Chapter Text
In all the time Hank's known Gavin, he's only seen him cry a handful of times, most of them while Gav was pregnant. Gavin told him it was something that'd always been hard for him, and the testosterone only made it harder. It wasn't that he thought crying was for babies; even if he wanted to cry it usually wouldn't come out. Hell, it took him a week to finally let go for Daisy, and that dog had been his world.
Hank had never seen him cry for Cole. He hadn't let him stick around long enough to see if he ever would.
Gavin doesn't cry in his arms, not quite. It's a dry heave of emotion, all labored breathing and choked whimpers and tears that gather but refuse to fall. He beats on Hank's chest in his heartbreak, and chants sour nothings like, "I hate you. I hate you so fucking much. I loved you, and you made me hate you. I'll never forgive you for that."
Hank struggles to believe he could ever forgive himself, either.
Gavin eventually stills, worn out and boneless against Hank's body. The anger's still there in his shuddering breath and shaking shoulders, but he seems to lack the energy to keep harnessing it against Hank.
It's an unfair comparison, and it's cruel of Hank's mind to make it, but he can't help but be reminded of the way Cole used to sometimes tantrum himself to sleep. This is so much more than a tantrum, but Hank still cards his fingers through Gavin's hair the way he did for Cole. When he scratches lightly through the soft down at the base of Gavin's skull, he feels him shiver.
"You never answered my question," Gavin says, muffled in Hank's shirt.
Hank missed this. He missed Gavin, his brutal honesty, his unwavering conviction. He missed holding him. "I don't think I ever stopped loving you."
Gavin scoffs. "Like I fucking believe that."
"I mean it," he urges. "I just thought I was being stupid."
Gavin's bark of laughter sounds like it's been strangled out of him. "Fuck, you were. A goddamn idiot."
Hank's own chuckle comes with tears. "Yeah, just not the way I thought I was."
Gavin shifts, only slightly, adjusting from where he'd started to slump downwards. He leans his head on Hank's shoulder, and it puts his mouth achingly close to the crook of Hank's neck.
They say hindsight's 20/20, and you never know how good you had it until it's gone. Hank feels those clichés like they were made for him and him alone. He trembles at Gavin's breath on his skin like he's being teased by the touch of a ghost. He wants what he can't have, with a fearsome agony.
Gavin must feel it, because he tenses and then sits up suddenly. He keeps a hand on Hank's sternum, pushing away from him but unwilling to break contact completely. It's like a white-hot brand next to the cold emptiness his body left behind. "You ever fuck the android like you fucked me?" he jeers.
Hank reels at the abrupt change in atmosphere, at the sudden sting of Gavin's words. "His name's Connor," he insists, though it's strained.
"Fine. You ever fuck Connor?"
Hank would take a thousand accusations over this. He feels on fire with desire and shame and rage. "I don't have to answer that."
Gavin is a pocket knife. Usually, he remains closed, the primal, violent fang of him tucked safely away. Sometimes, as he did earlier, he opens up and presses the blunt side of the blade against his target's throat, threat without danger. That isn't the case now. Now, he wields the deadly edge towards Hank, ready to slash or to plunge the tip into his heart. His glare bores past Hank's eyes, into his center. His perception is as sharp as his fury. "What did he give you that I couldn't?"
Hank has no right to want Gavin. He has no right to wish Gavin would just drop this, that they could kiss and make up and go back to the way things were before, when he's the one who threw it all away. He has no right to wish he could run his hands over Gavin's body and soothe away everything that's hurting him, when he's the cause of all that pain. He has no right to be angry with Gavin for lashing out, when what he did was so much worse.
He doesn't know what his rights are, here.
"Say something, you bastard!"
Hank feels the icewater rising around him. He feels himself beginning to sink down towards that place where nobody would be able to reach him. He feels like a festering thing, like one of the bloated corpses they sometimes fish out of the river. Barely even a man anymore. He wishes, as he has a million times before, that he'd just died in the crash. Then he wouldn't have been able to say those things, then Gavin would have been able to mourn him and move on, then neither of them would have had to suffer.
