Work Text:
Jesse was fine. Or at least, he would be. He couldn’t afford to be anything else, not right now, not today. He’d been telling himself (and anyone else who asked) that the blood on his hands and clothes was Danielle’s.
The team needed everyone’s help to close this case and fast. There was a kid in the middle of the whole mess, and Jesse wasn’t letting that boy get hurt any more. Not if he had anything to say about it.
The only one who should have been hurt was him.
Not the receptionist who’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Not the kid whose parents made decisions he was in no way responsible for.
Not the wife who’d trusted him with her life, and never should have, because he’d only ever let her down.
They weren’t supposed to get hurt, not like him.
He’d made a conscious choice to put his life on the line when he’d picked up that badge.
He could deal with it.
Crush the pain down somewhere dark and quiet with all the rest of the things that hurt, and do his job.
Same as he had for most of his life. He'd gotten really damn good at that.
So doing it again for a few hours was hardly the worst thing life had thrown at him.
He’d almost gotten away with the whole thing. Changed shirts again, to the backup he’d been keeping in the bag in his car, washed the blood off his hands in the locker room, and deliberately avoided pulling blood-caked denim away from the wound to get a better look. If it was healing, he didn’t need to rip the scab off and start all over again.
He’d done enough of that already, moving back here.
He handed Horatio the file he’d gotten, the one he couldn’t bring himself to look at more than once, and a sudden wave of dizziness hit, sending him stumbling forward, photos of a kid with all too familiar cuts and bruises slipping out from the manila folder, hitting the ground a split second before Jesse followed them down.
In the moment before the darkness swallowed him, he realized he’d fallen against the window glass of the interview room, and there was a smear of bright red against its clear surface.
Damn it.
…
Horatio hadn’t seen Jesse in over a decade.
He didn’t count newspaper clippings and TV reports from the LA station he’d stayed up far too late to watch more times than he’d care to admit.
He didn’t really count phone calls. Not even if he could picture Jesse’s face with every change in tone of voice. Not even if he could hear the worry and pain that kept cutting deeper and deeper lines into the kid’s face every time he did catch a glimpse of him somewhere in the news.
He didn’t even count the security footage they’d seen right before all hell broke loose in the one place Jesse should have been safer than anywhere else in the world.
This was Horatio’s fault. All of it.
He wasn’t fool enough to blame himself for a troubled man whose case he’d never worked deciding to get his attention the only way he could fathom. That, H could absolve himself of and move on. This wasn’t a botched case, he hadn’t missed something. No way he could have on a case he’d never seen before today.
But he had taken the field assignment that morning. Gone out with a team that was more than competent, to process a routine scene.
He should have been in the building when Jesse got there.
He should never have let Jesse walk out in the first place.
He didn’t know what exactly had driven the kid to the other side of the country. Maybe there were enough bad memories in Miami that it had taken worse demons than his childhood to send Jesse running back.
Maybe it had been a problem with someone on the force. People generally liked Jesse, but he had been smart. He’d been rising ranks faster than a lot of the other people in the department. Passing his detective’s exam with one of the highest scores they’d ever seen, in what was almost record-breaking time from graduating the Academy. Making good cases, that stuck, that won him more than one commendation in just the few years he’d been with Miami-Dade.
So when Jesse called him, sounding like a kicked dog with his tail between his legs, and asked if that offer H had given him before he left on his last day was still valid, there hadn’t even been a question.
He’d never have tried to keep Jesse somewhere he didn’t want to be, never would have forced him to stay, but it felt right to have him back in Miami. Horatio just wished the circumstances would have been better. A lot better.
He’d at least been able to hope LA would be the fresh start Jesse needed, to cut the past loose once and for all and heal.
Instead, it had just broken him all over again, like pain was following him closer than his own shadow.
Horatio couldn’t think of anyone who deserved that hurt less.
Okay, maybe he was a little biased, given that the first time Jesse had walked through the doors of his department he’d seen the hurt and the desperation and the need to be accepted, and decided this kid was his now, if he’d never been anyone else’s up to then.
He’d been determined that this time, at least, he was going to get it right. He’d gotten a second chance to help Jesse get his feet under him, and this time, whatever was hurting him, Horatio wasn’t going to let it slide with half-acknowledged questions and the perpetual lie of ‘I’m fine’ he’d been given whenever he’d pushed even a little at the edge of whatever had turned Jesse’s last year with MDPD into something he was ready to run to the other side of the country to escape. He’d just gotten Jesse back, in his department, in his life. He wasn’t going to lose the kid again.
And then Jesse had shown up, predictably early (always the overachiever, the one who tried hardest to get people to like him, and never wanted to make a mistake), and Horatio hadn’t been there to meet him.
And it had all gone to hell.
