Chapter Text
Daniel and Peggy seemed to be enjoying their enforced ranch vacation, which Jack thought was all well and good for them, but by the middle of the following day, he found himself hot, sticky, thirsty, miserable, and bored. The real heat of summer hadn't set in yet -- he could only imagine that the ranch, which lacked any sort of air conditioning, would be utter Hell by July -- but it was hot enough to make him sweat, aggravating the itching of the bandages and worsening a crawling restlessness under his skin. He wasn't sure if that had to do with the morphine, with the knowledge that his colleagues had tried to kill him (in fairness, he had betrayed them first) or with his inability to concentrate long enough to actually do anything about it. He was too tired and weak to sit up and read, but not weak enough to just sleep through it; his body seemed to have decided that it had slept enough lately, and while he was too exhausted to move, he didn't seem to be exhausted enough to actually rest.
He ended up lying in a sweaty heap on the bed, staring at the wall and snapping at anyone who came in, which eventually succeeded in getting everyone to leave him alone.
Except for Peggy. Of course.
"I brought you some fresh water," she reported, whipping away the half-empty glass of lukewarm water and replacing it with another.
"Oh good," Jack muttered, staring at a crack in the wall. The water on the ranch tasted heavily of minerals, and the warmer it got, the worse it got.
Also, the more he drank, the more often he had to get up to pee, and getting up was even worse than lying still. He spent a self-indulgent and (he had to admit) self-pitying moment wishing Blackwell had better aim. At least he wouldn't be having to put up with all of this.
The bed dipped under Peggy's weight as she sat down beside him. Jack clenched his teeth in anticipation of some British platitude about stiff upper lips, or a Peggyish barb about lying around feeling sorry for himself. Instead, her hand settled on his arm.
"I was shot in the shoulder once, you know," she said. "It wasn't the same as this, but the thing I remember most, besides the boredom of recovery, was how much of a mess I felt after two days in bed. It's a funny thing, a person who's up and about can easily go for a few days without a bath and not feel too dreadful about it; I suppose we all learned that during the war. But a day or two in sickbed and one starts to feel absolutely disgusting."
"So you're saying I stink," Jack said after a moment, but he couldn't keep a note of deprecating humor out of his voice.
Her fingers were cool on his overheated skin, rubbing up and down his arm. "No, I'm saying I think you'd feel a lot better if you were clean, especially in this warm weather. I don't think it's a good idea for you to take a bath yet, with your bandages, but I could bring in some water so you can wash your hair."
He wanted to argue about it; he was in that kind of mood. But his scalp itched and his skin itched and the idea of washing away some of that feeling was too strong a siren call to risk losing by being enough of a bastard to chase her away. "That'd be all right, I guess," he said.
Peggy squeezed his arm and rose from the bed. Jack lay in a self-pitying heap for awhile longer and listened to her footsteps tripping in and out (she appreciated having a mission, he suspected, even if it was only arranging bath things) before he steeled himself and sat up. Peggy had been busy; she'd pulled two chairs close together and had a large bowl of water on the seat of one, and a pitcher and stack of towels on the other.
"I think the easiest thing would be to have you sit on the floor and lean your head backwards," Peggy suggested. Suiting action to words, she folded a blanket and laid it in front of the chair on the new-looking wooden floorboards. "Bending forward might be too much of a strain on the stitches in your back."
Jack's only reply was a grunt. Sitting up was already making him dizzy; the heat made it worse. Peggy was probably right that he wasn't drinking enough water, but right now just moving seemed like more effort than it was worth. His hands rested in his lap like lead weights at the end of his arms.
"Come on," Peggy urged, tugging at him. Jack allowed himself to be manhandled out of bed and helped down to the floor, at which point he realized that she meant she was going to wash his hair and stiffened up.
"Oh, don't have a fit," Peggy remarked with stifled laughter in her voice. She folded a towel over his shoulders, covering the heavy, restrictive mass of bandages on his upper back. When he moved, he could feel them tugging at him.
"I don't know if I can lean back any more than I can lean forward," he admitted. He'd thought he was past the point of embarrassment with everything that had happened to him lately, but sitting on the floor in his undershirt and boxers, sweaty and weak, he discovered that there were depths of humiliation yet to plumb.
"I won't let you fall," Peggy promised, and the worst part was, he believed her. She sat on the second chair, next to the one with the basin of water, and draped another folded towel over the seat for him to lean against. Both chairs were jammed against the wall, so there wasn't much chance of tipping, but it took an effort of willpower to lean back, tipping his head carefully into Peggy's sure hands.
She cupped a hand under his skull and picked up the pitcher with the other. Jack flinched violently (and painfully) when the first stream of cool water cascaded over his scalp. He'd expected it to be warmer. Also, the water had a slight scent, something sweet and floral. "I'm going to smell like my grandmother's bedroom after this," he complained.
