Chapter Text
A bullet whizzes past his head—
He ducks behind an actuator, the next two bullets ricocheting off the pipelines, and breathes in deep,
no time to think,
only time to act.
After all he’s alone down here, people are counting on him to get this guy, a man responsible for the death of David Laporta, for shooting Nina, for killing three people down here all so he could help Lankov bring about another 9/11.
Not on his watch.
He reappears from behind the actuator, striding down the walkway before the other man can level his silencer at him, and shoots him in the knee.
Averanka crashes to the floor, dropping his gun, and before he gets the chance to trigger the remote detonator he straddles the man, pins his arms to his side, and looks Nina’s wannabe killer in the eyes for the first time.
If he didn’t know any better he’d think they glowed red.
‘I’m glad that didn’t kill you’— his voice sounds far off, a reverberation in the distance.
He grabs around Averanka’s collar, the jacket that reads Vichy Security, and slams his head back onto the cold concrete.
‘You Americans actually care who they kill?’
‘I’m glad because I want you to know when you’re gonna die ...’
Unthinking, he reaches back for the gun holstered at his hip, takes off the safety, and presses it to Averanka’s forehead.
‘... and who did it.’
Beneath him, Averanka stills, eyes fixed on the muzzle of the gun, now digging hard into his skull.
‘You shot Nina,’ he voices calmly, while his fingers tighten over the man’s chest, as if— if he dug down deep and brutal enough and ripped out his heart with his bare fingers this son of a bitch might feel a fraction of what he’d done to him, to Nina, to—
‘You shot my-’
His future.
Averanka smiles a Chesire grin. ‘I hope she suffered.’
His heart stalls.
All the air filters from his lungs, and in his ears rings another man’s voice—you cross that line you never come back—but that man isn’t here right now, not here to stop him.
A single tear falling down his cheek, he straightens his arm, and pulls the trigger.
He wakes with a gasp.
No, no no, what did he do, what—
He shoots up in bed and touches his face, but even in the dark of the room, in the early morning light seeping in through the blinds, he can tell there’s no blood on his hands.
Yet red still teases at his peripheral vision, blood and brain matter splattered on the ground, some phantom of a dream overstaying its welcome. His breathing comes hard, labored, like there’s a eighty pound weight on his chest he hasn’t breathed around for weeks.
Weeks. It’s been weeks.
And still his skin crawled, his vision tunneled, the storm in his chest broiled every time he thought back on what he did, almost did, might’ve done. Because what if no one had been there to talk him down? Would he have crossed that line?
They’re thoughts akin to the ones he had over twenty years ago. What would he have done if he got his hands on any of the assholes behind 9/11? Would he have killed them with his bare hands? Could he have?
Here he was twenty odd years later asking the same questions.
Only now he had a gun.
Is that why he chased this job? for the gun? to become a killer?
He shot people before. Why was it the one he didn’t shoot that haunted him?
Mind muddled with these thoughts, he glances at the clock.
8am, and Nina’s side of the bed is empty next to him.
At least she got spared his nightmares.
He hops into the shower, though it offers little in the way of relief.
His nightmare haunts him even here.
What had stayed his hand? What stopped him from pulling the trigger? Remy saying ‘son’, conjuring thoughts of his own unborn son? An innate sense of justice born in him the day Douglas died?
Did any of that matter when his intent couldn’t have been more clear?
He wanted to kill Averanka in cold blood.
Maybe, after all was said and done, he wasn’t any better than the criminals he put behind bars.
A bad man.
And bad men didn’t deserve to be happy, to have a best friend for a partner, colleagues he considered close friends, a beautiful girlfriend.
A son.
He heads downstairs still barely breathing.
“Morning, sleepy,” Nina calls from the kitchen, where she sits on a stool at the counter, laptop in front of her, a mess of papers littered in a half moon around it.
The sight of her releases some of the tension in his chest; her hair’s done up in a messy bun, escaped curls fallen to her forehead.
Wearing one of his old Princeton shirts.
Maybe he didn’t deserve it, deserve her.
But good God did he want to.
“You sleep through the night?” he asks, and reaches around to place a hand on her belly, pushing a kiss to her temple.
