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Sometimes Sonny could almost convince himself that it couldn’t be real.
The feeling of being observed, sharp and nagging and always, always true. The bone-deep cold that came on without warning, prickling his skin and forcing his hands into his pockets on even the hottest Florida summer days. The sensation of seasickness, which was really bullshit—he hadn’t felt legitimately seasick since he was a little boy, and he lived on a boat, for christ’s sake.
The dreams.
He’d trusted it in ‘Nam, when he was half-crazy anyways and throwing magical thinking into the cocktail of neuroses he’d picked up there felt like something of a foregone conclusion. All it really got him was a second tour and more dead friends than he could recall the faces of. More likely than not, he was confusing a knack for saving his own ass with premonition.
Because it couldn’t be real.
If it was real, that meant he should’ve figured it out better by now. Should’ve been able to read it right, should be the best fucking cop ever, no blood on his hands, no widows to give notices of death. Should’ve been able to save Mike Orgel the day he woke up ice cold and sick to his stomach with no clue as to the source besides the unfamiliar strength of the feeling. The dream of a gas station with the pumps dispensing blood. But it could’ve been anywhere. Anyone, or at least anyone close.
It decimated any chance Sonny’d ever have of a functional relationship. Caroline had come to expect phone calls at any hour whenever Sonny was in the grip of “one of his spells,” and she’d always chalked it up to paranoia from being a soldier, from being a cop. And sure, it was a little of both, but there was always that tinge of something else, the cold-prickly-seasick thing. He was content to let her believe that he was just a little touchy, even shell-shocked, rather than certifiably insane, and he thought he’d worked out a balance, learned to ignore the itch of wrongness, gauge its severity before panicking.
Even so, he was always coming off as overprotective, sometimes outright controlling when he’d ask her, with desperately forced casualness, where she was going that day in an attempt to check her schedule against the places in his dreams. And when the cold hit him particularly hard, Sonny couldn’t conceal the fear and urgency behind his questioning. It had definitely contributed to the divorce. Then Calderone had put a hit on him, the Argentinian assassin had turned up at the safehouse and opened fire on his family, and he’d barely felt anything.
Sure, maybe it meant that he was never truly in any real danger. Maybe if he’d already done everything he was supposed to do to mitigate the damage, he wouldn’t feel much. Or maybe there were no rules, there was nothing to figure out, and it was just going to hit him with random intensity whenever anyone he had the slightest connection with was in trouble. Or, again, maybe it wasn’t real. Sonny had a lot of justifiable anxiety and a lot of Miami locations rattling around in his head. Being on edge made sense. Having nightmares about these places made sense. If they were a little… relevant, it just meant that he was a decent investigator and he was extrapolating from known information. And sometimes the dreams didn’t seem to foreshadow anything at all.
But part of his mind whispered that some of the places were completely unknown until after the fact, that maybe he’d just never entirely figured out how some of the things he’d dreamed about applied to real life. He knew that, even if it seemed crazy, it was probably real, and that pretending it wasn’t despite all evidence to the contrary was a defense mechanism, but fuck worrying about that. Sonny was okay with a little defense mechanism now and then if it meant quelling the urge to painstakingly research the whereabouts and daily habits of every friend and family member whenever he caught a chill.
So when he dreamt of Evan for the first time in years, Crockett knew that it meant something. And yeah, he was tired of caring about this. Tired of trying to save everyone. But this was Evan. Evan, who would never understand just how shitty he felt about what had happened to Mike. What they’d done to Mike. How Sonny knew that he would’ve been able to stop what had happened if he’d paid the slightest attention to his friend’s life after he’d shut down the moment he’d heard the word “gay.” If he’d just called him the day he’d died, when he’d run through the list of people he cared about. He’d called Caroline, he’d called probably a dozen guys from the army, he’d called Evan. Kept it vague. Made small-talk under the pretense of catching up or reminding them of something. Told them to be careful. Let them know he cared, in a stilted attempt to make it sound like an afterthought. And in the end, he hadn't called Mike because it'd be awkward, Mike had died, and he hadn't needed to utter a single cruel word for it to be entirely his fucking fault.
In the new dream, Crockett was opening crates of guns and ammunition. He could see his breath in the air as he pried the lids off with a crowbar, the wood splintering, and as he went down the line of boxes, they grew larger and larger, more difficult to open. Finally, Sonny arrived at a box and there was extra space inside, a sort of indentation in the orderly rows of semiautomatics and clips. And the next box had the same strange negative space. By the time he’d arrived at the next crate, he was sweating despite the cold, and he shrugged his shirt off before wedging the crowbar between the lid and box, levering it loose with what felt like all of his strength. He’d only gotten one side properly unstuck, but to his surprise, the lid fell aside with ease. Sonny turned his head to look toward the end that he’d believed to be nailed shut, and there was Evan, shouldering his own crowbar, grinning.
