by Nicole Field
As he introduced himself, McCartney pulled his ID and badge from his pocket and showed them to Bruce.
"I have the right to remain silent," Bruce said immediately. "And I want to speak to an attorney." The handcuff jangled, steel against the steel railing of the bed as he tried to lift his hand again.
He didn't have an attorney—had never considered that he might need one—but knew of course that one could be appointed to him by the state. He wanted that. He wanted that right now.
The D.A. rolled his eyes and crossed his arms over his black suit as though Bruce was being especially difficult. "You do have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to a phone call and, as you say, an attorney. But I have to ask: Why would you run? Both security guards on site confirmed nothing had been stolen. It would have been a slap on the wrist and a warning at best if you hadn't attempted to evade arrest."
Would it have been? Bruce wondered. Even with Captain Hart's involvement? And what happened to Ron? was immediately added to Bruce's list of unasked questions. He attempted to keep his breathing slow and calm, but he had a feeling that D.A. McCartney knew exactly how much his heart was racing.
"Now, instead, here we are," McCartney finished. He narrowed his eyes, leaning forward. "Why?"
Had he not woken up in a hospital bed, still dizzy, afraid for himself, Leo and even Ron, he might have made a stronger argument. He'd protested before and knew his rights in terms of arrest. But he'd never been in this situation before. He pulled at his restraints again, gaze flickered from McCartney's, to the other two men now in the room, and back again. He wasn't going to say anything. He knew his rights, and the 5th Amendment. Was Leo being questioned as well? Treated as poorly as this? Bruce's mind fled abruptly to the second gunshot he'd heard just before he'd passed out. It hadn't hit him. Was Leo in another hospital bed like this? Worse?
"I heard a second gunshot!" Bruce said suddenly, intently. The handcuffs grated against the side of the bed again. "After the shot that hit my shoulder. Did it…? Is anyone else… hurt?"
McCartney's face shut down all expression. "I'm afraid there's an order to the way we have to do things," he told Bruce sternly, and in a way that made clear he wasn't going to give any information he didn't want to. "Let's go from the start. You and Captain Hart infiltrated Geyser Industries' medical facility."
After a small hesitation, Bruce could see no disadvantage to him if he answered this question, beyond the obvious. This was just confirming what they already knew from the security guards. "Yes."
"You were found in the animal testing laboratory," McCartney continued.
When Bruce didn't confirm this, McCartney looked up at him again, eyebrow raised.
Were they really going to keep him from knowing anything about Leo unless he told them? It was coercion. And they still hadn't respected his right to an attorney. This could still be thrown out of court, even if he answered.
"Yes," Bruce breathed again.
"Good. Now, in your own words, why did you and Captain Hart break and enter into the Geyser Industries medical facility?"
Here, any possible words stuck like rocks in Bruce's throat. How did he know what to say? He knew what not to say, but the rest of the story didn't make much sense without the tip offs they'd been receiving about there being more aliens.
After a protracted silence, McCartney said snidely, "I would strongly advise against lying."
Bruce could feel the panic starting in the back of his throat. He couldn't say anything that would put Leo in danger either. He really wished Leo was here. He would have known what to say.
He really wished he knew Leo was alive. He couldn't… he couldn't go through thinking he was dead again. He couldn't…
"We…" Bruce started, shakily and still without any idea how he was going to finish his sentence.
"Yes…?" McCartney said, leaning forward.
"We… were investigating the dogs that came from the same facility as the one that escaped and bit Captain Hart," Bruce said. The words, once started, came out in a rush.
McCartney sat back in his chair. It was difficult to tell, but Bruce thought he looked disappointed at the explanation. "Go on," he said, voice low.
"We… just wanted to look. Not take anything. We wouldn't have taken anything, even if the guards hadn't found us when they did," Bruce attested.
McCartney's eyes narrowed. He never looked towards the two suits at the foot of Bruce's bed. He never looked away from Bruce. It was making Bruce begin to sweat. "And why did you run?"
Why had he run? It had seemed almost straight forward at the time. Leo had wanted him to get out of there at the start, and then Ron had made it a viable option. He'd just been… following. It turned out that he couldn't have been any dumber. If it had been found out that Ron let him go, he could be fired for it. And if he hadn't left Leo…
Bruce swallowed. "I don't know. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before. I got scared. I wasn't thinking." He said the words softly, almost hoping the D.A. wouldn't pick them up.
He did, of course. "If you're hiding anything, or protecting anyone…" he started. It was pretty obvious who he thought Bruce was trying to protect.
"No! I'm not! No." Only after he shut his mouth did he realize that his vehemence may have come across as protesting too much. He closed his eyes. The pain was getting to him again. Surely it wasn't right that he was being pressed for answers while he was still in this state. "I tried to talk him out of doing it, but I didn't try hard enough. We agreed to go in together. That's it." He opened his eyes again. "Is he okay?" he asked, needing to find out too much to keep himself from asking.
McCartney eyed him for a long time. Then he shook his head. "I'm afraid I can't tell you that."
