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faye_dartmouthTitle: Weak Spots
Disclaimer: These characters and this universe are not mine.
A/N: Fills my forced to participate in an illegal activity prompt for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
hc_bingo. Very unbeta’ed.
Summary: Jay knows his weak spots, you see. He’s never once counted his brother among them.
-o-
They say everyone has a weak spot. It’s nothing to be ashamed of; it’s just life.
And Jay knows he’s got his share. He’s got his PTSD, which flares up when he least expects it, and he’s got an unyielding sense of justice that won’t be compromised. There’s his soft spot for Hailey, which he thinks may be a problem someday, but for now, he’s got it under control.
He’s got everything under control.
Jay knows his weak spots, you see.
He’s never once counted his brother among them.
-o-
The thing about Will is that he’s been more of a pain in the ass than anything else. Will’s the older brother, but you’d never guess it. He’s a mess of inconsistency, being both the smartest and dumbest asshat Jay’s ever met. He’s the kind of guy who can come from nothing and get himself through med school without any support, but he’ll cut and run the second things get hard. Jay’s hated Will as much as he’s loved him.
Will’s stuck around a lot longer this time, and sometimes, Jay thinks he can believe things are different now. Sometimes, he believes Will’s changed. He lets himself think he’ll never lose his brother again.
Because Will’s not going to let him down.
But that’s what weak spots are all about.
-o-
See, in Jay’s line of work, he makes enemies. When you go after high profile cases, you make high profile victims. The harder you work to take someone down, the more incentive they have to get back at you.
But they don’t come after Jay directly. They don’t stalk him at his home. They don’t bother him at work. They don’t go after his friends; they ever steer clear of his girlfriend.
They find Jay’s weak spot all the same and exploit it for all its worth.
Jay pays the price.
His brother, as it turns out, pays it more.
-o-
The call comes in one morning, just shy of the lunch hour. Jay’s knee deep in another case – something about drugs and sex – and he doesn’t notice at first when Voight takes it. The sergeant is always working his own angles, and Jay’s learned long ago when to ask questions and when to let it go. He doesn’t think twice about this until Voight closes his door.
Even then, it’s not that weird. Voight’s got high levels of clearance, and his results have earned him a lot of credibility. He gets called in for personal favors a lot, and he’s a go-to man for a lot of high ranking officials and rich vendors throughout the city.
But then, Voight opens his door again and he looks right at Jay.
“Halstead,” he says. “We need to talk.”
-o-
It’s an ominous prelude, but they do ominous work. It’s not necessary the end of the world.
Except when it is.
Voight has him sit down, which Jay figures doesn’t bode well. He wants Jay to be calm, which means he thinks he’s going to have cause not to Sitting gingerly in the chair, the request, therefore, has the opposite effect.
Voight probably knows this. He continues anyway as he draws a weary breath and turns his laptop toward Jay. “I want you to know that I’m showing this you first as a favor.”
Jay’s not sure if he’s actually supposed to be grateful, but he doesn’t dare thank his boss until he knows what he’s getting into. Instead, he inclines his head cautiously. “Okay.”
This doesn’t seem to be a sufficient answer. “I’m going to show you this, and I’m going to see how you respond before I let you anywhere near this.”
That means he thinks Jay will feel personally invested. As if Jay lacks professionalism.
Which, to be fair, he has on occasion.
But only when warranted.
“Near what?” he asks, quickly concluding that the warning itself means that Jay’s knee-jerk response will in fact be warranted.
Voight purses his lips, face soured. “Just promise me you’ll keep yourself together,” he says. “I can’t have any loose cannons. At least until we know more.”
This time, Jay goes ahead and scoffs. “Know more about what? Sarge, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Voight doesn’t bother with further warnings or caveats. Instead, he draws a long breath and finally presses play.
And Jay watches the video as it kicks up. Jay recognizes it as a surveillance feed pretty quick, and it takes him about another three seconds to recognize the location. It’s Chicago Med.
About two seconds later, he realizes that he recognizes the man on the feed. It’s a tall, red-headed doctor. It’s Will.
Then, slowly, Jay recognizes the second person.
“Is that--?”
Voight nods. “James Kendall.”
Jay’s mouth is hanging open, watching as his brother talks to Kendall. “I thought he’d gone underground. The whole thing has been quiet since we put his brother in prison.”
Voight is still nodding. “That’s what we thought,” he says. “We dismantled his organization, put his brother and partner away. He only got away on a technicality, but we essentially crippled his ability to do business in this town.”
Will gets up and seems to start moving toward the door with Kendall. Jay shakes his head. “So what the hell is he doing?”
“The best we can tell? He’s kidnapping your brother,” Voight says.
It’s a little like he’s been punched in the gut, and Jay wants to be grateful that Voight’s not mincing his words, but it’d help if the words made some sense. Jay grapples with it, still gaping while he watches the grainy footage, which clearly depicts Will leaving of his own accord, Kendall’s hand on his elbow as they leave the room together.
“We’ve got additional footage of them going through the ED, out the front doors,” Voight explains as the footage ends. “The last sight we have of them confirmed so far is disappearing into the street.”
Jay finally turns his gaze back to Voight, still reeling. “But why? Will’s got nothing to do with Kendall. He wouldn’t even know about the investigation.”
It’s a point that Voight has clearly already considered. “But he’s got everything to do with you,” he says. “You spent a lot of time going after Kendall. You were the star witness who put his brother away and took down his network. The fact that he went after Will, so plainly, so brazenly -- he’s targeting you. More than that, he wants you to know it’s him.”
Jay has to scoff once more, feeling desperation start to build as denial sets in. “But Will just walked out with him. He didn’t get into that ED armed. So why the hell would Will just go?”
Voight shrugs, but it’s not a casual motion. “My best guess is that Kendall just came out and told Will who he was and what he wanted,” he says. “If he threatened you, I think Will would have gone willingly.”
It’s a point Jay wants to dispute, but he can’t. It sounds just like Will.
It is just like Will.
To walk into a trap.
As long as it saved a life -- especially the life of his brother. Will was the moron who walked willingly into a hostage situation on his wedding day to save a criminal who wanted to kill him. For Jay? He’d do a hell of a lot more.
“But he doesn’t have me, so there’s no one to save,” Jay says. “So what the hell does he want Will for?”
It’s a question.
Voight tips his head to the side.
Jay already knows the answer.
-o-
In short, Kendall doesn’t want Will at all.
He wants Jay.
And Will?
Is just a means to an end.
-o-
After Jay promises Voight that he’s got control of his emotions, they show the footage to the rest of the team and open the official investigation. They pool their resources and call on their connections, and soon there’s a good portion of the city looking for Kendall and Will is officially declared missing. The search around the hospital is well underway, and Jay stays back to help orchestrate things.
This is what Voight tells him he’s going.
Really, Jay’s just being kept on the sidelines just in case.
Jay can tolerate that for now. They don’t have any other leads anyway, and if Kendall is going to call in with a ransom, then Jay wants to be there to take the call. He’s not sure why. It’s not like threatening the man who’s holding his brother hostage is going to be a successful gambit, but it’s a control thing. Jay likes to be in control, even when he’s clearly not.
Jay waits by the phone, but the rest of the team is focused on other salient leads. The information they come across is not what any of them are expecting.
Kendall’s been a ghost ever since Jay took his operation down. Jay ruined him, but in the weeks that followed, Kendall burned himself. He’s cut all ties, scrubbed all his connections. He’s not got his name on a single lease, and every contact he’s ever worked with reports that he’s out of the game. It’s possible to pay off one or two, but all of them? This isn’t just for show. Kendall’s fallen off the map.
Not fallen.
He’s jumped.
He’s gone dark for a reason, but they’re scrambling to figure out why and how.
“He’s been doing something,” Jay says, feeling his exasperation rise. He shakes his head. “I mean, he’s got to have been doing something.”
“That’s the problem,” Ruzek says, sounding a little nervous to admit it over another round table meeting, a few hours after Will’s gone missing. “There’s just one thing he’s been doing.”
Jay looks at Ruzek with a frown, but Ruzek doesn’t say anything. Atwater looks away; Burgess can’t meet his eyes. Hailey looks like she’s ready to cry. Finally, it’s Voight who says what no one seems willing to admit. “He’s quit the organization. He’s severed all ties. We got his phone records, email. The only thing he’s been doing for the last six months is thinking about how to get revenge on you.”
“On you,” Voight confirms soberly. “He’s spent six months looking for your weak spot, and now he’s doing everything he can to exploit it.”
-o-
They have email and phone – the last records that Kendall has – but they don’t yield anything. The accounts are still technically open, but the billing address is dead. There’s no activity on his data plan, and they can’t even get an address. The last known sighting of the guy is the public works office a week ago when he closed out his utility accounts.
It makes his motives clear: he wants to move without any possible connection or tracking.
It makes his position nearly impossible to track: he’s a needle in a haystack out there.
And he’s got Will with him.
-o-
They work into the night, but it doesn’t matter. The team takes shifts, sleeping on one of the couches, but it doesn’t matter. Jay stays up, bleary-eyed and shellshocked.
Will’s gone, is all he can think.
All the times Will left and Jay blamed him, this time it’s his fault.
This time, if Will never comes home, it’s all Jay’s fault.
-o-
It’s about 10 AM the next morning, 24 hours since Will walked out of Med and disappeared.
They get the break they need.
But not the one they want.
And definitely not the one they were expecting.
-o-
It’s not a ransom call. It’s not a sighting. It’s not a smuggled message. It’s not a trail of clues or even, God help him, a body.
It’s a bank robbery.
A small bank, in a quiet area across town. Well to do, lazy.
Someone walks in wearing a winter overcoat. He goes to the teller, unzips his coat and demands all the money from the tills. He’s wearing a bomb around his chest, and he tells everyone it’ll explode if anyone fights, runs, or produces a weapon. The bomb is convincing enough to force everyone, including the portly guard, to comply, and by the time the local PD arrives, the culprit has made out with all the money.
The catch is?
The person pulling the robbery?
Is a tall red headed doctor named Will Halstead.
-o-
Jay doesn’t believe it when the report is given to him. He doesn’t believe it even as they go out to the scene to see the the footage of themselves. He doesn’t believe it until he sees the recording, watching it frame by frame. He doesn’t believe it until he sees Will with his own eyes, robbing a bank.
Though, to say it’s him robbing the bank is somewhat of a stretch. The feed makes it obvious that Will is not acting of his own volition. He looks pale and sweaty, and he’s incredibly stilted. As far as convincing performances go, it’s a miracle Will pulled it off. His voice is shaky, and he fumbles and apologizes his way through the crime. It’s not hard to see that the bomb is real, but it’s also not hard to see that that’s not the only intervention Will’s got. He’s wearing an earpiece, and it’s easy to see him listening to a voice on the other end of the line as he goes throughout the motions.
In other words, Will’s been strapped to a bomb and he’s been told that if he doesn’t follow direction, he’ll blow himself up – and everyone around him. It’s unusually cruel, as far as kidnappings go. He’s heard of people being victims of blackmail, but strapped to a bomb? An actual bomb? For a bank robbery?
Kendall is making a statement. He’s parading Will about, showing Jay just what he can do, what he’s capable of.
And Will is terrified. Jay can see it, even over the video feed. Will thinks he’s going to die.
Jay can’t blame him.
At this point, if Kendall’s playing with bombs and felonies, there’s not likely to be a happy ending here.
Just an explosive, messy ending that may or may not end with Jay being the last Halstead standing.
-o-
Voight takes over the robbery in no time, and Intelligence runs the scene as they would. They take over canvassing, and they’re interviewing all the witnesses, who report the same thing. They were terrified. Will had been more terrified.
At one point, he begged a teller to just do what he asked because he didn’t want to die, he didn’t want anyone to die.
When the guard asked why he was doing this, Will apologized to him, too, before rushing out and climbing into a windowless black van. They track the van a few blocks, but it disappears. When they find it, it’s been abandoned. No sign of the money; no sign of Will.
In the bank, Will’s trying to protect the patrons and staff.
Outside, in the car, he’s trying to protect Jay
As if Jay needed this to get worse.
