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After everything, standing in the front room of the rectory, Jud collapses. Not externally; he's still standing upright under his own power, but some inner strength that has propelled him through the past three sleepless days has finally burned through. Benoit can see it in the dullness of his eyes, the slump of his shoulders as he stands, purposeless, in what has probably never felt less like his home.
"Father," Benoit says gently, and again, when Jud gives no sign of having heard him, "Father."
Jud startles and turns, gaze unfocused, to blink slowly in Benoit's vague direction. He's concussed, most likely; Benoit should have gotten him checked out instead of dragging him hither and thither to Nat's house and the church and back to the rectory. Stupid. Benoit isn't thinking straight.
Neither is Jud. He keeps blinking and shakes his head slightly as though that might dispel some of the confusion clouding his gaze, wincing when all it does instead is aggravate the headache he has been trying and failing to hide from Benoit for hours. "Hmm? Sorry, I didn't… I'm so tired, I guess all that no sleeping caught up with me."
"You're concussed, son," Benoit says. It's almost sweet, the way Jud takes that in, frowning in concentration as he works through the idea and finally, satisfied with Benoit's conclusion, offers a grave nod.
"Yeah. Yeah, I'm… that's true. I got… he hit me pretty hard, and… you know, when I was a boxer I got a lot of… so it's supposed to be easier to get more, I think. But you don't need to worry, I know how to deal with them. I've had them… lots, I've had lots."
Christ. It's no wonder Jud finds the thought of someone - be it Benoit or Geraldine or anyone else - looking out for him so incomprehensible. Who in his life has taken care of him? Benoit, at least, has Phillip, and it took well into the first decade of their relationship to fully acclimate to having another human being who cared so deeply about his well-being. Jud has no one, has had no one for a very long time.
"You'll brain yourself on those stairs before you can take care of it," Benoit tells him, leaving no room for argument, and grips Jud's elbow to steer him carefully up the narrow staircase to the upper floor of the rectory and into Jud's sad little bedroom. "Where do you keep your pajamas?"
Jud points to a low oak dresser on the wall opposite the bed. "There, but… you don't have to…"
"Nonsense."
Benoit has already retreived a pair of boxers and an undershirt from the top drawer before Jud can finish voicing his protest. In this instance Jud's concussion is working in Benoit's favor. In his right mind, Jud is Benoit's match for stubbornness; like this, Benoit has the slightest of upper hands. He spots a pair of soft grey sweatpants draped over the antique wicker chair in the corner and snags them as well before returning to Jud, who has collapsed sideways onto the narrow bed and now lies there with his brow furrowed and eyes shut against the dim glow of the bedside lamp.
"Clothes," Benoit says, keeping his voice low to avoid jarring Jud's headache any further. "Then you can sleep."
"'mnot sleeping. You're not… supposed to sleep, with concussions," Jud says, eyes still shut.
Benoit bites back a smile. "You're working off outdated science, Father. Your brain requires sleep to heal. I'll keep an eye on you, never fear."
Jud cracks open one suspicious eye. "You're staying?"
"Of course. You need someone to watch you, and I have nothing urgently requiring my attention. I am happy to play the concerned friend for a night," Benoit says.
He pushes away any guilt he might feel over the fact that he ought to have acted like a concerned friend last night, when the concussion was new and Jud was at the highest risk of dangerous complications. The least he can do now that Jud is out of the woods is give him the peace of mind he needs to rest.
"If you're sure," Jud says. He pushes himself back up to sit and tries to start on the buttons of his shirt, but his fingers slip uselessly off the plastic. "Shit."
"That'll be the concussion." Benoit doesn't wait for permission; if he has to get a clear and sound-minded yes before taking Jud's clothes off they'll be here like this until morning. He steps between Jud's splayed legs and deftly undoes the top three buttons, pausing briefly to figure out the clasp of Jud's clerical collar before he moves on to the rest. Jud makes a halfhearted attempt to squirm away, but he doesn't have enough fight left in him to succeed in it. "Don't fight me, Father. I may not be a boxer, but I'd venture to say I've handled the aftermath of more murder cases than you have. You're in no state to take care of yourself. Let me."
Jud sags slightly in defeat, although Benoit suspects it's only because he's too tired to put up any more resistance. He lifts his arms without protest to help Benoit slide the shirt off his shoulders, but when Benoit reaches for the hem of his sweat-stained undershirt, he flinches away again. His eyes are closed, expression pained, and it seems like an effort to get the words out, but it's more forceful than he has been about anything else since they made it back to the rectory.
