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In the end it never really mattered why it happened- why any of it happened. It was inevitable, like that. Like how they described Mikey ending up in Latvia, even after the connectivity strike. Something like destiny, except more vindictive. A literal cruel twist of fate, orchestrated by something that must be tangible in this world and yet just as unreachable. It didn’t matter, like he said.
In the end it was inevitable.
They’d gone through so much shit just to get to that point, the bugs in his house, the double and triple blinds between all of them, trusts and loyalties balanced against each other on a tightrope in the saddest circus you’d ever seen. Just the fact that they made it through to the other side of that mess without anyone cutting anyone else off was a miracle and involved a lot of concessions and one or two concussions before they managed it. Point was, even though he knew this would happen, conceptually, he’d mainly put it out of his mind. Being told you were going to kill someone and actually killing them were two different things.
That left him here, at the end. Coming home from a mission and finding the door left open. Walking in from the door and finding unfamiliar boot prints on their carpet. Following the boot prints in and finding blood. Following the blood and finding-
And finding-
Sylvester August Baxter was not a stranger to death, human or otherwise, friend or not. Hell, he wasn’t even a stranger to this death, technically, it was just that….
The thing is, usually the one dying was Mikey, plain and simple, discounting whatever they got up to in the compound (he tried not to think about it, because it left him feeling helpless and unimaginably angry and sad). And one way or the other they always managed to fix it, and, most notably, he’d never been the first one to find out.
This was a different story. This was-
This was Michael’s body in their living room, the couch pushed to the side and the table knocked over, signs of the struggle just highlighting how still he was, how stark the blood was. It was still spreading, it was still-
“Michael?” He heard himself ask, distantly, quiet in a way he wasn’t sure was from how he couldn’t seem to remember how to breathe or how hard it was to hear anything from the static roaring itself inside his ears. Similarly, he didn’t really know how he ended up on the floor, either, only that one moment he was looking at the scene and the next his knees were hurting and he could feel the warmth still in the process of leaving his body as he pulled him close.
He’d considered this possibility before, of seeing him- of seeing Michael, dead. With the way things went they both just sort of assumed he’d be the first to kick it, between them. But it always felt outside of him, of his involvement, of his control. But this was his home, this was their home, it was safe.
It was supposed to be safe.
He was supposed to come home and they’d cook something together, do whatever they felt like doing to occupy their night and then go to bed.
He wasn’t supposed to be learning, vividly, what it was like to hold a body as the cold seeped into it. He wasn’t supposed to stare into unblinking, blank eyes and not have the courage to close them even as they terrified him to look into. To see how truly wrong it all was.
When he considered this, Michael’s death, he could never decide if he thought he’d cry or not. He wasn’t, but he wished he was. Instead he felt…numb, like a weight had been attached to all of his thoughts and emotions and it had been dumped in the middle of a freezing lake, and he was stuck in the middle. Floating enough to breathe but feeling the cold rake through his veins the longer he stayed there, unmoving.
Eventually he got up, somehow. He couldn’t… he didn’t know what to do, from there, but he knew he didn’t want to do anything , he didn’t want to move past this point.
Luckily, he didn’t have to in a very real, literal sense. He could fix it.
He just had to fix it.
He couldn’t do it on his own simply because he had nothing to do it with; that was the only reason he ended up calling the satellite base. Out of his options, that was the one that was least likely to resist- or at least, the one he could probably convince to help even though it might not be the best decision from a logistical standpoint (because fuck that, Michael being dead would never be the better option, damn whatever consequences came with it).
To the Base and the Compound he was just…well, he was Michael, still, but he was also just the oldest version of Mike that was here at the moment. To him, to Mikey, and M.W., he was Michael, and he couldn’t just be replaced by some other version of himself, the same but different. So he knew he could get them to help; and after a tense few hours of back and forths and shouting and pleading and, honestly, a lot of words he’d have to apologize for later, he was being sent back to find out what happened.
