Chapter Text
"I can't believe we asked Freight Train to do this,” James said, shaking his head as he paced around Logan's office. Logan sighed. He hadn't exactly liked doing this, either, but he didn't know any other way to get the information they needed, and he didn't think that Kendall would give any of them a real answer if he was asked, so this was what they had to do. They had to have this file. “He could go to jail for that, right?”
Logan nodded unhappily. Carlos reached over and opened the file. “We got it. You read it. Get it over with. If Freight Train is going to get in trouble, at least make it worth getting in trouble for.”
“Okay,” Logan agreed, looking at the file. Kendall's doctor had an interesting sense of organization, putting the newest notes at the back. Maybe he liked to review all the older visits before the new one, not just the latest one.
“That's a big file. How long has this guy been Kendall's doctor?”
“Since... the summer after the accident. He's got notes on the injuries from the accident—looks like Kendall came to this guy first for a second opinion on the hockey thing,” Logan began, wincing as he read through it. Taylor had said that he took hockey away from Kendall, but that wasn't all he'd done. A lot of these injuries weren't on the official record for the accident, and according to the notes, none of them had been healing properly.
Outpatient for gunshot wound. No sign of infection, minimal scarring. Scheduled a psychiatric consult. Displays a complete lack of regard for his health and little for his own life. “Kendall got shot.”
“What?”
“Six years ago. He never told us.”
“What? That's messed up,” James shook his head. “How did it happen?”
“That's not in here,” Logan told him, though he wished it was, too. He flipped through the notes, reading over a knife wound that Kendall had also never told anyone about, one that he'd gotten shortly before the fight with James. Logan couldn't believe what he was reading. This was—the doctor was right. Kendall really hadn't cared if he lived or died.
“I knew it. Kendall is such a liar. His doctor recommended surgery to cauterize the ulcers months ago,” Logan was getting really mad now. Why couldn't Kendall just do what the doctor said? None of them wanted him dead, and he should take better care of himself, Taylor or no Taylor.
“Surgery?” Carlos asked. “Why?”
Logan sighed. “Kendall's got one of the ulcers that forms from repeated use of heavy painkillers, which he's had a prescription for since the accident and has managed to get himself reinjured plenty of times since then, so it's not like it's really a question of addiction, but it seems like every time he got off of one, he got hurt and went on another. We've all seen how well he takes care of himself.”
“You mean he doesn't.”
“Well, yeah. It's just—I can't really blame him for not wanting to take the painkillers after what they did to his stomach,” Logan said. “He's been refusing medication for everything but the ulcers for the past couple years, not that it has fixed anything with his stomach.”
“This is all stuff you basically already knew, though, right? Why would Kendall want you to read that?”
Logan reached the final page and shook his head. “This had better not be the reason.”
“What?”
“His doctor wanted him to go in for an MRI for the headaches. His notes say that he thought that Kendall's headaches were probably caused by a tumor.”
James shook his head again. “If this is Kendall's way of telling us he has cancer, it's one hell of a way to do it.”
“Well, his doctor has no actual notes or test results in this file that say that Kendall definitely has cancer. If he does, there's no sign of it or any treatment for it in these records.”
“Then why tell you to read the chart?” Carlos asked. He frowned. “Wait, you called that a file. Then records. You never actually called it a chart. But I had a chart. I had... Why my chart? What would be in that?”
“Let me find it,” Logan said, rummaging through his desk. He had a copy of the chart that he'd been meaning to look over to see what might have triggered Carlos' recovery. It wasn't that he wasn't grateful that Carlos woke up; it was just that he wanted to know why. Maybe it could help someone else.
He found the copy, flipped through it, and then he fell back in his chair. He shook his head, unwilling to accept what he'd just read. It was right there, black and white, and Kendall had as much as admitted it, but it couldn't be true. Logan didn't want to believe this. “No. He didn't. He wouldn't. That's not what he meant.”
“What is it?” James asked. “What are you talking about?”
Logan couldn't hardly look at them. He didn't want to accept this himself. They didn't need to know. But how could he not tell them? No, he had to tell them. “There's... It... You had drugs in your system, Carlos. The kind they use for medically induced comas. You could have woken up years ago, but... you were drugged.”
Carlos shook his head, refusing to believe it. “No. No. That is not... It...”
“I'm going to kill him,” James said, moving toward the door.
“Wait!” Carlos cried, and James stopped to look back at him. He hadn't really thought past the wait, so he didn't know what he was going to do now. He wasn't sure what to do. He was so confused. Hurt. Hurt and confused. He didn't want to believe it. Kendall would not have done that to him. He just... wouldn't have.
