Chapter Text
Todd sighed as he rubbed at his stinging eyes, before punching the dispense button of a coffee vending machine that looked like it had come from the ‘60s tucked in the deserted corridor just off to the side of the ER waiting rooms. Now that the adrenaline from Wendimoor encounter and the mad “amboolents” dash was starting to fade, he could feel pain building steadily behind his temples, from pressure into a full-blown headache, as well as the phantom ache from the metal rings that Suzie Boreton had used to almost crush him. The finishing beep of the vending machine encouraged him to crack open his eyes and gaze at the impending caffeine with anticipation.
“Why are you in hospital, Todd?” Dirk’s cheerful voice called suddenly from behind Todd’s shoulder, just as Todd picked up his coffee cup. Todd startled, spilling half the contents of his cup on the floor. “Funny sort of place for Francis to send you just to get Farah some refreshment… He must have been a bit more out of touch with reality than I thought.”
“Shit!” he cursed, wrenched a handful of paper towels from a dispenser by the vending machine, and crouched down to soak up the brown puddle that had formed between their feet. Craning his neck, Todd looked up to see Dirk leaning heavily on an oddly-shaped wooden crutch, eyes worried and free arm outstretched.
“Sorry for startling you!” Dirk said quickly, hopping a step closer. “Stupid Dirk, always forgetting that magical transportation makes for sneaking up on people! Is there anything I can do to help?”
“No, no, it’s fine,” Todd reassured, standing back up and tossing the cup and the sodden paper towels into the trash can. Turning his attention fully back on Dirk, Todd took in his rumpled hair, dirt-smeared shirt, and the dark red stain growing progressively larger down this right pant leg. “Are you OK, Dirk? How did you get here, anyway?”
“I asked Francis to drop me off with you, and I suppose he took that literally,” Dirk said with a grin, completely sidestepping the first question. “But the bigger question is: why are you getting what must barely count as coffee in the corridor by a hospital waiting room?
Todd sighed. “It’s Farah,” he said quietly. “She, Tina, and Hobbs were all shot while dealing with the Mage. I managed to get them here, and they’ve just been taken into surgery, but the nurses tell me that it’ll be hours before we hear anything.”
“Farah,” Dirk whispered in horror, his eyes filling with tears as he stumbled back into the wall and slid down into a ball with his knees to his chest. “It was supposed to stop once the case was solved!” he said, closing his eyes tightly and tugging forcefully at his hair in despair.
Todd blinked in surprise at Dirk’s volatile reaction, before edging slowly toward him, folding himself to sit cross-legged beside the detective. He picked up the Panic Pete stress toy that had appeared where Dirk had discarded the crutch, and propped it up on one of Dirk’s knees. “Hey, it’s OK to be scared of the news, Dirk. I know I am, too,” Todd said. “At least the nurses said that they were hopeful, going in.”
“No, this isn’t me scared ,” Dirk said, opening his eyes again and fixing Todd with a determined frown. “Thank you for trying to make me feel better, but that’s not enough. I need to get out of here.” He picked up Mona and stood with a wince as she obligingly turned back into a crutch, before starting to hobble toward the hospital exit.
“What? Wait!” Todd cried after Dirk, rushing forward to stop him with an arm at his elbow. “You’re hurt, Dirk. We need to get a doctor to look at your leg!”
“That isn’t important right now,” Dirk retorted, shaking him off and continuing on through the automatic doors into the parking lot. “I can’t be here right now, and if you really want to help, then you can drive.”
Todd balked in surprise. “Is this a holistic thing?” he said, before throwing his hands up in the air as Dirk kept going without answering. He sighed before catching up with Dirk and pointed to where the amboolents was parked. “Which way are we going?”
---
Todd glanced at Dirk from the corner of his eyes as they drove toward the outskirts of Bergsberg. The detective had curled up as soon as he climbed into the passenger seat, his hands tightly gripping the yellow leather jacket around his shoulders that was Mona’s current form, and he was now staring away from Todd with his head propped against the window.
