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Part I – Hands
After a couple of years in a more forgiving climate, Robbie had forgotten how the English cold gets into every part of you. Until he finds himself crouched down beside Hathaway, this new lad who’s somewhat inexplicably attached himself to Robbie as his sergeant, in damply freezing pre-dawn greyness. Watching Laura Hobson, in a mercifully dry ditch below, do her work with the body of some poor sod.
Hathaway’s attention is not focused on the body.
Robbie turns his own head to query the angle of his gaze. “Your hands, sir.” And he becomes aware that in addition to the frigid air stiffening his fingers, his hands have taken on a reddish, mottled appearance. The harsh glare of the lights rigged up around the scene must make them look worse. He starts flexing his fingers to rid himself of the annoying distraction. There’s a job to do here. And Hathaway’s distracted Laura now too. She’s paused in her work to cast a glance up at them. Robbie sends a complicit, exasperated quirk of his eyebrows back at her. But she’s not looking at him. She’s gazing at Hathaway almost as if she’s properly considering him for the first time. And—“You should be wearing gloves,” comes Hathaway’s voice again.
He’s left them back in the car. He explains this, shortly, to Hathaway in his and-there’s-an-end-to-it-now-sergeant tone that doesn’t seem to really register with Hathaway sometimes—or else he chooses not to take it on board whenever it suits his purposes, Robbie’s not quite sure yet.
This appears to be one of those times, judging by the displeased set of Hathaway’s mouth. “No-one could possibly spend any length of time working outdoors on a night like this without wearing gloves—”
“Laura isn’t,” Robbie points out. A feeble argument, admittedly. “Well, not unless you’re counting those—”
“Laura can’t,” Laura says acerbically. “As you’re bloody well aware. Laura, however, is not of the school of martyrdom that requires other people to suffer alongside her.” She seems to have decided to take Hathaway’s side, oddly.
“I’m fine—”
“Here. While I get yours.” And Hathaway’s pulled his own leather gloves off and is holding them, still open, in front of Robbie. Robbie stares at him, taken aback. Hathaway looks back at him, quite open. It seems hard to muster an objection that can outweigh the expectancy of that gaze. Robbie finds himself sliding one hand into one of them and then the other. They’re long-fingered. It makes him think inconsequentially that Hathaway had said he plays guitar.
Through the patchy numbness that had set in he can feel the wool lining of the gloves, still warm from Hathaway’s hands. It’s unexpectedly intimate. Hathaway, satisfied, rises from his crouched position, turns on his heels above Robbie and retreats.
Laura looks up at Robbie again. She purses her lips slightly and then draws her eyebrows down and just sends him a look. There’s a lilt of delight in her expression.
“Stop that,” he tells her, distracted. He’s looking after Hathaway, who's striding back down the path towards the car, hands shoved down into the pockets of his long coat.
“And how’s your new sergeant working out?” Laura enquires gravely.
Part II - Walking Wounded.
Robbie’s not particularly sure how some of these rounds of polite wrangling even get started. Well—polite on Hathaway’s part. Technically. But it’s not like Robbie hasn’t started to work out how to interpret the array of looks that tend to accompany Hathaway’s deceptively mild words.
Working with Hathaway—it’s undeniably interesting. He keeps taking you by surprise, the odd mixture that he is. He sort of livens you up and brings an unexpected touch of humour to your days at the most unexpected moments. Keeps you on your toes. But this particular dispute is one that Robbie needs to win. Even if his current position—sitting in his own armchair, one foot elevated on a stack of cushions carefully arranged on the ottoman—is rather undermining his stance. Hathaway, after briefly providing a strong arm to assist Robbie into his flat, has patently failed to leave and dropped down on Robbie’s couch. The sheer undeniable fact of that injured ankle lying there between them seems to have triggered something in him, emboldening him.
“It’s a sprain, sergeant. Confirmed now. That’s all it is. I’m sure I can hobble around and cook me own dinner.”
“I’m sure you can,” Hathaway agrees. “Hobble around, that is. Even though you have been told to rest it,” he mutters to himself. “Cooking dinner though,” he continues, eyeing Robbie with a look that tells Robbie that he’s been sitting on this one for a while. “Well, that’s another matter. Isn’t it, sir?”
“I meant I’d take something that Sainsbury’s so kindly prepared for me earlier from the freezer and stick it in me microwave.”
“I know you did,” says Hathaway, with a sigh. “That’s what I meant. Seriously, sir, how do you live off those travesties?”
“An’ here was me going to invite you to stay and we could’ve had matching meals for one each.”
There’s a momentary flash of unexpected pleasure in his sergeant’s eyes. One minute he’s insulting the food on offer and the next he’s looking like he’s taken that joke as seriously as a formal dinner invitation and he’d actually like to—
“I think we can do better than that,” he resolves. “I’ll cook.”
He’ll do what? Well—he knows his way around the place. From being here in the mornings if he arrives early and makes coffee or a bit of toast when he’s waiting for Robbie. Or from the evenings when he appears on some case-related matter or other, opening a beer and comfortably collapsing on that couch for a bit—but cook? That’d be a shock to Robbie’s kitchen.
“Nothing there to cook with, Hathaway. Unless you mean beans on toast.”
Hathaway regards him askance.
“Be off with you now. Go on. I won’t starve. Can always get a takeaway delivered. You’re dismissed, sergeant. See you in the morning—”
“I can nip out and get ingredients,” Hathaway decides, his face clearing as he chooses to ignore his governor’s instructions entirely. He’s like a lanky cheerful limpet when he gets like this—impervious to Robbie’s rebuttals and moods. Deliberately so, too, Robbie’s figured out by now. But maybe sharing that thought with him might just offend him enough to get him to leave of his own accord—
“You’re like some sort of lanky limpet, you are—”
“Generally when people use a shellfish metaphor to describe me they prefer to go with clam,” Hathaway says, interested. Well—Robbie’s not about to dispute that. “But you do like to take the road less travelled, don’t you, sir?”
Robbie does? You couldn’t get much more normal than Robbie.
“I’m pretty sure that’s how CS Innocent would put it anyway—well, if she was looking to reference Frost. At the moment, I’ve heard she goes with unorthodox. Sometimes upping it to positively renegade. But that’s just on a bad day, sir,” Hathaway finishes in confiding tones.
“I’m not sure she’d say I give her that many good days.”
“I think she’s getting to like you—despite herself. And she definitely likes it when you solve cases. She just wishes you’d do it in more usual fashion. Ruffle less feathers in the process. Not undermine what she feels is proper procedure—it’s frustrating for her, that’s what I think.” He’s settling himself there on the couch, as he warms to his topic, making himself more comfortable. And Robbie suddenly feels an odd lack, sitting here in this chair.
