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Fixer contracts, especially the tough ones, always made Aiden Pearce walk a fine line or two―or seven, if he was being realistic. Violence was a part of his job, a part of his daily routine, a little more than just collateral damage and a little less than something he actively embraced. He tried to minimize it when he could, getting in that daily cardio from chasing criminals and beating them up instead of taking the easy way out (a spray of bullets, or, if he was lucky, just one or two, well placed). But still, he wasn’t above killing if and when he had to, and Jordi Chin suffered even less such inhibitions than his partner in crime actions of oft-dubious legality and/or morality.
He usually walked the line between the necessary and the maybe-necessary; the utilitarian and that which was arguably paranoid. Aiden was arguably paranoid, possibly even more so than Jordi, but he also wasn’t as much of an idiot as his sister would have him think. He set lures and hacked phones and didn’t flinch at the slight, hair-raising, near-imperceptible whoosh of sniper rounds finding their mark.
(Aiden didn’t think there was much to compare the sound of bullets entering flesh to. It was characteristic, unmistakable; you could certainly imagine it with ease, and once you really heard it, you never forgot it. But there really wasn’t much else that conjured up the same sensation, no analogy or parallel or metaphor for lead meeting flesh. It was the sound of violence and death, simple as that.)
Sometimes, though, things went bad. And there were plenty of ways that could happen, but they were all on different levels of bad. There was Oh shit, time to run bad, and Oh shit, I’m going to take a beating after this bad, and then there was the sort of bad that sent Aiden spiraling, panicking on the spot, hands shaking, and made him want to curl in on himself, to adopt the fetal position still holding whatever gun he had on hand that day.
That was the kind of bad that made him think he’d dug a hole he wouldn’t be able to climb back out of. It went like this:
Jordi’s voice, crackling in the earpiece hooked up to Aiden’s cellphone. Infuriatingly cheerful―bordering on manic―in the way that he was a solid fifty percent of the time (the rest, he was deadly serious, his wrath the kind of thing that ripped the word whiplash apart, emphasized both individual halves on their own, and then jammed the whole thing back together to make yet another deadly weapon.)
“The Vigilante is coming in hot! Three mercs right off the bat, lured into his traps like moths to a flame!”
Aiden scowled, heart pounding with a mixture of adrenaline and fear―he’d momentarily forgotten that only he could hear Jordi.
“It’s not a damn game,” he murmured under his breath, gaze darting between the pistol he clutched in one hand and the profiler open on his cell phone, clutched even more tightly in the other.
Jordi, being Jordi , continued to narrate with dramatic flair. Aiden, having grown used to this long ago, and possibly (though he’d never say it out loud, let alone admit it to himself) even having become just a little fond of the particular style of bicker he had with this man, sighed deeply. Under his mask, though, the corners of his lips were tilted upwards just a little, and the wrinkles that lined his long-since permanently tired eyes became slightly more defined in a slight smile.
All the more reason to turn his gaze away from the nearby security cameras he was hacking into. He couldn’t afford distraction, and he certainly couldn’t afford the risk of anyone else knowing he was distracted. He had no qualms walking dangerous lines, so long as he stayed in control.
Staying in control was key in every way. Not killing the wrong people. Not shooting too wildly. Not hacking the phone of a Blume affiliate by accident. Not letting his... colleagues know what lay beneath the steely expression he always carried, deep down within his very human heart. Even with how little sleep he got, and how foreign the concepts of self-care and circadian rhythms were to him, he still managed to hide things, to keep steady, to maintain that dangerous, fragile equilibrium.
Even as he felt the fatigue pulling at the back of his mind, tugging his eyelids downwards, making him want to yawn, he swallowed the feeling and focused on what had in his hands: a pistol, his cell phone, the fate of this mission. It hadn’t been easy thus far, that was almost never the case, but it hadn’t been painfully difficult.
Yet.
Aiden set another lure, throwing it over the crates he’d been using as cover. Set it off, shifted in his crouched position as the sounds of muffled talking began to emanate from it. Breathed a sigh of relief, setting off brand new pain in his ribs―he had the worst posture, didn’t he?―as two more shots came from above. Part of his brain, still operating on his usual trains of thought despite his focus on the mission, wondered how he’d ever questioned Jordi’s skill with a sniper rifle. Sure, the man probably didn’t have the discipline to do anything like a military sniper op, crawling through the bushes, going silent for hours or days at a time, but work in the city was different. He could aim and fire, keep it steady―to do that through gloves was impressive; Aiden couldn’t shoot straight even holding a sniper rifle with his bare hands.
