Chapter Text
Sammy is tired.
This single parenting thing, it’s bullshit, alright? He doesn’t know how anybody does it. Sure, sometimes he gets hot women coming up to him in the supermarket or in the park, cooing over Nate and telling Sammy he's such a good dad to be doing this kind of stuff. Which, first, he hates when people talk about him babysitting his own kid, because he is a father, okay, and second he's just fucking tired.
Cooking, cleaning, baths, bedtimes, work, laundry. Rinse, lather, repeat, and all of it by himself.
He’s reconnected with Lydia Adams lately, had coffee a couple times—not in a date way, hot as she is; she’s got something tentative going on with her old partner and besides, he’s way too busy for dating—but they can commiserate with one another better than most over the single parent cop life. Plus, Nate and Christopher have been getting along, and somehow having two toddlers in the house is easier to wrangle than one; at least, unless they team up against him. And she takes Nate a couple times a month, too, which lets him collapse in his bed for a full night with nobody calling out for a trip to the potty, or a water refill, or a closet-monster removal.
Sammy loves his kid, and he loves his work, but he's so tired and he's starting to think maybe he needs some kind of change.
He’s just closed the door on Nate and Christopher for the night—both toddlers finally sacked out in Nate’s bed after six consecutive reads of Goodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site—when he sees the envelope sitting on the door mat. He freezes.
Sammy doesn’t get much mail, is the thing, and this envelope definitely hadn't been there a half hour ago. After the whole fake NBK shit, he’d moved to this place in a quiet cul-de-sac, and he’d made sure he didn’t put his address anywhere or give it to anyone. Hell, as far as most of the precinct knows, Sammy still lives in Castaic. Most of the mail he does get is directed to his PO box, all his bills and crap, so this letter is an unexpected surprise.
It sits under the mail slot he keeps meaning to nail shut and replace with a mailbox on the street so there’s not a fucking hole in his door people can stick cameras or guns or whatever through (maybe he’s a little paranoid, sue him, he’s got good reason), and it’s thick, textured paper, the kind the guy from American Psycho would have had a boner for. The address and his name—his full name, Samuel Matthew Bryant, and nobody calls him Samuel or uses his middle name for shit—are calligraphied on there, in thick cursive lines like a wedding invitation.
It gives him the heebie-jeebies, a little bit.
He bends down, picks it up, flips it over.
It has a fucking wax seal.
“Either someone’s playing a really weird joke,” he murmurs to himself, “or I’m about to get murdered.”
Sammy slides his finger under the edge of the flap and pops it open. There’s a smell to it, too, something like old books, worn leather, a hint of vanilla. The card inside is thick, cream-colored parchment, blank, and when he flips it over to make sure he didn’t miss something, something bright explodes across the page.
He doesn’t remember dropping the letter or going for his gun but he manages not to shoot the sparkly piece of paper. It’s a near thing, though.
It’s still glowing, the edges burning golden-bright with patterns, the text shimmering as it unfurls itself across the page.
Sammy reads aloud, "You have been selected to interview for a prestigious position with the Metropolitan Public Library." He turns the page over. That's it. That's all it says. "The fuck?"
As pranks go, it's weird. He's not saying that he'd prefer to have someone steal his towel and tape his locker shut while he's in the shower, or fill his car with pigeons, or what the fuck ever, but he's not real sure where the punch line is here. Doesn't seem like the sense of humor of anyone he knows. Butts are funny. Fake invitations for a job with a place that Sammy guesses is located in New York City, based on the postmark? Well, that kind of falls flat.
There's not even a date or time or email address listed for this supposed interview. "No standards in pranking these days," Sammy grumbles to himself, and heads for the kitchen. He can't have a beer while he's got the kiddos around, but maybe he's got some decaf left or—
He jumps when he turns on the kitchen light and sees that there's something stuck to the front of the fridge that wasn't there a few hours before. A second look tells him it's another letter—Next Wednesday, 3p.m., via the West 40th Street Entrance—and two paper plane tickets. Round trip, LAX to JFK, one for Samuel M. Bryant and the other for Nathaniel T. Bryant. Sammy gets closer and squints at the bottom of the page, where in tiny font it says The Library is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, national origin, sexuality, religion, disability, parental status, or other protected class.
When Sammy fires up his battered laptop to look for the airline's contact info, check if these tickets are legit or just clever fakes, he finds that there's a booking confirmation email sitting in his personal email inbox. Typing the confirmation code into the airline's website brings up flight tickets. The fuck? Someone's spent money on this.
This is definitely the weirdest prank he’s ever been the victim of. He's not what anyone would call a reader, and his degree is in Criminal Justice, not in… Librarianology or what the hell ever. What would he be supposedly doing working for a library?
But on the other hand—he’s never seen New York. Nate’s never even left California, unless Tammi’s done something that breaks their custody agreement (likely). So maybe he’ll just stop looking this gift horse in the mouth. What's the worst that could happen—he tries to check in for the flights the day before and finds that the tickets don't work?
He’s due for a vacation, anyway, plenty of days saved up that he’d been planning to use for the custody battle; but now that that’s over, and Nate is safely his—Tammi only gets monthly supervised visits until she's done with rehab—he can waste a few on an adventure.
#
He puts in his leave request and it’s approved immediately, and still, nobody pops up with a gotcha, sucker!—Ben even says something about how he hopes Nate will have a good time, which is kind of fucked up given that he wasn't exactly prioritizing whether Nate was having a good time a few months ago, but Sammy ignores it. It takes him more time to figure out the logistics for the NYC side of things. Dewey’s been there, but everything he recommends isn’t what you'd call toddler-friendly. It's barely grown human friendly.
So Sammy ends up googling it all. He finds a cheap-ish hotel a few blocks from the address on the card that’s also near the Empire State Building and has a park nearby for Nate. He bookmarks a webpage titled '72 Hours with Kids in Manhattan.' He figures they’ll do a little sightseeing, eat some good deli food, and whatever does or doesn't happen at the library on top of that will be golden.
At the very least, it'll make for a good story.
Nate’s excited to go on a plane—the little guy’s been in a transit phase for a few months, and he makes Sammy read every single plane book in the house the day before the trip. "Plane, dada?" he asks every morning after Sammy tells him, hoping that today's the day.
"Tuesday, buddy," Sammy tells him, and ruffles his hair. "Gotta be patient."