"Don't - I… it's, I mean, it's fine, I can sleep like this. I don't need… you don't have to…"
The sour taste Benoit has been swallowing down all weekend creeps back up his throat like acid, nudging at his gag reflex and threatening the nausea he's spent years training himself out of. Jud may be the best version of a Catholic Priest there is, but he's still Catholic, and a man as openly gay as Benoit undressing him is, it seems, a line too far.
"I promise you your virtue is safe with me, Father," he says, pushing the sourness back down yet again and turning his frustration and disappointment into a gentle, chiding humor. There's a reason he doesn't form close friendships with Christians.
The reassurance seems to confuse Jud rather than mollify him, and he squints up at Benoit with a slow shake of his head. "That's not… what? I don't, I mean I don't care about… there's just, it's… if you saw, you'd…"
The acid is back, but now it is fear rather than disappointment. Jud is hiding something - something that if Benoit saw, he would… what? He would deduce something Jud doesn't want him to know? It has nothing to do with the case; Benoit knows in his bones that he's wrapped that one up tight, but there's a lot about Jud Duplenticy still locked away behind layers and layers of piety and repentance.
Jud ignored his concussion just as much as Benoit did; it stands to reason he'd ignore any other injury just as easily. Former boxer, Benoit reminds himself. Pushing through pain is just another day.
Benoit doesn't offer any verbal answer; an indication of his intentions would just give Jud more time to react. Instead, he shoves Jud's feebly protesting arms aside and yanks the undershirt up and over his head before Jud's delayed reflexes can kick in and stop him, then steps out of range in case those reflexes tend more towards punching than Jud likes to think they do.
"Fuck," Jud says, wrapping his arms around his torso and curling in on himself to hide from Benoit's view, but it's too late.
The bruising is extensive. It's close to a week old, still blueish-green in the deepest places and fading into an ugly yellow around the edges. Benoit maps out organs and sensitive spots like a macabre connect-the-dots: kidneys, stomach, spleen, all marked out on Jud's skin by the very deepest bruises. The hardest kicks.
"Father," Benoit says, helpless, for a moment, to think of anything else. Jud curls tighter in on himself and Benoit changes his mind. Now is not a time for titles. "Jud. Please let me examine you. I have some medical knowledge, and those bruises… never mind. We'll get you to see the EMTs tomorrow."
Jud stares defiantly at his knees, still incongruously clothed in his filthy black trousers. He's shivering. "I'm fine. I was a boxer, I… I checked them myself. I'm fine."
Benoit is, quite frankly, proud of himself for the patience he has displayed with Jud Duplenticy up to this point. The man is stubborn as all get-out with a lack of self-preservation to match - unfortunately a combination Benoit is drawn to when it comes to his Watsons, but still infuriating to deal with once the adrenaline of the case has faded and he is tasked with making sure being his Watson hasn't done any irreparable psychological damage.
"Father Jud," he says sharply. It makes Jud wince, but Benoit forges on without apology. "You cannot self-diagnose a ruptured spleen. Now, either you will let me examine you tonight, or you will allow the EMTs to do it tomorrow, but you will allow those bruises to be looked at. I did not clear your name just to lose you to internal bleeding because you were too stubborn to see a doctor."
Jud is quiet for several moments, seething. It isn't subtle; nothing he does or feels is. Benoit would find it almost charming if it weren't so infuriating.
"You, then," he says finally. "If it has to be someone. Since you already… know what happened."
"I'd like you to tell me again anyway," Benoit says, approaching the bed once more. Jud doesn't so much as lift his hands in a token gesture of protest as he uncurls from his protective hunch and lets Benoit lay him out on the bed with more care than his initial manhandling up the stairs. It's incredible how much this man has endured while concealing this much pain.
Jud turns his face towards the wall. "I know you already guessed it."
"Humor me regardless."
Benoit debates kneeling on the bed in order to better examine Jud's far side but decides against it. Jud may have been more concerned about revealing his secret than Benoit lusting after his bare chest, but he is still a priest and Benoit would rather not have to bully a priest into allowing a man to straddle him for any reason, medical or otherwise. If something seems concerning, he'll roll Jud over himself.
He rubs his hands together to warm them and begins to palpate the bruising as gently as he can, though he knows there's not much hope of avoiding pain. Jud winces and hisses through his teeth at every touch.
"Your story, Father," Benoit reminds him. Talking will hopefully distract Jud from the pain, and - if Benoit is lucky - his guard might be lower now than it was when he first told it. There are answers here to find yet.