Aiden couldn’t do much of anything straight, he thought as he rushed behind a nearby forklift, from one cover to the next. He had to keep moving, and he forced back a laugh, but Jordi heard the snort he couldn’t fully stifle.
“Something funny?” he asked.
“You’re supposed to be my help from above, Jordi. Not a distraction.”
Jordi laughed quietly, a normally unsettling and delighted (almost delight ful ) sound distorted by the low quality of the call.
“As you wish, my liege.”
There was a brief spurt of static as Aiden, still moving, must have passed in front of something that blocked the signal, and then the call ended.
Aiden moved methodically, through the yard of the warehouse he was working to infiltrate, and towards the closest entrance to the building. He swore he could feel Jordi’s eyes on him, even though the other man was both off the map on his profiler and not even in the ctOS system. Maybe he was just paranoid.
Maybe he was right to be paranoid, he thought as a spray of bullets whizzed past him in quick succession, embedding themselves in his cover and surroundings. Aiden waited, wishing he could make himself smaller like a feral cat hiding in the shadows, curl into a lithe ball that would lash out to protect itself upon the rare occasion that it was approached. He heard one of the new adversaries signaling to another, footfalls on gravel, the rushing of some unknown number of people―it couldn’t be more than a few, though, unless some were managing to be almost deathly silent―hiding behind their own cover.
Aiden waited some more. Any moment now, he’d look around the corner and spot that red laser dot, the end of an invisible line of sight, and then people would go down like dominoes.
Incoming call: UNKNOWN NUMBER.
He picked up.
“I can’t get them. There are three of ‘em, but they’re hiding. You’re gonna have to bring ‘em a little closer, Pearce.”
Aiden sighed deeply. “This is my last lure.”
“Shit,” Jordi cursed. The following silence, clearly perturbed, was even more telling than any words he could have said would’ve been.
“Use it well, then.” This time, Jordi stayed on the line, silent as Aiden prepped his last lure, turning a corner to peer out on his adversaries― fuck , all three were wearing bulletproof vests; if Jordi didn’t get them with headshots, or if the lure didn’t work at all, Aiden would have to aim true and fast, and he’d done it a million times before, but a pistol at this distance wasn’t the most reliable thing, nor the quickest, nor the deadliest, and one mistake could mean his instantaneous death―or worse, his prolonged death, in the form of his enemies calling for reinforcements.
Aiden threw the lure with a sense of finality, and a moment later, he heard a bullet strike flesh, superimposed with the muffled sound of the sniper rifle’s firing coming through his earpiece.
A second bullet. Running, a curse.
“So, that third guy. He grabbed the second one, pulled him out of the way. I can’t get them now. It’s on you, Pearce.”
“Shit,” Aiden muttered out loud, before he could think any better of it. At least he was hardwired to talk quietly during missions.
His earpiece crackled with static yet again: “And be quick about it. It looks like they called reinforcements.”
Well, that was quite enough of that. Aiden removed all thoughts of the balcony somewhere above him, upon which Jordi was crouched with his sniper rifle, from his brain, and focused entirely on what was right in front of him instead. The second guy, whipping around to find out where his would-be kill shot had come from, went down easily―two shots to the skull; he’d been putting himself right out there. Aiden was starting to get back in the swing of things, despite knowing that he was about to be flooded by another wave of enemies.
The third guy wasn’t as easy. He fired back, because of course he did, and Aiden swore a bullet came so close he felt it graze the tails of his leather trench coat as he ran, but neither of them were hit.
Fuck, he just wanted to get out of here. Get some sleep, a meal, maybe a shower if he was lucky. And something in him snapped. If he persuaded Jordi (or, really, if Jordi was willing to entertain him), he might be able to convince the other man to pull some strings and get them a reservation at one of those nice riverside restaurants. He knew Jordi would insist on coming with, but he’d be willing to put up with that just to get a fucking break ; hell, he’d even be able to put up with the chance of being recognized by a civilian. That was the kind of thing he never did, the kind of thing he hadn’t even really thought much of or cared about back before things went bad for him, but he couldn’t be bothered to care. He fucking deserved a break―deserved to not be on his toes twenty-four-fucking-seven.
