A/N: FYI, I do have a reference in here to Jay being considered abusive and I stand by it. If you think about the way he was with Will and Hailey when he father died, that was straight up physical and emotional abuse to both of them. He isn't horrible but he has been shown to take out his anger or hurt on other people more than once.
FNG - Jay, Adam, Mouse
Ruzek finished up the last of his report and noticed Halstead was still hanging around, even though everyone else had left to go to Molly's. They had invited him of course but he wasn't sure he wanted to go. He kind of wanted to go home and have his mom rub his scalp and make him chicken noodle soup. He almost thought about calling her but he didn't. He was still a grown ass man after all and he needed to act like one and not crumble just because he had his first shooting or as Halstead referred to it, a confirmed kill. All gave him a weird look when he called it that but he wasn't sure why.
It was an odd thought for him. He had seen other members kill and he had shot at people but this was the first time he had actually ended a life. He wondered if he should feel proud or sad but felt neither, just numb really.
He stood and slipped the report onto O's desk for him to look over before it went to Voight. He didn't think he was going to get into any trouble. Everyone said it was a good shoot, but he still wanted his partner's eyes on it. He turned and came face to face with Halstead. He jumped, having not heard him approach. You may not notice Alvin in a room but Halstead moved like a fucking cat. He didn't even make noise walking down stairs. It was creepy. The other man smiled at his discomfort and backed up a step. Adam ran his hand through his hair, hoping to gain back his composure.
"You already do your piss test?" he asked, chewing gum. Jay liked to chew gum, it was a weirdly childish thing. He didn't smack it though, like a kid so it didn't bother anyone but Erin.
"Yeah, yeah man, I did it before I got back here," he said, wondering how Jay knew about it. Later he would realized how fucking stupid of a thought that was. The guy seemed to kill someone every other week.
"Cool, let's go get a drink then," he grabbed his coat and shoved Ruzek towards the door.
"I'm not really in the mood for Molly's," he started, hoping to get out of it. Jay wasn't mean but he also wasn't the most outgoing person. He didn't usually offer to hang out after work so he felt bad rebuffing him.
"Who said we were going to Molly's. I was thinking someplace a little more private."
"That sounds ominous."
"Just get your shit and come on," he said as he headed out. He followed Jay to his car and didn't say anything as Jay turned south onto Halsted street, away from Molly's, his place, and Jay's.
"Where are we going?" He finally asked after 4 lights.
"There is a Canaryville Balcony waiting for us," he said offhandedly. Adam furrowed his brow not understanding. "Seriously, I know you spent most of time on the North Shore but really?" Jay answered. Adam looked away. He liked to cultivate an air that he was some tough guy from the southside that grew up rough and ready but he wasn't. Even after his parent's divorce, his Dad was always around and his mother remarried a few times before landing on an orthodontist and moved out of Canaryville when he was fourteen. He may like to pretend but Halstead was the real deal.
"Why aren't you taking 90, then?" He asked as they stopped at another light.
"I have a fondness for this road," Jay answered and Adam snorted. "You know my great grandfather changed his name from McGranaghan to Halstead, after the street, to sound more English so he could get a job in the stockyards. Of course he was an illiterate bastard and spelled it wrong." Somehow that didn't surprise Adam in the least even though it was a random piece of information to offer. Jay could be such a weird dude sometimes. He looked like he would be a totally basic bro but then he would turn around and have some weirdly specific piece of knowledge about Ashkenazi Jewish faith and a bizarre fondness for southern soul food. Of course that whole thing made a lot more sense after he met Mouse and found out how long he had been stationed in Georgia.
They pulled onto a ratty looking street. There were shitty cars and broken shutters but there was also some love still there. Some homes were taken care of and some looked to be boarding on crack houses. He parked in front of one of the slightly better manicured homes, it was white with green trim and a bleached out Irish flap drooping from a pole. Though there were beer bottles with cigarettes in them lined up on the front stoop. It was dark inside and Ruzek checked his gun because O had taught him to always check it.
Jay got out and grabbed a bottle of something and stuffed it into the interior pocket of his jacket and headed towards the front door. Adam wondered where they were and watched his fellow officer side step the door and go to the railing to hop up, grab the edge of the gutter and hoist himself onto the roof. He then turned to Adam and called him over.
He walked over and checked inside. There was a light on, but he didn't hear anything. "What are we doing here?" He asked, looking around.
"Just get your ass over here." Adam climbed onto the half wall and Jay held his hand out to help him up. He was glad. Jay sometimes forgot not everyone was in as good of shape as he was. Adam turned around and felt a little dizzy because Halstead also tended to forget that not everyone liked being way up on rooftops. He followed him though, until he settled down above a dormer that gave them a block from sliding down. The shingles were still warm from the setting sun and felt nice against the slight chill.
Jay settled down, taking out a paper bag with a 5th of something in it and smiled as Adam looked around at the rather unremarkable neighborhood. "See, a Canaryville balcony," he explained as he crumbled the bag and stuffed it in his pocket before handing Adam one of the two red Solo cups that had been sitting on the top of the bottle. He then poured them each a drink and topped his off with blue gatorade, which he waved off with a crinkling of his nose. "What did you not realize I am basically southside, white trash?" Adam felt his lips pull up. He wasn't going to say it but yeah, every now and again he would have thought that Jay was raised in a trailer park.
"Do we need to worry about the owner of this house coming up here and shooting us?" He tried to ask another why where they were and why they were there.
"No, he doesn't own a gun," Jay leaned back and looked up at the sky. It was clear but there was too much light pollution to really see the stars.
"Ok," Adam drew the words out but took a sip of what turned out to be Wild Turkey. He tried to sit still and be quiet but he only lasted about two minutes. "So where are we and what are we doing here?"
