you can call me L

It was Sophie — Sophie always, Sophie alone — who could draw such an exaggerated response out of this reformed rake, but it was the wait — the long months of abstinence while they were engaged, but not yet wed, as Benedict was nothing if not determined to respect any and all of Sophie's wishes — that transformed him from feverish for Sophie to downright feral. A mere touch and he was ready to whimper. That was his torture to bear, and only for one more night; no need to bother Sophie with the problem of relieving his seemingly unquenchable lust.

Then, during dinner, as Benedict's mother and endless gaggle of siblings each raised a toast to congratulate the couple, Sophie (who sat opposite him) kicked her up foot and delicately dragged down her dainty slipper — of silk, not glass — from the underside of his knees down to his ankle.

Benedict choked on a gulp of wine.

"Are you well, brother?" Francesca, who sat to his right, asked.

"Yes, of course. Yes! Yes. Yes." Good grief. Now, not only was he sullying his fiancée with increasingly impure thoughts, his fantasies running amok, but he was making a scene before his widowed sister, who'd so graciously given him and Sophie her blessing to proceed with their nuptials even while she was still donning her funereal blacks.

Benedict turned to Sophie, an apology at the ready, only to see her laugh into her cup. Laugh!

Nothing on God's green earth nor any hypothetical worlds beyond brought Benedict more joy than the sound of Sophie's pleasure, carnal or otherwise, even if it was at his expense, especially if it was at his expense. Her laughter at the sight of his confused arousal only made him more confused, more aroused, and thus promptly more laughter, and so on and so on. Oh dear Lord, may this feedback loop never end!

Dinner wound down soon enough. More toasts were made. More toasts (of the bread variety, that is) were served. Sophie looked at anyone and anything but Benedict, even as her feet lightly passed over his shin, once in a while. Benedict looked at nothing but Sophie, even when his mother bid them goodnight with stern instruction to remain in their separate wings of My-but-soon-to-be-Our Cottage. No one could accuse Benedict of being a rule stickler, but even if he had to sacrifice his mind, his sanity, even if he could never complete a second painting, he wanted to get this wedding right. He agonized for hours in that lonesome bed, taking himself in hand, flopping back in frustration when the mere fantasy of Sophie did not remotely quell his hunger for her reality, trying to surrender to sleep and pass by these tormenting hours unconscious, failing, and then, conjuring some new enticing image of his beloved, attempting to satisfy himself again.

He had just fished his cock out of his underpants when the knock came at his door.

Sophie.

"Sophie," Benedict sighed, the sight of her in a loose white nightgown, hair undone and and falling around her shoulders, bringing both relief and further torment. "What are you —"

She shoved him backward, then shoved the door shut.

"We should not ..."

"We should not what?" Her voice was rough, her desire too strong for her to even feign at a teasing innocence, the way she'd done when she played at being the silver ingénue at the masquerade.

With an arm full of Sophie, Benedict could hardly answer you if you'd asked for his own name, but he would always try to answer her. "We should be careful ... You said ... You didn't want ..."

"Oh, I want ..." Sophie whispered. Benedict's knees buckled at the sight of those eyes, glassy with wanting, dark with hunger. "I want you. I always want you." As he helplessly drew her back to him, she began mouthing at his neck. "It's one night."

"Oh ..."

"It's one night before we're married, before you become my husband, and I your wife."

"Oh my ..."

"One night. Even if I become with child" — her hands began to roam where his hand just been, dainty fingers dipping into his undergarments — "no one would know the difference." Her warmth tucked into his embrace, her lips at his ears. "Benedict, please?"

Months of patient restraint, carefully upholding a sacred vow, completely undone by a single plea?

—woke up.

Not gasping. Not drenched in sweat like the movies wanted you to believe. Just awake, staring at the ceiling of an apartment that had never quite stopped feeling temporary, heart doing something slow and heavy in your chest. The photo album was still open on the nightstand where you'd left it last night, like an idiot, like you didn't already have the pictures memorized. Your hand found it before your brain caught up to the decision, and you closed it. Didn't look. Didn't need to. You knew exactly which page it had fallen open to.

Eight years, give or take, of being the best shot the Army had. Not a boast — a fact, logged in performance reviews and confirmed kills and the kind of reputation that got you flown places nobody talked about afterward. You'd been good at distances that made other snipers uneasy, good at the math of wind and drop and timing, good at the stillness the job demanded of a body and a mind at the same time. People who didn't know better assumed that kind of good came from not feeling much. It hadn't. It had come from feeling everything and doing the job anyway, which was a different thing entirely, and a much more expensive one.

You set it face-down in the drawer and got up to make coffee like a person who had never met either of the men in that photograph.

Scout was already awake when you padded into the kitchen, tail thumping once against the cabinets in greeting before he settled back onto his bed by the window — a German Shepherd built like he still thought he was a puppy, even at seven, even at ninety-some pounds. He watched you with the mild, patient attentiveness of a dog who'd been trained young to read a room before he ever learned to sit. You scratched behind his ear on your way to the coffee maker and didn't think, on purpose, about who'd been standing next to you the day you picked him out.

★・・・・・・★

The phone rang at 6:52 a.m., which meant it was either a telemarketer or the government.

"This is a secure line for—" the voice started, all clipped professionalism, and you already knew.

"I retired," you said, before the woman could finish. "Whatever this is, I'm not—"

"Ma'am, I understand, and I apologize for the early call. My name's Emily Prentiss, I'm the Unit Chief of the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit. We have an active LDSK case in New York City — that's a long-distance serial killer, a shooter — and your name came up as a possible consultant."

You sat down slowly at the kitchen table. Outside, a garbage truck groaned its way down the street, ordinary and loud and nothing like this conversation.

"There are other snipers," you said. "Better ones, probably, that haven't been out of the field for years."

"There are other snipers," Prentiss agreed, easy, like she'd expected the pushback and had already decided not to fight you on the small stuff. "There's exactly one of you. My team is good — genuinely, some of the best people I've worked with — and I promise you nobody's going to pry into anything you don't want to talk about. This isn't a debrief. It's a consultation. One of my agents has read every paper, every case file, every piece of literature that exists on LDSKs and long-range shooters. He could recite it back to you cover to cover if you asked him to."

"Sounds like you don't need me, then."

"He's read about it," Prentiss said, and something in her voice sharpened just slightly, the way a person's does when they're circling toward the actual point. "You've done it. There's a difference between studying a discipline and having spent years living inside it — the instinct for it, the years of experience that don't show up in a textbook. That's not something my agent can replicate no matter how many books he gets through. And your file happens to say you've consulted on cases like this before. More than once."

"My file's wrong, then. I'm retired."

"Your file doesn't say that anywhere, actually." You could hear the smile in it, faint and entirely unbothered, like she'd read that exact line before making the call and had been waiting to use it. "But I'll let you keep saying it if it makes you feel better."

Consultant only. You almost laughed. As if the moment you looked at crime scene photos you wouldn't already be building the profile in your head without meaning to — cataloguing wind allowance, positioning, the story a shot told about the person who took it. You'd been doing that your whole life. It wasn't a skill you could hand over in pieces.

But you didn't say any of that. You just said, "Where do I need to be."

"JFK, six p.m. tonight. Someone from my team will meet you at the field office."

You hung up before the woman could say anything else, before the offer could turn real enough to take back.

★・・・・・・★

You should call someone. Tell someone you were going.

You ran through the list out of habit more than hope, and it came up short the way it always did these days. Your parents would worry more than help. The few friends who'd stuck around after the Army had learned, gently but firmly, not to ask what you did before the dogs and the veterans' program, and you weren't about to break that unspoken rule over a phone call at seven in the morning. There wasn't really a list. There was one name, and everyone else was just there to make it look like there were options.

Your thumb hovered over your contacts anyway. Luke Alvez. Still saved under a dumb nickname from a dumb night that used to make you laugh until you cried.

It would be so easy. Guess who's apparently never really retired. You could already hear how he'd say it back to you — not surprised, not really, because the two of you had always known the truth underneath the paperwork: neither of you had ever actually wanted to stop. You'd both just needed a version of stopping that let you keep breathing. He'd get that instantly, the way he got everything, and that was exactly the problem. He was the one person who wouldn't need it explained, and you hadn't let yourself need that kind of understood in three years.

You didn't call.

You told yourself it didn't mean anything — that he was probably still down in some field office in another state, running down bank robbers or whatever it was Bureau guys did after the Army spat them out the other side. Last you'd heard, he was stationed at Quantico, training new recruits or whatever it was he did now. Quantico wasn't even that far from New York, not really — a shuttle flight, a few hours by car if you wanted to be dramatic about it. But it was far enough that calling him out of nowhere to say hey, funny story, I'm about to be in your backyard would've sounded exactly like what it was: an excuse. And you didn't get to have excuses. Not with him. Not after three years of choosing not to.

You packed a bag. You didn't bring the photo album.

You had your phone out to text your usual dog-sitter before you'd even zipped the bag shut — a reflex, the same one that fired every time a job took you further than a day trip — and you got as far as typing hey, are you free this week before you stopped, thumb hovering, and looked over at Scout. He was sitting by the door already, head cocked, watching the suitcase with the particular alertness of a dog who knew exactly what a packed bag meant and had opinions about being left out of it.

You deleted the text.

"Yeah, okay," you said, and he was up and wagging before you'd even finished the sentence, like he'd understood you perfectly, which — knowing him — he probably had. It wasn't a hard decision, in the end. Some jobs you did alone because you had to. This one, you didn't have to, and you weren't in the mood to pretend you were tougher than you actually were about it. If you were about to spend however many weeks in a city that used to feel like a countdown clock, you weren't doing it without the one piece of home that had a heartbeat.

You told yourself that didn't mean anything either.

★・・・・・・★

The BAU's temporary field office took up half a floor in a building that still smelled like fresh paint, the kind of space a task force gets handed when nobody expected to need it for this long — all glass partitions and hastily labeled evidence boards, extension cords taped down along baseboards, a coffee machine that had clearly been donated rather than budgeted for. Boxes of case files sat stacked against one wall, still half taped shut, and someone had already pinned up a map of the five boroughs so dense with colored string and marker that it looked less like an investigation and more like an argument nobody had won yet. It had the particular chaos of a task force that hadn't had time to get organized, the sense of a room built in a hurry around an emergency that wasn't slowing down to let anyone catch their breath. You'd flown in expecting exactly this — the fluorescent lights a shade too bright, the low hum of people who hadn't slept properly in days — and some small, traitorous part of you had missed it more than you'd admit to anyone with a badge. You'd barely made it through the security checkpoint, Scout's leash looped twice around your wrist and your duffel over one shoulder, when he went rigid.