M.W. is on the phone with him, a fail safe listening in on the off chance he makes a misstep and ends up dead alongside his- er, well. Alongside Michael. It takes them, according to M.W., ten tries for Sly to get eyes on the culprit without also being spotted and subsequently killed. He has a feeling it’ll take a lot more to actually fix it once he does though.
Hunter Jeremiah Hartley.
Specifically, Hunter, just old enough to perfectly match a corpse set to appear in a cabin in O.V.E.R. years ago, just old enough to be someone Sly knows he will kill, because he has to.
It takes 10 hours of scouting, 35 non-consecutive hours of planning, and 137 tries for it to go correctly. In that time he does not sleep, barely eats, and subsists mainly on water because this is too important to fog up with alcohol no matter how much he wants to jump into that particular abyss.
In the end, they have to wait for him at the house. This means that, for approximately 87 tries that went wrong, Sly directly sees the bullets enter the man he loves and hears the combination thump-crunch of his body colliding with the table and the floor. Sees the beginnings of the blood stain he walked in on that started all of this.
He only vomits the first two times, and no one blames him for it.
When he walks in, harried, stretched thin, aching and still halfway out of his body, somewhere between drowning in that mind-numbing lake and making his way to shore, Michael always does the same thing. He sees him, and the concern takes over his face. He goes to embrace him, then sees the gun, and the look in his eyes, stops, and asks,
“What happened?”
Every time he does Sly feels like he wants to weep, finally, but he knows this isn’t fixing it. He can’t stop until he fixes it. And he knows he will.
It’s inevitable.
In the end the oldest of the Hunters dies relatively easily, or maybe that’s simply because he’s run out of ways to escape it, in Sly’s mind. He’s already gone through the different ways it works out for Hunter, so it just goes down to probability that eventually they’d make it to an option where he stays dead, and they only need to get to it once. Disposing of the body goes…about as well as it can, when they know that no matter how careful they are someone will intercept it and make it into what it ends up having been.
But it’s inevitable, and it has to work out somehow, or it wouldn’t have happened the way it had, so to a degree this was always going to be how it turned out. Hunter had to have known that, on some level. He must have known he wasn’t coming back from this. Maybe he hoped this would be the time he finally killed a Mike Walters in a way that stuck.
Too bad.
The evening ends, finally, two days later, about half an hour after he first walked through the door at the beginning of it all. There’s some blood on the carpet that they’ll clean up later from Hunter’s body before it was transported out. There’s explanations that need to be given, they have to tell Base eventually, simply to start to untangle all the possible consequences. Not now though, not right away.
Not when all he wants to do is sleep but can’t, because when he closes his eyes he sees Michael’s staring back at him, dead and empty as he grows colder and colder.
Not when he’s still stuck in the lake.
Michael doesn’t ask what happened, not that night. Maybe he will later, maybe he won’t- he can probably figure out enough to understand that gist, can see the way Sly can’t let him out of his sight, the way he trembles when he takes the gun from his grip, the way he can’t let go after that.
Somehow, Michael gets them both into the shower, gets him cleaned up. He’s pretty sure he’s shut down- shock, maybe, or just the result of running almost solely on adrenaline and loss for nearly 48 hours, probably some combination of the two. He doesn’t say much, but he wants to, wants to reassure him when he sees how much it scares him, wants to tell him what happened, or just tell him how scared he was at the idea of going on without him. He doesn’t say any of that, but he can hear, somewhere in the back of his mind, Michael talking to him, quietly, a steady stream of noise to soothe him. He doesn’t tell him he can’t understand the words but something in him thinks Michael already knows.
They both understand that is not what the words are for, right now.
Michael must have had to help him dress, too, because he doesn’t clearly remember the steps between getting into the shower and getting into bed, but that’s where they end up, clean and dry and in soft flannel pajamas too warm for this time of year. Michael had pulled him over onto his chest, where he can hear his heartbeat and where fingers card easily through his hair. It’s almost enough to lull him to sleep; hearing two sets of breaths, the noticeable lack of the scent of blood, replaced by the myriad of familiar ones that simply mean home .
The warmth of another body, alive.
It’s almost enough to pull him out of the lake.
Maybe in the morning it will be.