Archive of Our Own

He hadn't needed suits in the marines. 

After that, he'd been in school, and he'd never felt like he was smart enough to be there, so he'd worked his ass off. He'd worked on Capitol Hill, he'd helped get a good man elected president and he'd bought a really great house in Georgetown. And then, he was elected a senator which was not easy. After that - and he'd been as surprised as anyone by this part - he had to be a senator. He's been busy for approximately his entire life. 

His excuses are for shit and he knows it.

But Number One came in somewhere around getting the good man elected president; she's run his life for ten years. And that's meant buying his damn suits. But - well, he's wanted her for ten years. This was not a dinner and a movie date; this is a suit and tie and she'll wear a dress date. 

He wonders if she'll wear her hair down, if he'll get his hands in it. He honestly doesn't think so. Knowing her, she'll be the most conservative of daters, she won't hug him because she's Number One and she doesn't do that, and he'll get his hands in it on the fourth date. He'll hold out. 

There's a suit at the very back of his closet that, if it doesn't predate her, maybe came into his life so long ago that she won't know she sent an intern out with explicit instructions to buy it. Probably a print out, too, a map of the store and a guide on which salesman already knew his measurements. 

Boyce was right when he said Chris should've just drunk away the urge to do anything about this. He'd been fine for a decade, and then it had overcome him at coffee on Tuesday, and she'd said yes and it had all been down the fucking toilet from there.

Maybe dinner would be good, or maybe it would be awful and put him off doing any of this for life. Maybe there would be a military coup and he wouldnt' be able to go because he would be fighting for his country. So many good things could happen in the fifteen minutes between this moment of conflicted glaring into his closet and the one in fifteen minutes when he'll have to drive out of the garage and go. 

He's kind of hoping for the military coup when the phone rings as he's securing his tie -the only person who ever calls the line is his mother, and she's in Aruba. He realizes it's probably a telemarketer, and takes some comfort in the idea of being mean to them before he has to go out and do this thing. Except it can't be because this number is so very far beyond unlisted. Number One worked magic with the phone company, in some way. 

He wonders if it would be wrong to call her Number One tonight. He's called her Eunice probably twice since he interviewed her, and she doesn't seem to appreciate it. It would feel weird anyway, quite possibly it would be weird. Not that it won't be, anyway. He just doesn't want to heighten it. 

"Senator Pike," he says into the phone, maybe a moment too late and forgetting altogether he's not at the office. He still likes hearing the senator bit, though. 

"Chris?" 

"Yeah," he says, and his stomach sinks. 

"Winona Kirk, and I need a favor."  

~*~

He met Winona the summer he was researching his dissertation. He was thirty-one, and felt a hell of a lot younger. She was gorgeous and blonde and seemed tired and alone. Her kids were sweet. He hadn't known how to do anything but offer to help her and so he had, in that week he'd spent with her before he'd plunged into the complicated world of actually finding out what had killed her husband. 

Thing was, Winona played like she was this sweet mom with kids who only had full-grain organic foods, even then. She wasn't, he thought. She'd cut herself off from everyone, everything that had known her husband and she'd done it quickly. By the time he'd gotten to the Kirks, George's parents, six weeks after he left her apartment in Demoines, they hadn't spoken to her in a month and had stopped expecting to at all. But he still felt like maybe she needed someone. 

She'd called him once, maybe four years after, looking for a loan that he hadn't been able to give her. 

Again, a couple years after that, and that time he could. She paid it back, four years ago, said she'd just been married and so she had the money now. She hadn't sounded happy so much as unspeakably relieved, as much as Winona ever sounds like anything. The kids had been screaming at each other in the background - something about the remote, maybe, liberally interspersed with commentary one somebody's hairstyle. 

But talking to her is like sinking down this black pit, because she's not there. It gives Chris the fucking creeps, how wrapped up she still is in someone who's been gone fifteen years. He doesn't get how she remarried, because he can't figure out who would want to get sucked into whatever world it is Winona puts herself in every day.

