by G. D. Cox
Internalized because see, this was also far from the first time that Cole had come across a man who was a deeply closeted gay one with some serious self-loathing.
He was once deeply closeted himself, confused as hell over why he had to be different from most other guys. Then he grew up. Got older, stronger, wiser. He finally understood what Pa meant about there being no point in asking some questions, about moving on even when you didn't get answers. Sometimes, some things didn't have to be questioned in the first place. Sometimes, some things were just destined to be, to happen.
Like him being bisexual, and being totally all right with that, being no less a man because of it.
Like Nate becoming his oldest, most trusted best friend, against all the odds. Like Nate assigning Barnett, of all the agents in the GATF, to him as his asset, knowing about Barnett's homophobia long before he did.
Like Barnett eventually, inevitably finding out about his bisexuality two years after their meeting in Nate's office.
Looking back on that fateful day, Cole thinks himself pretty damn lucky that the man who would become his lover a few months afterward, who would become his husband four years later, hadn't just barged into his office in HQ with guns a-blazing. He'd expected the younger agent to scream every derogatory, homophobic word known to modern society at him. Maybe let that spirited temper rip for once at him and hurl things around the room for good measure, condemn him for being some deceitful, predatory faggot who just wanted to rape him when his defenses were down. (It wouldn't be the first time Cole had that yelled in his face.)
But, no. No, Barnett - Clyde did no such thing. Once Clyde stormed into his office and slammed the door shut behind him, Clyde had just stood there with quivering hands and breaths, staring at him with such wide, childlike eyes. The eyes of a lost boy whose whole universe had just crumbled to dust, leaving him hanging in a black void and not knowing where to go or what to do.
Clyde couldn't believe that he was queer in any way. Clyde paced the length of his office in front of his desk and kept rubbing his face with both hands and kept saying that he couldn't be gay or bi or whatever because brave, tough, noble men like Cole couldn't be any of that. Cole was the bravest, toughest, most noble guy Clyde had ever met and known, Clyde said.
And with his heart lodged in his throat, Cole said to the man he was in love with for years, "Clyde. So are you, to me."
And Clyde had staggered silently to the burgundy couch set against one wall of the office. Sat slumped there for ages with reddened, glistening eyes before whispering, "Sir ... I think ... I think I'm gay. I'm so fucked up. What's wrong with me?"
Even after their solemn, hushed conversation on that couch about bisexuality and homosexuality, with him sitting next to Clyde with just a foot of space between them, it had taken Clyde months to bring up the issue again. Clyde being Clyde, he'd done it the way Cole could imagine only a guy like Clyde pulling it off: Clyde stormed into his office again. Slammed the door shut behind him. Stormed up to his desk as he walked around it to face Clyde with nothing between them ... and then grabbed his face with both hands and kissed him, opening him up to the mystery of Clyde's lips.
Jesus, it'd been ingenious of Nate to allow the office doors of top-level agents to lock automatically via verbal command. Clyde wouldn't let him up from the couch, pressing him down onto the burgundy cushions with his whole leather-and-spandex-clad, delectable body, kissing him again and again and again and grinding their taut, hardened, frantic bodies together until they were both breathless and boiling up and groaning and fuck, coming in their underwear like they were randy teenagers having sex for the first time.
In a way, for Cole who'd had multiple long-term relationships with women and men by then, it had felt as if he was kissing someone for the very first time, like nothing before in his life.
He'd felt that way once more four years later, after he and Clyde had slid their engraved, luxurious platinum, court-shaped wedding rings on each other's fingers in front of Nate and the vetted officiant in Nate's office. When they kissed each other then, they weren't just the finest handler-asset pairing in the GATF's history, they were also the best of friends, lovers and now husbands. They had found in each other The One they never thought they would be destined to find, much less have in this vast, unfair, crazy world. Somehow, somewhen, they had been granted the Happily Ever After they never thought men like them would be allowed to have.
