His last conscious thought is, I’m dying alone.
It’s late, those deep hours of the night, ice-cold and vertiginous: Santa Barbara’s streetlights flashing past his windows, the uneven shapes of warehouses and construction sites lurking in the shadows. The smell of the distant sea, mixed with old trash and still-hot tarmac. His ribs still crunching down on his heart, despite the miles he put between them and himself, despite the two scotches burning in his veins.
Then, a screech of tires on his left. No headlights, but the van is white – a cheery purple elephant smiling from its sides. He steers, but it’s too late. It’s already happening.
Noise: a crash, brakes whining, crunch of bones. Warmth, seeping through his shirt, metal coming out of the fabric, out of him.
Oh, oh.
The nails of his right hand are still embedded in the leather of the passenger seat. It shot out to protect the person there, forgetting tonight there’s no one in it. Ache. Relief. She’s not here, he thinks, and, Thank God, and, oh, I’m dying alone. A vision: his car crumpled into a dinosaur carcass of fuming metal, uniforms swarming around it, strangers sending condolences to his mother.
He’s always known it was going to end like this.
(He dared to hope it wouldn’t.)
Black.
***
At three in the morning, Juliet is nursing the stress migraine squeezing her head like a giant pair of thongs, and watching trash TV. The District reruns, a detective in grainy Nineties palettes grilling a suspect. Despite her attempts at losing herself in the girly delight of the Bachelorette, she has rolled back to the grim-looking detective like metal filings rushing to a magnet. It makes her simultaneously very mad and extremely sad.
The thought chain is immediate. The greenish interrogation rooms, her personal version of the grizzled blue-eyed detective. The meeting room and Shawn twitching and electric with excitement and their nerves frayed by three days of non-stop investigations and bad coffee. Comments snapped out before thinking. Words shot like bullets. Gus whimpering, caught in the cross-fire. The door slamming behind Carlton, face so colorless under the station neon-lights it glowed faintly. In her fury, Juliet still found herself thinking he looked so very pale. So very tired.
Yet, she didn’t run after him. Not this time.
If Carlton wants to play the brooding Clint Eastwood-y protagonist, she won’t stop him.
Juliet groans. The blister of aspirin lies on the coffee table, next to her badge and the Cinnamon Fair mug she filled with water when she stumbled in and realized she had no clean glasses. She’s already taken two, but the pressure pushing on her eyes has yet to dim, the weight lodged somewhere under her collarbone still heavy. Crushing.
She’s not sure aspirin, even with its mighty and blessed powers, can do much about that.
Dammit, Carlton, she thinks, a bitter taste on her tongue, like cough syrup. Why do you have to make everything so hard, all the time?
The meat of the problem has been one of Shawn’s ideas: a by-the-book reason for Carlton’s rage. They’ve been suspecting one of the warehouses in the industrial district, an old fishing manufacture closed somewhere in the Eighties, has been turned into the hideout of a ring of local drug dealers, but the police hasn’t been able to link them to anything concrete enough for a warrant yet. Two days ago, the daughter of the detective in charge of the case has gone missing: Shawn – and Lassiter and Juliet too, as they are not as perfectly blind as her boyfriend sometimes seems to believe – saw a connection.
Yesterday evening, said boyfriend proposed to let him sneak in the warehouse during the night, collect information, and then come back with the chivalry.
Of course, Carlton said no. Juliet saw his breath itch, his blue eyes turning scorching as dry ice. Carlton’s anger usually fills him hard and fast as gasoline, but when it gets real bad it seems to spill out of him: making his whole body tremble, as if there is not enough of him to contain it all. They have slept less than twelve full hours in the past week, the life of a girl was on the line, so, Carlton didn’t burn. He deflagrated.
The only problem is, Juliet and Shawn did too.
He told them they were reckless idiots, and that he would rather lock Shawn up in the holding cell
than let him mess up. They called him unreasonable, and heartless.
You’re incredible , O’Hara – you’d agree with any idiocy this clown suggests.
At least I know we’re running out of time, Carlton. You don’t even care about Han’s daughter enough to try.
That was a lie. She has known it all the time. But she was so exhausted, and so angry, and baring her teeth felt so good.
Carlton’s eyes widened – swelled with ice. He crossed the room, ripping the door open.
(His teeth bared, too.)
Think what you want, partner. But I’d rather die than let you ruin this operation – or kill that child.
