Chapter Twenty Nine: Love
Skipper opened his eyes, and realized that he hadn't been shot at all.
Julien emerged from the corner of the tunnel, grimly lowering his gun. Skipper stared wide eyed, and he followed where Julien had shot; his suspicions were proven correct when he saw Hans laying on the ground, grasping his abdomen with a pained wince. Dark red blood was pooling through his fingers and above his shirt, dripping down and forming a puddle on the ground. He looked down at the wound and hissed loudly.
"Julien…?" Skipper questioned, his voice no more than a whisper.
"Hello Hans." Julien's tone was like ice.
"I don't believe we've met," Hans coughed. There was more blood.
"We haven't." Julien approached, grasping his gun tightly.
Hans reached for his own gun, but Julien immediately kicked it away. It skidded into the darkness, and Hans glared up at him with intensity unmatched. Skipper felt frozen. He'd never frozen up on the battlefield, but he belatedly realized he was probably experiencing shock. If Kowalski were there, maybe he could have clarified, but then, Skipper's thoughts weren't at all on Kowalski. Instead, he was helpless to watch as the scene before him played out.
"Zen why did you shoot me?" Hans snapped. "You don't even know me."
Julien laughed, as if this was funny. "Did you know I got two degrees?"
Hans glanced to Skipper, wondering what was going on, but Skipper was just as clueless as he was.
"One in fashion merchandising," Julien re-aimed his gun at Hans. "And one in research."
"What does all zis have to do vis me?" Hans snarled, squeezing at his wound to try and stop the bleeding. "I have no idea who you are!"
Julien turned to Skipper. His stare was still cold. "I didn't know that you had loved him, not until a few days ago."
Skipper wasn't sure what to say to that. "I…"
Without any further prompting, he explained. "When I was just a little child, all of my family died in a car accident. Well, not an accident - someone was trying to kill someone who was in the car with us. She and I both did the surviving, and so she adopted me, along with Maurice. Then, for reasons I didn't know at the time, we moved to America. I found out later it was being because her work was very… Demanding. She had to travel quite the lot, but I never thought of it, not until after she died."
Skipper began to realize that Julien wasn't just talking about any job that required travel. The clues - other than what Julien had just said - were all there, mostly from snippets of things Maurice had said or done.
"...Excuse me, but aren't you a bit… Young to be Julien's father?"
"I'm not his biological dad, no. Just a family friend who... Adopted him."
"...Where did you learn how to bust down a door like that?"
"My wife. Before she died."
"I know that Hans was arrested for killin' Clover."
Skipper gasped just as the realization hit him. "Your - your adoptive mom was…"
Julien turned to him, and his face was more heartbreaking than any expression Skipper could have ever mentally conjured up. His eyes became distant as he continued his story. "Hans did the killing of my adopted mother, many years ago… She said that she was going to go away for a little while, on a business trip to a place in Denmark. I asked if I could be going, but of course, she told me that I couldn't. Me and Maurice had to stay home, and so we did that. But then we heard on the news about this sinking ship… And she never did the returning home. Instead, we… We got a letter to tell us that she had disappeared into the ocean, but people do not just disappear, do they?"
"Copenhagen, Denmark?" Skipper asked warily; his question was almost inaudible. He already knew the answer.
Julien nodded.
"You can't prove zat vas me!" Hans snapped.
Julien pulled a drawstring bag from his back, which Skipper immediately recognized as the only thing he'd taken from Park Zoo when he'd come to the Penguin Eyes' office. From it he pulled a voice recorder; the device seemed to have been scratched and worn over time, but Julien was not deterred. Hans significantly paled when he pressed the play button.
"I, Hans, killed Clover. I confess, just… Keep Skipper out of zis."
"Believe me now?" Julien tilted his head.
"How did you get zat?" Hans ground his teeth as Skipper gazed up with wide, horrified eyes.
"Maurice. He would not stop, not until he found out who killed her. The things that people will be doing for love, you know? I needed to know too. That is being why," Julien turned his head to the side wistfully, tracing his fingers over the wall of the cave. "I found out about everything…"
"Everything?" Hans sneered, disbelieving.
Julien turned to him, apathetic. "Everything."
Hans became silent at Julien's sheer confidence, suddenly unsure of himself. Julien didn't seem to be playing around, and Skipper watched as Hans' fingers twitched around the blood that was surfacing. If he didn't get help soon, he would definitely die. And still, Skipper was frozen. He couldn't move, could hardly breathe. There were too many emotions.
Julien smiled, and there was something very dismal about it. His hands returned to the drawstring bag, carelessly dropping the voice recording to the ground as if it no longer mattered. Julien opened the bag once more, and pulled out a thick handful of pictures. Suddenly, his eyes were on Skipper, intense and plaintive enough that Skipper felt his heart surge.
"I've loved you for years, Skipper." He confessed as he threw the pictures to the ground, one by one. "For years."
