Erin learns the hard way to be extremely careful waking Mouse or Jay from a nightmare.

It's several weeks in to their dinners. Though Mouse has stayed the night more than a couple times, there's yet to have been another midnight confessional. There was one night where Mouse was woken by Jay wandering in to the living room and clicking on the TV, and he lifted his head groggily from the pillow, and Jay rested a hand gently on Mouse's head, running his fingers through Mouse's hair with a soft smile, and Mouse nodded and drifted off to sleep again to the quiet murmur and flickering of whatever documentary Jay put on, waking briefly again when the TV was shut off and Jay ran his fingers once again lightly through Mouse's hair on his way back to bed where Erin was still asleep.

They have a case that day where the key witness was a soldier. He's just a man at the wrong place at the wrong time who had the misfortune to see the shooters who opened fire on a café with machine guns early in the morning. It had been nearly empty – nearly, but not fully, the owner taking a round to the chest, DOA, and a 21 year old girl working the early shift helping to open brought to the hospital in critical condition. So Antonio walks the witness, the soldier, into the office and sits him down in the lunch room at the table. His name is Eric Stanport. Mouse watches the man, older than himself, but not an old man, pass by and tries to keep his eyes from flickering down to the stump of Eric Stanport's right arm.

Later in the day, the team are all out running down leads, but this time Mouse isn't alone on the Intelligence floor. This time, Eric Stanport sits on a wobbly chair at a small round table, slit into pieces and flashes behind the slats of the blinds, and Mouse's eyes often drift up without his consent to catch the small constant shifts of the soldier in the other room. Mouse's fingers tap anxiously on the desk, the other hand fiddling with his empty coffee mug. Eric Stanport sits in the room with the coffee.

The last time he was with another soldier other than Jay and Al, Jeff Frazier put a gun to his head. He's not afraid, per se, and not because of Frazier certainly. But the thought of walking into that room makes his pulse jump, and the near silence of the room buzzes in his brain. Finally, he takes a deep breath and stands, hooking his fingers around the handle of his mug and walking to the break room.

Eric Stanport's head jerks up as Mouse opens the door, startled green eyes made wide with alarm. Mouse tries for a calming smile as he walks in towards the coffee pot. His senses are on high alert as he pours a fresh cup; he can almost feel every breath Eric Stanport takes behind him. He pours in the sugar and turns, taking a sip. Stanport has turned back to the table, so Mouse is looking at the back of a head covered in unkempt blond hair, and a dirt and dust stained jacket that is thinning and fraying but used to be, as far as Mouse can tell, army green. Looking at that jacket, Mouse is suddenly reminded of the day, a few months after he got clean, looking at his closet one morning and realizing that everything he owned was earth tones, camouflage colours, army colours. Coming up on three years after his last tour, and he'd still been living like a man in a war zone. So he went to a store and defiantly bought a bright red shirt, and a blue one, and one in purple, and stuck them in his closet.

Mouse starts to walk out of the room, but stops, turning to Stanport again.

"Hey," he says hesitantly, and Stanport looks up cautiously. "You need anything?" Mouse sees a twitch of a grimace at the edges of Stanport's mouth, hesitation, and then the man is shaking his head.

"No, no, I don' need anythin," he says, words running clumsily together. Stanport clenches his left hand in a tight fist against his thigh, but not before Mouse sees the tremoring of the fingers, and Stanport can't hide the shiver that runs through his body. Mouse's grip tightens on his coffee mug, eyes darting to the dark shadows carved under Stanport's tired eyes, the grime of his skin, the dirty clothes, threadbare to match the jacket on his back. Mouse feels a shudder running lightly over his own skin, coming to rest in a vibrating anxiety, curled like a purring cat at his collarbone and twining through his ribs. He swallows, nods, and leaves the room, pulling the door shut behind him with a soft click that echoes too loudly in the quiet of the Intelligence floor. Mouse squeezes his eyes shut and takes a few deep breaths, then strides purposefully back to his computer and goes back to work, keeping his gaze firmly averted from the break room.

