Jay was embarrassed about his breakdown in the locker room. He shouldn't be, he knew that; how many times had he said something similar to Mouse? But it was one thing to tell Mouse that there was no shame in letting Jay hold him while he broke, and another thing altogether to be the broken one. This wasn't news. When they had gotten back from Afganistan after their last tour, Jay had been a mess – Mouse was too, Jay knew that, but at first Mouse seemed to be coping better – and he had done his best to turn his broken edges into knives rather than admit that he needed Mouse. But Mouse had refused to let Jay drive him away, until Jay had picked himself back up and shut the memories away, and then Mouse had vanished.
It had nearly broken him all over again, the sudden loss of the one person Jay could depend upon absolutely. He had been terrified and furious, and he had searched and searched and searched, but Mouse was too good at hiding, used to slipping through the night and covering his tracks and able to erase his digital footprints. Jay never gave up on finding him, but as he got used to the ache, he turned his focus to his career, until he made Detective, and had new resources and resourceful friends. Even so, Mouse slipped through his fingers like smoke every time he thought he was getting close, until the night the phone rang, waking him out of nightmares.
"Is this Jay Halstead?" The crisp voice had asked on the other end of the phone.
"Yes." Jay had fumbled the bedside lamp on and sat up, and then came the words that made his heart stop.
"This is Chicago Med, you're the emergency contact for a patient here, Greg Gurwitz."
"Is he alright?" Jay had bit out, and once his heart started beating again his pulse was racing.
"He will be; he's being treated for an accidental overdose."
"I'm on my way."
He had sat all night by Mouse's bed. Mouse's hand was cold and his body was too thin, and Jay had cried at what had become of his best friend, his brother in arms, the man he had fallen in love with somewhere in the middle of sand and bullets and blood. He had pushed that thought away; there was no place for it then, as he watched Mouse's chest rise and fall in the dim hushed fluorescence of the hospital at night. He had fallen asleep in the chair, and in the morning the work of bringing his friend back from the edge had begun, leading them to the moment where Jay mourned another brother on the floor of the locker room with Mouse at his side.
He had been holding back his grief by the skin of his teeth until the case was done, soldiering on – and wasn't that an apt phrase – through washing the blood off his hands, Al telling him Terry hadn't made it, seeing Lissa and her telling him about Terry and the Police Academy, pressing his boot into the throat of the man who killed his friend, sitting in his dress uniform at another funeral with Mouse on one side Erin on the other. He had held his breath, held back the tears. After the funeral he had stripped out of the uniform and packed it away again, pulling on regular clothes that hung so much lighter. Erin sat perched on the edge of the bed, watching him with sad eyes and he couldn't stand it. So he left for Molly's throwing out some words about army kinship to get Erin to stay home. He got there before Mouse, and Ethan found him, Ethan who had been the doctor who worked on Terry in the ED before he went up for a surgery that wouldn't save him, Ethan who was military, who had fought. So they got some beers, and Mouse joined them before long and they told army stories, battle stories – funeral stories – and Jay couldn't stand it. So he left. He wasn't ready to go back home and face Erin's mournful kindness, and it was instinct that led him back to the district. And then Voight had said those words - "I'm lucky to have you in my unit" – and the dam broke.
He didn't feel lucky; he felt cursed, one more brother's body he had to carry around in his memory, one more person he couldn't save, one more person he failed, and Voight was telling him he's lucky to have him. He was adrift as he turned on the water at the sink, couldn't bear to look himself in the eye in the mirror, trying to catch his breath, but then he was sinking to the floor, sobs breaking out of him, echoing in the room and he felt lost and broken and utterly alone, and suddenly Mouse was beside him, warm and comforting and holding him and he was so tired. Erin's arrival and the return to the apartment was a blur, a haze of exhaustion and grief. The next clear thing was waking up to the tentative rays of sun through the blinds, and the bewildering realization that there were three bodies in the bed, that he was bracketed on either side by Mouse and Erin and in the moments before full consciousness rose, his only thought was that it was perfect.