Still, he doesn't hang up when she calls this time, doesn't even regret the fact that he always makes sure she has his new number. Winona Kirk doesn't want help and she doesn't know how to ask for it when she needs it, but somehow she can ask him. Chris has never been the kind of man who could walk away from that and he never wants to be.

"My son's in jail," she says, once he's told her he'll do what he can. 

"Sam's in jail?" he says, when she's finished telling him the address he needs to go to and how much bail will be. 

"God only knows where Sam is," she says, and she sounds tired in a way Chris has never been tired. But she always did. "Jimmy's in jail." 

"Isn't James ten?" 

"Fourteen," Winona answers. "Just. It was a fight with my husband- Frank - and he took off and I just got the call. Kid refused to give them a state to start looking in for two days." 

Chris wants to ask why there wasn't a missing person's report, because he doesn't have kids, but it seems like the kind of thing you would do. He doesn't. He helps Winona when he can, but he's not getting sucked into her life. He'll pick the kid up, put him on a plane, move on. It's fine. 

"How do I return him?" he asks, trying to be funny, and failing horribly. 

"I'll come get him in a few days," Winona says. "If he can stay with you? It's only that Frank needs some time to calm down, and I do too or Jim'll be out of the house by supper and -" Chris thinks that, maybe, you'd want to see your child, too, after they'd been missing a few days. But he doesn't have kids, he doesn't know. And he's not fucking Winona so maybe he can't know. 

"I have a guest room," Chris says, thinking that he might. Somewhere, under about eighty bills that a responsible legislator might've read and not skimmed and left to Number One's powers with bullet points. 

~*~

Jim's kind of scrawny, or small for his age is maybe how Chris is supposed to put it. Jim carries it badly. 

Chris briefly considers the idea that he doesn't know how tall fourteen year old boys are supposed to be but decides that he faintly remembers his brother being taller, and Tony pretty much lives on the median. Jim scrunches up in the car seat next to him. He hasn't spoken since confirming that yeah, he knew this guy, it was a friend of his mom's from way back when, now let him the fuck out. He might've looked about twelve, but his voice came out like he was forty. 

"You hungry?" 

"No dairy," Jim answers, "or almonds, and not pineapple." 

Chris is almost entirely sure that means 'yes' in surly, which he speaks fairly fluently.

"Pasta?" he offers, thinking he probably has that in his fridge. 

"No sauce," Jim says, considering. 

They're quiet, again, Chris drums his hands on the wheel and Jim repeats the rhythm on his knee, then fiddles with the window. 

When his phone rings, Jim jumps a solid foot in the air. They're also merging onto the freeway. 

"Can you answer that, kid?" he asks, and Jim does. 

"Senator Pike's phone," and that sounds like fourteen. He covers the speaker, dutifully, after a moment. "Do you know a person named Number One?" 

"Shit," Chris says, with feeling. Fucking cellphone doesn't have speaker and she's been sitting at a restaurant for twenty minutes waiting for him. He really hadn't ever planned on fucking this up. Thank you, Winona Kirk. 

He nearly drives them into someone's SUV before he gets into the flow of traffic. Jim is still looking at him, not exactly expectant, but he doesn't think the kid could be dull-eyed if he tried. He knows nothing about fourteen year olds, but he's pretty sure two days in the drunk tank is supposed to make them more than grouchy.  He doesn't really plan on having time to find out, but he thinks Jim might be something else altogether than his aggressively average brother. 

"Gimme the phone," he says, and reaches out. He doesn't really know what he's going to say, and then he remember that she knows his life and she'll get it. She won't be happy, but she'll be right there with him. That's why she's waiting at the restaurant. That and her ass. "You gonna believe that I just bailed George Kirk's boy outta jail and I'm in temporary custody for at least a week and so can we please reschedule?" 

"Have you ever been stood up?" She asks, coolly. It doesn't mean anything. Once, Number One yelled at someone. It was her ex-husband. It was fourteen years ago and the man left in tears. He thinks she's as reserved as she is because if she lets out all the crazy there'll be nothing left to do but surrender most of the governments of the world to her will.

"Actually, yes. Really pretty girl." 