-o-
A few hours on the scene, and it’s not hard to deduce the rationale now. In this revenge play, it’s not a simple eye for an eye. There’s no ransom because Kendall doesn’t want Jay’s money. He wants Jay's sense of security, his pride.
He wants the things that are much more valuable.
That’s why Will was taken in broad daylight. That’s why there’s no attempt to obscure his identity. That’s why they sent Will in to rob a bank. It’s not enough to take Will. It’s not even enough to hurt him or kill him. By forcing Will to do something illegal, it’s a power play. He’s showing Jay just how much control he has.
It’s effective, too. The play hits all the beats.
Worse, Jay’s got nothing to go on. It’s easy to deduce the motives and means now, but all the salient information needed to stop a criminal is decidedly missing.
The plan has been carefully orchestrated and impeccably executed. There’s no trace of Will. They can’t identify the bomb, and with Will armed, there is no way to intervene without killing him. Kendall is using a remote feed, probably video on Will himself, and his orders are dictated through a feed in his earl. This allows Kendall to tell Will what to do and ensure absolute compliance.
They don’t know when. They don’t know where. They don’t even know how.
They just know it’s going to happen again.
-o-
Time is of the essence, and the team springs into overdrive now. They pull in backup from all jurisdictions, and they’re running as many leads as humanly possible. And then some.
Jay stays abreast of it all as best he can, but he finds himself distracted. He keeps rewatching the video.
For clues, he says.
But all he can see is how scared Will is.
How completely scared.
He’s been taken apart. The person robbing that bank is only an approximation of his brother. He’s paler. He’s shakier.
Will’s a doctor. He’s committed to saving lives.
Now, the only life to save is his own.
And Jay’s not sure they can.
God help him, God help Will. The leads are dry, and Will is terrified.
Jay’s just not sure.
-o-
Then, there’s nothing. There’s no contact, no sign, nothing. There’s no trace of Jay’s brother, and all the leads that kept them busy initially have yielded nothing. They’re reduced to running the same leads, shaking trees, and coming up with nothing
It’s ironic how he thought seeing his brother commit that robbery was the worst thing.
The silence after.
The deafening, resounding, unending silence.
Is worse.
Jay doesn’t know where Will is. He doesn’t know what conditions he’s being kept in. He’s not sure if they’re feeding him, giving him someplace warm and dry to sleep. Will could be in danger right now. He could be hurt or suffering.
Hell, his brother could even be dead.
All Jay’s left with the resounding doubts.
And the horrible silence.
-o-
He doesn’t sleep; he doesn’t eat. He works himself ragged, running down leads, doing research, making phone calls. He’s half crazy after two days, and he starts to notice how worried Hailey is when she looks at him. Voight is hovering. Everyone else mostly keeps away. They talk about the case in hushed voices, and Jay doesn’t bother listening. They’re hushed because they don’t have anything.
There’s nothing to have.
These assholes took Will, strapped him to a bomb, and had him rob a bank.
That kind of operation is either really, really messy or really, really smart.
Jay doesn’t sleep. He doesn’t eat.
Then, on the third day, all that changes.
-o-
Jay’s surviving on caffeine and energy bars, and he hasn’t showered or shaved. He’s fallen asleep several times, head bobbing down at his desk, and once or twice, Hailey feeds him something that is moderately nutritious. At this point, the only thing that defines him is that Will’s gone, and he’s no longer able to think about leads that don’t pan out. He just wonders if his brother’s even alive, if he’ll ever see him again.
If only the point was to cripple him professionally, this could be over.
Jay fears they want his weakness for more than tha.
He’s so out of it that he barely notices when the call comes in. Voight gets it first, and one by one the team gathers near. When they all look at him, Jay knows.
Jay knows.
He’s about to discover just how weak he really is.
-o-
It’s another robbery, but this time they’ve caught wind in progress.
Still, it’s across town. With traffic, they’re probably not going to get there in time.
Jay can’t decide if it’s better or worse. He needs to be with Will, but the idea of seeing him and having to let him go is a lot to take. And they have to let him go. They have no actual plan. Without knowing where the Kendall is, there’s no way to intervene without putting Will and everyone else at the scene at risk.
And if Jay stands there while his brother explodes?
Well, that’s a weakness he’d prefer not to realize.
It occurs to him, as they race to the scene, that he may not have the choice.
-o-
Usually, Jay doesn’t like giving up the wheel, but he’s glad they’re riding together.
Glad’s the wrong word.
He’s relieved.
As focused as he is on Will, the thought of driving safely is a little beyond him. Honestly, sitting there, everything feels a little beyond him right now.
Atwater manages to get a live feed by piggybacking off a police signal, and Jay sits in the backseat, staring at the images as they happen in real time on the phone.
He’s watching. He’s just sitting there watching. While his brother robs a bank.
While strapped to a bomb.
Will, for his part, looks in relatively good condition. There’s no obvious sign of injury, and he’s still moving under his own willpower. That’s the good news.
That’s literally the only good news.
All the rest is not just bad.
It’s terrible.
Will is on the frame, and he’s holding a gun. His brother can shoot safely and with some accuracy, but the thing is shaking in his fingers. The gun is just for show. The bag for the money is in his other hand, but that’s not the point either.
The point is the bomb.
It’s easily visible on the video. Will’s been forced into an oversized coat, but now that he’s inside, he’s got it opened with the detonation mechanism visible. He’s visibly shaking on the feed as he orders the tellers to empty their tells, and he takes in the money until the bag is full.
Around him, the crowd has huddled together. They’re scared; people are crying. There’s a woman with a baby who’s crying. A few people seem to be praying. They’re trying to get as far away from Will and the bomb as they can.
That’s actually a luxury. Will can’t walk away, see. He can’t hide. All he can do is rob a bank and hope like hell he doesn’t blow up in the process. Needless to say, it’s easy to see how terrified his brother is right now.
Logically, Jay knows that nothing is probably going to happen right now. If they wanted Will dead, this show would be unnecessary. That's not to say Will’s going to survive. It's just that he's not going to die until they get what they want.
Jay's pretty sure he knows what that is.
And it has to do with Jay, watching his brother on a feed while robbing a bank with a bomb on his chest.
He watches as Will fumbles through the motions, his voice shaking. He seems to twitch, listening to the voice in his ear.
But Will finishes the robbery. He takes the money and no one dies. No one even gets hurt. The bomb chirps and Will looks sick, but he gets away with his second bank robbery in a week.
Jay pulls up to the scene as Will walks out. Local uniforms have already been briefed on the situation, and there are orders not to shoot. But Will’s also a walking bomb. They all give him wide berth, lest he take out the money and everyone near him.
They haven't come up with a solution yet. To stop Will without stopping him. You can stop a bank robbery or you can save a victim. It's harder to do both.
Will gets into a car and drives away. Jay sees him, still listening to the feed in his ear.
There’s nothing WIll can do except drive.
There’s nothing Jay can do except let him go.
-o-
It’s against their instincts and training to let Will go, but it’s a policy they’ve agreed on, and Voight has pulled a lot of strings to make sure the rest of the Chicago PD respects that call. With Will’s situation, any kind of pursuit is a risk – both to Will and to bystanders. Until they have a plan, they have to let Will go.
Jay knows this. He’s the one who insisted.
But sitting there, watching his brother’s getaway vehicle speed away, it’s still hard. It’s almost impossible. Burgess has a tech team coordinate to track the van from a distance, and it works for awhile. For a few blocks, they see it twist and turn through some of the backstreets. But, right when they start to follow, the van disappears from the footage.
By the time they find it, in a dead video zone several blocks away, it’s been abandoned. It’s still sitting there with the engine open, the door ajar.
With no trace of Will at all.
-o-
They do what they can, of course. They scour the area for any sign of clues, but they come up with very little. All the physical evidence comes back linked to Will and Will alone, and they can’t come up with local surveillance footage or even a tire mark.
Two robberies, and they are still no closer to finding Will.
The team circles back and starts running the same exhausted leads, and Jay can’t do it anymore.
He can’t play good cop.
Not when his brother is being held by a crazy man as a pawn to exact revenge on Jay. They’re too slow. They’re too empty. They’re too far behind. They’re too weak.
Jay hates their weakness.
Almost as much as he hates his own.
They regroup at Intelligence.
And Jay falls apart.
He’s sullen at first, offering snide commentary as the others try to share their progress -- or lack thereof. Then, he gets combative. When people try to ignore him, he raises the stakes. When Voight finally calls him on it, Jay lashes out caustically. He yells, bolstering his chest, staring Voight down with reckless abandon.
Voight doesn’t hit him, though he looks tempted. Instead, he does something worse.
He sends Jay home.
Jay’s ready to go down kicking and screaming. There’s no way he’s going home while Will is missing, but Voight doesn’t budge. He’s about to start throwing his own punches, when Hailey intervenes, half dragging him outside.
At this point, he’s so mad that he’s breathless, and the anger threatens to overwhelm him. He can’t catch his breath, he can’t think, he can’t -- he can’t--
Hailey bundles him up the car as he grapples with the shock of it all, and for the first time, he’s struck by the sense of loss he’s put off. The terror settles into something horribly mystifying, and he stares blankly out the window as Hailey drives them back to his place.
Jay’s spent his fight, and he’s got nothing left. No willpower, no drive, no brother.
Hailey parks the car and leads him inside, and she tells him to sit down while she rummages in the kitchen and produces something to eat. It could be a minute; it could be ten minutes. It could be ten years, for all Jay knows.
She comes back and hands him the food and sits down next to him. Jay stares at the food blankly, because he doesn’t understand.
What does it mean to sit here on a couch? Eating dinner?
When Will is going?
When Will has been kidnapped by a mad man?
When his brother is probably going to die for Jay’s mistakes?
He doesn’t realize he’s crying until Hailey puts a hand on his shoulder. “Jay, it’s okay.”
He almost laughs, inhaling raggedly as he shakes his head and looks at her. “No, it’s not,” he says. “Kendall is going to toy with Will for as long as he can, and then he’s going to kill him. He’s going to torture my brother and then murder him. Nothing about this is okay.”
“We’re going to find Kendall, and we’re going to rescue Will,” she tells him.
“How?” he asks. “We’ve got nothing. All this time, and I know we’ve got nothing, and I can’t do this anymore. I can’t sit here and pretend like we’ve got this under control. I can’t.”
He’s hot and cold all at once. He’s overwhelmed, the words tumbling out in a rush he can’t stop.
Her face creases sympathetically, and she eases her arm around his back. “Jay, you don’t have to do this,” she says.
“But it’s Will,” he tells her, letting the emphasis make his point.
She doesn’t waver. “And it’s all of us,” she replies steadily. “When one of us is weak, the others can be strong. That’s how this works.”
She’s talking about weakness.
She’s talking about strength.
It’s not a lesson Jay’s ever wanted to learn, but here he is. He looks at her, and allows himself the smallest portion of hope. “You can do this?”
She nods. “I can do this,” she promises. “You’ve just got to trust me. Trust the team. Trust us.”
And Jay, with no other options, does.
-o-
So, Jay eats. He takes a shower. He finally – finally – goes to bed. He lays there for a bit, staring at the ceiling. He wonders where his brother is; he wonders if Will is safe. He wonders how scared Will is.
He wonders if Will knows how sorry he is.
He’s not sure what he’s sorry for, but he’s sorry for his weakness. He’s sorry that he let this happen. He’s sorry that he can’t undo it.
No doubt, Will still trusts him.
So Jay does the only thing he can.
And he trusts his team.
-o-
When he wakes up, it’s morning. There’s still no sign of Will, but Jay finds himself rested and strangely coherent. It’s a surreal sort of clarity, and Hailey agrees to take him into work first thing.
“What’s the point?” he asks.
She doesn’t quite smile, but there’s something confident in her look. “Well, for one, we have a plan.”
And Jay blinks at her, feeling blank.
They have a plan, then.
They actually have a plan.
-o-
Jay holds off on his questions until they get there, and the team assembles with a sense of anxious renewal. They look at Jay hesitantly, but they waste no time in laying out the specifics.
And they are out there.