"We're at my parent's house, or my dad's house now, I should say." He kicked his leg over and hit the dormer, "that is the room I grew up in. Before my grandparents died, they owned that green house at the end of the street and my other set lived two streets over in a brown and white house. I was born in that hospital over there and so were my parents and their parents. I went to school at St. Thomas the Apostle Catholic School on the other side of the park, and most of my family is buried in the church's cemetery. Everybody knew everybody, every mother would feed you or pray for you and every father would smack you for misbehaving. So basically Canaryville." He had his right arm behind his head and his left holding his cup against his belt buckle. He looked relaxed but Adam, over the last few weeks, had learned not to trust the appearance of languidness in his fellow cop.
Ruzek was a little jealous. His childhood was much more volatile between the divorces and remarriages, step siblings that came and went, and moving constantly he didn't have this type of a sense of home and community. He had gone to three different highschools in four years and had two different step fathers in that time span too. He couldn't imagine the permanency of this type of upbringing. It sounded like heaven. Halstead must have had a really good life here.
"Oh, and your pops isn't going to be angry if he finds us on his roof at 8 o'clock at night?"
Jay chuckled slightly, "who knows and who gives a fuck but he isn't even home. Every Friday night, he goes down the road and has dinner at Mrs Gutierrez's house, then goes to a bar and plays cards at the local mobster's game. One of his buddies will help him home and he'll pass out on the couch till midday tomorrow." This was a surprising amount of personal information for the perpetually tight lipped man.
Ruzek, when he had first joined the unit, had assumed he and Halstead would end up as BFFs. I mean, looking at him he looked just like any other basic bro and Adam was self actualized enough to realize he was one as well. But after spending all of 15 minutes around Jay, he realized that there was a creepy intensity in him that was anything but basic and could be incredibly off putting. He hadn't been able to put his finger on it yet but every once and a while it was like he turned into a greyhound that someone released a rabbit in front of. It was weird and very different from Alvin's calmness, Voights intimidation, Lindsey's scrappiness, or Antonio's steadiness.
"So guessing you aren't going to stop in and say hello," Adam tried to joke, still slightly confused about why he was here.
"Fuck no. We see each other exactly once a year, on the anniversary of my mother's death. We meet at the cemetery, we stand there, don't say shit to each other, then he comes home and gets drunk and I go somewhere else and do the same. Isn't that how most father son relationships end up?" he said and Adam furrowed his brow.
"No, man, no it is not," he said, unsure if Jay was being serious. Jay snorted at him to show it was a joke, or trying to cover it up and make it seem like it was a joke. Either way, Ruzek let it slide. "So why are we sitting on the roof of your estranged father's house?"
"I thought you could some decompression," Jay answered, sipping his drink without even sitting up completely.
"I told you, man, I'm fine. Everyone is making such a big deal out of this and it really isn't anything." Adam defended remembering not to be too pissy about his response after the way Halstead had reacted the last time.
"You keep telling yourself that enough and maybe you will believe it for the next day, maybe week or two but not for much longer than that." Jay said philosophically.
"Have you ever," he trailed off.
"Shot someone?" Jay finished his thought then barked a cynical laugh at him like it was funny. Years later, after he got to know Jay better he would realize how dumb of a question it was. "Yeah, one or two," he replied with a smile. Adam snorted because he wasn't sure what else to do. "Which is why I know, you aren't fine or you won't be as soon as the numbness and macho desire to not let it bother you wears off." Ruzek looked away.
"Why do you think this was my first?" He said out of bravado, trying to save face in front of someone he respected. He didn't want to be thought of as the weak one on the team that couldn't handle a good shoot.
"Spent a lot of time ganking people at NIU?" Jay asked with a smirk. OK, his comment was kind of dumb. He deflated slightly. "Look, I don't know exactly how you feel because my first confirmed kill was a much different circumstance but I do know that it will sneak up on you, whether you want it to or not so don't waste the opportunity to take some time and use the counselor until you get used to it."
"Did you, with your first one?"
Jay sighed. "Like I said, my first one was different. See I joined the Army when I was 18 years old, a month after I graduated from highschool."
"You didn't want to go to college?"
"I got recruited by Notre Dame but I didn't go," Jay said and Adam was impressed. That was a really good school and Jay didn't seem that smart.
"You were recruited, like scouted?" Jay nodded. "What sport?"
"What sport do you think I played?" Jay asked with a grin. Adam thought about it for a second and answered. Jay fast but he wasn't that big. He probably didn't play football unless he was a kicker or something. But what other sports would they recruit someone for?
"Baseball, shortstop, or football as a quarterback or running back." He said, fairley certain at least one of his guesses was right.
"Nope, I played soccer. I was a striker or center midfielder." Well that would explain the freakish speed and endurance that he was just starting to realize. He didn't know what those positions were nor did he really care that much.
"Hmm," Adam said, actually able to see it. Soccer was barely considered a sport at most of the schools he had gone to. Football was king and basketball was queen.
"Go ahead and make your snide comments about soccer being a girl's sport," Jay said.
"No, though, like I said, I could see baseball,but soccer is just boring. You don't seem like a boring dude." Adam said, realizing that he was getting a little tipsy.
"Baseball is fun to watch and boring to play, where soccer is fun to play and boring to watch," he explained and Adam nodded, not really having an opinion. He had played football in high school so he hadn't needed to take PE. He hadn't played soccer since junior high maybe.
"So why didn't you go to Notre Dame? Why did you join the Army instead?"
"I wasn't really cut out for academia plus I got in a huge fight with my dad and just wanted out of here. Fighting for my country seemed like a good idea." He said, sipping his drink. Adam couldn't really understand why he would want out of such a homey place or why he would give up a ride to play division 1 soccer at such a good school. He had barely made it into NIU and only after two semesters of community college. A school like Notre Dame was kind of a ticket to the North Shore.
"Ok, but what does that have to do with anything?" Adam asked, getting a little antsy at Halstead's meandering conversation.
