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Amidst clatter and horns and the clang of an oncoming trolley, Scotty says, “It's all downhill from here, Melvin.”
This is a literal fact, considering that he and Kelly are currently standing at the top of Powell Street looking down at Chinatown – where their contact for their next mission is supposed to be drinking tea in a little shop behind another shop, down and around and there they'll be.
But this is his way of warning his partner, too. Kel's only been walking around for two days, still looking green around the edges and all too unsteady on his feet. Even now he's swaying like he's going to fall –
Like he'd fallen over the rail of the Golden Gate four days ago when Natalia Romanski had pulled him with her, an unexpected tumble into cold, with water hard as any city street below them. Scotty had been moving before she'd made her grab, or Kel would have been just another wartime roadkill.
Like he'd been swaying a couple of years ago at the top of Coit Tower, driven by their superiors' bad faith and the trigger they'd put in his head. Scotty had moved then, too, to offer his hand and pull Kelly back.
Now, on another sunny-cold July day, sharp wind blowing straight off that hard water, Scotty moves one more time to brace Kelly before another San Francisco plummet. Shoulder to shoulder should do it, he thinks.
Once Scotty's that close, though, he registers Kel's tiny, uncontrollable shivers. Sometimes Scotty thinks that they're too close, that one good earthquake would shake them all to pieces with nothing to keep them anchored. Sometimes – like in the last couple of days, after one too many Chinese takeouts – he wakes from bad dreams, fearing that they're too far apart, fearing that he won't catch Kelly this time and then he'll be there, empty-handed and alone, hanging over the abyss.
He's got to stop eating that Szechuan chicken late at night. A man can hurt himself with bad dreams.
He nudges his partner. “You feeling the chill, Kel?”
“Yeah.”
The monosyllabic response tells Scotty all he needs to know. Kelly's walking through his own bad dreams, reliving more than just one fall. And here at the top, the wind is knifing through them, just as it had on the bridge, like it had been trying to separate them.
So Scotty shrugs off his jacket and puts it around Kel's shoulders. He makes it kind of an elaborate jokey gesture, the same way he drapes towels around Kel's neck after a tennis match – with a trainer's care, a false subservience they usually laugh about in their hotel room afterward.
When they're not fighting the fall, anyway.
He smooths the fabric over Kelly's shoulders, then gives him a sharp pat. “That better?”
Kelly's grin is a little twisted. “Why do I feel like a five-year-old that Daddy's watching over?”
“Don't know. Why do you feel like a five-year-old--”
“I'm not kidding, man.”
No, Scotty sees that he isn't. And maybe it's because he's tired and all dreamed-out, maybe it's because he too feels the cold edge of the wind and the abyss below, that he doesn't manage to soften his voice when he says, “You know, Kel, you don't have to be a child to need someone.”
Which wasn't exactly what he'd meant to say, but to hell with it.
Kelly just... stops. Not that he was moving yet, anyway, but all of the nerves and bounce and fakery that animate Mr Kelly Robinson on a good day and jitter him on a bad one coalesce into single-minded focus. The trolley cresting the hill, the tourists streaming by, the clatter and horns and clang, everything goes still.
Scotty knows that gaze, knows the depths of it, but he doesn't know what Kelly's looking for. So he just holds on and waits.
Kelly's face relaxes at last. “You know what, Stanley, you're right.”
“Of course I'm right, Fred C. I'm always right. There are archives of my rightness, piled high as the moon.”
“True, true,” Kelly says, in what to an untrained listener would seem like his usual way. But it's deeper than that, and his next words fall into a strange silence, an eddy in the current of this loud life: “You're a good man, Charlie Brown.”
“Kelly, man.” It's all Scotty can find to say, because the moment's too deep.
Kelly smiles. “Scotty, man,” he says, mockingly, and this is his usual way, Kelly skittering along the surface of feeling so nobody gets sucked in and drowns. Then he shrugs off the jacket and offers it to Scotty. “You know what else? I'm feeling warm as a Guadalajara beauty's kiss right now, and I give you back your own. Wouldn't want you to catch your death, you know.”
“I won't,” Scotty says. “Got my partner looking out for me.”
Their hands clasp briefly in the exchange, just as they did that day at Coit Tower, that day on the Golden Gate. Then Kelly puts his hands in his pockets and rocks back and forth on his heels, and Scotty puts on his jacket, and they start the walk to the teashop and their next mission.
After a few steps, though, Kel starts laughing, that helpless surrender to mirth that he does sometimes, and Scotty says amiably, “What's so funny?”
“'It's all downhill from here,'” Kelly says, sort of gurgling. “Man, is that supposed to be encouraging?”
“Depends on how you look at it, Hoby,” Scotty says, and his shoulder brushes against Kelly's, and they walk on together, their steps matched and their smiles the same.