He’d normally drop down on his couch beside Hathaway. Who has this contradictory way of being so unforthcoming and guarding his privacy that fiercely about some things, talking away but never revealing too much about anything too personal somehow, unreachable almost—and yet you suddenly find that he’s sharing your space with you quite comfortably. Robbie doesn’t object. Well, be hard to, wouldn’t it now? He tends to not really process that they are comfortably sitting that close to each other. Again. Until he starts to feel slightly more cheerful and becomes aware of the sensation of that accommodating warmth right against him.
“It’s when you blithely ignore her processes and in doing so get there by intuition.” Hathaway is still educating him. In his theories on Innocent’s mysterious inner workings. “It’s the combination really—your success rate seems to go up at the times when you’ve managed to ignore precisely what she’s said about proper procedure. And that’s got to be frustrating when she’s an excellent detective herself and she feels that just following her procedures—”
“She’s creative in her bureaucracy, I’ll give her that.”
“That’s an oxymoron…”
“Takes one to know one, sergeant.”
This time he’s thoroughly, instantly indignant. “Are you calling me a—”
“No, I’m sayin’ you’re a bloody contradiction in terms yourself. Contrary sod that you are.” Strangely, that seems to pacify him. Apparently you can insult his personality as long as you don’t cast aspersions on his intelligence. Must not be the first time he’s been called contrary. Well, Christ—how could it be? Which gives Robbie another idea—
“You can stay here tonight, if you like, then,” he suggests. “The better to keep an eye on me.” Giving in easily. That’ll get Hathaway feeling he’s won this round. And get him worried that he’ll be stuck here, kipping on his boss’s couch. He’s too dignified and carefully put together to spend a night on someone’s couch, isn’t he? Robbie eyes him, enjoying the thought of watching him back his way out of this one.
Hathaway’s face doesn’t move a muscle. You wouldn’t actually want to be trying to get information out of this one in an interrogation room. He’d make a bloody great spy.
“That’d be best, sir,” he agrees. “I can give you a hand in the morning with anything that needs to be done and then, if you’re still going in tomorrow, we can leave a bit early and stop off at mine for me to change. Shall I make tea?”
Make tea? Tea? That’s his response? Had he planned this all out already? It’s not actually the worst plan, technically but—did Robbie just walk into that one?
“Don’t you have better things to do with your time off?” Robbie tries, suddenly curious. “Places to go, people to see, medieval madrigals to—strum at?”
“Practice is tomorrow night,” James informs him.
What else does he do in his time off anyhow? Robbie tries to picture it. “Book to read?”
“Well—can’t actually get to sleep without reading, just a bit,” Hathaway confides. “But I’m sure you’ve something here that I’d find—” He stops. “Although—” And he runs to a halt again, casting a dubious look at Robbie’s shelves. His confidence, which Robbie rather suspects is more a cheerfully impervious front than anything else, seems to falter for the first time. It occurs to Robbie that he may really be doing this determinedly unruffled act since he doesn’t quite want to be sent away. The thought makes little sense but there it stays.
And, actually, there is reading material in the flat that’d run more to Hathaway’s taste. Books kept for reasons beyond their contents. Odd books and plays that Robbie had been handed unceremoniously by Morse, over the years, in an everyone-should-appreciate-these-Lewis sort of a way. Some of which quite took Robbie’s fancy and some of which were very—Morse. And then there are particular favourites of Val’s that, come to think of it, Hathaway would probably approve of. Then his sergeant’s face clears. “Ebook,” he says in relief. He means on his little device. “I don’t much like the idea of them but they’re great for emergencies.”
Only Hathaway would have an emergency book. Robbie’ll warrant that he doesn’t mean a manual for survival in the wilds either. It’s so entirely Hathaway that Robbie just gives up.
“Take my wallet.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, sir.” And he’s up, shrugging back into his suit jacket and heading off. Robbie will have to make sure he pays him back later. Maybe in pints. But the door has barely closed behind his sergeant when his mobile starts up in his pocket and he shuffles awkwardly to get at it. Lyn had rung earlier when he was waiting at the clinic to be seen.
“Did they x-ray it, Dad?”
“Aye, pet, it’s just a bad sprain.”
“You’ll need to keep it elevated—”
“I am, stop fretting now. It’s fine. I won’t have to move.” I’ll barely be allowed to. “Me sergeant’s here. Well, he’s gone out to get something to cook with. He’s helping out—”
“He is?” And then Lyn is overcome with laughter.
“An’ what’s so funny?”
“Sorry, Dad. That’s great, honestly. It’s just suddenly hit me—it’s like you and Morse when he’d have you doing all sorts—” and she’s off again.
“I don’t have him doing all sorts,” Robbie says grudgingly, not exactly willing to admit to any parallels here yet.
“I must email Mark and tell him how you’ve got your very own sergeant—I should’ve guessed when the two of you were listening to music together—that’s just like you and Morse too, although you never had a choice in what music you got subjected to then, did you, Dad? He did get you into opera, eventually, I suppose. God, I don’t know whether it’s karma that you’ve earned your own sergeant or poetic justice—”
What is the lass on about? “Lyn, you know Hathaway’s been assigned to me for a while now. And you know full well I’ve had sergeants before him—”
“Not like this one. Not one who comes around and cooks. Mind you, that’s one thing you never did—you never cooked for Morse, did you? Well, not like you could cook for anyone, Dad. Does he cook, your sergeant?”
He wishes she’d stop saying your sergeant in that delighted tone of voice. Like Hathaway is some kind of fixture that’s slotting into Robbie’s life, filling different ill-defined roles like Robbie had maybe done a bit for Morse. Although for someone so reticent and not exactly social—and Robbie would have been surprised, really, if Hathaway had had some lively social event to attend tonight—well, he does seem to be quietly placing himself into Robbie’s life. He’s sort of just—there. When you turn around. Should be well annoying actually. Should be. It’s hard to make head or tail of in some ways—
“Remember how it used to drive Mum mad when Morse would have you called back in? Or he’d just call in the middle of things when you’d actually made it home at a decent hour, with some random-seeming thought or instruction? And she’d be gesturing madly at you that dinner was on the table…” Lyn’s voice trails off a bit. “She’d have hated to have you living off ready meals, wouldn’t she?” she starts again in a different tone. And then there’s a pause on the other end of the line now, far away in Manchester. “I’m glad you’ve got someone there, Dad. Glad you’ve got a sergeant.”
