Title:in a universe where you see the worst (and it's up to you to fix it)
Author: Sefkhet
Fandom: Silent Witness
Pairing: Harry/Leo
Summary: "It wasn't supposed to be anything." Post-ep for Shadows.
in a universe where you see the worst (and it's up to you to fix it)
He was missing something.
The boy, Scott, with his face cut open, helpless on the bathroom floor, begging Harry not to leave. It was hardly what his parents must have imagined when they told him to work hard and get good A-levels. And on the video, mocking them, telling them that they had no idea how big it was going to be.
Why did he feel as though it should be staring him right in the face?
Harry leaned against the wall. He looked at the patch of floor where barely an hour ago he'd performed his second-ever craniostomy, with - Jesus - with a corkscrew and a mobile phone and, just barely, the power of prayer. His palms were still clammy. He could feel the adrenaline of the day beginning to drain away, being replaced with a bone-deep exhaustion.
Just as he felt his eyes begin to wander, a bright light drifted onto the edge of his peripheral vision. He took a step towards it and peered upwards for a better look, tiredness briefly suppressed by curiosity.
Missing something.
Missing something.
It turned from green to red.
"Oh, Jesus," he muttered faintly.
The bathroom door slammed open.
"Jesus."
"Dr Cunningham?"
"Yes," he said, still staring at the vent. "Oh, God. Listen - "
"Doc, we have to get you out of here."
"No, you don't understand," said Harry, a faint note of hysteria creeping into his voice. "There's a bomb."
"They're already on it. We need to evacuate the building."
"In the video, that's what he meant. He's going to blow up the campus."
"That means you, too."
"What?"
"We need to get you out of here."
"Have all the students been evacuated?"
"Doc!"
Harry took a last look at the red light blinking above his head and shook himself. "Right," he said.
And ran.
The scene on campus was one of absolute bedlam.
There were hordes of staff and students lingering outside the evacuation zone, not sure that they wanted to be there but equally not sure that they wanted to go home; growing numbers of parents had begun to turn up and were uniformly both lost and tearful; journalists and television crews and the curious onlookers lurked at a 'safe' distance; and the constant ebb and flow of sirens heralded the arrival of more emergency services vehicles than Leo had ever seen in one place.
He pressed his phone more tightly to his ear and shouted over the hum of the crowd. "Are you OK?"
"Yes." Nikki's voice came back at him, almost drunk with fatigue. "No. I don't know."
"Nikki."
"I've been cleared by the paramedics," she said. "But there wasn't anything - He was never going to hurt me, Leo. He was never going to hurt anyone. He was just a scared kid, and now he's dead and it's our fault."
He didn't say anything. He didn't have the energy for pointless reassurances that she wouldn't believe anyway.
She sighed, her breath sounding harsh down the phone. "Any sign of Harry?"
"He's not answering his phone." Leo bit the inside of his cheek and cast a pointless, frantic glance across the chaos, and then spat it out: "He was with the Dean. She said that he'd gone back in."
Her surprise was palpable. "What? But what for?"
"Because he's trying to send me into early heart failure, I sometimes think."
"Theyre evacuating, though," said Nikki. "They'll have got him out."
"I know. I know." It sounded like a lie even to his own ears. "You should go home. You haven't… when was the last time you slept?"
"What day is it?"
"Home, Nikki."
"But…"
"There isn't anything more you can do here," he said. "Besides, we're never going to find each other in this lot. I'll let you know, the minute I hear something from him. I promise."
She made a small, unwilling noise of agreement. "All right."
Leo flipped his phone shut and looked blankly across the crowd. He could feel the beginnings of a headache. There was nothing more for him to do here, either - post-mortems and paperwork, yes, but it would be hours before he was allowed back into his office. He had no better chance of actually finding Harry than he had done of finding Nikki, and he knew that he should take his own advice and go home. Harry wasn't (completely) stupid; he would be out of the building by now and would contact Leo either when he got home or when the mobile networks calmed down.
He would be fine.
If he wasn't, Leo would kill him himself.
He grabbed at a passing police officer.
"I'm looking for one of my colleagues," he said. "He's - "
"I'm sorry, sir."
"Harry Cunningham," Leo said, pushing. "He was in the Thomson Building this afternoon, when everything was going on, and I don't - "
"I'm sorry, sir," she repeated. "It's been impossible to keep track of everyone, but we're getting everyone out. I'm sure he's out here somewhere."
Leo opened his mouth to argue but gave it up as a bad job, checked his phone for what felt like the millionth time, thumbed the call button.
"You've reached the voicemail of Harry Cunningham. I'm not - "
He raised his eyes skywards.
And from over the top of the chatter that had turned into human white noise, he heard a blessedly familiar voice yell for medics. He moved, heedless of the toes he trampled on and the ribs that he elbowed as he shoved through the mass separating him from the police cordon. At the edge of the evacuation zone, a huddle of green and yellow jackets surrounded a mop of black hair.
