“Thanks,” said Nick through chattering teeth. “That had to have been ....odd. But it’s what I needed.”
“More like hard,” said John. He was shivering himself, and soaked to the skin.
“But it was what I needed. Thanks for - respecting my dignity enough to give me that.”
John’s breath caught. Dignity? If there was one thing utterly lacking in this dimension, it was dignity. But looking into Nick’s eyes, the eyes of a man beaten and exhausted and frozen and wet and covered with algae and waiting to be chained hand and foot and marched into a cell where he couldn’t so much as use the toilet unobserved, that was what he saw looking back at him. Dignity. It meant something different to Nick. But God, did he ever have it.
“Thanks for trusting me with it,” said John, in awe.
Nick’s face relaxed in relief, and he turned around almost suddenly and put his arms behind his back, avoiding emotion.
John braced himself, pulled Nick's hands together, positioned the first cuff around his wrist, and crumbled. Tears streaked down his face, hot and wet in the frigid air. Numb hands shaking, he pulled the cuffs away and threw them in a puddle where they belonged.
"John?" asked Nick in a soft, questioning voice.
John wanted to curl up in a corner in shame. Guilt. Horror. He sniffed instead, and wiped the tears away as Nick turned to face him. "I can -- never put you in chains again."
The thought seemed so revolting, so cruel and wrong and unnecessary, it sickened him. He loved his job, he believed in his job, and was never again going to be willing to do it across the board. He'd now met the people, complex and twisted and lethal, who required a place like this to contain them. But he felt the horror and heartache of it for Nick Aster as keenly as if he was the prisoner himself, understanding the why of it and how he ended up here but unable to shake the pain and fear and misery of it.
He was desperate to get out of here, to get Nick out of here.... to stop thinking about how many more people like him there were, flawed and loving and playful and reckless, who didn't have anyone to put anklets on them and try to save them and teach them what a family was, just a system to punish them for years.
It was hard, with tears flowing from his eyes, but he managed to meet Nick's gaze. It was tense and worried and unmistakably loving. "I'm very okay with that," said Nick with a tiny smile. "But don't feel so bad. Please."
"I feel awful," admitted John.
"You're everything a good man and a good FBI agent should be," said Nick. "You have nothing to feel awful about, and you know it. You identify too much with your entire profession. That’d be like me getting heartsick every time a criminal kills someone.”
Something cleared, and with it his tears and the crushing weight on his heart. No, it wasn't his job to fix the entire system in an instant, he hadn't beaten Nick or tried to kill him. It was....
"I -- feel an empathy for you I can't even describe," said John carefully. "I think it's not so much that I feel guilty, as that I want you to see how much I feel for you, and that it's not sympathy, it's understanding where you've been and what you've felt. I want you to have company in the emotions and traumas it created."
"You're a world-class friend," said Nick. “I accept your company with glee. Now, for heaven’s sake, call Wills in to get me in where it’s cold instead of freezing.”
John’s mouth turned down at the corners, his forehead tightening. Nick reached carefully through the bars and poked him. “Stop it,” said Nick warningly. “Unless you’re about to tell me you designed this entire facility yourself just to make me miserable, which I wouldn’t put past you, by the way, just stop it.”
“I did,” said John, deadpan. “I traveled back in time with the Doctor to when they were drawing up the plans.”
“Of course you did,” muttered Nick. “I’ll bet you invented tracking anklets while you were about it.”
“Oh, I did,” said John, holding his expression flat. “Actually, I invented tracking collars with nametags on em, for inmate number and ‘return if found.’ Some buzz-kill said something cruel and unusual something something constitution — whatever.”
Nick grinned, blue eyes twinkling. “Were they white collars?”
JOHN
The sharp clang of the door to the hallway caused John to spin around. A cluster of corrections officers in riot gear were entering. An extraction team.
If there is any distraction, any at all, ignore it and go to Aster’s cell.
“Come on!” He yelled to Wills and Kasdan, bolting for the cell. John and Wills got there several seconds before the extraction team, and four officers behind electric riot shields surrounded them.
A familiar wail of complaint reached John's ears. "I want a muffin!"
“Get out of the way!” yelled one of the officers.
John and Wills exchanged split-second sideways glances. This lot wanted into Nick’s cell. Shit. As one mind, he and Wills locked arms, backs pressed against the cell door.
“Get out of the door,” yelled another officer, discharging his electric shield for menace. John's heart rate bumped up when he recognized Schrader, the orange-skinned steroid aficionado.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Go Hot FBI Chicks!
JOHN
Facing him down from behind a riot shield was Schrader, staring at John with an almost fanatic, bloodthirsty sheen glazing his eyes. “Get out of the way,” yelled Schrader.
John braced his back hard against the cell door, clenched the handle, and sized up the situation. Aster had been back in his cell for an hour, so this couldn’t be a misunderstanding relating to taking him for exercise. Five COs in formation, two boxing him and Wills in with electrified riot shields. Three abreast behind them stood officers in tactical gear, wielding industrial-sized canisters of pepper spray and electric batons.