"Everything. Six weeks after I turned 18, I was on a bus to Fort Sill for basic training. I spent the next year being taught how to kill," he said frankly. "Becoming a finely tuned and trained weapon of war for Uncle Sam. Not just the mechanics of it like squeeze the trigger, don't pull, fire between breaths and heartbeats if you can, and don't forget to follow through, what angle and how much force it takes to cause a cervical dislocation on someone, but the psychological side of it. How to dehumanize your enemy. They weren't people, they were racist names and stereotypes. They weren't human to us, they were terrorists, vermin that needed to be exterminated. A thought process that can be problematic for a police officer since you may have to help one day then kill the next," he gave a small grin Adam grinned back because that was part of how he was rationalizing his kill. The guy was a criminal, an animal.
"After basic I went through Airborne school because I had watched Band of Brothers in middle school and wanted to be a paratrooper."
"You jumped out of airplanes?"
"Yes, it's sooo fun. So are fast roping, SPIE drops, and skid jumps." Halstead's eyes, for once, twinkled. When they weren't intense, his eyes could be kind of flat.
"What are those?"
"It's kind of like a cross between repelling and a fireman's pole out of a bird or jumping out of one for a twenty foot free fall into the water. They are awesome, better than a rollercoaster."
"You and I clearly have very different views on what is fun,". Adam said with a smile. The entire length of their acquaintance, he would never actually understand Halstead's adrenaline seeking addiction. Probably because his central nervous system would never be burned out and rewired to seek higher and higher levels of stimulation in an attempt to feel something.
"Anyway, my Sarge told me to try for RIP and my buddy wanted to so I did.
"What is RIP?"
"Ranger Indoctrination Program," Halstead supplied.
"So like Ranger School?"
He snorted, "actually I didn't go through Ranger School until later but RIP is how, as an enlisted, you are assigned to the 75th and Ranger School is optional. But they teach you mental exercises to deal with the stresses of combat and killing. Actually they break you in every way imaginable then build you back up as an elite soldier." Adam felt his eyes go wide. He wasn't surprised that Halstead was military but Rangers were like, really cool.
"What was it like, Ranger training, I mean?" He asked, feeling like a little brother wanting to know something.
"It was tough. The first 96 hours of it are fucking hell so is Cole Mountain, and Eglin. They bring you in, you drop your shit off in the barracks then they run you, 12 miles with no rest. Then Chow, then class, then run, then class, then chow, then the same thing over and over again. The first person to fall asleep is out. The last one up the hill is out. The first one to give up is out. First and only time in my life I ran till I puked. It is also where I learned I will get violently seasick if I can't see out of the side of the boat" Jay chuckled.
"They don't let you sleep those first 4 days and sleep deprivation is way more brutal than most people realize. There is a reason cults and interrogators use it. By the last run, my legs were lead, I couldn't feel my hands, I thought my head was floating off my body, I was seeing balloons everywhere, and was convinced they were everyone else's heads that had floated off of their bodies. By the end you are so mentally and physically exhausted you want to cry. Some people did. Grown ass men and soldiers curled up on the ground begging for it to stop.
"During classes they give you these things, codes, you have to remember, like phrases or lists of numbers, letters, or colors and you have to recite them later. First few times it isn't bad but lack of sleep affects your ability to move short term memory into long term memory so it gets harder and harder to remember things and they make them more and more random. And the first person that couldn't remember was out. I couldn't tell you what I had for breakfast this morning but somehow I still remember 18-WW-24-RT-109, which was the last code I had to remember."
"That is wild, man."
"Not really, never underestimate the stress that mental and physical exhaustion will have on you. It can cause alternating apathy and desperation and severely impair your ability to think critically. But I could shoot a 40/40 so after SOCM, they sent me and my buddy, who could do it too, to Sniper School."
"You were a sniper, that is cool. Did you hang out in bell towers and shoot generals and shit?"
"That isn't what being a sniper is like. I actually kind of hate even using that word."
"Why?"
"Because movies have created this weird cultural understanding of how snipers work that is completely false. Like first off, we are not heartless assassins, or all crazy religious nuts from the south that pray before we shoot. We don't sleep with or have weird fetishes with our guns. In fact you don't even have a specific gun assigned to you. You pick one from the armory based on the mission parameters. Sometimes you use an M24 and sometimes you use an M82, just depends on the conditions. Most of your time is actually spent as forward reconnaissance not killing people. We certainly don't act alone because you always have a spotter with you, because you can't actually do your job without your spotter. And if you were like some psychopath you wouldn't have made it through the psych evals to get in." Ruzek nodded his head still not really understanding what the big deal was but whatever he liked to be addressed as Detective and apparently didn't like to be called a sniper.
"You also don't sit there and revel in your kill. You can't actually even tell if you killed them. It is the spotter's job to look for the red mist to show a confirmed hit, then wait for them to go down to confirm the kill."
"Red mist?" Adam asked, wondering if that was actually what he thought it was and if it was, gross.
"Sniper rifles are the absolute pinnacle of firearms. They are not a tool of home defense, for swinging as a dick replacement, or on the streets. They are designed for a single purpose, to be used by a highly trained precision shooter to neutralize a target. It is a weapon of war just as the sniper himself is a pure weapon of terror. An M24, the standard and most commonly used S-Rifle fires a .338 Lampua round at 790 meters per second, which is over twice the speed of sound and well over twice what your hand gun can do. By the time you hear the ping of the firing or the crack from the bullet breaking the sound barrier, you are already dead. The M82 50 caliber rifle, while not my favorite because of the unwieldiness of it and the weight, can fire a round at nearly 900 m/s on a good day. When either of those two guns are employed and a target is hit, both rounds will enter the body with over 60,000 psi of force and speeds faster than many jets can fly. When they do so, it aerosolizes the blood, causing a mist to be ejected rather than a splatter. That mist is what the spotter looks for." Jay explained and Adam felt a little sick.