Part III - Impossibilities
They don’t get very far once they leave the courthouse and Simon Monkford behind. To the prospect of his incarceration. They get across the busy road all right. As Oxford, oblivious, goes on about its normal business. For a moment it seems that that’s what they can manage to do too, even in the face of this. That it’s done now, irrevocable, and he’s thanked Hathaway for coming with him and now they can just—But then Robbie hits a wall. He finds his steps slowing, his forward momentum fading, and he’s turning abruptly where there’s no turn to make, faced with a literal wall in the warm golden bricks of Oxford stone. He’s helpless to do anything that makes more sense, in the face of the reaction that’s risen up within him with breath-robbing suddenness.
There’s that hand on his arm again, closing on his elbow and not letting go this time. A different clasp than that brief reach at the top of the flight of stairs, a minute ago. Before they’d descended out into this overbright sunlight—“C’mon, sir. In here.”
When the world starts to assume solidity again, it’s dingy and shadowed. The windows in here are too low and not the cleanest and the wooden table is vaguely sticky under Robbie’s palm as he lowers himself into a chair. And maybe it’s the right sort of place to come to if you're going to seek alcohol at this hour when the pubs are barely open. Maybe it’s the right place to come to when you’ve just had the most forcible of reminders of how your comfortably pictured joint future had disappeared those years ago in one moment on Oxford Street. When one half of you was keeping the parts that made up all of everyday life going, in her own particular fashion, just shopping for Christmas, and the other half was working back here in Oxford on a case in St Matilda’s.
“If you want something harder, I’ll get it for you.” James, who must’ve left for a moment, is putting a pint glass down on the table. Unsure. It’s early enough that maybe he’s worried how much drinking it’ll lead to if he does hand Robbie something that’s more like what Robbie needs right now.
James has only got orange juice himself, incongruously bright in its glass in these surroundings, held in his hand as he hovers. Robbie’s own habitual drink as a sergeant. Back then. Before. Robbie should probably locate something to say about tonic water and spurious glamour. James in the Randolph just a short time ago. Make some joke about that.
James waits. “Do you want me to…”
Robbie angles his head at the seat opposite. It’s the only instruction he can come up with for now. It’s enough, though.
When you have a sergeant who can sense that there’s some need to put that much into following up on a petty conman, as you’ve now discovered that he did. Who knew somehow that he was close to something that they needed to find—and maybe that was just because he’d taken the sheer fact of your immoveable grief on board and never tries to shy away from it, never undermines it. When you have a sergeant who has internalised the injustice and the bloody wrongness of it all until he’d somehow found himself right in the place that Monkford’s sister had said the date when the world changed and James had just known, as instantly as Robbie would have himself. When you have a sergeant like that he’ll just sit when and where you need him to.
So you can just sit for a while yourself and not be required to take part in the fiction that the world outside is still turning unchangeably on its axis.
The traffic roars past, still jarringly loud through these inadequate windows. Passers-by continue to go about their business. This pub, which probably deserves to be deserted if the flatness of their beer is anything to go by, stays back apart from it all. He looks across at James, who had tried to get him to stop his desperate search at Oswald Cooper’s house with all those press clippings when there was no hope at all of finding this man. And who had then refused to leave him when Robbie couldn’t stop. And who’s now somehow found him anyway for Robbie.
There are certain undoubted truths that James, apparently devoting his full attention to watching the street, could offer here. Other folk will be offering them over the next while, after all. Sometimes it gets worse again before it gets better. It has to help in the long-term. At least they’ve got him now. All softly implying that Robbie can move on now. All undeniable. And wholly inadequate. All failing to do justice to the still-incredible fact of her death.
There had been a court reporter there today too. There’ll be another press cutting generated now. The neatly summarised facts of this. Or a more personal piece with a sympathetic tone. Tidying up the story of Robbie’s loss with this as its ending. More people with something to say about this. More people with their opinions.
James, gazing straight out the window, knows to say nothing at all.
Part IV – A Firm Support
James, entering the office, stops abruptly before he trips and stares down at Robbie, his startled expression yielding to one of resignation. “I’m getting the strangest feeling of déjà vu here, sir…”
Fair enough, Robbie had first found that adopting this position on the floor helped with spasms in his back during—well, that case. Oswald Cooper. A couple of years back now. Back then, James had simply expressed his feelings with his eyebrows and commenced briefing Robbie. He gets the feeling he won’t be getting quite such an easy go of it this time. He assumes his best casual expression now. “D’you get that report?”
James eyes him.
“Go ahead, sergeant.”
“Just—let me help you up and drop you home.”
“No need. I’m fine. Be perfectly all right shortly. Just—admiring the ceiling.”
James casts a long-suffering glance upwards at it. It manages to convey both his scepticism at this atrocious effort and let him mask the fact that he is effectively rolling his eyes at his inspector.
“What are Laura’s final conclusions, Hathaway?”
“It’s just official confirmation on the tox screen to add to the file—this is ridiculous, sir. We’re not on an active case. There’s no need for you to be here like this—”
Well, he wouldn’t have come in if he’d felt quite this bad when he’d left the flat. Driving in has made the situation worse, but there’s no need to reveal that to James.
“Driving in probably made it worse, didn’t it? You should have called me—”
Robbie had thought of it, actually. He’d emerged, slightly lightheaded, from a shower that had had to be longer and hotter than usual in an effort to ease his back and he’d reached for his mobile without much conscious thought. Just an instinct that somehow the answer to prevent this ominous, stiff discomfort from gathering weight and force into pain, was James. It had been such an odd moment that when he thinks back now that he can only attribute it to that lightheaded state.
Anyway, he’d discovered a text already waiting, informing Robbie that James would pick this report up from Laura en route to the office. And the text had been sent some time before so that his sergeant would have had to backtrack through rush hour traffic to collect him.
The firm relief of the floor is not really doing its work though. And the painkillers, which should be starting to kick in, don’t seem to be quite up to their task either. He probably just needs to give it a little longer.
James is skirting carefully around him now and looms briefly above Robbie’s head, before—surprisingly—settling himself right down on the floor, his own back propped against the side of Robbie’s desk. As if he simply intends to stay down here too for the duration. “You really should see someone about this, you know,” he says ruefully. Like he doesn’t really expect Robbie to listen.
“It’ll be fine, shortly. Just a twinge.”
“A twinge,” says James flatly, staring down at him, “is making you lie on our office floor?”
“Aye. A twinge.”
“Ay, a scratch, a scratch,” mutters his sergeant to himself.
“What’s that?”
“Marry ‘tis enough. Then the bloke dies soon after he says that. Romeo and Juliet.”
It just would be somehow, wouldn’t it? “An’ what did I tell you about quoting the balcony scene at me in the office, sergeant?”
“That was Mercutio. Who seems to have shared your undoubted gift for understatement regarding suffering, sir.” Suffering and endurance. The bedrock of a happy marriage. Or so his sergeant apparently thinks. James casts another glance down at him. “I ran into Innocent on my way back, she mentioned something about still needing to discuss that report with you later…” If he’s trying to unnerve Robbie now, he should know better.