Then again, the Kendall Carlos had seen since he woke up from the coma had been a completely different Kendall. He had struggled with accepting all of the changes in the last eight years—he'd gone from his friends being happy and their new album about to be released to where his friends barely spoke and only James sang anymore. Kendall had probably changed the most of any of them. James still had his clothes and his hair, and he was a pop star like he always wanted to be. Logan was a doctor like everyone knew that he was going to be. Kendall was a cop. No one expected that of him. Carlos still had trouble believing it, even after seeing him in uniform. No, Carlos knew that Kendall had changed. A lot. That was clear.
Still, Kendall was a good person. Too good to have done that, right?
“Wait, what?” James demanded. “I'm going to go find Kendall and kick his ass. Right now.”
“There are bigger implications than how mad we all are right now,” Logan began unhappily, looking around at his friends. Carlos didn't know that he was mad, exactly, just really upset. Logan shifted the papers, putting the chart away so that he didn't have to look at it anymore. “When we started looking—”
“If you're going to bring up the whole Kendall might have cancer thing, I'm sorry, but no,” James interrupted angrily. “I don't care if he has a giant tumor in his head. It doesn't excuse what he did to Carlos. End of story.”
Logan sighed. “That's not what I was going to say. We were talking about how what we'd gotten Freight Train to do was illegal. So is this.”
“Uh...” James blinked, not sure how to react to that. He'd been angry, yeah, but Carlos could tell that he didn't know what to think. Neither did Carlos. “So... what, Kendall could go to prison for that?”
Logan nodded. “I'm not sure there's a clear legal statute for what Kendall did, but I have been through so many ethics classes and had to sign so many policy forms dealing with it—as a doctor, I have to be sure that someone consented to take their medication, and if they didn't, that someone with the right authority to agree to it did consent. It's not something that's taken lightly by any means. I'm sure most of the laws deal with administration of drugs without consent as either a medical issue or maybe a part of a sexual assault, and this isn't either of those things, but... It could possibly be filed under an assault charge.”
“Then maybe it should be,” James said, shaking his head. “Kendall knew what he was doing was wrong, or he wouldn't have been a damn chicken about telling us.”
“He wouldn't have said goodbye, either,” Carlos whispered, thinking back to that last conversation. Kendall had known they'd be angry, that they might never want to see him again, and he'd said goodbye to them. Bring that up had made James madder, and he was pacing around talking to himself while Carlos tried to sort out his thoughts. He was the one that this really affected, wasn't he? He remembered the way he'd been worried about Kendall, and he didn't like the idea that he could go from worry to hate so fast, no matter what Kendall had done. He needed more time. A lot more time.
“So what if he said goodbye?” James asked. “Good riddance! He kept you in a coma, Carlos! Eight years we waited for you to wake up, but we didn't have to! We could have had our friend back! You could have had your life back! Kendall didn't let you.”
“I know,” Carlos agreed miserably. He looked at Logan and at James for a long moment. “Look, we... We haven't heard anything he has to say to us about what he's done—”
“It doesn't matter,” James insisted. “It really doesn't.”
“—And it happened to me,” Carlos finished, raising his voice a little. “Whatever happens, whatever charges get pressed or whatever—that's my decision. I'm not saying you can't be mad at Kendall. You can be as mad as you want. But I choose the other stuff. If something happens where Kendall has to go to prison or something, that's my choice, not yours. Either of yours.”
“Carlos—”
“I know what you think, and it doesn't matter if I didn't grow up with the rest of you when you did! This is my decision! I get to do this,” Carlos persisted. Logan looked almost relieved—Carlos doubted he wanted to have to decide what to do about Kendall—and James was actually angrier, if that was possible. Carlos sighed. “James, if you want to go up to Kendall and punch him in the face, you can. I'm not... I just want the rest of it to be my choice. No one else's.”
James nodded. “Fine. Now I'm really going.”
“Uh, James,” Logan began, and James turned back, almost ready to attack him for keeping him from Kendall again. “Kendall's working a case. Around a bunch of cops? Might not be a good time to try and... hit him.”
James shook his head. “You're right. But this is not over. I am going to tell him exactly how I feel about this.”
“We all will.”
“Jo!”
She forced a smile as she went over to join Carlos and his physical therapist. She'd been working with them for a while now, and she hated herself every day for it, even as much as she knew that she had to do this to atone for her role in all of it. It was just so hard to be encouraging when she knew what she did. That secret was slowly destroying her, and she imagined that it was even worse for Kendall. She wondered if he was trying to hold onto his friends for the little time he had left before they found out or if he was trying to make sure that Carlos recovered before he told him. She didn't really believe that Kendall would try to hide it.
