Chapter Thirty-five

Stage Three: Bargaining

Nate wakes up one morning and, for no particular reason, goes to the library.

He wanders through the stacks, breathes in the musty smell of old paper and ink, lets his fingers trail over the book spines. He nods at the pleasant-faced librarian; he thumbs through a copy of Doctor Zhivago.

And he finally chooses the morning's issue of the Salt Lake Tribune and settles in at a huge oak table. But he barely has time to skim the first article before two patrons gather their things and quickly move away from him; Nathaniel frowns down at his filthy coat and stained jeans, realizing for the first time that he hasn't washed his one set of clothing since he left Reid.

But still, he stays. He reads.

And when he gets to the obituaries, he freezes. He doesn't know why at first - it's just unfamiliar names and ages and causes of death, funeral details and next of kin. Whole lives wrapped up in tiny blurbs, a few words that don't actually explain anything that really matters.

He reads them all, wondering how many of these he has been responsible for over the years. He tries to remember them all; now including Eve and Devon and Elsa and the motel clerk in DC.

He'd never even bothered to learn the guy's name.

And that's how, hours later, he finds himself consumed with research. He's buried behind piles of newspapers, combing through Facebook pages that have turned into tributes to the dead. He writes down every detail he can find, concentrating on the names of the people who have been left behind. The ones who were living without their loved ones, because Nate knows that pain intimately now.

It makes him sick to know that he was ever the cause of it for anyone.

By the time he's finished, he has a carefully itemized list of thirty-seven people that he is absolutely sure he has stripped of their family or significant other. Thirty-seven more lives to feel guilty about.

He has no idea why he has bothered with all of this, but it feels important. It feels like a key, like there's something he desperately needs to see if he just looks hard enough.

So he sits in the library and he stares at his cramped handwriting. And he thinks.

The sun sets; people come and go.

Nothing.

It finally comes to him like most great ideas - at the moment when he stops trying to figure it out. He's standing at a urinal, staring idly at the library bathroom's tile wall when he thinks, this is about the money.

He blinks, zips up, and strides back to his table and list, buzzing with purpose. Because Nate may have confessed most things in his deposition, but he still has his secrets. Ones even Reid doesn't know about, ones some part of Nathaniel fought to keep buried - just in case he needed them some day.

That's what all his secret stashes were always about, anyway.

He'd created his first one when he was sixteen and still a decade from even considering rebelling against his family. Still, he'd felt the need to have an escape hatch, just in case. So he'd pried up a floorboard in his high school music room and stashed two hundred dollars and a switchblade inside.

His just-in-case stashes have grown more sophisticated over the years - from buried bags in remote corners of the desert to safety deposit boxes under fake names and finally to a few offshore bank accounts - but he never knew what he was going to do with any of them.

Staring down at the list of people he has devastated, he thinks he finally understands.

He's going to use it to redeem himself.

It was the same idea that had driven Nathaniel into Reid's office (and life) in the first place; it seems only right that it be the path that eventually - somehow - brings them back together.

Nathaniel's possessed with the conviction that if he can find absolution, if he can even the cosmic scales by atoning for all the pain he has ever caused, the universe will find a way to reward him. He will have earned the right to be with Reid again.

He'll get the money. He'll find these people. He'll make it right.

*******

Days pass, and Reid learns to stop asking about Nate.

Instead, he pretends to focus on the doctors who insist on talking about his rehab, on treating his body, on making sure he's healing.

As if he even cares what happens to it if Nathaniel is gone.

Because Nate is more than just a man to him now. He has become an obsession, a conviction, a religion.

Reid just needs to find Nate. Do that, and everything will be perfect again. Everything will be exactly the way it used to be; Reid can be happy and whole again.

Find Nate.

But the only way Reid can do that is to get out of the fucking hospital - and the only way out of the fucking hospital is to heal.

So he stops being such a pain-in-the-ass patient. He takes his doctor-recommended slow walks around his floor of the hospital, takes his medicine without bitching, accepts the nurses' praise and extra pudding with a smile. He shows off when Ben is there; even more in front of Andy.

And it works, because - eventually - he's deemed well enough to discharge. Reid wants to jump up and click his heels in joy, but he's afraid it would pull some stitches and put him even further behind. So he suffers the indignity of riding out the front doors in a wheelchair, nearly chokes on the truckload of shit he wants to give Ben about how gingerly he handles Reid when he helps him into his stupid rental car.

It's a lime green Kia, one of those ones the hamsters advertise. Reid rolls his eyes at the indignity.

But then they're free of the antiseptic and sickly-sweet smell of the hospital, Reid putting his window down to gulp in lungfuls of fresh air. (He's actually trying to catch the familiar peppermint and pine smell of Nathaniel, but even he knows that's insane. He just doesn't know what else to do.) Because he knows in his bones that Nate is out there somewhere, scared and alone and on the run.

