A/N: I have been staring at this chapter for way too long, and I am done dammit, so I'm sorry if there are typos.
Lena takes one more spin in front of the mirror. Perfect. Nothing manages to project professionalism and say 'fuck me' at the same time like a tight, perfectly tailor skirt-suit and backseam pantyhose. Today is Tim's first day back at the office, and she means to be noticed.
Sayeed gives her the side-eye as they climb into the car, and Lena's not sure if it's judgment or surprise at her choice of ensemble. Out of consideration, she generally limits herself to pantsuits around him. It had better not be judgment. I keep you alive, dude. After ten tensely silent minutes he compliments her hair, and Lena takes back every mean and preemptively defensive thought that she'd been stewing over.
A few months into their acquaintance, they'd been sitting at tea in the backyard of his then safe house, and a few pine needles had blown into her hair. She'd felt the prick of one against her cheek, saw his eyes tracking the snag as it blew around in the wind, but she'd pretended not to notice it for nearly an hour to see if he said anything. He never did. Lena smiles, trying not to grin, warmed by his words far beyond the flattery to her appearance.
He says it more slowly and with even more fastidious dedication to pronunciation than usual, and Lena gets the feeling he'd been rehearsing the phrase in his head. He complimented her cooking once. Once. A year ago. That had been a landmark in their relationship.
Lena's in a good mood when they pull up to the courthouse. She and Sayeed climb the stairs to the floor housing the Marshals' offices, but when they walk past Tim's desk he's not there.
"Is he alright?" she asks Chief Deputy Mullen, feigning only professional concern.
"Deputy Gutterson's doing just fine," assures her. He just wanted to take another day to recuperate from his injuries. Lena nearly calls bullshit and clenches her jaw against the instinct. She'd texted him two days ago, and he was practically climbing up the wall because he couldn't wait to get back to work.
But she's not here to see Tim; she's here to discuss how to handle Sayeed's case in the wake of the shooting, so Lena puts all thoughts of the deputy Marshal on hold to be dealt with later.
They'd been moved of course. No other witnesses had been shot at, but according to Oona this was most likely because they were families with children and therefore potential shooters would have known that they couldn't have been Sayeed or Lena. She hadn't found any abnormal traffic on the Marshal servers, but given that whoever was behind this was working for the US government, that didn't mean anything. It's easier to be sneaky when you don't have to be.
"I think you should consider staying in Lexington, Agent Carlan." Ha, agent. That still gets her. Oona was really good at faking badges. "Actually, it's totally real, and if you ever stop by the New York office where you officially work say high to Jeff for me." Lena doesn't know if 'say hi' means 'say hi' or 'it's ok to shoot him and I'll help you hide the body.' One never knows with Oona.
"You really want to keep us after all that trouble?" Lena asks dubiously. She'd already found two more potential safe houses out of state and had planned to ask for a detail to escort them. Hopefully Tim would have been on that detail.
"Well, I doubt whoever's hunting you would think we'd actually keep you here after all that," Deputy Mullen addresses Sayeed, "That probably it the best place to hide you now. It's so stupid it's smart." He leans back in his chair, fingers laced behind his head. "Also, he shot one of my deputies, and I wouldn't mind getting one over on them."
It makes sense, so Lena agrees. For now. Although she's made some security modifications of her own to the house – she'd installed a few discretely positioned cameras and motion sensors the day they moved in and linked them all up to her phone.
Lena drops Sayeed back at their new safe house, but stays in the car, wondering if she ought to go check on Tim, when her phone pings. She digs it out of her purse to look at the notification.
passed goat lab. ur looking at a new combat medic now :-)
Lena relaxes back into her seat, a soft, irrepressible smile spreading across her face. Meyer. She's always made sure he has her number. She'd insisted. "I owe you." He doesn't know how deeply she means those three words and the lengths to which she'd go – that she can go – to even that debt, and the affection she feels for him is deeper because of it.
She's in the middle of texting him back, I don't see anything :-P, when a photo pops up on the screen – Meyer standing with a group of soldiers, probably at a bar, all frozen in some ridiculously juvenile, celebratory pose.
