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Neal was running, his lungs burning, toward where Peter was.
The irony of this, even under such dire circumstances, was not lost on him.
He was being chased through a giant mansion belonging to a wealthy, ruthless Wall Street banker with a penchant for illegal stock tips and weapons. He’d gotten caught rifling through the man’s desk, searching for the ledger that would have proved their case. Peter, elsewhere in the mansion, was flirting with the man’s wife and providing what was supposed to be a much-needed distraction to keep him at the party his wife was throwing. Otherwise, there was just too much risk that he might slink off to his office with an associate to talk business.
So when the door banged open and the drunk banker-turned-weapons-dealer caught Neal at his desk, it was truly red-handed. He hadn’t even had time to come up with some half-assed excuse for why he was there. The man had basically lunged at him with what Neal could only assume was pent-up rage from whatever Peter had done.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” the man had roared at him.
“I — oh, shit.” Neal had leaped to the side and grabbed as many things on the desk as he could before sprinting out the door and taking off down the hallway.
He hadn’t gotten far before something loud and fast ripped past his ear.
A few feet in front of him, a bolt from a crossbow stuck into the crown molding. He glanced over his shoulder, real fear suddenly bottoming out in his stomach. He’d missed by quite a wide margin, but the man was drunk and reloading.
Neal had no interest in finding out if his aim was always poor or if it was just the liquor that had made him miss the first time.
Neal ducked down a hallway and tried to keep switching directions to lose him. But he could hear the man behind him and he heard a few bolts hit the walls and floor behind him as he ran.
“Tambourine,” he’d yelled into the one-way receiver on his lapel, giving the FBI the abort-mission codeword and trying not to trip on his own feet as he scrambled through the house. “Jones, he’s armed! I need help!”
He had to be getting close to the party.
Neal was at a disadvantage, because he knew the house far less intimately than the man on his heels. He was doing every evasive maneuver he could think of, but somehow the man kept ending up too close for comfort — popping out from a side hall or suddenly right behind him. He didn’t have time to stop and think about what he’d seen on the house schematics when they’d spread them out on the conference room table. Right now, it was all blind panic and heady fear.
He was running, literally, for his life.
Another bolt shot past him and his arm exploded with heat and pain as it flew by. Just a graze, he told himself. Don’t look.
He stumbled a bit, taken off guard, but tried to keep going without slowing down. When he turned the next corner, he was in a wide rotunda, a huge open room with nowhere to hide, just a large staircase across the room that led to a narrow interior balcony.
As he shot forward, racing for the staircase, he saw Peter come sprinting out onto the balcony, gun drawn.
“Neal!”
Oh no. Peter was alone. Where is his backup?
As Neal’s foot hit the first step, a bolt flew across his path and lodged into the wall beside him. He swayed on his feet, feeling suddenly as if the room was spinning. He looked down at his chest and saw that his shirt had turned a startlingly bright shade of red.
His vision swirled out of focus, black spots obscuring more and more of the scene.
Someone very close by made a sound like an animal being killed; it was painful to listen to. It was all agony and fear and desperation.
Even more frightening, Neal was dimly aware that it sounded like it had come from him.
But the most horrific sound was what came next.
“Neal!”
Peter’s voice sounded strange. Shrill with alarm, strangled by panic. The way Peter screamed his name sounded like it had been ripped from his chest, almost as if it had been tortured out of him. It sounded like Peter, but twisted, reshaped into something Neal didn’t recognize. He winced, tried immediately to forget the sound.
But then, again, louder or closer or both: “Neal!”
He looked for Peter, but found himself off-balance, stumbling on the stairs. His vision was narrowing down to a small sliver. When he locked eyes with Peter, he found only an unfamiliar, terror-struck expression. The room spun away from him as if falling out of orbit, breaking all the rules of the universe to descend toward chaos.
Peter never looked afraid. Worried, yes. Angry, yes. But never afraid. And certainly not while looking at Neal.
…afraid of me? Neal’s brain provided brokenly.
He heard a gun discharge, a thud from elsewhere in the room.
Neal realized he’d grabbed the railing, but that the railing was now above him. One arm holding onto it, above his head. His head lolled backward, resting against its twisted iron bars.
Footsteps, approaching fast, from above him.
“Peter?” he heard himself say when hands touched him. His vision was swirling black. He tried to focus but ended up just closing his eyes. He couldn’t bear to see Peter’s face anyway, not right now.
