AN: If you get the chance, please give the song below a listen. It was a massive inspiration for the tone of this chapter, the team's grief and desperation. Thanks to whoever is sticking with this story and still reading!
'Like the butterfly effect,
Wonder if we never met—
Would I have lost
My heart inside my chest?'
"Butterfly Effect" ~ Before You Exit
"You okay, sarg?"
Greg wonders if he'll ever get used to hearing that. He flashes back over two years ago and these same words spoken by the same person. They'd been driving then, and it had been daylight.
Now, their breaths steam away inside the dank shelter of the factory. Even with both their flashlights on, it's barely enough to see in the midnight gloom.
Greg sits down on a bench in the antique kitchen. "Yeah, Jules, I'm okay."
The words are stale bread, flat and crumbling. Jules doesn't call him out on the obvious lie.
Sighing, she sits next to him. "They're not here, boss."
"No." Greg rests his forehead on his hands, where they perch on his cane at eye level. "No, they aren't."
Another dead end.
Hartford and Dean patrol the grounds while Jules and Greg agreed to search the building. Sam is working on getting their absolutely busted tires in working order before they have to bunk down for the night.
Fat chance.
The drive here alone, which took over an hour through jungle-like terrain, is one Greg will never forget as long as he lives. His leg still aches from the jostling. There's not much point anway, with the sirens and helicopters tracking their phones, growing ever closer.
This is their last building to clear…and they've come up empty except for some medical tape, SRU issued boots, and the smell of sick in a basement.
They were here, at least.
"That means they're still alive, though. Right?" Jules tugs her braid loose and restarts it. "We would have found dead bodies otherwise."
Greg doesn't say anything. He knows the statistics after a gap so long. Their chances of finding Ed and Spike alive…they have a better shot of winning the lottery.
Jules gives up, hair tumbling around her face. She wipes at her nose with the back of her hand. "Boss? I get why you stowed away in the camper."
Greg nods, slow and absent. Then it crescendos into a head shake. "I know, logically, that it's not my fault. Nobody is at fault except our criminals. But I still feel responsible."
Jules hides her face in her hands for a moment.
"They're my family." Greg looks up at the ceiling, to push back a building pressure in his eyes. "If we find their bodies, Jules, I might just drop dead. Because short of a body bag, I cannot return to Canada alone."
It's not a fair statement, especially to Dean. But it's the truth. Greg had Ed and Spike for far longer than anyone else in his life.
They're his Aaron and Hur, holding his arms up for life's battles, however big or small. He'll be lost without them.
"We were never supposed to work."
Greg looks at Jules, turning her words around in his mind. He can't make sense of it.
She catches his eye. "The six of us, we were all placed on Team One all those years ago just to train and then be transferred elsewhere."
She's right, Greg realizes. Most of our team was placed here temporarily.
Jules ticks their names off on her fingers. "Wordy wanted to teach but he agreed to be paired with Ed, his good friend, for a year. Lew was assigned just for training purposes. Ed wanted to run his own team, probably the only one who truly wanted to be there. Sam intended to get out the second he could, placed here by his father. I wanted to pursue undercover work; SRU was never part of my plan. And Spike. There's a story."
Greg leans back with a huff.
Hiccuping, wiping her wet nose again, Jules bows her head. "Do you remember those recruitment trials with him?"
"How can I forget?"
Greg thinks of the very first time he ever met Spike, that day out on the lawn for field tests, the striking sight of that lanky kid with a bruise along his jawline and hard fire in his eyes, guarded and mistrustful when they fell on Ed and Greg. Spike aced the written exam, so prodigious that city patrol basically begged the SRU to take him off their hands.
And yet how he struggled during drills.
None of the other officers knew what to do with Spike, so he was usually given a wide berth and isolated.
How he'd looked Ed dead in the eye with a defiant expression, blood on his lip from a tumble off the climbing wall, and demanded they let him try again. He'd pushed at their buttons, as if waiting for one of them to explode and get angry with him, prove him right. Greg will never forget Spike's increasingly startled look over the fact that they never did. They never struck him, they never verbally put him down, never did any of the demeaning things he so expected from people in authority.
Ed called different departments: did Vice need a gifted tech? Guns 'n Gangs? He'd even contacted Organized Crime and Canine's unit, training drug dogs.