Afterwards, he would have no memory of ducking under the tape or of running across the tarmac or, as Harry would later put it, screaming like a demented banshee. He would remember feeling his heart stutter to a dead stop, and feeling it start again as he reached past paramedics, past the young student on the ground beside him, and grasped Harry's hand, warm and whole and alive.
"I'm all right," Harry said.
"You're bleeding."
"I'm not. I'm fine. It's hers." He struggled to his feet. "I found her in the corridor, she got crushed and left behind in the evacuation. I'm OK. I am, really, I - "
The rest of the sentence - I promise or I didn't mean to scare you or I'm sorry, unlikely though the last one was, Leo knew, whatever it had been was swallowed up as, dizzy with relief and adrenaline, he pulled Harry towards him and they were crashing together in a fast, painful kiss.
"What'm I going to do with you?" he mumbled against Harry's mouth.
"Leo - "
"Dr Cunningham?"
"Superintendent." Harry gently disentangled himself from Leo's clutches and turned to Chief Superintendent Somerville, hovering behind them. "Is the building safe?"
"It's being taken care of," she said. "I'm glad to see you alive, Dr Cunningham, and I won't keep you any longer than necessary, but we need a statement before you leave."
"Of course. Leo - "
"I'll wait."
Harry blinked, as though that hadn't been quite what he was expecting. "Yes, all right," he said. "I'll be as quick as I can."
In the event, it had taken almost an hour for Harry to re-emerge from inside the mobile command unit. Leo was sitting on the top step, waiting.
"I could have got myself home," he said.
Leo looked up at him. There was an exhausted quality to Harry's voice that hadn't been there earlier, he had black smudges under his eyes, and he was beginning to look fuzzy around the edges. The adrenaline was wearing off, for both of them. He recalled his phone call to Nikki, hours ago now. "And when was the last time you slept?"
"… the day before yesterday," Harry admitted after a telling pause.
"Right." Leo got to his feet, wincing as his cold joints protested. "Home. Bed."
Harry looked like he was thinking of protesting, although, given that he looked ready to keel over, Leo wasn't at all sure on what grounds he'd have intended to protest. It lasted for all of twenty seconds. "Yes," he said. "OK."
Leo took his arm and steered him away from the campus, heading for the Kensington Road. It was only once he had found and got them into a cab, finally free of the crowds, that he felt rather than heard Harry take a shuddering breath in.
"I thought - "
"Yeah," said Leo. "I did, too."
Leo blinked open his eyes to the smell of fresh coffee, sunlight streaming through the windows, yesterdays clothes, and Harry sitting on the coffee table in front of him and looking significantly more human than he had the previous night.
"You stayed," he said.
"Mm." He pulled his head out of Harry's spare pillow. "Is that coffee?"
He handed over a mug and watched as Leo inhaled the contents. "Dr Mears rang your mobile earlier to tell you that the police and the CPS have agreed that we can't do any of the autopsies related to the case, and that our building is still a crime scene and any other cases are being farmed out to other divisions for the next day or two. I told her that you were drooling on my couch and she said to leave you where you were." He paused. "I thought you would have gone home last night."
"I didn't want to leave you."
"I didn't mean that I minded." Harry smiled, something soft and fond and altogether terrifying settling around his eyes. "Leo, I'm all right. I wasn't hurt and I'm not traumatised, and… I'm a big boy, I can scare away my own monsters from under the bed, if they're there."
Leo thought about and discarded several responses to that, before settling on: "It's not the monsters under your bed that terrify me. It's the ones you go running after."
Harry laughed.
"I'm not joking," he said. "I thought I'd lost you, yesterday."
"Then you know how I felt."
Leo looked at him blankly.
Harry reached out, sliding a hand into Leo's hair and and finding the gnarled knot of scar tissue. "I must have aged twenty years that week," he said quietly. "The number of times they told me that you weren't going to wake up. And then you did wake up and I never said a single word, because I thought that that was how you wanted it."
And then Harry was leaning forward and tilting up his chin and covering his mouth with a kiss infinitely gentler than the one they had had the day before and sweet enough to make Leo's toes curl and -
"Wait," said Leo, hands flying up between the two of them. "Harry, this is a bad idea."
"Why?"
"Because we - " He stared at Harry, we broke up hanging in the air between the two of them, not able to be spoken aloud because strictly speaking there had never been anything to break up. Leo had been grieving and broken, and Harry… Harry had been the one to put him back together again, never pushing or probing or analysing, just there, with burned toast and bad television and undemanding company and something to hold onto when the nightmares came, and, when Leo had gathered together the scattered pieces of his life, letting them slip back into the friendship that they had had before.
If Leo had ever thought that they could be something else, he had shut those thoughts away. If loving Harry had become something that was as unremarkable as breathing and as normal as still loving Theresa, then that was all right. And if his heart stopped every time Harry got himself taken hostage or shot at or locked in a room with a ticking bomb, well, that was Harry's fault.
If Harry had ever thought that they could be something else, he had never said it or looked it or ever ever acknowledged that, once, they almost had been.