Jud's speech is halting and slurred, interrupted every few words by noises of discomfort, but even in his abysmal state he has the natural cadence of a storyteller, and Benoit can't help but be compelled.
"It was… on Palm Sunday, you know, I took his confession, and… I cracked, really, and I told him everything I thought he was doing wrong. And he… he really socked me, honestly, I was surprised how strong that punch was. I went down and he just… he kept kicking me, telling me to get up and fight him, saying stuff like I'm the world, you're the church. The sort of typical Wicks bullshit. The world's a wolf, get angry, don't take it lying down. And I tried to argue, while he was kicking me, but it wasn't really… it wasn't about that."
He trails off.
Benoit pauses in his examination of Jud's ribs - so far, so surface-level, but he won't be satisfied until he can get Jud into a CT scan and make sure nothing is cracked. "Go on."
Jud's face is still turned towards the wall, but what Benoit can see of his cheek is flushed in what Benoit can only assume is mortification. That's to be expected, he supposes, with another man's hands splayed possessively across his bare chest, touching him more intimately than he has been touched in what must be years outside of a medical setting. But it's interesting that Jud sees it that way too.
"Come on, Blanc," Jud says, small-voiced. "You guessed it already. Don't make me say it."
Benoit hadn't, actually. Perhaps that's a black mark on his record as a detective, but he ought to be forgiven for his lapse in this one instance, given that everything about Jud's vocation screams heterosexual. He understands now, though.
He keeps his touches light as he continues his exploration of Jud's ribs, letting none of the rage bubbling up to replace his earlier discomfort bleed into his hands. The goddamn church. "I think you ought to, for your own peace of mind."
To his surprise, Jud responds not by arguing but by making an aggrieved face and opening his eyes to look at Benoit once more. They're still hazy and unfocused, pupils far too large, but the spark in them feels more like the man Benoit has come to know over the past few days than the defeated, broken creature Jud has been since Samson's death.
"You just can't let things rest, can you?"
"I'm a detective. It's my job to dig up what folks would rather leave buried."
"I didn't want to bury it," Jud says. He closes his eyes again but keeps his chin tilted ever so slightly in Benoit's direction. "I wanted to tell everyone. This fucking guy, this priest, who's supposed to be so much better and holier than me, and he's spending every week telling me how, how much he masturbates and looking at me like he's trying to figure out if I like hearing it, like he's so pleased with himself for sniffing me out. And then the day I called him on it he beats me up? It wasn't about the church. It was about him and me, and he knew there wasn't a thing I could do about it. How could I tell anyone? The church wouldn't…"
Benoit feels abruptly sick. He pulls his hands away.
"I think you ought to get this looked at by the EMTs in the morning. I'm not… I'm not the best qualified judge of this sort of thing."
Jud tries to sit up, alarmed, and falls back against his singular pillow. "What? No, you said… you offered, you said, you or the EMTs. They'd just ask questions, and I don't…"
"And you can tell them what you told me the first time," Benoit says, tasting bile.
How many times has he done this, in his youth, before Jud was old enough to read the Lord's Prayer? How many gay men has he patched up to keep them out of the hands of the authorities, out of the hands of qualified medical professionals who ask questions like who did this to you and why?
Benoit is too old to be doing it again.
Slowly, painfully, Jud pushes himself upright. He chews his lip anxiously. "If you think I should. I'm sorry, I… I made you uncomfortable."
"Certainly not," Benoit says. He's a better liar than Jud is. "I would just rather not leave anything to chance with your health."
He has forgotten that Jud is better at seeing through him than most people. He covers his eyes with his palms - not rubbing, just protecting them from the light, Benoit thinks - and keeps going, muffled behind his wrists.
"I didn't mean to - to make you think, because I was telling you, that it meant… I know you're gay, I mean, I read your wikipedia, and I know you probably think… fuck, you must think I'm so pathetic, a gay priest who won't report a hate crime because he'd have to come out to do it."
"Son," Benoit says, aghast, and places a reassuring hand on Jud's bare shoulder before he can think better of it. "No, that's - that's not it at all."
"Then why did you stop touching me?" Jud asks. It's quiet, plaintive, tinged with an awareness that it sounds like something much more than what it really is.
Who in this boy's life has ever truly taken care of him? Not the church, that's for damn sure, and not anyone for a long time before that. Benoit's chest hurts.
Phillip would tell him to stop wallowing in self-pity and do what he was always going to do.