“We’ve got problems up here,” Jordi’s voice said into his ear, startling him almost enough to make him physically jolt. “Reinforcements are coming in a helicopter. Little bird’s flying on in.”
Shoot the pilot , Aiden thought, but he forced the words to die on his tongue. He didn’t want to give Jordi any sensational ideas. The man already had more than enough of a flair for the dramatic, and Aiden wasn’t about to attract the cops with that sort of takedown, no matter how effective (and, admittedly, pretty fucking great to watch) it would be.
Aiden made up his mind quickly. “Get out,” he said. “Get yourself to safety. I’m taking this guy down and running.”
“Fucking hell, Pearce,” Jordi swore, but Aiden could hear him packing up the rifle, no doubt already alighting to some marginally more safe lookout.
“We were supposed to take all of them out,” Jordi reminded him, words interspersed with quick breaths and muffled footsteps. “I’ll come down and help you if I can, or maybe not, but however this goes you’d better fuckin’ make sure nobody lives to point a finger at either of us.”
Of course. He was right. And really, he was saving Aiden’s ass more than his own―he was just the voice on the other end of the line, faceless help from above. Jordi Chin walked the line between eccentric and insane; he was the world’s worst avenging angel, and he cared more about getting himself out in one piece than much else, but even he sometimes slipped and let his humanity show.
“On it,” Aiden replied. The call ended, static crackling with a sense of finality in his ear, and he got the feeling that Jordi wouldn’t be calling him back unless they were making a rendezvous point or everything really, truly went to shit.
His hands were beginning to shake, palms sweating just enough to make him almost juggle his phone and gun as he wiped his hands on his jeans, but he forced himself to retain as much composure as possible while fumbling to reload his gun, waiting for the third man to come out from behind his cover once again.
Of course the fucking bullet missed, and of course Aiden, some little part of his brain that wasn’t fully entrenched in the wild jackhammer thrashing of his heart beginning to panic, misfired a second time, and emptied out the entire fucking magazine of his pistol at the man. One of those bullets was bound to hit, and it did , but Aiden’s first mistake had cost him too much time, and his second mistake now cost him his cover, and he could hear helicopter blades whirring, coming ever closer, and he realized. He realized . He was losing control.
Not just of this, here, now, the situation―his ability to shoot well, his ability to not panic, his ability to make sure the contract was as clean and quick as possible. He was losing control of the facade he kept up―and those other things were part of it, sure, but messing those things up wasn’t the same as showing others that part of him cared about Jordi, Clara, T-Bone, in almost the same way he cared about Nicky and Jacks. Moreover, most of Aiden didn’t want Jordi to die because it would be one hell of a headache for him, but part of him―maybe a substantially bigger part than he was ready to admit―didn’t want Jordi to die because he’d actually miss the man. Infuriating as Jordi was, Aiden couldn’t deny that he had gotten in the habit of awaiting the man’s calls, whether they had to do with fixer contracts or Blume or ctOS or simply whatever had Jordi on a near-manic rant at the time.
Somewhere else on the perimeter of the yard, or maybe within the yard if Aiden’s luck was particularly shitty today, the helicopter landed. Aiden regretted not telling Jordi to shoot it down, but there was nothing to be done. All he could do was make sure he didn’t keep making mistakes.
Fuck it.
He assessed his options for cover as quickly as possible, gaze darting between stacks of crates, eyeing forklifts, sizing up distractions. Even with his earpiece, he was uncomfortably aware of the not-distant-enough sound of the helicopter unloading its passengers, subconsciously gauging its direction and distance, and Aiden didn’t want to stick around longer than he had to.
He darted out from behind his cover and into the warehouse, one swift sprint, trench coat flapping behind him, and he swore he heard yelling, but upon pulling up his profiler once he was safely hidden again, there was no indication anyone knew he was there.
Well.
There was still the other problem, that being the fact that his target, inside the warehouse, was a person. A moving, thinking, fighting person, who could call even more reinforcements―or, in a thought that made Aiden’s blood run cold, the cops ―and who could shoot Aiden. Who could run . Who, if they’d been paying attention at all, had heard the gunshots, knew Aiden was here. Data was easier, it didn’t usually move on its own; a computer terminal was a stationery object.