"Close your eyes," Peggy told him in an amused tone. "You'll get water in them."
Jack gave a long-suffering sigh and shut his eyes.
Without visual input, and soon with water clogging his ears, he was left in a world composed mainly of touch and smell. The lukewarm water felt impossibly good, soothing away the sticky heat and the unpleasantness left behind by two days of sweating in a sickbed. Peggy alternated pouring water and massaging her fingers against his wet scalp. She rubbed in slow circles, easing tension he hadn't even realized was there.
By the time she gave his hair a final rinse, he'd relaxed into it completely. Even the growing ache in his back -- the position wasn't particularly good for either the healing bullet wound or for his spine -- wasn't enough to rouse him from a lethargic pleasure coma.
Peggy blotted his hair with a towel. He'd wilted sideways and was leaning against her leg. His eyes were still shut; he tensed again, a little, when a wet cloth touched his face and smoothed across his damp forehead and cheeks.
Her ministrations with the cloth moved down, eventually, to his neck, and he mustered the energy to crack his eyes open. "Sponge bath?"
"I think you'll feel much better if you are clean."
"Yes," he said fervently. "I can do it, though." He reached up, fumbling around in an attempt to take the cloth away from her. They ended up in a brief tug of war, which she of course won.
"I know you can," she said, and smiled with a gleam in her eye, dropping her gaze appreciatively to his shoulders. "But I want to. Let's get your shirt off."
They were between the bed and the wall, and the room wasn't very large, so it was easy enough for Jack to slide over to the bed without getting up. He leaned on the bed while Peggy helped him peel his shirt off, and then he rested his head on his folded arms while she stripped off the itching bandages.
"I'm going to bring some clean water, all right?"
He grunted acknowledgement, and relaxed against the bed while she crossed the floor; the door opened and closed. The heat no longer seemed so oppressive; actually, with his hair damp and cool, he was almost comfortable. The deep ache between his shoulder blades was still there, though, even muffled by the narcotics, like a kink he couldn't quite stretch out.
The door opened and Peggy came in, and hers weren't the only set of footsteps. Jack jerked upright before he realized who the other person was from the crutch tap.
Daniel grinned at him and sat down on the bed, while Peggy knelt behind him with a bowl of clean water and a washcloth.
"I understand Peggy's got you acting almost human," Daniel said, scruffing his fingers through Jack's wet hair.
Jack decided he was too relaxed to bother coming up with a sarcastic retort. Besides, Peggy was washing his back and it felt too good to want to break the moment. "Where'd you get off to?" he asked instead.
"Went to town with Jarvis." Daniel stretched out on the bed, though he kept his hand on Jack's head. "Jarvis wanted to pick up, as he put it, 'a few small items, without which a civilized existence is impossible.'" His rendition of Jarvis's tones and accent was accurate enough to make Jack smile against his arm, and Peggy gave a muffled snort. "Which apparently translates to an hours-long shopping spree, while I did some snooping around to find out how things are going with our friends at the Arena Club."
Thoughts of Vernon and the SSR rose in Jack's mind like nausea in his throat; he tried to push them back. "I saw the paper," he said, trying for flippant. "Apparently I'm dead. What'd you two do to my car?"
"Nothing worse than you already did to it when you drove it into Howard's privet hedge," Peggy said behind him. She was working on his shoulders now, applying the cool, damp cloth as well as massaging the muscles with her strong hands. He didn't want to admit how good it felt, easing out the soreness from days of inactivity.
Still, he managed to rally enough to say, "Nothing worse? If the paper can be believed, you set it on fire!"
Daniel gave his hair a gentle tug. "The point is keeping you alive."
The frustrating thing was, they were right. He knew how long the reach of the Council could be, and if Vernon and everyone else thought he was dead, they wouldn't be looking for him. It was the only way to keep all of them safe. But he didn't have to like it.
"Do you two have a long-term plan, beyond hiding in the middle of nowhere until they forget about us?"
"The plan's about the same as it ever was," Daniel said. "We're going to drop a PR bomb on the Council. They'll be too busy scrambling to fight off lawsuits and criminal charges to worry about us for awhile."
"Just in case, though, we'd already planned to lie low for awhile." Peggy's lips brushed across the back of his neck. "This doesn't change things a great deal. We simply have more reason than we did before to spend some time avoiding our usual locales."
"In all seriousness, Jack, we really couldn't have done any of this without you on the inside," Daniel said. "We might never have managed to get dirt on some of these bastards."
"You'd have found a way. Probably ludicrously dangerous and ill-advised, based on past experience."