It turns out that the owner of the café had taken out a hell of a loan to get his business started, and couldn't pay up, and the man he owed wasn't the forgiving type. The loan shark did his best to go out in a hail of bullets, but Antonio got him with a bullet in the leg, and they dragged him out, bleeding but breathing. Antonio is the one to tell Eric Stanport that they got the guys, that what he told them had helped crack the case, that it's safe to leave the district now, and it's Antonio that leads him out across the Intelligence floor. Mouse can't help but watch him surreptitiously as he goes. It feels oddly like standing at the edge of a cliff, or a high diving board, until Stanport descends the stairs and falls out of sight. Most of the rest of the team head to Molly's, but it's dinner night, so the team heads out without Erin, Jay, and Mouse.

It's Jay's night to choose the meal – he chooses pizza, homemade, though they cheat, buying premade crusts and pizza sauce. Erin gets to work on grating cheese while Jay sauces the pizzas and Mouse starts cutting up onions and peppers. Jay and Mouse do their best to keep veggie chopping out of Erin's hands, lest they end up with vegetable bits everywhere – it's not only carrots she has a hard time with. Mouse finds his concentration drifting, losing track of Erin and Jay's conversation, seeing and not seeing the cutting board in front of him as he slices and dices, only experience keeping him from cutting himself accidentally.

He blinks into focus at Jay nudging him gently with an elbow. Jay quirks an eyebrow ever so slightly, blue eyes searching Mouse's face – okay? – and Mouse shrugs one shoulder. Jay nods and rests his fingers on Mouse's for a second before turning back to his conversation with Erin.

Mouse tries to keep up with the conversation more once they sit down to dinner, but his attention wanders hazily. Once, he looks up and catches Erin watching him. Her expression is inscrutable as her eyes meet his and hold them, and then casually flick away to smile at Jay as though the moment had never happened, and Mouse wonders if he imagined it.

After dinner, and after they've cleaned up and are moving into the living room, when Erin goes to the bathroom, Jay takes Mouse's arm gently.

"You're staying tonight," he murmurs. So Mouse stays.

It's cold, dampness of the night dew saturating the fraying fabrics of his clothes, a harder kind of cold, a deep-earth kind seeping into his body through the concrete beneath him, and the bricks at his back. He hates that he likes being cold like this, because he can pretend that its only shivers from the chill of the night that make his fingers fumble and dance in the dimness. Except, of course, for the rattling bottle of pills in his jacket pocket, and he can't quite decide whether he can actually feel the weight of it or if he imagines it. It's not quiet in the warehouse – Chicago is never quiet. Even at this late, or maybe early, hour, cars rev in the streets outside, punctuated by the occasional honk; voices call out, the drunken slur of catcalls, shouts of arguments, abruptly loud laughter that echoes and carries in the streets and the walls. These noises are familiar, but there are other noises that no matter how many times he hears them, he can't get used to.

Bang!

It could be a car backfiring, a firecracker, a dropped brick or one thrown, every once in a while it's an actual gunshot. It doesn't matter; his body jerks, scrambling away from the noise, abruptly breathless as the night fills with a bout of raucous laughter. Trembling hands scratch and pull and fumble at his pocket. He swallows the pill dry, eyes crushed shut, feeling his heartbeat still thrumming like a hummingbird's wings, waiting.

The transition is seamless, as it is in dreams, which possess a logic all their own that falls away in the morning.

His heart thrums so fast it barely feels like it's beating and his breath is shallow and gasping; his body is numb, or he is floating in space, ethereal spirit disembodied. The roof above him is not quite white anymore, and it blurs in and out of his flickering vision; sound comes in wobbly bursts, like a phone call with a bad connections, catching snatches of words. The woman's face comes into fuzzy view and he sees her lips moving – "Sir … hear me?"

It's not hard to figure out what she's asking and he wants to nod, say yes, but he's a bit preoccupied with the fact that he's choking and his chest is on fire as he's being dragged to the bottom of the ocean. The man leans over, but if he says something Mouse misses it entirely, distracted by the man's blue eyes, startling against his black skin, and almost exactly the same shade as Jay's. And he is consumed by a single thought – Jay will never forgive me.

The dream shifts again. The last hacking job went well; there's enough money in his pocket that he'll have enough left over after the buy to have some real decent food, maybe even enough to buy a new coat – the one he's wearing is getting thin and the cold cuts through it. It's late; the sun dipped below the horizon a few hours ago. It seems, he thinks errantly, as though my whole life has happened in the dark.