“It’s been half an hour, Dirk,” Todd said eventually, breaking the tense silence. “Can we talk about this? What’s going on?”
“Stop the car,” said Dirk, without turning to look at Todd.
“What, now?” said Todd in alarm, taking his eyes off the road to steal glimpses at Dirk. “But — ”
“Please,” whispered Dirk, squeezing his eyes shut.
Relenting, Todd pulled over to the soft shoulder of the highway. He startled as Dirk immediately opened the door and hobbled off the road to sit in the grass to the side of the highway. Cautiously, Todd got out of the door himself, feeling a wave of déjà vu at the familiarity of their stopping place, before he rounded the car and stepped toward Dirk.
You should go back,” Dirk said, meeting Todd’s gaze for the first time since the hospital. “Go check on Farah, I’ll be fine here.”
“What? Where’s this coming from?” Todd demanded, confused. “I’m not going to just leave you and Mona here alone in some ditch by some random field!”
“Just go away!” Dirk cried, shrugging out of Mona’s jacket and tossing her toward Todd as he tried to step closer. “I’m trying to protect you.”
“I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what this is about,” Todd retorted, catching Mona easily as she turned back into a stress toy, and tucked her into his jacket pocket. At Dirk’s continued silence, Todd paused, then crouched slowly so that he was eye-level with Dirk and raised his own hands placatingly. “You’re not going to be fine just bleeding out in the middle of nowhere, Dirk. Please just let me help you?”
“It’s your safety you should be worried about,” Dirk replied. “It wasn’t safe for me to be at the hospital — Farah, Tina, and the Sheriff have a better chance if I’m not there — and you’re not safe here with me.”
“What do you mean?” Todd said, frowning, bewildered. “There’s nobody here.”
Dirk averted his gaze, choosing instead to pick at the hole in his pant leg. “Everywhere I go, death and destruction just follow, and I can never get ahead of it,” he said eventually. “I thought that after I solved the case, things would get better, but I still can’t control it. I can’t stop the bad things from happening, and I can’t keep you out of the blast radius if you stay close to me.”
Todd gaped, speechless. “Dirk — ” he started.
“You were this close to being crushed to death by magic rings, Todd!” Dirk interrupted angrily, raising his hand in front of Todd’s face with his fingers a hair’s breadth apart. “If we were a minute slower, you would have died! And just look at what happened to Farah! We still don’t know if she’s — ”
“Hey, it was a close call, but I’m fine, I promise,” Todd said, ignoring the steady pounding of his headache as he moved to sit shoulder-to-shoulder with Dirk. “And I know what happened to Farah is terrifying — I’m worried too — but she’s strong, right? She’ll make it through this too, I know she will.”
“You don’t know that!” Dirk spat, shifting away with tears in his eyes. “Even if she does somehow recover fully, she wouldn’t have been hurt at all if it weren’t for me. And what about the next time? And what about you?
“You know, you’re such a good brother to Amanda that you’ve put up with being friends with this monster just to try and find her,” he continued, pointing jerkily at himself before using the same hand to pull out a blood-stained thread from his pants with a grimace, “and you’re such a good friend that you’ll follow me and take care of me even though I ruined your life! But look, you’ve got her back now, and there’s nothing left here that could possibly benefit you.
“You were right — I do deserve to be alone. And… and you’d be much better off just going back to Farah and forgetting me.”
Todd took a shuddering breath, heart heavy with guilt at the words that he had spoken under stress and frustration months ago thrown back at him in this way. “Dirk — ” he began, before pausing to gather his thoughts on how best to frame his response.
“You’re not a monster, Dirk, and you never ruined my life,” Todd said. “I’m really sorry I said those things to you before. I lashed out at you then because it had made me feel that everything we had done together up to that point was a lie. But I didn’t really mean any of it.”
“But you were right — ” Dirk said.
“No, I wasn’t,” Todd countered firmly. “Because what happened then wasn’t your fault, and what’s happened now isn’t your fault either. You didn’t cause any of this destruction.”
Dirk smiled bitterly. “None of it would have happened if I wasn’t there,” he said, raising his eyebrows.
