Chapter Text
The Pastoral Wanderings
It happens somewhere that Donnelly hasn't been back to his hotel room in a week and change. He crashes on Szymanski's couch while they try to watch a movie - he isn't sure where he'd turned into the sort to let this thing go on in the undefined way it seemed to want to without having to nail it down with some kind of label. He falls asleep in bed with the cat on his chest and refusing to move while trying to wait for Bill to get off the night shift and trying to keep his focus on the blurring lines of newspaper text columns, his mind awash in agonizing blankness that suggests he's missed something crucial.
It will turn up if he just goes back over it, the pattern will emerge.
And then he stays because it's just easier, because Bill will tug the papers out of his hands and push hot coffee into them wordlessly, and look at him until he remembers that there's more of life than work, even if that's been Donnelly's habit since he'd first fallen out of Quantico and headlong into a career, pushing everything else aside until - he told himself - he had success.
He'd just kept re-quantifying success.
It's one of these nights, when he's still sitting up on the couch trying to badger faster results out of the database technicians in the Federal Plaza building and Bill gets home from graveyard, and gives him a look as he comes in and realizes that Donnelly hasn't risen early (probably from the deepening of the circles under his eyes) but has burned right on through the night, and his shoulders actually droop lower.
Bill sits on his legs where they're stretched out to take up the whole love seat, and waits for him to get off the phone, just watching him. He looks tired, looks like - looks like a mirror to Donnelly's own hangdog moments of downtime that Donnelly just hangs up the phone after letting his sentence hang incomplete.
"You'll never let it go?"
"Someone has to catch-"
Szymanski shakes his head sharply. "Joss has gone round in circles with this guy from day one. Don't you think there's a reason?"
Donnelly tries to guess at what he means (and he knows later, he remembers the words later) but he's so tired now that he's trying to reverse the tracks of his momentum that his thoughts trail after Bill's words into useless nothings.
"He's got a lot of money rolling behind him, a lot of power," Donnelly says. "I just can't figure out why."
"I'm seeing the paperwork go across my desk, Nick," Bill says, and maybe he sounds a little bitter, a little harder on the word 'desk', "It could be any one of those guys. It could be all of them, running you around in a circle."
"I'm running them right back," Donnelly manages, and he is, he's going to get that one step ahead, finally, that he actually needs.
Bill stares at him for a moment in silence, and then drops four words into the silence. "I saw him once."
Donnelly had almost forgotten his suspicions from weeks ago, when they'd both sat at his desk and traded casual flirtation in a stunted half-grown way, when he'd seen the quiet shadow pass over Szymanski's features.
"He's just a man," Bill says at length, and then gets up while Donnelly tries to sort the jumble of words in his brain into a series of questions - where? when? - but in the end he gives up when all he gets is silence and and Bill closes him out of the bathroom with an expression that begs him to try and understand.
His hotel room greets him with stale air when he gets back to it, like a stranger's house stale with old cigarette smoke and dirty dishes a week old in the sink, and his feet crinkle over the stack of unread newspapers left just inside his door.
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The Third Sally
The world spins and jolts and tumbles again, and he can barely process that the car isn't still flying through the air, because it had seemed to go on forever after that first impact had jammed his head hard against the driver's side window and stole everything from his mind but white light and sensation. He holds onto the wheel, feels the airbag push his fingers off of it as it explodes outward, but it's already deflating before the car actually hits the ground again, and then it seems to be flying and rolling at the same time, seconds playing themselves out with no regard to sequential order.
It can't be more than a minute, or maybe he hits his head hard enough to lose consciousness for a while, but when he comes to, everything still feels like it's in motion and he feels the stab of broken bones in his wrist, maybe his ribs, hears the rough idle of a truck engine, and the ominous ticking from the car, the falling of broken glass like every sound is magnified.
Everything hurts, and that's all he can focus on for a minute before he remembers the voice on the phone, hears shifting - he checks on Carter first - moving, alive. The man in the suit is faring better, and his mind drags up a voice, a warning in his ear just before events become a blur of motion and reaction -
I'm the partner of the man in your back seat
-and he can almost see the picture, here, sketched out in Carter's actions, in the man in the suit's actions, in Bill's warnings, and there's the sound of heels on pavement, but this is important. His legs are pinned, twisted, held under the crush of seats and twisted car interior, but his mind isn't. 'Don't you think there's a reason?'
He must have hit his head pretty hard, his vision is going round and round like the car's still spinning, and when he lays back, lets his head rest on the ground, he can almost picture himself laying back in Bill's apartment, on the bed, the warm weight of the cat settling on his chest.
They know something I don't, they all did, he thinks, and for a moment the thought is bitter, it tastes like lead in his mouth.
His giant was a windmill: an inn is just an inn, not a castle.
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