But none had wanted Spike, the runt of his graduating class's litter. The oddball who the textbook profile said should never have passed the qualifying exam in the first place. Too young to be an officer, graduating before he was even old enough to drink.
"That bomb charade convinced him." Jules laughs at the memory. "I still can't believe Spike planted a cellphone on the floor of the SRU lobby and called it when Ed walked in."
Greg cracks a smile. "I personally love the part where he shoved Ed over and dragged him by his collar twenty feet down the hall."
Once Ed had finished yelling at the indignity of it, Spike grinned at him and said, "What if that had been a cellphone triggered IED? I just saved your life."
The team roared about that one for a while; so long, in fact, that Ed didn't live it down for over two months. The team still teases him about it sometimes. Usually when Ed has to be dragged out of a burning building or when a bomb call is just a little too close for comfort with regards to Spike's safety and they need to feel normal again.
That day proved three things, all of which convinced Greg to hire him: Spike was strong enough to heft a weight that, at the time, was nearly a third heavier than his own; he could react quickly to a threat; and he wouldn't give up, eager to help people.
He is both a fighter and peacemaker.
Now, the team can't imagine working without him. He's the whole reason Greg felt ready to contact his biological son in the first place, teaching him how to love a son properly. That's an invaluable gift, one Greg will forever love him for.
"We proved them all wrong. Every SIU panel who sneered at us, the press, our own families." Jules' quiet, awed tone flurries over their heads. "We lasted."
And in the SRU world, that is a miracle.
Teams hardly ever last more than a year, officers as cards shuffled and reshuffled into various, inconsistent combinations. The job is hard and vulnerability a feat to achieve between officers, to feel so trusting and safe with each other like the six of them are. Most of the time, gruff indifference is used to handle the wear and tear of human trauma. Because of that, teams don't often bond at the level they have and thus never last.
Greg wonders what it will do to them if Spike and Ed don't make it home—how they'll unravel in spectral, gory detail, threads snipped and knotted.
The prospect of burying their bodies…Greg imagines himself standing before two headstones and mentally balks.
They're too young, with too much still to do and see and love.
Jules continues to sniffle. Greg looks up again but it does no good, eyes bright.
He squints.
"Uh…Jules?"
"Yeah, boss?" Jules finishes sending a quick text to Sam. "What are you…?"
She follows his eyes up to the ceiling. Something is tucked, trying to be hidden, among the rafters. The only reason it catches their eye is because it's shiny against the light.
"Are you seeing this too?" Greg asks.
Jules stands suddenly. "It's a bag."
"Not just a bag." Greg points to the red symbol. "It's a biohazard bag."
Sliding her gloves back on, Jules puts the flashlight between her teeth and climbs up onto the table.
Greg stands, keeping a hold of her ankle just in case. "Is it sealed? Don't touch it unless it's sealed."
Jules nods. She shifts the flashlight to her hand. "I've got three empty water bottles and a syringe."
"Is it…" Greg hates to ask but knows he has to. "Is it empty?"
Jules turns back to him and holds the bag out. Her eyes are grim. "Afraid so."
"Any chance it's labelled?"
Jules hops to the floor. She sighs and runs a hand down her face. "No. Boss, there's a liquid line in the syringe. The cc count is quite…high…for a biohazard, whatever it is. A large dose."
"It would have to be," Greg reasons, voice much more even keel than his pulse. "If it was going to dose three separate bottles, they'd need enough to be effective."
Jules walks to the door, pauses, and comes back. "Boss…"
"I know, Jules." Greg closes his eyes for a moment. "I know what this means in abduction cases. Let's keep the bag for evidence."
Jules looks at Greg with her free hand on her hip, eyes rock hard, angry even while they swim. Her nose is pink. He sees her winding up to say something unpleasant and braces himself.
"Should we be looking for a burial site?" she asks.
Greg wants to shake his head.
As a veteran of cases like this, however, he starts to nod. "Probably, yes."
Jules kicks the wall, beet red with defeat. Grief, thick and smothering, flashes over her face.
Greg's cellphone rings, making them both jump. He spies the caller ID and puts it on speaker. "Hartford? What have you found?"
"Parker!" Hartford sounds like he's running, panting and jostled. Greg goes to reply until he realizes Hartford isn't talking to him. "Dean, stop! Greg, we've just sighted the paint van up the road! It's slowing down!"