He left so fast he forgot his suit jacket on the chair.
On impulse, Juliet grabbed it when she went home – knowing being pissed at him was not a good enough reason to let him lose it. The jacket currently lies on the back of her love seat. It was the charcoal gray one, one of his favorites.
I’d rather die. The words ring once more through Juliet, rippling down her spine.
Her phone starts buzzing in her sweatpants pocket. Juliet fishes it out, sweeps right, answers with her Detective Voice.
She doesn’t make a sound. There is not enough air.
Seven seconds later, she’s ripping down the stairs, in her flip flops.
Falling.
***
When he gets the call, Juliet’s golden face flashing on the screen, Shawn is microwaving a bag of popcorn.
“My jewel – to what do I owe the pleasure?”
She explains. She’s not hysterical, not his Jules. She’s collected, reasonable, the slightest shaking around the edges of every word.
A suckerpunch to the throat.
This is not happening. This is not-
“What you want me to do?” he whispers.
“I’m – going to the hospital. They told me nothing. I’m there in ten – five minutes.” A breath. “You don’t. You don’t have to-”
Shawn’s heart lurches, the command thrumming deep in his bones.
Of course I have.
He tears at the microwave plug. He stumbles out of the door, bike keys digging in his palm and the text for Gus already typed out in the canvas of his mind, thoughts running ahead, stretching into the night, the dark.
“I’m coming.”
***
Carlton is standing in a hospital cafeteria.
He sees white walls, white-tiled floor, clusters of soft-speaking people hunched around toothpaste blue tables. Allergy Awareness Week posters hanging over the counter – smell of burnt coffee and disinfectant. He’s seen the obnoxious things enough times to recognize the place immediately.
Carlton frowns. He doesn’t remember any case that could have brought him here, nor anyone he could be visiting here; now that he thinks about it, he doesn’t even remember how he got here. Flashes of the verbal shootout that went down that night flicker across his mind, like murder-scene snapshots: Spencer’s ludicrous plan, him and O’Hara jumping at each other’s throat.
Is it O’Hara? The idea slams into him. It feels like a gun recoil thrumming up his arms, the world shifting slightly out of focus. It takes him a couple of deep breaths to remember how to dig into his pocket for his cell.
Except it isn’t there.
Carlton frowns. Harder.
Now that he thinks about it, other things are missing, too: his jacket, shirtsleeves rolled up at his elbows, his wallet. The weights of his badge and his shoulder holster are still there – left shoulder and right hip, balancing him.
Still, a shiver of unease climbs the knobs of his spine.
The air-conditioned air is cold and bitter, and yet there is no goose bumps on his arms.
Carlton shakes his head – recites his personal prayer in the space between his heartbeats. Actions, facts, logic. He straightens, and pushes towards the frantic buzz of the ER. No one spares him a look. A bulky bear of a woman with tinted hair and glitter-pink glasses nearly bumps into him, barreling forward as if she hasn’t even noticed his six-foot-tall figure.
She ignores the glare he burns into her scalp, too.
Carlton slips after a young, blond couple in matching Nike tracksuits – good grief – through the sliding doors, and stops a moment to locate the closest nurse. He forces himself to unclench his teeth, O’Hara’s disapproving voice echoing at the back of his skull. You’re gonna crack your jaw doing that, Carlton.
The eerie unease is still here, creeping up like hypothermia.
In that moment, the ER doors burst open – bare white lights and night sky flashing behind them. A red-white blur shoots past them.
Carlton feels speared to the floor.
The blur is O’Hara. Wearing her SBPD softball sweatshirt and freaking pink flip-flops, hair in a messy bun, face free of makeup and tired and more scared than he has ever seen her. Behind her, Spencer and Guster.
Carlton’s disciplined mantra spirals into chaos. His heart skips a beat.
He’s suddenly moving – running.
“O’Hara –“
She doesn’t stop. She flies past him, feet skidding awkwardly off the tiles, towards the inner belly of the ER – one of the glass-walled rooms where trauma cases are rushed in. There’s noise coming from the room, too: raised voices, wheels rattling, the screech of machines, and underneath it all, a deep drumming sound.
It ripples across the floor, humming through Carlton’s feet and all the way to the tip of his fingers, the base of his neck. It makes his teeth chatter, like an earthquake, but no one else seems alarmed by it. It stirs echoes, things he should remember.