What do you say, pal? Think you’ll fit?
The other man raised his eyebrows suggestively, giving Crockett a slow, deliberate once-over. Sonny didn’t know what to say, and was immediately profoundly conscious of his bare chest.
Listen, buddy, what are you—don’t start with— he stammered, embarrassment and anger and something warm that he didn't want to interrogate all curdling in his stomach.
But Evan’s gaze slid lazily from his skin to focus on the last crate, a half-smile lingering at his mouth, bemused and otherworldly, and Crockett looked down into the box for the first time. Mike Orgel, nestled among the firearms, almost serene if it weren’t for the entry point of a bullet that opened just beneath his left eye, clean and bloodless, distorting his features and pulling the lower eyelid down to expose a sliver of glimmering sclera, the hint of an iris, ice-blue and clear. Sonny jerked away in horror, stepping back and back until his body connected with something. Evan had drifted toward one of the crates with the hollow space on the inside, which now made a terrible kind of sense.
Think you’ll fit? he repeated, the wild-eyed kamikaze look Sonny had privately dubbed “late-stage Evan” mingling with a far-away spark of suppressed laughter and a dirty smile, and motioned with his crowbar toward the object at the other man’s back, and of course it was the other box, of course it was, and suddenly it was set into the ground and he was falling, he was waking up, cold and jumpy, and then he was going to work.
So Evan had come back into Sonny’s life, and Evan had died, but not before telling Sonny that it was his turn to make his own decision, whatever the fuck that meant. He guessed it could mean anything, good or bad, but coming from the man who claimed to have a bullet with Crockett’s name on it, and whose outlook had been so dark for so long, it felt more like a curse. When you die, it’ll be at a point where you’re so miserable that no one will be sure that you didn’t do it on purpose.
But life went on, and the more severe dreams subsided for a while. New York threw him off-kilter in that it actually got a little cold there, especially at night, and he wandered around the city feeling lost and ineffectual until the inevitable heartbreak and flight home. He stepped off the plane and was answered with a shiver that would’ve almost felt like a welcome if it hadn’t heralded a spate of ritual murders.
Then Hank Weldon had come back and made Sonny feel positively lucid by comparison, and then Robbie had been killed by his own father's men and Sonny had been unable to stop it, his dreams garbled things with no clear meaning, nothing to figure out other than the fact that Robbie and the woman and the baby were all possible casualties.
And then one night, after news that an old adversary had finally been put out of commission, and after he'd seen proof in the form of the body, Sonny dreamed of the man.
But Papa Legba was fucking dead. And Sonny literally had the pictures to prove it. He'd never had a dead man show up as not-dead in one of his dreams. At least he was spared that particular variety of psychological torture.
In the dream, Sonny was looking out at a small body of water. It was frozen over, save an oblong hole cut in the center, and there was Legba, looking very much alive and sitting up in his casket, which rocked gently in the sliver of water like a little boat. He looked over at Sonny like he was surprised to see him, like he was the one who shouldn’t be there, but that was only for a second, and then he smiled. Beckoned Crockett out onto the ice, toward the casket, and the detective couldn’t just let him get away, so he shook off the confusion and broke into a run. But the son of a bitch started sinking, then, and looked damned unbothered by it, and Sonny was definitely running, but he didn't seem to be getting much closer, losing his footing on the ice. Legba waved at him, eyes bright and glittering, as if he’d just pulled some kind of practical joke, and soon the casket was completely submerged.
By the time Sunny stumbled his way to the spot where the thing had gone under, the ice had grown over it, solid and shining like a scar. He dropped to his knees and didn’t give a shit that it could break—that wasn't important. What was important was that he needed to find Legba, to catch him and make him explain why he was there, in his dream. So he scrabbled at the ice, which was quickly being dusted with a thin coating of the snow that skimmed across the surface of the pond, fine and dry as ash.
And it was working, getting clearer. Something was still under there, he could tell. A dark shape just below, parallel with his own body. He gave one last sweep across the remaining stripe of snow and suddenly, he was face to face with someone—the ice clear as a window—and it wasn’t Legba at all.
It was his partner. It was Rico.