She deletes the message she'd been typing out and sends Grats! instead, followed by a few emoticons of confetti horns for extra enthusiasm.
At the same time she's proud and happy for him, and maybe a little relieved too, there comes the sobering realization that now that he's finished with training he'll be deployed. Lena had followed his progress, first as he finished airborne school, and then his spec ops combat medic, or SOCM, training. She'd rooted for him every step of the way, and even when training rendered communication impossible, she still accessed his files to check his progress. Now all she feels is the overwhelming fear that he'll be hurt or killed.
What unit are you assigned to?
not sure yet. i'll let u kno.
Lena debates the ethics of trying to quietly get him assigned somewhere that will be stateside for a while. Or to try to fix things so his unit goes somewhere marginally safer. You thought you were safe once, and look how that turned out. She pauses, frozen in a circular loop of worst case scenarios, paralyzed by the fear that each choice is the wrong choice. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Snap out of it, dollface. Lena gives herself a shake. He fought for this path; she can't take it away from him. For now.
Be safe.
yes ma'am.
He's the only one she lets call her ma'am. He'd insisted. Lena smiles to herself. She should tell Tim. She wants him to be just as proud of Meyer as she is. Though to be fair, Meyer did get him shot, so maybe he…Lena frowns. A few pieces in the back of her mind rattle against each other before fitting together. Tim requesting the day off. Meyer. It's six years to the day Tim knocked a scared private out of the path of an enemy bullet.
Lena sits silently in the driver's seat, pondering. Fudge. She's never going to hear the end of this. She pulls out her phone and dials then starts the car.
"Hey, boss lady, what's up?"
"Oona? I need an address."
o.O.o
God, people are fuckin' morons. Tim slams the cupboard closed, the glass on the counter, and the bottle down after it once the glass is full. The first swallow of bourbon is a relief, and a second quickly follows. His mind is loud, and he can either find something louder to drown out the noise or he can force it all to be quiet. Right now he wants quiet, so a third glass is downed, followed by a fourth, this one savored now that the edge has been dulled.
First it was the fuckers in line in front of him at the grocery store, a group of vapid, twittering hipsters whose biggest concern in life was their damn hair or lame party. He'd had to endure fifteen long minutes of listening to some twenty-one year old who probably still lived in his parents' basement whine about how his shitty, greasy hair wasn't quite long enough for a man-bun. What the fuck is a man-bun? Men don't have fucking buns. And who worries that goddamn much about their hair? Then he'd had to listen as the guy explained, in excruciating and pompous detail how to pick out 'proper' red wine. Douchebag had been holding a case of Natty Lite.
Tim takes another swallow, angry again and a little jealous that someone can go through life that concerned about insignificant shit. His twenty-first birthday was in Iraq.
He has to take a piss, brings his drink with him. Tim looks at his hair while he washes his hands. Only time he cared so much about it was when they handed him a DD214 and he realized he'd never again have to get a high-and-tight from the Bx barber.
A loud knock downstairs jerks him back to the present. Shit, he thinks, mind immediately jumping to work, and what could have gone wrong, and from there to how he's going to handle it in his current state. His extremities are already pleasantly warm, and Art would probably kill him if he tried to drive –
Tim yanks the door open to find Lena standing on the front porch. He'd thought it was Art, or maybe Rachel. The pounding had been too businesslike for Lena. The bourbon has taken enough effect that his eyes drop immediately to her skirt and linger, appreciating what it does for her legs. He wanted to see her again, but not today, and not when he was like this.
Her mouth draws into a thin line as she takes in his appearance – no doubt put off by his old flannel shirt and oil-stained jeans – and Tim's earlier admiration turns hard. Her presence, especially in contrast to his own, makes him acutely aware of each and every flaw. Well fuck her. Tim squares his shoulders, on the defensive. This is his home, and this is him in his home, and he refuses to feel ashamed of it.
