#piii

He waited until he was released before approaching the door to the sacristy. He didn't bother knocking, instead carefully pushing it open to reveal Reagan standing against the far wall, tie undone and cigarette clutched between two fingers. The ash had grown long enough to drop from its own weight, but as soon as Ben entered the room, Reagan tapped it onto the floor in front of him.

They were silent for several moments after the door quietly clicked closed.

"I can't seem to get out of this fucking room."

Reagan's voice was hoarse, particularly deep in a way that had little to do with the time of morning and a lot to do with how much he'd been chain-smoking in the past few days.

Ben glanced around the room, and though he was unfamiliar with Catholicism other than what he'd learned from Reagan over the course of their lives, he knew that using that particular flavor of language and behavior was frowned upon here. But instead of mentioning that, Ben nodded.

"I know," he said gently. He moved closer, brushing past the hanging vestments. "...But you have to. Your daughter's already in tatters because her brother isn't here to see her get married, and you are not adding your refusal to participate on top of that."

"I can't keep going like nothing's happening." Reagan took a long drag from his cigarette and dropped it, grinding it with his heel against the stone floor as the smoke was pushed out of his lungs. He glanced at the crucifix on the wall, a fleeting look he pretended didn't happen. "...I can't possibly be expected to function when I don't know where the fuck my son is."

"He's gonna be fine..."

"You don't know that."

"It's all I can say, Reagan," Ben snapped. "It's quite literally the only thing I can say right now."

"You don't even feel this, do you?" Reagan thumped his palm against his own sternum. "This hollow vessel of a man who can't do anything but wait. Wait for news on Brady. Wait for you. Wait for the next public appearance, the next time I have to put on a brave face for everyone else around me when I'm falling to pieces in a room full of crap that's supposed to keep me strong."

"I've been like a second father to Brady all his eighteen years of life, Reagan." Ben scowled, his teeth clenched. "You really think I ain't worried sick? You really think I haven't lost any sleep over this? I've held him, changed him, helped him with homework—and you're gonna stand here and tell me I don't know what you're goin' through? Never mind what would happen if the news was bad. Never mind the pieces of both of us I'd have to pick up off the floor."

Reagan paused, his hands in his suit pockets. "...Yeah," he muttered. "You're right."

Ben took another step forward, into Reagan's space. "You're not gonna let Charlotte down. It's not you. After everything you've had to do to make up for Carolyn leaving them, you're the one who stepped up in ways above and beyond the role of a dad. You're the parent they can rely on."

The succeeding silence swallowed the small room, and Reagan leaned his head back against the wall. He closed his eyes, taking a deep breath.

Ben reached up to cradle the back of Reagan's head in both hands. He brought him down to press a kiss to his forehead, his lips lingering against his skin.

Reagan's hands trembled as they came up to grip Ben's hips. "I'm sorry," he mumbled.

"I know," Ben said again, pulling him into an embrace. Reagan's fingers gripped the back of Ben's suit jacket, twisting the fabric too tightly. "Do me a favor and walk your girl down the aisle."

But neither of them immediately moved. Then, Reagan cleared his throat and let go of Ben to tie his tie.

"I missed the first five of Charlotte's birthdays," he rumbled. "I'm not missing this."

"'Atta boy," Ben whispered. He caressed Reagan's face, a quick, grounding thing that made Reagan stand just a little bit straighter. "She's waiting for you."

The first time was when they sat in Ben's room, Reagan aged thirteen, processing the finality of Reagan's decision not to move back to Ireland with his parents and to live in New Jersey with the Mertzes. The second, Ben fully recovered from a nearly fatal bout of pneumonia when they were both teenagers, and Reagan had to explain to him, without falling apart, that he almost lost him.

The third time was when they tried to pretend their drunken kiss in '42 never, ever happened. The fourth, Reagan dealt the blow that he was disbanding Gilmore & Murray.

The fifth, Reagan stood at Ben's door in a downpour, clutching a soggy divorce summons in his hand.

And this, the sixth, Brady Gilmore, Reagan's only son, his youngest child, forever leaving an imprint of his draft letter behind his father's eyelids.

Ben sat at his kitchen table across from Reagan, his own eyes pinning an intensely terrified stare into the coffee he enabled Reagan to make alcoholic.

