"I love you," John whispers into her hair and she turns around and looks at him for a long time without speaking. Lara fully turns in his embrace and kisses him hard and John wants nothing more than to melt into that moment.

"I think I like this new you," she says softly, cupping his cheek and looking up into the eyes that aren't his.

John isn't sure what she's talking about for a second, so much has changed since the last time they were together, not much of it good. Maybe he's a little more… stable than he was; he isn't going to put his gun in his mouth again, but as far as he can tell he's more fucked up than ever. He's still using, but he's hiding his tracks better now, keeping his inhalers hidden and only taking them when she's gone to sleep because he still can't force himself to sleep sober, and when the nightmares inevitably come the drugs keep him paralysed instead of waking her. As long as Lara is here though, it doesn't matter so much that he doesn't like himself as long as she does. He can build himself back up from the ground, rebuild their life together, forget Lamar and Hineman and everything else.

He forces a smile that might even reach his eyes as she kisses his cheek.

She stands on her toes and whispers in his ear: "With those new eyes you don't remind me so much of him."

The smile drops. He pushes her away as he staggers back.

"What?" Her brows furrow in confusion as if she hasn't just shattered something vital inside him.

"I…" he tries to string a sentence together, can't find the right words. "I can't do this."

He pulls on his discarded jeans and shirt as he stumbles for the door, and she just stands there and watches, doesn't ask why, doesn't try to stop him

Maybe she knew what she said hurt him and wanted to leave him to cool off. Maybe she just didn't care enough to follow him as he left the house.

Either way, John is halfway home before he even realises what he's doing, like what she said had made him go into shock. His hands are shaking. He's lucky cars drive themselves now, if he'd had to control it he can't imagine it having gone well.

His whole body is shaking by the time he gets back to his apartment, and the tears falling from his face feel like they're reopening the wounds in his eye sockets. His left shoulder smacks hard into the door frame when he staggers out of his car, left hip hits the table when he tries to walk past it. John stumbles from the impact and hits the floor hard. He doesn't try to get up again, just curls up holding his head.

He hasn't been able to see out of his left eye since he took the bandages off his face six hours earlier than he was supposed to, blinded exactly like Eddie said he would be. The right isn't worth a damn either, he doesn't know if it was the dirty water in the tub he hid in that did it or Eddie's surgical skills or the eyes themselves, but he needs glasses that he hates having to wear. They only seem to make the light brighter and make his near-constant headache worse.

John doesn't know quite how long he stays there on the floor, but he only gets up because he's sweating and his heart is starting to beat harder in his chest. Most of his stash is hidden under some old photography equipment in Lara's attic, but he easily finds an inhaler in the drawer by his bed. He doesn't stop shaking, although the withdrawal eases quickly. This is something else, something worse, but with the neuroin kicking in he passes out before he can think any more about it.

He dreams of Sean and of Agatha, Arthur and Dashiell, all somebody else's kids just locked up, enslaved for most of their short lives. When he wakes up, the shakes are gone, replaced by a cold certainty.

Lara hasn't called. She knows what she said, and maybe she only got back with him because she thought he was the man she'd been married to again. He isn't, and too much has happened for him to ever be that man again. Maybe she knows that now. Maybe she'll try again in a few days.

His former friends from Pre-Crime haven't spoken to him since the first round of court cases ended. Most of them were openly hostile, Fletcher and a couple of others had been polite but awkward.

He doubts anyone but his dealer will even notice he's gone.

His service weapon has been confiscated until he gets reassigned, but John is practical and maybe part of him always knew he wouldn't be a cop forever; he owns another gun, a pistol. He bought it, fully legal, licenced and registered, just after Lara had registered for divorce. Just after she'd cited his suicide attempt as a reason and he thought they might kick him off the force. He bought the gun because he was scared that when they did realise what a mess he was, he wouldn't have had anything to end it with, and he'd been right.

It's been living in the drawer by his bed with a couple of spare inhalers since the night Lamar died.

