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"We were kids back then," John says, almost like he believes that means something. Cooper, on the other hand, is done with this bullshit. They've been on the run for six months now, which is six months longer than he'd thought they'd last back when it all started, and there John is, acting like this thing is nothing when it's definitely something. So, Cooper raises his brows like that means something, too. Maybe John's not psychic, just like he's not a ghost and he's not the boogeyman, but they know each other well enough that there's no way he doesn't understand. The look on Cooper's face says he's done. It says he's fucking done.---There was a smudge of blood on the front door that night, bright and wet against the paintwork, so Cooper knew to expect his unexpected guest. He's never liked bringing his work home with him - he tells himself that's why his job was always a secret till it wasn't anymore - but he had his gun in its shoulder holster there in easy reach. Times were he would've left it locked in the strong box hidden in the lining of the trunk of his car so no one could've found it around the house, but there was no one to find it anymore. He eyed the smudge. He pushed open the door. He went inside. He's done a lot of things over the years and he's made a lot of enemies so he figured work had followed him home, the way it had before during the Frank Moses incident. He maybe should've been thinking through all of the people it could've been but he was focused on the volume of his breath in the air and the weight of his gun in his hand (was the clip still full? it felt full) as he let his eyes adjust to the relative dark. Then he walked into the den and there the intruder was, sitting in Cooper's favorite armchair. He knew who it was, even in the half-light. If he'd expected anyone, it wouldn't've been him."Are you working?" he asked. John flicked on the lamp; Cooper immediately lowered his gun. "Jesus Christ, John, you look like hell," he said, and he pushed his gun back into its holster. He strode over there, to hell with how John's hand was still resting on the grip of a beat-up Beretta because he was pretty sure neither of them believed he could pick it up. "So, what happened?" he asked, leaning over him to quickly assess the damage. Contusions, lacerations, blood seeping through the side of his shirt and straight into the upholstery, so maybe he was shot. He looked about ten paces from the morgue and Cooper was pretty sure the chair would never be the same again. "Must've been bad for you to be here." He gave John's side an experimental palpation. "Gunshot?" John nodded, wincing slightly. Cooper stood back, his fingertips bloody."So, who did you kill?" he asked.John looked at him levelly, like he was weighing his options as he bled. He rested his head against the chair back."Santino," he said."Jesus." "Maybe he thought he was, yeah.""So why aren't you at the Continental?" John just looked at him; his expression was so damn obvious that Cooper's stomach sank. He guessed he didn't need to ask any more questions about that. He stepped back. He sat down heavily on the thankfully sturdy wooden coffee table Michelle had never been sure about, not that he could say her lack of foresight in terms of domestic furniture made him any gladder she was gone. "You know you can't stay here, right?" Cooper said."I'm just asking for the night." "You think we'll get through the night with the Camorra coming for you?"John frowned. "It's not just the Camorra." "Has it ever occurred to you to wonder why everyone always wants to kill you?" Cooper asked. He ran both hands over his hair, feeling his holster pull tight across his shoulders. "You can't be here, John," he said, and he wished to God he could've let that be the end of it except he knew it wasn't. They hadn't seen each other in fifteen years and there was enough water under that bridge for them both to drown in but John was still John. A friend was still a friend. Maybe that was why John had come to him, or maybe he'd just had nowhere else to go.Cooper sighed. "I have a place you can go," he said. But they both knew John wouldn't be going alone, and that didn't just mean the dog sitting there by the armchair. He didn't even wonder if John still had his marker till they were already gone.