Carlton stares after his partner and her companions, that drum behind his ribs like a second heart. Then he dashes after her.
“O’Hara! Spencer!”
No reaction. The three of them keep running, the line of their backs – Guster’s carefully-shaved fuzz on the back of his neck, Spencer’s leather jacket, Juliet’s bobbing hair – startlingly familiar as they rush away from him. Are they still mad at him? Mad enough to ignore him, full first-grade style?
Carlton refuses to dwell on it. He refuses to let it hurt. He sprints, the drum beating harder the closer he gets to the glass-walled room, making it hard to breathe. He remembers a glimpse of the white door of a van, tastes blood on his tongue.
(I’m dying alone.)
The thought rips through him, obtrusive and alien like a thorn under your nail – and yet ringing with him, humming right. Carlton gasps on his next breath. Sees the others stop against the glass wall of the ER room, skids to a half beside them, the thrum echoing off his bones, off his core.
Spencer and Guster are talking in hissed, urgent whispers, faces made strange by distress. Spencer stares at the doctors inside, the flurry of white coats and the half-drawn shutters obscuring the view. O’Hara is pressing her hands to the glass, as if she wants to push herself in through it, eyes wild and enormous.
The drumming is unbearable. It sounds more and more like a struggling heartbeat.
Suddenly, Carlton gives in to the unease – the wrong wrong wrong in that echo. Suddenly, he wants nothing less than to look into that room.
He still does.
Inside, men and women in blue scrubs leaning over a gurney. On it is a man – lurching limply under the defibrillator pads, one hand dangling from the railing. Carlton needs only a couple of details – the blood-smeared white shirt baring his chest, the thin sickle-shaped scar on his wrist – to know.
To remember.
“Carlton,” O’Hara whispers to the glass, a prayer.
Carlton Lassiter stands beside his partner, looking at the doctors trying to restart his own heart.
***
The ER waiting room is packed with uniforms. They get her a chair – You look pale, detective, please, take a seat – and a cup of sugared coffee she leaves untouched. Shawn and Gus are standing nearby, nervous energy not letting them sit, the other cops crowded around the Chief like chicks.
Not Buzz. Buzz is sitting in front of her, telling the story in shaky breaths, big hands wriggling his own cup.
He looks nearly as bad as Juliet does.
He’s been the one who found Carlton. A call for a car accident in the industrial district while he was on patrol. The second car – a van, shoved halfway into the Ford – nearly unscathed, and deserted. The alarms squealing in the night. The hood smoking. And inside, inside –
There was so much blood, Detective O’Hara. I wanted to get him out, but I didn’t know if he was – if it would – But I waited with him till the ambulance arrived.
Buzz’s fingers shake – crushing the cup till coffee nearly spills out.
And he looked so small. I’m kinda scared of him, you know, in a good way, but there, in that trap of metal and plastic and all that blood, he. He looked so small.
Juliet says nothing, feeling like her heart is pumping ashes. She has to bite on her lip to pay attention to the rest of Buzz’s tale. When he’s done, she almost wishes she hasn’t.
When the white van ran into him, Carlton was driving back from the McArthur’s Fishing company warehouse. They found photos on his phone, retrieved from where it lodged itself in the space between Carlton’s feet and the dashboard: snapshots of shadows standing by the skylight on the roof, a pink child sock lying in the courtyard. A white van with a purple elephant, parked in the nearby alley.
They found a Google Doc left open, too, hastily-typed notes in Carlton’s shorthand style.
Too many people. Front business. Van – Dumbo’s Dry-Cleaner. Han’s girl in warehouse? In the shop?
He went back to check on Shawn’s hunch. Juliet can almost see him: fuming with rage, lips clasped in a line as he tears off the station parking lot, driving halfway across the city to do the stupid thing he forbad them to do.
The car crash has been no accident. The men behind this must have seen Carlton, followed him to kill him and grab the phone, but run at Buzz’s arrival.
Now they have a good trail, and her partner has already flatlined twice on an ER gurney.
“Oh, fuck,” Shawn exhales, somewhere on her left head in his hands.
Carlton’s boring silver Samsung hangs from one of the uniform’s fingers, zipped into an evidence bag. It’s speckled in red.
It pulls at her like a ball of yarn unraveling.
I’m sorry, Buzz keeps saying, as if it were his fault. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.
***
He tries everything.