"You were fifteen," she says, still cool. He can't remember when he told her the story, and thinks it's possible that she just knows. "It is an unpleasant experience." 

"Expense your wine?" he suggests. He'd ask her if she'd reschedule, but it'll only annoy her. Number One does things in her own sweet time. Jim is still glaring suspiciously out the window, somehow having managed to slouch even further down in his seat than he already was. His backpack is clutched between his knees in a way that's got to cramp, Chris notes, absently while he's waiting. 

"Embezzlement from the federal government is so often the best answer," she says. "There is a play I wish to see next Saturday, in the event that I am still not willing to speak to you." 

"Is it weird to ask you to book the tickets on my card?" he asks, letting himself sound as relieved as he is. He is seriously not letting this go because he can't say no to Winona Kirk when she comes asking. 

"I understand that you couldn't do it if you tried. Good luck," she says, her voice almost colored by laughter, and hangs up. 

"I call her Number One because she's my secretary," Chris feels compelled to explain, a few minutes of dead silence later. Jim turns away from the window to look at him. He's practically oozing out of the damn seat but it still manages to look a little accusatory. "Also, I was supposed to go out with her tonight." 

"Sorry," Jim says, and he sounds so fucking sincere that something in Chris nearly cracks. Fourteen year old boys aren't supposed to be able to mean anything that much. 

"It's good," he says, "I like meeting new people." Jim looks skeptical. 

~*~

Jim curls up in the guest room and seems to expect not to come down again, but Chris feels like he should probably watch the kid eat or something, and so drags him down to the kitchen for pasta. There's a lot more slouching and looking at Chris, furtively. Jim pokes at his food a lot before he finally eats it, slowly and carefully. 

"Where are you guys living these days?" he asks, because he faintly remembers Winona asked him the first time for a loan to keep the house her boys had grown up in.

"Me and Mom stay at Frank's house," Jim says, after a long moment, and then takes another bit of his pasta. 

"Frank's your stepdad?" 

"He and Mom got married a while ago," Jim says, nodding. Chris gets the idea that staying on the topic's not going to get him any more information on the guy brave enough to take on Winona and her lost eyes. 

"How's Sam?" 

"Sam ran away again," Jim says, looking up at him. And then back down at his food, too quickly, somehow.

"Again?" Jim just flat out ignores him this time, downing a bit of pasta and a sip of water (he hadn't been sure about the food coloring in Fresca and Chris hadn't been sure about the ethics of giving a fourteen year old beer, even if he had it on very good authority that said fourteen year old quite liked beer). "How old's Sam now?" 

"Eighteen in two months," Jim says. "He's done school now, though." Like it's an excuse. 

"You're just starting high school?" Jim seems to need to think about this for a minute. It's September, so maybe he hasn't started school yet or something. Chris isn't exactly an expert in the Iowan public school system. Hell, he's a little in charge of the California one and last week he gave this beautiful disaster of a quote about curriculum changes that's going to haunt him until he's dead and probably show up in a couple obituaries. 

"Yeah," he says. "My math teacher is the same one Dad had, she told me so." It's the first thing he's seemed even remotely excited about. 

"I never knew your dad," Chris says, "always admired him though. You know how I know your mom?" Jim shakes his head. "Wrote my thesis about your dad, for my masters." 

"Frank doesn't really like it when we talk about Dad a lot," Jim says. "Do you live by yourself?" Chris isn't - he'd think a kid who didn't get to talk about his father much would want to. But then, what the fuck does he know? 

"I was thinking about getting a cat a while back." 

"Were you ever married?" 

"Not even a little bit," Chris says and Jim nods like he approves of this development. 

~*~

It takes him two days to figure out there's something wrong with Jim Kirk. Or, no, those are the wrong words. Something bad has happened to Jim. 

He doesn't sleep, he just paces in his room until Chris gets up at six. Chris has been working in the home office because they're not in session and it seemed like the right thing to do (and Number One has the exquisite ability to continue being angry with him for months after he's been forgiven, so he's decided that the better part of valour is cowering and giving her the run of the office), so he thinks Jim maybe grabs a few hours in the afternoon when he gets quite. 