"But sniper school teaches you to literally disregard the person you are shooting at and consider them only as a target. Your entire concentration is the ⅛ of an inch by ⅛ of an inch where the crosshairs are and keeping that trained on one of your triangles. You physically can't see more than 6" circle of them, so they stop being people and are just a blob of color to target. The world around you doesn't exist, shit, you sometimes start to feel like the rest of your body doesn't even exist. One shot, one kill is your only goal. It is your reason for existence. It's your fucking pride," he explained and Adam felt a cold at the statement for some reason.
"Triangles?"
Halstead touched three points on his chest that would encompass the heart and lungs; three points on his neck that would cover the windpipe, jugular, and cervical spine' and finally three points on his face, behind which was the frontal lobe. "The first one is for surety and to be taken for distance or moving targets. The second one is for if a head shot is possible and you need to make sure they can't retaliate before death. It doesn't kill instantly but if your aim is right, you cut off the brain's ability to send signals to the body. The final one is an insta-kill. They are dead before they even hit the ground. It's the hardest target though, the smallest, the easiest for them to move, duck, be covered, anything. Only take that target if you need to stop them from firing a gun on a civi or set off a bomb." Halstead explained in an almost rote and memorized way.
Over the years, he would notice that Halstead tended to take neck shots a lot but only took head shots if there was a very strong reason, even though the dude's aim was crazy. Adam would try too, to learn from him and Al how to do it but he was shit at it and Halstead was shit at explaining how he did.
"Then level C SERE training."
"What's that?" Adam asked, now wondering what other weird shit he was going to find out about this guy.
"Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape training or where they put all the people that failed the psych eval for sniper school, because they were total sociopaths and turn them into instructors." Jay's smile as he said that was a little stiff and forced. His eyes were no longer just gazing upwards but were hard and staring at some fixed point. He took a breath and relaxed though and Adam didn't push the point, he could just google it when he got home. "But basically it is where they teach you what to do if you are separated from your unit. How to survive, which you learn in RIP. How to evade capture. If you are captured, how to escape. And how to handle some less than pleasant interrogation techniques."
"You mean like torture? What was that like, what did they do?" Ruzek kind of felt like he was talking to a movie character or something.
"Level C shit is classified but I will put it this way, you waive your constitutional rights before going and you learn to live by Hanoi Hilton rules. But the worst is when they bring in the folks from PSYOPs or the Company. They can convince you that you aren't who you think you are, you aren't where you think you are, and make you tell them almost anything without ever touching you."
"That would be a pretty useful skill for interrogating suspects."
"None of it would be even remotely legal and I don't mean like skirting the rules the way Voight does, I mean like against the Geneva Convention shit."
"When I was over there, I hooked up with this chick that was attached to our unit. She was Company and had the most beautiful eyes and was probably the smartest person I had ever met in my life. I still have no idea why she picked me out of the field of dudes but I wasn't going to complain about it, even though thinking back on it she was like 37 and I was 20 so it was actually a little weird. Anyway she once told me that all the psych evals you take look for specific traits that make you more successful at certain tasks. So for the Rangers they look for resilience, above average intelligence, and the ability to compartmentalize, and a strong sense of self. Though Rangers are unit and battalion based, it's still special forces so a lot of the how to accomplish something is left to the individual. For snipers they want a high degree of self reliance, closer to an introvert than an extrovert, and the ability to compartmentalize to the point of nearly being dissociative." Adam looked at him and allowed his confusion to show.
"Compartmentalizing is a coping mechanism where you separate your emotions from your actions to prevent yourself from suffering mental stress. It's basically how you can do bad shit and not hate yourself for it. Kind of what you are doing now. Making sure to only think about it in logical terms, 'you had to shoot, you would do it again,'' Jay mimicked Ruzek's voice. "I on the other hand have the ideal long gunner trait of being able to do it to the point where, if I were a civilian, it might be considered a mental illness," he explained as he sipped his drink. Adam followed suit and Jay reached over and handed him the bottle so he could refill his cup.
"Anyway, nearly a year of school and I was finally deployed for a short turnaround to act as a spotter for a more experienced shooter. And anyone that tells you that the spotter has the easier job is lying or has never actually been deployed. But it was a chance to do some missions where I didn't need to be in charge, because the shooter is always in charge, even if the spotter is higher ranked or more experienced, in theory anyway. My normal spotter and I didn't really stick to that. But this shooter, he was this really nice and well trained brother named Jordan," Jay chuckled, "and he was from the south and he was religious and he did pray before he fired but that isn't important," Jay rushed through that last part before slowing down with a slight grin on his face. "He used to make me wear so much eye black and camouflage paint because he swore I was so pale I would only be useful in winter.
"Another often misrepresented fact, at least when it comes to the Rangers, is that snipers do spend the majority of their time with the rest of the unit and are assault trained and often act in that capacity unless our other skills are needed. In the Rangers, everyone is part of a unit, everyone is assault trained, and then you have your specialty. So we are with the assault team and we are clearing out this area and there is some isolated fire but nothing heavy. I turn to sweep to my left and there is this guy with a gun leveled at me. I fire twice, pop pop, two in the chest and he goes down. Jordan comes in and tells me we have the all clear and I just stand there and stare at this dude. He was my enemy, he was a target, he was a terrorist, he had a gun pointed at me, but he was also just a dude. Mid thirties; short, dark hair with grey at the temples; thick beard; hawkish nose; a scar under right eye; short and stocky. He had a red vest and a white shirt." Jay shrugged. "I watched him writhe in pain and moan. You could hear that sucking sound that I had hit one of his lungs. He was trying to pray but he couldn't breathe deep enough to form words. Then he did that agonal breathing gasp you do before you die. Then he died. I still remember, every fucking detail, the wind howling, the weight of my weapon, I had an itch on my left thigh, the smell when he shit his pants, all of it."
"What did you do?" Adam asked, a little disturbed by the rather clinical way Jay explained the whole thing. But one day he hoped he could be that detached, even if Jay had said it bordered on a mental illness. It seemed easier than actually feeling what he was feeling. But after something like that Jay had probably had tons of therapy and shit so he could deal. Of course once he had gotten to know Jay, he would realize how laughable that thought was. Halstead was the king of repression and self reliance.
