He knows this place—this section of DC. It is old and new, apartments rising out of the mad tangle of mag-lev streets, clawing, reaching, seeking the sky. Cheap concrete from latter part of the twentieth century; more powerful duracrete from a few years back. Everything looks the same, every balcony, every window, whether misty from a resident's shower, cracked from a child's game of ball, obscured by curtains.
He knows this place.
The man at the front desk of 348 Manhattan looks at him, bored. Stamps him in, gestures. He doesn't know the man—that much has changed. But not the worn blue carpet, the yellowing paint on the walls. The grease-shined wooden doors, their numbers hanging loose and forgotten. In the days just before, just after, his divorce, Anderton called this place home—at night, at day, working and not.
Because back—six years, four years, two, one, a month—back then, Fletch and Knott welcomed him. Smiled when they saw him come in, hung on gamely no matter how enraged, how scared, how piss-drunk or high on dope he was. It didn't matter—even though Fletch was a hothead, would slap him into sobriety on a twenty-minute max—there was always Knott, quiet, bigger than them both, experienced and patient by two, three years. It was enough—enough to make Fletch swallow his worry and rage and go make coffee, enough to make Anderton himself sit quiet on the couch, still and quiet, until finally he would allow a tear or two.
Would they still welcome him now?
Up a flight of stairs, two, seven, ten. He tests himself on these stairs—if he has the energy for endless flights of stone steps, he has the energy for Fletch and the desperation to see them and damn the consequences. And he'll know then—he'll know if they welcome him. If Fletch has the same hothead rage and Knott the same crazy patience for them both. He'll know. He has to know.
The hall smells soft and bitter like smoke and coffee and old beer. It's eerily silent, and the carpet goes crush-crush, crush-crush beneath his feet. The numbers pass him, reminding him of the showdown with Crow. But he knows the door by heart, number or not. Last on the left, cracked and battered, so much like the whirlwind of nights spent like bachelors, lying on the couch and the floor and eating whatever wasn't crawling with mold from the fridge.
A pause—does he dare? He knows his options--
//'You have a choice.'//
Agatha's unused voice.
//'You have a choice.'//
Stay or go. Forgive, forget, bitter past arguments that surface unbidden. Touches that healed what no words could reach, caresses in the dark in a giant bed, and why did two men have one bed anyway? Who cared, then or now? Not him. Not John Anderton.
He knocked—once, twice. Pause, silence, worry. Three, four times, harder. He'd punch the door in just to hear Fletch's voice, full of rage at the bill for a new one.
"*What*?" Growling, intense, it's clear that Knott isn't expecting company. The door cracks open, caught by a taut brass chain. Two dark eyes set like black diamonds in a hard-jawed face peer out, blinking, tired.
It is, after all, nearly two in the morning.