“Aye, she’s a bee in her bonnet about it. I met her earlier.” He’d been making his stiff, slow and uncomfortable way to his office, hoping to meet as few people as possible, after the way his back had finally seized up in the car, and had, naturally, encountered Innocent around the first corner he’d negotiated. He grimaces, remembering her silent look of sceptical appraisal. It had only deepened after he’d got in a pre-emptive shot and assured her that he was fine.
“Indeed,” she’d said dryly. “Well. Just as well you are, isn’t it, Inspector? Thank you for offering that information, a propos of nothing. Useful to know. Since our perfectly adequate and, dare I say, highly applicable sickness absence criteria are apparently not to your liking?”
James, generally unable to withhold his ready sympathy even when he’s frustrated by you, gives in. “It’s okay,” he says, reluctantly relinquishing his trump card, “You know she’ll have headed off by now to that monthly meeting—”
He stops as their office door is pushed open but not as far as it might be, as it rebounds off the soles of Robbie’s shoes. Robbie suppresses an oath at the vibration and a sigh at the sight of Innocent’s enquiring face appearing. Innocent, her gaze travelling slowly downwards, also looks like she’s struggling with several conflicting things she’d quite like to give voice to. She steps neatly into their office.
“Or maybe not,” mutters James to himself. “Ma’am,” he says, obligingly, rising to his feet with an enviable ease and standing there, hands clasped behind his back, right above Robbie’s head. As if this is a perfectly ordinary office tableau that he’s now participating in.
Robbie looks up at him and abruptly knows that maintaining this position on the floor is a better proposition than trying to struggle upright. Because he can suddenly see, with a conviction borne of knowing James, what will happen. Those firm arms will instantly reach to support him if he makes a move, and will take most of the task and help him upwards with a gentleness belying their strength. And then James’s hands will linger very briefly on his back, warm through Robbie’s shirt, a quick comfort, steadying Robbie. He can feel it happening, can feel clearly how they would do this, the sensations of it, with a surety that he can’t quite deny. And he finds that having James’s hands on him, like that, however briefly—for some reason it’s just not something that he wants to happen under the mercilessly observant gaze of his Chief Superintendent.
And it is merciless. Innocent is still staring down at Robbie. Apparently she does not appreciate her officers going to such lengths to remain in her station. “Lewis—” she starts. Then she obviously changes her mind mid-sentence. “Sergeant,” she says instead, a note of relieved confirmation in her voice. Although she doesn’t remove her gaze from Robbie. Her eyebrows can’t rise any higher than that, can they? Robbie had thought that the more unpredictable of James’s various comments had tested the upper limits of their reach over the years. Turns out he’d been wrong.
“Ma’am,” says James’s voice agreeably.
“Sergeant, just—I’m putting you in charge. You can consider it a temporary promotion. I’m reversing the chain of command for today. Team-building exercise. You can do whatever’s necessary to get him to go home and lie on his own floor. Or his bed if you actually have the power to persuade him to such orthodox courses of action. Think about what a rational being would do when they’re injured and use that as your role model. Just get him—”
“There’s that report, ma’am,” Robbie interjects in his best matter-of-fact tones, largely because he doesn’t much like being talked over as if he’s an actual corpse here. “Deadline’s tomorrow.”
Innocent closes her eyes briefly and inhales. “Just—get him out of my station, sergeant. And what exactly do you expect to get done today, Robbie? Apart from functioning as some sort of giant doorstop…” She shakes her head as if she’s rather trying to shake off the whole encounter which she’s unwittingly walked straight into, disrupting even the semblance of order that she strives to impose on her domain, and departs swiftly.
“Hmm,” says James. And he resettles himself down on the floor at Robbie’s head, dropping easily into sitting tailor-fashion now. He’s dead flexible. Athletic and flexible and his arms are dead strong. And it’s privately a relief that he’s going to help Robbie up with those strong arms and get him home somehow. Although—he doesn’t seem to be making any move to do so. In fact he’s gone suspiciously quiet. Robbie tilts his head back to look up at him. James has a considering look on his face now. He’s in no hurry. Just musing.
“What, sergeant?”
“She’s put me in charge,” answers James. Slowly. Contemplatively. Pleased.
“She’s—” Oh, Christ. Mercutio might have had a point. This could prove fatal after all.
Part V - Heart
The callout comes in the early hours of the morning. Three forty-eight. Robbie knows precisely when since he’s not asleep.
They weren’t meant to be at the top of the on-call rota, today. They’ve been bumped up the list for some reason that remains unestablished. By rights it should have been a quiet day. It turns into anything but. It develops into a frustrating, chaotic, rather confused weight of a day with the conflicting pulls of the effort of getting through it and the surges of stress that come with closing in on suspects that are being thoroughly obstructive and you can’t quite get a handle on why.
James, who knows, just rather miraculously redoubles his already-diligent efforts to compensate for any lack on Robbie’s part. And the afternoon finds them far enough from Oxford but maybe not too far, maybe there’d still be time—except that as Matthews is guided into the car by the uniforms Robbie knows, full well, that with the leads this could engender they need to head back to the nick as well and start questioning the bloke. And he feels the last hope, rather futile in any case, slip away.
They glimpse the car repeatedly on the frustrating journey back. Right up until they’re back in Oxford and they lose it at a junction. James, having failed to make the light, comes to a halt. His car seems overheated now. The rain washes against the windscreen, and any pedestrians are keeping well back from flowing gutters and the inconsiderateness of their fellow man when he’s behind a wheel in the build-up to rush hour. Making it seem like a hazy, grey, impossibly desolate world. Robbie gazes out his own window and says nothing. There’s nothing much to say. James is casting barely-there glances at him, as he has been all day.
It’d be annoying, coming from anyone else, this level of surveillance.
Robbie straightens his shoulders trying to broaden an entry for the rather suffocating, recycled air in the car. Later he’ll figure out that that one small gesture was the tipping point for James. Because as the lights change in their favour, James, signalling to turn right, clicks his indicator down to signal the opposite, cranes his neck to check there’s nothing coming and swings left instead.
“What’re you—” But Robbie knows where he’s headed.
James says nothing.
“James. Nice thought. But back to the station now. Swing a right here.”
His sergeant carries straight on.
“James—”
“No. We’ll be at the station until all hours tonight now.” Something about the way he’s gazing straight ahead tells Robbie that he’s finding this rather hard to do. There’s a note of anger somewhere underneath the sheer stubbornness in his tone.
“I know. It’s all right.”
“It isn’t.” Maybe it’s anger at a world in which you do the job that it turns out a part of your inspector’s soul needed done for years, you find the man who killed his wife this day those years ago, and he’s put behind bars. And yet you can’t mend this for him. It should be possible to locate the words to tell his sergeant that that mattered. That the days still come, like this, but that that mattered. Then again, James will likely know.