Bruce winced as though struck. But his mind, slow because of the pain, grabbed on to something else the D.A. had said earlier. "If it would have just been a slap on the wrist, why are you prosecuting this case?" If it was important enough to have gotten the D.A.'s attention… Could it actually be that Leo had been shot?
If Captain Hart had been killed, that would certainly be reason enough for the District Attorney's attention.
Was Leo dead? They'd only just started to discover what they were to each other; what they might be together. It was too soon for all that to just be gone. Leo couldn't be dead!
The monitor beside his bed began beeping, loudly. D.A. McCartney stood up. For the first time, he looked towards the other suits, as a nurse came in. She was frowning—whether at the D.A. or at what she perceived Bruce to have done, he didn't know—as she checked his vitals.
"I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to leave," she said, turning to face the D.A.
"I have enough for now," McCartney answered. To Bruce, he added, "Don't even think of leaving the district. We'll be in contact."
Bruce pressed his lips together. The monitor beside him had stopped beeping quite so quickly. Bruce allowed himself to tune out as the nurse moved around his bed and checked his chart. She had a few of her own clinical questions to ask of him, which he answered with distraction.
If Leo was dead… If Leo was really gone this time… Bruce didn't know what he'd do.
It would be different now, knowing for sure rather than guessing the worst. It would also be different because… well, because of everything. None of it had been anything Bruce had expected, or been looking for.
But if Leo was dead, that would devastate him.
He was crying before he thought of it, handcuffed to his hospital bed and alone but for the slowly beeping monitor beside his bed and the hospital staff outside his room.
Chapter Twelve
They kept him overnight for observation.
Between the constant beeping and scuffling of the nurses in the nearby station, and the thoughts rushing around Bruce's head, it was nearly impossible for him to sleep, but he managed a little.
Around ten the next morning, a doct
or came in and announced that he could go home.
"Don't… don't I need to wait for the D.A.?"
The doctor shook his head slightly. "He didn't leave any instructions for us to detain you. You're free to go."
Once he was given the all clear, he all but raced the way back to the apartment he shared with Leo.
"Leo!" he called as he came in through the front door, and before he'd even shut the door behind him.
He waited a second to hear Leo's answering call before he shut the door with a thud.
"Leo?" he called again, quieter this time, as he wandered into the house, past the living room and into the dining room. A look into the kitchen told him that too was empty, before he headed towards their bedrooms.
He wasn't there. He wasn't in the house. He hadn't called; Bruce had checked his phone several times on the way here. A sinking feeling was crushing him and he didn't think he had the strength or resources to fight it.
He tried his best not to think about anything whatsoever, and failed. Over and over again, he would find his thoughts straying again to Leo. Without anything he needed to focus on at home, it was a struggle not to notice his housemate's absence in their house in dozens of tiny different ways all over again.
Bruce found himself back in the living room, sitting on the couch and staring numbly at the blank wall in front of him when he belatedly remembered he was late to work. That gave him enough impetus to push himself off the couch. He even remembered to change into some new clothes before he left the house, unable to face the emptiness of his home any longer.
There was no obvious place else to go other than work. Almost as soon as he arrived, he was called into his manager's office. Only at that point did he realize he'd not shown up to work the previous day without calling in or any explanation.
"I'm sorry, sir," he said, as soon as he entered the room. "I was in hospital yesterday. I was shot in the shoulder."
He hardly felt it as his boss gave him a formal warning and reiterated to him the rules and regulations of their company. It all just added into the white noise in his head as he moved from his manager's office back to his own cubicle, avoiding his workmate's concerned and sympathetic expression once he got there.
He didn't count the hours as they passed, knowing them to have little to know point if all they ticked by was the slow beat of time until he could return to an apartment that didn't have Leo in it.
When his cell phone rang towards the end of shift, he almost didn't look at it. When he did, he saw the name Leo on the display and almost darted out of his chair, grabbing the phone.
"I've got to take this!" he said, although no one at work was specifically looking at him. "Leo?"
"It's me." He sounded tired, but otherwise okay. And alive. Alive. "How are you?" Leo asked, sounding more intent, as though he'd been as worried about Bruce as Bruce had felt about Leo.
The idea of that just filled Bruce with another rush of feeling. "God, Leo, I didn't know if you were dead. The D.A. came into the hospital and interviewed me. He wanted me to say I was protecting you. I didn't, though. I didn't tell him anything about…" Bruce gave a sudden, covert look around. Nobody actively seemed like they were listening in on his conversation, but he was still within hearing of other people. "About anything," Bruce finished lamely.
"Good." Again, that awful tiredness in Leo's voice—the sense that he was holding all other emotions back. Bruce didn't like the sound of his near emotionless voice. It made him wonder what else he was hiding about his situation.
"Leo…" Bruce started. "Where are you? You're not home, I went back there."
"The police handed me over to Homeland Security, who then put me in front of the President when I told them they were wrong, and that the aliens weren't gone after the Battle of Washington. They wanted every single detail about the month I spent combing through small towns to weed them out. Surprisingly, they weren't particularly confident in my ability to get them all." Leo gave an exhausted, bitter laugh. "This is the first minute I've been out of meetings and able to call you. Tell me you're all right? You were shot."
