I know this, of course, because I’ve been standing outside his door for the last twenty minutes. It’s cold, and it’s raining, and I’m too much of a coward to knock.

I hate this. It’d be so much safer to go home. If he wants to come back, he’ll come back. They usually do. He would’ve come back last time, if I’d left him alone long enough. This is just going to get him angry. He hates it when people try to take care of him. I once watched him rip into an assistant for a good twenty minutes because the man tried to urge Danny to go home and get some sleep ‘for his own good’. What I’m doing is no better.

Besides, it’s not like he lives completely alone. If he went home looking the way he left my house, one of his daughters would certainly be able to strong-arm him into getting whatever he needed so badly that he’d… do that.

My face feels hot at the memory. I rub at my cheek with the back of my hand like that will make it go away.

All right. It’s decided, then. I’ll knock, and if his daughter answers the door, I’ll know he’s okay. And then I can go home and hide under my desk until the need to hyperventilate goes away. That should work.

I knock.

Nothing.

I knock again, a little harder this time.

Silence.

Well, there goes that plan.

Biting at my lower lip absently, I reach down and rattle the doorknob without much hope. It twists under my hand, and I almost fall into his darkened front hall. I swallow, and carefully shut the door behind me, leaving me in the dark.

With a last wistful look over my shoulder at the window and the solitude beyond it, I put my hands in my pockets and start moving cautiously through his hallway. All the lights are off, putting the house in twilight and shadows. The ventriloquist dummy at the foot of the stairs looks distinctly menacing, smirking down at me too knowingly. I walk on the other side of the hall, keeping my eye on it. A sudden creaking noise above my head almost makes me bolt.

Upstairs. Danny’s upstairs.

Which means, I suppose, that I have to go upstairs.

Wonderful. Damn him.

The stairs creak more than a staircase in a modern house really should, and I’m sure he knows there’s someone in the house the second my foot touches the first step. So much for the element of surprise. The scent of alcohol and something sour, sicker, gets stronger as I climb closer to the top. The idiot’s drunk, possibly worse, and considering that he’s paranoid in the best of circumstances…

“Danny?” The sound of my voice sounds impossibly loud in the loaded silence. “I need to talk with you.”

Something creaks, but he says nothing. I hope that wasn’t the sound of him getting a weapon. Swallowing against the urge to go downstairs and curl up in the safety of my car, I come around the corner with my hands awkwardly up.

He looks at me, a bundle of pale skin and muddy clothes and feverishly bright eyes amid pages full of notation. There’s a smear of blood above the elegant curve of his eyebrow and an open bottle of vodka leaning against his bare knee, and the circles under his eyes look like they were carved out with a knife, and he’s shivering, and the stupid fuck is composing.

For a second, he looks startled to see me. Then his lip quirks up in a smirk dripping with scorn, and he raises the bottle to me in a mock toast. “Well, well. Look who grew a set and came out from under his desk." The jab obviously quite get him what he wants, because he lets the smirk fall away. It leaves him looking colder. "I didn’t think I’d see you again.”

“You were the one who ran.”

“It’s only fair. You’ve been running for years. I figured it was my turn.” Rising with an odd sort of shaky dignity, he gathers the notation together into a pile and sets it on the edge of the bed. When he lifts his head again, his eyes are a dead blank. “How did you get into my house?”

“The door was unlocked.”

He grimaces and mutters a curse. Then he turns his back on me to fuss with one of the marionettes swinging from the ceiling, toying with the delicate shape of its foot. It grins at me over his head as he says flatly, “Get out. And lock it beyond you when you go, if you please.”

There it sits, my engraved invitation to walk away. He’s being uncooperative, nothing I can do. Instead, insanely, I take a step into the room. My voice betrays me, shaking slightly as I tell him, “I’m not going anywhere. Not until you tell me why you…”

He snorts and looks at me over his shoulder. “Can’t even say it, can you?” In a tone he would use with a child, he explains, “I blew you. I sucked your cock. It’s not an entirely difficult concept, really.”

“You didn’t enjoy it.”

His laugh is edged with razors and long years of experience. Hard to tell which is cutting deeper. “Since when has that mattered?”

The words spill out of me, scaring me as badly as they’re unnerving him. “I’m worried about you.”

He goes still, even the hand that fidgets with the marionette pausing. I’d have to be blind not to see the tension in him. When he finally speaks up, his voice is tight. “I damned near raped you this morning, and you’re worried about me.”

I take a step towards him, but the floorboard groans under my feet. He flinches from the noise, edging away from it and me. Taking the hint, I stop where I am. “You didn’t rape me.”

“You told me to stop.” Turning, he crosses his arms and stares fixedly at the floor. “I could’ve hurt you.”

“I think you hurt yourself more.”

The tone was a mistake. It’s too gentle, nothing he wants. The laugh that bursts from him is staggeringly bitter. “Sweet, forgiving Tim. And you say you’re not like a child?”