Sammy’s kind of excited, too, because he’s been on a plane, sure, but it’s not exactly an everyday thing for him, either. He drops fifty bucks he doesn't really have on one of those ride-along suitcases for toddlers, this one decorated with pictures of planes and rocket ships, and Nate actually hugs it the first time he sees it. Totally worth it.
It’s a six hour flight, direct, and LAX is a nightmare (they make him dump out Nate’s apple juice at security, which is fucked up, and he has to deal with an emergency trip to the potty with ten minutes till boarding) but once they’re onboard, he pushes open the window shade and watches Nate’s absolute fucking joy as the ground drops away from under them. He barely even notices the way his stomach drops at the elevation, or his ears popping, because he’s never seen that look on his kid’s face.
All worth it, even if it is a stupid prank.
(Although it’s driving him nuts. What the fuck is the punchline?)
#
Being driven in a cab across Brooklyn Bridge is pretty much like it is in the movies, except maybe with more traffic, and Sammy thinks it's baller. Aloud, though, what he says to Nate is, "Hey, buddy, isn't this fun?"
Nate says, "Yellow car!"
Sammy agrees with him that yes, they're in a yellow car.
"Yellow!" Nate says again, and claps his hands together.
"Yup," Sammy says, and he loves his kid but sometimes he does remind him of the three painful weeks he'd spent partnered up with Mike Davison, back before he got his detective badge for the first time. Nice guy and all, but it was like driving around for eight or nine hours a day and having a conversation with a fucking brick wall.
The hotel is like another blast from the past, what with their room being about the size of the first apartment Sammy had ever rented, eighteen and desperate to get out from under his parents' thumb. But it's clean, it's got a proper cot for Nate wedged in next to Sammy's (supposedly) double bed, and Sammy quickly dumps their shit there before they go out to explore the city.
New York's a lot more compressed than LA is, is Sammy's first impression, and the weather's a lot more changeable. Lot of fucking pigeons. But he kind of digs it. They go see some trains on the platforms at Grand Central Station, which has Nate vibrating with joy, they eat some ice cream, they're both wiped and head to bed early.
And then when Sammy wakes up, it's Wednesday, and he's maybe got an actual job interview ahead of him.
What the fuck is his life.
First thing in the morning, they visit the Empire State Building to beat the crowds. Sammy's ticket is stupid expensive, but the views are pretty great—like taking a chopper ride over LA, but without anyone having to commit a crime first. After lunch, he puts on the nicest of his suits from his detective days and straps Nate into the front pack thing (because the backpack one means Nate chews his hair and that’s fucking gross) and wonders, for a moment, what a potential employer will think about him showing up with his toddler. But if they were able to send him that special-effect letter, they probably already know he’s a single dad who doesn’t know a single person east of Sacramento, and they did have all that corporate diversity speak stuff on their paperwork, so. They can survive seeing his incredibly cute kid for an hour or whatever.
When Sammy was first starting out with LAPD, he thought the people—usually women—who made a fuss about parental leave and whatnot were kind of shrill and trying to make their problems other people's business. He guesses maybe he thinks a bit differently about these things now.
He’s just stepping up to the impressive marble hulk of the Metropolitan Public Library building, coffee in one hand, what he thinks of as his dad bag (containing everything you need to survive a day on the go with a toddler, a copy of his résumé and a ziploc baggie of cheerios) in the other, when a whirlwind of limbs smacks directly into his side. Sammy catches himself on the railing although his coffee goes flying down the stairs, but the other guy’s not so lucky: he tips sideways, arms flailing, and folds over the railing, landing flat on his back on the pavement.
“Shit!” Sammy kneels next to him, maneuvering awkwardly around Nate’s legs. They definitely hadn't bumped into one another that hard. “Hey, buddy, you okay?”
The guy groans and rubs a hand over his face, and, shit, it’s a nice face: big brown eyes, a mop of brown hair, lines around his eyes like he smiles a lot. In Sammy's line of work, he learned long ago that you can't always tell just by looking at someone whether they're a good guy or a bad guy, or muddling along somewhere in between like most people. A handsome face can help someone get away with the most fucked-up shit you could imagine; the grumpiest face can belong to the kindest person—but sometimes, sometimes your gut tells you right from the get-go whether you're looking at someone who's trustworthy face or not.
Sammy thinks he can trust this guy's face.
"Oh, hi," the guy says, blinking up at Sammy, "it's you! You're early, but I suppose punctuality is something prized in law enforcement, right? Or just in security professions in general; your résumé shows that you've got quite a bit of additional experience chaperoning pop stars and whatnot."
Chaperoning and whatnot? Where the hell did this guy come from? Sammy blinks. "I'm sorry, sir, I don't know who—"
"Oh, yes, introductions are helpful." The guy finally hauls himself up off the ground and doesn't so much stand as he bounces himself into an upright position. He holds out a hand for Sammy to shake once he stands, too. He beams; his grip is warm and firm. "I'm Flynn Carsen, or I suppose I should say Dr. Flynn Carsen in a context like this one, doctorates and all, but since the interview is really more a formality than anything, I think just Flynn is fine. Pleasure to meet you, Samuel! Oh, and you too, Nathaniel." He shakes Nate's small hand, too, with less force but an equal amount of sincerity, and stoops so that he's looking right into the kiddo's eyes as he speaks to him.
Sammy won't say he's not confused—this guy's got so much extra energy fizzing off him it's almost visible, but his pupils are the size they should be and he's showing none of the other usual signs exhibited by someone who's off their head on meth or PCP—but he is kind of charmed despite himself.
"Just Sammy is fine," Sammy says, and brushes the fall of red hair off Nate's forehead. "And my main guy here is Nate."
"Welcome, welcome," Flynn said, "this way." He led them through the crowds of visitors, swiped them through a side door, and down a corridor to a wooden spiral staircase that looked like something out of a castle. Thanks to various cases, almost all of them really fucking depressing, Sammy had been in plenty of rich people's homes over the years, the majority of them painted white and grey and made out of steel with walls of glass that let in the Californian sun and looked out over the Hollywood Hills. Few of them felt the way that this place did: like you weren't just looking at what a lot of money could do, you were looking at something that had been built up by money and power over many, many generations.
Nate points at a suit of armor as they reach the top of the staircase. “Silver man!”
“He sure is,” says Flynn. He drops his voice into a conspiratorial whisper. “I call him George.”
Nate waves at George as they pass by, and Sammy grins to himself.
He follows Flynn to a bookshelf with two guys standing beside it, obviously guarding it, and yeah. This is weird. They look Secret Service, sort of: earbuds and military posture and definitely concealed weapons, kind of like the guy that Sammy got his guard card training from. But what the hell would Secret Service agents be doing in a library, guarding a shelf of like, plays or something?