Not scared-rigid. Focused-rigid, ears up, the specific stillness that meant he'd caught a scent he cared about.

"Scout—"

He was gone before you finished his name, leash yanked clean out of your hand, nails skidding on the tile as he shot down the hallway like he'd been fired out of something. You swore under your breath and went after him, already mortified, already composing the apology you were about to owe some very confused federal agent, and then you turned the corner and your whole chest did something complicated and fast, because Scout wasn't tackling a stranger.

Scout was up on his hind legs with his front paws braced against Luke Alvez's chest, tail going so hard his entire back half was moving with it, making a sound that was half-whine, half-joy, the sound he only ever made for exactly one person who wasn't you.

Luke went down on one knee without even seeming to think about it, both hands coming up to scratch behind Scout's ears, laughing that low surprised laugh you'd have known blindfolded, in a crowd, from a hundred yards out with a scope between you and him. "Hey — hey, buddy, whoa —"

You caught up a second later, breathless, mortified, and froze.

"I'm so sorry," you said, to the top of Luke's head, because it was easier than saying anything to his face yet. "He doesn't do this. He's never done this with anyone but — that's actually why I brought him, he's only ever—"

Luke looked up.

Everything you'd rehearsed on the flight over — every version of hi you'd practiced not needing, every careful, professional greeting you'd built like scaffolding around the actual thing you felt — evaporated on contact, useless, the way plans always were the second reality showed up wearing a different face than you'd braced for.

Three years. Three years of telling yourself it had dulled, that time did what it was supposed to do, that whatever this had been was something you'd survived rather than something you were still, quietly, unforgivably inside of. And here it was, undulled, unsurvived, sitting up in your chest like it had never once agreed to leave. He was familiar in a way that had nothing to do with memory and everything to do with instinct — the exact angle he tilted his head, the exact way his mouth did that thing before it decided whether to smile — and at the same time he was almost a stranger, a man three years further into a life you hadn't watched him build, new lines and new weight and new history you had no claim to and every reason to want. Nearly a stranger. Only nearly. That gap, that specific, aching nearly, was somehow worse than either extreme would have been.

You understood, distantly, that you were never going to get over this. Not really. Not all the way. You'd built an entire life around the shape of after him and it had never once occurred to you that the shape had a name, and the name was standing four feet away with dog hair on his slacks, looking at you like he was doing the exact same arithmetic and getting the exact same impossible number.

"Oh," you said. Just that. Just, oh.

"Hi," Luke said back, still crouched, one hand buried in Scout's fur like he needed somewhere to put it, somewhere safer than reaching for you. Not omg it's you. Not dramatic, not performed for anyone watching. Just quiet, a little stunned, like he was checking the words against the person in front of him and finding, against all odds, that they still fit. "Hi."

"Hi," you said again, because apparently that was the whole vocabulary you had left, the entirety of three years and every unsent text and every 2 a.m. flashback compressed down into one syllable said twice.

Neither of you moved for a second that stretched out longer than it had any business stretching. Scout, oblivious to the tension he'd just detonated, flopped fully into Luke's lap like the last three years hadn't happened to him either — like there was no gap at all, no nearly, just the two people he loved most in the world finally back in the same room, which, you thought, distantly, half-hysterically, was maybe the only uncomplicated read on this entire moment that either of you were going to get.

"Well," said a voice from down the hall, dry and amused and entirely unbothered by walking into whatever this was, "I did not have dog on the bingo card for today."

You looked up to find a woman in a sharp blazer leaning in the doorway of what was clearly the makeshift bullpen, arms crossed, eyebrows doing a lot of quiet, diplomatic work. "Emily Prentiss," she said, crossing over and offering a hand, which you shook while Luke was still getting to his feet, Scout's leash now firmly back in his grip instead of yours. "We spoke this morning."

"Right. Hi. Sorry — this is Scout."

"I gathered." Prentiss glanced between you and Luke with the specific patience of someone filing information away for later without commenting on it yet. "You didn't mention a dog on the phone."

"You didn't give me a lot of time to organize a sitter," you said, which was, everyone in a ten-foot radius could tell, an absolute lie — the kind that only worked if nobody bothered to call it out, and clearly nobody was going to bother, not yet. "And I'm just consulting, so — it doesn't really mean anything. It's not a whole thing. The hotel you put me in is dog-friendly, so. It's fine. It works out."

"Mm," Prentiss said, in the tone of someone who understood exactly seventy percent more than she was letting on. "It's fine. It works out." A beat, her eyes flicking to Luke, who was very carefully not reacting to any of this, both hands still on the dog like Scout was a life raft. "Alvez, why don't you get our consultant set up at a desk." Prentiss's eyes moved between the two of you again, slower this time, clocking something she clearly wasn't going to say out loud yet. "I take it you two know each other."

"We — yeah." Luke straightened up, and it took him a beat too long to find anywhere to put his hands now that Scout had abandoned his lap for yours. "We've met. It's been a while."

"A while," you echoed, which wasn't an answer so much as a confirmation that neither of you were going to be more specific than that in front of a Unit Chief you'd known for exactly nine minutes.

"Right," Prentiss said, in a tone that made it very clear she'd noticed the gap between a while and whatever the actual truth was, and had decided, for now, to let it sit there unexamined. She wasn't the type to leave a thread like that alone forever — you could tell that much already — but she also clearly knew better than to yank on it in a hallway. "Get her set up. Conference room in ten, max. We've got another body."

★・・・・・・★

Ten minutes turned into six, because neither of you knew what to do with the other four.

You both just sort of... stood there, for a second, in the wreckage of Prentiss's exit, like two people who'd rehearsed an entire reunion in their heads a hundred different ways and discovered, on arrival, that none of the scripts covered awkwardly hovering in a hallway while your dog demands attention from your ex-something. Ex-what, even. That had never gotten a name. That was sort of the whole problem.

"So," Luke said. Then didn't finish it. Just crouched back down instead, like Scout was a much safer place to put his attention than you were, and went back to scratching under his chin while the dog leaned his whole weight into it, eyes half-closed in bliss, blissfully unaware he was doing the emotional heavy lifting for both of you.

"So," you agreed, and crouched too, because apparently you also needed somewhere safer to look.

"Still can't believe he remembers me," Luke said finally, not looking up, scratching under Scout's chin while the dog leaned his whole weight into it, eyes half-closed in bliss. "It's been three years. That's insane."

"He's smarter than either of us." Your voice came out rougher than you meant it to, and you cleared your throat like that would fix it, like three years of not saying things could be cleared like that. "Better memory too, apparently."

Luke huffed something that was almost a laugh, shaking his head. "Roxy would be so jealous right now if she could see this. She still holds a grudge over a squirrel from two years ago, but sure, let's talk about my dog's memory."

Something loosened in your chest at just hearing her name, easy and unprompted, like she'd never stopped being a fixture in his life. "How's she doing?"

"Good. Getting a little gray around the muzzle, slowing down some, but she's good." He said it plain, unguarded, and there was something in the casualness of it that hit you harder than a bigger admission would have — proof that whatever this had been between the two of you, at least the dogs had made it through intact, even where the two of you clearly hadn't. "She's the best decision either of us ever made." He glanced up at that, something wry and a little pointed in it, like he knew exactly how that sentence could be read two different ways and had chosen it on purpose.

"Low bar," you said, mostly to have something to say.

"Wasn't talking about the bar," Luke said, and the look he gave you then was steadier than it had any right to be, like he'd meant exactly what he said and wasn't going to pretend otherwise just because it was inconvenient. You risked a glance up. Immediately regretted it, in the specific way that meant you'd be doing it again in about four seconds anyway. He was close enough that you could see the new lines at the corners of his eyes, the little scar above his eyebrow that definitely hadn't been there before, the new certainty in how he held himself — steadier than the man in your photo album, older in the ways that mattered and none of the ways that didn't. It was unfair, honestly, how much you wanted to reach out and just — touch his face, confirm he was real, confirm all of this was actually happening and not some elaborate stress dream your brain had cooked up on the flight over. You didn't. Obviously you didn't. You dug your nails into your own palm instead and said, "You look good, Alvez."

"You look—" He stopped. Actually stopped, mid-word, like his mouth had gotten ahead of whatever his brain had cleared for release, and you watched him visibly recalibrate, watched him swallow whatever the first version of that sentence had been. "You look like you didn't know I'd be here."

"I didn't." Your face was doing something you didn't have full control over. Probably too much. Probably way too much, for a conversation that was supposedly about a dog. "If I'd known, I—" You stopped too. Great. Now you were doing it.

"You'd have what?"

"I don't know." You did know. You absolutely knew, and the knowing was the exhausting part. "Would've needed longer to say yes, maybe."

"Would you have come if you had?" Luke asked, and it wasn't an accusation, which was somehow worse than if it had been — it was genuinely curious, a little braced, like he'd already decided he could survive either answer and just needed to know which muscles to brace before it landed.

You looked at Scout instead of at him, which was cheating, and you both knew it, and neither of you called it out, because calling it out would've meant admitting why the cheating was necessary in the first place.

"I don't know," you said again, and then, because the silence afterward felt worse than honesty, "Probably. Eventually. Like I said. It would've just taken me longer."

Luke nodded slowly, jaw doing something tight, like that answer was somehow both better and worse than the one he'd braced for — better because it wasn't no, worse because eventually had a three-year track record of meaning not yet, not yet, still not yet. Scout, entirely unaware he'd just been the emotional load-bearing wall for an entire reunion, rolled fully onto his back and demanded his stomach be rubbed, four paws in the air, tail thumping the tile, and you both dropped your hands to him at the exact same time, knuckles brushing for half a second before you both pulled back like you'd touched something hot.

Neither of you said anything about that either.

"Ten minutes," you managed eventually, standing too fast, brushing dog hair off your knees that definitely didn't need brushing, just needed somewhere for your hands to go that wasn't him. "Conference room?"

"Yeah." Luke stood too, and didn't step back the way the moment probably called for, close enough that you had to actually, consciously decide not to reach for him, which was its own small, exhausting exercise, one you had a feeling you were going to be doing on a loop for however long this case lasted. "Yeah. Come on. I'll introduce you to the team before Prentiss decides we're taking too long and comes to do it herself."

"She seems like she would."

"You have no idea," Luke said, with a look that suggested there was a whole story there he wasn't getting into right now, and for just a second, walking side by side down that hallway with Scout trotting happy and oblivious between you, tail still going, leash slack because neither of you had bothered to hold it tight, it felt almost like no time had passed at all.