He hears the footsteps coming towards him from around the corner, a group of them, but pays them no mind. Chicago is a busy place at night. But he does slink a little closer to the wall, holding his body tense, because Chicago is also a dangerous place at night.

There's four men, and one woman, swaggering confidently, and he feels the moment their eyes zero in on him. Shit. He's a better fighter, he can be reasonably sure of that, but his body is stiff with cold and from sitting long hours by the computer for the job, and there are five of them.

"Well, well, what do we have here?" The leader lilts, and the group grin. He nods to them and tries to slide away, but one grabs him by the arm and spins him back against the wall. They set upon him with wild laughter. He throws punches, catching one in the stomach, using his elbows and quick hands, body reacting instinctively. They'll come away from this with a few bruises. But five of them, almost all bigger than him, are unrealistic odds, and soon they have him on the ground, ripping at his pockets, fists to his stomach. He takes the pain silently, even as the blows leave him gasping for breath, but when the woman pulls out the neat stack of folded bills from the inside pocket of his jacket, he can't help the small cry of despair. She grabs a fistful of his hair, yanking his head back and leans in, close enough that he can feel the heat of her breath on his ear. Thanks, honey, she says sweetly. He can smell beer on her breath, overlaid by the cloying scent of bubble-gum. She keeps hold of his hair, pulling tightly, and grins wickedly, sliding her other hand lower, lower, and he thrashes wildly in the restraining arms, but they hold him tight. She squeezes once, hard, cackling, and shoves off him. The men fall upon him again, fists and boots and pain and hands gripping him tight, shaking him, and suddenly he has an arm free, somehow he has the leverage, grabbing at the hands holding him, twisting and rolling until he's got them with a chokehold round the neck, arms prone behind their back; his chest heaves with adrenaline and relief, but he finds his mouth assaulted by long strands of their hair-

Reality is a blow to the chest harder than any launched by those men on the street, and he feels sick and dizzy and breathless as he pushes Erin out of his arms scrambling blindly against the wall, flinching violently as Erin coughs and regains her breath. His whole body trembles, gasping, the room beginning to spin with the vicious onset of the panic attack, heartbeat racing as fast as it did in his dream, back in that ambulance, chest already aching with the effort of breathing, eyes burning with tears that spill down his numb cheeks.

Perception in a panic attack is a strange, paradoxical thing. So when Jay appears in the doorway of the living room, Mouse is both only dimly aware of it, and sharply and vibrantly cognisant of it and the "Shit" that bursts from Jay's lips before he bolts to Erin's side, arm around her shoulder murmuring quietly, her murmuring back, too low for Mouse to hear over the sound of his breath scraping in and out of his throat.

Seconds or minutes or hours later, Jay rises, leaving Erin sitting still by the couch, and walks slowly over to Mouse, eyebrows crinkled with emotion. Jay drops to edge up next to Mouse up against the wall. Mouse is caught between the intense desire to run, and the equally intense desire to collapse into Jay's arms. Trapped within himself, Mouse does nothing, frozen and gasping and drowning. Jay snakes an arm around Mouse's body, pulling him in, and a strangled sob forces its way out between Mouse's gasping breaths and he squeezes his eyes shut and wishes he could pour bleach into his brain to forget the way that he turned his body into a weapon against Erin, and the sound of her coughs as she struggled to breathe again.

His stomach churns with guilt and panic, and he has a moment of desperate pleading with himself or any deity or controlling force in the universe that this won't be the kind of panic attack that makes him sick, but then he feels the hot-cold flush flash across his skin and the cold sweat breaking at his temples. He jerks in Jay's arms, eyes opening to meet Jay's in the dimness, and a whimper escapes through the panicked panting, and Mouse can see the instant that Jay knows. Jay bolts from his side, and Mouse sees Erin's head jerk round to watch Jay, confusion evident and Mouse tries to focus on her face instead of his roiling stomach, but the surge of guilt at her tousled hair and rumpled shirt has the opposite effect. And then Jay is back, sliding the garbage can up beside Mouse, dropping back down to wrap his arm back around Mouse's body, ready to prop him up. Mouse catches the flicker of understanding on Erin's face and feels burning humiliation and shame join with the guilt in the split second before his stomach clenches and he jerks forward, Jay's arms supporting him as he chokes on the vomit burning its way up his throat, splattering hotly from his lips. He gets one gasping breath in before his stomach convulses again, tears spilling down his cheeks, until his stomach is empty and the heaving ends and he slumps back, crying and struggling to catch his breath, body trembling feverishly in shivering waves, and he buries his head in his hands, trying to block out the world while Jay shifts to hold him more comfortably.

