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They’re fighting.
Of course they are, they’re always fighting, nearly every second of the short time they’ve known each other has been spent fighting, whether both of them realize it or not—but for real, this time. Hands on each other (finally, God, finally ), nails digging in. Strahm hadn’t quite caught Mark by surprise but it’s basically good as, since he’s got the height advantage and the frantic adrenaline of a cornered prey animal; plus, he fights dirty, scratching and sucker-punching, his face twisted into a snarl of buzzing, burning hatred, his eyes utterly alight with it.
It’s lovely. Like looking at a slice of the Sun. The bright heat of it sears when Strahm gets close. Swing, parry, swing, dodge—Strahm hits like a tank, and Mark knows he’s gonna bruise, but he doesn’t mind. Looks forward to pressing on them later, in the throes of desperation to relive the wonderful strangling energy of all this. Mark thinks this might be what it’s like to be in love.
He aims hard with the hand holding the syringe he’d brought, halfway full of a benzo sedative that’ll lay Strahm out like a brick to the head, but Strahm blocks him with a strong hand halfway through the downswing and shoves Mark’s arm roughly to the side. Mark manages not to drop the syringe, though, and when Strahm pulls his arm back for another low-aimed punch Mark takes advantage of the opening, surging forward and jamming the needle into the side of Strahm’s neck, right at the juncture of the shoulder where the collar of his leather jacket peels back to make a space.
Strahm’s eyes go wide as the plunger depresses, pupils dilating in horror. He rears back and scrabbles at the puncture with his other hand, tearing the syringe out of his skin, but it’s no use—the thing’s already pressed empty, the liquid inside already flushed into his carotid artery. A tiny strangled gasp of “ You—! ” escapes his mouth, the quiet smallness of it unfitting for him, and he tries to take another swing at Mark, but the punch goes wide, and Mark sidesteps it easily. Strahm’s steps begin to stagger and sway, those long eyelashes falling shut of their own accord as the midazolam rapidly hits his bloodstream.
Mark catches him as he falls, hands twisted in the back of the leather jacket to keep him mostly upright. Strahm sags against him and man, he’s heavier than he looks, eyes rolled up in his head, groaning unintelligibly into the dip of Mark’s shoulder as he tries to resist the irresistible.
“You’re more trouble than you’re worth, you know,” Mark mutters, giving into the temptation to stroke a hand over the short hair at the back of Strahm’s neck.
“Nnh,” says Strahm.
Rather laboriously, Mark turns the both of them around and pulls Strahm forward, closer to the glass box. Strahm is a little bit taller than Mark is, and the scuffed toes of his boots drag across the concrete floor. His breath is warm and slow against Mark’s shoulder, and the heat of his body is a solid thing cradled in Mark’s arms. What for this to be under any other circumstance… No, don’t go there right now.
Mark tilts Strahm back like a dance partner, one hand at the small of his back and one steadying his side, and rests him in the glass box as gently as possible. Strahm’s shoulders nestle into the sharp bed, the shards lining the bottom clinking together quietly, and his eyebrows pinch together in sleepy discomfort as his unconscious brain registers the faint pricking against his back, mostly blocked by his thick jacket but not completely, never completely. The fluorescents along the edges of the box tint his face teal-blue and put the scar running down from the corner of his left eye into relief, and the little square of medical tape at the base of his throat glows peroxide-white in the light. Mark lets himself touch Strahm’s face just one time, tracing that sharp jawline with the back of a finger, before he steps back.
Strahm looks good like this, unconscious, finally calm, Snow White asleep in his glass coffin—one arm lax at his side, jagged pieces digging slightly into his wrist, the other crossed over his chest as though making a promise, swearing on his own heart. His wedding ring glints under the krypton brights and Mark has a strange, fleeting urge to reach in and pull it off Strahm’s hand, but he doesn’t. He just steps back, closes the lid of the glass box, and books it across the room before the door slams shut and traps him.
Outside, in the hallway, Mark presses his ear to the locked door and listens to the grinding of the gears, the creaking of the moving walls. A series of sharp cracks echo as the tape recorder and Strahm’s gun get pulverized; Mark flexes his palm against the chilly concrete wall, chewing his bottom lip in anticipation. He almost wishes Strahm didn’t have to sleep through the spectacle—it would have been better if he could have seen what had almost been. What would have been, if not for Mark’s infinite mercy. Mark doesn’t really feel like examining what sparked that mercy, though, so when the hydraulics stop groaning and the click of the glass box’s lock reaches him through the closed-in room, he creeps into the workshop in the space behind without another thought.
The workshop is quiet and cold, long gone unused—Mark doesn’t think he’s been down here since before the old man died, since they were preparing the nerve gas trap, cobbling together that breathing apparatus for the Matthews kid. It’s dark to the corners, dusty and still like it’s holding its breath. The only light comes from the center of the room, where the conveyor belt ends and brings the glass box to its final stop.