It’s not the kind of plan they usually prefer. There are a lot of unknown variables, and it’s riddled with risks. It’s not the kind of plan that Voight would normally clear, but this is not the kind of case they usually run. Will’s a hostage and a bank robber, so the situation doesn’t exactly lend itself to normal.
Even so, Jay’s not sure if he’s supposed to be impressed or terrified.
The plan is to wait.
Literally, that’s the plan.
Tracing Kendall so far has been impossible. They’re still no closer to finding any kind of location. As best they can tell, there isn’t likely a single location, but a string of safehouses sprinkled throughout the city. This allows Kendall to move Will freely. More importantly, it’s how the remote access for Will’s comms and the bomb detonation device would work. The man would have to be within range of Will to pull any of this off, and since the robberies have been in different locations with no overlapping radius, it’s clear that he’s on the move.
They don’t have enough to guess where they’re going to strike next, but they think they have technology to hack the signal and reverse it. By doing this, they should be able to get a fairly precise lock on where the signal is coming from. Then, they can use that signal to find Kendall and stop him.
The problem is that they need time. Tracking the signal is hard enough, and pinpointing the location is even harder. Not to mention the fact that they have to launch a full scale assault with no warning. Any sign of a tipoff, and it’s likely Kendall will pull the plug – and press the button.
To prevent this, they need a decoy to buy them time and hold Kendall’s attention. Jay’s the real target here, so it has to be him.
Jay has to go to his brother’s bank robbery and talk him down while he’s strapped to a bomb. One wrong move, and they’ll both be dead. Jay has to hold this cover as long as he can, keeping Will and Kendall calm on the other end of Will’s live feed.
“I know it’s a little tricky,” Hailey says, and she sounds like she’s apologizing.
Jay, however, has heard enough. He nods. “It’s how we get Will back, right?”
“We think it can work,” she says. “If you can keep their attention long enough.”
“It’s for Will, right?” Jay says. “It’s for Will.”
The next robbery will be the last, then.
One way or another.
-o-
They make the preparations. They set up the equipment. They practice the tracking technique. They brief different squads positioned throughout the city to be on standby. They increase surveillance, making connections with every bank to ensure total coverage and optimal response times.
Mostly, though, they wait.
One day.
Two days.
Then, the calls comes.
-o-
Their preparations seem to work. They get notified immediately, and they’re able to mobilize to respond to the call while the robbery is still in progress. Local teams secure the scene before they arrive, and Jay gears up with nothing but a comm of his own as he’s cleared to go inside.
He’s doing this part alone.
And trusting his team to do the rest.
-o-
Inside, Jay moves slowly and carefully. He keeps his hands up. The guests are huddled together on the ground, looking terrified. The tellers have their hands up, except for the young woman emptying her till. Will is at her desk, shifting anxiously from foot to foot. He’s still wearing the overcoat, and from this angle, Jay can’t see the bomb.
However, when Will turns, looking anxiously round the room, he can see it well enough. He sees it first before he lifts his eyes and makes contact with his brother for the first time in five days.
Will freezes, and his expression is suspended somewhere between relief and horror. There’s a look of confusion on his face, and his head tips to the side as he clearly receives a fresh set of instructions. Carefully, slowly, he moves away from the teller, leaving the bag of money behind. He approaches for several paces and then comes to a stop so that he and Jay are facing each other, several feet apart.
“Dr. Halstead,” Will says, and his voice wavers precariously. “You’re finally joining us.”
“You could have invited me if you wanted to talk,” Jay says cautiously. He looks at his brother and tries to reassure him.
Will’s not reassured. His breathing is taut and ragged and he swallows convulsively. “I wanted to see if you could – could figure it out. I guessed if the stakes were – the stakes were high enough, you might. And here you are.”
Will shudders badly, and he has to take a gasping inhalation as he tries to get his nerves back in check.
“So, let’s do this right,” Jay says. “I’m the one you want, and you’ve got my brother. I’m not going anywhere. Let’s let the rest of the people go.”
Will stills, listening to the voice in his ear. His voice cracks as he resumes. “Fine,” he say, relaying the message. “They can go, and then Will here will barricade the door.”
Will almost breaks on his own name, but somehow he keeps it together. Jay doesn’t dare betray anything, but he sticks to the plan. Hailey’s comm link is still dead, as part of the plan. Radio silence is the safest way to ensure Kendall isn’t tipped off. They don’t want the lines to cross.
But with no way of knowing how the raid is going, Jay doesn’t know if he’s got to stall for five minutes or 15.
It doesn’t matter.
He’ll do it for as long as it takes.
Will seems to listen for another second to the voice in his ear, and then he nods. Once, and then a few more times. “Everyone else can go,” he says. And he manages to raise his voice, glancing around at the crowd on the floor and then back to the tellers. He sounds palpably relieved. “You can all go. Quickly. Out the front door. Just go, and don’t look back.”
The people are hesitant at first, but Will looks so genuinely relieved that they start to get up. When nothing happens, they start rushing to the door. The tellers fumble out from behind the desk, and Will holds himself as still as possible as the crowd departs.
Then it’s just Will and Jay.
And Kendall and the bomb.
“Will--”
Jay starts, but Will doesn’t seem to be listening. He frowns for a moment, but seems to nod. Before Jay can ask him what’s wrong, Will cuts a wide path around him to the front doors. He processed to lock them, shoving some furniture in front of them for a makeshift barricade. Then he retreats, stopping once, and then stopping again, before he seems to get the all-clear signal.
Kendall doesn’t want them disturbed; he’s positioned Will out of view of the window. If this ends, Kendall wants it to end on his terms.
Jay understands the impulse, but he’s surrendered that control. He’s accepted his weakness.
Instead, all he can do is watch as Will postures. Only after several tedious seconds does Will turn back, planting his feet, and looking at Jay.
They’ve been apart for almost a week now, and Will still looks better than Jay has expected in some ways. For someone who has been kidnapped, there’s not much in the way of overt abuse. No bruising. Not cuts. He looks well fed, and he’s clearly moving comfortably.
But that’s not to say there isn’t abuse.
Will looks shattered. Just standing there, he’s sweating and breathless. The weight of the bomb is literal and metaphorical, and Jay isn’t sure which one is more pronounced. From this distance, the earpiece is clearly visible, and so is the mechanism on the bomb. A remote detonator, just as expected. It’s got the expected wireless connection.
At least that much is according to plan.
However, it’s also got a timer. It’s not activated, but Jay is aware that he’s got an audience here.
So is Will.
Painfully, horribly aware.
Just the two of them, Will is trembling in earnest. He looks half on the verge of tears. “You finally got here,” Will says, and the words are stiff and stunted as he relays them. “I wasn’t sure if you couldn’t catch me or if -- if you were too scared to see your brother -- your brother die.”
His voice nearly breaks over those words, but he barely composes himself.
Jay finds himself with a similar struggle. The air is tight in his lungs, and his fingers feel like they’re going numb because they’re clenched so tight. “You’re playing a game,” Jay says, mustering as much confidence as he can with a silent earpieces and a brother wearing a bomb. He’s just got to keep talking. He’s got to keep Kendall talking. “So I figured I might as well play, too.”
It’s a forced cavalier attitude that it’s thin as can be, but it still makes Will shudder. “It’s not a game,” Will says robotically. He swallows. “This is revenge. You put my brother away, and now I’ll put yours away.”
Jay scoffs, wishing he could believe his own thunder. “Your brother was a criminal. Will’s a victim here. He’s not going away.”
Will half flinches, and he’s visibly sweating now. “No, he’s just going to go boom.”
The way his voice shakes on the word boom is almost too much for both of them. Will has to close his eyes, and Jay scrambles to keep himself collected. Hailey said she’d get it done. Hailey said the team had it under control. Hailey promised that he could count on their strength when he had absolutely nothing left.
“It’s sweet, though,” Will says, finally opening his eyes again. “I took your brother right out from under you. I made him rob banks. He’s a bank robber.”
Jay suspects there’s glee in Kendall’s voice, but Will’s tenor only depicts fear.
Jay purses his lips, feeling his ire start to rise uncontrollably. “You strapped him to a bomb. This is you robbing banks, not him. Just you.”
It’s gruff when he says it. Will flinches again -- and badly -- and Jay feels guilty. He has to posture to keep Kendall occupied. That same posturing can only distress Will more. It’s the definition of a lose-lose situation, but Jay is banking on the ends justifying the means here.
“To be fair,” Kendall posits with Will’s voice while Will struggles to keep himself erect. “He’s difficult to control. I got him to come with me the first time by threatening you. But to rob a bank? I needed a little more. The bomb was -- the bomb was a good bet.”
It’s unsettling the way Will has to relate his own trauma in the third person, and Jay wishes he could see Kendall so he could throttle him with his own two hands. Hailey has to be closing in on his position. This has to be over soon. It has to be.
Jay has to stall.
Jay has to buy the team time.
Jay has to buy Will time.
Which means he’s got to stand here and make chitchat while his brother’s wearing a bomb.
“A bomb, though?” Jay asks, forcing a scathing skepticism. “How the hell did you even get a bomb? You’ve never had that much finesse.”
He can’t see Kendall’s response, but Will blanches as the feed spills fresh words into his ears. “Money,” he blurts. He wets his lips and swallows. “Connections. Desperation. You can buy anything when you – when you want it bad enough. I – I liquidated all my assets. And I – I bought the best bomb I could.”
Will pauses. He has to swallow again.
“Remote detonation. A timer,” Will intones against his Will. “A big enough blast radius so they’ll be identifying your brother by scraps of DNA.”
It’s a horrible thing to make Will say, and Jay’s gut twists as he watches his brother force his way through it. His breathing is starting to intensify, and he’s looking peakish. Jay wants nothing more than to rush forward and end this thing, but there’s a plan. He’s going to trust the plan. “It’s an awful lot of trouble to go through,” Jay posits instead.
Will looks like he’s listing a little bit, from the weight of the bomb or the stress of the situation, Jay’s not sure. Will’s almost on the verge of collapsing at this point, and Jay’s not strong enough to save him. Where the hell is Hailey?
“Well, I found that I had time for it these days,” Will recites, repeating the words as his breathing continues to grow short and clipped. He licks his dry lips and swallows hard. “When you ruin someone’s life, you don’t get to be upset with how they rebuild it.”
Those are ironic words, really. Considering what Kendall is doing to Will right here and now. Jay’s not sure how Will will put himself back together, but he’s going to be there to help him do it. God help him, they’ll do it together, the both of them.
Desperation is not the right play, though. Jay keeps his chin steady. “Reality check, Kendall,” he says. “You destroyed your own life. That’s what happens when you break the law.”
Will has to close his eyes again, and when he opens them again, tears leak out, slipping down his cheeks. “You’re standing at the scene – the scene of your brother’s – your brother’s–” Will starts, but stops as he hiccups for air, more tears falling. “Your brother’s bank robbery. And you say that like it’s so simple, like there’s never – never extenuating cir-circumstances.”
Will’s nearly colorless now, the starkness of his red hair almost uncomfortably bright. The bomb still blinks, showing that it’s still armed and loaded, and Jay’s earpiece is painfully silent. He wants nothing more than to run to Will, consequences be damned. But it’s not just his life on the line. It’s Will’s.
“No one strapped a bomb to you,” Jay points out.
Will’s jaw is trembling now, and he looks to just barely keep the sobs at bay. “Yeah, I guess – guess they didn’t,” he relays, the words even more choppy than before. “But you still – you still – still ruined my life.”
Will has to stop, taking a heaving breath that is choked off with a sob.
He concludes, voice almost impossibly thin. “I think I’ll ruin yours.”
Will’s held up remarkably well until this point, but it could be the kidnapping, the three bank robberies, the bomb strapped to his chest, or the simple fact that he’s orating his own likely demise – but he can’t hold up any longer. He curves over, sobbing once more, and this time when he collects himself, there’s a wild, uncontrolled look in his eyes.
Jay’s still playing the game.
Will, however, is done.