I move towards him again. He tries to back away, but his shoulders hit the wall and he can’t go any further. He’s caught. I think my smile turns dark. “I’m hardly a child.”

He shakes his head and snarls, watching through wide and wild eyes while I move towards him. “No. But you… you get to stay innocent.”

“Danny.” Closer now, so close that I can smell the alcohol on his breath and the old sweat on his skin. His fingers drag along the wall behind him like he’s trying to claw his way through it, and his breaths hitch dangerously in his throat. “Relax. Just breathe.”

Ignoring that, he stares at me through narrowed eyes and demands in a rasp, “Why do you get to stay innocent when the rest of us go to shit, huh? Why in the fuck are you so special?” With a suddenness that’s unnerving, he grabs my shoulders. His nails dig into my skin, but I can’t look away from the exhausted desperation in his eyes. “Why are you still pure when you’re crawling in the same shit as the rest of us? Why can you do this to me?” Shaking me once, he snarls, “Why can’t I hate you?”

He’s trembling, gasping, barely more a bundle of badly restrained violence now. He’s hurting me. He’s going to break. I should run. I should run. I should…

My arms slide around him, pulling him against me. Cradling the back of his head as he spits and snarls and fights to get free, I murmur his name over and over until he starts shuddering too hard to claw at me. The coughing fit takes us both by surprise, and leaves him slumped against me, too tired not to be. His temple feels clammy where it’s pressed against my throat. I can feel him breathing, slow and shallow. He seems fragile in my arms. There’s no divinity in him now.

I don’t think about moving before I’m steering us both towards the bed. He pushes at my chest, protesting being guided. I growl at him without thinking first, a tentative half-snarl that wouldn’t even intimidate me. It earns me a snort, but apparently distracts him enough to let me haul him the last few feet to the bed. He’s heavier than he looks.

Letting him slide out of my grip to sit on the edge of the bed, looking dazed and worn, I keep my hand on his shoulder because I think that’s the only thing keeping him upright. Before I can push him backwards, he grabs my arm in a surprisingly strong grip. “The notes.”

With the proper reverence, I pick up the notes and carefully set them aside. That seems to satisfy him. He nods grudgingly, and lets me push him back to the sheets without much resistance. His eyes stay warily on my face, waiting for something. It unnerves him, I think, when I grab his feet and pull them up on the bed. The dark line of tattoo on his calf distracts me; I’ve never seen it up close before. Unthinking, I trace the line of ancient words with my fingertip. He draws in a sharp breath through his teeth, and I look up.

His eyes are nearly black, and wide, and deep enough to fall into. I never realized what that meant before. I lean towards him without meaning to, drawn. Just one kiss couldn’t hurt…

My brain starts working just before my lips touch his, and I shift, pressing a kiss to his forehead. He makes a startled, indignant noise that I ignore, pushing his shoulders flat against the bed. He glares up at me, which just makes the urge to do… something… worse. Grabbing a handful of sheets more for a distraction than because I think he who works in artic conditions really needs them, I pull them up to his neck and try for something approaching a glare. Judging from his smirk, it’s not entirely effective.

“Sleep,” I mutter, and slide off the bed.

With a sleepy, cynical smile, he asks dryly, “Running now?”

“I’m gonna go call Lisa, tell her that I won’t be home tonight.”

I shouldn't be smug about that surprising the jaded look off of his face. His eyes widen, and he half sits up, even though it makes him grimace and pale. “Tim, you can’t do that. Go home, I’ll be-”

“You won’t be fine.” Watching him struggle for something to convince me to go, I lean against the doorway and sigh. “If you can stop me from getting to the phone, I’ll go.”

He scowls.

I can’t resist a smirk. “You can’t get up, can you?”

Growling something, he pulls the covers up over his face and turns over on to his side. I believe that’s my cue to go downstairs.

Lisa sounds sweetly, kittenishly bewildered as I explain that I’m being held up in a meeting, and that no, really, she shouldn’t join me. My heart’s pounding in my head while I stammer out the lies; if she even questioned once, I would have broken down.

She doesn’t question once, though, only wishes me good night and hangs up so passively that I just stand there staring at the phone. It can’t really be that easy to lie to my wife… she has to know somehow, she has to be just biding her time to spring it on me. This was a mistake. I should call her back and go home and…

And Danny’s asleep.

I stop in the doorway to watch him, frozen in place. He’s curled up on his side in this tight ball, only his hair visible over the sheets. Without seeing the cynical amusement written on his face, he looks almost… peaceful. He’s trusting me. And with people like us, that only happens once.

Damn it.

I can barely even manage myself on a good day. How am I supposed to fix this, any of the mess that was once my nice relatively simple life?

The obvious answer: I can't.

So instead, I go make myself some coffee and prepare to spend the night watching him breathe and trying very, very not to touch him. Right now, I think something would break,

Pouring the grinds into the filter with shaking hands, I lean my forehead against the doorframe and wish I'd stayed at home.