Chapter Text
Following the call from Aaron, Sweets had felt disoriented and light headed. And, as he started to hyperventilate, he had fled to the nearest restroom. His panic attack had passed in a blur, wedged in a stall struggling to breathe. In his opinion, it was worse than normal because it was in public… but he could objectively say he handled it well.
Lance emerged from the Jeffersonian lab’s bathroom an indeterminate time later, only to discover that Dr. Brennan and Agent Booth had moved onto the platform in the center of the lab, along with the rest of their team.
It was likely due to the episode, but the remainder of the day seemed to pass in a blur. He remembered joining the group on the platform and something about the victim being strangled with a guitar string. He remembered the anthropologist-agent pair bickering as they departed, and he remembered Dr. Saroyan and Dr. Hodgins both pulling him aside and expressing their concern for him. A while later, he was back in his office.
In coming days, he wouldn’t remember if he said anything to Booth or Brennan; he wouldn’t even remember the trip back to the Hoover building. He would, however, remember the rest of his day, helping patients and doing paperwork. As he helped others, he temporarily forgot about the impending danger that loomed over his head. He did notice, in a detached sort of way, that he was more calm than he expected to be, but he figured it was just an after effect of the adrenaline rush. It was different every time for him, following an attack.
Regardless, the remainder of his day (immersed in denial) was productive— he even managed to complete the paperwork for a few evaluations early. He did a little more work on the case between his sessions, and sent a refined profile to Booth just before he packed up for the day. He left his office feeling lighter than he had all week.
It didn’t last, of course.
As he made his way out of the building, the invisible weight—the awareness of him—settled over his shoulders like a heavy, bulky, cumbersome cloak… the type that easily induced the sensation of claustrophobia. Despite his best efforts, the reality of his situation began to set in once again and the questions he had been avoiding jumped to the forefront of his awareness, and haunted him all the way to the parking garage.
How much did he know? Did he know where Sweets was? Was he watching? Would he kidnap him again, or would he destroy his friends and family instead? Was the team in danger? Was Jack in danger?
The dangerous cycle of his thoughts was interrupted by someone calling his name; Sweets turned, instinctually moving behind a nearby car as he did. He needn’t have worried, though. Derek was standing about twenty feet down the row, waving a bit at him.
“Hey, Junior!” he chuckled, “I’ve been calling you. Did you forget I’m picking you and Jack up?”
Sweets winced slightly. Yes, he had forgotten. “Hey, Morgan,” he called back, already moving towards his friend, “Sorry. I’m just a little stuck in my head today.”
“Oh, don’t you know that’s dangerous?” he shot back jokingly.
Sweets couldn’t help but feel like it fell a little short, considering how true it was. “Oh, believe me… I know,” he muttered to himself. Louder, he changed the subject, “So, do you have any grand plans for today, Uncle Derek?”
The man in question let out a delighted laugh and clapped Lance on the back as he moved into range, “I didn’t know I should! I figured, since I’m the guest on this time-honored weekly uncle-nephew outing, I’d be getting the five-star treatment.”
Sweets let out a scoff, “In your dreams,” he smirked up at him, batting his hand aside. Morgan just chuckled and hustled his friend into his car.
An hour later, after sitting through the hell known as ‘after school pick up’, the two profilers were set up with giant ice cream cones, their nephew squished between them. Jack was beaming ear-to-ear, holding a ginormous masterpiece with ice cream smeared across his face and dripping down his arm.
“Oh man, buddy,” Derek chuckled, “Your dad is gonna kill us!”
“Nooo,” Jack rolled his eyes, “Daddy wouldn’t kill you!”
“What’s he gonna do then?” Lance smiled down at the giggling little boy.
Jack gave a dramatic shrug, “I don’t know. He made me clean the bathroom last week.”
The two adults struggled not to laugh at the boy’s solemn thousand-yard stare, causing him to look suitably horrified by the chore.
“I’m sure you dad won’t make me clean the bathroom,” Derek reassured the boy, a faux serious note to his voice, “I’m sure he’ll just give me extra paper work. Your Uncle Lance, though….”
“Hey!” Sweets cried, glaring at the smirking profiler. Before he could say anything though, Jack laid a sticky hand on his wrist and gave him a horribly sympathetic and excruciatingly cute look. Any comeback he had harbored instantly disappeared.
How had he gotten this lucky?
Regardless, Aaron had indeed not killed them when they had dropped off a sticky Jack. He had even managed to maintain a stern demeanor (barely) until Jack had run upstairs to clean up. The smile he gave his son’s retreating back was definitely worth the annoyed glare he gave the two of them. The Hotch Glare hadn’t lasted long, however, and while it appeared as though he rather wanted to talk to Sweets—likely about protection—he refrained and simply wished them a good night.