“Jay you have to go,” he blurts, the words all in a rush now. “I swear, you have to get out of here. He’s not kidding. He hates you, he’s going to kill you–”
Jay’s taken by surprise, blinking rapidly as he switches gears and adapts to Will’s unexpected outburst. He’s momentarily terrified that Kendall will blow them up for this misstep, but he’s not about to leave his brother like this. “Will, I’m not leaving–”
The fear is still there, everpresent, but now it’s colored by a deeper, growing panic. “No, Jay, you have to go,” Will says, and he’s shaking so hard that Jay can actually see it, hear it in his voice. “You’ll die, too, and I can’t -- I can’t--”
Will’s voice breaks altogether, and his face dissolves into a sob that he barely keeps in check. Jay’s own heart skips a beat, and he holds up his hand. He needs to save Will’s life, and that means keeping him calm. “Hey, hey, look,” he says quickly. Calmly. Certainly. “No one’s dying, okay?”
He’s as certain as he can be.
For someone standing next to a guy strapped to a bomb.
He takes a step closer, cautious both of Will’s fidgety disposition and the obvious interference Kendall. Kendall has tolerated this off-script back and forth, and Jay thinks it’s probably what he wants. He wants them to talk. He wants them to tell each other how scared they are. Kendall has put on a performance, and he’s looking for Jay and Will to finish out the final act.
It’s just a question of who draws the curtain, Kendall or Jay’s team.
Moving imperceptibly forward, Jay thinks he’s being subtle; he thinks he has this under control. He thinks they have time.
He’s wrong.
He’s been wrong a lot these days.
Just like that, the timer switches on, and the countdown begins.
One minute.
Will notices immediately, and he takes a frantic step back. “You have to get out of here,” he says, and he’s just this side over hyperventilation now. “Jay, you have to go.”
“No,” Jay says, and he holds his ground. Clearly, Kendall is still at large if he’s making this move. They’re on the clock now, but he trusts his team. He trusts his plan. And he can’t afford to let himself believe otherwise. It doesn’t matter, anyway. At this point, it doesn’t change what he’s going to do now. “I’m not leaving you.”
“Jay, I’m dead either way, okay? I’m dead,” Will says, gulping for air while fresh tears stream down his face. He glances at the time as it ticks down to 45 seconds. “I’m not walking away from this.”
“The hell you’re not,” Jay says, and it’s a confidence he’s made himself believe. “We’ll walk away from this together. I promise.”
Will’s face crumples again, and his breathing hitches nearly uncontrollably. “Jay, please,” he says, all but begging now. The timer has ticked by, 30 seconds gone. “Please.”
Jay doesn’t have time to think about it. He doesn’t have time to doubt. It’s not blind trust; it’s necessary trust. Because in 30 seconds, he’s either walking out of here with his brother, or they’ll both be spattered on the walls. Either way, it’s just 30 more seconds.
“Will, I need you to trust me,” he coaches, straining to hear any sign of life on his comms, but they remain stubbornly quiet.
20 seconds.
“No,” Will says, and there’s no more hint of panic. It’s full on panic now, and his legs threaten to give out. “No, no--”
15 seconds.
“Will, hey, Will,” Jay says, trying to get his brother’s attention.
Will looks at him, brown eyes wide and terrified. There’s a clarity, unsettling though it is.
10 seconds.
“I can’t do this if you’re going to die,” Will says, and his voice is no more than a whisper in the air between them. “I can’t.”
“No one’s dying,” Jay says again, and he dares to move a step closer. “Do you trust me?”
Five seconds.
Will tenses. His eyes dart down for a second to watch the time and lock onto Jay again.
Somewhere across town, Jay has to believe that Hailey and the others are closing in. He has to think the work, the planning, it’s all paid off. He has to think he’ll save his brother, that he’ll drag Will’s ass back home one more time.
Four seconds.
They’ve gone back and forth for a lifetime, fighting like brothers will. Jockeying for position. Trying to prove themselves. Jay holds grudges. Will runs away. But they’re both standing eye to eye now.
Three seconds.
Jay’s breath is frozen, and Will body has gone still. All the lives they’ve saved. All the good they’ve done. And it amounts to this.
Two seconds.
Will wasn’t there when their mother died. Jay’s last words to his father were insulting and diminutive. They’re both still here, though. They’re both still here.
One second.
That’s all they need, then. The two of them. For one second. For one lifetime.
And the timer ticks irrevocably to zero.
-o-
You can’t start over without ending something first. Endings are beginnings, in some ways. They’re intertwined, interwoven, interdependent. Jay can hold his grudges. Will can run all the way across the world. But they’re still right back here, right where they started.
And the clock ticks back to zero.
Then, somehow, it starts counting again.
-o-
There’s no time left to think, and ironically, it’s Jay that freezes. In the split second between now and eternity, he sees the endless possibilities and greets them with futility. He’s not proud of it, but in the split second it consumes him, there’s really nothing to be done for it.
Will, for his part, springs to action. At the blinking zero, he curls in on himself, diving to the ground with surprising force. He tightens inward, as if he can collapse in completely, and Jay realizes that he’s trying to absorb the explosion from the bomb.
It’s stupid and heroic, because it’s hard to be heroic without being stupid, and Jay remembers that he and his brother aren’t so different after all. There’s respect; there’s gratitude; there’s horror.
Then, Jay realizes something more salient, there’s nothing.
There’s no explosion.
In fact, there’s a lingering stillness that seems so loud that he can hear it reverberating in his ears. For another second, he considers the possibility that he’s dead already, but he feels his heart pounding in his chest, and he’s alive.
More importantly, Will’s alive.
Will’s alive.
Then, Hailey’s voice provides clarity over the comm in his ear. “Jay?” she asks, voice garbled over the static for a moment. “Jay! We got them! Copy? We got them.”
-o-
It’s a swell of relief so strong that Jay momentarily blacks out, right there, standing on his feet. He basks in it for a glorious moment, before he remembers that life is more than this moment. The seconds are ticking forward now, and Will’s still on the ground.
“Will!” he says, and he remembers how to move. He flies forward, crossing the distance between them quickly. He hits his knees hard, but he hardly feels the impact as he reaches out for his brother. “Will, look at me!”
At Jay’s touch, Will startles. He unfurls just a little, looking up at Jay with confusion and terror. He doesn’t understand what’s happened yet.
“Will, it’s okay,” he tells him. “The bomb’s disarmed. It’s okay.”
That’s the short version -- it tells Will nothing of the plan, of Hailey’s role in it, of his team’s support and the dangerous venture they’d played -- but Will’s not in a position for the long version. In fact, on the ground, Will looks more confused than ever. He tries to make it parse, but it’s too much, and he starts crying inside.
Jay grabs him by the shoulders and wrests him up. “You’re okay,” he says again. “We’re okay, Will. The bomb’s disarmed. We’re okay.”
Will sobs, ugly and gasping, and Jay’s fingers tighten. “It’s over,” he says. “Will, it’s over.”
Through the tears, Will somehow manages to see him. Tears dripping into his beard, snot hanging off his nose. “But the bomb?”
The words are strained and broken, and Jay doesn’t let go. “Disarmed. It’s disarmed. Completely. You’re safe now. We’re safe.”
Nearly convulsing with relief, Will fumbles in Jay’s grip. He pulls away haphazardly, lifting his arms up to grapple at the vest he’s been forced to wear. His coordination is off, though, and the more he tries, the more desperate he becomes. He’s hyperventilating in earnest now, and Jay quickly intervenes before his brother passes out.
Working together, they get the vest off, and Jay takes it from his brother, skidding it gently across the floor, as far away from them as possible. Will looks at it, eyes wide and wild, and his wrenching sobs continue. Then, before Jay can scoop him up again, Will turns to the side and is violently, overwhelmingly ill.
Jay reaches for him, supporting him while he retches, and he bears all of his brother’s weight when he collapses, totally spent. He runs his hand through Will’s hair, smoothing it down. He tucks his brother against him, and though Will is bigger than he is, he curls up close and allows himself to be held.
Comfort in the touch.
Comfort in the sound of their hearts pounding in rapid unison.
Comfort in being together.
It’s over, then.
Which is to say, it’s just begun.
-o-
Physically, Will is mostly unharmed from the ordeal. He’s got some superficial abrasions, and he’s been hit once or twice. But, all things considered, he’s fared remarkably well for someone who was supposed to blow up several times.
Of course, Jay’s not stupid. He’s not about to think Will’s lucky. The physical damage is minimal, but the emotional toll is going to be harder for them to calculate. By the time the rest of the team arrives, Will is sitting up on his own, but he won’t let Jay out of his sight. He responds to questions when asked, but his answers are sparse and vague. He doesn’t remember much, maybe. He doesn’t want to remember the rest, probably.
Jay knows the investigative angle in all this, but he doesn’t care. He gives Voight the bare minimum, and he pulls Will out of there as fast as he can. He takes his brother back home. He’s going to drop him off, but once he gets Will upstairs, it’s clear that he can’t leave.
Not for Will’s sake.
Not for his own.
Instead, he helps Will get cleaned up. He puts Will in the shower, and gets out some fresh sweats to change into. He makes a small meal, and he sits his brother down and they eat it together, bite by bite, in relative silence. Once or twice, Jay’s phone rings, but Will seems so scared by every change that Jay turns his phone off for good.
When they’re done, Jay considers hanging out, but Will looks spent. Haggard and listing, Jay takes his brother to bed and makes him lay down. Will complies with the same vacant doe-eyed look he’s had since the bomb didn’t go off, but when Jay goes to leave, the panic creases across his face once more.
“Don’t go,” Will says. “Jay. Please.”
Jay sits down on the bed next to his brother. “I’m right here,” he says. “And you’re safe. Nothing’s going to happen to you here.”
It’s not that Will doesn’t believe him, but it’s just that Will doesn’t believe him. He can’t believe him, probably. The trauma he’s been through is too substantial. The scars you can’t see are the ones that run the deepest.
“I knew I was going to die,” Will says suddenly, and his eyes are glistening. “After I robbed that first bank, I knew I was going to die.”
Jay finds he can’t speak. The reassurances die on his tongue.
Will takes a halting breath and somehow continues. “And all I could think was that was okay. If you could live, then it was okay.”
Jay shakes his head. “That would never be okay.”
But Will is earnest in this. “I’ve been a terrible brother. I know it, and you know it. You’ve told me so a thousand times,” he says. “And if I left this time, if I left this time, I wanted it to be to save you. That’s the only way I could leave again, Jay. To save you.”
And it’s hard to say what’s harder to hear. That Will had been so convinced of his own death.
Or that he’d accepted it if it meant Jay got to live.
Will shudders, a small sob escaping. “I still hear the bomb,” he says. “I can feel it in my chest. I know it’s not there, but I -- I--”
His brother’s breathing has tightened again, and Jay reaches out, placing his hand on Will’s. “But you can’t make it stop.”
Will is trembling, but he nods. “I keep thinking it’s back down to zero.”
“It got to zero,” Jay reminds him. “And you know what happened? Time started again.”
Will can’t take it, though, and he turns away, face dissolving into sobs once more. He corrects himself as quick as he can, wiping his nose. “I’m sorry,” he says, words in a rush. “I just -- I can’t.”
“I know,” Jay says. “And it’s okay. You had to do it alone before. But not this time. Not this time.”
Will nods, gathering his emotions once more. He sniffles and looks at Jay uncertainly. “Will you stay?”
“Sure,” Jay says.
“Just here,” Will says. “Stay.”
And Jay understands. Awkward as it is, Jay lays down next to his brother. Close enough so they’re touching. “I’ll stay,” he promises, and he feels Will relax against him finally as he closes his eyes. “I’ll stay.”
Because morning will come soon enough.
But they have to get through the night first.
-o-
Will falls asleep quickly after that, and Jay’s arm goes numb supporting his brother’s weight but he doesn’t dare move. He doesn’t dare blink. He watches Will sleep, safe, sound, and secure.
Somewhere, Voight is pushing the investigation forward. Somewhere, Hailey is leading the team through the mountains of evidence. Somewhere, Kendall is in a jail cell, ready to rot there for the rest of his life. Somewhere.
But here Jay is.
And maybe he has one weak spot.
It turns out, keeping his brother close, he’s actually okay with that.