Almost. And that almost was going to be the death of you, you already knew, walking into that conference room with your heart doing something it had absolutely no business doing at a professional consultation, on day one, over a man you weren't supposed to still feel like this about.

★・・・・・・★

The conference room had the particular hush of a briefing that had been given too many times already — the kind where the words come out flat because everyone's said them enough times to stop hearing themselves say them. A younger agent you hadn't met yet, all gangly limbs and rapid-fire delivery, was midway through walking the room through victimology when you and Luke slipped in, Scout settling under the table by your feet like he'd done this a hundred times before, which, you supposed, in a sense, he had.

Prentiss caught your eye and paused the briefing just long enough to wave a hand around the table. "Quick introductions since you'll be around for a while — JJ, David Rossi, Dr. Tara Lewis." A blonde woman gave you a small, warm nod; an older man with sharp eyes and the bearing of someone who'd been doing this since before you were born inclined his head; a woman with a steady, assessing gaze offered something closer to a genuine smile. "And you've clearly already met Spencer" — a small, dry look at the agent who'd been mid-ramble when you walked in — "Dr. Reid. And Alvez, obviously, you know."

"Obviously," you said, and didn't look at Luke when you said it, which took more effort than it should have.

The younger agent — Spencer, apparently, Dr. Spencer Reid — picked back up where he'd left off, and you made yourself focus on the screen instead of the fact that you were sitting across a table from Luke Alvez for the first time in three years like this was just a normal Tuesday.

"—six victims in eleven days, all shot at range, all with a single kill shot to center mass or head, no pattern in victim selection we've been able to establish yet. Different ages, different neighborhoods, different times of day. If there's a signature connecting them, it's not in who he's picking."

You made yourself look at the photos when they came up. That was always the part nobody warned you about going in — not the math, not the science of it, but the actual faces, the actual stillness of people who'd been walking down a street an hour before they weren't anymore. Something in you wanted to look away the way it always did, the old reflex, the part of you that had spent three years building a life specifically so you wouldn't have to look at this kind of thing again.

But you didn't look away, because looking away wasn't actually what made you good at your old job, and it wasn't what was going to make you good at this one either. You'd spent years telling yourself that the reason you'd been so good behind a scope was that you'd learned how to go somewhere cold and empty inside yourself and stay there until the job was done — and that was true, as far as it went, but it had never been the whole truth. The actual truth, the one you'd never said out loud to anyone except maybe Luke, on maybe one specific night neither of you talked about anymore, was that you'd never gone cold at all. You felt every single one of it — every shot, every consequence, every face on a board like this one — and you'd just learned, somewhere along the way, how to let that feeling sharpen you instead of break you. That wasn't the same as not feeling it. It was the opposite, actually. You were good at this precisely because you didn't have the luxury of looking away from what it cost.

You made yourself hold the victims' faces in your mind a second longer than was comfortable, and then you looked at the geography instead, because that, at least, you could do something useful with.

"He's disciplined enough to hit six for six," Reid said, "which in itself tells us something. Most LDSKs, especially unsubs without formal training, miss at least once over this many attempts. Range, wind, breathing — it's not intuitive. So we're looking at either military training, competitive shooting background, or extensive—"

"He's not that disciplined," you said.

The room went quiet in the specific way rooms go quiet when someone new has just contradicted the person who'd clearly been the smartest guy in every room he'd ever walked into.

"He's hitting six for six," Reid said, careful, not defensive exactly, just recalibrating in real time. "That's a hundred percent kill rate at range. That's not undisciplined."

"It's a hundred percent kill rate," you agreed. "That's not the same as a hundred percent accurate rate. Can I see the wound photos again — not the summary, the actual entry points?"

Prentiss pulled them up. You leaned forward, and something in you that had been dormant for three years — quiet, patient, waiting — sat up and paid attention.

"There," you said, pointing at the second photo. "And there. Look at the entry point relative to where you'd expect a center-mass shot to land if it were placed the way a trained shooter places it. He's hitting the kill zone every time, but he's not centered in it. He's landing high-left on three of these, low-right on the other two. That's not intentional shot placement. That's a shooter whose fundamentals are good enough to guarantee lethality but not good enough to guarantee precision. There's a difference between a kill shot and a perfect shot, and every one of these is the first, not the second."

Reid was quiet for a second, working through it, and you watched the exact moment it landed for him — a small, genuine, unbothered nod, the nod of someone who valued being right less than he valued being accurate. "That's — huh. That's a meaningful distinction. What would cause that kind of consistent-but-imprecise pattern?"

"Could be a lot of things. But if I had to guess without seeing it in person? Impatience. Someone who's good, and knows he's good, and isn't slowing down enough between the trigger pull to actually confirm the shot the way someone properly trained would. That's not a discipline problem. That's an ego problem."

"And the lack of a victim connection?" Rossi asked, arms crossed, the first thing he'd said since introductions.

"I don't think there is one. Not in the people, anyway." You looked back at the map on the wall, the string and pins marking each location. "I think you're looking for a connection in the wrong place. He's not picking victims. He's picking positions — buildings with the right sightlines, the right elevation, the right distance to make an easy, comfortable shot. The victims are probably just whoever happened to be the best target from wherever he'd already decided to set up. That's backwards from how most of these guys operate. Most LDSKs choose a victim and then find a position to reach them. I think this guy finds a position he likes and then just takes whatever's in front of him."

Rossi's eyebrows went up slightly, and he exchanged a look with Prentiss that you didn't fully catch the meaning of, but that felt, unmistakably, like the start of something clicking into place for the room.

Luke, across the table, hadn't said anything yet, but you could feel him watching you with an expression you recognized immediately and hated slightly, because it was the exact same look he used to get watching you work a range back before either of you had ever heard the word unsub — something warm and a little awed and entirely unsubtle about it.

"Could you tell more from the actual scene?" Prentiss asked. "Not just the photos."

"We already know roughly where he was shooting from on the last one," Rossi said. "General direction, at least. We just don't have the exact building, let alone the exact floor. There's four high-rises with a clean sightline to that intersection, and the math gets messy fast — witnesses moved the body trying to check for a pulse before anyone realized what they were dealing with, so the original position's been compromised. We've got a general trajectory. We don't have a window."

"Photos flatten everything anyway," you said. "I'd want to see the angle in person — the actual position, the actual distance, what it would've taken to get there and set up without being seen. If the body's been moved, the math from photos alone is only ever going to get you in the neighborhood. I might be able to narrow it past that." You glanced at the most recent crime scene photo still up on the screen — a wide avenue, four buildings across from it with dozens of possible windows between them. "Where was the most recent one?"

★・・・・・・★

Of the four high-rises with a sightline to the intersection, you'd ruled two out before you'd even gotten out of the car — wrong angle relative to the entry wound, one of them blocked at the right height by a rooftop water tower nobody had apparently thought to check for. That left two candidates, and by the time you stood on the sidewalk looking up at both of them, cross-referencing the wound angle against each building's face, you were fairly sure which one it was: fifty-eight stories of glass and steel, close enough to the intersection to explain the shot placement without needing an implausible level of skill to compensate for extra distance.

You stepped out of the elevator onto the fifty-fifth floor — the floor you'd settled on, before you'd even seen the building up close, based on angle math you'd done in your head on the walk over from the car — aware of Reid a step behind you, notebook out, and Luke a step behind him, hands in his pockets, watching you the way you imagine people watch weather they can't quite believe is real.

"Fifty-fifth," Reid said, checking something on his phone. "That's — how did you land on fifty-fifth specifically, out of fifty-eight floors?"

"Angle of the wound relative to the victim's height and the width of the avenue. Basic trigonometry, once you know the distance across the street and the drop, even with the body having been moved before anyone photographed the original position — you can back the angle out from the wound track itself, it doesn't actually depend on where the body ended up afterward." You said it like it was obvious, because to you, it was — the same way breathing was obvious, the same way it had been obvious for eight years of your life before it had also been the thing that ended it. "This floor, or the one below it. This one has a better sightline to where he was hitting."

The office space on fifty-five was mid-renovation, half the floor stripped down to concrete and exposed wiring, which made it, you thought, almost insultingly easy — no furniture to hide behind, no carpet to disguise anything. You walked the windows slowly, scanning, and stopped at the third one from the corner.

"Here."

"How do you know?" Luke asked, and it wasn't a challenge, it was just genuine, a little helpless, like he already knew you were right and just wanted to hear you explain it because he'd missed hearing you explain things.

You crouched by the window, running two fingers lightly along a set of faint scuff marks on the concrete a few feet back from the glass — nothing dramatic, nothing a person not looking for it would ever clock. "Bipod marks. See the spacing? That's a shooter who set up prone, not standing, which tells you he's had at least some training, because most amateurs shoot from a standing or kneeling position at range and he clearly knows better than that." You moved a foot to the left, crouched again, studying the angle of the marks against the window. "But look at the positioning relative to the glass. He's set up closer to the window than he needed to be. A trained shooter, someone who's actually been taught fieldcraft, sets up back from the opening — minimizes silhouette, reduces muzzle flash visibility, gives himself more concealment. This guy's practically got his barrel in the glass. That's someone who either doesn't know better, or—"

"Or doesn't care," Reid finished, slower now, watching you the way you imagine he usually got watched by other people.

"Or doesn't care," you agreed. "Which, combined with the imprecise shot placement — that's not fear, and it's not sloppiness exactly. That's someone who wants it to be easy. Someone who's not particularly worried about getting caught, because getting caught would almost be a bonus. He wants to be seen being good at this. He's not hiding from the risk of being noticed. He's just not thinking that far ahead, because he's got a version of invincibility going on that only shows up in people who are young, and confident, and have never once had it seriously threatened."

"Age?" Prentiss asked, arms crossed, watching all of this from a few feet back with an expression that hadn't moved much, though you were starting to understand that was mostly just her face.

"Younger than you'd think for someone this capable. Late twenties at the outside, could be younger. Older shooters — even self-taught ones — develop a wariness that shows up in setup and positioning even when the actual shot's good. This is someone who hasn't had the years yet to get scared of anything."

"You never had that," Luke said, quiet, mostly to you, while Reid was busy photographing the bipod marks and Prentiss was a few feet off on the phone with Rossi. "The overconfidence thing. You were better than guys twice your age by the time you were twenty-four and you were still double-checking everything like you didn't trust yourself."