Lena is oblivious to his resolve. She looks like a woman with a purpose and a plan, and given that his only plan is to drink himself into a comfortable stupor, she represents a disturbance in the force. He gathers excuses to deny unvoiced demands, anticipates how best to refuse whatever she came here for.
Then she steps forward and he steps back reflexively, and just like that she's inside and he's scrambling to mount a new defense, unsure of what attack she has in store. Tim glances behind him. There are crusted plates and old cups layered with grimy film covering his coffee table. There's still cold, half-eaten pizza at one end of the couch left over from lunch. He hasn't done the dishes in two days. Planting himself firmly between Lena and the path to the rest of the house, this time he's determined to hold his ground.
"How do you know where I live?"
"It was pretty easy to figure out," she says, not really answering. Lena squints uncertainly, not at the mess, but up at him. "Are you drunk?"
Lena's shorter than him, so with her standing so close he's forced to look down, but his eyes keep going before climbing back up. Tim wonders if tonight is the night he does something Raylan-level stupid. She's wearing those ridiculous heels again, and because he's already a little drunk, he forgets to hate them because they're colluding with her skirt to show off her legs. The sudden, sharp memory of the both of them in her office, Lena's legs wrapped around his waist, jumps to the front of his mind. Tim wishes he were wearing a different shirt and didn't smell like a distillery. Tonight is not the night for stupid. But she's still looking up at him, standing close enough that he thinks maybe…
Lena takes another step forward and plucks the glass out of his hand without so much as a howdedo, and continues on past him down the hall. The memories evaporate.
"Where's your kitchen?" she asks, not looking back. But she's already found it, and Tim follows her in, wondering what the fuck she's doing with his bourbon, and turns the corner just in time to see her finish pouring it back into the bottle he'd left on the counter.
"What the fuck?" Given her feelings about whiskey, he should probably be grateful it's not going down the sink.
"Happy alive day." She turns back to face him.
He looks away and goes to the cupboard to pull out a new glass and a different bottle and pours another drink. But Lena is beside him again, and she takes that glass and the bottle too this time.
"Jesus Christ, what the hell?" Goddammit, all he wants is tradition and quiet. He isn't prepared for intrusions, and definitely not her.
"You don't need any more." Anger flares. As if she has any right to make that call.
"You gave me whiskey in the middle of a goddamned warzone where I wasn't even allowed to have it, and now you're taking it away when it's my day off?"
"Well back then you'd just saved my life, and you were cute, and you had this whole," she waves her finger around haphazardly at him, "southern charm thing going." She's in a mood, with no patience for mincing words or holding anything in, and what would otherwise sound like a compliment sounds instead like dispassionate rationalization.
He glares belligerently, pulls out another bottle, doesn't bother with a glass, just drinks from it right in front of her, a line in the sand.
"Alright. Fine." Lena unscrews the cap on the bottle she's still holding hostage. "You drink, then I drink."
Tim sneers, "Yeah right. I've seen you drink." He takes another swallow, calling her bluff.
She raises her eyebrows in calm – god, why is she always so fucking calm? – acceptance of his challenge and takes a hefty pull. It obviously still tastes like shit for her, which gives him a moment of sadistic satisfaction. Lena opens the cupboard behind her and hands him a glass. He thinks he's won easy. Then she pulls out another.
"I can't keep track if you drink from the bottle." Her stubbornness confuses him.
Tim pours a drink, sets it on the counter, then snatches her glass over and pours an equal measure.
"There you go," he says, sliding it back, tipping his own towards her in a mocking toast.
Lena holds up her glass. "Your health and happiness." It sounds so formal.
Whatever. Tim drains his glass in a gulp, and when he sets it back on the counter hers is waiting as well.
"Well go on then, pour." Her determination – or maybe it's her pig-headed refusal to admit certain failure in what is, for her, a stupid idea – irritates him.
He counts in his head and figures she's probably had about three shots in five minutes. Tim shrugs and does as she asks. Lena's a big girl and can tap out whenever she wants.