People? People were messy.
Killing, however, was easier than a takedown. A takedown―easier than talking it out. Violence was, more often than not, the path of least resistance. Aiden didn’t like it, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to go with it if that was what he had to do to protect the things he loved. When it came down to it―as it had , more times before than he could count―he wouldn’t (and didn’t ) hesitate to put a bullet in someone’s head.
That was assuming his target didn’t get away first, though, and he was quickly coming to the realization that all his mistakes were stacking up, negligible amounts of risk coming together to make a very much not negligible amount of Oh shit, I fucked up .
He wished Jordi were on call just so he had someone to complain to.
He didn’t have time to complain, not even in the confines of his own head, as a red dot outlined in green crept into the map on his profiler, slowly at first, and then unmistakably broke into a run. The profiler went away, the gun was reloaded, and Aiden was on his feet again, darting after the target―now in his line of sight. He didn’t even fucking care if the reinforcements spotted him, he just wanted to get this one thing done so he could get the hell out of here, or at least so he didn’t have to worry about completely failing his mission once he regrouped and hid again.
Bang, the gun goes off, Aiden thought, cracking a dry smile that didn’t reach his eyes at the darkness of his own humor. (He’d always heard that the Irish bottled up their emotions, had the darkest sense of humor, and he really was walking proof of concept, wasn’t he?)
Bang, the gun went off. Bang, the body of his target hit the floor, stumbling, scrabbling, hands slicked with sweat and maybe now blood―he couldn’t tell from this distance. Bang, Aiden’s heart was pounding like a submachine gun, automatic, too fast for comfort.
Murderous.
Bang, the target was firing back―Aiden had hit a leg, somewhere nonlethal; the target was trying to run. Bullets whizzed by, and Aiden only had so much luck―a bullet hit him, through the shoulder, tearing flesh, taking a chunk with it, and he became aware of the unfortunately familiar hot trickle of blood down his arm, soaking into layers of clothing. He could already hear Jordi chiding him, and he wanted to make it out of this just to see the exasperation on the other man’s face when he showed up nursing one limp arm and covered in scratches and bruises. He wouldn’t be taking this one to the hospital, that was for sure.
Bang, he fired again. Stepped closer. And again. Kept walking, closing the distance between himself and the target. And again . The target went down, finally, and he didn’t know which bullet did it, but he already hated himself for it, was already compartmentalizing those thoughts, storing them away in neat little boxes carefully separated from one another, already walking past the body.
This time, he was the one to call Jordi, or at least one of the burner phones in his call history that may or may not have belonged to Jordi. And of course, the one time Aiden actually made an effort , the damn fool didn’t fucking pick up. Straight to voicemail, straight to clipped, maniacal laughter made even more horrendous by the low quality of the phone the message had been recorded on. He recognized the laugh, though.
At some point, the whirring of the helicopter blades had stopped. Now, footsteps were coming even closer, and Aiden ducked behind cover yet again. He was surrounded, he knew it. It was plain as day on his profiler, red dots closing in around him. He wanted to get out. He wanted to pinch himself, feel nothing, jolt, and wake up to find that none of this was real. He wanted to suddenly discover that he had a normal life, or if he couldn’t get that, that he’d at least succeeded in making some change for the better.
Wherever that train of thought had been headed, it was abruptly derailed by two simultaneous occurrences. One, Aiden got a call from yet another unknown number, and he slammed the accept button before he could think any better of it to hear that same damn laugh again, but live on air this time. Two, red dots danced in his vision, almost quicker than he could follow, and he whipped around to find that yes, he was in fact surrounded, but his armored assailants were quickly being picked off by headshot after headshot. That awful sound again, bullets striking flesh.
He pulled it together and began to fire off his own bullets again, emptying his last magazine into the skulls of the reinforcements. He didn’t even care when the gun just clicked instead of firing, an empty shell, because his heart was pounding with adrenaline, his entire body practically vibrating―that might have just been a physical effect of his paranoia and anxiety, but he’d long since grown used to it―and the others were all down.
