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go-to-two · 3 months ago

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In the Dark - CPD 9x04 Triptych

Hello! I mentioned recently that I had an old one-shot from season 9, episode 4 that I was tinkering with again. I landed here, with what are essentially three different scenes that make up the bulk of the story. They take place in the district bathroom after the panic attack scene, when Jay gets home after confronting Voight, and at home in the middle of the night. In that order. This might not ever see AO3, so we'll consider this a Tumblr special for anyone still hanging around this place. Under the cut. No warnings beyond what would apply to the Roy Walton storyline.

PART 1

"Hey..." Jay's voice is soft, pleading. He locks the door and crosses the women's bathroom towards her. The shower she never got to step into is running while she stands motionless in her jeans and sports bra. His eyes track over her frail frame, worry lining his every feature. "Hailey, talk to me. Please." Jay takes a gentle approach, hoping this will be the one that finally works.

It almost did, minutes ago. Before Voight walked in the room with a stone-faced glare, she was about to tell him everything. She is out of strength. For weeks, it came and went in waves. One minute she had the resolve to take this to the grave, and the next she was gripping his hand until both of their knuckles turned white just to keep herself together.

Now, Hailey can't speak. The words have been pushed so far back from ever escaping her mouth that she can't find them anymore. Even if she decided to tell him everything right here, right now- her brain goes blank. She is beyond exhausted and the steam from the shower is still filling the room. She thinks her vision might just go black and for a moment, she feels relief. It would give her an out from standing in front of him at a loss for words while he begs.

She gets her wish. Her vision does go black, just for a split second. She feels his arms around her when she stumbles forward, and he reaches into the shower stall to turn off the water. "Alright, you're alright," he assures. Jay walks her over to sit on the long benches in front of the lockers, and he takes a seat next to her. "It's okay. It's just us here. Just me. I want to make this better for you, but you have to tell me what's going on."

"Jay-"

"-Don't." He cuts her off before she can say "nothing." He knows that tone. That dismissive tone he has let slide for weeks while he gave her the space to figure this out. "Don't you dare try to tell me there's nothing going on." He turns to straddle the bench and leans closer to her. "Not after all this. I know this started the night Kim went missing. I know it involves Voight."

He lists off the pieces he does have. It's enough to paint a bad picture, but he's missing the details that fill in the blanks to explain why his fiancée is falling apart in front of him.

"What am I not seeing here?" He pleads.

With her last bits of resolve, Hailey puts her hands over her eyes and shakes her head.

"What are you so afraid of?" Jay pushes backwards on the bench, away from her, and smacks his hands down on the hard metal. The gentle approach wasn't working. Frustration, helplessness, pressure. Nothing worked. The only thing he has left is anger. "Do you think I won't be able to help? I won't understand? I'll stop loving you? Do you really think I would lock myself in the bathroom with you like this if I didn't love you with everything I have? I do, Hailey, I do."

Jay's voice breaks on the last words, and his posture crumbles. He is supposed to be making that promise to her at an altar, but he can't see them walking down an aisle with something like this between them. "How can we get married, if you can't talk to me?" He finally whispers.

The voice in Hailey's head always warned her that she'd lose Jay somehow, but she never guessed she would be the one to tell him to go. She'll do it. She'll cut him loose before she drags him down with her. "Is that an ultimatum?" She finally asks.

"Would it really take one for you to be honest with me?" His voice is thick, heavy with the realization that she's keeping everything from him. It's not just that she's keeping something from everyone or she's covering for Voight. She's keeping it from him, and that's when he understands how bad this really is. "I'm going to find out," he says simply.

"Jay, don't."

He stands from the bench and shakes his head. "I'm done asking you. I'm done pretending I don't notice you getting up in the middle of the night. I'm done watching you push the food around on your plate enough to make it look like you ate something." Jay has made his decision, and they both know he'll find what he's looking for if he looks hard enough. He could have done this weeks ago, and the only regret he'll have when he gets his answers is that he didn't do this sooner. "You can be mad at me, that’s fine. At least you'll be alive. I'm going to find out."