"I went back to base and had some chow, then hit my bunk," he said and Adam decided that he needed to savagely push down the guilt that was slowly bubbling up in him as the alcohol had begun to lower his defenses. "Then in the middle of the night I got up and went to the latrine and puked because I was 19 fucking years old, had never been further away from home than Georgia, and was now in Afghanistan and had just killed someone. It didn't matter that he may have at one point considered knowing someone that thought about attacking my country or that he would have killed me. He was someone's son, husband, brother, whatever. I destroyed their lives in a way that could never be fixed because you can fix a lot of shit but you can't fix dead," Jay explained and Adam felt his shoulders relax a bit. "My buddy figured I might want some company so he stayed with me while I had a little mini existential crisis over the Catholic teachings that had been drummed into my head my whole life and the job I had signed on to do. But I managed to pull my shit together by revaley. It was what was expected of me, it was part of the Ranger Creed, always be ready and you can't be ready if you can't kill."
"That's messed up man," he didn't know what else to say. He was 24 years old and had the support of everyone around him, his partner, his squad, the counselors, and Wendy, if he let her in, not thousands of miles away from his home and family with strangers.
Jay just shrugged at him and poured him another drink. He slowly realized that his companion was still nursing the same drink he started with while he was on his 5th, maybe 6th. He wasn't sure how he was getting off this roof. "I guess but no different than any other soldier had to deal with. But it kind of makes my point. I spent a year learning how to do it, between all the schools and training I had had probably 90-120 hours of training specifically with how to deal with the mental stress of killing and combat and I had a nearly perfect psychological profile for it determined through a literal battery of tests. Compare that to the one, 2 hour, optional, class on it at the Police Academy and the shitty Myers Brigg style test they give you. Taking all of that into account, it still fucked me up and I still think about that dude 8 years later, which is why I know you are going to have a break down over this whether you want to or not."
"Maybe I am tougher than you," Ruzek said, feeling his resolve to be tough start to evaporate. Jay was the first person not to come at him with pity or with sympathy. He came at him with straight up facts and somehow it was harder to maintain his bravery with that or it was the Wild Turkey.
"Kid, trust me, nobody is that tough," he turned around and finally looked Adam in the face instead of staring up at the sky and while he expected to see caring, he saw detachment. He wondered if Antonio or Al had put Jay up to this little conversation because they thought he might listen to him. It was kind of nice that they cared that much but it also made him a little sad that Jay cared so little. But After years of dealing with Halstead, he would start to recognize that look as Jay's way of coping with unpleasant shit but now, for some reason, it made him feel like he couldn't keep the facade up anymore. Like it was ok to admit he wasn't OK and that it was OK to not be OK.
"It was a good shoot," he mumbled as he felt tears start to roll from his eyes.
"Doesn't matter, good, bad, or indifferent you killed somebody and you have to carry that shit with you for the rest of your life. The question is, are you gonna realize that what you think is the right way to deal with it and being strong is actually the absolute worst thing you can do?"
"What is the right way then?" Ruzek asked, for some reason really hoping Halstead had the answer. That somehow he knew how to get rid of the awful feelings he had been trying to shove down since he had found out the guy died, scratch that, he had killed the guy.
"You can always try drugs and alcohol. I hear that works out great for people," he said in a deadpan voice while raising his party cup, acknowledging the hypocrisy of bringing him up here and getting him drunk.
"So I am supposed to spill to you and hug it out?" Adam asked sarcastically, trying to hide how choked up his voice sounded.
"Fuck no, I am the absolute last person you should be doing that with. I would tell you to nut up and quit acting like a fucking pussy and that is what the shrinks are for." Ruzek took it as a joke but would later realize that it wasn't far from the truth. For all that Jay was a solid dude, he could be kind of intolerant of people that weren't as tough or disciplined as he was. It would usually be him, Burgess, and Atwatter that would catch flak from him for not being fast enough to keep up with him on foot chases, but like seriously, the dude was like freakishly fast. Or actually showing or acknowledging fear in super terrifying situations or needing sleep.
"You talk to shrinks and counselors?" Ruzek snuffled.
"Every damn time. Pretty sure they just have pre filled forms for me," he joked. "But no, I don't. Not for real anyway. I say what I am supposed to say. They do the same. We are both just going through the motions and the world keeps turning. But the difference between us is that you have a chance to maybe be able to sleep like a baby at night and I don't think I have had a good night's sleep in 8 years." That was fucked up. And years later, he would realize that this was the one of the only times Jay ever showed any form of vulnerability to him or any of their team for that matter, unless he was having sex with them. And even both of them complained about him being emotionally unavailable and unable to show vulnerability. Jay was a cool dude but underneath that coolness, he was kind of fucked up and maybe Adam didn't actually want to be like that afterall.
Adam felt the tears speed up and was helpless to stop them. He didn't want to carry this weight. He wanted it to go back to it being cops and robbers where everyone got back up at the end. He wanted to go back to Monday when everything was exciting and he still felt like a teenager not like he did now. Not like the guy sitting next to him that looked young except for every once in a while where his eyes didn't look so much older, as already dead.
"How many?" He asked, not sure why, maybe just to keep Jay talking to cover up the sound of his tears. Or maybe it was the Greek tragedy effect of wanting to hear he wasn't the worst.
"One hundred and sixteen, one hundred and sixteen confirmed kills." There was no pride in his voice. He was simply stating a fact like that he as 5'11" or that he was right handed.
"Does it get easier?"