Standing there, shaking, lurching forward a little, stumbling to keep himself upright, everything came back into focus once again. Reality. Blood staining the grimy linoleum floor. Blood splattered on every nearby surface that could have been used as cover, and a few that couldn’t. Guns and bodies littering the area, no doubt more outside. Bullets, innumerable bullets, that could be traced back to Aiden’s gun―he’d never been so thankful it was unregistered, as Jordi had insisted. He was sure Jordi’s sniper rifle was the same, untraceable except to its original buyer, who was no doubt long since dead or gone, the gun having changed hands multiple times since then.
“Well, I’m glad that fucking worked,” Jordi said into Aiden’s earpiece, but he sounded a little off, almost layered, like there were two of him, and― oh.
Aiden turned. Pulled out his earpiece as the call ended. Jordi, climbing down a flight of stairs at the opposite end of the building, had his sniper rifle cradled in one arm like a baby, or maybe a shopping bag―although with more care than he’d probably hold either of those things, knowing him.
“How the hell did you pull that off?” Aiden asked, half incredulous and half so unsurprised he was exasperated.
“Ran around the other side of the roof, did some parkour, knifed a guy―” Aiden raised an eyebrow at Jordi, to which the other man simply responded by scowling back and then morphing his expression into a grin just as quickly “―oh, relax, I hid the body. No evidence here.” He waved a gloved hand in the air, dismissive, and Aiden briefly wondered how he’d managed not to get any blood on that fancy dry-clean-only suit of his.
“Speaking of which,” Aiden said, rolling his dully aching shoulder to find that yes, it still hurt a hell of a lot, “I took a bullet to the shoulder.”
Jordi sighed. “Of course you did,” he said. “Is it need medical attention right now bad, or can you make it to my closest hideout?”
Aiden considered his options. “I think I can make it. It’s gonna be a hot fucking mess to clean up, though.”
Jordi let out a jerky exhale, taking off towards some unknown destination at a casual, ambling pace. He was practically swaying like it was a damn catwalk.
“Come on, I’ll get us a ride.”
Aiden holstered his gun, hidden in the folds of his trench coat, and followed the other man. “‘Pre-owned’ as usual?”
“You know me so well,” Jordi replied, miming pressing a hand to his chest in shock, as if he were swooning.
“Yeah, yeah. Let’s just get it over with.”
Jordi was grinning, but Aiden could have sworn there was some bright, stressed glint in his eyes―maybe it was just the reflected glow of passing streetlights turning on as the sun sank over the horizon, letting the night’s darkness encroach upon the ever-living city―as he drove them through back streets and alleys and eventually came back around to an underground parking garage Aiden might not have been able to find on his own.
He was uncharacteristically silent, in both his words and his gestures―his hands, typically moving and gesticulating, remained forcefully still by his side―as he walked beside Aiden, carefully watching the Vigilante. Up to the surface, around a corner, behind a building. Aiden was too tired, too pained―against his better judgment, too trusting of Jordi―to bother to catch every detail, just trudging along behind the other man as they went up, up too many flights of stairs, down a long hallway, through a locked door, and finally. Finally . They must have reached his hideout. Aiden was aware of warm lights being turned on, dimly gleaming, and Jordi pushing him down onto something soft.
There was the sound of drawers opening and closing, but Aiden had his eyes squeezed shut through the rapidly increasing pain, far too intense by now to simply ignore.
“Come on,” Jordi said, “don’t make me strip you.”
Aiden snorted. “You know you’d like it,” he said, instinctually digging for some humor even in this state, and he knew he’d struck some sort of nerve―good or bad, he couldn’t tell―with Jordi when the other man responded by reaching around him to peel off his trench coat.
“Fatal injury isn’t really my kink,” Jordi said, somehow managing to sound no more amused than usual as he not-so-gently guided Aiden out of the pullover he wore under his trench coat. Left in just his worn old T-shirt, mask haphazardly lain around his neck and his cap gone somewhere else, Aiden couldn’t help but feel naked. For fuck’s sake, he usually slept in his trench coat, and as much as he actually liked it, he wore those layers of clothing, keeping his head down and hat on all the time, because anything else was putting himself out there. Making himself vulnerable.
Besides, Chicago was cold.
Jordi sucked in a breath, quite loudly and with notable distress, snapping Aiden out of his thoughts once again.