Rebandaged and changed into a clean undershirt, Jack drowsed through the afternoon, stretched out on the bed. He woke to find that the hard white sunlight shafting through the window had turned soft and gold on the wall. When he'd fallen asleep, Daniel had been lying with him, playing casually with his hair -- Peggy had taken the soiled dressings off somewhere and hadn't come back -- but now he was alone on the rumpled bed. Voices drifted in from outside through the partly open window. He heard Peggy's laugh, and the silvery tinkle of another woman's laughter, who he guessed was Ana Jarvis, followed by the low cadence of Daniel's voice.
There was a glass of water beside the bed. He drank half of it, wincing at the taste, and took a morphine tablet. A short investigation of the bedroom uncovered clean men's clothes in the bureau in the corner; he guessed the slacks and shirts had been either borrowed from Jarvis, or bought by Jarvis, either of which was a weird thought, but they fit him well enough. He was able to dress himself without needing help as long as he took it slowly, waiting out dizzy spells by leaning on the corner of the bureau.
He left the bedroom and ventured out into the main part of the house. There were boxes of fat manilla envelopes on the floor, and Jack paused to glance through a few of them, finding ones addressed to various law enforcement agencies, newspapers, radio stations ... Apparently Peggy and Daniel were serious about this PR bomb idea of theirs.
Eventually he followed the sound of voices out to a veranda on the shady side of the house. All four of them were out here, sipping drinks and chatting as the day faded into evening.
"You're awake!" Ana Jarvis was the first to scramble to her feet; she dragged a chair over for him. Peggy and Daniel were holding hands, but Peggy reached out to brush her hand across his arm.
Jack wasn't entirely sure how to reciprocate. He didn't know what the Jarvises were supposed to know about his relationship with Peggy and Daniel; hell, he wasn't completely sure what his relationship with Peggy and Daniel actually was. On the other hand, the three of them seemed to be sharing a bedroom (or bedrooms, rather; none of the beds were big enough for three people, so it was more of a rota -- Peggy last night, Daniel this afternoon) and it wasn't like the ranch was big enough for word not to get around.
"Are you hungry?" Peggy asked him.
"I could eat." It surprised him to discover he wasn't just hungry, but ravenous.
They ate outside, devouring an incongruously gourmet meal spread out on a "rustic" plank table. Jack decided not to ask if they'd been waiting for him to wake up, since everything was ready except for a quick salad that Ana tossed together. The thought was a strange one, warm and unfamiliar in equal parts.
It was the first time he had a chance to talk with either Jarvis or the man's wife, but it was less awkward than he'd been expecting. Jarvis was polite, although wary, and Ana was openly friendly, even though Jack knew a blood-covered stranger couldn't have made the best first impression.
After dinner, Jarvis lit lanterns and they stayed outside in the long blue dusk. Peggy brought a thick blanket from inside and spread it on the decking. Jack was both annoyed and skeptical about this, but relented and lay down, mollified somewhat when Peggy and Daniel abandoned their chairs to sit with him. Out in the darkness somewhere, a coyote yapped and howled. The conversation washed over him; he wasn't really paying attention.
Maybe it wouldn't be too terrible spending a few days or even a few weeks out here, he thought drowsily. He wasn't a person who took vacations ... at least, he never had been before. There was always something more important to be done. You didn't climb the social ladder by sleeping on the job.
But now that life lay in flaming wreckage behind him. The thought was more strange than painful. He supposed that grief about everything he'd lost would probably set in eventually, but right now he couldn't find anything to miss: an empty house in a city where he never wanted to live in the first place, a job that had turned out to be more about doing other people's dirty work than serving law and order ...
Maybe having a little time to think about what he wanted to do next wasn't such a bad thing, after all.
He slitted his eyes open, watching Peggy and Daniel in the warm glow of the lanterns, both of them beautiful and unselfconscious. Although he wasn't included in their conversation at the moment, he didn't feel left out. He was content just to lie here and watch them.
They could use someone to watch their backs, he thought sleepily. Based on what he'd seen, a guy who was handy with a gun and had professional contacts in high places might be useful in their world.
He couldn't believe he was actually considering this.
But ... why not? What else did he have to do with his life? Peggy and Daniel were making a real difference in the world. When it came right down to it, he'd always thought of himself the hero type -- or at least he'd hoped he was. He'd thought the war would give him a chance to prove it, and instead it had done the opposite; and then he'd thought the SSR would be his redemption, but that hadn't worked out as he'd planned either.
Maybe this was his real second chance ... his opportunity to do better. To be better.
He wasn't sure if he was entirely ready to pitch the idea to them. What if they said no? Still, look at the competition, he thought. They were using mobsters for backup. Working with him had to be an improvement over that.
Peggy glanced his way, and Jack hastily closed his eyes. Nothing changed in the cadence of her conversation with Daniel, but she moved a little closer to him, and her hand found his in the lamplit dark.
~The Beginning~