"I have lived a few decades more than you have, by my reckoning," he says, and now he is the one fighting the urge to close his eyes to avoid Jud's gaze. "In social circles very different from the one you have chosen. I am not… unfamiliar with young men who fear the consequences of going to the authorities. You simply brought up some old memories. I'm sorry. If you want to avoid questions, of course I'll look you over."
Jud laughs, pressing his palms harder against his eye sockets for a moment before he drops his hands to look at Benoit again. "I guess… yeah, I guess none of this is new to you. Sorry."
"It's not your fault."
It's the church's fault, first and foremost. What other institution could keep men like Jud stuck in the 1990s, tending to each other's cuts and bruises and keeping each other safe when those who were supposed to protect them refused to? Benoit knows Jud knows that, just as he knows that knowing it won't change Jud's mind about any of it.
Jud shoots him a sad smile. "I'll go to the EMTs in the morning, tell them what I told you the first time. Thanks for… for caring, I guess."
"Think nothing of it," Benoit says. Any appellation of son or Father feels wrong, in this quiet moment. "You need more people who care about you."
"You're probably right about that." Jud hesitates. "Will you still stay? Just in case?"
"Tell me which bedroom was Wicks's so I can avoid that one, and yes, I'll stay."
"First door off the stairs, the big one."
Benoit squeezes Jud's shoulder once in thanks and, before he can talk himself out of it, bends to press a kiss to his grimy forehead. He stays there, breathing deeply, as Jud's hand slowly rises to cover Benoit's, tethering them at the wrist, and tilts his head up to look Benoit in the eye. His pupils are wide and dark, shifting from side to side as he tries to focus on Benoit's face, and his expression is soft and heartbreakingly open.
"Thank you for caring about me," he repeats, and uses his grip on Benoit's hand as leverage to pull himself upward and close the distance between their lips.
Benoit doesn't let it linger. He kisses back with as much gentleness as he can, matching Jud's syrupy pace, and cards his free hand through sweaty curls, fearful to tug and exacerbate Jud's headache. Jud sighs into the kiss and goes limp, slumping back towards the bed and breaking their connection.
"Quite the thank you," Benoit murmurs into the inches of space between them.
Jud goes stiff beneath him, eyes wide with fear. "Shit, I - I'm sorry, I should have… I shouldn't have - fuck my head is killing me, I can't… but -"
"Tomorrow," Benoit tells him firmly. He pulls away to retrieve the forgotten shirt and boxers and hands them to Jud, then, when Jud merely turns those big sad eyes on Benoit, takes them back and prepares to help dress Jud for bed. "Tomorrow we will get that concussion looked at, and if you are pronounced sound of mind, we will talk about whether you truly meant to do that. Tonight, your job is to sleep."
"Bossy," Jud says, muffled by the undershirt as Benoit pulls it overhead, but it sounds more fond than afraid. He lifts his hips to let Benoit pull his pants off and accepts the fresh boxers.
"It comes with the profession, I'm afraid."
With his back turned, Benoit can hear Jud struggling into the new pair of boxers as he attempts to put them on without standing up. His voice is thick with laughter even as his words break on a yawn. "No, I'm pretty sure that's just you."
"Perhaps." Benoit allows himself one final look at Jud, smaller and younger in just a t-shirt and boxers, fumbling to pull down the blanket and sheets. He manages without Benoit's help, which is probably for the best. "I'll be just next door if you need me."
"Night, Blanc. Thanks."
Benoit takes the leap. "Benoit."
"Benoit. Thank you."
Taking in strays, Phillip calls it, this thing Benoit does with his Watsons. Always at the heart of the case, always in need of someone to see the goodness at their core, to acknowledge and alleviate their suffering. He picks them up, helps them dust themselves off, and sets them back on their path - or, if he can, a newer, better one. It's what Phillip did for him thirty years ago, when Benoit was young and lost and hurting.
Jud might need a bit more rehabilitation than most before Benoit can set him on his feet again. But if the Catholic Church is going to force Jud into a life of hiding like the ones Benoit and Phillip worked so hard to break out of, the least Benoit can do is play the role that was once so familiar to him and open his home and his heart to a young queer man in need.
And if Jud did mean to kiss him, and moreover wants to do it again, well - Phillip has been predicting that one for a while. One of these days, he says, each time Benoit falls for the charms of another good-hearted, downtrodden suspect, you're going to pick one up and not be able to let go of them, and then we'll have to adopt.
"It really is no trouble," he tells Jud, pausing to switch off the lamp before he leaves. "As long as you need me, I'm here."
"That's a weird way to talk about tomorrow morning," Jud says, voice already slurring with sleep.
Benoit smiles to himself. "Indeed it is."