---They spent twenty minutes grabbing Cooper's shit: just a few essentials they'd need if and when they got where they were going, like his go bag (clothes, towels, tube of toothpaste, like any of that would matter if they got themselves shot to death), his other go bag (guns, ammo, first aid kit that might even have been stocked well enough to deal with most of John's current injuries), and his other go bag (six passports in a variety of different names and nationalities, a bunch of keys, a case of gold coins that he'd never thought he'd need again but that he'd kept just in case he did). He had it all ready, for the most part. He only had to hack out part of one wall, which seemed pretty reasonable considering where he could've hidden the case instead.They spent two hours getting out. They left through the back door with John's arm slung around Cooper's shoulders and Cooper's arm slung around John's waist, trailing bags through the snow as they slip-slided their way across the frozen pond in the dim glow of the neighbors' back porch lights. They climbed the bank, John in pretty much no fit state to move except they couldn't not move him and Cooper figured if they lived through the night, then they could worry about the damage. They stole a neighbor's shitty old sedan right from the driveway, ditched it after three miles and then picked up an minivan round the corner that had a dent in the driver's side door like its owner had opened it up straight into a parking meter and fast food wrappers littering the footwells like the word trashcan was entirely absent from their vocabulary. They ditched the minivan somewhere in the next suburb over and walked twenty minutes with their heads down, Cooper's hand pressed up hard to John's bleeding side underneath his jacket and the dog wandering along obediently beside them. They picked up an inconspicuous black SUV Cooper had had stashed in a parking structure, just waiting for a rainy day, and they drove away. John passed out on the back seat with the dog's head on his lap. It wasn't a great sign, but at least he only had the gunshot wound he'd arrived with and no fresh ones to match; they got where they were going without a single bullet being fired. Cooper had to wonder whether it was expertise or just blind luck.They spent two days in an apartment Cooper had been keeping under an alias, someplace just expensive enough that his neighbors kept themselves to themselves but not so much it drew the wrong kind of attention. They went in the back way and he hauled John's, heavy, unconscious ass up the stairs all the way to the fourth floor, dumped him on the bed and left him there with the dog standing guard while he ran back down to grab his stuff from the car. Honestly, he half expected to find a Camorra goon or two looming over John's bullet-riddled corpse when he got back but he was just how he'd left him, the dog whining next to him on the mattress. He gritted his teeth and didn't try to tell himself he'd seen him look worse, because he really hadn't. Then he rolled up his shirtsleeves and he got to work.He cut off John's bloody shirt and re-stitched then re-dressed the wound in his side while he was still out cold, because that just seemed like the easiest option. He cleaned off John's torn-up knuckles over a bowl of warm water laced with antiseptic and patted them dry on a bloodied-up towel. He pulled off John's shoes and laid him out in the bed and when he woke up groaning sometime around 3am, Cooper handed him a couple of strong painkillers to knock him right back out again - John looked at him like he was trying to figure out if he could trust him, like he wondered if the pills were poison or he'd hand him over to the goddamn Camorra as soon as he was out again, so Cooper just raised his brows and crossed his arms over his formerly white shirt now stained with John's blood like some kind of trashy horror flick. John took the point, and he took the pills. It wasn't long till he was out again, just something more like sleep that time and not straight-up unconsciousness.He figured John needed to rest. He figured he'd come to him in the first place because he knew he'd look out for him while he did, even if he'd needed reminding of that fact, and not just because someplace, somewhere, with him there or not, John still had his bloody fingerprint inside an official marker. He knew he could've gone through John's stuff to check for it while he was still out, but he just didn't bother. Two days later, he helped John into a change of clothes so he wouldn't pull his stitches and they moved on again.They spent two weeks in the next place, Cooper heading out to buy food with a gun holstered under his winter coat while John held the fort, sleeping in shifts just in case the Camorra - or maybe just someone else completely, given how wide Cooper guessed the contract had gone - somehow found them. Cooper spoke to Winston from a payphone in the back of a shitty bar forty minutes' drive away to find out exactly what the fuck was going on because somehow that seemed easier than asking John. He stood there, eyeing the patrons in various stages of drunkenness while Winston talked, like any one of them could've turned out to be a hired assassin and frankly, the world John lived in that Cooper had gotten out of once upon a time, that much was true. Winston seemed surprised to hear from him, even if he still recognized his voice, and Cooper figured it'd been fifteen years so that made perfect sense. Winston told him was was going on. It was as bad as he'd thought and then some, and there was nothing more that Winston could do to help. His hands were tied, and they both knew it, but he seemed almost relieved to hear Cooper was the one that John had gone to. He didn't pretend not to understand exactly why that was. Winston didn't