Leo started again. "I nearly died last year and you nearly got blown into a hundred pieces last night, and the fact that we're scared of losing each other isn't - "
"It isn't what?" Harry's voice was impossibly gentle. "Leo, we had good reasons for not doing this. I know that. But that was four years ago and I've never stopped loving you, and you're right, because life is too bloody short."
"Say that again."
"What, life's too short?"
"No, the other part."
"Oh." And then Harry was kissing him again, grinning against his lips and tasting like coffee and toothpaste, and it was all stubble burn and noses getting in the way and so much less than perfect, and he broke off and murmured, breath damp on Leo's ear, "I've never stopped loving you."
Six Weeks Later
Harry flipped the page of his forensics report and stifled a yawn. Charlie had taken advantage of an empty mortuary and had steered Harry at the toppling over pile in his in-tray with threats about cutting off his caffeine supply and reminders that she wasn't his secretary, and, eight hours later, he was falling asleep over an apparently endless stack of paperwork.
A warm hand on his shoulder jolted him out of his stupor.
"Coffee," Leo said quietly, setting down a cardboard container. "I can see you from my desk and it's becoming painful to watch."
"Oh, thank Christ," he said, heartfelt, and, after inhaling a large mouthful: "Leo, truly you are a God."
Leo ignored him, and removed a second container from the tray and raised his voice. "Nikki? Coffee."
"Coffee from the Home Office?" she asked, reaching for it. "Well, that can't be good news."
"I'm not allowed to just be being nice?"
"Rarely," said Harry, teasing. "Actually, I don't - "
"Dr Alexander?" He broke off at Charlie's head appearing around the door of their office. "I've got the tox report on Melissa Hartridge."
"Thanks." Nikki looked down at the single sheet of paper she had been handed.
"Is this the presumed suicide?" Leo asked.
"Charlie, can you make arrangements to have the body released to her family?" she said, and: "Yes, her blood alcohol level was over six times the legal limit and it looks as though she's taken at least fifty amitryptilline. The poor girl must have been stockpiling her prescription for weeks."
"Oh, speaking of…" Harry put down his coffee and rifled underneath his scattered papers. "I've had the explosives report on the Scott Weston case."
"And?"
"Well, you were right about the two chemicals, but something else had been added to the mixture so that it wouldn't detonate." Leo and Nikki looked at him, impatient. In answer, he picked up one of the sugar packets that Leo had dropped on his desk and held it aloft between his thumb and forefinger.
"Sugar?" said Leo, incredulously.
"Yes, the sugar that they found on Jason!" Nikki said. "He diluted the mixture?"
Harry nodded. "And sabotaged the bombs. I think Jason wanted to stand up to Scott, but Scott could be pretty persuasive, as we know, and now - now he's still trying to pin it on the two dead boys."
Nikki looked stunned. "God, they probably never would have done anything more serious than forty in a thirty mile an hour limit. They just wanted someone to believe in."
"It depends on who you meet, the people you collide with," said Harry. "Isn't it?"
"I suppose we just have to hope that it's with the right ones." Leo picked up his coffee from the top of Harry's paperwork. "I have a meeting," he said. "I'll see you later?"
"If I don't drown under all this."
Leo's mouth twitched into the beginnings of a smile and he leaned down to steal a kiss. If he hadn't known better, Harry would have sworn that he could hear his heart thumping in triple time. "I'll see you later?" he repeated.
"Yeah."
He left swiftly, leaving Harry to stare after him with what could only be described as a shit-eating grin and Nikki to gape back and forth between the two of them like a spectator at Wimbledon.
"You - Leo - and - and - you and Leo?"
The grin widened.
"Since?"
"The night when I almost got blown up."
"And - " Nikki hesitated. "And you aren't joking?"
"No." Harry sat back and finally met her eyes. "No, we're not joking."
"And it's - your - you - "
"Yes."
"Really?"
Harry resolutely looked at his report. "It's not - we were once before, a few years ago. After Theresa and Cassie," he added. "It wasn't meant to be anything. You were there, Niks. He was setting himself up on a course to total self-destruct. He needed someone, and I was there. And time passed and he began to heal and it ended, eventually, for reasons that seemed like good ones at the time."
"And now?"
"It is something. I'm not sure that it ever wasn't."
Nikki looked thoughtfully at the door. "He seems happy. He deserves to be happy."
"And what about me?" he asked indignantly. "I don't?"
"No, not really. People who go and stand under bombs deserve everything they get.
He chuckled wryly.
"I suppose it never occurred to me - " A moment of something not wholly unlike regret passed across her face, and Harry had a painful flash of exactly what it was that had occurred to her. He said nothing. He didn't have the right words to make that better and suspected that now wasn't the right time to tell her that he loved her, fiercely and protectively and very much as he imagined he might have loved a little sister, and then the moment was over and she was taking a deep breath and looking determined. "You are?" she asked. "Happy?"
"Yes."
"I'm glad," she whispered.
And while she brushed a kiss across his cheek and left the office with a file clutched too tightly in her hand, Harry's phone vibrated and skittered across his desk and something in his chest unknotted as he opened it to read the incoming message.