Then Connor would probably be dead.
That's his answer, isn't it? "A purpose," he says.
"What?"
"Connor gave me a purpose."
"Come again?"
There's probably no explanation Hank could give that Gavin would like. There's nothing he could say that would redeem him in Gavin's mind. He risks nothing by telling him the truth, so the least he could do is be honest. "Connor needed someone. He needed me. I couldn't save Cole, and I couldn't fix what I'd done to you, but I could help him. He had so much potential, and all he needed was a push. He gave me a chance to help people again, by fighting for him and the other androids."
"You really are an idiot." Gavin finally lets his hand drop away, trailing down Hank's belly before leaving him completely. "Your mind is a fucking death trap, I swear." He curls his legs under himself and sits back on his haunches, eyes downcast. "You could have fixed it. You know that, right? All you had to do was stop using me as your scapegoat and take some fucking accountability, before you decided to give up everything for some plastic twink you barely knew."
Hank feels himself deflate. "No. I didn't know that. Not until just now."
Gavin snorts and looks away. What Hank can see of his face is a picture of pure misery.
"Look, Gav, I know what I did was beyond shitty. I know I don't deserve your forgiveness, and I'm not here to try and get it."
"Then why?" He leans to pick up his coffee, and stares into the last dregs of his drink. It's doubtless cold by now, but it seems to give him a point of focus that isn't Hank. "Why are you here? Why couldn't you just leave me alone?"
"I hoped I could give you some relief. Maybe closure." He reaches, slowly, and settles his hand on Gavin's shoulder.
Gavin tenses, but doesn't put up any other resistance.
"What do you need, Gavin? I wish I could go back and change what I did, but I can't. Is there anything I can do for you now?"
He scoffs. "What I need is to know why the fuck you pointed your gun at my head."
Hank thought the answer should have been obvious. "You were threatening Connor."
That does cause Gavin to jerk away from his touch. "Seriously?"
Hank lets him go.
Gavin slams his mug back onto the table and gets up to pace, putting distance between them. "You really don't see my side? You really think I was the bad guy in that situation?"
"Connor didn't do anything wrong." He knows it's probably the wrong thing to say, especially when Gavin is already so angry, but it's his truth and he still needs to be honest. "He'd just gotten us the confession we needed, and he was trying to make sure that android didn't snap and self-destruct."
Gavin turns on him, snarling, gesturing wildly. "We were standing in the interrogation of a machine that'd malfunctioned so bad that it didn't just kill a guy; it brutalized him. And what did you do? You sent another one in, alone, with the perp. Connor wasn't vetted. He wasn't one of us. He got sent in by some civvie tech company that probably didn't know a damn thing about our work, that'd been letting their androids run around killing people for months. What if he'd broken the suspect out? What if they'd decided they wanted to go Mortal Kombat on all our asses?" He returns to pacing, running his hands through his hair. "Connor wasn't following orders the way an android was supposed to. I'd clocked him as a potential threat to every single human in that room."
Hank feels his stomach drop into the floor. "You were trying to protect us."
"Yeah. I stepped up to make sure me and my men were safe, while my Lieutenant was drunk off his ass, being a bleeding heart for Robocop and Stabby McStabface." He throws his hands up. "But noooo, clearly I'm the villain because I was mean to your new doe-eyed pet Terminator, and you're the knight in shining armor. The hero who can do no wrong, just like you always were. Even though when I pulled my gun it was on a walking computer, and you pointed yours at the living, breathing human being you almost married."
The words leave a ringing in the air, and in Hank's skull. Gavin clutches his hair, and screams in rage--in a deep, dark pain that frightens Hank.
He did this to Gavin. He turned him into this. He made him into this cornered, frightened animal with fangs and teeth bared sharp. "I'm sorry," he says again. "I--" He presses his lips together. "You didn't deserve the way I treated you. You're not the awful person I made you out to be."