Shit, is this all because someone stole a Shakespeare? Original Shakespeares are expensive, Sammy remembers that much from high school English class.
Flynn waves at the men, who don’t wave back. They both do glance at Sammy, though, and one definitely gives the stink eye to Nate on his chest—fuck you, man—but he’s getting the impression that Flynn’s the guy in charge here, because they both glance at Flynn first. He gives them that big, rabbit-toothed smile and Sammy’s glad to see that he’s not the only hardened law enforcement guy who melts a little bit in the face of those sparkly eyes and pink cheeks.
Flynn tugs one of the books out halfway, and there’s a click somewhere in the floor that makes Sammy reach for the gun he is obviously not wearing, and the bookshelf swings open.
Sammy has a moment, as Flynn steps forward through the dark gap, of wondering what the hell he’s doing, bringing his kid into this extremely fucking weird situation, but despite the guys with guns and the weirdness of it all, he doesn’t feel like they’re in danger. He trusts his Spidey Sense.
After all, this is New York City. Spidey Sense is king here.
He follows Flynn through the gap in the bookshelf, and it swings shut behind them.
It turns out to lead into an elevator, which is less weird than Sammy was expecting, considering—but then it starts to descend without either of them pushing any buttons, and it keeps going.
And going.
And going.
Sammy glances over at Flynn, who’s rocking on his heels a little bit (the guy never seems to stop moving, Jesus) but he doesn’t seem to think there’s anything wrong with the fact that they’re definitely down more than twenty floors by now and the elevator's not slowing down. The screen’s not even showing a number anymore, just weird symbols, and he’s about to ask... something... when it jolts to a stop.
Nate lets out a little shriek, and Sammy kind of wants to do the same thing, but he’s a cop and a fully grown man, so he doesn’t. And then the doors slide open.
Sammy looks around him, and his jaw falls open. Him and Big Nate had once worked a case in the Getty where two conservators got into it about some aspect of the job and one of them had brained the other with an ancient Greek vase that had a lot more dicks painted on it than Sammy would have predicted. So he knows that the building over his head is big, and he also understands that libraries and museums and what have you, they often have underground levels that they use for storage and conservation and other behind the scenes stuff.
But the space in front of them goes on and on and on, book cases and cabinets and is that a fucking boat? It looks like it stretches out half the length of Manhattan, and Sammy's pretty sure that he should have heard by now if there was a library out there that was as big as a city—if only because he spent a lot of time out on the couch in the small hours of the morning, cradling Nate during his fucking awful colicky phase and zoning out in front of NatGeo documentaries. Meant that he learned a lot of stuff about whales.
Which is how he knows, when he cranes his neck backwards, that what he can see suspended overhead is an entire blue whale, and that those suckers can reach up to a hundred feet in length. The whale looks small in the immensity of the space.
Sammy takes this all in, and then he says, "Uh", which feels like the only thing he can say that's not a lot of four-letter words, and honest he is trying to be better about not using swears where Nate can hear him.
"I've got the paperwork around here somewhere for you to sign," Flynn is saying. "Pension contributions aren't great, considering, but the health benefits are excellent, including dental, and the salary is competitive. We've also got a guest suite you can stay in while you're looking for a place around here. Obviously Midtown can be a tough place to apartment hunt, but there's also a housing supplement, so—"
Sammy holds up a hand. "Hold up, hold up, Mr… uh, Flynn. No one's actually told me what this supposed job offer even is. I'm an LAPD officer, I don't work with all of… whatever this is." He gestures around him at the books and the boat and the… is that a fucking fountain?
Flynn blinks. "Oh! Oh, yes, I suppose you wouldn't… well, I mean, the letter is traditional but it maybe prioritizes the aesthetic over the, you know, communication." He stands up straight, sets his shoulders, and for the first time he doesn't so much look like a cute dweeb in a tweed jacket as… well, still a cute dweeb in a tweed jacket but also one who has absolute confidence in the job and in where he stands. "I'm the Librarian," he says, and somehow Sammy can hear the capital L in the title, "and my duty is to serve this Library, to increase its store of knowledge and to safeguard the books and relics it contains for the safety and betterment of all humanity."
"Okay," Sammy says slowly.
"There have been Librarians for generations, and each Librarian has a Guardian who stands by their side… except for how I've been having trouble keeping one lately. Having trouble keeping a lot of people around lately. The core Library staff is basically, uh, just me right now." Flynn's shoulders droop, and instead of guardian Sammy hears partner and he thinks about dragging Nate's awful, limp weight into the car, his throat already raw from screaming; thinks about Ben and his betrayals.
"But I guess the Library feels like it's time for me to work with a new Guardian," Flynn goes on. "A Guardian is like an elite bodyguard. An expert in combat, tactics, survival. Someone who can help me keep my feet on the ground, I guess. You might have a tough time believing this, but"—Flynn's voice drops into a stage whisper—"sometimes people say that I have trouble with common sense."
"No kidding," Sammy says.
"And the Library's searched the world and it found you, Samuel Bryant of the LAPD," Flynn says. "Beat cop and detective and licensed to operate as private security in the state of California. But more than that, the Library likes you, it thinks you're… you're valiant. It thinks you should be a Guardian. So, uh, what do you say?"
Sammy looks down at Nate, who’s staring up at the ship that’s looming over them. Nothing about this place makes sense, but maybe nothing about Sammy's life has made sense in a while. He's been so tired, and so lonely, and the job that gave him meaning for so long just doesn't seem to fit him right any more. Plus, he's got that kind of tingle he gets sometimes when he's right on the verge of putting two and two together on a case. Then he looks at Flynn, whose brown eyes are sparkling, hopeful, and thinks, what the hell. Someone thinks I'm valiant.
He takes Flynn’s warm hand in his and shakes it.
#
The cross-country move is somehow easier and more complicated than Sammy expected: he puts in his notice, turns in his badge and service weapon, and sells the house, easy.
He tells Tammi, which is also less difficult than he expected. He expects some kind of blow-out argument, days of screaming phone calls back and forth. But Tammi doesn't kick up any fuss about him leaving the state with her first-born. Turns out she’s pregnant again, with Victor’s baby this time, and he thinks she might have fallen off the wagon for a third time, which is... not his problem, but it still breaks his heart a little bit. The way she says "Having him for a couple of weeks in the summers is fine, sure," makes him want to punch a wall. He doesn't think the girl he'd first met, more than a decade ago now, would have shrugged off her own kid so easily.