“I’m six months pregnant.” Nina laughs, resting a hand over his. “I haven’t slept through the night in a while.”
The joyful note in her voice dispels at least some of his worry; her panic attack a week ago scared them both, and they still felt the underlying dread of it happening again—not only to her, but their baby. He’d lain awake for hours every night listening to her breathe, fighting sleep, fending off his own nightmares—to no avail, however, since the effort recalled nights when he lay next to Alex, the reason why he’d kept watch, and how close he came to losing someone he couldn’t bear to again.
“What’s all this?”
He presses up against her back, and cups both hands under her belly.
“Paperwork I’ve been putting off.” She leans back into him with a grateful sigh. “Bills, mostly.”
“If you need any help with those...”
Nina smiles. “I’m good for now, thanks.”
With a kiss to her hair he rounds the kitchen counter and makes a double espresso, in the hopes of expelling the last remnants of sleep still lingering in his body.
He watches Nina pay her bills with the utmost concentration, with the kind of concentrated stare he’s seen her level at suspects, and him, on more than one occasion.
They should probably talk about money too, at some point. Never too early to start a college fund or a 529 plan, and it wouldn’t be a bad idea to open up a custodial brokerage account either—that way he could keep a closer eye and curate the investment portfolio.
“By the way, I’m- making you my health care proxy.”
He frowns, and asks—“Why?”—even though the answer’s clear, the timing of it painfully obvious.
“In case something happens and you-”
“Nothing’s going to happen.”
“You- don’t know that,” Nina says, brow furrowing, eyes haunted by look what happened. “No one can know that. With our jobs-”
His face flushes, the echo of a gunshot, and Nina bleeding out on the ground. If he’d already been assigned as her health care proxy, would Isobel and Jubal still have kept him in the dark? Or would he have been Isobel’s first phone call?
“And I need to know that if I’m ever in trouble you’ll make the best decision for me.”
He nods, fully aware how big a step this is for her, that Rome spun them both a little out of control, that dealing with the aftermath left them struggling for air to breathe.
“Of course. I will. I promise.”
This wasn’t just a big deal for her. It was a big deal for both of them. It showed a level of trust he didn’t know she had in him.
“You’ll need to sign this,” Nina says, holding out a pen for him.
It didn’t get much more real than this.
Up until today Alex served as his proxy, but his sister won’t mind no longer having to worry if or when she’d have to make those kinds of decisions. Nina knew the job as well as he did, perhaps even more now—she’d make the best decisions for him too, should it ever come to it.
He walks over again, and signs the document, eyes glossing over words like permanent coma and artificial nutrition and initiated/continued/removed.
But this isn’t about any of those potential scenarios, rather Nina’s peace of mind.
“Thank you,” he says, and rubs her back, “for trusting me with this.”
Nina smiles, and kisses his cheek.
“And”—Her head tilts playfully—“I’m going to talk to a therapist.”
His eyebrows rise in surprise.
She laughs again, “Yeah,” though nerves saturate her voice now.
“Not to tempt fate here, but- where is all this coming from?”
“I talked to Isobel.”
His eyes fall to the dark of his coffee, concentric rings rippling over the surface.
What power did Isobel hold to affect such a sudden change? What did Isobel say that he hadn’t dozens of times over?
“She recommended someone, and- I’m going to give it a try.”
Nina moves on as if the mention of the name doesn’t set his hair on end, doesn’t press replay on that would-be conversation they’d have if anger didn’t close up his throat every time he so much as looked at her.
Anger? he thinks. Was it anger that stopped him breathing?
Or a thing far deeper, much more insidious?
“I’ve seen firsthand what- unresolved trauma can do to a parent.”
When Nina pauses, he looks at her, and finds her eyes out of focus, drifted to memories of half a lifetime ago, of a father who never dealt with his PTSD and drowned in drink instead, who left behind his wife and two daughters to fend for themselves.
“I don’t want that for our son.”
And when that’s followed by her staring silently at her computer screen for long moments, he bites his tongue. This isn’t about him right now.
“Are you okay?”