“Thanks for coming today, Jo. Carlos has been rather uncooperative, so I thought maybe you could cheer him up a bit, get him working.”
Carlos glared at the PT, and Jo frowned. He'd never been like this, even when he got frustrated. This wasn't Carlos. She knew that recovery was bound to have a lot of mood swings, but Carlos was just so happy to be awake that he had one of the best attitudes she'd ever seen, far better than her own had been when she was starting out. “I'm not doing this today.”
The PT held up his hands. “Fine. I'm going. I'll check on you in a while.”
“You got off easy,” Jo said as she watched the other man leave. “My drill sargent would never have done that if I said no to him.”
Carlos sighed. “I should do it. I should walk. But... I shouldn't have to learn to walk all over again. I shouldn't have lost all my muscles because I was stuck in bed.”
“I know it's hard to accept the accident—”
“It wasn't an accident, and I'm not even talking about the car crash,” Carlos said. He shook his head. “Last night... Logan read my chart. He said... I'd been drugged. To keep me in the coma. Kendall told him to look. Kendall did this to me.”
She winced. It was a relief to her that Carlos finally knew, but she knew that it wasn't for him. She knelt down next to him. “Carlos, I am so sorry—”
“I don't understand. It's Kendall. Of all people, he did this. James is so mad that he wanted to go off and hurt Kendall, and Logan he got all weird and wanted to research the possible effects on me, like he can't even deal with the idea that Kendall did it, and me... I don't know what to think.”
“Have you tried talking to Kendall? He might have an explanation—and I'm not saying that he does or even if he does that you should just forgive him, but if you want to know why or how, he's the one that knows, isn't he?”
Carlos lifted up his phone. “I start to call, but then I get angry. I can't talk to him right now. I can't. Kendall is the last person I thought could do something like this. He was always taking care of us. Protecting us. Why, Jo? Why would he do this?”
Jo swallowed hard. “When Kendall asked me about my father, he mentioned rules. Rules my father had given him to follow. I don't know what all of them were, but he did say he was supposed to stay away from me. Maybe there was something in those rules that said... maybe my father said if you woke up, he'd kill you. I don't know. But I can't imagine—even as much as Kendall hurt me—that he would do something like this for anything less than that.”
Carlos lowered his head. “That doesn't make it any better. It... Logan and James were mad because Kendall didn't tell them what was going on, but he didn't even let me wake up. How—what—I don't understand. I don't know what to do.”
She looked at him. “You know what you won't do. You won't let another day go by of you stuck in a bed or in a chair helpless. You're going to call that guy back in this room, and you're going to keep working on walking. Because that was something that should never have been taken away from you, and you can learn to do it again. So you will. That's where you start. I can't tell you any more than that, can't tell you how to feel. That's something you'll have to sort out for yourself. Just take all the anger and put it toward recovery. I did that with what my father said to me, and it helped.”
Carlos looked at her. “What did Kendall do to you? You said he hurt you.”
“He didn't keep me in a coma.”
“I know that. But... you still care about him. How? Why? Was what he did... not that bad?”
“In so many ways, Carlos, what happened between us was almost the worst thing that could have happened. I—I told you, my father told him to stay away from me. When I ran into him in Ventura, it was a complete accident on both our parts, at least at first. But that meeting led to me wanting a lot of things I'd given up on, feeling things that I didn't expect to feel again, and then getting my heartbroken all over again. It's also the reason that my father started killing people. Because he thought Kendall broke the rules. I don't know how anything good... It's—The one thing I understand now about all of it was how desperate Kendall seemed to have even a moment of peace. He took it a my expense, and I do hate him for that, but I can't blame him all at the same time. It's... all my fault, Carlos. My accident. My father. I should go.”
“Jo—”
“You can't hate Kendall without hating me. It was my father who did all of this to you because of my accident. My choices helped push him over that edge. My choice to get in the car, to kick him out of my life. I told him—never mind. It doesn't matter. I just... don't belong here,” she insisted, hurrying toward the door.
“Jo!”
She heard Carlos calling after her, but she didn't stop. Couldn't. Not until she got to her car, sat down, and started crying. What she'd said to Carlos was true. She couldn't hate Kendall without hating herself. If she was ever going to move on, everyone said she had to forgive herself. And that would mean forgiving him, too.