But time changes people, and drugs change people, and Nate deserves a better mom, one who gives a shit about him as more than a pawn between the two of them, but Tammi’s the one he’s got.
Leaving the job Sammy’s had since he was fresh out of his associate’s degree—that’s harder. He’s never done anything else. In high school, he hadn’t had much of a plan for the future, and he’d only had the vague idea he wanted to help people somehow; he wasn’t going to be a doctor or anything, not with the cost of four-year college, so he’d gone along with it when his friends had joked about taking the cop test. And then he hadn’t been able to let go of the idea, when he got his scores back—even if he'd only finally worked up the courage to sign on the dotted line when he was totally blazed. Now he’s not doing that any more.
Now he's leaving the only home he’s ever known. He's an Angeleno, born and raised, same as his parents, same as their parents. Moving away feels like a big fucking deal. It feels sad. But not sad enough to change his mind.
On Sammy's last day in Los Angeles, he drives back to the intersection where his partner Nate died. He stands in the street, taking it in. The worst day of his life happened right here, and no one ever saw proper justice for it, and he’s probably never going to see this spot again.
He thinks maybe that’s a good thing.
He thinks about Mariella, about the way she’d sold her place and pulled up her family's roots, fleeing the memories and the strange whirlpool they’d found themselves in when he’d been living on her couch. There had been a few moments between them, where he’d felt the pull: where he’d wanted to kiss her, wanted to hold her, wanted to take her to bed so he could forget all his shit for even a few minutes. But he hadn’t, because it hadn’t been about her. It hadn’t even been about them. He's talked to Mariella once or twice since she'd moved back to Texas, but that's it. That's probably a good thing, too. They'd never really been friends. Nate had been the only thing they'd really had in common.
Sammy drives by the Morettas' old house, too, parks across the street, stares at it for a while. He remembers watching the game with Nate in the living room, the two of them losing their goddamn minds with joy when their team won. Thinks about sitting on the porch, pouring cereal for Pete and chasing him around the yard. Remembers the way Mariella’s eyes had gone wide when he’d told her about little Nate’s name.
Lets himself conjure up Nate’s smile, the feel of his hand on his shoulder, the way he’d hug Sammy tight after a tough case, and thinks: yeah, it’s time to go. Because going back to patrol—it didn’t solve it, didn’t fill the hole inside him the way he’d hoped it would. Didn't dissolve his anger or his fear. His grief. He'd thought he was doing a good thing, helping to mold new cops who'd be just as good, just as determined and tenacious and loyal as Detective Nate Moretta had been. Instead he’d been sucked into the same shit it always was, and all he came out with was scars and cynicism, rather than any life lessons imparted to the next generation.
Yeah. It’s time to go.
Some of the guys from the precinct throw him a goodbye party at a local bar, but it’s a weird vibe, because he hasn’t told any of them exactly why he’s dropping everything and moving across the country. Tough to do that, when you've signed a magical NDA with a secret ancient Library. There are rumors flying, because of course there are: he hears one that he’s been tapped for the FBI, which is pretty cool, and another that he won the lottery and isn’t telling anyone. Lydia's the one who comes the closest to the truth—she had almost lost Russell, after all, had lost him as a partner, knows what it’s like to work beside a ghost. So she doesn’t ask why, just hugs him tight and makes him promise to send pictures of Nate and to visit as much as he can.
And then he packs everything into a U-Haul and starts the long, long drive across the country, just him and his best guy.
#
By the time they hit the halfway point, Sammy’s delirious with exhaustion—even only driving six or seven hours a day, it’s a lot for one guy. The U-Haul steers like shit, the semi drivers are insane, and Nate doesn't like being cooped up for hours at a stretch. Sammy’s starting to wonder if he hallucinated Flynn and the library altogether, because what the hell was he thinking? He quit his well-paying, pensioned job on a fucking whim? He flexes his hands against the steering wheel.
Every so often, he glances at the job invitation that's tucked into the flap of the sun visor above him, and then over at Nate, who's buckled tightly into the car seat beside him. They have another fourteen or fifteen hours of travel ahead of them, minimum. Iowa has no business being this flat. Every time he has to pee, he has to take Nate out and bring him into the men’s room. The motels of middle America are starting to melt together in his brain, and Nate’s pack and play is getting more and more battered with every unfolding.
His phone rings with an unknown number as he pulls into the parking lot of the less disreputable looking of the two motels in a small Illinois town just off I-80, and when he picks it up, Flynn’s voice is bright in his ear.
"Hey!" Flynn says. There's some kind of noise in the background of the call that Sammy can't place—it sounds almost like the flapping of birds’ wings? Weird—but Flynn doesn't sound bothered by it. "How's the trip going?"
"Exhausting," Sammy admits, as he tries to get Nate out of his car seat one-handed. "But we should still be there by Friday. Unless—" He feels a sudden spike of panic that maybe this is the moment when the punchline hits. This is when Flynn hands over the phone to Ben who says "Fucking psych" and Sammy realizes he’s a sucker who just quit his job and sold his place and drove halfway across the country for nothing.
But all Flynn says is, "Great! I'm looking forward to seeing you guys. I was just calling to check in about the set-up for you in the guest accommodation. I know you'll want to be out and in your own space soon enough, but it should be comfortable for you and the little guy while you're with us. So we've got your rooms made up, but I was wondering if you had favorite snacks? Foods? Beverages? I got those little animal cracker things for Nate, because I loved them when I was a kid, but maybe he's got his own preferences? Or you? Do you have any dietary restrictions? I'll let you know up front that I'm not great with olives, but honestly, just tell me what to get and I'll add it to the list. We can expense it all later—between you and me, I kind of have an in with the Library accounting system, ha!"
Sammy blinks, because this isn't anything he was expecting. Not just a professional space being made for him, but a home—even a temporary one—being made for him and his son? It's such a small thing in one sense, but in others it's so far from getting down on his knees and scrubbing blood off a stranger's floor, or having to paint over fake gang tags on his living room wall by himself.
He rattles off a list of groceries that will be good to have around to feed a sometimes-picky toddler without too much effort while he checks into the motel. And Sammy could just end the conversation there, thank Flynn for his time and effort, but he finds himself putting Flynn on speakerphone and just staying on the line and chatting while he assembles a sandwich for Nate from the dwindling contents of the cooler that he first packed back in LA, and then gets him ready for bed.