“Most of the time?” She nods, biting the inside of her cheek, and smiles sadly. “But- between the nightmares and the panic attacks something’s gotta give, you know?”
His jaw tightens. It shouldn’t matter to him who or what convinces her to go to therapy, just that she did and put her mental health first. Isobel had an outside view that might help Nina put this all in perspective, as SAC, even more so as a woman, and as someone who’d found solace in counseling herself.
Just because he still can’t look Isobel in the eye—
“I keep seeing it, you know,” Nina says, “replaying it in my head, over and over again. If I’d just-”
Tears fill her eyes, stirring memories along with them, of Jubal telling her to stand down, of cold cobblestones beneath her, of that second heartbeat on the hospital monitor, beating just a little faster than hers.
“All I could think about was our baby and that he was gonna die, how it was all my fault and you’d-”
She releases a shuddery breath, the pain in her eyes mirrored sharply in his chest, and his own memory of watching her get shot in the surveillance footage from Rome replays before his eyes—it’d made the wound started by Scott saying Nina got shot just a little bit bigger, a little bit deeper, a little bit more susceptible to his mercurial temperament.
It’d painted a bull’s eye in the dead center of Anton Averanka’s forehead.
“-you’d never be able to look at me again.”
“Hey, no.” He blinks. “That was never going to happen.”
“I know.”
She looks at him with narrowed eyes, head tilted, and touches a hand to his face, thumb brushing across his cheek.
“I think”—Her hand falls away—“that’s part of the problem.”
It takes a while for the words to fully sink in, even longer for any sort of meaning to take shape.
“What- what do you mean?”
Nina gets up and rummages around in the fridge for a while, only to come up empty-handed.
Why would him still looking at her the same way be a problem? He gave her space to recover from her injuries, time for things to get back to normal, for them to figure things out before the baby comes. He didn’t blame her, he—
“Wait.” He frowns. “Are you- upset that I’m not mad at you?”
A hand on her hip, Nina’s eyes fix on him tightly.
“Nina, that’s ridiculous.”
She huffs a laugh. “I’m not being ridiculous.”
“How does that help you?”
“Not everything has to help me, Scola. Maybe your calm doesn’t help me. Maybe I need you to feel like-”
And when he sees his anger mirrored in her eyes in turn, he catches the true meaning of her words, how this consumed her all the same, how him pretending like it didn’t happen fueled both their nightmares—
“This is your son too. And he could’ve-”
—how she recognizes all too well that she’s the one who got shot, but part of him did too, and that shielding her from it, holding back the terrors he experienced, helped no one, not him, not her, not their relationship.
Because that’s what sharing a life with someone meant. You didn’t only share all the good, but the bad too.
“And the thought of losing him...”
He shakes his head, palms gone sweaty.
‘I’m glad that didn’t kill you’—rings in his ears, but in the distance he hears his own voice, even, steady, and the click of his holster as he grabs his gun.
“... the thought of losing you...”
‘He shot Nina!’
“... nearly killed me, Nina. I-”
‘He shot my-!’—in his mind’s eye his nightmare plays over and over again, he and Averanka alone in that tunnel, no one to talk him down, no one to talk sense into him.
Just him and that gun, and the man who thought to kill Nina and his son.
His finger pressed against the trigger.
Averanka’s blood on his hands.
Hesitation weighs down his tongue.
How can he tell her that he didn’t cross the line professionally, but he crossed a line within himself? That for twenty plus years the past had chased him like a shadow, waiting to trip him up? That while he didn’t pull the trigger he violated multiple suspects’ rights?
Was knowing that it weighed heavily on him not enough for her?
“I don’t know what you want me to say.” He shrugs. “I don’t blame you.”
No. He’s done that. He blamed Doug for taking that meeting rather than staying home with his family, he’d blamed his dead brother, the terrorists, the government, the whole entire world before he blamed himself, and it’d sent him into a tailspin of self-hatred and guilt and—
He won’t do this. He won’t blame her like she blamed herself.
“So you just”—Nina crosses her arms over her chest—“moved on.”
His heart hammers in his chest.