Mark creeps over to the box and peers down over it, looking in through the front panel at its occupant. He doesn’t strictly need to be stealthy, or anything, but some sort of strange instinct urges him not to let his guard down. He reaches out gently, carefully, and pries up the unlocked lid of the box, levering it open slowly enough that the hinges don’t creak.
The sedative was supposed to keep him under for at least twenty minutes, and it hasn’t even been half that, but Strahm’s indomitable ability to not only beat his own stacked odds but crush them to dust under his heel strikes again—he turns his head away, mumbling something uncharitable when a glass piece skims his cheek, and shivers slightly as the box lid opens and the vaguely refrigerated air of the workshop engulfs him.
Mark leans over the box, lifting himself up with both arms, hands curled around the sharp metal edges. If Strahm sat up, they’d crack their foreheads together. Staring down, stray strands of hair slipping out of their wax and down over his sweat-slick forehead, through an unbidden but unobstructed smile, he says, “Morning.”
Strahm’s definitely no longer asleep , but the sedative is clearly still swirling through his system—he’s having visible trouble prying his eyes open, his eyelashes fluttering like the wings of an insect that’s struggling to fly. He makes a small noise in response to Mark’s words, a wheezy sort of groan, and it twinges at his injured throat. A little dimple curves between his brows as he winces.
Fucking Christ, Mark wants to do something—do something to him. He isn’t sure what. Wants to—wants to grab him and squeeze, wants to bite him, wants—God, he wants.
He doesn’t do any of that, but he does give into the temptation to reach out and touch, curling a hand around Strahm’s shoulder and giving him a gentle shake. It’s not true love’s kiss, but it’ll do, especially because Mark’s pretty sure Strahm would bite him if he tried anything funny.
Strahm hisses in a vaguely reptile-esque manner as the movement jostles the glass poking into his back, but his gaze focuses just a little bit further, so Mark counts it as a net positive.
“Rise and shine, Agent.”
(Mark does let the backs of his knuckles linger against the warm side of Strahm’s neck far longer than necessary. Strahm doesn’t seem to notice.)
“Jesus,” Strahm slurs, voice rough with sleep and stab wounds, making a move to lift a hand to his face that’s quickly aborted by the fact that his nerves still aren’t quite firing on all cylinders yet. “Another five minutes?”
“Real funny,” Mark replies, vinegary, even though it actually kind of is a little funny. “Can you sit up?”
“Nnh. What'd you do to me?”
“Knocked you out for a bit, since you’re allergic to seeing sense. You shouldn’t be awake yet.”
Eyes sinking half-shut again, Strahm murmurs, “I don’t… feel awake.”
“Hey, you’re pretty calm, all of a sudden. What’s up with that?”
“You…you shot me up with something, wiseass. If you were gonna kill me now,” breath in, breath out, long and slow, “you would’ve done it already.”
Mark can’t argue with that, so he tilts his head to the side in concession. His hand is still brushing the side of Strahm’s neck. “I don’t want to kill you.”
“Funny way of showing it.” It’s unclear whether it’s purposeful or if he currently can’t, but Strahm doesn’t shrug Mark’s hand away.
Mark finds himself smiling again, an unbidden twist of the mouth that Strahm’s unfocused eyes zero in on. The blue of them gleams in the turquoise light.
“What happens in the room,” Strahm asks, into the sudden dusty silence, so quiet it’s nearly under his breath, making it even raspier. “When you close the box.” What would have happened to me , is the unspoken question.
Mark leans forward, closer, further into Strahm’s space—if he lost his grip, he’d fall in, slice up his hands on the glass—and lowers his own voice to a similar intimate register as he answers, simple and true.
“The walls close in.”
Strahm closes his eyes completely at that, another shiver running through him. His expression twitches to something else; fear, definitely—relief? Mark’s not sure. He keeps his position (even though it’s putting a strain on his back) until he hears, like a choir of angels, like the most beautiful song in the world, Strahm’s soft, shredded voice whispering, “Get me out of here.”
Mark ends up having to lift him out of the box bodily, glass pieces falling from the back of Strahm’s leather jacket and shattering into glitter against the concrete floor. He still does feel absurdly like Prince Florian, freeing Snow White from enchanted sleep, although the effect is somewhat diminished by Strahm swearing at him breathily as he tries and fails to stand on his own.
“Cut that out,” says Mark, sliding an arm around Strahm’s waist to keep him upright, being mindful despite himself of the blood-sticky wounds along Strahm’s back. “You’re never gonna get up two flights of stairs.”
“Mmnh, I hate you,” Strahm mumbles, but his hand is in a death grip around Mark’s bicep. His head falls back as though too heavy to lift, exposing the long line of his throat, the patch of medical tape, and he sways slightly as Mark pulls him completely out of the box, like a freshly unpackaged doll without an acrylic stand.