PART 2

It didn't take long for him to find his answer. Hailey isn't surprised at that, but she is startled when she wakes from a restless sleep to find him standing in their bedroom doorway, staring. Heartbreak is written all over his face and she knows then, everything she was trying to avoid is there on her doorstep. They say no good deed goes unpunished. She still isn't sure if her deeds have been all that good, but she's being punished at every turn so it doesn't seem to make much difference in the end.

She doesn't move for a few seconds. She knows that he knows, but she waits for him to make the first move. In her waiting, Hailey forgets to breathe. She is like a bottle with its lid screwed tight, shaken and ready to implode at the first release.

Quietly, Jay crosses the room. He picks up the half-empty glass of whiskey she had left on the nightstand, studies it, and sets it back down. Time stands still, until he sits on the edge of the bed and wraps her up in his arms. "Take a breath," he says evenly. "You can take a breath now."

Her first breath is a gasp buried in his shoulder, and everything speeds up again, making impact after impact against her chest as she releases everything she has been holding in for so long. He holds onto her for several minutes- five, ten. She loses track. It's dark in their bedroom and for as long as he'll let her, Hailey cries in his arms.

She cries until she can't anymore. She has exhausted all the emotion she can, but she doesn't dare move first once she has calmed down. He feels when her breathing evens out and the tears stop, and Jay lets go to scoot away from her. He eyes the glass on the nightstand again. "Are you drunk right now?" He asks calmly. No accusation.

"No."

"Okay. Then let's go out there," he nods his head toward the kitchen, a more neutral space. "I don't want to do this all in here."

They end up at the kitchen counter. Hardly neutral- it's where they signed the paperwork making this place home, where he lifted her up onto the hard granite to celebrate, where they ate, talked, laughed. There is no neutral space at home. He sits on one side and she pulls a stool around to sit on the other, and she finally tells him everything.

Every last detail. She starts with figuring out that they were given bad leads, then making Adam leave to care for Makayla, and finding Voight and Roy Walton in that warehouse. He knew the basics already, but his eyes get darker with every detail Hailey assumes Voight left out.

She gets through it through stutters and long pauses, and Jay sits quietly. If Hailey were a betting person, she would bet on what his first response is, because it was hers too.

"We have to tell the team," he says.

Hailey understands his motivations. His guilt. It was the first decision she had to make in the wake of Roy Walton's death- to walk away and not radio the team- and she'll spend the rest of her life playing out every scenario in her head, wondering if she made the right one. "We can't," she answers him.

"It's the right thing to do."

"Jay," she says slowly. "I have wanted to tell them time and time again, but this case is already too far ahead of us. They didn't ask for any of this." She wipes her eyes and rakes her fingers back through her hair. "If this gets out- and we both know it could- we'd all be implicated. We could all lose our jobs, all go to jail. We would have ruined their lives and robbed Jordan, Vinessa, and Makayla of the only family they have. I couldn't live with that. I don't think you could, either. At least this way, if it comes to it, I can sit on a stand and say they had nothing to do with it."

He sits back and scrubs his hands over his face in frustration. Voight once told him he was wired through the heart. He jumps head first into what he thinks is right without looking at the consequences the truth can really have.

"You wanted to know," Hailey says, "so now you have to think about the realities of it all."

"I did want to know," Jay says coldly, but she didn't tell him. She was going to let them fall apart before she did. "So what about me? I did ask for this, and I still had to find out on my own because you wouldn't talk to me. Do I not deserve a better answer as to why?"

She looks up at the ceiling, tears and the bright kitchen lights blurring her vision. That's a much more complicated answer than simply giving him plausible deniability. "You watched me struggle for months," she admits. "I crossed lines that I said I'd never cross. I was lost. But then the one time I finally found my way again... this one time I did the right thing- this is what I got. So, if I had come home that night and told you I shot Roy Walton, would you have doubted me?"

"No."

"I did. I doubted." Hailey shrugs with tears tracking down her face again. "I see it all play out again every time I close my eyes, and I wonder if maybe I pulled the trigger too early. If that were anyone else other than Walton, would I have waited a few more seconds before firing?"

"Were his hands on Voight's gun?"

They were. She knows without a doubt they were, but it's easy to let black and white blend into grey when that is all they've known for years.