But see, see, here's the thing that Cole knows now, two years after their classified wedding in Nate's office: Happily Ever Afters only last forever in fairy tales. You can be granted them, but you can lose them too. And once upon a time, Pa had warned him about this. Sure, Pa wasn't exactly referring to him removing his wedding ring and its chain necklace from around his neck or to the emptiness of the apartment, the home he'd shared with Clyde for over five years. Pa got the gist though. The universe was probably talking through Pa then, trying to prepare him for the despair to come.
Sometimes, bad things just happen to good people for no reason.
"Phelan?" Pa's asking him now with that low, resonant, consoling voice, forty-two years after his birth. "Are you all right?"
Cole stares down at the rectangular, lit up GATF communication pad on the table in front of him. He stares at the recent photograph of his dad on its screen, smiling up at him with a slight quirk of lips that Ma says he's inherited from Pa. He can hear Pa's voice through the comm pad's loud speaker as if Pa's sitting right here with him in the kitchen, but Pa's hundreds of miles away from New York City, still in Chicago with Ma, unaware of what occurred right here just four days ago.
Phelan, I ... I can't. I - ... No.
There's a glass of whiskey on the table near his right hand. Next to it is his Glock 22, out of its holster and lying on its side, its barrel pointed away from him. It's fully loaded.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
He hasn't changed out of his white t-shirt and gray sweatpants for three days and counting. He hasn't shaved for as long, or brushed his teeth or showered and he doesn't give a fuck. He hasn't slept for two days, not since the nightmare that wasn't a nightmare of feeling Clyde's hand pressing against his chest, pushing him away. Of seeing Clyde turning away from him and walking away without looking back. Of hearing the front door of their ... his apartment clicking shut like the distant, heavy flip of the switch for an electric chair.
He still has four days before he has to return to work. He's about ninety-nine percent sure that Nate will be stomping his way here long before that. In his entire record of employment by the GATF, all fifteen years of it, Cole had never applied for emergency leave. Not even once. Until now.
"Phelan?"
He drags the Glock nearer to him with his right hand. He traces the gun's polymer frame with the pads of his callused fingers when he isn't tapping his thumb and forefinger repeatedly. He itches to pick it up, to grip it high on its back strap and slide his finger around the trigger. He has a vision, a split-second one, of the muzzle jammed against his right temple.
Fuck, he's drunk a lot today. He knows he has. That's probably the eighth shot of whiskey on the table there (that he recalls) and it isn't even 2PM yet. He doesn't even know where the bottle's gone (or where the other bottles went). Fuck, he hasn't drunk alcohol like this since Clyde told him about his abusive, alcoholic sonofabitch of a father who robbed him of anything resembling a childhood. And the shit going through his head right now, it's ... it is not the kind of shit he thinks about. No. No, he wouldn't do that. No. He's just ... in a bad place right now. Just dealing with a bad thing that's happened to him.
He'll be okay. He will. He's a genuine, tough fucker who's proven himself over and over, and he'll keep doing it.
"Phelan. Are you all right, son?"
He pushes the Glock away from him. His hands fall to his lap where they grit into fists. He thinks that maybe his hands are shaking, that maybe his lower jaw's shaking too and his eyes are stinging and yeah, maybe i
t's a good thing after all that Pa is all the way in Chicago and not here. Pa's real good at reading people but Pa can't see him, can't see his face right now. He's okay. He'll be okay.
His lips tremor up in a feeble parody of a smile, but that's okay too. Nobody's here to see it. Nobody has to tell him why people can smile even when they're sad and angry and defeated and chugging straight into hollow. He knows that really well now.
"No, Pa," he rasps, not sounding at all like the little boy he once was in his childhood bedroom, playing with colorful toy cars on a mild, spring afternoon. "I don't think I am."
It's true, because he's never been able to lie to his dad. Because sometimes, bad things just happen to good people for no reason, even when it's no one's fault. Because sometimes, most times, good people can still be hurt even when they've done their goddamn best to be good all their lives. Because most times, most times, the bad guys win and get away with their crimes even when the good guys do their best to stop them and catch them.