Lena doesn't tap out, instead settling in at his kitchen table with her stolen liquor, tipsy but not wasted. She's still sitting up straight, one leg crossed primly over the other. In defiance of her earlier disappointment and her clean cut appearance, he sprawls on the chair next to her, one arm slung over the back. Tim wonders if she'd been pretending to be drunk that time in Bagram, some sort of trick to loosen his tongue and weaken his guard when she wanted information. The thought that he'd been deceived about that too puts a bitter taste in his mouth.
Tim doesn't knock them back, but he keeps pouring, growing more resentful with each glass she finishes with him. She's had roughly seven drinks now.
"Jesus, your liver is a gladiator." She's speaking a little more slowly, taking care to enunciate properly, but nowhere near the sloppy drunk he'd expect.
"You done yet?"
"Nope."
He shrugs again. Not his problem.
Lena nods at the liquor in his hand. "How does this help?" she asks, genuinely curious.
"Not all of us want to remember everything."
"And this erases your memory does it?" Lena looks down at the glass, tilting her head at the liquid in the bottom. "It's not really working. If you want to feel better, heroine would be more effective." She fixes him with a look. "Don't do heroine."
"What? You don't feel like shootin' up with me?"
She twirls her glass on the edge of the table, and Tim waits for it to fall on the floor. "Meyer passed his SOCM training."
The non sequitur startles him off balance. "Good for Meyer." His tone is sarcastic, but the next swallow he takes is a sincere drink to the other man's success. "That what you came here to tell me?"
"Yeah."
Goddamn her.
Lena jerks, fumbling the glass. It falls off the table and she panics, tumbling after it. Lena ends up on the floor, glass cradled in both hands over her stomach. "Ow." She giggles and holds it up to him, her prize.
"It's just a glass," he says, setting it on the table before giving her a hand up. It takes several tries for her to get her feet under her, and Tim realizes she's considerably more inebriated than he'd previously thought.
"Oh fuck it." She toes off her heels, tripping as she does so and nearly falls again. A moment later she chucks each one against the doorframe with a thunk.
"You're an angry drunk." He pours himself another glass, and she does the same, knocking the bottom of her glass against his in a clumsy toast.
"Says you." Lena leans forward over the table, looking up at him from where her head rests sideways on her forearms. Her eyes are slow to focus. "Why does being alive make you sad?"
"I like being alive."
"Why are you drinking so much?" she amends.
"You always gotta know everything?" he shoots back.
She looks at him, searching, and one corner of her mouth twitches up weakly in a nervous smile. "Would it be so bad?"
He meets her gaze, vulnerable despite having him on the defensive. He's not drunk enough or sober enough for this and chooses to distract her instead. "That's pretty funny coming from someone who won't even tell me who she works for."
"You always gotta know ever'thing?" she parrots back at him. "You're awfully concerned about where my paycheck comes from," and because she's more resistant to his attempt at distraction than he'd hoped, she says quietly, hesitantly, "I always celebrate my alive day."
"I used to. But it's not so fun when not everyone else is alive to celebrate with you."
"But tha's not your fault." An offhand, confident assumption that she doesn't realize cuts until it's out of her mouth.
Tim pours himself another drink, and says nothing. His silence speaks loudly enough, and Lena's face falls guiltily as she slides her own glass over as well.
"Is that what you're trying t'forget?"
"Why do you want so badly to remember?" he counters.
Lena frowns, considering. "I asked you first," she says, undeterred. Damn her.
"Just 'cause I can remember it doesn't mean I can fix it."
She smiles sadly. It's not like she's that ignorant.
After a while Lena picks her head up off her arms, sitting straighter. She licks her lips, nervous. "Hey, remember tha' time a building blew up unner us?" Her words are a lot more slurred than before, but the determination hasn't disappeared. "You saved m'life. You saved i' way before tha' too. 'F you hadn' taken that bullet for Meyer, then he wouldn'a been there t'pull me outta that Humvee. Can you at leas' drink t' that?"
He's reluctant at first, but it's easier just to agree, so he humors her, holding up his glass. But Lena's face lights up when he does, a big goofy grin spreading from one end to the other. Yeah, he can drink to that.