"I trusted myself fine. I just didn't trust the wind." It came out lighter than you meant it to, and you glanced at him, and something in his face made you add, "That's not overconfidence. Overconfidence gets people killed. I wanted to be good enough that I didn't have to be lucky."

"I remember." He said it simply, no weight thrown behind it on purpose, though it landed like weight anyway. "You used to make me recheck my own math twice before you'd let me take a shot. Drove me insane at the time."

"You're welcome."

"I didn't say I was complaining." A small, crooked smile, there and gone. "I still do it, actually. Recheck. Every time. Some habits you don't get to unlearn just because the person who taught them to you isn't standing next to you anymore."

You didn't have anything to say to that, or you had too much to say to that, which amounted to the same problem, so you turned back to the window instead and let the silence do the work neither of you were equipped to do out loud, not here, not with Rossi twenty feet away and a murder to solve.

You crouched lower, studying the scuff marks again, and something about the pattern of them started to bother you the longer you looked. "There's something else. Look at how many separate marks there are here — not one clean bipod set, adjusted once and left. Three, four distinct positions, all within about a foot of each other. That's not a shooter calmly repositioning for a better angle. That's someone shifting because he's frustrated, resettling because the first position didn't feel right and neither did the second. Real patience looks like stillness. This doesn't look like stillness. This looks like someone who couldn't get comfortable and kept moving instead of just waiting it out."

"Anger," Reid said, half to himself, writing it down.

"Maybe. Or just impatience that reads like anger from the outside — genuinely not sure there's a difference for someone like this." You looked back at the victim data on your phone, the timeline Prentiss had sent over. "And look at victim selection again — for someone this disciplined, he's not waiting for a clean, ideal target. He's taking the first person who steps into a decent kill zone. That's not restraint. That's someone who wants the shot over with the second it's available, because sitting there waiting is the part he can't stand."

"That tracks with the shot placement being consistently off," Reid said. "If he's rushing the moment he's got a target instead of waiting for the ideal window—"

"Right, but it's more specific than just rushing." You crouched down further, eye level with the scuff marks, picturing it — the actual physical mechanics of it, a body you knew intimately because you'd spent years inside the same posture yourself. "Every one of these shots is off in the same general direction — high-left, or close to it, on most of them. That's not random error from rushing. That's something mechanical and repeated. Something he's doing every single time without realizing it." You thought about it for another second, chasing the shape of it. "Could be a grip issue. Could be breathing. But if I had to guess — that kind of consistent pull, paired with the impatience — that's the kind of thing that happens when someone's clenching their jaw through the shot. Grinding, ticking, whatever you want to call it. It changes your whole upper body tension without you noticing, and it pulls a shot in a specific, repeatable direction. It's a tell a lot of people never train out of, because most people never even realize they're doing it."

You crouched down all the way then, scanning along the base of the window, running your eyes over the floor the way you'd have checked your own position afterward, out of habit, out of the same restlessness you'd just described.

"Or what?" Reid asked, waiting, notebook ready.

"Or he chews gum," you said, and stopped. Half-tucked behind a folded drop cloth left by the renovation crew, small, easy to miss, exactly the kind of thing that got kicked under something and forgotten by an unsub in a hurry to leave a scene, was a single flattened wad of gum.

You crouched again and looked, without touching it.

"There's gum here," you said. "Under the cloth."

Reid was beside you in an instant, and even Prentiss had crossed the room by the time you'd finished the sentence. "Gum," Reid repeated, like the word itself was a gift.

"He chews gum while he's set up. Probably out of habit, probably out of the same restlessness that's messing with his shot placement — somebody who can't sit still long enough to be perfectly precise probably can't sit still long enough to go twenty minutes without something to do with his mouth either. If that's his, and it's got saliva on it, you've got DNA. You've got an actual name behind all of this, not just a profile."

Prentiss was already on the phone with evidence recovery before you'd finished talking, rattling off the floor number and a request for a rush on any DNA processing, and Reid was crouched next to you now, notebook forgotten, just looking at the gum and then at you like he was recalibrating an entire internal model of what you were capable of.

"That's — genuinely impressive work," Reid said, and he sounded like he meant it, no edge to it at all, the particular grace of someone secure enough in his own intelligence that watching someone else be right didn't cost him anything. "I've read every case study that exists on LDSK profiling and I would not have caught the bipod spacing. I wouldn't have thought to look for gum at all."

"You've read them," you said, not unkindly, echoing something Prentiss had said to you on the phone that morning without quite meaning to. "I used to live inside one of these setups for a living. It's a different kind of knowing."

"Clearly," Reid said, and it wasn't grudging, it was something closer to delighted, the tone of a man who loved being handed new information more than he loved being right.

Luke, over by the window, hadn't said anything in a while, and when you glanced over he was just watching you with that same unsubtle warmth from before, arms loose at his sides, like he'd forgotten there was a room full of other people in it.

"What," you said.

"Nothing." He shook his head slightly, a small, helpless smile breaking through despite himself. "I just forgot how good you are at this. Watching you do it in person instead of just — hearing about it after. It's different."

"You've literally seen me do this before, Alvez."

"Yeah," he said. "I know. Doesn't make it less impressive."

"You're being weird."

"I'm allowed to be weird. I haven't watched you work a scene in three years, forgive me for having feelings about it." He said it easy, almost joking, but there was something underneath it that wasn't a joke at all, something that made you look away first before he could see exactly how much that landed. "You know most people would've missed the gum."

"Most people weren't trained to think like the guy who left it there."

"That's not — " He stopped, recalibrated, tried again. "That's not just training. I've worked with plenty of people who came out of the same programs you did, similar backgrounds, similar skill sets. None of them do what you just did in there. That's not just muscle memory. That's you." He said it like it mattered to him that you understood the distinction, like it wasn't a compliment he was handing you so much as a correction he needed you to accept. "I don't think you ever gave yourself enough credit for that. Even back then."

"You always said that."

"I always meant it." A beat, his eyes steady on yours in a way that made the renovation-site noise and Reid's muttering by the window and the whole rest of the room fall away for a second. "Still do."

You looked away first, mostly because you didn't trust your own face not to give away exactly how much that landed, and busied yourself watching the evidence tech who'd just arrived carefully bag the gum, chain of custody forms already coming out, the whole apparatus of a real investigation clicking into motion around a piece of chewed gum you'd found because you knew, in your bones, what kind of person left it there.

It was, you thought, the first time in three years that being this good at this particular thing had felt like something other than a wound.

★・・・・・・★

Garcia's face filled half the screen in the conference room, hair a color you didn't have a name for, talking faster than you could fully track. "Okay, so, the gum — DNA came back, and we've got a partial hit. Not a full match in CODIS, which means he's never been convicted of anything that requires a sample, but there's a familial match. His name's Caleb Voss, twenty-six, and his older brother did two years for aggravated assault a few years back, which is how we've got anything at all."

"Twenty-six," Reid said, glancing at you, something almost pleased in it, like a number confirming a hypothesis always was. "You said late twenties at the outside."

"I said younger than you'd think. I didn't say I was going to be exact." But you felt it too, the small, satisfying click of a guess turning into a fact.

"No priors of his own," Garcia went on. "Not even a parking ticket, if you can believe it. Which, for a guy who's killed six people in eleven days, is either really lucky or—"

"Or exactly what we said," you finished. "Someone who's never been caught doing anything, ever, and thinks that means he's untouchable. That's not luck. That's a kid who's spent his whole life getting away with things and has started to believe it's a permanent condition."

"He works — well, worked, up until about two weeks ago — at a sporting goods store in Queens," Garcia said, pulling up an employee photo, a young guy with a soft, unremarkable face, the kind of face that would never make anyone cross the street. "Fired for what his manager's statement calls 'attitude issues.' Coworkers describe him as, quote, 'always had something to prove,' and one former manager specifically flagged that he'd get visibly frustrated over small stuff, clench his jaw, storm off the floor. No fixed address since, according to his last known lease, which lapsed a month ago."

Reid looked up from his laptop, something almost delighted crossing his face. "Jaw clenching. That's — you called that. Specifically."

"I did." It landed somewhere strange in your chest, hearing it confirmed out loud like that, a piece of a stranger's body language you'd built entirely out of scuff marks and a shot pattern turning into an actual documented fact about an actual person. Every thread you'd pulled at in that half-renovated office was turning out to be attached to something real — the impatience, the arrogance, the refusal to wait for a clean shot, all of it, apparently, just who this kid had always been, long before he'd ever picked up a rifle.

"There's more," Garcia said, scrolling. "Two separate write-ups for insubordination, both times over being told to wait — once for a delivery he thought should've come faster, once over a schedule change he didn't agree with. This is not a patient man. This is not, and I cannot stress this enough, a man who enjoys being told to hang on a second."

"That's the victim selection," you said, half to the room, half working it out loud for your own benefit. "He's not choosing targets. He's not capable of choosing targets, because choosing requires patience he's never once demonstrated in his adult life. He sees an opening and he takes it, immediately, because waiting even thirty more seconds for a better one is apparently unbearable to him. Same with the setup — the way he's practically got the barrel in the glass instead of hanging back. He's not being careless because he doesn't know better. He's being careless because slowing down long enough to do it properly isn't something he's built to do."

"So he's not tethered to anywhere obvious." Prentiss frowned at the board. "No fixed address since the lease lapsed, no priors, nothing to pull him toward a particular location. That complicates finding him fast."

"Not as much as you'd think," you said, and something in you — the same something that had gone quiet and patient in the conference room the first day — sat forward. "If he's genuinely as impatient and unrooted as the profile suggests, he's not planning three steps ahead. He's not hiding well because hiding well requires patience he doesn't have. He'll be somewhere close to a good vantage point, somewhere he doesn't have to think hard about getting to. Probably somewhere he already knows. Family, an ex, an old friend who'll let him crash without asking questions."

"The brother," Luke said, already pulling up an address on his own laptop, close enough beside you that you could feel the warmth off him without quite touching. "If Caleb's like this, he's probably still in contact with the one person in his life who's proven he'll get away with things. Shared history. Same appetite for it, if the assault charge is anything to go by."

"Exactly." You looked over at him, and something passed between you that had nothing to do with the case and everything to do with how easily the two of you had just built that thought together, half a sentence each, the way you used to build a plan back when the stakes were a training exercise instead of six bodies. Every single piece of it had held. Every guess you'd made standing in that stripped-down office, working off nothing but scuff marks and a piece of gum and eight years of knowing exactly what it felt like to be that impatient, that hungry to be seen as good at something — all of it, real. A whole person, built out of instinct, turning out to be exactly who you'd said he'd be.