Jim has no interest in talking to his mother who has no interest in talking to him and gets more and more vague about how long she and Frank are going to take to come get her son. He doesn't talk about home and nobody seems especially concerned that he's missing school. He's never loud and he never rejects food, even if the salad Chris orders in on Tuesday from the Iranian place down the street leaves him visibly nauseous for a few hours. When he doesn't like a question, he just doesn't answer it but he'd never say he was uncomfortable with anything. He never touches anything he isn't first told he's allowed to. He doesn't ask for clothes until halfway through the second day, and then he's fidgeting and apologizing the whole time. 

Chris is a good man, he grew up in a good house and he knew kids like this. They were just - never his problem before. He goes online, but there's nothing that tells you what to do with a kid living in your guest room who you think is being abused by a woman you can't say no to. Or not abused - Winona, with her blank eyes, couldn't summon the strength to abuse he thinks. He knows she tries to do right by the boys, he just wonders if maybe she'd miss it. 

He hates the look on Jim's face when it's Frank who picks up the phone when Chris has them on speaker in the kitchen. He doesn't want to know, not ever, what it means. It might make him a terrible kind of person, that he can't bring himself to ask that. 

So he lets it go on - he lets Jim be strange and he tries to be trustworthy, tries to coax Jim out of the house at least once a day and normally fails, calls Winona every night like clockwork and stops asking if she wants to talk to Jim on the fourth day. After a week, he stops asking when she's coming and wonders if she should start asking if, instead. 

He cancels his date with Number One and spends the night watching old Bond flicks with Jim, instead, because somehow Jim had never seen them. They make popcorn, which seems fairly safe and at no point does Jim go into anaphylactic shock, something Chris is finding increasingly likely. 

"Dad liked these," Jim says, at the end of Goldfinger. "There used to be a box of the books in the basement. Of the apartment. There was a flood. That's why Mom had to marry Frank." This is more information than Chris has gotten out of him in a week, even if it makes less than no sense. The websites said not to push. And if he pushes, he might get answers. Jim's slouching towards him on the couch, and he's not giving that up for anyting. 

"You want to go out tomorrow and get the books?" Chris offers. 

"I can't pay for them, and Mom wouldn't," Jim says, too quickly, again. 

"Call it a present." Jim looks distrustful. "And maybe, if you're going to stay a while, some pyjamas? Something to make it easier for you to sleep." 

"I sleep fine." 

"I'm old, not deaf, Jim." 

"I think I'm going to go to my room," Jim says, and clears his dishes up before he goes. 

One step forward, two steps back, Chris' mother's voice rings out in his head. Fuck, he'd always hated it when she said that. He possibly thinks he's starting to get it. Kids are fucking irritating. 

In the morning, there's a note taped to his door, and he pictures Number One's face if she saw the scotch tape on the door she'd spent weeks finding a decorator to paint exactly the right color of eggshell (it's a better face than the one he knows she must have made on Thursday afternoon, when he called into the office to get a phone number and ask to push it back a week, again. That one could rip him up, if he let it). Jim's asking if he could, maybe, have a lock for his door, if it's not too much trouble, he'll try to pay Chris back later. 

Chris installs it that night while Jim's reading Casino Royale and gives Jim the key. Jim sleeps for fourteen hours that night and something settles warm and heavy at the base of Chris' spine in knowing that. 

~*~

After three weeks he and Jim finally talk about the fact that apparently Jim's kind of semi-permanent. It happens only partially because Number One finally told him to stop rescheduling. That this maybe wasn't it, that he seemed to have something else to focus on. She hasn't met Jim yet because Chris doesn't want to explain why there's a teenaged boy glaring at his office furniture and reading spy novels to any reporters who might wander in, and she's being cold and angry and productive to punish him, so he hasn't seen her outside the office. 