The brush of fabric makes Mouse jump and he looks up to find Erin draping a blanket over him and he stares at her with wide eyes as she gently covers him with it, moves the garbage can slightly farther away, and sinks to the ground next to him. His gaze catches on the shadow of redness around her throat. She snakes a warm hand up to enclose one of his own, cold and still lightly trembling.

"Hey," she murmurs. "I'm okay. You didn't hurt me."

"Liar," he croaks quietly. She tugs her lips into a half smile.

"Who you calling a liar? I'm made of tough stuff, you know that." Her bid for humour fades back into a serious intensity. "You did not hurt me. I'm okay. This is not your fault; I should have known better than to try and shake you awake like that. You even told me it was a bad idea."

Mouse looks away, clenching his jaw and keeping his lips tightly closed to stop reflexive venomous words escaping. Who are you to tell me about guilt? Unfortunately, looking away from Erin just leads to him looking at Jay, who has been silent until their eyes meet.

"Remember what you always told me? 'We are not what our bodies do, we are not what our fear does, and we are not guilty of the things beyond our control.' You can't have it both ways."

Mouse swallows hard as Jay goes on.

"You know that this isn't your fault, and we don't blame you." Jay falls silent again and the words hang in the air. None of them speak. Erin rubs her thumb gently on Mouse's hand.

"You know, one time," Erin begins with sudden animation, "when I was still in school and living with Hank, he came to wake me up in the morning. Only I was having this dream where I was running from this horde of moths. It wasn't really a nightmare, more like one of those weird dreams that's so weird that even the dangerous parts are just kind of funny and entertaining. But I was being chased by this giant cloud of moths, and they were catching up to me, and I was flailing my arms around trying to fight them off. But it turns out I actually started doing that in real life too, just as Hank was leaning over to wake me up. Got him right in the face." She chuckles. "I thought he was going to be pissed, but he just put a hand to his face and did that 'huh' thing he does – you know what I mean? – and he just looks at me and says, 'Nice right hook, kid.' And when I told him about the dream, he laughed so hard." Erin is grinning, and Mouse feels Jay chuckling beside him, but Mouse is watching Erin bemusedly. She sees his expression, and her own softens. "My point, is that it never even occurred to him to be angry, because he knew that I had no intention of hurting him. He knew that I wasn't hitting him, I was hitting those damn moths." She squeezes his hand. "You weren't trying to hurt me. You were trying to defend yourself from whatever you were dreaming about. And there is nothing in that for you to feel guilty about."

"Easier said than done," he mutters.

"Of course it is," she continues fiercely. "Everything is. I can't tell you how to feel Mouse. I know that even though Hank laughed about it, I felt guilty for weeks. He got a black eye from it, and every time I saw it I felt like crap. But now? Now I think of it every time I see a moth and it makes me smile. Guilt fades, if you let it. And you should, because you don't deserve to carry that weight around with you."

Mouse closes his eyes at the passion in her voice – passion in his defense – and squeezes her hand in return, the thanks he can't force himself to voice. They're quiet for a moment. Mouse feels Jay tense, and knows that he's about to stand, about to pull him up from the floor to go clean up, take him back to bed to sleep, move on. The words burst from his lips unbidden.

"Eric Stanport; he's homeless. And an addict."

Jay freezes, then Mouse feels Jay's muscles relax as he settles back into sitting.

"What?" Erin's voice is bewildered, taken by surprise by his sudden outburst, and words she doesn't understand the significance of.