“Half an hour one way or the other won’t hurt.” James is arguing, almost with himself. “Matthews isn’t going anywhere. I’ll—” He doesn’t say what he’ll do to ward off the consequences of this. Their both going absent without leave at this particular highly noticeable juncture. For just long enough to allow this to happen.
And Robbie doesn’t ask because the dull weight that’s been in his chest since he woke this morning has somehow eased a little as they turn down a quieter road now. Maybe—
James clicks his windscreen wipers back a notch in deference to the rain easing just a little.
They’re that close now, it’s hardly worth making him turn around—
“Pull in at the—” But he is already. Robbie gets out of the car at the small row of shops and draws his coat around him, preparatory to a soaking. But he finds as he gets out that he’s almost directly outside the florists. The awning, inadequate shelter against rain that carries in on gusts of wind, hasn’t prevented drops from gathering throughout the day on the bunches outside which look impossibly bright. Roses. Out of season now and better in the summer on her birthday. But she’d just liked them.
When he glances out, as he waits for the florist to finish, he seems to look straight into the direct, waiting gaze of his sergeant. Right through the light-reflecting double barrier of front window-pane and car windscreen and the obscuring rain in between. James, just right there throughout their hopeless day. Holding his phone to his ear now, no doubt smoothly giving God-knew-what excuse to account for their delay.
When he gets back in the car James is just waiting, his hands on the steering wheel. The rain has eased a little further even if dusk has begun to move in. And as Robbie sits back in his seat, in the cooler, easier air of the car now, he slips the hand unburdened by a plastic-wrapped cone of flowers across to the slightly damp wool of James’s forearm and finds himself giving it a brief press. A gesture which could almost be part of his own rebalancing, his settling himself. James’s eyes slide sideways to his before he turns the key in the ignition.
At the cemetery, further darkness gathers in the shadows of stone walls and the streetlamps in the surrounding road start to expand from bulb-shaped spots of light to glows that triangulate outwards. The rain falls within the triangular patches they cast. By the time Robbie is ready, rising from his practiced efforts at flower-arranging, and turns to find him, James, who knows, like no-one else on earth does, how to remove his presence when need be—and yet be right nearby as soon as you might look for him—is standing down the path, as he did on the first day they met. This time he seems willing to hold the whole chaotic world at bay so that Robbie can at least have this today.
It’s a more bearable steady drizzle now. No real hope of it letting up altogether but doable. Something you can stand in and not be too distracted or turned away by.
“Been a long one today, bonny lass,” Robbie starts. Within the privacy of this guarded space that’s been created for him. So that he can yield up just a little of what he’s been carrying all day. The way he used to do with her.
James, further down the path, collar up on his long wool coat, hands resting in pockets, waits.
Part VI- Half-Heard Truths.
Robbie raises a hand to this infernal mask, to pull it aside in an attempt to speak more clearly. A smaller hand, which turns out to be Laura’s, immediately comes over his. “Don’t try to talk, Robbie, leave that on till your levels improve and they’ll let you move to a nasal cannula instead then. Plus you’ll be out of here much sooner.” She’s standing beside him, almost level with him as he lies here, raised up on these pillows—
Robbie releases the mask and starts to take his bearings. Well, this is not good. But it’s an uncommon relief first of all to spot James behind Laura, quirking his eyebrows in reassuring fashion at Robbie now. Because the last thing he can remember of James is a Sir, a very insistent, rather panicked Sir, as the world went dark around him, and then even a Robbie. And things must’ve been bad if James had finally resorted to his name. And then there are vague memories of coming to in an ambulance with this mask on amongst efficient strangers.
James would’ve needed to drive the car here, of course. Here apparently being a small room in the familiar setting of the John Radcliffe. Although Robbie is not used to regarding it from the vantage point of the person in the bed.
But they’d been out chasing down a lead on a bugger of a case that’s going frustratingly nowhere, revisiting the crime scene in a wooded area a short tramp from the car park, when—this—must’ve happened.
He becomes aware that Laura is eyeing him, pressing her lips together. Obviously with something to say and trying to restrain herself. “I’ll let them know you’re properly awake but—look, Robbie—you were told you to go to your GP sooner.”
It’s a bit unexpected, that—seems a bit unlike her to start reproaching him just at this moment. Although, fair enough, yes, she had said. The last time he’d seen her, a couple of days back, she’d frowned sharply when he’d inconveniently developed one of those monumentally annoying coughing fits that have been punctuating his day at odd moments, left over from this—well, what Robbie had assumed was a dire cold. Hardly worth the whole palaver you had to go through to get an appointment these days. And he’d have had to wait days, anyway, not being an urgent case. He’d have been better before he’d been seen. Well. Or so he’d thought…
“Get that seen to, Robbie,” she’d advised. “I mean it. You’re not recovering the way you should be.” And she’d also followed up by text once or twice, come to think of it. He’d had to be rather creative with his evasions—
“Yes,” says James fervently. He’d been eyeing Robbie increasingly dubiously over this. Especially today, when that ruddy fever seemed to be making a belated return. He’d actually threatened earlier to haul Robbie off to his own GP as an emergency case that evening. Robbie had had to half-heartedly agree to finally making an appointment with his own just to avert the risk of James making an unplanned detour en route to that ill-fated visit to the crime scene. After that whole episode with the dentist he really wouldn’t have put it past James to take him hostage.
That’s a bit much coming from you, he wants to joke at his sergeant now, though. James not being the world’s best at conceding when he might need medical care himself, despite his own various misadventures. But it’s largely that he needs to get that look out of the lad’s eyes. It’s bothering Robbie, that look, under James’s apparently cheerful demeanour. He doesn’t particularly want to think about what’s put it there.
So he describes a circle with one hand, motions pouring with the other and then pats the black rubber of the little circle-shaped valve at the base of his mask. “Circle,” James starts immediately, “circumference, pouring, rubber, black rubber…”
“Given the context, I’d imagine he’s making a comment on pots calling kettles black,” says Laura. She doesn’t sound very appreciative.
James is quite annoyed. “I could’ve got that one, given a moment. Although that’s a rubbish sign for pot—”
“—And that’s no defence at all,” Laura is continuing, undeterred. “Even James would have had the basic self-preservation instincts to insist on seeing a GP once—”
“Even James?” interrupts the man in question, torn from his frustration at losing to Laura in Robbie’s impromptu game of charades by this. “What’s that mean—even James?”
“That you’re both as bad as each other but he’s worse,” Laura informs him. “Which applies to quite a few things, actually,” she mutters to herself.
“That doesn’t even make any sense—” James starts, after a short pause.