pretend he thought it would be anything but his last resort, and didn't pretend he didn't think he'd need it.When he got back, while he was changing the dressing over John's wound, John asked about Cooper's wife like he already knew half the answer, or at least like he suspected it. Cooper's hands went still for a second over John's warm, bare side. He winced. He started again, taping down the bandage. John looked basically the same as he always had, not even too much older, but there were more scars underneath his clothes than Cooper remembered."Someone told her what I do for a living," he replied, taken off-guard the way John had always seemed to get him, ever since the day they'd met. "When she asked me about it, I told her the truth." "Oh," John said. Cooper smiled tightly. "Yeah, oh," he replied, standing up, stepping back, and he didn't elaborate. He didn't ask about John's wife; that didn't require elaboration, either. He just went into the other room and got started in on dinner.In the morning, Cooper sat John down on a dining chair he dragged into the bathroom and he cut his hair short. He lathered his face and he shaved him clean like he'd used to do sometimes, before, when it'd still seemed weird but not quite as weird. He'd done it the first time because John had fucked up his hands, probably on a guy's face but he never really got the full story. John was always clean-shaven back then and the five-day beard was pissing him off, not that he said so but by then the two of them hadn't really needed to say much to get the point across and Cooper had brought out a fancy straight razor his uncle had given him for his twenty-first birthday. The last time was three weeks before the end; John hadn't understood when Cooper said he wanted his help getting out, but he'd helped him anyway, maybe because offering a marker had made it seem real somehow, like he'd thought it through and not like it was some spur-of-the-moment crap he'd dreamed up. He'd made a really good Marine after that. He'd been a really good agent once he'd gotten himself recruited. He wasn't dumb enough to believe the company's higher-ups didn't know at least some part of who he was and where he'd come from, but the rest of it John had helped him bury. "I would've done this without the marker," Cooper told him, pretending like he wasn't looking at him, pretending like his thumbs weren't lingering at John's cheekbones or his jaw as he smoothed some kind of aftershave lotion over his shaved face. He looked younger without the obvious gray in his beard. John nodded, meeting his gaze steadily. "I marked it paid two hours after you left," he replied. Cooper guessed he should've known.---Winston was the one who introduced them. Winston always seems to know everyone who walks through the doors of the Continental, so it was hardly a surprise he knew both of them, so the surprise was more than he went out of his way to make the introduction - he intercepted Cooper with his usual charm, though he wasn't exactly Cooper yet back then, and guided him through the hotel bar to where John Wick was sitting. He was wearing a suit and looking uncomfortable though that seemed to have more to do with the party going on around them than his choice of outfit for the night, and Cooper could tell he had no interest in being there, which was a lot like he felt himself. Still, it turned out the family had felt like they had to send a representative along since the Albanians and the Camorra and the Cosa Nostra all had, and with everyone else out of town, back in Russia for some kind of high-powered tête-à-tête, Cooper was what they'd got. He'd been trying to distance himself from the family business for years by then already - he was a grad student in Political Science living on the money his father had left him and a part-time bartending gig that had made him really handy with a cocktail shaker, and kept out of all the other stuff. But when Uncle Vasily called, it wasn't like he could say no.He knew who John Wick was, mostly because everyone did and not just the Tarasovs. He had a reputation, even then, and Cooper had no idea what Winston was doing introducing the two of them. They shook hands politely and Winston ushered Cooper into the booth and waved over a waitress with a couple of glasses of champagne before he vanished back into the crowd and left them there together. Cooper didn't mention how John's boss's boss was his dead dad's brother. He figured he probably already knew. The surprise was, it didn't turn out to be even half as awkward as Cooper expected it to be. They glanced at each other in a kind of muted amusement as people came to the table to pay their respects to Cooper's absent uncle but didn't linger too long because John Wick was sitting right there. They sipped their way through three flutes of good champagne each then John asked for a bottle of bourbon and two glasses and when he nudged one in Cooper's direction entirely without a word, he took it. They drank together till the party was officially over then they shook hands again and they went their