“Damn, that is messy,” he said. squinting at Aiden’s wound. The sleeve of his shirt was ripped at the left shoulder, where he’d been shot, and it hardly took any effort for Jordi to tear it from the rest of the garment, revealing the extent of the damage beneath. The bullet had taken a path somewhere between just grazing Aiden’s shoulder and tearing directly through his flesh, leaving mangled skin and fat in its wake. Blood was still leaking from the wound, though marginally slower than before, and it seemed that the damage was mostly on the surface level.
“Where the hell’d you learn to clean a wound?” Aiden asked, squeezing his eyes shut once again as Jordi opened the first aid kit in his hands.
“Trial and error,” came the other man’s nonchalant response. He hardly missed a beat.
“Why are you even helping me so much? I can do this myself.”
“You know―” Jordi stepped back, moved to pat Aiden on the shoulder, paused, patted him on the other shoulder instead “―I’d be pretty fucking pissed if you bled to death on my watch, Pearce. And anyways, I’d be bored without you.”
“Not sure what that’s supposed to mean,” Aiden grunted, gritting his teeth through a surge of pain as the familiar sting of antiseptic met his wound, “but I’ll chose to take it as a compliment.”
“Well―” Jordi pressed a soft pad of gauze to Aiden’s shoulder “―if I were a normal person, I’d just say that I care a lot about you, or some sappy shit like that, but I’ve never had much of a taste for being normal. Social conventions, things you’re supposed to say, that’s boring.”
“Emotions? Do I hear emotions from you?”
Jordi pressed down on the pad maybe a bit harder than was necessary, making Aiden hiss in pain. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He was gentle, though, wrapping more gauze around Aiden’s shoulder in a careful, calculated manner that suggested he actually did know what he was doing, and taping the end with a flourish.
His hand lingered on Aiden’s shoulder before he pulled away to clean up the first aid kit, and it hit Aiden with a jolt that Jordi had taken off his gloves at some point. There was something about that gesture that mirrored Aiden’s loss of his outerwear―sure, it hadn’t been strictly necessary , but it almost felt like a subtle reminder that they were on the same side. That they were both human, and they both felt , and they were both vulnerable.
Aiden finally unclenched his jaw, grimacing at the soreness of it and what must have been every other joint and muscle in his body. He might just be reading too much into things.
“So,” Jordi said from somewhere Aiden couldn’t see. Aiden, finally getting the opportunity to look around and really take in his surroundings, deduced that they were in what was either a fancy hotel suite or a fancy apartment―a nice little hideout, the kind of place that an extended stay in could be paid for in cash, registered under a fake name with no questions asked.
“So?” Aiden echoed. He was perched on the end of a bed, the only one in the room. Queen sized, probably some ridiculously high number for the thread count in the sheets, but he slept on straight mattresses too often to notice or care about such small discrepancies beyond nice sheets , shitty sheets , and no sheets .
Jordi appeared in a doorway across the room―behind him, a bathroom. He’d lost his suit jacket, no doubt to the dry cleaning rack next to the mass-produced ironing board that Aiden had spotted in every hotel room he’d ever seen. He moved, standing in front of the window, curtains half-open. He was partially backlit by the Chicago skyline like this, but his eyes were dark.
“So that was the messiest damn contract I’ve done in a hot second, and I feel safe saying the same goes for you. I want to know what the hell happened to you back there. I have never , not once , seen you like that. What are you, off your meds or something?”
Even with his trench coat, Aiden would have felt exposed. Jordi was digging into him, laying his vulnerabilities bare. Jordi’s jokes, dark and in poor taste as usual, didn’t mask the tinge of grimness to his voice. He was serious.
“I panicked,” Aiden replied. It was the truth. It was not the entire truth. There was a subtle but important difference between these two things.
Jordi stepped closer. “It isn’t that simple,” he said firmly.
“So?” There it was again, that stupid question, so much packed into one simple word.
“So I want to know what was running through your head under that thick fucking skull of yours, so it doesn’t happen again.”
Aiden hesitated for a long, tense moment before he finally spoke again.
“I made some mistakes. Things started to spiral. I lost control.”
Jordi threw his head back and laughed; he cackled like a damn hyena. “No shit, Sherlock!”
The tension in the room could have been cut with a knife. It was stretched taut, almost beyond its limits, and as Aiden leapt abruptly to his feet, it snapped, rebounding, striking both of them. He was clenching his fists, heart pounding again.