"Hi, Flynn!" Nate says, with all a toddler's volume control, which means none. "Gotta TUCK."
"You're driving in a big truck?" Flynn says, somehow translating a toddler's pronunciation with ease. "That's great, buddy!"
"Flynn gotta tuck?" Nate sounds very concerned that maybe Flynn is having to live in the heart of Manhattan without a U-Haul truck to call his own.
"I don't, but maybe you can show me yours when you get here. How about that?" Flynn answers Nate’s toddler questions with as much seriousness as he does Sammy’s own. It's kind of flustering, how unconsciously charming it is.
Nate falls asleep clutching his favorite stuffy to his chest. Sammy sits on his bed and stays talking quietly to Flynn until his battery runs low and he's got to plug in his phone. "You sure you don't have anything better to do than talk to me? Single guy in the big city, you should be out, you know, living it up in the club."
Flynn’s laugh crackles down the line. “Oh, yeah, living it up, that’s me. You know, I tried to take a vacation a couple years back in New Orleans—”
Sammy’s starting to doze off, Nate’s tiny snores soothing him down along with Flynn’s voice. He’s idly trying to picture the white suit and cravat vibe that Flynn’s describing when his attention catches on something else he’s saying.
“Did you say vampires?”
“There was a whole plot where people were trying to resurrect Dracula for the greater glory of Mother Russia, yep. Long story, though.” There’s a rustle across the phone line, and Sammy’s mind produces the image of Flynn, stretched out in a mirror to Sammy on a bed in some fancy Manhattan apartment. Probably has a view of the Empire State building. Does he have matching pajamas? He seems like the kind of guy to have matching pajamas. The old-fashioned, button-up kind, probably.
“Russian vampires,” Sammy wiggles a little on the lumpy motel bed, kicking the comforter down so he can snuggle under the sheets. “Okay, sure. And you stopped them, though?”
“Just barely,” Flynn says. He sounds tired, too, and Sammy lets his eyes drift shut on the wave of Flynn’s voice.
He wakes up in the morning to Nate’s voice, already chattering about the birds he can see out the window, and with his phone still in his bed, a lump trapped beneath his back.
#
Sammy thinks about the improbable weirdness of this some more as he drives east. He's mostly set aside now the idea that this is some huge practical joke, but it's still difficult to get from "giant library exists underneath Manhattan" to "vampires are real." Maybe it's a metaphor? Has to be a metaphor. Flynn's probably just a very nice but very eccentric ultra rich dude who's read too much poetry and majored in English Lit or whatever.
He's basically settled on the idea of it being a metaphor, and come up with the theory that Flynn just got Sammy's name from one of the celebrities he did a bodyguarding stint with, by the time he's rolling through Jersey City and heading for the Holland Tunnel. That makes the most sense, yeah.
But when he parks mid-afternoon on Friday in the private Metropolitan Library loading bay that Flynn gave him directions to, Sammy finds he's got to do some rethinking.
Because you can tell yourself that alleged vampires you've never seen are metaphors, sure. Little more difficult to tell yourself that the boxes containing all your worldly goods levitating themselves out of the back of the U-Haul are doing it because they're being metaphorical or a simile or whatever.
"Uh," Sammy says.
Nate laughs and claps in delight. "Dada, they flying."
"Yup," Sammy says, watching as the boxes line up in floating rows, two by two, like something out of a Disney cartoon. "That's what's happening, bud."
Maybe, he tells himself, all those teenage stoner years are finally catching up to him.
"Oh good, you made it!" Flynn seems to appear out of nowhere. This time, he's not dressed like he wandered out of one of those old Agatha Christie movies that Sammy's grandma used to love. Not a glimpse of tweed. He's in jeans and Converse and a t-shirt, and he'd seem like basically any other guy roughly Sammy's age that he might hang out with, if not for the fact that his t-shirt says Math: It's Radical!
"Hey, buddy!" Flynn says, crouching and holding up his hand for Nate to high five. Nate does so with utter glee, and then hands over his favorite stuffie for Flynn to inspect. "This is a very cool elephant, Nate. Okay, come on this way, I'll show you where we've got you set up."
Sammy scoops Nate up and they, followed by their boxes, process behind Flynn into the Library and down a different spiraling flight of stairs and along some corridors and into something that's basically a self-contained apartment. Sammy's eyes widen in surprise. He'd been expecting a beige room with a bed and a cot and a shower, maybe a coffee maker if he was lucky.
Instead, they'd been given a spacious set of rooms that was probably bigger than the place he'd just sold back in LA.
First up, a kitchen-cum-living room, looking like something out of one of those interior design magazines that Tammi would sometimes buy and sigh over and say, "But if we got just a small loan, we could make the kitchen so nice, baby." The moving boxes stack themselves neatly in one corner of the room. A bowl of fresh fruit already sits on the countertop; there’s a vase of tulips on the coffee table in front of the TV. Leading off the kitchen to the left is a spacious bathroom with a tub and a shower, and a fricking skylight, which doesn't make any sense when they're this far below ground. Sunlight sparkles off gleaming white tile and polished grey stone.
And then to the right of the kitchen, a bedroom for Sammy, and one for Nate, and when he sees Nate's room, Sammy feels a lump in his throat.
Between lawyers' fees and alimony payments and moving costs and going from detective back to patrol cop, Sammy's had a long period of burning through what meagre savings he ever had, and even with all the overtime he's been pulling it's been a struggle to start building back up any kind of cushion. He's still living paycheck to paycheck, essentially, which is kind of fucking ironic when one of the reasons why he'd decided to stick it out through the academy was the promise of some kind of future financial stability. He'd seen how much it had fucked up his parents' marriage, trying to keep one step ahead of their creditors. He's always, always tried to give Nate the best he could, to let him grow up without that kind of fucked-up fear hanging over his head. Sammy would prefer to go without dinner than deny his son anything; he'd worn socks that were mostly holes for two solid months to be able to pay for Nate's Christmas gifts last year. But there was only so far you could stretch a dollar, and Nate's bedroom back in LA had been clean and safe but plain.
Here, the room that says 'Nate' on the door is like something out of a kid's dream. The walls are alive with color—coated with striped wallpaper in all different shades of blue—and against the far wall stands what is surely a custom-built wooden bed, shaped like a tiny fort and painted pale green. Rugs make the wooden floor cozy; there are picture books and finger paints stacked on a small white table that stands, with a matching chair, in the middle of the room.
Nate runs into it at full toddler speed, and immediately starts dismantling the tower of brightly colored wooden blocks in one corner.