The other man’s hazel eyes were wide and filled with a fear Sonny had never seen in real life, his hands pressed against the ice, feeling for purchase. Crockett cursed under his breath and quickly switched from clearing the ice to trying to break through it, his knuckles splitting. But it was useless—it might as well have been bulletproof, and soon Rico’s eyes shuttered closed and he lost consciousness, body drifting beneath a swath of seemingly unclearable snow and out of Crockett’s sight.
And the bottom of the water opened into an oval of sky, and there was Papa Legba, looking up or looking down, and he was laughing.
Sonny woke up with a start, heart pounding, and grimaced at the wave of cold, a sensation like icicles breaking off into his blood. He was going to have to wear a shirt with real sleeves today. And even if the Legba in the dream was some kind of metaphor—which he had to be—the danger was still unmistakable.
He was going to have to tell Tubbs.
As the day wore on, every development in the case bolstered Sonny’s resolve that warning his partner was not only the smart move, but the only move. Legba was alive. The bastard had been in some kind of voodoo poison-coma, and now he was back and more fucked up than ever. Not only was he shambling his way through Miami when he was supposed to be under six feet of dirt, he was sending some kind of hit squad out to unabashedly murder people. In Crockett’s past experience, there was usually a little more subtlety to the man, but now he was killing men in public places while detectives were sitting right outside. Detectives that were Rico and Sonny.
He'd ridiculed the voodoo, sure. It was preposterous. He realized that he was hardly in a position to deem anything "unrealistic," but he knew what a conman looked like. A trafficker. The guy wasn't a priest of anything. He was just another criminal using something bigger than himself to scare people. Sonny wasn't about to legitimize that in anyone's eyes, even if he was a bit more wary of the sorts of things most people would dismiss as the stuff of bad fiction.
But Rico? Rico was actively disdainful, and wouldn’t let it go. He took things like this personally—considered the irrationality to be a setback to the entire human race or something. But he didn't know Legba like Crockett did. He was ruthless, and smart, and got in people's heads. And hell, maybe he was able to do things most people couldn’t. Weird stuff happened in Miami.
So Crockett invited Rico over to his boat for a drink the night before the other man was scheduled to infiltrate the voodoo ceremony—a terrible idea, in Sonny’s opinion, but he couldn’t talk him out of it. Sometimes Crockett still couldn’t believe “infiltrate the voodoo ceremony” was a real option on his bureau’s agenda, but again, it was just… Miami.
Rico could tell that Sonny was nervous the moment he stepped onto the pier and saw the man standing on the deck of the St. Vitus Dance. Firstly, his shoes didn’t match the rest of his outfit, and secondly, he was already drinking. He looked up from his tumbler of whiskey and smiled at him, a pained, inauthentic thing that redoubled Tubbs's concern.
It got even worse after that. He'd tried to make small talk, speaking in a long, falsely-cheery and borderline manic stream of banal comments that left his partner discomfited and wondering if he'd resort to talking about the weather. He was refilling his glass before he'd finished it. Not making eye contact. Attempting to sit down, then invariably standing up within minutes and gazing out at the ocean like the dramatic motherfucker he was. All in all, he was a mess.
But Tubbs could wait it out. He thought it was a pretty safe assumption that Sonny hadn't invited him here just to waste his time. He'd get around to whatever it was he wanted to say eventually.
And he did.
“Hey, uh, Rico? Remember when I told you about Evan? And Mike?” asked Sonny, finally, staring into his glass again as if there was something extremely mysterious at the bottom and not just what Tubbs suspected was shaping up to be a pretty substantial hangover. This was it—the point.
“Sure, man.”
“Well, I guess I kinda… left some stuff out.”
Tubbs had figured that this was the case. He hadn’t pushed the issue when Crockett first told him the story—it had clearly taken a lot out of him to give him as much as he already had. The guy had been wound so tight during the case with Evan that Rico had been half-convinced that he was going to outright quit the force before the thing was even finished. They’d had a friendship breakup over it, for fuck’s sake. So he took it for granted that the other detective was still withholding some information. Tubbs considered himself to be a pretty damned good investigator, even if he was hired onto the vice squad under false pretenses, and he was ninety percent sure that Crockett had been involved in some kind of relationship with Mike, Evan, or some combination therein, and that said relationship wasn’t strictly confined to your typical cop-buddy-guy stuff.
He didn’t give a shit about that, and he'd be lying if he said it hadn't hurt a little that Sonny had been so visibly afraid to tell him anything about what had happened. Admittedly, the man had a full carousel of emotional baggage, but still.