“I realized,” he said, low and dangerous, “that I might take you down with me. Or worse, that I might make it out, and you might not. Because of me . Because you actually fucking trusted me for once, and I miscalculated.”
Jordi cocked his head. His face was momentarily cloaked in darkness as he stepped forward yet again, and then the light caught his eyes. His expression was utterly unreadable, an odd parallel to his nonexistent ctOS profile. Then―his lips twitched. Slowly, his teeth showed as he contorted his face into some awful rendition of a smile, mania hiding pain.
“That’s just collateral, Aiden.”
Aiden.
“You’re―” for once, Aiden was at a loss for words “―you’re not collateral .”
“Careful. Getting sentimental, are we?”
“Don’t pretend you haven’t felt the exact same way. You and I both are human, no matter what you want to think, and...trust me, bottling up your emotions won’t get you anywhere.”
“It’ll keep me safe,” Jordi replied, and it almost physically hurt Aiden how convinced he sounded.
“It’ll keep you miserable .”
“It’ll keep me in control , and that’s what I want.”
“Is it?” Aiden asked. “ Is it? ” As far as he could tell, both of them were beginning to lose control once again at this very moment. The tension was rising again in a crescendo of panic, clawing at him, a tsunami about to hit a too-weak breaker.
“You don’t know what I want, Aiden Pearce.”
“Then tell me what you want.”
That got him to stop. To turn, to glance out the window, gaze sweeping over the city. To turn back to face Aiden. He spoke again, more carefully measured than Aiden had heard him speak in a long time, but as rapid-fire and stilted as usual nonetheless.
“I’ve worked my ass off to get to where I am now. I’m walking on this tightrope―” he was back to the hand gestures once again, visualizing things with his body instead of just his mind, and it somehow reassured Aiden to know that this one sliver of normalcy remained despite it all “―and I just keep swaying, and thinking I’m going to fall, and it’s so damn hard to keep my balance, but the thing goes on for fucking miles and there’s no end in sight. I just have to keep going, and never fall. I…”
He stopped. Took in a deep, shaky breath. Dragged the palm of one hand down his face. Maybe Aiden was still suffering from the blood loss, but he could have sworn Jordi’s other hand was shaking where he held it out in a palm-up See what I mean? kind of gesture. Just a slight tremor, nothing more, but that wasn’t the kind of thing that was typical in a guy who could snipe a dozen people straight through the skull without missing a single shot. He sounded morose, his usual humor draining from his voice as he finished off the monologue.
“I want to not fall. But more than that, part of me just wants to reach the fucking end, and get it over with already.”
“I see,” Aiden replied, quietly, for lack of much else to say.
Jordi snorted, dropping both hands to his side again, wringing them out briefly before crossing his arms defensively. “Yeah. You have fucking eyes, man.”
Aiden couldn’t have stopped the words coming out of his mouth in that moment even if he’d wanted to. He was human, he felt , and he didn’t always think before speaking―before letting his emotions take over.
“That’s not everything. What else do you want?”
Jordi uncrossed his arms and rolled his shoulders. His brows furrowed as he inhaled, his expression morphing briefly into something approaching a grimace.
Then he sighed. Deflated again. Willed a half-smirk to come over his face.
There was that good old glint in his eyes again.
“Is it too disgustingly cliche if I say I want you?”
Aiden shrugged. “Probably. But let’s be real, my entire life is a series of cliches at this point. One more can’t hurt.”
Jordi stepped forward again. And again. And another time, until there was barely any space between them, and Aiden stepped back to find himself tripping a little on the edge of the bed, bending backwards, letting Jordi’s arms snake around his waist, dipping him as if they were dancing some horrendous, bastardized version of the tango.
“Mind the shoulder,” Aiden breathed, and what little air he had left in his lungs was quickly stolen as Jordi’s lips crashed against his a moment later. The whole thing was surprisingly gentle despite both of them being, well, themselves , but it was still comfortingly familiar for Aiden to note the firm grip Jordi had on his waist, and the unbridled fierceness with which he kissed. And along with all that, there was a warm sensation rising in Aiden’s chest that, for once, wasn’t blood in places it shouldn’t be.
Being sentimental had its good side.