“You don’t know that,” Todd said. “Look, man, Suzie Boreton was off the deep end — she would totally have done something else just as terrible if you weren’t here. And you helped to stop her from hurting more people.”
He shifted closer to Dirk, putting a hand on his shoulder. “All of that is just what-ifs,” he continued, “but you know what I do know is true? Everything that I told you at the concert. Back when I was working at the hotel, nothing mattered. For years, I was just going through the motions, trying to make ends meet for Amanda.
“But then you showed up, and — yes, there was a lot of death, a lot of destruction, and a lot of near misses — but we also saw so many incredible things, traveled through time, and saved Lydia’s life while doing that. During that week, something clicked, you know? I got to glimpse the connections between everything that you keep talking about, and I felt more alive than I had in years!” he exclaimed, his smile cutting off Dirk’s next objection.
“You brought meaning and purpose to my life,” he said finally. “And not just me! Amanda hadn’t left the house in years before you arrived. Then you came and helped nudge her out the door. And now she’s saving the world with crazy magic powers!”
Dirk smiled. “Amanda’s fantastic,” he said fondly.
“You asked the right questions and started it all, Dirk,” Todd said. “And you inspired me to be straight with her. Even ignoring everything else, I’ll always be grateful for that.”
They sat in silence for several minutes, Todd watching with bated breath the flurry of expressions that flashed across Dirk’s face as he absorbed what had been said. “That’s very kind of you to say,” Dirk said finally with a rueful smile. “I appreciate your assessment, even if I can’t agree with it fully. And it doesn’t negate the danger that all of you are in because of me.”
“Crazy things do always tend to happen near you,” Todd corrected. “But I think that the Rowdy 3 have the right idea on this one. We have to stick together and help each other to get through it all.
“I get it if you need to take a breather for a bit. But I need you, and Farah needs you. So please don’t turn your back on us, OK?”
Dirk huffed exasperatedly. “But I’m just useless — ”
“Let me be the judge of how ‘useful’ you are,” Todd said dismissively, waving a hand as Dirk looked at him with an unreadable expression. “You matter to me, and that’s gotta mean more than what some guy at Blackwing might have said to you in the past. Besides, we’re all a little bit useless… except Farah — she’s like the opposite of useless.
“But, my point still stands.” He pulled Mona back out of his pocket, and offered her to Dirk with eyebrows raised. “I want your help. Will you help me?”
Dirk gasped softly, eyes widening at the familiarity of his own plea turned back at him. He reached out slowly to take Panic Pete Mona back into his hands, and whispered, “OK.”
“OK?” Todd said hesitantly, his gape morphing into a grin as he realized Dirk’s meaning. “OK! Yes, OK!” He launched himself at Dirk with a burst of laughter, and pitched them both into the grass. Dirk landed with a pained yelp, and Todd broke the hug immediately, feeling his face heat up as he clambered back with a gasp and avoided Dirk’s eyes. “Oh no, I’m so sorry!”
“It’s fine,” Dirk replied shakily, his own cheeks reddening as he raised himself to his elbows with a wince. “I appreciate your excitement. No harm done.” He accepted Todd’s outstretched hand, and let himself be pulled up to his feet.
Dirk gasped in surprise as they turned together to face back toward the amboolents. “Is that the — ” he said.
“‘The Infant, Male, Pollock, Francis,’ yes,” Todd replied with a smile, his hand steadying Dirk by the elbow as they shuffled back toward the car. “You did mention that you wanted to see it.”
“It’s just so wonderfully impossible!” Dirk exclaimed, waving his free arm at the weather-worn boat, stranded in the middle of the field on the other side of the road. “Maybe we were meant to come by here after all.”
“Maybe we were,” said Todd with a smile, before poking Dirk lightly in his arm. “Now can we please get your leg patched up?”
Dirk shrugged with a tilt of his head and a raise of his eyebrows. “Well, it really is getting a bit sore...”
“OK, let’s go,” Todd said, opening up the passenger door for Dirk and helping him maneuver back inside.
Dirk beamed with wonder. “What did I do to deserve you?”