It’s too strong a statement to make in the wake of everything he still carried, and besides he didn’t carry Rome the way she did, rather he shouldered JFK, Anton Averanka, Remy’s complicity which he actually felt grateful for, the overwhelmingly unbearable anger— no, shame, that followed in its wake.
It was shame.
Shame that crippled him.
Shame that stopped him from talking to Isobel.
Shame that now stuns him into silence.
They stare at each other for what feels like a small eternity, her eyes hard and unforgiving, his firm in his refusal to burden her with this too. What good would come of it?
It’s Nina who breaks eye contact, who sighs and shakes her head, heading upstairs to busy herself there.
“Shit,” he curses under his breath, disappointment settling over him.
He realizes all too well the hypocrisy of the situation, how he asked her to open up, talk to him, time and again, and she’d allowed herself to be vulnerable around him.
Why couldn’t he give her the same, be naked around her, stripped of all his defenses.
Only he knows why—what if he tells her what he did and she decides he’s not worth it, that he’s a bad man, any other man ill equipped to deal with his emotions or his trauma. What if she peers right through him, all the bad and all the ugly, and sees only her father staring back?
What if telling her the truth has the same net result as him staying quiet?
He sits down sideways in the stool at the kitchen counter, weak in the knees, when his eyes fall to a piece of paper front and center, simply waiting for her signature.
Lease Termination Letter.
Tears shoot into his eyes.
He swallows hard.
With trembling fingers he slides the paper closer, eyes drawn to her name in the top right corner of the page, his address directly below it. Their address.
Nina’s staying.
Disappointment sets deeper beneath his skin.
What’s he playing at?
If he keeps doubling down on this decision he’ll definitely lose her, and he’ll only have himself to blame.
For so long he lived half a life, going through the motions, never getting close to anyone so he never had to feel the sting of loss again. It left him jaded, disconnected from his family and himself, not to mention Tiff.
Who would he be if Tiff hadn’t talked some sense into him?
Would Nina have even given him a second chance?
All she asked from him now was honesty, the truth.
And she’s right.
Maybe it doesn’t have to help her.
Maybe it’s meant to help him.
He could talk to Tiff, but Remy kept his conduct out of the official reports, and he didn’t want to put her in the difficult position of knowing what he did.
He didn't want her to know he’d put hands on not one but three suspects.
He knew how she felt about things like that.
But Nina, his Nina, his storm in a shot glass, she would understand.
She got shot too, after all.
He finds her in the bedroom, angrily folding laundry.
He leans up against the doorframe, searching for the right words, wondering if there really are any. Tough to sugarcoat this.
“I didn’t just- move on.”
If Nina hears him, she refuses to acknowledge his presence; she folds a large towel in half, then twice into three equal parts.
“The thought of you... of our son... 4000 miles away, knowing there was nothing I could do to help ...”
All against the backdrop of a terror event unfolding, one that would shake New York the same way 9/11 had, and he’d felt so utterly and completely powerless. He couldn’t help her like he couldn’t help Doug, but he had a gun now, a badge, so if he stopped this, maybe he’d save Nina too.
Maybe he could save their son.
“And- another 9/11...”
He draws in a shaky breath, biting his teeth together.
Nina stills, and turns to face him.
He wonders what she sees, besides the slump in his shoulders, his downcast eyes. Did she see the shame weighing him down? Did she see half a man?
“Nina,” he says softly, tongue heavy, “I lost it, okay?”
“What are you talking about?”
He shrugs, hands slipping into his pockets.
“Stuart.”
Nina settles on the bed, the bitterness in her eyes made way for compassion.
“Baby, will you- talk to me?” She pats the empty spot next to her. “Please?”
Not all that long ago he asked her to do the same, for much the same reasons. He can’t keep carrying this all on his own. He did that before, and it took him twenty years to dig himself out of that hole.
“Did some things I’m not- proud of,” he says as he sits down next to her. “Remy was there to talk me down, but-”
Four weeks ago a shadow closed in on him, a ghost from the past threatening his future.
Nina reaches a hand toward the nape of his neck, twisting her fingers in his hair.
“I- threatened a suspect.”
He nods, blinking at tears, bracing for the impact his confession will bring, and sees himself slam Viktor Karcuk’s head against the interrogation table, his hand around his throat—
“Physically assaulted a suspect.”