Out of courtesy, Rico tried to look a little taken-aback by the news that Crockett hadn’t told him the full truth.
“Oh yeah? Like what?” he said, carefully neutral.
“Well, Castillo worked it out on his own, so I figured I should probably tell you.”
Fuck. Rico liked the lieutenant a whole lot, but he was strange. Really strange. He had virtually no clue what the dude thought about anything. Judging from the other detective's demeanor, Tubbs didn't think Castillo had told Sonny to clean out his desk, but even so. Some things were worse than being fired, they just happened a little slower. Sonny had learned that from Mike Orgel.
Rico would fucking destroy the people responsible if what had happened to Mike ever happened to Sonny.
He was so damned fond of him. His ridiculous clothes (Who wore that much white and expected to be stealthy? And how did it seem to work sometimes?), omnipresent smile, willingness to keep giving everyone a chance even though he’d seen so much bad shit and got hurt for his trouble far more often than not. The boat that was also his house and his absurd attachment to the Ferrari and that fucking alligator, which Rico knew for a fact that he talked to. He was stubborn and petulant and tried so hard to look blasé, even now, chain-smoking and pacing the deck of the St. Vitus Dance.
Finally, he stood still, but remained facing away from Tubbs, staring out at the water. He took in a deep breath, leaning against the boat's railing.
“I knew Mike was gonna die that day, Rico.”
So, they were back to this. Crockett might be able to convince himself that he was an asshole, but he wasn't convincing Tubbs.
“Come on, Sonny. It wasn’t your fault. You couldn’t have known that he’d—"
“But I did know."
Something about his tone closed off all space for argument. He shot a fierce, defiant look Rico's way. And even though the conversation was quickly veering off any map Tubbs was familiar with, he felt another spike of affection for the man.
"I knew Evan was gonna die too,” Sonny continued, visibly on-edge. He worried at his clothes in an extended search for his cigarettes, which were always in the same pocket, and took a few tries to light one.
This was starting to freak Rico out a little.
“What are you trying to tell me, buddy?”
So Crockett told him everything. About the dreams, how he'd called everyone but Mike the day he’d died, he even told him a little about Vietnam. And the persistent coldness that made so much sense; it explained why Sonny seemed to keep his hands in his pockets all the time even though he lived in the damn tropics. Rico had long suspected there was something going on there other than another louche Burnett-Crockett affectation. It was always accompanied by a sort of unease, an elevated air of concern. The occasional almost-suppressed shiver. He’d figured it had something to do with trauma, or garden variety nervousness, or maybe even a physical issue he was compensating for—pain from his old football injury or something.
Then Sonny told him about the dream with Legba and the frozen pond, and he understood exactly why he was here. Sonny was worried about him. Really worried. The dream had rattled him, and his eyes looked a little glassier than usual when he got to the part where Rico himself turned up.
Rico Tubbs believed himself to be a rational guy. He didn't advertise it, but he didn’t go in for religion or superstition, or even karma or luck, really. He was a detective. It wasn’t just his job; it was how he was wired. To decide what was bullshit and what wasn't. And, somewhat to his own surprise, this didn't feel like bullshit. And it was Sonny. He was volatile, sure, but Rico never doubted him, not when it counted. Tubbs had spent entire days with him, from sunup to sundown, and he most definitely was not out of his mind.
So Rico believed himself to be a rational guy, but he also believed in Crockett’s... visions.
Huh.
Sonny took a long drag of his cigarette, exhaling the smoke hard through his nose, and carded a hand through his hair. “Fuck. I’ve never told anyone about this. I’ve been thinking all day about ways to make it sound less crazy, and it didn’t really work, did it?”
“And you said that Castillo… figured all of it out somehow?” Rico said carefully.
“Yeah, when all that stuff went down with Weldon, I guess I slipped up. Said something about knowing I was being watched. Didn’t think it was that weird, but you know how he is.”
Rico nodded.
“As much as anyone can know how he is, yeah.”
“Exactly. So he crept up on me at the station while I was working late one night—I swear, he came out of nowhere—and asked me about it. Fucking… whispered a bunch of questions at me. If I’d known who was watching me, or just that it was happening. Said he'd 'heard about things like this' or something. Man, who even is that guy?”
“Which was it, anyways?”
“Knew it was a cop or ex-cop, didn’t know it was Weldon.”
Sonny paused.
“I was kinda thrown for a loop by that, to be honest. Never got any specific read on the person watching before, other than, you know, 'this ain’t good.'”