He’d been terrified, when he saw only two hostages walking out with the masked gunman, that the hostage taker had been true to his word and shot Jesse just for being a cop. He’d swallowed down the thought of having to go back into that room and carry another bloodied body, this one beyond saving, out of it, just in time to notice the trick Matthew had played.
It had taken several minutes in an office by himself to stop his mind from playing out the scenario where the SWAT team had ignored him, followed Stetler’s directive, and shot to kill.
Maybe that had been what Matthew was counting on.
Maybe he’d wanted Horatio to know it had been his own people that took the life he’d threatened.
But the what-ifs didn’t solve the case. Didn’t bring their man in. Didn’t find answers and the justice Matthew claimed to be seeking.
When he’d found out it had something to do with the boy, Horatio felt something tight and angry in his chest relax its grip, just a little.
Nothing that happened today was right.
But at least he could understand a bit more of the reason.
If it had all been for the money, he never could have rationalized it.
He was afraid he was about to find out just how badly justice had been denied (for Matthew, but maybe more importantly, for his son) when Jesse stopped outside the door of the interview room, a folder in hand.
And then everyone else’s problems had taken a quick trip a lot further than the back seat when Jesse lost his balance, slumped sideways, and slid down the glass wall, a stripe of far too bright blood following him to the floor.
…
The first coherent thought in Jesse’s head when he woke up was that Horatio was going to be pissed.
At their hostage taker, mostly, for using grenades that not only created smoke, but shrapnel as well, in a room full of civilians. And that one of those pieces had ended up in Jesse.
But also, more than a little, at Jesse for not telling him it had happened at all.
It wouldn’t have been the first time. He’d hidden injuries since he started at MDPD. It had been drilled into him a long time ago. Showing pain was showing weakness, and letting anyone see you were hurting meant more pain later.
Hard habit to break.
He’d started to, those first few years, with Horatio alternately scolding and fussing at him about it, trying to drill in a new perspective, that if Jesse wasn’t going to worry about himself, he had damn well better worry about the people whose lives he was risking if he wasn’t at a hundred percent doing the job.
They’d both known that was just a smoke screen.
And then Jesse had moved to LA, and started over, with people who actually believed that. The walls had gone right back up, black shirts had replaced the white ones he’d started to favor the last year in Miami, and the first aid kit in the bathroom cabinet had been the kind that had needles and thread and the kind of bandages that were usually reserved for paramedics.
Tracy had done her best to keep him from falling all the way back down, but he’d tried not to worry her either, when he could manage. He’d watched the job destroy his colleagues’ marriages when their spouses couldn’t cope with the hours or the fear or the trauma or the nightmares. He hadn’t wanted things to end like that for them.
They hadn’t. He almost wishes they had. That she’d seen things the way so many others had and run as far away from him as she could.
Maybe then, at least, she’d be alive.
Maybe that’s why he didn’t care about any of this as much as everyone else might find reasonable.
He still hadn’t really paid the price his mistakes deserved.
He didn’t think the gash had actually been bleeding since the last time he’d moved a set of boxes around for the guy (He still sort of thinks of him as Ted, not Matthew). The pain was a dull ache that only got worse if he sat down or stood up suddenly. He’d almost collapsed in the conference room after talking to Calleigh, but thank God and whoever designed the new crime lab (that is way better than its broom closet predecessor) for picking chairs with arms for the space.
Unfortunately, his luck, and whatever divine providence has been watching out for him all this time, had just run out.
He really shouldn’t have packed a white shirt as his backup.
That had been asking for trouble.
The long hem was stained red wherever it had brushed up against the gash on his hip.
Which still wasn’t as bad as the blood slowly drying on the glass wall beside him.
Or the worried eyes staring down at him as Horatio crouched next to him on the floor, standing in the middle of a litter of photos and documents.
“Jesse?”
Hands hovered an inch away from his arms, lesson learned from the time Jesse had been hit in the head by a suspect fleeing a scene, and the resulting concussion had made him lash out at anything he could even remotely assume was a threat, including Horatio.
Jesse reached for the nearest thing to steady himself to sit up, which happened to be H’s arm. Horatio didn’t move as long as Jesse was holding on, but the moment he let go, Horatio was spinning around, shouting that they needed a bus and paramedics right now, before he turned back to Jesse with concern and more fear in his eyes than Jesse ever wanted to be responsible for putting there.
“How bad is it?”
“Shrapnel. Nicked my hip.” Jesse was fairly sure there was still a bit of it in there, judging by the white-hot pain that had burned through it when he moved. “I was going to go to the hospital. Once we finished this.”
There was blood on Horatio’s sleeve.
Jesse looked down at the red smears on his hands.
It didn’t seem possible the blood was his. Didn’t even really feel like the hands were his.