It should have felt like vindication. Mostly, it just felt like proof of something you'd never really doubted about yourself, and had spent three years trying not to need proven.

★・・・・・・★

The brother's apartment was above a laundromat in Astoria, up a narrow flight of stairs that smelled like fabric softener and old carpet, and the two of you went together — not officially paired off, nobody had said the words, but somehow it had just happened that way, the same way it always used to, like your bodies remembered a formation your mouths had never needed to discuss.

Luke knocked, hard, three times, and said "FBI, open up" in a voice you hadn't heard from him before — flat, authoritative, all the easy warmth from earlier completely gone, replaced with something that made even you straighten up a little beside him.

There was a long pause, footsteps, and then the door opened four inches, caught on a chain, one eye and a slice of a wary face visible in the gap.

"Yeah?"

"Marcus Voss?" Luke held his badge up close enough to the gap that the guy couldn't pretend not to see it. "We need to ask you some questions about your brother."

"Don't know where he is." The door didn't move. "Told the other guy that already."

"We didn't ask if you knew where he is," Luke said, stepping half a foot closer, enough that his shoulder filled most of the remaining light through the gap. "We asked if we could come in and talk. There's a difference, and I'd think about which side of that difference you want to be standing on, because obstruction in an active homicide investigation is not the kind of thing that goes away on its own."

You watched Marcus's eye flick past Luke, land on you, and something in his posture shifted — not relaxed, exactly, but recalibrating, the way people do when the threat in front of them suddenly has a second option standing just behind it.

You caught Luke's gaze for half a second. Neither of you said anything. You didn't need to — three years apart hadn't touched this particular language, the one you'd built together long before either of you had ever worked a real case, the one where he went hard so you didn't have to, and you went soft so he didn't have to keep being the only voice in the room. He read it off you the same way he always had, some old shared instinct clicking back into place without either of you consciously reaching for it, and he took one small, deliberate step back, just enough to let you forward into the space he'd made.

"Marcus," you said, gentler, unhurried, nothing behind it but tired understanding. "I know this is scary. I know whatever loyalty you've got left for your brother is probably fighting pretty hard with whatever fear you've got right now, and that's an awful place to be standing. We're not here to make things worse for you. We just need five minutes."

The chain rattled. The door shut for a second — long enough that you weren't sure which way it would go — and then opened properly, and Marcus stepped back to let you both in, arms crossed over a stained t-shirt, looking at the floor more than at either of you.

The apartment was small and cluttered in the specific way of someone who'd let a sibling crash on their couch more than once and never quite gotten the space back afterward. You clocked the jacket on the hook by the door immediately — two sizes too big for the man standing in front of you — and didn't say anything about it yet.

"He hasn't been staying here," Marcus said, before either of you had asked. Too fast. The kind of answer that arrived before the question because he'd rehearsed it already, probably lying awake with it the last few nights. "I don't know where he's been."

"When did you last see him?" Luke asked, arms crossed, voice still hard but not cruel, holding the line without pushing past it now that you were inside.

"Couple weeks, maybe. I don't keep track." Marcus's eyes flicked to the jacket on the hook and away again, fast, the kind of tell a person doesn't know they're giving. "He's not — he wouldn't do what you're saying he did. He's not like that."

"I think you know he might be," you said, quiet, not unkind, and watched something crack very slightly behind Marcus's eyes — not a confession, not yet, but the specific look of a person who already knew the truth and hadn't let himself sit with it until a stranger said it out loud in his kitchen. He didn't answer that. He didn't have to. You'd gotten everything you needed from the look alone, the same way you'd gotten everything you needed from a floor covered in scuff marks two days ago — not a full statement, but enough truth leaking out around the edges of a lie to build the rest of the shape yourself.

You asked a few more questions after that — routine ones, ones you already half-knew the useless answers to — and Marcus gave you nothing solid, no address, no plan, nothing you could act on directly. But none of that mattered as much as the two things you left with: the jacket, and the look on his face when you'd said he might be, which told you plainly enough that Caleb had been here recently, and that some part of Marcus was waiting, dreading, half-hoping for the knock on the door that had just happened.

Back out on the sidewalk, the door shut behind you, you exhaled long enough that it fogged slightly in the cold.

"He's been here," you said. "Recently. That jacket's not his."

"I saw it." Luke exhaled too, hands on his hips, looking back up at the building. "We're close. Not close enough for tonight, but close."

"He'll come back. Guys like this don't have anywhere else that feels safe." You said it with more certainty than you probably had, but it felt true in your gut, the same place the rest of the profile had come from. "We put someone on the building, we wait him out."

"Already talked to Prentiss." Luke held up his phone. "Local PD's sending two patrol officers to sit on the building overnight — everyone federal's stretched too thin to spare for a stakeout that might not pan out, so it's not going to be JJ or Rossi watching the door, just two guys from the local precinct keeping an eye on the entrance and calling it in if anyone matching the description shows. Nothing else we can do here tonight."

The two of you stood there a second longer than the moment required, the L train rattling somewhere behind you, the smell of dryer sheets drifting out from the laundromat below, and for a second it felt less like the end of a lead and more like the two of you just standing somewhere quiet together, which hadn't happened, you realized, once, not really, not since you'd landed.

"Come on," Luke said finally, gentler, the hardness from the doorway completely gone now, folded away like it had never been there at all. "Nothing more we can do tonight. Let's head back."

★・・・・・・★

By the time everyone reconvened at the field office to compare notes, it was past ten, and the exhaustion in the room had that specific, silent quality that comes after a day spent running on adrenaline instead of sleep — Reid rubbing at his eyes over a folder he'd stopped actually reading twenty minutes ago, JJ and Rossi both still at their desks going back over statements one more time before calling it, Garcia's video window minimized down to almost nothing because even she'd run out of things to say.

Prentiss looked around the room, at all of you, and something in her expression softened, just slightly, the particular fondness of someone who'd led enough of these to know exactly when to call it.

"Okay," she said. "We stop for tonight. Get some rest — actual rest, not case-notes-in-bed rest — because tomorrow, if he comes back to that apartment, we need everyone sharp. You all earned it today. Go home. Or, well—" a small, dry look around the unfamiliar field office, at the city outside the windows that wasn't home for any of you right now— "go to your hotels. Same thing tonight."

The room broke apart slowly, gathering bags, muttering goodnights, and you found yourself standing by the elevator with Scout's leash in your hand and absolutely no idea what you were supposed to do with the rest of the night. Your hotel room was fifteen minutes away. It had a bed in it, and nothing else — no dog to walk this late, since you'd already done that, no case file worth opening again tonight, no reason at all to be anywhere but asleep.

And yet.

You knew, with the same clean, uncomfortable certainty you'd used all day to read scuff marks and wound angles, that there was exactly one person you actually wanted to spend tonight with — not doing anything, not even talking necessarily, just being in a room with him the way you used to be, before either of you had needed a case to justify it. You had his room number. He'd mentioned it earlier, off-hand, not an invitation, just information, the kind of detail you filed away without meaning to because some part of you had apparently been waiting for an excuse to use it.

The elevator doors opened. Scout looked up at you, waiting for a decision you hadn't made yet.

You didn't know what you'd even say if you knocked. You didn't know what you wanted to happen once you did, or what you were more afraid of — that nothing would, or that something would.

But you knew exactly which floor his room was on, and your feet already knew which direction the elevator needed to go.

★・・・・・・★

You knocked before you could talk yourself out of it, three soft raps that felt embarrassingly loud in the empty hallway, Scout sitting patiently at your feet like he already knew exactly where he'd been leading you the whole elevator ride up.

There was a pause, footsteps, and then the door opened, and Luke stood there in a t-shirt and sweatpants, hair damp like he'd just gotten out of the shower, and for a second neither of you said anything, because apparently that was still a thing that happened to the two of you, this specific kind of silence that filled up a doorway.

"Hey," he said finally, and then, looking down, "hey, buddy," to Scout, who'd already trotted past both your legs into the room like he lived there.

"Sorry, I know it's late. I just—" You gestured vaguely at nothing, at everything, at the general concept of the last three years. "I didn't want to be alone in my room. And you were the only person in this city I actually wanted to not be alone with."

Something in his face did something complicated and soft. "Yeah. Come in."

His room looked like every other Bureau-issued hotel room in existence — beige, forgettable, a laptop open on the desk with a case file half-minimized behind a paused episode of some cooking competition show — but he'd clearly made it his own in small ways, a jacket thrown over the desk chair, a battered paperback splayed open on the nightstand, and you filed all of it away without meaning to, the way you'd always catalogued the small details of him, back when you'd had the right to.

"You want anything? I've got—" he opened the little hotel fridge, peered in with the specific disappointment of a man who'd already checked its contents twice today. "Water. A beer I stole from the minibar and definitely shouldn't have. Some sad-looking string cheese."

"The beer's tempting, but I think we're both technically on the clock if that door opens tomorrow."

"Fair." He grabbed two waters instead, tossed you one, and folded himself onto the end of the bed, back against the headboard, leaving space beside him that felt both completely obvious and terrifyingly loaded. You sat anyway, an acceptable distance away, Scout immediately flopping across both your feet like he'd appointed himself furniture.

"So," Luke said, and there was something looser in his voice now, off the clock in a way he hadn't let himself be all day. "Tell me everything. Not case stuff. Just — everything. Three years is a lot to catch up on."

"That's a big ask for one night."

"I've got nowhere to be." A small, easy smile. "Believe me."

So you told him. Not all of it, not yet, but real things — the veterans' program you'd built from nothing in a spare office above a hardware store, the first guy you'd worked with who reminded you so much of a soldier you'd served with that you'd had to excuse yourself and cry in a bathroom for ten minutes before you could go back in and finish the intake form. The apartment you'd finally stopped calling temporary sometime last year, even though you still hadn't hung anything on the walls. Scout's various crimes — the Christmas he ate an entire ham off the counter, the time he'd herded an actual raccoon out of your yard like it had personally offended him.

Luke laughed more than you expected, and told you things back — Roxy's ongoing feud with a neighbor's cat, the ridiculous nickname the team had given him after a case in Texas he refused to elaborate on no matter how much you pushed, the apartment in DC he'd finally bought instead of rented, small, unglamorous, entirely his.

"You bought a place," you said, something warm and a little wistful in it. "That's— Luke, that's huge. You always said you didn't want to put down roots anywhere you couldn't picture staying for good."

"Yeah, well." He looked down at his hands. "Guess I finally pictured it."

You didn't ask where. You had a feeling you already knew, and you weren't ready yet to find out if you were right.

