The night was dark and quiet and mild, late spring somewhere in Cook County, Illinois. But it might as well have been the ninth circle of hell with the way Jonathan burned as he skulked through the dark towards the cinderblock building. How could he have been so stupid. He'd left the doctor alone for only a minute and they'd gotten him, police ransacked the apartment they'd used as an operating theater, a place of business, the closest thing either of them had to a home.
Those pigs didn't even have a warrant, he knew that, lord knows he wouldn't have left Herman alone if they did. He fought the urge to tear at his hair, those bastards took him, took the one blessing of softness the world saw fit to bestow upon Jonathan Brewster and locked him away somewhere in that dark building, behind iron and brick. Leaving him to his car and his equipment, to circle the area like some aimless shark, for days.
His head swam with all matter of unpleasantries he knew cops and robbers alike were more than capable of committing, ones that were all too easy to commit onto the doctor. He knew Herman could hold his own well enough in a fair fight, but trapped in a crowded holding cell, or worse, surrounded by cops, stripped of all weapons- it would be foolish to believe he stood a chance.
An unfamiliar and deeply unpleasant cocktail of fear, helplessness, and concern for another bloomed in his stomach and climbed in his throat like kudzu in a garden. He swallowed hard and fell back upon a tool he'd picked up as a boy, turning the tears that pricked his eyes and the worry churning in his gut into something he could use.
The familiar hot thrum of anger filled him, a comfortable fire that he'd use all those other horrendous feelings as fuel for, just like he'd always done. You could always do something with anger, turn it outwards on the world, use it as a battering ram, a dagger, to carve out a path for yourself. Worry, pain, fear, and sadness didn't offer that flexibility, and so he'd learned as a boy to transfigure and convert them to something else. An alchemist of negative emotions. If he couldn't be happy, he could at least be angry.
But he wasn't important right now, Herman was, and as he approached the tiny jail's back door, he wondered if Herman knew he'd be coming. Jonathan hoped he did, hoped the surgeon knew that he deserved freedom more than he did, hoped that he knew how utterly lost he felt without Herman, hoped he knew how much Jonathan would do for him, how much he meant to him. He hoped because he wasn't sure if he'd ever be able to say it aloud.
The solitary lockpick he'd brought didn't fail him, and the thick iron door swung open without a groaning complaint, a silence Jonathan welcomed. He walked past the rows of empty interrogation rooms. To the left, was the door that would lead him to the rows and rows of cells, one of which held the doctor. His hand hovered over the handle momentarily. No, it felt wrong to enter empty-handed, to risk giving the doctor false hope of a rescue that he could be unsuccessful in. While a jennypin like the one he had might work on a standard lock, he knew jail cells were different, so he pressed on. The building was surprisingly empty and quiet, and Jonathan slipped through the dark with precision. Most jails in this area were the same, cookie Cutter brick-and-mortar one-story affairs, and he'd come to the door that separated the front office from the rest of the building. All the cops in these walls were out there or in the cell gallery, he'd checked all the other rooms. Safe in this knowledge, he peered through the bulletproof glass to see two policemen sitting at a front desk, a ring of keys on either of their belt loops. Perfect. He felt for the revolver in his pocket.
It'd been a Christmas present from Herman. He'd remembered just how touched he'd been when the doctor had presented it to him, confused too, when he knew the doctor's Jewish faith was a large part of why he'd relocated to London. "You mentioned your family were Catholics, so I supposed I should get you a Christmas present, Johnny." He'd protested, tried to force the pearl-handled gun back into the smaller man's hands. "But I didn't get you anything for-" Herman, with those warm, clean hands had folded Jonathan's own back around the gift. "I didn't ask you to." "Then why-" He'd stared into the doctor's face, and was met with that placid smile, the kind that made him believe that perhaps, he wasn't just a monster. "Because I wanted to, Johnny. Because I like you, that's why." He'd finally taken it then, and remembered how desperately he'd wanted to kiss the doctor in that moment. But he hadn't, that had come later, nearly a year later, and so Herman had wished him a merry Christmas and he'd muttered a belated happy Chanukah, which had made Herman laugh happily against his shoulder because he'd butchered the word.