“Jesse, stay with me. Jesse? Jesse!”
…
Horatio had spent entirely too much time in hospitals. Sometimes, it was for himself. But the worst times were when it was a member of his team. His family. He’d lost Marisol. He’d almost lost Eric. Twice. He wasn’t going to let Jesse be next if there was anything he could do about it.
Jesse looked too pale, too still, the blue hospital gown washing out any of the tan in his skin and the tubes and wires running along his arms making them somehow look thinner. He’d changed a lot in twelve years. But unfortunately, looking at him in that bed, it seemed like the change, at least the most recent spell of it, hadn’t been for the better. Jesse was a good sixteen years older than he’d been the first day H had met him, but somehow, right now, Horatio felt like he was looking at the same skinny, scared kid they’d handed off to him fresh from the academy with a shiny new badge and a world of hurt in his eyes.
The only difference was a few more lines on his face and a few more scars on his skin.
Jesse blinked slowly, shaking his head side to side a few times, then looked up.
“Hey. Sorry about…this.” He gestured vaguely to the bed, the room, the IV stand tethering his hand. Like it was his fault a masked man stormed their building and threw multiple grenades into a crowded room.
“Don’t be. You did a good job today, Jesse.”
“Did you find out?” Jesse asked, starting to sit up and then grimacing. “Who was hurting the kid? ‘Cause I know it wasn’t his dad.”
Horatio winced. “It was the mother.”
Jesse swallowed, looking down at the pattern on the hospital gown. “What’s going to happen to him now? All his parents are going away. Even that sorry excuse for a stepfather.”
“I’m going to personally make sure he’s placed with a good family.” Horatio rested a hand on Jesse’s shoulder, gently. “He’ll get a chance to be loved the way he deserves. He’s a resilient little boy. He’s going to be just fine, Jesse.”
Jesse nodded, blinking a little faster.
And so will you. You’re just as resilient as that boy. Always were. I wish we’d found you sooner. Been able to intervene there too. But no one came to us for you.
Horatio couldn’t condone Matthew’s actions. But he also couldn’t say nothing good came of them. There was a kid out there now who was going to get a chance to grow up safe and loved.
But there was a kid in this room who needed to be reminded he’d gotten a second chance too.
“They want you to spend the night here. For observation.”
The doctors had pulled not one but three separate pieces of metal out of Jesse’s hip and thigh. There was a time, years ago, when Horatio might have brought it up. Might have insisted Jesse should have told someone sooner.
But none of that was what Jesse needed to hear right now.
He didn’t need anyone else’s blame. Anyone else’s criticism.
He was hearing enough of that, from his old department.
And if H was right, from himself, too. Jesse had always been his own harshest critic. If a case fell through, he’d take responsibility, even if the issue had been nothing he’d ever touched during the investigation.
It felt like he was hoping people would go easier on him if he just told them everything was his fault.
“Are you going to stay, or check yourself out as soon as my back is turned?”
Jesse leaned back, staring at the ceiling. “Not like my motel room is a whole lot better. Probably won’t get any more sleep there.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
Jesse sighed. “I don’t know. Not sure which is worse, honestly.”
H wondered, vaguely, what they’d given Jesse to make him say anything as remotely open and vulnerable as that. The kid had always had everything he was feeling or thinking locked down tight. It was the eyes that betrayed him, and H had learned to read them well.
“There’s a spare bedroom at my place.”
Jesse looked up at him, startled.
“Someone ought to be keeping an eye on you tonight. You shouldn’t be alone. But you might actually get some rest there without all this stuff.” He nodded to the monitors. “I know you. It’ll get around eleven and you won’t be able to sleep and you’ll want to leave.”
Jesse shrugged. “I don’t want to put you out. I’m not the easiest person to have in the house. At night. Anymore.”
“None of us do this job without bringing home the nightmares, Jesse.” Horatio rested his hand on Jesse’s shoulder again. “Got a go bag in your car at the station?”
“Not anymore. That’s where the shirt was from.” Jesse chewed on his lip for a moment. “My stuff’s all at the motel.”
“Then you can borrow some of mine for the night.” Horatio said.
“Anything’s better than this thing.” Jesse picked at the hospital gown with a grimace.
“What? That pattern is better than half those godawful ties you wear.”
A flash of pain that no amount of anything in that IV was going to deaden flickered across Jesse’s face for a moment. The ties are a sore spot. I wonder if Tracy gave him grief about his fashion sense too.
Jesse had always been a minefield of trauma, raw edges, and old wounds. Nothing new about working around a few more.
H smiled at him, just a bit, hoping to start pushing the cloud hanging over the kid out of the way, just a little. “Well, then, let’s sign you out against all sound medical advice and go home.”