“I’ll carry you,” Mark threatens.
“Go… go fuck yourself.”
They somehow do make it out of the workshop, down the hall, up the stairs and out the trap door, and Strahm’s knees only buckle twice. Mark never drops him, enjoying too much the feeling of holding him up, Strahm’s weight propped against the full length of his side.
They’re definitely not making it up the stairs to the bedroom, though—way too narrow hallways up there—so Mark balances Strahm on the sofa and goes to get his first-aid kit.
“Don’t lean back,” he says, crossing into the kitchen to rummage under the sink.
Weakly, Strahm says back, “Yeah.”
The plastic box is way back in the far corner of the cupboard, neglected and dusty. Mark bumps his head on the little doorway as he extricates himself.
He walks back into the living room to find that Strahm has, of course, tipped back against the sofa cushions, getting spots of blood on the fabric and turning the olive green to brown. Mark doesn’t really care about the sofa, but he twists a hand into the front of Strahm’s jacket and yanks him back up anyway, not loosening his grip even when Strahm makes a hurt noise.
“Take this off,” he demands, though he proceeds to strip the jacket off of Strahm himself. The whole back is pocked with puncture wounds—some small enough not to be noticeable, but some big enough that they’ll probably require sewing—and soaked in blood, rapidly cooling and turning tacky, staining Mark’s hand ruby-red. Fighting the urge to lick his fingers, he drops the jacket to the floor and cracks open the first-aid box, fishing for the antiseptic and the precision tweezers. Okay, how’m I gonna do this…
He hauls Strahm up into an actual sitting position, tilting him forward so that Mark can see most of his back over his shoulder. Reaching around his waist with the tweezers, Mark aims for the first piece of glass he sees glittering against the dark fabric of Strahm’s shirt, working it out carefully with just the tiniest bit of resistance.
Strahm flinches with pain against him; he’d probably be tenser than a bowstring if the ebbing effects of the sedative would let him. Mark finds himself placing the palm of his unoccupied hand against the back of his neck, flat, unmoving, both a comfort and a restraint. “Hey. Relax.”
Strahm doesn’t say anything, just exhales harshly, hot against Mark’s collarbone. It’s exceedingly intimate, in a very sudden and astonishing way, both of them warm from a good fight and the late hour, and Mark wishes for one singular millisecond that his neckline was a bit more open so he could feel the damp drag of Strahm’s eyelashes against his skin.
The sedative must be worn off by now—it’s been almost half an hour since it’d been administered—but Strahm remains uncharacteristically cooperative, pliant and calm where he’s draped over Mark, allowing him to pull the glass from his back sliver by sliver. Mark would almost think he’d actually fallen naturally asleep, were it not for the miniscule tenses and hitches in breath and bitten-off swear words that come with the removal of every embedded shard.
Eventually, all the glass that Mark can find has been excised, a tiny little pile of crystal pieces gathered on the coffee table. Trading the tweezers for the bottle of antiseptic, Mark tugs at the hem of Strahm’s thin sweater and says, “Lemme see you.”
It’s not quite the phrase he’d intended to use, but it gets the point across—Strahm gives him a poisonous scowl, but slowly strips his shirt off with only a couple muttered words of complaint. Before his shoulders can hunch in too far, Mark pulls him in to expose his back again.
“This’ll hurt,” he warns.
“Just go,” orders Strahm, and fists a hand into the back of Mark’s suit jacket, hard.
Mark upends the bottle of hydrogen peroxide over Strahm’s sliced-up back.
None of the wounds are big enough to require stitching, some bandages will probably do just fine, but no wound is too small to sting when doused in antiseptic. Strahm gives a raspy, agonized shout, pressing his forehead hard into the crook of Mark’s shoulder as fresh pain lances up his spine.
“ Fuck ,” he groans, voice like gravel close to Mark’s ear, bony fingers digging into the soft flesh of his hip. “Oh, fuck you. Fuck you, for this.”
“You’re welcome,” Mark replies, petting through Strahm’s hair just one time.
After a moment, Strahm plants his hands on the rounds of Mark’s shoulders and levers himself up, wrists shaking slightly from the effort. He blinks at Mark with sharp eyes.
“Why are you doing this,” he asks.
Mark stares at him for a long second. Opens his mouth a little, closes it. He doesn’t really have an answer, is the thing—at least not an answer he really feels like thinking about, let alone sharing with Strahm. This wasn’t part of the original plan, though, the one John’d laid out for him weeks ago. He’s winging it, has been since he sat there in his kitchen and filled that syringe with midazolam. One of the only things Mark is truly good at anymore is winging it.