“What’s going on?” John yelled back.
Offset behind the five was a Sergeant with a video camera trained on the scene. That was at least somewhat reassuring; who brings a video camera to a murder? But where was levelheaded Sergeant Evans? Schrader was the only officer John recognized.
The Sergeant stepped out from the group. “This inmate took poison. We don’t have time to waste getting him out, so move unless you want this guy to die.”
“I did not,” yelled Nick from the cell, three feet back from John’s ear. He sounded scared. “I didn’t take anything and I’m not resisting.”
A shrill, piercing wheep, wheep, wheep chirped from the alarm clipped to John's belt. Nick had activated the panic alarm every agent in the prison was wearing, and it echoed up and down the corridor.
Good going, Nick.
“FBI!” bellowed John.
“Fight! Fight! Fight!” urged an excited chant from behind cell doors. Muffled voices chimed in along the row, even though most inmates couldn't even see what was happening.
“US Marshals!” Gary Wills barely got the words out before one of the officers grabbed him and tried to drag him away from the door. He and John braced themselves with arms interlocked, and were only moved a foot before John caught two flashes of movement.
A black blur swung at him from the left, and agent Kasdan appeared at a dead run from the right.
“NO!” Kasdan flung himself between John and Wills and the extraction team, using his own body to shield the other two agents. The black thing was an electric baton, and it slammed into Kasdan’s ribs with a sickening ticking noise.
Kasdan screamed and plummeted to the floor, landing on John’s feet. He cried out again in agony, muscles quivering in involuntary spasms. John realized the baton was once more being driven against Kasdan’s ribs, and kicked the monstrous thing away from his agent.
“FEDERAL AGENTS, STOP!” John ordered at the top of his lungs in fury. Schrader was wielding the baton from behind the shield, so John couldn’t get at the officer without being shocked himself. "Schrader, get the fuck away from my goddamn agent!"
John was standin
g with an electric riot shield arcing two inches from his nose, but the sheer force of his glare made Schrader back off at least an inch.
The sally port at the end of the hallway to the left opened, and a string of four FBI agents charged in at a dead run, belt alarms chirping away. By the time they reached Nick's cell, they'd assessed the situation. They weren't allowed to carry guns inside the prison any more than John. But with the extraction team's shields and weapons targeted forward at John, Wills, and Kasdan, the team was vulnerable from behind.
Marianna Calis, Nick’s FBI paramedic, had a 20-yard head start on the others, and without hesitation targeted Schrader, picking him up by the shoulders. With a fierce twist of her hips for leverage, she flung him head first against the cement wall. He hit with a smack and landed face-down on his shield, uttering an outraged roar.
One of the rear COs in the formation lunged at her with a stun baton while her back was turned. Calis heard him coming, ducked, and grabbed the shaft of the baton as it passed over her shoulder. Yanking it and the CO toward her, she spun to face him. She grabbed a fistful of his hair and jerked the off-balance officer forward, tripped him with a kick to the shin and sent him flying.
"Stop! Stop! Stop," bellowed Wash and Corsich, arriving at a sprint. Each picked a CO and plowed into them without pausing. Kelly slammed hers against a metal cell door, and he howled in pain. He dropped to the floor holding his nose.
“Wahoooooo!” shouted the inmate behind the door, kicking it in the approximate vicinity of the officer’s head. “Go hot FBI chick!”
Wash took his target down before the officer could deploy his baton, and they engaged each other in a brutal no-holds-barred street fight.
“Sergeant!” John pointed at the bewildered Sergeant who was swinging the camera from side to side, trying to catch the action. “Stand your men down! FBI! Tell them to stop!”
Kelly wrestled another CO for control of a canister of pepper spray, and got flung around like a dog toy by the officer twice her size. An agent John recognized from their briefings ran into the fray just in time to back her up.
A furious snarl of pain came from Wash. The CO he was fighting was biting down on his ear, and Wash tried to gouge the CO’s eye out in return. “Hey!” yelled John. “You’re on the same side, cool down!”
“Stand down!” yelled the Sergeant at his men. “Hold!”
The COs paused in mid-brawl, caught between defending themselves and obeying the order. In that second, a fifth arriving agent tackled the remaining un-engaged CO to the ground, and got kicked in the face by the one fighting Wash.
"HOLD," bellowed John at the top of his lungs. "EVERYONE, HOLD. FBI, HOLD!"
The agents obeyed John, albeit keeping their fists up and their eyes focused on their uniformed opponents. The COs obeyed their Sergeant, and nobody breathed for a tense ten seconds.
“What the fuck is going on here?” asked the Sergeant.
“I want my muffin!” howled the inmate next door to Nick. The tension broke, fists lowered, and cautious steps backward were taken while glares remained locked.
