Pathos - A Duskwood Fanfiction

Chapter 3

Although neither of them were aware of it, both men were lost in the same memory as the police chief stared into the eyes of the man that the FBI had, through highest clearance classified channels only, declared one of the most wanted cyberterrorists in the country. And even though Jake currently had Alan strung up against a motel wall like a hunting trophy, the police chief only felt his intuition double down on its belief that all was not as it seemed.

It was this belief that allowed him to remain at rest in the other man's vice like grip, and it was this belief that had overcome his instinct to grab for the gun at rest on his hip. He simply hung there, pinned to the wall by Jake's unrelenting physical force as his racing thoughts began to close in on a slow realization.

With everything that had happened in the last 72 hours, the things that he had seen and heard when he had first encountered Jake in the mine had fallen into background noise, filing themselves away for later scrutiny. The situation at the time had been too intense, too potentially disasterous to spend any mental attention or effort elsewhere, and so the things that he had heard and seen just prior to pulling Jake down onto the mine shaft floor had been unrecalled until this very moment.

They came back now in abrupt flashes as his thoughts began to coalesce, and he stared at the man in front of him with new understanding. A mental image of Jake's phone as he had flung it into the depths of the mine suddenly rose to prominence, and he saw again the phone's background picture a half second before it went dead. It had been enough time to recognize the person in the picture however, and as his mind worked at lightspeed to forge new connections, he realized that he could now identify the hidden emotion that lay in the predatory gaze of the man that was pinning him like a ragdoll to the wall.

He remembered now the words that Jake had whispered before hitting the button on the phone's auto destruct, and he remembered the glittering trail of tears spilling out of Jake's eyes as they had confronted one another face to face. He could hear the memory of Jake's nearly silent sobbing as the man had lain on the tunnel floor, staring up at Alan like a wounded animal.

I love you, Jake had whispered.

Ah.

So that's what it was.

That was the emotion that Alan had failed to identify in Jake's eyes, and it was the emotion that he could see as clear as crystal now that he knew what he was looking for. It was present in every aspect of the other man's face, an emotion so heavy and deep and anguished that it made Alan want to look away.

Despite the instinct to shut it down, he maintained steady eye contact with Jake, but there must have been something that had changed in the quality of that contact because he felt the other man's frantic grasp on his jacket falter almost imperceptibly.

Alan's voice was strangled as it fell into the intimacy of the space between them, Jake's full weight still pressing into Alan's chest with a crushing heaviness that that resembled a straitjacket in its totality. In between ragged gasps, he forced out each word as coherently as he could manage and then took deep and desperate breaths as he felt Jake's weight suddenly shift and release.

The other man's hands released Alan's jacket in staggered degrees, the relinquishing of the iron grip that he'd had allowing blood to flow back into Alan's arms as the police chief began to sag down the wall behind him. He was unable to stay upright as the ferocity of the moment that had just passed started to leave him, and he remained in an awkward half slump as he hungrily heaved for air, looking up at the man who was now backing away with a look of twinned relief and despair in his haunted gaze.

There was a moment of silence then, marked only by the sounds of their combined heavy breathing, and then Jake's low voice bid Alan to explain himself. The deadly cadence that had been present mere moments before in the other man's voice had dissolved as though it had never been, and the words that came now were empty ghosts that faded away into silence almost before they were spoken.