Took me 21 chapters to realize that the borders I put between the sections in a chapter aren't showing up. Geez. Sorry about that people. Just fixed this chapter anyway...

Chapter 21 – The Course of True Love

"Can I help you?" Regan Kelly made no pretense of formally answering the phone; she could read the caller ID just fine. And she was not happy to hear from him. Ben Harris knew he had a lot of ground to make up to get things back on an even keel with her, just from the frosty tone in those four simple words.

"Hey, Regan." Even to his own ears he sounded like a whipped puppy; he was glad that Lucas Reynolds was back in the van where he couldn't overhear the conversation. Ben had let Lucas think he was storming off in anger in an attempt to salvage his pride, because what he really was about was that he wanted to apologize for the way he'd treated Regan.

"Did you need something, Agent Harris? Or am I supposed to just waste my time listening to you breathe now? I realize I'm not oh-so-important as you and all, but I do still have a job to do."

He supposed he deserved that. Probably worse. He'd been utterly vicious to her in the last few weeks, and the poor kid had no idea why. And if he was wise, he'd be sure she never did. But then, he'd been in short supply of wisdom lately. "Regan, don't," he said softly. "I'm calling to apologize. I had no right to speak to you the way I did before."

Regan huffed. But when she spoke, some of the hard edge was gone from her tone. "Ya think? I know I can be a little... impulsive and okay, maybe even a little irritating at times, but I honestly don't know what I ever did to make you hate me so much." He could hear the strain of suppressed emotion in the tightness of her voice.

"I don't hate you." Mostly true.

"You could have fooled me. I don't think you've said one civil word to me since you transferred to our unit. If it isn't hate, what is it? Loathing? Contempt? Disgust? All of the above?"

Ben stopped walking to lean up against a building. He felt weary to his bones, and not because she was pushing his buttons. The truth was she didn't have to do a damn thing to get under his skin. She'd been a permanent resident there for the last 6 years. He'd moved away from the old neighborhood in hopes that time would erase the memory of what had happened, but here he was, and it was as fresh as if it happened yesterday. He'd transferred into the DC field office while chasing after a promotion, but instead he ran headlong into a past he'd never been able to forget.

The day he'd walked into his new job and seen her there, every moment of self-loathing he'd ever known came roaring back at him until he'd barely been able to function. He could see in Ghostwalker's face (and how odd that no one knew the man's real name he thought) that there was some question as to his mental stability to perform his job. So with no other choice, he'd cloaked himself in hostility toward her, just to get through each day. It had become a pattern, and sort of a "thing" between them ever since, although until today she had brushed it off as though it was some sort of game they were playing, and the challenge was to see who would break down and back off first.

Apparently, she'd won. It ate away at him every time he was cruel to her, and part of what fueled his anger was his own inability to remain indifferent toward her. He'd let Lucas bait him today until his rage was a living breathing thing, capable of acting on its own, and act it had. He was shamed to think about the way he'd treated her earlier. In some distant corner of his mind, he wondered if this is what that Keller dude had to deal with on a daily basis. He kind of felt sorry for the guy if it was.

"Ben?" Regan sounded timid and very unsure of herself. Somehow, it seemed completely incongruous with the self-assured woman she'd become. He hadn't heard her call him by his given name in 6 long years. He felt like they'd suddenly been transported to the night when he'd packed everything he owned in his Honda Civic and drove off, never looking back. Well, that's the image he tried to paint for himself, anyway. But the truth was, he'd watched her in his rearview mirror as he pulled away, until he couldn't discern her form any more. She hadn't understood then why he'd left, or why he had refused to talk to her and say goodbye when she'd come over to see him off with the rest of his family. He sure as hell didn't want to explain it to her now. For all the years that had passed, he still felt as guilty as he had back then. Maybe even more so. But somehow they were going to have to put this behind them, because he couldn't keep ravaging her emotionally at every turn. Ben Harris had never been a mean-spirited bully, and he was damned sure he didn't want to become one, either. He'd better grow a backbone, quick. He was 35 years old, and ought to be able to deal with his emotions in a mature fashion by now. Continuing to berate Regan was starting to feel too much like plucking wings off a faerie.

Regan bristled. "I don't know why you bothered to call if you weren't going to say anything. I'm sorry that my very existence seems to bother you so much. I promise, I'll try to keep our interaction to a minimum."