"To Brady Fionan," he'd toasted with a mug of newly-spiked coffee a full five minutes earlier. "Not as perfect as my son, but pretty damn close."

It was a joke. Reagan knew it was a joke. He laughed, and it wasn't the fake he employed at award shows or around vapid fellow celebrities. It was the first one in hours.

But still, when the laughter died, the air was thick with the stench of it.

Ben withdrew air, sharp. "Reagan—"

"No, Benny," Reagan interrupted, shaking his head slowly. He lifted his eyes to finally meet Ben's across the table, his jaw tense with the burden of needing to rationalize his current irritation. "...No, Benny."

Ben jolted out of his chair so quickly that the thing kicked back and almost toppled. He paced the perimeter of the kitchen, hands on his hips or running aggressively through his hair or over his face.

"No, you fuckin' listen to me," he snapped in a heated snarl as he whipped around to face Reagan. "Don't you 'No, Benny' this. Don't you take my apology away from me."

Reagan stared at him for a stretch, then got to his feet. Practically an unfolding of his body, six-foot-one and towering over Ben by a whole inch. "...Your apology," he muttered.

"It was a dumb thing to come outta my dumb mouth. Of course I love your son as if he was my own."

Reagan moved closer. "Shutting up would be the best course of action for you at this time, Benjy."

"I should've known better. I should've known better than to make a stupid joke like that. What the hell was I thinkin'?"

"Is there a particular reason as to why you're suddenly makin' this about you?" Reagan asked loudly despite being mere inches away from Ben's face.

Ben stopped, then. His gaze made the mistake of dropping, as brief as it was, to Reagan's lips.

Reagan caught it. And his eyebrows found his hairline.

"...Wanna rephrase that?" he whispered darkly.

And then a peculiar thing happened. A seventh silence. A deep, tumultuous silence with the stillness of a hurricane cutting into the gossamer sinew holding these two apart. As hard as it is to believe, they stood there for another five minutes and twenty-four seconds, not saying a word.

"He'll be okay," Ben said then, his voice barely a ghost in the room. "You'll be okay."

Reagan was criminally close, now. The scent of him—expensive leather, tobacco, deceptive floral notes—dissolving the last of the defenses in Ben's decaying brain.

"You sound so sure," Reagan murmured. A genuine challenge. Pessimism. "...You've never been so sure about anything in your god damn life."

"One thing," Ben cut in this time. His eyes took on something wide, wild, recognition that he was about to cross a line that's been drawn in the dirt since the day they met. "...I've always been sure about one fucking thing."

Reagan's eyes darkened.

"And if I'm sure about that," Ben continued sharply, "you can be damn sure I'm sure about this."

Reagan's hand snapped up to grip Ben's chin, forcing his face even closer. But then the fury in his eyes warped into a fathomless melancholy.

"Hey," Ben breathed, threading a trembling hand through Reagan's hair. "Hey. You've kept me alive for forty years. It's my turn."

Reagan pressed their foreheads together. Slid his hand around to the back of Ben's neck. Said nothing when their lips met. Almost second nature.

As he was in '42, Ben was the first to realize what was happening. Unlike '42, he pulled Reagan closer, deepened the kiss, took a wrecking ball to the glass wall installed over that line in the dirt. His hands fisted in Reagan's shirt without urgency, savored every second, every movement, every hitched breath.

Reagan's hand found Ben's hip and gripped hard, and Ben reared back.

"Fuck, Reagan," he yelled, wrenching himself from Reagan's grasp. "...FUCK, Reagan!! We SWORE!!"

"We never made a verbal or written agreement," Reagan said evenly, gingerly dabbing at his own lower lip with the pad of his thumb.

"Why should we HAVE to?!" Ben gestured sharply. "Why should we have to verbalize into the universe or write in plain fuckin' English how much this was a CATASTROPHIC mistake?!"

"No, Benny." Reagan’s expression was the most sincere Ben had ever seen it. A finger was lifted, pointed directly at him. "…No, Benny."

Ben froze. He stared at Reagan, adrenaline making a mess of his nervous system.

That was the backswing of the wrecking ball.

Despite the scalding shower that all but scoured his skin off his bones in the morning, Faye smelled it on him. The guilt, the self-loathing, the relief.