Because even after you've found The One, even after you thought you've gotten your Happily Ever After, your whole world can still die anyway.
I.
COLE'S WORLD AS HE knows it dies on an overcast Thursday afternoon in a terrorist bunker in Croenia. It happens during a covert GATF mission to rescue a captured junior agent, Agent Dushku, who'd been undercover in the southeastern European country for several months. He won't know this for another three days, nor does he know that it happens with a blinding, blue ray from an inconspicuous-looking metal box that Clyde comes across after kicking down an equally inconspicuous-looking metal door in said bunker during the rescue operation.
The ray strikes Clyde through the head, entering an inch below his left eye and exiting at an almost forty-five degree angle upward and out via a point on the edge of his crown. The ray penetrates his medial temporal lobe, but it will leave no physical trace whatsoever of its journey through the fleshy creases, neurons and synapses of Clyde's brain. It won't leave any physical marks on Clyde's face or on Clyde's crown either, which is why all Clyde says to Cole upon returning to the Ark along with Agents Perez, Turner, Rahman and a living though rather battered Dushku is, "There was some weird flash of blue light when I kicked down the door. But that's it, sir. There was nothing else in the room apart from that box and some books on the table."
Agent Turner has brought the box and a stack of journals back with them in a GATF-issued hard case sling bag, and Cole instantly orders Turner to stash the items in the Ark's containment unit until Research & Development can get their hands on them. There's no telling what the hell the box actually is until then, or what it may have done to Clyde.
The moment the Ark is back on American soil and parked in its shielded hangar, Cole orders Clyde to submit to an immediate medical examination at HQ. He doesn't relax, not a bit, until Clyde struts out of the Medical department hours later with a wink and says with that raspy, sensual voice, "Everything a-okay, sir. Still in my one awesome, gorgeous piece."
The box has now been in the hands of R&D for five days. Five days since the mission, and the R&D techs have nothing to tell him other than, "We're sorry, Agent Cole. We still don't know what caused Agent Barnett's condition or how to reverse it. We're doing what we can to further reverse-engineer the device and learn more about it."
His surname is Barnett-Cole, he wants to roar at them in his frustration. His surname is Barnett-Cole and I can't tell the whole goddamn world about it and maybe I never will.
Fifteen days after the mission, Cole removes his luxurious platinum, court-shaped wedding ring and its chain necklace from around his neck, and finally knows what it means to be a dead man walking.
II.
NATHAN FABRY IS THE only person in the GATF to know that Cole and Clyde are married. Even Bhargava, despite being Deputy Director and another trustworthy friend to both Nate and Cole, is out of the loop about it. Even Dr. Sandra Fisher, the GATF's head psychiatrist who regularly counseled Clyde for over two years after he came out to Cole, doesn't know. Outside of the GATF, only Cole's parents do. Nate had been the first person he'd informed about his sexual relationship with Clyde when it began six years ago, as mandated by GATF rules about fraternization in the agency. There weren't - and still aren't - any official rules forbidding sexual and/or romantic relationships between a handler and asset, since there are handlers and assets who are married to each other on the active duty roster.
Cole and Clyde were the sole homosexual couple who were also handler and asset at the time of Cole informing Nate about said relationship. Cole and Clyde were - and still are - also the most outstanding handler-asset pairing in the agency, at the very top of the game with no mission failures to date. If Cole's reputation before becoming Clyde's handler was frightening enough already, it's become something akin to legendary since then. Their combined reputation's preceded them, marking them out to allies and adversaries alike to be GATF members as essential as Nate and Bhargava, as prime targets for elimination if enemies of the agency are keen on impairing it.
In light of that, Nate had advised that he and Clyde keep their relationship a secret from everyone else for their own protection and to avoid having said relationship used as a weapon against them. (Nate gives the same advice to any married couple in the agency on active duty, but also leaves the final decision to their discretion.) It'd made a lot of sense to Cole as well as Clyde, although they couldn't help resenting the furtiveness, with Clyde fervently reassuring Cole that he would gladly tell the whole goddamn world how proud he was of belonging to Cole, if only it didn't place Cole in any danger.