Some time later, after an unsuccessful bid to return home, Sweets found himself attempting to wield a hammer. Derek had dragged him along to his most recent project house (he needed to ‘finish one thing’), and had somehow managed to convince him to lend a hand. That had led to Sweets attempting to replace a floorboard. He had managed to measure and cut the piece just fine—his dad had taught him a thing or two back in high school, despite his protests. The problem was the whole hitting in the nails bit. He was not nearly coordinated enough, so the process led to a great deal of cursing, near misses, and bent nails. Derek, of course, was busy laughing his ass off.
Renovation was not Lance’s idea of fun.
He could see what was happening here, though. Morgan was trying to distract him. For a while, it even worked. But after he continued to fail to properly wield a hammer, his mind began to wander once again. His thoughts turned darker. His fears and pent up emotions, still there after his quiet panic attack earlier in the day, came back in full force.
So, when Derek’s phone beeped, causing him to frown and step out of the room, it was the last straw. Lance sat back on his heels and stared at the empty doorway, straining to hear what his friend was doing. And, when he returned, Lance gave him a disapproving frown.
“What is it?” he asked as innocently as he could.
Derek gave him a slightly strained smile, “Nothing; it was just Garcia.”
“Don’t lie to me. That wasn’t nothing,” Sweets shifted on his slightly numb legs and stood, “What aren’t you telling me?”
For a long moment, the half-skeletonized house echoed with silence. Derek considered his young friend’s determined and annoyed stance. He sighed. “Junior…”
“Don’t you Junior me,” Lance snapped back, “What happened? Does it have something to do with Hotch suddenly wanting to send me away?”
Derek brought a hand up and scraped it down his face, “Yes. There was a new victim discovered earlier today—”
“I know that,” Sweets protested.
Derek glared at him, “Fine. You wanna know what’s up? The message changed; that’s what’s up.”
“The message?” he asked a little dumbly, no longer really seeing his friend, “You mean, that h-he… carves—” Sweets’ voice ceased working.
Everything about the older profiler softened. He moved across the room and gently touched his distressed friend’s shoulder. “Yes,” he murmured, “The message he carves into his victims changed,” he ignored Sweets’ sharp intake of breath, and plowed onwards, “His last message wasn’t ‘nobody’, Junior, it was ‘Lance’.”
“No…” he breathed, horror swelling up in his chest, like bile in his throat.
“That’s why we’re all ‘suddenly’ more worried, Sweets,” he huffed, “We want you safe.”
“I can’t leave,” he stated numbly, echoing what he had told Aaron earlier.
His friend shook his head and moved a little closer. “I know this is hard, Lance,” Derek squeezed his shoulder, “And I can only imagine how all of this feels.”
Numbly, Sweets simply shook his head. He wasn’t certain what he was shaking his head at, but he couldn’t seem to stop.
The older man wasn’t having it; he gently tugged the therapist until he had a grip on both of his shoulders and was peering into his face, “But I can imagine how suffocating the idea of a security detail could be, especially now.”
Sweets stared back.
“But, I’m gonna be straight with you here, man…” he huffed a sigh, “You’ve gotta try to let Hotch help you. If not for your sake, then for ours.”
He blinked, uncomprehending.
Morgan shifted his grip and pulled him in for a hug, “We can’t lose you again, Junior. We just… can’t.”
A white-hot sensation of… something —from all that pent up emotion, the echoes from his panic attack— streaked though him. Pain, panic, relief, horror, worry, confusion, love, fear… it blurred together in a kaleidoscope of conflict. It had been there, in the background, but now it was out in the open, exactly how Lance had worked so hard to stop earlier.
It was too much.
Lance broke.
The burly profiler with a heart of gold merely pulled him in tighter and ignored the rapidly growing wetness on his shoulder.
The day following his meltdown on Derek’s shoulder was a blur. It was a blur of emotion and activity, and was exactly what he needed. Going through the motions of his life and helping those who needed it was a huge relief; Sweets always preferred to have a purpose, and being a therapist filled that need in a way nothing else had—not even being a profiler with the BAU.
The routine lulled him to a certain point, and allowed him to work though a few things the previous night, spent talking with Derek, had shaken loose. Over lunch he called Aaron, who agreed to meet him the following day, Friday, to talk about protection. Shortly thereafter, Sweets received a phone call from Booth, sharing the news that they had caught their killer—Tommy’s neighbor—and that the team planned to visit the establishment the late singer frequented in order to celebrate… and hear Brennan sing.
Sweets instantly agreed to go.
Once he finished up for the day and assured his (justifiably) overprotective family that he was going to be with an FBI agent, the therapist found himself seated around a table, next to Zack, laughing with his newfound team.