“It certainly does from where I’m standing.” Robbie hopes, largely for his own sake, that James isn’t tempted to step over to where Laura’s standing to consider that. He doesn’t think it’d go down too well with Laura at the moment.
Laura gives a sigh which could be exasperation or something more wistful. Robbie can’t quite get eye contact with her as she turns to leave the room. “They’ll want to do more checks now, Robbie. I’ll get someone.”
James drops into the closest chair to the bed and scoots it a bit closer, watching her leave. “I think she’s annoyed with you,” he informs Robbie, in wondering tones. “She’s hiding it well but I’m a detective. I see these things.”
Robbie tries not to laugh since he knows what sort of coughing bout that might trigger. Anyway he’s not quite sure that James has that one right. There was something in Laura’s manner there that Robbie can’t quite put his finger on—she hadn’t seemed exactly annoyed with him so much as—
“This is where you’d like to say “Aye” isn’t it?” James asks. “We’ll have to invent you a sign just for that. So you can still sign with your own particular accent.” Robbie taps his eye. “Oh, this is just a golden opportunity for you to make awful puns now,” James mutters.
When the doctor appears, and James is temporarily evicted, Robbie learns that he has suspected pneumonia, that they want this mask on him until his carbon dioxide levels become more respectable and that then there’ll be this nasal cannula which turns out not to be as bad as it’d first sounded there. At least he’ll be able to talk properly. And that the IV currently inserted in his hand is delivering an antibiotic as well as fluids but they hope to switch him to oral antibiotics. So that all going well he shouldn’t actually be in too long and can recover at home as an outpatient. From pneumonia. Bugger.
When the doctor departs, though, it’s Laura who returns. Alone.
Back a fair while ago now, they’d finally given their relationship a proper go of it but it had rather confusedly failed to take off. It didn’t make much sense really—Laura had seemed like the obvious person to try to move forward with. And he’s that fond of her. But when it had become apparent that it wasn’t working out, his main fear had been that he’d messed up that easy, forthright friendship of so many years with her. That there’d be a distance between them and they’d be reduced to awkward pleasantries at work. Pleasantries? With Laura? Didn’t bear thinking about.
Robbie had fairly rapidly discovered that he needn’t have worried. Laura still feels free to speak her mind to him whenever she feels the need to do so, just as much as ever. Whether he’s quite looking for it or not. And he was right about that feeling he got from her earlier. There is something she’s intent on saying.
“There just wasn’t any need for this, you know, Robbie. It could very likely have been avoided if you’d just taken a bit of time off, gone to your GP, taken antibiotics—you wouldn’t be in here, you wouldn’t have risked lung damage and you wouldn’t have done that to James—”
Robbie, who has to privately concede that, all right, so she has a point here, had been attempting a mildly resigned expression to make her feel like he’s taking all this on board. But finding himself in this situation suddenly stops being mainly the cause of a fairly disorientating frustration—He taps her arm.
“What? Oh, honestly, what kind of effect did you think this had on James? You collapsed right there with him when he was his own with you. You pretty much blacked out, Robbie, and it took long enough to get an ambulance there—he’s making light of it now, amusing you—well, just because he’ll never have a go at you for putting him through that, doesn’t mean I won’t.”
Add it to my list of transgressions, Robbie wants to say. He really can’t think how to sign that. He grimaces at her instead.
It doesn’t work.
“You’re just so oblivious when it comes to him, aren’t you?”
What? The hell he is—he’d reckon he knows his sergeant, knows James, a damn sight better than most people do. Maybe anyone. Oblivious? He’s well aware of James, thank you very much. Too bloody aware, he thinks at times.
“I mean—oh, it’s not my place.” But she looks quite frustrated and of course it’s still her place to have a go at him in the circumstances, if she needs to get it off her chest. He gives her hand a quick squeeze. She looks at him. “Next time,” she says. “Think? It’s not just you you’ve got to consider, is it?”
Well, she’s right. He shouldn’t have upset her so much, of course. Just because things didn’t work out between them doesn’t mean either of them have stopped caring about the other. And he doesn’t fancy the thought of Lyn’s reaction when she hears about this. And—well, it wouldn’t have been much fun for James. Robbie wouldn’t much like the thought of his sergeant suddenly collapsing like that, struggling to breathe or stay conscious—bloody unfair really, to put the lad through that…He nods at Laura.
She rises to her feet but then just stands looking at him. “He can’t handle seeing you in pain, Robbie, can’t you see that? He won’t have a go at you when you’re ill and he’s just thoroughly relieved now and trying to cheer you up, give you what he reckons you need but—well, he was something else entirely on the phone to me when he thought that the paramedics were taking too long. He kept wanting to know if there was anything else he could do for you, just kept repeating that—”
She twists her mouth a bit, obviously considering saying something further but deciding against it. And then she drops a brief kiss on his cheek instead, angling her own head carefully around the mask. But Robbie, sensing something, finds his eyes looking past her as she straightens back up. To James and a ghost of a frown disappearing from a face carefully returning to a particularly neutral expression. Is he thinking he’s walked in on something? He knows full well that Robbie and Laura had ended things for good by now doesn’t he? And doesn’t he know that Franco is very much back on the scene for Laura? How would you even sign Spanish Dictator?
But James’s eyes have a residue of doubt and he's quite still in the doorway. It seems somehow essential to reassure him before this becomes something bigger in his overactive mind and Robbie can see that he’s already gearing up to make his polite, cheerful excuses and leave. And yet Robbie can say nothing. And Laura, her head turning to track Robbie’s gaze, can’t possibly have caught that fleeting troubled look of his, can she? But she smiles at James anyway and suddenly makes it all much easier.
“Look after him, would you, James? Which means making him leave that on for now. I’ll call in a favour with one of the nurses out there and arrange for you to stay awhile. They’ll leave the two of you in peace in between the necessary checks. I’ll let them know exactly what he’s like as a patient.” And she sends a mock-frown at Robbie now. “So they’ll be glad you’re here to keep him in check.”
Although he doesn’t actually move, as such, James’s whole posture seems to become more relaxed. He nods briefly in response to her instructions. And then Laura presses her hand on his arm to pull him down.
Well, that’s one way to show him that kissing Robbie’s cheek is purely a platonic impulse now.
James is slightly flushed once she’s gone, as he makes his way around to the side of the bed free of all this medical paraphernalia. When was the last time someone kissed him? In purely friendly, reassuring fashion like Laura just did or—well, any other way. And who was it? comes the next thought, unbidden into Robbie’s head.
He realises that James is raising his eyebrows at him. There are no chairs on that side of the room—Robbie gestures with a sideways nod and James kicks off his shoes and levers himself up on to the side of the bed with a sigh, sinking right back against the raised head of it, beside Robbie. “That okay?”