Talking loudly, quietly. Whispering. Shouting – which feels marginally good. Carlton stomps around the cop-filled waiting room as hard as he can, shakes the rickety coffee table with the pile of ancient National Geographics like a damned haunted house ghost. He screams into Spencer’s ear, tries to gently smack Guster’s neck – swallowing the panic when his hand wavers like water and skids off before making contact.
(He tries with O’Hara – more than with anyone else. He calls her by name and by title and by her first name. He begs her. Please, Juliet-)
It’s pointless.
Here, time works in hiccups: sudden lurches forward, with swamps of mist in between. By the time he had watched his lifeless body jolt off the table three more times, and had felt the drumming sound grow earth-shattering and maddening and then retreating again, minutes passed: another body in the room, the hallway empty.
Carlton wandered the harshly white corridors of the hospital, people narrowly avoiding him as if bouncing off a magnetic field, his steps soundless, before a sharp pull under his sternum led him to a door on the left.
In it, he found Spencer and Guster and O’Hara slumped in plastic chairs.
(He refuses to acknowledge the dread: the blinding panic that seized him when he realized he didn’t know where the three of them were and he was alone, dreaming or dying or dead, the heady relief now flooding his veins. The tiny voice repeating over and over, they’re still here, thank God, they’re still here.)
That was fifteen minutes ago. Leaning against the vending machine near the door, Carlton sighs, and accepts he’s not going to contact them.
And to tell them what? Ehy, I’m a ghost? Spencer, if I die don’t you dare touch my tie collection?
His breath catches.
I’m sorry?
That doesn’t sound quite right. There are still holes in his memory of the night before, but he remembers why he said the things he said; why he got so angry. Still, it doesn’t mean he meant all of them. It doesn’t mean he wants those dummies to remember them forever, especially if, especially if –
Carlton finds his hands shaking. With some measure of amazement, he realizes he really don’t want it to end like this. He really doesn’t want for his last words to them to be angry and horrible.
Suddenly, steps clatter behind him. Someone comes through the door – a middle-aged woman in a white coat.
O’Hara shoots out of her chair. Spencer and Guster stumble out of theirs.
“You’re all here for Mister Lassiter?”
“Detective,” O’Hara instantly cuts in, fierce and fragile. “It’s Detective Lassiter. I’m his emergency contact. And they’re – yes. We’re all here for him.”
Juliet.
“Sure. My apologies.” The woman in white, the doctor, makes a curt nod to the three people huddled together in front of her, and takes out the chart tucked under her arm.
The name scribbled on the top of the first page makes Carlton’s heart tremble. His chart.
O’Hara crosses her arms. “How is he?”
The doctor clasps her lips together. She gives them a steady, evaluating gaze, and it may be a trick of the light, but Guster looks like he’s trying to puff out his chest to look taller.
They pass the inspection.
“I’m not going to lie to you,” the doctor says. “Your friend’s body sustained considerable damage: collapsed lung, broken shoulder – intracranial bleeding. The next twelve hours will be crucial. We’ll ease him off meds in the morning, and check if there is neurological response. If he doesn’t wake up–“
O’Hara makes a sound, and the doctor stops with her next word already halfway out. But she’s not crying: it’s not a sob, but more like an animal sound, the breathless gasp you make with a bullet in your ribs. She presses one hand to her mouth, knuckles first, gnawing at them, and it’s such a weirdly predator thing to do, such an O’Hara thing to do, the thought hits Carlton like a bolt of electricity.
His partner is terrified. And he can’t go there to her, because he’s the one she’s terrified for.
“If he doesn’t wake up, it’s a mess?” whispers Spencer. “Isn’t it?”
The tone is out of character enough to make Carlton flit his eyes to him. He sees a man there, jaw clenched, pale under the tan.
“Yeah.” The dark head of the doctor bobs in a nod. “If he doesn’t, it’s a mess.”
The doctor leans in to touch O’Hara’s arm. “I swear we’re doing all we can for your friend.” She turns to the door. “Now go home and try to sleep. We’ll call you as soon as we have news.”
Spencer has been hovering by O’Hara’s side, brushing at her spine and her elbow as if she were a broken-winged bird – but now he straightens back to full height. His head whips up, fast enough the bones shift with an audible clack.
“We’re not going anywhere.”
The doctor freezes with one hand on the door jamb. Carlton looks up too, disoriented with shock.