Nate needs Reid; Reid needs to know that Nate is still breathing.

So that he can keep breathing.

Ben crams into the seat next to Reid on the flight back to Kansas, a four-and-a-half hour experiment in testing the limits of Reid's pain tolerance. Sitting in that position strains at the barely-healed puncture wound in his gut, and Ben makes him get up and walk the aisles every thirty minutes since some ass-hatted doctor told him that Reid was at a greater risk for a blood clot flying so soon after surgery.

And once they're back home, Kansas City somehow smaller and sadder than Reid remembers it, Ben won't even allow him the dignity of holing up in his apartment and secretly plotting how to go after Nate. Instead, he drives Reid straight to his house. There's a suitcase of his things waiting in the guest bedroom, and Janie immediately takes over the fussing and care-giving and general making-Reid-wish-that-ginger-bitch-had-finished-the-job-and-killed-him-weeks-ago duties.

He doesn't even last an hour with the two of them hovering before begging off dinner to retreat to the guest bedroom early. He sinks into the bed, plotting to escape as soon as Ben and Janie go to sleep...but his recovering body has other ideas. He nods off almost immediately.

So it's on the wrong side of midnight when he wakes up again, swearing and struggling to stand. He hisses with pain when he lifts his still-packed suitcase, nearly drops it twice as he struggles with it through the dark silence of the house.

He's at the front door with no idea where he's going or even how he'll get there; he hasn't heard about the Camaro since he parked it behind the cabin in Vermont. But he's had to waste weeks recovering enough to be freed from the hospital. He's not about to let himself be cooped up for one more minute.

Because that's one more minute that's keeping him from his mission, one minute longer he has to go without finding Nate.

Find Nate and it'll all be perfect.

"You don't have to sneak out, you know."

Reid's so startled he drops the suitcase, whirling frantically until he sees the abnormally large silhouette in the dark.

"Shit, Benny. Don't just lurk like that."

"I don't, usually. Just had this crazy feeling that you were going to try to take a runner."

Reid eases down onto the couch; his stomach is aching and his big plan has been blown all to hell. He might as well take a load off.

"So what now? You stand guard over the front door? Janie ties me to my bed every night? Actually," Reid raises an eyebrow, his lips quirking into a half-smirk, "that part's not a bad idea."

"I would hit you for that if you weren't so gimpy."

"That's a little known benefit of getting shot. Lusting after your partner's wife consequence-free."

Ben snaps on the lamp; Reid squints.

"I'm actually here to offer my help, jerk."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. I mean, I think it's a terrible idea and I would have never suggested it, but since you're determined to look for him with or without me, I'd rather be there to back you up."

Reid grins and stands back up, claps a hand on Ben's shoulder when he rushes over to help. "I knew there was a reason I liked you. C'mon, Benny. We've got a witness to save."

*******

They don't actually go anywhere.

At least, not at first. Ben has got to pack and they both need some sleep, plus they have no fucking clue where they'd go anyway. So they sit down to strategize over breakfast the next day.

"Have there been any sightings? Does anyone have any idea where he could have gone?"

"No. But I haven't exactly been pushing for it. Like you said - the Angelevs have probably recruited a replacement for Jill, so we don't know who we can trust."

Reid sighs, scrubs a hand over his scruffy chin. "Yeah, okay. I get it. So where do we start?"

"Well, we know he started at the hospital in Vermont. How would you get away from there?"

"Me?" Reid smiles, starts typing furiously into the laptop before him. "I'd steal a car."

*******

He was right; there was a three-year-old Honda Accord taken from the hospital parking lot that day. Anonymous, unremarkable, a perfect choice.

It had been found the next day, ditched in an alley half a mile from a train station in western Massachusetts. Ben flies in and flashes Nate's picture around - it doesn't turn up anything until Reid looks at the map online and realizes there's a bus station nearby as well. There they strike gold - a young clerk remembers Nathaniel buying two tickets - one to Boston, one to Indiana.

Ben's voice is staticky over the line when he calls to tell Reid what he's learned; Reid feels like the static somehow makes its way into his own brain.

"I don't know," Reid finally admits, and it feels like admitting so much more - that he doesn't know Nate as well as he thought, that he's so much further from finding Nate than he had believed. "I have no idea which of those buses he really boarded."

In the end, Ben stays on Nate's trail on the east coast; Reid finally gets the Camaro returned to him (well, to the nonexistent David Cutter of Cincinnati) and makes his way to Indianapolis.

And between the two of them, they spend weeks tracking Nathaniel's zig-zagging travel around the country, but they're always at least two steps behind.

Reid's equal parts frustrated and proud; he taught Nate well.

Too well.

A voice whispers in the back of his mind that he will never see Nathaniel again, that he has failed. Again.

Reid tells it to shut its traitorous fucking mouth, but it doesn't matter. It grows louder with every passing day.