"It shouldn't ever be easy but the mechanics of it get easier. You get more skilled, you hesitate less, you learn your best tasks. The rest of it, well, you live with it or you don't. It's that simple," he said and took another sip of his drink and continued to stare at the sky. "Believe it or not, I sometimes miss Afghanistan. Everyone thinks it is a hot, sandy desert like Iraq but it isn't. The elevation makes it really windy and it's dry and dusty but parts of it, like The Valley, are really pretty and you can see so many stars, at least when you are at the COP or out of the wire. I'm a city kid, I had rarely seen stars like that before. I used to like to sit outside, especially in the summer because when we had to black out the barracks, they were stifling, and I would just stare at them. My buddy, Mouse, he would sit out there with me and he knew all the constellations and how sailors used to use the stars to navigate and shit. And he would talk about it because he is one of those people that never shuts up. And I would nod every few minutes like I was paying attention even though I wasn't listening to a word he said, and just watch the lights twinkle and relax." Jay said out of nowhere and Adam realized that Jay seemed to understand that his job now was just to keep talking and let Adam know he wasn't alone.
A few hours later, Adam was barely aware of Jay helping him off the roof and driving him to his Dad's house. He helped him stagger in and to a bed with his father questioning Jay the entire time. All he remembered Jay saying in return was, "it's been a hell of a week." HIs father than walked in to make sure he was OK and he maybe spilled his guts to the man about the shooting and actually feeling really horrible that he had had to do it and that he had thought he would be someone that might never actually kill. And that he was afraid to come across like a pansy to everyone else because it did bother him. His dad sat beside him and held him as he cried and even made him breakfast the next day.
Mouse answered the knock at his door at 1 am because it really wasn't as odd as you would think for Jay to show up there in the middle of the night. At least this time he had called first and he wasn't flying high or coming down from an adrenaline rush. Jay walked in, immediately shrugging off his coat and sinking onto the floor. Mouse didn't really have furniture other than his computer stuff and his bed. Halstead then handed him a bottle of whiskey.
"You and your Wild Turkey, you would have thought you would have learned by now that there are far finer liquors on the market." Mouse retrieved two glasses and poured them each some.
"Hey, it is cheap and it gets you drunk. What more do I need?"
"Something that doesn't taste like diesel fuel and brown," he commented, inhaling to try and offset the burn. This shit really was nasty. But Halstead was kind of low class.
"Hey, it isn't the worst thing I have ever had to drink," he countered as he flopped onto his back and propped his feet up on the wall. Or his traditional, I am not going anywhere, anytime soon, pose. Mouse was cool with it. It wasn't like this was the first or last time one of them had shown up at the other's place in the middle of the night because they didn't want to be alone.
"You really should consider raising the bar on how you judge things slightly above not being the worst."
"Did it ever occur to you that my low bar is why we are still friends?"
"Actually I am kind of insulted I am not the worst. I may need to try harder but I suppose it is tough to beat Will in a race to the bottom," Mouse joked, only half serious. Jay cocked his head sideways in acknowledgment that his brother was kind of the worst. Though he knew Jay didn't mean it. He had a very weird love hate thing with his big brother that was kind of hard to watch. Jay loved him but hated how Will treated him but would always forgive him because he loved him so much. And Will would always fuck him over because he knew that Jay would always forgive him. But to be fair, though he hated to be, Will forgave a lot of shit with Jay too, like the broken bones, explosive temper, and the passive aggressive guilt tripping he did because Will hadn't come home when their mother was sick. While Will was far more psychologically abusive to people by gaslighting them and being more than a little narcissistic, Jay could be straight up physically and verbally abusive sometimes. It was kind of sad and a window into the way the Halstead family dynamic worked.
"I am a simple man, my friend, with simple tastes" Jay countered, downing his drink and holding out his cup for more. Mouse poured him another two shots.
"I do not argue the fact you are a simpleton." Jay just snorted at him. "So what has your knickers in such a twist that you are drinking with the sole aim of getting drunk? And what are you doing here instead of with that bartender, Maggie McStupidIrishName or whatever?"
"Callahan," Jay filled in.
"I repeat, McStupidIrishName or did she dump you already?"
"No, she hasn't dumped yet and she wasn't working tonight." Jay held his glass up to be refilled.
"Have you slept with her?" Mouse asked with a smile. Jay was so predictable. He lived his entire life stuck in the middle of a triangle between what society said he should want, what he actually wanted, and what he thought he deserved. So he would go after and date an Irish bartender, in a blue collar Irish Pub, but because that wasn't actually what he wanted, he would get bored. Then he would start to get down on himself for not being happy about her and decide he didn't deserve her and either break up with her or be so awful and distant with her that she would dump him.
"We went back to her place last week and played Scrabble."
"So you fucked her. I give you another month, tops before you lose interest."
"I'm not you, I am capable of having monogamous relationships." Jay defended with little heat, telling him that Jay didn't really care that much about this woman. She was just there to scratch an itch but Halstead wasn't the one night stand sort. So what should be a one night stand always became a failed relationship.
"No, you are a serial monogamist, whose relationships tend to last all of three weeks because you are also an intimacy phobic asshole."
"True enough. But can't I just come over and unwind after doing my good deed for the day?" Ah, the classic Halstead deflection. Mouse propped his feet up on his desk because he was going to be here a while. Jay wanted to talk, needed to talk about something, but wasn't lubricated enough to do so just yet because the man was made of grit, denial, and repression, with a dash of sarcasm. Mouse sometimes felt sorry for him because he spent so much time denying and rationalizing away how he felt that he spent half his life miserable instead of just being able to say, hey I'm sad today and need a hug.
"What was your good deed? Did you climb up a tree to save a cat?"
"No, it's the fire department that does that. Cops would just shoot the cat, especially if it were black," Jay's assessment was amusing and depressing.
"You wouldn't shoot a cat."
"I wouldn't shoot a cat. I like cats. They are squishy and they make relaxing noises." Jay said, tucking his arm behind his head.
"You are a cat. Small circle of trust, soft hair, green eyes, great balance, horrible approach avoidance patterns of wanting your tummy rubbed until you have had enough then you bite, and a love of smoked fish." Mouse joked with him.
"Dawson calls me a police dog with thumbs." Who the fuck was Dawson?
