Work Text:
It was snowing the night his wife was murdered.
That was the detail that never loosened its grip on him, not the time of death or the angle of the wound or the neighbor who’d heard nothing at all. Snow changed everything. It slowed traffic, softened sound, excused lateness. When she didn’t come home on time, he told himself the roads were bad, that she’d pulled off somewhere safe to wait it out, that she’d call any minute with an apology and a laugh.
She never did.
Snow kept falling, thick and quiet, burying the street in white and his certainty with it. By morning, the world looked clean enough to pretend nothing awful had happened.
He took a leave of absence that stretched from weeks into months. Grief has a way of hollowing a person out, leaving only the motions behind. He attended the funeral, thanked people for casseroles he never ate, stared out the window at a city that kept moving without her. Winter bled into spring. The snow melted. The case cooled as evidence wore thin; leads melted away, witnesses unreliable, footprints erased by plows and passing time.
By summer, it was officially cold.
He went back to work that autumn thinner, quieter, and more patient than anyone remembered. He learned how to wait. How to let time do what brute force couldn’t. The file stayed on his desk long after it should have been archived, the corners soft from handling. Every so often, he opened it, just to remind himself that it was real, that she had existed, that what happened to her mattered, even if no one else had the bandwidth to keep caring.
The phone call came on an ordinary afternoon, the kind designed to be forgotten.
The voice on the other end was calm, distorted just enough to feel intentional. It didn’t ask questions or make threats. It knew the street. The snowbank. The way the blood looked against the ice. It named the man who did it.
Then it hung up.
Justice is supposed to be clean. It’s supposed to be procedural, documented, approved. But grief doesn’t care about rules, and neither did he. Not anymore. He followed the breadcrumbs quietly, methodically, like he’d been trained to do. When he found the man, it was snowing again.
By then it was unseasonably late in the spring, over a year since his wife’s passing, fat flakes drifting down like the city had decided to forget what month it was. He almost laughed at that. Nature had a sense of irony, if nothing else.
The blanket of snow was the perfect cover.
The body wasn’t found right away. When it was, there were no witnesses and no usable evidence. The weather did for him what it had done for the man who killed his wife; it blurred the edges, softened the truth, gave everyone plausible deniability. Another cold case stalled out. Another tragedy filed away, forgotten to the seasons.
He told himself it was over.
Then there was the video.
It arrived without ceremony, slipped into his life like the first flake of a storm you don’t realize is coming until you’re already buried. The footage was grainy but clear enough: the man’s face, the moment, the aftermath.
Someone else had been patient too.
That was how the girl entered the picture. Kate. She looked like she belonged in a different life. She was bright-eyed, earnest, out of her depth. She wasn’t dirty, not really. Just adjacent to people who were. Morally ambiguous men with expensive tastes and worse habits. He hated himself a little for noticing how young she seemed, how unprepared.
He needed leverage.
He told her just enough to keep her compliant, not enough to fully destroy her. He told himself that mattered. He promised her things: safety, distance, a way out when it was done. He promised the man she loved that he’d make it right, no matter how difficult he made things. He promised himself this would be the last compromise, the final sin on a growing list.
Disappearances were easier than murders. Easier to misfile, to delay, to let weather and bureaucracy do the heavy lifting. He engineered it carefully, a vanishing act in exchange for the music box, an absurdly delicate object for something worth so much blood.
He told himself their case would go cold. Truly cold. No calls. No footage. Another casualty of winter.
The night the storm rolled in off the Atlantic, he stood at the window and watched the city disappear one street at a time. The blizzard was relentless, the kind that shut everything down and gave people permission to stop looking. It felt fitting. Inevitable.
The news found him anyway.
The plane. The explosion.
Kate was dead. Collateral damage in someone else’s cold war.
Outside, the snow kept falling.
He understood exactly what it was like to lose someone and never get them back, to watch the world erase the evidence and move on, to be left with nothing but cold and questions and a terrible, gnawing certainty.
In a brief professional lapse, Garrett Fowler empathized with Neal Caffrey.