"Were his hands on the gun?" Jay repeats, expecting an actual answer. "Close your eyes if you have to, and tell me. Did Roy Walton have his hands on Voight's gun?"

"Yes."

"Then it was a good shoot, Hailey. It's a shot every single one of us would have taken. I don't doubt that, okay? I don't doubt you."

"Would a jury?" She challenges. "If you gave this case to the right prosecutor who looked into Intelligence's history and spun the right story, I'm not so sure it'd go my way."

Hailey leans forward with her arms crossed on the kitchen counter. Jay still looks at her like he's waiting for an answer that will satisfy him, but there will never be one. "You're looking for a simple answer where there isn't any, Jay. There was never one moment that I decided not to tell you. There were a lot of individual moments, and each time I'd find a different reason, something I hadn't considered before, that told me it was better if you didn't know."

She pauses, and she tries to come up with the words that she thinks might give him the most peace. "The way you look at me matters. So yes, I was afraid you'd never be able to look at me the same way, but more than that- I figured that if I didn't tell you... maybe you'd hate me, maybe you'd leave me, but you wouldn’t lose everything you've worked for. I could sit on a stand and say you didn't have anything to do with it, either. And now..."

Hailey trails off as an all-too-familiar weight settles in her chest. She was willing to lose him to keep him away from this, but they're here all the same. She has to worry about his fate like she worries about hers, and somehow their hope lies in Hank Voight's ability to bury a body.

PART 3

Hailey wakes up at 1:30am, barely a half an hour after going to bed. Jay isn't next to her anymore, but she figures maybe he needed some more time to wind down. She wakes up again at just past 2am, and he still isn't there. She doesn't see him, but his watch and phone are still on his nightstand, so she gives him space. She doesn't wake up again until almost 4:45am, and his side of the bed is cold and empty.

She sits up while her eyes adjust to the low light. Hailey finally spots his silhouette far across the apartment in the living room. He sits on the hardwood floor facing the glass balcony doors, his legs drawn up to his chest and his fingers hooked around his knees. Shadows cover his face so Hailey can't see if he is angry or crying or just staring off ready to walk out into the night and leave all of this behind.

She slides from the bed. She doesn't bother trying to be quiet since he is up anyway and she wants him to hear her footsteps to know she is coming. His chin dips in her direction as she gets closer- not fully looking at her but at least acknowledging that she is there.

Hailey sits in front of him with her back to the window. "What are you looking at?" She asks weakly.

Jay shrugs. "Just thinking."

She nods, biting her lip to keep from responding. She feels like she has forfeited her right to ask what he is thinking about tonight. This is uncharted territory for them. They've always been each other's person, and now they sit across from each other in the dark wondering if any two people have ever felt this far apart before.

Jay finally meets her eyes. "The night..." he has to clear his throat after being quiet for so long "...the night everything happened is when you said we should get married."

"Yeah."

"Did you mean it?"

There is only so much guilt she can take, and the hollow look in his eyes might be the thing that finally breaks her completely. She pushes off the floor and walks closer to him on her knees. Gently, she unclasps his fingers and moves his hands to make room between his legs. He doesn't reach for her like he usually would, but he lets his legs fall flat on the ground when she kneels between them.

Hailey reaches out to hold his face. There are one million ways she loses Jay in all of this, but it won't be because she let him doubt how she feels or because he feels like some hail Mary on her worst night. Not when he is the best part of her every day. His stubble is coarse under her fingers, and his jaw works when he swallows thickly.

"I meant it," she promises. "We can wait if we need to. If you want to ask again when this is done, when things are better- my answer will be the same. I meant every word I said to you."

He sniffles sharply and nods, but the conversation ends there. He never reaches for her. "You were finally getting some sleep. You should go back to bed," he whispers.

Hailey tilts her head and traces her thumbs over his jaw. "Why don't you come with me?"

Just like before, he agrees wordlessly and follows behind her into the bedroom. He lays down facing her. Open, but still not reaching out. Hailey falls asleep again to the feeling of him close by but when she opens her eyes to her alarm at 6:30am, he is already gone.

#triptych just means i don't want to write transitions rn #upstead fanfiction #upstead fic #upstead #jay halstead #hailey upton #hailey x jay #jay x hailey #chicago pd fanfiction

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