Shawn’s words have been nowhere like a question. They have been a statement.
The doctor recovers first. She blinks, slips on a pleasantly reasonable mask that at four a.m. looks worn out around the edges. “Sir, I understand-“
“With all due respect, ma’am – no, you don’t. We’re not going anywhere. Those plastic chairs look super nap-friendly anyway.”
The doctor frowns. Tears off the pleasant mask. Opens her mouth.
Juliet steps forward.
“We’re staying,” she says, loud and clear, in the tone no wise human would argue with.
(The doctor is a wise woman.)
***
Five a.m. The hospital personnel’s provided them with blankets, baby wipes, endless coffee. We’re not complete monsters, Detective O’Hara, the doctor – Mason – said as she dumped the blankets on their knees, but she was smiling. Juliet thinks she’s starting to like them.
“You don’t have to stay here, Shawn. You guys go home, have a sho-“
“We’re not going anywhere, Jules.”
“But-“
“-anywhere.”
Hands find each other in the dark. For a moment, in the blue darkness under her eyelids, Juliet thinks there’s a four shape in the room, sitting by her knees.
***
Sometimes after dawn, Doctor Mason tells them they can see him.
Juliet rips herself off her seat as if she’s been electrocuted. As she sweeps her legs off the chair she dislodges Gus’s jacket-pillow, sending him tumbling to the ground – a head-trauma brochure still flattened on his stomach. He lurches to his feet as Shawn rolls into the room from his cigarette break, I know, I should quit, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. And off they go.
It is a strange thing to walk into a room chirping with machines and see yourself lying in a bed. Carlton stays back, taking in the bruised eyes, the stitches on his forehead, the complicated sling holding his right shoulder together, and grimaces. The drum is back, deep in his bones, in perfect sync with the trembling green line on the monitor above the bed. Quiet, so very quiet.
Sweet justice.
He recognizes himself, of course – and there is a shame about it, a vulnerability that shoots through him like compressed lightning. He looks so young, so old. So fragile. He remembers something his mother told him once and made his teenage heart burn with indignation – that it’s his fire what made him tough, because genetics gave him her slender bones and long eyelashes and baby blues, eternally exposed. Now, with no fire filling it, he sees her point, the secret delicateness of certain parts of his body, and hates it. Gets scared.
He doesn’t want the others to see him like this. He doesn’t want O’Hara to see him like this. But Juliet has already pulled a chair to the bed, crashing into it and claiming her territory. Spencer floats to the other side. Guster mutters things under his breath, face ashen. With a start, Carlton realizes he has tears in his eyes.
You can stay with him for a bit, the doctor says. It’s against every regulation in the world, but.
O’Hara makes that dying animal sound again. Carlton feels a spike of nausea, too. They’ve both seen it, with colleagues or badly-injured witnesses: the docs calling off protocol when they’re very afraid there will be no goodbye time later.
He watches his partner curl her hands around the railing of the bed, as if she’s going to keep him there out of sheer stubbornness. It’s Spencer who answers the doctor, tells her they’re grateful and they’ll be quiet and thanks a lot, really.
Just then, it hits Carlton, like a junkie jumping you in a side alley.
I could die, he thinks. I could be actively dying right now.
He may be in the first stages of it, or his failing brain may be hallucinating in its final moments of existence, wheezing with electricity like a staticky television. He always imagined death as a clean, rapid business – lights out, hopefully his partner there to take care of things and dress him in the Washington-black suit he is so proud of.
But this is nothing like that. This is messy, and agonizing, and whimsical enough to make his teeth tingle with displeasure. It leaves him time to behold O’Hara’s white-knuckles hands gripping the railing, Guster’s tears, Spencer’s unreadable eyes, twenty years older than they’ve been yesterday.
They care. They stayed – for me.
For the privilege to be sad at my deathbed.
The thought is rattling. This is not their dynamic, their protocol. He doesn’t want them to see him like this – to remember the last minutes of Carlton Lassiter as this sad, delicate thing, time tickling by with each struggling beat of his heart.
So you’d rather be alone? His conscience, his O’Hara-conscience, roars. Really, Carlton?
No. Please no.
“I told him he didn’t care,” O’Hara says, sudden as a bullet. “I told him he didn’t care about a little girl.”
Spencer sniffs loudly. “He knows we didn’t mean it. That we’re idiots. That I’m an idiot.”