Disclaimer: These characters and this universe are not mine.
A/N: Fills my forced to participate in an illegal activity prompt for
hc_bingo. Very unbeta’ed.Summary: Jay knows his weak spots, you see. He’s never once counted his brother among them.
-o-
They say everyone has a weak spot. It’s nothing to be ashamed of; it’s just life.
And Jay knows he’s got his share. He’s got his PTSD, which flares up when he least expects it, and he’s got an unyielding sense of justice that won’t be compromised. There’s his soft spot for Hailey, which he thinks may be a problem someday, but for now, he’s got it under control.
He’s got everything under control.
Jay knows his weak spots, you see.
He’s never once counted his brother among them.
-o-
The thing about Will is that he’s been more of a pain in the ass than anything else. Will’s the older brother, but you’d never guess it. He’s a mess of inconsistency, being both the smartest and dumbest asshat Jay’s ever met. He’s the kind of guy who can come from nothing and get himself through med school without any support, but he’ll cut and run the second things get hard. Jay’s hated Will as much as he’s loved him.
Will’s stuck around a lot longer this time, and sometimes, Jay thinks he can believe things are different now. Sometimes, he believes Will’s changed. He lets himself think he’ll never lose his brother again.
Because Will’s not going to let him down.
But that’s what weak spots are all about.
-o-
See, in Jay’s line of work, he makes enemies. When you go after high profile cases, you make high profile victims. The harder you work to take someone down, the more incentive they have to get back at you.
But they don’t come after Jay directly. They don’t stalk him at his home. They don’t bother him at work. They don’t go after his friends; they ever steer clear of his girlfriend.
They find Jay’s weak spot all the same and exploit it for all its worth.
Jay pays the price.
His brother, as it turns out, pays it more.
-o-
The call comes in one morning, just shy of the lunch hour. Jay’s knee deep in another case – something about drugs and sex – and he doesn’t notice at first when Voight takes it. The sergeant is always working his own angles, and Jay’s learned long ago when to ask questions and when to let it go. He doesn’t think twice about this until Voight closes his door.
Even then, it’s not that weird. Voight’s got high levels of clearance, and his results have earned him a lot of credibility. He gets called in for personal favors a lot, and he’s a go-to man for a lot of high ranking officials and rich vendors throughout the city.
But then, Voight opens his door again and he looks right at Jay.
“Halstead,” he says. “We need to talk.”
-o-
It’s an ominous prelude, but they do ominous work. It’s not necessary the end of the world.
Except when it is.
Voight has him sit down, which Jay figures doesn’t bode well. He wants Jay to be calm, which means he thinks he’s going to have cause not to Sitting gingerly in the chair, the request, therefore, has the opposite effect.
Voight probably knows this. He continues anyway as he draws a weary breath and turns his laptop toward Jay. “I want you to know that I’m showing this you first as a favor.”
Jay’s not sure if he’s actually supposed to be grateful, but he doesn’t dare thank his boss until he knows what he’s getting into. Instead, he inclines his head cautiously. “Okay.”
This doesn’t seem to be a sufficient answer. “I’m going to show you this, and I’m going to see how you respond before I let you anywhere near this.”
That means he thinks Jay will feel personally invested. As if Jay lacks professionalism.
Which, to be fair, he has on occasion.
But only when warranted.
“Near what?” he asks, quickly concluding that the warning itself means that Jay’s knee-jerk response will in fact be warranted.
Voight purses his lips, face soured. “Just promise me you’ll keep yourself together,” he says. “I can’t have any loose cannons. At least until we know more.”
This time, Jay goes ahead and scoffs. “Know more about what? Sarge, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Voight doesn’t bother with further warnings or caveats. Instead, he draws a long breath and finally presses play.
And Jay watches the video as it kicks up. Jay recognizes it as a surveillance feed pretty quick, and it takes him about another three seconds to recognize the location. It’s Chicago Med.
About two seconds later, he realizes that he recognizes the man on the feed. It’s a tall, red-headed doctor. It’s Will.
Then, slowly, Jay recognizes the second person.
“Is that--?”
Voight nods. “James Kendall.”
Jay’s mouth is hanging open, watching as his brother talks to Kendall. “I thought he’d gone underground. The whole thing has been quiet since we put his brother in prison.”
Voight is still nodding. “That’s what we thought,” he says. “We dismantled his organization, put his brother and partner away. He only got away on a technicality, but we essentially crippled his ability to do business in this town.”
Will gets up and seems to start moving toward the door with Kendall. Jay shakes his head. “So what the hell is he doing?”
“The best we can tell? He’s kidnapping your brother,” Voight says.
It’s a little like he’s been punched in the gut, and Jay wants to be grateful that Voight’s not mincing his words, but it’d help if the words made some sense. Jay grapples with it, still gaping while he watches the grainy footage, which clearly depicts Will leaving of his own accord, Kendall’s hand on his elbow as they leave the room together.
“We’ve got additional footage of them going through the ED, out the front doors,” Voight explains as the footage ends. “The last sight we have of them confirmed so far is disappearing into the street.”
Jay finally turns his gaze back to Voight, still reeling. “But why? Will’s got nothing to do with Kendall. He wouldn’t even know about the investigation.”
It’s a point that Voight has clearly already considered. “But he’s got everything to do with you,” he says. “You spent a lot of time going after Kendall. You were the star witness who put his brother away and took down his network. The fact that he went after Will, so plainly, so brazenly -- he’s targeting you. More than that, he wants you to know it’s him.”
Jay has to scoff once more, feeling desperation start to build as denial sets in. “But Will just walked out with him. He didn’t get into that ED armed. So why the hell would Will just go?”
Voight shrugs, but it’s not a casual motion. “My best guess is that Kendall just came out and told Will who he was and what he wanted,” he says. “If he threatened you, I think Will would have gone willingly.”
It’s a point Jay wants to dispute, but he can’t. It sounds just like Will.
It is just like Will.
To walk into a trap.
As long as it saved a life -- especially the life of his brother. Will was the moron who walked willingly into a hostage situation on his wedding day to save a criminal who wanted to kill him. For Jay? He’d do a hell of a lot more.
“But he doesn’t have me, so there’s no one to save,” Jay says. “So what the hell does he want Will for?”
It’s a question.
Voight tips his head to the side.
Jay already knows the answer.
-o-
In short, Kendall doesn’t want Will at all.
He wants Jay.
And Will?
Is just a means to an end.
-o-
After Jay promises Voight that he’s got control of his emotions, they show the footage to the rest of the team and open the official investigation. They pool their resources and call on their connections, and soon there’s a good portion of the city looking for Kendall and Will is officially declared missing. The search around the hospital is well underway, and Jay stays back to help orchestrate things.
This is what Voight tells him he’s going.
Really, Jay’s just being kept on the sidelines just in case.
Jay can tolerate that for now. They don’t have any other leads anyway, and if Kendall is going to call in with a ransom, then Jay wants to be there to take the call. He’s not sure why. It’s not like threatening the man who’s holding his brother hostage is going to be a successful gambit, but it’s a control thing. Jay likes to be in control, even when he’s clearly not.
Jay waits by the phone, but the rest of the team is focused on other salient leads. The information they come across is not what any of them are expecting.
Kendall’s been a ghost ever since Jay took his operation down. Jay ruined him, but in the weeks that followed, Kendall burned himself. He’s cut all ties, scrubbed all his connections. He’s not got his name on a single lease, and every contact he’s ever worked with reports that he’s out of the game. It’s possible to pay off one or two, but all of them? This isn’t just for show. Kendall’s fallen off the map.
Not fallen.
He’s jumped.
He’s gone dark for a reason, but they’re scrambling to figure out why and how.
“He’s been doing something,” Jay says, feeling his exasperation rise. He shakes his head. “I mean, he’s got to have been doing something.”
“That’s the problem,” Ruzek says, sounding a little nervous to admit it over another round table meeting, a few hours after Will’s gone missing. “There’s just one thing he’s been doing.”
Jay looks at Ruzek with a frown, but Ruzek doesn’t say anything. Atwater looks away; Burgess can’t meet his eyes. Hailey looks like she’s ready to cry. Finally, it’s Voight who says what no one seems willing to admit. “He’s quit the organization. He’s severed all ties. We got his phone records, email. The only thing he’s been doing for the last six months is thinking about how to get revenge on you.”
“On you,” Voight confirms soberly. “He’s spent six months looking for your weak spot, and now he’s doing everything he can to exploit it.”
-o-
They have email and phone – the last records that Kendall has – but they don’t yield anything. The accounts are still technically open, but the billing address is dead. There’s no activity on his data plan, and they can’t even get an address. The last known sighting of the guy is the public works office a week ago when he closed out his utility accounts.
It makes his motives clear: he wants to move without any possible connection or tracking.
It makes his position nearly impossible to track: he’s a needle in a haystack out there.
And he’s got Will with him.
-o-
They work into the night, but it doesn’t matter. The team takes shifts, sleeping on one of the couches, but it doesn’t matter. Jay stays up, bleary-eyed and shellshocked.
Will’s gone, is all he can think.
All the times Will left and Jay blamed him, this time it’s his fault.
This time, if Will never comes home, it’s all Jay’s fault.
-o-
It’s about 10 AM the next morning, 24 hours since Will walked out of Med and disappeared.
They get the break they need.
But not the one they want.
And definitely not the one they were expecting.
-o-
It’s not a ransom call. It’s not a sighting. It’s not a smuggled message. It’s not a trail of clues or even, God help him, a body.
It’s a bank robbery.
A small bank, in a quiet area across town. Well to do, lazy.
Someone walks in wearing a winter overcoat. He goes to the teller, unzips his coat and demands all the money from the tills. He’s wearing a bomb around his chest, and he tells everyone it’ll explode if anyone fights, runs, or produces a weapon. The bomb is convincing enough to force everyone, including the portly guard, to comply, and by the time the local PD arrives, the culprit has made out with all the money.
The catch is?
The person pulling the robbery?
Is a tall red headed doctor named Will Halstead.
-o-
Jay doesn’t believe it when the report is given to him. He doesn’t believe it even as they go out to the scene to see the the footage of themselves. He doesn’t believe it until he sees the recording, watching it frame by frame. He doesn’t believe it until he sees Will with his own eyes, robbing a bank.
Though, to say it’s him robbing the bank is somewhat of a stretch. The feed makes it obvious that Will is not acting of his own volition. He looks pale and sweaty, and he’s incredibly stilted. As far as convincing performances go, it’s a miracle Will pulled it off. His voice is shaky, and he fumbles and apologizes his way through the crime. It’s not hard to see that the bomb is real, but it’s also not hard to see that that’s not the only intervention Will’s got. He’s wearing an earpiece, and it’s easy to see him listening to a voice on the other end of the line as he goes throughout the motions.
In other words, Will’s been strapped to a bomb and he’s been told that if he doesn’t follow direction, he’ll blow himself up – and everyone around him. It’s unusually cruel, as far as kidnappings go. He’s heard of people being victims of blackmail, but strapped to a bomb? An actual bomb? For a bank robbery?
Kendall is making a statement. He’s parading Will about, showing Jay just what he can do, what he’s capable of.
And Will is terrified. Jay can see it, even over the video feed. Will thinks he’s going to die.
Jay can’t blame him.
At this point, if Kendall’s playing with bombs and felonies, there’s not likely to be a happy ending here.
Just an explosive, messy ending that may or may not end with Jay being the last Halstead standing.
-o-
Voight takes over the robbery in no time, and Intelligence runs the scene as they would. They take over canvassing, and they’re interviewing all the witnesses, who report the same thing. They were terrified. Will had been more terrified.
At one point, he begged a teller to just do what he asked because he didn’t want to die, he didn’t want anyone to die.
When the guard asked why he was doing this, Will apologized to him, too, before rushing out and climbing into a windowless black van. They track the van a few blocks, but it disappears. When they find it, it’s been abandoned. No sign of the money; no sign of Will.
In the bank, Will’s trying to protect the patrons and staff.
Outside, in the car, he’s trying to protect Jay
As if Jay needed this to get worse.