It became easier for Bruce to breathe through the panic that had been threatening to engulf him since the other night.
"And handcuffed to a hospital bed," Bruce said. He filled Leo in on the rest of his own adventure, feeling colours slowly returning to his world. By the end of it, his words were coming out more slowly, sounding far less agitated. "And, yeah, I'm all right. Now."
"All charges have been dropped," Leo said. "You won't have any trouble with the D.A. again. If the D.A.'s office is still unhappy about anything, it'll be me they want now."
So much of Bruce's budding sense of relief vanished with those words. "What do you mean?"
"That means that the President isn't happy about gaining her intel from an unreliable source but that the situation has become serious enough that she can't ignore the warning. The FBI has eyes in every small town in the country with orders to look out for anything out of the ordinary. I'm getting ready with the US military to get back into Geyser's medical facility. They want to get their hands on the dogs like the one that bit me and see what's been done to them."
Bruce paused. "Are you sure that's wise?"
"After the other night, I'm sure I don't have any other option," Leo replied, managing to sound both frustrated and exhausted.
"You do, though. The US military is in on it. The FBI. You've got no training for any of this."
"Wrong," Leo told him. "I've dealt with these aliens before."
"And I'm sure the FBI has contingencies in place for how to handle it if we had alien contact in the US."
"This is the contingency," said Leo. "Get anyone with any relevant experience to the situation and keep them close. Don't worry, Bruce. I've got this."
Bruce's jaw hardened on his side of the line, as the colours that had started to return to his world threatened to fade again. "That's just it," Bruce said, biting each word out curtly. "You don't have this. You're running around on arrogance and no training."
Leo started to interrupt him then, but Bruce wasn't having any of it. He'd been pushed to his limits too, had already faced the idea of Leo being taken away from him again. Now he found that Leo was still safe right now, and wanted to keep him that way. Dammit. It shouldn't have been that hard to do.
"You seem to think it's okay to be taken for granted," Bruce said. "And I can understand that. You woke up one morning and had superpowers. It made me jealous to see you just… fritz that lock back there. I've been learning for years to be able to do what I can do with technology. But just being given all of that doesn't make you invincible," Bruce told him, the words probably harsher than he meant them. "I already worried that you were dead, twice now. I don't want to go through that again."
By the time Bruce finished what he had to say, he was almost in tears, facing the wall of the corridor and blinking desperately not to let them fall. This time, however, Leo say anything. Bruce listened hard for any audible cues of what Leo was thinking, but he couldn't even make out the sound of his breath over the line.
"Look, I'm not saying it's unearned arrogance," Bruce said after a moment, softening now that he'd gotten the chance to say his piece. "I'm just saying you've been given a lot, and you might not appreciate it."
There was a long pause
"Given to me?"
Bruce realized immediately how much he'd misjudged the presence of anger in Leo's silence.
"I've been fighting against people's prejudices almost as long as you've known me. Now I can finally express myself properly and, yeah, I can do one thing you've worked hard at, but that's one thing."
"It's more than one thing," Bruce argued. "You act like you're not accountable to anyone. You could have taken down the D.A. if you'd been in my position. No one would have stopped you."
"I would have stopped me," Leo said coldly. Then, without leaving Bruce any time in which to reply, he steamrolled through. "I'll contact you when we've
got the dogs." Though his words were almost slurring with exhaustion, the tense emotion came through.
"Leo…" He didn't want end the conversation on that note.
"I've got to go. I'm glad you're all right," he added gruffly, before hanging up the phone.
*~*~*
Bruce flicked the cell's ringer to its highest volume so there would be no chance of him missing Leo's next call.
When it came, it came at 6.16p.m. Bruce's stomach grumbled at the exact same time. He'd been trying to convince himself he didn't need to eat yet when he jumped on top of the phone.
"Leo?" Bruce said, before checking the screen.
"It's District Attorney McCartney," came the voice at the other end of the phone, filling Bruce with the now familiar sinking feeling.
"Hello," Bruce said, far more coolly. "Uh, how can I help you?"
"You can tell me where Leo Hart is," McCartney said. "I know he called you earlier today."
How could McCartney know that? "Are you tapping my phone?" he asked. That would be illegal without a warrant, or going through Homeland Security. And Leo had already assured him that all charges were dropped. There wasn't any good reason for the NSA break the law just to illegally tap his phone.
"I told you we'd be in contact," the D.A. said to him instead.
Now that Bruce knew that Leo was all right, and he was no longer handcuffed to a hospital bed, the District Attorney didn't seem nearly so scary as he'd seemed the first time. Still, a phone call from him didn't exactly inspire good thoughts either.
"You did," Bruce said slowly.
"I should tell you, Mr. Paulson, that I don't like waiting," said McCartney.
"I don't know where he is," Bruce told him, lying to McCartney for the first time. "He called me to let me know he was all right. That was all."
"Is that so." The words dropped heavily down the phone line between them.
Bruce didn't say anything else. If McCartney didn't believe him already, saying the words again wouldn't make things any better.