“I’m his partner – it’s my fault.”
“It’s our fault,” Guster steps forward, not wiping his face, putting one hand on O’Hara’s shoulder. She covers it with her own. Spencer sighs, leans his head on Guster’s shoulder. “But now we’re here.”
“Hear that, Carlton?” Juliet whispers. Her free hand trails up his arm. “We’re here. So come back. Please?”
Her fingers press to his cheek, tentatively. Just like that, he’s connected, linked to the chain of intertwined hands and touching bodies of the three people in the room. Carlton lets his eyes roam over their faces, pale and tired and rumpled, so young again, looking as vulnerable as the one of the Carlton in the bed.
Something cracks open inside him. The world tilts under his feet.
“I want –” he blurts out, “–I want to come back.”
Nothing happens – but for the first time that night, in that strange suspended time of Carlton Lassiter’s soul, his voice seems to carry through the room: tremble through the air, move atoms with its waves. The drumming sound is still here, thudding quietly in the back of his skull, in the back of his words, but suddenly, it just isn’t ominous anymore. It’s his heart: his still beating heart. It means he’s still here. It means he can still come back.
Or die trying, his gun against his shoulder, these people, his people around him, as it should be.
Carlton pushes himself off the door jamb, to the bed, to the broken body Juliet is caressing with a mother’s grace. He calls on that drumming, pulls it up and up from the center of his stomach, till it beats hard and real and loud in his ears, against the white walls of the room.
Shrill beeps squeak in protest, but he doesn’t even hear them.
“I want to come back,” he repeats, louder. He reaches Guster. “I want to tell you to stop letting Spencer drag you in his unholy plans.” He twists his head to Spencer. “I want to tell you that you’re an idiot indeed, but I’m glad you finally recognized it.”
He moves to O’Hara: kneeling by her side, the way he has done for a woman he thought he would build his whole life with, a thousand years ago. But this feels different: it has nothing to do with romanticism and rings nestled in velvet boxes, and everything to do with companionship, and devotion, and the illuminated pictures he remembers from his World History class, of armor-clad knights kneeling in front of fellow warriors to offer their swords and their loyalty.
The drumming grows and grows, singing through him, war-like. He looks up at her drained face, her red eyes. Rests his fingers on her wrist – encircling it, as if checking for a pulse.
“I want to tell you it’s not your fault, O’Hara.” A beat. “Juliet.”
She shivers – gasps. Her hand twitches, as if feeling a pressure on it, reaching for something. She doesn’t see him, and the thudding is deafening now, shaking the ground, but he still smiles at her.
The monitor starts hrieking. A mighty pull tugs at Carlton’s chest, dragging him back, like a giant black hand clutching at his sternum. The world goes muffled, color and air bleeding away from him, but he still sees the pink smudge of Spencer’s face whip towards the monitor, Juliet’s What’sgoingon, shrill with terror. The drumming swallows it, too. He floats in blackness. Swims towards it, the noise, the pain.
The last thing he sees, feels, is Juliet leaning over him, folded around him like a bear cub protecting its brother.
“If you die,” she whispers in his ear, as doctors flood the room and pull her away, “I’ll never forgive you.”
***
White. Noise, beeps and scraping of chairs and muffled voices, light. Taste of death on the tongue.
Smells. Lemon, sweat, but – peaches, too. A shadow, shielding him from the light. Give him time.
(The shadow’s voice raw and wobbly, but shushing the others.)
A touch on his cheek, butterfly-light. His name.
Carlton feels like he’s resurfacing into his own body, slowly refilling its shape. It hurts. His head, his shoulder. Ribs singing with pain like xylophone bars. (Morphine, making him metaphor-prone.)
Three people sit at his side. Guster, so startled he drops his cup, coffee staining the sheets. Spencer is standing, chair toppled behind him, hands hovering at his side like he doesn’t know what to do with them.
And O’Hara. Bursting into tears as soon as she sees his eyes open – punching his arm, gently, oh-so-gently. Having just laid something dark on his chest.
His jacket, his forgotten jacket.
“Thank-“
“Don’t talk.” Again, butterfly fingers on his face. “Later. Sleep. We’ll be here.”
Carlton closes his eyes. Sigh. Dreams at the edge of his conscience, strange and terrifying, drums, but for now, for now –
“I know,” he whispers.
Outside, another dawn is breaking.