"Is it okay?" Flynn says from just behind Sammy. "I don't have a lot of experience with kids, and you can swap out whatever you don't like, I just told the Library to do what it thought was good. But I did suggest the finger paints! Finger paints are great. Good to get him practicing his hieroglyphics while he's still young, you know?"
"It's, uh, it's perfect," Sammy says, and fucking hell, he is not going to embarrass himself by tearing up.
Flynn shows Sammy where the food is, and then says he'll leave them alone to unwind a bit. "If you want me, I'm just down the hall, first door on the left."
"That your office?" Sammy says, because if he's going to be the Guardian of this place then one of his first jobs is going to be getting his bearings. He's going to need to carry a mental map of the Library, and of New York City, in his head, the same way he knows every inch of LA.
"Mine? Oh, no, it's where I live," Flynn says, and he flashes a smile that hasn't got quite so much of his usual cheer to it. "I mean, I am the Librarian."
#
They settle in quickly, unpacking into the space, and Sammy dutifully looks at apartment listings, but he discovers that he doesn't want to look very hard. They’re all small, and expensive, and this place is great and free, and his commute right now is a wander down the hall. Plus, the Library’s got a whole playroom for Nate, which is pretty cool, with a child-size version of their apartment kitchen and a whole chest of awesome costumes for him to try on and a model train set that Sammy just knows Big Nate would have flipped his shit for. The playroom is surrounded by a half-wall with a gate, so Sammy can pop him in there and keep one eye on him and the other on Flynn as he bops around the place, looking like the Willy Wonka of rare books and magical artifacts.
Sammy finds a proper daycare pretty easily, because apparently daycare is free in New York City for two year olds now? Which is wild, since back in LA there had been no way he could afford it full time like this. He knows it'll be good for Nate to socialize with kids his age, make some little friends, get used to a wider world than one that's made up of his old man. The daycare facility is only a couple blocks away from the Library, so five days a week, he and Nate trundle down West 40th, pointing out pigeons and grabbing coffee from Ahmed’s cart on the corner of 8th and a breakfast sandwich from the bagel shop right next to the daycare.
Flynn comes with them a couple times that first week, and Sammy’s amazed the guy hasn’t been hit by a bus: he gets distracted, falls off the curb, waves his hands around as he talks and once nearly walks into a light post (but Sammy grabs his flailing hand at the last moment and yanks him sideways to safety).
There’s a park right across from the Library, too, where Sammy takes Nate most days after picking him up: he chases ducks and points out buses and generally just sort of loses his mind for an hour or so before getting cooped back up inside.
And it's good, it's great, but that’s pretty much it. It seems like Flynn doesn’t do much else, at least not more than any librarian Sammy’s imagined would. He reads. He types things on his laptop. He makes phone calls, though it's true that his calls tend to be in more languages than Sammy would have thought possible for one person. And Sammy's not saying that's not work, but it is pretty sedentary. No peril involved. No one else uses the Library, so it's not like he even has to check out books, or wrangle patrons who decide to have their messy relationship breakup very loudly in the New Releases section or something.
For the first couple weeks or so, Sammy feels like he's there on some kind of weird vacation. Any day now he's going to wake up to a notification on his phone telling him that it's time to check in for his one-way flight back to Los Angeles. Back to reality. It's a nice weird vacation, true. He gets to hang out a lot with his kid, to see streets and sights he only knows from the movies, and to eat his fill of bagels that really do put the ones they'd had in LA to shame—all this, and he's getting paid for it. He's getting paid for it really well. But after so many years pulling ten-hour shifts multiple times a week, of running after dealers and thieves along back alleys and feeling the pulse of adrenaline in his system when someone shouts, "Gun! He's got a gun!", well… it's starting to feel like he's getting paid to just sit around on his ass, and that's kind of dissatisfying.
It's not that he's doing nothing. He familiarizes himself with the Library—as much as he can, at least. The hallways don't seem to stay in the same spot, which takes him a bit to get his head around; sometimes the Theoretical Animals Wing leads to the Modern Artifact Wing, and sometimes it adjoins the Chamber of Memories. He probably spends the most time in the Armory. The floating sword—which is apparently the Excalibur, as in King Arthur's sword, what the fuck—is pretty helpful at showing him the various kinds of badass weapons from all kinds of time periods that the Library has in its collection.
"Huh," Flynn says, when he pokes his head around the door one day to see if Sammy wants to grab lunch with him, "I didn't even know we had this room! An Armory? Neat! It must like you, if it's showing you rooms of your own already."
Sammy doesn't know what to make of that, but he pats the door jamb on the way out of the room and he's almost sure that he can feel the building give a happy little hum in response.
But there are only so many rooms to map, or practice rounds Sammy can put in at the firing range, and only so many swords he can swing around in front of a mirror and pretend like he's in a medieval version of Die Hard or something.
"Is this… it?" Sammy asks Flynn when he sits down opposite him in the Reading Room one day. Flynn is poring over some huge, leather-bound book written in an alphabet that Sammy doesn't recognize. He's wearing a thin-knit black sweater and he's got a pair of wire-rimmed glasses balanced precariously on the tip of his nose. It's a good look on him; Sammy bets it brings in a lot of ladies.
“What do you mean, it?” Flynn puts a long finger on the page to mark his place and pushes his glasses up his nose to peer at Sammy. He leans back in the chair, stretching a little and revealing a little sliver of pale, mostly-hairless tummy, and Sammy’s eyes track the movement idly. Not much to look at in the Reading Room, after all.
“The job. Is there something I can... do? Because it kind of feels like I’m just sitting around, you know. Not a lot of guarding getting done.”
Flynn’s eyes get that sparkle that Sammy’s already starting to recognize should make him wary. “There’s plenty of books to shelve,” he says. “And Cal’s always looking for a training buddy.”
“How often am I going to need to sword-fight, Flynn?” Sammy asks, because honestly, in more than a decade as a cop, he hadn’t needed much other than his fists and his gun. Well, he hit a guy over the head with a length of piping, once, but that had been improvised self-defense. He doesn't think it's the same thing. "I played around with them, that's more than enough."
“You’d be surprised.” Flynn picks up a bookmark and closes the tome he’s reading, standing. He reaches out with an open hand and suddenly there’s Cal, flying into his open palm. “I once fought a duel in the middle of an antiquities auction, you know, oh, and another in a Romanian museum, and if I hadn’t known how to fence, I’m pretty sure the world would have ended by now.” He steps closer, and he’s so light on his feet that Sammy doesn’t realize how close he is until he raises Cal, its point hovering a foot from Sammy’s chest. With his other hand, he plucks another sword from one of the armory racks, tosses it at Sammy, who catches it automatically. “So. Show me what you’ve learned.”