separate ways and Cooper thought that was it, but two nights later, around 9pm, there was a knock on his apartment door. It was John, in his suit but carrying a bag full of cartons of Thai food from the place around the corner in one hand and a bottle of really good vodka in the other. Cooper guessed the fact he wasn't dead already meant John wasn't working that night, not that he could see any reason for a poli sci grad student to have a price on his head. He thought about asking him to leave, like that would even mean anything when John was barely a bigger part of things than he was himself. He opened the door and let him in instead and they ate straight from the cartons on the couch in front of the TV that was playing a Hitchcock movie. It turned out John enjoyed the classics and so did he. IT was a start, if nothing else. John came by again three nights later and four nights after that. He came by with pizza or Chinese takeout, beer or a bottle of tequila, and they ate on the couch with a movie playing. The next time, John brought a hard case with him that he leaned against the wall by the door and Cooper figured there was probably a rifle in it. The next time, he was wearing two guns in a shoulder holster that he hung up on the coatrack. The next time, there were flecks of blood down one side of his neck and Cooper, stupidly, reached out with one hand to rub them away. John looked at him, not quite frowning, so Cooper showed him his faintly bloody fingertips. "Oh," John said. "I guess I should've taken a shower before I came over." "You can use mine," Cooper told him. "You don't mind?""Let me grab you a towel."And fifteen minutes later, John reappeared, barefoot in his pants and undershirt, his wet hair slicked back and clinging to his neck. He seemed different, mostly out of the the expensive suit. Cooper told himself not to look too closely.He came over twice a week, three times, sometimes four. A couple of times he stopped by Cooper's work and ordered a complicated cocktail with a totally straight face and watched him make it, which was fine because then Cooper got to watch him drink it. After the first couple of times he caught him loitering in the hall like something out of some terrible film noir, he gave him his spare key and after that, sometimes he came in after work or a late-running meeting with his supervisor and found John working on a stir-fry in the kitchen or sitting on his couch with a beer in one hand and a gun in the other, just in case. Somehow, school had started to feel a whole lot less important than the taciturn killer in his living room, and that was fine, he'd had that kind of dumbass crush before and gotten over it eventually. The only problem was, as a month became two became six and more, that he didn't get over it. Ity only ever got worse. It was nine months after they'd met the first time someone tried to kill him. He came home and flipped on the light, figuring he was alone, but came face to face with some unfamiliar guy in the kitchen thirty seconds later; John shot the guy in the head, without a moment's hesitation, showering Cooper in blood in the process. John called for cleanup then he tossed him a jacket and had him pull up the hood and keep his head down as they walked out; twenty minutes and a cab later, they stepped inside the Continental. Five minutes and a shiny gold coin across a counter after that, John stripped him down and nudged him into eh shower. A minute after that, eh joined him. Maybe John thought he'd be too shaken up for it to register, but he really wasn't. He was right there in the moment when john reached out and washed the dead man's blood from his skin. And when he got back to his apartment the next day, it was just as clean as he was. The next time was after work a few weeks later, more than a month but less than two. He stepped out of the back way into the alley and a guy caught him around the neck with some kind of a garotte. John, from nowhere, punched the guy in the neck. John, from nowhere, buried a knife in the guy's aorta then whipped it straight back out again. He called for cleanup from a cab they caught on the street two minutes' walk away and Cooper pulled on John's suit jacket to hide the blood all over the front of his white work shirt. He still couldn't speak by the time they arrived at the Continental and his neck was a angry red and faintly bloody mess. He let John strip him out of his ruined clothes and take him to the shower like that was the normal thing to do under the circumstances, watched him strip himself and join him, too. He watched John rinse the blood from him, watched his hands on his chest, fingers over his abdomen, and oh God, there was no way he could laugh off the reaction that he had to that because he couldn't talk, let alone laugh. All he could do was gasp and lean back against the tiled wall as John's hand skimmed down lower and his fingers wrapped around him. All he could do was watched as John dropped down onto his knees and brushed his lips against the tip of his erection. All he could do was watch as John took his cock