Skipper stared in disbelief as each paper fell to the ground. There must have been at least forty, and all of them were pictures of him. Some were mugshots, most were taken from a distance or far off angles, and some were drawings. The great majority of the photos were blurry or pixelated, and many seemed as if they'd been pictures of other pictures. He was surprised that Julien actually recognized him in all of them, as for several, he'd been in disguise. He could tell that they'd been taken over a period of years, as Julien had implied, being that they were worn and of varying quality.
The illustrations that Julien had drawn were of incredible detail, and Skipper could tell just from the soft lighting and delicate attention to his features that they had been rendered with fondness. Even though Julien said it, his art showed it. He loved Skipper, and had loved him for a very long time. Skipper honestly didn't know what to say.
"You see, it was you," Julien elaborated, and his words were full of warm tenderness, almost desperate for Skipper to know the truth that he'd hidden for so long. "It was because of you that my mother was avenged… If not for you, then Hans would have been free. You are being the reason he confessed, and so when I heard, I had to find out who this Skipper he mentioned was… And I found you."
"So zen you stalked him?" Hans scoffed.
Julien peered down at Skipper despairingly. "I knew that there was nothing I could be doing about my feelings. As long as Clemson lived, I would never be able to… And besides that, what could I be saying? You never knew me. You never..."
"You," Hans snarled. "You vere Clemson's little toy? Parker said zat you vere an airhead! He told me zat you vere a nobody!"
Julien turned to Hans, and once again, his face morphed into coldness. "Parker lied."
Hans looked as if, had he not been clinging to his bullet wound and basically incapacitated, that he would have leapt up from his position on the floor and strangled Julien. Skipper was half inclined to believe he might do so anyway, regardless of the loss of blood and the bullet embedded in his flesh. Julien sensed this, but didn't seem to mind.
He pointed his gun at Hans again. "I am betting that you feel sorry for yourself, don't you? That you got punished for doing your job... A victim, right? You don't care about the lives that you had ruined when you did the things that you had done."
"Your sweet momma lady vas a killer, too!" Hans snarled. "She ruined ze lives, too!"
"Yes." Julien agreed. "But she also saved them. She did what she could be doing to save the most lives, not to hurt them. She cared about the lives of the innocent, of the people who needed the most help... What did you care about, Hans? Power?"
"No! Shut up!" Hans shouted.
"You knew that you were next in line, didn't you? Tell me, who was it that did the blowing up of the building in Shanghei while Manfredi and Johnson were still inside? It couldn't have been Skipper, since the mission files - which my mother had - said that his detonation remote never had access to that part of the building."
"Shut up!" Hans repeated, this time angrier.
"Who submitted a form to be Nigel's successor?" Julien's finger tightened around the trigger. "Who attempted to bribe his way to a promotion with all of the minister of open-faced sandwiches' business profits? Who personally went to commander McSlade to be telling him that he was above of everyone else in his class, and that he would take them all out to prove it?"
"You can't prove any of zis!" Hans denied.
Julien didn't relent. "And who, Hans, submitted a formal request to work only on solo-missions as a way to prove his worth, abandoning his partner that he apparently loved?"
"SHUT UP!" Hans screamed this time.
"Hans…" Skipper choked on his words. "You-"
"I did love you." Hans interrupted, so quiet that he almost could not be heard. "I loved you more zan anyzing in ze whole world, Skippar. But you vere dragging me down, and I knew zat my love for you… It vas going to be ze death of me."
Skipper stared down at him. Hans had been right all along. He should have gotten as far away from Skipper when he could. Look at where staying his partner had gotten him… Tortured for eleven years, broken beyond all compare, laying in a puddle of his own blood. Eleven years ago, they had been Hans and Skipper, the duo that could take on any mission. And yet, in the end, Skipper made it. Hans didn't.
Hans looked to Julien, and for a moment, there was almost empathy in his previously loathing gaze. "It vill be ze death of you, too, Julien."
"No," Julien shook his head. "Just you."
"Maybe." Hans murmured, with surprising lament. He looked to Skipper again, and for the first time, it seemed as if he began to regret everything. "Skippar, I…"
Skipper kneeled down beside him, and he wondered if Hans had ever really stopped loving him at all. Hans was pale as a sheet, breathing heavily. He'd lost too much blood; though Julien's bullet hadn't hit anything vital, he'd still shot with the intention to kill. Hans would be gone within seconds, and there was nothing Skipper could do. At that point, he wasn't sure that there was anything he would do, even if given the chance. Nothing between him and Hans could ever be patched up after all this. The only thing left to do was to move on, and Hans knew it. He'd accepted it, just as Skipper had. He was ready for death.
Hans smiled. "...Goodnight, Skippar."
Skipper reached out to touch his face, but fell short, and allowed his hand to drop back to his side. "Sweet dreams, Hans."
With that, Hans shut his eyes, and was finally at peace.