That seems to take the wind out of Gavin's sails. He sinks back into the recliner, wringing his hands and keeping his gaze stubbornly downcast. "Look, I know I overreacted to Connor," he mutters. "I was just so fuckin' freaked out. With all the deviancy cases, and him acting so fuckin'--so human, when that shouldn'ta been possible..." He shakes his head. "If they were just machines that'd gone haywire, we coulda shut 'em down and the problem woulda been over. We'd go back to how things used to be, maybe even without all the rioting and red ice, and all the other shit that started when they came along. But if they were people, that meant they were committing real-ass crimes, and that meant we had a whole new population of fuckin' millions to deal with, who were faster and smarter and stronger than us. Hard enough to keep up when it's just the humans, you know? I didn't know if I could handle it, if all that got dropped on me on top of everything else. I was already on thin ice with Fowler. I didn't wanna believe it was a possibility, so I--" He curls into himself.
Hank stares, his jaw slack. He hadn't expected Gavin to offer an explanation, and he definitely hadn't expected him to look so ashamed as he did it. He realizes, with a sinking feeling of heartbreak, that the worst thing he did to Gavin was to trigger him to doubt his own goodness. Hank had been Gavin's partner, but he'd also been his mentor, his superior, the man Gavin looked up to as an example of how to be a good cop and a good person. He remembers the look Gavin would give him when he was just starting out, whenever Hank would tell him he'd done a good job. He remembers, suddenly, just how much older he is than Gavin, and how much more damage he probably did because of it.
The pieces slot into place. Gavin, twenty-five years old, staring starry-eyed at his crush, his idol, as Hank--thirty-eight at the time and a sergeant to Gavin's detective II--told him that his feelings were reciprocated. Gavin, inexperienced in love because he'd still been growing into a new body when he dove headlong into a career of service, kissing Hank like his life depended on it. Gavin a year later, desperate to be closer after a case gone sour, begging Hank to skip the condoms. "I shouldn't be able to get pregnant, right? I went straight from puberty blockers to T." Gavin, who'd wanted an oophorectomy for ages but had put it off because he didn't want to stop working to recover from surgery, not knowing how much he'd regret it.
Gavin, a few months later, shaking like a leaf after Hank had urged him to take a pregnancy test when he kept missing morning shifts because of nausea. Gavin, head bowed in fear as they had to confess to Fowler how thoroughly they'd broken the fraternization rules. Gavin, trapped at his desk or his home for half a year, body going soft and round, while Hank got sucked into the biggest, most dangerous drug busts of his career. Gavin, congratulating Hank on his promotion and then going into labor a month later.
Gavin, only 27 and with his life changed forever by one impulse decision that Hank shouldn't have encouraged, watching Hank slip away into work and fatherhood when he needed him most.
Gavin, losing the son he'd given up everything to bring into life, and then losing Hank in the cruelest way imaginable.
"Oh god, Gav. I am so fucking sorry."
"For what?" Gavin asks with a bitter chuckle. He's probably confused, when he was the one who was last justifying his decisions.
"For everything. For being a terrible partner, even before the fight."
Gavin sits up straighter and gives him a cautious, sideways glance. "What do you mean?"
"I was supposed to be the responsible one. I got together with you knowing how bad I could hurt you because I was in a position of power, and I fucked it up. I didn't communicate with you. I didn't use the condom, even though I knew it was a risk. I put my career first instead of taking care of you after I knocked you up. I didn't think about how much it had to hurt you to watch me gettin' all the glory while you had to deal with the consequences of our mistake. Then I neglected you for Cole, so you'd have to run after me and spend more time with our kid. I was too far up my ass to see anything except how pissed I was that you didn't spontaneously develop a paternal instinct." He shakes his head, trying not to cry. "Fuck, Gav, I was a prick, and you deserved so much better. You were the best partner I ever had, and I treated you like shit."