They talk after a shopping trip taken so Jim could actually own clothes that weren't sweatpants. Jim had agreed to a pair of jeans and a few shirts, some socks, some underwear. Chris snuck in a sweater and a winter jacket when he sent Jim to the holistic food place to find some cereal that wouldn't give him hives. Those are all reasons they need to talk, too. 

They have Chinese for dinner that night, and as Jim's carefully separating dishes into sections he says; "I like it here. Last time I had to stay with Frank's uncle. He was an asshole." 

"And I'm not? Thanks," Chris says, then, "don't be so stingy with the bok choi, kid." Jim flinches. He does, sometimes, with nicknames, and Chris tries to remember which ones aren't good and which ones kind of are. Mostly he sticks to Jim, since that seems to work out. He's learned not to apologize for it, because then Jim will start, and once Jim's started apologizing Chris won't sleep for days because - well, he's heard Jim OK, now, and it's not that when he's sorry about something. "How long was last time?" 

"Four weeks," Jim said. "That was the longest. Before we stayed with a friend of Mom's from college for two weeks. Sometimes we used to go see Grandpa Jim, but that was only for a few days." It's good to ask a question Jim can answer. 

"Do you want to go home?" He asks, and he feels like he's overreaching when he does. Jim hands him his plate, and takes a couple bites off his own (fried rice, no soy sauce because neither of them could identify all the ingredient of soy sauce and Jim couldn't remember ever eating it), and Chris thinks he's not getting an answer. 

"I don't think Frank's ready yet." Chris considers taking that as an answer, and he's about to when Jim keeps going. "He was pretty mad at me when Sam left." 

"Why would he be mad at you?" Chris asks, because he feels like maybe he's getting somewhere and he wants to keep going there. No leading questions, he thinks, faintly remembering what little he knows about custody precedent, abuse cases. 

He doesn't know how they did it, but he knows somebody hurt the kid in front of him, and he knows he can only live in a world where that happened if he can make them hurt, too. 

"'Cause Sam wasn't there," Jim shrugs. "And Mom left me when she went to work. So." 

"So you left, too?" 

"Sam got into Georgetown last year," Jim says, very quietly. "I thought maybe he came here." 

"Did he?" Jim shakes his head. "You want us to look for him?" 

"I like it here," Jim says, like that's an answer. "You wanna watch the news?" 

"And afterward we'll watch something where things blow up, as men do?" Chris suggests, raising his eyebrows at Jim, who nods. 

~*~

Sam's at the University of Iowa, full scholarship. Chris knows a guy in the FBI who doesn't ask too many questions and has questionable ethics that Chris never looks into. Sam scored off the fucking charts on his SATs and it seems like he's doing OK. Chris tells Jim and then spends three days waiting for him to take off again. He doesn't and five weeks in, they buy another lock for Jim's door, because Jim asked. Winona starts calling once a week. Chris sits down and writes up a list of everything Jim thinks he might be allergic to, practically cries and finds an allergist near the Capitol with an opening the next Tuesday. He's considering wallpapering in epipens. 

With the allergist, it's the first time he's needed Jim to leave the house that Chris isn't going with him. The instructions he gives about the metro are probably significantly more exacting than they need to be. Jim rolls his eyes so hard that Chris considers also putting in a call to his optometrist. He tells Jim this and Jim tells him he isn't funny. 

Because he made Jim leave probably forty-five minutes before he actually needed to, Jim spends a while lurking in the anteroom, while Chris haggles with union representatives who want to eat his brain on a platter with garlic. He knows because they told him so. Principals are scary people who should not have been allowed collective bargaining until everyone who'd ever gotten the strap from one was dead, he thinks, rubbing at his knuckles as he leaves. 

Jim and Number One, who he hadn't even realized would meet, are having a staring contest. Or possibly just glaring each other down. Number One is still resolutely typing, and, to Jim's credit, there's a book open on his lap even if he's not looking at it.

"Jim," he says, nodding, and Jim nods back, starting to shove the book into his back pocket. "I'm out for the day," he tells Number One who hands him his schedule for the next morning. 