Logan swallowed nervously as he walked into the room. The homicide bullpen or whatever they called it was full of people, all of them busy at work. Some were on the phone, some were making notes on the computer, and others were talking to someone, either their partner or some witness. A few were eating. Everyone was moving at once, but no one noticed him. That was fine. He didn't really want to be noticed. He had come here to finally confront Kendall—he'd been working up to this for a long time—and now that he was here, he wanted to crawl into a hole and hide.
Why couldn't Kendall just have been at his apartment? This would have been so much easier if he was. But the guy that was there now said that he had no idea what happened to the last tenant—in uglier, coarser words—and that he didn't care.
Logan thought again about calling. He had tried outside the station, dialed the number, but the call didn't connect. It went right to voice mail, and Logan wondered how many angry messages James had left before Kendall shut it off. He didn't know how anyone else was reacting to this. Carlos kept saying he'd deal with it. Logan had done his best to make sure that Kendall's actions hadn't permanently damaged their friend, but that wasn't enough. He had to talk to Kendall.
“Doctor Mitchell,” a voice said from behind him, and he winced a little as he turned around to face Helena Bennett. He wasn't sure if he should be relieved that she was alone. She moved past him, going for her desk. “You're late.”
“Late?” Logan asked with a frown. What did she mean, he was late? How could she even know he was planning on coming here? No, she couldn't. He hadn't been planning on it, so he couldn't be late. “What are you talking about?”
“A month. You're a month late,” she said, sitting down at her desk. She dug into the bottom drawer and took out a granola bar, ripping open the wrapper. “Personally, I think it shouldn't have taken this long, but that's me.”
“This long?”
“For you to actually come here to talk to Knight,” she answered, trying to keep catch the part of the bar that fell forward after she took a bite. She sighed as it hit the floor and started eating everything that was still in her hand as quickly as possible. He watched her for a moment, on the one hand offended by her eating habits and on the other hand wondering when the last time she'd eaten was and hoping that she took time for a bit more than that today. That was the way that Kendall ate, and it wasn't a good habit at all.
Logan really didn't want to think about Kendall's eating habits, though. He needed one question answered, and then he could go. That was why he was here. And he needed to do it in person, only he didn't know where Kendall lived anymore, and so he was stuck... here. With Bennett. Kendall could come back at any time so they could talk or make arrangements to talk or something.
“I needed time to think. Time to accept what he did and to look at the long-term consequences that they'd have for Carlos,” Logan began defensively. He didn't think he should have to explain himself to Kendall's partner. It wasn't like she knew what any of this was like for them. “I needed to know that—I'm not explaining this to you. Why would I explain it to you? I don't have to.”
“Maybe not, but it does seem to me that I'm the only friend Knight has left, and that is not good.” She threw away the wrapper and tried to get the extra goo off her fingers. “It's also not right.”
“He lied to us. He did something horrible. Unforgivable. He didn't even have the guts to tell us the truth about it. He let me read it in a chart.”
“I'm not saying that he's perfect, not by any means,” Bennett agreed as she rose. “What I am saying is that you could have tried to talk to him before today. Yes, I know what he did. I'm not an idiot. I figured that out for myself, too. I even know why he did it because I did talk to him about it. I have my reasons for letting that go, and I'm under obligation to do something about it. The job. Me, though, I'm a bit more merciful than that. Or maybe it was pity. Or loyalty...”
Logan shook his head. He couldn't believe she was using that word. That word did not belong to Kendall Knight anymore. It wasn't loyalty—what he'd done—that made loyalty impossible. Friendship. Everything. He'd betrayed them. He'd been the one to tell them they could get through anything together, and then he'd done everything against that. He'd kept Carlos in a coma. He'd denied Carlos his life and the rest of them their friend. That was not together.
“That's fine for you. You're not one of us. It wasn't your friend that you've known since you were too little to remember who did this to one of you. It's not like anything Kendall could say could make this better. He... betrayed us. All of us. For what? To protect us? Maybe. But what he did... I can't forget that, can't forgive him...”
“Maybe you were right to stay away, then,” she said with a cold edge to her voice, and then she shrugged. “In any case, it doesn't matter. I meant what I said. You're too late. He's not here. Hasn't been for a month.”
“He's... gone?” Logan blinked in confusion. He hadn't expected that. Kendall's life had been the job before now, and if he didn't have them, what did he have? The job, right? So why wasn't he here? “Where did he... A month?”
She ignored Logan as her desk phone rang, yanking it to her ear angrily. “Bennett. Yeah, I know Knight. I trust him. So does Benny. You have got to be kidding me—are you saying you're accusing him of murder?”