Ben could tell she was crying by the quiver in her voice. He'd heard that tell-tale sign a couple times before when she was much younger. One time he'd bandaged her up when she cut her knee rollerblading, then took her to the ER for stitches when it wouldn't stop bleeding. Then there was the time he'd held her after a reckless driver had hit and killed her dog Barney. He didn't even realize he'd spoken the thought aloud until he heard her soft gasp.

"What made you mention Barney after all these years?" she asked quietly. She was utterly confused by his actions, but here was a glimmer of the Ben Harris that had always been her hero, and the secret object of her affection for as long as she could remember.

"I was just thinking how you sounded then just like you do now, with that little quiver in your voice. It was never difficult to know how you were feeling, you know."

"I guess. Daddy always said I wear my heart on my sleeve."

"Pretty much." He felt adrift, not sure what to say to her, or where to go from here. "Listen, Regan, I really am sorry for the way I've been acting. There are things about me you don't know; things I really don't want to dredge up and talk to you about. But I want you to know that all this anger I've been venting on you hasn't been about you at all, okay? I'm just angry at myself for a lot of things and it was easier to lash out at you than to be a man and deal with my own issues. I'm going to try to be better about it, and I hope maybe someday you can forgive me." He ended the call before she could respond. He was feeling far too vulnerable, and the last thing he needed was to rehash any more soft memories of their past.

Regan pulled the phone from her ear and just stared at it. She was pretty sure she would never understand men, especially Ben Harris. Here he'd gone and done such a sweet thing by apologizing, then he turned around and hung up on her. But right before he had, he said he hoped she could forgive him. She smiled. Her index finger caressed the picture of him that she had set as the wallpaper on her phone, as she murmured, "Silly man. I already have."

Evan stared at the results from the mass spectrometer in disbelief. He had been sure that this was another copy-cat killer the more he thought about it; especially after examining the nature of the wounds that had been inflicted on the young woman who had been murdered early that morning. They bore some similarities to the wounds he'd now associated with Vincent, but the lacerations were more uniform in size and less random, unlike a wild animal. Something about this looked too… controlled.

And yet the DNA evidence he had recovered from her body clearly belonged to Vincent Keller. There had been instances of him helping people where he'd left a DNA trail before, but the fact still remained that JT had told him Vincent was unconscious in their loft at the time of the murder, when clearly he had been out and about. After all, DNA didn't just materialize out of thin air.

He wished for the second time that day that he had a way to reach JT Forbes. If he could convince him to meet, and then grill him, he could make the man crack. He was just one nudge away from a meltdown half the time as it was. It shouldn't be too hard to push him to the edge and trip him up. Unfortunately, to this point their association was all on the other man's terms. Evan was between a rock and a hard place. He could only hide his findings from Joe for so long. If he didn't have answers by tomorrow morning, he was going to have to make some very tough decisions.

The only way he knew to reach JT now was through Cat, but he wasn't even sure if she'd regained consciousness yet. He looked at the clock on the wall for the first time in hours. It was already 10 pm! He couldn't believe he'd been holed up in the basement for the last 6 hours working on this case. Maybe the drugs had finally worked out of her system and she would be able to help him. Either that, or he could simply get the number from the address book on her phone…

Evan cleaned the autopsy table and gathered the lab results to take with him. He didn't want to leave any damning evidence lying around until he knew for sure what he was up against. He wasn't sure if Joe had left yet for the night, so he slipped out the side entrance on the lower level and walked around to where they parked behind the precinct. Joe's car was still in the lot – he was glad he'd taken the extra precaution to avoid running into him. He slipped into his car as quickly as possible and took off into the night.

Alex opened the service entrance door at exactly 10 o'clock. Vincent could have set his watch by it. That was one of the things he remembered about her from their previous life together. She was a stickler for punctuality. He'd never let her know he'd actually already been there for 10 minutes before she arrived. She couldn't stand the thought of people waiting on her.

"Hey," she said quietly as he slipped in through the opening. Once she pulled the door shut and locked it, she turned to hand him the items she had brought. "Lab coat and mask, as requested," she listed off, "and a stethoscope to complete the ensemble." She smiled, but there was a bittersweet quality to it, and the smile never quite reached her eyes, which connected with his gaze for only a brief moment before looking away again. "I've already done some preliminary work briefing the officer on duty that there would be a doctor remaining in the room all evening to supervise Catherine's treatment. I also made sure to be the one doing all her care this evening, so that it wouldn't raise suspicion that there would be a doctor tending to her when I hadn't bothered to myself."