Robbie taps his eye.
James rolls both of his in response.
Laura didn’t seem to finish what she had to say there. Maybe she’s leaving the rest of it till he can mount his own defence. Not that he’s got much of a one. He can’t really dispute anything she’s said so far. Well—apart from the bit about him being oblivious to James. That’s well off target. That’ll be a bone to pick with her as soon as he gets his voice restored to him. He’ll need to start keeping a list of things he wants to take up with people. Well, except for James, oddly. Oddly, given that James is his most regular sparring companion. But he’s not coming up with anything that Robbie wants to take exception to, or feels frustrated that he can’t reply to. He’s just settling in quietly, brushing lightly against Robbie as he makes himself comfortable on this narrow bed. It’s rather steadying to have him here, truth to tell.
And now he’s leaning precariously over to the bedside locker to secure the remote control. There’s a television in a ridiculously high position on the wall.
Robbie takes the opportunity to study him. James, in stocking feet and unusually creased suit trousers and with his shirt sleeves rolled back, lies back beside him again with his knees humped up. “Only fair to let you choose in the circumstances,” he mutters, starting to flick through options until he settles on what would be Robbie’s choice from what’s on offer, yes. A classic Western. This evening is suddenly shaping up as well it can in the rather surreal circumstances.
He thinks of Laura’s home truths about what he’d put James through today, and he suddenly finds his hand on James’s bare, warm forearm. James pauses the television with the remote and drops it on the mattress.
“What is it?” he asks, his eyes affectionate as he waits for a request. Robbie shrugs. James’s gaze searches his face. Robbie raises his eyebrows at him. Then he watches James’s eyes flit briefly down to Robbie’s hand. Still lying there on James’s arm. Robbie carefully reaches for the remote with his other hand and flicks the film back on. Then he just gazes up and ahead at the small television screen.
Eventually, when he’s sure that James has turned back to study the screen again, he risks a sideways glance at his profile.
He’s taken by surprise by the smile.
Part VII- Solace to the Soul
It probably makes sense that the flu would hit a bit harder at the tail end of a winter that had contained that chest infection that went wrong—as Robbie still prefers to think of his bout of pneumonia. Lyn had warned him that that could happen. But he’d woken with a splitting headache either way. And, frankly—well, Robbie wouldn’t have much fancied going near the morgue if he’d struggled into work today. Laura never had actually finished telling him all that she’d obviously wanted to say when he was in hospital.
It had seemed the best idea to just call in sick, with this being the Friday of a week when they’ve really only been tying up the loose ends on a case. And Robbie had retreated back to bed with the glass of water that was all he’d wanted.
The glass is empty now, maybe a few hours later, and it seems far too much effort with his leaden head to raise it off the pillow and make tracks for the kitchen. Easier to just lie here and try and ignore the rising thirst for now. Luckily he drops off again but this time he wakes to a relentless thudding, each throb of his pulse seeming to mean a corresponding throb of dull pain, and to the impossibility of lifting his head to do anything about it. Even the lamp light seems a bit much—and the lamp’s on, what time of day—
A hand lands and lingers on his forehead, somehow providing solace well beyond the gesture. James. When he’d get here? He’s had a key for a little while now. He was casually coming and going that much during Robbie’s recent recuperation —be easier if you don’t have to keep getting up to let me back in later, sir.
“You’re parched, c’mon drink this.” His voice is sharp with concern now. And his arm has worked his way under Robbie and is prompting him to sit upright. A couple of pillows hastily rearranged behind Robbie keep him in that position as the arm withdraws and then there’s a glass being offered. It’s coolish but not too cold and would be very easy to finish if James wasn’t being so—“Sip,” instructs his sergeant, with a hand on Robbie’s arm. “Slowly. That’s it.” He sounds more satisfied. “And paracetamol now—”
And Robbie finds himself able to just surrender to James’s ministrations. There seems no good reason to resist anymore. “Wasn’t really a good day to have sent me off on a wild goose chase now, was it, sir?” he murmurs at Robbie, as Robbie swallows the paracetamol with more of the water. “Went off up to Peterborough as per your instructions last night, and spent the morning re-interviewing the family. I don’t think I got much of use. And I only found out you were ill when I couldn’t get a reply to my texts. I knew you must be bad if you’d rung in sick…” He doesn’t seem to require any response.
It’s dead soothing, his familiar presence. Once the water is gone, he rises. Job done, Robbie realises hazily. Ah, well. That blessed drink was enough anyway, if that was all he was here to do…And Robbie must drift off again, more peaceably after that, because the next time he wakes everything is rather clearer. And here’s James sitting on Robbie’s bed, in his suit trousers and shirt, offering a glass of something bright orange now that makes Robbie think of pubs and all those pints that are not pints if you’re a sergeant who has an exacting Inspector—
James is just waiting patiently for Robbie’s attention. “Here, sir. I just went out for provisions. It’s a smoothie. It’s thick enough that it’ll line your stomach a bit, so you can take this ibuprofen if you need to, okay? Tackle your headache. I’m going to make you some soup.” Does he cook, Dad, your sergeant?
At this particular moment in time it makes perfect sense that James knows he has a headache. “Ah. Have you got one too?” Robbie’s voice sounds unused—he hasn’t spoken aloud all day since his brief conversation with the duty sergeant this morning.
“A headache?” James grins at him. “No. It’s not infectious.”
The flu is though. “You’ll catch this—”
James puts the glass down on Robbie’s bedside table and then leans over and brushes a kiss to Robbie’s forehead, swift and warm and gone before it’s there. “There now,” he says. “Checking you for fever. You’ll live. And if I’m going to catch it from you, I’ve caught it now. No need to worry further. Point of no return.”
And that’s just exactly what it is. Robbie grasps hold of his shirtsleeved arm as he moves to get up. James looks back, smiling at him. “What do you need—”
You. “Stay here a minute.” And Robbie raises his hand to press against his sergeant’s cheek, turning James to face him properly.
James tilts his head at him, surprised. Although the gesture also makes him move more into Robbie’s touch. He still looks like he’s waiting for some instruction. Robbie starts to stroke his thumb gently against that evening-stubbled cheek as bewilderment begins to steal into James’s expression. “Are you delirious, sir?” he asks.
“I dunno. Check me again.”
James startled gaze meets his. This time the kiss is very briefly pressed against a corner of Robbie’s mouth. Hasty and wistful and brave. But he’s also closed his eyes just as he leans in so lightly to offer it. And it might still have been just the quick clumsy press that an unsure James obviously intended. If Robbie hadn’t decided to do something about that and lifted his other hand too, to frame James’s disbelieving face just as he had started to pull back.