I don't need the whole world, he'd murmured to Clyde, their foreheads pressed together, lying on their sides in their bed in the hush of midnight. I just need you.
And so, Nate had been the one witness at their classified wedding ceremony in his office, since Cole would only tell his parents about it weeks afterward in person when he and Clyde were able to visit them again. Nate had personally selected the officiant. Witnessed them slide their wedding rings on each other's fingers, their first kiss as husbands and him smiling like an idiot and Clyde laughing like one too, their very first minutes of the rest of their life together.
Now, Nate is standing before him in his apartment's living room, a six-foot-two, blistering bastion of brewing rage all the more fearsome for his lack of bellowing and baleful stare. Nate looks like an avenging angel in his long, black leather coat against the now naked, white walls of the living room. Cole is slumped on the black, leather-bound couch, unable to recall how he'd ended up there. All he knows is that he couldn't handle being in the bed alone anymore, not with Clyde's scent fading away from the pillows and blankets. That he's been wearing the same white t-shirt and gray sweatpants for four days and counting and still hasn't shaved or showered.
There's a part of him that's embarrassed to be seen like this by Nate. He's always strictly maintained his hygiene and appearance since he was a teenager, even more so once he joined the army and had such habits drilled into him. He knows he's in a bad place. He knows he'll be here for a while. (A long while.)
"He left? With a muthafucking email?" Nate snarls, low and gravelly, like stones clacking against each other in the rumbling belly of a seething dragon. "That little shit."
Cole says nothing. He stares at a point to Nate's right with sore, grimy eyes, at the wall where a framed photograph of him and Clyde smiling at the camera with their faces touching used to hang. Clyde had snapped it with his GATF comm pad in a steakhouse in Brooklyn that would become one of their regular haunts in the following years. Clyde wanted a public photograph of them that wasn't of them being handler and asset, that wasn't yet another photo where they had to pretend they were just professional peers, just friends. Clyde wanted a photo of them, of Phelan and Clyde, he remembers that. A photo of just two guys who somehow managed to meet in this vast, unfair, unpredictable, senseless world and found something even more immense and meaningful that made all the sense in th
e universe in each other.
Clyde had kissed him on the cheek with one arm slung over his shoulders for the second shot, right there in front of everyone in the steakhouse. As LGBTQA-friendly a dining place as it was, it was the first time Clyde had kissed him in any way in public. It'd blown his mind. (He refused to let Clyde frame and hang the third photo that was of him looking like a wide-eyed, open-mouthed dolt and Clyde laughing at him with crinkled eyes and a huge grin.) And the gossip about them that had run amok through HQ after Clyde had briefly set the first photo as the background image of his comm pad and not-so-subtly paraded it around! Clyde had such a great laugh about the rumors that they were - gasp - possibly more than friends. He remembers that. Oh, he does.
Clyde doesn't, not anymore.
Clyde doesn't want to remember.
"Phelan," Nate says, and his voice now thrums with something heavy, something rounded with softness that makes wet heat grow behind Cole's eyes yet again. "Talk to me."
Just like that, Cole's thinking of Clyde again, of saying the same fucking words to Clyde so many times since they became handler and asset. Of hearing Clyde's voice through his earpiece say to him, yes, sir and looks like another job well done for you and me, sir and have I ever let you down, sir?
And now, now he can't answer that question anymore. Not like he used to. The most fucked up thing about the whole situation is, it isn't Clyde's fault. It really isn't. It isn't anyone's fault, not even the dead Croenian scientists who invented that damn box with its mind-fucking laser, whose journals crammed with coded notes disclose that the device is supposed to restore memories.
The couch sinks to his right as Nate sits down next to him, just like Nate used to when they were still Rangers and they were still young and the good guys still won more often than not. Nate's left knee touches his right. He doesn't move his leg away. He stares on at the blank space where that framed photograph of him and Clyde used to hang. He feels like he's staring into a mirror and seeing himself stare back. A blank space, with nothing to say or feel.