It only got better as Brennan finally agreed to sing and made her way onstage. Everyone was delighted and surprised to find that the anthropologist was actually quite good. In fact, Sweets was so engrossed in Brennan’s enthusiastic performance, he almost missed the yell of “Seeley” from behind the group. There was no way, however, he could miss Booth shooting to his feet a split second before a heart-stopping crack destroyed the entire atmosphere.
Booth’s shoulder jerked back; someone screamed; red blossomed across his chest.
For one deadly, excruciating moment, Booth waivered on his feet. In the next, he hit the ground. Then Brennan was diving off the stage, towards her partner. People were screaming, everyone was on their feet, Sweets turned to look, found Pam Nunan holding a gun, looking stunned.
A moment passed, everyone was yelling, Pam’s face hardened. He took a step towards her, unsure what he was going to do, but certain he had to stop her before she shot again, but only managed that single step before another heart-stopping bang echoed through the small establishment. A dot of red erupted from Pam’s throat. In an eerie echo of moments before, the obsessive woman waivered on her feet before tumbling to the ground.
Lance whirled around to find Brennan abandoning Booth’s just-used service weapon at her side as she turned back to it’s owner. She desperately covered the gushing wound on her partner’s chest, meaningless reassurances tumbling past her lips.
Sweets was frozen for one terrible second before he rushed to Dr. Brennan’s side, ripping off his jacket and thrusting it at the desperate anthropologist’s occupied hands. She obligingly lifted her hands for a split second before applying pressure to the fabric instead.
“Come on, Booth,” she pleaded repeatedly, “It’s going to be fine; you’re gonna make it. Come on, Booth.”
Lance’s breath caught in his throat, the desperate scientist’s pleas fading into the background, overwhelmed by the roaring in his ears. Nonsensical fragments of thoughts whirled through the frozen therapist’s mind, and he attempted to decipher them before it devolved into something more serious, like a panic attack. He couldn’t afford one. Not now.
Panic was the first word to surface. It was what surrounded him on all sides. It was what he couldn’t let himself feel right now.
The next… Pain. Yes, that’s right. Booth was in pain. He was pale, it was clear… he was going into shock.
And… red. The blood. Yes. Booth’s blood, on Brennan’s hands.
Cold. It was a little chilly, but Sweets was aware that could easily be his own shock setting in…
But… Rust. Ah, yes, the neglected tools hanging on the wall across from him— Wait. No. That’s not right.
Sweets blinked, refocusing on the heart stopping scene before him.
It was the smell. The smell of iron.
In a matter of seconds, the air surrounding Booth had become thick with the metallic tang of blood. Sweets sucked in a sharp shocked breath of realization around the all too familiar lump still obstructing his breathing. It was so familiar, but he hadn’t smelt it since… well.
Sweets sank to his knees beside the begging scientist, ostensibly to help, but in reality… he was attempting to stave off the tightness igniting in his chest and the phantom sensations tingling across his skin.
Iron, blood, rust. Bindings digging into his wrists, pain throbbing through his head, his chest… numb feet—were they even there anymore?—numb fingers, save the one that was a mangled broken mess sandwiched in a splint he was certain was designed to heighten the endless pain…
And the terror. Mind numbing terror.
A black mask leaning over him.
Laughter.
Tell me, Lance…
A sickly melodic voice, rich, deep, mocking.
Who are you, really?
Cold, sharp, pain.
What does it feel like?
Furious, hot, heat.
Isn’t it lovely?
The glint of light off the needle.
Honestly, boy, you’ll bleed out like this.
The brush of thread against his skin.
Stop moving; you’ll hurt yourself.
Blinding pain; the sting of alcohol on his arm.
You can’t bleed out on me.
A prick. A pull. A sickening tug.
I’m not done with you yet.
A hand, strong, firm on his chest…
“Sir,” a voice echoed in his head. “Sir, we need you to move.” The hand on his chest pushed him firmly backwards.
Sweets blinked. He was in a club, Booth was bleeding out, and the paramedics had arrived.
“Of course,” he stammered, stumbling to his feet and to a chair several feet behind him, “Sorry.” He was still half in the past, needle threaded through his skin, tugging steadily to the relentless velvety voice echoing from a faceless shadow.
Lance watched the flurry of action as professionals fought to stabilize the life of one of the most extraordinary agents he had ever known (and that was saying something), a hollow feeling in his chest.
The layered flashback gave another sickening tug; Sweets’ right hand drifted to his left forearm, sliding under the thin fabric of his button up shirt to brush against smooth scar tissue.
Brennan was hovering behind the paramedics, looking lost. Behind her, the rest of the Jeffersonian team was huddled together, horror and fear in every line of their bodies.
The skin under Lance’s hand gave a phantom tug.
The man leant over Booth yelled something, a bag was nearly ripped open in haste.
The voice in his head cackled.