"Wow, Alex – that's great," he complimented her. She blushed, and still wouldn't look him in the eye, but he could tell she accepted his praise as genuine. He followed her through the halls as they quietly navigated the lower level of the hospital to avoid detection.

"Has she regained consciousness?" he asked idly, to fill the awkward silence. He knew full well she hadn't.

"Not yet," Alex confirmed. "She is stable though, and I anticipate she'll come out of the effects of the overdose sometime in the next few hours. It's good she'll have someone familiar with her when she does. She might be agitated and disorient-" She stopped herself mid-sentence. "But of course, you know all this. I'm sorry. It's just… it's been so long."

"And… you're uncomfortable around me." She winced, confirming his suspicion. "Alex, look. I want you to know that I meant it when I said I did what I did to protect you and spare you and the family a lot of heartache. If I could have spared you all of this, I would have. I hope you know that."

"I know," she told him. "And I know there are a lot of things going on that you can't tell me about, and that's fine, really. I've accepted your explanation about why you never came back."

"But…?" he prompted. He could feel her unresolved questions lingering in the air between them.

"But," she repeated slowly, "I know there are things you are choosing to not tell me. Things that have nothing to do with why you pretended to be dead."

Vincent's heart did a weird flip. He was used to adrenaline surging for a fight, but this weird nervous fluttering could easily develop into flight mode if he wasn't careful. He drew a few deep, controlled breaths to get himself in order. "What kind of things?" he finally ventured to ask.

Alex stopped in the middle of the hall and turned to face him. "I know that there's more to this relationship with Catherine Chandler than you've told me. I was hoping you would have told me this afternoon when we talked about it, but apparently you don't want that much honesty between us. I get that we can't go back and recapture what we had, but it still bothers me that we've fallen so far to the point you feel you have to lie to me."

Vincent took a step closer and looked down into her face. "Alex, I didn't lie to you this afternoon. Everything I told you was true, alright? Yes, there is more to it, and I had fully intended to tell you, but then you kind of derailed the discussion onto something else… I don't even remember what now, but then the moment was lost. We had moved on to other topics and it just felt… awkward to go back and say, 'oh by the way, I'm also in love with her.' Can you understand that?"

At Alex's gasp, Vincent closed his eyes in self-loathing. He hadn't meant to just blurt it out like that. But sometimes she didn't know when to stop pushing. "Look, I'm sorry, that was brutal. I didn't mean for it to come out that way. But now you know. You wanted to know what my relationship with Catherine is, and now you do. Are you finally satisfied?"

"How long?" The question was barely a whisper, but there was nothing wrong with his hearing. He wasn't even going to pretend he didn't know what she was asking him.

"Catherine didn't even know I existed until 4 months ago," he told her. Knowing she'd just keep calculating and pondering the situation, he decided to forestall the 20 questions session and just lay it all out on the table for her. "Yes, I saved her from the hit men that tried to kill her 9 years ago, but she had fallen and hit her head. Her vision was blurry, and she never saw me, never knew who I was.

"I had been on the run for a little over a year, and I was depressed to the point of almost being suicidal. I had lost everything – my friends, my family, you…" He let the reality of that sink in with her for a moment. "Every day I wanted to reach out to you but I couldn't. I wouldn't let myself, because keeping you safe was the one last act of love I could give you. Anything else would have been total selfishness.

"Anyway, the night that I saved Catherine, everything started to change for me. Suddenly I realized that just because I couldn't be a doctor didn't mean I couldn't still help people. So that's what I started to do. I had to be careful; I had to do my thing under the cloak of darkness in order to keep from being recognized. But I started to find that my life could still have meaning. With that, I was able to start to move forward again, and even though I still missed you and the family, I started to heal; to have moments where I didn't feel overwhelmed with emotional pain. I was finally able to stop considering making myself a walking target a viable option. So I guess in a way, when I saved Catherine, she saved me, too. She became a symbol of hope for me – a kind of touchstone I could look back at and give myself permission to grieve and move on. I wasn't lying when I said I watched over her out of respect for her mom, but I also did it because it gave me comfort. To see that I had done something good and right with my life, you know?"

"But Vince, you've done a lot of good things in your life! You're one of the best, kindest people I ever knew. Why should you need to be reassured about that?"