Gavin chews on his lip for a long moment. When he finally releases it there's a gash of bright red where he's ripped off a chunk of dry skin with his teeth. "Maybe we never coulda worked out," he says, voice quiet. "My career was my life, and you wanted a family. I thought it was irresponsible to bring a kid into this world, and it was more important to make the world a better place for the people who were already here. You wanted--" He flails a hand towards Hank instead of talking for him.
"There's only so much I can do in my lifetime. I thought the best I could do for the world was pass along what I'd learned to the next generation. Doesn't matter how much of a difference we make now if it all ends when we do."
He nods. "Point is, maybe what we wanted was too different. Maybe we were never compatible," and to hear him voice it is still terrifying, even now, "but we didn't wanna face that. So we never talked about it, and..."
"And I got the kid and the promotion."
"Yeah. And I spent nine months stagnating at work and turning more and more into the bearded lady every day." He swipes a thumb over his bottom lip. "You know, I never really talked to you about it, but I was fuckin' terrified I wouldn't pass anymore after that." He runs a hand through his hair, mussing it up and then tugging, nervously. "There aren't many trans guys who get to skip girl puberty like I did. I was lucky. I never had to do top surgery, never had to work off all the curves. I spent so long while I was preggo like, 'Is this just gonna reverse all that?' Talk about fragile masculinity, right?" He huffs a laugh at his own wordplay, then deflates. "It felt like my body still wanted me to be a girl and the universe wanted to punish me for not liking kids. Like, what did I do wrong? Was I just a selfish bastard, to think I could be a man and just live my own life without having to give it all up for some snot-nosed brat?" He flinches from his own words. "Sorry. Cole wasn't--I didn't mean--"
"Gav, it's okay." Hank scoots closer and sets a hand on his knee. "You didn't do anything wrong. You deserved to be able to have your body look like the guy you are inside. You deserved a partner who had the same priorities."
He sets his hand on top of Hank's and squeezes. "And you deserved one who actually wanted kids, the way you did."
"But I had you. Gav, look at me."
Gavin does, eyes red-rimmed and so, so tired.
Hank meets his eyes and says, "I had you, and it wasn't fair of me to get mad because you didn't want the same things I did. I wanted to have my cake and eat it, too. I wanted to be with you, and I wanted to be a father, and I never manned up and made a choice about which one was more important."
"You did, though. You chose fatherhood."
That forces the air out of his lungs. "Yeah. Yeah, I guess I did. And I guess--"
Hank barely catches himself before he says, "I got punished for that, too." He takes a deep, shaking breath, and reminds himself that Cole dying wasn't about him. He reminds himself that Gavin doesn't need his self-pity right now, and tries again. "Look, Gav, I shoulda supported you more than I did. I shoulda put the job aside and spent more time with you. I shoulda tried to make as much time for you as I did for Cole."
"But that's the thing, Hank: I wanted you to do the red ice busts, because I couldn't. I wanted you to give your time to Cole, 'cause I knew I couldn't give him the kinda care he needed."
"But what about you?"
Gavin breaks the eye contact again.
"You're not selfish, Gav. If anyone here is, it's me."
His mouth tenses, and it's clear he's holding something in.
"Did I say or do something that pushed you not to get the abortion?" Hank suspects he knows the answer already.
Gavin shakes his head. "I just...couldn't. I thought about what kinda person Cole might end up being, and I couldn't take that away from him."
"That ain't something a selfish man would say," he offers, gently.
His bottom lip starts quivering, and he clutches Hank's hand like a lifeline.
Hank turns his own hand to clutch right back. "You needed me, Gavin. You needed me and I let you down, over and over again. It was my job as your partner to put you first, especially when you couldn't. I shoulda put you above the job. And I shoulda found a way to balance being your partner and Cole's dad. And if I couldn't do all that, I shoulda had the courage to let you go, so you could find someone who'd treat you right. Outta love, not outta anger."
Finally, truly, Gavin breaks down and cries.
Hank stands, and he helps Gavin up and into his arms, and he bundles him close and lets him sob out his years of pain. "I love you," Hank tells him. "You're so good, Gav, and you deserved so much better than I gave you. I love you," and he holds him until there are no tears left.