“No, no, no.” The hands were hesitant but frantic, touching him on the forearm, the head, the shoulders. “Neal, please.”
“Peter?” he asked again.
Peter sounded genuinely, truly terrified when he said, “It’s me. I’m here. I need a medic here. Now!”
Neal’s head drooped forward. A hand on his jaw and cheek lifted it back and gently placed it back against the railing.
“Jesus Christ.” Distantly, Neal thought Peter’s voice sounded like he had been the one hit by a bolt from a crossbow. So pained, so choked. “Neal, stay with me. Please.”
“Anklet…in hell?” Neal tried to make a joke — Think the anklet would still track me in hell? — but found that it was difficult to breathe.
“What?” Peter’s voice was breathy with panic instead of laughter. “Jesus Christ, Neal, don’t… stay with me, okay? Stay—”
Neal opened his mouth but all that came out was a cough. Even over his own hacking, he could hear Peter gasp. The sound made him feel a little sick, he thought.
But even as he was thinking it, he was sliding out of feeling, out of the room. Everything got a little darker, but the pain felt as if it was smoothing out.
“Peter…” he whispered. And his body slumped over, all feeling gone, the world receding to the sound of Peter yelling his name, over and over.
The sound Neal made when the crossbow’s bolt shot right across his front made Peter’s heart stop dead in his chest. But seeing Neal’s chest throbbing red and watching him stumble on the stairs was worse. Too far away to help, too far away to catch him, too far away to do anything but watch.
“Neal!”
Peter couldn’t get to him fast enough.
He had taken the stairs two at a time, nearly eating shit as he hurdled down the stairs. He was shouting into his receiver that he needed an ambulance, medics, backup, right the fuck now. But he was the closest. He was the one who would have to triage Neal, who had been sliced across the chest by a goddamn bolt.
He was on his knees in front of Neal in what felt like either 30 seconds or an eternity. Neal’s eyes were unfocused, rolling in his head. Peter tried to decide what to deal with first, his hands flying across Neal’s body; he couldn’t, he realized, do much of anything. The wound was too long to hold pressure on it consistently, and he couldn’t tourniquet the man’s chest.
“Peter?”
The fact that it was a question made his heart stop a second time.
“It’s me, I’m here,” Peter offered, finally landing one hand on Neal’s shoulder and the other going to the receiver, where he barked for a medic, again, as if the panic in his voice would make it come faster.
Neal’s eyes rolled all the way back as his head lolled forward, limp and lifeless. Peter’s chest seized tight, his breath rushing out of him and not returning right away as he lifted Neal’s head. He leaned forward into his face, got close enough to feel Neal’s irregular breathing.
When he’d heard Neal’s voice come loud through his earpiece, shrieking for help, Peter had had dropped, just for a moment, his glass. He’d been able to catch it before it smashed against the ground, but the fear in Neal’s normally calm-cool-collected voice had made his composure slip. He’d let his FBI agent brain take over, lifting his badge into the air, shepherding people outside, handing off crowd control to Hopkins and then taking off back into the building to find Neal.
The other agents had fanned out through the building. They weren’t sure exactly where Neal was, so it made sense to split up. The place was huge and Neal was likely running.
Peter hadn’t expected to see him when he’d gotten to the atrium just outside the party.
That, and the wound that Neal had already been sporting on his arm, had distracted him. He’d yelled Neal’s name, saw the man pursuing him a second too late.
“Jesus Christ,” Peter said shakily. The immediate spike of panic and fear was now spreading through his body as guilt and anxiety. “Neal, stay with me. Please.”
Neal’s eyelashes fluttered a little, and his voice was slurring and weak as he said, “Anklet in hell?”
Peter’s chest tightened again. He’s dying he’s dying he’s dying he’s — “What?” Neal didn’t answer, just slumped back against the railing a little more. Peter pushed his hair back, trying to figure out what to do.
“Jesus Christ, Neal, don’t…” Don’t die. “Stay with me, okay? Stay—”
Suddenly, Neal coughed. Blood splattered out of him, across Peter’s face and down Neal’s front. Peter seized Neal’s face between his hands and said his name, shook him a little. His hands were perfectly positioned to feel the life vacate Neal’s body as he slumped forward into his grasp.
That Neal whispered Peter’s name as he slid toward death made Peter want to die with him.
“Neal? Neal. Neal!”