"I noticed earlier," Mouse goes on, staring at the floor. "His hands were shaking, circles under his eyes, the dirty threadbare clothes." Mouse can practically hear Erin's mind turning, trying to make the connection. If not now, when? he thinks to himself. His free hand digs into the deep pocket of his sweatpants and pulls out the slightly worn medallion. Resting his forearm on one knee, he flips it in his fingers. "Almost four years clean, and a homeless addict soldier still scares the shit out of me." He glances up at Erin, who's staring at him with wide eyes, stilled by shock. He looks back at the coin, watching the faint glimmer of the bronze in the dim light, not enough light to make out the etched "NA" on its face.

"There were five of them. Four men, one woman. They were all drunk, probably on something too. I don't know if robbing me was the point, or if they were just bored, but they came at me. I fought, but… they took my money – I'd just finished a job, so I had more than usual. Had enough for the drugs, a decent meal, a new coat… The woman, she took the money, had her little fun, and left me for the men to kick until they got tired of it. Fists, feet, elbows… and then I wasn't dreaming anymore."

When he looks up again, Erin is focused on the coin in his hand. He holds it out to her, and she takes it tentatively, running her fingers over the engravings.

"Do they help? The meetings?" She looks up at him. He shrugs.

"I wouldn't know. I don't go to them – Jay gets the coins for me. I'm sure they do for some people, but I don't think they would for me. But the coins help – having a physical reminder of the accomplishment, and what I'd be losing if I slipped… And it gives me something to do with my hands." He takes the coin back from her gently, rolling it across his knuckles, then doing a simple vanishing coin trick. "Did you really never guess?"

She frowns, shaking her head. "No." He sees the way she raises her head to look at Jay with furrowed brow, and interrupts before the thought he knows is coming can be formed.

"I'm very good at hiding when I don't want to be found, even from Jay. And he just didn't have the resources – at least for a while."

"And…" she says hesitantly, "you were living on the street?" Mouse shrugs again.

"Paying rent as a jobless drug addict gets difficult," he says, before adding wryly, "I don't recommend it; it's cold as fuck."

The comment has the desired effect – Jay snorts, and Erin coughs around a choked on laugh. Jay tenses to stand again, and this time Mouse stays silent, allowing himself to be pulled up to stand. He feels a little hollow, but most of the aftereffects of the panic attack have dissipated. Erin pushes up off the ground as well.

"Come on," Jay says, tugging Mouse's hand. Mouse follows Jay into the bathroom where he brushes his teeth and washes his face. When they come back out, Erin has tied up the garbage bag and put it away, and remade the bed on the couch. She looks up as Mouse walks towards the couch.

"Go," she says sternly, pointing at the bedroom. He opens his mouth to protest, stopped by the noise she makes, which sounds, frankly, like the kind of noise made at a dog doing something wrong. She raises an eyebrow at him imperiously and shoos him away. He sighs, shaking his head slightly, shoulders slumping, and catches the smile on her face before he turns away and shuffles back into the bedroom, glancing back to see Jay and Erin exchanging loving smiles, Jay's tinged by gratitude. Mouse slides under the blankets of the bed, settling in. The bed jostles as Jay slides in on the other side, Jay reaching out to gently grip Mouse's hand before rolling over. Mouse closes his eyes, and waits to drift back to sleep.

They don't talk about it in the morning, but Mouse can somehow see the mark of it on all of them: something in Erin's smile, Jay's eyes, Mouse's reflection in the mirror; something imperceptible really, but there.

Three days later, Mouse pulls Erin aside at the district and presses a small bronze coin into her hands, and she smiles, raising the coin to her heart before sliding it into her pocket.


AN: I know it's been forever! aHHH! This chapter was slow going in terms of writing, one half because it was difficult to formulate exactly how I wanted it to play out, and one half because I just don't have as much time as I did during the school year. I literally live at the campground I work at, which is great, but it means that even when I'm not on shift, I'm still kind of on shift, and the whole, independent living in a trailer with only a bar fridge, two burner hot plate, microwave, and toaster, thing is not as easy in terms of food making and whatnot as a house, not to mention the fact that I spend a lot more time outside and not on my computer with the whole, gorgeous sunshine, pool where I live, beaches, bike rides, literally some of the best skies in the province for stargazing, thing. So the gist of that little ramblingness is that I can't promise the next chapter will come much faster - only that it will come eventually.

As always, it would make me super happy to hear from you guys!