It went on like that for a long time — easy, warm, occasionally punctuated by Scout demanding attention from one or both of you, the cooking show still muted and forgotten on the TV, the case file completely abandoned behind it. It felt, for the first time since you'd landed in this city, like something other than survival. Like an actual evening. Like something you'd both quietly needed far more than either of you had let on.

It was well past midnight when the conversation slowed, settled, the easy chatter thinning out into something quieter, and Luke asked the question you'd known was coming eventually, the one you'd been circling around all night without either of you saying it out loud.

"Can I ask you something? You don't have to answer."

"You can ask."

He was quiet for a second, choosing the words carefully, the way he always used to before he said something that actually mattered. "What happened. After. You never really told me — not the whole thing. Just that you were leaving, and that you needed to, and I believed you, because I trusted you, but I never actually understood it. Not really."

You expected your chest to tighten the way it always did, the old reflex, the flinch. It didn't, not quite — or it did, but it was smaller than you braced for, softer around the edges, like something that had finally had enough time to scar over properly instead of staying raw.

"My team," you said, and the words came slower than you meant them to, but steady. "Near the end. There was an op that went wrong. And here's the part I've never actually said out loud to anyone — it wasn't just bad luck. I saw it coming. I had the shot lined up, I knew, I knew, the second I saw the setup, that they were walking into something. Every instinct I had was screaming that it was a trap. I asked for clearance to take the shot early, before anyone stepped into the kill zone, and I was told no. Hold position. Wait for confirmation. So I listened. I followed the order, because that's what you do, because eight years of training tells you the chain of command knows something you don't." Your hands had gone very still in your lap. "And I was right. I was right, and I didn't pull the trigger, and people I loved walked into exactly what I told them not to, and I lost most of them in one afternoon — people I'd been in the dirt with for years, people whose kids' names I knew, people I'd have died for without thinking twice about it. And I didn't die. And they did. I don't pull a trigger lightly, ever, I never have — but that's the one time in my life I was a hundred percent sure, and I still didn't do it, because I listened instead of trusting myself, and that's the part that never leaves. Not the op going wrong. Me listening."

Luke didn't say anything. He just listened, the way he'd always been so good at listening, like the words mattered more coming from you than they would from anyone else.

"I kept doing the job for a while after. Everyone told me that was healthy, actually — get back on the horse, don't let it win. And I tried. I really tried." You looked down at Scout instead of at Luke, found it easier that way. "But every time I got set up somewhere, every single time, I'd start running the math on it. Not the shot. The other math. The what-if math. And I kept landing on the same thing, over and over, no matter how hard I tried to think about literally anything else."

"What was the thing," Luke asked, quiet, though something in his voice told you he already suspected.

"I kept thinking about you." You said it plainly, no dramatics behind it, just the truth as it had actually lived in your head for months before you'd finally left. "Not because you were on any of those ops. You weren't. But I kept thinking — what if it had been him. What if it had been Luke on the ground and I was the one behind the glass and something went wrong that had nothing to do with skill, nothing to do with preparation, just the universe deciding today was the day. And every time I thought it, I couldn't — " Your voice caught, finally, just slightly, the first real crack all night. "I couldn't finish the thought. I still can't. I physically cannot make myself picture the rest of that sentence, even now, even years later, even knowing you're sitting right here, fine, alive, annoyingly stubborn about your dog's grudges. I just — couldn't."

"Hey." Luke's voice was low, careful, and you felt the mattress shift as he moved closer, not pulling you in exactly, just closing the distance enough that his shoulder was against yours, solid and warm and real. "Hey. Shh. Okay. I know."

"I'm not upset," you said, which was mostly true. "I just — I wanted you to actually know. Not the short version. The real one."

"I know," he said again, softer this time, and you felt him press a kiss to the top of your head, brief and unthinking, the kind of gesture that belonged to two people who'd done this exact motion a hundred times before and never once needed to discuss what it meant. "I know, I know. You don't have to explain the rest of it. I get it. I've had that thought too, you know. About you. More times than I'd probably admit if you asked me on a good day."

You let yourself lean into him properly then, the tension you hadn't realized you were still holding finally draining out of your shoulders, and for a long moment neither of you said anything else, just sat there together in the quiet, half-lit room, Scout's steady breathing at your feet, the muted cooking show still flickering uselessly on the screen.

"I'm glad you left," Luke said eventually, into the quiet. "For what it's worth. I hated not knowing where you were. I hated it more than I let myself say out loud, even to myself. But I'm glad you got out before that thought turned into something you couldn't come back from. I'd rather have three years of not knowing than the alternative."

"That's a low bar."

"You keep saying that." He huffed something that was almost a laugh, and you felt it more than heard it, his chest moving against your shoulder. "Maybe stop setting the bar so low that everything I say sounds like I'm clearing it easily."

"Maybe you should stop being so easy to clear it for."

"Rude." But he was smiling, you could hear it, and you let yourself smile too, tucked into his side, feeling lighter than you had in longer than you wanted to admit.

You didn't talk about what any of this meant. You didn't have to, not tonight — there'd be time for that later, or there wouldn't, and either way tonight wasn't the night to force it. Tonight was just this: the two of you, a dog, a paused cooking show, and three years of distance finally, quietly, closing itself back up.

"You should probably sleep," Luke said eventually, though he made no move to actually let go of you. "Big day tomorrow. Possibly a very not-fun day, if our friend Caleb decides to show back up at his brother's."

"Probably." You didn't move either. "I don't really want to walk back to my room right now, if I'm honest."

"Didn't ask you to." He shifted slightly, made room, an unspoken offer sitting there plainly between you, no pressure behind it, just an open door. "Stay. I'll take the couch — bed's too soft anyway, my back's been killing me all week, I was gonna end up on the couch regardless."

You looked at him for a second, at the couch in question, which was a perfectly ordinary hotel couch that had clearly never once caused him back pain in his life, and decided not to call it out. Some lies were just a person being careful with you, and you were tired enough, grateful enough, to let him have this one.

"Okay," you said. "Whatever helps your back, Alvez."

"Exactly." He didn't quite meet your eyes when he said it, and you let that slide too.

You looked over at Scout, sprawled diagonally across the end of the bed like he'd claimed it as his personal property the second you sat down, and you laughed, actually laughed, something easy and unguarded that you hadn't heard yourself do in longer than you wanted to think about.

"Yeah," you said. "Okay. I'll stay."

And for the first time in three years, falling asleep didn't feel like something you had to do alone to survive it.

★・・・・・・★

"Hey. Hey, wake up."

Luke's hand was on your shoulder, gentle but urgent, and you were awake instantly, the way you'd trained your body to be years ago and never quite unlearned, adrenaline arriving before your eyes had even fully opened.

"What's happening?"

"Patrol thinks they just spotted him. Someone matching Caleb's description went into the building about two minutes ago." Luke was already up, already pulling on last night's shirt, phone pressed to his ear with his other hand. "Prentiss wants everyone rolling now."

You sat up fast, mind snapping fully awake in the space of a breath, and Luke crouched back down in front of you for half a second, phone still against his ear, his free hand finding your face, thumb brushing once along your jaw like he needed to ground himself in you before the day took over completely.

"Hey," he said, quieter, just for you, the professional urgency dropping out of his voice for a beat. "You good? You don't have to be out there for this part if you don't want to be."

"I'm good." You meant it, mostly, adrenaline already sharpening everything into focus. "I'm not sitting this one out, Alvez."

"Didn't think you would." Something flickered across his face — worry, maybe, or just the old familiar reluctance of a man who'd once had to watch you walk toward danger and had never fully made peace with it. He didn't say any of that out loud, not with the clock running the way it was. He just held your gaze a second longer than the moment strictly needed, like he was trying to memorize it, and then stood, already talking into the phone again, already Agent Alvez instead of just Luke. "Copy that, we're five minutes out."

"Go," you said, already swinging your legs off the bed. "I need my rifle. It's not exactly hanging out in your closet."

That got the smallest flash of a smile out of him despite everything. "Meet you in the lobby. Two minutes."

"Two minutes," you agreed, and he was gone, door swinging shut behind him, and for one strange, suspended second you sat there in the quiet he'd left behind, heart hammering, before your body caught up with the rest of you and got moving.

You were down two flights to your own room on the floor below in under a minute, because your rifle sure as hell hadn't spent the night in Luke's. You changed fast, hands steady on the case latches despite the hour, weapon check automatic, muscle memory doing the thinking your still half-asleep brain hadn't caught up to yet. There was a strange, clean certainty to it, doing this again after three years away from it — like slipping back into a version of yourself you'd never actually stopped being underneath everything else. Okay, you thought, closing the case, rifle slung, adrenaline settling into something usable instead of something frantic. I'm ready for this.

You swung back up to Luke's room just long enough to collect Scout, who lifted his head from the end of the bed, alert, and you paused just long enough to press a hand to his fur.

"Stay, buddy. Good boy. Stay here." He settled back down, trusting, and you hated leaving him for exactly as long as it took to shut the door behind you.

★・・・・・・★

You were four minutes out when the radio crackled to life with the kind of chaos that meant something had already gone wrong.

"Shots fired, shots fired, both patrol officers down, repeat, both officers down—"

Your stomach dropped straight through the floor of the car. Luke's jaw went tight beside you, knuckles white on the wheel, and neither of you said anything, because there wasn't anything to say that would make the next several minutes go any faster.

The radio kept going, voices stacking over each other, half-panic under all the trained calm — a request for immediate backup, someone calling for a medic, someone else confirming the shooter's position was still unknown, that no one had eyes on him, that both downed officers were still in the open with no safe approach. You gripped the door handle without meaning to, watching the streets blur past too slowly, every red light an agony, every intersection a held breath.

"They shouldn't have been that close," Luke said, low, mostly to himself, the words coming out tight. "Two guys. Local PD. They weren't supposed to be doing anything but watching the entrance."

"He must have made them." You said it before you'd fully thought it through, but it felt true the second it left your mouth — the same restless, paranoid energy you'd profiled from a scuffed office floor, the same inability to sit still inside a threat, real or imagined. "Or he panicked. Thought he was cornered before he actually was, and went with the only instinct he's ever really trusted."

Luke didn't answer that, just took the next turn a little harder than he needed to, and you understood, without either of you saying it, that he was doing the same thing you were — running the entire drive on the singular, narrow hope that neither of the officers on that radio call was already past saving, and that whatever waited at the end of this drive wasn't going to ask either of you to lose someone else today.