Sammy raises the sword, meeting Flynn’s thrust, and lets himself be drawn in.
Flynn wins with shocking ease.
#
But as fun as all the swordplay and pretend derring-do is, it doesn’t answer his question—it actually makes him wonder even more if this is all just some kind of joke for Flynn, if he’s been hired to keep him company, to amuse him while he does whatever rich weirdos in New York do all day (apparently, read books and play around with magic crap). Sammy’s babysitting, basically, even if his charge is a fully-grown, kind of pretty man with really bizarre taste in fashion (what is with the cravats? Sammy had never seen anybody outside of Fred from Scooby-Doo wear one).
“Seriously, though,” he asks over dinner later that week, because they’re neighbors, and Flynn lives alone in an apartment so bare that it startles Sammy the first time he sees it—and he's seen a lot of the kind of godawful, mattress-on-the-floor shitholes that rookie officers tend to rent. Not only that, but he seems to live mostly on coffee and cup noodles that he slurps while he reads. Sammy spent enough time around the extended Moretta family and its exuberant Mexican-American hospitality that the idea of just letting Flynn continue to live like that fills him with shame. He’s started making enough food for three instead of for two. “What do you need a guardian for? Your job seems pretty safe, man.”
“It’s not always,” Flynn says, taking a bite of pasta and letting out a little moan, eyes closed, cheeks flushed, like it's something other than pasta and red sauce (albeit with lots of veggies hidden in the sauce to get them past the discerning eye of the picky toddler). “Oh, man, this is good. You’re an amazing cook, you know that?”
Sammy definitely doesn’t get flustered at the compliment.
“Anyway, we’ll have to go out of the library one of these days soon—I’ve almost pinpointed the location of the Spear of Cú Chulainn and we’ll be heading out to retrieve it. Then you'll see.” He glances at Nate. “Bud, you’re gonna have to stay with a friend for a couple nights, okay?”
Nate responds by solemnly plucking a noodle off his plate and putting it into Flynn's hand.
Shit. Sammy shouldn't have procrastinated so much on finding a minder who can do nights and weekends. “Flynn, I don’t have anyone yet—”
Flynn grins, points at Nate with his un-pasta'ed hand. “You want to hang out with my mom, buddy?”
Margie Carsen turns out to be a very nice, normal lady living in a nice, normal house, and Sammy is not at all clear on how she produced a son who is a kind of gangling genius force of nature who lives inside a magical library. But, then again, Sammy supposes, his own grandma would have said that it takes all sorts of people to make a world.
Mrs Carsen is delighted to take Nate for a long weekend. "It's going to cause all sorts of neighborhood gossip that I'm just going to refuse to acknowledge," she says when Sammy awkwardly tries to offer her payment. Her grin makes Flynn's parentage that much more explicable. "That's more than enough."
And then a few mornings later, Sammy is on a plane to Ireland, which is his first trip outside of the States if you don't count a couple of boozed-up trips to Tijuana with some buddies when he was 18 or 19 (and he can't really remember them so he probably shouldn't), and it turns out that Flynn wasn't lying when he said that sometimes Guardians had a lot more to do than just sit around. Ireland is nice and green, but it's difficult for Sammy to pay much attention to the beauty of the landscape, what with all the running and jumping and getting lost in ancient woodlands. There were several fist fights, a sword fight for real (and man, wouldn't Big Nate have loved to hear that story), and a climb up the side of what Sammy was pretty sure was some kind of protected national monument as they scrambled to get to this magical spear before this, like, apocalyptic death cult got to it.
It isn't that it's better or worse than dealing with killers in LA, exactly, but it sure is different.
Especially since he's got Flynn next to him the whole time. There's a point when they're walking back along a hedgerow-lined laneway to their bed and breakfast at sunrise, the magical spear tucked safely away under Flynn's arm. The two of them are bruised and scraped up and longing for food and showers and sleep, and Sammy glances over at a satisfied-looking Flynn and thinks: oh, this is who a Librarian and a Guardian are to one another. It's this. I missed this.
#
This becomes Sammy's life for the next few months. He watches with pride as his son gets ever closer to crossing the line that separates baby from little kid, growing so fast and learning so quick, he's just the brightest kid.
Sammy trains. He gets to know Manhattan through accompanying Flynn on buying trips to antiques dealers both legit and real fucking sketchy. He flops next to Flynn on the sofa in the evenings, and uses the Library's unrivalled cable TV package to try to coopt Flynn into rooting for the Lakers, as God intended. He listens to Flynn talk to Nate in like Mandarin or something—he insists that if Nate's to speak tonal languages without an accent he should start learning them now—and occasionally, in English, share scattered stories about his own childhood.
Sammy gets the feeling that Flynn was very lonely for a very long time.
Mrs Carsen helps out with Nate-sitting when a couple of more long-distance missions crop up—Flynn and Sammy retrieve a cursed wine goblet from Montreal, buy a collection of rare and powerful prophecies from a manuscript dealer in Johannesburg, and almost (but not quite) fall off a mountainside in Austria on the trail of some magic flute or other. It's like the kind of college Study Abroad experience Sammy never got to have, only with more swords and bullets. He eats foods he's never eaten before, listens to Flynn have conversations with people in languages that Sammy can't even name, and the whole time he'd swear that he's steadily becoming a better fighter, a better tactician. He even thinks that his eyesight is getting better, which is not usually a thing a guy in his thirties can say, at least without shelling out a lot of money on laser eye treatment.
Sammy says as much to Flynn when they're on their way back from their most recent expedition—a short jaunt to D.C. to exorcise some haunted thing that only needed them to do a day trip by train. (It was kind of nice, what with it being peak cherry blossom season along the Mall, especially since they have enough time to stop off there before heading back to the train station. Sammy feels like he's walking through some kind of movie set while they're there, even though—or maybe especially because—the White House looks so much smaller than it did when it was getting blown up in Independence Day.)
"That kind of comes with the territory, I think," Flynn tells him. "The longer that you work with m… with, uh, with the Library, the stronger the connection becomes. And that connection doesn't let you do things you wouldn't have been able to do before, but it lets you tap into, um, I guess into more of yourself, in a way. Does that make sense?"