He guesses he knew it would come to this, and it is not just because of Sean, it's because of all the people he hurt in his grief, people who were, for all intents and purposes, totally innocent. He knows that now, he understands; if you know your fate, you can change it. Maybe even bring it to an end.

John sets up a data file of Sean, his favourite from only a short while before he was taken. It's one Lara took of them sat in Sean's bed, and John is reading to him. He knows the book by heart, even did back then, and recites it along with the John in the video, doesn't even try to stop the tears falling from his eyes.

His eye is blurred with tears when the video starts to come to an end, when he turns to Sean and they both say "And then they lived happily ever after."

John swallows and raises the gun to his temple.

He pulls the trigger.

Nothing happens. No round in the chamber. He pulls it again.

Might have helped if he'd bought some fucking bullets for this thing.

He laughs bitterly, and pushes the barrel against his temple so hard it hurts, pulls the trigger a couple more times to the same hollow click . He can't even kill himself right.

This time, he isn't going to be discouraged so easily.

He digs up all the inhalers in the apartment. Most of them are empty, but there are a couple he'd missed or had only half used in his stupor in the past. He drops them in a pile on the table, still almost clean from when he knew Lara was coming and didn't want her to see the mess.

Still not enough.

John is still fully dressed from the night before, doesn't even bother to get changed to head down to the Sprawl.

He's down to the last inhaler. A pile of six or so empties sit in a pile on the table in front of him. With any luck enough to knock him out permanently. He pushes down the button and breathes in deeply.

"Oh John."

The voice comes so suddenly he almost jumps, but the lethargy is already kicking in. At first he thinks it's Lara, that she's actually come to apologise and found him like this. Then he looks up and he knows it isn't. He stands and takes a step forward, takes a long second before he can find his voice.

"Lamar?" he chokes.

"It's alright, my boy," Lamar whispers, cups his cheek with one hand and takes the hand that holds the inhaler with the other. "I won't tell anyone."

John lets his head fall forwards onto his chest and-

And then the gun is pressing into his stomach, struggles with it and then Lamar shoots. He staggers back, watches his friend and mentor fall to the floor bleeding. John steps on his fallen inhaler and loses his footing, hits his head on the hard floor when he falls and grunts in pain. When the room has stopped spinning and he can force himself to sit, Burgess is gone. Of course he is. He's been dead for three months now, even if he still lives in the dark places in John's head.

It's been four years since Burgess had found out about his addiction, and he'd done as he promised; nobody else had ever found out. He'd even pointed John towards some more reputable dealers who sold higher quality product, making sure he wouldn't kill himself with a bad batch. At the time, he was grateful, knowing he could have been fired, arrested, sectioned even, but looking back, knowing what he does now… How much of Burgess's affection for him, how many mistakes he'd 'forgiven' or behaviours he'd encouraged had been for a purpose? How much of what John had always thought of as a great friendship, even something… more, had been to keep him under control, compliant and unquestioning? He'd had no reason to doubt Lamar before recently, no reason to think anything he did was for anything but the good of everyone around him, but it turned out he was just the same as everyone else who'd ever let John down, just another selfish bastard pushing his own agenda. He's been wondering a lot lately, at least when he's been lucid enough, how many of the others in Pre-Crime had been in the same position as him when Burgess had brought them in, but really, he already knows. Jad, Fletcher, they'd all lost someone, they all had the kind of vulnerability-induced one track mind that would be willing to look past the potential faults in the system, be willing to ignore what they were doing to the Precognitives, treating them as gods or computers instead of what they were; kids, just kids. He wonders if Burgess had given the others attention too, listened to their problems, held them through the worst days.

He knows he's trailing away from clarity and rationality again, but he's too tired to try and hold on.

When he blinks, his head is buried in Burgess' chest again. There's no gun, but why would there be? Where did that thought even come from? Lamar presses his lips to John's ear and tells him he's a good boy as one hand presses his left hip hard enough into the floor to leave a bruise.