"I can see that too because you do have thumbs and a tendency to stick your nose in the crotches of semi attractive bartenders, clearly Dawson doesn't know you like I do." Mouse agreed as he poured Jay another drink.
"He is one of the guys in my unit. I have known him the longest. He has a smoking hot sister. Gorgeous doe eyes, adorable smile, great ass, nice tits, really pushy in bed but well worth it, though she is a biter too."
"Does Dawson know you banged his sister?"
"Yeah, he knows. I mean he doesn't know all of that but it doesn't matter. I apparently wasn't as good because she dumped me after I caught a bullet and as soon as she didn't need me to protect her anymore. So really who is the asshole in that situation?"
Mouse remembered him mentioning this a few weeks ago. Jay had been under cover for a few months and had been kind of scarce then popped back up with his arm in a sling. "Probably you," Jay just shrugged. "So your good deed was not fucking your teammate's sister again?"
"I was helping out Ruzek," Jay finally blurted out.
"What is a Ruzek?" Mouse asked, starting to feel slightly relaxed himself. He wasn't in danger of falling asleep because he hadn't gotten up till 3pm anyway but he needed to watch this. Alcohol could easily take the place of narcotics because they numbed you almost the same way.
"He is this new dude in my unit. I mean everyone is basically new because it is a new unit but we have all been detectives for a while. This guy, he's new new, like hasn't even graduated from the academy yet. He's all piss and vinegar and going to clean up the streets on his own. He talks tough and thinks he's Dirty fucking Harry. He fronts like he's southside street but he went to school in Beverly and went to college before the academy for Christ's sake. He says shit like, 'where I come from you have to be aggressive,' when his step father is a goddamn orthodontist. He's fucking annoying as shit. He's such an FNG ." Jay didn't really have to say anything else to explain to Mouse. While fucking new guys weren't nearly as much of thing during their tours, because they deployed as a full unit, they did still get replacement troops. The last FNG Mouse remembered was Ortega. He was manning the gun when the Humvee was hit. Jay had had to untangle himself from Ortega's guts and had tripped on his small intestines getting out of the vehicle. It was always best to not give too much emotional capital to FNGs until they proved they could make it. It was just safer that way.
"So what did you help the new meat with?" Mouse asked, sipping his drink. He still couldn't understand why he liked this stuff.
"He shot someone, they died, it was his first time. I felt, I don't, bad for him because everyone was giving him shitty advice and he was trying to play the badass card, but was clearly freaking out," Jay explained. "I tried to talk to him, make him understand that he really should take advantage of all the support and shit they give you here for stuff like that." Mouse couldn't help the smile on his face as Jay said that. Jay was allergic to formal support of any kind. He knew why, Jay's self image was highly tied to being self-reliant and admitting he needed help of any kind caused him a lot of mental stress. But he also had just been conditioned his entire life to bottle things up, repress them, ignore them, work until he was too tired concentrating on them until they became so debilitating that he couldn't function anymore.
Mouse always found it very interesting to compare Will and Jay. Will was a complete open book. If he was sad he cried, if he was happy he laughed, if he was upset he yelled. He was easy as shit to read, emotionally. Will was also very manipulative as hell. He was the type of person that would say one thing then do something completely different. It was tough to know where you stood with him. He was really good at manipulating his brother into doing what he wanted, usually forgiving him. Where Jay was a stonewall of I'm fine. No matter what was going on, Jay was always fine, rarely freaked out, and was usually very calm. The only time he wasn't was when something was really wrong and he would explode and lash out at you. He could be fucking vicious too. The first time Mouse saw it, it was really jarring, but he was used to it now. Jay was pretty direct. You always knew where you stood with him, unlike Will. Didn't change the fact that the entire Halstead family was fucked up.
On the surface, Jay came from a much better background. His parents were married, where both Mouse's mother and grandmother had had children out of wedlock. Jay was raised in the heavy religious culture of Irish Catholicism, including 12 years of parochial school but was now a card carrying atheist. Where Mouse, while Jewish, was not Orthodox or particularly observant but still strongly believed in God. The Halstead family seemed to actively hate each, at least the male members, while Mouse's family was pretty damn tight knit. Emotional abuse and occasional physical abuse from all parties seemed to be the norm in Jay's house, where Mouse had never even been spanked. His Nana saying she was disappointed was far worse than any hit could ever be. Both Will and Jay were fairly successful in their fields where Mouse was kind of a loser nowadays but Mouse had a pretty wide circle of friends and a strong support system where Jay found it nearly impossible to form strong attachments to people.
Of the two of them, no one could argue that Jay wasn't the more functional one. He had a good job. He had had some relationships, though most weren't long because Jay had horrible approach avoidance patterns that drove pretty much everyone other than Mouse away. Halstead seemed to have a shit relationship with his family. But he also seemed to be like that before Afghanistan. He had a car, an apartment that he wasn't squatting in, had even managed to deploy again as a reserve. He studied martial arts, ran marathons, still kept up his sniper certifications both military and police. Mouse on the other hand was a complete wreck most of the time. He did drugs, though he was clean now. He committed crimes. He didn't have real jobs other than contract work. Yeah, Blue Jay by all rights was doing far better until you made him slow down because that was what scared Jay worse than nearly anything. Having nothing to do, nothing to distract him, nothing to concentrate on was terrifying to his buddy because then he couldn't avoid, ignore, repress, the shit inside his head anymore.
That was what had taken him down originally and driven him to the cabin. After his mother died, he had finished all his reconstruction surgery and rehab, and Mouse was mostly mobile, Jay hadn't had anything to concentrate on. There was nothing that urgently needed his attention and all that shit that he had been pushing down while things had been urgent came bubbling up and he hadn't been able to handle it. He hadn't known how to ask for help or even really accept it, when it was offered. The fact that he trusted Mouse was the only reason he was able to even get through him and bring him home. Mouse had pointed out that Jay had been willing to kill for him, die for him, now he needed him to do the hardest thing and live for him and for all their buddies that couldn't do it themselves. It hadn't been fair to use Jay's survivor's guilt against him like that but at the time, when Jay had been in complete shambles, sobbing so hard Mouse couldn't even understand what he was saying, and was an inch away from swallowing a bullet because he couldn't carry the weight of all the dead anymore, he would have said or done anything. And luckily it had worked, at least to the extent that Jay was not dead, even if he really didn't have much of a life.