into his mouth and teased him with his tongue and sicked him till he made him come, holding his hips still with both hands as he did it. It was ridiculous. He hadn't known what to expect, but it hadn't been that. And afterwards, John dabbed the broken skin at Cooper's throat with antiseptic cream, both of them sitting shirtless on the huge hotel room bed. They slept side by side and John didn't say a word while Cooper couldn't and by the time his voice was back again, the moment to question exactly what the fuck was going on had decidedly passed. The third time someone tried to kill him was five weeks after that, and even then he figured it was all just to get to his uncle through the weakest link. A guy burst in while John was in the shower and all Cooper could do was reach for John's gun. He thumbed off the safety and he shot him twice, in the chest and in the neck, and he dropped to the floor with a pained kind of gurgle; John appeared, stark naked, and finished the guy office with a cushion pulled from the couch pressed over his face. "Are you hit?" John asked, standing himself back up. The shower was still running in the bathroom. There was still water running of John's hair and down his neck, over his shoulders, down his chest. Cooper shook his head. "I'm fine," he said. He held out the gun. "Keep it," John told him, and he tossed him his phone. "Call for cleaning. Give them your name, they'll know you're not me."So he did it, while John was drying himself and pulling on his clothes - he gave his name, his real name, and the damned account number he'd never even wanted to have in the first place. When they left the apartment, Cooper had one of John's guns tucked into his belt at the small of his back. Everything he'd worked for was sliding out of his grip. There was no way he could control it. He didn't notice they weren't headed to the Continental till they got where they were going and it wasn't there. It was a converted warehouse in the sort of part of town that had been really shitty not too long ago before the hipsters had moved in with coffee shops and wine bars. John led him up the fire escape to the top floor - they went in through a window and John moved across the room in the dark to go kill the alarm. "This is your place," Cooper said, more statement than question. John nodded curtly in the affirmative once he'd turned on the lights and Cooper looked around; the big open living room was practically empty except for three mats and a punchbag, just white goods and a table with one chair through in the kitchen, a bed and a table lamp sitting on the bedroom floor. "I guess you don't entertain much," Cooper said. John looked at him sharply. "No, I don't," he replied. "Then what are we doing here, John?""Was that the first time you've killed someone?""Do you expect me to break down?""No.""Then what?""I want to be sure the people behind this know we don't work together.""So you think this is about you?""I want to be sure that it's not.""And you think this will prove it?""You said it yourself. I don't entertain much."Cooper rubbed his eyes. "This doesn't prove anything unless they know you.""It proves something.""How doesn't anyone know this isn't work?""It's not work.""It's not? How does anyone know we're not partners? How do they know you weren't hired to protect me?""I wasn't.""How do I know?""You know.""How?"John took him by the shoulders. John took him by the back of the neck. He moved closer. "You know," he said, lower, closer. And he pressed his mouth to his.Cooper kissed him back. Cooper took a handful of John's hair and he kissed him back, hard. John's fist closed on a handful of shirt a the small of Cooper's back and they pulled apart, flushed and breathless. He guessed he did know after all. Cooper pulled off his shirt and tossed it to the floor. John took off his jacket and unbuttoned his shirt. Cooper unbuckled John's belt and John unzipped Cooper's jeans and they stripped each other down to their bare skin under the stark lights in front of huge, curtainless windows. Maybe it should've bothered him more that anyone could've seen but he guessed that was part of the point and he ran his hands over John's hips, kissed his throat, wrapped one hand around his cock and squeezed. John groaned and Jesus Christ that was gratifying. He wanted to make John Wick lose control. He pushed him down on the mats by the punchbag and knelt down between his thighs; the look on John's' face said he'd've let him do whatever the hell he wanted to and Cooper thought about it, about finding something approximating lubricant and fucking him right then and there. He didn't. He sucked John's cock instead, got him wet, got him hard, then straddled his thighs. He guided John's' cock up against his hole and pushed down, slowly, pushed him in, made himself groan out loud and John right with him. He didn't care that it hurt because it felt good, too, once he'd relaxed around him, once he'd let John's cock stretch him open. It felt amazing. It felt like what he'd wanted to do since almost the same night they'd met. John looked