The last minute felt longer than the four before it combined, sirens rising ahead of you, the radio still crackling with half-finished sentences, and you found yourself doing the thing you hadn't let yourself do in years — praying, wordlessly, to nothing in particular, for the ordinary mercy of everyone getting to go home tonight.

By the time you arrived, the block had already been cordoned, more units rolling in behind you, and the scene that met you was worse than the radio call had let on — both patrol officers down near the entrance, one clearly beyond help, the other being worked on by paramedics who'd gotten there faster than anyone should have been able to. Five shots, you'd learn later. Three misses, two that found their marks, and Caleb Voss was somewhere inside that building with a rifle and apparently nothing left to lose.

No one could get close. Every approach to the front of the house was covered by a sightline from an upstairs window, and the two agents who'd tried had been driven back by warning shots that weren't warnings at all, just misses that hadn't happened to land.

Prentiss found you almost immediately, her face doing none of its usual composed stillness. "I need eyes and a position," she said. "Can you set up somewhere that gives us a shot if this goes bad?"

You didn't hesitate. "Give me two minutes."

You found it fast — a stand of overgrown bushes at the edge of the yard next door, enough cover to disappear into, a clean line to the upstairs window where you'd already clocked movement. You dropped into position with the same clean, practiced stillness you hadn't used in three years, rifle steadying against your shoulder like it had never once left it, breath slowing into the old familiar rhythm.

Breathe in. Half out. Hold.

Prentiss crouched beside you, low, urgent. "Only shoot when I give the order. We're going to try to talk him down first — Alvez is going in on comms, see if we can end this without anyone else getting hurt. You are our very last option. Understood?"

"Understood."

She held your gaze a second longer, checking, and whatever she saw there must have satisfied her, because she nodded once and moved off toward the command position, already speaking into her radio, clearing Luke to make contact.

You settled deeper into the bushes, cheek against the stock, eye to the scope, and found him — Caleb, pacing behind the window, rifle in hand, movements jagged and too fast, exactly as unsteady as three years of profiling every version of this exact kind of person had taught you to expect. Impatient. Frightened now, underneath the arrogance, cornered in a way his whole life had never prepared him for.

Your own pulse had gone slow and strange in your ears, the old, familiar quiet settling over you the way it always used to right before a shot — the world narrowing down to breath and glass and a single small window of movement, everything else falling away, the shouting near the command post, the distant wail of an ambulance pulling off with one of the fallen officers, even your own fear for the man about to walk toward that house with nothing but his voice as a weapon. All of it receded to somewhere far away, filed under things you could not afford to feel right now, not until this was over.

You found the rhythm of your own breathing and matched it to the rise and fall of Caleb's shoulders through the scope, the same way you'd been trained to years ago — not just watching a target, but learning him, anticipating him, becoming so attuned to the rhythm of another person's body that you could read the half-second before he moved before he'd finished deciding to. It was an old, intimate kind of attention, the kind you'd never been able to explain to anyone who hadn't done it themselves — how close you had to let a stranger get to you, in your own head, in order to be ready to end his life cleanly if it came to that.

You thought, distantly, of Luke walking toward that house right now with nothing between himself and a loaded rifle except his voice and whatever fragile thread of reason was still holding Caleb together, and you made yourself breathe through the fear instead of around it, the way you'd learned to do a long time ago, because falling apart now would help no one, least of all him.

Steady, you told yourself. Just be steady. That's all you have to be right now.

"Caleb." Luke's voice, steady, careful, coming through your earpiece and echoing faintly across the yard from wherever he'd taken up a covered position closer to the house. "My name's Luke. Nobody else needs to get hurt today. I want to talk to you. Just talk."

Silence, then movement in the window. Caleb's voice, ragged, distant. "Get back! Get everybody back or I swear—"

"I hear you. I'm not moving any closer, okay? I'm exactly where I am. I just want to talk."

You watched through the scope, every muscle in your body locked into stillness, the crosshair resting steady on a shifting, unpredictable target, your finger resting outside the guard exactly where it belonged, waiting.

Luke kept talking — steady, patient, the same voice you remembered him using on green recruits who'd frozen up on their first live exercise, the same voice he'd once used on you, on a very bad night neither of you talked about, when you'd needed exactly this kind of calm and he'd been the only person who knew how to give it to you. He was good at this. He'd always been good at this. It was, you thought distantly, the thing you'd loved about him from the very beginning — not the good shot, not the sharp mind, but this: the specific, rare gift of making someone feel steadier just by being spoken to.

For almost a full minute, it seemed to be working. Caleb's voice lost some of its ragged edge. He said something about not meaning for it to go this far, about the officers, about how it wasn't supposed to happen like this.

And then his posture changed.

You saw it half a second before it happened — the same tell you'd read off a scuffed concrete floor days ago, the same restless inability to sit still inside his own fear, the shift in his shoulders as something in him snapped past whatever thin thread had been holding the conversation together. He swung the rifle toward Luke's position.

There was no more waiting for an order. There was no more anything except the years of training underneath every other version of yourself you'd built since, rising up in the half-second that mattered more than any half-second of your life ever had.

You didn't hear Prentiss say a word. You didn't need to. You'd already exhaled, already found the half-breath, already settled into the stillness that had always been the only place you'd ever felt completely, uncomplicatedly certain of yourself.

Caleb fired.

You fired half a heartbeat behind him, and where his shot went wide — rushed, panicked, exactly as imprecise as every other shot he'd ever taken — yours did not. It never had, not once, not in eight years, not in this single moment that mattered more than every one of them combined.

The window went still.

You were up and moving before your brain had fully caught up with what your body had just done, rifle left behind in the grass, running across the yard faster than you'd run in years, lungs burning, one single thought looping over and over: let him be okay, let him be okay, let him be okay.

"Luke!"

He came around the side of the house at almost the same moment, upright, moving under his own power, and the relief that went through you was so total it nearly took your legs out from under you.

"I'm okay," he said, catching you as you slammed into him, both of you breathing hard, his hands coming up to your face, checking you with the same urgency you were checking him with. "Hey — hey, I'm okay, I'm fine, he missed, I'm fine."

"You're sure? You're not—"

"I'm sure. I'm right here." His forehead dropped against yours, both of you still catching your breath, hearts going too fast for entirely different reasons now. "You got him. You got him before he—" His voice caught, just slightly, the first crack in all that steady calm he'd been holding for Caleb's benefit a minute ago. "You saved my life."

"I wasn't going to let anything happen to you." It came out rougher than you meant it to, three years and a lifetime of unsaid things packed into six words. "I couldn't. I told you. I couldn't even finish the thought last night, and I wasn't about to let it become real."

Luke pulled back just far enough to look at you properly, something raw and open on his face that he wasn't bothering to hide anymore, not now, not after this. "I know," he said. "I know you weren't."

Behind you, the scene was already filling with the noise of an aftermath — agents moving in, radios crackling, Prentiss's voice cutting through it all giving calm, clear instructions — but for one more second, it was just the two of you standing in the middle of somebody's front yard, foreheads still touching, both of you shaking slightly with the kind of adrenaline that only comes after nearly losing something you'd never actually said out loud that you had.

"For what it's worth," Luke said quietly, "that was the first time in my life a shot has ever felt like the best thing that's happened to me instead of the worst."

You laughed, a little wetly, and didn't pull away. "Low bar."

"Yeah." His hand found yours, held on. "Guess I keep clearing it anyway."

You both stood there a moment longer, letting the adrenaline finish draining out of your legs, and slowly, gradually, the noise of the scene around you started filtering back in — Prentiss's voice, steady and clear, directing the response teams; the low murmur of agents confirming the house was secure; somewhere further off, the specific, awful quiet that surrounded the two fallen officers, a silence that would need its own reckoning later, one you weren't ready to look at directly yet. Luke's thumb moved absently over the back of your hand, like he needed the motion as much as you needed the contact, both of you still just breathing, just existing, in the space of having survived something.

"That's twice now," you said eventually, voice quieter, some of the adrenaline finally starting to give way to something rawer underneath it. "Twice I've had you in a scope and had to actually pull the trigger to keep you alive. I don't know how many more of those I get in me before I actually fall apart."

"You didn't fall apart the first time," Luke said, gentle, watching you with an attentiveness that made you feel entirely seen, in the uncomfortable way that only he had ever really managed. "You got quieter. Steadier. I used to think that was you not feeling it. Took me way too long to figure out it was the opposite."

"You feel everything and do the job anyway," you said, half to yourself, an old truth you'd said out loud to no one but yourself in three years, until last night. "That's not the same as not feeling it."

"No," Luke agreed. "It's not." He reached up, brushed something — dirt, maybe, or just an excuse to touch your face again — from your cheek, his hand lingering there a beat longer than the gesture strictly required. "For what it's worth, I've never once doubted that you felt every single one of them. I don't think you're capable of not feeling something. I think that's actually the whole reason you're as good as you are."

You didn't have an answer for that, or you had too many, and none of them felt like they belonged out loud in the middle of a crime scene with two dead officers and an ambulance still idling nearby. So you just leaned into his hand instead, let yourself have this small, quiet moment of being known completely by somebody, before the rest of the day came crashing back in to claim you both.

Neither of you said anything else for a while. You didn't need to. Not yet. There'd be time, later, for everything else you still hadn't said — but right now, standing there with his hand in yours and his heartbeat finally slowing back down to something normal under your palm, it felt like enough just to have this: both of you, still here, still standing, the worst of it finally, actually over.

Scout, you thought distantly, was going to be so smug about all this when you got back to tell him.

★・・・・・・★

The scene took hours to clear — statements, evidence recovery, the slow, exhausting machinery of closing out a case that had cost too much to close out cleanly. It was well past dark by the time you and Luke finally made it back to the hotel, adrenaline long since curdled into a bone-deep exhaustion neither of you had the energy to fight anymore.

Scout met you at the door like you'd been gone a year instead of half a day, and you dropped to your knees in the hallway just to bury your face in his fur for a second, letting yourself finally, finally feel the whole day catch up with you all at once.

"Hey." Luke crouched down beside you, voice low, careful, like he was checking on something fragile. "You okay?"

"I don't know." Your voice cracked, unexpectedly, and you didn't fight it. "I keep replaying it. The half-second before I fired. I keep thinking about what would've happened if I'd been a fraction of a second slower."

"You weren't." Luke's hand found your face, tilting it gently up to his. "You weren't slower. You were exactly fast enough. You have to let yourself have that, okay? You have to let yourself just — have this. Just for tonight. You don't have to run the what-ifs on this one."

"I almost lost you today."