"The meeting with Matlin has been pushed to the afternoon, so I am trying to get her to agree to lunch instead of a formal meeting. If it is a formal meeting it will be in her office and not yours," something prints behind her and she whirls around in the chair, still talking about his first meeting, upon which she seems to feel reelection hangs by a rapidly fraying thread. He, personally, thinks she just really doesn't like the junior senator from Arkansas and wants to make him cry. She staples the papers that have just printed - he notes a lush, green brochure cover and wonders if she's going on vacation. 

He would have known that, a few months ago. He wouldn't, a few months ago, have known the names of seventeen allergists and everyone to ever play a Bond villain. Wouldn't have known how to install a lock. He considers feeling unsettled, but then notes that Jim's shoved the emergency epipen he did have when he showed up into his pocket for once and gets distracted by the idea that Jim behaves for doctors, wondering where they came from, if it should worry him. If there's a way of being more worried than he already is that he doesn't know about. 

He and Number One used to have dinner together at least a few times a week, but he's been leaving a bit earlier because it's probably not good for Jim to spend that much time alone in the house. He'll get depressed. And besides, the kid makes for good company. That's why he doesn't know, is all. There's still the familiar burn in the pit of his stomach when he looks at her, just accompanied by something heavy and beating in his throat every time he glances towards Jim, skulking towards the door like he's aiming for a quick escape. 

"This," she says, handing him the papers, now stapled and placed in one of her green - green for personal - folders, "is a list of every school in the greater DC area which is frequently used by the children of sitting senators. Look over them, you are not camp senator and there is no reason for him to think that you are." Jim's head shoots up and he turns away from his interested examination of one of the guards strolling past. Chris has been wondering if it would be weird to take the kid to target practice in the FBI gym sometime. Jim'd probably like it. 

Chris would like Jim to be able to kill anyone who so much as looks at him wrong.  Not that he'd want Jim to do it just- he'd want Jim to have that safety. His views on guns are many and varied and have caused Number One small aneurysms before, he thinks. 

"It might be something to look into, Jim," Chris says. He had thought about it, a few weeks ago, but then decided that maybe this wasn't that kind of permanent. "You can read over these tonight, I'll call your mom." 

"You wouldn't mind?" Like he's looking for an excuse, and Chris rolls his own eyes, something he's sure he didnt' do nearly so much before Jim set up residence. It might be infectious. 

"It is illegal for you not to be registered in a school," Number One puts in, directly addressing Jim, who glares at her. 

Chris thinks, first, that it's probably not for the best if the two most important people in his life hate each other. 

Then he spends a catatonic hour in the allergist's office trying to figure out when Jim got important while the allergist weeps over Jim, who has reacted to the scratch test by basically blowing up, and suggests that maybe, if they just encase him in bubble wrap, it's possible he'll survive to see sixteen, but he isn't hopeful. 

~*~

School is the catalyst, in the end. School is when they realize that it's been two months and something has to be decided. Chris imagines it's probably about when Winona realizes she finally lost her son. When she stops, just for a minute, taking the path of least resistance she's been on since her husband's last protest and thinks, for a few weeks at least, about fighting back. 

They fight about it, Jim screams and cries and stomps. He doesn't want to go, he says, doesn't need to go, knows it all already and he's smarter than the teachers. Chris agrees that that might all be right but that being arrested by truancy officers is probably a truly pathetic experience. Jim runs into his room, and there's the neat click of the two locks before the sound of Jim hitting the bed with an unusual amount of force. Then the creaking of Jim moving across the floor and the click of the phone coming off the hook. 

Chris does know that it's wrong, and maybe a violation of trust, when he settles on the floor outside Jim's room. It gets to be beside the point very quickly, when Jim starts talking. 

The way Jim apologizes is always, always far too heartfelt, like it's something being ripped out of him. This is something else. 

"I fucked it up again, Mom," he starts, and it goes downhill from there. Stupidly quickly, recriminations, and it's so clear that Winona's playing into it. Into this crazy idea that Jim made his own life terrible that - the whole story comes out and Chris can't think, can't analyze in a way that's been second nature to him the past thirty years. 