"And when y'saved me 'n Clarence from tha' su'cide bomber."
He raises his glass again.
"And when you came wi'me t'the prison." Her glass smashes clumsily against his. "An' when y'came an' got me from th'guy pretendin' t'be Qasim." Lena continues enthusiastically, making toasts to the entire chronology of their acquaintance. She is now completely blasted-off-her-ass drunk, and he's having a hard time remembering to resent her presence.
"When you fast and furious-ed us back to base," he adds.
This earns him an extra-large grin.
"Oh!" She jumps up, immediately stumbles against the table, grabbing his shoulder for balance. "C'mon," the hand on his shoulder tugs, and he gets up to follow, curious to see where she takes him. "Got'n idea."
Lena bends down to grab the shoes she'd tossed into the hallway and hands one to him before continuing unsteadily towards the front door.
"Here," she says when they're outside, "now throw it."
Tim gives her a look. "Um, what?"
"Throw it. I ain' slurrin' that badly." She is, but he chooses to take things one at a time.
"And why in the hell do you want me to do that?"
Lena steps back and draws herself up, uncertain again. "It'll make you feel better." Tim looks down at her swaying slightly from foot to foot, waiting for him to throw her shoe. God, she's ridiculous. And in that moment he doesn't want her to leave. Fuck, he wishes she weren't so drunk.
Tim throws the shoe up in the air as high as he can, and the stupid thing comes crashing back to earth with a solid, satisfying thwack. He turns back to find Lena smiling at him and can't help returning the expression. Absolutely ridiculous.
"Hey," She steps in and a brightly painted finger pokes his cheek. He's less surprised at being poked than by her initiation of physical contact that's not solely for the purpose of keeping her upright. "You smiled."
"Jesus, you're drunk," he says, doing it again. He feels less self-conscious about smelling like a distillery when she smells like one too.
"I also came here for that too you know."
"You wanted to get this drunk? You're going to be hungover as shit tomorrow. You also didn't need me for it."
"No, dufus," she pokes his smile again, this time letting her finger trail down his cheek, "fer this." Oh, how he wishes she weren't drunk.
He lets out a breath and steps back, keeping his hand on her arm in case she starts listing again. "It's time for you to have a Gatorade."
Lena sways forward, the smile slipping away to something more serious, and shudders. "Um, I…"
This time Tim doesn't step back. Lena pukes down his front.
"Shi'I'm so sorry." She stumbles backward, "I don' feel so good."
"Yeah, I gathered that," he says, wiping at his shirt. It's pure liquid, no chunks, and Tim wonders if she'd bothered eating before embarking on this little bender. He steers her back inside only to have her throw up again in the entryway.
Lena continues her slurred apologies all the way to the bathroom, barely making it to the toilet for the third round. He twists her hair back, tucking it into her collar and hopes it holds. She leans forward heavily, and Tim prays she's too drunk to notice the state of his toilet. Of course she is.
"I'll be right back with Gatorade, alright?" He gives her hair one more twist. It's gonna be a long night.
Tim grabs a couple bottles of Gatorade, and after a little more rummaging he finds a half-full box of crackers. He takes the roll of paper towels with him as an afterthought.
Lena's resting across the toilet, chest to cheek, eyes closed and breathing heavily.
"Hey," he gives her a gentle shake, so as not to upset her stomach further, and tries to press the Gatorade bottle into her hand. Her eyelids twitch. "Lena?" He shakes a little harder this time. "Lena?" Fuck, he hadn't realized she was this drunk. She'd been sitting down the whole time, and he'd drunk pretty fast so she had too. He no longer remembers how much she had. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. He's such a fucking idiot. "Lena?"
He hauls her off the toilet seat and shakes her hard now, starting to worry. Her eyes flutter, but don't open, head lolling back. "Nnnggh." He thinks maybe that's a good thing, but then a ripple runs through her body, and she throws up again. Tim turns her head quickly to the side, but only half makes it into the toilet bowl. She coughs weakly.
"Shit. Lena?"
She doesn't respond.