"Because the Vincent Keller you knew and loved – he doesn't exist anymore. Not really. Alex, I've seen things… done things… that I'm ashamed of. Things I can never undo; that will torment me for the rest of my life. But in the middle of all that, Catherine has become this ray of light in the darkness for me. When she finally discovered me because of a case she was working on, she also managed to trip into the knowledge about my past that I'd been hiding from. We came together out of some pretty dark places for both of us. Yet somehow through it all, we managed to forge a relationship away from prying eyes and government assassins and the specter of her mother's death to bring joy into each other's lives. It was almost impossible to accept at first, because I didn't feel worthy, and certainly hadn't considered that it would even be possible for me to ever have something like that again in my life. But in spite of all the darkness in my life – and she knows about it all – she still loves me, and has stood by me when I didn't feel I deserved that kind of loyalty."

"So you couldn't turn to me for that comfort, for that loyalty, but you could take it from a stranger? Do you have any idea how much that hurts, Vince?" He could see the tears welling in her eyes.

"Alex, please don't do this to yourself. None of this is about you. And it wasn't like I said to myself, 'oh, let's ditch Alex and find a new girl to love.' I didn't go out looking to have Catherine find me or find out what I had been involved in. But between her mother's involvement and her own innate curiosity as a cop, she found out just enough on her own to put her in a great deal of danger and almost get herself killed for her trouble. So I had to keep her closer to keep her safe."

"So you started sleeping with her to keep her safe? Do you really expect me to believe that?"

"Alex, for God's sake will you listen to yourself? You're 32 years old and it's like you haven't grown up a day since I left for Afghanistan. It's all high drama and emotional manipulation with you. It was one thing at 21, but it's time to get over it. And for the record, Catherine and I are not sleeping together, or living together. I was referring to allowing her into my life as a good friend when I said keep her close. "

"Oh." She didn't know what else to say to that; he'd set her down pretty hard with his harsh words, but some part of her knew that he was right. She had been clinging so tightly to the past that it had stunted her emotionally. Now she knew that Vincent had moved on and had found someone new; perhaps she could too. She felt like a weight was being lifted off her shoulders. Silently, she turned and began leading him through the maze of corridors again.

He was relieved to realize how much thought she'd given to their route to the ICU, as she led him through a door that came out on the other side of the elevators from the glass-enclosed lobby. She knew he didn't want to risk any exposure to the men who were lying in wait outside the building. They would take the elevator up the one floor this time instead of using the main staircase in the lobby.

When they reached Catherine's room, the officer stood to greet them. Alex spoke up to make introductions. "Good evening Officer Bagnato. This is the doctor I was mentioning to you earlier." She caught Vincent's eye and he realized her dilemma immediately. Without missing a beat, he held out his hand to the officer.

"Vincent Zalanski," he lied smoothly. Looks like that fake identity was going to come in handy after all. "Nice to meet you." The aging officer nodded, impressed with the firm, confident grip. Nothing he hated more than a wimpy handshake. "I'll be staying the duration in Ms. Chandler's room, just so you know. This isn't my normal rotation, so I don' t have any other patients I'll need to be checking on. My first priority is to assure her safe recovery."

"We all appreciate it, young man," the officer responded. "Miss Chandler is a pretty special little lady. Everyone in the precinct thinks highly of her. I still can't believe something like this could happen not once, but twice to her in such a short period. Hardly seems right." Vincent had to fight the urge to agree wholeheartedly with the officer, being that he wasn't supposed to know Catherine. Instead he opted for a nod of his head, and the assurance that he would take good care of her.

As he turned to go into the room, Alex laid a hand on his sleeve. "I'll be in to check on her one last time before I leave for the night. You'll let me know if there's anything you need?"

Vincent inclined his head in a professional manner. No one had to know that they were all in cahoots up to their eyeballs on this. "That would be great," he answered. "After I look at her chart and see what's in the room I'll be sure to let you know." Responding in kind, Alex nodded her head once, then turned and left. Vincent closed the door behind him and turned out the lights in Catherine's room. After a few seconds his eyes adjusted, and he was able to cross to the window and close the shades. Once that privacy barrier had been established, he turned on the light in her private bathroom to serve as a nightlight. He didn't want her waking to harsh lights and sounds.

He walked to her bedside, and skimmed the backs of his fingers against her cheek. Leaning down, he placed a sweet kiss on her lips, lingering briefly for the comfort it brought him. Sliding his lips over her cheek he whispered, "I'm here Catherine. I'm going to take good care of you, and you're going to come back to me. My life is meaningless without you." He pulled a chair to her bedside and sank into it. It had been a long, stressful day, and he was glad it was finally coming to an end. Laying his head on the mattress next to her leg, he promptly fell asleep.