—he shoots Nico in the leg, pressing down on his wound to get him to talk and—
“I put a gun to a man’s head, without-”
Without cause. He’d disarmed Averanka, the remote detonator well out of his reach—all he had to do was read him his rights, cuff him, and be rid of him.
“Averanka,” Nina supplies.
His eyes find hers, and she nods.
Her fingers tighten in his hair.
Anton Averanka. The man who shot her.
“I wanted him to see my face when I-”
His voice trembles, unable to say the words out loud again.
A tear slips down his cheek, and Nina pushes in closer, processing his meaning, the implication. There’s no blood on his hands but there’s an intimation of it—what might he have done without another agent by his side?
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because... that anger?” He licks his lips. “I’m afraid that’s still inside me. And you don’t deserve that. You don’t need that from me.”
They were building a life together, a home. It had no room for her father’s anger.
“That doesn’t mean you can just ignore it.”
No, he tried that. Look where it got him.
“Trust me, I get the reflex, okay? But feelings like this don’t go away by themselves.”
Why did they always have to learn that the hard way?
“You think I’m not angry?” Nina asks. “In all this I’ve been- so hard on myself.”
“It’s not”—His voice cracks—“the same thing though.”
“I know.”
In so many ways her anger often outclassed his own, hers a sharper, more consistent overall anger, his a simmering boil, a pressure cooker, not all too often expressed.
“And- I’m not trying to draw comparisons or make it about me.
“You’re angry,” Nina says, as if it were that simple, as if decades-old grief and regret, as if fear didn’t underlie it all. Fear of losing her, of losing what they have.
“You’re allowed to be angry.”
For so long he’d lived half a life—too long, he realizes now, because falling back into the habit of locking everything up proved too easy. He couldn’t afford to do that anymore, not with Nina, not with a baby on the way. Not if he wanted them in his life.
“And you’re also allowed to forgive yourself.”
His eyes close.
A tear runs down his cheek, and everything he’s kept bottle up for weeks reaches up his throat, wraps around his windpipe—
How can he forgive himself when he’s barely accepted what he did, that it was him and him alone who grabbed that gun, put it to Averanka’s head, meant to pull the trigger. It didn’t matter that Remy shot a civilian five minutes later in their run to reach the bomb, he was the bad guy, he’s the one who crossed a line he might never come back from.
Nina pushes her lips to his temple. “Because I do.”
A sob rakes through him, and it’s all he can do before he crumbles beneath the strain of it all, of twenty years worth of unresolved anger, of coming too close again to losing what he couldn’t bear, of grief and fear and a trigger almost pulled.
“It’s okay, baby.” Nina pulls him closer, arms folding around him. “I’m here.”
She kisses his cheek, his neck, his shoulder, and he curls into her, holding on for dear life.
“Look, we all- get lost, okay? Especially when the people we love are threatened, but-
“You’re- a good man, Stuart Scola. I’ve always known that.”
Would Doug say the same, he wonders, would Tiff, if they knew what he’d done?
“I know how-”
Nina draws in a shaky breath.
“I’ve seen what anger and violence can do to a person. But you- you took your anger and your fear, your grief, and you became someone who saves people. Okay?”
He breathes in big gulps of air, but he can’t stop the tears, not when her words reach deep as if—if they dug down deep enough and cradled around his heart he might start believing them.
“That’s the man I fell in love with.”
He did a bad thing, a terrible thing, there was no getting around that, but did it have to define him for the rest of his days?
“That’s the man I love.”
And as he cries he cries for Nina too, who bottled up all her pain for so long, all her grief, and chose him of all people to open up to.
He cries for Doug, who never asked to die, never put himself in harm’s way, and still got caught in the machinations of a cruel world.
He cries for her father, who never had the tools to deal with his mental illness, and ended up hurting all those around him.
And he cries for himself, for all the would-be men he could’ve been but chose not to be, for the man he faced in his darkest hour. Forgiving himself was yet a long way off, but now at least he could imagine that one day he would.
Nina kisses his hair. “That’s the kind of dad you’re going to be to our boy.”