“You all’re about to get arrested for assaulting Federal agents, is what’s happening,” said John, furious. Kasdan was still writhing at his feet. “Why you mounting an assault on the inmate we’re protecting?”
“It’s not an assault, it’s an emergency extraction,” explained the Sergeant. “We got a tip that this inmate swallowed poison, we’re here to subdue him and get him medical treatment,”
John and Wills both displayed their badges, keeping their arms interlocked just in case. “He’s not suicidal,” said Wills. “He does have well-connected people trying to murder him, and you’re not getting in this cell.”
"Where’s Sergeant Evans?" asked John.
"Dealing with a disturbance in A," said the Sergeant.
John's arm hair crawled. Everything starts with a diversion.
“Back up,” John ordered the two COs sizing him up. They didn’t. The Sergeant didn’t back up John’s order. “I’m not kidding you, Schrader here’s getting arrested for assaulting Agent Kasdan. Rest of you are treading dangerously close to a kidnapping charge if you don’t back away.”
“Back away,” ordered the Sergeant after a few seconds of consideration. “You do know we’ve got an inmate’s life on the line here.”
“Nick, have you been hitting the poison cupboard again?” called John, not taking his eyes off the extraction team to look in the cell.
“No!” said Nick, affronted. “And I’m in the middle of the cell with my hands up and my best puppy-dog eyes, the picture of compliance. I really don’t feel like being pepper-sprayed and electrocuted today, if you guys don’t mind.”
“He’s trying rather hard to stay alive, not kill himself,” said John. “Agent Calis will examine Aster in case someone did slip him something.”
“Yes, sir,” said the Sergeant, and as fast as it had escalated, the tension in the air vanished. Shoulders slumped, deep breaths were taken, and hands went to injured body parts as FBI agents and COs looked at each other in remaining confusion.
Weapons, shields, and helmets littered the floor underfoot. Blood was starting to run from noses, lips, and knuckles. One CO was curled on his side immobile in the fetal position. Another sat with his back against the wall in shock, head down, clutching his elbow.
Schrader was on his feet, holding his shield, He gave John a lethal glare and circled to put himself in a position where there was a clear path to the cell door and John.
Raised hairs tickled the back of John’s neck, and he double-checked his grip on the cell door with his right hand and tugged his left arm, still interlocked with Wills, to alert him. Schrader realized he’d been made. He turned sideways in defeat and looked away.
Agent Calis was lying on her back, upper body raised by her elbows, gasping for breath. A steady drip of blood ran from Wash’s left ear onto his shoulder. Kelly kept her weight on one leg, favoring her right ankle.
John, Wills, and the Sergeant were the only ones untouched by the melee.
Calis stood, and sucking in deep gulps of air, pointed at Kasdan. "Why do we got an agent down?"
"Stun baton," said John.
The paramedic narrowed her eyes and shook her head. "That ain't right."
Catching the eye of one of the male agents that were starting to cluster around, Calis pointed at the fluorescent orange medical bag she'd abandoned part way down the hall. "Bring me it."
John knelt and put his hand on Kasdan’s upper arm. He was on his side, gasping and stifling desperate moans. He stilled a little under John’s touch. “What -- was....” The agent literally didn’t know what hit him.
“Electric baton,” said John. He gave Kasdan’s arm a reassuring squeeze. “Just lie there. You’ll feel better soon.”
Kasdan gave John a longing look, like he didn’t believe that but wanted to.
John put his hand over the agent’s chest where he’d been shocked. “That was brave. I think you grew a spine.”
Kasdan managed a pained smile. “Ow.”
“Can you sit up?”
“Why - would I do a silly thing like that?” asked Kasdan weakly.
“You really are a Nick clone,” said John. He patted Kasdan’s upper arm. “I didn’t need another of you.”
“Too bad,” whispered Kasdan. He struggled to sit while clutching the left side of his ribcage. Despite John’s help, he couldn’t manage it and collapsed with a moan. “Think - damn thing did something.”
John frowned, still holding the other agent’s chest. Under his hand was the clear outline of a ballistic vest. Kasdan was wearing a t-shirt, bulletproof vest with ceramic plates, and a polyester corrections uniform. How had a simple stun baton incapacitated him so badly through all of that?
The paramedic sat beside Kasdan, snatching the bag and unzipping it. “Let’s get that vest off so I can listen to your heart.” Kasdan barely moved, although he tried.
Calis cut away
layers of clothing and John pulled them out of the way until Kasdan’s chest was bare. Angry red and white burns traced nonsensical patterns on his skin, and a chill ran up John’s spine, making him shudder when he caught sight of a discarded baton on the concrete floor.
“Gimme a minute?” asked John.
Kasdan managed a shaky half-nod, and John straightened. He pointed at the Sergeant, who was aiming his camera in Kasdan’s direction. It looked like the displacement activity of someone who had zero ability to lead when things went off the rails.
Broken Blue Lines: Love. Hate. Criminal Justice.: An FBI Crime Drama / LGBT+ Love Story Page 47