When John wakes up on the floor of his apartment, head aching and mouth tasting of blood, he sobs. It's been years since he's let himself cry, since he's let himself feel anything this strongly. He cries for Sean and for Burgess and for everything he's lost and everything he's done . Over the last three months he's seen the Precogs a few times and every time they'd been so kind and understanding, Agatha most of all. They see his pain and his reasons; they seem to have forgiven him for taking away years of their lives. He wishes he could forgive himself the same way. Since the beginning of Pre-Crime, they'd arrested and haloed over a thousand people, a thousand innocent people, and killed almost twenty more when they tried to resist. He cries for all of them.

He's ruined lives, broken families apart and hurt so many people but the universe just didn't seem to want him to die. He'd almost begged Burgess to kill him, tried twice himself, and he's still here.

He figures he pretty much has two choices for the future; one is to get clean and try to make amends for what he did, the other is to end it, and he might as well give the former a shot before he fails at the latter again.

John Anderton is missing.

Danny has wanted to talk to him since he got out of the hospital. He was in there for a long time. Didn't matter how far medicine advanced, bullets to the chest and throat were a big deal. He was in an induced coma for two months, still breathing through a tube for another two weeks after they woke him up, kept in the hospital for another fortnight on top of that. He's still a mess and knows it, but he's been out for a week now and he can't find a trace of Anderton.

He wants to apologise, tell him that he was wrong about him, even if John had been a goddamned idiot. He asks around the former pre-crime officers, but he hasn't spoken to most of them since they arrested and haloed him, and the rest since the last day of court. Burgess is dead (thank god, or Danny would have had to shoot the bastard himself), his ex hasn't seen him in weeks, neither have his regular dealers, and other than them, John Anderton doesn't seem to speak to anyone. Just another cop whose entire life is the job.

Maybe that's why Danny decides to check up on him; without the job, without even having a department to go back to if he wanted to or was medically fit enough for it, he's isolated. Anderton could be dead and nobody would even notice he was gone, or if they did they wouldn't care. Lara was the last person to hear from him, ten days ago when he apparently left without warning when they were in bed, but she didn't look for him and hadn't reported him gone. She's a talented photographer, Danny considers, but her people skills leave something to be desired.

The door to Anderton's place is locked when Danny gets there, but a flash of his ID badge opens it up easily enough. There's no telltale smell of an undiscovered corpse, but the air tastes musty, like nobody's opened a window or turned on the aircon in more than a few days, with a sharp undertone to it.

Danny looks into the darkness, waits for his eyes to adjust instead of turning on a light.

It's… cleaner than the last time Danny was here. The air isn't heavy with dust, even if it is stale. The surfaces that had been covered in empty bottles and old food have been cleaned spotless. The only sign of the old disarray is a pile of mismatched neuroin inhalers on the table, enough to kill a normal person but probably not a seasoned addict. Danny picks one up and shakes it: empty. They're all empty.

His eyes stray to the wall closest to the desk. There's no blood, no marks on the wall or floor; whoever had done the cleanup had done a good job. Danny still can't look at that part of the room without thinking about Burgess and the gun and the pain like he never felt before. He reaches for his father's Saint Christopher medal where it lives in his pocket, twists the chain around his fingers anxiously before he can force himself to look away. Fuck, his chest hurts.

Was this the real reason he came here? Is it nothing to do with Anderton after all, just him trying to get some closure for what had almost killed him, what still feels like it might every time he moves wrong? There are no scars on his chest or his throat, nothing on the surface, but there should be with all the pain that refuses to fade. He can't keep up his carefully constructed persona any more; his shirts are all too rough against the fresh skin and his throat still hurts too much when he tries to speak with the American accent. His voice is quieter than it had been and hoarse, and he doesn't have a choice but to let himself sound like he's from Dublin any more. His mother had been pleased about that when he'd first started speaking again and couldn't do the accent; she hated that he'd tried to hide where he was from, but he'd had to to be taken seriously in his line of work, at least when he got to federal level.

He tries to push his own problems out of his mind, to focus on Anderton instead. He's alive, he can make it through this. Anderton might not.