-o-
A few hours on the scene, and it’s not hard to deduce the rationale now. In this revenge play, it’s not a simple eye for an eye. There’s no ransom because Kendall doesn’t want Jay’s money. He wants Jay's sense of security, his pride.
He wants the things that are much more valuable.
That’s why Will was taken in broad daylight. That’s why there’s no attempt to obscure his identity. That’s why they sent Will in to rob a bank. It’s not enough to take Will. It’s not even enough to hurt him or kill him. By forcing Will to do something illegal, it’s a power play. He’s showing Jay just how much control he has.
It’s effective, too. The play hits all the beats.
Worse, Jay’s got nothing to go on. It’s easy to deduce the motives and means now, but all the salient information needed to stop a criminal is decidedly missing.
The plan has been carefully orchestrated and impeccably executed. There’s no trace of Will. They can’t identify the bomb, and with Will armed, there is no way to intervene without killing him. Kendall is using a remote feed, probably video on Will himself, and his orders are dictated through a feed in his earl. This allows Kendall to tell Will what to do and ensure absolute compliance.
They don’t know when. They don’t know where. They don’t even know how.
They just know it’s going to happen again.
-o-
Time is of the essence, and the team springs into overdrive now. They pull in backup from all jurisdictions, and they’re running as many leads as humanly possible. And then some.
Jay stays abreast of it all as best he can, but he finds himself distracted. He keeps rewatching the video.
For clues, he says.
But all he can see is how scared Will is.
How completely scared.
He’s been taken apart. The person robbing that bank is only an approximation of his brother. He’s paler. He’s shakier.
Will’s a doctor. He’s committed to saving lives.
Now, the only life to save is his own.
And Jay’s not sure they can.
God help him, God help Will. The leads are dry, and Will is terrified.
Jay’s just not sure.
-o-
Then, there’s nothing. There’s no contact, no sign, nothing. There’s no trace of Jay’s brother, and all the leads that kept them busy initially have yielded nothing. They’re reduced to running the same leads, shaking trees, and coming up with nothing
It’s ironic how he thought seeing his brother commit that robbery was the worst thing.
The silence after.
The deafening, resounding, unending silence.
Is worse.
Jay doesn’t know where Will is. He doesn’t know what conditions he’s being kept in. He’s not sure if they’re feeding him, giving him someplace warm and dry to sleep. Will could be in danger right now. He could be hurt or suffering.
Hell, his brother could even be dead.
All Jay’s left with the resounding doubts.
And the horrible silence.
-o-
He doesn’t sleep; he doesn’t eat. He works himself ragged, running down leads, doing research, making phone calls. He’s half crazy after two days, and he starts to notice how worried Hailey is when she looks at him. Voight is hovering. Everyone else mostly keeps away. They talk about the case in hushed voices, and Jay doesn’t bother listening. They’re hushed because they don’t have anything.
There’s nothing to have.
These assholes took Will, strapped him to a bomb, and had him rob a bank.
That kind of operation is either really, really messy or really, really smart.
Jay doesn’t sleep. He doesn’t eat.
Then, on the third day, all that changes.
-o-
Jay’s surviving on caffeine and energy bars, and he hasn’t showered or shaved. He’s fallen asleep several times, head bobbing down at his desk, and once or twice, Hailey feeds him something that is moderately nutritious. At this point, the only thing that defines him is that Will’s gone, and he’s no longer able to think about leads that don’t pan out. He just wonders if his brother’s even alive, if he’ll ever see him again.
If only the point was to cripple him professionally, this could be over.
Jay fears they want his weakness for more than tha.
He’s so out of it that he barely notices when the call comes in. Voight gets it first, and one by one the team gathers near. When they all look at him, Jay knows.
Jay knows.
He’s about to discover just how weak he really is.
-o-
It’s another robbery, but this time they’ve caught wind in progress.
Still, it’s across town. With traffic, they’re probably not going to get there in time.
Jay can’t decide if it’s better or worse. He needs to be with Will, but the idea of seeing him and having to let him go is a lot to take. And they have to let him go. They have no actual plan. Without knowing where the Kendall is, there’s no way to intervene without putting Will and everyone else at the scene at risk.
And if Jay stands there while his brother explodes?
Well, that’s a weakness he’d prefer not to realize.
It occurs to him, as they race to the scene, that he may not have the choice.
-o-
Usually, Jay doesn’t like giving up the wheel, but he’s glad they’re riding together.
Glad’s the wrong word.
He’s relieved.
As focused as he is on Will, the thought of driving safely is a little beyond him. Honestly, sitting there, everything feels a little beyond him right now.
Atwater manages to get a live feed by piggybacking off a police signal, and Jay sits in the backseat, staring at the images as they happen in real time on the phone.
He’s watching. He’s just sitting there watching. While his brother robs a bank.
While strapped to a bomb.
Will, for his part, looks in relatively good condition. There’s no obvious sign of injury, and he’s still moving under his own willpower. That’s the good news.
That’s literally the only good news.
All the rest is not just bad.
It’s terrible.
Will is on the frame, and he’s holding a gun. His brother can shoot safely and with some accuracy, but the thing is shaking in his fingers. The gun is just for show. The bag for the money is in his other hand, but that’s not the point either.
The point is the bomb.
It’s easily visible on the video. Will’s been forced into an oversized coat, but now that he’s inside, he’s got it opened with the detonation mechanism visible. He’s visibly shaking on the feed as he orders the tellers to empty their tells, and he takes in the money until the bag is full.
Around him, the crowd has huddled together. They’re scared; people are crying. There’s a woman with a baby who’s crying. A few people seem to be praying. They’re trying to get as far away from Will and the bomb as they can.
That’s actually a luxury. Will can’t walk away, see. He can’t hide. All he can do is rob a bank and hope like hell he doesn’t blow up in the process. Needless to say, it’s easy to see how terrified his brother is right now.
Logically, Jay knows that nothing is probably going to happen right now. If they wanted Will dead, this show would be unnecessary. That's not to say Will’s going to survive. It's just that he's not going to die until they get what they want.
Jay's pretty sure he knows what that is.
And it has to do with Jay, watching his brother on a feed while robbing a bank with a bomb on his chest.
He watches as Will fumbles through the motions, his voice shaking. He seems to twitch, listening to the voice in his ear.
But Will finishes the robbery. He takes the money and no one dies. No one even gets hurt. The bomb chirps and Will looks sick, but he gets away with his second bank robbery in a week.
Jay pulls up to the scene as Will walks out. Local uniforms have already been briefed on the situation, and there are orders not to shoot. But Will’s also a walking bomb. They all give him wide berth, lest he take out the money and everyone near him.
They haven't come up with a solution yet. To stop Will without stopping him. You can stop a bank robbery or you can save a victim. It's harder to do both.
Will gets into a car and drives away. Jay sees him, still listening to the feed in his ear.
There’s nothing WIll can do except drive.
There’s nothing Jay can do except let him go.
-o-
It’s against their instincts and training to let Will go, but it’s a policy they’ve agreed on, and Voight has pulled a lot of strings to make sure the rest of the Chicago PD respects that call. With Will’s situation, any kind of pursuit is a risk – both to Will and to bystanders. Until they have a plan, they have to let Will go.
Jay knows this. He’s the one who insisted.
But sitting there, watching his brother’s getaway vehicle speed away, it’s still hard. It’s almost impossible. Burgess has a tech team coordinate to track the van from a distance, and it works for awhile. For a few blocks, they see it twist and turn through some of the backstreets. But, right when they start to follow, the van disappears from the footage.
By the time they find it, in a dead video zone several blocks away, it’s been abandoned. It’s still sitting there with the engine open, the door ajar.
With no trace of Will at all.
-o-
They do what they can, of course. They scour the area for any sign of clues, but they come up with very little. All the physical evidence comes back linked to Will and Will alone, and they can’t come up with local surveillance footage or even a tire mark.
Two robberies, and they are still no closer to finding Will.
The team circles back and starts running the same exhausted leads, and Jay can’t do it anymore.
He can’t play good cop.
Not when his brother is being held by a crazy man as a pawn to exact revenge on Jay. They’re too slow. They’re too empty. They’re too far behind. They’re too weak.
Jay hates their weakness.
Almost as much as he hates his own.
They regroup at Intelligence.
And Jay falls apart.
He’s sullen at first, offering snide commentary as the others try to share their progress -- or lack thereof. Then, he gets combative. When people try to ignore him, he raises the stakes. When Voight finally calls him on it, Jay lashes out caustically. He yells, bolstering his chest, staring Voight down with reckless abandon.
Voight doesn’t hit him, though he looks tempted. Instead, he does something worse.
He sends Jay home.
Jay’s ready to go down kicking and screaming. There’s no way he’s going home while Will is missing, but Voight doesn’t budge. He’s about to start throwing his own punches, when Hailey intervenes, half dragging him outside.
At this point, he’s so mad that he’s breathless, and the anger threatens to overwhelm him. He can’t catch his breath, he can’t think, he can’t -- he can’t--
Hailey bundles him up the car as he grapples with the shock of it all, and for the first time, he’s struck by the sense of loss he’s put off. The terror settles into something horribly mystifying, and he stares blankly out the window as Hailey drives them back to his place.
Jay’s spent his fight, and he’s got nothing left. No willpower, no drive, no brother.
Hailey parks the car and leads him inside, and she tells him to sit down while she rummages in the kitchen and produces something to eat. It could be a minute; it could be ten minutes. It could be ten years, for all Jay knows.
She comes back and hands him the food and sits down next to him. Jay stares at the food blankly, because he doesn’t understand.
What does it mean to sit here on a couch? Eating dinner?
When Will is going?
When Will has been kidnapped by a mad man?
When his brother is probably going to die for Jay’s mistakes?
He doesn’t realize he’s crying until Hailey puts a hand on his shoulder. “Jay, it’s okay.”
He almost laughs, inhaling raggedly as he shakes his head and looks at her. “No, it’s not,” he says. “Kendall is going to toy with Will for as long as he can, and then he’s going to kill him. He’s going to torture my brother and then murder him. Nothing about this is okay.”
“We’re going to find Kendall, and we’re going to rescue Will,” she tells him.
“How?” he asks. “We’ve got nothing. All this time, and I know we’ve got nothing, and I can’t do this anymore. I can’t sit here and pretend like we’ve got this under control. I can’t.”
He’s hot and cold all at once. He’s overwhelmed, the words tumbling out in a rush he can’t stop.
Her face creases sympathetically, and she eases her arm around his back. “Jay, you don’t have to do this,” she says.
“But it’s Will,” he tells her, letting the emphasis make his point.
She doesn’t waver. “And it’s all of us,” she replies steadily. “When one of us is weak, the others can be strong. That’s how this works.”
She’s talking about weakness.
She’s talking about strength.
It’s not a lesson Jay’s ever wanted to learn, but here he is. He looks at her, and allows himself the smallest portion of hope. “You can do this?”
She nods. “I can do this,” she promises. “You’ve just got to trust me. Trust the team. Trust us.”
And Jay, with no other options, does.
-o-
So, Jay eats. He takes a shower. He finally – finally – goes to bed. He lays there for a bit, staring at the ceiling. He wonders where his brother is; he wonders if Will is safe. He wonders how scared Will is.
He wonders if Will knows how sorry he is.
He’s not sure what he’s sorry for, but he’s sorry for his weakness. He’s sorry that he let this happen. He’s sorry that he can’t undo it.
No doubt, Will still trusts him.
So Jay does the only thing he can.
And he trusts his team.
-o-
When he wakes up, it’s morning. There’s still no sign of Will, but Jay finds himself rested and strangely coherent. It’s a surreal sort of clarity, and Hailey agrees to take him into work first thing.
“What’s the point?” he asks.
She doesn’t quite smile, but there’s something confident in her look. “Well, for one, we have a plan.”
And Jay blinks at her, feeling blank.
They have a plan, then.
They actually have a plan.
-o-
Jay holds off on his questions until they get there, and the team assembles with a sense of anxious renewal. They look at Jay hesitantly, but they waste no time in laying out the specifics.
And they are out there.