up at him, settling his hands at Cooper's hips. Cooper shifted, rocked his hips against him, moved above him, moved around him, gritted his teeth and spread his hands over John's chest. It didn't take much and it didn't take long but Jesus, when John wrapped his hand around Cooper's cock and stroked, when Cooper rode him harder, pushed him deeper, it felt like they'd wasted a year getting up to that point. John came inside him, his hands pulling so tight they'd maybe bruise, and the sad fact was Cooper would've killed ten men if it meant he got to feel that again. He'd've killed twenty. They did it again in the morning, in John's bed, no further deaths required. They did it again at Cooper's place, two nights later, then three nights after that. They screwed on his couch and broke the coffee table. They screwed in a shower at the Continental the next time someone tried to kill him. They screwed in his shared office at the school he was pretty sure he was dropping out of. He was fucked up. He was carrying a gun under his coat, and he knew exactly how to use it; over the next few months, John made sure of that. John gave him the skills to be the kind of man he'd hoped he'd never be, just to make sure he stayed alive."It's your uncle," John said, six months down the road, and somehow that made perfect sense. Cooper laughed. It wasn't really funny, except in a way it was; Uncle Vasily had always been a sneaky son of a bitch, and he'd let himself be manipulated. A few more failed attempts, a few more deaths and who knew, maybe he would've wound up coming back to the fold of ostensibly his own accord. It was brilliant, really, when he thought about it. He had to give him credit, but he sure as hell didn't have to give him anything else.Six nights later, he kissed John on the mouth then told him that he wanted out. He asked for his help. He offered him his marker. One week after that, Cooper was gone. He's made hard decisions in the course of his life, but none have been harder than that one. He was pretty sure he'd never see John Wick again.---They spent twenty minutes grabbing Cooper's shit and two hours getting out; they spent two days in the first place and two weeks in the one after that. They spent two months in the next place. John had never been chatty but then neither had Cooper so it was just like old times except worse, looking over their shoulders, watching their backs. Cooper walked the dog and John fed him. They took turns cooking when John could finally handle standing at the stove and not just because he was being a stubborn ass about it. John talked a little about his wife who'd died. Cooper talked a little about his ex-wife and kids he could never see again. When they kissed that first time, it was more out of a kind of melancholic despair than from nostalgia for times together past. The next time, it wasn't shared misery that did it. Three months in, safe house number nine, almost all of Cooper's options were utterly expended though somehow that didn't seem to matter; he'd fucked things up with the CIA and now he probably couldn't go back even if he'd wanted to, and there was John sitting opposite him at the kitchen table while they cleaned a couple of their guns. It reminded him of the old times, at the Continental while John was on a job or in Cooper's shitty student apartment and they'd known they shouldn't because it wasn't like Cooper worked for the Russians the way John did. Cooper was part of the top Russian family, seventh or eighth in line from the head of it who had the Russians' seat at the high table, minor and uninvovled enough to be mostly left the hell alone but major enough that people knew his name - back then, it wasn't Cooper. And John, well, John was baba yaga. They shouldn't've been friends but Winston had introduced them. They were friends after that. Some kind of friends, at least, though he guessed exactly what kind depended on who you asked.It reminded him of old times except then again maybe they were both different people. Maybe fifteen years away from that life had meant something except he stood and he went around the table and he took the gun from John's hands and he put it down. He leaned down and he kissed him and then John looked at him like maybe he might say something except he didn't say a word at all. He pushed him back. He stood himself up. He pushed Cooper up against the damned kitchen sink and he looked at him, like nothing had changed, like no time had passed, like they were back there, like they knew each other, like whatever this was really meant something. But things had changed and it wasn't just time. It wasn't just the greater number of scars there underneath John's shirt. John walked away.There've been more times since. There've been mornings at the kitchen table, nights reading books on the couch or the two of them out running with the dog that still has no goddamn name even now and maybe it's not the same as it used to be but it's not not. He catches John getting out of the shower or the other way around, they brush past each other in the hall, and it's there