Jay had pulled himself back together though, and was doing really well, for all intents and purposes, at least he had thought so. Mouse hadn't realized how bad it was, until he had finally started getting help. He just thought Halstead was tougher than him and he was just weak for having problems. He didn't know there were different presentations of PTSD and while he was the internal type that suffered from depression, anxiety, and substance abuse. Jay was the external type that was aggressive, risk seeking, and self destructive. He didn't realize that Halstead was just compensating in a different way. Work, focus, and adrenaline were his drugs instead and he was just as dependent on them as Mouse had been with Oxy. Society just frowned on his addiction and lauded Jay's.
"So how did it go? Did you set him straight on the properly dissociative way to handle the mental stress of killin'?" Jay barked out a laugh. Jay wasn't an easy person to make laugh so it always gave Mouse a little bit of a thrill when he could. When Mouse would go work at the District, he remembered how weirded out most of the team was the first time they saw Halstead laugh because none of them had ever seen it before.
"Not sure about that. I did tell him about my first time and all the euphemisms made me think I should actually have been talking about busting my cherry with Abby after a soccer game and a few pilfered beers but I told him about the first time I killed someone in Afghanistan." Mouse liked Abby, she was hot, funny, totally his type, and while still good friends with Jay, unrepentantly used him as a breathing sex toy whenever she came into town. She had zero intention of ever sticking around and being anything more than a long distance booty call, even if he kind of suspected that Jay might be into being more. Though that could just be a weird hold over thing because of his attachment to her family and feeling bad about her brother being killed. He needed someone like her that was into completely no strings attached sex. .
"What was his response?"
"More stupid macho shit before he finally broke down and cried like a bitch, just like I knew he would." Jay sounded slightly annoyed by the entire thing. One of Jay's biggest failings, and why he wasn't always the best person to put in a leadership position, was that he kind of lacked empathy sometimes. Not for everything but he had a tendency to get miffed or frustrated with people's emotions, when he didn't feel they were warranted. At least he could be like that with men. He was better with women but he still sometimes got testy. He just didn't seem to get that not everyone was a cold, hard ball, of toxic masculinity that was physically unable to express emotion like him. But Mouse let it slide. Jay was Jay and if he couldn't deal with it, they wouldn't be friends. And besides, he was oddly never like that with Mouse. In fact, he was the opposite and tended to coddle him.
"Well not everyone has the slightly sociopathic streak you do and some people angst about shit like that." Mouse joked. He knew Jay wasn't actually a sociopath but he didn't generally get upset about killing either. He was very clinical about it, very good at separating the logical need to kill from the emotional fallout of murdering someone. It was what had made him a great sniper. He was even able to take pride in his skill at it to some extent, though if you thought too hard about it, it would be a really disturbing thing to be proud of.
"Yeah, pussies," Halstead threw back, rubbing the inside of his left arm against his side. He did that a lot because he couldn't really feel the skin graft on his upper arm. He said it would itch or tingle sometimes but he couldn't really feel himself scratching it.
"Whatever man, I remember when," he said rooting around in his fridge for something to eat. It was too late to go out and get anything, even if Jay were paying. "In coming," he said as he tossed a jar of pickles at Jay, who caught them without even sitting up. He barely had more than frozen waffles and some eggs but he made sure that he always had pickles for Jay because he was just that good of a friend.
"This team is weird, man," Jay said as he crunched on a pickle.
"How so?" Mouse finally found some milk that didn't smell too dodgy and missed some scrambled eggs because the best thing to eat when you are drinking are pickles and scrambled eggs. Luckily both of them had pretty cast iron stomachs.
"I don't know, they like want to do shit together and I don't mean training, because that makes sense but we don't ever seem to do it. But they want to hang out after work have barbeques and go to comedy shows. It's fucking weird." Mouse kind of got it. Jay's last partner had been 25 years older than him and a year away from retiring so wanted nothing to do with the pathologically risk taking Ranger. And when he was in SWAT they trained but most people were married with kids. Plus both units were much larger than his current team so there clearly wasn't as much comradery.
"Some people like hanging out with other members of their species," Mouse said, serving up over cooked and probably over salted eggs to his friend, who finally sat up, flipping over so he was leaning against the wall instead of propping his feet on it.
"I hang out with other people."
"Me, you hang out with me and whatever short lived bar tender you are fucking at the time. It wouldn't be the worst thing for you to extend your circle of friends a little."
"And get attached to an FNG and watch him get his neck blown out?" Jay said somewhat bitterly. Mouse understood. He really did, but maybe the most glaring difference between the two of them was that Mouse was always more afraid of being killed himself while Jay was always more afraid of watching someone else be killed. But Mouse worried what would happen to his buddy if he relapsed or if something happened to him. It sometimes kept him up at night, now dependent Jay could be on him. He understood it because he was sometimes like that with Jay. In the end, it was seeing Jay lose it and start crying that had convinced him to clean up and go to rehab. But as he had gotten more into therapy and trying to unass himself, he realized just how incredibly unhealthy their relationship with each other actually was.
"Maybe not the FNG," Mouse smiled. "But didn't say your new partner was hot and you seem to like that Dawson guy. Give them a chance. Commit to 2 social team events a month."
"Is that you or your therapist's advice?" Jay asked. Mouse could tell that Jay was annoyed by it but also trying not to make Mouse think he was looking down on him for getting help.
"Maybe both.
Jay sighed. "Fine, Dawson invited me over for dinner next week. I guess I can go," he sulked and Mouse smiled at him.
