A/N My internet's been down for a couple of days (freaking dial up), so hopefully this will post. This chapter was the hardest one to write and I still think some of it sounds awkward, but I'm just letting it go (my natural obsessive-compulsive tendency is to pick everything to death until it's all just horrible), so I hope it isn't too bad. However, the sequel to this is coming along pretty well, so I should have the first part posted in the next couple of days, if the gods of dial up are being friendly.

Chapter Seven

Eames watches him so carefully as she pulls into the parking lot of Tates that he's become perfectly still under her gaze, afraid if he relaxes he'll twitch or shudder or flinch or somehow otherwise indicate that he's feeling anything other than fine. And after his little display of clinging to her last night he certainly doesn't want to burden her with more of his unwieldy emotions, so he keeps his mouth shut and gets out of the car wordlessly.

"Have your list ready?"

"Gave up on it," he mutters. "Stupid idea." They have forsaken pronouns and the niceties of the beginnings of sentences and cut straight to the important things, because he can't focus on anything other than the task at hand (pound information out of anyone he possibly can) and everything else seems to have fallen on to the side.

"Who do you want to talk to first?" Eames has to nearly jog to keep up with him but she stays even by his side and their pace never falters. "The warden, the guards, other patients…"

"I was thinking his roommate. That is, if they let us in."

"They'll let us in." Quietly confident.

"How do you know?"

"How are they going to stop us? Call the cops?"

That earns a smirk from him, and she glances over sideways to see it, raising her eyebrows.

But she is wrong. Well, half wrong. They get in easily enough, with a flashed badge at the other cops milling around the scene and a duck under the yellow crime scene tape wound around the door, but no one is inside except other cops and a few lost-looking reporters. No warden. No guards. No Donny's roommate.

No Donny.

He feels like he wants to cry again. He can't imagine what's going on with his body, because he cries about as often as Eames cries (he assumes), which is to say, rarely.

"What the hell happened?" he manages to say to a cop jotting down notes on a clipboard.

"They closed the place up. Some serious shit went down—apparently this idiot from Major Case got himself locked up in here and they chained him up."

"You don't say," Eames murmurs, keeping her eyes wide and fascinated. "So they shut the place down over this one idiot?"

He's so far gone he can't tell if he wants to laugh or cry. Have to look up that study.

"Naw, the warden was doing a bunch of illegal things too—kickbacks, health code violations, the whole bit. The investigation just set the whole thing off."

"Of the idiot who got himself locked up," Eames adds.

Subtle, Eames.

"Yeah." The cop looks at them with some suspicion. "Who did you say you were again?"

"Oh, we didn't." Eames flashes her badge and grins. "I'm Detective Eames, and this is my partner"—emphasis on the word partner—"Detective Goren. Major Case."

All the blood drains out of the cop's face and Eames smirks. "I…uh…tell that cop that I hope he's feeling better and everything."

Eames' smirk deepens. "Will do."

Goren interrupts, because they need to get back to the point. "So what happened to all the patients who were here? Are they going to be coming back eventually?"

The cop snorts. "From what I hear they're shutting this place down for good and building a mini-mart."

"What about the patients?" he asks again, an edge creeping into his voice.

"Dispersed. Some went to different wards, some went to hospitals—I heard a couple kids just fled during the transfer."

"Is there any way we can find out who went where?" Eames asks, touching her partner lightly on the elbow as though she can sense the frustration building up in him.

"Try Mitchell over there." The cop points to a guy so faded looking that Goren can't believe he's the one in charge. There are important matters here—shouldn't someone competent be in charge? "He's in charge."

Mitchell produces a list of the patients and their locations, but it doesn't matter because it's just that, names and locations, and Goren doesn't know the roommate's name. And no matter how much he tries to remember even the number of the room Donny was in, he can't, and it's irritatinghim even more.

"I don't know," he keeps muttering to himself. "I don't know."

Eames pulls him into a secluded corner and he shakes her touch off because everything's starting to spin again and he's perilously close to tears and the only thought he can focus on is finding Donny.

"We need to go," Eames says firmly, taking her hand off his shoulder but standing right in front of him so he can't just brush her off and leave.

He shakes his head. "There's more we can do here. There's…evidence, probably. I'm sure we can narrow Donny's fingerprints down to one particular room he was in a lot, probably, and then run the other prints in the room, and narrow it down to people who could have been his roommate—"

"You have to calm down."

"You said you would help look for Donny," he spits back at her. "You—you said we could—"

"I know what I said." She reaches out again and grips his arm tightly. "And we will. We are. But there's nothing else we can do here at Tates. We'll go to the library and find out who worked here, and then we'll try to track them down and talk to them. But you have to stay calm, Bobby. You have to realize that we might not find him right away. It might take weeks. It doesn't sound like he wants to be found."

He can't speak so he just nods, shakily, and pushes his fingers on to the bridge of his nose.

"All right?" Eames asks. He closes his eyes and doesn't answer. She moves closer to him. "Bobby."

"It's this place," he chokes out, wiping furiously at his eyes. Eames doesn't say anything, doesn't touch him, just stands in front of him and shields him from the eyes of anyone possibly watching. She waits until he pulls himself together and then leads him out to the car without another word.

"This was a bad idea," he murmurs as he slides into the passenger seat, still scrubbing at his face. "I shouldn't have come out here. I should have stayed in Manhattan and just looked for Donny there, tried to find Frank again, the fucker."

Eames puts the key in the ignition but doesn't turn it on, instead turning to face him. "I don't think there are any right or wrong choices in this," she says softly. "You just go with what you think until you find him. And you will. You will. But it's going to take some time."

"I'm not a very patient person," he murmurs.

"Gee, really?"

He lifts his eyes to hers and sees nothing but compassion. "You are, though."

"I'm what?" she murmurs.

"Patient. With me. With all this…with everything. And…thanks." He can't think of the right words to say, the right order to put the words into, but he has to keep talking. "I owe you so much."

"You don't owe me anything," Eames says, her voice a ghost of the tone he had used last night to say the same thing.

"But I do. I do. And…I want you to know that I recognize that." There's more to be said, but he can't, at this point, so he lets it drop. She understands, and despite the fact that they are in a parking lot with other cops, despite the fact that they don't typically touch, she leans forward and hugs him and he hugs her back, feeling dwarfed by her presence—overwhelmed, even.

"We'll find him."

"I know."

They stay like this for a long time.

When they do finally pull apart Eames turns the key in the ignition, Bobby blows his nose, and they drive off to the library to continue searching. Together. Because really, what else is there?

~~Complete~~