It’s not the kind of plan they usually prefer. There are a lot of unknown variables, and it’s riddled with risks. It’s not the kind of plan that Voight would normally clear, but this is not the kind of case they usually run. Will’s a hostage and a bank robber, so the situation doesn’t exactly lend itself to normal.
Even so, Jay’s not sure if he’s supposed to be impressed or terrified.
The plan is to wait.
Literally, that’s the plan.
Tracing Kendall so far has been impossible. They’re still no closer to finding any kind of location. As best they can tell, there isn’t likely a single location, but a string of safehouses sprinkled throughout the city. This allows Kendall to move Will freely. More importantly, it’s how the remote access for Will’s comms and the bomb detonation device would work. The man would have to be within range of Will to pull any of this off, and since the robberies have been in different locations with no overlapping radius, it’s clear that he’s on the move.
They don’t have enough to guess where they’re going to strike next, but they think they have technology to hack the signal and reverse it. By doing this, they should be able to get a fairly precise lock on where the signal is coming from. Then, they can use that signal to find Kendall and stop him.
The problem is that they need time. Tracking the signal is hard enough, and pinpointing the location is even harder. Not to mention the fact that they have to launch a full scale assault with no warning. Any sign of a tipoff, and it’s likely Kendall will pull the plug – and press the button.
To prevent this, they need a decoy to buy them time and hold Kendall’s attention. Jay’s the real target here, so it has to be him.
Jay has to go to his brother’s bank robbery and talk him down while he’s strapped to a bomb. One wrong move, and they’ll both be dead. Jay has to hold this cover as long as he can, keeping Will and Kendall calm on the other end of Will’s live feed.
“I know it’s a little tricky,” Hailey says, and she sounds like she’s apologizing.
Jay, however, has heard enough. He nods. “It’s how we get Will back, right?”
“We think it can work,” she says. “If you can keep their attention long enough.”
“It’s for Will, right?” Jay says. “It’s for Will.”
The next robbery will be the last, then.
One way or another.
-o-
They make the preparations. They set up the equipment. They practice the tracking technique. They brief different squads positioned throughout the city to be on standby. They increase surveillance, making connections with every bank to ensure total coverage and optimal response times.
Mostly, though, they wait.
One day.
Two days.
Then, the calls comes.
-o-
Their preparations seem to work. They get notified immediately, and they’re able to mobilize to respond to the call while the robbery is still in progress. Local teams secure the scene before they arrive, and Jay gears up with nothing but a comm of his own as he’s cleared to go inside.
He’s doing this part alone.
And trusting his team to do the rest.
-o-
Inside, Jay moves slowly and carefully. He keeps his hands up. The guests are huddled together on the ground, looking terrified. The tellers have their hands up, except for the young woman emptying her till. Will is at her desk, shifting anxiously from foot to foot. He’s still wearing the overcoat, and from this angle, Jay can’t see the bomb.
However, when Will turns, looking anxiously round the room, he can see it well enough. He sees it first before he lifts his eyes and makes contact with his brother for the first time in five days.
Will freezes, and his expression is suspended somewhere between relief and horror. There’s a look of confusion on his face, and his head tips to the side as he clearly receives a fresh set of instructions. Carefully, slowly, he moves away from the teller, leaving the bag of money behind. He approaches for several paces and then comes to a stop so that he and Jay are facing each other, several feet apart.
“Dr. Halstead,” Will says, and his voice wavers precariously. “You’re finally joining us.”
“You could have invited me if you wanted to talk,” Jay says cautiously. He looks at his brother and tries to reassure him.
Will’s not reassured. His breathing is taut and ragged and he swallows convulsively. “I wanted to see if you could – could figure it out. I guessed if the stakes were – the stakes were high enough, you might. And here you are.”
Will shudders badly, and he has to take a gasping inhalation as he tries to get his nerves back in check.
“So, let’s do this right,” Jay says. “I’m the one you want, and you’ve got my brother. I’m not going anywhere. Let’s let the rest of the people go.”
Will stills, listening to the voice in his ear. His voice cracks as he resumes. “Fine,” he say, relaying the message. “They can go, and then Will here will barricade the door.”
Will almost breaks on his own name, but somehow he keeps it together. Jay doesn’t dare betray anything, but he sticks to the plan. Hailey’s comm link is still dead, as part of the plan. Radio silence is the safest way to ensure Kendall isn’t tipped off. They don’t want the lines to cross.
But with no way of knowing how the raid is going, Jay doesn’t know if he’s got to stall for five minutes or 15.
It doesn’t matter.
He’ll do it for as long as it takes.
Will seems to listen for another second to the voice in his ear, and then he nods. Once, and then a few more times. “Everyone else can go,” he says. And he manages to raise his voice, glancing around at the crowd on the floor and then back to the tellers. He sounds palpably relieved. “You can all go. Quickly. Out the front door. Just go, and don’t look back.”
The people are hesitant at first, but Will looks so genuinely relieved that they start to get up. When nothing happens, they start rushing to the door. The tellers fumble out from behind the desk, and Will holds himself as still as possible as the crowd departs.
Then it’s just Will and Jay.
And Kendall and the bomb.
“Will--”
Jay starts, but Will doesn’t seem to be listening. He frowns for a moment, but seems to nod. Before Jay can ask him what’s wrong, Will cuts a wide path around him to the front doors. He processed to lock them, shoving some furniture in front of them for a makeshift barricade. Then he retreats, stopping once, and then stopping again, before he seems to get the all-clear signal.
Kendall doesn’t want them disturbed; he’s positioned Will out of view of the window. If this ends, Kendall wants it to end on his terms.
Jay understands the impulse, but he’s surrendered that control. He’s accepted his weakness.
Instead, all he can do is watch as Will postures. Only after several tedious seconds does Will turn back, planting his feet, and looking at Jay.
They’ve been apart for almost a week now, and Will still looks better than Jay has expected in some ways. For someone who has been kidnapped, there’s not much in the way of overt abuse. No bruising. Not cuts. He looks well fed, and he’s clearly moving comfortably.
But that’s not to say there isn’t abuse.
Will looks shattered. Just standing there, he’s sweating and breathless. The weight of the bomb is literal and metaphorical, and Jay isn’t sure which one is more pronounced. From this distance, the earpiece is clearly visible, and so is the mechanism on the bomb. A remote detonator, just as expected. It’s got the expected wireless connection.
At least that much is according to plan.
However, it’s also got a timer. It’s not activated, but Jay is aware that he’s got an audience here.
So is Will.
Painfully, horribly aware.
Just the two of them, Will is trembling in earnest. He looks half on the verge of tears. “You finally got here,” Will says, and the words are stiff and stunted as he relays them. “I wasn’t sure if you couldn’t catch me or if -- if you were too scared to see your brother -- your brother die.”
His voice nearly breaks over those words, but he barely composes himself.
Jay finds himself with a similar struggle. The air is tight in his lungs, and his fingers feel like they’re going numb because they’re clenched so tight. “You’re playing a game,” Jay says, mustering as much confidence as he can with a silent earpieces and a brother wearing a bomb. He’s just got to keep talking. He’s got to keep Kendall talking. “So I figured I might as well play, too.”
It’s a forced cavalier attitude that it’s thin as can be, but it still makes Will shudder. “It’s not a game,” Will says robotically. He swallows. “This is revenge. You put my brother away, and now I’ll put yours away.”
Jay scoffs, wishing he could believe his own thunder. “Your brother was a criminal. Will’s a victim here. He’s not going away.”
Will half flinches, and he’s visibly sweating now. “No, he’s just going to go boom.”
The way his voice shakes on the word boom is almost too much for both of them. Will has to close his eyes, and Jay scrambles to keep himself collected. Hailey said she’d get it done. Hailey said the team had it under control. Hailey promised that he could count on their strength when he had absolutely nothing left.
“It’s sweet, though,” Will says, finally opening his eyes again. “I took your brother right out from under you. I made him rob banks. He’s a bank robber.”
Jay suspects there’s glee in Kendall’s voice, but Will’s tenor only depicts fear.
Jay purses his lips, feeling his ire start to rise uncontrollably. “You strapped him to a bomb. This is you robbing banks, not him. Just you.”
It’s gruff when he says it. Will flinches again -- and badly -- and Jay feels guilty. He has to posture to keep Kendall occupied. That same posturing can only distress Will more. It’s the definition of a lose-lose situation, but Jay is banking on the ends justifying the means here.
“To be fair,” Kendall posits with Will’s voice while Will struggles to keep himself erect. “He’s difficult to control. I got him to come with me the first time by threatening you. But to rob a bank? I needed a little more. The bomb was -- the bomb was a good bet.”
It’s unsettling the way Will has to relate his own trauma in the third person, and Jay wishes he could see Kendall so he could throttle him with his own two hands. Hailey has to be closing in on his position. This has to be over soon. It has to be.
Jay has to stall.
Jay has to buy the team time.
Jay has to buy Will time.
Which means he’s got to stand here and make chitchat while his brother’s wearing a bomb.
“A bomb, though?” Jay asks, forcing a scathing skepticism. “How the hell did you even get a bomb? You’ve never had that much finesse.”
He can’t see Kendall’s response, but Will blanches as the feed spills fresh words into his ears. “Money,” he blurts. He wets his lips and swallows. “Connections. Desperation. You can buy anything when you – when you want it bad enough. I – I liquidated all my assets. And I – I bought the best bomb I could.”
Will pauses. He has to swallow again.
“Remote detonation. A timer,” Will intones against his Will. “A big enough blast radius so they’ll be identifying your brother by scraps of DNA.”
It’s a horrible thing to make Will say, and Jay’s gut twists as he watches his brother force his way through it. His breathing is starting to intensify, and he’s looking peakish. Jay wants nothing more than to rush forward and end this thing, but there’s a plan. He’s going to trust the plan. “It’s an awful lot of trouble to go through,” Jay posits instead.
Will looks like he’s listing a little bit, from the weight of the bomb or the stress of the situation, Jay’s not sure. Will’s almost on the verge of collapsing at this point, and Jay’s not strong enough to save him. Where the hell is Hailey?
“Well, I found that I had time for it these days,” Will recites, repeating the words as his breathing continues to grow short and clipped. He licks his dry lips and swallows hard. “When you ruin someone’s life, you don’t get to be upset with how they rebuild it.”
Those are ironic words, really. Considering what Kendall is doing to Will right here and now. Jay’s not sure how Will will put himself back together, but he’s going to be there to help him do it. God help him, they’ll do it together, the both of them.
Desperation is not the right play, though. Jay keeps his chin steady. “Reality check, Kendall,” he says. “You destroyed your own life. That’s what happens when you break the law.”
Will has to close his eyes again, and when he opens them again, tears leak out, slipping down his cheeks. “You’re standing at the scene – the scene of your brother’s – your brother’s–” Will starts, but stops as he hiccups for air, more tears falling. “Your brother’s bank robbery. And you say that like it’s so simple, like there’s never – never extenuating cir-circumstances.”
Will’s nearly colorless now, the starkness of his red hair almost uncomfortably bright. The bomb still blinks, showing that it’s still armed and loaded, and Jay’s earpiece is painfully silent. He wants nothing more than to run to Will, consequences be damned. But it’s not just his life on the line. It’s Will’s.
“No one strapped a bomb to you,” Jay points out.
Will’s jaw is trembling now, and he looks to just barely keep the sobs at bay. “Yeah, I guess – guess they didn’t,” he relays, the words even more choppy than before. “But you still – you still – still ruined my life.”
Will has to stop, taking a heaving breath that is choked off with a sob.
He concludes, voice almost impossibly thin. “I think I’ll ruin yours.”
Will’s held up remarkably well until this point, but it could be the kidnapping, the three bank robberies, the bomb strapped to his chest, or the simple fact that he’s orating his own likely demise – but he can’t hold up any longer. He curves over, sobbing once more, and this time when he collects himself, there’s a wild, uncontrolled look in his eyes.
Jay’s still playing the game.
Will, however, is done.