Danny eventually finds him curled up on the bathroom floor, unconscious. It looks like he'd dragged himself halfway across the room to get there, and there's a drying pool of bile on the floor around him where he hadn't quite made it far enough to throw up into something.

Most importantly, though, he's breathing. It's a little erratic and laboured, but Anderton is definitely alive. He's lucky he hasn't choked.

Danny carefully rolls him onto his back and sees fading bruises on his right hip and shoulder. His ribs all protrude from his skin; he's lost a lot of weight and muscle, probably hasn't eaten in a while. With the pile of empty inhalers, Danny had figured he'd tried to OD, but this something different. Neuroin overdoses didn't cause nausea, from what Danny had seen a lot of them ended up literally coughing their lungs up if they took as much as John had. If he hadn't eaten, and the lack of dishes or food in the kitchen at all backed that up, and he was still sick, that sounded a hell of a lot more like withdrawal.

Danny sighs softly. Maybe he shouldn't have been so worried.

He picks Anderton up very carefully to put him in the shower stall, and John only responds with a quiet groan. He's lighter than he should be, lighter than would be healthy, but the still-healing muscles in Danny's chest scream as he lifts him off the floor.

Danny kicks off his shoes and socks and rolls up the bottoms of his slacks and his sleeves, then steps into the cubicle next to Anderton's slumped, unconscious form. He runs the water down the drain until it warms up, then starts to rinse the sweat and vomit off Anderton's body. He'd done a good job even making it as far as the bathroom; while Witwer has never been through it himself, he knows enough about neuroin addiction and withdrawal from his years as a cop, knows that enough addicts trying to get clean or just run out of money have choked or starved or died of dehydration with how weak it made you.

He rubs John's bare chest clean with the washcloth in the cubicle and he groans again, this time a little stronger, but still doesn't open his eyes.

Danny peels the dripping joggers away from Anderton's skin and starts rubbing him down with the towel that was on the radiator, then carries him back to his bed when he's dry. There are clean ones in the second drawer he checks. It's hard to dress a dead weight, but he manages it.

This isn't exactly how he expected his day to go, but he should have known better than to have expectations when John Anderton was involved.

Danny picks up the blankets that are on the floor by the bed and covers him with them. John immediately pulls them closer around him and curls up, the first thing he's done that suggests to Danny that he might be even vaguely aware of what's going on around him.

He finds a bucket under the kitchen sink and leaves it by the bed along with a couple of bottles of water from the refrigerator, then goes to clean up the bathroom. If Anderton is trying this hard to get clean, he doesn't deserve to wake up to that mess.

When John wakes up this time, he's in bed and there's a couple of unopened bottles of water and a glass on the table next to him. He swears he passed out in the bathroom, but losing time isn't the weirdest shit that's happened since he stopped using.

Every muscle in his body aches . That was one thing neither the internet or the dealers ever told you; if you went cold turkey you ended up so weak you couldn't even go pick up if you wanted to. John has no idea how long it has been since he decided to get clean, but he hopes these particular symptoms don't last much longer. He's still nauseous but his mouth is like a desert, his tongue is stuck to his teeth when he tries to yawn. He reaches out for the water on the table, but he still isn't used to his blind eye and the loss of depth perception that went with it, and knocks the glass and bottles over instead of managing to take one, and they roll to the floor one by one.

John sits up without much of an issue, but when he tries to lean over to pick up one of the bottles, the world spins and he falls out of bed to the floor.

At least he's closer to the water now, manages to pick one up this time and gulp it down without coming up for air, almost choking but not caring.

It's only when he takes a breath that he wonders why he'd get himself some bottles of water out of the refrigerator and not drink them when he was that thirsty. Is somebody else here? There's nobody left who cares enough, is there?

He picks up a second bottle of water and drinks that too, a little slower this time. How long has it been since he ate or drank?

It's only when he's finished that too that he hears the footsteps. John barely dares turn towards the sound. The only person he can think of who might come to check up on him is Lara, and he isn't ready to see her yet, isn't ready to explain himself or look at her after the last thing she said to him.

It is not Lara.