Tubbs took the gamble. He let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding, and said “Shit, here I was thinking that you were just going to tell me that you and Evan might’ve, you know, had a thing.”
“What kind of a thing?” the blonde bristled, voice at full gravel.
“Seriously?”
Rico raised an eyebrow. He wasn’t going to fight him on it, but come on. The guy had just told him he had… some kind of psychic ability, and he was still getting fucking cagey about this? One of the two topics they’d discussed tonight made considerably less sense than the other, and Crockett seemed more concerned at the moment with the one that was… honestly pretty common. In the real world.
Finally, after a tense moment, Sonny’s shoulders dropped, and he stopped looking like he was going to take a swing at him or something. Which was great, because that macho shit really wasn't either of their style. Crockett sighed.
“We didn’t. I was with Caroline.”
He shot Tubbs a significant look. He would have. This was all he was getting out of him on that front, and it was more than he’d expected. Still, Rico didn’t want to completely let it go. If they were going to talk about magic, they were going to talk about this.
“Evan was a good-looking dude,” he supplied casually.
“Yeah,” Sonny conceded, suddenly extremely interested in his cigarettes again, drawing one out of the pack and tapping it against a palm. If he’d noticed the tacit hint of an admission on Tubbs’s part, he made no sign of it. “And he used to be a hell of a lot of fun. All three of us were. Before everything went to shit.”
He grew silent for a while.
“I think it pissed Evan off. That Mike had been… hooking up with guys from those clubs.” Sonny paused, then added pointedly, “Other guys.”
“Oh… so they were…?”
“Nah,” said Sonny, shaking his head. He stopped tapping his cigarette and rolled it along his lower lip pensively. “I don’t think so. I think Evan might’ve been… figuring some stuff out. Or trying not to, I guess. It’s safer, you know? When you don’t think someone would ever be interested anyways. Easier to ignore. So you let yourself get… close, ’cause there’s no way it’ll be able to hurt you in the same kinda way. And then you find out it could've been possible and…”
“Yeah,” agreed Tubbs, “it’s not just in your head anymore.”
Suddenly, he desperately wanted one of Sonny's cigarettes, and he'd never been a smoker. This conversation had been enlightening, but fucking exhausting, and he wanted a cigarette. And he wanted Sonny to light his cigarette, and maybe… He cut off the thought before it could fracture off into additional, similar thoughts. Now was not the time to add that revelation into the mix, no matter how on-topic it was.
"So, you and Mike, did you two ever…"
Sonny scoffed.
"I know it must come as a real shock to your deviant mind, pal, but none of us were actually sleeping together."
"I don't know, three vice cops? Sounds like you'd be able to come up with some interesting ideas," he said, waggling his eyebrows.
Sonny made a sour face, rolling his eyes.
"I'll be sure to call Switek and Zito and let 'em know you said so. I bet there's plenty of room in the bug van."
Rico laughed then, genuine and surprised and just fucking happy. Happy that his friend's walls were down for once and might even stay that way, at least with him.
“So,” Crockett said when their laughter died down, “you don’t think I’m crazy, then?”
“I always think you’re crazy, man.”
A flicker of doubt crept into the blonde detective’s expression, before carefully disappearing beneath the usual smile. He was still one flippant remark away from ducking below deck with his goddamn alligator and a fresh bottle of Jack and not emerging until he absolutely had to come into work, Rico realized. He put a hand on Sonny’s arm.
“Sonny. You’re my best friend. If you say this is real, then it’s real. End of story.”
Relief flooded Sonny’s features then, and gratitude. A pause.
Tubbs couldn’t resist.
“You’re psychic, you play for both teams. It’s all cool.”
Sonny punched him in the arm, and Rico put both hands up in surrender.
"Yeah, well, not everyone can learn ten languages and know all about… art and whatever, buddy. Some people gotta work off of their instincts.”
"‘Instincts,’ right…”
"I'm not psychic," the blonde added crossly.
"Sure you’re not, Crockett,” Rico said smugly, patting him on the shoulder.
“I still don't believe in voodoo, man," he asserted.
"Neither do I, Rico,” Sonny sighed, “but Legba does. I know this guy. Take it from me—he's dangerous, no matter what you call it. Just be careful, alright?"
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, “I’ll be sure not to drink the Kool-Aid while I’m there.”
“They’ve got guns, too, you know,” Sonny noted wryly.
“So did Jim Jones. My reference stands.”
“You know, you're a real pain in the ass, Rico,” said Sonny, all unguarded affection and crow's feet and smiles, “Don’t ever change.”