"I guess so," Sammy says slowly, because it does, but there's something about how Flynn says it that gets that Spidey Sense tingling again. That hesitation before saying that Sammy's connection was to the Library; that pink flush on his cheekbones. But Sammy doesn't know what it means, and anyway their train is pulling into Penn Station, so he puts it aside for consideration later.
#
Their informal arrangement with Mrs Carsen works perfectly for a couple of months, and then when Flynn calls her one day to ask if she's free to take Nate for a few hours later this week, just while they take care of a quick job in Brooklyn, she says, "I'm sorry, honey, I can't! I'm going on my Caribbean cruise, remember? The Silver Senior Experience. Rosemary from the post office says her mother met a wonderful man on it last year."
Flynn turns faintly green, but says, "Oh, right, yes, thank you for the reminder," then hangs up and looks at his phone in horror.
So Nate comes along to Brooklyn, strapped firmly to Sammy’s chest, and it’s supposed to be a quick, easy job—just grabbing an enchanted mushroom that’s loose in Prospect Park—but of course, it’s never that easy. The mushroom turns out to have teeth, and Nate turns out to be terrified of two-foot-tall mushrooms (which, in this case, is fair, because the two-foot-tall mushroom has fucking teeth), and all three of them end up covered in grass by the time they’ve got the stupid thing bagged up.
On the subway ride home, Nate starts to doze off in Sammy's lap, sniffling faintly and cheek plastered against his chest in a way he's rarely done since he was a real little guy. Sammy’s glad the car’s mostly empty because he knows they all stink like sweat and dirt and possessed mushroom juices. Probably not the weirdest thing the train car’s seen, but still. Sometimes he misses his cruiser.
Next to Sammy, Flynn seems just as exhausted. He's got his head tipped back against the window, there’s a smudge of dirt high on his cheekbone, he’s got a bit of a five o’clock shadow coming in, and he’s holding tight to the bag of rabid mushroom just like Nate clutches his stuffed racecar at night.
Sammy spends a long time just looking at Flynn. He shouldn’t find a grown man cute, right? That’s weird. Even if he really wants to brush that stray piece of grass off of the delicate skin under Flynn’s eye. It’s just because it looks like it’s tickling him, okay? So he doesn’t do it, but when Flynn tips slightly, mouth open, and his head lands on Sammy’s shoulder, all Sammy does is shift until he can slide an arm behind his neck.
Just in case the train stops suddenly and Flynn hurts his neck. Flynn doesn’t sleep enough, probably.
Flynn makes a weird little snorting noise and turns his face until his forehead rests on Sammy’s cheek, breath blowing over his jaw, and. Sammy needs to start getting himself out there, because. Wow. That feels. Nice.
Nate’s fast asleep by the time they’re getting close to their stop, and Sammy can't wrangle two unconscious people off the train and out of the station. He tips his head down, whispering Hey, almost there into Flynn’s fluffy brown hair. It smells like grass and some kind of flowers and a little bit like clean sweat. Flynn’s brows draw together, and in the edge of his vision, Sammy can see his lips push out in a pout, and he looks so much like Nate when he doesn’t want to be woken up that Sammy presses a kiss to his hair automatically, then freezes, because. What the fuck.
Instead of doing it again—because why does he want to do it again!—he looks around guiltily to see if anyone saw him being fucking weird about his partner. No one's paying any attention, because this is New York City and people see ten stranger things before breakfast most days. Sammy lets out a shaky sigh, tells himself it's one of relief, slides his arm back out from behind Flynn and elbows him gently in the side. “Hey, buddy,” he says, louder this time. “Hey. We’re home.”
Flynn lifts his face up, blinking like he’s brand new to the world, cheek all pink with crease-lines from Sammy’s shirt. "Oh hey. Home," he says, looking right at Sammy while he does, and Sammy feels his cheeks heat.
#
The next afternoon, Sammy and Lydia finally make schedules and time differences and shit work, and have a video call. They'd intended it to be a way for Christopher and Nate to see one another, have some kind of virtual toddler playdate, but Sammy supposes he should have guessed that the kids would stare silently at one another for about thirty seconds while their parents encourage them to say hi! and then toddle off to do their own thing.
"They're still young," Sammy says, dubious, though he also supposes that they've been gone from California now for long enough that Nate probably doesn't remember any of it. The kiddo's probably going to grow up thinking of himself as a New Yorker rather than an Angeleno, and that's a weird thing to realize.
"It was a long shot," Lydia says dryly. "How're you doing? I'd say you look like you're getting more sleep, but you've got a toddler so I know that can't be true."
"No, I'm good, I… You mind if I ask you something?" It's not that he and Lydia were ever the tightest, but right now she's basically the only person from his LA life that he still keeps in touch with. A lot of the guys from the precinct turned out to be the kind of friends who were friends only when work had you around one another multiple times a week. His parents were dead, he was an only child, and who else did he have to talk to? Kind of a depressing realization, in your mid-thirties.
"Shoot," Lydia says.
"You, uh, you ever catch feelings for someone you work with?" Sammy picks at a non-existent thread in his jeans.
Lydia sighs. "Oh brother."
Sammy's feelings exactly.
#
Lydia has some good advice. She reminds him that he's uprooted his whole life after a rough couple of years, that his daily routine is kind of contracted in a lot of ways, even if he's travelling a bunch for work. "Get out more, Bryant," she says, "live a little."
Sammy knows she's right. Is he kind of gay for Flynn, or is it just that Flynn's face is one he sees almost every day? So Sammy starts going to a gym, he joins a group for single parents and their kids at the local non-magical library, he takes the time to chat with Ahmed from the coffee cart on the corner and get a deeper sense of this stretch of the city from him. He learns people's names; they learn his. It feels like when he'd been a rookie and had really been putting in the work to get to know LA, only now he's coming at things from a different angle. He's not fleeing where he works every evening, retreating to the safety of Castaic, for one thing. Sure, New York City is a vast place but it starts to feel like home, starts to feel like he's got friends.
Of course, it's also anonymous enough that Sammy can let himself watch some guys at the gym—just to like, see, no harm, no foul—and a couple of them look back and Sammy… Sammy kind of likes it. One of them—tall, lanky, brown eyes—even flirts back, and Sammy doesn't take him up on his obvious offer. He does go back to the Library, though, and shower and jerk off kind of epically while thinking about Flynn and his big hands and his kind eyes and whether he'd get down on his knees for him and…
Yeah. Sammy doesn't think it's just down to him not having much of a social life.
Fuck.