Work Text:
“You have to quit smoking for this to have any real impact,” Castillo said in his usual rasping whisper, and Sonny rolled his eyes, rolled a Lucky Strike across his lower lip and pointedly flicked his lighter, feeling juvenile but also justified.
Somehow, the lieutenant had talked him into learning yoga, or something like it, and he was presently sitting on his lawn and murmuring at Crockett in a tone that Sonny suspected, for Castillo, translated as serene. Privately, the detective thought it might be more unsettling than the man’s customary terseness and unblinking stare, but maybe he was just unused to it. Or maybe Marty, in his short-sleeved button-up and thin black tie, sitting in the lotus position in his socks, eyes closed and whispering at him to quit smoking, was just freaking him the fuck out. Did the guy always have to look like he was en route to a tropical funeral?
“Alright, I draw the line at that—no way am I giving up nicotine for inner peace or whatever,” Sonny said, gesturing vaguely with his cigarette.
“Smoking is not meditative,” the other man said flatly.
“This is meditation, pal,” he grumbled, tipping ash on the lawn. “Different people have different ways of doing things.”
“Sonny, the potential damage to your lungs is a liability.”
“Yeah, well, so’s not wearing running shoes sometimes, but I think I still manage to chase people down pretty well in those,” he said glibly, waving a hand in the direction of the white leather loafers that sat nearby in the cropped grass, fully realizing that his clothes were more a part of his cover, of the Burnett costume, than the smoking ever was. Though the smoking was plenty important, too. Calmed him down, gave him something to do with his hands. Made him look like he didn’t give a damn about the state of his lungs.
“Why don’t you ever talk to Switek and Zito about the cigars?”
Since Crockett and Tubbs had helped rescue Jack Gretzky’s family and had thus effectively deus ex machina’d themselves into Castillo’s permanent good graces, the lieutenant seemed fractionally more lenient with them—with Sonny, really, since he’d admit that he was the harder one to work with. Now Castillo responded to Sonny’s incessant griping with silence more frequently than a disapproving stare and barely-concealed irritation. Sonny sometimes got the nagging feeling that the man felt bad for him, and he didn’t like it, but he figured that they both had some pretty fucked up stuff in their pasts and some ongoing fucked up stuff on their respective horizons, so maybe it was just some weird gesture of respect. Acknowledgement. Pity wasn't really Marty's style, anyways.
And the whole Sonny-having-a-sixth-sense shit probably had something to do with his shift in attitude, too.
So here he was, learning how to fucking meditate at like 5:00am on his boss’s Floridian zen garden of a lawn, his house all spartan feng shui and books and uncomfortable-looking chairs which Sonny never actually got to sit on because he was always sitting on the damn ground (which was completely unfair, since he didn't own many clothes dark enough to hide grass stains), or stretching, or balancing, or practicing mindfulness. Castillo was practically his damn therapist. ...but it was true that Castillo had also told him he should see a therapist.
Which was probably fair, but what could he actually say to them? Even without the ESP or whatever, his job was incomprehensibly bizarre, horrifying—how many suicides had he witnessed this year alone? How many people he’d cared about had been killed or turned out to be criminals? And then there was everything he wished he could forget about the war… Not to mention that he couldn’t date without worrying that he’d be too distracted by a real relationship to be effective at work. He didn’t think the best therapist in the world would be able to relate, and he knew that they probably wouldn’t have to in order to be helpful, but it’d make him a hell of a lot more likely to give it a try if they could.
When he had a house, it wasn’t like this. When he had a family. Or it wasn’t quite as bad. He’d always been too focused on work, sure, and he’d always drank a little more than he should. But he’d had people to go home to. A separate space that had nothing to do with being a detective. But now, his house was a drug dealer’s boat (albeit a nice boat), his roommate was an alligator, his car was owned by the police, and his wife and son were in another state. The delineation between his cover and his Actual Life was getting… blurry. And somehow, even though he had no real expenses, he was still flat broke.
Another thing he couldn’t tell a therapist about: the dreams. Categorically knowing that people were probably going to die on any given day put a real damper on his mental health. But he could tell Castillo. And once he started telling him, started telling Tubbs, it felt good. He didn’t have this fucking secret anymore; they knew who they were talking to when they were talking to him, and they didn’t think he was lying or being crazy. He felt less like his personality was something he was making up, not Burnett, not the version of Sonny Crockett who had his act (somewhat) together, who didn’t have cold spells and wasn’t regularly scared shitless by his dreams. Some freewheeling divorcee who could make the boat/alligator/married-to-his-job situation seem fun.
He’d believed himself to be too cynical for catharsis, but his dual disclosure to Rico about his… not-complete-straightness and the thing with the dreams and dream-adjacent stuff had been strangely reassuring. It had just kind of… comfortably enfolded into their repertoire of conversational material, even joke material, without Sonny getting defensive. And his partner's repertoire of things he could have one of his insights about. The guy was always, out of the blue, offering up a piece of advice, asking a question Crockett hadn't asked himself and hadn't thought to ask himself. New, suspiciously-helpful, good-looking guy appears and volunteers his mob connections for a case? "Don't fall for him, Crockett, alright?" Sonny catches a chill while they're out on the open ocean? "It's actually a little cold right now—probably nothing to worry about, man."
And Castillo was helping, too, even if his new peace-and-harmony campaign was sometimes a lot to handle. He was trying to get him to clear his mind, parse out the useful stuff from the tangle of anxiety and generally overwhelming bad feelings that came along with his career in regularly observing and participating in nightmarish, improbable events. And yeah, it probably wouldn’t hurt for Marty to have a detective working for him that could… know a little more than the average guy, but Sonny was still doubtful he’d ever be genuinelu useful on that front.
He sometimes wondered if it was fucked up that these people were basically his family. But Sonny was always at work, and at work, Castillo was kind of like… his dad. A hell of a lot nicer than his old man had ever been, a statement he imagined people would find borderline unbelievable, someone calling the lieutenant nice. But he put up with Sonny’s bullshit, he somehow hadn’t fired him or Tubbs or anyone on the squad, really, when the job got a little too personal and they did something… extralegal. He had their backs. And now he was teaching Sonny how to meditate, and if he really thought it would help, Crockett supposed he could stand the inconvenience.
“Alright,” Sonny looked to Castillo and sighed with the put-upon, slightly incredulous air of a man about to part with something priceless at a bargain, “Maybe I’ll cut back a little—how does half a pack a day sound?”
And if the lieutenant smiled, just a little, it was probably a trick of the light from the sunrise.