“Jay you have to go,” he blurts, the words all in a rush now. “I swear, you have to get out of here. He’s not kidding. He hates you, he’s going to kill you–”
Jay’s taken by surprise, blinking rapidly as he switches gears and adapts to Will’s unexpected outburst. He’s momentarily terrified that Kendall will blow them up for this misstep, but he’s not about to leave his brother like this. “Will, I’m not leaving–”
The fear is still there, everpresent, but now it’s colored by a deeper, growing panic. “No, Jay, you have to go,” Will says, and he’s shaking so hard that Jay can actually see it, hear it in his voice. “You’ll die, too, and I can’t -- I can’t--”
Will’s voice breaks altogether, and his face dissolves into a sob that he barely keeps in check. Jay’s own heart skips a beat, and he holds up his hand. He needs to save Will’s life, and that means keeping him calm. “Hey, hey, look,” he says quickly. Calmly. Certainly. “No one’s dying, okay?”
He’s as certain as he can be.
For someone standing next to a guy strapped to a bomb.
He takes a step closer, cautious both of Will’s fidgety disposition and the obvious interference Kendall. Kendall has tolerated this off-script back and forth, and Jay thinks it’s probably what he wants. He wants them to talk. He wants them to tell each other how scared they are. Kendall has put on a performance, and he’s looking for Jay and Will to finish out the final act.
It’s just a question of who draws the curtain, Kendall or Jay’s team.
Moving imperceptibly forward, Jay thinks he’s being subtle; he thinks he has this under control. He thinks they have time.
He’s wrong.
He’s been wrong a lot these days.
Just like that, the timer switches on, and the countdown begins.
One minute.
Will notices immediately, and he takes a frantic step back. “You have to get out of here,” he says, and he’s just this side over hyperventilation now. “Jay, you have to go.”
“No,” Jay says, and he holds his ground. Clearly, Kendall is still at large if he’s making this move. They’re on the clock now, but he trusts his team. He trusts his plan. And he can’t afford to let himself believe otherwise. It doesn’t matter, anyway. At this point, it doesn’t change what he’s going to do now. “I’m not leaving you.”
“Jay, I’m dead either way, okay? I’m dead,” Will says, gulping for air while fresh tears stream down his face. He glances at the time as it ticks down to 45 seconds. “I’m not walking away from this.”
“The hell you’re not,” Jay says, and it’s a confidence he’s made himself believe. “We’ll walk away from this together. I promise.”
Will’s face crumples again, and his breathing hitches nearly uncontrollably. “Jay, please,” he says, all but begging now. The timer has ticked by, 30 seconds gone. “Please.”
Jay doesn’t have time to think about it. He doesn’t have time to doubt. It’s not blind trust; it’s necessary trust. Because in 30 seconds, he’s either walking out of here with his brother, or they’ll both be spattered on the walls. Either way, it’s just 30 more seconds.
“Will, I need you to trust me,” he coaches, straining to hear any sign of life on his comms, but they remain stubbornly quiet.
20 seconds.
“No,” Will says, and there’s no more hint of panic. It’s full on panic now, and his legs threaten to give out. “No, no--”
15 seconds.
“Will, hey, Will,” Jay says, trying to get his brother’s attention.
Will looks at him, brown eyes wide and terrified. There’s a clarity, unsettling though it is.
10 seconds.
“I can’t do this if you’re going to die,” Will says, and his voice is no more than a whisper in the air between them. “I can’t.”
“No one’s dying,” Jay says again, and he dares to move a step closer. “Do you trust me?”
Five seconds.
Will tenses. His eyes dart down for a second to watch the time and lock onto Jay again.
Somewhere across town, Jay has to believe that Hailey and the others are closing in. He has to think the work, the planning, it’s all paid off. He has to think he’ll save his brother, that he’ll drag Will’s ass back home one more time.
Four seconds.
They’ve gone back and forth for a lifetime, fighting like brothers will. Jockeying for position. Trying to prove themselves. Jay holds grudges. Will runs away. But they’re both standing eye to eye now.
Three seconds.
Jay’s breath is frozen, and Will body has gone still. All the lives they’ve saved. All the good they’ve done. And it amounts to this.
Two seconds.
Will wasn’t there when their mother died. Jay’s last words to his father were insulting and diminutive. They’re both still here, though. They’re both still here.
One second.
That’s all they need, then. The two of them. For one second. For one lifetime.
And the timer ticks irrevocably to zero.
-o-
You can’t start over without ending something first. Endings are beginnings, in some ways. They’re intertwined, interwoven, interdependent. Jay can hold his grudges. Will can run all the way across the world. But they’re still right back here, right where they started.
And the clock ticks back to zero.
Then, somehow, it starts counting again.
-o-
There’s no time left to think, and ironically, it’s Jay that freezes. In the split second between now and eternity, he sees the endless possibilities and greets them with futility. He’s not proud of it, but in the split second it consumes him, there’s really nothing to be done for it.
Will, for his part, springs to action. At the blinking zero, he curls in on himself, diving to the ground with surprising force. He tightens inward, as if he can collapse in completely, and Jay realizes that he’s trying to absorb the explosion from the bomb.
It’s stupid and heroic, because it’s hard to be heroic without being stupid, and Jay remembers that he and his brother aren’t so different after all. There’s respect; there’s gratitude; there’s horror.
Then, Jay realizes something more salient, there’s nothing.
There’s no explosion.
In fact, there’s a lingering stillness that seems so loud that he can hear it reverberating in his ears. For another second, he considers the possibility that he’s dead already, but he feels his heart pounding in his chest, and he’s alive.
More importantly, Will’s alive.
Will’s alive.
Then, Hailey’s voice provides clarity over the comm in his ear. “Jay?” she asks, voice garbled over the static for a moment. “Jay! We got them! Copy? We got them.”
-o-
It’s a swell of relief so strong that Jay momentarily blacks out, right there, standing on his feet. He basks in it for a glorious moment, before he remembers that life is more than this moment. The seconds are ticking forward now, and Will’s still on the ground.
“Will!” he says, and he remembers how to move. He flies forward, crossing the distance between them quickly. He hits his knees hard, but he hardly feels the impact as he reaches out for his brother. “Will, look at me!”
At Jay’s touch, Will startles. He unfurls just a little, looking up at Jay with confusion and terror. He doesn’t understand what’s happened yet.
“Will, it’s okay,” he tells him. “The bomb’s disarmed. It’s okay.”
That’s the short version -- it tells Will nothing of the plan, of Hailey’s role in it, of his team’s support and the dangerous venture they’d played -- but Will’s not in a position for the long version. In fact, on the ground, Will looks more confused than ever. He tries to make it parse, but it’s too much, and he starts crying inside.
Jay grabs him by the shoulders and wrests him up. “You’re okay,” he says again. “We’re okay, Will. The bomb’s disarmed. We’re okay.”
Will sobs, ugly and gasping, and Jay’s fingers tighten. “It’s over,” he says. “Will, it’s over.”
Through the tears, Will somehow manages to see him. Tears dripping into his beard, snot hanging off his nose. “But the bomb?”
The words are strained and broken, and Jay doesn’t let go. “Disarmed. It’s disarmed. Completely. You’re safe now. We’re safe.”
Nearly convulsing with relief, Will fumbles in Jay’s grip. He pulls away haphazardly, lifting his arms up to grapple at the vest he’s been forced to wear. His coordination is off, though, and the more he tries, the more desperate he becomes. He’s hyperventilating in earnest now, and Jay quickly intervenes before his brother passes out.
Working together, they get the vest off, and Jay takes it from his brother, skidding it gently across the floor, as far away from them as possible. Will looks at it, eyes wide and wild, and his wrenching sobs continue. Then, before Jay can scoop him up again, Will turns to the side and is violently, overwhelmingly ill.
Jay reaches for him, supporting him while he retches, and he bears all of his brother’s weight when he collapses, totally spent. He runs his hand through Will’s hair, smoothing it down. He tucks his brother against him, and though Will is bigger than he is, he curls up close and allows himself to be held.
Comfort in the touch.
Comfort in the sound of their hearts pounding in rapid unison.
Comfort in being together.
It’s over, then.
Which is to say, it’s just begun.
-o-
Physically, Will is mostly unharmed from the ordeal. He’s got some superficial abrasions, and he’s been hit once or twice. But, all things considered, he’s fared remarkably well for someone who was supposed to blow up several times.
Of course, Jay’s not stupid. He’s not about to think Will’s lucky. The physical damage is minimal, but the emotional toll is going to be harder for them to calculate. By the time the rest of the team arrives, Will is sitting up on his own, but he won’t let Jay out of his sight. He responds to questions when asked, but his answers are sparse and vague. He doesn’t remember much, maybe. He doesn’t want to remember the rest, probably.
Jay knows the investigative angle in all this, but he doesn’t care. He gives Voight the bare minimum, and he pulls Will out of there as fast as he can. He takes his brother back home. He’s going to drop him off, but once he gets Will upstairs, it’s clear that he can’t leave.
Not for Will’s sake.
Not for his own.
Instead, he helps Will get cleaned up. He puts Will in the shower, and gets out some fresh sweats to change into. He makes a small meal, and he sits his brother down and they eat it together, bite by bite, in relative silence. Once or twice, Jay’s phone rings, but Will seems so scared by every change that Jay turns his phone off for good.
When they’re done, Jay considers hanging out, but Will looks spent. Haggard and listing, Jay takes his brother to bed and makes him lay down. Will complies with the same vacant doe-eyed look he’s had since the bomb didn’t go off, but when Jay goes to leave, the panic creases across his face once more.
“Don’t go,” Will says. “Jay. Please.”
Jay sits down on the bed next to his brother. “I’m right here,” he says. “And you’re safe. Nothing’s going to happen to you here.”
It’s not that Will doesn’t believe him, but it’s just that Will doesn’t believe him. He can’t believe him, probably. The trauma he’s been through is too substantial. The scars you can’t see are the ones that run the deepest.
“I knew I was going to die,” Will says suddenly, and his eyes are glistening. “After I robbed that first bank, I knew I was going to die.”
Jay finds he can’t speak. The reassurances die on his tongue.
Will takes a halting breath and somehow continues. “And all I could think was that was okay. If you could live, then it was okay.”
Jay shakes his head. “That would never be okay.”
But Will is earnest in this. “I’ve been a terrible brother. I know it, and you know it. You’ve told me so a thousand times,” he says. “And if I left this time, if I left this time, I wanted it to be to save you. That’s the only way I could leave again, Jay. To save you.”
And it’s hard to say what’s harder to hear. That Will had been so convinced of his own death.
Or that he’d accepted it if it meant Jay got to live.
Will shudders, a small sob escaping. “I still hear the bomb,” he says. “I can feel it in my chest. I know it’s not there, but I -- I--”
His brother’s breathing has tightened again, and Jay reaches out, placing his hand on Will’s. “But you can’t make it stop.”
Will is trembling, but he nods. “I keep thinking it’s back down to zero.”
“It got to zero,” Jay reminds him. “And you know what happened? Time started again.”
Will can’t take it, though, and he turns away, face dissolving into sobs once more. He corrects himself as quick as he can, wiping his nose. “I’m sorry,” he says, words in a rush. “I just -- I can’t.”
“I know,” Jay says. “And it’s okay. You had to do it alone before. But not this time. Not this time.”
Will nods, gathering his emotions once more. He sniffles and looks at Jay uncertainly. “Will you stay?”
“Sure,” Jay says.
“Just here,” Will says. “Stay.”
And Jay understands. Awkward as it is, Jay lays down next to his brother. Close enough so they’re touching. “I’ll stay,” he promises, and he feels Will relax against him finally as he closes his eyes. “I’ll stay.”
Because morning will come soon enough.
But they have to get through the night first.
-o-
Will falls asleep quickly after that, and Jay’s arm goes numb supporting his brother’s weight but he doesn’t dare move. He doesn’t dare blink. He watches Will sleep, safe, sound, and secure.
Somewhere, Voight is pushing the investigation forward. Somewhere, Hailey is leading the team through the mountains of evidence. Somewhere, Kendall is in a jail cell, ready to rot there for the rest of his life. Somewhere.
But here Jay is.
And maybe he has one weak spot.
It turns out, keeping his brother close, he’s actually okay with that.