Sam left, maybe two days later Winona started working overtime, too much overtime, and Frank was always rough, but he was worse when one of the boys was acting out. With Sam gone and damn near impossible to find, he started beating on Jim - never, Chris figures, thinking back to Jim's new collection of thick, oversized sweaters, where anyone could see, but always exactly where it would hurt. Jim took off, to stay at a friend's, maybe, and Frank found him. It was whatever happened then that set Jim running, and Chris is a brave man, but he can't think of that. 

And Jim is sorry, so fucking sorry for letting Winona's asshole mistake of a husband lay his hands on him. No one should feel like that, especially no child and Chris isn't a good man for thinking it, but especially not Jim. Not his kid. 

It's the first time he thinks it, and it's the first time he thinks about breaking down Jim's door to get and him and keep him safe. He doesn't, he just pulls his knees up to his chest, like he's fucking five, and waits it out. Winona takes the apologies, and he wonders if she's manipulating him, or if she's letting him walk himself down this path. 

He knows Winona, a little better now that he knows her son, and she's letting him take himself down, probably. Knows what she wants but would never ask for it, just lets it happen, lets it not. Jim's nearly there, he thinks, briefly regaining the ability to figure these things out. Thinks of notes taped to his bedroom door and Jim shuffling into the kitchen in the mornings and mentioning that he thinks there's something bad about the off-brand Froot Loops they bought the week before like it's an apology. 

Jim's not going to get to where Winona spends most of her time, Chris can't let him. 

The next day, Jim apologizes to him, tells him he wants to stay, and Chris just nods and roots around in the fridge for the rice milk. He has no idea how to say that he doesn't even know who he'd be if Jim left now. 

~*~

It takes him three weeks to figure out how to say it. Three weeks of Jim on the phone with Winona and Chris bargaining Jim's way into an exclusive private school in Maryland while Jim stubbornly refuses to contemplate starting after Christmas and Number One looking at Chris like he's an entirely new person. Three weeks of Chris feeling like he's an entirely new person. 

A person who runs home to get to Jim and watch movies and eat dinner and try not to set off an allergic reaction. A person who's stopped thinking about dates, but not about what it'd be like to kiss Number One on the cheek in the mornings instead of his usual curt nod and beeline for the coffeemaker. Just - maybe he can't have that. Maybe he got Jim instead. 

He hates himself, a little, for thinking it's more than a fair trade. 

Later, he won't even remember what the fight was about. Something stupid, maybe he wanted Jim to take the trash out and Jim balked or Chris told him to turn down the volume on the TV because healthcare bills were fucking incomprehensible without the distraction. 

But it ends exactly the way it always does. 

Chris sighs, resigned, sits down at the kitchen table and waits. Fifteen minutes, always painful, always hard. Sometimes he sits outside Jim's room, sometimes he doesn't. There's nothing new to hear and it doesn't break his heart any more to be there than it does to wait it out in the kitchen. 

Jim comes down and sits across from him and says "I want to stay." 

And this time, instead of brushing it off, trying to talk about what actually happened, feeding him, turning on Die Hard, whatever it would have been, Chris answers. 

"There is nothing," he says, looking at Jim, catching his eyes even as Jim's looking like he's about to bolt, "that you could ever do that would ever make me want you to leave. I care about you, and you've always got a place here." 

And from then on, that's how they start. They fight like hell, Jim comes down to apologize. 

"There's nothing you could do, Jim," he'll say, and they'll set out how long Jim's grounded. 

~*~

Winona calls in December to announce that she's ready for Jim to come home. Chris is a politician, he is a fucking professional at not telling people he hopes they die in horrible ways as quickly and painfully as possible. 

"No," he says, simple, thorough, exactly what he means. "You're not." And he hangs up on her and doesn't take her calls for three days. Jim never answers the phone in the house because no one's ever calling for him, but it's still tearing something in Chris not to be telling him. He's kind of hoping that this moment of Winona asking for somethign will pass, that she'll decide that Jim's not worth rousing herself from her half-world and she can be this villain who never loved Jim as much as she should have, and it'll be OK. He'll never have to tell Jim she ever asked and he'll get to save Jim without Jim's involvement and Jim's complexity. 

