stops inside the doorway and they share a knowing look, a brief moment of recognition, and things feel heavy all over again. Then Bill offers Holden a small smile, one that Holden returns, and the fleeting feeling dissipates.
“You know why," Bill says.
Holden nods. “Yeah, I know.”
As Bill opens the door to leave, Holden stoops down to pick up his suit jacket from where it fell onto the floor. He turns it over in his hands, examining it. The grey cotton fabric is rumpled and creased along the hem.
“You wrinkled my jacket,” Holden says with a feigned frown.
Bill flips him off on his way out.