again, in his head, getting underneath his skin. Sometimes John looks as unwilling to stop as Cooper feels. And last night, they didn't stop. This morning, John wants to take it back."I called my uncle," Cooper said, last night. John didn't ask which one, though they both know he has several. There's only ever been one that matters, and it's not Uncle Sasha who sells suits in Queens or Uncle Nikolai with the strip club in St. Petersburg, or Vladimir who's been incarcerated almost as long as Cooper has been alive. He was talking about the one all the other uncles had named kids after, like that would bring on some kind of bout of favoritism. Of course, Cooper's father hadn't held much with that; after all, he'd called him William.John frowned at him from the kitchen table. "Why?" he asked, almost like he genuinely didn't know. "You know why," Cooper said. "I offered him a trade. He accepted." He tossed the final passport down on the table right in front of him, the last identity he had on hand, the one he'd always toyed with just plain setting fire to instead of repeatedly renewing. "Him for you."John flicked to the details. Cooper knows they read William Bondarev, not William Cooper, though they're essentially the exact same thing in two different languages. He looked at him. John has never been great at showing emotion, at least not as long as Cooper's known him. He's great with severe, sometimes managers angry and menacing seems to come pretty easily though Cooper's not convinced that's not just his reputation preceding him. He can give flat-out blank like a champion, but actual emotion...well, that's pretty rare in Cooper's particular experience. Right then, though, John's face was a picture. He looked genuinely fucking appalled."No," he said. "You don't have to do that.""You expect me to believe that's not why you came to me and not any of a hundred other people?""Yes. Because that's not why."Cooper shrugged. "Either way, it's done.""So undo it."Cooper smiled wryly. "You know I can't," he said. "Besides, it's my decision. I'm choosing to save your life, John. You're just going to have to live with that."John stood. John stood himself up and he hit him, he hit him, closed fist to the jaw and Cooper maybe half-expected it but staggered back a pace or two from it anyway. John hits hard. Cooper would know; since he left, he's barely been a week without a fight. He traded one life of violence for another kind, like that shit just followed him wherever he went.John kissed him. He grabbed him as he was testing out his jaw and he kissed him, and he pushed him, and he shoved him up against the wall and Cooper pulled at him, at his shirt, at the back of his neck, his hair, not even close to close enough.When they went to bed, if felt right, even after everything. And after, while he was tracing the lines of John's tattoos with his fingertips, when John turned his head with the ghost of a smile, maybe it even felt like the years between were worth it.---"We were kids back then," John says, like he means they didn't know any better, like he means it was all one big mistake, like he means they should've outgrown it. "We can't go back."Cooper grimaces. "I was twenty-three," he replies, his tone hard. "And goddammit, John, you can't tell me you were any younger." He sighs. He shakes his head. "Besides, I'm not talking about going back. I'm talking about what comes next." John considers this. John looks at him, like it's a trick question when there wasn't even a single question in there anywhere, except maybe there was, wrapped up inside. Does John think they were too damn young back then to mean it? Cooper doesn't. As far as Cooper's concerned, they knew what they were doing all along. As far as Cooper's concerned, he's known what he's been doing since he walked into his house and found John bleeding. He knew what he was doing when he called Vasily. He knew what he was doing after that, in the bedroom, skin on skin. Cooper's done with this. He's fucking done with John's bullshit, with this thing that's been looming, like they've never been anything but colleagues when they've never been colleagues at all. He's angry and he's sick and he could fucking scream but even after that, he knows there's nothing about it that he'd change. He was always going to help him. He was always going to save John's life, the way that he saved his and maybe it's that that John sees when he looks at him now. Maybe that's what makes him frown, not the fact he doesn't want it but the fact he does."I'm older than I look," John admits. He says the words clearly and deliberately. He enunciates. There's no misunderstanding there.Cooper mouth twists in something almost a smile. He knows what that means. He knows what he's admitting. When John steps in and rests his forehead against his, it all makes sense again."I know you have to go," John says, like he wishes he didn't."You'll just have to come get me," Cooper replies. "I won't be hard to find."He got out once, all those years ago, so he figures he can do it again. And John's right there to help him do it.