===
“Soup,” says James, bewildered, lying there beside Robbie, top buttons undone. By Robbie’s fingers, come to think of it. Hair tousled. By Robbie’s fingers too. Face flushed and shirt untucked on one side.
James had been dead gentle, more gentle than he’d needed to be, right up until Robbie had slid one hand against his sergeant’s hip and untucked that shirt and then things had developed in a highly promising fashion.
“What’s that, lad?”
“I was going to make soup,” James informs Robbie’s ceiling, helplessly. “Soup.”
“I’m feeling much better now,” Robbie tells him, kindly. He’s rather impressed that he’s handling this new development better than his sergeant so far.
“Okay.”
“Although I reckon you’ve got the flu all right.”
“Small price to pay.”
He’s just generating random responses now. Robbie picks up the glass of that tropical concoction, seeing as they’ve stopped for a bit and James doesn’t appear able to hold a rational conversation. “Me head’s feeling better and everything—” he informs the oddly silent James. It is too. Right at this moment he feels bloody marvellous. “Never thought I’d see you at a loss for words, though?”
James must have somehow prepared him over the years for this to finally happen. With all his caretaking and his compassion. And his mere presence, unstinting loyalty and protectiveness at Robbie’s side, so familiar now that it’s unthinkable to be without it, really. And yet James himself seems to be finding the reality of this too unexpected to process. Although—there’s a certain expression now forming on his face—
And James rolls onto his side, towards Robbie, propping his head up on one elbow. “I don’t think it is the flu, you know. I think you were more dehydrated than anything else—maybe the exchange of bodily fluids helped you a bit,” he suggests thoughtfully, “argues well for later, so. Oh, now look what you’ve done, sir,” and James makes a belated, unsuccessful grab for the glass as Robbie, startled, starts to choke. “I used fresh mangoes in that smoothie, they’ll stain—”
===
“I think you’re completely better this morning,” comes a deep mumble in Robbie’s ear.
Ah, he awakes at last. “An’ shouldn’t I be the judge of that?” Robbie protests mildly. Although he does feel remarkably better.
“No. I think you’re better,” says James meaningfully, raising his head from where it had been pressing heavily and agreeably into Robbie’s shoulder as he’d slept. He slides his bare arm around Robbie, lightly, warmly, and lets his hand rest against Robbie’s hip.
It’s just as well for James’s sake that this wasn’t the flu. Yesterday evening Robbie had found that lightheadness and a certain heavy fatigue were the worst that he’d been left with. So he’d been able to venture out to the couch for a bit, and keep James company when he’d eventually started to make that blessed soup.
James had gone on a bit about symptom recurrence from pneumonia and about his immune-boosting vegetables and ginger and what he called harnessing the placebo effects of chicken soup. But he’d even put lentils in there too. And after he’d cleared all the paraphernalia from his much-appreciated efforts he’d come to join Robbie and had propped himself firmly in that corner of the couch that he usually landed up in. So Robbie had let his own head rest back against James’s chest. James had nursed his head for a bit. The television had murmured away agreeably in the background. And with the soft regular thud of James’s heartbeat quietening him a little further as the day seemed to draw properly to a close, Robbie had drifted off to sleep again to the thought that that was a sound he’d be well able to get used to.
When he’d been woken later, he’d been plied with more water and painkillers. And he’d found the bed neatly ready, with an extra blanket, when he’d returned from the bathroom more than ready to retire. And James, obviously ready for bed himself but rather tentative about where he was quite meant to sleep tonight, had just needed to be told to stop fretting and get over here before he’d rolled into the bed and fitted himself to Robbie with a sigh, neatly and quite contentedly, as if he was maybe where he belonged.
Although, much to Robbie’s amusement, it turns out that he sprawls remarkably once he really starts to drift off. How the hell he’s managed to sleep on the couch so many times without doing himself a mischief, or flinging himself off in the midst of his slumbers, is beyond Robbie. Robbie had stirred a few times in the night and found himself pinned agreeably to the bed by the weight of a long stray limb. It had felt like a rather possessive gesture—James asserting his claim and effectively ensuring that Robbie couldn’t pull away undetected. Not that Robbie had the least desire to do so.
He’s shuffling his head comfortably over onto Robbie’s chest now to look up at him.
“And good morning to you too,” Robbie says.
“I’m going to make you breakfast in a bit,” James announces. “Which doesn’t mean a fry-up by the way,” he adds, “before you get your hopes up. Something light but nutritious.” There’s still the slightest question in his eyes though.
“I’ll look forward to that. Nutrition, you say. An’ then you’ll enjoy a fry-up another morning. Real breakfast. When I’m on breakfast duty.” There’s one thing Robbie can make.
He gets a sleepy grin for that but James does seem to settle a little further. He needs this, doesn’t he? The reassurance of the joint everyday domesticity, the casual intimacy, so that he’ll slowly enter more into trusting this with Robbie, trusting what’s fully on offer here. It’s making Robbie wonder if James had hankered after this over the years—making himself at home here with Robbie. If maybe that everyday intimacy part won’t be that much of a step for them from where they are already.
But his head is being drawn down now and he’s being slowly and thoroughly kissed as James takes his time about it. Robbie gets an arm around him to pull him more firmly against himself, which James seems to take as an invitation. Because he rolls over right on top of Robbie and shuffles down just a bit, in a very welcome way, propping his chin up on Robbie’s chest, to look at him, considering—like he’s contemplating doing something more—
“You’ve tried to take care of every part of me, haven’t you?” Robbie asks him. “Over the years.”
James frowns briefly, considering these words and then obviously decides to forgo comprehension for once, in favour of proceeding with his own agenda. “Well—there’s one very particular part that seems to be asking for me to take care of it now. Making its presence felt. So to speak.” The lightest experimental touch from James underneath the duvet does seem to be making that situation develop further.
And Robbie may have been a bit slow on the uptake with some things here.
But he’s learnt a few lessons from his sergeant now. James has taught him a thing or two with all that gently persistent caretaking, whenever he was let. Even while he must have thought that Robbie would never get here, past his grief and all the barriers that had stopped Robbie from seeing the tenor of their relationship for what it had truly become.
He finds himself hoping that in the long run the shape of this between them might settle James too and bring contentment to him. That Robbie can give that to his complicated sergeant just as he’s always somehow known how to bring comfort to Robbie despite, Robbie strongly suspects, rarely having received that sort of care himself. It all just seems to well up from James’s sheer stubborn kind-heartedness.
But right at this particular moment—well, it’s futile to resist the lad when he’s on a mission, really, Robbie decides. And he settles back now to yield himself very willingly to James’s tender mercies, with a deep sigh that elicits a grin from James. Robbie’s learnt that lesson over the years too, after all. Giving in to James—it just saves you a whole heap of trouble in the long run.