"You didn't." His thumb brushed along your cheekbone, and something in his expression cracked open, all the careful restraint of the last three years finally giving out at once. "I've almost lost you about six different times over the last decade, in about six different ways, and I never once let myself say what I actually wanted to say every single time, because I told myself there'd be another chance to say it later. I'm not doing that again. Not after today."

"Luke—"

"I love you." It came out rough, unpolished, nothing like the careful, patient man who'd talked a killer down an hour ago — just raw and immediate and three years overdue. "I've loved you since before either of us knew what to do with it, and I let you walk away once because I didn't fight for it, and I am not making that mistake twice. I don't care that it's messy timing. I don't care that we're both running on no sleep and too much adrenaline. I needed you to know today, specifically, because today reminded me exactly how little time any of us actually get."

You didn't answer him with words. You didn't trust yourself to get them right, not after a day like this one, so you kissed him instead — messy, off-center, both of you too exhausted and too wrecked open to do it gracefully, his hand fisting in your jacket, yours gripping the front of his shirt like you needed something solid to hold onto while the whole world finally, finally settled back into place around you. It wasn't elegant. It wasn't the kind of kiss either of you would have staged if you'd planned it. It was better than that — it was real, and overdue, and entirely, finally yours.

When you finally broke apart, foreheads pressed together, both of you breathing hard for reasons that had nothing to do with the case anymore, Scout gave an enormous, unimpressed sigh from somewhere around your ankles, like he'd been waiting three years for the two of you to catch up to something he'd apparently known the whole time.

"I love you too," you said, finally, voice thick. "I have for a very long time."

Luke laughed, wet and disbelieving and happy, and kissed you again, softer this time, unhurried, like the two of you finally had all the time in the world instead of none.

You ended up on the floor of the hallway for a while, still in your jackets, still smelling like the crime scene neither of you had properly processed yet, Scout wedging himself bodily between you like he had every intention of being included in whatever this was. Neither of you moved to get up. Neither of you wanted to, not yet — it felt, strangely, like the safest place either of you had been in days, sitting on hotel carpet with your backs against the wall, hands still tangled together, both of you occasionally laughing for no reason at all except the sheer, disbelieving relief of having finally said the thing.

"Three years," you said eventually, shaking your head against his shoulder. "Three years of pretending I didn't still think about you every single day, and it took a guy with a rifle and a grudge to get us here."

"I'd have preferred a less dramatic catalyst, personally." Luke pressed a kiss to the top of your head. "But I'll take it. I'm not picky about how we got here. Just that we did."

"What happens now?" You asked it half into his shoulder, half into the quiet of the hallway, genuinely unsure of the answer for the first time all night — not afraid of it, just curious, the way you used to be curious about a case before you knew how it ended.

"Now?" Luke considered it, thumb tracing slow circles against your hand. "Now I think we go inside, and you take the world's longest shower, and I order truly inadvisable amounts of room service, and tomorrow we deal with the case wrap-up and the flight home and all of that. And after that—" He paused, something soft and certain settling into his voice. "After that, I don't know. We figure it out. Together, this time. No more three-year gaps. No more almosts."

"No more almosts," you agreed, and meant it more than you'd meant almost anything in longer than you could remember.

Scout let out another long-suffering sigh, clearly ready to be fed, and the two of you laughed again, finally hauling yourselves up off the floor, hands still linked, neither one letting go.

★・・・・・・★

Three months later, you were teaching Roxy to fetch a tennis ball she had absolutely no interest in fetching, while Scout looked on from the porch with the particular judgment only a German Shepherd who considered himself above such games could manage.

"She's not going to do it," Luke called from the grill, not even looking over. "She's never once fetched anything in her life. She's not starting today."

"She might surprise you."

"She will not."

You threw the ball anyway. Roxy watched it bounce twice across the yard, looked at you with an expression that could only be described as and why, exactly, would I do that, and settled back down in the grass with a contented huff. Scout, beside her, put his head on his paws like he was embarrassed on her behalf.

"Told you," Luke said, insufferably smug, flipping something on the grill that smelled a lot better than either of your cooking skills probably deserved.

You'd moved into his place — small, unglamorous, entirely his, and now, gradually, entirely both of yours — two months ago, once the case had wrapped and the paperwork had cleared and the two of you had run out of reasons to keep pretending the distance between your two hotel rooms had ever meant anything. It hadn't been a big conversation, in the end. It had mostly just been Scout, deciding one weekend visit that he preferred Luke's apartment to your temporary one, and neither of you having the heart, or honestly the desire, to argue with him about it.

"You know," you said, wandering over to lean against the porch railing, "there's something almost poetic about this. Two people who once trained dogs to help them survive their own heads, ending up with the same two dogs, in the same backyard, teaching one of them absolutely nothing new."

"Very poetic." Luke handed you a plate. "Very sappy. You've gotten sappy since you moved in, you know that?"

"I blame you. You're a bad influence."

"I'm an incredible influence." He kissed your temple on his way past, easy, unthinking, the kind of gesture that had stopped feeling new somewhere around week three and had instead just become the shape of your life now, the way breathing was. "Ask anyone."

★・・・・・・★

Later, dishes done, the dogs finally worn out and sprawled together in a tangle of fur on the living room floor, you found yourself digging through a box you still hadn't fully unpacked, looking for a specific photo you knew was in there somewhere.

You found it near the bottom — the two of you, years younger, dust-caked and grinning, a much smaller Scout held awkwardly between you like neither of you had quite figured out how to hold a puppy yet. Luke had a black eye in it, courtesy of an argument the two of you had never quite agreed on the details of since.

"Oh, no," Luke said, appearing over your shoulder, groaning. "Where did you find that. I thought I destroyed all copies of that."

"It's a good picture."

"I look like I lost a fight with a door."

"You lost a fight with me," you said, delighted, "over whose turn it was to hold him, and then you tripped over your own boots, and then Scout peed on your shirt out of solidarity."

"I remember it differently."

"You remember it wrong." You held the photo up, comparing it to the two dogs currently passed out together on the rug, one significantly grayer around the muzzle than the puppy in the picture, the other snoring like a much bigger animal than he actually was. "Look how far we've all come."

Luke was quiet for a second, looking at the photo, and then at you, something soft and unhurried crossing his face. "You remember what you called me, back then? Before any of this. Before I even really knew you."

"Alvarez," you said immediately, because you did remember, you'd never actually forgotten. "For like two weeks. Because I refused to learn your actual name out of pure spite, since you strolled in on your first day acting like you already belonged on my range before you'd proven a single thing to me."

"You called me Alvarez to my face for two weeks. I genuinely thought that might be my name for a while. I almost introduced myself as Alvarez to my CO."

"You deserved it. You were insufferable."

"I was sixteen months out of basic and terrified of you," Luke said, laughing now, setting the photo down gently on the table. "Everyone was terrified of you. You were the best shot on base and you knew it and you had this — this thing you'd say, every time, right before someone took a shot they were nervous about."

You knew exactly what he meant, and something warm settled in your chest at the memory of it, unprompted, unbidden after all these years. "You've got this. You always do."

"Yeah." Luke's voice went quiet, and you both just stood there a second, years of history folding neatly into the small, ordinary living room around you, the dogs asleep, the dishes done, absolutely nothing dramatic happening at all, which felt, somehow, like the whole point. "You said that to me. Right before I took my first live shot in the field. I don't think I ever told you how much I needed to hear it right then."

"You didn't have to tell me. I could see it."

"Yeah, well." He reached for your hand, laced his fingers through yours, easy, familiar, permanent in a way that no longer needed announcing. "I've got you now. Figured it was time I said it back."

"Said what back?"

"You've got this." He smiled, small and certain, the exact same smile you'd fallen for a lifetime ago in a different, harder version of both your lives. "You always do."

You didn't say anything to that. You didn't need to. You just leaned into him, into this small unremarkable evening in a small unremarkable house that had somehow, against every version of the odds either of you had ever calculated, ended up being exactly where you both belonged, and let the quiet hold you the way it always used to before either of you had needed a war, or a badge, or three years of distance to understand what it was worth.

Luke's phone buzzed on the coffee table, breaking the quiet, and he groaned even before checking it.

"Ugh, no," you said, already bracing. "Please tell me that's not a case."

"Relax, I’m not on call this week." But he was smiling as he read the screen, trying and failing not to, something clearly amusing him more than he was letting on. "It's Prentiss."

"Tell her I said hi and also that You’re off the clock and she should feel bad about texting you right now."

"She's not texting. She's calling." He answered before you could protest further, propping the phone against his ear, still smiling in that specific way that made you immediately suspicious. "Hey. Yeah — no, we're just at the house. Yeah, she's right here."

He listened for a while, nodding, expression sliding gradually from amused into something warmer, something almost proud, and by the time he pulled the phone away from his ear you were fully sitting up, alert, half convinced something was wrong purely because he was taking so long to just tell you.

"What. What did she say."

"She finished the paperwork." Luke was grinning now, unable to hold it back any longer. "She's formally requesting you join the BAU. Full special agent status as your qualified, not a case-by-case consultant — permanent, if you want it. She said to tell you specifically that our relationship being a factor was reviewed and accounted for in the paperwork, so you don't need to worry about that being a problem. Her words, not mine. She sounded very pleased with herself about writing that sentence."

You sat there for a second, stunned, the reality of it slowly settling in — an actual place, an actual team, an actual reason to keep doing the thing you'd only ever let yourself believe you were good at again over the last few months, and not just as a favor, not just for one case, but for good.

"What do you say?" Luke asked, gentler now, watching you with the specific patience of a man who already knew the answer but wanted you to get there yourself.

"Yes." It came out immediately, no hesitation at all, surprising even you with how easy it was. "Obviously yes."

Luke laughed, delighted, pulling you into him. "So let me get this straight," he said, into your hair, still grinning. "Three years of not seeing each other, not speaking, barely existing in the same state — and now we're about to live together, work together, and apparently be professionally reviewed and approved as a couple by the federal government."

"When you say it like that it does sound like a lot."

"I'm just saying, we've gone from zero to a hundred pretty fast."

"To be fair," you said, pressing a kiss just under his jaw, "there's plenty we do together these days that never made it into Prentiss's paperwork."

"There is a real chance HR would like to know about several of those things."

"HR does not need to know about several of those things."

"No," Luke agreed, laughing properly now, "they really don't."

Outside, the porch light buzzed faintly. Inside, two dogs snored in perfect, unbothered harmony, and neither of you moved for a long, long time.

★・・・・・・★

wc: 18,386