Strahm seems to wing everything and get what he needs by sheer chance, so maybe he would understand. But Mark isn’t going to say all of that right now, not when it’s one o’clock in the morning and one of them is still covered in open cuts, so instead of giving Strahm the explanation he wants, or the explanation that he might not want but is possibly more accurate— I want you with me, I want you here, alive, I want you— Mark just nudges his shoulder a bit roughly and says, “Turn around.”
Strahm levels Mark with another glare that could strip paint, but does as he’s told, and only jumps a little at the press of Mark’s fingertips against the warm plane of his back. “What the Hell are you doing?”
“What d’you think? Don’t move.” Mark takes to carefully smoothing bandages over each and every slice that strikes across Strahm’s back, ensuring that everything is covered. He’s self-aware enough to know that acting like this is rankling against something hard and cold that’s planted itself deep inside of him, but he doesn’t feel any particular incentive to force himself to be cruel, so he doesn’t.
Strahm wriggles a bit, because of course he does, but mostly he stays in place. The lack of contest is so strange. Mark wants to check him for head wounds.
When everything’s been patched up, Strahm turns back around, fishing for his discarded shirt. He unfolds it from its crumpled pile, wrinkling his nose at the tacky crust of blood that’s formed along all the miniscule holes in the back. “Damn it.”
“You gonna add destruction of property to my record? Might as well,” Mark says tonelessly. Strahm’s upper lip curls, venomous, as Mark continues, “You’re welcome, by the way.”
“I’m not thanking you for fixing something you did,” Strahm rasps, his hands flexing against the sofa cushion like he’s only just holding back from curling them into fists. Frankly, Mark wasn’t aware Strahm was capable of such restraint.
Fixed him , purrs the little animal curled up in Mark’s chest, kneading at his heart. Fixed him, fixed him.
The little square of medical tape covering Strahm’s tracheotomy wound is peeling up a little bit along the left edge. Without thinking, Mark reaches out to smooth the lifted edge back down with the pad of his thumb, palm and fingers against the side of Strahm’s bare, vulnerable throat.
He feels the movement under his thumb as Strahm swallows, taken off-guard by the touch, and the contact is broken as Strahm jerks back out of Mark’s reach. Wide-eyed, he lifts a hand to his neck, fingers brushing over the re-secured bandage. A warm flush crawls up his chest and blooms across his face.
“Don’t touch me,” he croaks.
“I was touching you before. All over. You didn’t care then.”
Strahm’s face gets slightly redder, his eyebrows tilting down in comically astonished offense. God, this guy is expressive. He’s like a cartoon.
“Fuck you.”
Mark caves, leans back a bit, lifts his hands in an okay, you win sort of way.
“Alright. Hey, alright.”
Strahm sneers at him once more before wrestling himself into his messed-up shirt, unrolling the bunched sleeves and pushing his arms through them. It takes him a minute, and he curses irritably as the blood coating the back of it smudges onto his face as he pulls the fabric down over him.
Poking his head out of the unbuttoned neck, he smooths the shirt down over himself carefully, mindful of the bandages on his back, and swipes the back of a hand over his red-smeared cheek. Mark watches.
“You can’t go back,” says Mark after a moment, breaking the lull of silence they’d fallen into.
“Oh, and why’s that?” Strahm asks, rather meanly.
“I told them you’re the Jigsaw accomplice.”
Strahm blinks, the irritation on his face falling into slack confusion. “What?”
“Well, I didn’t tell them. They came to the conclusion. Erickson probably did.” Mark fumbles the words a bit, trips over them awkwardly. Ridiculous, really, he’d so smoothly set the trap and now he’s stumbling through the gloating at pulling it off.
Strahm is just staring at him. Mark stares back until, suddenly, quick as a striking cobra, Strahm’s arm comes up, the left one— smack!— and he backhands Mark across the face. Hard, sharp, clinical, more of a snap-out-of-it than anything else. Mark twists his head to the side, luxuriating in the warmth that spreads from the point of impact even as he hisses from the sting.
“I’m going to kill you,” says Strahm, and Mark looks back to see him breathing heavily, eyes on fire, a swipe of his own drying blood across his cheek, and Mark thinks God, would you, would you please, if anyone does it should be you, and then his train of thought is cut by Strahm finishing, “Tomorrow.”
Mark says, “What?”
Strahm’s still-raised hand drops down to Mark’s shoulder, palm sliding further to his chest, bony fingers wrapping tight around the knot of his necktie. He doesn’t pull in, just—holds him there. Mark shivers with wariness, with want.
“Tomorrow.” Strahm speaks in a calm tone, at odds with his manic expression and slightly spasming grip on Mark’s tie. “Tomorrow, I’ll kill you.”
Mark stares him down, peering right into him. He thinks he likes what he sees. “And tonight?”
Strahm breathes in and out, air fluttering warm over Mark’s cheek. He leans back. He lets go. His eyes still burn.
“Tonight, I get your bed.”