He finally does, six days before Christmas, when Jim's asking what they even do for Christmas in California since there's no snow. He looks all of twelve and Chris wants to bundle him up and take him to Vermont immediately. He realizes then that he has to tell him because - because Jim deserves Vermont Christmases and the small bundle of things he's bought online and over lunches (dragging Number One with him a few times, because she's less angry now and he misses talking to her; she picked most of the books, saying a boy needed more than one genre. He picked all the video games because somebody'll need to play with Jim, and he wants a fair shot of winning). Jim deserves to know that someone wants that for him. Deserves to be reminded that somebody would choose him, every damn time. 

"Your mom wants you to go home," he says. "I don't want that, and I told her so." 

"Why don't you want that?" Jim asks, genuinely puzzled. Chris wants to tell him that he's only just gotten the hang of having to plan his meals days in advance, or that he went through a lot of trouble to get Jim registered in winter courses. But that's not right. That won't tell Jim what he needs to know. 

"Because she hurt you." 

"Not Mom," Jim says, very fast, very low. His voice still cracks, sometimes. More now that he's comfortable, he sounds so much younger when he's happy, but now he's the forty-year-old Chris picked up from the drunk tank. 

"Frank," Chris says and Jim nods. "You don't have to go back." 

"She's my fucking mom," Jim says. "Full custody 'cause, you know, dad's dead and no one else ever fucking wanted me." Normally, Jim doesn't swear around him, at least not much, some twisted idea of respect that Chris suspects he doesn't even want to know where Jim picked up. 

"Well, I want you to stay. You want me to figure out how to make that happen?" 

"I want to stay here," Jim says, and runs back upstairs. He's said it before, but this time he says it like he's about to start crying. 

And god, he's just a kid, and he can be Chris' kid, and there's no way he goes back to Winona after saying that. 

~*~

Sometimes, Chris is not literal enough, he realizes. 

Because Jim could be his kid and it's Jim who comes up with it. If Chris adopted him, then he'd be Chris' and Winona couldn't touch him, not ever again. Which is possibly the most appealing thing either of them have ever heard.

He has Number One start looking up adoption law, and starts the long, slow process of trying to get Jim to understand that he'd still be a good person if he let Chris make sure Frank Welling never saw sunlight again. Jim's not interested. He doesn't want to hurt Winona, he just doesn't want to let her near him. Chris wants to point out that he doesn't think it's possible to hurt Winona any more than she's already been hurt, but then he remembers that she did try to do good by the boys. That she doesn't seem to understand why they both left, why it would hurt them that she didn't come running, that she built her life around George's empty seat at the table and not the way Jim turns purple whenever someone says 'almond' in his general vicinity. 

He used to think she needed to be woken up, needed to learn how to love her sons and maybe - stupid as it sounded - herself, a little bit. How to fight back and make a fucking choice every once in a while instead of waiting for the next thing to come to her. Now he just hopes he can throw up enough obstacles that she'll give up, that she'll go back to patiently waiting to die and get it all over with already, whatever it is that she's been doing. 

And, again, it's Jim who comes up with it, comes up with the obstacle they can throw that'll be too big for her to scale, too big for her to care about scaling. 

It's the middle of the night, and Chris is mostly asleep - there's paperwork next to him on the bed because he lives a cliche (at least it doesn't smell like Number One's perfume, maybe because she doesn't wear any. She doesn't, he reflects, really smell like anything. Practical soap, maybe a bit of baby powder, fresh shoe leather, the bindings on reports), and Jim locked himself in his room a couple hours before. He's reading The Bourne Identity, now, and starting school in two weeks. He'll be fifteen in eight months, and it's been a week since Chris figured out that he could get to be the one who sees Jim become something special. 

It's been six months. Jim's making straight As, but at the second school he went to 'cause the kid's nothing if not particular and aggravating. He drives Number One up the wall and does most of their filing because Chris doesn't trust him not to commit felonies if left alone with the kind of kids Jim makes friends with.