I can't see Dan fully from this angle, but it seems likely Leo shot him. Knowing Leo, it'll be somewhere non-lethal.
Dan snarls at Leo and makes to go back to kicking the shit out of me. Leo fires off another shot, catching Dan in the shoulder this time, a place I can actually see the bullet enter.
"Back off, Dan!" Leo calls out to my brother, moving closer with his gun still trained on him.
Dan gets to his feet, ignoring the bullet wounds. Now I can see that the other bullet caught him on his side. I was right, the position of the entry point guarantees Leo didn't hit anything vital on its way through.
"Stand down!" Leo shouts when Dan starts prowling towards him.
Terror at the sight of my brother bearing down on Leo lights me up from the inside, but my head is still too fucked to let me be of any use in stopping him. I try to sit up and just barely manage to roll onto my side, my head feeling like it's going to split open.
As if waiting for a cue, Damon, followed by a large cadre of other FISA agents, spills out onto the roof, coming to box Dan in from behind. Damon has his gun out and aimed at my brother's back. He fires off a shot when he sees him going after Leo, the bullet biting into Dan's bicep.
Dan assesses the situation within a dozen heartbeats, looking between Leo and Damon's small army. He shoots one last glance down at me, and our eyes connect for a single painful moment. There seems to be a whole lifetime spoken in that one shared look. Then Dan tears his gaze away and runs, vaulting himself off the edge of the roof, disappearing from view as he hurtles towards the ground.
I try to call out "no," but my voice won't work. Then Dan is gone, and the loss feels as fresh as it did the day I killed him. I don't have the strength to chase after him even though every fibre of my being pulses with the need to get my eyes back on him, to catch him like a mouse in a trap and hold him still so I can try to understand.
No. Fuck it. I don't care about understanding. I don't care why. I just want. I just.
I want my brother.
Over the course of a few exhausted blinks, Leo appears at my side. He's kneeling down beside my battered form, a blurry look of panic on his face. Fear for me. He touches me, hands on my shoulder, my face. He keeps telling me I'll be alright, we'll fix this, we'll make it okay.
I wish I could tell him I don't give a flying fuck about anything other than the fact my brother is running away from me, and I need, Ineed, to get him back.
Leo's eyes are so blue. Everything else feels like it's blacking out at the edges. But the pale blue of Leo's eyes stands out in the dark.
When that darkness finally eclipses everything, Leo's eyes are the last sight to fade out of existence.
Chapter fourteen
Leo
Ispendthetimeit takes to get Jack from the OI facility to FISA's medical unit internally losing my shit. Scared of losing Jack to the extensive injuries his brother inflicted. Mindfucked over the reappearance of Dan Roth.
When Rohan told me about Dan back on the fourth floor, I wasn't sure what to believe. I didn't think Rohan would lie to me about something that insane, but at the same time, it seemed impossible to accept as the truth. Jack was so sure he'd killed his brother, so how could the man be alive?
That's the main reason I didn't tell Jack straightaway. I wanted to make sure Rohan was right about Dan before opening all kinds of wounds for Jack. What if I made Jack go through all that, and it turned out Rohan was somehow wrong? It would've killed Jack to be given hope about his brother and then have it snatched away.
I can't imagine how painful it must have been for Jack to see his brother like he did, though, and maybe I should have told him to lessen the shock. It was bad enough for me, and I never knew him.
Seeing him in the flesh was an experience all its own. I didn't get the chance to properly study him, too busy focusing on protecting Jack, but it was still surreal to me how much he looked like my partner. Of course, I'd known they were identical twins. Still, that knowledge couldn't have prepared me for looking into the eyes of the man I'd come to care so deeply for, looking back at me from another face.
What struck me most was the wildness in Dan's bright-green eyes. It perfectly matched what I've seen in Jack's when he's feeling particularly untethered and emotionally volatile.
I'm sure if I had gotten closer, I would have seen the differences between the two brothers, in personality if not appearance. But in that moment, Dan looked so much like Jack, I couldn't bring myself to be truly afraid of him. I definitely couldn't hurt him in any permanent way.
North would have told me to take the kill shot, I know it. I knew it then. But I couldn't. Not only because he is Jack's mirror image, but also because he's Jack's brother. I know only a little of how much Dan's death wrecked Jack with grief. I saw how it plagued his minimal sleep with nightmares so terrible he would wake up shouting, screaming his brother's name, with his eyes wide and wet in agony, his mind drenched in suffocating guilt.
How could I take away Jack's second chance to be with his brother? Answer: I couldn't. I refused to even if it meant trying to survive a fight with Dan on that roof.
Thankfully, depending on how you look at it, Damon arrived just in time to act as backup, forcing Dan to retreat and stage a truly theatrical escape.
When Jack gets brought into medical, a swarm of doctors gather around him, including my cousin Rex, who tells me to get the hell out of the way whilst simultaneously promising to look after Jack for me. Rex makes it sound like a sworn oath rather than passive reassurance. My cousin has an intensity about him unlike anyone I've ever met. When he tells me he'll take good care of Jack, I believe him unreservedly.
I wait at the far side of the room, out of the way, whilst the medical team works on Jack.
Damon and North come in at certain points, attempting to steal me away, either for a debrief or just to wash Jack's blood off my hands. I refuse, turning them both away, unwilling to move too far from my injured partner.