In fact, when he finally gets the nerve to turn, he's pretty sure it's not anybody at all. He's been having hallucinations since he tried to OD, and the man in front of him is dead , John was arrested and haloed, in part, for his murder.

"Good morning, gorgeous," Witwer says with a shit-eating smirk. His voice is hoarse and totally different from the bland federal accent he'd had before.

"Why are you Irish?" That's the only thing he can think of to say. John had called him out on his Danny-Boy bullshit, on talking about seminary and Ireland, and now it seems like his brain has twisted it so that this hallucination speaks like he's from Dublin.

"I've always been Irish, I just toned down the accent when I was working." The dead man shrugs stiffly.

"You died. Burgess killed you."

"He tried, yeah. Couple of bad readings on a life support system had them thinking I was brain dead for a while, but my mother wouldn't let them pull the plug. She's still holding it over my head as proof of the power of prayer." He rolls his eyes at that. "She never liked that I became a cop instead of a priest."

"They arrested me for your murder. You can't be here." John leans forwards and holds his head. When he looks up again, he expects Witwer to be gone, but he's more stubborn than most of his hallucinations. Makes sense, he guesses. The guy had been more stubborn in life too.

"Well, I am. Somebody has to be. Don't want you to die of something stupid like dehydration."

"What, instead of getting crushed in a car factory?"

Witwer frowns. "I am sorry about that. Really."

"Now I know you're not here. You'd never apologise."

"You only knew me for a couple of days, John, how would you know what I would and wouldn't do?"

"Just go," he whispers.

Witwer shakes his head.

"Go!" he croaks and throws the glass that had fallen from the table when he knocked the water off, but between his lack of depth perception and his weak, shaking hands, it shatters on the floor between him and the hallucination, who steps back but stubbornly refuses to vanish back into the dark places in his mind.

"Not happening." Witwer shrugs again, still speaking with that stupid, unfamiliar accent.

"Please," he begs, curls up into a fetal position on the floor and tries to pull the blankets from the bed over him. "Just leave me alone."

"I can't do that, John," Witwer says gently, but there are soft footsteps walking away from him, and when he looks up the dead man is gone.

There are still tears blurring his vision when Witwer reappears with his dustpan and sweeps up the broken glass. For the first time, John has to admit to himself that Danny might actually be here, might actually be alive. When he steps into the light from the window, John can see how pale he looks, how gaunt his face is compared to the last time they met. His movements are all stiff and carefully limited like he's scared he's going to hurt something, or at least hurt something worse. Once he moves his right arm too far and gasps quietly under his breath. He almost drops the brush, holds his other arm to his chest like he's trying to hold his rib cage together.

Danny finishes cleaning up the glass before he comes back though, even if he is still hurting. This time he leans back against the wall next to John, purposely choosing to stand on his good side, making absolutely sure John can see him.

"Still think I'm a figment of your imagination?"

John shakes his head.

"Good."

John looks up at him. "Can we just cut to it? Why are you here?"

Danny slides down the wall to sit next to him. "I wanted to apologise. I was wrong about you, John. I shouldn't have acted the way I did towards you."

"You were right about me, but yeah, you shouldn't," John says with a frown. "Are you trying to get me on different charges now? You want me to confess to something?"

"You're not my suspect anymore. You're not involved in any investigation I'm working. Hell, I'm still off sick from those bullets Burgess put in my ribcage. I don't know if I'll be able to go back at all. Don't know if I want to," he pauses, massages his chest. "You tried to fix what you did. You didn't even make a deal in case you all got sent to jail before you decided to testify against Pre-Crime. You've been visiting the Precog kids, helping them get used to 'now'. From what I heard you were trying to bring Burgess in alive even when he had a gun to your chest. You're a good man, John, you just got lost somewhere along the way."

"Not an answer."

"I don't know. I want to help, I guess," he says. His voice turns gentle again and he reaches out and offers John a hand. "You're going to have to trust somebody eventually. Might as well be me."

John takes it. "I don't trust you yet-"

"I wouldn't expect you to," Danny interjects.

"But you're right. I can't do this on my own any more."